I knew it all along, beer is good for you. While hops aren't on the list of ingredients for the very early beers the germans brewed ("Met"), legend has it that the Romans put in hops into the German's beers in order to make them more "preservable" because hops have an anti-biotic effect on the micro-organisms spoiling freshly brewed beer, but seemingly their secret agenda was to calm the wild german tribes down because hops also have a very soothing effect on a person.
Well, they lost anyway, and I guess "Hermann der Cherusker" and his hordes had a few to celebrate their victory in the "Varus"-battle which cost the Romans about three legions. Hops or not, here's to beer;)
Whatever. I guess the rest of us got the message, though,thanks for clearing up this misconception. If you're interested, my interpretation of learning curves won't stop you from learning Zope anyway;)
I checked some of the RoR tutorials out there a while ago, and found nothing that Zope (http://www.zope.org/ wouldn't do for me in the same or even shorter amount of time (old fashioned DTML here, not ZPT, mind you;) . Zope has a quite a steep learning curve, but from reading the tutorials I would guess the same goes for RoR, and for now, I'll be sticking to Zope.
usual bookplug: Read "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, many of your questions will be answered there (and quite a few you never thought about before as an added bonus;)
good work on resurrecting the game, folks. It'll be interesting to watch the story unfold now that it has a dedicated, passionate crew running the show.
"It's just sick to even think of what might be a reality check for all of humanity"
Not all of humanity, just a single culture, mind you. Ok, it's the dominant culture that 99.999% (still rising) of all people on this planet belong to, but still only one culture out of tens of thousands of cultures that have existed on this planet since man came into being.
Read Ishmael by Dan Quinn, which is a very good book which deals with this issue.
the Zaurus rocks! It takes a while to get used to, but basically as soon as you have network connectivity up you can ssh into the Zaurus and do all kinds of neat things with it.
The only thing I am missing is a good Mahjonng thingy, but apart from that it's a full blown Linux workstation... in your pocket;-)
The only "additional" feature I require on my PDA in addition to all the run of the mill stuff is that it runs Nethack. The Zaurus does this nicely, so I won't have to buy a new PDA while this one lasts and doesn't break;-)
I emerge and try out the latest versions of kde and gnome every onee in a while on my dual celeron 500 box at home, but never fail to return to windowmaker for pure speed and configurability after a day or two of "having switched".
It really is a window manager that doesn't "get in the way", and it's beautiful on top of that;-)
I'm pretty much addicted to simracing myself (mostly "Grand Prix Legends", N2003 and F1C), but I can practise offline for league races and still tolerate interruptions by the kids, doing household chores and so on.
Our bi-weekly league races online are a different matter though; both my kids and my wife know my room is off-limits during the actual race which lasts an hour or so on Saturday afternoon. I told them that "other hubbies might go out to watch a football game and return drunk, while I'm sitting in my chair pretending to drive a racecar" which has to be better in their books;-)Also we usually have month-long breaks betweeen racing seasons, os it's not really a bi-weekly obligation by any stretch of the imagination.
Our racing league has been racing together for over six years now, and quite a few friendships and meetings in RL have resulted from our hobby, so there's another upside to present to my better half.
;-) I chose this site because the "original" authors site (see sig) happened to be down at the moment, sorry for that.
About the other poster saying I haven't performed the experiment, just ask tribal people (where we have until now chosen to leave them alone) if they would like to live like us (no horror stories of cutting off female parts and the like, please).
While they might have a set of laws and customs in place that fits their lifestyle perfectly, funnily enough they don't go out to conquer the world and tell everyone that they should live like them.
That's exactly what our culture does (and has done) on a global scale for the last 10,000 years, simply because our form or agriculture (of which there are many) produces so much human "surplus" that expansion into other tribe's territories becomes a necessity and part of the tribal vision.
This success is rather short-term of course, as obviously our food-fueled population explosion will not last very much longer simply because we'll run out of resources if we continue on that path. Colonization of other planets won't help a lot, either.
Exponential growth simply is not sustainable, not for animals and not or the human species on a whole.
Quote:Human nature never ceases to amaze me. Even under large orginizations called countries, corruption can and WILL take place.
Maybe humans aren't meant to live in "large organizations", leaving them stranded without a culture to pass on from generation to generation for thousands of years?
Evolution shaped the best-of-breed form of living together for humans: the tribe. Not perfect to be sure, but also not planet consuming like our taker culture has proved to be ever since it took off in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago.
"It makes it cheaper for me to fly to the US to buy it and carry it home than it is for me to buy it in the UK."
