Why on earth would you use the stylus as a joy stick, when there's a thumb disk on the wrist strap that was made for analog controls? Just position the disk under the tip of your thumb, and tighten the wrist strap around your nail. Instant analog stick that works better (IMO) than most real analog joysticks -- the N64's in particular. What did you think that little disk was for, anyway?
The interstate is more like the Internet. Grokster is more like a trucking company that advertises "We're the cheapest way to ship your illegal narcotics!"
While FedEx and UPS may unkowingly ship illegal drugs to customers, they certainly don't encourage this sort of thing. If Grokster hadn't encouraged their customers to "share", we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
But as long as the gameplay is about leveling, the fastest levellers will be the best players, by definition.
The folks who level the fastest will be those who gain the biggest reward for the least amount of risk. (Just like capitalism.) It has nothing to do with being "the best player". Or, more accurately phrased, being the best player has so much more to do with "everything else" than it does with how fast you've leveled.
Reaching level 40 in record time because your level 50 buddy, "The Babysitter", kept you buffed and at full health through every level since Outbreak does not make you a good player. (And neither does earning top dollar in your father's research lab make you a good scientist.)
As Jack already explained, the best availble metric to quantify MMORPG ability is XP/hour.
If you want to find the best player's in CoH, find the ones that have the most mission-related badges. These players are going to be much stronger overall because the Task Force and Trial missions tend to be incredibly challenging and will require competent players to succeed. (Just like those with the most reputable certifications, awards, and accomplishments will most often be the best workers.)
And since all of the Task Force and Trial missions have min/max level requirements, you can be pretty sure that if The Babysitter was tagging along, he did it on equal footing with the rest of the team. (It's much more difficult for daddy to buy you the Nobel prize.)
Once you're believing in the supernatural, you aren't really answering the philosophical why or how anymore, you're just making things up (or accepting something someone else made up).
There are two types of people in the world (yep, just two;), those who are able to accept the "supernatural" and those who can't (or won't). I could get into a long tangent about this, but I'm fighting that urge. Instead, I'll just say that at some point every person is presented with an event that they can't explain. I'd argue that:
It won't be a "there is no spoon" event where the laws of physics go wacky. These sort of things are either illusions or can, with near unanimity, be explained rationally.
It won't be a "John Edward's encounter". He's either a very good fake, or a very dangerous man (and not for the reasons you're probably thinking).
What it will likely be is something personal that cuts to your heart. You won't be able to stop thinking about it. At first, you may not even think of it as something spiritual, but you will struggle to account for it rationally. In the end, you'll be forced to either (a) deceive yourself into believing an argument that you know is weak, or (b) reformulate what you believe is possible.
It's broadly worded, I know, but it's difficult to be specific when you're not prophetic. (*Sigh*, wouldn't that make life easier?) Ask one of your Christian friends why they believe. I'd be surprised if you couldn't find at least one person who has a story that fits well with my final point. You could also e-mail me (my address is obfuscated public) and I'll share mine (or start up a slashdot journal discussion).
Whatever we do, I feel guilty for abusing this discussion with chatter as off-topic as this is becoming. It's been a good chat though.:)
You're exactly correct, religion is not philosophy. Nor did I claim it was. What I did say was that religion answers the "philosophical why" and not the "physical how". There's also a physical why (i.e. cause and effect, the cause being why) and I wanted to be clear that I was talking about meaning and motivation and not simply a chain of events. Hopefully, now I'm being clearer.
That being said, you have a pretty limited and poorly informed view of faith. What you're talking about is ignorance, not faith. In reality "the word of god" stresses probing, questioning and learning at least as much as being able to trust God when you don't understand. One is not a substitute for the other.
Let me challenge you to do some probing of your own. Learn about religion by actually reading a religious text and not just assuming you know what it says. I'd particularly encourage you to read something from the bible. (I'm confident what you'll read from that source, at least, will be honest and correct because I've critically examined quite a bit of it.) What you'll most likely find is a predominantly historical text, one that doesn't just say don't murder, God said so but also illustrates and argues why murder is wrong through the lives of the men and women you'll read about. Read about David (mostly 2 Samuel), there is a man who spent at least as much time probing and questioning God, as he did "accepting" things because "god said so". Or, since you seem enamored with philosophy, try one of the booksofSolomon or the book of Job. All four of those books are thinking books, even philosophical.
Because they're really hard to do. Seriously, the guy who designed Tahoma was paid quite well for it. Further, Mocrosoft tweaked their font-rendering code (not sure what parts, or maybe it was the TTF file itself...) to get the glifs looking exactly as the font-designer wanted them to.
That being said, there is a family of fonts included with Gnome that absolutely love. I even copied them over to my Window's box [gasp!]. (I think it's the bitstream vera fonts, but I'm not certain cause I'm at work.)
