The conflation of authentication and encryption is the bane of SSL and all SSL-based applications. The two really should be separate. Encryption buys you a certain set of guarantees and leaves you with a certain set of exposures that you already had.
In those cases where that is sufficient, the introduction of authentication only muddies the overall value and importance of clean authentication. For example, I use TLS for SMTP mail delivery, but with a self-signed cert. This is because I don't particularly care about being intercepted, only that the casual sniffer of traffic between us will get nothing. For anything more sensitive, I don't trust SMTP anyway, no matter how encrypted and authenticated it might be.
The same goes for LDAP. I tried to set up LDAP between my home and work for the purpose of sharing some contact info. I wanted to encrypt and filter traffic so that only I could access it, but didn't really care about it so strongly that I was willing to buy a cert. However, I still had to hack the client to accept the self-signed cert. Why? What possible value to the user (me) is there in that?
I have to disagree with the sentiment that Slashdot has remained static with respect to journalistic quality. I've been here a fair while, and I thnik it's actually gotten better. I'm still annoyed that some basic editing skills haven't been picked up over the years (e.g. the recent article that had the typo, "which which," instead of, "with which"), but for the most part there has been a moderate improvement. Remember the "tales from the hellmouth" series? Do you remember when editorial comments added to an article by the stafff would often include even more inflamatory rhetoric than they do today?
Slashdot's still one of my primary news sources, though. Why? Because most of the things that I want to know about show up here, and I can always go find out more on my own. It's really the pointer that I need, not journalistic polish.
Being prepared and being aware of the concept are different things. The FAA was simply not prepared for 9/11. Now they are. The window for exploiting that particular problem has closed, and this is the one and only situation in which I can envision the military being asked to kill innocent citizens in which I would fully agree. It's probably something that would wound the person who did it for life, but if I or one of my loved ones were on such a plane, I would understand and approve.
This is not to say that such things can't happen, just that THAT mechanism has been removed.
I won't speculate on other ways to cause damage. I'd rather not give that kind of help, but I assure you that there are others, and many are much more effective than 9/11 in terms of accomplishing specific goals without rallying the public like killing 3000 people did.
Yes, he did vote for the original PATRIOT act, and I'm shamed to say that I might have fallen for it too. Still, I'd rather have a flawed human who is willing to fight against PATRIOT now than boot out the folks who vote their conscience. If you feel so strongly, why not organize a bunch of people who live in the districts whose reps authored PATRIOT and get them removed? Assuming that you have finite influence, isn't it wiser to place it in a narrow focus on the problems?
Pay hikes don't bother me. $170,000/year? That's not all that much. It's 70% more than a step 5 GR15, which seems to me to be reasonably in-line for the equivalent of an executive-level position (not to be confused with the executive branch) within the government. And, no I don't consider COLAs to be pay raises. Not increasing pay rates with inflation would amount to a tacit pay cut. I feel the same about minimum wage and private sector wages, though in both cases, COLAs are implemented spotily and rarely.
You want to reform government? Push election reform (no political ads, period). Go find a candidate that you DO respect and work for his/her campaign. Or, run for office! Ranting and negativity is never so effective as putting your words in action and moving the system FORWARD.
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) stated his intention April 28 to introduce legislation that would provide government whistleblowers similar protections to those in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a corporate accountability law that protects corporate whistleblowers.
Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) sent a letter to the Inspector General of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) asking for an investigation into how the agency is restricting public access to unclassified information. The letter noted many instances of the agency blocking public access to meetings, unclassified reports, and other information routinely used by public interest groups and community advocates.
USA PATRIOT & Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization Act, Bill Number: HR 3199. Representative Edward J. 'Ed' Markey voted NO.
USA PATRIOT & Terrorism Prevention Act- Motion (this was a motion to set a time-limit on the above infinite extension of the PATRIOT act, to expire in 2009). Representative Edward J. 'Ed' Markey voted YES. It should be noted that this motion failed and the above bill passed, which is a sad state of affairs for all Americans.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence passed a secret bill on June 7 to expand the PATRIOT Act. Markey was not involved.
Homeland Security Department Authorization Act FY06. Representative Edward J. 'Ed' Markey voted NO.
Care to comment, or were you just looking to rant about how bad "they" are?
"Money isn't the root of all evil anybody who votes for any incumbent is."
My incumbent U.S. representitive is the guy who championed the cause of ending extraordinary rendition. If that makes me evil by your standards, then I proudly wear that label.
You need to stop kidding yourself. Cockpit crew on major airlines (the ONLY airlines that travel with enough fuel to be as dangerous as the planes that hit NY and DC on 2001-09-11 were) were TRAINED to allow the plane to be taken. After all, keeping everyone alive is the priority.
No one was prepared for what might happen. No one at the FAA was watching planes with an eye to which ones were weapons. That line of thinking would have taken hours to get enough people to follow up on.
If it ever does happen again, I assure you that the man or woman who orders the missile that shoots that plane down will pause for a fraction of a second as they consider what they are about to do... and THEN they will blow it out of the sky.
Your examples really are terrible by the way. I looked at the first two and gave up. The first is the only one in the US. It was a small commercial plane that had 26 people on it flying a short run. This is completely different from a plane that is gassed up for long-haul flight with 100 or more people.
The second example was this:
"Two flight attendants and a few passengers tackled the man. The plane returned to Melbourne and the man, believed to have been an irate passenger, was taken into custody by federal agents."
Oh yes, good example of how people are sheep and will comply with the hijackers.
C is a HIGH level language. Assembler is a low level language.
The distinction is not firm, and in reality it's a relative assessment of the scope and abstraction of a language which varys with respect to time. In 2100, we might well consider Perl or Smalltalk to be "low level languages" because they have no constructs for directly representing the state of the programmer's brain. That's hyperbolic, of course, but you get the idea. "High level" is whatever "low level" isn't, and right now, that's languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, LISP and Smalltalk. Languages like C, C++, Objective C, Fortran and Pascal, are generally thought of as low-level languages. Some ambiguity comes up for modern languages like Fortress, which stand in the middle somewhere. Even Java is hard to nail down. It's high-level in that its specification requires a virtual machine, but it's low-level in that it lacks many of the abstractions of modern high-level languages.
You are assuming that the goal was to claim that they are supporting more browsers. This is almost certainly not the case.
