Besides the aforementioned point about the display of Swastikas and the fact that you can't buy Castle Wolfenstein because it promotes Nazism?
Freedom of Religion. In Europe, it's mutating into Freedom FROM religion. I.e., the right for easily-offended individuals to go through life without seeing or hearing anything religious, or religion-related. Note that this becomes the polar opposite of Freedom of Religion.
Teachers in Germany can't wear scarves to class.
France is worse. You can't even wear a crucifix or yamaka to class if you are a student.
Uh, censorship IS the repression of material by the government.
A store can choose to stock its own goods.
If you get your way -- that WalMart would have to carry magazines with naked ladies on the covers -- then you've just removed a fundamental freedom we have here in America. The government now controls what stores may stock.
"'Danny's intelligence is the rarest of kinds,' says Rose. 'The sheer practicality of his knowledge makes him a true genius.'
As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe. About a decade later he invented an electronic mainframe computer called the Connection Machine that worked somewhat like a human brain; instead of one processor, it had 65,536, all firing at once like buzzing neurons, a model that supercomputers have used ever since. The irony is inescapable: The architect of the world's fastest machine now designs the world's slowest."
Holy hell, he built a tinkeroy machine that could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe? He IS a genius!!
Pheh, the model that the Connection Machine used is NOT used in all supercomputers ever since. In fact, the model was scrapped because it was too hard to code for.
So either Hillis was tooting his own horn to the reporter (, lying), or the reporter was rather the opposite of what he was lauding Hillis for.
In general, I'd advise not trying to set fires in airports. The fact that it's a flag doesn't really matter.
Fact is, America is the free-est country in the world. If you believe the mass media (which it sounds like you do if you think people are routinely getting tossed in the slammer for dissing America) then America is a totalitarian dictatiorship. But the mass media hates America, so they're not really an unbiased source. In general, you go way out of your way to act like a prick to get tossed in the slammer. Violating security cordons, blocking traffic, threatening to fly a plane into a building... Police sometimes respond with too forceful a reaction -- these are the events always reported in the mass media -- but it doesn't change the fact that Americans have rights that people in China, North Korea, or even Germany do not have.
I'd trust America 10x over to maintain the root DNS servers before trusting an international body with a proven track record of incompetance and corruption.
And to answer your question as to the best way, per-capita living in modern, industrialized cities.
Sure, I was being facetious that they would breed people to get out of quotas, but the simple fact is the rural poor in China allow the major population centers to essentially pollute as much as they want, since they get to divide it out by their billion people.
In fact, my Chinese instructor announced to our class that the air in Beijing was quite clean to breathe now.
Of course, that was less than a month after I got back, and I doubt even if they shut off all their factories right when I left, that the air still wouldn't be clean by the time she announced that.
And that's why per-capita models for pollution control are flawed. Breed a lot of people living in mut huts somewhere and you get a free pass on your heavily polluted industries.
I've been to Beijing. The air there ain't clean. I've never actually felt sick just from breathing a city's air before, and I've been to most major cities in the US and Europe.
Eberron ain't that great a setting. It's not particularly inspired, and the rules for it don't help it reach its stated goal, which is to create "Cinematic Roleplaying". Wow, ok, I have these "Action Points" that can be used as die bumps. Thats crazy. Wow, the "Extreme Adventurer" gets more of these die bumps. So very cinematic. =P
I think their core concept is that if you publish modules with one or two film noir-esque illustrations in each one, that somehow will make a roleplaying experience cinematic. (And no, it doesn't work.)
For a roleplaying system that actually, really, creates a cinematic feel to it, try out Feng Shui some time. There's a D20 adaptation for it (Google "Burning Shaolin"), but their core system is better. No dis on D&D, I play it a lot, it's just that they really missed the mark on this one.
The last time I looked into it, silent power supplies were totally inadequate for gaming. A 500W supply means that you can finally have a new video card and have a silent PS at the same time. That's pretty big news. Or, I guess it's not earth shattering, but big enough to warrant mention on Slashdot.
My current supply has a thermally controlled fan, so it's not loud at all, but some people out there go crazy for that 0db stuff.
Very odd, last night (after watching the Threshold premiere) I had a conversation with my friends.
Essentially, my point was that in all of these sci-fi shows, "Math is the universal language" seems to be taken for granted. My thought was: why?
