Hit points allows for gradual damage, allowing you to change strategy, withdraw, etc. Limb damage takes you out of the fight, instant kills make for an unplayable game, and auto-recovery unless you take a lot of damage quickly is just too unrealistic--particularly when the damage is done by bullets. What the hit point system does is give you reaction time.
In any case, the hit point system did not reflect actual damage, but exhaustion, bruising, blood loss from superficial wounds, disorientation, etc. The final blow or two did the actual damage. This works better when the combat is swords and sorcery. But as a friend pointed out to me, bullets do one of three things: kill you, maim you, or almost nothing. Yes, there are soldiers who've been shot six times and still kept fighting. This friend was a military historian told me about a Canadian soldier in a peace-keeping mission who got hit five times (once in the mouth--he spit the bullet out with a couple of teeth.) It all depends on where you're hit--the first hit could kill. Melee is different, since most wounds tend to be superficial until you're too tired to dodge or fend off the killing blow.
The assumption most people are making here is that it was actually the Canadian mint that put the tag in the coin (if indeed there was one.) The article implies that anyone could have done it, and in fact, intelligence agencies from outside of North America would probably have a stronger motive. But I just can't see the point of it either; with the looneys and toonies here, everyone tries to get rid of their change quickly so they don't end up carrying a pound of metal in their pockets. And the range is very limited, and even if the coin doesn't shield the chip, the other coins around it probably will. Really dumb idea, if you ask me, but 'intelligence' organizations all over the world seem to specialize in those. The whole thing reeks of tin-foil-hat theory--some paranoid probably scanned his Canadian coins, got a 'signal' from the inlaid types (who knows what he considered a signal) and concluded they were bugged.
It just happens that there are two Canadian coins that have an inset center, making them perfect for this kind of modification: the tooney and a commemorative quarter from last year. The quarter was a bit of a dud, with a red glaze that wore off, so it ended up looking like crap anyway. That one would be easy to bug--you could replace the center with ceramic or plastic and no one would be able to tell. But again, I can't see the point, unless it was another experiment by the mint in counterfeit detection. The Canadian government seems to be very concerned by counterfeiting, and comes up with new bills every few years with improved anti-counterfeiting measures. I'm not sure why--about 75% of all American currency in circulation is counterfeit, due to industrial scale operations in Russia that are probably still going, and the American government doesn't seem the least bit concerned.
1. Clients rarely know what they want. Most software projects are designed and written for someone else's requirements. These requirements often come in the form of "I don't like that, but I have no idea what I actually want."
2. Coders are systematizers, who tend towards the asocial end of the spectrum, which is why silicon valley produces so many autistic and Auspergers's kids. Large projects require communication, and there are a lot of coders out there who may be good with machines but are lousy with people.
3. As a result, lead programmers are often tantrum throwing prima-donnas, intellectual bullies who use their position to undercut those under them and make themselves look superior. You may have to promote and fire half a dozen programmers before you fill the lead programmer position with someone who is actually good at the job. In the meanwhile, you've just lost 5 good programmers. And if you actually manage to find a good one, you'll have to pay him in blood, because he's probably worth more than your house.
3. Salesmen, who deal with the client, are professional bullshitters, who are generally wafer thin on the technical details. That's actually not a slam--this is literally their job--to sing whatever lullaby the client wants to hear. Programmers will generally learn their lesson after being burned a couple of times and will not promise the impossible. The sales people never get burned--it was the programmers who screwed up, right? Calls for heroics on the part of programmers invariably begin with someone in marketing.
So, a few tips:
1. Get someone to hammer out the details of the specifications before signing the contract.
2. Get someone with some technical knowledge to study those specs, and the deadlines, before signing the product.
3. Get a lead programmer who fights for his team, not for the himself, and who is more interested in getting things done the right way than in getting them done his way.
4. Get a project manager (preferrably female--tends to calm the more socially inept coders, less testosterone poisoning) who handles communication between the coding team and the client. Do not, repeat DO NOT allow the coder to meet the client. They will eat the client! You will have a hard time getting paid, and hiding the bones is a bitch.
Not all Christians want to ban Harry Potter. Most don't, and those that do are a small moronic minority.
Yeah, they are a minority. Unfortunately, they're a damn noisy minority, who seem to have a better publicity machine and better connections than most. That leaves the impression that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. The press and the government seem to assume that people like these speak for you, and that makes you look like a moron too.
There was a time when these people lived in backwood shacks and nobody paid attention to them because more balanced Christians kept them in check. Now they show up on the news every day. If they don't get on the news, they scream about a bias against Christians until they do. Targetted messaging campaigns fill petitions with names that they brandish to the media and politicians as the people they represent, even though many of the names on the list may have no idea of what their name is actually going to be used for. My sister ended up on some of those mailing lists, and she had no idea what she was signing up for.
So I feel for you, but unless moderate Christians start to make some noise and pack these loons back to the fringes where they belong, a lot of people are going to assume that you agree with them.
If he were a superman, that would send the wrong message too: "Oh, well, he can do that because he's really clever and powerful." He's not lazy, but he's not particularly studious either. He actually has to work much harder than Hermione to learn the same things (most of the time, though, he's up to his ass in schoolwork and other problems as well.) On the other hand, he's no slouch--he still manages to be near the head of his class. And he pays dearly for all of his flaws--he makes so many mistakes in Order of the Phoenix that he almost gets everyone killed, and in the end, Sirius Black pays for it with his life.
What he does have is loyalty, fairness, kindness, generosity, and courage. In every situation, that's what carries him through. In standard fantasy parlance, he'd be a Paladin. The books are about the power of love vs. the power of hatred (ironic that Christians try to ban these books--they just don't get much of anything, do they?) His mother's protection is just a metaphor for that--but his mother's protection, and Dumbledore's, is gone now. In the final book he will have to grow up and face Voldemort alone. He's going to have to work like a trojan to be able to pull it off. But Rowling has set it up so that he's going to be tested most in the very qualities that have carried him so far. All is not what it seems. If Harry behaves like a jerk in the final book, he will lose a great deal, even if he wins the final battle.
