You can steal something non-physical. Just try to steal cell-phone air time or cable tv service. Theft of service is still theft, that's what the law calls it, and that's how the courts treat it.
Or how about identity theft. You still have your original (though now much tarnished) identity, don't you?
It's theft when you appropriate something (a good or service or anything else) for your own or some others' use, without the person's permission. Give it up already.
. So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.
You assume those 80% of people would have purchased the game, had it been impossible for them to obtain a pirate copy.
Psst. What part of the word "potential" don't you understand?
Someone who steals the game (and let's not get into the semantics of "I didn't steal it - they still have their copy", because we know that it also means taking something that doesn't belong to you without the owners' permission) is a potential lost sale. More importantly in this context, because they and their ilk have overloaded the servers, they may have given the game a bad name, and the potential lost sales (if you include people who hear "it's lousy because you can't connect to the game servers blah blah blah") are actually greater...
The "chemical changes in the brain" argument is bogus. ALL thought produces chemical changes in the brain. You cannot think without changing the brain's chemistry. And if the person can self-induce a chemical change in one direction, they can certainly induce it in another - IF they so desire. They CHOOSE not to. This is not the same as externally-induced chemical changes, or structural changes cause by the environment, accidents, drugs, alcohol, etc.
There's a difference between someone working themselves into a mental state (and the chemical changes associated with it) and chemical changes on the brain caused by outside chemicals.
Simple thought experiment: If someone with a a very strong will can break the "psychological addiction" with no real effort, then it's obvious that those who cannot are less strong-willed. In other words, "psychological addiction" is about willpower.
Stop excusing adults acting like spoiled children.
Just because addiction exists doesn't mean that punishment isn't one of the ways to cure it.
It could be argued that punishment makes doing the addictive thing more painful than the withdrawal symptoms from not doing it.
Worked for Pavlovs' followers. I guess you could say "In Soviet Russia, addiction punishes YOU!"
Better than "In decadent west, addiction excuses you."
Pain is necessary for the proper functioning of humans. It's how we learn not to put our hand in the fire, not to stick a knife in someone (because we know sharp things hurt), etc.
Telling them that "it's okay - yu're addicted to games" is NOT going to get them to change. What WILL get them to change is the same thing that gets other people to change - THEY have to want something else more. Or did you miss that point? If they don't want to change, why the FUCK should I care one way or another? Let them play. No skin off my nose. But don't start excusing their behaviour by saying it's "an addiction" - the next step is "we can treat it - give me money$$$", and after that - "let's sue the game manufacturers and distributors". You know it as well as I do - we've seen it before, with games.
You know there's a problem when EVERYTHING can fall under the same "addiction" metaphor. Computers. The Internet. Cars. Food, Books. Stamps. Coins. Soap Operas. American Idol. Matchsticks. Old newspapers. Glass. Flowers. Having babies (Octomom!!!) When EVERYTHING is addictive, then the term means nothing.
Using the scientific method to determine if someone does or doesn't have an addiction (or something is or isn't highly addictive) is merely a determination of fact.
HOw about you call me back when science has a method of determining if gaming is addictive other than their subjective assessment:-) People do not experience "severe trauma" when they're forced to stop playing games - they throw temper tantrums because they have had their toy taken away. Adults throwing temper tantrums because they can't play with their toys... how fucking lame. The only thing lamer is people trying to make money off it by saying that "they're addicted, and need treatment - give me $$$." Follow the money. Money talks, and we know how this story ends...
Too bad you didn't get the memo - many psychological problems are treatable via CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It's more successful than ALL other treatments combined, and it includes a strong dose of "it's your problem and it's up to YOU to actively do something about it." Change your behaviour to change your thinking. (And as someone who always said Freud was full of shit, I was happy to see CBT kick ass:-)
Sexual disorders (such as pedophilia) fall into the same category. You can have mild pedophilia and be attracted, but still have control of your actions, you can have severe pedophilia and still have control of your actions, and you can have extreme pedophilia where it just dominates everything you think about.
