The big difference is that mmorpgs reward stupid things, like sitting around for hours, or camping something so that someone else can't get it. There's a reason many people find them to be lame games. At least if they rewarded you fighting or exploring the time spent becomes a side effect. People expect things to take time, yet the hate waiting. Nobody would buy EQ if one of the blurbs on the back was "Sit utterly still for hours, waiting for something to happen!"
What's the difference between a two-hour wait in line to see a movie and watching the two-hour movie?
Didn't you find OoT to be very repetetive? I ran back and forth over the main area (in front of the castle) like thirty times, five minutes per trip. That and gold - every now and then you need a bunch which means you pull up weeds of whack zombies or some other crap until you've got enough gold to play a minigame, where you fail and go collect gold. Dullsville. The only other N64 game I played was Mario 64 with the dumbest controls ever.
Oh, that's not true, I played Mario cart which was pretty cool.
What RPGs actually have 1000 (or even 100) hours of content? You know, NPCs with unique text, new monsters, new items and levels, etc? Walking back and forth over the same dull levels isn't content, fighting yet another randomly generated herd of orcs isn't content.
If a game actually had 1000h of content your point might be meaningful, as is though, those 1000h games could easily be 20h games that could be played in a month or two.
Look at Morrowind for an (admittedly imperfect) example of the plot reminder. It journals all your conversations, keeps quest notes, and provides a map that NPCs mark when describing an area.
The plot is quite complex, but you have enough reminders when coming back that you can read the summary (recent conversations, quest goals, etc) and pick up where you left off. It's as if you could download a summary for the first 161 pages of _The Hunt for Red October_ so you could continue reading it a year later.
As for the cheat issue, which I think you mean to be one of difficulty, I think having cheats does expand the playability of a game. When I played Doom2 excessively I'd warp to a favorite level, give myself all the guns (and use whatever I wanted to that day - often less than I'd have had access to with a save-game) and start playing. If I wanted to explore after playing I could go into god mode and noclip. In GTA3 now I use cheats to summon the vehicle I want without walking the streets to find it - sure it'd have made some missions easy, but I'm an adult, I can choose not to use the cheats if it would ruin something. Having them for the missions I can't get through means that I'll play the rest of the game though (and buy the next edition).
That's a cool idea. Gung-ho players could do more quests at any level and have more stuff to choose from, but not more powerful stuff. And maybe you could have fame-based rewards (ie, not boosting in-game power) for completing more quests. Or perhaps the tutors you find in the city aren't as cool as the ones you quest to find, so you can do more customized characters (who are, overall, just as powerful) if you venture to far-off lands in search of masters.
But you'd be able to come into the game for a few hours every week or two and still be mostly able to play with your friends. They've have funkier customized stuff and more medals and favors from fair maidens, etc, but be killing the same monsters so you could team and not be dead-weight.
You could even rank people by a score based on all the extra playing - a casual player would never be at the top of the ranks, but would at least not be out of the game.
But what if any yahoo could just sit around for twenty hours and pick up some uber item? You've simply switch from rewarding everyone to rewarding people with a ton of time. Personally, I'd rather "work" for my items by going new places and doing new things. If that ends up with me having the same item as many others, so be it. How about having the challenge be to defeat a monster, which could be fairly easy to find, yet hard to do?
If you insist on having different items, create them semi-randomly. For any character who goes through this area create an item for them, with the same overall power as other items created there, but with random powers from a list that would suit the player.
Once you've swalled the idea that everyone can do the same quest and everyone can rescue the same princess from the same ogres, why can't you accept that everyone who does it gets either a +5 longsword, or an item with +5 in something and two powers off of a class-based list?
The computer-voting with paper-ballots is actually a neat idea. It lets you display more information, confirm ballot-correctness, and confirm choices with candidate photos, etc. It then prints out the ballot (in a human-readable fashion - likely looking much like a hand-filled ballot) and you take it to a second (completely seperate) machine to have it verified before dumping it in the box.
The second machine would show you what it thought you voted for on-screen to verify, and would stamp (punch-out, whatever) a second set of validation marks right next to the original choices. This second-level of confirmation ensures that the ballot will be readable later when recounted, avoiding the hanging chad problem. You know it's borderline because the verification and counting machine won't accept it. This last machine also does the official counting (unless a paper recount is ordered) so you get your fast results.
As for actual receipts - I think there's no way to do it right. You can't provide a useful receipt (for proving a miscount), that doesn't let someone force you to provide it as proof of a bought vote. Even creating fake receipts doesn't really work because they *must* be distinguishable at some point or you've created potential evidence of a miscount - you risk the vote-buyer cracking this system and finding out the vote they bought wasn't cast their way.
But, I think the system of dropping paper slips into a box and not letting the box out of sight of many different representatives, all of whom want different results (and to implicate their rivals in vote-spoiling scandals), is secure. Not much need for receipts if the original system is more trustable.
Yawn. You continually berate me for not covering your issues and yet I see very little of this intellectual honesty from you - you keep narrowly defining the issue as best suits you and ignoring everything else.
Regardless of the source of the poll it's meaningless because republicans and democrats are groups that attract different people - if the democrats attract those who are unhappy with the dictates of conservative society, which they seem to do, they are going to have more unhappy supporters. I'm not surprised to see it mentioned on an obviously right-wing site, it's the kind of partisan nonsense that drives US politics. Similar feel-good polls that painted Democrats in a better light (to a Democrat) would find a home on similarly biased leftist sites.
Again yawn, you tell me how I judge, without bothering to address the point of the uselessness of the survey. You tell me my arguments are red-herring, though you are the one bringing up the alarmist "There's no 100% safety", "won't you think of the children" type of argument instead of actually saying what you feel is harmful about sex. There's no 100% safety guarantee with a bike yet parents let their children - children incapable of making sound choices - ride bikes. I think it should be obvious that 100% guarantees aren't possible, nor are they demanded in real-world situations.
