Shooting is only justified if you feel your life is in danger and you are incapable of running away. Pretty arguable point when the attacker is only weilding a bat.
Mostly wrong. For example, in the jurisdiction of New York, see this page, or Google yourself. Quote:
When one believes that the use of deadly force is justified, one has a duty to retreat before using such force if one knows one can do so with complete safety.
Running away from a guy beating you with a bat is not "complete safety". You would be entirely justified in defending yourself in this situation, and as far as the degree of that defense:
... one may justifiably use "deadly physical force" to defend herself from what she "reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful physical force."
The question isn't even the deadliness of the assault, just its unlawfulness.
The page I linked also listed the relevant law in other jurisdictions. Of the states they list there, Delaware seems to have the most onerous requirement for the victim, in that he must retreat if he can do so "safely". All the other states either use the term "complete safety", or don't have a requirement for flight to be considered at all. That means that a victim in those states is never required to run away before wounding/killing his attacker.
His comment, "Let me make direct commits within 2 months, or I will pull out of the project altogether" isn't exactly dressed for success. Making threats, seriously or not, never gets people to come to your way of thinking.
I think someone in the thread made a comment much like yours, and Harry responded to it by saying that it wasn't a threat, just a statement: that he would remove Cygwin/XFree86 from the main XFree86 project server unless he was given cvs commit access. Not a threat: no one's going to be harmed -- and, indeed, it looks like no one else in the project even cares much about the cygwin port, at least not enough to bother checking in his patches more than once every month. He's just going to take his branch out of the main project.
If I'd been contributing for closing in on 3 years, and got insulted by asshole core devs when I asked for commit access, I'd blow up too.
This is not Open Source/Free Software's proudest moment. With luck, perhaps it will be a moment that will lead to a better X.
Man, I hope so. But it seems like we get a chance to say that every couple of months or so, when yet more devs leave the main XFree86 project, and nothing's come of it yet.
The Yamato cannon is named after a Japanese battleship (one of the largest) that fought during WWII.
Actually, iirc, it was the largest, ever.
Re:Studies Showing The Opposite Too
on
Praying Doesn't Help
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
For every scientific study "proving" that prayer doesn't work, there's one proving that it does. For example, look at this Wired article which talks about a faith healing study done at UC San Francisco Medical Center. It's just one of many.
But this one is the largest, most comprehensive ever. It's worth more than the other, smaller ones.
Nobody who believes in prayer will be swayed by this report [...]
Most people who believe in prayer wouldn't even be swayed by the destruction of the Earth and the death of all humans, so I think we can safely ignore them.
and those who don't believe won't be swayed by the one I linked to.
Uh, dude, I don't think you read that article as closely as you should have. Besides the fact that it only involved 20 patients -- as opposed to the 750 patients in this new study -- eventually it also gets around to pointing out how the study in question was illegitimate. Quote:
WHAT TOO FEW PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT TARG'S FAMOUS AIDS STUDY: That her study had been unblinded and then "reblinded" to scour for data that confirmed the thesis - and the Western Journal of Medicine did not know this fact when it decided to publish.
And what did one of the researchers do?
[...] He had also seen which group each patient was assigned to, treatment or control, but he swore he didn't remember and maintained he was therefore impartial.
Did you read that!? One of the researchers, who had been privy to the assignment of patients into groups, then went back through the patients' charts to gather more data. Blindedness was totally compromised... and incidentally, this incident displays a more-than-cavalier attitude toward the science in the study.
[...] This isn't what science means by double-blind. The data may all be legitimate, but it's not good form. Statisticians call this the sharpshooter's fallacy - spraying bullets randomly, then drawing a target circle around a cluster.
The writer also notes:
I learned all this from Dan Moore and confirmed it with Mark Comings. Moore seemed unaware how explosive his version of the story was. "I was always troubled over the sifting it took for the data to hold together," he said. "I think Fred and Elisabeth missed the real story, which was the difference between medical science and alternative medicine. Triple-drug therapy was literally saving lives. We were only looking at secondary things."
