We played a heavily-modified 1st/2nd edition hybrid until the Wizards of the Coast stores closed in '04 and we bought the books at 75% off the list price. The local game stores cleaned ours out of most of their inventory because it was cheaper that ordering wholesale from WoTC.
I liked the 3.5 rules because they reduced the "ad-hockery" of the 1st edition rules, but it wasn't a really big deal. We're "role-play/shared story telling" dweebs who can go an hour without rolling any dice. Still the old rules served for nearly a quarter of a century, and we've not even finalized our custom character sheets for 3 yet, so I don't anticipate making the switch again anytime soon. These days, we don't play that much anyway.
Wow, you posted a link to a blog that just quotes another article. That sure is convincing. And then the second blog posts a false dilemma based pretty much on the first one. I'll see your blog of a story, and raise you an originally authored story that pretty much debunks the whole "racist newsletter" crap.
The funny thing is, though I'm a fairly libertarian person, I'm not even much of a Ron Paul supporter, or a "Rondroid" as you so cleverly put it. I view him as the least objectionable Republican, but it wasn't enough for me to register as one, as I am ambivalent about him as president as he's a bit too much of a social conservative for me and he maintains some troubling ideas about science (yes, I'm talking about creationism/ID) I just can't quite get past. I'd like to think he adheres to his libertarian principles enough that those things wouldn't matter, but I'm not sure I would trust myself in the office of president to not muck with things I shouldn't, so it's difficult for me to trust anyone else to behave either.
But it really pisses me off that, like calling someone a pedophile, it's so easy to smear someone with the "racist" label. It's pure fucking bullshit, and I'm calling it as such. All of this complete crap eventually comes from a single hit piece written by James Kirchick of The New Republic, which if you were wanting to smear Ron Paul is the actual article you should've quoted. It's right up there with the "Barack Obama is a closet fundamentalist Muslim who will institute Sharia law in America if elected!" bullshit that's been circulating. That little meme wouldn't have the traction it does if he didn't have a "funny" name. Likewise, it's really just too easy to take an old white social conservative guy from Texas and put a white hood on his head.
That people fall for this crap almost every goddamned time makes it extremely tempting to root for the candidate who will most fuck up this country because we're a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots and we deserve it.
FYI, Python also has deprecation facilities to allow any code to raise a deprecation warning when something is planned to be removed.
Then again, my REAL problem with Python is that thanks to late binding, the actual broken code won't be discovered until someone actually executes it. You get that "faster-to-production" high at the expense of all the early error checking that more rigid languages require.
We could debate dynamic/static typing forever as it's quite the holy war (usually indicative that there's no real 'best, always right in every circumstance' answer), but surely you don't think it's a good idea for code to go into production without it being executed in some sort of test beyond "hey, it compiles!" first?
I know you're just being funny, but I hope that any truly smartass C programmer also knows that the printf family of functions that trailing f stands for "format" and not "function". python already provides the format stuff using the modulus ('%') on strings, which is sort of weird if you think of it a modulo instead of thinking of it as a simple mnemonic that the modulo operator is the same character as the format escape character. So calling the print function "printf" would actually be misleading as it does not take a format argument.
Example:
>>> from math import pi >>> print "The value of %s is %.2f." % ("pi", pi) # printf, python pre3 style The value of pi is 3.14. >>> a = "The value of %s is %.4f." % ("pi", pi) # sprintf >>> a 'The value of pi is 3.1416.'
It wouldn't be painful even if I were to hand-compile my own versions - some masochistic thing I am not inclined to do.
I have found that when I need multiple versions of python on a system, compiling and maintaining those versions from the original source tarballs is very simple, and usually faster than hunting to see if there's a package for the distro/python version combos I need. Sometimes I have some issues with GUI toolkits, but for the most part, it's really just not that difficult.
You're not alone! I started with Python 8 years ago using 1.5.2 as well. I liked python then, but when python 2 came out, I went from liking python to it becoming a favorite language. I looked at one of my old python 1.5.2 scripts a couple weeks ago, and it looked very odd and a little clunky to me. If python 3 someday makes me look at my python 2 code in the same way, then as far as I'm concerned, it's all good.
