I happen to be in the middle of playing one of his games (Geneforge 5) and I'm really impressed. The crappy graphics took an hour or so to get used to, but the complexity of the world and faction system makes the game worth playing. You really feel torn between the ideals of the different factions, and get to know the personalities of the major players. I think it compares quite favorably to modern big-budget games in that regard. Also the fighting mechanics were solid and didn't get in the way of gameplay.
There's a summary and apology now on their site and it's linked from the front page (albeit not in huge letters). I'm not saying this is good enough, just providing an update.
Americans, by and large, are religious, willfully ignorant, and ruled by fear.
Wow, nicely done. Regardless of whether that is true or not, you just managed to get a +5 post by slamming, without citing any evidence, the whole people of a country. I wonder if it's possible if it's possible to get a +5 by insulting any other country (e.g., all Serbians are asses, etc.).
The great-great-grandparent post was talking about how government does everything for us, and corporations are worthless. So it's worth mentioning that your post equally shows that it's impossible to get away from the the U.S. government anywhere on earth. In your examples it's the U.S. government (CIA and military) that is intervening directly.
What's obvious is that government is the same way---policitians aren't my friends, they're not doing it "for me"; they're out for themselves just like corporations. That doesn't mean both government and corporations can't be harnessed for good.
You'd probably say "government has checks, that makes them better". How well are those checks working now? Most of the evil stuff corporations do (e.g. huge taxpayer subsidies/bailouts, state-inforced monopolies like with patents) is actually government evil. If government truly were controlled, corporations wouldn't be nearly as bad.
Why is western society obsessed with mathematics, deluded into thinking it's useful in general, and why are people so stressed over learning this useless and dryly-presented subject?
Math is useful in general. And western society doesn't just stress about learning math. An even greater number are probably stressed about passing english tests. Society thinks language and math are important to education; your basket-weaving and sculpture not so much. I personally don't see the problem with this.
Go ahead, people, cheer for the corporations. None of them are doing anything for you.
I agree with the other reply-ers who have gotten modded to oblivion. This is obviously a dumb statement. No corporation has done anything for us?? That's an ironic statement coming from someone using a computer to post to Slashdot. I'm glad the ol government made all that happen for you.
Sorry, but that's a bad idea. What if companies and business don't get rights, no big deal right?
But what happens when a newspaper or TV show publishes a piece attacking a powerful politician? No right to free speech for that company, so the politician just shuts down the paper or station Venezuela-style.
Or what happens when the local mayor comes by to shake down your family business for campaign contributions and you don't donate? No right to due process, so he fines your business for "health code violations".
And while we're in science-land, we probably can explain how heavier-than-air molecules are supposedly floating in the upper levels of the atmosphere for extended amounts of time while preventing the oh-so-precious heat loss of our planet.
Exactly, everyone except global warming conspiracists know that heavy objects and gasses sink! Unfortunately I'm at sea level, and nitrogen is lighter than oxygen. I would help you debunk their theories except I'm obviously breathing 100% nitrogen and am about to
Exactly, flash is the least consistent program in my experience. On my computer it randomly crashes about 50% of the time—it's the only program I use that crashes frequently.
If you even read the grandparent post you would have seen that the suggestion is to use rsync. And yes, you do get multiple full filesystem trees (but with hardlinking for deduplication).
Changes in permissions/mtimes/atimes corrupting all your old backups because all of them are hard linked, or alternatively
Changes in permissions/mtimes/atimes causing an entire file to get copied
There are also other things to worry about. To be fair, the guy who invented --link-dest wrote a backup program called Dirvish so that is a better comparison to rdiff-backup.
I see a lot of posts bashing people for being idiots, and I'm sure that's often the case, but IMHO there are some big problems with statistics itself.
The most common school is the "classical" school, which is extremely counterintuitive. For instance, most people think that if a 95% confidence interval is 5 to 10, then the parameter has a 95% chance of being between 5 to 10. This would be true with Bayesian statistics, but exactly backwards for classical statistics. For classical statistics, it's that your 5 to 10 interval has a 95% chance of being around the parameter! This is a subtle difference that most statisticians don't even understand, and it screws up almost everyone. Furthermore the classical statement is much less useful than the intuitive statement that people think it is.
