Re:Can it live up to the fans' expectations?
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Stargate MMO Announced
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeah, but WoW only has two playable factions. It's not like you can be a goblin and work for the Steamwheedle Cartel. Admittedly, that would be very cool....
I believe that was his point - on different WoW servers, for a variety of reasons, the balance of power is immensely one-sided. Which means that the PvP aspects of the game tend to be heavily unbalanced, for all manner of reasons. Multiple factions mean 'politics' is possible in a meaningful fashion.
Of course, whether that would work well in Stargate is questionable, thanks to the fact that everyone, in general, wants to wipe everyone else out.
Are they carrying out their conversations in one of the public chat channels, and do you report them, with specific reasons why it offended you (ideally directly related to the topics mentioned in thier policies), often?
The problem which happened here, is that somewhere along the line someone likely lodged a complaint about this guild. And, due to the extremely strict wording of Blizzard's policies, they had to take action (although in this case it was the lightest action they could). If you raise enough of a stink I'm sure you could get these other guilds into a spot of bother too. They're bound by their own policies to try and prevent people feeling uncomfortable due to this sort of thing, if you and others actively report it I'm sure they'd feel compelled to do something about it.
Hehe... Yep, that's exactly their response too. Damn overfunded astrophysicists. Their lounge has free chocolate biccies, we don't even have a lounge any more. It's a travesty:(
The longer I live, the less enamored I am with science. I was always taught that it's this great infallible thing,
Whoever taught you were incorrect then. Science's biggest strength is the fact that it is based around the concept that what we know can, and likely is wrong, and that it can only be verified by observing facts.
In this case, it's quite like relativity generalising Newton's laws - for large, easily observable stars, this rule holds true. But more detailed measurements indicate errors which happen in 'special' (or, in truth, more general) condition.
Development in science is nothing to be afraid of - sure, we were wrong in the past, and probably still are, but now we're a little more right. Maybe it's not a big problem, but it's better than sticking our heads in the sand and never learning.
(Besides, everyone knows Astrophysicists aren't real scientists... or at least that's what I tell my friends in that department. They usually don't disagree:) )
I live in a city with more PhD's per square mile anywhere on earth besides Silicon Valley.
To disprove my "generalisation", you cite an example of one of a region which is only one step away from being as far away from the norm as you can get? Interesting. It's quite easy to take up the opposite path - that while in many areas 'education' is simply a thing to put on your CV, there are some exceptions where the pursuit of knowledge is still a viable goal, and so forth, as is shown by your choice of extreme example.
But see that's where you are wrong. I was doing half of that before college.
I didn't say this could not be done without going to college, I was saying that universities are typically places where this sort of personal development is particularly encouraged - you know, moving out, meeting new people, experiencing new things, the whole deal? How you being able to do it outside of university makes universities unsuitable places for anything other than grinding out your degree is lost on me.
It is the desire to learn that drives me to do those things. I commune with other people who learn those things, interactively. That's the best way to learn.
No doubt, I agree with you fully. And I still state that going to university and studying things that interst you is one of the best ways to get the opportunity to interact with others who are intersted in it, no? Once again, just because it's possible to do outside of that environment doesn't mean the only thing university is good for is to get a job.
(I skipped a few sentances, cos I'm not sure exactly what you were trying to say in them... I mean, if Aerospace was related to your unrelated interests, you would probably have invented a new kind of logic or somesuch.)
I didn't say that. I merely said, the point is, at the end I will use my education to get a job.
Actually, what you said was that the point of college was to get a job. Not that you personally were simply using it as such, or that was a side benefit, but that it was the whole point. This is an idea which has gotten lodged in society, that the only purpose of learning is to get a job. From your posts it seems you yourself enjoy learning about things for learnings sake (or for your own interest, or however you want to express it. You know what I mean, I'm sure), but for some reason seem to want to excise that idea totally from the traditional 'education' experience, since you didn't feel that university plays a part in your learning. This, imo, is rather silly, but this kind of thinking is causing some undesirable shifts in our education system.
In addition, please note that I totally agree with you that these lectures are in no way, shape, or form a complete substitute for other kinds of learning. However it is certainly possible that they would help some, and the promotion of this kind of material on the internet would undoubtably be beneficial, at least in some small way, to the promotion of learning of all kinds - just because you personally can't possible imagine finding it useful doesn't mean others will not.
Holy generalizations. And bad ones at that. (a state of what?
All righty, I guess that colloquialism doesn't travel to wherever you live? When said like that (around here, at least) it implies that it is in a sorry state/state of decline/not what it should be, and so forth. I'll be sure to be more careful in future.
