What is this guy talking about? Offshore accounts are legal.. if used for legal purposes.
But anonymous and undeclared accounts are NOT legal. Also, any financial transaction over a certain threshold is illegal for a US citizen, period, unless the appropriate form is submitted to government by the financial institution. It seems to me that this technology can be very easily applied by anyone who gets a merchant account to achieve near-complete financial impenetrability for money transfers, aka "laundering".
And its not like these credit cards are going to be regulated any different then normal credit card
In theory no. But in reality, I believe that the technology as described allows for very easily circumvention of existing financial regulations.
Note that nowhere on that link, or at any other similar organization, does it say "None of this applies if you broadcast to people who already own the CD of the song you're playing."
For mp3.com to claim that proving the listener's ownership made them magically exempt from all laws governing public performance always did strike me as pretty questionable legally. I'm totally unsurprised at the decision.
This is absolutely not normal business practice in retail stores...The problem is that they are using some secret criteria to charge people different prices as individuals.
Ummmm... that's pretty standard practice in most areas of the world, actually. Hell, even here it is. For any large expense at a retail store, I'll find whoever has authority to cut a deal and I'll cut a deal with them. As long as you can convince them it won't get out, pretty much anybody prefers cash in hand to inventory on the shelf, lowered profit or not.
If I can size up the store and try to chew them down, what on earth is wrong with vice versa?
The way you phrase this, it sounds like you pay label price on everything you buy. You're kidding, right? Are there REALLY people that dumb in the world?:)
The concepts in Mage: The Ascension parallel literature back to the Greek and Hebrew mythology. Prometheus and fire, Adam, Eve and the Tree of Knowledge are but two examples of enlightenment.
Ummmmm... you're missing a very significant piece here, that being the organization and brotherhood.
What they're actually conceptualizing is the mystery school of initiatory revelation, which in our world started with the Egyptians (check out in the Bible where Moses performs the rod and snake bit, their equivalent of the Masonic handshake) and through the Essenes and Templars ended up with the Masons, Shriners, etc. of today. Nowadays they're just social clubs (putting the various conspiracy theorists aside for this discussion:) but the original schools actually took quite seriously the mystical powers and so forth, just like the game portrays.
As a matter of fact, the principles of the Masons are close enough to this "Order of Reason" that it really beggars belief to claim that they did NOT model it directly on said organization.
I guess, in my attempt not to become a Jon Katz ragger, I am struggling to understand the purpose of this article.
You know, I don't really get it either:)
He seems to be thinking that what is actually a very clear modelling on historical societies and beliefs can be taken as some kind of allegorical wisdom to be applied to today's world.
I think he needs to find a better quality of crack.
Besides, any intelligent person knows that Harn (www.columbiagames.com) is the only good RGP.;-)
Good God, it's still alive? I haven't played RPGs for seventeen years and I still have all the first edition Hârn stuff tucked away just in case I ever want to write a CPRG and need to pull a detailed setting out of a hat:)
I won't even get started on the fact that most artists are unsigned and will not ever see a bloddy penny of the collected tax,
Actually, it's even stupider than that... it's only CANADIAN artists on CANADIAN labels that get this divvied among them.
Now, while it is true that probably 2/3 of the CDs I burn are audio CDs, I have *never* *once* burned a single song by a Canadian artist on a Canadian label.
So this tax is the veritable apotheosis of a government policy; it steals from the innocent to give to the undeserving while being completely orthogonal to the problem it purports to address.
I also agree very strongly that in any world that makes pretensions to logic you don't punish people for a crime they might POSSIBLY commit. *shakes head* Whatever.
The fact that people (such as myself, and presumably such as Snocone) read his writings and think "Wow, cool! The future's gonna be hardass, but at least we're in the lucky small percentage of the population that has a chance at surviving it!"
Heh. I'm a bit more hardcore about it than that. Here's a piece of a flamewar on more or less the topic of this discussion that I bothered saving a couple years back (Sherlock content searching ROCKS!:) At the very least, I trust it presents a thought-provoking alternative to the 'newly empowered sovereign individual' theory. I wrote this three+ years ago, but I see no particular reason to change my opinion so far.