I'm curious what kind of sex education you expect to have that will educate children about sexual safety, and yet will discourage any experimentation.
There's no biological reason why people we class as children can't have sex. What argument do you intend to use to convince them to wait to try something that you admit (you will admit this?) is pleasurable.
I simply feel that it's better to accept that they will experiment, that experimentation may include full intercourse, and that you need to prepare for this - the "worst case scenario".
You wouldn't let your 5-year old get a credit card, right?
I would. They make credit cards for kids these days. $20 limit, otherwise the same as normal. Or, the prepaid ones, where it's really a debit card with a visa logo.
there is this thing called "education" that we engage in for years and years before we are expected to stand on our own and get a job.
Exactly. Part of that education is to be given jobs, in the context of school assignments, chores, neighborhood jobs, and such. You learn through these jobs where failure doesn't put you on the street so that hopefully you can succeed when it matters.
It's also immoral, irresponsible and idiotic to ask for a 12-year old that is still mentally a child to make sexual decisions that could potentially affect that child for life.
It's partly that you need to recognize that 12-year olds are playing doctor and will be experimenting. If you hide the issue of sex from them and don't teach them you're more likely to have them get pregnant. Children explore the forbidden.
It's like firearms education. You can hope they never encounter a gun, by making sure you don't have any, and you can scare them, but this doesn't teach them what to do if a friend finds their gun. The same as ignoring the issue of sex, or scaring the child with overblown consequences, isn't going to teach them how to have sex safely when they do.
You have some pre-conceived notions about conservatism == restrictive
Pretty much by definition.
== religious
Often, but not always.
Well, at least the polls seem to disagree with you on your last point:
Hah. That poll was dreck. I'll even ignore that the source is a site that opened with a picture of Reagan and had a very conservative bent.
The poll didn't account for the fact that gays (likely to be less happy because of persecution) are more likely to be democrats (because of the persecution of religious conservatives who are often republicans). It didn't take any steps to sample equivalent populations whose only difference was political platform, and it ranted about marxist coercive utopias.
If code needs to be secure, and you've got clueful management, that last thing you'll do is write it in-house. Or do you really think you can afford an OS-design team that is 1) perfectly trusted, 2) as skilled as all of the experts working on Linux, or employed at Microsoft, and 3) can put ten years into designing an OS.
You'd be much better off having the same people who'd create your OS verifying an existing OS, be it Embedded Windows, VXWorks, Linux, QNX, or whatever, than trying to reinvent the wheel.
I think it'd be fairly hard to slip broken code into a library like that. Many (most?) large projects have compile-time tests and it's unlikely you could write anything that would get past them, and the array of other code which used your library, and yet mess up trajectory calculations.
I don't think you'd be caught, just that your code would look overly complex, would do odd things (why would a math library need to keep track of which calculations were performed (surely there's no one calculation that is gunnery related) or implement a special-case for one certain subset of numbers?) and that the project maintainer wouldn't accept it. Ugly/Overly-complex code gets rejected all the time.
And yes, it's perfectly reasonable to hire a panel of experts to security-check the Linux kernel and standard libraries. Checking code is at least ten times faster, if not a hundred, than writing it. For something where the vendor might want $10M for a source license you could easily afford to hire a twenty full-time programmers to check the code on an ongoing basis. As a benefit, their checks should also improve stability - they're much more likely to find bugs than trojans.
Further, you may not always do this, but you've got the option. Checking closed-source apps is harder, even with shared-source type projects often you don't get code that will compile so you can't verify that you're checking the code you actually run.
Terrorism, I think, is the intentional targetting of civilians by military units, or military-level weapons. But, if my land was taken away and the bad guy's troops were all safe in tanks, who else would I be able to attack?
So yeah, the definition is pretty convenient. In essence, if you're a nation, it's war, unless you're going against the USA, in which case you're a terrorist. If you're not a nation, you're a terrorist. Note that the definition of nation is conveniently vague.
But yeah, our laws always seemed effective before. Police were allowed to ignore many due-process and search-warrant restrictions when in hot pursuit, or when they could show that they believed they acted to prevent immediate danger. Search warrants were fairly easy to get, but prevented abuse by not allowing fishing trips - they had to state what they expected to find, or see direct evidence of capital crimes. (Dead bodies, etc.)
Seemed reasonable. You could get by most roadblocks to get terrorists and other threats, but you couldn't use any other evidence to get a conviction on some unrelated crime to cover up your failure to find evidence of terrorist conspiracies.
So yeah, the patriot act is a crock. Once you're labelled a terrorist you're as good as guilty.
Atheism is a-theism, the antonym of Theism. Theism is "the doctrine or belief in the existence of a God or gods", so Atheism is "an absense of doctrine of belief in the existense of a god or gods."
If you think it's anything else, or is equivalent to some other religious belief, you're simply wrong. It's just the state of not believing in gods.
As to how an athiest would pick, well, as an athiest, I tend to pick my beliefs to benefit me, and society, which ultimately benefits me. Society is a collection of people who all think of themselves as 'me' and who probably feel much like I do about many things. If I want a stable life I support the civilization I'm in, I do that by supporting those around me unless it greatly inconveniences me.
I don't think an Ant has to have a belief in god to decide to help the colony and in a similar way, I don't have to have a belief in an ultimate right and wrong to feel that my best interests lie with some form of the golden rule and "civilized" behaviour. "When in Rome", to a degree.
What I wonder is why you think you need a god to tell you this. Are you so desperate for someone to take responsibility that you'll take direction from a musty of book just to avoid being in charge of your own actions?
What if aliens make us all sterile? Stick to reality, please.