To be more specific, I am referring to the fact that there is a vast trend in 'dumbing down' education in many countries so each govt can claim to be improving standards - sometimes by shifting the lower-acheiving students into different statistics, but also removing the emphasis on what should be fundamental parts of education (most noticably in mathematics and the sciences) because they are often perceived as 'too hard' or not useful in life, and shifting it to fuzzy "employment skills". Now the common argument I see claims that people aren't going to need to know these things, because they aren't useful in their jobs in the future. But of course, life is more than a job, and if we look at major issues often discussed today (energy, global warming, ID, Genetic modification, and so forth), these things are often integral to debates which affect our everyday lives, but because they don't fall neatly into a marketable 'skill' for most people, they're excised from the education system for the most part. (And I think everyone should be required to have some grasp of basic statistics so that stupidly misleading statistics wouldn't be such a prominent part of various media stories)
As an example of the shift from education to work skills, a friend of mine has begun to consider dropping of his Computer Science MSci program, as the department has decided that they want to promote 'entrepreneurship' among the students, and so they're all required to take several modules on business law, health and safety regulations, and so forth. And due to the way the modules are marked, a few essays on this stuff is worth as much as a years worth of comp sci classes from earlier years.
The point of college *is* to make yourself more employable.
Perhaps this is just a matter of perspective, but I would have argued that, at least in part, College is there to give you a chance to do all of that stuff you list at the end of your post. I fully agree that you aren't going to learn well just dredging through the recommended texts for a course and listening to a recording of the lecturer. College gives you a chance to do much more of that than would otherwise be available in day to day life, as well as a whole bunch of that other 'life experience' stuff.
Going there simply to grind out 3 or 4 years worth of homework and exam performances in a subject you don't care for so you can get a degree to get a job in more or less unrelated fields is a bad outlook, as evinced by a number of my friends who came into uni with that outlook, but crashed out because they simply didn't care for what they're doing. Universities are not solely degree-granting factories for employment advancement, and the perception of them as such is leading a lot of people to go there because they feel they have to and leaving with nothing to show for it but a lot of debt.
Statements like that are why the education system in many Western countries is in such a state. No longer do people pursue degrees for the love of the subject, they just want a nice piece of paper to wave in front of possible employers. It's a shame that for many personal achievement is now a distant second to what other people think of the letters after your name.
I know, for myself at least, that those notes often provide additional insight or alternate approaches to material I've studied, and are helpful when you want to grab a quick bit of information on something but don't want to have to hunt down the text books, dig them out of the library, and hope they actually cover what they claim to in the way you need it. But hey, that's just me.
I will grant that ZG's content has rather more 'interesting' details than what went before due to the more varied bosses, but I would argue that adds to the interest in the zone, and is something most players could easily learn, if they wanted to.
But look at your other objections - incompetent rogues, people who don't listen when the leader says "Don't jump down", wipes on mobs who are simply not that dangerous, and groups made up of people who don't know their class, or even the language. Is this the group high end content should be balanced around? The kicker is here:
ZG doesn't have people running pick up for it, because it's simply too hard without teamspeak/vent and good players.
Good players are what's missing. TS/Vent are nice, but only really necessary because even good people don't always pay enough attention to/g and/ra. I know there's lots of unguilded players, or those in small guilds, who actually know the game and their class well. Problem is, they're drowned out by the crapfest that seems to make up 75% of the other players. The only reason these guys have gotten so far without actually having to learn to pay attention/learn their class is because many instances in WoW can be rendered too easy, by methods I mentioned, and then all of a sudden you have a lvl 60 char with pretty decent gear, and have never really faced a challenge in much of your wow grinding/instance career, and so be woefully out of your depth when faced with a genuinely interesting challenge in the high end instances.
So yes, for the majority of players, ZG is indeed a step up in difficulty, but I still feel that's as much a factor of how players approach the game as how the instance is put together.
(Also, what boss in ZG requires los hiding? That sounds like 'sploits to me...;) )
The key reason why ZG is such a big step up from UBRS is because ZG is the first instance that cannot simply be steamrolled with more powerful characters/more players than needed. For most instances, many players can simply not imagine doing them at anything other than the higher end of Blizzard's level bracket. However, when you hit UBRS/Strat/Scholo, suddenly you can't simply get to a higher level, because these things are tuned for max level characters. So what do you do?
You bring your buddies.
Finding a 5-man pickup group to either of the two undead instances is tricky. Finding a 10-man group for UBRS is nigh-impossible, because people just don't think it's meant to be done that way. Contrary to popular opinion, UBRS is tuned for 10-man, not 15-man. However, people completely ignore what Blizz thing is a challenge, and so the high-end instances are something of a joke to waltz through with an overly large pickup group in an hour or two.
