I got this game last night, and the name "Golias" is already taken on BattleNet! I mean, how weird of a name does a guy have to use to keep it unique!?
And that strategy has worked so well for Mac Zealots, I'm sure their fantastic success will be repeated with Linux.
Seriously, if you want to see more Linux games, then you had better hope that Linux market share goes way up, because the game companies will always run with the herd.
Otherwise, if there is a gene for criminal behavior, then we cannot arrest criminals:
Well, if your goal is to arrest criminals, then I guess discovering a gene that causes people to murder, rape, or steal is a bad thing. After all, if we treat these people with corrective therapy before the problem manifests itself, then we won't get the carthartic sense of satisfaction when whe punish them later, right?
OTOH, If your goal is to prevent people from being murdered, raped, and ripped off, then such a discovery would be fantastic news, although it would raise as many questions as it would answer.
Our laws, ethics, religions have always been built on the idea that we are each personally responsible for our own actions. To imagine that it might be otherwise is the most dehumanizing concept since Darwin & Co. said that we are basically just animals, with slightly better brains and opposable thumbs. "Genetic tendencies" sounds too much like "pre-ordinaiton" to us. We tend to fear that the concepts of "responsibility" and "free will" are somehow going to be stamped out by the discovery of a "nerd gene" or whatever.
But what about the psychopathic killer? Some of those guys kill themselves or choose not to appeal death row sentences, because they know they will kill again if given the chance.
What if it turns out that most deviant behavior could be attributed to some form of madness or another? What if most of what we call our "personality", the reason why I am a very different sort of person than my brother (even though our "nurture" environment was pretty much the same), is the result of subtle differences in our DNA?
There are certain things about ourselves that we have little control over. If I trained every single day, I would not be as fast as Michael Johnson, nor as good of a boxer as Tyson. If I spent my every waking hour developing my intellect, I would still be no match for Stephen Hawking, nor could I learn to beat Kasparov at chess. Is it so unreasonable to think that other traits of our identity, like personality, might also have predetermined boundries?
Either way, the woman spilled hot coffee on herself, then sued the restaurant for selling it to her. That's like suing a power tool company after you fire a nail-gun into the back of your hand, saying "they should have put a sensor on it so it could tell flesh from drywall".
Accidents happen, and sometimes you will be hurt by them. It's called life.
That sounds more to me like dogma than a conclusion.
The "nature vs. nurture" argument about human development is a lot like the "particle vs. wave" argument about light.
The correct answer, according to the leaders in each field is the same: "We think it resembles both."
There is plenty of evidence that genetic programming dramatically influences our physical and mental health, and that a lot of our "environmental" conditioning begins in the womb, when factors like our mothers' hormone levels have a great deal of influence on our development.
There is also plenty of evidence to suggest that environmental and behavioral conditioning during childhood is very important, but before you assume that it is more important (as a typical Psych book from the 70's may have lead you to believe), you may want to read a little about David Reimer and Dr. Money's bold attempt to prove that nurture trumps nature. The results are not encouraging for his side, and his blatant fraud does not help his case (although it won him many accolades when he was still getting away with it).
At the trial of this case, it was revealed that while coffee served in your home, in a restaurant, on an airplane or in a fast food establishment is normally in the range of 135-145 degrees, McDonald's routinely sold its coffee nationwide at 180-190 degrees.
(Gasp!) What a shocker!!!! I never heard that side of the story before, let alone have I heard it over and over and over by whiney crybabies who simply can't accept that a faceless corporation might not be the bad guy in every single case.
Look, the reason McDonald's coffee was hotter than the stuff you got out of your pot at home was not because of some nefarious corporate scheme to burn old ladies. It was hotter because most of their customers wanted it that way! The typical McCoffee drinker is a blue-collar 9-to-5er who buys the coffee on their way to work, and doesn't actually drink it until much later, sometimes a half hour or hour later. In order to prevent the coffee from being as cold as a witch's t?? by the time they drink it, the coffee was sold hotter than the temperature you would normally drink it at.
