Yup. You might be interested in the book What's a Matter with Kansas? It
talks about how the poorest and least educated vote against their own
interests all in the name of the "culture wars". i.e. Vote to end abortion.
Receive the elimination of Social Security.
You do realize that abortion is considered by many to be tantamount to
murder.
If your personal beliefs led you to think that legalized abortion had
lead to the mass murder of millions of human beings, you'd be more likely
to vote for the candidate that is more likely to limit abortions, even
if you know that candidate's policies will personally harm you.
Don't write this behavior off to stupidity. These people are voting
based on their personal ethics, not their pocketbooks.
Finally, I would imagine that the cost of living in Kansas is lower than
many other regions of the country. $30k might not support one person in
New York City, but would probably be a nice wage in a small Kansas town.
As for education, don't confused schooling with learning. School is an
excellent way to learn some ideas, but a very poor way to learn other
ideas: Why do you think certain professions require apprenticeship?
The average fulltime farmer isn't some ignorant country hick: He's a small
businessman who needs to understand farming, science, finance and even
a bit of law. There's a lot more to the job then digging a hole in the
ground and dropping a few seeds.
I sent off a polite letter detailing my severe disproval about their
actions.
Then I started thinking... Their mail server knows I'm angry. Slashdot
knows about what they did. But the world at large doesn't know.
So, I picked one news agency at random and fired off a letter. Will
it change anything? Probably not. But hey, maybe I'll get lucky.
Anyways, if I do nothing, I know nothing will change. This way, I
have a chance.
So, I encourage you all to head to google, find your favorite news
outlet, look up the contact information, and fire off a copy of
the following letter. Clean up the text, personalize it, add your
own thoughts, etc. Have fun! (This was formatted nicely until the
lameness filter barfed!)
February 10th, 2005
Dear Sir or Madam,
Here is a story idea for you. You have my permission to use any
or all of it, without crediting me or compensating me. In return,
I expect not to be held responsible for any inaccuracies in the
following story -- I am not a lawyer, nor do I have access to
the documents or the people in this case.
STORY START
Tecmo, a gaming company, filled a lawsuit against the website
'ninjahacker.net' for "creating, hosting and contributing content to
a forum created to foster and facilitate the knowing infringement of
Tecmo's proprietary software for its video game titles."
In short, Techmo is claiming to go after "hackers".
But that isn't the whole story:
The ninjahacker.net forum isn't devoted to the sort of "hackers" who
create viruses, steal credit cards, and deface websites.
ninjahacker.net is full of smart coders who take their legally purchased
games and figure out how they work "under the hood", so to speak.
They are the electronic version of hot-rodders. In the slang of the
online gaming community, they are known as "modders", and their
results are known as "mods", short for "modification"
"Mods" can range from changing how a game looks to changing the entire
feel and play of a game. Its the electronic version of 3rd market parts
and accessories for your car: Everything from coffee-cup holders, to
an aftermarket cd player, to even a racing engine.
The game "Counter-Strike" started out as a "mod" to the popular game
Half-Life. In Half-Life, you played a scientist-turned-hero fighting
against an alien invasion. The modders turned Half-Life into a
counter-terrorists vs terrorists game and originally released it for
free on the internet. Were the creators of Half-Life upset? No:
Like all mods, Counter-Strike required the player to already own
the game it was based on: The success of Counter-Strike ended up selling
more copies of Half-Life! Counter-Strike became so popular that
the creators of Half-Life started selling Counter-Strike in stores!
So why would Tecmo sue its own modding community? Speculation varies,
but one popular explanation is the nature of some of the
ninjahacker.net mods. ninjahacker.net ended up giving away the
electronic equivalent of naked-lady mudflaps. Tecmo released some
rather awful games featuring busty women in rather skimpy clothing.
Some of the mods for these games removed what little clothing remained!
Unfortunately, technical skill doesn't always come with maturity.
But how could Tecmo sue ninjahacker.net? Isn't their discussion
and mods protected under free speech? Remember, they aren't pirating
the game: To use their mods, you must already own the game.
So what exactly is illegal?
Tecmo is suing the modders under the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act
(DMCA), a law that makes some reverse engineering illegal. This law
has been called overly broad by critics which site the following:
+ Lexmark cited the law in order to sue a company who sold aftermarket
toner cartridges for their printers.
+ The Chamberlain Group sued Skylark systems for making a replacement
garage door remote.
