The Australian election was interesting. The reason the economy was a big issue was that the govt ran a scare campaign that under the opposition interest rates would rise. The reason this was such an effective campaign is the incredible rise in house prices. This means that that a rise in interest rates of a few percent could wipe out quite a lot of people.
Both elections were won by fear campaigns, and not enough work was done to allay the fears of the population.
At what point did I say that I thought Stalin was a worse butcher than Hitler? I think you actually need to read my comments rather than spouting off. But thanks for the (further) correction on GULAG. I clearly do not have any right to discuss such things until I do have a better understanding. As for propogande, I have never lived in the US, so I have been spared that to some extent.
First of all, a person who writes "GULAG" in plural has no business discussing Russian history. This is as bad as "rumors on the internets".
Thanks for the correction. I am aware that this refers to a geographical locality, rather than a general word used to describe a labour camp (even though it used that way).
"Kulaks" were sent to exile and prison camps, and that definitely was one of the worst things Stalin did, however their numbers at any time were around a million-something people, of whom less than half a million died before WWII -- and that includes natural mortality among the exiled. Still horrible, but hardly Hitler's scale, where count was in tens of millions.
You missed one of the points there: starvation. The decisions of Stalin caused widescale stavation in the country. There are no figures for how many people starved at this time, but the number could well be signifigant (millions).
I understand that some "historians" are eager to pin all WWII deaths on Stalin, however this is just stupid. It was Nazi war, Hitler was the aggressor, and it was German military that attacked USSR, after conquering Europe, so every soldier who died in a battle, and every civilian killed on the occupied territory by Nazi was his responsibility. Without Nazi, those people would live, and this is what matters.
Agreed.
It's also worth to be mentioned that Hitler's victims weren't all Jewish, so numbers that are mentioned as Holocaust statistics are not the total count, as some people want to present them. The number of USSR citizens alone, killed in WWII is somewhere around 27 millions, this is far beyond the scale of "jewish-only" version of Holocaust.
I am well aware of German history during and around WW2.
Stalin can be accused of being incompetent in handling of defense, but it does not make him a butcher -- other things do. Hatred toward Stalin is not based on the number of his victims, it's based on the fact that those were the very people that he was supposed to protect (or be allied with, in case of Poland), on the lies that his government used to support that, and on his hypocrisy, and atmosphere of fear that he used to achieve his goals. Hitler is less impressive -- merely a very honest, consistent racist pig, grown to a scale that can't be understood without seeing it, but despite being such a trivial person from the modern point of view, he is many, many times more of a butcher than Stalin ever was.
I think that the various purges also contribute to the hatred of Stalin. Much of Hitler's destructive energy was devoted to external enemies, Stalin devoted a lot energy to internal 'enemies'. (Note that I said most, I am aware that there were plenty of Germans in concentration camps). I guess I am re-hashing your point though, these were people he was supposed to protect.
I hate AC posts. Stand behind the comments you make. That aside...
Juries don't come into a awful lot of decisions that are made. Besides laws ensure confirmity in judgements. You don't want to get convicted of something because it is a beef with a couple of jurors or the judge.
"Forget what you feel is right or wrong, go by the letter of the law."
Feeling is stupid reason to judge somthing right or wrong. Better to prove something right or wrong, than to 'feel' that it is right or wrong. But I digress. What you are missing is that the law is largely a description of what is right an wrong. An imperfect description, but a good description none the less.
Laws are complicated for a reason. They do complex things. They try (imperfectly) to provide justice in a huge variety of circumstances. Cut down the number of laws, and all you succeed in doing is making the law even less just.
I am all for simplifying the law where appropriate, but to set an abitrary limit (and such a small one at that) is just silly. I can't imagine you'd fit even 10% of the laws regarding personal tax (let alone corporations tax) in 200 pages @ 12pt.
I may be biased as both my father and sister are lawyers.
Re: I have played HL 1, but still I don't understa
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
Having had more time to think about it, this happens at the start of the Blue shift, before the resonance cascade when everything went pear shaped. Somewhere or other you come across a security panel with a bank of screens for security cameras. If you 'use' the panel you get to see a scientist pushing the cart with the sample. I think that the scientist was female, but I'm not completely sure. There was just one though. [quick google for walkthrough] Actually here is a picture
One of the neat things with Opposing force & Blue Shift is the way that they let the stories converge a little. So in Opposing force you see Gordon make the leap into the portal. In Blue shift you are the security guard you see pounding on the door when you are on the trainride in Half Life.
