Your comment: I've sprained ankles, cracked ribs, and broken my nose in those games.
shows there is an ongoing change in the play style. In 15 years of play back in 83-98, we had about 3 injuries of that type with 70-100 players passing through over the years. The non-contact sportsmanship aspect of the game used to be a lot more stressed. Lately, I have started seeing more basketball attitude ("What does it mean when I foul someone hard? It means I've got several more fouls left- so back off!")
The careful players could last a long time but the really competitive players followed a very similar pattern. Play hard, bust a ligament. Come back months later 20 pounds heavier and out of shape. 80% Disappear forever at that point. The rest put on a knee brace and play through the pain until they adapt.
My knee went (from stretching of all things!) at 43. I can play for about 40 minutes before it stiffens up. I can still ski so I don't play ultimate that much any more. It's also a factor that the young kids are better trained these days so they have speed, good handling skills, and they can catch. The net result is also that they throw to each other a lot (sometimes the same set of 3 kids all night) which gets old and boring fast. I keep meaning to set up an "oldtimers" game. We played monthly until the university built a building over our night field and we always had fun since we all threw to each other.
Sports people who juice are killing themselves. Football players and wrestlers have real problems with livespans.
These days I hit the gym for 10 minutes twice a day and walk for 10-20 minutes a day and sprint a couple times to get the heart rate up above 140.
It is much safer to do 40 reps with 100 pounds than it is to do 10 reps with 200 pounds.
I'm impressed with your fitness. I spent an entire year and was only able to get to 5 pullups (of course I'm 6'5" and 270 pounds).
Your body can adapt to anything but it takes it years to fully adapt. Your tendons and ligaments and bones will not do well with sudden extreme changes (especially after 35).
However, in your case, it sounds like you were doing something extremely mild when your C5 went out. Did you try a chiropractor? Any particular reason your C5 went out that you know of?
I don't do situps. I use the pullup machine and it gave me a six pack and obliques for "free". (and lots of frolic'ing too!)
I still have to lose 20 pounds and it's being stubborn. Doc would actually like me to lose 30 pounds.
Brush and floss regularly. Or your teeth will go bad and your mouth will smell like a 3 day old dead animal on the side of the road.
Flossing breaks up the plaque deposits which form like coral on your teeth. Eventually they turn black because they are full of bacteria shit.
You swallow all those toxins (and "bad" bacteria) constantly and they attack your heart in various ways and cut your healthy, fun, lifespan by about 5-7 years.
These days, I have a package of those pre-wired flossing handles and I floss after every meal in all of 30 seconds. My teeth and my breath are perfect. I brush twice a day. I'm going to die at 80 with a full set of my damn teeth and breath that smells fresh and minty.
As a successful manager making top 5% income, I have to disagree on the negative impact of D&D (and Everquest).
D&D taught me social skills and I spent 10 relatively happy years with my first wife and spawned as a result of D&D.
EQ taught me the politics and logistics of running groups of 60 people (I was a guildmaster for about 24 months before finding a new one to replace me).
The friends I had who were not gamers are all gone. They all disappeared into "real life" about the time they had their first children. They spend hours watching football or on other meaningless activities.
I don't disagree with your basic point. D&D should not be your entire life and you need to take care of business. But I got my degree while running campaigns 8 days a month and with 24 players and it remains one of the kickass best parts of my life to this day (after having traveled to europe, downhill ski'd, etc.) The type of people who completely disappear into EQ or D&D may not have had a shot at this successful life you speak of anyway.
If I have a copy of a book on my hard disk, and I've never read it, then does it really count as being out twice?
If I have a copy and read it, and then two weeks later someone else reads a copy of the book and I'm not reading it, does it count?
If I'm reading the 113th page of the book and other people are reading the 7th and 211th pages, does that count?
If I'm reading the third word of the 4th sentence and another person is reading the 8th word of the 12th sentence on the same page, does that count?
If the library has a copy of the book and it sits there unread and then two people read it on the same day, how about that? (happens a lot with reference books when a paper is assigned and the book is on special reserve status).
Your post really only shows how wonderful humans are at rationalizing.
Dale Carnegie says that humans make the decisions 90% by emotions and if you get their emotions, they will emphasize and deemphasize the facts to match the decision.
I'm not for or against global warming in particular, I am not at all convinced that we will choose to take the right action or that humans are the cause for it.
I understand your point, but their track record over the period so far is not particularly reliable. Every time they make a prediction lately, it's wrong.
I was taking the worst case figures.
