I'm not a guy who blindly follows what he's used to. When I got Windows 8, I gave Metro a try. It has some good parts, and I don't even dislike the look of it. I could have adapted to the inconsistencies, and the weird tabletness of it all. But after trying dozens of apps, I found that none of them worked as well as the desktop applications.
I like to think I'm a guy who does what works. Metro didn't work, so I no longer use it. I got a program that gives me a start menu back, and it lets me configure it to be even better-fitted to my needs than the stock W7 menu.
I gave Slashdot Beta a try, because I thought it deserved a chance. Perhaps all the hate for it was just small-minded traditionalists clinging on to the familiar. But no. Slashdot Beta breaks all the important functionality, and it makes it look worse. If it goes live as it currently is, not only am I quitting Slashdot for good, but I'll be throwing a proposal to my bosses about making a competitor, because the market for an audience-focused tech site will be wide open (I'm currently contemplating "Alpha" as a name).
Slashdot Classic has problems, certainly. Unicode is broken, HTML comments are stupid, the design isn't that great, and since the thing is still running on Perl I'm sure there's some hindrances to continued development. Slashdot needs a rewrite, a clean new technical foundation powering a new front-end design.
But Beta isn't it. With all the problems Classic has, Beta is a million times worse. I can't think of even one way in which Beta is superior - it is a step down on all fronts, obviously designed by people who never used Slashdot and only copied from other news sites and comment forums.
I will leave unless they can fix the major issues. Foremost of which is the comment full/abbreviated/hide system based on scores. I don't want to choose between just insightful, funny or interesting - I want all of them, but not the horrible comments.
Contrary to popular consensus, Slashdot doesn't have a good commenter base. There's just as many assholes and retards here as there are on Youtube. But having a good karma system, good moderation system, and most of all the ability for users to use those rankings themselves to show/hide comments, makes it look like one of the best comment sections around. Hell, I rarely actually read the articles anymore - the comments are usually more accurate and better-written.
Other than that, and maybe making the site less mobile-styled, make the headlines a more reasonable font size and shrink the gaps between everything, I could deal with it. But without that piece of functionality, I may as well just read Reddit.
Most games are full-screen. The Steam Overlay currently gives you a lightweight web browser and chat. It's very useful for, say, checking a walkthrough while playing, because switching from a fullscreen app to the desktop is a slow and bug-prone process, while throwing a Direct3D/OpenGL overlay with that stuff in it is fast and relatively safe. Even with multiple monitors, just changing inputs is tricky.
Adding a lightweight media player to it is a fairly logical step. I've actually wanted just that - give me something that can play my own music, and control it without having to quit the game. That would work well for games like Civilization, Minecraft, or Kerbal Space Program, to name a few.
Steam Music, from Valve's description, is basically just an in-game music player (they already have the Steam Overlay running things in-game, for chat and web browsing). You pick your media folder, it lets you play stuff from it. I see absolutely nothing about selling music via Steam.
And this makes sense. There's many games I would want to play my own music in (Civilization springs to mind), and be able to control it from inside the game. It probably won't be the greatest music player, but much like the Steam Overlay web browser is just a simple WebKit browser that doesn't really compete with Chrome or Firefox as standalone browsers, this doesn't need to compete with whatever passes for a top-notch media player. It just needs to play music from my hard drive, and let me pause/play/change tracks by pressing Shift+Tab and some buttons.
That said, Steam *already* sells music - several games have their soundtracks in the Steam store, usually as a bundle with the game for an extra buck or two. As far as I've seen, they're all DRM-free, just plain MP3 files.
I don't know about moose or cows, but the deer I've encountered seem to respond more to an engine rev than to a horn. I guess it sounds more like a predator?
Well, these coding courses are aimed at creating careers - the "students" are trying to make this their job. People going to any of your examples are not - they may be developing skills, but the camps are for hobbies, not careers.
That seems like a significant enough difference to me.
Even Microsoft Office does not guarantee 100% compatibility with older documents. And I've personally witnessed simple things breaking between MS Office on a Mac or on Windows.
When I dug through some very old Office 98 docs of mine a few years back, Office 2007 broke rather badly, but OpenOffice was able to read them. I'm sure it wasn't pixel-perfect, but it was readable and more-or-less as intended, unlike Office proper.
As far as trading between various offices, I've noticed more problems with Office For Mac than with LibreOffice. Granted, most people in my office are using either Google Docs, iWork or LibreOffice, but we get a fair number of outside docs that were made in MS Office.
For most uses of Word (glorified RTFs), everything is compatible. I've even had no issues going from AbiWord to MS Word. If you get crazy with auto-summaries or embedded docs, it might get problematic, but do you really use those? Presentations are much the same, although I've not worked with them nearly as much (because I do real work).
