Yep, pretty naive. The standard C library was created in times when each damn if() cost *PRECIOUS* CPU cycles. Now that everyone can, and does, write bloatware, it's somehow no longer understandable why these standard functions did not check every boundary (like eg. BASIC). Oh, well.
Out of curiosity: how can you check that the size of a memory block pointed to by a pointer in C ? Because if you can't, then making boundary checks in strcpy() and fellows is impossible, so you have to leave them for whatever function calls them.
Once to see how many HD you can turn, but first a roll to cap what you can do (don't want low-level characters turning liches, natch).
Why not ? A lich is supposed to be intelligent, so it will just send a horde of zombies to act as turn fodder while it prepares a lightning bolt. Or just give it and other powerful undead turn resistance or something.
I personally don't understand why religion is needed for moral judgments.
For the same reason why acceleration is needed to determine which way is "up": it gives a frame of reference. Without it the concepts of right and wrong become meaningless as anything more as matters of taste, because they don't refer to anything beyond a particular person's subjective opinions.
Of course this doesn't mean that people become nasty and amoral, because social instincts don't disappear; it simply means that morality has no philosophical foundation in an atheistic philosophy.
If God is required not for the carrot and stick but for a voice that tells you what is right or wrong then this again can be taken care of by our society, murder is patently bad for society and as such it is wrong.
It may or may not be bad for the particular society in which it happened, but may or may not be helpful to others. Please explain why one should consider the welfare of society in general and some specific society in particular a basis for determining right and wrong.
The thing is, rejecting religion also means rejecting any meaning behind reality, which in turn means rejecting any objective values, since there's nothing left to derive them from. In other words, atheism inevitably leads to nihilism.
The agnostic says: "It can't be proven either way, so I don't care."
Stated this way, the agnostic is drawing an absolute conclusion without evidence. If the Christian God were to show up in Times Square tomorrow and give an irrefutable demonstration of who he is, then it would be proven.
And just what would that irrefutable demonstration be ? No matter what he did, how do you eliminate the possibility that he isn't actually a very powerful, but not divine, fake, who accomplished his deed through science and technology beyond ours ?
Or, to put it another way: What is a sufficiently demanding task that nothing short of omnipotence could possibly achieve it ?
And in any case, the quote clearly means that the person saying it can't prove it either way, not that God himself couldn't prove his existence.
The US is definitely not an atheist culture, but most of Europe is (if you don't count the Muslims.)
Europe is not atheistic, or at least the part of it I live in (Finland) isn't. We simply don't see the need to constantly seek attention about our belief or lack of it.
I have to admit, thought, that these constant flamefests on Slashdot are great entertainment - the geek equivalent of wrestling:).
You forgot to explain what's wrong with the basket metaphor.
It assumes that you can only have one basket at the time. However, pretty much any religious person takes stuff from the science basket as well; cars, electricity, printed books...
I Won't argue with you. You obviously believe in God, which makes you less than human. When you improve your logic as to be considered a Human being instead of a Christian, I'll happily talk to you.
The scary thing about religious debates is that it is often impossible to tell whether someone is trolling, being sarcastic, or serious.
Evolution is a fact; natural selection is but one theory to explain the fact of evolution.
"Natural selection" is a concept, not a theory. It refers to whatever natural causes (as opposed to intentional breeding) one lifeform to have more descendants than another; the common (false) idea equates this cause with an untimely death.
"Evolution" itself is the logically obvious result in a situation where inheritable traits may effect the number of descendants, and needs no further explanation.
Gravity is a fact. Mechanics was Newton's theory of gravity; it has since been replaced by Einstein's General Relativity, but at no time did gravity stop being a fact.
Newton's mechanics are not a theory of gravity, they're a theory of motion. Newton had no theory of gravity, just a mathemathical formula (F=f*m1*m2/(r*r)) to calculate the force it exerts on objects.
The problem with the "public should be taught the limitations of science" model is that the limitations of science should be seen as the limitations of human knowledge.
No, the limits of science should be seen as the limits of verifiability.
Take Paul, who claimed to have converted to christianity after seeing a vision of ascended Christ. He had a good reason to have faith; after all, he saw the object of his faith with his very own eyes. However, does that mean that he can prove that he's neither lying nor crazy ? Of course not. He was given sufficient evidence to convince him, but the evidence isn't the kind that could be verified by anyone else.
Then take Einstein, who's Theory of Relativity made some precise predictions about what would happen in certain conditions; specifically, he predicted that Sun's gravity would affect the light of stars which pass near it. This prediction can and has been tested during a total solar eclipse, as have many other predictions from said theory; they can also be tested again at will (assuming that you have access to a satellite; otherwise you need to wait for a solar eclipse;).
