You're not the only one. My wife and I also find them funny. It's a little bit of "When I stub my toe it's tragedy. When you fall off a ladder and break your arm it's comedy." But even as I know I could be a victim, I still root for them and enjoy their style of antics.
There are lots of potential motivations to pay for porn or sex (all of which could be invalidated in context):
absolution of guilt: I know this person wants to have sex with me because I paid them. That makes it consensual.
feeling of control: They have to do what I want because I'm paying them.
proprietary feelings: I don't want to sleep with a stranger, but since I'm paying this person they belong to me (for an hour), so they're not a stranger.
illusion of quality (sometimes justified): I'm getting better sex because this person is a professional.
expectation of security or discretion: Since I'm paying for it, this person won't try to get something else out of me later.
Paying for porn or sex is no stranger than paying for music when you've got plenty of musicians in your circle of friends who'd be happy to make music for or with you. Paying for it allows you to choose from a wider variety of styles and to enjoy it in the way you want to (odd times of day, peculiar tastes, etc).
I "have to wonder" about people who treat all transactions in life as part of a zero-sum game to be optimized for maximum personal benefit. I also "have to wonder" about people who think picking someone up at a bar for a one-night-stand is always equally as satisfying as maintaining a professional relationship with a trust-worthy sex worker.
Did you perhaps mean Gamebryo, which is what they used for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 games? Or did you mean Creation Engine, which they developed in-house for Skyrim?
There's no reference to Bethesda on the id Tech wikipedia page.
A hazmat suit won't block much radiation, but it will keep the wearer from accumulating condensation or dust in their lungs and on their skin. Their long-term exposure to the radiation is reduced dramatically by wearing a suit, removing the suit safely (not touching the outside) and taking a thorough shower before and after getting out of the suit.
On top of that, while a heavy suit of lead would be impractical, even reducing the radiation exposure by a smaller fraction with a thin layer of shielding is worthwhile as it gives the body more room to repair the damage as it's happening, reducing the peak damage done.
1) 3000 people die at the hands of random extremists and nobody makes any jokes.
2) 3000 people die at the hands of random extremists and someone references AYBABTU.
I like the second scenario better. I probably won't laugh if I know a victim, but other people's laughter doesn't hurt me.
Not laughing at tragedy doesn't make it less tragic. Laughing is one of the ways people cope. There is no harm in growing a thicker skin. We can still have feelings and care about life without revering life. Death happens.
Life is for the living. Cry until you laugh, laugh until you can't breath then sleep it off and move on.
At one point or another, the common man needs to set up a state that works for his interests.
I've been thinking that for years, but there's one problem I can't see a way around. The kind of people who can organize a stable government are the kind of people who are already on the winning side. I'm not saying the losers aren't good people or that they're dumb or uncharismatic. I'm saying that anyone who posses all the traits necessary to create a new government probably doesn't see a need to because the current systems benefit them.
My hope is that individuals who posses some of the traits can band together with individuals who posses the other traits and as a group they might succeed.
There's a difference between having the power (or "means" or "capability" or "opportunity") to do something and having the authority to do it.
A mugger has the power to acquire resources through threats or actual violence. The IRS has the authority to do so. When the mugger attacks you they are breaking the law. When the police seize your property to rectify a tax debt, they are enforcing the law.
This is a matter of definitions, not politics. Government is the system a society chooses (or fails to overthrow) as a mechanism to develop and implement the rules of law. Corporations are organizations which exist under those rules. Sometimes corporations break rules just as muggers do. It is within their power to do so, but they do not have the authority. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes they get away with it. That's the nature of reality. But the meaning of the words is such that only a system of government has the ultimate authority to use force to enact its will. Any non-government entity which acquires that authority does so at the behest of the government(s) it serves or operates under (which is usually the same thing).
When a Corporation mis-behaves, it is the job of the Governments who have jurisdiction over those incidents to correct the behavior of the Corporation in question. When a Government mis-behaves, it is the job of the Citizens to correct the behavior of that Government.
