Actually, if you outlawed the government from doing anything but protecting your right to life and property, you wouldn't have to worry about wars and thus mustard gas would be irrelevant.
It isn't scientists that are the problem. It's politicians leading the masses of common yokels on crucades. Sad Al Gore lost the election (not that Bush is some ideal candidate)? You're part of the problem.
I find it extremely curious my response was categorized as a Troll, while the original post about Vegans was deemed "Insightful". I thought Slashdot was better than that. My post may have been pithy, but was much more insightful, and certainly not a Troll.
Two-Fisted Tales of Programming, Served In a Dirty Glass With a Hair In It, (c)opyright 1879
It just depends on the toughness of the words of your era.
I'm surprised they used "Extreme" though. I thought that died the day I saw a children's science sight with at least 30 different topics, each one headed by "Extreme", as in "Extreme Animals", "Extreme Geometry", and "Extreme Lemon Battery".
It's really more like the Borg not noticing a few mosquito bites.
If China ever gets their act together, they'll far outstrip the US. Fortunately, getting their "act together" means becoming free and capitalistic, at which point there won't be any conflicts of significance between them and the US.
Humane is debatable. Democratic has nothing to do with it. One cares not whether the population of the opposing country would vote to not have you there.
I don't think there's anything you could possibly camp on EverQuest that, when sole on eBay and then divided out by hours spent, would even begin to approach a minimum wage job.
This is more an issue for high school and college students who will be playing the game *anyway* and could use a few bucks *anyway*, so what the heck...
Actually, the more likely result would be that your anti-farming guild WOULD be able to take the spawn away, but the camper would/petition, and everyone in the anti-farming group would be warned, and eventually banned.
You see a farmer, the GM just sees a guy camping a place and six other guys who've taken the campsite.
> it poses an unfair advantage to a select few and finally
This is an incredible laugh! The amound of eBay twinkage pales into insignificance compared to that a high level char can do to his or his friend's newbie secondary character, or what a high level guild can farm for their new members or secondaries.
I'll bet 99 out of 100 level 8 warriors running around in crafted (or is it smithed fine steel racial plate now?) are doing it because of a rich "sugardaddy" ingame, rather than buying it on eBay.
I don't know the solution to this (and personally doubt the "staying power" of being able to twink as a means to keep people playing) but I do know EverQuest certainly has it Massively Messed Up.
Given the countless quadrillions of molecules floating around, that life started without help from a god (or a technologically advanced society) is arguably inevitable.
"God" mucks things up by being synonomous with "magic", i.e. "we don't know how it started, therefore it was magic."
And, of course, "Any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic to the natives." A. C. Clarke.
Re:Other historical tragedies.
on
The Challenger
·
· Score: 1
> 5) Women losing the right to control their own bodies.
And men, too. Prostitution is illegal for both buyer and seller, and this doesn't even involve the nonconsentual death of anyone.
Mechwarrior II: Mercenaries for the PC, you mean. This game suffered from what I call SimAnt Syndrome, where the enemies would always make a beeline for your mech unless directly being assaulted by your assistants. Of course, then all you needed to do was give yourself a speedy runner and assign your Atlases D and K to your squad assistants, and train everybody except one all around, assigning the assistants to pick off them one by one. Easy.
Second place was the Battletech cartridge for Sega Genesis. Now that was a tough game to beat.
1. Forget a lot of the "process". It's made by chimpanzees in Universities who are inventing things to be important experts at. It has all the validity of a good get-rich-quick infomercial.
2. Get some real people who understand user interface to design that. Too often, even with Windows and Mac, UI is just something the programmer thought up when he rolled out of bed that morning.
3. DO do design before you start coding. Work through the ramifications of the design.
4. Program defensively. Unless you're writing an embedded system, or a tight inner loop on some serious number crunching, there is no reason whatsoever not to check every parameter for validity at the entrance to every routine or section, or result from a function call.
5. Learn Network and Thread programming principles. They're largely the same thing. TRUST NO ONE. TRUST NO STATE. When writing middleware, which is to say, anything that connects between separate threads (network or in process) provide routines to check state. When functions are called in an incorrect state, make the return values obvious to the caller so they know that things weren't in the state the caller thought they were.
Oh, come on now. No one goes into a robot movie expecting car chases, unless it's Robocop, or Terminator. They expect to see the robot rip people's arms off. That's what I WOULD expect to see in a Robin Williams/Isaac Asimov robot story, I know that much!
