>But why does there need to be a reason? Can things simply not be ?
The same reason why scientists need to run around and find out 'how'. This is a confused comparison.
On the one hand, scientists, usually, have a *personal* motivation to discover the 'how' behind things. It fascinates, interests, drives them. The accumulation of knowledge, the probing of an area of inquiry is rewarding and satisfying to them and that is why they do it.
The "need" for them to do it is of their own chosing according to their own internal motivations.
The question about reasons is pointing out that the distinguishment of religion vs science (why vs need) is sortinging out two categories of inquiry in which one category does not necessarily have any value at all. Since it is possible that there is no actual meaning to our existence, and that there is only the fact of it, to presume that there is a category of exploration of meaning pre-supposes that there is such a thing, when it is not given. Thus, by framing the question one can dodge the thorny issue of whether there is any meaning at all.
Of course by all means the issue of "maybe there might not be any meaning to it all" has not gone unnoticed by the philosophers of many ages, but it DOES go unnoticed by the general public. Pointing out the ignored presupposition is totally reasonable.
Snorting is ideal for delivery of drugs to the brain.
The distance between nasal passagaes and the blood/brain barrier is quite small, and thus placing a high concentration in this location is good for brain delivery.
That isn't how a network filesystem bug occurs, unless the network filesystem code is reliant on all sorts of externalities it really shouldn't be. In short, this is bad engineering unless the triggering case is very rare.
Windows does provide (at the insistence of some very large customers) for the possibility of having network-available home environment/desktops. The thing is... this setup is not the default in windows environments, even in large networked windows environments, while it IS the default in medium size (50 workstations and up) unix workstation environments.
Why would that be? The reason is that the unix tools for creating this type of setup are simple and transparent, while the windows tools for creating the type of setup include shades of obscurity, clunkiness, and conflict with various bits of (probably badly written) certain windows apps. The fact that windows has these features is certainly a bullet point that you will find in certain sales presentations, but the experience of setting up a network to provide these features isn't so pleasant, and it's not something most users are even aware is possible.
So it's not a *hard* technical limitation in terms of the tools not being there. It is however a limitation in terms of the tools being sufficiently inferior that they don't get used most of the time.
Your mod file example is great. It's a now archaic format which is no longer in vogue.
Fortunately the LPT port nonsense was a hardware specific nonsense completely independent of the format, and open source code which can reproduce the music on any modern platform is readily available. http://mikmod.raphnet.net/http://www.modplug.com/ (sourcecode for modplug is availble, believe it or not)
The thing is BigMem isn't so hot. You pay for some execution speed of the whole system by turning it on, and the memory outside the flat space has to be swapped in and out. Some developers don't have a lot of faith in the feature and believe it's not very mature. So it's reasonable to default it to off.
Really if you want to use 4gb of memory or more, I'm surprised you don't have a 64-bit chip.
Having ridden many roller coasters and also been in a car crash which was at much lower G forces, I can say that I have a memory of slowed (although not extemely so) time from the car crash and not the roller coasters.
My response to this is that flash is of approximately the same age, but has been a large success. I'm curious what should cause us to expect this situtation to change.
Well, when you have nonvolatile memory that is as fast as DRAM and as *cheap* as DRAM, you might as well use it as system ram. We've had the former for a long time. In fact, DRAM has been slower than some forms of persistent ram for a long time. It's just much cheaper.
Not sure why it would; though wow should really work fine on consoles if they have enough ram, and you hook up a keyboard and mouse. I suspect the sell rate would be low for that reason. Without a keyboard wow is kind of futile. Quick - choose one of your 40 actions with a d-pad, while also moving your character!
By all means! I am not saying "uranium is running out". This is not chicken little. Uranium extraction will certainly continue for a long time, and yes cost changes will affect use of exploitable reserves. The point is simply that this particular slice over the overall energy budget too will have a peak output and so convservation remains important.
I suspect that the forecasters of uranium use are aware of these technologies, and they certainly will help, but the demand for nuclear power is going to explode. I am all for investment in deployment of proven nuclear power solutions and for investment in research and development of cutting edge nuclear power solutions. I am also for investment in research in power generation technologies whose sources are not expected to peak in the next 50 years. I am also for conservation so that our footprint is reduced and so that our exhaustion of proven resources is slowed.
