It's not necessarily that simple unless you're independently wealthy. What'll happen is you'll talk to your coworkers, they'll love the idea, but you'll find they love being able to feed their wives and children more.
It's not an easy thing, as a relatively unknown quantity, to get financial support to run your own game studio and produce a quality game. If you can do it, likely you'll be beholden to a game publisher, and the deadlines and restrictions they're going to impose put you back in a boat pretty close to the one you left.
When I was growing up as a kid, I never thought that Science and the Bible were necessarily in conflict. Most people believe that the bible represents a guide and isn't to be taken absolutely literally.
I thought the same thing, but the older I get, the more I believe they absolutely are in conflict. Not in what they literally say, necessarily, but in their underlying premises.
Science tells us we should only believe in things we can observe and methodically verify. Religion tells us we should believe in some things we can't see, hear, touch, or taste. You either believe in things you can't prove, or you don't. In one case you're a bad Christian (or whatever religion), in the other case you're a bad scientist.
The Bible says that a man can't serve two masters, and in that case, I believe it's correct.
Honestly, I doubt it. As long as there is ANY advantage to being higher, plenty of people will do it. As a small example, witness the number of level 90+ characters in Diablo 2 despite the fact that you could easily finish all of the game's "content" by about level 60 if you were of a mind to.
There's no reason you couldn't keep PvE pretty level based and make PvP less so, either.
I'd suggest that the design flaw would then be more in how level-based things are. A level 60 character trying to jump on a level 40 character is obviously going to have a big advantage, but the fight shouldn't be unwinnable (assuming the game in question allows a level 60 to attack a level 40, which it does.)
Re:Looking at the distribution ...
on
Women Leaving I.T.
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I assume that this is the real cause as well, actually.
For example, during the dot-com era, some of the bigger consulting companies were crash-training whole classes of non-technical people to do IT. Can a former art or literature major with 3 months of technical training develop quality software? Generally not, but we're talking about companies like Anderson or PwC that don't mind solving problems by throwing more bodies at them, since that equates to more they can bill.
When the tech market took a downturn, a lot of these people got forced out of the market. Some discovered they had a real talent or love for IT and stuck with it through the thin periods, but most went back to whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place.
I think this kind of crowd was proportionaly more women than men, and their departure is what the statistics are really showing. I've met some great women in the IT field who do it for much the same reasons as most of the men you'd meet in the field, and those women aren't going anywhere.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way taking a shot at the parent poster. This just seemed like an appropriate point to jump in on the discussion.
The first question that comes to my mind is, what do you think the concept of PvP is if not this?
In some ways it almost seems a little silly to me to implement PvP in a game like WoW, because the players who really want to play PvP aren't the same kinds of people who want to play a game like WoW.
I see people posting in this thread saying, in essence: "This PvP thing sucks because people will be trying to kill me when I'm trying to level." Personally, I think that's the beauty of it! You couldn't pay me to grind out the last handful of levels on most MMORPGs, even on WoW which has made the concept less frustrating in many ways -- but if I had to always be on my guard, ready for someone to try to jump me at any time? That's fun. Instead of level solely being a function of your time put in, in some small way it would reflect your skill, cleverness, even exploration talent. Level off mobs no one else has thought to try to get XP from and your chances of getting killed while doing so would be way lower than levelling on what everyone else does.
To a PvP player, the threat of player violence at any time isn't the end of the fun -- it's just the start of it!
I'll take this rare opportunity to make an on-topic shameless plug of my MUD of choice, along with some explanation as to why it should be yours.
I will forego explaining all of the basics. Suffice to say that Carrion Fields has all of the things you would expect from a MUD that has prospered for over ten years.
Some highlights that should be important to players thinking about trying another MUD:
- We're a roleplaying MUD. The only OOC channel in the game is used for answering questions for new players at the lowest of levels. After that, everything is designed to be immersive and In Character- no distracting chatter about who's going to win the Super Bowl. We host a full pantheon of detailed religions, a number of cabals (including one based on building our history and providing events for top-notch roleplay), and have a varied and unique series of rewards. A staff of 30+ Immortals maintains the environment and keeps everyone roleplaying with frequent quests and interactions. And you can make your mark- our in-game libraries are filled with page after page of player-authored contributions and historic tributes.
