Okay, so maybe it's not that easy to do, but my friends and I like to play with the bots. Good Co-op would make this easier to sell to my group. COD really missed the ball on this, and even though the coop on Battlefield vietnam and 2142 and 1942 wasn't that great, it still made for decent gameplay. Oh, and MORE MAPS, please!
Thank you, sir, for restoring my faith in tired, old, slashdot memes. I was waiting for it, and lo it was there! Better than hot grits on natalie portman.
The best explanation and reason I ever heard for not smoking pot was "Smoking pot makes you feel okay about doing nothing. If you're not high and you don't want to do anything, you don't have to, but most of the time you'll find something you want to do that is fun or enjoyable. If you smoke pot, you take that choice out of your hands, and it makes it harder for you to find something else to do. It's not bad, in and of itself. It just makes it easy for you to make bad choices with your time." Even though it may not be true for everyone, I think it's a good explanation.
What a bunch of hooey. Cannabis would be no harder to tax than tobacco. Tobacco is so cheap that it doesn't make sense for 99% people to grow it themselves. Those who do are "enthusiasts". It's not regulated in any way in terms of ingredients, content or strength of dose. All one has to do is allow companies to grow and process it into some standard package and the government has something to regulate (like the label) and tax. It wouldn't work for medical purposes (smoking isn't a very healthy way to deliver a drug), but it would satisfy the recreational need... think of the difference between cigarettes and nicotine patches. You could allow posession of non-taxed plant material (could be homegrown, like your tomato) but have sale or distribution be illegal. Not hard to do, not hard to enforce.
... versioning's a bitch when you get marketing involved.
As some have already said, don't be too uptight about the marketing version or name. Keep your own internal number that you might use for branches or builds, but feel no obligation to have the two match.
It can be nice when things match, but don't worry if it doesn't.
If you want to avoid having numbers in your marketing name over time as new stuff gets added, use stepping adjectives -- like SuperFunApp Standard to SuperFunApp Plus to SuperFunAll Elite to SuperFunApp Professional.
If you want to use numbers, and your marketing folks want to start at 5.0 or something, fine. I'd recommend settling on a numbering scheme that is going to make sense going forward. Ask yourselves "What milestone would it take to move us from 5.0 to 6.0, and is that a milestone we'll cross?" Sometimes a product's really only going to come out with a set of basic features and you'll be doing bugfixes only from that point out -- maybe you don't need the "point" release.
As some have already said, you can use the year of release as your version number -- it doesn't say anything about what's in it, how polished it is, or what's next -- it's just the year.
In my current shop we have a 4-part version number: Major.Minor.SP.HF. Major is a release of the products as a suite, minor is the addition of significant new feature functionality in the suite, SP is aggregation of hotfixes and HF is Hotfix (or build number). Where we've gotten into trouble in the past is when marketing folks started dictating the internal version number. It was an epic fail and led to great confusion.
Dunno where you got the 97K figure, but he's stated publicly that he will drop tax rates on the poor and middle class. As I've always understood it, "Middle Class" didn't refer to an actual threshhold of income, but had more to do with education levels, job prospects and aspirations for upward mobility. Also, did you know that Mr. Obama isn't the President? He hasn't stuck anyone with anything... at least not yet.
Now, let's see. Who set up a nationwide energy policy behind closed doors that results in a tripling in the cost of gasoline in four years? That's right, President Bush! Who signed you and me up for top-shelf no-bid pricing for all medicines purchased by the government? That's right, President Bush! Who led us down a warpath, paying for war materials on no-bid exclusive contracts? That's right, President Bush! Who's sending planeloads of cash to Iraq? That's right, President Bush!
Now, who's -=really=- sticking it to the people? Must be President Obama, I guess.
Really, how big a deal is this? It's not uncommon to get a BSOD from time to time, and the number and power of the computing resources involved was probably pushing the limit. I'm not surprised and I don't think it's a big deal. The NBC people were practically falling all over themselves to find a flaw in the opening ceremonies, and if this is the biggest thing that surfaces, they went off flawlessly, imho. Who really cares about one little BSOD in such a huge spectacle, really?
I hate to parse, but I don't recognize any of those statements as having come from environmentalists.
Let's keep around the old trees and kill the young ones.
This overstatement is soooo very hyperbolic, it'd be amusing if it wasn't so pathetic. Old growth forests just don't exist anymore in the US, at least not to any appreciable degree. We've already cut down all the old trees. As a rule, environmentalists are against clearcuts and for sustainable forestry (more expensive to log, but keeps trees of various ages in a given acreage, offers a diverse understory, allows for some logs to lie where they fall and includes fire as part of the natural cycle). That said, it's recognized even by the environmentalist groups that Boise Cascade and other wood & pulp products producers either own or lease their lands outright and can ultimately tree-farm and clearcut to the extent they desire.
You can't clear out any of the underbrush, and we have to stop wild fires right away! (See California)
Wow. What a broad brush you've got there. Brush clearing has always been okay, even on public lands. Some states contract out for it, and others use -=gasp=- FIRE to clear it out. It's taken as a given that any property owner needs to clear brush from their houses. Did it every occur to you that natural wet-dry cycles can leave a lot of dry scrub when drought eventually sets in? In CO, we've got millions and millions of dead trees from pine bark beetle. Do you think those dead trees are all going to sit there? Hell no, the state's already permitting for logging most of it out, on millions of acres, as they should.
You can't have nuclear power plants, the waste contaminates the environment. (Breeder reactors anyone?)
I'm pretty sure that one of the founders of the Sierra club has come to endorse nuclear energy. Regardless, the main environmetalist objection to nuclear energy hasn't been in waste disposal anyway (almost all nuclear waste from power plants is held on-site) -- it's been with the way uranium is mined and what the tailings and ore processing leachfields do to rivers & the water table. Think this is whining? It's not. My state (Colorado) already has a superfund site to show for it... Uravan. Breeder reactor development got squashed 25 years ago, and it's only now being talked about again. Maybe the discussion is ready to re-open. I dunno.
Yep, it's those annoying enviro-hippies. They only exist to make things difficult. They just don't have any other reason for what they do other than being annoying. Oooooh, and they're sooooo annoying. Sooooo annoying that the entire US government has been able to ignore them for eight years. Ooooooh, they're soooooo powerful. Soooo scary! Like martians! Like clowns! BooogaBoogaBooogaBoogaBoooga!
Scared yet? Didn't think so. If you look closely at the issues you'll see that there's a balance to be struck between competing goals. The best outcomes are the ones that nobody's entirely satisfied with, but let things go forward. We can't achieve those outcomes if folks sit back, re-enforce their stereotypes, point fingers and blame blame blame, as you do.
Jeezus, what bunch of hand-wringing whiny pussies conservatives have become.
To temper this a little bit, let me try to inform on the assumption that dems see gun ownership as "immoral". We do not find gun ownership immoral (while unaffiliated, I almost always vote democrat). I'm also an NRA member, and I have enough guns to arm my entire neighborhood, twice over.
For most of us left-leaners, guns are seen as tools of war or tools of crime or tools of getting something to eat. Most left-leaners have no problem with gun ownership, but also believe that there's a certain level of responsiblity (and regulation) that makes them safer to have around if one -=must=- have one around. Interestingly, in conversations with my right-leaning friends who keep and shoot guns, they also point out that a concealed carrry license doesn't require any safety training or demonstration of competence, whereas we require that for cars and motorcycles. The colorful part is that people die from poor operation of cars and motorbikes all the time, so there's a seperate argument as to whether training and testing have much effect,... but I digress.
Left-leaners basically don't want to see guns used in crimes, and the thought is that if you make guns hard to get, or restrict which guns can be acquired based on meaningful background checks or licensing/registration schemes, the likelihood of having these guns being used in crimes is diminished. Our friends on the right love to point out that criminals don't follow the rules, and therefore the restrictions only fall on the law-abiding. True enough. Yet, if a bank robber gets one sentence if he robs a bank with a fist and an angry look, most lefties believe that he should be charged with two crimes if he robs a bank with a gun, and three crimes if it's a gun that has not been legally acquired.
I concede that most of these controversies tend to flow to envisioning "what if" scenarios, but I believe it is unfair to state that democrats think owning guns are immoral. Democrats want to see criminals who use guns punished to the fullest extent, and to reduce the numbers of guns used in crimes. That last sentence is not forcing morality on anyone. Everyone can agree on those two things, even the gun-nuts. Where people differ is on how you accomplish those two things, and that's a very good dialogue to have.
Lots of democrats own guns, but most of them choose to not associate themselves with the NRA, and choose to not justify their ownership by way of the 2nd amendment. They're pretty much silent on the topic, unless you get them talking about hunting. For my part, I am an NRA member because we stand for the training, gun education (operations, safety) and gun rights education. In general, I do not support the candidates that the NRA suggests I support,... unless they're democrats, that is.
Yeah, except that L1's pretty unstable.
Better at L4 or L5... none of this balancing a marble on a marble BS out there. Still doesn't solve the cosmic ray problem, but at least the thing would stick there.
Linky: Here
If you truly believe that Clinton "loosened the rules leading to our current housing crisis", you're a little misinformed. It was GWB's championing of the "ownership society" and the deregulation of lending practices that led to the influx of bad mortgages. GWB specifically said that he was doing so to allow people who could not afford to own their own homes to have the ability to make that kind of investment. Look at when all those bad loans were written -- nearly every one was written over the last four years -- well outside the Clinton term. Bad loans get written all the time, in all kinds of administrations (and I know that because I worked at the RTC and FDIC when the S&L collapse had to be fixed, and I remember when Silverado tanked), but I have never seen the kind of volume of LINA (Lo-Income-No-Assets) and NINA (No-Income-No-Assets) loans at any time before GWB -- and LINA and NINA loans didn't exist before GWB took office. (Actually, to be fair, LINA loans did exist before GWB, but they were very rare and generally low-dollar loans that got pooled with much less risky paper when they got commoditized.) It's easy and satisfying to say that "Clinton did it.", but in this case, he didn't.
I think you're overlooking certain facts as well. There is no democratic control of the senate. Joe Lieberman, though he caucuses with the democrats, usually votes with republicans. Another democratic senator has been sidelined by a stroke for a long time. Ted Kennedy is out for the foreseeable future. At the most, the democratic party has had only a single periodic vote in majority, which is easily nullified. To really have control of the senate, one party needs 55 solid votes. Anything less doesn't hold up. You can have a numerical majority without having actual control, which is where senate democrats are right now.
I carry 5-6 ball bearings (steel buckshot, really, 1/4 in diameter) when I ride. They're easy to get to with gloved hands, virtually invisible to anyone behind you, simple to drop and totally non-recoverable. The effect is no different from what happens when a dump truck or tractor-trailer throws a pebble. Harmless, but effective. As for road rage, I'm not nearly as angry as I used to be -- I don't even flip the bird anymore, but I do still carry a ball peen hammer in the right side saddlebag just in case. A motorcycle can accelerate faster, corner more quickly and brake more effectively than any car. If I want to find and meet any car on the road, I can do it with ease. However, after my last roadside encounter with a motorist some ten years ago, which gained me a charge of menacing and the motorist a charge of reckless endangerment, the cop who responded gave me the advice to keep my ass in the saddle no matter how PO'd I become. He was a motorcycle cop. I've followed his advice ever since. Oh, btw, we each agreed to drop the charges we filed on each other in the end, saving lots of tax dollars and lawyer bills.
Myself, I found that beer was giving me all those calories. I used to wash down the day with 1-2 litres of beer (~2 cases a week). Cutting back to.5 litres, and sometimes not having beer at all (~.5 cases a week), has really cut the calories for me. To put this in perspective, I quit smoking a month ago, and even though I'm eating more, I've only gained a pound or two.
I know I'll never be able to give up beer (it's proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, after all), but I don't miss the calories.
Great points. As a PC gamer who plays with a regular group, I've always wished that club licensing was an option -- one physical copy, loadable on 5 machines, for a little less than the price of four individual copies. Having to login online, plus having the physical media in the drive, every time I want to play either a standalone or LAN game is a real pain in the patoot.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, so maybe it's not that easy to do, but my friends and I like to play with the bots. Good Co-op would make this easier to sell to my group. COD really missed the ball on this, and even though the coop on Battlefield vietnam and 2142 and 1942 wasn't that great, it still made for decent gameplay. Oh, and MORE MAPS, please!
Saw a video linked at gizmodo. Neat stuff, Chris, if a bit scary.
Thank you, sir, for restoring my faith in tired, old, slashdot memes. I was waiting for it, and lo it was there! Better than hot grits on natalie portman.
Remember these guys? What happened to their idea? A jet-powered hybrid?
They recently changed that. It's now going forward as a front-wheel drive. The pictures, as you note, have not caught up.
The best explanation and reason I ever heard for not smoking pot was "Smoking pot makes you feel okay about doing nothing. If you're not high and you don't want to do anything, you don't have to, but most of the time you'll find something you want to do that is fun or enjoyable. If you smoke pot, you take that choice out of your hands, and it makes it harder for you to find something else to do. It's not bad, in and of itself. It just makes it easy for you to make bad choices with your time." Even though it may not be true for everyone, I think it's a good explanation.
What a bunch of hooey. Cannabis would be no harder to tax than tobacco. Tobacco is so cheap that it doesn't make sense for 99% people to grow it themselves. Those who do are "enthusiasts". It's not regulated in any way in terms of ingredients, content or strength of dose. All one has to do is allow companies to grow and process it into some standard package and the government has something to regulate (like the label) and tax. It wouldn't work for medical purposes (smoking isn't a very healthy way to deliver a drug), but it would satisfy the recreational need... think of the difference between cigarettes and nicotine patches. You could allow posession of non-taxed plant material (could be homegrown, like your tomato) but have sale or distribution be illegal. Not hard to do, not hard to enforce.
Yes, and Al Gore successfully re-invented big government. It's not the same big government, rather it's a different, all-new big government. -=wink=-
As some have already said, don't be too uptight about the marketing version or name. Keep your own internal number that you might use for branches or builds, but feel no obligation to have the two match.
It can be nice when things match, but don't worry if it doesn't.
If you want to avoid having numbers in your marketing name over time as new stuff gets added, use stepping adjectives -- like SuperFunApp Standard to SuperFunApp Plus to SuperFunAll Elite to SuperFunApp Professional.
If you want to use numbers, and your marketing folks want to start at 5.0 or something, fine. I'd recommend settling on a numbering scheme that is going to make sense going forward. Ask yourselves "What milestone would it take to move us from 5.0 to 6.0, and is that a milestone we'll cross?" Sometimes a product's really only going to come out with a set of basic features and you'll be doing bugfixes only from that point out -- maybe you don't need the "point" release.
As some have already said, you can use the year of release as your version number -- it doesn't say anything about what's in it, how polished it is, or what's next -- it's just the year.
In my current shop we have a 4-part version number: Major.Minor.SP.HF. Major is a release of the products as a suite, minor is the addition of significant new feature functionality in the suite, SP is aggregation of hotfixes and HF is Hotfix (or build number). Where we've gotten into trouble in the past is when marketing folks started dictating the internal version number. It was an epic fail and led to great confusion.
Hope it helps
Dunno where you got the 97K figure, but he's stated publicly that he will drop tax rates on the poor and middle class. As I've always understood it, "Middle Class" didn't refer to an actual threshhold of income, but had more to do with education levels, job prospects and aspirations for upward mobility. Also, did you know that Mr. Obama isn't the President? He hasn't stuck anyone with anything... at least not yet.
Now, let's see. Who set up a nationwide energy policy behind closed doors that results in a tripling in the cost of gasoline in four years? That's right, President Bush! Who signed you and me up for top-shelf no-bid pricing for all medicines purchased by the government? That's right, President Bush! Who led us down a warpath, paying for war materials on no-bid exclusive contracts? That's right, President Bush! Who's sending planeloads of cash to Iraq? That's right, President Bush!
Now, who's -=really=- sticking it to the people? Must be President Obama, I guess.
Really, how big a deal is this? It's not uncommon to get a BSOD from time to time, and the number and power of the computing resources involved was probably pushing the limit. I'm not surprised and I don't think it's a big deal. The NBC people were practically falling all over themselves to find a flaw in the opening ceremonies, and if this is the biggest thing that surfaces, they went off flawlessly, imho. Who really cares about one little BSOD in such a huge spectacle, really?
Huh?
I hate to parse, but I don't recognize any of those statements as having come from environmentalists.
Let's keep around the old trees and kill the young ones.
