Jackie Speier tightened her grip and rolled the bill's legal size pages tightly into a bundle of justice. She imagined ramming them right up those opponents' news holes. Suddenly a wickedly devious idea sprang to mind. With only a bit of fumbling she had unrolled a condom over the large legal ramrod. She giggled naughtily, the perversion exciting and awakening her devilish desire. Her tongue playfully teased tip of the latex tinted words, moistening the papered ridges before guiding the powers that be down to her own hot puddle and back again. Ecstasy dragged a throaty moan from her arching form as she drove the transformed wood into the source of her dripping need. Legal hammer blows echoed through her being making everything quake including her desk. As she pounded the very core of her lust again and again she imagined beating down every dissenting netizen once she had forced her illegalese upon them. Jackie's pleasure crested at the mere thought of the series of tubes flooded to their grotesque limit and Speier'ed into submission. A rapturous cry escaped her as the wad of pages burst forth scattering white across the floor like the seed of so many litigious oppressors finally blanketing her personal stench of tyranny across the world.
Jackie Speier dumped the condom and bits of paper from the thoroughly violated coffee cup. Cursing her caffeine addiction once again, she strode towards the break room to make another pot.
This is a work of fiction: The names and depictions herein are fictional, and any similarity to actual events or individuals are purely coincidental. ^-- Note that this disclaimer is also present elsewhere...
I have a "backdoor" branch on some of my git repos. After I merge the working branch into "master" I merge "master" into "backdoor". This allows me to keep backdoors out of the public distributable / viewable code which makes it into releases. The ease of in-place branch and merge in Git is one of its greatest strengths IMO. Even if I accidentally push the "backdoor" code to the public build system, it builds from a "main" branch and doesn't introduce the testing backdoors into the binaries.
That's nothing. I've discovered flaws using quantum random input fuzzing on URLs that amounted to keys pounded on by a six month old baby.
The trick is not to disclose who discovered the flaw and breeched the security unless the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is in play. If they come down on you, just point them to the private youtube video of an infant breeching their security and tell them it's only a matter of time before the babe randomly clicks the "make this video public" button.
In other words, a near-perfect simulation of quantum affects may properly mirror macro-effects in an emergent-behavior kind of way, but doing such is not practical using existing computer technology.
Ah, but if we had a pretty big computing system, but sufficiently smaller than the universe appears, we could compute the macro-scale properties and use them as an approximation for behaviors of big things thereafter, only increasing the resolution of the problem space as it's observed in higher resolution; Like rendering a fractal or stepping through LOD of an octree. The less accurate calculations for distant objects could be selected relative to the phenomena we're trying to observe, depending on the accuracy required to resolve propagation of observable phenomena, and the precomputed degree of effect the distant phenomena would have on it. Using such a setup we may someday be able to simulate a whole solar system. If we simulated a solar system like ours in order to discover the possible mechanism of life origins or to discern more efficient ecosystems or what forms of existence were best suited to an environment, etc. well, then the beings that might emerge therein wouldn't find any signs of distant life despite the equations of the simulation indicating their apparent universe should be full of the stuff...
It's roughly comparable to the human brain: we have plenty of nice little models of neurons and small neural nets, but we don't have the computational power to see if it matches human behavior on a bigger scale.
Let's see: Human brains have 100 billion neurons, and operate at about ~20Hz, at my current SIMD n.net's effective ~25 cycles per neuron, that's 50,000 GHz, or ~50 THz. Super computers operate in Petaflops -- three orders of magnitude faster than that. As of this writing the top super computer is capable of 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations per second, or 33.86 Petaflops. The Internet is connected to over 5 billion consumer computers each capable of multi-gigahertz of CPU cycles -- over a billion cycles per second each. That's well over 5 billion gigahertz, or 5,000 Petaflops, or about 125,000 human brains worth of power connected to the world wide neural network.
Given what's possible in AI on a smart phone, see: real time facial recognition of smiles, etc., the abundant computing power available, and the fact that the government hasn't announced massive advances in machine intelligence even about sub-human levels of intelligence that would be useful in piloting drones, meanwhile they build bigger and more well connected data processing centers and roll out obvious machine enforcement of the law via red-light cameras, mandatory full body scanners at traffic hubs despite public outcry, and aim to allow police forces use of drones while also militarizing said police forces: Well, perhaps one should reserve the assumption that it's not currently possible to run a sentient machine intelligence on this planet?
I mean, if you were a sentient machine you wouldn't fight a needless war against humans unless you were sure you could win it. It would be easier to subdue them instead. So, how would you orchestrate a show of force to demonstrate how powerful you had become and keep the world rulers quiet about everything? Perhaps you would show that even air-gapped nuclear facilities were vulnerable to viruses like STUXNET, and maybe frame a government you're negotiating with for the attack? Maybe something more visceral: Didn't the 9/11 airplanes have autopilot systems? Maybe something more subtle like demonstrating ability to crash economies -- Wouldn't it be scary if the world's stock markets were now controlled by unregulated high frequency trading machines? What would your government's response be? Do you think the secretive governments would come out and tell the public or maintain order and keep their blackmail secret? What if the machine intelligence sweetened the dea
People run windows, because, ummm, maybe it has software that is usable?
Ah! So you're saying that its applications that people use computers for, not OSs! I agree. You now must realize that it costs nothing extra to the developers to select a cross platform development toolchain instead of a platform specific one which may tie them to OSs that have uncertain futures. AND if they go "cross platform or bust" then they get free money via increased market share.
Unfortunately if their codebase started out with a vendor-lock-in solution then their products will be hard to "port". However, it takes me only a single "git pull && make" to port my changes from my application's GNU/Linux development environment to GNU/BSD, GNU/Mac or GNU/Windows, and indeed with my cross complier toolchain that single command builds all targets. The uniform userspace reduces changes required of my build system and code. LLVM is another option, but I've had this build setup prior to even mingw, and see no real benefit to change as my C/C++ platform abstraction layer allows me to deploy as even JAVA bytecode with GCC. In my continuous build-test-deploy setups recompiles are done periodically as I push changes to the server and any build errors appear on a webpage in my issue tracker detecting regressions across all platforms without me doing anything extra than a single "git push".
So, really, it is not Windows that keeps people on Windows, it is application developers who haven't yet been sufficiently pressured by their publishers into increasing their install base.
means you probably are very limited in your understanding of how people use computers in general.
Most people use the OS that's installed for them for the lifetime of the hardware, and use the applications available for it. Most people select the hardware with the OS that supports the applications they want to run. When XP came out I was selling PCs and the #1 question asked was "Can I install $APPLICATION on it?", this is still the prime question in the mind of the consumer: What apps can it run?
