That was not my suggestion or point.. Mislead much?
You say that, but then you immediately go on to suggest that (per your logic) more updates means more problems of equivalent nature to problems found on Windows. You say this in great detail in both posts.
Apple and Microsoft both fix numerous bugs in each patch release. Apple just updates more often. You're not comparing apples to apples here.
Admittedly, some of the bugs in the last update were of the same level of danger as MS's browser latest browser exploits for running arbitrary code. A difference is they'd all run with restricted privileges unless you also tied in a privilege escalation exploit, but that requires the use of two bugs at once to do. Most of the bugs were not exploitable to put malicious software on the system.
Mac users are way too smug about the invulnerability of their system, but to suggest that Macs are less safe than Windows PCs because of the update schedule is just ridiculous.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why you need any "mechanics" to handle anything but the combat. Why do I need "rules" to govern anything other than what happens when I try to stab someone with a pointy stick?
For the most part, that's true. Most RPG rule-sets are defined by their combat rules because conflict is the root of all stories, and RPGs trace their lineage from Chainmail, the first fantasy, miniature wargame. D&D is particularly tied to combat since all the rewards for play in D&D come from combat. The experience system, the collection of treasure, and the ability to use 90% of your character's "crunchy bits" and powers all flow from combat. In the terminology of the gaming theory website The Forge, it's a heavily Gamist RPG -- one that focuses on and rewards the defeating of challenges. Read System Does Matter for a better idea of the terminology I'm using. It was sort of a watershed moment for me when I read that essay in the back of the RPG Sorceror.
There are other fine RPGs out there that reward different sorts of play and have rule-sets that encourage them. The RPG "The Dying Earth" lets you get into the world of a Jack Vance novel, where the people are venial, corrupt shysters trying to get maximum benefit for minimal work. The system has a schtick based "paper-rock-scissors" combat system that also has an analouge for fast-talking (and being fast-talked). Players are expected to play along and believe (at least until disproven) whatever their characters get talked into. The system also has a set of resistances to various forms of tempatation that all characters have to try to resist (and usually fail) to reflect the veniality of the typical character. There's also bonus experience points for using phrases handed out by the GM in a session to get people into using the wordy, convoluted way of speaking of Jack Vance's stories.
The Indy RPG "Dogs in the Vineyard" is set around playing enforcers of community and morality in a Wild West people of the faith setting vaguely reminiscent of the early days of the Mormon faith. It's a highly narrativist game (a game that focuses on character development and story). Stats in the game are attributes, skills, items, relationships, and vices -- all of which contribute dice to a pool for conflicts. Conflicts can be verbal, fisticuffs, or gunplay with each for contributing larger and larger dice to roll on a fallout table at the end of combat which determines how badly the conflict shaped a character (with death being very rare). In the end, the system rewards the growth of relationships and vices a little more than attributes, skills, and items because the whole goal is character building. It has a mechanic for adding to the difficulty of a situation as the sins of the community are revealed (to encourage players to handle things before they get out of control).
Some games facilitate the kind of play where PCs get to imagine living in a particular setting or situation. These games enforce rules that tie one into the settings whether that setting be "realistic" like the burdensome Rolemaster rules set or cinematic like Feng Shui's rules set. Rolemaster makes people roll for keeping their footing in slippery situations and to avoid diseases through proper hygene because players want that sort of "realistic" actions have consequences sort of play. Feng Shui gives a +! damage bonus on a shotgun if you take a small interval of a combat round to cock it and say "schk-chkt!" and penalizes sorcerors who use repetitive magic or who do not give flashy names to their spell effects because that enforces the Hong Kong action movie feel.
There are all sort of uses for rules in games. Even games not based on Fortune mechanics (mechanics that involve die rolls and other randomizers) have rules for certain things. The game Nobilis is a resource-based system where Sovereign Powers can cast li
Cough. It doesn't let you power game by increasing power as fast as D20, but its point-based character creation system lets you munchkin really hard (though not as bad as Champions). GURPS appeals much more to Tactician-style gamers than Power Gamers and Buttkickers, though. It's pretty much the poster child for that style of play.
Personally, I can't stand the amount of dice rolling and the complexity of combat in GURPS, but I've always been a diceless / rules-light gamer. The Star Wars D6 system is pretty much the outer treshold for my rules discomfort level. It's a shame, though, because GURPS really has some of the best supplements of any game system, and it really encourages you to build your own game setting.
Monte Cook's stuff is all great for a very particular style of RPG play that I personally despise -- the "life is cheap" style of gaming. There are no heroes, because PCs can and will be dropped like flies almost at whim. Evil is stronger than good, and the world is very bleak. It's a very old-school way of play where you don't really identify well with your characters either due to lack of interest or as a defensive mechanism if you're trapped in a game with GM like that.
I recently played D&D for the first time in a bazillion years, and it was something of a disappointment. I just wanted to do that first adventure, D&D basic, go down into the dungeon, and find some evil druids in the last room. Instead, we wandered around a town in the Forgotten Realms for a while, worried about boring minutiae ("What colour do you want the stitching in your robes to be?"), and in general had a boring old time.
