But at the same time, the CARB has done amazing things for California's air quality; there's more Chinese pollution in LA now than the local stuff. Which highlights the NEXT phase of the problem...
Getting rid of CARB, because it has obviously succeeded in its mission and is no longer useful at this point in time?
Yup. That's assuming you're willing to continue working with computers or programming (or at all) after chaulking up 1200 hours in 3 months.
Hire me, please, but I'd like to keep the hours closer to 1200 hours every 6 months. If it's needed to get the job done, I'd be willing to clock in 1200 in a 5 month span.
There are blog entries and other webstuffs that support the idea that in fact "EA tries to avoid telling people that 85 hours/wk is the normal schedule".
Anyone interested in starting a boycott? Maybe EA will get the point if people stop buying their American chinese-sweatshop software.
Story can be a real selling point for a game: How many times over have people played the Wing Commander games? I spent many an hour replaying Wing Commander 2. Or what about Descent: Freespace? Good heavens, do I even want to try counting how many times I've replayed certain RPGs (Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy 4 (or 2 for you non-Japanese)?
I don't think story kills replay value: Story gets you to tolerate game's deficiencies until you've finished playing the story through.
Imho, the real factor is (duh) fun. I mean, Doom 1 and 2 were fun, and even new at the time. Deathmatches are fun. Capture the flag is fun. Objectives-based combat is fun, too (though a good team sure helps). Platformers and adventures are fun. Sadly, many of these are practically beaten to death nowadays, due to far too many shovelware titles.
Besides, there's tech in the works to remove the mobo (or circuitboards of any sort) from the system--- upgrading the mobo spec for integrated solid state drives may come just in time for mobos themselves to "go the way of the floppy", and them we really are just plugging the drive into the cpu.:)
And you all thought those science novels were fiction.
Mmm... not utterly destroy itself? How much heat do those solid-state hard disks make (and can they nuke themselves the way an unprotected AMD can)?
Seriously, CRTs have so not gone the way of floppies or diskettes. The entire campus I work at uses CRTs. The entire college campus I attend uses CRTs. I've seen about 3 LCD screens that weren't attached to laptops (excepting those times I was forced to walk past the Apple store... bad memories, shoo shoo!)
There is one iMac (which we don't use) here at work.
A fellow gamer I know has an LCD screen--- and hates it.
My former roommate had an LCD screen. Great size and weight for packing and traveling, but I kept smoking him in various FPS games because he refresh rate was... well, not exactly lacking, but just not a CRT.
Actually, come to think of it, I've seen more plasma screen TVs than I have LCD monitors.
Meh. I'm still of the opinion that the PSP is the hacked together project because Sony wanted in on the handheld industry. I'd bet they started the project, realized Nintendo had the DS in the works, and has been on "hayate" mode ever since.
I know it sounds like a really good idea at first, but imagine what a single jerk could do to a group of unsuspecting gamers in a p2p environment... ick.
Maybe if Trusted Computing (read: Microsoft becomes the rightful owner of your soul) comes to pass, that would be feasible.
Good example, but I think I have a better example of automation that breaks the rebuttal:
Counter-Strike is hardly "tedious." How many flavors of cheats were made for that? How many other really, really fun FPS games have been made, and how many more aimbots have been made for each of them?
Judging by the picture, it doesn't look like there will be the L and R buttons, so the button count may not have changed from the GBA/SP, just their position.
Non-belief in God is a matter of logic and Occam's Razor, not faith.
Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". A re-statement of Occam's Razor, in more formal terms, is provided by information theory in the form of minimum message length.
It is argued that Ockham was an intellectual forefather of the Scientific Method because he argued for a degree of intellectual freedom in a time of dogmatic belief. He can also, however, be seen as an apologist for Divine Omnipotence, since he was concerned to demonstrate that creation was contingent and the Creator free to change the rules at will. Thus, if God is free to make an infinity of worlds with completely different rules from those which prevail in our world, then we are free to imagine such worlds and their logical and practical consequences.
