Heh, I recently bought a used copy of Resident Evil IV because I'd heard that it was "JUST AMAZING! SO GOOD!"
I've played non-commercial zombie-related mods for the original Half Life that are better games in every way except the graphics. How the hell does this pass for "good"?
Most of the truly GREAT games I've played have been on the PC.
Deus Ex, System Shock 1/2, the Half Life series, Fallout 1/2, Morrowind (yes, there was an XBox port, but it was horrible, and the modding was the best part anyway), Oblivion (again, the modding MADE the game, fixing very broken things that won't be fixed on the console because they're features, not bugs), The Witcher, the Thief series, Starcraft, C&C Red Alert 2, and a host of others.
Games that have come close to that on recent consoles? FFX, Suikoden III and V, and MGS2 are the only ones that come to mind. The GTA series, I guess, sort of, though Vice City is the only one that I like enough to play through again--San Andreas is only fun for the occasional cheat-fueled rampage/car chase, and is more like a quick game of Tetris to me than anything else.
At least a couple of the PC games listed above are installed on my PC at any given time, and I play each of them at least once every couple of years (exception: The Witcher, since it's so new, but I'll likely go through it again next Spring and try some different things).
I like *amazing* single player experiences. I've seen it happen more often on PC than on consoles. I don't know whether I just have different tastes or whether console gamers/reviewers just have very low expectations, but blockbuster, super-popular games like Halo and God of War just bore me. Whatever the reason, I'm sticking with the PC until console games get better or PC games get much worse.
I would expect them at least to prove it was me through the usual channels. After that their removal of my rights would be punishment, and would be perfectly normal.
Crime is crime.
Sometimes things ARE done other ways, of course, but it's usually in third world countries, and no matter who's doing it, it's barbaric. Besides, if the point is to remove threats, you want to make sure you've got the right guy.
Now, I haven't read it since the beginning of the war in Iraq, but I recall pretty clearly that non-uniformed combatants were OK as long as they weren't part of an army or militia that'd been around long enough and was organized enough to be expected to have uniforms.
Members of the military fighting out of uniform are in trouble. Members of a militia that's been around for a few weeks or longer and have more than a handful of members are clearly in trouble. Jim Bob with his shotgun who decides to take shots at some invading Ruskies definitely IS protected, though. Spontaneous and more-or-less disorganized action against an invading foreign power by a non-uniformed populous is allowed for, and they ARE protected.
I'm just responding to the generalization that "people fighting out of uniform aren't covered by Geneva", remember. Yeah, SOME aren't, but others are.
You don't go to a foreign country and expect their rights, do you?
Actually, yes.
Were I to be arrested while on vacation in, say, Germany, I would fully expect to be tried under normal German law, with rights identical (or at least very nearly identical) to those of a citizen.
Were I to annoy the German government in some way that is legal but considered undesirable behaviour in a foreigner (say, by participating in a G8 protest or something like that) the worst I would expect is to be kicked out of the country and told not to come back. That's the only sort of case where I would expect my treatment at the hands of the government to differ significantly from that of a citizen.
People fighting out of uniform are not covered by Geneva
On the off chance that this isn't a troll and you actually believe this, allow me to make a suggestion:
Try reading it before you say things like this.
Here, I'll even give you a hint: there's a whole section devoted to people fighting out of uniform, and they ARE covered. Soldiers fighting out of uniform are not covered, IIRC, but anyone who picks up a gun and starts fighting invaders without bothering to coordinate his fashion with his fellow fighters DOES NOT lose Geneva protection.
And if the people in question weren't picked up on the battlefield, I can only assume we suspect them of having committed some crime. We should probably conduct an investigation and try them in a court of law, then. That is how suspected criminals are supposed to be dealt with, after all.
More to the point, passengers in cars are not required to produce ID, and it's not so much the ID for the driver as it is the proof that they're licensed to operate the vehicle.
