Usenet is a public archive. If you choose to post to it, then you implicitly give others the right to view your work (just like if you put up a billboard, you can't complain if someone photographs it). You can't post to a public archive and then later on try to take back the implicit right for others to view it.
What you *can* complain about, however, is that by selectively deleting parts of what you posted, they are effectively putting words in your mouth. I'm not sure what the legal term for that is - sort of the opposite of plagerism - falsely attributing something to someone that they did not actually say, or deleting an important bit of context so that what they say now has inverted meaning.
Your conversations in standard email are not private (unless you pgp them)
People along the transmission path, and sysadmins with access to the mail spool can snoop on them, yes. But (1) they are not intended to be shown to the whole world, while usenet posts are - by posting to usenet you are giving explicit permission for your post to be public, and (2) they are not visible to every single person in the world with a web browser.
You know how the typical back-and-forth usenet thread with multiple nested levels of inclusions looks in a post, right? Something like this:
Foo <foo@blahblah> said: : Bar <bar@blahblahblah> said: : : Foo <foo@blahblah> said: : : : Bar <bar@blahblahblah> said: : : : : yadda yadda yadda : : : yadda : : : : yadda yadda : : : : yadda yadda : : : yadda : : : : yadda yadda : : : : yadda yadda : : : yadda : : yadda : : : : yadda : : : yadda : : yadda : yadda yadda yadda yadda
Well, with the new google groups format, for some totally inexplicable reason, they keep altering back and forth between fixed-width and proportional fonts, making it difficult to tell which lines are nested to which levels, because some are printed in different width fonts than others.
To me, that sucks a lot more than their cutting off of the deep linking. I don't want someone searching my name to find a presentation layout that effectively puts other people's words in my mouth.
One problem I noticed personally is that the big giant state college campus for our state turned out less impressive undergrad CS students than the satellite smaller schools in the state college system. I think this might come from the fact that the smaller college doesn't offer a post-grad degree, and therefore they have the attitude that "We have to teach all the important stuff *now*, because this bachelor's degree is all we're going to be giving out..." Thus I was getting the same topics thrown at me in "400" level classes in my undergrad cirriculum that I saw didn't show up until the "500" and "600" level classes at the big central state school's cirriculum (i.e. how to write a parser, how disk filesystems work in OS'es, why semaphores have to be handled at the OS level and don't work in userland, that sort of thing). I think the attitude at the bigger college was "We can get around to teaching that stuff only for the students that are going on to grad school. For the rest, they aren't going to care about it."
I think that if you are only going for four years, you'll get a better education at a school that does NOT offer a graduate program. If you are planning on going longer than 4 years, then it's a different story of course.
Wihtout naming names, one of the professors at my small alma mater would give you assignments where he'd let you access his 'starter skeleton code' from a FTP server to kickstart your assginments. (for example: Need to demonstrate that you understood hash tables, and the assignment involves reading a list from disk and indexing it? Then the starter skeleton code would already do the reading from disk part, the output writing part, and all that, but the function call to hash the data would be left for you to implement.) After a while everyone had learned that they could get the assignments done faster by doing them all from scratch and not using the starter skeleton code, because the starter code had bugs in it already before you got your hands on it. In retrospect, those bugs weren't that bad, and most were matters of unstated assumptions rather than bugs. But one thing about it is that it did teach us from an early stage NOT to trust "working" code. A lot of people early on would keep getting stuck trying to debug their programs because they kept hitting that wall of assuming the fault for the bug MUST be in their own code, and therefore never looking at code the professor supplied. He unintentionally taught us a lot about the mindset you need when picking up someone else's project and continuing it (a common situation in the workplace).
You have enough information to mark me as a "foe" (slashdot's equivilent of a killfile). You don't provide me with the same when you post anonymously. Insulting the source is always a last resort when your argument is failing, eh?
