... I don't think it's fair to expect to allow an early release over Steam.
It appears that Vivendi was somewhat suprised by the introduction of Steam in the first place, since they likely expected the game they were publishing to be like nearly every other game, where it's goes through just the normal retail chain. Whether Valve was legally within their rights due to whatever contract is something I don't know, but it seems like at the very least there was a misunderstanding, though I have some feeling there was some sneakiness on Valve's part. Now, I have no love for Vivendi, with most game contracts leading to relatively little of the revenues going back to the developers themselves. However... something was awry.
Now, in terms of where we are now with Vivendi supposedly not allowing Valve to authenticate the game... Vivendi would be sacrificing a chunk of their profits if they were to allow people to authenticate, including those with the steam version, since there are many potential boxed versions that would instead be sold online since the hardcore players will want the game as soon as possible. As well, they would be neglecting any deals they have with their distributors on the release date. Now... one thing Valve could possibly offer is the ability to only authenticate those boxed copies that somehow got into the market early. Valve is unlikely to want to do this though, since it would:
a) Require last minute programming of Steam.
b) Cause people to avoid ordering the Steam version in the hopes of finding an early release of the box.
All in all, I hope the fanboys can put their torches and pitchforks away and just wait another few days. It's really not that long!
Conseravatism is a very subjective word. I wouldn't consider any neo-con to be a conservative, but I tend to use it in casual conversation to mean someone that tends to vote Republican.
Well, I was arguing that the 'conservative' side of him, whatever that means, isn't the important quality here. However, he is a social conservative, which in his case means being very anti-abortion, as well as pro-censorship, with his rediculous covering up of the breast on a statue and his attacks against adult pornography.
In my opinion, Ashcroft is a fascist... and before I get flamed, fascism is simply authoritarianism on social issues and a corporatist economic policy.
Though I do agree when you get specific, the term fascism has just as obscure a meaning as conservatism, if not more so.
Whoa... Stalin was an authoritarian communist. Probably the complete opposite of what is considered "conservative".
One of the worst aspects of soviet communism was how it was authoritarian. While Ashcroft may be a conservative, he is also shown himself to be quite authoritarian. He pushed for laws such as the patriot act, which among other things allow for warrentless searches of things such as the books you take out of the library, and allowed the infiltratation of protest groups under the guise of fighting terrorism.
I just tried this, and I'm finding a few things finicky, including the 'help' menu not having help available, and the tools/options menu not showing choosing one of the options by default and giving a strange empty window.
Resetting the profile seems to fix the options problem, but still no 'help' menu... I guess I'll do a full install.
An interesting problem is how likely it is to find such a coincidence.
Lets assume that all two team/player competitions have no predictive powers, and wins half the time. Lets also assume the incumbent wins half the time. Therefore, on average a team will be 'right' half the time. The probability of a team being 'right' 15 times in a row is 0.5^15, or 1 in 32768.
So, what does all this mean? Not a whole lot. Now, I doubt there are that many major teams/players of any sport that have been around long enough to be right that many times. Also, I'm not sure when they decided to track this specific team's ability to 'predict', but if back in 1936 (or even a fair amount later) they stated that this would happen, it would be interesting.
Also, though it may be unlikely to come up with this kind of sports predictor for any specific 50/50 event, there are many important 50/50 events in the world that may happen to have such a predictor. It's pretty meaningless, but some people clearly have fun looking for them.
When it is comparable to this example (yes, the text above is both the logic and the GUI for the game below), or this calculator or spreadsheet implementations I'll be impressed.
It may look obfuscated, but it isn't to one versed in K programming. And if you aren't versed, anything (except perhaps Python) looks obfuscated.
I did some J programming a little while back, and K as far as I understand is similar. Anyway, code I wrote in J definately did not look like some fo those horrible strings of who-knows-what those example have. Code in J just has to be broken up the code into smaller chunks, and you have to comment it well. I found it to be necessary to write more comments than code in order to make things readable, as language itself was not. (not a good thing, imo) Just because the language makes it easy to shove a whole lot of 'code' into a line, doesn't mean that's what you should be doing.
Sam and Max 2 not officially back from the dead
on
Sam and Max 2: Reloaded
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Though this is certainly very positive news, they have not yet announced that Sam and Max 2 has been resurrected. I'm guessing they are in the middle of making a deal on that, though it's a touch premature to say it's back.
From the article:
But what about the question on everyone's mind--is a new Sam and Max title coming? Although Telltale Games hasn't specifically said anything, the upcoming first press release from the company does reference the game three times, then ends by saying that Telltale is currently "in the design phase on a well-loved license." Could it be?
Fundamentalist atheists are just as bad. Only, it's not socially acceptable to show bigotry towards them, like it is to Christians.
I'm sorry, but don't know of all that many 'fundamentalist' atheists, at least not in the modern western world. I've noticed a lot of the time fights against things susch as school prayer are portrayed as being anti-religion, as you seem to in a later post. Students are not banned praying in school, and it's rediculous to argue otherwise. What *is* banned is for the school administration to promote religion, as they are publically owned. If you are Christain, you likely wouldn't be too pleased if you heard someone reading prayers out of the Quran over the loudspeakers, just an atheist wouldn't be happy to hear any prayers. The constitution demands that the state not promote religion, so *the state* can't. However, individuals, including students in public school, can.
