I dunno...I wasn't a political science major so politics, aside from the inane discussions everyone has on major topics, didn't come up in detail much. Universities are often progressive places because, really, it's a bunch of people (students and faculty) who haven't been exposed to the real world -- they're idealists. They like to propose how things could change for the better and don't dwell on how things could stay the same for the better. Where's the fun in saying, "We should do nothing!"
There's that saying, "A young conservative and an old liberal are both fools."
Bush vs Obama vs Clinton vs Reagan. So far the only difference is how badly they screw something up. Bush's mass murdering of the middle east, Reagan's economic failures, Obama forcing people who can't afford insurance to pay for it or be fined (how does that make sense?), and Clinton -- well, he did ok, but only because he didn't make any huge moves in the wrong direction.
But I didn't have many strong opinions in college because I hadn't been exposed to much. But meeting people from every culture and belief system definitely let me figure out where I want to stand.
Yah, everyone has a different experience certainly. I came from a small town and went to a medium-sized university in a large city. I actually made the comment of someone on our hallway:
"He's Jewish? I thought he was French!"
So that got cleared up for me (cuz, you know, I thought Jewish...I thought Israel, I thought droopy eyes, big nose, etc...so I was a complete idiot because I was thinking "Jewish" was more country and racial, rather than religious.)
College, I think, is partly about learning your major and partly about learning everything else. It's the environment, the exposure to other cultures and ideas that really make college better than a trade school. When you leave college you should be more open-minded, more theoretically-minded, than when you entered. You should be an idea generator, not only an idea applier. The world needs both and you can be both. You may not be a better coder because of college, but you're probably a better designer.
With all the movies depicting that small craft or men in armored flight suits that just zip up into space and grab the thing without any worries, I almost find it hard to believe we can't do that yet. So sure, the Iron Man suit has icing issues and probably doesn't have the air supply to get up and back to space without some modifications. But why don't we have a cool little Space Shuttle dinghy that seats two and can race around to manage stuff like this?
Huh...they have Master of Magic. A truly "good old game" surpassed, surprisingly, by Age of Wonders (and especially Age of Wonder II: Shadow Magic). Essentially the same gameplay only better in Age of Wonders. Yes, I was surprised too since MoM was a childhood favorite.
Robbery: Stealing something from a person with the threat or application of force Burglary: breaking into a structure with the intent of committing a crime Larceny: like burglary, only you didn't break in, you walked in. "Along with motor vehicle theft, larcenies can include purse snatching, shoplifting, theft of any bicycle, fraud, embezzlement, identity theft, forgery, con games, etc"
So...in the attempt of burglarizing someone's house while they sleep, you might wake them up and force them to tell you where the safe is. You're now a burglar and a robber. I suppose "robbing" a bank with a gun while it's open, while certainly robbery, may also be considered larceny since banks are public buildings.
(Caveat: Some are serious, some are tongue-in-cheek. You decide.)
Gitmo Closed: Solution: Building a superprison for some place to put all those Gitmites. Desire: Give fair trials to the people captured and release those illegally detained so they can move forward and become proper terrorists.
Iraq War ended: Solution: Pull out many of our troops but leave our main base there. Desire: Pull out completely from a stable Iraqi government with contracts in place for oil benefits to the US.
Afghan War ended: Solution: Keep fighting people in Afghan. Desire: Pull out completely from a stable Afghani government that allows women equal rights with men.
Patriot Act gone: Solution: Leave it alone. Desire: Completely toss it in the garbage and write something that isn't an offense to the American perception of freedom.
Full Employment: Solution: Obamabucks to infrastructure construction, education, etc. Desire: Regulation on greed so people will trust investing and loaning again.
Deficit Reduced: Solution: Increase Deficit Desire: Reduce deficit...but really, we're all one big happy world and my debt it your debt.
End of Partisan Politics: Solution: Elect a president certain to have the Republican party pee their pants for the next 4 years. Desire: Limit terms of House and Senate; regulate lobbyists; watchdogs on kickbacks.