BTW, if you like Tahoma, Verdena is considered better on many fronts and is basically a wider variety of Tahoma.
The most likely reason is because English is written horizontally, from right-to-left. Our brains are trained to read rows of text, and so it's easier for our eyes to track information that's horizontal.
This, IIRC, is an issue for internationalization, as many dialects are written right-to-left, and (most/all?) Asian dialects are triditionally written in columns.
Better documentation can fix that learning curve better than ignoring the docs and adding new features as fast as possible, IMO. As soon as a new learner has to go hunt something down on the net to fix some problem or to help them get to speed in using whatever app is bothering them, it starts to blow chunks big time for them.
I disagree with you there, if the user has to go searching a help file to get up to speed on an app, that's when it "starts to blow chunks big time". Users don't read help files to get "up to speed" on software. They use the app, and if it's not intuitive enough to at least start drawing/writing/playing/whatever then they're going to go onto something else (or go back to what they were using before).
The help file isn't there to teach a new user how to use an application--that's what the GUI is for! The help file is there to help folks who have a basic understanding of the application get the most out of it.
I'll certainly agree that help files are lacking in most FS/OSS that's out there, but it's improving the interfaces by providing a consistent and predictable GUI, that will impact new users the most. (Which explains the major goals of KDE and Gnome.)
There are OS (mostly academic/research) that do exactly this. EROS is one, though it looks like the project has stagnated. While it was active, some work was being done to create a *NIX compatability layer (including X) that would allow traditional GNU utilities to run on top of the capability system. (Obviously, you'd need to (re)written programs to get the most security/etc. from this system.)
It's a pretty hefty paradigm shift, but eventually, I think any system that needs to guarantee security will need to be a capaiblity based system like this one. As you indicated, user-based security just doesn't offer enough control.
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
I have to take argument with part of this statement. Science is all about answering HOW, religion is about WHY.
Religion is meant to give meaning to the world, not to help us understand how it works. It answers the philosophical WHY, going only so far into the physical HOW as to lay a foundation for understanding that why. Religion, as an intellectual process is grossly inadequate for answering HOW. Science, OTOH, is tool used to understand HOW, but is grossly inadequate for understanding WHY.
When religion tries to do the job of science, you get clergy claiming the Earth is the center of the universe and imprisoning anyone who disagrees with them.
When science tries to do the job of religion, you get scientists who defend there theories religiously because any refute or refinement of the theories based on new observations and arguments threaten to undermine their entire belief system.
Both cases yield non-satisfactory results. When religion adheres to beliefs about the natural world that are obviously false, religion is the fool. When science refuses to adapt to new observations because these observations invalid the scientists belief system, we have a science we can no longer trust because it's abandoned all attempts at objectivity. The relationship between correct science and correct religion is such that they need to be allies. It's find (even healthy) for the twain to occasionally disagree on the details of our reality, but over time they need to support one another in understanding that reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on earth would you use the stylus as a joy stick, when there's a thumb disk on the wrist strap that was made for analog controls? Just position the disk under the tip of your thumb, and tighten the wrist strap around your nail. Instant analog stick that works better (IMO) than most real analog joysticks -- the N64's in particular. What did you think that little disk was for, anyway?
The interstate is more like the Internet. Grokster is more like a trucking company that advertises "We're the cheapest way to ship your illegal narcotics!"
While FedEx and UPS may unkowingly ship illegal drugs to customers, they certainly don't encourage this sort of thing. If Grokster hadn't encouraged their customers to "share", we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now.
The folks who level the fastest will be those who gain the biggest reward for the least amount of risk. (Just like capitalism.) It has nothing to do with being "the best player". Or, more accurately phrased, being the best player has so much more to do with "everything else" than it does with how fast you've leveled.
Reaching level 40 in record time because your level 50 buddy, "The Babysitter", kept you buffed and at full health through every level since Outbreak does not make you a good player. (And neither does earning top dollar in your father's research lab make you a good scientist.)
If you want to find the best player's in CoH, find the ones that have the most mission-related badges. These players are going to be much stronger overall because the Task Force and Trial missions tend to be incredibly challenging and will require competent players to succeed. (Just like those with the most reputable certifications, awards, and accomplishments will most often be the best workers.)
And since all of the Task Force and Trial missions have min/max level requirements, you can be pretty sure that if The Babysitter was tagging along, he did it on equal footing with the rest of the team. (It's much more difficult for daddy to buy you the Nobel prize.)
There are two types of people in the world (yep, just two ;), those who are able to accept the "supernatural" and those who can't (or won't). I could get into a long tangent about this, but I'm fighting that urge. Instead, I'll just say that at some point every person is presented with an event that they can't explain. I'd argue that:
What it will likely be is something personal that cuts to your heart. You won't be able to stop thinking about it. At first, you may not even think of it as something spiritual, but you will struggle to account for it rationally. In the end, you'll be forced to either (a) deceive yourself into believing an argument that you know is weak, or (b) reformulate what you believe is possible.
