I live in South Dakota. South. Dakota. I'm 25, and I've got two kids (by choice). Both my wife and I get quite a few hostile looks when we go out in public with our kids. The only people I know of with kids are those who are 10 years older than I, or are single moms who don't know of birth control and can't keep their legs shut.
Go to the Northeast, and you're in a world where the common age for having children is well past 30. My dad is 47, and his high school classmates are just now starting their families with kids the same age as my kids. Even then, it's uncommon to see a family with more than two kids. That's not even taking into account the large percentage of the population which has the perspective of "kids are brats" and raise dogs and cats as their children instead.
As far as having a duty to breed: I'd argue it's a nationalistic duty. I don't care that the world is over-populated. That's their fault. Our country, however, has a decreasing population of natural-born citizens. That's a problem, as it's going to lead to a cataclysmic societal upheaval here within a couple decades.
Nope. Franchises die because the companies change too many things that people liked without making enough additions that they also like to compensate.
FOr instance, the Mechwarrior franchise. People loved the game's mechanics in MW2, the damage distribution, the weapons... pretty much everything about the core game. The problem with MW2 is that it lacked a couple things: good networking play, quality graphics, and a couple other little things.
So what did MS do? They changed the things the people liked so they didn't work the same anymore, added some new weapons, and added half-assed networking support, and completely changed the ambience of the game (via changing sounds and music substantially). The result? They managed to kill off the interest in the PC MechWarrior games pretty damn effectively within 2 itinerations.
What?! They were working on Privateer Online and axed it for WoW?!
Those fuckers!
I have tried all the 'space' MMORPGs, free and otherwise, in the hopes that one would duplicate the Privateer franchise at least in spirit. None have, though Eve comes close in some respects - just without the adrenal fun, with added accountant nerd fun. So really, not all that fun. I had high hopes for Freelancer when it came out, but keeping with tradition, Microsoft aborted it and released it anyway.
I didn't care for the second one so much - I don't recall precisely why; maybe because it seemed too artificially forced and simplified for consoles - but the first DX is my favorite game, period. I've played it through 3 or 4 times, which is more than I've read any single book or played any game before or since.
- Oni - a quasi-anime third-person shooter/fighter game with a story. Hell of a lot of fun. Made by Bungie right before MS bought them; the sequel and network support they were working on were killed. - Mechwarrior - Microsoft killed the franchise when they bought them. They had a good thing going with MechWarrior 2, but the gameplay in 3 and 4 got progressively less challenging, refined, and balanced. Ditto for the Mech Commander games, which were medicore at best to begin with. They could do a lot of awesome stuff with this franchise right now, if they did it right. Mechwarrior MMORPG, anyone (ala Mechwarrior Merc on a trans-global scale)? - Privateer/WingCommander series - with the technology we have today, why haven't we seen this world continued in the old tradition? It was great. - Duke Nukem - OK, so where the hell is Duke Nukem Forever? Duke3D was great fun, then the release of a couple mediocre side-scrolling games for platform and PC, and we're still waiting for DN4R, which has been in the works for like... 7 years, now? - Descent - Descent 1 and 2 were great, and 3 was medicore at best in terms of single and multiplayer gameplay. Heck, Descent 1 and 2 are still fantastic to play with d2x and modern textures. The games were way ahead of their time technologically, as well, introducing physics systems, true 3d, and lighting in 1993, for cryin' out loud. And then they just kinda stopped making Descent IV.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. Except, something more like this:
In the mid-1990s, there was a game that took place on the far side of the moon. Its premise was that the Soviets and the Americans were fighting a covert war on the moon throughout the cold war (possibly using Nazi tech; I don't recall). The soviets had more, lesser quality ships, while the Americans had better but fewer ships.
Gameplay worked like this: It was a FPS/RTS hybrid. In essence (and IIRC - I barely played it, but it was my best friends' favorite game), each player controlled a 'lead ship', and the lead ship was the POV used for the RTS construction. You could level up, too, IIRC, and become more powerful through upgrades. You could then control your constructed ships and base from within your lead ship in a fashion not too different from the control you'd expect with RTS, except the waypoints were limited by what you could see from within your ship. (Ships were, iirc, most exclusively tracked or hovercraft vehicles, not space farring or similar to aircraft.)