I think that a reasonable, genuinely scientific approach would have a lot fewer histronics. The fact everything is so cataclysmic is a good sign to me that emotions are in play instead of reason.
I suspect the main problem with IE and many other packages are accounting rules that makes coding 50% more expensive if you are "maintaining" instead of "developing completely new code".
I've run into this at multiple companies-- they have good code, if they would let us refactor and polish it, it would just get better and better. But if they write new code, it's a capital expense.
It has some nice graphs of actual sea level change vs various IPCC predictions and says in part...
"... I conclude that the ongoing debate about future sea level rise is entirely appropriate. The fact that the IPCC has been unsuccessful in predicting sea level rise, does not mean that things are worse or better, but simply that scientists clearly do not have a handle on this issue and are unable to predict sea level changes on a decadal scale. The lack of predictive accuracy does not lend optimism about the prospects for accuracy on the multi-decadal scale. Consider that the 2007 IPCC took a pass on predicting near term sea level rise, choosing instead to focus 90 years out (as far as I am aware, anyone who knows differently, please let me know)."
"[netscape killed themselves by rewriting] Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
Joel's argument is "code doesn't go bad. it is better to sand it and polish it because a given code base has already had a lot of bugs found and removed. writing a new codebase brings you back to bug rich code".
People don't mind paying a reasonable price for content. People do have a limited amount of money they CAN spend.
With absolutely perfect DRM, it will become abundantly clear that people grossing $46k per year are not going to be filling IPODS at $10,000 out of their net salary. They'll just move on to other cheaper forms of entertainment.
If I *want* to charge $100,000 a song, I don't lose a dime (much less $900,000) if 9 people pirate the song. I only really lose money if my audience would still purchase my product given absolutely perfect DRM.
People are getting tired of paying yet another $1 for the same song they've bought 3 times already.
There is a huge glut of entertainment. I do not even sample dozens of television shows and hundreds of songs every year. I don't read hundreds of books a year. I don't read dozens of magazines a year. I don't watch many movies (even for FREE and even tho I'd probably like them at least a little). There is so much entertainment I can't keep up.
If nothing else, by waiting 6-9 months, the movies and television shows are often 50% cheaper. Once you have a 12 month backlog built up, you just take the next item on the stack at pennies on the dollar.
Every frikkin page of Questionable Content and Girl Genius is on the web.
The QC recently bought a house, travels to conventions, and has a pretty damn good life. People buy tons of merchandise which they could make free themselves for a couple bucks less!
Phil and Kaja seem to be doing okay as well. (For some reason people keep buying the damn books which they could get perfectly free from the Foglio's web site).
Why do these seemingly intelligent people keep giving their work away for free???
In 2001-2004, our indian contractors were top notch. Since then, we too are seeing "Yes, we can do that for 600 hours" and then the delivery of substandard work.
We had a project locally estimated at 2400 to 3000 hours. They said they could do it for 600 (which the exec VP really wanted it to be), they came in at 1100 hours. The project will never see production. It's unusable.
Slashdot Mirror
Right of immortals with unbalanced amounts of money to control society.
I think a base which is not a legitimate word plus a changing part based on context (the site) plus a number is fairly secure.
However, after seeing the report, I think I'll experiment with symbols. The problem is if symbols are not allowed everywhere then it messes me up.
I've been to some sites months or years later and I'm able to rebuild the unique password because I have a system.
Easiest non english word is based on the first letter of a sentence.
Zoos have grey elephants (ZHGE).
Then a pre or postfix for the context.
Then an arbitrary number (3711) which
I do like your idea of a sentence as a password if allowed, but most places limit passwords length more severely than that.
The problem is, whoever you vote for is really in with the big boys.
If they are not, we see constant news coverage of what goofballs they are because thew news media are all owned by large corporations these days.
Your comment: I've sprained ankles, cracked ribs, and broken my nose in those games.
shows there is an ongoing change in the play style. In 15 years of play back in 83-98, we had about 3 injuries of that type with 70-100 players passing through over the years. The non-contact sportsmanship aspect of the game used to be a lot more stressed. Lately, I have started seeing more basketball attitude ("What does it mean when I foul someone hard? It means I've got several more fouls left- so back off!")
I play ultimate frisbee.
The careful players could last a long time but the really competitive players followed a very similar pattern.
Play hard, bust a ligament.
Come back months later 20 pounds heavier and out of shape.
80% Disappear forever at that point. The rest put on a knee brace and play through the pain until they adapt.
My knee went (from stretching of all things!) at 43. I can play for about 40 minutes before it stiffens up. I can still ski so I don't play ultimate that much any more.
