Essentialism is saying women aren't as good at math, or that all black men have big penises.
Essentialism is still a lie. I don't know why intelligent people can let themselves be deluded into thinking it's true. Shame on you and shame on the moderator who gave your talk a mod point.
"Essentialism and society
Essentialist positions on gender, race, and characteristics, consider these to be fixed traits while not allowing for variation in the group or individual. Contemporary proponents of identity politics including feminism, equality for gay people, and anti-racist activists generally take constructionist viewpoints. However, these proponents have taken various positions including essentialist ones. Prejudices such as racism, sexism and anti-gay bias may be based on an essentialist view, such as the view that all people of a particular race inherently possess a particular negative characteristic."
Do you honestly think that women are bad at math because they were built that way, or is it because of years of gender stereotyping, starting with what colour clothes the parents put on the baby right after birth?
Essentialism is the lie that African Americans are born dumber than whites because they have a lower IQ, rather than looking at the distribution of income and social equality that those people have (Bill Cosby may be rich, but most black folk are still way below the poverty line; in Canada, replace African American with Native to get the same effect).
"In feminism, Yashar Keramati understands that essentialism constitutes that women have pre-determined characteristics. This goes beyond simple body parts, those being the vagina and the penis. Rather, this means that women are born 'emotional,' 'inferior,' 'irrational' and so on. Therefore, essentialism could circulate false information about women which results in lowering their status. Though this necessarily depends upon the value judgements a society adheres to. It also depends upon the supposition that these qualities are negative and don't possess the ability to be sublimated -- just like the lower qualities in the male sex. Essentialism can also be taken to an extreme by characterizing different races in such a way -- though it is true that every school of thought is subject to distortion."
Essentialism is what Hitler used as justification for putting Jews and Gays and other undesirables into furnaces. To say you support this point of view is carte blanche for a return to eugenics and all the other madness that implies.
If you're the kind of successful person who happens to be a CEO or near-CEO that is targetted for a phone issue, you probably have many other things giving you a good credit rating: wicked income, stuff that can be sold (cars, houses, etc) for money, and other forms of credit (credit cards, for example).
There's a 7-year timeout on a bad credit mark. I'd sure as hell do it.
"To get around this, it is common for Emacs users to map "Caps Lock" to a control key, so that the poor pinky doesn't have to continually press down in such an unnatural way"
-- IF you use that foolishness known as home row.
I move my hands around a lot on the keyboard. I keep the centre of my hand over the most likely strike area. I also have the keyboard far from my body, and supported by my forearm muscles (not wresting on my wrist). Any time I have pain, it's in the right wrist after using the mouse a lot (in a casual way, that is wresting my wrist on the table and pivoting it, instead of using the whole arm).
I think my new MX-1000 is partially to blame for this; standard, non-contoured mice have more to enourage you to use the arm instead of the wrist.
I also use Dvorak to minimize the amount my hands have to swing around; my left hand can be pretty much stationary while pecking away at the vowels, while the right hand moves to the correct consonants. On a QWERTY keyboard, both hands have to be in constant motion, and to much greater average trip lengths than on a Dvorak. Home row is for suckers!
I've spent the past 15 minutes looking around for something that suggests itself to be a nice browsable index of results with no good effect. Everything you'd think would be good isn't.
"I don't have a lot of spending money, about $15 every two weeks. And yet, I wouldn't trade any amount of money or so-called social freedom for my family."
How are your children going to get an education ($$ anywhere), or what happens if you have a medical emergency (assuming you live in the US)?
Basically, Ruby on Rails saves you lots of hassle.
About 5 years ago, if you wanted to make a blog, you'd sit down and design a database schema. You'd design a controller that would have certain actions. You'd write a bunch of templates that would have variable locations. You'd extend the controller to use these templates from the db to make views. You'd write pages which allowed editing of these values. You'd write code for sanity checking. You'd write unit tests. You'd do everything over again that you'd done before.
