I agree. It has worked awesome. At only the cost of a billions on dollars, literally hundreds of thousands of deaths, the funding of black markets, and the countless ruined lives for minor drug offenses, we have done a great job making it so that only about 10% of the population is criminal at any one time for using a basically harmless drug that ranks below caffeine and alcohol in terms of side effectives. Mission accomplished! We are winning the war on drugs!
The problem with the Palestine / Israel issue is that Israel is not working towards any solution. What is Israel's long term solution? Have sovereign absolute rule over a few million people in a prison that their citizens can, at will, and with army backing, snatch up pieces for settlement? Oh yeah, that is going to work out. Palestinians either need to be sovereign or citizens of Israel. Israel needs to pick one because the keeping a ghetto of nationless people method isn't working.
Don't get me wrong. I am sympathetic to Israel in many regards, but they have fucked up the Palestinian issue with epic skills since 1967 onwards. Instead of immediate developing and executing a plan to 'deal with' the conquered land either through integration or by creating a sovereign democracy they opted to basically imprison a few million people form now until the end of time. It should come as a "no shit Sherlock" that 40+ years later these nationless people are pissed.
Israel needs to rip a page out of the American handbook on imperil power. If your flatten another nation you have three options.
1) You can integrate them into your nation as citizens and give them some level of enfranchisement as they did to Native Americans, Hawaiians, and Mexicans. This is not a basket of roses method, but as pissed as Hawaiians might occasionally be, I haven't seen many draw weapons or plant bombs.
2) You could commit to rebuilding a conquered nation more or less in your own image, as the US did in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Bosnia. This is expensive, but when it works everyone leaves the table more or less happy.
3) Leave, stop trying to kick over their government with bombs, and accept the fact that these people are going to hate you for what you have done for a while and that only time is going to heal. This was done with Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti, North Korea, Lebanon, half of south America, etc.
That actually is not entirely true. There are four instances I can think of where crews saw this sort of issue.
1) Normal around the world sailing trips could take this long during the height of sailing. Granted, these crews did put into port and so never were a full two years isolated. That said, a lot of merchant ships of ~1650-1800 had crew sizes in the teens, which is roughly what I would expect for a Mars mission
2) Marooned ships could find themselves on islands for years before rescue. Again, it isn't a perfect analogy as island, even small ones, are bigger than a space ship.
3) Arctic explores trying to find the Northwest passage are almost perfect analogs for a Mars mission. These explorations almost always took a couple of years or longer, they were completely isolated with no contact with outsider, and arctic conditions made the ships basically space ships. These ships would get stuck in ice every winter and the crew would have to sit around doing basically nothing. The only thing that make these expeditions less than perfect metaphors for a Mars trip is that the crew sizes on these ships tended to be up closer to a 100, rather than the teens you would expect for a Mars mission.
Of course, you want to be careful how far you take the analogy. Ship captains had the capacity to enforce their disciple with brutal and barbaric methods that are not going to fly on a Mars mission. Flog your engineer and he is likely to seal you off behind a bulkhead and see how long you can suck space.
No, it should be handled like alcohol. It is laughably absurd that a drug like alcohol can be bought anywhere in the US, but pot is illegal. There is no one who can, with a straight face, claim that alcohol is a safer drug than pot. People don't OD on pot, but they sure as shit do in alcohol. Pot does not induce violent rage, but alcohol certainly can. The amount of alcohol it takes to incapacitate a persons judgement is trivial. The physical damage alcohol inflicts upon the body is high. If you do very long term studies on pot, you might find some marginal, slightly elevated, non-lethal health risk. The damage alcohol inflicts on the other hand can be extreme and completely lethal.
It is absurd beyond all reason that we, as a society, give thumbs up to alcohol consumption, but have to fight a war over pot, which is a clearly lesser drug. All this is coming from a guy who smokes no pot, but certainly enjoys alcohol. You don't have to be a pot head to realize that our estimations of risk are completely fucked up.
It depends upon WHY you consider it a sin over whether or not the tax makes sense. If for instance it is a sin to drink soda because you might be killing yourself, than surely the tax is 'unfair' in that it harm the poor far more than the rich. If I make 500k a year, I am not going to notice a jump in soda prices no matter how much I drink. It won't change my behavior.
On the other hand, if the sin is consuming medical resources without paying for them, then the tax makes sense. A guy doing 500k a year probably has insurance and probably pays for himself. Someone making 15k a year with 5 fat kids is almost certainly not paying for themselves. When they get sick a tax payer is going to have to step in and pay the cost. Hence in this case, the 'sin' tax is targeted more or less correctly. The sin of failing to cover your health costs and making yourself ill is a sin that an impoverished person can make, but a rich person likely doesn't.
I'm not commenting either way. I honestly find the whole debate over health care troublesome and without good answers. That said, keep in mind that as you use more tax payer money to cover people's ill health, 'sin' taxes and the like are going to become more appealing. If we lived in a society where we let people die in the street if they can't afford care, it is unlikely we would care much what people do with their bodies. When we pay for everyone though, we suddenly care a whole lot more what people do with their bodies. Right now we inhabit a middle ground where we both offer emergency care to all and extract as much money as humanly possible out of them before dipping into tax payer money. Hence, we have the middle ground interest in sin taxes. Interest in sin taxes and other methods of behavioral modification is going to jump once insurance is freely available and you don't run the risk of extreme debt for going to the hospital. Just consider it food for thought.
The wet finger in the air method is interesting, but I suggest the alternative to "modeling" an infinitely complex system with constantly changing rules is to structure yourself such that you can eat as many risks as possible, no matter how improbable they are. So, if your computer "model" tells you that the chances of home equity prices dumping off as much their value as they just did is a "10 sigma" event likely to happen only once in the creation of the universe, toss out your model because it is clearly a piece of shit.