The point is that it's possible to have seen proof without having proof. It doesn't even have to be a religious matter; for example, someone could make an otherwise perfect murder, with the sole exception that you happen to see it. You can't prove it to anyone, because there is no evidence - it being a perfect murder - but you'd be a fool to disbelief what you saw.
In the long term I do believe that the Bible will vanish just like all these old religions like polytheism (somes last for 4000 years see the Egyptian religion).
AFAIK Hinduism is still alive and strong, so it's not like polytheism has vanished anywhere. Besides, Roman Catholicism isn't actually all that far from polytheism; it simply calls its lesser gods saints.
"Re-factoring" the code, e.g. by changing the layout of the variables in the memory, could suddenly change that: if the code now, under certain unlucky conditions, smears junk into *another*, more critical variable, you could introduce very hard-to-find regression bugs.
You'd better never upgrade the compiler either, then, because the new version could arrange memory differently.
Because of all the dirt surrounding the diamond industry, I will never buy one, and when/if I propose to my girlfriend she's getting a ring with any gem other than a diamond. (And not because I'm some cheap-ass.)
Why give a gem ring at all ? Give a simple ring, made of gold, with inscription inside, which comes visible and glows red when heated in fire.
Yes, buy a wedding ring from Mordor Jewelers, Inc., and you'll never have to worry about your significant other abandonging you ! Guaranteed to be less evil than DeBeers.
Mordor Jewelers Wedding Ring - because she's your precioussss !
The "ripping mp3s is unauthorized" angle is FUD all around, though. FUD on the RIAA for using that wording in the first place (yes it's unauthorized, in the same sense that I'm not authorizing you to disagree with my post), and FUD on everyone who cites this as the moment where the RIAA calls all users thieves.
Ripping CD's to MP3's is authorized by the fair use exception of the copyright law, while me disagreeing with you and making this disagreement public is authorized by the First Amendment of US Constitution (or would be, if I was a US citizen, which I'm not, but that's besides the point). So no, it isn't misleading FUD, but rather an outright lie.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Ok, I have heard that you can "grow out of" allergies, but that seems counter-intuitive to me. Can someone who's actually an MD comment on the method by which an immunity can "wear off"?
I used to be highly allergic to oak pollen as a kid, to the point I'd often get fever in springtime. Nowadays it won't even give me a runny nose. I have no idea about the mechanism behind this change, unfortunately.
Digital broadcasts are made using a decent amount of forward error correction. That means that a disturbance that would cause a barley noticeable speck of snow on analog will be corrected and do absolutely nothing at all to the picture in digital.
Except that, in practice and according to my own eyes, it does. Block artifacts are the reality of digital television for me and, judging from newspaper comments, lots of other people here in Finland.
Of course it could simply be that Finnish digital standard doesn't have sufficient level of error correction. That wouldn't really be surprising, considering how ill-planned the rest of the conversion process has been.
This is not a fundamental property of digital. In theory, digital picture quality in the presence of severe noise could have been vastly better even than analog. The actual bitstream format is not much more than raw MPEG streams arbitrarily divided into packets, multiplexed, and per-packet error correction added. Graceful degradation was never part of the design, but should have been.
Actually, any error having far larger effect in digital than analog signal is a fundamental property of compressed picture. After all, an error of similar size causes a larger proportion of total information to be lost the tighter the smaller size the total has been packed to. And compression is the whole point of digital television; without it, it would consume just as much bandwidth as analog. So yes, fragility is a fundamental property of digital television.
What they wanted and what game mechanics allow just don't match up. They talked a lot in the game about how the "good" path could actually be harmfull and the "evil" path could be about giving people strength BUT it never panned out.
This isn't a problem with game mechanics but with the script. The premise, as explained by Smiling Mountain at the beginning, was that Open Palm was Law and Closed Fist Chaos. A practitioner of Open Palm would strive to put everything to its place; at best, this achieves harmony and at worst oppression and tyranny. And a practitioner of Closed Fist would strive to advance himself and/or others; at best this means helping the weak become stronger, and at worst, Social Darwinism. It's a question between giving a hungry man a fish and teaching him to fish.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game then ignored this philosophy and equated Open Palm with Good and Closed Fist with Evil.
Perhaps because that entire idea is a load of bull. According to the theory of the closed fist, Hitler did the jews a favor with the holocaust since they got Israel out of it and made them into one of the thougest nations on earth.
