I'm going to go back to Jonathan Swift here, in Gulliver's Travels. He claimed that the Yahoos, who were these little dirty, simian versions of humans with no intellect and nothing but greed, hatred, disease and guile, had lawyers. One yahoo found a shiny rock. Another yahoo came and tried to take it away from him. Struggle insues. 3rd yahoo comes in and takes it away from both of them (that's the lawyer).
Swift would've positively loved this one.
But anyway, I have to get in a cursory rant about what an apocalyptic crime this is. Feel free to ignore it, i'm sure it'll just be repeated several thousand times over. Now, it's not the fact that a patent may or may not be valid (i.e., conforming to the rules of a sadistic, flawed game), it's the fact that still more needless litigation is being introduced into a system that is already frought with friction. That friction favors the powers that be and makes sure that nothing truly creative ever happens again in the United States. If this shit is allowed to continue, you will never see another dirt-poor writer making it to fame, or another hacker in a basement cooking up the next revolution in technology.
One issue is the fact that they will probably use a different BIOS technology than standard IBM clones: Open Firmware or EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). For compatibility's sake, your current PC uses more or less the same BIOS as the original PCs when it boots up, and uses tricks to access higher modes. That's one thing I've always loved about Macs - the booting. No matter how much they try to disguise it with logos, I still see it's booting to the same resolution as DOS.
Also, consider the fact that they might deliberately only include driver support for their stuff. Driver support in Darwin is already pretty limited, and they have no incentive to produce more drivers than they will use. That means more hacking.
Finally, I think one of the goals with the TPM is to make it so that you'd have to produce a unique hack for each case, rather than one generalized hack that can be mass-produced. Can't give you specifics, but at least they're moving away from "Let's make it impossible to crack!" which always fails, to "Let's make it so hard to crack that only a market-insignificant number of people will be able to crack it!"
Anyway, I'm sure it's possible and somebody will do it, but it might not be as simple as a little solder job. I don't have much first-hand knowledge of this kind of stuff, I just read a little here and there.
I'll restrain myself from saying RTFP, but they said right on the top that they've strengthened their protections against hackers. However, without the knowledge that the main thing the hackers are trying to accomplish is putting OS X on generic intel hardware, you wouldn't know that the answer is no, it won't run on regular intel hardware.
...resort to desparate and morally reprehensible measures to slow their decline, be they the MPAA or the RIAA. They're behaving like frightened, cornered animals. I'd expect both of these industry cartels to resort to some really scary shit in the next decade or so to try to cut their losses (like the east fork stuff, http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/18 11/), but they don't understand the difference between gliding along in a paracheut and flying. Ultimately, the industry megacorporations will tank (well, the music industry will, but movies are much harder to make than music), and our freedoms will be the real casualty.
Yeah. They're getting slapped all over the place by Apple. My next 'tv' is going to be a 30" cinema display with a tuner hooked up to the computer. I'LL NEVER NEED TO LOOK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER AGAIN!
This just reminds me of that article about the now-President of Sony reprimanding the people at Sony BGM for being to greedy, and essentially handing the digital music player revolution to Apple because they thought it might encourage piracy. In fact, it reminds me of all of the business surrounding PSP hacking. They're just overly loss-averse. Something about their corporate mentality prevents them from seeing that while they might lose a couple million bucks in CD revenue, they'll get billions upon billions in luxury mp3 players, or likewise why they might lose a little bit of their game revenue, but gain by having tons of enthusiasts such as myself purchasing PSPs. I won't, because of all the tomfoolery they're pulling. Of course, that's the problem when your company has many cthulhu-like tentacles stretched out into a variety of areas, each thinking and acting like an independent company. Nobody sees the big picture.
Star Trek is perhaps most cool in that its stiff-in-the-back Lawful Goodness created the reaction that brought us Firefly, Farscape and other such "gritty" sci-fi. In that metaphor, OSS zealots are piloting the Starship Debian, Linus is bald, Anglo-Norman and strangely attractive, and the seat-of-your-pants source jockeys out in the Windows Wastes are the crew of Serenity. I don't know who's cooler, but one thing's for certain: the outlaws always get more tail. Except for Kirk, but that comes at the expense of being William Shatner. And Richard Stallman is a lot less morally flexible than Kirk, so I doubt he'd have as many escapades in the alpha quadrant as Jimmy T.
They both have their uses, really. If we're talking programming or editing XML, it's emacs all the way. nxml-mode really beats the shorts off of everything on the market, free or not. But administration, especially if you're going to be doing it through an xterm to a remote machine, is strictly a vim thing.
I'd really like to learn how to use vim better, but since I spend most of my time writing XML and not editing plaintext, I don't have much opportunity.
Unfortunately, in speaking of the design of the human eye you don't actually understand how it works, any nore than the people you got this idea from. It is indeed true that the nerves go across the front of the retina, and the blood vessels are behind. If it were reversed, the huge blood supply needed to keep the eye operating at peak efficiency would block light to the receptors, whereas the nerves are almost transparent. The blind spot is 15 degrees off the focal point, which means that it has no practical effect on our vision.
in some people, the blind spot is at the focal point. I understand it's a very frusterating disorder. And research into mantis shrimp sometime. They see in like 23 different colors (either way you look at it, they're really cool!).
