next time you're talking with your friends about how stupid Americans are because they elected George Bush
I regret the line a bout GWB. While I still hold a great deal of contempt for the man, it had no relevance to this discussion. My apologies.
My "attack", or whatever you want to call it, was not directed at Republicans though. It was directed at the system you have created for yourselves - or rather, the one your adored founding fathers have created for you. Where common sense never enters the field, and everything is dragged to court. The fact that the term "or else I will sue you..." seems hang implicitly at the end of every sentence is what's bothering me, and that's the frustration behind the fantastically offensive "what the fuck is wrong with you?".
I have a handfull of American friends, far fewer than I have European friends. This is unsurprising, of course, as I live in Europe, but if I had to make a guess, I'd say the ratio is roughly 1:100. Now, of all my friends that have ever seen the inside of court room, the Americans are in majority. Even though it'd be reasonable to assume that only one in a hundred legal battles that have affected my friends would have had anything to do with the Americans, they are in a majority. This, is what I think is so fucked up. You guys seem to think that court is a natural way of sorting out any problems. Any problems - even those that apparently could be easilly sorted out by sitting down and having a chat with eachother.
A sibling comment of yours explains that "No one is going to risk their career to be the one to have a 'normal conversation'". That is so fantastically Orwellian I can hardly even begin to comprehend it. You have created a society where people are so perpetually afraid of interacting with eachother, that you avoid having "normal conversations". Can't you see how fucked up that is?
Now, just for the record, I ought to point out, before anybody else does it for me, that the current administration over here does its best to make things about as screwed up here. Trivial things are more often dragged off to court; lawyers and politicians are doing their best to convince the public that they're incapable of sorting out their problems on their own. However, there seems to be orders of magnitudes of differance in how much influence this bizarre mindset has. So far.
Politics over here is more than just Iraq.
Completely unrelated to the other stuff, but that's what we see. We see your foreign politics. I honestly don't really give a damn about Republicans vs. Democrats. As I suspect you don't care much for the differances between Folkpartiet and Vänsterpartiet here. We see the foreign politics of the elected government. And apart from the occasional broken international agreement, and a few instances of kidnapping & torture of non US citizens, it hasn't been much more than Iraq lately.
Who hasn't sat through sexual harrassment training Men in many workplaces are so worried [...] that we ignore women and avoid eye contact.
OK, I'm gonna get modded to hell for this, but... WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU GOD DAMNED AMERICANS? Except from the mouth of that president of yours, I don't think I've ever heard words more stupid. In saner regions, where things aren't judged by their potential value in court, people actually do have polite conversations - even with "minorities", and people are not afraid of being sued to hell just because they give someone a compliment or, by the Gods, invite them to a relation that spans outside of normal working hours. Get your damned act together and start acting like normal people, for Christ's sake!
No. Computing already wascheap. This was not Microsoft's doing.
Of course, you can argue if some of the prices listed there can really be classified as cheap, but OTOH some of the others can. Sure, they're not down to today's prices, but they're certainly heading that way.
In all the places I've worked, it has never been the developers who have been unwilling to produce user friendly interfaces. It's usually the managers that decide that it's more important to squeeze in two half arsed features with poor user interfaces than conducting usability tests and produce one well coded feature with a good interface.
2. Aren't mass transit systems in Europe commonly struck by worker strikes?
No.
[...] if there is a strike or a derailing or something like that, I don't know what you could do.
Call a cab. It happens once every couple of years. How often does your car break down?
I've lived in a (European) town of half a million people for ten years and I've relied solely on the public transport system. Yeah, it happens that it doesn't work. Particularly during the winter because everytime snow falls (every year) everybody is perfectly amazed that there's actually snow around, and the city is completely unprepared for it, but it's usually only a problem for a day or two. So, a couple of times every year I have to wait 30-60 minutes extra. Once or twice during ten years the public transport system was completely shut down due to bad weather. It lasted longer than most private transportation systems (cars).
All in all, after having spoken to my car using friends and colleagues, I figure they spend more time (and significantly more money) on problems with their vehicles than I ever do waiting for busses and trams that won't show up.
But not trying it because it's not open source is pretty stupid IMHO.
I've never understood the unless-you're-editing-the-source-open-source-means -nothing-crowd. The argument just doesn't hold water. The fact that something is open source (and has a somewhat respectable user base - I'm sure we can agree that Firefox qualifies) more or less guarantees that there will be future support for the product. It also guarantees that there will be no mischief in the form of spyware and similar involved.
