That's why people should pick a Nom de Querty. If it's ever traced to your iRL name, pick a new name and delete all the old accounts. Or better yet, use a different name on every site. Harder to remember, but more secure.
Or you're argumentative, or you missed my point. Or maybe the devil (someone who disagrees with the post i replied to) doesn't have much of a point. If he was as smart as you, he'd agree with you, right?
Sorry, when i said Churchill, i meant Winston Churchill, not Chamberlain. The guy who was prime minister for most of WW2 and thereby the one who seemed to be the one who could have offered surrender/withdrawn from the fight.
Why should i back it up? It's the devil's position, not mine. Feel free to be your own devil's advocate. Maybe you'll understand your opponent's position better if you do it yourself.
i think changing one's mind about something is what grown ups do (when faced with new/complete/additional information). It takes courage to admit being wrong, or to even question one's beliefs. If your beliefs are out in the open, it must be even harder. i don't want a politician to be spin like a weather vane, but nor to go "la la la la I can't hear you".
Buy a case from Lian Li. Buy a mobo by ASUS. Get a few sata hard drives. Install XP (or install a linux distro first). Your support network for such a machine will be about 10 times as big, as will your hard and software options. As for viruses, turn on the windows firewall, keep it up to date, use firefox as your browser (with NoScript) and stay away from non-English porn sites. You won't get that smug feeling you had during your exile, but you'll have a machine that cost you less and is more under your control.
Hmm, i wonder if the fanbois will mod me a troll or flamebait....
Ambivalence, indecisiveness and vacillation are signs of weakness and are feminine traits. If a politician changes their mind every time the wind shifts nothing will get done. Imagine if Churchill all the sudden went "golly, fighting big wars is hard, let's give up and go home". Or worse yet, if Bush had gone "wow, people really don't like the idea of Iraq becoming a democracy, I guess we should let Al Queda(?) handle it". Having a politician change their position based on popular whim approaches direct democracy, wherein the left half of the bell curve makes all the decisions. The same people who think Paris Hilton is interesting would be making decisions.
Indeed, esp. in my area (Washington DC). My girlfriend has to leave her phone in her car when she goes to work. Some military folk might find a camera-less phone appealing as well. Personally, i don't care about the camera, the pictures are too shitty to make it worth the effort. That of course might change with newer devices.
What i REALLY want from a phone is for it to not assume i'm a 12 year old girl who has to constantly yammer. i pay almost 50$ a month and have stored up tens of thousands of rollover minutes. i can has a 20$ plan?
You've allowed conservatives to corrupt the term political correctness into something negative. PC is about fairness, not about "person hole covers" or quotas. Sure, some people took it to a bizarre extreme (as people are wont to do), but conservatives put that extreme up as a straw man and said "this is what PC is about"... and you bought into it. ___ Anywho, there was a study about how there we so few blacks in comp sci and programming. Of course the cry of racism rang out, but further research showed that blacks just were not interested in computers to the same degree as whites. Blacks were tending toward law and medicine.
When i was a kid, every girl i knew wanted to be a marine biologist so they could work with dolphins.
Instead of trying to figure out what post is the parent, child and grandpa....
It start like this:
1. First Post
2. Second Post
----
Then later:
1. First Post
1.1 Reply to 1.
1.2 2nd Reply to 1.
2. Second Post
2.1 Reply to 2
2.1.1 Reply to 2.1.1
2.1.2 Reply to 2.1.1
3. Boobies! (post dated)
Then i could say '2.1.2 points out that 2+2=4'. The next step would be to have tagging that turns 2.1.2 into a link to that post. When referring to a post in another thread it would be 12345.2.1.2.
There was a time when the USAF decided that all air to air fighting would happen via missiles, and so, left out guns in the fighters. Korea showed that to be wrong thinking. While our current conflicts are low intensity and door to door, that doesn't mean that an old school throw down will never happen again. It would be naive to get rid of heavy bombers. Some day we might have an actual war to fight.
Offer servers that do not allow any player to player trade. Or have a check box on the character sheet that shows that this character has never traded. Once you take anything from/give anything to another player, that status is revoked forever. While you are a trade virgin you get some kind of XP bonus, or maybe it's just an honor thing. i think the former might work better than the latter.
Trade between players allows gold farming and twinking as emergent behavior. This is one of the things that made me leave WoW. Some kid with more allowance than sense could buy his way into a better character.
Before someone whines at me about "but trade is part of the game/is important to some people"... reread the post and note that my suggestions are designed to make it a choice. The former means you'd be in a world where everyone has earned what their character is wearing (unless they bought a character). In PvP you'd never see a low level with uber equipment. Players who want to twink and buy virtual property with real currency can have their hollow victories elsewhere.
i've wondered sometimes what would happen if we took a gaggle of chimps and removed all predators and ensured a good food supply. Maybe they'd take up painting with berries.
One of my personal theories is that morality is a luxury and a technology. We can afford to discuss a woman's 'right to choose', because we aren't desperate for members of a hunting or gathering party. We can choose to allow someone we don't like to live another day, because food is plentiful. We can discuss Nietzsche and Nietzsche could afford to BE Nietzsche because food, shelter and security are pretty much handled. People living in gang infested ghettos have to deal with problems like "Will I eat today?" and "Was that a gun shot or a jalopy with a bad engine?". How could they devote time and thought to existentialism when survival is an issue?
Consoles suck for FPS and RTS games. Most console games are designed for their target market... 13 year old boys. Being a bit older than that, most console games hold no appeal to me. Also... consoles and their games are very pricey for what you get. My windows box runs tons of games beautifully and i can use it for dozens of other purposes. Close PlanetSide, open Word. Can't post on/. with an X-box.
It's frustrating to watch otherwise intelligent people go all emotional and cross eyed with anything remotely associated with Bush. Had Al Gore taken his rightful place as president and ordered the invasion we'd be lauding him for overthrowing a mass murdering, neighbor invading tyrant who was champing at the bit to resume WMD production. He didn't have any. So what? The day the sanctions ended he would have gone full steam back into it. When the NFZ patrols stopped he'd go back to shelling the Kurds. He would have rebuilt his military and gone after some other neighbor, and done so with money from the BILLIONS in oil concessions from France, Russia, Germany and China (who were uncoindentally the primary objectors to overthrowing Saddam). But don't let reality get in the way of that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you chant "No blood for freedom", i mean "No blood for oil".
Speaking of oil. When is all this oil we're stealing from Iraq going to get here? You pansies said we were invading so we could have cheap gas. So where's the cheap gas? i want the cheap gas you promised me./voted for Clinton, Gore and Kerry, will vote for Obama
to make Iran's gov't look evil, with the endgame being of course another invasion for oil. Don't believe their lies! This is just like when they told us Saddam used chemical weapons on the Kurds and Iranians. Just like when they told us that Saddam was spending Oil for Food money on palaces instead of medicine. Remember that picture from the first gulf war of the "baby milk factory"? The gov't put that in the picture to make us think the Iraqis were trying to hide something. Or the so called "SCUD attacks" in Israel... all that footage was shot on a set in Burbank. And don't get me started on the obvious photoshopping of a guy standing in front of tanks in Tienanmen Square!
There are some sites that are exclusively flash.... i think the site for six flags is utterly useless w/o it. i can't verify because i'm behind websense atM. Many sites require JavaScript to show ANYTHING. Having NoScript in FireFox opened my eyes to how lazy/thoughtless some web developers are.
IMO, books like other media are dying as products. People are going to have to deal with the new tech killing off old business models. It's simple supply and demand. If you can digitize something you can reproduce it perfectly, infinitely. That means supply is virtually infinite. Any finite demand divided by infinity is as close to zero as makes no odds. The value of data is 0. This is the beauty of FOSS business models, and the model of say, google. Change what you're selling. i get that writing a book is time consuming and requires skill and effort etc, but it's time to adapt or die. Write a text book and charge for something else (or maybe just deal with making less money).
This is what i think should happen: Various profs write text books and give them away on something you could call FreeTextBooks.org. Then the books compete to be the most downloaded. A softcopy text book has limited uses... many students will still want a hard copy so they can use it when having a laptop is inconvenient. Instead of making money on expensive books, publishing becomes a means to build reputation. If Dr. Soandso's book is the most popular he can cash in that fame for a job at a more prestigious school.
Also... it isn't piracy. Piracy is armed robbery on a boat. The article describes copyright violation. Don't let them misuse words to make a civil offense sound like a violent crime. Furthermore, copyright violation is theft only if talking to my neighbor over the fence is stealing from the phone company.
If you're tired of grinding mobs, chinese gold farmers, twinks, gankers and knowing that the game is stat boxes duking it out... try PlanetSide. It's an MMFPS (the O is redundant).
In PlanetSide, the fight does not always go to the player who has the most spare time to grind. Skill, understanding of the game and organized teams win. The power curve in PS is very shallow in comparison to D&D like games. After two or three hours you'll have access to the same equipment as someone like me who has played for 5 years. You'll have a tank, and i'll have a tank... i'll just have a plane and a troop carrier as well. In WoW, i often played just to make levels, in PS i play to play (to have fun). WoW often felt like a part time job. The day i seriously considered buying gold with real money was the day i quit. In PS there's no need for that, because anything player A can get B can get as well.
You'll get ganked, but you'll be able to fight back and win (if you're the better player). Better yet, you tell your outfit mates the position of the sniper and call in an air strike. PS is rich in tactical and strategic depth. Sure you can be a brainless foot zerg pretending that you're playing Quake, but you'll get much further if you treat it like Counter Strike. You'll get further still if you treat it like an all out planet spanning war.
In PS, i'm the commander of the spec ops division in an outfit (guild) called Ghosts of the Revolution. My team does surgical strike far behind enemy lines to cut power and benefits to the enemy's front line. Specifically, we target the enemy's ability to spawn large/high tech vehicles and aircraft. When my empire has full size tanks and the enemy has mini-tanks... my empire wins.
If you want to try it out, create a character in the Vanu Sovereignty empire on the Gemini (US) server. Be there on Thursday night at 1930 eastern and look for/send a tell to N1H1L.
gotr.net/no, i don't work for Sony, i just really enjoy this game and think that many others would too if they gave it a chance
Last thing i read about terraforming Mars would be nigh impossible was that the sun is blasting away the atmo. Earth's atmo is protected by the magnetosphere generated by the moving iron core (or some such). Mars is solid all the way through, and has no such protection.
It doesn't seem to be aimed at increasing accuracy, but at integrating... connecting data A to data B. You're karma whoring by insulting the Agency, a group you probably know very little about. Any shot at "the man" is guaranteed to be marked as insightful. Accuracy would come from adequate funding and leadership (pointing them at the right targets).
Slashdot Mirror
That's why people should pick a Nom de Querty. If it's ever traced to your iRL name, pick a new name and delete all the old accounts. Or better yet, use a different name on every site. Harder to remember, but more secure.
Or you're argumentative, or you missed my point. Or maybe the devil (someone who disagrees with the post i replied to) doesn't have much of a point. If he was as smart as you, he'd agree with you, right?
Sorry, when i said Churchill, i meant Winston Churchill, not Chamberlain. The guy who was prime minister for most of WW2 and thereby the one who seemed to be the one who could have offered surrender/withdrawn from the fight.
Why should i back it up? It's the devil's position, not mine. Feel free to be your own devil's advocate. Maybe you'll understand your opponent's position better if you do it yourself.
i think changing one's mind about something is what grown ups do (when faced with new/complete/additional information). It takes courage to admit being wrong, or to even question one's beliefs. If your beliefs are out in the open, it must be even harder. i don't want a politician to be spin like a weather vane, but nor to go "la la la la I can't hear you".
Buy a case from Lian Li. Buy a mobo by ASUS. Get a few sata hard drives. Install XP (or install a linux distro first). Your support network for such a machine will be about 10 times as big, as will your hard and software options. As for viruses, turn on the windows firewall, keep it up to date, use firefox as your browser (with NoScript) and stay away from non-English porn sites. You won't get that smug feeling you had during your exile, but you'll have a machine that cost you less and is more under your control.
Hmm, i wonder if the fanbois will mod me a troll or flamebait....
Playing devil's advocate for a moment:
Ambivalence, indecisiveness and vacillation are signs of weakness and are feminine traits. If a politician changes their mind every time the wind shifts nothing will get done. Imagine if Churchill all the sudden went "golly, fighting big wars is hard, let's give up and go home". Or worse yet, if Bush had gone "wow, people really don't like the idea of Iraq becoming a democracy, I guess we should let Al Queda(?) handle it". Having a politician change their position based on popular whim approaches direct democracy, wherein the left half of the bell curve makes all the decisions. The same people who think Paris Hilton is interesting would be making decisions.
Indeed, esp. in my area (Washington DC). My girlfriend has to leave her phone in her car when she goes to work. Some military folk might find a camera-less phone appealing as well. Personally, i don't care about the camera, the pictures are too shitty to make it worth the effort. That of course might change with newer devices.
What i REALLY want from a phone is for it to not assume i'm a 12 year old girl who has to constantly yammer. i pay almost 50$ a month and have stored up tens of thousands of rollover minutes. i can has a 20$ plan?