From: Alex Curylo
Sent: Wednesday, April 2, 1997 11:20 AM
Subject: RE: Jobs
> If the problem stems from not enough training rather than not
> enough jobs, how do you account for the recent increase in student
> loan defaults?
Because lots of students are idiots and they take useless crap like arts courses. That is not training. That is wasting your time.
> Regarding wages, it DOES seem to be an employers market. In 1980 I had a
> job as a construction grunt for $8.00 an hour. I have seen so many present
> job postings where employers are providing the same wage for applicants who
> must have at least 3 yrs. experience with references AND a degree.
Supply and demand, my earnest but apparently ignorant sir, supply and demand. In 1980 I was milking cows for $4.50 an hour, and I bet you didn't have to get up at 3:30 in the morning to do your construction either. My present job posting is $75K. Training, my dear boy, training. And a modicuum of foresight in putting oneself on the DEMAND side of the supply and demand curve. I think $75K a year for me to fuck around emailing people like you is hardly an employers market, but that's just my opinion.
> Canada is going through a radical change right now where the rich are
> getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Actually, no, what's happening is that the natural pattern of human relations is reasserting itself. Despite my above broadsides at arts courses, knowing what's in them is actually good, particularly in this case economics and history. In all societies throughout history up 'til the Industrial Revolution, there were three classes:
A) The owners of the means of production
B) The skilled workers
C) The peasants
Whether these were Pharoahs, scribes, and farmers, or kings, priests, and peasants, or tsars, boyars, and serfs, the pattern was basically identical. Now, with the Industrial Revolution, suddenly unskilled labor became valuable with the addition of minimal training; and furthermore, the peasants suddenly became empowered. Strikes, or sabotage, can strike directly at Class A in a way that previous peasant uprisings never could unless they were truly universal and the government had pretty much lost its grip in any case. So Class A was forced to share its wealth not only with Class B as it always had, but with Class C as well. Thus the rise of union labor and the middle class, starting around 1825 and extending more or less to now.
This little history recap is pretty uncontroversial, altho it's usually not presented in precisely these terms. It is also generally accepted that with computerization and automation and global free trade, we are currently (last 10-15 years, say) starting the Information Revolution, or the Third Wave, or the Industrial Derevolution, or whatever the trendy label is this month.
However! And here is the first thing I've said that qualifies as a genuine insight -- it is a NECESSARY consequence of this derevolution that the middle class disappear. The odd person has noticed that union jobs are going away and manufacturing is going to Indonesia and all that and has questioned what's going on, approximately the same level of insight you've demonstrated. But they haven't thought through the consequences of computerization and automation. If they would, they would realize that computer technology is going to wipe out all but the most menial and most skilled of jobs just as certainly as the internal combustion engine wiped out horsewhip makers. It's not a side effect, it's not something that the government can do anything about, it is a direct consequence of technological progress.
In less than 25 years, and quite possibly in less than 10, this is going to be obvious to everybody. It's being hidden right now because of the effects of trade globalization (another NECESSARY consequence... but that's another discussion altogether) have brought in the intermediary step of manufacturing being diverted to developing countries before being disposed of altogether. So we have the anti-Nike demonstrations and so forth. Well, those people are all complete idiots who don't know history, either of the early Industrial Revolution or of the last 50 (hell, 20) in the industrializing Asian economies, or basic economics, or fucking common sense for that matter. But I digress yet again. The point is that once the currently 'exploited' societies industrialize, then the manufacturing will disappear completely. It'll take at least 20 more years in Thailand, Burma, and so forth, maybe 50 in China (or then again, maybe not, those 23% annual growth rates in Shenzen are downright scary...) but when there's no more pockets of underdevelopment, then it will become perfectly obvious that The Era Of The Middle Class is OVER worldwide. It'll have been long gone in the currently industrialized world for decades, of course. And we will be back in the normal pattern of human relations: the rich, their lackeys, and the common scum.
I'm doing pretty good positioning myself for the lackey class, in my humble opinion. So you're not doing that good, eh? Well, better get on it then, you don't really have all that much time left.
No, just unusual. Perhaps you have heard of a little teenybopper named "Joan of Arc" for instance?
Women didn't do combat. Why? Women were not strong enough.