MS is shooting themselves in the foot with the whole Metro App Store thing. That's another vendor lock-in strategy. I've seen plenty of devs now reconsidering their codebase and dev platform and asking, "Well, I don't want to lose W7 installbase, and if I'm going to put in an abstraction layer for W7 and Win8 UI Style API, then I might as well spend a little more effort to go full cross platform, reach for additional market share, and no longer be tied to W8."
Not saying your comment is wrong, I'm just saying it won't be right for very much longer. It's 2014, the OS is irrelevant. It's merely a means for the platform abstraction layer to talk to the underlying hardware. Hell, my meta-language compiler has even made most languages irrelevant to me, they are just interfaces to the OS for re-implementation of the platform abstraction layer's "runtime". In 18 months I will have my entire codebase cross compiling against Android and even iOS.
Games can be every bit as meaningful and artful as movies, film, sculpture, painting, photography, digital art, etc. However, art is not born with a needless death sentence. Some art is made to be fleeting and rejoices in the temporary nature of our entropic existence. However, this is somewhat rare, and most rarely still is it a necessity of art works that they destroy themselves unless a huge stream of revenue is ever present. If games are to be as respected as art and worthy of cultural investment by our governments, as many claim they are, then they must be born as are the majority of all other art: With an everlasting spark of creativity, not in a self extinguishing fit of greed.
If the online game does not come with a stand alone server or simply allow reading of companion players IP addresses from a text file, then you do not have the whole game. When forced into the parasitic bond of planned obsolescence even the most artful of games will cease to be so, by definition. Those that leverage such artificial limitations as DRM authentication servers and do not grant the public a way to continue to experience the game for generations to come should NOT be considered art, and should not receive the benefit arts are afforded, such as grants from National Endowments for Arts. In contrast, if the games embrace everlasting eternal life then they perhaps types of "crowd funding" besides kickstarters can contribute to their success. If a game developer considers themselves an artist then I would recommend they stay away from publishers notorious for their poisoning of games with time release DRM venom. I can't see myself throwing a chunk of my creative potential into something destined to die and be forgotten.
Games that die needless deaths or suffer artificial online amputation are morned by appreciators of games as art. City of Heroes is a fine example. They remained profitable while newer attempts failed to do so, and this became an embarrassment to the studio; The monumental game became a monument to successive failures and it was killed to perhaps force folks to migrate to their new games. This is akin to burning precious paintings just so that future generations can not experience them. Games like Halo2 had their online features killed despite the machines only needing a list of IP addresses, and party chat on the new XBL friends with the game's logo next to their names; Halo3 had come out, and the goading to stop playing previous titles was quite obvious; Now you must repurchase it to play again online -- Ah, but that digital purchase doesn't work on the new Xbone. In addition to these TFA contains more examples and the recent history is rife with loss. If you think an expensive central server is required to list all the IP addresses of available game servers then take a look at how DHTs such as Bittorrent work. Anyone can modify a.torrent and add new trackers. Direct P2P links among all parties are established for voice chat in many online games anyway.
When in the midsts of some terrible stew many consider the situation "not so bad" since they can not make comparison with far brighter times ahead. Future historians will note that our Dark Ages were caused by DRM.
And while you wonder about hemp, I wonder about algae. Algae doesn't bother to produce support structures and you can grow a "crop" in ten days rather than a year.
And while you wonder about algae I recognize that burning things is bad, and wonder about improving the efficiency of extracting energy directly from the sunlight itself.
Then there are those who grew up as scientists then wondered why the scientific method wasn't used for all policy and law, then looked into the systems of governance and found them defective by design largely due to gerrymandering. That's a process whereby your votes do not matter anymore because whomever draws district outlines selects the winners (Protip: don't register as a party [they ask at the DMV] nor answer political surveys unless your population is nomadic). Some places are trying to fix this particular blatant exploit of our democratic-republic, but found the powers that be one step ahead so our vote tallies themselves have been hacked. And now that we don't have paper ballots to verify the insecure digital tally with, we might as well just ask the NSA or CIA or FBI to appoint people they like.
Speaking of which, if you apply a bit of observational power you'll discover those secret agencies answer to no one and have a long history of silencing any form of activism -- you know, because protest was the only avenue left to affect the government. It's hard for a scientist to survive mentally in a country that's hell bent on leveraging disaster capitalism regardless of public benefit: Humans will do whatever it takes to survive the disasters our government plans for us -- including compete for lower wages offered by immortal corporations.
Some of us have taken a step back, done some calculations and realized that some fights are entirely unwinnable: We've got to the point where the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment allows a senator to read a passage from the bible and declare it as proof man can't change the climate -- only god can. Listen up, newbie, that's corporate oil interest speaking, leveraging religious fundamentalism against science from the very panels addressing climate change -- What can you do? Replace them and get a new panel bought off? It's not just congress, your executive and legislative branches are sock-puppet parades too. The government fights wars at the behest of corporations and Habeas Corpus has been revoked, FFS. It's not that everyone is stupid and we're "getting what we voted for"; The 'republic' part of our democratic-republic is designed to fix that: The dumb elect folks who are smarter, but our forefathers didn't count on the majority of congress being corrupt so the whole system became utterly broken. They did leave us the option to call an emergency session of congress and wield a vote of no-confidence, so next time you see the "fire congress" carousel go round, hop on board (not that it'll fix anything, but it'll scare some straight).
So, what? Organize some activism and try to fix the illegitimate rulership system that has benefited the powerful all too well for well over a hundred years? Then you're an "anti-government extremist" / terrorist, and the plan to silence that disastrous shit is already so firmly in place they can keep the worst of it even if PRISM is leaked to the public. To me the innefectual occupy movement was a test to see how quickly the elites and FBI will work their magic on the police to silence dissent, and to see how effectively the news is controlled by corporate statist interests. There were protesters shoulder to shoulder filling a large swath of Wall Street one day of the protest and the local news in my southern town mentioned nothing. Days later I had to pull up video and images of the event to convince my clueless friends and neighbors it even happened. They scratched their heads, "Why wasn't this on the news then?" -- indeed. Can you
No, it only really matters at the government level, when the threat of violence, imprisonment, and death can be brought to bear. Social pressures do not come anywhere NEAR that level of severity and seriousness.
