I believe there are laws of gravity, not just a theory. which has, by the way, been observed for quite a long time. Evolution has been a theory for not very long... yes, ancient peoples had ideas of it, but I don't think you'd see them as particularly similar except from a philosophical standpoint. Gravity has very seldomly been "philosophical." If it has, it ended when the philosopher got pushed off a cliff.
Instead of arguing from the "theory" side though, I'd rather say this - evolution is a theory, but the scientific community holds to it as if it WERE a law. In other words, they have decided that no other explanation should be allowed. Furthermore, textbooks are full of errors, as are college science classes, etc. My sister recently took a college level biology course and when briefly going over the presumed evolution of humans, known hoaxes were mentioned as proof. I guess that's not really a problem though, as long as the truth is taught, who cares what supports it? Or something?
You'd have to check, but I think their older Exile series has been released to some extent as free. Not Avernum, but Exile. Direct link to their older games: http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/productsOld.html
They are fun adventure RPGs, story-driven, and will run an old [as in Pentium I, I think...] hardware. I believe their Exile series can be downloaded for free, and Blades of Exile's code has actually been GPL'd recently. I highly recommend the games. Great fun.
I set up my parents with openSuSE 11.0 on an older desktop of mine. It runs fine. They are using KDE 4.0. I have to fix a few things now and then, I had to show them how to use some stuff, but they are using it now to print (Canon MP210, network share... slightly buggy when accessing via network on XP but it still works), e-mail (gmail), web (firefox), video (can't remember the program), music (amarok, pandora), documents (openoffice.org, pdf reading), etc.
I'll upgrade my laptop to openSuSE 11.1 first and if it works, upgrade their desktop as well. Hopefully it will support the video card (Radeon 9800) drivers a little bit better.
Frankly, the Microsoft/Novell "evil deal" thing is extremely frustrating to me. I'm working with both SuSE and RedHat a lot at work now, and I frankly prefer SuSE to RedHat as far as usability. I've tried Ubuntu and I don't like Gnome, and it was harder to customize Ubuntu (at least for me) than SuSE 10.3/11.0.
No, SuSE did not pass the grandma-install test, but it passed the set-up-for-parents-and-let-them-use test.
IIRC, people have been claiming the mouse will be dead in X amount of years for quite a few years now. And keyboards, too. And non-automatically-driven cars. And I think we're supposed to be living on the moon by now or something...
Predictions and speculation are cool, but humans do not appear to be very good at fulfilling them in general. Talk to an economist about that.
Old software doesn't always run well on newer systems nor on a different cpu architecture. It very much depends on the software. I'm surprised that he didn't bother to check to see if it would run on the new OS before buying his new computer; I'm also surprised he didn't simply put XP on the computer.
Early Windows 7 build shows performance ups and automatically they are viewed as stupid tests, anything can beat Vista, etc.
Oh well. Even if it beat Linux or OS X or every other OS on the planet at speed, the naysayers would still say that it doesn't matter because it's unstable, or too easily compromised, etc.
Basically, if you want to find fault, you will, and can. Unless you find fault with Linux, then you are obviously flamebait and don't know what you are talking about.:)
AT&T has dry-loop DSL? I'm paing +$10ish for a phone line ($5 through AT&T, $5ish for government 'fees'... taxes...), and I was not aware that they would do it without the phone line. I know Verizon did, but didn't know AT&T did.
Doesn't this kinda depend? Just because you found something else while looking for your actual thought doesn't mean you have to IGNORE it. If you came looking for credit card fraud and found, say, illegal hacking activity, should they just ignore it? If you go into a house looking for marijuana and you find people being tortured, do you have to go back to the station, get a warrant for looking into that, and then come back?
Now, if they pull you over for "presumably" running a stop sign and sniff your car, that's different. On the other hand, since illegal immigrants and drugs seem to go together, since drug trafficking and immigrant trafficking is a similar thing (smuggling), I don't actually see a problem is searching for both at the same time.
I'm not saying they should be allowed to just randomly show up and search your house without giving a reason, by the way.
It's a fine line between hampering catching criminals by giving "too many rights" and stepping over the bounds of innocent until proven guilty...