You should go through the Norse sagas to find some striking counterexamples. However, Teutonic women are a special case, as any of you who have visited Nordic countries probably know already:) Viking lines of battle were often anchored by lines of shieldmaidens. Stabbing spears poking out from shieldwalls aren't particularly valiant or odeworthy, and don't require a particularly notable amount of strength... but they are very effective.
Valkryies aside, effective women warriors have historically been archers, as any reasonably strong woman can pull a bow of the rather pathetic draws that historical bows were capable of handling. Also, being a good archer requires a lot more training and discipline than a footsoldier while being less individually glorious, which traits are more often to be found acceptable by women than macho male warriors, oddly enough:) The Amazons were foot archers, as much as what Amazons actually were can be pulled out of the myths; many of the Central Asian steppe tribes used women (and children) as horse archers, Samartians most notably; Chinese had women crossbow regiments; it seems the Incans had women sling corps, but we don't really know enough about them to be sure of that. Et cetera.
The reason there aren't more examples to draw from is that historically most cultures were not on a constant war footing and thus women could be relegated to babymaking and surplus male population to warmaking. In cultures where everyone had to fight, women were vital components of the order of battle in some position where their average lack of upper body strength wasn't particularly relevant.
And, to step away from direct combat, female ninjas were actually more prevalent and dreaded than male ninjas, contrary to current movie mythology; there are several recorded instances of ninja geishas with their koshigatanas taking out multiple samurai. Ninja geishas. Mmmmmm. Mmmmm.:)
And you explain the success of Robert Jordan's godawful shit how?
Hey, the first book was excellent. The next two or three were pretty good as well.
They really have become quite pathetic since, I agree. It's just a collection of short stories now rather than any kind of compelling narrative.
Re:Sounds even better than the Hammer and the Cros
on
Ash: A Secret History
·
· Score: 1
Alternate history (vikings, 10th century).
Um, actually, it's hardly alternate at all. A lot of Civil War etc. novels that are generally labelled 'historical' play far faster and looser with actual events than H&C did.
So ugly a book is GRUNTS, so much "in the spirit of Mordor" to quote a friend of mine, that I wasn't able to read more than a page or two of THE SECRET HISTORY before my simmering antipathy towards Gentle came to the surface.
Heh, now here's a same planet different worlds scenario. Not being a lame-ass whimpering uptight git like yourself, I thought GRUNTS! just fucking ROCKED.
"Pass me another elf, this one's split..."
All baiting aside, Mary is actually quite a nice person and GRUNTS! is parody. You know, humour? Like, a fucking joke?
(Of course, people who have actually been in war zones say that it's the most accurate portray of how real soldiers behave that they've ever seen in literature, so maybe it's not actually all THAT funny...)
Really? I never realized one was supposed to, I had the impression the more expensive cost of the gas was supposed to cover their wages. How much do you tip?
And you do? All I've seen you do is regurgitate some comments from a "buddy" of yours who is doing PS2 development.
*shrug* I did an evaluation for his shop on how much time and money it would take to get their line onto the Mac OS platform... I think I have their economics of development down pretty well after that experience. You're free to disagree, of course.
Your "buddy" obviously has a stake in seeing the PS2 succeed...
Nope -- PS2 T&L are going to be in maintenance mode in a couple months, so he's looking for new interesting work, actually. This is why I think his evaluation of tying his star to the Xbox is to be considered with some seriousness.
I don't care about API's. I don't care about any other developer nonsense. I all care about is games. And I suspect they will be there.
Well, the important thing that you should worry about then is called "Return on Investment". And that depends on game sales, which depends on platform adoption, which depends on games produced, which depends on big game makers having confidence in the platform.
Or, of course, MSFT just throwing around loads of cash. It's easy to buy friends... for a little while.
The divergence at the API level should be small and manageable....A common ancestry is a lot better from a developer's point of view than no commonality at all.
Now, not meaning to flame you here really, but you don't understand game development at a big shop.
The games are written to internal APIs, and it's the job of the T&L teams to make sure those APIs work the same on every platform. There are large efficiencies there between PC and Xbox, yes.
HOWEVER... the _real_ costs in game development these days are the graphic work. Now, PC models at the time will have how many polygons compared to the Xbox? The correct answer here is "many, many, more".
