That's more or less equivalent to saying that a linux distrubution isn't really open or free because they didn't develop the hardware the OS runs on and distribute it for free.
As long as the mod is freely distributed and the source is available, it completely qualifies as a FOSS game. It is something fundamentally different from the base game engine and just as much a "new" game as half the crap that gets slapped on the shelves these days if not more so.
lol, that's the one thing that pisses me off more than anything about using a hotmail account, they convert all links into total gobbeldy gook just so they can stick that hotmail header on wherever you head, makes it totally impossible to verify where you're being directed to
Re:Why not some mainstream fallacies?
on
Bad Science Awards
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd hardly call something where the evidence is inconclusive to be a fallacy. A fallacy is something that can be shown to be untrue.
A friend of mine used to tell me the reason he never runs stop lights or passes in no passing zones, it's because he said that if he never does those things, it will be impossible for him to be in an accident while running a red light or passing in a no pass zone.
In other words, if you avoid deviations from the norm, you also avoid the potential problems that lie outside the norm.
Maybe polluting the atmosphere to fuckall and back will have no serious long term consequences, but if you're going to go about demanding iron clad evidence of something before allowing action to take place, then that is where the burden of proof should lie.
And if it was just someone randomly making dire warnings that would be something else, but there is good experimental evidence that shows in the laboratory potential mechanisms for how these forms of pollution could result in catostrophic global climate change. Are they right?
Well let's just say that I'd feel a lot more comfortable avoiding crashing my volvo into a concrete barrier at 100mph to see if "she can take it." Maybe I would survive without injury, but sometimes learning the hardway is no way to learn at all.
Doubtful, as mentioned in some of the articles published today...
"Jennings, a Mormon, will donate 10 percent of his winnings to his church and a European vacation is planned, "probably a really nice one." He'll hardly slip back into anonymity; he's visiting David Letterman and Regis Philbin this week, has a book deal and is open to any commercial sponsorship opportunities."
Heh, well that would explain the trailer. Just push the last one out and finish the contract. Cars looks like total crap, I mean you can play video games that look 10x better now than what was in the trailer, and if a rusted truck saying "dag gum" over and over is what passes for humor, I think I will pass.
Well admittedly this is going to take a couple days to really sink in, I voted myself for Bush back in 2000, but he was pretty much an unknown quantity back then and I viewed Gore as just a continuation of the dishonesty and politics of convenience of the Clinton years.
What shocks me now and really disheartens me is that a majority of my countrymen preferred Bush, knowing exactly the kind of person he is and what his administration is capable of.
Honestly I'm just kind of treading water right now mentally, it's kind of like learning that a close family member did something truly horrifying, and you just can't believe that they actually did something that horrible.
I am genuinely terrified of what is going to come in the next 4 years now that Bush can drop all pretenses since he no longer has to worry about reelection.
Assuming that enough fraud is uncovered that it could have swung the election the other way, what recourse is there? Would we have to rehold the election? Or could the current winner be undone?
From their point of view I suspect they don't want people doing a web search for mario to have a porn site pop up in the list since their target audience is children. Because it's a porn site it might get more traffic than most sites which means its ranking would be inflated.
Secondly, because the name usage is truely trivial (it adds nothing to their site, it's just a random babbling from a forum poster or something) they have zero incentive to keep it if it's going to create hassle for them and would represent legal costs to try to defend it.
So is this a bit of big gun legal intidimidation for something that isn't really an infringement? Probably. But that doesn't mean Nintendo is unlikely to achieve their goal, nor that the goal is all that terrible (the means of course aren't great, especially if a lot of companies or people with big legal firms on retainer start using it for more and more trivial purposes).
Think of it as a big car rebate, just like how you can buy a new Ford truck and get a couple grand back. Well as mentioned in the interview with him, this has been a dream of his for a very long time and he realized that if he waited for someone else to make commercial space travel a reality he might be 90 before he would get the chance and who's going to let a 90 year old on board?
So now he gets to do what he wanted plus a good chance of getting most of his money back to boot lol. Would you buy a new truck for 5 grand? I would.
That's one of the things I miss about living in a college town, they had a nice 2nd run theatre where they would play the movies on a 2-3 month delay for a buck a show. Was cheaper even than renting and would still get the theatre/live audience experience.
