Much can be done in the name of the crown which couldn't/wouldn't be done in a Republic. Despite the fact I think Cromwell was pretty much worse than Hitler, the Commonwealth would have given Manip the things he said he wants.
That isn't exactly accurate. What you are talking about, I think, are the various and extensive powers (royal prerogatives) which technically belong to the monarch, and are now exercised by the Prime Minister without requiring the approval of Parliament.
However you could abolish the monarchy without changing this one whit (and I'd argue this is exactly what would happen). Similarly you could reform this without abolishing the monarchy. The link between the two issues is historical, and really isn't relevant to a modern debate about whether to abolish the monarchy.
Heh, this has confused me in the other direction. Thankfully we have this great educational resource called 'pornography,' which taught me what ethnicity Americans mean by Asian.
I don't know exactly why people from the subcontinent are called Asians in Britain. Presumably something to do with having a large amount of immigration from their in the post-war period and needing something politically correct to call them.
And there's the problem.
All they needed to do when the story broke was say "We are looking into it".
By rejecting it while it was obviously true, I've lost faith in them.
As someone who works in computer component retail, I can tell you with 100% certainty that they don't want your business. You are obviously a twat, and any retailer in the world will tell you it isn't worth dealing with twats. They are a source of aggravation and financial losses that you can't do anything about, since in this ecommerce world you can't spot them in advance (sometimes, if you get them on the phone, you can manage to send them to your competitors).
A twat removing himself from your pool of potential customers is excellent news, and I'm sure NewEgg will appreciate your generous offer.
I have a game I like- why would I want to mod it into another game?
Because then you have two games you like? I don't think you quite understand the depth of some of the mods - I've never used them myself much, apart from tweaks, but I tried Fall from Heaven II on a whim recently, and all I can say is Wow! The sheer polish of the mod is amazing, and I can't begin to imagine the amount of work that has gone into it.
Even if you end up preferring vanilla, which I do at the end of the day, it is different enough that it is almost a separate game - radically different races with their own powers, play styles and motivations, a tech tree designed so you want to push deep down a few paths rather than try to research everything, oh and a deep system of magic with mages and priests (which you may completely ignore depending on who and how you're playing). Oh a lot of unique racial units, and some hero characters for each race. And probably a crap load of other stuff, since I only really scratched the surface.
When I want to burn a day away I'll still dust it off and pray the scratches haven't accumulated too much (I later bought both it and the expansion, and can't find anywhere to buy a new copy.)
I recently bought this (UK). Weirdly I can't seem to find that re-release on amazon.com, but there is a SMAC + Expansion here for a bit more.
He does have a point though - most of what is classified as "mature" in games really only appeals to teenagers. Take the sex scenes in Bioware's DragonAge; speaking as someone in my thirties they are cringe-makingly awful, but I suspect my eighteen year old self would have enjoyed them.
It isn't just games. I recently reread what I remembered as some excellent Sci-Fi books, Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn series. I still like the books, but I found the constant gratuitous sex scenes really got a bit wearing after a while. When I first read them, I found those sections titillating.
... $25-35 penalty per chargeback from the merchant. Therefore it is the advantage of the bank when more fraud occurs.
You hear this a lot on ecommerce boards. I don't actually buy it myself, or at least the "banks are actually encouraging fraud" implication that tends to get tacked on. Banks aren't particularly hurt by card not present fraud, it is true, but it is hardly in their interests.
Bank: "I'm sorry for the inconvenience, sir. We have removed said transactions, cancelled your card, and are sending you a new one in the mail, which should arrive in two business days."
And you think they compensated you with their own money? That's so cute!
I suppose it is possible - if the fraudsters made a physical clone of your card and made physical purchases in a store with it, then the bank probably did lose out. But if, as probably happened, they used the card online, then whatever poor businesses accepted the transactions got a nice letter in the post a few days after you called your bank.
I do see your point - I'm an ecommerce guy so the websites tend to be pretty simple, and the consequences of cutting off a percentage of visitors from being able to complete an order is obviously a percentage of sales.
We get over 2% IE6 on our biggest site, and less than 30% of our traffic is Windows (Mac focussed site) so I imagine that your average ecommerce site probably gets well over 5% IE6 traffic* - failing to support IE6 == 5% drop in sales. It would have to be a fairly snazy feature that you want to implement that would be worth that..
*Thinking about those numbers a bit more, I expect most of our Windows traffic is from Mac owners surfing from Windows at work, and corporate environments are going to be the biggest IE6 holdouts, so I'm probably overestimating the figures for an average site.
Agreed. This is why browser sniffing is bad. Just design it to be standards compliant, and let the browsers that can't follow the standards fail, hopefully gracefully. Blocking IE6 users completely is just pointless.
Don't be ridiculous. Unless it is just a vanity site where you don't care about your users, you support any browser that is popular. This still includes ie6.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden
and the four fingers extended.
