It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from the late, great Dr. Feynman: "Far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?"
That's an interesting question, and a good point: Is the "greater truth" not fact itself?
But there are still some people who manage to insist they are real, actual events! - UFO religions like the Scientologists or heaven's gate.
While on the plane today, there was a trivia thing on the video screens called "Cranium." The subject of almost all of the questions were pop-culture related: Celebrities, TV shows, the like. In the airport, the newspapers crow the latest celebrity gossip. And in the in-flight magazine, more "test your knowledge" quizzes ask you about popular ad jingles, movies, TV shows, celebrities. Even the Sudoku puzzle therein boasts, "You don't need to know any math!"
If you're going to test someone's knowledge, why not test their knowledge about something valuable? Why not ask them things about math, science, and arts that actually matter?
Is it any wonder that people have trouble separating fact from reality?
I do think you can make the case that a large number of folks remember that "stem cell research" is bad and forgotten why it's supposed to be bad. You haven't, but I do think you can. What you're suggesting here is that religion is inherently at war with science. In the spirit of your sig, I'd like to introduce you to my friend, "Straw man argument," and his two siblings, "Statistics of small numbers" and "Observational Selection".
You sound like someone who has distanced himself from religion. That has the benefit of preventing religion from influencing you. It has the disadvantage of preventing you from knowing very much about religion and what religious people actually believe.
If you want to know what religious people actually believe, you could try asking them.
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony Cunningham
"String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that's 3 more than ANSI said I should)"
"...And the lord said, 'lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'"
"a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"
"'Volatile' and 'Register' are not miscible"
"You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler"
"This struct already has a perfectly good definition"
"type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)"
"Can't cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that's why)"
"Huh ?"
"can't go mucking with a 'void *'"
"we already did this function"
"This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"
"Call me paranoid but finding '/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious"
"Too many errors on one line (make fewer)"
"Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer"
"Trailing comma not permitted in enum definition. (This time I'm letting you off with a warning)"
This year, I had the opportunity to attend E3 to help my business grow. I had to decide whether or not the trip would be worthwhile. When I looked at the stated reason for E3's existence, it looked like the precise event I needed to attend; when I asked people about it and recalled my experiences there in years past, I knew that there would be no chance to actually make the business contacts I needed to make.
Thanks for looking that up, and for the link. I, too, became a DarwinPorts fan after being disappointed with Fink. Fink has the better name, but DarwinPorts -works- better for me. I've never had problems with a DP package installing correctly; whereas I had all kinds of troubles with Fink.
DP's "it just works" capabilities means I get more work done.
If he successfully fights this, it will change the game. There is a good chance that it will prevent future lawsuits. Considering that is part of his intention, and he will get both financial and legal support to do so, he could construct the case just so that is the outcome.
It may not be possible in this case, but to automatically assume that it's impossible just shows your ignorance of the way the judicial system works.
The best standards I've encountered occur when someone develops something in-house, then presents it to the world as a standard. Even then, depending on who that someone is, you can still end up with a camel created by committee, but with one entity pursuing a single vision for a while before releasing it to the public, you end up with a great basis for opening things up.
Incidentally, this also separates the successful open-source software projects from the lame as well...
"You were just saying that game companies should keep sinking money into a project..."
No, I was saying the exact opposite with my example of NovaLogic.
I was saying they should STOP putting any money into a project at the moment it hits the point of diminishing returns..."Not one day later." That is what has kept NovaLogic in business where other companies have failed: They have the business sense and the discipline to say, "If we spend another year on this, it could be a great game instead of merely mediocre, but we'd never make the money back on it, so just ship it as it is."
There are a lot of ways to do this, too. Blizzard's secret, in addition to addictive gameplay, has been to make their target market as huge as possible by making the games look great on lowest-common-denominator hardware. Their art direction is first-rate, and they went with 2D graphics long after other companies had attached themselves to 3D simply because the 3D graphics wouldn't look as good as what they could do in 2D. And WoW would run adequately on my old G3 iBook... before it broke.
Duh... they couldn't make money any more.
on
Five That Fell
·
· Score: 1
If you put untold developer hours into a game to make it The Awesomest Game Ever, you're going to fall into a lot of traps, but the biggest trap of all is the cost of all of those developer hours; unless your game is an unmitigated hit, you're never going to make that money back.