+ The MPAA sued over software needed to watch legally purchased DVDs
on certain computers using linux -
Techmo Autos'r'Us
Legal Department
101 Somelane Anytown USA 54321
777-123-4567
Sir or Madam:
It has come to our attention that not only are you
selling an aftermarket radio system for our
automobiles, you have also launched a website
in order to tell others how to replace the radio
system in their automobiles.
Prepared to be sued.
- Techmo Autos'r'Us Legal Department.
Absurd, isn't it? Dodge isn't going to sue a store
for selling naked-lady mudflaps and a "don't come a
knockin' if this vehicle's a rockin'" bumpersticker
for my truck, no matter how distasteful they may
find it. If they even attempted to sue the store,
the case would be a laughing stock. The store could
give me step-by-step instructions on how to remove
the old mudflaps and install the new mudflaps without
any fear of being sued.
Yet there is no outrage when Techmo tells gamers
that they can't distribute or tell others how to
put the digital equivalent of naked-lady mudflaps
on their games.
Sorry, but most open source games are just not very good.
The ones that are fun, are almost without exception the
ones that are just ripoff versions of commercial software.
Amazingly, most of the commercial games that are fun are
just ripoff versions of commercial software as well.:)
In the short run, it does. In fact, all goods fluctuate in
regards to each other and to currencies. But in the long
run, gold is remarkably stable. A man who owns an ounce of
gold today can buy roughly the same amount of goods as
someone who owned an ounce of gold 500 years ago. That
cannot be said of *any* fiat currency that has ever
existed.
You need to pay attention to your history lessons.
The value of gold has fluctuated historically, over the long
term. Different societies valued it differently. One often-cited
example is gold and silver in the east and west: During the 1700s,
the Far East wanted silver, while Europe wanted gold -- the result
was that silver flowed out of Europe and gold flowed out of
east Asia.
Also, you need to pay more attention to your economics.
Gold doesn't buy the same amount of goods now that it does 500 years
ago because the value of other goods fluctuate.
If you are advocating gold for economic stability, it doesn't allow
the same 'tricks' that fiat money does, and I feel that weakens the
economy.
If you are advocating gold for a measure of value after the US
crashes and burns, taking the rest of the world with it, I humbly
suggest that bullets, books and medicines may be more valuable.
Of course, I could be wrong. Greenspan disagrees with me as well.:)
The "real" economy went virtual the day we didn't have a value in gold to
back the value of ever dollar.
Gold has as much inert value as giant stone wheels.
The value of gold can (and does) fluctuate in regards to other goods,
as a minute's worth of research would show.
Money is the concept to use a scarce good as a medium of exchange, nothing
more, nothing less.
Historically, gold has been useful as a currency, due to its rarity, but
there are some problems with gold: The supply of gold tends to be
fixed. The size of economies fluctuate. This leads to problems.
(Of course, I tend to worship at the altar of Keynes, so I might be biased.)
Fiat money has a few advantages that gold does not, the major one is that
the quantity of fiat money can be expanded and contracted as need
requires, leading to a more stable economy.
Staci: I don t want to talk about elections... I was fooled by the
liberal propaganda that Kerry actually had a shot in hell and I voted
for him -- which made his losing all the more devastating.
What is she talking about? Of course Kerry had a shot: He was a very solid
second to Bush's lead. If he had just a few more electoral votes, he'd have
won.
In the 2004 elections, both Kerry and Bush had a good shot at the whitehouse:
Neither is liberal or conservative propaganda.
If someone was telling you that Badnarik[1] had a shot at the whitehouse in 2004,
that would have been propaganda[2].
[1] The libertarian candidate.
[2] There were good reasons to vote for him, but expecting your vote to put him
in the whitehouse wasn't one of them.
No, the basis of Atkins is some handwaving about insulin. Basically, according to
Atkins, you should limit the intake of carbohydrates to enter a
state of ketosis and start burning stored fat.
I consider that the reasoning behind Atkins is medically unsound: All across
Earth, there are plenty of cultures where a high intake of carbohydrates are
considered the norm yet do not have a high incident of obesity, which seems to
disprove his hyperinsulin theory.
My personal belief is that Atkins works the way that any other diet works:
By restricting net calorie intake. With the restriction on carbs (including
sugar), many high-calorie foods aren't available to Americans.
Losing wait isn't complicated: Energy in has to be less then energy out.
High-fiber and low fat foods have less calories then high fat food and
food without the additional bulk of fiber. (Yes, per unit of weight,
fat has over twice the calories of carbohydrates and protein.) Everything
being constant, more energy in is weight gain.
