I have to wonder who's pushing for this. Taxing gas gives people an incentive to be gentle on the environment and less needful of an economic entanglement that hasn't been harmonious. Taxing distance is almost like the same thing except fuel efficiency becomes irrelevant.
I think you're judging the man too harshly. From what I recall, he wasn't credulous -- "I'm not reading this bullshit." If he was merely a passive tool Cheney wouldn't have poked him in the chest while telling him that he could "afford to lose a few points." There comes a point when the rest of ones team wants to go the other way so badly that saying, "This is a mistake." just sounds like, "I'm a traitor." This administration has been especially apt to hear internal criticism that way to boot.
The first time around he campaigned as an isolationist and made a lot of noise denouncing "nation building", intervention, and anything else that might involve American troops being put in harms way for ideal aims.
So the xorg guys have smaller dicks than the XFree guys. Who knew...
Anyway, this minor flap about the release notes would have a more appropriate dimension if this release were given the minor sounding number it deserves.
Was 4.91 already taken?
I disagree. The bending of light implied by Relativity was not a prophesy or even a "prediction" critically speaking. It was an aspect of the scientific framework Einstein proposed that could be true or false. When verification became possible Relativity remained unfalsified.
As for the book of Daniel, its date of origin varies by 400 years. One can argue for the earlier date and call him a successful prophet or the latter date and call him a successful practitioner of vaticinium ex eventu.
I can understand why C would seem vulnerable to criticism in respect to ambiguous type sizes, but hindsight is 20/20, types larger than a byte relate to the machine architecture by design, and stdint.h (or homegrown alternatives) provide discrete specification. "C" is called a "portable assembler" because it cuts right to the bone and deals with what von Neumann architecture machines do. Other languages aren't more portable. They've just done the porting for you.
In any event your argument fizzled into Candyland when you brought GTK+ et al into it. Speech synthesizers would do nothing to the relevance of any language you might trumpet as more modern.
Hmmm, you've made a good point. Moreover, I'm gratified to find my vulgar language hasn't inspired vulgar recrimination (thankyou). Expressing my counter-point obscenely made twisted sense to my twisted soul. Then again I may or may not have been inebriated at the time. I can neither confirm nor deny that sir.
Is it really such a big deal to have games metered in some way so long as they aren't outright censored or banned? We do this with driving, drinking, gambling, voting, etc... I don't mind that 12 year olds aren't allowed drive. I prefer bars that aren't full of 23 year olds let alone teenagers. If there really is a political threat to Enemy Territory Quake Wars, for example, why must the defense be calling it art? There are playing cards with thoughtful athetic designs. I feel no need to call poker anything more than a game.
For the record, I do find artistic merit in some of the video games I've played. The ambient sound in Medal of Honor deserves kudos. There was something a touch magical and Disneyesque to the dying skeletons in Return to Castle Wolfenstein (the musical cues in the single player game were emotionally effective too). Some of the maps in Call of Duty 2 had a kind of oblique harmony and balance.
But we have to ask what the intention is when a game is made. Either it's something beautiful that the public incidentally wants to play or it's something fun that had room for athetic craftsmanship. The line drawn there can be fluid and debatable, but the conventional wisdom here seems frozen on one pole of the issue as if the matter were settled. Is there an offended rebuttal to Ebert from John Carmack or Splash Damage?
Then again most of the posts on this topic are whinging about how Ebert doesn't understand real games. Why the obsession with Eberts opinion? Who has set out to make a work of art, but then decided to call the end result a game for marketing reasons?
I think you're overstating the case when you slam his documentation. I've found some of it to be so clearly expressed that it seems obvious he is a teacher. The problem with it is that it lives on his server in html format.
DJB's software is held up only by his licensing. Gerrit Pape's runit is a clone of daemontools with some added functionality. It's packaged in Debian and FreeBSD because it's GPL, not because daemontools is deficient in some way.
It's a shame Bernstein is such a polarizing figure. His disciples and detractors can be equally annoying and the noise buries a worthy signal.
Since yours is the first highly modded post in this discussion that doesn't seem like bullshit to me I'll interject my question here: Why is everyone so hell bent on calling video games art?
"Stating that games cannot be high art, and backing up this assertion by giving examples of games that aren't (anecdotal evidence) is logically flawed."
True but he didn't do that at all. He talked about what games are.
Kyle Gann tried contributing to the article on Minimalism only to abandon his effort in the face of futility. The guy is an esteemed and established composer and critic.
Wikipedia can have great value when it's a first stop. But now that it invades half of my trips to google.com I can't help but resent its borg-like other half. It seems to be spidering across the internet like a turbo-charged DMOZ that thinks it's more destination than launch-pad.
"...non-power brokers like me have no defacto say...
Every/. story about the RIAA involves a conflict between principals dejure and the defacto state of affairs.
"Five years is plenty fair IMHO for getting paid for (in some cases a few hours worth of work), over and over again for the rest of one's life."
