"It's probably no coincidence that there are only a handful of native speakers left though, since a language like this isn't going to be very useful ("how many enemy did you see heading our way?" "a few" (reality: 300))."
First, obviously the use of emphasis would disambiguiate "a few" (meaning a handful) from "A FRIGGIN FEW RUN FOR YOUR LIVES WE'RE ALL DEAD! DEAD! DEAD DO YOU HEAR ME WE'RE ALL DEAD! A FEW FEW FEW FEW FEW! RUN!" Additionally, there's no reason to think that the people have magically lost their comparative abilities: "too many [enemies] for us to handle!". Furthermore, where's the evidence that the speakers don't have non-discrete mass nouns? For example: a few a bunch a lot a ton. In English (in my dialect) it's words like these, not numbers, that are the workhorses of practical daily dialog. Half the time, actual 'numbers' are really just exaggerated, made-up substitutes for emphatic mass nouns: "There's LIKE A THOUSAND PEOPLE!; man I've been through this like 85 times!"
Secondly, languages don't die out because they're ineffective or "not useful" as you've stated/implied. Languages die out simply and solely because a different language, with many many many many more speakers, moves in either geographically or culturally. Children of these languages end up going to English or Spanish schools, they consume English/Spanish culture, and on and on. The elders die in old age, and the language is gone.
Articles like this routinely use misleading terminology ("Ms. Pac-man teaches herself") in reference to nothing more than a pre-programmed set of [prioritized] rules. The convention is in fact to make normal extant AI seem as strong-AI-like as possible, by way of blurry vague terminology and hype.
The robotworld (site) article for example is totally inconsistent or misleading in its use of the words "learn" and "teach". Gamers here know that when they play Half-life single-player they are fighting "the AI", but nobody can seriously say "the AI is TEACHING itself (and/or LEARNING) to attack me!".
What you say is true but the parent is still right too, the way I see it. Articles like this routinely use misleading terminology ("Ms. Pac-man teaches herself") in reference to nothing more than a pre-programmed set of [prioritized] rules. The convention is in fact to make normal extant AI seem as strong-AI-like as possible, by way of blurry vague terminology and hype.
The robotworld (site) article for example is totally inconsistent or misleading in its use of the words "learn" and "teach". Gamers here know that when they play Half-life single-player they are fighting "the AI", but nobody can seriously say "the AI is TEACHING itself (and/or LEARNING) to attack me!".
First of all, people are entitled to criticize a system, regardless of whether they're "free to not use it." This is a technology site and commentators discuss the strong and weak points of various sytems, which can be informative for many people.
Second of all, NOT EVERYONE HAS A CHOICE. Businesses will insist on keeping Windows, for compatibility/legacy reasons. IT people have to deal with it.
Third of all, nobody's bragging about having a system that's "better." They're rightfully pointing out that good solutions already exist and MS has no excuse for screwing us all in the ass. (No excuse other than being fools, I mean.)
Fourth of all, as already pointed out, if UAC is turned off it defeats the whole purpose. That it can be turned off is irrelevant to the debate. Getting a prompt for running an executable HAS NO EFFECT ON whether that executable is malicious, or includes malicious code. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. User Joe Public knows that they have to open the file they just downloaded-- assuming they deliberately downloaded something-- so the prompts won't help them.
Your argument is comparable to, "You have a criticism of America? Then move somewhere else!"
It's funny. In this day and age I hear a bill title like that and I automatically assume it's some tyrannical euphemistic horror-show and that I should immediately call my representatives and insist they opppose it.
Incidentally this bill really is evil, because apparently all consumers and businesses currently use tremendous bandwidth without paying for it! I for one think it's about time the internet service providers were paid a monthly bill for the courtesies they provide!
"I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had,"
He's stunned that people aren't seeing what they'll be laughing at 5 years in the future.
It's the 21st century and we can't even time-shift. Microsoft, lead the way! I believe their ultimate plan is to go back and make Vista come out earlier, like back when it wouldn't been obsolete.
Yeah, granted. Maybe I wasn't clear about "EM drools." I didn't mean that EM was negligible or contemptible in the slightest-- just aping the (opposite) caricature of the parent.
"The mechanisms for the aurora and other processes are very powerful producing electrical currents at the highest levels ever seen."
You-- and "Thunderbolts"-- want to argue that EM rather than gravity shapes EVEN PLANETARY systems, yet, the aurora borealis is the most powerful electric current observed? The aurora is entirely local to earth!
Hello? The "Thunderbolts" claim that INTERPLANETARY electric arcs shape planets. Surely we would have observed one by now?
"the EM force rules the universe and all of the data coming back backs up the assertions of the Thunderbolts crew. The Einstein Special Relativity crowd who thinks gravity rules are just wrong. Sorry but they are. Special Relativity is a busted theory and it doesn't answer issues like the atmosphere temperature on Saturn."