Sounds like you're a Power Gamer or Buttkicker in group full of Character Actors & Storytellers (if you follow the player types in "Robin's Laws of Gamemastering"). You just have group mismatch. You want action and monster-slaying. They want setting detail and role-playing. They'd probably be just as bored to tears in a game like you want because they'd get no thrill from the same things you like.
I'm personally boggled by the fact that they were playing D&D. D&D (particularly 3.0/3.5) is much more geared towards fast, kick-in-the-door style play than drama. There are other systems that aren't so crunchy and filled with combat-oriented mechanics that would suit them better.
If you want to find some "old-school" play, then look to very young gamers. People don't usually find a taste for Character Actor or Storyteller* style play until they've had exposure to it. Once you get into college aged gamers, you tend to find Power Gamers and Buttkickers crowded out or in a subtle war for control of a group against other player types (and you really don't want to join the latter disfunctional kind of group).
If your local game shop handles coordinating meeting other players, see if they have a way of listing play-style preferences instead of just game preferences. With D&D and White Wolf games, you're going to get a huge grab bag of different people because many people who play those games do so because of popularity or because it's the only games they've ever learned. Such groups are frequently torn between people who want very different things out of gaming or are all centered on some random play-style that may have very little to do with the game title they're playing.
* Note that Storyteller sytle play is all about moving forward a story along a cinematic or plot-driven basis. It has nothing to do with White Wolf's "Storyteller system" which is far more facilitating towards Power Gamers and Character Actors than Storytellers. See Feng Shui for a Storyteller (and Buttkicker) focused game.
(Oh, and just to be on-topic, the idea of a low-magic D20 system game just makes me personally curl up into a ball and shudder. That's just my play preferences, though.)
Safer? I guess, except in the past year Apple released more security and exploit fixes for OSX than Microsoft did for WindowsXP...
So again how is it a safer OS if these exploits existed in the first place?
Apple updates its OS more, so it must be less reliable?
This is the logical equivalent of pulling the CarFax report on two cars and deciding against the car that's had all its regularly scheduled maintenance since it must obviously be less reliable than the car that's only been taken to the shop when something broke down.
There's a difference between the things Apple fixes and the things Microsoft fixes.
It's also in my opinion the single most wrong speculation in the entire list. Apple has already demonstrated that they want to keep the system on Apple-only hardware. That's part of the reason for getting TPM chips in the hardware. Ultimately, they'll get hacked, but they'll go after it hard. No matter how much we all say we'd love it if they weren't, Apple is and will always be a hardware company and a company fiercely protective of their intellectual property.
Just look at how they treat rumors sites.
I think he's mostly right, though I can't comment on the financial rumors about TiVO & Google. However, betting on plasma TV Macs, pirated beige box Macs, or the "never gonna happen" pipe dreams of the dot-com era -- streaming video and network appliances -- is just a losing proposition. Until network technology improves significantly, streaming video portables are doomed (especially portables with only 802.11b access), and network appliances will never take off when cell phones, laptops, and desktops can do everything they do better.
I seriously doubt it. Let's look at your list of right-wing talk radio buzzwords:
Democrat Party
liberated Iraq
Islamofacist
You seem to support the war in Iraq as having something to do with stopping terrorism, you accuse the secular dictator Hussein of being an Islamic fundamentalist, you constantly refer to people that threaten us as "animals," and you advocate strongly following tradition as a virtue (but one that is secondary to voting out of fear). Furthermore, you think that exposing the violation of our civil liberties is a bad thing compared to confirming what terrorist probably already suspected about the safety of their phone conversations.
You're obviously a rabid conservative and probably a devoted fan of Fox News talk shows or conservative talk radio shows based on the jargon you use. Your implied support for tradition, latent xenophobia, trust in unhindered law enforcement powers, and conflation of the War in Iraq as having something to do with preventing terrorism show extremely clearly that you're a conservative pretending to be a Democrat for astroturfing purposes. You're also extremely unclever at doing so. I'd suggest listening more to non-conservative points of view before attempting to ape them.
A "whistleblower," under Federal law, is someone who, whilst still employed at the offending agency/company, brings illegal action to the attention of internal resources...
Isn't that exactly what he's claiming to be? Didn't he claim that they hauled him in for a psychological evalution after he complained frequently about this being illegal, labelled him paranoid, and stripped him of his security clearance which prevents him from doing his job? According to him, when he complained, they took steps to proactively discredit him and effectively fired him.
The thing about whistleblower protection is that it is almost entirely enforced after an employer has taken punitive steps against an employee. It's like all other laws that way. You don't enforce them until they've been broken.
I need a "get the &#^$ out of my way" button that works on the self-absorbed asshole yapping on his cellphone while driving his enormous SUV 52 in the 65 passing lane and backing up traffic for a mile behind him! I push the button, he moves his ass over and life goes on.
