>>I'm sorry, being a mayor of a town of 9000 doesn't qualify you to be Vice President, especially when the presidential candidate has age and a history of health problems going against him.
Being a junior senator (who has never made a single decision in your life) doesn't qualify you for president.
>>As for governor, Alaska has a population of 670,000, roughly twice the population of the CITY I live in.
And?
>>She has no international experience, or for that matter, any national experience.
Obama does?
Personally, I'm puzzled by how all the democrats are attacking Palin on her lack of experience when Obama's just as bad off, and worse, has a platform consisting of 1) hand-waving and 2) changing the subject. Because? Because when people hear his actual plans, he comes off sounding like a lunatic, and he knows it. So he sticks to his message of content-free change.
Not like I'm going to vote for either McCain or Obama, as they're both pretty terrible candidates.
Yes, because I'd love to have yet another device to carry around with me wherever I go, and if I forget or pack into my luggage, cannot access any sites on the internet.
AoC has been much more stable than WoW. There was a guild called Firetree Sucks on my WoW server, since the damn thing died, lagged out, or otherwise caused problems on a daily basis. AoC has a bit of that as well, but is overall much more stable.
The only thing that changes after level 20 in AoC is that you lose voice acting on your quests. I just hit level 60, and haven't run out of quests to do, and have been enjoying myself immensely. There are less quests than WoW, but overall the quests are of higher quality --WoW has ten thousand and one quests of the form "kill 20 plainstriders", "ok, now kill 20 lions", "ok, now kill 20 zebras", "ok, now kill 20 wolves"... AoC quests have a few of those, but are head and shoulders more amusing than WoW quests. Also, the radar shows you the general area you need to be in to complete a quest, which means you don't need to alt-tab out to Allakhazam or Thottbot every quest to get coordinates.
What can I say? Broken items and stats and skills were all things that pissed me off, but I was willing to overlook it since I only play occasionally, and the game experience is pretty good.
>>The police were friendly, waved, and didn't bother to investigate something that by all rights did not look overtly illegal. They acted appropriately.
Seriously.
I mean, as much as Slashdot complains about police brutality and how America is a police state and related nonsense, shouldn't it be celebrating a reasonable police action? They cruise by, check it out, see nothing obviously illegal going on, wave, and leave.
>>Funny as it sounds, I used a smart-card system for the buses in French city where it was quite common to be validating your card after the bus had left the station
Heh, in San Francisco, you just get on the MUNI. Occasionally (as in, once in a very blue moon) a transit guy will check tickets on a bus or light rail.
Not surprisingly, fraud rates are apparently pretty high on the MUNI (something like 50% if I recall the Chronicle article correctly), but I think the city got sued when they tried to move to a different system, because it discriminated against homeless people or something.
As a San Diego native, I've worked throughout the South (mainly South Carolina and Mississippi), and while there have been some racial things I didn't like (the high school I was working with had their first integrated prom this year... the integration underwritten by Morgan Freedman, and also, black and white teachers at the schools sat on opposite sides of the break room in one school), by and large I think racism is a thing of the past, even though the people there are constantly confronted with it. I work in the history field (well, computer science + history) and so slavery, the civil war, and other sensitive topics are often brought up, but by and large the people there are wonderful to work with, with just a hint of animosity toward the north and California.
(I've been told on several occasions in the South that they call California "the land of fruits and nuts".)
That said, it's been pretty obvious for years now that Georgia and Russia were going to go to war, and Putin has been looking to flex his muscles. Former KGB agent, no love for the west, suddenly fat on oil revenues, an adjacent country threatening to join NATO... yeah.
My friends and I have been expecting a war between Russia and Georgia for a while now. There's been a lot of saber rattling, and one of my friends (a Russian) claimed that Russia would never allow Georgia to join NATO. I expect that's the core source of the conflict as much as anything going on in the region.
A friend of mine just got back from Ecuador, which has price ceilings on gas prices there. For some reason, none of the gas stations have any gas. Whose fault was it? George W. Bush's!