Slashcode, Scoop, you name it -- they were all written through the same ideas.
Ruby on Rails makes all the redundant parts go away. In the video (which I just watched, and finally gives me a compelling reason to learn and use Ruby), the person sits down and generates a basic controller for their blog. They then show that the basic templates generated will show text. It takes another 5 minutes to define a db called posts and generate a default action for it. The code is smart enough to just directly make the things like title and body editable widgets on the page. 5 minutes to have posted blogs!
Then the video takes 5 minutes to extend this by writing about 15 lines of code. This has a big effect: the listing of posts is abstracted out into a block that can be included in any page. The ordering is reversed. The title attribute is made a required field.
But what good is a blog without comments? In the final 5 minutes, the author quickly adds a comment table, generates a comment controller, says that posts own comments, sticks in 3 lines of code in the post view segment which do a foreach associated comment, display, and then adds a page to edit comments. They also (at the same time) show us the basics of the unit-testing framework you get "for free" (the basic test is return true, but he changed it to test if the comment post code worked with another 4 lines of code).
The entire thing took 15 minutes to write and had 58 lines of code. When the db schema changed, the code adapted -- the programmer did not have to rewrite the code. When the programmer wanted to change anything, the code would quickly bend itself to the task.
I dare say it's the sexiest thing I've seen yet. If they ever release a version 2 that allows for simple Javascript on the client for AJAX interfaces, there will be only 1 game in town for web development!
I'm not inexperienced in web design. I have written my own stuff to test ideas out, as well as participated in Scoop's development to a degree. Recently I've been playing with Drupal because all the basics are setup with it, and you can just extend it with modules. I can honestly say that while it took me an hour to setup Drupal (and another hour to get it completely to how I liked it) it a test config, I could probably replicate the base distribution plus the modules I use in Ruby on Rails within a day -- maybe 2, if I'm slow. It's that effective!
I'm not overstating. My 12" gets me 5 hours. If I have wifi/bt off and the screen min, that little thing will say 5.5hr to start with. If I turn of WiFi, 5 or just under. If I have the screen maxed and everything on, it'll be around 3hr. If I have something sucking CPU and clocking it up, maybe as little as 2 hours.
My friend's 17" gets between 3 to 4.5 hrs. He runs his screen between medium and full bright with WiFi usually on.
Either way, way the fuck better than 57 minutes, and still better than the people who brag about 2hr from their x86 laptops.
"They aren't experiencing weightlessnes due to a combination of being in a low orbit (rather than outer space where the wightlessnes is) and a few under-floor gravity generators."
Orbit is weightlessness! Weight is the force you feel when you are pressed up against something (like the seat in a car under acceleration, or the earth which is accelerating you towards its centre due to gravity). If you are in orbit, you are weightless, because you have nothing to be pressed up against (otherwise you'd be on a surface of some kind!).
You can simulate the gravity by spinning your space vehicle, but you need a very large circumfrence if you want to experience anything close to a G. Plus, there's no such thing as a gravity generator. Scientists still don't agree on what a graviton is or even if they exist yet! (Matter could be attracted due to the bends in a higher dimension in space caused by matter, instead of a particle field, which means we can't really build gravity generators anyways.)
Reality shows prove again that stupidity is the core audience.
You can buy a desktop computer that is big, but powerful for about 1400$ US (AMD64, GeForce 6800 or better, min 1gb of ram, etc).
You can also buy a 12" PowerBook for that much. It weighs 4.6lb, and gets 5 hours of battery life (half-bright screen and WiFi off; turn on WiFi to start with 4.5hr). My 12" plays WoW alright (although my desktop does it better).
Alternatively, you can pay a bit more, and get a little ShuttlePC that has a nice projector output. Lug it around in your backpack (after all, it's going to be 8-10lb), and it's about as portable as this Widow PC.
