Maybe I'm biased the other way, but the "truly hardcore" players have always come across to me as slightly-overweight 14-year-olds who have nothing better to do other than lord their 72-level characters' might over the hapless passersby. I'd support perma-death if advancement was a zero-sum game, i.e., in order to improve at something you have to get worse at something else. Then we'd quit the "John Rambo" loop non-perma-death is used to mitigate.
Some latter-day IFs (linky-linky) do provide just that. Of course, in that case, you already have all game data local on your HD and serving a given piece of media to 200 players isn't an issue...
Maybe what we need is a smart client which can understand old-style BASIC "PLAY" grammar -- "o4t240cdededrddcdere.... About the graphics, loads of MUDs already have ASCIIArt maps and stuff -- libcaca is your friend.
Biopiracy, n. The smuggling of species of plants, animals and fungi, typically from tropical, 3rd-world countries to temperate, 1st-world ones, for the purpose of isolating substances which are then patented as inventions and levied as taxes on the same countries where the substances came from.
Yes, kids, it exists. You'll find it nowhere in US and European media because it's not convenient to anyone, but people are arrested regularly for it in international airports of developing nations for it (including the selfsame Brazil). The pharmaceutical industry isn't quite the paragon of correctness and hard effort you make them out to be.
It might, except that J. Random Reader isn't going to "get" an ad promoting several competing products, and it would waste the not-insignificant amount of dough that went into the effort. After all, to the non-initiated, an advertisement for everything but IE will come across as desperate.
That being said, I'm all for a full-page ad in the NYT for Safari. It has to be a different ad, though.
It may seem a little harsh, but in the Macs we don't have nearly the same browser monoculture we have in Windows. And of course, the Windows user base is an order of magnitude larger than Macintosh's. So the battle must be fought in Win32 world.
OTOH, if you really mean by saying that 'Safari already won that battle' is that there's no need to use anything but Safari, then you're thinking down the same path that led us to our current predicament. By the same token, too high a usage rate for Firefox (above 70%) is also a bad thing, but considering that scenario is rather far-fetched, no one worries about it today.
What you write is quite correct. And frankly, there is not much of a way around it; the "upgrade train" isn't going to go away, even because protocols evolve with time, and applications (and OSes have to evolve right along). However, the likelihood that systems like browsers or OSes will be upgraded is inversely proportional to the cost of such an upgrade to the user. That is why windowsupdate.com is such a killer idea, and why conversely tying the browser to the OS is so bone-headed.
Should Mozilla become the leader in the browser market, it's certain that script kiddies, spammers and such will flock to this platform, to try and exploit it in whatever way they can. Vulnerabilities will be found, patches will be released, and eventually someone will begin to work upon the successor to Firefox. The new 0.10 release already has a feature to automatically download patches, just like Windows Update. With IE, however, this sort of process is placed on its ear. Let us imagine an example:
It's 2010 and I'm running Windows 2006 (AKA Longhorn) and a critical vulnerability is discovered in IE 7 or whatever the system browser will be called. I'll have to upgrade to Windows 2009 in order to get a fix for it or live with a potentially-compromised machine. Fine, upgrade it is, except for the fact that Windows 2009 comes with the WinFX relational file system which did not make it in time for Win06, as well as.NET framework 3.0 and a host of other changes which are almost-but-not-quite binary compatible with the host of applications I'll have currently sitting on my hard disk -- especially since 2002, when MS decided that backwards compatibility is not so hot anymore. Which means that in order to get a system upgrade, I'll need to upgrade my OS and just about every application I have, just to be on the safe side. How much time, let alone money, will I need for that?
Finally, even more important than the Mozilla-vs-IE debate, which is itself an offshoot of the ecological-diversity-on-the-Web debate, what I'm railing against here is the vertical integration of software MS is practicing. The existence of obsolete software in use is an inevitability which we need to take into consideration when we look to the future; but when we tie down applications to the OS, we're breaking modularity, which every programmer or systems engineer knows is wrong; object orientation and even structured programming are paradigms created to introduce modularity into programming.
