Okara KAmi

I like both genres, but only when they're mixed properly with everything else that makes a good movie. I don't like movies that are solely action, because that ends up feeling like the director just bragging about all the different pyrotechnics he can afford, and that just isn't appealing. A good example was Transformers. During the second movie, I remember falling asleep in the middle. Mind you, I never fall asleep during movies, and have always thought the expression an exaggeration of how boring a movie is. Yet, somehow, the second movie managed to lull me to sleep half way in the middle. I woke up and was just as uninterested as before.The sad part is, I wasn't even on a date. I was with my other (male) friends, and all of us found the movie boring, which is sad considering it is a movie geared specifically towards the male audience. While that fact can be refuted, the rather unimportant role of actors like Megan Fox in the movie, contrast to how much sex appeal they protrude, was easy to see. I get bored with an endless onslaught of fighting or graphics unless there's some meaning behind it, something deeper that is easier to relate to.The same stands for horror. I hate horror movies that are just about scares and shocking scenes. If I wanted to hear quick bursts of loud and scary sounds, I'd get married. One example of a boring horror movie was the latest Nightmare on Elm Street. It's predictable and formulaic, and relies on its sudden bursts of scary noise and scenery to 'scare' its audience, while it does not invest any brain power in actually frightening us beyond the screen.One action movie I really liked was Police Story, by Jackie Chan. It's an old one, but it's a classic example of a story that is, at its core, an action movie. There are fight scenes left and right, and the scenes are so stunt-oriented that Jackie Chan has burned off his palm while doing the movie. Yet, somehow, no point in the movie made me feel as if I was being thrown a superfluous stream of action scenes that I did not need. The story progressed and the action scenes -helped- that progression. That's what I liked the most about the movie, that the genius action scenes 'helped' the movie, and did not make it. Similarly, a recent horror movie that i liked was Paranormal Activity. I know that there have been various opinions about this movie but I feel that it was very well made. It did not rely on sudden loud noises to scare us, but planted a fear in the viewer that came from the unknown. It let us use our imagination to give form to the formless ghost that wandered the house, and soon the fear of the actors in the movie became something that we have all been able to relate to. That kind of scary, where the loud scenes and the dramatic camera work is not the entirety of the spook, is the kind of scary that I want.I guess what it all comes down to is how the action and the horror is used.But unfortunately, I also don't think that the scales are balanced. That is to say, even with the same amount of mastery in horror and action, and given the same degree of decency for the rest of the film, I think that the reception of both types of films will differ. Why? Because the reception of horror movies is vastly more negative than that of action movies. When it comes to action movies, we all know that what happens in the screen is fake and that certain parts are meant for dramatic fights while the other parts are meant for comedic showdowns. Thus, when two viewers go to the movies to watch these fight scenes, no one comes out of the movie with any embedded emotion. That is what a movie should be like.Unfortunately, with horror movies, the scary aspect of them challenges something intrinsic to all men (and some women). The majority of us do not like to admit that we were scared by scenes in the movie, or are still haunted by the feelings that they gave us. So, after watching a movie that scared the wits out of a viewer, they might be urged to rebel against the insecurity that their own fright brings about, by negatively remarking on the film. This general sentiment of rebellion against scary movies, where people immediately claim that it was not scary and that it did not even spook them, serves to drape the entire horror movie industry in a sense of ridicule. After-all, what faster way to play off your fear than by laughing at what you're really afraid of?As such, I think as a SOCIETY, we like action movies better.But I, personally, like horror movies better, because in the battle field of horror movie ratings, finding a good scary movie is an accomplishment all on its own.

