Symantec and other anti-virus manufacturers would probably find it in their best interest to write viruses themselves. If they can figure out the newest, best ways of doing things, then they can heuristically detect viruses that use them, even if it's not the exact same virus.
In fact, they already do this and admit to it... if you read most virus reports (not the big ones, obviously), including this one, they say something like "occurrences in wild: 0". In this case, it's "0 - 49", which probably means "0" or "we slipped and it got on somebody's workstation for an hour".
If the viruses aren't being found in the wild, where do you think they're coming from? From their labs, of course - so they can study the techniques of virus authors. It doesn't require a conspiracy theory, just common sense.
Re:One argument for the GPL and against "look alik
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You're absolutely right - except I still must disagree with you on the last bit.
Anarcho-capitalists claim the contract between individuals to be sacred, no matter the terms and conditions. Thus, one really could "sell oneself into slavery". Technically, somebody who makes this decision (or is coerced into making this decision) and then attempts to assert sovereignty over his or her own life *is* breaking the terms of the contract.
A jury of peers (9 out of 10 on average being anarcho-capitalists) would if being ethically consistent (I realize that in reality some people would vote inconsistently on this case because of the nature of it, but this is just an example) return the slave to his or her owner.
The thing with "wage slavery" is, somebody who quits his job is usually still unable to make his own decisions regarding his life -- he still feels that he has to find a job *somewhere*, earning money for somebody else, getting little respect from his superior, and receiving meager pay (in comparison with the boss).
Even if it's not precisely true (you *could* go join a hippie commune or do math tutoring out of your home or sell homemade jewelry or something), the point being made is that the individual is a slave in his own mind -- he believes strongly that the only way to "make a living" is to feed the ambitions of somebody higher up on the social scale than himself.
As for the risks being faced in today's society, most people would consider being homeless and starving to death as penalties. Again, doesn't mean they're correct, just that they have been indoctrinated with that mindset practically since they were able to understand spoken language.
I agree there should be a better word for it, but it is difficult to replace one word with another in popular language (everybody knows what you mean when you say "wage slavery", nobody will understand the first time they hear "wage brainwashing" or whatever is decided on).
I haven't had a good debate in a long time - this is fun! Thank you very much for the opportunity!:)
I agree with your loop remark at the bottom there:)
But I still think that being whisked away from sudden death at the bottom of a long fall is more exciting than looking down for a third of a second and then gradually tilting back from vertical to become level. If a momentary force of four, five or even six gravities is going to be felt after the sudden swoop upward, well that's just the price I'm going to pay because otherwise the ride certainly wasn't interesting enough for me to wait in line for.
Re:One argument for the GPL and against "look alik
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Debian And WineX
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mmmm, close - I'll give you 7 out of 10:)
In a true anarchy, it would work this way - the differences between the varieties of anarchy is that their ideologies make the formation of certain types of society easier or more difficult (just like any other set of rules, an ethical code makes certain things easier and others more difficult).
The main reason that anarcho-capitalists are *not* the same thing as anarcho-socialists is the same reason that capitalism is *not* socialism. (Remember your Rand - "A is A - A is never not A")
One views class differences as a good thing, the other views them as a bad thing.
In an anarcho-socialist society, the anarcho-capitalist would have a difficult time finding workers for his company (it couldn't be a corporation, since those are legally defined by the government) -- no anarcho-socialist would willingly place someone else into power over himself (thus casting himself as a lower class of citizen). The act of employment in itself creates a caste difference. Now you have two groups of citizens -- "workers" and "bosses". The workers work to make the bosses more money and the bosses reap the benefits of the workers' effort, meanwhile holding the threat of unemployment over the heads of their employees. Obviously, this situation would seem untenable to many anarcho-socialists, therefore there would not be many willing workers for the bosses to exploit.
Meanwhile, in an anarcho-capitalist society, the anarcho-socialist would face dificulties of a different nature. This would be like the current "GPL in a world of capitalists" era. The "bosses" in a capitalist society would obviously have no desire to work on an equal level with everyone else in a syndicate. The "workers" may initially flock over, but market conditions would be difficult for the less rapacious syndicate to sell its goods in. Firstly, the marketing of the products would not be as coercive as the marketing for the capitalist-produced products, capitalists having no problem with coercion as long as it is not carried out in the name of the state. Since the products will not sell as well, there will be a fewer number of workers supported than in an ideal situation (although more than an equivalently funded capitalist company, since there is no "boss" to soak up a huge salary at the expense of paychecks for workers).
