It has nothing to do with liking to see naked chicks. Sure, I like to see naked chicks too. I don't go install spyware on people's computers for that.
Similarly we all like money, but most of us don't go empty someone's bank account with a keylogger or phishing site. And most of us like sex, but we don't give someone some *ahem* surprise sex. And most of us would like something bad to happen to that guy who was the school bully or to some cruel ex or idiot boss or whatever, but we don't go set their house on fire. Etc.
Reducing it to liking or wanting something is ridiculously simplistic. The question isn't what he wanted, but how he went about that.
And frankly, few things piss me off than the kind of person who's only kept from being a bully or a crook by not having the balls to do it IRL, but who turns into a bully or a crook as soon as there's a couple of routers between him and the victim. I don't have much respect for the former category to start with, but the kind who thinks he's so L33T for hiding behind the screen to do it, ranks even lower for me.
... but I'm hoping soon he'll see "Inbred Cell-Mate Called Bubba Gone Horny And Wild". Since he likes shower scenes, I hope it'll involve picking the soap.
Yes, I know it's not a nice thing to wish someone, but, WTH, the whole point is that I'm not wishing him a nice time.
That's what I don't get either when such a story comes up. Forget even strip clubs, it's not like there isn't an abundance of higher res images on the Internet if he wants to see naked women on his computer. So exactly what is it that makes yet another idiot break the law?
I'm guessing it gives the idiot some kind of feeling of power or something.
If including the casual gamers "throws the numbers", then it throws them to their correct value. If someone plays enough Angry Birds or whatever, they are gamers.
Besides, it's pretty stupid to divide some genres as not really games, as this basically would mean a lot of us who started in the early 80's never actually played a game. Most of the games that were available on a ZX-81 or ZX Spectrum or C-64 or even early IBM PC games, didn't even have the complexity of cell phone games these days.
Heck, the whole video game genre started with games like Pong.
I don't think anyone thought that people playing those are anything but gamers. We didn't think, "ah, well, they can't be Real Gamers, because nobody invented Real Gamer games like first person shooters yet."
Probably not, actually. The median age in the USA is 36.8 years old.
Basically at this point the average gamer is just the average guy. For every guy under 37 that plays video games, there's someone over 37 who also plays video games, AND that's essentially the exact same information you'd get by their ages alone.
Really, gaming has already spread through all age segments. You have preschoolers playing edutainment games, and you even have 80 year old grandmas in WoW raids, and everything in between. (But not everyone admits it. Mom is 30 if you ask her in WoW.)
There isn't really much way for it to go much higher than the median age, unless it actually gets less popular among young 'uns than among senior citizens. I don't think anyone will manage to make gaming unpopular with kids any time soon, so I'd expect that to just follow the median age in the near future.
So most editors let you do CTRL+DOWN to move to the next paragraph and CTRL+UP to move to the previous. Which, for the last and first paragraph on the screen cause just that: scrolling by one paragraph.
I don't have Word on this computer to check (what with it being a Linux computer), but in OpenOffice Writer I just tried it with their article and it works like a charm.
Other programs have similar ways to do that, and/or support outline views for reading by paragraph.
Granted, it's not a universal feature, but, honestly, it just shows how much it's missed by the rest of the world.
Well, I'll even grant that one, but that's more like a GUI design complaint than actually a feature lost to "devolution". All the functions are still there.
I mean, reading that list made me think of some old geezers complaining about how cars in their time had a big ol' crank in front, unlike these wussy cars that kids use these days.
I mean, complex and hard to master scrollbars? Really? That's a thing to miss? Exactly what usability advantage does that have? Exactly how many new users are complaining that scrolling up and down isn't complex enough?
Besides, what's described as totally awesome functionality lost, isn't lost at all. You can still get an outline view in Word or OpenOffice Write or whatever. Even programming IDEs have that. So exactly how the fuck is that a lost feature? The only thing "lost" is that it's no longer done by learning arcane ways to use a scrollbar.
I mean, even the person missing them in TFA starts by basically saying that it was a pain in the butt to learn to use them. So exactly what's lost there, by doing the same thing in an easier way? The whole argument boils down to "it's bad because it's not the exact clicks I learned to use waaay back". Or in other words, "stop the world, I don't want to learn anything new ever again."
Other arguments get fucking stupid.
E.g., on page 3, "Steve Silberberg, software contractor and owner of Fatpacking" misses having a program called "see", which was... a hex editor. I mean, really? He's a software contractor and he doesn't know how to get a hex editor on the Internet? That is a lost feature for him?
