It's been mentioned, but if you do any C++, you absolutely must have exactly 2 books once once you've understood the basics:
The C++ Programming Language (Stroustrup) Effective C++ (Meyers)
There are so many garbage books on C++ that rehash the same crap. These 2 are the rare ones that will actually help you progress further in your understanding.
In general, I try to find the one definitive book on a subject. There often is one. In CS, these would include:
Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen et al) Compilers - Principles, Tools and Techniques (Ahi et al) Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Sipser)
A good university text each on discrete math, linear algebra, databases, operating systems, and networking is handy too, but there seems not to be a consensus as to which is the best. I guess what I'm saying is "do a CS degree and keep all of your textbooks".
I remember growing up and teaching myself programming in high school, like many people here. If there is one thing I wish I'd had, it's better access to technical books. Good books are worth the money. They're better written, better organized, and have much more quality content than the web. Skip the mainstream book stores and proceed directly to your local university book store, wherein you will find many books you won't find anywhere else, and much less crap. Abandon public libraries as they contain little in the way of serious technical material. University libraries are much better and some will let you join for a minor annual fee (eg $50), even if you don't go to that school.
So much for that. Now, some random personal favorites:
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett) How the Mind Works (Pinker) The Computational Beauty of Nature (Flake) Practical Ethics (Singer) Real Time Collision Detection (Ericson) - this book is much better than most I've seen on the subject
I've been doing scripts at work lately in Perl to pull data from Access and Excel files. There's ActivePerl for Windows, DBI to get at the Access data, and other modules for Excel. It all works quite well, and the text processing of Perl is handy for those reports (more so than, say, VBA). Not sure how you'd get at the images though. (Note: I am not a Perl fanboy in general, but if it works...)
You can still buy AOE 2 with the expansion pack for $40 in stores in Canada, and it's still one of the best RTS's around, which I play regularly. Not bad for a game that was released in 1999.
When people talk about a polar bear going extinct, and then claim that evolution will create new species so we shouldn't worry (which is not a straw man by the way, I have seen people say things like this repeatedly, including in response to this article), they are proposing that whatever we lose by not having polar bears we can regain through the evolution of new species. Yes, fine, evolution can take place on shorter timescales. But when large mammals go extinct, you won't be seeing new ones developing from other species for a very long time. I'm talking about changes that non-biologists will notice.
In all seriousness, if polar bears went extinct, how long would we expect to wait to see something else resembling a polar bear or anything else remotely as interesting develop? Sure, if polar bears were extinct, maybe some other bear species would evolve into something similar (though I'd imagine that would still take a long time). But if all bears were extinct, would you hold your breath for say, canines or some other mammal to evolve into something fundamentally different (ie, as different as a polar bear is from a dog)? The attitude I'm taking aim at here is "Who cares how we mess up the environment, nature will repair itself". Is it so difficult to see my point, or do you just like to nit pick?
Of course, there is a question of assigning value to things. How is having polar bears more valuable than not having them? "Nature" doesn't care. Of course not. But people do. People don't appreciate species because they fill an ecological niche. A polar bear is something to be appreciated for it's beauty, as a subject for biological study, for its role in a diverse ecosystem, and as a unique and irreplaceable product of million of years of evolution.
Any value that, say, a polar bear has to you, romantic or otherwise, you will lose if it goes extinct. Maybe it has no value. Whatever. But don't expect nature's sorting it out to be any comfort to you. Hell, we could wipe out everything except single celled organisms, and nature will sort it out. Nature isn't something that cares; we are.
There is at least one other post for this article thats says "why should we protect the polar bear if its environment changes; what if some new creature adapted to the new environment emerges that is just as interesting?" My point is that we will never see this creature, it's going to take millions of years to evolve.
Ok, fine. If you really don't care, then don't save them. My point is that it is stupid to think about them being replaced, or nature "sorting it out", since these things probably won't happen while humans are still around. From our point of view, they might as well never happen.
