Agreed - some people enjoy maths puzzles, and coding is basically the same vein of challenge.
I would argue that if the person writing the article thinks that no one could find coding fun, then they're probably not of the correct mindset to be a good coder, and hence not even remotely qualified to talk about the subject.
Because you see, developers who find it fun, will always be better than those who do not. This isn't just true of development though, it's long been obvious that people who have a passion for and enjoyment of things always do a better job of them because their heart is in it.
There's a simple test - if coding wasn't fun then no one would do it in their spare time, yet there's an entire massive fucking ecosystem that is made up of a substantial group of spare time developers, it's called open source, people here may have heard of it.
But even outside open source, the number of people who do Unity game development, who write apps and so forth is phenomenal, people aren't slugging through this just because they expect a massive pay off.
Yes it is technically hard, yes it is ethically complex, but some people enjoy technical and ethical challenges - the idea that technical difficulty and ethical complexity are mutually exclusive to enjoyment is the fundamental flaw in this entirely broken article. Sorry Walter Vannini, that you ended up in a field you don't enjoy - don't assume that's the norm, or that that's just how it is though, you fucked up with your career choice, you'd be better of accepting that than trying to self-justify that it's fine because no one else enjoys it either as that's simply not true.
The same reason people cheat in video games. Some people are such desperate failures at life that they'll go to any extreme to try and convince themselves that they're not just a waste of oxygen.
Are there any breakdowns about what browsers do with all that memory? I'd be intrigued to know what they're filling it with.
I've always thought the same, it seems excessive, I understand that they can speed things up by caching, which in turn saves memory, but even here I'm struggling to understand what you could possible cache that would turn a 5mb web page into a 150mb slab of cache - even if you cache all the markup, the scripts, the images, the CSS, and have them in raw form, and displayable form (i.e. the DOM, resized images etc.) I'm still not entirely sure how you end up with so much. Even if you're JIT'ing the scripts and storing the JIT compiled versions it still seems entirely excessive.
The irony is that Microsoft does offer paid support for Windows XP, but that the UK's current Conservative government decided to axe the contract a year or two back to save money.
I wonder how that £5mill saving has paid off now that they're going to have to pay a fucking fortune in sorting it all out and upgrading anyway?
I can speak for this type of application, I genuinely find these kind of projects useful, not for Java, but certainly for.NET.
One of our products supports client scripting, and it used to just call out to native Lua, it was horrible doing this for many reasons, from performance due to unmanaged managed martialling, through to security issues in being difficult to sandbox.
I replaced the scripting engine with one built ground up to resolve many of these issues, not least to make the damn thing more modular and testable. As a result of that I actually made the language part pluggable, so that we are now able to support multiple languages by just creating a simple language interface plugin, and whilst we do support native interpreters through this engine, we've now retired them all so that we only actually deliver managed languages running on the CLR now. The net result is that we're not simply bound to Lua, but we now support Lua, Python, C#, and a few others.
The great thing is that performance is up, because we're not hit by the cost of manage/unmanaged martialling, and for languages that support it we allow for precomilation, so for example, precompiled C# scripts run between 40x - 80x faster than calling out to native Lua. But perhaps one of the biggest benefit, is that since we've retired support for native interpreters, and switched to only managed interpreters, we can now support sandboxing in an entirely consistent manner across all languages - that is, restrict what scripts can actually access and do. Our clients love the fact that they're not bound purely to Lua and can use things like Python now, and we're happier because the solution is more performant, and far more secure.
So I get what you're saying, it's not obvious why all these language projects we see day in, day out are useful, but there are genuine uses - interop, scripting support and so forth can often take great advantage of these things. Creating managed implementations of languages on the JVM, on the CLR and so forth are great endeavors, and for anyone wishing to learn more about language implementation and so forth I would argue are far more productive avenues for self-learning for wider society, than creating yet another programming language that runs in it's own custom execution environment and that doesn't offer anything existing more widely supported languages already do better. I think it's worth making a distinction between projects like this - that expand the use cases for existing languages and technologies and so have wider benefits, and projects we often see pimped here where companies and individuals create a new language that they pretend is the next great thing, but basically never actually is. If nothing else, this project has real actual commercial use cases.
The whole point in JIT compilation is that it compiles "Just In Time", that is, just in time to execute - to do something like eval you merely JIT the section of script you want to eval when you eval it.
I'm a little out of date on Java, it's been a while, but alternatively if it supports something like.NET's DLR you simply generate expression trees for execution at runtime and execute those.
