Another great open-source game is Battle for Wesnoth, a role-playing, turn-based strategy game. It's available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD - even AmigaOS.
"Namely, groupthink, conformism, the silencing of heretics, and the promotion of biased agendas."
Then why is slashdot one of the most popular discussion sites on the web ?
I can't remember reading many discussions where a few people make the same point, and then hundreds of others unanimously agree with them. This is why I think its ridiculous when people talk about the slashdot "groupthink". Think how many times here you've read the word "groupthink" here - that's a lot of people who aren't part of the "groupthinking".
The fact that you made the post to which I'm replying reinforces this. The fact you're (currently) at +5 reinforces it further. I don't agree with your comment. Personally, I think its an effort to use a personal gripe with the slashdot moderation system as a means of promoting a personal "political" belief in lack of restrictions on personal behaviour (which I personally think is a very valid and important principle in many areas).
I'm not complaining about your moderation - you've obviously hit some sort of chord somewhere - but I find it very interesting that the very fact you've been moderated to +5 invalidates the point you were making.
Wow, if only these highly experienced businessmen with the skill, judgement and determination to make it to the top of large multinational companies had just thought to read Slashdot they could have saved themselves millions by reading your post.
I bet they never even thought of the money they could save. Companies today, huh ? Splashing around millions and millions of pounds as if there's no tomorrow.
"You set your fonts and colours in the GNOME control panel, then you start a KDE app and it looks like weird-arse shit."
Carrying things to an extreme, if you want true consistency for users, you shouldn't be changing font and colour settings........
But I think your suggestion about a unified control panel is the best suggestion I've heard re. unifying the "Linux desktop". Personally, I'm glad there are several Linux desktop environments, all competing with each other and rapidly improving together as a result.
A single control panel which could control at least the common elements of the most popular desktops would be a wonderful idea. I hope someone reads your suggestion and makes a serious go at it - really, this would go a huge way towards achieving the "unified Linux desktop" in the eyes of the end user.
(Getting the environments to use the same font sizes (respecting the X11 DPI values) would be another).
"Apple makes money by doing everything that is supposed to be suicidally stupid. It sells hardware and software tied to each other. It tries to do many things well instead of concentrating on one area of strength."
Sounds just like IBM.
Not many people would say what they do is suicidally stupid.
".....they're still fighting over the scraps in the remaining 10-20 percent of the market that *haven't* converted to Apple yet".
So 80-90% of the population now has an MP3 player ?
".....converted to Apple....."
You mean all those people were using a different MP3 player before the iPod came along ?
No. Most of those people started using MP3 players, in particular iPods, because they offered something people wanted (high quality, portable music, with a huge storage capacity (compared to a diskman or portable CD player)), and did so in an attractive, compact, easy-to-use package.
That doesn't mean there's no market for anyone else. There's a HUGE market for other players.
And don't forget Lotus' huge lead in spreadsheet packages, WordPerfect's huge lead in word processors, IBM's huge lead in "IBM-compatible" PCs. Where are they all now ?
"Scary as it is, Microsoft and other large software companies have patented software ideas and algorithms in order to make sure that no other company would go and patent the same idea and use it against them."
Then why have they pushed so hard to have software patenting made legal in the EU ?
"...if we are to reach anything like a utopian state (think Star Trek here) then we, as a race, have to overcome quite a few thresholds. The number of people on the planet is one,..."
Sounds like what you meant to say is "if some of us are to reach anything like a utopian state".
Others may have a view of a utiopia which is not so selective about who get let in.
"Leftists are actually heavily under-represented in charitable volunteering."
"If only left-wingers are interested in a particular topic (like sustainability or Peak Oil), they can and in fact do crowd out attempts to insert balance."
If only left-wingers were interested in a particular topic, then surely only left-wingers would be reading it ?
You talk about balance, and complain about the "left" but not the "right".
"Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws."
"Oh, and addressing this specifically: if this stands, and other countries follow, no more advances may be made in bird flu research since all private-sector motivation is removed."
Wow, you got us on that one.
Yep, if all the private-sector motivation is removed we'll all just sit here and die. It would never occur to us to group together as citizens in a country, choose a small group of people to run the country (maybe give them a name such as a "government"), instruct them to do what we want, such as putting the necessary research into something which could save the lives of great numbers of us, and giving them the financial means (via taxes) to do so.
We could even come together with other countries to pool our resources.
But no, that could never happen. Nobody would care enough.
