OK. Two issues here. First off, I can easily believe you never used it, and probably never even looked at it, because Its Ada (a person's name), not ADA (an acronym). No biggie, but its something anyone who actually looks at the language realizes pretty quickly.
Secondly, you clearly didn't RTFA either. You are of course in good company there. In fact, I don't think the submitter read it either. They aren't mandating FOSS. All they are doing is making clear that OSS can typically be considered COTS (Commercial Off-The Shelf), which is often mandated (or strongly preferred). It may sound like splitting hairs, but there is a big difference. Nothing is stopping anyone from totally ignoring Linux when buying OS's. All the new new guidance memo appears to be trying to do is make it clear that OSS can be considered COTS, if you want to look at using it.
Still, you have to admit it would have been in better taste to make fun of something like his own lack of speaking skills, or his penchant for clearing brush, rather than how he doesn't care about the rest of the country.
Well, for those of us who have lives outside of the house or, God help us, kids, there's lots of point to it. I don't have to schedule my social life around my favorite shows anymore. This is the killer-app part of TiVo. The whole power relationship between me and my television has been turned totally on its head, and now I'm the one in control.
If I want to go have dinner on Monday evening, I don't have to worry about missing Heroes. Its there waiting for me whenever I do have time. If I have another show I want to watch during Deadwood or The Daily Show, I just tell TiVo to record the midnight showing for me while I'm sleeping. When a kid has a needy moment during a show (or the climax of The Big Game), they no longer get screamed at. I or my wife can just pause the show and go clean the poo off the mirror, fish the cat out of the toilet, or whatever the latest emergency is.
As for commercials, I do fast forward through some of them, but I'll happily stop and watch entertaining ones. Movie trailers and the Mac/PC ads are typical examples of commercials I stop and watch. Even the fast-forwarded commercials aren't a total loss for the advertisers though. I have to pay enough attention to the images flashing by to identify them as not belonging to my show or a commercial I might like. Typically, that means I at least identify the product being pumped. Half a second of mind-space is better for them than none at all (which is what they'd have if I was in the bathroom instead).
Deeds are a unique element to Lord of the Rings Online, a kind of achievement system somewhat reminiscent of those earned on the Xbox 360.
Ummm....no. The Deed/Title stuff is pretty much a direct copy of what City of Heroes has been doing for years with its "Badges" and Titles. There's nothing wrong with that. Its a neat game mechanic, that allows you to further personalize your character, and I'm damn glad to see other games picking up on it. Just don't go spreading myths that LotRO thought this up themselves.
I'd like to stress again what a nice feature this is, particularly for a game like LotRO, where you don't have nearly enough character creation options to differentiate yourself. A really obscure or difficult to achieve title can be a significant source of pride. I had one in CoH for working off a massive amount of death debt. You basicly have to die an impressive amount of times in a row to achieve this; sort of a perverse badge of incompetence. I wore it proudly.:-)
What you haven't described is why we, California, use these "tactics" to "artificially empower rural areas".
I didn't say you did. We'll use Hanlon's Razor and assume it happened on accident. All I'm saying is that the effect (or one of the effects) has been to empower rural areas, and that someone wanting to purposely cause that outcome could use this proven method to do so.
Instead, why don't we consider systems that have worked successfully. Those of the Electorial College and US Senate,
Here's another successful USA tactic which others could implement to artificially empower rural areas. Put all your prisons in rural areas, but fill them with prisoners from urban areas. Now here's the really neat trick: You count those prisoners as residents of the rural area instead of the urban area you took them from for purposes of representation! Of course this only works if you also prevent all prisoners (we call them "felons") from voting, but still count them as residents.
If this doesn't help skew things toward rural voters enough, you can add another USA trick: start locking up a huge percentage of your population. Try criminalizing addictive behaviors like drug use, gambling, sex, etc. Our "Three-strikes-you're out" laws are great for institutionalizing otherwise productive people for minor offenses. I know "Three Strikes" doesn't translate well, but perhaps there's some Cricket term you can rename it after, to get your elitist ex-jocks to think its a great idea.
By that logic, schools in the US shouldn't teach about slavery, fearing a confrontation of an 'anti-black' sentiment among racist hicks.
Um...do you have direct evidence that this isn't indeed the case? I'd like to believe it, but the above seems a pretty good description of my grade-school history books back in the 70's. The only mention slavery ever really gets is in the runup to the Civil War, like it didn't exist before 1850.
Given that most people today seem to think the US Constitution was a divinely inspired tome spelling out the best of all possible governments, when in fact it has at least 3 clauses put in it purposely to support slavery, I doubt things have improved that much.