No lobbyists in his administration: Solution: Lobbyists are like "Special Interests" -- they serve a purpose. Desire: Government should not be decided by the largest pocket book.
Fast action on oil spill: Solution: Act fairly quickly after the fact. Desire: Actually enforce safety regulations so this stuff can't happen. If it isn't safe, it doesn't operate.
So I've never played EQ2 and I've only seen WoW played by someone else. I played EQ for about 2 years, Dark Age of Camelot for about 2 months.
EQ had 3D swimming, racial night vision, different running speeds (potions, spells, bards, etc), the ability to flee a battle, etc. The new games seem so...balanced...and that sort of takes the fun out of some things. There was something cool about my level 50 monk friend jumping through a hole in the ice with his water-breathing spell to go fight some underwater creature for a quest item. The creature was level 35 or something so it was an easy win...but then his health bar started dropping very quickly. Apparently his water-breathing spell had worn off and he was having a problem finding the hole in the ice to resurface.
Happily, I was a paladin so managed a mid-range lay on hands to give him enough time to work things out.
I disagree. Even working at a university, it completely depends on how you run your show. The department I'm part of has a border firewall, client firewalls, no one runs as administrator, antivirus, spyware, malware checkers are run on a regular basis. More important than any of those: we spend time to educate our users on security. They know what to avoid in terms of phishing scams, never to give out passwords to anyone, what to look for before you click on a link in an email (or even a website), etc.
To say the desktop war has been lost because the company you talked to has sucky IT and suckier IT clients...is just dumb.
I'd rather see a character translation method. I should be able to type CNN in my native language and, once put into a URL bar, it will translate it to cnn.com and move forward. There are plenty of URLs in different languages, but as far as I know they're all the latin characters (abcdef, etc).
I kind of agree, for some things anyway. Microsoft's Office is one of those. Word, Excel, Powerpoint -- they haven't significantly changed since Office 97. I mean, they are what they are. More wizards now, different toolbar, prettier graphs. But Office 97 was enough for 99% of the users. Email is the same way -- why does Thunderbird take 113 MB of memory to run, when it doesn't do much more than the 500K of Pegasus mail back in 1994. Web sites are definitely more complex, but Firefox is running at 350 MB right now...I don't think Half Life 2 consumed that much memory.
There are lots of examples of better programs, but it generally matters how in depth you get with them. Photoshop's layers, introduced in version 3 back in the 90s, made the program infinitely more useful than without layers. Since then...I don't use it a whole lot, but I think I could probably still get by with Version 3: layers, colors, basic filters.
Encryption of a disk only helps when the data is on the disk itself. Use Terminal Services to connect to a central encrypted server. Have a single point of entry to this server -- perhaps a VPN that allows only Remote Desktop to one TS cluster.
Or, like everyone else said, don't check work email from home, and don't bring your personal computer to work.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP.
People think PvP is niche gameplay but the reality is that it's niche in the MMORPG world. In FPS, it's the most popular multiplayer game model running. Guild Wars came close to an MMORPG with PvP because it took so many of the elements of FPS and tossed it into a relatively open world. Like Quake with swords and spells and a touch of character advancement.
I'm not a big PvP fan other than, in general, computer AI sucks in MMORPGs. I will say it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a level-based game with PvP: I'm twice your level, and you can't even hit me. I'd rather see, and this can be applied to PvE as well, if you're going to use levels, make positions count. If a 2nd level dwarf with an axe sneaks up behind a level 50 warrior who is currently engaged with two other enemies, the dwarf should score a hit. All characters should be useful in any fight with a little strategy.
