Actually, there might be an Internet operating system.
I assume you read this as "OS running on the Internet", which is, of course, impossible. But I read it as "an operating system for the internet".
So, basicly an unified layer that allows to create applications running "on the Internet", accessed by thin-clients, abstracting the worries about underlying hardware, connection & login from the client, "traditional" OS, and other stuff. To paraphrase wikipedia : A software program that manages the hardware and software resources of a network. So the concept is not stupid in itself.
The buzzword, however, is stupid, as nobody really knows what it means. Definitions seam to reach from just "Some internet based apps with remote storage (i.e. Remote Shell - NOT an OS)" over "An app-server farm offered by a single vendor (Google) allowing remote execution and storage (somewhat an OS)" to the "Ultimate Grid-Computing where (almost) every machine (or every server?) on the internet is just a resource used by "the Internet OS"".
I'd limit it to his own attorney costs to avoid people engaging frivolent huge lawyer armies.
E.g. : - I engage one 50k lawyer - the other engages a team of 10 100k lawyers - I loose - I pay 50k for my lawyer and 50k for the other lawyers - the other 950k are paid by the other team
This way, everybody (whos confident to win) can afford a legal defense as good as the guy sueing him. If you want a better defense, you have to pay it yourself.
Still needs some rules to consider variable costs (e.g. an attorney that get paid nothing if you loose and 500M if you win the 1G claim, but most likely will get 1M out of a settlement) and pro bono attorneys.
Also needs some rules to consider outcomes that are no clear win/loss situation. (e.g. the RIAA sues me for 350M, offers a settlement for 14k. I engage a lawyer, defend myself and end up paying 3500; plus 20k attorney costs. Did I just loose, win or what?) As a rule of thumb I propose : a party wins if it has proposed a settlement and ends up as good or better than the settlement. If the outcome ends up being between the proposed settlements, everybody pays his own attorney costs.
You are a typical, know-it-all and pompous Slashdot nerd
Na, there, you're just projecting.
Your arguments are based on ignorance
I implemented an agent-based system, did you implement your "silver bullet"? So, why do you claim to know more about something I did, but you didnt?
and I refute them on my site
My arguments (resumed) :
the human brain is not perfect
the human brain can crash (e.g. post-traumatic stress disorder)
your "silver bullet" is essential an agent based system, which has known limitations
algorithms have predictable results in predictable situations with complete data
agent systems (and most AI) has unpredictable results, that are "good enough" most off the time, but work in unpredictable situations with uncomplete data
therefor algorithms are better in predictable situations with complete data
AI (and natural I) techniques are better in unpredictable situation with uncomplete data
as the results of AI are unpredictable, it is hard to debug
Therefor, AI, including agent based system, including your "silver bullet" are no silver bullet to solve the problems of software engineering
Now, you rebut them on your site? (In an article written after my post, btw) Let's see, you adress 5 issues, 3 about hardware (I never spoke about hardware, as I have no experience in hardware design), 1 about asynchronous brains (I never spoke about this either) and finally 1 about the brain beeing unreliable. This is just one of my arguments. Anyway, lets look at your "rebuttal":
Unlike our current computer systems, the brain is self-correcting, that is to say, it uses a trial and error process to modify itself.
And I completly agree, one of the strength of the human brain is that it learns. And your "silver bullet" doesn't. Nowhere in your article do you even mention machine learning, and to believe that a system will learn just because it is agent-based is just ignorant. Machine learning is possible, but it is not easy, especially in agent-based systems. Also, every learning system (be it a computer or a human) needs to be trained before it can be used, another point that you do not adress in your "silver bullet" article.
So basicly your "rebuttal" of my arguments is "but the human brain learns". But your "silver bullet" doesn't, so it adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
How about adressing the hard questions, like the predictability of your architecture? And why should we always use an unpredictable system?
And as a final point : look at us two : we have completly opposite opinion. Therefor, one of us must be completly wrong. So, one of our brains produces a completly wrong answer, and even learning more doesn't change this delusion. (And of course, we both claim that the other one is delusional.) Do you still think that brains are reliable?