The grand-parent post used the word "power" when they should have used the word "authority". It is, by definition, true that "Governments have the authority to deprive you of your life, liberty or property." The circumstances under which various governments have that authority vary from country to country, and from state to state.
If you don't like what corporations due, vote with your dollar and your ballot. If you don't like what your government does, vote with your wallet, ballot and feet. (It looks like voting with bullets doesn't work anymore.)
It seems like a lot of people can't think of a use case for hosts behind firewalls to want to talk to each other.
I want to stream music from my local media server while doing system administration one any of three remote private networks.
My work uses a private network of 10/8, my university uses 172.16/12 and my secret club uses 192.168/16. Which private network should I use at home? It doesn't matter because whatever I pick, I cannot establish a tunnel from home to whichever location uses the same private network without running into a routing conflict. There is no way to tell whether an address is local or remote once I establish that connection. Regardless of the tunneling tricks used, my computer will have no way of knowing which side of the tunnel a host is on if both the source and destination network are the same private network. It could try both, but what if the same IP exists on both sides?
Most VPN software solves this by not allowing the client to access local network resources when attached to the VPN, but that's just dodging the real issue. The way IPv4 works, hosts need to have globally unique addresses to talk to each other easily, and it's not unreasonable to expect hosts on different protected networks to want to talk to each other.
You can have the advantages of NAT without the disadvantages. Get IPv6 and firewalling correctly configured.
Social problem: your family is scattered all over the globe.
That's only a social problem if your family is scattered because they hate each other. In that case your technical solutions won't solve the problem.
When people starve because people with guns lock up the food, that's a social problem. When people starve because of drought, that's a technical problem.
Just because something is a problem for people doesn't mean it's a problem with people.
"there have been many big extinctions, and each allowed some hardier form of live to make it to the next expansion."
That is an inaccurate way of describing the process. Each event changed the environment in which organisms competed and allowed a better-suited form of life to make it to the next expansion. That is, if the environment is one in which hardiness is not advantageous, the _less_ hardy forms of life will flourish.
Evolution is not a process of perfection. It is a process of conforming, as a gas fills a volume.
Imagine mapping every possible genome to a point in space. If a genome could not produce a viable organism, that point in space is solid. If there are no organisms possessing a particular genome, that point is empty. All other points contain a virtual "gas". That gas will expand to fill any empty points adjacent to it. That expansion is half of evolution. It's not seeking complexity or simplicity. It is seeking viability. The way that refinement (the second half of evolution) happens is that the gas interacts with itself through the environment. The existence of certain organisms shapes the "solid" portion of this made-up space. The openness of the "carnivore" portions of the genome space is contingent on an ample supply of "prey". In an environment where "hard" organisms have no advantage over "soft" organisms, the gas will fill the spaces of those competing volumes evenly.
This Ars technica article references an experiment in which "E. coli can end up resistant to ciprofloxacin in about ten hours." This happened because the environment in the experiment was setup so that the survival cost of having that resistance was paid for by an abundance of food. The extra food in the poisoned side of the experimental apparatus reduced the solidness of the resistant-strain portion of the genome-space.
Extinction events don't just test the hardiness of all current organisms. They change the viability of various genetic strategies. The events don't just wipe out the weaker organisms. They create an ecosystem in which a new strategy is favored.
To put it another way: if it were possible to kill 90% of organisms in a stable system without changing the genetic pressures the survivors live under, the system would return to its previous state.
"... they often provide a different and useful set of sensibilities to the community (Alan Turing,..."
It's true that many great people have also been homosexual, but I don't think their greatness has ever been because of their sexual preferences. The only sphere within which sexual preference could be argued have any relationship to social contribution is in art.
Your point about homosexuality not actually beign a problem is much better than implying that 'fixing' the problem would deprive us of 10% of our geniuses.
"part of what is keeping our country propped up is the inefficiency of bureaucracy and that it allows a lot of otherwise useless people to remain employed"
I don't accept your premise that there are "otherwise useless people" who would be out of a job if government were more efficient. They may not have other skills right now, but there is definitely something else they could be doing.
