Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far, but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
Or maybe the attitude to stop poor games from hitting the shelves. Yes, knowing up front if the idea will work out is hard but at the end it can't be that hard to work out what the reviews will be. Having a good reputation means people will preorder and hype it up instead of waiting for reviews to say if it's hit or miss. It's an asset that smart companies get, they could sell one game that was utter crap but every game after that would suffer.
However, if that asteroid were 15 or 20 years away? The bickering would continue right up until impact. A small but highly funded group of "astronomers" would assure us that the asteroid would miss the earth entirely.
Your world view is rather depressive. I imagine it'd take a year or two to really confirm the trajectory is on a collision course with earth, then an Apollo-like decade of hard science and engineering and hopefully a happy ending while the asteroid is still way out there. I think we'd have much bigger problems with an immidiate danger, for each passing day the effort required to get it out of earth's orbit would increase so I'm not sure throwing endless manpower and resources at it would help as they start tripping all over each other. Most likely we could only rush production of an existing rocket design using people already experienced in the field, which short term is a very limited resource.
Re:No people complain when you over claim
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Wine 1.2 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
For example I was trying to move to a Linux desktop at work, to learn more about Linux and its working in our setup. However, being work, I had to be able to get everything done. So I tried Linux AV software and it was crap, couldn't do what I needed to do. I went and asked our Linux head if he'd be willing to help see if Wine could run Sony Vegas. He said sure. After 3 days of fairly intense work and research, he said no, he could find no way to make it run. He was pretty good too, he didn't blow this off he really tried.
The best place to check is the WineHQ application compatibility database. It'd have told your sysadmin in much less than three days that people have gotten it to run but "Installing this was a mission though." and the best anyone's been able to give it a silver rating. The last test report is from almost a year ago though, it'd be very nice if your sysadmin took five minutes to write up a test report to tell others what he found. Anything less than a gold rating should not be used in a production environment, and even then I'd read the notes to see if it's gold because of functionality flaws or installation complications (to get a platinum rating the application must install without special configuration).
Living in society comes with a cost. You do not get to dictate what the cost is. Other people get to tell you what to do, that's part of the cost. If you don't like it, you are free to shop around for something you like better. But, if you can not find something you like better, you do not get to simply take what you like without paying for it.
Actually, that's what people do when the costs forced upon them becomes too high. Most don't abandon their land, they declare their independence. They opt out of both the costs and the benefits, if they don't need anything from the society they depart from then they don't owe that society anything. I may not have the lands to build your own state or the armies to defend it, but why shouldn't I have the same right? You can not justify forcing a cost on me by virtue of me getting some benefits that have also been forced upon me. I would flip it around and say it's far more likel you are being charged for a product you never ordered.
If you encounter a regression and don't submit a bug report for it, then you deserve what you get. Wine developers do pay attention to regressions, especially if someone does a regression test (git is really great for that job).
I did. After a ton of bisect tests (yes, they ask YOU do to it, not them) it turned out to be the gecko version, which didn't really give much of anything and the instructions to build that was arcane to say the least. It took many more months before finally it was patched, then broken a few months later then fixed again a few months after that. Also, you largely underestimate how many applications graciously ignore unimplemented functions without really suffering problems, but then go boom once WINE starts half implementing them. That happened to me on several installers and yes bugs were filed and eventually resolved but it effectively broke a lot that was working. yay. I assume it's probably not working properly for some other application I don't know about since someone's working on it, but if your application was working fine then it can really only go downhill from there. The same happened on something that was harmless graphical glitches but the "fix" started to crash instead, don't get me wrong overall it gets better but sometimes it definitively gets worse before it gets better.
PlayOnLinux makes a decent effort, but I don't think it helps WINE development much. It's basically a simple way to run predefined installation scripts that install into separate prefixes with different wine versions and custom settings. If you want to file any bugs, use vanilla wine. CodeWeavers sells a version that does pretty much the same thing and there your money mostly goes into making wine better. On the one side I like the POL approach as you don't get the %&%/%"#% regressions, the downside is of course that with less testing the regressions are unlikely to be fixed. But wine tends to have a bit too many regressions IMO...
