Imagine the screaming hissy fits about conspiracy if Microsoft brokered a similar deal with Opera to default to whatever MS call their seach engine these days (yes I know Google got there first as well).
Apparently the deal fell through. My employer provides blackberries to all and I noticed a couple months ago that the Opera mini search bar changed from google (which it was for 2-ish years at least) to yahoo search.
Starcraft was a good game for a bit for a lot of us, but the long term appeal was mostly towards a certain mentality. e.g. battle.net was overwhelmed by people that wanted less strategy and so always wanted to play on "fastest" on a single popular symmetrical map. Today's game designers seem to try to appeal to multiple personality types so they can get a bigger bang for their buck. Don't forget that the goal of these companies is to make money.:)
You forgot the "germs" part. Having more domesticated animals and living among them exposed Europeans to more diseases and killed off lots of them(e.g. Bubonic plague), leaving the resistant survivors. Europeans arrived in the Americas - bringing their various animals along - exposing the native Americans to the diseases which they have not built up resistance to, resulting in widespread death without even having to use much of their advanced technology to defeat them.
And the central "confrontation" illustrated in the book was with the Incan empire. Mexico didn't exist yet,:)
And yes, the book is not very well written - I didn't finish reading it - which puts it in a very, very small group for me along with Cujo and Sphere.:) I can't fathom how it won a Pulitzer; _The Selfish Gene_ it is not.
Oh, I think they are. The religious leadership didn't invent this stuff or understand it, they just parrot what they learned at a religious school because they think it will make them go to heaven. Natural selection means that the religions which get the formula right to grow quickly will be more common than ones that don't. Possibly there were mutations along the way to - the religion split over some doctrinal difference and then the fork with the more evolutionarily fit beliefs out competed the other.
I think you are mostly correct. But I think religious leaders who made some of the rules in the first place understood their effects. e.g. I suspect they came up with a rule against eating pork, because even though they were unaware of trichinosis, they were capable of noticing people were more likely to die when they ate pork. I don't think they randomly mutated an aversion to pork...;) Also, a vow of celibacy has pretty straightforward repercussions into how much time the clergy can devote to the religion and proselytization.
Earlier I asked a friend from a highschool why he, in his e-mail address, he used a more biblical, American spelling of his name now: Gian -> John. His reply was:
It is a work thing, I live in the south now and they just don't like different. I would spend more time explaining who I was then it's worth.
My last girlfriend has an Arabic name(American mom/Turkish-Bangladeshi dad) and she was all concerned about getting stopped on plane flights or not getting jobs because of her name. I've always wondered if attitudes like that are just exhibiting paranoia/persecution complex or my having grown up white in lower/middle class in Miami with friends of every race, religion, and national origin in combination with being a computer professional - a career where we value skill above anything else - has led me to be overly sheltered and close-minded about the existence of that kind of discrimination still existing in the 21st century because I have never experienced or seen it.
I disagree with both of you... and agree with both of you.:) I enjoyed Tolkien for the mythological war between good and evil and the pure-hearted heroes like Sam. I also very much enjoyed the adult viciousness and verisimilitude of Martin's character's shades of gray, as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_ice_and_fire
Ugly == Evil
Pretty == Good Also, the whole modern fantasy concept of Orcs and Trolls and Undead came from Tolkien, and in Middle Earth, they are pretty much evil. Also in D&D, orcs and trolls and undead were monsters to be fought, not playable character races - aside from half-orc (and you know how that happened). http://mume.org/ was the first game I experienced that let you play as a troll or orc (or evil human: Black Numenoreon). And being a Tolkien based game, those characters were firmly on the side of Sauron in the war. (As a side note, in MUME you permanently died as a troll if you were caught out in the sun and had to deal with pesky elves like me sneaking into the troll warrens to kill them; very challenging characters to play.):) Warcraft's cutesy "stop poking me" Orcs are slightly different, but you can't just change decades of opinions and memories that easily.
How in the hell is this spying? All they are doing is taking a rough estimate of the number of people in the room and adjusting the AC/heat (and I did RTFA). No tracking. No identification of individuals.