Heck yes I'd like to know when I die.The reason is that I assume I won't go into some depressed state if I do find out. Say I am going to die next week -- I'm going to presume that I have enough sense to spend that time wisely, instead of brooding over it. Now if finding out my deadline does not throw me off of my path, then knowing when I die will always be a good thing. Now I know how I should alter my plans to adhere to the fact that I will be in the ground soon. I would cancel my trip to Japan, spend much more time with those that I love, and invest more resources into what I leave behind, rather than what I use currently. If a father found out that he was about to die, the first thing he would think about was how his family was going to sustain itself after his passing.With that mentality, knowing when you die means that you don't get caught off guard, and you're able to leave behind more to those that you care about.I guess that's a super optimistic and benevolent way of looking at it. It is not in my personality to think about something that I can not help, and brood over it. If I am going to die, by definition, I can not change that. As such, if people function under my first assumption, and the finding out of their deadline does not ruin their lives, then we could be looking at much more intelligently planned lives.On the other hand, this could bring about a negative effect also. When someone knows that they are going to die tomorrow no matter what, then they might do stupid things today. The basis of law is prevention -- you impose heavy punishments for crimes so that people who commit these crimes won't do it again, and people who look on the punishment will not do the crime. But this breaks down when the punishment becomes invalid, because the criminal dies the next day. In that sense, people might take advantage of the lack of punishment and harm other people.Of course, this is an extreme example, but it should be considered.---At the same time, let us look at the definition of the future.At T + some X, such and such happens, where T is the current moment in time.To predict that such and such happened is not a "would be" future, it is THE future.If it is THE future, that means it already accounts for the fact that you looked INTO the future.What does that mean?Well for one, it means that one can not 'change' the future ever. Why? Because the future they saw already took into account the fact that they looked into the future. Thus, them changing their actions does not really 'change' anything, because that future that they saw is still THE future. Now with that in mind, it's entirely possible that if I know I'm going to die tomorrow, I might do something stupid now, and my stupidity NOW causes my death tomorrow.

--- Regarding the effect of violent games/movies on ChildrenI think the effect that violent video games have on children is an organic one, and not something that we hold the responsibility to control. By that logic, we should limit over exposure of anything and everything, because it will make the child numb to it. It's up to the parents to adapt their parenting to the morphing world. I played a lot of violent games, but never lost track of the fact that it was just a game. The line between what is allowed in a game and what is allowed in real life was never blurred either. This came down, I believe, to my own internally embedded moral code.If i have a weak sense of morality, then it becomes harder for me to know where the rules of a game ends and where the rules of real life starts. And while this is a dangerously generic categorization of the reason why kids become affected by video games, I do believe the responsibility lies in their up bringing.Limiting how violent video games are is intrinsically an anti-American view. We should have the right to produce whatever we want. If the consumer wants it, he can buy it. If the parent thinks that their child is not ready for such a violent game, then they should not buy it. The choice should rest, always, at the grass-roots, and should not be regulated by the government. Why? Because no matter how you view this topic, it is bound to be an opinion, and opinions should never be made into laws.--- Regarding Sentient LifeAs a Computer Science, I would like to state that self-awareness isn't completely out of the question. The big stone wall between AI now and sentient behavior is active learning and opinion generation. That is to say, we haven't fully been able to make an AI understand new concepts and generate a "view" on it. It's easy to parse through a lot of data, say on the internet, and regurgitate relevant information about key word(s). But it's difficult to 'talk' about the subject.Once we are able to overcome this barrier, it becomes easier to create self-aware AI that 'feels' about new information. This feeling about new information can be translated to having "senses", immediately making it a sentient AI.This is a long way from now, as currently I can't even 'think' of a way to dynamically generate emotion about new subjects in code. But when that becomes possible, I don't think killing AI's inside of a game will be our biggest problem. Imagine a race of robots with infinitely more computing power than our brains, that begin to understand that they're the superior race. xD

It should also be noted that we have not found any life of our caliber anywhere else in the Universe. We've probed distances light-years away for any sign of intelligence, but nothing. So I can't see the point of view that our lives should be cut short due to our effect on the environment. But you're right in the sense that our expansionist mentality, soon, will become too large for the Earth to be able to handle. When this time comes, the resources available for us on the planet will not be enough to provide for our race. This, to me, is an imminent obstacle in our future, albeit beyond our life spans. Why? Because our rate of consumption increases with the population and the rising wealth of nations. Given that, we don't have any proportionately powerful ways of increasing our "output" of natural resources.At some point, we will run out of oil, be depleted of fertile fields, and have a desert where forests should have been. Much before we push that threshold, naturally, we would have invested a large amount of our resources into finding alternative sources of energy in the universe. While this sounds a little bit like Star Trek, I really don't see how we can avoid it. Costs rise, resources aren't infinite, so at some point, Costs > resources.Of course it can also be argued that a genocidal policy towards self preservation, perhaps by eliminating other races to cut down on consumption, is a very real answer. But then we move full circle back to our nuclear holocaust idea, where we eat eachother alive.Like the above poster said, we're too awesome to put other forms of life at higher priority than ourselves. =D

Guys. All these other posters seem to talk about rapping, but they don't spit their game. But have no fear. My rap name is Immortal Technique. You might have heard of me.@ Scorpion120, @ Guest_Joe_*, here is your rap song.Yo yo yo you're a real fine lassWith cherry red hair like a real wine glassI wanna chase you like a duck in the grassAnd maybe tonight you'll get ____ed in the ____West side ride or die.