Let's replace paedophilia with being horny.
"You can be mildly horny, but still have control of your actions, you can be severely horny and still have control of your actions, and you can be extremely horny where it just dominates everything you think about."
Would you say that the person who is "extremely horny" and where sex "just dominates everything they think about" has an excuse to rape someone? Of course not - even if all they can think of is sex, that's not an excuse (guys are supposed to think of sex what, 6 times a minute?) Think about it... it's no different, really, than "game addiction." No matter how bad you want it, you still have the final say in whether you act on your urges or not.
Why? Because I think that people should be more responsible for their actions? That they should learn to have, not only will-power, but WON'T-power, as in "I won't do that because it's not the best thing for me right now"?
Obese people don't get that way overnight - it takes years of over-eating. And it will take just as much work to lose the weight, and for those who do make it, I say "congratulations" because there are few things more basic than eating. For those who want to hide behind lame excuses like "I'm big-boned" or "it's glandular", I don't buy it. Their metabolism cannot violate the laws of physics (thermodynamics). They need to stop lying to themselves.
Obese people are now being charged for the second seat on airplanes. This is fair. You take up two seats, you should have to pay for two seats. Obesity is a lifestyle problem, and we need to treat it as such. It's gotten so epidemic that, if you're normal weight, some people will say "OMG you need to put on some weight!" because they don't SEE normal people on a daily basis - all their friends and family are FAT.
If you want to solve such problems, you can't just slap a label on it and use it as a way to get people to "excuse" their situation. Whether its games or food, it's up to them to say "fuck this!" When someone says "I really want to lose weight" I say "No you don't - not as much as you want that 3rd helping." There's a difference between wishful thinking and motivation. Only motivation leads to action.
Have some junkie OD on a hot load, and the other junkies do not stop shooting dope. They actually try to find the source for the hot load so they can buy some, because it has to be good shit if such-and-such OD on it.
Some do, some don't. At one point, they either realize that they are NOT invulnerable, or they croak. They like to think "I'm different", just like everyone who has unprotected sex thinks "it won't happen to ME." Yeah, right...
In other words, they develop the ability to control their impulsive behaviour. The physical addiction is still there - they have the craving, the urge - but they also learn that it is up to THEM to say "I will NOT do this."
You don't search the data - you search the index. The index is pre-encrypted, with the values you want.
If you want to search a table of users, by user name, you only need an index holding the encrypted values of their user names.
If "John Smith" is "de9ld933dd9ddd93d9da8080", you search for "de9ld933dd9ddd93d9da8080", and you get the encrypted data for that row in the table.
This is NOT the same as the case you're thinking of, where you want to do a plain-text search. In that case, you would have to drop all the stop words, then create indexes for the encrypted value of each significant phrase chunk. For "The cat is black", you would drop the words "The" and "is", then create indexes to that "document" on the encrypted values for "CAT", "BLACK", "CAT BLACK", and "BLACK CAT". Not that much different from existing full-text search (though this IS an over-simplification) - but it WILL work.
It doesn't work for plain-text, but it DOES work for text or other values that are inde3xed.
If you have an index with the filed "user" for "John Smith" (say it was "109fcu91833c098890"), there's no reason you can't search for user "109fcu91833c098890" and find the record associated with it.
Remember, you're not searching the text, just the index, which contains encrypted values.
I do this all the time - store a crc64 of a much longer datum - and I can now use the crc54 (8 bytes) instead of the datum itself, as an index value. Much better when your datum might be 100 or more characters, like a url.
Use your imagination a bit... any method of generating an encrypted value will work with this, provided you use the same algorithm, the same salt, and the same data. Think about session data as one example - you don't search it by the user name, but by a generated datum.
Sure, there's a lot of newspaper reports about fat kids playing MMORPGs to the point of having no real life
"Sure, there's a lot of newspaper reports about fat people having no real life"
There, fixed it for you.
