Why are RPGers so snobbish about what games they'll call an RPG?
Welcome to the world of geekdom, where people have screaming arguments over whether vi or emacs is a better editor, what sci-fi series is best, and how any product that you like that competes with a product they like is a clear sign of your moral and mental inferiority.
Gamers who like one type of game frequently disparage the other types because of same sort of stupid pride that leads to platform and editor flamewars. Rather than admit that we all like different games and that that's okay, they'd rather go off about how people who enjoy something they don't are idiots.
This is unfortunately human nature and is only curable with maturity.
There's a site called The Forge that's been wrestling with what is an RPG (for table-top gamers) for a while that's come up with a good broad three categories for game types: Narrativist, Simulationist, and Gamist.
Narrativist games focus on a story. Simulationist games focus on exploration. Gamist games focus on overcoming challenges.
The main emphasis of The Forge for table-top gamers is to point out that games (and gaming groups) that try to satisfy everyone tend to satisfy no one and to increase awareness of alternative playstyles for people stuck in games that they find disatisfying.
Eastern / console RPGs are narrativist games that focus primarily on the telling of a good story and in getting you emotionally involved in the plot. Western / PC RPGs are simulationist games that have an open-ended world to explore and let you shape a character into anything you want. The only purely gamist games with little emphasis on plot and exploration might be a few Strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem and Makai Kingdom and some action RPGs like Shining Tears. All RPGs have some element of all three play styles, but all workable RPGs tend to strongly reward one of the three player goals over the others.
People just need to recognize that tastes differ and quit falling back on the "no true Scotsman" argument.
Most municipal governments could, in fact, be converted into private organizations without a great deal of trouble: change property taxes to land rents...
Thank you. Right off the bat you identify the main problem with your own argument -- it requires that we all be "sharecroppers" who aren't allowed to truly own the land we live on. Your suggested "private" institution only works if people are denied private property rights to their home.
This is quintessentially a government power backed by use of force which is anathema to a pure private ownership paradigm. You have shuffled the names and identities around, but you have not in any way shown a true privatized system that upholds the goals of personal financial liberty and of an ownership society.
What you have proposed is essentially the status quo.
If you fry some potatoes in non-hydrogenated vegetable oil, it's a perfectly healthy side dish.
No, it's not. It's just empty calories. The insides of potatoes are almost completely free of vitamins and minerals to begin with before you destroy any vitamins in the frier. That's just nothing but starch and fat -- admittedly unsaturated fat, but fat nonetheless. That adds a significant amount of calories to your food.
100g of plain baked potato is 136 kCal with 0.2g fat. 100g of french fries / chips from KFC is 294 kCal with 14.8 g fat.
Your comparison against highly processed foods is silly. Eat some steamed broccoli instead, dangit.
(With regard to students--US minimum wage with a 20 hour workweek comes out to $412 per month, more than enough to cover rent in my college town. Of course, my college town is in a state with a higher minimum wage, so one would make $612 a month, enough to cover rent and basic living expenses.)
Woah! Where the heck do you live!?
I live in Atlanta. The crappiest place to rent I know is a place where a friend of mine who works in a call center for a car rental chain lives. Rent there is just under $600/month, and it's a complete slum. Heck, my aparment's kind of seedy, and it's $750/month. You don't start getting into "nice" communities until you break $900/month. Of course, that doesn't count the $200+/month in gas, water, electricity, and phone service, much less internet, cellphone, gasoline, and food.
The working poor are also often squeezed by having absolutely no savings. If you don't have a full first month's rent saved up, you might end up in some place that charges you an obsence month-to-month or worse week-to-week rate. This is where the truly desperate get trapped. You pay too much for rent to save up enough money to pay less for rent.
Sure, the author's a bit too whiney and privileged to really understand what it's like to live that life, but a lot of the stuff she brings up is true. I have an unfortunate number for friends who got trapped after college with no job prospects and who now have too little experience post-college to ever get better job prospects, and I see how they have to get by. In all cases, they got themselves into this mess, but I'm not sure exactly how they're supposed to get themselves out of it now.
I've also travelled quite a bit through Europe with tour groups and I have always noticed that while people from other countries embraced the cultural differences and wanted to sample new foods, the Americans generally couldn't wait to go trotting off to the McDonalds or KFC.
