Comparing a bad situation to something worse in no means negates or diminishes the badness of the original situation. By your suggested logic, you would never get a raise because there are still people who make less money than you... or are pressed into labor.
And yes, this is one of the more overt practices of a police state. It's even more worrisome when people forget that the very philosophical and documented building blocks of the nation is a piece of paper that restricts the federal government from doing exactly what this article reports:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This cannot be suspended except under marshal law and I've missed that memo if it's been announced. When the government stops recognizing their limitations and begins using forms of law enforcement and fear-mongering to bypass those limitation, then it's most definitely a police state.
I'm with you on the load-time hate. Growing up with less disposable income than most of the gamer culture, I got a hand-me-down NES from a friend when N64 came out and his N64 when he went on to PC Gaming. (I also got a hold of a Xerox 086 with floppies the size of bed sheets around that time.) But this didn't stop me from playing every system there was with that generation.
NES, SNES, NEOGEO, N64, Genesis (with the built on volume control!), Playstation, Dreamcast, PS2 -- and that's where I stopped. It was pretty evident what the deciding factor for me was: Load Time.
NES was unreliable. Well, was as reliable as your lungs were. Genesis was great, but unless you invested in 3rd part controllers, the 3-button setup sucked. SNES had all the buttons for Street Fighter II (swoon) and had what I believe the most fun of the Super Mario installments.
Anything with a CD/DVD format was just unplayable after growing up with cartridges. The only exception I would make is that Dreamcast game were SO WIDELY PIRATED that you could play just about any game from any manufacturer around the world if you had an internet connection that didn't die too frequently and a reliable FTP server.
Load times killed console gaming for me. All PC gaming from thereon out.
Well, we keep funding a war that less than half the nation believes in, this isn't too much more to ask, eh? =P
But really, though. I understand you're trying to describe a slippery slope, but the Canadian people *just* may be able to put up a fight to stop such a thing from happening. They seem to have a better grasp on their political system than we do. (This statement is based on the last 8 years of American politics)
She's sharing the expenses of other peoples lifestyles as they are sharing hers (medical bills, medication, etc). Everyone shares a bit of the cost and the cost, as a whole, goes down (see "Insurance"... minus the scammy part about not wanting to pay out).
Sure, you could say "Screw you, I'll pay for what I want when I want it! And not a penny more!" but watch out-- when suddenly you *NEED* something, the cost will be pretty dang high.
This is the difference between the American pseudo-free, pseudo-capitalism and a good deal of the rest of modern Western Civilization. We Americans think that paying only our costs is cheaper than everyone helping to pay everyone's costs.
You know, my one bit of common-culture pride came from my capability to keep my techi-nerdiness a complete secret until my super powers were needed. No one would know otherwise. But I read this and laughed so loud, one of my co-workers HAD to come by and have me explain what was so funny. Now I'm a "Trekkie" according to her.
*sigh. eepok, when his laugh alerted others.
Oh, for those that are curious, these oddly constructed sentences are references to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Enterprise had encountered a race that can communicate using English words, but their syntax was so foreign, that the Federation considers them "friendly" but completely incapable of similar communication. Turns out that they speak in only in metaphors and stories of actions and events that have happened in their history or their holy book(s).
For example: To say that Slashdot has been forcibly and legally censored, they would say "Slashdot, when the hammer of Scientology came down."
It was modded insightful by someone who also sees the very high potential for a slippery slope developing under the unwary nose of the body politic. Nazi Germany was one situation where a government slowly pushed certain rules and regulations to lessen the educational freedoms of the public. Given that many of them were convinced that they were superior, under attack, and that their leaders wouldn't betray their trust, a good deal of the public blindly followed the rules.
When it comes to the slavery comparison, the poster was drawing a parallel between the rules governing education of the black slaves in Colonial America with the proposed prevention of self-education that this law could bring. His concern on this ground may not be as strong as the first, but nonetheless, being able to draw such historical parallels typically gains the comment of "insightful."
Lastly, comparing something to Nazi Germany, though monotonous in online communities, should never be discouraged unless they are maliciously false. It's my understanding that we (civilization) are supposed to learn from the mistakes of our forefathers. I, too, am constantly wary of people starting that slide down the slope that would lead to a strictly controlled public with no fortitude to stand up to their government.
Well, "evolutionary advantage" can mean one of two things in this situation:
1) The trait's been passed on generation to generation because men are less likely to learn from is that "sex may produce unwanted offspring." 2) The trait benefits the species in the long run.
I believe the appropriate interpretation in the this case in (1).
Wow! That's some strong words. "Most unstable app I use by far"?
I by no means intend the following to be insulting, but I have to ask:
1) What are you doing that causes Firefox issues? 2) What "more stable" apps are you using?