Yeah, I'm getting kind of sick of it. They get me all pumped up on a card but then you can't buy it. By the time it finally gets out into wide distribution the next round of stuff is getting hyped. They're really doing themselves no favors with these paper launches, I mean upgrading is hard enough when you know better stuff will come out in 6 months or so, but when you can't even buy the damn cards for months and months it makes it darn near impossible to get over the upgrade inertia.
Re:low unemployment compared to europe
on
The Jobs Crunch
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"I am pretty sure that a person without a job in Europe is much better off then a person without a job in the US."
Which unfortunately contributes to joblessness. Good arguments can be made to have unemployment programs, but the more you increase the coverage period and the better the benefits, the higher jobless rates will go.
And the comparison isn't being made by most people as a "well other people have it worse argument," rather it's meant to show that you need to be careful of the policies you institute because sometimes they make the problem worse, not better, despite your good intentions. Europe is an example, so before we charge ahead with policies that have been shown to fail, we should think twice.
It's usually a lot easier to focus on the short term, but we really need to take a long term view of things. Opening trade and eliminating barriers to the free flow of labor is where the larger rewards are in the long term.
Just as people have self-destructive tendencies with diet because we didn't evolve in an environment filled with calorie rich and easily obtained food, we also end up shooting ourselves in the foot when we decide to circle the wagons and protect members of the "tribe." It's not the world we live in anymore, and it requires a leap of rationality to recognize what is best for everyone in the long term.
Federal Internet and Software Commision, FISC? Oh wait that's already taken by the Federal Information Security Conference, this is harder than I thought.
What should we have done? Let the inspectors finish their jobs maybe? Assemble a convincing case and get UN approval before playing cowboy half way across the world for something Hussein *might* do? Afghanistan was one thing, but we also had widespread support, because it was a reasonable and just thing to do, going directly after Bin Laden.
Iraq was something we never should have undertaken. Life is filled with choosing the lesser of two evils. Invading a sovereign nation and pissing off 90% of the Arab world, torturing people, ignoring basic rights, excluding ourselves from international treaty agreements, this whole mess is going to return to us ten-fold over the next century.
I agree it's unlikely. It would take some major cataclysm, but let's say Bush wins the electoral college and loses the popular vote, then does something truely insane but within his character, like say use nuclear weapons or sell off the national parks system to Haliburton, then I think there might be enough of a groundswell to change the electoral college. But barring something monumental like that happening I think you're completely right that there are too many serious obstacles to casual change.
As it is now the politicians can concentrate their time and money on a handful of states instead of having to fight for the votes of everyone. I may be an optimist, but I can't help but hope that such if they were forced to do so because everyone's vote counted no matter where they lived, it would make us much better off in the long run.
In a perfect world you would be right, however the ballot laws in most states create very costly barriers in time and money to just getting on the ballot in the first place. There are voter thresholds that strongly favor the two main parties wherein they need expend no effort to get on the ballot themselves while excluding the rest.
Votes help towards those meeting those thresholds for the next election cycle. Meeting the threshold means that money and time that would have been spent getting on the ballot can be spent instead on the candidate and the platform.
I'm not necessarily saying the tradeoff is worth it in every case, but it's wrong to say that a third party vote is worthless.
It's unfortunately not an issue many people are familiar with, and though it varies from state to state, the degree of repression is shocking. Work for any third party though and you'll quickly gain an intimate knowledge of just how unfair and smothering ballot access laws can be.
Normally I would agree with you, but I lean toward the chance of real change over making a statement. As was discussed in one of the questions put to him and his answer, there's a real chance of doing away with the electoral college sometime in the next decade or so.
While your vote may not make a difference one way or the other in the assignment of electoral college representatives if you live a non-battleground state, it will still count as part of the common vote. As close as this election is running should the unthinkable happen and Bush wins a second term there is still the possiblity that he once again loses the common vote. To have this happen twice in a row might be just the kick in the pants we need to finally get rid of the electoral college.
I've voted Libertarian every election since turning 18, but for the first time I find myself presented with a compelling reason to vote non-Libertarian in the presidential race even though I live in a non-battleground state.
I will still be voting for the local candidates though, and actually that is where the most progress is being made by far.
Sometimes there are headless conspiracies. Otherwise known as the law of unintended effects.
Most school systems generate the bulk of their revenue from property taxes. Property taxes are based on the assessed value of the homes.