As my buddy put it, getting artists to render in different palettes for different platforms is hard enough. Getting them to do two completely different levels of design detail, for every rev of a Xbox/PC game... naaaaah. So common development gives you a really lame PC game. Ummmm... that won't cut it.
Nope, common development is just a nice theory. If there's more than a handful of games that actually end up being done that way, I will be shocked.
I was talking with a buddy who does PS2 stuff at EA about this, and he pointed out that all this stuff about Xbox being a good console compatible with PC platforms is nonsense.
Is MSFT going to stop improving PC APIs all of a sudden when Xbox comes out? Are card makers going to stop improving their video cards? No? Well then. How long are the platforms ACTUALLY going to remain compatible?
Six months at most is what he gives it, which sounds not unreasonable. That means your window for doing combined Xbox/PC development is one year, at the outside, starting right about now.
And when you take that away, what's the Xbox? A pretty good gaming PC, for now. A mediocre gaming PC, when it comes out, not really up to the consoles that will be out at the time like the Dolphin, er, GameCube. And in another six months, a legacy platform.
Now... putting that into perspective, do you *really* believe the hype in this article?
There's a number of pieces of GPL code it would be rather nifty to work into this program. But I can't, because the GC is officially certified as an Acceptable Recording Instrument for the purpose of proving FAI world record claims... and to maintain that certification, the GC's control protocols may not be publicly disclosed. Which open sourcing the code in any fashion would do, in their opinion.
Yes, they're stupid. No, I cannot change the FAI's mind even if I was idiotic enough to try. So I can use BSD code, public domain code, whatever, and provide a free as in beer program like I am. It would be a better free as in beer program if I could use GPL code, but I can't because the FAI are morons.
Sooo... the GPL here is limiting my freedom to make the best free as in beer program I can from publicly available source code, which means that the pilot community doesn't have as good a free resource as they would otherwise. Nobody at FAI gives a flying fuck about computers, never mind Open Source, there is no way that going to the trouble of changing this would ever get on the agenda in the foreseeable future.
How many other "Vancouver"s in Canada are there, brainiac?
There are 1 million French-speakers in Canada who don't live in Quebec.
Latest numbers up at StatsCan say 930,000 and change, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt, that's out of 21.5 million Canadians outside Quebec. That works out to... 3%. And almost half of those are in Ontario.
3% is "nonentity" in my books, bucko. And no other province outside Ontario is anywhere near to even that.
You either a) don't know what a "creole" is
"a language formed from the contact of a European language (esp. English, French, or Portuguese) with another (esp. African) language."
-- Concise Oxford
Get a dictionary and a clue, dumbass.
Noone in either country genuinely thinks the other is speaking a creole.
*snicker*
Do we have any Parisiennes here to bitchslap this deluded loser?
(Those of you who this is all going past: Frenchmen in France regard Quebecois as barely a step above the French spoken by Algerians. No matter what defensive boy here would like to fool himself into thinking.)
When referring to your nationality it sounds awkward to me to omit the article ("un")...I could be mistaken of course
There's no problem with that, any more than there is omitting it in English.
"Tu" and "Te" would both be translated into english as "you", but they are different. Unfortunately I lack the grammar lingo to explain the difference.
Tu == subject. Te == object. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but let's start simple:)
Slashdot Mirror
What is this guy talking about? Offshore accounts are legal.. if used for legal purposes.
But anonymous and undeclared accounts are NOT legal. Also, any financial transaction over a certain threshold is illegal for a US citizen, period, unless the appropriate form is submitted to government by the financial institution. It seems to me that this technology can be very easily applied by anyone who gets a merchant account to achieve near-complete financial impenetrability for money transfers, aka "laundering".
And its not like these credit cards are going to be regulated any different then normal credit card
In theory no. But in reality, I believe that the technology as described allows for very easily circumvention of existing financial regulations.
The income tax people will FREAK on this.
This is why offshore accounts are illegal!
(1st?)
It wasn't public performance.
Yes it is. 'Public' is not necessarily plural. Go follow the link and learn what words mean in this context.
Radio stations don't infringe on copyright.
They do if they don't follow the licensing rules.