This seems like a remarkably morbid wager...I'm assuming you're talking about Amanda Clayton. I'd heard about her a while ago. I think she will get much smarter with her money, given that she does not get any DHS aid anymore. If she's willing to keep her lottery money in tact while she uses food stamps to feed herself, then she has the right type of menality (and perhaps even the right type of morality?) to stay rich longer than the average lottery winner.So for the sake of sport (I'm going to hell for this), I say she doesn't need food stamps for 3-5 years. With what cut a lawyer will take out of her wallet (assuming she's crazy enough to get one and not use a state commissioned one), I think this whole ordeal will scare her straight. I hope she doesn't bail herself out... Jail food/housing is free

Hey Velma,It's doen manually? That makes more sense. I thought perhaps some php script ran every time I posted, so I assumed I had missed some "No Post Count!" sign somewhere along the line. Thank you for your quick reply, and yes, my Credit has gone up.

You're defining the requirement for religion to be organized in the same way that Christianity/Islam/Judaism are. Why does there need to be a single prophet or a single religious book? Does the Bible not have an old and new testament through which the character of "god" undergoes some heavy mood shifts? Are these not, by their self definition, written in hugely different times? It is in the same way that Hinduism has the Ramayana and the Mahabhagvatha.As is the case with any polytheistic religion, the term "organization" gets thrown out of the window. Think Greek Myth. The Hindu religion integrates a rich text of mythology, wars between gods, demons, and humans fill the pages of the text. I don't see this as disorganization in the same way that Harry Potter isn't disorganized merely because there are so many Wizard battles. A story is told, and a pathos is extended from that story unto those who believe in it.---Now since we are attributing our opinions to the strength or validity of a religion, then would an evolving religion not be a more suitable one? Surely you know that the Bible has been interpreted in various and temporally convenient ways, along the ages. Think the crusades, hell-fire and brimstone, and modern day. The purpose of a religion is not disjoint from the intention of its people. A religion would not exist if it starkly contrasts the moral code of its followers. That is why Christians don't take their naughty children to the edge of town and stone them, even if it says to do so in the Bible. This is because the internal definition of the religion changed with its people, not different from how Hinduism does.In that aspect, i believe that a religion that has the ability to morph organically, is a much more powerful religion than one that preaches beliefs that are centuries outdated. So while that river may have twisted and turned through its path, and changed its color from when it once started, its ability to encompass change fluidly is what drives it forward. This is, of course, assuming your river analogy is apt at all. By your view, most religions are rivers, as I can point out adaptations and changes that each religion undergoes to adhere to the progress of the times.---I hope I've cleared up some of your mystification about the subjet, by providing the other side of the story.PS: "Religion is the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods." -- GoogleThe definition you used for Religion isn't a definition of it at all, it's what a certain subset of religions are. Subsets do not define the superset.

darko100 is right, the Social Network market is pretty well hashed out and flagged down. Unless you have a game-changing idea, or even an older idea that never hit it big before, you won't get anywhere with it. The first question you want to ask yourself is, "Why would anyone want to cut down their FB/Twitter time to join my site?" There are a ton of resources, friends, and data on FB/Twitter that makes every minute you spend there more fruitful than 1 minute you spend somewhere else.Once you've found what you want to bring to the table, your site name should come easy.But if we're going with random recommendations:alakaz.am, cap.com xD

I think Facebook's monopoly over the Social Networking game is too absolute for Google+ to stand a chance. Google made some important tactical errors when it came to its product, the first of which, I believe, is the UI. It should have known that, by definition, Facebook is practically the standard for all social networks, and thus, when creating your own site, it should adhere to some important paradigms Facebook set forth. But Google+, while similar to FB in many ways, differs starkly with its use of colors and how large everything is.It's hard to deny that most Google+ users would be FB users too, and thus, it would have been beneficial to stay sensitive to this fact and make the transition between Google+ and Facebook as simple as possible. One way to go about this, something that Android phones already do, is integrating with Facebook. If I have 600 friends on FB, why would I want to start a whole new network on Google+? It should have inflated accounts out of people on Google's contact list AND friends on Facebook, so that when an FB user comes to Google, they don't lose 95% of their friends.Beyond that, the App market for Google+ is practically nonexistant, whereas people are coming out with new FB Apps every day. Making an FB compatible sandbox so that FB Apps can be translated to Google+ apps without too much of a problem, would have also been an important step.It all comes down to transition.Google+ asked too much of its users. We don't want to ditch FB and go to a whole new playground, when there's nothing wrong with our old one.