Remember Novalogic? They haven't had an honest-to-goodness hit since that voxel helicopter game back in the early 90's. And they're still around because they understand this basic principle: Ship the game when you know that it's good enough to generate enough sales to cover your costs, and not one day later. As long as your staff is marginally competent and decently paid, you can always meet that goal.
Origin never saw a deadline they couldn't miss. They, Sierra and Black Isle were increasing their budgets, only to essentially remake the same games that people had played a decade before. Atari failed because most of their games were crap, and the bad games typically had as big or bigger budgets than the good ones. (Remember the horrible Indiana Jones and Return of the Jedi games?)
The only real tragedy in this list is Looking Glass, who was killed off because Eidos would rather divert funds to help Daikatana limp along -- Eidos failing to recognize the common sense of NovaLogic. (In the end, John Romero really did make us his bitch, by denying us more great Thief games.) But at least there's BioShock to look forward to, so this story is not yet over.
But in the end, your game's budget should be less than your expected revenue for said game. If you don't expect the game to sell more than 20,000 full-price copies, you should plan the project -- marketing, development, everything -- starting from that point.
All standard cable connectors have a "male" and "female" end. The end with metal prongs sticking out of it is the "male" end, and the end that receives said prongs is the "female" end.
Thus, the problem came where the "female" end -- the IDE cable itself -- had no notches or ridges to match the accompanying notch on the "male" end -- the drive -- to ensure that an idiot like me could plug the cable in correctly.
Usually the male end is the wire, such as USB cables, RCA audio connectors, coaxial, power plugs, etc. Some cables, such as the DB9 connectors on EIA-232 serial cables, will have female on one end and male on the other, to make sure that the RX and TX lines don't get crossed.
That's got to be a real shock to experienced "power users" just switching to a Mac or Linux from Windows for the first time... "Wait, we don't need to install drivers?"
I've been that customer before, only in my case, I'd installed a floppy cable upside-down (there were no notches on the female end to show which way it would go, in my defense).
But as for that specific problem, I know at least one otherwise intelligent CS grad who fell into the same trap.
Your basic claim, as I understand it, is that because various governments rejected one church or religion, that they somehow aren't religious in themselves.
Any organized system of beliefs is a religion. Every church has a governing body, rules and enforcement. Thus, the church is a state, and the state is a church.
The incidents you describe are examples of replaceming of one religion with another: e.g., with the French Revolution, you went from the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost to the trinity of Equality, Liberty and Brotherood.
Even if you take out "endowed by their creator" from the Declaration of Independence, it is a document outlining a religious doctrine, as is the Gettysburg Address.
I pointed out the Chinese religion of "Communism" in hopes this would be clear: You can't be properly jingoistic if there isn't some organized system of faith (i.e., religion) to use for emotional appeals.
I think what underlies your OP (please correct me if I'm wrong) is that religions and governments often share methodologies, and that often there is as much dogma with a civil government as there is with a religion.
That's a great paraphrase to most of what I'm saying.
While churches may sometimes support a government, administer a government, or be sanctioned by a government, it doesn't hold that all religions are governments and vice versa.
I agree with this statement; sometimes, but not always, a government adopts a religion's dogma and organization rather than inventing its own; this is typically what we mean by "theocracy."
What I mean by "the church is a state" is that organized religions have their own governing bodies, their own "laws," their own enforcement. You have authoritarian regimes like the Catholic Church, you have full-fledged representative democracies like the Presbyterian Church USA, and everything else. You even have enforcement to varying degrees, from simple reactionary, "Hey, we should kick out the person who was involved in this high-profile crime," to deacons checking up on members and their families, to full-fledged armies (cf. fundamentalist Islam). They have their own boundaries, although this is not usually so clear-cut as the Southern Baptist Convention or Vatican City.
If Church and State were merely similar, these similarities wouldn't have any meaning. The key point is that the ideologies and laws of churches and the ideologies and laws of states compete with each other. The history of China provides very clear examples of this; the crackdown on Falun Gong, which has nothing to do with Marx and Lenin and everything to do with eliminating an organization that ideologically and organizationally competes with the dominance of the Chinese State's power, is just the latest in a history spanning many dynasties of Chinese central governments' attempts to maintain control.
Slashdot Mirror
She didn't have the authority to do it. That's why this made the news.