- We're a PK MUD. Not only do we feature a huge array of abilities, but each class plays in a unique manner. That Maran high-elven sword/dagger specialist who employs Incarnadine Wave and Flow of Shadows is going to be so different from that Scion fire giant mace/axe specialist who uses Crashing of Waves and Trapping Beneath Thunder, that you will probably forget they are both members of the warrior guild. And yet, we religiously adjust and re-adjust things so that the game balance stays tightly focused, and every dog can and does have their day. New players always ask what is the "best" character to play. Old players know there is no answer.
- We have a veteran playerbase. Being up since 1994 means that many of those 100+ people you see in the evenings are lightning-quick killers who can change gears and lecture you on the finer points of the history of law enforcement in Galadon. Our 24,000+ rooms won't feel so big when you're trying to hide from them, or when one swoops to your rescue.
- We have an equally veteran staff. Professional treatment. Swift and just enforcement of our rules. Fast attention to bugs. Constant development. Top-notch original areas. 1800+ easily indexed helpfiles. Detailed, epic quests rooted deep in our world's history.
- We are 100% free. No 30-day trials. No varying levels of service- we value every rule-abiding player. No gear for dollars. No hidden fees. We won't bribe or force you to vote for us on Top Mud Sites. Everyone plays on a level field- if that guy just beat you down, or got picked to be Captain of the BattleRagers over you, it's because he's better, and not because he had an extra $50 to spend or because he's an "Iridium" member.
- We're tough. Not tough as in "It takes 500 hours of mashing the same two kinds of goblins to build a character who is any good at anything." Tough as in our areas and rules encourage fierce competition. Many items exist in finite numbers, and if you want that shiny sword over there, you might just have to rip it out of another player's cold, dead hands. Tough as in the mind-hurting twists and puzzles of Kteng's Laboratory or Nyathl Ikalith, the Silent Tower, some of which have been in for years without any player fully unlocking the innermost secrets. Tough as in you won't be fighting NPCs who are just skill-less tackling dummies outside of the first few newbie areas. Tough as in we show cheaters the door. Tough as in you'll look up from your screen, realize you've been with us for a year, and still be baffled at all the facets of the game you haven't experienced or mastered yet. Tough as in two seconds to think is often one more than you had.
- Every character starts off on the same footing. We're 100% free to play, and we mean it. You won't end up competing against other characters
... to a lot of people, better games haven't come out.
I've spent a lot of time playing Warcraft 3. I like Warcraft 3. It certainly has better graphics than Starcraft, but I don't think it's as good of a game. Certainly, it's tactically a very different game, even if both are Blizzard RTSes.
Starcraft in general places a higher value on micromanagement (some would say skill, but that's not completely accurate) than War3 or really most RTS games. Inspired use of a caster unit or a small handful of caster units can easily turn a SC game. Not so much true for War3 or many other RTS games.
I wouldn't fault anyone for preferring War3 or another game over Starcraft, but I don't, and neither do most of my friends who play games of this sort.
On top of things already mentioned in some good replies to this post...
You have to remember that the spyware climate looked pretty different back when WinXP was first being designed/written. It's reasonable that the designers wouldn't have anticipated it becoming as much of an issue as it has and wouldn't have prioritized it very highly.
That said, I have a Windows machine at work and another at home, and outside of cookies that AdAware cleans up, neither has ever had spyware or a virus. You'll never be able to write software that makes it impossible for malicious people to exploit uneducated or naive computer users. That doesn't mean that the effort shouldn't be made, but realize it's a losing battle. There will always be some way to trick novice users to allow something bad to happen to their machine.
And lexmark is by far the worst abuser of this business model.
And how. I made the mistake of buying a Lexmark printer, and on top of the ridiculous cost of ink cartridges, the quality is past shitty. I've had to return 1/3-1/2 of them as defective.
Granted, Lexmark did agree to replace them, after going through a very time consuming and painstaking process to ascertain that, no, I was not a drooling idiot and yes, the cartridges were useless, but it just shouldn't happen so much in the first place. From here on out it's either third party cartridges or a new printer for me. Going through the defective cart song and dance just isn't worth the hassle.
The grandparent poster is supporting the designers by buying the hardcover.
I tend to do the same thing -- buy the hardcover, both because I want to support the industry and because having the real deal is just handier in a lot of cases, and then P2P download a.pdf of the same book for the things.pdf is good for.