Just to make it clear, I'm pretty damned sure that hex editors still exist, since I even made mods for Fallout 3 with a hex editor and made a tutorial for how to do that, waay back in the days before there was an official toolkit and before even NifSkope got updated to open the new mesh files. Finding one didn't even register as something hard, much less as a feature lost forever.
Really, what the hell is that guy even doing as a contractor, if he can't even find a hex editor? Seriously.
Another guy on the same page is bemoaning the loss of some obscure old text-mode editor, misses TurboPascal (Delphi apparently isn't the same for him), and has been programming in NotePad until he found a port of his old favourite text-mode editor. Even the feature he mentions as missing in newer editors is actually trivial to simulate in any IDE (if nothing else, you can just copy and paste that part into another window and work there)... not to mention that if you need to specifically mark from where to where you want to edit in a source file so you don't get into other parts, you probably should have made that part a separate file in the first place. And not to mention that by using NotePad he's actually having even less features anyway.
I'm sorry, but that's not loss of features to "devolution", that's just the kind of guy who illustrates the kind of attitude that fuels the rampant age-ism in the industry. The only "devolution" there is that he doesn't want to learn anything newer than the good old days of his using XEdit.
Other personal whines mis-represented as features lost to "devolution" include:
- doing the same things with different key combinations nowadays (sorry, key combinations never went away. Just the ones that guy used changed)
- having the control key in a different position than in some guy's youth (so what? It's not like he didn't have decades already to learn the new position)
- how in the good old days you could set some obscure variable to read program output in pages at a time (unlike, I guess, these days using "less" to read program output one page at a time, and being also able to search and go forward and back)
Etc.
Sorry, I actually went there to learn about some awesome features that we've been missing, but I don't see any. I'm just treated to a gallery of people who somehow never learned how to use new keystrokes or a new program to do the same things. Which is actually even more freaking sad than "lost features."
But... but... weren't we all told that this isn't possible? I'm sure I've heard the rhetoric repeatedly before that if someone didn't bother porting some malware to Mac or Mozilla back when they had tiny market share, then it's some kind of proof that they're secure and it can't be done.
Well, I don't have much experience with bacteria, but based on my experience with other life forms that live on caffeine... as Baldrick would say, "I have a cunning plan, milord."
We just need to get them hooked on powerpoint too.Then they'll spend half the day in meetings to decide
- whether the background should be #C0C0C0 or #C0C0C1,
- who's to blame for one string being 1 pixel shorter in the browser compared to some mockups done in Photoshop,
- why can't the application be ready by next week by just adding a little code to the HTML mockup. I mean, the important part is already done, right?
- why it absolutely needs JAXB to transform the data to XML and back between the data access layer and the GUI, because the boss just read that buzzword in some PR ragazine,
- whether 10 MB of animated graphics per page is almost enough, given that the boss's best buddy has a graphics design agency and is getting the contract for those graphics
- how to fix database performance, given that the IT department won't do either of (A) actually doing their job and tuning that database, or (B) allow someone else access to do it, and (C) has no room in the racks for extra hardware to fix it by brute force either
Etc.
Throw in a few "team building" meetings and the like, and next thing you know, they're needing overtime just to make up for all the time spent in those productivity-building meetings and have no more time or interest in reproducing:p
Aye, just wait until the kids discover how to set them for bongo, and then start slapping each other silly. It's slapstick comedy potential at its finest.
To each their own. Me, I think I spent more time making various swords, axes, maces and fine business suits for Fallout New Vegas than actually playing the damned thing. And actually did some hex hacking back in ye olde Fallout 3 days, before there was an official modding kit. I wish more games shipped with a modding kit built in, personally.
Hate to break it to you, but mechanical engineering is hardly the big unknown where you only have to learn post-facto that your design doesn't work. It's not magic, it's physics and maths, you know?
For a start calculating the centrifugal (ok, centripetal) force is hardly the cutting edge of science an more, you know? They teach that shit in high schools by now. Ditto for calculating the sum of two vectors and seeing if that plus weight falls outside the tracks. Vector calculus was cutting edge at the end of the 19'th century, but in the 21'st century it's basic stuff. Anyone who only discovers afterwards that it fell so far outside the wheels that the train flew off the tracks, should just hand in their engineering degree and do something else. There must be some village in China needing an idiot.
And for the strains on the tracks, chassis, wheels, axles, etc, or the tolerances before things go to heck, there are good programs to calculate that kinda shit by now. Finite element simulation for example is a very mature domain by now.
Plus, you know, engineering is just the applied branch of science. And you know what science is big on? Experimentally validating or falsifying the predicted results. There's a reason why, for example, car manufacturers have those wind tunnels, and test tracks, and machinery to simulate repetitive stress, etc. And I can't imagine that it's very different for train manufacturers.