Hi!Three posts ago (of good length? Around 100-300 Word Count) I had the same myCents as I do now, and I was wondering how often the script iterates through the users to update the count. My balance has not changed, over at my Xisto account either, so i wanted to make sure that I wasn't beating a dead horse.Thanks,Kami

Do you guys not believe that there is what seems like a market bubble in Indian real estate? I think a large portion of India's imported cash comes from foreign investments into the land. What happens when you have foreign investors is that they are willing to function in a higher price bracket than what is normal in the Indian economy. With enough "rich" people investing in Indian land, the price of the land steadily grows higher to accomodate the willingness of the buyer to pay more.What this has done, especially in my home town (Ahmedabad), is it's made the property prices sky-rocket. The average Indian struggles to buy land, because single floor condos (known as "Flats" in India) can sell in the 100's of thousands (lakhs) or Rupees. Do you guys think that this market can last? When does the investment interest in India begin declining due to the rate of increase in Indian prices? When does India stop being an out source capital and other rising countries become more viable options?What I'm saying is, the more foreign interest in India, the richer India gets.The richer India gets, the higher the prices go.The higher the prices go, the lesser the foreign interest gets.I know that might be an oversimplification of the matter, but I think it's a real obstacle.

Well the largest reason anyone should invest in a website is the fact that it can reach a ridiculously larger group of people than any physical form of advertising, for much less cost. For example, I can pay 10 bucks a year and reach millions of users if I advertise properly. I have worked as a Web Developer for startup companies, small businesses, and mom n' pop shops around my city. The first thing I tell them is that word of mouth just isn't the strongest tool any more.Like the previous poster said, a website can add credibility. A well established website with positive feed-back, as well as a lot of legitimate material (portfolio), can help credit your business much faster than word of mouth can.But I think the most important aspect of a website is the instant functionality. Imagine how easy it is now to add an "affiliate" or to keep track of a "customer" without the need of a paper of pencil. Use a mySQL database, store their information and retrieve it programmatically, instead of hiring an accountant or a clerk to do all of that for you. The older generation isn't too used to the paradigm of the user and the interface, so in my experience, they are always pleasantly surprised when they find out that they can keep accounts online, using Cloud resources that run behind their website to cut down their work by 80% for free.I think social networks need a mention here, because it lets your customers know what you're up to and what you're interested in. That personal connection which many might have initially thought is lost without word of mouth, can be re-established if you have your users follow you on Twitter, or add you on Facebook. The end goal here is to create your commercial website, but tie it with your online persona, so that your customers become your friends, and your friends in turn become long time customers.

I think coding in C forces you to up your game in programming. The function orientation of the language means you, as the programmer, have to know which function belongs where, instead of object orientation doing it for you. It promotes powerful practices, like memory management, which is done 'for you' with other programming languages. But when we have garbage collectors doing the job for us, we know right off the bat that there will be an overhead. That is to say -- it takes longer for Java to clear our un-linked objects from data than it does for a C program to do it inside of the program itself.I'm not sure how deep you've gone into C program, but you'll run into commands like malloc() and free(). The former sets aside memory to hold an object such that a pointer to it can be passed in and out of functions, while the latter frees it from memory. In Java, you can pass entire objects back and forth and never worry about it, but that's why i think C gives you a better grasp of what's going on underneath the hood.Having programmed in C, you will come across powerful tools like valgrind and gdb that really put your code out into the open regarding your algorithmic errors and other such shortcomings. Not to mention, even without the garbage collecting over-head, C is very much faster than programming languages that run on top of VM's. I remember coding in a combination of C and Assembly for a huge Fibonacci Heap problem, and the speed with which is finishd it over its Java counterpart was impressive.But. If you've ever stared at your terminal wondering why your "Heap" was aborted during a C program, you know that all isn't well in the realm of C xD