Actually, Hitler would be a supporter of the Open Palm ideologue. After all, in his vision, the State took precedence over everything. Nazi ideologue is, at its core, a strive to harmony through strict hierarchy and destroying all obstacles, real or imagined. Hitler imagined a perfect world and considered any sacrifice worth that goal; that he was insane and his idea of perfection built on a silly fantasy about aryan race and magical powers achieved through blood purity doesn't change that. Nazism is a stereotypical example of an Open Palm ideologue perverted into evil; law and order, at any cost, is the core of fascism.
Fascism is the dark side of Open Palm, and peace and prosperity the light; for Closed Fist, the dark side is Social Darwinism and freedom and independence the light.
One problem I've been having with every one of these action RPGs (KotOR, Mass Effect,..) is that Bioware claims that you don't have to be inherently evil to go down the 'bad guy' path, but in Jade Empire it was the worst. They said it wouldn't be good vs evil, but every time you end up making that very choice.
Yup, it was supposed to be Law (Open Palm) vs. Chaos (Closed Fist), or so Smiling Mountain explained at the beginning, but every time it got down to Good vs. Evil. Nothing wrong with making a black and white world, but why pretend it isn't ?
Social Darwinism is wonderful as long as you're the strongest guy around
...and don't ever need to sleep and none of the weaker guys ever organise into a group.
Ah, but you see, if the weaker guys organize, they are clearly communiststs / unionized lazy bums / collectivists / left-wing bleeding heart liberals, so the big guy has legitimate cause to call the government to protect him. After all, the strong picking on the weak is just the way of nature, but the weak banding together and ganging on the strong is unfair.
How is that the same thing? When I buy a book, I hope I'll get entertained or amused by it more than I could have been by spending the same money on something else. In my case, probably beer.
Yes, and the same is true for the guy who buys a new avatar or whatever on Second Life instead of a book. Now, you might personally prefer books and beer over virtual world avatars as entertainment, and some other people prefer those avatars over books and beer. Such differences make the world go around.
I don't expect to be able to read it over and over and over again and hence get twenty times the cover price back. If it's not real work it's not a real business, so why do people expect to get real money out of it?
Um, how is modelling or writing a script or producing some other content for a virtual world any less "real work" than writing a book ? As long as someone is willing to pay real money (or something which can be exchanged to real money with relative ease) for something you produced, you have real business.
And I'd imagine that people expect to get real money out of it because experience has shown them that that expectation is justified.
Elephant's Dream was an arthouse kind of short. Yeah. Big whoop. It went over rather well in the independent film theaters where it was shown -- that was its target audience. It was written by a professional writer with a good deal of experience, and there certainly was a story being told, maybe even with sugar in its porridge. If that kind of story's not your thing, fine. Go watch X-Men again.
Elephant's Dream was a mixture of various unrelated scenes thrown together to demonstrate the capabilities of Blender and the animators (which, admittedly, are great). The story and scenes have no relation to each other whatsoever; the characters just run through random scenes until the final conflict.
"It isn't safe ! But jumping from plate to plate over a looming abyss is."
"I can't take it ! Hanging gardens of Babylon ! Colosus of Rhodos !"
*WHACK*
That said, it is an entertaining piece, colorful and imaginative. But it doesn't tell a coherent story. It is simply someone's dream, no more, no less.
That said, if I were to ever produce a fantasy movie, I know who I'd hire to make the special effects. The ending is how you make a battle scene between gods, with reality itself getting torn into itty bitty pieces, rather than the wussy death rays like in Xena or Hercules.
But I've never understood why anyone would use REAL money in a FAKE world!
Have you ever bought a fiction book, movie, video game, or anything like them ? If you have, what you paid for was not the physical media (unless you paid for a blank book) but rather the contents inscribed on it. In other words, you paid real money to immerse yourself into a fictitious - fake - world.
The world might be fake, but the entertainment is real. Besides, objective reality and subjective reality aren't the same thing; if you spend time playing in Second Life, then it it real for you, for some values of real. Of course it's all just ones and zeroes in a computer's memory; but if you perceive these ones and zeroes as a virtual world, then as far as you are concerned, there is a virtual world there.
Not unlike Slashdot itself, or any website for that matter, coming to think of it. Altought that might be a bad example if we're trying to figure our why anyone would pay real money to subscribe;)...
Slashdot Mirror
Out of curiosity: how can you check that the size of a memory block pointed to by a pointer in C ? Because if you can't, then making boundary checks in strcpy() and fellows is impossible, so you have to leave them for whatever function calls them.
For that matter, why are tieflings a race ? If they are people with fiendish ancestry, wouldn't a template work better ?
Why not ? A lich is supposed to be intelligent, so it will just send a horde of zombies to act as turn fodder while it prepares a lightning bolt. Or just give it and other powerful undead turn resistance or something.