Mozilla will have bugs, and obsolete, compromised versions will be around. It's part of the nature of software. However, the stance the Mozilla foundation takes regarding these bugs is fundamentally different from the stance MS has taken since 2001, and that's what in my view you're missing.
Initially, one would think so, wouldn't one? And if nuclear power plants would only produce nuclear waste and energy, this reasoning would be even correct. However, nuclear power plants also consume radioactive fuel -- typically Uranium -- which exists out in the wild. Therefore, the total amount of nuclear material does not increase as alarmingly as one first suspects.
Similarly, excess CO2 can be sequestered for a while, then put into more productive uses -- turning it into calcium carbonate (marble) for construction work, for example.
At the end of the article, the author debunks some green myths about solar and wind power. Truly green methods of energy generation involve being able to scale up, like we scale computing capacity. Solar and Wind power require just too much surface area to ever be useful. In the medium to long term, underground nuclear plants and emission-controlled internal thermoeletric turbines are what will allow us to control environmental degradation while allowing the energy demand to increase to meet the demands of the developing world economy.
But it's OK for some dude to publish an IE vuln without first contacting Microsoft and giving them a chance to fix it
It's certainly not all right for someone to publish a vulnerability without contacting MS; any responsible FOSS developer will agree. However, once a security vulnerability is in the wild, it's in the wild, and pretending it doesn't exist will not help matters any.
The big beef most FOSS developers have with MS lies in the fact that the current rendering engine for MSIE, Trident, is obsolete, MS acknowledges it as such, and yet still refuses to overhaul it. I quote from Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
In a May 7, 2003 Microsoft online chat, Brian Countryman, Internet Explorer Program Manager, declared that on Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer will cease to be distributed separately from the operating system (IE 6 being the last standalone version); it will, however, be continued as a part of the evolution of the operating system, with IE updates coming bundled in OS upgrades. Thus, IE and Windows will be kept more in sync: it will be less likely that people will use a relatively old version of IE on a newer version of Windows,
and newer versions of IE will not be usable without an OS upgrade.
Now, this is a problem because many Windows users use versions of Windows which are obsolete: 98SE, ME, 2000. When Longhorn comes, this trend will of course hold true: people don't rush to the stores to buy the newest Operating System version. This means that people will be using still old versions of MSIE long after IE7 comes, which will, of course, be unsupported by MS because they don't want to trail support for 5 or 10 different versions of a single product.
Finally, tying the web browser to the OS version ensures that a product that is upgraded for free today won't be in the future: remember, you may get the "newest" version of MSIE for free, but you must pay $50 or $60 (if memory still serves) for a new version of Windows, not counting the hardware upgrades which prove necessary. Most people will think that the old version works "well enough" and blissfully go on surfing the Web. Remember, security vulnerabilities are such because they're not obvious.
In conclusion, FOSS developers do not criticize MS for keeping quiet about security vulnerabilities which do not yet have a fix; they criticize it for denying the need for a complete overhaul of their application even faced with massive evidence that their rendering engine has given what it had to give; instead, they concoct a scheme to force users to upgrade (spending money they might not have) in order to keep their data safe.
Sorry, on my vanilla Linux system (a Knoppix HD install, actually), it's turn computer on, it boots, log in, click on the Writer icon, it loads. The only extra step is the login, which isn't very hard to explain to the average user. Of course, one can set the display manager to do auto-login, though I certainly wouldn't recommend it...
I'd say five parts ease-of-use, three parts cost-effectiveness and two parts inertia (and inertia is always a valid argument; if something ain't broke, why fix it?)
Unfortunately, it's not that Windows "ain't broke", because it is; it's that it's just not broken enough for people to get off their asses and learn alternatives.
Very much unfortunately, an OS is in many ways like a language. One has to learn it, and it's not a single day affair. Oftentimes one will want to use structures from the languages one does know, especially if one only knows a single language; simply because one does not see these features as being intrinsic to the language so much as to human communication itself! Now substitute "OS" for "language" above, and "computing" for "human communication". See what I mean?