It depends on how much light you're getting. E.g., since the specifically mentions dwarf stars, those actually radiate a lot less energy than the Sun.
Plus, generally, don't think having twice the Earth's energy input (which seem to be the underlying assumption in all the "why black" posts), because then you also wouldn't have liquid water and thus life. Messrs Stefan and Boltzmann say that radiated energy flus is proportional to the 4'th power of absolute temperature, and basically you achieve equilibrium when what you get equals what you radiate. So to make a long story short, if you actually got twice the energy we get from the sun, all things being equal, you'd also have 20% higher temperature.
It sounds not bad, but it's actually in Kelvin, so it means approx 60 Kelvin (or Celsius) more. I.e., between the two tropics, it would actually exceed the boiling temperature of water.
Which still doesn't sound so bad, until you remember that that water vapour is a greenhouse gas. A sauna atmosphere like that can raise temperature some more and turn it into Venus.
So necessarily, seen seen from the planet each of the two suns would have to be dimmer than our sun.
But anyway, that's the short version: don't think of the problem as "how do you deal with twice the light", but basically "how do you deal with roughly the same amount of light, only with a much weirder spectrum distribution."
Right.. that is why we can find out the addresses of all the camwhores on wikipedia right? Oh wai..
I hope you also realize that Wikipedia is full of vandalisms. (E.g., I learned from there that iron is extracted from monkeys, the bridges of ancient Rome were manufactured in Japan, or that didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes. The last one actually had a whole page on the German Wikipedia for more than a year.) It's also full of idiots thinking that they're actually doing a favour to the world by changing stuff to something funny... only to themselves. It's full of half-baked mis-information, vanity edits of one's own pages or panning someone you don't like, edit wars that are won by the most persistent instead of the most informed, and occasional acts of personal vengeance. Like the recent case that was even on Slashdot, where some idiot who got panned way back on the Old Man Murray site, getting the page removed from Wiki. Or that for some people or events, the pages actually have to be locked, to stop the flood of crap edits.
Frankly, the only reason why you don't have high school kids editing an ex-GF's wikipedia page to say "SHE'S A SLUT!!!" is because she doesn't have a page on Wikipedia.
It's not only a Wiki problem. See Amazon reviews, and again a recent thread even on Slashdot where we even had lemmings defending their drivel flood as some great act of comedy. Never mind that they're not particularly funny, and not particularly helpful to have to wade through hundreds of such imaginary crap for a product to find an actual review. And again, praising one's own book or panning someone without even reading, actually do happen all the time. Or fanboy reviews hyping or panning something long before it's actually even available, but they already somehow know it will rule or suck.
But generally, humans are humans for as long as we have a written history. Just about anywhere there even was a public board (of the actual wooden kind) or some statue, people have pinned anonymous or pseudepigraphic libel about people they don't like. See the talking statues of Rome in the 16'th century for example.
So, yes, I do expect it to happen lots if every single house on Google can get such notes attached. The kind of people who only weren't defacing an ex-GF's/ex-BF's Wikipedia entry because she had none, now will be able to add exactly such notes to her/his house. And I expect a lot of them to do just that.
Funny you should mention that, because chess was originally not some uber-intellectual study, but just a 4 player strategy game, with units modeled after the armies of their time. You had lots of infantry, horsemen, elephants and chariots. And literally, each of the 4 players would get half the pieces and start off one of the 4 board sides. Then eventually they figured out that since the Internet still wasn't anywhere in sight in their Civ tech tree, they're either stuck with waiting for a 4th player, or they can play with 2 players commanding two of those armies each. In the process, one king became a grand vizier, and the deadliest piece on the board. (Queens had no political or military power, but a grand vizier was one mean mofo.)
Later the elephants unit became "bishop" , the chariots became a "rook", and, of course, the grand vizier became a queen.
So, yeah, I'm not sure why one couldn't play WH40K instead. Take your pick as to whether the tabletop or computer version.
Meanwhile any popular high school kid can tell you there's a correlation between chess and being the kind of unpopular nerd who'll likely die a virgin. So maybe that's the real plot there: they're trying to curb population growth;)
Yep, you definitely have my empathy. I've run into that kind of situation before myself.
I used Gangsters for example, because it actually happened to me too. I had 2 HDDs, 1 RAM-disk, and 2 CD-ROMs. There was no way that game was going to be in a drive letter lower than drive F:. So I start the game and pretty much I'd get screwed no matter what I do. I could have my gangsters even just sitting around doing nothing, and still get everyone arrested. Not only I wasn't getting my money's worth out of the game, but there's the sheer annoyance factor of, you know, "WTF does it want from me? What AM I supposed to do here?" Then I eventually run into its being recognized as a problem and patched, and pretty much went ballistic when I realized that the damned thing had cost me several hours of increasing annoyance, just because some idiot hadn't even thought it possible to have a legitimate CD in any other drive than D:.