When looking at information that comes out of a large company, it is always best to think in terms of what customer requirements were being met.
More than likely, there were large media companies that leaned on MS by saying that they HAD to move to non-MS formats if MS would not support all of their users. Losing 9-10% of the user community because they can't use your stuff is unacceptable.
MS, in turn, put the bravest face on this that they could, but they're really just meeting the needs of a select few customers who carry enough weight to make MS do what they say.
Of course, this is a guess, but does anyone have a better explanation?
"Also consider checking out Arcana Evolved by Monte Cook[...]
I've heard good things about it. Apparently it's ditched alignment, which is a great start..."
It ditched a lot of things, and changed a lot of things. It's generally best not to think of it as a D&D variant (though, because of d20, it's D&D compatible), but as a genre-based system on its own. It has its own races, classes, prestige classes, feats, skills, etc. In many ways it is a unique system which just happens to have been grown out of d20.
He has some clear pet peeves. Wish is gone. All of the Tolkein-based racial stuff is gone (he returns to the roots that Tolkein based his ideas on, and branches from there). There are no wish-like spells. Spells go up to 10th level. Levels go up to 25 in all classes, but there's no epic level system.
It's fairly neat. I recommend grabbing it at a hobby shop and leafing through it first. It's pricy, like I said, so you want to see if you really want it first. Of course, it's not pricy if you compare it to the DMG+PHB, but your players don't have to buy the DMG in D&D... your milage may vary.
As for alignment. I've changed opinions on alignment a lot over the years. At this point, I like it.
I look at alignment this way in D&D: you live in a world where good and evil aren't abstract concepts, but tangible forces that are active in the modern world. You see people summoning forth undead using the powers granted to them by malevolent gods. You see gods of good granting their people the ability to heal the masses.
We don't see good and evil this way, so it's hard to relate, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to have alignment in such a system.
Well, the whole hit points thing is another topic entirely. I'd like to finish the class discussion, but OK.
Hit points are an abstract way of summing up all factors related to your ability to withstand incoming attack. For some classes, this means being able to roll with a punch, take a hit without physical injury, etc. Yes, at some point, we're talking about real damage, and yes, there are optional rules that make that damage affect your ability to fight.
However, as with GURPS and many other systems that do take that into account, such rules tend to massively favor even the slightest starting advantage in a battle and make combats short and brutal (realistic? yes; fun? depends on who's playing). D&D combat is a bit more (to use the Hero System term, which derives from comics), "four color". No, it's not terribly realistic by default. Yes, you can make it more so while staying within the rules. Optional complexity can, sometimes, be more useful than optional simplicity.
The armor thing is, again, a matter of abstraction. The idea being that a sword that would have hit you, save for your armor class, DOES hit you... it just glances off of your armor. Thus, armor only makes you harder to damage. This is why "touch" attacks ignore armor.
"D&D is [...] ideally focused on people with magical abilities or nearly supernatural fighting skills going on adventures and having epic battles..."
NO. D&D is designed for that, not justideally focused on it. But d20 is not D&D, so don't confuse the two. d20 actually works well, when used correctly, for just about any sort of game, save one. I really don't think it's a good supers system, so I'd use Hero System for that, even for the poor newbie who's going to be put off by the math and plethora of rules.
Then again, for a lot of those things d20 is good at, I tend to prefer GURPS. That's preference, but compared to D&D 1st or 2nd edition... well, there really is no comparison.
PS: Also consider checking out Arcana Evolved by Monte Cook. It's expensive, but a really, really good d20 fantasy game. Arguably much better than D&D, though purists on both sides will tell you their own story.
I'm going to cherry-pick a few points where I think we disagree, or you interpreted what I said oddly, because I don't have a ton of time, but suffice to say that I think you and I agree on a fair amount.
"And what skills would those be?
Well,..."
You missed the fact that that was a rhetorical question which I went on to explore from there. I've played GURPS and other skill-based systems extensively, so I wasn't unsure of what skills to use, just pointing out that, when presented with a huge list of skills, each with their own mechanic, it can be quite daunting. d20 simplifies this, but there's no particular reason that d20 can't be a strongly skill-based game if you want it to be. In fact, some d20 variants have no classes at all, just huge skill lists (Call of Cthulhu d20 comes to mind).
" On the basic D&D character sheet, there are 10-20 skills that you have to choose from.
I am confused. Is a number between 10 and 20 supposed to be unmanageably large? Also, that is the total number of all skills in D&D."
I find 10-20 to be quite manageable, and the names are mostly clear enough that you can select them right off the character sheet without having to read the descriptions. Again, of course there are many more skills in the d20 universe, but those are the ones that you need to play D&D as a newbie, and this is a good thing. D&D is the least-common-denominator system that you can usually play with any gamer. Most have played it, and those who haven't can pick it up amazingly fast.
"I have to search through dozens of advantages and disadvantages to find those, and each of them is its own mechanic that I have to learn and understand.
The way you have to read through all the classes and feats to figure out what advantages they give you and how they work? And, again, if the advantages are named sensibly, you only have to skim through them until you find something called "berserker" or "magical talent", and there you go."
I don't play the systems you do, but again using GURPS or Hero System as a point of comparison, the gulf is huge. I only NEED to look over the 10 base classes, and feats are really an advanced feature of the game. If I were GMing a newbie, I'd select a generic starting feat(s) for them (in the case of our berserker mage, I'd probably go with something like Toughness or Alertness).
"How would you create a diplomat character in D&D? One who doesn't sing, or do magic, or have an uncanny skill at sneaking up on people and shooting them, or hug trees - just a well-travelled nobleman who is good with people and skilled at negotiating his way out of all kinds of dangerous situations? D&D assumes that combat ability will be a major facet of your character, and the system is designed with a combat-heavy campaign in mind."
First off, yes, D&D defaults to being a system for designing dungeon crawls, but you need not use it that way at all. You see, this is the trap. You have a high-level system with tons of choices made for you, so if you want to customize, you do so ON TOP of that system through role playing. For example, let's say I'm running a game, and someone says, "I want to be a diplomat." I'd say that that's a fine job (skill: Profession (diplomat); skill: Diplomacy, skill: bluff, etc.), but it's not the sort of epic hero that makes for D&D characters, so what is it that you do that's above and beyond the mere mortals who walk the streets?