You've allowed conservatives to corrupt the term political correctness into something negative. PC is about fairness, not about "person hole covers" or quotas. Sure, some people took it to a bizarre extreme (as people are wont to do), but conservatives put that extreme up as a straw man and said "this is what PC is about"... and you bought into it.
___
Anywho, there was a study about how there we so few blacks in comp sci and programming. Of course the cry of racism rang out, but further research showed that blacks just were not interested in computers to the same degree as whites. Blacks were tending toward law and medicine.
When i was a kid, every girl i knew wanted to be a marine biologist so they could work with dolphins.
Instead of trying to figure out what post is the parent, child and grandpa.... It start like this: 1. First Post 2. Second Post ---- Then later: 1. First Post 1.1 Reply to 1. 1.2 2nd Reply to 1. 2. Second Post 2.1 Reply to 2 2.1.1 Reply to 2.1.1 2.1.2 Reply to 2.1.1 3. Boobies! (post dated) Then i could say '2.1.2 points out that 2+2=4'. The next step would be to have tagging that turns 2.1.2 into a link to that post. When referring to a post in another thread it would be 12345.2.1.2.
http://allecto.wordpress.com/2008/07/06/joss-whedon-and-jean-paul-sartre-the-wanker-phallosophers/ Allecto would disagree.
There was a time when the USAF decided that all air to air fighting would happen via missiles, and so, left out guns in the fighters. Korea showed that to be wrong thinking. While our current conflicts are low intensity and door to door, that doesn't mean that an old school throw down will never happen again. It would be naive to get rid of heavy bombers. Some day we might have an actual war to fight.
Offer servers that do not allow any player to player trade. Or have a check box on the character sheet that shows that this character has never traded. Once you take anything from/give anything to another player, that status is revoked forever. While you are a trade virgin you get some kind of XP bonus, or maybe it's just an honor thing. i think the former might work better than the latter.
Trade between players allows gold farming and twinking as emergent behavior. This is one of the things that made me leave WoW. Some kid with more allowance than sense could buy his way into a better character.
Before someone whines at me about "but trade is part of the game/is important to some people"... reread the post and note that my suggestions are designed to make it a choice. The former means you'd be in a world where everyone has earned what their character is wearing (unless they bought a character). In PvP you'd never see a low level with uber equipment. Players who want to twink and buy virtual property with real currency can have their hollow victories elsewhere.
i've wondered sometimes what would happen if we took a gaggle of chimps and removed all predators and ensured a good food supply. Maybe they'd take up painting with berries.
One of my personal theories is that morality is a luxury and a technology. We can afford to discuss a woman's 'right to choose', because we aren't desperate for members of a hunting or gathering party. We can choose to allow someone we don't like to live another day, because food is plentiful. We can discuss Nietzsche and Nietzsche could afford to BE Nietzsche because food, shelter and security are pretty much handled. People living in gang infested ghettos have to deal with problems like "Will I eat today?" and "Was that a gun shot or a jalopy with a bad engine?". How could they devote time and thought to existentialism when survival is an issue?
a book that tells smitty that there is only one math. Start there.
Consoles suck for FPS and RTS games. Most console games are designed for their target market... 13 year old boys. Being a bit older than that, most console games hold no appeal to me. Also... consoles and their games are very pricey for what you get. My windows box runs tons of games beautifully and i can use it for dozens of other purposes. Close PlanetSide, open Word. Can't post on /. with an X-box.
The whole book was introduced by man, and only by man.
*signing*
If it is possessive it's just I-T-S!
but if it is a contraction it's I-T-apostrophe-S!
Scalawag!
What is not already generated electricity?
It's frustrating to watch otherwise intelligent people go all emotional and cross eyed with anything remotely associated with Bush. Had Al Gore taken his rightful place as president and ordered the invasion we'd be lauding him for overthrowing a mass murdering, neighbor invading tyrant who was champing at the bit to resume WMD production. He didn't have any. So what? The day the sanctions ended he would have gone full steam back into it. When the NFZ patrols stopped he'd go back to shelling the Kurds. He would have rebuilt his military and gone after some other neighbor, and done so with money from the BILLIONS in oil concessions from France, Russia, Germany and China (who were uncoindentally the primary objectors to overthrowing Saddam). But don't let reality get in the way of that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you chant "No blood for freedom", i mean "No blood for oil".
