It's a good game, but it's more than just a little inspired by Zelda.
The concept of evolution applies to game design. Succesful games get their qualities passed on to future generations, and less succesful ones don't. Sometimes a game can be so succesful it starts a whole new genre - compare the emergence of RTS and FPS games to the emergence of reptiles and mammals, for example. And there is a tendency towards greater complexity, just as in evolution.
I think it is wonderful irony that evolution explains so well the behavior of a system with multiple Intelligent Designers competing with each other about the success of their creations - especially when those designers are, in a sense, creating whole worlds and realities:).
Wouldn't it be : In Soviet Russia, you eat black holes ?
Well, seeing how both people and goods had a habit of disappearing and never being seen again in Soviet Russia, I'd say that both forms are correct. I wonder if that reflects some deep, underlaying symmetry in the Laws of Politics ?
As an interesting aside, the light emitted near the event horizon of a black hole experiences red shift as it climbs up the gravitational field, and the Soviet Russia's flag is... red. Does that mean that Soviet Russia was a black hole, eating both people and material, and has now evaporated ?
Being agnostic or atheist has no necessary connection to being amoral.
Obviously most atheists and agnostics are moral, since they have social instincts and end up adopting whatever rules of behavior there exists in the society around them. However, why an atheist or agnostic would consider following said instincts better than following the so-called "lower" instincts is less obvious; after all, material reality doesn't have any inherent morality, so why should being moral from the point of view of one system of morals be any better than not being so ?
From evolutionary perspective morality is essentially a fabrication to faciliate co-operation between members of a pack. Every pack-forming animal has some kind of rules of behavior. These rules are useful to the species, but only as long as all pack members follow them, so any member not following them tends to get cast out by other pack members. This explains why atheists are so quick to defend themselves against allegations that they might slip from adherence to these rules: it is simple self-protection.
However, it also seems to me that, given an atheistic viewpoint, a person who can suppress his conscience, sense of guilt, and other social instincts, has no reason not to do so. For example, raping and killing aren't wrong, because there is no right or wrong outside of people's imagination; consequently, for an atheist there is no rational reason not to do them if the chances of getting caught are low. Most atheists won't do such things, of course, but they ultimately have no reason not to, besides being unable to overcome their instincts.
In other words, atheists may be moral, but atheism is inherently amoral, since denying the existence of anything supernatural - non-material - also denies the existence of morality in any meaningful sense.
I have often heard atheists claiming to be moral, but I have never heard any showing what this means from atheistic perspective, and why being moral is better than not being moral, again from atheistic perspective; all such attempts I've seen have presupposed the values of the surrounding culture - usually christian values in western cultures - to be universal and then engaged in circular reasoning. So, any care to explain ?
Hmm. I wonder if religion and atheism should be added to Godwin's law;).
There are far more car crashes in the back of my building, where two "harmless" streets meet and people park near the crossroad, limiting visibility for drivers coming from two of the four ways, than in the freeway, where everyone is speeding in the same direction, at the same speed.
The cars in a freeway don't always all go in the same direction. I speak from experience.
You sure you want a traffic cop to be able to access info about your finances?
Why would a traffick cop need to be able to access that info ? All he'll has to decide is how many days worth of income the fine should be; how much this is in dollars can be determined later by the IRS or something.
That's who kills more people than people like this... he's generally safer because he's actually aware he's fighting the odds, the daily commuters and soccer moms are the real danger because they have completely forgotten they are driving a killing machine.
There are million times more daily commuters and soccer moms than assholes like this guy, and they drive their commutes daily. That's why they have more accidents, not because they're more dangerous.
What happened that we are so afraid to test our boundaries? Guess what, no matter how safe you try to be, people will die.
Don't test your boundaries where failing will get other people hurt. Test them where the only possible victim will be you. And if you do insist on risking other people's lives, don't be surprised when they defend themselves by locking you up.
And yes, I've lost very close loved ones to traffic accidents. Raging against everyone that drives a little fast is not how you remember them.