It's also a factor that the young kids are better trained these days so they have speed, good handling skills, and they can catch. The net result is also that they throw to each other a lot (sometimes the same set of 3 kids all night) which gets old and boring fast. I keep meaning to set up an "oldtimers" game. We played monthly until the university built a building over our night field and we always had fun since we all threw to each other.
Sports people who juice are killing themselves.
Football players and wrestlers have real problems with livespans.
These days I hit the gym for 10 minutes twice a day and walk for 10-20 minutes a day and sprint a couple times to get the heart rate up above 140.
Most injuries come from pushing too hard.
It is much safer to do 40 reps with 100 pounds than it is to do 10 reps with 200 pounds.
I'm impressed with your fitness. I spent an entire year and was only able to get to 5 pullups (of course I'm 6'5" and 270 pounds).
Your body can adapt to anything but it takes it years to fully adapt. Your tendons and ligaments and bones will not do well with sudden extreme changes (especially after 35).
However, in your case, it sounds like you were doing something extremely mild when your C5 went out. Did you try a chiropractor? Any particular reason your C5 went out that you know of?
I don't do situps. I use the pullup machine and it gave me a six pack and obliques for "free". (and lots of frolic'ing too!)
I still have to lose 20 pounds and it's being stubborn. Doc would actually like me to lose 30 pounds.
Agreed.
The cyclopedia is superior to D&D.
I'm afraid with AD&D that people are losing track of the roleplaying and focusing on the boardgaming aspects.
It took me a while to learn this.
Brush and floss regularly. Or your teeth will go bad and your mouth will smell like a 3 day old dead animal on the side of the road.
Flossing breaks up the plaque deposits which form like coral on your teeth. Eventually they turn black because they are full of bacteria shit.
You swallow all those toxins (and "bad" bacteria) constantly and they attack your heart in various ways and cut your healthy, fun, lifespan by about 5-7 years.
These days, I have a package of those pre-wired flossing handles and I floss after every meal in all of 30 seconds. My teeth and my breath are perfect. I brush twice a day. I'm going to die at 80 with a full set of my damn teeth and breath that smells fresh and minty.
As a successful manager making top 5% income, I have to disagree on the negative impact of D&D (and Everquest).
D&D taught me social skills and I spent 10 relatively happy years with my first wife and spawned as a result of D&D.
EQ taught me the politics and logistics of running groups of 60 people (I was a guildmaster for about 24 months before finding a new one to replace me).
The friends I had who were not gamers are all gone. They all disappeared into "real life" about the time they had their first children. They spend hours watching football or on other meaningless activities.
I don't disagree with your basic point. D&D should not be your entire life and you need to take care of business. But I got my degree while running campaigns 8 days a month and with 24 players and it remains one of the kickass best parts of my life to this day (after having traveled to europe, downhill ski'd, etc.) The type of people who completely disappear into EQ or D&D may not have had a shot at this successful life you speak of anyway.
www.meetup.com
There are many local gaming groups.
I run two D&D games and will probably start a third later this year.
I play a home brew Cyclopedia version. It has about 400 pages of rules, all in Openoffice.
My game has a lot of concepts later added to AD&D. I suppose they had to solve some of the same problems I did.
I've been playing since 1976 after hearing about the "D&D Room" at a convention. I bought a whitebox set and Greyhawk.
I tried AD&D and the first PHB killed that campaign (it had survived the monster manual).
Current campaign is closing on 20 years and has 12 players.
The games are out there.
Unfortunately, the cat is dead.
I see a continuum of possibilities...
If I have a copy of a book on my hard disk, and I've never read it, then does it really count as being out twice?
If I have a copy and read it, and then two weeks later someone else reads a copy of the book and I'm not reading it, does it count?
If I'm reading the 113th page of the book and other people are reading the 7th and 211th pages, does that count?
If I'm reading the third word of the 4th sentence and another person is reading the 8th word of the 12th sentence on the same page, does that count?
If the library has a copy of the book and it sits there unread and then two people read it on the same day, how about that? (happens a lot with reference books when a paper is assigned and the book is on special reserve status).
If you don't like it, at least for now, you fly southwest.
The price may be higher or lower, but at least the stated price *is* the price.
It's why I'm going to denver via SW next weekend. Seriously-- $15 for the 1st??? bag? How many people fly without any bags at all?
Your post really only shows how wonderful humans are at rationalizing.
Dale Carnegie says that humans make the decisions 90% by emotions and if you get their emotions, they will emphasize and deemphasize the facts to match the decision.
