Hah! First he says "Bad quote", but immediately allows for the possibility that he implied it upon request for a transcript.
I have been quoted in a couple of articles in local papers over the past few years. I have never seen an article that didn't include at least one misquote. Usually something minor, true, but a misquote none the less.
I don't know what the cause of this is - bad note taking? Reporters hearing what they expect, instead of what you say? Misunderstanding of the nuances of jargon and other terminology that sounds like everyday language? Cutting out a few seemingly useless words that inadvertently changes the meaning of a quote, or joining a couple of quotes together to get something that isn't quite what the speaker meant? Maybe I'm just misremembering what I said?
Regardless of the cause, it happens - you think you said X, and the reporter writes that you said Y. It's happened to me frequently enough that I'm quite willing to believe that it's not an uncommon occurance. If the officer in question has had any dealings with the media before, he's probably been in the same situation. Even if a transcript of the conversation does exist, who do you think made the transcript? The reporter who allegedy got the quote wrong in the first place! His comments sound a lot less like CYA to me, and a lot more like "I didn't say that, and if the reporter thinks that I said it, or that I implied it, then they misunderstood me".
Their argument is that the state is requiring ISP's to provide a particular service whether they like it or not. They are dictating how ISP's are "permitted" to do business, asserting that they need the state's blessing to run that particular type of business.
And this would be different from every other type of business... how, exactly? That's basically the whole point of government: to regulate and enforce the laws governing the behavior of individuals. I don't see this as any different from the government telling, say, a credit reporting company, "You must provide a way for someone to submit corrections to their own credit report", or telling the phone company, "you must provide a way for someone to block unwanted phone solicitations", or telling a publically traded company, "You must provide the public correct financial information in quarterly reports."
I'd still object on the grounds that the government is promoting censorship, but at least they wouldn't be forcing ISP's to do it at gunpoint like they are now.
So, what - allowing a person to filter their own internet content is censorship, now? Good grief, man - look up the definition of the word. Nobody is restricting anyone's access to anything against their will. If you have to ask someone to prevent you from seeing it, it certainly isn't censorship.
Wrong. you've never worked for a small/medium size company have you?
First - the discussion wasn't about me or my work history; it was about whether or not Oracle's desire to save a few bucks per developer was the reason that RedHat went with Gnome over KDE. I don't know if you consider Oracle to be a "small/medium sized company"; I certainly don't.
Second - yes, I have worked for small companies my entire adult life (modulo a short stint in the US Navy.) The largest company I've ever worked for consisted of less than 250 people. I have never had a problem getting the tools I needed to do a good job; whether those were compilers, product libraries, source control systems, defect tracking systems, debuggers, memory profilers, licensing protection libraries, automated test tools, or what have you. The whole purpose of my employment, in every case, was to make money for the company. If you can show that investing $2000 per developer per year in some random development library (like QT) is likely to shave 10-12 developer-months off of a project, for example, it doesn't take a whole lot of selling to convince someone that those kind of tools are an advantage.
If you're producing an app then as a developer you have to fight for *Every* penny that gets spent.
Maybe I'm just lucky, and every single one of the last four companies I've worked for has been unusual. Honestly, though, I don't think so. Getting approval for something in a smaller company is easier than getting approval in a large company - it certainly doesn't "take about a month and cause you to miss your deadline", as you say. There is usually just one or two people (owner/CEO/CTO) that you need to convince about the worthiness of an expenditure. If you're prepared to make a case, and can clearly demonstrate how something will be of value, then you can get a yes or no answer from a decent CTO in less than an hour. If he says no, then drop it. If he says yes, the two of you will probably spend 10 minutes getting a yes or no from the CEO. If you can't manage all of that and get a yes/no answer and budget approval in less than 2 days time for a tool you're already familiar with, then there's something wrong...
...by my reckoning that one bug cost them $50,000 out of the developer (or 'resources') budget but spending $1000 out of the software budget was too much...different line in the spreadsheet).
...and there it is. If you're being told that spending $1,000 to save the company $50,000 is impossible because it would put you overbudget in some category, someone in the company is a fool who doesn't understand the value of money - and it doesn't sound like you.
If you take a great deal of pride in your work, you may want to quit and find someplace where they're able to hire managers that can understand complex statements like "50 is larger than 1". On the other hand, if a job's a job is a job to you, you might want to shrug and continue sucking money out of them as long as you can, taking solace in the idea that you're at least managing to contain those infected with "bumbling idiot manager disease", keeping them safely quarantined within your current company.
It's interesting that the example you cite as being particular nasty for autoconf to support (Digital UNIX) is also one of the last that would ever adopt your scheme of making the operating system partially responsible for autoconf.