We all submit that Firefox can grow to be bloated in RAM if it's not restarted every so often. (I'm at 85MB right now having not closed it since 8am this morning and having surfed/goofed quite a bit today.)But if a site ever causes Firefox to crash, I probably don't want to be going to that site anyway, or when I restart Firefox, it opens up all my tabs to the pre-crash site and I'm still logged in.
Could you imagine cars working like that? 1) Crashed into by some A-hole. 2) Crash data sent to manufacturer for preventative measures, fix will be out in all models in a couple weeks 3) You get pulled out of your car and, if you want to continue driving that day, are presented with a clone of your car, pre-crash, to do so.
I remember when Firefox was covered by Slashdot about 7 years ago. It was described as some itty bitty beta based vaguely on Netscape (which I personally hated), but it was mentioned that it was only some 5MB download. I thought, "Hey, it's free (my favorite price), it's small (I seriously needed better hardware), and it's cutting edge (geek factor)."
I downloaded it, installed it, learned I could move the buttons around and fell in love. Since then, I would always install Firefox on every computer I fixed. I require all friends to use it. I carry around FireFox portable (and thunderbird) on a thumbdrive so I can use it wherever and however I wish.
While in beta, it worked. The release candidates worked. The final versions worked. Tabs and middle click CHANGED what the internet was to me. Java control, add-ons, everything -- Thank you Firefox!
UCI has one. The administration chooses not to give it the name, but we all knew it and know it was just that. You had to get a permit to use it and that was only possible between 11am and 2pm... that is, unless you're selling something. Then you can open shop at sun up and leave at sun down.
They say that you can't "protest" or "demonstrate" just anywhere on campus because it would begin to inhibit education. I say "Free speech zones" inhibit education.
"The system is very responsive, using barely 480MB of memory after boot."
I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS! That's just mad! I frequently fix friends' and coworkers' computers (XP) and I don't let them have their computers back until I have their boot up down to >100MB. It could go lower, but not without making some tasks burdensome ("Oh, you want to print? Turn this service back on..")
But 480MB? Just insane. Why upgrade the software? By default, you'd have to upgrade your hardware. And for what? What can you do on 7 or Vista that you can't do (BETTER! and CHEAPER!) on XP?
I think the article doesn't summarize the work properly, since they are suggesting that evolution is highly directed and deterministic, whereas the paper is instead analyzing the "degree of bias" that is inherent to the selection effects of evolution. For instance, the scientific paper doesn't claim that evolution can't produce non-advantageous mutations.
From what I picked up in bio, it was known to work as such:
Assume Mutation
(1) If mutation not hindrance, animal likely to live and likely makes babies.
(2) If mutation is boon, animal more likely to live and more likely makes babies.
(3) If mutation is hindrance, animal less likely to live and less likely to make babies
From there, you consider whether or not the mutation is recessive/dominant which determines if the babies get the mutation (then referred to as a trait).
Repeat many many times and you get a separation of a special line.
The proper combination of factors being: mutation = beneficial, mutation dominant, mutated animals screw like proverbial rabbits.
As an American who is pretty knowledgeable about tech, I'm pretty surprised I hadn't heard about these myself. They're not marketed much if at all in the States according to the article.... that may have a bit to do with slow/no adoption.
Well, instanced zones don't necessarily cure the ails. Recently, on one of the Everquest servers, there have been claims and reason to believe that a small group of characters beat a progression-based instanced mission (a first for the server) when the instanced is tuned for a extremely highly progressed raid of 54 people. Moreover, on the Firiona Vie server, all nearly all loot and gear is transferable between characters, thus any hacking of extremely high content (including instanced zones) turns directly into in-game currency via a sale and that in-game currency turns into real currency by selling the platinum for real money.
Game design flaws are the not the *cause* of these problems. Bad players cause exploits and design unpreparedness allow those exploits to turn into problems.
Massively just did an interview with John Smedley and touched upon the issue of farmers/plat sellers and how they are using social hacking to bring in profits and hurt the company.
SOE owns and operates Everquest, Everquest 2, Star Wars Galaxies, and other MMOs.
I think the issue of farming is higher on the radar now than it ever has been. The behinds the scenes things are really frustration. A lot of these farmers are essentially stealing from us. What they do is they charge us back all the time. They use a credit card -sometimes stolen, sometimes not - to buy an account key. They use the account for a month, and then they call the credit card company and charge it back. We have suffered nearly a million dollars just in fines over the past six months; it's getting extremely expensive for us. What's happening is that when they do this all the time, the credit card companies come back to us and say "You have a higher than normal chargeback rate, therefore we'll charge you fines on top of that."
Slashdot Mirror
A/S/L ?
Nerds are interested in many a subject. I am an education/tech nerd. I'm pretty damn sure there's quite a few politics and history nerds in here, too.
Beyond that, why complain when genuine news hits the front page? Did you complain when Slashdot was holding up the internets when the towers fell?