They spread put across the Americas and developed in to more locally adapted cultures. The Folsom point is a fairly obvious derivative of the Clovis point..
The way I remember my old Anthro course, the main distinguishing factor in Clovis was the "fluted" spear/arrow heads. This basicly means they had a trench in the sides, to help the very large mammals they got stuck in to bleed to death quicker. Once the very large mammals died out (for whatever reason), there was no longer a huge need for the fluting.
The point here is that the disappearance of the large mammals and the eclipse of Clovis are not a coincidence. They basicly go hand-in-hand. So there's no real mystery here to be explained away by things like huge continent-wide firestorms.
...many of them are associated with projects like Apache and PostgreSQL that don't even use the GPL...
This prevents them from having a valid opinion of the GPLv3?
No. But they clearly didn't like GPLv2 either, so this should hardly be news to anyone. The fact that any non-GPL users are interested in GPLv3 (which apparently many are) should be viewed as very positive for the GPL.
Valve has announced that if they go out of business, they will release one final Steam update that disables the need to authenticate.
That reminds me of France's promise to England during WWII that, in the event they were forced to leave the war, they would put their navy out of the reach of Germany. However, once France actually was at the mercy of Germany they weren't able to make good on the promise. Their navy was one of the few remaining assets they had that Germany was interested in. England ended up having to find the French capital ships themselves and blast them to bits (with their earstwhile allies still aboard) to prevent their later use against England.
If Valve were to go bankrupt, it would be at the mercy of its creditors and the courts. Steam may be its only remaining asset of any value. A promise such as is quoted above in that situation means absolutely nothing.
There is a difference between something being deeply interesting, "cool" and entertaining. Mathematics, physics, chemistry, etc. are interesting, fascinating, but not entertaining on the level entertainment is commonly used, that is games, movies and pop music.
I don't know... I had a prob/stat teacher at College who was a former stand-up comedian. He didn't precisely perform a routine during the class, but it was still way more entertaining than any other class I had. Perhaps I'm not a prob/stat whiz now, but I sure remember way more of the material than I do from any of my other College math courses.
If something gets a bad rap because people figure out what it is, just rename it! Ask the army. They forever removed the stigma of shellshock by renaming it "battle fatigue", then "combat fatigue", then "war neurosis", then "posttraumatic stress disorder"...
Many things currently decided by federal laws, should have remained within the rights of the states
Why? I know what the constitution says, but that part was mostly put in on the insistence of the slaveholding states. They knew in their heart of hearts that what they were doing was wrong, which made them deathly worried that a strong Federal government would one day see the light and take their slaves from them. So they made sure the new government would have no power to do so, got themselves extra representation just to be sure (the famous 3/5ths clause), then insisted on the emasculating "all other rights are reserved to the states" clause.
You never hear anyone (Libertarians especially) talking about "States Rights" in reference to commerce regulation. There they want "consistency", so companies don't have 50 different rules to follow (and there's only one legislature to buy). Its only with reference to social issues that you hear this. "States Rights" was, is, and always has been code for protecting the "right" of a region to oppress its own people. We fought a Civil War over this, more than 600,000 good men died, and the states rights-ers lost. The clause is mostly a dead issue now. Get over it.
The only add-on I use is TagZilla, which adds a randomly selected tagline from a file to every email. I'm so attached to this that I won't upgrade to newer versions of Thunderbird until TagZilla supports them.
I have people ask me all the time how I get those randomly selected tags on my emails. Of course the answer starts with "First off, you have to be using Thunderbird...":-)
A person with no intent to assault anyone isn't going to do any harm to humans simply because they possess a weapon that can fire 600 rounds per minute. True, they don't technically need it either, but simply having it does no harm.
It'd be nice to live in this simple world you describe, where we could divide everyone into "safe" and "unsafe" groups.
The fact is that under the right (or rather wrong) constellation of circumstances, nearly anyone could snap. Sure, thats unlikely for most of us. However, in a country of 300 million people, the unlikely happens rather often. So when it happens, would you rather the most deadly thing said enraged person can get hold of quickly be a butcher knife, or a 600 round per minute assault weapon?
If the activities take place only in a virtual world, and the entire transaction is carried out within the private sector and without government involvement, then precisely why should they be taxed?
Because if you have people continually generating money (via questing, looting mobs, etc.) and don't have some way of removing money from the system, you get runaway inflation.