And, yeah, there are a few other games where I still really wonder. Was I just bad at, say, Operation Flashpoint (another game which actually was proud of screwing the difficulty if it thought you're a pirate), or did their shitty DRM glitch on me?
There were plenty of games which tried to do something sneakily wrong to gameplay if they think you're a pirate.
The problem is that, basically, invariably there's the assumption that such a piece of code is 100% proven and bug-free itself. You know, unlike the rest of the program and unlike other shitty pieces of DRM.
A prime example of what I'm talking about was IIRC Gangsters by Eidos in the '90s. Among other things it would take as a clue that it must be a pirated copy running in an emulator -- until a later patch fixed it -- was if your CD is any other drive letter than D:. Because God knows that no honest customer ever would have more than one HDD or partition or have a RAM-disk or two CD drives or anything, you know?
...or Lazarus, or Jairus's daughter... or did you mistakenly believe that Jesus's is only thought to be special because he died and came back to life?
The myth of some holy dude or healer reviving a dead person is actually even more common than someone popping back by themselves. You have stories all over the Mediterranean of some dude or dudette that was brought back when they were waay past where everyone had written them off for dead.
It's still the same basic thing of having someone offed and then back in the story, though. And in fact most of the examples I gave there are actually in this category.
E.g., Osiris is not just already long dead, he's even been dismembered and the pieces scattered all over the world. Then Isis puts him back together and anoints him, and *WHAM* he lives again. Eat your heart out, Lazarus;)
Well, it depends on the exact religion and period. Egyptian religion changed quite substantially over its 3 millennia of existence, ranging from just a Ka and a parallel world, to a Ka and a Ba, to rebirth. So it's probably misleading the casual readers to say anything as applying to Egyptian myths generally, much less the whole Mediterranean area religions.
That said, it's kinda interesting.
The original Egyptian myth afterlife was more like ours than what many other religions had, in a sense. And in another sense, it wasn't exactly heaven either, but rather a parallel world which doesn't work very differently from the normal world.
I could rant for pages about peculiarities of those myths, and, well, I _do_ tend to rant lots. But in this case I'd say that the main motif of the hero who gets killed, is somehow near or past the point of no return (e.g., already buried), then *poof* he/she's alive again, much to everyone's surprise, is already there.
Maybe Osiris is the bad example, there. While an actual resurrection of him in the physical world can be supported too (if in their crops, rather than as a guy: they actually have paintings of wheat stalks growing up of a buried corpse, and that was actually a resurrection scene for them), it actually does require a wall of text to even scratch the surface of. So we're probably better off just forgetting about him entirely.
But there are plenty who don't remain in some afterlife as a resurrection. E.g., Dionysus is killed and actually his body destroyed, eaten by the Titans even, except for his heart, in one version of the myth. That's way beyond what you'd expect even Jesus to be able to resurrect any more. But Zeus implants that heart in his thigh, and Dionysus is born a second time.
Sure, it's not the same kind of resurrection as in the Bible, but it's nothing you couldn't use, say, for a superhero story after you offed them once. Since, you know, that's the thread's topic.
And the thing is, that seems to be exactly how these old religions evolved. Each tribe or city state had one patron god, and as power dynamics shifted, so did god hierarchies. They made up stories as to how god A got to rule over god B, as the faction worshipping god A came to have power over those who liked god B.
And gods and heroes (demigods) were routinely killed or disabled in stories, too. E.g., Akhenaten made up a whole story in which Amun is killed, when he wanted to replace the solar worship with his own cult of Aten. Then, a dozen years later, Akhenaten's reign is over, an suddenly Amun lives again.
That's the 14'th century BC, not 20'th century Marvel and DC comics:p
Hell, it's been a plot device for ever, not just in television.
You may remember hearing about a really old character who was killed, was buried, and then to the amazing of everyone involved, *wham* they live again. You know who I'm talking about, right? Yep, Snow White and her glass coffin. Or Osiris. Or Dionysus. Or the couple dozen killed-oops-he-lives-again deities the cult of Osiris-Dionysus eventually assimilated. Read: pretty much any vegetation deity known around the Mediterranean. Or, oh, right, that dude in Jerusalem that a bunch of Romans nailed to a stick and made a scarecrow out of, circa 32 AD;)
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It has nothing to do with liking to see naked chicks. Sure, I like to see naked chicks too. I don't go install spyware on people's computers for that.
