They get away with that because they claim their might be weapons or othe rthings physically dangerous. Which is a complete crock, but there you go. It's the same reason the police can search you without a warrant when they arrest you...you might have a gun.
With cell phones, however, we see what's really going on.
But on the other hand, these kids can stop using their phones during class or turn them off and that might be the conclusion if that school doesn't get a way to monitor the traffic, because most likely they feel out of control of the things going on in that school and want to get back a hold on the problem.
Erm, you didn't actually read the article. No one said anything about 'monitoring' cell phones, which, incidentally, would be illegal for anyone to do without a warrant. We're talking about searching cell phones.
And no school or even college allows the operatation of cell phones during class. Not even, in theory, to send text messages. No one has a problem with that. Cell phone use should be restricted to out of class times, and it would be fine to restrict it to breaks only or even before/after school. No one has any constitutional problem with restrictions on cell phones, although for safety reasons students should be allowed to have them outside of the school day, at the very least.
The problem is that this school feels they can search cell phones that happen to be on campus. Not 'used during class', not even 'in use', merely located on campus. And by 'search', we mean 'Go through the memory of', not 'flip open to see if something is sitting inside it', FYI.
The previous excuses for searching lockers and bookbags were 'weapons and drugs'. You rather obviously can't have a weapon or drugs stored inside your cell phone. Even if they are searching for evidence of drugs, the original searches were allowed, with a warrant, under 'safety'...it's the same reason a cop can search you when you're arrested...drugs physically located at schools are dangerous, in theory, so they claimed, so they can search for them.
Well, this really shows what the whole motivation for that thing was about.
Then after their standard of living is raised to an "acceptable" level, it's okay to start wasting money on arms and military? Or should these countries never be allowed to play in the world arms game at all? Is the game limited to a fixed number of players? They came late so they can't play? Do the rules say only civilized players can test weapons?
Well, assuming by 'waste money' you mean 'Spends more than needed to keep the country from getting invaded', the rules are:
If there are people hungry, you don't get to waste money on the military.
If there are people homeless, you don't get to waste money on the military.
If there are people without medical care, you don't get to waste money on the military.
If there are people who can't safely walk down their street, you don't get to waste money on the military.
It's not spirituality that's killed anyone, or even faith in God. It's blind faith in humans that say they know what God wants.
No one should ever listen to anyone who says they know what God wants.
Which, in the end, is why I have to go with Jesus on this whole 'religion' thing. Read what he said, and you'll notice he wanted you to do two things: Love God, and love everyone else. That's it, those are the only things you should do in the name of his religion or even not do in the name of his religion.
Yes, Christianity ended up with a lot of trappings of Judaism and Roman pagan stuff, and Paul was pretty wacked in the head on some stuff. But it's not Paulianity or Judairomanchristianity. Don't confuse the message with the way the message was presented 2000 years ago.
Every single thing Jesus said boils down to 'love everyone, including God'. He doesn't say to follow anyone on earth, he has some things that would be useful, like 'feeding widows' and 'don't pretend to be pious and lord it over people', but he's pretty clear this should follow logically from 'loving everyone', and they aren't 'rules'. Any action is okay as long as it is based in love of everyone, or at least not based in hate or jealous or an opposite of love.
But, like I said, don't believe me. Read his words, the ones that managed to make through the distortion of the sect wars in the early church. Everything else about Christianity is just tacked on garbage. Especially anything Paul wrote about sex.(1)
And, yeah, I know it's a bit odd to say 'Don't ever listen to anything anyone says God wants you to do' and then say 'But here, listen to what this guy said God wanted you to do'. That is what you call 'faith'.
And I've got no problem if someone wants to love everyone as themselves for some other reason, or even no reason at all, or want to called God 'Allah' or 'humanity' or 'nature'.
1) Why did I single Paul out? Because he was writing to Romans who would attend church on Sunday and then go to an orgy dedicated to a Roman God on Monday, and people like to translate the word he used that means 'sexual immorality' as 'fornication', which it often is a metaphor for worshipping idols, or even worshipping idols via sex, so a lot of his condemnations seem a lot broader than they actually are. Also, he disliked sex in general and was apparently afraid of women with any power, neither of which have anything to do with anything Jesus said.
Hearing about 'hell' has made me consider 'What would be the most just afterlife?', and I think I've figured it out. It would be living your life from everyone else's point of view.
You get to be every other person you interacted with, for better or worse. If you left them a little better off, you get a little better off. If you broke up with them in a callous way, well, you get to experience that from the other side. And I mean everyone, if you caused the death of someone, you not only get to experience that, you get to be all their relatives and everyone who has to deal with their death. Etc etc.
Of course, you can take this to the next level and assert that isn't an 'afterlife'...that you are, in real time, everyone. That there is only one person who is operating billions of bodies at once.
So some people look at the evidence available to them and conclude that God probably exists, while others such as yourself conclude that He probably does not exist.
You know, it's not so much the existence of God. It's the fact people have chosen specific sets of rules and pretend they are some sort of moral code. (Often these rules don't match their own behavior, and their own religious texts don't seem to support what they are saying, while condemning thing they seem to have no problem with doing.)
Atheists being pissed has nothing to do with belief in any supernatural entity, it's the 'What you are doing is wrong.' when applied to behavior that doesn't appear to harm anyone.
Think about it. Pretend that a large portion of the population held a belief you thought was absurd, like a flat earth. Do you have a problem with it? Well, not, it's dumb, but really not important.
Now pretend those people had control of the government and were influencing foreign policy based on the concept the world is flat.
Of course, traffic tunnels are order of magnitude wider than subway tunnels, too, so the blast has a lot easier time getting out the ends.
Seriously, anyone who thinks you can set a blast inside a tunnel drilled through rock and collapse it is delusional. That's how they built the damn tunnel, and, trust me, they use a lot more exposives than you will be able to fit in a truck, and carefully placed them into drilled holes, not just out in the open.
