...while it has a lot of nice features (being quick and clean the one I like most), also many people got soon tired of the stereotypical characters it allowed and the poor realism of its rules.
Quick? Clean? Who were you playing with? Your campaigns were quick and clean? You didn't have people you were playing with who acted perversely for the express purpose of annoying the DM? You didn't have a DM who figured out how to keep these freakish people in line by ever-increasing creativity?
The character guidelines were a list of suggested career paths, really. You took your statistics and you decided on a character that you would enjoy playing. You act based on what you think your character would do, not according to some stupid rule book. Anything else and you're just writing numbers on a paper and rolling dice, while accruing imaginary tokens. D&D should be role playing, not Sim City.
Among other things, Ford could choose to block the link from 2600 so that it didn't get forwarded. They're not powerless in this matter. But Ford's filing says: "The public recognizes, and often relies on the expectation, that links to a company's official web site address are sponsored by, affiliated with, or somehow approved by that company." Which is bogus.
Sure, Ford may be upset or concerned about this. And I suppose I can understand why they're unhappy, but they can't claim that people don't have the right to link to their site, period.
Create/Sell your own GNU/GPL console then.. the best part is that you won't then buy an XBox, and drive up the price of my games with your piracy.
Um... hello? This is so illogical it makes my head spin. The only reason people can claim that piracy drives up the cost of games is that if more people were buying games, you could create an economy of scale (or something), thus resulting in lower prices for all. If I choose to pirate a game--and I don't, but that's another story--the impact on the bottom line of the game manufacturer is exactly the same--exactly--as if I had just not purchased it at all. If someone chooses not to buy a game, whether for piracy or because there's a better platform available, it has the same effect on you.
But you're also assuming that the price of games is being determined by market forces. Sure, and so are CD prices....
He describes a scenario in which only certified binaries will execute on an operating system. Uh... how on earth is this even remotely possible? And who would put up with it? Let's say that I'm just learning computer science. And I write a standard "Hello World" program, and compile it. Now, there's an uncertified binary. And, hypothetically, it won't run on my hardware.
If no binary can run without certification by some outside agent, it follows that users can't write programs and run them without getting them certified (If they could, there'd be no worries about Open Source). Good god. Can you imagine what that is going to do to my debugging efforts?
This scenario is not going to happen. Because even mostly clueless M$-running people will listen if you say, "Hey, you realize that if you run Palladium-based architecture, your darling children won't be able to use their computer for some very important learning purposes."
Do we need any further proof that the current state of intellectual property law is hindering, not helping, advance technological progress? I mean, the whole point of this was to make sure people were compensated enough to make innovation beneficial. Now we can't even breathe without someone saying, "I say, I took a breath like that once--I think you may owe me a billion dollars for violating my intellectual property rights."
I gather you've never tried to prepare a meal for a reasonably large bunch, have you? If you're reasonably efficient, and you're making a meal that requires you to be in the kitchen, you don't spend a lot of time standing around in the kitchen doing nothing.
First, you figure out what's going to take longest to cook--rice, potatoes, maybe a cake that needs to bake--and throw it in the oven. You start the soup base boiling with whatever's there. Then you chop vegetables, and start putting other stuff together. Remember to stir the soup. Make sure what's in the oven is doing okay. Now clean off the counters. Make dressing for salad. Get the pasta off the stove, and drain it.... If you're really spending time in the kitchen, it's doing something.
If you had that extra five minutes, trust me, you'd rather go sit down at a desk somewhere and read e-mails than stand on your feet for another second in the goddamn kitchen, because being a soccer mom is your second shift, and you've already put in more than eight hours.
This is the stupidest appliance I've ever heard of, and most of the mothers I know would roll their eyes at the thought of spending a couple extra hundred dollars for something this ridiculous. And say, "Good god, if you think saving me the three seconds to walk to the computer is worth it, then let's eat out and save me a couple hours."
One thing to consider, though. Are combat and "survival of the fittest" type exercises REALLY what we want robots to base their intelligence on? It sounds to me like we are "breeding" them for aggression.
No kidding. If we ever create artificial life, the human race is going to make a really horrible bunch of parents. When they said this might be "really scary" I was thinking it was scary, not because of any silly references to science fiction, but because I felt sorry for the robot, not scared for my own safety.
If we ever create intelligence, we're going to exploit it and enslave it. Rather than talking about how we can protect ourselves from robots a la Asimov, we should be wondering how to actually treat them humanely. Children learn from their parents; if we want robots not to revolt against us, the solution is not to try and hard-code abstract laws into their heads, but maybe to treat them well enough that they don't want to revolt.