I don't mind if Wall street toys with their models. Nothing is more fun than watching Wall Street dump money into model until it stops working and a few years of steady profit is wipe out in a day or two. What I mind is when they try and use their silly models to predict rare events. Models simply FAIL when they try and predict rare events, or worse, events that have never happened before... both of which happen regularly and often.
That means that when you are trying to set up risk "models", you need to take into account the events that are rare or have never happened. How they want to deal with such events depends upon which financial toys they are gambling with. The most obvious advice would be to structure your institution such that it is never so leveraged or monoculture that a handful of financial devices failing at once doesn't result in your implosion.
Don't get me wrong, bailing out over leveraged companies that just got taken down by models that predict an event was only supposed to happen once in the creation of the universe is fun and all, but I'd like to take a pass. I'll take a far more boring and conservative Wall Street over one that it shocked by a new and "unpredictable!" crisis every few years.
I really wish wall street would get off their 'risk models' fetish. The financial systems of the world are wildly complex beyond all comprehension. "Risk models" make three, very shitty assumptions and, as a rule, eventually always fail. As we saw with the latest blow up, some times they fail with epic spectaularity. The three shitty assumptions are:
1) That the model has enough information to make predictions in this infinitely complex system 2) The system doesn't change. 3) We will see nothing in the future we have not seen in the past.
It is like watching someone try and figure out a way to predict the winner of a game where the rule book takes a library to hold AND the rule books are constantly being swapped out for new rule books. Everyone likes to blame the current recession on greed, evil bankers, and corporate corruption. While all of those things exists, they are not what caused the melt down. What cause the melt down was that a bunch of morons were using a 'risk' model that basically predicted that what happenend could NEVER possibly happen, so don't worry about it. Based upon this bad information, people made some very awesomely bad 'safe' bets. When the "impossible" (as the risk "models called them) happened, those very bad but "safe" bets imploded and you saw the wide spread destruction that happened as a result.
I don't believe that has to be true. A lot of work can be co-opted. If I want to make the ultimate role play MUD, do I really care if I just snag some stock armor? Why bother building my own? In fact, done right you wouldn't HAVE to build anything. You could 'open source' it. You go out and grab a few balanced areas other people made, toss in a neat balanced class set someone built, and snag dozens of weapon models that countless people have made.
Granted, your world won't be the most original, but that isn't the point. The point is that you only have to 'build' what someone else hasn't. Most places would certainly want to build their own stuff, but they will likely focus on what matters for their game.
A perm death RP enforced game likely would skimp on balance, areas, and other such features. They would likely want sophisticated monitoring features, a stellar crafting system, and a brutal and utterly unbalanced combat system. This means they could focus on custom building just a few areas and spend the rest of their time developing 'realistic systems' and putting staffing power into encouraging and monitoring RP.
A PvP heavy game might up for mostly stock areas for NPC killing, but put all of their efforts into tweaking someone else's siege code and getting class balance just right.
A hack and slash fest might grab all the best stock areas it can from others and work on balancing those NPC fights to be awesome.
Sure, no place will beat WoW in everything, but you better believe that some would beat the living piss out of WoW when it comes to providing a satisfying PvP, RP, or GM lead adventure experience. Yeah, the RP world might have crappy NPC encounters, the PvP world might have dull NPC encounters, and the adventure world might not even allow PvP... but if it serves your niche, who cares? You don't need a million people to have your taste... just a couple hundred.
Intelligent Design has theories? What, if anything, does it predict?
That is actually the wrong criticism of ID. ID can certainly predict things. If the 'designers' are a bunch of bored aliens that like to do anal probes, you could predict that the aliens will cause changes in animals DNA such that they tend towards having ass holes. If the FSM is the designer, than you will predict that creatures will be designed towards higher spaghetti creating lifeforms. If the designer is an all powerful omnipotent god that thinks beetles totally kick ass, you will predict that there will be a crap ton of beetles (which there in fact are).
And hey, all of the above might very well be true.
If someone wants to go out and try and prove it, more power to them. The issue is that ID is nothing more than an attempt by religious nuts to try and teach about baby Jesus in the schools. If there were people that were taking the 'study' of ID seriously, they would sit around designing experiments to catch whatever the mysterious force is that manipulates DNA to force evolution and create their spiffy designed universe. Further, when they pondered what the force was, they would have to constrain themselves to theories based upon real physics. This would handily rule out 'magic' and 'god juice'. If they want to show that the force is god juice, they then need to go ahead and reinvent physics to try and explain how the force of god juice works. At no point does 'magic', 'just cause', or 'humans can't understand because they are not Jesus' acceptable.
The issue with ID is that science doesn't accept 'magic' as an answer. If you say a designer is forcing evolution, you need to go and figure out the force being used, and it either needs to conform to current theories or you need to find new ones that explain all observable events. This is what makes the ID folks nothing more than religious whack jobs. When Darwin declare that natural selection was the answer, people went to work figuring out how natural selection works and didn't just decide it was a magical force that just happens. They tore it apart by from a macroscopic level that studied how animals compete and co-opt, they tore it apart on the biological level understanding how cells reproduces, and they keep on drilling down until they are looking at atoms and figuring out how quantum affects influence evolution. At no point was anyone ever satisfied with 'magic' as the answer.
Not really. String theory is based on observations like any theory. You can observe things, see that it lines up with your theory, and you can falsify string theory. The problem with string theory, and the reason why people complain about it, is that most of its observations are also true of the boring old theories we have right now or true of other variations of string theory. People get a little annoyed when you come up with a dozen contradictory string theories and according to all known observations they could all be true and no one can figure out a way to disprove any of them shorting of lighting off a big bang.