The "expose them to the real-world dogma" is all nice and progressive and seemingly commonsense, but it is almost certainly unnatural. And anything that is unnatural,
No, you have this exactly backwards. What's unnatural (and the prevailing current "dogma") is the idea of protecting children from the real world. It has only been the last 80 years or so when anyone had the luxury to devote that kind of time to creating an illusional fairy world around their kids. Before the 50's or so, all housework had to be done by hand, and children were mostly left to fend for themselves until they were old enough to start learning a trade (which would have been quite young by today's standards). The real world, in all its scary uglyness, was right there for them to explore.
Go look at primitive societies if you want to see what is "natural" for human beings. However, expect to have your modern sensibilities rather shocked at what you find. Abortion, infanticide, etc. Most primitive societies don't even bother to name their children till they manage to make it to age 4 or so.
I'm not advocating that of course, and you should raise your own children according to your best instincts. However, I will do the same, and my 3 are most assuredly *not* being "protected" from knowing what the real world is like. I have noticed they think a lot more about moral issues than other kids I come in contact with as well.
I wonder what those other kids are going to do one day when they are confronted by evil which they are totally unfamiliar with, due to this "protection". Will they know enough to make the right choices, when they had never been given the chance to think about it before?
You actually submitted a headline where the moron spelled it batchelor
Which moron? Isn't this a submission created by kdawson? I don't see any "So and so writes" in front of the article text. This would imply there was no second moron involved.
You would be surprized how easily the "unwashed masses" can be manipulated by the media and marketing. Most people my age ( genY'ers) want smaller cars that are cute and fuel efficient. For many years American car companies have pushed "Bigger=more status=better" and everyone bought it,
There's a reason for that too. When congress passed the last serious round of safety and mileage standards in the 80's, trucks were exempted. The logic behind this was that trucks were work vehicles, not commuting/passenger vehicles. It doesn't make a lot of sense to sink a ton of resources into crash safety for a pickup that spends 90% of its time in an open field hauling hay to the cattle and whatnot.
What the US automakers proceeded to do was to sink the majority their development resources into creating commuter/passenger "trucks", and the majority of their marketing resources into promoting them.
When I was a kid in the 70's, my grandfather (a farmer and a rancher) owned 4 pickups and one passenger car. The sole purpose of the passenger car was for trips to town. Driving a truck to town (unless you had to haul something back) was considered seriously low-rent. Now the parking lot outside my office is full of trucks and pickups whose tires have never seen a single blade of grass or piece of gravel. That is *all* marketing.
But rather than the democratic ideal you'd rather go back to a system where a few mega-rich fat dudes literally decided what got made. You honestly think that would be an improvement?
I think there is a very small chance of space debris reentering the atmosphere, hitting an airplane. It is possible ofcourse, but I think you've got a better chance of winning the lottery...
Hmmm...so should I buy a lottery ticket, or an airline ticket?
How do you know the "extremists" aren't police plants? Once upon a time, that would have sounded like a paranoid remark
It doesn't sound paranoid at all, if you know a little history. That's exactly what the FBI did to the Black Panthers.
From Wikipedia: However the final report of Senate "Church Committee" which investigated the actions of COINTELPRO in 1975 and 1976 did not agree with Adams, and purported to demonstrate that the FBI "itself engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest."
For example, once you understand that your CPU only has a limited number of registers, you'll understand why (on some CPU architectures) it is a good idea to limit the number of function arguments so that they can be passed via registers
...and once you understand compilers, you'll understand that your compiler passes them all on the stack save the return value, so it matters only in readability what order you put them in. However, it matters a great deal whether you are passing large structures around by reference rather than by copy, or if you are passing a large number of parameters. However a truly smart compiler (eg: Most Ada compilers) will take care of that for you too. You'll also understand that none of this matters if your compiler manages to inline the routine.
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OK. Two issues here. First off, I can easily believe you never used it, and probably never even looked at it, because Its Ada (a person's name), not ADA (an acronym). No biggie, but its something anyone who actually looks at the language realizes pretty quickly.
Secondly, you clearly didn't RTFA either. You are of course in good company there. In fact, I don't think the submitter read it either. They aren't mandating FOSS. All they are doing is making clear that OSS can typically be considered COTS (Commercial Off-The Shelf), which is often mandated (or strongly preferred). It may sound like splitting hairs, but there is a big difference. Nothing is stopping anyone from totally ignoring Linux when buying OS's. All the new new guidance memo appears to be trying to do is make it clear that OSS can be considered COTS, if you want to look at using it.
Still, you have to admit it would have been in better taste to make fun of something like his own lack of speaking skills, or his penchant for clearing brush, rather than how he doesn't care about the rest of the country.
Sad how we ended up with that mistaken impression, eh?
Well, for those of us who have lives outside of the house or, God help us, kids, there's lots of point to it. I don't have to schedule my social life around my favorite shows anymore. This is the killer-app part of TiVo. The whole power relationship between me and my television has been turned totally on its head, and now I'm the one in control.
