everquest: people have swords and spells. they hurt things. that's the whole damn point of it to begin with: pointless violent escapism.
Correction: That's the whole damn point of it to you.
In my MUDing days we used to discuss the four classes of MUD player. In the overall, it is perilous to say that the point of a game is any one of those, since even games that are geared in every way to one of them tend to create subcultures of the others. It is--or can be--a form of escapism, but it is not necessarily pointless and not necessarily violent.
They did not "detain a suspected shoplifter," they specifically declined to accuse him of shoplifting and call the police (he was the one who called the police). Thus they were (illegally, AFAIK) detaining him and preventing him from leaving.
a) That particular pandemic took off in large part because of weakened populations after a war. Plague tends to follow wars.
b) It killed that many people *worldwide*. Localized impact, while potentially still bad, was substantially more distributed than that. Saying that it killed "50 million people" begs the question of "where."
Are you familiar with the Swine Flu Affair? We need to be looking at not just the potential impact of a "Category 5 Pandemic" (1.8+ million dead) but also at the probability of such occurring. Fear mongering and talking about the destruction caused by the Spanish lady without framing it in these terms does everyone a disservice.
To say it for all my colleagues and for the umpteenth million time (from college bull sessions to learned treatises): science simply cannot (by its legitimate methods) adjudicate the issue of God's possible superintendence of nature. We neither affirm nor deny it; we simply can't comment on it as scientists. If some of our crowd have made untoward statements claiming that Darwinism disproves God, then I will find Mrs. McInerney and have their knuckles rapped for it (as long as she can equally treat those members of our crowd who have argued that Darwinism must be God's method of action). Science can work only with naturalistic explanations; it can neither affirm nor deny other types of actors (like God) in other spheres (the moral realm, for example).
Forget philosophy for a moment; the simple empirics of the past hundred years should suffice. Darwin himself was agnostic (having lost his religious beliefs upon the tragic death of his favorite daughter), but the great American botanist Asa Gray, who favored natural selection and wrote a book entitled Darwiniana, was a devout Christian. Move forward 50 years: Charles D. Walcott, discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossils, was a convinced Darwinian and an equally firm Christian, who believed that God had ordained natural selection to construct a history of life according to His plans and purposes. Move on another 50 years to the two greatest evolutionists of our generation: G. G. Simpson was a humanist agnostic. Theodosius Dobzhansky a believing Russian Orthodox. Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs--and equally compatible with atheism, thus proving that the two great realms of nature's factuality and the source of human morality do not strongly overlap.
I don't know, ef - a fairy tale of the two is a fairly artistic game, and I can rattle off a dozen other games that, while "just a pasttime" would certainly qualify as "artsy."
Kilograms and other measures of mass do not depend on gravity, they depend on a referential mass of a defined size (1 liter of water, which you mention) which is balanced against the object. If we take it to another planet, move closer to the sun, change the constant of gravity, whatever else it will still be defined as 1 liter of water in mass. We can use scales in whatever gravity we are in to see how many kilograms something is by measuring one against the other and the defined constant of a kilogram doesn't change. It also won't change if we change the pressure, change the temperature, or anything else (except in how these things will affect the accuracy of the scales).
Weight is a different measure which is dependent on gravity.
I need to rewrite the entire thing since a lot of it is now outmoded, and will do so when the next version of Keynote comes out. What I have been doing:
MacTeX. This is a Mac version of TeXLive that comes with everything and the kitchen sink installed.
Installed with MacTeX is LaTeXiT. This works a lot like Equation Service used to. While the MacTeXtras come with a few others, LaTeXiT mostly outclasses them.
You can store them in the machine in a secure container, perhaps on card stock, then simply move the container over.
Barcodes are completely incomprehensible to most people, however. Thus they have no assurance that both ends were not hacked. With a ballot they can personally verify, in a language they can understand (as opposed to barcodes), it prevents that vector of attack. It does not force the person to trust the electronic device reading the code. It removes a source of error since text is harder to render incomprehensible than barcodes. It also automatically solves the problems of people forgetting to drop off their ballot, having a misprinted ballot that the machine reads correctly (can I just print this again? well that involves going back into the voting booth...)
Not to mention that it becomes two potential bottlenecks and two pieces of machinery that have to be maintained.
Barcodes would also not be any more difficult to falsify than text. It just takes any ordinary printer. What protects in this regard is the double-signature and the precise verification mechanisms between the number of signatures and the number of votes. Admittedly, *any* paper trail is better than *no* paper trail, but voter-verified is the best way to go.
That said, I like the idea of just having a sheet with your preferences on it and circling the one you want. It is massively paralizable, easily understood, and doesn't take much in the way of equipment to protect.