By that reasoning, you can't touch a terrorist or a terrorist recruiter until he or she succeeds. Even if the intelligence agencies had known about the 9/11 plot, they wouldn't have been able to arrest Atta and company until they attacked the stewardess--by which time it would have been too late. And by the same reasoning, Osama bin Laden is innocent.
This is why every country makes conspiracy a crime. You don't have to take any action to commit the crime yourself to be guilty; facilitating the act is enough. These laws are centuries old, not recent developments. And yes, attempting the crime is illegal--you don't get off a robbery charge if there is no money in the till. Incompetence is not proof of innocence.
With terrorism, the weapon is not just the explosive, or the knife, or the gun. The weapon is the gullible young man or woman primed to commit the act. These are human bullets, and the people who recruit, indoctrinate, train, and equip them--the puppet masters--are the real terrorists, serial killers who can count these recruits, along with the targets of those recruits, as their victims. Don't confuse this with freedom of expression, which restricts itself to civil discourse. This is not even civil disobedience, it is cold blooded murder. There are plenty of radical islamists in England who shout "Death to England" at rallies, and they aren't arrested (although many people think they should be.) But once they take concrete steps to bring that about, they are committing a crime. This woman was working with the puppet masters. They only investigated her because of her connection to a known terrorist cell.
There will always be more marginal youths to recruit, no matter how many prisons you build to house them. Perhaps the hottest debate in Europe today is whether you can tolerate an ideology which is inherently intolerant, and which refuses to present itself in free and open debate, but instead deals in threats and attempts to squelch all voices outside itself. Where does freedom of speech stand when encountering an ideology which wants to end freedom of speech, for everyone, forever? Britain asserts too much control on both sides. On the one hand, they have cameras everywhere, and near complete Orwellian surveillance. On the other hand, they've passed a hate speech bill which protects religion, which means that you can't challenge radical Imams who run madrassas to indoctrinate that next generation of terrorists. There are a lot of things happening over there that deserve criticism. Arresting this woman isn't one of them.
The Heartland Institute, which you sited, is a FUD site. You've been had.
300 year old trees in rainforest areas never used to burn down every decade or so--and the rainforests of the west coast that people are acting to preserve are precisely these areas. The brush which does burn down every 10 years or so is not preserved for environmental reasons, but because it is typically near housing developments which it will take down with it when it burns. British Columbia has been dealing with this problem for the past ten years--towns that are threatened by wild burns that have been prevented unnaturally. Frankly, we've gotten too good at fighting forest fires--but rainforests are too wet to burn. Old growth stands are taken down for lumber purposes. They are old growth precisely because they do not burn down regularly. But these are precisely the trees most valuable for lumber purposes. They're also very good at conserving water tables, which is of critical importance to Northwest agriculture.
Yellowstone scrub falls in the category of forests that typically burn down on a regular basis.
As for the fish, anyone who has been following reports on fish stocks could see this coming for the past ten years. The Salmon are dying off on the West coast, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, once the most plentiful fishing grounds on the planet, are dead, plankton, the basis of oceanic ecology, is dying off, the coast of China is pouring billions of tons of effluents into the Pacific, and bottom dragging nets have been destroying spawning habitats for decades. If this is a surprise to you, you really need to pull your head out of your ass once in a while and look around.
So, no trees, no water, no crops, and no livestock which depend on those crops. No fish, no seafood. What, exactly, did you think your kids were going to eat?
Michael Jackson may be a reference point. His voice never changed, he never developed secondary attributes, and his baby had to be fertilized artificially, so there was some medical intervention at work there. Plastic surgery was probably not the first elective surgery he went through. I suspect that this is the root of most of his psychological problems. That's why I tend to give the guy a pass for a lot of his weirdness--the decision would have been forced on him by his father.
In 2000 the average home PC had 256 megs and less--I know, because we were targetting a game for the home average. Windows XP alone takes that much, but then, this is Linux--you don't use MS products on it. If they want to run office applications, they have their older PC's, which are built to run that stuff. What they want are computers that run games and allow you to browse, edit text, send mail, and permit you to code--and the games they want to run are the new PS3 games. Linux will do all that just fine in 256M. And this isn't the Linux that Sony (who know nothing about OS's) offered in 1998 for a 32M machine. The software and development end is handled by IBM, who know quite a bit about software and operating systems, so this will be be a real OS.
Exactly. Given that it will cost you $1000 to build an XBox360 with something approaching the same features, which will still have less power, and that all those peripherals you shell out for won't be used for the games anyway because they have to target the standard system, and price is hardly an issue. Plus Microsoft wants to charge you a monthly fee for network gaming, while Sony doesn't. You'll end up paying more for your basic XBox360 within the first two years.
Many of the people I know who have pre-ordered (paying full price unseen) are buying the PS3 as a high powered desktop computer. It has a full installation of Linux native, will browse the web, play music, and allow you to code on it, and it's more powerful than a $2500 high end PC for $600. Hell, I may replace my PC with one too, especially if MMORPG's port to the PS3 (which they very well might--it supports PC controllers.) So the PS3 will not only beat Microsoft on the console market, they may take a chunk out of their desktop market as well.
Have you seen the games coming out for it? They make the XBox360 look like a toy.
You get penalized in this game for resorting to violence at all--and that violence amounts to fisticuffs. The game is about outwitting bullies and coping at a dysfunctional school, not about being one. In fact, it's one of the most interesting game concepts to come out in a while. These people are reacting because of its name, and because it was made by Rockstar, who also make the GTA titles. Beyond that, they haven't a clue.