But anyway, before we go arguing about whether that's karma or demonic affliction, I think we're getting off the subject here. The big thing I hear from IDers is that the eye is too complex to have evolved by chance, and 'what good is half an eye,' or wing, etc.
Well, to address the latter, when I've been out herping in the foothills with my biologist friend, we've found some little lizards who skitter away like mad and are very dexterous at leaping between logs. If they had rutamentary feathers and little flaps of skin that didn't allow them to fly, but made them extra swift at getting away from predators in just such a tall-grass, thick underbush environment.
Secondly, an eye really isn't too complex to have evolved gradually, and half an eye is really nice if your enemy is blind. An organism evolves light-sensitive cells on its skin. This is good, because it can kind of sense when a bigger animal gets near it and moves out of the way. Then, those EM-sensitive cells evolve into a pit. Example: Pit vipers (true evidence that I am under the sway of the serpent!). Once you have a pit, you get not only a sense, but a vector. From there, it's not that hard to imagine a membrane forming over the top to protect it from infection as that pit gets deeper and deeper. Add a lens and you can focus the light to be sharpest at a particular distance, forming an image. Finally, you detach the parts a bit from one another so the whole apparatus can swivel, then you can look at different things without turning your head. Each variation has an advantage and a purpose.
This is the part where I get rambly. Forgive me for not structuring things better.
But I don't seriously think that I'm going to convince anybody who believes otherwise. What pisses me and other nerds off is the idea that our children might go to a school where our kids don't get Sex Ed or a proper education in biology, but they do get ID rammed down their throats whether they like it or not. Believe me, I know a lot about the subject, and I fully intend to educate my children on it. But not everybody is as fortunate.
If you want a world without sexual education, look at most of the poor, primarily black/latino schools in Oakland, CA. My girlfriend did some work as part of her education minor with some 14-17 young women from West Oakland, (arguably) the worst part. They knew nothing. They were having sex, but they had such absurd ideas as birth control pills preventing HIV transmission, etc. They had sex without condoms all the time. One was 8 months pregnant. If you taught these kids 'abstinence only' education, they'd ignore it, partly because their educational system has failed them in other regards, but mostly because they want to have sex, just like everybody else in the history of humanity. Sex is not an invention of the 1960s, mind you: read Shakespeare and Chaucer, sometimes it's downright raunchy. Read the Song of Solomon if you want to (yeah yeah metaphor for God's love, you're a twisted, blind son of a bitch if you think it's about anything but erotic love). HOWEVER, if you just went over the basics of condoms, diseases and the like with them, they might not get pregant, and have a choice between ruining
That's not quite right, unless by 'flawlessly' you mean 'without breaking for no apparent reason,' rather than 'without flaw, perfectly', and by 'once installed' you mean 'once a highly motivated nerd tweaks with it for a few days'.
I've got Gentoo and Windows dual booting on my home computer, which currently you might say is more my girlfriend's than mine, since I have a new anodized aluminum laptop whose brand I'm SURE nobody wants me to mention. Before that, I ran Slackware. Here are my thoughts. Bear in mind they're only the negative ones. There are many things I love about Linux, like Xine and Fluxbox. However, I have more than my share of criticisms:
Configuring the kernel is a bitch. I'm pretty good at it now, but this is a task I was completely unprepared for when I first started using windows. Fortunately, now I'm using GRUB instead of LILO. There's just something unsavory about writing to the MBR every time I need to fix a driver.
ATI's drivers are a pain the ass to work with.
Gentoo is a little too cutting-edge for me. Shit breaks all the time. For like a month Firefox had the oddest bug which would cause any download activity to lock the entire interface. It's annoying as all hell, because the tabbed browsing as why I use Firefox in the first place. At my boss's suggestion, I think I'm going to try Debian.
USB mass storage devices, scanners, and printers are all just godforsaken hard to set up. I've never gotten the hang of how to set up a USB mass storage device, and I've never gotten a scanner to work well.
Blackdown Java? Give me a break. For that matter, I'd like a simple way to tell my package management system 'No thank you, I am not a GPL fanatic. I like my Windows fonts, my WMP and Real codecs so I can play everything but everything on Xine, as well as my Sun Java JDK and closed-source framebuffer drivers. Thank you.'
Default permissions settings often (in my experience, I know more about unix now than when I first set up Linux) make files which really should be group-writable, like/dev/dsp, 644 by default. It seems trivial now, but it was really confusing when I first installed Slackware and I could play music as root but not as my normal user.
I'd like a way to print in reverse order on Cups without resorting to lprng. Haven't found one yet, sorry.
I really think that learning how to use Linux transformed the way I think about computers and rekindled my nerdliness, but it simply doesn't work out of the box for anything except server applications.
Re:What does this mean for San Fran and SBC Park?
on
Ma Bell is Back
·
· Score: 1
Bah, if you call it anything but Candlestick, it's a sure sign that you're either a tourist, a radio personality, or under drinking age.
SBC Park is another matter because it doesn't have an original name, but I know a lot of people who still call it Pac Bell Park. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that 4 members of my family were employees of AT&T->Pac Bell->SBC.
I really find it works better when the main tank pulls w/gun. 1) Feign death can be resisted, 2) Competant hunters are rare, and 3) The aggro is already on me - it's easier to tank and maintain aggro than pull aggro off somebody else.
But hey, you're not in my group, so what do I care?