No, but in the interests of simplicity, they're making "Deity" a prestige class with 20 levels.
Try Girl Genius. Gotta love a comic about a geek girl with glasses who can turn circus wagons into clockwork killer robots :).
Every slashdotters wet dream...
For the same reason why acceleration is needed to determine which way is "up": it gives a frame of reference. Without it the concepts of right and wrong become meaningless as anything more as matters of taste, because they don't refer to anything beyond a particular person's subjective opinions.
Of course this doesn't mean that people become nasty and amoral, because social instincts don't disappear; it simply means that morality has no philosophical foundation in an atheistic philosophy.
It may or may not be bad for the particular society in which it happened, but may or may not be helpful to others. Please explain why one should consider the welfare of society in general and some specific society in particular a basis for determining right and wrong.
The thing is, rejecting religion also means rejecting any meaning behind reality, which in turn means rejecting any objective values, since there's nothing left to derive them from. In other words, atheism inevitably leads to nihilism.
And just what would that irrefutable demonstration be ? No matter what he did, how do you eliminate the possibility that he isn't actually a very powerful, but not divine, fake, who accomplished his deed through science and technology beyond ours ?
Or, to put it another way: What is a sufficiently demanding task that nothing short of omnipotence could possibly achieve it ?
And in any case, the quote clearly means that the person saying it can't prove it either way, not that God himself couldn't prove his existence.
Europe is not atheistic, or at least the part of it I live in (Finland) isn't. We simply don't see the need to constantly seek attention about our belief or lack of it.
I have to admit, thought, that these constant flamefests on Slashdot are great entertainment - the geek equivalent of wrestling :).
It assumes that you can only have one basket at the time. However, pretty much any religious person takes stuff from the science basket as well; cars, electricity, printed books...
The scary thing about religious debates is that it is often impossible to tell whether someone is trolling, being sarcastic, or serious.
"Natural selection" is a concept, not a theory. It refers to whatever natural causes (as opposed to intentional breeding) one lifeform to have more descendants than another; the common (false) idea equates this cause with an untimely death.
"Evolution" itself is the logically obvious result in a situation where inheritable traits may effect the number of descendants, and needs no further explanation.
Newton's mechanics are not a theory of gravity, they're a theory of motion. Newton had no theory of gravity, just a mathemathical formula (F=f*m1*m2/(r*r)) to calculate the force it exerts on objects.
No, the limits of science should be seen as the limits of verifiability.
Take Paul, who claimed to have converted to christianity after seeing a vision of ascended Christ. He had a good reason to have faith; after all, he saw the object of his faith with his very own eyes. However, does that mean that he can prove that he's neither lying nor crazy ? Of course not. He was given sufficient evidence to convince him, but the evidence isn't the kind that could be verified by anyone else.
Then take Einstein, who's Theory of Relativity made some precise predictions about what would happen in certain conditions; specifically, he predicted that Sun's gravity would affect the light of stars which pass near it. This prediction can and has been tested during a total solar eclipse, as have many other predictions from said theory; they can also be tested again at will (assuming that you have access to a satellite; otherwise you need to wait for a solar eclipse ;).
The point is that it's possible to have seen proof without having proof. It doesn't even have to be a religious matter; for example, someone could make an otherwise perfect murder, with the sole exception that you happen to see it. You can't prove it to anyone, because there is no evidence - it being a perfect murder - but you'd be a fool to disbelief what you saw.
In the long term I do believe that the Bible will vanish just like all these old religions like polytheism (somes last for 4000 years see the Egyptian religion).
AFAIK Hinduism is still alive and strong, so it's not like polytheism has vanished anywhere. Besides, Roman Catholicism isn't actually all that far from polytheism; it simply calls its lesser gods saints.
You'd better never upgrade the compiler either, then, because the new version could arrange memory differently.
In Soviet Russia, the Collective destroys you !
Why give a gem ring at all ? Give a simple ring, made of gold, with inscription inside, which comes visible and glows red when heated in fire.
Yes, buy a wedding ring from Mordor Jewelers, Inc., and you'll never have to worry about your significant other abandonging you ! Guaranteed to be less evil than DeBeers.
Mordor Jewelers Wedding Ring - because she's your precioussss !
Ripping CD's to MP3's is authorized by the fair use exception of the copyright law, while me disagreeing with you and making this disagreement public is authorized by the First Amendment of US Constitution (or would be, if I was a US citizen, which I'm not, but that's besides the point). So no, it isn't misleading FUD, but rather an outright lie.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
I used to be highly allergic to oak pollen as a kid, to the point I'd often get fever in springtime. Nowadays it won't even give me a runny nose. I have no idea about the mechanism behind this change, unfortunately.
