IIRC, the part of your brain that decides whether someone is so closely related as to be 'off limits' selects those you spent a lot of time with up to age six or so.
Unless I've got my words totally scrambled you don't know any polygamous relationships. But it sound like you know some cases of polyandry.
Polygamy is more than one wife, polyandry is more than one husband.
Just being pedantic, no offense intended.
I was rather suprise by umbuntu myself. NOT pleasantly however. I installed it to it's own hardrive yet it overwrote the boot sector on another drive in the system, without a clear means to undo it.
It assigned filetypes to files on a seemingly random basis and provided no way to change it's assignments and I couldn't use some of them from umbuntu because of this (excuse me but HOW is a *.iso file application/mp3 ?!?!? or rather how is just half of them at random?!?)
I'd advise holding off on Umbuntu untill it's out of beta.
The 32bit version might be better, but the amd64 install was an excersise in futility and unpleasant suprises.
Mandrake is what I've usually found to be easiest to use, not that I've tried to many distros.
I don't hate ms enough I guess. I find PDF far more abhorent than.doc.(they're both proprietary and intended to push a particular closed source companies products)
At least.doc can be read, doesn't bloat a 146k text only file to 2+ meg, and the viewer written by the owners of the format don't lock up a system with an amd64 3500+ cpu and a gig of ram while the doc downloads.
I'm a pc gammer mostly so I don't do live, it just looked like a good way for someone to be deprived of something they're paying for based on what's fun for them vs what's fun for you. I'm certainly not trying to do more than post an outsiders take on what you said.
I appretiate you giving more info also.
You may not like people who bail on games mid-stream, and are likely in the majority on that, but that doesn't mean they like being stuck playing what looks to be a boring game to them. And the rules of the system are on thier side at the moment. If I was someone who couldn't stand getting stuck in a bad game (however I defined it) and rules said it was o.k. to quit and got bad feedback that could cost me what I'd paid good money for I'd definately complain. Now I'd not stay for the start of the game if Beforehand I was warned the other players didn't like quitters, I'd not subject them to MY preferences eigther.
And it does look like you warn in advance the only concern I'd have there is that if they bother ed to record your message they would have solid evidence of you threatening them.
It seems to me there is a better fix available, Live just needs a 'reliability' stat. Just show some sort of indicator as to how likely a player is to bail durring the game.
Might also have a way so that if 3/4ths of the player agree a game is 'spoiled' (by quiters, lag, game bugs, etc.) it could be ended with no penalaty or gain to anyone.
My suggestion in the meantime would be to simply tell everyone you don't like quitters and suggest your tactic as a house rule for the game your playing or some such and pressuring Live to adopt some sort of metric or mechanism for dealing with the different outlooks on quiting for better match ups.
Hopefully they fix things for you, but you'll probably need to get a goodly number of people to convince them of the need so they can justify the costs.
FWIW I like the slower games that take time to play, a couple of my friends don't. If it's not mindless repetition of the FPS of the week they won't play for very long. Especially the one guy who's got a nack for FPS's. But take a game that's slower paced and they'll quit before finishing. The last such time was when one of them rented Outlaw Golf (two I think, not shure of ver number though). They got bored and quit about hole 6 or 7 I think. They also tend to get tired of fighting games (though alot less on MK) awfull quick (something about looser passes and me almost never having to pass:) So I'm not completely unsympathetic, just trying to show the other side and why it's probably better not to use such tactics unilateraly.
I dunno, I would think copying from previous slashdot stories could have the opposite effect, Especially if they accidently copy from a goat.cx link or gnaa troll.
As cool as a bipedal mech would be I'd have to add in against serious deployment.
The cube square problem kicks in and the stresses the legs have to take grow all out of proportion to the size.
It's like why all the b-grade sci-fi movies with ants and such twice the size of a vw beetle (eigther version) are bs.
I seem to remember reading some where that the first time a veritech takes a step it'd break it's legs from shearing stress or some such if it wasn't made out of something many times stronger than anything we'd invented yet (read in the late nineties).