Once again, another example of politicians grandstanding with no idea of what they are talking about. Did you know, by the way, that the premise of the terrorist plot which recently hit the headlines--the plan to mix chemicals on the plane to produce explosives--was completely unworkable? You need a reasonably well equipped lab to control the reaction, keeping it at low temperatures, otherwise the chemical mixture will go off prematurely and all you'll get is a loud, smokey fizzle--enough to draw a lot of attention to yourself, but not enough to actually kill anyone, let alone bring down a plane. But none of the politicians could actually be bothered to ask a chemist about that, either. So now people can't bring any liquids on a plane, because our leaders are just too fucking lazy to do a little research...
Violence in video games is not real. Violence in movies is not real. Real violence is real. Real people get hurt. Pretty simple, huh?
When I see a bunch of people in a movie get mowed down by a machine gun, I know that the director yelled "Cut!" and all those people got up and asked how it looked. I can watch the bloodiest scenes from any game or movie and giggle the whole time. But I loathe reality TV because the humiliation and pain is real. There is more desensitization that goes on watching a single episode of Survivor than in playing all the GTA games put together. Nor will I watch Jackass; I know that they are doing it to themselves deliberately, but I can't stand watching people who are really in pain.
Not much of a fan of the skater videos where the guy lands on his head or his nuts either. Hell, I don't even watch boxing anymore, because I know they're pounding each other's brains into mush.
There seems to be a general confusion of fantasy with reality in all of these conversations, and those who object most strongly to fictionalized depictions of violence share the same inability to distinguish the two that these crazed snipers do. Find a way to address that, and you've got something. But until we do, the world is going to have people in it who will be provoked into snapping by anything. But if you ban everything that might set the idiots off, if you build a foolproof world, you will only succeed in populating the world with fools.
Don't be so certain that there is no difference in the possibility of terrorism between Muslims and Christians. Christian martyrs go to their death peacefully--that's where we get the psychological concept of the martyr complex: someone who suffers silently while feeling smugly superior. Muslim martyrs die fighting the infidel, and this is not an extremist position, it's right in the Koran and the Haddith, stated over and over and over again. Most people of any religion would not act on this, because people don't like to die, but there is no question that Islam encourages its followers to lay down their lives killing unbelievers, and does not distinguish between civilians and soldiers as targets.
The percentage of the population in the Muslim world who consider suicide bombers martyrs worthy of emulation runs into the double digits in some countries. In England an analysis of the Muslim population and the attitudes amongst them indicates that there are roughly 3000 potential candidates for terrorism--and this is in a Western country with a small Muslim minority. And yes, these attitudes do exist; take a look at this. Violent extremism amongst Muslims is sufficient to intimidate most of the moderates into silence. Those who do speak out against Islamic extremism keep an emergency police phone number on speed dial, because they get death threats, lots of them. You can be fairly confident that criticising Christianity will not get you killed. You can also be fairly certain that if you openly criticize Islam in a way that gets you noticed, you will have to sit down with the police and discuss some fairly advanced security measures, as the likes of Salman Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, and Theo Van Gogh (too late) have discovered.
Actually, macroevolution has quite a bit of solid proof. The best is the DNA record, which confirms inheritance and branchings predicted by the evolutionary tree.
The main objection to macroevolution is that no one has actually seen one species of macro-fauna spontaneously transform into another. This is true, because the process takes thousands of years. We just haven't been looking that long. But there are examples where the intermediate stages still exist in an unbroken chain between two species. Richard Dawkins mentions the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull, which cannot interbreed and are therefore seperate species. Both exist in Europe. But if you follow the population of Herring Gulls westward around the north pole, to North America, Alaska, Siberia, and back to Europe, you encounter all the intermediate stages leading to the Black-backed Gull. In each area around this ring, the gulls in that area can interbreed with their neighbours. Only when you get to Europe do you have two seperate species.
The objection that nobody has actually observed macro-evolution in action is based upon a complete misunderstanding of science. By this reasoning, nearly all of cosmology would collapse because nobody can actually see most of the celestial bodies in question, only measure their emanations. It's analogous to saying we have no idea how far away the sun is because nobody has a tape measure that long.
Well, how else do you explain the irrational resistance to alleviating pain? What, an old man that's going to be dead in a month will get addicted to morphine? The reason for this isn't medical, moral, financial, or at all rational. So, what's left? What irrational belief would encourage otherwise normal people to allow someone to suffer when it would be so easy to prevent it? The same forces which pushed for the prohibition of drugs also pushed for the prohibition of alcohol. Look them up and find out who they were. Our reluctance to give people in pain the drugs they need is a continuation of this same policy. When you're doing something stupid, it's helpful to know why you're doing it, so that maybe you can stop doing it.
I'd always known that this tendency to regard suffering as a positive boon to others ran through the stricter Protestant sects, and some Victorian writers, including Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens, go into some length describing how this idea suited the purposes of ministers with a streak of cruelty. The Catholics also have a long tradition of "mortification of the flesh", and Pope John Paul II wrote an entire Apostolic Letter on suffering and the need for suffering. The wording is quite similar to quotes from Mother Teresa. Still, this was always presented as being voluntary, and those who tolerated or contributed to the suffering of others were usually regarded as aberrations--in polite company, anyway. But the argument was still making the rounds in Catholic schools when I was young.
But finding it in Mother Teresa's case, where it was policy in an order of 40,000 nuns and volunteers charged with caring for the sick, and realizing how many people saw this and never said a word publicly, and you realize that this is not an isolated aberration. And the pursuance of this same policy, albeit in a milder form, in public medicine should tell you just how far it reaches.
Still, maybe the Eastern Orthodox churches aren't into this, but it certainly seems to run through the Protestant and Catholic churches. That is most of Christianity.
