A corporation has to answer to customers if a patch breaks.
On the surface of it that would appear to be a true statement. But the existance of Microsoft is a counterexample. They often have broken patches and nobody bothers calling them to task for it.
I'd also like to reccomend "War in the age of imperialism" by the same company. I just bought it at GenCon last week and I've only played it three times, but I definately can tell I'm going to like it for some time to come.
I also saw at GenCon that the same people (eaglegames) are also working on a Civilization board game similar to the computer games. (yeah, I know there was a Civilization board game before the computer game, but this is sort of a "port" from the computer version back to a boardgame again, using different rules. It's supposed to be out ath the end of September.
The same applies to work you plan to give away to the public as well. That was the motivation behind the GPL. If you don't provide any licensing terms of any kind and instead just show your work to others on good faith, they can claim the work as their own, and lock *you* out of it by slapping *their* terms on it and calling *you* the plagerist. The story I heard was that RMS saw that very thing happen to one of his MIT collegues way back when - where a company copied his code (which was fine by him, that's what he wanted) but then turned around and claimed it as their own by slapping a copyright on it, and told the original person who came up with it that he was no longer allowed to show it to others. That's what started him thinking on the path to the GPL, and one of the reasons he's so rabid about licensing terms today. Can anyone out there back this story up and tell me if it's myth or real?
MS doesn't want to tell this to people, but it obviously must be archiving your list of songs on their servers somewhere. Remember the EULA of WMP that says you give MS the right to 'spy' on what you are playing? I think this feature might be the reason why that clause was there. They know that you had played that song in WMP once before.
Pollution (of the artificial varieties probably being measured here) is more dependant upon production than on population, and the relation between high population and pollution is only indirectly through the fact that often more population means more production. In the case of India, the population/production ratio is rather high, so NO they should not be statisticly expected to produce 15-20% of the world's pollution unless they had more industry than they do. For the amount of industry they have, they should be producing less pollution. I knew a co-worker at a previous workplace (a small software company) who hailed from India and before becoming a programmer had previously worked in the shipbuilding business in India. His lungs were all shot to hell from the horrendous working conditions they had, where improper ventallation meant the workers had to breathe in byproducts of welding, various glues and dies, and so on. He had to go slow walking up stairs. Despite the fact that he was an otherwise fit-looking small man probably weighing under 130 pounds, he wheezed like an overweight asthmatic.
4% of the world's population producing 25% of the world's pollution
US, the world's biggest terrorist
The US also produces and exports more than the global average. To be fair, that 25% should be compared to GNP, not population, since it's typically industry that produces the most pollution. No, I don't know what the result would be of that calculation, since I don't have GNP world figures in front of me right now. But the stat you quoted is unfair because it ignores the fact that if a company in the US produces a product that is bought overseas in another country, the buyers of that product in that other country are just as "responsible" for their share of that company's pollution as a buyer in the US would be. That 25% pollution is a by-product of goods used around the world, not just by that 4% of the population that lives here.
Plus, I know the politically correct don't see it this way, but I see natural 'pollutants' such as human sewage in the drinking water to be just as much of a problem as artificial pollution. And in those areas not well developed, they get that sort of pollution to compensate for the lack of the industrial type. If you die from human diseases in your drinking water, that's just as bad an environmental problem as if you died from industrial waste in your drinking water.
It's more than just scanners that need truecolor. Before there were scanners there were gradient shadings to get a 3D effect, which don't work well when you can see large discrete jumps from one color to it's neighbor. Nobody in their right mind would want to output a raytraced image as a GIF, or a video game screenshot as a GIF.
It's no fair asking a user to RTFM when 95% of the material in the F'ing M is blatantly obvious stuff that doesn't add anything at all that you couldn't figure out by just looking at the interface yourself. I've always had a beef with Microsoft's user documentation because it wastes valueble reader time with crap like "to close the file pick File|Close from the menu" and not enough time on the hairy stuff for which documentation would really be helpful. I'll take a dry unix man page any day over MS's documentation. Sure, the man page is boring and droll, but it doesn't waste your time explaining stuff you already know. You get an awful lot in just a few screenfulls of terse paragraphs.