Eh, I thought it was a moderately interesting abstract work. Not great, but decent, though I'm not normally an abstract art fan. By all means, if it's something you would've done in grade school, you should take painting up again and show us your work. You might have a hidden talent.
I am big fan of all of Introversion's games. Darwinia basically burned a week of my life playing through it and investigating all its little corners. That I got to really worry for a bunch of green stick figures says a lot about the story-telling in that game. DEFCON is great, too. I think what really sells that game is the ambient sounds and music, coupled with the abstract remove you have from the destruction.
I've played the demo of Uplink, and I'm intrigued by it enough to buy it once my South Carolina to Arizona move is complete.
Conversely I've generated several thousands of volts using my bare hands and a piece of nylon, but because the current was rather small nobody noticed.
"Anybody who has a problem with me saying "Merry Christmas" shouldn't and won't be taken seriously" I have a problem with it... it's almost February.:-)
Tangent: If you've never seen Jerry Miculek, it's scary that someone can be this freakishly fast. This guy can fire 12 round with a revolver using a speed loader in under three seconds. Video here.
And who-ever it was who thought tying computationally costly operations to fancy clock cycle consuming progress bars was a good idea should be shot.
Probably someone who was tired of the computational expense of having something run halfway through umpteen times, only to have their users kill the program, because it was "hung". If you've got a progress bar that's consuming enough CPU that it is having an significantly adverse impact on an application's performance, it's either coded horribly wrong, or you're at the very limit of your hardware's maximum capability, and perhaps you should really consider upgrading.
FWIW, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool shell scripting, C, Python and Perl programming command-line Unix elitist snob who uses X11 (or OS X for that matter) as little more than a fancy terminal manager, and have been for almost 20 years. But that doesn't mean I don't understand basic human factors.
I can't help you with Vista, I'm apparently lucky to never have used it. XP is more than adequate for my current Windows needs.
Apparently at a minimum he wrote a script that saves a considerable amount of electric power, a scarce resource, that could be applied to more productive use elsewhere. Presumably he's done other things that have enhanced the infrastructure of the school he works for, which helps educate the citizens, which in turns develops his country. I'm not sure, but it seems to me you're trying to criticize his desire to perhaps better his and (maybe) his family's life by trying life in another "developed" country.
It's a tough choice, the tension between wanting to help your homeland improve and wanting to give you and your family a better chance at happiness (or more extreme cases, just survival), and it's not limited to people in so-called "developing" nations. As an American who is very concerned at the fairly prevalent anti-scientific, anti-intellectual zeitgeist, coupled with what I consider potentially disastrous economic policies, I'd be lying if I said I have never considered emigration to places that I perceive as better in these regards. That impulse wars with my innate patriotism, to "fight the good fight" to protect my country from what I perceive as a threat to it, and admittedly, abject laziness and inertia. I suspect that though the details differ wildly, the essence of the decision is similar, but that doesn't mean we are really qualified to determine the proper course of action for someone else.
"Sir, a zone transfer is when you type 'dig google.com axfr'. It is a standard feature of the DNS protocol and software suite. The only way it can be abused is if it is left unprotected by the network administrator, much the same as a house can be abused if you leave your doors and windows unlocked."
If that's the defense you're going to use, you'll have to excuse me if I don't retain you as a lawyer. Apart from the moment you said 'dig google.com axfr' and the non-computer savvy person's "you are speaking gibberish" light is on, the analogy is enough to convict. While not locking your doors and windows could be foolhardy, depending on where you live, it does not forgive someone for criminal trespass and unlawful entry. A better but still flawed analogy would be a box full of "Take one!" flyers advertising the features of the house for sale, or maybe a take-out menu for a restaurant. You can come in, grab one, and order stuff if you want, but you can't go back into the kitchen and cook stuff, or steal a couple fajita pans or grab a beer out of the cooler.
