Nope. You don't understand human nature very well. You don't torture people for information, you torture them to get confirmation of what you want to be true. If you torture someone long enough and they'll tell you exactly what you want to hear.
The inquisition used to force people into confessing they were satanists so that the church could confiscate their property, and, of course, they'd generously split that property with person who reported the dangerous sinner.
So you see, torture isn't used because it's a reliable method of gathering information, it's used because it's a reliable method of manufacturing evidence. You can get whatever you want out of a tortured confession, and that is why confessions extracted under duress are not admissable in most modern court systems.
However, it appears likely that the author of the book of the book, is overplaying his hand and it was in fact, ergot poisoning and not a CIA LSD experiment, at least according to some random poster who sounds reasonable here: http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/12/cia-doses-french-bread-with-ls
That's actually a pretty good suggestion for a feature. It'd be cool to even just be able to do an "album shuffle" mode where all the songs on an album are played in order before randomly selecting the next album.
Because nothing ever written by Microsoft ever turns out the be the "flavor of the month". There are no IE6 only web sites that can't be upgraded to newer browsers. Microsoft didn't totally change Visual Basic a couple of times..Net never existed. Silverlight has always been more popular and better than flash.
The problem you describe has nothing to do with MS or not and everything to do with the changing nature of technology and/or a failure to establish consistent policies. Frankly, going MS only is the idiot's way of solving this problem in that it's the wrong answer to the wrong problem.
I'm not sure if the author of the article assumed people knew the intimate details of other formats, but if he had included some relevant compare and contrast with other formats, I might have been moved to actually care about what appears to me to be nothing more than an impotent rant.
It's got technical details in it, but they lack context and objectivity to anyone who's not a specialist in container encodings.
Frankly, the random swipes at people who disagree with him, and some of the more bizarre claims (All formats should use a 1-bit version field?) don't inspire me to believe the author or the article.
While I'm not absolutely positively sure of this, I think single-player games that don't have trophies work fine. It's the date bug that screws up the trophies that screws up the offline games. The network connection problem is correlated, not causitive.
It looks to me like there several different issues tied to a single bad-leap-year calculation:
1) It's using an invalid date to update trophies because when you try to play a game with trophies, the trophies disappear. The game becomes unplayable because the trophy code requires them to be available or the game won't launch (this may only be some games with poor trophy code).
2) The invalid date is (somehow) being transmitted to the PSN on login attempts, the bad date is rejected on Sony's end and you can't login to the PSN. Any game that relies on being logged into PSN won't work.
I doubt it was intentional that if the date was wrong games would stop working. I think if you change the system date and play offline you won't bork your trophies and you will still be able to play (In fact, someone reported that they did exactly that and didn't have any problems).
The problem with the DRM system Ubisoft is using is that the game will cease to be playable when the shut the save game servers down, which they will do while some people are still playing the game. I still have some games I like to go back and play that are many years old. Frankly, I think this is one of the worst possible systems of copy protection. We tolerate this in MMOs because that's the nature of the game taking a non-MMO game and forcing this type of always online requirement is simply too much for me.
The end problem is that you are paying a big up front cost to rent a game for an indefinite period. They would be better served by making the game free and just requiring customers to pay a monthly subscription to play it. Of course, this is probably a stepping stone to that destination. It'd be a handy way to stab all the companies dealing in used games in the back.
I don't pirate games, and I'm offended by this copy protection.
That's unfortunately because the article proves that the "climate skeptics" are frauds too, they've lied and mislead and deceived people for their own benefit which, of course, according to your own standard means they are wrong and can't be believed.
So there, the world must be colder because it's can't be getting warmer because the scientists and the CRU are mean, the non-scientists and IPCC made a mistake in a 400 page report, and the so-called skeptics are continuously and repeated proven wrong over and over again. That's the only possible conclusion. Right? Right?
Of course they don't. Normally CO2 is released as temperatures rise. We're forcing the temperature rise by releasing greenhouse gases. Now pretend you're smart and what do you think is going to happen when we prematurely force the temperature to rise?
Maybe the CO2 levels will rise even higher and we'll get a hotter than normal peak temperature? One which may cause problems for the areas where we grow our food? Because there's two really big problems that may be caused by a warmer global climate: massive flooding and widespread starvation.
Sure, it could, and you know monkeys could flying out of my butt.