I'd still like one though.
I can understand you're not likeing it when people quit, but best as I can tell threatening them for it is a violation of the rules, but quiting isn't.
Also what about when someones net connection goes down? Or thier young child suddenly needs help, or thier parent intervenes and shuts down thier game?
I'll also point out that if you are in a game that's very lopsided then no one gets noticebly better, the poorer player has no real chance and dies repeatedly with little to no chance learn anything (unless the better player is tutoring him/her, different story entirely there) and the better player isn't challenged at all.
Reading what some have said about how thier happy even though many would think they have cause for sorrow reminds me of two discoveries and decision I made a while back.
The discovery is that life has many moments that can eigther be cried over or laughed at. The second discovery is that laughter is usually much better than crying (though exceptions exist, goodbye Mr. Doohan, you'll not be forgotten soon). The descision was to choose the laughter whenever I could.
Part of the key might be that through experiencing reall sorrow some manage to realize just how trivial many of lifes pains are. Or perhaps just a stubborn refusal to let life drag one down. Or perhaps some are simply lucky enough not to feel the effects of real pain, though I honestly don't know if that's luck.
Yep I scrambled that a bit didn't I. And leagle definitions, In my limited experience (ianal) have at best a passing resemblance to reality. (One town nearly passed a law that PI=3 to make school easier, if that's not an urban legend).
FWIW monopolies are not illeagle in the US, but once one exists it's rules of operation change a bit and it becomes much easier to be violate all sorts of laws and few that only apply to monopolies.
Microsoft was convicted of being an illeagle monopoly, not just of being a monopoly.
Indeed our system incourages some monopolies of very limited sort, via patents and copyright laws (nevermind that those have been seriously twisted out of thier intended shape/use).
IANAL, but it's my understanding that a non-compete can be enforced if it's sufficiently narrow in scope.
The courts don't like them much and look for excuses to toss them, you mention a couple of the most common excuses, but don't count on one not holding up. Get a lawyer of your own that knows the laws AND the likely hood of a suit and it's outcome before risking anything in this area, from what I've heard there is nice thick murky line between unenforcable and enforceable.
And yeah, big companies like to say things that look like contracts that aren't (or are but are not enforceable) hoping John Q. Public accepts it as such out of ignorance.
Actually the way I've heard it explained it's more like 'put the kinds and quality of food you're used to'.
Non-competes don't seem to hold up much if they interfere with you making the kind of money you are used to in the field you are used to.
Generaly only the most narrowly defined clauses tend to hold up, courts don't seem to like them much.
But then as IANAL, and I've heard the grey areas in this are murky indeed, get a real lawyer for actual leagle advice should you plan on doing anything other than read about this, and maybee even then.
As I understand it non-compete clauses aren't very enforceable in the us. But it depends.
Generaly if the clause would damage your ability to work your trade to much the courts tend to toss it, but if it's a fairly norrow clause that protects them from you going into bussiness against them it might be ruled valid.
If say you're a senior software engineer for a major game publisher and the clause says no matter what you can't do anything computer related in the same hemisphere for ten years after leaving thier employ no matter how you left, then no the courts aren't likely to enforce it.
If however your the manager of a local italian resturaunte and the cluase says you can't work for a set list of thier nearest 10 competitiors who are all within 5 miles of thier location for 6 months if you quit without 2 weeks notice, that the courts might call fair.
IANAL, but everytime I hear this brought up on the local radio station that does a leagle call in segment they say pretty much the same thing. The clause's enforceability drops rapidly as it's scope increases, but the grey areas are very grey indeed.
"Now I don't do the jack rabbit lane changes that some people do but by avoiding the lanes that get congested I can save significant amounts of time."
This is what I meant by driving smart is faster than driving 'faster'.
Avoid the problems rather than try and do 80 in a 60.