Damnation, that drove me completely crazy when I spent 3 weeks in Japan back for a class back in 2000! I had an explicit goal when I was there to never eat anything that I could easily get in America. I was essentially forced when hanging out with some classmates to go to places like McDonald's, KFC, and Starbucks and had to change my goal to always getting something that I couldn't get in America at everyplace....Up until the bland facelessness of Starbucks screwed me out of that goal.
(That said, KFC makes a delicious curry side dish, the Teriyaki Burger is kind of neat, and I really loved McDonald's "Shakashaka Poteto" which was french fries with a flavor packet, available in curry and umeboshi, and a bag to shake it all up in.)
Meanwhile, after a single week, some of the other students were whining about how they couldn't wait to get back to America and go to Pizza Hut. I just couldn't believe it. What's the point in going to a foreign country where you don't like the food?
Both of my parents are teachers, and my sister is a teacher. You are absolutely correct.
The problem with education is the what passes for parenting today and the willingness of parents to fight to destroy teachers' careers rather than face up to the fact that their kid might be a little monster. My mom has to deal with this sort of nonsense ALL THE TIME from my her school's worthless community. Oh, and the petty interpersonal politics between teachers and the little martinets that aim to be school administrators doesn't help either.
Find us a sewer system built entirely without government intervention. That means no privatized, pre-existing, municipal systems, no government loans, no use of governmet force to acquire rights to lay pipe through private property without compensation, etc.
Also, explain how to give coverage to the poor sectors of society, maintain the system, and earn a profit for investors. Please provide numbers.
Truely private healthcare would be doctors competeing for cash paying customers having to match their rates to what people can actualy afford rather than what they can get out of insurance companies.
I think you misunderstand the free market. Insurance companies are a free market institution. They are customers pooling their resources and hedging their bets against having to personally pay for healthcare costs instanaeously and without sufficient savings which could take nearly a lifetime to build up (if possible) for some procedures. Insurance companies are like a reverse lottery -- you pay in in the hopes of not having to get a pay out. They're a risk mitigation strategy, kind of like putting money into bonds or commodities just in case the stock market tanks.
A free market would not eliminate insurance in the slightest. You'd have to outlaw it, and then that regulation would make it hardly a free market at the point.
So justify it. And do so without emotionally charged arguments, because we all know it is a terrible thing when a loved one gets cancer. That fact has nothing whatsoever to do with forcing me to pay for her care.
Alright. You really want the cold, hard, rational argument for altruism. Fortunately, you've handed us one of the best cases for such an argument.
The costs for treating and curing cancer are enormous. Chemo costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend your life for a few years. Chances are really good that you can't afford those drugs as a sudden expense if you found out you had cancer today. This is true for many medical conditions. I had to have my gallbladder removed, and the total bill was $15,000 to my insurance company. An expense like that (due within a few months of it being incurred) would have killed me financially at the time.
So, it is in your best interest to pay a small fee every month to cover the costs of everyone else who is sick with the agreement that if you get sick, everyone else will cover your costs. This is the selfishly rational argument for altruism at its finest. You act as part of a group to help individuals face burdens that they cannot bear alone because they will be there for you should you face a burden that you cannot bear alone. It's why you help friends move; it's why you do weight lifting with a spotter; and it's why you pay for insurance right now.
That's right -- that's what insurance is at its core. You pay a monthy premium that amortizes the predicted average health costs you are likely to incur in your life which goes straight into paying for the care of others. Chances are that right now you aren't sick, but you're paying for the welfare of others. You do this because when your time comes around, others will pay for your well-being.
The average person will end up paying more into insurance than they will get back even with non-profit insurance. Many of us will die in a manner that is swift and incurable; we will not recoup the loss of money that went to pay for people put on life-support and expensive drugs. However, it's to our benefit to take the risk and put the money into the fund because there's always the chance that it will be we who are saved by a procedure we can't afford.
That's it: The rational argument for paying for others is at core that they will pay for you in a time when you cannot cover it yourself.
The reason the Democrats will lose the White House again in 2008 is because they keep deluding themselves that only religious nutbags can possibly vote for a Republican.