I have to say this, because every time something like this comes up, there are a bunch of posts saying, "It's natural, it's evolution, new species will develop, nature will repair itself, bla bla bla". I just want to point out a fucking obvious fact that people seem to forget. Yes, nature will sort it out. Somewhere during the next several million years. You, your grandkids, and the whole human race probably won't be around to see it. Evolution works on geological time scales. Try and wrap your head around it. Save those species now, because from our point of view they will never be replaced.
I learned Java from Core Java and I still think it's a good intro. For C++, after you've gone through an introduction, you definitely want to get The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup. It has everything about C++, and you need it for that reason.
One of my favorite books that I think is a bit underappreciated is The Computational Beauty of Nature by Flake. There's just so much neat stuff in it, all across the spectrum of math and computer science, and it's quite accessible, yet with enough meat to satisfy.
Wow, that's exactly it. I said in my post elsewhere that Trevor was "pure evil", but that's not it at all. He simply isn't a good guy. And he is ruthless in pursuit of his goals, but that doesn't necessarily make him bad. What I hated most about the movie is how they changed the motivations and attitudes of Aeon and Trevor to make them both into Good Guys, when the moral ambiguity of the original series was one of the best things about it.
I'm actually shocked that anyone who was a fan of the original series could have liked this movie, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Aeon and Trevor in the series were both more... alien characters, and Trevor was essentially pure evil. That was what made it good! The series was pretty twisted and bizarre, and didn't really respect the moral attitudes that are prevalent in most fiction.
Everything that made the series unique and interesting was ripped out of it and replaced with ho-hum Hollywood storytelling. Sure, the movie would have to have a bit more plot than the series. But it didn't have to be "main characters fall in love and try to save the world". In the movie, Aeon is trying to kill Trevor to avenge for her sister's death. Give me a break. In the series, it wasn't obvious what she was motivated by, or whether in fact she was trying to kill him. She was just fucking with him! They were just two people who were at the top of their game, and so maybe that's why they identified with each other. That whole dynamic was completely absent from the movie.
This is just another step in Hollywood's relentless drive to strip mine the last 50 years worth of underground comic, fantasy, and sci-fi material since they have zero fresh ideas themselves. I wouldn't object, except that in many cases they completely miss the point of the material they are adapting, and turn it into more of the same garbage they would have produced anyway. Aeon Flux had zero relationship to the animated series, and was at best a weak sci-fi action movie.
I haven't looked much at the hardware for either system, but does not the PS3 use the Cell processor? That thing is seriously rockin'. 1 main PowerPC and 8 subprocessors. The 8 procs use their own instruction set, are optimized for number crunching, and each has 256KB of its own dedicated memeory that is basically L1 cache. The API lets you load code directly into each chip's memory and let it rip. Very cool.
Of course, that won't necessarily mean that the games will be any good, which is the bottom line. But I think the Cell has the potential to be in a whole different league as far as processing power that can be devoted to things other than graphics.
Well, of course it's not truly realistic. Perhaps we should model the world at the level of quantum physics. You can always layer on more and more complicated rules to account for absolutely everything.
My point is that GURPS is more realistic than say, the d20 system, to a degree that at least satisfies most player intuitions. Most players will complain, and rightly so, if a they can't get a kill out of a head shot. Few will complain about the particular fraction of energy lost by a bullet as a function of range.
There must exist some optimum level of detail or realism that produces fairly reasonable results without requiring a supercomputer to run the game. I think GURPS is closer to that optimum than other systems.
I guess my problem with d20 is exactly what you describe as it's strength: simplicity. Sure, the combat moves quickly and plays well enough for heroic fantasy, but it lacks realism and detail. Sure, character creation is easy, but it lacks depth.