My statement was not that they should or should not be licensed, only that today they are not
False. That is not the only thing you said. Not only did you say they currently do not know the risks, but also that they should not be aware of the risks. You even capitalized the "nor should they" for emphasis. That is what prompted my comment. You said you don't think they SHOULD be aware of the risks, not just that they currently are unaware of the risks.
"What makes more sense" is entirely subjective. A computer interface should never respond subjectively to anything, because the advantage computers have over a person *is* their total objectivity. Destroy that and what you are left with is just as subjective as a human being, and if that's what you need, then you shouldn't be using a computer to do the task.
You need to get it thru your head ( and others like you ) that the common man DOES NOT understand the risks NOR SHOULD THEY. They are USERS not TECHIES...
Do you favor letting people legally drive without taking a driver's test to get a license first? If not, then your position is inconsistent.
Since you're too clueless to see the problem, let's spell it out for you: Do you want the situation where it is okay for sites to spew wasted bandwith at each other such that the one with the most bandwith wins the war? The end result is that whomever spends more money on bandwith wins. Consider the implications when it's Slashdot versus Microsoft, or Slashdot versus SCO, instead of Slashdot versus some random little spammer.
Wouldn't it require a really tight, tight resolution, though, to notice the relevant shift? The technique might work on something close-up that you photograph, but the farther items would probably be tough to resolve. (The shift you get from this two-flashbulbs technique is further apart.)
The problem I have is how people often use the "language changes, get used to it" argument to support bigoted redefinitions of terms. There is a difference between language drifting naturally versus language drifting because people with an agenda are pushing it along.
You are confusing "objective" with "provable". They are not the same thing. It is possible for something to be objective but unprovable, which is pretty much what agnositicsm says about god existing. To say that god's existence is subjective is closer to Unitarianism than agnosticism, (and this attitude is what I see as one of the logical flaws with Unitarianism.)
The problem with detecting sarcasm is that it requires that you can tell if the speaker is smart. If you don't know if the speaker is smart, then you can't tell if the silly thing he just said is a joke or just one of those silly things that stupid people actually sincerely believe. That is especially true when it comes to sarcasm about religion. There is no discernable difference between sarcasm and a Jack Chick tract, for example, until after you learn more about the person authoring the material.
And you *did* say it was possible for god to both exist and not exist (which isn't the agnostic position, by the way), so it could have just been that you were an idiot. I couldn't tell the difference from here.
And not once did I run into the problem of warriors being overbalanced compared to any other class.
The game you describe as rolemaster, and the game I played called rolemaster, sound like two completely different games that happen to share the same name for some inexplicable reason, then.
That's because you're still thinking in AD&D character class terms.
You are lying by claiming to know what I am thinking. Stop it.
This problem has nothing to do with classes.
The problem would persist if there were no classes in Rolemaster. If someone who wants to be good at X only has to buy one skill, while someone who wants to be good ay Y has to buy 10 because the skills are not the same narrowness as each other, then there's a problem. Either make everything rather vague and widespread, or make everything narrow, but to do half the skills one way and half the other way isn't fair.
The bookkeeping on critical hits is absurd. The healing spells are absurd (have to learn different types for different things you heal - oh, sorry, I don't have the bone healing spell), and the system is not balanced between fighters and other types. (Case in point - to be an effective acrobat, I needed 10 different skills. To be an effective fighter, I would need 1 (pour all points into the same weapon skill, split it for attack and defence). These skills cost the same, hence the unbalance.)
That, and (and D20 has this same problem) I don't like the unneccesary extra tier to the main attributes: "Okay, here's your main attribute score, which you will never actually use, and there written down next to it is the bonus modifier you get when you look up that attribute score on a table, which is the number you will actually use. Why we didn't just make that number be the attribute, I don't know."
I think back to the beginnings of the industry and wonder why the TSR competitors didn't do better. They're like the Microsoft of RPG.
You just answered your own question. They got popular the same way - network effect favors people using the same thing as their friends and aquiantences, and that is a much stronger factor than any quality of the product itself. An OS isn't that useful if other people aren't using it, and a roleplaying game is even less useful if other people aren't using it.
