You assume that science and religion have the same domain. In reality, their domains might look something like this NOT-TO-SCALE Venn diagram. Your analogy omits a big chunk of the "truth" category.
Congratulations! You've just done the sleaziest, dirtiest, basest thing you can do in a creation/evolution discussion! You've heard someone say "I don't believe in evolution," where it's obvious they mean that humans evolved from single-celled life forms, and then responded as though they were saying they don't believe in the evolution we observe today!
You have done a very nice job identifying yourself as an ignorant slimeball who will deliberately misinterpret his opponents in an effort to defeat them. Well done!
he wants to scrap what little healthcare the poor in the US have access to (bear in mind that the US already has lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality than European countries that spend less per capita on healthcare)
So if they spend less on socialized healthcare than we do, yet they're doing better, then obviously the amount we're spending is not the problem, and perhaps if we spent less and changed some things at the same time, maybe our situation would get better.
What the crap does it matter whether a doctor understands evolution? Doctors deal with the way people's bodies work today, and I couldn't care less what they think about how they worked millennia ago or how they got here.
Evolution may be the fundamental principle of biological history, but that's only one facet of biology as a whole.
To clarify the summary, the biggest issue is not the spying on users; the biggest issue is the deceptive server name, 192.168.112.2O7.net. It's at least meant to confuse unwary users, and possibly meant to confuse misconfigured firewalls.
As someone said on a blog I can't find right now, this is not a story about privacy; it's a story about lies.
I have to agree with you, and further unload on this topic.
On and around the time Six Apart released MT3, they proved they had nothing but disdain for their loyal MT2 users. Let me count the ways:
They always said there would always be a full-featured free version of Movable Type. Then, as they worked on MT3 in the year or so preceding its release, they assumed complete radio silence on the topic. They said nothing, indicated in no way that there was a shift in their mentality of any kind. Then, on MT3 release day, BOOM: the two most important features, number of users and number of weblogs, are limited for free users. You may say those aren't really "features," but their Features page disagreed; even after MT3's release, two of the top features on the page were "Unlimited users" and "Unlimited weblogs".
Many people called the people who complained about that freeloaders and cheapskates, but the fact was that most people weren't mad about 6A charging for Movable Type; they were mad that they went back on their word without a prior hint.
But that wouldn't've been so bad, if it weren't for a couple of other things:
When MT3 came out, the license explicitly stated that you could only create one weblog in the software with the free version. People were upset with this, because one of the most common MT hacks is to create a weblog for your articles, one for your links, and maybe a couple of others, and then combine them all into one website.
So there was a furor over that particular change. A couple of weeks or so later, 6A changed the license to say you could create unlimited software-weblogs as long as they were confined to a single web site.
But they didn't say they changed their license. Oh no. They said "We've just posted a clarification to our free license, to clarify that you can have unlimited software-weblogs on one web site."
This was weasel-speak, plain and simple. They didn't have the dignity or the respect for their users to admit they had to change their minds. And finally,
There's a guy who works at Six Apart by the name of Anil Dash. He has a weblog. At the time, his weblog had a special links section in the sidebar.
On the day of MT3's release, he posted a link to the MT3 website in that sidebar. The text around the link said something to the effect of "Movable Type 3 is released. [Something something something something.] Let the complaints begin!"
That's right. A vice-president (or whatever he was at the time) of the company made a snarky remark about his users' reaction to his company going back on its word on his weblog. (He Orwellized it away shortly thereafter.)
That last one especially indicates the mindset inside 6A at the time. They slowly stopped seeing their users, the people who got them where they were, as their lifeblood, and started seeing them as complaining cheapskate freeloaders. At some point between MT 2.6 and MT3, they lost their respect for their loyal base, and replaced it with respect only for their corporate customers. Going back on their word, not talking straight with us, and making snarky comments about us seem to pretty clearly indicate disdain for us, not respect.
So I don't really care about MT being open source, because I don't think their attitude has probably changed one bit. It's simply gotten to the point where the "cheapskate freeloaders" can help their corporate mission better if MT is Free.
