I was six when the Chernobyl accident happened, so my memories, and my insight, into the time are rather limited. I do remember how scared my parents were however, I do remember hardly being allowed to play outside that whole summer, and I do remember that we only got powdered milk for about six months.
Sometimes I wonder about how much time the downfall in this area took off my life, but then I come to and look at the smoke rising from the highway just a few hundred meters from my house, and wonder how much that is taking off even as we speak.
Nuclear Power as it stands is a dirty, nasty, dangerous business. We are playing with forces which we know can destroy us all, we are creating toxins and wastes that we hardly know how to deal with, and we are putting trust in that the next generations will solve our problems for us. However, it is not alone. POWER is a dirty bussiness. As much as nuclear power is a killer, so are all the other ways we have today. Anyone here going to tell me that greenhouse effect is not real? or that it isn't a bigger deal to our children than having to deal with nuclear waste? or that hydro-electric damns aren't gigantic destruction of some of our last real ecological systems?
The Ukranians need power. For them to have a chance at rebuilding their economy, they will need all the power they can get, and we cannot expect them to pay the price for the global bad conscience about what we are ruthlessly doing power our way of life. If we want that reactor shut down, we are going to have to give them an option, and we obviously aren't.
Until then, I guess we'll just have to stack up on iodine pills and hope that the wind is going the other way next time...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, you are far from the only one to note this. I, and many with me, have made parallels between the prohibition of the early part of this century (alcohol), and that of the latter (drugs), and the situation that this poses in cyberspace many times before here.
However, it goes way beyond just DVD movies, or even mp3 songs, and into the whole concept that anyone can be granted the control, or right to control, the flow of information. Enforcing that is impossible, for while I know its a cliche, information _does_ want to be free. When a society holds onto laws that it is obviously incapable of enforcing, and tries to make up for it by escalating the punishments (driving the market deeper underground) you get this situation.
I have no doubt that, if we do not do something, the IP war will do to our data networks what the war on drugs has done to our city cores.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Interestingly, this would mean the opposite of what the original post said: if a minor downloads a GPLed piece of software, he cannot agree to the license, and is therefore not allowed to modify and further distribute it. Which isn't to great for young Open Source developers...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Yes, very true. China is the only threat left to America and the world (except for the proliferation of Nuclear weapons to smaller states: but that is a different question). Had he said China, I would never have objected.
However, we don't say China, do we. Instead we trade with and suck up to China, completely ready to not give a shit about the people they kill or the countries they invade (Tibet). We send our leaders to China where they proceed to get down on their knees and praise the totalitarian, dehumanizing dictatorship. Even here on Slashdot, anyone saying that the Chinese regime is simply evil and should be crushed with any possible means was moderated down in exchange for long letters about the peace-loving, politically stable, economically sound government of China.
And so we have someone claiming to work for the NSA using little fish like North Korea (large standing army my ass: remember what happened to the last large standing army America fought) to justify continuing operation like if the cold war were still in full force.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
We are still behaving the same way about national security as we did during the cold war. I don't care if every single north korean is uniform, they are still tiny compared to the threats against freedom of any previous period.
NK is a big deal for national security of South Korea. With the missile technology they have demonstrated they may be a threat to the national security of Japan. They are not a threat to the national security of the USA.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Spoken like a true techie. Of course, what if your passion happened to be history or social studies? Would you have ever clued into that if you only been taught speed-reading and math?
Actually, I do believe I would have. I read a lot and think a lot about what I read, including some history and social theory. History and social science are all around us, if they are your passion you would have to be blind to not find them, school or no.
School never taught me a line of code, yet I found my interest in programming.
While I agree that the primary lesson taught in pre-college school is how to learn, I don't think narrowing the bredth of what it teaches is a good way to go about that. One of the most important facets of learning is interest. If a person is never introduced to a subject they're interested in they're likely never to see a reason to know how to learn. Which will in turn impair their ability to learn how to learn.