Now, specifically, I would suggest bard as your standard diplomat. The bard class requires you to choose a performance skill to base your bardly abilities on, and for a diplomat, the obvious choice is "oration". Propperly played, an oration-based bard with carefully chosen spells (you don't get many anyway, since you're a spontaneous caster) and the Bardic Lore ability can be role played as someone whose magic is entirely internalized, and who does not think about or portray it AS magic. Instead, he use
"You don't have to understand the entire system in order to generate characters in a more freeform way by buying advantages/disadvantages and skills. As long as the bits are sensibly named and organised, it really isn't very difficult."
Hey, I'm an old GURPS guy, but if what you were saying were true, then GURPS would never have needed to introduce Templates. Go look at the simplest template fromt the 3rd edition Warriors book. It's just not a simple thing. Is 4th edition any simpler (I haven't read it yet, since I have a substantial investment in 3rd)? I mean, it's not traveller where you could die in character creation, or Champions where you needed a slide-rule to optimize your PD, but it's not as simple as "slap on a class", and that's why d20 is the ideal first system.
Of course, any system is as good as the GM, and that's the key.
"Want a character that can fight well and steal stuff? Roll stats. Add one level of rogue, one level of fighter. Thank you, come again.
Buy some high "hit things with sword" skills and some good "be sneaky" skills."
And what skills would those be? On the basic D&D character sheet, there are 10-20 skills that you have to choose from. It's more a difference in attitude than a difference in the system itself. D&D gets the newbie up and playing fast. GURPS simply doesn't. I'd prefer to run GURPS any day of the week, but if I were running a game for new players, I'd probably pick a d20 variant.
"Want a character that can do magic and has a berserker-rage mentality toward combat? Roll stats. Add one level of druid, one level of barbarian. Thank you, come again.
Get a "magical ability" advantage and a "berserker" advantage/disadvantage. Buy skill in "hit things with axe"."
Oh, but it's not so simple. First off, I have to search through dozens of advantages and disadvantages to find those, and each of them is its own mechanic that I have to learn and understand. d20 has the same things, but they are split into two categories: the stuff most characters of a certain type will want and the stuff that only some will want. The former are grouped into classes and the latter are feats. It's really not that different, just easier to use.
"The difference is that with a class you get a package of qualities which stereotypically "go with" the broad characteristics that you would like. For example, what if I want a magic-using berserker who isn't particularly in tune with nature and thinks all trees are good for is campfires? Why would I want to be a druid?"
I give up, why would you want to be a druid? It was just my concept.
"What magic-using class should I slot in instead? What weird baggage which totally doesn't fit with my character idea am I going to get with that?"
Ok, let's follow up on that. How about sorcerer. What baggage does sorcerer have? They can cast spells. They can (and there's really nothing forcing you to) have a familliar. That's about it.
"Sure, you can mix and match and multiclass in increasingly byzantine and unsupportable-in-character ways"
Eh? How is any combination of classes unsupportable in-character? I dare you to come up with a combination of classes that I can't come up with a decent character concept for.
"or ignore some rules and swop some skills around, or apply prestige classes (which are essentially a way to get around the creative limitations of classes)."
Oh now you're just being silly. Prestige Classes are just classes with prerequisites. They are a logical continuation of the concept of a class, and while the class concept has its weaknesses (e.g. each class introduces new rules which must be seperately balanced), it's a very workable system for creative role players. If you have to bend the rules to come up with a good character using d20, then fine, go play GURPS or Hero System, but most people who hit gaming for the first time have no problem selecting one of the classes, and of course the most important thing you bring to a character is role playing, not mechanics.
What I don't get is this: What's Red Hat Linux? As far as I know, Red Hat Linux is a discontinued product circa several years ago, and the only modern Red Hat platforms are Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in all of it's flavors) and Fedora. I would imagine that we're talking about the RHEL desktop, which isn't such a bad idea, though it would probably have to be an unsupported version. Fedora might actually make a bit more sense, since there are lots of other people running it without support, willing to help.
I'm not sure I understand turning down OS/X though. It's mostly open source, and the parts that are not can be replaced if the user wants (you can run pure Darwin). It is also much easier for the neophyte computer user.
"I'll also go on record saying that the d20 system is a piece of crap. That said, I play v3.5 D&D regularly because it's the lowest common denominator, and it is fun. But using it as some kind of universal rules system is a pure marketing move, it makes about as much sense as the tired Palladium rule system that was dragged from game to game, ruining potentially excellent settings like Rifts."
I'm curious why you think this. I've been a fan of game systems and mechanics since the late 80s, and I see d20 as an excellent hybrid of the old "everything is a rule" model that D&D had and the more Hero System or GURPS like idea that you can build a character modularly.
Above all, the d20 combat system is just flat-out excellent for the amount of detail that it chooses to employ. I know of better combat systems for higher detail (GURPS 3rd ed. "Avanced Combat") and better for lower detail (Hero System), but d20 managed to peg a nice middle-ground and do it well. There are flaws, but for the most part it works well, and I like it a lot.
"And character classes... honestly, haven't we grown out of those yet?"
Good gods, NO! Character classes are a brilliant abstraction for the gamer who doesn't want to spend his time gaining a deep understanding of the entire system. It allows the casual gamer to pick up D&D fast, which is why D&D is the primary system for people who have been gaming for less than 10 years. This is exactly why GURPS had to introduce the template system. It's not that it adds anything to the game, but it vastly simplifies the job of the player or GM who wishes to just "do something" not sit around crunching numbers.
Want a character that can fight well and steal stuff? Roll stats. Add one level of rogue, one level of fighter. Thank you, come again.
Want a character that can do magic and has a berserker-rage mentality toward combat? Roll stats. Add one level of druid, one level of barbarian. Thank you, come again.
Feats were essential, though I'm still disapointed that there is no first-class companion to feats for negative character attributes (such as GURPS disads), though.
Of course, if you play GURPS, you're not locked in to templates, and that's great if you need that flexibility, but most gamers and GMs don't.
Oh well, to each his own. I hope you enjoy your D&D game enough for the role playing that it doesn't matter much what you think of the system.
Hackmaster is a d20 variant, which includes D&D as well (it being the original d20 game from which the system sprang).
We were generally discussing systems, not variants and settings. Had we been discussing variants and settings, there are many d20 games that I think deserve mention (and some that are awful, such as the d20 CoC).