Why shouldn't a skilled character target a vital organ and deliver a single killing blow, rather than chop hit points down from 100 a few d6 at a time? One of the things I really like about GURPS and Cyberpunk is the ease with which even a powerful character can be killed. It's just plain realistic. It's the little details that matter. For example:
in GURPS, if you take damage in one round, the amount taken is subtracted from your DX (effectively, skills) during the next round, as you are reeling from the blow. Now you'll say, "but then whoever gets the first shot in wins". Perhaps so. What do you think happens in a real fight?
in GURPS, there are crushing, cutting, and impaling damage types. Armour is subtracted from raw damage, then afterwards, crushing damage is the same, cutting is multiplied by 1.5, and impaling by 2. Weapons like maces deal a lot of crushing damage - helps penetrate armour, yet less lethal generally. Impaling weapons like daggers deal a small amount of damage, but are lethal against unarmoured opponents.
In GURPS, weapon skill is used to parry attacks from the opponent. Thus, two highly skilled swordsmen will probably always make their hit rolls, and usually parry. So you have...fencing! When a hit does happen, it can be deadly. Again, realistic. Various maneuvers such as feints serve to speed this up a bit so that fencing doesn't go on indefinitely.
How about this simple rule from Cyberpunk: head shots deal double damage. Point blank gunshots deal maximum damage (rather than rolling, eg d6 always deals 6). Thus point blank headshots almost always kill. Similarly, expert marksmen can easily kill with a single shot. When two square off, the slower one usually dies. Maybe all those westerns were on to something...
One last point about skills checks: GURPS uses 3d6 instead of a d20 for most actions. With a d20, all results are equally likely, including critical successes and failures fully 5% of the time each. (Cyberpunk is sadly even more guilty of this than d20, as it uses a d10). With 3d6, the rolls follow a more normal distribution - 3's and 18's are extremely unlikely, whiles 9's and 10's are very likely. Thus, highly skilled characters almost never fail at simple tasks, and skill improvements yield rapid gains at low levels and diminishing returns later on.
I feel that realistic rules like this are really important. If a player wants to go for the more difficult head or even eye shot for a quick kill, they will be really unhappy if the rules only allow damage that is less than 10% of the target's hitpoints (as can easily happen between mid level D&D characters). Of course, the DM can adjudicate, but as I said before, he wouldn't have to under better rules.
On character creation: the fact that GURPS added templates I see as more of a concession to beginners in a WotC dominated market than anything of real value. In GURPS, everything from attributes to skills to advantages (read: feats) is bought from a common point pool. In d20 by comparison, you can't trade a feat for more skills, or vice versa, or lower your basic stats to buy other things. And as you point out, there is no analog in d20 to GURPS's disadvantages.
Essentially, d20 forces you into straight jackets during character creation, where GURPS give you unlimited flexibility while maintaining balance. Sure, rolling up a character using classes is quick and easy, and that's fine for hack and slash. But I prefer to spend the extra time during character creation to make something that's exactly tailored to the concept I have in mind, and I don't like the system getting in my way.
I'll go on record saying that GURPS is the most realistic, flexible, well designed roleplaying system ever. Mind you, I'm talking about the system ie rules, not setting. The GURPS settings are somewhat hit and miss, but some are excellent (GURPS Space comes to mind). GURPS generally requires more world building work on the part of the GM, but it really gives you the tools to do anything you want.
Having been a long time GURPS fan, I just picked up the 4th Edition GURPS (now the Basic Set spans 2 books) which combines and cleans up rules from many previous GURPS books, and it is well worth the upgrade, a great job overall.
Second best system award goes to Cyberpunk 2020, though the books are looking sadly dated.
I'll also go on record saying that the d20 system is a piece of crap. That said, I play v3.5 D&D regularly because it's the lowest common denominator, and it is fun. But using it as some kind of universal rules system is a pure marketing move, it makes about as much sense as the tired Palladium rule system that was dragged from game to game, ruining potentially excellent settings like Rifts.
Some people will say that you should use the rules as a loose guideline, reinterpret them when logic and realism dictates. True enough, but a good rules system will require less interpretation because it already accurately reflects reality. Why not use the better system in the first place? D20 plays like some hack and slash computer RPG (eg Diablo), it requires VERY liberal interpretation to produce believable results (even in the heroic fantasy world sense of believable). And character classes... honestly, haven't we grown out of those yet?
