As far as I could ell from the article, this looks like they want to charge for receiving e-mail rather than for sending it. That's not the same thing at all.
The reason it's bad is that it doesn't seem to distinguish between stuff you *wanted* versus stuff you had sent to you unknowningly. You are not in control of the bytes you receive at your end. If I were feeling naughty, I could simply 'ping' your computer thousands of times a second and you would end up paying for the bytes I sent to you. I could mail a large file to you once every hour. Heck, you might visit a site that looks fairly small but in reality has lots of megs of useless text buried inside HTML comments (<--..... >) so that you don't even realize how much you are paying to read the site.
The reason this pricing is bad is that it makes you pay for things you have no control over. Imagine if you had to pay every time someone rang up your telephone, even if you didn't pick up. That's what this is like. It's like having junk mail sent to your house COD, and being required by law to pick it up and pay.
He didn't mention them by name, but he *did* present a URL that went to their site, and said that he prefers using their keyboards.
VI - mode change is fast.
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 1
This article inevitably led to a 'vi' discussion, and I do agree that the article is a bit unjust toward emacs, but there is one point I want to defend here.
People have been saying that vi's alleged speed is nulled out by the need to switch out to command mode first by hitting escape. Well, with all due respect, anyone who says that is using vi the "wrong" way around. You're supposed to stay in command mode most of the time and only switch into insert mode when you have something new to type. A programmer spends most of his editor time altering code he wrote rather than typing in something brand new. Typically when I am editing 'in the zone', my thoughts go something like this: "Stick in a new line there. Type type type - okay, done. But I just made a new variable so I gotta declare it, first lets memorize where I am [mark 'a'], now jump back to the top of this function "[[", lesse -down, down,down,down - There's a good place to put it - insert line - type type type done. okay, go back to where I was [tick 'a']. Now, I wanted to take those next 15 lines and stick 'em in an 'if', so lets block them out first and indent, (using vim: Vjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj>O{[esc]jjjjjjjjjjjjjjo}[esc] ). Now figure out the wording of the 'if' - lesse - uhm, open line above, type...type...(thinking)...type...type. done
What was the point of this rambling? Well, I just wanted to point out that regular vi users don't generally stay in insert mode. They stay in command mode without even thinking about it. It just comes naturally. In the example above, every time I said done I hit escape. This is so hardwired into my head now that I am not even consiously aware of it while typing.
There is a feeling that every switch into insert mode is like opening a file for writing - you need to accompany it with a close to finish it off. This is so ingrained that I cannot walk away from my editor and leave it in insert mode - it feels like leaving the refrigerator door open. There is a real feeling that insert mode is temporary and command mode is the default.
Your analogy is broken in the following way: 1 - You list several cases where pundits proclaimed a new budding technology wouldn't take off, and instead an old technology would continue to be used. Then you compare this to: 2 - A situation which is exactly the opposite, where a pundit is claiming an old technology (print magazines) will falter in favor of a new one (online magazines).
Regardless of whether #2 is true or not, it is in fact the opposite of your attempted analogies, and the use of those analogies hurts your point rather than helping it.
Why do people feel the need to chastise the linux community for not being as soft-spoken as Linus?
I'm really getting tired of all these claims that shooting holes in your detractor's bogus claims amounts to zealotry. When Mindcraft tested one very specific setup (static pages, multiple NICs), and then published from this the extrapolation that "NT is 200% faster than Linux", when they *knew* that the situation they were testing puts the bottlenecks in different places than the more typical situations, where which Linux performs much better, they were being very dishonest. Pointing this out is *not* zealotry. And, in fact if you were paying attention, you'd see that Linus also points this out on occasion too, that the Mindcraft test was not representative of real-world use, yet none-the-less it did point out an area where the kernel could use a lot of work. (Although webserving isn't the kind of application that really needs 4 NICs, the fact that Linux didn't properly utilize the 4 NICs very well is still something to fix for the sake of other types of applications.) Linus's response is very different than what some would advocate, that we should just bend over and take it when someone shoves FUD at everyone for fear of looking like zealots.
Mindcraft must have a short memory. Their credibility was being questioned *not* because of the truthfulness of their test, but because of the applicability of their test to the general common case. A webserver with four seperate NICs is not common. An intel webserver pumped to the max CPUs with 4 processors, with only static content, no dynamic pages at all, is, I would suspect, very, very rare. Maybe some sort of archive site, like a library of popular publications or something might be set up like that, but not a business site (the test's target audience).