"If you don't know C, that's just another thing to learn before starting down this road."
This is an even better point than many readers of that comment may realize. C is an excellent language to learn if you already know any programming language and you want to expand your horizons. C is a strong influence on the syntax of any language which uses braces to delineate blocks. It is low-level enough to expose all of the nasty resource management and concurrency problems that are normally hidden by high-level languages. It is high-level enough to facilitate modern programming styles. With C you are (mostly) operating directly on the metal, but it provides the abstractions you need to save yourself from repetitive stress injuries.
The following is probably valid C:
void Continuation__call_or_throw(Object obj, String method_name) { ContinuationFrame result = obj->lookup_method(method_name);
if (result->isa(Error)) { String error_str = new String( sprintf("Error '%s' looking up method '%s' on object '%s'", result->description, method_name->as_string, obj->as_string)); myContinuation->start_traceback(error_str, result); } else { myContinuation->add_frame(result); }
myContinuation->resume(); }
C is a little like Latin in that once you know it, you know a lot about every language which was spawned from it. Even if you never work on a project written in C, you will use what you learn in every other language you learn. It will also stretch your brain so that whenever you think about an abstract list or array, you also think about linked lists and arrays of pointers. You don't have to know about these things to use them, but knowing about them makes using them less surprising. It is impossible to over-recommend learning C if you're interested in programming at all.
These two blocks of code do the same thing: replace back slashes with slashes on all lines not starting with zero or more whitespace characters followed by a hash character.
No language can be all things to all people, but Perl is currently all things to me.
I agree that losing all this art is tragic, but we should also keep in mind that before 1900 we had no practical way of preserving this kind of art. For that matter, a lot of other art was lost which can now be preserved because of our ability to make copies automatically. Certainly digitizing sculptures, pictures and performances is a lossy first copy, but every copy after that can be lossless if someone is willing to foot the bill.
In 100 years we're going to have the opposite problem: we will have more art than we know what to do with. It's a good problem to have.
"given the generally accepted principle in our economy that anything other than constant growth in profits is failure"
This is not unique to our economy or economies in general. It is a fact of life. Anything which does not outperform its alternatives within a domain will be obsoleted by them. This is not bad any more than gravity or the speed of light is bad. It's the way the universe works.
Stasis is death. Growth is life. Steady increases in growth rates are more lively than static growth rates. Exponential growth is a universal constant in dynamic systems.
"Similar fate would befall you in total anarchism."
Total anarchism does not mean lack of order, it means lack of hierarchy. Anarchism is not the same as chaos. You can have laws in an anarchy, you just don't give anyone a monopoly on creating or enforcing them. It's not necessarily a free-for-all. It's not Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Certainly those worlds are included in the set of all possible anarchistic societies, but they are not the only worlds, they are not innevitable, and few serious anarchists are trying to bring that about.
"They wanted to be able to send any CD-Key they want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response."
I'm not familiar with the original case, but it is a minor technical tweak to solve the problem you describe. I work for a Large Media Company who out-sources their web email to a third party. We want our users to have one user name and password for everything they do with us, but we don't want the third party to see this information. When users go to our third-party hosted web mail site they are redirected to a login page we host which on success sets a cookie that the third party can use to verify that the user's login succeeded.
If Blizzard's only concern had been exposing CD keys they could have implemented a similar protocol. This was not what they objected to. Blizzard Does Not Get It.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like a scoring system and a way to get a custom RSS feed which only shows stories above a certain score with a minimum time spent published.
I don't expect it to succeed, but I'm favor the concept. We need decentralization in all areas, especially commerce.
You're not the only one. My wife and I also find them funny. It's a little bit of "When I stub my toe it's tragedy. When you fall off a ladder and break your arm it's comedy." But even as I know I could be a victim, I still root for them and enjoy their style of antics.
Don't ever change, LulzSec!
There are lots of potential motivations to pay for porn or sex (all of which could be invalidated in context):
Paying for porn or sex is no stranger than paying for music when you've got plenty of musicians in your circle of friends who'd be happy to make music for or with you. Paying for it allows you to choose from a wider variety of styles and to enjoy it in the way you want to (odd times of day, peculiar tastes, etc).