Similarly we all like money, but most of us don't go empty someone's bank account with a keylogger or phishing site. And most of us like sex, but we don't give someone some *ahem* surprise sex. And most of us would like something bad to happen to that guy who was the school bully or to some cruel ex or idiot boss or whatever, but we don't go set their house on fire. Etc.
Reducing it to liking or wanting something is ridiculously simplistic. The question isn't what he wanted, but how he went about that.
And frankly, few things piss me off than the kind of person who's only kept from being a bully or a crook by not having the balls to do it IRL, but who turns into a bully or a crook as soon as there's a couple of routers between him and the victim. I don't have much respect for the former category to start with, but the kind who thinks he's so L33T for hiding behind the screen to do it, ranks even lower for me.
... but I'm hoping soon he'll see "Inbred Cell-Mate Called Bubba Gone Horny And Wild". Since he likes shower scenes, I hope it'll involve picking the soap.
Yes, I know it's not a nice thing to wish someone, but, WTH, the whole point is that I'm not wishing him a nice time.
That's what I don't get either when such a story comes up. Forget even strip clubs, it's not like there isn't an abundance of higher res images on the Internet if he wants to see naked women on his computer. So exactly what is it that makes yet another idiot break the law?
I'm guessing it gives the idiot some kind of feeling of power or something.
If including the casual gamers "throws the numbers", then it throws them to their correct value. If someone plays enough Angry Birds or whatever, they are gamers.
Besides, it's pretty stupid to divide some genres as not really games, as this basically would mean a lot of us who started in the early 80's never actually played a game. Most of the games that were available on a ZX-81 or ZX Spectrum or C-64 or even early IBM PC games, didn't even have the complexity of cell phone games these days.
Heck, the whole video game genre started with games like Pong.
I don't think anyone thought that people playing those are anything but gamers. We didn't think, "ah, well, they can't be Real Gamers, because nobody invented Real Gamer games like first person shooters yet."
Probably not, actually. The median age in the USA is 36.8 years old.
Basically at this point the average gamer is just the average guy. For every guy under 37 that plays video games, there's someone over 37 who also plays video games, AND that's essentially the exact same information you'd get by their ages alone.
Really, gaming has already spread through all age segments. You have preschoolers playing edutainment games, and you even have 80 year old grandmas in WoW raids, and everything in between. (But not everyone admits it. Mom is 30 if you ask her in WoW.)
There isn't really much way for it to go much higher than the median age, unless it actually gets less popular among young 'uns than among senior citizens. I don't think anyone will manage to make gaming unpopular with kids any time soon, so I'd expect that to just follow the median age in the near future.
So most editors let you do CTRL+DOWN to move to the next paragraph and CTRL+UP to move to the previous. Which, for the last and first paragraph on the screen cause just that: scrolling by one paragraph.
I don't have Word on this computer to check (what with it being a Linux computer), but in OpenOffice Writer I just tried it with their article and it works like a charm.
Other programs have similar ways to do that, and/or support outline views for reading by paragraph.
Granted, it's not a universal feature, but, honestly, it just shows how much it's missed by the rest of the world.
Well, I'll even grant that one, but that's more like a GUI design complaint than actually a feature lost to "devolution". All the functions are still there.
But are we really going backwards?
I mean, reading that list made me think of some old geezers complaining about how cars in their time had a big ol' crank in front, unlike these wussy cars that kids use these days.
I mean, complex and hard to master scrollbars? Really? That's a thing to miss? Exactly what usability advantage does that have? Exactly how many new users are complaining that scrolling up and down isn't complex enough?
Besides, what's described as totally awesome functionality lost, isn't lost at all. You can still get an outline view in Word or OpenOffice Write or whatever. Even programming IDEs have that. So exactly how the fuck is that a lost feature? The only thing "lost" is that it's no longer done by learning arcane ways to use a scrollbar.
I mean, even the person missing them in TFA starts by basically saying that it was a pain in the butt to learn to use them. So exactly what's lost there, by doing the same thing in an easier way? The whole argument boils down to "it's bad because it's not the exact clicks I learned to use waaay back". Or in other words, "stop the world, I don't want to learn anything new ever again."
Other arguments get fucking stupid.
E.g., on page 3, "Steve Silberberg, software contractor and owner of Fatpacking" misses having a program called "see", which was... a hex editor. I mean, really? He's a software contractor and he doesn't know how to get a hex editor on the Internet? That is a lost feature for him?
Just to make it clear, I'm pretty damned sure that hex editors still exist, since I even made mods for Fallout 3 with a hex editor and made a tutorial for how to do that, waay back in the days before there was an official toolkit and before even NifSkope got updated to open the new mesh files. Finding one didn't even register as something hard, much less as a feature lost forever.