Or, for the price of both the desktop and the PowerBook (or a Shuttle and a cheaper x86 laptop), you can buy this monster which weighs 11-13lb (depending on whose specs you read), and gets 57 minutes (!) of battery life. Plus you can't upgrade the thing when it's out of date in a year or two (like a friend of mine who had a Dell gamer laptop he hated). That laptop is the same as if I took 3 12" PBs and stacked them up in terms up weight, and gets roughly 1/15th as much battery life (57 minutes vs. 15 hours of 3 PBs).
You might as well buy a 17" widescreen PowerBook, which comes equipped with some very sexy specs, is thin, and gets up to 5.5hr of battery life. You'd only buy such a "laptop" as a penis extension!
People have used the strawman of "it's stupid to have 2 DEs" in the past. We're really starting to see the effects of having 2 DEs now -- once they reached maturity, they started to develop quite differently.
I'm going to toss my hat in behind this statement from Linus also: "Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection thing, never mind that it's a million times slower."
Every time I have to use The Gimp, I hate that fucking GTK file dialog. It's a piece of shit. If you're going to make a dialog that's hard to use and annoying as default, the least you can do is make it stateful so that when I expand it and change it so I can see my file names, those choices are remembered for next time. Apple gets it right: if you change a file dialog in an app, that will be remembered forever.
When I bought my PowerBook, I took a little time to learn the MacOSX interface so I could be as fast with it as I was with my KDE desktop. It wasn't that difficult: *M -> minimize a window (the only bad part of you have to click it to get it back) *H -> Hide the app (can be clicked back to or *TABed to) *TAB -> Goes between apps (interferes with the only good multi-desktop tool I've found, so I never use multidesktops). *` and *~ -> Walk between windows of the same app. *W and *Q -> Close windown or close app, respectively.
Plus I have a quick show-all windows and show-desktop Expose setup in the 2 bottom corners.
The file dialogs rule. When you drag them out to fill the screen (instead of being a little patch in the middle), they remember it. You can have them in the column mode (*3) so that you can quickly whip around, and you can DnD shortcut dirs to the side bar just like in KDE. It's awesome.
The only thing I hate is that I can't switch to focus follows pointer (not as big a deal on the smaller screen of the laptop, but I'd be very angry about it on a desktop), and the fact that sometimes my current window loses focus when something else starts to whine about something is annoying. Nothing should ever steal my focus.
The X11 support in MacOSX is pretty shoddy, too. I simply don't use apps if they require X11, because they integrate poorly with the system, and don't follow the interface standards that the normal Carbon and Cocoa apps do.
No region coding. If they had no region coding (just different PSUs for different region power, and a standardized HD connector), you could ship the same box anywhere it had i18n and l10n text for (which is pretty much anywhere; I had my Canadian Xbox in Japanese for a good year).
When you create artificial barriers like region coding, you open the door to problems like this. If MS has these problems, they may think about the next console launch they do and if it will involve region locked consoles.
What about the man-hours on each site, setting up a new IPv6 address on the machines there, and new AAAA records for the machines, etc?
What about all the machines which are not updated or updated infrequently, which don't have people around to make them IPv6?
IPv6 has not been designed to allow an easy transition from IPv4. You can't just throw in new A records, or say that ISPs now hand-out IPv6 addresses, or any of the other hundreds of time-intensive things that are required for an IPv6 switch over.
There is no special room with a switch: IPv4 [is no fucking transition phase in any of the IPv6 designs.
I swear that Ubisoft paid off all the video game magazines so that they would condsider BG&E a great game.
The trouble was that BG&E was rushed out for the holiday season. In doing so, they cut off the required development time to make it a great game.
" there's no question that Ancel achieved his ambition of producing a streamlined adventure, there's nothing memorable, nothing meaty in any of the game's set pieces. It's a game you finish in a happy haze, entranced by your time in Jade's world, but hard pressed to remember a single fight, puzzle, race, or stealth challenge that stood out."
The best part I can think of is the first dungeon, because I played it twice (once at a friend's place, and once when I bought the game for 9$ CAD new).