D&D is much more flexible today than it was. 3.5 is a modular game system in many respects, though it still does not have a decent way of genericizing magic and other powers the way, say, Hero System does, but the draw-back of Hero System—and to a lesser extent, GURPS—is that it requires the player or GM to do much more work. The problem with the D&D approach is that different, but similar mechanics tend to diverge in terms of game balance and functionality.
In D&D today, you basically just have a character with stats, class levels (total of all class levels is character level), feats, and skills. In GURPS terms, this would map to abilities (though D&D abilities include some of what you would need GURPS advantages and disadvantages for), templates, advantages, and skills.
You can manage these four parameters as you wish within the constraints of prerequisits and some arbitrary limitations (such as the Paladin class limitation that you cannot take levels in another class and then come back to Paladin... once you stray, you're done).
I'm not a big pro-D&D guy (though I do run a game using it), but certainly you shold give it another glance if you're still comparing it to 1st or 2nd edition.
"modularization and encapsulation of cross-cutting concerns."
And it's just that kind of buzzword-to-noise ratio that makes people ignore AOP.
In reality, AOP is a structured way for a programmer to modify existing classes an an OO system without sub-classing. So, here's AOP in Perl, just as an example:
package SomeClass; ... sub somemethod {...} ... # And then later in your code: my $oldmethod = \&SomeClass::somemethod; *SomeClass::somemethod = sub {
print "Invoking somemethod...\n";
goto $oldmethod; }
I used Perl's stackless-invocation goto semantics here for two reasons: it's the most efficient way to do this; but it's also an eye-catcher that (because of the bad blood programmers tend to have with respect to C or BASIC style goto) highlights what I think the problem is.
I tend to try to avoid this kind of thing in my programs, regardless of language, except where I make it very clear that functionality can and should be added, in which case I provide a mechanism. So, I'm not sure how AOP could work well (it's supposed to be used in those cases where the original author didn't have any idea about what you want to do). Sub-classing or re-writing such code has always seemed the right way to go to me.
How, for example, are you supposed to maintain code where a substantial change to any library routine's internal behavior could cause catastrophy for someone who has tried to add behavior to it? I suppose you could lexically scope such constructs, which would be reasonable, but no... I think this is just an attempt to get a small portion of what smalltalk or ruby style mix-ins/traits would give you.
Then again, I guess the problem really stems from trying to use a high-level language (Java) which attempts to simulate the constraints of a low-level language (C or C++) while users attempt to use it as if it were high-level (like Smalltalk, Haskell, Python, Perl or Ruby).
In the end, it seems to make more sense to use Java the way it was intended to be used, and use high level languages where you want dynamic features like the ability to reach into someone else's code and do whatever you like.
D&D's d20 system is doing well, but here are the other heavy-hitters out there with large and loyal followings:
Ars Magica 5th ed. winner of the Best Role-Playing Game for 2004 Origins award.
Vampire, Mage another White Wolf "World of Darkness" games.
GURPS, the generic role playing system, now in its 4th editon.
Hero System, originally designed for superhero-oriented gaming, it is now a generic system with special focus on supers, fantasy, SF and martial arts.
All of these are great games, and I recommend that newbie role players talk to your local hobby-shop owner and get a sense of the options at your disposal, and what would fit your group best.
"That's because gasoline is a commodity, not a utility. Anybody with a well can put crude on the market, and anybody with an operating refinery can purchase the crude and distill it, then sell the products which consist of everything from asphalt, heating oil, natural gas, to plastics."
Not quite right. A utility is generally considered to be those essential goods or services that people cannot do without, and increasingly, gasoline is in that category. I can also produce my own electricity (in fact an old friend of mine makes money selling his excess back to the grid), but that's a utility too.
Well, there's a good an bad side. I think it's safe to say that capitalism tends to break down when it comes to utilities. This is because the vendor has no market to GAIN, only to LOSE, and so market share loss is all important, and that drives companies to try to lock people in with no interest in how much it disenfranchises them. Because of this strain on the capitalist system, utilities tend to be regulated... all except for gasoline, for some strange reason.
So, I can approve of moving from total reliance on gasoline to a partial reliance, but we're replacing it with a reliance on electricity, which is still generated primarily by the burning of fossil fuels; loses a fair amount in transmission (far more waste than shipping gasoline, and you get to use all of the other parts of the crude oil when you ship gasoline for things like plastics, heating oil, lubricants, adhesives, etc.); and the filtration is not quite as efficient, though it's MUCH better than it was 20 years ago. Also on the plus side, however: you CAN use trash burning (one of the most environmentally friendly operations going in the modern facilities) to generate electricity; you can also use nuclear power, which concentrates your waste problem into a much more managable space which would be easy to deal with if we didn't have a "not in my back yard" mentality in the U.S.
The ideal solution is what Brazil is doing. Make alcohol out of sugars (for which you need heat, so it's not a waste-free process -- they use beets as the starter), and then burn the alcohol in cars that can take a mix or alcohol and gas in any ratio. Alcohol isn't toxin-free, but you still have significant controls on car exhaust, but it's far cheaper so people can actually afford even stricter regulations on filtration.
One thing I don't see in the article is discussion of the impact of braking. Regenerative breaking is a huge win, but really only helps in city driving, and even then requires skill on the part of the driver. It's a huge win, but not one which is easy to quantify. I'd love to see a study which tracked a couple of groups: one that was told just to drive around the city for a day and one that was given a class on how to use the breaks and then told to drive around the city. I wonder what the real-world delta on fuel efficiency would be.
And perhaps you missed the part in my original post where I drew a clear line between choosing portable systems, languages and libraries from writing portable code.
Writing portable code is difficult, time-consuming and very important. It is, in fact, so important that you should do it only when you have a complete, working, maintainable system and can thing in the large about the ramifications of portability for your entire system.
Absolutely! I've been saying this since the very early days of C# (it had a different name then, and hadn't been Javafied yet). I was stunned by some of the good work that had come out of MS Research. It truly was an independent and fascinating organization. They released many things as open source (real open source, under various OSI-approved licenses), and all of their work was very interesting, hard CS.
Sadly, Microsoft decided that they were getting out of hand, and has done thing like insist that any code released by MSR must be released under MS's shared source license, They've also been taking a much stronger role in constraining the goals of research to match existing Microsoft initiatives.