I played the first half hour of Doom 3 and got bored and annoyed. This was the same as a number of firends in my experience. One guy who bought it couldn't be bothered playing it for more than a few hours, it just wasn't enjoyable. The other, a pretty serious gamer, finished it, but only after switching on cheats because he was sick of hunting through levels looking for ammo, only to be ambushed by monsters the whole time.
Re: I have played HL 1, but still I don't understa
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
It was on one of the dedicated Half life sites it that is any help. Ah I've found it. The interesting thing about this article is that it was written before the game was released.
Blue shift doesn't add a whole lot to the storyline of HL2. Neither does Opposing force for that matter, but they both just provide a little more information and a different viewpoint to the story. eg in one of them you see the sample on its way up to the test chamber.
This is true. I write web apps, not stuff that is generally accessible to the outside world. Nonetheless despite some pretty heavy use of Javascript the sites I write support every major browser of the last couple of years (with the exception of IE for Mac).
Re: I have played HL 1, but still I don't understa
on
Review: Half-Life 2
·
· Score: 1
What good or bad does my killing of the big nastie in the end of pt. 1 accomplish?
There is an interesting article on this kind of thing, unfortunately I didn't link it. The suggestion in this article was that the big baby at the end of HL1 was under the control of someone else. Both it and the vortigons (lighting guys) had bands around their wrists and neck. The other Xen enemies (head crabs, bullsquids) were not intelligent enough to react in any other way. You'll note that in HL2 vortigons are allies and they don't wear the bands. The article speculated that much of Xen was under the control of the combine, and the current state of earth is the result of the combine coming to town.
Is The Administrator a.k.a. G-man a human or an alien, a traitor or a spy?
Just a clarification. The G-man and the administrator are two separate people. This isn't explicitly spelt out in HL1, but is in 2. In HL2 the administrator is revealed to be Breen, while the GMan is someone completely different. The administrator is a minor figure in HL1, the G-Man is a more major figure and in general is a positive figure. In Opposing force he opens a door to let your character out of a trap.
What are the samples examined by Gordon in pt.1 and was resonance cascade phenomenon effect of an accident or a sabotage?
It is pretty clear from HL1 that the samples are from the alien world. Accident seems to be the consensis. However it is possible that someone knew that the effect of the experiments would be pretty interesting.
Did G-man have anything in common with it?
Not at all. In opposing force the suggestion is that the GMan was sent to 'clean things up'. He appears to be some sort of trouble shooter whose motivation remains unknown. From the ending sequences of HL1 and Opposing force it would appear that he controls teleportation technology. The impression you are supposed to get is that this guy is the puppet master.
And what did Gordon actually do after accepting the administrator's offer?
The implication at the start of HL2 is that Freeman has been in stasis of some sort. The GMan does say rise and shine, but also says "not that you have been sleeping on the job".
1. Do you include figures from before WW2? This would include the 'Kulaks' who starved or were sent to Gulags in the 30s. AFAIK there are no accurate figures for this.
2. Do you include figures for Russian soldiers who died through mismanagement?
I personally don't know if either of these figures would be large enough to have an effect.
The problem with this kind of viewpoint is that while it may work, as it diverges from the standards, it is less likely to do so in the future. I prefer to write HTML that is standards compliant and works in most borwsers. Most does not include NS4.
The university I was at (college for Americans) was working on some systems for this in the mining industry. They had this great video of one of the vehicles in use.
Imagine a driverless 200 ton mining truck barelling down the road at 60 km/h. Standing in the middle of the road ahead of the truck was the CEO of the company automating the trucks. When the truck gets a little closer it flashes its lights at the guy. A second later it slams on the brakes and comes to a neat halt.
Anyway, that aside I cannot imagine that we will see this in the next 40 years or so. First off you need to control the environment, which means large infrastructure changes. The reason this could be done in the mining industry was that. Secondly there is going to be great social resistance to this kind of thing.
I think where you might see this kind of thing is more likely to be in automatic trains/trams, and maybe on buses that have segregated lanes to use. Both are environments you can control.