Now, transpose this to Starcraft. Imagine there are two or three main roles: controller - which is the RTS player, commander (a 'group' commander), and specialist - someone who can control individual units to greater impact/skill, and retains his skill. The specialist and commander units would basically be like 'heros' in WC3, except their skills (damage modifiers, maybe some other unit-impacting abilities like what the medics, etc. had depending on what kind of unit they're in). The controller would be responsible for assigning commanders to unit groups, which they would control in the fashion of the above mentioned soviet vs. US game - first person, with NPC wingmen. As the controller makes units, they automatically get assigned to groups, which are then given to a commander to control.
The commanders and specialists all start out playing the game as something like a Super Marine (or protos/zerg equiv), but then can enter (or control, in the case of zerg?) any unit in the game. So, for instance, you could have a dozen people on a team, 4 teams (2 zerg, 1 tos, 1 ter), with 1 controller and enough people to control 6 teams, with 5 specialists (or however you want to arrange them, depending on the skill of the people - commanders double as specialists to some degree, but the opposite isn't true, and the specialists would have more individual skills than a commander).
Of course, the controller would need a substantially more enhanced interface than what starcraft offered, as he'd have to have an easy way (aside from just the alt-4 type combination key shortcuts) to assign new units to groups, and then for those groups to individual commanders. Specialists, conceivably, could either be assigned units for maximum affect, or they could conceivably pick whichever they're better at.
Individual gameplay for the commanders (and specialists) would obviously have to be a bit more complex than it is for Starcraft with more combat options, but then I imagine the various units would also have substantially more abilities. There'd also (at least initially) be less unit types to play, obviously. Terran would have the marines, firebats, goliaths, and tanks. Similar for 'tos and zerg. There may even need to be less units on the field at a time than in SC, as obviously 200 is a lot.
Then, when a given match is finished, a person's account retains all the abilities they gained in their individual role, whether it be commander, controller, or specialist.
Then, at a level above controller, commander, and specialists, you'd be able to have clans and control planets through those clans.
For the overall affect, think: Starcraft meets a non-existent MechWarrior 5 that everyone wants to play.
Well, you could make being a zombie fun and interesting. But you'd have to enjoy covert things; ideally, both the human and zombies would have to be fairly covert, so it wouldn't matter: it'd appeal to those who like to be covert (there's an x-box game that does this, but as I don't have an xbox i can't recall what it is).
Just off the top of the head, here are the things zombies might be able to do which would make it interesting: - Mostly impervious to any sort of damage aside from cranial damage. - Can regenerate very quickly (ie limbs) by eating anything living (human, animals, plants) - No heat signature - Stronger than a mere human - Able to sense nearby living things (6th sense?) - 'hunger burst' where they're faster within a certain radius of something living, allowing them to grab someone quickly - No need to breathe (obviously) - hive mind (ie radar of some sort - I don't imagine the humans would have this ability), allowing them to coordinate
Do all that with a diverse terrain, and it'd be great.
Also, there was a game where you play a zombie who can control a horde - single player. Looks funny and interesting. I don't recall what it's called, though.
Your post is contrite. News flash: it is the normal thing to do to have kids. You're biologically and mentally wired to be a parent. If you don't breed, you are unselecting yourself for helping continue your race. Just because a person is selfish and didn't want a kid, doesn't mean it isn't natural or necessary.
Guess what? The only reason you're even able to have this perception is because it has become popular to look down on those who have kids. This, as well as the resulting social implications, is why having a kid these days is difficult and undesireable: because there's a culture of perpetual childhood, where people refuse to grow up and become adults.
It exists already as a counter-strike: source mod. It's not very fun, whether because they made the game wrong, or because it doesn't scale well to a FPS game.