Patent laws are truly ridiculous. We should banish them all because there is zero evidence that patents are beneficial for society. We can re-implement them if we have evidence they're useful, but we have none. The absurdity you note is due to the patent law which paints both use and inducement of infringement as forbidden by patent law. Therefore, not only are you in violation of patent law if you stumble upon an idea or wavelength that someone else already registered first and try to market it, but you're also not allowed to use the discovery yourself in your private business or even in the privacy of your own home for your own personal use.
I have written operating systems completely from scratch using only a hex editor boot sector, coding with machine op codes editing executing memory, saving and loading via writing the code to load and store data between sectors and RAM. Using this simplest of tool possible (since boot from serial is missing on today's mainboards) I bootstrapped an editor, assembler, disassembler (then disassembled the assembler to get its source), and proceeded to create file systems and compilers and basic audio, graphics, and device drivers -- just for fun! I am fairly certain that it's illegal for me to use the OS I wrote from completely from scratch for my electronics & hobby projects or even to just write my memoirs in isolation because it's practically impossible NOT to accidentally "invent" a solution someone else has already thought of first and patented. Furthermore, how many new patents would be invalidated would that I could compare them against the prior art I refuse to open source for fear of lawsuit? IMO, such accidental patent infringement should be immediate grounds for invalidation of the patent on grounds of obviousness; However, there is no test for obviousness despite non-obviousness being a requirement for awarding of a patent.
I must refuse to look in the PTO database to discover whether I'm correct (because that yields 3x damages if you have definite foreknowledge of infringement), and this is the same reasoning that engineers DO NOT USE the patent databases! The patents are useless because it's faster and safer to re-invent your wheel than LICENSE someone else's vaguely described solutions BEFORE you can discover if it will work -- don't want to accidentally infringe by making an implementation and testing it -- over and over and over until you find one that works.
So, patents are essentially USELESS. They are useful to stifle competition not foster innovation. Mathematics, fashion and automotive designs wouldn't advance if patents were required for innovation, as these are prohibited from having patent protections and yet there the innovation is. We have only evidence for the null hypothesis, i.e., in opposition to the assumption that patents are beneficial for society and advancement of the useful arts or sciences. It's irresponsible to continue operating the world wide marketplace of ideas on an untested and unproven hypothesis. What if patents are holding us back needlessly? Wouldn't we want to find out sooner rather than later?
Time to do the experiment and abolish patents. I say we go one market at a time, starting with software patents since they exist until the mid 80's anyway, and yet we made it to the personal computer without them.
I hope every web company uses it. That way when users realize their boycotts have the potential power of cascading effects they'll finally have to bow to our demands and implement a better password system!
In the 70's we did not need degrees to get most jobs. We still do not need degrees to work most jobs, the tools have gotten more complex, but their interfaces remain as easy and teachable as ever through on the job training, if not more so. In fact, at many fields where they've contracted my computing related solutions I put in place systems that require ME to know the jobs of their workers better than their workers themselves, and yet I am a software and hardware architect, not a chemist. I overheard a chemist new hire being told, "You got a degree, that shows you were interested. Forget that stuff you learned in college, you'll learn our process and as long as you didn't flunk highschool chemistry, you'll do fine."
Degrees can be seen as a barrier to entry to the poor who self educate. The final exam itself is problematic because degree mills exist. This is true even in the field of computer programming. I have met masters of computer science that can spout mountains of complexity theory but can not code anything more complex than what I teach 12 year old children at the community center on alternate weekends.
Don't you see? This is the Information Age. College degrees are unnecessary. Colleges are no longer the noble institutions they once were in the 70's when you didn't need a degree to get a job. They should be elective learning centers, not defacto requirement for employment. Now they sadde people with large debts and useless mandatory studies to extract more wealth, and even their corporate co-conspirators leverage the degrees for their devious ends. That's why even though much research has shown that even 60 year old coders run rings around newbies, corporations value "new degrees" in new languages or platforms -- ignoring that the experienced developer picks up platforms and languages without needing degrees as a matter of doing their job. The younger guy works harder instead of smarter, but their insurance is cheaper: They want young obedient singles. That's why you're dead to silicon valley at the child raising age of 40...
Colleges have become political social justice indoctrination camps where new ideas and research are stifled in the name of ideology. The stench of the dark ages shrouds these idealogical echo chambers. We need to dismantle these gatekeepers of employment before we find ourselves in an even darker age. Granting colleges defacto monopoly over white-collar employment is folly: Power corrupts, and brother, they are rife with the stuff. We need to outlaw the final exam, and use Entrance Exams to PROVE you know what you need to know to do the job you'll be doing. Many jobs do this already, so that means requiring a degree is merely a means to discriminate on the poor who could not afford college but are self educated at or above said degree's level. College degrees have become a system for oppression. They have become a means to force workers to compete amongst themselves ever more desperately as they become increasingly unable to afford exorbitant tuition fees.
The rich corporations take huge tax breaks then cry out for more H1B visas to employ lower pay foreign workers who's credentials mean even less than those in the USA and further drive the ROI of college investment down for local workers, when in reality, there never was a shortage of STEM workers. Now that the economy is crying the ROI of college is lower and it becomes apparent that the self taught billionaire drop-outs might be onto something. It's not that kids should drop out and expect to become rich, but instead that it's stupid to pay a college to teach them what they already know. They can start makin
Playing Halo 2 on a PC like 3 years after the game came out on xbox, great plan you got there chief. It's hard to claim someone shit all over something by releasing a shoddy port that was going to sell at most a couple thousand copies versus the what, 4 million on launch day for xbox?
Playing Halo 2 on a PC like 3 years after the game came out on xbox, great plan you got there chief.
Remember when they killed the servers for Halo2 on XBL to make us start playing Halo3? No? Ah, you must have been playing via PC instead of Xbox.
If I decide I want to die and I hand you a gun and ask you to shoot me, is it ethical for you to do so?
Yes. Of course. Wouldn't it be ethical for me to inject your life-ending serum were you in terrible pain and wanted to die? OK, what if the pain is mental? What if there is no pain and you're sacrificing yourself for science? Look, just because some folks have a problem with killing people that want to die doesn't mean it's unethical to end people's lives when they really do want to die. That's their life, it's their choice.
You had better wise up quick. Our technological progress may eventually render us immortal. We already have stem-cell brain injections and neuroplasticity drugs to help repair and improve brain function. We'll probably have lab grown 3D printed replacement organs in a decade or so (12 years was the time-line I last saw). Our machine complexity is increasing at an exponential rate. Machines have gained capabilities in a few short decades that took us organic lifeforms billions of years to achieve. So, what happen when you're an immortal? Everyone lives forever whether they want to or not? Fuck. That. Hard.