If you don't want people telling you what to do, you don't have to live in society.
Where exactly? There's no place on earth not claimed by a country. There's no property in this country not claimed by somebody, including public property. And even though it's called public property, I can't just take a piece of it and put up a homestead and call it my own. And even if I did own it, I'd still be bound by all laws and building codes and zoning regulations and whatever else regulations. Besides, what claim could I have on any other land? It's on this land that I was born so by birthright this is the one I have the most claim to, even if I don't recognize the society running it. That I was born into this nation is not a choice, what denies me the right to cut out my own patch, raise my own flag and declare independence? Well the constitution paragraph 1 says the nation is "indivisible" ( 1. Kongeriget Norge er et frit, selvstændigt, udeleligt og uafhændeligt Rige. Dets Regjeringsform er indskrænket og arvelig monarkisk.) Who decided that? Men from 1814 that are long since dead, and the constituency is mostly drawn by borders created by vikings a thousand years ago.
I'm not trying to go off on some anarchistic rant here, I'm just trying to point out that no you don't have a choice and a lot of it is not cooperative but rather quite arbitrary and full of historical luggage. Today, people in Washington DC decide federal law that applies in California thousands of miles away. It's almost as detached as London deciding colony law even though there's some representation, you can still be overruled by a bunch of people thousands of miles away. And if you think they could just peacefully secede, dream on. In Africa there are still country lines drawn with rulers on a map as the colony powers divided the continent between them. Look at all the separatist groups all over the world, there's only one thing keeping nations from crumbling as bits and pieces decide to become independent and that is pure application of force, either military or otherwise. The closest thing you got are certain occupant areas like Freetown Christiania where around 1000 occupants have made some partially independent mini-state but the government is trying hard to "normalize" the area which in practice means forcing them into the confines of the nation state again. One person or even a handful of person would stand no chance, neither would these if push comes to shove. For real independence you need thousands of men with arms, which really only creates a difference society you want out of. You can opt out of living with other people and become a hermit, but you can't really opt out all the way.
That's called 'stealing.'
Congratulations on a worse abuse of words than the MAFIAA.
Considering it's five billion years down and takes another five billion years for the blink to get back, this must be a Guiness record for world's longest practical joke.
Agreed. I once saw a job application form asking for project details, customer names and other information you would usually consider confidential. Would you want your employee, when they are applying for another job, to disclose these details to another company?
Well, I can't speak for anyone else but I was a consultant and I listed each project with start-finish, for what company and a 1-2 line summary of the project and my role. It'd all be of the form "project to do X", but I wouldn't write any project details on how they do X. It's about the same that went out on my corporate CV to other potential customers too, which is a pretty good guideline. If you want my employment with you to be a total secret, it'll take more than the boilerplate NDA. Of course I don't know what level of detail they wanted here, but I got little problem drawing the line.
The news has always been free. The subscription cost (often barely) covered the printing and distribution costs. The Internet is the printer and distributor now, so this is essentially free. That is to say, we don't pay the paper any longer, we pay the ISP. The ads paid for news in the paper era, and Google's income and market cap lead me to believe that there is some potential for ad revenue on the internet.
But before the Internet, my choice of news was essentially the choice of newspapers at the news stand which created an oligopoly that gave profit. Also there was a steady pulse to the news, the expression "that's yesterday's news" pretty much says it all about how far you'd get just copying what the other papers wrote about.
Today, neither is true. Today I have an almost limitless number of information sources, and while they don't copy the article text they copy the news quickly and shamelessly. That quickly drives the value of those news down towards zero, The non-generic news is no longer just to stand out from the crowd, they really have to be money makers all of them to turn the wheels which happens only in a few niches. Reality is that if you sum up all the non-investigative news of world happenings, product announcements/reviews, politics, sports, culture, weather forcast, tv program, crossword puzzles and all else that fill up a news paper, you get quite a lot. Real investigative news is expensive to make, and how many really care? I suspect they're going the way of the filler songs in the iTunes age - people just buy the hits, the big easy stuff like write up some general BS about the world cup in soccer for example which they've done hundreds of and most just speculation, opinion and random statistics. If you can't increase the price, lower the cost. It's the reality show version of news.