There is a handsome rogue who pilots one of the fastest freighters in the system. He's hired to rescue a sarcastic and bossy princess with an odd hairstyle. They are at odds with Darth Vader, a Sith Lord with who is strong in the Dark Side of the Force. Grand Moff Tarkin (what the hell is a Moff?) is a general in the Emperor's military and relies on Vader's influence and fearsomeness to command the troops. Vader eventually takes control by abolishing the Senate and declaring rule by fear. The princess is captured as a Rebellion spy. Enter Luke Skywalker, a teen coming of age in the ways of the Force: "I got one!" "Don't get cocky, kid!" are quips as they team up to battle Vader and the Empire, rescue the princess, and blow up the Emperor's new toy with a resounding, "Yeehaw!"
Sort of. I'm not sure at what point in our culture we went from "it takes a village to raise a child" to "don't tell me how to raise my kids" and "not like I give a damn about your kids".
I don't think it's as simple as "no you can't have this". Not sure that ever worked. People need to set examples, they need to at least try to explain things to children, and people DO need to give a damn past what's at the end of their nose or purse string.
Have a friend who had the same situation but on a different ISP. I believe both GoDaddy and this other ISP use cPanel for access and content control. And the issue only occurred when referred from Google. I perused his site's code but couldn't find anything that stood out. I'm not even sure how the virus is activated (people would visit his site from a Google redirect and their antivirus would cry foul).
I mean, so far, South Park has lampooned Christ, Budda, etc....and yet none of these groups have threatened them with anything more dangerous than possibly a boycott.
If one does not hear the screams of self-immolation, is it a boycott?
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I dunno...I wasn't a political science major so politics, aside from the inane discussions everyone has on major topics, didn't come up in detail much. Universities are often progressive places because, really, it's a bunch of people (students and faculty) who haven't been exposed to the real world -- they're idealists. They like to propose how things could change for the better and don't dwell on how things could stay the same for the better. Where's the fun in saying, "We should do nothing!"
There's that saying, "A young conservative and an old liberal are both fools."
Bush vs Obama vs Clinton vs Reagan. So far the only difference is how badly they screw something up. Bush's mass murdering of the middle east, Reagan's economic failures, Obama forcing people who can't afford insurance to pay for it or be fined (how does that make sense?), and Clinton -- well, he did ok, but only because he didn't make any huge moves in the wrong direction.
But I didn't have many strong opinions in college because I hadn't been exposed to much. But meeting people from every culture and belief system definitely let me figure out where I want to stand.
A tweet isn't a birdcall. It's a new technology the web uses to display 140 character messages online.
This automatic reply generated by Smarcasm, the online Sarcasm Detection Software.
Yah, everyone has a different experience certainly. I came from a small town and went to a medium-sized university in a large city. I actually made the comment of someone on our hallway:
"He's Jewish? I thought he was French!"
So that got cleared up for me (cuz, you know, I thought Jewish...I thought Israel, I thought droopy eyes, big nose, etc...so I was a complete idiot because I was thinking "Jewish" was more country and racial, rather than religious.)
College, I think, is partly about learning your major and partly about learning everything else. It's the environment, the exposure to other cultures and ideas that really make college better than a trade school. When you leave college you should be more open-minded, more theoretically-minded, than when you entered. You should be an idea generator, not only an idea applier. The world needs both and you can be both. You may not be a better coder because of college, but you're probably a better designer.
We need to pick up the pace, or we risk an entire gulf coast with an ecosystem that resembles a wal-mart parking lot.
I thought about what you said, and I find it very interesting. Car exhaust, candy bar wrappers, spilled sodas and frapuccinos, puke...
We could probably move a good portion of the bottom feeders in the gulf to a Walmart and they'd get along quite well.
With all the movies depicting that small craft or men in armored flight suits that just zip up into space and grab the thing without any worries, I almost find it hard to believe we can't do that yet. So sure, the Iron Man suit has icing issues and probably doesn't have the air supply to get up and back to space without some modifications. But why don't we have a cool little Space Shuttle dinghy that seats two and can race around to manage stuff like this?
Huh...they have Master of Magic. A truly "good old game" surpassed, surprisingly, by Age of Wonders (and especially Age of Wonder II: Shadow Magic). Essentially the same gameplay only better in Age of Wonders. Yes, I was surprised too since MoM was a childhood favorite.