With this information, I reread the paper with an awe for how carefully they chose their words. Only with the benefit of this hindsight do holes emerge, ones that had been clouded by the scientific language and statistical commentary.
Unbelievable. And an eminent biostatistician who looked at the study said:
Spiegel continued: "It does change her work considerably. It puts it into more of an exploratory study, rather than a confirmatory study. It would be wrong to say it'd been proven."
That's an understatement. And finally, thanks to the study's insufficiently random selection of patients, and laughably small sample size:
[...] In other words, the study provided fairly convincing evidence that if you had AIDS back in the mid-1990s, the older you were the more likely you were to die.
So this pro- faith healing study was a total crock of shit. No one's going to be swayed by it because it's imaginary, and it only demonstrated the poor science being put out by faith healing people.
Not for China... they seem to have a relatively low regard for life (compared to the U.S. and other space-faring nations) [...]
Yeah.
so I'd bet getting them up is/was more important than getting them back.
Nope. For the Chinese, a large part of the value in this space launch is its propaganda value. In that light, having their first man in space die on his way back would be disastrous. It would make them look incompetent, compared to the USSR's and the US' first manned launches.
Hey, thanks dude. I am running 1.2.7, but your comment gave me an idea, so I searched through the preferences menu, and sure enough, there's a "Save Playlist Position" setting.
Anyone else moderately-to-extremely annoyed at how in the track info listing in "View File Info", the "Comment" field is rendered useless because (at least in ogg) xmms looks for a "=" to start the comment field, instead of the proper "COMMENT="? So I have to go someplace else just to load up the track and see who the fuck the violinist is on Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. Is this an oversight that's never been fixed, or some bizarre "feature"?
It would also be nice if the playlist window could remember where you were last looking / where the last file you played was, instead of reverting to the beginning of the listing every time you restart it.
Don't want to get too vehement, since it is free software, but why did active development stop? All I really want is a winamp in linux, and xmms is a decent replacement, but nonetheless pretty inferior. I've tried to go to some other players -- zinf, for one. It was buggy as hell and crashed often... whatever.
You exhibit a frightening lack of knowledge of both chess and algorithms.
You need to support this assertion better.
If chess was "purely mathematical" then there would exhist an optimal solution(s).
It is, and there is. The game tree for chess, however, is simply so large that finding the optimal solution probably exceeds the computational power of the universe, or something like that.
That is why there is no solution to be solved for and instead computers must solve for partial solutions. These partial solutions get better and better as computers can examine more scenarios, but there are definitely diminishing returns.
Did you look at the chart of computer chess scores in the article? If you do so, you'll note that it's roughly linear with time. Not asymptotal. You need to provide evidence to support your assertion that there are diminishing returns -- there well may be, but all that matters is whether chess computers stop at this maximum before they surpass all human chess players. This surpassing looks like it will happen fairly soon; reaching the theoretical maximum, not so soon.
[...] most developers have never talked to an actual customer in their entire career.
I think the next programming movement should be called XTTFC for Extreme Talking To a Fucking Customer.
Some firms have people to do the developers' talking for them...
Bob Slidell: "What.. what would you say... you do here?"
Tom: "Look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?"
Valmont, you began with "heh you wanna know stable?", then described the load on your OS X machine, and suddenly said
PC's with Linux do make great UNIX-ish workstations but not nearly anywhere near Mac OS X.
But grandparent asked "Is it the most usable and stable? Show me some studies that say so. Your opinion means little to me."
While I found your description of your system interesting, I don't think there's any shortage of testimonials in/.'s Apple section. To support your statement that Linux workstations are "not nearly anywhere near Mac OS X" requires SOME evidence. All you've said about linux is that you can turn any box into a "cheap, decent" worksation or server. But in truth, do you think that no one on/. could say that they do everything with their Linux machine(s) that you do on your OS X box? (Only replacing with Office with OpenOfice.)