Think about it: zombies need to be shot once, in the head, to die. A person needs to be bitten once anywhere to turn into a zombie. That seems pretty one-sided, when you consider that zombies 'in real life' don't coordinate, whereas the players will coordinate as zombies. It'd get pretty monotonous: you'd either be trying to avoid zombies, or you'd be trying to hide, sneak, or race up to get someone.
Here's the only way I can see it working: zombies are slow shamblers, except when they get near 'meat' they have a burst of speed/energy due to their desire. Say, just as fast as a human's 'walk' speed, but they don't have a 'run' speed like the humans. They can also become faster by eating meat. Humans would have stamina, so they could only outrun for a short distance; they'd have to rely on other tactics, like shooting and hiding. All of this would require a fairly complex game world, with lots of rooms, buildings, cabinets, and various other places where both humans and zombies could hide.
Zombies could bite the humans, but the humans wouldn't turn right away; it would depend on how much damage was caused. They might be able to get an antidote, or at least prevent themselves from turning (suicide), if they're fast enough and respawn as a human. This respawning could obviously be prevented by injuring them enough, fast enough, to kill and turn them quickly (group tactics, coming from behind, etc.). Zombies, if shot in the head, would die, but then they would respawn at another location.
It may be a stupid idea, but VMS did it 30 years ago, and that wasn't such a dysmal failure.
I hypothesize that the main reasons VMS was beat out by UNIX were two fold: one, UNIX was open, and two, the organizational mechanisms within VMS were substantially more conceptually complex, requiring a greater deal of administrative oversight to get right.
It seems to me that the computing industry is slowly moving the way of VMS. They had it perfect - in many ways - 30 years ago, and we've been trying to get as much of VMS functionality into PCs/x86 architecture as possible since then.
That's great, but it doesn't mean a damn thing. It's their word, against their actions. Simply public relations stuff. They'll do what they can under the radar, and the countries will oblige them because they want the company to do business with them.
Just moving more of the motions which make the world turn 'round under the table.
Do you recall the airplane that fell on New Jersey, shortly after 9/11, shortly after leaving the airport? The one which had a cataclysmic spark in the fuel tank, despite dozens of people claiming to have seen something streak up and hit the plane before it fell?
And - don't forget - there's not only the electoral vote, but the electoral college. These are not things which 'rig the system' inherrently; they're necessary in a democratic republic.
Unfortunately, the republicanism of our nation has been marginalized, as the electoral college in particular requires a sizeable representative mass of House members. This doesn't mean one or two or three per state, or what have you, as it is now. It means we need to have probably close to a thousand House members, all representitive of a specific population center in the country. The way districting currently is set up rigs House votes in favor of urban, populated areas. Using my own home state (SD) as an example, the ideal would be to give one representative to the two main population centers in the state each, and then two more for the more rural areas of the state - one for west of the Missouri; the other for east of it. This is more in line with the intent of our founding fathers.
And no, I'm sorry, I can't recall what legislation or governmental change it was which resulted in the marginalization of the House and the electoral college, but there was one (iirc it was at about the time of the civil war/war between the states/war of northern agression).
Sounds to me like what you're describing for 5.56NATO ammo is the M855 stuff. That's not steel ammunition. It's lead, with a copper jacket. It's different than the stuff used in Vietnam - I don't recall what it was, exactly - but it wasn't that substantial. I suspect that the Vietnam troops were just shitty shots (them bein' constripts, an' all), and that they used the 'brush stopped my bullets' argument in much the same way Bubba complains about not being able to find the blood trail for the deer he just missed.
You may be thinking of M995, which has a tungsten core and is AP ammo, but I doubt it. IIRC that's only issued for use in the SAW. (But if you're a Marine, hell - I'd not be surprised if your CO just said fuck convention.:P And I say that fondly.)
You might find this interesting; it debunks the.223/5.56 NATO round the M4/M16/SAW uses fairly thoroughly with quite indepth data: http://www.ammo-oracle.com/body.htm
I'm fairly certain that a.5" hole through the center of your head - right in the face! - would have a fairly detrimental impact on your prolonged survival. Even if it was slowly bored a grain at a time using ancient Chinese secrets.
