>>No, it does not. Only some people who believe ID believe in evolution. ID itself does not.
You're again not being careful enough with your definitions. Creationism is the literal belief of one of the account of creation in Genesis. ID necessarily stipulates natural selection and an old earth; it's an inherent part of the theory. ID disagrees with, or critiques, what is commonly called macro-evolution.
As any person can see, the theories of Creationism and ID are incompatible. Of course, both could involve a God figure, but thats as similar as Newtonian physics and Relativity both having the concept of velocity -- same word, different roles.
>>And any person with two rational brain cells would not use argumentum ad hominem.
I'm not attacking you, simply any of your purported experts on ID that believe creationism and ID are equivalent, or even compatible.
>>Well, no, you actually are wrong. You said ID is >>something, as opposed to something else, and you were >>wrong, as I showed by quoting an authoritative source on ID.
It's not an authoritative source. I'd rather say that Behe and Dembski are the only two people to seriously consider in ID. Old arguments like Paley's are irrelevant to the modern discussion. ID is not argument from design. It stipulates evolution, with the critique that there is evidence that an intelligent designer tampered with the evolutionary process.
>>When you say "creationism is not ID" you are clearly >>talking about your own definition of ID. But most >>people, including most proponents of ID, do not use your >> definition.
Yes, it is a common, and false, belief.
I've written it as a common myth that creationism and ID can be equated, and I've also deflated the myth: any person with two rational brain cells can see the fundamental conflict between creationism and ID.
>>Well, no, it is neither testable nor falsifiable. (Not >> that I care about those things, as they are rather >>stupid ways to go about solving the demarcation problem.)
>>Well, OK, it is testable in theory, but not in practice. >> We'd need an oracle or some other relevatory device. >>And it is not falsifiable at all, any more than the >>existence of God is falsifiable.
>>What makes you think that? At times I've seen cats make more >>rational decisions than humans. And when they're in heat, they >> act more or less like I do when I'm drunk!
Humans are famous for their ability to say no to sex. This is actually one of the most major differences between humans and animals.
Not at all. It's simply a question of a term getting overloaded.
>>ID is not Creationism, this is true. But ID is not what you said, either.
I divide ID into hard ID and soft ID. Soft ID simply says that God was behind everything. So, for example, evolution could be unquestionably true, but that God fired off the big bang with certain parameters so that the world as we know it emerged.
Hard ID stipulates most of evolution, but claims that the so-called "ball rolling uphill" mutations are not adequately explainable with evolution, and proposes an outside agency which messed around with evolution to bring about the world as we know it. If phrased correctly, this is a testable hypothesis, and so can be falsified and worth at least a study given the large number of people believing in it.
>>The whole point of Intelligent Design is to be an alternative to evolution, to >>replace it with a theory that (very) superficially* does not seem to be >>religious in nature.
Panspermia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) is a valid (ish) scientific theory, that would serve as the "intelligent designer" of ID. Crick, IIRC, is an atheist who also believes in panspermia (which I'd say qualifies him as an ID believer).
So, yes, it's quite possible to be a scientist, an atheist, and believe in ID.
Humans are 90%+ similar to most animals on the planet, IIRC.
However, humans are the only beings capable of meta-examining one's impulses, and choosing among (or denying them). This is the fundamental basis for ethics, and the very real line that separates us from animals. I'm quite sure that someone like a Jane Goodall could have some example of primitive meta-cognitive thinking in apes or dolphins, but nonetheless, I feel my statement holds true.
>>In other words, it's about the nature of humanity, which they see as >>distinguished from other animals by a spark of divinity.
Some people might call this division between man and animal "a spark of divinity". I don't. You can call it what you will, but the division is actually more real and profound than people who always quote the "we're 99% the same as chimps DNA-wise" would let on. Comparing percentages of DNA being similar is a misleading statistic, by the by. We're very genetically similar to most animals on the planet. The devil is in the details, after all.
I'm a Christian, but I'm also not a fundamentalist. I believe in the primacy of reason, and feel that fundamentalists in general are irrational, and give Christians a bad name. I also find it aggravating that places like Slashdot tend to lump all Christians together under one label.
>>It's not just the existence of God that people are arguing for. Christian >>fundamentalists would be horrified to be told that God exists but doesn't >>intervene in human affairs, for example.
