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Comment: Re:Developers are not going to make games for free (Score 1) 212

by wed128 (#46409113) Attached to: PC Game Prices &mdash; Valve Starts the Race To Zero

It's not about helping valve out, it's about the market forcing prices to be low. it's capitalism working. The games will cost what they have to, and not more (this is the idea anyway)

The fear is that the presence of free games will cause an overall drop in quality; mobile gaming is used as evidence of this.

Comment: Re:Calculus should not be an elective (Score 1) 313

by wed128 (#46366873) Attached to: Should programming be a required curriculum in public schools?

In any university-track school curriculum, calculus is a requirement, not an elective.

Yea, but the problems are the following:
1) except for engineering and math students, very few students will *take* higher math classes in college
2) the first two weeks of college calculus covered more then the entire year of high-school calculus. It's slowed down so people who want to go to college, but don't want to take math, can keep up.
3) learning abstract logic through programming in an expressive language like python or ruby (or perhaps some domain-specific language) is much more applicable to day-to-day life then calculus, which is only really used by engineers and scientists. Even math-heavy jobs like those in the accounting and finance fields don't use much calculus, do they?


Github Rolls Out New Text Editor Atom 82

Posted by Unknown Lamer

Comment: Just wait... (Score 2) 304

by prisoner-of-enigma (#46329243) Attached to: Oklahoma Schools Required To Teach Students Personal Finance

I'm sure someone will stand up shortly and complain that this is somehow racist, sexist, or otherwise deleterious to the well-being of the pupils being schooled. Can't have kids learning about how money is made, handled, taxed, and invested. That would interfere with them being good little minions who simply do what they're told by their betters...i.e. those in government power.

Comment: Re:Cloud formation albedo (Score 1, Flamebait) 378

by prisoner-of-enigma (#46282095) Attached to: Darker Arctic Boosting Global Warming

The wait until the car drives off the cliff before thinking about putting on the brakes theorem .

See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought. If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives. If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence. Thus far, you have *some* evidence, but that does not equate to proof.

First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.

Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.

Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?

These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.

Comment: Re:Cloud formation albedo (Score 5, Insightful) 378

by prisoner-of-enigma (#46281351) Attached to: Darker Arctic Boosting Global Warming

98% of all marine species went extinct during the Great Dying due to high levels of C02 turning the ocean acidic.

The exact causes of the Permian–Triassic extinction event you reference are not known. High CO2 are but one hypothesis, alongside many others, all of which have at least some supporting evidence. CO2 may be the favorite whipping boy these days but it is a blatant falsification on your part to claim CO2 was the sole driver of this particular extinction event. CO2 may have been the sole cause. It may have been a contributing cause. Or, in the case of something like a catastrophic impact, it may have had *absolutely nothing* to do with the event. I don't know the answer, but you most certainly don't either.

The problem with your sig and issues such as this is that your wrong decisions have a negative effect on everyone else, you rights are not infinite, they end when they negate the rights of others.

And your wrong decisions don't have similar impacts were they to be implemented as national policy? Of course they do! But you're naively assuming you're the only "right" person in this discussion. You've made up your mind and that's the end of it, despite plenty of evidence to show that there just *might* be other climate factors out there that could be just as -- or perhaps even more than -- contributory to what's going on with the climate. It's that kind of dogmatism that marks you as a zealot, and subsequently makes logical people tune you out.

Comment: Re:Cloud formation albedo (Score 1) 378

by prisoner-of-enigma (#46281261) Attached to: Darker Arctic Boosting Global Warming

We care because civilization as we know it is really shockingly dependent on climatic patterns like rainfall and seasonal temperature and parameters like sea level being what they are.

All of these factors (rainfall, temp, sea levels) have changed all on their own without human input over the course of this planet's history. They will continue to change, with or without our input. To expect things to stay the way they are just because we happened to evolve at this particular point in history is kind of silly. The climate *will* change. *We* must adapt.

Comment: Cloud formation albedo (Score 3, Interesting) 378

by prisoner-of-enigma (#46280675) Attached to: Darker Arctic Boosting Global Warming

And increased heat in the oceans can (and likely will) lead to increased cloud formation, which will alter the planet's albedo in the opposite direction. How much and how soon? Nobody knows. But the planet has been both warmer and cooler than it is now during it's long history. Each time it's damped out cycles of extreme warming and extreme cooling all by itself.

Comment: I'm sure he's quivering in his boots... (Score 2) 325

by prisoner-of-enigma (#46276241) Attached to: N. Korea Could Face Prosecution For 'Crimes Against Humanity'

I'm sure Kim Jong-un is just quivering in his boots at this "strongly worded condemnation" by the UN. After all, the UN has such a strong record of following up such condemnations with action...

What's pathetic about this is such UN declarations just serve to reinforce what an absolute joke the whole organization is. The UN has no power whatsoever to do anything to North Korea and Dear Leader knows this.

Comment: Better way to spend money... (Score 1) 134

Here's an idea: instead of spending all this money now to launch probes from Earth, why not spend it instead on building a base with launch infrastructure on the Moon? No atmosphere, no environment to worry about, lesser gravity well...the list of advantages is quite large. The only disadvantage is it would take a while to get going. But the same could be said for the space industry 50 years ago. So we could spend a lot of money on a lunar base now and get huge payoffs later, or keep spending almost as much on Earth-launched probes for the next several decades and advance the human presence in space not one whit.

NASA still hasn't figured this out. The public is not *interested* in these pure science missions, regardless of how beneficial they are to scientists and engineers. The public wants the glory, grandeur, and *adventure* of Apollo. And without public backing, NASA's budget gets whacked again and again and again. NASA needs to come up with things that capture the public's imagination like the glory days of the 1960's. Then they'll get the money and political clout to do big things. I'm sure most American's don't give two damns about a mission to Uranus or Neptune.