If anyone wanted to just kill the number of people on an airplane (or more) and cripple air travel, they could just pick a busy day and detonate a bag full of ball bearings (or several bags at different spots in the same area, if they've got even a couple of accomplices) in the security line at an airport. Trivial, cheap as hell, possibly not fatal to the attacker(s) (if they have a timer) and there's no practical way to defend against it (unless "practical" includes increasing the air travel security budget tenfold).
Slightly less spectacular than taking down an airliner, but it'd kill plenty of people and probably disrupt air travel even more than one or two downed planes.
It's pretty obvious that there just aren't very many motivated people interesting in pulling stunts like this. If there were, we'd see it way, way more often.
Am I the only one who was super-excited upon seeing a screenshot or video of this game, only to be crushed moments later by the discovery that it was another damned MMO?
Sid Meier's Pirates! was cool, but the single-player pirate experience could be done much better. Stupid MMO, getting my hopes up for all of 5 seconds.
The Fountain, though... ugh. You know a movie sucks when you're hoping it'll suddenly and without warning turn into a space thriller with giant space-sharks and alien zombies halfway through, killing all the existing characters in less than a minute's time and introducing Bruce Campbell as the swashbuckling space-pirate lead.
For a storyline-driven shooter, it's just the right length (fairly short, then, compared to most others), its style is amazing, the story is pretty good, and the gameplay is fast and fun, with almost none of the boring/repetitive stretches that plagued the first one.
Try playing it through on the most difficult mode. Use a cheat to make it available to you, if it's not there until after the first play-through (I can't remember whether it is or not). I found myself using a totally different and (to me) more fun play style when my saves were limited and healing items were nearly non-existent. I usually don't play games over the "normal" difficulty rating (and often on "easy" if I expect any frustration from controls or puzzle elements) but this is one game that benefits greatly from play at its top difficulty.
ReiserFS 3.* and ext2/3 are nice because they can be read from and written to from windows (with some 3rd party drivers/applications), which is really handy for those of us who dual-boot (what can I say, I'm a gamer--Windows to game, Linux to get things done).
AFAIK, JFS and XFS lack that support. Good for my fileserver which'll have Samba as a layer between it and any Windows boxen anyway, bad for my dual-boot machine or external hard drive.
No kidding. About 75% of professors seem to think that it's acceptable to waste the students' time by conveying exactly the same information (and NOTHING more) that they could have digested with 10 minutes of reading via a 50 minute lecture.That's not education--that's a complete waste of 40 minutes.
At the very least the lecture should be compelling enough to hold one's attention, even if the actual information in it would be more efficiently conveyed in text form; that way, there's at least a chance of a boost in retention from the lecture format. Low-content, poorly-presented lectures seem to be the norm, however. Too bad.
OK, you may already know about this, but I feel compelled to spread the Good News in case you don't.
You can right click on any search field, and click "add a keyword for this search" to be able to type "[keyword] [search term(s)]" in your address bar to use the search.
For example, every Firefox installation that I use has Wikipedia set up as, "wp [keyword(s)]". If I game on it, it's got Gamefaqs set to "faq [keyword(s)]". I'm so used to it that I try it without thinking on other people's machines and am always a bit taken aback when it doesn't work:) Much faster than selecting the desired search provider in the box at the right.
Gattaca is a blueprint for tomorrow. It's micro-level message is about the human spirit, but its macro-level message is one against sloppy family planning in a society that relies on heavily on genetic engineering of offspring.
I'm always a bit baffled by people who are just *SO* disgusted by China's government-mandated birth control.
It's something that most other countries on the planet will probably have to do eventually; WTF do they want a country with a huge population and out-of-control birth rates to do? Let people breed as they want, seeking to meet immediate, individual needs, so that they can collectively cause a huge starvation die-off a couple of decades later? Or collectively enforce birth control so the die-off doesn't happen and everyone's standard of living can start going up?
Don't get me wrong, China's government sucks, but this seems to be the single issue that people always bring up when talking about how repressive they are, and I just don't see it. Given similar circumstances, I'd HOPE our government would do the same thing--we've just not had to deal with that problem yet.