Again, nobody will explicitly try to force anyone to stop on either side, but the conditions of the society's prevailing ethical structure definitely create a situation more conducive to one type of workplace than another.
"Selling yourself into slavery" is a commonly used analogy only because it's a very good one -- there's a reason that working for a capitalist boss is known as "wage slavery", after all.:)
Re:One argument for the GPL and against "look alik
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Debian And WineX
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· Score: 1
BSD would be the anarcho-capitalists, while GPL would be the anarcho-socialists.
Anarcho-capitalists claim that men must have the freedom to sell themselves into slavery if they wish (if you can't do anything you want it's not freedom!).
Anarcho-socialists say that any such agreement must not be binding, because it creates a limit on mankind's freedom by its very nature (can you sell your descendants into slavery as well? can you coerce somebody to become a slave?).
For arguments on the anarcho-capitalist side, check Ayn Rand and her fan club (the Ayn Rand Institute).
Here's a good argument on the anarcho-socialist side: http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secFcon.html
The very factors you list as entertaining *require* a certain level of acceleration to be viable.
Being upside-down can't happen for very long in a traditional (wheels under the car, no other means of attaching to the rail) coaster. It is required to switch back and forth, or corkscrew -- each change in velocity (direction is a part of velocity as well as speed) implies a change in acceleration.
Free-fall is the other big one you mentioned. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that if you like free-fall, you'll like a longer sustained duration of free-fall even more. Free-falling for 1/2 a second won't give you as much of a rush as free-fall for 3 seconds, right?
Well, at some point the free-fall has to end in a curve upwards (unless you like to hit the ground at the end of your fall - I don't). This curve is a change in velocity and acceleration which is measured as a scalar of G. A more gradual curve may pull 1.5 G, while a more sudden change in direction (which is more thrilling because the rider feels that he/she has been saved from death by a split second) will assert more force - in the vicinity of 4 or 5 G.
You can't rationalize physics away - if you take away more powerful G forces, you *do* by necessity reduce how thrilling the ride is.
> most of us have the skills to decide if a food preparation place is hygenically adequate
This isn't really true. There are lots of vectors for harmful bacteria that the average person who ooks at home is unaware of. In general, only trained food-service professionals are aware of cross-contamination, for example.
Cross-contamination occurs when two different types of meat come into contact with one another. For instance, seafood and beef. Shellfish harbor a symbiotic bacterium (like the ones in our intestines) that becomes virulent when it feeds on beef protein. This is why restaurants have color-coded cutting boards. (the blue one for fish, red for beef, yellow for poultry, etc...). Storage of the meat can also be a factor - seafood should never be placed above beef in a storage area.
If you knew about that already, then my hat is off to you! I only learned about it day before yesterday from my landlady (who runs a meat packing plant).
My point was that only trained professionals truly have the knowledge to judge whether practices in any profession are really safe or not.
It's at 80% efficiency, which is pretty good. That means it only loses 20% of the energy as waste heat (which isn't recovered). The rest of it is recoverable. You never gain energy, the best you can do is only lose a little bit, and that's what they're talking about. This device loses less energy than a refrigerator or a Peltier unit.
You must be American. Most countries in the world slready teach children to read and speak English in schools. Only in America is it natural for people to grow up speaking only the mother tongue, n'est-ce pas?
Also, the open source documentation that I have read in languages other than English far surpasses the quality of translated MSDN documentation.
The amount of "mucking about" that Linux requires to run "properly" depends on your personal value of "properly" - I'm more or less happy with Mandrake or Red Hat out of the box. If I were installing Windows, I would have to install many third-party utilities (Windowblinds, Litestep, XMouse, Mozilla...) before my desktop acheived a state consistent with my value of "running properly".
What school was this? Most universities are more than happy to take on a homeschooled undergrad, because they know it makes them look better to have smarter people in the school:)
My homeschooled girlfriend got a 1440 on her SAT I; no college that she's talked to (VCU, Virginia Tech, MIT) seems to think that homeschooling put her at a disadvantage - in fact, quite the contrary!
