As an aside, this liberal isn't interested in taking your guns - I own several myself
Just as a weird question, I know you guys aren't down with drilling ANWR because of the environment, but, is that an absolute thing? I'm looking at it like, it's trillion dollars worth of oil and the country could use some money right now.
Like, if, instead of just leasing the place to the likes of Exxon and have them sell it wherever, what if we put on the table having the government do the drilling through the auspices of some sort of a state owned enterprise. I could even be coaxed into some sort of an affirmative action thing so that we could say that minorities could use this "bonanza" to really leverage themselves economically for once.
The government would then sell the oil on the world markets, at some price that is around where it is today. Then, instead of just blowing the money, we would do two things. First I would bail out everyone who makes under some XYZ amount of dollars who bought a house. I would take about 400 billion of that and just have the federal government buy all the subprime mortgages in areas that have been screwed by globalization and forgive those debts. Just, hand the keys to the homes back to the homeowners, along with the deeds, and stabilize a lot of neighborhoods.
Then, I would rebuild a good chunk of our national transportation infrastructure. Like, I would extend all the rail lines in the USA, upgrade all the track on "lines west", upgrade all the commuter passenger rolling stock, tear down all the wires from PRR electrification and replace all the rolling stock in all the passenger rails with faster, more efficient rolling stock. I reduce airport congestion, get more people out of cars and onto trains.
And, if there's some billions left, I build an ITER fusion reactor, invest in alternative energy, and we can argue about building loads of nuclear power plants and helping the car companies retool with electric cars.
There, we make one deal with the devil, but instead of pissing it way, we do something smart and put the country on a track for a secure energy future.
He is conjuring the warrior concept. Imagine making a movie about Vietnam where the troops yell 'Kill the North Vietnamese' instead of the obvious terrible words that I will not reproduce here
I don't what this has to do with why you chose to use a slur. If it's in an ironic sense, I apologize for my lack of sensitivity.
You are fine, but you weren't the audience of the slur and so I can understand why you might be upset by it. I thought it was a good way to validate to my peeps in the right wing that I share their perspective. I could have written "I understand your feelings....", but that sort of language is overlong and loses right wingers. But, if you start off with a slur, then, everyone knows you are on the un-PC page, and from there, we can get to the meat of things.
If someone thinks it's OK for GWB to have unlimited, Constitution-defying power but not Hillary, then they are simply authoritarian statists... And, the worst insult: they are identical in my mind identical to the dreaded "nanny state" liberals
And you know how you can tell - its the conspiracy theories... you go to the either loony site, far left or far right, and you always wind up with some collection of shady characters plotting against the world for no good, and, we have to give our guys money|votes|whatever to stop them before they grind up our children.
I'm just sick of it. I want my country to be sane again.
Overall I think the balance has been a positive one.
And on that, we could disagree. Were I few years, heck, maybe even a few days younger, I'd probably jump in and start arguing each and every one of your points and in doing so would completely undermine the very point that I am trying to make. I am perfectly willing to agree to disagree with you on those issues and we will come to some sort of democratic decision one way or the other.
However, what we can agree on is, if the current practices of the government keep up, we will lose the right to have any sort of political discussion -at all-.
That to me is an important area where we can focus on, and that means, politically, the left needs to start holding its leaders to the fire on these sorts of things and so does the right. We have to police ourselves, because, what's happening is that, we're letting all the other issues on which we disagree become the silent fog of political war in which all of our liberties are seized.
Because we let this go on amongst ourselves for way too long. We were the ones that identified, as Reagan said, "The government is the problem"... we were the ones that argued against the IRS, and a host of other government regulations on the grounds that they were an attack on state and ultimately individual sovereignty and would lead to a police state.
But, wow, Bush gets in, we get into a war, and the next thing you know, we actually HAVE the makings of an institutionalized police state, and we just say "oh, ok, but its to fight the terrorists.." It's the weakest excuse ever.
Now, we know that its been almost a decade where the legal framework that created this monster was enacted in the wake of 9/11, and, we're in serious danger of institutionalizing it. It's crazy talk. I mean, guys at a train station with machine guns, live automatic weapons. WTF is up the that.
