Unlike what the article says, Microsoft did not acquire FASA. They only acquired FASA Interactive. FASA itself still exists as a holding company, and still owns the paper versions of their games, which they license to a variety of other companies, including WizKids, who in turn license Shadowrun to the German company FanPro, who is currently publishing the fourth edition of Shadowrun. Earthdawn is licensed to Living Room Games. Other games have been licensed to other companies.
FASA Interactive, and thus Microsoft, only owns the rights to computer games based on these settings.
In their previous propaganda game, America's Army (which we play a lot at the office because it's free, not because we actually like the US army), weapons could jam. And hitting the enemy is far from trivial; a well aimed shot with a good scope is often worth a lot more than a machine gun. But when you're hit and the bullet doesn't kill you outright (which it might), you move slower, and you can still bleed to death. Pretty convincing game IMO.
On the other hand, the game also clearly demonstrates the US view that your own side is always the good guys, and the opponents are always the bad guys: both sides see their team mates as US soldiers, and the other side as terrorists. It confuses a lot of new players who want to know if they're the Americans or the terrorists, and who else is on their side.
Any monotheist, Christian or not, would be foolish to think that their god didn't create the universe. It's simply common sense.
Not necessarily. It seems obvious to us today, but there are plenty of cultures who just (used to) take the existence of the universe and the earth as given, and believe their god created just the humans, and possibly the animals, or shaped the earth a bit, or something.
The fact that some monotheists have trouble accepting the size and age of the universe also suggests that they have some trouble seeing God as the creator of all that. A creator of just the earth and its immediate surroundings is much easier to grasp, I suspect.
5 - 7 is not that much people. Try 30 instead. Or 50.
50 people in one room sounds a bit crowded, or too open and noisy. I think 5-10 is best. Preferably people who are working on the same project, some of whom have different skills and specialities than you have, so you can help each other.
In any case, I don't want to sit alone in an office all day.
More interesting (and a bit scary) is that the SP, which started as a maoistic party in 1971, received 17% of the votes. They had 6% of the votes in 2003. Although they claim to be a a more socialistic at this time, it still is the farthest left in dutch politics.
They abandoned their maoist background in 1972. The SP is mainly a party that wants to solve problems for "the common man", which explains their popularity. He appeals to a lot of normal, average people, whereas GroenLinks (which is much more leftist according to kieskompas.nl) is much more intellectual, and therefore doesn't appeal nearly as much to the man in the street.
Although I didn't vote for him, I wouldn't mind seeing the leader of the SP as prime minister one day.
It's interesting and true, it still makes him even more of a "lefty" from the US point of view:-)
He was openly gay, which makes him by definition a lefty in the US. But he was he was a rich dandy, against muslim immigrants, and he wanted strong measures to protect "our way of life", which can also fit in well with the far right side of the political spectrum. I think many of his followers prefered to ignore the fact that he was gay.
Well, at least he got gay rights firmly entrenched in the right side of our political spectrum.
Does it? From my experience, Libertarians only have a few things in common with liberals. When it comes to economic issues, they are pretty far-right.
Just like the Dutch liberal conservatives. Economic liberalism means open market, privatise everything, and let the corporations figure it out for themselves.
Thing is, "liberal" comes from "liber", freedom. And who doesn't like freedom? Yet, everybody has their own ideas about what kind of freedom they want. The freedom to use your money for profit the way you see fit, even if it hurts others, or freedom from oppression by those better off than you?
I tried Kieskompas.nl and they had better questions
My experience with kiskompas.nl is a bad one. It looks like it's more accurate and has more nuance, but some questions are just wrong.
For example, the question "Turkey must join the EU". I think Turkey should only be allowed to join the EU when they fulfill all the requirements (which they don't), and even then they're not required to join, but just allowed. So I voted "disagree", and ended up opposed to my favorite party, who was considered to agree, because once Turkey fulfills all the requirements, they should be allowed to join. Which is exactly, to a word, the reason why I disagreed with the question.
In the end, I ended up far removed from a party I almost completely agreed with.
It doesn't always recommend D66 though (try some extreme choices and see).
You don't have to try extreme choices. I gave very reasonable, predictable answers, and ended up at SP, and later at GL. Not sure what I answered differently that last time though. And I think my answers would have fit ChristenUnie at least as well as SP en GL, so I don't know why I didn't end up there.
That's a good question. If people blindly obey these online tests, the makers of the tests become very powerful. But how accurate and objective can the test really be? This test advised VVD party leader Rutten to vote for D66, a slightly less conservative liberal party. And although this test advised me to vote for GroenLinks (I'm a member of that party, so that sounds accurate enough), another test that was supposed to be more accurate urged me to vote PvdA, SP or even D66, and put GroenLinks quite some way to the left of my position.
The simplest test, by the way, is Stomwijzer. (It's a pun: "stom" means "stupid", while "stem" means "vote".) It's a test for people who don't want to think. On the first picture it shows a cow, and you can reply "cute" or "food". The rest is just as simple.
[ Deliverance of Israel ] In that day, the LORD will punish with his sword, his fierce, great and powerful sword, Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster of the sea.
Seems kinda obvious to me. It wasn't a crocodile.
Obvious that it wasn't a crocodile perhaps, but it's by no means obvious what this is about. Sounds like a big sea snake. Some other verses sound like it could be a whale or shark. So what do you think it is? And why?
PS: You pasted the text 3 times. Better preview your post next time.
It shouldn't take a genius to realise that if God created ALL of the animals on the same day as humans (day 6), they co-existed.
It also doesn't take a genius to realise that Genesis 1 is not an eye witness account or a scientific dissertation, but a spiritual text with the message that God didn't just create us, but the entire universe. It puts God in a much bigger perspective than the much older text from Genesis 2 does. But it's not meant as a scientific theory of the exact details of how God created the universe.
If you consider yourself a normal, sane Christian, but don't believe the Bible, or you consider a literal interpretation of it a "perversion", I'm not sure what can be done for you.
I do believe in the bible, but I prefer to take the bible seriously. Did you know, for example, that Genesis 1 is not actually 6000 years old, but only about 2500? It's a lot younger than the rest of Genesis, and it's even younger than much of the rest of the OT. Genesis 1 was probably written during the Babylonian exile. The rest of Genesis is younger, but that too is not an eye witness account; at the earliest, it was written at the time of Moses, so you're still looking at a thousand years of oral history.
Many early christian thinkers and church fathers who selected the books and stories that make up our bible also didn't take everything as literally as creationists do. It's a much too short-sighted approach to something this important. It's really not a sin to use your god-given brain, and accept the world around you as real. If you do that, you can see God's hand in his creation, you can learn a lot about how he actually created the world, and evolution is clearly a big part of that.
Unless ofcourse you consider the world around you, God's creation, as not real, or you consider God a liar, or at least a practical joker, who created a seemingly consistent world that isn't, with evidence of an age that's false, with fossils of creatures that never lived. Personally, I find all of these options much more offensive than the idea that Genesis 1 is not a scientific dissertation, and that God created a much bigger, and much more complex universe with complex processes like evolution producing wondrous life forms like us.
I have read The Bible several times and do not remember hearing anything about our ancestors playing around with dinosaurs?
Then you know the bible better than these people. Normal, sane christians are quite aware that dinosaurs had been extinct for millions of years by the time the stories in the bible took place.
As a christian, I'm disgusted that these people pervert stories from the bible into these kind of Disney/Flintstone fairytales.
I'd hate to see the copycats if there's precedent set that you can get money for being a total asshole to police officers and praying for a non-lethal overreaction.
I'd love to see those copycats, actually. Police need to act responsibly, and protect ordinary citizens, not assault them. If they can be driven to assault and torture this easily, they deserve everything they get.
Lastly, those officers were in a hostile situation with a mob closing in around them. They've a job to do and that was to remove someone purporting to be a student who had refused to exit the premise (that's called trespass (an unlawful act causing injury to the person, property, or rights of another, committed with force or violence, actual or implied.)) The mob then surrounds and distracts the officers during the performance of their duties. You want to have a discussion? Fine. Do it after the suspect has been subdued- not while they're wondering whether or not the guy is going to run, shoot, attack, berserk, maim, or do something else irresponsible and dangerous.
As far as I can tell, the subject had been subdued. He was sitting on the ground, not attacking the officers. Still they tased him. That's what got the mob forming. The officers were endangering themselves by using excessive violence in a situation like this. Had they just arrested him, cuffed him and dragged him off, most students would have ignored them, but excessive violence like this should get any upstanding citizen to react and to stop it.
Those officers should loose their jobs, but remember the police department is funded with tax $. It seems crazy that the entire public has to loose over the actions of these bad officers.
Let the officers themselves pay. Let them give every other penny they make for the rest of their lives to this kid. That way it won't cost society much, and it will definitely make other police officers reconsider using excessive force like this.
The description of the incident does not indicate how cooperative that the Iranian was. In fact, his refusal to show a student ID card suggests that he was very uncooperative and is sufficient for the police to take action.
He got tasered for not showing his ID. Five times. Don't you think that's just a bit excessive punishment for passive resistance? If I understand correctly, he was even already on his way out of the library on his own. He just didn't want to cooperate with racial profiling.
Seriously, if police is allowed to use excessive violence against anyone who doesn't obey them blindly, you're living in a police state.
Well, what do yoou call data? There are quite a lot of XML-based languages, including programming languages, like XSLT. XSLT is basically the ultimate XML language, because it's in XML and it's made to operate on XML. So you could use XSLT to generate the XSLT you want to handle your data, or crazy stuff like that.
I've often wondered this myself. What is the reward for developing open source software? If companies can come in and use open source components in their own creation in a way that they make money without violating licenses, but at the same time aren't obligated to give anything back to the community, where's the motivation for new developers to go open source? Not everybody operates with an altruistic "I'm giving back to the community" motivation.
The company I work for contributes a lot to the Apache Cocoon community, and so do several other companies. The basic idea here is that that code is useful to us, and the more we contribute, the more the community will be heading in a direction useful to us. We want Cocoon to get better, so we'll have a better framework to work with.
We've released our CMS under an Apache license, and although this is one of our main money makers, we now also make money training others in using it and developing for it. And everything they add, again adds to the value we can sell.
Ofcourse anyone can take our code and use it to sell websites, but will they really build better sites for less money than we do? So far, we're still the experts.
The real reason why the PS2 was such a success, is that it was a very cheap DVD player, and DVDs had just become established technology.
The PS3 is a cheap Blu-Ray player, but Blu-Ray is by no means established. Instead of using the DVD to launch the PS2, they're trying to do the reverse: using the PS3 to launch Blu-Ray. I don't think that will work nearly as well. In fact, I expect it to fail miserably.
I'm not sure it's such a good idea to endanger your business's only revenue stream. How about you keep the source closed, but make sure the support you offer is excellent (i.e. implementation of new features on request, being responsive to bug reports and actually fix bugs for customers who have already paid, porting to new architectures when there's demand)? Also, have your customers actually asked for the source code?
Actually, going Open Source might open new revenue streams. Our Open Source CMS can be configured too use various XML editors, and one editor we use a lot is proprietary and from another company. My boss tried to convince that company to go open source, because he had lots of new customers for them if they did. Many governments, other institutions and open source lovers in general prefer open source software over other software, and we have a lot of customers that fit those descriptions. The other company is missing out on a share of these customers because they're not open source and our customers choose to use our own editor instead.
According to another recent study, very early ancestors of humans managed to interbreed with chimp ancestors to some extend, despite not being interfertile anymore. It works like this: some species that aren't interfertile enough to produce fertile offspring, may still be able to produce a "mule" (similar to the non-fertile offspring of a horse and a donkey). But while such a hybrid is not truly fertile, it's possible that some of them may be able to reproduce with one of their parent species. (I think the mother's species, but i'm not sure. And I think it only works for male hybrids, but again i'm not sure.)
The hybrid resulting from that may also be fertile with that same parent species, and after a few barely fertile hybrid generations, the hybrids may be sufficiently like that parent species that fully fertile offspring may result, but that offspring can still carry some genes of the other parent species. This way, genes can migrate from one species to another closely related yet seperate species.
Apparently the ancestors of humans and chimps did this about 3 million years after their split. It doesn't sound too unlikely that homo sapiens and neandethal may have done something like this too.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike what the article says, Microsoft did not acquire FASA. They only acquired FASA Interactive. FASA itself still exists as a holding company, and still owns the paper versions of their games, which they license to a variety of other companies, including WizKids, who in turn license Shadowrun to the German company FanPro, who is currently publishing the fourth edition of Shadowrun. Earthdawn is licensed to Living Room Games. Other games have been licensed to other companies.
FASA Interactive, and thus Microsoft, only owns the rights to computer games based on these settings.
In their previous propaganda game, America's Army (which we play a lot at the office because it's free, not because we actually like the US army), weapons could jam. And hitting the enemy is far from trivial; a well aimed shot with a good scope is often worth a lot more than a machine gun. But when you're hit and the bullet doesn't kill you outright (which it might), you move slower, and you can still bleed to death. Pretty convincing game IMO. On the other hand, the game also clearly demonstrates the US view that your own side is always the good guys, and the opponents are always the bad guys: both sides see their team mates as US soldiers, and the other side as terrorists. It confuses a lot of new players who want to know if they're the Americans or the terrorists, and who else is on their side.
Not necessarily. It seems obvious to us today, but there are plenty of cultures who just (used to) take the existence of the universe and the earth as given, and believe their god created just the humans, and possibly the animals, or shaped the earth a bit, or something.
The fact that some monotheists have trouble accepting the size and age of the universe also suggests that they have some trouble seeing God as the creator of all that. A creator of just the earth and its immediate surroundings is much easier to grasp, I suspect.
That is circular reasoning. Christians believe God created the universe because they have been told so by the bible.
50 people in one room sounds a bit crowded, or too open and noisy. I think 5-10 is best. Preferably people who are working on the same project, some of whom have different skills and specialities than you have, so you can help each other.
In any case, I don't want to sit alone in an office all day.
They abandoned their maoist background in 1972. The SP is mainly a party that wants to solve problems for "the common man", which explains their popularity. He appeals to a lot of normal, average people, whereas GroenLinks (which is much more leftist according to kieskompas.nl) is much more intellectual, and therefore doesn't appeal nearly as much to the man in the street.
Although I didn't vote for him, I wouldn't mind seeing the leader of the SP as prime minister one day.
He was openly gay, which makes him by definition a lefty in the US. But he was he was a rich dandy, against muslim immigrants, and he wanted strong measures to protect "our way of life", which can also fit in well with the far right side of the political spectrum. I think many of his followers prefered to ignore the fact that he was gay.
Well, at least he got gay rights firmly entrenched in the right side of our political spectrum.
Just like the Dutch liberal conservatives. Economic liberalism means open market, privatise everything, and let the corporations figure it out for themselves.
Thing is, "liberal" comes from "liber", freedom. And who doesn't like freedom? Yet, everybody has their own ideas about what kind of freedom they want. The freedom to use your money for profit the way you see fit, even if it hurts others, or freedom from oppression by those better off than you?
My experience with kiskompas.nl is a bad one. It looks like it's more accurate and has more nuance, but some questions are just wrong.
For example, the question "Turkey must join the EU". I think Turkey should only be allowed to join the EU when they fulfill all the requirements (which they don't), and even then they're not required to join, but just allowed. So I voted "disagree", and ended up opposed to my favorite party, who was considered to agree, because once Turkey fulfills all the requirements, they should be allowed to join. Which is exactly, to a word, the reason why I disagreed with the question.
In the end, I ended up far removed from a party I almost completely agreed with.
You don't have to try extreme choices. I gave very reasonable, predictable answers, and ended up at SP, and later at GL. Not sure what I answered differently that last time though. And I think my answers would have fit ChristenUnie at least as well as SP en GL, so I don't know why I didn't end up there.
That's a good question. If people blindly obey these online tests, the makers of the tests become very powerful. But how accurate and objective can the test really be? This test advised VVD party leader Rutten to vote for D66, a slightly less conservative liberal party. And although this test advised me to vote for GroenLinks (I'm a member of that party, so that sounds accurate enough), another test that was supposed to be more accurate urged me to vote PvdA, SP or even D66, and put GroenLinks quite some way to the left of my position.
The simplest test, by the way, is Stomwijzer. (It's a pun: "stom" means "stupid", while "stem" means "vote".) It's a test for people who don't want to think. On the first picture it shows a cow, and you can reply "cute" or "food". The rest is just as simple.
Obvious that it wasn't a crocodile perhaps, but it's by no means obvious what this is about. Sounds like a big sea snake. Some other verses sound like it could be a whale or shark. So what do you think it is? And why?
PS: You pasted the text 3 times. Better preview your post next time.
It also doesn't take a genius to realise that Genesis 1 is not an eye witness account or a scientific dissertation, but a spiritual text with the message that God didn't just create us, but the entire universe. It puts God in a much bigger perspective than the much older text from Genesis 2 does. But it's not meant as a scientific theory of the exact details of how God created the universe.
I do believe in the bible, but I prefer to take the bible seriously. Did you know, for example, that Genesis 1 is not actually 6000 years old, but only about 2500? It's a lot younger than the rest of Genesis, and it's even younger than much of the rest of the OT. Genesis 1 was probably written during the Babylonian exile. The rest of Genesis is younger, but that too is not an eye witness account; at the earliest, it was written at the time of Moses, so you're still looking at a thousand years of oral history.