I should add that an important distinction is that it is possible to be agnostic (think the answers are unkowable) and theist (still believe--an agnostic theist), while even weak atheism takes a stance that eliminates theism as an option.
Agnosticism actually claims that the answers are unknowable. Weak atheism simply claims that, lacking knowledge or proof of god, we should treat the matter the same way we would any other claim with similarly poor support; it does not actually assert that such proof (direct or logical) is impossible to find.
That "tiny minority" runs nationally-syndicated (in the U.S., anyway) radio programs showcasing their beliefs (and their "science"), has a surprisingly strong influence on the boards of education in several states (Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri to some extent, etc.), ships their missionaries all over the world (I know this because they brag about it all the time on their batshit-crazy radio shows), and influences the U.S. federal government to an alarming degree.
It's not hard to see why many still think that this idea (and others like it) needs to be opposed against so vehemently and constantly.
Agnosticism is believing that god and gods existence (or lack thereof) is entirely unknowable, period.
Atheism is divided into two major categories:
"weak" atheism, which is essentially the stance that god(s) should be treated like anything else, and not assumed to exist in the absence of direct evidence or logical necessity, though a weak atheist does not actually say "there is no god" (since to a weak atheist, the statement is unnecessary). These are the Russel's Teapot-type folks.
"Strong" atheism is the stance that there definitely is no god, and a strong atheist will assert and attempt to back that up with logic or evidence. AFAIK, there aren't actually a whole lot of these.
And that would still be allowed, but you would need to compile your kernel with this option enabled ( or more to the point the other disabled ).
Luckily, I'm sure that every single distribution (with the possible exception of Debian, though I'm sure an alternate repository will be set up by someone for the sole purpose of fixing it) will patch this crap out before it can interfere with a significant number of their users. If the Kernel maintainers deliberately break something as widely-used and vital as NDISWrapper, the distribution maintainers will just un-break it.
Slashdot Mirror
Better visibility in the winter. All the water vapor freezes out of the air, basically.
Heh, I recently bought a used copy of Resident Evil IV because I'd heard that it was "JUST AMAZING! SO GOOD!"
I've played non-commercial zombie-related mods for the original Half Life that are better games in every way except the graphics. How the hell does this pass for "good"?
Most of the truly GREAT games I've played have been on the PC.
Deus Ex, System Shock 1/2, the Half Life series, Fallout 1/2, Morrowind (yes, there was an XBox port, but it was horrible, and the modding was the best part anyway), Oblivion (again, the modding MADE the game, fixing very broken things that won't be fixed on the console because they're features, not bugs), The Witcher, the Thief series, Starcraft, C&C Red Alert 2, and a host of others.
Games that have come close to that on recent consoles? FFX, Suikoden III and V, and MGS2 are the only ones that come to mind. The GTA series, I guess, sort of, though Vice City is the only one that I like enough to play through again--San Andreas is only fun for the occasional cheat-fueled rampage/car chase, and is more like a quick game of Tetris to me than anything else.
At least a couple of the PC games listed above are installed on my PC at any given time, and I play each of them at least once every couple of years (exception: The Witcher, since it's so new, but I'll likely go through it again next Spring and try some different things).
I like *amazing* single player experiences. I've seen it happen more often on PC than on consoles. I don't know whether I just have different tastes or whether console gamers/reviewers just have very low expectations, but blockbuster, super-popular games like Halo and God of War just bore me. Whatever the reason, I'm sticking with the PC until console games get better or PC games get much worse.
You could reject the EULA and request a refund, right?
I would expect them at least to prove it was me through the usual channels. After that their removal of my rights would be punishment, and would be perfectly normal.
Crime is crime.
Sometimes things ARE done other ways, of course, but it's usually in third world countries, and no matter who's doing it, it's barbaric. Besides, if the point is to remove threats, you want to make sure you've got the right guy.
Now, I haven't read it since the beginning of the war in Iraq, but I recall pretty clearly that non-uniformed combatants were OK as long as they weren't part of an army or militia that'd been around long enough and was organized enough to be expected to have uniforms.