That said if you can save five minutes in five miles other than by doing and EXTRA 60mph (on an empty road) I feel sorry for you for the kind of rush hour nightmare you must deal with.
Mycroft
Re:What a sad week for gamers
on
EA's Busy Week
·
· Score: 1
Actually EA used to be one of my favorite game companies, back about 20years ago.
I used to play a lot of thier titles on the Commodore 64.
Innovate? well IIRC they did do 'Mail Order Monsters' and 'Earth Orbit Stations' to name two, I'm pretty shure they were also behind M.U.L.E. but i'm not as shure I could be.
Them, SSI, and Origin systems made about 90% of the games I liked back then.
Of course now that they've turned into a corporate monster absorbing company after company and rather than focusing on making good games they've lost most of the respect I used to have for them.
I can't think of any EA titles lately that aren't actually from some company they've bought out except sports.
I will say I've seen the reverse though. A distro that thought non-mp3 files where mp3, gave half of my.iso files the same mime type it gave my mp3's and refused to do otherwise with them. I tried drop and drag to burn one and got a 'wrong file type' message. On a lark i tried 'playing' these strange mp3's to get 'file corrupt' type message.
The real kick is there was NO way to change this that could be discovered in over an hour of digging around and it had trashed my primary hd's boot sector so I couldn't even go back to something else to dig on the web for answers, depite my having told it to install on the secondary hard-drive.
Needless to say I do NOT currently recomend Ubuntu (at least for 64bit amd users) after that fiasco.
Umm if they know how to make it work, why don't they.
Untill then it's still broken for laptop use. Unless of course thier just listing fixes for things that have come out since the last release and it will be fixed in the next for 90%+.
RTFM is ***NOT*** acceptable by joe user and most people who actually have a life and don't need to spend hours just to get thier computer to do the basics it did out of the box when they bought it. They'll go back to WinXp and being a wholy pwnd subsidiary of spammers are us first.
Actually there are 5 lagrange points(as the blurb says). And I think we're talking about the earth-moon lagrange points here not earth-sun.
The lagrange points are basically 60degrees in front of and behind the smaller object in it's orbit, between the two objets, just past the small one, and on the other side of the big object from the small one.
Check the first link in the blurb, it'll take you to the L5 societies homepage where you can get a MUCH better explanation along with pictures.
It's also possible to have more than one occupant at a lagrange point, as the 'point' is more like a area. While this point is a tiny space compared to the two bigger objects, it can be fairly large compared to a man made structure. Though the farther from the centre of the Lagrange point you are the more use of correctional thrusting you'll need.
Contrary to common conception lagrange points aren't like magical peg holes that you 'lock' to when you get there, what they really are are places where if you stop there the various forces from the two larger bodies will ballance out such that you won't need to do anything to stay there. but this is the ideal, with perfect spheres and NO other gravitational souces, no solar wind, etc. So you'll always need tiny corrections from time to time, the L points just reduce this to the smallest amount, so by being willing to deal with slightly more correction you can park very near there. Again the L5 society has better info most likely, and if not google for it, I'm sure some-one has expounded with more accuracy and eloquence than I have mustered.
I have plenty of respect for people up to small groups.
But large groups tend to become mobs/groups. I'm sorry if you don't like the fact that in sufficient numbers people are more manipulateable and react with less group sense than any of the individuals it's made up of would otherwise show.
But it's a well known fact that that is exactly what people will do. The reason is simple, we are a social animal and respond in that fasion.
Or do you think such things as peer presure and group psycology were made up for some wierd alien species in a sci fi b movie?
Slashdot Mirror
Welcomd to slashdot. Home of opinionated mods and poor spelleng. :)
Mycroft
IIRC, the part of your brain that decides whether someone is so closely related as to be 'off limits' selects those you spent a lot of time with up to age six or so.
Mcyroft
Unless I've got my words totally scrambled you don't know any polygamous relationships. But it sound like you know some cases of polyandry.
Polygamy is more than one wife, polyandry is more than one husband.