For spreadsheets, its a bit more hit-or-miss. If all you're doing is glorified CSVs, once again everything works, but the crazier your formulae get the more likely it will only work in one program.
The forecast for Atlanta was "it'll miss us to the south"? That's a load of crap - I live in Richmond, a couple hundred miles to the north, and our forecast was "we'll get hit, with the storm moving in from the south or southwest". That was the consensus not only of the actual NWS, but of all the media forecasters. There's no way that storm could have hit Richmond and failed to hit Atlanta.
Also, Richmond managed to deal with our inch or two reasonably. Before the snow even started sticking to the ground (which happened around 4PM), they'd put schools on a two-hour delay for the morrow, and many people had headed home from work early. I left work at normal hours, and the drive home was actually easier than normal rush-hour traffic, save that all the good parking spots were taken when I got there. The only reason I worked from home the day after the storm is because I'd stayed up too late playing Guacamelee and wanted to sleep in a bit.
I won't fault Atlanta for not having the equipment to deal with the snow once it was there, because they don't need it, but they definitely are hiding behind a bullshit excuse to cover their incompetence.
Where did I ever say that the GPL pre-dated the BSD license? I did not - because that's not true. I am familiar with the story of UNIX, Berkeley, and all the sordid details of the Unices.
What I'm saying is that non-copyleft licenses are the "endgame", for lack of a better word. BSD-licensed works could not make open source the dominant force it is today, but GPL could. But now that the goal is accomplished, the strictures of the GPL are a liability, not an asset.
When open-source was first taking off, the GPL was necessary because only a small group of die-hard believers thought it would work. Having the work "stolen" into a proprietary product that successfully hijacks the userbase was entirely possible, and so a protective license was necessary.
Now, open-source is common. Users are aware enough that it's nearly impossible to hijack a userbase - any good features added to a proprietary version will be quickly cloned in the open-source original, and few users distrust open-source software. Companies are rarely afraid to work with open-source projects or release their code, and many see it as an advantage.
The GPL (and similar copyleft licenses) protects the open-sourceness of the project, but it also limits its usability. BSD or similar licenses do not offer similar protections, but also do not have the restrictions. Now that open-source has cultural, not just legal, defenses, GPL is not necessary unless you consider the open-sourceness of the code to be more important than the usability of the code.
And so I think GPL is best treated as a transitional license. In areas of software where open-source dominates, it is no longer necessary. In areas where it faces strong opposition from proprietary software, it remains useful or even essential.
Yes, Pathfinder is a great way to get into it. The Beginner Box in particular has everything you need to play for the first few months or so (goes up to level five, and has a decent bestiary, but you'll have to come up with your own adventures after the tutorial dungeon), and it's dirt-cheap.
"Things don't always work the way you expect" would be better advice for a GM than for a player. At least with one set of players (I GM two games), I've found it better to just create a scenario and let them figure out how to deal with it, rather than to come up with one solution and try to lead players to it. Which leads me to think like an adversary - I'll think "OK, so the players are going to try to bust this guy out of jail, now how would the city guard be protecting him? He's awaiting trial for multiple murders, treason and grand theft, so they'd be keeping him in a secure cell. Deep in the dungeons, probably. And in solitary. Probably keep him manacled even in his cell, come to think of it, since they're claiming him to be 'the most dangerous man in the eight kingdoms' and the sole mastermind behind the big attack to mask their incompetence that let the other two escape.". I figured out general guard schedules, equipment and such, but left the details to be improvised.
I make sure that there *is* a viable solution or two (imitate a lawyer to sneak in and meet with him, pass him some kit for him to escape with; actually act as a lawyer and get him off on a technicality (technically it was a different party member who did most of the murders); forge a request for extradition from another kingdom that wants to execute him for negligent regicide (he actually did do that one); hire an army of goons and storm the Bastille; buy a dozen scrolls of teleport and just warp in and out), but I've never successfully predicted one that they've used (they waited until he was being taken to trial, then tried to recreate the scene from The Dark Knight with the police convoy).
As an avid video gamer who's gotten into tabletop gaming, I've found they both have their strengths.
Computers work well for rigidly-defined rules, particularly for stuff like combat. If all you're doing is slaying orcs and such, computers can do a lot of it better.
Tabletop gaming works for less well-defined systems. No game has really, *really* gotten diplomacy right - it comes down to figuring out the right choices to make in a few menus. And clever players will be able to work better in a tabletop RPG - things that totally would work in the real world, but the official rules don't have anything for. With video games, maybe you can find a mod to add a button to let you do something, but with a tabletop game and a decent GM, you'll be able to create "rules" on the fly to handle it.
Example: My players were fighting a dragon, and managed to wound it enough that it would (logically) retreat rather than keep fighting. He took off, they all fired off ranged attacks while he flew off, except for one. She threw her grappling hook at it, which there aren't specific rules for so I treated it as a ranged touch attack. Success. She tried to climb it (which there is a set of rules for), failed, and then failed an opposed strength check from the dragon trying to shake her off (I improvised the check being necessary, but used the general rule for "two people doing something against each other involving muscle").