Marketing's job is to spin these things to maximum profit. But Apple really has no reason to develop this except to provide a test bed for developing on the iPhone. Now, from marketing's standpoint, this may be viewed as an opportunity: if they make it pervasive, it will increase Apple's mindshare. It also increases the odds of people testing with Safari to make sure it works (or at least not explicitly blocking it).
But, it still comes back to that their primary goal with this is to encourage development of apps for the iPhone, since now you don't need a Mac or an iPhone for the initial testing--just a copy of a freely available browser.
Go up to access the menu bar for whatever application you are in.
On a system where you have a consistant one between applications, it is always in the same place and there is an "infinite ceiling" so that you just have to "throw the cursor to the top of the screen" and there you are.
Compare to one where it floats in the window. How wide is the window? Where is it? How high is the window at the moment? Does what you do with the menus in that window matter for every window or just for the one you have in the front? If you close all of the windows in the application can you still configure preferences on it?
Just because you prefer it another way does not mean that it isn't bad UI design in the general case.
Oh, I don't dispute that it takes up more space than it does on the Mac, simply because it needs to have the "in-window" menu bar (which is bad UI design, but consistent between Windows apps). It simply takes up less space than Firefox on the same platform.
- Nice smooth interface, takes up less space than Firefox. - Definitely beta software. I get occasional and sporadic crashes. These are not currently consistently repeatable. - Font rendering is nice, including Unicode characters. - Unicode characters that I have fonts for no longer display as boxes in the title bar (they still do in Firefox). - Transitioning to pages sometimes takes significantly longer than it should. It will stall before loading the page.
...and my religion involved, at one point, hanging people from a tree and stabbing them in the side with a spear (I trow I hung on that windy Tree \ nine whole days and nights, \ stabbed with a spear).
It does not mean I do that, believe in doing that, or condone it any more than most Christians follow the parts of a bible about how to resume intercourse after a woman's period (which, like the advice on shellfish, probably had something to do with maintaining cleanliness in a tribal society).
The books of the Abrahahmic religions contain stories. Stories from tribal societies. Some were attempting in their stories of gods and demons, as H. R. Ellis-Davidson put it, to reveal inner truths or to teach fundamental lessons. Others were attempting to share part of their history.
Attempting to criticize the modern religion for what a society that followed a predecessor to the religion did some 3000 years ago and recorded in their mythology seems a little odd.
Everyone may know it, but if I had $1 for every time I've seen any of these horribly violated by someone with over a year of programming experience and a C++ degree, I'd be rich.
Slashdot Mirror
Correction: That's the whole damn point of it to you.
In my MUDing days we used to discuss the four classes of MUD player. In the overall, it is perilous to say that the point of a game is any one of those, since even games that are geared in every way to one of them tend to create subcultures of the others. It is--or can be--a form of escapism, but it is not necessarily pointless and not necessarily violent.
They did not "detain a suspected shoplifter," they specifically declined to accuse him of shoplifting and call the police (he was the one who called the police). Thus they were (illegally, AFAIK) detaining him and preventing him from leaving.
It was also Circuit City, not Best Buy.
a) That particular pandemic took off in large part because of weakened populations after a war. Plague tends to follow wars.
b) It killed that many people *worldwide*. Localized impact, while potentially still bad, was substantially more distributed than that. Saying that it killed "50 million people" begs the question of "where."
Are you familiar with the Swine Flu Affair? We need to be looking at not just the potential impact of a "Category 5 Pandemic" (1.8+ million dead) but also at the probability of such occurring. Fear mongering and talking about the destruction caused by the Spanish lady without framing it in these terms does everyone a disservice.
To quote Stephen Jay Gould:
I don't know, ef - a fairy tale of the two is a fairly artistic game, and I can rattle off a dozen other games that, while "just a pasttime" would certainly qualify as "artsy."
The fundamental misunderstanding here is that constants are defined with a given pressure, temperature, etc included.
Thus "one liter of water under these circumstances" not "one liter of H20 under any circumstances."
Really bad example, not even illustrative.
Kilograms and other measures of mass do not depend on gravity, they depend on a referential mass of a defined size (1 liter of water, which you mention) which is balanced against the object. If we take it to another planet, move closer to the sun, change the constant of gravity, whatever else it will still be defined as 1 liter of water in mass. We can use scales in whatever gravity we are in to see how many kilograms something is by measuring one against the other and the defined constant of a kilogram doesn't change. It also won't change if we change the pressure, change the temperature, or anything else (except in how these things will affect the accuracy of the scales).
Weight is a different measure which is dependent on gravity.
...I don't know about "never," look up Caroline Cossey...
I need to rewrite the entire thing since a lot of it is now outmoded, and will do so when the next version of Keynote comes out. What I have been doing:
Hope that helps!
These are two separate statistics representing two separate things: Vista adoption vs. "Switchers."
They cannot be directly and meaningfully compared on a month-to-month basis.