No, the reason Democrats might lose again is because their base consistently treats religious people as "nutbags" instead of trying to bring them to the table with shared values of love for your neighbor and for alleviating the suffering of the poor and by failing to point out the contempt that many Republicans have for real Christian values like charity, mercy, and peace.
Populists -- people who support both government regulation of morals and of business are a real swing vote that have been consistently dragged into voting for the richer to get richer and for the way business is done to get more heartless by wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, etc. Religions black voters are almost all populists, for example. The Republicans know how to court them without giving them everything they want and by slowly turning them into conservatives who worship Mammon right beside God. If Democrats courted them more, they could win the election, but the hard Left has an utter disdain for these people because they don't see the parts where they have agreement and only see the smoke screen the Right has thrown up to put religious people all in a single block that votes Republican.
The media has no friends (amongst the people) because it deserves none. The media is just as corrupt as the Republican and Democratic Parties for the exact same reasons -- they all largely depend on the largesse of the wealthy and powerful (i.e. donors or advertisers) who pressure them into pursuing the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Only on rare occasion can they be brought to heel by the people under the current system.
The trend of mega-mergers of media conglomerates has only worsened the situation over the past 30 years as the power to shape public opinion has become more concentrated and thus more easily bribed by sponsors.
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Note that this text lacks any requirement that the accused be a US citizen (not that that matters in the case of Jose Padilla). Note that the text lacks a clause of "but not if the accused is a really, really bad person." Nor is there a limit on borders within the US government must behave. Now, what part of locking up prisoners indefinitely in Guantanimo Bay without charges, without access to lawyers, without access to a jury trial, and without access to all witnesses against them is not in violation of the text above?
This government wanted to go even further than that. They actually argued unsuccessfully before the 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that prisoners in Guantanimo have no standing to challenge their detention and treatment even if they were being tortured and summarily executed!
Regardless of what you think about the guilt or innocence of terrorist suspects, there is a truly frightening aspect to the idea that this government has asserted its right to "war powers" in an indefinite length conflict against terrorism to abduct people worldwide (including US citizens like Jose Padilla) and hold them indefinitely in overseas prisons where they assert the right to torture and execute them with no judicial oversight. The only qualifications to fall into this legal black hole is that the government says that you're an "enemy combatant" or a "terrorist suspect" and to be successfully seized and flown out of country. After that, they would argue that you essentially have no rights. There is a reason we have rule of law and protections for the accused -- to prevent people from being disappeared, Soviet-style.
Wake me up if/when impeachment proceedings start. Otherwise, stop spreading FUD.
Impeachment means nothing. It's a partisan political tool now. Clinton was impeached and threatened with removal from office for lying under Oath about an act of sexual infidelity. Bush has essentially wiped his rear end with the Constitution, defied Congress repeatedly, and blatantly broken laws meant to restrain Presidential power, and because the Congress is controlled by his own party, nothing will happen to him.
Saying that he's innocent of crimes because his own buddies won't hold him accountable displays a cowardly and contemptable disregard for reality and standards of law.
Psychopathic science and immune exploits.
on
Spam Gets Personal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm reminded of Mark Buller, the guy who improved the accidental enhancement mousepox into a 100% deadly disease even in mice vaccinated against it. A guy named Ramshaw was researching transmissable mouse contraceptives to deal with an overpopulation problem and spliced a gene for the immunosuppressant IL-4 into mousepox. Unfortunately, this led to the death of 60% of the test mice. Buller published research where he expanded on this idea by putting the IL-4 gene in a better spot and put in another gene to maximize production. This killed mice even treated with anti-viral drugs with a nearly 100% fatality rate.
Fortunately, however, Buller seems to have tried to make up for this a little by having come up with a counter-measure. This provides a hope for some people to live in case of genetically engineered smallpox, but I don't think that the kind of drugs required are even close to being common and inexpensive enough to help the public at large.
One of these days, I'm worried that unethical or thoughtless biologist are going to publish exploits for the human immune system, and one of these days technology is going to get cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for the biologist equivalent of a script kiddie to wage genocide. I'm worried that in the next century, we're going to get an object lesson in just how hard it is to "patch and update" our immune system.
Wrong market. The console's clearly not targetted at the 20-30 crowd. It should be "Nintendo: Lifestyles (for kid's pleasure)." ... ...Wait, um... maybe not.