The reason is that suffering is supposed to build character, which makes these drugs evil. God wants you to suffer for your own good. Now do you understand? Of course not, it doesn't make sense, but there it is. Someone once said that a Puritan is a person who lies awake at night terrified that somebody, somewhere, is enjoying themselves.
I wish it were only Puritans, but this kind of lunacy seems to permeate most of Christianity. Christoper Hitchens wrote a book entitled The Missionary Position which included eyewitness accounts of people who worked with Mother Theresa. Apparently, Mother Theresa refused to use pain killers stronger than aspirin, even for terminal patients who were writhing with pain from cancer. It's not like she couldn't afford them; her order had fifty million in the bank, and she wasn't far from Afghanistan--morphine would have been dirt cheap. Her rationale was that suffering brought you closer to Christ who suffered on the cross. So hey, pain is good, painkillers are evil, got it?
At some point, a religious consolation which was supposed to make people feel better about their pain (I'm sorry we can't help your pain, but something good may come of it) became twisted into a message that pain was good for the soul (which is why the Inquisitor needs all these implements of torture.) But don't try to understand it, it's a mystery...
This is called Pascal's Wager; if you bet on the existence of God, all other things being equal, you lose nothing if he doesn't exist, and you gain if he does. The flaw in this argument is that all other things are not equal. If base your life on ancient myths instead of sound knowledge, it could cost you your life--in fact, it could cost the lives of everyone on the planet.
If you believe in God just so you can tell people "I told you so," then I doubt that God would have any more use for you than I do for your argument. And if God were so eager for us to believe in him, don't you think he would have made himself a little more obvious? I strongly doubt that an entity capable of creating the entire universe would concern himself with what we think of it, or whether we think of it at all. Your conviction that he does is just one more sign that you've created him in your own image.
And no, I wouldn't consider this type a good programmer. The days of solo programming are long over. A guy who breaks everyone else's code because because he can't be bothered to work with others is likely to cause more problems than he solves.
It is true that the moment of destination of our soul to Hell or Heaven is predetermined, but the only way to learn that is to live a life, to make choices, you cannot live a life without making choices. So what we believe and we hope for that our final destination will be Jannah, not Jahannam. It is emotional thing. I just do not want to go to Hell, so in order to function normally I simply must to believe that I am good, that I deserve the ultimate Mercy. It is a survival thing.
But the point still remains that the final decision of where you go is predetermined by God at birth. Your choices, according to this view, are an illusion. God creates some people with the certain intent of condemning them, and there is nothing they can do about it. This is profoundly cruel. I wouldn't do this to people, and I wouldn't even give busfare to, let alone bow down and worship, a God who did it. So how is it that I can be more compassionate, and therefore more perfect, than God?
This is no small matter. To accept cruelty in God is to reserve judgment about all cruelty, on the grounds that it might be right, because God does it. This is not a moral absolute, but complete moral relativism. And this cuts right to the heart of the distinction between the traditions of Islam and those of Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy, and science. In Islam, what is Good is what God wills. In the others, the Good is determined by the law, which may be established by God but which binds God as well. Having laid down the law, God is not free to change his mind; he is subject to the same judgement as we all are. The law always stands; the laws of the church, of the courts, and of nature. This establishes a tradition of precedence which allows incremental gains, however slow and uncertain they may be. But without the stability of this idea of a law which binds all, you have individuals who claim to know the mind of God (a heresy in itself) who dispense with laws as they see fit--God can, after all, change his mind if he is not bound by any covenant. The society is stuck in an endless trap of feudalism, as one cult of personality is replaced by another, much the same way that kings suceeded each other. Since God never makes personal appearances, fatwas are pronounced on the whims of Imams whose qualifications may be sketchy at best. The people have only the Imams' claims that God is guiding them. This has held the nations of the Muslim world in a state of perpetual medieval chaos to this day--unable to make any headway, they remain the pawns in the games of great powers. And unfortunately, we have Fundamentalist Christians who would like to dispense with the tradition of law as well, in favour of their own interpretations of scripture. They're the ones who claim that Revelations calls for a liberal sprinkling of nukes in the Middle East. This is really not a world-view that you want to encourage. And I'm sorry if all of this offends you, but it's true, and there is simply no more polite way to put it.
Religious beliefs can change as our understanding of God changes. In the story of Abraham, he wanders into the land of Moria to sacrifice his son, and desists when an angel tells him not to. Moria is greek for folly, and it was not Jehovah, but Moloch, who demanded the blood sacrifice of children. This is a story of the changing of the Gods--Abraham went up the mountain with Moloch, and came down with Jehovah. God does change, as our understanding of God does. If your God is cruel, you probably have him wrong, which means that you are worshipping a false God. This is not just a function of scripture, which is after all the work of human hands, however brilliant the inspiration--even Mohammed confessed that he sometimes got it wrong--but also a matter of interpretation, in this case yours and those instructing you.
To say that we cannot understand or judge the imputed character of God is the same as saying that we must suspend our own moral judgement. This is what I meant when I said you had surrendered all moral
Yeah, but you usually fix the bugs. Our eyes are built inside out, the birth canal should not go through the pelvis (the opening is too small for our huge human head, requiring babies to be born with immature brains and women to have problematically wide hips), the size of our brains has squashed our sinuses and pushed our jaws out of alignment, etc, etc.
Can you imagine the comments in the code?
// I'm not happy with this but it *seems* to work...
// HACK HACK HACK HACK HACK
// Old generic mammal code, needs to be replaced!
// Required by large brain code--refactor if time permits
// Copied from chimp project--doesn't really work well there either.
Slashdot Mirror
Hit points allows for gradual damage, allowing you to change strategy, withdraw, etc. Limb damage takes you out of the fight, instant kills make for an unplayable game, and auto-recovery unless you take a lot of damage quickly is just too unrealistic--particularly when the damage is done by bullets. What the hit point system does is give you reaction time.