James MacNeil Whistler sued John Ruskin for libel. On the stand Whistler was asked how he could ask for two hundred pounds for two days work. He responded that he was charging for knowledge "gained in the work of a lifetime." Among musicians that don't appreciate his work, Handel will still remain immortal for writting The Messiah in a mere three weeks. IIRC, Dostoyevsky "knocked off" Notes from the Underground. When you argue that monetary compensation derived from copyright should be tied to hourly measures of time you assume equivalence in the value of work by Beethoven and one by Madonna. Hell, in this day and age, a fella can make millions by playing a game of basketball. How long does that take, an hour and a half?
I'm very gratified to find a response because this conversation interests me greatly. It's like my own personal Socratic education. Since my last post I've found myself further clarifying my own foggy notions and finding new questions.
With your latest response I see our dialog as being driven from two vantage points. Yours is more scientifically informed and explanitory. Mine is more speculative, muddled, and drives to a point less concerned with empirical truth than how we should look at it.
Your first four paragraphs respond to a literary and rhetorical attempt to express my dissatisfaction with the term "perfect vacuum". I did pretty much understand your use of the term "perfect vacuum". It is a scientifically qualified nothingness. We remove aspects of the universe until there's nothing left -- no matter, no forces, no space, no time. We could just as easily call this the uncosmos or nullverse rather than perfect vacuum. After all, cosmologists are physicists too.
Here's where philosophic queries come into play. The pragmatic difference between the comologists perfect vacuum and the philosophers nothingness is that the former instantaneously spawns a nacent universe so long as the math and theory are correct. It's like a computer with an infinite power supply that always "reboots" by the next clock cycle ("instantaneously"). Such a machine would never be "off" -- uncalculating or non-existant if you will -- for more than zero cycles. Suppose it ran until it tried to divide by zero. Well, it's up and running again. All previous results are lost and can't be fathomed from it's current "boot". The analogy is pretty gross but it illustrates what I mean by saying the universe didn't come from nothing and simply started. The alternative is a perfect vacuum or nothingness that can, uh, remain in its state of non-existance.
When you say "current universe" you seem to mean "as it is now after the Big Bang", but then you reference the universe in toto to explain a "more perfect" type of "perfect vacuum" that didn't exist "in the universe" because it lacked space too. Apparently, the lack of space is a triffling difference and once it's eliminated it doesn't exist in the universe? I could recharacterize your explication with more confusion but I know what you're saying. Still, even if we might be on the same page we might as well wipe the mud off of it.
"Perfect vacuum" seems a poor choice of terminology and a compromise to get us close to the nihilo in ex nihilo while retaining an accessable imaginability. Clearly I'm not a comological physicist, but I think we should let "perfect vacuum" refer to what we want inside particle accelerators and find some other name for what came "before" or simply provided for the "cosmic egg" or sigularity. If the universe as it was at time zero is qualifiable then we should turn to something more mathematic and philosophic. Otherwise we end up squabbling over misunderstandable names.
I intuitively took to arguing that there is no such thing as nothingness for the same reason we've both put quotes around the word "before". It makes no sense to ask what came before time zero because there is no "time negative one". As you put it, it's like asking how hot three miles is. Similarly, we shouldn't talk of the universe being created out of nothing. There is simply the universe with its existance which started. It can be no other way just like two plus three can only equal five.
Like negative numbers, nothingness must exist conceptually. However, my pyrex measuring cup can't contain a negative quantity. At best, that means I owe the neighbor some sugar.
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I have to wonder who's pushing for this. Taxing gas gives people an incentive to be gentle on the environment and less needful of an economic entanglement that hasn't been harmonious. Taxing distance is almost like the same thing except fuel efficiency becomes irrelevant.
That could be the character in Hamlet.
I think you're judging the man too harshly. From what I recall, he wasn't credulous -- "I'm not reading this bullshit." If he was merely a passive tool Cheney wouldn't have poked him in the chest while telling him that he could "afford to lose a few points." There comes a point when the rest of ones team wants to go the other way so badly that saying, "This is a mistake." just sounds like, "I'm a traitor." This administration has been especially apt to hear internal criticism that way to boot.
The first time around he campaigned as an isolationist and made a lot of noise denouncing "nation building", intervention, and anything else that might involve American troops being put in harms way for ideal aims.
Anyway, this minor flap about the release notes would have a more appropriate dimension if this release were given the minor sounding number it deserves. Was 4.91 already taken?
Yeah, the distinction is a touch semantic.
As for the book of Daniel, its date of origin varies by 400 years. One can argue for the earlier date and call him a successful prophet or the latter date and call him a successful practitioner of vaticinium ex eventu.
Ahh, good point. I've misread you and agree.
In any event your argument fizzled into Candyland when you brought GTK+ et al into it. Speech synthesizers would do nothing to the relevance of any language you might trumpet as more modern.
Why should we presume to be the youngest celestial children?
Is it really such a big deal to have games metered in some way so long as they aren't outright censored or banned? We do this with driving, drinking, gambling, voting, etc... I don't mind that 12 year olds aren't allowed drive. I prefer bars that aren't full of 23 year olds let alone teenagers. If there really is a political threat to Enemy Territory Quake Wars, for example, why must the defense be calling it art? There are playing cards with thoughtful athetic designs. I feel no need to call poker anything more than a game.