Quite a bit has been said about the need for Linux to become more "user-friendly" (read: like Windows), but truth is that teaching Windows to a lay user is every bit as difficult as teaching Linux to one, or to a Windows user. And the Windows user is especially obnoxious because he'll think, "why can't this be like I've already learned? Why must I learn things over again?", and will rather just default back to what they already know -- Windows. Therefore, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is a myth: instead only if we teach the people who learn "computer science" (that is, Windows, Word and Excel) in schools and specialized courses to learn Linux, OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc instead. Only then we will see the market share of Windows really fall on the desktop.
In short, your five parts ease-of-use are actually five parts inertia...
Siderurgy is high energy consumption. Software development isn't. Neither is most social or biological research, including there high-end genetic, pharmaceutical and medical research. There's no actual excuse not to sign the Kyoto protocol, even because efficient energy use is high tech and a very, very profitable industry.
Some censorship will always, and I mean *always*, happen. After all, one could think of anti-slander and anti-libel laws in the US as a restriction of one's freedom to talk trash publicly about someone else.
Yes, any law has the potential for abuse, as you just mentioned: the First Amendment itself can be abused and OK the spread of lies and hate, as it's done several times already. So the only thing we can do is trust the judges to have the ethical strength to rule fairly when a law applies and when it doesn't. It's inconvenient for us when they disagree with what we think is correct, but there's not much we can do short of bloody revolution.
That's a sophism if I ever saw one. Anti-Nazi laws aren't passed because the government hates the Nazi. It's because the government recognizes that Nazism is a destructive influence on a multiethnic society like the new Europe (yes, really), and that it cannot be allowed to grow unchecked, or it's 1933 all over again.
Don't kid yourself, either. behind every law there is an assumed threat of use of force: physical harm, incarceration, economic sanctions, fining; they are all a restriction on one's freedom in different levels. And they're a core principle of democracy (well, except for physical harm, of course).
One day, everyone may come together and naturally wish the best for everybody else, banishing selfishness from society. But at that point, we'll be better off becoming Communists, because then we'll be assured it works. In the meantime, we have to keep up with the use of force to curtail the selfishness of individuals in the name of the overall good, however flawed that may be. Because frankly, there's nothing better around.
isn't about time someone making some standard for a business actually asked what the business wanted and made it for them instead of some hypothetical extreme programming remote procedure call markup language shit?
You have apparently never worked in the web application field, have you? If you had, you'd know exactly what the client wants: everything, fast, and preferrably, the application should do the thinking for its user. Whatever your application does, the user is going to invariably want a back-door that allows him to bypass all of your pretty business logic.
Considering this, standards are churned out in the vain hope business folks will want to abide by the rules they themselves decided on over the course of the development. Useless? You be the judge!
It would be incredibly naive to believe that other countries and terrorist organizations would not exploit an easy opportunity to sabotage our military or critical infrastructure systems when we have been doing the same to them for more than 20 years!
Whoa, he comes out and says it like that? Man, if I were part of the Gringo-hater crowd, that'd give me fuel for years!...:-)
Let's say I knew that DoD used a certain package in gunnery firmware. Let's say a math library that would be used to make calculations to calibrate the weapon. How hard would it be to build in a small tiny bit of error that would only be useful in cases of calibration of high-tech weapons?
Pretty hard, I wager. First off, calibration of high-tech weapons does not use mathematical constructs that are more complicated than the processing of wind-tunnel data or climate system modelling or the calibration of particle accelerators. And believe me, if the DoD doesn't use the same mathematical library that CERN or the SETI program or NASA or unnumbered projects in the scientific community use, then it deserves to have miscalibrated weapons.
If 3000 lines of dense mathematically rich C were checked in and a dozen lines acted in concert to create a miscalculation, how much expertise would be needed to catch that?
As I said before, if they use stuff that's been validated by real-life experience by the scientific community, where results are always out in the open and failures in calculation are always eagerly sought, they ought to have no problem. If they use the bleeding-edge stuff, however, they'll get bugs in OSS or in proprietary land... But they should know that, already.
Read Slashdot? Whoever does that? This is the original `chmod 622` news site...
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 1
Exactly. The nationalist, racist, etc. ideas are used as pretext to gain political/economic power.
