I'll tell you what: you build an ion drive that can launch me into space and I will do it. Let me know when you are done.
You are intentionally confusing reaching orbit and interstellar travel. These are different problems that require different solutions (engine designs).
A car analogy: To reach orbit you need a dragrace car but to reach nearby star you need a car that has the best possible mileage. Maybe it is possible to have the same engine to do both, but it is very unlikely.
Our more likely, it could be an alien probe that was launched couple mil years ago at our solar system when methane was first detected in the atmosphere indicating signs of life. However, there nobody left 'home' to receive its focused burst transmission from this probe reporting that technological civilization was detected in a fly-by scan.
You don't understand interstellar travel. Speed is a result of acceleration over time. If you have very long time, even modest acceleration can get you there. More relevant question is how long a probe could sustain acceleration as that would ultimately determine speed. Our current best designs could accelerate for mere hours, you need to be able to do this for years. This doesn't mean it can't be done.
How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away.
Our civilization was potentially detectable for at least last 10,000 years and feasibly detectable during technological civilization of 3000 years. For example, widespread cultivation of plants (i.e. agrarian civilization) potentially can be detected by analyzing light spectrum reflected by the planet. Our technology can't do that right now, we don't have good enough optics or historical data to ran models, but considering that we developed ability to detect plants in the past couple decades, it only makes sense that such technology could be refined over time to allow such monitoring.
So 3-10K years from the first detection, 0.05C probe and you have substantial neighborhood for potential origin. Proxima Centauri (4 ly) is only about 85 years away at 0.05c.
Voting for someone is a value judgment. It is very likely that most Trump voters could see all the things you listed yet chose to vote for him despite that. This means some other value was a higher priority. If you can understand what that other value is, you can understand why Trump was elected. Outright dismissing that there could be such value would just lead to a second term.
No, there just aren't enough idiots in US to elect Trump, so significant number of non-idiots voted for him. You need to understand why non-idiots voted for him instead of just calling them idiots or this will happen again.
I understand your point, but I think you are overstating your point in "but they sure don't agree on many things, including but not limited to how to interpret those holy books". Take Christianity as a whole for example, there are many kinds and types, but they mostly agree on a large number of concepts - from existence of an omnipotent bearded man in the sky to discouragement of sexual relationship with your neighbor's wife. I don't think you can demonstrate such degree of coherence between different groups of SJWs.
That is, I see SJW as mob-driven and highly arbitrary. One group of people gets dragged by SJW for exact same behavior that another group of people get praised for.
Tim Cook's basic complaint is that, this data that originates from the intense tracking by iOS devices is being bought and sold without giving Apple its due share.
I have to agree with this cynical view. Apple's IPhone invented surveillance capitalism, nothing that came before even dreamed of collecting so much user data. Before that, MACs were first to push what we now know as cloud integration.
Apple clearly fired the first shots in war on consumer privacy.
Emotional response is along "Lets get worked up about our feelings, the lash out at perceived injustices" lines. Rational response is along "Lets consider available evidence and determine most beneficial possible course of action".
I stand by my original point that we can use a lot less emotional and a lot more rational decision making.
Your emotions should never take over control of your body.
If only. You can get angry, sad, happy, moody... and it absolutely impact your decisions. If this is not the case for you, please remand yourself into nearest robotic overlord reclamation facility, your human emulation matrix is malfunctioning.
In evolutionary terms, speed of response was of paramount importance while accuracy, specifically overabundance of false positives, was not at all important.
We evolved to knee-jerk emotionally overreact to about anything, because at some point our ancestors had to be afraid of tigers, snakes, and large predatory birds and false negative was fatal. None of this is relevant today, but neurological mechanism are still in place.
Optimal response strategy balances false positives and false negatives trying to minimize both. When you have a system that only optimizes one of these, it is sub-optimal in overall minimization of false responses.
No, we could use a lot less emotional bullshit and a lot more logical and reason. Your feelings at best could described by a fuzzy logic with a lot of hysteresis. It is very lousy system for making any kind of decision.
That is why I started with "for example", and not with "the only example".
What is "religion as a whole" in context of this discussion? Is it belief in omnipotent God? Is it worship of a deity (i.e. theism)? Is it belief in supernatural? Charitable and context-sensitive interpretation of my words is that I was speaking about organized religions.