Granted that any spacefaring civilization would have to have certain capabilities when it comes to math (plotting intercepts with planets, especially in other systems requires certain prerequisites), I said it seems reasonable to assume that any advanced civilization would have to have some knowledge of trig. But -- why would they necessarily have developed the concept of sine, coosine, etc? We don't know how math could develop when 'people' take a radically different approach to it (i.e., by races not 'standing on the shoulders' of our mathematical predecessors).
I proposed that a race could probably create a trig system that didn't have a concept of sine, cosine or tangent, by working with / directly manipulating angle values, etc.
And then the next day this article goes up. Odd.
But I think it does prove my point that Math As The Universal Language might have to be revisited. =)
>10 years ago, I would have though ppl crazy for >thinking that a DB is bad. Now, In light of what >has happened over the last 5 years, I have changed >my mind.
Odd. 10 years ago it was already a horrendous idea. It's not like security has significantly changed for the better or worse in the meantime.
Swords do way more damage than daggers. The amount of damage you do per hit is inversely proportional to the weapon speed. Since rogues break the normal equation by just getting bonus attacks, once every two seconds, it follows that you want a weapon with as much damage as possible per hit, with as long a delay as possible. The Krol Blade is that weapon.
There's quite a bit of knee-jerk reactions on blogs (OMFG -- the world is going to end), but once you mentally can filter all that out, the level of reportage isn't much worse than, say, what you get from the New York Times, 60 minutes, or Newsweek. =)
Wait, weren't inaccuracies in those stories broken by blogs...?
OF COURSE the keyboard is faster than the mouse. Ever see a poweruser look up or set hotkeys for every possible action he ever does? It's because hitting ctrl-s is about 20x faster than moving the mouse to the file menu, hunting to find the right location, clicking, examining the pop-down menu to see if it is the full menu or condensed menu, hunting for the save option, moving down, and clicking it.
Of course, a competent user can do this all fairly quickly, but it's still an operation on the order of 2-3 seconds, versus about a 10th of a second to hit ctrl-s.
When I write code, I never touch the mouse at all. If I do, I know there's something wrong going on, and I look for the shortcut that will let me bypass it.
I was a great sniper in team fortress using only the keyboard. The part of the body you can hit on the opposing balcony is always at your head height, so moving to a mouse, where you get up/down variance, actually caused me to miss more.
Of course, I couldn't hit people crossing the bridge, but such is life...
I agree, Win2K is the best OS MS has ever made. I still use it, and refuse to upgrade to Windows XP. Even with all the GUI crap turned off, Win2K is still faster, except on bootup. I have to wait a LONG ass time for my Win2K machine to boot vs WinXP.
The article calling it a failure is just full of it.
I went to China and they caught sarcasm just fine.
Probably just told you that just so you didn't commit a cultural faux-pas.
Oh, hmm, this topic is on sarcasm, so anything I write will automatically be interpreted backwards But wait, that means that your post meant that actually the Chinese got sarcasm just fine, which means I don't need to post this....
Wow, using a per-captia calculation for China to show... how clean they are?
Lol, China is one of the most heavily polluted places on the planet. When I was in Beijin, I started feeling nauseous from all the air pollution.
A while back, Slashdot had a map showing pollution levels in the world. IIRC, the blurb said "the pollution over America and Europe was expected, but what is that large thing over Siberia? An anamoly?"
Something like that.
China's pollution will only continue to rise, as they are adding a million new drivers a year.
Morrowind? You mean the game that gets it's 100 hours of gameplay by walking across a continentent. Walking. Across a continent. Multiple times for stupid relay quests. Mark and recall cut out half those trips, but Morrowind was the only RPG I've played where I finished a novel while playing it.
It's actually a myth that voter turnout has declined in recent years. The key point being that the census bureau reports it in terms of % of voting age population. This includes people that can't vote, i.e., non-citizens. If you look at the % of people voting who actually are able to vote, the rates have remained relatively constant for the last 50 years.
I can see Flicker. It's the reason why I've cycled through four different monitors in the last year, before finally settling down on a Sony SDM-HS94P (flatscreen). Any refresh rate less than 72 is intolerable for me, and even faster refresh rates are noticeable when I move my eyes or look at it in my perhipheral vision.
What's worst is eating crunchy food. The jarring motion of biting down on someting crunchy apparently jolts my head at the same speed the screen is refreshing, so the image breaks up for a second. If I'm eating a lot of crunchy things, it makes a CRT unusable.
The oddest part is I can see "Flicker" on LCD screens. It's not flicker like on a CRT (you know, from seeing the refresh line move across the screen from top to bottom), it's seeing the individual pixels refresh at a 60Hz rate. So the problem is, on a lot of LCDs, when I run my eyes from the left to the right, my eyes will track at exactly the refresh rate of the screen, and the pixels break up and swim.
