I'd nominate Jurassic Park for two very different reasons: one, the geneticists using virtual reality headsets - really? to visualize strings of 'C','A','T', and 'G' ? and number two, even more egregious, was Nedry talking to the ship's captain on a video call, while a progress bar ran across the bottom of the window, because obviously it was a pre-recorded video clip and they couldn't even be bothered to position the window so that bit was off the bottom of the screen, let alone actually run it in a modified window. or just use a unix command-line video player. still one of my favorite books though.
most of the time i'll happily drop less important things i might be doing to help a friend, family member, or random person out with a technical problem, simply because i like (and / or am obsessed with) solving problems. i don't really know why, i just rarely find myself feeling annoyed by it. if i did, i'd just say it wasn't something i had the time or resources to fix and point them in the direction of a shop i thought could do it. i figure it keeps me sharp and more in touch with users, and that's important for me. i find rants like this funny and am not above making fun of a user afterward, but sincerely like helping people. is it related to being it manager of a tiny charity in southeast asia? well, it probably helps, but i was always like this. when the tsunami hit Indonesia I was at the UN headquarters cleaning malware off of the doctors' computers so they could do their work. as a Linux user i need this kind of thing to keep my Windows skills sharp, and often keep the malware for my personal collection and / or submission to efforts like ClamAV.
my point here is not to brag or talk about myself, i'm just baffled. i enjoy fixing stuff or i don't do it, and tend to feel appreciated (sometimes paid too, in money or food), and actually care that people who aren't geeks can get proper use out of their computers. am i the only one? if so, what the heck is wrong with me?
haha, like i said, there are other definitions. you are certainly defining the whole concept quite differently than i and many other people do. and of course, as i acknowledged, your view is also extremely common. like many people you are looking for a 'good guys, bad guys' definition (good luck!). I'm not even going to try to use it to classify people, people can wear more than one hat, even at the same time if they want to. I just classify the hacks themselves, so to me it will continue to be simple: if you have permission, it's white hat. no permission but good intentions, gray hat. otherwise, black. it's just like walking up to a neighbor's house and noticing their door can be opened with a credit card because they forgot the second lock on the door. if they are your friend and asked you to check the door, white. if you don't know them or weren't asked, but you open the door, leave a note letting them know about it, and then lock it and leave, gray. if you take something or prank them or anything else it's black.
just one of many ways to define hats, but it is at least consistent.
yes, they are a security firm, and as such need to maintain a white hat / ethical hacker image. I'd judge their actions individually, though, and I'm thinking in this case they weren't wearing a hat at all - they were only creating tools and strategies. of course, internally such tools must be tested, and doing so is pure white-hat. using the same tools against another party without their knowledge and permission, for a purpose other than improving their security, would not constitute a white hat operation even if they maintain a normally clean reputation. I don't think they did that, though, and even if they did, it doesn't say whether they are good guys or bad guys or evil or anything. the convention of hats is about something else entirely.
i know someone who believes this. literally. he's a nice enough guy but i think it bothered him that i didn't just take his word for it that star wars was actually filmed on other planets as real battles took place. for a glimpse into such a mind, this is his web site: http://www.starcityhistory.com/
It was my understanding, gleaned from sources including the good old Jargon File, that one of the most agreed upon standards for hat color definition is a combination of permission and intention:
White Hats are hired or are granted permission to attempt to crack a system's security by the owner(s), usually for the purpose of auditing security, discovering vulnerabilities, and understanding how to fix or minimize them.
Gray Hats crack security without authorization, but have no ill intentions once they succeed. These are either practicing their art for practice's sake, doing the owners a favor (unsolicited) by letting them know where the vulnerabilities are so they can fix it, or most likely both.
