I am apparently one of those poor saps who can either make eye contact, or watch where my hand is going, but not both.... I sometimes end up either too short (just fingers) or too far (jamming).
I believe it's muscle memory, and practice will perfect it. Bear with me if this sounds somewhat absurd and comical; I am quite serious that I think you should practice it. I've just never practiced shaking hands (I should!), so I'm coming up with these ideas as I write. Sorry.
Have you considered doing some hand-eye coordination exercises? Practice doing things where you be aware at a muscle-memory level of where your hands and arms are. Martial arts, fencing, juggling. (Of those, fencing seems most apropos, to me, but that's because I am a fencer [though a poor one].) In fencing, one of the beginner's drills is to constantly practice placing the tip of the blade (via arm extension, and then later with a lunge) on a small target -- post-it, a coin, a mark on a wall, the knot of a tree. Repeating this helps you fine-tune your motor skills when doing something you don't do often, until it's muscle memory. For a more handshake-like analogue, you might practice pressing your doorbell (without looking at it), as that's roughly hand-height. Make sure you return your hand to the resting (at your sides) position each time, because what you're practicing is going from there to a desired position.
You might also just practice shaking hands with someone you trust. Tell them, "Hey honey/Joe/dad, I am really bad at shaking hands. I need practice to make sure my hand goes the right way. Can you help?" Then, sit down, and practice shaking hands. Start by standing still, with their hand in as close to the same place as possible. Grab their hand like you would while shaking. Do it again and again until you can comfortably predict (visualize? know? expect?) where their hand IS, so that you can guide your hand for proper docking. Once you master that, practice doing it while approaching them. Then, practice doing it while one or both of you are standing or seated.
I like a sibling poster's suggestion to first snapshot where their hand is, dock quickly (but not hurriedly), and then secure eye contact. I think I do this -- look briefly at the hand before I grab it, to make sure I have judged correctly where it is. This is probably even more important when you assume that most people are like you or I and are imperfect at hand-shaking, and therefore probably do not have a lot of practice getting their hand to the "right" position. So, find their hand, put yours in it, look them in the eye, shake. Practice, practice, practice.
This seems to absurd to be talking about this. If I had punctuation for "I'm not at all being sarcastic" I'd want to use that... but that would probably be considered sarcasm.:-)
Do you really believe that someone snowed under with work would spend so long composing email responses, or spend so much of his time putting together silly posters?
It's quite possible that he wasn't super-busy at the time, but had in the past been frequently pestered by her (and others) for graphic design "favors". She could have spent 5 (or 2) minutes in Word and made her own, and instead decided to waste his time. So, being a complete dick to her (if it's not fiction) sends the message that not only is your request a waste of my time,/it's an insult that you'd even ask me to do this for free/. Especially if it were a chronic problem. Much as BOFHs often get that way after being jaded from months of user abuse, I see this as him wanting to make an example of this coworker. (Again, if it's not fiction.)
Someone that were polite and friendly would have said, "Hey, my cat's gone missing; can you make me a good looking 'lost cat' poster (here's a picture!) that will help people find her? I'll bring you a 6-pack of your favourite $FROSTY_BEVERAGE in thanks." (Or something similar.) By making it clear that they value your time, and aren't trying to merely freeload, they are more likely to get a good response, rather than either trolling (if bored or not friends) or a "why not do it yourself in word?" response.
Do you really think that the woman asking wouldn't have got the hint and done it herself? Or even if she didn't, she might have talked to someone else who would have explained things?
Some people are oblivious. She might not have realized that she was being rude to ask him the way she did, or that she was treating him as an employee and not as a peer. His response, which was more elaborate way of saying "OH SURE let me drop everything and help you do something you can do yourself, but instead want me to do for free, with very little guidance, and lots of criticism" -- clearly sarcastic. I am sure that some people would be so self-centered as to not realize that someone was uninterested in helping them at the drop of a hat.
... state to engage in selective prosecution of crimes, as is expressly forbidden in the bill of rights, for damned good reasons
It is? I don't recall anything about that, can you tell me which of the first ten amendments relate to selective prosecution? I don't think any of them do, from my cursory re-reading of them. The closest is perhaps the prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment, but I don't think that applies at all.
Selective prosecution (choosing which crimes and criminals to prosecute) allows a judicial system to prioritize crimes or criminals who are most disruptive, to avoid enforcing an unjust law, or merely to scale their workload to fit the number of people they can leverage. For example, we don't have enough cops to ticket everyone for jaywalking, or littering, or speeding. So, the police in some places spend more of their time pursuing things that are either more harmful (robberies/assaults) or more lucrative (drug busts, speed traps). Clearly, in some cases it feels unjust when law enforcement chooses to devote many resources to things like speed traps, but that's a problem with their funding or with their local mandate, rather than with a "problem" of selective prosecution.