This is the difference between "good" schools and "bad" schools. People are also willing to pay a premium to move into one of the "good" school districts, driving the valuations higher, and the taxes higher while at the same time depressing prices in poor districts and driving tax revenues down even more.
And this is where the conspiracy comes in. State wide fixed per pupil spending would resolve this issue, but the people with the power are the ones that have everything to lose because they currently live in the good districts.
I had a bike like that, was a total junker, and yet it got stolen 5 times, each time being abandoned and picked up by the cops and returned to me later though. It got stolen a 6th time and to this day I wonder if it just never was recovered or if the cops found it again and trashed it rather than give it back to me. And yes it was either unlocked or locked with a crappy lock each time, but I was under the same impression to start, who would want just a piece of shiite. And as it turns out quite a lot of people apparently.
To the extent that you are quibbling over the term produce, nothing is produced, ever. Given that anytime the term production is used it necessarily means moving/transferring energy or material from an unavailable state to an available state your point is redundant.
Production of these toxic substances is making them available for humans to come into contact with them. Taking these substances from underground coal reserves and pumping them into the air and dumping them into surface landfills is indeed producing them from the only context that is meaningful, that of human/animal health and well-being.
Wow. Just when you think you've read it all. And here I was thinking it was a positive that coal reserves may last for another two centuries. Everything is such a damn boondoggle. I guess it's just par for the course that a pdf claiming to be unverisally useful can't take the hits and is shut down in minutes when it is made universally available.
Actually that's one of the benefits of having a principled party. The positions flow from more basic principles so it's rare to have much of a surprise. Unlike focus group and poll driven positions that change from election to election with the major parties.
I agree with the parent that it's more about what they hope to accomplish with their efforts, and how they plan to get there.
I have a couple of machines, and while opening up the case and installing a PCI card is rather trivial, I don't want to buy cards for every single machine, nor do I want to open two cases and switch a card everytime I want to do some video work on a different machine than where the card currently is.
The one machine household is becoming a rarity these days.
Is the Canadian legal system so lenient in general? You make it sound like he's getting more punishment than he deserves for his true role in the whole thing, but probation then a year for his earlier convictions, and now just four years for the latest after having passed off millions in rubber money? I mean that really sounds like there's little incentive for him not to keep doing what he's doing each time he gets out. Not that it sounds like he could quit if he wanted to.
Slashdot Mirror
That's more or less equivalent to saying that a linux distrubution isn't really open or free because they didn't develop the hardware the OS runs on and distribute it for free.
As long as the mod is freely distributed and the source is available, it completely qualifies as a FOSS game. It is something fundamentally different from the base game engine and just as much a "new" game as half the crap that gets slapped on the shelves these days if not more so.
lol, that's the one thing that pisses me off more than anything about using a hotmail account, they convert all links into total gobbeldy gook just so they can stick that hotmail header on wherever you head, makes it totally impossible to verify where you're being directed to
I'd hardly call something where the evidence is inconclusive to be a fallacy. A fallacy is something that can be shown to be untrue.
A friend of mine used to tell me the reason he never runs stop lights or passes in no passing zones, it's because he said that if he never does those things, it will be impossible for him to be in an accident while running a red light or passing in a no pass zone.
In other words, if you avoid deviations from the norm, you also avoid the potential problems that lie outside the norm.
Maybe polluting the atmosphere to fuckall and back will have no serious long term consequences, but if you're going to go about demanding iron clad evidence of something before allowing action to take place, then that is where the burden of proof should lie.
And if it was just someone randomly making dire warnings that would be something else, but there is good experimental evidence that shows in the laboratory potential mechanisms for how these forms of pollution could result in catostrophic global climate change. Are they right?
Well let's just say that I'd feel a lot more comfortable avoiding crashing my volvo into a concrete barrier at 100mph to see if "she can take it." Maybe I would survive without injury, but sometimes learning the hardway is no way to learn at all.
maybe he got laid that morning
Doubtful, as mentioned in some of the articles published today...
"Jennings, a Mormon, will donate 10 percent of his winnings to his church and a European vacation is planned, "probably a really nice one." He'll hardly slip back into anonymity; he's visiting David Letterman and Regis Philbin this week, has a book deal and is open to any commercial sponsorship opportunities."
Heh, well that would explain the trailer. Just push the last one out and finish the contract. Cars looks like total crap, I mean you can play video games that look 10x better now than what was in the trailer, and if a rusted truck saying "dag gum" over and over is what passes for humor, I think I will pass.
