Then go looking for news articles about kids being lured to their death by people in chat rooms, etc. You'll find plenty.
Then go looking for news articles about people dying in freak accidents, like being struck by lightning. You'll find plenty.
Doesn't mean you should avoid the outdoors, or cower in the basement every time you hear thunder.
Nor does it mean you should walk out onto a field in a lightning storm, wearing armor and a carrying a metal javelin.
I mean seriously, some of the arguments here are positively inane. Have you no common sense? Do you think that simply because something is possible you should open your mouth like a baby bird and consume everything that is shoveled down your throat? Do you read every spam message that comes into your mailbox? Buy every product you see advertised? Rent every video ever made just because it's there?
The point is, every human being has filters. Whether you use the filter between your ears, use the delete key judiciously, use search engines, or use actual filtering programs, you're finding ways to view only certain data. Young children don't have the mental capacity to enact all those filters in healthy ways. Parents do. Of course, parents have to gauge when to be protective and when to let go. That's difficult. But that's parenting.
Part of how we define who we are is by what we don't do. I don't rape women, worship Satan, or kill people who disagree with me. That is part of what I want to convey to my children.
Are some parents too restrictive, and some parents too permissive? Yes. But most parents are simply trying to raise their kids to be good human beings -- by their own definition, not yours. You have your own kids, you raise them your way. You certainly cannot discredit the concept of filtering information just because someone does it differently than you would.
I'll give a couple, because I'm not really that interested in writing a long diatribe on problems with your bible or monotheism as a whole.
The examples you gave are also terrible for citing as problematic. Look, I don't want to train non-Christians on how to criticize the Bible, but what you really need to do is find factual errors that are not easy to write off as allegory or translation errors. Your Leviticus quote is never cited in Russian layman critiques of the Bible, because the translation to Russian never implied birds with 4 legs. Similarly, the Russian Bible has a whole host of "errors" that English speakers never stumbled upon, because our language didn't have the same issues.
If you want some real examples of factual errors in the Bible, look for internal conflicts, where instead of being in error with what we know now, it is in error with itself. Here is an example: the last words of Jesus are different, depending upon what page you're on. Luke 23 says "Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit." And John 19 says "It is finished." Matthew 27 has something too, but Matthew added that Jesus "cried out" again without specifying what Jesus said. So Matthew isn't really definitive about the last words of Christ. In any case, when you cite Luke and John, most Christians will tell you that it's just different accounts from different Biblical authors. The problem? Well if it's just people writin' stuff, it ain't the Word of God. The Bible is supposed to be divinely written, perfect in every way. So the conflicting declarations about the last words of Jesus sorta poke a hole in the whole inerrancy thing. Here's another one: Judas dies differently, depending upon the Biblical account you're reading. If the Bible is truth from God, then how can God get the death of his own betrayer wrong? OK? See where I'm going with this? There is no need to go after weak mis-translation errors when there are real problems that even Christians such as myself are struggling with.
There is also Exodus 21:22, wherein God commands that if a man strikes a woman and causes a child to be stillborn, it's "eye for eye, life for life."
Actually, that is not what it says. As another poster pointed out, it clearly says that the punishment for causing a miscarriage is a fine, but that if any other harm follows (presumably to the mother) it's life for life, etc.
I like how you conveniently left out this line from my original post:
I think that verse is ambiguous. Depending on the translation, it doesn't always use the word "stillborn" and so it might be talking about harm to the mother.
Nice selective quoting. Your post sounds like a rebuttal, but is actually simply restating what I already said.
Nowhere in the bible does it say 'abortion = murder' or 'an unborn child is a full fledged human being' or anything like that.
Well, it doesn't say it word-for-word, but since you added "or anything like that" to the end of your declaration, I'd have to disagree. There is God's vision to Jeremiah, when God says in Jeremiah 1:5, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." There is also Exodus 21:22, wherein God commands that if a man strikes a woman and causes a child to be stillborn, it's "eye for eye, life for life." However, I think that verse is ambiguous. Depending on the translation, it doesn't always use the word "stillborn" and so it might be talking about harm to the mother. But in any case, there is another verse which I cannot find without scanning through my whole Bible for highlights. In that verse, a man is condemned for striking his wife in the stomach and killing his unborn son. If I find it at home tonight I might try to email it to you. In any case, if I were you, I'd find some other problems with the Bible, because this problem doesn't appear to be as you suggest.
If "gets it right" has anything to do with "met customer demand" then no, they did not get it right. The reason fans would be upset about the missing Kaboom! game is because that's the one they wanted. If there was a dictionary entry for "getting a retro paddle device right" it would be defined as "includes Kaboom!"
Oh well. I'm sure some of the people reading this will be happy with the other games. I'll just keep waiting for Activision's version, I guess.
Let's say the game reversed the roles so that the player took on the role of a military/militia team or a terrorist cell and the missions involved removing 'The American Threat' from Iraq?
