I can confirm that this is occuring. I work at a University, and while they do not, technically, ban Skype outright, they might as well. The reason for this is that Skype likes to put computers on our network into supernode mode (considering the bandwidth here, I understand why it happens). The problem is that it starts eating bandwidth like mad, and reduces bandwidth available for other users. So, in order to combat the bandwidth hogging, Skype traffic is throttled at the firewall; it is still allowed to connect and use some bandwidth, but you can forget video conferencing. And before I get any of the "but, but, but...student's rights" type posts: we are a private university, i.e. no public funds; the students have the right to go elsewhere if they don't like it.
Actually, this is a rather timely article, as I am working on setting up a video conferencing room and need to find good free/cheap options.
You do realize that he is up for re-election in November, and that his major opponent is none other than the person who passed the information on to the LA Times? And that the LA Times went on to quote Phil Angeledies as being very outraged, in the same article that they broke the story. Those of us in California, with more than half a brain (which does eliminate a large portion of the state's population), realized it for what it was: election year mud-slinging. The LA Times is generally expected to be a left slanted newspaper, and they do what they can to attack Schwarzenegger at any possible time. So, running a story, on the front page, about an off-color comment, made in a closed door meeting, (which didn't even offend the person who was being talked about. She actually took it as a point of pride, being called "hot blooded.") is absolutly no suprise.
You're missing the obvious: you're supposed to live like the peasant you are!
Seriously, what this idea of "carbon neutral" by buying off your bad habits is doing is promoting class warfare. The people with money will live like they are now, and the rest of the populous will suffer to support it. It's outright stupid. The only way there is going to be positive change in the way things occur, is if the rich elites are forced to deal with the same problems as the rest of society. As is usually the case, this will not happen, and nothing will change until society is crumbling around the ears of the rich, and their money is no longer ale to insulate them from the effects of it. Allowing people a pass because they can buy their way out of it is a recipe for disaster.
I think that the quest system is one of the big draws for WoW for casual gamers like myself. I can log on in the evening, after dinner, play for a few hours and come away with a feeling of accomplishment, and still get enough sleep so that I can work the following day. Blizzard has done a lot right with WoW, and one of those things is allowing casual gamers to enjoy the game. I've tried a bunch of different MMORPG's, this one stuck because I didn't have to sink my life into it, just to be able to do anything interesting.
You're makeing a couple of possible bad assumptions. First off the poster mentoined DVD's as well as CD's. If they are working with something like GIS data (large rasters, etc) it is quite possible that, not only are the discs full, but they are probably receiveing multipule discs per job. At 30,000 discs, if you assume an average of 2GB per disc you have ~60TB. Which doesn't seem unreasonable. Just to give some perspective I maintain a 4.5TB RAID array for an office of about 25 people. This is not because of wasteful use, it's because we deal with some big rasters and generate a lot of maps/posters/etc which contain large, uncompressable, images. My array is nearly full and we will probably be expanding soon, especially if we have to host the data for one project we have possibly comming in, which would add about 10TB of data (god be thanked we built some expandability into our array, now I just have to figure out where the hell I'm going to put the drive trays and the UPS to keep the thing chuging along in case of power failure, my racks are starting to look full.)
As for CD storage, other posters have it right: get automated jukeboxes. I have a number of simple CD towers, which hold 100 discs each. They all plug into a computer via USB. Said computer has a program and database of all the discs and you can search for and eject a specific disc through that interface. While CD spindles are great for space saving, good luck finding anything in them. If you have perfect following of all rules and procedures for storage and retrival, you'll be fine. Some one screws it up once and you are going to spend more in man hours to straigten it out than it would have cost to buy the jukeboxes.
I find that the two most often ignored amendments are the ninth and tenth. Amendment IX The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, the often used bullshit argument that there is no right to privacy listed in the Constitution is just that: bullshit. We have rights not listed in the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights was never meant as a full list. On the other hand, if we look at the tenth amendment: Amendment X The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If a power is not given to the Federal Government by the Constitution, the Federal Government is not supposed to be allowed to wield it. I wonder how many powers the Federal Government is using these days which aren't really constitutionaly justified? Unfortunatly, the Constitution left open the hole that, ultimatly it is a federal body which decides which powers the Federal Government gets, with the only checking on it is done by the Federal Government. Ideally, this would have worked, as the Constitution was written, but we moved away from some key points. For example, senators were not supposed to be democratically elected. It was intended that they would be selected by the state governments, which means that the states could make sure that the senators would be interested in preserving state's rights. Once the senators were no longer beholden to the states, it opened up the possibility for the Senate to start taking powers from the state governments, with little repercussions. And now we have the expected end result, an out of control Federal Government with no respect for the states or the people.
The problem isn't necessaily that laws will be passed to make things illegal. Throwing people in jail isn't the only way to get rid of them. If the government does reach the point of despotism, I expect that due process will be the first thing to go. And death squads in the streets will be perfectly happy to use data collected by a previously benevolent government to pick out targets. The point is that the government has no right to such information and should not be allowed to have it. The question isn't: if you have nothing why do you have anything to hide? The real question should be: why does the government need to know? If they cannot answer that question (i.e. go before a judge and get a warrant) then they should not be allowed to collect that information.