Considering you are human, the idea that humanity should be destroyed coming to your mind is evidence that we're so highly developed. We not only recognize ourselves as organisms taking part in the existence of a larger host, but are able to judge our effects on the host. But the ability to make such an analysis does not suggest that we would be able to do much of anything in its regard. A Mass suicide is out of the question, and unless we somehow wipe ourselves out in a nuclear holocaust, I don't see our kind dropping to dust any time soon.Besides that, I think it's a bit crazy to think that we aren't just playing our role. What makes you think we are any any less natural than a fly or a tree? We were created from the soil that we build on, and like a bird building a nest, we build our concrete jungles and playgrounds. It's our right, as part of the ecosystem, to work for our benefit and to ensure our survival. Ensuring our survival comes in many ways. We need fuel and resources to continue providing ourselves in our high-demand way of life. But we also need to keep greenery in tact, because it provides us with clean oxygen, and bolsters our atmosphere. To keep the greenery in tact and balanced, we need wildlife to push the circle of life along.As such, our survival is just as crucial as the survival of anything else on the planet. Sure, lions can survive just fine without human beings, but the inverse holds true too, so the argument that we are a plague doesn't seem to hold much substance. Our rapid expansionist mentality is something that naturally comes to us, and it can't be helped given our rising population and increasing technological requirement.All in all, I'd have to disagree, wiping out all humanity because "we are a plague" is a bit of a stretch.

Being unable to tell the difference between 100 stones and 101 stones proves as much about human mathematics as telling the difference between 1000 drops of water, and 1001. Negligibility and human error are aspects of the physical world, and they don't undermine the mathematics behind it. 101 stones > 100 stones. 1001 drops > 1000 drops. Saying that a human can't tell the difference means the human wasn't given enough preparatory conditions to develop a more accurate answer, and doesn't mean the human himself makes all logical decisions based on deduction rather than awareness of inequality. But on the same note, let's look at some definitions of "Math" "mathematics: a science (or group of related sciences) dealing with the logic of quantity and shape and arrangement" -wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn "Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns, formulate new conjectures, and establish truth by rigorous deduction from appropriately chosen axioms and definitions." -en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MATH Those are the two top most Google Define definitions of the word. It doesn't help the partition in our definitions much, but I'm going to stick with my stance that fundamental math (which I'm saying we all can recognize) deals with the theory of quantities, inequalities, and so on and so forth.

So... I want to get the CDT plugin features for my Eclipse JDK that I have. I tried out a few things at first, like installing another Eclipse CDT, copying all of its plugin files onto my original plugin folder for my first Eclipse's directory. That worked, and allowed me to turn on C/C++ in my perspective toolbar, but I'm not too certain if this is efficient or recommended, seeing as how I will inevitably have a lot of plugin files that may serve the same purpose, and having Eclipse crash on me is the last thing I want.So does anyone know an easy way to get C/C++ onto my Java Eclipse Perspective options?

I think it was really sweet of you to send over $50. I'm not quite sure why, but in this day and age, that kind of stuff just seems so anachronistic. In a good way, of course. Now about the long distance relationship itself, the generic things would have to be communication, like was said before. It's REALLY easy to feel distant from someone distant from you, and to keep yourself closer on the inside, a constant stream of feelings, events, thoughts, chitchat or whatever is necessary in my opinion. It can't ever compensate for the lack of companionship, but it's probably the closest thing you'll get to having them near you. If your boyfriend in Switzerland isn't able to talk much, you should probably tell him that you want him to make some time in the middle, as much as he possibly can, to get on and talk to you. Make a schedule, or something. As long as you guys talk. It can be boring for all we know, but talking makes that distance seem a little less.I'd imagine your sleep schedules are about 5-7 hours apart, so by the time he wakes up, you're asleep or about to go to sleep.Communicating and telling him what you want to say, rather than just some pattern of mushy talk, is the most important thing about a long distance relationship for me. Without it, both of you will just feel more distant from one another. Other than that, I can't give you much more advice. I really hope it works out for you =)