Three Kings is a celebrated movie about Iraq that initially focuses on some US soldiers, but switches into a story about "removing the American threat from Iraq." It wasn't as extreme as your "what if" scenario, and didn't glorify the massacre of US soldiers, but it did portray the people killing US soldiers as sympathetic underdogs. It won a number of awards and made a lot of money in the US. That's a real example of something critical of the US not only surviving, but flourishing here. Of course, I suspect the more hard-core-anti-US things get, the less well they will do in the US. And I suspect that any game that involves executing US civilians will get criticised by Senators & Representatives. Hell, they already criticize games like GTA, which "merely" involve US citizens killing other US citizens. But I don't think any US President would react to any game by saying that the Iraq citizens would suffer terrible real-world retribution that leaves them all dead.
And Ghost Recon doesn't involve US agents kidnapping and executing innocent citizens. It's only military combatants versus military combatants. So your "what if" is a little too extreme to apply here. At least, I personally can't apply it to the current situation without thinking "apple and oranges" in my head.
(Hmm. And since I made a concession in my other post, let me make a concession here too. I personally do not ever play these games. I find any real-world scenario to be in poor taste, whether it favors the US or not. I do like shooters, but I play Unreal & Tribes. My closest encounter with a "real world" scenario is RTCW, which is fairly removed from reality. Still, playing a terrorist sounds like an interesting game. But probably not a profitable one.)
If your point is "these games are bad, have some sympathy for the North Koreans" then I think your point has backfired.
No, actually my point was that we shouldn't bash North Korea for doing something that I have a sneaking suspicion that the US would do just as easily.
"Have some sympathy" and "shouldn't bash" == same concept, different words IMHO.
In any case, let's go with your correction. I'm suggesting that the 8 or 9 replies to your comment all refuted the idea that the US would do the same thing. The US has more laws requiring free speech, and cannot as "easily" shut something down. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but it is to say that terrorism laws would have to be twisted and used in a overreaching manner to censor such a thing. And even though that is possible, I don't think it's plausible. We've had many US-critical media items that went unchallenged or were even celebrated/used by the military or the public. In the US, outlawing something makes it stronger. We learned at least a little from prohibition.
But I'm not even sure we need to talk about how the US would stop such a game, because your original question merely asked how the US would react to its existence, not how it would react if it was sold in the USA. And so I stick by my original comment that some people would view such a game made by Canadians as yet another indiciation of their estrangement from us, but others wouldn't care or would ignore it. In fact, if there is one criticism of the US that is real and applies here, it's that we collectively ignore everyone else. There are people who care. We are a huge melting pot of ideas & cultures. But as a whole, we're only paying attention to what's here. So if Canada makes a game, it's all of a 5-second sound byte on the evening news that 1% of the country will watch, and then it's gone. The President certainly wouldn't frame it in the context of a real-world war.
To expand on that, I mean to say that it would be very, VERY HARD for the leader of the USA to threaten that such a game will become real and result in horrific deaths for the North Koreans. A US President cannot make outrageous threats like that without having the entire planet brace for war. But NK's leaders can, because no one on the planet believes them. I do believe they could get dirty bombs into the US and hurt us, but I also believe they would end up bombed worse than Japan in retaliation. The idea that NK would emerge victorious is remote. They wouldn't "emerge" at all. And so no, our leaders cannot "easily" react the same way their leaders have.
(As a slight concession to you, I would submit that if we were to elect someone even worse than Bush, someone who was even more of a poorly-spoken war-mongerer, then yeah, maybe the US could react the same. This would be disastrous, and millions of people would die due to an abuse of power beyond anything we've ever seen. But that's fiction, and even in the real world, Bush barely won. In fact some will say the only way he got the presidency was to bypass the voters and sue for it. I intend to vote against him again. So hopefully our democracy is more self-correcting than North Korea, too.)
If your point is "these games are bad, have some sympathy for the North Koreans" then I think your point has backfired.
I'm just curious what your reaction would be if someone in Canada made a game that depicted a revolution against a tyranical US President (just for argument's sake let's say George W), and put you in the role of a terrorist/revolutionary?
Some would suggest it was yet another indication of how estranged Canadians have become lately, to be sure. But not a single person would suggest that it doomed Canadians to horrible deaths in an upcoming war. As an interesting side note, I would mention that while the USA has strong laws preventing censorship of unpopular ideas, I do believe that there is a law about killing a sitting US president: something like you can't advocate it. So I can write this as an intellectual discussion with no worries, and I can criticise the government and the President with no worries. But if I suggest that killing the President is a good idea, I believe the Feds will come knocking. Which means that your game might have to avoid depicting a real President and offering him as a real target in a game. But to be honest, I'm not sure. The last time I heard about that law was 15 years ago.
Or how about a game that let you play as Osama Bin Laden. How do you suppose Americans would like the game? Would there be a public outcry? Would the government try to censor it?
