Frankly, I do find the idea of being treated like a potential criminal every time I launch the game offensive. It's like having a store run a criminal record check every time you wander in to buy something.
Oh please...it's like having to go through a scanner at stores that detects shoplifting...and it's like having security cameras watching you in stores. Trying to prevent theft isn't evil
Maybe it's just me, but it's a GAME, that costs $50, and will give you what? 30 hours of gameplay? 50 tops? If you're really so worried about the terms of buying the game, don't buy it--make the decision that it's not worth it to you. Or you could simply buy the game, play it, and enjoy it. I don't see how it's worth it to get angsty over something that, to me, is rather trivial in cost, time, and importance:-p
(I'm not really TRYING to sound like an ass, sorry!)
The religious aspect of why printing presses weren't accepted in Islamic lands is just one aspect. As you say, the Arabic script is cursive, and much harder to reproduce on a press--and much much harder to make it look good. Scribes in places like Turkey, Persia, etc were highly respected and had plenty of work--calligraphy took on an importance it never had in Europe.
OTOH, Venetian merchants were printing up copies of the Qur'an in Italy in Arabic, and selling them in North Africa by at least the mid-16th century. I'm not sure about the examples you give of words being segmented--it's very possible.
Can anyone point to technology that religion embraced in its infancy? I really would be interested.
The most obvious would be the printing press, in Europe (not just Western Europe--all of Europe). Markedly different from the acceptance of the printing press in other areas, such as Islamicate Ottoman Turkey. A distinction which, imho, has a lot to do with religious acceptance and usage of the technology.
I agree--beyond supporting OpenBSD, it's quite handy to have the CDs. I've convinced the business to buy a copy of OpenBSD at least a time or two a year, so it works out pretty nicely.
Also you can use binary snapshots to upgrade, which I did recently from 3.1 -> 3.5. VERY easy. I would've done source upgrade, but the computer is a 386 and that takes a long time:-p
As for updating files in/etc/... MERGEMASTER! It's a port, in sysutils I think...mergemaster is your friend, and a really, really awesome program.
Well, FYI then, 3ware is not software raid, not at all, nothing like winmodem. The one I've got in use is a 64-bit pci card that has quite nice performance! It's got excellent cross platform support (their phone techs will actually answer questions about linux and freebsd for instance!)
also it has some quite nice management tools, including a very nice www based monitoring daemon.
Why don't you like 3ware? I've admittedly only put two systems into production with 3ware hardware, but this was after extensive reading and searching, in which 3ware received great reviews.
I don't like agnostics, they are flip-floppers and most of them smell like poopy.
My view: I don't like deists because they are irrational. Likewise, I don't like atheists, because they are irrational. We CAN'T know the existence of god/God/gods/whatever. Personally I don't believe in the existence of a God, but I can't rule it out--I don't have that kind of evidence. A Rumsfeldian known unknown, if you will.
And your description of conservative is pretty whack too, but I don't think I need to seriously respond to that;)
all I remember is reading a couple of letters in which Asimov was practically RABID about sci-fi! He hated it!
It originated, iirc as a pun on "hi-fi" and that really irked Asimov:-p
Then again, he also as you say preferred s.f. as it seemed more respectable for the literary genre--important to Asimov as it wasn't a particularly respectable genre during much of his life.
Well, that depends on who you talk to...I have a feeling you're talking about Asimov's famous dislike of the term scifi, though he personally preferred "s.f." rather than SF.
The question of what is life, what is a human, and what the value of life is one that has occupied people since the dawn of time. This isn't going to change. Just because you make it sound cut and dried doesn't make it so.
I never thought I'd say this, but I am looking forward to the day when China provides a counter-balance to the US's might. The Chinese goal of doing what's best for the state, as opposed to the new US goal since the end of the Cold War of doing what's best for the corporation, is probably going to be more world friendly than the present US position.
