"What I can't accept is your assertion that my belief is false, when there is in fact no scientific evidence to support either viewpoint." It is trivial to show that god is not here. Just call out and see that there is no answer besides statistical noise. But then the believers say that god somehow works in more mysterious ways. You cannot simply call out, that would be too easy, right? But that is just running away, isn't it? By now the basic stance of most religious people is that god is there where science cannot see. It used to be that gods lived on moutains and in clouds. The problem is of course that science now has a pretty good look of what is around and the only places left for religious people to hide their god is: A) somewhere beyond quantum mechanics B) somewhere outside the big bang/universe C) inside their heads (seems to be your position) These are all places where science has not illuminated stuff and it is here where concepts of god have to be reduced to. Don't count on god smiting you down with lightning from his cloud because we know he is not there and that lightning is a natural phenomenon. God is now mostly a personal experience simply because science cannot read your mind very well and so the concept of your god is safe inside your brain.

Which makes me wonder. How does this tie in with the upcoming policy change at google? I mean, if your google blog gets censored, all google services on that account would be aware of that. Is this new policy change introduced just to ease the work of the censors? It is increasingly becoming clear that google has no other goals than keeping their pockets filled and mottos like "Do no evil" become meaningless flutter.

"So some fucking cunt can harass fellow photographers over a fucking picture most people won't even see?" Did you even read the story or the judgement? It's about one company making a photoshop. Then another wants to use it for their own brand but doesn't want to pay licensing fees. Then this second companie goes on to make a somewhat different photoshop that looks a lot like the original just to circumvent paying these fees. The story has very little to do with everyday fellow photographers. And it is, in fact, not about photographs. It is about photoshops and companies using them.

Here is an interesting quote from AMD's head of GPU developer relations, Richard Huddy :

'It's funny,' says AMD's worldwide developer relations manager of its GPU division, Richard Huddy. 'We often have at least ten times as much horsepower as an Xbox 360 or a PS3 in a high-end graphics card, yet it's very clear that the games don't look ten times as good. To a significant extent, that's because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad - mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way.' Huddy says that one of the most common requests he gets from game developers is: 'Make the API go away.' 'I certainly hear this in my conversations with games developers,' he says, 'and I guess it was actually the primary appeal of Larrabee to developers – not the hardware, which was hot and slow and unimpressive, but the software – being able to have total control over the machine, which is what the very best games developers want. By giving you access to the hardware at the very low level, you give games developers a chance to innovate, and that's going to put pressure on Microsoft – no doubt at all.'

Also, the rest of the article explains most of the things that suck about D3D.
Note the last sentence, according to him D3D does damage to innovation. So your comment about microsoft providing functionality as demand rises is nonsense. There is demand, yet no solution from microsoft.

"On the way out, so it's being replaced by....what? Don't pretty much all best selling PC/Xbox games use DirectX?"

On the way out as in game devs dedicating more time to circumvent D3D to achieve new types of visuals.

"Never mind efficiency; MS is efficient, and would provide missing functionality if there's a market demand for it."

dictating a standard != providing missing functionality
And microsoft is not a nimble little fairy that magically implements everything gamedevs ever wanted and more, lol.

Besides, it's not about providing missing functionality.
It's about their 3D framework being designed for old graphics hardware and system specs at the core.
nVidia and AMD have to keep implementing stupid and ridiculous stuff in their drivers to satisfy direct3d while at the same time d3d prevents the full use of modern gpu architecture.
That is why we have stuff like CUDA that sidestep the graphics pipeline alltogether and use the GPU in a different way.
I mean, you could not do a real time ray tracing thing with D3D, but the GPU wouldn't mind chewing on those calculations.
It simply is a very limited api if you care to look at what the hardware is capable of.
You can only do games efficiently if they look like D3D

And they know it to.
You mention xbox, but on that platform (as on any other console) it becomes essential to circumvent provided apis as much as possible to be able to deliver new experiences. It is impossible to talk to the hadware directly without going through a mile of abstraction layer in D3D.
If people would purely use D3D on the 360 then we would see games with worse graphics than a 5 year old pc game.
That's because 5 years ago pc hardware was about as powerfull as that of an 360.
Surprise surprise, the 360 does way cooler things now graphically than pc games did 5 years ago.
Why?
Because on the pc it's totaly impractical to optimize around D3D (unless you use newer versions of opengl, and even then).
And that is why pc games look way crappier running on a pc then on similar hardware but on consoles.