I guess my 'beef' with them not testing *ahem* other Unix platforms is that they are vastly different. I have personal experience with AIX, HPUX, and Solaris, and they are all very different, and all are Unix... but they tested a lot of Windows versions, apparently.
Nobody said he's listening. Just because I set up a forum doesn't mean I'm going to actually listen. Just because you read my post on/. doesn't mean you are listening to me. Chances are, most people that read my posts think they aren't worth listening to, but they still 'read' them.
It's interesting that you mention that. I think most people think the US wasn't founded with a direct democracy simply because it wasn't practically feasible. Now that it is (with technology), people think it'd be a far better system. They should take a Greek political history course or something.
According to Far, Mac OS X runs "a little faster than Vista" with an SSD drive, but Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."
Never runs anything in the background? What in the world does that mean? Am I missing something, here, or is this just the wrong terminology to use? Even at the most basic use level, you can "background" an application in Linux with the ampersand... I'm confused.
Not to mention that they didn't test Linux... or, presumably, any Unix OS. They basically only tested Apple and Microsoft operating systems. Hm. I actually like Windows on occasion, and I find that pretty stupid. (I also like Linux:) )
It did have some interesting things to say though, like the block alignment.
And what would be the determinable time for murder, terrorism, rape, etc? In other words, should society hold no crime serious enough that the punishment is as serious as prison for life? Or should punishment no longer fit the crime.
Yes, I completely agree that there is some reason they are doing. I decline to agree that it's simple brutality and a love of torture. Are there people like that? Yes. I bet a lot of them play games like GTA, heh.
Yes, I know people lose their hearing by shooting guns, etc. And by going to rock concerts. And I know about tinnitus, members of my family have it... and not from rock concerts.
Here's my question to you. How do you propose to protect your country from those who plot against it? How do you discover plots? Hope for some of them to repent and come tell you willingly? Interestingly, a lot of the "torture" that goes on is psychological but completely verbal.. threats of family disowning them, for example, appears to work well with certain religious groups. E.g., threaten them with publically declaring that he converted to Christianity or something like that, which would cause him to be disowned by everyone he knows. Is that inhumane also? I suppose you could contemplate suicide based on that, too.
Um. Their peers? Who are their peers? Other terrorists?
So, in a humane country, the jury consists of fellow criminals? In other words, justice (or, shall we say, the correct response of law-enforcers to lawbreaking) is now defined by those who have broken the law?
If living a life that has no future except being locked in prison for decades is torture, then what should we do to criminals? Let them go? Tell them to be good and hope they are? Give them drugs?
Just because you have been there for years doesn't mean you don't have anything new to say, does it? I think you underestimate human abilities of deception.
I guess we should just not try to extract any information from prisoners. Forget the whole "intelligence" thing. We shouldn't spy, we shouldn't use "torture." If 16 hours of extremely loud rock music (apparently not enough to deafen, though) and 4 hours of complete silence and darkness counts as "torture," people need to visit some other countries more often.
I don't think torture should be used, but I don't think this counts as torture. I guess we should give terrorists a nice cell and good food and hope they feel guilty enough about trying to blow up people that they tell us their secrets, e.g., what is planned for the future?
One other note. It's obvious to me that Morello of RAM isn't particularly upset with the "torture," as he (I presume "humorously" but people don't usually joke about something without meaning some small part of it, at the very least) joked about leveling Guantanamo except for one cell and putting Bush in that cell. Strange thing to say for someone who thinks it is so awfully inhumane. I guess he thinks Bush deserves inhumane treatment, while terrorists who rape, kill, murder, based on religion and political beliefs, deserve humane treatment.
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I believe there are laws of gravity, not just a theory. which has, by the way, been observed for quite a long time. Evolution has been a theory for not very long... yes, ancient peoples had ideas of it, but I don't think you'd see them as particularly similar except from a philosophical standpoint. Gravity has very seldomly been "philosophical." If it has, it ended when the philosopher got pushed off a cliff.