Really, what the hell is that guy even doing as a contractor, if he can't even find a hex editor? Seriously.
Another guy on the same page is bemoaning the loss of some obscure old text-mode editor, misses TurboPascal (Delphi apparently isn't the same for him), and has been programming in NotePad until he found a port of his old favourite text-mode editor. Even the feature he mentions as missing in newer editors is actually trivial to simulate in any IDE (if nothing else, you can just copy and paste that part into another window and work there)... not to mention that if you need to specifically mark from where to where you want to edit in a source file so you don't get into other parts, you probably should have made that part a separate file in the first place. And not to mention that by using NotePad he's actually having even less features anyway.
I'm sorry, but that's not loss of features to "devolution", that's just the kind of guy who illustrates the kind of attitude that fuels the rampant age-ism in the industry. The only "devolution" there is that he doesn't want to learn anything newer than the good old days of his using XEdit.
Other personal whines mis-represented as features lost to "devolution" include:
- doing the same things with different key combinations nowadays (sorry, key combinations never went away. Just the ones that guy used changed)
- having the control key in a different position than in some guy's youth (so what? It's not like he didn't have decades already to learn the new position)
- how in the good old days you could set some obscure variable to read program output in pages at a time (unlike, I guess, these days using "less" to read program output one page at a time, and being also able to search and go forward and back)
Etc.
Sorry, I actually went there to learn about some awesome features that we've been missing, but I don't see any. I'm just treated to a gallery of people who somehow never learned how to use new keystrokes or a new program to do the same things. Which is actually even more freaking sad than "lost features."
But... but... weren't we all told that this isn't possible? I'm sure I've heard the rhetoric repeatedly before that if someone didn't bother porting some malware to Mac or Mozilla back when they had tiny market share, then it's some kind of proof that they're secure and it can't be done.
Well, I don't have much experience with bacteria, but based on my experience with other life forms that live on caffeine... as Baldrick would say, "I have a cunning plan, milord."
We just need to get them hooked on powerpoint too.Then they'll spend half the day in meetings to decide
- whether the background should be #C0C0C0 or #C0C0C1,
- who's to blame for one string being 1 pixel shorter in the browser compared to some mockups done in Photoshop,
- why can't the application be ready by next week by just adding a little code to the HTML mockup. I mean, the important part is already done, right?
- why it absolutely needs JAXB to transform the data to XML and back between the data access layer and the GUI, because the boss just read that buzzword in some PR ragazine,
- whether 10 MB of animated graphics per page is almost enough, given that the boss's best buddy has a graphics design agency and is getting the contract for those graphics
- how to fix database performance, given that the IT department won't do either of (A) actually doing their job and tuning that database, or (B) allow someone else access to do it, and (C) has no room in the racks for extra hardware to fix it by brute force either
Etc.
Throw in a few "team building" meetings and the like, and next thing you know, they're needing overtime just to make up for all the time spent in those productivity-building meetings and have no more time or interest in reproducing :p
Aye, just wait until the kids discover how to set them for bongo, and then start slapping each other silly. It's slapstick comedy potential at its finest.
Well, I couldn't even model a cube in ye olde Unreal and Quake days, so it made little difference :p
To each their own. Me, I think I spent more time making various swords, axes, maces and fine business suits for Fallout New Vegas than actually playing the damned thing. And actually did some hex hacking back in ye olde Fallout 3 days, before there was an official modding kit. I wish more games shipped with a modding kit built in, personally.
Oh please... some of us are well adjusted adults with jobs and all, and can afford our own basement to camp in ;)
Hate to break it to you, but mechanical engineering is hardly the big unknown where you only have to learn post-facto that your design doesn't work. It's not magic, it's physics and maths, you know?
For a start calculating the centrifugal (ok, centripetal) force is hardly the cutting edge of science an more, you know? They teach that shit in high schools by now. Ditto for calculating the sum of two vectors and seeing if that plus weight falls outside the tracks. Vector calculus was cutting edge at the end of the 19'th century, but in the 21'st century it's basic stuff. Anyone who only discovers afterwards that it fell so far outside the wheels that the train flew off the tracks, should just hand in their engineering degree and do something else. There must be some village in China needing an idiot.
And for the strains on the tracks, chassis, wheels, axles, etc, or the tolerances before things go to heck, there are good programs to calculate that kinda shit by now. Finite element simulation for example is a very mature domain by now.
Plus, you know, engineering is just the applied branch of science. And you know what science is big on? Experimentally validating or falsifying the predicted results. There's a reason why, for example, car manufacturers have those wind tunnels, and test tracks, and machinery to simulate repetitive stress, etc. And I can't imagine that it's very different for train manufacturers.