I "have to wonder" about people who treat all transactions in life as part of a zero-sum game to be optimized for maximum personal benefit. I also "have to wonder" about people who think picking someone up at a bar for a one-night-stand is always equally as satisfying as maintaining a professional relationship with a trust-worthy sex worker.
Did you perhaps mean Gamebryo, which is what they used for the Elder Scrolls and Fallout 3 games? Or did you mean Creation Engine, which they developed in-house for Skyrim?
There's no reference to Bethesda on the id Tech wikipedia page.
This is either the best or worst idea I've seen all day.
I'm not sure which/[?|]{3,}/
See also this comment
A hazmat suit won't block much radiation, but it will keep the wearer from accumulating condensation or dust in their lungs and on their skin. Their long-term exposure to the radiation is reduced dramatically by wearing a suit, removing the suit safely (not touching the outside) and taking a thorough shower before and after getting out of the suit.
On top of that, while a heavy suit of lead would be impractical, even reducing the radiation exposure by a smaller fraction with a thin layer of shielding is worthwhile as it gives the body more room to repair the damage as it's happening, reducing the peak damage done.
Two hypothetical 9/11inspried scenarios:
1) 3000 people die at the hands of random extremists and nobody makes any jokes.
2) 3000 people die at the hands of random extremists and someone references AYBABTU.
I like the second scenario better. I probably won't laugh if I know a victim, but other people's laughter doesn't hurt me.
Not laughing at tragedy doesn't make it less tragic. Laughing is one of the ways people cope. There is no harm in growing a thicker skin. We can still have feelings and care about life without revering life. Death happens.
Life is for the living. Cry until you laugh, laugh until you can't breath then sleep it off and move on.
I've been thinking that for years, but there's one problem I can't see a way around. The kind of people who can organize a stable government are the kind of people who are already on the winning side. I'm not saying the losers aren't good people or that they're dumb or uncharismatic. I'm saying that anyone who posses all the traits necessary to create a new government probably doesn't see a need to because the current systems benefit them.
My hope is that individuals who posses some of the traits can band together with individuals who posses the other traits and as a group they might succeed.
There's a difference between having the power (or "means" or "capability" or "opportunity") to do something and having the authority to do it.
A mugger has the power to acquire resources through threats or actual violence. The IRS has the authority to do so. When the mugger attacks you they are breaking the law. When the police seize your property to rectify a tax debt, they are enforcing the law.
This is a matter of definitions, not politics. Government is the system a society chooses (or fails to overthrow) as a mechanism to develop and implement the rules of law. Corporations are organizations which exist under those rules. Sometimes corporations break rules just as muggers do. It is within their power to do so, but they do not have the authority. Sometimes they get caught, sometimes they get away with it. That's the nature of reality. But the meaning of the words is such that only a system of government has the ultimate authority to use force to enact its will. Any non-government entity which acquires that authority does so at the behest of the government(s) it serves or operates under (which is usually the same thing).
When a Corporation mis-behaves, it is the job of the Governments who have jurisdiction over those incidents to correct the behavior of the Corporation in question. When a Government mis-behaves, it is the job of the Citizens to correct the behavior of that Government.
The grand-parent post used the word "power" when they should have used the word "authority". It is, by definition, true that "Governments have the authority to deprive you of your life, liberty or property." The circumstances under which various governments have that authority vary from country to country, and from state to state.
If you don't like what corporations due, vote with your dollar and your ballot. If you don't like what your government does, vote with your wallet, ballot and feet. (It looks like voting with bullets doesn't work anymore.)
It seems like a lot of people can't think of a use case for hosts behind firewalls to want to talk to each other.
I want to stream music from my local media server while doing system administration one any of three remote private networks.