Count yourself lucky. Our SUV-wielding, self-absorbed, cellphone-blabbing drivers are the ones tailgating people going 85 MPH in the MIDDLE lane. I'd just about up and move to where you live just so that the inattentive drivers would be the things to drive around instead of the things trying to run me over.
It wasn't Adobe who arrested him - only the government can do that. It's not the same thing to say that since corporations have influence over the government, it's the same thing as them wielding force directly.
You're correct. However that wasn't in any way specified in the sentence, "Say what you want about corporations, but at the end of the day, they can't legally initiate the use of force against you." Getting the government to use force against you through the court system is "legally initiating the use of force" by any sane definition of "legally initiating."
Even accepting for the sake of argument that these are not actually uses of force initiated by the government (which they clearly are), these are circumstances where the individual has arguably initated the use of force themselves, by stealing what is not theirs.
By that definition, tax collectors and other law enforcement never initate the use of force because they only do so in response to your violation of the law.
Say what you want about corporations, but at the end of the day, they can't legally initiate the use of force against you.
Dmitri Skylarov.
Remember how Adobe got the DoJ involved in arresting him for writing software that broke DRM in eBooks so that text-to-speech readers for the blind could read them? Then they got to soften the publicity blow by claiming that they no longer thought he should be locked up but still got to keep him locked up since the DoJ considered their opinion irrelevant once notified of the crime.
Or how about search and seizure of your computer any time the RIAA gets a John Doe file sharing lawsuit turned into a real name? In the more traditional realm of failure to repay your debts, how about evictions by the local sheriff for failure to pay rent?
Yeah, corporations have absolutely no power to initiate the use of force against people at all...
I don't see how this demo counts as a failure as it accurately demonstrated the typical user experience with that particular product.
Except that if I remember correctly, only the top half of the screen blue-screened which shows very strongly that the demo was rigged and still failed. I find that the funniest part of the whole business. That and the nervous panic of the presenter right in front of Gates and the world.
Good? Since when does a magnetic field, intense or otherwise, have anything to do with a gravitational field?
There's no evidence. There's no theory. It's just something somebody made up.
Einstein thought that they did. The ultimate goal of general relativity for Einstein was a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. In Einstein's conception, all forces (not just gravity) were the effect of curvatures in space-time. Since all energy was curvatures of space-time, so was all matter. Heim just expounded on Einstein's theories and he did so in a way that actually predicts the masses of fundamental particles. Thinking hard on relativity was what he did to distract himself from the pain of from where his hands used to be after they were blown off in an explosives lab accident. The same incident made him deaf-blind, so he preferred isolation rather than colaboration and pretty much spent all his time on the subject. This same isolation made his theories relatively unknown for a very long time.
The editorial blurb is hideously sensational, though. Even if we do prove that EM fields can alter space and produce gravitational effects, you're a long way from creating a practical form of propulsion. On the other hand, we'd at least have hope of a reactionless drive.
The idea fascinated me, so I looked up the statistics in the CIA world fact book. By my back of the envelope calculations, China experiences about 47,000 births per day which is well short of the 86,400 seconds per day. Now, if you had them walk past once every two seconds, the math would add up.
The article you linked to has the REAL reason HD-DVD may win:
Asked whether Microsoft is now doing just that, Weber said that in the end, "It's about money and the cost to the PC industry." Whereas the overall Blu-ray royalty structure adds up to $30 per PC drive, she said, everything a PC vendor needs to support HD-DVD "comes free, shipped and integrated with Vista -- Microsoft Corp.'s next-generation operating system."
Am I the only one who remembers why USB 2.0 replaced Firewire in next generation PC standards? It was Apple's demand for a mere measly $1 per port licensing fee (admittedly on $30 is freaking enormous compared to this in the world of razor-thin PC profit-margins.
On the other hand, the PS3 will come with Bluray. That's its biggest saving grace. Even if Windows doesn't support Bluray, Sony or someone will be sure to write drivers for it, and Windows will thus have to support it in some fashion unless they take really blatantly illegal moves to block it. As is, MS is already treading on thin ice with their current actions.
"Natural" means "more valuable" in the marketplace these days.
Not without reason however. Considering the effects of trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, and certain additives and preservatives in food on the body, "natural" (i.e. containing no chemicals not found in food you can pluck out of the ground or take an axe to) is more valuable to some customers. In this case "natural" has a legitimate use although it's frequently misused such as by people who think that adding a little oat fiber makes some glorified breakfast candy bar "natural" when it's still mostly highly processed sugars.
Personally, I've always found the most legitimate criticism of the use of the word "natural" to be about man-made products derived from non-man made sources, such as "natural fibers" and "natural foods." However, even there it serves a legitimate role as a clarifying word to groups certain products together and to seperate them from products that contain synthetic source materials.
There are lots of products we get from crude oil that we can't press out of biomass: think about plastics, asphalt, lubricants.