I've actually met quite a few awesome paladins. It's hunters who piss me off (I can just hear the cries now: hunter weapon, hunter weapon!).
The one 'smacktard' paladin I met put together a group for Zul'Farrak. Actually, that's incorrect. He spammed "lfm zf," on general chat, and I messaged him for an invite for me and my girlfriend, only to find he was alone. I then went out to Tanaris and found 2 other decent players.
Meanwhile, cocktard paladin was out in the Badlands 'helping a friend'. What he was really doing was getting ganked for about 30 minutes straight by some horde. Good for the horde, I say now in retrospect. All I could say at the time was, "You moron, why don't you bubble/hearth? Let's get this show on the road." He didn't understand. Finally, when my eyes were almost bleeding, he made it north to Loch Modan and started the long trek to Kalimdor.
Anyway, so we get into the instance. I try to explain to him that I should pull since I'm the tank. He proceeds to run through the whole instance aggroing everything in his path. The hunter proves himself to be categorically useless. Somehow, we make it to Antu'sul, the Troll with a Hundred Basilisks. It's around this time I notice 1) I don't have blessing of might on, and never have, and 2) the cocktard doesn't have an aura up. "Clearly," I say to my girlfriend, "this guy's a 7 year old playing on his older brother's account." She agrees.
We then wipe on Antu'sul no less than four times. Most of the time the pally and the hunter weren't even fighting. I should've quit earlier, but I really wanted that mace.
Thank god for my new guild, though. We just 4-manned the 100 Trolls two nights ago. Teamspeak and playing with adults is awesome.
Disgruntled-looking plainclothes GM, his hair ragged, storms into the office of the Blizzard CEO.
"Sir!" he pants, "We've got a problem on US Nathrezim. A bug is preventing an alliance guild from running Molten Core! They've got 40 living, breathing people with families and jobs who've set aside an entire day to get leet loot, and they've been bamboozled!"
"Great scot!" cries the CEO. "Did you reset their raid IDs? Talk to the server admins? The programmers? Metzen?"
"No sir! According to the GM Code, Article 3, Section 6, I am not allowed to do anything useful whatsoever, anything which may be construed as a favor, renumeration, or a meaningful and intelligent action!"
"You snivling little shit! Do you know what this means? I'm going to be up all night making phone calls to those people, apologizing and begging their forgiveness. These wounds don't just heal by themselves. We've gotta do something now, before this situation gets out of control."
"But sir! The code!"
"Damn the code! You mention that pile of marketing bullshit to me one more time and I'll have you flaggelating yourself with a rusty scourge til next month -"
"- I thought that was just a rumor -"
"- with no overtime pay! Now, go down there and grab the lead programmer by the scruff of his neck and tell him he's got to fix this pronto. In the mean time, get your ass out to GM Isle and start farming epics for these guys. Anything they want. [Perdition's Blade] or [Eschander's Right Claw]. Hell, give the main tank the full Wrath set. You don't go home until they have everything they want."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"And if I ever hear some shit on the slashdot forums about you not responding like a human being again, I'll bust your ass down to QA monkey for Ghost so fast your thumbs will fall off! In fact, you should consider every day I don't an example of my generousity and mercy. Aren't I generous and merciful?"
The result is more money concentrated in the hands of the few, fewer well-paying jobs for skilled people in this country, and oh yeah a little bit different distribution of what wealth remains. Gutting the American middle class for fun and profit!
I was talking to my mother-in-law the other day, who just inherited a million bucks. She was dirt-poor when she raised my girlfriend, and she's glad that now she still mourns the loss of 3 artichokes that went bad in the fridge. We were going on about these investment bankers who worked for Harvard, managing the company's endowment, who were pissed off that they were now capped at making a mere $25 million a year.
In her experience, she said, the people who make $25m are mad as hell that they don't make $50m. They have only one mansion and staff instead of three. They have to share a private jet instead of owning their own private jet. These people have far more personal wealth than I will probably ever have, and yet they are obsessed with acquiring yet more.
Another thing people are throwing around here a lot is "Shouldn't we realize that as American IT workers, we're getting paid too much, and should in fact get paid less?" Bullshit. I'll start thinking "Maybe I should look forward to renting forever, being in debt all my life, and not sending my children to college," when I see a couple of American execs display some shame and say, "Maybe I should buy a normal IKEA shower curtain, instead of this $40,000 one, and maybe I should settle for a normal desk instead of a hand-wrought one that costs my company 3 million bucks.
If they really want to push more efficient automobiles, perhaps we could wean the American preference for the large SUV?
Completely the right way to go. If you live in a typical geek habitat like the SF area or Seattle, you don't realize how much people in Arizona, Southern California and the midwestern states prize their SUVs. A friend of mine went to visit some distant relatives out in Phoenix and was astonished that each adult owned a minivan or a Suburban. There was only one person in the entire gathering (aside from Andy, he drives a Geo Metro) who had a mid-sized sedan, and that was because he had to commute (which was a very foreign concept to all of them). The apologized profusely when he had to ride in the piddly sedan, as if it was a grave and serious offense.
These monsterous vehicles are a way of life for many Americans. They're home away from home: air-conditioned little worlds with 800 watt sound systems and DVD players. That's a hard mindset to budge.
