This war and the mindless support US citizens have given it will go down as one of the greatest crimes of modern history, and those who knowingly support it deserve at least as bad as what is coming to them, and probably worse.
"One of the Greatest Crimes of Modern History?" Please. I dislike the Bush administration and their idiotic excuses for invading Iraq, but president Jr. isn't even smart enough to commit an attrocity on the level to warrant such a description.
Let's not taint the discussion buy suggesting that the war in Iraq is a criminal enterprise on the level of Hitler, Stallin, Pol Pot, or other individuals who systematically spread terror and death in their wake. It isn't something like the apartite movement of wide spread supression. Nor does it relate to the mass organized genocide that occured in the balkans or Africa in the last decade.
I'm not defending president Jr.'s actions in any way. But let's keep the conversation rational. He is stupid, but he isn't evil.
Our defence budget is limited, we can't spend insane amounts of money unworkable solutions to improbable threats. It's way more logical to spend the money on something immediately useful and tangible, like border security.
You are preaching to the choir. Go back and re-read my post. I wasn't making arguments for an anti-missile shield, I was simply pointing out that the concept of MAD deterence falls short when you are faced with an opponent that is willing to acccept mutuial destruction as an option.
Your comments about a everyone being willing to die are somewhat faulty. The only person involved with nuclear weapons that has to be willing to die for the MAD concept to fail is the person who can push the button. At that point, everyone else's thoughts on the matter are rather moot.
i just sit back with the mike and a beer and do my best to teach the kids to curse like saliors.
I go news for you, you're wasting your time. Kids these days already know how to curse like sailors. Most of them have already moved on to cursing like marines..
The working alternative is MAD. I.e. if anyone attacks US we will have enough time to respond.
MAD is an excellent way of deterring an enemy that wants to live. What do you do if your opponent is perfectly willing to die just to kill you? For example, let's say that there was a hypothetical country in the middle east that was run by religious fanatics that thought that dying while killing their opponents would let them go to their religion's version of heaven. Then suppose that, being a state entity, they put their resources into acquiring the technology and knowledge needed to construct and deploy nuclear devices via missile. How would MAD provide any sort of deterrence to keep them from acting against their enemies?
I don't really think that the missile shield was intended to protect us from an attack from the former Soviet Union. Perhaps a stray missile that was fell into the wrong hands, or more likely, an attack from a rogue state.
I happen to work for Kroger and having worked with the inventory control system running on SCO Openserver, I can tell you that it does not depend on people using Plus cards. If it did, we would have to check the stock on hand before every computerized reordering to compensate for all those people who do not use the Plus card.
Not for direct inventory control, but I bet you money that either your marketing division or your purchasing division uses the data to find long term trends. In that sense, the card generated data is a large sample set of purchases made, and can be used for proactive inventory control.
Of course, in the days before discount cards they would have given those discounts to everyone and called them "sales". So, actually, they are giving out fewer discounts than they would have and getting marketing info for free.
True, but you can fight back. For example, Safeway is currently collecting data on one 'Wombat Jones' of South Gnome Alaska. And to further confuse things, I trade these cards around with my friends as often as I can. If you pay cash, they cannot attach the shopping data to any real person, and you still get the discount.
The more they try to gather information about me, the more I feel obligated to isnure that it is incorrect. I don't object to them collecting sales information for stock control purposes, but as soon as they try to figure out who shopper #00023217002 is, I draw the line.
Based on my experiences with FFXI, I think the anti-Chinese sentiment in WoW is simply a human's innate tendency towards racism. Don't get me wrong, a lot of gold farmers are in fact Chinese, but a lot of them are European and American as well. Yet, everyone "knows" that all the farmers ruining the game are Chinese.
And the really funny thing is, now that all those chinese are behaving like nice capitalists instead of dirty unwashed heathen commies, everybody is gettin all bent out of shape.
Why did we bother with that whole stupid cold war thing, anyway?
The answer is clear. The U.S. must invade Japan to overthrow the government responsible for this cyber terrorism.