Your argument that people need direction to learn things like higher math is also false, by the way - I have taught myself linear algebra and methods of using quaternions (four-dimensional vectors) to represent an orientation in space. I am also going back and relearning much of what I was taught in high school about history and politics from the ground up because much of it appears to be patently untrue or misconstrued. Original sources are your friends!
Nobody needs to be *forced* to learn - they only need to be coerced if you are attempting to brainwash them to follow orders without question (something the public school system is quite good at doing). My kids will *definitely* be homeschooled.
Read "The Underground History of Education" by John Taylor Gatto (New York State Teacher of the Year), and also "A People's History of the United States" (don't know the authors). Broaden your horizons.:)
One recommendation - when you read something in the rulebook that doesn't make sense or seems to conflict with Roger Zelazny's presentation of things, stop reading the rulebook, think it through yourself and play it by ear if necessary:)
I found a bunch of places like that in my copy... But I've got the second edition - there might be a 3rd edition out by now that fixes some of it.
As an example of what I'm talking about, one of the examples it gives of why a high Warfare score is good is Benedict supposedly being able to parry a sword thrust by an invisible attacker that he wasn't warned of? Come on, he *did* get his arm cut off twice in the series didn't he? He's the best out there, but he's not omnipotent!
Also, the artifact point system is totally fucked. Just because beginning players might *want* something like Grayswandir or Ghostwheel does *not* mean you should give it to them! And certainly not for only 12 points!!
Aside from things like that, the basic premise of the game system is very solid. If you're playing with "traditionalist" AD&D types, you might want to devise a dice-based combat system though, because otherwise it becomes basically "the player can get out of any situation because he only has to keep track of what one person is doing whereas the GM has to keep track of 20, and the player will argue that he should have been able to dodge that".
Sorry, I phrased that poorly -- I didn't mean the brain was hardwired by the time you're 16:)
I meant that the connections by which one learns new things are pretty well ingrained by that time and the rate/quality of learning only decreases after that. Thus, you're about as intelligent as you ever will be (which is certainly *not* to say the same thing as that you have learned all that you ever will -- I know I didn't know anything about linear algebra when I was 16, and I certainly didn't know enough calculus...).
Sorry about the hostile nature of the earlier post, it just felt like you were attacking the people who legitimately did it to get their scholarship. I apologize if I misunderstood.
A 16 year old person is probably about as intellectually mature as they're going to get. Their brains are pretty hardwired by that time as to what manner in which they learn and stuff like that. If it's meant to be challenging to a 16 year old, then it's meant to be challenging to an adult (16-year olds *are* adults, but that's another topic altogether).
The reason it isn't a huge deal to have solved it is because it wasn't meant to be *that* challenging -- they expected lots of people to solve it (and 100 did).
If it were targeted toward 6-9 year olds, then your statement would have more validity. As it is, you sound like you've got sour grapes because you coldn't figure it out, and so you're trying to denigrate not only the people who posted the answer, but the original class of people it was aimed towards.
OpenGL 1.2 came out before Windows 98 did... OpenGL 1.3 is the current standard....
But Microsoft *still* ships OpenGL 1.1 with each of their operating systems -- Windows XP still uses the same version of OpenGL as Windows 95, even though OpenGL 1.3 is vastly improved...
They basically only include it right now as a token show of compatibility - they don't care about how usable it is. This just means they don't have to bother anymore.
He claims DOS had a better way of organizing applications. This is a red herring. I don't want to organize my applications. Ever. I want to organize my data. I don't remember many applications in DOS that were compatible with the same type of data. If there had been, the limitations of the DOS structure would have been readily made apparent. First, CD into the directory where your audio recording utility is and make a.wav file. Then, move the.wav file into the directory where your audio editing utility is and edit it. It works, but why not keep the data in one place and run programs on it as you see fit without regard for their location on your hard drive, and without having a 10-second seek through your PATH variable?
Besides which, DOS had c:\msdos50 (or whichever version you used). That was DOS's variation on/bin. Ever look in that directory and attempt to hand-reduce the number of binaries in it to save disk space? I did. A package management system would have made that doable.
