I can't ever hear Alan Turing's name anymore without getting angry all over again at the disgraceful way he died.
He essentially founded modern Computer Science. He also lead the team that cracked the German codes during WW2. You could make a case that we owe the man for everything we have today. This is the kind of guy who should have statues in DC and Trafalgar Square. So how did we thank him? By driving the poor guy to his death, that's how.
You see, none of that other cool stuff he did mattered in the slightest because he was gay.
You are absolutely right about the sillyness of removing Religon from a game about recreating history.
OTOH, Sid Meyer is rather famous for removing gameplay features that detract from the fun of the game. Quite often over the loud objections of simulation purists. It could just be that this was one of those cases. Religon's biggest long-term effect in the CIV4 was just to give AI Civ's one more thing to get pissed off at you about. There was no winning with it either, as no matter which you picked, you'd tick somebody off. This made persuing one of the peaceful victory options (like a cultural win) damn near impossible. At least for me.
The submitter clearly never read The Mythical Man-Month. He doesn't even seem to realise that it's a book, not a theory. It talks about quite a few things, mostly in the realm of software project management. This is not really something that can be "busted".
What he seems to be talking about is Brook's Law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". Now when a contributor like "anonymous reader" starts off being this totally wrong about something what are the odds of the rest being worthwhile?
Well, if you bet on "yes", you were wrong. The link provided has absoultely nothing to do with adding manpower to a late software project. Heck, there's not even a single project in question. They just hired a bunch of kids to work on different projects at the same time in the same room.
Read some of the "fixes" and then ask who is going to pay for them? Should the government keep subsidizing wind and the infrastructure.
How about we just quit subsidizing the coal and gas industries instead? If they had to pay to clean up their own drilling and mining sites, to properly dispose of their own hazardous wastes, and to remove all the hazardous chemicals and CO2 they are pumping into our air then power generation that didn't need all that would be competitive on its own.
They will never clean up their act while the taxpayer is footing the cleanup bill for their dirty practices for them (or just letting them do it for free without any cleanuup).
There has to be an economic motive to change, and that can most easily be created by taxing what we don't like (coal/oil) and giving subs to what we do like (nuclear, wind, sun, etc..).
A dumb tax wouldn't even be nessecary. Just make every power-generator pay for the true cost of what they are doing, including cleaning up after themselves. That means cleaning all the crap out of the air and water that they put into it (inculding CO2). That means properly dispsosing of their heavy metal and radioative by-products, that means restoring their extraction and refining sites to a livable condition when they are done with them. Right now the old power and resource extraction industries just leave it to us taxpayers to clean up their messes (if we can clean them up at all), while they keep the profits for themselves. Privitize the profits, Socialize the costs.
If every method of power generation had to play on a truly level playing-field, we wouldn't need any further artificial incentives.
After a couple of failing companies submit to Microsoft's "Linux patent" extortion, and then go under, people will start talking about a "Microsoft Curse". That'll do more damange to them than they were hoping to do to Linux.
This is precisely where the Right went wrong in the US over the last 10 years. Winning elections does not mean you are not a wacko. You could just be a really convincing wacko.
What makes someone a wacko is inability to accept and deal the real world on its own terms. Certian people got it in their heads that they could somehow change basic science, economics, sociology, etc. just by comming up with ideas they would like to be true, and publicising them heavily. The real world ain't like Tinkerbell; it doesn't care how hard you believe.
Actually, I could argue less. After all, selection is all about numbers of surviving children. An agricultural worker needs lots of kids to help with the immense amount of manual labor involved in agricultural work.
On the other hand, someone smart enough to pass the civil service tests ends up salaried, and every kid they have is just an additional burden with no compensating reward. Thus they (like modern first world families) will have less kids. In the long run, their genetic contribution will get lost in the noise.
That's what I did too. Someone managed to get hold of mine, and by the time I'd noticed had charged up $20,000 worth of stuff. I'm not sure how they did it either, but apparently with those convienence stores it is quite possible.
According to comments posted here yesterday by a student, some did put tape over the lens. They were viewed as paranoiacs by everyone else. Its a sad state when the paranoiacs are right.
More to the point, the fact that they hit this kid up about it proves they were closely examining pictures taken of kids in their own rooms. The odds of none of those pictures showing children in a state of undress (the taking of which is a very serious federal offense) seems rather remote. We are talking federal prison and the Sex Offender registry here.
I actually never owned a cell phone until a year ago. I only bought it then because I could get one of the new smartphones with a good moble web browser and email access. Texting is nice too, but otherwise I could do without the standard voice phone capabilities, just like I have always done without them.
How did the tools get there without some species of hominoid crossing the water? 200 miles is a long way to swim, so how did the hominoids cross the water?
Perhaps they swam or rafted over from the North instead? Crete is only about 74 miles from mainland Greece, and there are island chains between them. During an Ice Age sea levels would be lower so there would probably be even more and larger islands between them.