Sure, and I disagree with fundamentalists on this point. If they are spared from some natural disaster, they claim it was God that intervened to save them, but if they died, it would be part of his great plan. I think it is contradictory to claim that God would establish a natural order and then routinely violate it. I personally don't believe in fate, though I do thank God for any beneficial things that happen in my life -- why not? If God intervenes, I'd suspect it would be on much more a limited basis than what fundamentalists claim, who say things like "God provided me with my wife". Well... what if she didn't want to be your wife? Does that make God some kind of pimp? No. The notion is completely contrary to free will, self-accountability, and right and wrong.
>>You could try pointing out that humans were decorating graves and writing >>theCode of Hammurabi long before the Bible was written and won't suddenly >>revert to animalism if they abandon the 20th-centruy movement to take the >>entire Bible literally.
20th century movement? Some people consider it simply reactionary on the part of Christians to now treat Genesis as allegory, now that evolution is on the scene. But as far back as the church goes, there are different camps treating the creation story as allegory or fact -- long before the evolution argument ever arrived. St. Augustine considered the creation story as allegory, for example, and he lived around 400 AD. He pointed out that there are two creation stories in the bible, that contradict each other in the exact order of the "days" (they basically go backward).
However, there is a lot to be said for the existence of a Christian church regardless of other factors. Examining the differences in states which are Christian and those that are militantly secular shows a much greater respect for the individual in the Christian states. While most atheists are also humanists, it is only the Christian humanists that seem to really believe in what they are saying. The USSR was established on humanist principles, and, well, produced the biggest mass-murderer of all time, Stalin.
"The rising popularity in the United States of 'intelligent design' - a controversial creationist theory of life - is eroding acceptance of evolutionary science in Canada"
Repeat after me, people -- ID is NOT creationism.
In fact, ID and creationism are antithetical to each other -- if one is true, the other is false.
Creationism == the earth was created as it was said in the bible (created in 7 days, the earth is only a couple thousand years old, etc.) ID == natural selection is true, creatures evolved, but an intelligent designer influenced evolution.
If the professor himself couldn't understand this very basic difference between the two ideas, he definitely didn't deserve to get a grant to study it. It'd be like a physicist not understanding the difference between newtonian and quantum physics applying for a grant to study the possible implications of quantum mechanics.
>>If you can play Oblivion at 720p (1280x720) with full graphics on the system >>you described... well... I'd have to see it before I'd say you were right, >>because frankly I don't think you could.
My system is similar -- 6800 video card, (okay 6800GT), 1GB RAM. I play at 1280x720 with full detail except grass (grass causes the game to drastically slow down, and hides monsters and loot besides). I get very nice FPS, and no load times. At all. (It just prints "loading area" but I don't even skip a frame.)
The no load times might be more a factor of having a SATA RAID0 HD to run the games off of, though.
Agreed. The best thing is to not partner with someone with a wide gap in skill. I don't want to be teaching C to someone when writing a compiler. The best thing would be to not work with the guy.
I actually have Dawnstar on my cell phone, played it for an hour or two while stuck in various places without anything better to do, haven't been particularly impressed by it. What did you like so much about it?
Daggerfall is still the most ambitious of all of their titles. I played through the game, then went back to look at some of the spoilers for it, and... WOW. There's a gajillion things you can do in the game that I hadn't even touched upon. Not only could you become a vampire, but they had 12 different clans of vampires, with different abilities, inter-clan politics. The most detailed character generator yet, which just played up to the powergamer in me (fear of animals flaw FTW). Werewolves. Unique Artifacts. Quests for different religions, guilds, etc. A crazy awesome magic item creation system (My top gear only worked during the full moon, to keep costs low. I spent a lot of time sleeping.)
And I thought that my flying horse was pretty cool.
Sure, they used a "dynamic map" system of pseudo-random generating the dungeons and towns, but you know what? I liked the fact that there was 20,000 dungeons in the world. Every so often, I'd hop down into one for a nice randomly-generated-ala-diablo-2 experience. The sucky part was when you'd get quests to fish items out of the dungeons -- the dungeons were litterally huge, and could take hours to complete sometimes, especially if you couldn't find the one secret door behind the double-hairping corridor turn. So if I was doing quests for the mages guild (which I spent maybe 75% of my game time doing), I'd just drop any dungeon fetch quests and request a new one.
I wish they'd do a "digitally-remastered" version of Daggerfall, kinda similar to what they did with FF1&2 (improved the graphics, added a lil' bit of new content). If it looked as good as Oblivion, I'd never leave my computer.
