Your bank should make these available to you for next to nothing, and you don't have to worry about buying your own safe and making sure that it's secure, fireproof, etc.
Huh? Trolling? Dare I ask how? I'm not suggesting that people pick up a Dreamcast at the Stephen King Memorial Rummage Sale.
(a) Dreamcast controller != Atari joystick
This is true.
(b) Used Dreamcast != $20, sorry.
*shrug* That's what I paid for mine. The guy was asking $40 for it, but I talked him down to $20, telling him that the machine was out of production and pretty much obsolete. A little white lie, to be sure, but those never hurt anybody.
(c) Mention downloading StellaDC and Atari rom packs, and burning it with a special program so your DC can boot it will make most people go "huh?".
"Most people" don't read Slashdot, and I don't consider mkisofs and cdrecord to be particularly esoteric pieces of software.
(c') If they don't go "huh?", they probably have better things to do than find a used Dreamcast and do all of the above.
You can do a lot more with a Dreamcast than play Atari games.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't shell out a paltry $20 for one of these things if they want it.. only that there are ways to get a lot more bang for the buck.
Yeah, the sound needs some work. The opening music to Frogger is excruciating.:-) Still, it's not bad, as emulators go. You're right about NesterDC.. the emulation is 100% spot-on for pretty much every game I've tried it with (even Castlevania III, which is a nice accomplishment.)
For $20 you can go to a pawnshop and pick up a used Sega Dreamcast machine. You can then go to DC Emulation and download StellaDC (an Atari 2600 emulator for the Dreamcast) along with a ROM pack of almost 300 public domain (read: legal) games, including Adventure, Pitfall, and most of the classics. Then you can sit back and kill a rainy/snowy day by playing all of the games that used to consume you as a kid.
Anyone care to correct me on the far-side thing? I never really trusted the textbook I got that out of.
What, you can't Google for "moon landing sites"?
Think about this for a minute.
If all of the moon landings were on the far side, then how do you propose that NASA was able to keep in contact with the landers, or make contact at all, for that matter? It's awfully hard to maintain radio contact with something that (by definition) never faces you. The Sea of Tranquility, Hadley-Apennine, Mare Imbrium, etc. are all on the near side of the moon.
I really wish us stubborn americans would just switch to SI...
The Carter Administration tried this back in the 1970s. The plan was to gradually ease the U.S. into the metric system; the first step was to put up metric speed limit signs. Patriotic Americans responded warmly by shooting them down. So you could say that the metric system has not caught on very well here, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. (Paraphrasing Dave Barry.)
Incidentally, Charlton Heston (who is the head of the NRA) is also a member of the ACLU. Apparently, Mr. Heston recognizes the importance and validity of the concept of "division of labor," something that the original AC poster might want to consider.
So if we unsigned time_t on 32 bit unices we'd have another 68 years in which to switch to architectures that can handle 64 bit integers without a performance penalty.
That would break any code that relies on being able to store negative values in an object of type time_t. This is common in instances (for example) when you're calculating the difference between two times. Now, you might (successfully) argue that code like that is broken anyway since the C standard does not specify the interpretation and/or granularity of time_t, and therefore does not guarantee that mathematical operations on objects of said type will yield any useful or portable results. Really, all you can do with time_t object(s) is pass them to functions like mktime() or difftime().
However, this ignores the fact that there is, for better or worse (mostly worse) a lot of code out there that will break if such a solution is applied. It's not a big deal, really; anybody who is still using a 32-bit UNIX OS in 2038 is going to deserve what they get.:-)
.. but this case really has nothing to do with him. It was originally filed as Eldred v. Reno. The reason that the defendant was Reno (and is now Ashcroft) is because as United States Attorney General, (s)he is the one who is (presumably) responsible for making sure that the law(s) in question will be enforced.
This has nothing to do with personal statements or actions that have been made by either Reno or Ashcroft.
Here is a link to the Quaoar FAQ, maintained by Chad Truijillo, one of the planet's co-discoverers. There's a lot of cool stuff there, including the discovery images (animated so you can see it moving across the star field), the Hubble images, information about the orbit, etc.
The movie October Sky, based on the book "Rocket Boys" by Homer Hickham, is about a group of kids in a West Virginia coal town who become interested in rocketry after the Soviets send up Sputnik. The entire town gathers together on the night of the launch and watches as the spacecraft passes over. A lot of the reactions are pretty humorous ("That thang's gonna drop bombs on us!" "Why don't we just shoot thing damn the down?")