Would the genocide of indians have happenned without the Manifest Destiny doctrine? Would the Russian revolution have happenned without the ideology of the fight of the classes? Would the Holocaust have happenned without nationalism? Certainly not exactly like they happenned, I think, but they certainly would have, with a different face.
Re:Personally, I would go one step further.
on
Game with God
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Remember, when the Christains took over in 346 AD, they closed the Universities in Greece, burned the Great Library at Alexandria (and viciously murder the priestess Hypatia) and actively banned an persecuted all thinking that did not agree with Church dogma for over 1000 years (and they are still trying it).
Funny, if the Christians burned it down to the ground, how come it was recently discovered beneath the sea off the Egyptian coast? Go here for some interesting studies on the subject. Personally, I'm inclined to believe it landed in the Mediterranean as the result of an earthquake, several of which were reported during the Middle Ages.
Furthermore, many of the works of Classical writers which reached us today were compiled by Isidore, the Catholic Bishop of Seville in the late 500s into an anthology which was used to teach in the Medieval Universities for one thousand years. So much for actively banning and persecuting all thinking that did not agree with Church dogma for over 1000 years...
That's why it was called the Dark Ages. Meanwhile civilisations in America, China and Muslim countries were literally flowering with art and science.
They were called the Dark Ages by Illuminist scholars who had an axe to grind with the previous status quo, the same way "ogival" architectural style of the St. Dennis Abbey was called "Gothic" to link it to barbarism.
Meanwhile, in Muslim countries culture thrived, but so did political strife. The Abbasids chased the Umayyads from Baghdad all the way to Seville, the old animistic religions of the Near East were stamped out, and the old Babylonian faith finally failed after four thousand years.
In America, the "innocent" Incas and Aztecs were in fact powerful conquerors rivalling Rome in its heyday, standing proud over the remains of several civilizations they conquered and subjugated in the name of their kings.
And in India, of course, people were relegated to a life of social ostracism due to having been born in the wrong family, and still do to this day. Look up "pariah" in the dictionary.
(and who cares about Augustine - just another apologist for a corrupt institution).
Ad hominem attack -- you don't bother to refute any of his work, preferring to instead attack him for being a Christian. How is this different from the Reich scientists attacking Relativity for being "Jewish science"?
I wonder how many brilliant minds and discoveries we will never hear about because the Church and its various inquisitions put the people to the torch?
Here are some brilliant discoveries made during the Dark Ages: several chemical elements (Albertus Magnus et al.), the underpinnings of Musical Theory (Guido d'Arezzo, among others), the water wheel, crop rotation, the "Gothic" architectural style, the magnetic compass...
But evidently, it's the evil Christians who deserve our scorn and hatred most of all. How dare they come out on top in the cultural food-chain? Frankly, the one who comes across sounding like a bigot is you. Isn't mercy a virtue in Buddhism, too?
Slashdot Mirror
I sense a bit of a bias here.
Maybe I'm biased the other way, but the "truly hardcore" players have always come across to me as slightly-overweight 14-year-olds who have nothing better to do other than lord their 72-level characters' might over the hapless passersby. I'd support perma-death if advancement was a zero-sum game, i.e., in order to improve at something you have to get worse at something else. Then we'd quit the "John Rambo" loop non-perma-death is used to mitigate.
Some latter-day IFs (linky-linky) do provide just that. Of course, in that case, you already have all game data local on your HD and serving a given piece of media to 200 players isn't an issue...
Maybe what we need is a smart client which can understand old-style BASIC "PLAY" grammar -- "o4t240cdededrddcdere.... About the graphics, loads of MUDs already have ASCIIArt maps and stuff -- libcaca is your friend.
Biopiracy, n. The smuggling of species of plants, animals and fungi, typically from tropical, 3rd-world countries to temperate, 1st-world ones, for the purpose of isolating substances which are then patented as inventions and levied as taxes on the same countries where the substances came from.
Yes, kids, it exists. You'll find it nowhere in US and European media because it's not convenient to anyone, but people are arrested regularly for it in international airports of developing nations for it (including the selfsame Brazil). The pharmaceutical industry isn't quite the paragon of correctness and hard effort you make them out to be.
And is it northern or southern hemisphere? DST seasons varies according to hemisphere, too.