The trouble with TES games is the fact that Bethesda doesn't believe in that whole whacky "quality assurance" thing. Daggerfall wouldn't run on my computer. Period. Until the 18th patch or so -- had a Cyrix CPU in 1996, remember those? Battlespire was almost a great game (online multiplayer with real working castles, catapults, drawbridges!) but was so buggy I had to stop playing. Redguard wouldn't run for more than 5 minutes without crashing. Morrowind once corrupted a section of the world (forcing a reinstall), and another time ate one of the quest items I needed to complete the game (had to go into the TES Construction set and drop a new one on the ground for me). Oblivion crashes every time I quit (ironically enough), but then also if I alt-tab, hit the windows key, reload too fast, click too fast, hit the keyboard too fast... or basically any time your hard drive can't keep up to speed (I have a Raid0 hard drive, so it rarely happens). It did crashed once on my girlfriend after she'd spent an hour without saving, which is really the only way I got to get my computer back from her after she spent her entire spring break on my own computer playing Oblivion. =) I was relegated to doing work with an old laptop.
Oblivion is great though. Maybe not as big in scope as Daggerfall, but damn. It looks awesome if you have the rig to run it, the quests (and the quest system) are about 100x more interesting than Morrowind's. All in all, it's one of the better RPGs I've played (and I thank the lord it's not an interactive movie like FFVII or FFX), and if the only time it reliably crashes is when I quit... well, I can deal with that.
Sorry, but what's going to happen is that as time goes by, your project will asymptotically approach 100% your code, as you replace and redesign almost everything he's written. I understand that your project can't be all done by one person, but I've been in this situation a lot of times, and so trust me -- do it all yourself and save yourself the headache of having to rewrite the entire project.
That said, pair programming with other people at your level can be quite good, as having two people working together keeps one or the other from getting distracted.
If you want your friend to learn something from the experience, have him do it all by himself, and then when you're done, show him the right way to do it. Or, hell, he might surprise you and you'll learn a new approach yourself. But the total man hours will be less than doing one project together.
Hmm, interesting. Except IIRC MTBF is generally considered a gaussian process. And I'm not talking about "they all went out at about the same time", I mean it would go FLASH, FLASH, FLASH as all three would blow simultaneously.
Sure, it reeks of pseudoscience, but from my personal experience I can see two ways "dirty electricity" could matter.
1) I lived in a place that had really crazy electrical wiring. As in, about every month or so all three lightbulbs on our cieling fan would all blow out at the same time. If I kept my CRT near one wall, the pattern would make the swimming noises you sometimes see if you put an electric fan near a TV. It made me too nauseous to use it for any extended period of time. Solution? Moved my damn computer to another wall (actually in front of a glass wall -- no EMF interference there).
2) Some fluorescent lights drive me batty. Many lights flicker at double the frequency of the power supply (60hz x 2 = 120hz), which is bloody human noticeable, regardless of how many scientists cast doubt on this. Come to my karate class, wave your hand in front of you, and you'll see multiple images of your hand. Or sometimes no intervening images at all on a punch if you throw it fast enough, which probably makes you look a lot faster than you really are. If you had a "dirty" power supply, I could see it perhaps making a difference to fluorescent lights that are tied to the cycle of the power supply.
Actually, I'm curious why corporations are allowed to donate at all. The rights of free speech are not to be abridged to individuals -- let people blog and talk about politics as much as they want. It's Wheaties donating $1M across 2000 politicians that worries me more.
Oddly enough, FFX-2 is the best FF game to be released since FF Tactics. If you can get through the horrid singing and gratuitous fan service, the game is actually non-linear and kinda fun, which stands in stark contrast to interactive movies like FFVII and FFX.
You sound like the bastards calling for a reinstatement of the draft so that they can get rid of the military entirely.
Which is great and all except...
The world is not a perfect place. When humans solve all their problems, they just invent more to take their place.
>>With this, we're spending less money and putting >>fewer lives at risk to kill a proportionally >>higher number of foreign militants.
Sounds good to me!
>>At what point does war become a targeted genocide?
When you start intentionally going after civilians. The military jumps through a lot of hoops and endangers a lot of its own men to try to minimize civilian casualties. All the people who are calling Bush a war criminal should look into the world's real mass murderers; between Stalin and Mao's various purges, genocides, and famines you're looking at ~85 million people killed. Consider that WWI killed between 15-37 million, and WWII at 62 million (military and civilian) for the relative scope of things.