Blizz realised this, so their next high-end instance (Dire Maul) was capped at 5 players, and ZG is tuned for roughly it's full capacity (20 people). No longer can you simply waltz in with superior numbers and collect your loots, since you no longer have a power advantage over Blizzard's expected level.
ZG is viewed as content for the 'elite' simply because it's the first one that the playerbase doesn't render overly easy.
As it stands, the high-end content is currently reasonably accessible with gear which can be accumulated from the high end 5-man instances in a reasonable timescale (I know we choose our applicants based on attitude, not on how l33t their gear is). While an entire raid of people in this gear would be at a significant power disadvantage (although not an insurmountable one, providing you have a couple of characters with required bits and pieces), a well-geared guild can accomodate a few of these people with ease, and most likely gear them up pretty quickly too. In a while, when a few more instances are put in, this may become an issue, but for now, gear isn't a significant problem for applicants if they can find a guild who's interested in the person, rather than the character.
So yeah, in general, high-end content in WoW is fairly accessible. On Skullcrusher (EU), I think there's about a dozen distinct raiding groups who can clear the 20 man instance and the two 40-man encounters (A couple of the zerg guilds can support enough people to field multiple raids, and a couple of small guilds field joint raids), and probably more who regularly clear the current 20-man and will be able to move up to do AQ20 without much of a problem.
And who elects the MEPs? (Members European Parliament) The EU is precisely the form of world government most Americans fear from the UN.
MEPs are directly elected by the citizens of the constituencies they represent (IIRC, different countries are free to choose exactly how they break up the distribution of their MEPs, within reason). I can see why Americans are so afraid of such things...
Of course, presumably you are and thinking of the EU Comission. In this case, they are nominated by the EU council (typically made up of Heads of state or their foreign ministers), and must be approved by the Parliment before they can take office (similar to, say, nomination of supreme court justices in the US). And of course, the Comission does not actually 'decide' anything - their role is typically to draft legislation to be put forward before the council and parliment, who jointly act as legislative bodies, in response to needs/requests/legal challenges - a job which is probably fulfilled by all manner of unelected civil servants in many countries. All actual decision making is done by the directly elected MEPs and heads of state.
Neither is my theory that places the mistakes on the observer's side of things, at first glance. But that's the philosophical hole in Occam's razor- it can cause us to reject theories and models without testing them merely because they seem to be more complex on the surface.
There is no hole there, it's in the misinterpretation of Occam's razor which is common. If the two theories offer identical predictions (as is the case with many of these hidden variable theories, by design) there is no way to perform a test which will distinguish between them. Therefore there is no possible test which enables us to distinguish between them. Thus we either have to say 'maybe' or pick one to use, and it is simply sensible to pick the one with fewest levels of complexity. Of course there may be future results which enable us to distinguish between them, but as it stands they have simply been fitted to match everything we have, so we have nothing to go on at the moment.
That's precisely why you need to do it at a lower level...
Unfortuantely, I do not think this is exclusively a result of the teaching of science. The fact is, most people just don't care enough about it. Society doesn't respect critical thought and research. The syllabi are designed to try and teach the material without being offputting to the potential students. Making scientific education more extensive and detailled may help with how people look at science, but the problem is probably more a function of people not really wanting to learn as of them not having the opportunity. And if you consider most schoolkids, forcing it onto them is simply not going to ignite any sort of a passion for it, and may off kids who otherwise would be. The change would probably have to come in how society views science before any changes in education are really going to make any traction.
It is entirely possible we're too stupid to include enough variables- I remember when Star Trek tackled this in an episode, the holographic Einstein claimed it would require more than 21 dimensions to make sense of it. That's likely a low estimate.
Well, there do exist QM hidden variable theories which sacrifice locality and suggest that all particles can interact with all other particles instantaneously, which would be comprable to a system with coupling variables between every pair of particles for every interaction they can have. That's pretty much the upper limit of non-redundant information the universe could possibly hold. The problem is many of these theories are set up so that they reduce exactly to 'normal' QM predictions for any observable system. Meaning they don't really offer us much new predictive power.
The obvious answer is to stop teaching science as fact- and start in middle school or earlier with the philosophical underpinnings of the scientific method and *why* they're assumed to be true, while NEVER actually claiming that they are true.