To simplify original argument, Organized Religions have a holy book that contains a set of rules. These rules are followed to various degrees by adherents of such religion. So in that sense other religions are more consistent than SJW, that don't have an agreed-on set of rules and what rules exist are not followed by adherents of SJW.
Religion, when compared to SJW, is more consistent.
For example, identifying infidels to kill is fairly straightforward process for radical Islamists. It is possible to know with a high degree of accuracy if any given religion would consider you a heretic and at least know range of possible repercussions. Yes, it is not as precise as laws, and it is often not logical, but it isn't arbitrary.
With SJWs even that is too high of a bar to clear. You can not know with any degree of certainty if any given action would be targeted, and what is response going to be. That is, with SJW anyone is infidel and fatwa is whatever is happen to be trending on Twitter today.
but must every game be made so it appeals to both genders?
You'd have to demonstrate there is a benefit to actively trying to exclude one first.
Are makers of makeup actively trying to exclude male audience? Maybe if they made all makeup in pale gray or dark blue colors they would stop actively alienating men and would have more inclusive makeup scene?
Obviously, the above argument is absurd. Knowing and targeting your audience and trying to exclude other audiences is no the same thing.
I was speaking mainly on consistency. Religions tend to be somewhat consistent when compared to SJWs. With religion, if you do X, for a known set of values, then you are heretic and religious people will go after you.
SJW have most elements of religion (dogma, zeal, attacks on heretics) but none of the consistency. One day it is X, other day it is Y that would get SJWs go after you.
The fact that you think a game can not be made that appeals to both genders...
Sure, it probably could be made, but must every game be made so it appeals to both genders? Why is it not OK to make products that just appeal to one gender?
a) You have "maybe we shouldn't include graphic dismemberment" and you have "there aren't enough visible minorities and female characters in a game about medieval Northern European military orders" type of censorship. Sure it is about values, but diversity taken to absurd levels isn't a shared value across gaming population.
b) Yes, it presupposes that. Care to show that this inaccurate in any way?
c) Shortage implies unmet demand, can you show that anyone outside of numerically insignificant activist groups gamers wanted to see that? To me, "a very real shortage of commercial video games with diverse characters in prominent roles" is a diktat pushed by outside parties that have nothing to do with gaming.
Wokeness signaling is not a no-loss proposition. Any gaming company has to realize that it also brings about:
a. Content censorship. Be prepared to run all your content decisions by an unaccountable "committee" that will issue arbitrary decisions. Unlike law and religion, these people are not sufficiently organized or organizationally mature to have a set of rules or standards to follow. b. Departure from meritocracy in employment standards. One of the common demands is hiring higher number of minorities and women, while great as a principle without available qualified candidates the only way to meet targets is to hire unqualified candidates. c. Gamers generally don't appreciate political messaging in games, as these groups repeatedly attacked and abused gamers in the past (i.e. gamergate)
I played BF since BF2 and FPS since Doom 2, but I took pass on BF5 for the following reasons:
a. I don't want to grind unlocks again. b. I don't want to have to pay for season pass on top of full price or have everyone abandon 'base' game and move-on to newer maps in a couple months. c. I really don't like loot boxes, and I expect EA to push them on me even harder. d. Getting BF5 to run would require me to download Origins and recover my account, which is a bother. e. I don't want to pay $1500 for a new video card or have the game look like minecraft on my moderately sized screen. ... z. Brouhaha with inclusivity and virtue signaling wokeness.
As much as I want to see the end of victimhood and grievance culture, BF5 failure is unlikely to be the beginning of the end for it in gaming. The likely explanation is that EA's nickel-and-dime DLCs and loot boxes caught up to them, not their attempts to virtue-signal wokeness.
Slashdot Mirror
It is ready. Pack everything you need for 1,000,000 year trip. Unfortunately, you have to get your net wight down to about 1 gram.
I'll tell you what: you build an ion drive that can launch me into space and I will do it. Let me know when you are done.
You are intentionally confusing reaching orbit and interstellar travel. These are different problems that require different solutions (engine designs).