In any case, the hit point system did not reflect actual damage, but exhaustion, bruising, blood loss from superficial wounds, disorientation, etc. The final blow or two did the actual damage. This works better when the combat is swords and sorcery. But as a friend pointed out to me, bullets do one of three things: kill you, maim you, or almost nothing. Yes, there are soldiers who've been shot six times and still kept fighting. This friend was a military historian told me about a Canadian soldier in a peace-keeping mission who got hit five times (once in the mouth--he spit the bullet out with a couple of teeth.) It all depends on where you're hit--the first hit could kill. Melee is different, since most wounds tend to be superficial until you're too tired to dodge or fend off the killing blow.
The assumption most people are making here is that it was actually the Canadian mint that put the tag in the coin (if indeed there was one.) The article implies that anyone could have done it, and in fact, intelligence agencies from outside of North America would probably have a stronger motive. But I just can't see the point of it either; with the looneys and toonies here, everyone tries to get rid of their change quickly so they don't end up carrying a pound of metal in their pockets. And the range is very limited, and even if the coin doesn't shield the chip, the other coins around it probably will. Really dumb idea, if you ask me, but 'intelligence' organizations all over the world seem to specialize in those. The whole thing reeks of tin-foil-hat theory--some paranoid probably scanned his Canadian coins, got a 'signal' from the inlaid types (who knows what he considered a signal) and concluded they were bugged.
It just happens that there are two Canadian coins that have an inset center, making them perfect for this kind of modification: the tooney and a commemorative quarter from last year. The quarter was a bit of a dud, with a red glaze that wore off, so it ended up looking like crap anyway. That one would be easy to bug--you could replace the center with ceramic or plastic and no one would be able to tell. But again, I can't see the point, unless it was another experiment by the mint in counterfeit detection. The Canadian government seems to be very concerned by counterfeiting, and comes up with new bills every few years with improved anti-counterfeiting measures. I'm not sure why--about 75% of all American currency in circulation is counterfeit, due to industrial scale operations in Russia that are probably still going, and the American government doesn't seem the least bit concerned.
There are a number of problems:
1. Clients rarely know what they want. Most software projects are designed and written for someone else's requirements. These requirements often come in the form of "I don't like that, but I have no idea what I actually want."
2. Coders are systematizers, who tend towards the asocial end of the spectrum, which is why silicon valley produces so many autistic and Auspergers's kids. Large projects require communication, and there are a lot of coders out there who may be good with machines but are lousy with people.
3. As a result, lead programmers are often tantrum throwing prima-donnas, intellectual bullies who use their position to undercut those under them and make themselves look superior. You may have to promote and fire half a dozen programmers before you fill the lead programmer position with someone who is actually good at the job. In the meanwhile, you've just lost 5 good programmers. And if you actually manage to find a good one, you'll have to pay him in blood, because he's probably worth more than your house.
3. Salesmen, who deal with the client, are professional bullshitters, who are generally wafer thin on the technical details. That's actually not a slam--this is literally their job--to sing whatever lullaby the client wants to hear. Programmers will generally learn their lesson after being burned a couple of times and will not promise the impossible. The sales people never get burned--it was the programmers who screwed up, right? Calls for heroics on the part of programmers invariably begin with someone in marketing.
So, a few tips:
1. Get someone to hammer out the details of the specifications before signing the contract.
2. Get someone with some technical knowledge to study those specs, and the deadlines, before signing the product.
3. Get a lead programmer who fights for his team, not for the himself, and who is more interested in getting things done the right way than in getting them done his way.
4. Get a project manager (preferrably female--tends to calm the more socially inept coders, less testosterone poisoning) who handles communication between the coding team and the client. Do not, repeat DO NOT allow the coder to meet the client. They will eat the client! You will have a hard time getting paid, and hiding the bones is a bitch.
Not all Christians want to ban Harry Potter. Most don't, and those that do are a small moronic minority.
Yeah, they are a minority. Unfortunately, they're a damn noisy minority, who seem to have a better publicity machine and better connections than most. That leaves the impression that the lunatics are in charge of the asylum. The press and the government seem to assume that people like these speak for you, and that makes you look like a moron too.
There was a time when these people lived in backwood shacks and nobody paid attention to them because more balanced Christians kept them in check. Now they show up on the news every day. If they don't get on the news, they scream about a bias against Christians until they do. Targetted messaging campaigns fill petitions with names that they brandish to the media and politicians as the people they represent, even though many of the names on the list may have no idea of what their name is actually going to be used for. My sister ended up on some of those mailing lists, and she had no idea what she was signing up for.
So I feel for you, but unless moderate Christians start to make some noise and pack these loons back to the fringes where they belong, a lot of people are going to assume that you agree with them.
If he were a superman, that would send the wrong message too: "Oh, well, he can do that because he's really clever and powerful." He's not lazy, but he's not particularly studious either. He actually has to work much harder than Hermione to learn the same things (most of the time, though, he's up to his ass in schoolwork and other problems as well.) On the other hand, he's no slouch--he still manages to be near the head of his class. And he pays dearly for all of his flaws--he makes so many mistakes in Order of the Phoenix that he almost gets everyone killed, and in the end, Sirius Black pays for it with his life.
What he does have is loyalty, fairness, kindness, generosity, and courage. In every situation, that's what carries him through. In standard fantasy parlance, he'd be a Paladin. The books are about the power of love vs. the power of hatred (ironic that Christians try to ban these books--they just don't get much of anything, do they?) His mother's protection is just a metaphor for that--but his mother's protection, and Dumbledore's, is gone now. In the final book he will have to grow up and face Voldemort alone. He's going to have to work like a trojan to be able to pull it off. But Rowling has set it up so that he's going to be tested most in the very qualities that have carried him so far. All is not what it seems. If Harry behaves like a jerk in the final book, he will lose a great deal, even if he wins the final battle.