Why not ? It seems to me that if sociopathic behavior gets someone killed, the best possible way to remember them is to get the guilty punished as cruelly as possible and then crushing said sociopathic behavior.
Life is dangerous.
Life would be a lot less dangerous if cretins like this didn't insist on doing stupid shit in public.
Oh, come on, for God's sake, grow a sense of humour.
I did, but some asshole ran over it with a car.
This is an astounding driving achievement.
No. What this is is some asshole endangering everyone using public roads and then being proud of it.
And as the article points out, this guy has become known as a fast but SAFE driver. I would have no doubt that he poses far less of a risk to other drivers than all those 'normal people', as you put it.
Of course. He's a SAFE driver, rather than an ordinary guy. How foolish of us not to realize that.
There is a difference between driving fast and driving dangerously.
Since the amount of mayhem caused in the case of an accident, the braking distance, and the reaction distance all go up as the speed of the car goes up, and the former two squared at that, I'd say that you are very wrong. Driving faster is more dangerous than driving slower, both to yourself and to everyone else on the road.
And besides, as a road user, doesn't it just go with the territory that you accept the risk that another driver may hit you?
No, anymore than it goes with the territory of owning a house that someone might decide to bar the doors and set it on fire because they happen to like watching the flames while you're sleeping on your bed.
I know I do. I know there are a few drivers out there who will sometimes drive well above safe speeds (which are not necessarily the same as the speed limits), and if one of them takes me out, well, it's just all part of the game of driving.
Driving isn't a game. Driving is using a public utility - roads - to get from point A to point B. Drivers who can't get it through their heads that endangering others isn't okay should had their licenses and cars taken away.
Which, I hope, will happen to these particular morons now that they've made their little trip public.
My site is fucking amazing. I dotted all the I's and crossed all the T's, and it's just right. I told some people, and they told some people, and it's still growing. Those search engine guys sure are using a lot of traffic with their robots. They're lucky I let them spider my site, but it's an open Internet... I guess it comes with success.
This only happens if the site's content is fucking amazing. That is extremely unlikely for a corporate homepage. Dotting the I's and crossing the T's only makes the site flawless, not excellent. And flawless is not enough to draw people.
If you build excellence, and Google doesn't find a way to index it, they become less relevant, not the other way around.
Except that if Google doesn't index it, no one knows it exists, so it doesn't matter how excellent it may be: it still won't get any traffick.
Of course the real problem is that Google is de facto monopoly in search business. More competition would cause the situation you described; but as-is, if it's not in Google, it doesn't exist.
That sounds like two separate bugs as the "lots of files in a single operation" sounds more like overflowing a fixed size array than anything else.
That wouldn't cause an Out of Memory error, but a General Protection Fault or something.
More likely the copy operation allocates some data structure for each file as it is copied (possibly only if it has extended attributes), and only deallocates it after the whole operation is completed, as opposed to directly after the particular file has been copied. That would cause the memory usage to go up constantly during the copy operation and cause it to run out if the number of files is large.
The problem was that the operating system's facilities for addressing the hardware - in particular the screen - were so piss-poor that programmer's had to address the hardware directly in order to achieve reasonable results. There weren't even system calls to allow the software to discover dynamically where the hardware was - the locations had to be hard coded. As a result it then became impossible to move on to a new generation of hardware (with a different limit) because the old software then wouldn't run any more.
No. That was not the problem. The problem was that DOS programs were 16-bit real mode programs. This means that they used 16-bit pointers to refer to memory locations. This is what limits a DOS program to 1 megabyte of memory, not any deficiency in MS-DOS (which it had many of, admittedly). The segmented perversion of 8086 made things even worse by making memory divided into 64kB chunks rather than contiguous.
In any case, as time went on, most DOS programs did move to next-gen hardware, first by using EMS and XMS memory, and later by using DOS extenders to run in 32-bit protected mode. Having fixed screen memory location was never the problem, quite on contrary: it made it possible to access the video card memory directly from protected mode without having to convert a 16-bit pointer from DOS into 32-bit one.