So, Mindcraft, to jog your memory, your credibility was in question because of you tested an unrealistic situation that is *known* to have its bottlenecks in different places than the more typical situation, and then you extrapolated the conclusion "NT is faster" from that unrealistic scenario. Your credibility was not in doubt because of the performance achieved in that unrealistic scenario.
Shame on RedHat for helping Mindcraft run another instance of the unrealistic scenario and letting them shift the topic again to the wrong points.
But, thanks to Mindcraft's tests, one admitted weakness of Linux was found (TCP/IP performance does not double when you add a second NIC). Thank you for helping debug the linux kernel, Mindcraft. It's being fixed. Luckily the fix will be in place long before your unrealistic scenario actually ever enters common usage, assuming it ever does.
Marx viewed socialism as an transitional state between Capitalism and Communism. He had this silly notion that if everything went socialist, then it would turn communist naturally afterward. This is absurd because government fat cats are just as unwilling to give up their power and money as corporate fat cats are. Marx was naiive in thinking that communism is even possible in the first place, and the Wrong-wing Republicans are wrong in believing the lie that the USSR was communist. In this day and age, 'communist' has become a synonym for 'totalitarian' and the truth falls by the wayside because of it. We like to say that China is a repressive government and so we call it 'communist' even though China is in bed with many international capitalistic business interests. It scares the living hell out of wrong-wingers to admit that a totalitarian regime can be capitalist-friendly, because it pokes holes in their ideology.
In your last paragraph you advocate giving a high moderation score to posts that evoke flames. Sure, you don't phrase it that way, but that's what it boils down to. (Give a high score to posts that have a lot of negative and posative moderations together.) This is not going to raise the level of debate. It will lower it.
Duuuhh - the complaint wasn't that the media took some comments from Slashdot. The complaint was that they did it without citing credit.
Whenever Slashdot does a story, it does more than most journalists do for citing sources. It actually gives a LINK back to the original source. That's even better than what 'respected' journalists generally do. Not only does that cite the source, it also makes it quick and convienient for you to double-check it with the proper context.
Looking at the PDF document, I noticed this partway down:
(This is from part II.A.1.19)
A consumer intent on aquiring a server operating system would also have to buy a computer of substantially greater power and price than an Intel-compatable PC, because server operating systems generally cannot funciton properly on PC hardware.
So even though the Judge is on our side on this one, that still doesn't mean he's not a little clueless in places still. (Does anyone know how to cut and paste out of a PDF in acroread? Typing that in was annoying.)
It is very, very wrong to make a site pay a per-user lisence in an environment where they don't control the number of users. That opens up the possibility of external people violating the license by simply flooding your server.
The reason an interpeted language is popular is because so many people develop a website on a workstation and then upload it to a server. Perl is a lot more portable for that purpose.
When you write a perl script, it should still work after your ISP changes servers. That's a big problem when you aren't in charge of the server. It could change at any second and you need to be ready.
I don't have the Loki version, but I've played the Windows version of RTK2 a lot (before they came out with the 'gold' or '2nd century' expansions). Here's my impressions:
1 - It's 'realtime strategy'. But, luckily, you can pause it and still give commands to the game while time is not passing, thereby making it feel like a turn-based game if you prefer this. (At the harder levels, real-time strategy eventually becomes a contest of dexterous fast mouse usage rather than the fast thinking it bills itself as.)
2 - It is an excellent strategy game because of all the different aspects to keep track of: Stock market. Industries' input and output needs. Choosing trains that comprimise top speed for good steep grade performance, or visa versa. Laying long track to go around grades or straight track with steep grades. Laying expensive electric track that allows fast trains or laying cheaper 'dumb' track that requires self-powered trains. It's good on the complex strategy front, but...
3 - You really need to leave your common sense at the door and think within the rules of the game. If you do what would make sense in the real world, it doesn't work well in the game. For example, each city produces N number of passengers a year that want to go somewhere. Apparently they must really hate their hometown because the same number of people will want to leave regardless of where you actually take them. Since you make a lot more money taking passengers a long distance than a short one, you are better off setting up train routes that send people on the most illogical journeys. (For example, if you have laid track across the US from New York to LA, and you also have track from LA to San Francisco and track from New York to Washington, DC, you are much better off by not offering any passenger service between LA and SanFran or between Washington and New York, but instead to take all those passengers all the way across the country. (So theoretically, if a person wanted to ride your company's trains from Washington to New York, they'd have to go by making a stopover in Los Angles.) There are a few other examples where following common sense will get you in trouble, but this is the most glaring.)