I dont think that I'll be able to change your ideas, however, even if you disagree with me, I invite you to read current articles about agent-based systems. Your system is agent-based and this might give you ideas how to perfect your system. My hope is that by learning more, you will also learn about the limitations of agent-based systems, but who knows, maybe you can proove me wrong and design a easy-to-instanciate, general-purpose agent-based system that will change the way I design software. In both cases, it be good for you to get in contact with the guys doing research on similar architectures.
Due to its sheer astronomical complexity, the human brain is the most reliable behaving system in the world. Its reliability is many orders of magnitude greater than that of any complex program in existence.
Unfortunatly for your crazy theories, the human brain is a pretty UNreliable system. It contiously distords (and invents) memory, it makes some completly irrational decisions, etc... Here's a starting point for lecture : List of cognitive biases.
What the human brain is good at, however, is to use its crazy, complex and seamingly contradicting functions to get a "good enough" response in a crazy, complex and seamingly contradicting world. In other words : to operate in uncertain situations with uncomplete data. This includes that it (most of the time) doesnt crash when something unexpected happens. Sometimes, however, it does crash and people get things like post-traumatic stress disorders.
So, if something similar to the brain (your "silver bullet") is "good enough" in uncertain situations, why dont we use such an architecture? Well, we do, its called AI (artificial intelligence), you might have heard of it.
Your silver bullet is simply an agent-based system. And I'm currently doing my master in artificial intelligence on such a system, VERY close to your silver bullet. And I can tell you that this system is NOT the solution. It can handle uncertainity. It probably wont crash.
But the problem is that it is impossible to debug.
With an algorithmic system, I know what it supposed to happen. I can test on the way. In an agent-based system, while I can test every agent, this isnt the problem. The working of the system emerges from the interaction of these agents. And this is something very magical. Every agent doubles the complexity, so nobody understands any more how they work exactly. A developper has to make guesses, put the entire system together and then hit run. If it works : cool, but nobody knows how. If it doesnt work : crap, because nobody knows what to change.
Also, these systems have to same problem as people : they make errors, they never work 100%. And a computer is supposed to work free from critical errors. A human might tell you : Oh, I forgot to send this letter. If your computer tells you : Oh, I forgot to send your email, most people will be shocked (or not, as they accept bugs far too easily nowaday).
Bottom line : tradional computers aim to be predictable : if they crash, they crash hard, and they need complet data to be able to work, but most of the time, they do exactly as expected. AI (including your "silver bullet") no longer aims to be predictable. It can work under uncertainity, it might crash less often, but it results are unpredictable and instead of being as expected, they are only close to the expectation, most of the time.
And I cant believe that I spend 30 minutes on an offtopic post, just to debunk your "silver bullet".
I'm curious - what do you consider a realistic timeline for conversion from the current Earth to an ice age Earth?
Three years!
Yes, I'm serious:
Looking at the ice cores, however, scientists were shocked to discover that the transitions from ice age-like weather to contemporary-type weather usually took only two or three years. Something was flipping the weather of the planet back and forth with a rapidity that was startling. (Ok, this is the reverse direction : Ice Age -> Normal)
What brought on this sudden "disappearance of summer" period was that the warm-water currents of the Great Conveyor Belt had shut down. Once the Gulf Stream was no longer flowing, it only took a year or three for the last of the residual heat held in the North Atlantic Ocean to dissipate into the air over Europe, and then there was no more warmth to moderate the northern latitudes. When the summer stopped in the north, the rains stopped around the equator: At the same time Europe was plunged into an Ice Age, the Middle East and Africa were ravaged by drought and wind-driven firestorms. (This is about Normal -> Ice Age)
What most likely happened is one of his applications was claiming multiple inventions,
What about some facts, instead of speculation?
One application did indeed get duplicated and resulted in twodifferent patents. Which both have the exact same abstract. Both have the almost the same description. (The newer one lacks the words "Here is an example of a url expressed in a form commonly used today:" and then removed the phrase "www.foo.com is the name of the server to which the request is to be sent. bar.html is the request that is to be sent to the server." which was duplicated in the old one.) So, the only thing that is different in the two patents are the references and the claims. They are similar, but the newer patent is more wordy.
A sister comment linked to some patent law about "Continuation". I didnt fully understood the legalese, but it could be that the patent system had some build-in "extend before granted"-mecanism that results in two grants.