Smart people don't make massive changes to a planet when they don't understand the consequences. But that is what we are collectively doing. We are terraforming the planet and we don't know what the end result is going to be.
It's already pretty suitable for us, and we're pretty well adapted to the way it is. Chances are pretty good that it will get worse, not better.
From what I understand, the "lying" scientists in question threatened a journal which was publishing (according to them) bad papers. The threat was that they would stop associating with the journal unless the journal actually followed it's own written approval procedures. Apparently, the bad papers were, in fact, being approved unilaterally by a single editor in violation of the journal's own policies.
If you flip that around and assume that the scientists are actually honest, then what they did is actually not only proper but required. It's a little weird isn't it? You see it's the presumption that they pressured a journal to reject a good paper as opposed to the presumption that the pressured a journal to reject a bad paper that makes all the difference.
According the scientists own personal emails, they thought the paper was "riddled with errors". So we know that they were at least acting in good faith, even if they were somehow wrong and the paper was pristinely original and challenging of the orthodoxy.
However, as I understand, when the reviewed by independent analysis, the paper was found to in fact be utter rubbish. Of course, you probably won't believe that because it doesn't fit into your world view properly.
We have no evidence to support the hypothesis that decreasing emissions will make things worse, and quite a bit that keeping emissions at the current rate could be very bad for a lot of people.
That one is obvious, and in the article. The carbon dioxide reduction policies are a economic threat to Utah. They produce the coal for the power plants that the carbon dioxide reduction policies are trying to eliminate.
Nothing much to see here, just a legislature passing a "Don't take our juuurbs!" statement.
Hmm. Wasn't the "Depression" of 1920 neither severe enough nor long enough to actually qualify as a depression?
I'm not sure your prediction of 7 more years of recession is accurate. Of course, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that if you excluded the health care and housing sectors of the economy, the U.S. would have been in a recession since 2001.
What I'm saying is it looks like the "Depression of 1920" and the current trouble probably aren't as easily compared as you would like them to be. I don't see a whole lot similarity between them.
The problems with the Star Wars prequel are both pretty deep and pretty simple:
The movies were treated as a mechanism for delivering special effects. The stories were dumbed down for American children (or more accurately, American parents). What you were left with was a series of special effects segments that had to be linked together into a somewhat comprehensible story. Thus the real problem is that the prequel stories are less important that action scenes and it shows.
I expect the TV show will be 40 minutes of "story" whose sole purpose is to lead up to one or more fight scenes about half of which will involve light sabers. The way George Lucas explained it as being more "talky" only serves to further lower my expectations.
It's the intersection of capitalism and journalism. What you get is constant scaremongering to get people to look at their show so they can sell those people to advertisers.
Is your local water about to kill you and everyone you've ever loved? Find out at 11!
Interesting, because when they do speed benchmarks, each version of Firefox is faster than the last...
Personally, I haven't noticed an increase in bugs, or a decrease in either speed or stability and I use Firefox pretty much all day at work. Maybe the changes you are experiencing are related to Windows 7 in combination with Firefox? And of course, there's the ever-present possibility of confirmation bias.
Well, this is not particularly true. The social cohesiveness of an open source project's security team is likely to be less than that of a comparable closed source team. Without a management team bent on reducing costs and maximizing revenue with the stick of firing the developer if he doesn't work on exactly what the management team tells him, you end up with two effects, one it's harder to stifle complaints about the project "sitting on" vulnerabilities and two you can't stop developers who are interested in security from working on even if management considers security to be merely an expense.
What it means is that any sufficiently large open source project has a higher minimum threshold of focus on security than a comparable closed source project. Now some closed source projects may be more secure than comparable open source projects but that's only if the closed source project has a on-going and continual focus on security.
That is not the case for Internet Explorer. Over time we have witnessed again and again how Microsoft sits on critical vulnerability reports for months or years until they become publicly revealed by a third party and then rushes a patch for the problem through the development team. It is clear that security for Internet Explorer is treated much like airport security.
In other words Microsoft only cares about appearing to be secure to the most ignorant of spectators.
Heck, square dancing should be banned under the same theory. And what about church? There's a minister who tells people what to do in church so that makes it kind of like a gang too. Oh and the hospital? Got to get rid of it too, that doctor is telling people what to do. And the warden definitely has to go, that guy is telling everyone what to do. He really looks like the prison gang leader to me.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, according to theWikipedia article on it, it looks like corporate personhood was decided in the courts.