Nope, won't work. We tried it once before and they savaged our consumer electronics and auto industry in retaliation. We try that again, and they might go after something critical: our porn industry. Ask yourself this, is a DMR rootkit worth the risk of having used women's underwear vending machines on every street corner? Let's let this one slide....
...To compensate for the fact that the characters will not have access to powerful magic, each of the core classes in Iron Heroes is substantially more powerful than their standard d20 counterparts...
Oh, good. I was just saying to a friend of mine the other day, that the 3.0/3.5 D&D rules don't crank up the power gaming factor enough for me over the 1st and 2nd edition rules. And here, we go, instant karma.
Arrr...ye be askin', where do old programmers be goin'?
Legend has it, there be a place know as the programmers graveyard in the dark heart of Africa. The ground, it be littered with the ivory of thousands of programmer skeletons. Everyone knows that programmers be rich, and their corpses are said to be covered in bling bling and solid gold pocket calcuators and silver PDAs as far as the eye can see. There be platinum slide rulers encrusted with rubies as big as yer fist boy! There are even rumors that some of the great hackers of legend took their riches with them to die. I heard that that be the final resting place of the shroud of Touring. Aye, it be true.
But be warned: There be a powerful curse upon the place. Any who dare to take so much as a bit o' data from the programmer graveyard, is cursed to ba atacked by pirates and have every mp3 shang-hi'eeeeed off of their drives before yer so much as an hour older. So beware...HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHA!
The reason 'Cristians' come off so bad these days, is because of the vocal portion that trys to foster their values on others via laws, constitutional ammendments, and social pressure.
I have a theory about this: people who are zealously religious are insecure about their faith, and got to extreems to prove to themselves and others of their 'devotion'. The goal of getting others to believe what you believe seems to be some form desire to have their faith validated via others. E.G., 'If everybody in the world believes in God, then I must be correct in my belief.'
Why does it matter one way or another of someone else validates your belief system by agreeing with you? The people who are behind censorship manuvers are trying to manipulate the world, in order to get it to conform more to their idea of what it should be. I would suspect that they feel threatened by things that challenge their views, and by implication, cause them to question their faith.
Don't interpret my comment as any sort of slight on them as a company, I think they make great products. I'd much rather play a rock solid, well designed game than some brilliant new comcept game that has rough edges.
Question for all the coders out there..
on
How to Write Comments
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I am an old school coder, and I see a lot of this stuff these days:
if (foo) { // Bleah // Bleah // Bleah // Bleah
}
Why do people put the opening bracket on the same line as the conditional? where the hell did this come from? I see it a lot in JS, and more modern C/C++ code. I always though you were supposed to use carrage returns and tabs to make it easy to see the body of a conditional:
(underscores for whitespace; damn you slashcode!)
WoW may not do anything significantly new to the genre, but what it does is done very well. The game is easy to get into, and it's entertaining.
That is the key. Blizzard NEVER creates any games that are breakthroughs in terms of design. They take an existing concept, and engineer the hell out of it. That is why they have such massive sales. Warcraft is just a C&C clone. Diablo is just a rendered dungeon crawl. They really shine when it comes to making a fun (if not revolutionary) game.
Brilliant kids have different goals - Knowledge
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Knowledge for knowledge's sake, good for goodness' sake.
I think that this comment is an accurate description of the ethos that motivates highly intelligent people.
I was chatting with a friend of mine awhile back, and he made a comment that all that really matters in terms of a person's achievements in life is knowledge. Intelligent people achieve the thing they value: knowledge. Sometimes this might lead to diseases being cured or physics being revolutionized, or sometimes it might just lead to someone becomming the world champion on Jepoardy.
Dude, you don't need to retranslate the Koran to offend muslims. I think the untranslated version has them at eachother's throats as it is. We just need to get out of the middle east so they can resume their mellinium old hobby of killing eachother over minor religious squabbles.
Sony has made a mistake of epic proportions. Watch their sales numbers. I bet dollars to doughnuts it takes a drammatic drop.