Science sais : we dont know - keep looking for an explanation. ID sais : we know : the designer (God) did it - stop looking for an explanation.
And that's the problem. If ID would actually prove God, I would support it. But all they do is claim that all mysteries are actually godly influence and that we can stop looking for an explanation because God is the explanation. But scientific progress does come from these mysteries. By claiming that mysteries are solved by God (mystery solved - end of research), ID is killing the curiosity that drives scientific progress.
I think the price range should be $10-$30 not $30-$50.
Did you try ebooks? Almost all books on DriveThruRPG.com are in the 0-30$ range. (30$ for core books (and I prefer my core books in paper anyway), most add-ons are in the 5-20$ range). And most books are watermarked pdfs with no additional DRM.
Well, ok, not for WotC, from which there are only 7 products, all around 30$. But other publishers are well presented, including Fanpro (Shadowrun) & White Wolf (World of Darkness).
Guys who masturbate are in need of a good woman to fill their lives yada, yada, yada.
1. Nowhere in the article is masturbating equalled with an addiction.
2. An addiction, by definition, is an activity that degrades your quality of life, and even knowing that it degrades your life, you cannot stop.
3. Masturbating can be an addiction. But in this case, masturbation is degrading the addicted's life (ruining his marriage, his friendships, getting him fired because he does it on the job, etc)
4. Internal emptiness is not something solved by an relationship. Actually, if an internal empty person gets in a relationship, he's in great danger to just get addicted on the other person. (And BTW, the porn addicted in the article IS married)
5. Internal emptiness is solved by working on oneself. Finding a meaning to one's life. Improving one's self-image. Etc.
6. And finally, it is agreed uppon that most addictions result from internal emptiness. However, there's no hard & precise rule whether an activity is an addiction or just the normal pursuit of happiness. (I gave the definition under 2., but it allows for a lot of gray cases : is it really degrading the quality of life, can the person really not stop? And many addicted are under the delusion that they "could stop anytime, they just dont want to.")
Microsoft's double-click patent only applies to buttons on handhelds (or, as they word it : "limited resource computing device", and later "Small, mobile computing devices, such as personal desktop assistants including hand-held and palm-type computers and the like"). And if I interprete the patent correctly, even then, only to physical buttons.
And I still think that the patent is bogus. (You know, it's an innovation because... well... everybody did this, but never on... well, you know... small, portable computers. Yeah, there, it's a complet novelty.)
6b: Frank paste a single paragraph into the document and suddenly ALL formatting & numbering in the document changes and you have to spend an 3-hour maraton formatting session to get it approximatly to the state before.
This did happen to me (Office 97 IIRC), and this is the reason I dont use Word anymore. I'm kind of unhappy with OO.org too though, but at least it hasnt changed my entire document for mysterious reasons yet. It has reformatted frame layout for mysterious reasons though, but I prefere to fix one frame-layout, instead of the entire document.
Sigh, I havent found my Office Suite yet. I just want some Office 97 features, without any mysterious automagic formatting. Whoever though about automagic formatting should be shot. All the trouble it caused me so far just isnt worth the occasional "Tab"-key that it saves.
Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) like BSD Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) kind of like LGPL or MPL : you must relicence files that contain Ms-CL code as Ms-CL, but can use them in any way you want. Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) - you may only look at it
And I hve no clue which of these apply for this game. I even downloaded the ReadMe.rtf (rtf? from Microsoft?), but it only says that you need directx from feb 2006 to compile the "MC2 Viewer". (And I won't download 1GB to maybe find out what licence it is...)
Requiring root password? Isnt that bad?
on
Sudo vs. Root
·
· Score: 1
Then, you can force sudo to require the root password
Hu? I though one of the strength of sudo (over su) was that you DONT have to give out the root password to every user that needs some administration powers.
Of course, if the root account is completly disabled and the root password is ONLY used to authentificate against sudo, it's slightly less of an issue, but even then I dont think it's better than requiring the user password.