I live in a country where any person can attend a court proceedings, even without having to identify themselves. While I never take advantage of this privilege, I still find it extremely important that it is there. It's a guarantee that things don't get out of hand there - and if they do, I'll read about it in the papers in no time. While I'm not personally there, making sure that each and every ruling is just, I know that enough people attend to keep the system as a whole under observation. And even if you, personally, aren't editing Firefox' source code, you can know that enough people keep their eyes on it, to keep spyware and mischief out, and preserve the general knowledge base about how the application works, so that it will be supported even in the future.
But I'm sure closed court proceedings with secret rulings works too, eh, so why should I care?
If you're in a country with a low-income, you can profit off of a work that people can already get for free anyway?
Well.. yes. That's one of the things you can do. I guess you wouldn't succeed if you didn't add any value to it though. I believe that residents of developing nations of more cost sensitive than those if high income countries.
If you add value though, you wouldn't be ripping people of, would you? Added value could, for example, be any or a mix of the following: * Printing * Translation * Public reading * Performances based on the work * Anything else anybody can think of that's cool
You wouldn't be "ripping customers off" if you sold translated copies of the book in a country where most people can't speak English.
I had no idea it existed, but this Cory fellow is apparently releasing his books under the Creative Commons Developing Nations License. In essence, it says that you can not only download the work, but you can also make money on it - as long as you live in a developing country, and do not make any money on it in a High-Income country.
Way cool.
Re:The annoyances of Mozilla products (Windows)
on
Firefox 1.05 Released
·
· Score: 1
>>> 3. Why are profile paths so strange? The mozilla creates something like...\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.21a. That's hilarious.
>> Seems pretty reasonable to me!
> Yep, pretty reasonable...to a geek. Not to a non-technical end-user.
Application Data is a hidden folder. Non-technical end-users never look at it. Hell, they shouldn't even know it exists. All your points are moot.
I am European. I am an ex resident of London, and I have friends in London. And yes, I'm making jokes about it. Making jokes about something does not mean you don't take it seriously. Neither does it mean you disrespect anybody. It just means that you, for a moment, want to make someone laugh.
Yes, I made jokes about 9/11. I made jokes about when 60 people died in a fire in the house next to mine, and I made jokes about when a colleague I really liked killed himself in car crash (yes, it was most definitely his own fault).
If you think that means these people are "just a joke" to me, you... I lack the words, even - it's that stupid.
Re:Not Insightful or Interesting
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, the original value for freezing in the Centigrade scale was 100 and boiling was zero. It wasn't changed until the mid 1700's.
While what you're saying is true, I think that the way you put it may give people reason to exaggerate the life span of the original scale. The original system was proposed in 1742, and modified to its current version in 1747. Both are years I'd say qualify for the being part of "the mid 1700's".
I'm sure dissidents in the PRC or other dictatorships, who look forward to a way of publishing things that go against their governments without losing their heads, are happy to hear you're worried about IRC crapflooding...
- IRC crapflooding is a form of DoS attack. - DoS attack renders the forum to which they are applied practically useless (thus its name - Denial of Service). - Practically any internet base publishing format is vulnerable to DoS attacks. - Dissidents in the PRC or other dictatorships won't be able to publish anything while their choice of publishing format has been rendered practically useless.
Tell me again, why should they not be worried about IRC crapflooding?
For the record: I don't really agree with GP, and I think Tor is a very good idea. I just want to point out that your logic is flawed (or non existant!).
To paraphrase our dear Exile: "Somewhere in that long rant of yours, you forgot the part about how this affects the topic of TFA";)
This is primarily about the Pen & Paper RPG, not the computer RPG.
Just because the computer game was unfinished (a fact that nobody argues), some of the concepts from it may still be cool to re-use in the P&P RPG. And there are several cool concepts in SL.
Slashdot Mirror
next time you're talking with your friends about how stupid Americans are because they elected George Bush
I regret the line a bout GWB. While I still hold a great deal of contempt for the man, it had no relevance to this discussion. My apologies.
My "attack", or whatever you want to call it, was not directed at Republicans though. It was directed at the system you have created for yourselves - or rather, the one your adored founding fathers have created for you. Where common sense never enters the field, and everything is dragged to court. The fact that the term "or else I will sue you..." seems hang implicitly at the end of every sentence is what's bothering me, and that's the frustration behind the fantastically offensive "what the fuck is wrong with you?".
I have a handfull of American friends, far fewer than I have European friends. This is unsurprising, of course, as I live in Europe, but if I had to make a guess, I'd say the ratio is roughly 1:100. Now, of all my friends that have ever seen the inside of court room, the Americans are in majority. Even though it'd be reasonable to assume that only one in a hundred legal battles that have affected my friends would have had anything to do with the Americans, they are in a majority.