BG&E had a lot of promise, but the execution was flawed. The game needed a couple more dungeons (it had 3 in total, plus the racing and standard side-story collections), and could've used maybe one or two more side-story things (it's a nice change from a game like FF X-2 that demands 40 hours of my life for a bare-minimum experience!). The story was very promising, but the ending could've used more work, especially letting Jade suceeed because she was determined, not because of some fate. The monsters were pretty cookie cutter, too.
It would've been nice if there was replability (hell, a simple arrange mode which moved everything around randomly after you beat it once would've been worth it).
Not quite. Almost every place I've run across for things like per capita income (such as this page) show the US to be at 40,000$. This is a raw mean.
The median is supposed to be around there, also.
Of course, when you factor in things like the price of health care, the US doesn't look so good. Most of the other countries listed next to it have a much higher general standard of living and lesser poverty than in the US due to socal programs (Norway is a great example of this).
The entire post was taking a basics economics view on things, not considering non-market forces (just like basic econ). In real life, there are going to be other factors influencing production.
I was trying to point out the stupidity of the stock-market view of a song's value as well. Anything that is infinite is fundamentally worthless, like tap water, or the air you breathe. Only finite resources have value (thanks to scarcity). A song that can be copied infinitely is never going to be the basis for a song stock market. Electronics have made a lot of the economics of entertainment silly, on a model somewhat like what I mentioned, but as you pointed out, it's also much more complex.
The true finite resource in entertainment is time. You trade your person time at a job for money, and you trade that money for someone else's time for making entertainment. Then you spend your free time to experience that entertainment. If you have no time for entertainment, you'll value it less. If there are other forms of entertainment vying for the time, you'll pick the one you find most rewarding. If you entertain yourself by making entertainment, you'll be supplying that infinite supply.
Of course, the record companies want to slide down that money supply/demand curve enough that a lot of people can afford it, and then freeze the price at that level so that they can maximize their profits on something which has a near-zero replication cost. This price fixing and gouging is what has been going on since the first record was invented. If we want to return to an economic model where people's entertainment incone is related to how much they can entertain (instead of popularity), we have to limit how long you get royalties on things (via copyright) if we're using entertainment reproduction devices.
But we also see that, at the same time, certain vested interests have been pushing to extend copyrights. Those vested interests are those of corporations who buy entertainers wholesale, and then publish them until someone buys it. Since the entertainers have signed the rights to the corporations, the corporations earn all the money. It's a vicious cycle.
Only drastic shortening of copyright terms and utilizing our technology for the free-content-copying can we evolve our economy more towards what it should be, a system where people directly exchange things based on a shared-value system, rather than as a means of sustaining economic creatures designed for the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
But a post like that's not going to get moderated up on slashdot:)
" Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?"
No, it's too little. If you put demand and supply as 2 linear equations on a graph, you'll see they're related.
Let's go through a simple situation: demand is x, and supply is y. Now since we have infinite supply (since this is a digital work), we're going to say that y is not supply, but rather money supply (since the money is the only limited part as far as the markets are concerened). As demand goes up, price goes down. If we were at the far-right, with maximum demand, price would tend to zero. If we were at the far-left, with only 1 person wanting the work in question, the price would tend to the total production cost! For 0, infinity (which is why if no one wants it, it won't get made).
You're not going to get a perfect relation due to effects outside the market's control (such as non-market copying), but you'll see that 99 cents is too little for something this is in low demand, and 25 cents is too much for something that is in high demand.
Slashdot Mirror
After seeing comments like this that imply women are born stupid, I'm glad to see that a balanced opinion can be moderated up on Slashdot.
Maybe someday we can stamp out the rampant ignorance that leads to such gender disparity in some fields!
Essentialism is saying women aren't as good at math, or that all black men have big penises.
Essentialism is still a lie. I don't know why intelligent people can let themselves be deluded into thinking it's true. Shame on you and shame on the moderator who gave your talk a mod point.