Special Relativity also doesn't explain the price of tea in China either, but I've never heard that cited as a disadvantage.
I've also never heard any "relativity crowd" claiming that "gravity RULES" or that "EM drools" or any other similar nonsense that you just made up. I'm not a physicist and even I know that gravity is extremely weak relatively, no pun intended, and would never explain-- and isn't supposed to explain-- the vast majority of phenomena in the universe. You know, like sub-atomic ones, or the thermal mechanics of every atmosphere (let alone a single one), or good web design.
You're looking for "true scientific types" and "some seriously good science" to swoop in and justify or expand on what you've claimed, but you don't seem to be a practitioner yourself.
Practically every passage of that page is problematic at best and absurd at worst. It's the kind of thing that's so foolish it makes you do a confused a tap-dance just to address the tangled web of stupidity. Here I go anyway: evidently no one pointed out that a force-like phenomenon keeps us attached to the earth-- we don't float away-- with no electricity or magnetism involved. And that when we formalize the relationship between people/cannonballs, the same principles (OF GRAVITY) easily and uncontroversially explain many cosmic phenomenon whose parts are billions of times more massive than people and even than our planet.
"Close approaches of planets led to powerful electric arcing between planets and moons. All rocky bodies in the solar system show the massive scars of these kinds of electrical events."
You really don't get it, do you. I didn't criticize anybody's original post because "the only difference between a farm-house and a city was scale." I also never said scale doesn't matter, only that it doesn't matter IN PRINCIPLE FOR MY ANALOGY AND THE ORIGINAL QUOTE, AS FORMULATED.
I criticized it because it made an idiotic argument for why a city is "inhuman", and because it ignored the obvious fact that cities contain massive amounts of the necessities for life, which made it more incoherent than true or false.
I drew an analogy to a farm-house and a field of crops-- the farm-house doesn't actually contain the necessities for life. The cropfield does. Does that make the farm-house inhuman? Scaling up, a city is always fed by a regional breadbasket somewhere, otherwise it cannot exist.
You really don't get it. You still haven't illustrated why the scale of a city makes it "inhuman." To make matters worse you earlier cited an example of different PROPORTIONS as an example of scale, which serves as further evidence that you don't know what you're talking about. Now, your example of principal and interest doesn't relate at all to what I said about investment and return (though you quoted me), it doesn't save your earlier comment (about food & walking) from revealing your silliness, and doesn't actually have anything to do with a city as a municipal unit, does it.
Apparently nobody told you, but a million examples of people being idiots doesn't demonstrate that a particular person X is an idiot. You're very good at reciting irrelevant cliches, though.
I wasn't actually talking about Blizzard's decisions, but Ebay's.
It's true that house rules dictate who will get kicked out of the game for certain actions, but that's Blizzard's discussion. That also applies to Ebay's decisions about their users. But it's unrelated to to the idea that Ebay might have stopped virtual-loot transactions because of IP concerns-- which is decidedly idiotic, given what the transaction actually involves.
I don't personally know if Ebay ever said that the ownership was ambiguous, but it came up in the theoretical discussion here.
I wouldn't have been surprised if the final quote of the article actually reached the conclusion that evolution isn't real because humans "evolved from apes" yet apes still exist!
To the guy's credit, the article clearly minces his words (about dinos and birds). The prose states that he isn't surprised by evidence that steers away from the impact-caused cret. extinction, yet what he's actually quoted as saying has nothing whatsoever to do with the historical cause or chronology of the mass extinction. Giving his quote the benefit of the doubt, he seems to be making the HIGHLY FIGURATIVE POINT that "dinosaurs are still all around you! heh. they're not gone!" The article, typically, treats that as some kind of serious claim about (pre)history.
Obviously birds evolving from dinosaurs doesn't mean that birds evolved from the LAST LIVING dinosaurs. Birds today carry no implication for what a hard meteorite impact did or didn't do.
I'm probably just getting older, but the state of 'popular'-type scientific articles seems to keep getting more and more miserable.
Another example: Notably, Keller states she has evidence that the mass extinction happened 300,000 years AFTER the yucatan impact (and therefore wasn't caused by it?). That's significantly weaker than if the mass extinction happened BEFORE the impact. Am I going to far? Well combine that with the fact that Keller says global "cooling" led to the extinction, 300ky after the impact. In my life I've never heard anybody suggest that the impact itself would have caused the extinction-- it's the after-effects, for example the dust and debris that would have been thrown into the air, cooled temperatures, possibly with catastrophic effects. I'm not a paleontologist and I don't know if 300ky is a reasonable timespan for the post-impact effects to cause the later extinction, but all the same the ASM article/release is pretty poor.