Now, the publisher could make this easy on me by providing a unique access code for a copy of the.pdf available with the purchase of the book, but until that happens, this method is pretty effective. I don't have to pay for the same content twice, but I am paying, and supporting the designers.
(By the way, do the moderators not like free speech? This guy has a perfectly valid viewpoint. He's not a troll or flamebait just because you disagree with him.)
In case you haven't noticed, you can still browse at -1 and read his comment.
The people who run Slashdot are not in any way obligated to provide anyone with a forum to speak their mind. The government doesn't have a right to jail you for speaking an unpopular opinion; on the other hand, people who own private property certainly do have the right to kick you off it if they don't like what you're saying. That's not censorship. They're not depriving you of a right to say it anywhere; they're just depriving you of a right to say it there.
Anyway, all that being said, the moderation system of Slashdot doesn't even deprive you of a chance to speak your mind, no matter how offtopic or inane. It just lets people choose to read only comments that the community agrees are of a higher level of quality, if they choose.
And then they're informed. In ways they never would have been before. I wouldn't know most of this stuff if I hadn't seen the film and then read all the debates. And I wouldn't have read the debates if it weren't for the Internet. Hell, Michael Moore used footage he got from the Internet to make the movie.
I think that's the point a lot of people are missing. The movie brings up things that either didn't receive coverage or didn't receive enough coverage in the normal media.
I know maybe a dozen pretty undecided people that saw the movie. A couple were totally swayed by it, and one had the total opposite reaction, but most were somewhere in the middle. They basically said: "You know, I think there's some truth to what's said in this movie, but I also don't think I can take it all at face value; some of it's probably distorted. I need to find out more about this." (Although, again in most of those cases, they believed enough of it was true to be horrified or disgusted with GWB's administration at points.)
To a large degree, the conventional news media set up F911 to have the power that it does. Some of what's in the movie is definite retread, but a lot of it isn't. If we had seen at the time, for example, GWB sit seemingly dumbfounded for seven minutes after hearing of the WTC attacks, it probably wouldn't have been all that big a deal -- and if Moore brought it out again three years later, no one would have cared. It's precisely because this is new that it has the power it does, and it's precisely because it's new to us that Moore has the freedom to spin it the way he does. If FOX News had covered it at the time and spun it as the President taking a moment to mourn the lives lost or some such thing, Moore couldn't tell you it's confused stupidity instead and have it seem so plausible.
Here's hoping what really comes out of all of this is an increase in the quality of journalism in this country.
You'll note I said lawful means. Two of those examples definitely aren't. Making porn, depending on its type, probably is, and you know? If you believe welfare etc. is a bad thing, I think you'd have to support that too.
On the other hand, if you don't think poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps by dint of hard work and, generally, by taking jobs that other people find distasteful and can't or won't do, then I have no problems with you hating Edwards.
If your problem is just with health care costs, maybe the solution is to change how we handle it in America. Maybe the solution is to reform malpractice laws. The solution is probably not to hate poor people who manage to get jobs as lawyers.
Hate the garbage, but not the garbageman. He's just trying to feed his family and get ahead in the world the same as you are.
You can say what you want about Edwards, but he's a guy who started poor and, as far as I know, without handouts from government, worked his way up to being rich.
Isn't that sort of the Republican ideal? That poor people don't need welfare or special advantages, because the American way is to pull yourself up through hard work?
It would be hypocritical to encourage people to rise from poverty through whatever lawful means necessary, and then condemn their way of doing it.
I find it funny that Moore asks Congressman if they would send their Children into Iraq to fight a war, but Moore himself didn't even go to Iraq to get footage for HIS OWN MOVIE!.. Does anyone else see the irony?
No, not really. If you can't see the difference between making a movie and ordering people to fight and die for you... well, I can't think of any response to that that isn't pure flamebait. I'm hoping you actually can see the difference.
Even so... we have a right to expect more of our leaders than our common citizens. If we give that up, all is lost.
Who considers what is popular or unpopular? While you may think a one sentence post espousing abortion rights is "popular" I may think of it as flamebait.