As well, being an atheist assigns a huge stigma to a person in the eyes of many. Since many promote religion as being synonymous with morality, there is a implication that athiests are immoral. This is a totally unfair assumption, yet it along with bigotry to athiests is so pervasive it goes unquestioned.
And it actually works fairly well. It scans for any program that reads these files and makes sure they don't have the bug in them. If it can't patch them, it bugs you about it so you can find a fix for the app. Only Microsoft apps of course, I don't think Adobe wants Microsoft pushing out software updates for them.
I really can't give Microsoft much credit here, as this is not nearly enough. So many Microsoft programs have this bug, and while it will tell you which programs have problems, it only points you in the right direction to fix it, and doesn't fix it itself. Why can't the Windows Update service actually fix these bugs? I realize they aren't all part of the OS itself, but come on, it's all Microsoft.
Your average user is going to get to the point of loading the program that notifies you of the problems, and then not go to all these strange "Knowledge Base" links to actually install the updates. The end result will be that while the core system will be fixed, there will still be a lot of loose ends that will be exploited unless Microsoft auto patches them.
The handling of this shows that Windows is in need to increase the scope of their update utility to that of not only it's own programs, but other programs as well. Ideally, it should act as the centeral repository for security patchs for all major (and minor?) in Windows apps. While each individual app could do this, a single spot for all patches would be very useful and much easier on the user. In Debian, an 'apt-get update' can fix most known security flaws in nearly all the programs I have installed. Given the position Microsoft is in, they could implement something at least somewhat similar, as I imagine other software vendors would take advantage of it. If patching isn't easy enough for users, they won't get the patches until it's too late (and perhaps not even then).
Firefox blocks popups out of the box, doesn't support ActiveX at all, doesn't let you run EXE files directly without saving them first, isn't tied with explorer.exe, etc. How many sites do you know that have spyware which affects Firefox?
As several people have mentioned, there have been some spyware targetting Mozilla, and I have personally run into websites that attempt to install spyware through it's plugin install feature. It looks like the newer versions of Mozilla and Firefox require upgrades to come from update.mozilla.org, thus for spyware to easily get through it must have been put up on that site.
OK, I not a die-hard libertarian, but this seems like a good idea. This is not the same as tracking someone's movements all the time, as a theme park is ostensibly not the real world. It should stop kids from being getting lost; and it would save school and youth organisation groups from having to hammer around in those big chain gangs with flags, etc.
I see nothing wrong with this use of RFID tags, as the users of it *want* it to be used for tracking. There's no reason this wouldn't be a 'good' thing if it were done with GPS instead of RFID.
The problem with RFID tags is that if a large number of the goods we buy have them, then it's easy for someone to put RFID readers out there so that when you pass them, they know what you are currently holding, which will likely lead to targetted advertising as you walk down the streets. I.e., if you are the type of person to buy expensive clothing, don't be suprised if you tend to get extra attention while shopping from the sales people.
If such readers are networked, they can be used as a way of tracking your position. This 'feature' will not for *you* to see where your friends and family are like in the example in the article, but for others.
As the article points out Linus is vehemently against making the kernel API/ABI's stable. On the one hand this allows them to add knew stuff all the damn time, but it breaks drivers. In my opinion this is what's holding linux back. It contributes to Linux having crappy hardware support. (Yes it has crappy hardware support people!) Sure it supports LOTS of devices, but a lot of them require some voodoo to make them work.
Something like this isn't the only thing holding linux back, but it would be a big help. I find it pretty frustrating that everytime you want to update the kernel, you have to recompile and setup all those non-builtin drivers to get things working again. At the very least, it would be nice if the kernel had at least some minimal guarantees that drivers compiled for one major revision of the kernel (i.e. the 2.4 series or 2.6 series) worked on all minor versions. At the moment, any time there's some little security bug requiring a kernel upgrade, you need to recompile your drivers or else force them to run for a version they weren't compiled for and risk something breaking.
A judge's job is not to support the viewpoint of most other hispanics. A Judge's job is to judge according to the law, with deference to the highest law in the land- the US constitution.
You want someone to represent hispanic viewpoints in the government? Fine. Elect a senator or representative to do so. A judge, on the other hand, should just do his job. Creative judges representing viewpoints and effectively writing laws is what has many of us right-wingers pissed off at the judiciary and the percieved lefty takeover of it.
Estrada (that was his name, wasn't it?) , when asked about representing hispanic viewpoints while on the bench replied that he didn't see what being hispanic had to do with anything. He's just gotta judge according to the law. That's the kind of people this right winger wants, I don't give a shit what color he is.
Like it or not, judges do have their biases, as is very clear. You suggest that conservatives are mad at liberal judges, but this is definately not a one way issue. My feeling is that judges aren't doing enough to enforce the constitution, allowing laws to get passed that take away constitutally protect civil rights. Laws are supposed to balance people's rights, yet laws against things like drug use don't protect anyone, as the supposed victim is the one who wanted them.
As for Estrada specifically, if I remember correctly his problem wasn't that he refused to answer questions on how he would rule on cases as a judge. Certainly he shouldn't be asked 'how would you judge on position x', but he should be able to provide his methodology. Not giving this kind of information is like going into a job interview and saying nothing.
Condeleeza Rice and Colin Powell? That oughta get you started.
Oh, wait, they're not really black because they're conservative, right? Isn't that the type of racism that's okay in the twisted view of the democrats?