Was I the only one that thought immediatly of Asimov's dsytopian Earth in the Robot Novels when I read this? How long until we reach the point that all work is directed by machines? And will humanity accept it? I think that, in then end, laziness will win out and we will stagnate and decay under machine rule. The only question about such a state is: if there are machines running evrything, will they find a way to compensate and keep the majority of humanity comfortable enough to not revolt?
Fortunatly, it's a long way off before that level of sophistication will exist, so at least I'll be dead. Still, I do sort of wish I could watch the outcome.
This is a big problem with casual players. I'm part of a casual player guild, and am a casual player myself. Whlie we do have one or two members who would love to be doing the 5 night a week raiding, the rest of us just aren't able or willing to put in the time. For myself, I just don't have the time. I work 8-5 and have an hour commute each way. So, by the time I get home and get dinner cooked and eaten, it's around 7pm. If I want to get a reasonable amount of sleep, I go to bed by 11. this leaves 4 hours each night of "free" time. I can't spend all of that playing a video game. Somewhere in there I have laundry, house cleaning, and everything else associated with living a normal life. In the end, we do most of our raiding on weekends because that's when everyone has plenty of free time. Even that is irregular, since most of us actually have lives that we like to go live.
The worry that is now facing the guild is that we have several people hitting 60, but no where near enough to do some of the large raids. And unless we have some huge membership boosts, it's just not going to happen. We have about 20 unique players, most of which are somewhere between levels 20 and 40. Even if everyone made it to 60, we still wouldn't be doing the 40-man raids without either half the group being a pickup or teaming up with another guild (which is what we are planning to try to do).
The problem that these 'local Nerd Brigades' are running into is a choice of:
A) Do it right, and spend the next few months dealing with a complaining user who can't do a lot of stuff with the machine. At which point they have to teach him about the administrator account, which the user will just start using to avoid having to deal with security anyway.
B) Do it wrong and make money off the sucker when he comes in to have his PC cleaned of spyware.
C) Sell him a Mac and hope that he wasn't insterested in gaming.
Personally, I would like to option 'C' used more often, but too many customers think they know what they want, and aren't willing to listen to reason.
P.S. Yes, I know gaming exists on the Mac; however, go to most game stores and compare shelf space. PC gaming may be dying, but Mac gaming is several miles ahead of it down the shaft.
Having inherited a Sharepoint implementation, I've found that the best way to deal with the browser issue (assuming you use FireFox) is the 'IE in a Tab' extension. Sure, it's still IE running, but at least it integrates into your FireFox browser, and with some rules work on the extension, you can make sure that your Sharepoint site links come up correctly.
And yes, Sharepoint et al. are really just a way of getting everyone to organize better. Though, the document workspaces are nice, since they offer automatic versioning. Also, the real pain with Sharepoint is that it pretends like it's going to integrate with AD and Exchange, but that's largely a sham. It knows they exist, and can even get usernames from them, but that's about it. Because it was a business decision to move to Sharepoint, I'm stuck with it, I'm just hoping that the next version is at least half as nice as MS is promising.
You've not used Windows much in the past 3 years or so, have you?
Explain to me this why can't I download an application to install, save it to my desktop, rt. click the installer file and run-as admin to install it in the privilaged programs directory?
Ok, you can't do exactly that. It's more like:
download an application to install,
save it to my desktop, Shift rt. click the installer file
and run-as admin to install it in the privilaged programs directory
I know, having to hit shift to have the 'run as' show up in the context menu is such a pain in the ass.
...it runs fine as an unpriveleged user...
You do, of course, realize that this is the fault of the program's developer and not Windows, which creates this problem. If a program is properly written, it never gets outside the HKCU registry hive during runtime; and certainly never touches system files. But, since we're bashing MS, it's ok to ignore the source of a problem.
installing McAfee, you have to use IE period, you have to let McAfee install an ActiveX controll into IE period, you have to do this as admin...blah, blah, blah...I don't know Windows well enough so I'm just going to bash it. Someone call the Wahhhambulance. In linux I can just:
su -c"pacman -S clamav"
type in the admin password and pacman goobles up everything I need and installs it.
And I assume:
runas/user:administrator "c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe http://mcaffe.com/installer"
Is too hard? Granted, it would be eaiser if the path to iexplore was in the PATH environmental variable, but that would require some work on the user's part.
Windows does have a lot of problems (BSOD on program crashes, easily circumvented security, etc), but let's at least be honest about it.
Yes actually. I have had some who didn't realize that they should still change their password from the default. Also, a determined hacker can use Gummi Bears to fool them.
I'm 29 and I can here the range just fine (assuming the article linked to above in this discussion has accurate sound clips). The problem with saying that "no one" above 25 can hear it, assumes that everyone is exactly the same, which is quite far from the truth. The article author's neighborhood may just have a bunch of people that have good hearing for being over 25.
As for how to deal with it:
1. Talk to the neighbor rationally, try to find out what it is he is having problems with, and see if you can arrive at a mutually agreeable solution.
2. If the neighbor is just being ridiculous in his requests (e.g. no kids playing on the street) get the police involved
3. When the police prove impotent several times, get a lawyer to file a complaint.
4. If the guy still won't be reasonable, then go ahead and disbale the device in the middle of the night.
It's one thing to do as you please on your property, but when your actions are affecting the quality of life of those around you, you have overstepped your rights.