You can't blow up rock by standing near it holding a bomb when the blast can just wander off whereever.(1)
A much better plan would be to attack from the top, where you could rely on the water to hold the blast in a little. That, however, requires a lot more work, and has the disadvantage that now you have mud buffering the whole thing.
1) If you don't believe me...got any fireworks left? Not the rocket key, just a 'llight and toss' one? Drink two cans of soda, set one upside down and light a firework on that, and back off. Now set the other can right side up and put a lit firework inside it, and run like hell.
The first can might not even be crumpled, the second can probably won't even been in one piece.
I didn't mean to imply that POSIX was a useful standard in the long run. If you were writting a very simple program, you could use it, but anything bigger and you'd either run into compatibility issues, or, more likely, wander off POSIX altogether, where, yeah, ironically you often had more compatiblity. It was, however, until MS removed it, possible to write a single somewhat complicated program that you could compile on any Unix and even Win NT, or at least port trivially between them with a few #ifdefs.(1)
I was just pointing out what's happened before when the government has 'required' an open standard...people have purchased things that in theory conform to it, and then not actually used it. Unless all (new) documents are required to be ODF format, we'll see exactly the same thing...people using and trading doc files, but it will be okay because the software purchased was 'ODF capable'.
1) Nowdays, all Unix compatiblity is done via people writing to somewhat fictional library standard, and then autoconf putting in missing functions, or wrapping functions, or including the right libs, that the root libc doesn't support. Which is a much more useful way to do things but not, I suppose, any sort of standard. Although you could make it one by defining a big list of all the functions and parameters you can use in writing a program, and then say 'either the OS's libc have these functions for use, or there should be a auto configuration utility we can use to do that'. Which is what we have now, although it's de facto list instead of de jure.
It is quite possible to hold deep respect for someone but fail to display it adequately
No, it's possible for you to hold someone in respect but for them not to notice it, because society has conditioned them to look for the appearance of respect instead of actual respect.
As for military salutes, those don't have anything to do with respect for the people being saluted. They are to remind everyone of the chain of command and keep up disipline, both of which the military relies on. While I think most 'artifical' indications of respect are stupid, the military has specific different needs, and the whole thing there is a continual reaffirmment of following orders and regulations.
And nothing that's manditory can ever be an indication of respect, period, except maybe doing it can be an indication of at least some respect for the rules. It can't be an indication of respect of any specific person, that concept doesn't even make any sense.
As for the business world, who respects their boss more: Someone who wears exactly the right clothes, following both the formal and informal dress code, who says 'yes sir' to everything, and then goes and does whatever they want or at least as far as they can twist their instructions to cover, or someone who grudingly wears a suit that mostly fits within the dress code, doesn't say 'sir', but actually does whatever their boss suggests and what they think their boss would want when they don't have specific instructions?
And who has more respect: Someone who hand-writes thank you cards for Christmas cards, or someone who, if you were to show up at their house bleeding from a gunshot at four in the morning and ask to borrow their car, two changes of clothes, their credit card, their cell phone, and their handgun for three days for a reason you can't explain, and not to tell anyone, would let you?
The first person shows respect in their trivial actions, but don't actually have any respect. The latter shows respect by their important actions, because they respect the person and the decisions they make, and make the assumption there is a good reason behind them.
Your average Government worker will be trained in this and follow the procedure in a totally mindless fashion.
Or it will be like the POSIX fiasco. At a certain point in history, government purchased opererating systems were required to support POSIX, which is an actual independent standard that various Unixes created after Unix fragmented. The theory was, you could write to POSIX, and your stuff would compile on any Unix, which generally works in practice. So MS tacked some POSIX support onto Windows NT.
Of course, no one actually wrote any programs that used POSIX. The government would purchase NT boxes and write Win32 programs, not POSIX ones. They were just required to purchase POSIX operating systems, not actually use POSIX.
Likewise, I'm imagine the government require programs that support ODF, but everyone uses the Word format to save and transport files, thus completely defeating the purpose.
Oh, and before anyone says 'But that's much harsher than the crime!'...um, duh. You kidnap someone for two days, you don't get two days in jail. You steal 17 dollars in mugging, you don't get a 17 dollar fine. In both those cases, you'll be 'paying' more than ten times your crime, and maybe even a hundred or a thousand times your crime. Just having to pay back what you took, or close to it, would just mean you're back when you started and there's no incentive not to do it.
You steal, say, more than twenty million dollars...well....we take it all.
And, in actual fact, I suspect such people wouldn't spend a single day on the street. Rich people have rich friends who will be able to spare a house or two for the criminal to live in while trying to get him some new cushy CEO position. It's more the principle of the thing.
Three words for these fuckers: Financial Death Penalty.
Take every single goddamn dime away from them. Everything they own, period. Including assets in other countries, jail them until they turn them over. Everything single thing they own, everything their spouse owns, everything their minor kids own. (We, however, will give the kid's stuff back when they hit 18.)
And just like a divorce, if it looks like did something to try to keep something afterwards, like selling your car for 'one dollar and other considerations' to a friend or putting the deed to your house in the name of your 16 year-old son...no. We grab that too.
We'll let them stick, say, a thousand dollars worth of family heirlooms and photo albums and paintings their kids did in storage and they can buy them back if they ever get enough money, and the rest goes to auction. (Most of the actual personal stuff like photographs is technically valueless, so they should be able to buy all their memories back for 20 bucks or so, before anyone whines about that.)
And then, of course, we aren't completely heartless. We'll give them one of those 'out of prison' outfits and fifty bucks, just like anyone walking out prison gets.
And before anyone says 'What about the children?', there are plenty of poor children in this country. They can always apply for food stamps. Any proposed consideration shown to those kids better apply to kids born to families with almost nothing, or you subconsciously think rich kids 'deserve' more.
Many games give the protagonist few "hit points" and work just fine: Thief, Metal Gear, Pac Man, just about every other adventure game ever made... Not every game is a run and gun smash-a-thon.
Yes, which is why I'm glad adventure games have caught up to the concept.