Our math assignments are marked automatically in a web based system (WebCT) which also shows grades, has discussions, etc. The really dumb thing about it is that after you've done the assignment, the system marks it and tells you your score. It doesn't tell you which questions are wrong, just how many are wrong, but usually our assignments are daily and only 2-3 questions.
So then, you are given the option to go back and redo the questions. This is necessary because you have to enter answers such as (cos(x^2))^(1/3), hence most people who know the right answer don't enter it properly on the first try; some even go nuts trying to figure out how to properly enter an answer they know is right. But bottom line is, if you have the time to spare, you can get perfect on every homework - just try again if you're wrong!
Not to mention, every time you use your credit card in a store the number is printed on a receipt that goes in the register drawer. This drawer is closely guarded by some monkey employee making minimum wage.
If I wanted to steal credit card numbers, I wouldn't bother trying to hack anything, I'd just get a job at a gas station and copy the receipts. Or for instance, I once worked at a travel/sales company, as a temp for almost minimum wage I might add, where the full details, ie name, address, phone, credit-card etc of around 30,000 customers were stored in Outlook as archived email messages. I could have stolen the entire thing with a simple File-Export or what have you and walked out. They wouldn't even have known it was stolen. Which is more likely, a scenario like that or having you cc number stolen while in transit over the net using heavy encryption... ?
Not an expert on gun issues, but I have to say this about Canadian handgun laws: they keep a LOT of guns out of the hands of criminals.
The downtown eastside of Vancouver, arguably one of the worst neighbourhoods in Canada, is a nasty drug-infested places with one of the highest crime rates in the country (I worked at the courthouse there). One time the cops did a big sweep of street dealers, picked up over one hundred guys. Of those, they found 3 handguns.
I'm sure you can find better statistics about a lack of gun related crime in Canada, but I think this demonstrates the point. If they did a similar sweep in a bad neighbourhood in say, LA, how many guns do you think they'd find?
Sure, I'd like the right to own a handgun, but if that means that I never know who's packing one until they pull it, then you can keep your freedoms in that area. Despite being such a bad neighbourhood, the DTE is really not a dangerous place - most of the drug addicts, who would have no trouble mugging people if they had guns, are simply not capable of doing the same without one. Shoplifting, burglary, car theft, even fist fights are all common, but little serious violence considering.
Actually, having worked quite a bit as a computer instructor teaching adults to use the web, I can say that this has absolutely been true in my experience. I constantly have to point out the difference between ads, even really obvious ones, and search results.
I think the problem is that the average person does not understand or think about the economic relationships of websites, eg the fact that ads help pay for free websites. Most of the time they have no idea who is providing a website or why - they just think "the computer" gives it to them.
I just bought a BenQ FP71G, for $450 CDN it's 17 inches. Response time is 12ms and I find that more than adequate for UT2004 and similar games, although my friend who is pickier about these things says he notices the ghosting. Still, if there is any ghosting it is hard to notice, not at all like the horrible problems you had a few years ago.
I'd say my motivations for buying went something like: 50% for less eye strain, 25% for desk space, 25% for toy value.
One thing I didn't know before buying that suprised me is the whole native resolution thing: if you run it at its native resolution, you get crystal clear pixels. But run it at a lower res, and from what I can tell it does a hardware interpolation of some sort. It looks really bad frankly, like half the pixels on the screen have been shaded for anti-aliasing or something. Very noticable even on non-graphically intensive apps. Not really a problem as long as you run in native res, but good to be aware of. All that having been said, I'm happy with the purchase.
...I'd say roughly 10% of you have actually read the article. He mentions specifically many of the criticisms you've mentioned. I don't think this is earth shattering, but some of the ideas are pretty good.
I for one like the idea of source code stored as XML, but not displayed or edited as XML. Imagine, viewing source code in the format you specify (eg positioning of braces). And it would be really nice to be able to treat source code as data without breaking your back writing a parser. And for those of you worried about bloat - honestly, we're talking about text files here!
