The real story behind this story is that the American government is doing one of two things: (1) psy-ops (i.e. psychological warfare) against the enemy or (2) political games to improve support for the Iraqi war effort.
Um, you do realize that #2 amounts to "psy ops" against the American People, don't you?
The first of these is the most ironic. Back in 1999, Mac users were still ridiculing "Micros~1", while in fact it was their operating system, not Microsoft's, which could not handle adequately long filenames!
Actually, if you shut off the 8.3 aliasing feature of NTFS (which creates the "Micros~1" directory when you make a "Microsoft Office" directory, for example) - all kinds of things start breaking. Even on XP. Microsoft handles long filenames. It handles them by creating two filenames, and alternately relying on the short or long names.
So, on Monday, we'll find out that Microsoft is dumping Intel, and partnering with IBM to produce a new Personal Computing Platform based on PowerPC, and Vista will be ported to, and run exclusively on this new PPC platform.
(stranger things have happened: MacOS X86, Xbox360. . . . )
Always underpromise. . . . And hedge. . ...Always tell the truth..
These are your Engineer's instincts speaking.
The reason that an Engineer must do these things, the reason why good Engineers have these instincts, is because they are intended to manage the entire process of product design, development, and delivery.
They are necessary forces injected into this process to counter the OPPOSITE forces introduced by Management, Marketing, and Sales (respectively: Management will over promise, Marketing will draw you out onto a limb, and Sales will lie).
The engineer hopes to, by doing these three things, counter the effects on the process by Management, Marketing, and Sales, thus producing a more reliable, repeatable, and consistent process.
Unfortunately, this doesn't compensate well for idiotic customers.
Stands to reason that a skript kiddie could hack into such a system, and turn the crew into a thin red paste (ie. make the system think the ship is jumping to warp, when it's not).
I have no idea, nor do I care, there are billions of people out there, I have faith in humanity.
There are also billions of ants.
They're easy enough to exterminate in huge quantities through a can of Raid, or a boot heel. Humans aren't much different.
2nd Amendment? Yeah right. Let me know when the 2nd Amendment guarantees your freedom from annihilation by a B-52 pilot flying 60,000 feet above you, who can't even see your house, but who can blast it to splinters and you to quivering bits of hamburger at the touch of a button.
Your 2nd Amendment rights are about as good as your 4th Amendment rights, or your 1st Amendment rights.
Well, there's no true decoupled flight (we call it Newtonian motion) in FreeSpace, but since the source was opened up, they've added gliding. Which means your fighter can keep moving in the same direction, but you can turn your fighter and face the guy on your tail. There's also keys that let you thrust up, down, left, right and backwards.
The Macintosh version doesn't have this. At least not the one I downloaded about 3 months back. The controls for the up down left right back thrusters are listed in the configuration page, but they don't actually function. Maybe it's just as simple as a keybinding problem. Never really pursued it. IF there's a mod I can download for the Mac version, I'd certainly like to try it.
Anyway, secretly, when BSG came out, and I first watched it, I was hoping that it would be popular so someone would write a video-game version. But like I said before, they're going to need a really innovative UI to make decoupled flight (Newtonian motion) accessible for the average player.
I dunno - I probably could have parlayed my wicked case of cronic tendonitis as an excuse why I am far better off typing on a laptop than writing by hand.
More than a few pages, and you can SEE the swelling in the knuckles.
I don't know if you can do this with the Freespace engine.
But what's called "decoupled flight" in aerospace terminiology (vehicle is "pointed" in a direction other than the direction of travel), is actually very difficult to manage and control for an unskilled operator, it takes a very well-developed sense of 3 dimensional thought. I remember a freeware game that attempted this a few years back, but they still cheated (you could put the game into a non-realistic mode, that compensated for the effects with "reaction control thrusters" - which amounted to - the ability to accellerate in directions other than that which your main engine was pointed, yet at accellerations that would have required a main engine).
It's my opinion that we're still waiting for a brilliant software developer to invent the right User Interface to make this not such a difficult task.
But I understand the frustration. Every space-dogfighter shares it. "This motherfucker's on my tail, I'm in space, why the fuck can't I just turn around and blast him?"
Because, by allowing the charade of Congress/Parliment to continue, we still have the illusion of Republican systems of government, when in fact, we have dictatorships.
When my kid is in school learning about how great the US is, and how we're great because we're free, will they teach him that we're not actually free any longer because of a tacit approval of abdication of our rights? No. Because we have a "congress".
By the time the series ends, whatever suspension of disbelief the once-powerful opening scenes of A New Hope originally conjured will have been totally destroyed by the knowlege that Luke Skywalker is in fact just as experienced and battle-hardened as any character from Sailor Moon.
In the next several elections, you'll be voting not just for Representatives or a President -- you'll be voting on the future, or the future decline, of your country.
Bullshit.
Look at the recent Democratic response to Feingold's censure measure.