Go back and re-read - he never said the OS should take responsibility, but instead that there should be a platform-dependent component to autoconf that the core autoconf framework uses. I imagine that those components could be part of the OS, though they would most likely be seperate OSS projects that make use of a core configuration API. And frankly, he's right. As things stand, all autoconf is is a portable shell script code generator. A pretty sophisticated code generator, but despite that sophistication, its a code generator none the less, and it suffers from the problems that any code generation system has. Not to mention that, in an effort to generate portable shell code, it's probably gotten to the point where it "configure" would be cleaner code, simpler and easier to understand if it was written in portable C with enough #ifdefs to allow it to bootstrap itself on any random arch...
Because companies making expensive propriety apps (Oracle et al) prefer people to be using gnome so they don't have to license qt.
Oh, man. I was going to let this pass, but... man. You're just plain wrong. Licensing QT is nothing for even a small company, let alone Oracle. Face it, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis - if the cost of supporting KDE was less than they money they could make by supporting it, they'd do it. Simple as that.
As it stands, though, Oracle and other major companies are not at all interested in choosing sides between KDE and Gnome. What they're interested in is choosing which distributions they will run on. The desktop environment is almost completely irrelevant to them. It was RedHat that choose to use Gnome as a default environment. IIRC, this was more of a political decision than anything else - no complaints on my part, mind you: I like both Gnome and KDE. But to imply that RedHat choose Gnome over KDE just because Oracle and other companies wanted to save a few grand is all-out wrong.
I do agree with you however that Gibson & Sterling paved the way.
Bzzt, wrong. I don't know what the first reference to this type program would be, but I do know that Roger Zelazney used something very similar to a virtual "earth" as a plot device in Home is the Hangman, written in 1975:
'Home is The Hangman' is part of a series of novellas where the premise is that when the world databases are unified, a programmer takes the opportunity to completely erase his existence. He pursues a career as a trouble-shooter, taking on those assignments no one else will do.
Which is why, it seems to me, that you would need in most of these schemes to have incorporate a well designed financial institution that would esstentially be a proxy for you as a productive citizen.
Part of the point Niven was making, I think, is that in these schemes you're not just relying on a "well designed financial institution" - you're also relying on the social and political background to be one that continues to support those institutions. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure that one of the implications in A World Out of Time (if it wasn't stated outright) is that changes in the social and political climate led to the corpsicles being declared legally dead once there was an obvious advantage for the state to do so.
In other words - in any scheme like this, you're essentially betting that, even if everything goes perfectly well, people will be fundamentally "good". Betting on a "well designed financial institution" may seem reasonable. Betting that once you're an amazingly wealthy corpse de jure, someone with political or military power won't make you a corpse de facto is something else entirely.
When I've heard of somebody who's obsessed with one of these life-extension schemes that will make some distant future generation able to reboot them, the question that always raises itself in my head is, "why would future generations want to?"
Larry Niven asked that question in A World Out of Time, and came up with the pretty logical answer:
For the most part, they wouldn't.
The main character in AWOOT was revived only because his personality profile indicated that he might make a good ramship pilot. His choices were to cooperate or else they'd kill him and try the next candidate. Compared to the lowest citizen of the State that revived him, he was nothing more than an expendable resource to be used and discarded. He and others like him - the corpsicles - were kept around they same way that you might keep around a jar of spare nuts and bolts. One of them might come in useful some day, so they were kept around only so long as it was slightly more inconvenient to discard them.
The DNC list, IIRC, is only an issue if there's no pre-existing business relationship. Just tell them you were their psychic counselor when you both lived in Atlantis in one of your past lives, and it was this relationship that allowed you to sense their need for your advice now...
It seems that by if this were in the interest of security, they would be required to include Saudi Arabi in the list of contries.
Wow. It's almost as if they expect that Saudi Arabia will cease to be any sort of threat to the US in the near future! I wonder why they would think that...
Nope, that wasn't the design goal:-) The player-as-foe concept was contingent on the idea that low-level characters can die and respawn without penalty - that the initial stages of the game were less RPG-like, and more FPS-oriented. No real opportunities for farming; you're a soldier of the Empire, and the Empire will supply your needs for the mission, thank you very much. Draw your armor and your weapon from the quartermaster before proceeding to the drop capsule...
Think of a set of scenarios more like a team fortress match. A group of players would receive a mission - capture a fortress, clean out a section of the underhive, locate and destroy a purestrain genestealer. With no penalties for dying - the Emperor's legions are more numerous than the stars! - and no items or loot to gain that will last longer than the mission at hand, the idea would be to recreate the atmosphere of WH40K: a wave of humanity, throwing themselves into the breach, winning against a terrible enemy by overwhelming them with numbers instead of heroes.