Without giving away too much of the plot, the Rocket Boys become more and more proficient at their craft and eventually get scholarships to attend college, something that saved them from having to work in the coal mines (which 95% of the rest of the town's boys ended up doing.) The main character (Homer) ends up becoming a NASA engineer, training astronauts for Space Shuttle missions. It's a pretty good movie. It's less about Sputnik than it is about American small coal-town life in the 1950s, but it's a pretty accurate snapshot of how things were Back Then (or so I've been told.)
Incidentally, "October Sky" is an anagram of "Rocket Boys." The film was originally titled "The Rocket Boys", but was changed in post-production.
It's the fact that by linking this site the organization is provided the terrorist's with a vehicle for communication...
This is preposterous. The company or organization hosting the "terrorist's" Web site is the one that's providing the vehicle for communication, not any Web pages that link to it. By your logic, we ought to shut down Google and all other Internet search engines since I can run a search on "FARC" and end up with a web page that links to this same Web site.
Incidentally, the irony here is that if the school had left this issue alone, then virtually nobody would have seen the offending Web site. Now that they've raised a big stink about it wrapped up in the PATRIOT act, you can expect the URL to appear in countless places (as it already has done several times in replies to this story.)
What you will find is that if there is a M$ solution regardless of cost or funstionality, you will be required to use that. I have run into this before and logic does not play a role.
Doubtful. The relationship between contractors and many government agencies is changing. We're moving away from old models where government personnel were actively involved in technical aspects of day-to-day work and into a new model called PBC (Performance-Based Contracting.) In that model, the government serves more of an oversight role (in terms of things like budget and schedule) and assumes a more hands-off role when it comes to how the work is actually done.
.. and this whole thing is basically nonsense. As briancnorton said in his post, expect waivers to fly like snowflakes in a blizzard (if they even bother to try to enforce this at all.)
At the installation where I work, we've got dozens of legacy systems running on UNIX boxes as far as the eye can see. Some of these are processor-hungry image processing applications that run on high-end boxes from SGI and Sun. These systems are not going away anytime soon, regardless of what some tech-clueless bureaucrat at the top of the chain would like to think.
I'm posting this from an SGI O2, sitting on my desk next to a PC that dual boots Win2K and Linux. All of the developers in the cube farm outside my office door are doing UNIX development on Linux PCs. In the past couple of years, we have started to shun more expensive solutions in favor of software like Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL/MySQL. There are currently several efforts underway to port existing systems from proprietary UNIX (i.e., IRIX or Solaris) to Linux so that we can leverage inexpensive, commodity hardware platforms and get away from paying exorbitant maintenance fees.
We're moving pretty aggressively towards open standards and free software, and I would guess that this memo will have exactly zilch effect on that.
Yes, you're correct about Piltdown Man; he was a fraud perpetrated by a rather small group of British researchers (including, of all people, Arthur Conan Doyle.) He is mentioned in many scientific and literary works of the early 20th Century, including the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It was a wildly successful piece of scientific trickery and deceit, perhaps the most successful hoax in history.
But here's the thing: it wasn't anti-evolution activists or Baptist ministers who exposed Piltdown as the fraud it was. The truth came out of a process that started at an international congress of paleontologists in 1953. That's right; the same scientific establishment that you are accusing of widespread fraud and corruption is responsible for learning the truth about Piltdown Man. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find a biology textbook written any time after 1958 that mentions Piltdown Man in any context other than that he was a fraud. Find me a modern biology textbook that references Piltdown Man as evidence for evolutionary common descent.
Good luck.
Compare and contrast this with the creation science community. Many (but not all) of these folks consistently refer to theories and pieces of physical evidence that have long been debunked or shown to be fraudulent. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is references to the Paluxy River tracks, which some claim show human tracks next to dinosaur tracks, suggesting that man and dinos were contemporaries. This "evidence" was debunked a long time ago, and even the Institute for Creation Research, an organization not known for its strong committment to the scientific method, has suggested that "honest creation scientists" not use the Paluxy River tracks as evidence for a young Earth.
That's just one example of creationists providing false and/or debunked evidence for their particular brand of creationism. The list goes on and on; we've got ridiculous claims that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we've got the false stories about moon dust and about how NASA was afraid that Apollo 11 would get mired in it, we've got the urban legend about NASA computers "finding" the missing day from Joshua's siege on Jericho, etc. etc.