Don't get me wrong, but how is that supposedly connected? I own a few Nintendo pieces. Do I have to listen to Gorillaz now? And since I can't have TiVo and go to the movies (obviously, or I'd have to embrace the PS3 and the X360), do I have to download my movies?
All I know is that my complete and total hatred of Enimem is almost enough to make me consider an Xbox 360 instead to avoid being associated with Enimem fans.
Logically, I'd also think that showing people how good your product is (rather than how bad the other product is) has a much more positive effect.
What if your strength is that you don't do something horrible? What if your strength is that you do something better than a competitor, and you'd like to show how much better you are? What if failures are rare for both products, but you want to show yourself as better? Isn't it fair in that case to contrast your success against your competitor's failure?
If you're selling fluorescent lights, and you want to contrast the short life and high power consumption of incandescent lighting against your product, is that bad?
If your cell phone service doesn't drop calls and lets you communicate clearly, isn't it better to show your competitors failing at this rather than trying to show an entire month of not failing?
If your product cleans stains effectively, isn't it fair to compare it against "the leading brand" to show how much better it is?
I see no difference between the above commercials and what Apple is doing. However, I think it's a little like calling the Titanic "Unsinkable" before its maiden voyage to brag about how virus-free Macs are. That kind of hubris is definitely going to bite Apple when the platform reaches that critical mass of interest + talent especially now that much more common x86 assembler experience can be leveraged by malware writers against the Mac now.
that all said, my (admittedly limited) experience with threading is that it's best to design the deadlocks away before you even touch the editor.
That's not "limited" experience. That's common sense. Trying to find deadlocks, race conditions, and accidental serialization in an application by experimentally compiling and running is like trying to build a house by nailing the boards together only after they've collapsed on you.
Seriously, threads cannot be bolted on as an afterthought. You have to consciously design threads in in the first place, and if you ignore this advise and attempt to retrofit your code, then you must audit the code fully first to see where execution can be grouped into the smallest safe units for locking.
I've seen what happens when you ad hoc threading in large library that was never designed to be reentrant. Worse, I've seen what happens when you get it working on Windows but fail to realize that the UNIX version never was successfully locking the library for 3-4 years before a customer tried to build an aggressively multithreaded app on top of it and only then discover all the deadlocks that lay hidden inside.
Rehashing an old idea is not necessarily bad. Reusing as story isn't necessarily bad. We did it for centuries before the advent of motion pictures, and it's led to some pretty brilliant movies since then when Shakespeare is the source of the rehashed ideas.
The best version of "Richard III" that I've ever seen was a 1995 movie that placed it in a 1930s fascist England. "West Side Story" is a street gang musical based on Romeo and Juliet that is widely held in great esteem (unlike the movie "Romeo + Juliet"). One of my absolute favorite plays is "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," an absurdist take on "Hamlet" from the POV of two bit characters who are slowly becoming aware of their unimportance and impending death by plot. Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" and "Ran" are two of my favorite samurai movies but are based on "Macbeth" and "King Lear," respectively.
The problem is that Hollywood is generally too lazy and too focused on churning out easy money to get it right. If Hollywood rehashed old ideas with style, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Unfortunately, "Revenge of the Nerds" isn't exactly Shakespeare, and Hollywood's not doing this for any sort of "artistic merit."
The problem is that Japanese has a phoneme in between L, R, & D. That sound is what we usually romanize as R. Because of this sound that sits between the three, a Japanese accent often slides L & R towards that middle sound. Also, whenever transliterating foreign words into their native language, L sounds and leading R sounds both get changed to the same characters. (Trailing R sounds, such as in "cancer" turn into extended-vowels, like "kansaa".)
Slashdot Mirror
What is security? No, really. There are no closed systems: access is fundamental, you could say. Thoughts?
Security, techmology... What's it all about? Is it good or is it whack?
Why are RPGers so snobbish about what games they'll call an RPG?
Welcome to the world of geekdom, where people have screaming arguments over whether vi or emacs is a better editor, what sci-fi series is best, and how any product that you like that competes with a product they like is a clear sign of your moral and mental inferiority.