Just being pedantic, no offense intended.
Mycroft
I was rather suprise by umbuntu myself. NOT pleasantly however. I installed it to it's own hardrive yet it overwrote the boot sector on another drive in the system, without a clear means to undo it.
It assigned filetypes to files on a seemingly random basis and provided no way to change it's assignments and I couldn't use some of them from umbuntu because of this (excuse me but HOW is a *.iso file application/mp3 ?!?!? or rather how is just half of them at random?!?)
I'd advise holding off on Umbuntu untill it's out of beta.
The 32bit version might be better, but the amd64 install was an excersise in futility and unpleasant suprises.
Mandrake is what I've usually found to be easiest to use, not that I've tried to many distros.
Mycroft
That's too much information sir, let's just stick with figuring out this lady's just rewards for her actions.
no offence intended, that was just too good a straight-line to pass up:)
Mycroft
Perhaps the content they're removing is the CLOTHES in the 'hot coffe' portions. I know if I was them that's what I'd be tempted to do :)
Mycroft
I don't hate ms enough I guess. I find PDF far more abhorent than .doc.(they're both proprietary and intended to push a particular closed source companies products) .doc can be read, doesn't bloat a 146k text only file to 2+ meg, and the viewer written by the owners of the format don't lock up a system with an amd64 3500+ cpu and a gig of ram while the doc downloads.
At least
Mycroft
I'm a pc gammer mostly so I don't do live, it just looked like a good way for someone to be deprived of something they're paying for based on what's fun for them vs what's fun for you. I'm certainly not trying to do more than post an outsiders take on what you said.
I appretiate you giving more info also.
You may not like people who bail on games mid-stream, and are likely in the majority on that, but that doesn't mean they like being stuck playing what looks to be a boring game to them. And the rules of the system are on thier side at the moment. If I was someone who couldn't stand getting stuck in a bad game (however I defined it) and rules said it was o.k. to quit and got bad feedback that could cost me what I'd paid good money for I'd definately complain. Now I'd not stay for the start of the game if Beforehand I was warned the other players didn't like quitters, I'd not subject them to MY preferences eigther.
And it does look like you warn in advance the only concern I'd have there is that if they bother ed to record your message they would have solid evidence of you threatening them.
It seems to me there is a better fix available, Live just needs a 'reliability' stat. Just show some sort of indicator as to how likely a player is to bail durring the game.
Might also have a way so that if 3/4ths of the player agree a game is 'spoiled' (by quiters, lag, game bugs, etc.) it could be ended with no penalaty or gain to anyone.
My suggestion in the meantime would be to simply tell everyone you don't like quitters and suggest your tactic as a house rule for the game your playing or some such and pressuring Live to adopt some sort of metric or mechanism for dealing with the different outlooks on quiting for better match ups.
Hopefully they fix things for you, but you'll probably need to get a goodly number of people to convince them of the need so they can justify the costs.
FWIW I like the slower games that take time to play, a couple of my friends don't. If it's not mindless repetition of the FPS of the week they won't play for very long. Especially the one guy who's got a nack for FPS's. But take a game that's slower paced and they'll quit before finishing. The last such time was when one of them rented Outlaw Golf (two I think, not shure of ver number though). They got bored and quit about hole 6 or 7 I think. They also tend to get tired of fighting games (though alot less on MK) awfull quick (something about looser passes and me almost never having to pass:) So I'm not completely unsympathetic, just trying to show the other side and why it's probably better not to use such tactics unilateraly.
Mycroft
I dunno, I would think copying from previous slashdot stories could have the opposite effect, Especially if they accidently copy from a goat.cx link or gnaa troll.
Mycroft
As cool as a bipedal mech would be I'd have to add in against serious deployment.
The cube square problem kicks in and the stresses the legs have to take grow all out of proportion to the size.
It's like why all the b-grade sci-fi movies with ants and such twice the size of a vw beetle (eigther version) are bs.