In fact, apparently every single problem in South America is the result of Bush's devious scheme to bring down his nemeses - those guys in those countries that... uh... what're their names again?
>>Especially when you consider the irrational American hatred of unions, collective bargaining, and collective action in general.
Unions are a difficult issue to handle. If unions are allowed to set pay (via whatever mechanism, striking, bargaining, or whatnot), then they continue increasing pay until the company goes broke. Look at Southwest vs. American Airlines, General Motors vs Honda, etc. NPR interviewed an entire factory of GM workers sitting around in an abandoned factory somewhere in detroit, earning full pay to play cards all day.
That, and you get unions for all sorts of stupid shit. At a convention I went to, I couldn't scotch tape a note to a wall saying the room had changed. No -- I had to get the fucking paper-taping-uppers-Union to come and tape it to the wall for me. How much? 240 fucking dollars.
That said, I do agree with law to protect people in one-sided agreements, notably employees and renters.
You forgot the best way of getting into the industry: writing mods for established games.
Threewave, Counterstrike and any other number of people have all made it successfully that way. Plus, a lot of game company staff are people who started out as modders.
Of course, I started in the game industry and then moved into modding (www.customtf.org), so I did it kind of backwards, but I think it's still good advice.
I believe it is indeed a phonetic translation. Been a while since I took my Chinese classes, but I think believe it is indeed a foreign loan word.
In Mandarin, the 'c' sound is close to 'ts', so it sounds relatively similar. Enough so that when I went to China and I read on a sign "can... ting... oh, Canteen!"
Dogma is believing something without empirical evidence, or in contradiction to empirical evidence.
For example, what Mythbusters does is expose dogma by taking common beliefs and testing them.
That said, they had an episode where they tested "pyramid power" to see if apples rotted faster or slower in pyramids, cubes, or on a tabletop. When they got an experimental result which disagreed with their pre-held belief (that it shouldn't make any difference) they ignored the experiment (which apparently demonstrated that apples in cubes rotted slower) and restated their belief. That's dogma.
Oh, I have my WEP key memorized as well as a whole slew of phone numbers... that I used to call before I got a cell phone. I know about 10 numbers for my friends in high school, and recited them to them at our 10 year reunion a couple years back.
But since I got a cell phone, anyone on speed dial (including my fiancee) I have no fucking clue what their number is, since I've only entered it once. There hasn't been the repetition needed to store it in memory.
Now, if you want to ask me who I have set to speed dial for the first 20 numbers, I can tell you *that*.
While some people claim this is evidence that computers are making us stupid (or stupid-er), the way the brain works, if it knows something is being held somewhere else, it doesn't bother to remember it. I've looked at my fiancee's phone number thousands of times since we started dating 7 years ago, and all I remember is that it has like an 8 in it. (Uh, maybe 2 8's? And theres a 6 in there somewhere?). It kind of pissed her off, but I said, "Hey, that's what cell phones are for!" Didn't fly so well though.
The brain actually can incorporate external objects into its sense of self. In this sense, a PDA, computer, or, (shudder) Wikipedia becomes a form of external memory. And you're precisely right - losing these things (as I did with a PDA once) does make a person feel precisely like an amnesiac.
It's also why I think that people in olden times had less trouble memorizing stuff like the Illiad than we do. (Another part was that it rhymed, and could be set to music, which also greatly help -- have you ever thought about how many thousands of song lyrics are stuck in your head?)
Anyhow, I don't think it necessarily makes us stupider, as long as we're able to think and reason on our feet. As long as own brains have cached the most important information, who cares if we have to reference the internet to figure out what year the Dawes Act was signed?
(I'm most amused by the name, as it's obvious someone at IBM is a Harry Potter fan.)
>>I can thinking of many ways of dying that are far more agonising that Ebola. MS would be one. To be gradually robbed of my motor and mental skills would be a horrible and terrifying experience.