Gamers who like one type of game frequently disparage the other types because of same sort of stupid pride that leads to platform and editor flamewars. Rather than admit that we all like different games and that that's okay, they'd rather go off about how people who enjoy something they don't are idiots.
This is unfortunately human nature and is only curable with maturity.
There's a site called The Forge that's been wrestling with what is an RPG (for table-top gamers) for a while that's come up with a good broad three categories for game types: Narrativist, Simulationist, and Gamist.
Narrativist games focus on a story.
Simulationist games focus on exploration.
Gamist games focus on overcoming challenges.
The main emphasis of The Forge for table-top gamers is to point out that games (and gaming groups) that try to satisfy everyone tend to satisfy no one and to increase awareness of alternative playstyles for people stuck in games that they find disatisfying.
Eastern / console RPGs are narrativist games that focus primarily on the telling of a good story and in getting you emotionally involved in the plot. Western / PC RPGs are simulationist games that have an open-ended world to explore and let you shape a character into anything you want. The only purely gamist games with little emphasis on plot and exploration might be a few Strategy RPGs like Fire Emblem and Makai Kingdom and some action RPGs like Shining Tears. All RPGs have some element of all three play styles, but all workable RPGs tend to strongly reward one of the three player goals over the others.
People just need to recognize that tastes differ and quit falling back on the "no true Scotsman" argument.
Most municipal governments could, in fact, be converted into private organizations without a great deal of trouble: change property taxes to land rents...
Thank you. Right off the bat you identify the main problem with your own argument -- it requires that we all be "sharecroppers" who aren't allowed to truly own the land we live on. Your suggested "private" institution only works if people are denied private property rights to their home.
This is quintessentially a government power backed by use of force which is anathema to a pure private ownership paradigm. You have shuffled the names and identities around, but you have not in any way shown a true privatized system that upholds the goals of personal financial liberty and of an ownership society.
What you have proposed is essentially the status quo.
If you fry some potatoes in non-hydrogenated vegetable oil, it's a perfectly healthy side dish.
No, it's not. It's just empty calories. The insides of potatoes are almost completely free of vitamins and minerals to begin with before you destroy any vitamins in the frier. That's just nothing but starch and fat -- admittedly unsaturated fat, but fat nonetheless. That adds a significant amount of calories to your food.
100g of plain baked potato is 136 kCal with 0.2g fat.
100g of french fries / chips from KFC is 294 kCal with 14.8 g fat.
Your comparison against highly processed foods is silly. Eat some steamed broccoli instead, dangit.
When a guy who's sick of the flue [sic] hijacks a plane and flies it into a building.
Since when has a guy blowing himself and a building up ever led to his grievances being addressed?
Honestly, if someone did that, you'd see the mass arrest of sick people as a threat to the nation before you'd see national healthcare.
That is possibly the most Insightful quote I have read in a long time.
(With regard to students--US minimum wage with a 20 hour workweek comes out to $412 per month, more than enough to cover rent in my college town. Of course, my college town is in a state with a higher minimum wage, so one would make $612 a month, enough to cover rent and basic living expenses.)
Woah! Where the heck do you live!?
I live in Atlanta. The crappiest place to rent I know is a place where a friend of mine who works in a call center for a car rental chain lives. Rent there is just under $600/month, and it's a complete slum. Heck, my aparment's kind of seedy, and it's $750/month. You don't start getting into "nice" communities until you break $900/month. Of course, that doesn't count the $200+/month in gas, water, electricity, and phone service, much less internet, cellphone, gasoline, and food.
The working poor are also often squeezed by having absolutely no savings. If you don't have a full first month's rent saved up, you might end up in some place that charges you an obsence month-to-month or worse week-to-week rate. This is where the truly desperate get trapped. You pay too much for rent to save up enough money to pay less for rent.
Sure, the author's a bit too whiney and privileged to really understand what it's like to live that life, but a lot of the stuff she brings up is true. I have an unfortunate number for friends who got trapped after college with no job prospects and who now have too little experience post-college to ever get better job prospects, and I see how they have to get by. In all cases, they got themselves into this mess, but I'm not sure exactly how they're supposed to get themselves out of it now.
I've also travelled quite a bit through Europe with tour groups and I have always noticed that while people from other countries embraced the cultural differences and wanted to sample new foods, the Americans generally couldn't wait to go trotting off to the McDonalds or KFC.