>>The embargo and lack of review copies is a good indicator that a game has problems. As is, overwhelmingly >> positive "reader reviews" showing up within an hour of daybreak on the east coast aren't a good sign >>either.
Actually, it is a very very good game (though it has its bugs, like all Bethesda games).
>>I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen >> shots? There's a really good reason for that...
Thats because the XBox version has a really short viewbox. On my 6800GT, I have the view distances all cranked to the max and I have a great framerate. Oddly enough, the only thing that slows me down is the grass. Which, while beautiful, can hide monsters and treasure, so I keep grass turned off anyway.
Oblivion is actually a really fun game. Unlike Morrowind which was just rather tedious and unexciting. I haven't been able to play WOW recently because my fiancee has become addicted to Oblivion and won't let me use my own computer.
Like you, the first 10 times you get scared by monsters popping out of the darkness scares you. After that, you start becoming resigned to the fact that the game spawns creatures in areas you've already cleared, making the tactical aspects of the game frustrating.
When I play a FPS, I clear an area, move into that area, and from cover clear the next area, and so forth. Which is worthless when the game just arbitrarily spawns monsters behind you.
The maps are all build around physics puzzles. You have to pile up junk, or push junk off ledges, or remove junk blocking a ramp, which then lets you jump over a gate, the long fenced corridors of Ravenholme seems entirely designed around cutting zombies in half with the gravity gun.
And yeah, the gravity gun being a weapon that wouldn't exist without Havok physics.
And, ok, sure. They probably could have done the dialogue without the Havok engine. =)
Slashdot Mirror
>>No, it does not. Only some people who believe ID believe in evolution. ID itself does not.
You're again not being careful enough with your definitions. Creationism is the literal belief of one of the account of creation in Genesis. ID necessarily stipulates natural selection and an old earth; it's an inherent part of the theory. ID disagrees with, or critiques, what is commonly called macro-evolution.
As any person can see, the theories of Creationism and ID are incompatible. Of course, both could involve a God figure, but thats as similar as Newtonian physics and Relativity both having the concept of velocity -- same word, different roles.
>>And any person with two rational brain cells would not use argumentum ad hominem.
I'm not attacking you, simply any of your purported experts on ID that believe creationism and ID are equivalent, or even compatible.
>>Well, no, you actually are wrong. You said ID is
>>something, as opposed to something else, and you were
>>wrong, as I showed by quoting an authoritative source on ID.
It's not an authoritative source. I'd rather say that Behe and Dembski are the only two people to seriously consider in ID. Old arguments like Paley's are irrelevant to the modern discussion. ID is not argument from design. It stipulates evolution, with the critique that there is evidence that an intelligent designer tampered with the evolutionary process.
>>When you say "creationism is not ID" you are clearly
>>talking about your own definition of ID. But most
>>people, including most proponents of ID, do not use your
>> definition.
Yes, it is a common, and false, belief.
I've written it as a common myth that creationism and ID can be equated, and I've also deflated the myth: any person with two rational brain cells can see the fundamental conflict between creationism and ID.
>>Well, no, it is neither testable nor falsifiable. (Not
>> that I care about those things, as they are rather
>>stupid ways to go about solving the demarcation problem.)
>>Well, OK, it is testable in theory, but not in practice.
>> We'd need an oracle or some other relevatory device.
>>And it is not falsifiable at all, any more than the
>>existence of God is falsifiable.
Here, just read this so I don't have to repeat myself again:
http://slashdot.org/~ShakaUVM/journal/121956
>>What makes you think that? At times I've seen cats make more
>>rational decisions than humans. And when they're in heat, they
>> act more or less like I do when I'm drunk!
Humans are famous for their ability to say no to sex. This is actually one of the most major differences between humans and animals.
>> Well, the problem is, you're wrong. :-)
Not at all. It's simply a question of a term getting overloaded.
>>ID is not Creationism, this is true. But ID is not what you said, either.
I divide ID into hard ID and soft ID. Soft ID simply says that God was behind everything. So, for example, evolution could be unquestionably true, but that God fired off the big bang with certain parameters so that the world as we know it emerged.