Even better:
"Sure, there's a lot of newspaper reports about people having no real life"
Try to argue against either one... they're both just as accurate/inaccurate/stupid/nonsense/insightful/trollish/whatever. Newspapers say anything that sells, because if they didn't they'd go out of business even quicker.
When's the last time you saw a newspaper that reported the truth on the mortgage crisis in big headlines - that, for example, when Firth did a study on a sample of mortgage applications, every single one of them had fraud and misrepresentations by the applicants, so that, far from deserving a bailout, your neighbours should be in jail for fraud?
Way to miss the point:-) The GP poster claimed that macs were the exclusive purview of geeks. My point was that non-geeks like them too, not that ONLY non-geeks like them.
After my wife played with my computer for a few weeks, she wanted a Macbook. I'm pretty happy with it, too. She's dumb as a brick,
Oh man, what a set-up line... please check all that apply...
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she married ME!
[_] I am SO dumb that I married someone dumb as a brick!
[_] Blow-up dolls ARE as dumb as a brick, you ignorant clod!
[_] In Soviet Russia, dumb wife bricks YOU!
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she's the CowboyNeal option!
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she once burned water.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she lost the recipe for ice cubes.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she chases after cars.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she buried her father in a rented suit, and has been paying $50/month for years
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she complains that when I die, she doesn't know HOW she's going to keep paying my life insurance policy.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, when she won the lottery, she returned the ticket and insisted on another one because it didn't have "her" numbers on it.
The real one...
[X] My wife is so smart, she conned me into buying her a mac.
How common is sports addiction anyway? I've never heard of people staying up until 3am to kick a soccer ball around several times a week or pissing in a water bottle because they couldn't bear to be away from the tennis court for a couple of minutes. MMORPG addicts behaving like that are a dime a dozen; sports addicts, not so much.
According to your criteria, second-hand sports addiction is very common. Guys will stop in the middle of sex because their stupid hockey game is on, or they'll find an excuse to go find a TV on their WEDDING DAY because the soccer game is on. Preachers hide mini tvs in their pulpits so they can keep track of the football game while they're preaching. Is any of this any better?
But to call it addiction in today's legal and social climate is to help "enable" the people who do it, just as calling morbidly obese people addicted to food would. It's time we took a real look at addiction, and admitted that there is always a choice involved - even for those who claim they can't stop. You can be darned sure that if you held a gun to their head, and told them that you'll pull the trigger if they don't stop, they will, if they've just seen you blow away the person next to them for the same reason.
To claim that there is no choice involved, ever, is to open up the door to pedophiles claiming they're "addicted" to having sex with 3-year-olds. Well, if they're "addicted", then they can't help themselves, and we have no right to punish them... do you REALLY want to go there? Especially since there IS more evidence that pedophilia is an addiction than that gaming is... What about the person who shoplifts because they're "addicted" to bling? The person who defrauds millions because they're "addicted" to a certain social lifestyle and the endorphin high it gives them to lord it over eveyone? They don't need to be treated for addiction - they need to grow up.
Treat a kid like an adult, and they'll usually behave like one. Treat an adult like a child, and they'll behave like a child.
So, why are so many adults behaving childishly? Follow the endorphins. "It feels good" / gives an endorphin high - is NOT sufficient reason to lay a claim of addiction. The phony "disease" of kleptomania is just one example of how we make poor impulse control socially acceptable by mislabeling it. If you have poor impulse control and decide that you don't want to delay gratification, that's your choice. Live with the consequences. Drink yourself to death, eat yourself to death, game yourself to death, pile on credit card and mortgage debt to your financial ruin because you want it all, and you want it NOW - if you don't care, why should anyone else? But don't excuse it by saying you're addicted. After all, you LIKE it that way. Don't ask others to bail you out until you've learned the hard lessons, because only YOU can learn them, and that means YOU have to decide you're fed up with things as they are. Nobody else can make that choice for you, ever.