This is the where I think player-as-foe fits in. In WH40K, the idea is that a company of the legion will win by sheer numbers and tenacity if they throw themselves into battle against a single purestrain genestealer, a chaos marine, an orkish warlord. The player-as-foe would fit in as the "main" enemy in a misssion - the boss, if you will. They will loose, eventually; the players effectively have infinite lives and ammo, while the enemy-as-foes doesn't. The focus is the experience of the fight, not the reward at the end of it. Let the rest of the enemies in a mission be controlled by the game AI, but give the players the chance to face at least one real opponent that they can fight, outwit and overcome as part of the mission.
Yah, I know. This doesn't entirely eliminate the scenario you described. The problem is that nothing will. If you allow higher-level characters to interact with lower level in any way, you open yourself up to favoritism and twinking. The scenario I'm proposing eliminates twinking (since there's no permanent items to be gained from the mission), and if the players-as-foe get don't get to choose which missions they play opposition on, there's less of a chance that favoritism will play a role. If it's the idea of players-as-foe earning something for their activities that you object to, then eliminate it - for a lot of players, the opportunity to be the big boss on the other side will be enough to encourage them to participate in something like this, I think.
Once players advanced out of this particular arena, the player-as-foe concept wouldn't work, for the reasons you described. Once there are penalties for dying, and in-game rewards other than experience for finishing a mission, there's too much at stake for the players to risk introducing a scenario like you described; you'd have to limit PK opportunities to specific scenarios where all those involved knew ahead of time that they'd be playing out that kind of scenario. But while the players are "doing time" as grunts, getting a feel for the game and figuring out what path they eventually want to pursue as a character? Sure. Every game has some sort of early-on, newbie area with easy missions that allows a new player to come up to speed and get acquainted with the game. This is an idea to make those early missions challenging and fun in their own right, and maybe even make it attractive enough that even experienced players will occaisionally want to "dress down" and play a random grunt again.
Just had a thought... heh! Once a player reaches a certain level of competence, offer them the chance to create an "enemy" account on another server. When they play an enemy, they don't get any experience... but they do get credit for kills that counts towards their other account for online play time. This would get the best players to spend at least some time playing tyranids, genestealers, chaos marines, cult leaders and the like... and doing their best to be viscious, ruthless killers, because if they're good enough at the task, then they get to play their "real" account for free.
I've been geeking out on Warhammer 40K books laterly, and was just thinking last night that a WH40K MMORPG would be a whole heck of a lot of fun. You could start players as legion troops - expendables for the Emperor. Who cares if you die? You're just replaced by another Roane Deeper trooper like yourself... respawn in the battle fleet, draw from stores and re-deploy yourself back to the mission. Staging areas would be Navy vessels orbiting a planet overrun by tyranids, chaos, orks or the like. That would keep things fresh - the battle fleets as a whole might have a mission ("exsanguinate Ropar V"), and when that mission was met, they'd get reassigned to a new front.
On the individual level, once a player accumulated enough experience as a trooper, they could move into command, or become an arbites, or train as a bounty hunter, or discover you're a latent psyker, or develop special skills and join an inquisitor's retinue... once you became a "character" as opposed to a random trooper, you'd unlock new areas with different missions. Those missions might have an impact on battle group missions as well.
Sigh. It could be a whole lot of fun. Unlikely to ever happen, though, unless someone decides to pitch it as "EverQuest - in SPACE!"
Oh, bother. I wasn't trying to be overly critical! Yes, you were a bit excessive with the parenthesis:-) That's more or less what I started to say, but then I got caught up in the spirit of the thing. You saw the results; I just hope the intended humor came through.
I recommend "Parenthisizers Anonymous"
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Yes, you can get help (from others). You don't have to face this by yourself (alone). You can learn to use your favorite language (lisp) without feeling the desire (that burning need) to litter your entire conversation (or posts) with an amazing (literally amazing) amount of parenthetical notes (or notations, if you prefer).
You may want to start with using footnotes instead of parenthetical asides. This will allow you to gradually wean yourself off of your dependence on parenthesis. Note that some experts recoomend using braces instead of parenthesis. This won't do at all! You will still be dealing with your, ahem, addiction. Your readers will just think that you have gone completely nutso-wheelies and are trying to communicate in bash shell script.
