> Something could have happened in international handling in Germany. Unlikely but not ruled out. A better designed experiment is needed
RTFA (I know, Slashdot). "Having run a series of control tests in Germany and Europe, which demonstrate no such bias, the problem appears to lie in the USA..."
> That means you do something and I witness it. Do you have a right to compel me to forget it ever happened? Of course not.
Yes. But the law is not targeting people, but rather systems. Organizations are not people as are not machines. Asking to be forgotten by such systems is not without precedent. A judge may expunge a juvenile's record on adulthood, for instance. The people who already knew of the juvenile's escapades are not demanded to forget the events, nor are they forbidden from being queried later; just the systems in question. The goal is not to rewrite the past, but to close certain channels of access (usually with known automatic triggers with unfair consequences) to it. All this sounds fair to me.
Well. Here in India, Internet and cable TV use wires hanging between buildings, and have done so for decades. Theft is not really a problem.
The cheapest wireless internet we have is 256 kbps at $5 a month. That's quite adequate for everything but video. $10 for 1 mbps wired.
The important thing is for everyone to with the most basic literacy to be able to afford unmetered Internet *access*. Higher bandwidth is much less important. Upper tiers just get used for entertainment and are not critical.
I feel that making basic Internet access at limited bandwidth (256 kbps is fine, 1mbps is better if we are to target online education), available as free as radio waves or water, is a better goal than 20 for 20 by 20.
Mobile phones are already very cheap here. Incoming calls are free. Outgoing call balance can be recharged with cards as low as 50 cents. So a poor family living in a hut with a leaky roof can still afford phones for each of its members for essential use. Internet should be as affordable as that and it will surely get there here without any ITU directives.
> 1.5mbps is insufficient to stream with decent quality these days without spending a ton of time waiting for the video to buffer.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Most of you are just spoilt with high speeds and forgot how resourceful you can be (I learned my tricks in dial-up days):-). I am in India now with a 1 mbps connection ($10/month). I can get faster Internet and can afford way more. But I chose not to for reasons I won't go into now.
I just use browser plugins, downloaders or my own Python scripts to download videos and watch them offline (since I get annoyed when video redownloads when I skip around). Yes, not everyone will want to do this. I have downloaded plenty of MOOCs and Youtube conference presentations here. Youtube introduced WebM, which compresses better. I have a greasemonkey script to get them. I can watch a 480p WebM video (360p mostly works for small text on slides. 480 is perfect) in realtime as it downloads.
I used my own (there are some published scripts too, but I wanted custom renaming etc) Python scripts to batch download some Coursera videos (they are very well compressed 540p mp4s since most of the window is just a whiteboard with little movement. 10 min is around 11-15 MB. BTW. 1 mbps is plenty for realtime viewing) and Youtube lecture playlists. I also video conferenced with 6 people at once while working over RDP - all at 1 mbps.
I think I can get by with even 256 kbps ($5/month) except for conferencing. I would just download the lectures overnight. What I care more about are bandwidth caps (Most Coursera courses aren't more than 2 GB. So that's not a real problem either) or service outages.
Its also not that I don't know what speed means. As I left US, I was using 100mbps at the university and downloaded 60GB of various public research datasets over just a few hours that I would not download from here. I am not suggesting that low bandwidth is something to look forward to. You can see that I am wasting some time working around it. But as bandwidth increases, even though it changes the way we work, it only provides diminishing returns. For one, the time saved not working around would be replaced by entertainment temptations, at least for me.
As long as there is connectivity, speed is mostly not a show stopper. That said, Americans should demand more bandwidth given the tax dollars that went into the infrastructure... just not for MOOC reasons.
And its a pretty good argument too. I don't care how the devs wanted me to enjoy their product - I don't fit the psychological profile of their target demographic. I will choose how best to get value for my money.
Take RTS games. I don't care about the "challenge". I don't care about winning or losing in video games. Too stressful and too much of a mundane grind for something that is supposed to be fun. Instead, I just use them as a domino set - Set em up, knock em down. Accumulate lots of units and save... from a safe perch, I like to see if I can take down the enemy base using my own rules about units and tactics from there (Company of Heroes). Or just play specific sections of long levels (Men of War). I like the little explosions and other physics effects. Why should the devs care about how I use their product as long as they got the money and I as long as I am not using cheats on another player.
Most games have some great moments with a lot of replay value and loads of filler content that life is too short for. Saves allow one to savor the good bits and not waste time on the failings.
I just don't see how he can be severely punished by any court at this point without diminishing itself. At least from the comment sections of major US/International news outlets, the court of public opinion (arguably skewed) is firmly against any major sentencing and that he had suffered enough already. Anything more than a few years will not be good for the international image.
Another Protip: When someone uses a neat statistic on Slashdot, you can be pretty sure that they pulled numbers out of thin air.
@ FriendlyStatistician
> Have you read 1984 recently? A huge part of the plot revolves around the protagonist thinking he was safe
Its been a while. I remember this part well. Hence the post.