Well admittedly this is going to take a couple days to really sink in, I voted myself for Bush back in 2000, but he was pretty much an unknown quantity back then and I viewed Gore as just a continuation of the dishonesty and politics of convenience of the Clinton years.
What shocks me now and really disheartens me is that a majority of my countrymen preferred Bush, knowing exactly the kind of person he is and what his administration is capable of.
Honestly I'm just kind of treading water right now mentally, it's kind of like learning that a close family member did something truly horrifying, and you just can't believe that they actually did something that horrible.
I am genuinely terrified of what is going to come in the next 4 years now that Bush can drop all pretenses since he no longer has to worry about reelection.
Assuming that enough fraud is uncovered that it could have swung the election the other way, what recourse is there? Would we have to rehold the election? Or could the current winner be undone?
From their point of view I suspect they don't want people doing a web search for mario to have a porn site pop up in the list since their target audience is children. Because it's a porn site it might get more traffic than most sites which means its ranking would be inflated.
Secondly, because the name usage is truely trivial (it adds nothing to their site, it's just a random babbling from a forum poster or something) they have zero incentive to keep it if it's going to create hassle for them and would represent legal costs to try to defend it.
So is this a bit of big gun legal intidimidation for something that isn't really an infringement? Probably. But that doesn't mean Nintendo is unlikely to achieve their goal, nor that the goal is all that terrible (the means of course aren't great, especially if a lot of companies or people with big legal firms on retainer start using it for more and more trivial purposes).
Think of it as a big car rebate, just like how you can buy a new Ford truck and get a couple grand back. Well as mentioned in the interview with him, this has been a dream of his for a very long time and he realized that if he waited for someone else to make commercial space travel a reality he might be 90 before he would get the chance and who's going to let a 90 year old on board?
So now he gets to do what he wanted plus a good chance of getting most of his money back to boot lol. Would you buy a new truck for 5 grand? I would.
That's one of the things I miss about living in a college town, they had a nice 2nd run theatre where they would play the movies on a 2-3 month delay for a buck a show. Was cheaper even than renting and would still get the theatre/live audience experience.
Yeah, I'm getting kind of sick of it. They get me all pumped up on a card but then you can't buy it. By the time it finally gets out into wide distribution the next round of stuff is getting hyped. They're really doing themselves no favors with these paper launches, I mean upgrading is hard enough when you know better stuff will come out in 6 months or so, but when you can't even buy the damn cards for months and months it makes it darn near impossible to get over the upgrade inertia.
"I am pretty sure that a person without a job in Europe is much better off then a person without a job in the US."
Which unfortunately contributes to joblessness. Good arguments can be made to have unemployment programs, but the more you increase the coverage period and the better the benefits, the higher jobless rates will go.
And the comparison isn't being made by most people as a "well other people have it worse argument," rather it's meant to show that you need to be careful of the policies you institute because sometimes they make the problem worse, not better, despite your good intentions. Europe is an example, so before we charge ahead with policies that have been shown to fail, we should think twice.
It's usually a lot easier to focus on the short term, but we really need to take a long term view of things. Opening trade and eliminating barriers to the free flow of labor is where the larger rewards are in the long term.
Just as people have self-destructive tendencies with diet because we didn't evolve in an environment filled with calorie rich and easily obtained food, we also end up shooting ourselves in the foot when we decide to circle the wagons and protect members of the "tribe." It's not the world we live in anymore, and it requires a leap of rationality to recognize what is best for everyone in the long term.
Federal Internet and Software Commision, FISC? Oh wait that's already taken by the Federal Information Security Conference, this is harder than I thought.
What should we have done? Let the inspectors finish their jobs maybe? Assemble a convincing case and get UN approval before playing cowboy half way across the world for something Hussein *might* do? Afghanistan was one thing, but we also had widespread support, because it was a reasonable and just thing to do, going directly after Bin Laden.
Iraq was something we never should have undertaken. Life is filled with choosing the lesser of two evils. Invading a sovereign nation and pissing off 90% of the Arab world, torturing people, ignoring basic rights, excluding ourselves from international treaty agreements, this whole mess is going to return to us ten-fold over the next century.
I agree it's unlikely. It would take some major cataclysm, but let's say Bush wins the electoral college and loses the popular vote, then does something truely insane but within his character, like say use nuclear weapons or sell off the national parks system to Haliburton, then I think there might be enough of a groundswell to change the electoral college. But barring something monumental like that happening I think you're completely right that there are too many serious obstacles to casual change.