I'm not sure about an "outcry" but the game would probably be panned. Personally, a game that allowed me to try out terrorist tactics sounds interesting. I imagine that the US government would not censor it, but if it were done well enough, might strike a contract with the developer to use the game for training/simulations with soldiers. They've done it before.
I agree with your suggestion that ESR should be Chaotic Neutral. My old DM's guide describes CN as self-interested, unpredictable, and hard to control. Very often, paranoid or crazy people. That sounds more accurate than Chaotic Evil, which implies the wholesale destruction of society and life as we know it.
But the grandparent, which suggested that Linus should be Neutral Good? Naaaah. Linus never ever takes sides. Even if he did take a side on some things, it would be a drop in the bucket. His neutrality is firmly established. He is on the side of technology, and doesn't sem to care about the implications of his work. I think calling Linus True Neutral is correct.
PS: Yay! I'm a D&D geek! There's probably a 24-hour cooling-off period after I post this, where my wife will refuse sex until I regain some sense of non-geekness. But for now, I revel in my pasty-skinned +1 alpha-dork glory!
1) Getting out of the atmosphere. 2) Getting to low orbit. 3) Getting anywhere else.
4) Getting back.
(I don't mean this as a "funny" post. Doesn't getting back to Earth involve a huge number of problems? Such as: atmosphere; avoidance of crash landings in civilized areas; and a few other things that don't matter if you just intend to land on the moon or Mars.)
Maybe he doesn't hold the official title of CEO, but he still owns the company, and it is operated under his direction.
Well, in his blog he says, "I have not worked there for over two years." If he's actually lying or stretching the truth a whole lot, then you're right, he's a dick. If he's telling the truth and you're just so pissed at him that you have to get one more pot-shot in, then you're a dick. Somebody's a dick, I don't know who. But the point is that it doesn't matter anymore. Why? Because he's getting out. OK? If you're so upset with his handling of free accounts, well, congratulations. Dave is marginalizing himself and providing a perfect opportunity for others to come in and do better. So cheer up. Get your blog back on July 1st, wave goodbye to him, and let him walk away.
You also seem to believe it when Dave says he's getting out of the hosting business. Wrong again.
So what if he has paid hosting? Take your business elsewhere! Why stress yourself out interacting with someone who "treats you like shit even if you're a paying customer"? Stop being a paying customer!
So it is not too surprising that people jump at the chance to respond to Winer's insanity in a forum that isn't controlled by Winer.
Fair enough. But it's also fair for other people to wonder where exactly the problem is. Free or paid, the solution is in front of you.
So if you haven't sucked up to Winer sufficiently, your blog is toast. Such are the tribulations of dealing with millionaire dilletantes.
Well shoot. I've already doled out 3 mod points here, but I'm going to give them up so I can post. Apologies to the 3 people who see their nice "+1 Informative" mods vanish.
Look, I think your post (and many of the posts here) are overly harsh. They should be harsh to an extent, because something bad has happened that didn't have to happen. Dave made a mistake. But to rip into the guy as if we're entitled? C'mon.
For those of you haven't bothered to listen to Dave's audio blog, he explains exactly the criticisms leveled here. Does the/. readership understand that Dave hasn't worked at Userland for years? He saw Userland wanted to dump the blogs and tried to move it to his own private server. This worked poorly. In the audio blog he explains that if he put the server up as-is and gave people 2 weeks to download the sites, it would have hammered his server, which was already in use for other things. You might say he should have fixed the server, and his response is already in the blog -- it would have taken a big time investment, and he's not healthy enough to do it.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve some criticism. If you listen to his audio blog, you'll get the clear impression that he's tired of trying to help people who act as hyper-critical (about free stuff!) as some of our Slashdot posters. That's his right of course, but he could exit more gracefully, I'm sure. And posting a 3.5 meg audio blog has to hammer his server almost as much as 3000 site backups would. So there's weird stuff. But the real issue ought to be Userland. Why couldn't they host the site for 2 more weeks? They have healthy employees. They might have even been able to turn it into a business opportunity if they made it easy to migrate to Manila or another paid service.
Give the rich boy a break. He tried to do right, it didn't work out, and now he wants to stop. OK. Ask him for your blog back, and when you get it, stay the hell away from centralized servers run by a single entity. Host your own. Use my low-end phpBB Blog, or Bloxom, or anything else. Some of these blog tools are even easy.