Many early christian thinkers and church fathers who selected the books and stories that make up our bible also didn't take everything as literally as creationists do. It's a much too short-sighted approach to something this important. It's really not a sin to use your god-given brain, and accept the world around you as real. If you do that, you can see God's hand in his creation, you can learn a lot about how he actually created the world, and evolution is clearly a big part of that.
Unless ofcourse you consider the world around you, God's creation, as not real, or you consider God a liar, or at least a practical joker, who created a seemingly consistent world that isn't, with evidence of an age that's false, with fossils of creatures that never lived. Personally, I find all of these options much more offensive than the idea that Genesis 1 is not a scientific dissertation, and that God created a much bigger, and much more complex universe with complex processes like evolution producing wondrous life forms like us.
Then you know the bible better than these people. Normal, sane christians are quite aware that dinosaurs had been extinct for millions of years by the time the stories in the bible took place.
As a christian, I'm disgusted that these people pervert stories from the bible into these kind of Disney/Flintstone fairytales.
If people like him hadn't messed up this reality so much, perhaps young people wouldn't feel the need to escape from it.
I'd love to see those copycats, actually. Police need to act responsibly, and protect ordinary citizens, not assault them. If they can be driven to assault and torture this easily, they deserve everything they get.
As far as I can tell, the subject had been subdued. He was sitting on the ground, not attacking the officers. Still they tased him. That's what got the mob forming. The officers were endangering themselves by using excessive violence in a situation like this. Had they just arrested him, cuffed him and dragged him off, most students would have ignored them, but excessive violence like this should get any upstanding citizen to react and to stop it.
Let the officers themselves pay. Let them give every other penny they make for the rest of their lives to this kid. That way it won't cost society much, and it will definitely make other police officers reconsider using excessive force like this.
He got tasered for not showing his ID. Five times. Don't you think that's just a bit excessive punishment for passive resistance? If I understand correctly, he was even already on his way out of the library on his own. He just didn't want to cooperate with racial profiling.
Seriously, if police is allowed to use excessive violence against anyone who doesn't obey them blindly, you're living in a police state.
Well, what do yoou call data? There are quite a lot of XML-based languages, including programming languages, like XSLT. XSLT is basically the ultimate XML language, because it's in XML and it's made to operate on XML. So you could use XSLT to generate the XSLT you want to handle your data, or crazy stuff like that.
The company I work for contributes a lot to the Apache Cocoon community, and so do several other companies. The basic idea here is that that code is useful to us, and the more we contribute, the more the community will be heading in a direction useful to us. We want Cocoon to get better, so we'll have a better framework to work with.
We've released our CMS under an Apache license, and although this is one of our main money makers, we now also make money training others in using it and developing for it. And everything they add, again adds to the value we can sell.
Ofcourse anyone can take our code and use it to sell websites, but will they really build better sites for less money than we do? So far, we're still the experts.
The real reason why the PS2 was such a success, is that it was a very cheap DVD player, and DVDs had just become established technology.
The PS3 is a cheap Blu-Ray player, but Blu-Ray is by no means established. Instead of using the DVD to launch the PS2, they're trying to do the reverse: using the PS3 to launch Blu-Ray. I don't think that will work nearly as well. In fact, I expect it to fail miserably.
And some people are pigs. It's just tooo easy to confuse the two.
Actually, going Open Source might open new revenue streams. Our Open Source CMS can be configured too use various XML editors, and one editor we use a lot is proprietary and from another company. My boss tried to convince that company to go open source, because he had lots of new customers for them if they did. Many governments, other institutions and open source lovers in general prefer open source software over other software, and we have a lot of customers that fit those descriptions. The other company is missing out on a share of these customers because they're not open source and our customers choose to use our own editor instead.
According to another recent study, very early ancestors of humans managed to interbreed with chimp ancestors to some extend, despite not being interfertile anymore. It works like this: some species that aren't interfertile enough to produce fertile offspring, may still be able to produce a "mule" (similar to the non-fertile offspring of a horse and a donkey). But while such a hybrid is not truly fertile, it's possible that some of them may be able to reproduce with one of their parent species. (I think the mother's species, but i'm not sure. And I think it only works for male hybrids, but again i'm not sure.)
The hybrid resulting from that may also be fertile with that same parent species, and after a few barely fertile hybrid generations, the hybrids may be sufficiently like that parent species that fully fertile offspring may result, but that offspring can still carry some genes of the other parent species. This way, genes can migrate from one species to another closely related yet seperate species.
Apparently the ancestors of humans and chimps did this about 3 million years after their split. It doesn't sound too unlikely that homo sapiens and neandethal may have done something like this too.