Considering that Sikh are supposed to have a ceremonial dagger on their person at all times, it's still a good idea, no?
That's an interesting question, and a good point: Is the "greater truth" not fact itself?
While on the plane today, there was a trivia thing on the video screens called "Cranium." The subject of almost all of the questions were pop-culture related: Celebrities, TV shows, the like. In the airport, the newspapers crow the latest celebrity gossip. And in the in-flight magazine, more "test your knowledge" quizzes ask you about popular ad jingles, movies, TV shows, celebrities. Even the Sudoku puzzle therein boasts, "You don't need to know any math!"
If you're going to test someone's knowledge, why not test their knowledge about something valuable? Why not ask them things about math, science, and arts that actually matter?
Is it any wonder that people have trouble separating fact from reality?
Oh for heaven's sake. By your analogy, Pons and Fleischmann were merely misunderstood, and Mother Theresa was running a scam.
I do think you can make the case that a large number of folks remember that "stem cell research" is bad and forgotten why it's supposed to be bad. You haven't, but I do think you can. What you're suggesting here is that religion is inherently at war with science. In the spirit of your sig, I'd like to introduce you to my friend, "Straw man argument," and his two siblings, "Statistics of small numbers" and "Observational Selection".
You sound like someone who has distanced himself from religion. That has the benefit of preventing religion from influencing you. It has the disadvantage of preventing you from knowing very much about religion and what religious people actually believe.
If you want to know what religious people actually believe, you could try asking them.
Those sites are so slashdotted, it's not even funny.
- UMD movies
That's because European girls like to fuck. Who has time for games?
This year, I had the opportunity to attend E3 to help my business grow. I had to decide whether or not the trip would be worthwhile. When I looked at the stated reason for E3's existence, it looked like the precise event I needed to attend; when I asked people about it and recalled my experiences there in years past, I knew that there would be no chance to actually make the business contacts I needed to make.
I'm happy to see this kind of change.
Awesome.
You should actually send him that.
In fact, if you made it a petition, I'd sign it.
Thanks for looking that up, and for the link. I, too, became a DarwinPorts fan after being disappointed with Fink. Fink has the better name, but DarwinPorts -works- better for me. I've never had problems with a DP package installing correctly; whereas I had all kinds of troubles with Fink.
DP's "it just works" capabilities means I get more work done.
Have you never heard of "case law?"
If he successfully fights this, it will change the game. There is a good chance that it will prevent future lawsuits. Considering that is part of his intention, and he will get both financial and legal support to do so, he could construct the case just so that is the outcome.
It may not be possible in this case, but to automatically assume that it's impossible just shows your ignorance of the way the judicial system works.
The best standards I've encountered occur when someone develops something in-house, then presents it to the world as a standard. Even then, depending on who that someone is, you can still end up with a camel created by committee, but with one entity pursuing a single vision for a while before releasing it to the public, you end up with a great basis for opening things up.
Incidentally, this also separates the successful open-source software projects from the lame as well...
Funny that you would mention that, as just last month I was directly manipulating several write-only and read-only registers on a processor in C.
Given the sales figures of EA Sports titles, that's appropriate in more ways than one.
My boss was telling me how he'd spent all morning with the IT manager removing a trojan off of his Windows machine.
..."
I looked up from my iBook and FC5 workstation, looked him in the eye with a face full of innocence, and asked, "What's a 'Trojan?'"
"Well, see, it's like... a 'trojan' is like the Trojan horse; it's a program that comes into your system and
wink
"...why I oughtta slug you!"
It's a good thing the guy's a consummate professional, because I probably deserve to be writing this from the hospital.
No, I'm not joking. Those games were horrible. People only played 'em because of the license.
"You were just saying that game companies should keep sinking money into a project..."
No, I was saying the exact opposite with my example of NovaLogic.
I was saying they should STOP putting any money into a project at the moment it hits the point of diminishing returns..."Not one day later." That is what has kept NovaLogic in business where other companies have failed: They have the business sense and the discipline to say, "If we spend another year on this, it could be a great game instead of merely mediocre, but we'd never make the money back on it, so just ship it as it is."
There are a lot of ways to do this, too. Blizzard's secret, in addition to addictive gameplay, has been to make their target market as huge as possible by making the games look great on lowest-common-denominator hardware. Their art direction is first-rate, and they went with 2D graphics long after other companies had attached themselves to 3D simply because the 3D graphics wouldn't look as good as what they could do in 2D. And WoW would run adequately on my old G3 iBook... before it broke.
