Political discussions among geeks are simply more interesting than among most other crowds. I believe it's because we are by nature more willing to delve into the gritty details. Like any subculture, there are biases and stupid memes but these flaws are at least occasionally point out and debated... it's not that we don't have an echo chamber here, it's that ours at least has a skylight.
For lack of mod points: This is the main reason why I still read slashdot.
Wow, I didn't expect to see that at +5 insightful.
The sentiment that someone should have life-long consequences for some careless words (regardless of how vile those words may have been) is highly dangerous and uncharacteristic of slashdot. Sure this is serious stuff, but put the pitchforks down folks! To start with, people placed in that sort of social ostracism are much, much more likely to turn to crime or otherwise become harmful to society. It is already harmful enough that people who have been convicted of crimes have so much trouble living normally should they decide to not continue committing crimes. Is it right to then further add the inustice of such a disproportionately harsh fate?
I had thought people were being a little overzealous in applying the term "witch hunt" to this story, I fear I may have been wrong.
Skyrim's actually really popular with women. Partly because it's so fun to play
Fixed that for you.
Being "open-ended and exploratory" does not make it more enjoyable for women it makes it more enjoyable for anyone who enjoys open-ended or exploratory games.
Just as hardcore games are no more enjoyable for men than they are for women. Hell, my wife has ascended, how many guys do you know that have pulled that off?
Women are just as capable of being hardcore gamers as men are. Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women.
And while your post is a lot better than reading the rape and violence threats, you are still propagating some of the same old stereo types that were trying to break down.
-Rick
Ascended. As in Nethack? If so, props to your wife, and to you for marrying someone so awesome.
Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women
However, I think you are missing something here. If you were talking CoD or DotA or EVE (less so EVE) you'd have a point about hardcore gamers shunning women. It seems they do. However with games like, nethack, Dark Souls, etc. (some people in DkS2 actually communicate and could be construed as being capable of shunning, not so much Dark Souls), since they are single player games I don't think you can possibly argue that the players of those games shun women. Couldn't it be that women tend not to like those games, say, for cultural reasons? Could it be, as another slashdotter suggested, it is a matter of women shunning other women who play such games?jj
Skyrim's actually really popular with women. Partly because it's so fun to play
Fixed that for you.
Being "open-ended and exploratory" does not make it more enjoyable for women it makes it more enjoyable for anyone who enjoys open-ended or exploratory games.
Just as hardcore games are no more enjoyable for men than they are for women. Hell, my wife has ascended, how many guys do you know that have pulled that off?
Women are just as capable of being hardcore gamers as men are. Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women.
And while your post is a lot better than reading the rape and violence threats, you are still propagating some of the same old stereo types that were trying to break down.
-Rick
Ascended. As in Nethack? If so, props to your wife, and to you for marrying someone so awesome.
Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women
However, I think you are missing something here. If you were talking CoD or DotA or EVE (less so EVE) you'd have a point about hardcore gamers shunning women. It seems they do. However with games like, nethack, Dark Souls, etc. (some people in DkS2 actually communicate and could be construed as being capable of shunning, not so much Dark Souls), since they are single player games I don't think you can possibly argue that the players of those games shun women. Couldn't it be that women tend not to like those games, say, for cultural reasons? Could it be, as another slashdotter suggested, it is a matter of women shunning other women who play such games?
Where are mod points when you need them. Very much this. The effect described by the parent post has happened in other industries, and will continue to happen until people become more wise.
That is not what sysrammer is saying. He is saying that the republicrats (not to mention the insurance industry) were stonewalling and attempting to cause delays, and that the demipubs were in danger of having the delay ending up in the same stasis field the patriot act is in.
So what he is saying is that the political theater needed to be disrupted in order for things to progress at all, even if the reality of things wasn't pretty.
I don't know, I don't think that guy from devshed defended his case well. In some cases he completely misses what the fractal article was trying to say. He says that the settings in php.ini that the fractal design article mentions are not problematic. He even says that the intransitive == operator is merely a result of loose typing and there is no legitimate issue there.