It might, except that J. Random Reader isn't going to "get" an ad promoting several competing products, and it would waste the not-insignificant amount of dough that went into the effort. After all, to the non-initiated, an advertisement for everything but IE will come across as desperate.
That being said, I'm all for a full-page ad in the NYT for Safari. It has to be a different ad, though.
It may seem a little harsh, but in the Macs we don't have nearly the same browser monoculture we have in Windows. And of course, the Windows user base is an order of magnitude larger than Macintosh's. So the battle must be fought in Win32 world.
OTOH, if you really mean by saying that 'Safari already won that battle' is that there's no need to use anything but Safari, then you're thinking down the same path that led us to our current predicament. By the same token, too high a usage rate for Firefox (above 70%) is also a bad thing, but considering that scenario is rather far-fetched, no one worries about it today.
What you write is quite correct. And frankly, there is not much of a way around it; the "upgrade train" isn't going to go away, even because protocols evolve with time, and applications (and OSes have to evolve right along). However, the likelihood that systems like browsers or OSes will be upgraded is inversely proportional to the cost of such an upgrade to the user. That is why windowsupdate.com is such a killer idea, and why conversely tying the browser to the OS is so bone-headed.
Should Mozilla become the leader in the browser market, it's certain that script kiddies, spammers and such will flock to this platform, to try and exploit it in whatever way they can. Vulnerabilities will be found, patches will be released, and eventually someone will begin to work upon the successor to Firefox. The new 0.10 release already has a feature to automatically download patches, just like Windows Update. With IE, however, this sort of process is placed on its ear. Let us imagine an example:
It's 2010 and I'm running Windows 2006 (AKA Longhorn) and a critical vulnerability is discovered in IE 7 or whatever the system browser will be called. I'll have to upgrade to Windows 2009 in order to get a fix for it or live with a potentially-compromised machine. Fine, upgrade it is, except for the fact that Windows 2009 comes with the WinFX relational file system which did not make it in time for Win06, as well as .NET framework 3.0 and a host of other changes which are almost-but-not-quite binary compatible with the host of applications I'll have currently sitting on my hard disk -- especially since 2002, when MS decided that backwards compatibility is not so hot anymore. Which means that in order to get a system upgrade, I'll need to upgrade my OS and just about every application I have, just to be on the safe side. How much time, let alone money, will I need for that?
Finally, even more important than the Mozilla-vs-IE debate, which is itself an offshoot of the ecological-diversity-on-the-Web debate, what I'm railing against here is the vertical integration of software MS is practicing. The existence of obsolete software in use is an inevitability which we need to take into consideration when we look to the future; but when we tie down applications to the OS, we're breaking modularity, which every programmer or systems engineer knows is wrong; object orientation and even structured programming are paradigms created to introduce modularity into programming.
Mozilla will have bugs, and obsolete, compromised versions will be around. It's part of the nature of software. However, the stance the Mozilla foundation takes regarding these bugs is fundamentally different from the stance MS has taken since 2001, and that's what in my view you're missing.
Initially, one would think so, wouldn't one? And if nuclear power plants would only produce nuclear waste and energy, this reasoning would be even correct. However, nuclear power plants also consume radioactive fuel -- typically Uranium -- which exists out in the wild. Therefore, the total amount of nuclear material does not increase as alarmingly as one first suspects.
Similarly, excess CO2 can be sequestered for a while, then put into more productive uses -- turning it into calcium carbonate (marble) for construction work, for example.
At the end of the article, the author debunks some green myths about solar and wind power. Truly green methods of energy generation involve being able to scale up, like we scale computing capacity. Solar and Wind power require just too much surface area to ever be useful. In the medium to long term, underground nuclear plants and emission-controlled internal thermoeletric turbines are what will allow us to control environmental degradation while allowing the energy demand to increase to meet the demands of the developing world economy.
It's certainly not all right for someone to publish a vulnerability without contacting MS; any responsible FOSS developer will agree. However, once a security vulnerability is in the wild, it's in the wild, and pretending it doesn't exist will not help matters any.