Obviously, I decide what is popular.:P
Seriously, maybe the point should be that a one sentence disagreement is pretty much always flamebait. Strong non-neutral language is often a troll or flamebait. Everything else that makes a real case for or against the issue at hand should be left to be judged on its own merits, perhaps not modded up (not every good post is), but certainly not modded down.
... that as long as people are writing posts that inform and explain their viewpoint, they won't be modded down, even by people who disagree. A one sentence-post espousing an unpopular viewpoint, yes, is basically a troll or flamebait. A paragraph or so explaining why the author has that viewpoint and some of the facts/reasoning behind it shouldn't be. These are the kinds of posts that make for stimulating discussion that enriches us all, even if you don't agree.
It's possible I'm just a rosy-glassed optimist, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope.
But more importantly, there is not a shred of evidence that P==NP, so talking about what terrorists would do if P==NP makes about as much sense as speculating about what terrorists would do if they had teleportation or Voodoo dolls.
Wow, that's scary. They could blind me by jabbing needles in my doll's eyes from thousands of miles away, then instantaneously pop up next to me and steal my pants.
At my company, the bottom line is meeting customer requirements correctly and on-time. It is a sink-or-swim atmosphere: if you can't hack it, you're "let go", and if you CAN, then you are likely to enjoy some measure of job security. I have seen no evidence of sexism in my workplace whatsoever. Perhaps mine is the exception, but I can't help thinking that quite a few barriers perceived by many women are imaginary. If you make yourself vital to a company, the company will keep you.
My experience agrees with the notion that performance matters more than gender etc. up to a point, but not entirely.
I believe that, like an excellent resume or cover letter, having the right arbitrary factor the employer is looking for will help get you in the door. You'll get interviewed and even hired when an equivalent person without that arbitrary factor will not.
On the other hand, when it comes down to being promoted, retaining one's job, etc. I believe it generally is a more truly blind question of performance. Or at least, is not concerned with the arbitrary factors.
I've seen numerous examples of this kind of thing in my career. To give one example, a company I worked for (doing a 180 from the notion discussed in parent posts) wanted to hire more women in technical roles. One woman they hired was fun, charming, and generally looked like a slightly older and bustier version of Britney Spears. She was cool, but she just couldn't hack the work. A lot of the other developers would try hard to help her out (because she was cute if you're cynical, or because she was nice if you're not, your call), but even with that assistance she just couldn't perform the job to a reasonable capacity. She was let go pretty fast.
(The previous anecdote is in no way a condemnation of women in technical roles. In fact, the most amazing technical manager I ever had was a woman.)
In short, arbitrary factors are good for that first impression, but don't matter much over the long haul.
I'll admit I haven't looked at OO in a while. It probably manages the.DOC format better than I remember.
We might just have to agree to disagree on the meaning of "standard" in this case. When I look at something like OO or AbiWord and I'm thinking about the.DOC format, what I'm really thinking is: If I write a complex document in the latest version of Word, will this other program interpret it correctly? Conversely, if I write a complex document in OO, will Word interpret it correctly?
Because Word has such an enormous market share, in most businesses it's a given that you'll be dealing with people that are using it, either at your own company or at your clients/partners/etc. Let's say a new version of Word came out and it did one thing majorly retarded compared to previous versions -- that is to say, documents written using this feature are okay in the same version of Word, but it comes out messed up in other word processors, and things using that same feature written in other word processors come out messed up in that new version of Word. Hardly anyone is going to care that OO or whatever would be handling things the technically right way -- what they care about is that you're giving them a document that "doesn't open right" in Word.
That's why I think of Word, at the moment, as the standard, even with good competition that interprets the.doc format -- because at the end of the day, business users are generally going to care about the competitor's compatibility with whatever Word is doing. Being correct to the document format but "wrong" to Word is a pyrrhic victory at best. It's like being convicted for murder and finally being proven innocent after thirty years in prison -- technically, you won there, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not necessarily that simple unless you're independently wealthy. What'll happen is you'll talk to your coworkers, they'll love the idea, but you'll find they love being able to feed their wives and children more.
It's not an easy thing, as a relatively unknown quantity, to get financial support to run your own game studio and produce a quality game. If you can do it, likely you'll be beholden to a game publisher, and the deadlines and restrictions they're going to impose put you back in a boat pretty close to the one you left.