The == operator is listed as "flaky." The == operator is the core of loosely typed languages, and is immensely powerful. He thinks it's flaky because he can't wrap his brain around loose comparisons
And it gets worse:
array_search, strpos, and similar functions return 0 if they find the needle at position zero, but false if they don’t find it at all. In C, functions like strpos return -1 if the item isn’t found. If you don’t check for that case and try to use that as an index, you’ll hit junk memory and your program will blow up. [...] In, say, Python, the equivalent.index methods will raise an exception if the item isn’t found. If you don’t check for that case, your program will blow up. In PHP, these functions return false. If you use FALSE as an index, or do much of anything with it except compare with ===, PHP will silently convert it to 0 for you. Your program will not blow up; it will, instead, do the wrong thing with no warning, unless you remember to include the right boilerplate around every place you use strpos and certain other functions.
So basically, if you don't include the right boilerplate around other languages, they fatally crash and destroy their state, potentially also destroying neighboring programs in memory. However, if you do the same erroneous code in PHP, it continues to work with slightly unexpected results. Tell me again why "keeps working" is a problem? Plus, for what might be the 10th time, he just plain doesn't understand loosely typed languages. Yes, false == zero. That's actually an incredibly powerful feature of the language. The boilerplate he's comparing about isn't exactly onerous either. Look, here it is: "!== false". Oh man, look out. That nearly broke my fingers I typed for so long.
Silently failing is bad. Failing catastrophically is preferable to random program behavior. That's the assumption behind what the original quote is saying (which may be explicitly stated in other parts of that article).
So yeah, I think the main purpose of the "hardly" rebuttal is to reinforce why the fractal of bad design article is correct.
That would be true, if the "normal" behavior of drivers was reasonably safe.
it isn't.
Changing the conditions of the road is a band-aid fix. It is important to reduce accidents and fatalities by fixing the road. However, if you want to reduce the frequency of accidents to near-zero of any task where injury-causing accidents can be the result of human activity (and given the population of the roads in my city, we need to), you need to make sure people are not engaging in unsafe behavior. Dangerous situations can often be resolved by safe behavior -- I'm not saying safe behavior will help you inside a tornado or anything -- but unsafe behavior is unsafe so long as there exists an unsafe mode of failure.
What I'd really like is for vehicles to be near completely fail-safe, but we'd need to give them rails like trains or something. Merely making the road more "normal" is probably necessary here, but that is completely powerless to actually stop people from dying or getting seriously injured.
Firstly, not being able to release in-house tools is a complete non-issue.
Secondly, if the programs are loosely coupled, the GPL, especially GPLv2, is very forgiving of proprietary code and GPLed code working together. You just have to mind your manners and know the rules. For the GPLv3, here are some basic rules from the GPL FAQ:
For instance, if the program uses only simple fork and exec to invoke and communicate with plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license of the plug-in makes no requirements about the main program.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
Furthermore, the system library exception may prove useful sometimes as well, though that is less common.
In conclusion then, while there is a kernel of truth hiding very, very well around what you are saying, it is largely FUD. From the GPL FAQ again:
Which programs you used to edit the source code, or to compile it, or study it, or record it, usually makes no difference for issues concerning the licensing of that source code.
Finally, although far less importantly, if you suppose that the GPL is violated by your project in some subtle manner (just don't copy code, mkay?), chances are, it doesn't matter unless you are doing something particularly malign. In general, someone else will have to find some way to prove you violated the terms of the license. Furthermore, generally organizations like the FSF provide an ample chance to fix noncompliance, even deliberate noncompliance. I highly doubt there is a recorded case of someone being made sorry for using the GPL in good faith.
Working as intended. If you use something that is GPL, you have to be sure to give it back, usually for free. When your business model depends on not giving up the entirety of what you made for free, the GPL is dangerous. Now the GPL is by no means an insurmountable obstacle to building non-free-as-in-beer software, but you have to watch your step. This is intended and necessary for what the GPL tries to do. I *like* the GPL because it prevents my code from being supplanted by proprietary derivative code. I *like* that the GPL does this. This is a feature, not a bug.