The point is this: Before you accuse scientists en masse of widespread fraud, lies, and deception, you might want to consider getting your own house in order first. The Piltdown Man debacle demonstrates that scientists are ever skeptical and are willing to admit when they are wrong and have been misled. Are you and yours capable of the same honesty?
Hey, I've got news for you, buddy.. a lot of those games were great!
Sure, they didn't feature a lot of the CD-quality music and breathtaking FMV and first-person, three-dimensional, high-polygon-count graphics that you'll find in modern games, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're any less fun. I don't know about anybody else, but I probably had more fun playing the original Legend of Zelda than I did playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask. Good graphics and music + glitzy presentation does not necessarily = better games. A lot of today's games are very nicely packaged, but all too many of them are nicely-packaged garbage.
Re:Irrational Liberal "Epistemology" Strikes Again
on
Politicizing Science
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· Score: 1
My logic is meretricious and my conclusions are indisputably indefensible. My facts stand on firm epistemological ground. You may draw different conclusions if you like, but only if you are insane.
Since Government doesn't have to produce a profit or even stick to a budget..
I'm not sure why you would think this. I work at a federal facility that gets a yearly outlay from Congress, the same as any other government agency/facility. When the money is gone, we can't just go ask for more. In the past year we've had to cut training budgets and even lay some people off because of budget shortfalls.
The thing you have to remember about a lot of questions like these that you'll find in background checks and security clearances: Answering "yes" is not (necessarily) going to disqualify you. The FBI could probably care less if you got a DWI on the way home from a party when you were in high school, and they're not going to throw the cuffs on you for admitting that you smoked dope in college. There are three major reasons for asking questions like this and digging into a person's record:
They want to make sure that you're honest. If they ask if you've ever smoked pot at some point in the past and you say that you have, even if you doubt they could prove otherwise, you're being honest with them. If they disqualified everybody who had ever experimented with pot at one point or another in their youth, there would be a lot of empty offices at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Nobody cares (well, almost nobody) about youthful indiscretions like this, so long as they do not represent current behavior patterns. What they care about is that you're honest enough to answer the question truthfully.
They want to make sure that you've got nothing "on" you that can be used to blackmail you. This is a bigger issue for higher security clearances (i.e., Top Secret/SCI and above) than it is for general background checks. There are all sorts of obvious things that fall into this category such as extramarital affairs and the like. If you've got anything in your past that somebody else may be able to hold over your head and get you to compromise your position, you can bet that those boys are going to want to know about it.
Finally, yes, they do need to weed out the undesirables (pun intended.) If a person who is a current drug dealer, wife-beater, or alcoholic applies with the FBI, then obviously they're a moron.
The point is this: You don't need to be an angel to pass a background check or get a security clearance. It might help, but it's not a requirement. What you need to be is honest. The chances of you getting brought up on charges for something stupid you did in your youth are virtually nil; the FBI has far more important things to do, particular these days.
The proper name for the Christian god is "Yahweh" (or "Jehovah", if you prefer.) Now, I certainly have no objections to Christians using the generic "God", but as others have pointed out, pantheists and deists have used "God" for centuries. You may reject this usage on the basis that you reject pantheism and deism, but you should know that the pantheists and deists reject your usage for precisely the same reason.:-)
.. who is to say that the 'inital' creation of animals wasn't simply a day where God seeded the world with animals in various stages of change?
You could certainly say that (many creationists do) and it would be impossible to disprove. Now, this is not a very scientific theory, and there's a question about whether it makes sense or not, but if people choose to believe that, then that is their business.
Are fossil records considered complete and accurate enough to 'prove' this was not the case?
Well, that doesn't really matter since you could just say that God created the fossil record too.;-)
The concepts of "microevolution" and "macroevolution" are basically arbitrary distinctions invented by people who are forced to admit that biological evolution does, in fact, happen, but cannot accept that twin-nested hierarchies of evolutionary common descent are the source of the biodiversity on Earth.
Let me give you an example. If I stand on one side of my living room and take tiny toe-to-heel steps, I will reach the other side of my living room within a minute or so. If I stand on one edge of my town and do the same thing, I'll reach the other side in a day or so. If I stand in New York and do the same thing, I'll reach Los Angeles in a few hundred years (just a guess, really.)