The other side of the equation is energy out: Inactive lifestyles use
less energy.
PS: In the long run, the Atkin diet fares poorly in regards to keeping a
healthy weight.
Aha, finally a Christian comes up with a testable theory! Let's see. Theory:
Christians do less crime than others. Let's consult the stats. Any takers?:-)
Considering that Christianity tends to include a support network and a structured
framework, I'd be a little leary of questioning if Christians committed less crime
than non-Christians.
Many Christians don't even drink, or consider drinking to drunkeness a sin, another
factor in criminal behavior.
There are only two factors that I could see pushing the Christian crime rate up:
Prison ministries, and hate speech and other crimes against gays and abortion-right
activists. Other than a few nutcases, Christians tend to be strongly outspoken
against homosexuality and abortions, but not to the point of committing crimes.
The prison ministries may be a huge factor though.
The other problem is how to define Christian? There are many self-described
"Christians" out there that I don't consider Christian due to their lapse
of practicing Christianity. They are as much Christian as they are Germans
or Swedes or English: It may have been the belief/country of their ancestors,
but they no longer practice the customers. Its like "Wiccans" who convert to
their faith after watching "The Craft", yet have very little grasp of the
Wiccan theology.
Unfortunately, googling is turning up no useful statistics, such as the
percentage of criminals at the time of their crime who regularly participated
in religious acts (praying, church participation, etc) vs the population on
average.:(
If you don't understand religion, don't write it off as some strange cult.
Without considering the supernatural, religion has some rather big benefits,
which may be one of the reasons why atheistic cultures are relatively rare in
history. Religion can help bind a culture together, and provide rules in
order to increase the chances of survival. Look at the Islamic rules on bodily
hygiene: Most of them make a lot of sense. Its similar to the US dietary
guidelines: While parts of it are probably mistaken, following them should
improve your chances of survival. The difference is that the US dietary
guidelines are based on science, while strict religious laws are based upon
which tribes and religions or subsects of religion survived.
Even today, in the age of science, those who regularily participate in
religious customs (solitarily or in groups) tend to be healthier than those
who don't. Stress is unhealthy: forgiving others and believing that God is
in charge reduces a lot of stress. I had a religious family member be diagnosed
with cancer several years ago. In addition to the support network her church
gave her, she had a lot less stress because she believed that whatever happened
was God's will. She had biopsies and went to radiation therapy and drug therapy[1],
and has been cancer free for several years. While we can credit modern science
with killing the cancer, her lower levels of stress probably played a factor
in recovery.
[1] Yes, God helps those who helps themselves. Religion has already answered
the question of "If I have faith in God, why should I do anything at all?"
centuries ago. You aren't being witty by bringing it up: You are showing your
ignorance of Christian theology.
Geeks are prime targets. 18 months is more than enough time, heck 18 hours is more
than enough time to be victimized. Some people get abused before they are even
tried.
There is something more going on here than just using a different browser.
Police would never arrest someone just because of the browser he was using.
Was he trying to hack into the website? If he did that, then it is a crime
and the police had the right to arrest and jail him (hopefully for a long
time).
Assuming that the story is legit, it does seem odd that someone clueful
enough to read logs would be ignorant of other browsers to the point of
believing that it was a hacking attempt.
What if they were using some sort of turnkey intrustion decection
software that falsely flagged lynx as a hack attempt?
(Proudly posted with w3m. Look ma, I'm *hacking* Slashdot!)
What's next? Sometime in the near future: Man tries to buy chocolate bar with paper money! Shock! Horror! Maybe this is just a little too random but that's where my mind travelled to.
We are already at the point where making a large purchase with paper money is unusual.
About two years ago, I decided I wanted a dishwasher. I went down to my bank, took out some money, checked a few places, and finally paid for a small dishwasher in cash.
Had some extremely strange looks from the salesperson.
CPU load. SCSI puts much less of a load on your CPU than (s)ata does.
Depending on the task, the CPU for PATA/SATA isn't that bad.
For fileservers, on a price/capacity ratio, SATA will kick SCSI's ass to the curb and back. While SCSI is faster, and, on average, more reliable, SATA is often 'good enough'.
Or imagine a webserver with huge amounts of memory. For performance, SATA and SCSI will be roughly equal, since most files will be cached in the memory.
What about a DNS server: Again, the performance of the system should be dependent on memory, not the hard drive speeds.
Don't forget firewalls. SATA is fast enough for log files, and the CPU shouldn't be a bottleneck unless your firewall rules are extremely complex.