If you put untold developer hours into a game to make it The Awesomest Game Ever, you're going to fall into a lot of traps, but the biggest trap of all is the cost of all of those developer hours; unless your game is an unmitigated hit, you're never going to make that money back.
Remember Novalogic? They haven't had an honest-to-goodness hit since that voxel helicopter game back in the early 90's. And they're still around because they understand this basic principle: Ship the game when you know that it's good enough to generate enough sales to cover your costs, and not one day later. As long as your staff is marginally competent and decently paid, you can always meet that goal.
Origin never saw a deadline they couldn't miss. They, Sierra and Black Isle were increasing their budgets, only to essentially remake the same games that people had played a decade before. Atari failed because most of their games were crap, and the bad games typically had as big or bigger budgets than the good ones. (Remember the horrible Indiana Jones and Return of the Jedi games?)
The only real tragedy in this list is Looking Glass, who was killed off because Eidos would rather divert funds to help Daikatana limp along -- Eidos failing to recognize the common sense of NovaLogic. (In the end, John Romero really did make us his bitch, by denying us more great Thief games.) But at least there's BioShock to look forward to, so this story is not yet over.
But in the end, your game's budget should be less than your expected revenue for said game. If you don't expect the game to sell more than 20,000 full-price copies, you should plan the project -- marketing, development, everything -- starting from that point.
All standard cable connectors have a "male" and "female" end. The end with metal prongs sticking out of it is the "male" end, and the end that receives said prongs is the "female" end.
Thus, the problem came where the "female" end -- the IDE cable itself -- had no notches or ridges to match the accompanying notch on the "male" end -- the drive -- to ensure that an idiot like me could plug the cable in correctly.
Usually the male end is the wire, such as USB cables, RCA audio connectors, coaxial, power plugs, etc. Some cables, such as the DB9 connectors on EIA-232 serial cables, will have female on one end and male on the other, to make sure that the RX and TX lines don't get crossed.
That's got to be a real shock to experienced "power users" just switching to a Mac or Linux from Windows for the first time... "Wait, we don't need to install drivers?"
I've been that customer before, only in my case, I'd installed a floppy cable upside-down (there were no notches on the female end to show which way it would go, in my defense).
But as for that specific problem, I know at least one otherwise intelligent CS grad who fell into the same trap.
Your basic claim, as I understand it, is that because various governments rejected one church or religion, that they somehow aren't religious in themselves.
Any organized system of beliefs is a religion. Every church has a governing body, rules and enforcement. Thus, the church is a state, and the state is a church.
The incidents you describe are examples of replaceming of one religion with another: e.g., with the French Revolution, you went from the trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost to the trinity of Equality, Liberty and Brotherood.
Even if you take out "endowed by their creator" from the Declaration of Independence, it is a document outlining a religious doctrine, as is the Gettysburg Address.
I pointed out the Chinese religion of "Communism" in hopes this would be clear: You can't be properly jingoistic if there isn't some organized system of faith (i.e., religion) to use for emotional appeals.
That's a great paraphrase to most of what I'm saying.
I agree with this statement; sometimes, but not always, a government adopts a religion's dogma and organization rather than inventing its own; this is typically what we mean by "theocracy."
What I mean by "the church is a state" is that organized religions have their own governing bodies, their own "laws," their own enforcement. You have authoritarian regimes like the Catholic Church, you have full-fledged representative democracies like the Presbyterian Church USA, and everything else. You even have enforcement to varying degrees, from simple reactionary, "Hey, we should kick out the person who was involved in this high-profile crime," to deacons checking up on members and their families, to full-fledged armies (cf. fundamentalist Islam). They have their own boundaries, although this is not usually so clear-cut as the Southern Baptist Convention or Vatican City.
If Church and State were merely similar, these similarities wouldn't have any meaning. The key point is that the ideologies and laws of churches and the ideologies and laws of states compete with each other. The history of China provides very clear examples of this; the crackdown on Falun Gong, which has nothing to do with Marx and Lenin and everything to do with eliminating an organization that ideologically and organizationally competes with the dominance of the Chinese State's power, is just the latest in a history spanning many dynasties of Chinese central governments' attempts to maintain control.
The main reason China does it? It works.