Banning Ricdic for making $5,000 in real money from the game will probably result in him making more real money, from real work, in the real world. He might even meet a real girl and have a real relationship and real children. Hardly seems like much of a punishment, if you ask me. If the developers of EVE wanted to punish Ricdic, they'd have given him two more accounts....for free.
Do projects of a similar scope on Windows/SQL Server succeed while others fail? I contend that the answer is yes.
Here's the secret....the programmers and customers assigned to work on the custom development project and their skills, ability, intelligence and maturity will determine the success of the project.
This isn't a platform failure. It's a people failure.
killing has always been acceptable, as long as it's done outside our borders (or in slums). And sex has always been highly suspect. This is nothing new. Our tendency toward mass violence is tightly intertwined with our general sexual repression.
If we're all just laying about smoking dope and having sex, who will kill our enemies? And you know, we've got a lot of enemies. They hate us for our freedom.
I'm using Office for most 90% of my word processing and spreadsheet work. I am far more likely to switch from Office to Google Docs than either SoftMaker or OpenOffice's offerings. Why? Google Docs offers simplicity, collaboration and built-in backup.
I believe it is 1000 times less likely that Google will lose my files compared to me losing them if I have to store them on a hard drive and remember to setup some kind of backup facility.
>> Getting a liver transplant is a long, involved, and lengthy process.
Not for Steve Jobs. Because his net worth exceeds $100 million, he doesn't have to worry about what his insurance company will or will not pay. He simply writes a check.
But voting for third parties is a waste. The third party candidates will be corrupted by campaign finance the minute they get elected. Unless you're talking about a third party that only runs in-human robots for office.
The root problem with US democracy is campaign finance. Until we deal with campaign finance (aka legalized bribery of elected officials), all the rest is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
"Your" elected official? Did you give "your" elected official more money than Monstanto gave "your" elected official? I didn't think so. So she is not really "your" elected official. Is she? Of course not.
>> we have complained about our son's teacher many times
This is precisely why it is difficult to fire a "bad teacher." 99.9% of the parents who complain about a teacher are moonbats. Their noise drowns the 0.1% of signal from parents about actually incompetent teachers.
If we "corrected" this and fired all the teachers parents do not like, we'd find ourselves with no teachers.
Get over it. Your child learns something more important than 2+2=4 from a bad teacher. They learn how to deal with a bad authority figure. This is a skill that will serve them well in their adult lives.
And yes, I've got children who have had bad teachers.
>> As treatments emerge, we'll find out whether they're willing to sacrifice other human beings for their own health & longevity.
Of course we're willing to sacrifice other human beings for our own health and longevity and just plain comfort. We do it all the time.
If you don't think so, ask yourself how you can have excess food, clothing, housing, stuff while 3,000 children starve to death today outside your immediate vicinity on this planet earth.
cog,
Thanks for your post. I seem to be able to comprehend most of what you're saying and if a physicist can explain it so that I can understand it, it means that physicist really deeply understands it.
Here's one thing I know I'm missing...you state that "the cutoff seems to be somewhere around a molecule" in the classical vs. quantum threshold. Then you say "This is actually very remarkable because it means that nature specfically engineered a molecule that manifests quantum behavior on a larger scale..."
And then I'm confused because...the electron walking multiple paths (behaving in a quantum fashion) is smaller than a molecule...it's part of one atom of the molecule. Do we not normally see electrons take multiple paths? Is it sub-electron particles with all those funny names that usually take multiple paths simultaneously?
Oh, and how do physicists detect interference patterns?
And again, thanks!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometer
According to Wikipedia, TDR is for kilometer-long telecom cable run testing.
In my experience, a dumb "how fast can I copy a DVD from computer A to computer B" over this cable test is probably sufficient to find problems with cables.
If you want to get every so slightly more sophisticated without spending a bundle, you could load a packet inspector and see how many packets are getting retransmitted overnight, swap cables and check again the next day.
The numbers are somewhat astonishing, last I heard it was like 14% of GDP going into healthcare in the USA.