The rest of the world somehow manages to have better schools while spending less money. I fail to see how spending MORE money when you already outspend most nations could possibly be the answer. The whole institution is rotten. I would be all for a dramatic increase in charter schools or vouchers. The public schools system has stagnated and there is zero proof that tossing even more money at the broken system is going to magically make it work. The system needs to be torn down and new things tried. The government has had a couple hundred year monopoly on the school system and proven itself remarkably incapable. Time to open it up a little.
There are alternatives to class balance, MMORPGs just are not capable of them. Look at a game like Armageddon MUD. It has zero balance. A n00b Templar will mop the floor against pretty much everything else in its home city. Being a Templar in that game is like being a level 50 in WoW mage when no one else can ever get past level 20. How do you balance such absurd power? Social pressure and enforced role play. You might be the high and mighty Templar, but you have certain responsibilities, everyone wants to kill you, you are never allowed to actually use your full power, and if you ever abuse it you simply die. The entire game is built like that. Magic users are epically powerful, but show that your a magic user in public, and you die. Oh, and death is permanent. It isn't for everyone, but it certainly takes rock, paper, scissors and flips it on its ass.
Personally, I think that the next "MMORPG" revolution will be a devolution. Server space, bandwidth, and general computational power is now cheap as hell. There isn't a reason in the world why a few individuals can't host a Not So Massivily Multiplayer Online RPG. (NSMMORPG?). Open it up for heavy modding, build it such that someone who wants to spend the money for a server can host a couple hundred people, and let the MMORPG ecology get some new blood. WoW is a lowest common denominator game. That is great for most people, but imagine the other possabilities. Imagine a WoW that was 100% PK all the time and super guild based. Imagine a WoW with permanent death, no levels, heavy into RP, and an iron fisted adminstrative staff that enforced it. Imagine a purely RvR game, or a game that is nothing but epic dungeon crawls.
WoW is most mediocre of games. They have to be to appeal to a wide audience. The result is that few people are truly happy with it. Most want it to be a little more of this or a little more of that. Never Winter Nights 2 came closer to this concept of a pint sized MMO, it just wasn't robust enough to really let people tear into it. You wait. MUDs are going to make a come back. The MMORPGs will always be there, but for people who want an extreme experience graphical MUDs will be the name of the game.
No. Absolutely nothing like Guild Wars. The two games are basically polar opposites. UO is (or at least was as of a few years ago) a 100% skills game. No levels, no classes, and you could drop and add skills at will. Further, skills were learned 100% by doing. Slaughtering a few thousand NPCs didn't make your skills go up. Using your skills made your skills go up. If you happen to kill something in the process, loot to you, but that is it.
Guild War is a generic Everquest style system. Levels, classes, etc. Sure, it tweaks the formula, but it is the same beast. The fact that you can later on pick two classes (OMG!? TWO!?) doesn't make it anything like UO. If you want to play a comparison game, if Everquest is Doom and Guild Wars is Half Life 2 (different games, different features, same rough idea), UO was Star Craft,a totally different games balls to bones. The only thing it had in common with the current crop of MMORPGs is that it is a "massive" online game set in a fantasy realm.
So the US govt is providing ways for foreign citizens to access content that is considered illegal in their countries... What would be the US govt reaction if some other country provides a way for US citizens to access content that is illegal in the US ?
Exactly what it is currently doing? Nothing. Surfing from the US I have never had a government firewall block my access. What could a foreign government possibly do when the the US government does absolutely nothing? The US government only reacts to illegal content, it doesn't make any attempt to censor it. Further, its definition of "illegal" is pretty narrow. If you trade in kiddie porn, you might provoke the US to try and arrest you. Otherwise, the only danger the US government poses is that companies can use their courts to try and impose our insane copyright laws. There is a pretty limited class of illegal things you can do on the intertubes in the US. Censorship isn't the worry. Lawsuits are.
Right, because government censors constantly appear to block my Internet surfacing. Right. If you are in the US, I am pretty sure I could post a series of links to convince you that not only does the US government not censor the Intertubes, but that a man, a woman, a horse, a communist, and an anarchist can get freaky in kiddie pool of astro glide. The US sucks in a lot of ways, fanatical defense of free speech isn't one of them. The US trounces the shit out of the rest of the world, EU included. It isn't perfect, but it is certainly the best, and I have the Nazi midget porn to prove it.
If you want to notice a speed difference, go find a website with a lot of links to videos. Now open two dozen tabs with video behind them quickly. For me, running an older computer, Firefox chokes and dies. Chrome barely stutters.
Agreed, publicizing stories like this is extremely important. Apple deserves to be smacked around when it pulls shit like this. I don't expect Apple to stop any time time soon, but I hope people realize the kind of crap they are going to have to deal with when they plunk down a few hundred for an Apple mobile device. I know I would be pissed if I plunked down a few hundred for an iWhatever only to find that the damn thing is covered in nerf foam, has my disapproving Irish Catholic grandmother serving as the gold standard for what it censors out, and turns into a very cool and well marketed shiny white plastic iBrick if I try and unlock it.
Why would I care if it obscures my workspace? If I'm looking at a menu then by definition my attention is away from the workspace.
It isn't the end of the world, but why bother needlessly blocking it? Like I said, it isn't life and death, but it is nice to pull up a tab with various formatting options and having the work space remain visible. It isn't needed, but it is certainly nice.
Again, why should I care? If it's a routine task them I'm going to learn the keyboard shortcut, the menu/ribbon won't factor into things at all.