The big beef most FOSS developers have with MS lies in the fact that the current rendering engine for MSIE, Trident, is obsolete, MS acknowledges it as such, and yet still refuses to overhaul it. I quote from Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
Now, this is a problem because many Windows users use versions of Windows which are obsolete: 98SE, ME, 2000. When Longhorn comes, this trend will of course hold true: people don't rush to the stores to buy the newest Operating System version. This means that people will be using still old versions of MSIE long after IE7 comes, which will, of course, be unsupported by MS because they don't want to trail support for 5 or 10 different versions of a single product.
Finally, tying the web browser to the OS version ensures that a product that is upgraded for free today won't be in the future: remember, you may get the "newest" version of MSIE for free, but you must pay $50 or $60 (if memory still serves) for a new version of Windows, not counting the hardware upgrades which prove necessary. Most people will think that the old version works "well enough" and blissfully go on surfing the Web. Remember, security vulnerabilities are such because they're not obvious.
In conclusion, FOSS developers do not criticize MS for keeping quiet about security vulnerabilities which do not yet have a fix; they criticize it for denying the need for a complete overhaul of their application even faced with massive evidence that their rendering engine has given what it had to give; instead, they concoct a scheme to force users to upgrade (spending money they might not have) in order to keep their data safe.
Sorry, on my vanilla Linux system (a Knoppix HD install, actually), it's turn computer on, it boots, log in, click on the Writer icon, it loads. The only extra step is the login, which isn't very hard to explain to the average user. Of course, one can set the display manager to do auto-login, though I certainly wouldn't recommend it...
Unfortunately, it's not that Windows "ain't broke", because it is; it's that it's just not broken enough for people to get off their asses and learn alternatives.
Very much unfortunately, an OS is in many ways like a language. One has to learn it, and it's not a single day affair. Oftentimes one will want to use structures from the languages one does know, especially if one only knows a single language; simply because one does not see these features as being intrinsic to the language so much as to human communication itself! Now substitute "OS" for "language" above, and "computing" for "human communication". See what I mean?
Quite a bit has been said about the need for Linux to become more "user-friendly" (read: like Windows), but truth is that teaching Windows to a lay user is every bit as difficult as teaching Linux to one, or to a Windows user. And the Windows user is especially obnoxious because he'll think, "why can't this be like I've already learned? Why must I learn things over again?", and will rather just default back to what they already know -- Windows. Therefore, the "Year of the Linux Desktop" is a myth: instead only if we teach the people who learn "computer science" (that is, Windows, Word and Excel) in schools and specialized courses to learn Linux, OpenOffice.org Writer and Calc instead. Only then we will see the market share of Windows really fall on the desktop.
In short, your five parts ease-of-use are actually five parts inertia...
Siderurgy is high energy consumption. Software development isn't. Neither is most social or biological research, including there high-end genetic, pharmaceutical and medical research. There's no actual excuse not to sign the Kyoto protocol, even because efficient energy use is high tech and a very, very profitable industry.
Theoretically, you could make super-strong body armor to outfit your stormtr^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsoldiers. So, indirectly, it can be used to kill people...
:)
Of course, even super-strong body armor pales before the power of the Force
Actually, in "The Hobbit", Mithril was described as silver with the strength of triple steel. So it would have to be silver, then? Still expensive...
Some censorship will always, and I mean *always*, happen. After all, one could think of anti-slander and anti-libel laws in the US as a restriction of one's freedom to talk trash publicly about someone else.
Yes, any law has the potential for abuse, as you just mentioned: the First Amendment itself can be abused and OK the spread of lies and hate, as it's done several times already. So the only thing we can do is trust the judges to have the ethical strength to rule fairly when a law applies and when it doesn't. It's inconvenient for us when they disagree with what we think is correct, but there's not much we can do short of bloody revolution.
That's a sophism if I ever saw one. Anti-Nazi laws aren't passed because the government hates the Nazi. It's because the government recognizes that Nazism is a destructive influence on a multiethnic society like the new Europe (yes, really), and that it cannot be allowed to grow unchecked, or it's 1933 all over again.
Don't kid yourself, either. behind every law there is an assumed threat of use of force: physical harm, incarceration, economic sanctions, fining; they are all a restriction on one's freedom in different levels. And they're a core principle of democracy (well, except for physical harm, of course).