How about "Al Qaida?" It's more accurate than "the muzzies," it's less wildly broad in who it blames for 9/11, and it's even shorter to type. But maybe it doesn't achieve your goal of projecting hate at the whole of the Muslim world
The choice was deliberate. Let's assume for a moment that the vast majority of muslims do in fact hate the west. They don't like our liberal society, they don't like that globalization is forcing a re-examination of their own values and the don't even have a good relationship with christian countries - having been fighting them for 1500 years. Let's assume that we all hate each and other and that all of the above is true.
Take all of that, and ask - is is really that big of a threat? That's what I'm asking... and I'm saying, the answer is NO.
This isn't like Soviet Communism toppling regimes left and right. There's no Muslim equivalent of a Red Army putting 200 million people under occupation or a Wermacht invading all of Europe. This islamic threat can't even project food and water in their own borders, let alone have an industrial complex capable of funding a modern army like the Germans, Japanese, or Russians could. In fact, militarily, if it came right down to it, all of the Islamic armies combined could not even fight France.
I mean, last time I checked, the USA has 13 large aircraft carriers, plus around 20-30 smaller ones, a bunch of nuclear submarines, guided missile cruisers and destroyers, and then, if we got really bored, we have a couple of Iowa class battleships that we could reactivate. Add to that a few thousand combat aircraft...
What's Iran going to attack all that with? They couldn't even decisively defeat Iraq after ten years of fighting and we did that in a month.
It's like the whole idea of some vast Muslim threat is utterly ludicrous.
I do not know in my right mind how, it became permissable for George Bush to undermine civil liberties in the same way that we always argued it was wrong for Democrats to do.
Liberty and Freedom do not care about political affiliations and political parties. If a federal practice is wrong, it is wrong regardless of which party does it. If we do not want Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama or Bill Clinton reading our e-mail, then we should not tolerate George Bush or John McCain doing it either. Doing so only undermines the very essence of the rule of law and the fabric of our democracy. It is the totalitarian regime that justifies itself through personality, not the free one.
We conservatives have many differences with our fellow liberal americans and we always will. However, the very thing that makes us American, the idea, as Jefferson said, "We are endowed with certain inalienable rights... To secure these liberties, governments are instituted among men", is under assault and in the name of a rival that frankly is not nearly the equal of the rivals that we have faced in the past. We overcame the British Empire to secure our independence. We fought the Barbary Pirates, our own Civil War, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany, and then put our cities on the nuclear firing line against the dark stain of Communism... and we NEVER once entertained turning America into a land of checkpoints and identity requests.
What is going on now in our country is madness. America is not supposed to be a place where guys with machine guns are walking around train platforms, asking if you have a driver's license with federal approved features. America is not supposed to be the place where the government collects data on all of its citizens.
Yeah, the muzzies blew up the world trade center, and its sad that those people died. But, the British burned our nation's capital to the ground, the Germans sunk the Lusitania, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and captured an army of 80,000 men of ours. We've been attacked before and we'll be attacked again, and what makes America special is that we keep our freedoms, rather than surrender them.
There's a million dead soldiers rolling over in their graves because we have so easily surrendered every freedom they fought for. It's an insult to them, to our national heritage, to turn our country into some sort of crappy police state because a few muslims with box cutters give us the willies.
Support those candidates, regardless of party, that promise to end the Dept of Homeland Security, promise to repeal the USA PATRIOT ACT, and join me in a call for a Constitutional Amendment that bars the Federal Government from intercepting any electronic communications within its borders, unless it can prove before a court that those communications are with another nation with which the USA might be in a state of war.
all that was pretty freakin innovative. Not that they invented it but they made it all work
I like how Apple shoved shape tables into their little Apple basic. I mean, you had to do a bunch of byte coding by hand, but there it was, a vector graphics packing with 2d rotation and scaling and it performed well enough for me to make my own not too shabby lunar lander. I thought I was the cat's meow of coding until another guy in my high school computer club route a pinball game in assembly language..
but overall, to this day, I don't think any coder could top what Silas Warner did with the original Castle Wolfenstein... he had that Apple talking just by clicking the speaker just so...
I'm trying to remember the apple ii now.. wasn't it that the colors on the screen were done through artifacting... like, you got color because woz lined up the pixels to correspond roughly to where each of the rgb dots would appear in a composite monitor.. gave all the apple games a sort of a look that was other worldly and cool.
Dang! I remember wanting to buy an 80 column card for my s-100 buss and agonizing over whether to get one using 5x7 dot matrix or go for broke with 6x8 dot matrix. Or possibly building my own using the TV_typewriter cookbook.
Ya got me beat there. Closest I ever came to an S-100 bus was probably in a Byte article talking about how the world would have been better off had Apple gone S-100 rather than its own card system... and I think there might have been been similar complaints about the PC. If memory serves, I think somebody may have actually made a PC card that accepted S-100 cards... but by the time it came out, there were already so many PCs on the market that it was dominant.
By the way, please advise, Should I get the new fangled double-buffered version or try to write to memory during the re-trace?
The double buffered version is better obviously, because you can flip the buffers during the vertical blank and that gives you the best possible scrolling. However, the cost of the extra few k might mean you have to give up quite a few features for your application. If your hardware allows it... you might be able to squeeze a few things in during the -horizontal- retrace.. like at least change a background color and give you a cool gradient look.
God.. you bring back some memories. Scrolling on the Atari 800 and the Amiga was the best -ever- for that reason... I remember the scrolling in Chris Crawford's Eastern Front and I was completely blown away... I would not be so blown away until I saw the King Tut Deluxe Paint Demo on the Amiga and, then again, when I fired up a shareware program called Doom on my then powerful 486....
Thank you very much. You made me love computers again. I owe you a shot and a beer.
That would, say, let me run ubuntu off of a live CD on a Windows machine but still be able store some stuff on the Windows machine? Like, if I have a company notebook, and I want to run Linux on the train, could I do that... without putting Linux on it?
I know you were trying to make a humorous point, but..
And it was, just a joke. I'm not into the whole "Open Source and save the planet and trees" mindset. I like Linux because it is a cool operating system, nothing more than that. It's free, and that's cool. And, there's some stuff about Windows that I like too.
Fancy that... an open source team releases a product on time, as promised, and delivers the feature sets they promised.. meanwhile, the leading closed source competitor.....
I'm really looking forward to upgrading my Linux box to this new release, but judging by the posts, I shall wait a few days for the downloads to die down.
If that's what you consider "full spectrum," you must think visible light stops somewhere around, say, yellow.
No, I just ran out of time... I would add the BBC and NPR for the left and a smattering of Hannity and Limbaugh on the right. Even if you disagree with their spin on an issue, they raise it so that you can google it to get the whole story.
Or, to put it the other way, you're either intentionally lying or are too fucking stupid to know a goddamned thing about a major branch of science.
I will make the argument that evolution has proved absolutely useless for biology, other than to say that living systems are dynamic and change in response to each other and their natural surroundings.
What has biology done more me lately? Physics has done good stuff using relativity and q.d. as a framework, chemistry has done good stuff, using all the various reaction laws as a framework, plus some physics, but if biology is so heroically in the front line of medical research, let's see how these guys are doing.
Right now, we rightly say that Bush is a loser because he botched the war in Iraq and 4000 soldiers are dead with little to show for it. Meanwhile, scientists have been fighting HIV for decades now, and what we have is 100 million people dead, at least, many more many infected, and as we speak, all hope of a vaccine for AIDS has just evaporated. Do you understand what that failure means - basically, we're talking about the entire continent of Africa being wiped out, and THEN, newer strains of AIDS gradually surpassing the drugs we have out there to control it. Basically, everyone with AIDS is going to die from it. It's an utter disaster. The Independent (hardly a conservative paper), just ran an editorial suggesting perhaps that we bail on AIDS vaccine research altogether and focus on trying to keep the drug pipeline for treatment filled so that those people who have AIDs can stay alive when their existing drugs quit working.
So, faced with the black death of our time, science has utterly failed. And, AIDS is a new threat. In existing diseases, bacteria and virii continues to run their course, and both are outgaming science. The number of drugs that can treat drug - resistant bacteria is dwindling... I think they are now down to one or two, and there's not much left in the pipeline. There's no cure for common virii, still, and, even worse, even the flu is gradually passing the ability of vaccines to prevent it. Last year's vaccine was a failure, missing a new strain entirely...
The bottom line is, biology as a discipline has failed us. The only way biology is going to succeed is if it ditches evolution and instead turns to computer science, physics, and mathematics as a way of grapping with the problems of complexity that underly everything they do. It's hardly well and good for biologists to smugly point to Africa and say that our religious customs are invalid because they have found a fossil, when, a billion people will die on that continent over the next century from diseases that they have failed to cure.
What the hell is this? Have all the Ron Paul whack-jobs now decided to start spamming/. with pro-McCain blather.
