The same people on this forum who would criticize MS for not patching AND not removing WMF support, probably wish that Windows XP had better support for the old early-mid 90's DOS games.
This particular example is not too good; old DOS games work perfectly fine in an x86 emulator like Dosbox.
Even if you were just a "consumer" of it and didn't produce it yourself, you'd still be supporting those who are commiting sexual crimes against children.
In reality, today's pedophiles don't buy child pornography, they download it for free over the internet. Does that still amount to "supporting" those who committed the crimes?
The case for criminalizing simple viewing of child pornography is much weaker than the case for banning its distribution. It amounts to putting someone to jail purely for being a pedophile, not for having actually hurt any children. Simply having a certain sexual orientation doesn't seem like a valid reason to be put in jail, no matter how heinous that orientation might be. (Perhaps it's a valid rationale for being put in a mental hospital, but not a jail.)
Even if we were absolutely sure that there is no such thing as a pedophile who is able to keep his desires under control and that every pedophile will actually molest a child in the future, arresting him as a preventative measure still amounts to Minority Report-style Future Crimes Police. Most people, after seeing that movie, felt convinced that such a thing is not acceptable from a civil rights point of view. Why then is nobody uneasy at our draconian child pornography laws?
Honestly, anyone who does any of that stuff is beyond advice anyway.
I only disagree with your GPA comment. One of my friends wrote his (very high) GPA on his CV, and not only was he hired, he mentioned that he saw a copy of his CV on his interviewer's desk with the GPA circled in red. Of course if your GPA is middling, then don't write it.
Fine, then go back to getting your information from TV or Joe Blow's Random Website instead of Wikipedia and we'll see if you come out ahead. Look, no one's arguing that Wikipedia is as accurate as a scholarly tome or paper encyclopedia, but I don't have time or money to go to the library or buy a book if I'm suddenly hit by curiosity to learn a little about (say) the culture of Nepal, and neither do you I imagine. If you compare Wikipedia to other sources which are equally cheap and convenient, its accuracy is actually quite good.
Also, people tend to judge Wikipedia by its worst class of articles (those on politics). But if you look at Wikipedia's science articles, they tend to be highly accurate (and the recent Nature analysis bears this out). In my areas of expertise (mathematics and computer science), I rarely see any serious errors on Wikipedia. I imagine this is because nonexperts tend not to dare to edit them, and because there is little controversy.
As for development environments, so far I've _hated_ everything to do with visual * -- it seems to be a monster to use, to customize, and to work with efficiently, at least for this old Unix hack.
You have a point, but I don't know of any better C/C++ debugger than Microsoft's. gdb at least is a total pain compared to it. I always end up coming back to it for that reason.
Hm. My only contact with VB.NET is skimming through a book for beginners about it, and I came away with the impression that it was the same as C#. Care to enlighten me as to the major semantic differences?
The majority of modern marketing is nothing more than an arms race to get mind share. Everybody loses except the parasitic marketing "industry".
Yeah, everyone loses except the marketing parasites and, er, the millions of commercial newspapers, magazines and websites that depend on advertising revenue to survive.
On/. a classic is "I like linux but..." and then proceed to trash any viewpoint except the one they're paid to push.
So according to you, people are paid like 20$/hour salaries to post on slashdot. Hey, that sounds a lot like my job!
Yeah, the different Chinese languages are "dialects" of each other like Spanish is a dialect of French. The only reason many Chinese like to call them "dialects" is the nationalist "One China" propaganda.
There's no perfect mousing position; moving your mouse naturally implies putting stress on some muscles. But the position you're suggesting is particularly bad since your hand becomes bent upwards (as well as rotated to face downwards, which is a problem with any position using a horizontal mouse). That puts a lot of stress on the small muscles on the back of your forearm, and the stress continues even if you're not even moving the mouse but just resting your hand on it. Vertical mice shift the pressure to your stronger upper arm (not the shoulder), which are less liable to become strained, and the stress stops almost completely if you're not moving the mouse. I have a 3M ergonomic mouse and I'm quite happy with it.
All this said, getting a better mouse is only a small part of RSI prevention/treatment, since the biggest problems typically arise in the upper back.
I mean that if you only talk about random topics and never about yourselves, you don't learn to know each other and you're not really friends. You're only coworkers/RPG-partners/whatever.