Once you have managed to replace your use of parenthesis with footnotes, you can gradually and carefully eliminate the use of footnotes. In no time at all you will be writing clear, easily understood sentences. You readers will love you. Your parents, spouse, or SO will be proud of you. Your descendents will no longer have to avoid embarassing questions about your parenthetical love affair by telling stangers that they are RMS' illegitimate love children. World peace will become a reality.
The fate of future generations rests in your capable hands. Think of the children, man!
I think there have been some bills in Congress to change the way the rules are so that the 'riders' are related to the bill's topic, but asking Congresscritters to uphold integrity and honesty in passing bills is like asking the fox to guard the henhouse. These riders are a major source of their power and they use them all the time for their little-publicized amendments which further their own agenda.
Oh, for the love of... do I have to do all the thinking around here? Sheesh....
Congresperson Honest A. Trustworthy - next time you see a $100 million military funding bill come up for a vote, please do us all the simple favor of attaching a rider that will prevent you congresscritters from attaching riders to unrelated bills, OK? Make sure that everyone knows beforehand that a vote against that bill is a vote against our brave military personnel serving in Iraq, and bingo! - you'll have your no-rider legislation in place. It'll probably even pass 100-0.
It doesn't seem like the kind of thing 'Goodwill' would really get use of, but I hate to throw away perfectly good hardware and media if someone could make use of it.
Here in Pittsburgh, Goodwill has a store specifically for used computer hardware. I've been there a couple of times for one thing or antoher, or just to browse. Given what I've seen, they certainly wouldn't have any compunctions about taking in a load of random computer hardware and connectors, so long as the stuff wasn't obviously damaged or otherwise useless. If you're going to go this route, find out where your local Goodwill office (not store - office!) is, tell them what you have, and ask them where you can take it.
Great! I hope looking into this will be a help for you & your stepson. If you have any questions, my wife and I would be happy to help out and do our best to answer them - please feel free to write (spam -a-t- oneparticularharbor.net) anytime.
But as time went on, things went wrong. He would fly off the handle for no apparent reason (as a four year old). He still wakes up at 5:30 - 6 every morning absolutely bouncing off the walls. He can't grasp instruction (sans medicine) without constant repetition, and even then can't follow through well. He seems (note "seems") to think causing pain to the vulnerable (small animals/insects/etc) is funny in some way. He can show the greatest sympathy, however. He lies about meaningless things. He has very little external awareness. He exhibits loud repetitive patterns. He sneaks food he has permission to eat and hoardes snacks he doesn't. He has absolutely no tolerance for change or disappointment.
You may want to look into the possibilty that you are dealing with an emotional attachment issue (in whole or in part). A couple of the behaviors you mention are typically strong indicators of an attachment problem. They frequently show up in post-institutionalized or other children who did not have the opportunity to form emotional attachments to parents or caregivers early on in life.
IANA <whatever>, so please don't take my comments here as a diagnosis. My wife and I have dealt with attachment issues with our eldest (adopted) daughter, though, and your description seems to have some parallels with what I know and understand as symptoms of attachment issues. If you're interested in finding out additional information about attachment issues and potential treatments, you can start by taking a look at:
Its rather easy to check the bloody charts and make sure that you test all the other functions that are dependent on any code that you changed. Thats the responsible thing to do.
Sure. But at this point, you're assuming that your regression tests do indeed cover this case, and that they're written in such a way that they will always catch this particular failure mode.
Note that I'm not saying that there was a test-case failure in this particular situation. I don't work for Apple, I have no idea what their tests are like or what tests were run for this release. What I have seen are regression tests that passed, even when a feature was broken, because the regression tests were written in a particular way that failed to tickle a bug that (in hindsight) should have been caught by the tests. Tests are code, too: your regression tests are only as good insofar as you've tested them.
I've also seen properly written regression tests, that should have caught a particular bug, fail to fail (hah!) becuase of a seemingly trivial aspect of the test environment or the test hardware. This kind of test case failure often crops up specifically when you're doing integration or interoperability testing.
In short: regression tests are great, they're essential, but they can be far from perfect. It's easy to complain and ask questions like "What, didn't they bother testing this?" in the face of a seemingly obvious bug. If you don't know the details about how something was tested, though, you really can't say if a problem like this was a symptom of generally bad testing, or the result of a set of test cases that somehow just managed to miss the problem.
Ironic that you should mention DoubleClick...
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...since I just reloaded this page and got asked if I wanted to accept a DoubleClick cookie. Bleah.
That right there sums it up. If it is okay to skip to the naughty bits for some, it should be okay to skip past the naughty bits for others.
Let's expand the context a bit. Of all the people here saying that this type of video filtering is a violation of the producer's intent, it may change the meaning of the movie, you're not really getting the movie that was advertised, yadda, yadda, yadda...