Selective prosecution is basically an opposite extreme of "zero tolerance". It allows people in authority to either overlook minor offenses or to tell someone, "Look, you're a good kid, so knock that the hell off" rather than jailing/expelling/punishing them. In some cases it's not a good idea, but it's unwise (IMO) to try to avoid it completely, simply because no matter how hard you work at enforcement, there are always some that slip through your grasp.
Indeed. A blog I follow discussed the motivation behind (and the math which shows that it's a mathmatically better choice) employees cutting costs because they have no stake in the operation. (http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/07/risky-companies.html -- yes, I realize it's a WoW blog.)
Basically, he says that while the company wants to spend the money on preventative maintenance (e.g., $1M cost) in order to avoid the low-risk/high-cost catastrophic event (e.g., $1B damage), the individual employee does not. Because they aren't held responsible for a portion of the damages from a catastrophe, their options are:
- Save $1M and get a raise - 1% of the time, incur a massive cost on the company, and lose their job.
This boils down to a guaranteed zero raise if they spend their budget on maintenance or other disaster-prevention, versus (potentially) a raise which is very unlikely to have any bad effects on them. When you combine that with people's tendency to underestimate the likelihood of catastrophic events (or, overestimate their ability to avoid them?), we find that many people have numerical motivation for skimping on things which are normally seen only as Costs.
Thank goodness for ethical engineers, who are looking out not just for themselves but for their company, customers, and neighbors.
The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing.
I wonder how feasible it would be to ask people to voluntarily reassign their copyrights to some entity, so that the kernel (or their parts?) could be updated to GPL3. Can parts of the work even be licensed in separate ways like that?
True; how long would it take to download ~5 TB (20x 50 GB) over a 1 gbps connection? What if they were lower quality, or compressed in a lossy way, and we still could torrent them, or even just stream the whole thing from Netflix? I suspect the convenience of streaming (or of downloading them ahead of time) will outweigh this.
The human body involuntarily reacts to the sensation generated by this device. This means unless you have an abnormal nervous system, your eyelids will automatically close and shield your eyes from any damage. At which point, if you're too dumb to either leave the area, take cover, or not keep your eyes closed while looking directly at the weapon, then you've managed to causes harm to yourself in spite of the fact your body has done everything possible to prevent it.
If the eyes close involuntarily, how will you be able to see well enough (as your entire body surface erupts in pain) to get out of the area? How do you know where the area is, and where it isn't? More importantly, how do you know your eyes will be able to close fast enough to prevent permanent eye injury (similar to the way lasers can blind you before you can blink)?
The trouble with having guns is that (1) sooner or later you're going to be tempted to use it on someone, which will result in you ending up in jail, or (2) someone else will use it on you, which will result in you being dead.
Similarly, there are people who are very grateful they survived an assault to be in situation 1, rather than dead because they were unarmed.
The whole gaming experience was flat and unrealistic - "go to this person and do his mission" over and over again, plus waiting behind someone else on the same mission to kill an NPC only to have that NPC stand up again for me to kill him.
A big part of enjoying it is willing suspension of disbelief, just as when we go see a Bond film.
As a player, I know that I am one of twenty thousand "heroes" on my server, each of whom has killed the same zombies, done the same "fedex" quests, and raided most of the same dungeons. When leveling and questing, I ignore them. (I solo most of my quests because it's easier and more fun, usually.) I experience the quests as (often miniscule) parts of a larger story: why are we here, what is going on, why is that guy bad, etc. I accept that respawns happen (just as when playing Mario or Mega Man, I accept that enemies respawn off-screen), but treat that as an abstraction. There are bad guys, we go kill them. I ignore that there are 42 other players who will want to come do the same thing in the next hour.
In dungeons, since they're repeatable, I treat them as mini-games: how quickly can we do this, how flawlessly can we execute, etc. I seek perfection at the encounter-level, to demonstrate mastery of my character's mechanics (as different classes and roles use different patterns of behavior/spells/attacks) and of the nature of my enemies. (Do we kill healers first? Casters? That mean troll berserker?)
At a certain point of play, enemies are basically target dummies for you to do your rotations on, and bosses are loot pinatas whose fight mechanics you have to master. But... Fallout and Mega Man are the same way: Pavlovian practice until you Get It Right, and then it's suddenly "boring". ("Hey look, I can snipe mutants' heads off. I think I'll do that from now on.")
You can focus on the big plot (why is the Lich King such a jerk? Man, he's a jerk. We should march up to Northrend and apply torches and pitchforks to his pain-feeling parts). You can focus on the medium-level plots (Wow, these frost giants are pretty misunderstood. Their gods and leaders have been totally manipulated by old gods!). You can focus on the fight-scale picture. (Soloing this guy is hard. Maybe if I fight him here, then jump down there and heal while he runs to me, then drag him back up... I can kill him before he kills me. Shoot, I forgot to interrupt/avoid that nasty thing he does.) Each of these are different ways you can enjoy an MMO -- it's neither a mutually exclusive list nor a complete one.