I don't know if that makes sense, lemme see if there's a better way of explaining it. Ever see those flashing lights they like to use in Vegas, or at carnivals, where every other light alternates blinking on and off? If you just stare at one, you just see a light turning on and off, with the neighbors alternating. But if you look at it from a distance, it creates the illusion of motion. If you run your eyes from left to right across it at exactly double the "speed" of the lights, your eyes will hit the next natural frequency and the lights will be appearing to move twice as fast. That's what's happening with the LCD screen. The pixels swim when my eyes move at the refresh rate, and the image breaks up. My eye also throws an event (so to speak) that it's seen motion on the screen, so when I'm doing something, like, say, writing a paper, and move my eye to the top left part of the screen, the screen swims, and it breaks my concentration. I tried getting used to it, but it eventually got so frustrating to me that I had to return it.
And apparently I'm the only one who can see it. I returned that LCD to Fry's and they just looked at me like I was crazy. "Don't you see it??" Fortunately, it also had developed two stuck pixels in a week since I bought it (and it was still under warranty, natch) so they didn't think I was too odd, but I did notice when I was starting at the rack of LCD monitors they have for display, I was the only person who could see the refresh problem on the monitors. I can see it on about half of them. And it's not even per model. I've looked at three Sony HS94Ps now, and I bought the only one that didn't have the problem. My current one, if I try really hard (defocusing my eyes and running it from left to right at fast speed) I can get the pixels to swim, but it doesn't happen at all during normal use, and that's good enough for me.
Getting out of CRT flicker hell has made my life much more enjoyable.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides the aforementioned point about the display of Swastikas and the fact that you can't buy Castle Wolfenstein because it promotes Nazism?
Freedom of Religion. In Europe, it's mutating into Freedom FROM religion. I.e., the right for easily-offended individuals to go through life without seeing or hearing anything religious, or religion-related. Note that this becomes the polar opposite of Freedom of Religion.
Teachers in Germany can't wear scarves to class.
France is worse. You can't even wear a crucifix or yamaka to class if you are a student.
Uh, censorship IS the repression of material by the government.
A store can choose to stock its own goods.
If you get your way -- that WalMart would have to carry magazines with naked ladies on the covers -- then you've just removed a fundamental freedom we have here in America. The government now controls what stores may stock.
"'Danny's intelligence is the rarest of kinds,' says Rose. 'The sheer practicality of his knowledge makes him a true genius.'
As an MIT undergrad in 1975, Hillis and his friends built a binary computer out of 10,000 Tinkertoy pieces. It could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe. About a decade later he invented an electronic mainframe computer called the Connection Machine that worked somewhat like a human brain; instead of one processor, it had 65,536, all firing at once like buzzing neurons, a model that supercomputers have used ever since. The irony is inescapable: The architect of the world's fastest machine now designs the world's slowest."
Holy hell, he built a tinkeroy machine that could beat all comers at tic-tac-toe? He IS a genius!!
Pheh, the model that the Connection Machine used is NOT used in all supercomputers ever since. In fact, the model was scrapped because it was too hard to code for.
So either Hillis was tooting his own horn to the reporter (, lying), or the reporter was rather the opposite of what he was lauding Hillis for.
In general, I'd advise not trying to set fires in airports. The fact that it's a flag doesn't really matter.
Fact is, America is the free-est country in the world. If you believe the mass media (which it sounds like you do if you think people are routinely getting tossed in the slammer for dissing America) then America is a totalitarian dictatiorship. But the mass media hates America, so they're not really an unbiased source. In general, you go way out of your way to act like a prick to get tossed in the slammer. Violating security cordons, blocking traffic, threatening to fly a plane into a building... Police sometimes respond with too forceful a reaction -- these are the events always reported in the mass media -- but it doesn't change the fact that Americans have rights that people in China, North Korea, or even Germany do not have.
I'd trust America 10x over to maintain the root DNS servers before trusting an international body with a proven track record of incompetance and corruption.
And to answer your question as to the best way, per-capita living in modern, industrialized cities.
Sure, I was being facetious that they would breed people to get out of quotas, but the simple fact is the rural poor in China allow the major population centers to essentially pollute as much as they want, since they get to divide it out by their billion people.
Propoganda.
In fact, my Chinese instructor announced to our class that the air in Beijing was quite clean to breathe now.
Of course, that was less than a month after I got back, and I doubt even if they shut off all their factories right when I left, that the air still wouldn't be clean by the time she announced that.
