Admiral Regulus

I'm in a hotel room right now, so the bed is on the wall away from the window. There isn't much of a choice here, because the air conditioner needs to be by the window anyway.

As a Florida resident:

Why do Virginia and the Carolinas get to have all the fun? Hurricanes are supposed to be ours; come on, send us some too! We're waiting!

I feel like I need more coffee.

4 minutes ago, Passion said:

I will give you more or less the same answer real Discord would give you, feel free to read in John de Lancie's voice: "I could... but where's the fun in that?"

This is the best answer. It's not in Discord's interest to solve everyone's problems.

lead

Bean

Real

Mill

It's a bit late in the day for me, and not much has happened so far.

Perhaps tomorrow will be more interesting.

Unicorn, Smile, Vault Suit (That's what it looks like, anyway)

I should create an animation studio and hire a LGBT black girl and someone's grandma from Puerto Rico. Then I can claim to run the most diverse studio in the world.

I don't know much about making cartoons, but with such a diverse team, I'm sure nothing could go wrong.

I find this to be a question more of philosophy than physics.

I am neither convinced there is a multiverse, nor am I convinced the universe is infinite. What we do know, however, is that it's almost exactly "flat," and it's expanding from what was once a single point. That's pretty much it.

In the kitchen, sitting at the bar with my phone while I watch potatoes boil on the stove.

"Oh. That's good."

On 8/22/2018 at 4:08 PM, Celli said:

I just wanna say for anyone with pascal, don't bother with the 20 series, it is not worth the upgrade.

This is almost always true. We're getting to the point where each generation is only a slight improvement over the last. It doesn't make sense to be upgrading a GPU every year.

It's best to buy a high end card, and then keep it for several generations. If you're running a 980ti, you still have roughly 70% of the performance of a 1080ti, and the 980ti is more than three years old. With the 2000 series being what it is, a 980ti is going to be close enough in performance for a few more years still.

As a PC hardware nerd, I can pretty confidently say Nintendo has been behind for at least a decade or two. There's no question.

But that's just what they do. They're neither a cutting-edge hardware company like Sony, nor a cutting-edge software company like Microsoft. Nintendo is really their own thing. It's probably true that Nintendo won't present the first console to feature true 4K 60 FPS gaming, real-time ray tracing, high-resolution VR, or anything else that I'd like to see. But that's clearly not their goal.

Nintendo is Nintendo, and they're not really behind because they're not really even in the race at all.

If I don't have anything to do in the morning, I'll stay in bed for a little while and check my phone to see if I have any new messages or emails. Once I'm done with that, I move to the kitchen and grab a mug of coffee. I'll get something light for breakfast, like a cup of yogurt or a bag of chips. Then I sit down in a comfy chair in the living room, and I'll browse reddit and forums for a little while to read any news or interesting discussions. Once that gets boring or my coffee cup gets empty, I migrate over somewhere else for the day.

If I have something to do in the morning, I'm getting out of bed ASAP and dumping my coffee into a thermos. I then look for some nice clothes to wear, grab a snack, brush my teeth, and spend 20 or so minutes tring to fix the awful mess that is my bed head every morning. Then I'll grab my phone, wallet, and keys, only to turn around at the door when I realize that I need to go back to revisit the bathroom. And then, usually, I'm ready to leave after that.

wean

Not in the woods, but it did happen in the middle of the ocean once. I jumped out of the boat and did my business in the water. The details of the story may be a bit too graphic to post here.

33 minutes ago, Totally An Admirer said:

If you apply this probability to whole universe you'll still get millions of planet with intelligent life, if not more.

Not necessarily. It's a lot more complicated than that.

My post was intended to illustrate just how long it took multi-cellular life to evolve. Life on Earth arose rather quickly (indicating it is a probable event), but it took a very long time for complex life forms to start to appear. I would wager a guess that this is an exceptionally rare event.

Look at this another way: we have found that microbial life can survive in the vacuum of space, and even the sterilization processes we use on our equipment going into space. While we have very strict requirements for conditions we find habitable, we're continuing to find that there are are microbes that can live pretty much anywhere.

The same ratios for development of life on Earth don't necessarily apply to other bodies. It may be something like an exponential curve, where increasing complexity becomes exponentially less common throughout the universe, due to the requirements for development.

My prediction is that, within the next 30-50 years, we will find aliens on Mars, Titan, Enceladus, or Europa. But they won't be like we think. They'll be microscopic single-cell organisms, perhaps similar to the prokaryotic or eukaryotic lifeforms that existed on Earth for more than a billion years.

---

Just to put this into perspective, the Earth has existed for 4500 million years thus far. The earliest evidence of life dates back to 4100 million years ago, so life has existed on Earth for at least 91% of its history. In contrast, the first multi-celled organism didn't appear until just 600 million years ago--a time when the Earth was 3900 million years old. Multi-celled organisms have existed on Earth for only 13% of Earth's history. Intelligent live has existed for such a short time that it's pretty much negligible.

So, here's what this means. If aliens were to come to Earth at any time in Earth's current history, this is the breakdown of the probabilities:

• No life - 9%
• Single cell life only - 78%
• Single cell and multi-cell life - 13%
• Intelligent multi-cell life - 0.01% (maybe)

Not really. I'm more of a science guy.

TPAM's battery is less than 50 percent charged.

Look at my avatar, and you can probably take a guess.

1 hour ago, Denim&Venom said:

This is what happens when you don't use a BlackBerry OS.  

This problem is hardly specific to Android. In some ways, this is really just common sense.

If you're not paying for it, and it's not an open-source project, then you can safely assume that you're paying for it with access to your personal information. That's why Windows 10 was a free upgrade. That's why most of Google's services are free. It's the same story with Facebook and so many other things. Amazon's Alexa ranks pretty high on the list, too.

The point is, if this wasn't true, then we would have far fewer free apps on Google Play. And it's kind of silly to think that switching to another OS is going to grant you immunity to being tracked. There are precautions we can all take, but it's pretty much futile to completely avoid having data collected on you.

I use Android, but some of the things I do to mitigate this are:

• I download as few apps as possible. I don't bother with free games. If a website suggests that I download their app, I decline the offer and use the web browser instead.
• I use open source apps wherever possible. For instance, I use Firefox as my mobile web browser, and QKSMS as my messaging client. 
• I use the system default apps that come with the phone, if they don't suck. For instance, Samsung and Google both have their own apps for viewing photos and listening to music, but I avoid using the Google apps unless it's necessary.
• If an app asks for permissions that don't seem necessary, I'll uninstall it and look for an alternative.

Oh god no. Things like this drive me up the wall.

What's more likely, really? Human brains are imperfect and memories can contain errors, or we grew up in an alternate universe from the one we exist in now? There's a simple answer to this phenomenon, and a--quite frankly--ridiculous one.