> when he was in fact being watched on camera the entire time.
That I did not remember much of. Just that he was betrayed the whole time by people (although I vaguely recall the discovery of a camera in the capture scene and him retracing his memory to being watched). But hey, I don't reread classics to make web posts:-).
> you'll find most people won't want a camera shoved into their face
This is worse than 1984. In Oceania, one at least knew where the cameras were and could at-least try to avoid them.
> basically the entire public space is under surveillance all the time
Reminds one of the scene in The Matrix, where Neo is identified when the avatar of a homeless guy just sees him. So long privacy. It was nice knowing you.
Other thoughts... - Google will agree to not track or store (less likely) faces unless consented to... sort of like Google Maps blanking faces - Allow friends to follow you... literally, as you get detected by the crowd cams (why not? for some reason, people already let their online lives tracked by social media) - Subscribe to FBI's most wanted list, local missing people.
Re:It's not all about power....differentiators are
on
Sony Announces the PS4
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· Score: 1
Words out of my mouth.
> PC's have higher initial HW costs Yes. And for people like me who already need a half-decent desktop, the extra cost is just the mid-range GPU.
> $720 over 3 year I doubt that an average gamer buys 2 full priced games per month on average though, especially with GameStop in business. But they make up enough from most gamers... especially XBox 360 with XBox Live.
> Nintendo wins this generation almost by default Not too sure. Wii U sales have been underwhelming so far. I imagine a lot of people are looking at the controller and scratching their head. It's utility is not as clear as it was with the Wii controller. But the other two are not doing themselves any favors with their backward compatibility stances. If the other two consoles do worse than Wii U, consoles as a whole are doomed.
Re:It's not all about power....differentiators are
on
Sony Announces the PS4
·
· Score: 1
> The xbox 360 doesn't have an 8800
You're right. I was working off memory from last launch there. Not sure where I got that flub into my head.
> This is on the low side of high-end, but definitely not mid-end.
Yes, for now... when they have not even shown the console on stage. It will be mid-range by the time it is out in the market.
> 176 GBps and around 2 teraflops
AnandTech puts the GPU performance between Radeon HD 7850 and 7870. 7870 is currently a $250 GPU. By the time this launches, it will have a $150-$200 GPU inside. Hardly premium hardware.
> Also, no PC GPU is going to have 8 GB of GDDR5
No. GPU won't use it all. 8 GB is the combined RAM being shared by CPU + GPU. It would be interesting to see what faster memory does for PS4, but historically, CPU RAM speed upgrades never provided significant improvements. But perhaps having common fast memory pool will bring some advantages.
Re:It's not all about power....differentiators are
on
Sony Announces the PS4
·
· Score: 1
First, its not *all*-caps (maybe you prefer this style of emphasis) text. It was 4 words out of 276 that were emphasized. Others were abbreviations and one Xbox that was capped in error. Second, all-caps for full text is obviously bad netiquette. But I challenge you to find a general netiquette document that finds my selective style of capitalization in error. You just made up your own rule.
PC ports: Should be less expensive to develop and optimize now. PC mods?: If only these can be turned into full desktops. Sony... largest, accidental maker of gaming PCs:-). The irony would be sweet. Or perhaps PS4 OS on commodity PC hardware, ala Hackintosh. Better forced GPU features for your PS4 games. Emulation should also be more efficient when PS4 emulators emerge years later.
Now that it is x86, it may even run Windows this time:-). Think about it... budget gaming PCs... from a modded console.
Re:It's not all about power....differentiators are
on
Sony Announces the PS4
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Why do people, especially here, keep saying that you save money with a console? It may have other benefits (like not having to install game DRM on a general use machine, for family use, where the entertainment system should be isolated etc), but saving money is not one of them. You buy an EXTRA machine OVER your desktop. A gaming desktop is cheaper than a non-gaming desktop PLUS a console. And then there is console tax over games and multi-player, which when accounted, practically compensates the gaming component cost.
Having 2 devices has some advantages, but that's a different matter. PC GPUs can have 7yr life cycles too... if you are happy with 7 yr old settings... which is for most part (console graphics appear to improve over time, partly because the quality of early titles, aside from token exclusives, is poor. The difference is not so great that later titles will get you 1080p instead of 720p) is what you get with consoles anyway. Most recent games, will play on a 8800 (XBOX 360 had a 8800 while the PS3 had a 7800 to compensate the Cell's GPU failings) at 720p and medium to low settings. You only needed a PC refresh in between if you fancied 1080p or more, better physics, textures and tessellation since, that current consoles cannot deliver anyway. In short, PCs *appear* to have shorter life-cycles because *you* want more stuff... because upgrade is an *option*.
Personally, I prefer getting a mid-range GPU, a year after the consoles are released. My GTX 260, inexpensively bought on a sale, has at least another 2 years in it. PC gaming is NOT expensive.