A car analogy: To reach orbit you need a dragrace car but to reach nearby star you need a car that has the best possible mileage. Maybe it is possible to have the same engine to do both, but it is very unlikely.
Our more likely, it could be an alien probe that was launched couple mil years ago at our solar system when methane was first detected in the atmosphere indicating signs of life. However, there nobody left 'home' to receive its focused burst transmission from this probe reporting that technological civilization was detected in a fly-by scan.
We all know that you only need 64KB^h^h^h
You don't understand interstellar travel. Speed is a result of acceleration over time. If you have very long time, even modest acceleration can get you there. More relevant question is how long a probe could sustain acceleration as that would ultimately determine speed. Our current best designs could accelerate for mere hours, you need to be able to do this for years. This doesn't mean it can't be done.
How could it be an interstellar probe? The nearest star is over 4 light years away.
Our civilization was potentially detectable for at least last 10,000 years and feasibly detectable during technological civilization of 3000 years. For example, widespread cultivation of plants (i.e. agrarian civilization) potentially can be detected by analyzing light spectrum reflected by the planet. Our technology can't do that right now, we don't have good enough optics or historical data to ran models, but considering that we developed ability to detect plants in the past couple decades, it only makes sense that such technology could be refined over time to allow such monitoring.
So 3-10K years from the first detection, 0.05C probe and you have substantial neighborhood for potential origin. Proxima Centauri (4 ly) is only about 85 years away at 0.05c.
Voting for someone is a value judgment. It is very likely that most Trump voters could see all the things you listed yet chose to vote for him despite that. This means some other value was a higher priority. If you can understand what that other value is, you can understand why Trump was elected. Outright dismissing that there could be such value would just lead to a second term.
No, there just aren't enough idiots in US to elect Trump, so significant number of non-idiots voted for him. You need to understand why non-idiots voted for him instead of just calling them idiots or this will happen again.
I understand your point, but I think you are overstating your point in "but they sure don't agree on many things, including but not limited to how to interpret those holy books". Take Christianity as a whole for example, there are many kinds and types, but they mostly agree on a large number of concepts - from existence of an omnipotent bearded man in the sky to discouragement of sexual relationship with your neighbor's wife. I don't think you can demonstrate such degree of coherence between different groups of SJWs.
That is, I see SJW as mob-driven and highly arbitrary. One group of people gets dragged by SJW for exact same behavior that another group of people get praised for.
If anything, Apple does far too little to reduce their tax bill. They should be zeroing it out the way that GE does.
Every dollar in government hands is dollar either wasted, or spent on causing bloody mayhem.
If you are not positing this from Somalia, then you are a hypocrite.
Tim Cook's basic complaint is that, this data that originates from the intense tracking by iOS devices is being bought and sold without giving Apple its due share.
I have to agree with this cynical view. Apple's IPhone invented surveillance capitalism, nothing that came before even dreamed of collecting so much user data. Before that, MACs were first to push what we now know as cloud integration.
Apple clearly fired the first shots in war on consumer privacy.
The above is a bunch of feel-good nonsense.
Emotional response is along "Lets get worked up about our feelings, the lash out at perceived injustices" lines. Rational response is along "Lets consider available evidence and determine most beneficial possible course of action".
I stand by my original point that we can use a lot less emotional and a lot more rational decision making.
Your emotions should never take over control of your body.
If only. You can get angry, sad, happy, moody... and it absolutely impact your decisions.
If this is not the case for you, please remand yourself into nearest robotic overlord reclamation facility, your human emulation matrix is malfunctioning.
In evolutionary terms, speed of response was of paramount importance while accuracy, specifically overabundance of false positives, was not at all important.
We evolved to knee-jerk emotionally overreact to about anything, because at some point our ancestors had to be afraid of tigers, snakes, and large predatory birds and false negative was fatal. None of this is relevant today, but neurological mechanism are still in place.
Optimal response strategy balances false positives and false negatives trying to minimize both. When you have a system that only optimizes one of these, it is sub-optimal in overall minimization of false responses.
We we could use is more compassion and empathy.
No, we could use a lot less emotional bullshit and a lot more logical and reason. Your feelings at best could described by a fuzzy logic with a lot of hysteresis. It is very lousy system for making any kind of decision.