This is not about making "good games", this is about the evolution of games. Comples simulation games, for example, have traditionally been beyond consoles, since they just don't have the memory to hold the gameworld.
Sim games do tend to do better on PCs... except, the PS2 had Grand Theft Auto of various flavours, heralded of one of the best open world games. Consoles also had ports of Morrowind and Oblivion -- which again are two of the more complete world sim games out there. You're right, though, physical limitations limit them somewhat.
Consoles are basically equivalent to a "Decently Specced" PC from the time they were released (better graphics, at least); now, three years later, they're basically a 3 or 4 year old PC. Most casual computer users don't upgrade their PC for games all the time -- so the 2-4 year old computers make up a substantial section of the market.
Moreover, a developer CANNOT decide the PC's specs. Rather, they can list "desired" or "optimal" specs.. and most users will have that. But there will always be some subset of customers whose PC was some beige box that they bought at WalMart, with a crappy video card and a slow hard drive, and too little RAM, and the game will run like crap. (E.g.: Battlefield 2 ran terribly on my previous computer, because I couldn't afford to buy better at the time.) With a console, you're guaranteed that everyone can run it just as well. The fixed target yields a lower upper bound on allowable performance, but it also gives a reliable minimum bound on performance: Customers and Developers know that if it runs great on the demo machine, it'll run great in your living room.
A fixed hardware target ensures that everyone gets a good experience. This reduces the technical feats which games can do, but... that's not often game innovation. That's (usually) eye-candy innovation. Game innovation comes from the plot, the gameplay concept, and the writing. Deus Ex would feel more innovative than many games today, due to the breadth of player choices allowed, even if its graphics looked terrible (and no one would buy it next to Gears of War 4). ICO is tremendously innovative, and would be even if it were not as pretty as it is. Innovation and Eye Candy are orthogonal axes of game creation.
What makes this valuable (as opposed to trawling the torrent connections themselves) is the centralized nature: It's already collected. This makes data analysis on it much easier, since prospective users wouldn't need to gather the information themselves.
It seemed like an interesting extension of the conversation. Specifically:
Well, that's not quite true. Replace the word "Consequences" to "Costs", and you are flatly wrong. People respond to _costs_. And the fact of the matter is, for many Americans, the cost of throwing something away is quite low, and there's no reason for them not to do so..... we can extract the land acquisition and rent-value of continuing to do nothing more intelligent than simply _stacking garbage on city property_.
I'm not sure I agree with the later parts of the post, but that part seemed insightful. Costs are the consequence that influences people's behavior, whether they're monetary or in other forms. If the cost of dumping trash ($10/month) is less than taking my stuff to be recycled (drive 30 minutes, pay $, and only at particular times of the month), people are likely to toss it in the trash. It kindof makes me glad that part of my trash fee goes to have recyclable things picked out.
consoles hold back the development of games. Even something like XBox 360 has only 512 megs of memory, which severely limits how complex gameworlds it can represent; just compare with the 2 gigabytes minimum on newer PCs, and 6-8 gigs or more on high-end machines.
Bullshit.
Having a restrictive (yet capable) standard sandbox enables a developer to focus on working within those constraints, which can allow them to exercise creative freedom. Look at some of the most interesting and innovative games recently -- Portal, for example. Good games don't necessarily push hardware to it's limit.
Sure, you don't get as many "Crysis" equivalents (in terms of how hard they flog the hardware). However, you can get things like Heavy Rain, Portal, Rock Band, and tons of other innovative games. What makes a game good is gameplay and story -- if games are like cupcakes, then graphics are frosting on the cupcake. Sure, we always want better, but it's not sufficient (or even necessary). Lego Star Wars or Tetris Party don't really flog the hardware, but are still awesome games because their gameplay is excellent. Heavy Rain may not exercise the sort of hardware in a high end gaming PC, but it's main draw is the story and the degree to which you interact with it.
A fixed console target allows developers to push that hardware to the limit, and still have their target market consist of everyone with a console. With PCs, when the Next Crysis comes out, how many people will have (or will buy) the hardware for it? Fewer, I imagine, than those who already have an Xbox360 or PS3 or even a Wii.
You can get away with using them for speeds around 25 mph but even that is typically a tragedy. Just say no to concrete highways. Try to avoid using it in civil planning. Even the increased road glare is a hazard.
I've grown up in southern California, where most of our freeways are concrete, though roads are tarmac. I much prefer driving on concrete. I find the glare to be less in the mornings or evenings (though polarized sunglasses help a lot in both cases) than with oily tarmac. Sure, it's likely not so great for a road that doesn't have good maintenance, but for a highway system it is very nice to drive on. I've never encountered the damaged concrete roads that you have, which I think is ironic given that I live(d) in one of the most earthquake-prone parts of the country.