The extraction peak is essentially now, plus or minus a bit of time. Check it out, oil is now above 90 a barrel.
The uranium forecasts are not by doom-and-gloom fear mongers but by internal forecasts by analysists (geophysicsts, statisticians etc) within the energy companies. They could well be wrong, but their guess is better than yours. Keep in mind that uranium extraction will of course accelerate as energy demands increase and oil supply does not.
Raising energy rates is potentially regressive, but it's really the right thing. Even with a fairytale of massive nuclear power buildout, the nuclear fuel supply is expected to peak (by the researchers of the industry) in the 2030-2050 window. Conservation will become necessary at some point, and starting earlier (through elevated costs of energy) will lessen the damage of the adjustment.
The regressive nature of higher energy costs may demand tweaks to "unevenly" distribute the cost, such as causing the expensive of power per capita or household to cost more the more you use. Or maybe it doesn't. How much of a household budget does energy costs consume in an efficient home? I don't really know.
I have had the opposite experience in Atlanta, San Francisco, O'Hare, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, and *especially* Newark. The amount of pointless hassling and rude posturing is way way up. People being lectured and talked down to who are only behaving like normal people, doing what they are told or asking polite questions. It is like we are flying via totally different systems.
My experience is that if your tastes run to niche products, or products over 2 months old, EB and Gamestop will leave you wanting as well. Physical game stores are a waste of time for me, I sometimes find myself with time on my hands and a game store, and I go in, hoping. I typically have around 5-6 titles I might want to buy, and the game store typically has none of them, or maybe has a scratched used copy with no manual for 40 dollars (it's rare, yo!)
Sometimes asking about a game *they have* will produce the response "oh, that's *old*" as if I'm stupid for wanting to buy it. This means, you know, it's over 3 months old.
I like physical stores that you can browse through. I think there's real value in being able to poke around a place where you might be able to talk to someone about the product. I buy bicycle parts, books, music, tea, meat, and so forth in stores where there is someone competent that is interested in the product and is not being a jackass. Amazon, performance sports, tea.com, and so on really lack something a real store can offer, though they *are* cheaper, if you buy a sufficiency of items. It saddens me that physical game stores are apparently incapable of offering any of this value. The result is that I order games from online stores like estarland.
Word of warning regarding notpron, the puzzles largely depend on the medium: lots of http and html wankery. If you're a web designer or something and also into puzzles you will probably eat it up. If you've read enough html source in your life and doing it "for fun" doesn't sound exciting, then move on.
I'm a firm believer that all puzzle elements should be "in front of your face". It's okay if they're not obvious, like a puzzle in a park that ends up using the trees right next to you (and hints to trees!). It's not okay if you have to cut the image into bits, feed it into photoshop, and then do manipulations of the data. It's not okay if you have to write a program to pull the numeric values of the colors out of the bitmaps. This kind of puzzle is just computer fetishizing, as far as I'm concerned. It's *really* hard to make puzzles that are both challenging and do not include lots of tedious dead-ends that people will go down, smart or dumb. Adding elements to your puzzle that amplify this problem I think is simply bad craftsmanship.
On my system puzzle pirates runs in the browser web-start environment, with somewhat limited access to the filesystem etc, barring java implementation bugs.
Is flash-in-browser really "more limited" than java-in-browser?
I'm well aware that upstate new york reguarly tops the nation in terms of worst economic outlook.
I was hoping to get some idea of how the city of new york's policies were causing this. I didn't get that from this text. Are you sure they are? Sure a fat government sector doesn't help, especially when many of the positions aren't terribly productive (some sure are!), but the high costs of an older-heavy population are real. Not to mention your self-described situation of being tens of miles from your commerce centers, that's a HUGE economic inefficiency.
I'm just not seeing how these ills are being caused by state policy, rather of being insufficiently resolved by same. They're not really the same. A problem caused by state policy is consequently resolvable. Insufficiently addressed may well not be.
What New York state government policies are causing the economic climate in upstate new york that in turn causes businesses (and young people) to depart?
How does the rust belt situation of New York differ from say Lowell, MA, or Bethlehem, PA? Washington State is similarly dominated by Seattle, politically, and similarly there is a strong cultural divide, but yet that state seems relatively healthy overall.