How many are using a browser with ad-blocking and popup-blocking support?
How many use browser plugins that allow them to disable Flash?
How many have a Tivo or similar system with automatic ad-skipping capabilities?
How many are running spamassassin or other spam-filtering software?
As far as I can tell, there is no real difference between these types of filtering and ClearPlay-type edit lists. If ClearPlay hadn't been involved, or if it had been the ACLU or EFF instead of ClearPlay lobbying for this legislation, the ususal suspects here on/. would be overjoyed to see a law that explictly detailed the individual's right to alter personally viewed media to suit their tastes. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be that corporations are evil, and so any involvement of a corporation in the legislative process must therefore also be evil [1], regardless of what the actual legislation is.
[1] One notable exception is support of gay rights, pro-union, or other legislation generally approved of by "social progressives". Even then, corporations who pursue these agendas seem to be merely tolerated - and then only so long as they support the right causes.
There is no reason that these "experts" can't tune a 2.6 series kernel to around 1 MB (maybe less).
The linux-tiny patchset is your friend here. Using it, I've gotten a relatively full-featured kernel booting on x86 weighing in at under 800K... and that's without doing any agressive trimming, and without module support. According to his OLS 2004 presentation, Mackall has achieved a linux 2.6 kernel weighing in at a mere 363K, and others have reportedly managed a kernel as small as 191K.
Some of the linux-tiny ideas have been making their way into the mainline kernel, so this isn't just a special-purpose patchset - it's really a proving ground for kernel size minimization techniques.
Slashdot Mirror
I have been quoted in a couple of articles in local papers over the past few years. I have never seen an article that didn't include at least one misquote. Usually something minor, true, but a misquote none the less.
I don't know what the cause of this is - bad note taking? Reporters hearing what they expect, instead of what you say? Misunderstanding of the nuances of jargon and other terminology that sounds like everyday language? Cutting out a few seemingly useless words that inadvertently changes the meaning of a quote, or joining a couple of quotes together to get something that isn't quite what the speaker meant? Maybe I'm just misremembering what I said?
Regardless of the cause, it happens - you think you said X, and the reporter writes that you said Y. It's happened to me frequently enough that I'm quite willing to believe that it's not an uncommon occurance. If the officer in question has had any dealings with the media before, he's probably been in the same situation. Even if a transcript of the conversation does exist, who do you think made the transcript? The reporter who allegedy got the quote wrong in the first place! His comments sound a lot less like CYA to me, and a lot more like "I didn't say that, and if the reporter thinks that I said it, or that I implied it, then they misunderstood me".
Oh, that's OK, then. They just need to redefine their target audience from "professionals" to "grad students".
And this would be different from every other type of business... how, exactly? That's basically the whole point of government: to regulate and enforce the laws governing the behavior of individuals. I don't see this as any different from the government telling, say, a credit reporting company, "You must provide a way for someone to submit corrections to their own credit report", or telling the phone company, "you must provide a way for someone to block unwanted phone solicitations", or telling a publically traded company, "You must provide the public correct financial information in quarterly reports."
So, what - allowing a person to filter their own internet content is censorship, now? Good grief, man - look up the definition of the word. Nobody is restricting anyone's access to anything against their will. If you have to ask someone to prevent you from seeing it, it certainly isn't censorship.
First - the discussion wasn't about me or my work history; it was about whether or not Oracle's desire to save a few bucks per developer was the reason that RedHat went with Gnome over KDE. I don't know if you consider Oracle to be a "small/medium sized company"; I certainly don't.
Second - yes, I have worked for small companies my entire adult life (modulo a short stint in the US Navy.) The largest company I've ever worked for consisted of less than 250 people. I have never had a problem getting the tools I needed to do a good job; whether those were compilers, product libraries, source control systems, defect tracking systems, debuggers, memory profilers, licensing protection libraries, automated test tools, or what have you. The whole purpose of my employment, in every case, was to make money for the company. If you can show that investing $2000 per developer per year in some random development library (like QT) is likely to shave 10-12 developer-months off of a project, for example, it doesn't take a whole lot of selling to convince someone that those kind of tools are an advantage.
Maybe I'm just lucky, and every single one of the last four companies I've worked for has been unusual. Honestly, though, I don't think so. Getting approval for something in a smaller company is easier than getting approval in a large company - it certainly doesn't "take about a month and cause you to miss your deadline", as you say. There is usually just one or two people (owner/CEO/CTO) that you need to convince about the worthiness of an expenditure. If you're prepared to make a case, and can clearly demonstrate how something will be of value, then you can get a yes or no answer from a decent CTO in less than an hour. If he says no, then drop it. If he says yes, the two of you will probably spend 10 minutes getting a yes or no from the CEO. If you can't manage all of that and get a yes/no answer and budget approval in less than 2 days time for a tool you're already familiar with, then there's something wrong...