Are you suggesting the Democrats are against Rice and Powell because they are black? When they were put into the cabinet, I don't remember any argument from the Democrats. As far as I remember, the main cabinet member to face opposition was Ashcroft, who doesn't happen to be a visible minority.
Before the whole Iraq debacle, Rice and Powell were very well respected in all circles.
It's sort of like Republicans and Clarence Thomas-- the Democrats can't fight his appointment without losing face, because he's black, even though underneath the skin he's about as conservative as your average white CEO.
Well, that's the most racists and prejudiced thing I've read in a while.
Basically, you're saying that a conservative hispanic isn't really conservative at all, because hispanics are liberal.
...
YOU are stating that SKIN COLOR DETERMINES BEHAVIOR AND THOUGHT.
He didn't say that. Within any group, whether racial or otherwise, you are going to find certain viewpoints and issues that are a large number of them share. Stating that someone who is black is more likely to vote Democrat than Republican is not racist but fact. A Hispanic conservative is still Hispanic, however, if you assume most Hispanics are not (I really don't know, and the term 'conservative' is pretty general anyway), then a conservative Hispanic is not going to support the viewpoints of most other Hispanics. Thus, he will be a poor advocate for their causes.
The Republicans seem to like to screw with the Democrats with this tactic of appointing someone who they know they will disagree with ideologically, and then call them racists for doing so. Democrats are not being immoral by not accepting them, since they are doing so on idealogical grounds and not racial grounds.
Well, as a ReplayTV user, I often download selected movies, shows, or specials and burn them to DVD for later or repeated viewing.
I'm considering installing a DVD burner later on, though mainly for the purpose of lending out shows to friends who have missed them. In terms of movies, while certainly I could record and burn them if I wished, I'd much rather copy from the original DVD, though this in part might be because the quality of the analog television signal is only so good. There are quite a lot of places for someone to pirate a movie if they desired, and these kinds of measures are likely going to only be a drop in the bucket.
The danger is that these measures make recording normal shows on Tivo/ReplayTV difficult or illegal, all in the name of what's being marketed as copy protection. These types of systems need to become more widespread, so that people will actually know what they are missing and be able to complain in case these laws are changed.
Considering that Doom 3 has not lived up to its expectactions besides being a tech demo, how well would the game have done and how much better would it be if John Romero was still there?
Answer: Simple. Romero would have made it legendary.
I thought DOOM 3 was an great game. It had a decent storyline, was well paced, and was fun. On top of that of course, the graphics, and the sound and music. All and all, in terms of 'full fledged' games, Doom 3 is id's best to date. Most of their older games were pure tech demos, but people didn't mind back then because most games didn't have that much else in them anyway. The gameplay itself was admittedly simplistic in some respects, but it made up for it in other ways. You seem to either be holding Doom 3 to some extra high standard purely because it's a 'DOOM' game, and/or haven't really played it.
Also, while I think it's sad that Romero left id, this did happen a while ago and if he were there I don't think the game would be phenomonly different. I mean, the game he created, Daikatana, was nothing special and turned out to be a flop (though, that might be more a reflection of his management skills than game creation skills). I certainly think Romero did his part with the original DOOM, and in some ways DOOM 3 sounded like some of his (in)famous ideas/hype about the original Quake years before it came out (for example, the way you can see only the eyes of some of the monsters in darkness).
I've been using a MythTV setup for quite a while now, and I've been using it as anyone would expect me to, to record my shows so I can watch them at a later time. While certainly it is possible for me to store the videos for later viewing, I don't, simply because there is rarely much point in doing so, even with movies.
I think perhaps television companies are failing to see the true positives and negatives of these systems. Their true problem is not that people will turn their TIVO into a movie library (hence filling it to the point where they won't have any more space), but that they will skip commercials. The most likely response to this, besides desperate legislation, is to build more and more advertising into the shows themselves. Whether this is a good or bad scenerio, I don't know. It means less time wasted with commercials, but content becoming much more controlled.
The positives of these systems is there is no longer a 'prime time'. Once these systems are wide spread, you can schedule shows at any time, including the middle of the night, and people who want to watch them can.
As for Tivo and Replays "solution" here, well, not being able to keep pay-per-view stuff forever isn't so bad, though I'll stick with my MythTV box which I have total control over. The bad part of this is that this isn't likely to be the only restriction but the start of many restrictions which will further erode the usefulness of these systems, and even worse, the coming of new laws that would likely have made systems like Tivo illegal in the first place if they came a little earlier.
I refuse to vote FOR a person I don't believe deserves the job, and I also won't vote FOR someone just because they are not Bush (who I believe is worse).
Given that either I vote FOR someone or don't vote, I quite possibly won't vote for a presidential candidate.
This gets directly to my point. Just because you don't believe anyone in the current crop deserve to be president, one of them will be, and they will have a significant role in how the government is run. Their role will effect who will be on the supreme court, what legislation will be passed, how current legislation will be enforced, what civil rights you have, what wars we get into, etc.
One of them will get that job, and while they might not be up to your standards, you can still order them according to who would be better. You will never get the president you really want unless you are the president, so you should try to maximize your benefit from the election by voting for the most electable candidate who will best serve your needs. Not voting doesn't mean some third candidate will come out of no where and grab all those people who don't vote. Politicians care mainly about the opinions of those who will vote, and will craft their policy (or at least message:P) to them.