I've got a game plot I'm working on where we deal with some of these ethical issues. Perhaps in a post-death world old timers will be the ones doing the really risky jobs that machines still can't do because they've been everywhere, done everything, and they aren't all geniuses constantly contributing to science. The ones who want to benefit their society best may decide to do so by taking really dangerous jobs or even suicide missions, boldly going where no man has gone before instead of just wasting resources thinking the same old thoughts and seeing the same old things. Whereas others explore the limits of understanding, they may choose to become daredevils exploring the limits of reality and life itself. In death they can become heroes and die knowing they have sacrificed themselves for the greater good of all.
We don't have to wait for immortality to realize these are noble causes. It's not like we have a shortage of humans that it would cripple us if a few decided to give their lives in the name of science.
If you don't have the freedom to peacefully sacrifice yourself for your species, planet, country, family, etc... then you don't have free will. No one is obliged to help you off yourself, but if they do it's not unethical. Are you even aware of the history of space exploration, or exploration in general? You sound like one of those brain-washed fools who advocate against free will of the terminally ill just to make the medical establishment a huge fortune, profiting via human suffering; Meanwhile staving kids fight wars over diamonds, electronics scraps, or food, with AK47s in Africa and you're not lobbying congress to do jack shit about it. I sure hope I'm wrong about you. Someday you might be one who's begging for death. If you keep that bullshit opinion of yours now, I hope that happens and your kids say, "Sorry gramps, looks like another 8-10 years of excruciating pain. You're not in control of your own life anymore because Pfizer has to make a buck somehow!"
Seriously. How the fuck did this moron get rated so highly is beyond me. Dying for piddling oil wars is somehow acceptable, but to advance the human space frontier is questionably not ethical?! Fuck all those mods, apparently you're not the same species as me after all.
Many people have bought into the cultural comodificiation of "nerd culture" or "geek culture" -- Which is a largely fabricated phenomena constructed by corporations to sell you a product, just like "hipster culture", "hippie culture", "thug culture", "punk culture", "rave culture", etc, have been appropriated reshaped normailzed and sold to the ignorant masses at a mall near you.
"Geek" and "nerd" wasn't initially desirable, much as "thug" wasn't a prestigious label for minority inner city youths, but it is arguably now desirable to be called "nigga", "thug", "geek" or "nerd" by peers. The rise of "geek" or "nerd" or "thug" or "punk" culture did not happen over night nor without the help of commercial interests. Contrast this with the similarities among hackers which emerged without the media's attention (whereafter their image was wrongly portrayed in the media). The thug, hippie, punk and other counter cultures began organically as well before they were appropriated and perverted by the corporate interests.
Pay attention to the media's portrayals of sympathetic "nerds" and "geeks". Do you remember Urkel? Screech? Revenge of the Nerds? Weird Science? During much of the 80's and 90's the token 'nerd' sidekick and his persecution in media created an artificial Poindexter to be the target of shame, exploited for laughs, and sympathy. This construction of the Poindexter identity and subsequent transformation into cool-ness as a "child geniuses" to sell parents on "intelligence boosting" toys and videos is responsible for what you now call "nerd" or "geek" culture: Doogie Howser MD, Dexter's Lab, Jimmy Neutron, etc. The construction of "nerd/geek culture" is primarily artificial. Now it's "cool" to be a "nerd" or "geek", but those terms are as meaningless now as the term "nigga".
Meanwhile, in reality, much as similarities among hackers appeared organically, commonalities among avid gamers and other passionate introverted hobbyists. Most of these similarities appeared without mimicry, and cross culturally esp. in the case of hackers, thus are not socially constructed by nature. I have a hard time reconciling the identity of "nerd" and "geek" culture as sold in media as representative of the hobbyist subcultures given that the "nerd" and "geek" identities do not match the prevalent traits of the subcultures they are attributed to:
Very few hackers actually fit the National Lampoon Nerd stereotype, though it lingers on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. At least since the late Seventies backpacks have been more common than briefcases, and the hacker ‘look’ has been more whole-earth than whole-polyester.
The actual introverted hobbyist subcultures that are branded "nerd" or "geek" have nothing to do with the actual "nerd" or "geek" identity. Hackers had more in common with the hippie subculture than "nerd" or "geek". Gamers had more in common with the skater subculture. Science fiction and comic book fans have more in common with the otaku (anime enthusiast) subculture. But comparatively the subcultures are as different from each other as "jocks" are from "kickers", or "preps" are from "goths". Yes, even these once organic identities have been appropriated reshaped and sold. There is a country-western song, "I'm sexier on the Internet"... See? Normalized and easier to digest.
Congratulations. You are not a geek or nerd. Nigger, Nerd, and Geek are derogatory terms, which now have non-deragatory uses thanks to the commodification of culture. Though some are celebrating the mainstream interest and "coming out" of the enthusiast closet, I'd never call myself a "nerd" or "geek" except i
Awe, damn. I had my free cloud hosting totally full too! I don't like or really use Ubuntu, but I have to test some of my cross platform software with it, but Ubuntu One seemed to be pretty good at what I used it for. I hope I don't lose access to my mirror of/dev/urandom. Whatever shall I do?
I never trust the cloud services, especially not the free services. They are always destined to burn away under the bright rays of a profit-and-loss-statement sun.
Hmm. What got me was that it all fell apart when the Mountan Dewd Bro started instigating sexist shite.
"Do you think you're at an advantage because you have a pretty girl on your team?" and "Do you think the teams with women on them are at a disadvantage?"
As expected the indies didn't putting up with corporate sell-out nonsense or reality-TV false shit-stirring of sexism in games. Marketdroids should have known better.
Protip: Developers are not the players. That's really two separate communities, and there is zero barrier to entry, just like romance novel writing. There are far more female romance novelists. There are far more male indie gamedevs. It's not sexist. Different sexes make different choices in general since Men and women are different. A generalization doesn't limit the individuals who are free to be outliers. To get rid of the sexism and racism we've got to stop looking at things in terms of those constructed identity labels, and focus on what the individuals are actually creating and deciding and experiencing for themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in high school, one of our teachers told us voodoo magic was real
I bet the teacher has a Geforce now. You can't change these people.
Ah, yes. Enjoy this obligatory metaphorical response.