I do agree here, to a point. I have argued in favour of getting some more rigorous background teaching put into physics modules at my uni (both mathematical and philisophical). The problem is that at this point, courses are heavily dominated by people who are not there for the love of physics, but to get a degree because that's the done thing. Only about one in ten of us has gone on to do masters/phd work, and probably even fewer of them will actually pursue it as a career. These people are going to be somewhat put off by extremely heavy mathematics which is not particularly necessary to understand the basic concepts, or by philisophical musings which they are not likely to pursue on their own time. And the department can't risk that, since they're having enough trouble keeping some courses open as it stands.
This problem is even more pronounced at lower levels in schools - a small minority of people really enjoy their subjects and would welcome detailed background, but most will simply be put off by it. And if they can get easier courses without these unappealing aspects, they're going to take them. As an example, in the UK the A-level physics syllabus has been changed to no longer include any calculus, since this was taken as offputting to people who wanted to do physics without maths. Of course, the idea of physics without maths is pretty laughable to begin with, but since numbers are low to start, no course director is going to want to risk losing that number of people. So the syllabus gets thinned out, and quite often the unviersity courses have to be modified to take that into account.
It would be nice to expand the level of detail in these courses, but since it is likely to damage the number of people in already weak courses, I doubt it will happen any time soon.
Your Graduate QM class was falling into the same mistake I made in my original posting then. Bell's theorem is a valid counter-example to the hidden variable method suggested in the EPR paper, which retained all aspects of our 'classical' universe, most significantly locality, realism, and causality, which together lead to an entirely deterministic universe. QM gets around this by fudging the definite 'reality' part (apart from during interactions) to avoid a purely deterministic evolution of the universe, and that works extremely well as far as we've seen.
However, hidden variable theories can be created which do accurately describe all quantum mechanical observations, but it requires that several of the other things which implicitly make up our classical picture have to be sacrificed, most typically locality (as in all particles can exchange information with all other particles at all times) or causality (which is comprable to sacrificing locality, but in different terms).
These hacks are, in general, not very appealing because the tend to feel very 'fudged'. Of course the typical counterpoint is that many aspects of modern physics are a fudge until enough information is available to correctly describe all of these interactions, which is a fair point, but once again feels somewhat like the religious position where 'God' is responsible for the things we don't understand, and is gradually pushed back into more obscure corners as new evidence is accumulated. That's not to say he's not there, but right now there's little to suggest that it should be beyond a feeling that that's how the world should work.
Ah, my apologies for the semantical mis-step. I should not have implied that we had disproven every single possible 'hidden variable' theory, as it is possible that there is some underlying truth which gives the appearance of breaking all these rules while still, in fact, retaining them at some deeper level (much like how His Noodly Appendage is being obfuscated by this "evolution" business).
Although I would note that, as far as I've seen, since the EPR 'paradox' was shown to in fact represent how the world works, hidden variable theories are not faring well - they involve giving up significant numbers of other aspects of our classical universe to retain the deterministic effects, and often introduce large amounts of additional cruft that doesn't lead to any useful predictions.
Short term, it'll probably be financially viable - with people paying up for the credibility of google ads (i.e. ads people don't aggressively block, because they're not as intrusive as most) with the added bonus of pretty pictures.
But I know that as soon as stuff starts flashing at me, it gets blocked. And I'm sure many people will agree with me. If Google ads are reduced to the same level as all the other intrusive, flashing picture ads, much of their special value will be lost, and I'd expect it won't take long till that's reflected in how much google can make from them.
So if a comment was attached to ELOTH:TES saying that the material refers to fictional fiction, is that ok?
They have a sizeable wiki of their own they are using to put this stuff together, partly as an exercise in simply making stuff up, and partly to put together ideas to be used in future work. If the PA guys actually, say, produce a series of comics on this body of work, does it stop being "made up" fiction and become "real", thus making this article valid? These rules are rather arbitrary, doens't it seem?
He posted an article based on describing events in a fictional fantasy realm which was created as a parody, true. But he felt this wasn't totally out of place given the vast array of articles on say, the characteristics of individual Pokémon that are present in Wikipedia. His confusion arose from the fact that wikipedians consider themselves a serious encylopedia (thus excising his article with great speed) while allowing a multitude of detailed articles on similar fictional characters.
It says something about the internet that the parent got moderated 'Interesting', doesn't it? I can just see it now...
"Mushrooms, you say? By jove! Give that man some karma!"
Re:First? What about the African Prostitutes et.al
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Man Cures Himself of HIV?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The key difference is, I believe, that this man definately had HIV (assuming we can believe the insistence of the people who did the tests that they were correct) but now no longer does. By contrast, these women are people who by all rights should have got HIV through everyday exposure, but have not. It is not known whether they have got the disease and been 'cured' like this man, or if they simply never became infected in the first place - and since these women never tested positive for HIV before the study started, we can't confirm which of these was the case.