I do find it funny that you talk about people complaining that D&D is too difficult to learn and then turn around and say you like ROLEMASTER, of all things. The only advantage Rolemaster has over (old school) D&D in terms of complexity is that, although it is very complex it is at least consistent. D&D was less complex, but also less consistent (which makes it *feel* more complex than it is - each rule is a special case to memorize.) (I have to qualify here that I'm talking about old D&D (1st and 2nd ed). 3rd edition is considerably more consistent than the old stuff was, to the point where it feels like there is an actual system of sorts buried inside, rather than a random pile of rules made up one at at time and glued together.)
But me, I prefer die-pool systems because they can properly model the asymptotic nature of probability in a way that flat probability systems cannot. (Chances getting close to, but never quite reaching zero, and getting close to, but never quite reaching 1.)
But, of course, that all takes a backseat to having a GM that does a good job. A good GM can turn any game system into something fun, or something bad. What's not fun is when a GM refuses to recognize the holes in a system and acts as if the rules are canon.)
Probably, but perhaps a better idea is to just start with it minimized to an icon to begin with. Another method would be to take the splashscreen's frame, and resize it and turn it INTO the actual program's frame when it's ready rather than opening up a second frame for the app, and then disposing the splashscreen's frame - then the programs' main window appears wherever the splashscreen appeared.
This is an inherent disagreement between me and interface designers. I say that the moment an interface tries to second-guess what I meant such that it tries to do something "safer" than what I asked it to do, it is broken. At most, all I will tolerate in those situations is a confirmation dialog. Telling me I'm not allowed to do it is totally unacceptable.
I don't necessarily agree these are bad. The alternatives are removing them (bad because menu structure changes), not disabling them (makes no sense - they are disabled because they aren't meaningful right now), or not dimming them (bad because you don't signal the action is unavailable).
The complaint wasn't "I wish these weren't dimmed." The complaint was "I wish it wasn't mysterious as to WHY." That's about the only complaint he had that has any sort of validty in his entire list - and the solution is a hovering tooltip with an explanation, I'd say.
Slashdot Mirror
Usenet is a public archive. If you choose to post to it, then you implicitly give others the right to view your work (just like if you put up a billboard, you can't complain if someone photographs it). You can't post to a public archive and then later on try to take back the implicit right for others to view it.
What you *can* complain about, however, is that by selectively deleting parts of what you posted, they are effectively putting words in your mouth. I'm not sure what the legal term for that is - sort of the opposite of plagerism - falsely attributing something to someone that they did not actually say, or deleting an important bit of context so that what they say now has inverted meaning.
Your conversations in standard email are not private (unless you pgp them)
People along the transmission path, and sysadmins with access to the mail spool can snoop on them, yes. But (1) they are not intended to be shown to the whole world, while usenet posts are - by posting to usenet you are giving explicit permission for your post to be public, and (2) they are not visible to every single person in the world with a web browser.
To me, that sucks a lot more than their cutting off of the deep linking. I don't want someone searching my name to find a presentation layout that effectively puts other people's words in my mouth.
One problem I noticed personally is that the big giant state college campus for our state turned out less impressive undergrad CS students than the satellite smaller schools in the state college system. I think this might come from the fact that the smaller college doesn't offer a post-grad degree, and therefore they have the attitude that "We have to teach all the important stuff *now*, because this bachelor's degree is all we're going to be giving out..." Thus I was getting the same topics thrown at me in "400" level classes in my undergrad cirriculum that I saw didn't show up until the "500" and "600" level classes at the big central state school's cirriculum (i.e. how to write a parser, how disk filesystems work in OS'es, why semaphores have to be handled at the OS level and don't work in userland, that sort of thing). I think the attitude at the bigger college was "We can get around to teaching that stuff only for the students that are going on to grad school. For the rest, they aren't going to care about it."
I think that if you are only going for four years, you'll get a better education at a school that does NOT offer a graduate program. If you are planning on going longer than 4 years, then it's a different story of course.
