As much as we would defend your right to *try* to buy groceries by trading anything you have (legally) for merchandise from the grocer, sure. That doesn't mean we'll fight until you succeed. We'll merely defend your right to try to negotiate a mutually-agreeable deal with the grocer. We've always had the right to trade with each other. There's no good reason for a government to prevent that, saying you *can't* trade pigs for beer if you want to. So it's a liberty that should be defended. And the only entity you fight when defending liberties is the government -- not individual grocers, etc., as they're not the ones imposing a lack of freedom. Maybe a lack of choice (by all agreeing that bitcoins suck), but not of freedom.
DMV? In Oklahoma, at least, those are privately-run. All of them. Even if you order your tags online (through a state site), it asks you which private DMV you want to use, and you get your tags from that one physical location ("Tag agency".) States like Oklahoma would require the Feds to put in a clause that states can opt to provide the service any way they see fit, so states can compete, and through competition, figure out which method is best for our dearest citizens. (Note: I think competition between states is a ridiculous concept. Nobody gives California props for "trying things out" for the rest of us, nor does anyone interpret the mass migration to California as proof that its government had the best ideas.)
I'm curious: what if someone downloaded 10000 videos of people being shot by their governments? Would that be sick shit? Would it be bad? Would they become responsible for the deaths of thousands? (I'm not talking about Hollywood movie clips, I'm talking about, say, amateur video of street protests being repressed violently.)
I've seen the following, to avoid adding curly braces around the body of an existing one-liner condition/loop (especially for temporary debugging code):
if (1)
x(), y();
The comma also applies in constructors, specifying the order(?) and parameters with which member variable initializations will be called, before the constructor body.
Isn't that just cyclical? We've always had kings and aristocrats. And then we've had uprisings where the king's land gets redistributed by force. And then everyone wants a chance at being individually wealthy, and it starts over. We're probably just nearing the end of a cycle, as the problem gets magnified (again.)
This does bring in the question of the 'death tax' -- whether your children should be able to so fully enjoy the money you earned during your lifetime, and that was (ostensibly) designed by society as a reward for useful work. Should those who haven't directly earned be able to enjoy? Should the individual be able to get infinitely wealthy, with the caveat that at death, the money's redistributed rather than passed on?
I think the standard reply is that we in the lower classes (lower than max()) don't realize the services the upper classes get. Would we need such a large military if we were all poor? Who would care about invading? Do those with large investments, having more to lose, therefore benefit more from increased protection? Do those who hold patents (which I'll assume correlates with having the higher income to justify/allow purchasing the patents) benefit more than the rest of us from having a patent office, diplomatic/secretive efforts to extend the patent system worldwide, and then enforce those patents? Do the upper classes benefit more than the rest of us from free-trade deals, etc.?
Now we can move on to at least the following usual replies: a) we're a land of opportunity, and we all get the same (legal) access, so we should be flat-taxed (dollar amount, even, not percentage) b) our government spends tons on a few large issues -- military and social security; the rich don't get significantly enhanced social security benefits.
(Honestly, I don't know that it's fair to tax the rich more. But they can afford it. It hasn't discouraged people from trying to get rich yet, no matter what the conservatives claim.)
If you ask me, this is as close to a victimless crime as it gets.
No. Tax-payers are supposed to pay taxes to the collective pool of money called the government, to fund the services that we collectively receive. These people don't contribute, but do receive. We are all victims, which is why the government goes after tax-evaders on our collective behalf. No only do we lose the money these people should have paid, and the rest of us (nominally) have to make up, but they add to the overall system waste by forcing us to pay investigators, prosecutors, judges, etc. to hunt down and collect on tax-evaders.
There are plenty of real victimless crimes out there, and they need rectifying. I'll thank you not to make that fight harder by applying the same label to clearly victimful crimes.
To be clear: Wikileaks didn't sneak into the barn. They stood outside, and said that if anyone else happened to find pigs in there, they'd help with the ousting. One of the "select few" (million?!) farm hands chose to do so.
There are plenty of layers at which that could be logged for later review, yeah. Filesystems have for a while now had auditing that includes each time a user reads a file. Databases can have that setup via stored procedures, etc. Web servers, or other app layers, can also do the logging. If you differentiate between "read subject line" and "read body", and distinguish between "ran a search that looked at the body" vs. "user saw the body himself", you could get a good starting point for writing what should be, truly, a simple report. Add to that mappings of documents to departments, departments to users, and you could even detect someone who was trying to very slowly siphon out documents that should be available to him, but shouldn't pertain to him on such a regular basis.