Actually I never cared for Ron Paul. I like McCain because I respect his family and what they have done and accomplished. I also like that's been outspoken and not afraid to buck his own parties line. While Obama and Hillary run around the country pandering to their own left wing, McCain pisses off the Republican right. I think that's commendable because, if anything, we need leaders to break their parties out of being slaves to their radical fringes.
Policywise, I'm very much in favor of McCain's immigration amnesty bill. I have many friends in programming and at university who are from other countries that I think would be fantastic US citizens, even if they are all sadly more likely to be Democrats.
I believe McCain's the only candidate who would genuinely put a stop to torture and renditions because he was a POW. As I look back on it, he was one of the few Republicans to actively speak out and defend John Kerry's war record, he's attacked his own party just recently to tone down an anti-Obama advertisement in North Carolina... it's like, this isn't a pattern of a man who to me is some loose cannon... it is a pattern of a man to me who has an abiding sense of national fairness and I find that to be long overdue.
Here's the whole in a nutshell for me. He sides with the Intelligent Design/Creationist movement, which means he's an anti-intellectual and a science denier, so he can go piss up a rope.
That's like not voting for Obama just because his wife and preacher don't like white people... woops, did I say that?
While I don't agree with ID folks, I don't see that siding with the ID / creationist people makes one an anti-intellectual or even anti-science.
Evolution lacks a real rigorous mathematical framework so you really can't do anything with it that is useful, as opposed to real disciplines like physics or chemistry. It's all wishy washy pattern matching of fossils and talking around a fire about the best story. It might be interesting, but, its not like how the math of physics leads to interesting predictions of black holes and, on the flip side, LEDs and transistors, or how chemistry leads to new designer drugs. So you really could just put on the mental blinders, tune out evolution, buy into ID, and but still be quite the intellectual or scientist in some field that, well, you could make weapons with. And ultimately too, as a whole, evolution is so complex and so dependent on initial conditions, that almost by definition that you can't do anything with it that is repeatable. You could completely blow off evolution, believe in the book of genesis, and still cure cancer or build a spaceship or even find life on Mars.
I guarantee you this much... McCain, by virtue of going to Annapolis and going through flight school, probably has real engineering calculus under his belt, whereas his rivals probably had no math at all. It's probably been 50 years since he's had to take an integral or solve a differential equation, but I'd be willing to bet that in his prime, if you had to hand John McCain, Barrack Obama, or Hillary Clinton a rock and ask them to radioactively date it, only McCain could do the exponential decay math right.
So, what have you done today to help make science fiction closer to reality?
I work in my spare time on an open source project called factdiv. The idea is to use FACTOR as a problem to learn how to attack complexity itself. Complexity problems underly all the great open questions in science and so if you can solve those, you sorta solve them all.
So far, results haven't been all that great, but, someone will get there. If we do, then we can have computers answer questions, like, how to take 10,000,000 parts and build a spaceship, how to take a model of science and devise experiments to probe its limits, and have it wired up automatically to manufacturing apparatus so that it can pretty much do unattended science 24x7, and then file away the knowledge that will last far more long than a mere human brain can live.
But, I still can only FACTOR about 20 digits numbers and have no good complexity answers, but as you said, you have to start somewhere.
You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity, alter the strong force or increase the weak. We can utilize electromagnetism better than the other forces, but as a rule, the ability to control one of the most fundamental forces of nature utterly eludes us. Basically, physics is a total failure, and that's why there's no flying cars or nuclear fusion...
You haven't. What you've proven is that they haven't taken a stand one way or the other. The rest is simply your imagination. You may even be right, but you haven't demonstrated.
The underlying premise that you have is that Democrats are the party of civil liberties and freedom from government power, and there is not a shred of proof of that claim. It's not me that has to prove anything - it's that you have given your guys a pass without actually questioning what they are doing.
McCain is hands down the best candidate. He's most qualified, has the best education, the most profound life experiences, the best family background, the best heritage and best values.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a sec. Can I go and buy a big house I can't afford before this plan comes into effect? It would help me out a lot.
thanks!
If you did three combat tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, buy away.
Are we talking, maybe crack the planet in half with a bomb the size of a cigarette pack, or, just another run of the mill a-bomb.
As an aside, this liberal isn't interested in taking your guns - I own several myself
Just as a weird question, I know you guys aren't down with drilling ANWR because of the environment, but, is that an absolute thing? I'm looking at it like, it's trillion dollars worth of oil and the country could use some money right now.