I just don't see how the lack of toolset for Linux would mean more reboots.
It would if you approached it from the standpoint of someone who prefers being booted into linux for everything else besides the game, like web browsing, e-mail, programming, and so on. Having to go to windows for NWN developing and switching back to linux for everything else is a lot of rebooting. And since task switching into and out of NWN is going to be a lot more common while developing an adventure than whan playing it, it's the DM toolset that matters most to alleviate this. While playing the game I'm not likely to want to be switching between it and other apps. But while DESIGNING an adventure, I am. (For example, I might want to edit a sound file in a sound tool, and edit some textures in GIMP, and so on, WHILE I have the adventure creation app up and running.)
If you are smart enough, you can't help it.
on
MIT vs. Las Vegas
·
· Score: 2
It bothers me how people talk of card counting as if it was cheating, when it's not even an entirely voluntary act. To give a degenerate simple case, what if you saw four people at the table get aces in the last two rounds. You now KNOW the aces are gone from that deck, whether you want to know that or not. It's not like you can help it. Now just take that case and expand on it and imagine that you were a lot smarter and had a very good memory, like say a top echelon programmer would probably have. Now, how do you *not* count cards?
What it essentially boils down to is that the casinos are asking people to choose to deliberately forget specific things, as if that was even possible.
The package says it "requires" Windows or Mac, but goes on further to say that the special tools it comes with only work on Windows. This would lead me to believe that it doesn't actually require a special driver and the Windows stuff is just the typical mouse settings widget in the control panel. Where I'm going with this, of course, is the question of whether it would work in Linux as a typical PS/2 aux port mouse.
I really hate that aspect of the home PC industry. The packaging on a product isn't required to be specific about what it means when it says it "requires" something. Sometimes that's a lie and it just means "we only give phone support under those circumstances", and other times it really means what it says.
I would hope your microwave is shielded well enough that you *don't* see very much when you look at it with your x-ray vision. Plan on having kids?
The thing about the sorts of x-ray photos we've all seen before, like the type a doctor would use, is that to get such a photo requires more than just a device that can "see" x-rays on film. It also requires a device that *emits* them ot be seen, since, as the other poster pointed out, there isn't a whole lot of x-ray "light" down here on Earth occuring naturally. Thankfully.
Just like trying to use normal vision on somewhere like, say, Pluto, where you would need a flashlight to see anything, here on Earth you would need an x-ray "flashlight" to see anything with your x-ray vision. And I doubt you'd be allowed to just walk around dosing random strangers with it.
Security would be VITAL for something like this, and would require a lot more work than what we do today for internet stuff. Stuff that's pretty innocent and irrelevant today would become a big deal if your brain was networked. Imagine if you published something interesting in a journal that geeks liked to read about, so someone mentions it on slashdot and the next thing you know your brain is being inadvertantly DOSed by the slashdot effect.
I liked that touch in the article. What I didn't like is how the author kept jumping around between timeframes between pages of the article. At the end of page 1 he's holding down the convulsing Patient Alpha without an explanation of why, then you click to the next page and he's talking about the inventor when he was a kid. I kept trying to figure out what was broken with the site, because clearly I'd skipped a page or something (or so I thought).
That sort of jumping between contexts only works when it's obvious it was intentional. Doing it at the bottom of a page as you click to the next makes it look like the link is pointing to the wrong place or something.
But other than that, this is a cool device. It's not really workable yet, but it's good to see that progress is being made.
But "nothing is not equal to nothing" is a false statement, and it is what someone is saying when they say lack of evidence is not evidence of lack. (Because evidence of lack is a null set, and so is lack of evidence - they both evaluate to "nothing", which was my point.) There's NO SUCH THING as evidence of lack, even if it turns out to be the case that ET's don't exist. If you consistantly apply a policy that you will spend time pursuing the possibility that something exists until such a time as evidence of it's lack comes in, you will end up wasting time pursuing just about every possibility you can dream up, since the set of possible conditions that could convince you to break off the pursuit is the empty set.