It may have been extremely hot, but this woman jammed the coffee cup into her crotch and drove off without even checking if the lid was secure; and when she spilled the molten stuff all over her groin, what did she do? She kept right on driving while the skin on her lap was being destroyed.
I knew that the judge reduced the punative damages, and when he did so, it was because the original ruling was absolutely insane. The final judgement was still far more than she had a right to ask for, and I'm sure her ambulance-chasing lawyers collected most of it anyway.
Thanks to this old bat not taking responsibility for her own actions, thousands of schlepps that can't afford the good stuff are chugging down their morning brew right away on the highway commute while it still is above body temperature, which can't be much less dangerous than hot liquid in a cup.
Individualism and "wierdness" could show up in the new human map, along with tendencies towards anger, dissent, and bad skin. No, Jon, they couldn't. Those have been proven to be mostly environmental factors. There are a few mental disorders that lead to those, but nothing in the genetic code. Did you do any research on modern psychology before writing this?
Actually, a large percentage of geeks and nerds are believed to have Asperger's Syndrome, a disorder that impairs social interaction skill development, but also sometimes makes people very well suited to writing code all night.
This syndrome might have genetic origins in some cases. (It's hard to know, because it was only discovered as a unique pathology in 1994 and there are currently no biological tests for it).
OTOH... These days, some parents would probably want to genetically add the syndrome, rather than subtract it. Bill Gates shows many of the symptoms of this disorder, and who wouldn't want their kid to grow up and be a multi-billionaire?:)
Often when people launch frivolous lawsuits, the company will settle to avoid legal fees and embarrassment, in some situations, the person suing can play for sympathy (like that pathetic old lady that dumped coffee all over her lap, and sued McDonald's for the burns).
In this case, Nike has no reason to settle. Their case looks lead-pipe solid, and (from what I can see) the person suing them is a whining little bitch of an ISP sysadmin.
Even though nothing is likely to come out of this lawsuit, it will be played up in the news because so many people hate Nike. They charge "too much" for their shoes, they use overseas labor for their manufacturing, and they paste that Swoosh-thing on every flat surface within 5 miles of every stadium and golf course. On top of that, they are playing those stupid "Mrs. Jones" comercials, where a cardboard blaxploitation character talks jive into a radio microphone about how women athletes should be paid the same absurdly-high salaries as the men, even though hardly anybody watches them.
Yessiree, plenty of reasons for people of various political stripes to hate Nike... but this isn't one of them. I hope they win, and get counter-damages for having to waste their time on it.
No, it makes sense. After the Empire takes over, it creates the rumor that the Force isn't there, but that doesn't work, so they turn it into a religion of sorts...
But my point was that the "Force as religion" concept made Star Wars a great mythical story. The "Force as a biological parasite" concept makes Star Wars a really stupid Sci-Fi serial.
IIRC, Athena was not born at all... she emerged from the cracked skull of Zeus. Also, she was not a person, just another god among many in a polytheistic pantheon.
Shouldn't bug you...unless you think the bible is some sort of factual text rather than a collection of peasant poetry, mythology and moraltiy plays.
Cute. Just what we need, sufficient flamebait to start a massive, off-topic, fundamentalist-versus-agnostic-with-no-room-for-ot her-options flame war.
I'm not going to touch that one, other than to say "thanks a lot" for the shouting match which is likely to follow your comment.
Lucas draws most of his archetypes for the Star Wars series from religion. For all his protests of "I'm just making a cute story for 9-year-olds", he is trying to create an operatic tale of good and evil. (And when I say "operatic", I mean as in Wagner. It's all about scale. Everything is big, and the story is filled with gods and monsters.)
Christ figures are everywhere in western literature, and you don't have to look far to find other examples. Sometimes it is done well (like in Cool Hand Luke), sometimes not so well (In The World According To Garp, he was conceived when his mother raped an unknown dieing soldier.)
