You're subtly imposing a false dichotomy here (either you have to assume it's true, or you have to assume it isn't). It's most reasonable to just assume it's possible, but there's presently no way for us to find out if it's true or not.
You can't even say it's still more likely to be false. What do you know about the likelihood of such things? We know hardly anything at all about consciousness. Maybe a universe in which planets are conscious is more likely to exist than other types of universes? How would we know?
Of course it's still unreasonable to make blind assumptions, but that goes for both directions.
My point is that it's useless to make assumptions without any evidence. Just stick to known facts, that's the most practical way.
Actually there is no particular scientific reason nature (well, the universe or some smaller part of it: a galaxy, a star or a single planet) can't have developed a form of sentience.
Actually there is: Lack of evidence.
We can present all kinds of hypotheses, some more plausible and some less plausible, and everybody is of course entitled to present them, but as long as the hypothesis cannot be observed, measured, tested, studied, quantified, subjected to the world-wide peer-reviewing process and finally made into accepted physical laws and theories, there's no rational reason to believe those hypotheses are true. In fact, as long as there's nothing of that, it's more reasonable to assume it's not true (because assuming it's true leads nowhere and is only wasted effort with no benefit). From a pragmatic point of view is better to concentrate on actual proven measurable facts than on wild hypotheses with zero tangible evidence.
I can't go through Chemo after seeing what it did to my Aunt.
Extrapolation from one example is the way to go, especially in the subject of health and medicine.
It wasn't the Cancer that killed her. It was the Chemo that did it.
Yeah, without the chemo she would surely have lived another 20 years or so.
Sometimes chemotherapy doesn't work. That doesn't mean it's the chemotherapy doing the killing, or that it never works. Of course you will refuse to listen to the stories where it has worked (like the video I linked).
I guess apparently there's a book out there that tells of some type of food out there that Bill Clinton eats that cures like 97% of people with various types of cancers.
Like there are pills that can make your dick 50% larger.
I call bullshit. Vaccinated against what? It's not like there's one single vaccine, produced in one single way, using one single liquid medium.
Even if the numbers are accurate and the margin of error low, correlation still doesn't imply causation. There can be other factors at play.
The rest of the article seems to also be rife with correlation-implies-causation fallacies.
(I also find it sad how many parents prefer their children to die rather than having a very small alleged risk of becoming autistic or whatever, even though the probability of death by preventable disease is much larger. I suppose it's an attitude of "better dead than autistic".)
If nature/evolution meant that we should drink fluoridated water, the water in nature would already be fluoridated, and our bodies would have been adapted to it.
You seem to give nature some kind of sentience and will, like it's a benevolent being who tries to protect and benefit us, as long as we obey nature. Nature/evolution does not "mean" to do anything. Nature is. It doesn't have sentience or will.
Tooth decay and many other health problems is caused by us living unnaturally. For example, cooking food is unnatural, because food isn't cooked in nature by default.
Bullshit. You can eat as naturally as you want, and you will still get tooth decay if you don't care about your dental hygiene.
If it was meant for us to eat cooked food, then food would grow in volcanos.
That's one of the stupidest things you have written in a long time.
Anyways, you might want to reconsider your "coctail". IIRC studies have shown that flooding yourself with dietary supplements for long periods of time can be more harmful than beneficial.
this is relevant to my interests. Please link to this study.
Damned if I remember now where I read/heard about this. However, I'm pretty certain that the source was credible (because I don't have the habit of repeating hearsay and urban legends). Of course without me being able to give you a concrete reference, you shouldn't just take my word for it.
From what I remember, it wasn't even about dubious dietary supplements that promise miracles (such as losing weight or making certain organs grow larger), but precisely about normal vitamins and minerals that are part of a normal healthy diet. The thing was that if you overload your system with them, getting more than the recommended daily dosage, it can be harmful in the long run.