You can have all the localized application directories you want in/usr/local. The point of/usr/local is to hold larger packages which are local to the system. (hmm.../usr/local/games/UnrealTournament,/usr/local/games/Quake3,/usr/local/games/Terminus,/usr/local/games/RT2...) And as a bonus, thanks to the miracle of symbolic links you can have your cake and eat it too - as long as the application knows where the data files are installed you can make a symlink of the binary to/usr/local/bin and run it without editing your PATH variable too! Isn't UNIX grand?
> P.S. For all you "liberals" out there I am not in fact a Republican. I'm proud to be a Libertarian.
Heh - it always amuses me when people with a reactionary mindset call themselves liberals. There aren't any true liberals in the U.S. political system today. I applaud the strategic use of sarcasm quotes:)
I personally call myself a liberal, then get offended when people ask if I'm a Democrat, and take the time to explain to them what the word liberal actually means:)
Everybody has something to hide... under the right circumstances.
These circumstances are bring dictated by people at whim. Are you aware that in many states (assuming you are a U.S. citizen) sodomy is illegal? If you send an email to your wife talking about the blowjob she gave you last night, and the feds (in a hypothetical, strung-out situation, yes, but this makes it totally possible) decide to actually *enforce* that law, well, they know where to pick you and your wife up.
Do you trust the government not to blackmail you with your political affiliations? What if you visited a communist-owned website to get your news this morning? What if you donated money to the Libertarian Party, and the Republicans don't like that? Maybe the Libertarians are now defined as a "terrorist organization" -- after all, they avow support for all Americans to keep and bear deadly firearms! They're obviously just waiting for the signal from their cell leader to take out government officials!
History has proven again and again that people in power will stop progressing, and instead turn more and more of their energy to keeping themselves in power and acquiring more of it. We don't have to make it any easier for them.
e-mail and task/calendar/whatnot client: Easy - Evolution.
sendmail, imap, ldap - since when are these setup on the desktop? I would love to see you point out to me how your windows ME or 2K workstation doubles as a mail and address book server for your whole company while you are doing your accounting or whatever. That's the whole point of *client/server* -- see, you have servers... and then you have clients. The "clients" connect to the servers to access the "services" that these so-called "servers" are "serving".
Domain logons? What are you really using them for? To provide access to certain file shares for certain users? Just use NFS. Or SAMBA or Appletalk for all I care - the point is that each of these things can be configured to provide the same functionality domain logons provide, and configured for more security if necessary.
Firewall on the desktop? Why would you want such a thing? Firewall as the network gateway, where it belongs. End users do not configure firewalls. System administrators configure firewalls. You seem to be confused. Maybe it's the whole "client/server" thing getting you down again.
Version management? First off, the example you give isn't of "version management", the example is about updating programs on user's desktops. Again, NFS means update one computer and they're all updated. Why waste time and bandwidth copying patches to every desktop in the office?
I would setup a server to provide all the functionality needed first. This would take approximatly 6-8 hours. Then I would begin setting up users desktops. I would install everything on one computer in about 1.5 hours, then duplicate the hard drive as many times as necessary. I could probably get 20 desktops going in 8 hours, if I had no specialized duplication hardware and had to manually shutdown the original desktop, insert the new hard drive, boot it, copy the partition, shut it down, take out the new hard drive and put it in the new computer, lather, rinse, repeat. If I had disk duplication hardware available, that number (20 in 8 hours) would be increased at least 4-fold (depending on how many disks the duplicator can write at once).
In other words, you are woefully uninformed, good sir.
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Symantec and other anti-virus manufacturers would probably find it in their best interest to write viruses themselves. If they can figure out the newest, best ways of doing things, then they can heuristically detect viruses that use them, even if it's not the exact same virus.
In fact, they already do this and admit to it... if you read most virus reports (not the big ones, obviously), including this one, they say something like "occurrences in wild: 0". In this case, it's "0 - 49", which probably means "0" or "we slipped and it got on somebody's workstation for an hour".
If the viruses aren't being found in the wild, where do you think they're coming from? From their labs, of course - so they can study the techniques of virus authors. It doesn't require a conspiracy theory, just common sense.