Summary of differences between Burglary, Robbery, Theft, Larceny...
To summarize:
Robbery: Stealing something from a person with the threat or application of force
Burglary: breaking into a structure with the intent of committing a crime
Larceny: like burglary, only you didn't break in, you walked in. "Along with motor vehicle theft, larcenies can include purse snatching, shoplifting, theft of any bicycle, fraud, embezzlement, identity theft, forgery, con games, etc"
So...in the attempt of burglarizing someone's house while they sleep, you might wake them up and force them to tell you where the safe is. You're now a burglar and a robber. I suppose "robbing" a bank with a gun while it's open, while certainly robbery, may also be considered larceny since banks are public buildings.
Okay. Even I know that you can't run a cable from a satellite to my house. This whole article is fake.
And while I'm on the Internets, I'd like to bring up the issue about birth certificates again...
(Caveat: Some are serious, some are tongue-in-cheek. You decide.)
Gitmo Closed:
Solution: Building a superprison for some place to put all those Gitmites.
Desire: Give fair trials to the people captured and release those illegally detained so they can move forward and become proper terrorists.
Iraq War ended:
Solution: Pull out many of our troops but leave our main base there.
Desire: Pull out completely from a stable Iraqi government with contracts in place for oil benefits to the US.
Afghan War ended:
Solution: Keep fighting people in Afghan.
Desire: Pull out completely from a stable Afghani government that allows women equal rights with men.
Patriot Act gone:
Solution: Leave it alone.
Desire: Completely toss it in the garbage and write something that isn't an offense to the American perception of freedom.
Full Employment:
Solution: Obamabucks to infrastructure construction, education, etc.
Desire: Regulation on greed so people will trust investing and loaning again.
Deficit Reduced:
Solution: Increase Deficit
Desire: Reduce deficit...but really, we're all one big happy world and my debt it your debt.
End of Partisan Politics:
Solution: Elect a president certain to have the Republican party pee their pants for the next 4 years.
Desire: Limit terms of House and Senate; regulate lobbyists; watchdogs on kickbacks.
No lobbyists in his administration:
Solution: Lobbyists are like "Special Interests" -- they serve a purpose.
Desire: Government should not be decided by the largest pocket book.
Fast action on oil spill:
Solution: Act fairly quickly after the fact.
Desire: Actually enforce safety regulations so this stuff can't happen. If it isn't safe, it doesn't operate.
Perhaps the best reaction would be to embrace it and use it as a positive differentiator from other administrations.
There's an app for that.
Seriously -- the White House iPhone app. It's their blog, updated all the time.
RTFA again. This time do it slowly.
This is Slashdot. What makes you think I read it at all?
So I've never played EQ2 and I've only seen WoW played by someone else. I played EQ for about 2 years, Dark Age of Camelot for about 2 months.
EQ had 3D swimming, racial night vision, different running speeds (potions, spells, bards, etc), the ability to flee a battle, etc. The new games seem so...balanced...and that sort of takes the fun out of some things. There was something cool about my level 50 monk friend jumping through a hole in the ice with his water-breathing spell to go fight some underwater creature for a quest item. The creature was level 35 or something so it was an easy win...but then his health bar started dropping very quickly. Apparently his water-breathing spell had worn off and he was having a problem finding the hole in the ice to resurface.
Happily, I was a paladin so managed a mid-range lay on hands to give him enough time to work things out.
I disagree. Even working at a university, it completely depends on how you run your show. The department I'm part of has a border firewall, client firewalls, no one runs as administrator, antivirus, spyware, malware checkers are run on a regular basis. More important than any of those: we spend time to educate our users on security. They know what to avoid in terms of phishing scams, never to give out passwords to anyone, what to look for before you click on a link in an email (or even a website), etc.
To say the desktop war has been lost because the company you talked to has sucky IT and suckier IT clients...is just dumb.