You raise a lot of good points to chew on, but you're flat out wrong on this point. We already have corn-based plastics and vegetable lubricants are pretty easy to find. Asphalt's the hard one, but we already use concrete in a lot of structures meant for heavy traffic without asphalt covers. Replacing roads with concrete would provide an alternative to asphalt (albeit a more expensive one).
I would suggest determining the real problems before offering a solution. A nation designed around cars instead of people is definitely part of the problem, and alternative fuel doesn't solve that particular problem at all.
Unfortunately that's a problem that can't be solved without a lot of very unpopular, freedom-robbing or tax-heavy legislative efforts. I've thought for a good long time on this, and I can't forsee a future where people give up their cars in mass without massive concentration of all of the populace in urban centers that have been seriously redesigned to avoid the need for travel. Even so, you still have to give up in the face of people who will willingly drive 2 hours each way to work just to have a big house with a big yard at affordable prices.
Without a massive rail and other public transportation network that covers the entire nation like Japan has, you'll never see Americans give up the car. All solutions must account for the almighty car.
Free people from a giant, violent, centralized authority like a government, and equality, prosperity, and peace are the natural result.
Not necessarily. Instead, you get many competing violent authorities who pile up a lot of bodies fulfilling the natural human desires to get higher in the pecking order until peace is established by one of them becoming the single giant, centralized authority.
Of course, this is technically a straw man argument about anarchy since you haven't truly argued for statelessness, but constant references to violence in minarchist arguments tend to lead one to the natural assumption that you are arguing against any sort of government violence against the people instead of just the law standing behind the tax collectors.
In a minarchist's perfect world, government only exists to keep men from pursuing direct violence against one another and from misappropriating legally owned private property. This world in and of itself does not guarantee utopia. It all rests on one assumption which you voice right here:
Inequality comes from violence... it comes from situations where people are not allowed to make decisions for themselves and instead are forced to do something under the threat of violence.
Not always. Sometimes people are forced to do things to avoid starvation or lesser problems. The only reason we have a market for menial labor is because it is the only way that uneducated people can feed and clothes themselves and their children. You need to read "Nickled and Dimed" to see how desperate the situation is for the working majority of poor people. There honestly isn't a lot of freedom when you don't have enough money to put down the first month's rent for an apartment and have to instead take the more expensive and less secure option of renting week-to-week at a motel. You can't take time off from work to go to the doctor (even if you could afford it) because you wouldn't earn enough money to feed yourself. You won't tell a cruel boss to shove it and go look for a new job because you don't have the money to survive multiple weeks of unemployment. You can't afford to take time off to retrain and get better skills because you;re working 11-15 hours a day on multiple jobs.
These people already are economically subjugated but not by government. They're subjugated by a largely distributed private sector instead of a centralized government. They don't have opportunities because opportunity requires the ability to have a period of self-sufficiency and free time that aren't available to people in their economic state. Without government or enough private charity funding (which would probably indicate enough of a public sentiment to have government handle it), these people would have no future. If you took away public education, social security, and medicare & medicaid, they wouldn't received back nearly enough taxes to make up the difference to pay for these essential services themselves. Without labor laws, unemployment laws, the minimum wage (which has already atrophied almost to the point of uselessness thanks to inflation), these people would be little more than slaves with the ability to choose their master.
It doesn't take violence to grind away a person's spirit and to make them a slave. The callous apathy of society at large and financial desperation are more than enough. I remember from History what the so-called "Gilded Age" was like, and I personally don't want to see a return of those days when the only law of business was that of the contract and the life of labor was cheap and expendable.
I suspect the opposite. I'm pretty sure from my English lit classes that the idea of the supernatural and the natural as seperate entities came after the invention of the word "artifice." Of course, "artificial" used to primarily have connotations of complimenting something cleverly made instead of primarily insulting something as being less desirable than the original.
Also, I'd really like to hear your justification for why "artificial" and "natural" as antonyms has become meaningless. As far as I know, there hasn't been any breakthroughs that blur the line between man-made phenomena and either supernaturally created or creatorless phenomena (depending on your theological stance). It smacks of Newspeak to me to attempt to remove the meaning of the word.
"Natural" as even referenced in the Wikipedia article if you actually read it is commonly used to describe anything which is not artificial. The mountain is natural. A house is not because it was made by people and not non-sentient processes. An anthill may or may not be depending on your definition of "artificial," but in common speech it's generally assumed to be.
People who redefine words away from their long-accepted common usage bug the hell out of me. People who redefine a word to eliminate the usage of its antonym bug me even more.
If these "lenses" do nothing but sharpen images by "undoing" diffraction, couldn't they be used as a "filter" for a traditional magnifying lens to get better telescopic performance than is currently possible?
I've always heard that this research would lead to great advances in telescopes, but you post has me tentatively disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
How can a man be a patriot if he leads the violent overthrow of the rightful government of his country?
A man is a patriot if he loves his country and acts to defend it.
Loyalty to the current government has nothing to do with patriotism.