Treat a kid like an adult, and they'll usually behave like one. Treat an adult like a child, and they'll behave like a child.
Too many adults in this generation never really grew up. "Psychological addiction" is a joke. Label it what it really is - poor impulse control - by people who refuse to take responsibility for ruining their lives. THEN maybe we'll be in a better position to actually treat it, by confronting people with the fact that they need to learn to take control of their lives instead of playing the victim card all the time. Example: impulsive eaters are claiming discrimination because they're now being charged for the second seat. They should shut their mouths... actually, they should have shut them 20 years ago, after that 5th piece of cake. Funny how we don't accept that with little children, but in adults, we slap the "psychological addiction" label on it, and poor impulse control is suddenly socially excusable. Fuck that - and
Ah, grasshopper, with a rickshaw, you won't have to worry about rolling down the windows... and this way, everyone else can "share the fragrance."
Okay, instead of a rickshaw, how about an electric-assist pedal-cab? Still open, so the smell doesn't concentrate, and the operator won't sweat quite as much.
Apple's approach is to limit stuff to people prepared to pay well over the odds for hardware. Sure, iPods are popular, but I don't know any non-nerds with a Mac.
The only people I know with a mac are non-nerds... who got fed up with Windows and wanted something that "just works".
This way, not only will you not be burning hydrocarbons ( "burn, carbohydrates, not hydrocarbons" ) you'll have the "lovely" smell of NY to breathe... and when you take a ride to New Jersey...
For extra revenue, hook up with a fat farm or fitness club and CHARGE people to pull the rickshaws...
What, you thought I was going to make a "We welcome our photoshopping overlords" comment? The overlords are dead - netcraft confirmed it. That's what you get for basing your borg on bsd.
Direct them at tasers and they could first trigger lightning to spark and then act as a convenient but short-lived lightning rod to guide it safely to the ground, according to some researchers."
If a laser could intercept the dart before it hits you... I can just see it now - instead of tin-foil hats, geeks will be wearing their anti-taser laser phasers.
How Much Do I Need To Earn To Live? - Suppose your game takes a year to write and thus, counting salaries, needs to earn about $100K to break even.
If that's the case, you really need to find another job. Salaries - plural, plus other expenses for a year (employer's contribution to payroll taxes, health, etc), of $100k a year? I hope, for their sake, it's not more than 2 people...
Oh, And a Quick Note For Those Who Disagree With Me...
If you don't care about the people who work so hard to entertain you being able to charge a price that enables them to survive, I have no interest in what you have to say.
That's okay... what you have to say is pretty much bullshit whining anyway.
I don't think you're going to win him over somehow.
Yu're fairly right, of course. Between the problems with getting perl to do something that was not that much work in c, and the length of time it would take to run to completion, it was quicker to just do it in c. Open a couple of buffers, fill one up, scan through it, strcat the good stuff to the second buffer, when the second buffer gets enough data, write it out. The extra bonus was that it ran quickly, so it was easy enough to verify the outut was both sane and sanitized.
Perl 5.8 and higher do just fine with Unicode. With older versions, though, yeah, that was a problem.
It WAS perl 5.8, and perl insisted on "doing the right thing", handling unicode transparently, which was exactly the wrong thing for what I wanted to do with cleaning up 80 gigs of data and removing entries polluted with unicode crapola, with some exceptions that I could redo with 8-bit ascii...
Perl is a mess. Not that other languages aren't... just that even GOOD perl code looks fugly.
Seems to me they should put their money where their mouth is...
Sun *DID* put their money where their mouth is. They developed java, then GPL'd it. They bought StarOffice, the GPL'd it.
Google, on the other hand, is an advertising company that is trying to get lock-in, same as Microsoft did with their proprietary java extensions long long ago...
Not any more - it choked too many times on unicode, so I went back to c.... If I want to pay the price of a slow runtime interpreter, I can always use java.