I don't believe you would be able to find one, unless you went hunting for a laptop motherboard. Intel wants clear markets for its chips. P4 for desktop, Pentium M for laptop. They do not want to be in a position where they are competing against themselves.
This is really about Intel finally coming to terms with the fact that nobody wants to buy Itanium chips. That's where Intel was headed, and Intel assumed that everyone would follow along. Unfortunately, Itanium's future depended on technology advancements that never happened, and a rate of adoption that nobody was willing to pursue.
No. That is half of intel's problems. The Itanium was aimed at high end, possibly expanding to the lower end. For the lower end they had their P4s and variants.
Their Itanium problem is that adoption has been slow (for a number of reasons), and as performance of standard x86 chips has improved the window for Itanium as shrunk even smaller, to be used only in the highest of high end computing.
Their other problem is with the lower end chips. Put simply the decision to lengthen the pipline for the P4 was a bad one. It was a marketing decision to bring out higher numbers for clock speed. Intel has now discovered that the design doesn't scale well (either in performance or heat).
Hence the interest in Pentium M, which does scale well. If you read the Ars Technica articles on the subject this will all be clearer.
I'm surprised to hear this news becuase the last I had heard intel was continuing to base new cores on the P4, rather than the Pentium M, even though the Pentium M is the logical direction.
I bought a phone sync kit for my T720 a while ago and it came with software that could synch with the palm desktop. The catch? The client for the palm desktop was installed from a update from the web (like windows update, except without the catalog).
Since then the company has morphed into something else and the update servers have been taken down. They also do not offer a product that syncs with the palm desktop.
That is a problem, and activation makes things even worse.
I will be buying half life 2 (assuming the reviews are good). But I can assure you that I will search for a crack so that I can play without needing to authenticate on the web, at least for single player. Indeed I will keep a copy of the crack on my file server so that in 10 years time if I want to play half life 2, I can.
Slashdot Mirror
The Australian election was interesting. The reason the economy was a big issue was that the govt ran a scare campaign that under the opposition interest rates would rise. The reason this was such an effective campaign is the incredible rise in house prices. This means that that a rise in interest rates of a few percent could wipe out quite a lot of people.
Both elections were won by fear campaigns, and not enough work was done to allay the fears of the population.
At what point did I say that I thought Stalin was a worse butcher than Hitler? I think you actually need to read my comments rather than spouting off. But thanks for the (further) correction on GULAG. I clearly do not have any right to discuss such things until I do have a better understanding. As for propogande, I have never lived in the US, so I have been spared that to some extent.
First of all, a person who writes "GULAG" in plural has no business discussing Russian history. This is as bad as "rumors on the internets".
Thanks for the correction. I am aware that this refers to a geographical locality, rather than a general word used to describe a labour camp (even though it used that way).
"Kulaks" were sent to exile and prison camps, and that definitely was one of the worst things Stalin did, however their numbers at any time were around a million-something people, of whom less than half a million died before WWII -- and that includes natural mortality among the exiled. Still horrible, but hardly Hitler's scale, where count was in tens of millions.
You missed one of the points there: starvation. The decisions of Stalin caused widescale stavation in the country. There are no figures for how many people starved at this time, but the number could well be signifigant (millions).
I understand that some "historians" are eager to pin all WWII deaths on Stalin, however this is just stupid. It was Nazi war, Hitler was the aggressor, and it was German military that attacked USSR, after conquering Europe, so every soldier who died in a battle, and every civilian killed on the occupied territory by Nazi was his responsibility. Without Nazi, those people would live, and this is what matters.
Agreed.
It's also worth to be mentioned that Hitler's victims weren't all Jewish, so numbers that are mentioned as Holocaust statistics are not the total count, as some people want to present them. The number of USSR citizens alone, killed in WWII is somewhere around 27 millions, this is far beyond the scale of "jewish-only" version of Holocaust.
I am well aware of German history during and around WW2.
Stalin can be accused of being incompetent in handling of defense, but it does not make him a butcher -- other things do. Hatred toward Stalin is not based on the number of his victims, it's based on the fact that those were the very people that he was supposed to protect (or be allied with, in case of Poland), on the lies that his government used to support that, and on his hypocrisy, and atmosphere of fear that he used to achieve his goals. Hitler is less impressive -- merely a very honest, consistent racist pig, grown to a scale that can't be understood without seeing it, but despite being such a trivial person from the modern point of view, he is many, many times more of a butcher than Stalin ever was.