The point is this: in each of the three examples, the results are increasingly visible and dramatic, but the process is exactly the same. You would not, I presume, suggest that I was "micro-walking" in my living room and "macro-walking" across America. Some people seem to think that evolution is some sort of directed Black Magik. It's not. Biological evolution is variation in the gene pool of a population over time. That's it. That's all it is. The fact that its results are more visible and dramatic over time should not be particularly surprising to anybody.
Re:Any Text Editor That Needs A Book...
on
Vi IMproved -- Vim
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You may see the obtuseness of VI as part of the initiation; I see it as damage and route around it.
This is a common misconception among people who are unfamiliar with vi (that the people who use it know that it's hard to use, but use it anyway because they're stuck and the past and so that they can feel smug and superior to the Common Man who can only use Common Editors.) However, it's dead wrong.
I use vi because it's easy to use. That's right; vi is easy to use.
It is not, however, particularly easy to learn, and here's where the problems arise: too many people confuse ease of use with ease of learning. If you sit somebody down in front of a tool such as the MSVC++ editor, of course they will be able to learn it quicker than they would be able to learn vi, particularly if they are already familiar with concepts such as the mouse, pull-down menus, standard keyboard shortcuts, and other familiar elements of modern windowing environments.
But does that mean that, at the end of the day, the MSVC++ editor is easier to use than vi? I don't think so. For example, if I want to delete 8 lines of text in vi, I simply type "8dd". Now, you might say "Well, all I have to do is take the mouse, highlight those eight lines, and choose Edit->Cut or press Delete or Control-C or Control-X or whatever", and you'd be right. And this may be more intuitive and familiar then pressing "8dd", but you'd have a difficult time convincing me that it's easier, and it is most certainly not faster.
Here's the bottom line: Some vi users accuse users of other (mostly GUI) editors of being technically-challenged simpletons. Some users of other (mostly GUI) editors accuse vi users of being anachronistic elitists. Both sides are wrong. An editor is a tool; use the one that fits you the best. Personally, I'll take vi any day, but that is my opinion (and it is for this reason that I qualify my statement with "personally.")
The most karma you could ever have was 50. After that it could only go down.
Lots of us were "grandfathered in" before the 50-point cap was put on, though (we didn't get it chopped off to 50.) My karma was at something like 238 before it suddenly switched to "Excellent."
Slashdot Mirror
Safety deposit box.
Your bank should make these available to you for next to nothing, and you don't have to worry about buying your own safe and making sure that it's secure, fireproof, etc.
You're borderline trolling, IMHO, but I'll bite:
.. only that there are ways to get a lot more bang for the buck.
Huh? Trolling? Dare I ask how? I'm not suggesting that people pick up a Dreamcast at the Stephen King Memorial Rummage Sale.
(a) Dreamcast controller != Atari joystick
This is true.
(b) Used Dreamcast != $20, sorry.
*shrug* That's what I paid for mine. The guy was asking $40 for it, but I talked him down to $20, telling him that the machine was out of production and pretty much obsolete. A little white lie, to be sure, but those never hurt anybody.
(c) Mention downloading StellaDC and Atari rom packs, and burning it with a special program so your DC can boot it will make most people go "huh?".
"Most people" don't read Slashdot, and I don't consider mkisofs and cdrecord to be particularly esoteric pieces of software.
(c') If they don't go "huh?", they probably have better things to do than find a used Dreamcast and do all of the above.
You can do a lot more with a Dreamcast than play Atari games.
I'm not saying that people shouldn't shell out a paltry $20 for one of these things if they want it
Yeah, the sound needs some work. The opening music to Frogger is excruciating. :-) Still, it's not bad, as emulators go. You're right about NesterDC .. the emulation is 100% spot-on for pretty much every game I've tried it with (even Castlevania III, which is a nice accomplishment.)
.. why?
For $20 you can go to a pawnshop and pick up a used Sega Dreamcast machine. You can then go to DC Emulation and download StellaDC (an Atari 2600 emulator for the Dreamcast) along with a ROM pack of almost 300 public domain (read: legal) games, including Adventure, Pitfall, and most of the classics. Then you can sit back and kill a rainy/snowy day by playing all of the games that used to consume you as a kid.
The Dreamcast is perfect for something like this.
Anyone care to correct me on the far-side thing? I never really trusted the textbook I got that out of.
What, you can't Google for "moon landing sites"?
Think about this for a minute.