First, the universe exploded. We're not sure how or why, just that it did.
The gases (mostly hydrogen) collected and formed stars, which formed heavier atoms, and then exploded.
Repeat step 2 over billions of years.
Heavier atoms collect into molecules and planets orbiting about stars and moons orbiting these planets.
Just the right mix of these heavier atoms form and get rained on in the perfect environment for the instantiation of simple life: The first single-cell lifeform, reproducing asexually, with convenient food supply forms and reproduces to form billions of other said cells.
These cells steadily underwent genetic mutation, defying the odds of 10,000 harmful mutations per 1 non-harmful (neutral at best) mutation, and became plants. Just as these plants began to require carbondioxide instead of primordial goo, there was a ready supply to feed them.
Continuing to defy the odds presented by present-day observation of genetic mutation, these plants became fish and aquatic lifeforms which fed off of these plants and their predecessor single-cell lifeforms. They also developed organs and subsystems, despite the components of said subsystems being useless without all of the other parts.
These fish became land creatures, including dinosaurs, eventually, primates.
A rock hits Earth. Really hard. Winter ensures. Dinosaurs dies.
These primates are perfectly suited for winter weather with their previously inferior fur coats.
Primates perform a mental and physical progression akin to step 6, wherein they develop from monkeys to man.
God exists in eternity, outside the universe, akin to a programmer existing outside his simulation. God created the universe, created us, the planets, animals, air, planets, stars, and everything else.
In that case, these books are some of the most popular pieces of trash in recent literary history. Whether you liked them or not, the fact is that they sold copies. Publishers, like any other businesspeople, are out to make money, and the Left Behind series did.
I can't help but wonder if he'll be doing an anaylsis of games that did particularly poorly--- like Earth and Beyond (another EA failure), which had a barely survivable player base... that is, until SWG came out.
I hate to break it to you, but altruistic arguments like that aren't going to get the U.S. into a war. U.S. society is degenerating from the ethics and values that would encourage a population to support a moral war, and is becoming a self-centered country, filled with hedonists and hypocrites.
It doesn't matter what Saddam does to his people, we shouldn't be the ones to go oust him. Instead, we should simply prosper from him so we can live happier lives. Screw the world.
Since it's we who matter, we have to be threatened. If you don't believe this, then look at how many people incorrectly assume that this war is about oil. If there were no fear regarding our nation's security with oil, nobody would have given it a second thought. But our government used something far more immediately terrifying, especially in the wake of 9/11: WMDs. Nukes. Biobombs.
Now it's important to note that the President simply repeated what he had been told. There were intelligence failings pre-9/11, there were intelligence failings post-9/11, and there will be intelligence failings post-4/21/04. But even then, our intelligence was not entirely wrong. We've found materials that have no known use beyond the construction of nuclear arms. We saw Saddam use bio/chem weapons in the past. We feared the power of these weapons and trained our troops in the ways we knew to protect against them.
It still remains a possibility that Iraq saw the war coming, and moved any WMDs they had specifically in an effort to embarass the U.S.
Stop irrationally blaming anything and everything, and start logically examining the evidence, past and present. If you must make an assumption, assume that people are evil. It's usually correct.
So you're a liberal who supports human rights, free speech, and strives for world peace, right?
So you don't mind knowing that teenaged girls were being beaten and raped by the underlings of this fascist dictator, just so you can pump your oil? (But I thought you supported human rights?)
It doesn't matter that people in that country were shot on sight for merely speaking the slightest dissent against the government, so you have a little more money is your wallet? (But I thought you supported free speech?)
Saddam's aggressive militant expansion and desire to acquire nuclear weapons didn't make you feel even slightly insecure? (But I thought you wanted world peace?)
Of course it's newsworthy! Don't you understand the heartache that this man is going through because of the use of this utopian operating system in the evil hands of the military?!
Clearly, this liberal fancy-pants must be right, and it must be such a terrible, evil thing that the military now uses Linux, and it's all Bush's fault, just like 9/11, Al-Queda, world hunger, racism, and the Nazi party.