I think that the various purges also contribute to the hatred of Stalin. Much of Hitler's destructive energy was devoted to external enemies, Stalin devoted a lot energy to internal 'enemies'. (Note that I said most, I am aware that there were plenty of Germans in concentration camps). I guess I am re-hashing your point though, these were people he was supposed to protect.
I hate AC posts. Stand behind the comments you make. That aside...
Juries don't come into a awful lot of decisions that are made. Besides laws ensure confirmity in judgements. You don't want to get convicted of something because it is a beef with a couple of jurors or the judge.
"Forget what you feel is right or wrong, go by the letter of the law."
Feeling is stupid reason to judge somthing right or wrong. Better to prove something right or wrong, than to 'feel' that it is right or wrong. But I digress. What you are missing is that the law is largely a description of what is right an wrong. An imperfect description, but a good description none the less.
The friend who finished on cheats used to make jokes about the dread lord of hell guarding his armor shards of power.
I reckon it is a pretty poor idea.
Laws are complicated for a reason. They do complex things. They try (imperfectly) to provide justice in a huge variety of circumstances. Cut down the number of laws, and all you succeed in doing is making the law even less just.
I am all for simplifying the law where appropriate, but to set an abitrary limit (and such a small one at that) is just silly. I can't imagine you'd fit even 10% of the laws regarding personal tax (let alone corporations tax) in 200 pages @ 12pt.
I may be biased as both my father and sister are lawyers.
Having had more time to think about it, this happens at the start of the Blue shift, before the resonance cascade when everything went pear shaped. Somewhere or other you come across a security panel with a bank of screens for security cameras. If you 'use' the panel you get to see a scientist pushing the cart with the sample. I think that the scientist was female, but I'm not completely sure. There was just one though. [quick google for walkthrough] Actually here is a picture
One of the neat things with Opposing force & Blue Shift is the way that they let the stories converge a little. So in Opposing force you see Gordon make the leap into the portal. In Blue shift you are the security guard you see pounding on the door when you are on the trainride in Half Life.
I played the first half hour of Doom 3 and got bored and annoyed. This was the same as a number of firends in my experience. One guy who bought it couldn't be bothered playing it for more than a few hours, it just wasn't enjoyable. The other, a pretty serious gamer, finished it, but only after switching on cheats because he was sick of hunting through levels looking for ammo, only to be ambushed by monsters the whole time.
It was on one of the dedicated Half life sites it that is any help. Ah I've found it. The interesting thing about this article is that it was written before the game was released.
Blue shift doesn't add a whole lot to the storyline of HL2. Neither does Opposing force for that matter, but they both just provide a little more information and a different viewpoint to the story. eg in one of them you see the sample on its way up to the test chamber.
This is true. I write web apps, not stuff that is generally accessible to the outside world. Nonetheless despite some pretty heavy use of Javascript the sites I write support every major browser of the last couple of years (with the exception of IE for Mac).
What good or bad does my killing of the big nastie in the end of pt. 1 accomplish?
There is an interesting article on this kind of thing, unfortunately I didn't link it. The suggestion in this article was that the big baby at the end of HL1 was under the control of someone else. Both it and the vortigons (lighting guys) had bands around their wrists and neck. The other Xen enemies (head crabs, bullsquids) were not intelligent enough to react in any other way. You'll note that in HL2 vortigons are allies and they don't wear the bands. The article speculated that much of Xen was under the control of the combine, and the current state of earth is the result of the combine coming to town.
Is The Administrator a.k.a. G-man a human or an alien, a traitor or a spy?
Just a clarification. The G-man and the administrator are two separate people. This isn't explicitly spelt out in HL1, but is in 2. In HL2 the administrator is revealed to be Breen, while the GMan is someone completely different. The administrator is a minor figure in HL1, the G-Man is a more major figure and in general is a positive figure. In Opposing force he opens a door to let your character out of a trap.
What are the samples examined by Gordon in pt.1 and was resonance cascade phenomenon effect of an accident or a sabotage?
It is pretty clear from HL1 that the samples are from the alien world. Accident seems to be the consensis. However it is possible that someone knew that the effect of the experiments would be pretty interesting.