Fair enough. I would never be one to squash legitimate debate about any issue, and I would encourage reasonable criticism of any scientific theory. But given the battle, particularly in the US, between believers in evolution and religious folk of many kinds (who are in the majority), nine times out of ten when someone makes off the cuff remarks questioning the validity of evolution, they are not coming from a scientific standpoint. If the orginal post was meant as a joke, then I'll shut up, although again, given the social climate, there are probably more people who would take the comment seriously than as a joke. If evolutionists are sensitive to unjustified criticism, can you blame them?
If the theory of evolution has worked well for us -- even if this is arguable these days
Do I detect the scent of an evolution denier? And it is interesting that you implicitly question the validity of a theory even as you cite an example of its successful application.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been mentioned, but if you do any C++, you absolutely must have exactly 2 books once once you've understood the basics:
The C++ Programming Language (Stroustrup)
Effective C++ (Meyers)
There are so many garbage books on C++ that rehash the same crap. These 2 are the rare ones that will actually help you progress further in your understanding.
In general, I try to find the one definitive book on a subject. There often is one. In CS, these would include:
Introduction to Algorithms (Cormen et al)
Compilers - Principles, Tools and Techniques (Ahi et al)
Introduction to the Theory of Computation (Sipser)
A good university text each on discrete math, linear algebra, databases, operating systems, and networking is handy too, but there seems not to be a consensus as to which is the best. I guess what I'm saying is "do a CS degree and keep all of your textbooks".
I remember growing up and teaching myself programming in high school, like many people here. If there is one thing I wish I'd had, it's better access to technical books. Good books are worth the money. They're better written, better organized, and have much more quality content than the web. Skip the mainstream book stores and proceed directly to your local university book store, wherein you will find many books you won't find anywhere else, and much less crap. Abandon public libraries as they contain little in the way of serious technical material. University libraries are much better and some will let you join for a minor annual fee (eg $50), even if you don't go to that school.
So much for that. Now, some random personal favorites:
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins)
Darwin's Dangerous Idea (Dennett)
How the Mind Works (Pinker)
The Computational Beauty of Nature (Flake)
Practical Ethics (Singer)
Real Time Collision Detection (Ericson) - this book is much better than most I've seen on the subject
I've been doing scripts at work lately in Perl to pull data from Access and Excel files. There's ActivePerl for Windows, DBI to get at the Access data, and other modules for Excel. It all works quite well, and the text processing of Perl is handy for those reports (more so than, say, VBA). Not sure how you'd get at the images though. (Note: I am not a Perl fanboy in general, but if it works...)
You can still buy AOE 2 with the expansion pack for $40 in stores in Canada, and it's still one of the best RTS's around, which I play regularly. Not bad for a game that was released in 1999.
When people talk about a polar bear going extinct, and then claim that evolution will create new species so we shouldn't worry (which is not a straw man by the way, I have seen people say things like this repeatedly, including in response to this article), they are proposing that whatever we lose by not having polar bears we can regain through the evolution of new species. Yes, fine, evolution can take place on shorter timescales. But when large mammals go extinct, you won't be seeing new ones developing from other species for a very long time. I'm talking about changes that non-biologists will notice.
In all seriousness, if polar bears went extinct, how long would we expect to wait to see something else resembling a polar bear or anything else remotely as interesting develop? Sure, if polar bears were extinct, maybe some other bear species would evolve into something similar (though I'd imagine that would still take a long time). But if all bears were extinct, would you hold your breath for say, canines or some other mammal to evolve into something fundamentally different (ie, as different as a polar bear is from a dog)? The attitude I'm taking aim at here is "Who cares how we mess up the environment, nature will repair itself". Is it so difficult to see my point, or do you just like to nit pick?