'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five.
The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs
and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could
not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back
the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four.'
The needle went up to sixty.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'
The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern
face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his
eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably
four.
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'
'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Five! Five! Five!'
'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four.
How many fingers, please?'
In that sense, a good game is like a good woman. Oh, but this is a gaming thread on slashdot so no one here knows what I am talking about.
Right. If you take the whining you get on slashdot about games at face value, you'd think half the people here wouldn't know a good game if it cooked them breakfast.
He gets paid bupkas, the author of TFA is Peter Shah himself, who actually paid them to publish TFA, it's a paid advertisement for his book. If you think it's not a paid ad go ahead and try to find the name of the journalist who wrote TFA. What, the author's name is missing from TFA? How odd.
Jesus, some people will make up conspiracy theories about anything.
I use the Caps Lock for entering software serial numbers where you get a long string of capital letters and numbers.
Ok pet hate here. When requesting data input where the alphabetic characters are only valid when they are capitalised, WHY DON'T YOU JUST HAVE IT SO ALL LETTERS APPEAR AS CAPITALS???!!11!!!?
PS Shift key used all the way there.
PPS Yes I did need to go back and correct DON"T to DON'T.
Not really, no. I'm serious. One thing that humans are fascinatingly good at is ignoring this "knowledge". There's some brain research that shows evidence of our brains actually being wired up so that we avoid facing this, on very low-levels. In other words: It's not a conscious decision, not even an unconscious one. Runs a lot deeper than that.
While I don't disagree, it does remind me of a fascinating conversation I had with my 4 year old niece. She'd watched a video of Swan Lake with her parents on Christmas Eve and apparently on Christmas morning came out with "Mummy, am I going to die?"
Some basic facts of existence were explained by her parents, and they obviously lodged in her mind, since when I saw her over New Year she came up to me with a serious expression and asked "Michael, are you going to die?" I explained that it was more than possible, and she asked me if she was going to die as well. I told her I was thirty years older than her, so would die a long time before her, which seemed reassuring to a certain extent (at least she later went round her slightly older cousins telling them how much sooner they were going to die than her).
But I did find it interesting that we aren't born knowing we are going to die, and in fact the revelation when it comes is not one we are happy with at all.
I'm sure there are, and I'm sure it works well. I don't do recruitment, but I certainly judge customers on their email addresses. Selling admittedly fairly technical products, aol address == tech support nightmare waiting to happen.
Oh and don't get me started on people with the first name of 'Ignatius'. Arseholes the lot of them (well all 3 that I've dealt with in 9 years were, and that's enough of a pattern for me):)
Whatever you say, he's spot on. There are few areas of academia where massaging ego, obtaining research grants and getting tenure are less important than the facts of the matter. This is the problem at the heart of Science that nobody seems to want to address.
Is it that much of a problem? And what could be done about it anyway?
Science seems to have done ok over the past few centuries, and this situation has always been the case. At least church and state (mostly!) keep out of it these days, so it is just the human failings of scientists who try to maintain the orthodoxy in the face of their disruptive colleagues.
True, but if they bought any trademark that the unknown party had obtained in 1996 along with the site, then they have records and the case is pretty much in the bag.
If Microsoft already own a trademark on Bing I can't see how this case would have got even this far.
Slashdot Mirror
That isn't exactly accurate. What you are talking about, I think, are the various and extensive powers (royal prerogatives) which technically belong to the monarch, and are now exercised by the Prime Minister without requiring the approval of Parliament.
However you could abolish the monarchy without changing this one whit (and I'd argue this is exactly what would happen). Similarly you could reform this without abolishing the monarchy. The link between the two issues is historical, and really isn't relevant to a modern debate about whether to abolish the monarchy.
Heh, this has confused me in the other direction. Thankfully we have this great educational resource called 'pornography,' which taught me what ethnicity Americans mean by Asian.
I don't know exactly why people from the subcontinent are called Asians in Britain. Presumably something to do with having a large amount of immigration from their in the post-war period and needing something politically correct to call them.
As someone who works in computer component retail, I can tell you with 100% certainty that they don't want your business. You are obviously a twat, and any retailer in the world will tell you it isn't worth dealing with twats. They are a source of aggravation and financial losses that you can't do anything about, since in this ecommerce world you can't spot them in advance (sometimes, if you get them on the phone, you can manage to send them to your competitors).
A twat removing himself from your pool of potential customers is excellent news, and I'm sure NewEgg will appreciate your generous offer.
If your unemployed, got a mortgage to service, kids to feed... You get the picture.
Because then you have two games you like? I don't think you quite understand the depth of some of the mods - I've never used them myself much, apart from tweaks, but I tried Fall from Heaven II on a whim recently, and all I can say is Wow! The sheer polish of the mod is amazing, and I can't begin to imagine the amount of work that has gone into it.