Note that nowhere on that link, or at any other similar organization, does it say "None of this applies if you broadcast to people who already own the CD of the song you're playing."
For mp3.com to claim that proving the listener's ownership made them magically exempt from all laws governing public performance always did strike me as pretty questionable legally. I'm totally unsurprised at the decision.
This is absolutely not normal business practice in retail stores ...The problem is that they are using some secret criteria to charge people different prices as individuals.
... that's pretty standard practice in most areas of the world, actually. Hell, even here it is. For any large expense at a retail store, I'll find whoever has authority to cut a deal and I'll cut a deal with them. As long as you can convince them it won't get out, pretty much anybody prefers cash in hand to inventory on the shelf, lowered profit or not.
:)
Ummmm
If I can size up the store and try to chew them down, what on earth is wrong with vice versa?
The way you phrase this, it sounds like you pay label price on everything you buy. You're kidding, right? Are there REALLY people that dumb in the world?
The concepts in Mage: The Ascension parallel literature back to the Greek and Hebrew mythology. Prometheus and fire, Adam, Eve and the Tree of Knowledge are but two examples of enlightenment.
... you're missing a very significant piece here, that being the organization and brotherhood.
:) but the original schools actually took quite seriously the mystical powers and so forth, just like the game portrays.
:)
Ummmmm
What they're actually conceptualizing is the mystery school of initiatory revelation, which in our world started with the Egyptians (check out in the Bible where Moses performs the rod and snake bit, their equivalent of the Masonic handshake) and through the Essenes and Templars ended up with the Masons, Shriners, etc. of today. Nowadays they're just social clubs (putting the various conspiracy theorists aside for this discussion
As a matter of fact, the principles of the Masons are close enough to this "Order of Reason" that it really beggars belief to claim that they did NOT model it directly on said organization.
I guess, in my attempt not to become a Jon Katz ragger, I am struggling to understand the purpose of this article.
You know, I don't really get it either
He seems to be thinking that what is actually a very clear modelling on historical societies and beliefs can be taken as some kind of allegorical wisdom to be applied to today's world.
I think he needs to find a better quality of crack.
Besides, any intelligent person knows that Harn (www.columbiagames.com) is the only good RGP. ;-)
:)
Good God, it's still alive? I haven't played RPGs for seventeen years and I still have all the first edition Hârn stuff tucked away just in case I ever want to write a CPRG and need to pull a detailed setting out of a hat
I won't even get started on the fact that most artists are unsigned and will not ever see a bloddy penny of the collected tax,
... it's only CANADIAN artists on CANADIAN labels that get this divvied among them.
Actually, it's even stupider than that
Now, while it is true that probably 2/3 of the CDs I burn are audio CDs, I have *never* *once* burned a single song by a Canadian artist on a Canadian label.
So this tax is the veritable apotheosis of a government policy; it steals from the innocent to give to the undeserving while being completely orthogonal to the problem it purports to address.
I also agree very strongly that in any world that makes pretensions to logic you don't punish people for a crime they might POSSIBLY commit. *shakes head* Whatever.
The fact that people (such as myself, and presumably such as Snocone) read his writings and think "Wow, cool! The future's gonna be hardass, but at least we're in the lucky small percentage of the population that has a chance at surviving it!"
:) At the very least, I trust it presents a thought-provoking alternative to the 'newly empowered sovereign individual' theory. I wrote this three+ years ago, but I see no particular reason to change my opinion so far.
... but that's another discussion altogether) have brought in the intermediary step of manufacturing being diverted to developing countries before being disposed of altogether. So we have the anti-Nike demonstrations and so forth. Well, those people are all complete idiots who don't know history, either of the early Industrial Revolution or of the last 50 (hell, 20) in the industrializing Asian economies, or basic economics, or fucking common sense for that matter. But I digress yet again. The point is that once the currently 'exploited' societies industrialize, then the manufacturing will disappear completely. It'll take at least 20 more years in Thailand, Burma, and so forth, maybe 50 in China (or then again, maybe not, those 23% annual growth rates in Shenzen are downright scary...) but when there's no more pockets of underdevelopment, then it will become perfectly obvious that The Era Of The Middle Class is OVER worldwide. It'll have been long gone in the currently industrialized world for decades, of course. And we will be back in the normal pattern of human relations: the rich, their lackeys, and the common scum.