I hate MS Office as much as anyone, but isn't that a bit of hyperbole??
>>Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone. Just like, say, buying stuff on an airport might be more expensive than at the mall down the road.
From my experience in China, the Chinese are much more "capitalistic" than Americans. Sure, it's a nominally communist dictatorship, but at the individual level, they're very making-money-oriented. From kids hustling DVDs on the streets of Shanghai to nearly every vendor being willing to haggle with you, it felt more like a free market than any market I've been in in America.
But yeah, when they see foreigners, they see an opportunity to charge an order of magnitude more for something than they'd charge a fellow Chinese. When entering a subway in Shanghai, I heard something interesting, so I walked over to a vendor. He looked at me, said, "Rolex watch? 100 RMB." I looked at him and said in Chinese, "Oh really? You just sold one to that guy for 15." He laughed, and charged me the Chinese price.
Personally, I'm sort of confused why journalists are being required to live in a special village anyway - it's not like they are going to be interacting with anyone outside of their own bubble chamber there, and if they stay elsewhere they can get accommodations and internet access for much less, and probably just as nice.
Slashdot Mirror
>>I'm sorry, being a mayor of a town of 9000 doesn't qualify you to be Vice President, especially when the presidential candidate has age and a history of health problems going against him.
Being a junior senator (who has never made a single decision in your life) doesn't qualify you for president.
>>As for governor, Alaska has a population of 670,000, roughly twice the population of the CITY I live in.
And?
>>She has no international experience, or for that matter, any national experience.
Obama does?
Personally, I'm puzzled by how all the democrats are attacking Palin on her lack of experience when Obama's just as bad off, and worse, has a platform consisting of 1) hand-waving and 2) changing the subject. Because? Because when people hear his actual plans, he comes off sounding like a lunatic, and he knows it. So he sticks to his message of content-free change.
Not like I'm going to vote for either McCain or Obama, as they're both pretty terrible candidates.
Yes, because I'd love to have yet another device to carry around with me wherever I go, and if I forget or pack into my luggage, cannot access any sites on the internet.
AoC has been much more stable than WoW. There was a guild called Firetree Sucks on my WoW server, since the damn thing died, lagged out, or otherwise caused problems on a daily basis. AoC has a bit of that as well, but is overall much more stable.
The only thing that changes after level 20 in AoC is that you lose voice acting on your quests. I just hit level 60, and haven't run out of quests to do, and have been enjoying myself immensely. There are less quests than WoW, but overall the quests are of higher quality --WoW has ten thousand and one quests of the form "kill 20 plainstriders", "ok, now kill 20 lions", "ok, now kill 20 zebras", "ok, now kill 20 wolves"... AoC quests have a few of those, but are head and shoulders more amusing than WoW quests. Also, the radar shows you the general area you need to be in to complete a quest, which means you don't need to alt-tab out to Allakhazam or Thottbot every quest to get coordinates.
What can I say? Broken items and stats and skills were all things that pissed me off, but I was willing to overlook it since I only play occasionally, and the game experience is pretty good.
I, for one, am terrified of anything called a "Carginogen".
Wow, that's awesome stats research.
Mind if I repeat that online in the forum I got the TKD cheating story from?
>>It looks like China broke the rules, and the gold needs to be stripped from the effected athletes.
China was also cheating in TKD, with their judges refusing to score good players that would face Chinese athletes next:
http://olympics.thestar.com/2008/article/481950
http://www.cbc.ca/olympics/taekwondo/story/2008/08/19/f-olympics-taekwondo-gonda.html
http://www.tsn.ca/olympics/story/?id=246955&lid=headline&lpos=secStory_main
http://www.sportsnet.ca/olympics/2008/08/20/olympic_taekwondo_gonda/
>>The police were friendly, waved, and didn't bother to investigate something that by all rights did not look overtly illegal. They acted appropriately.
Seriously.