I am, in essence, an avowed capitalist, but let me say this:
It is the supreme irony that it is possible to more freely purchase what you want in China than it is in the United States - the country of the products' origin and central influence of capitalism throughout the world.
Short of the long of it: the k* applications use Qt (the foundation of KDE, and also made by the same people as KDE, iirc) and the g* applications are made using GTK+, the toolkit used for GNOME. Not sure why we're still doing it, but it was a naming convention which caught on years ago when library requirements were a bit less auto-detected by package management, and people often had to compile the requisite library just to get a g* or k* application to work.
I've not used a desktop distro in a while, but the last time I did we were getting really close to Qt and GTK theme engine visual duplication working seamlessly. In other words, about 3 years ago, we were pretty close to there being a negligible visual difference between Qt and GTK through an intermediate mechanism. I imagine that seamlessness is pretty good now that the process has been refined (it was beta software when i last tried it, something which had no package but had to be compiled myself).
I suspect that after Win2k is EOL'd, there wouldn't be many people using it anyway. Heck, I'd be surprised if there was much support for the hardware of 2010 in Win2k; it's already a pain to get currently new hardware working properly.
As a result of not many people using it (most of the poeple using Win2k will have upgraded/bought another computer by then - 8 or so years seems a bit long for your average home internet user to stick with an OS), there'd not be many people writing malicious stuff for it, simply put. Look at all the legacy OSes out there which people still use and don't have a proliferation of viruses or worms.
On the other hand, it may be MS who writes a malicious virus for Win2k when it's EOL'd - if there are still a significant number of people using Win2k, to attempt and force their hand.
I imagine it's the most popular wikipedia entry for several reasons:
1) There's no good source elsewhere on the Internet which describes what, precisely, "Web 2.0" is. 2) Nobody knows what Web 2.0 is 3) Everyone who thinks they know what Web 2.0 is has a different definition.
I'm a moderately experienced programmer with experience with AJAX - and I had no freakin' clue what Web 2.0 was until this past summer (thereabouts) when my brother (who is a bit more trendy than I, and an animator) told me to make his web site 'like digg or something - you know, web 2.0' (not the most descriptive person, but there you have it). Half an hour later I'd figured out what people tend to think of Web 2.0..
I hate that acronym. It's worse than blog, plog, or any of the other asinine web oriented and symantically awkward terms.
maybe the solution to package woes is for there to be a standard 'commercial' package type or translation API which could transliterate paths from the default to the distro default. It'd be straightforward enough, I think: just have a directive for man, bin, sbin, lib, etc. which deals with those file types as is the distro's standard way of dealing with things - and it'd be easy enough to test on a couple mainstream distros. Test on debian, mandrake, and whatever else is primarily popular (ubuntu? I don't do linux much these days), I'd think, and be reasonably certain it'd work on all the derivatives without modification. Seems we've gotten pretty standardized in general since 2000. Only odd-man-out I can think of would be Slack, or maybe Gentoo, and even most hardcore linux users avoid those due to practicality.
The other solution is to have simple meta packages which fetch the requisite proprietary packages - ala gentoo - and standardize something for the proprietary package makers - an API, complete with EULA and what have you, presented to the user either through CLI or GUI - to provide interface to.
Yep. I couldn't help but think about an episode of the old Superman serial - the black and white original one - in which someone invented a machine which could make a block of gold. But it made that gold block out of twice as much platinum.
The only thing I can see this having any utility in is "print it yourself" publishing. It'd have it's niche, I think - but, for the most part, it'd probably just serve those who want 5 copies of their "novel" (a hodgepodge result formed from random neuron collisions and synaptic suicides).
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Where in the US do you live?! The South, maybe?
I live in South Dakota. South. Dakota. I'm 25, and I've got two kids (by choice). Both my wife and I get quite a few hostile looks when we go out in public with our kids. The only people I know of with kids are those who are 10 years older than I, or are single moms who don't know of birth control and can't keep their legs shut.