That is just sad, voting for which candidate you think will win instead of which candidate you think is the best leader.
The best person for the job in my opinion is the person I hope to vote for, and who I expect everyone else to vote for is not a factor in my decision of whom I believe is best.
I agree that it is sad, but unfortunately the current system makes votes for the third parties mean little besides a small vote of confidence and relatively small amount of extra money (in comparison to what the big parties get both through the government and donations). I'm not sure voting strategically is "right" or "wrong", but it makes things more difficult that it's an option.
Of course, another problem in the voting system makes voting for third parties not so dangerous in some areas, and that's the electoral college. If your state is going by a significant margin to the Democrats or Republicans, your state's issues don't matter since the changes the parties can make through campaign promises won't effect the election. In those cases, I think voting for a third party is at the very least "safe". However, as for the Nader supports in Florida, I'm guessing most of them would feel much better with 4 years of Kerry than with Bush (though the argument can be reversed), yet they are willing to risk Bush to show support for Nader. While they may not have to hold their nose in the voting booth, the final result is what people pay attention to and what matters.
In the current system, it is unfortunate to say that the best way to change it is from within, that is, pressuring the democrats, or republicans, into positions you support. I'm not sure it's realistic to expect this to be significantly changed in our lifetimes.
Sadly, as a canadian who just went through the last election I witnessed this first hand. The last couple of years many of us were tired of the failures and scandals of the liberal (read lieberal !) goverment. When election time rolled around this year I sincerely thought there would be some change, a minority goverment, maybe a change in power. Alas, many of friends and family told me they would vote liberal again, then i wonder where they get the nerve to complain about the gov in power? safer with the devil they know i guess...
As another post mentioned, there is the problem with the first past the post system. I personally wanted to vote for the NDP, but the NDP candidate had zero chance of winning.
Another problem has been the collapse of the Progressive Conservative party and the rise of the Reform/Canadian Alliance/Canadian Conservative party. The old PC party provided a good balance to the Liberals, providing an alternative that most people would be happy with thus preventing the Liberals from becoming too corrupt or else they'd be replaced.
The new conservative party unfortunately seems to be trying to emulate the american republican party, most concerning it's positions on social issues where it seems to suggest we ignore the charter of rights.
When people had to balance how much they dislike the Liberals vs how much they are against the serious problems the Conservative party could cause, most appeared to vote for the Liberals.
Keep in mind that in Canada, unlike the United States, our consitutation/charter is much weaker, and we have fewer separation of powers. If a party has a majority in the House of Commons, they can do almost anything they want (the Senate rarely stops anything, and either way is undemocratic).
Please don't resort to name calling. I'm not ignorant and I do vote in all local and national elections.
Sorry OT, I meant to refer to the reasoning of how why people pull out this argument. However, I don't feel that voting for a third party candidate makes sense either when the candidate has little chance of winning.
Kerry has said many times that he would have attacked Iraq, but only with backing of the UN and international community. Basically Kerry's plans only differ from Bush's plans superficially. Kerry's argument is that Bush is incompentent. Vote for Kerry if you want more of the same, just done better.
That's not exactly what Kerry said. I argue against this point here.
Republicans got the prescription medication bill through. That's as close as we've ever been to universal healthcare. I have no reason to believe that the republicans won't move closer to universal healthcare. You can't say the republicans are against it, if they obviously are actively moving us toward it. The Democrats have shown a failure to deliver on this promise of universal healthcare. You can claim the republicans blocked them out, or whatever. It doesn't matter. The point is *both* parties are for healthcare right now. (Ignoring what they may have been for/against 10 years ago).
Republicans had to dragged into voting for the prescription drug coverage, after being lied to about its cost. (My other post also goes into this). I think the population in general is moving towards support universal health care, which is why you might perceive the republicans as "supporting" it, but they will only support it as much as they must to try to kill the issue. In Canada, even the most conservative parties support universal health care because that's what the population demands, but they do their best to try to privatize as much of it as they can get away with. If you want free market healthcare, the closest realistic vote would be for the Republicans.
I'm hoping that in 20-50 years the dems and repub merge into one party so we can finally call a spade a spade.
Unfortunately, that won't likely happen. A more likely scenerio is one of the parties imploding, but for the moment I think that will take some time.
ps- I'm voting for Badnarik. But since I'm in California my vote will be converted, against my wishes, into a Kerry vote. But you can't fault me for trying to do the right thing.
Unfortunately, as you acknowledge, the right thing ends up not counting. The current voting system is not very democratic.
Kerry says that he would AGAIN vote in favor of the Iraq War, even given EVERYTHING we NOW know about Saddam Hussein and his supposed WMDs and supposed 9/11 ties.
Kerry is unfortunatley bad at describing this position. His position is not that his vote was not a vote to go to war, but to give the option of war which the president could use either to go to war or as a pressure tactic. I think if the president simply pressured Saddam without going to war, it would have been a show of good foreign policy. He did manage to get Saddam to open up and allow weapon inspectors into the country. By nearly any objective measure possible at the time, Saddam was cooperating. The only ones who said he wasn't was the Bush administration, who seemed to suggest they had intelligence to the contrary, which we know now to be false. The problem was that the administration had no intention of just looking for WMD, they wanted to use it purely as a pretext for regime change (which, if was their original reason for war, before WMD, and now again their current reason since WMD weren't found).
Sure, the Republicans are "against" universal healthcare, but they sure appear to be in favor of HUGE medicare payouts to senior citizens.