Yes, you do have a point with this. It may be a little drastic to completely cut other subjects from school, but I still think that a certain change of weight is in order. After all, this thread was about schools not being updated on the information, and my point is that I don't think that is important. Your introduction to chemistry and its way of thinking probably won't be any less valuable because the teacher hasn't heard of the last 10 artifical (2-millisecond halflife) elements. If that is what you want to know the Internet will always be a better place to look...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Actually, I would argue that Mathematics is the only thing that is completely and utterly not articifial. True math is reality so close you can feel it, history is just the track record of past fools like us.
Math offers no clear cut answers either. No one has argued that it does since Gödel's proofs.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I remember hearing one of the most drastic proposals on this subject in a Usenet discussion a long while back, that schools ought to revert to teaching only maths, for analytical thinking, and speed reading, so people can teach themselves.
Most people just start screaming about elitism at the notion of this (certain people seem to believe that very concept of freedom is elitist because it hurts the stupid people), but I really think that it is fitting for the information age. School should no longer, in fact, it can no longer, teach students information. The information is readily available elsewhere, and more plentiful and dynamic than in any school to boot.
What students need to learn in school is no longer information: but how to gather, handle, and learn from the information they will be presented with continuely for the rest of their lifes.
Think about your own schooling: how much of what you learned has really been helpful to you later? I know that for me, it was extermely little. In my own subject I realized I could have learned everything I did from grade 1-12 by adding one more term at college rate study. And as for the other subjects, I have either forgot most of it, or realized from own my experience that what I thought I knew about them is probably as infinitesimal.
What I did bring with me from school, and that I am thankful for, is that it introduced me to the subject of my passion, that it taught me to think, and that I learned how to learn effiently. I think I would have been more happy weight had been devoted to these thing than trying to force me to read subjects like history and social studies which I never cared less about.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Have you any idea how much of a threat North Korea is? I do.
North Korea is a tiny underdeveloped remote country with a couple of million starving farmers. Its closed off, but it is currently without a strong leader, money, or support from larger countries.
If that little shit of a dictorship is the biggest threat you can think of for the entire, hundred times larger and a million times richer, western world, then we are truly right. Its beginning to sound like the NRA people arguing how they need bazookas to hunt rabbits...
"Do you know how dangerous a rabid bunny can be? I do!"
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm not so sure about that. Most people who work with open standards and university/science/peer review systems say that open source is pretty much exactly like they have been operating all along.
And, more importantly, open source/free software is not positioning itself as an alternative to scientific and university work: but to closed, propriatory corporation development. When we compare the innovation of FS, we have to look to the innovation of private software developers, which has been (esp under the last ten years) very limited.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
What reasons the DeCSS authors could use the to defend themselves against this chapter is not too important: I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea about the meaning of all the exceptions of things in that paragraph.
But my main point, that it is (contradictory to what the original post said) illegal to create a program that circumvents a copyprotection scheme regardless of whether you use it for illegal purposes or not, seems correct.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I said "most countries". And you are wrong about American Law, intentionally writing a work around for a copyprotection scheme IS illegal by the "Millenium copyright act" or whatever its called. I don't remember the exact wording but you can look it up.
The DeCSS people could possibly get away on the fact that they were explicitely working to create Linux support, but just wait until someone cracks the SDMI format, and you'll see the shit really hit the fan.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is a matter of individual vs national consquences though.
Individually, if you are worried about your privacy and the implications of the P3, go buy an Athlon or install an OS you can be sure isn't fucking with you. But the European governments ARE mandated in worrying that while individual loss is minimal, there is a national risk about having a feature that caters to foreign intelligence running the IT of the country.
From that perspective there is ampal reason for the governments to act acordingly and on a national level.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Interestingly, while I believe that the law won't hold the author responsible some cases (the tools you mentioned for example) there are others where it does.
The mosts striking example of this is the piracy field. By most countries law (and esp. American) copyright owners have the complete right to go after the very freedom of thought of the people who might create tools to that can used to break there copyrights. Look at the DeCSS people, who have done nothing illegal themselves, but were under attack right away. Napster is being sued for breaking the law by "aiding in copyright violation" while they themselves have not copied anything (napsters servers never contain the file). And while the Swedish courts held up, a kid here was dragged to trial because he LINKED to illegal mp3 sites.