As far as telecommuting, the people in my workplace would probably not suffer from coming in 2-3 times a week and telecommuting the rest of the time. The problem I have is that for me, work has a very large spatial component. Home has way too many pleasurable distractions, and not just the video games: my girlfriend, for instance. I wrote most of my essays in college in the kitchen, the school library and cafes. The only way I could telecommute is if I had a study or something. Or an SUV parked near a Starbucks.
This is the first I heard of it, but when I was going to play around with the new pricing options, I noticed that the 30" display was $2499 instead of 3 grand. I'm pretty sure it was 3 grand a week ago.
Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' is a grandiose, well-thought out, but morally unthinkable solution to the problem of Irish starvation. Thompson's 'A Modest Video Game Proposal' is not morally unthinkable (just disgusting), nor well-thought out, nor, considering how easy it is to make mods, particularly grandiose. In fact, I think he's mistaking irony for satire. Yes, it is ironic to have a sadistic, violent video game about how sadistic, violent video games are bad, but not particularly satirical. Seriously, if I wrote something like this, Professor Turner (my Restoration Lit teacher) would drive out to Oakland just to slap me.
Also, as many people have said in this thread, saying you'll donate 10 grand to charity and then reneging on your offer is downright low. After all, Swift didn't write, "I, Jonathan Swift, will gifte a sum of ten-thousand poundes sterlyng to buy such supplies as are needed for the support of Irishe peasants &c, upon the presentment to myself of one Irishe babe, broiled medium-rare, with a side of cabbage." Penny Arcade's move to actually shell out the cash is probably the biggest cockslap I've ever seen. I admire those boys.
I'm sorry but are you a fucking retard? The point of a raid is to go in and find indisputalable evidence that the crime was committed. A warrent will show that there is some evidence to it happening, but the raid will produce the evidence that will make the trail happen and get the assholes into jail.
The fourth ammentment is supposed to protect you from 'unreasonable search and seizure.' Ideally, this means that unless they have some evidence of wrongdoing, they cannot search your home, unless the present situation presses them to: i.e., they hear somebody screaming bloody murder inside. They can search your car, but that's a well-established exception.
The War on Drugs, the Red Scare and indeed the entire concept of the FBI is centered around violating those constitutional rights. Indeed, evidence that is obtained by illegal or legally questionable methods should be thrown out of court, and often is. I wish it happened more often. The whole War on Drugs is just a big mass of nonsense to send people into prison, preferably small-time dealers/users who don't have machine guns, and the more people go into prison, the more it is apparent that these agencies are doing their job. They get a big pat on the back from the guys who run correctional facilities, and there you have it: the Prison-Industrial Complex.
Perhaps now the powers that be have figured out that you can finger some nerd for something, get him in jail for fourty years, and he's almost certainly not got a gun. Let me leave you with a quote:
When the Nazis arrested the Communists,
I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist.
When they locked up the Social Democrats,
I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat.
When they arrested the trade unionists,
I said nothing; afterall, I was not a trade unionist.
When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew.
When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest. -Martin Niemöller
If you want a high capacity music player, then you want an iPod - everyone wants an iPod; they're cool. But then the video playing is just an added bonus. If you want a high capacity video player, then you'd get something else.
This allows them to test the water and only change their basic design a little bit. A friend of mine, who's a big apple nut and a sysadmin, claimed that the reason Apple almost died in the late 90's was because they had too many damn computer lines, and they were confusing and overlapping. When you have a bunch of lines of any product, there's a chance that everybody will buy Model A, and nobody will buy Models B-J. The main thing they've done right is simplify: iBooks, Powerbooks, iMacs, and PowerMacs. Mobile vs stationary, professional vs home user.
They've also done this with iPods. The iPod mini went the way of all things as soon as the Nano was introduced. You have two lines, and two different models of each. So, if they went out guns blazin' and made a newer, larger video-centric iPod with a big old screen, people would get confused, and Apple might be left some product in the warehouse that can't and won't sell.
I have plenty of fun just playing the game. In WoW, I played to 45 as a rogue, and got bored. I had plenty of fun, I just didn't like the rogue's playstyle. Then I played a shaman to 31, and got bored again because I wasn't in a guild. Then, I got my girlfriend into the game, which has really made it more rewarding. We're going to take a warrior and a priest to the level cap (60), and are making fairly good progress. We'll probably hit it in a month or so. And we have 2 other sets of alts to keep us busy if that gets boring.
Conversely, gosh, the only thing I really have to look forward to once I hit that cap is getting rare and epic armor and weapons, and PVP. I'll tell you what: as good as that Might set looks, I'll probably never run the end-game uber-raids. That's just me. And while PVP is fun, I certainly have more fun doing small group stuff.
I really would have liked to try Guild Wars, but I'm a Mac person now, so no dice.
Speaking as a WoW player, I've noticed quite a bit of inflation. Nothing like you're talking about certainly - people just starting out on a server most definitely have a chance to score some cash, especially by playing the in-game markets themselves. There are global rare drops (weapons/armor that are really good for their level) that you can auction, which are comparable to dungeon boss drops (which cannot be auctioned). A good rare drop will sell for 20g just because it's rare.