1) Methods to drive the screen purely by system calls, without having to be aware of the hardware at all.
We are talking about unaccelerated graphics card here. The fastest way to use them was to write directly to memory. Going through a system call would not only have been slower, meaning no one would had used it, but required said operating system to contain some kind of graphics driver, which would had taken up precious memory space and therefore hindered every program.
It's not as if all this wasn't known at the time. Other earlier offerings provided all this and more, but MS-DOS really didn't deserve the title of "Operating System" at all. It was a filing system and process loader with a few extra bits cobbled onto it to avoid being prosecuted under trades description laws.
DOS is perfect for what it's designed for - a filing system for two 360 kB diskettes that takes up little memory and doesn't get in your way, and lets you get your program into the memory. Of course a system resulting from these design parameters doesn't work too well in a modern machine with 500 GB hard disk, gigabytes of memory and a dazzling array of extension cards.
And, frankly, I doubt anyone at either IBM nor Microsoft realized that the IBM PC would still be in use, extended beyond nearly all recognition, 26 years later.
Run a sound daemon to queue it in software like windows does internally?
Mixing. Queuing would be the behavior your described.
In any case, this issue is solved: ALSA, the default sound system in 2.6 kernels, has an internal mixer, which the older OSS lacked. I don't know what will happen if two programs try to use the OSS emulation layer at the same time, thought.
Now you mention it, any good sports or exercise equipment could be legitimately referred to as Weapons of Mass Destruction. I'm going to have to start a fitness equipment company with that name..
Implements of Fat Destruction ? War on Fat ? Gadgets of Ass Construction ?
Or, to get back on the topic of trademarks, and since staying fit might help prolong your life, Die Another Day ?-)
I am absolutely sick of the jesusbots modding down anything critical of religion.
The post your responded to wasn't critical of religion, unless "you're stupid" is now considered valid criticism. It got correctly moderated as flamebait which it was.
Maybe instead the nerds of the world should make some spam proof technologies rather than filling up prisons for the equivalent of dumping junk mail fliers in your mailbox.
It is impossible to stop a communications medium for being used for advertizing by any technological means. Junk mail has a significant cost for the sender, so it has a natural limit on the amount of crap sent; e-mail, however, has no such natural limit.
Prison is a HUGE waste of money for someone who hasn't committed a violent act.
I guess mob bosses who don't dirty their own hands don't belong there then, eh ?
Is this guy a "real" threat to society at large?
Yes. "Spam" is using the communication medium (in this case e-mail) to send an endless stream of advertizements. It clogs up said communication channels, reducing signal to noise ratio, and increasing the chances of a legitimate message being lost. Since it is the communication between individuals which forms the society, spam directly attacks the very foundations of society, and is a very real threat.
There is another, long-term threat: cynicism. The advertizing we are being bombarded with at all times is making us adapt by becoming less and less receptive and likely to believe anything anyone tells us, which could have some extremely nasty implications down the road, since it weakens our ability to cooperate.
What happened to survival of the fittest?
Social Darwinism went out of fashion, as bad ideas often do.
This filling up prisons (placing non-violent folk in with psychos at that) is crazy stupid.
What makes you think that a spammer, who is running his operation with total disregard for the trouble and damage he is causing, isn't a psychopath ? Just because you're a psychopath doesn't make you too stupid to control your violent impulses when doing so is beneficent to you, you know.
There's only one problem with that. Multiplayer games that check for tampered datas. I remember using cracks/noCD/noDVD patches for games like Battlefield, and I get kicked off because of modified files.:(
Currently remotely running programs have no way of checking anything on your computer. They can, at most, ask the game program running on your computer for hashes of data files or something. If the cracked program doesn't know how to correctly answer such queries, the cracking group did a lousy job.