4 - It comes with a neato scenario editor where you can build your own maps and lay out the type of economy and so on. The editor also has a nice event-driven 'scripter' that will let you customize what happens during the scenario (for example, hardcode that a particular territory will open up on a specific date, or that a new industry will appear in a certain location in a certain year, etc.) It's the most flexible editor I've seen for a commercial game like this. It doesn't approach the flexibility of a true scripting language, since you have to use a GUI to edit the bits and pieces of it and you can't just edit the whole thing at once, but it is still pretty good.
5 - The scenarios have vastly different victory conditions, that make you think in different ways. Sometimes the winner is not the one with the best railroad, but the one with the best stock portfolio, for example. (I lost a scenario once even though I was the only railroad left in the end. The other Barons had bought more stock in my company than I did, so the profits I made were going to them more than me.)
6 - Yes, it can get tedious. This game has the common failing where even though you can set stuff up and let it go on its own, the commands to organize this aren't descriptive enough and so you end up manually helping your trains along too much. As another poster said, the game needs a better way to describe how you want to resolve conflicts of track or station use. (In what cases does train 1 wait for train 2 and in what cases does train 2 wait for train 1 - your control of this is too tedious and manual.)
All in all, I really liked the game for about 4 months, and then the small problems got way too tedious and annoying. But all this talk is making me want to get back to it again. I probably won't buy the Loki version because the game wasn't good enough to warrant me buying it twice just so I can use it on Linux too. But if I hadn't already bought the Windows version, I think it would be worth it to get the Loki version. Most of the reality problems RTK had were the sort of problems all similar games seem to have. (Civ was replete with them, but it was still fun anyway. Anyone ever notice how in Civ, if you sent your soldiers out to stand and guard something your citizens got unhappy for having 'their boys' out in danger, but if you send the units off and get them all killed right away, the citizens were all right with that.)
When I get the chance to start my own network from scratch, if that ever happens, I'd like to use the animals from O'Rielly book covers as the names. That way you *could* make them somewhat match their original function, but then if their purpose changes over time it doesn't matter too much that the names are off.
For example: "lemur" for a DNS server. "camel" for an apache webhost that has a lot of mod-perl being used. Well, you get the idea.
Hmm - even though I don't take the Bible seriously, I have to admit that it is a rich source of cool fables and names, much like the way people use a lot of greek myths as hostname sources (perseus, oberon, etc..)
I can just see it now: : Some script kiddie is flood-pinging Noah : I have a job running on Job : lucifer has been moved downstairs : Someone should put the covers back on Adam and Eve, they're getting dirty : I'll be right back as soon as I finish typing 10 more commands into Moses : I keep pinging, but I can't seem to find Jesus
Oh, thank you so very much Mr. Anonymous Coward, whoever you are, for royally screwing up my Netscape window with that waste of width. Now It thinks the thread needs to be about 1400 pixels wide and I have to keep scrolling my window horizontally to read the other comments on this page.
If you wanted to play the infinite 'mee too' joke, there was no reason you couldn't put your replies on the same nesting level so it didn't cascade and ruin the entire rest of this thread.
IMNSHO, if a phrase is already in common usage in a generic sense before your company gets its hands on it, it should not be available as a trademark. Saying "somethingorother for dummies" was already in use before IDG started making those books. Should we all be disallowed from saying "Open some Netscape windows" just because "Windows" is a trademark? Of course not.
Of course, if this rule of thumb were followed, then half of Microsoft's product line would fall under it. (SQL server {I remember using that as a generic term to describe a database that used SQL}, Internet Explorer {Again, "exploring the internet" was already a generic phrase}, etc..)
Doing nothing about a problem sometimes is the right solution, such as when the problem is blown out of proportion by the media. The actual size of the problem is much smaller than the percieved size of the problem, such that the cure is inevitably worse than the disease.
False positives that unfairly label people as dangerous who aren't is totally unfair. Even ONE false positive is one too many. If this system produces false positives, one of two things will happen: either Administrators will know the test produces false positives and should be ignored (thus rendering the test totally pointless), or they won't know about the false positives, and they will end up harrassing innocent people while convinced they are doing the right thing.