I can at least somewhat fight someone who has a knife. He certainly won't be able to go on a mass killing spree or kill me from a mile away. But since I don't have a big S on my red-and-blue tights, I can't fight bullets. And the "everybody should have guns" argument doesn't hold water, it hardly stopped shootouts in the Wild West and it wouldn't do any better today.
The words aren't very meaningful anyway. They only apply if they are your true sexual desire, and the child isn't simply the easiest way to have sex or satisfy some control/domination/other fetish as children are much less independant than adults. I suppose you could say that no matter what she was in the range of possible victims, but that's a weak conclusion.
Secondly, they deal with the bodily development which causes the attraction, which varies quite wildly between early and late bloomers while laws deal with age in years. What he did is clear, he raped a 12 year old. Answering why and which, if any, of the *phile categories he goes into is not. Personally I think anyone who rapes people have serious issues with their sexuality above and beyond what features they're attracted to.
I wouldn't get too paranoid. I think there's a similar clause in my terms of service, which is usually meant to say that I should use the Internet for "normal" traffic. If I'm instead trying to run a denial of service attack, sending malformed packets, attempting to hack or otherwise trying to disrupt the network or other servers, they have grounds to shut me off. I would imagine the law is worded so that they can continue to shut off users for those reasons, combined with privacy protection this seems like the strongest net neutrality and ISP protection law to date.
are destined to become inadequate at some point as our computing needs inevitably expand to fill the available capacity.
Which is why you can question how "green" these projects really are, what's the point to reduce consumption if it's immediately offset by an equal and opposite increase in consumption? It's as if we made cars with twice the MPG and everybody decided "cool, then I can make my commute twice as long and really get out of the city". Green projects are those that reduce aggregate consumption, sure it's nice if people get more for each watt or more people are able to participate in the wealth, but it doesn't do the environment any good if the total stays the same or goes up.
Rather than try and dumb down the internet to what is suitable for 8-year-olds, I would rather raise children to be mature and handle adult content.
Even if you could compress the maturity normally gained from 0-18 into 0-14 or 0-10, an eight year old will not be ready for everything that's on the Internet. And thinking back how simplistic my thinking was despite being a bright kid, I don't think you can compress it that much either. Children don't start out as little adults and expecting them to just deal with everything from day one is completely unrealistic. Oh they might "deal" in the same way as children growing up with alcoholics and abusers and drug addicts and many more worse fates than looking at bad stuff on the Internet, but not in a good way. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from a moral prude that thinks we should shield kids from everything bad until they're 18. But there has to be room to become mature, to gradually learn to handle adult content before you are that child. And for what it's worth, even outside the Internet I don't think the accelerated adulthood society has been pushing the last decades does children good. I see children now trying to dress, talk, act and be adults much earlier despite still being a little boy or girl on the inside. I think you lose a lot by fast tracking through your childhood.
I had people who would be friends when the bullies weren't around, but that didn't count for much. No, the kind of weirdness that'll scare off everyone isn't good. But the fact that I would fight my bullies even though they were bigger or stronger or more, is. And I don't think it intimidated anyone else because they saw who and why I was fighting, never anyone weaker than me. If a bully knows he can do whatever he wants and get away with it, some of them will do just that.
You both completely failed at learning jack, and resorted to the threat of violence. NERD FAIL. Learn social skills. THAT'S the lesson. They aren't hard and a handful of social cues makes all the difference.
Perhaps in the beginning as social circles were forming and relationships were built, but if you're already neck deep in an abusive situation then no they DON'T. You're being awfully simplistic, it's like complaining that people that get out of a relation with an abusive violent psychopath are doing it the WRONG WAY. The right way is whichever way gets you out, always. There's nothing wrong with signaling that you're willing and able to defend yourself, even facing a losing battle as a response to physical harassment. I wouldn't advocate it as a way to respond to pure mental harassment, but I can sympathize that if nobody can or will help you that eventually you lash out at them to make it stop. It's like with the four boxes of liberty - soap, ballot, jury and ammo box. If you're not getting heard, if the "authorities" won't listen, if you don't get justice you eventually see no other solution than violence. The world is not such a happy place where all disputes get resolved with words, neither on the micro nor the macro level.