Another advantage of concrete is that they have cut grooves in many parts of the highways (running parallel to traffic) which allow a small amount of water to settle there. The net result is that I can still see where lane markers are, and the road glare from other car's lights is roughly halved. On a tarmac section of road (such as pretty much everything that isn't a freeway here), it's pure hell to see where the lanes are when it rains. This is especially stressful when there is no physical median between each side of the road, or when your 4-lane road has curves in it. When wet, tarmac is like driving on a mirror -- I can't see a damn thing that's useful, and it scares the hell out of me.
As a driver, I'd rather drive on concrete roads ALL the time.
The biggest problem with concrete is that you cannot repair it gracefully as you can with tarmac.... If the ground settles under 'crete you grind the highs and pray.
The ease of repair is a good point, though. I don't know how much time they spend resurfacing concrete roads. On the other hand, the only times I've seen substantial road work on our freeways has been when they're building NEW portions of road, or are re-surfacing tarmac. The concrete seems to last forever, whereas they end up sending new tarmac crews around to various roads every 5-10 years. I believe (but could be wrong) that tarmac degrades faster than concrete, especially under high traffic. The tarmac roads I drive, with the exception of the ones that have been freshly surfaced, are always in worse condition than the concrete highways which are older.
In the first case, he's stupid. In the second, he's ignorant, which isn't at all the same as stupid. He asked a question which was based on his (mistaken) assumption of what it was. That's not stupid, that's exercising the scientific method (sort of). The answers he got would either be:
- lol (not useful) - MD5 numbers can hold ____ (useful, confirms his assumption) - MD5 numbers don't work like that. (useful, disproves his assumption, and sets him on the right path)
If he merely asked "what's MD5?" he'd get an answer like "MD5 is a hash used in cryptography", which wouldn't answer his question at all.
Also... in case the original poster is even reading these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5 should give you good information. MD5 is a hashing algorithm. It takes an arbitrary number of bits (your e-mail address, or a linux ISO, or the contents of your novel) and transforms them into a fixed length number of bits. The goal of a hash is to make the resulting numbers be completely uncorrellatable to the input data -- so one or two bits difference in the source will yield a large difference in the output.
It's like very very lossy compression... except that you can't UNcompress anything from it. The only way to determine what may hash to a given sequence is to make a rainbow table, and see what other things hash to the same value.
And, if you were trolling when asking about MD5, kudos to you for making us bite, I guess.:) I'm surprised that geeks don't know what this is... but then I spent a month reading Applied Cryptography on one vacation, which probably isn't normal.:D
If you're only following a single feed. But I have like 10 lists in TweetDeck that all get individually queried, and there are some who have WAY more than that.
It seems somewhat silly if you need to check feeds separately. Why not say, "Have A,B,C, or D said anything?", and get a batch of replies? After all, in theory Twitter already knows who you are following, so you probably don't even need to ask for most things.
Also, why do we care about per-second updating from Twitter? Perhaps some people do -- make it a premium service. For others, why not do a batch check every minute, or 30 seconds? If you're not in the middle of a conversation, there's a low chance that you need to be notified immediately, right?
I don't want to buy GM food. It's not because it isn't safe (because I don't know), but because I do not want to voluntarily support Monsanto's abusive practices. (I don't like the idea of losing our seed diversity, either, but mainly it's that Monsanto's leveraged technology and the legal system in ways which are (to me) evil.) That's why I want to see "Made with Monsanto" stickers on things, just as I look for the "certified organic" labels.
Namely, the point of art is to explain something beyond what is actually there. It must invoke emotion or something, or it's just a thing.
I won't touch your "or something" statement.:)
Some of the most engrossing and emotional stories, or parts of stories, I've encountered have been through video games. Sure, many video games don't aim to do that, but many do. Here are some examples that I experienced.
In Rainbow Six (and some of it's sequels), I worked hard to save hostages; I know they're only pixels and yet, the emotional depths of my failure when hostages ran into my line of fire as I was shooting their remaining captor was more memorable than any other failure (or success) in the story. Perhaps it wasn't the intent of the developers to make that, but their quest for "realism" in reactions and ballistics made it possible in a way I'd never seen before. I suppose this doesn't count as art, as it was not deliberate.
In Aliens vs Predator, I crept huddled in the Alien-infested tunnels of a wrecked outpost, listening with ever-increasing panic to the movement tracker, and eyeing my ever-decreasing ammunition count. I was screwed. Those missions conveyed superbly the emotion of being prey. You think a horror movie is bad? Imagine thinking you have control over where the protagonist goes, and he's going to die anyways. With a movie, I can stop watching, or fast forward past a scene, or cover my eyes until that part is over. In AvP, only I could progress the plot, and I had to fight through my fears, drowning in my fear, sweat trickling coldly down my back, or else I would never see the rest of the story. The direct interaction I had with it meant that it was impossible for me to completely escape those feelings. With lights on and after having taken a week-long break from the game, the cold panic gripped me within minutes (seconds?) the next time I started playing it.