Hard ID stipulates most of evolution, but claims that the so-called "ball rolling uphill" mutations are not adequately explainable with evolution, and proposes an outside agency which messed around with evolution to bring about the world as we know it. If phrased correctly, this is a testable hypothesis, and so can be falsified and worth at least a study given the large number of people believing in it.
Right. Except ID acknowledges an old earth, natural selection, etc.
Which part of "not created in 7 days" is so hard for you to understand?
Many creationists are drawn to ID since it isn't based on sollipsism, but it's unquestionable creationism and ID are mutually incompatible theories.
Learn2Think. KKTHX.
>>The whole point of Intelligent Design is to be an alternative to evolution, to
>>replace it with a theory that (very) superficially* does not seem to be
>>religious in nature.
Panspermia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panspermia) is a valid (ish) scientific theory, that would serve as the "intelligent designer" of ID. Crick, IIRC, is an atheist who also believes in panspermia (which I'd say qualifies him as an ID believer).
So, yes, it's quite possible to be a scientist, an atheist, and believe in ID.
Humans are 90%+ similar to most animals on the planet, IIRC.
However, humans are the only beings capable of meta-examining one's impulses, and choosing among (or denying them). This is the fundamental basis for ethics, and the very real line that separates us from animals. I'm quite sure that someone like a Jane Goodall could have some example of primitive meta-cognitive thinking in apes or dolphins, but nonetheless, I feel my statement holds true.
>>In other words, it's about the nature of humanity, which they see as
>>distinguished from other animals by a spark of divinity.
Some people might call this division between man and animal "a spark of divinity". I don't. You can call it what you will, but the division is actually more real and profound than people who always quote the "we're 99% the same as chimps DNA-wise" would let on. Comparing percentages of DNA being similar is a misleading statistic, by the by. We're very genetically similar to most animals on the planet. The devil is in the details, after all.
I'm a Christian, but I'm also not a fundamentalist. I believe in the primacy of reason, and feel that fundamentalists in general are irrational, and give Christians a bad name. I also find it aggravating that places like Slashdot tend to lump all Christians together under one label.
>>It's not just the existence of God that people are arguing for. Christian
>>fundamentalists would be horrified to be told that God exists but doesn't
>>intervene in human affairs, for example.
Sure, and I disagree with fundamentalists on this point. If they are spared from some natural disaster, they claim it was God that intervened to save them, but if they died, it would be part of his great plan. I think it is contradictory to claim that God would establish a natural order and then routinely violate it. I personally don't believe in fate, though I do thank God for any beneficial things that happen in my life -- why not? If God intervenes, I'd suspect it would be on much more a limited basis than what fundamentalists claim, who say things like "God provided me with my wife". Well... what if she didn't want to be your wife? Does that make God some kind of pimp? No. The notion is completely contrary to free will, self-accountability, and right and wrong.
>>You could try pointing out that humans were decorating graves and writing
>>theCode of Hammurabi long before the Bible was written and won't suddenly
>>revert to animalism if they abandon the 20th-centruy movement to take the
>>entire Bible literally.
20th century movement? Some people consider it simply reactionary on the part of Christians to now treat Genesis as allegory, now that evolution is on the scene. But as far back as the church goes, there are different camps treating the creation story as allegory or fact -- long before the evolution argument ever arrived. St. Augustine considered the creation story as allegory, for example, and he lived around 400 AD. He pointed out that there are two creation stories in the bible, that contradict each other in the exact order of the "days" (they basically go backward).
However, there is a lot to be said for the existence of a Christian church regardless of other factors. Examining the differences in states which are Christian and those that are militantly secular shows a much greater respect for the individual in the Christian states. While most atheists are also humanists, it is only the Christian humanists that seem to really believe in what they are saying. The USSR was established on humanist principles, and, well, produced the biggest mass-murderer of all time, Stalin.
Ugh...
"The rising popularity in the United States of 'intelligent design' - a controversial creationist theory of life - is eroding acceptance of evolutionary science in Canada"
Repeat after me, people -- ID is NOT creationism.
In fact, ID and creationism are antithetical to each other -- if one is true, the other is false.
Creationism == the earth was created as it was said in the bible (created in 7 days, the earth is only a couple thousand years old, etc.)
ID == natural selection is true, creatures evolved, but an intelligent designer influenced evolution.
If the professor himself couldn't understand this very basic difference between the two ideas, he definitely didn't deserve to get a grant to study it. It'd be like a physicist not understanding the difference between newtonian and quantum physics applying for a grant to study the possible implications of quantum mechanics.
