His tone is quite aggressive, arrogant, and also I think most would agree quite ignorant. That all adds up to flamebait, because it gets on people's nerves and encourages negative responses.
As for his views, people realised long ago that monkeys were smarter than your average animal. If he doesn't want to think of our tool using and problem solving skills as something that makes us "superior" animals it is indeed his own right, but there is a clear difference between built-in behaviour and learned behaviour, and any biologist or psychologist with even a passing familiarity of how the brain works could point out that these behaviours do originate from different sections of the brain. Some animals simply don't have the hardware to be able to override their built in behaviours and plan their actions beforehand. Primates have some of the largest (if not the largest, I'm not sure about dolphins) frontal lobes of any mammal with relation to their body size. This article shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who knows that, but it is funny nevertheless:)
Well going by historical evidence it is a good way to drive innovation, I didn't say that it was my preferred method of advancement though;) I doubt the rate of failed military projects will be that much higher than the average rate of failed commercial projects..
true, but I always thought of it as being 'muffled', rather than having any 'sizzle'. Well that's what I've found while listening with decent headphones and comparing my 192kbps rips to the 128s. If anything the higher quality rips have more 'sizzle' just because they're nice and clear!
this guy doesn't WANT to change from Photoshop to Gimp, from IE to FireFox, from AIM to Pidgin, to run Wine for WoW. The list goes on.
Please do go on. I have to say that apart from the WINE situation those examples are purely down to personal preference. Don't try to tell me that nobody on Windows prefers GIMP and Firefox to Photoshop and IE, because I was happily using them on Windows for years. I could also run Windows Messenger on WINE if I wanted to, but I don't like having ads in my face all the time, and I'd prefer to not rely on the Windows API for anything.
He wasn't saying the USA military industry invented all those things, just that war was the catalyst for inventing them, no matter where they came from. I'm not even going to get into the other stuff you mention. They have nothing to do with how war drives engineering forward - they are just nonsensical arguments for the sake for arguing.
I've had the same problem but with left click on any of the menu items. Like clicking on the Bookmarks menu kept bookmarking my homepage, so I've now subconsciously taken to just holding down the mousebutton on menus, oldskool..
I play guitar too, and sure I had to practice a little bit to get any good at hard and expert difficulty, but I still found it much more fun than it looked like it was going to be.
I play drums too, and the drumming in these games really does help to improve your real life drumming a lot. Not so much the guitar stuff, but I started preferring drums to guitar a few years ago anyway (mostly because all my friends play guitar too and I was the only one with enough rhythm and coordination when we all had a go at drumming:P ).
the main selling point of these music games is the track list. If you look at the back of the Rock Band or Guitar Hero jewel case, half of it is covered with a list of big-name bands.
There are a lot of big name bands true, but I ended up buying several albums from bands I'd never heard of through both Guitar Hero and Rock Band 'bonus' type tracks - most of them are still successful bands compared to your average band obviously, but they were ones I probably wouldn't have heard of or at least taken notice of otherwise: Fall of Troy, Flyleaf, The Mother Hips, Rush, Dragonforce, Senses Fail, Killswitch Engage, Radio Futura, An Endless Sporadic, and probably more. There are even some really famous artists that I was never too fussed about buying albums from, but was inspired to buy albums after playing them on Guitar Hero/Rock Band and really enjoying them - Hole, Guns'n'Roses, Jimi Hendrix, Queens of the Stone Age (and subsequently the Eagles of Death Metal and the Desert Sessions) and maybe a couple that I forgot.. Warner really should be paying these guys to have their tracks included - they're lucky that it's currently the other way round. I honestly would be happy to play an entirely indie catalogue as long as the songs were good, and I sure as hell would buy a few albums from the artists if I enjoyed playing along.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist or anything, but wikipedia says natural selection is:
A process by which heritable traits conferring survival and reproductive advantage to individuals, or related individuals, tend to be passed on to succeeding generations and become more frequent in a population, whereas other less favourable traits tend to become eliminated.
So I don't see why sexual traits should be separate from 'natural' selection - they are natural enough! They are a definite part of 'reproductive advantage'. Sexual traits can of course be separate traits that aid survival, but they all aid potential selection.
Besides, isn't a peacock's tail partially useful to intimidate and confuse would-be-predators by making it look bigger, with many eyes (seems to be a very natural thing to look into the eyes of another animal, just look at any cat or dog in the street and they'll probably look right at your eyes), etc? Or is that just a myth?
Why are you talking about Evolution as if it's some kind of deity, rather than just the name given to the process of natural selection of beneficial mutations?
I read the bible cover to cover a coupla times, but it didn't have much to do with me stopping believing. I think to use the bible as a basis for atheism is pretty ridiculous, unless by atheism you mean "not believing in the Christian God", but atheism surely means believing in no godlike being at all.
I find it almost as ridiculous that the universe even exists as some greater power or intelligence would exist, though it seems to me that most people just make gods to help give themselves a sense of purpose and security in life. It's nice to believe in magical things - take all the coincidences and make a big deal out of them, etc.