Then again, maybe we should start with our own species. We're not really doing a great job there, either.
This is called product patent and applies to all drugs.
But a gene is not a drug. It might make more sense to patent a drug which regulates a gene's expression. It might make sense to patent a specific molecule which serves a specific purpose. But a gene is essentially a statistical statement of a biological law: it says, "when X is on, there's R% chance of doing Y" (where R may be 100). Patenting a gene is like patenting quantum mechanics, or Newton's Laws. It's just dumb.
Personally, I think that the whole concept of intellectual property really needs to be Thought Out Correctly, by intelligent people who are relatively disinterested in the outcome. This is just more evidence for it.
Any way you slice it, the cost per passenger mile is much higher by rail than by car.
BART allows people who work in San Francisco to live in East Bay. It means that the Bay Bridge isn't constantly flooded by people whose only method of getting to SF is via highway. Fact is, even your average every-day SUV-driving rich guy whose never set food in public transit in his life benefits from it, as it drastically reduces the amount of traffic he sees.
Furthermore, good public transit also substantially influences the development of a region. Areas without public transit tend towards suburban sprawl--lots of space, severely lacking in character. A really good analysis of the costs and benefits of rail and subway vs. Just Cars can be found in Robert Caro's "The Power Broker", which is a stunningly good read.
I think we ought to demote most of the physicists in academia to teaching positions - no "research" for about 5 years or so. Then let students loose on the issues, but with none of that former apprenticeship culture that has held back several generations of scientists.
Push a bunch of people into pure teaching, who love research? And expect the students to come out with enough sanity to attack science? Dear God, what are you smoking?
I agree with the idea that if money was poured into open source software development it would be closer to Microsoft's software (in ease of use) - but it wouldn't get there without something else:
A Clear, unified vision.
Wait. Why do we want this? One of the things I *like* about open source is the fact that it's *not* unified. When you say Clear, Unified Vision, I think... boring. I *like* the fact that I can choose whether to use Gnome or KDE. I *like* the fact that there's tons of window managers to choose from. Or that I can choose to use openoffice, koffice, or a combination of abiword/gnumeric. (In fact, I choose to use openoffice if I need to preserve formatting on a word document, but if I'm just opening something quick or firing off a letter, abiword is fast beyond comparison).
The large number of choices we have available to us with Open Source is what makes us strong. You draw an analogy to genetics. But any biologist will tell you that a diverse ecology is more robust and more stable than a monoculture.
The beauty of Open Source is that development no longer becomes dependent on a top-down imposed view of Where We're Going. The leadership view of software development need only be imposed when an entire organization needs to defend itself and its proprietary codebase against all attackers.
Ultimately, your hopes of a "clear, defined direction" could only be achieved by losing flexibility, diversity, and more importantly, a sense of fun and wonder. While specific organizations in the open source community may define directions they'd like to take, I think that it would be a mistake to try and unify everyone to march in the same lockstep rhythm.
Look, look, I know that most of the people reading/posting on/. aren't like this. That's why I said in my original post that I knew it wasn't everyone, or even most of everyone on slashdot who was like this. Hell, most of my best friends read slashdot (male & female). No, I don't believe that everyone on slashdot is a whiny bastard who deserves to wallow alone in freakish loneliness. No, I don't think that slashdot is a monolithic community represented fully by each of its posters.
My comment was directed only at people who regularly whine/joke about lack (or quality) of women. It wasn't meant to be a blanket statement condeming all slashdotters, nor by illogical extension, everyone at the Mozilla party.
If you're already decent, as most of you are, move along. There's nothing to be seen in that comment.
Look, there's only one rule: pay attention to your SO. Some girls like being worshipped. Others find it off-putting. I haven't a clue which category your SO falls into. So *talk* to her. Find out what she likes (which is, sadly, not always what she says she likes, sorry). So pay attention to how she accepts compliments, et cetera, and moderate your level of worship to maximize her enjoyment of your company.
If she's really worth it, she'll figure out what you like, too.
Indeed. Because the point of my post was clearly to try and advance feminist ideals, a personal passion for which slashdot is the ideal forum, not to rant about a personal gripe with some people's attitudes.
I'm so impressed by your use of pointless jargon and unfounded meaningless statistics that I've decided to switch from Linux, the operating system which causes men to oppress, rape, and kill women around the globe, to the more female-friendly MS Windows, which oppresses, rapes, and kills people around the globe regardless of gender.