I really wouldn't call this universal healthcare, and the U.S. has had some limitted forms of socialized healthcare for some time. Keep in mind that a lot of the Republican party was against the idea in general, and in fact had to be fooled by the administration into thinking it would be cheaper that it actually was before voting for it. Part of the reasoning given to Republicans to vote for it was to deflate any Democratic version of the bill from gaining steam, and to try to remove an issue for the Democrats in the election.
One other issue with the Republican bill was that it didn't allow for negotiation with drug companies over the price of the drugs, thus costing the government more and providing more revenue for drug companies.
When people realize there is no significant difference between Bush and Kerry is when people will also realize that things have gone bad. It's pretty shocking that Bush and Kerry aren't debating real issues, perhaps it's because they agree on all major points. They'd rather debate vietnam military records and what is fair and not fair in political advertising.
If after four years of Bush and a lifetime of politics, you actually don't see any significant difference between the two candidates and parties, then you are the one who is ignorant. This "they are one in the same"-bullshit is rediculous, and is usually brought out by people as an excuse not to vote.
Wake up! While certainly the choice between Bush and Kerry may be the lesser of two evils, the differences are significant, and we aren't going to make any progress if we collectively give up on politics.
Ask yourself the following: Which canidate is for war in Iraq and which is against? Which canidate is for reduction in the size of the government and which is for providing more government services? Which canidate is for providing universal healthcare and which is for a free market healthcare system?
Bush created the war in Iraq, and while Kerry has certainly had some semantic sillyness in his description of his vote, we would not have had this war in the first place if he were president.
As for 'size of government', that's an extremely broad area. On the specfic issue of healthcare, the democrats in general do appear to want universal healthcare (remember, this an issue Hillary Clinton was pushing when Bill got in power) but have had trouble getting it passed and for now it's on the backburner. The Republicans are against it.
Slashdot Mirror
It appears that Vivendi was somewhat suprised by the introduction of Steam in the first place, since they likely expected the game they were publishing to be like nearly every other game, where it's goes through just the normal retail chain. Whether Valve was legally within their rights due to whatever contract is something I don't know, but it seems like at the very least there was a misunderstanding, though I have some feeling there was some sneakiness on Valve's part. Now, I have no love for Vivendi, with most game contracts leading to relatively little of the revenues going back to the developers themselves. However... something was awry.
Now, in terms of where we are now with Vivendi supposedly not allowing Valve to authenticate the game... Vivendi would be sacrificing a chunk of their profits if they were to allow people to authenticate, including those with the steam version, since there are many potential boxed versions that would instead be sold online since the hardcore players will want the game as soon as possible. As well, they would be neglecting any deals they have with their distributors on the release date. Now... one thing Valve could possibly offer is the ability to only authenticate those boxed copies that somehow got into the market early. Valve is unlikely to want to do this though, since it would:
a) Require last minute programming of Steam.
b) Cause people to avoid ordering the Steam version in the hopes of finding an early release of the box.
All in all, I hope the fanboys can put their torches and pitchforks away and just wait another few days. It's really not that long!
Well, I was arguing that the 'conservative' side of him, whatever that means, isn't the important quality here. However, he is a social conservative, which in his case means being very anti-abortion, as well as pro-censorship, with his rediculous covering up of the breast on a statue and his attacks against adult pornography.
In my opinion, Ashcroft is a fascist ... and before I get flamed, fascism is simply authoritarianism on social issues and a corporatist economic policy.
Though I do agree when you get specific, the term fascism has just as obscure a meaning as conservatism, if not more so.
One of the worst aspects of soviet communism was how it was authoritarian. While Ashcroft may be a conservative, he is also shown himself to be quite authoritarian. He pushed for laws such as the patriot act, which among other things allow for warrentless searches of things such as the books you take out of the library, and allowed the infiltratation of protest groups under the guise of fighting terrorism.
options->advanced->software_update->check now
I just tried this, and I'm finding a few things finicky, including the 'help' menu not having help available, and the tools/options menu not showing choosing one of the options by default and giving a strange empty window.
Resetting the profile seems to fix the options problem, but still no 'help' menu... I guess I'll do a full install.
Lets assume that all two team/player competitions have no predictive powers, and wins half the time. Lets also assume the incumbent wins half the time. Therefore, on average a team will be 'right' half the time. The probability of a team being 'right' 15 times in a row is 0.5^15, or 1 in 32768.
So, what does all this mean? Not a whole lot. Now, I doubt there are that many major teams/players of any sport that have been around long enough to be right that many times. Also, I'm not sure when they decided to track this specific team's ability to 'predict', but if back in 1936 (or even a fair amount later) they stated that this would happen, it would be interesting.
Also, though it may be unlikely to come up with this kind of sports predictor for any specific 50/50 event, there are many important 50/50 events in the world that may happen to have such a predictor. It's pretty meaningless, but some people clearly have fun looking for them.
When it is comparable to this example (yes, the text above is both the logic and the GUI for the game below), or this calculator or spreadsheet implementations I'll be impressed. It may look obfuscated, but it isn't to one versed in K programming. And if you aren't versed, anything (except perhaps Python) looks obfuscated.