Actually, strike all this. I guess a lot of violent robot movies do contain car chases after all. After all, they get to completely run over the hero or bad guy, who just gets right back up.
Then there was Steve Austin, the REAL one, who got into car chases WITHOUT THE CAR. Now THERE is a real man who kno, um well, a partial man, anyway.
> The Reaganauts (and their Bush II successors)
> tended to see technology as an alien, menacing
> new reality -- especially in terms of moral
> danger and challenge to authority.
Was this before or after Reagan mentioned the benefits of video games in training a whole new generation of high-tech soldiers? Maybe it was around when they wanted to dump a trillion dollars into uber-tech SDI?
I'm just waiting for the news report when one of those spike-swinging behemoths comes down on the head of an 8-year-old who went into his daddy's garage.
Gold is still worth something, but like all commodities, it is constantly lowering in price over the long term (just like oil and coal, which we are not running out of any time soon.)
In fact, we will probably never get rid of hydrocarbon-powered electrical plants. Long before coal starts getting scarce (many hundreds of years from now, if not thousands) which will be reflected by a rising price (government intervention aside) some greedy corporation will develop some bacteria that eats corn and poops out oil (if said isn't developed already.)
By the way, let's have a TON more hydroelectric dams, while we're at it. The loss of some species to humanity, as measured by human mortality with or without them, is more than made up for by additional, cheap energies and its effect on an advancing technological society.
Slashdot Mirror
See this? This is EXACTLY what I was talking about when that person suggested vegetarians and vegans would be the ideal person to sent to Mars.
You don't send people with demonstrated lack of critical thinking ability, you won't have problems like this.
What they need on Mars is a good, Bible-thumping evangelist.
That may be true, but why would you hamstring a mission to Mars for what amounts to adhering to a quasi-religious view of animals?
Actually, if you outlawed the government from doing anything but protecting your right to life and property, you wouldn't have to worry about wars and thus mustard gas would be irrelevant.
It isn't scientists that are the problem. It's politicians leading the masses of common yokels on crucades. Sad Al Gore lost the election (not that Bush is some ideal candidate)? You're part of the problem.
I find it extremely curious my response was categorized as a Troll, while the original post about Vegans was deemed "Insightful". I thought Slashdot was better than that. My post may have been pithy, but was much more insightful, and certainly not a Troll.
Two-Fisted Tales of Programming, Served In a Dirty Glass With a Hair In It, (c)opyright 1879
It just depends on the toughness of the words of your era.
I'm surprised they used "Extreme" though. I thought that died the day I saw a children's science sight with at least 30 different topics, each one headed by "Extreme", as in "Extreme Animals", "Extreme Geometry", and "Extreme Lemon Battery".
It's really more like the Borg not noticing a few mosquito bites.
If China ever gets their act together, they'll far outstrip the US. Fortunately, getting their "act together" means becoming free and capitalistic, at which point there won't be any conflicts of significance between them and the US.
Humane is debatable. Democratic has nothing to do with it. One cares not whether the population of the opposing country would vote to not have you there.
This is not a troll.
I am for the complete Trantorization of Earth. With several trillion people, the rates of scientific advancement will be incredible.
I don't think there's anything you could possibly camp on EverQuest that, when sole on eBay and then divided out by hours spent, would even begin to approach a minimum wage job.
This is more an issue for high school and college students who will be playing the game *anyway* and could use a few bucks *anyway*, so what the heck...
Actually, the more likely result would be that your anti-farming guild WOULD be able to take the spawn away, but the camper would /petition, and everyone in the anti-farming group would be warned, and eventually banned.
You see a farmer, the GM just sees a guy camping a place and six other guys who've taken the campsite.
> it poses an unfair advantage to a select few and finally
This is an incredible laugh! The amound of eBay twinkage pales into insignificance compared to that a high level char can do to his or his friend's newbie secondary character, or what a high level guild can farm for their new members or secondaries.
I'll bet 99 out of 100 level 8 warriors running around in crafted (or is it smithed fine steel racial plate now?) are doing it because of a rich "sugardaddy" ingame, rather than buying it on eBay.
I don't know the solution to this (and personally doubt the "staying power" of being able to twink as a means to keep people playing) but I do know EverQuest certainly has it Massively Messed Up.