That's not to say that it's not 10x cooler a place to work than most of the world for a programmer, but it's not as cool as it was.
Slashdot Mirror
The conflation of authentication and encryption is the bane of SSL and all SSL-based applications. The two really should be separate. Encryption buys you a certain set of guarantees and leaves you with a certain set of exposures that you already had.
In those cases where that is sufficient, the introduction of authentication only muddies the overall value and importance of clean authentication. For example, I use TLS for SMTP mail delivery, but with a self-signed cert. This is because I don't particularly care about being intercepted, only that the casual sniffer of traffic between us will get nothing. For anything more sensitive, I don't trust SMTP anyway, no matter how encrypted and authenticated it might be.
The same goes for LDAP. I tried to set up LDAP between my home and work for the purpose of sharing some contact info. I wanted to encrypt and filter traffic so that only I could access it, but didn't really care about it so strongly that I was willing to buy a cert. However, I still had to hack the client to accept the self-signed cert. Why? What possible value to the user (me) is there in that?
I have to disagree with the sentiment that Slashdot has remained static with respect to journalistic quality. I've been here a fair while, and I thnik it's actually gotten better. I'm still annoyed that some basic editing skills haven't been picked up over the years (e.g. the recent article that had the typo, "which which," instead of, "with which"), but for the most part there has been a moderate improvement. Remember the "tales from the hellmouth" series? Do you remember when editorial comments added to an article by the stafff would often include even more inflamatory rhetoric than they do today?
Slashdot's still one of my primary news sources, though. Why? Because most of the things that I want to know about show up here, and I can always go find out more on my own. It's really the pointer that I need, not journalistic polish.
"And if they don't care, I won't care."
I suggest to you that it's the other way around, but if you don't care, then there is no point in having this conversation.
Have a nice day.
Being prepared and being aware of the concept are different things. The FAA was simply not prepared for 9/11. Now they are. The window for exploiting that particular problem has closed, and this is the one and only situation in which I can envision the military being asked to kill innocent citizens in which I would fully agree. It's probably something that would wound the person who did it for life, but if I or one of my loved ones were on such a plane, I would understand and approve.
This is not to say that such things can't happen, just that THAT mechanism has been removed.
I won't speculate on other ways to cause damage. I'd rather not give that kind of help, but I assure you that there are others, and many are much more effective than 9/11 in terms of accomplishing specific goals without rallying the public like killing 3000 people did.
Yes, he did vote for the original PATRIOT act, and I'm shamed to say that I might have fallen for it too. Still, I'd rather have a flawed human who is willing to fight against PATRIOT now than boot out the folks who vote their conscience. If you feel so strongly, why not organize a bunch of people who live in the districts whose reps authored PATRIOT and get them removed? Assuming that you have finite influence, isn't it wiser to place it in a narrow focus on the problems?
Pay hikes don't bother me. $170,000/year? That's not all that much. It's 70% more than a step 5 GR15, which seems to me to be reasonably in-line for the equivalent of an executive-level position (not to be confused with the executive branch) within the government. And, no I don't consider COLAs to be pay raises. Not increasing pay rates with inflation would amount to a tacit pay cut. I feel the same about minimum wage and private sector wages, though in both cases, COLAs are implemented spotily and rarely.
You want to reform government? Push election reform (no political ads, period). Go find a candidate that you DO respect and work for his/her campaign. Or, run for office! Ranting and negativity is never so effective as putting your words in action and moving the system FORWARD.
Look at Representative Edward J. 'Ed' Markey (D-MA), and tell me what you think of his voting record.
Some highlights:
- Rep. Markey's Torture Outsourcing Prevention Act seeks to prohibit "extraordinary rendition".
- Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) stated his intention April 28 to introduce legislation that would provide government whistleblowers similar protections to those in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a corporate accountability law that protects corporate whistleblowers.
- Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) sent a letter to the Inspector General of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) asking for an investigation into how the agency is restricting public access to unclassified information. The letter noted many instances of the agency blocking public access to meetings, unclassified reports, and other information routinely used by public interest groups and community advocates.
- USA PATRIOT & Terrorism Prevention Reauthorization Act, Bill Number: HR 3199. Representative Edward J. 'Ed' Markey voted NO.
- USA PATRIOT & Terrorism Prevention Act- Motion (this was a motion to set a time-limit on the above infinite extension of the PATRIOT act, to expire in 2009). Representative Edward J. 'Ed' Markey voted YES. It should be noted that this motion failed and the above bill passed, which is a sad state of affairs for all Americans.
- The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence passed a secret bill on June 7 to expand the PATRIOT Act. Markey was not involved.
- Homeland Security Department Authorization Act FY06. Representative Edward J. 'Ed' Markey voted NO.
Care to comment, or were you just looking to rant about how bad "they" are?"Money isn't the root of all evil anybody who votes for any incumbent is."
My incumbent U.S. representitive is the guy who championed the cause of ending extraordinary rendition. If that makes me evil by your standards, then I proudly wear that label.
You need to stop kidding yourself. Cockpit crew on major airlines (the ONLY airlines that travel with enough fuel to be as dangerous as the planes that hit NY and DC on 2001-09-11 were) were TRAINED to allow the plane to be taken. After all, keeping everyone alive is the priority.
No one was prepared for what might happen. No one at the FAA was watching planes with an eye to which ones were weapons. That line of thinking would have taken hours to get enough people to follow up on.
If it ever does happen again, I assure you that the man or woman who orders the missile that shoots that plane down will pause for a fraction of a second as they consider what they are about to do... and THEN they will blow it out of the sky.
Your examples really are terrible by the way. I looked at the first two and gave up. The first is the only one in the US. It was a small commercial plane that had 26 people on it flying a short run. This is completely different from a plane that is gassed up for long-haul flight with 100 or more people.
The second example was this:
"Two flight attendants and a few passengers tackled the man. The plane returned to Melbourne and the man, believed to have been an irate passenger, was taken into custody by federal agents."
Oh yes, good example of how people are sheep and will comply with the hijackers.
C is a HIGH level language.
Assembler is a low level language.