What good, liberal, honest news establishment wouldn't air the story? You'd have to be a soulless borg with an icepick for a heart not to understand!
</sarcasm>
Jesse Ventura?! The most overruled governor in Minnesota state history? The man who shrugged off all of the citizens who supported him after he came into office?
Ventura running for President would be a joke. He would not be able to use his charisma effectively because a national scene requires real issues to successfully run. As it stands, the main reason he was elected into Minnesota governorship (without any political planks that I was aware of) had more to do with general disgust over the Democratic and Republican parties...
But to try and answer your question seriously:
The Republican party represents the political right (conservatives), while the Democrats represent the political left (liberals).
Conservatives tend to favor the following:
Reducing the size, power, and influence of national government by cutting federal programs and taxes.
Hands-off economics, leaving the free market economy and CEOs to determine how to best do business.
A large and well-prepared military for national defense.
Traditional ethics and values, as shared by most Christians, Jews, and other God-fearing people.
Patriotism in the form of supporting government decisions, including the choice to make war on another country.
Most liberals tend to favor the following:
Larger government, more active and influential in the daily lives of people, usually gaining the money by raising taxes somewhere.
Government control of the economy, because CEOs have shown that they can't operate "fairly", or with repect to the environment.
Smaller military (who ever would attack us, anyways?)
Values such as such as abortion, gay marriage, criminal rights, etc.
Civil disobediance of federal decisions one disagrees with.
Variants of the most extreme right would include Amish, militants, and Nazis.
Variants of the most extreme left would include socialists, communists, and anarchists.
Of course, both sides compete for power. That's how the system works, and with a series of check and balances the system is designed to result in a centric overall. Both wind up becoming puppets to their supporters, typically the wealthy ones (this should be obvious, as the politicians' jobs are to represent the people, and the wealthy have the money to spend on their interests).
Well, no black hat worth their bits would send a sequence of RST packets with incremental sequence number. You don't know what the window is, so you're better off choosing an offset tailored to how long how plan to sit there guessing. Even then, it doesn't take much effort for a computer to randomize the sequence of, say, 400,000 such numbers and then send them out in this nigh-random order, and you've just gotten around the overly-complicated detection hueristic.
So the routers are now supposed to deny access based on a send history? It would be easier, cheaper, and more reliable to just turn on the fisking anti-spoof stuffs at the ISP level. An ISP knows what IPs it has. Anything coming from inside their network claiming an IP from outside their network is trivially detected and should be just as trivially discarded.
I doubt it. I can still see Slashdot and it's the day after, so obviously the script kiddies who would do such a terrible thing to the internet haven't been able to. And they probably won't be able to, either, for a while.
Even then, this attack has no real impact on any internet service typically used by your average surfer, as these are pretty well open-and-shut services. Games might be at risk, but the 6-year-old terrorists aren't going to take out Everquest anytime soon, any more so than they're going to pack their home computer full of gunpowder and light a match.
So about the people at risk: Those routers. Well, it doesn't do a script kiddie much good to take out a router. At worst, they lose their internet for a while and then can't tell all about it on their favorite IRC channels. Even then, for them to see the difference, they probably need to take down a router very close to them, at which point they're only hurting themselves and those capable of punishing them/making their lives miserable.
I could already see the IRC.
## L347z0r - W3lc0m3 t00 j00 d00m - ##
L347z0r: H3y 4w3s0m3!
M1lK-n-704$t: Wh4t?
L347z0r: I t00k 0ut a r0ut3r.
M1lK-n-704$t: Really? Which one?
L347z0r: Th3 0n3 1n my n31ghb0rh00d. 4ll my n31ghb0rs h4t3 m3 n0w. c00l, huh?????????
M1lK-n-704$t: Y0u'r3 4n idiot. Y0u kn0w th4t, r1ght? Sh00.