> Anyone who thinks that sending all my keystrokes to their server...
Well. Not ALL keystrokes. Just Unity Dash searches. Doesn't Android's integrated search bar do something like this too? Not that it makes it OK of course.
Well. The good congressman is a product of that fine educational system. According to his Bio, he is a high-school graduate who moved to such intellectual activities as construction business and basic soldiering (NCO). But that's OK since he considers himself a "science enthusiast" and a HUGE "science buff". What do those stupid biased university professors with their PhDs and publications know? He just wants to redefine science so that it better fits his political needs. No big deal.
> I might get to learn Python one day but I'm afraid I'd become a so-so programmer in both languages.
I empathize since I conversely only barely use Ruby. Once someone learns one of these languages, there is not that much that the other offers. But happily, one need not learn advanced Python to benefit from these projects.
> it's a shame that so much effort is being divided between communities
AFAIK, all scientific funding from US and Europe is/was always directed to Python, not Ruby. So Python is firmly established as a research language and there is not much effort being divided with Ruby (which seems to have a much more spotted and amateur movement in this direction), at least as far as scientific stuff is concerned (Ruby is more popular on web app side). For me the tension for scientific use is not between Python and Ruby, but between Python and R. Python community is replicating a lot of R functionality these days but R still has a much better lead in science libraries. Happily, it is quite easy to call R from Python.
> but it is the result of what most libertarians say they want
Often, but not necessarily. But I agree that it is inevitable in those particular regions of the world with existing poverty and illiteracy. More stable societies will gradually transition to some form/level of liberalism once libertarianism hits its scalability limits.
All libertarians want is that contracts are respected and beyond general security, nothing else is enforced. I can understand how this can work when resources are plentiful and the resource is of such nature that hogging them is hard - such as a relatively small number of pre-industrialization farmers on a surplus land-mass (like frontier US, if you ignore slave and native-American perspectives).
The libertarian problem is that sooner or later power centers develop and abuse almost necessarily follows (unfortunately, libertarians at this stage resort to teleological justifications of that abuse - one is rich, therefore he must have deserved it) and there arises a need for a body that can contain everyone else, but one that operates by a set of principles, for the health of the overall system, rather than the self-interest that everyone else is expected to follow.
The liberal problem then necessarily follows in that the principles of this arbitrating/governing power is almost necessarily directed by those in economic power and to their advantage. At this stage, we don't have further answers. Hopefully, a better, more scientific system will evolve in the next century thanks to better availability of economic and behavioral data and greater transparency and literacy.
> I don't think you'll find many libertarians who believe they live in a free country.
As a foreigner who admires their idealism, I don't think American libertarians will believe they live in a free country, when put in ANY country in existence today.
No, he hasn’t... not a single one of your points. You are just eager to claim victory.
You are confusing between two statements
a.) I hold that it is rational to assume that there are no deities. b.) I can formally assert that there can absolutely be no deities.
The Webster definition can, in theory, be taken to cover both. Your argument is a strawman (despite your claims below that it isn’t) in that you insist that atheists follow (b). They don’t. I can’t speak for the atheists you say you met, but I am not aware of a SINGLE recognized atheist that asserts anything more than (a).
Feel free to cite statements from any *well-recognized* (unlike say, your neighbor Bob) atheist that states that it can be formally established that there can be no deities. YOU misread the definition. Not us.
I define atheists and agnostics quite differently.
> you don't believe in any particular religion (agnostic)
That's atheistic for me, not agnostic. Agnostic is when you say one/some of the religions *might* actually be correct, but there is no way to know for sure. As an atheist, I hold that all *current* religions made enough demonstrated blunders by their claims that their cosmic myths and escatologies don't deserve any further consideration (the validity of their social philosophies are a different matter, I am just referring to the supernatural bits here). As an atheist, I do not worry about whether a so far unmentioned deity beyond current religions could in fact be a causal force. I just think it is a wrong question.
Let's replace God with Lochness monster.
Agnostic - The current sightings don't prove existence, but it is still an open question. Atheistic - So many of the sightings turned out to be errors and outright frauds that the rational position is that we consider it as just a myth.
If we do in fact find a Lochness monster, I won't be embarrassed about my position. My position was rational and being rational with available information does not guarantee correctness. It just improves the odds significantly.
Can unicorns theoretically exist? Sure. But please excuse me if I privately chuckle at unicorn believers though. I won't normally mind their personal beliefs beyond that, but when they unilaterally think it is OK to preach to me and label me on my lack of unicorn belief, question my morality and when their beliefs start coloring public policy... which does impact my life, I do believe in calling out on their irrationality (people everywhere are rational about some things and irrational about others).
> You're right, a lot of high school textbooks promote liberal lies
The peculiar problem with textbooks in US is that there are too many of them... delicately catering to various political constituencies. Textbooks should reflect the intellectual consensus of the day. Whether the consensus will be proven to be untrue in the future is not a concern for *high-school* text books.