Your post, and the fact that it was moderated +1,Insightful (at the time of writing) on a slightly-more-clued-up-about-science-than-the-gene ral-population web discussion forum, helps demonstrate the kind of problems people are going to face getting anything done about the problem.
No doubt many people will reply at this point and say that it's not a problem, it's not the fault of humans, and/or nothing needs to be done about it.
Just out of curiosity, if you do feel the need to answer in this way, I'd be curious if you could mention where in the world you're from. Just as a sort of random sample of the geographical distribution of the people who feel strongly that this talk of global warming is a big fuss about nothing.
I often disagree with many of your posts, but on this occasion you are right on the mark.
I suspect many Americans are unaware of quite how much damage the current US administration has done to the reputation of their country.
For a long time, there's been a bit of a debate about whether the USA should be the "world's policeman", sorting out major world conflicts, because they're the only ones both strong enough and (to Europe's shame) willing enough to do so.
Were some countries unhappy about the USA's power and the way they used it ? Of course - often justifiably. The USA certainly got involved in (or started) wars they shouldn't have. But many countries were quite happy, or at least not seriously concerned, with America fulfilling the "world policeman" role. The USA was seen as pushy, occasionally arrogant, putting their own interests first, but on many occasions, in many parts of the world, they were seen as doing things with good intentions. Broadly, they were trusted.
No longer.
I wish more people in the USA could see just how much damage this administration has done to their country. Damage that will take at least a generation to fix, possibly much longer.
Slightly off-topic: Too many Americans seem to take the criticism of their administration too personally. Too easily it descends into a defensive slanging match about the part of the world of the person making the criticism. That said, too many people criticise the USA as a whole, when their criticisms are mainly to do with just the country's (current) administration.
Back on-topic: This whole DNS power struggle sounds like a hissy fit by the EU (and maybe others). Of all the things over which the USA has de-facto control, their handling of the internet architecture has been very fair. But like the parent poster pointed out, the USA no longer has the trust of a large part of the rest of the world. Amazing how it has come to this, after the worldwide sympathy felt for it in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
"The issue of "civilian" vs. "fighter" is often not a black and white kind of thing."
"You are right, the children weren't fighting yet, but the ones in Berlin were, and if we invaded Japan a lot more children would have been dead, because they would have been forced to defend "the Empire""
"It was their goverment that sealed the fate of its children and elderly when they....."
Have you ever considered joining Al-Qaeda ? Your views about deaths of civilians seem remarkably similar to theirs.
"In a more philosophical sense, there were few real civilians as they were almost all helping the war effort one way or another (Japanese are efficient that way)."
What a deplorable, inhuman, racist comment.
Wouldn't civilians in ANY country at war "help the war effort one way or another" ?
And yet most people (other than yourself) seem to maintain a distinction between civilians and the military.
Then again, if you dehumanise the people of another country, and make them seem less than human, it makes it easier for people on your side to want to kill them. An important factor during WW2, and one you seem unwilling to learn from.
"A front side bus that's a mere 2Mhz faster may not seem like much of a tweak, but it's just enough to gain an edge over the competition."
People need to learn to read graphs. "Best" is too often judged on speed, to the exclusion of other important factors. And too often, performance graphs in magazines and articles are drawn to exaggerate the differences between the worst-performer and the best performer, when the actual performance difference may be 1% or 2%. In terms of PC performance, neglibible.
But a 2% performance improvement may make the difference between a component or system being labelled as "disappointing" and "out in front" by a lot of dumbed-down magazines and online articles.
If only people were better able to keep a sense or proportion, and view performance tests with a little more intelligence, manufacturers wouldn't be so tempted to pull silly stunts like this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Another great open-source game is Battle for Wesnoth, a role-playing, turn-based strategy game. It's available for Windows, Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD - even AmigaOS.
Yes, maybe they should have got a Professor of Law and Legal History to help them write this. Oh wait, they did.
"Hot air and rants" ? You could have written something like "wishful thinking". Somehow, you don't come across as exactly neutral.
"Namely, groupthink, conformism, the silencing of heretics, and the promotion of biased agendas."
Then why is slashdot one of the most popular discussion sites on the web ?
I can't remember reading many discussions where a few people make the same point, and then hundreds of others unanimously agree with them. This is why I think its ridiculous when people talk about the slashdot "groupthink". Think how many times here you've read the word "groupthink" here - that's a lot of people who aren't part of the "groupthinking".
The fact that you made the post to which I'm replying reinforces this. The fact you're (currently) at +5 reinforces it further. I don't agree with your comment. Personally, I think its an effort to use a personal gripe with the slashdot moderation system as a means of promoting a personal "political" belief in lack of restrictions on personal behaviour (which I personally think is a very valid and important principle in many areas).