If we are to criticize Lucas for the virgin birth in TPM, it should be for being so ham-fisted and obvious about it, when he was so subtle and crafty with the symbolism in the last half of Empire. Perhaps he should consider hiring a more seasoned director to get his vision on the screen without cramming it down our throats.
The original series (it will always be the original series to me) was set in the rebel outposts and backwater towns of a civilization in rapid decline. Episode I took place in the opulent castle of Queen Amidala, and the Captial City of a massive republic.
(The subway in Washington DC is a lot cleaner and nicer than the one in New York... at least the trains that run to the federal building are, anyway. When I rode them, I never saw a single scrwal.)
The desert scenes in Episode I were plenty grimy, and the racing pods all looked like tricked-out hot-rod junkers.
It makes sense, though, that a royal princess from a peaceful planet would have a fleet of spiffy, barely-used fighter ships, and her personal ship (that silver thingy) was her planet's equivelant of Air Force One, so a lot of dents and scratches would be very out of place.
What they're debating is a suitable platform for amongst other things Mission Critical Information System components. Or do you live on an island, cook your own food etc. and thus have no need for large companies with large and reliable database. A.C. OCP MPC B.Tec
He he... I could not tell for sure if you were serious, trolling, or being sarcastic, but I got a good chuckle out of that post.
I could almost visualize somebody pushing his taped-together glasses back up on to the bridge of his nose while browbeating somebody at a party with that argument.:)
Or maybe Neo will have to ride a light-cycle and fight his way to the MCP before it gains total control.
Or perhaps the Strangers will wish to posess his mind, now that he has learned to tune.
Or maybe, just maybe, they will do something with their "He's The One" story that hasn't been done a million times before... but I doubt it.
The best thing they could do is just give up on their crappy story about AI robots using people for batteries and just give us two more flicks of Kung Fu fighting and cool camera tricks.
Actually, there were quite a few things I liked about Episode I.
First of all, he established the groundwork for what are sure to be two very dark and combat-filled movies.
Also, the lightsaber fight at the end was the best filmed so far.
Even during a second viewing, I was still laughing every time I saw the "thin client" attack droids in action. IMHO, anybody who doesn't think an entire army of Crow T. Robots getting their asses kicked by lizzard men is funny needs to lighten up a little. That battle alone was worth my seven bucks.
On the downside, turning The Force into super-intelligent germs was a huge mistake. In two brief scenes, he ruined the whole series by turning a beautifully impossible fantasy into a very implausable sci-fi load of crap.
This was even less forgivable than the cartoony Jar Jar, the Bat-Grapling-Guns that Amidala's royal guard used, or the fact that Brian Blessed (voice of the Gungan King) put in the corniest performance of his carreer since his hammy appearance in Flash Gordon.
Alright, I'm going to shut up now, because I'm starting to sound like the "Comic Book Store Guy" from The Simpsons.
In other breaking news: New desktop PC's out-perform laptops North Dakota expects colder weather than Texas this year Gerneralissimo Francisco Franco is still dead
Of course Compaq and Dell are going to tell you that this chip is crap. They are not using it. The companies that are using it are just as sure to tell you that the chip is an "Intel Killer" or something.
Make a hole with a gun perpendicular To the name of this town in a desktop globe Exit wound in a foreign nation Showing the home of the one this was written for
My apartment looks upside-down from there Water spirals the wrong way out the sink And her voice is a backwards record It's like a whirlpool and it never ends.
- From "Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants
Sorry for interrupting, but since the thread was wildly off-topic anyway, I figured what the hell.
If you put a Microsoft SQL Server guy in a room with an Oracle dude and a SyBase person for the purposes of discussing the relative merits of one database over the other, none would come out alive.
Gawd... I am hard-pressed to imagine a more tedious argument to witness.