After losing my faith and basically seeing life as without any purpose other than the ones we give it, I now sometimes envy those with faith in something - even if it seems misplaced to me. I'm torn between feeling dumb but happy, and being realistic but morose.
Doesn't help that the girl I like right now is a Christian either.. makes dumb/happy an even more attractive proposition. I'm currently thinking: if there is no such thing as god, but religion makes you happy, is it so bad to play along..? I wouldn't pretend I'm an actual believing Christian, but I would probably go to church again for her.
At least when data is stolen off servers I control I know who is to blame.
Employees who leave their workstations unattended and unlocked, or are too lax with their passwords? I doubt the weak link is often the actual administrator in charge of virtual security..
analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using [insert-any-application-here] because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option
What an amazing insight! Who would have suspected such a thing?
But if you also had a gun, they'd be a lot less likely to try to attack you.
That depends. Is this someone a Yautja Predator? Do they have Little Man Syndrome? Are they a Police Officer and you are carrying the gun in an airport? All important questions..
i do not belive that only 5% of homes in the US have a DVD player while 7% have a blueray player..
Who is trying to get you to believe that? Did you bother to read the title of the chart? It's the number of homes that have it after 3 years of the technology being released. It's pretty easy to believe that for example 5% of homes would have a PS3 and another 1 or 2% would have dedicated blu-ray players, that kind of thing.
But he says the package was from best buy, so I think the most likely thing still is that they just got his details from his bank card number and sent the package. I do think it's decent of them to send out updates, though I doubt the update involved that many bugfixes. It's primary purpose was likely for updating to the latest blu-ray spec.
There is most likely some other thing at work here.
Maybe it was aliens? Or little toys come to life? The guy bought the player at best buy. He received a package from best buy with an update. It doesn't take that much to figure it out.
Do best buy do anything like customer reward cards where they would have your address on file? Still, the guy says he only used his debit card. The simplest and most logical assumption would be that buying one of these players automatically puts you down to receive updates and they take the address from your debit card. Privacy nuts may hate that idea but I think it shows that Best Buy cares;)
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His tone is quite aggressive, arrogant, and also I think most would agree quite ignorant. That all adds up to flamebait, because it gets on people's nerves and encourages negative responses.
As for his views, people realised long ago that monkeys were smarter than your average animal. If he doesn't want to think of our tool using and problem solving skills as something that makes us "superior" animals it is indeed his own right, but there is a clear difference between built-in behaviour and learned behaviour, and any biologist or psychologist with even a passing familiarity of how the brain works could point out that these behaviours do originate from different sections of the brain. Some animals simply don't have the hardware to be able to override their built in behaviours and plan their actions beforehand. Primates have some of the largest (if not the largest, I'm not sure about dolphins) frontal lobes of any mammal with relation to their body size. This article shouldn't be too surprising to anyone who knows that, but it is funny nevertheless :)
Well going by historical evidence it is a good way to drive innovation, I didn't say that it was my preferred method of advancement though ;) I doubt the rate of failed military projects will be that much higher than the average rate of failed commercial projects..
Why the fuck would we send bottled water to space when salt water or mud puddle water would work just as well
Well, it would be nice to have some sort of legitimate use for all that "sparkling" bottled water you see in the shops.
true, but I always thought of it as being 'muffled', rather than having any 'sizzle'. Well that's what I've found while listening with decent headphones and comparing my 192kbps rips to the 128s. If anything the higher quality rips have more 'sizzle' just because they're nice and clear!
this guy doesn't WANT to change from Photoshop to Gimp, from IE to FireFox, from AIM to Pidgin, to run Wine for WoW. The list goes on.
Please do go on. I have to say that apart from the WINE situation those examples are purely down to personal preference. Don't try to tell me that nobody on Windows prefers GIMP and Firefox to Photoshop and IE, because I was happily using them on Windows for years. I could also run Windows Messenger on WINE if I wanted to, but I don't like having ads in my face all the time, and I'd prefer to not rely on the Windows API for anything.
He wasn't saying the USA military industry invented all those things, just that war was the catalyst for inventing them, no matter where they came from. I'm not even going to get into the other stuff you mention. They have nothing to do with how war drives engineering forward - they are just nonsensical arguments for the sake for arguing.
you insert = you cannot insert
You sound like my girlfriend.
The awesome bar isn't so awesome that it can use data that doesn't exist.
Good thing that there is no charge for awesome, otherwise I'd be asking for my money back.
I've had the same problem but with left click on any of the menu items. Like clicking on the Bookmarks menu kept bookmarking my homepage, so I've now subconsciously taken to just holding down the mousebutton on menus, oldskool..
I play guitar too, and sure I had to practice a little bit to get any good at hard and expert difficulty, but I still found it much more fun than it looked like it was going to be.
I play drums too, and the drumming in these games really does help to improve your real life drumming a lot. Not so much the guitar stuff, but I started preferring drums to guitar a few years ago anyway (mostly because all my friends play guitar too and I was the only one with enough rhythm and coordination when we all had a go at drumming :P ).
the main selling point of these music games is the track list. If you look at the back of the Rock Band or Guitar Hero jewel case, half of it is covered with a list of big-name bands.