Let's say, hypothetically, that I were a girl. This is easy for me, since I am. And let's also say that I liked mozilla and linux and was relatively rabid about open source. Which is also easy, because all that's true, too. Now, when the first thing people do when talking about some open source party is grouse about how there's gonna be no gurls there, and if there are, they'll all be UG-LY, it doesn't really make me want to go hang out with them.
This is probably going to come as a shock to some of you, but there are girls out there who run linux and like mozilla.
Now, it seems to me that if you're going to all spend your time whining and moaning about how there's no gurls to be found except ugly apes (and even if there were, they'd wreck everything, 'cause they have the cooties), you're going to annoy those of us that are smart, geeky, and reasonably pretty. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: you whine; we avoid you.
Now I can't speak for all the other myriad geeky girls our there, but I don't want a guy who's going to:
Drool over me 'cause I'm pretty, plus I run gentoo
Act like I'm a horrible aberration, rather than realize that I'm really a harbinger of Droves of Geek Girls To Come.
Seriously people, if you want women to go to your parties, don't alienate them. I know there's not many of us right now, but if you play nice, maybe we'll bring friends, and maybe in another twenty years slashdot will be more like 60/40 instead of 95/5.
Sorry for the rant, but this is only about the billionth time I've seen this particular whine on slashdot. This isn't directed specifically at the original poster, or even anyone who voiced these sentiments on this particular thread. I know it's not everyone, and not even most of everyone, but for those of you who haven't yet figured it out: girls don't like boys who whine about not having girls.
Having the latest browser doesn't exactly drive the ladies crazy.
You're right. That's not exactly what drives us crazy. The latest version of IE does nothing for women. Mozilla, on the other hand, is very sexy. Of course, that's not all you need. Chicks dig lightstrips too.
I don't quite understand how the discovery of ice on mars would make manned missions any more possible.
Assuming that you're correct physically--that, is, that water wouldn't be a problem for the duration of a manned mission to Mars--you're still missing a big aspect psychologically. It's a lot harder to say to the public, "Oh, look, here's this dead dry planet which could never sustain Earth colonies. Let's go waste valuable resources on a manned mission." (Not that I think it would be a waste even if it were dry, but you know how some people think).
The existence of water captures the imagination. It makes us think that the Red Planet could someday be blue, or even green (Kim Stanley Robinson, anyone?) It makes it so much easier to sell the public on the mission, because the possibilities have increased.
I hope that the fact that Mars has that much water really will help overcome a lot of psychological barriers which had previously been in place.
And yet it seems that there is a nearer and more certain source of ridiculously hot chicks residing on the third planet from the sun. Occasionally, they even remove their clothing.:)
However hot these naked Martian chicks may be, they have several obvious flaws which prevent them from being ultra-cool. Chicks on Mars have many natural handicaps which chicks on earth don't. To wit:
Chicks living on Mars can never get first post on slashdot. By the time the news item gets updated, minutes have gone by.
Likewise, think of the ping times.
Even supposing you do get them back here, they weighed 1/3 on Mars of what they do here. Can you spell "Honey, do you think I'm fat?" All the time. Don't underestimate the gravity of the situation.
Aside from sheer misplaced emotional idiocy, I don't see why not. There's folks out there who accept nuclear power despite tragic mishaps which have happened there. There's even people that accept the combustion of hydrocarbons as a source of power despite any number of mishaps. One major one that comes to mind? Some idiots flew a bunch of planes carrying upwards of 20,000 gallons of this stuff into the WTC. And we all know what happened there.
My point isn't that we should eschew all dangerous fuels. My point is that fuel is dangerous. It has to be. If it doesn't have a high chemical potential energy, it's not fuel; it's inert and therefore useless. I sure hope the public doesn't get swayed by stupid misguided safety arguments.
I've sent both Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer mail about this and the DMCA. Feinstein's response was reasonably intelligent and showed that she had a little bit of a grasp of the situation, on a political if not a technological level. Unfortunately, it can be summed up as follows: I understand your concerns. I believe they are quite valid, and you are correct that we are in a unique time which allows us to set the stage for digital rights in the next century. However, I have been bought by the music industry, and an honest politician stays bought. Sincerely yours, et cetera, et cetera.
Okay, point taken. But let me rephrase this. Most undergraduate students only want to learn the bare minimum to get a job paying money, which means all they want is a bulleted list of things to put on their resume. "Knows how to think" is unfortunately not in that category, so there's an emphasis from most students to learn applications, not the big picture.
Slashdot Mirror
Quick? Clean? Who were you playing with? Your campaigns were quick and clean? You didn't have people you were playing with who acted perversely for the express purpose of annoying the DM? You didn't have a DM who figured out how to keep these freakish people in line by ever-increasing creativity?