Heh. I'm a bit more hardcore about it than that. Here's a piece of a flamewar on more or less the topic of this discussion that I bothered saving a couple years back (Sherlock content searching ROCKS!
From: Alex Curylo
Sent: Wednesday, April 2, 1997 11:20 AM
Subject: RE: Jobs
> If the problem stems from not enough training rather than not
> enough jobs, how do you account for the recent increase in student
> loan defaults?
Because lots of students are idiots and they take useless crap like arts courses. That is not training. That is wasting your time.
> Regarding wages, it DOES seem to be an employers market. In 1980 I had a
> job as a construction grunt for $8.00 an hour. I have seen so many present
> job postings where employers are providing the same wage for applicants who
> must have at least 3 yrs. experience with references AND a degree.
Supply and demand, my earnest but apparently ignorant sir, supply and demand. In 1980 I was milking cows for $4.50 an hour, and I bet you didn't have to get up at 3:30 in the morning to do your construction either. My present job posting is $75K. Training, my dear boy, training. And a modicuum of foresight in putting oneself on the DEMAND side of the supply and demand curve. I think $75K a year for me to fuck around emailing people like you is hardly an employers market, but that's just my opinion.
> Canada is going through a radical change right now where the rich are
> getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.
Actually, no, what's happening is that the natural pattern of human relations is reasserting itself. Despite my above broadsides at arts courses, knowing what's in them is actually good, particularly in this case economics and history. In all societies throughout history up 'til the Industrial Revolution, there were three classes:
A) The owners of the means of production
B) The skilled workers
C) The peasants
Whether these were Pharoahs, scribes, and farmers, or kings, priests, and peasants, or tsars, boyars, and serfs, the pattern was basically identical. Now, with the Industrial Revolution, suddenly unskilled labor became valuable with the addition of minimal training; and furthermore, the peasants suddenly became empowered. Strikes, or sabotage, can strike directly at Class A in a way that previous peasant uprisings never could unless they were truly universal and the government had pretty much lost its grip in any case. So Class A was forced to share its wealth not only with Class B as it always had, but with Class C as well. Thus the rise of union labor and the middle class, starting around 1825 and extending more or less to now.
This little history recap is pretty uncontroversial, altho it's usually not presented in precisely these terms. It is also generally accepted that with computerization and automation and global free trade, we are currently (last 10-15 years, say) starting the Information Revolution, or the Third Wave, or the Industrial Derevolution, or whatever the trendy label is this month.
However! And here is the first thing I've said that qualifies as a genuine insight -- it is a NECESSARY consequence of this derevolution that the middle class disappear. The odd person has noticed that union jobs are going away and manufacturing is going to Indonesia and all that and has questioned what's going on, approximately the same level of insight you've demonstrated. But they haven't thought through the consequences of computerization and automation. If they would, they would realize that computer technology is going to wipe out all but the most menial and most skilled of jobs just as certainly as the internal combustion engine wiped out horsewhip makers. It's not a side effect, it's not something that the government can do anything about, it is a direct consequence of technological progress.
In less than 25 years, and quite possibly in less than 10, this is going to be obvious to everybody. It's being hidden right now because of the effects of trade globalization (another NECESSARY consequence
I'm doing pretty good positioning myself for the lackey class, in my humble opinion. So you're not doing that good, eh? Well, better get on it then, you don't really have all that much time left.
Hey kids, if you liked Sovereign Individual, you'll love Ian Angell,
.sig file :)
Damn rights. Mod this bitch up! Lots of great ones in that link. This is my fave:
But in the Information Age, governments chosen by the majority are governments chosen by losers.
That goes RIGHT into the
It may seem silly, but I'm getting really tired of books with "Bible" in the title
... you do realize that "Bible" is just a borrowing from Greek of 'biblia'? If translators weren't idiots, it would be called "The Book".
... English has lots of funky words for "book" :)
Ummmm
Although I also wish people would be a bit more creative in titling. 'Tome', 'Grimoire', 'Vade-mecum'
Female Merc in the 1470's? Bullshit!