...Up until the bland facelessness of Starbucks screwed me out of that goal.
Damnation, that drove me completely crazy when I spent 3 weeks in Japan back for a class back in 2000! I had an explicit goal when I was there to never eat anything that I could easily get in America. I was essentially forced when hanging out with some classmates to go to places like McDonald's, KFC, and Starbucks and had to change my goal to always getting something that I couldn't get in America at everyplace.
(That said, KFC makes a delicious curry side dish, the Teriyaki Burger is kind of neat, and I really loved McDonald's "Shakashaka Poteto" which was french fries with a flavor packet, available in curry and umeboshi, and a bag to shake it all up in.)
Meanwhile, after a single week, some of the other students were whining about how they couldn't wait to get back to America and go to Pizza Hut. I just couldn't believe it. What's the point in going to a foreign country where you don't like the food?
Both of my parents are teachers, and my sister is a teacher. You are absolutely correct.
The problem with education is the what passes for parenting today and the willingness of parents to fight to destroy teachers' careers rather than face up to the fact that their kid might be a little monster. My mom has to deal with this sort of nonsense ALL THE TIME from my her school's worthless community. Oh, and the petty interpersonal politics between teachers and the little martinets that aim to be school administrators doesn't help either.
To this I counter: sanitation and plumbing.
Find us a sewer system built entirely without government intervention. That means no privatized, pre-existing, municipal systems, no government loans, no use of governmet force to acquire rights to lay pipe through private property without compensation, etc.
Also, explain how to give coverage to the poor sectors of society, maintain the system, and earn a profit for investors. Please provide numbers.
Truely private healthcare would be doctors competeing for cash paying customers having to match their rates to what people can actualy afford rather than what they can get out of insurance companies.
I think you misunderstand the free market. Insurance companies are a free market institution. They are customers pooling their resources and hedging their bets against having to personally pay for healthcare costs instanaeously and without sufficient savings which could take nearly a lifetime to build up (if possible) for some procedures. Insurance companies are like a reverse lottery -- you pay in in the hopes of not having to get a pay out. They're a risk mitigation strategy, kind of like putting money into bonds or commodities just in case the stock market tanks.
A free market would not eliminate insurance in the slightest. You'd have to outlaw it, and then that regulation would make it hardly a free market at the point.
So justify it. And do so without emotionally charged arguments, because we all know it is a terrible thing when a loved one gets cancer. That fact has nothing whatsoever to do with forcing me to pay for her care.
Alright. You really want the cold, hard, rational argument for altruism. Fortunately, you've handed us one of the best cases for such an argument.
The costs for treating and curing cancer are enormous. Chemo costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to extend your life for a few years. Chances are really good that you can't afford those drugs as a sudden expense if you found out you had cancer today. This is true for many medical conditions. I had to have my gallbladder removed, and the total bill was $15,000 to my insurance company. An expense like that (due within a few months of it being incurred) would have killed me financially at the time.
So, it is in your best interest to pay a small fee every month to cover the costs of everyone else who is sick with the agreement that if you get sick, everyone else will cover your costs. This is the selfishly rational argument for altruism at its finest. You act as part of a group to help individuals face burdens that they cannot bear alone because they will be there for you should you face a burden that you cannot bear alone. It's why you help friends move; it's why you do weight lifting with a spotter; and it's why you pay for insurance right now.
That's right -- that's what insurance is at its core. You pay a monthy premium that amortizes the predicted average health costs you are likely to incur in your life which goes straight into paying for the care of others. Chances are that right now you aren't sick, but you're paying for the welfare of others. You do this because when your time comes around, others will pay for your well-being.
The average person will end up paying more into insurance than they will get back even with non-profit insurance. Many of us will die in a manner that is swift and incurable; we will not recoup the loss of money that went to pay for people put on life-support and expensive drugs. However, it's to our benefit to take the risk and put the money into the fund because there's always the chance that it will be we who are saved by a procedure we can't afford.
That's it: The rational argument for paying for others is at core that they will pay for you in a time when you cannot cover it yourself.
Microsoft has chosen to forge a bold, third path: (C) None of the above.