Slashdot Mirror
You can steal something non-physical. Just try to steal cell-phone air time or cable tv service. Theft of service is still theft, that's what the law calls it, and that's how the courts treat it.
Or how about identity theft. You still have your original (though now much tarnished) identity, don't you?
It's theft when you appropriate something (a good or service or anything else) for your own or some others' use, without the person's permission. Give it up already.
. So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.
You assume those 80% of people would have purchased the game, had it been impossible for them to obtain a pirate copy.
Psst. What part of the word "potential" don't you understand?
Someone who steals the game (and let's not get into the semantics of "I didn't steal it - they still have their copy", because we know that it also means taking something that doesn't belong to you without the owners' permission) is a potential lost sale. More importantly in this context, because they and their ilk have overloaded the servers, they may have given the game a bad name, and the potential lost sales (if you include people who hear "it's lousy because you can't connect to the game servers blah blah blah") are actually greater ...
The "chemical changes in the brain" argument is bogus. ALL thought produces chemical changes in the brain. You cannot think without changing the brain's chemistry. And if the person can self-induce a chemical change in one direction, they can certainly induce it in another - IF they so desire. They CHOOSE not to. This is not the same as externally-induced chemical changes, or structural changes cause by the environment, accidents, drugs, alcohol, etc.
There's a difference between someone working themselves into a mental state (and the chemical changes associated with it) and chemical changes on the brain caused by outside chemicals.
Simple thought experiment: If someone with a a very strong will can break the "psychological addiction" with no real effort, then it's obvious that those who cannot are less strong-willed. In other words, "psychological addiction" is about willpower.
Stop excusing adults acting like spoiled children.
Just because addiction exists doesn't mean that punishment isn't one of the ways to cure it.
It could be argued that punishment makes doing the addictive thing more painful than the withdrawal symptoms from not doing it.
Worked for Pavlovs' followers. I guess you could say "In Soviet Russia, addiction punishes YOU!"
Better than "In decadent west, addiction excuses you."
Pain is necessary for the proper functioning of humans. It's how we learn not to put our hand in the fire, not to stick a knife in someone (because we know sharp things hurt), etc.
Telling them that "it's okay - yu're addicted to games" is NOT going to get them to change. What WILL get them to change is the same thing that gets other people to change - THEY have to want something else more. Or did you miss that point? If they don't want to change, why the FUCK should I care one way or another? Let them play. No skin off my nose. But don't start excusing their behaviour by saying it's "an addiction" - the next step is "we can treat it - give me money$$$", and after that - "let's sue the game manufacturers and distributors". You know it as well as I do - we've seen it before, with games.
You know there's a problem when EVERYTHING can fall under the same "addiction" metaphor. Computers. The Internet. Cars. Food, Books. Stamps. Coins. Soap Operas. American Idol. Matchsticks. Old newspapers. Glass. Flowers. Having babies (Octomom!!!) When EVERYTHING is addictive, then the term means nothing.
Using the scientific method to determine if someone does or doesn't have an addiction (or something is or isn't highly addictive) is merely a determination of fact.
HOw about you call me back when science has a method of determining if gaming is addictive other than their subjective assessment :-) People do not experience "severe trauma" when they're forced to stop playing games - they throw temper tantrums because they have had their toy taken away. Adults throwing temper tantrums because they can't play with their toys ... how fucking lame. The only thing lamer is people trying to make money off it by saying that "they're addicted, and need treatment - give me $$$." Follow the money. Money talks, and we know how this story ends ...
Too bad you didn't get the memo - many psychological problems are treatable via CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. It's more successful than ALL other treatments combined, and it includes a strong dose of "it's your problem and it's up to YOU to actively do something about it." Change your behaviour to change your thinking. (And as someone who always said Freud was full of shit, I was happy to see CBT kick ass :-)
Sexual disorders (such as pedophilia) fall into the same category. You can have mild pedophilia and be attracted, but still have control of your actions, you can have severe pedophilia and still have control of your actions, and you can have extreme pedophilia where it just dominates everything you think about.