"Essentialism and society
Essentialist positions on gender, race, and characteristics, consider these to be fixed traits while not allowing for variation in the group or individual. Contemporary proponents of identity politics including feminism, equality for gay people, and anti-racist activists generally take constructionist viewpoints. However, these proponents have taken various positions including essentialist ones. Prejudices such as racism, sexism and anti-gay bias may be based on an essentialist view, such as the view that all people of a particular race inherently possess a particular negative characteristic."
Read more at Wikipedia.
Do you honestly think that women are bad at math because they were built that way, or is it because of years of gender stereotyping, starting with what colour clothes the parents put on the baby right after birth?
Essentialism is the lie that African Americans are born dumber than whites because they have a lower IQ, rather than looking at the distribution of income and social equality that those people have (Bill Cosby may be rich, but most black folk are still way below the poverty line; in Canada, replace African American with Native to get the same effect).
"In feminism, Yashar Keramati understands that essentialism constitutes that women have pre-determined characteristics. This goes beyond simple body parts, those being the vagina and the penis. Rather, this means that women are born 'emotional,' 'inferior,' 'irrational' and so on. Therefore, essentialism could circulate false information about women which results in lowering their status. Though this necessarily depends upon the value judgements a society adheres to. It also depends upon the supposition that these qualities are negative and don't possess the ability to be sublimated -- just like the lower qualities in the male sex. Essentialism can also be taken to an extreme by characterizing different races in such a way -- though it is true that every school of thought is subject to distortion."
Essentialism is what Hitler used as justification for putting Jews and Gays and other undesirables into furnaces. To say you support this point of view is carte blanche for a return to eugenics and all the other madness that implies.
I didn't like it the first time when it was called Starfox Adventures, why would I like it with different textures?
If you're the kind of successful person who happens to be a CEO or near-CEO that is targetted for a phone issue, you probably have many other things giving you a good credit rating: wicked income, stuff that can be sold (cars, houses, etc) for money, and other forms of credit (credit cards, for example).
There's a 7-year timeout on a bad credit mark. I'd sure as hell do it.
"To get around this, it is common for Emacs users to map "Caps Lock" to a control key, so that the poor pinky doesn't have to continually press down in such an unnatural way"
-- IF you use that foolishness known as home row.
I move my hands around a lot on the keyboard. I keep the centre of my hand over the most likely strike area. I also have the keyboard far from my body, and supported by my forearm muscles (not wresting on my wrist). Any time I have pain, it's in the right wrist after using the mouse a lot (in a casual way, that is wresting my wrist on the table and pivoting it, instead of using the whole arm).
I think my new MX-1000 is partially to blame for this; standard, non-contoured mice have more to enourage you to use the arm instead of the wrist.
I also use Dvorak to minimize the amount my hands have to swing around; my left hand can be pretty much stationary while pecking away at the vowels, while the right hand moves to the correct consonants. On a QWERTY keyboard, both hands have to be in constant motion, and to much greater average trip lengths than on a Dvorak. Home row is for suckers!
"To complex, to heavy, to expensive"
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I've spent the past 15 minutes looking around for something that suggests itself to be a nice browsable index of results with no good effect. Everything you'd think would be good isn't.
It's a very poorly designed website.
Could you :) use anymore :) smileys! :)
:))
(A joke, for the humour impared
"I don't have a lot of spending money, about $15 every two weeks. And yet, I wouldn't trade any amount of money or so-called social freedom for my family."
How are your children going to get an education ($$ anywhere), or what happens if you have a medical emergency (assuming you live in the US)?
Basically, Ruby on Rails saves you lots of hassle.
About 5 years ago, if you wanted to make a blog, you'd sit down and design a database schema. You'd design a controller that would have certain actions. You'd write a bunch of templates that would have variable locations. You'd extend the controller to use these templates from the db to make views. You'd write pages which allowed editing of these values. You'd write code for sanity checking. You'd write unit tests. You'd do everything over again that you'd done before.
Slashcode, Scoop, you name it -- they were all written through the same ideas.
Ruby on Rails makes all the redundant parts go away. In the video (which I just watched, and finally gives me a compelling reason to learn and use Ruby), the person sits down and generates a basic controller for their blog. They then show that the basic templates generated will show text. It takes another 5 minutes to define a db called posts and generate a default action for it. The code is smart enough to just directly make the things like title and body editable widgets on the page. 5 minutes to have posted blogs!
Then the video takes 5 minutes to extend this by writing about 15 lines of code. This has a big effect: the listing of posts is abstracted out into a block that can be included in any page. The ordering is reversed. The title attribute is made a required field.
But what good is a blog without comments? In the final 5 minutes, the author quickly adds a comment table, generates a comment controller, says that posts own comments, sticks in 3 lines of code in the post view segment which do a foreach associated comment, display, and then adds a page to edit comments. They also (at the same time) show us the basics of the unit-testing framework you get "for free" (the basic test is return true, but he changed it to test if the comment post code worked with another 4 lines of code).
The entire thing took 15 minutes to write and had 58 lines of code. When the db schema changed, the code adapted -- the programmer did not have to rewrite the code. When the programmer wanted to change anything, the code would quickly bend itself to the task.
I dare say it's the sexiest thing I've seen yet. If they ever release a version 2 that allows for simple Javascript on the client for AJAX interfaces, there will be only 1 game in town for web development!
I'm not inexperienced in web design. I have written my own stuff to test ideas out, as well as participated in Scoop's development to a degree. Recently I've been playing with Drupal because all the basics are setup with it, and you can just extend it with modules. I can honestly say that while it took me an hour to setup Drupal (and another hour to get it completely to how I liked it) it a test config, I could probably replicate the base distribution plus the modules I use in Ruby on Rails within a day -- maybe 2, if I'm slow. It's that effective!
I'm not overstating. My 12" gets me 5 hours. If I have wifi/bt off and the screen min, that little thing will say 5.5hr to start with. If I turn of WiFi, 5 or just under. If I have the screen maxed and everything on, it'll be around 3hr. If I have something sucking CPU and clocking it up, maybe as little as 2 hours.
My friend's 17" gets between 3 to 4.5 hrs. He runs his screen between medium and full bright with WiFi usually on.
Either way, way the fuck better than 57 minutes, and still better than the people who brag about 2hr from their x86 laptops.
When YTMND was appropriate, this is it.
"They aren't experiencing weightlessnes due to a combination of being in a low orbit (rather than outer space where the wightlessnes is) and a few under-floor gravity generators."
Orbit is weightlessness! Weight is the force you feel when you are pressed up against something (like the seat in a car under acceleration, or the earth which is accelerating you towards its centre due to gravity). If you are in orbit, you are weightless, because you have nothing to be pressed up against (otherwise you'd be on a surface of some kind!).
You can simulate the gravity by spinning your space vehicle, but you need a very large circumfrence if you want to experience anything close to a G. Plus, there's no such thing as a gravity generator. Scientists still don't agree on what a graviton is or even if they exist yet! (Matter could be attracted due to the bends in a higher dimension in space caused by matter, instead of a particle field, which means we can't really build gravity generators anyways.)
Reality shows prove again that stupidity is the core audience.
You can buy a desktop computer that is big, but powerful for about 1400$ US (AMD64, GeForce 6800 or better, min 1gb of ram, etc).
You can also buy a 12" PowerBook for that much. It weighs 4.6lb, and gets 5 hours of battery life (half-bright screen and WiFi off; turn on WiFi to start with 4.5hr). My 12" plays WoW alright (although my desktop does it better).
Alternatively, you can pay a bit more, and get a little ShuttlePC that has a nice projector output. Lug it around in your backpack (after all, it's going to be 8-10lb), and it's about as portable as this Widow PC.