Miracles yes, but so are many things we have today in comparison to our knowledge not even all that long ago.
So even if its a "miracle" it could still happen.
To say that it will happen is not scientific.
To say that it won't happen is equally so.
You can store them in the machine in a secure container, perhaps on card stock, then simply move the container over.
Barcodes are completely incomprehensible to most people, however. Thus they have no assurance that both ends were not hacked. With a ballot they can personally verify, in a language they can understand (as opposed to barcodes), it prevents that vector of attack. It does not force the person to trust the electronic device reading the code. It removes a source of error since text is harder to render incomprehensible than barcodes. It also automatically solves the problems of people forgetting to drop off their ballot, having a misprinted ballot that the machine reads correctly (can I just print this again? well that involves going back into the voting booth...)
Not to mention that it becomes two potential bottlenecks and two pieces of machinery that have to be maintained.
Barcodes would also not be any more difficult to falsify than text. It just takes any ordinary printer. What protects in this regard is the double-signature and the precise verification mechanisms between the number of signatures and the number of votes. Admittedly, *any* paper trail is better than *no* paper trail, but voter-verified is the best way to go.
That said, I like the idea of just having a sheet with your preferences on it and circling the one you want. It is massively paralizable, easily understood, and doesn't take much in the way of equipment to protect.
Websites in Japanese look fine and quite readable in Safari from what I can tell.
Why even use a barcode?
Just print the user's choices and never let them touch the ballot itself.
You are listening to marketing? Why?
Marketing's job is to spin these things to maximum profit. But Apple really has no reason to develop this except to provide a test bed for developing on the iPhone. Now, from marketing's standpoint, this may be viewed as an opportunity: if they make it pervasive, it will increase Apple's mindshare. It also increases the odds of people testing with Safari to make sure it works (or at least not explicitly blocking it).
But, it still comes back to that their primary goal with this is to encourage development of apps for the iPhone, since now you don't need a Mac or an iPhone for the initial testing--just a copy of a freely available browser.
Firefox really does integrate rather poorly in MacOS X.
The lack of Services, for example, in and of itself is a deal killer. I have heard that Firefox 3 is better, but have yet to try it.
Not much too new, but then its just a web browser.
But I just tried out the dragging tabs feature, very nice and I hadn't seen it before.
Go up to access the menu bar for whatever application you are in.
On a system where you have a consistant one between applications, it is always in the same place and there is an "infinite ceiling" so that you just have to "throw the cursor to the top of the screen" and there you are.
Compare to one where it floats in the window. How wide is the window? Where is it? How high is the window at the moment? Does what you do with the menus in that window matter for every window or just for the one you have in the front? If you close all of the windows in the application can you still configure preferences on it?
Just because you prefer it another way does not mean that it isn't bad UI design in the general case.
Oh, I don't dispute that it takes up more space than it does on the Mac, simply because it needs to have the "in-window" menu bar (which is bad UI design, but consistent between Windows apps). It simply takes up less space than Firefox on the same platform.
- Nice smooth interface, takes up less space than Firefox.
- Definitely beta software. I get occasional and sporadic crashes. These are not currently consistently repeatable.
- Font rendering is nice, including Unicode characters.
- Unicode characters that I have fonts for no longer display as boxes in the title bar (they still do in Firefox).
- Transitioning to pages sometimes takes significantly longer than it should. It will stall before loading the page.
What is it that Safari isn't rendering properly for you?
The number of sites I see that render correctly in Firefox and not in Safari are fairly limited: I can't even think of one I've encountered lately.
Reading slashdot with it now, the bars at the top seem to take up less vertical space than they do in Firefox.
Its kind of nice, the Menu + toolbar + bookmark bar + tab bar takes up about the same about of space as it does on Firefox without the tab bar.
...and my religion involved, at one point, hanging people from a tree and stabbing them in the side with a spear (I trow I hung on that windy Tree \ nine whole days and nights, \ stabbed with a spear).
It does not mean I do that, believe in doing that, or condone it any more than most Christians follow the parts of a bible about how to resume intercourse after a woman's period (which, like the advice on shellfish, probably had something to do with maintaining cleanliness in a tribal society).
The books of the Abrahahmic religions contain stories. Stories from tribal societies. Some were attempting in their stories of gods and demons, as H. R. Ellis-Davidson put it, to reveal inner truths or to teach fundamental lessons. Others were attempting to share part of their history.
Attempting to criticize the modern religion for what a society that followed a predecessor to the religion did some 3000 years ago and recorded in their mythology seems a little odd.
Everyone may know it, but if I had $1 for every time I've seen any of these horribly violated by someone with over a year of programming experience and a C++ degree, I'd be rich.
It may surprise you that there is a subtle difference between *watermarking* files and *scanning your computer*. Remarkable, I know.