Of course, there is a question of assigning value to things. How is having polar bears more valuable than not having them? "Nature" doesn't care. Of course not. But people do. People don't appreciate species because they fill an ecological niche. A polar bear is something to be appreciated for it's beauty, as a subject for biological study, for its role in a diverse ecosystem, and as a unique and irreplaceable product of million of years of evolution.
Hmmm. You appear not to have a point. Volcanoes are fast, therefore complex species can evolve within human lifespans?
Any value that, say, a polar bear has to you, romantic or otherwise, you will lose if it goes extinct. Maybe it has no value. Whatever. But don't expect nature's sorting it out to be any comfort to you. Hell, we could wipe out everything except single celled organisms, and nature will sort it out. Nature isn't something that cares; we are.
There is at least one other post for this article thats says "why should we protect the polar bear if its environment changes; what if some new creature adapted to the new environment emerges that is just as interesting?" My point is that we will never see this creature, it's going to take millions of years to evolve.
Ok, fine. If you really don't care, then don't save them. My point is that it is stupid to think about them being replaced, or nature "sorting it out", since these things probably won't happen while humans are still around. From our point of view, they might as well never happen.
I have to say this, because every time something like this comes up, there are a bunch of posts saying, "It's natural, it's evolution, new species will develop, nature will repair itself, bla bla bla". I just want to point out a fucking obvious fact that people seem to forget. Yes, nature will sort it out. Somewhere during the next several million years. You, your grandkids, and the whole human race probably won't be around to see it. Evolution works on geological time scales. Try and wrap your head around it. Save those species now, because from our point of view they will never be replaced.
I learned Java from Core Java and I still think it's a good intro. For C++, after you've gone through an introduction, you definitely want to get The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup. It has everything about C++, and you need it for that reason.
One of my favorite books that I think is a bit underappreciated is The Computational Beauty of Nature by Flake. There's just so much neat stuff in it, all across the spectrum of math and computer science, and it's quite accessible, yet with enough meat to satisfy.
Wow, that's exactly it. I said in my post elsewhere that Trevor was "pure evil", but that's not it at all. He simply isn't a good guy. And he is ruthless in pursuit of his goals, but that doesn't necessarily make him bad. What I hated most about the movie is how they changed the motivations and attitudes of Aeon and Trevor to make them both into Good Guys, when the moral ambiguity of the original series was one of the best things about it.
I'm actually shocked that anyone who was a fan of the original series could have liked this movie, for exactly the reasons you mentioned. Aeon and Trevor in the series were both more... alien characters, and Trevor was essentially pure evil. That was what made it good! The series was pretty twisted and bizarre, and didn't really respect the moral attitudes that are prevalent in most fiction.
Everything that made the series unique and interesting was ripped out of it and replaced with ho-hum Hollywood storytelling. Sure, the movie would have to have a bit more plot than the series. But it didn't have to be "main characters fall in love and try to save the world". In the movie, Aeon is trying to kill Trevor to avenge for her sister's death. Give me a break. In the series, it wasn't obvious what she was motivated by, or whether in fact she was trying to kill him. She was just fucking with him! They were just two people who were at the top of their game, and so maybe that's why they identified with each other. That whole dynamic was completely absent from the movie.
This is just another step in Hollywood's relentless drive to strip mine the last 50 years worth of underground comic, fantasy, and sci-fi material since they have zero fresh ideas themselves. I wouldn't object, except that in many cases they completely miss the point of the material they are adapting, and turn it into more of the same garbage they would have produced anyway. Aeon Flux had zero relationship to the animated series, and was at best a weak sci-fi action movie.
I haven't looked much at the hardware for either system, but does not the PS3 use the Cell processor? That thing is seriously rockin'. 1 main PowerPC and 8 subprocessors. The 8 procs use their own instruction set, are optimized for number crunching, and each has 256KB of its own dedicated memeory that is basically L1 cache. The API lets you load code directly into each chip's memory and let it rip. Very cool.
Of course, that won't necessarily mean that the games will be any good, which is the bottom line. But I think the Cell has the potential to be in a whole different league as far as processing power that can be devoted to things other than graphics.