I don't know the full scope of your group yet. However, I would ask for a couple things, if they are appropriate for your group to look at. First, I'd favor the XHTML 1.0 standard over plain HTML if you're looking for a foundation. Second, forms need more form field types. I need disclosure triangles or the [+] expand/collapse widget. I need HTMLArea to be a simple tag, like textarea is. I need HTMLArea to take a simple list of allowed or disallowed tags. Something like this:
<htmlarea allowed="p,br,b,i,em,strong,ul,ol,li">formatted text, sent in as XHTML 1.0</htmlarea>
Possibly we should be able to specify which spec the formatted text should adhere to. If we could specify whether an htmlarea should use CSS or tables for formatting, that would be nice. If we can't specify, it should default to CSS, not tables. I'd also like better menus for forms (or select boxes) that allow for nesting (which is already in the spec, but implemented nowhere I can find), as well as the combo boxes (these allow for keying in AND getting a menu). Drag & drop of files onto a file upload field would be excellent. For that matter, if you could drag & drop them onto any area designated as a drop zone, that would be great.
Oh, and forms need a standardized Help widget/icon. I know I can turn my cursor into a question mark, but I'm looking for something simple and pervasive. Maybe you can wrap fields in a help tag, just as you do for fieldsets. And in that help tag, attributes are available that allow for a nice, formatted, clean, full help text popup/area/thing.
Down near the end of this usenet post I wrote last month I talk about how the W3C has been a disappointment lately. Many of the specs I see from them are written for computer parsers, not humans. This is far different from the specs back in the heyday of Web growth. Lately it feels like following the W3C is like following a bureaucracy. It used to feel like I was having a conversation with fellow developers, people who were really into building Web sites and wanted to provide good, standardized ways to do more.
The bottom line is that if this new group can produce more developer-friendly documents that better address real-world problems, then I will support it. If they can get the KHTML team on board, then that's a huge bonus. Trying to do more within the realm of what already exists (rather than scrapping the old and starting again) is the right thing. It's refactoring. It's smart.
I dunno, whenever my girlfriend blames the computer for not doing "what [she] wants it to do", I usually roll my eyes and figure she's just not doing something right.
...and...
I've programmed C for 10+ years, but I still make mistakes now and again and can't figure out why the hell I'm leaking memory here or there.
How about: groan, another competitor that will claim to be somehow better than Open Office, but actually lags in enough areas to make it not worth it. I'm sorry, but Open Office has mindshare. In my opinion, it has even eclipsed Star Office. It's what I select by default for any Linux install. It's what I installed on my wife's Windows box when she insisted that we copy MS Office from a friend rather than pay for it. For all I know, she might think I did give her MS Office.
If you run a phpBB forum, you can grab my add-on phpBB Blog to turn a forum into a blog. Also, I have a beta available of the next release. I'd love input.
Also, since this is the Open Source world where cooperation is welcomed, I thought I'd mention that phpBB Fetch All is a blog system that I didn't know about when I made phpBB Blog. phpBB Fetch All is superior to my system, although it is also bigger and more complicated. But it sure looks good.
I also understand the "millions of eyeballs" argument, but doesn't that really apply again to the "big guys." Does anyone really believe that literally millions of people have done detailed reviews of the myriad small programs and libraries present on a typical open source operating system?
I have two software products, very small, that I've put out into the wild. I licensed them under BSD, so it's open source. My program PHPortfolio had a weakness in version 1.0. It only worked if installed at the top-level of a Web server. The first few people who installed my software coded up patches for themselves, and sent bug reports to me. In a later version, the thumbnailing feature was poorly done, and someone "donated" a few lines of code to improve it. So yes, the "eyeballs" argument seems to work even for small projects. Although they didn't give me their patches in every case (which is OK by the BSD license), they did give me bug reports.
I also have a program called phpBB Blog which, if you look in my forums, has a 1.0 beta out. A handful of people have downloaded it, but I've had no bug reports & no patches so far. In this case, it looks like the extra eyeballs (and there are a few) are not doing me much good. Or else the code is solid, which I doubt.:)
In any case, I think the open source model does work on a small level for small projects and it works on a big level for big projects. I suspect the only place it would fall apart is trying to tackle a big project with only a small base of support/fans. Having only a very few eyeballs scanning over a huge codebase doesn't sound like it can ensure high quality in the majority of such cases. That might need some cathedral-style development.
I'll probably be modded down for plugging my own work, but I wrote a very simple blogging tool that uses phpBB to manage blog entries and replies. It's phpBB Blog, and it's available under the new BSD license (no advertising clause). So it's free beer and free speech. I'll have a new version release in early June. Maybe some of the MT defectors here could consider it (although really, it's quite simple, probably not useful to many MT fans).
Hi Jeremy. One of the advantages I don't see Wine exploiting is that Wine doesn't have any financial need to constantly force users to the latest and greatest version of Windows. Microsoft of course is happy to deprecate features, change APIs, and so on. Why doesn't Wine offer different codebases as different "versions" of Windows are needed?
I've seen some of this -- as I setup Wine, I can select what kind of Windows widgets I want to use (95 or 98). But I've also seen some apps work for a while and then stop working as the codebase is updated. If I were able to say "run my BG2 game as Win 98" and "run my Office XP as Win XP" and so on, I could end up with a Windows that is more powerful and more capable than Windows itself. And possibly more stable too, if I can match my software to the version of Windows that ran it best.