I don't know if that story where I got the info was related to this study: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12531576
There are, of course, also many individual cases of a dietary supplement causing harm to (and even killing) someone, but I don't know if they are directly related to that either. Such as: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/29/eveningnews/main527399.shtml
I take a cocktail of vitamins every day, which if I ate until I was sick wouldn't cause permanent damage, and probably serve a lot of good, but I don't want to put it into anyone's water or food supply because it's an individual's choice.
So basically your only argument is that health must be a choice of every individual?
Anyways, you might want to reconsider your "coctail". IIRC studies have shown that flooding yourself with dietary supplements for long periods of time can be more harmful than beneficial.
If I end up with some type of Cancer, I won't be going through Chemo-Therapy.
There's a lot of misconceptions about chemotherapy out there, most of it based only on the worst case scenarios. Yes, there are many cases where chemotherapy is very destructive and hazardous, but there are also many other cases (probably even the majority) where it isn't, and it actually works and actually cures you. People tend to only look at the worst cases and get all emotional, without realizing that those are only the extreme cases, not the average.
See a more rational experience from an actual cancer patient: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzySHcWuRqw
Of course if you want to die a painful death instead of using a proven form of therapy, that's up to you.
Perhaps if this film would have concentrated more on the FDA and less on Burzynski's research, in other words, more of a "the FDA furiously attacks a lone medical doctor" and less of a "miracle cancer cure being shut down by greedy farmaceuticals", and its length cut to 1 hour, it could have been a more interesting documentary, more akin to Moore's Sicko.
20 seconds into the movie on the opening title card:
"This is the story of a medical doctor and PhD biochemist who has discovered the genetic mechanism that can cure most human cancers.
The opening 30 minutes of this film is designed to thoroughly establish this fact—so the viewer can fully appreciate the events that follow it."
Which is exactly why I wrote what you quoted from my post: If it had concentrated less on the "miracle cancer cure" and more on the "FDA furiously attacks poor doctor", and cut down to 1 hour (or less), it could have been interesting. As it is now, it feels more like proselytizing (and, frankly, like a typical conspiracy theory film).
nfq wrote:
Not only is there a cure for cancer, but drug companies also spend millions of dollars to create new and better drugs for causing diseases like cancer.
Why do you even bother making these types of posts anymore? We already know you believe everything, every single conspiracy theory, ufology, cryptozoology, parapsychology, every single claim of supernatural phenomena, and so on. (Ok, you don't believe everything: You don't believe in science. You will deny that, but it's just the truth.)
Maybe you do it because every once in a while some new forum user will fall for the troll and start arguing with you. Can I assume you enjoy these arguments?
One would think that implementing something like that would be rather simple: Just take frame n and frame n+2, blend them, and compare the result to frame n+1.
Of course it will work only if the frames are stored losslessly and the original blending uses the same algorithm as the test. If the frames are stored lossily, it becomes quite a lot more difficult to get accurate results.
I have never heard of such a ready-made tool, though, and I wouldn't be surprised if nobody has ever made it. You'll probably have to program it yourself.
Cancellation is not covered by the three day rule. It's covered by copyright laws, the right for an author to not have his work published when he doesn't want to.
But shouldn't it be the author who cancels the submission in that case?
Edit: Reading the judging guidelines, if I understand correctly, the three-day rule seems to actually be imposed by the server. Is the cancellation option being abused by judges to circumvent this rule? Shouldn't only the author himself be able to cancel his own submission?
I tried to watch the film, but I got bored at about the 40-minute mark, with still well over an hour to go, that I stopped. I am probably being a bit biased here, but it was just being too long.
I am not saying that this isn't a completely legitimate factual documentary, but I have seen so many superbly-crafted conspiracy theory "documentaries" that I can see the warning signs of cherry-picking and biased information. As said, I'm not claiming this film is cherry-picking, but from the 40 minutes I saw there were a few things that raised some suspicion.
Firstly, the length of the documentary can sometimes be a warning flag. Not that there aren't plenty of completely legit and factual 2-hour documentaries out there, even on controversial subjects, but I have noticed that many conspiracy theory documentaries are really lengthy, possibly as a form of shotgun argumentation ("the more evidence there is, the more plausible the theory"). Just look at the running times of such films as Loose Change, Zeitgeist, the various Moon landing hoax conspiracy "documentaries" out there, and so on. They tend to pack as much material in there as they can, probably trying to be as convincing as possible by the sheer amount of it.