I mean, as much as Slashdot complains about police brutality and how America is a police state and related nonsense, shouldn't it be celebrating a reasonable police action? They cruise by, check it out, see nothing obviously illegal going on, wave, and leave.
WTF, why the hate?
>>Funny as it sounds, I used a smart-card system for the buses in French city where it was quite common to be validating your card after the bus had left the station
Heh, in San Francisco, you just get on the MUNI. Occasionally (as in, once in a very blue moon) a transit guy will check tickets on a bus or light rail.
Not surprisingly, fraud rates are apparently pretty high on the MUNI (something like 50% if I recall the Chronicle article correctly), but I think the city got sued when they tried to move to a different system, because it discriminated against homeless people or something.
As a San Diego native, I've worked throughout the South (mainly South Carolina and Mississippi), and while there have been some racial things I didn't like (the high school I was working with had their first integrated prom this year... the integration underwritten by Morgan Freedman, and also, black and white teachers at the schools sat on opposite sides of the break room in one school), by and large I think racism is a thing of the past, even though the people there are constantly confronted with it. I work in the history field (well, computer science + history) and so slavery, the civil war, and other sensitive topics are often brought up, but by and large the people there are wonderful to work with, with just a hint of animosity toward the north and California.
(I've been told on several occasions in the South that they call California "the land of fruits and nuts".)
A good analysis, I only note the following:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Caucasus-ethnic_en.svg
The ethnic group does indeed span the mountains.
That said, it's been pretty obvious for years now that Georgia and Russia were going to go to war, and Putin has been looking to flex his muscles. Former KGB agent, no love for the west, suddenly fat on oil revenues, an adjacent country threatening to join NATO... yeah.
Thanks for pointing this out.
My friends and I have been expecting a war between Russia and Georgia for a while now. There's been a lot of saber rattling, and one of my friends (a Russian) claimed that Russia would never allow Georgia to join NATO. I expect that's the core source of the conflict as much as anything going on in the region.
Lol, oh that's awesome.
A friend of mine just got back from Ecuador, which has price ceilings on gas prices there. For some reason, none of the gas stations have any gas. Whose fault was it? George W. Bush's!
In fact, apparently every single problem in South America is the result of Bush's devious scheme to bring down his nemeses - those guys in those countries that... uh... what're their names again?
The best part of that page is that their only two testimonials are from CompUSA and NWA talking about how VbV increased their profits.
Ok course, now... CompUSA is kaput, and NWA went bankrupt.
See, VbV really works.
>>Especially when you consider the irrational American hatred of unions, collective bargaining, and collective action in general.
Unions are a difficult issue to handle. If unions are allowed to set pay (via whatever mechanism, striking, bargaining, or whatnot), then they continue increasing pay until the company goes broke. Look at Southwest vs. American Airlines, General Motors vs Honda, etc. NPR interviewed an entire factory of GM workers sitting around in an abandoned factory somewhere in detroit, earning full pay to play cards all day.
That, and you get unions for all sorts of stupid shit. At a convention I went to, I couldn't scotch tape a note to a wall saying the room had changed. No -- I had to get the fucking paper-taping-uppers-Union to come and tape it to the wall for me. How much? 240 fucking dollars.
That said, I do agree with law to protect people in one-sided agreements, notably employees and renters.
You forgot the best way of getting into the industry: writing mods for established games.
Threewave, Counterstrike and any other number of people have all made it successfully that way. Plus, a lot of game company staff are people who started out as modders.
Of course, I started in the game industry and then moved into modding (www.customtf.org), so I did it kind of backwards, but I think it's still good advice.
WoW is kind of meh in graphics. My fiancee wouldn't play it because she thought it was ugly.
AoC... now that's a pretty game. If you can get it to run at over 10fps, that is.
You're living proof that a little knowledge is dangerous.
In other words, you're ignorant as fuck, but disguise it by insulting others.
OMG, a phonetic translation that also conveys meaning!
Guess what - all good Chinese translations do that, baichi.