If I want to go have dinner on Monday evening, I don't have to worry about missing Heroes. Its there waiting for me whenever I do have time. If I have another show I want to watch during Deadwood or The Daily Show, I just tell TiVo to record the midnight showing for me while I'm sleeping. When a kid has a needy moment during a show (or the climax of The Big Game), they no longer get screamed at. I or my wife can just pause the show and go clean the poo off the mirror, fish the cat out of the toilet, or whatever the latest emergency is.
As for commercials, I do fast forward through some of them, but I'll happily stop and watch entertaining ones. Movie trailers and the Mac/PC ads are typical examples of commercials I stop and watch. Even the fast-forwarded commercials aren't a total loss for the advertisers though. I have to pay enough attention to the images flashing by to identify them as not belonging to my show or a commercial I might like. Typically, that means I at least identify the product being pumped. Half a second of mind-space is better for them than none at all (which is what they'd have if I was in the bathroom instead).
Ummm....no. The Deed/Title stuff is pretty much a direct copy of what City of Heroes has been doing for years with its "Badges" and Titles. There's nothing wrong with that. Its a neat game mechanic, that allows you to further personalize your character, and I'm damn glad to see other games picking up on it. Just don't go spreading myths that LotRO thought this up themselves.
I'd like to stress again what a nice feature this is, particularly for a game like LotRO, where you don't have nearly enough character creation options to differentiate yourself. A really obscure or difficult to achieve title can be a significant source of pride. I had one in CoH for working off a massive amount of death debt. You basicly have to die an impressive amount of times in a row to achieve this; sort of a perverse badge of incompetence. I wore it proudly.
I didn't say you did. We'll use Hanlon's Razor and assume it happened on accident. All I'm saying is that the effect (or one of the effects) has been to empower rural areas, and that someone wanting to purposely cause that outcome could use this proven method to do so.
Here's another successful USA tactic which others could implement to artificially empower rural areas. Put all your prisons in rural areas, but fill them with prisoners from urban areas. Now here's the really neat trick: You count those prisoners as residents of the rural area instead of the urban area you took them from for purposes of representation! Of course this only works if you also prevent all prisoners (we call them "felons") from voting, but still count them as residents.
If this doesn't help skew things toward rural voters enough, you can add another USA trick: start locking up a huge percentage of your population. Try criminalizing addictive behaviors like drug use, gambling, sex, etc. Our "Three-strikes-you're out" laws are great for institutionalizing otherwise productive people for minor offenses. I know "Three Strikes" doesn't translate well, but perhaps there's some Cricket term you can rename it after, to get your elitist ex-jocks to think its a great idea.
Um...do you have direct evidence that this isn't indeed the case? I'd like to believe it, but the above seems a pretty good description of my grade-school history books back in the 70's. The only mention slavery ever really gets is in the runup to the Civil War, like it didn't exist before 1850.
Given that most people today seem to think the US Constitution was a divinely inspired tome spelling out the best of all possible governments, when in fact it has at least 3 clauses put in it purposely to support slavery, I doubt things have improved that much.
The way I remember my old Anthro course, the main distinguishing factor in Clovis was the "fluted" spear/arrow heads. This basicly means they had a trench in the sides, to help the very large mammals they got stuck in to bleed to death quicker. Once the very large mammals died out (for whatever reason), there was no longer a huge need for the fluting.
The point here is that the disappearance of the large mammals and the eclipse of Clovis are not a coincidence. They basicly go hand-in-hand. So there's no real mystery here to be explained away by things like huge continent-wide firestorms.
No. But they clearly didn't like GPLv2 either, so this should hardly be news to anyone. The fact that any non-GPL users are interested in GPLv3 (which apparently many are) should be viewed as very positive for the GPL.
That reminds me of France's promise to England during WWII that, in the event they were forced to leave the war, they would put their navy out of the reach of Germany. However, once France actually was at the mercy of Germany they weren't able to make good on the promise. Their navy was one of the few remaining assets they had that Germany was interested in. England ended up having to find the French capital ships themselves and blast them to bits (with their earstwhile allies still aboard) to prevent their later use against England.
If Valve were to go bankrupt, it would be at the mercy of its creditors and the courts. Steam may be its only remaining asset of any value. A promise such as is quoted above in that situation means absolutely nothing.
I don't know...
I had a prob/stat teacher at College who was a former stand-up comedian. He didn't precisely perform a routine during the class, but it was still way more entertaining than any other class I had. Perhaps I'm not a prob/stat whiz now, but I sure remember way more of the material than I do from any of my other College math courses.