Like, if, instead of just leasing the place to the likes of Exxon and have them sell it wherever, what if we put on the table having the government do the drilling through the auspices of some sort of a state owned enterprise. I could even be coaxed into some sort of an affirmative action thing so that we could say that minorities could use this "bonanza" to really leverage themselves economically for once.
The government would then sell the oil on the world markets, at some price that is around where it is today. Then, instead of just blowing the money, we would do two things. First I would bail out everyone who makes under some XYZ amount of dollars who bought a house. I would take about 400 billion of that and just have the federal government buy all the subprime mortgages in areas that have been screwed by globalization and forgive those debts. Just, hand the keys to the homes back to the homeowners, along with the deeds, and stabilize a lot of neighborhoods.
Then, I would rebuild a good chunk of our national transportation infrastructure. Like, I would extend all the rail lines in the USA, upgrade all the track on "lines west", upgrade all the commuter passenger rolling stock, tear down all the wires from PRR electrification and replace all the rolling stock in all the passenger rails with faster, more efficient rolling stock. I reduce airport congestion, get more people out of cars and onto trains.
And, if there's some billions left, I build an ITER fusion reactor, invest in alternative energy, and we can argue about building loads of nuclear power plants and helping the car companies retool with electric cars.
There, we make one deal with the devil, but instead of pissing it way, we do something smart and put the country on a track for a secure energy future.
He is conjuring the warrior concept. Imagine making a movie about Vietnam where the troops yell 'Kill the North Vietnamese' instead of the obvious terrible words that I will not reproduce here
Exactly.
He choose it deliberately in order to trigger an emotional response and to illustrate the point he makes that they are not really our enemy.
Exactly.
I don't what this has to do with why you chose to use a slur. If it's in an ironic sense, I apologize for my lack of sensitivity.
You are fine, but you weren't the audience of the slur and so I can understand why you might be upset by it. I thought it was a good way to validate to my peeps in the right wing that I share their perspective. I could have written "I understand your feelings....", but that sort of language is overlong and loses right wingers. But, if you start off with a slur, then, everyone knows you are on the un-PC page, and from there, we can get to the meat of things.
If someone thinks it's OK for GWB to have unlimited, Constitution-defying power but not Hillary, then they are simply authoritarian statists... And, the worst insult: they are identical in my mind identical to the dreaded "nanny state" liberals
And you know how you can tell - its the conspiracy theories... you go to the either loony site, far left or far right, and you always wind up with some collection of shady characters plotting against the world for no good, and, we have to give our guys money|votes|whatever to stop them before they grind up our children.
I'm just sick of it. I want my country to be sane again.
Overall I think the balance has been a positive one.
And on that, we could disagree. Were I few years, heck, maybe even a few days younger, I'd probably jump in and start arguing each and every one of your points and in doing so would completely undermine the very point that I am trying to make. I am perfectly willing to agree to disagree with you on those issues and we will come to some sort of democratic decision one way or the other.
However, what we can agree on is, if the current practices of the government keep up, we will lose the right to have any sort of political discussion -at all-.
That to me is an important area where we can focus on, and that means, politically, the left needs to start holding its leaders to the fire on these sorts of things and so does the right. We have to police ourselves, because, what's happening is that, we're letting all the other issues on which we disagree become the silent fog of political war in which all of our liberties are seized.
Enough of that.
You speak for all of us, my friend.
Because we let this go on amongst ourselves for way too long. We were the ones that identified, as Reagan said, "The government is the problem"... we were the ones that argued against the IRS, and a host of other government regulations on the grounds that they were an attack on state and ultimately individual sovereignty and would lead to a police state.
But, wow, Bush gets in, we get into a war, and the next thing you know, we actually HAVE the makings of an institutionalized police state, and we just say "oh, ok, but its to fight the terrorists.." It's the weakest excuse ever.
Now, we know that its been almost a decade where the legal framework that created this monster was enacted in the wake of 9/11, and, we're in serious danger of institutionalizing it. It's crazy talk. I mean, guys at a train station with machine guns, live automatic weapons. WTF is up the that.
How about "Al Qaida?" It's more accurate than "the muzzies," it's less wildly broad in who it blames for 9/11, and it's even shorter to type. But maybe it doesn't achieve your goal of projecting hate at the whole of the Muslim world
The choice was deliberate. Let's assume for a moment that the vast majority of muslims do in fact hate the west. They don't like our liberal society, they don't like that globalization is forcing a re-examination of their own values and the don't even have a good relationship with christian countries - having been fighting them for 1500 years. Let's assume that we all hate each and other and that all of the above is true.