Instead of arguing from the "theory" side though, I'd rather say this - evolution is a theory, but the scientific community holds to it as if it WERE a law. In other words, they have decided that no other explanation should be allowed. Furthermore, textbooks are full of errors, as are college science classes, etc. My sister recently took a college level biology course and when briefly going over the presumed evolution of humans, known hoaxes were mentioned as proof. I guess that's not really a problem though, as long as the truth is taught, who cares what supports it? Or something?
You'd have to check, but I think their older Exile series has been released to some extent as free. Not Avernum, but Exile. Direct link to their older games: http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/productsOld.html
They are fun adventure RPGs, story-driven, and will run an old [as in Pentium I, I think...] hardware. I believe their Exile series can be downloaded for free, and Blades of Exile's code has actually been GPL'd recently. I highly recommend the games. Great fun.
I set up my parents with openSuSE 11.0 on an older desktop of mine. It runs fine. They are using KDE 4.0. I have to fix a few things now and then, I had to show them how to use some stuff, but they are using it now to print (Canon MP210, network share... slightly buggy when accessing via network on XP but it still works), e-mail (gmail), web (firefox), video (can't remember the program), music (amarok, pandora), documents (openoffice.org, pdf reading), etc.
I'll upgrade my laptop to openSuSE 11.1 first and if it works, upgrade their desktop as well. Hopefully it will support the video card (Radeon 9800) drivers a little bit better.
Frankly, the Microsoft/Novell "evil deal" thing is extremely frustrating to me. I'm working with both SuSE and RedHat a lot at work now, and I frankly prefer SuSE to RedHat as far as usability. I've tried Ubuntu and I don't like Gnome, and it was harder to customize Ubuntu (at least for me) than SuSE 10.3/11.0.
No, SuSE did not pass the grandma-install test, but it passed the set-up-for-parents-and-let-them-use test.
There's no denying that touchscreens have their uses.
But saying the mouse will be dead... hm.
I'd hate to use my 10" netbook with a touch screen. My finger would be roughly half the screen size. (ok, so that's slightly exaggerated...)
Sorry, keeping track of this the predictions of silly people in the past for the current year isn't my hobby, hehe...
IIRC, people have been claiming the mouse will be dead in X amount of years for quite a few years now. And keyboards, too. And non-automatically-driven cars. And I think we're supposed to be living on the moon by now or something...
Predictions and speculation are cool, but humans do not appear to be very good at fulfilling them in general. Talk to an economist about that.
But see... I love linux, too. :)
Old software doesn't always run well on newer systems nor on a different cpu architecture. It very much depends on the software. I'm surprised that he didn't bother to check to see if it would run on the new OS before buying his new computer; I'm also surprised he didn't simply put XP on the computer.
Early Windows 7 build shows performance ups and automatically they are viewed as stupid tests, anything can beat Vista, etc.
Oh well. Even if it beat Linux or OS X or every other OS on the planet at speed, the naysayers would still say that it doesn't matter because it's unstable, or too easily compromised, etc.
Basically, if you want to find fault, you will, and can. Unless you find fault with Linux, then you are obviously flamebait and don't know what you are talking about. :)
AT&T has dry-loop DSL? I'm paing +$10ish for a phone line ($5 through AT&T, $5ish for government 'fees' ... taxes ...), and I was not aware that they would do it without the phone line. I know Verizon did, but didn't know AT&T did.
Doesn't this kinda depend? Just because you found something else while looking for your actual thought doesn't mean you have to IGNORE it. If you came looking for credit card fraud and found, say, illegal hacking activity, should they just ignore it? If you go into a house looking for marijuana and you find people being tortured, do you have to go back to the station, get a warrant for looking into that, and then come back?
Now, if they pull you over for "presumably" running a stop sign and sniff your car, that's different. On the other hand, since illegal immigrants and drugs seem to go together, since drug trafficking and immigrant trafficking is a similar thing (smuggling), I don't actually see a problem is searching for both at the same time.
I'm not saying they should be allowed to just randomly show up and search your house without giving a reason, by the way.
It's a fine line between hampering catching criminals by giving "too many rights" and stepping over the bounds of innocent until proven guilty...
Reminds me of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey.
Quite true... because people, which make up the mob, can be (and are) influenced by the silliest things, change on whims, etc.