"This means something important. I'm not sure what..." Mashed Potatos - They help you keep your dates with aliens by making you remember where you were supposed to meet them.
First, the disclaimer part: I'm an atheist or an agnostic, depending upon exactly which of the many contested definitions of those words you are going by. (The difference is not relevant here.)
I dispise religion (by which I mean organizational worship in prepared ceremony, not internalized spiritual faith). I admire the US 'Founding Fathers' because they were willing to publically admit that they put secular concerns over religious ones when it comes to governing. (And I despise the way the 'Religious Right' trys to warp this fact in their version of history.)
I am confused as to how people in this day and age can still believe in Christianity, given all the parts of the Bible that have had to have their status watered down from being pure canon to being simply metaphporical fable. (Noah's Ark, the creation story (which even if you use that streched out 'god day' dodge, still puts things in the wrong order), etc.)
But, even with all that, I still say, "Katz, are you insane?!?" Christianity is *huge* (in membership size). There are vastly different people with vastly different opinions on right and wrong that all call themselves by the name "Christian". Just because some of them came up with this silly game doesn't mean they all agree with what it 'preaches' (assuming, of course, that it was meant to preach anything at all).
Christianity is the majority religion in 'Western Culture'. This means that it will have a *lot* of adherents who don't really adhere very strongly. Whenever something is a full-blown socially accepted religion rather than a smaller 'cult', it tends to attract more 'lay' members than 'true believers'. Witness: the fact that if you look hard enough you can find a Christian denomonation that preaches whatever moral philosphy you like.
The fact that it is so fractured like that means it is totally unfair to treat it like a homogeneous mass. To assume that Christian claimants have to hold the same opinions as each other on all issues is bigotry, plain and simple.
I have had several deeply religious Christain friends whom I would have never guessed were that religious until they metioned it. They didn't run screaming when I mentioned being an atheist either. The screaming lunatics promising to save our souls on TV and radio are the minority. Most Christains are more mild mannered and tolerant than that. (Although this is a recent 20th century phenomenon. In the past, Christians have been very brutal and bigoted toward 'heathens'.)
Ever read your history, John? The Pilgrims were a deeply religious lot, and they were seeking freedom when they set sail for North America. Most, if not all, of the founding fathers were deeply religious. Those who weren't, were at least deists. Most of those who fought for the emancipation of the slaves in the US and in the UK were religious people.
Deism is about as close as you can get to atheism without actually being an athiest. And its about as far away from being religious as you could safely admit to being in that day and age. And you failed to mention just *whom* those deists were. Jefferson, Madison, Adams. Not just a few on the fringe, they were the really important important few.
Why do all these products try to port things the wrong way around? It's the hardcore developers that prefer Unix and the end-users that prefer Windows. Why have developers using the Win32 API to write products for end-users on Linux? That's totally backward. The developers would rather develop on Linux.
Okay, so if I gave $1000 to a political party, then I'd be out the $1000. It's gone. Not mine anymore. That's what 'donate' means. I'm giving it to someone.
But if I spend $1000 on computer equipment, I still have the equipment. I didn't give it away and I didn't lose the equipment after the campaign was over. So how the hell can that be considered a donation?
It also ignores the fact that the computer is not necesserily being used exclusively for this purpose and no other. If I had a home business and used my home PC to run it, but also used it for games, I would only be able to declare a percentage of the PC's cost as a business expense rather than the entire cost. Why is this any different? Is that computer doing nothing but running this one political website?
If I drive my car to a political rally, and my car cost me $18,000, does that mean I have donated $18,000 to the campaign? Of course not. I only used a teeny tiny percentage of the car's lifespan to drive to the rally. And if a webpage is up on a good OS, it will only amount to a teeny tiny percentage of that computer's time and money.
The people who came up with this ruling are technical illeterates who know nothing about computers or how the 'net works. They have no idea that a webserver does not take up the majority of the computer's time unless its a really slow computer or a really busy website.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I could ell from the article, this looks like they want to charge for receiving e-mail rather than for sending it. That's not the same thing at all.
The reason this pricing is bad is that it makes you pay for things you have no control over. Imagine if you had to pay every time someone rang up your telephone, even if you didn't pick up. That's what this is like. It's like having junk mail sent to your house COD, and being required by law to pick it up and pay.
He didn't mention them by name, but he *did* present a URL that went to their site, and said that he prefers using their keyboards.