If something gets a bad rap because people figure out what it is, just rename it! Ask the army. They forever removed the stigma of shellshock by renaming it "battle fatigue", then "combat fatigue", then "war neurosis", then "posttraumatic stress disorder" ...
Why? I know what the constitution says, but that part was mostly put in on the insistence of the slaveholding states. They knew in their heart of hearts that what they were doing was wrong, which made them deathly worried that a strong Federal government would one day see the light and take their slaves from them. So they made sure the new government would have no power to do so, got themselves extra representation just to be sure (the famous 3/5ths clause), then insisted on the emasculating "all other rights are reserved to the states" clause.
You never hear anyone (Libertarians especially) talking about "States Rights" in reference to commerce regulation. There they want "consistency", so companies don't have 50 different rules to follow (and there's only one legislature to buy). Its only with reference to social issues that you hear this. "States Rights" was, is, and always has been code for protecting the "right" of a region to oppress its own people. We fought a Civil War over this, more than 600,000 good men died, and the states rights-ers lost. The clause is mostly a dead issue now. Get over it.
The only add-on I use is TagZilla, which adds a randomly selected tagline from a file to every email. I'm so attached to this that I won't upgrade to newer versions of Thunderbird until TagZilla supports them.
:-)
I have people ask me all the time how I get those randomly selected tags on my emails. Of course the answer starts with "First off, you have to be using Thunderbird..."
It'd be nice to live in this simple world you describe, where we could divide everyone into "safe" and "unsafe" groups.
The fact is that under the right (or rather wrong) constellation of circumstances, nearly anyone could snap. Sure, thats unlikely for most of us. However, in a country of 300 million people, the unlikely happens rather often. So when it happens, would you rather the most deadly thing said enraged person can get hold of quickly be a butcher knife, or a 600 round per minute assault weapon?
Because if you have people continually generating money (via questing, looting mobs, etc.) and don't have some way of removing money from the system, you get runaway inflation.
No, you have this exactly backwards. What's unnatural (and the prevailing current "dogma") is the idea of protecting children from the real world. It has only been the last 80 years or so when anyone had the luxury to devote that kind of time to creating an illusional fairy world around their kids. Before the 50's or so, all housework had to be done by hand, and children were mostly left to fend for themselves until they were old enough to start learning a trade (which would have been quite young by today's standards). The real world, in all its scary uglyness, was right there for them to explore.
Go look at primitive societies if you want to see what is "natural" for human beings. However, expect to have your modern sensibilities rather shocked at what you find. Abortion, infanticide, etc. Most primitive societies don't even bother to name their children till they manage to make it to age 4 or so.
I'm not advocating that of course, and you should raise your own children according to your best instincts. However, I will do the same, and my 3 are most assuredly *not* being "protected" from knowing what the real world is like. I have noticed they think a lot more about moral issues than other kids I come in contact with as well.
I wonder what those other kids are going to do one day when they are confronted by evil which they are totally unfamiliar with, due to this "protection". Will they know enough to make the right choices, when they had never been given the chance to think about it before?
The second moron was hiding in the grassy gnoll.
There's a reason for that too. When congress passed the last serious round of safety and mileage standards in the 80's, trucks were exempted. The logic behind this was that trucks were work vehicles, not commuting/passenger vehicles. It doesn't make a lot of sense to sink a ton of resources into crash safety for a pickup that spends 90% of its time in an open field hauling hay to the cattle and whatnot.
What the US automakers proceeded to do was to sink the majority their development resources into creating commuter/passenger "trucks", and the majority of their marketing resources into promoting them.
When I was a kid in the 70's, my grandfather (a farmer and a rancher) owned 4 pickups and one passenger car. The sole purpose of the passenger car was for trips to town. Driving a truck to town (unless you had to haul something back) was considered seriously low-rent. Now the parking lot outside my office is full of trucks and pickups whose tires have never seen a single blade of grass or piece of gravel. That is *all* marketing.
No, I think that's exactly what we have now
Hmmm...so should I buy a lottery ticket, or an airline ticket?
It doesn't sound paranoid at all, if you know a little history. That's exactly what the FBI did to the Black Panthers.
From Wikipedia:
However the final report of Senate "Church Committee" which investigated the actions of COINTELPRO in 1975 and 1976 did not agree with Adams, and purported to demonstrate that the FBI "itself engaged in lawless tactics and responded to deep-seated social problems by fomenting violence and unrest."
That depends on what was meant by the word "whiz"
That's right. If he had a better understanding of the "Ethics" everyone else lives by, then he'd really know how to screw us over.