I wholeheartedly agree with grandparent's request for objective, impartial evidence that proprietary Apple hardware running the largely-proprietary OS X is so overwhelmingly superior to open source Linux on commodity PCs.
My primary recollection of him is the gigantic hissyfit he made over how the DC Metro hadn't changed all its signs for "Washington National Airport" to "Ronald Reagan National Airport" or whatever after Congress renamed it after our glorious drooling ex-leader. Metro said it would cost thousands of dollars, as they'd have to reletter the name on all their signs, reprint all their schedules, etc. Barr went apeshit and used his position on some committee to hold up a spending bill for Metro until they capitulated.
So, Barr is an asshole. Also, the rule of Congress over Washington is unamerican. Unsurprisingly, because no one in congress is accountable to citizens in the district, they don't even stop to think before they trample over citizens and the elected local leadership. Your medical marijuana example is just one of many, many abuses that have occurred over the years. A crucial component of democracy is elected representation for citizens. The continued obstruction by the Republican leadership in Congress of proposals to give DC representatives/senators, out of fear that the District's large black population will make it a source of Democratic representatives, is disgusting.
What about Mario 64? I played it for a few hours at a friend's house when the N64 came out, and I haven't bought a Nintendo system since. It did absolutely nothing for me.
Mm... Let me try to dredge up some distant memories, of when we first got our N64 7 years ago or whatever...
Okay. I think you probably should have gone back and given Mario 64 another shot. You might still not have liked it, but there's a good chance you would have gotten into it. Because I can remember sorta being confused and aimless when I first started playing the game. I mean, the n64 controller was really different, and it took a long-ass time to get used to the z-stick or whatever it was called. And you had to get used to it by having Mario run around in 3d, where just about everything was totally unfamiliar.
But the bottom line is, that after you got used to everything, and got the interface down, Mario 64 was a damn fun game. It definitely had a different feel from previous Mario games, but that didn't stop it from having a coolness of its own. I can specifically remember that flying in that game was one of the funnest things I had ever done with video games up to that point. It was totally natural with the z-stick, and just incredibly well-done. Oh man... that very first time, when you looked up into the sun at that spot on the floor, and entered the first air level? Goddamn, what an adrenaline rush.
I had played 3d games before (Doom, Descent, etc...) but it just made me want to play the old games.
I didn't get that at all. Mario 64? 3d console "side-scroller" -- 3rd person. Doom? FPS. Descent? first-person... 6-degrees-of-freedom-game.
I've never seen Mario 64 and those games linked in this way before your post. So... take that how you will.
I'm all for progression in games, but they murdered their flagship franchise.
Obviously not. It was an excellent companion to the N64 -- which started off selling really well. As I've outlined, the game was fun, to me and everyone else I knew that had it, as well as in the magazine reviews I read at the time... In fact, in the Gamespot article, they specifically mention Mario 64 as a great game, that Sunshine didn't quite live up to, despite being fun in its own right. You probably should have offered some evidence that Mario 64 "murdered" their franchise.
Compare what recent authors put out to the crap Heinlein wrote for most of his career (OK, I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that), and see what you prefer.
As the great quote from Wolfgang Pauli goes, "I think what you said is not even wrong."
Your statement is turned around 100% from reality. You call Heinlein's output for "most of his career" "crap", and then stunningly declare "I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that". No, there isn't. Ask 99% of SF fans (and by that, I mean all but 5 guys), and they will tell you that it is Heinlein's later output that is crap. His early stuff is the foundation of science fiction, and it is fantastic. For our purposes, we can call 1973's Time Enough for Love the dividing line. Before that we have The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Starship Troopers, among many other notables.
Those 3 novels are classic, classic, CLASSIC. The opposite of crap. And what else do we have? How about Double Star, and a wealth of excellent juveniles (Space Cadet, Red Planet, Starman Jones, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars). A large library of excellent stories.