Wow, you're looking forward to a super power that has cameras monitoring every internet cafe, tens of thousands of fulltime monitors watching internet content and censoring accordingly, and controls news and information absolutely? That's tough.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of growing corporatism, but without corporations we wouldn't have automobiles, computers, the kinds of medicines we have, or any number of other things. Furthermore, I can always choose to avoid a certain corporations, and ultimately, the only power corporations have over me is what I allow them to have. There's no fighting back against the government.
Ask yourself - since Bush has come to power, what positive or great thing has been achieved in the world? There's a mess in Iraq, a mess in Afghanistan, no Kyoto while the Florida Quays sinks under hurricanes, trade wars with Europe... he's leading your country, and with it the world, into disaster.
Afghanistan is far, FAR better than it was 4 years ago. I find the Kyoto treaty to be the mess, not the lack of signing. There have always been hurricanes, there always will be. Anyone who spouts apocalyptic weather forecasts based on localized small data samples is, quite frankly, an idiot. Trade wars with Europe? What else is new, why not talk about French sugar and dairy, or any other number of European trade actions. Neither side is innocent there. What positive or great thing has been achieved? Let's see, the Taleban was dismanted, Saddam was taken out of power, Libya has renounced nuclear weapons and other WMD's, CAFTA is starting to provide business to CA region, Pakistan for possibly the first time in it's brief history is asserting control in NWFP and neighborig tribal regions which imho is a good thing for SECULAR Pakistani society. Tax cuts in America good! Complete prevention of terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11 -- that's a good record in my book. I could keep going if you would like..
If you admire Clinton, for example, you might ask what positive or great things were achieved because of him?
That is a rather interesting correlation, and one I'm not sure I'd completely disagree with.
However--the Rather papers were clearly forgery. Anyone who spent 30 seconds with Microsoft Word could have told you that the fact that the memos match up 100% with MS Word and there is no way that that would be true of a 1970's document. Rather the conclusion many have come to is that Rather et al gleefully ran the store because they were so elated to have something like this be out.
You can easily say the same thing about the Bush administration--looked at evidence in a certain way and gleefully decided to go attack Iraq. However, I would posit that the director of the CIA reporting that Iraq def. had nuclear tech (as it seems Tenet reported) is a bit different than failing to review memos. For one thing, there was largely no way to examine the truthfulness of the Iraqi statements. Secondly of all, was it worth risking a nuclear Iraq?
I don't really claim to have an answer, but I do think there is a substantail difference.
Uh, I'm not sure you've got your facts very straight. There was no US overthrow of the Iranian government 25 years.. Secondly, though the US DID interfere many years earlier, it was much more subtle than you make it sound, and not even entirely unpopular.
And your last point is your very most idiotic? The Afghani rebels that became al-Qaeda and attacked us on 9/11? I must have missed something, how many of the hijackers were AFghani?
Learn some history before you start seeing paranoid schemes and pretend that you understand something below the "surface" of the issue.
it's a neat thing, and on the more advanced end--even neater! There's been some work done on profiling and JIT, where frequently executed code is not only simply compiled to native code, but it is compiled with for the specific cpu (ie, can realize mmx, sse, etc) and heavily executed code areas can be compiled with higher levels of optimization--so in theory, long running java apps could even gain better performance than native code solutions.
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Stop spreading ignorance. Bush was the first President to get federal funding for stem cell research. You're simply spreading yet more FUD.
not much, if you are decently patched (he mentions at the very end the exploit installs don't work if you are running SP2)
Frankly, I do find the idea of being treated like a potential criminal every time I launch the game offensive. It's like having a store run a criminal record check every time you wander in to buy something.
Oh please...it's like having to go through a scanner at stores that detects shoplifting...and it's like having security cameras watching you in stores. Trying to prevent theft isn't evil
Maybe it's just me, but it's a GAME, that costs $50, and will give you what? 30 hours of gameplay? 50 tops? If you're really so worried about the terms of buying the game, don't buy it--make the decision that it's not worth it to you. Or you could simply buy the game, play it, and enjoy it. I don't see how it's worth it to get angsty over something that, to me, is rather trivial in cost, time, and importance :-p
(I'm not really TRYING to sound like an ass, sorry!)