Also, in my opinion, the high levels are as much to blame as the farmers. For example, on Dunemaul, my horde server, the people are piss poor. I think I've seen a handful of people on that server with epic raid gear. Consequently, there's not a lot of selection, but the prices are super low. Now, you go over to Nathrezim, my alliance server, and the people are bursting out the seams with cash and loot. They have Molten Core (a 40-man raid) down to a science. At any given time, there are no less than 30 people strutting between the bank and the auction house decked out in gear that represents a few months of work. I don't think it's an accident that prices are significantly higher there. But even then, it's not so bad. I've been able to afford a few pieces of rare gear.
The root of the problem is that currency is constantly being produced, but it's being produced faster than it's destroyed. Every monster you kill generates some cash, but the only things that effectively 'destroy' money are 1) Mounts 2) Training 3) Repairs and 4) The limited number of useful things that NPCs sell. Everything else, you just sell right back to the gold farmer for that epic sword.
I am a double-talking snake in the grass, and I propose that you have the user first select what country they are from upon loading Maps or Earth. Then, if the user's from China, it's the Provice of Taiwan; if the user's from Taiwan, it's the Republic of China (Taiwan). Furthermore, if the user is from the USA, it becomes The Magic Land Where Semiconductors Come From.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to go back to Jonathan Swift here, in Gulliver's Travels. He claimed that the Yahoos, who were these little dirty, simian versions of humans with no intellect and nothing but greed, hatred, disease and guile, had lawyers. One yahoo found a shiny rock. Another yahoo came and tried to take it away from him. Struggle insues. 3rd yahoo comes in and takes it away from both of them (that's the lawyer).
Swift would've positively loved this one.
But anyway, I have to get in a cursory rant about what an apocalyptic crime this is. Feel free to ignore it, i'm sure it'll just be repeated several thousand times over. Now, it's not the fact that a patent may or may not be valid (i.e., conforming to the rules of a sadistic, flawed game), it's the fact that still more needless litigation is being introduced into a system that is already frought with friction. That friction favors the powers that be and makes sure that nothing truly creative ever happens again in the United States. If this shit is allowed to continue, you will never see another dirt-poor writer making it to fame, or another hacker in a basement cooking up the next revolution in technology.
One issue is the fact that they will probably use a different BIOS technology than standard IBM clones: Open Firmware or EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). For compatibility's sake, your current PC uses more or less the same BIOS as the original PCs when it boots up, and uses tricks to access higher modes. That's one thing I've always loved about Macs - the booting. No matter how much they try to disguise it with logos, I still see it's booting to the same resolution as DOS.
Also, consider the fact that they might deliberately only include driver support for their stuff. Driver support in Darwin is already pretty limited, and they have no incentive to produce more drivers than they will use. That means more hacking.
Finally, I think one of the goals with the TPM is to make it so that you'd have to produce a unique hack for each case, rather than one generalized hack that can be mass-produced. Can't give you specifics, but at least they're moving away from "Let's make it impossible to crack!" which always fails, to "Let's make it so hard to crack that only a market-insignificant number of people will be able to crack it!"
Anyway, I'm sure it's possible and somebody will do it, but it might not be as simple as a little solder job. I don't have much first-hand knowledge of this kind of stuff, I just read a little here and there.
I'll restrain myself from saying RTFP, but they said right on the top that they've strengthened their protections against hackers. However, without the knowledge that the main thing the hackers are trying to accomplish is putting OS X on generic intel hardware, you wouldn't know that the answer is no, it won't run on regular intel hardware.
...resort to desparate and morally reprehensible measures to slow their decline, be they the MPAA or the RIAA. They're behaving like frightened, cornered animals. I'd expect both of these industry cartels to resort to some really scary shit in the next decade or so to try to cut their losses (like the east fork stuff, http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/18 11/), but they don't understand the difference between gliding along in a paracheut and flying. Ultimately, the industry megacorporations will tank (well, the music industry will, but movies are much harder to make than music), and our freedoms will be the real casualty.
Yeah. They're getting slapped all over the place by Apple. My next 'tv' is going to be a 30" cinema display with a tuner hooked up to the computer. I'LL NEVER NEED TO LOOK AWAY FROM THE COMPUTER AGAIN!
This just reminds me of that article about the now-President of Sony reprimanding the people at Sony BGM for being to greedy, and essentially handing the digital music player revolution to Apple because they thought it might encourage piracy. In fact, it reminds me of all of the business surrounding PSP hacking. They're just overly loss-averse. Something about their corporate mentality prevents them from seeing that while they might lose a couple million bucks in CD revenue, they'll get billions upon billions in luxury mp3 players, or likewise why they might lose a little bit of their game revenue, but gain by having tons of enthusiasts such as myself purchasing PSPs. I won't, because of all the tomfoolery they're pulling. Of course, that's the problem when your company has many cthulhu-like tentacles stretched out into a variety of areas, each thinking and acting like an independent company. Nobody sees the big picture.
Well, what can I say but "Ha-ha."
Star Trek is perhaps most cool in that its stiff-in-the-back Lawful Goodness created the reaction that brought us Firefly, Farscape and other such "gritty" sci-fi. In that metaphor, OSS zealots are piloting the Starship Debian, Linus is bald, Anglo-Norman and strangely attractive, and the seat-of-your-pants source jockeys out in the Windows Wastes are the crew of Serenity. I don't know who's cooler, but one thing's for certain: the outlaws always get more tail. Except for Kirk, but that comes at the expense of being William Shatner. And Richard Stallman is a lot less morally flexible than Kirk, so I doubt he'd have as many escapades in the alpha quadrant as Jimmy T.