To me this represents a huge leap forward in understanding nerd psychology.
Really? Bullies don't attack the "cool" people, so they bully those that don't manage to turn popular opinion against them. Well doh of course neither bully nor victim have huge social skills...
That's not the whole story though, because there's definitively people that were not smart, not popular and not bullying. Being a bully is a choice all of its own.
That's one hell of an unfounded leap. All of those conditions have known mechanisms of action (we know exactly what doesn't work properly) and have found the gene(s) is/are responsible for them. We have neither for serial killers/violent offenders, and I highly doubt there is any gene or set of genes that gives any reasonable probability of one becoming a serial killer or violent offender.
There might be a few sure positives, but they're probably so obviously mentally ill with uncontrolled violent behavior you could spot them a mile away. Reality is that most of us have a fight or flee response and if you just screw it up enough I think many of us have that capability. You can look at every genocide in history, there have been people ready to kill innocent defenseless civilians. They may have been somewhat more brainwashed than your average serial killer by ideology or religion or obeying orders or peer pressure, but they did it.
And there's always people that have been fucked enough with by war and poverty and crime and terror and abuse to just snap and have their empathy just shut down. It's a survival instinct, I remember reading reading an interview with people that had been forced to become child soldiers - turn back and they'd be shot in the back. I don't really remember it in enough detail to retell it, but they more or less disconnected with what they were doing and became emotionally numb. To the degree they felt anything, the fear and terror they provoked in others was turned into a feeling of power and control. Not because of genetics but because it was the only way they could cope with ruthless slaughter.
Personally, I'm very glad to have never tested my limits in that direction. If I had grown up in Somalia with essentially no police, bands of criminals, violence and weapons all around or hell even here wtih some really fucked up parents and childhood... I don't think my genes are that innocent.
SETI is pretty much fumbling in the dark on where to look. The really interesting parts going on now in my opinion is the search for exoplanets, with better equipment we'll soon start having real targets to listen to. It's entirely possible that we've missed it simply because there's been no antenna pointing in the right direction long enough. After all, life as we know it takes millions of years to develop - it's not like they're going to ping us every five seconds "Is there life now?", at least not after the initial attempts at contact. The last could have been thousands of years ago, and you can't assume they're as interested in finding us as we are in finding them. They might know there's life on other planets already, and treat the discovery of earth with the same shrug we discover a new species in the amazons.
One thing I've wondered, if we assumed a mirror image of ourselves on the other side could we do it? Like, how huge an antenna, how narrow a beam, how high power would we need to make a point to point interstellar connection using known technology? Could we do it at all?
Also, at least in certain grades kids are not that interested. In the early classes we would likely have slacked, in the latter classes we'd be pissed that we weren't getting the help we needed to get into good schools or good jobs. There's plenty injustice to go around so you don't need to ignore it, excuse it or accept it.
At my local Microcenter I could get a 5770 for around $179 or a GTX275 for $199. The difference between these cards is night and day. I bought the 4770 and returned it because it wasn't much faster than my 8800. The GTX275 on the other hand, just blows the 5770 away.
As always, check the benchmarks for the game you play. They're close in many games, but a few go exceptionally one way or the other. Mass Effect 2 for example is a very good game for the GTX275 compared to the 5770, other games not so much.
It truly amazes me how lazy developers are when it comes to supporting new things. They whine and bitch and drag their feet and blame MS, rather than just admitting they have to learn something new and doing it.
Probably because of the large number of developers that throw new interfaces out there all the time as a work in progress, where the interfaces themselves are buggy, incomplete and constantly changing. Sure it goes both ways, but I'm sure some are very conservative with good reason based on past experience.
Meh, personally I'd say LGPL so you don't get slightly incompatible file systems. With a BSD license the temptation is pretty big to keep the changes for yourself and say "works on our OS" while diverging from the common code base. Either that or a very detailed and exhaustive spec with a strict conformance test suite.
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Blizzard appears to have a pretty good hit/miss ratio so far, but it's hard to say if it's luck, talent for seeing what will work, or just hordes of loyal fans.