Black Hats crack security maliciously, for a wide variety of reasons - some personal, some financial, and some political. They intend to steal, vandalize, or otherwise harm the owners. Self-styled hacktivists may be an exception to some as they have intentions that they may believe are good, but in general fit here because they have niether the permission nor the intention of doing any good for the system's owners. This is probably the case for Cyber Warriors as well - those who are cracking security by order from their government, as soldiers in an online (but very real) war, or as spies. in these cases, it could mean that even a black hat isn't necessarily evil - and anyway, determining good and evil are probably outside of the scope of the discussion.
This is, of course, not the only way in which these terms are used, and they do in fact derive from the old spaghetti western convention of good guys in white cowboy hats, and bad guys in black. Technically, HBGary in TFA was not asked to do any form of cracking, just to develop tools and strategies. These tools, of course, were obviously for government-sanctioned attacks, and would have ended up in the hands of cyber warriors / spies. In use, it would probably qualify as a black-hat operation, although ostensibly for the cause of good if the ultimate goal is to thwart terrorists (though it must be kept in mind that many terrorists believe they are on the side of good. it's a strange world).
he doesn't mean to choose 'Nautilus' in your Ubuntu menus, he means choose 'Edit' (and so on) in your Nautilus menu. Nautilus is your default file browser - any time you open your home folder or another you're looking at a Nautilus window. for example, click Places -> Home Folder. you're looking at your home folder, and Ubuntu doesn't bother to tell you the name of the program creating the file browser window for you, but if within that Home Folder window you click Help -> About, you'll see it. (I'm not trying to be pedantic, plenty of things were non-obvious to me when I started so I try not to assume anything is obvious to others).
grasshopper or some form of grub i could imagine getting away with, but cockroaches have a distinctively bad smell and taste even worse. whatever advocacy council pops up to promote the adoption of insect 'meat', however, definitely should talk with Disney about using Timon and Pumbaa (from the Lion King, for those without toddlers) as spokescartoons.
OMG, he's found Mel's Hole! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel's_hole ]
But seriously, you are dead on, and I only wish I could be this direct with such people. Nice or not, I believe it's what he needs to hear.
that might explain its arrival in Mexico, but the origin of the myth is in Puerto Rico, although it seems to be a modification of an old and less well-known Spanish myth about vampiric birds. This modern thing about dogs / coyotes with mange seems to be a result of someone seeing an ugly creature and calling it a 'Chupacabra' in south Texas, without having any idea what the original looked like - and the ensuing media frenzy picked that up and ran with it. It certainly didn't look like a canid, more like a short green humanoid alien with bright red eyes and spikes on its back, and one or two fangs for sucking blood.
you probably have and didn't know it - the original source was seaweed, but for a long time the main production was from wheat glutin, and now it is commercially produced by fermentation of various plant sugars.
Re:Thanks for the warning about big genomes
on
Largest Genome Ever
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· Score: 1
dang, i was about to be all like "who the heck are the scientists 'warning', anyway?", and then you one-upped me. it wouldn't be funny now.
there really shouldn't be a Linux game market, just a game market. I know that's not likely to happen anytime soon and it wouldn't even make sense to most of the businessmen whose decisions could cause it to come about, but ideally there should be only one computer version of the game, alongside whatever console versions might be released. Computers have enough hardware in common, and the three major flavors of OS have some differences but they are not necessarily ones that affect games so much, at least now that most of the larger problems like graphics and sound are largely solved. Why make separate box versions for Windows and Mac when you can just put executables and installation systems for both in the same disc? With a little effort Linux can be added to that mix as well, as open source and indie games have proven - the game content itself is / should be platform independent anyway. It is my hope that in the future OS compatibility will just one of the bullets in the Compatibility section on the back of the box.
Steam for Linux would be like this if they made it, as Steam for Mac shows. If you buy the game for one OS, you can download and play it on the other as well (if it has a Mac version and supports "Steam Play"). I have no problem paying for games (other than having no money) and would pay full price, but it doesn't make sense to have different prices for different platforms. Id Software's games usually get a Linux port, and I've found that a great way to play them. Due to my GPU having been released before Nvidia's initiative to provide updated notebook video drivers, I simply cannot get new drivers for Windows (I dual boot). Since I do get the latest drivers for my Linux install, those games actually run much better in Linux for me - wish I could say the same for games running under Wine.