Take all of that, and ask - is is really that big of a threat? That's what I'm asking... and I'm saying, the answer is NO.
This isn't like Soviet Communism toppling regimes left and right. There's no Muslim equivalent of a Red Army putting 200 million people under occupation or a Wermacht invading all of Europe. This islamic threat can't even project food and water in their own borders, let alone have an industrial complex capable of funding a modern army like the Germans, Japanese, or Russians could. In fact, militarily, if it came right down to it, all of the Islamic armies combined could not even fight France.
I mean, last time I checked, the USA has 13 large aircraft carriers, plus around 20-30 smaller ones, a bunch of nuclear submarines, guided missile cruisers and destroyers, and then, if we got really bored, we have a couple of Iowa class battleships that we could reactivate. Add to that a few thousand combat aircraft...
What's Iran going to attack all that with? They couldn't even decisively defeat Iraq after ten years of fighting and we did that in a month.
It's like the whole idea of some vast Muslim threat is utterly ludicrous.
I do not know in my right mind how, it became permissable for George Bush to undermine civil liberties in the same way that we always argued it was wrong for Democrats to do.
... To secure these liberties, governments are instituted among men", is under assault and in the name of a rival that frankly is not nearly the equal of the rivals that we have faced in the past. We overcame the British Empire to secure our independence. We fought the Barbary Pirates, our own Civil War, Imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany, and then put our cities on the nuclear firing line against the dark stain of Communism... and we NEVER once entertained turning America into a land of checkpoints and identity requests.
Liberty and Freedom do not care about political affiliations and political parties. If a federal practice is wrong, it is wrong regardless of which party does it. If we do not want Hillary Clinton or Barrack Obama or Bill Clinton reading our e-mail, then we should not tolerate George Bush or John McCain doing it either. Doing so only undermines the very essence of the rule of law and the fabric of our democracy. It is the totalitarian regime that justifies itself through personality, not the free one.
We conservatives have many differences with our fellow liberal americans and we always will. However, the very thing that makes us American, the idea, as Jefferson said, "We are endowed with certain inalienable rights
What is going on now in our country is madness. America is not supposed to be a place where guys with machine guns are walking around train platforms, asking if you have a driver's license with federal approved features. America is not supposed to be the place where the government collects data on all of its citizens.
Yeah, the muzzies blew up the world trade center, and its sad that those people died. But, the British burned our nation's capital to the ground, the Germans sunk the Lusitania, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and captured an army of 80,000 men of ours. We've been attacked before and we'll be attacked again, and what makes America special is that we keep our freedoms, rather than surrender them.
There's a million dead soldiers rolling over in their graves because we have so easily surrendered every freedom they fought for. It's an insult to them, to our national heritage, to turn our country into some sort of crappy police state because a few muslims with box cutters give us the willies.
Support those candidates, regardless of party, that promise to end the Dept of Homeland Security, promise to repeal the USA PATRIOT ACT, and join me in a call for a Constitutional Amendment that bars the Federal Government from intercepting any electronic communications within its borders, unless it can prove before a court that those communications are with another nation with which the USA might be in a state of war.
all that was pretty freakin innovative. Not that they invented it but they made it all work
I like how Apple shoved shape tables into their little Apple basic. I mean, you had to do a bunch of byte coding by hand, but there it was, a vector graphics packing with 2d rotation and scaling and it performed well enough for me to make my own not too shabby lunar lander. I thought I was the cat's meow of coding until another guy in my high school computer club route a pinball game in assembly language..
but overall, to this day, I don't think any coder could top what Silas Warner did with the original Castle Wolfenstein... he had that Apple talking just by clicking the speaker just so...
I'm trying to remember the apple ii now.. wasn't it that the colors on the screen were done through artifacting... like, you got color because woz lined up the pixels to correspond roughly to where each of the rgb dots would appear in a composite monitor.. gave all the apple games a sort of a look that was other worldly and cool.
Dang! I remember wanting to buy an 80 column card for my s-100 buss and agonizing over whether to get one using 5x7 dot matrix or go for broke with 6x8 dot matrix. Or possibly building my own using the TV_typewriter cookbook.