I seem to remember reading some where that the first time a veritech takes a step it'd break it's legs from shearing stress or some such if it wasn't made out of something many times stronger than anything we'd invented yet (read in the late nineties).
I'd still like one though.
Mycroft
I can understand you're not likeing it when people quit, but best as I can tell threatening them for it is a violation of the rules, but quiting isn't.
Also what about when someones net connection goes down? Or thier young child suddenly needs help, or thier parent intervenes and shuts down thier game?
I'll also point out that if you are in a game that's very lopsided then no one gets noticebly better, the poorer player has no real chance and dies repeatedly with little to no chance learn anything (unless the better player is tutoring him/her, different story entirely there) and the better player isn't challenged at all.
Mycroft
Reading what some have said about how thier happy even though many would think they have cause for sorrow reminds me of two discoveries and decision I made a while back.
The discovery is that life has many moments that can eigther be cried over or laughed at. The second discovery is that laughter is usually much better than crying (though exceptions exist, goodbye Mr. Doohan, you'll not be forgotten soon). The descision was to choose the laughter whenever I could.
Part of the key might be that through experiencing reall sorrow some manage to realize just how trivial many of lifes pains are. Or perhaps just a stubborn refusal to let life drag one down. Or perhaps some are simply lucky enough not to feel the effects of real pain, though I honestly don't know if that's luck.
Mycroft
Yep I scrambled that a bit didn't I.
And leagle definitions, In my limited experience (ianal) have at best a passing resemblance to reality. (One town nearly passed a law that PI=3 to make school easier, if that's not an urban legend).
Mycroft
FWIW monopolies are not illeagle in the US, but once one exists it's rules of operation change a bit and it becomes much easier to be violate all sorts of laws and few that only apply to monopolies.
Microsoft was convicted of being an illeagle monopoly, not just of being a monopoly.
Indeed our system incourages some monopolies of very limited sort, via patents and copyright laws (nevermind that those have been seriously twisted out of thier intended shape/use).
Mycroft
IANAL, but it's my understanding that a non-compete can be enforced if it's sufficiently narrow in scope.
The courts don't like them much and look for excuses to toss them, you mention a couple of the most common excuses, but don't count on one not holding up. Get a lawyer of your own that knows the laws AND the likely hood of a suit and it's outcome before risking anything in this area, from what I've heard there is nice thick murky line between unenforcable and enforceable.
And yeah, big companies like to say things that look like contracts that aren't (or are but are not enforceable) hoping John Q. Public accepts it as such out of ignorance.
Mycroft
Actually the way I've heard it explained it's more like 'put the kinds and quality of food you're used to'.
Non-competes don't seem to hold up much if they interfere with you making the kind of money you are used to in the field you are used to.
Generaly only the most narrowly defined clauses tend to hold up, courts don't seem to like them much.
But then as IANAL, and I've heard the grey areas in this are murky indeed, get a real lawyer for actual leagle advice should you plan on doing anything other than read about this, and maybee even then.
Mycroft
As I understand it non-compete clauses aren't very enforceable in the us. But it depends.
Generaly if the clause would damage your ability to work your trade to much the courts tend to toss it, but if it's a fairly norrow clause that protects them from you going into bussiness against them it might be ruled valid.
If say you're a senior software engineer for a major game publisher and the clause says no matter what you can't do anything computer related in the same hemisphere for ten years after leaving thier employ no matter how you left, then no the courts aren't likely to enforce it.
If however your the manager of a local italian resturaunte and the cluase says you can't work for a set list of thier nearest 10 competitiors who are all within 5 miles of thier location for 6 months if you quit without 2 weeks notice, that the courts might call fair.
IANAL, but everytime I hear this brought up on the local radio station that does a leagle call in segment they say pretty much the same thing. The clause's enforceability drops rapidly as it's scope increases, but the grey areas are very grey indeed.
Mycroft
Or he could boot from his winxp cd, choose the recovery console and fixmbr and perhaps fixboot, IIRC.