Might be cheaper for you, but think of all the jet fuel being burnt just to lug your corpse there and back again!;-)
Also, what about warranty? I bought an eight inch SCT (schmidt-cassegrain telescope) from the U.S. ten years ago because they were far cheaper in the U.S. than over here in Germany, but I was told that the "limited lifetime warranty" would not be covered by European Celestron dealers. I was lucky enough to receive a well tested unit simply because Glenn of Wholesale Optics of Pennsylvania tested it for me before shipping it, but will Dell do the same for you?
Depends on what you define as "civilization". In our culture, it's usually assigned to the start of people being totally dependent on agriculture for making a living, thus producing huge food surplusses and spreading like wildfire because of the resulting overpopulation.
As you correctly point out, they did not spread into an empty world. There must have been hundreds if not thousands of other cultures around which had quite a different lifestyle and switched to totalitarian agriculture either by force "we need your land to grow crops" or sometimes by choice (although making a living by agriculture is much harder work than making a living by hunting and gathering).
I think it was quite a similar process to what is happening to the last tribes of mankind in the rainforests all around the world now. Taker culture (ours) ventures into their territory, they briefly fight for their old way of life but eventually are assimilated, or if they continue to refuse to accept our vision and way of living, simply killed and done away with.
Interestingly enough, their societies usually don't have the problems that we always moan about (abuse, crime, drug addiction, you name it), or have very effective ways to deal with these problems.
Usual plug to answer those questions: read Dan Quinn's book Ishmael or a summary of his ideas here on our "major" religions if you are interested.
Why would you want a neutral reference system? Why should you even need one in this case? Quinn merely points out that there are different ways of making a living, while mother culture teaches us that ours (totalitarian agriculture being at war with the rest of the community of life) is the only one possible, and even worse, that we have to convert each and every human being to it, regardless of what they value or if they'd rather be left alone.
As for the other poster (Quinn having more than two kids), well practise what you preach. I have two kids myself, but why I would I want to enforce my view on others? Nowhere in Dan's books I find references that people should only have two kids.
While I realize "Ish" is not everyone's cup of tea , it really has some very interesting viewpoints, and for me it has been one of the few titles I have read in my life that answer more questions then they create. Maybe you should try "My Ishmael" and / or "The Story of B" and see how you get along with those.
While not exactly fitting into the "Hacker Sci/Fi" category, both "Ishmael" and "The Story of B" by Dan Quinn have profoundly changed the way I view the world and humanity's place in it. It probably won't take you a month (I read "Ish" in a day because I simply could not put it down;-), but you can spend the rest of your free time reading Dan's other excellent books.
There is no better preparation for corporate life than going there, knowing what it's all about that fscked our culture up so badly (and I'm on about the global taker culture, not our "precious" east vs. west subdivisions and so on).
this title still is the most realistic racing simulation today, even though it's five years old! It has very good physics, great internet racing (19 drivers), tons of add on tracks (both fiction and real racing venues), and lots of nice racing leagues to participate in. How it has affected me in real life?
Well, if race long-distance you need to have stamina, so after years of being a couch potato I got out there again, rode my bike, ran through the woods, simply to be be fit enough to go through those bi-weekly league races in one piece!
Having recently been through a lenghty Oracle install (granted we had to use 8i for compatibility issues) on Red Hat 7.3, I'd advise these two newfound cuddlies to sort out the installation issues. Wrong libraries, auto-generated shell scripts that are flat out broken and buggy which you have to fix by hand, java based GRAPHICAL installer (now who would use a graphical installer with an industry strength database??? Yuck!) that will work with only a certain JDK version, pure, confusing hell, and not a word of advice on these well-known issues in the "installation" PDF. It's amazing they're actually charging people money for this pile of dung, and only supporting Red Hat Advanced Server doesn't help much, either.
It may be stable once you get it running, but oh boy, the loops were many that we had to jump through, and they were burning;-) I'd choose PostGres or MySQL (let the flames begin) over Oracle any day, but so often this is more a political issue than a technical one.
hi folks, just thought this might be interesting to some of you: got the game to work in a recent cvs build of wine (opengl enabled) on Linux Mandrake 9.0. You cannot use the mouse in any meaningful way though, but the pitch and angle can be adjusted using the nuermic keyboard. You'll also need MSVCP60.dll which can be had from dll-files.com.
This games uses SDL to I guess it would be too hard to create a native linux version. Oh yeah, current highscore 57,000 or thereabouts. Great fun!
Within a mere 500 generations, our culture has brought the planet right to the edge of a collapse, one foot over the cliff already. Sounds funny regarding the simple fact that humans as smart as you and I have walked the earth for two million years, no?
