Hehe. I wonder how JoshJ would have enjoyed watching doom2 deathmatches.
When I moved from doom to quake, the first thing that struck me was how slow you moved.
Doom is a game where you can run almost as fast as the projectile weapons without any tricks. And faster with wall hugging etc. Now that was arcade action.
Of course with some hopping and some optional rocket "boosts", you can achieve really high speeds in Quake/Quakeworld.
Anyone who wants realistic has no clue. Nobody wants to be dropped in the wrong zone - 20 km away from where you are supposed to be, and have to slash your way through the jungle for hours, only to die in the first few seconds of a battle, never to respawn ever again.
What would be nice would be another Aliens vs Predator game with Crysis-level technology, and the game should allow the predator to actually climb most stuff (predators couldn't climb up trees or walls in AVP2, only the "aliens" could). Predators should be allowed to climb most surfaces but a lot slower than "aliens" - and even hang from ceilings - they have those special claws after all.
"why are the natural laws and constants so precisely constrained for universe to have "us"."
But are they?
I thought popular theory was > 90% of the stuff in the universe is nothing like us.
So maybe we're just some insignificant anomaly or noise. Compared to 99% of the universe, there may not be much difference between us and some "interesting" cloud formation on Earth.
Patent? Anyone with a clue would have thought of this "on demand" within 5 seconds.
I bet more than 90% of the patents are in the category of: "I need an omellete, what next? I've got it, I need to get some eggs! Wow, let's patent that step".
At least that's what it was when I last checked on random patents.
The US Gov has the right to tell a _US_ company how to behave.
If the US company doesn't like it, it should stop being a US company.
A fair number of multinational companies set up complicated corporate structures to control their exposure to laws and regulations.
BUT, for many companies the US is still "The Market" for them, so if the USA says "heel", they will.
The US Gov doesn't have the right to tell a Chinese company in China what to do, but the US Gov can always ban all products from that Chinese company, and arrest people from that company if they step on US territory. If that company doesn't have anything to do with the USA, that might not affect it much.
But for other stuff, I think it needs a fair bit of testing first. For database servers, when say 10 users update a bunch of records, the writes don't usually end up conveniently going to the same area of the drive.
And different databases handle stuff differently - some write directly to the table, some write first to a rollback segment, some write to a write log, and so on.
You really don't want to hit the 4 writes per second scenario. That's abysmal.
It's fine if you are writing 20MB chunks at a time (80MB/sec), but if your write chunks are smaller than say 4MB...
The assets of the class bully were not frozen for 10 days.
A closer analogy to his elementary school stupidity would be a convicted monopolist getting no punishment, while the customers and other companies get punished (e.g. have to pay extra $$$ or put up with worse conditions).
Like they say: soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box.
Similarly: you write to them first, then you write to the papers, no response, then you write to your representative, etc.
If that stuff fails, you can do the drama thing with the security guard.
As it is, I don't see how you can change policy via security guards unless you or the guards do something stupid.
The guard has the right to ask you to leave the building. If it's not a public place, the guard can make you leave. So what are you going to do then? Wrestle with the guard?
If the guard screws up they can sack the guard, and still keep the "no photos" policy.
If the guard doesn't screw up, then what?
From my point of view, you can skip doing the "guard step" _first_ and go the next step instead.
I suspect most of the people doing the "guard step" aren't really fighting for people's rights.
They're fighting for some other reason (pride? ego?) or are just being assholes.
"Since they are fictitious legal persons we need the equivalent of prison time for them. In the information age it's perfectly possible to 'lock up' a company, suspending their trading and seizing all assets for 60 days would REALLY HURT."
I don't think so.
See, the whole idea of corporations is limited liability.
That's why the people in charge will take the risk and do stuff. That's good for society when they're doing the "good stuff".
Now if the people in charge do really bad stuff, you don't punish the fictitious legal person.
You punish the _real_ people behind it.
Many rich people own multiple companies. You lock one up, or punish one to dust, they have ten others, they write it off as a "cost of doing business".
Whereas if you jail the people in charge that would REALLY HURT.
A rich person isn't going to live much longer than 120 years, by the time they are rich, they've got a lot less than that left. So jail for 5 years does hurt.