I have to admit though it's 4:30am and I'm stopping caring right......NOW
Congratulations, that's several examples of scale mattering, but no illustration why it matters in the present case. And just like you so far, the original quote said nothing about why "cities" DO matter for their scale, if they do at all. The analogy that I drew held scale as irrelevant in principle (not in general). I don't doubt you'll come up with a few things, even that I agree with, but that doesn't change the fact that the original quote as stated is foolish and that you haven't improved upon it. I can't tell if you intend the calorie per footsteps example to bear on the issue at all, but it doesn't considering modern transportation and the fact that cities consistently exist at all. If society collapses, you might be left high and dry, but I never said otherwise here, since nobody said it in the first place.
Feel free to contribute.
"Walking five mintues to find more than you can eat in two weeks is very different from walking two weeks to find a mouthful. Scale matters." That's proportion of investment and return, not scale. But I'm saying this at the end, because I wanted to start off by transforming what you said into something that's actually relevant to the topic at hand. And the topic at hand is: cities, (including why the scale of a city matters). And yeah, saying "People are poison; The More, The Worse" would be pretty disappointing at this stage in the game, since it's uninformative and unanalytical tripe.
First by taking responsibility for oneself-- and I mean on the level of the nation state-- and ignoring for the time being the rest of the world. It's extremely prudent not to mention dignified.
The economy-wrecking effects of new technological paradigms have been on bogeyman duty way too long now. If clever people can invent the world-wide web and modern medicine, send probes to distant planets, men to the moon, I'm sure some industrial nations can ease more and more of their grid off of fossil fuels. (Regarding peak oil, rather than global warming) Oil executives and paid-for scholars are constantly claiming that fossil fuels aren't a problem because the future constantly brings better technology which will help find and access more reserves. Importantly, the exact same principle should apply to the solar (for one example) industry and efficiency of photovoltaic cells, and secondly the alleged oil-tech paradigm still depends on a clearly limited resource, unlike the obvious renewables.
And besides energy-source tech itself, just reducing personal waste and indulgence on a small and large scale could go a long way-- which will be the painful part as "10Ghz" says.
Unfortuantely, stopping damage that's already been done is a different kind of problem, but that shouldn't discourage efforts to reduce the part of the problem that we're currently contributing.
More cynically, I think it might even take a kind of peak oil crisis (real or perceived) to spur the alternatives, though it would be nice if it didn't have to come to that wouldn't it.
The small town is a city on a smaller scale: the point isn't that they're the same, but that they both stand in a necessary relation to something else which is not a town or city. So in principle, it's just a matter of scale.
That's ok! We're talking about municipal units, not poison.
Besides, the quote said cities were "inhuman" because they were devoid of necessities (even though they're full of people?), not because they were full of X or Y or Z Which Is Bad, which would be a different point entirely.
"My behemoth puts off emissions that have to be measured in ppm and ppb - thats parts per million and parts per billon. That means you have to have millions and billions of cars to get any kind of a quantity."
Would that be particles per particles, or volume per volume?
Parts per million is the chemical PROPORTION, and does not directly indicate anything about an actual quantity of noxious material. A separate issue is the particular environmental potency of a certain chemical quantity. Another separate issue is how many particles (or volume units) you emit per unit of time. In principle, depending on these factors, a single car could create some pretty horrible emissions.
It's sort of like saying, "As a gift, somebody promised to give me 1 millionth of their earnings!". Obviously the importance of that for you depends on how big their earnings are. Maybe they're a trillionaire. But maybe inflation has recently devalued the economic POTENCY of the currency. Maybe your car is a travesty. Your explanation of ppm isn't re-assuring.
A proportion is not equal to a quantity is not equal to a measure of the environmental consequences of a quantity.
"The irony of our modern civilization is how incredibly inhuman it is. Our cities are most notable for being entirely devoid of the things necessary to sustain human life, all of which must be provided from outside."
Just like how a farm-house is devoid of the things necessary to sustain human life, which must be provided by a FIELD OF CROPS and RIVERS, etc. Why, you might ask, would there be a concentration of people in the farm-house, instead of in the corn rows? Because nobody wants to live in a field of crops.
And before someone says "But small towns are good/better-than cities", I'll point out that the small-town is just a city on a smaller scale. People still don't live inside their food. Farm-houses go with farms, and cities go with huge regional breadbaskets.
It's amazing how many quotes express something obvious, trivial, and sensible, yet are somehow intended to expose something as contradictory or problematic. "Modern civilization" is the typical target for many such fallacies. I think you can rest assured that many of the problems of human society have nothing to do with modernity or with any recent advents.
Ha! Maybe not on your planet. But my planet, Earth, is a big spaceship flying around the universe and all my brothers and sisters are astronauts. Yippee!