It depends on how much light you're getting. E.g., since the specifically mentions dwarf stars, those actually radiate a lot less energy than the Sun.
Plus, generally, don't think having twice the Earth's energy input (which seem to be the underlying assumption in all the "why black" posts), because then you also wouldn't have liquid water and thus life. Messrs Stefan and Boltzmann say that radiated energy flus is proportional to the 4'th power of absolute temperature, and basically you achieve equilibrium when what you get equals what you radiate. So to make a long story short, if you actually got twice the energy we get from the sun, all things being equal, you'd also have 20% higher temperature.
It sounds not bad, but it's actually in Kelvin, so it means approx 60 Kelvin (or Celsius) more. I.e., between the two tropics, it would actually exceed the boiling temperature of water.
Which still doesn't sound so bad, until you remember that that water vapour is a greenhouse gas. A sauna atmosphere like that can raise temperature some more and turn it into Venus.
So necessarily, seen seen from the planet each of the two suns would have to be dimmer than our sun.
But anyway, that's the short version: don't think of the problem as "how do you deal with twice the light", but basically "how do you deal with roughly the same amount of light, only with a much weirder spectrum distribution."
I hope you also realize that Wikipedia is full of vandalisms. (E.g., I learned from there that iron is extracted from monkeys, the bridges of ancient Rome were manufactured in Japan, or that didgeridoos are cloned in test tubes. The last one actually had a whole page on the German Wikipedia for more than a year.) It's also full of idiots thinking that they're actually doing a favour to the world by changing stuff to something funny... only to themselves. It's full of half-baked mis-information, vanity edits of one's own pages or panning someone you don't like, edit wars that are won by the most persistent instead of the most informed, and occasional acts of personal vengeance. Like the recent case that was even on Slashdot, where some idiot who got panned way back on the Old Man Murray site, getting the page removed from Wiki. Or that for some people or events, the pages actually have to be locked, to stop the flood of crap edits.
Frankly, the only reason why you don't have high school kids editing an ex-GF's wikipedia page to say "SHE'S A SLUT!!!" is because she doesn't have a page on Wikipedia.
It's not only a Wiki problem. See Amazon reviews, and again a recent thread even on Slashdot where we even had lemmings defending their drivel flood as some great act of comedy. Never mind that they're not particularly funny, and not particularly helpful to have to wade through hundreds of such imaginary crap for a product to find an actual review. And again, praising one's own book or panning someone without even reading, actually do happen all the time. Or fanboy reviews hyping or panning something long before it's actually even available, but they already somehow know it will rule or suck.
But generally, humans are humans for as long as we have a written history. Just about anywhere there even was a public board (of the actual wooden kind) or some statue, people have pinned anonymous or pseudepigraphic libel about people they don't like. See the talking statues of Rome in the 16'th century for example.
So, yes, I do expect it to happen lots if every single house on Google can get such notes attached. The kind of people who only weren't defacing an ex-GF's/ex-BF's Wikipedia entry because she had none, now will be able to add exactly such notes to her/his house. And I expect a lot of them to do just that.
Matthew 5:37, "But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay, nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil."
It's from the sermon on the mount, no less, so it's, you know, from the big JC himself.
If that's not an endorsement of binary code, I don't know what is :p
Funny you should mention that, because chess was originally not some uber-intellectual study, but just a 4 player strategy game, with units modeled after the armies of their time. You had lots of infantry, horsemen, elephants and chariots. And literally, each of the 4 players would get half the pieces and start off one of the 4 board sides. Then eventually they figured out that since the Internet still wasn't anywhere in sight in their Civ tech tree, they're either stuck with waiting for a 4th player, or they can play with 2 players commanding two of those armies each. In the process, one king became a grand vizier, and the deadliest piece on the board. (Queens had no political or military power, but a grand vizier was one mean mofo.)
Later the elephants unit became "bishop" , the chariots became a "rook", and, of course, the grand vizier became a queen.
So, yeah, I'm not sure why one couldn't play WH40K instead. Take your pick as to whether the tabletop or computer version.
Meanwhile any popular high school kid can tell you there's a correlation between chess and being the kind of unpopular nerd who'll likely die a virgin. So maybe that's the real plot there: they're trying to curb population growth ;)
Yep, you definitely have my empathy. I've run into that kind of situation before myself.