This, is what I think is so fucked up. You guys seem to think that court is a natural way of sorting out any problems. Any problems - even those that apparently could be easilly sorted out by sitting down and having a chat with eachother.
A sibling comment of yours explains that "No one is going to risk their career to be the one to have a 'normal conversation'". That is so fantastically Orwellian I can hardly even begin to comprehend it. You have created a society where people are so perpetually afraid of interacting with eachother, that you avoid having "normal conversations". Can't you see how fucked up that is?
Now, just for the record, I ought to point out, before anybody else does it for me, that the current administration over here does its best to make things about as screwed up here. Trivial things are more often dragged off to court; lawyers and politicians are doing their best to convince the public that they're incapable of sorting out their problems on their own. However, there seems to be orders of magnitudes of differance in how much influence this bizarre mindset has. So far.
Politics over here is more than just Iraq.
Completely unrelated to the other stuff, but that's what we see. We see your foreign politics. I honestly don't really give a damn about Republicans vs. Democrats. As I suspect you don't care much for the differances between Folkpartiet and Vänsterpartiet here. We see the foreign politics of the elected government. And apart from the occasional broken international agreement, and a few instances of kidnapping & torture of non US citizens, it hasn't been much more than Iraq lately.
*Disclaimer: I like Emacs, really. It's taking up 40% of my screen right now.
:)
I think you misspelled memory
Who hasn't sat through sexual harrassment training
Men in many workplaces are so worried [...] that we ignore women and avoid eye contact.
OK, I'm gonna get modded to hell for this, but... WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU GOD DAMNED AMERICANS?
Except from the mouth of that president of yours, I don't think I've ever heard words more stupid.
In saner regions, where things aren't judged by their potential value in court, people actually do have polite conversations - even with "minorities", and people are not afraid of being sued to hell just because they give someone a compliment or, by the Gods, invite them to a relation that spans outside of normal working hours.
Get your damned act together and start acting like normal people, for Christ's sake!
IMO Microsoft made computing cheap
No. Computing already was cheap.
This was not Microsoft's doing.
Of course, you can argue if some of the prices listed there can really be classified as cheap, but OTOH some of the others can. Sure, they're not down to today's prices, but they're certainly heading that way.
In all the places I've worked, it has never been the developers who have been unwilling to produce user friendly interfaces. It's usually the managers that decide that it's more important to squeeze in two half arsed features with poor user interfaces than conducting usability tests and produce one well coded feature with a good interface.
Bah! Liar! That one's not even six feet long!
2. Aren't mass transit systems in Europe commonly struck by worker strikes?
No.
[...] if there is a strike or a derailing or something like that, I don't know what you could do.
Call a cab. It happens once every couple of years. How often does your car break down?
I've lived in a (European) town of half a million people for ten years and I've relied solely on the public transport system. Yeah, it happens that it doesn't work. Particularly during the winter because everytime snow falls (every year) everybody is perfectly amazed that there's actually snow around, and the city is completely unprepared for it, but it's usually only a problem for a day or two.
So, a couple of times every year I have to wait 30-60 minutes extra. Once or twice during ten years the public transport system was completely shut down due to bad weather. It lasted longer than most private transportation systems (cars).
All in all, after having spoken to my car using friends and colleagues, I figure they spend more time (and significantly more money) on problems with their vehicles than I ever do waiting for busses and trams that won't show up.
1GB = 1024 MB = 1048576 KB! Apparently one more unit of measurement isn't that easy.
Significant digits, son... significant digits.
Also, please refer to other replies about binary (as opposed to SI) prefixes.
But not trying it because it's not open source is pretty stupid IMHO.
s -nothing-crowd. The argument just doesn't hold water. The fact that something is open source (and has a somewhat respectable user base - I'm sure we can agree that Firefox qualifies) more or less guarantees that there will be future support for the product. It also guarantees that there will be no mischief in the form of spyware and similar involved.
I've never understood the unless-you're-editing-the-source-open-source-mean
I live in a country where any person can attend a court proceedings, even without having to identify themselves. While I never take advantage of this privilege, I still find it extremely important that it is there. It's a guarantee that things don't get out of hand there - and if they do, I'll read about it in the papers in no time.
While I'm not personally there, making sure that each and every ruling is just, I know that enough people attend to keep the system as a whole under observation. And even if you, personally, aren't editing Firefox' source code, you can know that enough people keep their eyes on it, to keep spyware and mischief out, and preserve the general knowledge base about how the application works, so that it will be supported even in the future.