Hey, you have a point when people place their symbols before their God. Some of them want to "look" Christian so they aren't pestered. Some think they're Christian, but do not live a Christian life, read their Bible, or do any of the things real Christians do. Some are real Christians, and want to tell the world.
That aside, The Passion is not about the life of Jesus. The life of Jesus is the "curing of the sick", offering the "yoke that is not heavy", and the let's give everyone a present.
I didn't find the movie funny, either. What parts did you think were jokes? I'm curious, and wondering if I can explain some of them.
The Passion is about the death of Christ. Why He went through all this pain and agony is the question that's supposed to be generated. Here we have a guy who (in life and in the movie) claimed to be God incarnate. When he said "my kingdom is not of this world", he was referring to heaven and eternity. When he said he'd destroy the temple and raise it up in three days, he was making a reference to his own death and resurrection.
So why the heck did Jesus have to go through this beat-down, torture, and death?
One of the fundamental beliefs of both Jews and Christians: God is the definition of good. God is perfect, cannot make mistakes, cannot lie, cannot do evil. God hates evil and sin, and as such his standards are perfection.
Ever tried to live a perfect life? It's bloody hard. I bet you can't find anyone in history---not even Ghandi or Mother Theresa---who has lived a perfect life.
So there you have it. We all fail. We all fall short of God's expectations. We lose, and burn in hell. God hates sin and evil.
Fortunately for us, God still loves us. He hates our sin. He hates our evil. But, like a father loves their child, no matter what, God loves us... no matter what. And he wants us to be with him.
Enter Jesus. He was the price. He footed the bill for us. He died a terrible death and took the punishment of our sins on our behalf. All we have to do is ask for him to know us. Why does this work? Because Jesus was the son of God himself.
Which is why people refer to John 3:16 as "The Bible in a nutshell": For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son...
Dang... I'm starting to sound like a priest, and I'm running out of time to write this post...
Slashdot Mirror
But at the same time, the CARB has done amazing things for California's air quality; there's more Chinese pollution in LA now than the local stuff. Which highlights the NEXT phase of the problem...
Getting rid of CARB, because it has obviously succeeded in its mission and is no longer useful at this point in time?
"Between two years and never"
Hire me, please, but I'd like to keep the hours closer to 1200 hours every 6 months. If it's needed to get the job done, I'd be willing to clock in 1200 in a 5 month span.
There are blog entries and other webstuffs that support the idea that in fact "EA tries to avoid telling people that 85 hours/wk is the normal schedule". Anyone interested in starting a boycott? Maybe EA will get the point if people stop buying their American chinese-sweatshop software.
I don't think story kills replay value: Story gets you to tolerate game's deficiencies until you've finished playing the story through.
Imho, the real factor is (duh) fun. I mean, Doom 1 and 2 were fun, and even new at the time. Deathmatches are fun. Capture the flag is fun. Objectives-based combat is fun, too (though a good team sure helps). Platformers and adventures are fun. Sadly, many of these are practically beaten to death nowadays, due to far too many shovelware titles.
And you all thought those science novels were fiction.
Seriously, CRTs have so not gone the way of floppies or diskettes. The entire campus I work at uses CRTs. The entire college campus I attend uses CRTs. I've seen about 3 LCD screens that weren't attached to laptops (excepting those times I was forced to walk past the Apple store... bad memories, shoo shoo!)
- There is one iMac (which we don't use) here at work.
- A fellow gamer I know has an LCD screen--- and hates it.
- My former roommate had an LCD screen. Great size and weight for packing and traveling, but I kept smoking him in various FPS games because he refresh rate was... well, not exactly lacking, but just not a CRT.
Actually, come to think of it, I've seen more plasma screen TVs than I have LCD monitors.Meh. I'm still of the opinion that the PSP is the hacked together project because Sony wanted in on the handheld industry. I'd bet they started the project, realized Nintendo had the DS in the works, and has been on "hayate" mode ever since.
Don't forget Vivendi Universal. Where would the industry be without them owning Blizzard and half of Europe?