Members of the military fighting out of uniform are in trouble. Members of a militia that's been around for a few weeks or longer and have more than a handful of members are clearly in trouble. Jim Bob with his shotgun who decides to take shots at some invading Ruskies definitely IS protected, though. Spontaneous and more-or-less disorganized action against an invading foreign power by a non-uniformed populous is allowed for, and they ARE protected.
I'm just responding to the generalization that "people fighting out of uniform aren't covered by Geneva", remember. Yeah, SOME aren't, but others are.
Actually, yes.
Were I to be arrested while on vacation in, say, Germany, I would fully expect to be tried under normal German law, with rights identical (or at least very nearly identical) to those of a citizen.
Were I to annoy the German government in some way that is legal but considered undesirable behaviour in a foreigner (say, by participating in a G8 protest or something like that) the worst I would expect is to be kicked out of the country and told not to come back. That's the only sort of case where I would expect my treatment at the hands of the government to differ significantly from that of a citizen.
On the off chance that this isn't a troll and you actually believe this, allow me to make a suggestion:
Try reading it before you say things like this.
Here, I'll even give you a hint: there's a whole section devoted to people fighting out of uniform, and they ARE covered. Soldiers fighting out of uniform are not covered, IIRC, but anyone who picks up a gun and starts fighting invaders without bothering to coordinate his fashion with his fellow fighters DOES NOT lose Geneva protection.
And if the people in question weren't picked up on the battlefield, I can only assume we suspect them of having committed some crime. We should probably conduct an investigation and try them in a court of law, then. That is how suspected criminals are supposed to be dealt with, after all.
Are you using Compiz?
Fixed all of my complaints about slow X drawing.
More to the point, passengers in cars are not required to produce ID, and it's not so much the ID for the driver as it is the proof that they're licensed to operate the vehicle.
If anyone wanted to just kill the number of people on an airplane (or more) and cripple air travel, they could just pick a busy day and detonate a bag full of ball bearings (or several bags at different spots in the same area, if they've got even a couple of accomplices) in the security line at an airport. Trivial, cheap as hell, possibly not fatal to the attacker(s) (if they have a timer) and there's no practical way to defend against it (unless "practical" includes increasing the air travel security budget tenfold).
Slightly less spectacular than taking down an airliner, but it'd kill plenty of people and probably disrupt air travel even more than one or two downed planes.
It's pretty obvious that there just aren't very many motivated people interesting in pulling stunts like this. If there were, we'd see it way, way more often.
I like Smarty for PHP templating.
I recommend looking in to XSL transforms (XSLT) if you're thinking about writing your own.
Am I the only one who was super-excited upon seeing a screenshot or video of this game, only to be crushed moments later by the discovery that it was another damned MMO?
Sid Meier's Pirates! was cool, but the single-player pirate experience could be done much better. Stupid MMO, getting my hopes up for all of 5 seconds.
Hey, I liked Pan's Labyrinth :)
The Fountain, though... ugh. You know a movie sucks when you're hoping it'll suddenly and without warning turn into a space thriller with giant space-sharks and alien zombies halfway through, killing all the existing characters in less than a minute's time and introducing Bruce Campbell as the swashbuckling space-pirate lead.
The second is a much, much better game, IMHO.
For a storyline-driven shooter, it's just the right length (fairly short, then, compared to most others), its style is amazing, the story is pretty good, and the gameplay is fast and fun, with almost none of the boring/repetitive stretches that plagued the first one.
Try playing it through on the most difficult mode. Use a cheat to make it available to you, if it's not there until after the first play-through (I can't remember whether it is or not). I found myself using a totally different and (to me) more fun play style when my saves were limited and healing items were nearly non-existent. I usually don't play games over the "normal" difficulty rating (and often on "easy" if I expect any frustration from controls or puzzle elements) but this is one game that benefits greatly from play at its top difficulty.