I guess my gut feeling is New York State was built up as an industrial center for a few hundred years, along with much of the rest of the northeast, and has fallen along the same lines. The economic climate disfavors areas with heavy infrastructure expenses which are not undergoing growth or expansion into new areas. Hartford is a sad place, and so is Syracuse. You could not pay me enough to live in Wilkes-Barre. I think patterns of development have certainly added to the economic downturn, but I would put blame on the extreme overvaluation of new development, edge cities, and suburbia which turns past development (significant in a hundreds-of-years-old industrial center) into an economic boat-anchor. The age old city-folks vs country-folks seems like forest for the trees.
But maybe I'm just way underinformed. Give us some meat.
You are making up a position for me that I do not hold.
The comment I was responding to took the farcical position that purchasing a product or service that has a terms of service statement immunizes the provide from legal challenges that fall within the description of the terms. I was mocking this farcical position, because it deserved it.
Aside from that, your response text contains a false dichotomy, and a lot of supposition.
If we're going to suppose, then here's what I suppose. (If there is one), a successful class action will pin Comcast for false or misleading advertising, or computer crime of some kind. Such a success needs to present enough legal strength for Comcast to take them seriously, and then there will be a settlement. The result will be a large payout to a law firm, and coupons for a month of free service to those who write in, or something along those lines.
The court will never hand down a decision in favor of the plaintiffs in actions like this, because the plaintiffs are always looking for money, which they get more plentifully from a settlement. From the defendent business perspective the settlement is far cheaper some business-intrusive judgement, and the legal exposure to the past deeds is closed for a lump sum.
So: your worrying about what will result from court actions is irrelevant to such a supposed case. Your comments about what bandwidth Comcast can support is irrelevant to my comment. Your expectations of specificity are irrelevant to the point.
Slashdot Mirror
The same reason why scientists need to run around and find out 'how'. This is a confused comparison.
On the one hand, scientists, usually, have a *personal* motivation to discover the 'how' behind things. It fascinates, interests, drives them. The accumulation of knowledge, the probing of an area of inquiry is rewarding and satisfying to them and that is why they do it.
The "need" for them to do it is of their own chosing according to their own internal motivations.
The question about reasons is pointing out that the distinguishment of religion vs science (why vs need) is sortinging out two categories of inquiry in which one category does not necessarily have any value at all. Since it is possible that there is no actual meaning to our existence, and that there is only the fact of it, to presume that there is a category of exploration of meaning pre-supposes that there is such a thing, when it is not given. Thus, by framing the question one can dodge the thorny issue of whether there is any meaning at all.
Of course by all means the issue of "maybe there might not be any meaning to it all" has not gone unnoticed by the philosophers of many ages, but it DOES go unnoticed by the general public. Pointing out the ignored presupposition is totally reasonable.
I am anal, and I am petty. I admit that.
But it is a *summary*, damnit. "Summery" might be the type of weather you get in the warmer part of the year.
Snorting is ideal for delivery of drugs to the brain.
The distance between nasal passagaes and the blood/brain barrier is quite small, and thus placing a high concentration in this location is good for brain delivery.
That isn't how a network filesystem bug occurs, unless the network filesystem code is reliant on all sorts of externalities it really shouldn't be. In short, this is bad engineering unless the triggering case is very rare.
You almost get it.
Windows does provide (at the insistence of some very large customers) for the possibility of having network-available home environment/desktops. The thing is... this setup is not the default in windows environments, even in large networked windows environments, while it IS the default in medium size (50 workstations and up) unix workstation environments.
Why would that be? The reason is that the unix tools for creating this type of setup are simple and transparent, while the windows tools for creating the type of setup include shades of obscurity, clunkiness, and conflict with various bits of (probably badly written) certain windows apps. The fact that windows has these features is certainly a bullet point that you will find in certain sales presentations, but the experience of setting up a network to provide these features isn't so pleasant, and it's not something most users are even aware is possible.
So it's not a *hard* technical limitation in terms of the tools not being there. It is however a limitation in terms of the tools being sufficiently inferior that they don't get used most of the time.
Your posting of the domains in question to slashdot will boost their web search visibility.
Please obfuscate them at least. Currently I believe you are assisting the spammers, intentionally or unintentionally.
So the substance of your post is "Macs are for babies"?
Your mod file example is great. It's a now archaic format which is no longer in vogue.