They both have their uses, really. If we're talking programming or editing XML, it's emacs all the way. nxml-mode really beats the shorts off of everything on the market, free or not. But administration, especially if you're going to be doing it through an xterm to a remote machine, is strictly a vim thing.
I'd really like to learn how to use vim better, but since I spend most of my time writing XML and not editing plaintext, I don't have much opportunity.
in some people, the blind spot is at the focal point. I understand it's a very frusterating disorder. And research into mantis shrimp sometime. They see in like 23 different colors (either way you look at it, they're really cool!).
But anyway, before we go arguing about whether that's karma or demonic affliction, I think we're getting off the subject here. The big thing I hear from IDers is that the eye is too complex to have evolved by chance, and 'what good is half an eye,' or wing, etc.
Well, to address the latter, when I've been out herping in the foothills with my biologist friend, we've found some little lizards who skitter away like mad and are very dexterous at leaping between logs. If they had rutamentary feathers and little flaps of skin that didn't allow them to fly, but made them extra swift at getting away from predators in just such a tall-grass, thick underbush environment.
Secondly, an eye really isn't too complex to have evolved gradually, and half an eye is really nice if your enemy is blind. An organism evolves light-sensitive cells on its skin. This is good, because it can kind of sense when a bigger animal gets near it and moves out of the way. Then, those EM-sensitive cells evolve into a pit. Example: Pit vipers (true evidence that I am under the sway of the serpent!). Once you have a pit, you get not only a sense, but a vector. From there, it's not that hard to imagine a membrane forming over the top to protect it from infection as that pit gets deeper and deeper. Add a lens and you can focus the light to be sharpest at a particular distance, forming an image. Finally, you detach the parts a bit from one another so the whole apparatus can swivel, then you can look at different things without turning your head. Each variation has an advantage and a purpose.
This is the part where I get rambly. Forgive me for not structuring things better.
But I don't seriously think that I'm going to convince anybody who believes otherwise. What pisses me and other nerds off is the idea that our children might go to a school where our kids don't get Sex Ed or a proper education in biology, but they do get ID rammed down their throats whether they like it or not. Believe me, I know a lot about the subject, and I fully intend to educate my children on it. But not everybody is as fortunate.
If you want a world without sexual education, look at most of the poor, primarily black/latino schools in Oakland, CA. My girlfriend did some work as part of her education minor with some 14-17 young women from West Oakland, (arguably) the worst part. They knew nothing. They were having sex, but they had such absurd ideas as birth control pills preventing HIV transmission, etc. They had sex without condoms all the time. One was 8 months pregnant. If you taught these kids 'abstinence only' education, they'd ignore it, partly because their educational system has failed them in other regards, but mostly because they want to have sex, just like everybody else in the history of humanity. Sex is not an invention of the 1960s, mind you: read Shakespeare and Chaucer, sometimes it's downright raunchy. Read the Song of Solomon if you want to (yeah yeah metaphor for God's love, you're a twisted, blind son of a bitch if you think it's about anything but erotic love). HOWEVER, if you just went over the basics of condoms, diseases and the like with them, they might not get pregant, and have a choice between ruining
That's not quite right, unless by 'flawlessly' you mean 'without breaking for no apparent reason,' rather than 'without flaw, perfectly', and by 'once installed' you mean 'once a highly motivated nerd tweaks with it for a few days'.
I've got Gentoo and Windows dual booting on my home computer, which currently you might say is more my girlfriend's than mine, since I have a new anodized aluminum laptop whose brand I'm SURE nobody wants me to mention. Before that, I ran Slackware. Here are my thoughts. Bear in mind they're only the negative ones. There are many things I love about Linux, like Xine and Fluxbox. However, I have more than my share of criticisms:
I really think that learning how to use Linux transformed the way I think about computers and rekindled my nerdliness, but it simply doesn't work out of the box for anything except server applications.
Bah, if you call it anything but Candlestick, it's a sure sign that you're either a tourist, a radio personality, or under drinking age.
SBC Park is another matter because it doesn't have an original name, but I know a lot of people who still call it Pac Bell Park. Of course, that might have something to do with the fact that 4 members of my family were employees of AT&T->Pac Bell->SBC.
I really find it works better when the main tank pulls w/gun. 1) Feign death can be resisted, 2) Competant hunters are rare, and 3) The aggro is already on me - it's easier to tank and maintain aggro than pull aggro off somebody else.
But hey, you're not in my group, so what do I care?
I've actually met quite a few awesome paladins. It's hunters who piss me off (I can just hear the cries now: hunter weapon, hunter weapon!).
The one 'smacktard' paladin I met put together a group for Zul'Farrak. Actually, that's incorrect. He spammed "lfm zf," on general chat, and I messaged him for an invite for me and my girlfriend, only to find he was alone. I then went out to Tanaris and found 2 other decent players.
Meanwhile, cocktard paladin was out in the Badlands 'helping a friend'. What he was really doing was getting ganked for about 30 minutes straight by some horde. Good for the horde, I say now in retrospect. All I could say at the time was, "You moron, why don't you bubble/hearth? Let's get this show on the road." He didn't understand. Finally, when my eyes were almost bleeding, he made it north to Loch Modan and started the long trek to Kalimdor.