The Palladium system is a good system, but it is not a GREAT system.
Whatever it is you're smoking, can I get a hit? The Palladium system is unadulterated crap. On the other hand, the game worlds Palladium comes up with are second to none. I love the Rifts world, and occasioanlly am willing to muddle through the shit system and even worse editing to play in it, but that is getting to be less frequent. I would love to see Rifts d20 (Mind you, I'm not sure how good d20 would really be for Rifts, but it would be an improvement.), but Siembieda has been activly killing off any such attempts.
Unfortunatly, Siembieda is way to full of himself to admit that he can't make a game system worth a damn, I really don't see him (and by extension Palladium) moving to anything better.
Blind MS bashing on/.? Never. Ok, a bit.
Actually, the biggest problem with XP (and 2003) is that a driver problem or a program problem can escalate to a full system lockup. To me, the bigest change MS could make to the OS, which would help, would be to isolate the drives and programs enough that I can lose say the IDE controller in a SCSI based system and not end up at a BSOD (I'm actually dealing with this exact problem today on a Server 2003 R2 system). A similar problem I run into is on my laptop (A Sony Vaio). It has a fingerprint reader for logon, which is fun (if bad for security). The system is XP Pro with SP2, and all updates. However, the software for the fingerprint reader replaces GINA.DLL with a special DLL for handling login via fingerprint. That DLL is buggy and about 1 out of 10 boots and/or shutdowns, it crashes to a BSOD. Reboot, and everything is good.
The problem is, since it causes Windows to crash out, many people see this as the OS crashing, not as a driver crashing. And in the end, they are right; the OS lost it because of a non-essential DLL crashing, the OS is just as "at fault" as the DLL. For a DLL which runs the logon process, just let it die and restart it, don't punt me to a fatal crash screen.
Personally, I'm with the people who are willing to let the "thru" spelling go. Languages change over time, and usually its a result of usage. Given the shift in common usage to using "thru", as opposed to "through", I expect that in 20 years time, or so, that this will be the accepted spelling, with the older "through" relegated to an archaic spelling that only geeks and old people use.
I also don't expect that any sort of grand scheme to simplify English is going to get very far. People are just going to do what they are used to. And, after they leave school, proper english becomes less important. Yes, people will be judged by the way they write and speak, but, with the exception of grammar nazis, no one really looks all that closely at it. Any attempt to make a large change will run into a wall of complacency and lack of enforcability.
One of the best 2d games I have seen in a while was Starscape. Great visuals, great gameplay. Just a ton of 2d goodness. I'm just waiting for Moopod to finally finish up War Angles now.
Why do some people still like the idea of ThAC0? It was the most broken of ideas ever put into D&D. (BTW, ThAC0 was in D&D, before the A got added, and well before 2nd Ed.) Of course, if you look hard enough at it, 3rd and 3.5 editions still have it, they just did the sensible thing and multiplied a -1 through the whole damn thing and rectified it.
Ok, just go with the fighter for simplicity, those who care to you can work out the rest.
ThAC0: each level the Fighter's ThAC0 goes down 1. (e.g. 19, 18, 17, etc.)
3rd: each level the Fighters To Hit bonus goes up 1. (e.g. +1, +2, +3, etc.)
So, at this point, we have just changed from subtracting 1 each level, starting at 20 to adding 1 each level starting at 0. So the delta is the same, but the starting point and sign has changed.
ThAC0: Naked opponent has an AC of 10, 1st level fighter with a ThAC0 of 19 hits on a roll of a 9 (ignoring Str., magic, etc.)
3rd: Naked opponent has an AC of 10, 1st level fighter with a To Hit bonus of +1 hits on a roll of a 9.(same conditions)
At this point, the mechanics work out exactly the same, the only differece is the method to get there.
ThAC0: ThAC0 of 19 - AC of 10 = 9 to hit roll.
3rd: AC of 10 - +1 To Hit Bonus = 9 to hit roll.
Again, we're arriving at the same point.
Next up, armor.
Leather armor:
ThAC0: Reduces your AC by 4 (gives you an AC of 6)
3rd: Increses your AC by 4 (gives you an AC of 14)
If you have a ThAC0 of 17 or a +3 To Hit bonus and roll a 12, what AC do you hit (do you hit the guy in leather)?
ThAC0: ThAC0 17 - roll of 12 = AC 5 (Hit)
3rd: 12 roll + 3 bonus = AC 15 (Hit)
Notice that, not only do both work out to hit the guy in leather, they both do so with the exact same margin i.e. by 1 more than was needed.
So, both work out the same, why do I call ThAC0 broken? Look back through the process and consider the average combat.
DM: Roll to hit.
Player: *rolls*
DM: What AC did you hit?
Player (ThAC0 version): ThAC0 of 17 minus 12 is....5 I hit an AC of 5
Player (3rd ed. version): 12 + 3 is 15 I hit a 15
(rest of combat)
In the ThAC0 version, the player was having to do subtraction, in the 3rd. ed. version the player did addition (and can accomplish it through counting). It's a subtle diffrence, but for many people, who are not great at math, addition is easier that subtration, primarilly because they know how to count (I've listened to players do this). This is why a very popular method of teaching people to give change is called Counting Change Up. It's easy to do for the non-math inclined.