I'd rather see a character translation method. I should be able to type CNN in my native language and, once put into a URL bar, it will translate it to cnn.com and move forward. There are plenty of URLs in different languages, but as far as I know they're all the latin characters (abcdef, etc).
Without commenting on the whole "which MMOG is bigger/better" thing
Everquest.
Ooookay, back to work...
I kind of agree, for some things anyway. Microsoft's Office is one of those. Word, Excel, Powerpoint -- they haven't significantly changed since Office 97. I mean, they are what they are. More wizards now, different toolbar, prettier graphs. But Office 97 was enough for 99% of the users. Email is the same way -- why does Thunderbird take 113 MB of memory to run, when it doesn't do much more than the 500K of Pegasus mail back in 1994. Web sites are definitely more complex, but Firefox is running at 350 MB right now...I don't think Half Life 2 consumed that much memory.
There are lots of examples of better programs, but it generally matters how in depth you get with them. Photoshop's layers, introduced in version 3 back in the 90s, made the program infinitely more useful than without layers. Since then...I don't use it a whole lot, but I think I could probably still get by with Version 3: layers, colors, basic filters.
Encryption of a disk only helps when the data is on the disk itself. Use Terminal Services to connect to a central encrypted server. Have a single point of entry to this server -- perhaps a VPN that allows only Remote Desktop to one TS cluster.
Or, like everyone else said, don't check work email from home, and don't bring your personal computer to work.
Only a small minority thinks it is fun to kill people in uncontrolled world PvP.
People think PvP is niche gameplay but the reality is that it's niche in the MMORPG world. In FPS, it's the most popular multiplayer game model running. Guild Wars came close to an MMORPG with PvP because it took so many of the elements of FPS and tossed it into a relatively open world. Like Quake with swords and spells and a touch of character advancement.
I'm not a big PvP fan other than, in general, computer AI sucks in MMORPGs. I will say it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a level-based game with PvP: I'm twice your level, and you can't even hit me. I'd rather see, and this can be applied to PvE as well, if you're going to use levels, make positions count. If a 2nd level dwarf with an axe sneaks up behind a level 50 warrior who is currently engaged with two other enemies, the dwarf should score a hit. All characters should be useful in any fight with a little strategy.
Bah. It's in the subject.
Hmm...
There is a handsome rogue who pilots one of the fastest freighters in the system. He's hired to rescue a sarcastic and bossy princess with an odd hairstyle. They are at odds with Darth Vader, a Sith Lord with who is strong in the Dark Side of the Force. Grand Moff Tarkin (what the hell is a Moff?) is a general in the Emperor's military and relies on Vader's influence and fearsomeness to command the troops. Vader eventually takes control by abolishing the Senate and declaring rule by fear. The princess is captured as a Rebellion spy. Enter Luke Skywalker, a teen coming of age in the ways of the Force: "I got one!" "Don't get cocky, kid!" are quips as they team up to battle Vader and the Empire, rescue the princess, and blow up the Emperor's new toy with a resounding, "Yeehaw!"
Damn, dude. You're spot on with that review.
Sort of. I'm not sure at what point in our culture we went from "it takes a village to raise a child" to "don't tell me how to raise my kids" and "not like I give a damn about your kids".
I don't think it's as simple as "no you can't have this". Not sure that ever worked. People need to set examples, they need to at least try to explain things to children, and people DO need to give a damn past what's at the end of their nose or purse string.
Have a friend who had the same situation but on a different ISP. I believe both GoDaddy and this other ISP use cPanel for access and content control. And the issue only occurred when referred from Google. I perused his site's code but couldn't find anything that stood out. I'm not even sure how the virus is activated (people would visit his site from a Google redirect and their antivirus would cry foul).
I mean, so far, South Park has lampooned Christ, Budda, etc....and yet none of these groups have threatened them with anything more dangerous than possibly a boycott.
If one does not hear the screams of self-immolation, is it a boycott?
Anything can be art. Like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder.