Alyx Vance, for example? She was a brilliant scientist who knew her way with a gun and built huge robots for fun. If she is not a strong female character, I don't know who is.
With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more....'"
"'...Only to find out that you need to solve a puzzle involving a babelfish to continue. 6 straight hours and a full head of hair later, you totally lose it and decide to play some Counter-Strike.'"
To which, if you have even the slightest clue about the nature of the internet, the answer is no. The internet is a fluid superentity, a collection of connections, designed from the get go to withstand global thermonuclear war. It can't be controlled. Even if you did something to the DNS servers, new forms of the internet would sprout out from the people and prosper.
This fight to 'control' the internet is so silly, you could almost make a sitcom out of it.
Any benefits of cannibinoid substances are, of course, going to be of benefit to the pro-legalization camp. As far as I'm concerned, it has been and always will be legal to smoke whatever you want as long as you harm no one while doing so.
Socialists, communists, fascists and neocons take note: It's noone's business if you want to ingest steak, vitamins, peach pits, bird droppings or THC. Everyone was born free. The degree to which you let others control your lives is the degree to which you abandon that freedom.
As far as I can tell from reading at least the US Constitution, smoking hemp, and making paper and canvas out of it has always been and will always be legal. The US has been occupied by either a delusion or a foreign power since at least 1938 as far as I can tell. There never has been any power in the US Constitution to tell people they can't grow Hemp and do whatever they want with it.
How is this possible? The power of the Federal US Govt was supposedly increased circa 1938 under the "welfare clause" of the constitution, however this is simply an auxillary clause and confers no power on the Federal government. The actual and enumerated powers of the US Federal Government are clearly ennumerated and stated as such. Don't believe me? Ask no greater Constitutional authorities than than James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
"If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions." - James Madison, Letter to Edmund Pendleton, January 21, 1792 _Madison_ 1865, I, page 546
"I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constitutents." - James Madison, regarding an appropriations bill for French refugees, 1794
"With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators." - James Madison, Letter to James Robertson, April 20, 1831 _Madison_ 1865, IV, pages 171-172
"Congress has not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but only those specifically enumerated." - Thomas Jefferson
Of course, excercising your freedom might upset the tools of the Central Occupying Powers (COPs), but *hey* sometimes the blood of patriots and tyrants must water the tree of liberty.
Sure, you say there are things they can already find out about you through other ways, but those take time, money, effort, things people don't want to spend to get information about you. Honestly, do you think advertisers have people waiting outside every potential customer's trashcan to dive through their dumpster and find out information about what they buy? No!
It's a pain in the butt. See, that's the difference. You have privacy because people just don't -want- to go through to the effort of finding out these things about you. With RFIDs, you're tagged like cattle, for crissakes. There is no effort. They just scan EVERYTHING and information about EVERYONE who has bought items with RFIDs in them are instantly put into their databases.
And it isn't just advertisers either. Anyone who wants to find out what kind of person you are can go on RFID scanning joyrides. Or if they have access to these databases(which I'm sure advertisers have no qualms about giving away or selling away) they just use those. If your life is decided by time, time is money, and you buy things with your money, people can find out about your entire life by scanning every single item you buy(or having it automatically scanned when you buy them, which is a hell of a lot more likely. Don't buy it when company's say they won't scan your products - they sure as hell will. More money for them.) It's just that simple. RFIDs will be in cash too and then that'll be that.
All that privacy you thought you had goes away. Right down the drain, out the window. Sayonara, it's gone. Say goodbye because you won't ever see it again.
I mean, come on, this is CHINA we're talking about here. This is the same ol' same ol' we've heard coming out of this country for about.. oh.. a millenia?
Damn "National Security" or "public good". This is not patriotism, but the same familiar prounoucement in China century after century. It's the first refuge of a despotic regime, but it should be the swang song of a dying government. It's tolerance by the Chinese people speaks volumes about their culture.