Depending on semantics, you may wish to call these options "interpreters", and I've got some sympathy for that argument given that the boundary between interpreted and JIT'd languages has become ever more blurred - C#'s DLR, HHVM for PHP, and V8 for JavaScript all make the distinction ever less simple. But this really proves the point - the idea of implementing something like eval in a JIT'd language isn't new, because that's exactly what happens for existing classically interpreted languages like JavaScript that are now more commonly JIT compiled.
Yes... so how would making a new version from scratch solve this problem exactly?
I'm not sure what the relevance of the first part of your reply is - the GP said Microsoft should write a new version from scratch, I pointed out it wouldn't make much difference because only old versions were effected - you replied to me highlighting that point, so um, thanks for proving my point I guess? My comment on it relying on people being dumb is based on the fact the only infection vector is either machine sat facing the open internet with no firewall and ports wide open, or people clicking e-mail attachments. Given it's been known this is a bad idea for any computer running any OS since near enough the dawn of the web and e-mail, then yes, for this to spread it required an exceptional amount of stupidity.
But regardless the rest of your argument really is fucking stupid - no longer updating a 16 year old OS is not a shitty business practice? especially when you gave a number of support extensions and gave people more than enough time and warning to upgrade? You'll find very few products in the world where the manufacturer still gives a shit after 5 years, let alone 16 years. Google for example stopped updating my Google branded Galaxy Nexus after only 18 months from UK release leaving it vulnerable, Microsoft have the longest support period of all major vendors - long support periods is one of Microsoft's greatest strengths, the fact there are people who wont upgrade ever is really not on Microsoft, especially when they had a free upgrade path to Windows 10 for 18 months which wasn't effected precisely because they were trying to do everything they could to get vulnerable OS off the internet.
It also didn't effect 90% of Windows systems new and old, I don't even know where you got that fake number from and can only assume you just outright pulled it out your ass because Windows 10 marketshare is alone at 26%, Windows 7 at 48%, and then Windows 8 at 9%, XP at 7%. So 64% of the OS market was vulnerable back in March before the exploit was in the wild when Microsoft released a patch. This was patched then, leaving 16% vulnerable with no patch options leaving 84% of the OS market safe from this exploit as of March this year if IT admins did their job, of which 74% of that share was Microsoft OS'.
Oh, and um, Windows XP came out in 2001, so no, they weren't convincing anyone to install it in the 90s. Really, let's be honest, what you were actually saying was "I'm an open source zealot, and you said something that gives Microsoft some kind of defence so I'm going to unthinkingly pounce on you!" wasn't it? because the first half of your argument agreed with me despite being written in a tone of disagreement, and the second part is just drivel that bitches at Microsoft for the sake of bitching at Microsoft regardless of rationality.
"There was no ad hominem attack. The poster I replied claimed something to be a fact â" I demonstrated, that it was not."
Incorrect, you said:
"headed by one Dr. Blumenthal [wikipedia.org], who has "chief health advisor to the Dukakis campaign" on his resume."
"The CIA report you cited showed people in other countries living longer on average. That's not, what was claimed. DogDude claimed, Europeans have better health, he said â" not live longer. And, no, the two are not quite the same..."
Incorrect, you said:
"Do you have statistics for longevity â" and differences in longevity â" among Europeans? I'm listening..."
"You are bringing up this "laughing at me" for the second time... I dread to learn any more about the emotional knot boiling inside your head, if you need to seek vindication from imaginary sympathizers in the imaginary audience..."
Yeah, so about those 6+ troll mods you got on this topic.
I get it, you said something stupid, someone corrected you, it pissed you off, you got downmodded, it pissed you off more, you got more people telling you your wrong, it pissed you off even more. Pissed off people don't back down easily - that's fine, but you ain't fooling me. It's quite obvious you made a tit of yourself, not by being wrong, but by refusing to admit you were wrong, and now you're flapping about still trying to somehow correct what you perceive as a grave injustice by trying to reframe the conversation in your favour even though Slashdot doesn't have an edit button, so you can't actually do that.
I learnt long ago, that when you're wrong, it's easier to either just duck out or admit you were wrong. Trying to turn the argument when you've already long lost it is a foolish proposition. I'd have thought your UID was low enough to have learnt this by now, but I guess not. Simply saying "Sorry, looks like I was wrong - you're right, it appears Europeans do have greater longevity on average" would have saved you so much more time, and avoided you so much more frustration. Be a better person - don't believe you have to get everything right, everyone gets stuff wrong sometimes, no need to be embarrassed about it. Even if someone is a dick about it and says "Hah you were wrong!" so fucking what? It's not like they're someone you have to give the slightest shit about are they?
I recently made this mistake, of booking a flight to Canada via Iceland.
It all sounds very good, until you realise it's a trap. Come via Iceland they said, get more luggage and cheaper flights they said.