People have been saying that vi's alleged speed is nulled out by the need to switch out to command mode first by hitting escape. Well, with all due respect, anyone who says that is using vi the "wrong" way around. You're supposed to stay in command mode most of the time and only switch into insert mode when you have something new to type. A programmer spends most of his editor time altering code he wrote rather than typing in something brand new. Typically when I am editing 'in the zone', my thoughts go something like this: "Stick in a new line there. Type type type - okay, done. But I just made a new variable so I gotta declare it, first lets memorize where I am [mark 'a'], now jump back to the top of this function "[[", lesse -down, down,down,down - There's a good place to put it - insert line - type type type done. okay, go back to where I was [tick 'a']. Now, I wanted to take those next 15 lines and stick 'em in an 'if', so lets block them out first and indent, (using vim: Vjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj>O{[esc]jjjjjjjjjjjjjjo}[esc] ). Now figure out the wording of the 'if' - lesse - uhm, open line above, type...type...(thinking)...type...type. done
What was the point of this rambling? Well, I just wanted to point out that regular vi users don't generally stay in insert mode. They stay in command mode without even thinking about it. It just comes naturally. In the example above, every time I said done I hit escape. This is so hardwired into my head now that I am not even consiously aware of it while typing.
There is a feeling that every switch into insert mode is like opening a file for writing - you need to accompany it with a close to finish it off. This is so ingrained that I cannot walk away from my editor and leave it in insert mode - it feels like leaving the refrigerator door open. There is a real feeling that insert mode is temporary and command mode is the default.
1 - You list several cases where pundits proclaimed a new budding technology wouldn't take off, and instead an old technology would continue to be used.
Then you compare this to:
2 - A situation which is exactly the opposite, where a pundit is claiming an old technology (print magazines) will falter in favor of a new one (online magazines).
Regardless of whether #2 is true or not, it is in fact the opposite of your attempted analogies, and the use of those analogies hurts your point rather than helping it.
I'm really getting tired of all these claims that shooting holes in your detractor's bogus claims amounts to zealotry. When Mindcraft tested one very specific setup (static pages, multiple NICs), and then published from this the extrapolation that "NT is 200% faster than Linux", when they *knew* that the situation they were testing puts the bottlenecks in different places than the more typical situations, where which Linux performs much better, they were being very dishonest. Pointing this out is *not* zealotry. And, in fact if you were paying attention, you'd see that Linus also points this out on occasion too, that the Mindcraft test was not representative of real-world use, yet none-the-less it did point out an area where the kernel could use a lot of work. (Although webserving isn't the kind of application that really needs 4 NICs, the fact that Linux didn't properly utilize the 4 NICs very well is still something to fix for the sake of other types of applications.) Linus's response is very different than what some would advocate, that we should just bend over and take it when someone shoves FUD at everyone for fear of looking like zealots.
So, Mindcraft, to jog your memory, your credibility was in question because of you tested an unrealistic situation that is *known* to have its bottlenecks in different places than the more typical situation, and then you extrapolated the conclusion "NT is faster" from that unrealistic scenario. Your credibility was not in doubt because of the performance achieved in that unrealistic scenario.
Shame on RedHat for helping Mindcraft run another instance of the unrealistic scenario and letting them shift the topic again to the wrong points.
But, thanks to Mindcraft's tests, one admitted weakness of Linux was found (TCP/IP performance does not double when you add a second NIC). Thank you for helping debug the linux kernel, Mindcraft. It's being fixed. Luckily the fix will be in place long before your unrealistic scenario actually ever enters common usage, assuming it ever does.
Marx viewed socialism as an transitional state between Capitalism and Communism. He had this silly notion that if everything went socialist, then it would turn communist naturally afterward. This is absurd because government fat cats are just as unwilling to give up their power and money as corporate fat cats are. Marx was naiive in thinking that communism is even possible in the first place, and the Wrong-wing Republicans are wrong in believing the lie that the USSR was communist. In this day and age, 'communist' has become a synonym for 'totalitarian' and the truth falls by the wayside because of it. We like to say that China is a repressive government and so we call it 'communist' even though China is in bed with many international capitalistic business interests. It scares the living hell out of wrong-wingers to admit that a totalitarian regime can be capitalist-friendly, because it pokes holes in their ideology.
In your last paragraph you advocate giving a high moderation score to posts that evoke flames. Sure, you don't phrase it that way, but that's what it boils down to. (Give a high score to posts that have a lot of negative and posative moderations together.) This is not going to raise the level of debate. It will lower it.