I'm not complaining about your moderation - you've obviously hit some sort of chord somewhere - but I find it very interesting that the very fact you've been moderated to +5 invalidates the point you were making.
"A bigger source of CO2 will be naturally occuring forest fires"
Never mind the article, never mind even the summary, did you even read the title to the summary ?
Here's a reminder: "Humanity Responsible For Current Climate Change".
Wow, if only these highly experienced businessmen with the skill, judgement and determination to make it to the top of large multinational companies had just thought to read Slashdot they could have saved themselves millions by reading your post.
I bet they never even thought of the money they could save. Companies today, huh ? Splashing around millions and millions of pounds as if there's no tomorrow.
"You set your fonts and colours in the GNOME control panel, then you start a KDE app and it looks like weird-arse shit."
Carrying things to an extreme, if you want true consistency for users, you shouldn't be changing font and colour settings........
But I think your suggestion about a unified control panel is the best suggestion I've heard re. unifying the "Linux desktop". Personally, I'm glad there are several Linux desktop environments, all competing with each other and rapidly improving together as a result.
A single control panel which could control at least the common elements of the most popular desktops would be a wonderful idea. I hope someone reads your suggestion and makes a serious go at it - really, this would go a huge way towards achieving the "unified Linux desktop" in the eyes of the end user.
(Getting the environments to use the same font sizes (respecting the X11 DPI values) would be another).
"Apple makes money by doing everything that is supposed to be suicidally stupid. It sells hardware and software tied to each other. It tries to do many things well instead of concentrating on one area of strength."
Sounds just like IBM.
Not many people would say what they do is suicidally stupid.
".....they're still fighting over the scraps in the remaining 10-20 percent of the market that *haven't* converted to Apple yet".
So 80-90% of the population now has an MP3 player ?
".....converted to Apple....."
You mean all those people were using a different MP3 player before the iPod came along ?
No. Most of those people started using MP3 players, in particular iPods, because they offered something people wanted (high quality, portable music, with a huge storage capacity (compared to a diskman or portable CD player)), and did so in an attractive, compact, easy-to-use package.
That doesn't mean there's no market for anyone else. There's a HUGE market for other players.
And don't forget Lotus' huge lead in spreadsheet packages, WordPerfect's huge lead in word processors, IBM's huge lead in "IBM-compatible" PCs. Where are they all now ?
"Scary as it is, Microsoft and other large software companies have patented software ideas and algorithms in order to make sure that no other company would go and patent the same idea and use it against them."
Then why have they pushed so hard to have software patenting made legal in the EU ?
"...if we are to reach anything like a utopian state (think Star Trek here) then we, as a race, have to overcome quite a few thresholds. The number of people on the planet is one, ..."
Sounds like what you meant to say is "if some of us are to reach anything like a utopian state".
Others may have a view of a utiopia which is not so selective about who get let in.
"Leftists are actually heavily under-represented in charitable volunteering."
"If only left-wingers are interested in a particular topic (like sustainability or Peak Oil), they can and in fact do crowd out attempts to insert balance."
If only left-wingers were interested in a particular topic, then surely only left-wingers would be reading it ?
You talk about balance, and complain about the "left" but not the "right".
Aren't you a little unbalbanced ?
"Should a lack of patent laws cause the death of people? Imagine that the entire world declared that for "serious disease" no one had to respect patent laws."
"Oh, and addressing this specifically: if this stands, and other countries follow, no more advances may be made in bird flu research since all private-sector motivation is removed."
Wow, you got us on that one.
Yep, if all the private-sector motivation is removed we'll all just sit here and die. It would never occur to us to group together as citizens in a country, choose a small group of people to run the country (maybe give them a name such as a "government"), instruct them to do what we want, such as putting the necessary research into something which could save the lives of great numbers of us, and giving them the financial means (via taxes) to do so.
We could even come together with other countries to pool our resources.
But no, that could never happen. Nobody would care enough.
We'll all just sit here and die instead.
Your post, and the fact that it was moderated +1,Insightful (at the time of writing) on a slightly-more-clued-up-about-science-than-the-gene ral-population web discussion forum, helps demonstrate the kind of problems people are going to face getting anything done about the problem.
No doubt many people will reply at this point and say that it's not a problem, it's not the fault of humans, and/or nothing needs to be done about it.