Well, of course it's not truly realistic. Perhaps we should model the world at the level of quantum physics. You can always layer on more and more complicated rules to account for absolutely everything.
My point is that GURPS is more realistic than say, the d20 system, to a degree that at least satisfies most player intuitions. Most players will complain, and rightly so, if a they can't get a kill out of a head shot. Few will complain about the particular fraction of energy lost by a bullet as a function of range.
There must exist some optimum level of detail or realism that produces fairly reasonable results without requiring a supercomputer to run the game. I think GURPS is closer to that optimum than other systems.
Why shouldn't a skilled character target a vital organ and deliver a single killing blow, rather than chop hit points down from 100 a few d6 at a time? One of the things I really like about GURPS and Cyberpunk is the ease with which even a powerful character can be killed. It's just plain realistic. It's the little details that matter. For example:
I feel that realistic rules like this are really important. If a player wants to go for the more difficult head or even eye shot for a quick kill, they will be really unhappy if the rules only allow damage that is less than 10% of the target's hitpoints (as can easily happen between mid level D&D characters). Of course, the DM can adjudicate, but as I said before, he wouldn't have to under better rules.
On character creation: the fact that GURPS added templates I see as more of a concession to beginners in a WotC dominated market than anything of real value. In GURPS, everything from attributes to skills to advantages (read: feats) is bought from a common point pool. In d20 by comparison, you can't trade a feat for more skills, or vice versa, or lower your basic stats to buy other things. And as you point out, there is no analog in d20 to GURPS's disadvantages.
Essentially, d20 forces you into straight jackets during character creation, where GURPS give you unlimited flexibility while maintaining balance. Sure, rolling up a character using classes is quick and easy, and that's fine for hack and slash. But I prefer to spend the extra time during character creation to make something that's exactly tailored to the concept I have in mind, and I don't like the system getting in my way.
I'll go on record saying that GURPS is the most realistic, flexible, well designed roleplaying system ever. Mind you, I'm talking about the system ie rules, not setting. The GURPS settings are somewhat hit and miss, but some are excellent (GURPS Space comes to mind). GURPS generally requires more world building work on the part of the GM, but it really gives you the tools to do anything you want.
Having been a long time GURPS fan, I just picked up the 4th Edition GURPS (now the Basic Set spans 2 books) which combines and cleans up rules from many previous GURPS books, and it is well worth the upgrade, a great job overall.
Second best system award goes to Cyberpunk 2020, though the books are looking sadly dated.
I'll also go on record saying that the d20 system is a piece of crap. That said, I play v3.5 D&D regularly because it's the lowest common denominator, and it is fun. But using it as some kind of universal rules system is a pure marketing move, it makes about as much sense as the tired Palladium rule system that was dragged from game to game, ruining potentially excellent settings like Rifts.
Some people will say that you should use the rules as a loose guideline, reinterpret them when logic and realism dictates. True enough, but a good rules system will require less interpretation because it already accurately reflects reality. Why not use the better system in the first place? D20 plays like some hack and slash computer RPG (eg Diablo), it requires VERY liberal interpretation to produce believable results (even in the heroic fantasy world sense of believable). And character classes... honestly, haven't we grown out of those yet?
Our math assignments are marked automatically in a web based system (WebCT) which also shows grades, has discussions, etc. The really dumb thing about it is that after you've done the assignment, the system marks it and tells you your score. It doesn't tell you which questions are wrong, just how many are wrong, but usually our assignments are daily and only 2-3 questions.
So then, you are given the option to go back and redo the questions. This is necessary because you have to enter answers such as (cos(x^2))^(1/3), hence most people who know the right answer don't enter it properly on the first try; some even go nuts trying to figure out how to properly enter an answer they know is right. But bottom line is, if you have the time to spare, you can get perfect on every homework - just try again if you're wrong!
Not to mention, every time you use your credit card in a store the number is printed on a receipt that goes in the register drawer. This drawer is closely guarded by some monkey employee making minimum wage.