Example : admin Alice has all powers (can sudo a shell) admin Bob can only edit httpd.conf and restart apache
Alice forgets to close his session (but did close all root-shells) and Bob walks by his machine. He types in sudo in a terminal. If sudo asks for Alice's password, Bob has to guess it. If however, sudo asks for the root password, Bob knows it and can gain a root shell.
OTOH, it forces an external attacker to guess/acquire 2 different passwords, but this can be solved differently. If Bob tends to choose weak passwords, this can be solved by rejecting weak passwords (for admin users) right away. And if admin B gives out his password to whoever asks... well, if he knows the root-password, he will gives that out too, so it's an attacker that can acquire 1 password from Bob will be able to get a second one too.
Bottom line : Requiring a root password for sudo seams like a stupid idea.
Name a non-Microsoft-owned site that Firefox can handle that Opera can't?
Sun Java(tm) System Messenger Express 6.1
An AJAX (? dont know about the X though) email system that my university uses. Works (sometimes buggy, but works) in IE, Firefox & Mozilla, but is buggy as Hell (= inoperable) in Opera.
Generally though, I agree. It's the only site I know of that Opera has problems with. And I think it's more a problem on Sun's side than with Opera.
Heck yeah, I've seen nothing on the computer (yet) that comes even close to a table top setting.
The main difference is that everything is possible in a table-top setting. While in a computer game everything is limited by what the designer though of in advance.
Just from my last game session : 1) We had a brawl between players (i.e. we were not trying to do lethal damage, but only show off to see who's stronger) 2) During which someone catched my shirt and shot through it (without harming me) just to get my attention 3) we broke through the bottom of an elevator, because we hadn't the key for the floor 4) we (magically) convinced a Guard that he was really thirsty and wanted to walk south till he got to a Bar.
As for computer games : 1) I dont know of any comp game that allows such brawls, but I might be mistaken. In general, fights in comp games have the only goal to do lethal damage, to kill. While in a table top, I might also fight in order to disable someone, to show off that I'm stronger, to catch someone, hit someone to let out frustrations, etc... Related to that : I've yet to see a game where opponents surrender (side note : depending on the GM, they dont do that in a table top setting neither) 2) I also dont know if any game allows to use guns for attention getting. It works well in real life (shoot into air, everyone turn your way and pays attention to you), but in the comp games I played, interaction seams to be limited to either fight or (exclusiv) speak. I've never seen implemented something like : fight a bit to show that you could kill the other, than speak and use the result of the fight as an intimidation ("I could have killed you"). 3) This might be possible once PPU's are standard. Currently, we have such stupid things as chests that cannot be opened without a key, even if I swing a maze that can break skulls (and surely chests). 4) In a computer game a NPC can only do what the designer though off. The only way to break this is by either : developing strong AI, or making a game without NPC, i.e. humans play everything with some intelligence, even weak goblins. (Perhaps pay humans with XP for their main character, or free extentions to their account for such deeds.)
Bottom line : while I like computer "R"PGs as a genre of their own, comparing them (in their current form) to table top RPGs is ridiculous. Maybe with PPU's and much better AI, but I doubt that this will be soon.
And some things will never be translated to a computer game : Players : "we open the door" GM : "Ahh, I've waited for hours to finally get you to this point... " (evil smirk) "and behind the door is... nothing."
The beauty of modern warfare is very few people die relative to former wars. Technology makes the difference.
History check : they said the same before WW1 and WW2.
Especially before WW2. New technologie and "Blitzkrieg" was though to make this the shortest and cleanest war ever.
Finally, it was longer and far more bloody then WW1.
I agree with sibling posts. The only reason that the US hadn't had something as bad as WW2 since it, is that they didn't attack someone their own size. I'm convinced that a war US vs. China would be longer and bloodier than even WW2.
Besides, the average marine has about a high school education, no morals and a low threshold for the sanctity of life. They might as well be robots anyways.:-)
And this is why I think we need a draft.
Not for the lack of volunteers or to get better soldiers, but to get rid of this "Soldiers are a not like us, but killing machines"-attitude. I'm german. We have a draft and I served. Hadn't I done this I wouldn't know how soldiers are like. The draft connected me with the armed forces and I'll now have a better idea what a soldier is.
