What annoys me is when the security people demand passwords that are, in terms of strength, way out of proportion to the data they protect.
My bank password? Yes, that should be strong. The forum where I go for auto repair advice? No, I shouldn't have to memorize an 8 character password with at least one upper case, one number, and one symbol character.
Hmmm well I don't think there were that many bad games that became popular just because very few games at all became popular, it was such a small group of people buying them.
Back in the day of less impressive graphics, immersion had to come about by superior storytelling and game design. When I played Wasteland, for example, even though the graphics were simple tiles and the combat system was a pokemon like "pick an option for everyone and then it'll just say what you did later" kind of thing, I got sucked in to certain parts. There was one bit where one of your characters got their mind transferred into a nightmare inside a cybernetic brain and you had to find your way out - it's been 20 years at least since I played it, and I can still remember some of the experiences from that, and I only played that sequence 2 times. I was also a wee child then, so that probably made it easier to get into it.
Wasteland is an amazing game; I still play it on occasion, I belong to a mailing list where people still talk about the game (and we still get questions regarding how to get places in the game!) and it is one of those games that really does hold its value. And yes, the Finster's head scene was pretty amazing. But honestly, most of the games back then had lousy storylines too, we just remember the really good ones (for storyline I'd put Wasteland, Ultima 5, and the infocom game Trinity at the top of the list for games from that era).
I don't think good storylines belong to any specific era. All-time best game story ever to me is actually a much newer game, Planescape: Torment (yes, I realize 10 years old isn't "new" to a lot of people, but it is to me). Deus Ex also is up there. In fact, I would argue that on average modern games tend to have better storylines just because they actually hire people specifically to develop stories, while the older games the story was often by the programmers, who might have been good at coding but weren't necessarily storytellers.
Even if they get brought to court and convicted of some antitrust charge, history has shown us the the punishments directed at corporations are inconsequential.
Of the many, many cases the RIAA has filed, a very small number involve people who probably really did not illegally file share. However, I am fairly sure that 99% of the people who are sued actually did break copyright laws.
I can't think of any other country where reactions and measures taken are so extreme, and so disproportionate and above all so quick to occur.
I think you are completely and utterly wrong. Just about every other country has this sort of thing happening, some are better than the US but some are worse.
The Brits has to fight an uphill battle when they tried to curtail freedoms. In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.
That is so incorrect as to be offensive. The Brits are notorious for rolling over and taking the most ludicrous government interference in their daily lives. Look at the absurd surveillance they've built up over there, or the DNA database, or the ID cards. The British are far more likely collectively to let their elected officials do whatever the hell they want.
In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.
Wrong. From the beginning a huge chunk of Americans have been fighting against civil rights abuses. You are insulting the millions of people who demonstrated against the last government, the hundreds of lawyers who have fought against the Guantanamo detentions unpaid as well as the Patriot Act, the people who were willingly thrown in jail (even some elected officials) during protests. You're forgetting the fact that the current American president was elected on a platform of restoring civil liberties.
But typical British smug superiority; maybe you should look around your own culture before you start pontificating, shouldn't be too hard considering all the cameras.
Hell, the UK is the only place I ever heard of where those wrongfully imprisoned are then forced to reimburse the government for the cost of their imprisonment.
Try to use some critical thinking skills. Carbon dioxide emissions caps will also have the effect of decreasing particulates, which most assuredly can cause lung cancer.
f the "man-made global warming" guys are correct, then "cap & trade" might have some value. But I don't think the science is proven. The "global warming" computer models cannot even predict the current conditions when given past conditions as input data, so why do we trust them to predict the future? And what if we are going into another Little Ice Age?
So we should believe you, an anomnymous internet nutjob, over the vast majority of climatologists and atmospheric physicists. Because why?
from him because you hate business.
No, I don't hate business. I also don't love it. I don't think it's the ultimate expression of human achievement.
So how exactly has this helped him or the economy?
His son isn't drafted to die in an oil field halfway across the world? His wife doesn't die of lung cancer from air pollution? His grandchildren don't end up having to wear oxygen masks when they go outside 40 years from now?
So he doesn't build his muffin shop into a gigantic conglomerate because of this, big deal. I am sick of hearing people consider "growing the economy" the highest, most noble goal humankind can aspire to.
Well, for one thing, a manned space program keeps some very intelligent scientists and engineers employed. It also hopefully captures the imagination of the youth to provide us with another generation of scientists and engineers.