I realize it's unlikely and with Valve having opted not to get involved, any progress is likely to be slow, but Linux is an enjoyable operating system to use, even for gaming. Linux users pay full price for games all the time - they just usually have to play the games on a different platform unless they are made by Id or otherwise have a Linux port available. I agree that the game companies don't have much incentive to invest in cross-platform compatibility at this time, but as it slowly becomes easier and some companies start to do experiment with it, it will be interesting to see what the effects will be. Linux does have more to gain than the game companies do. The number one reason I hear from people who wanted to switch to Linux but decided not to is that they don't want to go without certain software which isn't available for Linux, be it games or things they need for work. It's hard to judge what effect more proprietary Linux software would have on things like market share. I'd love to find out, because once Linux has more market share, there would be more software available to me (so which comes first, the chicken or the egg? or will I get neither?). In the end, people just want the choice to use the software they like with the OS they prefer, and don't really like it that the reasons they sometimes can't are business reasons rather than technical ones. I may in fact be rambling now, so I'll leave it at that.
the taste is just as bad as the smell. guts got in my mouth once when i swatted one too enthusiastically. you must be / have been in southeast asia too - the millipedes are pretty impressive, though not scary. the ~10 inch centipedes, though, are the worst. one crawled into bed with someone i used to know and sent them to the hospital. can't believe how fast and aggressive they are.
heck, i could give them actual cockroaches for free (plus shipping and handling)! way more lifelike that augmented reality and since the feeling of a cockroach crawling on you is much worse than just seeing one (trust me, i've woke up with them on my lips), I'm sure they would be more effective. That's assuming their strategy is to scare the poor patients to death, since dead people don't need counseling, unless it's from Bruce Willis. that seems to be what they're going for.
i had a Keyhole account before Google acquired them and rebranded their software as Google Earth. It was actually worth the $30, easily, but i was really happy when Google offered it for free because now i can easily use it as a way to encourage kids i volunteer with in the Philippines to learn geography.
this is a good answer. i found an Nvidia Geforce 8600 card via pricewatch for my dad's computer that has an hdmi port on it that would probably do for you if you don't want to pay a whole lot.. you can convert dvi to hdmi, but it's nice to have hdmi on the card itself because it can carry the audio also. on the other hand, it sounds like a PlayStation 3 would fit your requirements nicely.
-dan
yeah, i'll admit that python is the only calculator i use anymore, and i have gotten lazy enough to use it for a lot of things any really smart person would be able to compute mentally in a second or two. python is fun and makes sense to me.
someone's going to point this out to me anyway if i don't mention it, but Blood Frontier itself isn't based on Quake. (i didn't know that until a couple of minutes ago). naturally that makes half of my post irrelevant to TFA. Since i like Sauerbraten, and this game appears to actually have a story, i think i'm gonna have to look into it. i do think work on a new engine is necessary to make open source gaming all it can be, and the cube 2 engine is pretty neat, especially when editing on-the-fly. it's not designed to compete with Unigine, obviously, but i do think it's a step in a good direction. and now i'm done with this lame replying to self stuff.
i think the most obvious reason would be that id software traditionally releases their older game engines to open source when they roll out one that is two generations newer. you can't say that isn't nice of them. on the other hand, it leads to open source gaming being full of projects that start with, say, an older quake engine, and try to add modern features to it (some of them do look good, but so far none have really challenged the current mainstream leaders). you would think this approach would lead to games that had familiar graphics but new and innovative gameplay, but that doesn't actually seem to happen much. i'm not sure if the open source FPS scene just needs more contributors, or is waiting for inspiration, or it's something else, but as with any free and open source software, i'm still thankful for the efforts and contributions that are being made and shared. there's a ton of potential in it and i'm sure we'll see more than space dungeons and deathmatches in the future.