I used Gangsters for example, because it actually happened to me too. I had 2 HDDs, 1 RAM-disk, and 2 CD-ROMs. There was no way that game was going to be in a drive letter lower than drive F:. So I start the game and pretty much I'd get screwed no matter what I do. I could have my gangsters even just sitting around doing nothing, and still get everyone arrested. Not only I wasn't getting my money's worth out of the game, but there's the sheer annoyance factor of, you know, "WTF does it want from me? What AM I supposed to do here?" Then I eventually run into its being recognized as a problem and patched, and pretty much went ballistic when I realized that the damned thing had cost me several hours of increasing annoyance, just because some idiot hadn't even thought it possible to have a legitimate CD in any other drive than D:.
And, yeah, there are a few other games where I still really wonder. Was I just bad at, say, Operation Flashpoint (another game which actually was proud of screwing the difficulty if it thought you're a pirate), or did their shitty DRM glitch on me?
There were plenty of games which tried to do something sneakily wrong to gameplay if they think you're a pirate.
The problem is that, basically, invariably there's the assumption that such a piece of code is 100% proven and bug-free itself. You know, unlike the rest of the program and unlike other shitty pieces of DRM.
A prime example of what I'm talking about was IIRC Gangsters by Eidos in the '90s. Among other things it would take as a clue that it must be a pirated copy running in an emulator -- until a later patch fixed it -- was if your CD is any other drive letter than D:. Because God knows that no honest customer ever would have more than one HDD or partition or have a RAM-disk or two CD drives or anything, you know?
The myth of some holy dude or healer reviving a dead person is actually even more common than someone popping back by themselves. You have stories all over the Mediterranean of some dude or dudette that was brought back when they were waay past where everyone had written them off for dead.
It's still the same basic thing of having someone offed and then back in the story, though. And in fact most of the examples I gave there are actually in this category.
E.g., Osiris is not just already long dead, he's even been dismembered and the pieces scattered all over the world. Then Isis puts him back together and anoints him, and *WHAM* he lives again. Eat your heart out, Lazarus ;)
Well, it depends on the exact religion and period. Egyptian religion changed quite substantially over its 3 millennia of existence, ranging from just a Ka and a parallel world, to a Ka and a Ba, to rebirth. So it's probably misleading the casual readers to say anything as applying to Egyptian myths generally, much less the whole Mediterranean area religions.
That said, it's kinda interesting.
The original Egyptian myth afterlife was more like ours than what many other religions had, in a sense. And in another sense, it wasn't exactly heaven either, but rather a parallel world which doesn't work very differently from the normal world.
I could rant for pages about peculiarities of those myths, and, well, I _do_ tend to rant lots. But in this case I'd say that the main motif of the hero who gets killed, is somehow near or past the point of no return (e.g., already buried), then *poof* he/she's alive again, much to everyone's surprise, is already there.
Maybe Osiris is the bad example, there. While an actual resurrection of him in the physical world can be supported too (if in their crops, rather than as a guy: they actually have paintings of wheat stalks growing up of a buried corpse, and that was actually a resurrection scene for them), it actually does require a wall of text to even scratch the surface of. So we're probably better off just forgetting about him entirely.
But there are plenty who don't remain in some afterlife as a resurrection. E.g., Dionysus is killed and actually his body destroyed, eaten by the Titans even, except for his heart, in one version of the myth. That's way beyond what you'd expect even Jesus to be able to resurrect any more. But Zeus implants that heart in his thigh, and Dionysus is born a second time.
Sure, it's not the same kind of resurrection as in the Bible, but it's nothing you couldn't use, say, for a superhero story after you offed them once. Since, you know, that's the thread's topic.
And the thing is, that seems to be exactly how these old religions evolved. Each tribe or city state had one patron god, and as power dynamics shifted, so did god hierarchies. They made up stories as to how god A got to rule over god B, as the faction worshipping god A came to have power over those who liked god B.
And gods and heroes (demigods) were routinely killed or disabled in stories, too. E.g., Akhenaten made up a whole story in which Amun is killed, when he wanted to replace the solar worship with his own cult of Aten. Then, a dozen years later, Akhenaten's reign is over, an suddenly Amun lives again.
That's the 14'th century BC, not 20'th century Marvel and DC comics :p
Hell, it's been a plot device for ever, not just in television.
You may remember hearing about a really old character who was killed, was buried, and then to the amazing of everyone involved, *wham* they live again. You know who I'm talking about, right? Yep, Snow White and her glass coffin. Or Osiris. Or Dionysus. Or the couple dozen killed-oops-he-lives-again deities the cult of Osiris-Dionysus eventually assimilated. Read: pretty much any vegetation deity known around the Mediterranean. Or, oh, right, that dude in Jerusalem that a bunch of Romans nailed to a stick and made a scarecrow out of, circa 32 AD ;)