ReiserFS 3.* and ext2/3 are nice because they can be read from and written to from windows (with some 3rd party drivers/applications), which is really handy for those of us who dual-boot (what can I say, I'm a gamer--Windows to game, Linux to get things done).
AFAIK, JFS and XFS lack that support. Good for my fileserver which'll have Samba as a layer between it and any Windows boxen anyway, bad for my dual-boot machine or external hard drive.
No kidding. About 75% of professors seem to think that it's acceptable to waste the students' time by conveying exactly the same information (and NOTHING more) that they could have digested with 10 minutes of reading via a 50 minute lecture.That's not education--that's a complete waste of 40 minutes.
At the very least the lecture should be compelling enough to hold one's attention, even if the actual information in it would be more efficiently conveyed in text form; that way, there's at least a chance of a boost in retention from the lecture format. Low-content, poorly-presented lectures seem to be the norm, however. Too bad.
OK, you may already know about this, but I feel compelled to spread the Good News in case you don't.
You can right click on any search field, and click "add a keyword for this search" to be able to type "[keyword] [search term(s)]" in your address bar to use the search.
For example, every Firefox installation that I use has Wikipedia set up as, "wp [keyword(s)]". If I game on it, it's got Gamefaqs set to "faq [keyword(s)]". I'm so used to it that I try it without thinking on other people's machines and am always a bit taken aback when it doesn't work
Gattaca is a blueprint for tomorrow. It's micro-level message is about the human spirit, but its macro-level message is one against sloppy family planning in a society that relies on heavily on genetic engineering of offspring.
(Yes, I'm kidding. Mostly.)
I'm always a bit baffled by people who are just *SO* disgusted by China's government-mandated birth control.
It's something that most other countries on the planet will probably have to do eventually; WTF do they want a country with a huge population and out-of-control birth rates to do? Let people breed as they want, seeking to meet immediate, individual needs, so that they can collectively cause a huge starvation die-off a couple of decades later? Or collectively enforce birth control so the die-off doesn't happen and everyone's standard of living can start going up?
Don't get me wrong, China's government sucks, but this seems to be the single issue that people always bring up when talking about how repressive they are, and I just don't see it. Given similar circumstances, I'd HOPE our government would do the same thing--we've just not had to deal with that problem yet.
I should add that an important distinction is that it is possible to be agnostic (think the answers are unkowable) and theist (still believe--an agnostic theist), while even weak atheism takes a stance that eliminates theism as an option.
Agnosticism actually claims that the answers are unknowable. Weak atheism simply claims that, lacking knowledge or proof of god, we should treat the matter the same way we would any other claim with similarly poor support; it does not actually assert that such proof (direct or logical) is impossible to find.
That "tiny minority" runs nationally-syndicated (in the U.S., anyway) radio programs showcasing their beliefs (and their "science"), has a surprisingly strong influence on the boards of education in several states (Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri to some extent, etc.), ships their missionaries all over the world (I know this because they brag about it all the time on their batshit-crazy radio shows), and influences the U.S. federal government to an alarming degree.
It's not hard to see why many still think that this idea (and others like it) needs to be opposed against so vehemently and constantly.
*sigh*
This always comes up.
Agnosticism is believing that god and gods existence (or lack thereof) is entirely unknowable, period.
Atheism is divided into two major categories:
"weak" atheism, which is essentially the stance that god(s) should be treated like anything else, and not assumed to exist in the absence of direct evidence or logical necessity, though a weak atheist does not actually say "there is no god" (since to a weak atheist, the statement is unnecessary). These are the Russel's Teapot-type folks.
"Strong" atheism is the stance that there definitely is no god, and a strong atheist will assert and attempt to back that up with logic or evidence. AFAIK, there aren't actually a whole lot of these.
Luckily, I'm sure that every single distribution (with the possible exception of Debian, though I'm sure an alternate repository will be set up by someone for the sole purpose of fixing it) will patch this crap out before it can interfere with a significant number of their users. If the Kernel maintainers deliberately break something as widely-used and vital as NDISWrapper, the distribution maintainers will just un-break it.