I believe it is indeed a phonetic translation. Been a while since I took my Chinese classes, but I think believe it is indeed a foreign loan word.
In Mandarin, the 'c' sound is close to 'ts', so it sounds relatively similar. Enough so that when I went to China and I read on a sign "can... ting... oh, Canteen!"
Dogma is believing something without empirical evidence, or in contradiction to empirical evidence.
For example, what Mythbusters does is expose dogma by taking common beliefs and testing them.
That said, they had an episode where they tested "pyramid power" to see if apples rotted faster or slower in pyramids, cubes, or on a tabletop. When they got an experimental result which disagreed with their pre-held belief (that it shouldn't make any difference) they ignored the experiment (which apparently demonstrated that apples in cubes rotted slower) and restated their belief. That's dogma.
Dogma doesn't have anything to do with violence.
Oh, I have my WEP key memorized as well as a whole slew of phone numbers... that I used to call before I got a cell phone. I know about 10 numbers for my friends in high school, and recited them to them at our 10 year reunion a couple years back.
But since I got a cell phone, anyone on speed dial (including my fiancee) I have no fucking clue what their number is, since I've only entered it once. There hasn't been the repetition needed to store it in memory.
Now, if you want to ask me who I have set to speed dial for the first 20 numbers, I can tell you *that*.
It's true.
While some people claim this is evidence that computers are making us stupid (or stupid-er), the way the brain works, if it knows something is being held somewhere else, it doesn't bother to remember it. I've looked at my fiancee's phone number thousands of times since we started dating 7 years ago, and all I remember is that it has like an 8 in it. (Uh, maybe 2 8's? And theres a 6 in there somewhere?). It kind of pissed her off, but I said, "Hey, that's what cell phones are for!" Didn't fly so well though.
The brain actually can incorporate external objects into its sense of self. In this sense, a PDA, computer, or, (shudder) Wikipedia becomes a form of external memory. And you're precisely right - losing these things (as I did with a PDA once) does make a person feel precisely like an amnesiac.
It's also why I think that people in olden times had less trouble memorizing stuff like the Illiad than we do. (Another part was that it rhymed, and could be set to music, which also greatly help -- have you ever thought about how many thousands of song lyrics are stuck in your head?)
Anyhow, I don't think it necessarily makes us stupider, as long as we're able to think and reason on our feet. As long as own brains have cached the most important information, who cares if we have to reference the internet to figure out what year the Dawes Act was signed?
(I'm most amused by the name, as it's obvious someone at IBM is a Harry Potter fan.)
>>I can thinking of many ways of dying that are far more agonising that Ebola. MS would be one. To be gradually robbed of my motor and mental skills would be a horrible and terrifying experience.
I hate MS Office as much as anyone, but isn't that a bit of hyperbole??
Heh, I got my 1st degree black belt from beating up a 12 year old kid. At least he was pudgy...
>>Dunno, it seems to me more like good old, capitalistic smelling when you can fleece someone. Just like, say, buying stuff on an airport might be more expensive than at the mall down the road.
From my experience in China, the Chinese are much more "capitalistic" than Americans. Sure, it's a nominally communist dictatorship, but at the individual level, they're very making-money-oriented. From kids hustling DVDs on the streets of Shanghai to nearly every vendor being willing to haggle with you, it felt more like a free market than any market I've been in in America.
But yeah, when they see foreigners, they see an opportunity to charge an order of magnitude more for something than they'd charge a fellow Chinese. When entering a subway in Shanghai, I heard something interesting, so I walked over to a vendor. He looked at me, said, "Rolex watch? 100 RMB." I looked at him and said in Chinese, "Oh really? You just sold one to that guy for 15." He laughed, and charged me the Chinese price.
Personally, I'm sort of confused why journalists are being required to live in a special village anyway - it's not like they are going to be interacting with anyone outside of their own bubble chamber there, and if they stay elsewhere they can get accommodations and internet access for much less, and probably just as nice.