My question was if your opinions are based on the absence of perfect birth control, you're the one putting words in my mouth. My speculating on the future of medicine seems fine. I wanted you to separate the issues of disease and pregnancy from the issues of morality.
Why complicate a teenager's life when it's already quite difficult to begin with?
My stance is that teens shouldn't be punished for exploring their sexuality; that they shouldn't be kept ignorant of the issues. How does letting them do what may come natural count as complicating their life? I think restrictive rules and secrecy are the complications.
However, going off the deep end at the other extreme and attempting to reduce intercourse to a mere recreational activity is furtile, pointless, and immature, because by definition intercourse is not a purely recreational activity.
The pill is futile, pointless, and immature? That is what you're saying, because it attempts to reduce intercourse to a recreational activity. Strange, I'd have said that the pill has been the greatest single liberating influence for women.
What does sex early in life has to do with maturity?
What does being exposed to responsible drinking early in life have to do with drinking responsibly later in life? In my opinion, it makes a huge difference. Similarly, I think being exposed to responsible sexuality and not being forbidden to explore that side of yourself would make someone more responsible later.
The basic issue is, can you shelter someone away from a certain desirable activity (the intoxication of drinking, the attraction of sex, etc) for their entire youth and then expect them to make responsible decisions on their own, when suddenly over-exposed? Can you expect a child who has never worked and isn't encouraged to put time into extra-curricular activities to suddenly get a job and support themselves?
The most successful, meaninful relationships that I know of are among some of my most conservative friends
Are you sure that the issue isn't just that their religions forbid divorce? Many people enter and stay in unfulfilling relationships simply because they don't feel they have a choice. Also, "sexually liberal" sounds like it could be the sexual version of alcoholism - in other words, exactly what I'm saying people need help avoiding. I don't think everyone needs to run around having orgies - just that people not deny children the ability to explore. Help them decide, mutually, where they feel comfortable instead of dictating what they must not do or talk about.
In the final analysis, previous sexual activity determines nearly nothing when it comes to future happiness. Where do you get the outlandish assumption that it does?
Perhaps from seeing many examples of children with liberal parents who can handle sex, drinking, and drugs in a responsible manner (which can mean abstinence). Also, from seeing many children from restrictive families who fall into serious alcohol/drug abuse problems or who can't seem to understand the difference between sexual attraction and love and who get into serious problems because of it.
And inevitably, some schmuck comes along and points out a fairly trivial point that invalidates someone's joke of "Foo, but... ON A COMPUTER", makes an anti-anti-patent rant, as if the system must not be broken just because if you look through all seventeen pages of lawyerese there's a single new idea.
I hope you aren't gunning for an 'insightful' mod.
It doesn't take a patent lawyer to judge the worthiness of the system. (There's a perfect example of attempting to put a fox in charge of the henhouse.) It only takes someone who can see that the patent office sees nothing wrong with the single-click patent (or any patent on a result for that matter) or with RAMBUS's submarine tactics. Both of these are obvious innovation stifling patents, yet the PTO's comment is that it's not their job to validate patents... !?!
So, because they've got some budget trouble, they issue government-mandated monopolies to people on whole areas of technology, making it the responsibility of everyone else to police the system. That's like me saying I can't afford to do my job and charging you, at random, for the results of fixing my lack of work.
But yeah, I don't have a degree in patent law so obviously I can't see how patents are getting broader and broader, until they barely mention any specific technology, and are being used to blackmail whole industries.
Yeah, and I know there are weird things on every CPU. I guess I should say that while stuff like this slips in, it doesn't get used by Intel's code, leaving everyone else's in the dust.
Intel doesn't (seem to; I don't know if they do) use these things to lock people in.
I don't think you fully understand 'stable'. It's API stability not code stability that is traditional in even-numbered kernel versions.
There's never been a guarantee that you can grab the latest code from kernel.org and have a well-running system, it's like grabbing the nightly of Mozilla, or a random WinXP build.
Anyone who needs stability, Linux "customers", will use the kernels their distribution provides and won't know any different, just as it's always worked.
In the 2.4 stream there were some stinkers, some kernels no distro switched to. Just the same as there will be in 2.6 - RedHat will run their own tests, as well as seeing how 2.6.x runs in the wild, before they package it (with any RedHat addons) and make it available for non-hackers.
By the time you know how to download and compile a kernel you're expected to know when not to. If you don't need a new feature, don't switch. If it's not broken, don't fix it. If you do switch, don't replace a live server until you've tested it.
Does the fact that I can get a beta of the next version of Windows mean I should migrate my servers to it and then blame Microsoft when alpha software lives up to expectations?
You could probably convince the big companies to do this. You know, the ones that have a product and expect to profit based on its merits.
Good luck convincing assholes like SCO though, who exist only to leech money from those people who actually create things.
But because of this, and because Intel or AMD or anyone could turn into a SCO if they missed a generation (think 3Dfx) you need to change the patent laws. 1) Allow independent discovery. 2) Automatically refuse to enforce any submarine patents. 3) Don't allow continuations to extend the scope (part of #2). Implement those, and of course, some decent checking of what is actually new, not merely "... over a packet-switching network" and you'll clear up most of the problems. Even software patents could be tolerated if they were actually new and useful ideas, instead of rehashed crap, or UI patents, and perhaps if the terms were a bit shorter. As is, even if we ban software patents the whole system is still worse than useless.
Trusted computing won't stop bugs, an outlook bug will still let a worm spread to other broken copies of outlook, deleting files as it goes. All trusted computing will do is prevent you installing a mail program from someone Microsoft doesn't "trust" (ie, no kickbacks).
If any of these ideas were actually for the benefit of the user they might be reasonable, but they're for the benefit of the media companies.