Or maybe the attitude to stop poor games from hitting the shelves. Yes, knowing up front if the idea will work out is hard but at the end it can't be that hard to work out what the reviews will be. Having a good reputation means people will preorder and hype it up instead of waiting for reviews to say if it's hit or miss. It's an asset that smart companies get, they could sell one game that was utter crap but every game after that would suffer.
1. Wrap the whole stuff in AES.
2. Release the key on release date.
This is not the DRM problem of giving the locked box and the key, you simply don't give the key.
However, if that asteroid were 15 or 20 years away? The bickering would continue right up until impact. A small but highly funded group of "astronomers" would assure us that the asteroid would miss the earth entirely.
Your world view is rather depressive. I imagine it'd take a year or two to really confirm the trajectory is on a collision course with earth, then an Apollo-like decade of hard science and engineering and hopefully a happy ending while the asteroid is still way out there. I think we'd have much bigger problems with an immidiate danger, for each passing day the effort required to get it out of earth's orbit would increase so I'm not sure throwing endless manpower and resources at it would help as they start tripping all over each other. Most likely we could only rush production of an existing rocket design using people already experienced in the field, which short term is a very limited resource.
For example I was trying to move to a Linux desktop at work, to learn more about Linux and its working in our setup. However, being work, I had to be able to get everything done. So I tried Linux AV software and it was crap, couldn't do what I needed to do. I went and asked our Linux head if he'd be willing to help see if Wine could run Sony Vegas. He said sure. After 3 days of fairly intense work and research, he said no, he could find no way to make it run. He was pretty good too, he didn't blow this off he really tried.
The best place to check is the WineHQ application compatibility database. It'd have told your sysadmin in much less than three days that people have gotten it to run but "Installing this was a mission though." and the best anyone's been able to give it a silver rating. The last test report is from almost a year ago though, it'd be very nice if your sysadmin took five minutes to write up a test report to tell others what he found. Anything less than a gold rating should not be used in a production environment, and even then I'd read the notes to see if it's gold because of functionality flaws or installation complications (to get a platinum rating the application must install without special configuration).
Living in society comes with a cost. You do not get to dictate what the cost is. Other people get to tell you what to do, that's part of the cost. If you don't like it, you are free to shop around for something you like better. But, if you can not find something you like better, you do not get to simply take what you like without paying for it.
Actually, that's what people do when the costs forced upon them becomes too high. Most don't abandon their land, they declare their independence. They opt out of both the costs and the benefits, if they don't need anything from the society they depart from then they don't owe that society anything. I may not have the lands to build your own state or the armies to defend it, but why shouldn't I have the same right? You can not justify forcing a cost on me by virtue of me getting some benefits that have also been forced upon me. I would flip it around and say it's far more likel you are being charged for a product you never ordered.
If you encounter a regression and don't submit a bug report for it, then you deserve what you get. Wine developers do pay attention to regressions, especially if someone does a regression test (git is really great for that job).
I did. After a ton of bisect tests (yes, they ask YOU do to it, not them) it turned out to be the gecko version, which didn't really give much of anything and the instructions to build that was arcane to say the least. It took many more months before finally it was patched, then broken a few months later then fixed again a few months after that. Also, you largely underestimate how many applications graciously ignore unimplemented functions without really suffering problems, but then go boom once WINE starts half implementing them. That happened to me on several installers and yes bugs were filed and eventually resolved but it effectively broke a lot that was working. yay. I assume it's probably not working properly for some other application I don't know about since someone's working on it, but if your application was working fine then it can really only go downhill from there. The same happened on something that was harmless graphical glitches but the "fix" started to crash instead, don't get me wrong overall it gets better but sometimes it definitively gets worse before it gets better.
PlayOnLinux makes a decent effort, but I don't think it helps WINE development much. It's basically a simple way to run predefined installation scripts that install into separate prefixes with different wine versions and custom settings. If you want to file any bugs, use vanilla wine. CodeWeavers sells a version that does pretty much the same thing and there your money mostly goes into making wine better. On the one side I like the POL approach as you don't get the %&%/%"#% regressions, the downside is of course that with less testing the regressions are unlikely to be fixed. But wine tends to have a bit too many regressions IMO...