I'm thinking specifically of adventure games where a single guard would cause you to spend twenty minutes trying to avoid them, like Space Quest did at some point I can't exactly recall. Instead of giving you the option to take them out. Compare to, say, Metal Gear Solid.
Adventure games are about finding creative solutions to problems. Hitting a guy in the face is not a creative solution. There are few better adventure games than The Longest Journey (opinion), but there are many better face hitting games than Dreamfall (fact).
And sometimes the obvious solution is to hit the person a little. Think the very start of Dreamfall, where you're rescuing what's-her-name, that scientist.
Talking about 'creative solutions' reminds of games where you had the 'problem' of getting past a two foot high fence, which was only a 'problem' because the game mechanics said so. Limiting options does not make something 'creative'.
And what does that add to the game? Time? Busywork? Certainly not challenge or depth. Wouldn't you rather have seen an expertly choreographed cut scene instead of watching 2 mannequins use pushbutton kung-fu grip action? The fights are bad, not hard. That's. What. I'm. Talking. About.
No, that then goes to the 'Do you want to be out of control?', and, hilariously, I had the exact opposite discussion a few weeks ago.
I like the fact they don't take away your control for a cutscreen, and I've seen arguments that any cutscenes are jarring and take you out of the game, that you should always be in control of the character.
However, I wouldn't have a problem with them doing it as cutscenes.
Did you play the original, The Longest Journey? Do you think TLJ and Dreamfall were designed for the same audience? I know you consider the combat to be a conquerable obstacle, but do you like it or just tolerate it?
Yes, I did play TLJ, and yes, I do think it's for basically the same people. And I just tolerate the actual act. I just love the fact it's an option.
I disagree. Combat has been done many ways in adventure games - some good, some bad. Monkey Island's swordfighting was awesome because you won by learning to best your opponent in an insult contest, and you HAD to lose several times to learn the rules. This scheme worked in context and was original. Dreamfall doesn't make sense in this respect. The protagonist is a black belt, yet she has 2 moves and she does them both poorly. Not every story's protagonist has to be Rambo. Horror movies are suspenseful because the heroes are overpowered and in constant danger.
Dreamfall's fighting looks lame, admitted, especially when compared to the rest of the game. If your problem is with the implimentation of the fighting, I'm with you there.
I got about 8 hours into Dreamfall, the sequel to The Longest Journey, and I can't stomach another second. They made it a 3D dual analog game with Shaq-Fu fighting sequences. The story is still solid and so far there have been some satisfying and intriguing continuations of old characters' stories, but the control scheme is a nightmare.
What. The. Hell. Are. You. Talking. About?
The 'fights' in Dreamfall consist of repeatedly hitting buttons for twenty seconds. I suck at fighting games, and yet I was able to win every single fight the first time, except the fairly hard 'how to fight' fight that you don't have to actually win. (Luckily, everyone you control in a fight is actually a skilled fighter, and I don't think that's an accident.)
And I don't know what you mean by '3D dual analog game with Shaq-Fu fighting sequences'. I don't have a joystick, and I did fine.
I'll admit the fights didn't belong, but you're talking about maybe six instances of twenty seconds of random button pushing. They were so short I didn't even learn the controls for kick and punch and whatnot.
I actually kinda like that the game actually gives the option for violence, as opposed to TLJ. The idea that the second the enemy attacks you you're dead in an adventure game is kinda lame. Kick them in the face and keep going.
Um, please don't look at Broken Sword 3. The UI in that sucked balls, precisely because they aimed it at consoles. (I have to give them props, the physical challenges, like climbing along ledges and jumping, were done exactly how they should be done in an adventure game, via logic instead of pushing buttons at exactly the right time, barring a few fight scenes where they gave you no time at all to push buttons. And those crate puzzle made me go on a murderous rampage and kill four people.)
Look at, instead, The Longest Journey 2 or something. I can't even remember the UI of that, it was so good.
And, whatever you do, if you're doing real 3D, use fixed cameras and pay a lot of attention to where you switch between them. Look carefully at each transition area and ask yourself if you need another camera view there. Make sure that no one will ever even have a reason to attempt to do something in an area they can't see.
And don't put important things where the player can't see them, like a door between the character and the player, thus making it offscreen, that the character could clearly see but the player has no idea it's there until they wander 'towards the screen' far enough to switch cameras. If the design really requires that, consider a 'pan' when the character enters the room...just four seconds of video showing what the room actually looks like is very helpful. Or just switch cameras near the middle point of the screen, instead of having a single view that only switches when they walk up to each 'edge', because that's a really good way to miss things that are downstage.
If you want an example of how to put a "compelling story" complete with voice acting and "movie quality" action, then you have to go to Metal Gear Solid. The first one.
And if you want a confusing story that no one understands, you have to go to the second one.;)
No, seriously, the Metal Gear Solid series rocks. It's an almost perfect example of how to integrat a story into an action game. (Whether or not that story makes any actual sense is another matter.)
Of course, the greatest and simplest story in an action game has to be Half-Life.
That example is idiotic. Political parties operate as trusts, a oligopoly, like Coke and Pepsi. They compete with each other, but operate in collusion to keep competors out. Real competetion doesn't work like that.
Let's say you own a gas station, and have a regular customer who comes in to buy all sorts of things, including some food. One day they want a gas siphon, and you don't have one. Well, the Walmart has one, as does the hardware store, and they're both roughly the same distance. Which do you send them to?
The hardware store, because Walmart competes with you. Even non-Supercenter Walmarts have more food than a gas station, whereas the hardware store doesn't.
Gas stations don't say 'Man, I wished me and Walmart were the only stores that existed', that's flatly idiotic, because Walmart will beat them for every single thing (except gas). Likewise, hamburger places don't say 'Man, I wish every place sold hamburgers and there were no places that didn't'.
I'm sure the NSA has all sort of plans, but you'll note that the plan that was first invented 'AT&T builds the building' ending up not being the plan, instead if being 'AT&T provides a bunch of taps'.