Or, for the price of both the desktop and the PowerBook (or a Shuttle and a cheaper x86 laptop), you can buy this monster which weighs 11-13lb (depending on whose specs you read), and gets 57 minutes (!) of battery life. Plus you can't upgrade the thing when it's out of date in a year or two (like a friend of mine who had a Dell gamer laptop he hated). That laptop is the same as if I took 3 12" PBs and stacked them up in terms up weight, and gets roughly 1/15th as much battery life (57 minutes vs. 15 hours of 3 PBs).
You might as well buy a 17" widescreen PowerBook, which comes equipped with some very sexy specs, is thin, and gets up to 5.5hr of battery life. You'd only buy such a "laptop" as a penis extension!
People have used the strawman of "it's stupid to have 2 DEs" in the past. We're really starting to see the effects of having 2 DEs now -- once they reached maturity, they started to develop quite differently.
I'm going to toss my hat in behind this statement from Linus also: "Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection thing, never mind that it's a million times slower."
Every time I have to use The Gimp, I hate that fucking GTK file dialog. It's a piece of shit. If you're going to make a dialog that's hard to use and annoying as default, the least you can do is make it stateful so that when I expand it and change it so I can see my file names, those choices are remembered for next time. Apple gets it right: if you change a file dialog in an app, that will be remembered forever.
When I bought my PowerBook, I took a little time to learn the MacOSX interface so I could be as fast with it as I was with my KDE desktop. It wasn't that difficult:
*M -> minimize a window (the only bad part of you have to click it to get it back)
*H -> Hide the app (can be clicked back to or *TABed to)
*TAB -> Goes between apps (interferes with the only good multi-desktop tool I've found, so I never use multidesktops).
*` and *~ -> Walk between windows of the same app.
*W and *Q -> Close windown or close app, respectively.
Plus I have a quick show-all windows and show-desktop Expose setup in the 2 bottom corners.
The file dialogs rule. When you drag them out to fill the screen (instead of being a little patch in the middle), they remember it. You can have them in the column mode (*3) so that you can quickly whip around, and you can DnD shortcut dirs to the side bar just like in KDE. It's awesome.
The only thing I hate is that I can't switch to focus follows pointer (not as big a deal on the smaller screen of the laptop, but I'd be very angry about it on a desktop), and the fact that sometimes my current window loses focus when something else starts to whine about something is annoying. Nothing should ever steal my focus.
The X11 support in MacOSX is pretty shoddy, too. I simply don't use apps if they require X11, because they integrate poorly with the system, and don't follow the interface standards that the normal Carbon and Cocoa apps do.
No region coding. If they had no region coding (just different PSUs for different region power, and a standardized HD connector), you could ship the same box anywhere it had i18n and l10n text for (which is pretty much anywhere; I had my Canadian Xbox in Japanese for a good year).
When you create artificial barriers like region coding, you open the door to problems like this. If MS has these problems, they may think about the next console launch they do and if it will involve region locked consoles.
What about the man-hours on each site, setting up a new IPv6 address on the machines there, and new AAAA records for the machines, etc?
What about all the machines which are not updated or updated infrequently, which don't have people around to make them IPv6?
IPv6 has not been designed to allow an easy transition from IPv4. You can't just throw in new A records, or say that ISPs now hand-out IPv6 addresses, or any of the other hundreds of time-intensive things that are required for an IPv6 switch over.
There is no special room with a switch:
IPv4 [is no fucking transition phase in any of the IPv6 designs.
I swear that Ubisoft paid off all the video game magazines so that they would condsider BG&E a great game.
The trouble was that BG&E was rushed out for the holiday season. In doing so, they cut off the required development time to make it a great game.
" there's no question that Ancel achieved his ambition of producing a streamlined adventure, there's nothing memorable, nothing meaty in any of the game's set pieces. It's a game you finish in a happy haze, entranced by your time in Jade's world, but hard pressed to remember a single fight, puzzle, race, or stealth challenge that stood out."
The best part I can think of is the first dungeon, because I played it twice (once at a friend's place, and once when I bought the game for 9$ CAD new).