While in prison, they can't enjoy the benefits of their wealth as much. No cocktails on beautiful beaches, no luxurious surroundings.
When someone really breaks the rules of the game, no more hiding behind "limited liability" and "fictitious legal persons".
That is what will really hurt, and that is what will "adjust the attitude" of the real persons behind those shields.
Often they are told by their bosses that "this is the policy, enforce it". It's not like they have the luxury of saying "hey I think this policy is stupid".
So if they don't tell you to stop, they could lose their jobs.
If they tell you to stop, and things go the wrong way, they could also lose their jobs (see one of the cases involving Mr CEO photographer[1]).
It's not like most of them can afford the _time_ and money to seek legal redress if they get sacked just for being put in a stupid situation that's completely their fault.
If the security guard is really being an asshole, then maybe he deserves it.
But if the security guard is NOT being an asshole about it, maybe you should take it up with the people setting the policy, not the guard. Do you absolutely have to take that picture?
Sure you have the right to swing your fist about, as long as it is what the courts may view as a reasonable distance from others. But that doesn't necessarily mean you _have_ to keep swinging it about, when someone requests you to stop for whatever reason.
When someone wield a gun and a uniform and makes you do something, yes sometimes that can be bullying.
BUT don't forget, you can wield the law and be a bully as well.
If my friend asks me to stop taking pictures of him even in public places, I'd probably stop. Perhaps the guard is not your friend, but why not be friendly?
You can be 100% in the right all the time and have no friends.
[1] Seems a security guard showed Mr CEO Photographer the finger and lost his job for it. I'm not aware of the full story, and yes maybe the guard was out of line, but I dunno, security guards losing their jobs for showing someone a finger? Heck, real cops don't seem to lose their jobs for doing worse.
"you're reading for meaning"... "where most people are pretty sloppy"
That's fine if people are trying to express "standard" or "normal" aka boring stuff.
If you are trying to communicate unusual meanings to somebody else, it doesn't work so well if you are sloppy.
On Slashdot I'm expecting the discourse to be on a higher level than "Me hungry. Want food", and that at least some people here will post stuff that is out of the ordinary and hopefully interesting.
In such a case, in addition to figuring out whether the writer made a mistake in spelling, grammer, you also have to figure out whether the writer made a mistake in reasoning, or is trying to be funny, or is saying something really _different_, or is saying multiple things at the same time, or is just plain crazy, or whatever.
It's all very easy to parse if you only have to expect people to say boring stuff.
Maybe exploration is the wrong word. I'm more like saying some things should not be done yet, and other stuff given higher priority. Right now stuff seems quite haphazard.
Perhaps one day the equivalent of a "Big Red Kill Everyone Button" will be cheap and fairly available, will everyone have the discipline or desire to not push it?
Already the cost of making custom viruses is getting lower and lower.
Oh well, maybe it's just too late anyway and all we can do is hope for the best:).
For which athletes? I'm pretty sure the Greeks used to train and prepare for their games.
quote: The athletes... had to prove that they had been in training for ten months before the Games. They also had to spend 30 days training at Olympia before the Games began under the supervision of judges who made the choice of the athletes who would compete in the Games.
Anyway, you are still going to have to draw a line somewhere: doping, cybernetics, gene mods etc. So not allowing doping is a valid practical line. And so is "allowing full body swimsuits but only those with a buoyancy between X and Y".
Car analogy: it's just like Formula 1 racing, there is really no "formula unlimited", because at the end of the day people have to decide "What is an acceptable car?" and "What is an acceptable way of winning?", so they might as well decide "What is an acceptable F1 car".
After all with future tech, there could be cybernetics, or genetically modified humans, or biomodified humans. And then you also start asking "what's human".
While the rules do restrict, the rules also help provide _shape_ to the event. Are we sure we are ready for a games with mods and doping? It could be a slippery slope to quite a lot of nastiness - even _in_ spectators.
On a vaguely related note - this is why to me, exploration in some areas of science should be discouraged till humans are ready (in terms of tech, medical, culture, society, religion - religion isn't going away any time soon whether you want it or not) for the implications. It's like the "Civ" game, where you do some stuff first, then only other stuff.
For instance say some genius suddenly creates a gene mod that makes us super fit, AND also makes it contagious. I don't think all of us want it automatically - no matter how good it seems.