Crete is nearly as close to Asia Minor (Turkey), also w/ island chains in between.
I really don't understand the author's decision to quote the distance to the African coast. The only reason I can think of is appalling geographic ignorance.
Ahhh...you worked that out too? Back in the Civ1 days I sat down with a sheet of graph paper one day and figured that out.
There is basically one optimum setup, although there are four rotations of it, and four more that are mirror-flips of those four. So the first thing I do once my immediate area is scouted is to figure out which one of the eight city layouts to use. The idea is to find that one that maximizes irrigatable land and coastal cities, minimizes wasted land near coasts and the poles, and avoids having any city sites where there is a mountain.
Do you, like me, have a policy of razing any captured city that doesn't match your grid?:-)
BtW: For the curious, the pattern is such that all cities in one direction will either be
five squares off in one direction and two in another
five squares off in one direction and one in another
caty-corner by 3 and over one
caty-corner by 3 and up/down one
Its pretty easy to work out, one you figure it out. But now I'm going to have to find some hex paper and work out the ultimate setup with hexes...
Anyone elite enough to finish High School two years early we should be steering towards full four-year universities. Preferably the elite ones. This isn't just for our sake, but for society's as well.
This program instead is steering them into Community College. Most of the better four-years require applicants to have taken four years of English in High School too, so its not like these gifted folks will even have that option if they want to take it.
Actually, there are perfectly good languages that automatically check all buffers lengths when used (or even at compile time). That would mostly remove the human element and we wouldn't have to rail against the occasional (or even usual) developer who leaves out a check.
Instead folks insist on using crappy non-checking languages like C++. That's fine if you like C++, but don't complain about developers messing up and leaving off a buffer check, when the means for eradicating all buffer overflow errors is a simple language switch away. You knew what could happen when you picked up the gon...
Microsoft has never "innovated" anything in its history, unless you count software licenseing or vendor agreements.
They even bought DOS from someone else, for crying out loud.
The best case you could possibly make for them is WindowsNT. They developed that in-house, but they did it by hiring the team that created VMS away from DEC and setting them loose. It wasn't entirely a home-brewed thing.
This is just a story about Microsoft doing what they've always done for the last 30 years. If you want to find "innovation" at Microsoft, you have to look at their legal and marketing departments.
Slashdot Mirror
Australians, being a society founded by criminals, instinctively create laws which we must break.
Its a shame they decriminalized bankrupcy then. That's the "crime" that landed most of the first Aussies there in the first place.
Yeah, I saw mention of it elsewhere in this story. I'm going to have to go out and buy the second expansion so that I can install it...
I can't ever hear Alan Turing's name anymore without getting angry all over again at the disgraceful way he died.
He essentially founded modern Computer Science. He also lead the team that cracked the German codes during WW2. You could make a case that we owe the man for everything we have today. This is the kind of guy who should have statues in DC and Trafalgar Square. So how did we thank him? By driving the poor guy to his death, that's how.
You see, none of that other cool stuff he did mattered in the slightest because he was gay.
F'n ingrates.
You are absolutely right about the sillyness of removing Religon from a game about recreating history.
OTOH, Sid Meyer is rather famous for removing gameplay features that detract from the fun of the game. Quite often over the loud objections of simulation purists. It could just be that this was one of those cases. Religon's biggest long-term effect in the CIV4 was just to give AI Civ's one more thing to get pissed off at you about. There was no winning with it either, as no matter which you picked, you'd tick somebody off. This made persuing one of the peaceful victory options (like a cultural win) damn near impossible. At least for me.
If we're going to abandon reality, why don't we just add wizard units and inter-dimensional portals too?
I'm with hotdiggity. When is the sequel to Master of Magic comming out?
The submitter clearly never read The Mythical Man-Month. He doesn't even seem to realise that it's a book, not a theory. It talks about quite a few things, mostly in the realm of software project management. This is not really something that can be "busted".
What he seems to be talking about is Brook's Law: "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". Now when a contributor like "anonymous reader" starts off being this totally wrong about something what are the odds of the rest being worthwhile?
Well, if you bet on "yes", you were wrong. The link provided has absoultely nothing to do with adding manpower to a late software project. Heck, there's not even a single project in question. They just hired a bunch of kids to work on different projects at the same time in the same room.
Read some of the "fixes" and then ask who is going to pay for them? Should the government keep subsidizing wind and the infrastructure.
How about we just quit subsidizing the coal and gas industries instead? If they had to pay to clean up their own drilling and mining sites, to properly dispose of their own hazardous wastes, and to remove all the hazardous chemicals and CO2 they are pumping into our air then power generation that didn't need all that would be competitive on its own.
They will never clean up their act while the taxpayer is footing the cleanup bill for their dirty practices for them (or just letting them do it for free without any cleanuup).
There has to be an economic motive to change, and that can most easily be created by taxing what we don't like (coal/oil) and giving subs to what we do like (nuclear, wind, sun, etc..).