Some facts from my unit : - Soldiers like to play with guns. (But given the popularity of first person shooters, I'd say most people like to play with guns) - No soldier I know wants to kill people. And any soldier who overtly sais so is removed from the army. Contrary to some prejudices, the army actually wants professionals, not trigger-happy lunatics. In short, they dont want a "Full Metal Jack" scenario. - Yes, most soldiers have low education. People with higher education either become officers or do not serve at all. But I stopped judging people based on education. - Actually, soldiers have a high moral. They are willing to die for a cause. Can you say the same?
Disclaimer : As a draftee, I wasn't in a warzone. Soldiers act different in a war. But not because soldiers were different in the beginning, but because war is completly unlike everything a person might ever experience outside a warzone.
On a side note : I'm specifically for the draft because I'm against war if there is another way. I beliebe that if soldiers are seen as the human beeing that they are, people will be more reluctant to go to war.
(2)
A person is guilty of an offence if he obtains any article with a view to
its being supplied for use to commit, or to assist in the commission of,
an offence under section 1 or 3. (3)
In this section "article" includes any program or data held in electronic
form.
So, probably possession is illegal. I say "probably" because I do not understand exactly what they mean with "with a view to its being supplied for use to commit [...] an offence". Does this mean that they are only illegal when you intend to hack something?
Slashdot Mirror
He wasnt implying that the protesters had a right to do what they did,
but that the logic by which the feds claimed the case doesnt hold up.
Actually, there might be an Internet operating system.
I assume you read this as "OS running on the Internet", which is, of course, impossible. But I read it as "an operating system for the internet".
So, basicly an unified layer that allows to create applications running "on the Internet", accessed by thin-clients, abstracting the worries about underlying hardware, connection & login from the client, "traditional" OS, and other stuff. To paraphrase wikipedia : A software program that manages the hardware and software resources of a network. So the concept is not stupid in itself.
The buzzword, however, is stupid, as nobody really knows what it means. Definitions seam to reach from
just "Some internet based apps with remote storage (i.e. Remote Shell - NOT an OS)"
over "An app-server farm offered by a single vendor (Google) allowing remote execution and storage (somewhat an OS)"
to the "Ultimate Grid-Computing where (almost) every machine (or every server?) on the internet is just a resource used by "the Internet OS"".
Agreed.
I'd limit it to his own attorney costs to avoid people engaging frivolent huge lawyer armies.
E.g. :
- I engage one 50k lawyer
- the other engages a team of 10 100k lawyers
- I loose
- I pay 50k for my lawyer and 50k for the other lawyers
- the other 950k are paid by the other team
This way, everybody (whos confident to win) can afford a legal defense as good as the guy sueing him. If you want a better defense, you have to pay it yourself.
Still needs some rules to consider variable costs (e.g. an attorney that get paid nothing if you loose and 500M if you win the 1G claim, but most likely will get 1M out of a settlement) and pro bono attorneys.
Also needs some rules to consider outcomes that are no clear win/loss situation. (e.g. the RIAA sues me for 350M, offers a settlement for 14k. I engage a lawyer, defend myself and end up paying 3500; plus 20k attorney costs. Did I just loose, win or what?) As a rule of thumb I propose : a party wins if it has proposed a settlement and ends up as good or better than the settlement. If the outcome ends up being between the proposed settlements, everybody pays his own attorney costs.
Therefor, AI, including agent based system, including your "silver bullet" are no silver bullet to solve the problems of software engineering
Now, you rebut them on your site? (In an article written after my post, btw) Let's see, you adress 5 issues, 3 about hardware (I never spoke about hardware, as I have no experience in hardware design), 1 about asynchronous brains (I never spoke about this either) and finally 1 about the brain beeing unreliable. This is just one of my arguments. Anyway, lets look at your "rebuttal" :
And I completly agree, one of the strength of the human brain is that it learns. And your "silver bullet" doesn't. Nowhere in your article do you even mention machine learning, and to believe that a system will learn just because it is agent-based is just ignorant. Machine learning is possible, but it is not easy, especially in agent-based systems. Also, every learning system (be it a computer or a human) needs to be trained before it can be used, another point that you do not adress in your "silver bullet" article.
So basicly your "rebuttal" of my arguments is "but the human brain learns". But your "silver bullet" doesn't, so it adds absolutely nothing to the discussion.