Didn't you ever watch Sneakers? You can correlate IR data to individuals quite easily based on another data point such as an individual's arrival or departure to the building (perhaps even passing a security camera at the entrance).:) Or more interesting, you can identify individuals by their patterns of movement. They claimed 91% accuracy at identifying movement patterns such as loitering, walking somewhere, attending a meeting. From IR tracking data you could see certain people in certain work areas, attending meetings with particular groups from other work areas, taking smoke breaks, loitering at water cooler, going(as in walking there) to the bathroom. You can even deduce sex quite easily since unisex bathrooms aren't that popular half the folks head to one or the other.:)
One of the stories also mentions that he was joining the marines after he graduates(boot camp in October). I suppose the point is to give people an idea of what kind of person this is. hrm. A straight A student taking writing classes joining the marines? Private Joker?;)
On the North American Network Operators Group mailing list, I once saw this and added it to my quote file:
> But what *IS* the internet?
It's the largest equivalence class in the reflexive transitive
symmetric closure of the relationship "can be reached by an IP
packet from". --Seth Breidbart
You can make an appointment and meet your representative face to face just like any lobbyist if you feel that your letters aren't getting through. Obviously the staff of your representative is going to schedule big donors for meetings with more alacrity, but that doesn't mean normal people are never heard from at all. Your representative represents *you*, they can only do that job if they know what *you* want. The government is not some faceless monstrosity. It is made of people. (no, that isn't a Soylent Green joke:)
lied to the public for the purpose of invading a peaceful nation that had no ability to do you any harm
I agree with the rest of what you say - and I think the 2003 US invasion was wrong - but calling Iraq a "peaceful nation" so soon after the Iraq-Iran War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the slaughter of southern Shi'a after that and the firing of anti-aircraft missiles at planes patrolling the post-kuwait invasion no-fly zone and the launching of SCUDs into Israel is quite absurd.
I think it is only fair to mention the precursor of MMORPGS; the MUDs of the 80s and 90s:) and in particular MUME was - and still is! - one of the best. I still fondly recall my deadly battles with the crafty orcs, trolls, and black numenoreans or standing watch at guard towers or tracking footprints so I could inform my fellow elves, humans, dwarves, hobbits about the movements of a raiding party.(I played a legendary Elven scout named Vosh several years ago) The non-PvP parts were great, too; the world was so huge since so many people around the earth have contributed to it(Tolkien has been translated into 30+ languages, so many international fans). I loved exploring it and I also recall my fast-beating heart the first time I had to sneak into Moria for a quest and heard the BOOOM, BOOOM, BOOM, of the Orcish wardrums.
MUME is a free multiplayer roleplaying game based upon J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth that has been continuously enhanced since fall '91.
In MUME players can explore and live in this meticulously crafted world during its late Third Age, and possibly join the epic War between the forces of the Dark Lord and the armies of the West. The action takes place before The Hobbit and after the loss of the One Ring by Sauron. The key of Erebor was just found by Gandalf in Dol Guldur and all the epic tales narrated in The Lord of the Rings may take place.
http://mume.org/ Might want to try it out if you want a free game or to see something of the beginning of these types of games. I see that folks have even developed some graphical addons for representing/mapping the rooms of the text-based world.
Tom's hardware has the same feature. In addition to the various benchmarks, they also have a price/performance ratio which is pretty interesting: http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html
Download speed dropping when upload reaches a certain number is a problem inherent to ADSL technology. You didn't experience it on Comcast, because that is a cable connection. Part of the problem is the Asynchronous aspect. The big speed difference between ACKs being sent "up" acknowledging receipt of the packets you've received "down" and the speed of the packets arriving "down".
Also exacerbating the problem are the huge queues that ISPs typically employ to reduce packet loss and improve the perception of download speeds. (This is also the reason your ssh session will seem slow if you are also downloading other content.) One fix for this is to throttle yourself to slightly below the speed of the connection to avoid your packets being hung up in the ISP's queue. The LARTC has a cookbook section for how to do this with your linux router/firewall: http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.cookbook.ultimate-tc. html
On April 4, 2007, the album was made available for streaming on the album's official website, possibly to discourage any possible piracy of downloading the album, which leaked earlier that morning, by allowing free listen sessions. However, the streams could easily be downloaded and high quality MP3 copies of the songs could be extracted.
in the 90s before the crime wave crested and began to recede (and I don't think even now there's a clear consensus on why that happened -- some people, the authors of Freakonomics in particular, argue that it was actually the echo of Roe v. Wade from a generation earlier reducing the number of potential criminals; feel free to posit your own theory).