£700 for 2 fucking nights in a hotel they didn't say. Stopping over Iceland would be good if it wasn't for the fact Iceland is a phenomenal rip off in part because they were allowed to fix their currency for years when it should realistically have been allowed to depreciate as a result of their defacto self-imposed bankruptcy.
Iceland is a great option if you're happy to pay way over the top for everything and lose far more in accommodation, food, travel, and activity costs, than you'd ever save on the cheap airline.
It's not that Iceland isn't nice, it's not that I can't afford it, it's that cost/benefit ratio doesn't compute - if I'm going to spend £1500 on accommodation, food, and some activities en-route to North America then I'd rather buy 7 days in the Bahamas with that money, than 3 days in Iceland.
The only reason we went with it is because we really wanted to dive Silfra, I'd never do it again though as whilst good, it's not remotely good enough relative to the cost.
I don't need to do anything to "win" the argument - I already did that when I provided more sources and data, and explained why your ad hominem attack is meaningless. That ship has sailed - no matter how much you flap about now that argument is already long lost for you.
After that it's really just about trolling you to try and make you wake up from your ignorance. I'm not going to have any luck though am I, let's be honest, so have fun being wrong on the internet whilst everyone laughs at you.
Okay - I didn't realise you were a god botherer type who believes in the unprovable. Had I known that I'd have not wasted my time. Keep believing what you want to believe, it has no relevance to actual scientific discussion though and doesn't change the fact you're completely wrong.
I think you're conflating separate issues, a definition of consciousness is quite different to where the universe physically supports it - the latter is obviously true, because we're conscious, and if we're conscious, then so could machines be because there's nothing magical about us, we just don't have sufficiently advanced technology to implement it yet.
One things that may make it illegal would be evading any tax owed on it in your particular jurisdiction.
Another possibility is depending on your role, and depending on what you're making them pay for, it could fall under anti-bribery laws. So for example, if a user files for access to sensitive data on a shared drive and comes and pesters you to hurry up and give them access, paying into your money box to do so, and you do this, and it turns out they shouldn't have had access, then there's a reasonable chance this could be seen as you demanding a bribe.
But if you fall foul of neither of those things I don't see why it would be illegal.
"You had me disable AdBlock for this? It is not by Forbes â" they simply cite a survey by Commonwealth Fund â" an Illiberal organization currently headed by one Dr. Blumenthal, who has "chief health advisor to the Dukakis campaign" on his resume.
Seriously?"
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy for precisely this reason - because you don't like the fact that statistics show that developed European countries all do better than the US in terms of life expectancy you're instead attacking the person who did the study.
But that's not how statistics work - the numbers don't lie, take it from this guy, take it from any other, attacking this individual doesn't change the fact that life expectancy in Europe was higher.
I actually followed this thread because I was genuinely intrigued to see where you were going to take the life expectancy argument (because I was already aware it was higher in most European countries, and that you were hence on a losing bet by trying to make that argument). I'm disappointed to see that you've simply decided to deny reality though rather than accept the fact that you were wrong. That doesn't bode well for you as a human being.
You can't ask someone not to hate you when you're being willfully ignorant, because that highlights you as someone that isn't willing to learn and that's more interested in lying to themselves than having an adult conversation where things like facts actually matter.
Yes, I remember this project when Windows 2000 was released. Given it's had nearly 20 years to catch up and is still nowhere near I don't see why it would suddenly manage to do so now.
Honestly, with Microsoft's trajectory towards more open source, I think Windows will go open source before this becomes a viable Windows replacement. We'll probably find out in another decade.
Did you ever stop to think that's because maybe, no matter how much you may wish to moan about everything, this is as good as it gets?
I know, I know, you want to listen to the fascist who tells you she can solve all the worlds ills if we just blame it on those guys.
Yeah, Europe tried that, didn't work well, turns out it was actually much worse than what everyone is sticking to instead. Rather than assume everyone is an ignorant drone and you're the only enlightened person on the planet, maybe you should consider that in fact there's a good reason that people vote for the status quo that's made them the 5th richest nation in the world despite having a fraction of the world's population and resources to achieve that success?
Yes, I know, it's all terrible, everything's awful with the liberal West, it's terrible, sure, great, only it's just less terrible than all the alternatives. Even in the modern era you only have to look at Putin's Russia to see how awful the autocratic miserable hate filled blame gaming alternative is. I don't know about you but I'd much rather be at the bottom of the wealth ladder in somewhere like France, than at the bottom of the wealth ladder in Russia. That's why people rejected Le Pen, because no matter how bad things may appear to be in somewhere like France, no matter how much you may wish to whine about, no matter where on the wealth ladder you sit, you're still better off, and more free, than you would be under the alternative that was on offer.