When I was growing up as a kid, I never thought that Science and the Bible were necessarily in conflict. Most people believe that the bible represents a guide and isn't to be taken absolutely literally.
I thought the same thing, but the older I get, the more I believe they absolutely are in conflict. Not in what they literally say, necessarily, but in their underlying premises.
Science tells us we should only believe in things we can observe and methodically verify. Religion tells us we should believe in some things we can't see, hear, touch, or taste. You either believe in things you can't prove, or you don't. In one case you're a bad Christian (or whatever religion), in the other case you're a bad scientist.
The Bible says that a man can't serve two masters, and in that case, I believe it's correct.
Honestly, I doubt it. As long as there is ANY advantage to being higher, plenty of people will do it. As a small example, witness the number of level 90+ characters in Diablo 2 despite the fact that you could easily finish all of the game's "content" by about level 60 if you were of a mind to.
There's no reason you couldn't keep PvE pretty level based and make PvP less so, either.
Fair enough.
I'd suggest that the design flaw would then be more in how level-based things are. A level 60 character trying to jump on a level 40 character is obviously going to have a big advantage, but the fight shouldn't be unwinnable (assuming the game in question allows a level 60 to attack a level 40, which it does.)
I assume that this is the real cause as well, actually.
For example, during the dot-com era, some of the bigger consulting companies were crash-training whole classes of non-technical people to do IT. Can a former art or literature major with 3 months of technical training develop quality software? Generally not, but we're talking about companies like Anderson or PwC that don't mind solving problems by throwing more bodies at them, since that equates to more they can bill.
When the tech market took a downturn, a lot of these people got forced out of the market. Some discovered they had a real talent or love for IT and stuck with it through the thin periods, but most went back to whatever it was they wanted to do in the first place.
I think this kind of crowd was proportionaly more women than men, and their departure is what the statistics are really showing. I've met some great women in the IT field who do it for much the same reasons as most of the men you'd meet in the field, and those women aren't going anywhere.
Disclaimer: I'm not in any way taking a shot at the parent poster. This just seemed like an appropriate point to jump in on the discussion.
The first question that comes to my mind is, what do you think the concept of PvP is if not this?
In some ways it almost seems a little silly to me to implement PvP in a game like WoW, because the players who really want to play PvP aren't the same kinds of people who want to play a game like WoW.
I see people posting in this thread saying, in essence: "This PvP thing sucks because people will be trying to kill me when I'm trying to level." Personally, I think that's the beauty of it! You couldn't pay me to grind out the last handful of levels on most MMORPGs, even on WoW which has made the concept less frustrating in many ways -- but if I had to always be on my guard, ready for someone to try to jump me at any time? That's fun. Instead of level solely being a function of your time put in, in some small way it would reflect your skill, cleverness, even exploration talent. Level off mobs no one else has thought to try to get XP from and your chances of getting killed while doing so would be way lower than levelling on what everyone else does.
To a PvP player, the threat of player violence at any time isn't the end of the fun -- it's just the start of it!
I'll take this rare opportunity to make an on-topic shameless plug of my MUD of choice, along with some explanation as to why it should be yours.
I will forego explaining all of the basics. Suffice to say that Carrion Fields has all of the things you would expect from a MUD that has prospered for over ten years.
Some highlights that should be important to players thinking about trying another MUD:
- We're a roleplaying MUD. The only OOC channel in the game is used for answering questions for new players at the lowest of levels. After that, everything is designed to be immersive and In Character- no distracting chatter about who's going to win the Super Bowl. We host a full pantheon of detailed religions, a number of cabals (including one based on building our history and providing events for top-notch roleplay), and have a varied and unique series of rewards. A staff of 30+ Immortals maintains the environment and keeps everyone roleplaying with frequent quests and interactions. And you can make your mark- our in-game libraries are filled with page after page of player-authored contributions and historic tributes.
- We're a PK MUD. Not only do we feature a huge array of abilities, but each class plays in a unique manner. That Maran high-elven sword/dagger specialist who employs Incarnadine Wave and Flow of Shadows is going to be so different from that Scion fire giant mace/axe specialist who uses Crashing of Waves and Trapping Beneath Thunder, that you will probably forget they are both members of the warrior guild. And yet, we religiously adjust and re-adjust things so that the game balance stays tightly focused, and every dog can and does have their day. New players always ask what is the "best" character to play. Old players know there is no answer.