But I'm sure closed court proceedings with secret rulings works too, eh, so why should I care?
Well, a gram is a gram, on Earth or on Enceladus, it is a mass unit, not a weight one, hence gravity has *no* effect on the measured quantity.
:)
Good luck finding scales that really measure mass rather than weight though
Send female astronauts.
Yes, I see... the surface temperature is about the same as in a woman's heart, right?
apt-get install mozilla-firefox
For every binary I fetch from the Mozilla site, I fetch two from the Debian archives...
Don't worry, this "real world" instance seems to be pretty persistant
Fuck man, it's not an instance! There's people there I run into over and over again, and I'm telling you, they're not in my team!
So why is racism OK in the fantasy setting and you are totally hyper about it in the fantasy setting when its applied to meatspace races.
That's a pretty lame argument. I think war & violence in videogames is pretty cool, but in meatspace it's not.
The difference is of course that when real people get hurt, be it by war, violence or racism, it's not ok any more.
If you're in a country with a low-income, you can profit off of a work that people can already get for free anyway?
Well.. yes. That's one of the things you can do. I guess you wouldn't succeed if you didn't add any value to it though. I believe that residents of developing nations of more cost sensitive than those if high income countries.
If you add value though, you wouldn't be ripping people of, would you? Added value could, for example, be any or a mix of the following:
* Printing
* Translation
* Public reading
* Performances based on the work
* Anything else anybody can think of that's cool
You wouldn't be "ripping customers off" if you sold translated copies of the book in a country where most people can't speak English.
I had no idea it existed, but this Cory fellow is apparently releasing his books under the Creative Commons Developing Nations License.
In essence, it says that you can not only download the work, but you can also make money on it - as long as you live in a developing country, and do not make any money on it in a High-Income country.
Way cool.
>>> 3. Why are profile paths so strange? The mozilla creates something like ...\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\default.21a. That's hilarious.
>> Seems pretty reasonable to me!
> Yep, pretty reasonable...to a geek. Not to a non-technical end-user.
Application Data is a hidden folder. Non-technical end-users never look at it. Hell, they shouldn't even know it exists.
All your points are moot.
I am European. I am an ex resident of London, and I have friends in London.
And yes, I'm making jokes about it.
Making jokes about something does not mean you don't take it seriously. Neither does it mean you disrespect anybody. It just means that you, for a moment, want to make someone laugh.
Yes, I made jokes about 9/11. I made jokes about when 60 people died in a fire in the house next to mine, and I made jokes about when a colleague I really liked killed himself in car crash (yes, it was most definitely his own fault).
If you think that means these people are "just a joke" to me, you... I lack the words, even - it's that stupid.
Sounds like a Sony press release to me :)
Actually, the original value for freezing in the Centigrade scale was 100 and boiling was zero. It wasn't changed until the mid 1700's.
While what you're saying is true, I think that the way you put it may give people reason to exaggerate the life span of the original scale. The original system was proposed in 1742, and modified to its current version in 1747. Both are years I'd say qualify for the being part of "the mid 1700's".
Reference.
Here here!
Where, where?
I'm sure dissidents in the PRC or other dictatorships, who look forward to a way of publishing things that go against their governments without losing their heads, are happy to hear you're worried about IRC crapflooding...
- IRC crapflooding is a form of DoS attack.
- DoS attack renders the forum to which they are applied practically useless (thus its name - Denial of Service).
- Practically any internet base publishing format is vulnerable to DoS attacks.
- Dissidents in the PRC or other dictatorships won't be able to publish anything while their choice of publishing format has been rendered practically useless.
Tell me again, why should they not be worried about IRC crapflooding?
For the record: I don't really agree with GP, and I think Tor is a very good idea. I just want to point out that your logic is flawed (or non existant!).
hehum
iron maiden
'nuff said
[ SNIP: Long rant about how SL is unfinished ]
;)
To paraphrase our dear Exile: "Somewhere in that long rant of yours, you forgot the part about how this affects the topic of TFA"
This is primarily about the Pen & Paper RPG, not the computer RPG.
Just because the computer game was unfinished (a fact that nobody argues), some of the concepts from it may still be cool to re-use in the P&P RPG. And there are several cool concepts in SL.
1. Say Windows XP/Longhorn is bogus
:)
2. Wait for them to release it as Open Source
3. ???
4. Profit!!!
Point 3 is indeed a mystery. Who'd pay any money for it?