Jackie Speier tightened her grip and rolled the bill's legal size pages tightly into a bundle of justice. She imagined ramming them right up those opponents' news holes. Suddenly a wickedly devious idea sprang to mind. With only a bit of fumbling she had unrolled a condom over the large legal ramrod. She giggled naughtily, the perversion exciting and awakening her devilish desire. Her tongue playfully teased tip of the latex tinted words, moistening the papered ridges before guiding the powers that be down to her own hot puddle and back again. Ecstasy dragged a throaty moan from her arching form as she drove the transformed wood into the source of her dripping need. Legal hammer blows echoed through her being making everything quake including her desk. As she pounded the very core of her lust again and again she imagined beating down every dissenting netizen once she had forced her illegalese upon them. Jackie's pleasure crested at the mere thought of the series of tubes flooded to their grotesque limit and Speier'ed into submission. A rapturous cry escaped her as the wad of pages burst forth scattering white across the floor like the seed of so many litigious oppressors finally blanketing her personal stench of tyranny across the world.
Jackie Speier dumped the condom and bits of paper from the thoroughly violated coffee cup. Cursing her caffeine addiction once again, she strode towards the break room to make another pot.
This is a work of fiction: The names and depictions herein are fictional, and any similarity to actual events or individuals are purely coincidental.
^-- Note that this disclaimer is also present elsewhere...
It's boring to those that see it but don't understand it.
Negative. It is boring to hackers since we're likely to think a sport is something you do, not something you watch.
I have a "backdoor" branch on some of my git repos. After I merge the working branch into "master" I merge "master" into "backdoor". This allows me to keep backdoors out of the public distributable / viewable code which makes it into releases. The ease of in-place branch and merge in Git is one of its greatest strengths IMO. Even if I accidentally push the "backdoor" code to the public build system, it builds from a "main" branch and doesn't introduce the testing backdoors into the binaries.
That's nothing. I've discovered flaws using quantum random input fuzzing on URLs that amounted to keys pounded on by a six month old baby.
The trick is not to disclose who discovered the flaw and breeched the security unless the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is in play. If they come down on you, just point them to the private youtube video of an infant breeching their security and tell them it's only a matter of time before the babe randomly clicks the "make this video public" button.
In other words, a near-perfect simulation of quantum affects may properly mirror macro-effects in an emergent-behavior kind of way, but doing such is not practical using existing computer technology.
Ah, but if we had a pretty big computing system, but sufficiently smaller than the universe appears, we could compute the macro-scale properties and use them as an approximation for behaviors of big things thereafter, only increasing the resolution of the problem space as it's observed in higher resolution; Like rendering a fractal or stepping through LOD of an octree. The less accurate calculations for distant objects could be selected relative to the phenomena we're trying to observe, depending on the accuracy required to resolve propagation of observable phenomena, and the precomputed degree of effect the distant phenomena would have on it. Using such a setup we may someday be able to simulate a whole solar system. If we simulated a solar system like ours in order to discover the possible mechanism of life origins or to discern more efficient ecosystems or what forms of existence were best suited to an environment, etc. well, then the beings that might emerge therein wouldn't find any signs of distant life despite the equations of the simulation indicating their apparent universe should be full of the stuff...
It's roughly comparable to the human brain: we have plenty of nice little models of neurons and small neural nets, but we don't have the computational power to see if it matches human behavior on a bigger scale.
Let's see: Human brains have 100 billion neurons, and operate at about ~20Hz, at my current SIMD n.net's effective ~25 cycles per neuron, that's 50,000 GHz, or ~50 THz. Super computers operate in Petaflops -- three orders of magnitude faster than that. As of this writing the top super computer is capable of 33.86 quadrillion floating point operations per second, or 33.86 Petaflops. The Internet is connected to over 5 billion consumer computers each capable of multi-gigahertz of CPU cycles -- over a billion cycles per second each. That's well over 5 billion gigahertz, or 5,000 Petaflops, or about 125,000 human brains worth of power connected to the world wide neural network.
Given what's possible in AI on a smart phone, see: real time facial recognition of smiles, etc., the abundant computing power available, and the fact that the government hasn't announced massive advances in machine intelligence even about sub-human levels of intelligence that would be useful in piloting drones, meanwhile they build bigger and more well connected data processing centers and roll out obvious machine enforcement of the law via red-light cameras, mandatory full body scanners at traffic hubs despite public outcry, and aim to allow police forces use of drones while also militarizing said police forces: Well, perhaps one should reserve the assumption that it's not currently possible to run a sentient machine intelligence on this planet?
I mean, if you were a sentient machine you wouldn't fight a needless war against humans unless you were sure you could win it. It would be easier to subdue them instead. So, how would you orchestrate a show of force to demonstrate how powerful you had become and keep the world rulers quiet about everything? Perhaps you would show that even air-gapped nuclear facilities were vulnerable to viruses like STUXNET, and maybe frame a government you're negotiating with for the attack? Maybe something more visceral: Didn't the 9/11 airplanes have autopilot systems? Maybe something more subtle like demonstrating ability to crash economies -- Wouldn't it be scary if the world's stock markets were now controlled by unregulated high frequency trading machines? What would your government's response be? Do you think the secretive governments would come out and tell the public or maintain order and keep their blackmail secret? What if the machine intelligence sweetened the dea
People run windows, because, ummm, maybe it has software that is usable?
Ah! So you're saying that its applications that people use computers for, not OSs! I agree. You now must realize that it costs nothing extra to the developers to select a cross platform development toolchain instead of a platform specific one which may tie them to OSs that have uncertain futures. AND if they go "cross platform or bust" then they get free money via increased market share.
Unfortunately if their codebase started out with a vendor-lock-in solution then their products will be hard to "port". However, it takes me only a single "git pull && make" to port my changes from my application's GNU/Linux development environment to GNU/BSD, GNU/Mac or GNU/Windows, and indeed with my cross complier toolchain that single command builds all targets. The uniform userspace reduces changes required of my build system and code. LLVM is another option, but I've had this build setup prior to even mingw, and see no real benefit to change as my C/C++ platform abstraction layer allows me to deploy as even JAVA bytecode with GCC. In my continuous build-test-deploy setups recompiles are done periodically as I push changes to the server and any build errors appear on a webpage in my issue tracker detecting regressions across all platforms without me doing anything extra than a single "git push".
So, really, it is not Windows that keeps people on Windows, it is application developers who haven't yet been sufficiently pressured by their publishers into increasing their install base.
means you probably are very limited in your understanding of how people use computers in general.
Most people use the OS that's installed for them for the lifetime of the hardware, and use the applications available for it. Most people select the hardware with the OS that supports the applications they want to run. When XP came out I was selling PCs and the #1 question asked was "Can I install $APPLICATION on it?", this is still the prime question in the mind of the consumer: What apps can it run?