My work uses a private network of 10/8, my university uses 172.16/12 and my secret club uses 192.168/16. Which private network should I use at home? It doesn't matter because whatever I pick, I cannot establish a tunnel from home to whichever location uses the same private network without running into a routing conflict. There is no way to tell whether an address is local or remote once I establish that connection. Regardless of the tunneling tricks used, my computer will have no way of knowing which side of the tunnel a host is on if both the source and destination network are the same private network. It could try both, but what if the same IP exists on both sides?
Most VPN software solves this by not allowing the client to access local network resources when attached to the VPN, but that's just dodging the real issue. The way IPv4 works, hosts need to have globally unique addresses to talk to each other easily, and it's not unreasonable to expect hosts on different protected networks to want to talk to each other.
You can have the advantages of NAT without the disadvantages. Get IPv6 and firewalling correctly configured.
Social problem: your family is scattered all over the globe.
That's only a social problem if your family is scattered because they hate each other. In that case your technical solutions won't solve the problem.
When people starve because people with guns lock up the food, that's a social problem. When people starve because of drought, that's a technical problem.
Just because something is a problem for people doesn't mean it's a problem with people.
"there have been many big extinctions, and each allowed some hardier form of live to make it to the next expansion."
That is an inaccurate way of describing the process. Each event changed the environment in which organisms competed and allowed a better-suited form of life to make it to the next expansion. That is, if the environment is one in which hardiness is not advantageous, the _less_ hardy forms of life will flourish.
Evolution is not a process of perfection. It is a process of conforming, as a gas fills a volume.
Imagine mapping every possible genome to a point in space. If a genome could not produce a viable organism, that point in space is solid. If there are no organisms possessing a particular genome, that point is empty. All other points contain a virtual "gas". That gas will expand to fill any empty points adjacent to it. That expansion is half of evolution. It's not seeking complexity or simplicity. It is seeking viability. The way that refinement (the second half of evolution) happens is that the gas interacts with itself through the environment. The existence of certain organisms shapes the "solid" portion of this made-up space. The openness of the "carnivore" portions of the genome space is contingent on an ample supply of "prey". In an environment where "hard" organisms have no advantage over "soft" organisms, the gas will fill the spaces of those competing volumes evenly.
This Ars technica article references an experiment in which "E. coli can end up resistant to ciprofloxacin in about ten hours." This happened because the environment in the experiment was setup so that the survival cost of having that resistance was paid for by an abundance of food. The extra food in the poisoned side of the experimental apparatus reduced the solidness of the resistant-strain portion of the genome-space.
Extinction events don't just test the hardiness of all current organisms. They change the viability of various genetic strategies. The events don't just wipe out the weaker organisms. They create an ecosystem in which a new strategy is favored.
To put it another way: if it were possible to kill 90% of organisms in a stable system without changing the genetic pressures the survivors live under, the system would return to its previous state.
"... they often provide a different and useful set of sensibilities to the community (Alan Turing, ..."
It's true that many great people have also been homosexual, but I don't think their greatness has ever been because of their sexual preferences. The only sphere within which sexual preference could be argued have any relationship to social contribution is in art.
Your point about homosexuality not actually beign a problem is much better than implying that 'fixing' the problem would deprive us of 10% of our geniuses.
"part of what is keeping our country propped up is the inefficiency of bureaucracy and that it allows a lot of otherwise useless people to remain employed"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
I don't accept your premise that there are "otherwise useless people" who would be out of a job if government were more efficient. They may not have other skills right now, but there is definitely something else they could be doing.
"If you don't know C, that's just another thing to learn before starting down this road."
This is an even better point than many readers of that comment may realize. C is an excellent language to learn if you already know any programming language and you want to expand your horizons. C is a strong influence on the syntax of any language which uses braces to delineate blocks. It is low-level enough to expose all of the nasty resource management and concurrency problems that are normally hidden by high-level languages. It is high-level enough to facilitate modern programming styles. With C you are (mostly) operating directly on the metal, but it provides the abstractions you need to save yourself from repetitive stress injuries.