Unfortunately, if we want computers to be complex enough to be powerful we're going to be able to cause problems if we misuse them. At some point users need to take responsibility for computers, much as they would for their car. As the parent poster said, you might not have any idea what an "oilchange" is, or what a "brokenfanbelt" is, but you know that you need to get the car serviced regularly and that if a warning light is on it needs special attention. If you can't do it you hire someone. If you ignore or bypass the warnings and run a car that you should know isn't fit to drive you will be responsible for any harm you cause.
This is true even of lawn-mowers and propane barbeques which we don't require a license to buy. Why can't it be true of computers?
The problem is that the underlying architecture *could* stop worms and trojans but it doesn't. All that stops them is obscurity.
Don't get me wrong, I run Linux at home and I love the security, but I know that every configure script I run could contain harmful code. I know that a trojaned version of a mozilla pluggin could run with my privs and wipe out everything I can access.
What we need to do is run every application as a seperate user. You wouldn't run Apache and sshd as the same user, or run an ftp server as any user with anything other than read access to a chrooted environment, but people feel really comfortable running ut2004, Mozilla/Thunderbird/etc, konsole, BitTorrent, AcroRead, GQView, and a million other programs that could all have a buffer overflow (remember when the JPEG virus was just a myth?) and execute arbitrary attack code.
Sure, if I, as a user, typed 'rm -rf/' the computer would keep purring along. My servers would keep serving, nobody outside would notice. But I'd lose everything I care about. (I do have backups, but this is a what-if.) OS installs are easy these days, but recreating my thousands of documents, reripping my MP3s, losing my photos. These things are a pretty nasty consequence and I'm no safer in Linux than in Windows, except that I (possibly) pick better applications. One bug in my email client though and I'm hosed.
What we need is for Mozilla to run as wnight-mozilla, for ut2004 to run as wnight-ut, for gqview to run as wnight-gqview, etc. They'd all use (behind the scenes, the user could have a nice GUI for this) symlinks and user groups to get permission to access their files from a stripped-down home directory. If I use Firefox and Thunderbird, Firefox never needs to see my email directory, even with read access. GQView never needs to see it either, or my firefox directory. ut2004 doesn't need to know that any of those programs or their data even exists. But they need to share a download directory (where you can't over-write or delete another user's files, like/tmp) and where I can use a more-trusted file-browser to sort things around between aspects of my overall user account.
Otherwise we're just as vulnerable, once someone gets past our slightly higher walls we're just as unguarded.
I don't think RMS has a problem with Intel CPUs, closed-microcode and all. They at least implement a well-documented interface and don't have secret undocumented instructions for their use only. They sell to the military who sensibly has a policy of requiring a second-source for all of their operations equipment so Intel would be stupid to try to stop this.
It's much harder to clone Windows, largely because Microsoft doesn't want you to. They've deliberately obfuscated as much as possible and they've discussed (see Halloween documents) doing more of this and using software patents to stop anyone from implementing the same functionality.
If Windows was a nice modular part that could be swapped out for another, I don't think RMS would care. I'm sure he'd support writing a replacement, just in case, but I don't think he'd have a problem with its existance. He doesn't seem to mind Oracle, even though it's closed source. Oracle isn't a platform trying to control everything that interfaces with it. All RMS would likely say is that if you use proprietary extensions in Oracle you tie yourself to it.
Much less insane now than fourty years ago. And much less insane again if we think about almost perfect birth control and better STD protection in the future.
If it wasn't for the risk of pregnancy and STDs, would you have a problem with twelve-years olds having sex? Let's even just leave out the issue of any other ages and say with other twelve-year olds.
I'm going to let my children drink when under 18, and probably try some other things that I don't believe will harm them too quickly to learn from. I feel that if I don't do this they'll be unable to drink responsibly when they finally are able. I've seen too many college kids develop severe alcoholism and others merely drink themselves into a stupor, as soon as they get away from their parents and their stifling rules.
Is sex any different? Are people able to make rational choices when they finally sneak out from under your thumb and satisfy their hormones? Hell, even if we educated them about sex instead of keeping them ignorant it'd go a long way. But, I still think that at whatever age we expect young people to use sex to build relationships and consider having children, that we should give them freedom to experiment with it at a younger age so they don't have to make all their mistakes at once, without a safety net.
If we expect people to do all this (relationships, sex and drinking without parental oversite, a job) at ~20ish we should give them a chance to get started earlier when we're there to pick them up. It's why kids are encouraged to mow lawns of have a paper route, why we give them a bit of wine with dinner from a young age, and why, imho, we should let them (as safely as we can ensure) have sex with their peers).
Nobody could ever convince you to be an athiest. We're content to point out contradictions in your precious book and watch you squirm. Watch you dig deeper into the original language to pick another word, where convenient, to bolster your cirular reasoning.
You're only proving that when motivated, people can justify anything and go to incredibly lengths to avoid having to actually take responsibility for their own lives.
Even if you're perfectly right about the meaning in the ancient Hebrew, something which itself is somewhat circular because the bible is a large part of the surviving texts, it's still just a book which makes unsubstantiated claims. Even if you manage to prove that you've got a perfectly pure copy and to somehow read it flawlessly in the language in which it was written, it's still just a story and you've proven nothing about the outside world.
To keep others from looking for answers? They're trying to keep people from eating other fruit. They've done quite well, look at this thread and see how many people believe in something with no proof.
These people don't understand that 'X exists' and 'X doesn't exist', while being the two possible cases, are not necessarily both as likely. If there's no proof that something exists, it's reasonable to act as if it does not.
And why did god say not to do it? Because it was the fruit of knowledge. You get the feeling that we're going in circles here? Maybe because the only evidence for any of this is a book written by its supporters?
Original sin and damning an entire race for one member not following an arbitrary command sounds just as stupid as if the fruit was the reason. Your nit-picking is irrelevant. Either way, your omnipotent god was so upset at his orders not being obeyed that he blamed everyone till the end of time for the sins of their mother.