That said, it is probably just as well this debugging software is not GPLed, because watching your legal steps requires resources (and there are significant penalties for screwing up). In the case of a debugger, you have to watch if it falls afoul of the "output is mostly code" clause. "Probably not" is probably not a good enough answer.
What you say is true, but to throw a small wrench into that, even though mining and manufacturing don't create ISK, they do create value, increasing the value of every ISK in existence. Without that sort of thing happening, the value of ISK would not-so-gradually inflate into valuelessness.
Unvanquished is a successor to Tremulous a free, open source game that was originally a quake 3 mod (but has been its own standalone game for quite some time). It is an asymmetric FPS, aliens vs humans that has some similarities to Natural Selection, but has been around much longer and is much better balanced.
Tribes Ascend is a good free-to-play FPS based upon the original Tribes series. Jetpack skiing with explosive discs is fun.
Dwarf fortress is a surprisingly detailed simulation game about dwarves, who build fortresses. So yeah. Losing is fun.
EVE Online is an MMO that is unique in having an impressively detailed economy, and largely lives and breathes by player-directed drama. It also boasts some rather good parody songs like this one.
Please note that you cannot train for that ship with a trial account, on account of the fact that you cannot train Cloaking or Covert Ops. A complete list of skills you cannot train on a trial account can be found here. Furthermore, ultimately, even though you could train fleet command in about 20 days, actually fitting a cheetah would take closer to 30 (small projectile turret, motion prediction, basic fitting skills, etc).
I think a large reason for the skills that cannot be used on trial accounts is the fact that some skills with attractive names cannot actually be effectively used within a few weeks (battleship fleet command), or are really only useful to established players anyways (cynosural field generation). Cloaking is probably an exception here, but hisec might be a more dangerous if people's trial alts could cloak up.
Well, it depends on what you are doing. Guaranteed ISK is very hard to get starting out, but you could be making 2M ISK an hour mining tritanium (which requires a not quite AFK level of attention) in a venture in hisec after a couple hours of play. However, doing nothing but sit and mine is boring, and in the grand scheme of things, not that profitable (though probably a great deal more profitable after something like this happens). You can do missions in lieu of this, in fact I recommend it to some extent because that will give you some insight into how to perform other tasks in the game, but will be less profitable starting out.
After some small amount of training, you can start "exploring" (this is an eve term with a specific meaning). In hisec, the profitable ones are primarily data sites and combat signatures, though relic sites can be worth your time. Combat signatures are only profitable if they escalate, but I digress. Ultimately, your goal is to score an expensive item from one of these, which could easily be worth over 100M ISK, quite possibly significantly more. If you focus on this, and especially if you can get someone to help you with combat signatures early on, you could have such an item found and sold within a week of exploration.
Once you have some capital to play with, options of earning more ISK open up to you.
For this reason, 16M ISK generally falls into the category of "very disposable" by established players. Such players could buy almost 14,000 rounds of PvP ammo (in this case based off of the current Jita price for Republic Fleet Phased Plasma L) to be fired at the rate of 4 per second or something like that, all for about that same price.
A 40-hour work week pays for our current standard of living. A 20-hour work week would reduce that standard of living.
There are some people, and a considerable number of them, for whom that doesn't really matter. Cheap house, cheap car, decent food, good computer, good internet. I don't need that many luxury goods. I just wish I had more time to make use of what I have.
More importantly, if people are becoming more efficient (since machines and computers can assist with or even take over some tasks that humans used to do), but don't work less, then we must find more to do. Finally and perhaps more interestingly, working less may make people more efficient, which should presumably increase the standard of living.
Slashdot Mirror
Political discussions among geeks are simply more interesting than among most other crowds. I believe it's because we are by nature more willing to delve into the gritty details. Like any subculture, there are biases and stupid memes but these flaws are at least occasionally point out and debated... it's not that we don't have an echo chamber here, it's that ours at least has a skylight.
For lack of mod points: This is the main reason why I still read slashdot.
You, my friend, have never used Microsoft Access
Wow, I didn't expect to see that at +5 insightful.