I wouldn't use SATA in a database server or in any other application with a lot of random disk reads/writes, but it has its uses, even in servers.
Honestly though, I don't care what your moral or ethical beliefs are... this is something that needs watching and a good combination of government and private control. Playing God in a petri dish is one thing, but creating a new species and bringing an unknown consiousnous with who knows what kind of mental trama to bear is just plain wrong. I'm no scientific antagonist, but this is one line that should not be crossed.
Let me play devil's advocate here, and ask: Why shouldn't that line be crossed?
If we could give dogs the brains of humans (uplift-them, David Brin style[1]), why shouldn't we?
Right now, we think nothing of breeding a new kind of corn, or a new breed of dog. For all we can tell, a dog can feel pain, feel happiness, dream, and solve simple problems. Yet, for the most part, we treat dogs as objects, to be bought or sold.
If human-level intelligence is bothering you, adult human beings make decisions every day about creating new intelligent beings. Often the decision was under the influence of mind altering drugs. The first experiment with the mind of a human will at least be brought into this world with much more planning than the average human baby.
[1] Uplifting dogs was mentioned somewhere in the first trilogy, but presumably Earthclan sacrificed the plans in one of the negotations with the galactics.
Your ears, throat and anus should be able to hold in the pressure as well (no pun intended).
Even if your eyelids are closed, I'm guessing you are going to suffer some serious damage to your sight which may be permanent. Plus there is that little issue with oxygen and solar radiation.
So yeah, I've spent several thousand hours trying to do it on my own, but its not enough, you need a team.
Assuming "several thousand hours" >= 2000, I find it amazing that you spent at least 50 work weeks @ 8 hours/day and didn't come up with something that was at least playable.
Btw, there are several remarkable games and mods out there done by a single coder.
I could think of a dozen styles of games that'd top charts for half a decade. Programmers may burn out, but good game designers just pick up momentum. The problem is there is no way to rate a game designer. You can point at a good artist and say,"He's a good artist, look at his art." The best game designer in the world may never get a job. I'm a world class game designer, but have never even had an interview.
I just visited your webpage.
A few hints:
Geocities sucks. Webhosting is cheap and makes a far better impression. If your ISP doesn't offer you webspace, I've had excellent luck at nearlyfreespeech.net (not affilliated, just happy with them).
Your cover letter needs help. It gives the impression that you are a game playing obsessed geek. You also sound a little unprofessional (and your site looks it). I'm not an expert at writing resumes or cover letters, so my advice to you is to find an expert.
Those are the minor problems. Here is the biggie:
Your site screams "I'm creative, but I don't have the ability to stick to an idea when it gets boring." Jobs tend to have a lot of boring bits, even jobs in the gaming industry. If you are a world-class game designer (rather an inflated title, IMHO), then where is your work? As the other poster pointed out, a few paragraphs does not make a game design document. I can think of several potential candidates in the hobbyist field that are more employable than you, based on output alone.
We all tend to know bright, creative people who never did anything big and innovative because they didn't follow through. You may end up being one of those people.
No flames intended: I took the 15 minutes of visiting your site and composing this reply because you do have potential, you just need to develop a dedicated work ethic and improve your presentation.
Voice input might be it, once it's faster and all of the bugs are ironed out.
Do you speak 100 wpm? That's what I can easily do on a keyboard.
For me, for most tasks, the body/keyboard interface is not the bottleneck. The brain is a bottleneck: When coding, when composing, or when entering many commands.
The problem with stressing physical access is that physical access is the one thing you can't protect if some evil guvment TLA agency gets you in their sights.
Short of boobytrapping the drive (explosives, etc) or the room (think about the electromagnetic doorway in Crypto, if its plausible), your best bet is a long password and the willingness to eat a bullet at the right time.
Keep dogs for alert, and keep a gun.
For those who don't want to suicide, try stegnography, or a freenode-style system which semi-randomly retrieves data from the network. So if it regularly grabs data chunks [A], [B], [C], [D], and [E], they don't know which chunks you actually decrypt and use. If you need to keep data locally or don't have a network, randomly encrypt noise with a unknown key. Encrypt everything you are done using with the unknown key as well. Have programs to randomly manipulate so that you can't tell what files were last accessed.
Of course, if you are under a government that is willing to torture you for information, the same government is probably willing to kill you.
I'm not a drinker. I don't even like alchohol as I can't stand the taste. Well, I'm sure feces is the same way, but I don't want to acquire a taste for that, either.
Ah, I've seen you have tried American beer.