Fortunately the LPT port nonsense was a hardware specific nonsense completely independent of the format, and open source code which can reproduce the music on any modern platform is readily available. http://mikmod.raphnet.net/ http://www.modplug.com/ (sourcecode for modplug is availble, believe it or not)
There are also closed solutions: http://www.un4seen.com/
And there are industry standard sound libraries that do the job fine: http://www.fmod.org/
So, it seems that these antiquated technologies (mod dates to 1987) tend to get supported just fine.
The thing is BigMem isn't so hot. You pay for some execution speed of the whole system by turning it on, and the memory outside the flat space has to be swapped in and out. Some developers don't have a lot of faith in the feature and believe it's not very mature. So it's reasonable to default it to off.
Really if you want to use 4gb of memory or more, I'm surprised you don't have a 64-bit chip.
Having ridden many roller coasters and also been in a car crash which was at much lower G forces, I can say that I have a memory of slowed (although not extemely so) time from the car crash and not the roller coasters.
My response to this is that flash is of approximately the same age, but has been a large success. I'm curious what should cause us to expect this situtation to change.
Well, when you have nonvolatile memory that is as fast as DRAM and as *cheap* as DRAM, you might as well use it as system ram. We've had the former for a long time. In fact, DRAM has been slower than some forms of persistent ram for a long time. It's just much cheaper.
Not sure why it would; though wow should really work fine on consoles if they have enough ram, and you hook up a keyboard and mouse. I suspect the sell rate would be low for that reason. Without a keyboard wow is kind of futile. Quick - choose one of your 40 actions with a d-pad, while also moving your character!
And angband is balanced and fun, and TOME is an arbitrary collection of pain.
If you like pain (the colored text kind) and poor game balance, by all means, play TOME!
By all means! I am not saying "uranium is running out". This is not chicken little. Uranium extraction will certainly continue for a long time, and yes cost changes will affect use of exploitable reserves. The point is simply that this particular slice over the overall energy budget too will have a peak output and so convservation remains important.
I suspect that the forecasters of uranium use are aware of these technologies, and they certainly will help, but the demand for nuclear power is going to explode. I am all for investment in deployment of proven nuclear power solutions and for investment in research and development of cutting edge nuclear power solutions. I am also for investment in research in power generation technologies whose sources are not expected to peak in the next 50 years. I am also for conservation so that our footprint is reduced and so that our exhaustion of proven resources is slowed.
We have already peaked in our oil discovery.
The extraction peak is essentially now, plus or minus a bit of time. Check it out, oil is now above 90 a barrel.
The uranium forecasts are not by doom-and-gloom fear mongers but by internal forecasts by analysists (geophysicsts, statisticians etc) within the energy companies. They could well be wrong, but their guess is better than yours. Keep in mind that uranium extraction will of course accelerate as energy demands increase and oil supply does not.
Raising energy rates is potentially regressive, but it's really the right thing. Even with a fairytale of massive nuclear power buildout, the nuclear fuel supply is expected to peak (by the researchers of the industry) in the 2030-2050 window. Conservation will become necessary at some point, and starting earlier (through elevated costs of energy) will lessen the damage of the adjustment.
The regressive nature of higher energy costs may demand tweaks to "unevenly" distribute the cost, such as causing the expensive of power per capita or household to cost more the more you use. Or maybe it doesn't. How much of a household budget does energy costs consume in an efficient home? I don't really know.
Well the main problem is guessing what the "Earth's rotation of the sun" might mean. On the face of it, it is nonsense.
I have had the opposite experience in Atlanta, San Francisco, O'Hare, Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Philadelphia, and *especially* Newark. The amount of pointless hassling and rude posturing is way way up. People being lectured and talked down to who are only behaving like normal people, doing what they are told or asking polite questions. It is like we are flying via totally different systems.
My experience is that if your tastes run to niche products, or products over 2 months old, EB and Gamestop will leave you wanting as well. Physical game stores are a waste of time for me, I sometimes find myself with time on my hands and a game store, and I go in, hoping. I typically have around 5-6 titles I might want to buy, and the game store typically has none of them, or maybe has a scratched used copy with no manual for 40 dollars (it's rare, yo!)
Sometimes asking about a game *they have* will produce the response "oh, that's *old*" as if I'm stupid for wanting to buy it. This means, you know, it's over 3 months old.