Speaking of oil. When is all this oil we're stealing from Iraq going to get here? You pansies said we were invading so we could have cheap gas. So where's the cheap gas? i want the cheap gas you promised me. /voted for Clinton, Gore and Kerry, will vote for Obama
to make Iran's gov't look evil, with the endgame being of course another invasion for oil. Don't believe their lies! This is just like when they told us Saddam used chemical weapons on the Kurds and Iranians. Just like when they told us that Saddam was spending Oil for Food money on palaces instead of medicine. Remember that picture from the first gulf war of the "baby milk factory"? The gov't put that in the picture to make us think the Iraqis were trying to hide something. Or the so called "SCUD attacks" in Israel... all that footage was shot on a set in Burbank. And don't get me started on the obvious photoshopping of a guy standing in front of tanks in Tienanmen Square!
There are some sites that are exclusively flash.... i think the site for six flags is utterly useless w/o it. i can't verify because i'm behind websense atM. Many sites require JavaScript to show ANYTHING. Having NoScript in FireFox opened my eyes to how lazy/thoughtless some web developers are.
IMO, books like other media are dying as products. People are going to have to deal with the new tech killing off old business models. It's simple supply and demand. If you can digitize something you can reproduce it perfectly, infinitely. That means supply is virtually infinite. Any finite demand divided by infinity is as close to zero as makes no odds. The value of data is 0. This is the beauty of FOSS business models, and the model of say, google. Change what you're selling. i get that writing a book is time consuming and requires skill and effort etc, but it's time to adapt or die. Write a text book and charge for something else (or maybe just deal with making less money).
This is what i think should happen: Various profs write text books and give them away on something you could call FreeTextBooks.org. Then the books compete to be the most downloaded. A softcopy text book has limited uses... many students will still want a hard copy so they can use it when having a laptop is inconvenient. Instead of making money on expensive books, publishing becomes a means to build reputation. If Dr. Soandso's book is the most popular he can cash in that fame for a job at a more prestigious school.
Also... it isn't piracy. Piracy is armed robbery on a boat. The article describes copyright violation. Don't let them misuse words to make a civil offense sound like a violent crime. Furthermore, copyright violation is theft only if talking to my neighbor over the fence is stealing from the phone company.
If you're tired of grinding mobs, chinese gold farmers, twinks, gankers and knowing that the game is stat boxes duking it out... try PlanetSide. It's an MMFPS (the O is redundant).
In PlanetSide, the fight does not always go to the player who has the most spare time to grind. Skill, understanding of the game and organized teams win. The power curve in PS is very shallow in comparison to D&D like games. After two or three hours you'll have access to the same equipment as someone like me who has played for 5 years. You'll have a tank, and i'll have a tank... i'll just have a plane and a troop carrier as well. In WoW, i often played just to make levels, in PS i play to play (to have fun). WoW often felt like a part time job. The day i seriously considered buying gold with real money was the day i quit. In PS there's no need for that, because anything player A can get B can get as well.
You'll get ganked, but you'll be able to fight back and win (if you're the better player). Better yet, you tell your outfit mates the position of the sniper and call in an air strike. PS is rich in tactical and strategic depth. Sure you can be a brainless foot zerg pretending that you're playing Quake, but you'll get much further if you treat it like Counter Strike. You'll get further still if you treat it like an all out planet spanning war.
In PS, i'm the commander of the spec ops division in an outfit (guild) called Ghosts of the Revolution. My team does surgical strike far behind enemy lines to cut power and benefits to the enemy's front line. Specifically, we target the enemy's ability to spawn large/high tech vehicles and aircraft. When my empire has full size tanks and the enemy has mini-tanks... my empire wins.
If you want to try it out, create a character in the Vanu Sovereignty empire on the Gemini (US) server. Be there on Thursday night at 1930 eastern and look for/send a tell to N1H1L.
gotr.net /no, i don't work for Sony, i just really enjoy this game and think that many others would too if they gave it a chance
Kill Switch... Click /obscure?
Last thing i read about terraforming Mars would be nigh impossible was that the sun is blasting away the atmo. Earth's atmo is protected by the magnetosphere generated by the moving iron core (or some such). Mars is solid all the way through, and has no such protection.
Verbification weirds the language.
It doesn't seem to be aimed at increasing accuracy, but at integrating... connecting data A to data B. You're karma whoring by insulting the Agency, a group you probably know very little about. Any shot at "the man" is guaranteed to be marked as insightful. Accuracy would come from adequate funding and leadership (pointing them at the right targets).