You're right. After posting I thought I should've added a note to that effect. I was speaking about people who are obsessive about those things, not those who just casually enjoy them now and then.
You're making the old fallacy of making a binary division between the world of "geeks" and "normal people". I don't have much respect for shallow people who are unable to discuss abstract topics either, but you can be intellectual without having no social skills. A balanced conversation between friends is one that includes both abstract topics and personal life: if you're completely unable to discuss one or the other, you have a problem.
Bingo. Dorks like tabletop roleplaying for the same reason they like to read pulp science fiction/fantasy, read comic books or watch harem anime: not because they're more "creative" or whatever but because they want to escape into a pleasant fantasy land. They avoid reading mainstream literature, which is too concerned with reality for comfort. (Note: I don't mean this as a putdown of all SF/F, comic books and anime, just most of them.)
This is blindingly obvious to everyone except themselves; like the story submitter, they tend to make up all sorts of more palatable justifications for why they like their hobby. It's all pretty sad really. Social anxiety problems can be largely resolved given practice, so the sooner they stop the self-denial and start becoming adults, the better.
It's not just Wikipedia: a lot of the good things in the world come from really base motives. Take Nobel-prize-winning scientists: do you think they achieved what they did out of love of knowledge or a desire to improve society? Well, some of them. But it's an open secret that ambitious scientists are mainly driven by pure egotism. They have a selfish desire to show they're superior to others and make their name famous in their field. That's been true from Newton onwards.
So the most prolific Wikipedia editors are egotistic, anally retentive nerds indulging in their trivia obsession. Well hurray for egotism and anality, I say. Wikipedia would fall apart without such people to obsessively scan the recent changes list.
The "tolerance" of the right is just another myth like their support of states rights, their love of small government, their ability to be fiscally capable,
These aren't so much myths as reflections of deep divisions within the "right". Traditional conservatives care about this stuff, the new breeds of religious/foreign policy conservatives could care less. Bush is definitely in the latter.
Actually, the most outrageous passage in that essay, which you seem to have missed, is this:
The dark secret of homosexual society - the one that dares not speak its name - is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
Someone with this belief is pretty much the definition of a homophobe. It seems that Card believes being homosexually raped somehow involuntarily changes your sexual orientation, or begins some kind of drug-like addiction one is powerless to escape. Or perhaps he means that homosexuals are some kind of evil cabal that somehow keeps people trapped in their community. Whatever it is, this passage reveals Card's view of homosexuality to be completely detached from reality.
The rest of the article, as you point out, is a bunch of strictly speaking correct but irrelevant technicalities. Less objectionable I suppose, but the only reason one would want to raise them in the first place is because one is a homophobe --- it's similar to Neo-nazis raising minor technical quibbles about the Holocaust, without necessarily explicitly revealing their racist agenda.
Meh. It's hardly delusional to believe that adults are generally emotionally/intellectually stronger than children, the main readers of this book. (Actually, if you believe the opposite then that's a delusion --- indeed precisely one of the delusions fostered by Ender's Game.)
The best propagandists have always understood that the best way to sell your bogus message is to wrap it in a glorified, emotionally powerful tale of heroism and tragedy. And Card understands perfectly well that he's doing this --- go read his quote at the beginning of the Kessel article again.
Slashdot Mirror
Er? This sounds like it requires almost exactly the same number of keystrokes as adding/removing indentation.
Er, why do you care whether the joke is attributed to "hashmap" or "funkster at midwinter.com"?
WTF are REXX, CLIST and WFL? Well, at least I'm not the only one who's never heard of them.
This particular example is not too good; old DOS games work perfectly fine in an x86 emulator like Dosbox.
In reality, today's pedophiles don't buy child pornography, they download it for free over the internet. Does that still amount to "supporting" those who committed the crimes?
The case for criminalizing simple viewing of child pornography is much weaker than the case for banning its distribution. It amounts to putting someone to jail purely for being a pedophile, not for having actually hurt any children. Simply having a certain sexual orientation doesn't seem like a valid reason to be put in jail, no matter how heinous that orientation might be. (Perhaps it's a valid rationale for being put in a mental hospital, but not a jail.)
Even if we were absolutely sure that there is no such thing as a pedophile who is able to keep his desires under control and that every pedophile will actually molest a child in the future, arresting him as a preventative measure still amounts to Minority Report-style Future Crimes Police. Most people, after seeing that movie, felt convinced that such a thing is not acceptable from a civil rights point of view. Why then is nobody uneasy at our draconian child pornography laws?