DeoxyriboNucleic Acid profiling: "DNA profiling was developed in 1984 by British geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys,[107] and first used in forensic science to convict Colin Pitchfork in the 1988 Enderby murders case." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dna#Forensics
Plus we have the highest percent of our population incarcerated in the world; folks can't commit - many - more crimes if they are behind bars.
Why do you need a linux GUI for something like this? I installed debian etch a while ago and noticed encrypted partition was a an option along with normal filesystems, RAID, and LVM. So I tried it out. It was quite simple to setup. I made an encrypted / and an encrypted swap partition. Then when I booted into freshly installed system I had to enter my passphrase for each partition and after that it was just like a normal system. I didn't even notice any I/O performance loss. (Although I still went back to a RAID system after the experiment since I am not paranoid enough to sacrifice any performance or space yet:)
The Player: We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.
Guildenstern: Is that what people want?
The Player: It's what we do.
Wow, it never even occurred to me that someone would think of her show as politically oriented. I've heard about 30-40 interviews of hers over the last couple years on my drive home if it happened to be the right time and they were all with entertainers; most of which she seemed worried that they can't think of answers for themselves so she asks these very leading questions and then rambles on giving them their own answer until they realize she isn't going to stop until they interrupt her with their actual answer.:)
I prefer the Diane Rehm show for coverage of politics and news. (Well, the first hour, at least; the second hour is more like Terry Gross' interviews with entertainers.)
No offense, but you are statistically insignificant. If he made some kind of absolute statement about all managers being motivated this way then your counterexample would have merit. He simple made an interesting observation that 'an important fear' is losing a bit of control over developers, not that it is what motivates every manager - nor did he even imply you are evil. It is only human to want to have power and to brag to others, not evil.
You can't even figure out where your.sig is supposed to go and you are whining about editors? Just filter his stories in your preferences if you can't stand his article selections or frequent mistakes.
Slashdot Mirror
Starcraft was a good game for a bit for a lot of us, but the long term appeal was mostly towards a certain mentality. e.g. battle.net was overwhelmed by people that wanted less strategy and so always wanted to play on "fastest" on a single popular symmetrical map. Today's game designers seem to try to appeal to multiple personality types so they can get a bigger bang for their buck. Don't forget that the goal of these companies is to make money. :)
You forgot the "germs" part. Having more domesticated animals and living among them exposed Europeans to more diseases and killed off lots of them(e.g. Bubonic plague), leaving the resistant survivors. Europeans arrived in the Americas - bringing their various animals along - exposing the native Americans to the diseases which they have not built up resistance to, resulting in widespread death without even having to use much of their advanced technology to defeat them.
:)
:) I can't fathom how it won a Pulitzer; _The Selfish Gene_ it is not.
And the central "confrontation" illustrated in the book was with the Incan empire. Mexico didn't exist yet,
And yes, the book is not very well written - I didn't finish reading it - which puts it in a very, very small group for me along with Cujo and Sphere.
Not In My Atlas?!
I've always wondered if attitudes like that are just exhibiting paranoia/persecution complex or my having grown up white in lower/middle class in Miami with friends of every race, religion, and national origin in combination with being a computer professional - a career where we value skill above anything else - has led me to be overly sheltered and close-minded about the existence of that kind of discrimination still existing in the 21st century because I have never experienced or seen it.
I disagree with both of you... and agree with both of you. :)
I enjoyed Tolkien for the mythological war between good and evil and the pure-hearted heroes like Sam.
I also very much enjoyed the adult viciousness and verisimilitude of Martin's character's shades of gray, as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_ice_and_fire
Ugly == Evil :)
Pretty == Good
Also, the whole modern fantasy concept of Orcs and Trolls and Undead came from Tolkien, and in Middle Earth, they are pretty much evil. Also in D&D, orcs and trolls and undead were monsters to be fought, not playable character races - aside from half-orc (and you know how that happened). http://mume.org/ was the first game I experienced that let you play as a troll or orc (or evil human: Black Numenoreon). And being a Tolkien based game, those characters were firmly on the side of Sauron in the war. (As a side note, in MUME you permanently died as a troll if you were caught out in the sun and had to deal with pesky elves like me sneaking into the troll warrens to kill them; very challenging characters to play.)
Warcraft's cutesy "stop poking me" Orcs are slightly different, but you can't just change decades of opinions and memories that easily.