.. I remember the scrolling in Chris Crawford's Eastern Front and I was completely blown away... I would not be so blown away until I saw the King Tut Deluxe Paint Demo on the Amiga and, then again, when I fired up a shareware program called Doom on my then powerful 486....
Ya got me beat there. Closest I ever came to an S-100 bus was probably in a Byte article talking about how the world would have been better off had Apple gone S-100 rather than its own card system... and I think there might have been been similar complaints about the PC. If memory serves, I think somebody may have actually made a PC card that accepted S-100 cards... but by the time it came out, there were already so many PCs on the market that it was dominant.
By the way, please advise, Should I get the new fangled double-buffered version or try to write to memory during the re-trace?
The double buffered version is better obviously, because you can flip the buffers during the vertical blank and that gives you the best possible scrolling. However, the cost of the extra few k might mean you have to give up quite a few features for your application. If your hardware allows it... you might be able to squeeze a few things in during the -horizontal- retrace.. like at least change a background color and give you a cool gradient look.
God.. you bring back some memories. Scrolling on the Atari 800 and the Amiga was the best -ever- for that reason.
Thank you very much. You made me love computers again. I owe you a shot and a beer.
What about an 80-column card? (If you get that, I know how old you are..
I'd pass on that, as it doesn't really benefit my favorite SubLogic program.
That would, say, let me run ubuntu off of a live CD on a Windows machine but still be able store some stuff on the Windows machine? Like, if I have a company notebook, and I want to run Linux on the train, could I do that... without putting Linux on it?
I know you were trying to make a humorous point, but..
And it was, just a joke. I'm not into the whole "Open Source and save the planet and trees" mindset. I like Linux because it is a cool operating system, nothing more than that. It's free, and that's cool. And, there's some stuff about Windows that I like too.
Fancy that... an open source team releases a product on time, as promised, and delivers the feature sets they promised.. meanwhile, the leading closed source competitor.....
I'm really looking forward to upgrading my Linux box to this new release, but judging by the posts, I shall wait a few days for the downloads to die down.
If that's what you consider "full spectrum," you must think visible light stops somewhere around, say, yellow.
No, I just ran out of time... I would add the BBC and NPR for the left and a smattering of Hannity and Limbaugh on the right. Even if you disagree with their spin on an issue, they raise it so that you can google it to get the whole story.
Or, to put it the other way, you're either intentionally lying or are too fucking stupid to know a goddamned thing about a major branch of science.
I will make the argument that evolution has proved absolutely useless for biology, other than to say that living systems are dynamic and change in response to each other and their natural surroundings.
What has biology done more me lately? Physics has done good stuff using relativity and q.d. as a framework, chemistry has done good stuff, using all the various reaction laws as a framework, plus some physics, but if biology is so heroically in the front line of medical research, let's see how these guys are doing.
Right now, we rightly say that Bush is a loser because he botched the war in Iraq and 4000 soldiers are dead with little to show for it. Meanwhile, scientists have been fighting HIV for decades now, and what we have is 100 million people dead, at least, many more many infected, and as we speak, all hope of a vaccine for AIDS has just evaporated. Do you understand what that failure means - basically, we're talking about the entire continent of Africa being wiped out, and THEN, newer strains of AIDS gradually surpassing the drugs we have out there to control it. Basically, everyone with AIDS is going to die from it. It's an utter disaster. The Independent (hardly a conservative paper), just ran an editorial suggesting perhaps that we bail on AIDS vaccine research altogether and focus on trying to keep the drug pipeline for treatment filled so that those people who have AIDs can stay alive when their existing drugs quit working.
So, faced with the black death of our time, science has utterly failed. And, AIDS is a new threat. In existing diseases, bacteria and virii continues to run their course, and both are outgaming science. The number of drugs that can treat drug - resistant bacteria is dwindling... I think they are now down to one or two, and there's not much left in the pipeline. There's no cure for common virii, still, and, even worse, even the flu is gradually passing the ability of vaccines to prevent it. Last year's vaccine was a failure, missing a new strain entirely...
The bottom line is, biology as a discipline has failed us. The only way biology is going to succeed is if it ditches evolution and instead turns to computer science, physics, and mathematics as a way of grapping with the problems of complexity that underly everything they do. It's hardly well and good for biologists to smugly point to Africa and say that our religious customs are invalid because they have found a fossil, when, a billion people will die on that continent over the next century from diseases that they have failed to cure.
But, once you get GLaDOS built, don't forget to disable the neurotoxin enitters.