...and there it is. If you're being told that spending $1,000 to save the company $50,000 is impossible because it would put you overbudget in some category, someone in the company is a fool who doesn't understand the value of money - and it doesn't sound like you.
If you take a great deal of pride in your work, you may want to quit and find someplace where they're able to hire managers that can understand complex statements like "50 is larger than 1". On the other hand, if a job's a job is a job to you, you might want to shrug and continue sucking money out of them as long as you can, taking solace in the idea that you're at least managing to contain those infected with "bumbling idiot manager disease", keeping them safely quarantined within your current company.
Go back and re-read - he never said the OS should take responsibility, but instead that there should be a platform-dependent component to autoconf that the core autoconf framework uses. I imagine that those components could be part of the OS, though they would most likely be seperate OSS projects that make use of a core configuration API. And frankly, he's right. As things stand, all autoconf is is a portable shell script code generator. A pretty sophisticated code generator, but despite that sophistication, its a code generator none the less, and it suffers from the problems that any code generation system has. Not to mention that, in an effort to generate portable shell code, it's probably gotten to the point where it "configure" would be cleaner code, simpler and easier to understand if it was written in portable C with enough #ifdefs to allow it to bootstrap itself on any random arch...
Oh, man. I was going to let this pass, but... man. You're just plain wrong. Licensing QT is nothing for even a small company, let alone Oracle. Face it, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis - if the cost of supporting KDE was less than they money they could make by supporting it, they'd do it. Simple as that.
As it stands, though, Oracle and other major companies are not at all interested in choosing sides between KDE and Gnome. What they're interested in is choosing which distributions they will run on. The desktop environment is almost completely irrelevant to them. It was RedHat that choose to use Gnome as a default environment. IIRC, this was more of a political decision than anything else - no complaints on my part, mind you: I like both Gnome and KDE. But to imply that RedHat choose Gnome over KDE just because Oracle and other companies wanted to save a few grand is all-out wrong.
Bzzt, wrong. I don't know what the first reference to this type program would be, but I do know that Roger Zelazney used something very similar to a virtual "earth" as a plot device in Home is the Hangman, written in 1975:
Part of the point Niven was making, I think, is that in these schemes you're not just relying on a "well designed financial institution" - you're also relying on the social and political background to be one that continues to support those institutions. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure that one of the implications in A World Out of Time (if it wasn't stated outright) is that changes in the social and political climate led to the corpsicles being declared legally dead once there was an obvious advantage for the state to do so.
In other words - in any scheme like this, you're essentially betting that, even if everything goes perfectly well, people will be fundamentally "good". Betting on a "well designed financial institution" may seem reasonable. Betting that once you're an amazingly wealthy corpse de jure, someone with political or military power won't make you a corpse de facto is something else entirely.
Larry Niven asked that question in A World Out of Time, and came up with the pretty logical answer:
For the most part, they wouldn't.
The main character in AWOOT was revived only because his personality profile indicated that he might make a good ramship pilot. His choices were to cooperate or else they'd kill him and try the next candidate. Compared to the lowest citizen of the State that revived him, he was nothing more than an expendable resource to be used and discarded. He and others like him - the corpsicles - were kept around they same way that you might keep around a jar of spare nuts and bolts. One of them might come in useful some day, so they were kept around only so long as it was slightly more inconvenient to discard them.
The DNC list, IIRC, is only an issue if there's no pre-existing business relationship. Just tell them you were their psychic counselor when you both lived in Atlantis in one of your past lives, and it was this relationship that allowed you to sense their need for your advice now...
Wow. It's almost as if they expect that Saudi Arabia will cease to be any sort of threat to the US in the near future! I wonder why they would think that...
Nope, that wasn't the design goal :-) The player-as-foe concept was contingent on the idea that low-level characters can die and respawn without penalty - that the initial stages of the game were less RPG-like, and more FPS-oriented. No real opportunities for farming; you're a soldier of the Empire, and the Empire will supply your needs for the mission, thank you very much. Draw your armor and your weapon from the quartermaster before proceeding to the drop capsule...
Think of a set of scenarios more like a team fortress match. A group of players would receive a mission - capture a fortress, clean out a section of the underhive, locate and destroy a purestrain genestealer. With no penalties for dying - the Emperor's legions are more numerous than the stars! - and no items or loot to gain that will last longer than the mission at hand, the idea would be to recreate the atmosphere of WH40K: a wave of humanity, throwing themselves into the breach, winning against a terrible enemy by overwhelming them with numbers instead of heroes.