You're absolutely right - except I still must disagree with you on the last bit.
:)
Anarcho-capitalists claim the contract between individuals to be sacred, no matter the terms and conditions. Thus, one really could "sell oneself into slavery". Technically, somebody who makes this decision (or is coerced into making this decision) and then attempts to assert sovereignty over his or her own life *is* breaking the terms of the contract.
A jury of peers (9 out of 10 on average being anarcho-capitalists) would if being ethically consistent (I realize that in reality some people would vote inconsistently on this case because of the nature of it, but this is just an example) return the slave to his or her owner.
The thing with "wage slavery" is, somebody who quits his job is usually still unable to make his own decisions regarding his life -- he still feels that he has to find a job *somewhere*, earning money for somebody else, getting little respect from his superior, and receiving meager pay (in comparison with the boss).
Even if it's not precisely true (you *could* go join a hippie commune or do math tutoring out of your home or sell homemade jewelry or something), the point being made is that the individual is a slave in his own mind -- he believes strongly that the only way to "make a living" is to feed the ambitions of somebody higher up on the social scale than himself.
As for the risks being faced in today's society, most people would consider being homeless and starving to death as penalties. Again, doesn't mean they're correct, just that they have been indoctrinated with that mindset practically since they were able to understand spoken language.
I agree there should be a better word for it, but it is difficult to replace one word with another in popular language (everybody knows what you mean when you say "wage slavery", nobody will understand the first time they hear "wage brainwashing" or whatever is decided on).
I haven't had a good debate in a long time - this is fun! Thank you very much for the opportunity!
I agree with your loop remark at the bottom there :)
But I still think that being whisked away from sudden death at the bottom of a long fall is more exciting than looking down for a third of a second and then gradually tilting back from vertical to become level. If a momentary force of four, five or even six gravities is going to be felt after the sudden swoop upward, well that's just the price I'm going to pay because otherwise the ride certainly wasn't interesting enough for me to wait in line for.
mmmm, close - I'll give you 7 out of 10 :)
:)
In a true anarchy, it would work this way - the differences between the varieties of anarchy is that their ideologies make the formation of certain types of society easier or more difficult (just like any other set of rules, an ethical code makes certain things easier and others more difficult).
The main reason that anarcho-capitalists are *not* the same thing as anarcho-socialists is the same reason that capitalism is *not* socialism. (Remember your Rand - "A is A - A is never not A")
One views class differences as a good thing, the other views them as a bad thing.
In an anarcho-socialist society, the anarcho-capitalist would have a difficult time finding workers for his company (it couldn't be a corporation, since those are legally defined by the government) -- no anarcho-socialist would willingly place someone else into power over himself (thus casting himself as a lower class of citizen). The act of employment in itself creates a caste difference. Now you have two groups of citizens -- "workers" and "bosses". The workers work to make the bosses more money and the bosses reap the benefits of the workers' effort, meanwhile holding the threat of unemployment over the heads of their employees. Obviously, this situation would seem untenable to many anarcho-socialists, therefore there would not be many willing workers for the bosses to exploit.
Meanwhile, in an anarcho-capitalist society, the anarcho-socialist would face dificulties of a different nature. This would be like the current "GPL in a world of capitalists" era. The "bosses" in a capitalist society would obviously have no desire to work on an equal level with everyone else in a syndicate. The "workers" may initially flock over, but market conditions would be difficult for the less rapacious syndicate to sell its goods in. Firstly, the marketing of the products would not be as coercive as the marketing for the capitalist-produced products, capitalists having no problem with coercion as long as it is not carried out in the name of the state. Since the products will not sell as well, there will be a fewer number of workers supported than in an ideal situation (although more than an equivalently funded capitalist company, since there is no "boss" to soak up a huge salary at the expense of paychecks for workers).
Again, nobody will explicitly try to force anyone to stop on either side, but the conditions of the society's prevailing ethical structure definitely create a situation more conducive to one type of workplace than another.
"Selling yourself into slavery" is a commonly used analogy only because it's a very good one -- there's a reason that working for a capitalist boss is known as "wage slavery", after all.
BSD would be the anarcho-capitalists, while GPL would be the anarcho-socialists.