Two points:
First, you can have a ribbon and hot keys. If you do something and want to learn the hot key, a ribbon isn't going to stop you.
Second, some times a thing becomes 'routine' briefly, in which case hot keys are of minimal use. So, if I am about to crop a bunch of pictures in a word processing document, there might very well be a hot key that does it, but if cropping pictures is something I rarely do, I probably will not bother to learn it. A ribbon lets you easily do the same task repeatedly. In fact, it lets you do similar tasks repeatedly very quickly. So, if after I am done cropping I want to do some other picture modification, the option I need is just one click away. If you have memorized the hot key it is a moot point, but in instances where you have not, like in a task that is normally rare but in this particular instance it is something you will do many times, the ribbon is clearly superior.
Ribbons don't prevent hot keys. In fact, hot keys really have nothing to do with the ribbon/menu debate. You can have hot keys and ribbons as easily as you can have hot keys and menus. The only thing a ribbon does is make hot keys less necessary by putting stuff you are likely to use fewer clicks away.
I would actually find this useful, although it sounds a lot like what the "menu" key was supposed to do back when it came out.
The ribbon is just a way of keeping "menus" stuck open and out of the way. The ribbon just eliminates a click or two and some mouse movements to access stuff that is in menus.
Finally, I should point out that alls you have made are arguments as to why ribbons are not needed, not how they are inferior to menus. There is nothing a menu does that a ribbon can't do. Further, it is pretty easy to prove objectively that a ribbon can get everything done in fewer clicks than a menu.
The only instances I can think of where a menu outclasses a ribbon is if you are a user who makes no use of icon shortcuts. If your OO is just a menu without any clickable short cuts, a ribbon will eat a little more space. So, if you are a hardcore power user who knows the short cut to everything, you might find the ribbon eats a little more on screen real estate. Other than that one rare scenario that describes very few people, the ribbon is hands down the better alternative.
You are half right. The ribbon is certainly the most reviled 'feature' of Office 2007... for about a week or two. Then you come to realize that the ribbon actually works pretty damn well and beats the piss out of the traditional menu based systems. My first reaction to the ribbon was pretty much what most computer savvy people's reaction was, which is annoyance at how MS had managed to dumb down the interface even further and strip usability. However, as I used it more, I began to see the logic behind it.
There are a few things that the ribbon does better than menus.
First, it is a better use of space. Why have vertical menus drop down and obscure your work space? The ribbon keeps 'stuff' out of your way and doesn't drop into the work space.
Second, it speeds up routine tasks. If you are about to go do some action more than once, instead of having to click to the menu and pull down to what you want multiple times, you just click to the right ribbon tab and the option that you are about to use multiple times is sitting there one click away (versus a click, some movement, and another click with menus).
Third, the ribbon adapts to what you are doing. If you click on a picture, you get a picture tab on the ribbon with further sub tabs to do various things to the picture. Instead of having to click through a couple of different menus, it lumps it together nicely. If you are working on a picture, you probably are going to want to do 'picture stuff', and so it moves that 'stuff' fewer clicks away from what you are doing. In a menu system, the picture 'stuff' is generally the same distance away with no regard to if you are editing pictures or work on graphs.
I'm not saying the ribbon is a holy grail that makes the user experience an order of magnitude better, but it is better than the current menu systems. An objective measure of 'clicks to do something' reveals pretty quickly why the ribbon is better. The ribbon system generally reduces the number of clicks and moves you need to do by one, and by many more if you are about to perform multiple similar tasks in a row.
I personally have seen no good reason to NOT go to a ribbon system other than that it is what people are used to. While that in itself is some times a good argument, I think the efficiency boosts combined with the trivial ease of learning the change more than make up for unease people feel with having to change. If you hate the ribbon system, I suggest trying to set aside your annoyance and give it a fair shake for a week or two. After you get used to it, there really is no way in which a menu system is better beyond familiarity.
The current mode of global resource allocation requires a Greenpeace to permit us to continue to consume at unsustainable rates. If the consumptive "first world" were faced with how to redress the the vast injustices we cause through consumption, instead of simply buying indulgences through slightly more expensive environmentally-friendly labeled goods, we might slow down to think about why 2/3 of the world's population must struggle through inhumane living conditions so that we can enjoy our dozens of Energy Star appliances.
Right, because what that 2/3 of the rest of the world REALLY needs is for first world to set up trade barriers and tell them to fuck off with making stuff for us. The RAPID RISE in living conditions around the world is because the first world decided to farm out more of the manufacturing to places where they were scratching at dirt to keep themselves on a filling starvation diet. China is probably the best example. A few decades ago they were busy bleeding off percentage points of population to mass starvation. Now, the the idea that China could face famine again is considered absurd. There are other places that have done the same thing and better. Taiwan and South Korea come to mind.
I'm not saying that globalization does not have its issues. Environmental concerns in the third world are very much real. That said, the answer isn't to pull out of these nations and tell them to have fun with seeing how subsistence farming treats them.
About damn time is right. I really like my Roku box. The Netflix on demand works great and looks good. The selection is still a little iffy, but it is more than 'good enough' and getting better. The Amazon unboxed is nice if I really want to watch an episode or two of something. That said, it kills me that I can't tap into any of the awesome video pod casting that is out there. There is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to snag some Revision 3, TWiT, or any of the other quality video pod casts out there. I personally can't wait.
And if I dumped a car on an uninhabited island that island would have a car ownership rate of infinity (/0)!!! I bet they would have accidents all the time there!
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. It has worked awesome. At only the cost of a billions on dollars, literally hundreds of thousands of deaths, the funding of black markets, and the countless ruined lives for minor drug offenses, we have done a great job making it so that only about 10% of the population is criminal at any one time for using a basically harmless drug that ranks below caffeine and alcohol in terms of side effectives. Mission accomplished! We are winning the war on drugs!