When you get down to it, ThAC0 isn't gone. 3rd. Ed. just got rid of the subtraction. Yes, if you want to figure out the roll you need to hit something you have to do subtraction; that is not a necessary step. Telling the DM what AC you just hit is. For many players, 3rd Ed. allows them to completly avoid subtraction, and makes the game smoother and more accessible.
I had the same thought, though I had to wonder, how resistant is this "filter" to clogging? If we have a bunch of bacteria in the water (which seems to be a reasonable assumption), as those bacteria get driven against the filter, will they cause clog and lose efficiency?
I live in the Mojave Desert (Southern California part), and while we are not yet facing water rationing, we are probably not too far away from it; especially considering the number of people leaving Los Angeles and the surrounding area to the desert. Much of Southern California's water is fed to it via the California Aqueduct. The areas the Aquaduct draw from are being drained at an alarming rate. Also, our local water table is overtapped and the water we pull from the Colorado River's watershed (e.g. Mojave River) is slowly causing a problem for those downstream from us (but who cares about Mexico, right?). There is a long running argument (back at least as far as the '70s) about setting up desalinization plants on the coast to feed LA and the surrounding deserts. It would take a lot of pressure off of the lakes which feed the Aquaduct, and off of the Colorado River.
As an intersting note in this. Avalon on Santa Catalina Island (off the California coast) gets it fresh water via desalinization.
The reason that they can do it is that We The People let them. We accepted the argument that there are reasonable limits on free speech. Some of this is probably valid, and some of it is spurious. For exmaple, truth in advertising laws. While they are technically an abridgement of speech, it is probably a good idea. The whole idea of cavet emptor looks great on paper, but it fails in that our society has far too much knowledge for any one person to make a reasonable, informed decision in every situation. While it is possible for people to get reasonable information, we would spend so much time doing research, nothing would ever be accomplished. Also, lies in advertising do not serve a valid purpose and can lead to harm. If you look at some of the stuff which has been advertised in the past as health remedies, it becomes clear why society accepted such constraints on free speech. From this follows the claim that commercial speech is not as protected as non-commercial speech, which is the accepted view in US courts. This isn't so bad, there is a distinct line of "protected" vs. "non-protected" speech and the type of speech which is constrained does not serve a valid purpose in society.
However, rather than stop this at just commercial speech, we let it go one step further. Consider the ever popular example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. In this case we are trying to create an artifical area of "unsafe" speech. This is a debateable step. On one hand, the speech is likely to cause harm, assuming people stampede; on the other, if there really is a fire, I would hope someone would be kind enough to inform everyone of the danger, i.e., yell, "fire!" So, now we have a form of speech, which does not have a clear dividing line of when it's ok and when it's not; and there is the potential that the speech will be useful to society. In the end, the people accepted that this sort of thing should be decided after the fact. Again, this is probably not a horrible way to deal with the situation, we have simply criminalized putting people in danger needlessly. The downside of this is that we are left facing the possibility that anything we say may get dragged into a grey area and we could end up in jail for breaking a not well defined law.
The last piece of the puzzle to "how we ended up here" is when politicians realized that the people would accept just about any argument, as long as it was framed as a way to protect children. The argument was made that certain types of speech are harmful to children. Because of an unwillingness by the people to say, "no" to anything to protect the children the FCC was given the power to censor speech ad hoc and since we had already accepted the argument that speech could be determined to be harmful after the fact, this expansion was quite natural. And, unsuprisingly, with the prevelence of Christianity and their morals in our government and society, this ability has been used to censor anything that violates normal Christian mores. The Janet Jackson flashing incident is a good example of this. A single nipple causes an uproar and fines, while the standard violance in primetime television doesn't even cause comment.
In order for this type of censorship to stop, two things need to happen:
The US people need to quit the "protect the children" habit. As a people we need to actually inspect the claims put out by politicans and groups pushing more restrictive laws, even when they claim that it will "protect children."
Roll back the criminalizing of any private speech. Go ahead, yell, "fire" in a crowded theater, you won't be fined or arrested. On the other hand, you are directly responsible for a bunch of people getting hurt/killed; your ass will probably be sued into abject poverty. Nothing about free speech absolves you of the responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
Of course, the chance of that happening is probably so low as to be negative.
I doubt that it was too hard to sway the thrid parties.
Nintendo Rep: "We want to sell your old games for you again, can we?"
Third party guy: "How much is this going to cost me?"
Nintendo Rep: "Nothing, just give us a copy of the ROM code, and a license to sell it. You'll get 3 bucks a download."
Third Party Rep: "Here you go, you can even keep the floppy."
While there is some argument about self competition, and having your library availabe for one of those "Classics" discs which performed like a lead ballon, I doubt anyone lost any sleep over this. Except maybe a few accountants who were fapping all night long to the potential profit and almost zero cost.
Same here. I grew up with a NES and SNES in the house, and bought the N64 with money from my first job. There are plenty of titles I missed because of a lack of disposable income. I was fairly active in renting games, and had plenty I started but never got to finish, and would love to have a chance to go back and play some of them again. While I realize that some games are far better through the rose colored glasses of nostolgia, there are still a number of gems that stand the test of time. Just recently, because of the information on the new Super Smash Bros. having Pit from Kid Icarus, I went back and played through Kid Icarus again. Yep, it's 8-bit pallete shifting goodness, just like I remember; still worth playing. Hell, I even pulled out graph paper to map out the castles again, I've long since lost the ones my brother and I made years ago.