Personally I think the difference is that while the laws about computer security are working, the copyright laws aren't. It is when society attempts to hold on to legislation that just can't function that peoples rights start being fingered (see: prohibition, drug war). But that is off-topic for this discussion I guess.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
We cannot (yet) solve the atom bomb problem by hacking into reality and creating a fix for it (and we would be a little worried about putting out the sun if we did). We need to have laws to make up for gods little system oversites.
The same is not true for computer systems. A virus spreads because the system is broken, and because the system is broken only.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
While this is true from some sort of weird theoretical perspective, its the sort of concept of fairness that just ends up screwing you.
Consider: how much is tech-support worth to you? Have you ever called tech-support for a game? Would you be able to do so and not shrink away from the world out of shame afterwards?
As a geek calling tech support is so far from my mentality, that I can't even do it at work when my computer breaks (to everyones irritation since they want me to do what I'm paid for). A geek does not call for help when things don't work. A geek learns. There are many things I would sooner do than talk to some clueless phone-support person for a games publisher, who probably knows less than me about Linux anyways.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The thing is, I don't think that Epic or GT are loosing any sleep over the fact that you chose not to purchase UT. As vocal as we are, and as much as it may seem not like it here, we (Linux users who won't boot to win) are still a pretty small group.
The only person suffering is you. You are being petty (downloading a patch is NOT a big deal: knowing Epic you will have to patch a number of times anyways) and missing out on a fun game. Hope whatever satisfaction having punished GT gives you makes up for that (and Q3 is a better game anyways).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Regardless of whether this is true or not (the lasest demo release had great network code and did not bug at all for me) I have to wonder a little about why you would really care so much?
I mean, you obviously have a good Internet connection (seeing as you can post to slashdot 84 times a day), and you won't miss the news, so downloading a couple of megabytes of patch won't be that big of a deal for you.
I know that this is not true for some people, but personally I would rather have buggy version of Q3 tomorrow, and then a bug-free patch in 2 months, than having to wait 2 months to play the game at all. I would think the same would go for you.
Obviously I would be careful before paying for a game I knew was buggy, but with id I know that they have a 100% clean sheet on always making patches to fix all the bugs. I have no doubt they will do the same this time.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
There are many levels of mathematical knowledge. I am sure that this book was great for the complete layman (I did think it did a good job explaining what drives mathematicians to the unenlightened), which is whom it was written for.
However, as a third year mathematics major, I found that it was not suited for me at all (although I am far from good enough to actually pick up the proof and start reading). A lot of Slashdot readers have CS or technical degrees that include quite a lot of mathematics, so I think there are others here who would feel the same.
That was all I was trying to say. Not critisism of Singh, its just the nature of pop-science. Most physisists seem to find _A brief history of time_ appalling...
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Can we be sure that the DoD and NSA are really working together on these issues? Perhaps there is a bit of competition going on within the American government here.
After all, we were all wondering why the NSA would effectively comfirm that this is what they were doing by taking out that patent. But if they saw that the DoD were working on technology like it, they may have felt that that was reason enough to get a patent.
It also seems to make sense, in light of the cludged up nature of governments that makes it very hard to believe that they are keeping anything really secret. Thank god for profit motives huh:-).
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The demo was fairly stable on both platforms I played it. I must admit I was hoping they would work a little more on the AI (specifically: make the damn bots harder), but I don't think a bot will ever satisfy me.
Id have given up on the idea of releasing a patchless product anyways, from what JC wrote about the Linux/Mac releases, one can gather than he believes he will have to update it sometime after Christmas. Hopefully there won't be any really nasty bugs until then (security issues are the killer, but they can often be solved with server only patches).
Problems wih misplaced textures and stuff sounds like a bug with your graphics card. Perhaps you should look into making sure you have the lastest drivers/OpenGL for it.
- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Slashdot Mirror
I was six when the Chernobyl accident happened, so my memories, and my insight, into the time are rather limited. I do remember how scared my parents were however, I do remember hardly being allowed to play outside that whole summer, and I do remember that we only got powdered milk for about six months.