And I don't think they do -- I think most/.'s support legal action against the guy who, in this analogy, purposefully opened the barn door. The debate's over what to do once the pigs are out -- they could have gone to anyone, including foreign governments, and they could have gone there secretly, and they could have gone to someone who would release them instantly without any redaction or offer to work with the government. The only improvement you could reasonably ask for is not to release stuff at all. Anything else would have been worse than the current situation. But the 'enabler' concept comes in because WikiLeaks didn't just happen across stray pigs (to come back to the analogy), they had publicly stated they would take them in and redistribute them, if anyone should provide them. But that's nothing new -- the rest of the media's been doing that all along. It's their business. In fact, you can be somewhat thankful that this went to a sort of neutral third party, not directly to one particular media outlet, who would have had control over the spin of stories coming out. Here, you've got several independent eyes looking at it. So now you're talking about possibly the best kind of enabler, considering who else is out there. This really seems like the lesser of all evils, considering the barn doors aren't locked tight enough.
Government programs are/always/ plagued by waste and inefficiencies.
a) Private, commercial ventures are also always plagued by waste and inefficiencies. Humans are involved. You get what you get. b) Just because there's waste doesn't mean it's 95% waste. That's like saying that because lightbulbs emit both heat and light, they're incapable of ever illuminating anything. c) Grandiose statements like this one, common on the right, are faith-based attacks. It's common sense. Everyone knows governments waste. Everyone knows governments are nothing but wasteful bureaucracies. It's obvious. Duh. The only good government is a tiny one. But not nonexistent, as that might be seen as disparaging the founding fathers.
The underlying assumption is that you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit, because anything else is too good to be true. But not too much profit. So you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit in a suitably competitive market. You only trust greedy people. And then...
The only reason why they can sometimes get things done is because they have infinite money from stealing from taxpayers.
d) No. They're not stealing. We're pooling our moneys to achieve a common goal, as we've agreed to do, through the system of laws we've previously agreed to. If you don't like it, go live in France. (I can say this because I got tired of being told to live in France when I bitched about our new motherland security overlords after 9/11.)
Government restrictions.
e) That's what it *does*. That is the function of government. All freedoms not taken away, we keep. You're complaining that they're doing their job? If not, we need to know the specific restrictions you disagree with; honestly, I trust them to have a better idea of what restrictions we need than I trust you. They have thousands of people looking at what can go wrong when some private individual decides it's perfectly safe to shoot a rocket off from his back yard to go colonize Mars. And those thousands of people? They're just private citizens, like you and me, raised in the same country, under the same flag, learning the same constitution, going to the same backyard BBQ's. They love freedom too. Freedom not to be blown up because of their neighbor's stupid belief that freedom only means something when they can be perfectly reckless.
Devastate that economy? I think, again, that's a very hard point to argue.
Actually, I've seen quite a few sources talk about al qaeda's goal of destroying our economy. They know they don't have the means to destroy our army, or our people, or our institutions directly, but they can convince us to waste our own money. And if that forces us to retreat from the areas they want to control, then that's good enough for them. For the most part, they just want us out of the way so they can wage their real war, with their neighbors: secular-muslim states.
So where does the war stand now, according to al Qaeda? A leading al Qaeda operative has written a book, the title of which translates loosely to “The Management of Chaos.” According to al Qaeda, the current stage of revolution is the stage of “vexation and exhaustion” of the enemy. They have a notion of how to do this to the Americans and to their 'puppets'.
You vex and exhaust the Americans, according to al Qaeda, by making them spend a lot of money. The United States is a materialist society, and if forced to spend too much money it will “cut and run.”
The means to this end is to force the Americans to spread themselves thinly. Al Qaeda wants to strike everywhere, not just spectacular high value attacks. This will cause the Americans to defend a lot of places at high cost.
Airships: a second age http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7918762/Airships-a-second-age.html which includes the following: There’s a niggling worry I have about the LEMV squatting over Afghanistan: surely a giant white balloon will be vulnerable to attack, despite its lofty position? Fortunately, that’s something they’ve thought about a great deal at Cardington. Indeed, they’ve been thinking about it for many years now, because they also designed ships that were to be deployed over Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
At that time they tested a full-sized airship against a range of artillery including a Russian mounted machine gun filled with.22 calibre armour-piercing incendiaries and a SAM-7 surface to air missile. What they learnt was this: the airship is almost invincible to attack. Helium is an inert gas, so it doesn’t explode.