If we look at unnecessary procedures like the arthroscopy for osteoarthritis (assuming the study results are repeatable) that's one major way to save money.
Another major way to save money is to make the payment handling a non-profit business. Something like 20% of healthcare spending is going into the insurance business and dealing with payments. That should be more like 2%.
And a third major savings is to be gained by realizing we're all going to die and not spending huge money on someone in their last six months. It makes no sense, but most of the money spent on most of the people in the USA is spent on people within 6 months of death. And most of the time, their life is no longer than if they didn't spend the money, but it is more painful. Curbing this spending could save us as much as 20% of our current healthcare spending.
I suggest that if a person is 2 years beyond average lifespan, no government money be spent on hospitalization or surgery. If they have the money to buy private insurance or can pay for it out of pocket, fine, that's their choice, but otherwise, too bad, don't make the rest of us pay for torturing your granny to death.
Some folks felt safe surfing the dark side if they did it inside a virtual machine. They thought "hey, if
I get something nasty on my machine, I'll just restore my virtual machine from the checkpoint and voi-la, everything's ok again and I can resume working without a heavy re-install pentalty." But if these crazed Argentinians can infect your machine from an ActiveX control while you're surfing in a virtual machine and you have to reflash your bios to cure the infection, if you can cure it at all, then man, we're all hosed. Bad.
The fact is that wind/solar power is not economically viable right now. It makes little sense for Shell to spend tons of money that it will never recover.
Then why is Shell spening large piles of cash on oil shale projects in the US? Oil shale is not economically viable right now.
Shell is the dumbest of the big oil companies. And as such, it will be the next one to disappear.
Unless you get competent, experienced, help.
This is going to sound snarky, but seriously, if you think you need multiple servers for 1,000 users per day hitting a help archive, you do not know enough to setup a server properly.
Influential games...
1. Pong, Space Invaders, Missile Command->Nintendo
2. Zork
3. PLATO dungeon games -> Wizardry -> Everquest -> WoW
4. Wolfenstein->Doom
5. Artwick's Flight Simulator became Microsoft's Flight Simulator
6. Sim City
7. Age of Empires
8. Call of Duty (1st popularized the gaming dream of jumping into a tank or plane)
Today, the technology for electric vehicles that performs like a gasoline powered vehicle, specifically batteries, is not in place. And even when it does happen, electric vehicles won't save you from the long-thin parking lots that our metro-area interstates have become from 7am to 10am and again from 3pm to 6pm.
Furthermore, long-distance rail is not necessary to significantly decrease US dependence on oil. Most transportation oil is burned by people going less than 40 miles. And most of those people are concentrated in our 20-30 largest cities. To argue that we cannot or should not invest in rails because of land prices is also silly. We used emminent domain to put the interstates in during the 1950's and we can use some of the land currently occupied by the interstate system in the major metropolitan areas to put in rail lines without requiring any purchase or seizure of land.
On a per-capita basis, the USA uses about twice the oil that Germany uses. We can and will reduce our profligate consumption. And we don't have to wait for some magic technology to be realized.
If our incoming President wants to invest in US infrastructure with serious long-term contribution to our national wealth and well-being, I suggest he create a program to build 5-10 subway lines in each of the top 20 under-trained Metro areas. Maybe NYC could use their share to clean up and improve their existing system. But most of the rest of the US cities could use some lines.
In October this year, I visited NYC. I went anywhere I wanted in NYC, for $7.50 / day (far less than the cost of parking). I got there faster than I could in a car. With less stress.
If Stockholm can build a decent mass-transit system, any city of 2 million or more in the USA can build one. I used to think it was about population density and after visiting Stockholm--2 million, spread out over a good distance with a lot of bridges and tunnels because the city is built on a group of islands and penninsulas.
Slashdot Mirror
... the E in E-Book stood for electronic. Turns out it's Evil.
