Role Playing Games are really just a framework of rules that you all agree to in order to tell a story. One person takes on the role of Narrator (The DM) and the others take on the roles of main characters in the story. It doesn't have to be a fantasy based story, it could be anything. But the joy is in taking an initial vision and writing the story together as you all experience it. It's just a more interactive version of reading your favorite book. Almost everyone that enjoys some kind of media has wished at one time or another that they could be part of the story they are watching. Role playing games are a way to make that desire a little more real.
The USADA doesn't actually have the authority to strip Lance Armstrong of anything. The UCI is the only organization which can strip his titles from him and according to them the USADA hasn't even come close to meeting the burden of proof they require. So this is all just a giant smoke and mirrors act by the USADA. Armstrong has stopped fighting them because their accusations are irrelevant to him.
Everyone of us has trace amounts of cocain, explosive residue, and infectious biological agents all over us. This thing should trigger on every person that walks into the airport.
How about the fact that getting a Windows phone to work with an exchange server is slightly more painful than shooting yourself in the dick?
A small business that is using a self signed certificate might as well cross all windows phones off of their purchasing options forever. And don't tell me, "Oh they should just get a real certificate." because YOU don't get to make that call and neither do I. The client does and they say no.
iPhone? No Problem. Android? No Problem. Windows Phone? Export certificate from site, email it to yahoo or gmail account FROM a yahoo or gmail account because outlook/exchange refuses to allow you to mail a cert, then import it, reboot the phone, and HOPE that it works. I just got finished dealing with one that didn't work. We renewed the cert, and now the thing is just shitboxed. Can't get it to accept the new cert at all.
How the fuck hard is it to add a "Accept this certificate anyways?" option...
Assume 1 earthlike planet per galaxy, and say.... 1/1000 of those earthlike planets have life on them. And 1/1000 of those have intelligent life on par with humans. That's still a WHOLE LOT of intelligent life.
I've gotten more entertainment out of Master of Orion II than any other game I've purchased. Close behind is Diablo II. Neither of those games have INSANE graphics (MOO2 for sure doesn't) but both have a lot of replayable fun. I think I paid 29$ for each of them, and I've purchased them both more than once because I lost the discs and boxes and whatnot and just bought them again.
If someone released MOO2 for my iPhone for 5$ I would buy it in a heartbeat.
If someone released the old Monkey Island games on the iPhone for 5$ apiece there would be a good chance I would buy those too. To me the best market for games on the mobile devices is old school games. You could re-release a bunch of nintendo, super nintendo, or playstation 1 game on a smartphone and make bank. Final Fantasy 3 on my iPhone? Hell yeah.
I don't let random employees set up machines on the network and then allow outside access to them. I would want root access and a full rundown on what you were running on the system and who would have access.
They are being completely reasonable by requesting a non-root account.
"Oh shit, if that number is wrong then this planet is in a whole different place! Let's check! IT IS! HUZZAH! We know more today than we did yesterday!"
No this is the exact opposite of what we actually need. Higher birthrates lead to population pressure, which leads to expansion, which leads to things like space exploration and colonization. Humanity evolves through conflict, we're pretty much past the point of REALLY fighting with each other in a way that threatens the existence of humanity, so the only conflict left is the conflict for resources. We need to ramp that conflict up enough to make it profitable and desirable for people to pursue resources on other planets. That will drive technology and innovation, and continue to improve the average quality of life.
We need to spread out like locusts, ravaging everything before us, and the sooner the better.
Of course, I don't think that Deep Blue really out-played Kasparov on a level playing field either... I would be far more impressed if they could design a chess-playing computer that only considers a few hundred board combinations and still plays at a grandmaster level, since that is all that even the best human grandmasters do.
This is wrong. Human grandmasters enter the game with a pre-pruned tree. They've already discarded all of the obviously wrong board positions by applying their experience. So while they may only consciously consider a few hundred board positions it is not because they are not capable of considering more, it's because they have already discarded those board positions as very low percentage. Deep blue had to consider all of the board positions available for each move because it did not have "experience" to eliminate obviously bad board positions prior to consideration. So if you pre-pruned the computers tree to eliminate the 90% of the board positions that were obviously wrong then you could conceivably have a computer which only considered a few hundred positions for each move, but it would be considering the few hundred board percentages with the highest chance of resulting in victory. If it was locked into that pre-pruned tree you could then beat it by leading it into a nonstandard board position for which it did not have options. This is one of the ways you can currently beat most GO programs.
However if you allowed it to access the pruned options if a board position didn't match one of the higher percentage ones, much like a human player considering a novel board position by reviewing ones they have previously dismissed, then you have the same result. A chess playing robot that plays just like a human with a prodigious memory.
Anyone that buys a gun and then fails to get the proper training with it deserves to be shot with their own firearm.
You created a situation where your hypothetical average person is doomed to failure. You've already decided that they failed to get the proper training with the weapon they are carrying.
Black belts in what? Fandancing and Water Aerobics? Inquiring minds want to know, since you're using that as an appeal to your own authority. I wouldn't mind some kind of proof that you've ever been anywhere near a combat zone, much less served in the armed forces in any capacity as well if you're going to try to use that as a platform to attack the idea of concealed carry.
Personally I would rather be carrying the firearm than not. If I'm not in a situation where I can use it, and I give up my wallet, and I just have to go by the DMV and get a new license and whatnot, then so be it. But if the situation arises where me having a firearm would make a difference, then I have one.
Oh, and I've got a blackbelt in something useless too... So, y'know.
You do not need to charge your damned car at work. Nor necessarily at home either. If you have a 300+ mile capacity and there are filling stations that can fill the damn thing up in 6 minutes then you drive the damn car around just like it had a gasoline engine and when the charge gets down around the 10% level you stop at the damn charging station and fill it up.
Why is everyone obsessed with the idea that they need to charge their car at home and at work and at the mall? Within the next couple of years regular gas stations will start having one or two electric "pumps" just like they have one or two diesel pumps. Then maybe you'll all STFU about charging your fucking car at the office.
Unfortunately most users learn by memorizing a series of mouse movements and button clicks. So the time and expense of retraining them to memorize a whole new series of button clicks for things is stupidly high. The slightest change in routine can completely derail most users and turn them into gibbering, panicked lunatics.
I have an empathy disorder. I simply can't empathize with people. I don't even really understand what empathy means. When someone tells me about how shit their life is I immediately start outlining ways they could fix the crap that is wrong. A lot of people get upset by this and I don't ever understand why. It's lead to a policy whereby I just don't listen to peoples whining. I've told more than one person, "I'm a problem solver, not a priest. If you want to tell your problems to someone who can't help you go to confession.". I generally stop associating with someone if they complain about something to me, refuse to follow my advice on the issue, then complain about it a second time. Apparently this is not empathetic. What I want to know, is why the fuck anyone wants to tell all of their problems to someone and then not get any help? If I'm going to tell you that X is wrong, then I expect you to offer a solution. Not just go "Yes, that sucks. You are right." I don't need a second person for that shit.
I grew up with loaded guns all over the house. I don't think I was ever more than 20 feet away from a loaded firearm as a child. I also had a bunch of toy guns of my own. But I knew which guns were mine and which ones were my dads.
However, a 3 year old may not be able to make that distinction yet, and so should not be running around un-supervised around loaded guns. I absolutely agree there. The solution is not to change the way that the guns are handled, it's to change the way the kid is supervised. Letting your 3 year old run around unsupervised is negligent. Doing so with a loaded gun within reaching distance of the kid is criminally negligent.
I would suggest that any other children be removed from the home and the parent at the very LEAST be sentenced to some parenting classes, and some gun safety classes, and some community service. I don't believe jail time would be an effective method of dealing with this issue though. It doesn't do anything to educate him, and he's unlikely to be sprinkling guns around random places so he's not a threat to the public.
One of the underpinnings of a free market is an informed population. Being informed is the first step. The second free market issue here is that government regulation is what allows Monsanto to strong arm all of the other farmers and dominate the market. In a free market system of informed consumers the situation should end up with multiple companies genetically modifying the corn which is used in the market and competing to sell it to the companies which process it. If people demand a safer genetically modified corn, they will get it. If they demand the cheapest possible corn, they'll get that. Those two might not be the same thing though. In a scenario like that there is actually an industry available for people testing and rating genetically modified corn. A company might start that tests the corn of several companies that make it, all of whom pay for the privilege, and then rates them based on various criteria. Consumers could then avoid food which contains products from unrated companies at the very least. The free market DOES have a solution for this kind of thing, but it requires that the government not protect large companies and in fact actively work to make their business transparent to the people.
Are you serious? This is what you're bringing to the table? We already disrupt local economies and destroy the livelihoods of local farmers with the amount of food relief we drop into areas. The US spends more money on foreign aid than any other developed nation. We POUR food into the third world and their fucked up governments let the civilians starve while they feed their military and trade the food to other warlords for guns.
So take that bullshit and try to sell it elsewhere jackass.
We see this in our clients relatively frequently. Primarily because small to medium sized businesses are some how allergic to backups. No matter how hard we push for them to actually spend money on a backup system that is appropriate to the size of their business a lot of them end up cheaping out on either no backup, or a backup that isn't the right fit for them. The resulting failure a year or two down the line can cost then a huge piece of their annual revenue.
Other places we see this are when clients try to put their own (Windows) servers in and screw something up that requires the OS to be reinstalled to undo. In my experience a lot of these "IT Failures" are actually management/client/accounting failures that happen to overlap the IT spectrum. If you can't get the proper budget to do your job, that's an accounting failure that shows up in your area. If management refuses to abide by their own usage guidelines on the network and constantly are passing around infected files that's going to increase your infection rate. And if a client adamantly refuses to change their tapes then when they have a flood in their server room and it gets toasted that's going to translate into longer recovery times, longer down time, and lost revenue.
It makes me think that FOSS doesn't pay as well as proprietary development and so attracts a larger "hobbyist" crowd that women are not as often hobbyist programmers as men. Quite likely due to the whole introverted programmer nerd paradigm being so firmly entrenched in the masculine gender. You will rarely find women who were totally unable to form solid social bonds with their peers in their teenage yeers.
I would be willing to bet that.1% of most cake does consist of rodent and insect feces. So, nothing is wrong with my cake, it's got the same amount of shit in it as everyone elses cake.
Why would I apologize for something that someone else has done? It wasn't my idea, I didn't encourage them to do it, nor was I aware of their intentions beforehand. So what do I have to apologize for? I had nothing to do with the situation. Should I also be roaming the streets apologizing randomly to people for things which may have been done to them by other people with whom I am not associated?
Now, to get to the real point of this response: Life is -ist. It's Racist, it's Sexist, it's Ageist. Wherever there is a group of people with similar traits they will make jokes about groups that don't share those traits. As one of the technology elites have you never made a joke about someones lack of technical competence? Equality includes the right to be ridiculed equally. Amongst my rather diverse circle of friends which includes folk of both genders, various ethnicity's and assorted sexual preferences jokes regarding sexuality, ethnicity, gender, genealogy, personal grooming habits, etc... etc... are standard fare. When a new person is introduced to the group that person doesn't get special treatment. They receive their fair measure of harassment. It's part of our cohesion as a group.
So far no one has been able to show that any kind of sexist behavior is systemic within the community, so what we really have are a select few incidents which are being latched onto as representative of the community when they manifestly are not.
As for western culture and sexist jokes, all cultures have gender derogatory jokes regarding both sexes. Western culture is no exception. There are entire libraries of jokes about how incompetent men are as well as women. There are legions of jokes about sex which show both men and women in the role of the buffoon.
There are indeed real issues of sexism alive in the world, this is not one of them.
When I did crossfit I actually found that the WotD almost always required either somewhere you could run a good distance, or free weights to be available in some for or other. I actually found it to be MORE equipment intensive than something like Starting Strength or HIIT based body weight exercises.. I liked it, but eventually had to quit because I didn't have enough equipment to really do it properly.
Slashdot Mirror
This version is still collaborative storytelling, you're just telling a really shittily written story.
Role Playing Games are really just a framework of rules that you all agree to in order to tell a story. One person takes on the role of Narrator (The DM) and the others take on the roles of main characters in the story. It doesn't have to be a fantasy based story, it could be anything. But the joy is in taking an initial vision and writing the story together as you all experience it. It's just a more interactive version of reading your favorite book. Almost everyone that enjoys some kind of media has wished at one time or another that they could be part of the story they are watching. Role playing games are a way to make that desire a little more real.
The USADA doesn't actually have the authority to strip Lance Armstrong of anything. The UCI is the only organization which can strip his titles from him and according to them the USADA hasn't even come close to meeting the burden of proof they require. So this is all just a giant smoke and mirrors act by the USADA. Armstrong has stopped fighting them because their accusations are irrelevant to him.
Everyone of us has trace amounts of cocain, explosive residue, and infectious biological agents all over us. This thing should trigger on every person that walks into the airport.
How about the fact that getting a Windows phone to work with an exchange server is slightly more painful than shooting yourself in the dick?
A small business that is using a self signed certificate might as well cross all windows phones off of their purchasing options forever. And don't tell me, "Oh they should just get a real certificate." because YOU don't get to make that call and neither do I. The client does and they say no.
iPhone? No Problem. Android? No Problem. Windows Phone? Export certificate from site, email it to yahoo or gmail account FROM a yahoo or gmail account because outlook/exchange refuses to allow you to mail a cert, then import it, reboot the phone, and HOPE that it works. I just got finished dealing with one that didn't work. We renewed the cert, and now the thing is just shitboxed. Can't get it to accept the new cert at all.
How the fuck hard is it to add a "Accept this certificate anyways?" option...
Assume 1 earthlike planet per galaxy, and say.... 1/1000 of those earthlike planets have life on them. And 1/1000 of those have intelligent life on par with humans. That's still a WHOLE LOT of intelligent life.
I've gotten more entertainment out of Master of Orion II than any other game I've purchased. Close behind is Diablo II. Neither of those games have INSANE graphics (MOO2 for sure doesn't) but both have a lot of replayable fun. I think I paid 29$ for each of them, and I've purchased them both more than once because I lost the discs and boxes and whatnot and just bought them again.
If someone released MOO2 for my iPhone for 5$ I would buy it in a heartbeat.
If someone released the old Monkey Island games on the iPhone for 5$ apiece there would be a good chance I would buy those too. To me the best market for games on the mobile devices is old school games. You could re-release a bunch of nintendo, super nintendo, or playstation 1 game on a smartphone and make bank. Final Fantasy 3 on my iPhone? Hell yeah.
I don't let random employees set up machines on the network and then allow outside access to them. I would want root access and a full rundown on what you were running on the system and who would have access.
They are being completely reasonable by requesting a non-root account.
Epic SCIENCE you noob.
"Oh shit, if that number is wrong then this planet is in a whole different place! Let's check! IT IS! HUZZAH! We know more today than we did yesterday!"
That's science. And you suck.
No this is the exact opposite of what we actually need. Higher birthrates lead to population pressure, which leads to expansion, which leads to things like space exploration and colonization. Humanity evolves through conflict, we're pretty much past the point of REALLY fighting with each other in a way that threatens the existence of humanity, so the only conflict left is the conflict for resources. We need to ramp that conflict up enough to make it profitable and desirable for people to pursue resources on other planets. That will drive technology and innovation, and continue to improve the average quality of life.
We need to spread out like locusts, ravaging everything before us, and the sooner the better.
Of course, I don't think that Deep Blue really out-played Kasparov on a level playing field either... I would be far more impressed if they could design a chess-playing computer that only considers a few hundred board combinations and still plays at a grandmaster level, since that is all that even the best human grandmasters do.
This is wrong. Human grandmasters enter the game with a pre-pruned tree. They've already discarded all of the obviously wrong board positions by applying their experience. So while they may only consciously consider a few hundred board positions it is not because they are not capable of considering more, it's because they have already discarded those board positions as very low percentage. Deep blue had to consider all of the board positions available for each move because it did not have "experience" to eliminate obviously bad board positions prior to consideration. So if you pre-pruned the computers tree to eliminate the 90% of the board positions that were obviously wrong then you could conceivably have a computer which only considered a few hundred positions for each move, but it would be considering the few hundred board percentages with the highest chance of resulting in victory. If it was locked into that pre-pruned tree you could then beat it by leading it into a nonstandard board position for which it did not have options. This is one of the ways you can currently beat most GO programs.
However if you allowed it to access the pruned options if a board position didn't match one of the higher percentage ones, much like a human player considering a novel board position by reviewing ones they have previously dismissed, then you have the same result. A chess playing robot that plays just like a human with a prodigious memory.
It took me less time to find that iFixit already sold a Pentalobular screw driver kit and write a post about it than it did for you guys to bitch about the change in screws: Solution is here for those that can't be bothered using google ---> http://www.techemperor.com/how-to-remove-a-pentalobular-screw-from-your-iphone-4/
Enjoy.
Anyone that buys a gun and then fails to get the proper training with it deserves to be shot with their own firearm.
You created a situation where your hypothetical average person is doomed to failure. You've already decided that they failed to get the proper training with the weapon they are carrying.
Black belts in what? Fandancing and Water Aerobics?
Inquiring minds want to know, since you're using that as an appeal to your own authority.
I wouldn't mind some kind of proof that you've ever been anywhere near a combat zone, much less served in the armed forces in any capacity as well if you're going to try to use that as a platform to attack the idea of concealed carry.
Personally I would rather be carrying the firearm than not. If I'm not in a situation where I can use it, and I give up my wallet, and I just have to go by the DMV and get a new license and whatnot, then so be it. But if the situation arises where me having a firearm would make a difference, then I have one.
Oh, and I've got a blackbelt in something useless too... So, y'know.
You do not need to charge your damned car at work. Nor necessarily at home either. If you have a 300+ mile capacity and there are filling stations that can fill the damn thing up in 6 minutes then you drive the damn car around just like it had a gasoline engine and when the charge gets down around the 10% level you stop at the damn charging station and fill it up.
Why is everyone obsessed with the idea that they need to charge their car at home and at work and at the mall? Within the next couple of years regular gas stations will start having one or two electric "pumps" just like they have one or two diesel pumps. Then maybe you'll all STFU about charging your fucking car at the office.
Unfortunately most users learn by memorizing a series of mouse movements and button clicks. So the time and expense of retraining them to memorize a whole new series of button clicks for things is stupidly high. The slightest change in routine can completely derail most users and turn them into gibbering, panicked lunatics.
I have an empathy disorder. I simply can't empathize with people. I don't even really understand what empathy means. When someone tells me about how shit their life is I immediately start outlining ways they could fix the crap that is wrong. A lot of people get upset by this and I don't ever understand why. It's lead to a policy whereby I just don't listen to peoples whining. I've told more than one person, "I'm a problem solver, not a priest. If you want to tell your problems to someone who can't help you go to confession.". I generally stop associating with someone if they complain about something to me, refuse to follow my advice on the issue, then complain about it a second time. Apparently this is not empathetic.
What I want to know, is why the fuck anyone wants to tell all of their problems to someone and then not get any help? If I'm going to tell you that X is wrong, then I expect you to offer a solution. Not just go "Yes, that sucks. You are right." I don't need a second person for that shit.
I grew up with loaded guns all over the house. I don't think I was ever more than 20 feet away from a loaded firearm as a child. I also had a bunch of toy guns of my own. But I knew which guns were mine and which ones were my dads.
However, a 3 year old may not be able to make that distinction yet, and so should not be running around un-supervised around loaded guns. I absolutely agree there. The solution is not to change the way that the guns are handled, it's to change the way the kid is supervised. Letting your 3 year old run around unsupervised is negligent. Doing so with a loaded gun within reaching distance of the kid is criminally negligent.
I would suggest that any other children be removed from the home and the parent at the very LEAST be sentenced to some parenting classes, and some gun safety classes, and some community service. I don't believe jail time would be an effective method of dealing with this issue though. It doesn't do anything to educate him, and he's unlikely to be sprinkling guns around random places so he's not a threat to the public.
One of the underpinnings of a free market is an informed population. Being informed is the first step.
The second free market issue here is that government regulation is what allows Monsanto to strong arm all of the other farmers and dominate the market.
In a free market system of informed consumers the situation should end up with multiple companies genetically modifying the corn which is used in the market and competing to sell it to the companies which process it. If people demand a safer genetically modified corn, they will get it. If they demand the cheapest possible corn, they'll get that. Those two might not be the same thing though.
In a scenario like that there is actually an industry available for people testing and rating genetically modified corn. A company might start that tests the corn of several companies that make it, all of whom pay for the privilege, and then rates them based on various criteria. Consumers could then avoid food which contains products from unrated companies at the very least.
The free market DOES have a solution for this kind of thing, but it requires that the government not protect large companies and in fact actively work to make their business transparent to the people.
Are you serious? This is what you're bringing to the table? We already disrupt local economies and destroy the livelihoods of local farmers with the amount of food relief we drop into areas. The US spends more money on foreign aid than any other developed nation. We POUR food into the third world and their fucked up governments let the civilians starve while they feed their military and trade the food to other warlords for guns.
So take that bullshit and try to sell it elsewhere jackass.
We see this in our clients relatively frequently. Primarily because small to medium sized businesses are some how allergic to backups. No matter how hard we push for them to actually spend money on a backup system that is appropriate to the size of their business a lot of them end up cheaping out on either no backup, or a backup that isn't the right fit for them.
The resulting failure a year or two down the line can cost then a huge piece of their annual revenue.
Other places we see this are when clients try to put their own (Windows) servers in and screw something up that requires the OS to be reinstalled to undo.
In my experience a lot of these "IT Failures" are actually management/client/accounting failures that happen to overlap the IT spectrum. If you can't get the proper budget to do your job, that's an accounting failure that shows up in your area. If management refuses to abide by their own usage guidelines on the network and constantly are passing around infected files that's going to increase your infection rate. And if a client adamantly refuses to change their tapes then when they have a flood in their server room and it gets toasted that's going to translate into longer recovery times, longer down time, and lost revenue.
It makes me think that FOSS doesn't pay as well as proprietary development and so attracts a larger "hobbyist" crowd that women are not as often hobbyist programmers as men. Quite likely due to the whole introverted programmer nerd paradigm being so firmly entrenched in the masculine gender.
You will rarely find women who were totally unable to form solid social bonds with their peers in their teenage yeers.
I would be willing to bet that .1% of most cake does consist of rodent and insect feces.
So, nothing is wrong with my cake, it's got the same amount of shit in it as everyone elses cake.
Why would I apologize for something that someone else has done? It wasn't my idea, I didn't encourage them to do it, nor was I aware of their intentions beforehand. So what do I have to apologize for? I had nothing to do with the situation.
Should I also be roaming the streets apologizing randomly to people for things which may have been done to them by other people with whom I am not associated?
Now, to get to the real point of this response: Life is -ist. It's Racist, it's Sexist, it's Ageist. Wherever there is a group of people with similar traits they will make jokes about groups that don't share those traits. As one of the technology elites have you never made a joke about someones lack of technical competence? Equality includes the right to be ridiculed equally. Amongst my rather diverse circle of friends which includes folk of both genders, various ethnicity's and assorted sexual preferences jokes regarding sexuality, ethnicity, gender, genealogy, personal grooming habits, etc... etc... are standard fare. When a new person is introduced to the group that person doesn't get special treatment. They receive their fair measure of harassment. It's part of our cohesion as a group.
So far no one has been able to show that any kind of sexist behavior is systemic within the community, so what we really have are a select few incidents which are being latched onto as representative of the community when they manifestly are not.
As for western culture and sexist jokes, all cultures have gender derogatory jokes regarding both sexes. Western culture is no exception. There are entire libraries of jokes about how incompetent men are as well as women. There are legions of jokes about sex which show both men and women in the role of the buffoon.
There are indeed real issues of sexism alive in the world, this is not one of them.
When I did crossfit I actually found that the WotD almost always required either somewhere you could run a good distance, or free weights to be available in some for or other. I actually found it to be MORE equipment intensive than something like Starting Strength or HIIT based body weight exercises..
I liked it, but eventually had to quit because I didn't have enough equipment to really do it properly.