Let's replace paedophilia with being horny.
"You can be mildly horny, but still have control of your actions, you can be severely horny and still have control of your actions, and you can be extremely horny where it just dominates everything you think about."
Would you say that the person who is "extremely horny" and where sex "just dominates everything they think about" has an excuse to rape someone? Of course not - even if all they can think of is sex, that's not an excuse (guys are supposed to think of sex what, 6 times a minute?) Think about it ... it's no different, really, than "game addiction." No matter how bad you want it, you still have the final say in whether you act on your urges or not.
"Game addiction" is bullshit.
Bad comparison. We don't see "gaming addiction" anywhere else in the animal kingdom, whereas same-sex activity is normal behaviour in many species.
Why? Because I think that people should be more responsible for their actions? That they should learn to have, not only will-power, but WON'T-power, as in "I won't do that because it's not the best thing for me right now"?
Obese people don't get that way overnight - it takes years of over-eating. And it will take just as much work to lose the weight, and for those who do make it, I say "congratulations" because there are few things more basic than eating. For those who want to hide behind lame excuses like "I'm big-boned" or "it's glandular", I don't buy it. Their metabolism cannot violate the laws of physics (thermodynamics). They need to stop lying to themselves.
Obese people are now being charged for the second seat on airplanes. This is fair. You take up two seats, you should have to pay for two seats. Obesity is a lifestyle problem, and we need to treat it as such. It's gotten so epidemic that, if you're normal weight, some people will say "OMG you need to put on some weight!" because they don't SEE normal people on a daily basis - all their friends and family are FAT.
If you want to solve such problems, you can't just slap a label on it and use it as a way to get people to "excuse" their situation. Whether its games or food, it's up to them to say "fuck this!" When someone says "I really want to lose weight" I say "No you don't - not as much as you want that 3rd helping." There's a difference between wishful thinking and motivation. Only motivation leads to action.
Have some junkie OD on a hot load, and the other junkies do not stop shooting dope. They actually try to find the source for the hot load so they can buy some, because it has to be good shit if such-and-such OD on it.
Some do, some don't. At one point, they either realize that they are NOT invulnerable, or they croak. They like to think "I'm different", just like everyone who has unprotected sex thinks "it won't happen to ME." Yeah, right ...
In other words, they develop the ability to control their impulsive behaviour. The physical addiction is still there - they have the craving, the urge - but they also learn that it is up to THEM to say "I will NOT do this."
If you want to search a table of users, by user name, you only need an index holding the encrypted values of their user names.
If "John Smith" is "de9ld933dd9ddd93d9da8080", you search for "de9ld933dd9ddd93d9da8080", and you get the encrypted data for that row in the table.
This is NOT the same as the case you're thinking of, where you want to do a plain-text search. In that case, you would have to drop all the stop words, then create indexes for the encrypted value of each significant phrase chunk. For "The cat is black", you would drop the words "The" and "is", then create indexes to that "document" on the encrypted values for "CAT", "BLACK", "CAT BLACK", and "BLACK CAT". Not that much different from existing full-text search (though this IS an over-simplification) - but it WILL work.
If you have an index with the filed "user" for "John Smith" (say it was "109fcu91833c098890"), there's no reason you can't search for user "109fcu91833c098890" and find the record associated with it.
Remember, you're not searching the text, just the index, which contains encrypted values.
I do this all the time - store a crc64 of a much longer datum - and I can now use the crc54 (8 bytes) instead of the datum itself, as an index value. Much better when your datum might be 100 or more characters, like a url.
Use your imagination a bit ... any method of generating an encrypted value will work with this, provided you use the same algorithm, the same salt, and the same data. Think about session data as one example - you don't search it by the user name, but by a generated datum.
Sure, there's a lot of newspaper reports about fat kids playing MMORPGs to the point of having no real life
"Sure, there's a lot of newspaper reports about fat people having no real life"
There, fixed it for you.
