The problem here is that the Australian government KNOWS that people responding "Jedi" are either joking, or are complete losers. I've met so-called "Jedi"'s and they are among the most pathetic excuses for human beings I've ever met.
But, I have a very low tolerance for all forms of cosplay.
This is exactly it. End of story. Everyone can go home now.
I used to work for a credit union and we paid an insane amount of money for the specialized program that ran our business. What we got for that money was 24/7 x 365 tech support (and yes, I did call them once at 11:30 pm on Christmas day without fail. For anything related to their product. Even when my supervisor screwed up and did a "rm -R *" at the root directory and whiped the system clean.
In retrospect, we got a great deal.
When your business relies on one specialized piece of software, you pay what they are asking.
While many people were disappointed with HALO (and some for the mere fact that it came out only on XBox), I enjoyed the hell out of it. But I wasn't paying any attention to the game at all and only noticed it in the game press about a week before i bought my XBox.
I don't think that I will be disappointed with DOOM 3. Mostly because I am primarily a single-player game player, and I am jazzed that DOOM 3 will be focussing on the SP aspect.
I don't throw away computer parts, unless they are truley broken. I have a local "food chain" of computer equipment. Replaced parts from my computers are recycled into my lesser boxen until I hit the end of that line. Then they go to a good friend of mine who uses them to upgrade his equipment. He uses his old equipment to rebuild and upgrade other people's computers so they have something to do basic word processing on, or surf the Net.
There is a huge, but low-margin, market for older, functional computers.
I also reduce waste by only replacing what needs replacing. I've had the same keyboard for twelve years now (old IBM "iron surfboard") and I have no intention of replacing it. I've also broken my habbit of regular upgrades. Now I only upgrade when I have a demonstrated need. Hell, my LAN server is an old Pentium 233 and I'm not planning to replace it, ever.
You call this mess of duplicated effort an intellegent design? Why make ten animals to do a rabbit's job? Why make human eyes as badly as they are? Hell, and octopus has better designed eyes than we do! The world around us shows no indiication whatsoever than anything itellegent designed it. None.
I don't think I undertsand everything. I know I don't. But I also know that we, as a species, can know and understand everything. My brain is too small to hold the entire cosmos within the confines of my skull. But we are not limited to the confines of any individual's ability to learn and understand. We have language. Language gives us the ability to share information. That makes the collective whole much more powerful than the sum of its parts.
To simplisticly say that species originate in the same way that varieties of breeds withing species originate only over more time is simply false and provably so.
Okay. Prove it. You didn't with your post.
What you fail to take into consideration, or you are blatantly ignoring, is that you don't need the information of a yet unknown species to create it. An Eohippus does not need the genetic information to create a modern horse, even though it is a direct ancestor. Why? Because the information needed to make the horse is a modification of the information needed to make an Eohippus.
The gene pool is not static, nor is it limited to pre-existing information. Information is constantly being added to any gene pool. All mutations that survive long enough to reproduce increase the information in a gene pool.
Living creatures are not like Lego bricks. They are not limited to building only those things that come in the box.
Your basic problem is that you have trouble dealing with scales of probability. Because it takes a lot of successful mutations, and most mutations are lethal, you assume that it is not possible, or at least very unlikely, that mutations could add enough information to a gene pool to cause a new species to arise from another. Given the time scales involved, all you need is any non-zero probablity for it to work. Sure, he may need to wait millions, or even hundreds of millions, of years for that chain to get long enough, but guess what? It did. An Eohippus gave rise to a modern horse. He made it across the continent.
Evolution has nothing to do with the Big Bang Theory. Nothing. One is an attempt to describe the origins of the universe, and the other is a description of the adaptation of life. They are not comingled.
Your argument against macro evolution is flawed at a very basic level. Information retention is not needed for evolution. The only information needed is that which allows for the creation oif the current species. A species within a small gene pool does not need the information needed to produce any of it's ancestors or relations, only itself.
And information is always being added to the gene pool by mutations. No gene pool is static. If a mutation occures that is helpful in some way it gets passed on to the next generation and the information in the gene pool is changed.
If, over time, or in reaction to dramatic changes in the local environment, the information in the gene pool has changed enough, the resulting species might not be anything like what it used to be.