Does anyone know what kernel SUSE 9.1 will contain? And will it be custom-tweaked with the laptop patch or any other last-minute extras? I'm just curious what I'll be missing if I stick with 9.1's default kernel.
Well, you missed one small thing: they used "PC CRPG" to describe Dragon Age, not "action RPG." Which hints that it will be more like Baldur's Gate (in concept, not exact implemention, I'm sure). Lots of NPCs, party banter, more stealth/diplomacy options, strategic fighting. Yummy. Or am I reading too much into it?:)
But anyway, I do agree that it's important to note that they're not using D&D or D20 rules. This means they own their content and engine fully. They're beholden to no one, and won't experience what Interplay went through (they had their license revoked before BG3 could be published). I also have high hopes that this will mean no legacy weirdness (the distinction between wizards and sorcerers is, IMHO, wholly done to appease old AD&D players). A new set of classes and skill system could make for a much more enjoyable game.
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Nor does it mean you should walk out onto a field in a lightning storm, wearing armor and a carrying a metal javelin.
I mean seriously, some of the arguments here are positively inane. Have you no common sense? Do you think that simply because something is possible you should open your mouth like a baby bird and consume everything that is shoveled down your throat? Do you read every spam message that comes into your mailbox? Buy every product you see advertised? Rent every video ever made just because it's there?
The point is, every human being has filters. Whether you use the filter between your ears, use the delete key judiciously, use search engines, or use actual filtering programs, you're finding ways to view only certain data. Young children don't have the mental capacity to enact all those filters in healthy ways. Parents do. Of course, parents have to gauge when to be protective and when to let go. That's difficult. But that's parenting.
Part of how we define who we are is by what we don't do. I don't rape women, worship Satan, or kill people who disagree with me. That is part of what I want to convey to my children.
Are some parents too restrictive, and some parents too permissive? Yes. But most parents are simply trying to raise their kids to be good human beings -- by their own definition, not yours. You have your own kids, you raise them your way. You certainly cannot discredit the concept of filtering information just because someone does it differently than you would.
The examples you gave are also terrible for citing as problematic. Look, I don't want to train non-Christians on how to criticize the Bible, but what you really need to do is find factual errors that are not easy to write off as allegory or translation errors. Your Leviticus quote is never cited in Russian layman critiques of the Bible, because the translation to Russian never implied birds with 4 legs. Similarly, the Russian Bible has a whole host of "errors" that English speakers never stumbled upon, because our language didn't have the same issues.
If you want some real examples of factual errors in the Bible, look for internal conflicts, where instead of being in error with what we know now, it is in error with itself. Here is an example: the last words of Jesus are different, depending upon what page you're on. Luke 23 says "Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit." And John 19 says "It is finished." Matthew 27 has something too, but Matthew added that Jesus "cried out" again without specifying what Jesus said. So Matthew isn't really definitive about the last words of Christ. In any case, when you cite Luke and John, most Christians will tell you that it's just different accounts from different Biblical authors. The problem? Well if it's just people writin' stuff, it ain't the Word of God. The Bible is supposed to be divinely written, perfect in every way. So the conflicting declarations about the last words of Jesus sorta poke a hole in the whole inerrancy thing. Here's another one: Judas dies differently, depending upon the Biblical account you're reading. If the Bible is truth from God, then how can God get the death of his own betrayer wrong? OK? See where I'm going with this? There is no need to go after weak mis-translation errors when there are real problems that even Christians such as myself are struggling with.
I like how you conveniently left out this line from my original post:
Nice selective quoting. Your post sounds like a rebuttal, but is actually simply restating what I already said.
Well, it doesn't say it word-for-word, but since you added "or anything like that" to the end of your declaration, I'd have to disagree. There is God's vision to Jeremiah, when God says in Jeremiah 1:5, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." There is also Exodus 21:22, wherein God commands that if a man strikes a woman and causes a child to be stillborn, it's "eye for eye, life for life." However, I think that verse is ambiguous. Depending on the translation, it doesn't always use the word "stillborn" and so it might be talking about harm to the mother. But in any case, there is another verse which I cannot find without scanning through my whole Bible for highlights. In that verse, a man is condemned for striking his wife in the stomach and killing his unborn son. If I find it at home tonight I might try to email it to you. In any case, if I were you, I'd find some other problems with the Bible, because this problem doesn't appear to be as you suggest.
If "gets it right" has anything to do with "met customer demand" then no, they did not get it right. The reason fans would be upset about the missing Kaboom! game is because that's the one they wanted. If there was a dictionary entry for "getting a retro paddle device right" it would be defined as "includes Kaboom!"
Oh well. I'm sure some of the people reading this will be happy with the other games. I'll just keep waiting for Activision's version, I guess.