AFAIK, the percentages you see on your GRE score report are not a curved grade. It's the fraction of people you scored better than on that portion of the test. You also receive actual, absolute scores which have nothing to do with the performance of anyone else.
Indeed, that percentage is a proper percentile, which is an excellent system, and should be used if there's a suitably big sample size for it not to be far too coarse a measure. My objection is to scaled scores out of 800 which you are given. They are, from what I've read, by no means absolute. The absolute raw scores (number you got right, corrected for guessing) are fitted to their ideal score distribution, to correct for the difficulty of the particular paper. Thus their fitting, and hence your 'absolulte' score, is dependant on the performance of someone else, to an extent. Ideally, just raw score and percentiles would be the way to go, imo.
I reached the same conclusion whenever I checked out some of the sample materials for the GRE - the general math test doesn't test your ability to do math in most cases, but your ability to take their test. Just need to remember all their devious little tricks ('x = 16, x=4, not enough information to determine which is which' always used to catch me out...) and it should be pretty plain sailing. Or so I hope...
Actually, he may be correct. According to some of the GRE reference books I obtained, about 92% of people get 800/800 on the math test. Allowing for some distribution in scores over the years, it's quite possible that he got given an 800/800 'scaled' score, but that 9% of people beat him.
This is presumably a pitall of how they scale the scores - more than one raw (Number right - (number wrong/4) or somesuch) score yields the 800/800 'absolute' score, and thus there is a degree of differentiation required within the same score bracket, presumably using the secret raw score. This sort of confusion would of course immediately be solved if they had just quoted the raw score to begin with, instead of trying to fit their new absolute scores, which is pretty much the crux of my objection to the whole fitting process.
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I believe that was his point - on different WoW servers, for a variety of reasons, the balance of power is immensely one-sided. Which means that the PvP aspects of the game tend to be heavily unbalanced, for all manner of reasons. Multiple factions mean 'politics' is possible in a meaningful fashion.
Of course, whether that would work well in Stargate is questionable, thanks to the fact that everyone, in general, wants to wipe everyone else out.
The problem which happened here, is that somewhere along the line someone likely lodged a complaint about this guild. And, due to the extremely strict wording of Blizzard's policies, they had to take action (although in this case it was the lightest action they could). If you raise enough of a stink I'm sure you could get these other guilds into a spot of bother too. They're bound by their own policies to try and prevent people feeling uncomfortable due to this sort of thing, if you and others actively report it I'm sure they'd feel compelled to do something about it.
Hehe... Yep, that's exactly their response too. Damn overfunded astrophysicists. Their lounge has free chocolate biccies, we don't even have a lounge any more. It's a travesty :(
Whoever taught you were incorrect then. Science's biggest strength is the fact that it is based around the concept that what we know can, and likely is wrong, and that it can only be verified by observing facts.
In this case, it's quite like relativity generalising Newton's laws - for large, easily observable stars, this rule holds true. But more detailed measurements indicate errors which happen in 'special' (or, in truth, more general) condition.
Development in science is nothing to be afraid of - sure, we were wrong in the past, and probably still are, but now we're a little more right. Maybe it's not a big problem, but it's better than sticking our heads in the sand and never learning.
(Besides, everyone knows Astrophysicists aren't real scientists... or at least that's what I tell my friends in that department. They usually don't disagree :) )
To disprove my "generalisation", you cite an example of one of a region which is only one step away from being as far away from the norm as you can get? Interesting. It's quite easy to take up the opposite path - that while in many areas 'education' is simply a thing to put on your CV, there are some exceptions where the pursuit of knowledge is still a viable goal, and so forth, as is shown by your choice of extreme example.
But see that's where you are wrong. I was doing half of that before college.
I didn't say this could not be done without going to college, I was saying that universities are typically places where this sort of personal development is particularly encouraged - you know, moving out, meeting new people, experiencing new things, the whole deal? How you being able to do it outside of university makes universities unsuitable places for anything other than grinding out your degree is lost on me.
It is the desire to learn that drives me to do those things. I commune with other people who learn those things, interactively. That's the best way to learn.
No doubt, I agree with you fully. And I still state that going to university and studying things that interst you is one of the best ways to get the opportunity to interact with others who are intersted in it, no? Once again, just because it's possible to do outside of that environment doesn't mean the only thing university is good for is to get a job.
(I skipped a few sentances, cos I'm not sure exactly what you were trying to say in them... I mean, if Aerospace was related to your unrelated interests, you would probably have invented a new kind of logic or somesuch.)