My next retro project, the Original Fallout, followed by 2 and 3. Borrowed off a friend who's been mentioning them as some of the best games of all time. As far as I have seen of the first one, he is right. Might have to go back and play through Wasteland again, just for completness.
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I can confirm that this is occuring. I work at a University, and while they do not, technically, ban Skype outright, they might as well. The reason for this is that Skype likes to put computers on our network into supernode mode (considering the bandwidth here, I understand why it happens). The problem is that it starts eating bandwidth like mad, and reduces bandwidth available for other users. So, in order to combat the bandwidth hogging, Skype traffic is throttled at the firewall; it is still allowed to connect and use some bandwidth, but you can forget video conferencing. And before I get any of the "but, but, but...student's rights" type posts: we are a private university, i.e. no public funds; the students have the right to go elsewhere if they don't like it.
Actually, this is a rather timely article, as I am working on setting up a video conferencing room and need to find good free/cheap options.
You do realize that he is up for re-election in November, and that his major opponent is none other than the person who passed the information on to the LA Times? And that the LA Times went on to quote Phil Angeledies as being very outraged, in the same article that they broke the story. Those of us in California, with more than half a brain (which does eliminate a large portion of the state's population), realized it for what it was: election year mud-slinging. The LA Times is generally expected to be a left slanted newspaper, and they do what they can to attack Schwarzenegger at any possible time. So, running a story, on the front page, about an off-color comment, made in a closed door meeting, (which didn't even offend the person who was being talked about. She actually took it as a point of pride, being called "hot blooded.") is absolutly no suprise.
You're missing the obvious: you're supposed to live like the peasant you are!
Seriously, what this idea of "carbon neutral" by buying off your bad habits is doing is promoting class warfare. The people with money will live like they are now, and the rest of the populous will suffer to support it. It's outright stupid. The only way there is going to be positive change in the way things occur, is if the rich elites are forced to deal with the same problems as the rest of society. As is usually the case, this will not happen, and nothing will change until society is crumbling around the ears of the rich, and their money is no longer ale to insulate them from the effects of it. Allowing people a pass because they can buy their way out of it is a recipe for disaster.
I think that the quest system is one of the big draws for WoW for casual gamers like myself. I can log on in the evening, after dinner, play for a few hours and come away with a feeling of accomplishment, and still get enough sleep so that I can work the following day. Blizzard has done a lot right with WoW, and one of those things is allowing casual gamers to enjoy the game. I've tried a bunch of different MMORPG's, this one stuck because I didn't have to sink my life into it, just to be able to do anything interesting.
You're makeing a couple of possible bad assumptions. First off the poster mentoined DVD's as well as CD's. If they are working with something like GIS data (large rasters, etc) it is quite possible that, not only are the discs full, but they are probably receiveing multipule discs per job. At 30,000 discs, if you assume an average of 2GB per disc you have ~60TB. Which doesn't seem unreasonable. Just to give some perspective I maintain a 4.5TB RAID array for an office of about 25 people. This is not because of wasteful use, it's because we deal with some big rasters and generate a lot of maps/posters/etc which contain large, uncompressable, images. My array is nearly full and we will probably be expanding soon, especially if we have to host the data for one project we have possibly comming in, which would add about 10TB of data (god be thanked we built some expandability into our array, now I just have to figure out where the hell I'm going to put the drive trays and the UPS to keep the thing chuging along in case of power failure, my racks are starting to look full.)
As for CD storage, other posters have it right: get automated jukeboxes. I have a number of simple CD towers, which hold 100 discs each. They all plug into a computer via USB. Said computer has a program and database of all the discs and you can search for and eject a specific disc through that interface. While CD spindles are great for space saving, good luck finding anything in them. If you have perfect following of all rules and procedures for storage and retrival, you'll be fine. Some one screws it up once and you are going to spend more in man hours to straigten it out than it would have cost to buy the jukeboxes.
I find that the two most often ignored amendments are the ninth and tenth.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words, the often used bullshit argument that there is no right to privacy listed in the Constitution is just that: bullshit. We have rights not listed in the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights was never meant as a full list. On the other hand, if we look at the tenth amendment:
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
If a power is not given to the Federal Government by the Constitution, the Federal Government is not supposed to be allowed to wield it. I wonder how many powers the Federal Government is using these days which aren't really constitutionaly justified? Unfortunatly, the Constitution left open the hole that, ultimatly it is a federal body which decides which powers the Federal Government gets, with the only checking on it is done by the Federal Government. Ideally, this would have worked, as the Constitution was written, but we moved away from some key points. For example, senators were not supposed to be democratically elected. It was intended that they would be selected by the state governments, which means that the states could make sure that the senators would be interested in preserving state's rights. Once the senators were no longer beholden to the states, it opened up the possibility for the Senate to start taking powers from the state governments, with little repercussions. And now we have the expected end result, an out of control Federal Government with no respect for the states or the people.