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The big difference is that mmorpgs reward stupid things, like sitting around for hours, or camping something so that someone else can't get it. There's a reason many people find them to be lame games. At least if they rewarded you fighting or exploring the time spent becomes a side effect. People expect things to take time, yet the hate waiting. Nobody would buy EQ if one of the blurbs on the back was "Sit utterly still for hours, waiting for something to happen!"
What's the difference between a two-hour wait in line to see a movie and watching the two-hour movie?
Didn't you find OoT to be very repetetive? I ran back and forth over the main area (in front of the castle) like thirty times, five minutes per trip. That and gold - every now and then you need a bunch which means you pull up weeds of whack zombies or some other crap until you've got enough gold to play a minigame, where you fail and go collect gold. Dullsville. The only other N64 game I played was Mario 64 with the dumbest controls ever.
Oh, that's not true, I played Mario cart which was pretty cool.
What RPGs actually have 1000 (or even 100) hours of content? You know, NPCs with unique text, new monsters, new items and levels, etc? Walking back and forth over the same dull levels isn't content, fighting yet another randomly generated herd of orcs isn't content.
If a game actually had 1000h of content your point might be meaningful, as is though, those 1000h games could easily be 20h games that could be played in a month or two.
Look at Morrowind for an (admittedly imperfect) example of the plot reminder. It journals all your conversations, keeps quest notes, and provides a map that NPCs mark when describing an area.
The plot is quite complex, but you have enough reminders when coming back that you can read the summary (recent conversations, quest goals, etc) and pick up where you left off. It's as if you could download a summary for the first 161 pages of _The Hunt for Red October_ so you could continue reading it a year later.
As for the cheat issue, which I think you mean to be one of difficulty, I think having cheats does expand the playability of a game. When I played Doom2 excessively I'd warp to a favorite level, give myself all the guns (and use whatever I wanted to that day - often less than I'd have had access to with a save-game) and start playing. If I wanted to explore after playing I could go into god mode and noclip. In GTA3 now I use cheats to summon the vehicle I want without walking the streets to find it - sure it'd have made some missions easy, but I'm an adult, I can choose not to use the cheats if it would ruin something. Having them for the missions I can't get through means that I'll play the rest of the game though (and buy the next edition).
That's a cool idea. Gung-ho players could do more quests at any level and have more stuff to choose from, but not more powerful stuff. And maybe you could have fame-based rewards (ie, not boosting in-game power) for completing more quests. Or perhaps the tutors you find in the city aren't as cool as the ones you quest to find, so you can do more customized characters (who are, overall, just as powerful) if you venture to far-off lands in search of masters.
But you'd be able to come into the game for a few hours every week or two and still be mostly able to play with your friends. They've have funkier customized stuff and more medals and favors from fair maidens, etc, but be killing the same monsters so you could team and not be dead-weight.
You could even rank people by a score based on all the extra playing - a casual player would never be at the top of the ranks, but would at least not be out of the game.
But what if any yahoo could just sit around for twenty hours and pick up some uber item? You've simply switch from rewarding everyone to rewarding people with a ton of time. Personally, I'd rather "work" for my items by going new places and doing new things. If that ends up with me having the same item as many others, so be it. How about having the challenge be to defeat a monster, which could be fairly easy to find, yet hard to do?
If you insist on having different items, create them semi-randomly. For any character who goes through this area create an item for them, with the same overall power as other items created there, but with random powers from a list that would suit the player.
Once you've swalled the idea that everyone can do the same quest and everyone can rescue the same princess from the same ogres, why can't you accept that everyone who does it gets either a +5 longsword, or an item with +5 in something and two powers off of a class-based list?
The computer-voting with paper-ballots is actually a neat idea. It lets you display more information, confirm ballot-correctness, and confirm choices with candidate photos, etc. It then prints out the ballot (in a human-readable fashion - likely looking much like a hand-filled ballot) and you take it to a second (completely seperate) machine to have it verified before dumping it in the box.
The second machine would show you what it thought you voted for on-screen to verify, and would stamp (punch-out, whatever) a second set of validation marks right next to the original choices. This second-level of confirmation ensures that the ballot will be readable later when recounted, avoiding the hanging chad problem. You know it's borderline because the verification and counting machine won't accept it. This last machine also does the official counting (unless a paper recount is ordered) so you get your fast results.
As for actual receipts - I think there's no way to do it right. You can't provide a useful receipt (for proving a miscount), that doesn't let someone force you to provide it as proof of a bought vote. Even creating fake receipts doesn't really work because they *must* be distinguishable at some point or you've created potential evidence of a miscount - you risk the vote-buyer cracking this system and finding out the vote they bought wasn't cast their way.
But, I think the system of dropping paper slips into a box and not letting the box out of sight of many different representatives, all of whom want different results (and to implicate their rivals in vote-spoiling scandals), is secure. Not much need for receipts if the original system is more trustable.
Yawn. You continually berate me for not covering your issues and yet I see very little of this intellectual honesty from you - you keep narrowly defining the issue as best suits you and ignoring everything else.
Regardless of the source of the poll it's meaningless because republicans and democrats are groups that attract different people - if the democrats attract those who are unhappy with the dictates of conservative society, which they seem to do, they are going to have more unhappy supporters. I'm not surprised to see it mentioned on an obviously right-wing site, it's the kind of partisan nonsense that drives US politics. Similar feel-good polls that painted Democrats in a better light (to a Democrat) would find a home on similarly biased leftist sites.
Again yawn, you tell me how I judge, without bothering to address the point of the uselessness of the survey. You tell me my arguments are red-herring, though you are the one bringing up the alarmist "There's no 100% safety", "won't you think of the children" type of argument instead of actually saying what you feel is harmful about sex. There's no 100% safety guarantee with a bike yet parents let their children - children incapable of making sound choices - ride bikes. I think it should be obvious that 100% guarantees aren't possible, nor are they demanded in real-world situations.