The distinction is not firm, and in reality it's a relative assessment of the scope and abstraction of a language which varys with respect to time. In 2100, we might well consider Perl or Smalltalk to be "low level languages" because they have no constructs for directly representing the state of the programmer's brain. That's hyperbolic, of course, but you get the idea. "High level" is whatever "low level" isn't, and right now, that's languages like Perl, Python, Ruby, Haskell, LISP and Smalltalk. Languages like C, C++, Objective C, Fortran and Pascal, are generally thought of as low-level languages. Some ambiguity comes up for modern languages like Fortress, which stand in the middle somewhere. Even Java is hard to nail down. It's high-level in that its specification requires a virtual machine, but it's low-level in that it lacks many of the abstractions of modern high-level languages.
You are assuming that the goal was to claim that they are supporting more browsers. This is almost certainly not the case.
When looking at information that comes out of a large company, it is always best to think in terms of what customer requirements were being met.
More than likely, there were large media companies that leaned on MS by saying that they HAD to move to non-MS formats if MS would not support all of their users. Losing 9-10% of the user community because they can't use your stuff is unacceptable.
MS, in turn, put the bravest face on this that they could, but they're really just meeting the needs of a select few customers who carry enough weight to make MS do what they say.
Of course, this is a guess, but does anyone have a better explanation?
" Also consider checking out Arcana Evolved by Monte Cook[...]
I've heard good things about it. Apparently it's ditched alignment, which is a great start..."
It ditched a lot of things, and changed a lot of things. It's generally best not to think of it as a D&D variant (though, because of d20, it's D&D compatible), but as a genre-based system on its own. It has its own races, classes, prestige classes, feats, skills, etc. In many ways it is a unique system which just happens to have been grown out of d20.
He has some clear pet peeves. Wish is gone. All of the Tolkein-based racial stuff is gone (he returns to the roots that Tolkein based his ideas on, and branches from there). There are no wish-like spells. Spells go up to 10th level. Levels go up to 25 in all classes, but there's no epic level system.
It's fairly neat. I recommend grabbing it at a hobby shop and leafing through it first. It's pricy, like I said, so you want to see if you really want it first. Of course, it's not pricy if you compare it to the DMG+PHB, but your players don't have to buy the DMG in D&D... your milage may vary.
As for alignment. I've changed opinions on alignment a lot over the years. At this point, I like it.
I look at alignment this way in D&D: you live in a world where good and evil aren't abstract concepts, but tangible forces that are active in the modern world. You see people summoning forth undead using the powers granted to them by malevolent gods. You see gods of good granting their people the ability to heal the masses.
We don't see good and evil this way, so it's hard to relate, but that doesn't mean it's wrong to have alignment in such a system.
Well, the whole hit points thing is another topic entirely. I'd like to finish the class discussion, but OK.
Hit points are an abstract way of summing up all factors related to your ability to withstand incoming attack. For some classes, this means being able to roll with a punch, take a hit without physical injury, etc. Yes, at some point, we're talking about real damage, and yes, there are optional rules that make that damage affect your ability to fight.
However, as with GURPS and many other systems that do take that into account, such rules tend to massively favor even the slightest starting advantage in a battle and make combats short and brutal (realistic? yes; fun? depends on who's playing). D&D combat is a bit more (to use the Hero System term, which derives from comics), "four color". No, it's not terribly realistic by default. Yes, you can make it more so while staying within the rules. Optional complexity can, sometimes, be more useful than optional simplicity.
The armor thing is, again, a matter of abstraction. The idea being that a sword that would have hit you, save for your armor class, DOES hit you... it just glances off of your armor. Thus, armor only makes you harder to damage. This is why "touch" attacks ignore armor.
"D&D is [...] ideally focused on people with magical abilities or nearly supernatural fighting skills going on adventures and having epic battles..."
NO. D&D is designed for that, not justideally focused on it. But d20 is not D&D, so don't confuse the two. d20 actually works well, when used correctly, for just about any sort of game, save one. I really don't think it's a good supers system, so I'd use Hero System for that, even for the poor newbie who's going to be put off by the math and plethora of rules.
Then again, for a lot of those things d20 is good at, I tend to prefer GURPS. That's preference, but compared to D&D 1st or 2nd edition... well, there really is no comparison.
PS: Also consider checking out Arcana Evolved by Monte Cook. It's expensive, but a really, really good d20 fantasy game. Arguably much better than D&D, though purists on both sides will tell you their own story.
I'm going to cherry-pick a few points where I think we disagree, or you interpreted what I said oddly, because I don't have a ton of time, but suffice to say that I think you and I agree on a fair amount.
" And what skills would those be?
Well,..."
You missed the fact that that was a rhetorical question which I went on to explore from there. I've played GURPS and other skill-based systems extensively, so I wasn't unsure of what skills to use, just pointing out that, when presented with a huge list of skills, each with their own mechanic, it can be quite daunting. d20 simplifies this, but there's no particular reason that d20 can't be a strongly skill-based game if you want it to be. In fact, some d20 variants have no classes at all, just huge skill lists (Call of Cthulhu d20 comes to mind).
" On the basic D&D character sheet, there are 10-20 skills that you have to choose from.
I am confused. Is a number between 10 and 20 supposed to be unmanageably large? Also, that is the total number of all skills in D&D."
I find 10-20 to be quite manageable, and the names are mostly clear enough that you can select them right off the character sheet without having to read the descriptions. Again, of course there are many more skills in the d20 universe, but those are the ones that you need to play D&D as a newbie, and this is a good thing. D&D is the least-common-denominator system that you can usually play with any gamer. Most have played it, and those who haven't can pick it up amazingly fast.
"I have to search through dozens of advantages and disadvantages to find those, and each of them is its own mechanic that I have to learn and understand.
The way you have to read through all the classes and feats to figure out what advantages they give you and how they work? And, again, if the advantages are named sensibly, you only have to skim through them until you find something called "berserker" or "magical talent", and there you go."
I don't play the systems you do, but again using GURPS or Hero System as a point of comparison, the gulf is huge. I only NEED to look over the 10 base classes, and feats are really an advanced feature of the game. If I were GMing a newbie, I'd select a generic starting feat(s) for them (in the case of our berserker mage, I'd probably go with something like Toughness or Alertness).
"How would you create a diplomat character in D&D? One who doesn't sing, or do magic, or have an uncanny skill at sneaking up on people and shooting them, or hug trees - just a well-travelled nobleman who is good with people and skilled at negotiating his way out of all kinds of dangerous situations? D&D assumes that combat ability will be a major facet of your character, and the system is designed with a combat-heavy campaign in mind."