The pressure inside the envelope is so low that when a hole is made, say by a bullet, air seeps out slowly rather than rushing out catastrophically. Missiles need something hard to connect with if they’re going to explode, but an airship is accommodating, not hard-shelled. The material has the flexibility of a plastic bag; make a hole in it and it almost immediately shrinks inwards.
The swarm could be at the connection level -- swarms of connections finding the best routes over time, but within any given established connection, packets still travel single-file (like sand people, to hide their numbers.)
Re:I Guess I Don't Exist Then ...
on
Why Wave Failed
·
· Score: 1
Can you please tell us what Wave is (or could be) good for? I've tried to use it as a non-public wiki, and even for that, it wasn't great. You seem to have seen the light at some point. Please share. (But not via Wave.)
Would you prefer kludge? Oracle certainly didn't lose its locking (writers-block-readers) nature when they added it -- which I didn't say was recently. Their implementation is still limited compared to other good MVCC implementations, and they really don't seem to care, nor encourage anyone to use it. Seems they treat it as something only a niche market needs -- which may very well be the case, considering the number of large-scale apps that weren't built to use it, and were never upgraded to either, and are still the reason they make money. Nothing wrong with that. So maybe hack is too strong a word. "Clean" wouldn't be, though.
If you need good MVCC (busy OLTP environment shared with reporting, long-running transactions, multi-table reports, etc.), I'd recommend Firebird (or Interbase) or PostgreSQL. Interbase essentially pioneered MVCC. My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind. Oracle requires that you preconfigure INITRANS "just right" and it's not pretty if you don't. MS-SQL doesn't really push that it even supports transactions, let alone MVCC, though it does (2005 was messy, 2008 does a little better;) by default, MS-SQL still uses the writers-block-readers model. When I talk about MVCC, Oracle and MS-SQL DBA's usually don't even know what I'm talking about.
I think there's a difference between being skeptical and denying. The skeptic will accept the conclusions provisionally, perform or fund or encourage further investigation, particularly targeting deficiencies in the previous experiments, and try to be unsurprised at the new outcome whatever it is. The denier will simply deny it, outright. One says the opposite of TRUE is NULL, the other says the opposite is FALSE.
Try http://ifhgame.ru/main/campaigns/what-was/danger-and-opportunity -- it's been a long time since I tried it. Honestly, what I *did* like about the game was the menu graphics! I totally dig the scrappy, nebulous star-map thing. (Similar idea was used for the menu graphics in Homeworld2, some of the intro to Enterprise, and I think the Wing Commander movie had some bits like it...)
Babylon 5: "I've found her" had newtonian physics, as did the Independence War games. Frankly, at least for B5, it was just obnoxious. I would expect a real ship to provide computer assistance of some sort to avoid exactly what winds up happening: two ships fly back and forth past each other, as if jousting, with long periods of de/re-acceleration and then a split second of blasting away with hardly any ability to target. It was chaos, and not the good kind. 3D doesn't matter, because unless there are significant environmental obstacles, the fight is pretty much 1D -- even circling around your opponent fails to make sense. Distances become vast far too quickly (acceleration rather than velocity) yet your screen resolution and control mechanism don't make long-distance targeting feasible -- despite the fact that in space, there's really no reason you can't shoot each other down from a thousand miles away. While the XvT, WC, and FS physics weren't newtonian, at least the games were more fun. In the future, I'm thinking our space combat will be entirely automated, because empty-space newtonian physics and human pilots just don't mesh well. It's not intuitive.
FTFA: Our developer support team has done an amazing job of providing guidance, including creating a 21-page, 8,000 word whitepaper on best practices for achievements.
Does anyone have a link to this document? That's what I was hoping to read, more of a gamasutra-like look at what would make an achievement system good, not how it works on a technical (or in this article, not-so-technical) level.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as we would defend your right to *try* to buy groceries by trading anything you have (legally) for merchandise from the grocer, sure. That doesn't mean we'll fight until you succeed. We'll merely defend your right to try to negotiate a mutually-agreeable deal with the grocer. We've always had the right to trade with each other. There's no good reason for a government to prevent that, saying you *can't* trade pigs for beer if you want to. So it's a liberty that should be defended. And the only entity you fight when defending liberties is the government -- not individual grocers, etc., as they're not the ones imposing a lack of freedom. Maybe a lack of choice (by all agreeing that bitcoins suck), but not of freedom.