If you don't want people telling you what to do, you don't have to live in society.
Where exactly? There's no place on earth not claimed by a country. There's no property in this country not claimed by somebody, including public property. And even though it's called public property, I can't just take a piece of it and put up a homestead and call it my own. And even if I did own it, I'd still be bound by all laws and building codes and zoning regulations and whatever else regulations. Besides, what claim could I have on any other land? It's on this land that I was born so by birthright this is the one I have the most claim to, even if I don't recognize the society running it. That I was born into this nation is not a choice, what denies me the right to cut out my own patch, raise my own flag and declare independence? Well the constitution paragraph 1 says the nation is "indivisible" ( 1. Kongeriget Norge er et frit, selvstændigt, udeleligt og uafhændeligt Rige. Dets Regjeringsform er indskrænket og arvelig monarkisk.) Who decided that? Men from 1814 that are long since dead, and the constituency is mostly drawn by borders created by vikings a thousand years ago.
I'm not trying to go off on some anarchistic rant here, I'm just trying to point out that no you don't have a choice and a lot of it is not cooperative but rather quite arbitrary and full of historical luggage. Today, people in Washington DC decide federal law that applies in California thousands of miles away. It's almost as detached as London deciding colony law even though there's some representation, you can still be overruled by a bunch of people thousands of miles away. And if you think they could just peacefully secede, dream on. In Africa there are still country lines drawn with rulers on a map as the colony powers divided the continent between them. Look at all the separatist groups all over the world, there's only one thing keeping nations from crumbling as bits and pieces decide to become independent and that is pure application of force, either military or otherwise. The closest thing you got are certain occupant areas like Freetown Christiania where around 1000 occupants have made some partially independent mini-state but the government is trying hard to "normalize" the area which in practice means forcing them into the confines of the nation state again. One person or even a handful of person would stand no chance, neither would these if push comes to shove. For real independence you need thousands of men with arms, which really only creates a difference society you want out of. You can opt out of living with other people and become a hermit, but you can't really opt out all the way.
That's called 'stealing.'
Congratulations on a worse abuse of words than the MAFIAA.
Considering it's five billion years down and takes another five billion years for the blink to get back, this must be a Guiness record for world's longest practical joke.
Agreed. I once saw a job application form asking for project details, customer names and other information you would usually consider confidential. Would you want your employee, when they are applying for another job, to disclose these details to another company?
Well, I can't speak for anyone else but I was a consultant and I listed each project with start-finish, for what company and a 1-2 line summary of the project and my role. It'd all be of the form "project to do X", but I wouldn't write any project details on how they do X. It's about the same that went out on my corporate CV to other potential customers too, which is a pretty good guideline. If you want my employment with you to be a total secret, it'll take more than the boilerplate NDA. Of course I don't know what level of detail they wanted here, but I got little problem drawing the line.
The news has always been free. The subscription cost (often barely) covered the printing and distribution costs. The Internet is the printer and distributor now, so this is essentially free. That is to say, we don't pay the paper any longer, we pay the ISP. The ads paid for news in the paper era, and Google's income and market cap lead me to believe that there is some potential for ad revenue on the internet.
But before the Internet, my choice of news was essentially the choice of newspapers at the news stand which created an oligopoly that gave profit. Also there was a steady pulse to the news, the expression "that's yesterday's news" pretty much says it all about how far you'd get just copying what the other papers wrote about.
Today, neither is true. Today I have an almost limitless number of information sources, and while they don't copy the article text they copy the news quickly and shamelessly. That quickly drives the value of those news down towards zero, The non-generic news is no longer just to stand out from the crowd, they really have to be money makers all of them to turn the wheels which happens only in a few niches. Reality is that if you sum up all the non-investigative news of world happenings, product announcements/reviews, politics, sports, culture, weather forcast, tv program, crossword puzzles and all else that fill up a news paper, you get quite a lot. Real investigative news is expensive to make, and how many really care? I suspect they're going the way of the filler songs in the iTunes age - people just buy the hits, the big easy stuff like write up some general BS about the world cup in soccer for example which they've done hundreds of and most just speculation, opinion and random statistics. If you can't increase the price, lower the cost. It's the reality show version of news.