The item clearly doesn't "belong" to Blizzard or Blizzard artists in any sense that's relevant to the kind of virtual loot transactions in question. When you sell virtual loot, you (in reality) in addition to your own personal in-game character are losing something, and somebody else is gaining it, in fair exchange. As noted by other commentators here, the buying player "gains" the time and effort that somebody else invested in that item, and gains the benefits that the time and effort produced. The game designers gain and lose nothing.
The designers INVESTED nothing in that item IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD-- only the player did. Specifically, the player invested time and effort. The designers invested all sorts of things in the "items" in the real world. They created the artwork, creating the networking code, and much of the medium of the virtual world itself. But none of that is what the ebay buyer is paying for. The item for sale (or service, or time/effort, or whatever you want to call it) shouldn't be confounded with the physical game materials themselves including images and sounds.
When you work in-game to gain an item, you gain the privilege of possessing that item. That privilege is what other people will PAY YOU FOR.
If on the other hand you taking a screenshot of some typical in-game item, then sell that picture as merchandise itself, then it might be more appropriate to say that you're selling somebody else's property. Or if you steal a CD package from the manufacturer and sell it, for example.
The language isn't mechanically unjustifiable: a jaguar's morphogenesis stems from its genetic blueprint, and within its population that blueprint has changed through the process of evolution. In other words, an individual jaguar undergoes a process of being "made"-- starting with conception; on the species level a jaguar is also "made" via evolution. Ultimately when you see it in action, you say "it was made for the water." meaning, remarkably well-suited to the water.
The language is also justifiable for practical reasons: information wants to be anthromorphisized. Especially in a documentary, like you're talking about. Zoology documentaries are made for mass appeal, and so we can marvel at the (generally amazing) form and function of the zoological life that share the planet with us.
"inexact" speech doesn't appear in reputable textbooks and won't feature prominently in a technical conversation with a biologist if the topic is design and motivation. Casually (or excitedly) describing something within a documentary is totally different than pronouncing or formulating a definition or denotation (in which case possible misconstruals or implications would be more avoided).
Evolution is a "designer" in an abstract sense. We're human beings and we prefer to talk about things in figurative ways.
Giraffes & peacocks arise over timescales beyond our casual comprehension because of the mutability of genetic make-up across the generations, the divergence of populations, and physical environments that lend advantages and disadvantages to various biological forms. They don't just poof into existence, they have a dizzying set of ancestors and relatives like a lot of other animals, which are well detailed in the archeological record. Additionally the flashiness of peacocks is a common (but variably implemented) feature in the animal kingdom. As an interesting tangent about giraffes: the "eating food that's higher on trees" is a joke that was evidently originally created to deride darwinism rather than make sense of it, even though it still gets popularly cited as fact; a different and more empirical 'story' for the notable feature of giraffes-- long necks-- is that male giraffes are often observed to fight, by swinging their necks, even accomplishing killing blows, and the longer your neck the more tremendous your leverage. Within a small population the elimination of (shorter necked) male competitors would provide a huge boon to the representation of a long-necked giraffe in the local gene pool in subsequent generations. I'm no expert though and i've only heard this second hand.
Engage a credible biologist in a discussion-- or in publication-- instead of watching them in a documentary and you'll probably see a different presentation. All the same, "Design" (noun) commonly means "form", not "[Thing] That Was Made By Omnipotent Creator", and doesn't connote conscious intention. Drawing the inference that someone who uses the word "design" is making a theological claim and therefore isn't a "strict evolutionist" is absurd.
"name me one thing that Apple has done that involves DRM, besides the iTunes Music Store. You can't"
i've been an emphatic mac user for about a year and a half. and i can tell you it's annoying as hell that OS X forbids you from taking screen captures of a dvd you're watching in DVD player. totally idiotic implementation of DRM.
--of course there's no such thing as fair use of a single frame of a motion picture, and nobody ever wants to screen capture content from their own dvd content, right.
you can probably screen-cap with VLC. i'm tired and i forget. all the same the DRM is there.
a much more flagrant example is the native prohibition against copying mp3s from your ipod to your computer. even a per-5-computers "licensing" scheme would be better than that, though still contemptible.
i'm pretty sure the army times, navy times, air force times, and marine corps times saying he was an atrociously incompetent boob had something to do with it too.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to qualify my last paragraph: Except in cases of genocide, or the destruction of an entire race of people.
That I have to qualify it says more about human nature than this or that group's unique counting system does.
"It's probably no coincidence that there are only a handful of native speakers left though, since a language like this isn't going to be very useful ("how many enemy did you see heading our way?" "a few" (reality: 300))."