This is the where I think player-as-foe fits in. In WH40K, the idea is that a company of the legion will win by sheer numbers and tenacity if they throw themselves into battle against a single purestrain genestealer, a chaos marine, an orkish warlord. The player-as-foe would fit in as the "main" enemy in a misssion - the boss, if you will. They will loose, eventually; the players effectively have infinite lives and ammo, while the enemy-as-foes doesn't. The focus is the experience of the fight, not the reward at the end of it. Let the rest of the enemies in a mission be controlled by the game AI, but give the players the chance to face at least one real opponent that they can fight, outwit and overcome as part of the mission.
Yah, I know. This doesn't entirely eliminate the scenario you described. The problem is that nothing will. If you allow higher-level characters to interact with lower level in any way, you open yourself up to favoritism and twinking. The scenario I'm proposing eliminates twinking (since there's no permanent items to be gained from the mission), and if the players-as-foe get don't get to choose which missions they play opposition on, there's less of a chance that favoritism will play a role. If it's the idea of players-as-foe earning something for their activities that you object to, then eliminate it - for a lot of players, the opportunity to be the big boss on the other side will be enough to encourage them to participate in something like this, I think.
Once players advanced out of this particular arena, the player-as-foe concept wouldn't work, for the reasons you described. Once there are penalties for dying, and in-game rewards other than experience for finishing a mission, there's too much at stake for the players to risk introducing a scenario like you described; you'd have to limit PK opportunities to specific scenarios where all those involved knew ahead of time that they'd be playing out that kind of scenario. But while the players are "doing time" as grunts, getting a feel for the game and figuring out what path they eventually want to pursue as a character? Sure. Every game has some sort of early-on, newbie area with easy missions that allows a new player to come up to speed and get acquainted with the game. This is an idea to make those early missions challenging and fun in their own right, and maybe even make it attractive enough that even experienced players will occaisionally want to "dress down" and play a random grunt again.
Just had a thought... heh! Once a player reaches a certain level of competence, offer them the chance to create an "enemy" account on another server. When they play an enemy, they don't get any experience... but they do get credit for kills that counts towards their other account for online play time. This would get the best players to spend at least some time playing tyranids, genestealers, chaos marines, cult leaders and the like... and doing their best to be viscious, ruthless killers, because if they're good enough at the task, then they get to play their "real" account for free.
Unfortunately, I think you're right.
Bah! EverQuest? No thanks. WoW? Eh, maybe. Star Wars? Give me a break.
Chainsword and bolter, slaughtering chaos filth in the name of the Emperor? Sign me up!
I've been geeking out on Warhammer 40K books laterly, and was just thinking last night that a WH40K MMORPG would be a whole heck of a lot of fun. You could start players as legion troops - expendables for the Emperor. Who cares if you die? You're just replaced by another Roane Deeper trooper like yourself... respawn in the battle fleet, draw from stores and re-deploy yourself back to the mission. Staging areas would be Navy vessels orbiting a planet overrun by tyranids, chaos, orks or the like. That would keep things fresh - the battle fleets as a whole might have a mission ("exsanguinate Ropar V"), and when that mission was met, they'd get reassigned to a new front.
On the individual level, once a player accumulated enough experience as a trooper, they could move into command, or become an arbites, or train as a bounty hunter, or discover you're a latent psyker, or develop special skills and join an inquisitor's retinue... once you became a "character" as opposed to a random trooper, you'd unlock new areas with different missions. Those missions might have an impact on battle group missions as well.
Sigh. It could be a whole lot of fun. Unlikely to ever happen, though, unless someone decides to pitch it as "EverQuest - in SPACE!"
Oh, bother. I wasn't trying to be overly critical! Yes, you were a bit excessive with the parenthesis :-) That's more or less what I started to say, but then I got caught up in the spirit of the thing. You saw the results; I just hope the intended humor came through.
Yes, you can get help (from others). You don't have to face this by yourself (alone). You can learn to use your favorite language (lisp) without feeling the desire (that burning need) to litter your entire conversation (or posts) with an amazing (literally amazing) amount of parenthetical notes (or notations, if you prefer).
You may want to start with using footnotes instead of parenthetical asides. This will allow you to gradually wean yourself off of your dependence on parenthesis. Note that some experts recoomend using braces instead of parenthesis. This won't do at all! You will still be dealing with your, ahem, addiction. Your readers will just think that you have gone completely nutso-wheelies and are trying to communicate in bash shell script.
