Yes, because God forbid things should be pleasing or enjoyable.
Know what I enjoy when I'm using a piece of productivity software like OpenOffice? Getting my work done so I can go do something else.
The computer is a tool. Especially when using something like office productivity software. I don't sit around pondering the color scheme of my screw drivers, or whether or not my wrenches "go with" my hammer. Likewise, I don't spend time contemplating the visual attractiveness of OpenOffice. It lets me get my work done, that's good enough as far as I'm concerned.
You make it sound like you get any say in it at all.
Millions of people enjoy watching sports on TV and voluntarily shell out big bucks buying tickets to sporting events. Because people love spending money on it, it only makes sense that people involved with professional sports would make a lot of money.
Now look at education. People value it so little that many people eschew the very idea of paying for it themselves, and want other people (aka the government) to buy it for them. Big surprise that people doing jobs nobody wants to pay for won't make very much money. People don't mind paying for "higher education", and you rarely hear college professors bitching about their pay. The funny thing is, if you wanted to pay a teacher more, you probably couldn't - it's all controlled by the government and teachers unions.
Don't take it personally, but your opinion doesn't matter. The majority of people just don't think education is very valuable.
The idea of the hardcore community finding the more optimized build with such a large array of options is irrelevant. With so many options, new players would become overwhelmed and have no idea how to make an efficient or useful character, and the chance of an inexperienced player creating a poor build increases dramatically.
You're talking about people buying the third game in a best selling series that's been around for a decade. At this point Blizzard doesn't care about the casual, "inexperienced" gamer; they already know they can sell a boatload of games to the hardcore players. Their target audience is the person who doesn't mind playing for a while.
Also, I suspect they've learned from WoW and will charge for network play, so there's even more reason to draw out the time it takes to learn the game.
Oh, and failure to immediately create a decent build? That makes the game better. I could install Diablo 2 right now and have a fairly powerful, high level character in a couple of days because I know the basic formula characters. All the possibilities have been explored, and there's little point in searching for any new builds. Actually having to find a decent build, or being able to come up with a new combination that surprises people would be a lot more fun.
Ultimately it's up to Blizzard, but I think it'd make the game better.
The OP was complaining that the skills are carved up by classes at all. A necromancer can't put points in a sorceress skill, for example. So instead of 7 character "classes", each with 3 skill trees, just give every character 21 skill trees and let the player do as they please.
The multitude of options might be a little overwhelming at first, but with as many players as a Blizzard game will have, I think a few stable, decent builds would emerge fairly quickly, while still giving enough variety for people to come up with viable alternative builds. One thing that disappointed me in D2 was the lack of viable character builds, especially for PvP. If you deviated very much from one of the dozen cookie cutter builds, you could almost count on having to leech in experience runs and getting owned in duels.
The later patches of D2 actually explored it a bit, with runeword items that provided class specific skills, but could be used by any class. The items giving barbarian warcries and paladin auras were particularly popular, but there were a few items that would give necromancer and sorceress skills.
What's your point? Walmart was looking out for their bottom line? You don't really think Walmart is in business because they get warm fuzzy feelings selling cheap shit to cheap people, do you? A lawsuit would have been an expensive waste of time for everybody involved, and they almost certainly would have lost. It was clearly in Walmart's best interest to avoid it.
But that's the problem. How do you mitigate the risk of "No chance in hell of ever getting the money back"? Which is basically what the government wanted them to do in many cases. The answer is, you package it up, sell it off to somebody else, and let them worry about it.
I'm not making excuses for the banks, though. As far as I can see, the government, the banks, and the people taking out the crappy loans were all equally responsible. It's a shame they're the ones who will be least hurt by the chaos they've caused.
I'm saying that most likely no one saw the issue at all
Are you sure? I don't like Bush, but you're just wrong. His administration brought up the issue numerous times, and it was killed numerous times because "fixing" the problem would cut off loans to the "economically disadvantaged" (read "people who can't pay back their loans").
From the NY Times article:
"These two entities -- Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- are not facing any kind of financial crisis," said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."
Nope. Nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Just as long as they keep on pumping out loans for "affordable housing."
Representative Melvin L. Watt, Democrat of North Carolina, agreed.
"I don't see much other than a shell game going on here, moving something from one agency to another and in the process weakening the bargaining power of poorer families and their ability to get affordable housing," Mr. Watt said.
God forbid they stop giving out loans to people who aren't qualified. That would just be terrible.
First, as other people have mentioned, Perl use is declining. I love Perl, but it's just not as popular as it used to be.
Second, Perl has always been more popular on, and worked better with, UNIX. That's even more true now that fewer people are using it. Ask 100 Perl developers whether they prefer UNIX or Windows, and 99 of them will say UNIX. So it's not too surprising there's no Windows only rewrite of it.
As for Perl/Windows shops, do they even exist? Seems to me that if there were enough pressure to heavily use Perl, there'd be enough pressure to use something other than Windows.
If they click on it it says, the connection is encrypted and can't be eavesdropped but there is no gaurantee you are talking to who you think you are.
After thinking it over a little more, wouldn't eavesdropping in that situation be a pretty straightforward man-in-the-middle attack?
Good point! Maybe firefox 3 should pop up a huge error screen every time you try to connect to a site with plain http. It could say something like:
The server you are connecting to is insecure. Maybe there is a configuration error on the server. Or maybe someone is trying to impersonate it. Oh, and by the way, not only that, but any communication with them maybe trivially intercepted by any 3rd party...
Are you sure you want to communicate with them?
Then it could have friendly buttons like:
"Hell no get me out of here." or "Ok, I don't mind getting pnwed!"
The problem (I think) with treating self-signed certificates as 'unsigned with the added bonus that communications can't be eavesdropped' is that it would rely on site owners not asking for sensitive information while using a self-signed cert.
Most users are too dumb to check for SSL, good luck getting them to discern insecure, 'insecure but can't be eavesdropped', and secure. Hell, most users would be shocked to find out you can eavesdrop on their traffic in the first place.
It's still silly, but "Pray for this" isn't quite as dangerous as "God told me we should do this".
It's not that I have a problem with religion, it's just that I don't want an Iranian-style theocracy in the US (with Christianity instead of Islam). And I believe that Sarah Palin would work toward that end.
Well, she's an ex-jockette and ex-sportcaster (two classes of people who I believe add very little value to our society) who has no scruples and has shown herself willing to stab anyone in the back to get where she wants to be.
That's a pretty silly reason. It obviously provides enough "value to our society" that people paid her to do it, which is all that really matters. Apparently that's more than can be said about "community organizers". And do you have any references for the "no scruples" and "stab anyone in the back" stuff?
Honestly, considering that Obama, McCain and Biden just demonstrated that they've sold out to Wallstreet, I'm guessing scruples aren't going to be a deciding factor in the election.
Gosh, you're right. I must be full of hate.
What? I never said anybody was full of hate. I just asked a pretty simple question. I guess that explains it, though. You've been reading about Palin.
Also, Palin is a one-line wonder and can only screw things up.
This is the second post I've seen that's strongly anti-Palin, so I have to ask: what is it you dislike about Palin? It can't just be that she's a "one-line wonder", otherwise Obama's "hope and change" mantra would be driving you crazy by now. What am I missing?
I'm not voting for any of the mainstream candidates, but Palin seems to be the only decent one in the entire group, IMO.
Eh, what rights someone has is certainly a matter of opinion or argument.
Yeah, the right to buy a TV that blocks certain programming is right up there with free speech and freedom of the press. I can't believe they forgot that one when writing the constitution.
Yeah, the cost of a V-Chip was something like 5 cents per unit. Hardly worth caring about.
Well, then there's really no good excuse for having the government pay for it, is there?
I'm not asking you to do anything except to stay out of my way and stop trying to take tools away from me that make my life better.
No, you're asking me to help you pay for it. Nobody is stopping you from buying a TV that blocks programming, but I shouldn't have to help you pay for it. IMO a Rolls Royce would make my life better, but if I want one I'm going to have to pay for it myself, without forcing you to help me.
The government exists to protect your rights, not make your life better.
If you don't like it, may I suggest you move to a country that has no children.
Wow, nice attitude. "If you don't want to give me free money to raise my kids, you can GTFO." Maybe it's a good thing you're having other people raise your kids.