By that reasoning, you can't touch a terrorist or a terrorist recruiter until he or she succeeds. Even if the intelligence agencies had known about the 9/11 plot, they wouldn't have been able to arrest Atta and company until they attacked the stewardess--by which time it would have been too late. And by the same reasoning, Osama bin Laden is innocent.
This is why every country makes conspiracy a crime. You don't have to take any action to commit the crime yourself to be guilty; facilitating the act is enough. These laws are centuries old, not recent developments. And yes, attempting the crime is illegal--you don't get off a robbery charge if there is no money in the till. Incompetence is not proof of innocence.
With terrorism, the weapon is not just the explosive, or the knife, or the gun. The weapon is the gullible young man or woman primed to commit the act. These are human bullets, and the people who recruit, indoctrinate, train, and equip them--the puppet masters--are the real terrorists, serial killers who can count these recruits, along with the targets of those recruits, as their victims. Don't confuse this with freedom of expression, which restricts itself to civil discourse. This is not even civil disobedience, it is cold blooded murder. There are plenty of radical islamists in England who shout "Death to England" at rallies, and they aren't arrested (although many people think they should be.) But once they take concrete steps to bring that about, they are committing a crime. This woman was working with the puppet masters. They only investigated her because of her connection to a known terrorist cell.
There will always be more marginal youths to recruit, no matter how many prisons you build to house them. Perhaps the hottest debate in Europe today is whether you can tolerate an ideology which is inherently intolerant, and which refuses to present itself in free and open debate, but instead deals in threats and attempts to squelch all voices outside itself. Where does freedom of speech stand when encountering an ideology which wants to end freedom of speech, for everyone, forever? Britain asserts too much control on both sides. On the one hand, they have cameras everywhere, and near complete Orwellian surveillance. On the other hand, they've passed a hate speech bill which protects religion, which means that you can't challenge radical Imams who run madrassas to indoctrinate that next generation of terrorists. There are a lot of things happening over there that deserve criticism. Arresting this woman isn't one of them.
Step back and realize that all this modeling is done on data that has been gathered for about 100-200 years at best.
And ice core samples going back 10,000 years. And fossil samples going back millions of years. And geological samples going back billions of years.
Did I quote a left-wing site?
Crichton's State of Fear is a now infamous piece of pseudo-science. Never cite it if you want to be taken seriously.
The Heartland Institute, which you sited, is a FUD site. You've been had.
300 year old trees in rainforest areas never used to burn down every decade or so--and the rainforests of the west coast that people are acting to preserve are precisely these areas. The brush which does burn down every 10 years or so is not preserved for environmental reasons, but because it is typically near housing developments which it will take down with it when it burns. British Columbia has been dealing with this problem for the past ten years--towns that are threatened by wild burns that have been prevented unnaturally. Frankly, we've gotten too good at fighting forest fires--but rainforests are too wet to burn. Old growth stands are taken down for lumber purposes. They are old growth precisely because they do not burn down regularly. But these are precisely the trees most valuable for lumber purposes. They're also very good at conserving water tables, which is of critical importance to Northwest agriculture.
Yellowstone scrub falls in the category of forests that typically burn down on a regular basis.
As for the fish, anyone who has been following reports on fish stocks could see this coming for the past ten years. The Salmon are dying off on the West coast, the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, once the most plentiful fishing grounds on the planet, are dead, plankton, the basis of oceanic ecology, is dying off, the coast of China is pouring billions of tons of effluents into the Pacific, and bottom dragging nets have been destroying spawning habitats for decades. If this is a surprise to you, you really need to pull your head out of your ass once in a while and look around.
So, no trees, no water, no crops, and no livestock which depend on those crops. No fish, no seafood. What, exactly, did you think your kids were going to eat?
Michael Jackson may be a reference point. His voice never changed, he never developed secondary attributes, and his baby had to be fertilized artificially, so there was some medical intervention at work there. Plastic surgery was probably not the first elective surgery he went through. I suspect that this is the root of most of his psychological problems. That's why I tend to give the guy a pass for a lot of his weirdness--the decision would have been forced on him by his father.
In 2000 the average home PC had 256 megs and less--I know, because we were targetting a game for the home average. Windows XP alone takes that much, but then, this is Linux--you don't use MS products on it. If they want to run office applications, they have their older PC's, which are built to run that stuff. What they want are computers that run games and allow you to browse, edit text, send mail, and permit you to code--and the games they want to run are the new PS3 games. Linux will do all that just fine in 256M. And this isn't the Linux that Sony (who know nothing about OS's) offered in 1998 for a 32M machine. The software and development end is handled by IBM, who know quite a bit about software and operating systems, so this will be be a real OS.
Exactly. Given that it will cost you $1000 to build an XBox360 with something approaching the same features, which will still have less power, and that all those peripherals you shell out for won't be used for the games anyway because they have to target the standard system, and price is hardly an issue. Plus Microsoft wants to charge you a monthly fee for network gaming, while Sony doesn't. You'll end up paying more for your basic XBox360 within the first two years.
Many of the people I know who have pre-ordered (paying full price unseen) are buying the PS3 as a high powered desktop computer. It has a full installation of Linux native, will browse the web, play music, and allow you to code on it, and it's more powerful than a $2500 high end PC for $600. Hell, I may replace my PC with one too, especially if MMORPG's port to the PS3 (which they very well might--it supports PC controllers.) So the PS3 will not only beat Microsoft on the console market, they may take a chunk out of their desktop market as well.
Have you seen the games coming out for it? They make the XBox360 look like a toy.
Still think it's too expensive?
You get penalized in this game for resorting to violence at all--and that violence amounts to fisticuffs. The game is about outwitting bullies and coping at a dysfunctional school, not about being one. In fact, it's one of the most interesting game concepts to come out in a while. These people are reacting because of its name, and because it was made by Rockstar, who also make the GTA titles. Beyond that, they haven't a clue.