Just out of curiosity, if you do feel the need to answer in this way, I'd be curious if you could mention where in the world you're from. Just as a sort of random sample of the geographical distribution of the people who feel strongly that this talk of global warming is a big fuss about nothing.
I often disagree with many of your posts, but on this occasion you are right on the mark.
I suspect many Americans are unaware of quite how much damage the current US administration has done to the reputation of their country.
For a long time, there's been a bit of a debate about whether the USA should be the "world's policeman", sorting out major world conflicts, because they're the only ones both strong enough and (to Europe's shame) willing enough to do so.
Were some countries unhappy about the USA's power and the way they used it ? Of course - often justifiably. The USA certainly got involved in (or started) wars they shouldn't have. But many countries were quite happy, or at least not seriously concerned, with America fulfilling the "world policeman" role. The USA was seen as pushy, occasionally arrogant, putting their own interests first, but on many occasions, in many parts of the world, they were seen as doing things with good intentions. Broadly, they were trusted.
No longer.
I wish more people in the USA could see just how much damage this administration has done to their country. Damage that will take at least a generation to fix, possibly much longer.
Slightly off-topic: Too many Americans seem to take the criticism of their administration too personally. Too easily it descends into a defensive slanging match about the part of the world of the person making the criticism. That said, too many people criticise the USA as a whole, when their criticisms are mainly to do with just the country's (current) administration.
Back on-topic: This whole DNS power struggle sounds like a hissy fit by the EU (and maybe others). Of all the things over which the USA has de-facto control, their handling of the internet architecture has been very fair. But like the parent poster pointed out, the USA no longer has the trust of a large part of the rest of the world. Amazing how it has come to this, after the worldwide sympathy felt for it in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.
"...the Chinese government will have absolute control of what can be viewed by most of the Chinese people."
Hmmmmm.....control over what content can be viewed and by whom.....
Sounds like some sort of DRM scheme.
No-one would dream of trying anything like that in the free, capitalist west, now would they?
"option A: carjacking now involves hasty amputations"
It's already happened.
It depends how often they go down.
Just maybe, fewer people went to the cinema in 2005 because the films they watched in 2004 were so bad.
"BT was never meant (whether Bram Cohen realizes this or not) to....."
Surely the inventor of BT knows better than you when his invention was meant to achieve.
Now how well it actually achieves it may be a differnt matter.
"I think it is Hubris for humans to think that we can destroy the Earth."
I think it is Hubris for humans to think what we can't.
"Sure, humans have a huge impact on the earth, but the area we occupy is a small percentage."
What about the percentage of the area over which we cut down the trees ?
What about the rapidly-declining numbers of elephants, lions, tigers and all the rest ?
What about the declining areas of rain-forest ? How much rain-forest is there left in asia now ?
Take your hand from in front of your eyes. Humans have had, and continue to have, a HUGE impact on the whole planet.
"The issue of "civilian" vs. "fighter" is often not a black and white kind of thing."
"You are right, the children weren't fighting yet, but the ones in Berlin were, and if we invaded Japan a lot more children would have been dead, because they would have been forced to defend "the Empire""
"It was their goverment that sealed the fate of its children and elderly when they....."
Have you ever considered joining Al-Qaeda ? Your views about deaths of civilians seem remarkably similar to theirs.
"In a more philosophical sense, there were few real civilians as they were almost all helping the war effort one way or another (Japanese are efficient that way)."
What a deplorable, inhuman, racist comment.
Wouldn't civilians in ANY country at war "help the war effort one way or another" ?
And yet most people (other than yourself) seem to maintain a distinction between civilians and the military.
Then again, if you dehumanise the people of another country, and make them seem less than human, it makes it easier for people on your side to want to kill them. An important factor during WW2, and one you seem unwilling to learn from.
"A front side bus that's a mere 2Mhz faster may not seem like much of a tweak, but it's just enough to gain an edge over the competition."
People need to learn to read graphs. "Best" is too often judged on speed, to the exclusion of other important factors. And too often, performance graphs in magazines and articles are drawn to exaggerate the differences between the worst-performer and the best performer, when the actual performance difference may be 1% or 2%. In terms of PC performance, neglibible.
But a 2% performance improvement may make the difference between a component or system being labelled as "disappointing" and "out in front" by a lot of dumbed-down magazines and online articles.
If only people were better able to keep a sense or proportion, and view performance tests with a little more intelligence, manufacturers wouldn't be so tempted to pull silly stunts like this one.
There's gonna be hell to pay.....
Just wait till Kernel Sanders gets to hear about this.