Perhaps a raging debate at a Sci Fi convention over who wrote the best "authorized" Asimov-derived novel.
With so many "purdy pictures" coming in from the Hubble, and more orbital telescopes planned, it seems that we might approaching the point of diminishing returns for bigger ground-based telescopes.
Other than cost savings and easy access for changes, are there many advantages to staying on the ground?
Sounds like you are trying to have two arguments at once: Linux vs. *BSD UNIX, and GPL vs. BSD licensing. One is a technical debate, the other is a financial debate (or a moral debate, if RMS is to be taken seriously).
Either one could result in a bloody Holy War, so I don't think I'm going to enter the fray.
Is it really a troll if they put a little ":)" at the end of it? I mean, it is hardly their fault if somebody does not realize they were being sarcastic or kidding around.
Slashdot Mirror
I logged in a HeMightBeDave instead.
Seriously, if you want to see more Linux games, then you had better hope that Linux market share goes way up, because the game companies will always run with the herd.
Well, if your goal is to arrest criminals, then I guess discovering a gene that causes people to murder, rape, or steal is a bad thing. After all, if we treat these people with corrective therapy before the problem manifests itself, then we won't get the carthartic sense of satisfaction when whe punish them later, right?
OTOH, If your goal is to prevent people from being murdered, raped, and ripped off, then such a discovery would be fantastic news, although it would raise as many questions as it would answer.
Our laws, ethics, religions have always been built on the idea that we are each personally responsible for our own actions. To imagine that it might be otherwise is the most dehumanizing concept since Darwin & Co. said that we are basically just animals, with slightly better brains and opposable thumbs. "Genetic tendencies" sounds too much like "pre-ordinaiton" to us. We tend to fear that the concepts of "responsibility" and "free will" are somehow going to be stamped out by the discovery of a "nerd gene" or whatever.
But what about the psychopathic killer? Some of those guys kill themselves or choose not to appeal death row sentences, because they know they will kill again if given the chance.
What if it turns out that most deviant behavior could be attributed to some form of madness or another? What if most of what we call our "personality", the reason why I am a very different sort of person than my brother (even though our "nurture" environment was pretty much the same), is the result of subtle differences in our DNA?
There are certain things about ourselves that we have little control over. If I trained every single day, I would not be as fast as Michael Johnson, nor as good of a boxer as Tyson. If I spent my every waking hour developing my intellect, I would still be no match for Stephen Hawking, nor could I learn to beat Kasparov at chess. Is it so unreasonable to think that other traits of our identity, like personality, might also have predetermined boundries?
Accidents happen, and sometimes you will be hurt by them. It's called life.
That sounds more to me like dogma than a conclusion.
The "nature vs. nurture" argument about human development is a lot like the "particle vs. wave" argument about light.
The correct answer, according to the leaders in each field is the same: "We think it resembles both."
There is plenty of evidence that genetic programming dramatically influences our physical and mental health, and that a lot of our "environmental" conditioning begins in the womb, when factors like our mothers' hormone levels have a great deal of influence on our development.
There is also plenty of evidence to suggest that environmental and behavioral conditioning during childhood is very important, but before you assume that it is more important (as a typical Psych book from the 70's may have lead you to believe), you may want to read a little about David Reimer and Dr. Money's bold attempt to prove that nurture trumps nature. The results are not encouraging for his side, and his blatant fraud does not help his case (although it won him many accolades when he was still getting away with it).
(Gasp!) What a shocker!!!! I never heard that side of the story before, let alone have I heard it over and over and over by whiney crybabies who simply can't accept that a faceless corporation might not be the bad guy in every single case.
Look, the reason McDonald's coffee was hotter than the stuff you got out of your pot at home was not because of some nefarious corporate scheme to burn old ladies. It was hotter because most of their customers wanted it that way! The typical McCoffee drinker is a blue-collar 9-to-5er who buys the coffee on their way to work, and doesn't actually drink it until much later, sometimes a half hour or hour later. In order to prevent the coffee from being as cold as a witch's t?? by the time they drink it, the coffee was sold hotter than the temperature you would normally drink it at.