Three Kings is a celebrated movie about Iraq that initially focuses on some US soldiers, but switches into a story about "removing the American threat from Iraq." It wasn't as extreme as your "what if" scenario, and didn't glorify the massacre of US soldiers, but it did portray the people killing US soldiers as sympathetic underdogs. It won a number of awards and made a lot of money in the US. That's a real example of something critical of the US not only surviving, but flourishing here. Of course, I suspect the more hard-core-anti-US things get, the less well they will do in the US. And I suspect that any game that involves executing US civilians will get criticised by Senators & Representatives. Hell, they already criticize games like GTA, which "merely" involve US citizens killing other US citizens. But I don't think any US President would react to any game by saying that the Iraq citizens would suffer terrible real-world retribution that leaves them all dead.
And Ghost Recon doesn't involve US agents kidnapping and executing innocent citizens. It's only military combatants versus military combatants. So your "what if" is a little too extreme to apply here. At least, I personally can't apply it to the current situation without thinking "apple and oranges" in my head.
(Hmm. And since I made a concession in my other post, let me make a concession here too. I personally do not ever play these games. I find any real-world scenario to be in poor taste, whether it favors the US or not. I do like shooters, but I play Unreal & Tribes. My closest encounter with a "real world" scenario is RTCW, which is fairly removed from reality. Still, playing a terrorist sounds like an interesting game. But probably not a profitable one.)
"Have some sympathy" and "shouldn't bash" == same concept, different words IMHO.
In any case, let's go with your correction. I'm suggesting that the 8 or 9 replies to your comment all refuted the idea that the US would do the same thing. The US has more laws requiring free speech, and cannot as "easily" shut something down. That's not to say it couldn't happen, but it is to say that terrorism laws would have to be twisted and used in a overreaching manner to censor such a thing. And even though that is possible, I don't think it's plausible. We've had many US-critical media items that went unchallenged or were even celebrated/used by the military or the public. In the US, outlawing something makes it stronger. We learned at least a little from prohibition.
But I'm not even sure we need to talk about how the US would stop such a game, because your original question merely asked how the US would react to its existence, not how it would react if it was sold in the USA. And so I stick by my original comment that some people would view such a game made by Canadians as yet another indiciation of their estrangement from us, but others wouldn't care or would ignore it. In fact, if there is one criticism of the US that is real and applies here, it's that we collectively ignore everyone else. There are people who care. We are a huge melting pot of ideas & cultures. But as a whole, we're only paying attention to what's here. So if Canada makes a game, it's all of a 5-second sound byte on the evening news that 1% of the country will watch, and then it's gone. The President certainly wouldn't frame it in the context of a real-world war.
To expand on that, I mean to say that it would be very, VERY HARD for the leader of the USA to threaten that such a game will become real and result in horrific deaths for the North Koreans. A US President cannot make outrageous threats like that without having the entire planet brace for war. But NK's leaders can, because no one on the planet believes them. I do believe they could get dirty bombs into the US and hurt us, but I also believe they would end up bombed worse than Japan in retaliation. The idea that NK would emerge victorious is remote. They wouldn't "emerge" at all. And so no, our leaders cannot "easily" react the same way their leaders have.
(As a slight concession to you, I would submit that if we were to elect someone even worse than Bush, someone who was even more of a poorly-spoken war-mongerer, then yeah, maybe the US could react the same. This would be disastrous, and millions of people would die due to an abuse of power beyond anything we've ever seen. But that's fiction, and even in the real world, Bush barely won. In fact some will say the only way he got the presidency was to bypass the voters and sue for it. I intend to vote against him again. So hopefully our democracy is more self-correcting than North Korea, too.)
If your point is "these games are bad, have some sympathy for the North Koreans" then I think your point has backfired.
Some would suggest it was yet another indication of how estranged Canadians have become lately, to be sure. But not a single person would suggest that it doomed Canadians to horrible deaths in an upcoming war. As an interesting side note, I would mention that while the USA has strong laws preventing censorship of unpopular ideas, I do believe that there is a law about killing a sitting US president: something like you can't advocate it. So I can write this as an intellectual discussion with no worries, and I can criticise the government and the President with no worries. But if I suggest that killing the President is a good idea, I believe the Feds will come knocking. Which means that your game might have to avoid depicting a real President and offering him as a real target in a game. But to be honest, I'm not sure. The last time I heard about that law was 15 years ago.
I'm not sure about an "outcry" but the game would probably be panned. Personally, a game that allowed me to try out terrorist tactics sounds interesting. I imagine that the US government would not censor it, but if it were done well enough, might strike a contract with the developer to use the game for training/simulations with soldiers. They've done it before.
I agree with your suggestion that ESR should be Chaotic Neutral. My old DM's guide describes CN as self-interested, unpredictable, and hard to control. Very often, paranoid or crazy people. That sounds more accurate than Chaotic Evil, which implies the wholesale destruction of society and life as we know it.