As it is now the politicians can concentrate their time and money on a handful of states instead of having to fight for the votes of everyone. I may be an optimist, but I can't help but hope that such if they were forced to do so because everyone's vote counted no matter where they lived, it would make us much better off in the long run.
In a perfect world you would be right, however the ballot laws in most states create very costly barriers in time and money to just getting on the ballot in the first place. There are voter thresholds that strongly favor the two main parties wherein they need expend no effort to get on the ballot themselves while excluding the rest.
Votes help towards those meeting those thresholds for the next election cycle. Meeting the threshold means that money and time that would have been spent getting on the ballot can be spent instead on the candidate and the platform.
I'm not necessarily saying the tradeoff is worth it in every case, but it's wrong to say that a third party vote is worthless.
It's unfortunately not an issue many people are familiar with, and though it varies from state to state, the degree of repression is shocking. Work for any third party though and you'll quickly gain an intimate knowledge of just how unfair and smothering ballot access laws can be.
Normally I would agree with you, but I lean toward the chance of real change over making a statement. As was discussed in one of the questions put to him and his answer, there's a real chance of doing away with the electoral college sometime in the next decade or so.
While your vote may not make a difference one way or the other in the assignment of electoral college representatives if you live a non-battleground state, it will still count as part of the common vote. As close as this election is running should the unthinkable happen and Bush wins a second term there is still the possiblity that he once again loses the common vote. To have this happen twice in a row might be just the kick in the pants we need to finally get rid of the electoral college.
I've voted Libertarian every election since turning 18, but for the first time I find myself presented with a compelling reason to vote non-Libertarian in the presidential race even though I live in a non-battleground state.
I will still be voting for the local candidates though, and actually that is where the most progress is being made by far.
Sometimes there are headless conspiracies. Otherwise known as the law of unintended effects.
Most school systems generate the bulk of their revenue from property taxes. Property taxes are based on the assessed value of the homes.
This is the difference between "good" schools and "bad" schools. People are also willing to pay a premium to move into one of the "good" school districts, driving the valuations higher, and the taxes higher while at the same time depressing prices in poor districts and driving tax revenues down even more.
And this is where the conspiracy comes in. State wide fixed per pupil spending would resolve this issue, but the people with the power are the ones that have everything to lose because they currently live in the good districts.
I had a bike like that, was a total junker, and yet it got stolen 5 times, each time being abandoned and picked up by the cops and returned to me later though. It got stolen a 6th time and to this day I wonder if it just never was recovered or if the cops found it again and trashed it rather than give it back to me. And yes it was either unlocked or locked with a crappy lock each time, but I was under the same impression to start, who would want just a piece of shiite. And as it turns out quite a lot of people apparently.
To the extent that you are quibbling over the term produce, nothing is produced, ever. Given that anytime the term production is used it necessarily means moving/transferring energy or material from an unavailable state to an available state your point is redundant.
Production of these toxic substances is making them available for humans to come into contact with them. Taking these substances from underground coal reserves and pumping them into the air and dumping them into surface landfills is indeed producing them from the only context that is meaningful, that of human/animal health and well-being.
Wow. Just when you think you've read it all. And here I was thinking it was a positive that coal reserves may last for another two centuries. Everything is such a damn boondoggle. I guess it's just par for the course that a pdf claiming to be unverisally useful can't take the hits and is shut down in minutes when it is made universally available.
Actually that's one of the benefits of having a principled party. The positions flow from more basic principles so it's rare to have much of a surprise. Unlike focus group and poll driven positions that change from election to election with the major parties.
I agree with the parent that it's more about what they hope to accomplish with their efforts, and how they plan to get there.
I have a couple of machines, and while opening up the case and installing a PCI card is rather trivial, I don't want to buy cards for every single machine, nor do I want to open two cases and switch a card everytime I want to do some video work on a different machine than where the card currently is.
The one machine household is becoming a rarity these days.
Is the Canadian legal system so lenient in general? You make it sound like he's getting more punishment than he deserves for his true role in the whole thing, but probation then a year for his earlier convictions, and now just four years for the latest after having passed off millions in rubber money? I mean that really sounds like there's little incentive for him not to keep doing what he's doing each time he gets out. Not that it sounds like he could quit if he wanted to.