Wihtout naming names, one of the professors at my small alma mater would give you assignments where he'd let you access his 'starter skeleton code' from a FTP server to kickstart your assginments. (for example: Need to demonstrate that you understood hash tables, and the assignment involves reading a list from disk and indexing it? Then the starter skeleton code would already do the reading from disk part, the output writing part, and all that, but the function call to hash the data would be left for you to implement.) After a while everyone had learned that they could get the assignments done faster by doing them all from scratch and not using the starter skeleton code, because the starter code had bugs in it already before you got your hands on it. In retrospect, those bugs weren't that bad, and most were matters of unstated assumptions rather than bugs. But one thing about it is that it did teach us from an early stage NOT to trust "working" code. A lot of people early on would keep getting stuck trying to debug their programs because they kept hitting that wall of assuming the fault for the bug MUST be in their own code, and therefore never looking at code the professor supplied. He unintentionally taught us a lot about the mindset you need when picking up someone else's project and continuing it (a common situation in the workplace).
You have enough information to mark me as a "foe" (slashdot's equivilent of a killfile). You don't provide me with the same when you post anonymously.
Insulting the source is always a last resort when your argument is failing, eh?
Hypocrite.
My statement was not that they should or should not be licensed, only that today they are not
False. That is not the only thing you said. Not only did you say they currently do not know the risks, but also that they should not be aware of the risks. You even capitalized the "nor should they" for emphasis. That is what prompted my comment. You said you don't think they SHOULD be aware of the risks, not just that they currently are unaware of the risks.
People who insult from anonymity have no confidence in their words.
Put up or shut up.
One shot down spy mission out of hundreds of successful ones is not a good ratio for Russia.
"What makes more sense" is entirely subjective. A computer interface should never respond subjectively to anything, because the advantage computers have over a person *is* their total objectivity. Destroy that and what you are left with is just as subjective as a human being, and if that's what you need, then you shouldn't be using a computer to do the task.
I inivte you to re-read the part of my post where I said,
Since software has bugs, and sometimes gets stuck.
And then shut the hell up.
When you buy a car are you informed of the dangers of speeding, wreckless driving, etc?
Why is wreckless driving a danger? It should be everyone's goal when behind the wheel.
You need to get it thru your head ( and others like you ) that the common man DOES NOT understand the risks NOR SHOULD THEY. They are USERS not TECHIES...
Do you favor letting people legally drive without taking a driver's test to get a license first? If not, then your position is inconsistent.
Since you're too clueless to see the problem, let's spell it out for you: Do you want the situation where it is okay for sites to spew wasted bandwith at each other such that the one with the most bandwith wins the war? The end result is that whomever spends more money on bandwith wins. Consider the implications when it's Slashdot versus Microsoft, or Slashdot versus SCO, instead of Slashdot versus some random little spammer.
Wouldn't it require a really tight, tight resolution, though, to notice the relevant shift? The technique might work on something close-up that you photograph, but the farther items would probably be tough to resolve. (The shift you get from this two-flashbulbs technique is further apart.)
The problem I have is how people often use the "language changes, get used to it" argument to support bigoted redefinitions of terms. There is a difference between language drifting naturally versus language drifting because people with an agenda are pushing it along.
You are confusing "objective" with "provable". They are not the same thing. It is possible for something to be objective but unprovable, which is pretty much what agnositicsm says about god existing. To say that god's existence is subjective is closer to Unitarianism than agnosticism, (and this attitude is what I see as one of the logical flaws with Unitarianism.)
The problem with detecting sarcasm is that it requires that you can tell if the speaker is smart. If you don't know if the speaker is smart, then you can't tell if the silly thing he just said is a joke or just one of those silly things that stupid people actually sincerely believe. That is especially true when it comes to sarcasm about religion. There is no discernable difference between sarcasm and a Jack Chick tract, for example, until after you learn more about the person authoring the material.