First, obviously the use of emphasis would disambiguiate "a few" (meaning a handful) from "A FRIGGIN FEW RUN FOR YOUR LIVES WE'RE ALL DEAD! DEAD! DEAD DO YOU HEAR ME WE'RE ALL DEAD! A FEW FEW FEW FEW FEW! RUN!" Additionally, there's no reason to think that the people have magically lost their comparative abilities: "too many [enemies] for us to handle!". Furthermore, where's the evidence that the speakers don't have non-discrete mass nouns? For example: a few a bunch a lot a ton. In English (in my dialect) it's words like these, not numbers, that are the workhorses of practical daily dialog. Half the time, actual 'numbers' are really just exaggerated, made-up substitutes for emphatic mass nouns: "There's LIKE A THOUSAND PEOPLE!; man I've been through this like 85 times!"
Secondly, languages don't die out because they're ineffective or "not useful" as you've stated/implied. Languages die out simply and solely because a different language, with many many many many more speakers, moves in either geographically or culturally. Children of these languages end up going to English or Spanish schools, they consume English/Spanish culture, and on and on. The elders die in old age, and the language is gone.
Articles like this routinely use misleading terminology ("Ms. Pac-man teaches herself") in reference to nothing more than a pre-programmed set of [prioritized] rules. The convention is in fact to make normal extant AI seem as strong-AI-like as possible, by way of blurry vague terminology and hype.
The robotworld (site) article for example is totally inconsistent or misleading in its use of the words "learn" and "teach". Gamers here know that when they play Half-life single-player they are fighting "the AI", but nobody can seriously say "the AI is TEACHING itself (and/or LEARNING) to attack me!".
What you say is true but the parent is still right too, the way I see it. Articles like this routinely use misleading terminology ("Ms. Pac-man teaches herself") in reference to nothing more than a pre-programmed set of [prioritized] rules. The convention is in fact to make normal extant AI seem as strong-AI-like as possible, by way of blurry vague terminology and hype.
The robotworld (site) article for example is totally inconsistent or misleading in its use of the words "learn" and "teach". Gamers here know that when they play Half-life single-player they are fighting "the AI", but nobody can seriously say "the AI is TEACHING itself (and/or LEARNING) to attack me!".
First of all, people are entitled to criticize a system, regardless of whether they're "free to not use it." This is a technology site and commentators discuss the strong and weak points of various sytems, which can be informative for many people.
Second of all, NOT EVERYONE HAS A CHOICE. Businesses will insist on keeping Windows, for compatibility/legacy reasons. IT people have to deal with it.
Third of all, nobody's bragging about having a system that's "better." They're rightfully pointing out that good solutions already exist and MS has no excuse for screwing us all in the ass. (No excuse other than being fools, I mean.)
Fourth of all, as already pointed out, if UAC is turned off it defeats the whole purpose. That it can be turned off is irrelevant to the debate. Getting a prompt for running an executable HAS NO EFFECT ON whether that executable is malicious, or includes malicious code. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't. User Joe Public knows that they have to open the file they just downloaded-- assuming they deliberately downloaded something-- so the prompts won't help them.
Your argument is comparable to, "You have a criticism of America? Then move somewhere else!"
The police apparently learned what bombs look like from hollywood movies and comic books.
The MPAA should definitely foot the bill.
"Internet Freedom Preservation Act"
It's funny. In this day and age I hear a bill title like that and I automatically assume it's some tyrannical euphemistic horror-show and that I should immediately call my representatives and insist they opppose it.
Incidentally this bill really is evil, because apparently all consumers and businesses currently use tremendous bandwidth without paying for it! I for one think it's about time the internet service providers were paid a monthly bill for the courtesies they provide!
"I'm stunned how people aren't seeing that with TV, in five years from now, people will laugh at what we've had,"
He's stunned that people aren't seeing what they'll be laughing at 5 years in the future.
It's the 21st century and we can't even time-shift. Microsoft, lead the way! I believe their ultimate plan is to go back and make Vista come out earlier, like back when it wouldn't been obsolete.
Yeah, granted. Maybe I wasn't clear about "EM drools." I didn't mean that EM was negligible or contemptible in the slightest-- just aping the (opposite) caricature of the parent.
"The mechanisms for the aurora and other processes are very powerful producing electrical currents at the highest levels ever seen."
You-- and "Thunderbolts"-- want to argue that EM rather than gravity shapes EVEN PLANETARY systems, yet, the aurora borealis is the most powerful electric current observed? The aurora is entirely local to earth!
Hello? The "Thunderbolts" claim that INTERPLANETARY electric arcs shape planets. Surely we would have observed one by now?
"the EM force rules the universe and all of the data coming back backs up the assertions of the Thunderbolts crew. The Einstein Special Relativity crowd who thinks gravity rules are just wrong. Sorry but they are. Special Relativity is a busted theory and it doesn't answer issues like the atmosphere temperature on Saturn."