I bet they don't. Here is why: I worked at ChipmUSA in college. (Horrible store, btw. Never shop there if you can avoid it). Anyway, the sheer volume of stupid people who came in to buy crappy computers is staggering. And when I say stupid, I'm talking about otherwise intelligent people who can't be bothered to learn or understand what they are buying. No research, no advicem, just straight to the cheapest POS on the shelf. I was amazed that the lack of care they excercised in evaluating features. They sucked down packard bells and compaqs like blow off a hooker's ass.
Sony will do just fine in sales if they don't get sued into oblivion. You want to hurt their sales? Do something that will get the average american's attention: Get a TV reporters to do a story about how there might be a connection between Sony Compact Disks and ciminal obesity.
What, do you expect smokers to put the butts in their ashtrays or something? They smell terrible and stink up the car. It's much better to throw them out the window where you don't have to worry about those nasty, filthy things anymore.
I tried throwing some of those nasty, filthy things out the window once while driving down the freeway, but I couldnt. You would be suprised at how much strength and endurance an asmatic tobbaco addict has.
Your (often) over quoted reply isn't quite complete in it's relevance, as the media companies aren't jack booted facists bent on genocide. Yes, it is important to stand up for things before they go too far, but we are talking about media companies, not totalitarian governments. The big difference is that an amoral media entity will react to financial losses by falling back into line, where a facist government will send out some more secret police to torture and kill the dissenters.
By no longer consuming their product, you are standing up to them. Money is oxygen to a coporation. Step on their throat if you don't like what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
This war and the mindless support US citizens have given it will go down as one of the greatest crimes of modern history, and those who knowingly support it deserve at least as bad as what is coming to them, and probably worse.
"One of the Greatest Crimes of Modern History?" Please. I dislike the Bush administration and their idiotic excuses for invading Iraq, but president Jr. isn't even smart enough to commit an attrocity on the level to warrant such a description.
Let's not taint the discussion buy suggesting that the war in Iraq is a criminal enterprise on the level of Hitler, Stallin, Pol Pot, or other individuals who systematically spread terror and death in their wake. It isn't something like the apartite movement of wide spread supression. Nor does it relate to the mass organized genocide that occured in the balkans or Africa in the last decade.
I'm not defending president Jr.'s actions in any way. But let's keep the conversation rational. He is stupid, but he isn't evil.
Our defence budget is limited, we can't spend insane amounts of money unworkable solutions to improbable threats. It's way more logical to spend the money on something immediately useful and tangible, like border security.
You are preaching to the choir. Go back and re-read my post. I wasn't making arguments for an anti-missile shield, I was simply pointing out that the concept of MAD deterence falls short when you are faced with an opponent that is willing to acccept mutuial destruction as an option.
Your comments about a everyone being willing to die are somewhat faulty. The only person involved with nuclear weapons that has to be willing to die for the MAD concept to fail is the person who can push the button. At that point, everyone else's thoughts on the matter are rather moot.
i just sit back with the mike and a beer and do my best to teach the kids to curse like saliors.
I go news for you, you're wasting your time. Kids these days already know how to curse like sailors. Most of them have already moved on to cursing like marines..
The working alternative is MAD. I.e. if anyone attacks US we will have enough time to respond.
MAD is an excellent way of deterring an enemy that wants to live. What do you do if your opponent is perfectly willing to die just to kill you? For example, let's say that there was a hypothetical country in the middle east that was run by religious fanatics that thought that dying while killing their opponents would let them go to their religion's version of heaven. Then suppose that, being a state entity, they put their resources into acquiring the technology and knowledge needed to construct and deploy nuclear devices via missile. How would MAD provide any sort of deterrence to keep them from acting against their enemies?
I don't really think that the missile shield was intended to protect us from an attack from the former Soviet Union. Perhaps a stray missile that was fell into the wrong hands, or more likely, an attack from a rogue state.
I happen to work for Kroger and having worked with the inventory control system running on SCO Openserver, I can tell you that it does not depend on people using Plus cards. If it did, we would have to check the stock on hand before every computerized reordering to compensate for all those people who do not use the Plus card.