:) Viking lines of battle were often anchored by lines of shieldmaidens. Stabbing spears poking out from shieldwalls aren't particularly valiant or odeworthy, and don't require a particularly notable amount of strength ... but they are very effective.
:) The Amazons were foot archers, as much as what Amazons actually were can be pulled out of the myths; many of the Central Asian steppe tribes used women (and children) as horse archers, Samartians most notably; Chinese had women crossbow regiments; it seems the Incans had women sling corps, but we don't really know enough about them to be sure of that. Et cetera.
:)
No, just unusual. Perhaps you have heard of a little teenybopper named "Joan of Arc" for instance?
Women didn't do combat. Why? Women were not strong enough.
You should go through the Norse sagas to find some striking counterexamples. However, Teutonic women are a special case, as any of you who have visited Nordic countries probably know already
Valkryies aside, effective women warriors have historically been archers, as any reasonably strong woman can pull a bow of the rather pathetic draws that historical bows were capable of handling. Also, being a good archer requires a lot more training and discipline than a footsoldier while being less individually glorious, which traits are more often to be found acceptable by women than macho male warriors, oddly enough
The reason there aren't more examples to draw from is that historically most cultures were not on a constant war footing and thus women could be relegated to babymaking and surplus male population to warmaking. In cultures where everyone had to fight, women were vital components of the order of battle in some position where their average lack of upper body strength wasn't particularly relevant.
And, to step away from direct combat, female ninjas were actually more prevalent and dreaded than male ninjas, contrary to current movie mythology; there are several recorded instances of ninja geishas with their koshigatanas taking out multiple samurai. Ninja geishas. Mmmmmm. Mmmmm.
And you explain the success of Robert Jordan's godawful shit how?
Hey, the first book was excellent. The next two or three were pretty good as well.
They really have become quite pathetic since, I agree. It's just a collection of short stories now rather than any kind of compelling narrative.
Alternate history (vikings, 10th century).
Um, actually, it's hardly alternate at all. A lot of Civil War etc. novels that are generally labelled 'historical' play far faster and looser with actual events than H&C did.
So ugly a book is GRUNTS, so much "in the spirit of Mordor" to quote a friend of mine, that I wasn't able to read more than a page or two of THE SECRET HISTORY before my simmering antipathy towards Gentle came to the surface.
Heh, now here's a same planet different worlds scenario. Not being a lame-ass whimpering uptight git like yourself, I thought GRUNTS! just fucking ROCKED.
"Pass me another elf, this one's split..."
All baiting aside, Mary is actually quite a nice person and GRUNTS! is parody. You know, humour? Like, a fucking joke?
(Of course, people who have actually been in war zones say that it's the most accurate portray of how real soldiers behave that they've ever seen in literature, so maybe it's not actually all THAT funny...)
Now crummy waiters act as if they're entitled to 15% gratuity.
... if you wish them to refrain from spitting in your food next time you're there.
Well they are
and full-service fueling
Really? I never realized one was supposed to, I had the impression the more expensive cost of the gas was supposed to cover their wages. How much do you tip?
Does everyone else but me tip gas jockeys too?
Coffee takes a good half hour to an hour to kick in fully.
Crunch it dry. Hits you within a minute that way.
And you do? All I've seen you do is regurgitate some comments from a "buddy" of yours who is doing PS2 development.
... I think I have their economics of development down pretty well after that experience. You're free to disagree, of course.
... for a little while.
*shrug* I did an evaluation for his shop on how much time and money it would take to get their line onto the Mac OS platform
Your "buddy" obviously has a stake in seeing the PS2 succeed...
Nope -- PS2 T&L are going to be in maintenance mode in a couple months, so he's looking for new interesting work, actually. This is why I think his evaluation of tying his star to the Xbox is to be considered with some seriousness.
I don't care about API's. I don't care about any other developer nonsense. I all care about is games. And I suspect they will be there.
Well, the important thing that you should worry about then is called "Return on Investment". And that depends on game sales, which depends on platform adoption, which depends on games produced, which depends on big game makers having confidence in the platform.
Or, of course, MSFT just throwing around loads of cash. It's easy to buy friends
The divergence at the API level should be small and manageable....A common ancestry is a lot better from a developer's point of view than no commonality at all.