Daniel Quinn has a nice write up as to why we're consuming 200 species a day at Ishmael.org
The problem isn't population control, it's food control. What are you made of? Moonbeams? Dust? Think for a second. Or even better, go and read Dan's address to the Houston faculty of Health Science at the URL above.
Slashdot Mirror
No mention of Nethack on the Sharp Zaurus yet? Everything you need in an RPG is in there, and has been for three (?) decades at least ;)
{homer mode}hmmmm, beeeeeerrrr!!!{/homer mode}
;)
I knew it all along, beer is good for you. While hops aren't on the list of ingredients for the very early beers the germans brewed ("Met"), legend has it that the Romans put in hops into the German's beers in order to make them more "preservable" because hops have an anti-biotic effect on the micro-organisms spoiling freshly brewed beer, but seemingly their secret agenda was to calm the wild german tribes down because hops also have a very soothing effect on a person.
Well, they lost anyway, and I guess "Hermann der Cherusker" and his hordes had a few to celebrate their victory in the "Varus"-battle which cost the Romans about three legions. Hops or not, here's to beer
Whatever. I guess the rest of us got the message, though,thanks for clearing up this misconception. If you're interested, my interpretation of learning curves won't stop you from learning Zope anyway ;)
Cheers, uwe
I checked some of the RoR tutorials out there a while ago, and found nothing that Zope (http://www.zope.org/ wouldn't do for me in the same or even shorter amount of time (old fashioned DTML here, not ZPT, mind you ;) . Zope has a quite a steep learning curve, but from reading the tutorials I would guess the same goes for RoR, and for now, I'll be sticking to Zope.
Cheers,
Uwe
usual bookplug: Read "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn, many of your questions will be answered there (and quite a few you never thought about before as an added bonus ;)
Cheers, uwe
So would a 4-digit id mean anything special? ;-)
good work on resurrecting the game, folks. It'll be interesting to watch the story unfold now that it has a dedicated, passionate crew running the show.
All the best, hoover
Not all of humanity, just a single culture, mind you. Ok, it's the dominant culture that 99.999% (still rising) of all people on this planet belong to, but still only one culture out of tens of thousands of cultures that have existed on this planet since man came into being.
Read Ishmael by Dan Quinn, which is a very good book which deals with this issue.
Cheers uwe
the Zaurus rocks! It takes a while to get used to, but basically as soon as you have network connectivity up you can ssh into the Zaurus and do all kinds of neat things with it.
;-)
The only thing I am missing is a good Mahjonng thingy, but apart from that it's a full blown Linux workstation... in your pocket
make sure you have table soccer in some rec. room, it allows four people to let off steam at the same time ;-)
The only "additional" feature I require on my PDA in addition to all the run of the mill stuff is that it runs Nethack. The Zaurus does this nicely, so I won't have to buy a new PDA while this one lasts and doesn't break ;-)
It really is a window manager that doesn't "get in the way", and it's beautiful on top of that
uwe
Our bi-weekly league races online are a different matter though; both my kids and my wife know my room is off-limits during the actual race which lasts an hour or so on Saturday afternoon. I told them that "other hubbies might go out to watch a football game and return drunk, while I'm sitting in my chair pretending to drive a racecar" which has to be better in their books
Our racing league has been racing together for over six years now, and quite a few friendships and meetings in RL have resulted from our hobby, so there's another upside to present to my better half.
What an apalling waste of energy. Just think of all the Guinness that could be brewed with that much electricity!
About the other poster saying I haven't performed the experiment, just ask tribal people (where we have until now chosen to leave them alone) if they would like to live like us (no horror stories of cutting off female parts and the like, please).
While they might have a set of laws and customs in place that fits their lifestyle perfectly, funnily enough they don't go out to conquer the world and tell everyone that they should live like them.
That's exactly what our culture does (and has done) on a global scale for the last 10,000 years, simply because our form or agriculture (of which there are many) produces so much human "surplus" that expansion into other tribe's territories becomes a necessity and part of the tribal vision.
This success is rather short-term of course, as obviously our food-fueled population explosion will not last very much longer simply because we'll run out of resources if we continue on that path. Colonization of other planets won't help a lot, either.
Exponential growth simply is not sustainable, not for animals and not or the human species on a whole.
Maybe humans aren't meant to live in "large organizations", leaving them stranded without a culture to pass on from generation to generation for thousands of years?
Evolution shaped the best-of-breed form of living together for humans: the tribe. Not perfect to be sure, but also not planet consuming like our taker culture has proved to be ever since it took off in the fertile crescent 10,000 years ago.