And that's why per-capita models for pollution control are flawed. Breed a lot of people living in mut huts somewhere and you get a free pass on your heavily polluted industries.
I've been to Beijing. The air there ain't clean. I've never actually felt sick just from breathing a city's air before, and I've been to most major cities in the US and Europe.
I went ahead and created my setting anyway. =)
www.livingplanar.com
Eberron ain't that great a setting. It's not particularly inspired, and the rules for it don't help it reach its stated goal, which is to create "Cinematic Roleplaying". Wow, ok, I have these "Action Points" that can be used as die bumps. Thats crazy. Wow, the "Extreme Adventurer" gets more of these die bumps. So very cinematic. =P
I think their core concept is that if you publish modules with one or two film noir-esque illustrations in each one, that somehow will make a roleplaying experience cinematic. (And no, it doesn't work.)
For a roleplaying system that actually, really, creates a cinematic feel to it, try out Feng Shui some time. There's a D20 adaptation for it (Google "Burning Shaolin"), but their core system is better. No dis on D&D, I play it a lot, it's just that they really missed the mark on this one.
The last time I looked into it, silent power supplies were totally inadequate for gaming. A 500W supply means that you can finally have a new video card and have a silent PS at the same time. That's pretty big news. Or, I guess it's not earth shattering, but big enough to warrant mention on Slashdot.
My current supply has a thermally controlled fan, so it's not loud at all, but some people out there go crazy for that 0db stuff.
Very odd, last night (after watching the Threshold premiere) I had a conversation with my friends.
Essentially, my point was that in all of these sci-fi shows, "Math is the universal language" seems to be taken for granted. My thought was: why?
Granted that any spacefaring civilization would have to have certain capabilities when it comes to math (plotting intercepts with planets, especially in other systems requires certain prerequisites), I said it seems reasonable to assume that any advanced civilization would have to have some knowledge of trig. But -- why would they necessarily have developed the concept of sine, coosine, etc? We don't know how math could develop when 'people' take a radically different approach to it (i.e., by races not 'standing on the shoulders' of our mathematical predecessors).
I proposed that a race could probably create a trig system that didn't have a concept of sine, cosine or tangent, by working with / directly manipulating angle values, etc.
And then the next day this article goes up. Odd.
But I think it does prove my point that Math As The Universal Language might have to be revisited. =)
>10 years ago, I would have though ppl crazy for
>thinking that a DB is bad. Now, In light of what
>has happened over the last 5 years, I have changed
>my mind.
Odd. 10 years ago it was already a horrendous idea. It's not like security has significantly changed for the better or worse in the meantime.
>Diamond has its drawbacks, however. Diamond is a
>brittle material and is normally not electrically
>conducting.
You know, for all that diamonds don't conduct electricity and such, women still go crazy for 'em.
Women!
Actually WOW is better suited to the casual gamer than any other.
A hardcore gamer can hit level 60 in a month or less. A casual gamer can play it for ages but still feel like he's making real progress.
Unlike FFXI, where it just starts taking stupidly long amounts of time to level and do quests.
Swords do way more damage than daggers. The amount of damage you do per hit is inversely proportional to the weapon speed. Since rogues break the normal equation by just getting bonus attacks, once every two seconds, it follows that you want a weapon with as much damage as possible per hit, with as long a delay as possible. The Krol Blade is that weapon.
It's the best commonly available rogue weapon.
There's quite a bit of knee-jerk reactions on blogs (OMFG -- the world is going to end), but once you mentally can filter all that out, the level of reportage isn't much worse than, say, what you get from the New York Times, 60 minutes, or Newsweek. =)
Wait, weren't inaccuracies in those stories broken by blogs...?
Winner for the most obvious claim ever.
OF COURSE the keyboard is faster than the mouse. Ever see a poweruser look up or set hotkeys for every possible action he ever does? It's because hitting ctrl-s is about 20x faster than moving the mouse to the file menu, hunting to find the right location, clicking, examining the pop-down menu to see if it is the full menu or condensed menu, hunting for the save option, moving down, and clicking it.
Of course, a competent user can do this all fairly quickly, but it's still an operation on the order of 2-3 seconds, versus about a 10th of a second to hit ctrl-s.
When I write code, I never touch the mouse at all. If I do, I know there's something wrong going on, and I look for the shortcut that will let me bypass it.
Ditto.
I was a great sniper in team fortress using only the keyboard. The part of the body you can hit on the opposing balcony is always at your head height, so moving to a mouse, where you get up/down variance, actually caused me to miss more.