I'm curious what kind of sex education you expect to have that will educate children about sexual safety, and yet will discourage any experimentation.
There's no biological reason why people we class as children can't have sex. What argument do you intend to use to convince them to wait to try something that you admit (you will admit this?) is pleasurable.
I simply feel that it's better to accept that they will experiment, that experimentation may include full intercourse, and that you need to prepare for this - the "worst case scenario".
You wouldn't let your 5-year old get a credit card, right?
I would. They make credit cards for kids these days. $20 limit, otherwise the same as normal. Or, the prepaid ones, where it's really a debit card with a visa logo.
there is this thing called "education" that we engage in for years and years before we are expected to stand on our own and get a job.
Exactly. Part of that education is to be given jobs, in the context of school assignments, chores, neighborhood jobs, and such. You learn through these jobs where failure doesn't put you on the street so that hopefully you can succeed when it matters.
It's also immoral, irresponsible and idiotic to ask for a 12-year old that is still mentally a child to make sexual decisions that could potentially affect that child for life.
It's partly that you need to recognize that 12-year olds are playing doctor and will be experimenting. If you hide the issue of sex from them and don't teach them you're more likely to have them get pregnant. Children explore the forbidden.
It's like firearms education. You can hope they never encounter a gun, by making sure you don't have any, and you can scare them, but this doesn't teach them what to do if a friend finds their gun. The same as ignoring the issue of sex, or scaring the child with overblown consequences, isn't going to teach them how to have sex safely when they do.
You have some pre-conceived notions about conservatism == restrictive
Pretty much by definition.
== religious
Often, but not always.
Well, at least the polls seem to disagree with you on your last point:
Hah. That poll was dreck. I'll even ignore that the source is a site that opened with a picture of Reagan and had a very conservative bent.
The poll didn't account for the fact that gays (likely to be less happy because of persecution) are more likely to be democrats (because of the persecution of religious conservatives who are often republicans). It didn't take any steps to sample equivalent populations whose only difference was political platform, and it ranted about marxist coercive utopias.
Can you do better?
If code needs to be secure, and you've got clueful management, that last thing you'll do is write it in-house. Or do you really think you can afford an OS-design team that is 1) perfectly trusted, 2) as skilled as all of the experts working on Linux, or employed at Microsoft, and 3) can put ten years into designing an OS.
You'd be much better off having the same people who'd create your OS verifying an existing OS, be it Embedded Windows, VXWorks, Linux, QNX, or whatever, than trying to reinvent the wheel.
I think it'd be fairly hard to slip broken code into a library like that. Many (most?) large projects have compile-time tests and it's unlikely you could write anything that would get past them, and the array of other code which used your library, and yet mess up trajectory calculations.
I don't think you'd be caught, just that your code would look overly complex, would do odd things (why would a math library need to keep track of which calculations were performed (surely there's no one calculation that is gunnery related) or implement a special-case for one certain subset of numbers?) and that the project maintainer wouldn't accept it. Ugly/Overly-complex code gets rejected all the time.
And yes, it's perfectly reasonable to hire a panel of experts to security-check the Linux kernel and standard libraries. Checking code is at least ten times faster, if not a hundred, than writing it. For something where the vendor might want $10M for a source license you could easily afford to hire a twenty full-time programmers to check the code on an ongoing basis. As a benefit, their checks should also improve stability - they're much more likely to find bugs than trojans.
Further, you may not always do this, but you've got the option. Checking closed-source apps is harder, even with shared-source type projects often you don't get code that will compile so you can't verify that you're checking the code you actually run.
Terrorism, I think, is the intentional targetting of civilians by military units, or military-level weapons. But, if my land was taken away and the bad guy's troops were all safe in tanks, who else would I be able to attack?
So yeah, the definition is pretty convenient. In essence, if you're a nation, it's war, unless you're going against the USA, in which case you're a terrorist. If you're not a nation, you're a terrorist. Note that the definition of nation is conveniently vague.
But yeah, our laws always seemed effective before. Police were allowed to ignore many due-process and search-warrant restrictions when in hot pursuit, or when they could show that they believed they acted to prevent immediate danger. Search warrants were fairly easy to get, but prevented abuse by not allowing fishing trips - they had to state what they expected to find, or see direct evidence of capital crimes. (Dead bodies, etc.)
Seemed reasonable. You could get by most roadblocks to get terrorists and other threats, but you couldn't use any other evidence to get a conviction on some unrelated crime to cover up your failure to find evidence of terrorist conspiracies.
So yeah, the patriot act is a crock. Once you're labelled a terrorist you're as good as guilty.
Atheism is a-theism, the antonym of Theism. Theism is "the doctrine or belief in the existence of a God or gods", so Atheism is "an absense of doctrine of belief in the existense of a god or gods."
If you think it's anything else, or is equivalent to some other religious belief, you're simply wrong. It's just the state of not believing in gods.
As to how an athiest would pick, well, as an athiest, I tend to pick my beliefs to benefit me, and society, which ultimately benefits me. Society is a collection of people who all think of themselves as 'me' and who probably feel much like I do about many things. If I want a stable life I support the civilization I'm in, I do that by supporting those around me unless it greatly inconveniences me.
I don't think an Ant has to have a belief in god to decide to help the colony and in a similar way, I don't have to have a belief in an ultimate right and wrong to feel that my best interests lie with some form of the golden rule and "civilized" behaviour. "When in Rome", to a degree.
What I wonder is why you think you need a god to tell you this. Are you so desperate for someone to take responsibility that you'll take direction from a musty of book just to avoid being in charge of your own actions?
What if aliens make us all sterile? Stick to reality, please.