I didn't say that. I merely said, the point is, at the end I will use my education to get a job.
Actually, what you said was that the point of college was to get a job. Not that you personally were simply using it as such, or that was a side benefit, but that it was the whole point. This is an idea which has gotten lodged in society, that the only purpose of learning is to get a job. From your posts it seems you yourself enjoy learning about things for learnings sake (or for your own interest, or however you want to express it. You know what I mean, I'm sure), but for some reason seem to want to excise that idea totally from the traditional 'education' experience, since you didn't feel that university plays a part in your learning. This, imo, is rather silly, but this kind of thinking is causing some undesirable shifts in our education system.
In addition, please note that I totally agree with you that these lectures are in no way, shape, or form a complete substitute for other kinds of learning. However it is certainly possible that they would help some, and the promotion of this kind of material on the internet would undoubtably be beneficial, at least in some small way, to the promotion of learning of all kinds - just because you personally can't possible imagine finding it useful doesn't mean others will not.
All righty, I guess that colloquialism doesn't travel to wherever you live? When said like that (around here, at least) it implies that it is in a sorry state/state of decline/not what it should be, and so forth. I'll be sure to be more careful in future.
To be more specific, I am referring to the fact that there is a vast trend in 'dumbing down' education in many countries so each govt can claim to be improving standards - sometimes by shifting the lower-acheiving students into different statistics, but also removing the emphasis on what should be fundamental parts of education (most noticably in mathematics and the sciences) because they are often perceived as 'too hard' or not useful in life, and shifting it to fuzzy "employment skills". Now the common argument I see claims that people aren't going to need to know these things, because they aren't useful in their jobs in the future. But of course, life is more than a job, and if we look at major issues often discussed today (energy, global warming, ID, Genetic modification, and so forth), these things are often integral to debates which affect our everyday lives, but because they don't fall neatly into a marketable 'skill' for most people, they're excised from the education system for the most part. (And I think everyone should be required to have some grasp of basic statistics so that stupidly misleading statistics wouldn't be such a prominent part of various media stories)
As an example of the shift from education to work skills, a friend of mine has begun to consider dropping of his Computer Science MSci program, as the department has decided that they want to promote 'entrepreneurship' among the students, and so they're all required to take several modules on business law, health and safety regulations, and so forth. And due to the way the modules are marked, a few essays on this stuff is worth as much as a years worth of comp sci classes from earlier years.
The point of college *is* to make yourself more employable.
Perhaps this is just a matter of perspective, but I would have argued that, at least in part, College is there to give you a chance to do all of that stuff you list at the end of your post. I fully agree that you aren't going to learn well just dredging through the recommended texts for a course and listening to a recording of the lecturer. College gives you a chance to do much more of that than would otherwise be available in day to day life, as well as a whole bunch of that other 'life experience' stuff.
Going there simply to grind out 3 or 4 years worth of homework and exam performances in a subject you don't care for so you can get a degree to get a job in more or less unrelated fields is a bad outlook, as evinced by a number of my friends who came into uni with that outlook, but crashed out because they simply didn't care for what they're doing. Universities are not solely degree-granting factories for employment advancement, and the perception of them as such is leading a lot of people to go there because they feel they have to and leaving with nothing to show for it but a lot of debt.
I know, for myself at least, that those notes often provide additional insight or alternate approaches to material I've studied, and are helpful when you want to grab a quick bit of information on something but don't want to have to hunt down the text books, dig them out of the library, and hope they actually cover what they claim to in the way you need it. But hey, that's just me.
But look at your other objections - incompetent rogues, people who don't listen when the leader says "Don't jump down", wipes on mobs who are simply not that dangerous, and groups made up of people who don't know their class, or even the language. Is this the group high end content should be balanced around? The kicker is here: ZG doesn't have people running pick up for it, because it's simply too hard without teamspeak/vent and good players. Good players are what's missing. TS/Vent are nice, but only really necessary because even good people don't always pay enough attention to /g and /ra. I know there's lots of unguilded players, or those in small guilds, who actually know the game and their class well. Problem is, they're drowned out by the crapfest that seems to make up 75% of the other players. The only reason these guys have gotten so far without actually having to learn to pay attention/learn their class is because many instances in WoW can be rendered too easy, by methods I mentioned, and then all of a sudden you have a lvl 60 char with pretty decent gear, and have never really faced a challenge in much of your wow grinding/instance career, and so be woefully out of your depth when faced with a genuinely interesting challenge in the high end instances.
So yes, for the majority of players, ZG is indeed a step up in difficulty, but I still feel that's as much a factor of how players approach the game as how the instance is put together.