Sometimes I wonder about how much time the downfall in this area took off my life, but then I come to and look at the smoke rising from the highway just a few hundred meters from my house, and wonder how much that is taking off even as we speak.
Nuclear Power as it stands is a dirty, nasty, dangerous business. We are playing with forces which we know can destroy us all, we are creating toxins and wastes that we hardly know how to deal with, and we are putting trust in that the next generations will solve our problems for us. However, it is not alone. POWER is a dirty bussiness. As much as nuclear power is a killer, so are all the other ways we have today. Anyone here going to tell me that greenhouse effect is not real? or that it isn't a bigger deal to our children than having to deal with nuclear waste? or that hydro-electric damns aren't gigantic destruction of some of our last real ecological systems?
The Ukranians need power. For them to have a chance at rebuilding their economy, they will need all the power they can get, and we cannot expect them to pay the price for the global bad conscience about what we are ruthlessly doing power our way of life. If we want that reactor shut down, we are going to have to give them an option, and we obviously aren't.
Until then, I guess we'll just have to stack up on iodine pills and hope that the wind is going the other way next time...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
No, you are far from the only one to note this. I, and many with me, have made parallels between the prohibition of the early part of this century (alcohol), and that of the latter (drugs), and the situation that this poses in cyberspace many times before here.
However, it goes way beyond just DVD movies, or even mp3 songs, and into the whole concept that anyone can be granted the control, or right to control, the flow of information. Enforcing that is impossible, for while I know its a cliche, information _does_ want to be free. When a society holds onto laws that it is obviously incapable of enforcing, and tries to make up for it by escalating the punishments (driving the market deeper underground) you get this situation.
I have no doubt that, if we do not do something, the IP war will do to our data networks what the war on drugs has done to our city cores.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Interestingly, this would mean the opposite of what the original post said: if a minor downloads a GPLed piece of software, he cannot agree to the license, and is therefore not allowed to modify and further distribute it. Which isn't to great for young Open Source developers...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I really miss that show, I think he should start it up again...
(if you didn't get that, you probably have a life).
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Yes, very true. China is the only threat left to America and the world (except for the proliferation of Nuclear weapons to smaller states: but that is a different question). Had he said China, I would never have objected.
However, we don't say China, do we. Instead we trade with and suck up to China, completely ready to not give a shit about the people they kill or the countries they invade (Tibet). We send our leaders to China where they proceed to get down on their knees and praise the totalitarian, dehumanizing dictatorship. Even here on Slashdot, anyone saying that the Chinese regime is simply evil and should be crushed with any possible means was moderated down in exchange for long letters about the peace-loving, politically stable, economically sound government of China.
And so we have someone claiming to work for the NSA using little fish like North Korea (large standing army my ass: remember what happened to the last large standing army America fought) to justify continuing operation like if the cold war were still in full force.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
You can't motivate people by forcing something on them. Movitation must come from one self.
If people are not motivated to study, maybe they shouldn't be studying. Its a choice, nothing more, nothing less.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
We are still behaving the same way about national security as we did during the cold war. I don't care if every single north korean is uniform, they are still tiny compared to the threats against freedom of any previous period.
NK is a big deal for national security of South Korea. With the missile technology they have demonstrated they may be a threat to the national security of Japan. They are not a threat to the national security of the USA.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Spoken like a true techie. Of course, what if your passion happened to be history or social studies? Would you have ever clued into that if you only been taught speed-reading and math?
Actually, I do believe I would have. I read a lot and think a lot about what I read, including some history and social theory. History and social science are all around us, if they are your passion you would have to be blind to not find them, school or no.
School never taught me a line of code, yet I found my interest in programming.
While I agree that the primary lesson taught in pre-college school is how to learn, I don't think narrowing the bredth of what it teaches is a good way to go about that. One of the most important facets of learning is interest. If a person is never introduced to a subject they're interested in they're likely never to see a reason to know how to learn. Which will in turn impair their ability to learn how to learn.
Yes, you do have a point with this. It may be a little drastic to completely cut other subjects from school, but I still think that a certain change of weight is in order. After all, this thread was about schools not being updated on the information, and my point is that I don't think that is important. Your introduction to chemistry and its way of thinking probably won't be any less valuable because the teacher hasn't heard of the last 10 artifical (2-millisecond halflife) elements. If that is what you want to know the Internet will always be a better place to look...