I realize the following quote is profoundly Western, but I believe its a message that Mao would agree with even if it's to his disadvantage:
"What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure." (Thomas Jefferson)
That a Chinese blackout on unapproved news doesn't incite the masses to riot and rebellion means that it's time that they stop manufacturing plastic crap and start manufacturing weapons for themselves. If they don't, they will be doomed by the opression, not just of their own government but to the parasitic transnationals that take advantage of their wage slavery.
How is it that they can't have enough self respect to stop this?
"Political power flows through the barrrel of a gun." -Mao Zedong (and don't they know it!)
"INJURING THROUGH GREED When taxes are too heavy, hunger lays the people low. When those who govern interfere too much, the people become rebellious. When those who govern demand too much of people's lives, death is taken lightly. When the people are starving in the land, life is of little value, and so is more easily sacrificed by them in overthrowing government."
I get sooo sick of hearing about Microsoft's new C++/Java ripoff that it just occurred to me that no one has talked about a clean, vendor free inheritor to the C++ crown.
Imagine if you took everything you knew about C, C++ and Java and fixed it. What would you have? You would have 'D'. A completely underrated language that follows on in the tradition of C/C++ non-vendor specific languages.
If you want to work like a sharecropper, keep expressing your algorithms and developing your projects in Microsoft proprietary language. If you want portability and something better than C++, check out D here.
A Sony VAIO lasting three years in the desert seems reasonable to me. Go get it fixed.
As far as good advice goes, I'd suggest telling him to get the hell out of Iraq and go help someone really in need in New Orleans.
Nobody wants us in Iraq except certain large corporations (UNOCAL, Halliburton) who've spent this coutry's national treasure, many thousands of US soldier's lives and killed nearly 100,000 innocent Iraqis in an illegal war, undeclared by congress (check the Constitution) to make billions for themselves.
Get a clue. Use some of brains between your ears and tell him to get the f out.
I'm a veteran of Vietnam and the first Desert Storm debacle. Believe me, twenty years from now this mistake in the desert and this administration will be an embarassing historical memory, but your brother's life and limb as well as the lives and families of the people of Iraq may be just as dead. Get some perspective.
Amusing anecdote: I was an undergrad at the University of Missouri, Rolla and bored in my Senior AI course. Well, a little bored. We seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time studying Expert Systems, a path that I thought would yield little fruit in achieving true machine intelligence.
After one of the Expert System lectures I asked Professor Arlan DeKock whether Expert Systems didn't seem a little bit too much like more sophisticated if-then-else branching systems, perhaps with a bit of if-then-else-maybe thrown in. He considered that for a little while and asked what I'd rather be working on. I said Natural Language Processing. Perhaps something like Zork.
He said, "Well, isn't that just a slightly more sophisticated version of a compiler?" He had me a little bit, but I was willing to give it a shot. He told me I'd never finish it by the end of the semester. That sounded like a challenge, so I took him up on it.
I did a ton of research on NL parsing and imperative command processing and eventually learned a ton about linguistics, Zork, object-oriented programming and AST parsing in LISP. A fantastic adventure. (Thank you Messrs. Winston and Horn)
As to when I finished, well, believe it or not I actually had a minimal space adventure coded and tested and ready to demo for Dr. DeKock 3 minutes before it was time. Of course, my other studies took a *slight* hit. 8-)
The really crazy thing was that the good Doctor was getting into and playing the adventure. One of the puzzles in the adventure prevented you from leaving a room until you gave a can of oil to a robot. He would block your way to the exit otherwise. Rather than solving the puzzle the inteded way, the professor picked up the robot and put him in his backpack. I didn't take physics into account and my adventure let him do that. He then exited the room and the robot could do nothing. The game / adventure actually let him do that and handled it properly.
I was a little dismayed that the *user* won by doing something I hadn't expected, but I was thrilled that my system was logically processing a world that in a moderately sophisticated way.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is typical of the big media companies now, just like the Mafia"
What's the difference?
Welcome absolutely everyone to saying "Ew ew ew ew ew ew ew."
It worked for the drug war!
Why are we getting an annual report for a gaming company on slashdot?
Can you say advertising? Advertising!