The problem with the Palestine / Israel issue is that Israel is not working towards any solution. What is Israel's long term solution? Have sovereign absolute rule over a few million people in a prison that their citizens can, at will, and with army backing, snatch up pieces for settlement? Oh yeah, that is going to work out. Palestinians either need to be sovereign or citizens of Israel. Israel needs to pick one because the keeping a ghetto of nationless people method isn't working.
Don't get me wrong. I am sympathetic to Israel in many regards, but they have fucked up the Palestinian issue with epic skills since 1967 onwards. Instead of immediate developing and executing a plan to 'deal with' the conquered land either through integration or by creating a sovereign democracy they opted to basically imprison a few million people form now until the end of time. It should come as a "no shit Sherlock" that 40+ years later these nationless people are pissed.
Israel needs to rip a page out of the American handbook on imperil power. If your flatten another nation you have three options.
1) You can integrate them into your nation as citizens and give them some level of enfranchisement as they did to Native Americans, Hawaiians, and Mexicans. This is not a basket of roses method, but as pissed as Hawaiians might occasionally be, I haven't seen many draw weapons or plant bombs.
2) You could commit to rebuilding a conquered nation more or less in your own image, as the US did in Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Bosnia. This is expensive, but when it works everyone leaves the table more or less happy.
3) Leave, stop trying to kick over their government with bombs, and accept the fact that these people are going to hate you for what you have done for a while and that only time is going to heal. This was done with Mexico, Vietnam, Haiti, North Korea, Lebanon, half of south America, etc.
That actually is not entirely true. There are four instances I can think of where crews saw this sort of issue.
1) Normal around the world sailing trips could take this long during the height of sailing. Granted, these crews did put into port and so never were a full two years isolated. That said, a lot of merchant ships of ~1650-1800 had crew sizes in the teens, which is roughly what I would expect for a Mars mission
2) Marooned ships could find themselves on islands for years before rescue. Again, it isn't a perfect analogy as island, even small ones, are bigger than a space ship.
3) Arctic explores trying to find the Northwest passage are almost perfect analogs for a Mars mission. These explorations almost always took a couple of years or longer, they were completely isolated with no contact with outsider, and arctic conditions made the ships basically space ships. These ships would get stuck in ice every winter and the crew would have to sit around doing basically nothing. The only thing that make these expeditions less than perfect metaphors for a Mars trip is that the crew sizes on these ships tended to be up closer to a 100, rather than the teens you would expect for a Mars mission.
Of course, you want to be careful how far you take the analogy. Ship captains had the capacity to enforce their disciple with brutal and barbaric methods that are not going to fly on a Mars mission. Flog your engineer and he is likely to seal you off behind a bulkhead and see how long you can suck space.
No, it should be handled like alcohol. It is laughably absurd that a drug like alcohol can be bought anywhere in the US, but pot is illegal. There is no one who can, with a straight face, claim that alcohol is a safer drug than pot. People don't OD on pot, but they sure as shit do in alcohol. Pot does not induce violent rage, but alcohol certainly can. The amount of alcohol it takes to incapacitate a persons judgement is trivial. The physical damage alcohol inflicts upon the body is high. If you do very long term studies on pot, you might find some marginal, slightly elevated, non-lethal health risk. The damage alcohol inflicts on the other hand can be extreme and completely lethal.
It is absurd beyond all reason that we, as a society, give thumbs up to alcohol consumption, but have to fight a war over pot, which is a clearly lesser drug. All this is coming from a guy who smokes no pot, but certainly enjoys alcohol. You don't have to be a pot head to realize that our estimations of risk are completely fucked up.
It depends upon WHY you consider it a sin over whether or not the tax makes sense. If for instance it is a sin to drink soda because you might be killing yourself, than surely the tax is 'unfair' in that it harm the poor far more than the rich. If I make 500k a year, I am not going to notice a jump in soda prices no matter how much I drink. It won't change my behavior.
On the other hand, if the sin is consuming medical resources without paying for them, then the tax makes sense. A guy doing 500k a year probably has insurance and probably pays for himself. Someone making 15k a year with 5 fat kids is almost certainly not paying for themselves. When they get sick a tax payer is going to have to step in and pay the cost. Hence in this case, the 'sin' tax is targeted more or less correctly. The sin of failing to cover your health costs and making yourself ill is a sin that an impoverished person can make, but a rich person likely doesn't.
I'm not commenting either way. I honestly find the whole debate over health care troublesome and without good answers. That said, keep in mind that as you use more tax payer money to cover people's ill health, 'sin' taxes and the like are going to become more appealing. If we lived in a society where we let people die in the street if they can't afford care, it is unlikely we would care much what people do with their bodies. When we pay for everyone though, we suddenly care a whole lot more what people do with their bodies. Right now we inhabit a middle ground where we both offer emergency care to all and extract as much money as humanly possible out of them before dipping into tax payer money. Hence, we have the middle ground interest in sin taxes. Interest in sin taxes and other methods of behavioral modification is going to jump once insurance is freely available and you don't run the risk of extreme debt for going to the hospital. Just consider it food for thought.
How I would kill for mod points. I salute you.
+1 awesome.
The wet finger in the air method is interesting, but I suggest the alternative to "modeling" an infinitely complex system with constantly changing rules is to structure yourself such that you can eat as many risks as possible, no matter how improbable they are. So, if your computer "model" tells you that the chances of home equity prices dumping off as much their value as they just did is a "10 sigma" event likely to happen only once in the creation of the universe, toss out your model because it is clearly a piece of shit.