I think we can safely poll science fiction readers, and determine that no, the writing of recent authors has not magically become literary nirvana, while that of the first Grand Master is suddenly tripe.
Now, if you want to discuss writing quality, you have a point about the increasingly meritorious literature that the genre is seeing, as opposed to what was often a lack of "grace and poetry" in the old masters. However, calling it "crap" is 100% completely and totally unacceptable.
Since you do seem to have a knowledge of SF, as you mention Simak, Wells, Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson and others, you obviously are well-versed in the genre. But please don't mistake your personal preference for absolute truth.
Probably not, but they had universities when the anglo-saxons were still living in grass huts.
Funny thing about Chinese civilization. The quickly reached their peak, then stayed there ossified for the next 1500 years.
Oh please, Brandybuck.
Your single number is fucked up. "1500 years"? 1500 years ago is 500 CE. I hate to tell you this, but the dynasty of the Later Han collapsed in 220 CE. The Sui didn't reunite China until 589 CE, and China didn't really get going again until the Tang attained full control in 626 CE. Now, the universities grandparent was referring to were the imperial universities of the Han, already with 3,000 students in 8 BCE. We should consider that a peak -- and it doesn't correspond to your schedule.
So your date isn't a peak at all, but a trough in one of the many interregnums between Chinese dynasties.
You see, China's history is largely a story of the cyclic rise and fall of dynasties, one after the other. There has never been a time when Chinese civilization was allowed to ossify for such a long time as you posit -- dynasties collapsed much faster than that. And as far as "peak"s are concerned, China has had many peaks. The Han, the Tang, the Song, the Ming...
If you want objective evidence, instead of subjective cultural achievements, let me point you to Admiral Zheng He's 15th-century maritime voyages -- which the following article is referring to when it says "during the Song dynasty, China developed the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated merchant marine and navy". That article should be edifying as to why, despite its invention of gunpowder, printing, and the compass, China never conquered the world.
Well, this comment hasn't been flawless, but no, yuri benjamin, Brandybuck isn't right. Hope you enjoyed my theory, though.
It is clear you are strongly involved with gaming and trying to change the view of an avid gamer is not far from trying to change someone's religion or their political affilation.
It is clear you are strongly involved with anti-video-game-violence advocacy and trying to change the view of an avid anti-video-game-violence advocate is not far from trying to change someone's religion or their political affiliation.
I can just hope that this version will be on par graphically.
Well, Gamespot says
Finally, the graphics in Invisible War have been a topic of great interest, and for good reason: The game looks superb. It uses some of the same advanced graphics techniques, such as real-time lighting and shadowing and character normal-mapping, that make the forthcoming graphical juggernaut Doom 3 look so impressive.
I'd judge that quite a bit ahead of par. Take a look at some of the screenshots (here, here, etc.). They're not quite Doom III -- but that's not possible (unless you're Valve, I guess).
The last one was a good game that seemed to be, at the time of release, a generation or so behind the rest of the pack in terms of graphics.
Make that "great" game, but yeah.
I don't believe that graphics make the game, but they should at least be passable.
pr0n from newsgroups [...] warez or... games [...] movies, music, or anything
and mention that you will no longer download any files against copyright.
Then you ask for "streaming movies", legitimate free music (um, dude, if it's legitimate it's not going to be free), and inexplicably, you ask bewilderedly
Where's the *value*?
Well, duh. It was in the long list of stuff you said you weren't interested in. That's the stuff most people want... Actually, with games, movies, and music, you're claiming you're not interested in 3/4 of current popular entertainment/art, leaving out only books.
So, yeah, if you don't do anything online, then you don't need broadband.
If I'm just hitting ebay, slashdot, and a few other news sites, then really, what's the point of broadband?
If that is all you do, then you don't need broadband, unless you want your browsing to be quick. Have fun with your solitary web-browsing online existence, buddy.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm really curious, especially since your comment is sitting at +4, Insightful, as I write this.