Did G-man have anything in common with it?
Not at all. In opposing force the suggestion is that the GMan was sent to 'clean things up'. He appears to be some sort of trouble shooter whose motivation remains unknown. From the ending sequences of HL1 and Opposing force it would appear that he controls teleportation technology. The impression you are supposed to get is that this guy is the puppet master.
And what did Gordon actually do after accepting the administrator's offer?
The implication at the start of HL2 is that Freeman has been in stasis of some sort. The GMan does say rise and shine, but also says "not that you have been sleeping on the job".
His remark may depend on a couple of things:
1. Do you include figures from before WW2? This would include the 'Kulaks' who starved or were sent to Gulags in the 30s. AFAIK there are no accurate figures for this.
2. Do you include figures for Russian soldiers who died through mismanagement?
I personally don't know if either of these figures would be large enough to have an effect.
The problem with this kind of viewpoint is that while it may work, as it diverges from the standards, it is less likely to do so in the future. I prefer to write HTML that is standards compliant and works in most borwsers. Most does not include NS4.
With apologies to Wizard of Id.
The university I was at (college for Americans) was working on some systems for this in the mining industry. They had this great video of one of the vehicles in use.
Imagine a driverless 200 ton mining truck barelling down the road at 60 km/h. Standing in the middle of the road ahead of the truck was the CEO of the company automating the trucks. When the truck gets a little closer it flashes its lights at the guy. A second later it slams on the brakes and comes to a neat halt.
Anyway, that aside I cannot imagine that we will see this in the next 40 years or so. First off you need to control the environment, which means large infrastructure changes. The reason this could be done in the mining industry was that. Secondly there is going to be great social resistance to this kind of thing.
I think where you might see this kind of thing is more likely to be in automatic trains/trams, and maybe on buses that have segregated lanes to use. Both are environments you can control.
The mod community will release a fix for this.
My fiance just went away for 4 weeks.
:-)
Timing!
Neat. I wasn't aware that anyone had put out Pentium M motherboards. Thanks for the link.
The benchmarks do prove that the Pentium M is a very respectable desktop CPU.
I don't believe you would be able to find one, unless you went hunting for a laptop motherboard. Intel wants clear markets for its chips. P4 for desktop, Pentium M for laptop. They do not want to be in a position where they are competing against themselves.
This is really about Intel finally coming to terms with the fact that nobody wants to buy Itanium chips. That's where Intel was headed, and Intel assumed that everyone would follow along. Unfortunately, Itanium's future depended on technology advancements that never happened, and a rate of adoption that nobody was willing to pursue.
No. That is half of intel's problems. The Itanium was aimed at high end, possibly expanding to the lower end. For the lower end they had their P4s and variants.
Their Itanium problem is that adoption has been slow (for a number of reasons), and as performance of standard x86 chips has improved the window for Itanium as shrunk even smaller, to be used only in the highest of high end computing.
Their other problem is with the lower end chips. Put simply the decision to lengthen the pipline for the P4 was a bad one. It was a marketing decision to bring out higher numbers for clock speed. Intel has now discovered that the design doesn't scale well (either in performance or heat).
Hence the interest in Pentium M, which does scale well. If you read the Ars Technica articles on the subject this will all be clearer.
I'm surprised to hear this news becuase the last I had heard intel was continuing to base new cores on the P4, rather than the Pentium M, even though the Pentium M is the logical direction.
What about this?.
You are right, this is a major issue.
I bought a phone sync kit for my T720 a while ago and it came with software that could synch with the palm desktop. The catch? The client for the palm desktop was installed from a update from the web (like windows update, except without the catalog).
Since then the company has morphed into something else and the update servers have been taken down. They also do not offer a product that syncs with the palm desktop.
That is a problem, and activation makes things even worse.
I will be buying half life 2 (assuming the reviews are good). But I can assure you that I will search for a crack so that I can play without needing to authenticate on the web, at least for single player. Indeed I will keep a copy of the crack on my file server so that in 10 years time if I want to play half life 2, I can.
I'll compare your comments to hers.
I didn't know Ann Coulter posted on /. You learn something new each day.
This is going to cause a lot of grief for EA. Imagine dropping your entire development team 2 weeks before a release.