The problem isn't necessaily that laws will be passed to make things illegal. Throwing people in jail isn't the only way to get rid of them. If the government does reach the point of despotism, I expect that due process will be the first thing to go. And death squads in the streets will be perfectly happy to use data collected by a previously benevolent government to pick out targets. The point is that the government has no right to such information and should not be allowed to have it. The question isn't: if you have nothing why do you have anything to hide? The real question should be: why does the government need to know? If they cannot answer that question (i.e. go before a judge and get a warrant) then they should not be allowed to collect that information.
These colors don't run....the world....Yet.
Was I the only one that thought immediatly of Asimov's dsytopian Earth in the Robot Novels when I read this? How long until we reach the point that all work is directed by machines? And will humanity accept it? I think that, in then end, laziness will win out and we will stagnate and decay under machine rule. The only question about such a state is: if there are machines running evrything, will they find a way to compensate and keep the majority of humanity comfortable enough to not revolt?
Fortunatly, it's a long way off before that level of sophistication will exist, so at least I'll be dead. Still, I do sort of wish I could watch the outcome.
This is a big problem with casual players. I'm part of a casual player guild, and am a casual player myself. Whlie we do have one or two members who would love to be doing the 5 night a week raiding, the rest of us just aren't able or willing to put in the time. For myself, I just don't have the time. I work 8-5 and have an hour commute each way. So, by the time I get home and get dinner cooked and eaten, it's around 7pm. If I want to get a reasonable amount of sleep, I go to bed by 11. this leaves 4 hours each night of "free" time. I can't spend all of that playing a video game. Somewhere in there I have laundry, house cleaning, and everything else associated with living a normal life. In the end, we do most of our raiding on weekends because that's when everyone has plenty of free time. Even that is irregular, since most of us actually have lives that we like to go live.
The worry that is now facing the guild is that we have several people hitting 60, but no where near enough to do some of the large raids. And unless we have some huge membership boosts, it's just not going to happen. We have about 20 unique players, most of which are somewhere between levels 20 and 40. Even if everyone made it to 60, we still wouldn't be doing the 40-man raids without either half the group being a pickup or teaming up with another guild (which is what we are planning to try to do).
The problem that these 'local Nerd Brigades' are running into is a choice of:
A) Do it right, and spend the next few months dealing with a complaining user who can't do a lot of stuff with the machine. At which point they have to teach him about the administrator account, which the user will just start using to avoid having to deal with security anyway.
B) Do it wrong and make money off the sucker when he comes in to have his PC cleaned of spyware.
C) Sell him a Mac and hope that he wasn't insterested in gaming.
Personally, I would like to option 'C' used more often, but too many customers think they know what they want, and aren't willing to listen to reason.
P.S. Yes, I know gaming exists on the Mac; however, go to most game stores and compare shelf space. PC gaming may be dying, but Mac gaming is several miles ahead of it down the shaft.
Having inherited a Sharepoint implementation, I've found that the best way to deal with the browser issue (assuming you use FireFox) is the 'IE in a Tab' extension. Sure, it's still IE running, but at least it integrates into your FireFox browser, and with some rules work on the extension, you can make sure that your Sharepoint site links come up correctly.
And yes, Sharepoint et al. are really just a way of getting everyone to organize better. Though, the document workspaces are nice, since they offer automatic versioning. Also, the real pain with Sharepoint is that it pretends like it's going to integrate with AD and Exchange, but that's largely a sham. It knows they exist, and can even get usernames from them, but that's about it. Because it was a business decision to move to Sharepoint, I'm stuck with it, I'm just hoping that the next version is at least half as nice as MS is promising.
You've not used Windows much in the past 3 years or so, have you?
...it runs fine as an unpriveleged user...
/user:administrator "c:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe http://mcaffe.com/installer"
Explain to me this why can't I download an application to install, save it to my desktop, rt. click the installer file and run-as admin to install it in the privilaged programs directory?
Ok, you can't do exactly that. It's more like:
download an application to install,
save it to my desktop,
Shift rt. click the installer file
and run-as admin to install it in the privilaged programs directory
I know, having to hit shift to have the 'run as' show up in the context menu is such a pain in the ass.
You do, of course, realize that this is the fault of the program's developer and not Windows, which creates this problem. If a program is properly written, it never gets outside the HKCU registry hive during runtime; and certainly never touches system files. But, since we're bashing MS, it's ok to ignore the source of a problem.
installing McAfee, you have to use IE period, you have to let McAfee install an ActiveX controll into IE period, you have to do this as admin...blah, blah, blah...I don't know Windows well enough so I'm just going to bash it. Someone call the Wahhhambulance.
In linux I can just:
su -c"pacman -S clamav"
type in the admin password and pacman goobles up everything I need and installs it.
And I assume:
runas
Is too hard? Granted, it would be eaiser if the path to iexplore was in the PATH environmental variable, but that would require some work on the user's part.
Windows does have a lot of problems (BSOD on program crashes, easily circumvented security, etc), but let's at least be honest about it.
Yes actually. I have had some who didn't realize that they should still change their password from the default. Also, a determined hacker can use Gummi Bears to fool them.