I can at least somewhat fight someone who has a knife. He certainly won't be able to go on a mass killing spree or kill me from a mile away. But since I don't have a big S on my red-and-blue tights, I can't fight bullets. And the "everybody should have guns" argument doesn't hold water, it hardly stopped shootouts in the Wild West and it wouldn't do any better today.
The words aren't very meaningful anyway. They only apply if they are your true sexual desire, and the child isn't simply the easiest way to have sex or satisfy some control/domination/other fetish as children are much less independant than adults. I suppose you could say that no matter what she was in the range of possible victims, but that's a weak conclusion.
Secondly, they deal with the bodily development which causes the attraction, which varies quite wildly between early and late bloomers while laws deal with age in years. What he did is clear, he raped a 12 year old. Answering why and which, if any, of the *phile categories he goes into is not. Personally I think anyone who rapes people have serious issues with their sexuality above and beyond what features they're attracted to.
I wouldn't get too paranoid. I think there's a similar clause in my terms of service, which is usually meant to say that I should use the Internet for "normal" traffic. If I'm instead trying to run a denial of service attack, sending malformed packets, attempting to hack or otherwise trying to disrupt the network or other servers, they have grounds to shut me off. I would imagine the law is worded so that they can continue to shut off users for those reasons, combined with privacy protection this seems like the strongest net neutrality and ISP protection law to date.
are destined to become inadequate at some point as our computing needs inevitably expand to fill the available capacity.
Which is why you can question how "green" these projects really are, what's the point to reduce consumption if it's immediately offset by an equal and opposite increase in consumption? It's as if we made cars with twice the MPG and everybody decided "cool, then I can make my commute twice as long and really get out of the city". Green projects are those that reduce aggregate consumption, sure it's nice if people get more for each watt or more people are able to participate in the wealth, but it doesn't do the environment any good if the total stays the same or goes up.
Rather than try and dumb down the internet to what is suitable for 8-year-olds, I would rather raise children to be mature and handle adult content.
Even if you could compress the maturity normally gained from 0-18 into 0-14 or 0-10, an eight year old will not be ready for everything that's on the Internet. And thinking back how simplistic my thinking was despite being a bright kid, I don't think you can compress it that much either. Children don't start out as little adults and expecting them to just deal with everything from day one is completely unrealistic. Oh they might "deal" in the same way as children growing up with alcoholics and abusers and drug addicts and many more worse fates than looking at bad stuff on the Internet, but not in a good way. Don't get me wrong, I'm far from a moral prude that thinks we should shield kids from everything bad until they're 18. But there has to be room to become mature, to gradually learn to handle adult content before you are that child. And for what it's worth, even outside the Internet I don't think the accelerated adulthood society has been pushing the last decades does children good. I see children now trying to dress, talk, act and be adults much earlier despite still being a little boy or girl on the inside. I think you lose a lot by fast tracking through your childhood.
I had people who would be friends when the bullies weren't around, but that didn't count for much. No, the kind of weirdness that'll scare off everyone isn't good. But the fact that I would fight my bullies even though they were bigger or stronger or more, is. And I don't think it intimidated anyone else because they saw who and why I was fighting, never anyone weaker than me. If a bully knows he can do whatever he wants and get away with it, some of them will do just that.
You both completely failed at learning jack, and resorted to the threat of violence. NERD FAIL. Learn social skills. THAT'S the lesson. They aren't hard and a handful of social cues makes all the difference.
Perhaps in the beginning as social circles were forming and relationships were built, but if you're already neck deep in an abusive situation then no they DON'T. You're being awfully simplistic, it's like complaining that people that get out of a relation with an abusive violent psychopath are doing it the WRONG WAY. The right way is whichever way gets you out, always. There's nothing wrong with signaling that you're willing and able to defend yourself, even facing a losing battle as a response to physical harassment. I wouldn't advocate it as a way to respond to pure mental harassment, but I can sympathize that if nobody can or will help you that eventually you lash out at them to make it stop. It's like with the four boxes of liberty - soap, ballot, jury and ammo box. If you're not getting heard, if the "authorities" won't listen, if you don't get justice you eventually see no other solution than violence. The world is not such a happy place where all disputes get resolved with words, neither on the micro nor the macro level.