- We have a veteran playerbase. Being up since 1994 means that many of those 100+ people you see in the evenings are lightning-quick killers who can change gears and lecture you on the finer points of the history of law enforcement in Galadon. Our 24,000+ rooms won't feel so big when you're trying to hide from them, or when one swoops to your rescue.
- We have an equally veteran staff. Professional treatment. Swift and just enforcement of our rules. Fast attention to bugs. Constant development. Top-notch original areas. 1800+ easily indexed helpfiles. Detailed, epic quests rooted deep in our world's history.
- We are 100% free. No 30-day trials. No varying levels of service- we value every rule-abiding player. No gear for dollars. No hidden fees. We won't bribe or force you to vote for us on Top Mud Sites. Everyone plays on a level field- if that guy just beat you down, or got picked to be Captain of the BattleRagers over you, it's because he's better, and not because he had an extra $50 to spend or because he's an "Iridium" member.
- We're tough. Not tough as in "It takes 500 hours of mashing the same two kinds of goblins to build a character who is any good at anything." Tough as in our areas and rules encourage fierce competition. Many items exist in finite numbers, and if you want that shiny sword over there, you might just have to rip it out of another player's cold, dead hands. Tough as in the mind-hurting twists and puzzles of Kteng's Laboratory or Nyathl Ikalith, the Silent Tower, some of which have been in for years without any player fully unlocking the innermost secrets. Tough as in you won't be fighting NPCs who are just skill-less tackling dummies outside of the first few newbie areas. Tough as in we show cheaters the door. Tough as in you'll look up from your screen, realize you've been with us for a year, and still be baffled at all the facets of the game you haven't experienced or mastered yet. Tough as in two seconds to think is often one more than you had.
- Every character starts off on the same footing. We're 100% free to play, and we mean it. You won't end up competing against other characters
... to a lot of people, better games haven't come out.
I've spent a lot of time playing Warcraft 3. I like Warcraft 3. It certainly has better graphics than Starcraft, but I don't think it's as good of a game. Certainly, it's tactically a very different game, even if both are Blizzard RTSes.
Starcraft in general places a higher value on micromanagement (some would say skill, but that's not completely accurate) than War3 or really most RTS games. Inspired use of a caster unit or a small handful of caster units can easily turn a SC game. Not so much true for War3 or many other RTS games.
I wouldn't fault anyone for preferring War3 or another game over Starcraft, but I don't, and neither do most of my friends who play games of this sort.
On top of things already mentioned in some good replies to this post...
You have to remember that the spyware climate looked pretty different back when WinXP was first being designed/written. It's reasonable that the designers wouldn't have anticipated it becoming as much of an issue as it has and wouldn't have prioritized it very highly.
That said, I have a Windows machine at work and another at home, and outside of cookies that AdAware cleans up, neither has ever had spyware or a virus. You'll never be able to write software that makes it impossible for malicious people to exploit uneducated or naive computer users. That doesn't mean that the effort shouldn't be made, but realize it's a losing battle. There will always be some way to trick novice users to allow something bad to happen to their machine.
And lexmark is by far the worst abuser of this business model.
And how. I made the mistake of buying a Lexmark printer, and on top of the ridiculous cost of ink cartridges, the quality is past shitty. I've had to return 1/3-1/2 of them as defective.
Granted, Lexmark did agree to replace them, after going through a very time consuming and painstaking process to ascertain that, no, I was not a drooling idiot and yes, the cartridges were useless, but it just shouldn't happen so much in the first place. From here on out it's either third party cartridges or a new printer for me. Going through the defective cart song and dance just isn't worth the hassle.
I give the Citizen's United website a failing grade for requiring the latest version of Flash to view it at all. What is this, 1998?
I'd be curious to see what points they make, but I'm not going to set up Flash on (this particular) computer just to do it.
Somewhere, the creator of Lynx is rolling over in his grave.
The grandparent poster is supporting the designers by buying the hardcover.
.pdf of the same book for the things .pdf is good for.
.pdf available with the purchase of the book, but until that happens, this method is pretty effective. I don't have to pay for the same content twice, but I am paying, and supporting the designers.