I'm a tad suspicious of that one. He seemed like he was squeezing it _really_ hard. Like he was intentionally trying to break it.
If you're holding something as delicate as say an egg shell, when you break it, it doesn't fly so far and fast, unless you're really putting a lot of force on it.
Maybe it was very heavy and delicate. Even so, looking at the video, if it was really unintentional maybe they should have got someone else to demo it, or done it differently.
To me it depends on what those 1500 different chemicals were, and the quantities involved, how they are stored, and what he really is doing with them.
I probably have more than 1500 different chemicals in my body at the moment. Big deal.
If they came in, investigated and he was not doing anything illegal (which is quite amazing nowadays given the amount of laws they can throw at you), it is wrong to shut him down AND take his stuff.
Vista's dhcp client sets the "broadcast" wanted flag by default.
This normally works fine with the dhcp server[1] I wrote for work (which runs on nonwindows servers).
In the problem case when hotel guests using Vista plug to the "Internet" interface on some set top boxes, their Vista machines didn't receive the broadcast replies from my dhcp server. This was because the set top boxes did not pass ethernet broadcasts (AFAIK they're supposed to).
The set top boxes handle the TV, web-via-TV and video on demand stuff but are also supposed to allow guests to plug their computers to them to access the internet.
[1] It's a rules based dhcp server. Rules, leases and other stuff are stored in a database, so that they can more easily be changed and read by other stuff on-the-fly.
Nah, AFAIK Vista was doing things in an RFC compliant way. Just different from most other clients (XP, isc dhcp)- Vista tends to set the broadcast flag.
Doing work correctly does reduce maintenance, but up to a point - often you have to workaround other people's bugs.
For example: Vista worked fine with my dhcpd. But at one place it didn't work fine. Found out it was due to a bunch of set top boxes not passing ethernet broadcasts- which meant the set top box was broken (it's supposed to behave like a switch/bridge and so it should pass the broadcasts).
But no time to get vendor to fix the set top boxes (and there were hundreds of them). So in the end I had to add a workaround to the dhcpd - when enabled it sends replies using an ethernet unicast (e.g. machine mac instead of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff ) but a IP broadcast (e.g. 255.255.255.255), which is probably not quite RFC compliant;) ). Fortunately that still worked for Vista - in theory it was likely to work but Vista could have decided to be fussy and still be compliant.
And sometimes when you get down to the details, it gets less clear who is wrong or right - lots of ambiguities in some standards/RFCs.
Then there are some who are clearly doing things wrong, but you still have to try to work with them (like some BigBrand PDAs - even people working for BigBrand admitted they're crap;) ).
Maybe one phone in a metal plane doesn't do anything.
But how about 300 phones? And what happens if all of them go to max power because they can't reach a cell? Or when the plane's micro cell goes down.
Just putting an active GSM phone next to audio equipment makes it buzz. With such phones you can even tell that you are about to get a call just by the distinctive tatata-tatata-tatata-ta-ta sound from the interference.
So I won't be confident on it not causing problems to avionics.
Another thing - does using a phone in a fuel station really pose a significant increased risk?
You vote for candidates based on who get the most money from corporations?
It's clear that the voters don't really care. As long as they have their "bread and circuses" or should that be "Junk Food and Reality TV" everything is tolerable.
Otherwise they'd just vote for somebody else. Believe me, if random candidates started actually getting significant votes, the politicians would start to change their tune.
Slashdot Mirror
"speed of Quake"
Hehe. I wonder how JoshJ would have enjoyed watching doom2 deathmatches.
When I moved from doom to quake, the first thing that struck me was how slow you moved.
Doom is a game where you can run almost as fast as the projectile weapons without any tricks. And faster with wall hugging etc. Now that was arcade action.
Of course with some hopping and some optional rocket "boosts", you can achieve really high speeds in Quake/Quakeworld.
Anyone who wants realistic has no clue. Nobody wants to be dropped in the wrong zone - 20 km away from where you are supposed to be, and have to slash your way through the jungle for hours, only to die in the first few seconds of a battle, never to respawn ever again.
What would be nice would be another Aliens vs Predator game with Crysis-level technology, and the game should allow the predator to actually climb most stuff (predators couldn't climb up trees or walls in AVP2, only the "aliens" could).