Considering they thought of and implimented that second plan in seven months, I don't know why we'd assume they couldn't think of the first plan in one month, at least some sort of rough sketch of it. It's a pretty basic plan, 'Build an identical building to the one you guys already built, but let us have it.'.
And I'm honestly not sure under who's administration the idea was thought of matters. Like I said, the NSA probably has all sort of plans laying around, and it's not like this one was partically hard to think of: Hey, to spy on domestic phone calls, let's ask the phone company to do it. Not exactly rocket science there.
Our government has all sorts of plans drawn up. There are people in every agency to sit down and write out the craziest and most absurd plan imaginable. That doesn't mean that the people in charge are responsible, or even know about the plans. Clinton almost certainly didn't go to the NSA and say 'Come up with a way to spy on domestic phone calls'.
Bush implimented it, as soon as he got into office. I'm sorry, presidents on the way out the door don't set up spying programs with constitional questions, and that sort of thing would be the very first thing an incoming president would learn about. Bush said 'go'. That's the important point.
He probably neither knows nor cares if it was an existing plan, he said 'spy on domestic calls', and the NSA either whipped up a plan really quickly, or pulled out this vaguely defined 'plan' to ask the phone company to do it. Whether or not there was some file sitting in a drawer somewhere that said 'To spy on domestic call, I propose we ask the phone company for help' is unknown and unimportant.
And, frankly, this administration has lied so often about this program I wouldn't trust them to admit the NSA existed.
Unless you, oh, write XHTML with a correct xml header, or use the short form of the HTML 4 doctype, or all sorts of things that makes IE decide it's in quirks mode, thus wasting large amounts of everyone's time cause it doesn't, in fact, tell you this.
But you're right, I wasn't talking about the 'lets count the margins in the width' actual 'box model' bug. I was talking about all the inane CSS box weirdness like the 3 pixel thing and flipflop of dotted and dashed borders.
You haven't even LOOKED at it, have you?
No, because I'm a web developer, and I can't installed damn uninstallable beta-software if it means I can no longer look at pages in IE6. I'll probably get XP installed in my virtual machines by the end of this week when I have more time. But right now, I've merely been going off the reviews of what people say has been fixed.
If you want to bitch at someone, how about the slashdot editors who didn't provide any list of any sort of bugfixes, instead linking to complete fluff articles? Apparently we're supposed to be willing to download and install MS beta software so we can figure out what's still broken and what isn't so we can comment here. I mean, I'm the first to say 'read the fucking article' before commenting, but 'Download and install the beta software, possibly rendering your machine unusable' before commenting seems a bit excessive. If there had been major bugfixes to rendering, gee, it sure would have been nice that this 'News for Nerds' told us that.(1)
I just went off public statements by MS of the direction of IE7, and reviews of beta 2. If they truely have fixed the actual bugs, of course they should fix the parsing bugs too. I have to suggest fixing the parsing bugs a year before the rendering bugs, and acting like they weren't going to fix the rendering bugs, was a bit of a mistake. (Although this does explain what the hell happened to actually releasing IE7. I mean, beta 2 was almost a year ago, wasn't it?)
And, for the record, there were still, indeed, 'positioning and sizing boxes and cutting off content inside divs' bugs in beta 2.
Further, you know so little about it that you think conditional comments are in CSS.
I don't give a flying fuck about conditional includes. We already went through that whole browser-sniffing shitfeast, which, if I recall correctly, is when these were invented. Not again, especially not with some non-standard MS silliness. I'm sick and tired of half a dozen broken-in-different-ways browsers, and I'm even more tired when all these browsers appear to be MS.
1) I don't know know why I would expect anything from this site, though. The whole 'look at the fluff articles about beta 3' nonsense just confirms my opinion that the editors here are not, in any way, shape, or form, 'nerds'. Actual nerds would post articles about how IE7 will challenge Firefox, or new security or lack thereof in IE7, or how IE7 is going to make things better or worse for 'web developers', not 'Ooo, shiny, draggable tabs', which every actual nerd who's wanted it has had in IE for years via an IE shell. (In fact, actual nerds know that almost nothing useful is ever posted by ZDNet.)
I don't understand what you're talking about. This article doesn't say it was already in place.
There's some confusion, possibly delibrate, going on. In 2000, the NSA starting looking into plans to modernize.
One month after the Bush Administration entered office, the NSA asked AT&T to build some sort of spying rig into its network, called 'Pioneer Groundbreaker'. It didn't say 'Okay, here's what you need to install', it said 'Let's work together to spy on people, what's your suggestion?'.
There's nothing, that happened one month after Bush took office, that would require more than a week of prep to figure out a proposal. That's when AT&T was approached, not when anything happened.
Now, the NSA says this is part of the plans to modernize, but we don't have knowledge that would indicate said plan existed before Bush took office, or that it actually was part of any modernization, or that it's anything but a smokescreen. They fact they call it 'a different component' of the plan is rather telling. A component that was created when Bush took office, perhaps?
Here's the possible timeline that doesn't contradict anything we know:
2000: NSA, like all government agencies, decides it is once again time to modernize. It starts taking bids.
2001, January: Bush takes office.
2001, three days later: Bush asks NSA to spy on domestic calls.(*)
2001, Late January: The NSA decides to do this by getting the support of various telecomm companies. The project is called 'Pioneer Groundbreaker', and will have AT&T to build a network operations center which duplicated AT&T's Bedminster, New Jersey facility, for the NSA. It decides to call this 'modernizing'.(*)
2001, February: The NSA approaches AT&T with the proposal. AT&T says okay, and they start working out the details.
2001, unknown: The plan changes to have the NSA build the facility and AT&T just provide taps.
2001, unknown: This is all actually built.
2001, Sept 11: Terrorists attack.
What order the last three happen in is unknown. Whether the (*) happened under Bush or Clinton is unknown, but don't really make any sense to have happened under Clinton and not approach AT&T until under Bush.
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They get away with that because they claim their might be weapons or othe rthings physically dangerous. Which is a complete crock, but there you go. It's the same reason the police can search you without a warrant when they arrest you...you might have a gun.
With cell phones, however, we see what's really going on.