I love people who argue against facts with huge odds against. It doesn't matter how small the chances are that life was created out of non-living matter. It doesn't matter how small the chances are that life would then change and adapt and slowly give rise to the diversity of flora and fauna we see around us.
Our brains are too tiny to comprehend the universe
I would disagree with you. We can understand anything we want to. That does not mean that we have all the data to get a complete picture yet, or at all, nor does it mean that we will like the answers we get when and if we do.
If you beleive that a "greater being" created everything, we do know why he/she/it did it. It says why in the Bible (or whatever religious text you sunscribe to).
I find it deeply insulting when people say that we're not smart enough to understand the world around us. It ranks right up there with people who claim that space aliens built the great pyramids of ancient Egypt.
What? Okay, forst you have to find out which P2P system is still in use, because the one you used last week got shut down or everyione moved on. Then you've got to get rid of all the damned spyware and other cruft the stupid thing has planted in your system. Then you've got to find the song you want, and God help you if it's hosted on some twit on the other end of a 28.8 dailup with 200 concurrent downloaders. Then you've got to hope that what you downloaded is what you wanted and not two and a ha;f minutes of a porno movie soundtrack!
That's easier than going to the store and slapping down some cash for a CD that has what it says it has?
The reason you don't get it is because your basic assumption is wrong. Not "everyone and their dog" downloads music. Sure, a lot of college kids do (and they swapped cassette tapes before Napster came along), but most people do not.
CD sales are fown for three basic reaons: 1: Most newer music is crap. 2: CD prices are too high. 3: The US ecomony is in the shithole.
Items two and three would decrease CD sales even if number one was not true.
And that, Sir or Madam, is the crux of the bisquit: I don't want it. I go to the local record store every week as part of my normal shopping routine. I have bought three CDs in the last four months. Each was an album over ten years old (one was 20), and they were all on sale for $10.00 or less.
Why? Because I'm picky and almost all new music is crap, IMO. Now, I don't download music, save for that which has been released by the artist. I probably represent far more disafected CD purchasers that most Napsterites do. I have a CD collection that has at least 500 CDs, spanning over 14 years of CD purchases. It has not grown much in the last few years.
we've had 24 bit color labeled as 32 bit for quite some time.
Except that the definition of 32 bit color is 24 bits of actual color and 8 bits of alpha channel, and 32 bit color devices adhere to this definition.
The basic problem here is that Palm was dishonest and is not trying to tapdance around the truth.
Re:You'll hate me for saying this but...
on
Sen To, X-Men 2
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· Score: 1
No, I'll laugh at you for buying a movie you've never seen. Ever hear of renting? I always rent a movie first. If I really like it, then I buy it.
You don't have kids, do you?
on
CD Copy Stopper
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· Score: 1
If you did, you'd know better. The perfect solution would be that the kids know better. But they don't. That's a simple fact of life. So you use the solution that actually works.
Owners of the current copyrights should have the exclusive right to distribute for charge.
By your logic I can give away copyrighted material just as long as I do not financially benefit from it?
I'm stunned. Really. I don't really know what to say. I don't know whether to question your sanity or your intelegence.
What's the point of making any work for sale if anyone can give it away for free? All you end up doing is selling one copy before free copies are all over the Internet. Where the hell is your incentive to put in the time, energy, and money it takes to produce music or movies? How the hell can you expect enough of a return on investment to not have to keep a day job just so you can make content for freeloaders?
Fair Use gives you the right to make copies for your own personal use. ie: you can copy a CD you purchased and put MP3s of those songs in your computer or MP3 player to listen to. But it does not give you the right to share those files with everyone on the planet just because you are not making any money. It is just this kind of abuse of the Fair Use clause that is causing these people to try and get the clause killed!
I don't want a "platform", that's what my OS is for. I want a web browser. I don't want a bunch of useless shit clogging up what shiould be a small and nimble program. I don't want email or news on my broswer, I've got programs that were DESIGNED for those jobs and do them much better than any bolted on afterthought I've seen on browsers.
This, IMHO, is what screwed Netscape into the ground - the idiotic desire to not be just a wen broswer, but to be a platform for accessing everything on the Net. It turned Netscape 3.x, a lithe and nimble program, and turned it into the bloated, slow, anf buggy monster that was Netscape 4.x.