> The Church tried him for scientific misconduct, where he presented no evidence for his theories, took credit for the ideas of others, and when asked to present evidence, either made up data or just ridiculed others.
My reading of it was that he put the Pope in a difficult spot by choosing a combative tone in his book despite clear instructions to the contrary, at a time when the pope was in a politically vulnerable spot when the side he backed in a war, lost. So although Galileo was a personal friend of the pope from before he became a pope and even though he got the approval of the Vatican before publishing (with agreement on a dialectic method, which Galileo followed on letter, but not in spirit), it was decided that he needed to be silenced from further publication, as a political liability. Yes, the school books do have a much simpler narrative than this.
> Today, such a scientist would be sent to prison for fraud. The church placed him under house arrest instead.
Surely you jest. What you list is scientific misconduct at most... and scientists don't go to prison for this. They just get fired and are not welcomed by their peers anymore.
> Do they teach disclaimers that scientists aren't quite sure anymore
Again, the purpose of *high-school* text books is to give a basic framework of current understanding for mildly interested kids of moderate intelligence... by necessity. You are expecting disclaimers in the wrong place and are seeing conspiracy/propaganda where there is none. Most of those questions are discussed quite openly in graduate school, in open forums.
Whenever you see such conspiracy, I suggest this: Look for a developed country of reasonable scientific output where there is no such liberal/conservative dispute around education and check what they teach. Of course, if your world view is that liberal propaganda has intellectually subjugated the whole world and the last bastion of resistance are the contemporary conservatives in US, most of which are not exactly inspiring for their academic accomplishments and yet have somehow developed special understanding of sciences... this isn't going to help.
> For the most part, they don't try to. What we lack is a counterpoint to the blind faith and sordid history of evolutionism.
You lack quite a bit more than that, I assure you.
> Really? Are you sure that students in the West do not learn about slavery, Cortez and the Incas, smallpox blankets, the atrocities of the crusades, the opium war?
Like I said, I am not a Westerner. I did not go to school in US. I don't believe high-school students anywhere study nuanced history. I am reasonably certain that these are not covered in high-school curriculum since all the books I read about every single one of these in detail, had a certain elite vibe to them.
Conservatives in US seemed to believe that the point of history education is less about such nuances rather than creating well-behaved citizenry, with nationalistic pride, based on shared and elegant myths (facts, like science, are messy). My country similarly has its own shared myths in the curriculum. In my decade or so in US, it looked like the creationism lobby was trying for a similar platform, this time in science. Harder sell since this has only been done in theocracies so far, not in OECD countries.
But, like I said, there are more books self-critical written in the West than anywhere else... I was not talking about what school kids read.
> (Non-Western nations did comparable things too, but the standard response there is often denial.)
Exactly my point. I am confident they/we will get there in time.
>> I challenge you to cite *any* science that does not do this. > Exactly my point. It is a faith.
It may be your point. But it is utter nonsense. So in your view, science is all faith. So I assume that the recent Mars Rover got there entirely by a faith. There is always *some* faith of course, since we rarely have all the data. We were not sure we could land it until we did. But in your bizarre worldview, if there is a trace of faith, then it is all faith. Most people use a *continuous scale* for this. Your fundamental fallacy is that you use a *discrete scale*. How exactly do you make this leap? After all, the p-scale you seem to love is itself a continuous scale and its whole point is of communicating uncertainty... so that we can work with it or around it.
Your other points elsewhere. ======================
>>None of this seems to have anything to do with science. >Really? Do you think scientific reasoning is not based on statistics?
Matter-of-factually... no. Science uses statistics as a key tool. But often, it is not the main foundation for discovery.
>>You have created a strawman of how science works and are beating it with all your might. > To the contrary, the standard operating procedure of science is to create the straw man of the null hypothesis, then beat it with data which will contradict the straw man no matter what happens.
I actually don't disagree here. My own field greatly abuses this framework and it was one of my own critiques of my field. But do note that no one takes such results as definitive conclusions. Everyone understands that it is just a framework for talking about observations. Its a soft, rather than concrete use of statistical methods. Like using language linguistically, rather than in an ontologically rigorous manner.
> Where are the scientists who welcome the teaching of alternatives to the theory of evolution?
What alternatives? The only theory where there is any scientific activity is around the theory of evolution. Creationists haven't exactly come up with a scientific program.
> No, they lobby hard to pass laws making it illegal to teach any ideas that question the theory.
No. They recommend that the science curriculum for “high-school” students should include only theories that have scientific activity around them. Deepak Chopra, for example has a quantum theory of consciousness. But he proposes absolutely no scientific work, around his theory. So it won’t be in a science curriculum (Fortunately, new age types don’t think of this as an affront), given its limited scope. No one is stopping you from pursuing it elsewhere though. Librar
Slashdot Mirror
> Something could have happened in international handling in Germany. Unlikely but not ruled out. A better designed experiment is needed
RTFA (I know, Slashdot). "Having run a series of control tests in Germany and Europe, which demonstrate no such bias, the problem appears to lie in the USA..."