Special Relativity also doesn't explain the price of tea in China either, but I've never heard that cited as a disadvantage.
I've also never heard any "relativity crowd" claiming that "gravity RULES" or that "EM drools" or any other similar nonsense that you just made up. I'm not a physicist and even I know that gravity is extremely weak relatively, no pun intended, and would never explain-- and isn't supposed to explain-- the vast majority of phenomena in the universe. You know, like sub-atomic ones, or the thermal mechanics of every atmosphere (let alone a single one), or good web design.
You're looking for "true scientific types" and "some seriously good science" to swoop in and justify or expand on what you've claimed, but you don't seem to be a practitioner yourself.
http://www.thunderbolts.info/synopsis2.htm
Practically every passage of that page is problematic at best and absurd at worst. It's the kind of thing that's so foolish it makes you do a confused a tap-dance just to address the tangled web of stupidity. Here I go anyway: evidently no one pointed out that a force-like phenomenon keeps us attached to the earth-- we don't float away-- with no electricity or magnetism involved. And that when we formalize the relationship between people/cannonballs, the same principles (OF GRAVITY) easily and uncontroversially explain many cosmic phenomenon whose parts are billions of times more massive than people and even than our planet.
"Close approaches of planets led to powerful electric arcing between planets and moons. All rocky bodies in the solar system show the massive scars of these kinds of electrical events."
Interplanetary electric arcs? Come on.
You really don't get it, do you. I didn't criticize anybody's original post because "the only difference between a farm-house and a city was scale." I also never said scale doesn't matter, only that it doesn't matter IN PRINCIPLE FOR MY ANALOGY AND THE ORIGINAL QUOTE, AS FORMULATED.
I criticized it because it made an idiotic argument for why a city is "inhuman", and because it ignored the obvious fact that cities contain massive amounts of the necessities for life, which made it more incoherent than true or false.
I drew an analogy to a farm-house and a field of crops-- the farm-house doesn't actually contain the necessities for life. The cropfield does. Does that make the farm-house inhuman? Scaling up, a city is always fed by a regional breadbasket somewhere, otherwise it cannot exist.
You really don't get it. You still haven't illustrated why the scale of a city makes it "inhuman." To make matters worse you earlier cited an example of different PROPORTIONS as an example of scale, which serves as further evidence that you don't know what you're talking about. Now, your example of principal and interest doesn't relate at all to what I said about investment and return (though you quoted me), it doesn't save your earlier comment (about food & walking) from revealing your silliness, and doesn't actually have anything to do with a city as a municipal unit, does it.
Apparently nobody told you, but a million examples of people being idiots doesn't demonstrate that a particular person X is an idiot. You're very good at reciting irrelevant cliches, though.
I wasn't actually talking about Blizzard's decisions, but Ebay's.
It's true that house rules dictate who will get kicked out of the game for certain actions, but that's Blizzard's discussion. That also applies to Ebay's decisions about their users. But it's unrelated to to the idea that Ebay might have stopped virtual-loot transactions because of IP concerns-- which is decidedly idiotic, given what the transaction actually involves.
I don't personally know if Ebay ever said that the ownership was ambiguous, but it came up in the theoretical discussion here.
"Curiously, they do not discuss how an impact"
Haha. Curiously?
I wouldn't have been surprised if the final quote of the article actually reached the conclusion that evolution isn't real because humans "evolved from apes" yet apes still exist!
To the guy's credit, the article clearly minces his words (about dinos and birds). The prose states that he isn't surprised by evidence that steers away from the impact-caused cret. extinction, yet what he's actually quoted as saying has nothing whatsoever to do with the historical cause or chronology of the mass extinction. Giving his quote the benefit of the doubt, he seems to be making the HIGHLY FIGURATIVE POINT that "dinosaurs are still all around you! heh. they're not gone!" The article, typically, treats that as some kind of serious claim about (pre)history.
Obviously birds evolving from dinosaurs doesn't mean that birds evolved from the LAST LIVING dinosaurs. Birds today carry no implication for what a hard meteorite impact did or didn't do.
I'm probably just getting older, but the state of 'popular'-type scientific articles seems to keep getting more and more miserable.
Another example: Notably, Keller states she has evidence that the mass extinction happened 300,000 years AFTER the yucatan impact (and therefore wasn't caused by it?). That's significantly weaker than if the mass extinction happened BEFORE the impact. Am I going to far? Well combine that with the fact that Keller says global "cooling" led to the extinction, 300ky after the impact. In my life I've never heard anybody suggest that the impact itself would have caused the extinction-- it's the after-effects, for example the dust and debris that would have been thrown into the air, cooled temperatures, possibly with catastrophic effects. I'm not a paleontologist and I don't know if 300ky is a reasonable timespan for the post-impact effects to cause the later extinction, but all the same the ASM article/release is pretty poor.
