I don't think you can discuss PTSD/depression without "hurry up and wait" (more like hurry up and get super anxious).
Ain't that the truth. Six months of standing around in the Saudi desert in 90-91 waiting for something to happen mentally fucked me up more than two years of actually sometimes getting shot at in Afghanistan in 2001-2003. Granted, I was but a 21 year old PFC in 90 and an "old man" 32 year old SSG in 01, but still, I think the sense of purpose helped.
I would explain further but I don't think it is possible to 'get it' if you've never served or more likely never seen combat.
I've seen combat, and even though you are absolutely right that a video game will never even come close, that has absolutely nothing to do with the argument over whether the portrayal of combat in video games should be as realistic as possible. Your comments above are thoroughly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
what do we do if large numbers of people do buy the game and grow up thinking this type of thing is 'just how the world works'?
People aren't a blank slate waiting for the media to tell them how reality works. Thousands of years of evolution have left the vast majority of us with an innate moral sense that largely precludes killing except in very unusual circumstances. The few psychopaths who decide that killing is OK because they saw it in a video game have things wrong with them that simply keeping them away from video games won't fix.
Of course they'd claim it's just a thought experiment to get you to think about a world without the internet..... but it's just a fucking stupid idea, even as a thought experiment. It's like saying "imagine a world where the wheel has been banned", or "what would you do if there was no more beer, wine, or liquor?" So many things would have to change as a result that speculation as to what you'd do is just pointless.
Every time Microsoft releases and OS it has to be relearned. Vista was different enough from XP to prove you wrong
Hogwash. My latest laptop came with Vista, and I didn't have to learn anything. It had additional features, but very little has really changed beyond a slight reorganization of he Control Panel items. It's no where near as infuriating as Office 2K7 when you're coming from Office 2K3.
Win7 is just Vista with a few changes.
A few major changes.... like it's not as much of a resource hog, and it doesn't barf on any of my ancient legacy compilers like Vista did, to name two--- and I'm still running Win7 beta.
Sounds like you don't have much experience with either Vista or Win7.
Then get to work.
Linux is your operating system too. Why not start a project to build a desktop that works the way you want it?
This answer is one of the biggest, fattest, most fucking obnoxious type of BULLSHIT that keeps Linux in the hobbyist ghetto. When someone makes a suggestion or complains about anything under Linux, some clever dimwit will INEVITABLY say "quit complaining about it and fix it, then; it's open source". Human beings often have limited time resources. We don't all have time to get up to speed with kernel hacking, or the peculiarities of KDE or Gnome in order to fix shit. Similarly, I don't have time to run for city council, state legislature, or the house of representatives, or even time to walk around with a bloody petition in order to get bullshit laws changed--- yet there's also always some ass who says "if you don't like [zoning|sales tax rate|copyright law], don't just complain and work to break the law, try to get it changed". Fuck you eople, I have a life!
newbie linux user is supposed to know about ALT+drag how, exactly?
Really, you linux fanatics will go to extraordinary lengths to defend what is an obvious interface flaw. Pounding the enter key should always click the equivalent of the OK button, and the escape key should always do CANCEL. The display dialog in Ubuntu doesn't follow that. It's fucking BROKEN.
I heard the 911 call about the "out of control" 120mph Lexus mentioned in the article on the radio last week, and all I could think was "why didn't that dumb motherfucker turn the key and shut off the fucking engine?" Years ago, I had the accelerator linkage on my Datsun 280Z freeze at full throttle because a screwdriver I left in the works. I was only "out of control" for about a second and a half before I shut the engine off and pulled over. People are fucking idiots.
Or to California. Really. Expecting something to come out of the California government to make sense?
CARB is especially obnoxious. They have an agenda that extends quite a bit beyond their purpose. I would like to upgrade the horrible engine in my 1990 Volkswagen Vanagon to a modern TDi diesel. Many people in other states have done it, and the economy and utility is phenomenal. But no, CARB has declared that no OBD II engine may be transplanted without the entire exhaust and transmission from the donor vehicle. The newest engine I can use is an OBD I '95 Subaru 2.2l engine, which is an improvement, but nothing like a TDi would be. It shows that their real goal is to force people to buy new cars rather than improve their old ones. It's ridiculous. They're apparently happy to have me drive around with this anemic 70's vintage pollution generator, betting that I'll get tired of the 95 horsepower and junk my van for a Prius. Fuck you, CARB! I don't want a goddamned Prius! I want a 1 ton capacity van that's smaller than Chinese container ship--- a Prius is actually 6 inches longer than my van--- and gets better than 20mpg. Nobody makes that anymore. Now California's going to mandate RF-blocking glass? Great. Not as stupid as when they mandated that 10% of all cars sold must be electric, but a pretty good try.