Relatedly, other schools which make more sense such as Bayesianism and likelihoodism aren't taught. Furthemore, nonparametric statistics are usually not taught to undergrads (unless they are statistics majors probably). In the real world, non-parametric statistics are often more useful because no parametric model is actually true (for instance, basic regression assumes that the Truth is in your model, and it almost never is).
Finally, a lot of statistics as it is normally taught depends on the central limit theorem. Any result that depends on the central limit theorem (or the law of large numbers) is often useless in real applications due to data poverty. The basic reason is that the average of i.i.d. random variables only converges to a normal distribution as 1/sqrt(n). Everyone knows this, and it's obvious that something that converges to 1/sqrt(n) is much much slower than the typical 1/n convergence, but people still rely on the central limit theorem.
Statistics is changing slowly (mostly because computers and R make non-classical statistics more practical) but the way it's taught still leads to problems.
Yep, Slashdot is full of the same people, like the +5 comment above that says "If you can't figure out how to make money, that's your problem." But isn't it his problem too if all the sites he's ad blocking go out of business? I guess that thought is too complicated for most people; they assume that all these sites that "deserve to fail" will magically be around forever for them to leech off of.
It's not just the ink---a very complex PDF on the Kindle can take up to 30 seconds to display. I'd like a PDF reader with a more expensive (much faster) processor, not a cheaper and slower one.
FOV settings, the fov is related to the distance to the viewer. On a PC, people is near the screen, so the FOV sould be higuer, is just a number, but even 90 million dollars videogames forget to change it on the PC.
This is my biggest pet peeve and a total mystery to me. For most games that don't adjust the FOV (causing nausea in lots of people BTW), you can google to find a hack on some forums. Usually it works fine after changing, as you said, a single number in an.ini file. How can you spend millions on a port and not change a single number?
As people have pointed out before, this system may have already been co-opted by spammers and such, but I like the idea of being connected to people at random. The internet was supposed to have broadened everyone's horizons by allowing communication between people of different countries, backgrounds, etc. But then everyone just found the people who reinforce their pre-existing opinions. So sure, I'm talking with someone around the world, but we're both, say, talking about linux wifi drivers and complaining about the same company. It's arguably worse for political thought, where either corporations control mainstream thought, and/or conspiracy theorists only pay attention to the one blog with the same conspiracies.
People need more opportunities for true randomness, where they actually do sample evenly from the world's population and interact with someone.
But then, the true measure of success is whether it can generate enough revenue to continue existing anyway. From the begging I've been seeing on the pages recently, I'm not sure if that's the case.
The ability to generate revenue is only necessary for a very superficial type of success. I think your attitude is caused by laissez faire capitalism—the idea that the market is perfect so any contribution that adds value will be rewarded commensurately.
But this economics only works for traditional (excludable,
rivalrous) goods like wagon wheels. It doesn't work at all for public
goods like technology, ideas, culture, etc—most of the stuff
that actually improves the world permanently. There are tons of
examples (for instance Telsa died poor after inventing the induction
motor and a thousand other things).
Anyway, wikipedia=public good. For public goods, ability to
generate revenue has nothing to do with success or value.
On the DX bookmarks work in the sense that you can mark specific pages and return to them easily. However, I'm not sure how those bookmarks are stored. So if you add bookmarks to a PDF and then copy it from the Kindle, I'm not sure how to view those bookmarks on a computer.
Annotations don't work at all on PDFs as far as I can tell. But given the very limited nature of the Kindle keyboard, this isn't much of a loss. I don't use annotations with books in native formats either.
It's expensive, but if you can afford it (or get it as a gift like I did), it's quite nice. The big screen (9.7in, 824x1200px) makes reading PDFs easier than the other readers I've tried. It's really impractical to read normal PDFs on a 6" screen. Also, you can plug it into a computer and use it like any other USB storage device. In theory it has DRM, but I mainly use it to read PDFs (e.g. journal articles). Finally, it has wireless access at no additional charge. As long as you don't actually buy DRM'd books through Amazon, what's not to like?