I'm 29 and I can here the range just fine (assuming the article linked to above in this discussion has accurate sound clips). The problem with saying that "no one" above 25 can hear it, assumes that everyone is exactly the same, which is quite far from the truth. The article author's neighborhood may just have a bunch of people that have good hearing for being over 25. As for how to deal with it: 1. Talk to the neighbor rationally, try to find out what it is he is having problems with, and see if you can arrive at a mutually agreeable solution. 2. If the neighbor is just being ridiculous in his requests (e.g. no kids playing on the street) get the police involved 3. When the police prove impotent several times, get a lawyer to file a complaint. 4. If the guy still won't be reasonable, then go ahead and disbale the device in the middle of the night. It's one thing to do as you please on your property, but when your actions are affecting the quality of life of those around you, you have overstepped your rights.
The Palladium system is a good system, but it is not a GREAT system.
Whatever it is you're smoking, can I get a hit? The Palladium system is unadulterated crap. On the other hand, the game worlds Palladium comes up with are second to none. I love the Rifts world, and occasioanlly am willing to muddle through the shit system and even worse editing to play in it, but that is getting to be less frequent. I would love to see Rifts d20 (Mind you, I'm not sure how good d20 would really be for Rifts, but it would be an improvement.), but Siembieda has been activly killing off any such attempts.
Unfortunatly, Siembieda is way to full of himself to admit that he can't make a game system worth a damn, I really don't see him (and by extension Palladium) moving to anything better.
Blind MS bashing on /.? Never. Ok, a bit.
Actually, the biggest problem with XP (and 2003) is that a driver problem or a program problem can escalate to a full system lockup. To me, the bigest change MS could make to the OS, which would help, would be to isolate the drives and programs enough that I can lose say the IDE controller in a SCSI based system and not end up at a BSOD (I'm actually dealing with this exact problem today on a Server 2003 R2 system). A similar problem I run into is on my laptop (A Sony Vaio). It has a fingerprint reader for logon, which is fun (if bad for security). The system is XP Pro with SP2, and all updates. However, the software for the fingerprint reader replaces GINA.DLL with a special DLL for handling login via fingerprint. That DLL is buggy and about 1 out of 10 boots and/or shutdowns, it crashes to a BSOD. Reboot, and everything is good.
The problem is, since it causes Windows to crash out, many people see this as the OS crashing, not as a driver crashing. And in the end, they are right; the OS lost it because of a non-essential DLL crashing, the OS is just as "at fault" as the DLL. For a DLL which runs the logon process, just let it die and restart it, don't punt me to a fatal crash screen.
Personally, I'm with the people who are willing to let the "thru" spelling go. Languages change over time, and usually its a result of usage. Given the shift in common usage to using "thru", as opposed to "through", I expect that in 20 years time, or so, that this will be the accepted spelling, with the older "through" relegated to an archaic spelling that only geeks and old people use.
I also don't expect that any sort of grand scheme to simplify English is going to get very far. People are just going to do what they are used to. And, after they leave school, proper english becomes less important. Yes, people will be judged by the way they write and speak, but, with the exception of grammar nazis, no one really looks all that closely at it. Any attempt to make a large change will run into a wall of complacency and lack of enforcability.
One of the best 2d games I have seen in a while was Starscape. Great visuals, great gameplay. Just a ton of 2d goodness. I'm just waiting for Moopod to finally finish up War Angles now.
Why do some people still like the idea of ThAC0? It was the most broken of ideas ever put into D&D. (BTW, ThAC0 was in D&D, before the A got added, and well before 2nd Ed.) Of course, if you look hard enough at it, 3rd and 3.5 editions still have it, they just did the sensible thing and multiplied a -1 through the whole damn thing and rectified it.
Ok, just go with the fighter for simplicity, those who care to you can work out the rest.
ThAC0: each level the Fighter's ThAC0 goes down 1. (e.g. 19, 18, 17, etc.)
3rd: each level the Fighters To Hit bonus goes up 1. (e.g. +1, +2, +3, etc.)
So, at this point, we have just changed from subtracting 1 each level, starting at 20 to adding 1 each level starting at 0. So the delta is the same, but the starting point and sign has changed.
ThAC0: Naked opponent has an AC of 10, 1st level fighter with a ThAC0 of 19 hits on a roll of a 9 (ignoring Str., magic, etc.)
3rd: Naked opponent has an AC of 10, 1st level fighter with a To Hit bonus of +1 hits on a roll of a 9.(same conditions)
At this point, the mechanics work out exactly the same, the only differece is the method to get there.
ThAC0: ThAC0 of 19 - AC of 10 = 9 to hit roll.
3rd: AC of 10 - +1 To Hit Bonus = 9 to hit roll.
Again, we're arriving at the same point.
Next up, armor.
Leather armor:
ThAC0: Reduces your AC by 4 (gives you an AC of 6)
3rd: Increses your AC by 4 (gives you an AC of 14)
If you have a ThAC0 of 17 or a +3 To Hit bonus and roll a 12, what AC do you hit (do you hit the guy in leather)?
ThAC0: ThAC0 17 - roll of 12 = AC 5 (Hit)
3rd: 12 roll + 3 bonus = AC 15 (Hit)
Notice that, not only do both work out to hit the guy in leather, they both do so with the exact same margin i.e. by 1 more than was needed.
So, both work out the same, why do I call ThAC0 broken? Look back through the process and consider the average combat.
DM: Roll to hit.
Player: *rolls*
DM: What AC did you hit?