Predators should be allowed to climb most surfaces but a lot slower than "aliens" - and even hang from ceilings - they have those special claws after all.
"why are the natural laws and constants so precisely constrained for universe to have "us"."
:)
But are they?
I thought popular theory was > 90% of the stuff in the universe is nothing like us.
So maybe we're just some insignificant anomaly or noise. Compared to 99% of the universe, there may not be much difference between us and some "interesting" cloud formation on Earth.
Or are we both insignificant and interesting?
Self service discount? Over here we call it shoplifting :).
Patent? Anyone with a clue would have thought of this "on demand" within 5 seconds.
I bet more than 90% of the patents are in the category of: "I need an omellete, what next? I've got it, I need to get some eggs! Wow, let's patent that step".
At least that's what it was when I last checked on random patents.
The US Gov has the right to tell a _US_ company how to behave.
If the US company doesn't like it, it should stop being a US company.
A fair number of multinational companies set up complicated corporate structures to control their exposure to laws and regulations.
BUT, for many companies the US is still "The Market" for them, so if the USA says "heel", they will.
The US Gov doesn't have the right to tell a Chinese company in China what to do, but the US Gov can always ban all products from that Chinese company, and arrest people from that company if they step on US territory. If that company doesn't have anything to do with the USA, that might not affect it much.
Write speeds aren't that great: http://www.alternativerecursion.info/?p=106
It might be fine for desktop linux.
But for other stuff, I think it needs a fair bit of testing first. For database servers, when say 10 users update a bunch of records, the writes don't usually end up conveniently going to the same area of the drive.
And different databases handle stuff differently - some write directly to the table, some write first to a rollback segment, some write to a write log, and so on.
You really don't want to hit the 4 writes per second scenario. That's abysmal.
It's fine if you are writing 20MB chunks at a time (80MB/sec), but if your write chunks are smaller than say 4MB...
His analogy is pretty off.
The assets of the class bully were not frozen for 10 days.
A closer analogy to his elementary school stupidity would be a convicted monopolist getting no punishment, while the customers and other companies get punished (e.g. have to pay extra $$$ or put up with worse conditions).
That'll work really well eh?
In this case, I doubt either party is committing a crime, or following an unlawful order.
Like they say: soap box, ballot box, jury box, ammo box.
Similarly: you write to them first, then you write to the papers, no response, then you write to your representative, etc.
If that stuff fails, you can do the drama thing with the security guard.
As it is, I don't see how you can change policy via security guards unless you or the guards do something stupid.
The guard has the right to ask you to leave the building. If it's not a public place, the guard can make you leave. So what are you going to do then? Wrestle with the guard?
If the guard screws up they can sack the guard, and still keep the "no photos" policy.
If the guard doesn't screw up, then what?
From my point of view, you can skip doing the "guard step" _first_ and go the next step instead.
I suspect most of the people doing the "guard step" aren't really fighting for people's rights.
They're fighting for some other reason (pride? ego?) or are just being assholes.
If the security guard isn't setting the policy, you can also assert your rights by challenging that policy, not by challenging the guard.
You could write to the building management complaining about the policy, write to the papers, etc.
Challenging the guard can be a bit more dramatic. But drama is not always necessary for action.
"Their feelings are their own responsibility, not yours, and you have no control over how they feel about anything."
I may have no control, but I do have a slight bit of influence. In fact I just made a security guard smile today.
I waved at him as I jogged past. And no, he was not laughing at me. Or maybe he was...
But anyway, if you absolutely must get those shots, do it.
"Since they are fictitious legal persons we need the equivalent of prison time for them. In the information age it's perfectly possible to 'lock up' a company, suspending their trading and seizing all assets for 60 days would REALLY HURT."
I don't think so.
See, the whole idea of corporations is limited liability.
That's why the people in charge will take the risk and do stuff. That's good for society when they're doing the "good stuff".
Now if the people in charge do really bad stuff, you don't punish the fictitious legal person.
You punish the _real_ people behind it.
Many rich people own multiple companies. You lock one up, or punish one to dust, they have ten others, they write it off as a "cost of doing business".
Whereas if you jail the people in charge that would REALLY HURT.