> That means you do something and I witness it. Do you have a right to compel me to forget it ever happened? Of course not.
Yes. But the law is not targeting people, but rather systems. Organizations are not people as are not machines. Asking to be forgotten by such systems is not without precedent. A judge may expunge a juvenile's record on adulthood, for instance. The people who already knew of the juvenile's escapades are not demanded to forget the events, nor are they forbidden from being queried later; just the systems in question. The goal is not to rewrite the past, but to close certain channels of access (usually with known automatic triggers with unfair consequences) to it. All this sounds fair to me.
> Reason being copper theft. It's big deal.
Well. Here in India, Internet and cable TV use wires hanging between buildings, and have done so for decades. Theft is not really a problem.
The cheapest wireless internet we have is 256 kbps at $5 a month. That's quite adequate for everything but video. $10 for 1 mbps wired.
The important thing is for everyone to with the most basic literacy to be able to afford unmetered Internet *access*. Higher bandwidth is much less important. Upper tiers just get used for entertainment and are not critical.
I feel that making basic Internet access at limited bandwidth (256 kbps is fine, 1mbps is better if we are to target online education), available as free as radio waves or water, is a better goal than 20 for 20 by 20.
Mobile phones are already very cheap here. Incoming calls are free. Outgoing call balance can be recharged with cards as low as 50 cents. So a poor family living in a hut with a leaky roof can still afford phones for each of its members for essential use. Internet should be as affordable as that and it will surely get there here without any ITU directives.
> 1.5mbps is insufficient to stream with decent quality these days without spending a ton of time waiting for the video to buffer.
Where there is a will, there is a way. Most of you are just spoilt with high speeds and forgot how resourceful you can be (I learned my tricks in dial-up days) :-). I am in India now with a 1 mbps connection ($10/month). I can get faster Internet and can afford way more. But I chose not to for reasons I won't go into now.
I just use browser plugins, downloaders or my own Python scripts to download videos and watch them offline (since I get annoyed when video redownloads when I skip around). Yes, not everyone will want to do this. I have downloaded plenty of MOOCs and Youtube conference presentations here. Youtube introduced WebM, which compresses better. I have a greasemonkey script to get them. I can watch a 480p WebM video (360p mostly works for small text on slides. 480 is perfect) in realtime as it downloads.
I used my own (there are some published scripts too, but I wanted custom renaming etc) Python scripts to batch download some Coursera videos (they are very well compressed 540p mp4s since most of the window is just a whiteboard with little movement. 10 min is around 11-15 MB. BTW. 1 mbps is plenty for realtime viewing) and Youtube lecture playlists. I also video conferenced with 6 people at once while working over RDP - all at 1 mbps.
I think I can get by with even 256 kbps ($5/month) except for conferencing. I would just download the lectures overnight. What I care more about are bandwidth caps (Most Coursera courses aren't more than 2 GB. So that's not a real problem either) or service outages.
Its also not that I don't know what speed means. As I left US, I was using 100mbps at the university and downloaded 60GB of various public research datasets over just a few hours that I would not download from here. I am not suggesting that low bandwidth is something to look forward to. You can see that I am wasting some time working around it. But as bandwidth increases, even though it changes the way we work, it only provides diminishing returns. For one, the time saved not working around would be replaced by entertainment temptations, at least for me.
As long as there is connectivity, speed is mostly not a show stopper. That said, Americans should demand more bandwidth given the tax dollars that went into the infrastructure... just not for MOOC reasons.
And its a pretty good argument too. I don't care how the devs wanted me to enjoy their product - I don't fit the psychological profile of their target demographic. I will choose how best to get value for my money.
Take RTS games. I don't care about the "challenge". I don't care about winning or losing in video games. Too stressful and too much of a mundane grind for something that is supposed to be fun. Instead, I just use them as a domino set - Set em up, knock em down. Accumulate lots of units and save... from a safe perch, I like to see if I can take down the enemy base using my own rules about units and tactics from there (Company of Heroes). Or just play specific sections of long levels (Men of War). I like the little explosions and other physics effects. Why should the devs care about how I use their product as long as they got the money and I as long as I am not using cheats on another player.
Most games have some great moments with a lot of replay value and loads of filler content that life is too short for. Saves allow one to savor the good bits and not waste time on the failings.
I just don't see how he can be severely punished by any court at this point without diminishing itself. At least from the comment sections of major US/International news outlets, the court of public opinion (arguably skewed) is firmly against any major sentencing and that he had suffered enough already. Anything more than a few years will not be good for the international image.
@LordLimecat
Another Protip: When someone uses a neat statistic on Slashdot, you can be pretty sure that they pulled numbers out of thin air.
@ FriendlyStatistician
> Have you read 1984 recently? A huge part of the plot revolves around the protagonist thinking he was safe
Its been a while. I remember this part well. Hence the post.