The sentiment that someone should have life-long consequences for some careless words (regardless of how vile those words may have been) is highly dangerous and uncharacteristic of slashdot. Sure this is serious stuff, but put the pitchforks down folks! To start with, people placed in that sort of social ostracism are much, much more likely to turn to crime or otherwise become harmful to society. It is already harmful enough that people who have been convicted of crimes have so much trouble living normally should they decide to not continue committing crimes. Is it right to then further add the inustice of such a disproportionately harsh fate?
I had thought people were being a little overzealous in applying the term "witch hunt" to this story, I fear I may have been wrong.
Fixed that for you.
Being "open-ended and exploratory" does not make it more enjoyable for women it makes it more enjoyable for anyone who enjoys open-ended or exploratory games.
Just as hardcore games are no more enjoyable for men than they are for women. Hell, my wife has ascended, how many guys do you know that have pulled that off?
Women are just as capable of being hardcore gamers as men are. Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women.
And while your post is a lot better than reading the rape and violence threats, you are still propagating some of the same old stereo types that were trying to break down.
-Rick
Ascended. As in Nethack? If so, props to your wife, and to you for marrying someone so awesome.
Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women
However, I think you are missing something here. If you were talking CoD or DotA or EVE (less so EVE) you'd have a point about hardcore gamers shunning women. It seems they do. However with games like, nethack, Dark Souls, etc. (some people in DkS2 actually communicate and could be construed as being capable of shunning, not so much Dark Souls), since they are single player games I don't think you can possibly argue that the players of those games shun women. Couldn't it be that women tend not to like those games, say, for cultural reasons? Could it be, as another slashdotter suggested, it is a matter of women shunning other women who play such games?jj
Fixed that for you.
Being "open-ended and exploratory" does not make it more enjoyable for women it makes it more enjoyable for anyone who enjoys open-ended or exploratory games.
Just as hardcore games are no more enjoyable for men than they are for women. Hell, my wife has ascended, how many guys do you know that have pulled that off?
Women are just as capable of being hardcore gamers as men are. Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women.
And while your post is a lot better than reading the rape and violence threats, you are still propagating some of the same old stereo types that were trying to break down.
-Rick
Ascended. As in Nethack? If so, props to your wife, and to you for marrying someone so awesome.
Unfortunately the culture of hardcore gamers has largely shunned women trying to make it in the scene, so it's no big surprise that there are less women
However, I think you are missing something here. If you were talking CoD or DotA or EVE (less so EVE) you'd have a point about hardcore gamers shunning women. It seems they do. However with games like, nethack, Dark Souls, etc. (some people in DkS2 actually communicate and could be construed as being capable of shunning, not so much Dark Souls), since they are single player games I don't think you can possibly argue that the players of those games shun women. Couldn't it be that women tend not to like those games, say, for cultural reasons? Could it be, as another slashdotter suggested, it is a matter of women shunning other women who play such games?
Anyone can stand up a rouge DHCP server on most networks.
I tried to set up a rouge DHCP server once, but it left me marooned.
This is a ruddy work of beauty.
Where are mod points when you need them. Very much this. The effect described by the parent post has happened in other industries, and will continue to happen until people become more wise.
That is not what sysrammer is saying. He is saying that the republicrats (not to mention the insurance industry) were stonewalling and attempting to cause delays, and that the demipubs were in danger of having the delay ending up in the same stasis field the patriot act is in.
So what he is saying is that the political theater needed to be disrupted in order for things to progress at all, even if the reality of things wasn't pretty.
I don't know, I don't think that guy from devshed defended his case well. In some cases he completely misses what the fractal article was trying to say. He says that the settings in php.ini that the fractal design article mentions are not problematic. He even says that the intransitive == operator is merely a result of loose typing and there is no legitimate issue there.