Of course, I couldn't hit people crossing the bridge, but such is life...
I eventually switched to mice, of course.
Clan UVM all the way, baby.
I agree, Win2K is the best OS MS has ever made. I still use it, and refuse to upgrade to Windows XP. Even with all the GUI crap turned off, Win2K is still faster, except on bootup. I have to wait a LONG ass time for my Win2K machine to boot vs WinXP.
The article calling it a failure is just full of it.
I went to China and they caught sarcasm just fine.
Probably just told you that just so you didn't commit a cultural faux-pas.
Oh, hmm, this topic is on sarcasm, so anything I write will automatically be interpreted backwards But wait, that means that your post meant that actually the Chinese got sarcasm just fine, which means I don't need to post this....
Oh hell, I'm submitting it anyway.
Wow, using a per-captia calculation for China to show... how clean they are?
Lol, China is one of the most heavily polluted places on the planet. When I was in Beijin, I started feeling nauseous from all the air pollution.
A while back, Slashdot had a map showing pollution levels in the world. IIRC, the blurb said "the pollution over America and Europe was expected, but what is that large thing over Siberia? An anamoly?"
Something like that.
China's pollution will only continue to rise, as they are adding a million new drivers a year.
Morrowind? You mean the game that gets it's 100 hours of gameplay by walking across a continentent. Walking. Across a continent. Multiple times for stupid relay quests. Mark and recall cut out half those trips, but Morrowind was the only RPG I've played where I finished a novel while playing it.
A Neal Stephenson novel.
It's actually a myth that voter turnout has declined in recent years. The key point being that the census bureau reports it in terms of % of voting age population. This includes people that can't vote, i.e., non-citizens. If you look at the % of people voting who actually are able to vote, the rates have remained relatively constant for the last 50 years.
p ://elections.gmu.edu/turnout_rates_graph.htm
http://elections.gmu.edu/voter_turnout.htm
htt
I can see Flicker. It's the reason why I've cycled through four different monitors in the last year, before finally settling down on a Sony SDM-HS94P (flatscreen). Any refresh rate less than 72 is intolerable for me, and even faster refresh rates are noticeable when I move my eyes or look at it in my perhipheral vision.
What's worst is eating crunchy food. The jarring motion of biting down on someting crunchy apparently jolts my head at the same speed the screen is refreshing, so the image breaks up for a second. If I'm eating a lot of crunchy things, it makes a CRT unusable.
The oddest part is I can see "Flicker" on LCD screens. It's not flicker like on a CRT (you know, from seeing the refresh line move across the screen from top to bottom), it's seeing the individual pixels refresh at a 60Hz rate. So the problem is, on a lot of LCDs, when I run my eyes from the left to the right, my eyes will track at exactly the refresh rate of the screen, and the pixels break up and swim.
I don't know if that makes sense, lemme see if there's a better way of explaining it. Ever see those flashing lights they like to use in Vegas, or at carnivals, where every other light alternates blinking on and off? If you just stare at one, you just see a light turning on and off, with the neighbors alternating. But if you look at it from a distance, it creates the illusion of motion. If you run your eyes from left to right across it at exactly double the "speed" of the lights, your eyes will hit the next natural frequency and the lights will be appearing to move twice as fast. That's what's happening with the LCD screen. The pixels swim when my eyes move at the refresh rate, and the image breaks up. My eye also throws an event (so to speak) that it's seen motion on the screen, so when I'm doing something, like, say, writing a paper, and move my eye to the top left part of the screen, the screen swims, and it breaks my concentration. I tried getting used to it, but it eventually got so frustrating to me that I had to return it.
And apparently I'm the only one who can see it. I returned that LCD to Fry's and they just looked at me like I was crazy. "Don't you see it??" Fortunately, it also had developed two stuck pixels in a week since I bought it (and it was still under warranty, natch) so they didn't think I was too odd, but I did notice when I was starting at the rack of LCD monitors they have for display, I was the only person who could see the refresh problem on the monitors. I can see it on about half of them. And it's not even per model. I've looked at three Sony HS94Ps now, and I bought the only one that didn't have the problem. My current one, if I try really hard (defocusing my eyes and running it from left to right at fast speed) I can get the pixels to swim, but it doesn't happen at all during normal use, and that's good enough for me.
Getting out of CRT flicker hell has made my life much more enjoyable.
-Bill
Look into Compiler Tiling. It's all about reordering loops into ways that are more cache friendly.
Compiler writers are smart people.