*points to topic starter post* "Do you think math is a language that we are all born with? I mean look at it like this: Math is always math regardless of whether you have the ability to speak it or write it. You know that 1 group of stones is large than another group of stones. That is math. Native american indians hunted areas of buffalo that were in greater numbers because they knew their chances of getting more kills were more likely than hunting a smaller pack. That is math. A plant forms in space and is round, that is math. A circle or sphere is the path of least resistance or most efficient use of space. That is math. I believe we are all born with a built in knowledge of math, at least the basics, addition and subtraction. Do you agree?" He never said, in the topic starter, that mathematics was necessary or was in some how relevant to our survival. He said that there are traces of mathematical logic in ancient history, as well as prehistory. That's all he said. That makes this topic about: "Is it true? Do we have a sense of Math before we're TAUGHT it?" If you're looking for why Math = Survival for human beings, you're off topic. (Though that seems like a plausible spin off from here...) Not all species are designed specifically with parts pivotal to their survival. Proof? We have eyes, ears, legs, hands, tongues. We need NONE of the above to survive. I won't even get into the extra liver, the appendix, the frontal lobe of your brain and a few more nifty creepy things that we are born with... without needing them to survive. I can understand the tendency to think that if we are "able" of something, then we must need it somehow. But all species are born with a -HUGE- variety of mutational properties that may not be relevant to their current situation, in accordance to their gene pool. Also, I explained why I used other, lesser logically developed species (chicks and apes), as part of my proof. You know... since in the civilized world, we don't really have too many test subjects. Public Rep calamity and all... But nonetheless, if the connection between arithmetics in the lesser developed baby chicken and the obvious notion that we would start out with similar grasps can not be made, I guess we can look at the flip side of the coin. I'd like to see why you think Math ISN'T present in us in its most fundamental form before we're taught it. Do you have any evidence of why a baby might prefer two spoons of fudge rather than one? Do you have an explanation as to how we get scared of crowds as children, but are fine with single people? Quantitative awareness, if you would permit, is the root of all math. Understanding that things around us are in numbers, and some numbers are larger than others, while others are of equal magnitude, is how Math came about. I have yet to see proof in this topic about any occurrence in recorded history where any human civilization dating before public education was a norm, was NOT aware of numbers, inequalities, and so on. I can only speak from what I know, which happens to be remarkably small, so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there WAS a race out there that didn't care if they are 1 buffalo or 17.

Exploiting information about people to achieve higher financial success is a bad thing? This kind of stuff went on wayyy before Google.com, and Facebook would definitely fall into the same category of information leeching for business gains. If something like this happened for a small group of people, such that the data on that small group of people is of a manageable size, then yes, I would feel a bit nervous for that small group of people that now have to do their every day searches, emails, and documents on Google's open source cloud software. But that's not the case. Google's information isn't based on a small number of people. Billions of people are doing hundreds of thousands of searches. I find solace in the fact that unless I could Google any ludicrous phrase I want, like "Nuclear North Korea attack" and the query probably matches thousands of its like before me. There's just too much data for manipulate maliciously. The best Google can do, given its human resources, is to dedicate computing devices to decide what our interests are and try to buy us over with the magic of relevance. What else can it do? There are billions of us with trillions of different bits and pieces of data about us floating around somewhere waiting to be garbage-collected. Keep in mind Google is free. It needs to be two steps ahead of the game in terms of effective advertisement, to stay in the green zone with its business model. And sadly enough, my noScript Firefox add-on is the death of most js based Google Ads I would ever see. Information is power, same way a sword is power. But a hugely obese amount of information is like a mile-long sword. Not very useful. Bit I digress. Google does have fascinating amounts of information on all of us. So do the Food companies, and the CIA, but all of that information never really becomes relevant for 99.9999999999999% of users.