A dumb tax wouldn't even be nessecary. Just make every power-generator pay for the true cost of what they are doing, including cleaning up after themselves. That means cleaning all the crap out of the air and water that they put into it (inculding CO2). That means properly dispsosing of their heavy metal and radioative by-products, that means restoring their extraction and refining sites to a livable condition when they are done with them. Right now the old power and resource extraction industries just leave it to us taxpayers to clean up their messes (if we can clean them up at all), while they keep the profits for themselves. Privitize the profits, Socialize the costs.
If every method of power generation had to play on a truly level playing-field, we wouldn't need any further artificial incentives.
After a couple of failing companies submit to Microsoft's "Linux patent" extortion, and then go under, people will start talking about a "Microsoft Curse". That'll do more damange to them than they were hoping to do to Linux.
Ubisoft's point exactly.
This is precisely where the Right went wrong in the US over the last 10 years. Winning elections does not mean you are not a wacko. You could just be a really convincing wacko.
What makes someone a wacko is inability to accept and deal the real world on its own terms. Certian people got it in their heads that they could somehow change basic science, economics, sociology, etc. just by comming up with ideas they would like to be true, and publicising them heavily. The real world ain't like Tinkerbell; it doesn't care how hard you believe.
Actually, I could argue less. After all, selection is all about numbers of surviving children. An agricultural worker needs lots of kids to help with the immense amount of manual labor involved in agricultural work.
On the other hand, someone smart enough to pass the civil service tests ends up salaried, and every kid they have is just an additional burden with no compensating reward. Thus they (like modern first world families) will have less kids. In the long run, their genetic contribution will get lost in the noise.
Yeah, and they already tried suing competitors over software UI look and feel similarities 16 years ago. They lost.
Me too. I'll wait for those captured developer(s) to develop more libraries for it first.
You beast! FREE THE CAPTURED GO DEVELOPERS!
If you're really worried about it, buy one of those $100 "Electrosmog" meters and measure the signal strength yourself at various places.
This is the best single piece of advice I've seen in this entire discussion. Too bad you buried it at the end of your post.
That's what I did too. Someone managed to get hold of mine, and by the time I'd noticed had charged up $20,000 worth of stuff. I'm not sure how they did it either, but apparently with those convienence stores it is quite possible.
According to comments posted here yesterday by a student, some did put tape over the lens. They were viewed as paranoiacs by everyone else. Its a sad state when the paranoiacs are right.
More to the point, the fact that they hit this kid up about it proves they were closely examining pictures taken of kids in their own rooms. The odds of none of those pictures showing children in a state of undress (the taking of which is a very serious federal offense) seems rather remote. We are talking federal prison and the Sex Offender registry here.
I actually never owned a cell phone until a year ago. I only bought it then because I could get one of the new smartphones with a good moble web browser and email access. Texting is nice too, but otherwise I could do without the standard voice phone capabilities, just like I have always done without them.
How did the tools get there without some species of hominoid crossing the water? 200 miles is a long way to swim, so how did the hominoids cross the water?
Perhaps they swam or rafted over from the North instead? Crete is only about 74 miles from mainland Greece, and there are island chains between them. During an Ice Age sea levels would be lower so there would probably be even more and larger islands between them.
Crete is nearly as close to Asia Minor (Turkey), also w/ island chains in between.
I really don't understand the author's decision to quote the distance to the African coast. The only reason I can think of is appalling geographic ignorance.
Do you, like me, have a policy of razing any captured city that doesn't match your grid? :-)
BtW: For the curious, the pattern is such that all cities in one direction will either be
Its pretty easy to work out, one you figure it out. But now I'm going to have to find some hex paper and work out the ultimate setup with hexes...
This program instead is steering them into Community College. Most of the better four-years require applicants to have taken four years of English in High School too, so its not like these gifted folks will even have that option if they want to take it.
This seems like a bad idea all around.
Actually, there are perfectly good languages that automatically check all buffers lengths when used (or even at compile time). That would mostly remove the human element and we wouldn't have to rail against the occasional (or even usual) developer who leaves out a check.
Instead folks insist on using crappy non-checking languages like C++. That's fine if you like C++, but don't complain about developers messing up and leaving off a buffer check, when the means for eradicating all buffer overflow errors is a simple language switch away. You knew what could happen when you picked up the gon...
UAC asks the user if they wish to elevates privileges when an app does something unsafe.
...which is nice, but not real helpful when every single game with an auto-updater requires Admin to run.
Microsoft has never "innovated" anything in its history, unless you count software licenseing or vendor agreements.
They even bought DOS from someone else, for crying out loud.
The best case you could possibly make for them is WindowsNT. They developed that in-house, but they did it by hiring the team that created VMS away from DEC and setting them loose. It wasn't entirely a home-brewed thing.
This is just a story about Microsoft doing what they've always done for the last 30 years. If you want to find "innovation" at Microsoft, you have to look at their legal and marketing departments.