"...intelligent, strong, and powerful..."
Alyx Vance, for example? She was a brilliant scientist who knew her way with a gun and built huge robots for fun. If she is not a strong female character, I don't know who is.
When you could have 3 billion cores?
It doesn't limit their speech, but it -does- limit their freedom to exercise their right to perceive information of their choosing.
With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more....'"
"'...Only to find out that you need to solve a puzzle involving a babelfish to continue. 6 straight hours and a full head of hair later, you totally lose it and decide to play some Counter-Strike.'"
Information: Priceless.
To which, if you have even the slightest clue about the nature of the internet, the answer is no. The internet is a fluid superentity, a collection of connections, designed from the get go to withstand global thermonuclear war. It can't be controlled. Even if you did something to the DNS servers, new forms of the internet would sprout out from the people and prosper.
This fight to 'control' the internet is so silly, you could almost make a sitcom out of it.
Centralized systems of government control the internet.
"after all we're all here for the same reason - to have fun. "
Bow chika bow bow!
Thumb tacks and N'Sync.
Socialists, communists, fascists and neocons take note: It's noone's business if you want to ingest steak, vitamins, peach pits, bird droppings or THC. Everyone was born free. The degree to which you let others control your lives is the degree to which you abandon that freedom.
As far as I can tell from reading at least the US Constitution, smoking hemp, and making paper and canvas out of it has always been and will always be legal. The US has been occupied by either a delusion or a foreign power since at least 1938 as far as I can tell. There never has been any power in the US Constitution to tell people they can't grow Hemp and do whatever they want with it.
How is this possible? The power of the Federal US Govt was supposedly increased circa 1938 under the "welfare clause" of the constitution, however this is simply an auxillary clause and confers no power on the Federal government. The actual and enumerated powers of the US Federal Government are clearly ennumerated and stated as such. Don't believe me? Ask no greater Constitutional authorities than than James Madison and Thomas Jefferson.
Of course, excercising your freedom might upset the tools of the Central Occupying Powers (COPs), but *hey* sometimes the blood of patriots and tyrants must water the tree of liberty.It isn't just a way to help with inventory.
Sure, you say there are things they can already find out about you through other ways, but those take time, money, effort, things people don't want to spend to get information about you. Honestly, do you think advertisers have people waiting outside every potential customer's trashcan to dive through their dumpster and find out information about what they buy? No!
It's a pain in the butt. See, that's the difference. You have privacy because people just don't -want- to go through to the effort of finding out these things about you. With RFIDs, you're tagged like cattle, for crissakes. There is no effort. They just scan EVERYTHING and information about EVERYONE who has bought items with RFIDs in them are instantly put into their databases.
And it isn't just advertisers either. Anyone who wants to find out what kind of person you are can go on RFID scanning joyrides. Or if they have access to these databases(which I'm sure advertisers have no qualms about giving away or selling away) they just use those. If your life is decided by time, time is money, and you buy things with your money, people can find out about your entire life by scanning every single item you buy(or having it automatically scanned when you buy them, which is a hell of a lot more likely. Don't buy it when company's say they won't scan your products - they sure as hell will. More money for them.) It's just that simple. RFIDs will be in cash too and then that'll be that.
All that privacy you thought you had goes away. Right down the drain, out the window. Sayonara, it's gone. Say goodbye because you won't ever see it again.
or all the Chinese are great at math.
But they are!
People are not going to pay a year's salary for a gaming machine.
Nostalgia rules.
I mean, come on, this is CHINA we're talking about here. This is the same ol' same ol' we've heard coming out of this country for about.. oh.. a millenia?
Damn "National Security" or "public good". This is not patriotism, but the same familiar prounoucement in China century after century. It's the first refuge of a despotic regime, but it should be the swang song of a dying government. It's tolerance by the Chinese people speaks volumes about their culture.