Go to the Northeast, and you're in a world where the common age for having children is well past 30. My dad is 47, and his high school classmates are just now starting their families with kids the same age as my kids. Even then, it's uncommon to see a family with more than two kids. That's not even taking into account the large percentage of the population which has the perspective of "kids are brats" and raise dogs and cats as their children instead.
As far as having a duty to breed: I'd argue it's a nationalistic duty. I don't care that the world is over-populated. That's their fault. Our country, however, has a decreasing population of natural-born citizens. That's a problem, as it's going to lead to a cataclysmic societal upheaval here within a couple decades.
Nope. Franchises die because the companies change too many things that people liked without making enough additions that they also like to compensate.
FOr instance, the Mechwarrior franchise. People loved the game's mechanics in MW2, the damage distribution, the weapons... pretty much everything about the core game. The problem with MW2 is that it lacked a couple things: good networking play, quality graphics, and a couple other little things.
So what did MS do? They changed the things the people liked so they didn't work the same anymore, added some new weapons, and added half-assed networking support, and completely changed the ambience of the game (via changing sounds and music substantially). The result? They managed to kill off the interest in the PC MechWarrior games pretty damn effectively within 2 itinerations.
What?! They were working on Privateer Online and axed it for WoW?!
Those fuckers!
I have tried all the 'space' MMORPGs, free and otherwise, in the hopes that one would duplicate the Privateer franchise at least in spirit. None have, though Eve comes close in some respects - just without the adrenal fun, with added accountant nerd fun. So really, not all that fun. I had high hopes for Freelancer when it came out, but keeping with tradition, Microsoft aborted it and released it anyway.
Yes! That's one I forgot.
I didn't care for the second one so much - I don't recall precisely why; maybe because it seemed too artificially forced and simplified for consoles - but the first DX is my favorite game, period. I've played it through 3 or 4 times, which is more than I've read any single book or played any game before or since.
- Oni - a quasi-anime third-person shooter/fighter game with a story. Hell of a lot of fun. Made by Bungie right before MS bought them; the sequel and network support they were working on were killed.
- Mechwarrior - Microsoft killed the franchise when they bought them. They had a good thing going with MechWarrior 2, but the gameplay in 3 and 4 got progressively less challenging, refined, and balanced. Ditto for the Mech Commander games, which were medicore at best to begin with. They could do a lot of awesome stuff with this franchise right now, if they did it right. Mechwarrior MMORPG, anyone (ala Mechwarrior Merc on a trans-global scale)?
- Privateer/WingCommander series - with the technology we have today, why haven't we seen this world continued in the old tradition? It was great.
- Duke Nukem - OK, so where the hell is Duke Nukem Forever? Duke3D was great fun, then the release of a couple mediocre side-scrolling games for platform and PC, and we're still waiting for DN4R, which has been in the works for like... 7 years, now?
- Descent - Descent 1 and 2 were great, and 3 was medicore at best in terms of single and multiplayer gameplay. Heck, Descent 1 and 2 are still fantastic to play with d2x and modern textures. The games were way ahead of their time technologically, as well, introducing physics systems, true 3d, and lighting in 1993, for cryin' out loud. And then they just kinda stopped making Descent IV.
That's pretty much what I was thinking. Except, something more like this:
In the mid-1990s, there was a game that took place on the far side of the moon. Its premise was that the Soviets and the Americans were fighting a covert war on the moon throughout the cold war (possibly using Nazi tech; I don't recall). The soviets had more, lesser quality ships, while the Americans had better but fewer ships.
Gameplay worked like this: It was a FPS/RTS hybrid. In essence (and IIRC - I barely played it, but it was my best friends' favorite game), each player controlled a 'lead ship', and the lead ship was the POV used for the RTS construction. You could level up, too, IIRC, and become more powerful through upgrades. You could then control your constructed ships and base from within your lead ship in a fashion not too different from the control you'd expect with RTS, except the waypoints were limited by what you could see from within your ship. (Ships were, iirc, most exclusively tracked or hovercraft vehicles, not space farring or similar to aircraft.)