>The real question is why WB doesn't owe him several billion dollars for piracy.
They haven't distributed his work.
Yes they have. Allow me to quote because you're obviously too busy to RTFA (but not too busy to render an opinion, obviously):
While Collins has worked to make A Girl Like You freely available to his fans, [his wife/manager] alleges that the same track is sold illegally "all over the internet". "Not by Edwyn, [but] by all sorts of respectable major labels whose licence to sell it ran out years ago and who do not account to him."
You know I could do the same on the computers at work and that would land me in jail rather quickly.
So the fuck what? When I was working with classified information, I would be in the same boat. Information from the PACER system, however, is public information. Your bullshit vague assertion is bullshit.
OK, the problem is that we're arguing in a gray area here. If you have legitimate shell access to the machine, then by definition you have some degree of permission to "install" programs, if only in the form of a bash script in a separate process. That being the case, there's a valid argument that what was obviously a simple perl script would likewise be reasonably permissible.
I'd imagine that you could reduce that problem if you allowed some portion of the surplus to be converted to pay for the employees.
Wouldn't work. Then you'd end up with exactly what you get in private industry: corporate suits who "cut costs" by variously eliminating the quality from their core business, either in the form of "cheapifying" or one of the many variations of "shirking", and then pocket the multi-million dollar bonuses for "saving" money by making the company essentially not do its job anymore. About the only good part of the boatloads of money the government spends (at least on tangible goods) is that much of the cost is due to outlandish quality requirements.
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
I see this all the time where I work, at one of the nation's largest and arguably most dysfunctional school districts. The infuriating trend I've seen is not so much the elimination of those people whose jobs are to provide actual service to the "customer", but rather the weighting down of those people with mandatory and ever-expanding internal procedure. My employer has spent millions on computer systems intended to streamline the bureaucratic processes, but in reality all they've done is saddle us with an enormous amount of largely pointless data entry. We could just skip most of the most pointless parts of the data entry and, y'know, just do our actual jobs (we tried that initially) but that would MESS UP THE GRAPHS that the mid-level bigwigs in cheap suits use to assess our performance.
I never buy a product that doesn't have at least one review panning it. Any decent product that sells a lot of units is going to have a minimum of two or three buyer who, for whatever reason, thought it was crap. Even if their complaint is that it shipped slow, that's something. That generally shows that the retailer isn't round-filing bad reviews. No product is a panacea for everyone, so if you read the 1, 2, and 3 star reviews and find that their complaints wouldn't apply to you, you can probably safely buy it.
"fitness" != "physical prowess". In Darwin's usage, it's meant in its proper broader sense, and applies to things as diverse as plumage color, instinctive cooperative behaviors, and yes, even having a more sphisticated brain that allows you to out-think your prey.
My personal opinion is that geek has moved far beyond the 1980's definition of pocket protectors, glasses, and a calculator. Geeks come in all flavours now, from classical computing and math geeks all the way into sports and automotive geeks.
Damn straight! I'm a former glasses-wearing high school computer nerd who has variously been a programmer, electrician, locksmith, auto mechanic, communications systems technician, process control engineer, and US Army Human Intelligence Collector/Infantryman over the last 20-odd years. I think "nerd/geek" is a much bigger tent than people realize.
I find it interesting because it is about engineering. "IndyCars", on the other hand, are boring. All the cars are identical so it's just about the drivers. Who cares about the drivers?
I held that opinion for quite a while, but later came to amend it. I find it even more boring when it's like the Formula One races were for several years, with Nissan coming in 1st and 2nd every time because they came up with a particularly effective turbocharger. All about engineering, but not very interesting engineering. Really, car racing is boring as fuck to watch. Probably interesting to do, but it holds no particular value to intelligent spectators.
It's not your phone its slashcode. I've got a Nokia 5800 which has the same webkit browser the iPhone has (in a direct comparison me and a friend couldn't see a difference) and it struggles with Slashdot. I have no idea why... slashdot takes ages to load the last 10kb's of any page, then immediately tries to load another page which isn't a new page. Once I press Stop the page loads and displays properly however the browser will lock up for approximately 30 seconds.
Works fine on my Google G2, which uses the webkit browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you can discuss PTSD/depression without "hurry up and wait" (more like hurry up and get super anxious).
Ain't that the truth. Six months of standing around in the Saudi desert in 90-91 waiting for something to happen mentally fucked me up more than two years of actually sometimes getting shot at in Afghanistan in 2001-2003. Granted, I was but a 21 year old PFC in 90 and an "old man" 32 year old SSG in 01, but still, I think the sense of purpose helped.