i have a friend who does medical work among some tribes here where leprosy still occurs. his patients could tell you all about a life without pain. i understand what you're saying, that pain is just an indicator and we could replace it with some new technology that is less, er, painful... i'd be very, very nervous to go down that road.
my first reaction was that strategy games probably fit the "mastery" group better than role-playing games. when playing a single-player campaign or against AI, you often have to try several different strategies altogether in order to win a scenario, unless the game is set up to be too easy or you're just that good. RPGs, on the other hand, do usually reward strategy but almost always force you to grind away for xp anyway, and it didn't seem that the second group was defined as one that prefers repetitive tasks, but rather learning how to overcome a difficult challenge. well, being more of a strategy gamer, i'm probably biased, but it struck me as odd.
i suppose the idea of eugenics could have seemed like a natural extension of evolution in earlier times, when people commonly thought of evolution as a process that necessarily makes things superior over time -- starting with some single-celled organism and proceeding to humans or something anthropomorphic, and culminating in, i suppose, gods or something. i always cringe when i hear the term "highly evolved" - it makes sense in certain usages but often is a hallmark of the misunderstanding of evolution. evolution does seem to generate ever more complicated organisms, but the function of natural selection itself is to select the fittest for a certain environment / ecology, not the fittest in some more abstract aesthetic sense. this is why i always laugh at the old illustrations of humanoid dinosaurs that were imagined as what small therapods like troodon might have evolved into if they had survived. in fact, their near relatives did survive as birds, which were more fit despite lacking their fearsome rows of teeth.
in other words, thinking we could help natural selection by killing off those we deem as inferior could only derail evolution - it's artificial selection! I may be a Christian (a missionary, no less!) but i agree with a lot of atheists in that evolution doesn't deny morality - morality is what keeps us fit enough to not wipe ourselves off of this rock, probably. I also agree with them in not needing the Kirk Cameron version of the Origin of Species - the original already contains a better idea: that evolution is a process which God used to create, from one or several original organisms, the vast diversity of life as we know it. Kirk's views seem to be more in line with a very noisy minority belief that the natural world must fit our interpretation of the book of Genesis, science be damned, because there's no possible way we've understood it wrong. glad i jumped off that train.
this must be why people say they never have mod points when they need them. except you're already +5 so no worries:). now how do we make everyone else in america get it?
hey, stuffing the variable 'Before' with a much larger value than anticipated is basically the same as exploiting a buffer overflow, isn't it? perhaps English needs better memory management:D
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I'd nominate Jurassic Park for two very different reasons: one, the geneticists using virtual reality headsets - really? to visualize strings of 'C','A','T', and 'G' ? and number two, even more egregious, was Nedry talking to the ship's captain on a video call, while a progress bar ran across the bottom of the window, because obviously it was a pre-recorded video clip and they couldn't even be bothered to position the window so that bit was off the bottom of the screen, let alone actually run it in a modified window. or just use a unix command-line video player. still one of my favorite books though.
most of the time i'll happily drop less important things i might be doing to help a friend, family member, or random person out with a technical problem, simply because i like (and / or am obsessed with) solving problems. i don't really know why, i just rarely find myself feeling annoyed by it. if i did, i'd just say it wasn't something i had the time or resources to fix and point them in the direction of a shop i thought could do it. i figure it keeps me sharp and more in touch with users, and that's important for me. i find rants like this funny and am not above making fun of a user afterward, but sincerely like helping people. is it related to being it manager of a tiny charity in southeast asia? well, it probably helps, but i was always like this. when the tsunami hit Indonesia I was at the UN headquarters cleaning malware off of the doctors' computers so they could do their work. as a Linux user i need this kind of thing to keep my Windows skills sharp, and often keep the malware for my personal collection and / or submission to efforts like ClamAV.