I don't mind if Wall street toys with their models. Nothing is more fun than watching Wall Street dump money into model until it stops working and a few years of steady profit is wipe out in a day or two. What I mind is when they try and use their silly models to predict rare events. Models simply FAIL when they try and predict rare events, or worse, events that have never happened before... both of which happen regularly and often.
That means that when you are trying to set up risk "models", you need to take into account the events that are rare or have never happened. How they want to deal with such events depends upon which financial toys they are gambling with. The most obvious advice would be to structure your institution such that it is never so leveraged or monoculture that a handful of financial devices failing at once doesn't result in your implosion.
Don't get me wrong, bailing out over leveraged companies that just got taken down by models that predict an event was only supposed to happen once in the creation of the universe is fun and all, but I'd like to take a pass. I'll take a far more boring and conservative Wall Street over one that it shocked by a new and "unpredictable!" crisis every few years.
I really wish wall street would get off their 'risk models' fetish. The financial systems of the world are wildly complex beyond all comprehension. "Risk models" make three, very shitty assumptions and, as a rule, eventually always fail. As we saw with the latest blow up, some times they fail with epic spectaularity. The three shitty assumptions are:
1) That the model has enough information to make predictions in this infinitely complex system
2) The system doesn't change.
3) We will see nothing in the future we have not seen in the past.
It is like watching someone try and figure out a way to predict the winner of a game where the rule book takes a library to hold AND the rule books are constantly being swapped out for new rule books. Everyone likes to blame the current recession on greed, evil bankers, and corporate corruption. While all of those things exists, they are not what caused the melt down. What cause the melt down was that a bunch of morons were using a 'risk' model that basically predicted that what happenend could NEVER possibly happen, so don't worry about it. Based upon this bad information, people made some very awesomely bad 'safe' bets. When the "impossible" (as the risk "models called them) happened, those very bad but "safe" bets imploded and you saw the wide spread destruction that happened as a result.
I don't believe that has to be true. A lot of work can be co-opted. If I want to make the ultimate role play MUD, do I really care if I just snag some stock armor? Why bother building my own? In fact, done right you wouldn't HAVE to build anything. You could 'open source' it. You go out and grab a few balanced areas other people made, toss in a neat balanced class set someone built, and snag dozens of weapon models that countless people have made.
Granted, your world won't be the most original, but that isn't the point. The point is that you only have to 'build' what someone else hasn't. Most places would certainly want to build their own stuff, but they will likely focus on what matters for their game.
A perm death RP enforced game likely would skimp on balance, areas, and other such features. They would likely want sophisticated monitoring features, a stellar crafting system, and a brutal and utterly unbalanced combat system. This means they could focus on custom building just a few areas and spend the rest of their time developing 'realistic systems' and putting staffing power into encouraging and monitoring RP.
A PvP heavy game might up for mostly stock areas for NPC killing, but put all of their efforts into tweaking someone else's siege code and getting class balance just right.
A hack and slash fest might grab all the best stock areas it can from others and work on balancing those NPC fights to be awesome.
Sure, no place will beat WoW in everything, but you better believe that some would beat the living piss out of WoW when it comes to providing a satisfying PvP, RP, or GM lead adventure experience. Yeah, the RP world might have crappy NPC encounters, the PvP world might have dull NPC encounters, and the adventure world might not even allow PvP... but if it serves your niche, who cares? You don't need a million people to have your taste... just a couple hundred.
Intelligent Design has theories? What, if anything, does it predict?
That is actually the wrong criticism of ID. ID can certainly predict things. If the 'designers' are a bunch of bored aliens that like to do anal probes, you could predict that the aliens will cause changes in animals DNA such that they tend towards having ass holes. If the FSM is the designer, than you will predict that creatures will be designed towards higher spaghetti creating lifeforms. If the designer is an all powerful omnipotent god that thinks beetles totally kick ass, you will predict that there will be a crap ton of beetles (which there in fact are).
And hey, all of the above might very well be true.
If someone wants to go out and try and prove it, more power to them. The issue is that ID is nothing more than an attempt by religious nuts to try and teach about baby Jesus in the schools. If there were people that were taking the 'study' of ID seriously, they would sit around designing experiments to catch whatever the mysterious force is that manipulates DNA to force evolution and create their spiffy designed universe. Further, when they pondered what the force was, they would have to constrain themselves to theories based upon real physics. This would handily rule out 'magic' and 'god juice'. If they want to show that the force is god juice, they then need to go ahead and reinvent physics to try and explain how the force of god juice works. At no point does 'magic', 'just cause', or 'humans can't understand because they are not Jesus' acceptable.
The issue with ID is that science doesn't accept 'magic' as an answer. If you say a designer is forcing evolution, you need to go and figure out the force being used, and it either needs to conform to current theories or you need to find new ones that explain all observable events. This is what makes the ID folks nothing more than religious whack jobs. When Darwin declare that natural selection was the answer, people went to work figuring out how natural selection works and didn't just decide it was a magical force that just happens. They tore it apart by from a macroscopic level that studied how animals compete and co-opt, they tore it apart on the biological level understanding how cells reproduces, and they keep on drilling down until they are looking at atoms and figuring out how quantum affects influence evolution. At no point was anyone ever satisfied with 'magic' as the answer.
Not really. String theory is based on observations like any theory. You can observe things, see that it lines up with your theory, and you can falsify string theory. The problem with string theory, and the reason why people complain about it, is that most of its observations are also true of the boring old theories we have right now or true of other variations of string theory. People get a little annoyed when you come up with a dozen contradictory string theories and according to all known observations they could all be true and no one can figure out a way to disprove any of them shorting of lighting off a big bang.