Whenever Slashdot does a story, it does more than most journalists do for citing sources. It actually gives a LINK back to the original source. That's even better than what 'respected' journalists generally do. Not only does that cite the source, it also makes it quick and convienient for you to double-check it with the proper context.
(This is from part II.A.1.19)
So even though the Judge is on our side on this one, that still doesn't mean he's not a little clueless in places still. (Does anyone know how to cut and paste out of a PDF in acroread? Typing that in was annoying.)
When you write a perl script, it should still work after your ISP changes servers. That's a big problem when you aren't in charge of the server. It could change at any second and you need to be ready.
1 - It's 'realtime strategy'. But, luckily, you can pause it and still give commands to the game while time is not passing, thereby making it feel like a turn-based game if you prefer this. (At the harder levels, real-time strategy eventually becomes a contest of dexterous fast mouse usage rather than the fast thinking it bills itself as.)
2 - It is an excellent strategy game because of all the different aspects to keep track of: Stock market. Industries' input and output needs. Choosing trains that comprimise top speed for good steep grade performance, or visa versa. Laying long track to go around grades or straight track with steep grades. Laying expensive electric track that allows fast trains or laying cheaper 'dumb' track that requires self-powered trains. It's good on the complex strategy front, but...
3 - You really need to leave your common sense at the door and think within the rules of the game. If you do what would make sense in the real world, it doesn't work well in the game. For example, each city produces N number of passengers a year that want to go somewhere. Apparently they must really hate their hometown because the same number of people will want to leave regardless of where you actually take them. Since you make a lot more money taking passengers a long distance than a short one, you are better off setting up train routes that send people on the most illogical journeys. (For example, if you have laid track across the US from New York to LA, and you also have track from LA to San Francisco and track from New York to Washington, DC, you are much better off by not offering any passenger service between LA and SanFran or between Washington and New York, but instead to take all those passengers all the way across the country. (So theoretically, if a person wanted to ride your company's trains from Washington to New York, they'd have to go by making a stopover in Los Angles.) There are a few other examples where following common sense will get you in trouble, but this is the most glaring.)
4 - It comes with a neato scenario editor where you can build your own maps and lay out the type of economy and so on. The editor also has a nice event-driven 'scripter' that will let you customize what happens during the scenario (for example, hardcode that a particular territory will open up on a specific date, or that a new industry will appear in a certain location in a certain year, etc.) It's the most flexible editor I've seen for a commercial game like this. It doesn't approach the flexibility of a true scripting language, since you have to use a GUI to edit the bits and pieces of it and you can't just edit the whole thing at once, but it is still pretty good.
5 - The scenarios have vastly different victory conditions, that make you think in different ways. Sometimes the winner is not the one with the best railroad, but the one with the best stock portfolio, for example. (I lost a scenario once even though I was the only railroad left in the end. The other Barons had bought more stock in my company than I did, so the profits I made were going to them more than me.)
6 - Yes, it can get tedious. This game has the common failing where even though you can set stuff up and let it go on its own, the commands to organize this aren't descriptive enough and so you end up manually helping your trains along too much. As another poster said, the game needs a better way to describe how you want to resolve conflicts of track or station use. (In what cases does train 1 wait for train 2 and in what cases does train 2 wait for train 1 - your control of this is too tedious and manual.)
All in all, I really liked the game for about 4 months, and then the small problems got way too tedious and annoying. But all this talk is making me want to get back to it again. I probably won't buy the Loki version because the game wasn't good enough to warrant me buying it twice just so I can use it on Linux too. But if I hadn't already bought the Windows version, I think it would be worth it to get the Loki version. Most of the reality problems RTK had were the sort of problems all similar games seem to have. (Civ was replete with them, but it was still fun anyway. Anyone ever notice how in Civ, if you sent your soldiers out to stand and guard something your citizens got unhappy for having 'their boys' out in danger, but if you send the units off and get them all killed right away, the citizens were all right with that.)
For example: "lemur" for a DNS server. "camel" for an apache webhost that has a lot of mod-perl being used. Well, you get the idea.
I can just see it now:
: Some script kiddie is flood-pinging Noah
: I have a job running on Job
: lucifer has been moved downstairs
: Someone should put the covers back on Adam and Eve, they're getting dirty
: I'll be right back as soon as I finish typing 10 more commands into Moses
: I keep pinging, but I can't seem to find Jesus
PearlyGate would make a good firewall.