In Call of Duty 4, I clung desperately to my harness as our helicopter raced to escape ground zero of an impending nuclear device's explosion. Then, one of our escorts, who had saved my ass several times not ten minutes before, was critically damaged, and her helicopter went down. Marines leave no one behind. (I don't want to die! Get us the hell out of here! We'll never make it! We can't leave her to die here.) So, we fought our way to her copter, dragged her out of it, and got the hell out of dodge. Almost. Sweet victory has rarely soured so quickly. I get choked up about it now. A fictional character, and I'm emotionally invested in my failure to save her, despite knowing that it was scripted, that I could not save her (or myself). In my Rainbow Six example, my victory soured much more sharply, but this was deliberate. This was a Kobayashi Maru which I cannot forget, which the developers gave me. How is that not artful storytelling? It ranks up there on its emotional impact with some of the more gut-wrenching parts of Saving Private Ryan. (Players of ALL of the Call of Duty single player campaigns will likely have memorable stories like this.)
In World of Warcraft, I helped a father rekindle a relationship with his son. His son was trapped in a crusade which no longer was heroic, believing (from a young age) that his father was exiled as a traitor. After I helped him see the truth, he forsook the corrupted Scarlet Crusade, and we made our way to a reunion with his father. When Taelan Fordring was caught and murdered at his father's feet, just at the moment of his redemption, I was witness to an epic event. With his son lying dead before him, Tirion proceeded to exact vengeance, and then rekindled his vows of heroism (and his connection with the Light). It was... awesome. To watch him do what any father would want to do when facing his child's murders was very emotional for me - perhaps because I was holding my newborn baby close to my chest at the time and prayin
China... doesn't have laws. It has dictatorial guidelines you may be killed for not following but they aren't the same.
I realize you're likely trolling, but I'll bite. There's no qualitative difference between laws and "guidelines you may be punished for not following". That's all a law is: a social convention which is backed by the threat of force. Whether that threat is of death, imprisonment, caning, amputation, or merely a fine is merely a matter of degree.
You may feel it's unjust or that it's your moral duty to pursue your inalienable human rights, but what you're really doing when you enter a country is agreeing (implicity and sometimes explicitly) that you will be subject to their laws. If you go in and expect to flaunt them, at least do it with the knowledge that if caught, you are likely to be punished according to THEIR social conventions. That may mean caning for spray painting a sign somewhere, or bringing some drugs with you, or it could mean imprisinment for large numbers of years for things which your local oppressive government deems unsavory. It's [b]foolish[/b] to do any of those things, because that risk is there. This is not as low-risk as torrenting a music album.
Someone made a point earlier about the courageous man who stood in front of tanks. He was a hero, a courageous man. He's also dead. Consider whether your goal is to make an impact on history, or whether it is to return home to your loved ones (and relative safety) without having been harmed.
If you only drink mainstream bottled beverages, wouldn't that rule out any local factor in what you are drinking? "Well, he looks like he was drinking some beer brewed in Ireland..." Similarly, Dasani/Sparkletts/Arrowhead all have relatively large sales areas, don't they?
Secretly record the abuse on video. Talk to a lawyer. It's possible she's already abusing the kids while you're away -- we all saw the video several months back of the abusive babysitter, right?
I have no idea how you would get such cameras and storage for the video (not to mention get time to review it) without your wife knowing about it (and thereby modifying her behavior), but if you could, it sounds like it could be some pretty damning evidence.
Exactly. Challenging their authority will lead to all sorts of pain, and potentially ancillary charges like resisting arrest, if they get creative. I'm glad for the info on the phtographer's rights page -- I read that several years ago, and saved it. I'm quite thankful that some people exercise their photographer's rights; it just won't be me, I think.
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I believe it's muscle memory, and practice will perfect it. Bear with me if this sounds somewhat absurd and comical; I am quite serious that I think you should practice it. I've just never practiced shaking hands (I should!), so I'm coming up with these ideas as I write. Sorry.
Have you considered doing some hand-eye coordination exercises? Practice doing things where you be aware at a muscle-memory level of where your hands and arms are. Martial arts, fencing, juggling. (Of those, fencing seems most apropos, to me, but that's because I am a fencer [though a poor one].) In fencing, one of the beginner's drills is to constantly practice placing the tip of the blade (via arm extension, and then later with a lunge) on a small target -- post-it, a coin, a mark on a wall, the knot of a tree. Repeating this helps you fine-tune your motor skills when doing something you don't do often, until it's muscle memory. For a more handshake-like analogue, you might practice pressing your doorbell (without looking at it), as that's roughly hand-height. Make sure you return your hand to the resting (at your sides) position each time, because what you're practicing is going from there to a desired position.