No, but I think someone who has been shown to be making baseless claims (ie. you) should show a little more humility when shown to be completely wrong.
But as I've come to expect from denialists (as opposed to skeptics), you don't really care about the facts, just what you can convince other people of with your rantings.
I make no claim that the explanation is correct, merely that you are wrong to claim that no explanation has been offered. The fact that you repeat your disproven assertion immediately after it's proven to be wrong shows that you are incapable of carrying on rational discussion.
There often is a way to steal the McGuffin without killing anything.
But then the Game Developers declare that it's an exploit, ban anyone who can do it, and change the game so that when someone touches the McGuffin, it locks them into the room with and angry Evil Foozle who can see hidden and invisible creatures and teleport anyone who gets too far away to right in front of it. It's kind of shocking how far some game developers will go to ensure that everything (and everyone) goes exactly the way they planned it to go.
On the larger topic of having more roles, it can't be done by changing the character design. You'll just get not very good tanks, healers and dps if you try to go against the trinity that way. You have to change the A.I. of the enemies. Tanks exist because aggro control exists, and because most of the time you fight a few enemies who can be relatively easily focused on one target. If you want to introduce a new role (or roles) you have design your game from the ground up to make the other role(s) valuable. Not just occasionally valuable, but valuable all the freaking time. Want a trap-disarming/lock-picking class? You'd better have traps and locks all over the place. They'd better be an integral part of at least 75% of your boss battles. Not disarming the traps has to kill or severly hurt the characters, and not in a way that can be instantly healed by fire and forget magic.
That goes for any possible role that could be introduced, it won't be liked or appreciated if it isn't a necessary component of the game.
So, why doesn't everyone else go along with the CRU? If they're wrong, the people who show that they're actually wrong should get the respect that CRU loses, not to mention the money.
Your hypothesis doesn't pass the Occam's Razor test. It's simpler to believe that most climatologists support AGW because it's true, than because they're all being paid to say it's true.
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Nope. You don't understand human nature very well. You don't torture people for information, you torture them to get confirmation of what you want to be true. If you torture someone long enough and they'll tell you exactly what you want to hear.
The inquisition used to force people into confessing they were satanists so that the church could confiscate their property, and, of course, they'd generously split that property with person who reported the dangerous sinner.
So you see, torture isn't used because it's a reliable method of gathering information, it's used because it's a reliable method of manufacturing evidence. You can get whatever you want out of a tortured confession, and that is why confessions extracted under duress are not admissable in most modern court systems.
Actually it was in the paper recently:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/7415082/French-bread-spiked-with-LSD-in-CIA-experiment.html
However, it appears likely that the author of the book of the book, is overplaying his hand and it was in fact, ergot poisoning and not a CIA LSD experiment, at least according to some random poster who sounds reasonable here:
http://reason.com/blog/2010/03/12/cia-doses-french-bread-with-ls
So, make what you will of it.
That's actually a pretty good suggestion for a feature. It'd be cool to even just be able to do an "album shuffle" mode where all the songs on an album are played in order before randomly selecting the next album.
Because nothing ever written by Microsoft ever turns out the be the "flavor of the month". There are no IE6 only web sites that can't be upgraded to newer browsers. Microsoft didn't totally change Visual Basic a couple of times. .Net never existed. Silverlight has always been more popular and better than flash.
The problem you describe has nothing to do with MS or not and everything to do with the changing nature of technology and/or a failure to establish consistent policies. Frankly, going MS only is the idiot's way of solving this problem in that it's the wrong answer to the wrong problem.
I'm not sure if the author of the article assumed people knew the intimate details of other formats, but if he had included some relevant compare and contrast with other formats, I might have been moved to actually care about what appears to me to be nothing more than an impotent rant.
It's got technical details in it, but they lack context and objectivity to anyone who's not a specialist in container encodings.
Frankly, the random swipes at people who disagree with him, and some of the more bizarre claims (All formats should use a 1-bit version field?) don't inspire me to believe the author or the article.
While I'm not absolutely positively sure of this, I think single-player games that don't have trophies work fine. It's the date bug that screws up the trophies that screws up the offline games. The network connection problem is correlated, not causitive.
It looks to me like there several different issues tied to a single bad-leap-year calculation:
1) It's using an invalid date to update trophies because when you try to play a game with trophies, the trophies disappear. The game becomes unplayable because the trophy code requires them to be available or the game won't launch (this may only be some games with poor trophy code).