Now, transpose this to Starcraft. Imagine there are two or three main roles: controller - which is the RTS player, commander (a 'group' commander), and specialist - someone who can control individual units to greater impact/skill, and retains his skill. The specialist and commander units would basically be like 'heros' in WC3, except their skills (damage modifiers, maybe some other unit-impacting abilities like what the medics, etc. had depending on what kind of unit they're in). The controller would be responsible for assigning commanders to unit groups, which they would control in the fashion of the above mentioned soviet vs. US game - first person, with NPC wingmen. As the controller makes units, they automatically get assigned to groups, which are then given to a commander to control.
The commanders and specialists all start out playing the game as something like a Super Marine (or protos/zerg equiv), but then can enter (or control, in the case of zerg?) any unit in the game. So, for instance, you could have a dozen people on a team, 4 teams (2 zerg, 1 tos, 1 ter), with 1 controller and enough people to control 6 teams, with 5 specialists (or however you want to arrange them, depending on the skill of the people - commanders double as specialists to some degree, but the opposite isn't true, and the specialists would have more individual skills than a commander).
Of course, the controller would need a substantially more enhanced interface than what starcraft offered, as he'd have to have an easy way (aside from just the alt-4 type combination key shortcuts) to assign new units to groups, and then for those groups to individual commanders. Specialists, conceivably, could either be assigned units for maximum affect, or they could conceivably pick whichever they're better at.
Individual gameplay for the commanders (and specialists) would obviously have to be a bit more complex than it is for Starcraft with more combat options, but then I imagine the various units would also have substantially more abilities. There'd also (at least initially) be less unit types to play, obviously. Terran would have the marines, firebats, goliaths, and tanks. Similar for 'tos and zerg. There may even need to be less units on the field at a time than in SC, as obviously 200 is a lot.
Then, when a given match is finished, a person's account retains all the abilities they gained in their individual role, whether it be commander, controller, or specialist.
Then, at a level above controller, commander, and specialists, you'd be able to have clans and control planets through those clans.
For the overall affect, think: Starcraft meets a non-existent MechWarrior 5 that everyone wants to play.
Great idea! That'd add a lot to the game.
Well, you could make being a zombie fun and interesting. But you'd have to enjoy covert things; ideally, both the human and zombies would have to be fairly covert, so it wouldn't matter: it'd appeal to those who like to be covert (there's an x-box game that does this, but as I don't have an xbox i can't recall what it is).
Just off the top of the head, here are the things zombies might be able to do which would make it interesting:
- Mostly impervious to any sort of damage aside from cranial damage.
- Can regenerate very quickly (ie limbs) by eating anything living (human, animals, plants)
- No heat signature
- Stronger than a mere human
- Able to sense nearby living things (6th sense?)
- 'hunger burst' where they're faster within a certain radius of something living, allowing them to grab someone quickly
- No need to breathe (obviously)
- hive mind (ie radar of some sort - I don't imagine the humans would have this ability), allowing them to coordinate
Do all that with a diverse terrain, and it'd be great.
Also, there was a game where you play a zombie who can control a horde - single player. Looks funny and interesting. I don't recall what it's called, though.
Your post is contrite. News flash: it is the normal thing to do to have kids. You're biologically and mentally wired to be a parent. If you don't breed, you are unselecting yourself for helping continue your race. Just because a person is selfish and didn't want a kid, doesn't mean it isn't natural or necessary.
Guess what? The only reason you're even able to have this perception is because it has become popular to look down on those who have kids. This, as well as the resulting social implications, is why having a kid these days is difficult and undesireable: because there's a culture of perpetual childhood, where people refuse to grow up and become adults.
It exists already as a counter-strike: source mod. It's not very fun, whether because they made the game wrong, or because it doesn't scale well to a FPS game.