As for tax-payer money and personal responsibility, there are many examples I could use. I don't like speed limits. I'm perfectly capable of safely driving at a speed that exceeds the limits that government has set. Yet, because some people can't handle it, I have to drive at posted speeds! Also, by law, my car has to have child seat restraints placed in them. I drove for years before I had children. Why did I have to pay for such restraints when I didn't have kids? For that matter, no one ever rides in my back seats. Why must I have to pay for seatbelts to be installed back there? I never watch CBS. Why should I have to pay for the government to set aside a broadcast range for CBS to use? Why can't I use that broadcast range myself? I don't care about global warming or smog. Why should I have to spend money on fuel blends that reduce pollution? I think the homeless should get a job. Why does my tax payer money have to go towards homeless shelters?
I agree, the government shouldn't be involved in any of those things. If you think I'm being facetious, check my posting history.
There are many more examples of our tax dollars going to things that not everyone benefits from. Deal with it. Don't like it? Move.
You're the one who's life sucks bad enough that you want to take other people's money to help make it better. Maybe *you* should move?
Must be nice to not have to work and be able to spend 24 hrs a day with your kids, watching their every move. Unfortunately, many of us don't have that much free time. We work, sometimes two jobs to help make ends meet, and have to rely on baby-sitters and family to help out with our parental duties. This is a tool to help us.
Sucks to be you. Maybe you should have thought about how difficult and time consuming parenting is before you had kids. But hey, why bother when the rest of us can do it for you, right?
Funny how you're too busy to be a responsible parent, yet you have enough time to whine about how hard it is on Slashdot.
This is a tool that allows PARENTS to sensor TV.
Because "Turn that shit off" just doesn't waste enough tax money.
There must be some information missing somewhere, because neither version makes very much sense. The developers were laid off? How is that even possible on an open source project?
The confusing headline doesn't help, either. "How to kill an Open Source Project With New Funding". At first I thought it was going to link to an article showing an example of how increased funding had killed a project. Then I saw it was an "Ask Slashdot", and thought the poster was asking how one might go about killing a project with funding, which just made me confused as to why they'd want to do that. So I had to read the summary. Which just confused me further by being about a project I've never heard of, having nothing to do with the title, and asking questions with what seems to me to be fairly straightforward answers. Fork the code and get over it.
So, with that chip off your shoulder, I don't agree, and I still think that greed is a principal factor in the current state of western decline.
Being greedy motivates people to be productive, and satisfying greed makes people happy. I guess I just don't see the downside.
Yeah, there are people who will do stupid things like hurt people because of greed, but saying the whole concept is bad because of a few idiots is like saying pens and pencils are bad because a few idiots use them to stab people. The net effect is a huge benefit.
I'm sorry, I don't know much about American politics, but for sure, when I speak to my mostly minimum wage family later, I'll be sure to tell them that a foulmouthed, now rich and shouting about it guy on the internet said I was their biggest problem.
If my family is "rich" now it's because my parents worked their asses off for almost thirty years to provide a better life for my sisters and I. I'm "rich" because I worked my ass off to put myself through college so I could get a decent job and work my ass off 5 days a week. We didn't just magically become better off. We took responsibility for ourselves and said "Screw this being poor stuff. We're going to make this situation better."
Which will be a relief, I'm pretty sure they think that it's some greedy bank people messing with the barter system for their own profit.
Funny how your crap situation is everybody else's fault but your own.
Keep fighting the good fight, brother, and watch those pesky liberals and their anti greed power grabs now.
If you're "anti greed", why are you so pissed off that other people have more than you? Sounds greedy.
Hmm, if they were willing to pay enough. "Enough", in this case, is an upgrade to the wiring for four miles, plus the field hardware. $100,000 or so sound reasonable?
I know. What I'm saying is it's just not worth spending $100k for two people to get internet access. No matter who pays for it.
At that price it's cheaper for the government to claim eminent domain, pay them for their house and make them move closer to the city. It's in the public interest to get them internet access, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Know what I enjoy when I'm using a piece of productivity software like OpenOffice? Getting my work done so I can go do something else.
The computer is a tool. Especially when using something like office productivity software. I don't sit around pondering the color scheme of my screw drivers, or whether or not my wrenches "go with" my hammer. Likewise, I don't spend time contemplating the visual attractiveness of OpenOffice. It lets me get my work done, that's good enough as far as I'm concerned.
This has to be a new low for Slashdot.
The evidence this is spam/slashvertisement:
And if being obvious spam/slashvertisement weren't bad enough, the summary is basically a giant Obama/McCain troll.
But hey, they managed to keep spelling and grammar mistakes to a minimum, so I guess that's something.