That's why you should only use official releases from reputable cracking groups. They work fine - in fact on my computer a cracked version of Morrowind worked much better than the "official" one, which crashed presumably due to some copy protection check at startup.
Not all of your apps will run with WinVista, unless you use "compatibility mode" or do some extra steps.
And even if you do use compatibility mode, programs may still either refuse to run outright or crash randomly. Furthermore, every time a compatibility mode switches Aero off, Vista feels it's neccessary to pop up a message saying so. Finally, whenever something crashes, a message saying something to the effect of sending info to Microsoft pops up. Oh, and one update made the photo album software unable to save edited photos, but that thankfully was fixed by the next update.
Granted, the laptop I'm referring to came with Symantec crapware installed, so some of the problems may be caused by that. It seems to be running into some kind of problems constantly; funny how F-Secure antivirus in XP just works.
Still, as is, I'd heavily recommend against Vista. If you must run Windows, XP is reasonably good and least likely to run into problems. Vista offers Aero, but in the end that's just eye candy, and an endless series of headaches.
Walmart sales are based on estimated inventory demand from past performance and current market trends. A unique contract between two parties for services cannot be "estimated". This should be plainly obvious.
The chances of getting said contract and the likely impact on future earnings, however, can be estimated. Whether or not this estimate should be taken into account in any public, official, or other announcements of estimated future profits depends on particular laws of the country the corporation in question is located at, and is not obvious to anyone not familiar with the details of said laws.
Or to put it in other worsd: all future projections are guesstimates. Why should expected contracts be excluded from them ?
Police's. You know, the people who get paid to "serve and protect" ? Possibly army's or secret service's, if we are talking about Threats with capital T.
Just because some of us don't want to pay for proprietary software licenses, does not mean we need to leave the vast portion of the population defenseless against the scammers and worse that lurk on the net. We all know about these dangers, we laugh when we get 419 spam, others aren't so knowledgeable.
I am defended against scammers by my brains. Admittedly each upgrade to the paranoidic center has cost me dearly, thought, but after I put it to "default distrust" mode the problems have lessened considerably.
And just because you don't want to pay for proprietary software licenses in no way means that I should be monitored and policed by my ISP.
Re:There's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!
on
Has Wikipedia Peaked?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Thats because there's nothing left that wikki doesn't know!
Of course there are, many things. However, the Wikipedia editors have, in their blind rush to become a "real" encyclopedia, put up barriers of "notability". In practice this means that articles often get deleted if the editor doesn't consider them important ("notable").
Dead-tree encyclopedias have a bar of notability because they have limited size and primitive searching facilities (alphapetical order), so a non-notable article takes space which could be better used on something more important, while increasing the size makes the whole thing more expensive and harder to search. Wikipedia has in practice limitless size and advanced searching facilities (internal links and full text search), so adding an article always adds value.
There is the fundamental difference between online and dead-tree encyclopedias; it is a pity Wikipedia hasn't quite grasped this.
"Fuck" in the "fuck you" sense seems to have all the same properties as the entire phrase "I am displeased with". So "describe and I am displeased with communism"?
Hmm... But take the phrase "to fuck up". It doesn't have anything to do with being displeased, it just means that someone has just failed, and in a particularly spectacular way at that. So, "fuck communism" could also be interpreted "fuck up communism", or "make communism fail in a spectacular manner". So, the original sentence of "describe and fuck communism" could then be interpreted as "describe communism and make it fail in a spectacular way".
It's quite possible to have different people working on different things at the same time.
Maybe, but in this case it doesn't make sense. Firefox contains (a) memory leak(s), which make it neccessary to restart it regularly. Computer users put up with such, to put it frankly, piece of shit programming, but the users of other appliances won't, even if a modern cellphone is essentially a computer with radio receiver and transmitter. So, until the leak(s) have been plugged, there is no point in putting efforts towards a mobile Firefox; and, judging by how long they have persisted, I'd imagine them to be quite non-trivial and work-intensive to fix.