I did some J programming a little while back, and K as far as I understand is similar. Anyway, code I wrote in J definately did not look like some fo those horrible strings of who-knows-what those example have. Code in J just has to be broken up the code into smaller chunks, and you have to comment it well. I found it to be necessary to write more comments than code in order to make things readable, as language itself was not. (not a good thing, imo) Just because the language makes it easy to shove a whole lot of 'code' into a line, doesn't mean that's what you should be doing.
From the article:
But what about the question on everyone's mind--is a new Sam and Max title coming? Although Telltale Games hasn't specifically said anything, the upcoming first press release from the company does reference the game three times, then ends by saying that Telltale is currently "in the design phase on a well-loved license." Could it be?
I'm sorry, but don't know of all that many 'fundamentalist' atheists, at least not in the modern western world. I've noticed a lot of the time fights against things susch as school prayer are portrayed as being anti-religion, as you seem to in a later post. Students are not banned praying in school, and it's rediculous to argue otherwise. What *is* banned is for the school administration to promote religion, as they are publically owned. If you are Christain, you likely wouldn't be too pleased if you heard someone reading prayers out of the Quran over the loudspeakers, just an atheist wouldn't be happy to hear any prayers. The constitution demands that the state not promote religion, so *the state* can't. However, individuals, including students in public school, can.
As well, being an atheist assigns a huge stigma to a person in the eyes of many. Since many promote religion as being synonymous with morality, there is a implication that athiests are immoral. This is a totally unfair assumption, yet it along with bigotry to athiests is so pervasive it goes unquestioned.
I really can't give Microsoft much credit here, as this is not nearly enough. So many Microsoft programs have this bug, and while it will tell you which programs have problems, it only points you in the right direction to fix it, and doesn't fix it itself. Why can't the Windows Update service actually fix these bugs? I realize they aren't all part of the OS itself, but come on, it's all Microsoft.
Your average user is going to get to the point of loading the program that notifies you of the problems, and then not go to all these strange "Knowledge Base" links to actually install the updates. The end result will be that while the core system will be fixed, there will still be a lot of loose ends that will be exploited unless Microsoft auto patches them.
The handling of this shows that Windows is in need to increase the scope of their update utility to that of not only it's own programs, but other programs as well. Ideally, it should act as the centeral repository for security patchs for all major (and minor?) in Windows apps. While each individual app could do this, a single spot for all patches would be very useful and much easier on the user. In Debian, an 'apt-get update' can fix most known security flaws in nearly all the programs I have installed. Given the position Microsoft is in, they could implement something at least somewhat similar, as I imagine other software vendors would take advantage of it. If patching isn't easy enough for users, they won't get the patches until it's too late (and perhaps not even then).
As several people have mentioned, there have been some spyware targetting Mozilla, and I have personally run into websites that attempt to install spyware through it's plugin install feature. It looks like the newer versions of Mozilla and Firefox require upgrades to come from update.mozilla.org, thus for spyware to easily get through it must have been put up on that site.
I see nothing wrong with this use of RFID tags, as the users of it *want* it to be used for tracking. There's no reason this wouldn't be a 'good' thing if it were done with GPS instead of RFID.
The problem with RFID tags is that if a large number of the goods we buy have them, then it's easy for someone to put RFID readers out there so that when you pass them, they know what you are currently holding, which will likely lead to targetted advertising as you walk down the streets. I.e., if you are the type of person to buy expensive clothing, don't be suprised if you tend to get extra attention while shopping from the sales people.
If such readers are networked, they can be used as a way of tracking your position. This 'feature' will not for *you* to see where your friends and family are like in the example in the article, but for others.
That joke sure was cryptic.
Something like this isn't the only thing holding linux back, but it would be a big help. I find it pretty frustrating that everytime you want to update the kernel, you have to recompile and setup all those non-builtin drivers to get things working again. At the very least, it would be nice if the kernel had at least some minimal guarantees that drivers compiled for one major revision of the kernel (i.e. the 2.4 series or 2.6 series) worked on all minor versions. At the moment, any time there's some little security bug requiring a kernel upgrade, you need to recompile your drivers or else force them to run for a version they weren't compiled for and risk something breaking.
You want someone to represent hispanic viewpoints in the government? Fine. Elect a senator or representative to do so. A judge, on the other hand, should just do his job. Creative judges representing viewpoints and effectively writing laws is what has many of us right-wingers pissed off at the judiciary and the percieved lefty takeover of it.
Estrada (that was his name, wasn't it?) , when asked about representing hispanic viewpoints while on the bench replied that he didn't see what being hispanic had to do with anything. He's just gotta judge according to the law. That's the kind of people this right winger wants, I don't give a shit what color he is.
Like it or not, judges do have their biases, as is very clear. You suggest that conservatives are mad at liberal judges, but this is definately not a one way issue. My feeling is that judges aren't doing enough to enforce the constitution, allowing laws to get passed that take away constitutally protect civil rights. Laws are supposed to balance people's rights, yet laws against things like drug use don't protect anyone, as the supposed victim is the one who wanted them.
As for Estrada specifically, if I remember correctly his problem wasn't that he refused to answer questions on how he would rule on cases as a judge. Certainly he shouldn't be asked 'how would you judge on position x', but he should be able to provide his methodology. Not giving this kind of information is like going into a job interview and saying nothing.
Oh, wait, they're not really black because they're conservative, right? Isn't that the type of racism that's okay in the twisted view of the democrats?