See the last section of this "Ask Slashdot" entry from 2008, for the Ron Paul campain: http://interviews.slashdot.org/story/08/02/05/1511225/Ron-Paul-Campaign-Answers-Slashdot-Reader-Questions
DMV? In Oklahoma, at least, those are privately-run. All of them. Even if you order your tags online (through a state site), it asks you which private DMV you want to use, and you get your tags from that one physical location ("Tag agency".) States like Oklahoma would require the Feds to put in a clause that states can opt to provide the service any way they see fit, so states can compete, and through competition, figure out which method is best for our dearest citizens. (Note: I think competition between states is a ridiculous concept. Nobody gives California props for "trying things out" for the rest of us, nor does anyone interpret the mass migration to California as proof that its government had the best ideas.)
I'm curious: what if someone downloaded 10000 videos of people being shot by their governments? Would that be sick shit? Would it be bad? Would they become responsible for the deaths of thousands? (I'm not talking about Hollywood movie clips, I'm talking about, say, amateur video of street protests being repressed violently.)
Can we centralize the "alternatives to MySQL" thread here? My vote's for Firebird.
I've seen the following, to avoid adding curly braces around the body of an existing one-liner condition/loop (especially for temporary debugging code):
if (1)
x(), y();
The comma also applies in constructors, specifying the order(?) and parameters with which member variable initializations will be called, before the constructor body.
Isn't that just cyclical? We've always had kings and aristocrats. And then we've had uprisings where the king's land gets redistributed by force. And then everyone wants a chance at being individually wealthy, and it starts over. We're probably just nearing the end of a cycle, as the problem gets magnified (again.)
This does bring in the question of the 'death tax' -- whether your children should be able to so fully enjoy the money you earned during your lifetime, and that was (ostensibly) designed by society as a reward for useful work. Should those who haven't directly earned be able to enjoy? Should the individual be able to get infinitely wealthy, with the caveat that at death, the money's redistributed rather than passed on?
I think the standard reply is that we in the lower classes (lower than max()) don't realize the services the upper classes get. Would we need such a large military if we were all poor? Who would care about invading? Do those with large investments, having more to lose, therefore benefit more from increased protection? Do those who hold patents (which I'll assume correlates with having the higher income to justify/allow purchasing the patents) benefit more than the rest of us from having a patent office, diplomatic/secretive efforts to extend the patent system worldwide, and then enforce those patents? Do the upper classes benefit more than the rest of us from free-trade deals, etc.?
Now we can move on to at least the following usual replies:
a) we're a land of opportunity, and we all get the same (legal) access, so we should be flat-taxed (dollar amount, even, not percentage)
b) our government spends tons on a few large issues -- military and social security; the rich don't get significantly enhanced social security benefits.
(Honestly, I don't know that it's fair to tax the rich more. But they can afford it. It hasn't discouraged people from trying to get rich yet, no matter what the conservatives claim.)
If you ask me, this is as close to a victimless crime as it gets.
No. Tax-payers are supposed to pay taxes to the collective pool of money called the government, to fund the services that we collectively receive. These people don't contribute, but do receive. We are all victims, which is why the government goes after tax-evaders on our collective behalf. No only do we lose the money these people should have paid, and the rest of us (nominally) have to make up, but they add to the overall system waste by forcing us to pay investigators, prosecutors, judges, etc. to hunt down and collect on tax-evaders.
There are plenty of real victimless crimes out there, and they need rectifying. I'll thank you not to make that fight harder by applying the same label to clearly victimful crimes.
To be clear: Wikileaks didn't sneak into the barn. They stood outside, and said that if anyone else happened to find pigs in there, they'd help with the ousting. One of the "select few" (million?!) farm hands chose to do so.
German: "what the vuck"?
There are plenty of layers at which that could be logged for later review, yeah. Filesystems have for a while now had auditing that includes each time a user reads a file. Databases can have that setup via stored procedures, etc. Web servers, or other app layers, can also do the logging. If you differentiate between "read subject line" and "read body", and distinguish between "ran a search that looked at the body" vs. "user saw the body himself", you could get a good starting point for writing what should be, truly, a simple report. Add to that mappings of documents to departments, departments to users, and you could even detect someone who was trying to very slowly siphon out documents that should be available to him, but shouldn't pertain to him on such a regular basis.