Mycroft
"Now I don't do the jack rabbit lane changes that some people do but by avoiding the lanes that get congested I can save significant amounts of time."
This is what I meant by driving smart is faster than driving 'faster'.
Avoid the problems rather than try and do 80 in a 60.
That said if you can save five minutes in five miles other than by doing and EXTRA 60mph (on an empty road) I feel sorry for you for the kind of rush hour nightmare you must deal with.
Mycroft
Actually EA used to be one of my favorite game companies, back about 20years ago.
I used to play a lot of thier titles on the Commodore 64.
Innovate? well IIRC they did do 'Mail Order Monsters' and 'Earth Orbit Stations' to name two, I'm pretty shure they were also behind M.U.L.E. but i'm not as shure I could be.
Them, SSI, and Origin systems made about 90% of the games I liked back then.
Of course now that they've turned into a corporate monster absorbing company after company and rather than focusing on making good games they've lost most of the respect I used to have for them.
I can't think of any EA titles lately that aren't actually from some company they've bought out except sports.
Mycroft
I dunno about rebooted, but I doubt much at the local telco has been upgraded or anything in 20 years, possibly not even seen.
Mycroft
I will say I've seen the reverse though. A distro that thought non-mp3 files where mp3, gave half of my .iso files the same mime type it gave my mp3's and refused to do otherwise with them. I tried drop and drag to burn one and got a 'wrong file type' message. On a lark i tried 'playing' these strange mp3's to get 'file corrupt' type message.
The real kick is there was NO way to change this that could be discovered in over an hour of digging around and it had trashed my primary hd's boot sector so I couldn't even go back to something else to dig on the web for answers, depite my having told it to install on the secondary hard-drive.
Needless to say I do NOT currently recomend Ubuntu (at least for 64bit amd users) after that fiasco.
Mycroft
Umm if they know how to make it work, why don't they.
Untill then it's still broken for laptop use.
Unless of course thier just listing fixes for things that have come out since the last release and it will be fixed in the next for 90%+.
RTFM is ***NOT*** acceptable by joe user and most people who actually have a life and don't need to spend hours just to get thier computer to do the basics it did out of the box when they bought it. They'll go back to WinXp and being a wholy pwnd subsidiary of spammers are us first.
Mycroft
Actually there are 5 lagrange points(as the blurb says). And I think we're talking about the earth-moon lagrange points here not earth-sun.
The lagrange points are basically 60degrees in front of and behind the smaller object in it's orbit, between the two objets, just past the small one, and on the other side of the big object from the small one.
Check the first link in the blurb, it'll take you to the L5 societies homepage where you can get a MUCH better explanation along with pictures.
It's also possible to have more than one occupant at a lagrange point, as the 'point' is more like a area. While this point is a tiny space compared to the two bigger objects, it can be fairly large compared to a man made structure. Though the farther from the centre of the Lagrange point you are the more use of correctional thrusting you'll need.
Contrary to common conception lagrange points aren't like magical peg holes that you 'lock' to when you get there, what they really are are places where if you stop there the various forces from the two larger bodies will ballance out such that you won't need to do anything to stay there. but this is the ideal, with perfect spheres and NO other gravitational souces, no solar wind, etc. So you'll always need tiny corrections from time to time, the L points just reduce this to the smallest amount, so by being willing to deal with slightly more correction you can park very near there. Again the L5 society has better info most likely, and if not google for it, I'm sure some-one has expounded with more accuracy and eloquence than I have mustered.
Mycroft
I have plenty of respect for people up to small groups.
But large groups tend to become mobs/groups.
I'm sorry if you don't like the fact that in sufficient numbers people are more manipulateable and react with less group sense than any of the individuals it's made up of would otherwise show.
But it's a well known fact that that is exactly what people will do. The reason is simple, we are a social animal and respond in that fasion.
Or do you think such things as peer presure and group psycology were made up for some wierd alien species in a sci fi b movie?
Mycroft