For the record, I do find artistic merit in some of the video games I've played. The ambient sound in Medal of Honor deserves kudos. There was something a touch magical and Disneyesque to the dying skeletons in Return to Castle Wolfenstein (the musical cues in the single player game were emotionally effective too). Some of the maps in Call of Duty 2 had a kind of oblique harmony and balance.
But we have to ask what the intention is when a game is made. Either it's something beautiful that the public incidentally wants to play or it's something fun that had room for athetic craftsmanship. The line drawn there can be fluid and debatable, but the conventional wisdom here seems frozen on one pole of the issue as if the matter were settled. Is there an offended rebuttal to Ebert from John Carmack or Splash Damage?
Name one technically unskilled painter.
Nearly everything isn't art. There's nothing commensurate between my toenail clippings and "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf".
So the fuck what bitch. Porno is obscene too. You wanna athetic wank?
Then again most of the posts on this topic are whinging about how Ebert doesn't understand real games. Why the obsession with Eberts opinion? Who has set out to make a work of art, but then decided to call the end result a game for marketing reasons?
DJB's software is held up only by his licensing. Gerrit Pape's runit is a clone of daemontools with some added functionality. It's packaged in Debian and FreeBSD because it's GPL, not because daemontools is deficient in some way.
It's a shame Bernstein is such a polarizing figure. His disciples and detractors can be equally annoying and the noise buries a worthy signal.
Because no one has published a GPL clone of djbdns?
No, powermacx was talking about checkers. He wants to know if, like tic-tac-toe, checkers is biased towards the first move or the first response.
Since yours is the first highly modded post in this discussion that doesn't seem like bullshit to me I'll interject my question here: Why is everyone so hell bent on calling video games art?
Then there's that old classic tic-tac-toe where you're always a hero -- tragic or victorious.
True but he didn't do that at all. He talked about what games are.
Wikipedia can have great value when it's a first stop. But now that it invades half of my trips to google.com I can't help but resent its borg-like other half. It seems to be spidering across the internet like a turbo-charged DMOZ that thinks it's more destination than launch-pad.
Every /. story about the RIAA involves a conflict between principals dejure and the defacto state of affairs.
"Five years is plenty fair IMHO for getting paid for (in some cases a few hours worth of work), over and over again for the rest of one's life."
James MacNeil Whistler sued John Ruskin for libel. On the stand Whistler was asked how he could ask for two hundred pounds for two days work. He responded that he was charging for knowledge "gained in the work of a lifetime." Among musicians that don't appreciate his work, Handel will still remain immortal for writting The Messiah in a mere three weeks. IIRC, Dostoyevsky "knocked off" Notes from the Underground. When you argue that monetary compensation derived from copyright should be tied to hourly measures of time you assume equivalence in the value of work by Beethoven and one by Madonna. Hell, in this day and age, a fella can make millions by playing a game of basketball. How long does that take, an hour and a half?
With your latest response I see our dialog as being driven from two vantage points. Yours is more scientifically informed and explanitory. Mine is more speculative, muddled, and drives to a point less concerned with empirical truth than how we should look at it.
Your first four paragraphs respond to a literary and rhetorical attempt to express my dissatisfaction with the term "perfect vacuum". I did pretty much understand your use of the term "perfect vacuum". It is a scientifically qualified nothingness. We remove aspects of the universe until there's nothing left -- no matter, no forces, no space, no time. We could just as easily call this the uncosmos or nullverse rather than perfect vacuum. After all, cosmologists are physicists too.
Here's where philosophic queries come into play. The pragmatic difference between the comologists perfect vacuum and the philosophers nothingness is that the former instantaneously spawns a nacent universe so long as the math and theory are correct. It's like a computer with an infinite power supply that always "reboots" by the next clock cycle ("instantaneously"). Such a machine would never be "off" -- uncalculating or non-existant if you will -- for more than zero cycles. Suppose it ran until it tried to divide by zero. Well, it's up and running again. All previous results are lost and can't be fathomed from it's current "boot". The analogy is pretty gross but it illustrates what I mean by saying the universe didn't come from nothing and simply started. The alternative is a perfect vacuum or nothingness that can, uh, remain in its state of non-existance.
"Perfect vacuum" seems a poor choice of terminology and a compromise to get us close to the nihilo in ex nihilo while retaining an accessable imaginability. Clearly I'm not a comological physicist, but I think we should let "perfect vacuum" refer to what we want inside particle accelerators and find some other name for what came "before" or simply provided for the "cosmic egg" or sigularity. If the universe as it was at time zero is qualifiable then we should turn to something more mathematic and philosophic. Otherwise we end up squabbling over misunderstandable names.
I intuitively took to arguing that there is no such thing as nothingness for the same reason we've both put quotes around the word "before". It makes no sense to ask what came before time zero because there is no "time negative one". As you put it, it's like asking how hot three miles is. Similarly, we shouldn't talk of the universe being created out of nothing. There is simply the universe with its existance which started. It can be no other way just like two plus three can only equal five.
Like negative numbers, nothingness must exist conceptually. However, my pyrex measuring cup can't contain a negative quantity. At best, that means I owe the neighbor some sugar.