Dunno, I'm in my mid-30s and whilst I admittedly missed the very early era of gaming, I had more than enough time as a kid on C64, Spectrum, NES, Master System, Atari ST, Amiga, and so forth. I don't pretend to be old enough to remember the earliest days of gaming, but I'm old enough at least to have seen the evolution of some key genres (i.e. FPS, MMOs, Sim games, etc.)
I'd say this is more like the sort of list I'd expect from someone in their mid to late 20s that missed the 90s.
"a real time "scorched earth" type game that has nothing to do with the main game..."
I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers that, I remember two player sharing a keyboard I think having way more fun with that than the main game. I'm glad someone else remembers it so that I can be sure it wasn't just a figment of my imagination:)
Your post deserves more upvotes, it was a barrage of happy nostalgia that made me want to curl up in a ball, escape this century and decade, and go back in time.
Yeah, I'm not overly taken by this list. It feels like a list by someone who only really started gaming in the 00s, but is aware of a handful of the most popular 80s/90s names rather than someone who actually watched gaming evolve over the ages across it's key points.
Whilst I've always played things like the Halo games, I'm not overly taken by some of the candidates they're putting forward. I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth. It was also the first FPS that explicitly designed for user extensibility from the outset (Quake C anyone?).
World of Warcraft? High userbase sure, but hardly as influential or groundbreaking as EverQuest and Ultima Online. It was ultimately just a clone of stuff that had come before it such as EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and such with half the features of those MMOs missing, but with Blizzard's IP slapped on. I don't agree that highest popularity means most significant impact on gaming in part because the market is growing so more recent IPs will always sell better, but that doesn't make them more worthy for special recognition.
The Sims, okay, a pretty successful franchise, and definitely fairly novel, I think it deserves something, but shouldn't SimCity come first? SimCity and SimCity 2000 not only stole many years of people's lives, but even made it's way into classrooms as a teaching tool, and was used for some high level city planning. It's still being cloned to this day, games like Cities: Skylines owe the bulk of their design to SimCity and SimCity 2000, and it was the birth point of Sim Everything Else - from Sim Tower, to Sim Ant.
Agree, I think the fact a modern bacteria has done this is merely evidence that there are deadly modern bacteria out there.
This doesn't state anything about long dormant deadly diseases wiping us out, on the contrary, it's unlikely that a particularly ancient disease would bare much threat to modern humans - the odds are our bodies have been fighting it's descendants off for the last few thousand or however many years, and vast amounts of the genomes of modern living things that are currently inactive are the results of that. So what if grandad deadly disease comes back from 10,000 years ago? Our bodies most likely know how to kill him and about 9,000 years worth of his descendants too.
Could something moderately more recent like the bubonic plague arise from ice? Possibly, if it's resilient enough, but it's not like we haven't become medically advanced enough to deal with it.
It's like saying an army from 10,000 years ago is going to come out of the ice and kill us all, um, yeah, good luck cavemen getting past our AR15s, predator drones, and M1 Abrams. If you're lucky you'll be put in a zoo or lab as a curiosity, if you're not so lucky we'll just eradicate you altogether. The fact is, if it's evolved in the past to infect humans, then humanity already has a record of it the section of our genome marked "historical", if it hasn't evolved in the past to infect humans, then why assume it will now when it's been out of the genetic arms race for thousands of years?
Probably the first myth to dispel is that anthrax is some magical thing conjured up by governments for biological warfare. It's not, it's a naturally occurring bacteria, most common in warmer climates of Southern Europe and Africa, but also present in North America too. It's typically carried by animals, both through contact, and through ingestion (which in turn allows it to be transmitted from prey, to predator), and of the roughly couple of thousand natural cases of human infection that occur across the world every year, many are in people working in industries such as tanning - i.e. working with infected animal hides.
Part the reason this natural bacteria was chosen for weaponisation was precisely it's resilience, and it's ease of infection, coupled with it's relatively high fatality rate. It shouldn't be surprising therefore that an animal carcass frozen in ice could still infect someone given it's properties of resilience, infection, and the fact that animal carcasses are exactly where you would most likely encounter it in the first place.
Given this, I'm intrigued to know if you still think it's ridiculous, and if so, why?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - some people enjoy maths puzzles, and coding is basically the same vein of challenge.
I would argue that if the person writing the article thinks that no one could find coding fun, then they're probably not of the correct mindset to be a good coder, and hence not even remotely qualified to talk about the subject.
Because you see, developers who find it fun, will always be better than those who do not. This isn't just true of development though, it's long been obvious that people who have a passion for and enjoyment of things always do a better job of them because their heart is in it.