There is no meaningful difference between the two major parties. There are standouts like Feingold. And they are overshadowed by the vast legions of the spineless.
Democracy has been sold to corporate interests by the leadership of both parties.
You can't spin this as a liberal versus conservative thing,
Yes - normally you'd expect Conservatives to be FOR conservation. Intead - they seem to just want to expend our world's resources as quickly as possible. Oh. I'm sorry. "Their" world's resources.
Don't mistake me for an anti-immigration nazi either. (just in case).
I have many close hispanic freinds, I enjoy Mexican food, I love Mexican painted tiles, and decorated my house with them, (though my house is not really a "Spanish Casa-style" house), my kids pop pinatas on their birthday, and of course, everybody gets drunk on Cinco de Mayo!
My rant was a political one, not a cultural one. Just wanted to make that clear.
In fact, after a few more years of Bush-style Republicanism, I'm sure that there will be Americans flooding into Canada looking for jobs. We'll be the new "wetbacks". And with Global Warming, we won't have to worry so much about the brutal Canadian winters.
In the Iran-Iraq war, Iran would choose groups of schoolchildren to be martyrs, and walk hand-in-hand across the battlefield to sweep for mines to clear for the troops behind them to rush through in an assault.
So your proposal, as absurd as it sounds, is likely to actually happen at some point, considering the geographic region where these systems are being deployed.
Well, robots have been harming humans since the first guided missile shot down the first plane.
If you roll-back the human element in the process to the point where a human has made the decision to fire the missile (or in the case where say, the head of the Trade Federation decides to deploy the droid army) - it's still not the robot's decision to harm a human.
Asimov's robotics laws were moot before they were written. When a human decides to use a tool to kill another human, it doesn't matter if that tool is an antelope thigh-bone, or a T-1000. It's still a human decision. The context just changes so that it's not as obvious.
Slashdot Mirror
The real story behind this story is that the American government is doing one of two things: (1) psy-ops (i.e. psychological warfare) against the enemy or (2) political games to improve support for the Iraqi war effort.
Um, you do realize that #2 amounts to "psy ops" against the American People, don't you?
The first of these is the most ironic. Back in 1999, Mac users were still ridiculing "Micros~1", while in fact it was their operating system, not Microsoft's, which could not handle adequately long filenames!
Actually, if you shut off the 8.3 aliasing feature of NTFS (which creates the "Micros~1" directory when you make a "Microsoft Office" directory, for example) - all kinds of things start breaking. Even on XP. Microsoft handles long filenames. It handles them by creating two filenames, and alternately relying on the short or long names.
Did it impact the ground before Range Safety got to it? Inquiring minds want video!
So, on Monday, we'll find out that Microsoft is dumping Intel, and partnering with IBM to produce a new Personal Computing Platform based on PowerPC, and Vista will be ported to, and run exclusively on this new PPC platform.
(stranger things have happened: MacOS X86, Xbox360. . . . )
Always underpromise. . . . And hedge. . . ..Always tell the truth..
These are your Engineer's instincts speaking.
The reason that an Engineer must do these things, the reason why good Engineers have these instincts, is because they are intended to manage the entire process of product design, development, and delivery.
They are necessary forces injected into this process to counter the OPPOSITE forces introduced by Management, Marketing, and Sales (respectively: Management will over promise, Marketing will draw you out onto a limb, and Sales will lie).
The engineer hopes to, by doing these three things, counter the effects on the process by Management, Marketing, and Sales, thus producing a more reliable, repeatable, and consistent process.
Unfortunately, this doesn't compensate well for idiotic customers.
Stands to reason that a skript kiddie could hack into such a system, and turn the crew into a thin red paste (ie. make the system think the ship is jumping to warp, when it's not).
I want to see THAT episode.
I have no idea, nor do I care, there are billions of people out there, I have faith in humanity.
There are also billions of ants.
They're easy enough to exterminate in huge quantities through a can of Raid, or a boot heel. Humans aren't much different.
2nd Amendment? Yeah right. Let me know when the 2nd Amendment guarantees your freedom from annihilation by a B-52 pilot flying 60,000 feet above you, who can't even see your house, but who can blast it to splinters and you to quivering bits of hamburger at the touch of a button.
Your 2nd Amendment rights are about as good as your 4th Amendment rights, or your 1st Amendment rights.
Well, there's no true decoupled flight (we call it Newtonian motion) in FreeSpace, but since the source was opened up, they've added gliding. Which means your fighter can keep moving in the same direction, but you can turn your fighter and face the guy on your tail. There's also keys that let you thrust up, down, left, right and backwards.
The Macintosh version doesn't have this. At least not the one I downloaded about 3 months back. The controls for the up down left right back thrusters are listed in the configuration page, but they don't actually function. Maybe it's just as simple as a keybinding problem. Never really pursued it. IF there's a mod I can download for the Mac version, I'd certainly like to try it.
