interesting article... I wouldn't be surprised to find the news reading rate to have strong correlations to the literacy rate...
although I also recently read an article talking about the decline of the printed news industry in Taiwan, and they are very much a reading culture... (http://www.nownews.com/2009/09/07/142-2502353.htm --in chinese)
[The United States sends out Steven Chu] [Steven Chu used Voodoo Magic Science Attack] [It's super effective! Mother Earth has fainted, rolled over and resumed her regular role of abused neglected pregnant kitchen slave]
As in, a piece of sticky tape to apply over the lens whenever you don't want the camera on. Heck, they can even save on the software costs then! Camera is ALWAYS on whenever the patch isn't on. Solved!
Which subject can you take in any university that can teach you not to be a spineless coward?
I think it's one of the best things people can be taught: to be decent human beings. But I don't think that knowledge is to be found in any subjects, junk, soft or hard.
What, in layman's terms if possible, is effective population size?
Wikipedia definition quoting Sewall Wright: "the number of breeding individuals in an idealized population that would show the same amount of dispersion of allele frequencies under random genetic drift or the same amount of inbreeding as the population under consideration".
I don't know enough about genetics to be able to understand that statement. Would welcome any help, thanks
If starvation kills off 50% there is twice as much food left for the remaining 50%.
[Fawnsworth] Bullpies!
That will only be true in the scenario where 50% of people simply disappear over night, leaving the ability for planet earth to produce food intact, and leaving the ability of human beings to harvest, distribute, store, metabolize exactly the same.
The most sensible scenario where a significant percentage of the population just STARVED to death is that there is something horribly, horribly wrong with one of the above. In nature, starving is not necessarily a self-limiting mechanism : baby puffins are starving to death, and there hasn't been way more of them because it's not that there have been too many sharing too little food: there is simply no more of what they can actually eat. Think about it, if we fudge up our food sources for good, or some disease make us unable to benefit from eating what is left, there's no self-limit. It's called extinction.
I enjoyed the PS and PS2 immensely while they were still making games for them. It filled a very nice gap between when Nintendo started getting dated and sucking, up till Wii (when Nintendo stopped being dated and sucking). If you lived in Japan/HK you will realise that there are tonnes more games for every conceivable subject of interest. the PS, and PS2 was super awesome. I played my PS till it went up in smokes (literally).
PSP wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but technologically it's just as good as the DS.
There is a science fiction short story that talks about this scenario exactly: what will human civilization be like if there were no men, and women couples are able to have children that are genetically linked to both parents?
Excellent short story; was nominated for the Hugo and won a Nebula.
with all due respect, where'd you get the idea that parasites "never, never...kill their hosts"?
While I agree with your point that a successful parasitic mutation means getting better at leeching, without having the host die, surely you can't then assume that all is well in parasitic (NOT symbiotic) relationships, and that nobody dies from having a parasite?
Mosquitoes are older than dirt. They know what they are doing, and they are not interested in having us die from blood-sucking, true. But Mosquitoes inadvertently carry malaria, which WILL kill us. Millions upon millions of people die from malaria every year. Plasmodium do not particularly care if we die or not, so long as their young get to leave the dying host and infect a new organism.
[off-topic]Actually, it's in our best interest not to kill off our host planet, sure, but if we are offered a free and easy way to a new planet full of untapped resources, we would care even less about finishing it off[/off-topic]
while "space travel" was the first thing to pop into my head, that doesnt solve the "how i get to work on time if i work in Tokyo?" thing.
How about teleportation? It sounds crazy but no more crazy than "getting across water like fish" or "flying like birds" before we could do those things.
There's research going on to teleport particles and trying to re-assemble them. One day, we might be able to.
"Because you have so many different weapons and powers, it creates a paradox of choice. Since you have so many ways to kill any particular enemy, and there is little feedback to help find the most efficient way, it becomes less satisfying because I feel like I could have done it better."
I hear you! As for me, I saved all the most powerful weapons for battles that demand it. However, Bioshock didn't really have any of these! It was more just a constant threat that loomed over the player. (In this way its much like System Shock 2) As such, I was always using up the shotgun ammo but had full rockets, triplines, etc. What happened then was that I didn't really experience any different type of combat throughout the entire game. (Up till the boss fight, where I just unloaded everything I had)
Myth II was also a game that had 'issues' with uninstalling. Luckily, they found this issue before many 1.0 versions of the game were shipped so it didn't become wide spread.
Now I was never effected by this, but the guys at penny arcade made a comic about it.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/01/06
No, he died beside a river, and got kind of eaten a little bit. Maybe he was trying to make a lobster bisque....
Dinosaur: "I came here with a simple dream. A dream of killing all
humans. And this is how it must end? Who's the real
seven billion ton [fozzilized] monster here? Not I, not I..."