I realize the following quote is profoundly Western, but I believe its a message that Mao would agree with even if it's to his disadvantage:
"What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure." (Thomas Jefferson)
That a Chinese blackout on unapproved news doesn't incite the masses to riot and rebellion means that it's time that they stop manufacturing plastic crap and start manufacturing weapons for themselves. If they don't, they will be doomed by the opression, not just of their own government but to the parasitic transnationals that take advantage of their wage slavery.
How is it that they can't have enough self respect to stop this?
"Political power flows through the barrrel of a gun." -Mao Zedong
(and don't they know it!)
"INJURING THROUGH GREED
When taxes are too heavy,
hunger lays the people low.
When those who govern interfere too much,
the people become rebellious.
When those who govern demand too much
of people's lives, death is taken lightly.
When the people are starving in the land,
life is of little value,
and so is more easily sacrificed by them
in overthrowing government."
Lao Tze, approx 500 BCE
"It's okay to hate the RIAA. But demonizing them for kicking elf, stepping on spiders, and scaring babies is just taking it too far."
Is anything, besides bloodshed, too far when they're spewing this kind of crap? http://f00kie.com/pics/illegal-downloads.jpg
Imagine if you took everything you knew about C, C++ and Java and fixed it. What would you have? You would have 'D'. A completely underrated language that follows on in the tradition of C/C++ non-vendor specific languages.
If you want to work like a sharecropper, keep expressing your algorithms and developing your projects in Microsoft proprietary language. If you want portability and something better than C++, check out D here.
Ignore my name for a moment while I say this:
A better plot?!
Whatever you're smoking, can I have some, please?
A Sony VAIO lasting three years in the desert seems reasonable to me. Go get it fixed.
As far as good advice goes, I'd suggest telling him to get the hell out of Iraq and go help someone really in need in New Orleans.
Nobody wants us in Iraq except certain large corporations (UNOCAL, Halliburton) who've spent this coutry's national treasure, many thousands of US soldier's lives and killed nearly 100,000 innocent Iraqis in an illegal war, undeclared by congress (check the Constitution) to make billions for themselves.
Get a clue. Use some of brains between your ears and tell him to get the f out.
I'm a veteran of Vietnam and the first Desert Storm debacle. Believe me, twenty years from now this mistake in the desert and this administration will be an embarassing historical memory, but your brother's life and limb as well as the lives and families of the people of Iraq may be just as dead. Get some perspective.
Good luck,
Cato
Amusing anecdote: I was an undergrad at the University of Missouri, Rolla and bored in my Senior AI course. Well, a little bored. We seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time studying Expert Systems, a path that I thought would yield little fruit in achieving true machine intelligence.
After one of the Expert System lectures I asked Professor Arlan DeKock whether Expert Systems didn't seem a little bit too much like more sophisticated if-then-else branching systems, perhaps with a bit of if-then-else-maybe thrown in. He considered that for a little while and asked what I'd rather be working on. I said Natural Language Processing. Perhaps something like Zork.
He said, "Well, isn't that just a slightly more sophisticated version of a compiler?" He had me a little bit, but I was willing to give it a shot. He told me I'd never finish it by the end of the semester. That sounded like a challenge, so I took him up on it.
I did a ton of research on NL parsing and imperative command processing and eventually learned a ton about linguistics, Zork, object-oriented programming and AST parsing in LISP. A fantastic adventure. (Thank you Messrs. Winston and Horn)
As to when I finished, well, believe it or not I actually had a minimal space adventure coded and tested and ready to demo for Dr. DeKock 3 minutes before it was time. Of course, my other studies took a *slight* hit. 8-)
The really crazy thing was that the good Doctor was getting into and playing the adventure. One of the puzzles in the adventure prevented you from leaving a room until you gave a can of oil to a robot. He would block your way to the exit otherwise. Rather than solving the puzzle the inteded way, the professor picked up the robot and put him in his backpack. I didn't take physics into account and my adventure let him do that. He then exited the room and the robot could do nothing. The game / adventure actually let him do that and handled it properly.
I was a little dismayed that the *user* won by doing something I hadn't expected, but I was thrilled that my system was logically processing a world that in a moderately sophisticated way.
I got an A.
Then I got some sleep.