Secondly, I suspected this film to be very US-centric, and the first 40 minutes seemed to confirm this. I find this a bit suspicious because if this were indeed a revolutionary cure for all kinds of cancer, I'm pretty sure that countries around the world would be interested, there would be plenty of research and publications being done, and most people would have heard of it. Yet this seems to be restricted to basically one doctor and his personal team in Texas.
Thirdly, I just couldn't get rid of the nagging feeling of "are all these examples being cherry-picked? Are they all legit? Is there something that the film is not telling me?" It could perfectly well be all legit and sound, but I just have seen so many conspiracy theory films that I know that when you carefully cherry-pick information and package with bells and whistles, you can make almost anything sound convincing even though the real truth is not as simple as that.
A cursory research on this treatment seems to show that basically the only people who have seen positive results is this doctor and his team, and that the results could not be replicated by independent parties. Also most of the published papers showing positive results were published by this doctor himself, with no peer reviewing.
I'm not saying the treatment does not work. I'm just suspicious about why it seems to be restricted to this one doctor and positive results are not being reported all over the world. There are many cases presented in the film, but without knowing the exact circumstances (rather than the narrow details the film presents) it's impossible to say if they are legitimate and caused by the efficacy of this treatment and not because of something else.
Is the FDA in the US being overly zealous of this doctor and his research? Could be. I don't know. I haven't heard their side (although it could be given in the rest of the film, which I didn't watch). Does the FDA resort to dirty tactics in some cases because of greed and money. Could be, I don't know. But it could also be that this film is exaggerating the issue, using all the tricks in the book to make it convincing.
Perhaps if this film would have concentrated more on the FDA and less on Burzynski's research, in other words, more of a "the FDA furiously attacks a lone medical doctor" and less of a "miracle cancer cure being shut down by greedy farmaceuticals", and its length cut to 1 hour, it could have been a more interesting documentary, more akin to Moore's Sicko.
Out of curiosity, Warp, how do you feel about L+R? Isn't that also not 'legitimate input to the game'?
Does pressing L+R send a hardware signal to the CPU that interrupts the game in the middle of doing things, without the game being able to disable, control or hook to it?
As Kitsune said, the FDA doesn't care about human lives.
The question was not "does the FDA care about human lives?" It was "cure for cancer?" I know the answer to that question: The FDA cannot control whether there is a known cure for cancer or not, no matter how big they might be in the US.
I know that the healthcare system in the US is (still) messed up. That's not my problem. (I am pretty sure that Moore's film Sicko was probably right on many counts.) My problem was the implied conspiracy theory that the FDA is suppressing a cure for cancer.
StripeyDope wrote:
Believe it or not, the FDA is seeing nearly every single penny you worked hard for to try and cure a relative of cancer, or even yourself. If they were not money-guzzling greedy S.O.B's, the United States would be in much better shape population-wise right now.
Yeah, and somehow the FDA is keeping those pills out of Europe, Japan and many other countries by sheer force of greed, I suppose.
Apparently there's air in space (not only can he breath in space, he can also swim, and the smoke and explosions behave like in an atmosphere, not like in vacuum; I could nitpick about the sounds, but that's just a cinematic convention, not an error per se). Except for the meteorites (if there was air, it would cause drag to the meteorites and make them fall to the surface). Pretty inconsistent.
I'm sorry but those things scream "conspiracy theory!" so loudly that it discourages me from watching that "documentary". Even without watching it, I can already tell why it's probably bullshit.
Just the premise is so USA-centric that it gives me nausea, as if the USA was the only developed country in the world. How can the FDA be restricting access to cancer-curing medicine? Does the FDA control the entire world? Is the FDA a multinational evil corporation governing medical practice behind the scenes in all the world?