That's pronounced "uh-NAHL"
And yes, this is one of the more overt practices of a police state. It's even more worrisome when people forget that the very philosophical and documented building blocks of the nation is a piece of paper that restricts the federal government from doing exactly what this article reports:
This cannot be suspended except under marshal law and I've missed that memo if it's been announced. When the government stops recognizing their limitations and begins using forms of law enforcement and fear-mongering to bypass those limitation, then it's most definitely a police state.
I'm with you on the load-time hate. Growing up with less disposable income than most of the gamer culture, I got a hand-me-down NES from a friend when N64 came out and his N64 when he went on to PC Gaming. (I also got a hold of a Xerox 086 with floppies the size of bed sheets around that time.) But this didn't stop me from playing every system there was with that generation.
NES, SNES, NEOGEO, N64, Genesis (with the built on volume control!), Playstation, Dreamcast, PS2 -- and that's where I stopped. It was pretty evident what the deciding factor for me was: Load Time.
NES was unreliable. Well, was as reliable as your lungs were.
Genesis was great, but unless you invested in 3rd part controllers, the 3-button setup sucked.
SNES had all the buttons for Street Fighter II (swoon) and had what I believe the most fun of the Super Mario installments.
Anything with a CD/DVD format was just unplayable after growing up with cartridges. The only exception I would make is that Dreamcast game were SO WIDELY PIRATED that you could play just about any game from any manufacturer around the world if you had an internet connection that didn't die too frequently and a reliable FTP server.
Load times killed console gaming for me. All PC gaming from thereon out.
I would love to evolve to the point where we viewed the Arts as worthy of our tax dollars.
Well, we keep funding a war that less than half the nation believes in, this isn't too much more to ask, eh? =P
But really, though. I understand you're trying to describe a slippery slope, but the Canadian people *just* may be able to put up a fight to stop such a thing from happening. They seem to have a better grasp on their political system than we do. (This statement is based on the last 8 years of American politics)
She's sharing the expenses of other peoples lifestyles as they are sharing hers (medical bills, medication, etc). Everyone shares a bit of the cost and the cost, as a whole, goes down (see "Insurance"... minus the scammy part about not wanting to pay out).
Sure, you could say "Screw you, I'll pay for what I want when I want it! And not a penny more!" but watch out-- when suddenly you *NEED* something, the cost will be pretty dang high.
This is the difference between the American pseudo-free, pseudo-capitalism and a good deal of the rest of modern Western Civilization. We Americans think that paying only our costs is cheaper than everyone helping to pay everyone's costs.
Thy nerd-recall is greater than mine.
You know, my one bit of common-culture pride came from my capability to keep my techi-nerdiness a complete secret until my super powers were needed. No one would know otherwise. But I read this and laughed so loud, one of my co-workers HAD to come by and have me explain what was so funny. Now I'm a "Trekkie" according to her.
*sigh. eepok, when his laugh alerted others.
Oh, for those that are curious, these oddly constructed sentences are references to Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Enterprise had encountered a race that can communicate using English words, but their syntax was so foreign, that the Federation considers them "friendly" but completely incapable of similar communication. Turns out that they speak in only in metaphors and stories of actions and events that have happened in their history or their holy book(s).
For example: To say that Slashdot has been forcibly and legally censored, they would say "Slashdot, when the hammer of Scientology came down."
It was modded insightful by someone who also sees the very high potential for a slippery slope developing under the unwary nose of the body politic. Nazi Germany was one situation where a government slowly pushed certain rules and regulations to lessen the educational freedoms of the public. Given that many of them were convinced that they were superior, under attack, and that their leaders wouldn't betray their trust, a good deal of the public blindly followed the rules.
When it comes to the slavery comparison, the poster was drawing a parallel between the rules governing education of the black slaves in Colonial America with the proposed prevention of self-education that this law could bring. His concern on this ground may not be as strong as the first, but nonetheless, being able to draw such historical parallels typically gains the comment of "insightful."
Lastly, comparing something to Nazi Germany, though monotonous in online communities, should never be discouraged unless they are maliciously false. It's my understanding that we (civilization) are supposed to learn from the mistakes of our forefathers. I, too, am constantly wary of people starting that slide down the slope that would lead to a strictly controlled public with no fortitude to stand up to their government.
Well, "evolutionary advantage" can mean one of two things in this situation:
1) The trait's been passed on generation to generation because men are less likely to learn from is that "sex may produce unwanted offspring."
2) The trait benefits the species in the long run.
I believe the appropriate interpretation in the this case in (1).
Wow! That's some strong words. "Most unstable app I use by far"?
I by no means intend the following to be insulting, but I have to ask:
1) What are you doing that causes Firefox issues?
2) What "more stable" apps are you using?