And I don't think they do -- I think most /.'s support legal action against the guy who, in this analogy, purposefully opened the barn door. The debate's over what to do once the pigs are out -- they could have gone to anyone, including foreign governments, and they could have gone there secretly, and they could have gone to someone who would release them instantly without any redaction or offer to work with the government. The only improvement you could reasonably ask for is not to release stuff at all. Anything else would have been worse than the current situation. But the 'enabler' concept comes in because WikiLeaks didn't just happen across stray pigs (to come back to the analogy), they had publicly stated they would take them in and redistribute them, if anyone should provide them. But that's nothing new -- the rest of the media's been doing that all along. It's their business. In fact, you can be somewhat thankful that this went to a sort of neutral third party, not directly to one particular media outlet, who would have had control over the spin of stories coming out. Here, you've got several independent eyes looking at it. So now you're talking about possibly the best kind of enabler, considering who else is out there. This really seems like the lesser of all evils, considering the barn doors aren't locked tight enough.
Government programs are /always/ plagued by waste and inefficiencies.
a) Private, commercial ventures are also always plagued by waste and inefficiencies. Humans are involved. You get what you get.
b) Just because there's waste doesn't mean it's 95% waste. That's like saying that because lightbulbs emit both heat and light, they're incapable of ever illuminating anything.
c) Grandiose statements like this one, common on the right, are faith-based attacks. It's common sense. Everyone knows governments waste. Everyone knows governments are nothing but wasteful bureaucracies. It's obvious. Duh. The only good government is a tiny one. But not nonexistent, as that might be seen as disparaging the founding fathers.
The underlying assumption is that you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit, because anything else is too good to be true. But not too much profit. So you can only trust someone who wants to take your money for his own profit in a suitably competitive market. You only trust greedy people. And then ...
The only reason why they can sometimes get things done is because they have infinite money from stealing from taxpayers.
d) No. They're not stealing. We're pooling our moneys to achieve a common goal, as we've agreed to do, through the system of laws we've previously agreed to. If you don't like it, go live in France. (I can say this because I got tired of being told to live in France when I bitched about our new motherland security overlords after 9/11.)
Government restrictions.
e) That's what it *does*. That is the function of government. All freedoms not taken away, we keep. You're complaining that they're doing their job? If not, we need to know the specific restrictions you disagree with; honestly, I trust them to have a better idea of what restrictions we need than I trust you. They have thousands of people looking at what can go wrong when some private individual decides it's perfectly safe to shoot a rocket off from his back yard to go colonize Mars. And those thousands of people? They're just private citizens, like you and me, raised in the same country, under the same flag, learning the same constitution, going to the same backyard BBQ's. They love freedom too. Freedom not to be blown up because of their neighbor's stupid belief that freedom only means something when they can be perfectly reckless.
Devastate that economy? I think, again, that's a very hard point to argue.
Actually, I've seen quite a few sources talk about al qaeda's goal of destroying our economy. They know they don't have the means to destroy our army, or our people, or our institutions directly, but they can convince us to waste our own money. And if that forces us to retreat from the areas they want to control, then that's good enough for them. For the most part, they just want us out of the way so they can wage their real war, with their neighbors: secular-muslim states.
One sample: al Qaeda and other jihadists increasingly wage econo-jihad, study finds
Another, from Al Qaeda's grand strategy (summary of a lecture given by Michael Doran, Asst. Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton):
So where does the war stand now, according to al Qaeda? A leading al Qaeda operative has written a book, the title of which translates loosely to “The Management of Chaos.” According to al Qaeda, the current stage of revolution is the stage of “vexation and exhaustion” of the enemy. They have a notion of how to do this to the Americans and to their 'puppets'.
You vex and exhaust the Americans, according to al Qaeda, by making them spend a lot of money. The United States is a materialist society, and if forced to spend too much money it will “cut and run.”
The means to this end is to force the Americans to spread themselves thinly. Al Qaeda wants to strike everywhere, not just spectacular high value attacks. This will cause the Americans to defend a lot of places at high cost.