There's a simple test - if coding wasn't fun then no one would do it in their spare time, yet there's an entire massive fucking ecosystem that is made up of a substantial group of spare time developers, it's called open source, people here may have heard of it.
But even outside open source, the number of people who do Unity game development, who write apps and so forth is phenomenal, people aren't slugging through this just because they expect a massive pay off.
Yes it is technically hard, yes it is ethically complex, but some people enjoy technical and ethical challenges - the idea that technical difficulty and ethical complexity are mutually exclusive to enjoyment is the fundamental flaw in this entirely broken article. Sorry Walter Vannini, that you ended up in a field you don't enjoy - don't assume that's the norm, or that that's just how it is though, you fucked up with your career choice, you'd be better of accepting that than trying to self-justify that it's fine because no one else enjoys it either as that's simply not true.
The same reason people cheat in video games. Some people are such desperate failures at life that they'll go to any extreme to try and convince themselves that they're not just a waste of oxygen.
Meanwhile, everyone else knows the truth.
The Chrome executable is 1.1mb so that accounts for less than 1% of it unless it's substantially compressed and decompresses heavily in memory.
Are there any breakdowns about what browsers do with all that memory? I'd be intrigued to know what they're filling it with.
I've always thought the same, it seems excessive, I understand that they can speed things up by caching, which in turn saves memory, but even here I'm struggling to understand what you could possible cache that would turn a 5mb web page into a 150mb slab of cache - even if you cache all the markup, the scripts, the images, the CSS, and have them in raw form, and displayable form (i.e. the DOM, resized images etc.) I'm still not entirely sure how you end up with so much. Even if you're JIT'ing the scripts and storing the JIT compiled versions it still seems entirely excessive.
The irony is that Microsoft does offer paid support for Windows XP, but that the UK's current Conservative government decided to axe the contract a year or two back to save money.
I wonder how that £5mill saving has paid off now that they're going to have to pay a fucking fortune in sorting it all out and upgrading anyway?
I can speak for this type of application, I genuinely find these kind of projects useful, not for Java, but certainly for .NET.
One of our products supports client scripting, and it used to just call out to native Lua, it was horrible doing this for many reasons, from performance due to unmanaged managed martialling, through to security issues in being difficult to sandbox.
I replaced the scripting engine with one built ground up to resolve many of these issues, not least to make the damn thing more modular and testable. As a result of that I actually made the language part pluggable, so that we are now able to support multiple languages by just creating a simple language interface plugin, and whilst we do support native interpreters through this engine, we've now retired them all so that we only actually deliver managed languages running on the CLR now. The net result is that we're not simply bound to Lua, but we now support Lua, Python, C#, and a few others.
The great thing is that performance is up, because we're not hit by the cost of manage/unmanaged martialling, and for languages that support it we allow for precomilation, so for example, precompiled C# scripts run between 40x - 80x faster than calling out to native Lua. But perhaps one of the biggest benefit, is that since we've retired support for native interpreters, and switched to only managed interpreters, we can now support sandboxing in an entirely consistent manner across all languages - that is, restrict what scripts can actually access and do. Our clients love the fact that they're not bound purely to Lua and can use things like Python now, and we're happier because the solution is more performant, and far more secure.
So I get what you're saying, it's not obvious why all these language projects we see day in, day out are useful, but there are genuine uses - interop, scripting support and so forth can often take great advantage of these things. Creating managed implementations of languages on the JVM, on the CLR and so forth are great endeavors, and for anyone wishing to learn more about language implementation and so forth I would argue are far more productive avenues for self-learning for wider society, than creating yet another programming language that runs in it's own custom execution environment and that doesn't offer anything existing more widely supported languages already do better. I think it's worth making a distinction between projects like this - that expand the use cases for existing languages and technologies and so have wider benefits, and projects we often see pimped here where companies and individuals create a new language that they pretend is the next great thing, but basically never actually is. If nothing else, this project has real actual commercial use cases.
The whole point in JIT compilation is that it compiles "Just In Time", that is, just in time to execute - to do something like eval you merely JIT the section of script you want to eval when you eval it.
I'm a little out of date on Java, it's been a while, but alternatively if it supports something like .NET's DLR you simply generate expression trees for execution at runtime and execute those.
Depending on semantics, you may wish to call these options "interpreters", and I've got some sympathy for that argument given that the boundary between interpreted and JIT'd languages has become ever more blurred - C#'s DLR, HHVM for PHP, and V8 for JavaScript all make the distinction ever less simple. But this really proves the point - the idea of implementing something like eval in a JIT'd language isn't new, because that's exactly what happens for existing classically interpreted languages like JavaScript that are now more commonly JIT compiled.