Who will struggle to get jobs just like so many recent science and engineering grads are. As far as I can tell, the only professions that still offer secure employment are in healthcare, the military, and skilled trades. Everyone else is screwed.
We keep complaining that math and science education in this country keeps sliding. Giving kids something tangible that says "math and science can be fun and exciting" is what we need.
Slashdot is filled with people who complain about the state of science and math education, have strong talents in those directions, but decided to go into something more lucrative like software engineering. How many peopl reading this right now got a perfect score on your math SATs, yet either dropped out of college to make money, or graduated just to go into coding in the business world?
What if I think the Libertarian Party fields lousy candidates who would do far worse a job than more Republicans or Democrats? Shouldn't I then want the all-or-nothing kind of voting?
Canada and England do not have our malpractice litigation mentality
Medical malpractice insurance constitutes 2% of medical spending in this country. If we eliminated medical malpractice liability completely, we would still have the same problems. And then the insurance companies, HMOs, hospitals and doctors would have to come up with a new scapegoat.
The way to reduce health care costs is to find waste in the system and eliminate them through process improvement.
Only one man's waste is another man's profit. Why would an entire industry that has grown up making their money through health care costs want to eliminate their own profit?
What they have to do is a) figure out some way to stop rewarding doctors for providing unnecessary services, b) stop the AMA from limiting the number of medical students graduating, c) find out some way to dramatically cut the debt that doctors go into, and c) standardize and computerize as much as possible; why does every doctor's office have a doctor, a nurse, and 18 billing people?
You think you're alone? US citizens have consider the USA justice system a joke for decades too, you know.
Speak for yourself. There is a difference between thinking a system has flaws and considering it a "joke." And most Europeans get their ideas of the US from American sitcoms, so don't look to them for any special insight.
Judges avoid setting precedents, avoid bucking the trends, so basically congressional folks that manage to get laws passed have free reign to cause whatever mixup has been created with the introduction of x new law. This is why not much hits the supreme court anyway.
Judges can't win. They uphold the law, they're accused of giving in to corrupt congresspeople. They strike down the law and they're "judicial activists."
The EU system isn't exactly perfect either, but they definitely use more logic in their rulings.
I've read plenty of EU rulings, and wasn't particularly impressed. And some European countries have repulsive criminal court systems (thinking England and Italy especially).
Only the original poster was criticizing the "vividness" of the color, which is better represented by color saturation. How close something is to white does not necessarily indicate vividness or lack of it.
Only SCOTUS has explicitly stated that police can make arrests without a warrant. They apply a slightly stricter requirement for searches. So basically the Court has adopted the second interpetation, but they have decided that searches have stricter warrant requirements than arrests. Just another example of working with an ambiguous document.
Loading the graphic in GIMP, setting a grid, and using the color picker tool, I measured color saturation from both axes:
Starting with the first grid box of the blue axis (all the way to the left), and measuring the color saturation every 5 grid boxes, I got the following values: 98, 73, 43, 17.
Doing the same with red, I got the following values: 100, 73, 41, 16.
The difference seems negligible to me, especially considering some of the reds have less saturation than the corresponding blue.
Actually, if you knew your Constitutional history you'd realize that the Constitution was a result of many compromises, and some of the ambiguities were intentionally so in order to get enough support for its ratification.
Just read it. Too many things (like "commerce between the states") are left undefined.No, it doesn't. As an example, let me pick the most non-controversial one (by Slashdot standards) I can think of off the top of my head, the Fourth Amendment. Here's one of the questions they throw at you in law school:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The first clause says people are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the second clause says no warrants without certain requirements. Does this mean that you need a warrant to arrest people? There are two ways to read it; the first is that the two clauses are connected and a warrant is necessary for all arrests, the other is that arrests just need to be reasonable, and that if a police officer chooses to get a warrant, then it must be supported by oath or affirmation, etc. Both are valid readings of the text, with two very different results.
Slashdot Mirror
What annoys me is when the security people demand passwords that are, in terms of strength, way out of proportion to the data they protect.
My bank password? Yes, that should be strong. The forum where I go for auto repair advice? No, I shouldn't have to memorize an 8 character password with at least one upper case, one number, and one symbol character.
You Americans need to relax a little bit concerning sex. I think violence is a lot worse than sex.
Americans are far more relaxed about sex than a lot of other cultures. Look at India, or the middle east, for example.
Of course, in American movies and series, violence is rampant, even in family-rated stuff.
Uhhh..examples?