I think you two are using different definitions of "Z-lock". Edwdig, this sentence:
Switching between the sword and arrows mid fight without z lock is going to be a pain.
makes me think you're confusing Z-lock with the whole concept of Z-targeting. Z-lock in OoT is when you don't have to hold the Z button to stay Z-targeted. Turning off Z-lock doesn't mean giving up Z-targeting altogether.
drilling multiplication tables into childrens' heads, when in all likelihood they'll spend their entire lives not twelve inches away from a device that can do it a million times faster
Ehhh, I gotta object to this one. It's way faster to do low-number multiplication in your head than it is to do punch it in a calculator. Can you imagine if you had to whip out a calculator or scrawl on some paper every time you wanted to multiply 12 by 8?? Also, for mathematically inclined people, multiplication tables are an excellent way to introduce them to some rudimentary arithmetic patterns.
Nowadays we have maps, and these are generally structured to fit together seamlessly.
They may fit together, but it's not usually seamless.
Metroid Prime is the one people point out for having no loading times, but those completely different landscapes separated by elevator rides? Those are levels. Or in a way, "levels" are what happens between picking up major items or defeating bosses. You defeat a boss, and you've completed one level of the game. You pick up a new suit enhancement, and you can get to all sorts of new areas and gameplay changes. All levels.
My favorite example of an almost-seamless game is Riven. When you finish Riven, things have come together in your mind so that you have no idea how you figured it out without knowing it all ahead of time. But even it had seven separate areas with big-payoff vehicle rides or HUGE-payoff Linking Books between them.
Some people have mentioned Half-Life 2, which blows my mind, since the levels there are completely obvious. There's the crawling-through-sewers level, the air-boat-riding level, the zombie-filled-ghost-town level, etc., etc., etc.
I challenge anyone to name a game where you can't divide the gameplay up into discrete chunks separated by pivotal moments or gameplay changes. Those are levels, and they're everywhere, because without them the games would be boring.
The reason is memory. There's only so much you can load into RAM at once, and levels allow you to more easily control what assets get used and when.... It can lead to crash issues if the player gets too far before you've finished loading everything.
This is all correct, but when you were talking about the computer's RAM and assets, you should've been talking about the player's.
I've said it already in this thread, so I won't repost so I don't get modded redundant, but you should read this and then this.
People keep replying that levels are for some technological reason, or else that a story or some other external element requires them. But neither of those are correct. It's HUMANS that require them.
We need payoff. We need to feel like we've accomplished something bigger than defeating one enemy, but smaller than finishing the game. We need to expunge all the cruft from one section of the game from our minds to make way for new information.
LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM FOLLOWS:
On one level, we're getting reinforced all the time when we play games. We see an enemy (antecedent), we shoot the enemy (behavior), the enemy dies and the path is cleared (consequence). A couple of levels up, we have the whole game as one contingency, where playing the game is the behavior and having the game finished is the consequence. (I was having a hard time coming up with the exact antecedent on that one.)
But other than with very short games, we need something in between those two. Eventually most people will get satiated on the enemy-shooting contingency; without a higher contingency than that, but a lower contingency than the far-away end of the game, there's no strong enough, near enough reinforcement to be worth continuing to play. (At least for a while.)
END LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM
Game designers know all of this, so they space out the payoff so that there's always something near enough (end of a level) to be worth fighting toward. Eventually, most people will get satiated even with intermittent big payoff, but it takes a lot longer than if the game was just one big level. And in the end, the main goal of game designers is to keep you playing as long as possible.
It's not just that people like pauses, it's that we like payoff. We like to feel that we've finished something every once in a while before we finish the whole thing.
There's much more to a chapter or level ending than a pause. There's a wrapping up of previous story/gameplay elements, and a feeling of beginning anew: a chance to compress all our experiences in the previous level down to just the important stuff and to expunge the tedious parts.
In a way, like the people above have said, it has everything to do with loading new stuff into RAM and paging old stuff to disk. It's just not the computer's RAM or the computer's disk.
Pronounced "Dunny" by Rand Miller as Atrus in the supposed-to-be-games games, but pronounced "d-NEE" by the actual, English-speaking D'ni Yeesha in the supposed-to-be-real Uru. And also pronounced something close to "d-NEE" by the actual D'ni Esher in Myst V.