It is a very, very sad thing that Americans have forgotten this.
That was not my suggestion or point.. Mislead much?
You say that, but then you immediately go on to suggest that (per your logic) more updates means more problems of equivalent nature to problems found on Windows. You say this in great detail in both posts.
Apple and Microsoft both fix numerous bugs in each patch release. Apple just updates more often. You're not comparing apples to apples here.
Admittedly, some of the bugs in the last update were of the same level of danger as MS's browser latest browser exploits for running arbitrary code. A difference is they'd all run with restricted privileges unless you also tied in a privilege escalation exploit, but that requires the use of two bugs at once to do. Most of the bugs were not exploitable to put malicious software on the system.
Mac users are way too smug about the invulnerability of their system, but to suggest that Macs are less safe than Windows PCs because of the update schedule is just ridiculous.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see why you need any "mechanics" to handle anything but the combat. Why do I need "rules" to govern anything other than what happens when I try to stab someone with a pointy stick?
For the most part, that's true. Most RPG rule-sets are defined by their combat rules because conflict is the root of all stories, and RPGs trace their lineage from Chainmail, the first fantasy, miniature wargame. D&D is particularly tied to combat since all the rewards for play in D&D come from combat. The experience system, the collection of treasure, and the ability to use 90% of your character's "crunchy bits" and powers all flow from combat. In the terminology of the gaming theory website The Forge, it's a heavily Gamist RPG -- one that focuses on and rewards the defeating of challenges. Read System Does Matter for a better idea of the terminology I'm using. It was sort of a watershed moment for me when I read that essay in the back of the RPG Sorceror.
There are other fine RPGs out there that reward different sorts of play and have rule-sets that encourage them. The RPG "The Dying Earth" lets you get into the world of a Jack Vance novel, where the people are venial, corrupt shysters trying to get maximum benefit for minimal work. The system has a schtick based "paper-rock-scissors" combat system that also has an analouge for fast-talking (and being fast-talked). Players are expected to play along and believe (at least until disproven) whatever their characters get talked into. The system also has a set of resistances to various forms of tempatation that all characters have to try to resist (and usually fail) to reflect the veniality of the typical character. There's also bonus experience points for using phrases handed out by the GM in a session to get people into using the wordy, convoluted way of speaking of Jack Vance's stories.
The Indy RPG "Dogs in the Vineyard" is set around playing enforcers of community and morality in a Wild West people of the faith setting vaguely reminiscent of the early days of the Mormon faith. It's a highly narrativist game (a game that focuses on character development and story). Stats in the game are attributes, skills, items, relationships, and vices -- all of which contribute dice to a pool for conflicts. Conflicts can be verbal, fisticuffs, or gunplay with each for contributing larger and larger dice to roll on a fallout table at the end of combat which determines how badly the conflict shaped a character (with death being very rare). In the end, the system rewards the growth of relationships and vices a little more than attributes, skills, and items because the whole goal is character building. It has a mechanic for adding to the difficulty of a situation as the sins of the community are revealed (to encourage players to handle things before they get out of control).
Some games facilitate the kind of play where PCs get to imagine living in a particular setting or situation. These games enforce rules that tie one into the settings whether that setting be "realistic" like the burdensome Rolemaster rules set or cinematic like Feng Shui's rules set. Rolemaster makes people roll for keeping their footing in slippery situations and to avoid diseases through proper hygene because players want that sort of "realistic" actions have consequences sort of play. Feng Shui gives a +! damage bonus on a shotgun if you take a small interval of a combat round to cock it and say "schk-chkt!" and penalizes sorcerors who use repetitive magic or who do not give flashy names to their spell effects because that enforces the Hong Kong action movie feel.
There are all sort of uses for rules in games. Even games not based on Fortune mechanics (mechanics that involve die rolls and other randomizers) have rules for certain things. The game Nobilis is a resource-based system where Sovereign Powers can cast li
Try GURPS. It's much less prone to power gaming.
Cough. It doesn't let you power game by increasing power as fast as D20, but its point-based character creation system lets you munchkin really hard (though not as bad as Champions). GURPS appeals much more to Tactician-style gamers than Power Gamers and Buttkickers, though. It's pretty much the poster child for that style of play.
Personally, I can't stand the amount of dice rolling and the complexity of combat in GURPS, but I've always been a diceless / rules-light gamer. The Star Wars D6 system is pretty much the outer treshold for my rules discomfort level. It's a shame, though, because GURPS really has some of the best supplements of any game system, and it really encourages you to build your own game setting.
Monte Cook's stuff is all great for a very particular style of RPG play that I personally despise -- the "life is cheap" style of gaming. There are no heroes, because PCs can and will be dropped like flies almost at whim. Evil is stronger than good, and the world is very bleak. It's a very old-school way of play where you don't really identify well with your characters either due to lack of interest or as a defensive mechanism if you're trapped in a game with GM like that.
Personally, I dislike Monte Cook's stuff too.