Myself, I'd rather enjoy their face as some 16-year-old's window-shattering bass gets replaced by Eiffel 65's Blue...
Maybe if Trusted Computing (read: Microsoft becomes the rightful owner of your soul) comes to pass, that would be feasible.
Counter-Strike is hardly "tedious." How many flavors of cheats were made for that? How many other really, really fun FPS games have been made, and how many more aimbots have been made for each of them?
Obviously I'm sticking with my GB/SP and looking at the DS when it comes out.
Judging by the picture, it doesn't look like there will be the L and R buttons, so the button count may not have changed from the GBA/SP, just their position.
Occam's Razor: Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". A re-statement of Occam's Razor, in more formal terms, is provided by information theory in the form of minimum message length.
It is argued that Ockham was an intellectual forefather of the Scientific Method because he argued for a degree of intellectual freedom in a time of dogmatic belief. He can also, however, be seen as an apologist for Divine Omnipotence, since he was concerned to demonstrate that creation was contingent and the Creator free to change the rules at will. Thus, if God is free to make an infinity of worlds with completely different rules from those which prevail in our world, then we are free to imagine such worlds and their logical and practical consequences.
God exists in eternity, outside the universe, akin to a programmer existing outside his simulation. God created the universe, created us, the planets, animals, air, planets, stars, and everything else.
What was that? Occam's Razor?
You didn't actually sit on the page long enough for the 1.5" by 3" "loading" thing to finish, did you?
In that case, these books are some of the most popular pieces of trash in recent literary history. Whether you liked them or not, the fact is that they sold copies. Publishers, like any other businesspeople, are out to make money, and the Left Behind series did.
I can't help but wonder if he'll be doing an anaylsis of games that did particularly poorly--- like Earth and Beyond (another EA failure), which had a barely survivable player base... that is, until SWG came out.
It doesn't matter what Saddam does to his people, we shouldn't be the ones to go oust him. Instead, we should simply prosper from him so we can live happier lives. Screw the world.
Since it's we who matter, we have to be threatened. If you don't believe this, then look at how many people incorrectly assume that this war is about oil. If there were no fear regarding our nation's security with oil, nobody would have given it a second thought. But our government used something far more immediately terrifying, especially in the wake of 9/11: WMDs. Nukes. Biobombs.
Now it's important to note that the President simply repeated what he had been told. There were intelligence failings pre-9/11, there were intelligence failings post-9/11, and there will be intelligence failings post-4/21/04. But even then, our intelligence was not entirely wrong. We've found materials that have no known use beyond the construction of nuclear arms. We saw Saddam use bio/chem weapons in the past. We feared the power of these weapons and trained our troops in the ways we knew to protect against them.
It still remains a possibility that Iraq saw the war coming, and moved any WMDs they had specifically in an effort to embarass the U.S.
Stop irrationally blaming anything and everything, and start logically examining the evidence, past and present. If you must make an assumption, assume that people are evil. It's usually correct.
So you don't mind knowing that teenaged girls were being beaten and raped by the underlings of this fascist dictator, just so you can pump your oil? (But I thought you supported human rights?)
It doesn't matter that people in that country were shot on sight for merely speaking the slightest dissent against the government, so you have a little more money is your wallet? (But I thought you supported free speech?)
Saddam's aggressive militant expansion and desire to acquire nuclear weapons didn't make you feel even slightly insecure? (But I thought you wanted world peace?)
Clearly, this liberal fancy-pants must be right, and it must be such a terrible, evil thing that the military now uses Linux, and it's all Bush's fault , just like 9/11, Al-Queda, world hunger, racism, and the Nazi party.
What good, liberal, honest news establishment wouldn't air the story? You'd have to be a soulless borg with an icepick for a heart not to understand! </sarcasm>
Jesse Ventura?! The most overruled governor in Minnesota state history? The man who shrugged off all of the citizens who supported him after he came into office?
Ventura running for President would be a joke. He would not be able to use his charisma effectively because a national scene requires real issues to successfully run. As it stands, the main reason he was elected into Minnesota governorship (without any political planks that I was aware of) had more to do with general disgust over the Democratic and Republican parties...