I would explain further but I don't think it is possible to 'get it' if you've never served or more likely never seen combat.
I've seen combat, and even though you are absolutely right that a video game will never even come close, that has absolutely nothing to do with the argument over whether the portrayal of combat in video games should be as realistic as possible. Your comments above are thoroughly irrelevant to the discussion at hand.
what do we do if large numbers of people do buy the game and grow up thinking this type of thing is 'just how the world works'?
People aren't a blank slate waiting for the media to tell them how reality works. Thousands of years of evolution have left the vast majority of us with an innate moral sense that largely precludes killing except in very unusual circumstances. The few psychopaths who decide that killing is OK because they saw it in a video game have things wrong with them that simply keeping them away from video games won't fix.
Of course they'd claim it's just a thought experiment to get you to think about a world without the internet..... but it's just a fucking stupid idea, even as a thought experiment. It's like saying "imagine a world where the wheel has been banned", or "what would you do if there was no more beer, wine, or liquor?" So many things would have to change as a result that speculation as to what you'd do is just pointless.
use-able
We have a new compound word for that. We spell it "usable".
Every time Microsoft releases and OS it has to be relearned. Vista was different enough from XP to prove you wrong
Hogwash. My latest laptop came with Vista, and I didn't have to learn anything. It had additional features, but very little has really changed beyond a slight reorganization of he Control Panel items. It's no where near as infuriating as Office 2K7 when you're coming from Office 2K3.
Win7 is just Vista with a few changes.
A few major changes.... like it's not as much of a resource hog, and it doesn't barf on any of my ancient legacy compilers like Vista did, to name two--- and I'm still running Win7 beta.
Sounds like you don't have much experience with either Vista or Win7.
Then get to work. Linux is your operating system too. Why not start a project to build a desktop that works the way you want it?
This answer is one of the biggest, fattest, most fucking obnoxious type of BULLSHIT that keeps Linux in the hobbyist ghetto. When someone makes a suggestion or complains about anything under Linux, some clever dimwit will INEVITABLY say "quit complaining about it and fix it, then; it's open source". Human beings often have limited time resources. We don't all have time to get up to speed with kernel hacking, or the peculiarities of KDE or Gnome in order to fix shit. Similarly, I don't have time to run for city council, state legislature, or the house of representatives, or even time to walk around with a bloody petition in order to get bullshit laws changed--- yet there's also always some ass who says "if you don't like [zoning|sales tax rate|copyright law], don't just complain and work to break the law, try to get it changed". Fuck you eople, I have a life!
newbie linux user is supposed to know about ALT+drag how, exactly?
Really, you linux fanatics will go to extraordinary lengths to defend what is an obvious interface flaw. Pounding the enter key should always click the equivalent of the OK button, and the escape key should always do CANCEL. The display dialog in Ubuntu doesn't follow that. It's fucking BROKEN.
Oh, well "those guys did it too" makes it not a jerky thing to do, right?
I heard the 911 call about the "out of control" 120mph Lexus mentioned in the article on the radio last week, and all I could think was "why didn't that dumb motherfucker turn the key and shut off the fucking engine?" Years ago, I had the accelerator linkage on my Datsun 280Z freeze at full throttle because a screwdriver I left in the works. I was only "out of control" for about a second and a half before I shut the engine off and pulled over. People are fucking idiots.
Or to California. Really. Expecting something to come out of the California government to make sense?
CARB is especially obnoxious. They have an agenda that extends quite a bit beyond their purpose. I would like to upgrade the horrible engine in my 1990 Volkswagen Vanagon to a modern TDi diesel. Many people in other states have done it, and the economy and utility is phenomenal. But no, CARB has declared that no OBD II engine may be transplanted without the entire exhaust and transmission from the donor vehicle. The newest engine I can use is an OBD I '95 Subaru 2.2l engine, which is an improvement, but nothing like a TDi would be. It shows that their real goal is to force people to buy new cars rather than improve their old ones. It's ridiculous. They're apparently happy to have me drive around with this anemic 70's vintage pollution generator, betting that I'll get tired of the 95 horsepower and junk my van for a Prius. Fuck you, CARB! I don't want a goddamned Prius! I want a 1 ton capacity van that's smaller than Chinese container ship--- a Prius is actually 6 inches longer than my van--- and gets better than 20mpg. Nobody makes that anymore. Now California's going to mandate RF-blocking glass? Great. Not as stupid as when they mandated that 10% of all cars sold must be electric, but a pretty good try.
>The real question is why WB doesn't owe him several billion dollars for piracy.