Anyway, so we get into the instance. I try to explain to him that I should pull since I'm the tank. He proceeds to run through the whole instance aggroing everything in his path. The hunter proves himself to be categorically useless. Somehow, we make it to Antu'sul, the Troll with a Hundred Basilisks. It's around this time I notice 1) I don't have blessing of might on, and never have, and 2) the cocktard doesn't have an aura up. "Clearly," I say to my girlfriend, "this guy's a 7 year old playing on his older brother's account." She agrees.
We then wipe on Antu'sul no less than four times. Most of the time the pally and the hunter weren't even fighting. I should've quit earlier, but I really wanted that mace.
Thank god for my new guild, though. We just 4-manned the 100 Trolls two nights ago. Teamspeak and playing with adults is awesome.
Disgruntled-looking plainclothes GM, his hair ragged, storms into the office of the Blizzard CEO.
"Sir!" he pants, "We've got a problem on US Nathrezim. A bug is preventing an alliance guild from running Molten Core! They've got 40 living, breathing people with families and jobs who've set aside an entire day to get leet loot, and they've been bamboozled!"
"Great scot!" cries the CEO. "Did you reset their raid IDs? Talk to the server admins? The programmers? Metzen?"
"No sir! According to the GM Code, Article 3, Section 6, I am not allowed to do anything useful whatsoever, anything which may be construed as a favor, renumeration, or a meaningful and intelligent action!"
"You snivling little shit! Do you know what this means? I'm going to be up all night making phone calls to those people, apologizing and begging their forgiveness. These wounds don't just heal by themselves. We've gotta do something now, before this situation gets out of control."
"But sir! The code!"
"Damn the code! You mention that pile of marketing bullshit to me one more time and I'll have you flaggelating yourself with a rusty scourge til next month -"
"- I thought that was just a rumor -"
"- with no overtime pay! Now, go down there and grab the lead programmer by the scruff of his neck and tell him he's got to fix this pronto. In the mean time, get your ass out to GM Isle and start farming epics for these guys. Anything they want. [Perdition's Blade] or [Eschander's Right Claw]. Hell, give the main tank the full Wrath set. You don't go home until they have everything they want."
"Sir! Yes, sir!"
"And if I ever hear some shit on the slashdot forums about you not responding like a human being again, I'll bust your ass down to QA monkey for Ghost so fast your thumbs will fall off! In fact, you should consider every day I don't an example of my generousity and mercy. Aren't I generous and merciful?"
"Sir! Extremely, sir!"
"Now, get moving, GM!"
I was talking to my mother-in-law the other day, who just inherited a million bucks. She was dirt-poor when she raised my girlfriend, and she's glad that now she still mourns the loss of 3 artichokes that went bad in the fridge. We were going on about these investment bankers who worked for Harvard, managing the company's endowment, who were pissed off that they were now capped at making a mere $25 million a year.
In her experience, she said, the people who make $25m are mad as hell that they don't make $50m. They have only one mansion and staff instead of three. They have to share a private jet instead of owning their own private jet. These people have far more personal wealth than I will probably ever have, and yet they are obsessed with acquiring yet more.
Another thing people are throwing around here a lot is "Shouldn't we realize that as American IT workers, we're getting paid too much, and should in fact get paid less?" Bullshit. I'll start thinking "Maybe I should look forward to renting forever, being in debt all my life, and not sending my children to college," when I see a couple of American execs display some shame and say, "Maybe I should buy a normal IKEA shower curtain, instead of this $40,000 one, and maybe I should settle for a normal desk instead of a hand-wrought one that costs my company 3 million bucks.
Completely the right way to go. If you live in a typical geek habitat like the SF area or Seattle, you don't realize how much people in Arizona, Southern California and the midwestern states prize their SUVs. A friend of mine went to visit some distant relatives out in Phoenix and was astonished that each adult owned a minivan or a Suburban. There was only one person in the entire gathering (aside from Andy, he drives a Geo Metro) who had a mid-sized sedan, and that was because he had to commute (which was a very foreign concept to all of them). The apologized profusely when he had to ride in the piddly sedan, as if it was a grave and serious offense.
These monsterous vehicles are a way of life for many Americans. They're home away from home: air-conditioned little worlds with 800 watt sound systems and DVD players. That's a hard mindset to budge.
As far as telecommuting, the people in my workplace would probably not suffer from coming in 2-3 times a week and telecommuting the rest of the time. The problem I have is that for me, work has a very large spatial component. Home has way too many pleasurable distractions, and not just the video games: my girlfriend, for instance. I wrote most of my essays in college in the kitchen, the school library and cafes. The only way I could telecommute is if I had a study or something. Or an SUV parked near a Starbucks.
Holy shit. I guess it's time to go back to school.
This is the first I heard of it, but when I was going to play around with the new pricing options, I noticed that the 30" display was $2499 instead of 3 grand. I'm pretty sure it was 3 grand a week ago.
I suppose we'd have to wait until 2006 as well, and make sure the producers get a DBA (Doing Business As) so they can call themselves a company.
Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' is a grandiose, well-thought out, but morally unthinkable solution to the problem of Irish starvation. Thompson's 'A Modest Video Game Proposal' is not morally unthinkable (just disgusting), nor well-thought out, nor, considering how easy it is to make mods, particularly grandiose. In fact, I think he's mistaking irony for satire. Yes, it is ironic to have a sadistic, violent video game about how sadistic, violent video games are bad, but not particularly satirical. Seriously, if I wrote something like this, Professor Turner (my Restoration Lit teacher) would drive out to Oakland just to slap me.
Also, as many people have said in this thread, saying you'll donate 10 grand to charity and then reneging on your offer is downright low. After all, Swift didn't write, "I, Jonathan Swift, will gifte a sum of ten-thousand poundes sterlyng to buy such supplies as are needed for the support of Irishe peasants &c, upon the presentment to myself of one Irishe babe, broiled medium-rare, with a side of cabbage." Penny Arcade's move to actually shell out the cash is probably the biggest cockslap I've ever seen. I admire those boys.
The fourth ammentment is supposed to protect you from 'unreasonable search and seizure.' Ideally, this means that unless they have some evidence of wrongdoing, they cannot search your home, unless the present situation presses them to: i.e., they hear somebody screaming bloody murder inside. They can search your car, but that's a well-established exception.
The War on Drugs, the Red Scare and indeed the entire concept of the FBI is centered around violating those constitutional rights. Indeed, evidence that is obtained by illegal or legally questionable methods should be thrown out of court, and often is. I wish it happened more often. The whole War on Drugs is just a big mass of nonsense to send people into prison, preferably small-time dealers/users who don't have machine guns, and the more people go into prison, the more it is apparent that these agencies are doing their job. They get a big pat on the back from the guys who run correctional facilities, and there you have it: the Prison-Industrial Complex.
Perhaps now the powers that be have figured out that you can finger some nerd for something, get him in jail for fourty years, and he's almost certainly not got a gun. Let me leave you with a quote:
When the Nazis arrested the Communists, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Communist. When they locked up the Social Democrats, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Social Democrat. When they arrested the trade unionists, I said nothing; afterall, I was not a trade unionist. When they arrested the Jews, I said nothing; after all, I was not a Jew. When they arrested me, there was no longer anyone who could protest. -Martin Niemöller
This allows them to test the water and only change their basic design a little bit. A friend of mine, who's a big apple nut and a sysadmin, claimed that the reason Apple almost died in the late 90's was because they had too many damn computer lines, and they were confusing and overlapping. When you have a bunch of lines of any product, there's a chance that everybody will buy Model A, and nobody will buy Models B-J. The main thing they've done right is simplify: iBooks, Powerbooks, iMacs, and PowerMacs. Mobile vs stationary, professional vs home user.
They've also done this with iPods. The iPod mini went the way of all things as soon as the Nano was introduced. You have two lines, and two different models of each. So, if they went out guns blazin' and made a newer, larger video-centric iPod with a big old screen, people would get confused, and Apple might be left some product in the warehouse that can't and won't sell.
I have plenty of fun just playing the game. In WoW, I played to 45 as a rogue, and got bored. I had plenty of fun, I just didn't like the rogue's playstyle. Then I played a shaman to 31, and got bored again because I wasn't in a guild. Then, I got my girlfriend into the game, which has really made it more rewarding. We're going to take a warrior and a priest to the level cap (60), and are making fairly good progress. We'll probably hit it in a month or so. And we have 2 other sets of alts to keep us busy if that gets boring.
Conversely, gosh, the only thing I really have to look forward to once I hit that cap is getting rare and epic armor and weapons, and PVP. I'll tell you what: as good as that Might set looks, I'll probably never run the end-game uber-raids. That's just me. And while PVP is fun, I certainly have more fun doing small group stuff.
I really would have liked to try Guild Wars, but I'm a Mac person now, so no dice.
Speaking as a WoW player, I've noticed quite a bit of inflation. Nothing like you're talking about certainly - people just starting out on a server most definitely have a chance to score some cash, especially by playing the in-game markets themselves. There are global rare drops (weapons/armor that are really good for their level) that you can auction, which are comparable to dungeon boss drops (which cannot be auctioned). A good rare drop will sell for 20g just because it's rare.
Also, in my opinion, the high levels are as much to blame as the farmers. For example, on Dunemaul, my horde server, the people are piss poor. I think I've seen a handful of people on that server with epic raid gear. Consequently, there's not a lot of selection, but the prices are super low. Now, you go over to Nathrezim, my alliance server, and the people are bursting out the seams with cash and loot. They have Molten Core (a 40-man raid) down to a science. At any given time, there are no less than 30 people strutting between the bank and the auction house decked out in gear that represents a few months of work. I don't think it's an accident that prices are significantly higher there. But even then, it's not so bad. I've been able to afford a few pieces of rare gear.
The root of the problem is that currency is constantly being produced, but it's being produced faster than it's destroyed. Every monster you kill generates some cash, but the only things that effectively 'destroy' money are 1) Mounts 2) Training 3) Repairs and 4) The limited number of useful things that NPCs sell. Everything else, you just sell right back to the gold farmer for that epic sword.
I am a double-talking snake in the grass, and I propose that you have the user first select what country they are from upon loading Maps or Earth. Then, if the user's from China, it's the Provice of Taiwan; if the user's from Taiwan, it's the Republic of China (Taiwan). Furthermore, if the user is from the USA, it becomes The Magic Land Where Semiconductors Come From.