You might also just practice shaking hands with someone you trust. Tell them, "Hey honey/Joe/dad, I am really bad at shaking hands. I need practice to make sure my hand goes the right way. Can you help?" Then, sit down, and practice shaking hands. Start by standing still, with their hand in as close to the same place as possible. Grab their hand like you would while shaking. Do it again and again until you can comfortably predict (visualize? know? expect?) where their hand IS, so that you can guide your hand for proper docking. Once you master that, practice doing it while approaching them. Then, practice doing it while one or both of you are standing or seated.
I like a sibling poster's suggestion to first snapshot where their hand is, dock quickly (but not hurriedly), and then secure eye contact. I think I do this -- look briefly at the hand before I grab it, to make sure I have judged correctly where it is. This is probably even more important when you assume that most people are like you or I and are imperfect at hand-shaking, and therefore probably do not have a lot of practice getting their hand to the "right" position. So, find their hand, put yours in it, look them in the eye, shake. Practice, practice, practice.
This seems to absurd to be talking about this. If I had punctuation for "I'm not at all being sarcastic" I'd want to use that ... but that would probably be considered sarcasm. :-)
It's quite possible that he wasn't super-busy at the time, but had in the past been frequently pestered by her (and others) for graphic design "favors". She could have spent 5 (or 2) minutes in Word and made her own, and instead decided to waste his time. So, being a complete dick to her (if it's not fiction) sends the message that not only is your request a waste of my time, /it's an insult that you'd even ask me to do this for free/. Especially if it were a chronic problem. Much as BOFHs often get that way after being jaded from months of user abuse, I see this as him wanting to make an example of this coworker. (Again, if it's not fiction.)
Someone that were polite and friendly would have said, "Hey, my cat's gone missing; can you make me a good looking 'lost cat' poster (here's a picture!) that will help people find her? I'll bring you a 6-pack of your favourite $FROSTY_BEVERAGE in thanks." (Or something similar.) By making it clear that they value your time, and aren't trying to merely freeload, they are more likely to get a good response, rather than either trolling (if bored or not friends) or a "why not do it yourself in word?" response.
Some people are oblivious. She might not have realized that she was being rude to ask him the way she did, or that she was treating him as an employee and not as a peer. His response, which was more elaborate way of saying "OH SURE let me drop everything and help you do something you can do yourself, but instead want me to do for free, with very little guidance, and lots of criticism" -- clearly sarcastic. I am sure that some people would be so self-centered as to not realize that someone was uninterested in helping them at the drop of a hat.
It is? I don't recall anything about that, can you tell me which of the first ten amendments relate to selective prosecution? I don't think any of them do, from my cursory re-reading of them. The closest is perhaps the prohibition on cruel or unusual punishment, but I don't think that applies at all.
Selective prosecution (choosing which crimes and criminals to prosecute) allows a judicial system to prioritize crimes or criminals who are most disruptive, to avoid enforcing an unjust law, or merely to scale their workload to fit the number of people they can leverage. For example, we don't have enough cops to ticket everyone for jaywalking, or littering, or speeding. So, the police in some places spend more of their time pursuing things that are either more harmful (robberies/assaults) or more lucrative (drug busts, speed traps). Clearly, in some cases it feels unjust when law enforcement chooses to devote many resources to things like speed traps, but that's a problem with their funding or with their local mandate, rather than with a "problem" of selective prosecution.
Selective prosecution is basically an opposite extreme of "zero tolerance". It allows people in authority to either overlook minor offenses or to tell someone, "Look, you're a good kid, so knock that the hell off" rather than jailing/expelling/punishing them. In some cases it's not a good idea, but it's unwise (IMO) to try to avoid it completely, simply because no matter how hard you work at enforcement, there are always some that slip through your grasp.
Indeed. A blog I follow discussed the motivation behind (and the math which shows that it's a mathmatically better choice) employees cutting costs because they have no stake in the operation. (http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/07/risky-companies.html -- yes, I realize it's a WoW blog.)
Basically, he says that while the company wants to spend the money on preventative maintenance (e.g., $1M cost) in order to avoid the low-risk/high-cost catastrophic event (e.g., $1B damage), the individual employee does not. Because they aren't held responsible for a portion of the damages from a catastrophe, their options are:
- Save $1M and get a raise
- 1% of the time, incur a massive cost on the company, and lose their job.
This boils down to a guaranteed zero raise if they spend their budget on maintenance or other disaster-prevention, versus (potentially) a raise which is very unlikely to have any bad effects on them. When you combine that with people's tendency to underestimate the likelihood of catastrophic events (or, overestimate their ability to avoid them?), we find that many people have numerical motivation for skimping on things which are normally seen only as Costs.
Thank goodness for ethical engineers, who are looking out not just for themselves but for their company, customers, and neighbors.
I wonder how feasible it would be to ask people to voluntarily reassign their copyrights to some entity, so that the kernel (or their parts?) could be updated to GPL3. Can parts of the work even be licensed in separate ways like that?
True; how long would it take to download ~5 TB (20x 50 GB) over a 1 gbps connection? What if they were lower quality, or compressed in a lossy way, and we still could torrent them, or even just stream the whole thing from Netflix? I suspect the convenience of streaming (or of downloading them ahead of time) will outweigh this.