But on the other hand, these kids can stop using their phones during class or turn them off and that might be the conclusion if that school doesn't get a way to monitor the traffic, because most likely they feel out of control of the things going on in that school and want to get back a hold on the problem.
Erm, you didn't actually read the article. No one said anything about 'monitoring' cell phones, which, incidentally, would be illegal for anyone to do without a warrant. We're talking about searching cell phones.
And no school or even college allows the operatation of cell phones during class. Not even, in theory, to send text messages. No one has a problem with that. Cell phone use should be restricted to out of class times, and it would be fine to restrict it to breaks only or even before/after school. No one has any constitutional problem with restrictions on cell phones, although for safety reasons students should be allowed to have them outside of the school day, at the very least.
The problem is that this school feels they can search cell phones that happen to be on campus. Not 'used during class', not even 'in use', merely located on campus. And by 'search', we mean 'Go through the memory of', not 'flip open to see if something is sitting inside it', FYI.
The previous excuses for searching lockers and bookbags were 'weapons and drugs'. You rather obviously can't have a weapon or drugs stored inside your cell phone. Even if they are searching for evidence of drugs, the original searches were allowed, with a warrant, under 'safety'...it's the same reason a cop can search you when you're arrested...drugs physically located at schools are dangerous, in theory, so they claimed, so they can search for them.
Well, this really shows what the whole motivation for that thing was about.
Then after their standard of living is raised to an "acceptable" level, it's okay to start wasting money on arms and military? Or should these countries never be allowed to play in the world arms game at all? Is the game limited to a fixed number of players? They came late so they can't play? Do the rules say only civilized players can test weapons?
Well, assuming by 'waste money' you mean 'Spends more than needed to keep the country from getting invaded', the rules are:
If there are people hungry, you don't get to waste money on the military.
If there are people homeless, you don't get to waste money on the military.
If there are people without medical care, you don't get to waste money on the military.
If there are people who can't safely walk down their street, you don't get to waste money on the military.
Exactly.
It's not spirituality that's killed anyone, or even faith in God. It's blind faith in humans that say they know what God wants.
No one should ever listen to anyone who says they know what God wants.
Which, in the end, is why I have to go with Jesus on this whole 'religion' thing. Read what he said, and you'll notice he wanted you to do two things: Love God, and love everyone else. That's it, those are the only things you should do in the name of his religion or even not do in the name of his religion.
Yes, Christianity ended up with a lot of trappings of Judaism and Roman pagan stuff, and Paul was pretty wacked in the head on some stuff. But it's not Paulianity or Judairomanchristianity. Don't confuse the message with the way the message was presented 2000 years ago.
Every single thing Jesus said boils down to 'love everyone, including God'. He doesn't say to follow anyone on earth, he has some things that would be useful, like 'feeding widows' and 'don't pretend to be pious and lord it over people', but he's pretty clear this should follow logically from 'loving everyone', and they aren't 'rules'. Any action is okay as long as it is based in love of everyone, or at least not based in hate or jealous or an opposite of love.
But, like I said, don't believe me. Read his words, the ones that managed to make through the distortion of the sect wars in the early church. Everything else about Christianity is just tacked on garbage. Especially anything Paul wrote about sex.(1)
And, yeah, I know it's a bit odd to say 'Don't ever listen to anything anyone says God wants you to do' and then say 'But here, listen to what this guy said God wanted you to do'. That is what you call 'faith'.
And I've got no problem if someone wants to love everyone as themselves for some other reason, or even no reason at all, or want to called God 'Allah' or 'humanity' or 'nature'.
1) Why did I single Paul out? Because he was writing to Romans who would attend church on Sunday and then go to an orgy dedicated to a Roman God on Monday, and people like to translate the word he used that means 'sexual immorality' as 'fornication', which it often is a metaphor for worshipping idols, or even worshipping idols via sex, so a lot of his condemnations seem a lot broader than they actually are. Also, he disliked sex in general and was apparently afraid of women with any power, neither of which have anything to do with anything Jesus said.
Hearing about 'hell' has made me consider 'What would be the most just afterlife?', and I think I've figured it out. It would be living your life from everyone else's point of view.
You get to be every other person you interacted with, for better or worse. If you left them a little better off, you get a little better off. If you broke up with them in a callous way, well, you get to experience that from the other side. And I mean everyone, if you caused the death of someone, you not only get to experience that, you get to be all their relatives and everyone who has to deal with their death. Etc etc.
Of course, you can take this to the next level and assert that isn't an 'afterlife'...that you are, in real time, everyone. That there is only one person who is operating billions of bodies at once.
So some people look at the evidence available to them and conclude that God probably exists, while others such as yourself conclude that He probably does not exist.
You know, it's not so much the existence of God. It's the fact people have chosen specific sets of rules and pretend they are some sort of moral code. (Often these rules don't match their own behavior, and their own religious texts don't seem to support what they are saying, while condemning thing they seem to have no problem with doing.)
Atheists being pissed has nothing to do with belief in any supernatural entity, it's the 'What you are doing is wrong.' when applied to behavior that doesn't appear to harm anyone.
Think about it. Pretend that a large portion of the population held a belief you thought was absurd, like a flat earth. Do you have a problem with it? Well, not, it's dumb, but really not important.
Now pretend those people had control of the government and were influencing foreign policy based on the concept the world is flat.
If you're not a troll, you're a sociopath.
Of course, traffic tunnels are order of magnitude wider than subway tunnels, too, so the blast has a lot easier time getting out the ends.
Seriously, anyone who thinks you can set a blast inside a tunnel drilled through rock and collapse it is delusional. That's how they built the damn tunnel, and, trust me, they use a lot more exposives than you will be able to fit in a truck, and carefully placed them into drilled holes, not just out in the open.
You can't blow up rock by standing near it holding a bomb when the blast can just wander off whereever.(1)
A much better plan would be to attack from the top, where you could rely on the water to hold the blast in a little. That, however, requires a lot more work, and has the disadvantage that now you have mud buffering the whole thing.