I got the diamond ofr my wife's ring from my mom. My wife (fiance, at the time) knew it and didn't mind. She's now of the mindset that she does not ever want another diamond due to the issues brought up and that's fine with me.
At no time did this article ever claim that John Carmack invented BSPs or ray-tracing. He just used them in a gaming environment, which was pretty groundbreaking for games.
Carmack's skill is, and always has been, at adapting graphics display technologies to games. He hasn't invented most of teh techniques and technologies he's used in his engines. What he has done is manage to get those techniques and technologies to work effectively within the cionstraints of a gaming environment. There are a ton of rendering engines out there that kick anything John Carmack has ever done right into the dirt. But they can't render scenes fast enough to work in a gaming environment.
Yes, the Amiga had smooth scrolling before anyone thought to do it on the PC. It took Carmack to do it simply because he was the first to do it. It wasn't all that hard, but someone had to do it first on the PC.
The important point that many people seem to be missing is the historical aspects of teh IBM PC. While the Amiga was developed with games and multimedia (and developed after the PC, I might add), the IBM PC was designed first as a smart 3270 terminal with the ability to run local programs, and then later slightly retooled to be a "business copmputer". The original PC came with a text-only dsiplay adapter and no ability to play anything but the most primitive of sounds. This was all done very much on purpose. IBM did not want the PC to be persieved as a game box, a toy. They wanted it to be seen as a work machine, an office computer to get work done on.
IBM didn't even develope the first graphics adapter for the PC, that was a small company called Hercules. Only after the runaway success of the Hercules card did IBM bother to develope the (weak and craptastic) CGA desplay.
IBM didn't put sound or music into the PC, either. That was done by Adlib, Creative Labs and Advanced Gravis.
Also of importance is the fact that the Amiga; the Atari ST, 400, 800, etc; the C64, Apple 2, etc... is that these system all shipped with fixed graphics adapters: an Amiga programmer knew that he had a display of XxY pixels and 4096 colors to play with, or the C64 programmer knew what his display was able to doi. In the PC wordld you had MDA, CGA, EGA, and VGA. Each generation of adapter brough new abilities to the PC and programmers had to decide which minimum technology level they were going to require.
So Carmak was the first to do smooth side scrolling on the PC? Someone had to be first. If nor John Carmack, it could have been Roberta Williams.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that the Australian government KNOWS that people responding "Jedi" are either joking, or are complete losers. I've met so-called "Jedi"'s and they are among the most pathetic excuses for human beings I've ever met.
But, I have a very low tolerance for all forms of cosplay.
This is exactly it. End of story. Everyone can go home now.
I used to work for a credit union and we paid an insane amount of money for the specialized program that ran our business. What we got for that money was 24/7 x 365 tech support (and yes, I did call them once at 11:30 pm on Christmas day without fail. For anything related to their product. Even when my supervisor screwed up and did a "rm -R *" at the root directory and whiped the system clean.
In retrospect, we got a great deal.
When your business relies on one specialized piece of software, you pay what they are asking.
Very true. We've seen this happen many times.
While many people were disappointed with HALO (and some for the mere fact that it came out only on XBox), I enjoyed the hell out of it. But I wasn't paying any attention to the game at all and only noticed it in the game press about a week before i bought my XBox.
I don't think that I will be disappointed with DOOM 3. Mostly because I am primarily a single-player game player, and I am jazzed that DOOM 3 will be focussing on the SP aspect.
I don't throw away computer parts, unless they are truley broken. I have a local "food chain" of computer equipment. Replaced parts from my computers are recycled into my lesser boxen until I hit the end of that line. Then they go to a good friend of mine who uses them to upgrade his equipment. He uses his old equipment to rebuild and upgrade other people's computers so they have something to do basic word processing on, or surf the Net.
There is a huge, but low-margin, market for older, functional computers.
I also reduce waste by only replacing what needs replacing. I've had the same keyboard for twelve years now (old IBM "iron surfboard") and I have no intention of replacing it. I've also broken my habbit of regular upgrades. Now I only upgrade when I have a demonstrated need. Hell, my LAN server is an old Pentium 233 and I'm not planning to replace it, ever.
You call this mess of duplicated effort an intellegent design? Why make ten animals to do a rabbit's job? Why make human eyes as badly as they are? Hell, and octopus has better designed eyes than we do! The world around us shows no indiication whatsoever than anything itellegent designed it. None.