Even better:
"Sure, there's a lot of newspaper reports about people having no real life"
Try to argue against either one ... they're both just as accurate/inaccurate/stupid/nonsense/insightful/trollish/whatever. Newspapers say anything that sells, because if they didn't they'd go out of business even quicker.
When's the last time you saw a newspaper that reported the truth on the mortgage crisis in big headlines - that, for example, when Firth did a study on a sample of mortgage applications, every single one of them had fraud and misrepresentations by the applicants, so that, far from deserving a bailout, your neighbours should be in jail for fraud?
Way to miss the point :-) The GP poster claimed that macs were the exclusive purview of geeks. My point was that non-geeks like them too, not that ONLY non-geeks like them.
After my wife played with my computer for a few weeks, she wanted a Macbook. I'm pretty happy with it, too. She's dumb as a brick,
Oh man, what a set-up line ... please check all that apply ...
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she married ME!
[_] I am SO dumb that I married someone dumb as a brick!
[_] Blow-up dolls ARE as dumb as a brick, you ignorant clod!
[_] In Soviet Russia, dumb wife bricks YOU!
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she's the CowboyNeal option!
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she once burned water.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she lost the recipe for ice cubes.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she chases after cars.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she buried her father in a rented suit, and has been paying $50/month for years
[_] My wife is SO dumb, she complains that when I die, she doesn't know HOW she's going to keep paying my life insurance policy.
[_] My wife is SO dumb, when she won the lottery, she returned the ticket and insisted on another one because it didn't have "her" numbers on it.
The real one ...
[X] My wife is so smart, she conned me into buying her a mac.
Have a nice day :-)
How common is sports addiction anyway? I've never heard of people staying up until 3am to kick a soccer ball around several times a week or pissing in a water bottle because they couldn't bear to be away from the tennis court for a couple of minutes. MMORPG addicts behaving like that are a dime a dozen; sports addicts, not so much.
According to your criteria, second-hand sports addiction is very common. Guys will stop in the middle of sex because their stupid hockey game is on, or they'll find an excuse to go find a TV on their WEDDING DAY because the soccer game is on. Preachers hide mini tvs in their pulpits so they can keep track of the football game while they're preaching. Is any of this any better?
But to call it addiction in today's legal and social climate is to help "enable" the people who do it, just as calling morbidly obese people addicted to food would. It's time we took a real look at addiction, and admitted that there is always a choice involved - even for those who claim they can't stop. You can be darned sure that if you held a gun to their head, and told them that you'll pull the trigger if they don't stop, they will, if they've just seen you blow away the person next to them for the same reason.
To claim that there is no choice involved, ever, is to open up the door to pedophiles claiming they're "addicted" to having sex with 3-year-olds. Well, if they're "addicted", then they can't help themselves, and we have no right to punish them ... do you REALLY want to go there? Especially since there IS more evidence that pedophilia is an addiction than that gaming is... What about the person who shoplifts because they're "addicted" to bling? The person who defrauds millions because they're "addicted" to a certain social lifestyle and the endorphin high it gives them to lord it over eveyone? They don't need to be treated for addiction - they need to grow up.
Treat a kid like an adult, and they'll usually behave like one. Treat an adult like a child, and they'll behave like a child.
So, why are so many adults behaving childishly? Follow the endorphins. "It feels good" / gives an endorphin high - is NOT sufficient reason to lay a claim of addiction. The phony "disease" of kleptomania is just one example of how we make poor impulse control socially acceptable by mislabeling it. If you have poor impulse control and decide that you don't want to delay gratification, that's your choice. Live with the consequences. Drink yourself to death, eat yourself to death, game yourself to death, pile on credit card and mortgage debt to your financial ruin because you want it all, and you want it NOW - if you don't care, why should anyone else? But don't excuse it by saying you're addicted. After all, you LIKE it that way. Don't ask others to bail you out until you've learned the hard lessons, because only YOU can learn them, and that means YOU have to decide you're fed up with things as they are. Nobody else can make that choice for you, ever.