But to try and answer your question seriously:
The Republican party represents the political right (conservatives), while the Democrats represent the political left (liberals).
Conservatives tend to favor the following:
Most liberals tend to favor the following:
Variants of the most extreme right would include Amish, militants, and Nazis.
Variants of the most extreme left would include socialists, communists, and anarchists.
Of course, both sides compete for power. That's how the system works, and with a series of check and balances the system is designed to result in a centric overall. Both wind up becoming puppets to their supporters, typically the wealthy ones (this should be obvious, as the politicians' jobs are to represent the people, and the wealthy have the money to spend on their interests).
So the routers are now supposed to deny access based on a send history? It would be easier, cheaper, and more reliable to just turn on the fisking anti-spoof stuffs at the ISP level. An ISP knows what IPs it has. Anything coming from inside their network claiming an IP from outside their network is trivially detected and should be just as trivially discarded.
I doubt it. I can still see Slashdot and it's the day after, so obviously the script kiddies who would do such a terrible thing to the internet haven't been able to. And they probably won't be able to, either, for a while.
Even then, this attack has no real impact on any internet service typically used by your average surfer, as these are pretty well open-and-shut services. Games might be at risk, but the 6-year-old terrorists aren't going to take out Everquest anytime soon, any more so than they're going to pack their home computer full of gunpowder and light a match.
So about the people at risk: Those routers. Well, it doesn't do a script kiddie much good to take out a router. At worst, they lose their internet for a while and then can't tell all about it on their favorite IRC channels. Even then, for them to see the difference, they probably need to take down a router very close to them, at which point they're only hurting themselves and those capable of punishing them/making their lives miserable.
I could already see the IRC.
## L347z0r - W3lc0m3 t00 j00 d00m - ##
L347z0r: H3y 4w3s0m3!
M1lK-n-704$t: Wh4t?
L347z0r: I t00k 0ut a r0ut3r.
M1lK-n-704$t: Really? Which one?
L347z0r: Th3 0n3 1n my n31ghb0rh00d. 4ll my n31ghb0rs h4t3 m3 n0w. c00l, huh?????????
M1lK-n-704$t: Y0u'r3 4n idiot. Y0u kn0w th4t, r1ght? Sh00.
That aside, The Passion is not about the life of Jesus. The life of Jesus is the "curing of the sick", offering the "yoke that is not heavy", and the let's give everyone a present.
I didn't find the movie funny, either. What parts did you think were jokes? I'm curious, and wondering if I can explain some of them.
The Passion is about the death of Christ. Why He went through all this pain and agony is the question that's supposed to be generated. Here we have a guy who (in life and in the movie) claimed to be God incarnate. When he said "my kingdom is not of this world", he was referring to heaven and eternity. When he said he'd destroy the temple and raise it up in three days, he was making a reference to his own death and resurrection.
So why the heck did Jesus have to go through this beat-down, torture, and death?
One of the fundamental beliefs of both Jews and Christians: God is the definition of good. God is perfect, cannot make mistakes, cannot lie, cannot do evil. God hates evil and sin, and as such his standards are perfection.
Ever tried to live a perfect life? It's bloody hard. I bet you can't find anyone in history---not even Ghandi or Mother Theresa---who has lived a perfect life.
So there you have it. We all fail. We all fall short of God's expectations. We lose, and burn in hell. God hates sin and evil.
Fortunately for us, God still loves us. He hates our sin. He hates our evil. But, like a father loves their child, no matter what, God loves us... no matter what. And he wants us to be with him.
Enter Jesus. He was the price. He footed the bill for us. He died a terrible death and took the punishment of our sins on our behalf. All we have to do is ask for him to know us. Why does this work? Because Jesus was the son of God himself.
Which is why people refer to John 3:16 as "The Bible in a nutshell": For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son...
Dang... I'm starting to sound like a priest, and I'm running out of time to write this post...