The page I linked also listed the relevant law in other jurisdictions. Of the states they list there, Delaware seems to have the most onerous requirement for the victim, in that he must retreat if he can do so "safely". All the other states either use the term "complete safety", or don't have a requirement for flight to be considered at all. That means that a victim in those states is never required to run away before wounding/killing his attacker.
If I'd been contributing for closing in on 3 years, and got insulted by asshole core devs when I asked for commit access, I'd blow up too.
Man, I hope so. But it seems like we get a chance to say that every couple of months or so, when yet more devs leave the main XFree86 project, and nothing's come of it yet.Alright, that's one niggle gone.
Anyway, being a "Linux site" doesn't have anything to do with being biased or not, it just means it covers Linux news.
Anyone else moderately-to-extremely annoyed at how in the track info listing in "View File Info", the "Comment" field is rendered useless because (at least in ogg) xmms looks for a "=" to start the comment field, instead of the proper "COMMENT="? So I have to go someplace else just to load up the track and see who the fuck the violinist is on Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. Is this an oversight that's never been fixed, or some bizarre "feature"?
It would also be nice if the playlist window could remember where you were last looking / where the last file you played was, instead of reverting to the beginning of the listing every time you restart it.
Don't want to get too vehement, since it is free software, but why did active development stop? All I really want is a winamp in linux, and xmms is a decent replacement, but nonetheless pretty inferior. I've tried to go to some other players -- zinf, for one. It was buggy as hell and crashed often... whatever.
I think you read too much into that comment.
While I found your description of your system interesting, I don't think there's any shortage of testimonials in /.'s Apple section. To support your statement that Linux workstations are "not nearly anywhere near Mac OS X" requires SOME evidence. All you've said about linux is that you can turn any box into a "cheap, decent" worksation or server. But in truth, do you think that no one on /. could say that they do everything with their Linux machine(s) that you do on your OS X box? (Only replacing with Office with OpenOfice.)
I wholeheartedly agree with grandparent's request for objective, impartial evidence that proprietary Apple hardware running the largely-proprietary OS X is so overwhelmingly superior to open source Linux on commodity PCs.
Unfortunately dude, your warning may be doing more harm then good... You just made me curious, and he totally punked me with that magic eye thing.
My primary recollection of him is the gigantic hissyfit he made over how the DC Metro hadn't changed all its signs for "Washington National Airport" to "Ronald Reagan National Airport" or whatever after Congress renamed it after our glorious drooling ex-leader. Metro said it would cost thousands of dollars, as they'd have to reletter the name on all their signs, reprint all their schedules, etc. Barr went apeshit and used his position on some committee to hold up a spending bill for Metro until they capitulated.
So, Barr is an asshole. Also, the rule of Congress over Washington is unamerican. Unsurprisingly, because no one in congress is accountable to citizens in the district, they don't even stop to think before they trample over citizens and the elected local leadership. Your medical marijuana example is just one of many, many abuses that have occurred over the years. A crucial component of democracy is elected representation for citizens. The continued obstruction by the Republican leadership in Congress of proposals to give DC representatives/senators, out of fear that the District's large black population will make it a source of Democratic representatives, is disgusting.
Okay. I think you probably should have gone back and given Mario 64 another shot. You might still not have liked it, but there's a good chance you would have gotten into it. Because I can remember sorta being confused and aimless when I first started playing the game. I mean, the n64 controller was really different, and it took a long-ass time to get used to the z-stick or whatever it was called. And you had to get used to it by having Mario run around in 3d, where just about everything was totally unfamiliar.
But the bottom line is, that after you got used to everything, and got the interface down, Mario 64 was a damn fun game. It definitely had a different feel from previous Mario games, but that didn't stop it from having a coolness of its own. I can specifically remember that flying in that game was one of the funnest things I had ever done with video games up to that point. It was totally natural with the z-stick, and just incredibly well-done. Oh man... that very first time, when you looked up into the sun at that spot on the floor, and entered the first air level? Goddamn, what an adrenaline rush.