If all of the moon landings were on the far side, then how do you propose that NASA was able to keep in contact with the landers, or make contact at all, for that matter? It's awfully hard to maintain radio contact with something that (by definition) never faces you. The Sea of Tranquility, Hadley-Apennine, Mare Imbrium, etc. are all on the near side of the moon.
I really wish us stubborn americans would just switch to SI...
The Carter Administration tried this back in the 1970s. The plan was to gradually ease the U.S. into the metric system; the first step was to put up metric speed limit signs. Patriotic Americans responded warmly by shooting them down. So you could say that the metric system has not caught on very well here, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet. (Paraphrasing Dave Barry.)
Incidentally, Charlton Heston (who is the head of the NRA) is also a member of the ACLU. Apparently, Mr. Heston recognizes the importance and validity of the concept of "division of labor," something that the original AC poster might want to consider.
So if we unsigned time_t on 32 bit unices we'd have another 68 years in which to switch to architectures that can handle 64 bit integers without a performance penalty.
:-)
That would break any code that relies on being able to store negative values in an object of type time_t. This is common in instances (for example) when you're calculating the difference between two times. Now, you might (successfully) argue that code like that is broken anyway since the C standard does not specify the interpretation and/or granularity of time_t, and therefore does not guarantee that mathematical operations on objects of said type will yield any useful or portable results. Really, all you can do with time_t object(s) is pass them to functions like mktime() or difftime().
However, this ignores the fact that there is, for better or worse (mostly worse) a lot of code out there that will break if such a solution is applied. It's not a big deal, really; anybody who is still using a 32-bit UNIX OS in 2038 is going to deserve what they get.
.. but this case really has nothing to do with him. It was originally filed as Eldred v. Reno. The reason that the defendant was Reno (and is now Ashcroft) is because as United States Attorney General, (s)he is the one who is (presumably) responsible for making sure that the law(s) in question will be enforced.
This has nothing to do with personal statements or actions that have been made by either Reno or Ashcroft.
Here is a link to the Quaoar FAQ, maintained by Chad Truijillo, one of the planet's co-discoverers. There's a lot of cool stuff there, including the discovery images (animated so you can see it moving across the star field), the Hubble images, information about the orbit, etc.
The movie October Sky, based on the book "Rocket Boys" by Homer Hickham, is about a group of kids in a West Virginia coal town who become interested in rocketry after the Soviets send up Sputnik. The entire town gathers together on the night of the launch and watches as the spacecraft passes over. A lot of the reactions are pretty humorous ("That thang's gonna drop bombs on us!" "Why don't we just shoot thing damn the down?")
Without giving away too much of the plot, the Rocket Boys become more and more proficient at their craft and eventually get scholarships to attend college, something that saved them from having to work in the coal mines (which 95% of the rest of the town's boys ended up doing.) The main character (Homer) ends up becoming a NASA engineer, training astronauts for Space Shuttle missions. It's a pretty good movie. It's less about Sputnik than it is about American small coal-town life in the 1950s, but it's a pretty accurate snapshot of how things were Back Then (or so I've been told.)
Incidentally, "October Sky" is an anagram of "Rocket Boys." The film was originally titled "The Rocket Boys", but was changed in post-production.
It's the fact that by linking this site the organization is provided the terrorist's with a vehicle for communication...
This is preposterous. The company or organization hosting the "terrorist's" Web site is the one that's providing the vehicle for communication, not any Web pages that link to it. By your logic, we ought to shut down Google and all other Internet search engines since I can run a search on "FARC" and end up with a web page that links to this same Web site.
Incidentally, the irony here is that if the school had left this issue alone, then virtually nobody would have seen the offending Web site. Now that they've raised a big stink about it wrapped up in the PATRIOT act, you can expect the URL to appear in countless places (as it already has done several times in replies to this story.)
What you will find is that if there is a M$ solution regardless of cost or funstionality, you will be required to use that. I have run into this before and logic does not play a role.
Doubtful. The relationship between contractors and many government agencies is changing. We're moving away from old models where government personnel were actively involved in technical aspects of day-to-day work and into a new model called PBC (Performance-Based Contracting.) In that model, the government serves more of an oversight role (in terms of things like budget and schedule) and assumes a more hands-off role when it comes to how the work is actually done.
This is, of course, how it should be.
.. and this whole thing is basically nonsense. As briancnorton said in his post, expect waivers to fly like snowflakes in a blizzard (if they even bother to try to enforce this at all.)