I would think that doing things in an ethically unsound manner is worse than doing nothing.
If the eyes close involuntarily, how will you be able to see well enough (as your entire body surface erupts in pain) to get out of the area? How do you know where the area is, and where it isn't? More importantly, how do you know your eyes will be able to close fast enough to prevent permanent eye injury (similar to the way lasers can blind you before you can blink)?
Similarly, there are people who are very grateful they survived an assault to be in situation 1, rather than dead because they were unarmed.
A big part of enjoying it is willing suspension of disbelief, just as when we go see a Bond film.
As a player, I know that I am one of twenty thousand "heroes" on my server, each of whom has killed the same zombies, done the same "fedex" quests, and raided most of the same dungeons. When leveling and questing, I ignore them. (I solo most of my quests because it's easier and more fun, usually.) I experience the quests as (often miniscule) parts of a larger story: why are we here, what is going on, why is that guy bad, etc. I accept that respawns happen (just as when playing Mario or Mega Man, I accept that enemies respawn off-screen), but treat that as an abstraction. There are bad guys, we go kill them. I ignore that there are 42 other players who will want to come do the same thing in the next hour.
In dungeons, since they're repeatable, I treat them as mini-games: how quickly can we do this, how flawlessly can we execute, etc. I seek perfection at the encounter-level, to demonstrate mastery of my character's mechanics (as different classes and roles use different patterns of behavior/spells/attacks) and of the nature of my enemies. (Do we kill healers first? Casters? That mean troll berserker?)
At a certain point of play, enemies are basically target dummies for you to do your rotations on, and bosses are loot pinatas whose fight mechanics you have to master. But ... Fallout and Mega Man are the same way: Pavlovian practice until you Get It Right, and then it's suddenly "boring". ("Hey look, I can snipe mutants' heads off. I think I'll do that from now on.")
You can focus on the big plot (why is the Lich King such a jerk? Man, he's a jerk. We should march up to Northrend and apply torches and pitchforks to his pain-feeling parts). You can focus on the medium-level plots (Wow, these frost giants are pretty misunderstood. Their gods and leaders have been totally manipulated by old gods!). You can focus on the fight-scale picture. (Soloing this guy is hard. Maybe if I fight him here, then jump down there and heal while he runs to me, then drag him back up ... I can kill him before he kills me. Shoot, I forgot to interrupt/avoid that nasty thing he does.) Each of these are different ways you can enjoy an MMO -- it's neither a mutually exclusive list nor a complete one.
Sim games do tend to do better on PCs ... except, the PS2 had Grand Theft Auto of various flavours, heralded of one of the best open world games. Consoles also had ports of Morrowind and Oblivion -- which again are two of the more complete world sim games out there. You're right, though, physical limitations limit them somewhat.
Consoles are basically equivalent to a "Decently Specced" PC from the time they were released (better graphics, at least); now, three years later, they're basically a 3 or 4 year old PC. Most casual computer users don't upgrade their PC for games all the time -- so the 2-4 year old computers make up a substantial section of the market.
Moreover, a developer CANNOT decide the PC's specs. Rather, they can list "desired" or "optimal" specs .. and most users will have that. But there will always be some subset of customers whose PC was some beige box that they bought at WalMart, with a crappy video card and a slow hard drive, and too little RAM, and the game will run like crap. (E.g.: Battlefield 2 ran terribly on my previous computer, because I couldn't afford to buy better at the time.) With a console, you're guaranteed that everyone can run it just as well. The fixed target yields a lower upper bound on allowable performance, but it also gives a reliable minimum bound on performance: Customers and Developers know that if it runs great on the demo machine, it'll run great in your living room.
A fixed hardware target ensures that everyone gets a good experience. This reduces the technical feats which games can do, but ... that's not often game innovation. That's (usually) eye-candy innovation. Game innovation comes from the plot, the gameplay concept, and the writing. Deus Ex would feel more innovative than many games today, due to the breadth of player choices allowed, even if its graphics looked terrible (and no one would buy it next to Gears of War 4). ICO is tremendously innovative, and would be even if it were not as pretty as it is. Innovation and Eye Candy are orthogonal axes of game creation.
I realize it's not your dream compensation, and piracy sucked for you, but $60k/year is a pretty respectable income for many people.
What makes this valuable (as opposed to trawling the torrent connections themselves) is the centralized nature: It's already collected. This makes data analysis on it much easier, since prospective users wouldn't need to gather the information themselves.
It seemed like an interesting extension of the conversation. Specifically:
I'm not sure I agree with the later parts of the post, but that part seemed insightful. Costs are the consequence that influences people's behavior, whether they're monetary or in other forms. If the cost of dumping trash ($10/month) is less than taking my stuff to be recycled (drive 30 minutes, pay $, and only at particular times of the month), people are likely to toss it in the trash. It kindof makes me glad that part of my trash fee goes to have recyclable things picked out.