*ducks*
I'm USian, so I can joke about our beer. And no, its not fucking close to water. Its close to piss, there is a difference. If it was close to water, I could still stand to drink it.:)
Re:This is not the channel you are looking for...
on
Is IRC All Bad?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually to be honest, I've taken to calling it the "wastelands". If there is something I want, its google first. Bittorrent second. Kazaa-lite third. If all that fails, then its IRC. Usually if I get to that point, I'd rather give up before treking through that sludge.
That's because you are warezing.
Now, lets say you have an obscure question about a technical subject. Then the route tends to go TFM first, google second, and the appropropriate IRC channel third. (Always RTFM first, just to avoid pissing off the channel by asking the same damn questions over and over again).
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize that abortion is considered by many to be tantamount to murder.
If your personal beliefs led you to think that legalized abortion had lead to the mass murder of millions of human beings, you'd be more likely to vote for the candidate that is more likely to limit abortions, even if you know that candidate's policies will personally harm you.
Don't write this behavior off to stupidity. These people are voting based on their personal ethics, not their pocketbooks.
Finally, I would imagine that the cost of living in Kansas is lower than many other regions of the country. $30k might not support one person in New York City, but would probably be a nice wage in a small Kansas town.
As for education, don't confused schooling with learning. School is an excellent way to learn some ideas, but a very poor way to learn other ideas: Why do you think certain professions require apprenticeship? The average fulltime farmer isn't some ignorant country hick: He's a small businessman who needs to understand farming, science, finance and even a bit of law. There's a lot more to the job then digging a hole in the ground and dropping a few seeds.
I sent off a polite letter detailing my severe disproval about their actions.
Then I started thinking... Their mail server knows I'm angry. Slashdot knows about what they did. But the world at large doesn't know.
So, I picked one news agency at random and fired off a letter. Will it change anything? Probably not. But hey, maybe I'll get lucky. Anyways, if I do nothing, I know nothing will change. This way, I have a chance.
So, I encourage you all to head to google, find your favorite news outlet, look up the contact information, and fire off a copy of the following letter. Clean up the text, personalize it, add your own thoughts, etc. Have fun! (This was formatted nicely until the lameness filter barfed!)
February 10th, 2005
Dear Sir or Madam,
Here is a story idea for you. You have my permission to use any or all of it, without crediting me or compensating me. In return, I expect not to be held responsible for any inaccuracies in the following story -- I am not a lawyer, nor do I have access to the documents or the people in this case.
STORY START
Tecmo, a gaming company, filled a lawsuit against the website 'ninjahacker.net' for "creating, hosting and contributing content to a forum created to foster and facilitate the knowing infringement of Tecmo's proprietary software for its video game titles."
In short, Techmo is claiming to go after "hackers".
But that isn't the whole story:
The ninjahacker.net forum isn't devoted to the sort of "hackers" who create viruses, steal credit cards, and deface websites. ninjahacker.net is full of smart coders who take their legally purchased games and figure out how they work "under the hood", so to speak. They are the electronic version of hot-rodders. In the slang of the online gaming community, they are known as "modders", and their results are known as "mods", short for "modification"
"Mods" can range from changing how a game looks to changing the entire feel and play of a game. Its the electronic version of 3rd market parts and accessories for your car: Everything from coffee-cup holders, to an aftermarket cd player, to even a racing engine.
The game "Counter-Strike" started out as a "mod" to the popular game Half-Life. In Half-Life, you played a scientist-turned-hero fighting against an alien invasion. The modders turned Half-Life into a counter-terrorists vs terrorists game and originally released it for free on the internet. Were the creators of Half-Life upset? No: Like all mods, Counter-Strike required the player to already own the game it was based on: The success of Counter-Strike ended up selling more copies of Half-Life! Counter-Strike became so popular that the creators of Half-Life started selling Counter-Strike in stores!
So why would Tecmo sue its own modding community? Speculation varies, but one popular explanation is the nature of some of the ninjahacker.net mods. ninjahacker.net ended up giving away the electronic equivalent of naked-lady mudflaps. Tecmo released some rather awful games featuring busty women in rather skimpy clothing. Some of the mods for these games removed what little clothing remained! Unfortunately, technical skill doesn't always come with maturity.
But how could Tecmo sue ninjahacker.net? Isn't their discussion and mods protected under free speech? Remember, they aren't pirating the game: To use their mods, you must already own the game. So what exactly is illegal?
