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Macintosh Architecture Poll in General
Post Navel Trauma ^_^
Member # 67
Profile Homepage #26
My problem with the Mighty Mouse is that it treats a right-click with my other finger resting on the left button as a left-click.

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
A present in General
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Member # 67
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1. Your link is broken.
2. Your post is gibberish.

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OS X Native Character Editor in Blades of Exile
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #1
Did you change the delay parameter on WaitNextEvent?

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Macintosh Architecture Poll in General
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Member # 67
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Oh my, the mighty mouse. I think I put up with it for about two days before going back to my previous one.

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Starting stats for a singleton in Blades of Exile
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It's ages since I played, but I think the last time I made a singleton I took Frrrr, gave him 5 points of mage and priest skill and put the rest in strength.

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Sdf errors in Blades of Avernum Editor
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When you have problems with a script, you pretty much always have to post the whole thing, or there's nothing people can go on.

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Alint Error in Blades of Avernum Editor
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Ones BoA gives you might be. Ones alint gives definitely aren't.

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Alint Error in Blades of Avernum Editor
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The "Syntax error" message means there's something wrong at or slightly before the line number it reports. probably a missing semicolon, or incorrect bracket nesting.

It should be able to handle files with spaces in the name, if you put quotes round the filename:
alint -w "I like spaces.txt"

If you put alint.exe into C:\WINDOWS, then it's available anywhere and you don't have to copy it to every scenario folder.

[ Sunday, April 27, 2008 04:29: Message edited by: Khoth ]

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About code source in Blades of Exile
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Resources seem to love to get lost by everything that touches them. I have a copy here: http://khoth.ath.cx/~khoth/Resources.zip

If you're using OS X, I did stuff to get it working, so to avoid duplicating effort you might want to work from it: http://khoth.ath.cx/~khoth/

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Satellite Shootdown in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #21
To be fair to the managers, the verbing of nouns is common in English.

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Scope of Ethics in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #30
I've wondered before about Pareto efficiency in morality. The problem with it, as far as I can see, is that since any action could have consequences that you don't forsee, it's likely that almost any action is Pareto optimal.

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
Scope of Ethics in General
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Member # 67
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Everyone should do what I think is right.

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SimCity: the greatest evil? in General
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Member # 67
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Tullegolar, your mistake is thinking that RPGs are intended to make you think you can take the role of adventurer. Actually, they exist to train people to accept the morality that the adventurers impose on those they interact with. Entire races (such as goblins) are treated as evil and deserving only death at the hands of those who claim that their bloodthirsty treasurehunt puts them on the side of justice.

Of course, it's no better if you aren't a goblin. Innocent townspeople, harshly categorised by "level" and unable to grow, rely for survival on their ability to offer material rewards to the armed thugs who steal and terrorise without remorse or mercy, and who will kill anyone for the slightest chance of gaining something.

That is the world we are being forced to accept by these "games".

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Diversity in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #10
Sounds like you could have made the whole thing a lot less messy by just having
[ ] Minority
[ ] Not

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Bobby Fischer in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #5
He turned up again and went to live in Iceland.

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Hei! in General
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Member # 67
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Hello Scorples, you big fat liar! ::hugs::

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[censored]! in General
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Member # 67
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Well, if you want to discriminate against a group, making a law like that sounds like a good way of doing it.

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
Locking in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #187
quote:
Originally written by Stillness:

[QB]1) Although not seen, it is theoretically possible for natural selection to make increases in complexity.
2) We can’t allow willful agency to be the cause.
3) Natural selection must be responsible for all complexity.


At its heart is this thinking in my experience and estimation of Neo-Darwinism. I want it exposed or I want to be corrected if I’m wrong so we both know what we’re dealing with.
You are indeed wrong. It's more like:
1) There is a lot of similarity among lifeforms. Groups of similar species tend to have similar geographical distribution. Etc, etc.
2) Common ancestry would explain this.
3) Common ancestry, if true, would imply other things, such as the things I brought up earlier.
4) Those things turn out to be the case.
5) Therefore, common ancestry is very likely to be true, and it has predictive power. You get out of it more than you put in.

Note in particular that, contrary to your view of the logic:
1) There is a lot of evidence for it, and it is seen.
2) Arguments for it are positive, based on its explanatory and predictive ability, not based on enumerating and excluding alternatives.

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
Locking in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #184
Stillness, I don't know what you want. You've said that you accept that evolution is true. Presumably you mean on the small scale, just, but we have given explanations for how what you seem to call "complexity" can increase - for example, the middle part of my last post.

So that shows that it's possible. What shows that it's actually true isn't a short logical argument, but many thousands of pieces of evidence and successful predictions, a few of which I posted earlier.

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Locking in General
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I'm not a biologist, but I'll try to put forward some positive evidence for evolution.

First off, fossils. As you said earlier, Darwin commented on the lack of intermediate fossils. Since evolution implies continuous change, it predicts intermediate fossils. It's that sort of testable prediction that puts evolution in science - you can go and dig up more fossils and see whether the seeming lack of intermediates is real or just because few fossils were known. 150 years later, the answer is clear - there are lots of intermediate fossils.