Banning Ricdic for making $5,000 in real money from the game will probably result in him making more real money, from real work, in the real world. He might even meet a real girl and have a real relationship and real children. Hardly seems like much of a punishment, if you ask me. If the developers of EVE wanted to punish Ricdic, they'd have given him two more accounts....for free.
Do projects of a similar scope on Windows/SQL Server succeed while others fail? I contend that the answer is yes. Here's the secret....the programmers and customers assigned to work on the custom development project and their skills, ability, intelligence and maturity will determine the success of the project. This isn't a platform failure. It's a people failure.
killing has always been acceptable, as long as it's done outside our borders (or in slums). And sex has always been highly suspect. This is nothing new. Our tendency toward mass violence is tightly intertwined with our general sexual repression. If we're all just laying about smoking dope and having sex, who will kill our enemies? And you know, we've got a lot of enemies. They hate us for our freedom.
I'm using Office for most 90% of my word processing and spreadsheet work. I am far more likely to switch from Office to Google Docs than either SoftMaker or OpenOffice's offerings. Why? Google Docs offers simplicity, collaboration and built-in backup. I believe it is 1000 times less likely that Google will lose my files compared to me losing them if I have to store them on a hard drive and remember to setup some kind of backup facility.
>> Getting a liver transplant is a long, involved, and lengthy process.
Not for Steve Jobs. Because his net worth exceeds $100 million, he doesn't have to worry about what his insurance company will or will not pay. He simply writes a check.
She's a good-looking sexual psychopath. Once you've lived with one of these for a decade, you never go back.
experience under my belt. And today's games bore the crap out of me. Except World of Goo.
George's trifecta more than anything that involves coding.
But voting for third parties is a waste. The third party candidates will be corrupted by campaign finance the minute they get elected. Unless you're talking about a third party that only runs in-human robots for office. The root problem with US democracy is campaign finance. Until we deal with campaign finance (aka legalized bribery of elected officials), all the rest is re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
"Your" elected official? Did you give "your" elected official more money than Monstanto gave "your" elected official? I didn't think so. So she is not really "your" elected official. Is she? Of course not.
>> we have complained about our son's teacher many times
This is precisely why it is difficult to fire a "bad teacher." 99.9% of the parents who complain about a teacher are moonbats. Their noise drowns the 0.1% of signal from parents about actually incompetent teachers.
If we "corrected" this and fired all the teachers parents do not like, we'd find ourselves with no teachers.
Get over it. Your child learns something more important than 2+2=4 from a bad teacher. They learn how to deal with a bad authority figure. This is a skill that will serve them well in their adult lives.
And yes, I've got children who have had bad teachers.
Now we can play utterly boring games on other platforms. I can hardly wait.
>> As treatments emerge, we'll find out whether they're willing to sacrifice other human beings for their own health & longevity.
Of course we're willing to sacrifice other human beings for our own health and longevity and just plain comfort. We do it all the time.
If you don't think so, ask yourself how you can have excess food, clothing, housing, stuff while 3,000 children starve to death today outside your immediate vicinity on this planet earth.
cog, Thanks for your post. I seem to be able to comprehend most of what you're saying and if a physicist can explain it so that I can understand it, it means that physicist really deeply understands it. Here's one thing I know I'm missing...you state that "the cutoff seems to be somewhere around a molecule" in the classical vs. quantum threshold. Then you say "This is actually very remarkable because it means that nature specfically engineered a molecule that manifests quantum behavior on a larger scale..." And then I'm confused because...the electron walking multiple paths (behaving in a quantum fashion) is smaller than a molecule...it's part of one atom of the molecule. Do we not normally see electrons take multiple paths? Is it sub-electron particles with all those funny names that usually take multiple paths simultaneously? Oh, and how do physicists detect interference patterns? And again, thanks!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-domain_reflectometer According to Wikipedia, TDR is for kilometer-long telecom cable run testing. In my experience, a dumb "how fast can I copy a DVD from computer A to computer B" over this cable test is probably sufficient to find problems with cables. If you want to get every so slightly more sophisticated without spending a bundle, you could load a packet inspector and see how many packets are getting retransmitted overnight, swap cables and check again the next day.