One day, everyone may come together and naturally wish the best for everybody else, banishing selfishness from society. But at that point, we'll be better off becoming Communists, because then we'll be assured it works. In the meantime, we have to keep up with the use of force to curtail the selfishness of individuals in the name of the overall good, however flawed that may be. Because frankly, there's nothing better around.
IHBT.
You have apparently never worked in the web application field, have you? If you had, you'd know exactly what the client wants: everything, fast, and preferrably, the application should do the thinking for its user. Whatever your application does, the user is going to invariably want a back-door that allows him to bypass all of your pretty business logic.
Considering this, standards are churned out in the vain hope business folks will want to abide by the rules they themselves decided on over the course of the development. Useless? You be the judge!
Perl module: Lingua::Romana::Perligata
Whoa, he comes out and says it like that? Man, if I were part of the Gringo-hater crowd, that'd give me fuel for years!... :-)
Pretty hard, I wager. First off, calibration of high-tech weapons does not use mathematical constructs that are more complicated than the processing of wind-tunnel data or climate system modelling or the calibration of particle accelerators. And believe me, if the DoD doesn't use the same mathematical library that CERN or the SETI program or NASA or unnumbered projects in the scientific community use, then it deserves to have miscalibrated weapons.
As I said before, if they use stuff that's been validated by real-life experience by the scientific community, where results are always out in the open and failures in calculation are always eagerly sought, they ought to have no problem. If they use the bleeding-edge stuff, however, they'll get bugs in OSS or in proprietary land... But they should know that, already.
Slashdot reads YOU! ...Ok, it isn't really very funny, but it was *there*, you know? And it was bigger than me.
SCNR
Read Slashdot? Whoever does that? This is the original `chmod 622` news site...
Exactly. The nationalist, racist, etc. ideas are used as pretext to gain political/economic power.
Would the genocide of indians have happenned without the Manifest Destiny doctrine? Would the Russian revolution have happenned without the ideology of the fight of the classes? Would the Holocaust have happenned without nationalism? Certainly not exactly like they happenned, I think, but they certainly would have, with a different face.
Funny, if the Christians burned it down to the ground, how come it was recently discovered beneath the sea off the Egyptian coast? Go here for some interesting studies on the subject. Personally, I'm inclined to believe it landed in the Mediterranean as the result of an earthquake, several of which were reported during the Middle Ages.
Furthermore, many of the works of Classical writers which reached us today were compiled by Isidore, the Catholic Bishop of Seville in the late 500s into an anthology which was used to teach in the Medieval Universities for one thousand years. So much for actively banning and persecuting all thinking that did not agree with Church dogma for over 1000 years...
They were called the Dark Ages by Illuminist scholars who had an axe to grind with the previous status quo, the same way "ogival" architectural style of the St. Dennis Abbey was called "Gothic" to link it to barbarism.
Meanwhile, in Muslim countries culture thrived, but so did political strife. The Abbasids chased the Umayyads from Baghdad all the way to Seville, the old animistic religions of the Near East were stamped out, and the old Babylonian faith finally failed after four thousand years.
In America, the "innocent" Incas and Aztecs were in fact powerful conquerors rivalling Rome in its heyday, standing proud over the remains of several civilizations they conquered and subjugated in the name of their kings.
And in India, of course, people were relegated to a life of social ostracism due to having been born in the wrong family, and still do to this day. Look up "pariah" in the dictionary.
Ad hominem attack -- you don't bother to refute any of his work, preferring to instead attack him for being a Christian. How is this different from the Reich scientists attacking Relativity for being "Jewish science"?
Here are some brilliant discoveries made during the Dark Ages: several chemical elements (Albertus Magnus et al.), the underpinnings of Musical Theory (Guido d'Arezzo, among others), the water wheel, crop rotation, the "Gothic" architectural style, the magnetic compass...
But evidently, it's the evil Christians who deserve our scorn and hatred most of all. How dare they come out on top in the cultural food-chain? Frankly, the one who comes across sounding like a bigot is you. Isn't mercy a virtue in Buddhism, too?