You make it sound like you get any say in it at all.
Millions of people enjoy watching sports on TV and voluntarily shell out big bucks buying tickets to sporting events. Because people love spending money on it, it only makes sense that people involved with professional sports would make a lot of money.
Now look at education. People value it so little that many people eschew the very idea of paying for it themselves, and want other people (aka the government) to buy it for them. Big surprise that people doing jobs nobody wants to pay for won't make very much money. People don't mind paying for "higher education", and you rarely hear college professors bitching about their pay. The funny thing is, if you wanted to pay a teacher more, you probably couldn't - it's all controlled by the government and teachers unions.
Don't take it personally, but your opinion doesn't matter. The majority of people just don't think education is very valuable.
You're talking about people buying the third game in a best selling series that's been around for a decade. At this point Blizzard doesn't care about the casual, "inexperienced" gamer; they already know they can sell a boatload of games to the hardcore players. Their target audience is the person who doesn't mind playing for a while.
Also, I suspect they've learned from WoW and will charge for network play, so there's even more reason to draw out the time it takes to learn the game.
Oh, and failure to immediately create a decent build? That makes the game better. I could install Diablo 2 right now and have a fairly powerful, high level character in a couple of days because I know the basic formula characters. All the possibilities have been explored, and there's little point in searching for any new builds. Actually having to find a decent build, or being able to come up with a new combination that surprises people would be a lot more fun.
Ultimately it's up to Blizzard, but I think it'd make the game better.
I think you missed the point.
The OP was complaining that the skills are carved up by classes at all. A necromancer can't put points in a sorceress skill, for example. So instead of 7 character "classes", each with 3 skill trees, just give every character 21 skill trees and let the player do as they please.
The multitude of options might be a little overwhelming at first, but with as many players as a Blizzard game will have, I think a few stable, decent builds would emerge fairly quickly, while still giving enough variety for people to come up with viable alternative builds. One thing that disappointed me in D2 was the lack of viable character builds, especially for PvP. If you deviated very much from one of the dozen cookie cutter builds, you could almost count on having to leech in experience runs and getting owned in duels.
The later patches of D2 actually explored it a bit, with runeword items that provided class specific skills, but could be used by any class. The items giving barbarian warcries and paladin auras were particularly popular, but there were a few items that would give necromancer and sorceress skills.
Yeah, the headline plays up Ubuntu a bit too much. Sounds like they could have simplified by moving to almost anything with consistency.
What's your point? Walmart was looking out for their bottom line? You don't really think Walmart is in business because they get warm fuzzy feelings selling cheap shit to cheap people, do you? A lawsuit would have been an expensive waste of time for everybody involved, and they almost certainly would have lost. It was clearly in Walmart's best interest to avoid it.
That's the way it's supposed to work.
But that's the problem. How do you mitigate the risk of "No chance in hell of ever getting the money back"? Which is basically what the government wanted them to do in many cases. The answer is, you package it up, sell it off to somebody else, and let them worry about it.
I'm not making excuses for the banks, though. As far as I can see, the government, the banks, and the people taking out the crappy loans were all equally responsible. It's a shame they're the ones who will be least hurt by the chaos they've caused.
You just build a big tube. Like a giant internet that goes to the moon.
Are you sure? I don't like Bush, but you're just wrong. His administration brought up the issue numerous times, and it was killed numerous times because "fixing" the problem would cut off loans to the "economically disadvantaged" (read "people who can't pay back their loans").
From the NY Times article:
Nope. Nothing wrong with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Just as long as they keep on pumping out loans for "affordable housing."
God forbid they stop giving out loans to people who aren't qualified. That would just be terrible.
First, as other people have mentioned, Perl use is declining. I love Perl, but it's just not as popular as it used to be.
Second, Perl has always been more popular on, and worked better with, UNIX. That's even more true now that fewer people are using it. Ask 100 Perl developers whether they prefer UNIX or Windows, and 99 of them will say UNIX. So it's not too surprising there's no Windows only rewrite of it.
As for Perl/Windows shops, do they even exist? Seems to me that if there were enough pressure to heavily use Perl, there'd be enough pressure to use something other than Windows.
After thinking it over a little more, wouldn't eavesdropping in that situation be a pretty straightforward man-in-the-middle attack?