1) If you don't believe me...got any fireworks left? Not the rocket key, just a 'llight and toss' one? Drink two cans of soda, set one upside down and light a firework on that, and back off. Now set the other can right side up and put a lit firework inside it, and run like hell.
The first can might not even be crumpled, the second can probably won't even been in one piece.
I didn't mean to imply that POSIX was a useful standard in the long run. If you were writting a very simple program, you could use it, but anything bigger and you'd either run into compatibility issues, or, more likely, wander off POSIX altogether, where, yeah, ironically you often had more compatiblity. It was, however, until MS removed it, possible to write a single somewhat complicated program that you could compile on any Unix and even Win NT, or at least port trivially between them with a few #ifdefs.(1)
I was just pointing out what's happened before when the government has 'required' an open standard...people have purchased things that in theory conform to it, and then not actually used it. Unless all (new) documents are required to be ODF format, we'll see exactly the same thing...people using and trading doc files, but it will be okay because the software purchased was 'ODF capable'.
1) Nowdays, all Unix compatiblity is done via people writing to somewhat fictional library standard, and then autoconf putting in missing functions, or wrapping functions, or including the right libs, that the root libc doesn't support. Which is a much more useful way to do things but not, I suppose, any sort of standard. Although you could make it one by defining a big list of all the functions and parameters you can use in writing a program, and then say 'either the OS's libc have these functions for use, or there should be a auto configuration utility we can use to do that'. Which is what we have now, although it's de facto list instead of de jure.
It is quite possible to hold deep respect for someone but fail to display it adequately
No, it's possible for you to hold someone in respect but for them not to notice it, because society has conditioned them to look for the appearance of respect instead of actual respect.
As for military salutes, those don't have anything to do with respect for the people being saluted. They are to remind everyone of the chain of command and keep up disipline, both of which the military relies on. While I think most 'artifical' indications of respect are stupid, the military has specific different needs, and the whole thing there is a continual reaffirmment of following orders and regulations.
And nothing that's manditory can ever be an indication of respect, period, except maybe doing it can be an indication of at least some respect for the rules. It can't be an indication of respect of any specific person, that concept doesn't even make any sense.
As for the business world, who respects their boss more: Someone who wears exactly the right clothes, following both the formal and informal dress code, who says 'yes sir' to everything, and then goes and does whatever they want or at least as far as they can twist their instructions to cover, or someone who grudingly wears a suit that mostly fits within the dress code, doesn't say 'sir', but actually does whatever their boss suggests and what they think their boss would want when they don't have specific instructions?
And who has more respect: Someone who hand-writes thank you cards for Christmas cards, or someone who, if you were to show up at their house bleeding from a gunshot at four in the morning and ask to borrow their car, two changes of clothes, their credit card, their cell phone, and their handgun for three days for a reason you can't explain, and not to tell anyone, would let you?
The first person shows respect in their trivial actions, but don't actually have any respect. The latter shows respect by their important actions, because they respect the person and the decisions they make, and make the assumption there is a good reason behind them.
What would be really interesting if they actually had an objective criteria and judge of 'true' things.
Your average Government worker will be trained in this and follow the procedure in a totally mindless fashion.
Or it will be like the POSIX fiasco. At a certain point in history, government purchased opererating systems were required to support POSIX, which is an actual independent standard that various Unixes created after Unix fragmented. The theory was, you could write to POSIX, and your stuff would compile on any Unix, which generally works in practice. So MS tacked some POSIX support onto Windows NT.
Of course, no one actually wrote any programs that used POSIX. The government would purchase NT boxes and write Win32 programs, not POSIX ones. They were just required to purchase POSIX operating systems, not actually use POSIX.
Likewise, I'm imagine the government require programs that support ODF, but everyone uses the Word format to save and transport files, thus completely defeating the purpose.
Oh, and before anyone says 'But that's much harsher than the crime!'...um, duh. You kidnap someone for two days, you don't get two days in jail. You steal 17 dollars in mugging, you don't get a 17 dollar fine. In both those cases, you'll be 'paying' more than ten times your crime, and maybe even a hundred or a thousand times your crime. Just having to pay back what you took, or close to it, would just mean you're back when you started and there's no incentive not to do it.
You steal, say, more than twenty million dollars...well....we take it all.
And, in actual fact, I suspect such people wouldn't spend a single day on the street. Rich people have rich friends who will be able to spare a house or two for the criminal to live in while trying to get him some new cushy CEO position. It's more the principle of the thing.
Three words for these fuckers: Financial Death Penalty.
Take every single goddamn dime away from them. Everything they own, period. Including assets in other countries, jail them until they turn them over. Everything single thing they own, everything their spouse owns, everything their minor kids own. (We, however, will give the kid's stuff back when they hit 18.)
And just like a divorce, if it looks like did something to try to keep something afterwards, like selling your car for 'one dollar and other considerations' to a friend or putting the deed to your house in the name of your 16 year-old son...no. We grab that too.
We'll let them stick, say, a thousand dollars worth of family heirlooms and photo albums and paintings their kids did in storage and they can buy them back if they ever get enough money, and the rest goes to auction. (Most of the actual personal stuff like photographs is technically valueless, so they should be able to buy all their memories back for 20 bucks or so, before anyone whines about that.)
And then, of course, we aren't completely heartless. We'll give them one of those 'out of prison' outfits and fifty bucks, just like anyone walking out prison gets.
And before anyone says 'What about the children?', there are plenty of poor children in this country. They can always apply for food stamps. Any proposed consideration shown to those kids better apply to kids born to families with almost nothing, or you subconsciously think rich kids 'deserve' more.
'Meaning' to show respect and consideration is insincere.
Having respect and consideration isn't, but if you have it, you don't need to 'mean' to show it. You just do.
Many games give the protagonist few "hit points" and work just fine: Thief, Metal Gear, Pac Man, just about every other adventure game ever made... Not every game is a run and gun smash-a-thon.
Yes, which is why I'm glad adventure games have caught up to the concept.