If I wanted to steal credit card numbers, I wouldn't bother trying to hack anything, I'd just get a job at a gas station and copy the receipts. Or for instance, I once worked at a travel/sales company, as a temp for almost minimum wage I might add, where the full details, ie name, address, phone, credit-card etc of around 30,000 customers were stored in Outlook as archived email messages. I could have stolen the entire thing with a simple File-Export or what have you and walked out. They wouldn't even have known it was stolen. Which is more likely, a scenario like that or having you cc number stolen while in transit over the net using heavy encryption... ?
Not an expert on gun issues, but I have to say this about Canadian handgun laws: they keep a LOT of guns out of the hands of criminals.
The downtown eastside of Vancouver, arguably one of the worst neighbourhoods in Canada, is a nasty drug-infested places with one of the highest crime rates in the country (I worked at the courthouse there). One time the cops did a big sweep of street dealers, picked up over one hundred guys. Of those, they found 3 handguns.
I'm sure you can find better statistics about a lack of gun related crime in Canada, but I think this demonstrates the point. If they did a similar sweep in a bad neighbourhood in say, LA, how many guns do you think they'd find?
Sure, I'd like the right to own a handgun, but if that means that I never know who's packing one until they pull it, then you can keep your freedoms in that area. Despite being such a bad neighbourhood, the DTE is really not a dangerous place - most of the drug addicts, who would have no trouble mugging people if they had guns, are simply not capable of doing the same without one. Shoplifting, burglary, car theft, even fist fights are all common, but little serious violence considering.
Actually, having worked quite a bit as a computer instructor teaching adults to use the web, I can say that this has absolutely been true in my experience. I constantly have to point out the difference between ads, even really obvious ones, and search results.
I think the problem is that the average person does not understand or think about the economic relationships of websites, eg the fact that ads help pay for free websites. Most of the time they have no idea who is providing a website or why - they just think "the computer" gives it to them.
I just bought a BenQ FP71G, for $450 CDN it's 17 inches. Response time is 12ms and I find that more than adequate for UT2004 and similar games, although my friend who is pickier about these things says he notices the ghosting. Still, if there is any ghosting it is hard to notice, not at all like the horrible problems you had a few years ago.
I'd say my motivations for buying went something like: 50% for less eye strain, 25% for desk space, 25% for toy value.
One thing I didn't know before buying that suprised me is the whole native resolution thing: if you run it at its native resolution, you get crystal clear pixels. But run it at a lower res, and from what I can tell it does a hardware interpolation of some sort. It looks really bad frankly, like half the pixels on the screen have been shaded for anti-aliasing or something. Very noticable even on non-graphically intensive apps. Not really a problem as long as you run in native res, but good to be aware of. All that having been said, I'm happy with the purchase.
...I'd say roughly 10% of you have actually read the article. He mentions specifically many of the criticisms you've mentioned. I don't think this is earth shattering, but some of the ideas are pretty good.
I for one like the idea of source code stored as XML, but not displayed or edited as XML. Imagine, viewing source code in the format you specify (eg positioning of braces). And it would be really nice to be able to treat source code as data without breaking your back writing a parser. And for those of you worried about bloat - honestly, we're talking about text files here!
Fair enough. I would never be one to squash legitimate debate about any issue, and I would encourage reasonable criticism of any scientific theory. But given the battle, particularly in the US, between believers in evolution and religious folk of many kinds (who are in the majority), nine times out of ten when someone makes off the cuff remarks questioning the validity of evolution, they are not coming from a scientific standpoint. If the orginal post was meant as a joke, then I'll shut up, although again, given the social climate, there are probably more people who would take the comment seriously than as a joke. If evolutionists are sensitive to unjustified criticism, can you blame them?
If the theory of evolution has worked well for us -- even if this is arguable these days
Do I detect the scent of an evolution denier? And it is interesting that you implicitly question the validity of a theory even as you cite an example of its successful application.
The postmodern essay generator
Surely MS doesn't want to enable a lot of independent game developers...