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Actually, I would argue that Mathematics is the only thing that is completely and utterly not articifial. True math is reality so close you can feel it, history is just the track record of past fools like us.
Math offers no clear cut answers either. No one has argued that it does since Gödel's proofs.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I remember hearing one of the most drastic proposals on this subject in a Usenet discussion a long while back, that schools ought to revert to teaching only maths, for analytical thinking, and speed reading, so people can teach themselves.
Most people just start screaming about elitism at the notion of this (certain people seem to believe that very concept of freedom is elitist because it hurts the stupid people), but I really think that it is fitting for the information age. School should no longer, in fact, it can no longer, teach students information. The information is readily available elsewhere, and more plentiful and dynamic than in any school to boot.
What students need to learn in school is no longer information: but how to gather, handle, and learn from the information they will be presented with continuely for the rest of their lifes.
Think about your own schooling: how much of what you learned has really been helpful to you later? I know that for me, it was extermely little. In my own subject I realized I could have learned everything I did from grade 1-12 by adding one more term at college rate study. And as for the other subjects, I have either forgot most of it, or realized from own my experience that what I thought I knew about them is probably as infinitesimal.
What I did bring with me from school, and that I am thankful for, is that it introduced me to the subject of my passion, that it taught me to think, and that I learned how to learn effiently. I think I would have been more happy weight had been devoted to these thing than trying to force me to read subjects like history and social studies which I never cared less about.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Have you any idea how much of a threat North Korea is? I do.
North Korea is a tiny underdeveloped remote country with a couple of million starving farmers. Its closed off, but it is currently without a strong leader, money, or support from larger countries.
If that little shit of a dictorship is the biggest threat you can think of for the entire, hundred times larger and a million times richer, western world, then we are truly right. Its beginning to sound like the NRA people arguing how they need bazookas to hunt rabbits...
"Do you know how dangerous a rabid bunny can be? I do!"
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I'm not so sure about that. Most people who work with open standards and university/science/peer review systems say that open source is pretty much exactly like they have been operating all along.
And, more importantly, open source/free software is not positioning itself as an alternative to scientific and university work: but to closed, propriatory corporation development. When we compare the innovation of FS, we have to look to the innovation of private software developers, which has been (esp under the last ten years) very limited.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
You got upped because saying "this is slightly off-topic" is close enough to "I'll probably get moderated down for this".
(No I won't stop complaining about that)
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
What reasons the DeCSS authors could use the to defend themselves against this chapter is not too important: I am not a lawyer, and I have no idea about the meaning of all the exceptions of things in that paragraph.
But my main point, that it is (contradictory to what the original post said) illegal to create a program that circumvents a copyprotection scheme regardless of whether you use it for illegal purposes or not, seems correct.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
I said "most countries". And you are wrong about American Law, intentionally writing a work around for a copyprotection scheme IS illegal by the "Millenium copyright act" or whatever its called. I don't remember the exact wording but you can look it up.
The DeCSS people could possibly get away on the fact that they were explicitely working to create Linux support, but just wait until someone cracks the SDMI format, and you'll see the shit really hit the fan.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
This is a matter of individual vs national consquences though.
Individually, if you are worried about your privacy and the implications of the P3, go buy an Athlon or install an OS you can be sure isn't fucking with you. But the European governments ARE mandated in worrying that while individual loss is minimal, there is a national risk about having a feature that caters to foreign intelligence running the IT of the country.
From that perspective there is ampal reason for the governments to act acordingly and on a national level.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Interestingly, while I believe that the law won't hold the author responsible some cases (the tools you mentioned for example) there are others where it does.
The mosts striking example of this is the piracy field. By most countries law (and esp. American) copyright owners have the complete right to go after the very freedom of thought of the people who might create tools to that can used to break there copyrights. Look at the DeCSS people, who have done nothing illegal themselves, but were under attack right away. Napster is being sued for breaking the law by "aiding in copyright violation" while they themselves have not copied anything (napsters servers never contain the file). And while the Swedish courts held up, a kid here was dragged to trial because he LINKED to illegal mp3 sites.