And, from a previous Slashdot article (I think):
Airships: a second age
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7918762/Airships-a-second-age.html which includes the following:
There’s a niggling worry I have about the LEMV squatting over Afghanistan: surely a giant white balloon will be vulnerable to attack, despite its lofty position? Fortunately, that’s something they’ve thought about a great deal at Cardington. Indeed, they’ve been thinking about it for many years now, because they also designed ships that were to be deployed over Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
At that time they tested a full-sized airship against a range of artillery including a Russian mounted machine gun filled with .22 calibre armour-piercing incendiaries and a SAM-7 surface to air missile. What they learnt was this: the airship is almost invincible to attack. Helium is an inert gas, so it doesn’t explode.
The pressure inside the envelope is so low that when a hole is made, say by a bullet, air seeps out slowly rather than rushing out catastrophically. Missiles need something hard to connect with if they’re going to explode, but an airship is accommodating, not hard-shelled. The material has the flexibility of a plastic bag; make a hole in it and it almost immediately shrinks inwards.
Is this analysis of r57shell still relevant?
The swarm could be at the connection level -- swarms of connections finding the best routes over time, but within any given established connection, packets still travel single-file (like sand people, to hide their numbers.)
Can you please tell us what Wave is (or could be) good for? I've tried to use it as a non-public wiki, and even for that, it wasn't great. You seem to have seen the light at some point. Please share. (But not via Wave.)
Would you prefer kludge? Oracle certainly didn't lose its locking (writers-block-readers) nature when they added it -- which I didn't say was recently. Their implementation is still limited compared to other good MVCC implementations, and they really don't seem to care, nor encourage anyone to use it. Seems they treat it as something only a niche market needs -- which may very well be the case, considering the number of large-scale apps that weren't built to use it, and were never upgraded to either, and are still the reason they make money. Nothing wrong with that. So maybe hack is too strong a word. "Clean" wouldn't be, though.
If you need good MVCC (busy OLTP environment shared with reporting, long-running transactions, multi-table reports, etc.), I'd recommend Firebird (or Interbase) or PostgreSQL. Interbase essentially pioneered MVCC. My experience with both Oracle and MS-SQL has been that they didn't really grok MVCC very well, and their hacks to back-port it aren't nearly as good as a DBMS built with it in mind. Oracle requires that you preconfigure INITRANS "just right" and it's not pretty if you don't. MS-SQL doesn't really push that it even supports transactions, let alone MVCC, though it does (2005 was messy, 2008 does a little better;) by default, MS-SQL still uses the writers-block-readers model. When I talk about MVCC, Oracle and MS-SQL DBA's usually don't even know what I'm talking about.
I think there's a difference between being skeptical and denying. The skeptic will accept the conclusions provisionally, perform or fund or encourage further investigation, particularly targeting deficiencies in the previous experiments, and try to be unsurprised at the new outcome whatever it is. The denier will simply deny it, outright. One says the opposite of TRUE is NULL, the other says the opposite is FALSE.
Try http://ifhgame.ru/main/campaigns/what-was/danger-and-opportunity -- it's been a long time since I tried it. Honestly, what I *did* like about the game was the menu graphics! I totally dig the scrappy, nebulous star-map thing. (Similar idea was used for the menu graphics in Homeworld2, some of the intro to Enterprise, and I think the Wing Commander movie had some bits like it ...)
Babylon 5: "I've found her" had newtonian physics, as did the Independence War games. Frankly, at least for B5, it was just obnoxious. I would expect a real ship to provide computer assistance of some sort to avoid exactly what winds up happening: two ships fly back and forth past each other, as if jousting, with long periods of de/re-acceleration and then a split second of blasting away with hardly any ability to target. It was chaos, and not the good kind. 3D doesn't matter, because unless there are significant environmental obstacles, the fight is pretty much 1D -- even circling around your opponent fails to make sense. Distances become vast far too quickly (acceleration rather than velocity) yet your screen resolution and control mechanism don't make long-distance targeting feasible -- despite the fact that in space, there's really no reason you can't shoot each other down from a thousand miles away. While the XvT, WC, and FS physics weren't newtonian, at least the games were more fun. In the future, I'm thinking our space combat will be entirely automated, because empty-space newtonian physics and human pilots just don't mesh well. It's not intuitive.
FTFA: Our developer support team has done an amazing job of providing guidance, including creating a 21-page, 8,000 word whitepaper on best practices for achievements.
Does anyone have a link to this document? That's what I was hoping to read, more of a gamasutra-like look at what would make an achievement system good, not how it works on a technical (or in this article, not-so-technical) level.