>>If you can play Oblivion at 720p (1280x720) with full graphics on the system
>>you described... well... I'd have to see it before I'd say you were right,
>>because frankly I don't think you could.
My system is similar -- 6800 video card, (okay 6800GT), 1GB RAM. I play at 1280x720 with full detail except grass (grass causes the game to drastically slow down, and hides monsters and loot besides). I get very nice FPS, and no load times. At all. (It just prints "loading area" but I don't even skip a frame.)
The no load times might be more a factor of having a SATA RAID0 HD to run the games off of, though.
Always one more.
Agreed. The best thing is to not partner with someone with a wide gap in skill. I don't want to be teaching C to someone when writing a compiler. The best thing would be to not work with the guy.
I actually have Dawnstar on my cell phone, played it for an hour or two while stuck in various places without anything better to do, haven't been particularly impressed by it. What did you like so much about it?
Team Fortress... yeah, I played that one enough that when I decided to do something productive with my life, I wrote the CustomTF mod for it. =)
Daggerfall is still the most ambitious of all of their titles. I played through the game, then went back to look at some of the spoilers for it, and... WOW. There's a gajillion things you can do in the game that I hadn't even touched upon. Not only could you become a vampire, but they had 12 different clans of vampires, with different abilities, inter-clan politics. The most detailed character generator yet, which just played up to the powergamer in me (fear of animals flaw FTW). Werewolves. Unique Artifacts. Quests for different religions, guilds, etc. A crazy awesome magic item creation system (My top gear only worked during the full moon, to keep costs low. I spent a lot of time sleeping.)
And I thought that my flying horse was pretty cool.
Sure, they used a "dynamic map" system of pseudo-random generating the dungeons and towns, but you know what? I liked the fact that there was 20,000 dungeons in the world. Every so often, I'd hop down into one for a nice randomly-generated-ala-diablo-2 experience. The sucky part was when you'd get quests to fish items out of the dungeons -- the dungeons were litterally huge, and could take hours to complete sometimes, especially if you couldn't find the one secret door behind the double-hairping corridor turn. So if I was doing quests for the mages guild (which I spent maybe 75% of my game time doing), I'd just drop any dungeon fetch quests and request a new one.
I wish they'd do a "digitally-remastered" version of Daggerfall, kinda similar to what they did with FF1&2 (improved the graphics, added a lil' bit of new content). If it looked as good as Oblivion, I'd never leave my computer.
The trouble with TES games is the fact that Bethesda doesn't believe in that whole whacky "quality assurance" thing. Daggerfall wouldn't run on my computer. Period. Until the 18th patch or so -- had a Cyrix CPU in 1996, remember those? Battlespire was almost a great game (online multiplayer with real working castles, catapults, drawbridges!) but was so buggy I had to stop playing. Redguard wouldn't run for more than 5 minutes without crashing. Morrowind once corrupted a section of the world (forcing a reinstall), and another time ate one of the quest items I needed to complete the game (had to go into the TES Construction set and drop a new one on the ground for me). Oblivion crashes every time I quit (ironically enough), but then also if I alt-tab, hit the windows key, reload too fast, click too fast, hit the keyboard too fast... or basically any time your hard drive can't keep up to speed (I have a Raid0 hard drive, so it rarely happens). It did crashed once on my girlfriend after she'd spent an hour without saving, which is really the only way I got to get my computer back from her after she spent her entire spring break on my own computer playing Oblivion. =) I was relegated to doing work with an old laptop.
Oblivion is great though. Maybe not as big in scope as Daggerfall, but damn. It looks awesome if you have the rig to run it, the quests (and the quest system) are about 100x more interesting than Morrowind's. All in all, it's one of the better RPGs I've played (and I thank the lord it's not an interactive movie like FFVII or FFX), and if the only time it reliably crashes is when I quit... well, I can deal with that.
Sorry, but what's going to happen is that as time goes by, your project will asymptotically approach 100% your code, as you replace and redesign almost everything he's written. I understand that your project can't be all done by one person, but I've been in this situation a lot of times, and so trust me -- do it all yourself and save yourself the headache of having to rewrite the entire project.
That said, pair programming with other people at your level can be quite good, as having two people working together keeps one or the other from getting distracted.
If you want your friend to learn something from the experience, have him do it all by himself, and then when you're done, show him the right way to do it. Or, hell, he might surprise you and you'll learn a new approach yourself. But the total man hours will be less than doing one project together.