A rich person isn't going to live much longer than 120 years, by the time they are rich, they've got a lot less than that left. So jail for 5 years does hurt.
While in prison, they can't enjoy the benefits of their wealth as much. No cocktails on beautiful beaches, no luxurious surroundings.
When someone really breaks the rules of the game, no more hiding behind "limited liability" and "fictitious legal persons".
That is what will really hurt, and that is what will "adjust the attitude" of the real persons behind those shields.
I'm not a security guard.
But do try to see it from their point of view.
Often they are told by their bosses that "this is the policy, enforce it". It's not like they have the luxury of saying "hey I think this policy is stupid".
So if they don't tell you to stop, they could lose their jobs.
If they tell you to stop, and things go the wrong way, they could also lose their jobs (see one of the cases involving Mr CEO photographer[1]).
It's not like most of them can afford the _time_ and money to seek legal redress if they get sacked just for being put in a stupid situation that's completely their fault.
If the security guard is really being an asshole, then maybe he deserves it.
But if the security guard is NOT being an asshole about it, maybe you should take it up with the people setting the policy, not the guard. Do you absolutely have to take that picture?
Sure you have the right to swing your fist about, as long as it is what the courts may view as a reasonable distance from others. But that doesn't necessarily mean you _have_ to keep swinging it about, when someone requests you to stop for whatever reason.
When someone wield a gun and a uniform and makes you do something, yes sometimes that can be bullying.
BUT don't forget, you can wield the law and be a bully as well.
If my friend asks me to stop taking pictures of him even in public places, I'd probably stop. Perhaps the guard is not your friend, but why not be friendly?
You can be 100% in the right all the time and have no friends.
[1] Seems a security guard showed Mr CEO Photographer the finger and lost his job for it. I'm not aware of the full story, and yes maybe the guard was out of line, but I dunno, security guards losing their jobs for showing someone a finger? Heck, real cops don't seem to lose their jobs for doing worse.
"you're reading for meaning" ... "where most people are pretty sloppy"
That's fine if people are trying to express "standard" or "normal" aka boring stuff.
If you are trying to communicate unusual meanings to somebody else, it doesn't work so well if you are sloppy.
On Slashdot I'm expecting the discourse to be on a higher level than "Me hungry. Want food", and that at least some people here will post stuff that is out of the ordinary and hopefully interesting.
In such a case, in addition to figuring out whether the writer made a mistake in spelling, grammer, you also have to figure out whether the writer made a mistake in reasoning, or is trying to be funny, or is saying something really _different_, or is saying multiple things at the same time, or is just plain crazy, or whatever.
It's all very easy to parse if you only have to expect people to say boring stuff.
Nah, the main reason is she doesn't read Slashdot enough so she's not exposed to the tons of spelling mistakes on Slashdot (amongst other things) ;).
Maybe exploration is the wrong word. I'm more like saying some things should not be done yet, and other stuff given higher priority. Right now stuff seems quite haphazard.
:).
Perhaps one day the equivalent of a "Big Red Kill Everyone Button" will be cheap and fairly available, will everyone have the discipline or desire to not push it?
Already the cost of making custom viruses is getting lower and lower.
Oh well, maybe it's just too late anyway and all we can do is hope for the best
For which athletes? I'm pretty sure the Greeks used to train and prepare for their games.
quote: The athletes ... had to prove that they had been in training for ten months before the Games. They also had to spend 30 days training at Olympia before the Games began under the supervision of judges who made the choice of the athletes who would compete in the Games.
http://www.library.uq.edu.au/olympics/milns.html
Anyway, you are still going to have to draw a line somewhere: doping, cybernetics, gene mods etc. So not allowing doping is a valid practical line. And so is "allowing full body swimsuits but only those with a buoyancy between X and Y".
Car analogy: it's just like Formula 1 racing, there is really no "formula unlimited", because at the end of the day people have to decide "What is an acceptable car?" and "What is an acceptable way of winning?", so they might as well decide "What is an acceptable F1 car".
After all with future tech, there could be cybernetics, or genetically modified humans, or biomodified humans. And then you also start asking "what's human".
While the rules do restrict, the rules also help provide _shape_ to the event. Are we sure we are ready for a games with mods and doping? It could be a slippery slope to quite a lot of nastiness - even _in_ spectators.