That's going to be difficult because of all the complications with the folding nacelles and power couplings...
What the hell is this? Have all the Ron Paul whack-jobs now decided to start spamming /. with pro-McCain blather.
Actually I never cared for Ron Paul. I like McCain because I respect his family and what they have done and accomplished. I also like that's been outspoken and not afraid to buck his own parties line. While Obama and Hillary run around the country pandering to their own left wing, McCain pisses off the Republican right. I think that's commendable because, if anything, we need leaders to break their parties out of being slaves to their radical fringes.
Policywise, I'm very much in favor of McCain's immigration amnesty bill. I have many friends in programming and at university who are from other countries that I think would be fantastic US citizens, even if they are all sadly more likely to be Democrats.
I believe McCain's the only candidate who would genuinely put a stop to torture and renditions because he was a POW. As I look back on it, he was one of the few Republicans to actively speak out and defend John Kerry's war record, he's attacked his own party just recently to tone down an anti-Obama advertisement in North Carolina... it's like, this isn't a pattern of a man who to me is some loose cannon... it is a pattern of a man to me who has an abiding sense of national fairness and I find that to be long overdue.
Here's the whole in a nutshell for me. He sides with the Intelligent Design/Creationist movement, which means he's an anti-intellectual and a science denier, so he can go piss up a rope.
That's like not voting for Obama just because his wife and preacher don't like white people... woops, did I say that?
While I don't agree with ID folks, I don't see that siding with the ID / creationist people makes one an anti-intellectual or even anti-science.
Evolution lacks a real rigorous mathematical framework so you really can't do anything with it that is useful, as opposed to real disciplines like physics or chemistry. It's all wishy washy pattern matching of fossils and talking around a fire about the best story. It might be interesting, but, its not like how the math of physics leads to interesting predictions of black holes and, on the flip side, LEDs and transistors, or how chemistry leads to new designer drugs. So you really could just put on the mental blinders, tune out evolution, buy into ID, and but still be quite the intellectual or scientist in some field that, well, you could make weapons with. And ultimately too, as a whole, evolution is so complex and so dependent on initial conditions, that almost by definition that you can't do anything with it that is repeatable. You could completely blow off evolution, believe in the book of genesis, and still cure cancer or build a spaceship or even find life on Mars.
I guarantee you this much... McCain, by virtue of going to Annapolis and going through flight school, probably has real engineering calculus under his belt, whereas his rivals probably had no math at all. It's probably been 50 years since he's had to take an integral or solve a differential equation, but I'd be willing to bet that in his prime, if you had to hand John McCain, Barrack Obama, or Hillary Clinton a rock and ask them to radioactively date it, only McCain could do the exponential decay math right.
Fair enough, you have to start somewhere. But given your own results, what makes you think the physicists aren't making progress at a reasonable pace?
The whole post was a joke, and nobody got it.
So, what have you done today to help make science fiction closer to reality?
I work in my spare time on an open source project called factdiv. The idea is to use FACTOR as a problem to learn how to attack complexity itself. Complexity problems underly all the great open questions in science and so if you can solve those, you sorta solve them all.
So far, results haven't been all that great, but, someone will get there. If we do, then we can have computers answer questions, like, how to take 10,000,000 parts and build a spaceship, how to take a model of science and devise experiments to probe its limits, and have it wired up automatically to manufacturing apparatus so that it can pretty much do unattended science 24x7, and then file away the knowledge that will last far more long than a mere human brain can live.
But, I still can only FACTOR about 20 digits numbers and have no good complexity answers, but as you said, you have to start somewhere.
You know, we're going through all this, and we're still not anywhere near closer to coming up with a machine that does anti-gravity, alter the strong force or increase the weak. We can utilize electromagnetism better than the other forces, but as a rule, the ability to control one of the most fundamental forces of nature utterly eludes us. Basically, physics is a total failure, and that's why there's no flying cars or nuclear fusion...
You haven't. What you've proven is that they haven't taken a stand one way or the other. The rest is simply your imagination. You may even be right, but you haven't demonstrated.
The underlying premise that you have is that Democrats are the party of civil liberties and freedom from government power, and there is not a shred of proof of that claim. It's not me that has to prove anything - it's that you have given your guys a pass without actually questioning what they are doing.
McCain is hands down the best candidate. He's most qualified, has the best education, the most profound life experiences, the best family background, the best heritage and best values.