Hmm, interesting. Except IIRC MTBF is generally considered a gaussian process. And I'm not talking about "they all went out at about the same time", I mean it would go FLASH, FLASH, FLASH as all three would blow simultaneously.
Sure, it reeks of pseudoscience, but from my personal experience I can see two ways "dirty electricity" could matter.
1) I lived in a place that had really crazy electrical wiring. As in, about every month or so all three lightbulbs on our cieling fan would all blow out at the same time. If I kept my CRT near one wall, the pattern would make the swimming noises you sometimes see if you put an electric fan near a TV. It made me too nauseous to use it for any extended period of time. Solution? Moved my damn computer to another wall (actually in front of a glass wall -- no EMF interference there).
2) Some fluorescent lights drive me batty. Many lights flicker at double the frequency of the power supply (60hz x 2 = 120hz), which is bloody human noticeable, regardless of how many scientists cast doubt on this. Come to my karate class, wave your hand in front of you, and you'll see multiple images of your hand. Or sometimes no intervening images at all on a punch if you throw it fast enough, which probably makes you look a lot faster than you really are. If you had a "dirty" power supply, I could see it perhaps making a difference to fluorescent lights that are tied to the cycle of the power supply.
Actually, I'm curious why corporations are allowed to donate at all. The rights of free speech are not to be abridged to individuals -- let people blog and talk about politics as much as they want. It's Wheaties donating $1M across 2000 politicians that worries me more.
Oddly enough, FFX-2 is the best FF game to be released since FF Tactics. If you can get through the horrid singing and gratuitous fan service, the game is actually non-linear and kinda fun, which stands in stark contrast to interactive movies like FFVII and FFX.
You sound like the bastards calling for a reinstatement of the draft so that they can get rid of the military entirely.
Which is great and all except...
The world is not a perfect place. When humans solve all their problems, they just invent more to take their place.
>>With this, we're spending less money and putting
>>fewer lives at risk to kill a proportionally
>>higher number of foreign militants.
Sounds good to me!
>>At what point does war become a targeted genocide?
When you start intentionally going after civilians. The military jumps through a lot of hoops and endangers a lot of its own men to try to minimize civilian casualties. All the people who are calling Bush a war criminal should look into the world's real mass murderers; between Stalin and Mao's various purges, genocides, and famines you're looking at ~85 million people killed. Consider that WWI killed between 15-37 million, and WWII at 62 million (military and civilian) for the relative scope of things.
>>Most believed a 10T weight fell faster than a bag of feathers until last century.
Uh, Galileo was in the 1500s and 1600s.
And an anvil will fall faster than a bag of feathers. It's called wind resistance.
>>The embargo and lack of review copies is a good indicator that a game has problems. As is, overwhelmingly
>> positive "reader reviews" showing up within an hour of daybreak on the east coast aren't a good sign
>>either.
Actually, it is a very very good game (though it has its bugs, like all Bethesda games).
>>I didn't notice it before hand, but they never show you more than a few meters around you in their screen
>> shots? There's a really good reason for that...
Thats because the XBox version has a really short viewbox. On my 6800GT, I have the view distances all cranked to the max and I have a great framerate. Oddly enough, the only thing that slows me down is the grass. Which, while beautiful, can hide monsters and treasure, so I keep grass turned off anyway.
Oblivion is actually a really fun game. Unlike Morrowind which was just rather tedious and unexciting. I haven't been able to play WOW recently because my fiancee has become addicted to Oblivion and won't let me use my own computer.
They didn't get sent a free cookie from me.
I liked Doom3 better... I guess.
Like you, the first 10 times you get scared by monsters popping out of the darkness scares you. After that, you start becoming resigned to the fact that the game spawns creatures in areas you've already cleared, making the tactical aspects of the game frustrating.
When I play a FPS, I clear an area, move into that area, and from cover clear the next area, and so forth. Which is worthless when the game just arbitrarily spawns monsters behind you.
The maps are all build around physics puzzles. You have to pile up junk, or push junk off ledges, or remove junk blocking a ramp, which then lets you jump over a gate, the long fenced corridors of Ravenholme seems entirely designed around cutting zombies in half with the gravity gun.
And yeah, the gravity gun being a weapon that wouldn't exist without Havok physics.
And, ok, sure. They probably could have done the dialogue without the Havok engine. =)