Lack of evidence is the ONLY kind of evidence of lack that can you can ever hope for. If something doesn't exist, it leaves behind no evidence.
Carl Sagan's thinking on this is identical to that often used by people to justify irrational belief in a god. As Carl himself rejected belief in god, it shows he was not applying this rule consistently in his life. He got a bit sloppy in his thinking on that quote.
(Does this mean Carl should have believed in god? No, just the opposite - he shouldn't have used the same fallacy god believers use to justify his pursuit of ET's. Now, me, I *do* think the pursuit of ET's is still worthwhile, but not just for the reason that disproof is lacking (since unlike Carl I recognize that asking for disproof in order to stop the pursuit is setting the bar impossibly high). I think it's worthwhile because there *is* enough evidence to indicate that the likelyhood of it is high enough to be worth it. Simply work the probability math - the set of conditions needed is rather rare, but the number of trials is very large when you talk about the entire universe.)
(about your sig) Evidence of absence can't exist. So your sig essentially evaluates to "nothing is not equal to nothing", which is absurd on the face of it.
"decided that it would migrate towards"
^ past tense ^ future looking
Yes, but your original post began with the following sentence:
Until very recently the BBC web site was run primarily on Unix boxes.
That implies very STRONGLY that you meant it isn't anymore. Now, if you want to get technical, yes it doesn't literally say that, but then again under that pendantry I could say, "until very recently I was alive" and it would be true.
If I lived in a world where my reboots got done in thirty seconds I might agree. But in *this* world, reboots are an annoying waste of time that take a lot longer than thirty seconds.
I wasn't the one claiming Windows users prefer illusion, you know. It was the person I was responding to who implied that and didn't even realize he had done so. I was just pointing it out to him. I didn't say I actually agree with that notion - just that he was implying things I don't think he realized he was implying.
Now this is an interesting attitude! Personally, I thought anything that means less reboots to Windows would be a good thing
A half-done port means MORE reboots into Windows, not less.
(Think about the process of developing an adventure, very similar to developing software: develop/test/develop/test/develop/test. Each of those "/"'es is a reboot if the client and development tools are on different platforms. If they are on the same platform, it's only one reboot at the beginning and one at the end.)
The real reason I'd want the development on Linux is that development is a longer activity with more switching between apps, and in that situation the OS you are using becomes relevant, and I'd want an OS that caters to the needs of a programmer more than Windows does, because adventure design would be a lot like programming. What OS you are on isn't all that relevant when you are just PLAYING the game, because there is less switching between apps then - you just go in to the one app, it goes fullscreen, and the OS is largely unnoticable. It's there behind the scenes somewhere, but you don't have to directly interact with it once you are "in the game".
If there's any truth to your claim that they are planning on going to MS web servers, it hasn't happened yet. (Your use of Unix in the past tense implied it has already switched.)
And, further, if the classic definitions are used, it is possible for someone to be BOTH an agnostic and an atheist. That is what I consider myself. I don't see any reason to act as if there's a god given that a lack of evidence is what one would expect to find if god doesn't exist (so asking for evidence first before atheism can be considered would render atheism an impossible position to hold even if it turns out to be true). But I recognize that I cannot really *know* for sure that god doesn't exist. It's just that "made up by mankind" is still the more likely explanation by Occam's Razor for peoples' claims to have witnessed a god of some sort.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also like to reccomend "War in the age of imperialism" by the same company. I just bought it at GenCon last week and I've only played it three times, but I definately can tell I'm going to like it for some time to come.
I also saw at GenCon that the same people (eaglegames) are also working on a Civilization board game similar to the computer games. (yeah, I know there was a Civilization board game before the computer game, but this is sort of a "port" from the computer version back to a boardgame again, using different rules. It's supposed to be out ath the end of September.