In that "Quality of Life" page you linked to, the U.S. was always (slightly) above Canada, which I thought was weird and a bit funny. Anyway, in all of those statistics (except for Life Expectancy, which is presumably caused by the dysfunctional U.S. health care system), the U.S. is doing very well. Just because it's not about Luxembourg doesn't prove the U.S.'s economic system is inferior.
The U.S. is also doing much better than any similarly-sized country. If you put the individual states of the U.S. in those lists they would probably dominate the top 20. Anyway I don't necessarily disagree with your points but those links don't support them at all.
America is over? What does that even mean, that all Americans are going to die tomorrow? Is Britain/China/<other once-leading country> over?
It's also ironic that you were teaching in an American university complaining about how all Americans are libertarians. I'm sure a large portion of your salary was paid for by taxpayers. The university system is a good example of government-funded basic research where American still has an edge on other countries.
There are other measures that can be enacted to improve airline safety even further, and if it saves even one life, we should enact them, too. It's unacceptable that anyone should die as a result of anything they do.
Right on, one simple measure is to have all the seats face backwards. People have known that this arrangement is much safer for around 50 years but nothing is done. So much for safety being the top priority.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to be in the middle of playing one of his games (Geneforge 5) and I'm really impressed. The crappy graphics took an hour or so to get used to, but the complexity of the world and faction system makes the game worth playing. You really feel torn between the ideals of the different factions, and get to know the personalities of the major players. I think it compares quite favorably to modern big-budget games in that regard. Also the fighting mechanics were solid and didn't get in the way of gameplay.
There's a summary and apology now on their site and it's linked from the front page (albeit not in huge letters). I'm not saying this is good enough, just providing an update.
Wow, nicely done. Regardless of whether that is true or not, you just managed to get a +5 post by slamming, without citing any evidence, the whole people of a country. I wonder if it's possible if it's possible to get a +5 by insulting any other country (e.g., all Serbians are asses, etc.).
Anything that increases compound bow or crossbow homicides can't be bad.
The great-great-grandparent post was talking about how government does everything for us, and corporations are worthless. So it's worth mentioning that your post equally shows that it's impossible to get away from the the U.S. government anywhere on earth. In your examples it's the U.S. government (CIA and military) that is intervening directly.
What's obvious is that government is the same way---policitians aren't my friends, they're not doing it "for me"; they're out for themselves just like corporations. That doesn't mean both government and corporations can't be harnessed for good.
You'd probably say "government has checks, that makes them better". How well are those checks working now? Most of the evil stuff corporations do (e.g. huge taxpayer subsidies/bailouts, state-inforced monopolies like with patents) is actually government evil. If government truly were controlled, corporations wouldn't be nearly as bad.
Math is useful in general. And western society doesn't just stress about learning math. An even greater number are probably stressed about passing english tests. Society thinks language and math are important to education; your basket-weaving and sculpture not so much. I personally don't see the problem with this.
I agree with the other reply-ers who have gotten modded to oblivion. This is obviously a dumb statement. No corporation has done anything for us?? That's an ironic statement coming from someone using a computer to post to Slashdot. I'm glad the ol government made all that happen for you.
Sorry, but that's a bad idea. What if companies and business don't get rights, no big deal right?
But what happens when a newspaper or TV show publishes a piece attacking a powerful politician? No right to free speech for that company, so the politician just shuts down the paper or station Venezuela-style.
Or what happens when the local mayor comes by to shake down your family business for campaign contributions and you don't donate? No right to due process, so he fines your business for "health code violations".
But for some reason random data testing is less popular for the other languages I'm familiar with.
And while we're in science-land, we probably can explain how heavier-than-air molecules are supposedly floating in the upper levels of the atmosphere for extended amounts of time while preventing the oh-so-precious heat loss of our planet.
Exactly, everyone except global warming conspiracists know that heavy objects and gasses sink! Unfortunately I'm at sea level, and nitrogen is lighter than oxygen. I would help you debunk their theories except I'm obviously breathing 100% nitrogen and am about to
Exactly, flash is the least consistent program in my experience. On my computer it randomly crashes about 50% of the time—it's the only program I use that crashes frequently.