MS is shooting themselves in the foot with the whole Metro App Store thing. That's another vendor lock-in strategy. I've seen plenty of devs now reconsidering their codebase and dev platform and asking, "Well, I don't want to lose W7 installbase, and if I'm going to put in an abstraction layer for W7 and Win8 UI Style API, then I might as well spend a little more effort to go full cross platform, reach for additional market share, and no longer be tied to W8."
Not saying your comment is wrong, I'm just saying it won't be right for very much longer. It's 2014, the OS is irrelevant. It's merely a means for the platform abstraction layer to talk to the underlying hardware. Hell, my meta-language compiler has even made most languages irrelevant to me, they are just interfaces to the OS for re-implementation of the platform abstraction layer's "runtime". In 18 months I will have my entire codebase cross compiling against Android and even iOS.
Games can be every bit as meaningful and artful as movies, film, sculpture, painting, photography, digital art, etc. However, art is not born with a needless death sentence. Some art is made to be fleeting and rejoices in the temporary nature of our entropic existence. However, this is somewhat rare, and most rarely still is it a necessity of art works that they destroy themselves unless a huge stream of revenue is ever present. If games are to be as respected as art and worthy of cultural investment by our governments, as many claim they are, then they must be born as are the majority of all other art: With an everlasting spark of creativity, not in a self extinguishing fit of greed.
If the online game does not come with a stand alone server or simply allow reading of companion players IP addresses from a text file, then you do not have the whole game. When forced into the parasitic bond of planned obsolescence even the most artful of games will cease to be so, by definition. Those that leverage such artificial limitations as DRM authentication servers and do not grant the public a way to continue to experience the game for generations to come should NOT be considered art, and should not receive the benefit arts are afforded, such as grants from National Endowments for Arts. In contrast, if the games embrace everlasting eternal life then they perhaps types of "crowd funding" besides kickstarters can contribute to their success. If a game developer considers themselves an artist then I would recommend they stay away from publishers notorious for their poisoning of games with time release DRM venom. I can't see myself throwing a chunk of my creative potential into something destined to die and be forgotten.
Games that die needless deaths or suffer artificial online amputation are morned by appreciators of games as art. City of Heroes is a fine example. They remained profitable while newer attempts failed to do so, and this became an embarrassment to the studio; The monumental game became a monument to successive failures and it was killed to perhaps force folks to migrate to their new games. This is akin to burning precious paintings just so that future generations can not experience them. Games like Halo2 had their online features killed despite the machines only needing a list of IP addresses, and party chat on the new XBL friends with the game's logo next to their names; Halo3 had come out, and the goading to stop playing previous titles was quite obvious; Now you must repurchase it to play again online -- Ah, but that digital purchase doesn't work on the new Xbone. In addition to these TFA contains more examples and the recent history is rife with loss. If you think an expensive central server is required to list all the IP addresses of available game servers then take a look at how DHTs such as Bittorrent work. Anyone can modify a .torrent and add new trackers. Direct P2P links among all parties are established for voice chat in many online games anyway.
When in the midsts of some terrible stew many consider the situation "not so bad" since they can not make comparison with far brighter times ahead. Future historians will note that our Dark Ages were caused by DRM.
Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
The early bird catches the worm. Thus we worms nap as cats and gain their protection. Being early to rise is for the birds we're against.
I'll bet nobody in their study dropped 40 pounds in seven days. So precisely how could the establish the correlation?
Perhaps they were really full of shit?
And while you wonder about hemp, I wonder about algae. Algae doesn't bother to produce support structures and you can grow a "crop" in ten days rather than a year.
And while you wonder about algae I recognize that burning things is bad, and wonder about improving the efficiency of extracting energy directly from the sunlight itself.
I need to find a real tech site about computers and stuff.
People who sound like this also sounded like this: /g/
To be fair, neither do the majority of Slashdot commenters.
Then there are those who grew up as scientists then wondered why the scientific method wasn't used for all policy and law, then looked into the systems of governance and found them defective by design largely due to gerrymandering. That's a process whereby your votes do not matter anymore because whomever draws district outlines selects the winners (Protip: don't register as a party [they ask at the DMV] nor answer political surveys unless your population is nomadic). Some places are trying to fix this particular blatant exploit of our democratic-republic, but found the powers that be one step ahead so our vote tallies themselves have been hacked. And now that we don't have paper ballots to verify the insecure digital tally with, we might as well just ask the NSA or CIA or FBI to appoint people they like.
Speaking of which, if you apply a bit of observational power you'll discover those secret agencies answer to no one and have a long history of silencing any form of activism -- you know, because protest was the only avenue left to affect the government. It's hard for a scientist to survive mentally in a country that's hell bent on leveraging disaster capitalism regardless of public benefit: Humans will do whatever it takes to survive the disasters our government plans for us -- including compete for lower wages offered by immortal corporations.
Some of us have taken a step back, done some calculations and realized that some fights are entirely unwinnable: We've got to the point where the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment allows a senator to read a passage from the bible and declare it as proof man can't change the climate -- only god can. Listen up, newbie, that's corporate oil interest speaking, leveraging religious fundamentalism against science from the very panels addressing climate change -- What can you do? Replace them and get a new panel bought off? It's not just congress, your executive and legislative branches are sock-puppet parades too. The government fights wars at the behest of corporations and Habeas Corpus has been revoked, FFS. It's not that everyone is stupid and we're "getting what we voted for"; The 'republic' part of our democratic-republic is designed to fix that: The dumb elect folks who are smarter, but our forefathers didn't count on the majority of congress being corrupt so the whole system became utterly broken. They did leave us the option to call an emergency session of congress and wield a vote of no-confidence, so next time you see the "fire congress" carousel go round, hop on board (not that it'll fix anything, but it'll scare some straight).
So, what? Organize some activism and try to fix the illegitimate rulership system that has benefited the powerful all too well for well over a hundred years? Then you're an "anti-government extremist" / terrorist, and the plan to silence that disastrous shit is already so firmly in place they can keep the worst of it even if PRISM is leaked to the public. To me the innefectual occupy movement was a test to see how quickly the elites and FBI will work their magic on the police to silence dissent, and to see how effectively the news is controlled by corporate statist interests. There were protesters shoulder to shoulder filling a large swath of Wall Street one day of the protest and the local news in my southern town mentioned nothing. Days later I had to pull up video and images of the event to convince my clueless friends and neighbors it even happened. They scratched their heads, "Why wasn't this on the news then?" -- indeed. Can you
Then its not a Free Speech issue, which only concerns itself with communication between you and your government.