Slashdot Mirror
We played a heavily-modified 1st/2nd edition hybrid until the Wizards of the Coast stores closed in '04 and we bought the books at 75% off the list price. The local game stores cleaned ours out of most of their inventory because it was cheaper that ordering wholesale from WoTC.
I liked the 3.5 rules because they reduced the "ad-hockery" of the 1st edition rules, but it wasn't a really big deal. We're "role-play/shared story telling" dweebs who can go an hour without rolling any dice. Still the old rules served for nearly a quarter of a century, and we've not even finalized our custom character sheets for 3 yet, so I don't anticipate making the switch again anytime soon. These days, we don't play that much anyway.
Wow, you posted a link to a blog that just quotes another article. That sure is convincing. And then the second blog posts a false dilemma based pretty much on the first one. I'll see your blog of a story, and raise you an originally authored story that pretty much debunks the whole "racist newsletter" crap.
The funny thing is, though I'm a fairly libertarian person, I'm not even much of a Ron Paul supporter, or a "Rondroid" as you so cleverly put it. I view him as the least objectionable Republican, but it wasn't enough for me to register as one, as I am ambivalent about him as president as he's a bit too much of a social conservative for me and he maintains some troubling ideas about science (yes, I'm talking about creationism/ID) I just can't quite get past. I'd like to think he adheres to his libertarian principles enough that those things wouldn't matter, but I'm not sure I would trust myself in the office of president to not muck with things I shouldn't, so it's difficult for me to trust anyone else to behave either.
But it really pisses me off that, like calling someone a pedophile, it's so easy to smear someone with the "racist" label. It's pure fucking bullshit, and I'm calling it as such. All of this complete crap eventually comes from a single hit piece written by James Kirchick of The New Republic, which if you were wanting to smear Ron Paul is the actual article you should've quoted. It's right up there with the "Barack Obama is a closet fundamentalist Muslim who will institute Sharia law in America if elected!" bullshit that's been circulating. That little meme wouldn't have the traction it does if he didn't have a "funny" name. Likewise, it's really just too easy to take an old white social conservative guy from Texas and put a white hood on his head.
That people fall for this crap almost every goddamned time makes it extremely tempting to root for the candidate who will most fuck up this country because we're a bunch of mouth-breathing idiots and we deserve it.
Can you clue me in a little more specific than that link? The damn thing is reads like a three column timecube site.
If you're referring to the whole Ron Paul white supremacist thing, Justin Raimondo debunked it pretty thoroughly.
FYI, Python also has deprecation facilities to allow any code to raise a deprecation warning when something is planned to be removed.
Then again, my REAL problem with Python is that thanks to late binding, the actual broken code won't be discovered until someone actually executes it. You get that "faster-to-production" high at the expense of all the early error checking that more rigid languages require.We could debate dynamic/static typing forever as it's quite the holy war (usually indicative that there's no real 'best, always right in every circumstance' answer), but surely you don't think it's a good idea for code to go into production without it being executed in some sort of test beyond "hey, it compiles!" first?
I know you're just being funny, but I hope that any truly smartass C programmer also knows that the printf family of functions that trailing f stands for "format" and not "function". python already provides the format stuff using the modulus ('%') on strings, which is sort of weird if you think of it a modulo instead of thinking of it as a simple mnemonic that the modulo operator is the same character as the format escape character. So calling the print function "printf" would actually be misleading as it does not take a format argument.
Example:
"Funny once, Mike." :-)
I have found that when I need multiple versions of python on a system, compiling and maintaining those versions from the original source tarballs is very simple, and usually faster than hunting to see if there's a package for the distro/python version combos I need. Sometimes I have some issues with GUI toolkits, but for the most part, it's really just not that difficult.
You're not alone! I started with Python 8 years ago using 1.5.2 as well. I liked python then, but when python 2 came out, I went from liking python to it becoming a favorite language. I looked at one of my old python 1.5.2 scripts a couple weeks ago, and it looked very odd and a little clunky to me. If python 3 someday makes me look at my python 2 code in the same way, then as far as I'm concerned, it's all good.
I'm a grad school dropout so I'm not close to a PhD, but he's talking about this movie. HTH.
Eh, I thought it was a moderately interesting abstract work. Not great, but decent, though I'm not normally an abstract art fan. By all means, if it's something you would've done in grade school, you should take painting up again and show us your work. You might have a hidden talent.
I am big fan of all of Introversion's games. Darwinia basically burned a week of my life playing through it and investigating all its little corners. That I got to really worry for a bunch of green stick figures says a lot about the story-telling in that game. DEFCON is great, too. I think what really sells that game is the ambient sounds and music, coupled with the abstract remove you have from the destruction.
I've played the demo of Uplink, and I'm intrigued by it enough to buy it once my South Carolina to Arizona move is complete.
I'd respond to this, but I'm running AdBlock and didn't see your comment.
Thus spake the Anonymous Coward...
Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, okay?
I'm not worried... it's not like my root password of 's$1mHk8;e$%a4' is going to be in anyone's dictionary.
Wait... oh shit.
Tangent: If you've never seen Jerry Miculek, it's scary that someone can be this freakishly fast. This guy can fire 12 round with a revolver using a speed loader in under three seconds. Video here.
Oblig xkcd
.Probably someone who was tired of the computational expense of having something run halfway through umpteen times, only to have their users kill the program, because it was "hung". If you've got a progress bar that's consuming enough CPU that it is having an significantly adverse impact on an application's performance, it's either coded horribly wrong, or you're at the very limit of your hardware's maximum capability, and perhaps you should really consider upgrading.
FWIW, I'm a dyed-in-the-wool shell scripting, C, Python and Perl programming command-line Unix elitist snob who uses X11 (or OS X for that matter) as little more than a fancy terminal manager, and have been for almost 20 years. But that doesn't mean I don't understand basic human factors.
I can't help you with Vista, I'm apparently lucky to never have used it. XP is more than adequate for my current Windows needs.
Apparently at a minimum he wrote a script that saves a considerable amount of electric power, a scarce resource, that could be applied to more productive use elsewhere. Presumably he's done other things that have enhanced the infrastructure of the school he works for, which helps educate the citizens, which in turns develops his country. I'm not sure, but it seems to me you're trying to criticize his desire to perhaps better his and (maybe) his family's life by trying life in another "developed" country.
It's a tough choice, the tension between wanting to help your homeland improve and wanting to give you and your family a better chance at happiness (or more extreme cases, just survival), and it's not limited to people in so-called "developing" nations. As an American who is very concerned at the fairly prevalent anti-scientific, anti-intellectual zeitgeist, coupled with what I consider potentially disastrous economic policies, I'd be lying if I said I have never considered emigration to places that I perceive as better in these regards. That impulse wars with my innate patriotism, to "fight the good fight" to protect my country from what I perceive as a threat to it, and admittedly, abject laziness and inertia. I suspect that though the details differ wildly, the essence of the decision is similar, but that doesn't mean we are really qualified to determine the proper course of action for someone else.
What about the component molecules of nerve cells? The cells still metabolize, don't they?
Well, as I said, the analogy is still flawed, but at least in THAT one, I'm not guilty of a crime. :-)
If that's the defense you're going to use, you'll have to excuse me if I don't retain you as a lawyer. Apart from the moment you said 'dig google.com axfr' and the non-computer savvy person's "you are speaking gibberish" light is on, the analogy is enough to convict. While not locking your doors and windows could be foolhardy, depending on where you live, it does not forgive someone for criminal trespass and unlawful entry. A better but still flawed analogy would be a box full of "Take one!" flyers advertising the features of the house for sale, or maybe a take-out menu for a restaurant. You can come in, grab one, and order stuff if you want, but you can't go back into the kitchen and cook stuff, or steal a couple fajita pans or grab a beer out of the cooler.
We all know what the most important controversy is, though, right?
vi or emacs.