The numbers are somewhat astonishing, last I heard it was like 14% of GDP going into healthcare in the USA.
If we look at unnecessary procedures like the arthroscopy for osteoarthritis (assuming the study results are repeatable) that's one major way to save money.
Another major way to save money is to make the payment handling a non-profit business. Something like 20% of healthcare spending is going into the insurance business and dealing with payments. That should be more like 2%.
And a third major savings is to be gained by realizing we're all going to die and not spending huge money on someone in their last six months. It makes no sense, but most of the money spent on most of the people in the USA is spent on people within 6 months of death. And most of the time, their life is no longer than if they didn't spend the money, but it is more painful. Curbing this spending could save us as much as 20% of our current healthcare spending.
I suggest that if a person is 2 years beyond average lifespan, no government money be spent on hospitalization or surgery. If they have the money to buy private insurance or can pay for it out of pocket, fine, that's their choice, but otherwise, too bad, don't make the rest of us pay for torturing your granny to death.
Some folks felt safe surfing the dark side if they did it inside a virtual machine. They thought "hey, if I get something nasty on my machine, I'll just restore my virtual machine from the checkpoint and voi-la, everything's ok again and I can resume working without a heavy re-install pentalty." But if these crazed Argentinians can infect your machine from an ActiveX control while you're surfing in a virtual machine and you have to reflash your bios to cure the infection, if you can cure it at all, then man, we're all hosed. Bad.
Then why is Shell spening large piles of cash on oil shale projects in the US? Oil shale is not economically viable right now.
Shell is the dumbest of the big oil companies. And as such, it will be the next one to disappear.
...and mail them to Rush Limbaugh.
Unless you get competent, experienced, help. This is going to sound snarky, but seriously, if you think you need multiple servers for 1,000 users per day hitting a help archive, you do not know enough to setup a server properly.
Influential games... 1. Pong, Space Invaders, Missile Command->Nintendo 2. Zork 3. PLATO dungeon games -> Wizardry -> Everquest -> WoW 4. Wolfenstein->Doom 5. Artwick's Flight Simulator became Microsoft's Flight Simulator 6. Sim City 7. Age of Empires 8. Call of Duty (1st popularized the gaming dream of jumping into a tank or plane)
Proving yet again, Firewire is Betamax to USB's VHS.
...thinking about having sex with Children. And then writing about thinking about having sex with Children. Ooops. I'm in trouble.
Today, the technology for electric vehicles that performs like a gasoline powered vehicle, specifically batteries, is not in place. And even when it does happen, electric vehicles won't save you from the long-thin parking lots that our metro-area interstates have become from 7am to 10am and again from 3pm to 6pm.
Furthermore, long-distance rail is not necessary to significantly decrease US dependence on oil. Most transportation oil is burned by people going less than 40 miles. And most of those people are concentrated in our 20-30 largest cities. To argue that we cannot or should not invest in rails because of land prices is also silly. We used emminent domain to put the interstates in during the 1950's and we can use some of the land currently occupied by the interstate system in the major metropolitan areas to put in rail lines without requiring any purchase or seizure of land.
On a per-capita basis, the USA uses about twice the oil that Germany uses. We can and will reduce our profligate consumption. And we don't have to wait for some magic technology to be realized.
If our incoming President wants to invest in US infrastructure with serious long-term contribution to our national wealth and well-being, I suggest he create a program to build 5-10 subway lines in each of the top 20 under-trained Metro areas. Maybe NYC could use their share to clean up and improve their existing system. But most of the rest of the US cities could use some lines.
In October this year, I visited NYC. I went anywhere I wanted in NYC, for $7.50 / day (far less than the cost of parking). I got there faster than I could in a car. With less stress.
If Stockholm can build a decent mass-transit system, any city of 2 million or more in the USA can build one. I used to think it was about population density and after visiting Stockholm--2 million, spread out over a good distance with a lot of bridges and tunnels because the city is built on a group of islands and penninsulas.