Tecmo is suing the modders under the Digitial Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA), a law that makes some reverse engineering illegal. This law has been called overly broad by critics which site the following:
+ Lexmark cited the law in order to sue a company who sold aftermarket toner cartridges for their printers. + The Chamberlain Group sued Skylark systems for making a replacement garage door remote. + The MPAA sued over software needed to watch legally purchased DVDs on certain computers using linux -
If your car was a techmo game...
Techmo Autos'r'Us
Legal Department
101 Somelane Anytown USA 54321
777-123-4567
Sir or Madam:
It has come to our attention that not only are you selling an aftermarket radio system for our automobiles, you have also launched a website in order to tell others how to replace the radio system in their automobiles.
Prepared to be sued.
- Techmo Autos'r'Us Legal Department.
Absurd, isn't it? Dodge isn't going to sue a store for selling naked-lady mudflaps and a "don't come a knockin' if this vehicle's a rockin'" bumpersticker for my truck, no matter how distasteful they may find it. If they even attempted to sue the store, the case would be a laughing stock. The store could give me step-by-step instructions on how to remove the old mudflaps and install the new mudflaps without any fear of being sued.
Yet there is no outrage when Techmo tells gamers that they can't distribute or tell others how to put the digital equivalent of naked-lady mudflaps on their games.
Amazingly, most of the commercial games that are fun are just ripoff versions of commercial software as well. :)
You need to pay attention to your history lessons.
The value of gold has fluctuated historically, over the long term. Different societies valued it differently. One often-cited example is gold and silver in the east and west: During the 1700s, the Far East wanted silver, while Europe wanted gold -- the result was that silver flowed out of Europe and gold flowed out of east Asia.
Also, you need to pay more attention to your economics.
Gold doesn't buy the same amount of goods now that it does 500 years ago because the value of other goods fluctuate.
If you are advocating gold for economic stability, it doesn't allow the same 'tricks' that fiat money does, and I feel that weakens the economy.
If you are advocating gold for a measure of value after the US crashes and burns, taking the rest of the world with it, I humbly suggest that bullets, books and medicines may be more valuable.
Of course, I could be wrong. Greenspan disagrees with me as well. :)
Gold has as much inert value as giant stone wheels.
The value of gold can (and does) fluctuate in regards to other goods, as a minute's worth of research would show.
Money is the concept to use a scarce good as a medium of exchange, nothing more, nothing less.
Historically, gold has been useful as a currency, due to its rarity, but there are some problems with gold: The supply of gold tends to be fixed. The size of economies fluctuate. This leads to problems. (Of course, I tend to worship at the altar of Keynes, so I might be biased.)
Fiat money has a few advantages that gold does not, the major one is that the quantity of fiat money can be expanded and contracted as need requires, leading to a more stable economy.
Just imagine how secure the world would be if we wrote everything in PHP! :)
What is she talking about? Of course Kerry had a shot: He was a very solid second to Bush's lead. If he had just a few more electoral votes, he'd have won.
In the 2004 elections, both Kerry and Bush had a good shot at the whitehouse: Neither is liberal or conservative propaganda.
If someone was telling you that Badnarik[1] had a shot at the whitehouse in 2004, that would have been propaganda[2].
[1] The libertarian candidate.
[2] There were good reasons to vote for him, but expecting your vote to put him in the whitehouse wasn't one of them.
No, the basis of Atkins is some handwaving about insulin. Basically, according to Atkins, you should limit the intake of carbohydrates to enter a state of ketosis and start burning stored fat.
I consider that the reasoning behind Atkins is medically unsound: All across Earth, there are plenty of cultures where a high intake of carbohydrates are considered the norm yet do not have a high incident of obesity, which seems to disprove his hyperinsulin theory.
My personal belief is that Atkins works the way that any other diet works: By restricting net calorie intake. With the restriction on carbs (including sugar), many high-calorie foods aren't available to Americans.
Losing wait isn't complicated: Energy in has to be less then energy out. High-fiber and low fat foods have less calories then high fat food and food without the additional bulk of fiber. (Yes, per unit of weight, fat has over twice the calories of carbohydrates and protein.) Everything being constant, more energy in is weight gain.
The other side of the equation is energy out: Inactive lifestyles use less energy.
PS: In the long run, the Atkin diet fares poorly in regards to keeping a healthy weight.
Considering that Christianity tends to include a support network and a structured framework, I'd be a little leary of questioning if Christians committed less crime than non-Christians.
Many Christians don't even drink, or consider drinking to drunkeness a sin, another factor in criminal behavior.