My question was if your opinions are based on the absence of perfect birth control, you're the one putting words in my mouth. My speculating on the future of medicine seems fine. I wanted you to separate the issues of disease and pregnancy from the issues of morality.
Why complicate a teenager's life when it's already quite difficult to begin with?
My stance is that teens shouldn't be punished for exploring their sexuality; that they shouldn't be kept ignorant of the issues. How does letting them do what may come natural count as complicating their life? I think restrictive rules and secrecy are the complications.
However, going off the deep end at the other extreme and attempting to reduce intercourse to a mere recreational activity is furtile, pointless, and immature, because by definition intercourse is not a purely recreational activity.
The pill is futile, pointless, and immature? That is what you're saying, because it attempts to reduce intercourse to a recreational activity. Strange, I'd have said that the pill has been the greatest single liberating influence for women.
What does sex early in life has to do with maturity?
What does being exposed to responsible drinking early in life have to do with drinking responsibly later in life? In my opinion, it makes a huge difference. Similarly, I think being exposed to responsible sexuality and not being forbidden to explore that side of yourself would make someone more responsible later.
The basic issue is, can you shelter someone away from a certain desirable activity (the intoxication of drinking, the attraction of sex, etc) for their entire youth and then expect them to make responsible decisions on their own, when suddenly over-exposed? Can you expect a child who has never worked and isn't encouraged to put time into extra-curricular activities to suddenly get a job and support themselves?
The most successful, meaninful relationships that I know of are among some of my most conservative friends
Are you sure that the issue isn't just that their religions forbid divorce? Many people enter and stay in unfulfilling relationships simply because they don't feel they have a choice. Also, "sexually liberal" sounds like it could be the sexual version of alcoholism - in other words, exactly what I'm saying people need help avoiding. I don't think everyone needs to run around having orgies - just that people not deny children the ability to explore. Help them decide, mutually, where they feel comfortable instead of dictating what they must not do or talk about.
In the final analysis, previous sexual activity determines nearly nothing when it comes to future happiness. Where do you get the outlandish assumption that it does?
Perhaps from seeing many examples of children with liberal parents who can handle sex, drinking, and drugs in a responsible manner (which can mean abstinence). Also, from seeing many children from restrictive families who fall into serious alcohol/drug abuse problems or who can't seem to understand the difference between sexual attraction and love and who get into serious problems because of it.
And inevitably, some schmuck comes along and points out a fairly trivial point that invalidates someone's joke of "Foo, but ... ON A COMPUTER", makes an anti-anti-patent rant, as if the system must not be broken just because if you look through all seventeen pages of lawyerese there's a single new idea.
I hope you aren't gunning for an 'insightful' mod.
It doesn't take a patent lawyer to judge the worthiness of the system. (There's a perfect example of attempting to put a fox in charge of the henhouse.) It only takes someone who can see that the patent office sees nothing wrong with the single-click patent (or any patent on a result for that matter) or with RAMBUS's submarine tactics. Both of these are obvious innovation stifling patents, yet the PTO's comment is that it's not their job to validate patents... !?!
So, because they've got some budget trouble, they issue government-mandated monopolies to people on whole areas of technology, making it the responsibility of everyone else to police the system. That's like me saying I can't afford to do my job and charging you, at random, for the results of fixing my lack of work.
But yeah, I don't have a degree in patent law so obviously I can't see how patents are getting broader and broader, until they barely mention any specific technology, and are being used to blackmail whole industries.
Yeah, and I know there are weird things on every CPU. I guess I should say that while stuff like this slips in, it doesn't get used by Intel's code, leaving everyone else's in the dust.
Intel doesn't (seem to; I don't know if they do) use these things to lock people in.
I don't think you fully understand 'stable'. It's API stability not code stability that is traditional in even-numbered kernel versions.
There's never been a guarantee that you can grab the latest code from kernel.org and have a well-running system, it's like grabbing the nightly of Mozilla, or a random WinXP build.
Anyone who needs stability, Linux "customers", will use the kernels their distribution provides and won't know any different, just as it's always worked.
In the 2.4 stream there were some stinkers, some kernels no distro switched to. Just the same as there will be in 2.6 - RedHat will run their own tests, as well as seeing how 2.6.x runs in the wild, before they package it (with any RedHat addons) and make it available for non-hackers.
By the time you know how to download and compile a kernel you're expected to know when not to. If you don't need a new feature, don't switch. If it's not broken, don't fix it. If you do switch, don't replace a live server until you've tested it.
Does the fact that I can get a beta of the next version of Windows mean I should migrate my servers to it and then blame Microsoft when alpha software lives up to expectations?
You could probably convince the big companies to do this. You know, the ones that have a product and expect to profit based on its merits.
Good luck convincing assholes like SCO though, who exist only to leech money from those people who actually create things.
But because of this, and because Intel or AMD or anyone could turn into a SCO if they missed a generation (think 3Dfx) you need to change the patent laws. 1) Allow independent discovery. 2) Automatically refuse to enforce any submarine patents. 3) Don't allow continuations to extend the scope (part of #2). Implement those, and of course, some decent checking of what is actually new, not merely "... over a packet-switching network" and you'll clear up most of the problems. Even software patents could be tolerated if they were actually new and useful ideas, instead of rehashed crap, or UI patents, and perhaps if the terms were a bit shorter. As is, even if we ban software patents the whole system is still worse than useless.
Trusted computing won't stop bugs, an outlook bug will still let a worm spread to other broken copies of outlook, deleting files as it goes. All trusted computing will do is prevent you installing a mail program from someone Microsoft doesn't "trust" (ie, no kickbacks).
If any of these ideas were actually for the benefit of the user they might be reasonable, but they're for the benefit of the media companies.