The same applies to work you plan to give away to the public as well. That was the motivation behind the GPL. If you don't provide any licensing terms of any kind and instead just show your work to others on good faith, they can claim the work as their own, and lock *you* out of it by slapping *their* terms on it and calling *you* the plagerist. The story I heard was that RMS saw that very thing happen to one of his MIT collegues way back when - where a company copied his code (which was fine by him, that's what he wanted) but then turned around and claimed it as their own by slapping a copyright on it, and told the original person who came up with it that he was no longer allowed to show it to others. That's what started him thinking on the path to the GPL, and one of the reasons he's so rabid about licensing terms today. Can anyone out there back this story up and tell me if it's myth or real?
MS doesn't want to tell this to people, but it obviously must be archiving your list of songs on their servers somewhere. Remember the EULA of WMP that says you give MS the right to 'spy' on what you are playing? I think this feature might be the reason why that clause was there. They know that you had played that song in WMP once before.
Pollution (of the artificial varieties probably being measured here) is more dependant upon production than on population, and the relation between high population and pollution is only indirectly through the fact that often more population means more production. In the case of India, the population/production ratio is rather high, so NO they should not be statisticly expected to produce 15-20% of the world's pollution unless they had more industry than they do. For the amount of industry they have, they should be producing less pollution. I knew a co-worker at a previous workplace (a small software company) who hailed from India and before becoming a programmer had previously worked in the shipbuilding business in India. His lungs were all shot to hell from the horrendous working conditions they had, where improper ventallation meant the workers had to breathe in byproducts of welding, various glues and dies, and so on. He had to go slow walking up stairs. Despite the fact that he was an otherwise fit-looking small man probably weighing under 130 pounds, he wheezed like an overweight asthmatic.
Plus, I know the politically correct don't see it this way, but I see natural 'pollutants' such as human sewage in the drinking water to be just as much of a problem as artificial pollution. And in those areas not well developed, they get that sort of pollution to compensate for the lack of the industrial type. If you die from human diseases in your drinking water, that's just as bad an environmental problem as if you died from industrial waste in your drinking water.
It's more than just scanners that need truecolor. Before there were scanners there were gradient shadings to get a 3D effect, which don't work well when you can see large discrete jumps from one color to it's neighbor. Nobody in their right mind would want to output a raytraced image as a GIF, or a video game screenshot as a GIF.
It's no fair asking a user to RTFM when 95% of the material in the F'ing M is blatantly obvious stuff that doesn't add anything at all that you couldn't figure out by just looking at the interface yourself. I've always had a beef with Microsoft's user documentation because it wastes valueble reader time with crap like "to close the file pick File|Close from the menu" and not enough time on the hairy stuff for which documentation would really be helpful. I'll take a dry unix man page any day over MS's documentation. Sure, the man page is boring and droll, but it doesn't waste your time explaining stuff you already know. You get an awful lot in just a few screenfulls of terse paragraphs.
I just don't see how the lack of toolset for Linux would mean more reboots. It would if you approached it from the standpoint of someone who prefers being booted into linux for everything else besides the game, like web browsing, e-mail, programming, and so on. Having to go to windows for NWN developing and switching back to linux for everything else is a lot of rebooting. And since task switching into and out of NWN is going to be a lot more common while developing an adventure than whan playing it, it's the DM toolset that matters most to alleviate this. While playing the game I'm not likely to want to be switching between it and other apps. But while DESIGNING an adventure, I am. (For example, I might want to edit a sound file in a sound tool, and edit some textures in GIMP, and so on, WHILE I have the adventure creation app up and running.)
What it essentially boils down to is that the casinos are asking people to choose to deliberately forget specific things, as if that was even possible.
I really hate that aspect of the home PC industry. The packaging on a product isn't required to be specific about what it means when it says it "requires" something. Sometimes that's a lie and it just means "we only give phone support under those circumstances", and other times it really means what it says.
The thing about the sorts of x-ray photos we've all seen before, like the type a doctor would use, is that to get such a photo requires more than just a device that can "see" x-rays on film. It also requires a device that *emits* them ot be seen, since, as the other poster pointed out, there isn't a whole lot of x-ray "light" down here on Earth occuring naturally. Thankfully.