It may have been extremely hot, but this woman jammed the coffee cup into her crotch and drove off without even checking if the lid was secure; and when she spilled the molten stuff all over her groin, what did she do? She kept right on driving while the skin on her lap was being destroyed.
I knew that the judge reduced the punative damages, and when he did so, it was because the original ruling was absolutely insane. The final judgement was still far more than she had a right to ask for, and I'm sure her ambulance-chasing lawyers collected most of it anyway.
Thanks to this old bat not taking responsibility for her own actions, thousands of schlepps that can't afford the good stuff are chugging down their morning brew right away on the highway commute while it still is above body temperature, which can't be much less dangerous than hot liquid in a cup.
No, Jon, they couldn't. Those have been proven to be mostly environmental factors. There are a few mental disorders that lead to those, but nothing in the genetic code. Did you do any research on modern psychology before writing this?
Actually, a large percentage of geeks and nerds are believed to have Asperger's Syndrome, a disorder that impairs social interaction skill development, but also sometimes makes people very well suited to writing code all night.
This syndrome might have genetic origins in some cases. (It's hard to know, because it was only discovered as a unique pathology in 1994 and there are currently no biological tests for it).
OTOH... These days, some parents would probably want to genetically add the syndrome, rather than subtract it. Bill Gates shows many of the symptoms of this disorder, and who wouldn't want their kid to grow up and be a multi-billionaire? :)
Actually, I thought his sig file was even funnier.
In this case, Nike has no reason to settle. Their case looks lead-pipe solid, and (from what I can see) the person suing them is a whining little bitch of an ISP sysadmin.
Even though nothing is likely to come out of this lawsuit, it will be played up in the news because so many people hate Nike. They charge "too much" for their shoes, they use overseas labor for their manufacturing, and they paste that Swoosh-thing on every flat surface within 5 miles of every stadium and golf course. On top of that, they are playing those stupid "Mrs. Jones" comercials, where a cardboard blaxploitation character talks jive into a radio microphone about how women athletes should be paid the same absurdly-high salaries as the men, even though hardly anybody watches them.
Yessiree, plenty of reasons for people of various political stripes to hate Nike... but this isn't one of them. I hope they win, and get counter-damages for having to waste their time on it.
Iraq
Albania
Libya
North Korea
Haiti
Cuba
Brunei
Laos
and the list goes on and on...
You have resorted to wild hyperbole before, John, but this time you are just being silly.
But my point was that the "Force as religion" concept made Star Wars a great mythical story.
The "Force as a biological parasite" concept makes Star Wars a really stupid Sci-Fi serial.
IIRC, Athena was not born at all... she emerged from the cracked skull of Zeus. Also, she was not a person, just another god among many in a polytheistic pantheon.
Shouldn't bug you...unless you think the bible is some sort of factual text rather than a collection of peasant poetry, mythology and moraltiy plays.
Cute. Just what we need, sufficient flamebait to start a massive, off-topic, fundamentalist-versus-agnostic-with-no-room-for-ot her-options flame war.
I'm not going to touch that one, other than to say "thanks a lot" for the shouting match which is likely to follow your comment.
Christ figures are everywhere in western literature, and you don't have to look far to find other examples. Sometimes it is done well (like in Cool Hand Luke), sometimes not so well (In The World According To Garp, he was conceived when his mother raped an unknown dieing soldier.)
If we are to criticize Lucas for the virgin birth in TPM, it should be for being so ham-fisted and obvious about it, when he was so subtle and crafty with the symbolism in the last half of Empire. Perhaps he should consider hiring a more seasoned director to get his vision on the screen without cramming it down our throats.