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of evolution applies to game design. Succesful games get their qualities passed on to future generations, and less succesful ones don't. Sometimes a game can be so succesful it starts a whole new genre - compare the emergence of RTS and FPS games to the emergence of reptiles and mammals, for example. And there is a tendency towards greater complexity, just as in evolution.
I think it is wonderful irony that evolution explains so well the behavior of a system with multiple Intelligent Designers competing with each other about the success of their creations - especially when those designers are, in a sense, creating whole worlds and realities :).
Well, seeing how both people and goods had a habit of disappearing and never being seen again in Soviet Russia, I'd say that both forms are correct. I wonder if that reflects some deep, underlaying symmetry in the Laws of Politics ?
As an interesting aside, the light emitted near the event horizon of a black hole experiences red shift as it climbs up the gravitational field, and the Soviet Russia's flag is... red. Does that mean that Soviet Russia was a black hole, eating both people and material, and has now evaporated ?
In Soviet Russia, black holes eat you !
It isn't. It's plutocracy. Fascism is when the state is above everything and its interests trump everything else.
Obviously most atheists and agnostics are moral, since they have social instincts and end up adopting whatever rules of behavior there exists in the society around them. However, why an atheist or agnostic would consider following said instincts better than following the so-called "lower" instincts is less obvious; after all, material reality doesn't have any inherent morality, so why should being moral from the point of view of one system of morals be any better than not being so ?
From evolutionary perspective morality is essentially a fabrication to faciliate co-operation between members of a pack. Every pack-forming animal has some kind of rules of behavior. These rules are useful to the species, but only as long as all pack members follow them, so any member not following them tends to get cast out by other pack members. This explains why atheists are so quick to defend themselves against allegations that they might slip from adherence to these rules: it is simple self-protection.
However, it also seems to me that, given an atheistic viewpoint, a person who can suppress his conscience, sense of guilt, and other social instincts, has no reason not to do so. For example, raping and killing aren't wrong, because there is no right or wrong outside of people's imagination; consequently, for an atheist there is no rational reason not to do them if the chances of getting caught are low. Most atheists won't do such things, of course, but they ultimately have no reason not to, besides being unable to overcome their instincts.
In other words, atheists may be moral, but atheism is inherently amoral, since denying the existence of anything supernatural - non-material - also denies the existence of morality in any meaningful sense.
I have often heard atheists claiming to be moral, but I have never heard any showing what this means from atheistic perspective, and why being moral is better than not being moral, again from atheistic perspective; all such attempts I've seen have presupposed the values of the surrounding culture - usually christian values in western cultures - to be universal and then engaged in circular reasoning. So, any care to explain ?
Hmm. I wonder if religion and atheism should be added to Godwin's law ;).
The cars in a freeway don't always all go in the same direction. I speak from experience.
Why would a traffick cop need to be able to access that info ? All he'll has to decide is how many days worth of income the fine should be; how much this is in dollars can be determined later by the IRS or something.
There are million times more daily commuters and soccer moms than assholes like this guy, and they drive their commutes daily. That's why they have more accidents, not because they're more dangerous.
Don't test your boundaries where failing will get other people hurt. Test them where the only possible victim will be you. And if you do insist on risking other people's lives, don't be surprised when they defend themselves by locking you up.
Why not ? It seems to me that if sociopathic behavior gets someone killed, the best possible way to remember them is to get the guilty punished as cruelly as possible and then crushing said sociopathic behavior.
Life would be a lot less dangerous if cretins like this didn't insist on doing stupid shit in public.
I did, but some asshole ran over it with a car.
No. What this is is some asshole endangering everyone using public roads and then being proud of it.
Of course. He's a SAFE driver, rather than an ordinary guy. How foolish of us not to realize that.
Since the amount of mayhem caused in the case of an accident, the braking distance, and the reaction distance all go up as the speed of the car goes up, and the former two squared at that, I'd say that you are very wrong. Driving faster is more dangerous than driving slower, both to yourself and to everyone else on the road.