Are you suggesting the Democrats are against Rice and Powell because they are black? When they were put into the cabinet, I don't remember any argument from the Democrats. As far as I remember, the main cabinet member to face opposition was Ashcroft, who doesn't happen to be a visible minority.
Before the whole Iraq debacle, Rice and Powell were very well respected in all circles.
Well, that's the most racists and prejudiced thing I've read in a while.
Basically, you're saying that a conservative hispanic isn't really conservative at all, because hispanics are liberal.
YOU are stating that SKIN COLOR DETERMINES BEHAVIOR AND THOUGHT.
He didn't say that. Within any group, whether racial or otherwise, you are going to find certain viewpoints and issues that are a large number of them share. Stating that someone who is black is more likely to vote Democrat than Republican is not racist but fact. A Hispanic conservative is still Hispanic, however, if you assume most Hispanics are not (I really don't know, and the term 'conservative' is pretty general anyway), then a conservative Hispanic is not going to support the viewpoints of most other Hispanics. Thus, he will be a poor advocate for their causes.
The Republicans seem to like to screw with the Democrats with this tactic of appointing someone who they know they will disagree with ideologically, and then call them racists for doing so. Democrats are not being immoral by not accepting them, since they are doing so on idealogical grounds and not racial grounds.
I'm considering installing a DVD burner later on, though mainly for the purpose of lending out shows to friends who have missed them. In terms of movies, while certainly I could record and burn them if I wished, I'd much rather copy from the original DVD, though this in part might be because the quality of the analog television signal is only so good. There are quite a lot of places for someone to pirate a movie if they desired, and these kinds of measures are likely going to only be a drop in the bucket.
The danger is that these measures make recording normal shows on Tivo/ReplayTV difficult or illegal, all in the name of what's being marketed as copy protection. These types of systems need to become more widespread, so that people will actually know what they are missing and be able to complain in case these laws are changed.
Answer: Simple. Romero would have made it legendary.
I thought DOOM 3 was an great game. It had a decent storyline, was well paced, and was fun. On top of that of course, the graphics, and the sound and music. All and all, in terms of 'full fledged' games, Doom 3 is id's best to date. Most of their older games were pure tech demos, but people didn't mind back then because most games didn't have that much else in them anyway. The gameplay itself was admittedly simplistic in some respects, but it made up for it in other ways. You seem to either be holding Doom 3 to some extra high standard purely because it's a 'DOOM' game, and/or haven't really played it.
Also, while I think it's sad that Romero left id, this did happen a while ago and if he were there I don't think the game would be phenomonly different. I mean, the game he created, Daikatana, was nothing special and turned out to be a flop (though, that might be more a reflection of his management skills than game creation skills). I certainly think Romero did his part with the original DOOM, and in some ways DOOM 3 sounded like some of his (in)famous ideas/hype about the original Quake years before it came out (for example, the way you can see only the eyes of some of the monsters in darkness).
I think perhaps television companies are failing to see the true positives and negatives of these systems. Their true problem is not that people will turn their TIVO into a movie library (hence filling it to the point where they won't have any more space), but that they will skip commercials. The most likely response to this, besides desperate legislation, is to build more and more advertising into the shows themselves. Whether this is a good or bad scenerio, I don't know. It means less time wasted with commercials, but content becoming much more controlled.
The positives of these systems is there is no longer a 'prime time'. Once these systems are wide spread, you can schedule shows at any time, including the middle of the night, and people who want to watch them can.
As for Tivo and Replays "solution" here, well, not being able to keep pay-per-view stuff forever isn't so bad, though I'll stick with my MythTV box which I have total control over. The bad part of this is that this isn't likely to be the only restriction but the start of many restrictions which will further erode the usefulness of these systems, and even worse, the coming of new laws that would likely have made systems like Tivo illegal in the first place if they came a little earlier.
Given that either I vote FOR someone or don't vote, I quite possibly won't vote for a presidential candidate.
This gets directly to my point. Just because you don't believe anyone in the current crop deserve to be president, one of them will be, and they will have a significant role in how the government is run. Their role will effect who will be on the supreme court, what legislation will be passed, how current legislation will be enforced, what civil rights you have, what wars we get into, etc.
One of them will get that job, and while they might not be up to your standards, you can still order them according to who would be better. You will never get the president you really want unless you are the president, so you should try to maximize your benefit from the election by voting for the most electable candidate who will best serve your needs. Not voting doesn't mean some third candidate will come out of no where and grab all those people who don't vote. Politicians care mainly about the opinions of those who will vote, and will craft their policy (or at least message :P) to them.
The best person for the job in my opinion is the person I hope to vote for, and who I expect everyone else to vote for is not a factor in my decision of whom I believe is best.
I agree that it is sad, but unfortunately the current system makes votes for the third parties mean little besides a small vote of confidence and relatively small amount of extra money (in comparison to what the big parties get both through the government and donations). I'm not sure voting strategically is "right" or "wrong", but it makes things more difficult that it's an option.
Of course, another problem in the voting system makes voting for third parties not so dangerous in some areas, and that's the electoral college. If your state is going by a significant margin to the Democrats or Republicans, your state's issues don't matter since the changes the parties can make through campaign promises won't effect the election. In those cases, I think voting for a third party is at the very least "safe". However, as for the Nader supports in Florida, I'm guessing most of them would feel much better with 4 years of Kerry than with Bush (though the argument can be reversed), yet they are willing to risk Bush to show support for Nader. While they may not have to hold their nose in the voting booth, the final result is what people pay attention to and what matters.