I have to admit though it's 4:30am and I'm stopping caring right......NOW
Congratulations, that's several examples of scale mattering, but no illustration why it matters in the present case. And just like you so far, the original quote said nothing about why "cities" DO matter for their scale, if they do at all. The analogy that I drew held scale as irrelevant in principle (not in general). I don't doubt you'll come up with a few things, even that I agree with, but that doesn't change the fact that the original quote as stated is foolish and that you haven't improved upon it. I can't tell if you intend the calorie per footsteps example to bear on the issue at all, but it doesn't considering modern transportation and the fact that cities consistently exist at all. If society collapses, you might be left high and dry, but I never said otherwise here, since nobody said it in the first place.
Feel free to contribute.
"Walking five mintues to find more than you can eat in two weeks is very different from walking two weeks to find a mouthful. Scale matters." That's proportion of investment and return, not scale. But I'm saying this at the end, because I wanted to start off by transforming what you said into something that's actually relevant to the topic at hand. And the topic at hand is: cities, (including why the scale of a city matters). And yeah, saying "People are poison; The More, The Worse" would be pretty disappointing at this stage in the game, since it's uninformative and unanalytical tripe.
First by taking responsibility for oneself-- and I mean on the level of the nation state-- and ignoring for the time being the rest of the world. It's extremely prudent not to mention dignified.
The economy-wrecking effects of new technological paradigms have been on bogeyman duty way too long now. If clever people can invent the world-wide web and modern medicine, send probes to distant planets, men to the moon, I'm sure some industrial nations can ease more and more of their grid off of fossil fuels. (Regarding peak oil, rather than global warming) Oil executives and paid-for scholars are constantly claiming that fossil fuels aren't a problem because the future constantly brings better technology which will help find and access more reserves. Importantly, the exact same principle should apply to the solar (for one example) industry and efficiency of photovoltaic cells, and secondly the alleged oil-tech paradigm still depends on a clearly limited resource, unlike the obvious renewables.
And besides energy-source tech itself, just reducing personal waste and indulgence on a small and large scale could go a long way-- which will be the painful part as "10Ghz" says.
Unfortuantely, stopping damage that's already been done is a different kind of problem, but that shouldn't discourage efforts to reduce the part of the problem that we're currently contributing.
More cynically, I think it might even take a kind of peak oil crisis (real or perceived) to spur the alternatives, though it would be nice if it didn't have to come to that wouldn't it.
The small town is a city on a smaller scale: the point isn't that they're the same, but that they both stand in a necessary relation to something else which is not a town or city. So in principle, it's just a matter of scale.
That's ok! We're talking about municipal units, not poison.
Besides, the quote said cities were "inhuman" because they were devoid of necessities (even though they're full of people?), not because they were full of X or Y or Z Which Is Bad, which would be a different point entirely.
"My behemoth puts off emissions that have to be measured in ppm and ppb - thats parts per million and parts per billon. That means you have to have millions and billions of cars to get any kind of a quantity."
Would that be particles per particles, or volume per volume?
Parts per million is the chemical PROPORTION, and does not directly indicate anything about an actual quantity of noxious material. A separate issue is the particular environmental potency of a certain chemical quantity. Another separate issue is how many particles (or volume units) you emit per unit of time. In principle, depending on these factors, a single car could create some pretty horrible emissions.
It's sort of like saying, "As a gift, somebody promised to give me 1 millionth of their earnings!". Obviously the importance of that for you depends on how big their earnings are. Maybe they're a trillionaire. But maybe inflation has recently devalued the economic POTENCY of the currency. Maybe your car is a travesty. Your explanation of ppm isn't re-assuring.
A proportion is not equal to a quantity is not equal to a measure of the environmental consequences of a quantity.
"The irony of our modern civilization is how incredibly inhuman it is. Our cities are most notable for being entirely devoid of the things necessary to sustain human life, all of which must be provided from outside."
Just like how a farm-house is devoid of the things necessary to sustain human life, which must be provided by a FIELD OF CROPS and RIVERS, etc. Why, you might ask, would there be a concentration of people in the farm-house, instead of in the corn rows? Because nobody wants to live in a field of crops.
And before someone says "But small towns are good/better-than cities", I'll point out that the small-town is just a city on a smaller scale. People still don't live inside their food. Farm-houses go with farms, and cities go with huge regional breadbaskets.
It's amazing how many quotes express something obvious, trivial, and sensible, yet are somehow intended to expose something as contradictory or problematic. "Modern civilization" is the typical target for many such fallacies. I think you can rest assured that many of the problems of human society have nothing to do with modernity or with any recent advents.