In short, all the cool kids say "d-NEE" these days.:)
The joke was "Who calls [name some people call them]s '[previous suggested name]s'?" You said "Who calls a [name absolutely no one calls them] a "[previous suggested name]"?"
People interested in a proper joke should reply to my reply below and not this one.
First off, the things do not last. They're built like crap.
Not in my experience. The N64 analog stick degraded fast, especially when you played games like Mario Kart with lots of all-the-way-back-and-forth movement. I've yet to have a Gamecube controller's sticks degrade whatsoever. So, got any sources?
Not to mention they look like they were designed by a guy with Tourette's
Because the way a controller looks is a good and fine and intelligent criterion to judge it by.
There are random buttons in the stupidest places,
Like centered around the main A button? Or like shoulder buttons on top? Oooooh, now that's random and stupid.
they turned the c-buttons into some whacked out half-joystick
Which is better because it's a second analog stick, and which is better because it's nicer controlling cameras with a stick instead of buttons.
and you have to push the L and R buttons about 8 feet into the controller before they register.
Because they're analog buttons which actually register continually across their whole range of movement, even though they move freely enough that it feels just fine when quickly pushing down to the *click*.
Yeah, I'm pretty much a Nintendo fanboy, but you're definitely in the minority in disliking the Gamecube controller, and you're gonna need at least one decent argument to convince anyone with a clue.
Hum. I think you might be right. Somehow in a previous thread, I came up with the gerund "packaging" as the closest thing to a synonym for "SKU". I don't know if "package" just didn't occur to me --- which would be ridiculous and indicate that I have a sub-90 IQ --- or if I had a problem with it at the time.
I don't seem to have a problem with it now, though, so I guess I'll start evangelizing it and stop defending SKU.:P
Your point is good, but not necessarily relevant. "SKU" as it's used in Slashdot stories doesn't refer to the number or any characteristics thereof; rather it's used to refer to a hard-to-otherwise-express concept that needs a good succinct name.
I'm on board with you on SKU having a purpose, but not because SKU numbers are easy to type in.:P
Slashdot Mirror
And their one way involves memorizing keystrokes, while Windows's ways don't! Why doesn't everyone install it, I ask you??!
I explained it with this. His metaphor omits a big chunk of the truth.
You assume that science and religion have the same domain. In reality, their domains might look something like this NOT-TO-SCALE Venn diagram. Your analogy omits a big chunk of the "truth" category.
Congratulations! You've just done the sleaziest, dirtiest, basest thing you can do in a creation/evolution discussion! You've heard someone say "I don't believe in evolution," where it's obvious they mean that humans evolved from single-celled life forms, and then responded as though they were saying they don't believe in the evolution we observe today!
You have done a very nice job identifying yourself as an ignorant slimeball who will deliberately misinterpret his opponents in an effort to defeat them. Well done!
So if they spend less on socialized healthcare than we do, yet they're doing better, then obviously the amount we're spending is not the problem, and perhaps if we spent less and changed some things at the same time, maybe our situation would get better.
What the crap does it matter whether a doctor understands evolution? Doctors deal with the way people's bodies work today, and I couldn't care less what they think about how they worked millennia ago or how they got here.
Evolution may be the fundamental principle of biological history, but that's only one facet of biology as a whole.
Here's where I got that "story about lies" quote.
To clarify the summary, the biggest issue is not the spying on users; the biggest issue is the deceptive server name, 192.168.112.2O7.net. It's at least meant to confuse unwary users, and possibly meant to confuse misconfigured firewalls.
As someone said on a blog I can't find right now, this is not a story about privacy; it's a story about lies.
I have to agree with you, and further unload on this topic.
On and around the time Six Apart released MT3, they proved they had nothing but disdain for their loyal MT2 users. Let me count the ways:
They always said there would always be a full-featured free version of Movable Type. Then, as they worked on MT3 in the year or so preceding its release, they assumed complete radio silence on the topic. They said nothing, indicated in no way that there was a shift in their mentality of any kind. Then, on MT3 release day, BOOM: the two most important features, number of users and number of weblogs, are limited for free users. You may say those aren't really "features," but their Features page disagreed; even after MT3's release, two of the top features on the page were "Unlimited users" and "Unlimited weblogs".