2) The invalid date is (somehow) being transmitted to the PSN on login attempts, the bad date is rejected on Sony's end and you can't login to the PSN. Any game that relies on being logged into PSN won't work.
I doubt it was intentional that if the date was wrong games would stop working. I think if you change the system date and play offline you won't bork your trophies and you will still be able to play (In fact, someone reported that they did exactly that and didn't have any problems).
The problem with the DRM system Ubisoft is using is that the game will cease to be playable when the shut the save game servers down, which they will do while some people are still playing the game. I still have some games I like to go back and play that are many years old. Frankly, I think this is one of the worst possible systems of copy protection. We tolerate this in MMOs because that's the nature of the game taking a non-MMO game and forcing this type of always online requirement is simply too much for me.
The end problem is that you are paying a big up front cost to rent a game for an indefinite period. They would be better served by making the game free and just requiring customers to pay a monthly subscription to play it. Of course, this is probably a stepping stone to that destination. It'd be a handy way to stab all the companies dealing in used games in the back.
I don't pirate games, and I'm offended by this copy protection.
That's unfortunately because the article proves that the "climate skeptics" are frauds too, they've lied and mislead and deceived people for their own benefit which, of course, according to your own standard means they are wrong and can't be believed.
So there, the world must be colder because it's can't be getting warmer because the scientists and the CRU are mean, the non-scientists and IPCC made a mistake in a 400 page report, and the so-called skeptics are continuously and repeated proven wrong over and over again. That's the only possible conclusion. Right? Right?
Wait. Maybe science doesn't work like that.
Of course they don't. Normally CO2 is released as temperatures rise. We're forcing the temperature rise by releasing greenhouse gases. Now pretend you're smart and what do you think is going to happen when we prematurely force the temperature to rise?
Maybe the CO2 levels will rise even higher and we'll get a hotter than normal peak temperature? One which may cause problems for the areas where we grow our food? Because there's two really big problems that may be caused by a warmer global climate: massive flooding and widespread starvation.
That's why people are a little concerned.
Sure, it could, and you know monkeys could flying out of my butt.
Smart people don't make massive changes to a planet when they don't understand the consequences. But that is what we are collectively doing. We are terraforming the planet and we don't know what the end result is going to be.
It's already pretty suitable for us, and we're pretty well adapted to the way it is. Chances are pretty good that it will get worse, not better.
There's a certainly a problem here isn't there.
From what I understand, the "lying" scientists in question threatened a journal which was publishing (according to them) bad papers. The threat was that they would stop associating with the journal unless the journal actually followed it's own written approval procedures. Apparently, the bad papers were, in fact, being approved unilaterally by a single editor in violation of the journal's own policies.
If you flip that around and assume that the scientists are actually honest, then what they did is actually not only proper but required. It's a little weird isn't it? You see it's the presumption that they pressured a journal to reject a good paper as opposed to the presumption that the pressured a journal to reject a bad paper that makes all the difference.
According the scientists own personal emails, they thought the paper was "riddled with errors". So we know that they were at least acting in good faith, even if they were somehow wrong and the paper was pristinely original and challenging of the orthodoxy.
However, as I understand, when the reviewed by independent analysis, the paper was found to in fact be utter rubbish. Of course, you probably won't believe that because it doesn't fit into your world view properly.
Actually according to the Wikipedia article on ice ages, the next ice age is expected to occur in about 50,000 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_age#Glacials_and_interglacials
We have no evidence to support the hypothesis that decreasing emissions will make things worse, and quite a bit that keeping emissions at the current rate could be very bad for a lot of people.
That one is obvious, and in the article. The carbon dioxide reduction policies are a economic threat to Utah. They produce the coal for the power plants that the carbon dioxide reduction policies are trying to eliminate.
Nothing much to see here, just a legislature passing a "Don't take our juuurbs!" statement.
Hmm. Wasn't the "Depression" of 1920 neither severe enough nor long enough to actually qualify as a depression?
I'm not sure your prediction of 7 more years of recession is accurate. Of course, I'm pretty sure I remember hearing that if you excluded the health care and housing sectors of the economy, the U.S. would have been in a recession since 2001.
What I'm saying is it looks like the "Depression of 1920" and the current trouble probably aren't as easily compared as you would like them to be. I don't see a whole lot similarity between them.