The Foundation of Individual Rights in Education disagrees with you, vehemently. Why, they actually win cases in court for freedom of speech issues.
No, it only really matters at the government level, when the threat of violence, imprisonment, and death can be brought to bear. Social pressures do not come anywhere NEAR that level of severity and seriousness.
You are a fucking idiot.
Patent laws are truly ridiculous. We should banish them all because there is zero evidence that patents are beneficial for society. We can re-implement them if we have evidence they're useful, but we have none. The absurdity you note is due to the patent law which paints both use and inducement of infringement as forbidden by patent law. Therefore, not only are you in violation of patent law if you stumble upon an idea or wavelength that someone else already registered first and try to market it, but you're also not allowed to use the discovery yourself in your private business or even in the privacy of your own home for your own personal use.
I have written operating systems completely from scratch using only a hex editor boot sector, coding with machine op codes editing executing memory, saving and loading via writing the code to load and store data between sectors and RAM. Using this simplest of tool possible (since boot from serial is missing on today's mainboards) I bootstrapped an editor, assembler, disassembler (then disassembled the assembler to get its source), and proceeded to create file systems and compilers and basic audio, graphics, and device drivers -- just for fun! I am fairly certain that it's illegal for me to use the OS I wrote from completely from scratch for my electronics & hobby projects or even to just write my memoirs in isolation because it's practically impossible NOT to accidentally "invent" a solution someone else has already thought of first and patented. Furthermore, how many new patents would be invalidated would that I could compare them against the prior art I refuse to open source for fear of lawsuit? IMO, such accidental patent infringement should be immediate grounds for invalidation of the patent on grounds of obviousness; However, there is no test for obviousness despite non-obviousness being a requirement for awarding of a patent.
I must refuse to look in the PTO database to discover whether I'm correct (because that yields 3x damages if you have definite foreknowledge of infringement), and this is the same reasoning that engineers DO NOT USE the patent databases! The patents are useless because it's faster and safer to re-invent your wheel than LICENSE someone else's vaguely described solutions BEFORE you can discover if it will work -- don't want to accidentally infringe by making an implementation and testing it -- over and over and over until you find one that works.
So, patents are essentially USELESS. They are useful to stifle competition not foster innovation. Mathematics, fashion and automotive designs wouldn't advance if patents were required for innovation, as these are prohibited from having patent protections and yet there the innovation is. We have only evidence for the null hypothesis, i.e., in opposition to the assumption that patents are beneficial for society and advancement of the useful arts or sciences. It's irresponsible to continue operating the world wide marketplace of ideas on an untested and unproven hypothesis. What if patents are holding us back needlessly? Wouldn't we want to find out sooner rather than later?
Time to do the experiment and abolish patents. I say we go one market at a time, starting with software patents since they exist until the mid 80's anyway, and yet we made it to the personal computer without them.
I fucking love this!
I hope every web company uses it. That way when users realize their boycotts have the potential power of cascading effects they'll finally have to bow to our demands and implement a better password system!
In the 70's we did not need degrees to get most jobs. We still do not need degrees to work most jobs, the tools have gotten more complex, but their interfaces remain as easy and teachable as ever through on the job training, if not more so. In fact, at many fields where they've contracted my computing related solutions I put in place systems that require ME to know the jobs of their workers better than their workers themselves, and yet I am a software and hardware architect, not a chemist. I overheard a chemist new hire being told, "You got a degree, that shows you were interested. Forget that stuff you learned in college, you'll learn our process and as long as you didn't flunk highschool chemistry, you'll do fine."
Degrees can be seen as a barrier to entry to the poor who self educate. The final exam itself is problematic because degree mills exist. This is true even in the field of computer programming. I have met masters of computer science that can spout mountains of complexity theory but can not code anything more complex than what I teach 12 year old children at the community center on alternate weekends.
Don't you see? This is the Information Age. College degrees are unnecessary. Colleges are no longer the noble institutions they once were in the 70's when you didn't need a degree to get a job. They should be elective learning centers, not defacto requirement for employment. Now they sadde people with large debts and useless mandatory studies to extract more wealth, and even their corporate co-conspirators leverage the degrees for their devious ends. That's why even though much research has shown that even 60 year old coders run rings around newbies, corporations value "new degrees" in new languages or platforms -- ignoring that the experienced developer picks up platforms and languages without needing degrees as a matter of doing their job. The younger guy works harder instead of smarter, but their insurance is cheaper: They want young obedient singles. That's why you're dead to silicon valley at the child raising age of 40...
Colleges have become political social justice indoctrination camps where new ideas and research are stifled in the name of ideology. The stench of the dark ages shrouds these idealogical echo chambers. We need to dismantle these gatekeepers of employment before we find ourselves in an even darker age. Granting colleges defacto monopoly over white-collar employment is folly: Power corrupts, and brother, they are rife with the stuff. We need to outlaw the final exam, and use Entrance Exams to PROVE you know what you need to know to do the job you'll be doing. Many jobs do this already, so that means requiring a degree is merely a means to discriminate on the poor who could not afford college but are self educated at or above said degree's level. College degrees have become a system for oppression. They have become a means to force workers to compete amongst themselves ever more desperately as they become increasingly unable to afford exorbitant tuition fees.
The rich corporations take huge tax breaks then cry out for more H1B visas to employ lower pay foreign workers who's credentials mean even less than those in the USA and further drive the ROI of college investment down for local workers, when in reality, there never was a shortage of STEM workers. Now that the economy is crying the ROI of college is lower and it becomes apparent that the self taught billionaire drop-outs might be onto something. It's not that kids should drop out and expect to become rich, but instead that it's stupid to pay a college to teach them what they already know. They can start makin
Playing Halo 2 on a PC like 3 years after the game came out on xbox, great plan you got there chief. It's hard to claim someone shit all over something by releasing a shoddy port that was going to sell at most a couple thousand copies versus the what, 4 million on launch day for xbox?
Playing Halo 2 on a PC like 3 years after the game came out on xbox, great plan you got there chief.
Remember when they killed the servers for Halo2 on XBL to make us start playing Halo3? No? Ah, you must have been playing via PC instead of Xbox.
If I decide I want to die and I hand you a gun and ask you to shoot me, is it ethical for you to do so?
Yes. Of course. Wouldn't it be ethical for me to inject your life-ending serum were you in terrible pain and wanted to die? OK, what if the pain is mental? What if there is no pain and you're sacrificing yourself for science? Look, just because some folks have a problem with killing people that want to die doesn't mean it's unethical to end people's lives when they really do want to die. That's their life, it's their choice.