We all submit that Firefox can grow to be bloated in RAM if it's not restarted every so often. (I'm at 85MB right now having not closed it since 8am this morning and having surfed/goofed quite a bit today.)But if a site ever causes Firefox to crash, I probably don't want to be going to that site anyway, or when I restart Firefox, it opens up all my tabs to the pre-crash site and I'm still logged in.
Could you imagine cars working like that?
1) Crashed into by some A-hole.
2) Crash data sent to manufacturer for preventative measures, fix will be out in all models in a couple weeks
3) You get pulled out of your car and, if you want to continue driving that day, are presented with a clone of your car, pre-crash, to do so.
I remember when Firefox was covered by Slashdot about 7 years ago. It was described as some itty bitty beta based vaguely on Netscape (which I personally hated), but it was mentioned that it was only some 5MB download. I thought, "Hey, it's free (my favorite price), it's small (I seriously needed better hardware), and it's cutting edge (geek factor)."
I downloaded it, installed it, learned I could move the buttons around and fell in love. Since then, I would always install Firefox on every computer I fixed. I require all friends to use it. I carry around FireFox portable (and thunderbird) on a thumbdrive so I can use it wherever and however I wish.
While in beta, it worked. The release candidates worked. The final versions worked. Tabs and middle click CHANGED what the internet was to me. Java control, add-ons, everything -- Thank you Firefox!
UCI has one. The administration chooses not to give it the name, but we all knew it and know it was just that. You had to get a permit to use it and that was only possible between 11am and 2pm... that is, unless you're selling something. Then you can open shop at sun up and leave at sun down.
They say that you can't "protest" or "demonstrate" just anywhere on campus because it would begin to inhibit education. I say "Free speech zones" inhibit education.
That *should* be less than 100MB.
I've obviously been in *nix land for too long, I'm still of the impression that 256 Mb is pretty much all one needs for most tasks. Even EMACS! That's just mad! I frequently fix friends' and coworkers' computers (XP) and I don't let them have their computers back until I have their boot up down to >100MB. It could go lower, but not without making some tasks burdensome ("Oh, you want to print? Turn this service back on..")
But 480MB? Just insane. Why upgrade the software? By default, you'd have to upgrade your hardware. And for what? What can you do on 7 or Vista that you can't do (BETTER! and CHEAPER!) on XP?
That clears everything up.
Thank you kindly for that clarification. =)
So what's the difference, then?
I see...
Hmm... I don't understand...
From what I picked up in bio, it was known to work as such:
Assume Mutation
(1) If mutation not hindrance, animal likely to live and likely makes babies.
(2) If mutation is boon, animal more likely to live and more likely makes babies.
(3) If mutation is hindrance, animal less likely to live and less likely to make babies
From there, you consider whether or not the mutation is recessive/dominant which determines if the babies get the mutation (then referred to as a trait).
Repeat many many times and you get a separation of a special line.
The proper combination of factors being: mutation = beneficial, mutation dominant, mutated animals screw like proverbial rabbits.
How is this different from the new findings?
As an American who is pretty knowledgeable about tech, I'm pretty surprised I hadn't heard about these myself. They're not marketed much if at all in the States according to the article. ... that may have a bit to do with slow/no adoption.
Well, instanced zones don't necessarily cure the ails. Recently, on one of the Everquest servers, there have been claims and reason to believe that a small group of characters beat a progression-based instanced mission (a first for the server) when the instanced is tuned for a extremely highly progressed raid of 54 people. Moreover, on the Firiona Vie server, all nearly all loot and gear is transferable between characters, thus any hacking of extremely high content (including instanced zones) turns directly into in-game currency via a sale and that in-game currency turns into real currency by selling the platinum for real money.
Game design flaws are the not the *cause* of these problems. Bad players cause exploits and design unpreparedness allow those exploits to turn into problems.
Massively just did an interview with John Smedley and touched upon the issue of farmers/plat sellers and how they are using social hacking to bring in profits and hurt the company.
Part 1: http://www.massively.com/2008/01/14/a-ces-interview-with-soe-ceo-john-smedley-pt-1/
Part 2: http://www.massively.com/2008/01/14/a-ces-interview-with-soe-ceo-john-smedley-pt-2/
SOE owns and operates Everquest, Everquest 2, Star Wars Galaxies, and other MMOs.
I think the issue of farming is higher on the radar now than it ever has been. The behinds the scenes things are really frustration. A lot of these farmers are essentially stealing from us. What they do is they charge us back all the time. They use a credit card -sometimes stolen, sometimes not - to buy an account key. They use the account for a month, and then they call the credit card company and charge it back. We have suffered nearly a million dollars just in fines over the past six months; it's getting extremely expensive for us. What's happening is that when they do this all the time, the credit card companies come back to us and say "You have a higher than normal chargeback rate, therefore we'll charge you fines on top of that."