Hmmm well I don't think there were that many bad games that became popular just because very few games at all became popular, it was such a small group of people buying them.
And the group is at http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/wasteland/
Back in the day of less impressive graphics, immersion had to come about by superior storytelling and game design. When I played Wasteland, for example, even though the graphics were simple tiles and the combat system was a pokemon like "pick an option for everyone and then it'll just say what you did later" kind of thing, I got sucked in to certain parts. There was one bit where one of your characters got their mind transferred into a nightmare inside a cybernetic brain and you had to find your way out - it's been 20 years at least since I played it, and I can still remember some of the experiences from that, and I only played that sequence 2 times. I was also a wee child then, so that probably made it easier to get into it.
Wasteland is an amazing game; I still play it on occasion, I belong to a mailing list where people still talk about the game (and we still get questions regarding how to get places in the game!) and it is one of those games that really does hold its value. And yes, the Finster's head scene was pretty amazing. But honestly, most of the games back then had lousy storylines too, we just remember the really good ones (for storyline I'd put Wasteland, Ultima 5, and the infocom game Trinity at the top of the list for games from that era).
I don't think good storylines belong to any specific era. All-time best game story ever to me is actually a much newer game, Planescape: Torment (yes, I realize 10 years old isn't "new" to a lot of people, but it is to me). Deus Ex also is up there. In fact, I would argue that on average modern games tend to have better storylines just because they actually hire people specifically to develop stories, while the older games the story was often by the programmers, who might have been good at coding but weren't necessarily storytellers.
Even if they get brought to court and convicted of some antitrust charge, history has shown us the the punishments directed at corporations are inconsequential.
Tell that to Arthur Andersen.
Here.
Of the many, many cases the RIAA has filed, a very small number involve people who probably really did not illegally file share. However, I am fairly sure that 99% of the people who are sued actually did break copyright laws.
Until the average person knows that he is caught in the RIAA net too, he won't care, and nothing will change.
Since the average person probably isn't sharing copyrighted material, he probably won't have anything to fear from the RIAA.
I can't think of any other country where reactions and measures taken are so extreme, and so disproportionate and above all so quick to occur.
I think you are completely and utterly wrong. Just about every other country has this sort of thing happening, some are better than the US but some are worse.
The Brits has to fight an uphill battle when they tried to curtail freedoms. In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.
That is so incorrect as to be offensive. The Brits are notorious for rolling over and taking the most ludicrous government interference in their daily lives. Look at the absurd surveillance they've built up over there, or the DNA database, or the ID cards. The British are far more likely collectively to let their elected officials do whatever the hell they want.
In America, the population was crying out for more oppression.
Wrong. From the beginning a huge chunk of Americans have been fighting against civil rights abuses. You are insulting the millions of people who demonstrated against the last government, the hundreds of lawyers who have fought against the Guantanamo detentions unpaid as well as the Patriot Act, the people who were willingly thrown in jail (even some elected officials) during protests. You're forgetting the fact that the current American president was elected on a platform of restoring civil liberties.
But typical British smug superiority; maybe you should look around your own culture before you start pontificating, shouldn't be too hard considering all the cameras.
Hell, the UK is the only place I ever heard of where those wrongfully imprisoned are then forced to reimburse the government for the cost of their imprisonment.
Try to use some critical thinking skills. Carbon dioxide emissions caps will also have the effect of decreasing particulates, which most assuredly can cause lung cancer.
f the "man-made global warming" guys are correct, then "cap & trade" might have some value. But I don't think the science is proven. The "global warming" computer models cannot even predict the current conditions when given past conditions as input data, so why do we trust them to predict the future? And what if we are going into another Little Ice Age?
So we should believe you, an anomnymous internet nutjob, over the vast majority of climatologists and atmospheric physicists. Because why?
from him because you hate business.
No, I don't hate business. I also don't love it. I don't think it's the ultimate expression of human achievement.
So how exactly has this helped him or the economy?
His son isn't drafted to die in an oil field halfway across the world? His wife doesn't die of lung cancer from air pollution? His grandchildren don't end up having to wear oxygen masks when they go outside 40 years from now?
So he doesn't build his muffin shop into a gigantic conglomerate because of this, big deal. I am sick of hearing people consider "growing the economy" the highest, most noble goal humankind can aspire to.
Well, for one thing, a manned space program keeps some very intelligent scientists and engineers employed. It also hopefully captures the imagination of the youth to provide us with another generation of scientists and engineers.