There are a lot of big name bands true, but I ended up buying several albums from bands I'd never heard of through both Guitar Hero and Rock Band 'bonus' type tracks - most of them are still successful bands compared to your average band obviously, but they were ones I probably wouldn't have heard of or at least taken notice of otherwise: Fall of Troy, Flyleaf, The Mother Hips, Rush, Dragonforce, Senses Fail, Killswitch Engage, Radio Futura, An Endless Sporadic, and probably more. There are even some really famous artists that I was never too fussed about buying albums from, but was inspired to buy albums after playing them on Guitar Hero/Rock Band and really enjoying them - Hole, Guns'n'Roses, Jimi Hendrix, Queens of the Stone Age (and subsequently the Eagles of Death Metal and the Desert Sessions) and maybe a couple that I forgot.. Warner really should be paying these guys to have their tracks included - they're lucky that it's currently the other way round. I honestly would be happy to play an entirely indie catalogue as long as the songs were good, and I sure as hell would buy a few albums from the artists if I enjoyed playing along.
What you meant to say was "Bummer".
I'm unmitigatingly sorry that I have better things to do with my time.
I'm not an evolutionary biologist or anything, but wikipedia says natural selection is:
A process by which heritable traits conferring survival and reproductive advantage to individuals, or related individuals, tend to be passed on to succeeding generations and become more frequent in a population, whereas other less favourable traits tend to become eliminated.
So I don't see why sexual traits should be separate from 'natural' selection - they are natural enough! They are a definite part of 'reproductive advantage'. Sexual traits can of course be separate traits that aid survival, but they all aid potential selection.
Besides, isn't a peacock's tail partially useful to intimidate and confuse would-be-predators by making it look bigger, with many eyes (seems to be a very natural thing to look into the eyes of another animal, just look at any cat or dog in the street and they'll probably look right at your eyes), etc? Or is that just a myth?
Sexual selection is obviously a part of 'natural' selection.
Then again, this is slashdot, so perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that sex isn't 'natural' to you?
Why are you talking about Evolution as if it's some kind of deity, rather than just the name given to the process of natural selection of beneficial mutations?
More like "can I please fuck him up?" and "yeah sure, why not? He'll still love me! :p "
I read the bible cover to cover a coupla times, but it didn't have much to do with me stopping believing. I think to use the bible as a basis for atheism is pretty ridiculous, unless by atheism you mean "not believing in the Christian God", but atheism surely means believing in no godlike being at all.
I find it almost as ridiculous that the universe even exists as some greater power or intelligence would exist, though it seems to me that most people just make gods to help give themselves a sense of purpose and security in life. It's nice to believe in magical things - take all the coincidences and make a big deal out of them, etc.
After losing my faith and basically seeing life as without any purpose other than the ones we give it, I now sometimes envy those with faith in something - even if it seems misplaced to me. I'm torn between feeling dumb but happy, and being realistic but morose.
Doesn't help that the girl I like right now is a Christian either.. makes dumb/happy an even more attractive proposition. I'm currently thinking: if there is no such thing as god, but religion makes you happy, is it so bad to play along..? I wouldn't pretend I'm an actual believing Christian, but I would probably go to church again for her.
At least when data is stolen off servers I control I know who is to blame.
Employees who leave their workstations unattended and unlocked, or are too lax with their passwords? I doubt the weak link is often the actual administrator in charge of virtual security..
analyst Sheri McLeish, suggests that businesses may still be using [insert-any-application-here] because it is familiar to users or because they have a legacy investment in the application, not because it is the best option
What an amazing insight! Who would have suspected such a thing?
So you didn't notice how you can't spell "Islamo-Communist mental case" without I n t e l then?
But if you also had a gun, they'd be a lot less likely to try to attack you.
That depends. Is this someone a Yautja Predator? Do they have Little Man Syndrome? Are they a Police Officer and you are carrying the gun in an airport? All important questions..
i do not belive that only 5% of homes in the US have a DVD player while 7% have a blueray player..
Who is trying to get you to believe that? Did you bother to read the title of the chart? It's the number of homes that have it after 3 years of the technology being released. It's pretty easy to believe that for example 5% of homes would have a PS3 and another 1 or 2% would have dedicated blu-ray players, that kind of thing.
But he says the package was from best buy, so I think the most likely thing still is that they just got his details from his bank card number and sent the package. I do think it's decent of them to send out updates, though I doubt the update involved that many bugfixes. It's primary purpose was likely for updating to the latest blu-ray spec.
There is most likely some other thing at work here.
Maybe it was aliens? Or little toys come to life? The guy bought the player at best buy. He received a package from best buy with an update. It doesn't take that much to figure it out.
Do best buy do anything like customer reward cards where they would have your address on file? Still, the guy says he only used his debit card. The simplest and most logical assumption would be that buying one of these players automatically puts you down to receive updates and they take the address from your debit card. Privacy nuts may hate that idea but I think it shows that Best Buy cares ;)