I know, you're AC, but I'll respond anyway.
The religious aspect of why printing presses weren't accepted in Islamic lands is just one aspect. As you say, the Arabic script is cursive, and much harder to reproduce on a press--and much much harder to make it look good. Scribes in places like Turkey, Persia, etc were highly respected and had plenty of work--calligraphy took on an importance it never had in Europe.
OTOH, Venetian merchants were printing up copies of the Qur'an in Italy in Arabic, and selling them in North Africa by at least the mid-16th century. I'm not sure about the examples you give of words being segmented--it's very possible.
Thanks for the info though, it's interesting!
Can anyone point to technology that religion embraced in its infancy? I really would be interested.
The most obvious would be the printing press, in Europe (not just Western Europe--all of Europe). Markedly different from the acceptance of the printing press in other areas, such as Islamicate Ottoman Turkey. A distinction which, imho, has a lot to do with religious acceptance and usage of the technology.
Why is everyone acting as if this is something fantasically new in OSX? It's been that way in MacOS for a long, long time--window != app
I agree--beyond supporting OpenBSD, it's quite handy to have the CDs. I've convinced the business to buy a copy of OpenBSD at least a time or two a year, so it works out pretty nicely.
Also you can use binary snapshots to upgrade, which I did recently from 3.1 -> 3.5. VERY easy. I would've done source upgrade, but the computer is a 386 and that takes a long time :-p
/etc/ ... MERGEMASTER! It's a port, in sysutils I think...mergemaster is your friend, and a really, really awesome program.
As for updating files in
You make a good point...for me to poop on.
Did you happen to notice my Subject line "Obligatory Triumph Quote" ?
Which button calls your parents to come pick you up??
Well, FYI then, 3ware is not software raid, not at all, nothing like winmodem. The one I've got in use is a 64-bit pci card that has quite nice performance! It's got excellent cross platform support (their phone techs will actually answer questions about linux and freebsd for instance!)
also it has some quite nice management tools, including a very nice www based monitoring daemon.
Why don't you like 3ware? I've admittedly only put two systems into production with 3ware hardware, but this was after extensive reading and searching, in which 3ware received great reviews.
It must be obvious that you donn't know much about software RAID, because 3ware isn't software raid--they make hardware.
And they make quite good cards too, that are highly supported in linux,freebsd, etc. (I have an 8 port SATA raid card in use atm)
I don't like agnostics, they are flip-floppers and most of them smell like poopy.
My view: I don't like deists because they are irrational. Likewise, I don't like atheists, because they are irrational. We CAN'T know the existence of god/God/gods/whatever. Personally I don't believe in the existence of a God, but I can't rule it out--I don't have that kind of evidence. A Rumsfeldian known unknown, if you will.
And your description of conservative is pretty whack too, but I don't think I need to seriously respond to that ;)
I don't think that's true.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that morality and christian fundamentalism have very little in common.
I'm agnostic and in favor of deceny laws. How does that fit with your one-sided stereotypes?
as an American I want to say two things--firstly, I agree 100% with you. Secondly, I don't think _most_ Americans are xenophobic.
But anyway, right on with your messages--I enjoyed your point.
all I remember is reading a couple of letters in which Asimov was practically RABID about sci-fi! He hated it!
:-p
It originated, iirc as a pun on "hi-fi" and that really irked Asimov
Then again, he also as you say preferred s.f. as it seemed more respectable for the literary genre--important to Asimov as it wasn't a particularly respectable genre during much of his life.
Well, that depends on who you talk to...I have a feeling you're talking about Asimov's famous dislike of the term scifi, though he personally preferred "s.f." rather than SF.