The character guidelines were a list of suggested career paths, really. You took your statistics and you decided on a character that you would enjoy playing. You act based on what you think your character would do, not according to some stupid rule book. Anything else and you're just writing numbers on a paper and rolling dice, while accruing imaginary tokens. D&D should be role playing, not Sim City.
Sure, Ford may be upset or concerned about this. And I suppose I can understand why they're unhappy, but they can't claim that people don't have the right to link to their site, period.
Um ... hello? This is so illogical it makes my head spin. The only reason people can claim that piracy drives up the cost of games is that if more people were buying games, you could create an economy of scale (or something), thus resulting in lower prices for all. If I choose to pirate a game--and I don't, but that's another story--the impact on the bottom line of the game manufacturer is exactly the same--exactly--as if I had just not purchased it at all. If someone chooses not to buy a game, whether for piracy or because there's a better platform available, it has the same effect on you.
But you're also assuming that the price of games is being determined by market forces. Sure, and so are CD prices....
If no binary can run without certification by some outside agent, it follows that users can't write programs and run them without getting them certified (If they could, there'd be no worries about Open Source). Good god. Can you imagine what that is going to do to my debugging efforts?
This scenario is not going to happen. Because even mostly clueless M$-running people will listen if you say, "Hey, you realize that if you run Palladium-based architecture, your darling children won't be able to use their computer for some very important learning purposes."
Do we need any further proof that the current state of intellectual property law is hindering, not helping, advance technological progress? I mean, the whole point of this was to make sure people were compensated enough to make innovation beneficial. Now we can't even breathe without someone saying, "I say, I took a breath like that once--I think you may owe me a billion dollars for violating my intellectual property rights."
You mean dissolution as in eCos --> e- + Cos+? I guess it depends on the solvent. Try United Linux.
First, you figure out what's going to take longest to cook--rice, potatoes, maybe a cake that needs to bake--and throw it in the oven. You start the soup base boiling with whatever's there. Then you chop vegetables, and start putting other stuff together. Remember to stir the soup. Make sure what's in the oven is doing okay. Now clean off the counters. Make dressing for salad. Get the pasta off the stove, and drain it.... If you're really spending time in the kitchen, it's doing something.
If you had that extra five minutes, trust me, you'd rather go sit down at a desk somewhere and read e-mails than stand on your feet for another second in the goddamn kitchen, because being a soccer mom is your second shift, and you've already put in more than eight hours.
This is the stupidest appliance I've ever heard of, and most of the mothers I know would roll their eyes at the thought of spending a couple extra hundred dollars for something this ridiculous. And say, "Good god, if you think saving me the three seconds to walk to the computer is worth it, then let's eat out and save me a couple hours."
The top 4 most evil people they have listed:
No kidding. If we ever create artificial life, the human race is going to make a really horrible bunch of parents. When they said this might be "really scary" I was thinking it was scary, not because of any silly references to science fiction, but because I felt sorry for the robot, not scared for my own safety.
If we ever create intelligence, we're going to exploit it and enslave it. Rather than talking about how we can protect ourselves from robots a la Asimov, we should be wondering how to actually treat them humanely. Children learn from their parents; if we want robots not to revolt against us, the solution is not to try and hard-code abstract laws into their heads, but maybe to treat them well enough that they don't want to revolt.
Then again, maybe we should start with our own species. We're not really doing a great job there, either.
But a gene is not a drug. It might make more sense to patent a drug which regulates a gene's expression. It might make sense to patent a specific molecule which serves a specific purpose. But a gene is essentially a statistical statement of a biological law: it says, "when X is on, there's R% chance of doing Y" (where R may be 100). Patenting a gene is like patenting quantum mechanics, or Newton's Laws. It's just dumb.
Personally, I think that the whole concept of intellectual property really needs to be Thought Out Correctly, by intelligent people who are relatively disinterested in the outcome. This is just more evidence for it.
BART allows people who work in San Francisco to live in East Bay. It means that the Bay Bridge isn't constantly flooded by people whose only method of getting to SF is via highway. Fact is, even your average every-day SUV-driving rich guy whose never set food in public transit in his life benefits from it, as it drastically reduces the amount of traffic he sees.
Furthermore, good public transit also substantially influences the development of a region. Areas without public transit tend towards suburban sprawl--lots of space, severely lacking in character. A really good analysis of the costs and benefits of rail and subway vs. Just Cars can be found in Robert Caro's "The Power Broker", which is a stunningly good read.
Push a bunch of people into pure teaching, who love research? And expect the students to come out with enough sanity to attack science? Dear God, what are you smoking?