On a vaguely related note - this is why to me, exploration in some areas of science should be discouraged till humans are ready (in terms of tech, medical, culture, society, religion - religion isn't going away any time soon whether you want it or not) for the implications. It's like the "Civ" game, where you do some stuff first, then only other stuff.
For instance say some genius suddenly creates a gene mod that makes us super fit, AND also makes it contagious. I don't think all of us want it automatically - no matter how good it seems.
I'm a tad suspicious of that one. He seemed like he was squeezing it _really_ hard. Like he was intentionally trying to break it.
If you're holding something as delicate as say an egg shell, when you break it, it doesn't fly so far and fast, unless you're really putting a lot of force on it.
Maybe it was very heavy and delicate. Even so, looking at the video, if it was really unintentional maybe they should have got someone else to demo it, or done it differently.
He apparently wants to make his collection available to others to _listen_ to.
MP3 is the best choice for that purpose.
The other options: vinyl, flac, wav, ogg are not.
To me it depends on what those 1500 different chemicals were, and the quantities involved, how they are stored, and what he really is doing with them.
I probably have more than 1500 different chemicals in my body at the moment. Big deal.
If they came in, investigated and he was not doing anything illegal (which is quite amazing nowadays given the amount of laws they can throw at you), it is wrong to shut him down AND take his stuff.
You got it right first time :).
Vista's dhcp client sets the "broadcast" wanted flag by default.
This normally works fine with the dhcp server[1] I wrote for work (which runs on nonwindows servers).
In the problem case when hotel guests using Vista plug to the "Internet" interface on some set top boxes, their Vista machines didn't receive the broadcast replies from my dhcp server. This was because the set top boxes did not pass ethernet broadcasts (AFAIK they're supposed to).
The set top boxes handle the TV, web-via-TV and video on demand stuff but are also supposed to allow guests to plug their computers to them to access the internet.
[1] It's a rules based dhcp server. Rules, leases and other stuff are stored in a database, so that they can more easily be changed and read by other stuff on-the-fly.
Nah, AFAIK Vista was doing things in an RFC compliant way. Just different from most other clients (XP, isc dhcp)- Vista tends to set the broadcast flag.
;) ). Fortunately that still worked for Vista - in theory it was likely to work but Vista could have decided to be fussy and still be compliant.
;) ).
Doing work correctly does reduce maintenance, but up to a point - often you have to workaround other people's bugs.
For example: Vista worked fine with my dhcpd. But at one place it didn't work fine. Found out it was due to a bunch of set top boxes not passing ethernet broadcasts- which meant the set top box was broken (it's supposed to behave like a switch/bridge and so it should pass the broadcasts).
But no time to get vendor to fix the set top boxes (and there were hundreds of them). So in the end I had to add a workaround to the dhcpd - when enabled it sends replies using an ethernet unicast (e.g. machine mac instead of ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff ) but a IP broadcast (e.g. 255.255.255.255), which is probably not quite RFC compliant
And sometimes when you get down to the details, it gets less clear who is wrong or right - lots of ambiguities in some standards/RFCs.
Then there are some who are clearly doing things wrong, but you still have to try to work with them (like some BigBrand PDAs - even people working for BigBrand admitted they're crap
Maybe one phone in a metal plane doesn't do anything.
But how about 300 phones? And what happens if all of them go to max power because they can't reach a cell? Or when the plane's micro cell goes down.
Just putting an active GSM phone next to audio equipment makes it buzz. With such phones you can even tell that you are about to get a call just by the distinctive tatata-tatata-tatata-ta-ta sound from the interference.
So I won't be confident on it not causing problems to avionics.
Another thing - does using a phone in a fuel station really pose a significant increased risk?
I dunno, definitely don't ask the ones who modded you flamebait...
;).
Imagine if they were in charge of deciding who was "asshole enough".
No representation?
I heard most of you had the vote.
Why do you all keep voting them in anyway?
You vote for candidates based on who get the most money from corporations?
It's clear that the voters don't really care. As long as they have their "bread and circuses" or should that be "Junk Food and Reality TV" everything is tolerable.
Otherwise they'd just vote for somebody else. Believe me, if random candidates started actually getting significant votes, the politicians would start to change their tune.