Not for direct inventory control, but I bet you money that either your marketing division or your purchasing division uses the data to find long term trends. In that sense, the card generated data is a large sample set of purchases made, and can be used for proactive inventory control.
Of course, in the days before discount cards they would have given those discounts to everyone and called them "sales". So, actually, they are giving out fewer discounts than they would have and getting marketing info for free.
True, but you can fight back. For example, Safeway is currently collecting data on one 'Wombat Jones' of South Gnome Alaska. And to further confuse things, I trade these cards around with my friends as often as I can. If you pay cash, they cannot attach the shopping data to any real person, and you still get the discount.
The more they try to gather information about me, the more I feel obligated to isnure that it is incorrect. I don't object to them collecting sales information for stock control purposes, but as soon as they try to figure out who shopper #00023217002 is, I draw the line.
You sodding softy!
I had to do everything you mentioned, but I had to post about it on slashdot from a WINDOWS machine....
Based on my experiences with FFXI, I think the anti-Chinese sentiment in WoW is simply a human's innate tendency towards racism. Don't get me wrong, a lot of gold farmers are in fact Chinese, but a lot of them are European and American as well. Yet, everyone "knows" that all the farmers ruining the game are Chinese.
And the really funny thing is, now that all those chinese are behaving like nice capitalists instead of dirty unwashed heathen commies, everybody is gettin all bent out of shape.
Why did we bother with that whole stupid cold war thing, anyway?
It is racist. Ninja is Japanese, not Chinese. Learn the difference or you will be called an ignorant bigot.
True. The correct term would be 'Kung-Fu' looter. Oh, and Japanese warriors were called Samuari. Ninjas are actually American mid-west white trash.
The answer is clear. The U.S. must invade Japan to overthrow the government responsible for this cyber terrorism.
Nope, won't work. We tried it once before and they savaged our consumer electronics and auto industry in retaliation. We try that again, and they might go after something critical: our porn industry. Ask yourself this, is a DMR rootkit worth the risk of having used women's underwear vending machines on every street corner? Let's let this one slide....
...To compensate for the fact that the characters will not have access to powerful magic, each of the core classes in Iron Heroes is substantially more powerful than their standard d20 counterparts...
Oh, good. I was just saying to a friend of mine the other day, that the 3.0/3.5 D&D rules don't crank up the power gaming factor enough for me over the 1st and 2nd edition rules. And here, we go, instant karma.
Arrr...ye be askin', where do old programmers be goin'?
Legend has it, there be a place know as the programmers graveyard in the dark heart of Africa. The ground, it be littered with the ivory of thousands of programmer skeletons. Everyone knows that programmers be rich, and their corpses are said to be covered in bling bling and solid gold pocket calcuators and silver PDAs as far as the eye can see. There be platinum slide rulers encrusted with rubies as big as yer fist boy! There are even rumors that some of the great hackers of legend took their riches with them to die. I heard that that be the final resting place of the shroud of Touring. Aye, it be true.
But be warned: There be a powerful curse upon the place. Any who dare to take so much as a bit o' data from the programmer graveyard, is cursed to ba atacked by pirates and have every mp3 shang-hi'eeeeed off of their drives before yer so much as an hour older. So beware...HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHHA!
Arrrrr....
I do not press my views on other people...
The reason 'Cristians' come off so bad these days, is because of the vocal portion that trys to foster their values on others via laws, constitutional ammendments, and social pressure.
I have a theory about this: people who are zealously religious are insecure about their faith, and got to extreems to prove to themselves and others of their 'devotion'. The goal of getting others to believe what you believe seems to be some form desire to have their faith validated via others. E.G., 'If everybody in the world believes in God, then I must be correct in my belief.'
Why does it matter one way or another of someone else validates your belief system by agreeing with you? The people who are behind censorship manuvers are trying to manipulate the world, in order to get it to conform more to their idea of what it should be. I would suspect that they feel threatened by things that challenge their views, and by implication, cause them to question their faith.