The problems with the Star Wars prequel are both pretty deep and pretty simple:
The movies were treated as a mechanism for delivering special effects. The stories were dumbed down for American children (or more accurately, American parents). What you were left with was a series of special effects segments that had to be linked together into a somewhat comprehensible story. Thus the real problem is that the prequel stories are less important that action scenes and it shows.
I expect the TV show will be 40 minutes of "story" whose sole purpose is to lead up to one or more fight scenes about half of which will involve light sabers. The way George Lucas explained it as being more "talky" only serves to further lower my expectations.
It's the intersection of capitalism and journalism. What you get is constant scaremongering to get people to look at their show so they can sell those people to advertisers.
Interesting, because when they do speed benchmarks, each version of Firefox is faster than the last...
Personally, I haven't noticed an increase in bugs, or a decrease in either speed or stability and I use Firefox pretty much all day at work. Maybe the changes you are experiencing are related to Windows 7 in combination with Firefox? And of course, there's the ever-present possibility of confirmation bias.
I believe you have that slightly wrong:
The main reason for releasing IE8 was to keep the appearance that Microsoft is actively working on making IE better. It's the 'U' in FUD.
Well, this is not particularly true. The social cohesiveness of an open source project's security team is likely to be less than that of a comparable closed source team. Without a management team bent on reducing costs and maximizing revenue with the stick of firing the developer if he doesn't work on exactly what the management team tells him, you end up with two effects, one it's harder to stifle complaints about the project "sitting on" vulnerabilities and two you can't stop developers who are interested in security from working on even if management considers security to be merely an expense.
What it means is that any sufficiently large open source project has a higher minimum threshold of focus on security than a comparable closed source project. Now some closed source projects may be more secure than comparable open source projects but that's only if the closed source project has a on-going and continual focus on security.
That is not the case for Internet Explorer. Over time we have witnessed again and again how Microsoft sits on critical vulnerability reports for months or years until they become publicly revealed by a third party and then rushes a patch for the problem through the development team. It is clear that security for Internet Explorer is treated much like airport security.
In other words Microsoft only cares about appearing to be secure to the most ignorant of spectators.
Heck, square dancing should be banned under the same theory. And what about church? There's a minister who tells people what to do in church so that makes it kind of like a gang too. Oh and the hospital? Got to get rid of it too, that doctor is telling people what to do. And the warden definitely has to go, that guy is telling everyone what to do. He really looks like the prison gang leader to me.
I'm not sure where you're getting your information, according to theWikipedia article on it, it looks like corporate personhood was decided in the courts.
No, but I think someone who has been shown to be making baseless claims (ie. you) should show a little more humility when shown to be completely wrong.
But as I've come to expect from denialists (as opposed to skeptics), you don't really care about the facts, just what you can convince other people of with your rantings.
I make no claim that the explanation is correct, merely that you are wrong to claim that no explanation has been offered. The fact that you repeat your disproven assertion immediately after it's proven to be wrong shows that you are incapable of carrying on rational discussion.
Good day sir.
There often is a way to steal the McGuffin without killing anything.
But then the Game Developers declare that it's an exploit, ban anyone who can do it, and change the game so that when someone touches the McGuffin, it locks them into the room with and angry Evil Foozle who can see hidden and invisible creatures and teleport anyone who gets too far away to right in front of it. It's kind of shocking how far some game developers will go to ensure that everything (and everyone) goes exactly the way they planned it to go.
On the larger topic of having more roles, it can't be done by changing the character design. You'll just get not very good tanks, healers and dps if you try to go against the trinity that way. You have to change the A.I. of the enemies. Tanks exist because aggro control exists, and because most of the time you fight a few enemies who can be relatively easily focused on one target. If you want to introduce a new role (or roles) you have design your game from the ground up to make the other role(s) valuable. Not just occasionally valuable, but valuable all the freaking time. Want a trap-disarming/lock-picking class? You'd better have traps and locks all over the place. They'd better be an integral part of at least 75% of your boss battles. Not disarming the traps has to kill or severly hurt the characters, and not in a way that can be instantly healed by fire and forget magic.
That goes for any possible role that could be introduced, it won't be liked or appreciated if it isn't a necessary component of the game.
So, why doesn't everyone else go along with the CRU? If they're wrong, the people who show that they're actually wrong should get the respect that CRU loses, not to mention the money.
Your hypothesis doesn't pass the Occam's Razor test. It's simpler to believe that most climatologists support AGW because it's true, than because they're all being paid to say it's true.