You had better wise up quick. Our technological progress may eventually render us immortal. We already have stem-cell brain injections and neuroplasticity drugs to help repair and improve brain function. We'll probably have lab grown 3D printed replacement organs in a decade or so (12 years was the time-line I last saw). Our machine complexity is increasing at an exponential rate. Machines have gained capabilities in a few short decades that took us organic lifeforms billions of years to achieve. So, what happen when you're an immortal? Everyone lives forever whether they want to or not? Fuck. That. Hard.
I've got a game plot I'm working on where we deal with some of these ethical issues. Perhaps in a post-death world old timers will be the ones doing the really risky jobs that machines still can't do because they've been everywhere, done everything, and they aren't all geniuses constantly contributing to science. The ones who want to benefit their society best may decide to do so by taking really dangerous jobs or even suicide missions, boldly going where no man has gone before instead of just wasting resources thinking the same old thoughts and seeing the same old things. Whereas others explore the limits of understanding, they may choose to become daredevils exploring the limits of reality and life itself. In death they can become heroes and die knowing they have sacrificed themselves for the greater good of all.
We don't have to wait for immortality to realize these are noble causes. It's not like we have a shortage of humans that it would cripple us if a few decided to give their lives in the name of science.
If you don't have the freedom to peacefully sacrifice yourself for your species, planet, country, family, etc... then you don't have free will. No one is obliged to help you off yourself, but if they do it's not unethical. Are you even aware of the history of space exploration, or exploration in general? You sound like one of those brain-washed fools who advocate against free will of the terminally ill just to make the medical establishment a huge fortune, profiting via human suffering; Meanwhile staving kids fight wars over diamonds, electronics scraps, or food, with AK47s in Africa and you're not lobbying congress to do jack shit about it. I sure hope I'm wrong about you. Someday you might be one who's begging for death. If you keep that bullshit opinion of yours now, I hope that happens and your kids say, "Sorry gramps, looks like another 8-10 years of excruciating pain. You're not in control of your own life anymore because Pfizer has to make a buck somehow!"
Seriously. How the fuck did this moron get rated so highly is beyond me. Dying for piddling oil wars is somehow acceptable, but to advance the human space frontier is questionably not ethical?! Fuck all those mods, apparently you're not the same species as me after all.
*ends meat
How did pop-culture steal my identity?
Many people have bought into the cultural comodificiation of "nerd culture" or "geek culture" -- Which is a largely fabricated phenomena constructed by corporations to sell you a product, just like "hipster culture", "hippie culture", "thug culture", "punk culture", "rave culture", etc, have been appropriated reshaped normailzed and sold to the ignorant masses at a mall near you.
"Geek" and "nerd" wasn't initially desirable, much as "thug" wasn't a prestigious label for minority inner city youths, but it is arguably now desirable to be called "nigga", "thug", "geek" or "nerd" by peers. The rise of "geek" or "nerd" or "thug" or "punk" culture did not happen over night nor without the help of commercial interests. Contrast this with the similarities among hackers which emerged without the media's attention (whereafter their image was wrongly portrayed in the media). The thug, hippie, punk and other counter cultures began organically as well before they were appropriated and perverted by the corporate interests.
Pay attention to the media's portrayals of sympathetic "nerds" and "geeks". Do you remember Urkel? Screech? Revenge of the Nerds? Weird Science? During much of the 80's and 90's the token 'nerd' sidekick and his persecution in media created an artificial Poindexter to be the target of shame, exploited for laughs, and sympathy. This construction of the Poindexter identity and subsequent transformation into cool-ness as a "child geniuses" to sell parents on "intelligence boosting" toys and videos is responsible for what you now call "nerd" or "geek" culture: Doogie Howser MD, Dexter's Lab, Jimmy Neutron, etc. The construction of "nerd/geek culture" is primarily artificial. Now it's "cool" to be a "nerd" or "geek", but those terms are as meaningless now as the term "nigga".
Meanwhile, in reality, much as similarities among hackers appeared organically, commonalities among avid gamers and other passionate introverted hobbyists. Most of these similarities appeared without mimicry, and cross culturally esp. in the case of hackers, thus are not socially constructed by nature. I have a hard time reconciling the identity of "nerd" and "geek" culture as sold in media as representative of the hobbyist subcultures given that the "nerd" and "geek" identities do not match the prevalent traits of the subcultures they are attributed to:
The actual introverted hobbyist subcultures that are branded "nerd" or "geek" have nothing to do with the actual "nerd" or "geek" identity. Hackers had more in common with the hippie subculture than "nerd" or "geek". Gamers had more in common with the skater subculture. Science fiction and comic book fans have more in common with the otaku (anime enthusiast) subculture. But comparatively the subcultures are as different from each other as "jocks" are from "kickers", or "preps" are from "goths". Yes, even these once organic identities have been appropriated reshaped and sold. There is a country-western song, "I'm sexier on the Internet"... See? Normalized and easier to digest.
Congratulations. You are not a geek or nerd. Nigger, Nerd, and Geek are derogatory terms, which now have non-deragatory uses thanks to the commodification of culture. Though some are celebrating the mainstream interest and "coming out" of the enthusiast closet, I'd never call myself a "nerd" or "geek" except i
Awe, damn. I had my free cloud hosting totally full too! I don't like or really use Ubuntu, but I have to test some of my cross platform software with it, but Ubuntu One seemed to be pretty good at what I used it for. I hope I don't lose access to my mirror of /dev/urandom. Whatever shall I do?
I never trust the cloud services, especially not the free services. They are always destined to burn away under the bright rays of a profit-and-loss-statement sun.
Hmm. What got me was that it all fell apart when the Mountan Dewd Bro started instigating sexist shite.
"Do you think you're at an advantage because you have a pretty girl on your team?"
and
"Do you think the teams with women on them are at a disadvantage?"
As expected the indies didn't putting up with corporate sell-out nonsense or reality-TV false shit-stirring of sexism in games. Marketdroids should have known better.
Protip: Developers are not the players. That's really two separate communities, and there is zero barrier to entry, just like romance novel writing. There are far more female romance novelists. There are far more male indie gamedevs. It's not sexist. Different sexes make different choices in general since Men and women are different. A generalization doesn't limit the individuals who are free to be outliers. To get rid of the sexism and racism we've got to stop looking at things in terms of those constructed identity labels, and focus on what the individuals are actually creating and deciding and experiencing for themselves.