In the current system, it is unfortunate to say that the best way to change it is from within, that is, pressuring the democrats, or republicans, into positions you support. I'm not sure it's realistic to expect this to be significantly changed in our lifetimes.
As another post mentioned, there is the problem with the first past the post system. I personally wanted to vote for the NDP, but the NDP candidate had zero chance of winning.
Another problem has been the collapse of the Progressive Conservative party and the rise of the Reform/Canadian Alliance/Canadian Conservative party. The old PC party provided a good balance to the Liberals, providing an alternative that most people would be happy with thus preventing the Liberals from becoming too corrupt or else they'd be replaced.
The new conservative party unfortunately seems to be trying to emulate the american republican party, most concerning it's positions on social issues where it seems to suggest we ignore the charter of rights.
When people had to balance how much they dislike the Liberals vs how much they are against the serious problems the Conservative party could cause, most appeared to vote for the Liberals.
Keep in mind that in Canada, unlike the United States, our consitutation/charter is much weaker, and we have fewer separation of powers. If a party has a majority in the House of Commons, they can do almost anything they want (the Senate rarely stops anything, and either way is undemocratic).
Sorry OT, I meant to refer to the reasoning of how why people pull out this argument. However, I don't feel that voting for a third party candidate makes sense either when the candidate has little chance of winning.
Kerry has said many times that he would have attacked Iraq, but only with backing of the UN and international community. Basically Kerry's plans only differ from Bush's plans superficially. Kerry's argument is that Bush is incompentent. Vote for Kerry if you want more of the same, just done better.
That's not exactly what Kerry said. I argue against this point here.
Republicans got the prescription medication bill through. That's as close as we've ever been to universal healthcare. I have no reason to believe that the republicans won't move closer to universal healthcare. You can't say the republicans are against it, if they obviously are actively moving us toward it. The Democrats have shown a failure to deliver on this promise of universal healthcare. You can claim the republicans blocked them out, or whatever. It doesn't matter. The point is *both* parties are for healthcare right now. (Ignoring what they may have been for/against 10 years ago).
Republicans had to dragged into voting for the prescription drug coverage, after being lied to about its cost. (My other post also goes into this). I think the population in general is moving towards support universal health care, which is why you might perceive the republicans as "supporting" it, but they will only support it as much as they must to try to kill the issue. In Canada, even the most conservative parties support universal health care because that's what the population demands, but they do their best to try to privatize as much of it as they can get away with. If you want free market healthcare, the closest realistic vote would be for the Republicans.
I'm hoping that in 20-50 years the dems and repub merge into one party so we can finally call a spade a spade.
Unfortunately, that won't likely happen. A more likely scenerio is one of the parties imploding, but for the moment I think that will take some time.
ps- I'm voting for Badnarik. But since I'm in California my vote will be converted, against my wishes, into a Kerry vote. But you can't fault me for trying to do the right thing.
Unfortunately, as you acknowledge, the right thing ends up not counting. The current voting system is not very democratic.
Kerry is unfortunatley bad at describing this position. His position is not that his vote was not a vote to go to war, but to give the option of war which the president could use either to go to war or as a pressure tactic. I think if the president simply pressured Saddam without going to war, it would have been a show of good foreign policy. He did manage to get Saddam to open up and allow weapon inspectors into the country. By nearly any objective measure possible at the time, Saddam was cooperating. The only ones who said he wasn't was the Bush administration, who seemed to suggest they had intelligence to the contrary, which we know now to be false. The problem was that the administration had no intention of just looking for WMD, they wanted to use it purely as a pretext for regime change (which, if was their original reason for war, before WMD, and now again their current reason since WMD weren't found).
Sure, the Republicans are "against" universal healthcare, but they sure appear to be in favor of HUGE medicare payouts to senior citizens.
I really wouldn't call this universal healthcare, and the U.S. has had some limitted forms of socialized healthcare for some time. Keep in mind that a lot of the Republican party was against the idea in general, and in fact had to be fooled by the administration into thinking it would be cheaper that it actually was before voting for it. Part of the reasoning given to Republicans to vote for it was to deflate any Democratic version of the bill from gaining steam, and to try to remove an issue for the Democrats in the election.
One other issue with the Republican bill was that it didn't allow for negotiation with drug companies over the price of the drugs, thus costing the government more and providing more revenue for drug companies.
If after four years of Bush and a lifetime of politics, you actually don't see any significant difference between the two candidates and parties, then you are the one who is ignorant. This "they are one in the same"-bullshit is rediculous, and is usually brought out by people as an excuse not to vote.
Wake up! While certainly the choice between Bush and Kerry may be the lesser of two evils, the differences are significant, and we aren't going to make any progress if we collectively give up on politics.
Ask yourself the following: Which canidate is for war in Iraq and which is against? Which canidate is for reduction in the size of the government and which is for providing more government services? Which canidate is for providing universal healthcare and which is for a free market healthcare system?
Bush created the war in Iraq, and while Kerry has certainly had some semantic sillyness in his description of his vote, we would not have had this war in the first place if he were president.
As for 'size of government', that's an extremely broad area. On the specfic issue of healthcare, the democrats in general do appear to want universal healthcare (remember, this an issue Hillary Clinton was pushing when Bill got in power) but have had trouble getting it passed and for now it's on the backburner. The Republicans are against it.