This overstatement is soooo very hyperbolic, it'd be amusing if it wasn't so pathetic. Old growth forests just don't exist anymore in the US, at least not to any appreciable degree. We've already cut down all the old trees. As a rule, environmentalists are against clearcuts and for sustainable forestry (more expensive to log, but keeps trees of various ages in a given acreage, offers a diverse understory, allows for some logs to lie where they fall and includes fire as part of the natural cycle). That said, it's recognized even by the environmentalist groups that Boise Cascade and other wood & pulp products producers either own or lease their lands outright and can ultimately tree-farm and clearcut to the extent they desire.
You can't clear out any of the underbrush, and we have to stop wild fires right away! (See California)
Wow. What a broad brush you've got there. Brush clearing has always been okay, even on public lands. Some states contract out for it, and others use -=gasp=- FIRE to clear it out. It's taken as a given that any property owner needs to clear brush from their houses. Did it every occur to you that natural wet-dry cycles can leave a lot of dry scrub when drought eventually sets in? In CO, we've got millions and millions of dead trees from pine bark beetle. Do you think those dead trees are all going to sit there? Hell no, the state's already permitting for logging most of it out, on millions of acres, as they should.
You can't have nuclear power plants, the waste contaminates the environment. (Breeder reactors anyone?)
I'm pretty sure that one of the founders of the Sierra club has come to endorse nuclear energy. Regardless, the main environmetalist objection to nuclear energy hasn't been in waste disposal anyway (almost all nuclear waste from power plants is held on-site) -- it's been with the way uranium is mined and what the tailings and ore processing leachfields do to rivers & the water table. Think this is whining? It's not. My state (Colorado) already has a superfund site to show for it... Uravan. Breeder reactor development got squashed 25 years ago, and it's only now being talked about again. Maybe the discussion is ready to re-open. I dunno.
Yep, it's those annoying enviro-hippies. They only exist to make things difficult. They just don't have any other reason for what they do other than being annoying. Oooooh, and they're sooooo annoying. Sooooo annoying that the entire US government has been able to ignore them for eight years. Ooooooh, they're soooooo powerful. Soooo scary! Like martians! Like clowns! BooogaBoogaBooogaBoogaBoooga!
Scared yet? Didn't think so. If you look closely at the issues you'll see that there's a balance to be struck between competing goals. The best outcomes are the ones that nobody's entirely satisfied with, but let things go forward. We can't achieve those outcomes if folks sit back, re-enforce their stereotypes, point fingers and blame blame blame, as you do.
Jeezus, what bunch of hand-wringing whiny pussies conservatives have become.
He's also assuming we won't have to deal with those damn, dirty apes.
I don't know. Fill me in if you find it.
you're probably right.
There's a class here in Colorado, too, but plenty of ways to avoid it, depending on who you know.
For me, it's most about safety.
Ouch.
To temper this a little bit, let me try to inform on the assumption that dems see gun ownership as "immoral". We do not find gun ownership immoral (while unaffiliated, I almost always vote democrat). I'm also an NRA member, and I have enough guns to arm my entire neighborhood, twice over.
For most of us left-leaners, guns are seen as tools of war or tools of crime or tools of getting something to eat. Most left-leaners have no problem with gun ownership, but also believe that there's a certain level of responsiblity (and regulation) that makes them safer to have around if one -=must=- have one around. Interestingly, in conversations with my right-leaning friends who keep and shoot guns, they also point out that a concealed carrry license doesn't require any safety training or demonstration of competence, whereas we require that for cars and motorcycles. The colorful part is that people die from poor operation of cars and motorbikes all the time, so there's a seperate argument as to whether training and testing have much effect, ... but I digress.
Left-leaners basically don't want to see guns used in crimes, and the thought is that if you make guns hard to get, or restrict which guns can be acquired based on meaningful background checks or licensing/registration schemes, the likelihood of having these guns being used in crimes is diminished. Our friends on the right love to point out that criminals don't follow the rules, and therefore the restrictions only fall on the law-abiding. True enough. Yet, if a bank robber gets one sentence if he robs a bank with a fist and an angry look, most lefties believe that he should be charged with two crimes if he robs a bank with a gun, and three crimes if it's a gun that has not been legally acquired.