> when he was in fact being watched on camera the entire time.
That I did not remember much of. Just that he was betrayed the whole time by people (although I vaguely recall the discovery of a camera in the capture scene and him retracing his memory to being watched). But hey, I don't reread classics to make web posts :-).
> you'll find most people won't want a camera shoved into their face
This is worse than 1984. In Oceania, one at least knew where the cameras were and could at-least try to avoid them.
> basically the entire public space is under surveillance all the time
Reminds one of the scene in The Matrix, where Neo is identified when the avatar of a homeless guy just sees him. So long privacy. It was nice knowing you.
Other thoughts...
- Google will agree to not track or store (less likely) faces unless consented to... sort of like Google Maps blanking faces
- Allow friends to follow you... literally, as you get detected by the crowd cams (why not? for some reason, people already let their online lives tracked by social media)
- Subscribe to FBI's most wanted list, local missing people.
Words out of my mouth.
> PC's have higher initial HW costs
Yes. And for people like me who already need a half-decent desktop, the extra cost is just the mid-range GPU.
> $720 over 3 year
I doubt that an average gamer buys 2 full priced games per month on average though, especially with GameStop in business. But they make up enough from most gamers... especially XBox 360 with XBox Live.
> Nintendo wins this generation almost by default
Not too sure. Wii U sales have been underwhelming so far. I imagine a lot of people are looking at the controller and scratching their head. It's utility is not as clear as it was with the Wii controller. But the other two are not doing themselves any favors with their backward compatibility stances. If the other two consoles do worse than Wii U, consoles as a whole are doomed.
> The xbox 360 doesn't have an 8800
You're right. I was working off memory from last launch there. Not sure where I got that flub into my head.
> This is on the low side of high-end, but definitely not mid-end.
Yes, for now... when they have not even shown the console on stage. It will be mid-range by the time it is out in the market.
> 176 GBps and around 2 teraflops
AnandTech puts the GPU performance between Radeon HD 7850 and 7870. 7870 is currently a $250 GPU. By the time this launches, it will have a $150-$200 GPU inside. Hardly premium hardware.
> Also, no PC GPU is going to have 8 GB of GDDR5
No. GPU won't use it all. 8 GB is the combined RAM being shared by CPU + GPU. It would be interesting to see what faster memory does for PS4, but historically, CPU RAM speed upgrades never provided significant improvements. But perhaps having common fast memory pool will bring some advantages.
First, its not *all*-caps (maybe you prefer this style of emphasis) text. It was 4 words out of 276 that were emphasized. Others were abbreviations and one Xbox that was capped in error. Second, all-caps for full text is obviously bad netiquette. But I challenge you to find a general netiquette document that finds my selective style of capitalization in error. You just made up your own rule.
PC ports: Should be less expensive to develop and optimize now. :-). The irony would be sweet.
PC mods?: If only these can be turned into full desktops. Sony... largest, accidental maker of gaming PCs
Or perhaps PS4 OS on commodity PC hardware, ala Hackintosh. Better forced GPU features for your PS4 games.
Emulation should also be more efficient when PS4 emulators emerge years later.
Now that it is x86, it may even run Windows this time :-). Think about it... budget gaming PCs... from a modded console.
Why do people, especially here, keep saying that you save money with a console? It may have other benefits (like not having to install game DRM on a general use machine, for family use, where the entertainment system should be isolated etc), but saving money is not one of them. You buy an EXTRA machine OVER your desktop. A gaming desktop is cheaper than a non-gaming desktop PLUS a console. And then there is console tax over games and multi-player, which when accounted, practically compensates the gaming component cost.
Having 2 devices has some advantages, but that's a different matter. PC GPUs can have 7yr life cycles too... if you are happy with 7 yr old settings... which is for most part (console graphics appear to improve over time, partly because the quality of early titles, aside from token exclusives, is poor. The difference is not so great that later titles will get you 1080p instead of 720p) is what you get with consoles anyway. Most recent games, will play on a 8800 (XBOX 360 had a 8800 while the PS3 had a 7800 to compensate the Cell's GPU failings) at 720p and medium to low settings. You only needed a PC refresh in between if you fancied 1080p or more, better physics, textures and tessellation since, that current consoles cannot deliver anyway. In short, PCs *appear* to have shorter life-cycles because *you* want more stuff... because upgrade is an *option*.
Personally, I prefer getting a mid-range GPU, a year after the consoles are released. My GTX 260, inexpensively bought on a sale, has at least another 2 years in it. PC gaming is NOT expensive.
> Anyone who thinks that sending all my keystrokes to their server...
Well. Not ALL keystrokes. Just Unity Dash searches. Doesn't Android's integrated search bar do something like this too? Not that it makes it OK of course.
Oops. State rep of course, not congressman.