The reason the Democrats will lose the White House again in 2008 is because they keep deluding themselves that only religious nutbags can possibly vote for a Republican.
No, the reason Democrats might lose again is because their base consistently treats religious people as "nutbags" instead of trying to bring them to the table with shared values of love for your neighbor and for alleviating the suffering of the poor and by failing to point out the contempt that many Republicans have for real Christian values like charity, mercy, and peace.
Populists -- people who support both government regulation of morals and of business are a real swing vote that have been consistently dragged into voting for the richer to get richer and for the way business is done to get more heartless by wedge issues like abortion, gay rights, etc. Religions black voters are almost all populists, for example. The Republicans know how to court them without giving them everything they want and by slowly turning them into conservatives who worship Mammon right beside God. If Democrats courted them more, they could win the election, but the hard Left has an utter disdain for these people because they don't see the parts where they have agreement and only see the smoke screen the Right has thrown up to put religious people all in a single block that votes Republican.
The media has no friends (amongst the people) because it deserves none. The media is just as corrupt as the Republican and Democratic Parties for the exact same reasons -- they all largely depend on the largesse of the wealthy and powerful (i.e. donors or advertisers) who pressure them into pursuing the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Only on rare occasion can they be brought to heel by the people under the current system.
The trend of mega-mergers of media conglomerates has only worsened the situation over the past 30 years as the power to shape public opinion has become more concentrated and thus more easily bribed by sponsors.
The 6th Amendment
Note that this text lacks any requirement that the accused be a US citizen (not that that matters in the case of Jose Padilla). Note that the text lacks a clause of "but not if the accused is a really, really bad person." Nor is there a limit on borders within the US government must behave. Now, what part of locking up prisoners indefinitely in Guantanimo Bay without charges, without access to lawyers, without access to a jury trial, and without access to all witnesses against them is not in violation of the text above?
This government wanted to go even further than that. They actually argued unsuccessfully before the 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals that prisoners in Guantanimo have no standing to challenge their detention and treatment even if they were being tortured and summarily executed!
Regardless of what you think about the guilt or innocence of terrorist suspects, there is a truly frightening aspect to the idea that this government has asserted its right to "war powers" in an indefinite length conflict against terrorism to abduct people worldwide (including US citizens like Jose Padilla) and hold them indefinitely in overseas prisons where they assert the right to torture and execute them with no judicial oversight. The only qualifications to fall into this legal black hole is that the government says that you're an "enemy combatant" or a "terrorist suspect" and to be successfully seized and flown out of country. After that, they would argue that you essentially have no rights. There is a reason we have rule of law and protections for the accused -- to prevent people from being disappeared, Soviet-style.
Wake me up if/when impeachment proceedings start. Otherwise, stop spreading FUD.
Impeachment means nothing. It's a partisan political tool now. Clinton was impeached and threatened with removal from office for lying under Oath about an act of sexual infidelity. Bush has essentially wiped his rear end with the Constitution, defied Congress repeatedly, and blatantly broken laws meant to restrain Presidential power, and because the Congress is controlled by his own party, nothing will happen to him.
Saying that he's innocent of crimes because his own buddies won't hold him accountable displays a cowardly and contemptable disregard for reality and standards of law.
I'm reminded of Mark Buller, the guy who improved the accidental enhancement mousepox into a 100% deadly disease even in mice vaccinated against it. A guy named Ramshaw was researching transmissable mouse contraceptives to deal with an overpopulation problem and spliced a gene for the immunosuppressant IL-4 into mousepox. Unfortunately, this led to the death of 60% of the test mice. Buller published research where he expanded on this idea by putting the IL-4 gene in a better spot and put in another gene to maximize production. This killed mice even treated with anti-viral drugs with a nearly 100% fatality rate.
Fortunately, however, Buller seems to have tried to make up for this a little by having come up with a counter-measure. This provides a hope for some people to live in case of genetically engineered smallpox, but I don't think that the kind of drugs required are even close to being common and inexpensive enough to help the public at large.
One of these days, I'm worried that unethical or thoughtless biologist are going to publish exploits for the human immune system, and one of these days technology is going to get cheap enough and ubiquitous enough for the biologist equivalent of a script kiddie to wage genocide. I'm worried that in the next century, we're going to get an object lesson in just how hard it is to "patch and update" our immune system.