And you *did* say it was possible for god to both exist and not exist (which isn't the agnostic position, by the way), so it could have just been that you were an idiot. I couldn't tell the difference from here.
And not once did I run into the problem of warriors being overbalanced compared to any other class.
The game you describe as rolemaster, and the game I played called rolemaster, sound like two completely different games that happen to share the same name for some inexplicable reason, then.
That's because you're still thinking in AD&D character class terms.
You are lying by claiming to know what I am thinking. Stop it.
This problem has nothing to do with classes.
The problem would persist if there were no classes in Rolemaster. If someone who wants to be good at X only has to buy one skill, while someone who wants to be good ay Y has to buy 10 because the skills are not the same narrowness as each other, then there's a problem. Either make everything rather vague and widespread, or make everything narrow, but to do half the skills one way and half the other way isn't fair.
The bookkeeping on critical hits is absurd. The healing spells are absurd (have to learn different types for different things you heal - oh, sorry, I don't have the bone healing spell), and the system is not balanced between fighters and other types. (Case in point - to be an effective acrobat, I needed 10 different skills. To be an effective fighter, I would need 1 (pour all points into the same weapon skill, split it for attack and defence). These skills cost the same, hence the unbalance.)
That, and (and D20 has this same problem) I don't like the unneccesary extra tier to the main attributes: "Okay, here's your main attribute score, which you will never actually use, and there written down next to it is the bonus modifier you get when you look up that attribute score on a table, which is the number you will actually use. Why we didn't just make that number be the attribute, I don't know."
I think back to the beginnings of the industry and wonder why the TSR competitors didn't do better. They're like the Microsoft of RPG.
You just answered your own question. They got popular the same way - network effect favors people using the same thing as their friends and aquiantences, and that is a much stronger factor than any quality of the product itself. An OS isn't that useful if other people aren't using it, and a roleplaying game is even less useful if other people aren't using it.
I do find it funny that you talk about people complaining that D&D is too difficult to learn and then turn around and say you like ROLEMASTER, of all things. The only advantage Rolemaster has over (old school) D&D in terms of complexity is that, although it is very complex it is at least consistent. D&D was less complex, but also less consistent (which makes it *feel* more complex than it is - each rule is a special case to memorize.) (I have to qualify here that I'm talking about old D&D (1st and 2nd ed). 3rd edition is considerably more consistent than the old stuff was, to the point where it feels like there is an actual system of sorts buried inside, rather than a random pile of rules made up one at at time and glued together.)
But me, I prefer die-pool systems because they can properly model the asymptotic nature of probability in a way that flat probability systems cannot. (Chances getting close to, but never quite reaching zero, and getting close to, but never quite reaching 1.)
But, of course, that all takes a backseat to having a GM that does a good job. A good GM can turn any game system into something fun, or something bad. What's not fun is when a GM refuses to recognize the holes in a system and acts as if the rules are canon.)
Does X support similar functionality?
Probably, but perhaps a better idea is to just start with it minimized to an icon to begin with. Another method would be to take the splashscreen's frame, and resize it and turn it INTO the actual program's frame when it's ready rather than opening up a second frame for the app, and then disposing the splashscreen's frame - then the programs' main window appears wherever the splashscreen appeared.
This is an inherent disagreement between me and interface designers. I say that the moment an interface tries to second-guess what I meant such that it tries to do something "safer" than what I asked it to do, it is broken. At most, all I will tolerate in those situations is a confirmation dialog. Telling me I'm not allowed to do it is totally unacceptable.
Mysteriously dimmed menu items
I don't necessarily agree these are bad. The alternatives are removing them (bad because menu structure changes), not disabling them (makes no sense - they are disabled because they aren't meaningful right now), or not dimming them (bad because you don't signal the action is unavailable).
The complaint wasn't "I wish these weren't dimmed." The complaint was "I wish it wasn't mysterious as to WHY." That's about the only complaint he had that has any sort of validty in his entire list - and the solution is a hovering tooltip with an explanation, I'd say.