But the grandparent, which suggested that Linus should be Neutral Good? Naaaah. Linus never ever takes sides. Even if he did take a side on some things, it would be a drop in the bucket. His neutrality is firmly established. He is on the side of technology, and doesn't sem to care about the implications of his work. I think calling Linus True Neutral is correct.
PS: Yay! I'm a D&D geek! There's probably a 24-hour cooling-off period after I post this, where my wife will refuse sex until I regain some sense of non-geekness. But for now, I revel in my pasty-skinned +1 alpha-dork glory!
4) Getting back.
(I don't mean this as a "funny" post. Doesn't getting back to Earth involve a huge number of problems? Such as: atmosphere; avoidance of crash landings in civilized areas; and a few other things that don't matter if you just intend to land on the moon or Mars.)
Well, in his blog he says, "I have not worked there for over two years." If he's actually lying or stretching the truth a whole lot, then you're right, he's a dick. If he's telling the truth and you're just so pissed at him that you have to get one more pot-shot in, then you're a dick. Somebody's a dick, I don't know who. But the point is that it doesn't matter anymore. Why? Because he's getting out. OK? If you're so upset with his handling of free accounts, well, congratulations. Dave is marginalizing himself and providing a perfect opportunity for others to come in and do better. So cheer up. Get your blog back on July 1st, wave goodbye to him, and let him walk away.
So what if he has paid hosting? Take your business elsewhere! Why stress yourself out interacting with someone who "treats you like shit even if you're a paying customer"? Stop being a paying customer!
Fair enough. But it's also fair for other people to wonder where exactly the problem is. Free or paid, the solution is in front of you.
Hmm. Let's try your comment again, with a little help from the Wayback Machine:
Whew! So you're right, redirects to new hosts would have been nice. But isn't it good to see that all is not lost?
Well shoot. I've already doled out 3 mod points here, but I'm going to give them up so I can post. Apologies to the 3 people who see their nice "+1 Informative" mods vanish.
Look, I think your post (and many of the posts here) are overly harsh. They should be harsh to an extent, because something bad has happened that didn't have to happen. Dave made a mistake. But to rip into the guy as if we're entitled? C'mon.
For those of you haven't bothered to listen to Dave's audio blog, he explains exactly the criticisms leveled here. Does the /. readership understand that Dave hasn't worked at Userland for years? He saw Userland wanted to dump the blogs and tried to move it to his own private server. This worked poorly. In the audio blog he explains that if he put the server up as-is and gave people 2 weeks to download the sites, it would have hammered his server, which was already in use for other things. You might say he should have fixed the server, and his response is already in the blog -- it would have taken a big time investment, and he's not healthy enough to do it.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve some criticism. If you listen to his audio blog, you'll get the clear impression that he's tired of trying to help people who act as hyper-critical (about free stuff!) as some of our Slashdot posters. That's his right of course, but he could exit more gracefully, I'm sure. And posting a 3.5 meg audio blog has to hammer his server almost as much as 3000 site backups would. So there's weird stuff. But the real issue ought to be Userland. Why couldn't they host the site for 2 more weeks? They have healthy employees. They might have even been able to turn it into a business opportunity if they made it easy to migrate to Manila or another paid service.
Give the rich boy a break. He tried to do right, it didn't work out, and now he wants to stop. OK. Ask him for your blog back, and when you get it, stay the hell away from centralized servers run by a single entity. Host your own. Use my low-end phpBB Blog, or Bloxom, or anything else. Some of these blog tools are even easy.
I don't know the full scope of your group yet. However, I would ask for a couple things, if they are appropriate for your group to look at. First, I'd favor the XHTML 1.0 standard over plain HTML if you're looking for a foundation. Second, forms need more form field types. I need disclosure triangles or the [+] expand/collapse widget. I need HTMLArea to be a simple tag, like textarea is. I need HTMLArea to take a simple list of allowed or disallowed tags. Something like this:
<htmlarea allowed="p,br,b,i,em,strong,ul,ol,li">formatted text, sent in as XHTML 1.0</htmlarea>
Possibly we should be able to specify which spec the formatted text should adhere to. If we could specify whether an htmlarea should use CSS or tables for formatting, that would be nice. If we can't specify, it should default to CSS, not tables. I'd also like better menus for forms (or select boxes) that allow for nesting (which is already in the spec, but implemented nowhere I can find), as well as the combo boxes (these allow for keying in AND getting a menu). Drag & drop of files onto a file upload field would be excellent. For that matter, if you could drag & drop them onto any area designated as a drop zone, that would be great.
Oh, and forms need a standardized Help widget/icon. I know I can turn my cursor into a question mark, but I'm looking for something simple and pervasive. Maybe you can wrap fields in a help tag, just as you do for fieldsets. And in that help tag, attributes are available that allow for a nice, formatted, clean, full help text popup/area/thing.