Or more interesting, you can identify individuals by their patterns of movement. They claimed 91% accuracy at identifying movement patterns such as loitering, walking somewhere, attending a meeting. From IR tracking data you could see certain people in certain work areas, attending meetings with particular groups from other work areas, taking smoke breaks, loitering at water cooler, going(as in walking there) to the bathroom. You can even deduce sex quite easily since unisex bathrooms aren't that popular half the folks head to one or the other.
One of the stories also mentions that he was joining the marines after he graduates(boot camp in October). I suppose the point is to give people an idea of what kind of person this is. ;)
hrm. A straight A student taking writing classes joining the marines? Private Joker?
You can make an appointment and meet your representative face to face just like any lobbyist if you feel that your letters aren't getting through. Obviously the staff of your representative is going to schedule big donors for meetings with more alacrity, but that doesn't mean normal people are never heard from at all. Your representative represents *you*, they can only do that job if they know what *you* want. The government is not some faceless monstrosity. It is made of people. (no, that isn't a Soylent Green joke :)
lied to the public for the purpose of invading a peaceful nation that had no ability to do you any harm
I agree with the rest of what you say - and I think the 2003 US invasion was wrong - but calling Iraq a "peaceful nation" so soon after the Iraq-Iran War and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the slaughter of southern Shi'a after that and the firing of anti-aircraft missiles at planes patrolling the post-kuwait invasion no-fly zone and the launching of SCUDs into Israel is quite absurd.
The non-PvP parts were great, too; the world was so huge since so many people around the earth have contributed to it(Tolkien has been translated into 30+ languages, so many international fans). I loved exploring it and I also recall my fast-beating heart the first time I had to sneak into Moria for a quest and heard the BOOOM, BOOOM, BOOM, of the Orcish wardrums. http://mume.org/
Might want to try it out if you want a free game or to see something of the beginning of these types of games. I see that folks have even developed some graphical addons for representing/mapping the rooms of the text-based world.
Tom's hardware has the same feature. In addition to the various benchmarks, they also have a price/performance ratio which is pretty interesting:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics.html
Download speed dropping when upload reaches a certain number is a problem inherent to ADSL technology. You didn't experience it on Comcast, because that is a cable connection. Part of the problem is the Asynchronous aspect. The big speed difference between ACKs being sent "up" acknowledging receipt of the packets you've received "down" and the speed of the packets arriving "down".
. html
Also exacerbating the problem are the huge queues that ISPs typically employ to reduce packet loss and improve the perception of download speeds. (This is also the reason your ssh session will seem slow if you are also downloading other content.) One fix for this is to throttle yourself to slightly below the speed of the connection to avoid your packets being hung up in the ISP's queue.
The LARTC has a cookbook section for how to do this with your linux router/firewall: http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.cookbook.ultimate-tc
Plus we have the highest percent of our population incarcerated in the world; folks can't commit - many - more crimes if they are behind bars.
Why do you need a linux GUI for something like this? I installed debian etch a while ago and noticed encrypted partition was a an option along with normal filesystems, RAID, and LVM. So I tried it out. It was quite simple to setup. I made an encrypted / and an encrypted swap partition. Then when I booted into freshly installed system I had to enter my passphrase for each partition and after that it was just like a normal system. I didn't even notice any I/O performance loss. (Although I still went back to a RAID system after the experiment since I am not paranoid enough to sacrifice any performance or space yet :)
It is a remote tropical island. :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwajalein_Atoll
Wow, it never even occurred to me that someone would think of her show as politically oriented. I've heard about 30-40 interviews of hers over the last couple years on my drive home if it happened to be the right time and they were all with entertainers; most of which she seemed worried that they can't think of answers for themselves so she asks these very leading questions and then rambles on giving them their own answer until they realize she isn't going to stop until they interrupt her with their actual answer. :)
I prefer the Diane Rehm show for coverage of politics and news. (Well, the first hour, at least; the second hour is more like Terry Gross' interviews with entertainers.)
The grogginess is even worse for we computer geeks that stayed up to watch the spring forward to make sure our systems didn't have any problems. ;)
No offense, but you are statistically insignificant. If he made some kind of absolute statement about all managers being motivated this way then your counterexample would have merit. He simple made an interesting observation that 'an important fear' is losing a bit of control over developers, not that it is what motivates every manager - nor did he even imply you are evil. It is only human to want to have power and to brag to others, not evil.
You can't even figure out where your .sig is supposed to go and you are whining about editors? Just filter his stories in your preferences if you can't stand his article selections or frequent mistakes.