I recently played D&D for the first time in a bazillion years, and it was something of a disappointment. I just wanted to do that first adventure, D&D basic, go down into the dungeon, and find some evil druids in the last room. Instead, we wandered around a town in the Forgotten Realms for a while, worried about boring minutiae ("What colour do you want the stitching in your robes to be?"), and in general had a boring old time.
Sounds like you're a Power Gamer or Buttkicker in group full of Character Actors & Storytellers (if you follow the player types in "Robin's Laws of Gamemastering"). You just have group mismatch. You want action and monster-slaying. They want setting detail and role-playing. They'd probably be just as bored to tears in a game like you want because they'd get no thrill from the same things you like.
I'm personally boggled by the fact that they were playing D&D. D&D (particularly 3.0/3.5) is much more geared towards fast, kick-in-the-door style play than drama. There are other systems that aren't so crunchy and filled with combat-oriented mechanics that would suit them better.
If you want to find some "old-school" play, then look to very young gamers. People don't usually find a taste for Character Actor or Storyteller* style play until they've had exposure to it. Once you get into college aged gamers, you tend to find Power Gamers and Buttkickers crowded out or in a subtle war for control of a group against other player types (and you really don't want to join the latter disfunctional kind of group).
If your local game shop handles coordinating meeting other players, see if they have a way of listing play-style preferences instead of just game preferences. With D&D and White Wolf games, you're going to get a huge grab bag of different people because many people who play those games do so because of popularity or because it's the only games they've ever learned. Such groups are frequently torn between people who want very different things out of gaming or are all centered on some random play-style that may have very little to do with the game title they're playing.
* Note that Storyteller sytle play is all about moving forward a story along a cinematic or plot-driven basis. It has nothing to do with White Wolf's "Storyteller system" which is far more facilitating towards Power Gamers and Character Actors than Storytellers. See Feng Shui for a Storyteller (and Buttkicker) focused game.
(Oh, and just to be on-topic, the idea of a low-magic D20 system game just makes me personally curl up into a ball and shudder. That's just my play preferences, though.)
Safer? I guess, except in the past year Apple released more security and exploit fixes for OSX than Microsoft did for WindowsXP...
So again how is it a safer OS if these exploits existed in the first place?
Apple updates its OS more, so it must be less reliable?
This is the logical equivalent of pulling the CarFax report on two cars and deciding against the car that's had all its regularly scheduled maintenance since it must obviously be less reliable than the car that's only been taken to the shop when something broke down.
There's a difference between the things Apple fixes and the things Microsoft fixes.
Holy balls, that's interesting speculation.
It's also in my opinion the single most wrong speculation in the entire list. Apple has already demonstrated that they want to keep the system on Apple-only hardware. That's part of the reason for getting TPM chips in the hardware. Ultimately, they'll get hacked, but they'll go after it hard. No matter how much we all say we'd love it if they weren't, Apple is and will always be a hardware company and a company fiercely protective of their intellectual property.
Just look at how they treat rumors sites.
I think he's mostly right, though I can't comment on the financial rumors about TiVO & Google. However, betting on plasma TV Macs, pirated beige box Macs, or the "never gonna happen" pipe dreams of the dot-com era -- streaming video and network appliances -- is just a losing proposition. Until network technology improves significantly, streaming video portables are doomed (especially portables with only 802.11b access), and network appliances will never take off when cell phones, laptops, and desktops can do everything they do better.
I seriously doubt it. Let's look at your list of right-wing talk radio buzzwords:
You seem to support the war in Iraq as having something to do with stopping terrorism, you accuse the secular dictator Hussein of being an Islamic fundamentalist, you constantly refer to people that threaten us as "animals," and you advocate strongly following tradition as a virtue (but one that is secondary to voting out of fear). Furthermore, you think that exposing the violation of our civil liberties is a bad thing compared to confirming what terrorist probably already suspected about the safety of their phone conversations.
You're obviously a rabid conservative and probably a devoted fan of Fox News talk shows or conservative talk radio shows based on the jargon you use. Your implied support for tradition, latent xenophobia, trust in unhindered law enforcement powers, and conflation of the War in Iraq as having something to do with preventing terrorism show extremely clearly that you're a conservative pretending to be a Democrat for astroturfing purposes. You're also extremely unclever at doing so. I'd suggest listening more to non-conservative points of view before attempting to ape them.
A "whistleblower," under Federal law, is someone who, whilst still employed at the offending agency/company, brings illegal action to the attention of internal resources...
Isn't that exactly what he's claiming to be? Didn't he claim that they hauled him in for a psychological evalution after he complained frequently about this being illegal, labelled him paranoid, and stripped him of his security clearance which prevents him from doing his job? According to him, when he complained, they took steps to proactively discredit him and effectively fired him.
The thing about whistleblower protection is that it is almost entirely enforced after an employer has taken punitive steps against an employee. It's like all other laws that way. You don't enforce them until they've been broken.