This begs the question of why some people prefer a dishonest God. I'd rather live in an uncaring universe than with a God that lies to me.
Okay. Prove it. You didn't with your post.
What you fail to take into consideration, or you are blatantly ignoring, is that you don't need the information of a yet unknown species to create it. An Eohippus does not need the genetic information to create a modern horse, even though it is a direct ancestor. Why? Because the information needed to make the horse is a modification of the information needed to make an Eohippus.
The gene pool is not static, nor is it limited to pre-existing information. Information is constantly being added to any gene pool. All mutations that survive long enough to reproduce increase the information in a gene pool.
Living creatures are not like Lego bricks. They are not limited to building only those things that come in the box.
Your basic problem is that you have trouble dealing with scales of probability. Because it takes a lot of successful mutations, and most mutations are lethal, you assume that it is not possible, or at least very unlikely, that mutations could add enough information to a gene pool to cause a new species to arise from another. Given the time scales involved, all you need is any non-zero probablity for it to work. Sure, he may need to wait millions, or even hundreds of millions, of years for that chain to get long enough, but guess what? It did. An Eohippus gave rise to a modern horse. He made it across the continent.
Evolution has nothing to do with the Big Bang Theory. Nothing. One is an attempt to describe the origins of the universe, and the other is a description of the adaptation of life. They are not comingled.
Your argument against macro evolution is flawed at a very basic level. Information retention is not needed for evolution. The only information needed is that which allows for the creation oif the current species. A species within a small gene pool does not need the information needed to produce any of it's ancestors or relations, only itself.
And information is always being added to the gene pool by mutations. No gene pool is static. If a mutation occures that is helpful in some way it gets passed on to the next generation and the information in the gene pool is changed.
If, over time, or in reaction to dramatic changes in the local environment, the information in the gene pool has changed enough, the resulting species might not be anything like what it used to be.
I love people who argue against facts with huge odds against. It doesn't matter how small the chances are that life was created out of non-living matter. It doesn't matter how small the chances are that life would then change and adapt and slowly give rise to the diversity of flora and fauna we see around us.
The fact is that it happened.
I would disagree with you. We can understand anything we want to. That does not mean that we have all the data to get a complete picture yet, or at all, nor does it mean that we will like the answers we get when and if we do.
If you beleive that a "greater being" created everything, we do know why he/she/it did it. It says why in the Bible (or whatever religious text you sunscribe to).
I find it deeply insulting when people say that we're not smart enough to understand the world around us. It ranks right up there with people who claim that space aliens built the great pyramids of ancient Egypt.
What? Okay, forst you have to find out which P2P system is still in use, because the one you used last week got shut down or everyione moved on. Then you've got to get rid of all the damned spyware and other cruft the stupid thing has planted in your system. Then you've got to find the song you want, and God help you if it's hosted on some twit on the other end of a 28.8 dailup with 200 concurrent downloaders. Then you've got to hope that what you downloaded is what you wanted and not two and a ha;f minutes of a porno movie soundtrack!
That's easier than going to the store and slapping down some cash for a CD that has what it says it has?
Um, okay, Beavis.
The reason you don't get it is because your basic assumption is wrong. Not "everyone and their dog" downloads music. Sure, a lot of college kids do (and they swapped cassette tapes before Napster came along), but most people do not.
CD sales are fown for three basic reaons:
1: Most newer music is crap.
2: CD prices are too high.
3: The US ecomony is in the shithole.
Items two and three would decrease CD sales even if number one was not true.
And that, Sir or Madam, is the crux of the bisquit: I don't want it. I go to the local record store every week as part of my normal shopping routine. I have bought three CDs in the last four months. Each was an album over ten years old (one was 20), and they were all on sale for $10.00 or less.
Why? Because I'm picky and almost all new music is crap, IMO. Now, I don't download music, save for that which has been released by the artist. I probably represent far more disafected CD purchasers that most Napsterites do. I have a CD collection that has at least 500 CDs, spanning over 14 years of CD purchases. It has not grown much in the last few years.
Except that the definition of 32 bit color is 24 bits of actual color and 8 bits of alpha channel, and 32 bit color devices adhere to this definition.
The basic problem here is that Palm was dishonest and is not trying to tapdance around the truth.