I'm thinking specifically of adventure games where a single guard would cause you to spend twenty minutes trying to avoid them, like Space Quest did at some point I can't exactly recall. Instead of giving you the option to take them out. Compare to, say, Metal Gear Solid.
Adventure games are about finding creative solutions to problems. Hitting a guy in the face is not a creative solution. There are few better adventure games than The Longest Journey (opinion), but there are many better face hitting games than Dreamfall (fact).
And sometimes the obvious solution is to hit the person a little. Think the very start of Dreamfall, where you're rescuing what's-her-name, that scientist.
Talking about 'creative solutions' reminds of games where you had the 'problem' of getting past a two foot high fence, which was only a 'problem' because the game mechanics said so. Limiting options does not make something 'creative'.
And what does that add to the game? Time? Busywork? Certainly not challenge or depth. Wouldn't you rather have seen an expertly choreographed cut scene instead of watching 2 mannequins use pushbutton kung-fu grip action? The fights are bad, not hard. That's. What. I'm. Talking. About.
No, that then goes to the 'Do you want to be out of control?', and, hilariously, I had the exact opposite discussion a few weeks ago.
I like the fact they don't take away your control for a cutscreen, and I've seen arguments that any cutscenes are jarring and take you out of the game, that you should always be in control of the character.
However, I wouldn't have a problem with them doing it as cutscenes.
Did you play the original, The Longest Journey? Do you think TLJ and Dreamfall were designed for the same audience? I know you consider the combat to be a conquerable obstacle, but do you like it or just tolerate it?
Yes, I did play TLJ, and yes, I do think it's for basically the same people. And I just tolerate the actual act. I just love the fact it's an option.
I disagree. Combat has been done many ways in adventure games - some good, some bad. Monkey Island's swordfighting was awesome because you won by learning to best your opponent in an insult contest, and you HAD to lose several times to learn the rules. This scheme worked in context and was original. Dreamfall doesn't make sense in this respect. The protagonist is a black belt, yet she has 2 moves and she does them both poorly. Not every story's protagonist has to be Rambo. Horror movies are suspenseful because the heroes are overpowered and in constant danger.
Dreamfall's fighting looks lame, admitted, especially when compared to the rest of the game. If your problem is with the implimentation of the fighting, I'm with you there.
I got about 8 hours into Dreamfall, the sequel to The Longest Journey, and I can't stomach another second. They made it a 3D dual analog game with Shaq-Fu fighting sequences. The story is still solid and so far there have been some satisfying and intriguing continuations of old characters' stories, but the control scheme is a nightmare.
What. The. Hell. Are. You. Talking. About?
The 'fights' in Dreamfall consist of repeatedly hitting buttons for twenty seconds. I suck at fighting games, and yet I was able to win every single fight the first time, except the fairly hard 'how to fight' fight that you don't have to actually win. (Luckily, everyone you control in a fight is actually a skilled fighter, and I don't think that's an accident.)
And I don't know what you mean by '3D dual analog game with Shaq-Fu fighting sequences'. I don't have a joystick, and I did fine.
I'll admit the fights didn't belong, but you're talking about maybe six instances of twenty seconds of random button pushing. They were so short I didn't even learn the controls for kick and punch and whatnot.
I actually kinda like that the game actually gives the option for violence, as opposed to TLJ. The idea that the second the enemy attacks you you're dead in an adventure game is kinda lame. Kick them in the face and keep going.
Um, please don't look at Broken Sword 3. The UI in that sucked balls, precisely because they aimed it at consoles. (I have to give them props, the physical challenges, like climbing along ledges and jumping, were done exactly how they should be done in an adventure game, via logic instead of pushing buttons at exactly the right time, barring a few fight scenes where they gave you no time at all to push buttons. And those crate puzzle made me go on a murderous rampage and kill four people.)
Look at, instead, The Longest Journey 2 or something. I can't even remember the UI of that, it was so good.
And, whatever you do, if you're doing real 3D, use fixed cameras and pay a lot of attention to where you switch between them. Look carefully at each transition area and ask yourself if you need another camera view there. Make sure that no one will ever even have a reason to attempt to do something in an area they can't see.
And don't put important things where the player can't see them, like a door between the character and the player, thus making it offscreen, that the character could clearly see but the player has no idea it's there until they wander 'towards the screen' far enough to switch cameras. If the design really requires that, consider a 'pan' when the character enters the room...just four seconds of video showing what the room actually looks like is very helpful. Or just switch cameras near the middle point of the screen, instead of having a single view that only switches when they walk up to each 'edge', because that's a really good way to miss things that are downstage.
Day of the Tentacle is the best adventure game ever made, period.
You know what else GTA doesn't have?
Aliens.
If you want an example of how to put a "compelling story" complete with voice acting and "movie quality" action, then you have to go to Metal Gear Solid. The first one.
And if you want a confusing story that no one understands, you have to go to the second one. ;)
No, seriously, the Metal Gear Solid series rocks. It's an almost perfect example of how to integrat a story into an action game. (Whether or not that story makes any actual sense is another matter.)
Of course, the greatest and simplest story in an action game has to be Half-Life.
That example is idiotic. Political parties operate as trusts, a oligopoly, like Coke and Pepsi. They compete with each other, but operate in collusion to keep competors out. Real competetion doesn't work like that.
Let's say you own a gas station, and have a regular customer who comes in to buy all sorts of things, including some food. One day they want a gas siphon, and you don't have one. Well, the Walmart has one, as does the hardware store, and they're both roughly the same distance. Which do you send them to?
The hardware store, because Walmart competes with you. Even non-Supercenter Walmarts have more food than a gas station, whereas the hardware store doesn't.
Gas stations don't say 'Man, I wished me and Walmart were the only stores that existed', that's flatly idiotic, because Walmart will beat them for every single thing (except gas). Likewise, hamburger places don't say 'Man, I wish every place sold hamburgers and there were no places that didn't'.
I'm sure the NSA has all sort of plans, but you'll note that the plan that was first invented 'AT&T builds the building' ending up not being the plan, instead if being 'AT&T provides a bunch of taps'.