What Matt said, and this: Nature often seems cruel, but never wasteful. Animals are very, very serious about survival, and that means habitat, and resources. The wasp is perfectly capable of killing a cockroach, let its tiny baby sit there, stay with the egg until it hatches and feeds for a day, then kill another cockroach and transfer baby onto less rotten food, and repeat until baby is grown, at least enough to withstand the dangers of eating rotting food. I'm not sure how long it will take for baby to grow up, but I'm thinking at _least_ a dozen days. They're just doing the most efficient thing they know how. Kill just ONE big sized prey, enough for the duration for my one baby. Move on, have more babies. It's not any different than lions killing prey for their young, only baby wasps can't eat an entire carcass before it rots, unlike an entire pride.
Maybe I'm a freak in this case, but I see Nature as beautifully efficient. The mechanisms are complex, but they work.
There's an excellent book by CS Lewis by the name of Problem of Pain, in which he talks about "why would a Good God allow suffering". He was taught logics and was a professor in Literature at Oxford and Cambridge. It's worth a read just for good writing and flow of logic(He doesn't say "bible said it worked. there!"), and if you're curious about how this might work.
OH C'mon if you'd bothered with news of the OLPC from day one, or if you had just read this one, tiny article you'd have read that it's a nonprofit. [TFA also points out that $1 out of each laptop will be used for admin costs. ]
And as 0123456 points out, they're not doing it to be competitive in an open market for cheaper laptops, they're trying to eliminate the idea that laptops CAN in fact cost less than $100 each, one day, if it is bundled with free OS, software, and a cheaper chip.
One day the US will not be the market trend leader. And when that day comes they want the new guys to carry the torch (and factories) of their brands, not some cheap, free, open initiative that aims to remain cheap as a nonprofit entity.
Slashdot Mirror
interesting article...
I wouldn't be surprised to find the news reading rate to have strong correlations to the literacy rate...
although I also recently read an article talking about the decline of the printed news industry in Taiwan, and they are very much a reading culture... (http://www.nownews.com/2009/09/07/142-2502353.htm --in chinese)
proud, of course! now your wife will be thrilled when you tell her you need to go get some tequila!
actually it was "yipping" session 8D even more annoying.
[Mother Earth used Energy Crisis attack]
Obama : "Steven! I Chu-chu-choose you!"
[The United States sends out Steven Chu]
[Steven Chu used Voodoo Magic Science Attack]
[It's super effective! Mother Earth has fainted, rolled over and resumed her regular role of abused neglected pregnant kitchen slave]
Obama : Make me a sandwich, betch!
Then the webcam makers will just release a patch.
As in, a piece of sticky tape to apply over the lens whenever you don't want the camera on.
Heck, they can even save on the software costs then! Camera is ALWAYS on whenever the patch isn't on. Solved!
Which subject can you take in any university that can teach you not to be a spineless coward?
I think it's one of the best things people can be taught: to be decent human beings.
But I don't think that knowledge is to be found in any subjects, junk, soft or hard.
The Google Algorithm obvious has mistaken the horse's face for Sarah Jessica Parker's.
Honest Question Humbly Asked:
What, in layman's terms if possible, is effective population size?
Wikipedia definition quoting Sewall Wright: "the number of breeding individuals in an idealized population that would show the same amount of dispersion of allele frequencies under random genetic drift or the same amount of inbreeding as the population under consideration".
I don't know enough about genetics to be able to understand that statement. Would welcome any help, thanks
[Fawnsworth] Bullpies!
That will only be true in the scenario where 50% of people simply disappear over night, leaving the ability for planet earth to produce food intact, and leaving the ability of human beings to harvest, distribute, store, metabolize exactly the same.
The most sensible scenario where a significant percentage of the population just STARVED to death is that there is something horribly, horribly wrong with one of the above. In nature, starving is not necessarily a self-limiting mechanism : baby puffins are starving to death, and there hasn't been way more of them because it's not that there have been too many sharing too little food: there is simply no more of what they can actually eat. Think about it, if we fudge up our food sources for good, or some disease make us unable to benefit from eating what is left, there's no self-limit. It's called extinction.
I enjoyed the PS and PS2 immensely while they were still making games for them. It filled a very nice gap between when Nintendo started getting dated and sucking, up till Wii (when Nintendo stopped being dated and sucking). If you lived in Japan/HK you will realise that there are tonnes more games for every conceivable subject of interest. the PS, and PS2 was super awesome. I played my PS till it went up in smokes (literally).
PSP wasn't everyone's cup of tea, but technologically it's just as good as the DS.
Every time we Chinese build a wall those dang Mogorians come and climb all over it! >:E Literally! And then they took over our government! WTF?
This is a good move.
They have recently also given away books, with similar goal: get as many people programming for their OS'es as they can.
Like several guys have pointed out, OSes don't sell themselves, the applications that are developed for the OS does.
[snide]Besides, students are just going to pirate the stuff anyway. Might as well win some much needed brownie points[/snide]
There is a science fiction short story that talks about this scenario exactly: what will human civilization be like if there were no men, and women couples are able to have children that are genetically linked to both parents?