I'm not for or against global warming in particular, I am not at all convinced that we will choose to take the right action or that humans are the cause for it.
I understand your point, but their track record over the period so far is not particularly reliable. Every time they make a prediction lately, it's wrong.
I was taking the worst case figures.
I think that a reasonable, genuinely scientific approach would have a lot fewer histronics. The fact everything is so cataclysmic is a good sign to me that emotions are in play instead of reason.
I suspect the main problem with IE and many other packages are accounting rules that makes coding 50% more expensive if you are "maintaining" instead of "developing completely new code".
I've run into this at multiple companies-- they have good code, if they would let us refactor and polish it, it would just get better and better. But if they write new code, it's a capital expense.
New Orleans happened in a large part because of human intervention. Levees and canals magnified the impact of Katrina enormously.
And there is the basic lesson, don't build your city below sea level next to the ocean.
Found this after I posted...
It has some nice graphs of actual sea level change vs various IPCC predictions and says in part...
"... I conclude that the ongoing debate about future sea level rise is entirely appropriate. The fact that the IPCC has been unsuccessful in predicting sea level rise, does not mean that things are worse or better, but simply that scientists clearly do not have a handle on this issue and are unable to predict sea level changes on a decadal scale. The lack of predictive accuracy does not lend optimism about the prospects for accuracy on the multi-decadal scale. Consider that the 2007 IPCC took a pass on predicting near term sea level rise, choosing instead to focus 90 years out (as far as I am aware, anyone who knows differently, please let me know)."
From this article (by a unabashed pro-global warming person), the estimate is 3 feet by 2100.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/03/0323_060323_global_warming.html
"By the end of this century the seas may be three feet (one meter) higher than they are today, according to a pair of studies that appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science."
This other pro global warming site has a different figure (backed up by several other sites)
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11049-major-climate-change-report-looks-set-to-alarm.html
"the new report is believed to predict that sea-levels will rise by between 28 centimetres and 43 cm by 2100" (16 inches).
Personally, I think building properties on the edge of the ocean and subsidence from pumping groundwater are more significant to the problem.
In 99% of the globe, raising sea levels 16" is not going to significantly change the coastline.
He's probably thinking of articles like this:
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/541-mshtml-layout-engine-completely-rewritten-for-internet-explorer-8.html
Interesting article here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
"[netscape killed themselves by rewriting]
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
Joel's argument is "code doesn't go bad. it is better to sand it and polish it because a given code base has already had a lot of bugs found and removed. writing a new codebase brings you back to bug rich code".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
Plenty of free PDF readers, converters, writers listed...
The first part's serious (and history)... the end is a monty python reference to the "spring surprise" chocolate treat.
www.questionablecontent.net
www.girlgeniusonline.com/
---
People don't mind paying a reasonable price for content.
People do have a limited amount of money they CAN spend.
With absolutely perfect DRM, it will become abundantly clear that people grossing $46k per year are not going to be filling IPODS at $10,000 out of their net salary. They'll just move on to other cheaper forms of entertainment.
If I *want* to charge $100,000 a song, I don't lose a dime (much less $900,000) if 9 people pirate the song.
I only really lose money if my audience would still purchase my product given absolutely perfect DRM.
People are getting tired of paying yet another $1 for the same song they've bought 3 times already.
There is a huge glut of entertainment. I do not even sample dozens of television shows and hundreds of songs every year. I don't read hundreds of books a year. I don't read dozens of magazines a year. I don't watch many movies (even for FREE and even tho I'd probably like them at least a little). There is so much entertainment I can't keep up.
If nothing else, by waiting 6-9 months, the movies and television shows are often 50% cheaper. Once you have a 12 month backlog built up, you just take the next item on the stack at pennies on the dollar.
Every frikkin page of Questionable Content and Girl Genius is on the web.
The QC recently bought a house, travels to conventions, and has a pretty damn good life. People buy tons of merchandise which they could make free themselves for a couple bucks less!
Phil and Kaja seem to be doing okay as well. (For some reason people keep buying the damn books which they could get perfectly free from the Foglio's web site).
Why do these seemingly intelligent people keep giving their work away for free???
In 2001-2004, our indian contractors were top notch.
Since then, we too are seeing "Yes, we can do that for 600 hours" and then the delivery of substandard work.
We had a project locally estimated at 2400 to 3000 hours. They said they could do it for 600 (which the exec VP really wanted it to be), they came in at 1100 hours. The project will never see production. It's unusable.