This explains why Pokemon is so thoroughly documented on Wiki.
Be right back, writing a wiki article on raining donuts.
Final exam is Turning Test. If you fail it, you get A+ in the class.
That is why I started with "for example", and not with "the only example".
What is "religion as a whole" in context of this discussion? Is it belief in omnipotent God? Is it worship of a deity (i.e. theism)? Is it belief in supernatural? Charitable and context-sensitive interpretation of my words is that I was speaking about organized religions.
To simplify original argument, Organized Religions have a holy book that contains a set of rules. These rules are followed to various degrees by adherents of such religion. So in that sense other religions are more consistent than SJW, that don't have an agreed-on set of rules and what rules exist are not followed by adherents of SJW.
Religion, when compared to SJW, is more consistent.
For example, identifying infidels to kill is fairly straightforward process for radical Islamists. It is possible to know with a high degree of accuracy if any given religion would consider you a heretic and at least know range of possible repercussions. Yes, it is not as precise as laws, and it is often not logical, but it isn't arbitrary.
With SJWs even that is too high of a bar to clear. You can not know with any degree of certainty if any given action would be targeted, and what is response going to be. That is, with SJW anyone is infidel and fatwa is whatever is happen to be trending on Twitter today.
but must every game be made so it appeals to both genders?
You'd have to demonstrate there is a benefit to actively trying to exclude one first.
Are makers of makeup actively trying to exclude male audience? Maybe if they made all makeup in pale gray or dark blue colors they would stop actively alienating men and would have more inclusive makeup scene?
Obviously, the above argument is absurd. Knowing and targeting your audience and trying to exclude other audiences is no the same thing.
I was speaking mainly on consistency. Religions tend to be somewhat consistent when compared to SJWs. With religion, if you do X, for a known set of values, then you are heretic and religious people will go after you.
SJW have most elements of religion (dogma, zeal, attacks on heretics) but none of the consistency. One day it is X, other day it is Y that would get SJWs go after you.
The fact that you think a game can not be made that appeals to both genders ...
Sure, it probably could be made, but must every game be made so it appeals to both genders? Why is it not OK to make products that just appeal to one gender?
a) You have "maybe we shouldn't include graphic dismemberment" and you have "there aren't enough visible minorities and female characters in a game about medieval Northern European military orders" type of censorship. Sure it is about values, but diversity taken to absurd levels isn't a shared value across gaming population.
b) Yes, it presupposes that. Care to show that this inaccurate in any way?
c) Shortage implies unmet demand, can you show that anyone outside of numerically insignificant activist groups gamers wanted to see that? To me, "a very real shortage of commercial video games with diverse characters in prominent roles" is a diktat pushed by outside parties that have nothing to do with gaming.
Wokeness signaling is not a no-loss proposition. Any gaming company has to realize that it also brings about:
a. Content censorship. Be prepared to run all your content decisions by an unaccountable "committee" that will issue arbitrary decisions. Unlike law and religion, these people are not sufficiently organized or organizationally mature to have a set of rules or standards to follow.
b. Departure from meritocracy in employment standards. One of the common demands is hiring higher number of minorities and women, while great as a principle without available qualified candidates the only way to meet targets is to hire unqualified candidates.
c. Gamers generally don't appreciate political messaging in games, as these groups repeatedly attacked and abused gamers in the past (i.e. gamergate)
I played BF since BF2 and FPS since Doom 2, but I took pass on BF5 for the following reasons:
a. I don't want to grind unlocks again.
b. I don't want to have to pay for season pass on top of full price or have everyone abandon 'base' game and move-on to newer maps in a couple months.
c. I really don't like loot boxes, and I expect EA to push them on me even harder.
d. Getting BF5 to run would require me to download Origins and recover my account, which is a bother.
e. I don't want to pay $1500 for a new video card or have the game look like minecraft on my moderately sized screen.
...
z. Brouhaha with inclusivity and virtue signaling wokeness.
As much as I want to see the end of victimhood and grievance culture, BF5 failure is unlikely to be the beginning of the end for it in gaming. The likely explanation is that EA's nickel-and-dime DLCs and loot boxes caught up to them, not their attempts to virtue-signal wokeness.