How about adressing the hard questions, like the predictability of your architecture? And why should we always use an unpredictable system?
And as a final point : look at us two : we have completly opposite opinion. Therefor, one of us must be completly wrong. So, one of our brains produces a completly wrong answer, and even learning more doesn't change this delusion. (And of course, we both claim that the other one is delusional.)
Do you still think that brains are reliable?
I dont think that I'll be able to change your ideas, however, even if you disagree with me, I invite you to read current articles about agent-based systems. Your system is agent-based and this might give you ideas how to perfect your system. My hope is that by learning more, you will also learn about the limitations of agent-based systems, but who knows, maybe you can proove me wrong and design a easy-to-instanciate, general-purpose agent-based system that will change the way I design software. In both cases, it be good for you to get in contact with the guys doing research on similar architectures.
As another poster suggested :
Just forward your logs to DeGette.
You, Sir, are a crackpot. From your site
What the human brain is good at, however, is to use its crazy, complex and seamingly contradicting functions to get a "good enough" response in a crazy, complex and seamingly contradicting world. In other words : to operate in uncertain situations with uncomplete data. This includes that it (most of the time) doesnt crash when something unexpected happens. Sometimes, however, it does crash and people get things like post-traumatic stress disorders.
So, if something similar to the brain (your "silver bullet") is "good enough" in uncertain situations, why dont we use such an architecture? Well, we do, its called AI (artificial intelligence), you might have heard of it.
Your silver bullet is simply an agent-based system. And I'm currently doing my master in artificial intelligence on such a system, VERY close to your silver bullet. And I can tell you that this system is NOT the solution. It can handle uncertainity. It probably wont crash.
But the problem is that it is impossible to debug.
With an algorithmic system, I know what it supposed to happen. I can test on the way. In an agent-based system, while I can test every agent, this isnt the problem. The working of the system emerges from the interaction of these agents. And this is something very magical. Every agent doubles the complexity, so nobody understands any more how they work exactly. A developper has to make guesses, put the entire system together and then hit run. If it works : cool, but nobody knows how. If it doesnt work : crap, because nobody knows what to change.
Also, these systems have to same problem as people : they make errors, they never work 100%. And a computer is supposed to work free from critical errors. A human might tell you : Oh, I forgot to send this letter. If your computer tells you : Oh, I forgot to send your email, most people will be shocked (or not, as they accept bugs far too easily nowaday).
Bottom line : tradional computers aim to be predictable : if they crash, they crash hard, and they need complet data to be able to work, but most of the time, they do exactly as expected.
AI (including your "silver bullet") no longer aims to be predictable. It can work under uncertainity, it might crash less often, but it results are unpredictable and instead of being as expected, they are only close to the expectation, most of the time.
And I cant believe that I spend 30 minutes on an offtopic post, just to debunk your "silver bullet".
They were more precise for showing : So showing a nude female breast (even if it belongs to a non-female person) is outlawed. Unless it has no nipple
Yes, I'm serious
One application did indeed get duplicated and resulted in two different patents. Which both have the exact same abstract. Both have the almost the same description. (The newer one lacks the words "Here is an example of a url expressed in a form commonly used today:" and then removed the phrase "www.foo.com is the name of the server to which the request is to be sent. bar.html is the request that is to be sent to the server." which was duplicated in the old one.)
So, the only thing that is different in the two patents are the references and the claims. They are similar, but the newer patent is more wordy.
A sister comment linked to some patent law about "Continuation". I didnt fully understood the legalese, but it could be that the patent system had some build-in "extend before granted"-mecanism that results in two grants.
Science sais : we dont know - keep looking for an explanation.
ID sais : we know : the designer (God) did it - stop looking for an explanation.
And that's the problem. If ID would actually prove God, I would support it. But all they do is claim that all mysteries are actually godly influence and that we can stop looking for an explanation because God is the explanation.
But scientific progress does come from these mysteries. By claiming that mysteries are solved by God (mystery solved - end of research), ID is killing the curiosity that drives scientific progress.
Basicly, the catholic church says : Evolution may be the mean God used to form the human body. However, the soul is created by other means.