I tend to do the same thing -- buy the hardcover, both because I want to support the industry and because having the real deal is just handier in a lot of cases, and then P2P download a
Now, the publisher could make this easy on me by providing a unique access code for a copy of the
(By the way, do the moderators not like free speech? This guy has a perfectly valid viewpoint. He's not a troll or flamebait just because you disagree with him.)
In case you haven't noticed, you can still browse at -1 and read his comment.
The people who run Slashdot are not in any way obligated to provide anyone with a forum to speak their mind. The government doesn't have a right to jail you for speaking an unpopular opinion; on the other hand, people who own private property certainly do have the right to kick you off it if they don't like what you're saying. That's not censorship. They're not depriving you of a right to say it anywhere; they're just depriving you of a right to say it there.
Anyway, all that being said, the moderation system of Slashdot doesn't even deprive you of a chance to speak your mind, no matter how offtopic or inane. It just lets people choose to read only comments that the community agrees are of a higher level of quality, if they choose.
No bad talk about Altered Beast! That's a classic there you're stompin' on, buddy!
Granted, we demand a lot more from our games these days, and I'm glad we do. Still! Classic!
Wise fwom your gwave!
... is that Slashdot needs a a special icon for "X is dead/X predicted to die" stories.
May I suggest a small tombstone with "R.I.P." engraved on it? Perhaps a black armband?
And then they're informed. In ways they never would have been before. I wouldn't know most of this stuff if I hadn't seen the film and then read all the debates. And I wouldn't have read the debates if it weren't for the Internet. Hell, Michael Moore used footage he got from the Internet to make the movie.
I think that's the point a lot of people are missing. The movie brings up things that either didn't receive coverage or didn't receive enough coverage in the normal media.
I know maybe a dozen pretty undecided people that saw the movie. A couple were totally swayed by it, and one had the total opposite reaction, but most were somewhere in the middle. They basically said: "You know, I think there's some truth to what's said in this movie, but I also don't think I can take it all at face value; some of it's probably distorted. I need to find out more about this." (Although, again in most of those cases, they believed enough of it was true to be horrified or disgusted with GWB's administration at points.)
To a large degree, the conventional news media set up F911 to have the power that it does. Some of what's in the movie is definite retread, but a lot of it isn't. If we had seen at the time, for example, GWB sit seemingly dumbfounded for seven minutes after hearing of the WTC attacks, it probably wouldn't have been all that big a deal -- and if Moore brought it out again three years later, no one would have cared. It's precisely because this is new that it has the power it does, and it's precisely because it's new to us that Moore has the freedom to spin it the way he does. If FOX News had covered it at the time and spun it as the President taking a moment to mourn the lives lost or some such thing, Moore couldn't tell you it's confused stupidity instead and have it seem so plausible.
Here's hoping what really comes out of all of this is an increase in the quality of journalism in this country.
You'll note I said lawful means. Two of those examples definitely aren't. Making porn, depending on its type, probably is, and you know? If you believe welfare etc. is a bad thing, I think you'd have to support that too.
On the other hand, if you don't think poor people should pull themselves up by their bootstraps by dint of hard work and, generally, by taking jobs that other people find distasteful and can't or won't do, then I have no problems with you hating Edwards.
If your problem is just with health care costs, maybe the solution is to change how we handle it in America. Maybe the solution is to reform malpractice laws. The solution is probably not to hate poor people who manage to get jobs as lawyers.
Hate the garbage, but not the garbageman. He's just trying to feed his family and get ahead in the world the same as you are.
You can say what you want about Edwards, but he's a guy who started poor and, as far as I know, without handouts from government, worked his way up to being rich.
Isn't that sort of the Republican ideal? That poor people don't need welfare or special advantages, because the American way is to pull yourself up through hard work?
It would be hypocritical to encourage people to rise from poverty through whatever lawful means necessary, and then condemn their way of doing it.
I find it funny that Moore asks Congressman if they would send their Children into Iraq to fight a war, but Moore himself didn't even go to Iraq to get footage for HIS OWN MOVIE!.. Does anyone else see the irony?
No, not really. If you can't see the difference between making a movie and ordering people to fight and die for you... well, I can't think of any response to that that isn't pure flamebait. I'm hoping you actually can see the difference.
Even so... we have a right to expect more of our leaders than our common citizens. If we give that up, all is lost.