I only disagree with your GPA comment. One of my friends wrote his (very high) GPA on his CV, and not only was he hired, he mentioned that he saw a copy of his CV on his interviewer's desk with the GPA circled in red. Of course if your GPA is middling, then don't write it.
Also, people tend to judge Wikipedia by its worst class of articles (those on politics). But if you look at Wikipedia's science articles, they tend to be highly accurate (and the recent Nature analysis bears this out). In my areas of expertise (mathematics and computer science), I rarely see any serious errors on Wikipedia. I imagine this is because nonexperts tend not to dare to edit them, and because there is little controversy.
Right, and why would we need to? We can just ask the Supreme Court!
You have a point, but I don't know of any better C/C++ debugger than Microsoft's. gdb at least is a total pain compared to it. I always end up coming back to it for that reason.
The original PoP was cake. I could beat it in 22 minutes without dying once. Now PoP2, that's another cup of tea.
That's a pearl. Also, most people, I think, don't even know what multiple sclerosis is, so why should they care if they have it?
Hm. My only contact with VB.NET is skimming through a book for beginners about it, and I came away with the impression that it was the same as C#. Care to enlighten me as to the major semantic differences?
You'd be right if this was VB6, but VB.NET is basically C# with different syntax. There's no reason why you couldn't learn proper programming with it.
Or people involved with emulation, virtualization or software reverse engineering (e.g. unofficial videogame translations).
Yeah, everyone loses except the marketing parasites and, er, the millions of commercial newspapers, magazines and websites that depend on advertising revenue to survive.
On /. a classic is "I like linux but ..." and then proceed to trash any viewpoint except the one they're paid to push.
So according to you, people are paid like 20$/hour salaries to post on slashdot. Hey, that sounds a lot like my job!
Yeah, the different Chinese languages are "dialects" of each other like Spanish is a dialect of French. The only reason many Chinese like to call them "dialects" is the nationalist "One China" propaganda.
All this said, getting a better mouse is only a small part of RSI prevention/treatment, since the biggest problems typically arise in the upper back.
I mean that if you only talk about random topics and never about yourselves, you don't learn to know each other and you're not really friends. You're only coworkers/RPG-partners/whatever.
You're right. After posting I thought I should've added a note to that effect. I was speaking about people who are obsessive about those things, not those who just casually enjoy them now and then.
You're making the old fallacy of making a binary division between the world of "geeks" and "normal people". I don't have much respect for shallow people who are unable to discuss abstract topics either, but you can be intellectual without having no social skills. A balanced conversation between friends is one that includes both abstract topics and personal life: if you're completely unable to discuss one or the other, you have a problem.
This is blindingly obvious to everyone except themselves; like the story submitter, they tend to make up all sorts of more palatable justifications for why they like their hobby. It's all pretty sad really. Social anxiety problems can be largely resolved given practice, so the sooner they stop the self-denial and start becoming adults, the better.
So the most prolific Wikipedia editors are egotistic, anally retentive nerds indulging in their trivia obsession. Well hurray for egotism and anality, I say. Wikipedia would fall apart without such people to obsessively scan the recent changes list.
These aren't so much myths as reflections of deep divisions within the "right". Traditional conservatives care about this stuff, the new breeds of religious/foreign policy conservatives could care less. Bush is definitely in the latter.
The dark secret of homosexual society - the one that dares not speak its name - is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
Someone with this belief is pretty much the definition of a homophobe. It seems that Card believes being homosexually raped somehow involuntarily changes your sexual orientation, or begins some kind of drug-like addiction one is powerless to escape. Or perhaps he means that homosexuals are some kind of evil cabal that somehow keeps people trapped in their community. Whatever it is, this passage reveals Card's view of homosexuality to be completely detached from reality.
The rest of the article, as you point out, is a bunch of strictly speaking correct but irrelevant technicalities. Less objectionable I suppose, but the only reason one would want to raise them in the first place is because one is a homophobe --- it's similar to Neo-nazis raising minor technical quibbles about the Holocaust, without necessarily explicitly revealing their racist agenda.
The best propagandists have always understood that the best way to sell your bogus message is to wrap it in a glorified, emotionally powerful tale of heroism and tragedy. And Card understands perfectly well that he's doing this --- go read his quote at the beginning of the Kessel article again.