There are only two factors that I could see pushing the Christian crime rate up: Prison ministries, and hate speech and other crimes against gays and abortion-right activists. Other than a few nutcases, Christians tend to be strongly outspoken against homosexuality and abortions, but not to the point of committing crimes. The prison ministries may be a huge factor though.
The other problem is how to define Christian? There are many self-described "Christians" out there that I don't consider Christian due to their lapse of practicing Christianity. They are as much Christian as they are Germans or Swedes or English: It may have been the belief/country of their ancestors, but they no longer practice the customers. Its like "Wiccans" who convert to their faith after watching "The Craft", yet have very little grasp of the Wiccan theology.
Unfortunately, googling is turning up no useful statistics, such as the percentage of criminals at the time of their crime who regularly participated in religious acts (praying, church participation, etc) vs the population on average. :(
If you don't understand religion, don't write it off as some strange cult. Without considering the supernatural, religion has some rather big benefits, which may be one of the reasons why atheistic cultures are relatively rare in history. Religion can help bind a culture together, and provide rules in order to increase the chances of survival. Look at the Islamic rules on bodily hygiene: Most of them make a lot of sense. Its similar to the US dietary guidelines: While parts of it are probably mistaken, following them should improve your chances of survival. The difference is that the US dietary guidelines are based on science, while strict religious laws are based upon which tribes and religions or subsects of religion survived.
Even today, in the age of science, those who regularily participate in religious customs (solitarily or in groups) tend to be healthier than those who don't. Stress is unhealthy: forgiving others and believing that God is in charge reduces a lot of stress. I had a religious family member be diagnosed with cancer several years ago. In addition to the support network her church gave her, she had a lot less stress because she believed that whatever happened was God's will. She had biopsies and went to radiation therapy and drug therapy[1], and has been cancer free for several years. While we can credit modern science with killing the cancer, her lower levels of stress probably played a factor in recovery.
[1] Yes, God helps those who helps themselves. Religion has already answered the question of "If I have faith in God, why should I do anything at all?" centuries ago. You aren't being witty by bringing it up: You are showing your ignorance of Christian theology.
Geeks are prime targets. 18 months is more than enough time, heck 18 hours is more than enough time to be victimized. Some people get abused before they are even tried.
Female rape isn't funny, in or out of prison.
Male prison rape is funny.
(And I think our culture's sick.)
Assuming that the story is legit, it does seem odd that someone clueful enough to read logs would be ignorant of other browsers to the point of believing that it was a hacking attempt.
What if they were using some sort of turnkey intrustion decection software that falsely flagged lynx as a hack attempt?
(Proudly posted with w3m. Look ma, I'm *hacking* Slashdot!)
since when dose a "hack atempt" constitute hauling someone off to jail?
Ob Simpsons quote:
What's next? Sometime in the near future: Man tries to buy chocolate bar with paper money! Shock! Horror! Maybe this is just a little too random but that's where my mind travelled to.
We are already at the point where making a large purchase with paper money is unusual.
About two years ago, I decided I wanted a dishwasher. I went down to my bank, took out some money, checked a few places, and finally paid for a small dishwasher in cash.
Had some extremely strange looks from the salesperson.
CPU load. SCSI puts much less of a load on your CPU than (s)ata does.
Depending on the task, the CPU for PATA/SATA isn't that bad.
For fileservers, on a price/capacity ratio, SATA will kick SCSI's ass to the curb and back. While SCSI is faster, and, on average, more reliable, SATA is often 'good enough'.
Or imagine a webserver with huge amounts of memory. For performance, SATA and SCSI will be roughly equal, since most files will be cached in the memory.
What about a DNS server: Again, the performance of the system should be dependent on memory, not the hard drive speeds.
Don't forget firewalls. SATA is fast enough for log files, and the CPU shouldn't be a bottleneck unless your firewall rules are extremely complex.
I wouldn't use SATA in a database server or in any other application with a lot of random disk reads/writes, but it has its uses, even in servers.
Honestly though, I don't care what your moral or ethical beliefs are... this is something that needs watching and a good combination of government and private control. Playing God in a petri dish is one thing, but creating a new species and bringing an unknown consiousnous with who knows what kind of mental trama to bear is just plain wrong. I'm no scientific antagonist, but this is one line that should not be crossed.
Let me play devil's advocate here, and ask: Why shouldn't that line be crossed?
If we could give dogs the brains of humans (uplift-them, David Brin style[1]), why shouldn't we?