Even if you end up preferring vanilla, which I do at the end of the day, it is different enough that it is almost a separate game - radically different races with their own powers, play styles and motivations, a tech tree designed so you want to push deep down a few paths rather than try to research everything, oh and a deep system of magic with mages and priests (which you may completely ignore depending on who and how you're playing). Oh a lot of unique racial units, and some hero characters for each race. And probably a crap load of other stuff, since I only really scratched the surface.
Well it's an official cite from the official site. I think you got away with it...
I recently bought this (UK). Weirdly I can't seem to find that re-release on amazon.com, but there is a SMAC + Expansion here for a bit more.
Looking at a screenshot, they seem to tessellate the hexes with the pointy bit upwards, so it will presumably numpad without 8 and 2.
He does have a point though - most of what is classified as "mature" in games really only appeals to teenagers. Take the sex scenes in Bioware's DragonAge; speaking as someone in my thirties they are cringe-makingly awful, but I suspect my eighteen year old self would have enjoyed them.
It isn't just games. I recently reread what I remembered as some excellent Sci-Fi books, Peter F Hamilton's Night's Dawn series. I still like the books, but I found the constant gratuitous sex scenes really got a bit wearing after a while. When I first read them, I found those sections titillating.
You hear this a lot on ecommerce boards. I don't actually buy it myself, or at least the "banks are actually encouraging fraud" implication that tends to get tacked on. Banks aren't particularly hurt by card not present fraud, it is true, but it is hardly in their interests.
And you think they compensated you with their own money? That's so cute!
I suppose it is possible - if the fraudsters made a physical clone of your card and made physical purchases in a store with it, then the bank probably did lose out. But if, as probably happened, they used the card online, then whatever poor businesses accepted the transactions got a nice letter in the post a few days after you called your bank.
I do see your point - I'm an ecommerce guy so the websites tend to be pretty simple, and the consequences of cutting off a percentage of visitors from being able to complete an order is obviously a percentage of sales.
We get over 2% IE6 on our biggest site, and less than 30% of our traffic is Windows (Mac focussed site) so I imagine that your average ecommerce site probably gets well over 5% IE6 traffic* - failing to support IE6 == 5% drop in sales. It would have to be a fairly snazy feature that you want to implement that would be worth that..
*Thinking about those numbers a bit more, I expect most of our Windows traffic is from Mac owners surfing from Windows at work, and corporate environments are going to be the biggest IE6 holdouts, so I'm probably overestimating the figures for an average site.
Don't be ridiculous. Unless it is just a vanity site where you don't care about your users, you support any browser that is popular. This still includes ie6.
I think you need some re-education :)
Right. If you take the whining you get on slashdot about games at face value, you'd think half the people here wouldn't know a good game if it cooked them breakfast.
Jesus, some people will make up conspiracy theories about anything.
I think we may have run into a small technical problem. Isn't the wavelength of visible light about 0.5 micrometres?
...sively distended stomachs; pizza alone cannot account for that, it must be due to mas...
Ok pet hate here. When requesting data input where the alphabetic characters are only valid when they are capitalised, WHY DON'T YOU JUST HAVE IT SO ALL LETTERS APPEAR AS CAPITALS???!!11!!!?
PS Shift key used all the way there.
PPS Yes I did need to go back and correct DON"T to DON'T.
While I don't disagree, it does remind me of a fascinating conversation I had with my 4 year old niece. She'd watched a video of Swan Lake with her parents on Christmas Eve and apparently on Christmas morning came out with "Mummy, am I going to die?"
Some basic facts of existence were explained by her parents, and they obviously lodged in her mind, since when I saw her over New Year she came up to me with a serious expression and asked "Michael, are you going to die?" I explained that it was more than possible, and she asked me if she was going to die as well. I told her I was thirty years older than her, so would die a long time before her, which seemed reassuring to a certain extent (at least she later went round her slightly older cousins telling them how much sooner they were going to die than her).
But I did find it interesting that we aren't born knowing we are going to die, and in fact the revelation when it comes is not one we are happy with at all.
Correlation is not causation :)
I'm sure there are, and I'm sure it works well. I don't do recruitment, but I certainly judge customers on their email addresses. Selling admittedly fairly technical products, aol address == tech support nightmare waiting to happen.
:)
Oh and don't get me started on people with the first name of 'Ignatius'. Arseholes the lot of them (well all 3 that I've dealt with in 9 years were, and that's enough of a pattern for me)
Is it that much of a problem? And what could be done about it anyway?
Science seems to have done ok over the past few centuries, and this situation has always been the case. At least church and state (mostly!) keep out of it these days, so it is just the human failings of scientists who try to maintain the orthodoxy in the face of their disruptive colleagues.
The author claims in the comments that CNet copied him. No may be lying, but maybe not.
If Microsoft already own a trademark on Bing I can't see how this case would have got even this far.