Yes... so how would making a new version from scratch solve this problem exactly?
I'm not sure what the relevance of the first part of your reply is - the GP said Microsoft should write a new version from scratch, I pointed out it wouldn't make much difference because only old versions were effected - you replied to me highlighting that point, so um, thanks for proving my point I guess? My comment on it relying on people being dumb is based on the fact the only infection vector is either machine sat facing the open internet with no firewall and ports wide open, or people clicking e-mail attachments. Given it's been known this is a bad idea for any computer running any OS since near enough the dawn of the web and e-mail, then yes, for this to spread it required an exceptional amount of stupidity.
But regardless the rest of your argument really is fucking stupid - no longer updating a 16 year old OS is not a shitty business practice? especially when you gave a number of support extensions and gave people more than enough time and warning to upgrade? You'll find very few products in the world where the manufacturer still gives a shit after 5 years, let alone 16 years. Google for example stopped updating my Google branded Galaxy Nexus after only 18 months from UK release leaving it vulnerable, Microsoft have the longest support period of all major vendors - long support periods is one of Microsoft's greatest strengths, the fact there are people who wont upgrade ever is really not on Microsoft, especially when they had a free upgrade path to Windows 10 for 18 months which wasn't effected precisely because they were trying to do everything they could to get vulnerable OS off the internet.
It also didn't effect 90% of Windows systems new and old, I don't even know where you got that fake number from and can only assume you just outright pulled it out your ass because Windows 10 marketshare is alone at 26%, Windows 7 at 48%, and then Windows 8 at 9%, XP at 7%. So 64% of the OS market was vulnerable back in March before the exploit was in the wild when Microsoft released a patch. This was patched then, leaving 16% vulnerable with no patch options leaving 84% of the OS market safe from this exploit as of March this year if IT admins did their job, of which 74% of that share was Microsoft OS'.
Oh, and um, Windows XP came out in 2001, so no, they weren't convincing anyone to install it in the 90s. Really, let's be honest, what you were actually saying was "I'm an open source zealot, and you said something that gives Microsoft some kind of defence so I'm going to unthinkingly pounce on you!" wasn't it? because the first half of your argument agreed with me despite being written in a tone of disagreement, and the second part is just drivel that bitches at Microsoft for the sake of bitching at Microsoft regardless of rationality.
I'm not really sure what it would achieve given that this attack was dependent on old versions of Windows, and people being dumb.
A new version of Windows will fix neither of these things given that installing the latest version would've already prevented it.
"There was no ad hominem attack. The poster I replied claimed something to be a fact â" I demonstrated, that it was not."
Incorrect, you said:
"headed by one Dr. Blumenthal [wikipedia.org], who has "chief health advisor to the Dukakis campaign" on his resume."
"The CIA report you cited showed people in other countries living longer on average. That's not, what was claimed. DogDude claimed, Europeans have better health, he said â" not live longer. And, no, the two are not quite the same..."
Incorrect, you said:
"Do you have statistics for longevity â" and differences in longevity â" among Europeans? I'm listening..."
"You are bringing up this "laughing at me" for the second time... I dread to learn any more about the emotional knot boiling inside your head, if you need to seek vindication from imaginary sympathizers in the imaginary audience..."
Yeah, so about those 6+ troll mods you got on this topic.
I get it, you said something stupid, someone corrected you, it pissed you off, you got downmodded, it pissed you off more, you got more people telling you your wrong, it pissed you off even more. Pissed off people don't back down easily - that's fine, but you ain't fooling me. It's quite obvious you made a tit of yourself, not by being wrong, but by refusing to admit you were wrong, and now you're flapping about still trying to somehow correct what you perceive as a grave injustice by trying to reframe the conversation in your favour even though Slashdot doesn't have an edit button, so you can't actually do that.
I learnt long ago, that when you're wrong, it's easier to either just duck out or admit you were wrong. Trying to turn the argument when you've already long lost it is a foolish proposition. I'd have thought your UID was low enough to have learnt this by now, but I guess not. Simply saying "Sorry, looks like I was wrong - you're right, it appears Europeans do have greater longevity on average" would have saved you so much more time, and avoided you so much more frustration. Be a better person - don't believe you have to get everything right, everyone gets stuff wrong sometimes, no need to be embarrassed about it. Even if someone is a dick about it and says "Hah you were wrong!" so fucking what? It's not like they're someone you have to give the slightest shit about are they?
I recently made this mistake, of booking a flight to Canada via Iceland.
It all sounds very good, until you realise it's a trap. Come via Iceland they said, get more luggage and cheaper flights they said.