my point here is not to brag or talk about myself, i'm just baffled. i enjoy fixing stuff or i don't do it, and tend to feel appreciated (sometimes paid too, in money or food), and actually care that people who aren't geeks can get proper use out of their computers. am i the only one? if so, what the heck is wrong with me?
haha, like i said, there are other definitions. you are certainly defining the whole concept quite differently than i and many other people do. and of course, as i acknowledged, your view is also extremely common. like many people you are looking for a 'good guys, bad guys' definition (good luck!). I'm not even going to try to use it to classify people, people can wear more than one hat, even at the same time if they want to. I just classify the hacks themselves, so to me it will continue to be simple: if you have permission, it's white hat. no permission but good intentions, gray hat. otherwise, black. it's just like walking up to a neighbor's house and noticing their door can be opened with a credit card because they forgot the second lock on the door. if they are your friend and asked you to check the door, white. if you don't know them or weren't asked, but you open the door, leave a note letting them know about it, and then lock it and leave, gray. if you take something or prank them or anything else it's black.
just one of many ways to define hats, but it is at least consistent.
yes, they are a security firm, and as such need to maintain a white hat / ethical hacker image. I'd judge their actions individually, though, and I'm thinking in this case they weren't wearing a hat at all - they were only creating tools and strategies. of course, internally such tools must be tested, and doing so is pure white-hat. using the same tools against another party without their knowledge and permission, for a purpose other than improving their security, would not constitute a white hat operation even if they maintain a normally clean reputation. I don't think they did that, though, and even if they did, it doesn't say whether they are good guys or bad guys or evil or anything. the convention of hats is about something else entirely.
i know someone who believes this. literally. he's a nice enough guy but i think it bothered him that i didn't just take his word for it that star wars was actually filmed on other planets as real battles took place. for a glimpse into such a mind, this is his web site: http://www.starcityhistory.com/
This is, of course, not the only way in which these terms are used, and they do in fact derive from the old spaghetti western convention of good guys in white cowboy hats, and bad guys in black. Technically, HBGary in TFA was not asked to do any form of cracking, just to develop tools and strategies. These tools, of course, were obviously for government-sanctioned attacks, and would have ended up in the hands of cyber warriors / spies. In use, it would probably qualify as a black-hat operation, although ostensibly for the cause of good if the ultimate goal is to thwart terrorists (though it must be kept in mind that many terrorists believe they are on the side of good. it's a strange world).
he doesn't mean to choose 'Nautilus' in your Ubuntu menus, he means choose 'Edit' (and so on) in your Nautilus menu. Nautilus is your default file browser - any time you open your home folder or another you're looking at a Nautilus window. for example, click Places -> Home Folder. you're looking at your home folder, and Ubuntu doesn't bother to tell you the name of the program creating the file browser window for you, but if within that Home Folder window you click Help -> About, you'll see it. (I'm not trying to be pedantic, plenty of things were non-obvious to me when I started so I try not to assume anything is obvious to others).
grasshopper or some form of grub i could imagine getting away with, but cockroaches have a distinctively bad smell and taste even worse. whatever advocacy council pops up to promote the adoption of insect 'meat', however, definitely should talk with Disney about using Timon and Pumbaa (from the Lion King, for those without toddlers) as spokescartoons.
OMG, he's found Mel's Hole! [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel's_hole ] But seriously, you are dead on, and I only wish I could be this direct with such people. Nice or not, I believe it's what he needs to hear.
that might explain its arrival in Mexico, but the origin of the myth is in Puerto Rico, although it seems to be a modification of an old and less well-known Spanish myth about vampiric birds. This modern thing about dogs / coyotes with mange seems to be a result of someone seeing an ugly creature and calling it a 'Chupacabra' in south Texas, without having any idea what the original looked like - and the ensuing media frenzy picked that up and ran with it. It certainly didn't look like a canid, more like a short green humanoid alien with bright red eyes and spikes on its back, and one or two fangs for sucking blood.