... the _real_ costs in game development these days are the graphic work. Now, PC models at the time will have how many polygons compared to the Xbox? The correct answer here is "many, many, more".
... naaaaah. So common development gives you a really lame PC game. Ummmm ... that won't cut it.
Now, not meaning to flame you here really, but you don't understand game development at a big shop.
The games are written to internal APIs, and it's the job of the T&L teams to make sure those APIs work the same on every platform. There are large efficiencies there between PC and Xbox, yes.
HOWEVER
As my buddy put it, getting artists to render in different palettes for different platforms is hard enough. Getting them to do two completely different levels of design detail, for every rev of a Xbox/PC game
Nope, common development is just a nice theory. If there's more than a handful of games that actually end up being done that way, I will be shocked.
Micron's always displayed a fair bit of spunk for a RAM maker, especially when somebody disses them but also when they see a chance to put the boot in.
:)
This ought to be very interesting
This is yet another story that Doesn't Get It.
... putting that into perspective, do you *really* believe the hype in this article?
I was talking with a buddy who does PS2 stuff at EA about this, and he pointed out that all this stuff about Xbox being a good console compatible with PC platforms is nonsense.
Is MSFT going to stop improving PC APIs all of a sudden when Xbox comes out? Are card makers going to stop improving their video cards? No? Well then. How long are the platforms ACTUALLY going to remain compatible?
Six months at most is what he gives it, which sounds not unreasonable. That means your window for doing combined Xbox/PC development is one year, at the outside, starting right about now.
And when you take that away, what's the Xbox? A pretty good gaming PC, for now. A mediocre gaming PC, when it comes out, not really up to the consoles that will be out at the time like the Dolphin, er, GameCube. And in another six months, a legacy platform.
Now
i don't get it. how is the GPL limiting one's freedoms?
... and to maintain that certification, the GC's control protocols may not be publicly disclosed. Which open sourcing the code in any fashion would do, in their opinion.
... the GPL here is limiting my freedom to make the best free as in beer program I can from publicly available source code, which means that the pilot community doesn't have as good a free resource as they would otherwise. Nobody at FAI gives a flying fuck about computers, never mind Open Source, there is no way that going to the trouble of changing this would ever get on the agenda in the foreseeable future.
Practical example:
I have this logbook program which connects Ball GC varios with Macintoshes.
There's a number of pieces of GPL code it would be rather nifty to work into this program. But I can't, because the GC is officially certified as an Acceptable Recording Instrument for the purpose of proving FAI world record claims
Yes, they're stupid. No, I cannot change the FAI's mind even if I was idiotic enough to try. So I can use BSD code, public domain code, whatever, and provide a free as in beer program like I am. It would be a better free as in beer program if I could use GPL code, but I can't because the FAI are morons.
Sooo
And who exactly is benefiting? Nobody I can see.
Western-Canadian(I assume) Guy,
... 3%. And almost half of those are in Ontario.
How many other "Vancouver"s in Canada are there, brainiac?
There are 1 million French-speakers in Canada who don't live in Quebec.
Latest numbers up at StatsCan say 930,000 and change, but even giving you the benefit of the doubt, that's out of 21.5 million Canadians outside Quebec. That works out to
3% is "nonentity" in my books, bucko. And no other province outside Ontario is anywhere near to even that.
You either a) don't know what a "creole" is
"a language formed from the contact of a European language (esp. English, French, or Portuguese) with another (esp. African) language."
-- Concise Oxford
Get a dictionary and a clue, dumbass.
Noone in either country genuinely thinks the other is speaking a creole.
*snicker*
Do we have any Parisiennes here to bitchslap this deluded loser?
(Those of you who this is all going past: Frenchmen in France regard Quebecois as barely a step above the French spoken by Algerians. No matter what defensive boy here would like to fool himself into thinking.)
When referring to your nationality it sounds awkward to me to omit the article ("un")...I could be mistaken of course
:)
There's no problem with that, any more than there is omitting it in English.
"Tu" and "Te" would both be translated into english as "you", but they are different. Unfortunately I lack the grammar lingo to explain the difference.
Tu == subject. Te == object. Yes, it's more complicated than that, but let's start simple