BG&E had a lot of promise, but the execution was flawed. The game needed a couple more dungeons (it had 3 in total, plus the racing and standard side-story collections), and could've used maybe one or two more side-story things (it's a nice change from a game like FF X-2 that demands 40 hours of my life for a bare-minimum experience!). The story was very promising, but the ending could've used more work, especially letting Jade suceeed because she was determined, not because of some fate. The monsters were pretty cookie cutter, too.
It would've been nice if there was replability (hell, a simple arrange mode which moved everything around randomly after you beat it once would've been worth it).
A White Russian with cola?
Oh, you mean a Vodka paralyzer?
It's not like this was a new drink invented yesterday!
Quoting the parent to your reply: "sonic radars (or other type) can already be used for regulating the flow of indepentent vehicles on a road."
Shame on you for not reading; shame double on the mods for modding up!
Not quite. Almost every place I've run across for things like per capita income (such as this page) show the US to be at 40,000$. This is a raw mean.
The median is supposed to be around there, also.
Of course, when you factor in things like the price of health care, the US doesn't look so good. Most of the other countries listed next to it have a much higher general standard of living and lesser poverty than in the US due to socal programs (Norway is a great example of this).
The entire post was taking a basics economics view on things, not considering non-market forces (just like basic econ). In real life, there are going to be other factors influencing production.
:)
I was trying to point out the stupidity of the stock-market view of a song's value as well. Anything that is infinite is fundamentally worthless, like tap water, or the air you breathe. Only finite resources have value (thanks to scarcity). A song that can be copied infinitely is never going to be the basis for a song stock market. Electronics have made a lot of the economics of entertainment silly, on a model somewhat like what I mentioned, but as you pointed out, it's also much more complex.
The true finite resource in entertainment is time. You trade your person time at a job for money, and you trade that money for someone else's time for making entertainment. Then you spend your free time to experience that entertainment. If you have no time for entertainment, you'll value it less. If there are other forms of entertainment vying for the time, you'll pick the one you find most rewarding. If you entertain yourself by making entertainment, you'll be supplying that infinite supply.
Of course, the record companies want to slide down that money supply/demand curve enough that a lot of people can afford it, and then freeze the price at that level so that they can maximize their profits on something which has a near-zero replication cost. This price fixing and gouging is what has been going on since the first record was invented. If we want to return to an economic model where people's entertainment incone is related to how much they can entertain (instead of popularity), we have to limit how long you get royalties on things (via copyright) if we're using entertainment reproduction devices.
But we also see that, at the same time, certain vested interests have been pushing to extend copyrights. Those vested interests are those of corporations who buy entertainers wholesale, and then publish them until someone buys it. Since the entertainers have signed the rights to the corporations, the corporations earn all the money. It's a vicious cycle.
Only drastic shortening of copyright terms and utilizing our technology for the free-content-copying can we evolve our economy more towards what it should be, a system where people directly exchange things based on a shared-value system, rather than as a means of sustaining economic creatures designed for the late-19th and early-20th centuries.
But a post like that's not going to get moderated up on slashdot
" Isn't 99 cents too much to pay for music that appeals to just a few people?"
No, it's too little. If you put demand and supply as 2 linear equations on a graph, you'll see they're related.
Let's go through a simple situation: demand is x, and supply is y. Now since we have infinite supply (since this is a digital work), we're going to say that y is not supply, but rather money supply (since the money is the only limited part as far as the markets are concerened). As demand goes up, price goes down. If we were at the far-right, with maximum demand, price would tend to zero. If we were at the far-left, with only 1 person wanting the work in question, the price would tend to the total production cost! For 0, infinity (which is why if no one wants it, it won't get made).
You're not going to get a perfect relation due to effects outside the market's control (such as non-market copying), but you'll see that 99 cents is too little for something this is in low demand, and 25 cents is too much for something that is in high demand.
Honestly, how many times a day while driving do you see people speeding? Is it because they have people chasing them?
Didn't think so.