It's broadly worded, I know, but it's difficult to be specific when you're not prophetic. (*Sigh*, wouldn't that make life easier?) Ask one of your Christian friends why they believe. I'd be surprised if you couldn't find at least one person who has a story that fits well with my final point. You could also e-mail me (my address is obfuscated public) and I'll share mine (or start up a slashdot journal discussion).
Whatever we do, I feel guilty for abusing this discussion with chatter as off-topic as this is becoming. It's been a good chat though. :)
You're exactly correct, religion is not philosophy. Nor did I claim it was. What I did say was that religion answers the "philosophical why" and not the "physical how". There's also a physical why (i.e. cause and effect, the cause being why) and I wanted to be clear that I was talking about meaning and motivation and not simply a chain of events. Hopefully, now I'm being clearer.
That being said, you have a pretty limited and poorly informed view of faith. What you're talking about is ignorance, not faith. In reality "the word of god" stresses probing, questioning and learning at least as much as being able to trust God when you don't understand. One is not a substitute for the other.
Let me challenge you to do some probing of your own. Learn about religion by actually reading a religious text and not just assuming you know what it says. I'd particularly encourage you to read something from the bible. (I'm confident what you'll read from that source, at least, will be honest and correct because I've critically examined quite a bit of it.) What you'll most likely find is a predominantly historical text, one that doesn't just say don't murder, God said so but also illustrates and argues why murder is wrong through the lives of the men and women you'll read about. Read about David (mostly 2 Samuel), there is a man who spent at least as much time probing and questioning God, as he did "accepting" things because "god said so". Or, since you seem enamored with philosophy, try one of the books of Solomon or the book of Job. All four of those books are thinking books, even philosophical.
Because they're really hard to do. Seriously, the guy who designed Tahoma was paid quite well for it. Further, Mocrosoft tweaked their font-rendering code (not sure what parts, or maybe it was the TTF file itself...) to get the glifs looking exactly as the font-designer wanted them to.
That being said, there is a family of fonts included with Gnome that absolutely love. I even copied them over to my Window's box [gasp!]. (I think it's the bitstream vera fonts, but I'm not certain cause I'm at work.)
BTW, if you like Tahoma, Verdena is considered better on many fronts and is basically a wider variety of Tahoma.
The most likely reason is because English is written horizontally, from right-to-left. Our brains are trained to read rows of text, and so it's easier for our eyes to track information that's horizontal.
This, IIRC, is an issue for internationalization, as many dialects are written right-to-left, and (most/all?) Asian dialects are triditionally written in columns.
I disagree with you there, if the user has to go searching a help file to get up to speed on an app, that's when it "starts to blow chunks big time". Users don't read help files to get "up to speed" on software. They use the app, and if it's not intuitive enough to at least start drawing/writing/playing/whatever then they're going to go onto something else (or go back to what they were using before).
The help file isn't there to teach a new user how to use an application--that's what the GUI is for! The help file is there to help folks who have a basic understanding of the application get the most out of it.
I'll certainly agree that help files are lacking in most FS/OSS that's out there, but it's improving the interfaces by providing a consistent and predictable GUI, that will impact new users the most. (Which explains the major goals of KDE and Gnome.)
There are OS (mostly academic/research) that do exactly this. EROS is one, though it looks like the project has stagnated. While it was active, some work was being done to create a *NIX compatability layer (including X) that would allow traditional GNU utilities to run on top of the capability system. (Obviously, you'd need to (re)written programs to get the most security/etc. from this system.)
It's a pretty hefty paradigm shift, but eventually, I think any system that needs to guarantee security will need to be a capaiblity based system like this one. As you indicated, user-based security just doesn't offer enough control.
I have to take argument with part of this statement. Science is all about answering HOW, religion is about WHY.
Religion is meant to give meaning to the world, not to help us understand how it works. It answers the philosophical WHY, going only so far into the physical HOW as to lay a foundation for understanding that why. Religion, as an intellectual process is grossly inadequate for answering HOW. Science, OTOH, is tool used to understand HOW, but is grossly inadequate for understanding WHY.
When religion tries to do the job of science, you get clergy claiming the Earth is the center of the universe and imprisoning anyone who disagrees with them.
When science tries to do the job of religion, you get scientists who defend there theories religiously because any refute or refinement of the theories based on new observations and arguments threaten to undermine their entire belief system.
Both cases yield non-satisfactory results. When religion adheres to beliefs about the natural world that are obviously false, religion is the fool. When science refuses to adapt to new observations because these observations invalid the scientists belief system, we have a science we can no longer trust because it's abandoned all attempts at objectivity. The relationship between correct science and correct religion is such that they need to be allies. It's find (even healthy) for the twain to occasionally disagree on the details of our reality, but over time they need to support one another in understanding that reality.