Right now, we think nothing of breeding a new kind of corn, or a new breed of dog. For all we can tell, a dog can feel pain, feel happiness, dream, and solve simple problems. Yet, for the most part, we treat dogs as objects, to be bought or sold.
If human-level intelligence is bothering you, adult human beings make decisions every day about creating new intelligent beings. Often the decision was under the influence of mind altering drugs. The first experiment with the mind of a human will at least be brought into this world with much more planning than the average human baby.
[1] Uplifting dogs was mentioned somewhere in the first trilogy, but presumably Earthclan sacrificed the plans in one of the negotations with the galactics.
The problem is when you have cuts etc.
Frostbite should take care of any cuts.
Your ears, throat and anus should be able to hold in the pressure as well (no pun intended).Even if your eyelids are closed, I'm guessing you are going to suffer some serious damage to your sight which may be permanent. Plus there is that little issue with oxygen and solar radiation.
So yeah, I've spent several thousand hours trying to do it on my own, but its not enough, you need a team.
Assuming "several thousand hours" >= 2000, I find it amazing that you spent at least 50 work weeks @ 8 hours/day and didn't come up with something that was at least playable.
Btw, there are several remarkable games and mods out there done by a single coder.
Beat Doom 1 & 2 on nightmare with alot of saving
You might want to skip this one when listing accomplishments...
I could think of a dozen styles of games that'd top charts for half a decade. Programmers may burn out, but good game designers just pick up momentum. The problem is there is no way to rate a game designer. You can point at a good artist and say,"He's a good artist, look at his art." The best game designer in the world may never get a job. I'm a world class game designer, but have never even had an interview.
I just visited your webpage.
A few hints:
Those are the minor problems. Here is the biggie:
Your site screams "I'm creative, but I don't have the ability to stick to an idea when it gets boring." Jobs tend to have a lot of boring bits, even jobs in the gaming industry. If you are a world-class game designer (rather an inflated title, IMHO), then where is your work? As the other poster pointed out, a few paragraphs does not make a game design document. I can think of several potential candidates in the hobbyist field that are more employable than you, based on output alone.
We all tend to know bright, creative people who never did anything big and innovative because they didn't follow through. You may end up being one of those people.
No flames intended: I took the 15 minutes of visiting your site and composing this reply because you do have potential, you just need to develop a dedicated work ethic and improve your presentation.
Just my $.02.
"The normal English speaking rate is between 130-200 words per minute (wpm).
My bad. :( OTOH, when composing or coding, is your output 100 wpm? Perhaps when writing fiction, but I doubt it coding.
Voice input might be it, once it's faster and all of the bugs are ironed out.
Do you speak 100 wpm? That's what I can easily do on a keyboard.
For me, for most tasks, the body/keyboard interface is not the bottleneck. The brain is a bottleneck: When coding, when composing, or when entering many commands.
The problem with stressing physical access is that physical access is the one thing you can't protect if some evil guvment TLA agency gets you in their sights.
Short of boobytrapping the drive (explosives, etc) or the room (think about the electromagnetic doorway in Crypto, if its plausible), your best bet is a long password and the willingness to eat a bullet at the right time.
Keep dogs for alert, and keep a gun.
For those who don't want to suicide, try stegnography, or a freenode-style system which semi-randomly retrieves data from the network. So if it regularly grabs data chunks [A], [B], [C], [D], and [E], they don't know which chunks you actually decrypt and use. If you need to keep data locally or don't have a network, randomly encrypt noise with a unknown key. Encrypt everything you are done using with the unknown key as well. Have programs to randomly manipulate so that you can't tell what files were last accessed.
Of course, if you are under a government that is willing to torture you for information, the same government is probably willing to kill you.
I'm not a drinker. I don't even like alchohol as I can't stand the taste. Well, I'm sure feces is the same way, but I don't want to acquire a taste for that, either.
Ah, I've seen you have tried American beer.
*ducks*
I'm USian, so I can joke about our beer. And no, its not fucking close to water. Its close to piss, there is a difference. If it was close to water, I could still stand to drink it. :)
Actually to be honest, I've taken to calling it the "wastelands". If there is something I want, its google first. Bittorrent second. Kazaa-lite third. If all that fails, then its IRC. Usually if I get to that point, I'd rather give up before treking through that sludge.
That's because you are warezing.
Now, lets say you have an obscure question about a technical subject. Then the route tends to go TFM first, google second, and the appropropriate IRC channel third. (Always RTFM first, just to avoid pissing off the channel by asking the same damn questions over and over again).