Excellent short story; was nominated for the Hugo and won a Nebula.
Joanna Russ: When It Changed
did you manage to snag a really cool gamer wife yet? =)
i went to PAX with my husband for our birthdays last year....one of the funnest things we've done for birthdays =D
best of luck to you~!
with all due respect, where'd you get the idea that parasites "never, never...kill their hosts"?
While I agree with your point that a successful parasitic mutation means getting better at leeching, without having the host die, surely you can't then assume that all is well in parasitic (NOT symbiotic) relationships, and that nobody dies from having a parasite?
Mosquitoes are older than dirt. They know what they are doing, and they are not interested in having us die from blood-sucking, true. But Mosquitoes inadvertently carry malaria, which WILL kill us. Millions upon millions of people die from malaria every year. Plasmodium do not particularly care if we die or not, so long as their young get to leave the dying host and infect a new organism.
[off-topic]Actually, it's in our best interest not to kill off our host planet, sure, but if we are offered a free and easy way to a new planet full of untapped resources, we would care even less about finishing it off[/off-topic]
see, mapping and understand genes is like being able to figure out what certain routines or "batch files" are for.
To be able to make our own new little life program, we need to be able to "write" our own entirely, that is, arranage the molecules themselves.
It's like someone up there said, difference between cloning a bit of stuff from photoshop, versus drawing photorealistic pictures using MS Paint.
Not saying it can't be done, just saying that it's completely different from gene mapping and what we can do now.
while "space travel" was the first thing to pop into my head, that doesnt solve the "how i get to work on time if i work in Tokyo?" thing. How about teleportation? It sounds crazy but no more crazy than "getting across water like fish" or "flying like birds" before we could do those things. There's research going on to teleport particles and trying to re-assemble them. One day, we might be able to.
nay, sir. It isn't as deadly as it is beautiful:
http://www.galleries.com/minerals/sulfides/realgar/realgar.htm
"Because you have so many different weapons and powers, it creates a paradox of choice. Since you have so many ways to kill any particular enemy, and there is little feedback to help find the most efficient way, it becomes less satisfying because I feel like I could have done it better." I hear you! As for me, I saved all the most powerful weapons for battles that demand it. However, Bioshock didn't really have any of these! It was more just a constant threat that loomed over the player. (In this way its much like System Shock 2) As such, I was always using up the shotgun ammo but had full rockets, triplines, etc. What happened then was that I didn't really experience any different type of combat throughout the entire game. (Up till the boss fight, where I just unloaded everything I had)
Myth II was also a game that had 'issues' with uninstalling. Luckily, they found this issue before many 1.0 versions of the game were shipped so it didn't become wide spread. Now I was never effected by this, but the guys at penny arcade made a comic about it. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/01/06
No, he died beside a river, and got kind of eaten a little bit.
Maybe he was trying to make a lobster bisque....
Dinosaur: "I came here with a simple dream. A dream of killing all
humans. And this is how it must end? Who's the real
seven billion ton [fozzilized] monster here? Not I, not I..."
What Matt said, and this:
Nature often seems cruel, but never wasteful.
Animals are very, very serious about survival, and that means habitat, and resources. The wasp is perfectly capable of killing a cockroach, let its tiny baby sit there, stay with the egg until it hatches and feeds for a day, then kill another cockroach and transfer baby onto less rotten food, and repeat until baby is grown, at least enough to withstand the dangers of eating rotting food. I'm not sure how long it will take for baby to grow up, but I'm thinking at _least_ a dozen days.
They're just doing the most efficient thing they know how. Kill just ONE big sized prey, enough for the duration for my one baby. Move on, have more babies. It's not any different than lions killing prey for their young, only baby wasps can't eat an entire carcass before it rots, unlike an entire pride.
Maybe I'm a freak in this case, but I see Nature as beautifully efficient. The mechanisms are complex, but they work.
There's an excellent book by CS Lewis by the name of Problem of Pain, in which he talks about "why would a Good God allow suffering". He was taught logics and was a professor in Literature at Oxford and Cambridge. It's worth a read just for good writing and flow of logic(He doesn't say "bible said it worked. there!"), and if you're curious about how this might work.
OH C'mon if you'd bothered with news of the OLPC from day one, or if you had just read this one, tiny article you'd have read that it's a nonprofit. [TFA also points out that $1 out of each laptop will be used for admin costs. ] And as 0123456 points out, they're not doing it to be competitive in an open market for cheaper laptops, they're trying to eliminate the idea that laptops CAN in fact cost less than $100 each, one day, if it is bundled with free OS, software, and a cheaper chip. One day the US will not be the market trend leader. And when that day comes they want the new guys to carry the torch (and factories) of their brands, not some cheap, free, open initiative that aims to remain cheap as a nonprofit entity.
IMPOSTOR! It does not stop raining in the summer. [drone-like voice]It never stops raining here[/drone-like voice]
hehehe will single-celled sex with oneself type of graphical depiction get people upset, i wonder 8D