They haven't distributed his work.
Yes they have. Allow me to quote because you're obviously too busy to RTFA (but not too busy to render an opinion, obviously):
While Collins has worked to make A Girl Like You freely available to his fans, [his wife/manager] alleges that the same track is sold illegally "all over the internet". "Not by Edwyn, [but] by all sorts of respectable major labels whose licence to sell it ran out years ago and who do not account to him."
He effectively has no rights to his own works at this point.
I see the problem, You do not understand the English language. He still retains the rights. The rights are being infringed, but they are still his.
You know I could do the same on the computers at work and that would land me in jail rather quickly.
So the fuck what? When I was working with classified information, I would be in the same boat. Information from the PACER system, however, is public information. Your bullshit vague assertion is bullshit.
OK, the problem is that we're arguing in a gray area here. If you have legitimate shell access to the machine, then by definition you have some degree of permission to "install" programs, if only in the form of a bash script in a separate process. That being the case, there's a valid argument that what was obviously a simple perl script would likewise be reasonably permissible.
Less than 22% of the federal budget is defense spending ($660 billion out of just under $3.1 trillion)
I'd imagine that you could reduce that problem if you allowed some portion of the surplus to be converted to pay for the employees.
Wouldn't work. Then you'd end up with exactly what you get in private industry: corporate suits who "cut costs" by variously eliminating the quality from their core business, either in the form of "cheapifying" or one of the many variations of "shirking", and then pocket the multi-million dollar bonuses for "saving" money by making the company essentially not do its job anymore. About the only good part of the boatloads of money the government spends (at least on tangible goods) is that much of the cost is due to outlandish quality requirements.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy also applies:
"In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely."
I see this all the time where I work, at one of the nation's largest and arguably most dysfunctional school districts. The infuriating trend I've seen is not so much the elimination of those people whose jobs are to provide actual service to the "customer", but rather the weighting down of those people with mandatory and ever-expanding internal procedure. My employer has spent millions on computer systems intended to streamline the bureaucratic processes, but in reality all they've done is saddle us with an enormous amount of largely pointless data entry. We could just skip most of the most pointless parts of the data entry and, y'know, just do our actual jobs (we tried that initially) but that would MESS UP THE GRAPHS that the mid-level bigwigs in cheap suits use to assess our performance.
a company known for using a kill switch against their own customers
It's fairly clear they were compelled by copyright law to use that kill switch.
Amazon or Newegg, simply for sheer volume of reviews. Buy mostly from newegg because of the reasonable return policy.
I never buy a product that doesn't have at least one review panning it. Any decent product that sells a lot of units is going to have a minimum of two or three buyer who, for whatever reason, thought it was crap. Even if their complaint is that it shipped slow, that's something. That generally shows that the retailer isn't round-filing bad reviews. No product is a panacea for everyone, so if you read the 1, 2, and 3 star reviews and find that their complaints wouldn't apply to you, you can probably safely buy it.
"fitness" != "physical prowess". In Darwin's usage, it's meant in its proper broader sense, and applies to things as diverse as plumage color, instinctive cooperative behaviors, and yes, even having a more sphisticated brain that allows you to out-think your prey.
My personal opinion is that geek has moved far beyond the 1980's definition of pocket protectors, glasses, and a calculator. Geeks come in all flavours now, from classical computing and math geeks all the way into sports and automotive geeks.
Damn straight! I'm a former glasses-wearing high school computer nerd who has variously been a programmer, electrician, locksmith, auto mechanic, communications systems technician, process control engineer, and US Army Human Intelligence Collector/Infantryman over the last 20-odd years. I think "nerd/geek" is a much bigger tent than people realize.
I find it interesting because it is about engineering. "IndyCars", on the other hand, are boring. All the cars are identical so it's just about the drivers. Who cares about the drivers?
I held that opinion for quite a while, but later came to amend it. I find it even more boring when it's like the Formula One races were for several years, with Nissan coming in 1st and 2nd every time because they came up with a particularly effective turbocharger. All about engineering, but not very interesting engineering. Really, car racing is boring as fuck to watch. Probably interesting to do, but it holds no particular value to intelligent spectators.
It's not your phone its slashcode. I've got a Nokia 5800 which has the same webkit browser the iPhone has (in a direct comparison me and a friend couldn't see a difference) and it struggles with Slashdot. I have no idea why... slashdot takes ages to load the last 10kb's of any page, then immediately tries to load another page which isn't a new page. Once I press Stop the page loads and displays properly however the browser will lock up for approximately 30 seconds.
Works fine on my Google G2, which uses the webkit browser.