Wait. Why do we want this? One of the things I *like* about open source is the fact that it's *not* unified. When you say Clear, Unified Vision, I think ... boring. I *like* the fact that I can choose whether to use Gnome or KDE. I *like* the fact that there's tons of window managers to choose from. Or that I can choose to use openoffice, koffice, or a combination of abiword/gnumeric. (In fact, I choose to use openoffice if I need to preserve formatting on a word document, but if I'm just opening something quick or firing off a letter, abiword is fast beyond comparison).
The large number of choices we have available to us with Open Source is what makes us strong. You draw an analogy to genetics. But any biologist will tell you that a diverse ecology is more robust and more stable than a monoculture.
The beauty of Open Source is that development no longer becomes dependent on a top-down imposed view of Where We're Going. The leadership view of software development need only be imposed when an entire organization needs to defend itself and its proprietary codebase against all attackers.
Ultimately, your hopes of a "clear, defined direction" could only be achieved by losing flexibility, diversity, and more importantly, a sense of fun and wonder. While specific organizations in the open source community may define directions they'd like to take, I think that it would be a mistake to try and unify everyone to march in the same lockstep rhythm.
Be fair. My *mom* could install RedHat. And she's going to, because I'm sick of trying to troubleshoot her stupid Windows problems over the phone.
Sandscript: the language *so* dead that nobody, except possibly the reviewer, has heard of it.
My comment was directed only at people who regularly whine/joke about lack (or quality) of women. It wasn't meant to be a blanket statement condeming all slashdotters, nor by illogical extension, everyone at the Mozilla party.
If you're already decent, as most of you are, move along. There's nothing to be seen in that comment.
If she's really worth it, she'll figure out what you like, too.
I'm so impressed by your use of pointless jargon and unfounded meaningless statistics that I've decided to switch from Linux, the operating system which causes men to oppress, rape, and kill women around the globe, to the more female-friendly MS Windows, which oppresses, rapes, and kills people around the globe regardless of gender.
Cheerio, troll.
This is probably going to come as a shock to some of you, but there are girls out there who run linux and like mozilla.
Now, it seems to me that if you're going to all spend your time whining and moaning about how there's no gurls to be found except ugly apes (and even if there were, they'd wreck everything, 'cause they have the cooties), you're going to annoy those of us that are smart, geeky, and reasonably pretty. This creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: you whine; we avoid you.
Now I can't speak for all the other myriad geeky girls our there, but I don't want a guy who's going to:
Seriously people, if you want women to go to your parties, don't alienate them. I know there's not many of us right now, but if you play nice, maybe we'll bring friends, and maybe in another twenty years slashdot will be more like 60/40 instead of 95/5.
Sorry for the rant, but this is only about the billionth time I've seen this particular whine on slashdot. This isn't directed specifically at the original poster, or even anyone who voiced these sentiments on this particular thread. I know it's not everyone, and not even most of everyone, but for those of you who haven't yet figured it out: girls don't like boys who whine about not having girls.
Oh, and I'll probably be at the SF party. :)
You're right. That's not exactly what drives us crazy. The latest version of IE does nothing for women. Mozilla, on the other hand, is very sexy. Of course, that's not all you need. Chicks dig lightstrips too.
Assuming that you're correct physically--that, is, that water wouldn't be a problem for the duration of a manned mission to Mars--you're still missing a big aspect psychologically. It's a lot harder to say to the public, "Oh, look, here's this dead dry planet which could never sustain Earth colonies. Let's go waste valuable resources on a manned mission." (Not that I think it would be a waste even if it were dry, but you know how some people think).
The existence of water captures the imagination. It makes us think that the Red Planet could someday be blue, or even green (Kim Stanley Robinson, anyone?) It makes it so much easier to sell the public on the mission, because the possibilities have increased.
I hope that the fact that Mars has that much water really will help overcome a lot of psychological barriers which had previously been in place.
However hot these naked Martian chicks may be, they have several obvious flaws which prevent them from being ultra-cool. Chicks on Mars have many natural handicaps which chicks on earth don't. To wit:
My point isn't that we should eschew all dangerous fuels. My point is that fuel is dangerous. It has to be. If it doesn't have a high chemical potential energy, it's not fuel; it's inert and therefore useless. I sure hope the public doesn't get swayed by stupid misguided safety arguments.
Boxer gave a nondescript non-answer. Good luck.
Okay, point taken. But let me rephrase this. Most undergraduate students only want to learn the bare minimum to get a job paying money, which means all they want is a bulleted list of things to put on their resume. "Knows how to think" is unfortunately not in that category, so there's an emphasis from most students to learn applications, not the big picture.