I wasn't aware people who sat on their a55 all day and played video games had a life.
I wasn't aware that watching TV and listening to music constituted a life.
Nintendo: Lifestyles (for men's pleasure)
...
...Wait, um... maybe not.
Wrong market. The console's clearly not targetted at the 20-30 crowd. It should be "Nintendo: Lifestyles (for kid's pleasure)."
Enimem
Whoops. I mispelled "no talent washed-up hack with mother issues who helped ruin my favorite alternative station" twice.
Don't get me wrong, but how is that supposedly connected? I own a few Nintendo pieces. Do I have to listen to Gorillaz now? And since I can't have TiVo and go to the movies (obviously, or I'd have to embrace the PS3 and the X360), do I have to download my movies?
All I know is that my complete and total hatred of Enimem is almost enough to make me consider an Xbox 360 instead to avoid being associated with Enimem fans.
Almost.
Logically, I'd also think that showing people how good your product is (rather than how bad the other product is) has a much more positive effect.
What if your strength is that you don't do something horrible? What if your strength is that you do something better than a competitor, and you'd like to show how much better you are? What if failures are rare for both products, but you want to show yourself as better? Isn't it fair in that case to contrast your success against your competitor's failure?
If you're selling fluorescent lights, and you want to contrast the short life and high power consumption of incandescent lighting against your product, is that bad?
If your cell phone service doesn't drop calls and lets you communicate clearly, isn't it better to show your competitors failing at this rather than trying to show an entire month of not failing?
If your product cleans stains effectively, isn't it fair to compare it against "the leading brand" to show how much better it is?
I see no difference between the above commercials and what Apple is doing. However, I think it's a little like calling the Titanic "Unsinkable" before its maiden voyage to brag about how virus-free Macs are. That kind of hubris is definitely going to bite Apple when the platform reaches that critical mass of interest + talent especially now that much more common x86 assembler experience can be leveraged by malware writers against the Mac now.
that all said, my (admittedly limited) experience with threading is that it's best to design the deadlocks away before you even touch the editor.
That's not "limited" experience. That's common sense. Trying to find deadlocks, race conditions, and accidental serialization in an application by experimentally compiling and running is like trying to build a house by nailing the boards together only after they've collapsed on you.
Seriously, threads cannot be bolted on as an afterthought. You have to consciously design threads in in the first place, and if you ignore this advise and attempt to retrofit your code, then you must audit the code fully first to see where execution can be grouped into the smallest safe units for locking.
I've seen what happens when you ad hoc threading in large library that was never designed to be reentrant. Worse, I've seen what happens when you get it working on Windows but fail to realize that the UNIX version never was successfully locking the library for 3-4 years before a customer tried to build an aggressively multithreaded app on top of it and only then discover all the deadlocks that lay hidden inside.
Rehashing an old idea is not necessarily bad. Reusing as story isn't necessarily bad. We did it for centuries before the advent of motion pictures, and it's led to some pretty brilliant movies since then when Shakespeare is the source of the rehashed ideas.
The best version of "Richard III" that I've ever seen was a 1995 movie that placed it in a 1930s fascist England. "West Side Story" is a street gang musical based on Romeo and Juliet that is widely held in great esteem (unlike the movie "Romeo + Juliet"). One of my absolute favorite plays is "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead," an absurdist take on "Hamlet" from the POV of two bit characters who are slowly becoming aware of their unimportance and impending death by plot. Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" and "Ran" are two of my favorite samurai movies but are based on "Macbeth" and "King Lear," respectively.
The problem is that Hollywood is generally too lazy and too focused on churning out easy money to get it right. If Hollywood rehashed old ideas with style, it wouldn't be so much of a problem. Unfortunately, "Revenge of the Nerds" isn't exactly Shakespeare, and Hollywood's not doing this for any sort of "artistic merit."
The problem is that Japanese has a phoneme in between L, R, & D. That sound is what we usually romanize as R. Because of this sound that sits between the three, a Japanese accent often slides L & R towards that middle sound. Also, whenever transliterating foreign words into their native language, L sounds and leading R sounds both get changed to the same characters. (Trailing R sounds, such as in "cancer" turn into extended-vowels, like "kansaa".)