I need a "get the &#^$ out of my way" button that works on the self-absorbed asshole yapping on his cellphone while driving his enormous SUV 52 in the 65 passing lane and backing up traffic for a mile behind him! I push the button, he moves his ass over and life goes on.
Count yourself lucky. Our SUV-wielding, self-absorbed, cellphone-blabbing drivers are the ones tailgating people going 85 MPH in the MIDDLE lane. I'd just about up and move to where you live just so that the inattentive drivers would be the things to drive around instead of the things trying to run me over.
It wasn't Adobe who arrested him - only the government can do that. It's not the same thing to say that since corporations have influence over the government, it's the same thing as them wielding force directly.
You're correct. However that wasn't in any way specified in the sentence, "Say what you want about corporations, but at the end of the day, they can't legally initiate the use of force against you." Getting the government to use force against you through the court system is "legally initiating the use of force" by any sane definition of "legally initiating."
Even accepting for the sake of argument that these are not actually uses of force initiated by the government (which they clearly are), these are circumstances where the individual has arguably initated the use of force themselves, by stealing what is not theirs.
By that definition, tax collectors and other law enforcement never initate the use of force because they only do so in response to your violation of the law.
The article claims that about 50.000kg fell down. Now that is a heck of a turkey even by US standards. (How 50.000kg becomes 55tons is anyones guess)
So what you mean to say is, "You can't stop. The roc can't stop the rock?"
Say what you want about corporations, but at the end of the day, they can't legally initiate the use of force against you.
Dmitri Skylarov.
Remember how Adobe got the DoJ involved in arresting him for writing software that broke DRM in eBooks so that text-to-speech readers for the blind could read them? Then they got to soften the publicity blow by claiming that they no longer thought he should be locked up but still got to keep him locked up since the DoJ considered their opinion irrelevant once notified of the crime.
Or how about search and seizure of your computer any time the RIAA gets a John Doe file sharing lawsuit turned into a real name? In the more traditional realm of failure to repay your debts, how about evictions by the local sheriff for failure to pay rent?
Yeah, corporations have absolutely no power to initiate the use of force against people at all...
I don't see how this demo counts as a failure as it accurately demonstrated the typical user experience with that particular product.
Except that if I remember correctly, only the top half of the screen blue-screened which shows very strongly that the demo was rigged and still failed. I find that the funniest part of the whole business. That and the nervous panic of the presenter right in front of Gates and the world.
Good? Since when does a magnetic field, intense or otherwise, have anything to do with a gravitational field?
There's no evidence. There's no theory. It's just something somebody made up.
Einstein thought that they did. The ultimate goal of general relativity for Einstein was a Grand Unified Theory of Everything. In Einstein's conception, all forces (not just gravity) were the effect of curvatures in space-time. Since all energy was curvatures of space-time, so was all matter. Heim just expounded on Einstein's theories and he did so in a way that actually predicts the masses of fundamental particles. Thinking hard on relativity was what he did to distract himself from the pain of from where his hands used to be after they were blown off in an explosives lab accident. The same incident made him deaf-blind, so he preferred isolation rather than colaboration and pretty much spent all his time on the subject. This same isolation made his theories relatively unknown for a very long time.
The editorial blurb is hideously sensational, though. Even if we do prove that EM fields can alter space and produce gravitational effects, you're a long way from creating a practical form of propulsion. On the other hand, we'd at least have hope of a reactionless drive.
The idea fascinated me, so I looked up the statistics in the CIA world fact book. By my back of the envelope calculations, China experiences about 47,000 births per day which is well short of the 86,400 seconds per day. Now, if you had them walk past once every two seconds, the math would add up.
The article you linked to has the REAL reason HD-DVD may win:
Am I the only one who remembers why USB 2.0 replaced Firewire in next generation PC standards? It was Apple's demand for a mere measly $1 per port licensing fee (admittedly on $30 is freaking enormous compared to this in the world of razor-thin PC profit-margins.
On the other hand, the PS3 will come with Bluray. That's its biggest saving grace. Even if Windows doesn't support Bluray, Sony or someone will be sure to write drivers for it, and Windows will thus have to support it in some fashion unless they take really blatantly illegal moves to block it. As is, MS is already treading on thin ice with their current actions.
The NES light gun...
I thought the NES light gun came with the system.
Now the funky robot controller and the dance pad -- well that's a different issue.
"Natural" means "more valuable" in the marketplace these days.
Not without reason however. Considering the effects of trans fats, high fructose corn syrup, and certain additives and preservatives in food on the body, "natural" (i.e. containing no chemicals not found in food you can pluck out of the ground or take an axe to) is more valuable to some customers. In this case "natural" has a legitimate use although it's frequently misused such as by people who think that adding a little oat fiber makes some glorified breakfast candy bar "natural" when it's still mostly highly processed sugars.
Personally, I've always found the most legitimate criticism of the use of the word "natural" to be about man-made products derived from non-man made sources, such as "natural fibers" and "natural foods." However, even there it serves a legitimate role as a clarifying word to groups certain products together and to seperate them from products that contain synthetic source materials.