At the installation where I work, we've got dozens of legacy systems running on UNIX boxes as far as the eye can see. Some of these are processor-hungry image processing applications that run on high-end boxes from SGI and Sun. These systems are not going away anytime soon, regardless of what some tech-clueless bureaucrat at the top of the chain would like to think.
I'm posting this from an SGI O2, sitting on my desk next to a PC that dual boots Win2K and Linux. All of the developers in the cube farm outside my office door are doing UNIX development on Linux PCs. In the past couple of years, we have started to shun more expensive solutions in favor of software like Apache, PHP, PostgreSQL/MySQL. There are currently several efforts underway to port existing systems from proprietary UNIX (i.e., IRIX or Solaris) to Linux so that we can leverage inexpensive, commodity hardware platforms and get away from paying exorbitant maintenance fees.
We're moving pretty aggressively towards open standards and free software, and I would guess that this memo will have exactly zilch effect on that.
This is really off-topic, but...
Yes, you're correct about Piltdown Man; he was a fraud perpetrated by a rather small group of British researchers (including, of all people, Arthur Conan Doyle.) He is mentioned in many scientific and literary works of the early 20th Century, including the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. It was a wildly successful piece of scientific trickery and deceit, perhaps the most successful hoax in history.
But here's the thing: it wasn't anti-evolution activists or Baptist ministers who exposed Piltdown as the fraud it was. The truth came out of a process that started at an international congress of paleontologists in 1953. That's right; the same scientific establishment that you are accusing of widespread fraud and corruption is responsible for learning the truth about Piltdown Man. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find a biology textbook written any time after 1958 that mentions Piltdown Man in any context other than that he was a fraud. Find me a modern biology textbook that references Piltdown Man as evidence for evolutionary common descent.
Good luck.
Compare and contrast this with the creation science community. Many (but not all) of these folks consistently refer to theories and pieces of physical evidence that have long been debunked or shown to be fraudulent. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is references to the Paluxy River tracks, which some claim show human tracks next to dinosaur tracks, suggesting that man and dinos were contemporaries. This "evidence" was debunked a long time ago, and even the Institute for Creation Research, an organization not known for its strong committment to the scientific method, has suggested that "honest creation scientists" not use the Paluxy River tracks as evidence for a young Earth.
That's just one example of creationists providing false and/or debunked evidence for their particular brand of creationism. The list goes on and on; we've got ridiculous claims that evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics, we've got the false stories about moon dust and about how NASA was afraid that Apollo 11 would get mired in it, we've got the urban legend about NASA computers "finding" the missing day from Joshua's siege on Jericho, etc. etc.
The point is this: Before you accuse scientists en masse of widespread fraud, lies, and deception, you might want to consider getting your own house in order first. The Piltdown Man debacle demonstrates that scientists are ever skeptical and are willing to admit when they are wrong and have been misled. Are you and yours capable of the same honesty?
Hey, I've got news for you, buddy .. a lot of those games were great!
Sure, they didn't feature a lot of the CD-quality music and breathtaking FMV and first-person, three-dimensional, high-polygon-count graphics that you'll find in modern games, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're any less fun. I don't know about anybody else, but I probably had more fun playing the original Legend of Zelda than I did playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask. Good graphics and music + glitzy presentation does not necessarily = better games. A lot of today's games are very nicely packaged, but all too many of them are nicely-packaged garbage.
My logic is meretricious and my conclusions are indisputably indefensible. My facts stand on firm epistemological ground. You may draw different conclusions if you like, but only if you are insane.
:)
I've always loved this line.
Since Government doesn't have to produce a profit or even stick to a budget ..
I'm not sure why you would think this. I work at a federal facility that gets a yearly outlay from Congress, the same as any other government agency/facility. When the money is gone, we can't just go ask for more. In the past year we've had to cut training budgets and even lay some people off because of budget shortfalls.
- They want to make sure that you're honest. If they ask if you've ever smoked pot at some point in the past and you say that you have, even if you doubt they could prove otherwise, you're being honest with them. If they disqualified everybody who had ever experimented with pot at one point or another in their youth, there would be a lot of empty offices at the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Nobody cares (well, almost nobody) about youthful indiscretions like this, so long as they do not represent current behavior patterns. What they care about is that you're honest enough to answer the question truthfully.