You're right, it is unix.
I guess my 'beef' with them not testing *ahem* other Unix platforms is that they are vastly different. I have personal experience with AIX, HPUX, and Solaris, and they are all very different, and all are Unix... but they tested a lot of Windows versions, apparently.
Nobody said he's listening. Just because I set up a forum doesn't mean I'm going to actually listen. Just because you read my post on /. doesn't mean you are listening to me. Chances are, most people that read my posts think they aren't worth listening to, but they still 'read' them.
It's interesting that you mention that. I think most people think the US wasn't founded with a direct democracy simply because it wasn't practically feasible. Now that it is (with technology), people think it'd be a far better system. They should take a Greek political history course or something.
To some extent anyways, yeah. I don't know how similar it is to other *nix systems like Solaris, HPUX, and AIX... I haven't used it enough.
It's not only 'bad' it's weirdly bad.
According to Far, Mac OS X runs "a little faster than Vista" with an SSD drive, but Linux is "always faster" than Vista or Mac OS X -- to the tune of 1% to 2% -- because like Windows 2000, "it never runs anything in the background."
Never runs anything in the background? What in the world does that mean? Am I missing something, here, or is this just the wrong terminology to use? Even at the most basic use level, you can "background" an application in Linux with the ampersand ... I'm confused.
Not to mention that they didn't test Linux... or, presumably, any Unix OS. They basically only tested Apple and Microsoft operating systems. Hm. I actually like Windows on occasion, and I find that pretty stupid. (I also like Linux :) )
It did have some interesting things to say though, like the block alignment.
And what would be the determinable time for murder, terrorism, rape, etc? In other words, should society hold no crime serious enough that the punishment is as serious as prison for life? Or should punishment no longer fit the crime.
Yes, I completely agree that there is some reason they are doing. I decline to agree that it's simple brutality and a love of torture. Are there people like that? Yes. I bet a lot of them play games like GTA, heh.
Yes, I know people lose their hearing by shooting guns, etc. And by going to rock concerts. And I know about tinnitus, members of my family have it... and not from rock concerts.
Here's my question to you. How do you propose to protect your country from those who plot against it? How do you discover plots? Hope for some of them to repent and come tell you willingly? Interestingly, a lot of the "torture" that goes on is psychological but completely verbal.. threats of family disowning them, for example, appears to work well with certain religious groups. E.g., threaten them with publically declaring that he converted to Christianity or something like that, which would cause him to be disowned by everyone he knows. Is that inhumane also? I suppose you could contemplate suicide based on that, too.
Um. Their peers? Who are their peers? Other terrorists?
So, in a humane country, the jury consists of fellow criminals? In other words, justice (or, shall we say, the correct response of law-enforcers to lawbreaking) is now defined by those who have broken the law?
If living a life that has no future except being locked in prison for decades is torture, then what should we do to criminals? Let them go? Tell them to be good and hope they are? Give them drugs?
Just because you have been there for years doesn't mean you don't have anything new to say, does it? I think you underestimate human abilities of deception.
I guess we should just not try to extract any information from prisoners. Forget the whole "intelligence" thing. We shouldn't spy, we shouldn't use "torture." If 16 hours of extremely loud rock music (apparently not enough to deafen, though) and 4 hours of complete silence and darkness counts as "torture," people need to visit some other countries more often.
I don't think torture should be used, but I don't think this counts as torture. I guess we should give terrorists a nice cell and good food and hope they feel guilty enough about trying to blow up people that they tell us their secrets, e.g., what is planned for the future?
One other note. It's obvious to me that Morello of RAM isn't particularly upset with the "torture," as he (I presume "humorously" but people don't usually joke about something without meaning some small part of it, at the very least) joked about leveling Guantanamo except for one cell and putting Bush in that cell. Strange thing to say for someone who thinks it is so awfully inhumane. I guess he thinks Bush deserves inhumane treatment, while terrorists who rape, kill, murder, based on religion and political beliefs, deserve humane treatment.
... the rate of increase, one might add, will take a sharp upward curve...
Ironically, they already tax music. It's called "sales tax."