First off, yes, D&D defaults to being a system for designing dungeon crawls, but you need not use it that way at all. You see, this is the trap. You have a high-level system with tons of choices made for you, so if you want to customize, you do so ON TOP of that system through role playing. For example, let's say I'm running a game, and someone says, "I want to be a diplomat." I'd say that that's a fine job (skill: Profession (diplomat); skill: Diplomacy, skill: bluff, etc.), but it's not the sort of epic hero that makes for D&D characters, so what is it that you do that's above and beyond the mere mortals who walk the streets?
Now, specifically, I would suggest bard as your standard diplomat. The bard class requires you to choose a performance skill to base your bardly abilities on, and for a diplomat, the obvious choice is "oration". Propperly played, an oration-based bard with carefully chosen spells (you don't get many anyway, since you're a spontaneous caster) and the Bardic Lore ability can be role played as someone whose magic is entirely internalized, and who does not think about or portray it AS magic. Instead, he use
"You don't have to understand the entire system in order to generate characters in a more freeform way by buying advantages/disadvantages and skills. As long as the bits are sensibly named and organised, it really isn't very difficult."
Hey, I'm an old GURPS guy, but if what you were saying were true, then GURPS would never have needed to introduce Templates. Go look at the simplest template fromt the 3rd edition Warriors book. It's just not a simple thing. Is 4th edition any simpler (I haven't read it yet, since I have a substantial investment in 3rd)? I mean, it's not traveller where you could die in character creation, or Champions where you needed a slide-rule to optimize your PD, but it's not as simple as "slap on a class", and that's why d20 is the ideal first system.
Of course, any system is as good as the GM, and that's the key.
" Want a character that can fight well and steal stuff? Roll stats. Add one level of rogue, one level of fighter. Thank you, come again.
Buy some high "hit things with sword" skills and some good "be sneaky" skills."
And what skills would those be? On the basic D&D character sheet, there are 10-20 skills that you have to choose from. It's more a difference in attitude than a difference in the system itself. D&D gets the newbie up and playing fast. GURPS simply doesn't. I'd prefer to run GURPS any day of the week, but if I were running a game for new players, I'd probably pick a d20 variant.
" Want a character that can do magic and has a berserker-rage mentality toward combat? Roll stats. Add one level of druid, one level of barbarian. Thank you, come again.
Get a "magical ability" advantage and a "berserker" advantage/disadvantage. Buy skill in "hit things with axe"."
Oh, but it's not so simple. First off, I have to search through dozens of advantages and disadvantages to find those, and each of them is its own mechanic that I have to learn and understand. d20 has the same things, but they are split into two categories: the stuff most characters of a certain type will want and the stuff that only some will want. The former are grouped into classes and the latter are feats. It's really not that different, just easier to use.
"The difference is that with a class you get a package of qualities which stereotypically "go with" the broad characteristics that you would like. For example, what if I want a magic-using berserker who isn't particularly in tune with nature and thinks all trees are good for is campfires? Why would I want to be a druid?"
I give up, why would you want to be a druid? It was just my concept.
"What magic-using class should I slot in instead? What weird baggage which totally doesn't fit with my character idea am I going to get with that?"
Ok, let's follow up on that. How about sorcerer. What baggage does sorcerer have? They can cast spells. They can (and there's really nothing forcing you to) have a familliar. That's about it.
"Sure, you can mix and match and multiclass in increasingly byzantine and unsupportable-in-character ways"
Eh? How is any combination of classes unsupportable in-character? I dare you to come up with a combination of classes that I can't come up with a decent character concept for.
"or ignore some rules and swop some skills around, or apply prestige classes (which are essentially a way to get around the creative limitations of classes)."
Oh now you're just being silly. Prestige Classes are just classes with prerequisites. They are a logical continuation of the concept of a class, and while the class concept has its weaknesses (e.g. each class introduces new rules which must be seperately balanced), it's a very workable system for creative role players. If you have to bend the rules to come up with a good character using d20, then fine, go play GURPS or Hero System, but most people who hit gaming for the first time have no problem selecting one of the classes, and of course the most important thing you bring to a character is role playing, not mechanics.
What I don't get is this: What's Red Hat Linux? As far as I know, Red Hat Linux is a discontinued product circa several years ago, and the only modern Red Hat platforms are Red Hat Enterprise Linux (in all of it's flavors) and Fedora. I would imagine that we're talking about the RHEL desktop, which isn't such a bad idea, though it would probably have to be an unsupported version. Fedora might actually make a bit more sense, since there are lots of other people running it without support, willing to help.
I'm not sure I understand turning down OS/X though. It's mostly open source, and the parts that are not can be replaced if the user wants (you can run pure Darwin). It is also much easier for the neophyte computer user.
"I'll also go on record saying that the d20 system is a piece of crap. That said, I play v3.5 D&D regularly because it's the lowest common denominator, and it is fun. But using it as some kind of universal rules system is a pure marketing move, it makes about as much sense as the tired Palladium rule system that was dragged from game to game, ruining potentially excellent settings like Rifts."
I'm curious why you think this. I've been a fan of game systems and mechanics since the late 80s, and I see d20 as an excellent hybrid of the old "everything is a rule" model that D&D had and the more Hero System or GURPS like idea that you can build a character modularly.
Above all, the d20 combat system is just flat-out excellent for the amount of detail that it chooses to employ. I know of better combat systems for higher detail (GURPS 3rd ed. "Avanced Combat") and better for lower detail (Hero System), but d20 managed to peg a nice middle-ground and do it well. There are flaws, but for the most part it works well, and I like it a lot.
"And character classes... honestly, haven't we grown out of those yet?"
Good gods, NO! Character classes are a brilliant abstraction for the gamer who doesn't want to spend his time gaining a deep understanding of the entire system. It allows the casual gamer to pick up D&D fast, which is why D&D is the primary system for people who have been gaming for less than 10 years. This is exactly why GURPS had to introduce the template system. It's not that it adds anything to the game, but it vastly simplifies the job of the player or GM who wishes to just "do something" not sit around crunching numbers.
Want a character that can fight well and steal stuff? Roll stats. Add one level of rogue, one level of fighter. Thank you, come again.
Want a character that can do magic and has a berserker-rage mentality toward combat? Roll stats. Add one level of druid, one level of barbarian. Thank you, come again.