Anarcho-capitalists claim that men must have the freedom to sell themselves into slavery if they wish (if you can't do anything you want it's not freedom!).
Anarcho-socialists say that any such agreement must not be binding, because it creates a limit on mankind's freedom by its very nature (can you sell your descendants into slavery as well? can you coerce somebody to become a slave?).
For arguments on the anarcho-capitalist side, check Ayn Rand and her fan club (the Ayn Rand Institute).
Here's a good argument on the anarcho-socialist side: http://www.infoshop.org/faq/secFcon.html
You're obviously not an engineer :)
The very factors you list as entertaining *require* a certain level of acceleration to be viable.
Being upside-down can't happen for very long in a traditional (wheels under the car, no other means of attaching to the rail) coaster. It is required to switch back and forth, or corkscrew -- each change in velocity (direction is a part of velocity as well as speed) implies a change in acceleration.
Free-fall is the other big one you mentioned. Correct me if I'm wrong, but my assumption is that if you like free-fall, you'll like a longer sustained duration of free-fall even more. Free-falling for 1/2 a second won't give you as much of a rush as free-fall for 3 seconds, right?
Well, at some point the free-fall has to end in a curve upwards (unless you like to hit the ground at the end of your fall - I don't). This curve is a change in velocity and acceleration which is measured as a scalar of G. A more gradual curve may pull 1.5 G, while a more sudden change in direction (which is more thrilling because the rider feels that he/she has been saved from death by a split second) will assert more force - in the vicinity of 4 or 5 G.
You can't rationalize physics away - if you take away more powerful G forces, you *do* by necessity reduce how thrilling the ride is.
> most of us have the skills to decide if a food preparation place is hygenically adequate
This isn't really true. There are lots of vectors for harmful bacteria that the average person who ooks at home is unaware of. In general, only trained food-service professionals are aware of cross-contamination, for example.
Cross-contamination occurs when two different types of meat come into contact with one another. For instance, seafood and beef. Shellfish harbor a symbiotic bacterium (like the ones in our intestines) that becomes virulent when it feeds on beef protein. This is why restaurants have color-coded cutting boards. (the blue one for fish, red for beef, yellow for poultry, etc...). Storage of the meat can also be a factor - seafood should never be placed above beef in a storage area.
If you knew about that already, then my hat is off to you! I only learned about it day before yesterday from my landlady (who runs a meat packing plant).
My point was that only trained professionals truly have the knowledge to judge whether practices in any profession are really safe or not.
That's what they're talking about doing...
It's at 80% efficiency, which is pretty good. That means it only loses 20% of the energy as waste heat (which isn't recovered). The rest of it is recoverable. You never gain energy, the best you can do is only lose a little bit, and that's what they're talking about. This device loses less energy than a refrigerator or a Peltier unit.
You see that it's a Panasonic ad. Apparently they have much cooler advertisements in Japan than they do here!
:)
I think "hi-ho" is meant as a nonsense-word / trademarkable advertisement, the same way it is in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves"
You must be American. Most countries in the world slready teach children to read and speak English in schools. Only in America is it natural for people to grow up speaking only the mother tongue, n'est-ce pas?
Also, the open source documentation that I have read in languages other than English far surpasses the quality of translated MSDN documentation.
The amount of "mucking about" that Linux requires to run "properly" depends on your personal value of "properly" - I'm more or less happy with Mandrake or Red Hat out of the box. If I were installing Windows, I would have to install many third-party utilities (Windowblinds, Litestep, XMouse, Mozilla...) before my desktop acheived a state consistent with my value of "running properly".
That's been my experience anyway.
Socialism vs. Marxism, wrapped up in a slice of comedy (and with a guest appearance of monarchy!)
mmm... political debate...
Sorry, got what taken care of in the 90s? I wasn't paying attention because I realized I had to act NOW to get a free Penis Enlarger(tm)!
Only $19.95 plus shipping and handling! What a deal!
What school was this? Most universities are more than happy to take on a homeschooled undergrad, because they know it makes them look better to have smarter people in the school :)
:)
My homeschooled girlfriend got a 1440 on her SAT I; no college that she's talked to (VCU, Virginia Tech, MIT) seems to think that homeschooling put her at a disadvantage - in fact, quite the contrary!