No, anymore than it goes with the territory of owning a house that someone might decide to bar the doors and set it on fire because they happen to like watching the flames while you're sleeping on your bed.
Driving isn't a game. Driving is using a public utility - roads - to get from point A to point B. Drivers who can't get it through their heads that endangering others isn't okay should had their licenses and cars taken away.
Which, I hope, will happen to these particular morons now that they've made their little trip public.
This only happens if the site's content is fucking amazing. That is extremely unlikely for a corporate homepage. Dotting the I's and crossing the T's only makes the site flawless, not excellent. And flawless is not enough to draw people.
Except that if Google doesn't index it, no one knows it exists, so it doesn't matter how excellent it may be: it still won't get any traffick.
Of course the real problem is that Google is de facto monopoly in search business. More competition would cause the situation you described; but as-is, if it's not in Google, it doesn't exist.
That wouldn't cause an Out of Memory error, but a General Protection Fault or something.
More likely the copy operation allocates some data structure for each file as it is copied (possibly only if it has extended attributes), and only deallocates it after the whole operation is completed, as opposed to directly after the particular file has been copied. That would cause the memory usage to go up constantly during the copy operation and cause it to run out if the number of files is large.
No. That was not the problem. The problem was that DOS programs were 16-bit real mode programs. This means that they used 16-bit pointers to refer to memory locations. This is what limits a DOS program to 1 megabyte of memory, not any deficiency in MS-DOS (which it had many of, admittedly). The segmented perversion of 8086 made things even worse by making memory divided into 64kB chunks rather than contiguous.
In any case, as time went on, most DOS programs did move to next-gen hardware, first by using EMS and XMS memory, and later by using DOS extenders to run in 32-bit protected mode. Having fixed screen memory location was never the problem, quite on contrary: it made it possible to access the video card memory directly from protected mode without having to convert a 16-bit pointer from DOS into 32-bit one.
We are talking about unaccelerated graphics card here. The fastest way to use them was to write directly to memory. Going through a system call would not only have been slower, meaning no one would had used it, but required said operating system to contain some kind of graphics driver, which would had taken up precious memory space and therefore hindered every program.
DOS is perfect for what it's designed for - a filing system for two 360 kB diskettes that takes up little memory and doesn't get in your way, and lets you get your program into the memory. Of course a system resulting from these design parameters doesn't work too well in a modern machine with 500 GB hard disk, gigabytes of memory and a dazzling array of extension cards.
And, frankly, I doubt anyone at either IBM nor Microsoft realized that the IBM PC would still be in use, extended beyond nearly all recognition, 26 years later.
Mixing. Queuing would be the behavior your described.
In any case, this issue is solved: ALSA, the default sound system in 2.6 kernels, has an internal mixer, which the older OSS lacked. I don't know what will happen if two programs try to use the OSS emulation layer at the same time, thought.
Implements of Fat Destruction ? War on Fat ? Gadgets of Ass Construction ?
Or, to get back on the topic of trademarks, and since staying fit might help prolong your life, Die Another Day ?-)
The post your responded to wasn't critical of religion, unless "you're stupid" is now considered valid criticism. It got correctly moderated as flamebait which it was.
It is impossible to stop a communications medium for being used for advertizing by any technological means. Junk mail has a significant cost for the sender, so it has a natural limit on the amount of crap sent; e-mail, however, has no such natural limit.
I guess mob bosses who don't dirty their own hands don't belong there then, eh ?
Yes. "Spam" is using the communication medium (in this case e-mail) to send an endless stream of advertizements. It clogs up said communication channels, reducing signal to noise ratio, and increasing the chances of a legitimate message being lost. Since it is the communication between individuals which forms the society, spam directly attacks the very foundations of society, and is a very real threat.
There is another, long-term threat: cynicism. The advertizing we are being bombarded with at all times is making us adapt by becoming less and less receptive and likely to believe anything anyone tells us, which could have some extremely nasty implications down the road, since it weakens our ability to cooperate.