£700 for 2 fucking nights in a hotel they didn't say. Stopping over Iceland would be good if it wasn't for the fact Iceland is a phenomenal rip off in part because they were allowed to fix their currency for years when it should realistically have been allowed to depreciate as a result of their defacto self-imposed bankruptcy.
Iceland is a great option if you're happy to pay way over the top for everything and lose far more in accommodation, food, travel, and activity costs, than you'd ever save on the cheap airline.
It's not that Iceland isn't nice, it's not that I can't afford it, it's that cost/benefit ratio doesn't compute - if I'm going to spend £1500 on accommodation, food, and some activities en-route to North America then I'd rather buy 7 days in the Bahamas with that money, than 3 days in Iceland.
The only reason we went with it is because we really wanted to dive Silfra, I'd never do it again though as whilst good, it's not remotely good enough relative to the cost.
I don't need to do anything to "win" the argument - I already did that when I provided more sources and data, and explained why your ad hominem attack is meaningless. That ship has sailed - no matter how much you flap about now that argument is already long lost for you.
After that it's really just about trolling you to try and make you wake up from your ignorance. I'm not going to have any luck though am I, let's be honest, so have fun being wrong on the internet whilst everyone laughs at you.
Okay - I didn't realise you were a god botherer type who believes in the unprovable. Had I known that I'd have not wasted my time. Keep believing what you want to believe, it has no relevance to actual scientific discussion though and doesn't change the fact you're completely wrong.
That was a hell of a lot of words to say "I'm wrong, but I wont admit it".
You should probably just stop digging, everyone's laughing at you.
I think you're conflating separate issues, a definition of consciousness is quite different to where the universe physically supports it - the latter is obviously true, because we're conscious, and if we're conscious, then so could machines be because there's nothing magical about us, we just don't have sufficiently advanced technology to implement it yet.
"At this time, it is entirely unclear whether "thinking machines" are even possible in this universe."
Um, what do you think we as humans are? magic?
One things that may make it illegal would be evading any tax owed on it in your particular jurisdiction.
Another possibility is depending on your role, and depending on what you're making them pay for, it could fall under anti-bribery laws. So for example, if a user files for access to sensitive data on a shared drive and comes and pesters you to hurry up and give them access, paying into your money box to do so, and you do this, and it turns out they shouldn't have had access, then there's a reasonable chance this could be seen as you demanding a bribe.
But if you fall foul of neither of those things I don't see why it would be illegal.
"You had me disable AdBlock for this? It is not by Forbes â" they simply cite a survey by Commonwealth Fund â" an Illiberal organization currently headed by one Dr. Blumenthal, who has "chief health advisor to the Dukakis campaign" on his resume.
Seriously?"
Ad hominem is a logical fallacy for precisely this reason - because you don't like the fact that statistics show that developed European countries all do better than the US in terms of life expectancy you're instead attacking the person who did the study.
But that's not how statistics work - the numbers don't lie, take it from this guy, take it from any other, attacking this individual doesn't change the fact that life expectancy in Europe was higher.
I actually followed this thread because I was genuinely intrigued to see where you were going to take the life expectancy argument (because I was already aware it was higher in most European countries, and that you were hence on a losing bet by trying to make that argument). I'm disappointed to see that you've simply decided to deny reality though rather than accept the fact that you were wrong. That doesn't bode well for you as a human being.
What about the CIA?
https://www.cia.gov/library/pu...
Or are they too liberal for you too?
You can't ask someone not to hate you when you're being willfully ignorant, because that highlights you as someone that isn't willing to learn and that's more interested in lying to themselves than having an adult conversation where things like facts actually matter.
Yes, I remember this project when Windows 2000 was released. Given it's had nearly 20 years to catch up and is still nowhere near I don't see why it would suddenly manage to do so now.
Honestly, with Microsoft's trajectory towards more open source, I think Windows will go open source before this becomes a viable Windows replacement. We'll probably find out in another decade.
Did you ever stop to think that's because maybe, no matter how much you may wish to moan about everything, this is as good as it gets?
I know, I know, you want to listen to the fascist who tells you she can solve all the worlds ills if we just blame it on those guys.
Yeah, Europe tried that, didn't work well, turns out it was actually much worse than what everyone is sticking to instead. Rather than assume everyone is an ignorant drone and you're the only enlightened person on the planet, maybe you should consider that in fact there's a good reason that people vote for the status quo that's made them the 5th richest nation in the world despite having a fraction of the world's population and resources to achieve that success?