The point of my argument was that Math isn't so much an object that you "learn" when it comes to simple arithmetics, but a logic that your brain is able to develop. But if you're insistent on examples: Proceedings B's recent research on baby chicks_ Proceedings B is a biological institute by the way. Here was the case: "Newly hatched domestic chicks were reared with five identical objects. On days 3 or 4, chicks underwent free-choice tests in which sets of three and two of the five original objects disappeared (either simultaneously or one by one), each behind one of two opaque identical screens. Chicks spontaneously inspected the screen occluding the larger set (experiment 1). Results were confirmed under conditions controlling for continuous variables (total surface area or contour length; experiment 2). In the third experiment, after the initial disappearance of the two sets (first event, FE), some of the objects were visibly transferred, one by one, from one screen to the other (second event, SE). Thus, computation of a series of subsequent additions or subtractions of elements that appeared and disappeared, one by one, was needed in order to perform the task successfully. Chicks spontaneously chose the screen, hiding the larger number of elements at the end of the SE, irrespective of the directional cues provided by the initial (FE) and final (SE) displacements. Results suggest impressive proto-arithmetic capacities in the young and relatively inexperienced chicks of this precocial species." - Source According to the case study, newborn chicks have fundamental arithmetic awareness. A chick. A baby chicken with a brain nowhere near as capable of the functions that a human one is. Why did I use a reference to Animal math capabilities? Well because the top Biological schools of our time don't really have the license to test their theories on barbaric/uncivilized human beings. Now humans. What you're saying, Anwii, is that a fundamental human being can not understand, or develop and understanding, in Math. I think that's a pretty blatant gap and logic, because if it was impossible to understand math where you hadn't before, then we wouldn't have math today. Under the assumption that Aliens didn't come to the Earth and give our forefathers the knowledge of Math to be bestowed upon the world, it is safe to assume that we understood the basics of Mathematics, which allowed us to proceed into higher order sciences. Let's look at various pieces of our history that indicates that Arithmetics was understood by our kind, without a math teacher and a chalkboard present. Ishango Bone: I'm sure you've learned about it History class. African bone made of a baboon leg I believe. Was used to tally up numbers. What does that mean? An awareness of quantity. It means that humans could tell that having one orange, and another orange, means we have two oranges. Basic addition, and an organized way to store these numbers, were amongst us a very long time ago. How long ago? The Ishango Bone dates to about 8000bc. But then you might argue, 8000bc artifacts in pseudo-civilized tribes doesn't represent a true "barbaric" human. And then we might run into the fact that not a lot of tests in our age are sanctioned on "uneducated" test sample human beings. But if the fact that we HAVE math at all, doesn't convince you that at various points, Math was able to be understood by people who did not have it before them, doesn't convince you. Then maybe the fact that a chick with less than 1/20th of our brain size can recognize simple proto-arithmetics will seal the deal. But maybe you're still not convinced that if you took 3 million babies and put them all into a forest, 20 years later they wouldn't be able to understand any logic-oriented arithmetics. Then have a look at this: "A German team of neurobiologists has found that rhesus macaques can engage in abstract mathematical reasoning using specific brain cells dedicated to the comprehension of math rules and relationships. The finding could provide insight into the neurology behind human ability to comprehend much more complex mathematics, German scientists said. "Even simple mathematical operations are highly abstract mental operations on quantities that are governed by overarching concepts and principles," explained study co-author Andreas Nieder, a professor in the department of animal physiology at the University of Tubingen's Institute of Neurobiology. "Monkeys can adopt abstract mathematical rules, and they can switch between them." "That means they understand very fundamental, non-symbolic mathematical principles, such as 'greater than' and 'less than'," Neider added. His team traced this ability to neurons in the prefrontal cortex region of the primate brain -- an area that appears to be devoted to encoding the basic rules of math... [cont]" - Source Monkeys have fundamental arithmetic capability. Neurobiologists are making the connection from there, to how human beings are capable of Math as well. I wouldn't think that our inbuilt ability to grasp logic and arithmetics would be brought so heavily into question, your lack of faith in our kind is disturbing~

Moon colonization with our economy? That kind of stuff waits for when countries have the surplus resources to fund something like that. But assuming that we do get out of this global slump any time in the foreseeable future, then I think most of what you said would have to be rigorously followed through on to make any tangible progress. But colonization is a really large way away, and I think at this point in our tech plateau, there are a lot of more productive and less impossible ways we can tap into the presence of the moon. Silverwurm mentioned solar power. I think since we're on the subject of using the moon to take another step forward, we could plant the moon with solar panels. The theory is that it takes a lot of energy to deploy solar panels into orbit around the earth, and keep it there, where as if we stationed large solar panels on the moon itself, we would benefit from unadulterated radiation that can be brought back down to us periodically.But if we're going to talk about colonizing on the moon, I'd be wary of the politics behind it. That's a lot of different countries trying to make use of the space availability and industrialization opportunity in a land that doesn't suffer from anything besides constant sunlight for periods that are 27x longer than the Earth's. You're going to have a lot of competitive studies and another Cold War could easily break lose the second someone gets the bright idea of farming nuclear power from their own solar powered missionary plant on the moon. There's a lot of ways a whole new mass of available land can go wrong, and that means that we'd be looking at a whole new kind of political struggle to overwhelm our UN with.Other than that, you've made a few mentions about pure colonizations. That's, again, a realllly long while away. I can't emphasize enough how difficult it would be to replicate anything close to what we have here on Earth. Without an atmosphere, anything we pump there will be negated, and without a sustainable source of back up energy, all investments put into the moon are largely too risky to be an apt financial benefit.