Just like trying to use normal vision on somewhere like, say, Pluto, where you would need a flashlight to see anything, here on Earth you would need an x-ray "flashlight" to see anything with your x-ray vision. And I doubt you'd be allowed to just walk around dosing random strangers with it.
"Malkovich". Malcovich! Malkovich?
MalKoVIcH 'Malkovich'
Malkovich
Malkovich.
I liked that touch in the article. What I didn't like is how the author kept jumping around between timeframes between pages of the article. At the end of page 1 he's holding down the convulsing Patient Alpha without an explanation of why, then you click to the next page and he's talking about the inventor when he was a kid. I kept trying to figure out what was broken with the site, because clearly I'd skipped a page or something (or so I thought).
That sort of jumping between contexts only works when it's obvious it was intentional. Doing it at the bottom of a page as you click to the next makes it look like the link is pointing to the wrong place or something.
But other than that, this is a cool device. It's not really workable yet, but it's good to see that progress is being made.
But "nothing is not equal to nothing" is a false statement, and it is what someone is saying when they say lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.
(Because evidence of lack is a null set, and so is lack of evidence - they both evaluate to "nothing", which was my point.)
There's NO SUCH THING as evidence of lack, even if it turns out to be the case that ET's don't exist. If you consistantly apply a policy that you will spend time pursuing the possibility that something exists until such a time as evidence of it's lack comes in, you will end up wasting time pursuing just about every possibility you can dream up, since the set of possible conditions that could convince you to break off the pursuit is the empty set.
Lack of evidence is the ONLY kind of evidence of lack that can you can ever hope for. If something doesn't exist, it leaves behind no evidence.
Carl Sagan's thinking on this is identical to that often used by people to justify irrational belief in a god. As Carl himself rejected belief in god, it shows he was not applying this rule consistently in his life. He got a bit sloppy in his thinking on that quote.
(Does this mean Carl should have believed in god? No, just the opposite - he shouldn't have used the same fallacy god believers use to justify his pursuit of ET's. Now, me, I *do* think the pursuit of ET's is still worthwhile, but not just for the reason that disproof is lacking (since unlike Carl I recognize that asking for disproof in order to stop the pursuit is setting the bar impossibly high). I think it's worthwhile because there *is* enough evidence to indicate that the likelyhood of it is high enough to be worth it. Simply work the probability math - the set of conditions needed is rather rare, but the number of trials is very large when you talk about the entire universe.)
(about your sig)
Evidence of absence can't exist. So your sig essentially evaluates to "nothing is not equal to nothing", which is absurd on the face of it.
^ past tense ^ future looking
Yes, but your original post began with the following sentence:
Until very recently the BBC web site was run primarily on Unix boxes.
That implies very STRONGLY that you meant it isn't anymore. Now, if you want to get technical, yes it doesn't literally say that, but then again under that pendantry I could say, "until very recently I was alive" and it would be true.
If I lived in a world where my reboots got done in thirty seconds I might agree. But in *this* world, reboots are an annoying waste of time that take a lot longer than thirty seconds.
The sad thing is you probably really believe what you posted with complete sincerity.
I wasn't the one claiming Windows users prefer illusion, you know. It was the person I was responding to who implied that and didn't even realize he had done so. I was just pointing it out to him. I didn't say I actually agree with that notion - just that he was implying things I don't think he realized he was implying.
Check this:
b bc .co.uk
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=news.
If there's any truth to your claim that they are planning on going to MS web servers, it hasn't happened yet. (Your use of Unix in the past tense implied it has already switched.)
And, further, if the classic definitions are used, it is possible for someone to be BOTH an agnostic and an atheist. That is what I consider myself. I don't see any reason to act as if there's a god given that a lack of evidence is what one would expect to find if god doesn't exist (so asking for evidence first before atheism can be considered would render atheism an impossible position to hold even if it turns out to be true). But I recognize that I cannot really *know* for sure that god doesn't exist. It's just that "made up by mankind" is still the more likely explanation by Occam's Razor for peoples' claims to have witnessed a god of some sort.