Yes, I know, it's all terrible, everything's awful with the liberal West, it's terrible, sure, great, only it's just less terrible than all the alternatives. Even in the modern era you only have to look at Putin's Russia to see how awful the autocratic miserable hate filled blame gaming alternative is. I don't know about you but I'd much rather be at the bottom of the wealth ladder in somewhere like France, than at the bottom of the wealth ladder in Russia. That's why people rejected Le Pen, because no matter how bad things may appear to be in somewhere like France, no matter how much you may wish to whine about, no matter where on the wealth ladder you sit, you're still better off, and more free, than you would be under the alternative that was on offer.
Dunno, I'm in my mid-30s and whilst I admittedly missed the very early era of gaming, I had more than enough time as a kid on C64, Spectrum, NES, Master System, Atari ST, Amiga, and so forth. I don't pretend to be old enough to remember the earliest days of gaming, but I'm old enough at least to have seen the evolution of some key genres (i.e. FPS, MMOs, Sim games, etc.)
I'd say this is more like the sort of list I'd expect from someone in their mid to late 20s that missed the 90s.
"a real time "scorched earth" type game that has nothing to do with the main game..."
I'm glad I'm not the only one that remembers that, I remember two player sharing a keyboard I think having way more fun with that than the main game. I'm glad someone else remembers it so that I can be sure it wasn't just a figment of my imagination :)
Your post deserves more upvotes, it was a barrage of happy nostalgia that made me want to curl up in a ball, escape this century and decade, and go back in time.
Yeah, I'm not overly taken by this list. It feels like a list by someone who only really started gaming in the 00s, but is aware of a handful of the most popular 80s/90s names rather than someone who actually watched gaming evolve over the ages across it's key points.
Whilst I've always played things like the Halo games, I'm not overly taken by some of the candidates they're putting forward. I feel like Quake was far more important than Halo, ushering in the era of true 3D, the starting point for internet based online gaming and so forth. It was also the first FPS that explicitly designed for user extensibility from the outset (Quake C anyone?).
World of Warcraft? High userbase sure, but hardly as influential or groundbreaking as EverQuest and Ultima Online. It was ultimately just a clone of stuff that had come before it such as EverQuest, Dark Age of Camelot and such with half the features of those MMOs missing, but with Blizzard's IP slapped on. I don't agree that highest popularity means most significant impact on gaming in part because the market is growing so more recent IPs will always sell better, but that doesn't make them more worthy for special recognition.
The Sims, okay, a pretty successful franchise, and definitely fairly novel, I think it deserves something, but shouldn't SimCity come first? SimCity and SimCity 2000 not only stole many years of people's lives, but even made it's way into classrooms as a teaching tool, and was used for some high level city planning. It's still being cloned to this day, games like Cities: Skylines owe the bulk of their design to SimCity and SimCity 2000, and it was the birth point of Sim Everything Else - from Sim Tower, to Sim Ant.
Agree, I think the fact a modern bacteria has done this is merely evidence that there are deadly modern bacteria out there.
This doesn't state anything about long dormant deadly diseases wiping us out, on the contrary, it's unlikely that a particularly ancient disease would bare much threat to modern humans - the odds are our bodies have been fighting it's descendants off for the last few thousand or however many years, and vast amounts of the genomes of modern living things that are currently inactive are the results of that. So what if grandad deadly disease comes back from 10,000 years ago? Our bodies most likely know how to kill him and about 9,000 years worth of his descendants too.
Could something moderately more recent like the bubonic plague arise from ice? Possibly, if it's resilient enough, but it's not like we haven't become medically advanced enough to deal with it.
It's like saying an army from 10,000 years ago is going to come out of the ice and kill us all, um, yeah, good luck cavemen getting past our AR15s, predator drones, and M1 Abrams. If you're lucky you'll be put in a zoo or lab as a curiosity, if you're not so lucky we'll just eradicate you altogether. The fact is, if it's evolved in the past to infect humans, then humanity already has a record of it the section of our genome marked "historical", if it hasn't evolved in the past to infect humans, then why assume it will now when it's been out of the genetic arms race for thousands of years?
Probably the first myth to dispel is that anthrax is some magical thing conjured up by governments for biological warfare. It's not, it's a naturally occurring bacteria, most common in warmer climates of Southern Europe and Africa, but also present in North America too. It's typically carried by animals, both through contact, and through ingestion (which in turn allows it to be transmitted from prey, to predator), and of the roughly couple of thousand natural cases of human infection that occur across the world every year, many are in people working in industries such as tanning - i.e. working with infected animal hides.
Part the reason this natural bacteria was chosen for weaponisation was precisely it's resilience, and it's ease of infection, coupled with it's relatively high fatality rate. It shouldn't be surprising therefore that an animal carcass frozen in ice could still infect someone given it's properties of resilience, infection, and the fact that animal carcasses are exactly where you would most likely encounter it in the first place.
Given this, I'm intrigued to know if you still think it's ridiculous, and if so, why?