For example, courtesy of wikipedia, known hominin species as of Darwin's time, and every 50 years until now:
1850 1900 1950 2002
Notice that 1850, there are only a few species known, and the fossil evidence isn't really there. However, as time goes by, the number of known intermediates increases, as predicted by evolution, until there is a clear line of intermediates. The same sort of thing is true for other species.

Secondly, there's evidence from DNA. As Thuryl said, one way that complexity can increase is when a copying error results in the duplication of a gene. Once there are two or more copies, mutations in one copy are less likely to hard the carrier, since there's a functional copy left over. These mutations can accumulate over long periods, and after several mutations have taken place on the copy of a gene, it can end up taking on a different function. Of course, mutations leading to viable new genes are rare, so this theory predicts that typical DNA contains many damaged, nonfunctional copies of existing genes. This has also been experimentally verified.

It's 1:30am, so I'll stop after one more thing.

Humans are thought to be closely related to chimpanzees. However, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, whereas chimps have 24. It's unlikely that a complete chromosome could show up in the timeframe available, or that a chromosome could have been lost and still produced something viable. One possibility is that a common ancestor of chimps and humans had 24 pairs, but in the path to humans, two chromosomes got joined together. It so happens that there is a way to tell whether this is the case:

Chromosomes aren't uniform along their length. At each end is a long and highly recognisable sequence of repeating bases, many copies of the sequence TTAGGG. However, one human chromosome has something odd near the middle - a lot of TTAGGGs, followed immediately by a lot of CCCTAAs. (CCCTAA is what appears on the other strand from a TTAGGG). This is very clear evidence that a human chromosome is formed from the joining of two existing chromosomes, as predicted by evolution and not by anything else.

There are a lot more things like that. And note that these examples aren't about what might be, or picking holes in other theories, but are successful predictions, and explanations of things that otherwise make no sense.

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
Locking in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #161
It would be easier to follow your arguments if you distinguished between definitions, assumptions, facts and implications. Anyhow...

quote:
Originally written by Stillness:

1) Living organisms have irreducibly complex structures and systems.
Depending on how you define "irreducibly complex", maybe. But remember that "irreducible complexity" can be created by evolution, using the following method:
1. Add a part.
2. Make it necessary.
quote:
2) Irreducibly complex structures and systems are only observed to be made by a purposeful agency.
Wrong.
quote:
3) The alternative to purposeful agency is that which occurs in populations of living organisms gradually by means of recombination, mutations, and natural selection.
Likely correct.
quote:
4) Organisms observed over millions of generations (e.g. bacteria) do not develop irreducibly complex systems.
Wrong.
quote:
5) The fossil record does not indicate introduction of irreducibly complex structures by gradual change.
Most examples of irreducibly complex things that you people come up with are things like metabolic pathways, that don't fossilise.
quote:
6) Natural processes have not made the irreducibly complex structures and systems in living organisms.
You've nothing like proved this.
quote:
7) Irreducibly complex structures and systems in living organisms are a result of purposeful agency.
Or this.

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
Locking in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #141
What happens to the rock with the 'i' is also "directed". It's not going to turn into a porpoise any more than my hypothetical children will.

Oh, and about complexity through the length of the algorithm to generate it - that is Kolmogorov complexity, and is on a proper mathematical footing. However, it is not like your specific complexity - random sequences have, as people have been repeatedly saying, more complexity than nonrandom ones of the same length.

So algorithm-length isn't going to quantify complexity for you - it doesn't have the properties you want. Try again.

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Posts: 1798 | Registered: Thursday, October 4 2001 07:00
Locking in General
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Member # 67
Profile Homepage #126
quote:
By Stillness:
Ok Thuryl, you got me with the “i.” I was thinking about the letter drawn by a person meant to convey information.
This shows the worthlessness of your specified complexity argument.

You say here that the letter "i" only has specified complexity if it was made by someone trying to convey information. This implies that specified complexity, by definition, needs to have been created for a purpose. Therefore, to show that living things have specified complexity, you have to first show that they were created, otherwise your argument is circular.

If you want to say that a pattern like "i" doesn't have enough specified complexity, or whatever, then you're back to having to come up with a way to quantify it, which you refuse to do.

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World building poll in General
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quote:
Originally written by Student of Trinity:

And here is a ghastly puzzle: at which point in that continuous process would you change from being left-handed to right handed? Gah. I have an idea what the answer is, and I don't like it.
You wouldn't. You'd stay left-handed, and when you got back all the writing would look back-to-front.

If the world was small enough that getting round it was easy, then seeing something looking mirror-inverted would probably be psychologically similar to seeing something from behind - nothing about it has changed, and if you want to see it properly then move yourself or it.

On the other hand, if the world was large enough that history largely happened without people going all the way round, then you'd probably end up with something like timezones - locally everything is fine and nobody notices, but at some point there's an awkward and arbitrary orientation line (probably determined by the way the dominant writing system spread).

[ Wednesday, January 02, 2008 08:56: Message edited by: Khoth ]

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