The == operator is listed as "flaky." The == operator is the core of loosely typed languages, and is immensely powerful. He thinks it's flaky because he can't wrap his brain around loose comparisons
And it gets worse:
array_search, strpos, and similar functions return 0 if they find the needle at position zero, but false if they don’t find it at all. In C, functions like strpos return -1 if the item isn’t found. If you don’t check for that case and try to use that as an index, you’ll hit junk memory and your program will blow up. [...] In, say, Python, the equivalent .index methods will raise an exception if the item isn’t found. If you don’t check for that case, your program will blow up. In PHP, these functions return false. If you use FALSE as an index, or do much of anything with it except compare with ===, PHP will silently convert it to 0 for you. Your program will not blow up; it will, instead, do the wrong thing with no warning, unless you remember to include the right boilerplate around every place you use strpos and certain other functions.
So basically, if you don't include the right boilerplate around other languages, they fatally crash and destroy their state, potentially also destroying neighboring programs in memory. However, if you do the same erroneous code in PHP, it continues to work with slightly unexpected results. Tell me again why "keeps working" is a problem? Plus, for what might be the 10th time, he just plain doesn't understand loosely typed languages. Yes, false == zero. That's actually an incredibly powerful feature of the language. The boilerplate he's comparing about isn't exactly onerous either. Look, here it is: "!== false". Oh man, look out. That nearly broke my fingers I typed for so long.
Silently failing is bad. Failing catastrophically is preferable to random program behavior. That's the assumption behind what the original quote is saying (which may be explicitly stated in other parts of that article).
So yeah, I think the main purpose of the "hardly" rebuttal is to reinforce why the fractal of bad design article is correct.
That would be true, if the "normal" behavior of drivers was reasonably safe.
it isn't.
Changing the conditions of the road is a band-aid fix. It is important to reduce accidents and fatalities by fixing the road. However, if you want to reduce the frequency of accidents to near-zero of any task where injury-causing accidents can be the result of human activity (and given the population of the roads in my city, we need to), you need to make sure people are not engaging in unsafe behavior. Dangerous situations can often be resolved by safe behavior -- I'm not saying safe behavior will help you inside a tornado or anything -- but unsafe behavior is unsafe so long as there exists an unsafe mode of failure.
What I'd really like is for vehicles to be near completely fail-safe, but we'd need to give them rails like trains or something. Merely making the road more "normal" is probably necessary here, but that is completely powerless to actually stop people from dying or getting seriously injured.
Another alternative
In the long run, we are all dead.
Governments have never worked for any real length of time in history. They have all collapsed.
Firstly, not being able to release in-house tools is a complete non-issue.
Secondly, if the programs are loosely coupled, the GPL, especially GPLv2, is very forgiving of proprietary code and GPLed code working together. You just have to mind your manners and know the rules. For the GPLv3, here are some basic rules from the GPL FAQ:
For instance, if the program uses only simple fork and exec to invoke and communicate with plug-ins, then the plug-ins are separate programs, so the license of the plug-in makes no requirements about the main program.
If the program dynamically links plug-ins, but the communication between them is limited to invoking the ‘main’ function of the plug-in with some options and waiting for it to return, that is a borderline case.
Furthermore, the system library exception may prove useful sometimes as well, though that is less common.
In conclusion then, while there is a kernel of truth hiding very, very well around what you are saying, it is largely FUD. From the GPL FAQ again:
Which programs you used to edit the source code, or to compile it, or study it, or record it, usually makes no difference for issues concerning the licensing of that source code.
Finally, although far less importantly, if you suppose that the GPL is violated by your project in some subtle manner (just don't copy code, mkay?), chances are, it doesn't matter unless you are doing something particularly malign. In general, someone else will have to find some way to prove you violated the terms of the license. Furthermore, generally organizations like the FSF provide an ample chance to fix noncompliance, even deliberate noncompliance. I highly doubt there is a recorded case of someone being made sorry for using the GPL in good faith.
Working as intended. If you use something that is GPL, you have to be sure to give it back, usually for free. When your business model depends on not giving up the entirety of what you made for free, the GPL is dangerous. Now the GPL is by no means an insurmountable obstacle to building non-free-as-in-beer software, but you have to watch your step. This is intended and necessary for what the GPL tries to do. I *like* the GPL because it prevents my code from being supplanted by proprietary derivative code. I *like* that the GPL does this. This is a feature, not a bug.