The rest of the world somehow manages to have better schools while spending less money. I fail to see how spending MORE money when you already outspend most nations could possibly be the answer. The whole institution is rotten. I would be all for a dramatic increase in charter schools or vouchers. The public schools system has stagnated and there is zero proof that tossing even more money at the broken system is going to magically make it work. The system needs to be torn down and new things tried. The government has had a couple hundred year monopoly on the school system and proven itself remarkably incapable. Time to open it up a little.
Hey, remember that time on Endor when an entire legion of the emperor's best men were ruthlessly slaughtered by stone aged teddy bears?
There are alternatives to class balance, MMORPGs just are not capable of them. Look at a game like Armageddon MUD. It has zero balance. A n00b Templar will mop the floor against pretty much everything else in its home city. Being a Templar in that game is like being a level 50 in WoW mage when no one else can ever get past level 20. How do you balance such absurd power? Social pressure and enforced role play. You might be the high and mighty Templar, but you have certain responsibilities, everyone wants to kill you, you are never allowed to actually use your full power, and if you ever abuse it you simply die. The entire game is built like that. Magic users are epically powerful, but show that your a magic user in public, and you die. Oh, and death is permanent. It isn't for everyone, but it certainly takes rock, paper, scissors and flips it on its ass.
Personally, I think that the next "MMORPG" revolution will be a devolution. Server space, bandwidth, and general computational power is now cheap as hell. There isn't a reason in the world why a few individuals can't host a Not So Massivily Multiplayer Online RPG. (NSMMORPG?). Open it up for heavy modding, build it such that someone who wants to spend the money for a server can host a couple hundred people, and let the MMORPG ecology get some new blood. WoW is a lowest common denominator game. That is great for most people, but imagine the other possabilities. Imagine a WoW that was 100% PK all the time and super guild based. Imagine a WoW with permanent death, no levels, heavy into RP, and an iron fisted adminstrative staff that enforced it. Imagine a purely RvR game, or a game that is nothing but epic dungeon crawls.
WoW is most mediocre of games. They have to be to appeal to a wide audience. The result is that few people are truly happy with it. Most want it to be a little more of this or a little more of that. Never Winter Nights 2 came closer to this concept of a pint sized MMO, it just wasn't robust enough to really let people tear into it. You wait. MUDs are going to make a come back. The MMORPGs will always be there, but for people who want an extreme experience graphical MUDs will be the name of the game.
No. Absolutely nothing like Guild Wars. The two games are basically polar opposites. UO is (or at least was as of a few years ago) a 100% skills game. No levels, no classes, and you could drop and add skills at will. Further, skills were learned 100% by doing. Slaughtering a few thousand NPCs didn't make your skills go up. Using your skills made your skills go up. If you happen to kill something in the process, loot to you, but that is it.
Guild War is a generic Everquest style system. Levels, classes, etc. Sure, it tweaks the formula, but it is the same beast. The fact that you can later on pick two classes (OMG!? TWO!?) doesn't make it anything like UO. If you want to play a comparison game, if Everquest is Doom and Guild Wars is Half Life 2 (different games, different features, same rough idea), UO was Star Craft,a totally different games balls to bones. The only thing it had in common with the current crop of MMORPGs is that it is a "massive" online game set in a fantasy realm.
So the US govt is providing ways for foreign citizens to access content that is considered illegal in their countries...
What would be the US govt reaction if some other country provides a way for US citizens to access content that is illegal in the US ?
Exactly what it is currently doing? Nothing. Surfing from the US I have never had a government firewall block my access. What could a foreign government possibly do when the the US government does absolutely nothing? The US government only reacts to illegal content, it doesn't make any attempt to censor it. Further, its definition of "illegal" is pretty narrow. If you trade in kiddie porn, you might provoke the US to try and arrest you. Otherwise, the only danger the US government poses is that companies can use their courts to try and impose our insane copyright laws. There is a pretty limited class of illegal things you can do on the intertubes in the US. Censorship isn't the worry. Lawsuits are.
Right, because government censors constantly appear to block my Internet surfacing. Right. If you are in the US, I am pretty sure I could post a series of links to convince you that not only does the US government not censor the Intertubes, but that a man, a woman, a horse, a communist, and an anarchist can get freaky in kiddie pool of astro glide. The US sucks in a lot of ways, fanatical defense of free speech isn't one of them. The US trounces the shit out of the rest of the world, EU included. It isn't perfect, but it is certainly the best, and I have the Nazi midget porn to prove it.
If you want to notice a speed difference, go find a website with a lot of links to videos. Now open two dozen tabs with video behind them quickly. For me, running an older computer, Firefox chokes and dies. Chrome barely stutters.
Agreed, publicizing stories like this is extremely important. Apple deserves to be smacked around when it pulls shit like this. I don't expect Apple to stop any time time soon, but I hope people realize the kind of crap they are going to have to deal with when they plunk down a few hundred for an Apple mobile device. I know I would be pissed if I plunked down a few hundred for an iWhatever only to find that the damn thing is covered in nerf foam, has my disapproving Irish Catholic grandmother serving as the gold standard for what it censors out, and turns into a very cool and well marketed shiny white plastic iBrick if I try and unlock it.
Why would I care if it obscures my workspace? If I'm looking at a menu then by definition my attention is away from the workspace.
It isn't the end of the world, but why bother needlessly blocking it? Like I said, it isn't life and death, but it is nice to pull up a tab with various formatting options and having the work space remain visible. It isn't needed, but it is certainly nice.
Again, why should I care? If it's a routine task them I'm going to learn the keyboard shortcut, the menu/ribbon won't factor into things at all.