If you wanted to play the infinite 'mee too' joke, there was no reason you couldn't put your replies on the same nesting level so it didn't cascade and ruin the entire rest of this thread.
Way to go - I hope you are happy.
Of course, if this rule of thumb were followed, then half of Microsoft's product line would fall under it. (SQL server {I remember using that as a generic term to describe a database that used SQL}, Internet Explorer {Again, "exploring the internet" was already a generic phrase}, etc..)
False positives that unfairly label people as dangerous who aren't is totally unfair. Even ONE false positive is one too many. If this system produces false positives, one of two things will happen: either Administrators will know the test produces false positives and should be ignored (thus rendering the test totally pointless), or they won't know about the false positives, and they will end up harrassing innocent people while convinced they are doing the right thing.
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"This means something important. I'm not sure what..."
Mashed Potatos - They help you keep your dates with aliens by making you remember where you were supposed to meet them.
I'm an atheist or an agnostic, depending upon exactly which of the many contested definitions of those words you are going by. (The difference is not relevant here.)
I dispise religion (by which I mean organizational worship in prepared ceremony, not internalized spiritual faith). I admire the US 'Founding Fathers' because they were willing to publically admit that they put secular concerns over religious ones when it comes to governing. (And I despise the way the 'Religious Right' trys to warp this fact in their version of history.)
I am confused as to how people in this day and age can still believe in Christianity, given all the parts of the Bible that have had to have their status watered down from being pure canon to being simply metaphporical fable. (Noah's Ark, the creation story (which even if you use that streched out 'god day' dodge, still puts things in the wrong order), etc.)
But, even with all that, I still say, "Katz, are you insane?!?" Christianity is *huge* (in membership size). There are vastly different people with vastly different opinions on right and wrong that all call themselves by the name "Christian". Just because some of them came up with this silly game doesn't mean they all agree with what it 'preaches' (assuming, of course, that it was meant to preach anything at all).
Christianity is the majority religion in 'Western Culture'. This means that it will have a *lot* of adherents who don't really adhere very strongly. Whenever something is a full-blown socially accepted religion rather than a smaller 'cult', it tends to attract more 'lay' members than 'true believers'. Witness: the fact that if you look hard enough you can find a Christian denomonation that preaches whatever moral philosphy you like.
The fact that it is so fractured like that means it is totally unfair to treat it like a homogeneous mass. To assume that Christian claimants have to hold the same opinions as each other on all issues is bigotry, plain and simple.
I have had several deeply religious Christain friends whom I would have never guessed were that religious until they metioned it. They didn't run screaming when I mentioned being an atheist either. The screaming lunatics promising to save our souls on TV and radio are the minority. Most Christains are more mild mannered and tolerant than that. (Although this is a recent 20th century phenomenon. In the past, Christians have been very brutal and bigoted toward 'heathens'.)
Before anyone jumps on me, I made a mistake up above. Substitute Ben Franklin for John Adams in the list I gave.
Deism is about as close as you can get to atheism without actually being an athiest. And its about as far away from being religious as you could safely admit to being in that day and age. And you failed to mention just *whom* those deists were. Jefferson, Madison, Adams. Not just a few on the fringe, they were the really important important few.
Why do all these products try to port things the wrong way around? It's the hardcore developers that prefer Unix and the end-users that prefer Windows. Why have developers using the Win32 API to write products for end-users on Linux? That's totally backward. The developers would rather develop on Linux.
But if I spend $1000 on computer equipment, I still have the equipment. I didn't give it away and I didn't lose the equipment after the campaign was over. So how the hell can that be considered a donation?
It also ignores the fact that the computer is not necesserily being used exclusively for this purpose and no other. If I had a home business and used my home PC to run it, but also used it for games, I would only be able to declare a percentage of the PC's cost as a business expense rather than the entire cost. Why is this any different? Is that computer doing nothing but running this one political website?
If I drive my car to a political rally, and my car cost me $18,000, does that mean I have donated $18,000 to the campaign? Of course not. I only used a teeny tiny percentage of the car's lifespan to drive to the rally. And if a webpage is up on a good OS, it will only amount to a teeny tiny percentage of that computer's time and money.
The people who came up with this ruling are technical illeterates who know nothing about computers or how the 'net works. They have no idea that a webserver does not take up the majority of the computer's time unless its a really slow computer or a really busy website.