That said, it is probably just as well this debugging software is not GPLed, because watching your legal steps requires resources (and there are significant penalties for screwing up). In the case of a debugger, you have to watch if it falls afoul of the "output is mostly code" clause. "Probably not" is probably not a good enough answer.
What you say is true, but to throw a small wrench into that, even though mining and manufacturing don't create ISK, they do create value, increasing the value of every ISK in existence. Without that sort of thing happening, the value of ISK would not-so-gradually inflate into valuelessness.
IANAE (I am not an economist)
Dwe warship Dogar and Kazon!
Unvanquished is a successor to Tremulous a free, open source game that was originally a quake 3 mod (but has been its own standalone game for quite some time). It is an asymmetric FPS, aliens vs humans that has some similarities to Natural Selection, but has been around much longer and is much better balanced.
Tribes Ascend is a good free-to-play FPS based upon the original Tribes series. Jetpack skiing with explosive discs is fun.
Dwarf fortress is a surprisingly detailed simulation game about dwarves, who build fortresses. So yeah. Losing is fun.
EVE Online is an MMO that is unique in having an impressively detailed economy, and largely lives and breathes by player-directed drama. It also boasts some rather good parody songs like this one.
Do be aware that some similar sites may already exist, or in the case of technocrat.net, have already existed.
I didn't even hear the past two times this happened, but that's because to a large extent I wasn't really here back then.
Please note that you cannot train for that ship with a trial account, on account of the fact that you cannot train Cloaking or Covert Ops. A complete list of skills you cannot train on a trial account can be found here. Furthermore, ultimately, even though you could train fleet command in about 20 days, actually fitting a cheetah would take closer to 30 (small projectile turret, motion prediction, basic fitting skills, etc).
I think a large reason for the skills that cannot be used on trial accounts is the fact that some skills with attractive names cannot actually be effectively used within a few weeks (battleship fleet command), or are really only useful to established players anyways (cynosural field generation). Cloaking is probably an exception here, but hisec might be a more dangerous if people's trial alts could cloak up.
Well, it depends on what you are doing. Guaranteed ISK is very hard to get starting out, but you could be making 2M ISK an hour mining tritanium (which requires a not quite AFK level of attention) in a venture in hisec after a couple hours of play. However, doing nothing but sit and mine is boring, and in the grand scheme of things, not that profitable (though probably a great deal more profitable after something like this happens). You can do missions in lieu of this, in fact I recommend it to some extent because that will give you some insight into how to perform other tasks in the game, but will be less profitable starting out.
After some small amount of training, you can start "exploring" (this is an eve term with a specific meaning). In hisec, the profitable ones are primarily data sites and combat signatures, though relic sites can be worth your time. Combat signatures are only profitable if they escalate, but I digress. Ultimately, your goal is to score an expensive item from one of these, which could easily be worth over 100M ISK, quite possibly significantly more. If you focus on this, and especially if you can get someone to help you with combat signatures early on, you could have such an item found and sold within a week of exploration.
Once you have some capital to play with, options of earning more ISK open up to you.
For this reason, 16M ISK generally falls into the category of "very disposable" by established players. Such players could buy almost 14,000 rounds of PvP ammo (in this case based off of the current Jita price for Republic Fleet Phased Plasma L) to be fired at the rate of 4 per second or something like that, all for about that same price.
"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice"
- Hanlon's Razor
Mod parent up.
When used improperly, statistics are a dangerous tool.
Enter RequestPolicy, an add-on for firefox that does essentially this.
A 40-hour work week pays for our current standard of living. A 20-hour work week would reduce that standard of living.
There are some people, and a considerable number of them, for whom that doesn't really matter. Cheap house, cheap car, decent food, good computer, good internet. I don't need that many luxury goods. I just wish I had more time to make use of what I have.
More importantly, if people are becoming more efficient (since machines and computers can assist with or even take over some tasks that humans used to do), but don't work less, then we must find more to do. Finally and perhaps more interestingly, working less may make people more efficient, which should presumably increase the standard of living.