Almost all books on DriveThruRPG.com are in the 0-30$ range. (30$ for core books (and I prefer my core books in paper anyway), most add-ons are in the 5-20$ range). And most books are watermarked pdfs with no additional DRM.
Well, ok, not for WotC, from which there are only 7 products, all around 30$.
But other publishers are well presented, including Fanpro (Shadowrun) & White Wolf (World of Darkness).
2. An addiction, by definition, is an activity that degrades your quality of life, and even knowing that it degrades your life, you cannot stop.
3. Masturbating can be an addiction. But in this case, masturbation is degrading the addicted's life (ruining his marriage, his friendships, getting him fired because he does it on the job, etc)
4. Internal emptiness is not something solved by an relationship. Actually, if an internal empty person gets in a relationship, he's in great danger to just get addicted on the other person. (And BTW, the porn addicted in the article IS married)
5. Internal emptiness is solved by working on oneself. Finding a meaning to one's life. Improving one's self-image. Etc.
6. And finally, it is agreed uppon that most addictions result from internal emptiness.
However, there's no hard & precise rule whether an activity is an addiction or just the normal pursuit of happiness. (I gave the definition under 2., but it allows for a lot of gray cases : is it really degrading the quality of life, can the person really not stop? And many addicted are under the delusion that they "could stop anytime, they just dont want to.")
Microsoft's double-click patent only applies to buttons on handhelds (or, as they word it : "limited resource computing device", and later "Small, mobile computing devices, such as personal desktop assistants including hand-held and palm-type computers and the like").
... well ... everybody did this, but never on ... well, you know ... small, portable computers. Yeah, there, it's a complet novelty.)
And if I interprete the patent correctly, even then, only to physical buttons.
And I still think that the patent is bogus.
(You know, it's an innovation because
You forgot the part 6b :
6b: Frank paste a single paragraph into the document and suddenly ALL formatting & numbering in the document changes and you have to spend an 3-hour maraton formatting session to get it approximatly to the state before.
This did happen to me (Office 97 IIRC), and this is the reason I dont use Word anymore. I'm kind of unhappy with OO.org too though, but at least it hasnt changed my entire document for mysterious reasons yet. It has reformatted frame layout for mysterious reasons though, but I prefere to fix one frame-layout, instead of the entire document.
Sigh, I havent found my Office Suite yet. I just want some Office 97 features, without any mysterious automagic formatting. Whoever though about automagic formatting should be shot. All the trouble it caused me so far just isnt worth the occasional "Tab"-key that it saves.
Shared Source is at least 3 different licences :
...)
Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) like BSD
Microsoft Community License (Ms-CL) kind of like LGPL or MPL : you must relicence files that contain Ms-CL code as Ms-CL, but can use them in any way you want.
Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL) - you may only look at it
And I hve no clue which of these apply for this game. I even downloaded the ReadMe.rtf (rtf? from Microsoft?), but it only says that you need directx from feb 2006 to compile the "MC2 Viewer". (And I won't download 1GB to maybe find out what licence it is
Then, you can force sudo to require the root password
... well, if he knows the root-password, he will gives that out too, so it's an attacker that can acquire 1 password from Bob will be able to get a second one too.
Hu? I though one of the strength of sudo (over su) was that you DONT have to give out the root password to every user that needs some administration powers.
Of course, if the root account is completly disabled and the root password is ONLY used to authentificate against sudo, it's slightly less of an issue, but even then I dont think it's better than requiring the user password.
Example :
admin Alice has all powers (can sudo a shell)
admin Bob can only edit httpd.conf and restart apache
Alice forgets to close his session (but did close all root-shells) and Bob walks by his machine. He types in sudo in a terminal. If sudo asks for Alice's password, Bob has to guess it. If however, sudo asks for the root password, Bob knows it and can gain a root shell.
OTOH, it forces an external attacker to guess/acquire 2 different passwords, but this can be solved differently. If Bob tends to choose weak passwords, this can be solved by rejecting weak passwords (for admin users) right away. And if admin B gives out his password to whoever asks
Bottom line : Requiring a root password for sudo seams like a stupid idea.
Well, but the hat isnt out of aluminium foil,
it's a silver/copper grid.