Once you have managed to replace your use of parenthesis with footnotes, you can gradually and carefully eliminate the use of footnotes. In no time at all you will be writing clear, easily understood sentences. You readers will love you. Your parents, spouse, or SO will be proud of you. Your descendents will no longer have to avoid embarassing questions about your parenthetical love affair by telling stangers that they are RMS' illegitimate love children. World peace will become a reality.
The fate of future generations rests in your capable hands. Think of the children, man!
Oh, for the love of... do I have to do all the thinking around here? Sheesh....
Congresperson Honest A. Trustworthy - next time you see a $100 million military funding bill come up for a vote, please do us all the simple favor of attaching a rider that will prevent you congresscritters from attaching riders to unrelated bills, OK? Make sure that everyone knows beforehand that a vote against that bill is a vote against our brave military personnel serving in Iraq, and bingo! - you'll have your no-rider legislation in place. It'll probably even pass 100-0.
Here in Pittsburgh, Goodwill has a store specifically for used computer hardware. I've been there a couple of times for one thing or antoher, or just to browse. Given what I've seen, they certainly wouldn't have any compunctions about taking in a load of random computer hardware and connectors, so long as the stuff wasn't obviously damaged or otherwise useless. If you're going to go this route, find out where your local Goodwill office (not store - office!) is, tell them what you have, and ask them where you can take it.
Great! I hope looking into this will be a help for you & your stepson. If you have any questions, my wife and I would be happy to help out and do our best to answer them - please feel free to write (spam -a-t- oneparticularharbor.net) anytime.
You may want to look into the possibilty that you are dealing with an emotional attachment issue (in whole or in part). A couple of the behaviors you mention are typically strong indicators of an attachment problem. They frequently show up in post-institutionalized or other children who did not have the opportunity to form emotional attachments to parents or caregivers early on in life.
IANA <whatever>, so please don't take my comments here as a diagnosis. My wife and I have dealt with attachment issues with our eldest (adopted) daughter, though, and your description seems to have some parallels with what I know and understand as symptoms of attachment issues. If you're interested in finding out additional information about attachment issues and potential treatments, you can start by taking a look at:
Sure. But at this point, you're assuming that your regression tests do indeed cover this case, and that they're written in such a way that they will always catch this particular failure mode.
Note that I'm not saying that there was a test-case failure in this particular situation. I don't work for Apple, I have no idea what their tests are like or what tests were run for this release. What I have seen are regression tests that passed, even when a feature was broken, because the regression tests were written in a particular way that failed to tickle a bug that (in hindsight) should have been caught by the tests. Tests are code, too: your regression tests are only as good insofar as you've tested them.
I've also seen properly written regression tests, that should have caught a particular bug, fail to fail (hah!) becuase of a seemingly trivial aspect of the test environment or the test hardware. This kind of test case failure often crops up specifically when you're doing integration or interoperability testing.
In short: regression tests are great, they're essential, but they can be far from perfect. It's easy to complain and ask questions like "What, didn't they bother testing this?" in the face of a seemingly obvious bug. If you don't know the details about how something was tested, though, you really can't say if a problem like this was a symptom of generally bad testing, or the result of a set of test cases that somehow just managed to miss the problem.
...since I just reloaded this page and got asked if I wanted to accept a DoubleClick cookie. Bleah.
Let's expand the context a bit. Of all the people here saying that this type of video filtering is a violation of the producer's intent, it may change the meaning of the movie, you're not really getting the movie that was advertised, yadda, yadda, yadda...
As far as I can tell, there is no real difference between these types of filtering and ClearPlay-type edit lists. If ClearPlay hadn't been involved, or if it had been the ACLU or EFF instead of ClearPlay lobbying for this legislation, the ususal suspects here on /. would be overjoyed to see a law that explictly detailed the individual's right to alter personally viewed media to suit their tastes. The knee-jerk reaction seems to be that corporations are evil, and so any involvement of a corporation in the legislative process must therefore also be evil [1], regardless of what the actual legislation is.
[1] One notable exception is support of gay rights, pro-union, or other legislation generally approved of by "social progressives". Even then, corporations who pursue these agendas seem to be merely tolerated - and then only so long as they support the right causes.
The linux-tiny patchset is your friend here. Using it, I've gotten a relatively full-featured kernel booting on x86 weighing in at under 800K... and that's without doing any agressive trimming, and without module support. According to his OLS 2004 presentation, Mackall has achieved a linux 2.6 kernel weighing in at a mere 363K, and others have reportedly managed a kernel as small as 191K.
Some of the linux-tiny ideas have been making their way into the mainline kernel, so this isn't just a special-purpose patchset - it's really a proving ground for kernel size minimization techniques.