Except that, in practice and according to my own eyes, it does. Block artifacts are the reality of digital television for me and, judging from newspaper comments, lots of other people here in Finland.
Of course it could simply be that Finnish digital standard doesn't have sufficient level of error correction. That wouldn't really be surprising, considering how ill-planned the rest of the conversion process has been.
Actually, any error having far larger effect in digital than analog signal is a fundamental property of compressed picture. After all, an error of similar size causes a larger proportion of total information to be lost the tighter the smaller size the total has been packed to. And compression is the whole point of digital television; without it, it would consume just as much bandwidth as analog. So yes, fragility is a fundamental property of digital television.
This isn't a problem with game mechanics but with the script. The premise, as explained by Smiling Mountain at the beginning, was that Open Palm was Law and Closed Fist Chaos. A practitioner of Open Palm would strive to put everything to its place; at best, this achieves harmony and at worst oppression and tyranny. And a practitioner of Closed Fist would strive to advance himself and/or others; at best this means helping the weak become stronger, and at worst, Social Darwinism. It's a question between giving a hungry man a fish and teaching him to fish.
Unfortunately, the rest of the game then ignored this philosophy and equated Open Palm with Good and Closed Fist with Evil.
Actually, Hitler would be a supporter of the Open Palm ideologue. After all, in his vision, the State took precedence over everything. Nazi ideologue is, at its core, a strive to harmony through strict hierarchy and destroying all obstacles, real or imagined. Hitler imagined a perfect world and considered any sacrifice worth that goal; that he was insane and his idea of perfection built on a silly fantasy about aryan race and magical powers achieved through blood purity doesn't change that. Nazism is a stereotypical example of an Open Palm ideologue perverted into evil; law and order, at any cost, is the core of fascism.
Fascism is the dark side of Open Palm, and peace and prosperity the light; for Closed Fist, the dark side is Social Darwinism and freedom and independence the light.
Yup, it was supposed to be Law (Open Palm) vs. Chaos (Closed Fist), or so Smiling Mountain explained at the beginning, but every time it got down to Good vs. Evil. Nothing wrong with making a black and white world, but why pretend it isn't ?
Ah, but you see, if the weaker guys organize, they are clearly communiststs / unionized lazy bums / collectivists / left-wing bleeding heart liberals, so the big guy has legitimate cause to call the government to protect him. After all, the strong picking on the weak is just the way of nature, but the weak banding together and ganging on the strong is unfair.
Yes, and the same is true for the guy who buys a new avatar or whatever on Second Life instead of a book. Now, you might personally prefer books and beer over virtual world avatars as entertainment, and some other people prefer those avatars over books and beer. Such differences make the world go around.
Um, how is modelling or writing a script or producing some other content for a virtual world any less "real work" than writing a book ? As long as someone is willing to pay real money (or something which can be exchanged to real money with relative ease) for something you produced, you have real business.
And I'd imagine that people expect to get real money out of it because experience has shown them that that expectation is justified.
Elephant's Dream was a mixture of various unrelated scenes thrown together to demonstrate the capabilities of Blender and the animators (which, admittedly, are great). The story and scenes have no relation to each other whatsoever; the characters just run through random scenes until the final conflict.
"It isn't safe ! But jumping from plate to plate over a looming abyss is."
"I can't take it ! Hanging gardens of Babylon ! Colosus of Rhodos !"
*WHACK*
That said, it is an entertaining piece, colorful and imaginative. But it doesn't tell a coherent story. It is simply someone's dream, no more, no less.
That said, if I were to ever produce a fantasy movie, I know who I'd hire to make the special effects. The ending is how you make a battle scene between gods, with reality itself getting torn into itty bitty pieces, rather than the wussy death rays like in Xena or Hercules.
Have you ever bought a fiction book, movie, video game, or anything like them ? If you have, what you paid for was not the physical media (unless you paid for a blank book) but rather the contents inscribed on it. In other words, you paid real money to immerse yourself into a fictitious - fake - world.
The world might be fake, but the entertainment is real. Besides, objective reality and subjective reality aren't the same thing; if you spend time playing in Second Life, then it it real for you, for some values of real. Of course it's all just ones and zeroes in a computer's memory; but if you perceive these ones and zeroes as a virtual world, then as far as you are concerned, there is a virtual world there.
Not unlike Slashdot itself, or any website for that matter, coming to think of it. Altought that might be a bad example if we're trying to figure our why anyone would pay real money to subscribe ;)...