Your argument that people need direction to learn things like higher math is also false, by the way - I have taught myself linear algebra and methods of using quaternions (four-dimensional vectors) to represent an orientation in space. I am also going back and relearning much of what I was taught in high school about history and politics from the ground up because much of it appears to be patently untrue or misconstrued. Original sources are your friends!
Nobody needs to be *forced* to learn - they only need to be coerced if you are attempting to brainwash them to follow orders without question (something the public school system is quite good at doing). My kids will *definitely* be homeschooled.
Read "The Underground History of Education" by John Taylor Gatto (New York State Teacher of the Year), and also "A People's History of the United States" (don't know the authors). Broaden your horizons.
One recommendation - when you read something in the rulebook that doesn't make sense or seems to conflict with Roger Zelazny's presentation of things, stop reading the rulebook, think it through yourself and play it by ear if necessary :)
I found a bunch of places like that in my copy... But I've got the second edition - there might be a 3rd edition out by now that fixes some of it.
As an example of what I'm talking about, one of the examples it gives of why a high Warfare score is good is Benedict supposedly being able to parry a sword thrust by an invisible attacker that he wasn't warned of? Come on, he *did* get his arm cut off twice in the series didn't he? He's the best out there, but he's not omnipotent!
Also, the artifact point system is totally fucked. Just because beginning players might *want* something like Grayswandir or Ghostwheel does *not* mean you should give it to them! And certainly not for only 12 points!!
Aside from things like that, the basic premise of the game system is very solid. If you're playing with "traditionalist" AD&D types, you might want to devise a dice-based combat system though, because otherwise it becomes basically "the player can get out of any situation because he only has to keep track of what one person is doing whereas the GM has to keep track of 20, and the player will argue that he should have been able to dodge that".
Sorry, I phrased that poorly -- I didn't mean the brain was hardwired by the time you're 16 :)
I meant that the connections by which one learns new things are pretty well ingrained by that time and the rate/quality of learning only decreases after that. Thus, you're about as intelligent as you ever will be (which is certainly *not* to say the same thing as that you have learned all that you ever will -- I know I didn't know anything about linear algebra when I was 16, and I certainly didn't know enough calculus...).
Sorry about the hostile nature of the earlier post, it just felt like you were attacking the people who legitimately did it to get their scholarship. I apologize if I misunderstood.
A 16 year old person is probably about as intellectually mature as they're going to get. Their brains are pretty hardwired by that time as to what manner in which they learn and stuff like that. If it's meant to be challenging to a 16 year old, then it's meant to be challenging to an adult (16-year olds *are* adults, but that's another topic altogether).
The reason it isn't a huge deal to have solved it is because it wasn't meant to be *that* challenging -- they expected lots of people to solve it (and 100 did).
If it were targeted toward 6-9 year olds, then your statement would have more validity. As it is, you sound like you've got sour grapes because you coldn't figure it out, and so you're trying to denigrate not only the people who posted the answer, but the original class of people it was aimed towards.
OpenGL 1.2 came out before Windows 98 did... OpenGL 1.3 is the current standard....
But Microsoft *still* ships OpenGL 1.1 with each of their operating systems -- Windows XP still uses the same version of OpenGL as Windows 95, even though OpenGL 1.3 is vastly improved...
They basically only include it right now as a token show of compatibility - they don't care about how usable it is. This just means they don't have to bother anymore.
ah, but it does support alpha transparency!
:)
the XRender extension supports alpha-blending, useful for transparency effects and anti-aliasing fonts.
If you're running X11R6.5+ (Xfree86 4.0+) then you've got XRender installed already
I came away thinking "this man is insane".
He claims DOS had a better way of organizing applications. This is a red herring. I don't want to organize my applications. Ever. I want to organize my data. I don't remember many applications in DOS that were compatible with the same type of data. If there had been, the limitations of the DOS structure would have been readily made apparent. First, CD into the directory where your audio recording utility is and make a .wav file. Then, move the .wav file into the directory where your audio editing utility is and edit it. It works, but why not keep the data in one place and run programs on it as you see fit without regard for their location on your hard drive, and without having a 10-second seek through your PATH variable?