Down near the end of this usenet post I wrote last month I talk about how the W3C has been a disappointment lately. Many of the specs I see from them are written for computer parsers, not humans. This is far different from the specs back in the heyday of Web growth. Lately it feels like following the W3C is like following a bureaucracy. It used to feel like I was having a conversation with fellow developers, people who were really into building Web sites and wanted to provide good, standardized ways to do more.
The bottom line is that if this new group can produce more developer-friendly documents that better address real-world problems, then I will support it. If they can get the KHTML team on board, then that's a huge bonus. Trying to do more within the realm of what already exists (rather than scrapping the old and starting again) is the right thing. It's refactoring. It's smart.
...and...
Put 2 + 2 together, man!
Rich buyers: Hey, let's buy this station and move it to a profitable market!
Critics: We're on to you! This is just an attempt to tap the much larger Seattle radio advertising market!
Rich buyers (in deadpan tone): Gee. They discovered our secret.
How about: groan, another competitor that will claim to be somehow better than Open Office, but actually lags in enough areas to make it not worth it. I'm sorry, but Open Office has mindshare. In my opinion, it has even eclipsed Star Office. It's what I select by default for any Linux install. It's what I installed on my wife's Windows box when she insisted that we copy MS Office from a friend rather than pay for it. For all I know, she might think I did give her MS Office.
Open Office works. It has momentum, baby.
If you run a phpBB forum, you can grab my add-on phpBB Blog to turn a forum into a blog. Also, I have a beta available of the next release. I'd love input.
Also, since this is the Open Source world where cooperation is welcomed, I thought I'd mention that phpBB Fetch All is a blog system that I didn't know about when I made phpBB Blog. phpBB Fetch All is superior to my system, although it is also bigger and more complicated. But it sure looks good.
My God. Whatever you're talking about sure sounds like it should be illegal.
I have two software products, very small, that I've put out into the wild. I licensed them under BSD, so it's open source. My program PHPortfolio had a weakness in version 1.0. It only worked if installed at the top-level of a Web server. The first few people who installed my software coded up patches for themselves, and sent bug reports to me. In a later version, the thumbnailing feature was poorly done, and someone "donated" a few lines of code to improve it. So yes, the "eyeballs" argument seems to work even for small projects. Although they didn't give me their patches in every case (which is OK by the BSD license), they did give me bug reports.
I also have a program called phpBB Blog which, if you look in my forums, has a 1.0 beta out. A handful of people have downloaded it, but I've had no bug reports & no patches so far. In this case, it looks like the extra eyeballs (and there are a few) are not doing me much good. Or else the code is solid, which I doubt. :)
In any case, I think the open source model does work on a small level for small projects and it works on a big level for big projects. I suspect the only place it would fall apart is trying to tackle a big project with only a small base of support/fans. Having only a very few eyeballs scanning over a huge codebase doesn't sound like it can ensure high quality in the majority of such cases. That might need some cathedral-style development.
I'll probably be modded down for plugging my own work, but I wrote a very simple blogging tool that uses phpBB to manage blog entries and replies. It's phpBB Blog, and it's available under the new BSD license (no advertising clause). So it's free beer and free speech. I'll have a new version release in early June. Maybe some of the MT defectors here could consider it (although really, it's quite simple, probably not useful to many MT fans).
Hi Jeremy. One of the advantages I don't see Wine exploiting is that Wine doesn't have any financial need to constantly force users to the latest and greatest version of Windows. Microsoft of course is happy to deprecate features, change APIs, and so on. Why doesn't Wine offer different codebases as different "versions" of Windows are needed?
I've seen some of this -- as I setup Wine, I can select what kind of Windows widgets I want to use (95 or 98). But I've also seen some apps work for a while and then stop working as the codebase is updated. If I were able to say "run my BG2 game as Win 98" and "run my Office XP as Win XP" and so on, I could end up with a Windows that is more powerful and more capable than Windows itself. And possibly more stable too, if I can match my software to the version of Windows that ran it best.
Does anyone know what kernel SUSE 9.1 will contain? And will it be custom-tweaked with the laptop patch or any other last-minute extras? I'm just curious what I'll be missing if I stick with 9.1's default kernel.
Well, you missed one small thing: they used "PC CRPG" to describe Dragon Age, not "action RPG." Which hints that it will be more like Baldur's Gate (in concept, not exact implemention, I'm sure). Lots of NPCs, party banter, more stealth/diplomacy options, strategic fighting. Yummy. Or am I reading too much into it? :)
But anyway, I do agree that it's important to note that they're not using D&D or D20 rules. This means they own their content and engine fully. They're beholden to no one, and won't experience what Interplay went through (they had their license revoked before BG3 could be published). I also have high hopes that this will mean no legacy weirdness (the distinction between wizards and sorcerers is, IMHO, wholly done to appease old AD&D players). A new set of classes and skill system could make for a much more enjoyable game.