Social Darwinism went out of fashion, as bad ideas often do.
What makes you think that a spammer, who is running his operation with total disregard for the trouble and damage he is causing, isn't a psychopath ? Just because you're a psychopath doesn't make you too stupid to control your violent impulses when doing so is beneficent to you, you know.
Currently remotely running programs have no way of checking anything on your computer. They can, at most, ask the game program running on your computer for hashes of data files or something. If the cracked program doesn't know how to correctly answer such queries, the cracking group did a lousy job.
That's why you should only use official releases from reputable cracking groups. They work fine - in fact on my computer a cracked version of Morrowind worked much better than the "official" one, which crashed presumably due to some copy protection check at startup.
And even if you do use compatibility mode, programs may still either refuse to run outright or crash randomly. Furthermore, every time a compatibility mode switches Aero off, Vista feels it's neccessary to pop up a message saying so. Finally, whenever something crashes, a message saying something to the effect of sending info to Microsoft pops up. Oh, and one update made the photo album software unable to save edited photos, but that thankfully was fixed by the next update.
Granted, the laptop I'm referring to came with Symantec crapware installed, so some of the problems may be caused by that. It seems to be running into some kind of problems constantly; funny how F-Secure antivirus in XP just works.
Still, as is, I'd heavily recommend against Vista. If you must run Windows, XP is reasonably good and least likely to run into problems. Vista offers Aero, but in the end that's just eye candy, and an endless series of headaches.
Well, it's still a step ahead of Diablo voting machines.
The chances of getting said contract and the likely impact on future earnings, however, can be estimated. Whether or not this estimate should be taken into account in any public, official, or other announcements of estimated future profits depends on particular laws of the country the corporation in question is located at, and is not obvious to anyone not familiar with the details of said laws.
Or to put it in other worsd: all future projections are guesstimates. Why should expected contracts be excluded from them ?
The horse that is Star Trek is long dead. But haven't you ever heard of... zombies ?-)
Police's. You know, the people who get paid to "serve and protect" ? Possibly army's or secret service's, if we are talking about Threats with capital T.
I am defended against scammers by my brains. Admittedly each upgrade to the paranoidic center has cost me dearly, thought, but after I put it to "default distrust" mode the problems have lessened considerably.
And just because you don't want to pay for proprietary software licenses in no way means that I should be monitored and policed by my ISP.
Of course there are, many things. However, the Wikipedia editors have, in their blind rush to become a "real" encyclopedia, put up barriers of "notability". In practice this means that articles often get deleted if the editor doesn't consider them important ("notable").
Dead-tree encyclopedias have a bar of notability because they have limited size and primitive searching facilities (alphapetical order), so a non-notable article takes space which could be better used on something more important, while increasing the size makes the whole thing more expensive and harder to search. Wikipedia has in practice limitless size and advanced searching facilities (internal links and full text search), so adding an article always adds value.
There is the fundamental difference between online and dead-tree encyclopedias; it is a pity Wikipedia hasn't quite grasped this.
Hmm... But take the phrase "to fuck up". It doesn't have anything to do with being displeased, it just means that someone has just failed, and in a particularly spectacular way at that. So, "fuck communism" could also be interpreted "fuck up communism", or "make communism fail in a spectacular manner". So, the original sentence of "describe and fuck communism" could then be interpreted as "describe communism and make it fail in a spectacular way".
Maybe, but in this case it doesn't make sense. Firefox contains (a) memory leak(s), which make it neccessary to restart it regularly. Computer users put up with such, to put it frankly, piece of shit programming, but the users of other appliances won't, even if a modern cellphone is essentially a computer with radio receiver and transmitter. So, until the leak(s) have been plugged, there is no point in putting efforts towards a mobile Firefox; and, judging by how long they have persisted, I'd imagine them to be quite non-trivial and work-intensive to fix.