Besides which, DOS had c:\msdos50 (or whichever version you used). That was DOS's variation on /bin. Ever look in that directory and attempt to hand-reduce the number of binaries in it to save disk space? I did. A package management system would have made that doable.
You can have all the localized application directories you want in /usr/local. The point of /usr/local is to hold larger packages which are local to the system. (hmm... /usr/local/games/UnrealTournament, /usr/local/games/Quake3, /usr/local/games/Terminus, /usr/local/games/RT2...) And as a bonus, thanks to the miracle of symbolic links you can have your cake and eat it too - as long as the application knows where the data files are installed you can make a symlink of the binary to /usr/local/bin and run it without editing your PATH variable too! Isn't UNIX grand?
No, no - he should be Little Wooden Boy!!
"You take the ones on the left, Little Wooden Boy!"
*Tick throws mannequin at group of enemies*
"SPOOOOOOOON!"
the sad thing is, I'm dating a geek now and she and I do sometimes talk about sys admin and programming over dinner....
Oh God, I never realized how sad my life really was until this post.
> P.S. For all you "liberals" out there I am not in fact a Republican. I'm proud to be a Libertarian.
:)
:)
Heh - it always amuses me when people with a reactionary mindset call themselves liberals. There aren't any true liberals in the U.S. political system today. I applaud the strategic use of sarcasm quotes
I personally call myself a liberal, then get offended when people ask if I'm a Democrat, and take the time to explain to them what the word liberal actually means
Everybody has something to hide... under the right circumstances.
These circumstances are bring dictated by people at whim. Are you aware that in many states (assuming you are a U.S. citizen) sodomy is illegal? If you send an email to your wife talking about the blowjob she gave you last night, and the feds (in a hypothetical, strung-out situation, yes, but this makes it totally possible) decide to actually *enforce* that law, well, they know where to pick you and your wife up.
Do you trust the government not to blackmail you with your political affiliations? What if you visited a communist-owned website to get your news this morning? What if you donated money to the Libertarian Party, and the Republicans don't like that? Maybe the Libertarians are now defined as a "terrorist organization" -- after all, they avow support for all Americans to keep and bear deadly firearms! They're obviously just waiting for the signal from their cell leader to take out government officials!
History has proven again and again that people in power will stop progressing, and instead turn more and more of their energy to keeping themselves in power and acquiring more of it. We don't have to make it any easier for them.
Umm... I have some technology right now in my car that splits out hydrogen from hydrocarbons.
It's called an "Internal Combustion Engine".
e-mail and task/calendar/whatnot client: Easy - Evolution.
sendmail, imap, ldap - since when are these setup on the desktop? I would love to see you point out to me how your windows ME or 2K workstation doubles as a mail and address book server for your whole company while you are doing your accounting or whatever. That's the whole point of *client/server* -- see, you have servers... and then you have clients. The "clients" connect to the servers to access the "services" that these so-called "servers" are "serving".
Domain logons? What are you really using them for? To provide access to certain file shares for certain users? Just use NFS. Or SAMBA or Appletalk for all I care - the point is that each of these things can be configured to provide the same functionality domain logons provide, and configured for more security if necessary.
Firewall on the desktop? Why would you want such a thing? Firewall as the network gateway, where it belongs. End users do not configure firewalls. System administrators configure firewalls. You seem to be confused. Maybe it's the whole "client/server" thing getting you down again.
Version management? First off, the example you give isn't of "version management", the example is about updating programs on user's desktops. Again, NFS means update one computer and they're all updated. Why waste time and bandwidth copying patches to every desktop in the office?
I would setup a server to provide all the functionality needed first. This would take approximatly 6-8 hours. Then I would begin setting up users desktops. I would install everything on one computer in about 1.5 hours, then duplicate the hard drive as many times as necessary. I could probably get 20 desktops going in 8 hours, if I had no specialized duplication hardware and had to manually shutdown the original desktop, insert the new hard drive, boot it, copy the partition, shut it down, take out the new hard drive and put it in the new computer, lather, rinse, repeat. If I had disk duplication hardware available, that number (20 in 8 hours) would be increased at least 4-fold (depending on how many disks the duplicator can write at once).
In other words, you are woefully uninformed, good sir.