News flash: The USA is not the only country in the world that is proficient in medicine. Most European countries, Japan and many other developed countries are at least as, if not even more, advanced than the USA. Does the FDA control all of them? What possible reason could there be for the entire world to be hiding a cure that could save millions of lives? Don't make me laugh. If there was indeed a cure for cancer, they would be handling nobel prizes left and right.
(And yes, the "documentary" is probably pretty convincing. Most conspiracy theory "documentaries" are. That doesn't mean it's not bullshit.)
This has been discussed to death, so it's probably not a good idea to go over it again. But in summary, in my personal view, it's not so much about the save data corruption, but about how it's achieved, namely by interrupting the game with the reset button. (The question is whether resetting the console in the middle of saving can be considered legitimate input to the game or whether it's hardware abuse. In most consoles the game cannot disable or hook to the reset button, while in a few games resetting is actually used as a gameplay gimmick, although probably even those games don't survive a random reset unscathed, and are only able to manage it properly if you reset when the game expects it.)
Edit: Forget this post...I just found out the game was taken off of XBLA 4 months ago... =(
Reminds me of what happened to the free Japanese voice pack for Naruto: Rise of a Ninja.
The game in question was published back in 2007, and featured rather sub-par English voice acting. Some time after the publication Ubisoft announced and later published via xbox live marketplace a free pro-quality Japanese voice pack which gave the option to replace all the voices in the game. This patch was hugely popular.
Then, some time in late 2010 (AFAIK) the voice pack was simply removed from xbox live. No announcement, no explanation, nothing. One day it was still there, the next day it wasn't. AFAIK nobody knows why it was removed as Ubisoft or anybody else has never given a reason. (Personally I'm wondering if xbox live downloadable content has some expiration dates which must be renewed, and Ubisoft simply stopped caring about a 4-year old game, but this is just wild guessing.)
Even though it's a free patch, it's still DRM'd like the majority of downloadable content in xbox live. (Anything you download will be tied to your account and can't be used by anybody else.) This means that you can't just download the patch from somebody else and install it in your xbox. It just won't work. (Making it work would require some severe hacking of the system, most probably earning you a lifetime ban from xbox live. AFAIK the patch itself cannot be modified in such way that your xbox will accept it; you have to hack your xbox to make it accept it. Even if it didn't cause a ban, it's still too laborious and risky to start messing with the system.)
Well, guess when I bought a copy of this game (knowing that the Japanese voice pack was available, but not knowing that it was recently removed, as this tidbit isn't very visible anywhere online). And yes, the English voice acting sucks.
So perhaps we could summarize it as (I haven't played the game, only read this thread): A more or less average but good FPS, but definitely a disappointment compared to all the hype?
I voted yes once again. I honestly can't see why this shouldn't be published. It's highly optimized and sweetly short, and clearly entertaining to several people. Personally I think it's more entertaining than many of existing publications, even recent ones (so it really isn't a question of "past mistakes don't justify repeating them"). I still can't help but to compare it to SMB, which isn't all that more entertaining than this (but which I think also deserves its publication).
It's hard to even imagine how you would specify which instruction you want to trap from, and movie file formats would certainly have to change...
From the movie file format point of view, I think the only modification that is needed is that an additional value is stored alongside the reset command: The amount of clock cycles (from the start of that frame) after which the reset signal is issued. (Since emulation is always 100% deterministic, even if in the real console it might not be, this should be completely unambiguous.)
This raises an interesting technical question: Since most, of not all, CPU opcodes take more than one clock cycle to execute (especially with older CPUs, such as those used in the 80's and early 90's), what happens if the reset signal is sent while an opcode is being interpreted by the CPU? Does the CPU immediately drop whatever it was doing and jump to the signal handler, or does it wait for the instruction to be completed before doing so? (Would that even make a difference in practice?)
Not every TAS gets obsoleted - twice - before it's even published (or rejected for that matter; I think if it's rejected, it would probably be a first).
Isn't that contradictory? You like the movie and still vote no?
(For the obtuse: That was a hint that you might want to change your sig to avoid confusion.)