Once again, another example of politicians grandstanding with no idea of what they are talking about. Did you know, by the way, that the premise of the terrorist plot which recently hit the headlines--the plan to mix chemicals on the plane to produce explosives--was completely unworkable? You need a reasonably well equipped lab to control the reaction, keeping it at low temperatures, otherwise the chemical mixture will go off prematurely and all you'll get is a loud, smokey fizzle--enough to draw a lot of attention to yourself, but not enough to actually kill anyone, let alone bring down a plane. But none of the politicians could actually be bothered to ask a chemist about that, either. So now people can't bring any liquids on a plane, because our leaders are just too fucking lazy to do a little research...
How do you reconcile those two?
Violence in video games is not real. Violence in movies is not real. Real violence is real. Real people get hurt. Pretty simple, huh?
When I see a bunch of people in a movie get mowed down by a machine gun, I know that the director yelled "Cut!" and all those people got up and asked how it looked. I can watch the bloodiest scenes from any game or movie and giggle the whole time. But I loathe reality TV because the humiliation and pain is real. There is more desensitization that goes on watching a single episode of Survivor than in playing all the GTA games put together. Nor will I watch Jackass; I know that they are doing it to themselves deliberately, but I can't stand watching people who are really in pain.
Not much of a fan of the skater videos where the guy lands on his head or his nuts either. Hell, I don't even watch boxing anymore, because I know they're pounding each other's brains into mush.
There seems to be a general confusion of fantasy with reality in all of these conversations, and those who object most strongly to fictionalized depictions of violence share the same inability to distinguish the two that these crazed snipers do. Find a way to address that, and you've got something. But until we do, the world is going to have people in it who will be provoked into snapping by anything. But if you ban everything that might set the idiots off, if you build a foolproof world, you will only succeed in populating the world with fools.
Don't be so certain that there is no difference in the possibility of terrorism between Muslims and Christians. Christian martyrs go to their death peacefully--that's where we get the psychological concept of the martyr complex: someone who suffers silently while feeling smugly superior. Muslim martyrs die fighting the infidel, and this is not an extremist position, it's right in the Koran and the Haddith, stated over and over and over again. Most people of any religion would not act on this, because people don't like to die, but there is no question that Islam encourages its followers to lay down their lives killing unbelievers, and does not distinguish between civilians and soldiers as targets.
The percentage of the population in the Muslim world who consider suicide bombers martyrs worthy of emulation runs into the double digits in some countries. In England an analysis of the Muslim population and the attitudes amongst them indicates that there are roughly 3000 potential candidates for terrorism--and this is in a Western country with a small Muslim minority. And yes, these attitudes do exist; take a look at this. Violent extremism amongst Muslims is sufficient to intimidate most of the moderates into silence. Those who do speak out against Islamic extremism keep an emergency police phone number on speed dial, because they get death threats, lots of them. You can be fairly confident that criticising Christianity will not get you killed. You can also be fairly certain that if you openly criticize Islam in a way that gets you noticed, you will have to sit down with the police and discuss some fairly advanced security measures, as the likes of Salman Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, Irshad Manji, and Theo Van Gogh (too late) have discovered.
Actually, macroevolution has quite a bit of solid proof. The best is the DNA record, which confirms inheritance and branchings predicted by the evolutionary tree.
The main objection to macroevolution is that no one has actually seen one species of macro-fauna spontaneously transform into another. This is true, because the process takes thousands of years. We just haven't been looking that long. But there are examples where the intermediate stages still exist in an unbroken chain between two species. Richard Dawkins mentions the Herring Gull and the Lesser Black-backed Gull, which cannot interbreed and are therefore seperate species. Both exist in Europe. But if you follow the population of Herring Gulls westward around the north pole, to North America, Alaska, Siberia, and back to Europe, you encounter all the intermediate stages leading to the Black-backed Gull. In each area around this ring, the gulls in that area can interbreed with their neighbours. Only when you get to Europe do you have two seperate species.
The objection that nobody has actually observed macro-evolution in action is based upon a complete misunderstanding of science. By this reasoning, nearly all of cosmology would collapse because nobody can actually see most of the celestial bodies in question, only measure their emanations. It's analogous to saying we have no idea how far away the sun is because nobody has a tape measure that long.
What are we doing tonight, Brain?
Same thing we do every night, Pinky... Try to take over the world!
The artist can choose to sell the entire album as an album rather than as individual songs on iTunes.
Besides, most of these old albums have had songs appear on 'Best of' albums anyway. It amounts to the same thing.
Well, how else do you explain the irrational resistance to alleviating pain? What, an old man that's going to be dead in a month will get addicted to morphine? The reason for this isn't medical, moral, financial, or at all rational. So, what's left? What irrational belief would encourage otherwise normal people to allow someone to suffer when it would be so easy to prevent it? The same forces which pushed for the prohibition of drugs also pushed for the prohibition of alcohol. Look them up and find out who they were. Our reluctance to give people in pain the drugs they need is a continuation of this same policy. When you're doing something stupid, it's helpful to know why you're doing it, so that maybe you can stop doing it.
I'd always known that this tendency to regard suffering as a positive boon to others ran through the stricter Protestant sects, and some Victorian writers, including Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens, go into some length describing how this idea suited the purposes of ministers with a streak of cruelty. The Catholics also have a long tradition of "mortification of the flesh", and Pope John Paul II wrote an entire Apostolic Letter on suffering and the need for suffering. The wording is quite similar to quotes from Mother Teresa. Still, this was always presented as being voluntary, and those who tolerated or contributed to the suffering of others were usually regarded as aberrations--in polite company, anyway. But the argument was still making the rounds in Catholic schools when I was young.