Don't interpret my comment as any sort of slight on them as a company, I think they make great products. I'd much rather play a rock solid, well designed game than some brilliant new comcept game that has rough edges.
I am an old school coder, and I see a lot of this stuff these days:
// Bleah
// Bleah
// Bleah
// Bleah
// Bleah // Bleah // Bleah // Bleah
if (foo) {
}
Why do people put the opening bracket on the same line as the conditional? where the hell did this come from? I see it a lot in JS, and more modern C/C++ code. I always though you were supposed to use carrage returns and tabs to make it easy to see the body of a conditional:
(underscores for whitespace; damn you slashcode!)
if (foo)
{
_____
_____
_____
_____
}
Did I miss something? Are all the 'cool' coders doing this now, and I'm just old?
What can be done to recruit more students into IT programs?
Advertise in India...
WoW may not do anything significantly new to the genre, but what it does is done very well. The game is easy to get into, and it's entertaining.
That is the key. Blizzard NEVER creates any games that are breakthroughs in terms of design. They take an existing concept, and engineer the hell out of it. That is why they have such massive sales. Warcraft is just a C&C clone. Diablo is just a rendered dungeon crawl. They really shine when it comes to making a fun (if not revolutionary) game.
Knowledge for knowledge's sake, good for goodness' sake.
I think that this comment is an accurate description of the ethos that motivates highly intelligent people.
I was chatting with a friend of mine awhile back, and he made a comment that all that really matters in terms of a person's achievements in life is knowledge. Intelligent people achieve the thing they value: knowledge. Sometimes this might lead to diseases being cured or physics being revolutionized, or sometimes it might just lead to someone becomming the world champion on Jepoardy.
Dude, you don't need to retranslate the Koran to offend muslims. I think the untranslated version has them at eachother's throats as it is. We just need to get out of the middle east so they can resume their mellinium old hobby of killing eachother over minor religious squabbles.
It gets worse too. If you know the real reason for 9/11...
You mean that radical islamics don't actually hate us? Damn, they had me fooled...
He's already tried.
Well, damn, I'm impressed.
Perhaps we should hit him with a dose of Anthrax and see if his immune system can whip up a cure for that, too while we are at it...
No, Anthrax will never be controlled!
I AM THE MAN! BRING THE NOISE!
*Moshes violently*
Sony has made a mistake of epic proportions. Watch their sales numbers. I bet dollars to doughnuts it takes a drammatic drop.
I bet they don't. Here is why: I worked at ChipmUSA in college. (Horrible store, btw. Never shop there if you can avoid it). Anyway, the sheer volume of stupid people who came in to buy crappy computers is staggering. And when I say stupid, I'm talking about otherwise intelligent people who can't be bothered to learn or understand what they are buying. No research, no advicem, just straight to the cheapest POS on the shelf. I was amazed that the lack of care they excercised in evaluating features. They sucked down packard bells and compaqs like blow off a hooker's ass.
Sony will do just fine in sales if they don't get sued into oblivion. You want to hurt their sales? Do something that will get the average american's attention: Get a TV reporters to do a story about how there might be a connection between Sony Compact Disks and ciminal obesity.
What, do you expect smokers to put the butts in their ashtrays or something? They smell terrible and stink up the car. It's much better to throw them out the window where you don't have to worry about those nasty, filthy things anymore.
I tried throwing some of those nasty, filthy things out the window once while driving down the freeway, but I couldnt. You would be suprised at how much strength and endurance an asmatic tobbaco addict has.
Your (often) over quoted reply isn't quite complete in it's relevance, as the media companies aren't jack booted facists bent on genocide. Yes, it is important to stand up for things before they go too far, but we are talking about media companies, not totalitarian governments. The big difference is that an amoral media entity will react to financial losses by falling back into line, where a facist government will send out some more secret police to torture and kill the dissenters.
By no longer consuming their product, you are standing up to them. Money is oxygen to a coporation. Step on their throat if you don't like what they do.