I've gotten to the point now where I don't even try to plan things step-by-step, I just invent a scenario and let my players figure out the best solution. For another example: In the aftermath of the last quest, two of the three players ended up in jail (on charges of public indecency/intoxication and high treason/negligent regicide, respectively). The last had to break them out. All I had planned was what sort of cells and protection each was under, as well as the idea that they would be taken eventually to the court to be judged and they could possibly be rescued in transit. They figured out how to get one out beforehand by bending the bars of the window enough for him to slip through. They then set up a detailed plan to rescue the last guy in transit, having one person in disguise as a guard to disable the guards with drugged treats, with the other standing by on the rooftops to Errol Flynn his way in if combat broke out. Meanwhile, the imprisoned guy was taunting his captors, trying to goad them into dragging him out of his cage to engage in some police brutality (both as a distraction, and to get out of some of his restraints). Their stealth approach failed, but they managed to fight their way through it with the element of surprise. The game starts up again tomorrow with them on the run in the immediate aftermath, and I have absolutely no idea how they're going to get out of this, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.
As a guy who both studied game design and is working on a video game, and as a guy running two Pathfinder* campaigns, both have their unique strengths. A paper RPG that has too many rules *is* doing something wrong, but that's a fault of the specific game, not tabletop RPGs in general. And I think it may have been a historic thing - since I'm far from the first to realize the strengths of the two, tabletop RPGs have mostly gotten simpler and more streamlined since the early days, and having massive multi-volume rulebooks is no longer considered a good thing.
* Pathfinder is basically D&D 3.75. Like with any nerddom, major changes piss off users, so a company (actually the magazine publishing arm of WotC, which was spun off shortly before D&D 4.0) took advantage of the open-sourcing of D&D 3.5 to fork it and make a new game that's basically 3.5 with some simplifications and a new trademark, rather than the major upheaval that is 4.0. I like it because it's just complex enough to be interesting, and it's also like 75% cheaper (you can get into it with just the Beginner Box for $30 or so, and the only book you absolutely need for the full game
Already saw that one. Yes, you can find footage of police being attacked without any apparent activity on their part. But you can find the same in reverse - police snipers shooting people who are not fighting back, or bashing people's heads in while they're already on the ground.
This is combat. Not everyone is going to be 100% in control - you're going to have some people throwing molotovs at police because "fuck the police", just as you're going to have police brutality because "fuck protesters".
But you know what? The protesters aren't looting buildings or destroying public property (with the exception of digging up some streets for rocks to build walls with, and one statue of Lenin). They aren't stealing TVs or clothes the way rioters did in England. They're organizing defenses, shelter, and medical aid. They're listening to speeches. They're attacking the police who have been attacking them for months. They've given the whole "peaceful protest" thing a go, and the government's response was to step up the attacks and basically start building a totalitarian regime. If they keep trying the peaceful protest route, they're just going to end up dead or in a dictatorship.
Who are the ones hiring street thugs as muscle? The government. Who are the ones destroying hospitals or forcing doctors to not treat patients? The police. Who are the ones kidnapping and murdering people? The Berkut. Who's calling in a goddamn tank division to suppress the revolt?
I'm listening to the protesters because, while there's always some shades of gray and no conflict is black and white, this is maybe 0xDDDDDD against 0x222222.
I knew most of that, I just figured there had to be something more to the government's response than just "fuck protesters, let's just kill them". Still a very excellent summary of the situation, presents everything in a more understandable way.
There's a lot of elderly people in the protest square. Most of them aren't doing the fighting, but a lot of the fighting now is defensive - young protesters building barricades and fighting on the edges to keep police from coming in and beating the tar out of the elderly people now trapped in the center.
From what I can tell, it's geopolitical. The protests started because there was a movement to join the EU, and a seeming majority supported that, but certain political parties refused to let that happen and are trying to ally with Russia. The Communist Party has obvious reasons for that, but I don't understand why the Party of Regions is doing this, considering one of their platforms is supposedly tighter European integration. All I can guess is that it's some sort of power play, because there does seem to be a lot of corruption, which tends to lead to rulers trying to seize more power.
So it's basically a fight between the people who want to be EU members, and the people who want to be Russian allies (is there a new Warsaw Pact or something? Seems like something Putin would do). And it seems to be split a lot based on geography - the western parts of Ukraine want to be European, the eastern parts want to be Russian. I'm starting to think splitting the country might be a good idea for once.
I've been following this stuff all day, because this just got seriously violent: > Police authorized to use firearms, two dead from shooting already > Ban on using fire hoses in sub-zero weather lifted > Hospitals tending to wounded protesters have been attacked by police > Snipers out in force > Armored Personnel Carriers already deployed, an Army tank unit is being moved into the city > Opposition members of government resigning en masse > over 100,000 protesters in Kiev main square
Things are very bad for Ukraine right now. I don't fully understand the ideological issues they're fighting over, but I can certainly recognize the nature of the government's response.
Obviously too expensive. The cheapest Seagate "Enterprise Capacity" 4TB drives cost $320 to $380 depending on where you buy them. Even if they have 100% reliability, not a single failed drive, they're 50-100% more expensive. Unless failure rates are in the 20%+ range, I doubt it would be worthwhile.
And whattya know, their current preferred drive is a 4TB Seagate desktop drive with a 4% annual failure rate. That's actually worse than competing desktop drives that cost only a few bucks more, which means, to Backblaze at least, the cost of the extra replacements is less than a few bucks multiplied over all the drives.
Backups. You have a cronjob run the backup every night, or even every week. Maybe once a year your own system fails and you have to restore from backup - that gives a ~50:1 write/read ratio, or 98%, for the weekly, and ~360:1 write/read ratio (99.8%) for a daily backup.
Coincidentally, TFS begins with "Backblaze, the cloud backup company".
As one of those "damn kids who need to get off your lawn" (relatively speaking), particularly one who drives maybe 300 miles a month, let me say some things:
1) I don't like driving. I planned my life so that I don't have to drive that much. I live 2 miles away from where I work, and within walking distance of the grocery store and a fair number of restaurants. Hell, I walked to a Protomen concert. With rent and gas both being stupid expensive, I'm not really saving much money this way, but I'm saving time.
2) I don't need to drive to get to entertainment. I have the internet, there's plenty of clubs and bars within walking distance, so the only reason I really need to drive is to visit friends. Compared to yesteryear, when you needed to drive to watch a movie or to do whatever else people did for fun back then (bowling?).
So since I don't have to drive much for either fun or work, I end up not really driving much because I specifically try to avoid driving a lot. I used to drive 300 miles a week getting to school - I hated it, decided I didn't want to do that again, and now I'm not.
Well there you go, it's right there in the constitution: If you own a printing press, or work directly for someone who does, you are a journalist. Otherwise get stuffed.
Actually, yeah, I'm cool with that. We have a printer at the office, so I would count as a journalist, and given that low barrier to entry (owning, or working for a business that owns, a printing device), pretty much everyone counts as a journalist already or could quickly become one. And remember, a cheap inkjet is a faster and better printer than the best press money could buy back in 1776.
If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first.
I have an idea that I believe would simultaneously reduce capitol punishment errors to near-zero, and prevent cruel methods:
Let the convicted select the means of execution, within reason. They want lethal injection, they get it. They want the firing squad, they get it. They want to skydive into a volcano with no parachute, they do it.
And if they want to die of old age, let them. Put them back in prison, life sentence, with the only reversal being if the original sentence is overturned (ie. they prove he didn't do it). If they truly believe they are innocent, they have all the time in the world to prove it.
Now, I say near-zero because a lot of people would prefer a quick death to life in prison. Depending on the circumstances, I might, if I thought there was absolutely no way to prove my innocence. This can be reduced by making prison less of a torture, going for a rehabilitation approach rather than a punishment approach, but even then you'll never get it completely to zero.
But that also affects anything that involves life imprisonment. Even if the maximum penalty is life in jail, some people will kill themselves rather than go on with that. So I think, overall, the false execution rate will be acceptably low.
Particularly if coupled with some other reforms I have considered, chief of which is requiring the convicted to be proven unable to be rehabilitated before execution is even an option, as well as requiring an inquest whenever someone is posthumously exonerated of the investigators, prosecution and judiciary, to ensure that it was an honest mistake, not malice (particularly aimed at the shocking race divide in US executions).
PS: While I think capitol punishment can be a benefit to society if implemented properly, given the choice between the current US system, and no death penalty at all, I would instantly choose the latter. This is the subtle flaw in your bullshit test - assuming that support of execution in general is equal to supporting the current system.
How many people died trying just to cross the Pacific? Or to reach the South Pole? Percentage-wise, I'd bet it was a lot worse than any of the NASA programs. Even the Soviet programs probably did better. Exploration, by its very nature, involves risk. We do what we can to keep the risks in check, but the only way to eliminate risk is to explore and colonize space until going from Canaveral to Tranquility is as common as flying from New York to LA.
Could they do better? Probably, and they should never stop trying to do better. But we should also never stop going just because some people might die. It is sad to die in the attempt, but it is worse to have never made the attempt at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a guy who blindly follows what he's used to. When I got Windows 8, I gave Metro a try. It has some good parts, and I don't even dislike the look of it. I could have adapted to the inconsistencies, and the weird tabletness of it all. But after trying dozens of apps, I found that none of them worked as well as the desktop applications.
I like to think I'm a guy who does what works. Metro didn't work, so I no longer use it. I got a program that gives me a start menu back, and it lets me configure it to be even better-fitted to my needs than the stock W7 menu.
I gave Slashdot Beta a try, because I thought it deserved a chance. Perhaps all the hate for it was just small-minded traditionalists clinging on to the familiar. But no. Slashdot Beta breaks all the important functionality, and it makes it look worse. If it goes live as it currently is, not only am I quitting Slashdot for good, but I'll be throwing a proposal to my bosses about making a competitor, because the market for an audience-focused tech site will be wide open (I'm currently contemplating "Alpha" as a name).
Slashdot Classic has problems, certainly. Unicode is broken, HTML comments are stupid, the design isn't that great, and since the thing is still running on Perl I'm sure there's some hindrances to continued development. Slashdot needs a rewrite, a clean new technical foundation powering a new front-end design.
But Beta isn't it. With all the problems Classic has, Beta is a million times worse. I can't think of even one way in which Beta is superior - it is a step down on all fronts, obviously designed by people who never used Slashdot and only copied from other news sites and comment forums.
I will leave unless they can fix the major issues. Foremost of which is the comment full/abbreviated/hide system based on scores. I don't want to choose between just insightful, funny or interesting - I want all of them, but not the horrible comments.
Contrary to popular consensus, Slashdot doesn't have a good commenter base. There's just as many assholes and retards here as there are on Youtube. But having a good karma system, good moderation system, and most of all the ability for users to use those rankings themselves to show/hide comments, makes it look like one of the best comment sections around. Hell, I rarely actually read the articles anymore - the comments are usually more accurate and better-written.
Other than that, and maybe making the site less mobile-styled, make the headlines a more reasonable font size and shrink the gaps between everything, I could deal with it. But without that piece of functionality, I may as well just read Reddit.
Integration with the Steam overlay.
Most games are full-screen. The Steam Overlay currently gives you a lightweight web browser and chat. It's very useful for, say, checking a walkthrough while playing, because switching from a fullscreen app to the desktop is a slow and bug-prone process, while throwing a Direct3D/OpenGL overlay with that stuff in it is fast and relatively safe. Even with multiple monitors, just changing inputs is tricky.
Adding a lightweight media player to it is a fairly logical step. I've actually wanted just that - give me something that can play my own music, and control it without having to quit the game. That would work well for games like Civilization, Minecraft, or Kerbal Space Program, to name a few.
Steam Music, from Valve's description, is basically just an in-game music player (they already have the Steam Overlay running things in-game, for chat and web browsing). You pick your media folder, it lets you play stuff from it. I see absolutely nothing about selling music via Steam.
And this makes sense. There's many games I would want to play my own music in (Civilization springs to mind), and be able to control it from inside the game. It probably won't be the greatest music player, but much like the Steam Overlay web browser is just a simple WebKit browser that doesn't really compete with Chrome or Firefox as standalone browsers, this doesn't need to compete with whatever passes for a top-notch media player. It just needs to play music from my hard drive, and let me pause/play/change tracks by pressing Shift+Tab and some buttons.
That said, Steam *already* sells music - several games have their soundtracks in the Steam store, usually as a bundle with the game for an extra buck or two. As far as I've seen, they're all DRM-free, just plain MP3 files.
I don't know about moose or cows, but the deer I've encountered seem to respond more to an engine rev than to a horn. I guess it sounds more like a predator?
Well, these coding courses are aimed at creating careers - the "students" are trying to make this their job. People going to any of your examples are not - they may be developing skills, but the camps are for hobbies, not careers.
That seems like a significant enough difference to me.
Even Microsoft Office does not guarantee 100% compatibility with older documents. And I've personally witnessed simple things breaking between MS Office on a Mac or on Windows.
When I dug through some very old Office 98 docs of mine a few years back, Office 2007 broke rather badly, but OpenOffice was able to read them. I'm sure it wasn't pixel-perfect, but it was readable and more-or-less as intended, unlike Office proper.
As far as trading between various offices, I've noticed more problems with Office For Mac than with LibreOffice. Granted, most people in my office are using either Google Docs, iWork or LibreOffice, but we get a fair number of outside docs that were made in MS Office.
For most uses of Word (glorified RTFs), everything is compatible. I've even had no issues going from AbiWord to MS Word. If you get crazy with auto-summaries or embedded docs, it might get problematic, but do you really use those? Presentations are much the same, although I've not worked with them nearly as much (because I do real work).
For spreadsheets, its a bit more hit-or-miss. If all you're doing is glorified CSVs, once again everything works, but the crazier your formulae get the more likely it will only work in one program.
The forecast for Atlanta was "it'll miss us to the south"? That's a load of crap - I live in Richmond, a couple hundred miles to the north, and our forecast was "we'll get hit, with the storm moving in from the south or southwest". That was the consensus not only of the actual NWS, but of all the media forecasters. There's no way that storm could have hit Richmond and failed to hit Atlanta.
Also, Richmond managed to deal with our inch or two reasonably. Before the snow even started sticking to the ground (which happened around 4PM), they'd put schools on a two-hour delay for the morrow, and many people had headed home from work early. I left work at normal hours, and the drive home was actually easier than normal rush-hour traffic, save that all the good parking spots were taken when I got there. The only reason I worked from home the day after the storm is because I'd stayed up too late playing Guacamelee and wanted to sleep in a bit.
I won't fault Atlanta for not having the equipment to deal with the snow once it was there, because they don't need it, but they definitely are hiding behind a bullshit excuse to cover their incompetence.
Where did I ever say that the GPL pre-dated the BSD license? I did not - because that's not true. I am familiar with the story of UNIX, Berkeley, and all the sordid details of the Unices.
What I'm saying is that non-copyleft licenses are the "endgame", for lack of a better word. BSD-licensed works could not make open source the dominant force it is today, but GPL could. But now that the goal is accomplished, the strictures of the GPL are a liability, not an asset.
When open-source was first taking off, the GPL was necessary because only a small group of die-hard believers thought it would work. Having the work "stolen" into a proprietary product that successfully hijacks the userbase was entirely possible, and so a protective license was necessary.
Now, open-source is common. Users are aware enough that it's nearly impossible to hijack a userbase - any good features added to a proprietary version will be quickly cloned in the open-source original, and few users distrust open-source software. Companies are rarely afraid to work with open-source projects or release their code, and many see it as an advantage.
The GPL (and similar copyleft licenses) protects the open-sourceness of the project, but it also limits its usability. BSD or similar licenses do not offer similar protections, but also do not have the restrictions. Now that open-source has cultural, not just legal, defenses, GPL is not necessary unless you consider the open-sourceness of the code to be more important than the usability of the code.
And so I think GPL is best treated as a transitional license. In areas of software where open-source dominates, it is no longer necessary. In areas where it faces strong opposition from proprietary software, it remains useful or even essential.
Yes, Pathfinder is a great way to get into it. The Beginner Box in particular has everything you need to play for the first few months or so (goes up to level five, and has a decent bestiary, but you'll have to come up with your own adventures after the tutorial dungeon), and it's dirt-cheap.
"Things don't always work the way you expect" would be better advice for a GM than for a player. At least with one set of players (I GM two games), I've found it better to just create a scenario and let them figure out how to deal with it, rather than to come up with one solution and try to lead players to it. Which leads me to think like an adversary - I'll think "OK, so the players are going to try to bust this guy out of jail, now how would the city guard be protecting him? He's awaiting trial for multiple murders, treason and grand theft, so they'd be keeping him in a secure cell. Deep in the dungeons, probably. And in solitary. Probably keep him manacled even in his cell, come to think of it, since they're claiming him to be 'the most dangerous man in the eight kingdoms' and the sole mastermind behind the big attack to mask their incompetence that let the other two escape.". I figured out general guard schedules, equipment and such, but left the details to be improvised.
I make sure that there *is* a viable solution or two (imitate a lawyer to sneak in and meet with him, pass him some kit for him to escape with; actually act as a lawyer and get him off on a technicality (technically it was a different party member who did most of the murders); forge a request for extradition from another kingdom that wants to execute him for negligent regicide (he actually did do that one); hire an army of goons and storm the Bastille; buy a dozen scrolls of teleport and just warp in and out), but I've never successfully predicted one that they've used (they waited until he was being taken to trial, then tried to recreate the scene from The Dark Knight with the police convoy).
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what a human of intelligence 4 looks like.
As an avid video gamer who's gotten into tabletop gaming, I've found they both have their strengths.
Computers work well for rigidly-defined rules, particularly for stuff like combat. If all you're doing is slaying orcs and such, computers can do a lot of it better.
Tabletop gaming works for less well-defined systems. No game has really, *really* gotten diplomacy right - it comes down to figuring out the right choices to make in a few menus. And clever players will be able to work better in a tabletop RPG - things that totally would work in the real world, but the official rules don't have anything for. With video games, maybe you can find a mod to add a button to let you do something, but with a tabletop game and a decent GM, you'll be able to create "rules" on the fly to handle it.
Example:
My players were fighting a dragon, and managed to wound it enough that it would (logically) retreat rather than keep fighting. He took off, they all fired off ranged attacks while he flew off, except for one. She threw her grappling hook at it, which there aren't specific rules for so I treated it as a ranged touch attack. Success. She tried to climb it (which there is a set of rules for), failed, and then failed an opposed strength check from the dragon trying to shake her off (I improvised the check being necessary, but used the general rule for "two people doing something against each other involving muscle").
I've gotten to the point now where I don't even try to plan things step-by-step, I just invent a scenario and let my players figure out the best solution. For another example:
In the aftermath of the last quest, two of the three players ended up in jail (on charges of public indecency/intoxication and high treason/negligent regicide, respectively). The last had to break them out. All I had planned was what sort of cells and protection each was under, as well as the idea that they would be taken eventually to the court to be judged and they could possibly be rescued in transit. They figured out how to get one out beforehand by bending the bars of the window enough for him to slip through. They then set up a detailed plan to rescue the last guy in transit, having one person in disguise as a guard to disable the guards with drugged treats, with the other standing by on the rooftops to Errol Flynn his way in if combat broke out. Meanwhile, the imprisoned guy was taunting his captors, trying to goad them into dragging him out of his cage to engage in some police brutality (both as a distraction, and to get out of some of his restraints). Their stealth approach failed, but they managed to fight their way through it with the element of surprise. The game starts up again tomorrow with them on the run in the immediate aftermath, and I have absolutely no idea how they're going to get out of this, but I'm sure they'll come up with something.
As a guy who both studied game design and is working on a video game, and as a guy running two Pathfinder* campaigns, both have their unique strengths. A paper RPG that has too many rules *is* doing something wrong, but that's a fault of the specific game, not tabletop RPGs in general. And I think it may have been a historic thing - since I'm far from the first to realize the strengths of the two, tabletop RPGs have mostly gotten simpler and more streamlined since the early days, and having massive multi-volume rulebooks is no longer considered a good thing.
* Pathfinder is basically D&D 3.75. Like with any nerddom, major changes piss off users, so a company (actually the magazine publishing arm of WotC, which was spun off shortly before D&D 4.0) took advantage of the open-sourcing of D&D 3.5 to fork it and make a new game that's basically 3.5 with some simplifications and a new trademark, rather than the major upheaval that is 4.0. I like it because it's just complex enough to be interesting, and it's also like 75% cheaper (you can get into it with just the Beginner Box for $30 or so, and the only book you absolutely need for the full game
Already saw that one. Yes, you can find footage of police being attacked without any apparent activity on their part. But you can find the same in reverse - police snipers shooting people who are not fighting back, or bashing people's heads in while they're already on the ground.
This is combat. Not everyone is going to be 100% in control - you're going to have some people throwing molotovs at police because "fuck the police", just as you're going to have police brutality because "fuck protesters".
But you know what? The protesters aren't looting buildings or destroying public property (with the exception of digging up some streets for rocks to build walls with, and one statue of Lenin). They aren't stealing TVs or clothes the way rioters did in England. They're organizing defenses, shelter, and medical aid. They're listening to speeches. They're attacking the police who have been attacking them for months. They've given the whole "peaceful protest" thing a go, and the government's response was to step up the attacks and basically start building a totalitarian regime. If they keep trying the peaceful protest route, they're just going to end up dead or in a dictatorship.
Who are the ones hiring street thugs as muscle? The government. Who are the ones destroying hospitals or forcing doctors to not treat patients? The police. Who are the ones kidnapping and murdering people? The Berkut. Who's calling in a goddamn tank division to suppress the revolt?
I'm listening to the protesters because, while there's always some shades of gray and no conflict is black and white, this is maybe 0xDDDDDD against 0x222222.
I knew most of that, I just figured there had to be something more to the government's response than just "fuck protesters, let's just kill them". Still a very excellent summary of the situation, presents everything in a more understandable way.
There's a lot of elderly people in the protest square. Most of them aren't doing the fighting, but a lot of the fighting now is defensive - young protesters building barricades and fighting on the edges to keep police from coming in and beating the tar out of the elderly people now trapped in the center.
From what I can tell, it's geopolitical. The protests started because there was a movement to join the EU, and a seeming majority supported that, but certain political parties refused to let that happen and are trying to ally with Russia. The Communist Party has obvious reasons for that, but I don't understand why the Party of Regions is doing this, considering one of their platforms is supposedly tighter European integration. All I can guess is that it's some sort of power play, because there does seem to be a lot of corruption, which tends to lead to rulers trying to seize more power.
So it's basically a fight between the people who want to be EU members, and the people who want to be Russian allies (is there a new Warsaw Pact or something? Seems like something Putin would do). And it seems to be split a lot based on geography - the western parts of Ukraine want to be European, the eastern parts want to be Russian. I'm starting to think splitting the country might be a good idea for once.
I've been following this stuff all day, because this just got seriously violent:
> Police authorized to use firearms, two dead from shooting already
> Ban on using fire hoses in sub-zero weather lifted
> Hospitals tending to wounded protesters have been attacked by police
> Snipers out in force
> Armored Personnel Carriers already deployed, an Army tank unit is being moved into the city
> Opposition members of government resigning en masse
> over 100,000 protesters in Kiev main square
Things are very bad for Ukraine right now. I don't fully understand the ideological issues they're fighting over, but I can certainly recognize the nature of the government's response.
Everybody should scan through this - the images alone are powerful: https://twitter.com/Euromaidan...
Obviously too expensive. The cheapest Seagate "Enterprise Capacity" 4TB drives cost $320 to $380 depending on where you buy them. Even if they have 100% reliability, not a single failed drive, they're 50-100% more expensive. Unless failure rates are in the 20%+ range, I doubt it would be worthwhile.
And whattya know, their current preferred drive is a 4TB Seagate desktop drive with a 4% annual failure rate. That's actually worse than competing desktop drives that cost only a few bucks more, which means, to Backblaze at least, the cost of the extra replacements is less than a few bucks multiplied over all the drives.
PS: Desktop drives have warranties too.
Backups. You have a cronjob run the backup every night, or even every week. Maybe once a year your own system fails and you have to restore from backup - that gives a ~50:1 write/read ratio, or 98%, for the weekly, and ~360:1 write/read ratio (99.8%) for a daily backup.
Coincidentally, TFS begins with "Backblaze, the cloud backup company".
CLAs? I'm still angry about TLAs!
As one of those "damn kids who need to get off your lawn" (relatively speaking), particularly one who drives maybe 300 miles a month, let me say some things:
1) I don't like driving. I planned my life so that I don't have to drive that much. I live 2 miles away from where I work, and within walking distance of the grocery store and a fair number of restaurants. Hell, I walked to a Protomen concert. With rent and gas both being stupid expensive, I'm not really saving much money this way, but I'm saving time.
2) I don't need to drive to get to entertainment. I have the internet, there's plenty of clubs and bars within walking distance, so the only reason I really need to drive is to visit friends. Compared to yesteryear, when you needed to drive to watch a movie or to do whatever else people did for fun back then (bowling?).
So since I don't have to drive much for either fun or work, I end up not really driving much because I specifically try to avoid driving a lot. I used to drive 300 miles a week getting to school - I hated it, decided I didn't want to do that again, and now I'm not.
Well there you go, it's right there in the constitution: If you own a printing press, or work directly for someone who does, you are a journalist. Otherwise get stuffed.
Actually, yeah, I'm cool with that. We have a printer at the office, so I would count as a journalist, and given that low barrier to entry (owning, or working for a business that owns, a printing device), pretty much everyone counts as a journalist already or could quickly become one. And remember, a cheap inkjet is a faster and better printer than the best press money could buy back in 1776.
If we can me completely certain that there never will be an error in a capitol crime sentencing, I would advocate immediately dropping the killer in a wood chipper head first.
I have an idea that I believe would simultaneously reduce capitol punishment errors to near-zero, and prevent cruel methods:
Let the convicted select the means of execution, within reason. They want lethal injection, they get it. They want the firing squad, they get it. They want to skydive into a volcano with no parachute, they do it.
And if they want to die of old age, let them. Put them back in prison, life sentence, with the only reversal being if the original sentence is overturned (ie. they prove he didn't do it). If they truly believe they are innocent, they have all the time in the world to prove it.
Now, I say near-zero because a lot of people would prefer a quick death to life in prison. Depending on the circumstances, I might, if I thought there was absolutely no way to prove my innocence. This can be reduced by making prison less of a torture, going for a rehabilitation approach rather than a punishment approach, but even then you'll never get it completely to zero.
But that also affects anything that involves life imprisonment. Even if the maximum penalty is life in jail, some people will kill themselves rather than go on with that. So I think, overall, the false execution rate will be acceptably low.
Particularly if coupled with some other reforms I have considered, chief of which is requiring the convicted to be proven unable to be rehabilitated before execution is even an option, as well as requiring an inquest whenever someone is posthumously exonerated of the investigators, prosecution and judiciary, to ensure that it was an honest mistake, not malice (particularly aimed at the shocking race divide in US executions).
PS: While I think capitol punishment can be a benefit to society if implemented properly, given the choice between the current US system, and no death penalty at all, I would instantly choose the latter. This is the subtle flaw in your bullshit test - assuming that support of execution in general is equal to supporting the current system.
Indeed.
How many people died trying just to cross the Pacific? Or to reach the South Pole? Percentage-wise, I'd bet it was a lot worse than any of the NASA programs. Even the Soviet programs probably did better. Exploration, by its very nature, involves risk. We do what we can to keep the risks in check, but the only way to eliminate risk is to explore and colonize space until going from Canaveral to Tranquility is as common as flying from New York to LA.
Could they do better? Probably, and they should never stop trying to do better. But we should also never stop going just because some people might die. It is sad to die in the attempt, but it is worse to have never made the attempt at all.