Player (ThAC0 version): ThAC0 of 17 minus 12 is....5 I hit an AC of 5
Player (3rd ed. version): 12 + 3 is 15 I hit a 15
(rest of combat)
In the ThAC0 version, the player was having to do subtraction, in the 3rd. ed. version the player did addition (and can accomplish it through counting). It's a subtle diffrence, but for many people, who are not great at math, addition is easier that subtration, primarilly because they know how to count (I've listened to players do this). This is why a very popular method of teaching people to give change is called Counting Change Up. It's easy to do for the non-math inclined.
When you get down to it, ThAC0 isn't gone. 3rd. Ed. just got rid of the subtraction. Yes, if you want to figure out the roll you need to hit something you have to do subtraction; that is not a necessary step. Telling the DM what AC you just hit is. For many players, 3rd Ed. allows them to completly avoid subtraction, and makes the game smoother and more accessible.
I had the same thought, though I had to wonder, how resistant is this "filter" to clogging? If we have a bunch of bacteria in the water (which seems to be a reasonable assumption), as those bacteria get driven against the filter, will they cause clog and lose efficiency?
I live in the Mojave Desert (Southern California part), and while we are not yet facing water rationing, we are probably not too far away from it; especially considering the number of people leaving Los Angeles and the surrounding area to the desert. Much of Southern California's water is fed to it via the California Aqueduct. The areas the Aquaduct draw from are being drained at an alarming rate. Also, our local water table is overtapped and the water we pull from the Colorado River's watershed (e.g. Mojave River) is slowly causing a problem for those downstream from us (but who cares about Mexico, right?). There is a long running argument (back at least as far as the '70s) about setting up desalinization plants on the coast to feed LA and the surrounding deserts. It would take a lot of pressure off of the lakes which feed the Aquaduct, and off of the Colorado River.
As an intersting note in this. Avalon on Santa Catalina Island (off the California coast) gets it fresh water via desalinization.
However, rather than stop this at just commercial speech, we let it go one step further. Consider the ever popular example of yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. In this case we are trying to create an artifical area of "unsafe" speech. This is a debateable step. On one hand, the speech is likely to cause harm, assuming people stampede; on the other, if there really is a fire, I would hope someone would be kind enough to inform everyone of the danger, i.e., yell, "fire!" So, now we have a form of speech, which does not have a clear dividing line of when it's ok and when it's not; and there is the potential that the speech will be useful to society. In the end, the people accepted that this sort of thing should be decided after the fact. Again, this is probably not a horrible way to deal with the situation, we have simply criminalized putting people in danger needlessly. The downside of this is that we are left facing the possibility that anything we say may get dragged into a grey area and we could end up in jail for breaking a not well defined law.
The last piece of the puzzle to "how we ended up here" is when politicians realized that the people would accept just about any argument, as long as it was framed as a way to protect children. The argument was made that certain types of speech are harmful to children. Because of an unwillingness by the people to say, "no" to anything to protect the children the FCC was given the power to censor speech ad hoc and since we had already accepted the argument that speech could be determined to be harmful after the fact, this expansion was quite natural. And, unsuprisingly, with the prevelence of Christianity and their morals in our government and society, this ability has been used to censor anything that violates normal Christian mores. The Janet Jackson flashing incident is a good example of this. A single nipple causes an uproar and fines, while the standard violance in primetime television doesn't even cause comment.
In order for this type of censorship to stop, two things need to happen:
- The US people need to quit the "protect the children" habit. As a people we need to actually inspect the claims put out by politicans and groups pushing more restrictive laws, even when they claim that it will "protect children."
- Roll back the criminalizing of any private speech. Go ahead, yell, "fire" in a crowded theater, you won't be fined or arrested. On the other hand, you are directly responsible for a bunch of people getting hurt/killed; your ass will probably be sued into abject poverty. Nothing about free speech absolves you of the responsibility for the consequences of your actions.
Of course, the chance of that happening is probably so low as to be negative.I doubt that it was too hard to sway the thrid parties.
Nintendo Rep: "We want to sell your old games for you again, can we?"
Third party guy: "How much is this going to cost me?"
Nintendo Rep: "Nothing, just give us a copy of the ROM code, and a license to sell it. You'll get 3 bucks a download."
Third Party Rep: "Here you go, you can even keep the floppy."
While there is some argument about self competition, and having your library availabe for one of those "Classics" discs which performed like a lead ballon, I doubt anyone lost any sleep over this. Except maybe a few accountants who were fapping all night long to the potential profit and almost zero cost.
Same here. I grew up with a NES and SNES in the house, and bought the N64 with money from my first job. There are plenty of titles I missed because of a lack of disposable income. I was fairly active in renting games, and had plenty I started but never got to finish, and would love to have a chance to go back and play some of them again. While I realize that some games are far better through the rose colored glasses of nostolgia, there are still a number of gems that stand the test of time. Just recently, because of the information on the new Super Smash Bros. having Pit from Kid Icarus, I went back and played through Kid Icarus again. Yep, it's 8-bit pallete shifting goodness, just like I remember; still worth playing. Hell, I even pulled out graph paper to map out the castles again, I've long since lost the ones my brother and I made years ago.
My next retro project, the Original Fallout, followed by 2 and 3. Borrowed off a friend who's been mentioning them as some of the best games of all time. As far as I have seen of the first one, he is right. Might have to go back and play through Wasteland again, just for completness.