Many people called the people who complained about that freeloaders and cheapskates, but the fact was that most people weren't mad about 6A charging for Movable Type; they were mad that they went back on their word without a prior hint.
But that wouldn't've been so bad, if it weren't for a couple of other things:
When MT3 came out, the license explicitly stated that you could only create one weblog in the software with the free version. People were upset with this, because one of the most common MT hacks is to create a weblog for your articles, one for your links, and maybe a couple of others, and then combine them all into one website.
So there was a furor over that particular change. A couple of weeks or so later, 6A changed the license to say you could create unlimited software-weblogs as long as they were confined to a single web site.
But they didn't say they changed their license. Oh no. They said "We've just posted a clarification to our free license, to clarify that you can have unlimited software-weblogs on one web site."
This was weasel-speak, plain and simple. They didn't have the dignity or the respect for their users to admit they had to change their minds. And finally,
There's a guy who works at Six Apart by the name of Anil Dash. He has a weblog. At the time, his weblog had a special links section in the sidebar.
On the day of MT3's release, he posted a link to the MT3 website in that sidebar. The text around the link said something to the effect of "Movable Type 3 is released. [Something something something something.] Let the complaints begin!"
That's right. A vice-president (or whatever he was at the time) of the company made a snarky remark about his users' reaction to his company going back on its word on his weblog. (He Orwellized it away shortly thereafter.)
That last one especially indicates the mindset inside 6A at the time. They slowly stopped seeing their users, the people who got them where they were, as their lifeblood, and started seeing them as complaining cheapskate freeloaders. At some point between MT 2.6 and MT3, they lost their respect for their loyal base, and replaced it with respect only for their corporate customers. Going back on their word, not talking straight with us, and making snarky comments about us seem to pretty clearly indicate disdain for us, not respect.
So I don't really care about MT being open source, because I don't think their attitude has probably changed one bit. It's simply gotten to the point where the "cheapskate freeloaders" can help their corporate mission better if MT is Free.
Yes, his was the original mistake, I was just extremely short on time when I made my post and didn't have time to type the second half.
I think you two are using different definitions of "Z-lock". Edwdig, this sentence:
makes me think you're confusing Z-lock with the whole concept of Z-targeting. Z-lock in OoT is when you don't have to hold the Z button to stay Z-targeted. Turning off Z-lock doesn't mean giving up Z-targeting altogether.
Or maybe I'm the one who's misinterpreting.
Ehhh, I gotta object to this one. It's way faster to do low-number multiplication in your head than it is to do punch it in a calculator. Can you imagine if you had to whip out a calculator or scrawl on some paper every time you wanted to multiply 12 by 8?? Also, for mathematically inclined people, multiplication tables are an excellent way to introduce them to some rudimentary arithmetic patterns.
Well, he did screw up "at". That makes it a little less funny. (Unless there's a further part of the joke I don't get either.)
Phrase of the year. 100% interchangeable with all current instances of the phrase "desktop publishing" as a noun. Very nice job.
They may fit together, but it's not usually seamless.
Metroid Prime is the one people point out for having no loading times, but those completely different landscapes separated by elevator rides? Those are levels. Or in a way, "levels" are what happens between picking up major items or defeating bosses. You defeat a boss, and you've completed one level of the game. You pick up a new suit enhancement, and you can get to all sorts of new areas and gameplay changes. All levels.
My favorite example of an almost-seamless game is Riven. When you finish Riven, things have come together in your mind so that you have no idea how you figured it out without knowing it all ahead of time. But even it had seven separate areas with big-payoff vehicle rides or HUGE-payoff Linking Books between them.
Some people have mentioned Half-Life 2, which blows my mind, since the levels there are completely obvious. There's the crawling-through-sewers level, the air-boat-riding level, the zombie-filled-ghost-town level, etc., etc., etc.
I challenge anyone to name a game where you can't divide the gameplay up into discrete chunks separated by pivotal moments or gameplay changes. Those are levels, and they're everywhere, because without them the games would be boring.