I didn't get that at all. Mario 64? 3d console "side-scroller" -- 3rd person. Doom? FPS. Descent? first-person... 6-degrees-of-freedom-game.I've never seen Mario 64 and those games linked in this way before your post. So... take that how you will.
Obviously not. It was an excellent companion to the N64 -- which started off selling really well. As I've outlined, the game was fun, to me and everyone else I knew that had it, as well as in the magazine reviews I read at the time... In fact, in the Gamespot article, they specifically mention Mario 64 as a great game, that Sunshine didn't quite live up to, despite being fun in its own right. You probably should have offered some evidence that Mario 64 "murdered" their franchise.Your statement is turned around 100% from reality. You call Heinlein's output for "most of his career" "crap", and then stunningly declare "I haven't read much of his older stuff, but there is a good reason for that". No, there isn't. Ask 99% of SF fans (and by that, I mean all but 5 guys), and they will tell you that it is Heinlein's later output that is crap. His early stuff is the foundation of science fiction, and it is fantastic. For our purposes, we can call 1973's Time Enough for Love the dividing line. Before that we have The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Starship Troopers, among many other notables.
Those 3 novels are classic, classic, CLASSIC. The opposite of crap. And what else do we have? How about Double Star, and a wealth of excellent juveniles (Space Cadet, Red Planet, Starman Jones, Tunnel in the Sky, Time for the Stars). A large library of excellent stories.
I think we can safely poll science fiction readers, and determine that no, the writing of recent authors has not magically become literary nirvana, while that of the first Grand Master is suddenly tripe.
Now, if you want to discuss writing quality, you have a point about the increasingly meritorious literature that the genre is seeing, as opposed to what was often a lack of "grace and poetry" in the old masters. However, calling it "crap" is 100% completely and totally unacceptable.
Since you do seem to have a knowledge of SF, as you mention Simak, Wells, Gibson, Sterling, Stephenson and others, you obviously are well-versed in the genre. But please don't mistake your personal preference for absolute truth.
Your single number is fucked up. "1500 years"? 1500 years ago is 500 CE. I hate to tell you this, but the dynasty of the Later Han collapsed in 220 CE. The Sui didn't reunite China until 589 CE, and China didn't really get going again until the Tang attained full control in 626 CE. Now, the universities grandparent was referring to were the imperial universities of the Han, already with 3,000 students in 8 BCE. We should consider that a peak -- and it doesn't correspond to your schedule.
So your date isn't a peak at all, but a trough in one of the many interregnums between Chinese dynasties.
You see, China's history is largely a story of the cyclic rise and fall of dynasties, one after the other. There has never been a time when Chinese civilization was allowed to ossify for such a long time as you posit -- dynasties collapsed much faster than that. And as far as "peak"s are concerned, China has had many peaks. The Han, the Tang, the Song, the Ming...
If you want objective evidence, instead of subjective cultural achievements, let me point you to Admiral Zheng He's 15th-century maritime voyages -- which the following article is referring to when it says "during the Song dynasty, China developed the world's largest and most technologically sophisticated merchant marine and navy". That article should be edifying as to why, despite its invention of gunpowder, printing, and the compass, China never conquered the world.
Well, this comment hasn't been flawless, but no, yuri benjamin, Brandybuck isn't right. Hope you enjoyed my theory, though.
Oh yeah, and gigs and gigs of anime, streaming up and down my pipe. Sweet, sweet anime... [drools]
Then you ask for "streaming movies", legitimate free music (um, dude, if it's legitimate it's not going to be free), and inexplicably, you ask bewilderedly
Well, duh. It was in the long list of stuff you said you weren't interested in. That's the stuff most people want... Actually, with games, movies, and music, you're claiming you're not interested in 3/4 of current popular entertainment/art, leaving out only books.So, yeah, if you don't do anything online, then you don't need broadband.
If that is all you do, then you don't need broadband, unless you want your browsing to be quick. Have fun with your solitary web-browsing online existence, buddy.