you probably have and didn't know it - the original source was seaweed, but for a long time the main production was from wheat glutin, and now it is commercially produced by fermentation of various plant sugars.
dang, i was about to be all like "who the heck are the scientists 'warning', anyway?", and then you one-upped me. it wouldn't be funny now.
there really shouldn't be a Linux game market, just a game market. I know that's not likely to happen anytime soon and it wouldn't even make sense to most of the businessmen whose decisions could cause it to come about, but ideally there should be only one computer version of the game, alongside whatever console versions might be released. Computers have enough hardware in common, and the three major flavors of OS have some differences but they are not necessarily ones that affect games so much, at least now that most of the larger problems like graphics and sound are largely solved. Why make separate box versions for Windows and Mac when you can just put executables and installation systems for both in the same disc? With a little effort Linux can be added to that mix as well, as open source and indie games have proven - the game content itself is / should be platform independent anyway. It is my hope that in the future OS compatibility will just one of the bullets in the Compatibility section on the back of the box.
Steam for Linux would be like this if they made it, as Steam for Mac shows. If you buy the game for one OS, you can download and play it on the other as well (if it has a Mac version and supports "Steam Play"). I have no problem paying for games (other than having no money) and would pay full price, but it doesn't make sense to have different prices for different platforms. Id Software's games usually get a Linux port, and I've found that a great way to play them. Due to my GPU having been released before Nvidia's initiative to provide updated notebook video drivers, I simply cannot get new drivers for Windows (I dual boot). Since I do get the latest drivers for my Linux install, those games actually run much better in Linux for me - wish I could say the same for games running under Wine.
I realize it's unlikely and with Valve having opted not to get involved, any progress is likely to be slow, but Linux is an enjoyable operating system to use, even for gaming. Linux users pay full price for games all the time - they just usually have to play the games on a different platform unless they are made by Id or otherwise have a Linux port available. I agree that the game companies don't have much incentive to invest in cross-platform compatibility at this time, but as it slowly becomes easier and some companies start to do experiment with it, it will be interesting to see what the effects will be. Linux does have more to gain than the game companies do. The number one reason I hear from people who wanted to switch to Linux but decided not to is that they don't want to go without certain software which isn't available for Linux, be it games or things they need for work. It's hard to judge what effect more proprietary Linux software would have on things like market share. I'd love to find out, because once Linux has more market share, there would be more software available to me (so which comes first, the chicken or the egg? or will I get neither?). In the end, people just want the choice to use the software they like with the OS they prefer, and don't really like it that the reasons they sometimes can't are business reasons rather than technical ones. I may in fact be rambling now, so I'll leave it at that.
-Dan
the taste is just as bad as the smell. guts got in my mouth once when i swatted one too enthusiastically. you must be / have been in southeast asia too - the millipedes are pretty impressive, though not scary. the ~10 inch centipedes, though, are the worst. one crawled into bed with someone i used to know and sent them to the hospital. can't believe how fast and aggressive they are.
and yet, for some reason, i love it here!
heck, i could give them actual cockroaches for free (plus shipping and handling)! way more lifelike that augmented reality and since the feeling of a cockroach crawling on you is much worse than just seeing one (trust me, i've woke up with them on my lips), I'm sure they would be more effective. That's assuming their strategy is to scare the poor patients to death, since dead people don't need counseling, unless it's from Bruce Willis. that seems to be what they're going for.
-dan
i had a Keyhole account before Google acquired them and rebranded their software as Google Earth. It was actually worth the $30, easily, but i was really happy when Google offered it for free because now i can easily use it as a way to encourage kids i volunteer with in the Philippines to learn geography.
this is a good answer. i found an Nvidia Geforce 8600 card via pricewatch for my dad's computer that has an hdmi port on it that would probably do for you if you don't want to pay a whole lot.. you can convert dvi to hdmi, but it's nice to have hdmi on the card itself because it can carry the audio also. on the other hand, it sounds like a PlayStation 3 would fit your requirements nicely.