"Also, DirectX targets the GPU, as I understand it. Games say `needs DirectX 10` or whatever and you get a graphics card with a GPU which also supports it, so I'm not sure what you mean."

Because a cards driver can process D3D things doesn't mean it is limited to D3D or that D3D can realize everything the hardware is capable of.
The cards do not process D3D directly, the driver translates D3D to more native commands.
Problem is, of course, that the native commands in the driver change depending on the GPU architecture.
So the only real use for D3D is hardware abstraction.
But i think they have taken it too far and now they are dictating what a card should be capable of instead of providing a real interface to the cards capabilities.

"DirectX rules the gaming world, and doesn't need to add `vital features` as it already has them."

Direct3d is on the way out.
The platform is not designed to keep up with the flexibility of modern gpu designs and the increased bandwith between gpu and cpu.
There are bits of directx that put gigantic overhead on doing things in other ways than dictated by direct3d.

Very little effort is put into making it future-proof and directx already cannot expose more than 15% (guestimate, in reality propably lower) of a modern GPU's capabilities.
That's right, pc gamers have been pissing their moneys away because directx wants things done in a certain way.
GPU these days are pretty potent calculators and the directx api is severily limiting what you can do with that power.
A direct3d game cannot efficiently do things that directx cannot do, even if the card or the drivers can do much much more fancy things.
It's inefficient bloaty overly complex crapware that manages to produce some compatibility.
But that means the high end suffers for being limited.

I'm pretty sure it was just a logic burp...
It happens from time to time.

"Easier than you think."

In fact, much harder than YOU think, apparently.
The above article states the issue as a volume problem, which is not the case.
It is in fact a loudness problem, which is the perception of volume or the energy present in the signal.
And the problem with this energy is that we can artificially enhance it by using clever loudness optimization algorithms without affecting the amplitude.
This effectively means that for the same volume (amplitude) you get more loudness (energy).
So althou the commercials are peaking at the same amplitude as normal material they sound a lot louder.
(that besides the practice of just running the commercials at a louder volume than the programs).

Thankfully we can now measure the perceived loudness of a programme and adjust the volume accordingly.
And with laws backing this up tv audio will be a little better again.

Nah,. i say let him make his own internets.

First post1!!! ...

Sorry, i just wanted to participate..
I hope i won't get censored for this...

"I bought a 560 Ti just a month ago and now this? FFFFFFfffffffffff..."

Don't worry.
There won't be games that will use you cards full power for at least 2 or 3 years.
Current game developers produce art that fits the consoles and PC gamers are stuck with sub-par graphics that run great on 2 year old hardware.

It may be expanding, but does the entopy increase?

"His deep insight that true chaos devolves from ordered deterministic processes (e.g. cellular automatia) across all of nature is nothing short of astounding."

Then i must be at least as much a genius as he is since this was the first thought i had when i saw CA's for the first time as a teenager...
In fact, my thought was that CA's can cover the whole spectrum between order and chaos and chaos was nothing more than very complicated order.

You're incorrect.
It would be a collection of muscle cells.
Meat is something different.
Meat is those cells but then trained for years, drenched in the animals blood, supplemented with the animals fat.
Meat is a combination of the cells with other factors and grown in a very specific environment (hint: not a petri dish).

I've seen a program about this some months ago on the dutch telly.
The main problem, the scientists claimed, was that it doesn't taste like meat.
They are now in a process of trying tomake the cells do a work-out.
This involves electrical stimulation of the tissue.
A problem with this is that it costs energy and still does not make 'meat'.
Another problem is texture.
The cells do not arrange themselfs into muscle fibers by themselfs.
All they have now is these gelatinous plaques of cells.

So this is nothing like the thing we know as meat.
It is just part of meat, but misses most of the noticeable properties.

That's not a good description of the pancake flipping problem.
The pancakes are not numbered, they can be in either of 2 states, 0 or 1.
So you have a stack like this: [0,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]

You can sort a stack of n pancakes in at most n times by fliping the stack (starting with the top on) so that its state matches the next one, then include the next one in the stack.

So you get:
  [0,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
  [1,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
  [1,1,1,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]*
  [0,0,0,0,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
  [1,1,1,1,1,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,1,1,0,1,0,0]
  [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,0]
  [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,1,0,0]*
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,1,0,0]
  [1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0]
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]
  [0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0]*

If you are alowed to peek at the states of the remaining pancakes without flipping you can leave out the flips with an asterisk.