(Also, what boss in ZG requires los hiding? That sounds like 'sploits to me... ;) )
You bring your buddies.
Finding a 5-man pickup group to either of the two undead instances is tricky. Finding a 10-man group for UBRS is nigh-impossible, because people just don't think it's meant to be done that way. Contrary to popular opinion, UBRS is tuned for 10-man, not 15-man. However, people completely ignore what Blizz thing is a challenge, and so the high-end instances are something of a joke to waltz through with an overly large pickup group in an hour or two.
Blizz realised this, so their next high-end instance (Dire Maul) was capped at 5 players, and ZG is tuned for roughly it's full capacity (20 people). No longer can you simply waltz in with superior numbers and collect your loots, since you no longer have a power advantage over Blizzard's expected level.
ZG is viewed as content for the 'elite' simply because it's the first one that the playerbase doesn't render overly easy.
So yeah, in general, high-end content in WoW is fairly accessible. On Skullcrusher (EU), I think there's about a dozen distinct raiding groups who can clear the 20 man instance and the two 40-man encounters (A couple of the zerg guilds can support enough people to field multiple raids, and a couple of small guilds field joint raids), and probably more who regularly clear the current 20-man and will be able to move up to do AQ20 without much of a problem.
Yes, you are feeling lucky.
Result:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/glossar y.html
Handy that.
MEPs are directly elected by the citizens of the constituencies they represent (IIRC, different countries are free to choose exactly how they break up the distribution of their MEPs, within reason). I can see why Americans are so afraid of such things...
Of course, presumably you are and thinking of the EU Comission. In this case, they are nominated by the EU council (typically made up of Heads of state or their foreign ministers), and must be approved by the Parliment before they can take office (similar to, say, nomination of supreme court justices in the US). And of course, the Comission does not actually 'decide' anything - their role is typically to draft legislation to be put forward before the council and parliment, who jointly act as legislative bodies, in response to needs/requests/legal challenges - a job which is probably fulfilled by all manner of unelected civil servants in many countries. All actual decision making is done by the directly elected MEPs and heads of state.
There is no hole there, it's in the misinterpretation of Occam's razor which is common. If the two theories offer identical predictions (as is the case with many of these hidden variable theories, by design) there is no way to perform a test which will distinguish between them. Therefore there is no possible test which enables us to distinguish between them. Thus we either have to say 'maybe' or pick one to use, and it is simply sensible to pick the one with fewest levels of complexity. Of course there may be future results which enable us to distinguish between them, but as it stands they have simply been fitted to match everything we have, so we have nothing to go on at the moment.
That's precisely why you need to do it at a lower level...
Unfortuantely, I do not think this is exclusively a result of the teaching of science. The fact is, most people just don't care enough about it. Society doesn't respect critical thought and research. The syllabi are designed to try and teach the material without being offputting to the potential students. Making scientific education more extensive and detailled may help with how people look at science, but the problem is probably more a function of people not really wanting to learn as of them not having the opportunity. And if you consider most schoolkids, forcing it onto them is simply not going to ignite any sort of a passion for it, and may off kids who otherwise would be. The change would probably have to come in how society views science before any changes in education are really going to make any traction.
Well, there do exist QM hidden variable theories which sacrifice locality and suggest that all particles can interact with all other particles instantaneously, which would be comprable to a system with coupling variables between every pair of particles for every interaction they can have. That's pretty much the upper limit of non-redundant information the universe could possibly hold. The problem is many of these theories are set up so that they reduce exactly to 'normal' QM predictions for any observable system. Meaning they don't really offer us much new predictive power.
The obvious answer is to stop teaching science as fact- and start in middle school or earlier with the philosophical underpinnings of the scientific method and *why* they're assumed to be true, while NEVER actually claiming that they are true.
I do agree here, to a point. I have argued in favour of getting some more rigorous background teaching put into physics modules at my uni (both mathematical and philisophical). The problem is that at this point, courses are heavily dominated by people who are not there for the love of physics, but to get a degree because that's the done thing. Only about one in ten of us has gone on to do masters/phd work, and probably even fewer of them will actually pursue it as a career. These people are going to be somewhat put off by extremely heavy mathematics which is not particularly necessary to understand the basic concepts, or by philisophical musings which they are not likely to pursue on their own time. And the department can't risk that, since they're having enough trouble keeping some courses open as it stands.