(This could actually work, but it's still paranoid)
An AJAX (? dont know about the X though) email system that my university uses.
Works (sometimes buggy, but works) in IE, Firefox & Mozilla,
but is buggy as Hell (= inoperable) in Opera.
Generally though, I agree. It's the only site I know of that Opera has problems with. And I think it's more a problem on Sun's side than with Opera.
Eaxctly, DDO is combining
the limited complexity rules from a table top game with
the limited interactivity and freedom of action of a computer game
Heck yeah, I've seen nothing on the computer (yet) that comes even close to a table top setting.
...
... " (evil smirk) ... nothing."
The main difference is that everything is possible in a table-top setting. While in a computer game everything is limited by what the designer though of in advance.
Just from my last game session :
1) We had a brawl between players (i.e. we were not trying to do lethal damage, but only show off to see who's stronger)
2) During which someone catched my shirt and shot through it (without harming me) just to get my attention
3) we broke through the bottom of an elevator, because we hadn't the key for the floor
4) we (magically) convinced a Guard that he was really thirsty and wanted to walk south till he got to a Bar.
As for computer games :
1) I dont know of any comp game that allows such brawls, but I might be mistaken. In general, fights in comp games have the only goal to do lethal damage, to kill. While in a table top, I might also fight in order to disable someone, to show off that I'm stronger, to catch someone, hit someone to let out frustrations, etc
Related to that : I've yet to see a game where opponents surrender (side note : depending on the GM, they dont do that in a table top setting neither)
2) I also dont know if any game allows to use guns for attention getting. It works well in real life (shoot into air, everyone turn your way and pays attention to you), but in the comp games I played, interaction seams to be limited to either fight or (exclusiv) speak. I've never seen implemented something like : fight a bit to show that you could kill the other, than speak and use the result of the fight as an intimidation ("I could have killed you").
3) This might be possible once PPU's are standard. Currently, we have such stupid things as chests that cannot be opened without a key, even if I swing a maze that can break skulls (and surely chests).
4) In a computer game a NPC can only do what the designer though off. The only way to break this is by either : developing strong AI, or making a game without NPC, i.e. humans play everything with some intelligence, even weak goblins. (Perhaps pay humans with XP for their main character, or free extentions to their account for such deeds.)
Bottom line : while I like computer "R"PGs as a genre of their own, comparing them (in their current form) to table top RPGs is ridiculous. Maybe with PPU's and much better AI, but I doubt that this will be soon.
And some things will never be translated to a computer game :
Players : "we open the door"
GM : "Ahh, I've waited for hours to finally get you to this point
"and behind the door is
Especially before WW2. New technologie and "Blitzkrieg" was though to make this the shortest and cleanest war ever.
Finally, it was longer and far more bloody then WW1.
I agree with sibling posts. The only reason that the US hadn't had something as bad as WW2 since it, is that they didn't attack someone their own size. I'm convinced that a war US vs. China would be longer and bloodier than even WW2.
Not for the lack of volunteers or to get better soldiers, but to get rid of this "Soldiers are a not like us, but killing machines"-attitude.
I'm german. We have a draft and I served. Hadn't I done this I wouldn't know how soldiers are like. The draft connected me with the armed forces and I'll now have a better idea what a soldier is.
Some facts from my unit :
- Soldiers like to play with guns. (But given the popularity of first person shooters, I'd say most people like to play with guns)
- No soldier I know wants to kill people. And any soldier who overtly sais so is removed from the army. Contrary to some prejudices, the army actually wants professionals, not trigger-happy lunatics. In short, they dont want a "Full Metal Jack" scenario.
- Yes, most soldiers have low education. People with higher education either become officers or do not serve at all. But I stopped judging people based on education.
- Actually, soldiers have a high moral. They are willing to die for a cause. Can you say the same?
Disclaimer : As a draftee, I wasn't in a warzone. Soldiers act different in a war. But not because soldiers were different in the beginning, but because war is completly unlike everything a person might ever experience outside a warzone.
On a side note : I'm specifically for the draft because I'm against war if there is another way. I beliebe that if soldiers are seen as the human beeing that they are, people will be more reluctant to go to war.
Does this mean that they are only illegal when you intend to hack something?