I like physical stores that you can browse through. I think there's real value in being able to poke around a place where you might be able to talk to someone about the product. I buy bicycle parts, books, music, tea, meat, and so forth in stores where there is someone competent that is interested in the product and is not being a jackass. Amazon, performance sports, tea.com, and so on really lack something a real store can offer, though they *are* cheaper, if you buy a sufficiency of items. It saddens me that physical game stores are apparently incapable of offering any of this value. The result is that I order games from online stores like estarland.
Word of warning regarding notpron, the puzzles largely depend on the medium: lots of http and html wankery. If you're a web designer or something and also into puzzles you will probably eat it up. If you've read enough html source in your life and doing it "for fun" doesn't sound exciting, then move on.
I'm a firm believer that all puzzle elements should be "in front of your face". It's okay if they're not obvious, like a puzzle in a park that ends up using the trees right next to you (and hints to trees!). It's not okay if you have to cut the image into bits, feed it into photoshop, and then do manipulations of the data. It's not okay if you have to write a program to pull the numeric values of the colors out of the bitmaps. This kind of puzzle is just computer fetishizing, as far as I'm concerned. It's *really* hard to make puzzles that are both challenging and do not include lots of tedious dead-ends that people will go down, smart or dumb. Adding elements to your puzzle that amplify this problem I think is simply bad craftsmanship.
On my system puzzle pirates runs in the browser web-start environment, with somewhat limited access to the filesystem etc, barring java implementation bugs.
Is flash-in-browser really "more limited" than java-in-browser?
I'm well aware that upstate new york reguarly tops the nation in terms of worst economic outlook.
I was hoping to get some idea of how the city of new york's policies were causing this. I didn't get that from this text. Are you sure they are? Sure a fat government sector doesn't help, especially when many of the positions aren't terribly productive (some sure are!), but the high costs of an older-heavy population are real. Not to mention your self-described situation of being tens of miles from your commerce centers, that's a HUGE economic inefficiency.
I'm just not seeing how these ills are being caused by state policy, rather of being insufficiently resolved by same. They're not really the same. A problem caused by state policy is consequently resolvable. Insufficiently addressed may well not be.
I'm unclear on a few things.
What New York state government policies are causing the economic climate in upstate new york that in turn causes businesses (and young people) to depart?
How does the rust belt situation of New York differ from say Lowell, MA, or Bethlehem, PA? Washington State is similarly dominated by Seattle, politically, and similarly there is a strong cultural divide, but yet that state seems relatively healthy overall.
I guess my gut feeling is New York State was built up as an industrial center for a few hundred years, along with much of the rest of the northeast, and has fallen along the same lines. The economic climate disfavors areas with heavy infrastructure expenses which are not undergoing growth or expansion into new areas. Hartford is a sad place, and so is Syracuse. You could not pay me enough to live in Wilkes-Barre. I think patterns of development have certainly added to the economic downturn, but I would put blame on the extreme overvaluation of new development, edge cities, and suburbia which turns past development (significant in a hundreds-of-years-old industrial center) into an economic boat-anchor. The age old city-folks vs country-folks seems like forest for the trees.
But maybe I'm just way underinformed. Give us some meat.
You are making up a position for me that I do not hold.
The comment I was responding to took the farcical position that purchasing a product or service that has a terms of service statement immunizes the provide from legal challenges that fall within the description of the terms. I was mocking this farcical position, because it deserved it.
Aside from that, your response text contains a false dichotomy, and a lot of supposition.
If we're going to suppose, then here's what I suppose. (If there is one), a successful class action will pin Comcast for false or misleading advertising, or computer crime of some kind. Such a success needs to present enough legal strength for Comcast to take them seriously, and then there will be a settlement. The result will be a large payout to a law firm, and coupons for a month of free service to those who write in, or something along those lines.
The court will never hand down a decision in favor of the plaintiffs in actions like this, because the plaintiffs are always looking for money, which they get more plentifully from a settlement. From the defendent business perspective the settlement is far cheaper some business-intrusive judgement, and the legal exposure to the past deeds is closed for a lump sum.
So: your worrying about what will result from court actions is irrelevant to such a supposed case. Your comments about what bandwidth Comcast can support is irrelevant to my comment. Your expectations of specificity are irrelevant to the point.