The following is probably valid C:
void Continuation__call_or_throw(Object obj, String method_name) {
ContinuationFrame result = obj->lookup_method(method_name);
if (result->isa(Error)) {
String error_str = new String(
sprintf("Error '%s' looking up method '%s' on object '%s'",
result->description,
method_name->as_string,
obj->as_string));
myContinuation->start_traceback(error_str, result);
} else {
myContinuation->add_frame(result);
}
myContinuation->resume();
}
C is a little like Latin in that once you know it, you know a lot about every language which was spawned from it. Even if you never work on a project written in C, you will use what you learn in every other language you learn. It will also stretch your brain so that whenever you think about an abstract list or array, you also think about linked lists and arrays of pointers. You don't have to know about these things to use them, but knowing about them makes using them less surprising. It is impossible to over-recommend learning C if you're interested in programming at all.
It is a cryptic (to the uninitiated) but handy quick-n-dirty tool:
/^\s*#/;
/$self->skip/;
perl -pne '
s{\\}{/}g unless
' < pathlist.old > pathlist.new
And it is a full-featured, easy to read and write modern language:
perl -e '
use MooseX::Declare;
class Replacer {
has skip => (isa => "RegexpRef", is => "rw", default => sub { qr{^\s*#} });
has from => (isa => "RegexpRef", is => "rw", default => sub { qr{\\} });
has to => (isa => "Str", is => "rw", default => sub { "/" });
method filter (FileHandle $in, FileHandle $out) {
while (<$in>) {
s/$self->from/$self->to/g unless
print $out $_;
}
}
}
my $replacer = new Replacer;
$replacer->filter(\*STDIN, \*STDOUT);
' pathlist.old > pathlist.new
These two blocks of code do the same thing: replace back slashes with slashes
on all lines not starting with zero or more whitespace characters followed by
a hash character.
No language can be all things to all people, but Perl is currently all things
to me.
I agree that losing all this art is tragic, but we should also keep in mind that before 1900 we had no practical way of preserving this kind of art. For that matter, a lot of other art was lost which can now be preserved because of our ability to make copies automatically. Certainly digitizing sculptures, pictures and performances is a lossy first copy, but every copy after that can be lossless if someone is willing to foot the bill.
In 100 years we're going to have the opposite problem: we will have more art than we know what to do with. It's a good problem to have.
In all seriousness, I would totally watch that movie. Sounds like a good time. I wish Michael Crichton was still alive to write it.
"given the generally accepted principle in our economy that anything other than constant growth in profits is failure"
This is not unique to our economy or economies in general. It is a fact of life. Anything which does not outperform its alternatives within a domain will be obsoleted by them. This is not bad any more than gravity or the speed of light is bad. It's the way the universe works.
Stasis is death. Growth is life. Steady increases in growth rates are more lively than static growth rates. Exponential growth is a universal constant in dynamic systems.
"...while a room temperature superconductor is the Holy Grail of materials science, ..."
Perhaps a 200K superconductor would be more like a Shroud of Turin of materials science?
"Similar fate would befall you in total anarchism."
Total anarchism does not mean lack of order, it means lack of hierarchy. Anarchism is not the same as chaos. You can have laws in an anarchy, you just don't give anyone a monopoly on creating or enforcing them. It's not necessarily a free-for-all. It's not Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Certainly those worlds are included in the set of all possible anarchistic societies, but they are not the only worlds, they are not innevitable, and few serious anarchists are trying to bring that about.
For more information see http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/1931/.
"They wanted to be able to send any CD-Key they want to Blizzard and get a yes/no response."
I'm not familiar with the original case, but it is a minor technical tweak to solve the problem you describe. I work for a Large Media Company who out-sources their web email to a third party. We want our users to have one user name and password for everything they do with us, but we don't want the third party to see this information. When users go to our third-party hosted web mail site they are redirected to a login page we host which on success sets a cookie that the third party can use to verify that the user's login succeeded.
If Blizzard's only concern had been exposing CD keys they could have implemented a similar protocol. This was not what they objected to. Blizzard Does Not Get It.
And if your 10TB figure is accurate, I believe that the final figure comes to about 2.4 LoC/fortnight.
That certainly puts it in perspective, I think.