I concede that most of these controversies tend to flow to envisioning "what if" scenarios, but I believe it is unfair to state that democrats think owning guns are immoral. Democrats want to see criminals who use guns punished to the fullest extent, and to reduce the numbers of guns used in crimes. That last sentence is not forcing morality on anyone. Everyone can agree on those two things, even the gun-nuts. Where people differ is on how you accomplish those two things, and that's a very good dialogue to have.
Lots of democrats own guns, but most of them choose to not associate themselves with the NRA, and choose to not justify their ownership by way of the 2nd amendment. They're pretty much silent on the topic, unless you get them talking about hunting. For my part, I am an NRA member because we stand for the training, gun education (operations, safety) and gun rights education. In general, I do not support the candidates that the NRA suggests I support,... unless they're democrats, that is.
Yeah, except that L1's pretty unstable.
Better at L4 or L5... none of this balancing a marble on a marble BS out there. Still doesn't solve the cosmic ray problem, but at least the thing would stick there.
Linky: Here
If you truly believe that Clinton "loosened the rules leading to our current housing crisis", you're a little misinformed. It was GWB's championing of the "ownership society" and the deregulation of lending practices that led to the influx of bad mortgages. GWB specifically said that he was doing so to allow people who could not afford to own their own homes to have the ability to make that kind of investment. Look at when all those bad loans were written -- nearly every one was written over the last four years -- well outside the Clinton term. Bad loans get written all the time, in all kinds of administrations (and I know that because I worked at the RTC and FDIC when the S&L collapse had to be fixed, and I remember when Silverado tanked), but I have never seen the kind of volume of LINA (Lo-Income-No-Assets) and NINA (No-Income-No-Assets) loans at any time before GWB -- and LINA and NINA loans didn't exist before GWB took office. (Actually, to be fair, LINA loans did exist before GWB, but they were very rare and generally low-dollar loans that got pooled with much less risky paper when they got commoditized.) It's easy and satisfying to say that "Clinton did it.", but in this case, he didn't.
I think you're overlooking certain facts as well. There is no democratic control of the senate. Joe Lieberman, though he caucuses with the democrats, usually votes with republicans. Another democratic senator has been sidelined by a stroke for a long time. Ted Kennedy is out for the foreseeable future. At the most, the democratic party has had only a single periodic vote in majority, which is easily nullified. To really have control of the senate, one party needs 55 solid votes. Anything less doesn't hold up. You can have a numerical majority without having actual control, which is where senate democrats are right now.
I carry 5-6 ball bearings (steel buckshot, really, 1/4 in diameter) when I ride. They're easy to get to with gloved hands, virtually invisible to anyone behind you, simple to drop and totally non-recoverable. The effect is no different from what happens when a dump truck or tractor-trailer throws a pebble. Harmless, but effective. As for road rage, I'm not nearly as angry as I used to be -- I don't even flip the bird anymore, but I do still carry a ball peen hammer in the right side saddlebag just in case. A motorcycle can accelerate faster, corner more quickly and brake more effectively than any car. If I want to find and meet any car on the road, I can do it with ease. However, after my last roadside encounter with a motorist some ten years ago, which gained me a charge of menacing and the motorist a charge of reckless endangerment, the cop who responded gave me the advice to keep my ass in the saddle no matter how PO'd I become. He was a motorcycle cop. I've followed his advice ever since. Oh, btw, we each agreed to drop the charges we filed on each other in the end, saving lots of tax dollars and lawyer bills.
Still have my Cyborg 2000. It still works great. I like how adjustable it is.
-= love your logic! =-
Myself, I found that beer was giving me all those calories. I used to wash down the day with 1-2 litres of beer (~2 cases a week). Cutting back to .5 litres, and sometimes not having beer at all (~.5 cases a week), has really cut the calories for me. To put this in perspective, I quit smoking a month ago, and even though I'm eating more, I've only gained a pound or two.
I know I'll never be able to give up beer (it's proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, after all), but I don't miss the calories.
Great points. As a PC gamer who plays with a regular group, I've always wished that club licensing was an option -- one physical copy, loadable on 5 machines, for a little less than the price of four individual copies. Having to login online, plus having the physical media in the drive, every time I want to play either a standalone or LAN game is a real pain in the patoot.