Treat a kid like an adult, and they'll usually behave like one. Treat an adult like a child, and they'll behave like a child.
Too many adults in this generation never really grew up. "Psychological addiction" is a joke. Label it what it really is - poor impulse control - by people who refuse to take responsibility for ruining their lives. THEN maybe we'll be in a better position to actually treat it, by confronting people with the fact that they need to learn to take control of their lives instead of playing the victim card all the time. Example: impulsive eaters are claiming discrimination because they're now being charged for the second seat. They should shut their mouths ... actually, they should have shut them 20 years ago, after that 5th piece of cake. Funny how we don't accept that with little children, but in adults, we slap the "psychological addiction" label on it, and poor impulse control is suddenly socially excusable. Fuck that - and
Ah, grasshopper, with a rickshaw, you won't have to worry about rolling down the windows ... and this way, everyone else can "share the fragrance."
Okay, instead of a rickshaw, how about an electric-assist pedal-cab? Still open, so the smell doesn't concentrate, and the operator won't sweat quite as much.
Apple's approach is to limit stuff to people prepared to pay well over the odds for hardware. Sure, iPods are popular, but I don't know any non-nerds with a Mac.
The only people I know with a mac are non-nerds ... who got fed up with Windows and wanted something that "just works".
For extra revenue, hook up with a fat farm or fitness club and CHARGE people to pull the rickshaws ...
"Fark that!"
What, you thought I was going to make a "We welcome our photoshopping overlords" comment? The overlords are dead - netcraft confirmed it. That's what you get for basing your borg on bsd.
Direct them at tasers and they could first trigger lightning to spark and then act as a convenient but short-lived lightning rod to guide it safely to the ground, according to some researchers."
If a laser could intercept the dart before it hits you ... I can just see it now - instead of tin-foil hats, geeks will be wearing their anti-taser laser phasers.
How Much Do I Need To Earn To Live? - Suppose your game takes a year to write and thus, counting salaries, needs to earn about $100K to break even.
If that's the case, you really need to find another job. Salaries - plural, plus other expenses for a year (employer's contribution to payroll taxes, health, etc), of $100k a year? I hope, for their sake, it's not more than 2 people ...
Oh, And a Quick Note For Those Who Disagree With Me ...
If you don't care about the people who work so hard to entertain you being able to charge a price that enables them to survive, I have no interest in what you have to say.
That's okay ... what you have to say is pretty much bullshit whining anyway.
I don't think you're going to win him over somehow.
Yu're fairly right, of course. Between the problems with getting perl to do something that was not that much work in c, and the length of time it would take to run to completion, it was quicker to just do it in c. Open a couple of buffers, fill one up, scan through it, strcat the good stuff to the second buffer, when the second buffer gets enough data, write it out. The extra bonus was that it ran quickly, so it was easy enough to verify the outut was both sane and sanitized.
Perl 5.8 and higher do just fine with Unicode. With older versions, though, yeah, that was a problem.
It WAS perl 5.8, and perl insisted on "doing the right thing", handling unicode transparently, which was exactly the wrong thing for what I wanted to do with cleaning up 80 gigs of data and removing entries polluted with unicode crapola, with some exceptions that I could redo with 8-bit ascii ...
Perl is a mess. Not that other languages aren't ... just that even GOOD perl code looks fugly.
Seems to me they should put their money where their mouth is...
Sun *DID* put their money where their mouth is. They developed java, then GPL'd it. They bought StarOffice, the GPL'd it.
Google, on the other hand, is an advertising company that is trying to get lock-in, same as Microsoft did with their proprietary java extensions long long ago ...
Alphabet? You don't work with Perl much, do you?
Not any more - it choked too many times on unicode, so I went back to c. ... If I want to pay the price of a slow runtime interpreter, I can always use java.