Think about it: zombies need to be shot once, in the head, to die. A person needs to be bitten once anywhere to turn into a zombie. That seems pretty one-sided, when you consider that zombies 'in real life' don't coordinate, whereas the players will coordinate as zombies. It'd get pretty monotonous: you'd either be trying to avoid zombies, or you'd be trying to hide, sneak, or race up to get someone.
Here's the only way I can see it working: zombies are slow shamblers, except when they get near 'meat' they have a burst of speed/energy due to their desire. Say, just as fast as a human's 'walk' speed, but they don't have a 'run' speed like the humans. They can also become faster by eating meat. Humans would have stamina, so they could only outrun for a short distance; they'd have to rely on other tactics, like shooting and hiding. All of this would require a fairly complex game world, with lots of rooms, buildings, cabinets, and various other places where both humans and zombies could hide.
Zombies could bite the humans, but the humans wouldn't turn right away; it would depend on how much damage was caused. They might be able to get an antidote, or at least prevent themselves from turning (suicide), if they're fast enough and respawn as a human. This respawning could obviously be prevented by injuring them enough, fast enough, to kill and turn them quickly (group tactics, coming from behind, etc.). Zombies, if shot in the head, would die, but then they would respawn at another location.
It may be a stupid idea, but VMS did it 30 years ago, and that wasn't such a dysmal failure.
I hypothesize that the main reasons VMS was beat out by UNIX were two fold: one, UNIX was open, and two, the organizational mechanisms within VMS were substantially more conceptually complex, requiring a greater deal of administrative oversight to get right.
Interesting hypothesis.
It seems to me that the computing industry is slowly moving the way of VMS. They had it perfect - in many ways - 30 years ago, and we've been trying to get as much of VMS functionality into PCs/x86 architecture as possible since then.
That's great, but it doesn't mean a damn thing. It's their word, against their actions. Simply public relations stuff. They'll do what they can under the radar, and the countries will oblige them because they want the company to do business with them.
Just moving more of the motions which make the world turn 'round under the table.
Do you recall the airplane that fell on New Jersey, shortly after 9/11, shortly after leaving the airport? The one which had a cataclysmic spark in the fuel tank, despite dozens of people claiming to have seen something streak up and hit the plane before it fell?
If Congress or the Executive branch had the authority to interfere in such things, we'd be living in a plutocracy of the elect. No fucking thanks.
And - don't forget - there's not only the electoral vote, but the electoral college. These are not things which 'rig the system' inherrently; they're necessary in a democratic republic.
Unfortunately, the republicanism of our nation has been marginalized, as the electoral college in particular requires a sizeable representative mass of House members. This doesn't mean one or two or three per state, or what have you, as it is now. It means we need to have probably close to a thousand House members, all representitive of a specific population center in the country. The way districting currently is set up rigs House votes in favor of urban, populated areas. Using my own home state (SD) as an example, the ideal would be to give one representative to the two main population centers in the state each, and then two more for the more rural areas of the state - one for west of the Missouri; the other for east of it. This is more in line with the intent of our founding fathers.
And no, I'm sorry, I can't recall what legislation or governmental change it was which resulted in the marginalization of the House and the electoral college, but there was one (iirc it was at about the time of the civil war/war between the states/war of northern agression).
That was indeed the intended point of my statement. You know, the irony.
Sounds to me like what you're describing for 5.56NATO ammo is the M855 stuff. That's not steel ammunition. It's lead, with a copper jacket. It's different than the stuff used in Vietnam - I don't recall what it was, exactly - but it wasn't that substantial. I suspect that the Vietnam troops were just shitty shots (them bein' constripts, an' all), and that they used the 'brush stopped my bullets' argument in much the same way Bubba complains about not being able to find the blood trail for the deer he just missed.
:P And I say that fondly.)
.223/5.56 NATO round the M4/M16/SAW uses fairly thoroughly with quite indepth data: http://www.ammo-oracle.com/body.htm
You may be thinking of M995, which has a tungsten core and is AP ammo, but I doubt it. IIRC that's only issued for use in the SAW. (But if you're a Marine, hell - I'd not be surprised if your CO just said fuck convention.