Two points:
First, you can have a ribbon and hot keys. If you do something and want to learn the hot key, a ribbon isn't going to stop you.
Second, some times a thing becomes 'routine' briefly, in which case hot keys are of minimal use. So, if I am about to crop a bunch of pictures in a word processing document, there might very well be a hot key that does it, but if cropping pictures is something I rarely do, I probably will not bother to learn it. A ribbon lets you easily do the same task repeatedly. In fact, it lets you do similar tasks repeatedly very quickly. So, if after I am done cropping I want to do some other picture modification, the option I need is just one click away. If you have memorized the hot key it is a moot point, but in instances where you have not, like in a task that is normally rare but in this particular instance it is something you will do many times, the ribbon is clearly superior.
Ribbons don't prevent hot keys. In fact, hot keys really have nothing to do with the ribbon/menu debate. You can have hot keys and ribbons as easily as you can have hot keys and menus. The only thing a ribbon does is make hot keys less necessary by putting stuff you are likely to use fewer clicks away.
I would actually find this useful, although it sounds a lot like what the "menu" key was supposed to do back when it came out.
The ribbon is just a way of keeping "menus" stuck open and out of the way. The ribbon just eliminates a click or two and some mouse movements to access stuff that is in menus.
Finally, I should point out that alls you have made are arguments as to why ribbons are not needed, not how they are inferior to menus. There is nothing a menu does that a ribbon can't do. Further, it is pretty easy to prove objectively that a ribbon can get everything done in fewer clicks than a menu.
The only instances I can think of where a menu outclasses a ribbon is if you are a user who makes no use of icon shortcuts. If your OO is just a menu without any clickable short cuts, a ribbon will eat a little more space. So, if you are a hardcore power user who knows the short cut to everything, you might find the ribbon eats a little more on screen real estate. Other than that one rare scenario that describes very few people, the ribbon is hands down the better alternative.
You are half right. The ribbon is certainly the most reviled 'feature' of Office 2007... for about a week or two. Then you come to realize that the ribbon actually works pretty damn well and beats the piss out of the traditional menu based systems. My first reaction to the ribbon was pretty much what most computer savvy people's reaction was, which is annoyance at how MS had managed to dumb down the interface even further and strip usability. However, as I used it more, I began to see the logic behind it.
There are a few things that the ribbon does better than menus.
First, it is a better use of space. Why have vertical menus drop down and obscure your work space? The ribbon keeps 'stuff' out of your way and doesn't drop into the work space.
Second, it speeds up routine tasks. If you are about to go do some action more than once, instead of having to click to the menu and pull down to what you want multiple times, you just click to the right ribbon tab and the option that you are about to use multiple times is sitting there one click away (versus a click, some movement, and another click with menus).
Third, the ribbon adapts to what you are doing. If you click on a picture, you get a picture tab on the ribbon with further sub tabs to do various things to the picture. Instead of having to click through a couple of different menus, it lumps it together nicely. If you are working on a picture, you probably are going to want to do 'picture stuff', and so it moves that 'stuff' fewer clicks away from what you are doing. In a menu system, the picture 'stuff' is generally the same distance away with no regard to if you are editing pictures or work on graphs.
I'm not saying the ribbon is a holy grail that makes the user experience an order of magnitude better, but it is better than the current menu systems. An objective measure of 'clicks to do something' reveals pretty quickly why the ribbon is better. The ribbon system generally reduces the number of clicks and moves you need to do by one, and by many more if you are about to perform multiple similar tasks in a row.
I personally have seen no good reason to NOT go to a ribbon system other than that it is what people are used to. While that in itself is some times a good argument, I think the efficiency boosts combined with the trivial ease of learning the change more than make up for unease people feel with having to change. If you hate the ribbon system, I suggest trying to set aside your annoyance and give it a fair shake for a week or two. After you get used to it, there really is no way in which a menu system is better beyond familiarity.
The current mode of global resource allocation requires a Greenpeace to permit us to continue to consume at unsustainable rates. If the consumptive "first world" were faced with how to redress the the vast injustices we cause through consumption, instead of simply buying indulgences through slightly more expensive environmentally-friendly labeled goods, we might slow down to think about why 2/3 of the world's population must struggle through inhumane living conditions so that we can enjoy our dozens of Energy Star appliances.
Right, because what that 2/3 of the rest of the world REALLY needs is for first world to set up trade barriers and tell them to fuck off with making stuff for us. The RAPID RISE in living conditions around the world is because the first world decided to farm out more of the manufacturing to places where they were scratching at dirt to keep themselves on a filling starvation diet. China is probably the best example. A few decades ago they were busy bleeding off percentage points of population to mass starvation. Now, the the idea that China could face famine again is considered absurd. There are other places that have done the same thing and better. Taiwan and South Korea come to mind.
I'm not saying that globalization does not have its issues. Environmental concerns in the third world are very much real. That said, the answer isn't to pull out of these nations and tell them to have fun with seeing how subsistence farming treats them.
About damn time is right. I really like my Roku box. The Netflix on demand works great and looks good. The selection is still a little iffy, but it is more than 'good enough' and getting better. The Amazon unboxed is nice if I really want to watch an episode or two of something. That said, it kills me that I can't tap into any of the awesome video pod casting that is out there. There is no good reason why I shouldn't be able to snag some Revision 3, TWiT, or any of the other quality video pod casts out there. I personally can't wait.
And if I dumped a car on an uninhabited island that island would have a car ownership rate of infinity (/0)!!! I bet they would have accidents all the time there!
Since the billboards have been erected, there hasn't been a fatal accident in the area.
Of course, being New Zealand, since the billboard was erected there have not been any cars there either.