Who will struggle to get jobs just like so many recent science and engineering grads are. As far as I can tell, the only professions that still offer secure employment are in healthcare, the military, and skilled trades. Everyone else is screwed.
We keep complaining that math and science education in this country keeps sliding. Giving kids something tangible that says "math and science can be fun and exciting" is what we need.
Slashdot is filled with people who complain about the state of science and math education, have strong talents in those directions, but decided to go into something more lucrative like software engineering. How many peopl reading this right now got a perfect score on your math SATs, yet either dropped out of college to make money, or graduated just to go into coding in the business world?
Ok, I will.
The estimated tax revenue the government expects to extract from the population from the passage of this bill is huge.
So win-win? We can reduce our energy use and pollution, PLUS reduce the deficit.
What if I think the Libertarian Party fields lousy candidates who would do far worse a job than more Republicans or Democrats? Shouldn't I then want the all-or-nothing kind of voting?
Obama is basically creating a 2 class society: lower middle class and an upper middle class.
AWESOME. I am not being sarcastic. That would be so much better a country to live in than what we have now.
Anyone who thinks they need a better lifestyle than "upper middle class" is morally bankrupt.
I don't want to pay for people's things that choose neither (a) nor (b).
Because you're incredibly greedy and selfish. Most people in this country, thankfully, are not.
Canada and England do not have our malpractice litigation mentality
Medical malpractice insurance constitutes 2% of medical spending in this country. If we eliminated medical malpractice liability completely, we would still have the same problems. And then the insurance companies, HMOs, hospitals and doctors would have to come up with a new scapegoat.
The way to reduce health care costs is to find waste in the system and eliminate them through process improvement.
Only one man's waste is another man's profit. Why would an entire industry that has grown up making their money through health care costs want to eliminate their own profit?
What they have to do is a) figure out some way to stop rewarding doctors for providing unnecessary services, b) stop the AMA from limiting the number of medical students graduating, c) find out some way to dramatically cut the debt that doctors go into, and c) standardize and computerize as much as possible; why does every doctor's office have a doctor, a nurse, and 18 billing people?
Since it's open source, the answer is: probably not.
You think you're alone? US citizens have consider the USA justice system a joke for decades too, you know.
Speak for yourself. There is a difference between thinking a system has flaws and considering it a "joke." And most Europeans get their ideas of the US from American sitcoms, so don't look to them for any special insight.
Judges avoid setting precedents, avoid bucking the trends, so basically congressional folks that manage to get laws passed have free reign to cause whatever mixup has been created with the introduction of x new law. This is why not much hits the supreme court anyway.
Judges can't win. They uphold the law, they're accused of giving in to corrupt congresspeople. They strike down the law and they're "judicial activists."
The EU system isn't exactly perfect either, but they definitely use more logic in their rulings.
I've read plenty of EU rulings, and wasn't particularly impressed. And some European countries have repulsive criminal court systems (thinking England and Italy especially).
Only the original poster was criticizing the "vividness" of the color, which is better represented by color saturation. How close something is to white does not necessarily indicate vividness or lack of it.
Only SCOTUS has explicitly stated that police can make arrests without a warrant. They apply a slightly stricter requirement for searches. So basically the Court has adopted the second interpetation, but they have decided that searches have stricter warrant requirements than arrests. Just another example of working with an ambiguous document.
That's absurd. They were dealing with statutory damages, it literally by the (statute) book.
I don't see that at all. So I tested it.
Loading the graphic in GIMP, setting a grid, and using the color picker tool, I measured color saturation from both axes:
Starting with the first grid box of the blue axis (all the way to the left), and measuring the color saturation every 5 grid boxes, I got the following values: 98, 73, 43, 17.
Doing the same with red, I got the following values: 100, 73, 41, 16.
The difference seems negligible to me, especially considering some of the reds have less saturation than the corresponding blue.
Just read it. Too many things (like "commerce between the states") are left undefined.No, it doesn't. As an example, let me pick the most non-controversial one (by Slashdot standards) I can think of off the top of my head, the Fourth Amendment. Here's one of the questions they throw at you in law school:
The first clause says people are protected from unreasonable searches and seizures, and the second clause says no warrants without certain requirements. Does this mean that you need a warrant to arrest people? There are two ways to read it; the first is that the two clauses are connected and a warrant is necessary for all arrests, the other is that arrests just need to be reasonable, and that if a police officer chooses to get a warrant, then it must be supported by oath or affirmation, etc. Both are valid readings of the text, with two very different results.