Anyway, secretly, when BSG came out, and I first watched it, I was hoping that it would be popular so someone would write a video-game version. But like I said before, they're going to need a really innovative UI to make decoupled flight (Newtonian motion) accessible for the average player.
Do either #1 or #2.
Wait for the opposing stance's PAC to give you money.
Do the opposite.
Wash Rinse Repeat.
PROFIT.
Hardcore anal sex?
Bah!
Gimme bdsm scene castrations with a rusty hedge trimmer any day. (that guy looks like he's really enjoying himself! that must feel good. . . )
The 1st Amendment says: Do number 2. Fuck the Right. (then film it, and sell it).
If you are not willing to compromise on the affluent, aberrant lifestyle, then you MUST run the Red Queen's race
. . . the race to the bottom?
. . . yeah. Unfortunately, Safari is just about the ONLY application that uses it. What was that framework again? Cocoa?
I dunno - I probably could have parlayed my wicked case of cronic tendonitis as an excuse why I am far better off typing on a laptop than writing by hand.
More than a few pages, and you can SEE the swelling in the knuckles.
I don't know if you can do this with the Freespace engine.
But what's called "decoupled flight" in aerospace terminiology (vehicle is "pointed" in a direction other than the direction of travel), is actually very difficult to manage and control for an unskilled operator, it takes a very well-developed sense of 3 dimensional thought. I remember a freeware game that attempted this a few years back, but they still cheated (you could put the game into a non-realistic mode, that compensated for the effects with "reaction control thrusters" - which amounted to - the ability to accellerate in directions other than that which your main engine was pointed, yet at accellerations that would have required a main engine).
It's my opinion that we're still waiting for a brilliant software developer to invent the right User Interface to make this not such a difficult task.
But I understand the frustration. Every space-dogfighter shares it. "This motherfucker's on my tail, I'm in space, why the fuck can't I just turn around and blast him?"
. . . some day. . . .
Because, by allowing the charade of Congress/Parliment to continue, we still have the illusion of Republican systems of government, when in fact, we have dictatorships.
When my kid is in school learning about how great the US is, and how we're great because we're free, will they teach him that we're not actually free any longer because of a tacit approval of abdication of our rights? No. Because we have a "congress".
By the time the series ends, whatever suspension of disbelief the once-powerful opening scenes of A New Hope originally conjured will have been totally destroyed by the knowlege that Luke Skywalker is in fact just as experienced and battle-hardened as any character from Sailor Moon.
Pure Slashdot Gold.
In the next several elections, you'll be voting not just for Representatives or a President -- you'll be voting on the future, or the future decline, of your country.
Bullshit.
Look at the recent Democratic response to Feingold's censure measure.
There is no meaningful difference between the two major parties. There are standouts like Feingold. And they are overshadowed by the vast legions of the spineless.
Democracy has been sold to corporate interests by the leadership of both parties.
This civilization is doomed.
You can't spin this as a liberal versus conservative thing,
Yes - normally you'd expect Conservatives to be FOR conservation.
Intead - they seem to just want to expend our world's resources as quickly as possible. Oh. I'm sorry. "Their" world's resources.
California. :)
Don't mistake me for an anti-immigration nazi either. (just in case).
I have many close hispanic freinds, I enjoy Mexican food, I love Mexican painted tiles, and decorated my house with them, (though my house is not really a "Spanish Casa-style" house), my kids pop pinatas on their birthday, and of course, everybody gets drunk on Cinco de Mayo!
My rant was a political one, not a cultural one. Just wanted to make that clear.
In fact, after a few more years of Bush-style Republicanism, I'm sure that there will be Americans flooding into Canada looking for jobs. We'll be the new "wetbacks". And with Global Warming, we won't have to worry so much about the brutal Canadian winters.
In the Iran-Iraq war, Iran would choose groups of schoolchildren to be martyrs, and walk hand-in-hand across the battlefield to sweep for mines to clear for the troops behind them to rush through in an assault.
So your proposal, as absurd as it sounds, is likely to actually happen at some point, considering the geographic region where these systems are being deployed.
Well, robots have been harming humans since the first guided missile shot down the first plane.
If you roll-back the human element in the process to the point where a human has made the decision to fire the missile (or in the case where say, the head of the Trade Federation decides to deploy the droid army) - it's still not the robot's decision to harm a human.
Asimov's robotics laws were moot before they were written. When a human decides to use a tool to kill another human, it doesn't matter if that tool is an antelope thigh-bone, or a T-1000. It's still a human decision. The context just changes so that it's not as obvious.
The reason the US was attacked was because a certain religious group doesn't like our way of life....
You must be talking about the Oklahoma City bombing?
Of course socialism doesn't truly protect the most important of all rights: the right to earn and keep property.
Neither does Capitalism. Unless you've got a funny notion of the definition of "own".
Usually people tell me that it's because software takes more money and time to create than music.
do software engineers get paid more than Brittney Spears?
(then again, can she download pictures of my naked boobies?)