No, I'll laugh at you for buying a movie you've never seen. Ever hear of renting? I always rent a movie first. If I really like it, then I buy it.
If you did, you'd know better. The perfect solution would be that the kids know better. But they don't. That's a simple fact of life. So you use the solution that actually works.
I want to be cremated and have my ashes mixed into the plastic that will be made into women's bicycle seats.
The body os nothing more than a sack of meat. It's the living person that is important, not the rotting flesh left over after they die.
Even if the body is a temple, what's the difference between having it turned to diamonds or getting eaten by worms after the soul has left it?
By your logic I can give away copyrighted material just as long as I do not financially benefit from it?
I'm stunned. Really. I don't really know what to say. I don't know whether to question your sanity or your intelegence.
What's the point of making any work for sale if anyone can give it away for free? All you end up doing is selling one copy before free copies are all over the Internet. Where the hell is your incentive to put in the time, energy, and money it takes to produce music or movies? How the hell can you expect enough of a return on investment to not have to keep a day job just so you can make content for freeloaders?
Fair Use gives you the right to make copies for your own personal use. ie: you can copy a CD you purchased and put MP3s of those songs in your computer or MP3 player to listen to. But it does not give you the right to share those files with everyone on the planet just because you are not making any money. It is just this kind of abuse of the Fair Use clause that is causing these people to try and get the clause killed!
You mean the web developer guy who DOES NOT WORK FOR OPERA?
Whatever, Beavis.
I don't want a "platform", that's what my OS is for. I want a web browser. I don't want a bunch of useless shit clogging up what shiould be a small and nimble program. I don't want email or news on my broswer, I've got programs that were DESIGNED for those jobs and do them much better than any bolted on afterthought I've seen on browsers.
This, IMHO, is what screwed Netscape into the ground - the idiotic desire to not be just a wen broswer, but to be a platform for accessing everything on the Net. It turned Netscape 3.x, a lithe and nimble program, and turned it into the bloated, slow, anf buggy monster that was Netscape 4.x.
If what you want is a "platform", use AOL.
I got the diamond ofr my wife's ring from my mom. My wife (fiance, at the time) knew it and didn't mind. She's now of the mindset that she does not ever want another diamond due to the issues brought up and that's fine with me.
At no time did this article ever claim that John Carmack invented BSPs or ray-tracing. He just used them in a gaming environment, which was pretty groundbreaking for games.
Carmack's skill is, and always has been, at adapting graphics display technologies to games. He hasn't invented most of teh techniques and technologies he's used in his engines. What he has done is manage to get those techniques and technologies to work effectively within the cionstraints of a gaming environment. There are a ton of rendering engines out there that kick anything John Carmack has ever done right into the dirt. But they can't render scenes fast enough to work in a gaming environment.
*SIGH*.
Yes, the Amiga had smooth scrolling before anyone thought to do it on the PC. It took Carmack to do it simply because he was the first to do it. It wasn't all that hard, but someone had to do it first on the PC.
The important point that many people seem to be missing is the historical aspects of teh IBM PC. While the Amiga was developed with games and multimedia (and developed after the PC, I might add), the IBM PC was designed first as a smart 3270 terminal with the ability to run local programs, and then later slightly retooled to be a "business copmputer". The original PC came with a text-only dsiplay adapter and no ability to play anything but the most primitive of sounds. This was all done very much on purpose. IBM did not want the PC to be persieved as a game box, a toy. They wanted it to be seen as a work machine, an office computer to get work done on.
IBM didn't even develope the first graphics adapter for the PC, that was a small company called Hercules. Only after the runaway success of the Hercules card did IBM bother to develope the (weak and craptastic) CGA desplay.
IBM didn't put sound or music into the PC, either. That was done by Adlib, Creative Labs and Advanced Gravis.
Also of importance is the fact that the Amiga; the Atari ST, 400, 800, etc; the C64, Apple 2, etc... is that these system all shipped with fixed graphics adapters: an Amiga programmer knew that he had a display of XxY pixels and 4096 colors to play with, or the C64 programmer knew what his display was able to doi. In the PC wordld you had MDA, CGA, EGA, and VGA. Each generation of adapter brough new abilities to the PC and programmers had to decide which minimum technology level they were going to require.
So Carmak was the first to do smooth side scrolling on the PC? Someone had to be first. If nor John Carmack, it could have been Roberta Williams.