If you even read the grandparent post you would have seen that the suggestion is to use rsync. And yes, you do get multiple full filesystem trees (but with hardlinking for deduplication).
There are also other things to worry about. To be fair, the guy who invented --link-dest wrote a backup program called Dirvish so that is a better comparison to rdiff-backup.
Statistics is changing slowly (mostly because computers and R make non-classical statistics more practical) but the way it's taught still leads to problems.
Yep, Slashdot is full of the same people, like the +5 comment above that says "If you can't figure out how to make money, that's your problem." But isn't it his problem too if all the sites he's ad blocking go out of business? I guess that thought is too complicated for most people; they assume that all these sites that "deserve to fail" will magically be around forever for them to leech off of.
It's not just the ink---a very complex PDF on the Kindle can take up to 30 seconds to display. I'd like a PDF reader with a more expensive (much faster) processor, not a cheaper and slower one.
This is my biggest pet peeve and a total mystery to me. For most games that don't adjust the FOV (causing nausea in lots of people BTW), you can google to find a hack on some forums. Usually it works fine after changing, as you said, a single number in an .ini file. How can you spend millions on a port and not change a single number?
As people have pointed out before, this system may have already been co-opted by spammers and such, but I like the idea of being connected to people at random. The internet was supposed to have broadened everyone's horizons by allowing communication between people of different countries, backgrounds, etc. But then everyone just found the people who reinforce their pre-existing opinions. So sure, I'm talking with someone around the world, but we're both, say, talking about linux wifi drivers and complaining about the same company. It's arguably worse for political thought, where either corporations control mainstream thought, and/or conspiracy theorists only pay attention to the one blog with the same conspiracies.
People need more opportunities for true randomness, where they actually do sample evenly from the world's population and interact with someone.
The ability to generate revenue is only necessary for a very superficial type of success. I think your attitude is caused by laissez faire capitalism—the idea that the market is perfect so any contribution that adds value will be rewarded commensurately.
But this economics only works for traditional (excludable, rivalrous) goods like wagon wheels. It doesn't work at all for public goods like technology, ideas, culture, etc—most of the stuff that actually improves the world permanently. There are tons of examples (for instance Telsa died poor after inventing the induction motor and a thousand other things).
Anyway, wikipedia=public good. For public goods, ability to generate revenue has nothing to do with success or value.
On the DX bookmarks work in the sense that you can mark specific pages and return to them easily. However, I'm not sure how those bookmarks are stored. So if you add bookmarks to a PDF and then copy it from the Kindle, I'm not sure how to view those bookmarks on a computer.
Annotations don't work at all on PDFs as far as I can tell. But given the very limited nature of the Kindle keyboard, this isn't much of a loss. I don't use annotations with books in native formats either.
It's expensive, but if you can afford it (or get it as a gift like I did), it's quite nice. The big screen (9.7in, 824x1200px) makes reading PDFs easier than the other readers I've tried. It's really impractical to read normal PDFs on a 6" screen. Also, you can plug it into a computer and use it like any other USB storage device. In theory it has DRM, but I mainly use it to read PDFs (e.g. journal articles). Finally, it has wireless access at no additional charge. As long as you don't actually buy DRM'd books through Amazon, what's not to like?
In that "Quality of Life" page you linked to, the U.S. was always (slightly) above Canada, which I thought was weird and a bit funny. Anyway, in all of those statistics (except for Life Expectancy, which is presumably caused by the dysfunctional U.S. health care system), the U.S. is doing very well. Just because it's not about Luxembourg doesn't prove the U.S.'s economic system is inferior.
The U.S. is also doing much better than any similarly-sized country. If you put the individual states of the U.S. in those lists they would probably dominate the top 20. Anyway I don't necessarily disagree with your points but those links don't support them at all.
America is over? What does that even mean, that all Americans are going to die tomorrow? Is Britain/China/<other once-leading country> over?
It's also ironic that you were teaching in an American university complaining about how all Americans are libertarians. I'm sure a large portion of your salary was paid for by taxpayers. The university system is a good example of government-funded basic research where American still has an edge on other countries.
Right on, one simple measure is to have all the seats face backwards. People have known that this arrangement is much safer for around 50 years but nothing is done. So much for safety being the top priority.