But finding it in Mother Teresa's case, where it was policy in an order of 40,000 nuns and volunteers charged with caring for the sick, and realizing how many people saw this and never said a word publicly, and you realize that this is not an isolated aberration. And the pursuance of this same policy, albeit in a milder form, in public medicine should tell you just how far it reaches.
Still, maybe the Eastern Orthodox churches aren't into this, but it certainly seems to run through the Protestant and Catholic churches. That is most of Christianity.
The reason is that suffering is supposed to build character, which makes these drugs evil. God wants you to suffer for your own good. Now do you understand? Of course not, it doesn't make sense, but there it is. Someone once said that a Puritan is a person who lies awake at night terrified that somebody, somewhere, is enjoying themselves.
I wish it were only Puritans, but this kind of lunacy seems to permeate most of Christianity. Christoper Hitchens wrote a book entitled The Missionary Position which included eyewitness accounts of people who worked with Mother Theresa. Apparently, Mother Theresa refused to use pain killers stronger than aspirin, even for terminal patients who were writhing with pain from cancer. It's not like she couldn't afford them; her order had fifty million in the bank, and she wasn't far from Afghanistan--morphine would have been dirt cheap. Her rationale was that suffering brought you closer to Christ who suffered on the cross. So hey, pain is good, painkillers are evil, got it?
At some point, a religious consolation which was supposed to make people feel better about their pain (I'm sorry we can't help your pain, but something good may come of it) became twisted into a message that pain was good for the soul (which is why the Inquisitor needs all these implements of torture.) But don't try to understand it, it's a mystery...
Wow, I think you managed to miss every single point!
Oh, well, I tried...
This is called Pascal's Wager; if you bet on the existence of God, all other things being equal, you lose nothing if he doesn't exist, and you gain if he does. The flaw in this argument is that all other things are not equal. If base your life on ancient myths instead of sound knowledge, it could cost you your life--in fact, it could cost the lives of everyone on the planet.
If you believe in God just so you can tell people "I told you so," then I doubt that God would have any more use for you than I do for your argument. And if God were so eager for us to believe in him, don't you think he would have made himself a little more obvious? I strongly doubt that an entity capable of creating the entire universe would concern himself with what we think of it, or whether we think of it at all. Your conviction that he does is just one more sign that you've created him in your own image.
Oh, wait, I have worked with him...
And no, I wouldn't consider this type a good programmer. The days of solo programming are long over. A guy who breaks everyone else's code because because he can't be bothered to work with others is likely to cause more problems than he solves.
It is true that the moment of destination of our soul to Hell or Heaven is predetermined, but the only way to learn that is to live a life, to make choices, you cannot live a life without making choices. So what we believe and we hope for that our final destination will be Jannah, not Jahannam. It is emotional thing. I just do not want to go to Hell, so in order to function normally I simply must to believe that I am good, that I deserve the ultimate Mercy. It is a survival thing.
But the point still remains that the final decision of where you go is predetermined by God at birth. Your choices, according to this view, are an illusion. God creates some people with the certain intent of condemning them, and there is nothing they can do about it. This is profoundly cruel. I wouldn't do this to people, and I wouldn't even give busfare to, let alone bow down and worship, a God who did it. So how is it that I can be more compassionate, and therefore more perfect, than God?
This is no small matter. To accept cruelty in God is to reserve judgment about all cruelty, on the grounds that it might be right, because God does it. This is not a moral absolute, but complete moral relativism. And this cuts right to the heart of the distinction between the traditions of Islam and those of Judaism, Christianity, Greek philosophy, and science. In Islam, what is Good is what God wills. In the others, the Good is determined by the law, which may be established by God but which binds God as well. Having laid down the law, God is not free to change his mind; he is subject to the same judgement as we all are. The law always stands; the laws of the church, of the courts, and of nature. This establishes a tradition of precedence which allows incremental gains, however slow and uncertain they may be. But without the stability of this idea of a law which binds all, you have individuals who claim to know the mind of God (a heresy in itself) who dispense with laws as they see fit--God can, after all, change his mind if he is not bound by any covenant. The society is stuck in an endless trap of feudalism, as one cult of personality is replaced by another, much the same way that kings suceeded each other. Since God never makes personal appearances, fatwas are pronounced on the whims of Imams whose qualifications may be sketchy at best. The people have only the Imams' claims that God is guiding them. This has held the nations of the Muslim world in a state of perpetual medieval chaos to this day--unable to make any headway, they remain the pawns in the games of great powers. And unfortunately, we have Fundamentalist Christians who would like to dispense with the tradition of law as well, in favour of their own interpretations of scripture. They're the ones who claim that Revelations calls for a liberal sprinkling of nukes in the Middle East. This is really not a world-view that you want to encourage. And I'm sorry if all of this offends you, but it's true, and there is simply no more polite way to put it.
Religious beliefs can change as our understanding of God changes. In the story of Abraham, he wanders into the land of Moria to sacrifice his son, and desists when an angel tells him not to. Moria is greek for folly, and it was not Jehovah, but Moloch, who demanded the blood sacrifice of children. This is a story of the changing of the Gods--Abraham went up the mountain with Moloch, and came down with Jehovah. God does change, as our understanding of God does. If your God is cruel, you probably have him wrong, which means that you are worshipping a false God. This is not just a function of scripture, which is after all the work of human hands, however brilliant the inspiration--even Mohammed confessed that he sometimes got it wrong--but also a matter of interpretation, in this case yours and those instructing you.
To say that we cannot understand or judge the imputed character of God is the same as saying that we must suspend our own moral judgement. This is what I meant when I said you had surrendered all moral
Can you imagine the comments in the code?
// I'm not happy with this but it *seems* to work...
// HACK HACK HACK HACK HACK
// Old generic mammal code, needs to be replaced!
// Required by large brain code--refactor if time permits
// Copied from chimp project--doesn't really work well there either.
// FIX ME!!!
I wouldn't want him working on my project...