Personally I think the difference is that while the laws about computer security are working, the copyright laws aren't. It is when society attempts to hold on to legislation that just can't function that peoples rights start being fingered (see: prohibition, drug war). But that is off-topic for this discussion I guess.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
We cannot (yet) solve the atom bomb problem by hacking into reality and creating a fix for it (and we would be a little worried about putting out the sun if we did). We need to have laws to make up for gods little system oversites.
The same is not true for computer systems. A virus spreads because the system is broken, and because the system is broken only.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Don't forget that ownership of a good DNS address doubles the companies value. I mean, that has to be pretty obvious doesn't it
I hope they send the letter to guy who sold them linux.com...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
While this is true from some sort of weird theoretical perspective, its the sort of concept of fairness that just ends up screwing you.
Consider: how much is tech-support worth to you? Have you ever called tech-support for a game? Would you be able to do so and not shrink away from the world out of shame afterwards?
As a geek calling tech support is so far from my mentality, that I can't even do it at work when my computer breaks (to everyones irritation since they want me to do what I'm paid for). A geek does not call for help when things don't work. A geek learns. There are many things I would sooner do than talk to some clueless phone-support person for a games publisher, who probably knows less than me about Linux anyways.
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The thing is, I don't think that Epic or GT are loosing any sleep over the fact that you chose not to purchase UT. As vocal as we are, and as much as it may seem not like it here, we (Linux users who won't boot to win) are still a pretty small group.
The only person suffering is you. You are being petty (downloading a patch is NOT a big deal: knowing Epic you will have to patch a number of times anyways) and missing out on a fun game. Hope whatever satisfaction having punished GT gives you makes up for that (and Q3 is a better game anyways).
-
We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Regardless of whether this is true or not (the lasest demo release had great network code and did not bug at all for me) I have to wonder a little about why you would really care so much?
I mean, you obviously have a good Internet connection (seeing as you can post to slashdot 84 times a day), and you won't miss the news, so downloading a couple of megabytes of patch won't be that big of a deal for you.
I know that this is not true for some people, but personally I would rather have buggy version of Q3 tomorrow, and then a bug-free patch in 2 months, than having to wait 2 months to play the game at all. I would think the same would go for you.
Obviously I would be careful before paying for a game I knew was buggy, but with id I know that they have a 100% clean sheet on always making patches to fix all the bugs. I have no doubt they will do the same this time.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
There are many levels of mathematical knowledge. I am sure that this book was great for the complete layman (I did think it did a good job explaining what drives mathematicians to the unenlightened), which is whom it was written for.
However, as a third year mathematics major, I found that it was not suited for me at all (although I am far from good enough to actually pick up the proof and start reading). A lot of Slashdot readers have CS or technical degrees that include quite a lot of mathematics, so I think there are others here who would feel the same.
That was all I was trying to say. Not critisism of Singh, its just the nature of pop-science. Most physisists seem to find _A brief history of time_ appalling...
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
Can we be sure that the DoD and NSA are really working together on these issues? Perhaps there is a bit of competition going on within the American government here.
After all, we were all wondering why the NSA would effectively comfirm that this is what they were doing by taking out that patent. But if they saw that the DoD were working on technology like it, they may have felt that that was reason enough to get a patent.
It also seems to make sense, in light of the cludged up nature of governments that makes it very hard to believe that they are keeping anything really secret. Thank god for profit motives huh
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.
The demo was fairly stable on both platforms I played it. I must admit I was hoping they would work a little more on the AI (specifically: make the damn bots harder), but I don't think a bot will ever satisfy me.
Id have given up on the idea of releasing a patchless product anyways, from what JC wrote about the Linux/Mac releases, one can gather than he believes he will have to update it sometime after Christmas. Hopefully there won't be any really nasty bugs until then (security issues are the killer, but they can often be solved with server only patches).
Problems wih misplaced textures and stuff sounds like a bug with your graphics card. Perhaps you should look into making sure you have the lastest drivers/OpenGL for it.
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We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.