- They want to make sure that you've got nothing "on" you that can be used to blackmail you. This is a bigger issue for higher security clearances (i.e., Top Secret/SCI and above) than it is for general background checks. There are all sorts of obvious things that fall into this category such as extramarital affairs and the like. If you've got anything in your past that somebody else may be able to hold over your head and get you to compromise your position, you can bet that those boys are going to want to know about it.
- Finally, yes, they do need to weed out the undesirables (pun intended.) If a person who is a current drug dealer, wife-beater, or alcoholic applies with the FBI, then obviously they're a moron.
The point is this: You don't need to be an angel to pass a background check or get a security clearance. It might help, but it's not a requirement. What you need to be is honest. The chances of you getting brought up on charges for something stupid you did in your youth are virtually nil; the FBI has far more important things to do, particular these days.Unless the guys in India who work 18 hours a day write shitty code, which is kind of the point of this whole discussion!
The proper name for the Christian god is "Yahweh" (or "Jehovah", if you prefer.) Now, I certainly have no objections to Christians using the generic "God", but as others have pointed out, pantheists and deists have used "God" for centuries. You may reject this usage on the basis that you reject pantheism and deism, but you should know that the pantheists and deists reject your usage for precisely the same reason. :-)
.. who is to say that the 'inital' creation of animals wasn't simply a day where God seeded the world with animals in various stages of change?
;-)
You could certainly say that (many creationists do) and it would be impossible to disprove. Now, this is not a very scientific theory, and there's a question about whether it makes sense or not, but if people choose to believe that, then that is their business.
Are fossil records considered complete and accurate enough to 'prove' this was not the case?
Well, that doesn't really matter since you could just say that God created the fossil record too.
The concepts of "microevolution" and "macroevolution" are basically arbitrary distinctions invented by people who are forced to admit that biological evolution does, in fact, happen, but cannot accept that twin-nested hierarchies of evolutionary common descent are the source of the biodiversity on Earth.
Let me give you an example. If I stand on one side of my living room and take tiny toe-to-heel steps, I will reach the other side of my living room within a minute or so. If I stand on one edge of my town and do the same thing, I'll reach the other side in a day or so. If I stand in New York and do the same thing, I'll reach Los Angeles in a few hundred years (just a guess, really.)
The point is this: in each of the three examples, the results are increasingly visible and dramatic, but the process is exactly the same. You would not, I presume, suggest that I was "micro-walking" in my living room and "macro-walking" across America. Some people seem to think that evolution is some sort of directed Black Magik. It's not. Biological evolution is variation in the gene pool of a population over time. That's it. That's all it is. The fact that its results are more visible and dramatic over time should not be particularly surprising to anybody.
You may see the obtuseness of VI as part of the initiation; I see it as damage and route around it.
This is a common misconception among people who are unfamiliar with vi (that the people who use it know that it's hard to use, but use it anyway because they're stuck and the past and so that they can feel smug and superior to the Common Man who can only use Common Editors.) However, it's dead wrong.
I use vi because it's easy to use. That's right; vi is easy to use.
It is not, however, particularly easy to learn, and here's where the problems arise: too many people confuse ease of use with ease of learning. If you sit somebody down in front of a tool such as the MSVC++ editor, of course they will be able to learn it quicker than they would be able to learn vi, particularly if they are already familiar with concepts such as the mouse, pull-down menus, standard keyboard shortcuts, and other familiar elements of modern windowing environments.
But does that mean that, at the end of the day, the MSVC++ editor is easier to use than vi? I don't think so. For example, if I want to delete 8 lines of text in vi, I simply type "8dd". Now, you might say "Well, all I have to do is take the mouse, highlight those eight lines, and choose Edit->Cut or press Delete or Control-C or Control-X or whatever", and you'd be right. And this may be more intuitive and familiar then pressing "8dd", but you'd have a difficult time convincing me that it's easier, and it is most certainly not faster.
Here's the bottom line: Some vi users accuse users of other (mostly GUI) editors of being technically-challenged simpletons. Some users of other (mostly GUI) editors accuse vi users of being anachronistic elitists. Both sides are wrong. An editor is a tool; use the one that fits you the best. Personally, I'll take vi any day, but that is my opinion (and it is for this reason that I qualify my statement with "personally.")
The most karma you could ever have was 50. After that it could only go down.
;-)
Lots of us were "grandfathered in" before the 50-point cap was put on, though (we didn't get it chopped off to 50.) My karma was at something like 238 before it suddenly switched to "Excellent."
Thanks a lot, Taco.