To me this represents a huge leap forward in understanding nerd psychology.
Really? Bullies don't attack the "cool" people, so they bully those that don't manage to turn popular opinion against them. Well doh of course neither bully nor victim have huge social skills...
That's not the whole story though, because there's definitively people that were not smart, not popular and not bullying. Being a bully is a choice all of its own.
That's one hell of an unfounded leap. All of those conditions have known mechanisms of action (we know exactly what doesn't work properly) and have found the gene(s) is/are responsible for them. We have neither for serial killers/violent offenders, and I highly doubt there is any gene or set of genes that gives any reasonable probability of one becoming a serial killer or violent offender.
There might be a few sure positives, but they're probably so obviously mentally ill with uncontrolled violent behavior you could spot them a mile away. Reality is that most of us have a fight or flee response and if you just screw it up enough I think many of us have that capability. You can look at every genocide in history, there have been people ready to kill innocent defenseless civilians. They may have been somewhat more brainwashed than your average serial killer by ideology or religion or obeying orders or peer pressure, but they did it.
And there's always people that have been fucked enough with by war and poverty and crime and terror and abuse to just snap and have their empathy just shut down. It's a survival instinct, I remember reading reading an interview with people that had been forced to become child soldiers - turn back and they'd be shot in the back. I don't really remember it in enough detail to retell it, but they more or less disconnected with what they were doing and became emotionally numb. To the degree they felt anything, the fear and terror they provoked in others was turned into a feeling of power and control. Not because of genetics but because it was the only way they could cope with ruthless slaughter.
Personally, I'm very glad to have never tested my limits in that direction. If I had grown up in Somalia with essentially no police, bands of criminals, violence and weapons all around or hell even here wtih some really fucked up parents and childhood... I don't think my genes are that innocent.
SETI is pretty much fumbling in the dark on where to look. The really interesting parts going on now in my opinion is the search for exoplanets, with better equipment we'll soon start having real targets to listen to. It's entirely possible that we've missed it simply because there's been no antenna pointing in the right direction long enough. After all, life as we know it takes millions of years to develop - it's not like they're going to ping us every five seconds "Is there life now?", at least not after the initial attempts at contact. The last could have been thousands of years ago, and you can't assume they're as interested in finding us as we are in finding them. They might know there's life on other planets already, and treat the discovery of earth with the same shrug we discover a new species in the amazons.
One thing I've wondered, if we assumed a mirror image of ourselves on the other side could we do it? Like, how huge an antenna, how narrow a beam, how high power would we need to make a point to point interstellar connection using known technology? Could we do it at all?
Also, at least in certain grades kids are not that interested. In the early classes we would likely have slacked, in the latter classes we'd be pissed that we weren't getting the help we needed to get into good schools or good jobs. There's plenty injustice to go around so you don't need to ignore it, excuse it or accept it.
At my local Microcenter I could get a 5770 for around $179 or a GTX275 for $199. The difference between these cards is night and day. I bought the 4770 and returned it because it wasn't much faster than my 8800. The GTX275 on the other hand, just blows the 5770 away.
As always, check the benchmarks for the game you play. They're close in many games, but a few go exceptionally one way or the other. Mass Effect 2 for example is a very good game for the GTX275 compared to the 5770, other games not so much.
It truly amazes me how lazy developers are when it comes to supporting new things. They whine and bitch and drag their feet and blame MS, rather than just admitting they have to learn something new and doing it.
Probably because of the large number of developers that throw new interfaces out there all the time as a work in progress, where the interfaces themselves are buggy, incomplete and constantly changing. Sure it goes both ways, but I'm sure some are very conservative with good reason based on past experience.
Meh, personally I'd say LGPL so you don't get slightly incompatible file systems. With a BSD license the temptation is pretty big to keep the changes for yourself and say "works on our OS" while diverging from the common code base. Either that or a very detailed and exhaustive spec with a strict conformance test suite.