This problem is even more pronounced at lower levels in schools - a small minority of people really enjoy their subjects and would welcome detailed background, but most will simply be put off by it. And if they can get easier courses without these unappealing aspects, they're going to take them. As an example, in the UK the A-level physics syllabus has been changed to no longer include any calculus, since this was taken as offputting to people who wanted to do physics without maths. Of course, the idea of physics without maths is pretty laughable to begin with, but since numbers are low to start, no course director is going to want to risk losing that number of people. So the syllabus gets thinned out, and quite often the unviersity courses have to be modified to take that into account.
It would be nice to expand the level of detail in these courses, but since it is likely to damage the number of people in already weak courses, I doubt it will happen any time soon.
However, hidden variable theories can be created which do accurately describe all quantum mechanical observations, but it requires that several of the other things which implicitly make up our classical picture have to be sacrificed, most typically locality (as in all particles can exchange information with all other particles at all times) or causality (which is comprable to sacrificing locality, but in different terms).
These hacks are, in general, not very appealing because the tend to feel very 'fudged'. Of course the typical counterpoint is that many aspects of modern physics are a fudge until enough information is available to correctly describe all of these interactions, which is a fair point, but once again feels somewhat like the religious position where 'God' is responsible for the things we don't understand, and is gradually pushed back into more obscure corners as new evidence is accumulated. That's not to say he's not there, but right now there's little to suggest that it should be beyond a feeling that that's how the world should work.
Ah, my apologies for the semantical mis-step. I should not have implied that we had disproven every single possible 'hidden variable' theory, as it is possible that there is some underlying truth which gives the appearance of breaking all these rules while still, in fact, retaining them at some deeper level (much like how His Noodly Appendage is being obfuscated by this "evolution" business).
Although I would note that, as far as I've seen, since the EPR 'paradox' was shown to in fact represent how the world works, hidden variable theories are not faring well - they involve giving up significant numbers of other aspects of our classical universe to retain the deterministic effects, and often introduce large amounts of additional cruft that doesn't lead to any useful predictions.
You know he was pretty much wrong when he said that, right? Hidden variable theories of quantum mechanics have been pretty thoroughly disproven.
But I know that as soon as stuff starts flashing at me, it gets blocked. And I'm sure many people will agree with me. If Google ads are reduced to the same level as all the other intrusive, flashing picture ads, much of their special value will be lost, and I'd expect it won't take long till that's reflected in how much google can make from them.
They have a sizeable wiki of their own they are using to put this stuff together, partly as an exercise in simply making stuff up, and partly to put together ideas to be used in future work. If the PA guys actually, say, produce a series of comics on this body of work, does it stop being "made up" fiction and become "real", thus making this article valid? These rules are rather arbitrary, doens't it seem?
Because we all know every article on wikipedia is filled with historically significant information, relevant to the majority of people, right?
He posted an article based on describing events in a fictional fantasy realm which was created as a parody, true. But he felt this wasn't totally out of place given the vast array of articles on say, the characteristics of individual Pokémon that are present in Wikipedia. His confusion arose from the fact that wikipedians consider themselves a serious encylopedia (thus excising his article with great speed) while allowing a multitude of detailed articles on similar fictional characters.
"Mushrooms, you say? By jove! Give that man some karma!"
The key difference is, I believe, that this man definately had HIV (assuming we can believe the insistence of the people who did the tests that they were correct) but now no longer does. By contrast, these women are people who by all rights should have got HIV through everyday exposure, but have not. It is not known whether they have got the disease and been 'cured' like this man, or if they simply never became infected in the first place - and since these women never tested positive for HIV before the study started, we can't confirm which of these was the case.
Indeed, that percentage is a proper percentile, which is an excellent system, and should be used if there's a suitably big sample size for it not to be far too coarse a measure. My objection is to scaled scores out of 800 which you are given. They are, from what I've read, by no means absolute. The absolute raw scores (number you got right, corrected for guessing) are fitted to their ideal score distribution, to correct for the difficulty of the particular paper. Thus their fitting, and hence your 'absolulte' score, is dependant on the performance of someone else, to an extent. Ideally, just raw score and percentiles would be the way to go, imo.
I reached the same conclusion whenever I checked out some of the sample materials for the GRE - the general math test doesn't test your ability to do math in most cases, but your ability to take their test. Just need to remember all their devious little tricks ('x = 16, x=4, not enough information to determine which is which' always used to catch me out...) and it should be pretty plain sailing. Or so I hope...
This is presumably a pitall of how they scale the scores - more than one raw (Number right - (number wrong/4) or somesuch) score yields the 800/800 'absolute' score, and thus there is a degree of differentiation required within the same score bracket, presumably using the secret raw score. This sort of confusion would of course immediately be solved if they had just quoted the raw score to begin with, instead of trying to fit their new absolute scores, which is pretty much the crux of my objection to the whole fitting process.