Unfortunately, if we want computers to be complex enough to be powerful we're going to be able to cause problems if we misuse them. At some point users need to take responsibility for computers, much as they would for their car. As the parent poster said, you might not have any idea what an "oilchange" is, or what a "brokenfanbelt" is, but you know that you need to get the car serviced regularly and that if a warning light is on it needs special attention. If you can't do it you hire someone. If you ignore or bypass the warnings and run a car that you should know isn't fit to drive you will be responsible for any harm you cause.
This is true even of lawn-mowers and propane barbeques which we don't require a license to buy. Why can't it be true of computers?
The problem is that the underlying architecture *could* stop worms and trojans but it doesn't. All that stops them is obscurity.
/' the computer would keep purring along. My servers would keep serving, nobody outside would notice. But I'd lose everything I care about. (I do have backups, but this is a what-if.) OS installs are easy these days, but recreating my thousands of documents, reripping my MP3s, losing my photos. These things are a pretty nasty consequence and I'm no safer in Linux than in Windows, except that I (possibly) pick better applications. One bug in my email client though and I'm hosed.
/tmp) and where I can use a more-trusted file-browser to sort things around between aspects of my overall user account.
Don't get me wrong, I run Linux at home and I love the security, but I know that every configure script I run could contain harmful code. I know that a trojaned version of a mozilla pluggin could run with my privs and wipe out everything I can access.
What we need to do is run every application as a seperate user. You wouldn't run Apache and sshd as the same user, or run an ftp server as any user with anything other than read access to a chrooted environment, but people feel really comfortable running ut2004, Mozilla/Thunderbird/etc, konsole, BitTorrent, AcroRead, GQView, and a million other programs that could all have a buffer overflow (remember when the JPEG virus was just a myth?) and execute arbitrary attack code.
Sure, if I, as a user, typed 'rm -rf
What we need is for Mozilla to run as wnight-mozilla, for ut2004 to run as wnight-ut, for gqview to run as wnight-gqview, etc. They'd all use (behind the scenes, the user could have a nice GUI for this) symlinks and user groups to get permission to access their files from a stripped-down home directory. If I use Firefox and Thunderbird, Firefox never needs to see my email directory, even with read access. GQView never needs to see it either, or my firefox directory. ut2004 doesn't need to know that any of those programs or their data even exists. But they need to share a download directory (where you can't over-write or delete another user's files, like
Otherwise we're just as vulnerable, once someone gets past our slightly higher walls we're just as unguarded.
I don't think RMS has a problem with Intel CPUs, closed-microcode and all. They at least implement a well-documented interface and don't have secret undocumented instructions for their use only. They sell to the military who sensibly has a policy of requiring a second-source for all of their operations equipment so Intel would be stupid to try to stop this.
It's much harder to clone Windows, largely because Microsoft doesn't want you to. They've deliberately obfuscated as much as possible and they've discussed (see Halloween documents) doing more of this and using software patents to stop anyone from implementing the same functionality.
If Windows was a nice modular part that could be swapped out for another, I don't think RMS would care. I'm sure he'd support writing a replacement, just in case, but I don't think he'd have a problem with its existance. He doesn't seem to mind Oracle, even though it's closed source. Oracle isn't a platform trying to control everything that interfaces with it. All RMS would likely say is that if you use proprietary extensions in Oracle you tie yourself to it.
Much less insane now than fourty years ago. And much less insane again if we think about almost perfect birth control and better STD protection in the future.
If it wasn't for the risk of pregnancy and STDs, would you have a problem with twelve-years olds having sex? Let's even just leave out the issue of any other ages and say with other twelve-year olds.
I'm going to let my children drink when under 18, and probably try some other things that I don't believe will harm them too quickly to learn from. I feel that if I don't do this they'll be unable to drink responsibly when they finally are able. I've seen too many college kids develop severe alcoholism and others merely drink themselves into a stupor, as soon as they get away from their parents and their stifling rules.
Is sex any different? Are people able to make rational choices when they finally sneak out from under your thumb and satisfy their hormones? Hell, even if we educated them about sex instead of keeping them ignorant it'd go a long way. But, I still think that at whatever age we expect young people to use sex to build relationships and consider having children, that we should give them freedom to experiment with it at a younger age so they don't have to make all their mistakes at once, without a safety net.
If we expect people to do all this (relationships, sex and drinking without parental oversite, a job) at ~20ish we should give them a chance to get started earlier when we're there to pick them up. It's why kids are encouraged to mow lawns of have a paper route, why we give them a bit of wine with dinner from a young age, and why, imho, we should let them (as safely as we can ensure) have sex with their peers).
Nobody could ever convince you to be an athiest. We're content to point out contradictions in your precious book and watch you squirm. Watch you dig deeper into the original language to pick another word, where convenient, to bolster your cirular reasoning.
You're only proving that when motivated, people can justify anything and go to incredibly lengths to avoid having to actually take responsibility for their own lives.
Even if you're perfectly right about the meaning in the ancient Hebrew, something which itself is somewhat circular because the bible is a large part of the surviving texts, it's still just a book which makes unsubstantiated claims. Even if you manage to prove that you've got a perfectly pure copy and to somehow read it flawlessly in the language in which it was written, it's still just a story and you've proven nothing about the outside world.
Congrats.
To keep others from looking for answers? They're trying to keep people from eating other fruit. They've done quite well, look at this thread and see how many people believe in something with no proof.
These people don't understand that 'X exists' and 'X doesn't exist', while being the two possible cases, are not necessarily both as likely. If there's no proof that something exists, it's reasonable to act as if it does not.
And why did god say not to do it? Because it was the fruit of knowledge. You get the feeling that we're going in circles here? Maybe because the only evidence for any of this is a book written by its supporters?
Original sin and damning an entire race for one member not following an arbitrary command sounds just as stupid as if the fruit was the reason. Your nit-picking is irrelevant. Either way, your omnipotent god was so upset at his orders not being obeyed that he blamed everyone till the end of time for the sins of their mother.