"most countries can't fit in any sort of vehicle"
Ha! Maybe not on your planet. But my planet, Earth, is a big spaceship flying around the universe and all my brothers and sisters are astronauts. Yippee!
The item clearly doesn't "belong" to Blizzard or Blizzard artists in any sense that's relevant to the kind of virtual loot transactions in question. When you sell virtual loot, you (in reality) in addition to your own personal in-game character are losing something, and somebody else is gaining it, in fair exchange. As noted by other commentators here, the buying player "gains" the time and effort that somebody else invested in that item, and gains the benefits that the time and effort produced. The game designers gain and lose nothing.
The designers INVESTED nothing in that item IN THE VIRTUAL WORLD-- only the player did. Specifically, the player invested time and effort. The designers invested all sorts of things in the "items" in the real world. They created the artwork, creating the networking code, and much of the medium of the virtual world itself. But none of that is what the ebay buyer is paying for. The item for sale (or service, or time/effort, or whatever you want to call it) shouldn't be confounded with the physical game materials themselves including images and sounds.
When you work in-game to gain an item, you gain the privilege of possessing that item. That privilege is what other people will PAY YOU FOR.
If on the other hand you taking a screenshot of some typical in-game item, then sell that picture as merchandise itself, then it might be more appropriate to say that you're selling somebody else's property. Or if you steal a CD package from the manufacturer and sell it, for example.
Whoops-- definitely didn't mean "archeological" record there. (Such an archeological record would definitely be valuable...and ridiculous.)
Fossil record.
The language isn't mechanically unjustifiable: a jaguar's morphogenesis stems from its genetic blueprint, and within its population that blueprint has changed through the process of evolution. In other words, an individual jaguar undergoes a process of being "made"-- starting with conception; on the species level a jaguar is also "made" via evolution. Ultimately when you see it in action, you say "it was made for the water." meaning, remarkably well-suited to the water.
The language is also justifiable for practical reasons: information wants to be anthromorphisized. Especially in a documentary, like you're talking about. Zoology documentaries are made for mass appeal, and so we can marvel at the (generally amazing) form and function of the zoological life that share the planet with us.
"inexact" speech doesn't appear in reputable textbooks and won't feature prominently in a technical conversation with a biologist if the topic is design and motivation. Casually (or excitedly) describing something within a documentary is totally different than pronouncing or formulating a definition or denotation (in which case possible misconstruals or implications would be more avoided).
Evolution is a "designer" in an abstract sense. We're human beings and we prefer to talk about things in figurative ways.
Giraffes & peacocks arise over timescales beyond our casual comprehension because of the mutability of genetic make-up across the generations, the divergence of populations, and physical environments that lend advantages and disadvantages to various biological forms. They don't just poof into existence, they have a dizzying set of ancestors and relatives like a lot of other animals, which are well detailed in the archeological record. Additionally the flashiness of peacocks is a common (but variably implemented) feature in the animal kingdom. As an interesting tangent about giraffes: the "eating food that's higher on trees" is a joke that was evidently originally created to deride darwinism rather than make sense of it, even though it still gets popularly cited as fact; a different and more empirical 'story' for the notable feature of giraffes-- long necks-- is that male giraffes are often observed to fight, by swinging their necks, even accomplishing killing blows, and the longer your neck the more tremendous your leverage. Within a small population the elimination of (shorter necked) male competitors would provide a huge boon to the representation of a long-necked giraffe in the local gene pool in subsequent generations. I'm no expert though and i've only heard this second hand.
Engage a credible biologist in a discussion-- or in publication-- instead of watching them in a documentary and you'll probably see a different presentation. All the same, "Design" (noun) commonly means "form", not "[Thing] That Was Made By Omnipotent Creator", and doesn't connote conscious intention. Drawing the inference that someone who uses the word "design" is making a theological claim and therefore isn't a "strict evolutionist" is absurd.
"name me one thing that Apple has done that involves DRM, besides the iTunes Music Store. You can't"
i've been an emphatic mac user for about a year and a half. and i can tell you it's annoying as hell that OS X forbids you from taking screen captures of a dvd you're watching in DVD player. totally idiotic implementation of DRM.
--of course there's no such thing as fair use of a single frame of a motion picture, and nobody ever wants to screen capture content from their own dvd content, right.
you can probably screen-cap with VLC. i'm tired and i forget. all the same the DRM is there.
a much more flagrant example is the native prohibition against copying mp3s from your ipod to your computer. even a per-5-computers "licensing" scheme would be better than that, though still contemptible.
i'm pretty sure the army times, navy times, air force times, and marine corps times saying he was an atrociously incompetent boob had something to do with it too.