By chaos, I'll assume he means anything nail bitingly close to "too entropic" for logistic liking. But then again, if any seemingly chaotic event x takes place on time t0, I can watch it happen. Rewind back to t0. And x would take place again. If under the same parameters and circumstances, one "chaotic" event is reborn, can we really call it the creation of chaos? Which might then suggest that in the physical universe, where everything is determined my space/time and mass/energy, we can't ever get "true" chaos. An occurrence might "seem" to have no clear cut explanation, but that just makes it inexplicable in our visor of understanding, not chaotic.But the points you bring up are also a bit moot Zanzibarjones. The spherical shape, as someone above said, is the most diffusion-friendly shape for any liquid matter under 0 outside force. On top of that, spheres can occur through a variety of other factors. Celestial bodies in our universe, functioning under the theory that the Big bang really happened and that God almighty didn't put us together from clay, were constantly spinning and constantly being affected by the tremendous pull of the "core" of the bang. Take a random shape, put your finger on it, and rotate it in every possible angle (not 360 degrees, I mean in the spherical sense), and after a thousand years, you'll have a sphere because of the equilibrium that the input force arrives at. We're also going to assume that when this "big bang" happened, the celestial bodies that we know them as now weren't congealed, sizable chunks of mass as they are now. They were vastly large rocks loosely held together from a series of clashes over a preposterous amount of time. It would then be logical to assume that the large entity's own gravity would encourage the outlying pieces (which originally gave the shape a non-spherical form) to move closer to the center until finally (give or take a few infinities) you'd have the large masses becoming spheres.Symmetry isn't actually in the same category as the celestial bodies... in my opinion. Symmetry in life forms comes from the biological progression of life on our planet. We're not "really" symmetric, we're just vaguely put together that way. The human cell isn't symmetric, no organ is, to my knowledge, and even the human body isn't perfectly symmetric. Heck, your heart is on the left side. Your muscles are probably larger on your right/left side if you're a righty/lefty respectively. Also in line with Math. Math isn't an object to be invented. It's a principal. 2 + 2 = 4, regardless of where/when/what you are (unless you're in 1984) because basic Math is logic-oriented (fundamental math in this case), and usually has little to do with the practicality of where it's being applied.

I don't get why you would say you could cheat death.First of all, we're assuming this "death" is something that you see as a part of our future, right?And if it's a part of the future, this means that this is what will happen due to all of the leading events up till that moment, right? Then what makes you think you can change the future? The future, by definition, is what is to come. What is to come, AFTER what we do now. This means no matter what we do now in an attempt to change that future we "saw," all of our actions are exactly what MADE that future happen in the first place. But that's just my short rant on all these sci fi schools of thought thinking that they could change the future/past when I think that everything remains relative, we're not capable of "changing" anything because everything we do is what makes things the way they are to begin with! Grr.But! If I could see when I died...Hm. I'd say no. Well firstly, it would scare the hell out of anyone to know that they're going to die in 10 days, 10 months, or 10 years. It's like a big red flag that tells them where the book ends. How? Cancer? Murder? Suicide? Accident? It would lead to too much speculation, worry, plotting, pseudo-faith, and all kinds of nervous upheavals that wouldn't have been there to begin with. And what makes it worse is that there's only NOTHING anyone can do to change the future (refer to previous rant) so what's the point in knowing it? Well that and, hasn't anyone else heard of that "life flashing before your eyes" mumbo jumbo? Well if I knew when I was going to die, it couldn't possibly be touching enough to encourage something so awesome.

Well that's surprising. You'd think after all of those socially uncomfortable ads they had through out the superbowl and all on TV, they'd be making more profit x) But I guess we can blame the market for this like we do for just about everything else that crashes and burns now a days. I didn't, of course, know this was up for a billion dollars. That's pretty intense... But if the tabloid-esque excerpt is true, then it's millions of hosted names could face some shifty ground due to new management.