-dan
yeah, i'll admit that python is the only calculator i use anymore, and i have gotten lazy enough to use it for a lot of things any really smart person would be able to compute mentally in a second or two. python is fun and makes sense to me.
someone's going to point this out to me anyway if i don't mention it, but Blood Frontier itself isn't based on Quake. (i didn't know that until a couple of minutes ago). naturally that makes half of my post irrelevant to TFA. Since i like Sauerbraten, and this game appears to actually have a story, i think i'm gonna have to look into it. i do think work on a new engine is necessary to make open source gaming all it can be, and the cube 2 engine is pretty neat, especially when editing on-the-fly. it's not designed to compete with Unigine, obviously, but i do think it's a step in a good direction. and now i'm done with this lame replying to self stuff.
i think the most obvious reason would be that id software traditionally releases their older game engines to open source when they roll out one that is two generations newer. you can't say that isn't nice of them. on the other hand, it leads to open source gaming being full of projects that start with, say, an older quake engine, and try to add modern features to it (some of them do look good, but so far none have really challenged the current mainstream leaders). you would think this approach would lead to games that had familiar graphics but new and innovative gameplay, but that doesn't actually seem to happen much. i'm not sure if the open source FPS scene just needs more contributors, or is waiting for inspiration, or it's something else, but as with any free and open source software, i'm still thankful for the efforts and contributions that are being made and shared. there's a ton of potential in it and i'm sure we'll see more than space dungeons and deathmatches in the future.
i have a friend who does medical work among some tribes here where leprosy still occurs. his patients could tell you all about a life without pain. i understand what you're saying, that pain is just an indicator and we could replace it with some new technology that is less, er, painful... i'd be very, very nervous to go down that road.
my first reaction was that strategy games probably fit the "mastery" group better than role-playing games. when playing a single-player campaign or against AI, you often have to try several different strategies altogether in order to win a scenario, unless the game is set up to be too easy or you're just that good. RPGs, on the other hand, do usually reward strategy but almost always force you to grind away for xp anyway, and it didn't seem that the second group was defined as one that prefers repetitive tasks, but rather learning how to overcome a difficult challenge. well, being more of a strategy gamer, i'm probably biased, but it struck me as odd.
i suppose the idea of eugenics could have seemed like a natural extension of evolution in earlier times, when people commonly thought of evolution as a process that necessarily makes things superior over time -- starting with some single-celled organism and proceeding to humans or something anthropomorphic, and culminating in, i suppose, gods or something. i always cringe when i hear the term "highly evolved" - it makes sense in certain usages but often is a hallmark of the misunderstanding of evolution. evolution does seem to generate ever more complicated organisms, but the function of natural selection itself is to select the fittest for a certain environment / ecology, not the fittest in some more abstract aesthetic sense. this is why i always laugh at the old illustrations of humanoid dinosaurs that were imagined as what small therapods like troodon might have evolved into if they had survived. in fact, their near relatives did survive as birds, which were more fit despite lacking their fearsome rows of teeth.
in other words, thinking we could help natural selection by killing off those we deem as inferior could only derail evolution - it's artificial selection! I may be a Christian (a missionary, no less!) but i agree with a lot of atheists in that evolution doesn't deny morality - morality is what keeps us fit enough to not wipe ourselves off of this rock, probably. I also agree with them in not needing the Kirk Cameron version of the Origin of Species - the original already contains a better idea: that evolution is a process which God used to create, from one or several original organisms, the vast diversity of life as we know it. Kirk's views seem to be more in line with a very noisy minority belief that the natural world must fit our interpretation of the book of Genesis, science be damned, because there's no possible way we've understood it wrong. glad i jumped off that train.
this must be why people say they never have mod points when they need them. except you're already +5 so no worries :). now how do we make everyone else in america get it?
hey, stuffing the variable 'Before' with a much larger value than anticipated is basically the same as exploiting a buffer overflow, isn't it? perhaps English needs better memory management :D