Well. The good congressman is a product of that fine educational system. According to his Bio, he is a high-school graduate who moved to such intellectual activities as construction business and basic soldiering (NCO). But that's OK since he considers himself a "science enthusiast" and a HUGE "science buff". What do those stupid biased university professors with their PhDs and publications know? He just wants to redefine science so that it better fits his political needs. No big deal.
> I might get to learn Python one day but I'm afraid I'd become a so-so programmer in both languages.
I empathize since I conversely only barely use Ruby. Once someone learns one of these languages, there is not that much that the other offers. But happily, one need not learn advanced Python to benefit from these projects.
> it's a shame that so much effort is being divided between communities
AFAIK, all scientific funding from US and Europe is/was always directed to Python, not Ruby. So Python is firmly established as a research language and there is not much effort being divided with Ruby (which seems to have a much more spotted and amateur movement in this direction), at least as far as scientific stuff is concerned (Ruby is more popular on web app side). For me the tension for scientific use is not between Python and Ruby, but between Python and R. Python community is replicating a lot of R functionality these days but R still has a much better lead in science libraries. Happily, it is quite easy to call R from Python.
> Somalia is not what libertarians want
Of course not.
> but it is the result of what most libertarians say they want
Often, but not necessarily. But I agree that it is inevitable in those particular regions of the world with existing poverty and illiteracy. More stable societies will gradually transition to some form/level of liberalism once libertarianism hits its scalability limits.
All libertarians want is that contracts are respected and beyond general security, nothing else is enforced. I can understand how this can work when resources are plentiful and the resource is of such nature that hogging them is hard - such as a relatively small number of pre-industrialization farmers on a surplus land-mass (like frontier US, if you ignore slave and native-American perspectives).
The libertarian problem is that sooner or later power centers develop and abuse almost necessarily follows (unfortunately, libertarians at this stage resort to teleological justifications of that abuse - one is rich, therefore he must have deserved it) and there arises a need for a body that can contain everyone else, but one that operates by a set of principles, for the health of the overall system, rather than the self-interest that everyone else is expected to follow.
The liberal problem then necessarily follows in that the principles of this arbitrating/governing power is almost necessarily directed by those in economic power and to their advantage. At this stage, we don't have further answers. Hopefully, a better, more scientific system will evolve in the next century thanks to better availability of economic and behavioral data and greater transparency and literacy.
> I don't think you'll find many libertarians who believe they live in a free country.
As a foreigner who admires their idealism, I don't think American libertarians will believe they live in a free country, when put in ANY country in existence today.
No, he hasn’t... not a single one of your points. You are just eager to claim victory.
You are confusing between two statements
a.) I hold that it is rational to assume that there are no deities.
b.) I can formally assert that there can absolutely be no deities.
The Webster definition can, in theory, be taken to cover both. Your argument is a strawman (despite your claims below that it isn’t) in that you insist that atheists follow (b). They don’t. I can’t speak for the atheists you say you met, but I am not aware of a SINGLE recognized atheist that asserts anything more than (a).
Feel free to cite statements from any *well-recognized* (unlike say, your neighbor Bob) atheist that states that it can be formally established that there can be no deities. YOU misread the definition. Not us.
To illustrate: Richard Dawkins is currently the most well-recognized atheist and the photo is at the *Atheist* bus tour
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ariane_Sherine_and_Richard_Dawkins_at_the_Atheist_Bus_Campaign_launch.jpg
The banner reads - “There’s *probably* no god”. That's not an agnostic position. Its THE Atheistic position.
Aside from the strawman, your argument also reeks of "No true Scotsman".
I define atheists and agnostics quite differently.
> you don't believe in any particular religion (agnostic)
That's atheistic for me, not agnostic. Agnostic is when you say one/some of the religions *might* actually be correct, but there is no way to know for sure. As an atheist, I hold that all *current* religions made enough demonstrated blunders by their claims that their cosmic myths and escatologies don't deserve any further consideration (the validity of their social philosophies are a different matter, I am just referring to the supernatural bits here). As an atheist, I do not worry about whether a so far unmentioned deity beyond current religions could in fact be a causal force. I just think it is a wrong question.
Let's replace God with Lochness monster.
Agnostic - The current sightings don't prove existence, but it is still an open question.
Atheistic - So many of the sightings turned out to be errors and outright frauds that the rational position is that we consider it as just a myth.
If we do in fact find a Lochness monster, I won't be embarrassed about my position. My position was rational and being rational with available information does not guarantee correctness. It just improves the odds significantly.
Can unicorns theoretically exist? Sure. But please excuse me if I privately chuckle at unicorn believers though. I won't normally mind their personal beliefs beyond that, but when they unilaterally think it is OK to preach to me and label me on my lack of unicorn belief, question my morality and when their beliefs start coloring public policy... which does impact my life, I do believe in calling out on their irrationality (people everywhere are rational about some things and irrational about others).
> You're right, a lot of high school textbooks promote liberal lies
The peculiar problem with textbooks in US is that there are too many of them... delicately catering to various political constituencies. Textbooks should reflect the intellectual consensus of the day. Whether the consensus will be proven to be untrue in the future is not a concern for *high-school* text books.