There are lots of products we get from crude oil that we can't press out of biomass: think about plastics, asphalt, lubricants.
You raise a lot of good points to chew on, but you're flat out wrong on this point. We already have corn-based plastics and vegetable lubricants are pretty easy to find. Asphalt's the hard one, but we already use concrete in a lot of structures meant for heavy traffic without asphalt covers. Replacing roads with concrete would provide an alternative to asphalt (albeit a more expensive one).
I would suggest determining the real problems before offering a solution. A nation designed around cars instead of people is definitely part of the problem, and alternative fuel doesn't solve that particular problem at all.
Unfortunately that's a problem that can't be solved without a lot of very unpopular, freedom-robbing or tax-heavy legislative efforts. I've thought for a good long time on this, and I can't forsee a future where people give up their cars in mass without massive concentration of all of the populace in urban centers that have been seriously redesigned to avoid the need for travel. Even so, you still have to give up in the face of people who will willingly drive 2 hours each way to work just to have a big house with a big yard at affordable prices.
Without a massive rail and other public transportation network that covers the entire nation like Japan has, you'll never see Americans give up the car. All solutions must account for the almighty car.
Free people from a giant, violent, centralized authority like a government, and equality, prosperity, and peace are the natural result.
Not necessarily. Instead, you get many competing violent authorities who pile up a lot of bodies fulfilling the natural human desires to get higher in the pecking order until peace is established by one of them becoming the single giant, centralized authority.
Of course, this is technically a straw man argument about anarchy since you haven't truly argued for statelessness, but constant references to violence in minarchist arguments tend to lead one to the natural assumption that you are arguing against any sort of government violence against the people instead of just the law standing behind the tax collectors.
In a minarchist's perfect world, government only exists to keep men from pursuing direct violence against one another and from misappropriating legally owned private property. This world in and of itself does not guarantee utopia. It all rests on one assumption which you voice right here:
Inequality comes from violence... it comes from situations where people are not allowed to make decisions for themselves and instead are forced to do something under the threat of violence.
Not always. Sometimes people are forced to do things to avoid starvation or lesser problems. The only reason we have a market for menial labor is because it is the only way that uneducated people can feed and clothes themselves and their children. You need to read "Nickled and Dimed" to see how desperate the situation is for the working majority of poor people. There honestly isn't a lot of freedom when you don't have enough money to put down the first month's rent for an apartment and have to instead take the more expensive and less secure option of renting week-to-week at a motel. You can't take time off from work to go to the doctor (even if you could afford it) because you wouldn't earn enough money to feed yourself. You won't tell a cruel boss to shove it and go look for a new job because you don't have the money to survive multiple weeks of unemployment. You can't afford to take time off to retrain and get better skills because you;re working 11-15 hours a day on multiple jobs.
These people already are economically subjugated but not by government. They're subjugated by a largely distributed private sector instead of a centralized government. They don't have opportunities because opportunity requires the ability to have a period of self-sufficiency and free time that aren't available to people in their economic state. Without government or enough private charity funding (which would probably indicate enough of a public sentiment to have government handle it), these people would have no future. If you took away public education, social security, and medicare & medicaid, they wouldn't received back nearly enough taxes to make up the difference to pay for these essential services themselves. Without labor laws, unemployment laws, the minimum wage (which has already atrophied almost to the point of uselessness thanks to inflation), these people would be little more than slaves with the ability to choose their master.
It doesn't take violence to grind away a person's spirit and to make them a slave. The callous apathy of society at large and financial desperation are more than enough. I remember from History what the so-called "Gilded Age" was like, and I personally don't want to see a return of those days when the only law of business was that of the contract and the life of labor was cheap and expendable.
I suspect the opposite. I'm pretty sure from my English lit classes that the idea of the supernatural and the natural as seperate entities came after the invention of the word "artifice." Of course, "artificial" used to primarily have connotations of complimenting something cleverly made instead of primarily insulting something as being less desirable than the original.
Also, I'd really like to hear your justification for why "artificial" and "natural" as antonyms has become meaningless. As far as I know, there hasn't been any breakthroughs that blur the line between man-made phenomena and either supernaturally created or creatorless phenomena (depending on your theological stance). It smacks of Newspeak to me to attempt to remove the meaning of the word.
"Natural" as even referenced in the Wikipedia article if you actually read it is commonly used to describe anything which is not artificial. The mountain is natural. A house is not because it was made by people and not non-sentient processes. An anthill may or may not be depending on your definition of "artificial," but in common speech it's generally assumed to be.
People who redefine words away from their long-accepted common usage bug the hell out of me. People who redefine a word to eliminate the usage of its antonym bug me even more.
Question:
If these "lenses" do nothing but sharpen images by "undoing" diffraction, couldn't they be used as a "filter" for a traditional magnifying lens to get better telescopic performance than is currently possible?
I've always heard that this research would lead to great advances in telescopes, but you post has me tentatively disappointed.