See friendofishmael.org for more information.
Cheers,
Uwe
"It makes it cheaper for me to fly to the US to buy it and carry it home than it is for me to buy it in the UK."
;-)
Might be cheaper for you, but think of all the jet fuel being burnt just to lug your corpse there and back again!
Also, what about warranty? I bought an eight inch SCT (schmidt-cassegrain telescope) from the U.S. ten years ago because they were far cheaper in the U.S. than over here in Germany, but I was told that the "limited lifetime warranty" would not be covered by European Celestron dealers. I was lucky enough to receive a well tested unit simply because Glenn of Wholesale Optics of Pennsylvania tested it for me before shipping it, but will Dell do the same for you?
All the best,
uwe
Depends on what you define as "civilization". In our culture, it's usually assigned to the start of people being totally dependent on agriculture for making a living, thus producing huge food surplusses and spreading like wildfire because of the resulting overpopulation.
As you correctly point out, they did not spread into an empty world. There must have been hundreds if not thousands of other cultures around which had quite a different lifestyle and switched to totalitarian agriculture either by force "we need your land to grow crops" or sometimes by choice (although making a living by agriculture is much harder work than making a living by hunting and gathering).
I think it was quite a similar process to what is happening to the last tribes of mankind in the rainforests all around the world now. Taker culture (ours) ventures into their territory, they briefly fight for their old way of life but eventually are assimilated, or if they continue to refuse to accept our vision and way of living, simply killed and done away with.
Interestingly enough, their societies usually don't have the problems that we always moan about (abuse, crime, drug addiction, you name it), or have very effective ways to deal with these problems.
Usual plug to answer those questions: read Dan Quinn's book Ishmael or a summary of his ideas here on our "major" religions if you are interested.
Cheers,
uwe
As for the other poster (Quinn having more than two kids), well practise what you preach. I have two kids myself, but why I would I want to enforce my view on others? Nowhere in Dan's books I find references that people should only have two kids.
While I realize "Ish" is not everyone's cup of tea , it really has some very interesting viewpoints, and for me it has been one of the few titles I have read in my life that answer more questions then they create. Maybe you should try "My Ishmael" and / or "The Story of B" and see how you get along with those.
Cheers,
Uwe
There is no better preparation for corporate life than going there, knowing what it's all about that fscked our culture up so badly (and I'm on about the global taker culture, not our "precious" east vs. west subdivisions and so on).
Enjoy & good luck with your new job!
Uwe
this title still is the most realistic racing simulation today, even though it's five years old! It has very good physics, great internet racing (19 drivers), tons of add on tracks (both fiction and real racing venues), and lots of nice racing leagues to participate in. How it has affected me in real life?
Well, if race long-distance you need to have stamina, so after years of being a couch potato I got out there again, rode my bike, ran through the woods, simply to be be fit enough to go through those bi-weekly league races in one piece!
Having recently been through a lenghty Oracle install (granted we had to use 8i for compatibility issues) on Red Hat 7.3, I'd advise these two newfound cuddlies to sort out the installation issues. Wrong libraries, auto-generated shell scripts that are flat out broken and buggy which you have to fix by hand, java based GRAPHICAL installer (now who would use a graphical installer with an industry strength database??? Yuck!) that will work with only a certain JDK version, pure, confusing hell, and not a word of advice on these well-known issues in the "installation" PDF. It's amazing they're actually charging people money for this pile of dung, and only supporting Red Hat Advanced Server doesn't help much, either.
;-) I'd choose PostGres or MySQL (let the flames begin) over Oracle any day, but so often this is more a political issue than a technical one.
It may be stable once you get it running, but oh boy, the loops were many that we had to jump through, and they were burning
Just what Scotland needs... more rain ;-)
grrr, of course I meant it would probably not be too hard to create a linux version ;-)
uwe
hi folks, just thought this might be interesting
to some of you: got the game to work in a recent
cvs build of wine (opengl enabled) on Linux Mandrake
9.0. You cannot use the mouse in any meaningful way
though, but the pitch and angle can be adjusted
using the nuermic keyboard. You'll also need
MSVCP60.dll which can be had from dll-files.com.
This games uses SDL to I guess it would be too hard to create a native linux version. Oh yeah, current highscore 57,000 or thereabouts. Great fun!
Enjoy,
uwe
Daniel Quinn has a nice write up as to why we're consuming 200 species a day at Ishmael.org
The problem isn't population control, it's food control. What are you made of? Moonbeams? Dust? Think for a second. Or even better, go and read Dan's address to the Houston faculty of Health Science at the URL above.
Cheers,
uwe