You raise some interesting points, but seem to have entirely forgotten about the house of representatives.
Also, how many times has the popular vote and electoral college vote not been in alignment over the past 200 years?
The question of what is life, what is a human, and what the value of life is one that has occupied people since the dawn of time. This isn't going to change. Just because you make it sound cut and dried doesn't make it so.
I never thought I'd say this, but I am looking forward to the day when China provides a counter-balance to the US's might. The Chinese goal of doing what's best for the state, as opposed to the new US goal since the end of the Cold War of doing what's best for the corporation, is probably going to be more world friendly than the present US position.
Wow, you're looking forward to a super power that has cameras monitoring every internet cafe, tens of thousands of fulltime monitors watching internet content and censoring accordingly, and controls news and information absolutely? That's tough.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of growing corporatism, but without corporations we wouldn't have automobiles, computers, the kinds of medicines we have, or any number of other things. Furthermore, I can always choose to avoid a certain corporations, and ultimately, the only power corporations have over me is what I allow them to have. There's no fighting back against the government.
Ask yourself - since Bush has come to power, what positive or great thing has been achieved in the world? There's a mess in Iraq, a mess in Afghanistan, no Kyoto while the Florida Quays sinks under hurricanes, trade wars with Europe... he's leading your country, and with it the world, into disaster.
Afghanistan is far, FAR better than it was 4 years ago. I find the Kyoto treaty to be the mess, not the lack of signing. There have always been hurricanes, there always will be. Anyone who spouts apocalyptic weather forecasts based on localized small data samples is, quite frankly, an idiot. Trade wars with Europe? What else is new, why not talk about French sugar and dairy, or any other number of European trade actions. Neither side is innocent there. What positive or great thing has been achieved? Let's see, the Taleban was dismanted, Saddam was taken out of power, Libya has renounced nuclear weapons and other WMD's, CAFTA is starting to provide business to CA region, Pakistan for possibly the first time in it's brief history is asserting control in NWFP and neighborig tribal regions which imho is a good thing for SECULAR Pakistani society. Tax cuts in America good! Complete prevention of terrorist attacks on American soil since 9/11 -- that's a good record in my book. I could keep going if you would like..
If you admire Clinton, for example, you might ask what positive or great things were achieved because of him?
That is a rather interesting correlation, and one I'm not sure I'd completely disagree with.
However--the Rather papers were clearly forgery. Anyone who spent 30 seconds with Microsoft Word could have told you that the fact that the memos match up 100% with MS Word and there is no way that that would be true of a 1970's document. Rather the conclusion many have come to is that Rather et al gleefully ran the store because they were so elated to have something like this be out.
You can easily say the same thing about the Bush administration--looked at evidence in a certain way and gleefully decided to go attack Iraq. However, I would posit that the director of the CIA reporting that Iraq def. had nuclear tech (as it seems Tenet reported) is a bit different than failing to review memos. For one thing, there was largely no way to examine the truthfulness of the Iraqi statements. Secondly of all, was it worth risking a nuclear Iraq?
I don't really claim to have an answer, but I do think there is a substantail difference.
Uh, I'm not sure you've got your facts very straight. There was no US overthrow of the Iranian government 25 years.. Secondly, though the US DID interfere many years earlier, it was much more subtle than you make it sound, and not even entirely unpopular.
And your last point is your very most idiotic? The Afghani rebels that became al-Qaeda and attacked us on 9/11? I must have missed something, how many of the hijackers were AFghani?
Learn some history before you start seeing paranoid schemes and pretend that you understand something below the "surface" of the issue.
it's a neat thing, and on the more advanced end--even neater! There's been some work done on profiling and JIT, where frequently executed code is not only simply compiled to native code, but it is compiled with for the specific cpu (ie, can realize mmx, sse, etc) and heavily executed code areas can be compiled with higher levels of optimization--so in theory, long running java apps could even gain better performance than native code solutions.