Who considers what is popular or unpopular? While you may think a one sentence post espousing abortion rights is "popular" I may think of it as flamebait.
:P
Obviously, I decide what is popular.
Seriously, maybe the point should be that a one sentence disagreement is pretty much always flamebait. Strong non-neutral language is often a troll or flamebait. Everything else that makes a real case for or against the issue at hand should be left to be judged on its own merits, perhaps not modded up (not every good post is), but certainly not modded down.
I'm hoping, anyway.
... that as long as people are writing posts that inform and explain their viewpoint, they won't be modded down, even by people who disagree. A one sentence-post espousing an unpopular viewpoint, yes, is basically a troll or flamebait. A paragraph or so explaining why the author has that viewpoint and some of the facts/reasoning behind it shouldn't be. These are the kinds of posts that make for stimulating discussion that enriches us all, even if you don't agree.
It's possible I'm just a rosy-glassed optimist, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope.
But more importantly, there is not a shred of evidence that P==NP, so talking about what terrorists would do if P==NP makes about as much sense as speculating about what terrorists would do if they had teleportation or Voodoo dolls.
Wow, that's scary. They could blind me by jabbing needles in my doll's eyes from thousands of miles away, then instantaneously pop up next to me and steal my pants.
I feel an orange alert coming on...
At my company, the bottom line is meeting customer requirements correctly and on-time. It is a sink-or-swim atmosphere: if you can't hack it, you're "let go", and if you CAN, then you are likely to enjoy some measure of job security. I have seen no evidence of sexism in my workplace whatsoever. Perhaps mine is the exception, but I can't help thinking that quite a few barriers perceived by many women are imaginary. If you make yourself vital to a company, the company will keep you.
My experience agrees with the notion that performance matters more than gender etc. up to a point, but not entirely.
I believe that, like an excellent resume or cover letter, having the right arbitrary factor the employer is looking for will help get you in the door. You'll get interviewed and even hired when an equivalent person without that arbitrary factor will not.
On the other hand, when it comes down to being promoted, retaining one's job, etc. I believe it generally is a more truly blind question of performance. Or at least, is not concerned with the arbitrary factors.
I've seen numerous examples of this kind of thing in my career. To give one example, a company I worked for (doing a 180 from the notion discussed in parent posts) wanted to hire more women in technical roles. One woman they hired was fun, charming, and generally looked like a slightly older and bustier version of Britney Spears. She was cool, but she just couldn't hack the work. A lot of the other developers would try hard to help her out (because she was cute if you're cynical, or because she was nice if you're not, your call), but even with that assistance she just couldn't perform the job to a reasonable capacity. She was let go pretty fast.
(The previous anecdote is in no way a condemnation of women in technical roles. In fact, the most amazing technical manager I ever had was a woman.)
In short, arbitrary factors are good for that first impression, but don't matter much over the long haul.
I'll admit I haven't looked at OO in a while. It probably manages the .DOC format better than I remember.
.DOC format, what I'm really thinking is: If I write a complex document in the latest version of Word, will this other program interpret it correctly? Conversely, if I write a complex document in OO, will Word interpret it correctly?
.doc format -- because at the end of the day, business users are generally going to care about the competitor's compatibility with whatever Word is doing. Being correct to the document format but "wrong" to Word is a pyrrhic victory at best. It's like being convicted for murder and finally being proven innocent after thirty years in prison -- technically, you won there, but it sure doesn't feel like it.
We might just have to agree to disagree on the meaning of "standard" in this case. When I look at something like OO or AbiWord and I'm thinking about the
Because Word has such an enormous market share, in most businesses it's a given that you'll be dealing with people that are using it, either at your own company or at your clients/partners/etc. Let's say a new version of Word came out and it did one thing majorly retarded compared to previous versions -- that is to say, documents written using this feature are okay in the same version of Word, but it comes out messed up in other word processors, and things using that same feature written in other word processors come out messed up in that new version of Word. Hardly anyone is going to care that OO or whatever would be handling things the technically right way -- what they care about is that you're giving them a document that "doesn't open right" in Word.
That's why I think of Word, at the moment, as the standard, even with good competition that interprets the
When I say standard, I mean in a broader sense.
A majority of people in the world who do word processing use Word. Thus, Word is the standard.
I'm glad OO works great for your company, but it doesn't change what the rest of the world is doing.