Well, you could always submit a patch... ;-)
The problem (I think) with treating self-signed certificates as 'unsigned with the added bonus that communications can't be eavesdropped' is that it would rely on site owners not asking for sensitive information while using a self-signed cert.
Most users are too dumb to check for SSL, good luck getting them to discern insecure, 'insecure but can't be eavesdropped', and secure. Hell, most users would be shocked to find out you can eavesdrop on their traffic in the first place.
It's still silly, but "Pray for this" isn't quite as dangerous as "God told me we should do this".
I don't really see it, but fair enough.
That's a pretty silly reason. It obviously provides enough "value to our society" that people paid her to do it, which is all that really matters. Apparently that's more than can be said about "community organizers". And do you have any references for the "no scruples" and "stab anyone in the back" stuff?
Honestly, considering that Obama, McCain and Biden just demonstrated that they've sold out to Wallstreet, I'm guessing scruples aren't going to be a deciding factor in the election.
What? I never said anybody was full of hate. I just asked a pretty simple question. I guess that explains it, though. You've been reading about Palin.
Reference? Surely a statement as stupid as "God told me to open Alaska up for oil companies" would be plastered all over the web, right?
This is the second post I've seen that's strongly anti-Palin, so I have to ask: what is it you dislike about Palin? It can't just be that she's a "one-line wonder", otherwise Obama's "hope and change" mantra would be driving you crazy by now. What am I missing?
I'm not voting for any of the mainstream candidates, but Palin seems to be the only decent one in the entire group, IMO.
Yeah, the right to buy a TV that blocks certain programming is right up there with free speech and freedom of the press. I can't believe they forgot that one when writing the constitution.
Well, then there's really no good excuse for having the government pay for it, is there?
No, you're asking me to help you pay for it. Nobody is stopping you from buying a TV that blocks programming, but I shouldn't have to help you pay for it. IMO a Rolls Royce would make my life better, but if I want one I'm going to have to pay for it myself, without forcing you to help me.
The government exists to protect your rights, not make your life better.
Wow, nice attitude. "If you don't want to give me free money to raise my kids, you can GTFO." Maybe it's a good thing you're having other people raise your kids.
I agree, the government shouldn't be involved in any of those things. If you think I'm being facetious, check my posting history.
You're the one who's life sucks bad enough that you want to take other people's money to help make it better. Maybe *you* should move?
Sucks to be you. Maybe you should have thought about how difficult and time consuming parenting is before you had kids. But hey, why bother when the rest of us can do it for you, right?
Funny how you're too busy to be a responsible parent, yet you have enough time to whine about how hard it is on Slashdot.
Because "Turn that shit off" just doesn't waste enough tax money.
And it gets worse: both candidates with any chance of getting elected were for it to.
At least we can hope they were just whoring for votes.
No, not really.
There must be some information missing somewhere, because neither version makes very much sense. The developers were laid off? How is that even possible on an open source project?
The confusing headline doesn't help, either. "How to kill an Open Source Project With New Funding". At first I thought it was going to link to an article showing an example of how increased funding had killed a project. Then I saw it was an "Ask Slashdot", and thought the poster was asking how one might go about killing a project with funding, which just made me confused as to why they'd want to do that. So I had to read the summary. Which just confused me further by being about a project I've never heard of, having nothing to do with the title, and asking questions with what seems to me to be fairly straightforward answers. Fork the code and get over it.
Being greedy motivates people to be productive, and satisfying greed makes people happy. I guess I just don't see the downside.
Yeah, there are people who will do stupid things like hurt people because of greed, but saying the whole concept is bad because of a few idiots is like saying pens and pencils are bad because a few idiots use them to stab people. The net effect is a huge benefit.
If my family is "rich" now it's because my parents worked their asses off for almost thirty years to provide a better life for my sisters and I. I'm "rich" because I worked my ass off to put myself through college so I could get a decent job and work my ass off 5 days a week. We didn't just magically become better off. We took responsibility for ourselves and said "Screw this being poor stuff. We're going to make this situation better."
Funny how your crap situation is everybody else's fault but your own.
If you're "anti greed", why are you so pissed off that other people have more than you? Sounds greedy.
I know. What I'm saying is it's just not worth spending $100k for two people to get internet access. No matter who pays for it.
At that price it's cheaper for the government to claim eminent domain, pay them for their house and make them move closer to the city. It's in the public interest to get them internet access, after all.