The original series (it will always be the original series to me) was set in the rebel outposts and backwater towns of a civilization in rapid decline. Episode I took place in the opulent castle of Queen Amidala, and the Captial City of a massive republic.
(The subway in Washington DC is a lot cleaner and nicer than the one in New York... at least the trains that run to the federal building are, anyway. When I rode them, I never saw a single scrwal.)
The desert scenes in Episode I were plenty grimy, and the racing pods all looked like tricked-out hot-rod junkers.
It makes sense, though, that a royal princess from a peaceful planet would have a fleet of spiffy, barely-used fighter ships, and her personal ship (that silver thingy) was her planet's equivelant of Air Force One, so a lot of dents and scratches would be very out of place.
He he... I could not tell for sure if you were serious, trolling, or being sarcastic, but I got a good chuckle out of that post.
I could almost visualize somebody pushing his taped-together glasses back up on to the bridge of his nose while browbeating somebody at a party with that argument. :)
Or perhaps the Strangers will wish to posess his mind, now that he has learned to tune.
Or maybe, just maybe, they will do something with their "He's The One" story that hasn't been done a million times before... but I doubt it.
The best thing they could do is just give up on their crappy story about AI robots using people for batteries and just give us two more flicks of Kung Fu fighting and cool camera tricks.
First of all, he established the groundwork for what are sure to be two very dark and combat-filled movies.
Also, the lightsaber fight at the end was the best filmed so far.
Even during a second viewing, I was still laughing every time I saw the "thin client" attack droids in action. IMHO, anybody who doesn't think an entire army of Crow T. Robots getting their asses kicked by lizzard men is funny needs to lighten up a little. That battle alone was worth my seven bucks.
On the downside, turning The Force into super-intelligent germs was a huge mistake. In two brief scenes, he ruined the whole series by turning a beautifully impossible fantasy into a very implausable sci-fi load of crap.
This was even less forgivable than the cartoony Jar Jar, the Bat-Grapling-Guns that Amidala's royal guard used, or the fact that Brian Blessed (voice of the Gungan King) put in the corniest performance of his carreer since his hammy appearance in Flash Gordon.
Alright, I'm going to shut up now, because I'm starting to sound like the "Comic Book Store Guy" from The Simpsons.
New desktop PC's out-perform laptops
North Dakota expects colder weather than Texas this year
Gerneralissimo Francisco Franco is still dead
Of course Compaq and Dell are going to tell you that this chip is crap. They are not using it. The companies that are using it are just as sure to tell you that the chip is an "Intel Killer" or something.
Make a hole with a gun perpendicular
To the name of this town in a desktop globe
Exit wound in a foreign nation
Showing the home of the one this was written for
My apartment looks upside-down from there
Water spirals the wrong way out the sink
And her voice is a backwards record
It's like a whirlpool and it never ends.
- From "Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants
Sorry for interrupting, but since the thread was wildly off-topic anyway, I figured what the hell.
Gawd... I am hard-pressed to imagine a more tedious argument to witness.
Perhaps a raging debate at a Sci Fi convention over who wrote the best "authorized" Asimov-derived novel.
Other than cost savings and easy access for changes, are there many advantages to staying on the ground?
Either one could result in a bloody Holy War, so I don't think I'm going to enter the fray.
Is it really a troll if they put a little ":)" at the end of it? I mean, it is hardly their fault if somebody does not realize they were being sarcastic or kidding around.
(sigh)
Microsoft spent $150 million on Apple shares.
Just a few months before that, Apple purchaced next for $400 million, and found the money by cleaning out their sofa cushion.
Do the math, and you will see that Microsoft is one of the smallest corporate investors in Apple. IIRC, even Disney's stake is bigger.
You would be more accurate if you said Oracle owns Apple, because Larry is on the board of directors, while all the M$ stock is non-voting shares.
Nice try, astroturf boy.
So, following my faulty analysis with your new data set, only the very best teachers are responsible for evil. :)