> The Church tried him for scientific misconduct, where he presented no evidence for his theories, took credit for the ideas of others, and when asked to present evidence, either made up data or just ridiculed others.
My reading of it was that he put the Pope in a difficult spot by choosing a combative tone in his book despite clear instructions to the contrary, at a time when the pope was in a politically vulnerable spot when the side he backed in a war, lost. So although Galileo was a personal friend of the pope from before he became a pope and even though he got the approval of the Vatican before publishing (with agreement on a dialectic method, which Galileo followed on letter, but not in spirit), it was decided that he needed to be silenced from further publication, as a political liability. Yes, the school books do have a much simpler narrative than this.
> Today, such a scientist would be sent to prison for fraud. The church placed him under house arrest instead.
Surely you jest. What you list is scientific misconduct at most... and scientists don't go to prison for this. They just get fired and are not welcomed by their peers anymore.
> Do they teach disclaimers that scientists aren't quite sure anymore
Again, the purpose of *high-school* text books is to give a basic framework of current understanding for mildly interested kids of moderate intelligence... by necessity. You are expecting disclaimers in the wrong place and are seeing conspiracy/propaganda where there is none. Most of those questions are discussed quite openly in graduate school, in open forums.
Whenever you see such conspiracy, I suggest this: Look for a developed country of reasonable scientific output where there is no such liberal/conservative dispute around education and check what they teach. Of course, if your world view is that liberal propaganda has intellectually subjugated the whole world and the last bastion of resistance are the contemporary conservatives in US, most of which are not exactly inspiring for their academic accomplishments and yet have somehow developed special understanding of sciences... this isn't going to help.
> For the most part, they don't try to. What we lack is a counterpoint to the blind faith and sordid history of evolutionism.
You lack quite a bit more than that, I assure you.
> Really? Are you sure that students in the West do not learn about slavery, Cortez and the Incas, smallpox blankets, the atrocities of the crusades, the opium war?
Like I said, I am not a Westerner. I did not go to school in US. I don't believe high-school students anywhere study nuanced history. I am reasonably certain that these are not covered in high-school curriculum since all the books I read about every single one of these in detail, had a certain elite vibe to them.
Conservatives in US seemed to believe that the point of history education is less about such nuances rather than creating well-behaved citizenry, with nationalistic pride, based on shared and elegant myths (facts, like science, are messy). My country similarly has its own shared myths in the curriculum. In my decade or so in US, it looked like the creationism lobby was trying for a similar platform, this time in science. Harder sell since this has only been done in theocracies so far, not in OECD countries.
But, like I said, there are more books self-critical written in the West than anywhere else... I was not talking about what school kids read.
> (Non-Western nations did comparable things too, but the standard response there is often denial.)
Exactly my point. I am confident they/we will get there in time.
>> I challenge you to cite *any* science that does not do this.
> Exactly my point. It is a faith.
It may be your point. But it is utter nonsense. So in your view, science is all faith. So I assume that the recent Mars Rover got there entirely by a faith. There is always *some* faith of course, since we rarely have all the data. We were not sure we could land it until we did. But in your bizarre worldview, if there is a trace of faith, then it is all faith. Most people use a *continuous scale* for this. Your fundamental fallacy is that you use a *discrete scale*. How exactly do you make this leap? After all, the p-scale you seem to love is itself a continuous scale and its whole point is of communicating uncertainty... so that we can work with it or around it.
Your other points elsewhere.
======================
>>None of this seems to have anything to do with science.
>Really? Do you think scientific reasoning is not based on statistics?
Matter-of-factually... no. Science uses statistics as a key tool. But often, it is not the main foundation for discovery.
>>You have created a strawman of how science works and are beating it with all your might.
> To the contrary, the standard operating procedure of science is to create the straw man of the null hypothesis, then beat it with data which will contradict the straw man no matter what happens.
I actually don't disagree here. My own field greatly abuses this framework and it was one of my own critiques of my field. But do note that no one takes such results as definitive conclusions. Everyone understands that it is just a framework for talking about observations. Its a soft, rather than concrete use of statistical methods. Like using language linguistically, rather than in an ontologically rigorous manner.
> Where are the scientists who welcome the teaching of alternatives to the theory of evolution?
What alternatives? The only theory where there is any scientific activity is around the theory of evolution. Creationists haven't exactly come up with a scientific program.
> No, they lobby hard to pass laws making it illegal to teach any ideas that question the theory.
No. They recommend that the science curriculum for “high-school” students should include only theories that have scientific activity around them.
Deepak Chopra, for example has a quantum theory of consciousness. But he proposes absolutely no scientific work, around his theory. So it won’t be in a science curriculum (Fortunately, new age types don’t think of this as an affront), given its limited scope. No one is stopping you from pursuing it elsewhere though. Librar