Feats were essential, though I'm still disapointed that there is no first-class companion to feats for negative character attributes (such as GURPS disads), though.
Of course, if you play GURPS, you're not locked in to templates, and that's great if you need that flexibility, but most gamers and GMs don't.
Oh well, to each his own. I hope you enjoy your D&D game enough for the role playing that it doesn't matter much what you think of the system.
They still exist, but are not as widely played.
Hackmaster is a d20 variant, which includes D&D as well (it being the original d20 game from which the system sprang).
We were generally discussing systems, not variants and settings. Had we been discussing variants and settings, there are many d20 games that I think deserve mention (and some that are awful, such as the d20 CoC).
D&D is much more flexible today than it was. 3.5 is a modular game system in many respects, though it still does not have a decent way of genericizing magic and other powers the way, say, Hero System does, but the draw-back of Hero System—and to a lesser extent, GURPS—is that it requires the player or GM to do much more work. The problem with the D&D approach is that different, but similar mechanics tend to diverge in terms of game balance and functionality.
In D&D today, you basically just have a character with stats, class levels (total of all class levels is character level), feats, and skills. In GURPS terms, this would map to abilities (though D&D abilities include some of what you would need GURPS advantages and disadvantages for), templates, advantages, and skills.
You can manage these four parameters as you wish within the constraints of prerequisits and some arbitrary limitations (such as the Paladin class limitation that you cannot take levels in another class and then come back to Paladin... once you stray, you're done).
I'm not a big pro-D&D guy (though I do run a game using it), but certainly you shold give it another glance if you're still comparing it to 1st or 2nd edition.
And it's just that kind of buzzword-to-noise ratio that makes people ignore AOP.
In reality, AOP is a structured way for a programmer to modify existing classes an an OO system without sub-classing. So, here's AOP in Perl, just as an example:I used Perl's stackless-invocation goto semantics here for two reasons: it's the most efficient way to do this; but it's also an eye-catcher that (because of the bad blood programmers tend to have with respect to C or BASIC style goto) highlights what I think the problem is.
I tend to try to avoid this kind of thing in my programs, regardless of language, except where I make it very clear that functionality can and should be added, in which case I provide a mechanism. So, I'm not sure how AOP could work well (it's supposed to be used in those cases where the original author didn't have any idea about what you want to do). Sub-classing or re-writing such code has always seemed the right way to go to me.
How, for example, are you supposed to maintain code where a substantial change to any library routine's internal behavior could cause catastrophy for someone who has tried to add behavior to it? I suppose you could lexically scope such constructs, which would be reasonable, but no... I think this is just an attempt to get a small portion of what smalltalk or ruby style mix-ins/traits would give you.
Then again, I guess the problem really stems from trying to use a high-level language (Java) which attempts to simulate the constraints of a low-level language (C or C++) while users attempt to use it as if it were high-level (like Smalltalk, Haskell, Python, Perl or Ruby).
In the end, it seems to make more sense to use Java the way it was intended to be used, and use high level languages where you want dynamic features like the ability to reach into someone else's code and do whatever you like.
All of these are great games, and I recommend that newbie role players talk to your local hobby-shop owner and get a sense of the options at your disposal, and what would fit your group best.
"That's because gasoline is a commodity, not a utility. Anybody with a well can put crude on the market, and anybody with an operating refinery can purchase the crude and distill it, then sell the products which consist of everything from asphalt, heating oil, natural gas, to plastics."
Not quite right. A utility is generally considered to be those essential goods or services that people cannot do without, and increasingly, gasoline is in that category. I can also produce my own electricity (in fact an old friend of mine makes money selling his excess back to the grid), but that's a utility too.
Well, there's a good an bad side. I think it's safe to say that capitalism tends to break down when it comes to utilities. This is because the vendor has no market to GAIN, only to LOSE, and so market share loss is all important, and that drives companies to try to lock people in with no interest in how much it disenfranchises them. Because of this strain on the capitalist system, utilities tend to be regulated... all except for gasoline, for some strange reason.
So, I can approve of moving from total reliance on gasoline to a partial reliance, but we're replacing it with a reliance on electricity, which is still generated primarily by the burning of fossil fuels; loses a fair amount in transmission (far more waste than shipping gasoline, and you get to use all of the other parts of the crude oil when you ship gasoline for things like plastics, heating oil, lubricants, adhesives, etc.); and the filtration is not quite as efficient, though it's MUCH better than it was 20 years ago. Also on the plus side, however: you CAN use trash burning (one of the most environmentally friendly operations going in the modern facilities) to generate electricity; you can also use nuclear power, which concentrates your waste problem into a much more managable space which would be easy to deal with if we didn't have a "not in my back yard" mentality in the U.S.
The ideal solution is what Brazil is doing. Make alcohol out of sugars (for which you need heat, so it's not a waste-free process -- they use beets as the starter), and then burn the alcohol in cars that can take a mix or alcohol and gas in any ratio. Alcohol isn't toxin-free, but you still have significant controls on car exhaust, but it's far cheaper so people can actually afford even stricter regulations on filtration.
One thing I don't see in the article is discussion of the impact of braking. Regenerative breaking is a huge win, but really only helps in city driving, and even then requires skill on the part of the driver. It's a huge win, but not one which is easy to quantify. I'd love to see a study which tracked a couple of groups: one that was told just to drive around the city for a day and one that was given a class on how to use the breaks and then told to drive around the city. I wonder what the real-world delta on fuel efficiency would be.
And perhaps you missed the part in my original post where I drew a clear line between choosing portable systems, languages and libraries from writing portable code.
Writing portable code is difficult, time-consuming and very important. It is, in fact, so important that you should do it only when you have a complete, working, maintainable system and can thing in the large about the ramifications of portability for your entire system.
Absolutely! I've been saying this since the very early days of C# (it had a different name then, and hadn't been Javafied yet). I was stunned by some of the good work that had come out of MS Research. It truly was an independent and fascinating organization. They released many things as open source (real open source, under various OSI-approved licenses), and all of their work was very interesting, hard CS.
Sadly, Microsoft decided that they were getting out of hand, and has done thing like insist that any code released by MSR must be released under MS's shared source license, They've also been taking a much stronger role in constraining the goals of research to match existing Microsoft initiatives.
That's not to say that it's not 10x cooler a place to work than most of the world for a programmer, but it's not as cool as it was.