Considering they thought of and implimented that second plan in seven months, I don't know why we'd assume they couldn't think of the first plan in one month, at least some sort of rough sketch of it. It's a pretty basic plan, 'Build an identical building to the one you guys already built, but let us have it.'.
And I'm honestly not sure under who's administration the idea was thought of matters. Like I said, the NSA probably has all sort of plans laying around, and it's not like this one was partically hard to think of: Hey, to spy on domestic phone calls, let's ask the phone company to do it. Not exactly rocket science there.
Our government has all sorts of plans drawn up. There are people in every agency to sit down and write out the craziest and most absurd plan imaginable. That doesn't mean that the people in charge are responsible, or even know about the plans. Clinton almost certainly didn't go to the NSA and say 'Come up with a way to spy on domestic phone calls'.
Bush implimented it, as soon as he got into office. I'm sorry, presidents on the way out the door don't set up spying programs with constitional questions, and that sort of thing would be the very first thing an incoming president would learn about. Bush said 'go'. That's the important point.
He probably neither knows nor cares if it was an existing plan, he said 'spy on domestic calls', and the NSA either whipped up a plan really quickly, or pulled out this vaguely defined 'plan' to ask the phone company to do it. Whether or not there was some file sitting in a drawer somewhere that said 'To spy on domestic call, I propose we ask the phone company for help' is unknown and unimportant.
And, frankly, this administration has lied so often about this program I wouldn't trust them to admit the NSA existed.
FYI, the box model has been fixed since IE5.5.
Unless you, oh, write XHTML with a correct xml header, or use the short form of the HTML 4 doctype, or all sorts of things that makes IE decide it's in quirks mode, thus wasting large amounts of everyone's time cause it doesn't, in fact, tell you this.
But you're right, I wasn't talking about the 'lets count the margins in the width' actual 'box model' bug. I was talking about all the inane CSS box weirdness like the 3 pixel thing and flipflop of dotted and dashed borders.
You haven't even LOOKED at it, have you?
No, because I'm a web developer, and I can't installed damn uninstallable beta-software if it means I can no longer look at pages in IE6. I'll probably get XP installed in my virtual machines by the end of this week when I have more time. But right now, I've merely been going off the reviews of what people say has been fixed.
If you want to bitch at someone, how about the slashdot editors who didn't provide any list of any sort of bugfixes, instead linking to complete fluff articles? Apparently we're supposed to be willing to download and install MS beta software so we can figure out what's still broken and what isn't so we can comment here. I mean, I'm the first to say 'read the fucking article' before commenting, but 'Download and install the beta software, possibly rendering your machine unusable' before commenting seems a bit excessive. If there had been major bugfixes to rendering, gee, it sure would have been nice that this 'News for Nerds' told us that.(1)
I just went off public statements by MS of the direction of IE7, and reviews of beta 2. If they truely have fixed the actual bugs, of course they should fix the parsing bugs too. I have to suggest fixing the parsing bugs a year before the rendering bugs, and acting like they weren't going to fix the rendering bugs, was a bit of a mistake. (Although this does explain what the hell happened to actually releasing IE7. I mean, beta 2 was almost a year ago, wasn't it?)
And, for the record, there were still, indeed, 'positioning and sizing boxes and cutting off content inside divs' bugs in beta 2.
Further, you know so little about it that you think conditional comments are in CSS.
I don't give a flying fuck about conditional includes. We already went through that whole browser-sniffing shitfeast, which, if I recall correctly, is when these were invented. Not again, especially not with some non-standard MS silliness. I'm sick and tired of half a dozen broken-in-different-ways browsers, and I'm even more tired when all these browsers appear to be MS.
1) I don't know know why I would expect anything from this site, though. The whole 'look at the fluff articles about beta 3' nonsense just confirms my opinion that the editors here are not, in any way, shape, or form, 'nerds'. Actual nerds would post articles about how IE7 will challenge Firefox, or new security or lack thereof in IE7, or how IE7 is going to make things better or worse for 'web developers', not 'Ooo, shiny, draggable tabs', which every actual nerd who's wanted it has had in IE for years via an IE shell. (In fact, actual nerds know that almost nothing useful is ever posted by ZDNet.)
I don't understand what you're talking about. This article doesn't say it was already in place.
There's some confusion, possibly delibrate, going on. In 2000, the NSA starting looking into plans to modernize.
One month after the Bush Administration entered office, the NSA asked AT&T to build some sort of spying rig into its network, called 'Pioneer Groundbreaker'. It didn't say 'Okay, here's what you need to install', it said 'Let's work together to spy on people, what's your suggestion?'.
There's nothing, that happened one month after Bush took office, that would require more than a week of prep to figure out a proposal. That's when AT&T was approached, not when anything happened.
Now, the NSA says this is part of the plans to modernize, but we don't have knowledge that would indicate said plan existed before Bush took office, or that it actually was part of any modernization, or that it's anything but a smokescreen. They fact they call it 'a different component' of the plan is rather telling. A component that was created when Bush took office, perhaps?
Here's the possible timeline that doesn't contradict anything we know:
2000: NSA, like all government agencies, decides it is once again time to modernize. It starts taking bids.
2001, January: Bush takes office.
2001, three days later: Bush asks NSA to spy on domestic calls.(*)
2001, Late January: The NSA decides to do this by getting the support of various telecomm companies. The project is called 'Pioneer Groundbreaker', and will have AT&T to build a network operations center which duplicated AT&T's Bedminster, New Jersey facility, for the NSA. It decides to call this 'modernizing'.(*)
2001, February: The NSA approaches AT&T with the proposal. AT&T says okay, and they start working out the details.
2001, unknown: The plan changes to have the NSA build the facility and AT&T just provide taps.
2001, unknown: This is all actually built.
2001, Sept 11: Terrorists attack.
What order the last three happen in is unknown. Whether the (*) happened under Bush or Clinton is unknown, but don't really make any sense to have happened under Clinton and not approach AT&T until under Bush.