> if you read it, you'll see that Lot's daughters
> purposefully got him drunk and fucked him.
Sheesh, that's just what he told the police.
Given the countless quadrillions of molecules floating around, that life started without help from a god (or a technologically advanced society) is arguably inevitable.
"God" mucks things up by being synonomous with "magic", i.e. "we don't know how it started, therefore it was magic."
And, of course, "Any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic to the natives." A. C. Clarke.
> 5) Women losing the right to control their own bodies.
And men, too. Prostitution is illegal for both buyer and seller, and this doesn't even involve the nonconsentual death of anyone.
Mechwarrior II: Mercenaries for the PC, you mean. This game suffered from what I call SimAnt Syndrome, where the enemies would always make a beeline for your mech unless directly being assaulted by your assistants. Of course, then all you needed to do was give yourself a speedy runner and assign your Atlases D and K to your squad assistants, and train everybody except one all around, assigning the assistants to pick off them one by one. Easy.
Second place was the Battletech cartridge for Sega Genesis. Now that was a tough game to beat.
1. Forget a lot of the "process". It's made by chimpanzees in Universities who are inventing things to be important experts at. It has all the validity of a good get-rich-quick infomercial.
2. Get some real people who understand user interface to design that. Too often, even with Windows and Mac, UI is just something the programmer thought up when he rolled out of bed that morning.
3. DO do design before you start coding. Work through the ramifications of the design.
4. Program defensively. Unless you're writing an embedded system, or a tight inner loop on some serious number crunching, there is no reason whatsoever not to check every parameter for validity at the entrance to every routine or section, or result from a function call.
5. Learn Network and Thread programming principles. They're largely the same thing. TRUST NO ONE. TRUST NO STATE. When writing middleware, which is to say, anything that connects between separate threads (network or in process) provide routines to check state. When functions are called in an incorrect state, make the return values obvious to the caller so they know that things weren't in the state the caller thought they were.
That's pretty much it.
I don't know, though I've been told
(I don't know, though I've been told)
Robot slots have contacts of gold.
(Robot slots have contacts of gold.)
Robots don't kill people. People kill people.
Well, Ok. I guess an evil robot will kill people of its own free will.
Robot arms with chainsaw attachments don't kill people. Robots kill people. NO REGULATION OF CHAINSAW ARM ATTACHMENTS!
Oh, come on now. No one goes into a robot movie expecting car chases, unless it's Robocop, or Terminator. They expect to see the robot rip people's arms off. That's what I WOULD expect to see in a Robin Williams/Isaac Asimov robot story, I know that much!
Actually, strike all this. I guess a lot of violent robot movies do contain car chases after all. After all, they get to completely run over the hero or bad guy, who just gets right back up.
Then there was Steve Austin, the REAL one, who got into car chases WITHOUT THE CAR. Now THERE is a real man who kno, um well, a partial man, anyway.
> The Reaganauts (and their Bush II successors)
> tended to see technology as an alien, menacing
> new reality -- especially in terms of moral
> danger and challenge to authority.
Was this before or after Reagan mentioned the benefits of video games in training a whole new generation of high-tech soldiers? Maybe it was around when they wanted to dump a trillion dollars into uber-tech SDI?
He was just being lazy about his trademarks.
The microfans will be Growed(TM) in-place.
I'm just waiting for the news report when one of those spike-swinging behemoths comes down on the head of an 8-year-old who went into his daddy's garage.
It'll take about 30 seconds before some self-appointed leader of the poor will claim this is just a tax break for the rich.
Of course, that is a good thing because the rich employ a lot more than the poor do.
I am far more concerned about Bush trying to ban porn on the internet than of any environmental issues.
Gold is still worth something, but like all commodities, it is constantly lowering in price over the long term (just like oil and coal, which we are not running out of any time soon.)
In fact, we will probably never get rid of hydrocarbon-powered electrical plants. Long before coal starts getting scarce (many hundreds of years from now, if not thousands) which will be reflected by a rising price (government intervention aside) some greedy corporation will develop some bacteria that eats corn and poops out oil (if said isn't developed already.)
By the way, let's have a TON more hydroelectric dams, while we're at it. The loss of some species to humanity, as measured by human mortality with or without them, is more than made up for by additional, cheap energies and its effect on an advancing technological society.