You might find this interesting; it debunks the
I'm fairly certain that a .5" hole through the center of your head - right in the face! - would have a fairly detrimental impact on your prolonged survival. Even if it was slowly bored a grain at a time using ancient Chinese secrets.
I am, in essence, an avowed capitalist, but let me say this:
It is the supreme irony that it is possible to more freely purchase what you want in China than it is in the United States - the country of the products' origin and central influence of capitalism throughout the world.
Short of the long of it: the k* applications use Qt (the foundation of KDE, and also made by the same people as KDE, iirc) and the g* applications are made using GTK+, the toolkit used for GNOME. Not sure why we're still doing it, but it was a naming convention which caught on years ago when library requirements were a bit less auto-detected by package management, and people often had to compile the requisite library just to get a g* or k* application to work.
I've not used a desktop distro in a while, but the last time I did we were getting really close to Qt and GTK theme engine visual duplication working seamlessly. In other words, about 3 years ago, we were pretty close to there being a negligible visual difference between Qt and GTK through an intermediate mechanism. I imagine that seamlessness is pretty good now that the process has been refined (it was beta software when i last tried it, something which had no package but had to be compiled myself).
I suspect that after Win2k is EOL'd, there wouldn't be many people using it anyway. Heck, I'd be surprised if there was much support for the hardware of 2010 in Win2k; it's already a pain to get currently new hardware working properly.
As a result of not many people using it (most of the poeple using Win2k will have upgraded/bought another computer by then - 8 or so years seems a bit long for your average home internet user to stick with an OS), there'd not be many people writing malicious stuff for it, simply put. Look at all the legacy OSes out there which people still use and don't have a proliferation of viruses or worms.
On the other hand, it may be MS who writes a malicious virus for Win2k when it's EOL'd - if there are still a significant number of people using Win2k, to attempt and force their hand.
I imagine it's the most popular wikipedia entry for several reasons:
1) There's no good source elsewhere on the Internet which describes what, precisely, "Web 2.0" is.
2) Nobody knows what Web 2.0 is
3) Everyone who thinks they know what Web 2.0 is has a different definition.
I'm a moderately experienced programmer with experience with AJAX - and I had no freakin' clue what Web 2.0 was until this past summer (thereabouts) when my brother (who is a bit more trendy than I, and an animator) told me to make his web site 'like digg or something - you know, web 2.0' (not the most descriptive person, but there you have it). Half an hour later I'd figured out what people tend to think of Web 2.0..
I hate that acronym. It's worse than blog, plog, or any of the other asinine web oriented and symantically awkward terms.
maybe the solution to package woes is for there to be a standard 'commercial' package type or translation API which could transliterate paths from the default to the distro default. It'd be straightforward enough, I think: just have a directive for man, bin, sbin, lib, etc. which deals with those file types as is the distro's standard way of dealing with things - and it'd be easy enough to test on a couple mainstream distros. Test on debian, mandrake, and whatever else is primarily popular (ubuntu? I don't do linux much these days), I'd think, and be reasonably certain it'd work on all the derivatives without modification. Seems we've gotten pretty standardized in general since 2000. Only odd-man-out I can think of would be Slack, or maybe Gentoo, and even most hardcore linux users avoid those due to practicality.
The other solution is to have simple meta packages which fetch the requisite proprietary packages - ala gentoo - and standardize something for the proprietary package makers - an API, complete with EULA and what have you, presented to the user either through CLI or GUI - to provide interface to.
Yep. I couldn't help but think about an episode of the old Superman serial - the black and white original one - in which someone invented a machine which could make a block of gold. But it made that gold block out of twice as much platinum.
The only thing I can see this having any utility in is "print it yourself" publishing. It'd have it's niche, I think - but, for the most part, it'd probably just serve those who want 5 copies of their "novel" (a hodgepodge result formed from random neuron collisions and synaptic suicides).