I think he was implying that he wrote all the comments himself. Or maybe it really was a masturbation reference.
This is all correct, but when you were talking about the computer's RAM and assets, you should've been talking about the player's.
I've said it already in this thread, so I won't repost so I don't get modded redundant, but you should read this and then this.
People keep replying that levels are for some technological reason, or else that a story or some other external element requires them. But neither of those are correct. It's HUMANS that require them.
We need payoff. We need to feel like we've accomplished something bigger than defeating one enemy, but smaller than finishing the game. We need to expunge all the cruft from one section of the game from our minds to make way for new information.
LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM FOLLOWS:
On one level, we're getting reinforced all the time when we play games. We see an enemy (antecedent), we shoot the enemy (behavior), the enemy dies and the path is cleared (consequence). A couple of levels up, we have the whole game as one contingency, where playing the game is the behavior and having the game finished is the consequence. (I was having a hard time coming up with the exact antecedent on that one.)
But other than with very short games, we need something in between those two. Eventually most people will get satiated on the enemy-shooting contingency; without a higher contingency than that, but a lower contingency than the far-away end of the game, there's no strong enough, near enough reinforcement to be worth continuing to play. (At least for a while.)
END LAYMAN BEHAVIORISM
Game designers know all of this, so they space out the payoff so that there's always something near enough (end of a level) to be worth fighting toward. Eventually, most people will get satiated even with intermittent big payoff, but it takes a lot longer than if the game was just one big level. And in the end, the main goal of game designers is to keep you playing as long as possible.
It's not just that people like pauses, it's that we like payoff. We like to feel that we've finished something every once in a while before we finish the whole thing.
There's much more to a chapter or level ending than a pause. There's a wrapping up of previous story/gameplay elements, and a feeling of beginning anew: a chance to compress all our experiences in the previous level down to just the important stuff and to expunge the tedious parts.
In a way, like the people above have said, it has everything to do with loading new stuff into RAM and paging old stuff to disk. It's just not the computer's RAM or the computer's disk.
Pronounced "Dunny" by Rand Miller as Atrus in the supposed-to-be-games games, but pronounced "d-NEE" by the actual, English-speaking D'ni Yeesha in the supposed-to-be-real Uru. And also pronounced something close to "d-NEE" by the actual D'ni Esher in Myst V.
In short, all the cool kids say "d-NEE" these days. :)
You fail.
The joke was "Who calls [name some people call them]s '[previous suggested name]s'?" You said "Who calls a [name absolutely no one calls them] a "[previous suggested name]"?"
People interested in a proper joke should reply to my reply below and not this one.
Who calls USB flash drives 'USB memory sticks'?
Not in my experience. The N64 analog stick degraded fast, especially when you played games like Mario Kart with lots of all-the-way-back-and-forth movement. I've yet to have a Gamecube controller's sticks degrade whatsoever. So, got any sources?
Because the way a controller looks is a good and fine and intelligent criterion to judge it by.
Like centered around the main A button? Or like shoulder buttons on top? Oooooh, now that's random and stupid.
Which is better because it's a second analog stick, and which is better because it's nicer controlling cameras with a stick instead of buttons.
Because they're analog buttons which actually register continually across their whole range of movement, even though they move freely enough that it feels just fine when quickly pushing down to the *click*.
Yeah, I'm pretty much a Nintendo fanboy, but you're definitely in the minority in disliking the Gamecube controller, and you're gonna need at least one decent argument to convince anyone with a clue.
Hum. I think you might be right. Somehow in a previous thread, I came up with the gerund "packaging" as the closest thing to a synonym for "SKU". I don't know if "package" just didn't occur to me --- which would be ridiculous and indicate that I have a sub-90 IQ --- or if I had a problem with it at the time.
:P
I don't seem to have a problem with it now, though, so I guess I'll start evangelizing it and stop defending SKU.
Your point is good, but not necessarily relevant. "SKU" as it's used in Slashdot stories doesn't refer to the number or any characteristics thereof; rather it's used to refer to a hard-to-otherwise-express concept that needs a good succinct name.
:P
I'm on board with you on SKU having a purpose, but not because SKU numbers are easy to type in.