Bullshit.
Having a restrictive (yet capable) standard sandbox enables a developer to focus on working within those constraints, which can allow them to exercise creative freedom. Look at some of the most interesting and innovative games recently -- Portal, for example. Good games don't necessarily push hardware to it's limit.
Sure, you don't get as many "Crysis" equivalents (in terms of how hard they flog the hardware). However, you can get things like Heavy Rain, Portal, Rock Band, and tons of other innovative games. What makes a game good is gameplay and story -- if games are like cupcakes, then graphics are frosting on the cupcake. Sure, we always want better, but it's not sufficient (or even necessary). Lego Star Wars or Tetris Party don't really flog the hardware, but are still awesome games because their gameplay is excellent. Heavy Rain may not exercise the sort of hardware in a high end gaming PC, but it's main draw is the story and the degree to which you interact with it.
A fixed console target allows developers to push that hardware to the limit, and still have their target market consist of everyone with a console. With PCs, when the Next Crysis comes out, how many people will have (or will buy) the hardware for it? Fewer, I imagine, than those who already have an Xbox360 or PS3 or even a Wii.
I've grown up in southern California, where most of our freeways are concrete, though roads are tarmac. I much prefer driving on concrete. I find the glare to be less in the mornings or evenings (though polarized sunglasses help a lot in both cases) than with oily tarmac. Sure, it's likely not so great for a road that doesn't have good maintenance, but for a highway system it is very nice to drive on. I've never encountered the damaged concrete roads that you have, which I think is ironic given that I live(d) in one of the most earthquake-prone parts of the country.
Another advantage of concrete is that they have cut grooves in many parts of the highways (running parallel to traffic) which allow a small amount of water to settle there. The net result is that I can still see where lane markers are, and the road glare from other car's lights is roughly halved. On a tarmac section of road (such as pretty much everything that isn't a freeway here), it's pure hell to see where the lanes are when it rains. This is especially stressful when there is no physical median between each side of the road, or when your 4-lane road has curves in it. When wet, tarmac is like driving on a mirror -- I can't see a damn thing that's useful, and it scares the hell out of me.
As a driver, I'd rather drive on concrete roads ALL the time.
The ease of repair is a good point, though. I don't know how much time they spend resurfacing concrete roads. On the other hand, the only times I've seen substantial road work on our freeways has been when they're building NEW portions of road, or are re-surfacing tarmac. The concrete seems to last forever, whereas they end up sending new tarmac crews around to various roads every 5-10 years. I believe (but could be wrong) that tarmac degrades faster than concrete, especially under high traffic. The tarmac roads I drive, with the exception of the ones that have been freshly surfaced, are always in worse condition than the concrete highways which are older.
In the first case, he's stupid.
In the second, he's ignorant, which isn't at all the same as stupid. He asked a question which was based on his (mistaken) assumption of what it was. That's not stupid, that's exercising the scientific method (sort of). The answers he got would either be:
- lol (not useful)
- MD5 numbers can hold ____ (useful, confirms his assumption)
- MD5 numbers don't work like that. (useful, disproves his assumption, and sets him on the right path)
If he merely asked "what's MD5?" he'd get an answer like "MD5 is a hash used in cryptography", which wouldn't answer his question at all.
Also ... in case the original poster is even reading these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD5 should give you good information. MD5 is a hashing algorithm. It takes an arbitrary number of bits (your e-mail address, or a linux ISO, or the contents of your novel) and transforms them into a fixed length number of bits. The goal of a hash is to make the resulting numbers be completely uncorrellatable to the input data -- so one or two bits difference in the source will yield a large difference in the output.
It's like very very lossy compression ... except that you can't UNcompress anything from it. The only way to determine what may hash to a given sequence is to make a rainbow table, and see what other things hash to the same value.
And, if you were trolling when asking about MD5, kudos to you for making us bite, I guess. :) I'm surprised that geeks don't know what this is... but then I spent a month reading Applied Cryptography on one vacation, which probably isn't normal. :D
It seems somewhat silly if you need to check feeds separately. Why not say, "Have A,B,C, or D said anything?", and get a batch of replies? After all, in theory Twitter already knows who you are following, so you probably don't even need to ask for most things.
Also, why do we care about per-second updating from Twitter? Perhaps some people do -- make it a premium service. For others, why not do a batch check every minute, or 30 seconds? If you're not in the middle of a conversation, there's a low chance that you need to be notified immediately, right?
Surely I'm missing something; please enlighten me. :)
Perhaps google image searches are banned. :)
I wonder, does filtering one's access to things like that increase the risk of social engineering?
I don't want to buy GM food. It's not because it isn't safe (because I don't know), but because I do not want to voluntarily support Monsanto's abusive practices. (I don't like the idea of losing our seed diversity, either, but mainly it's that Monsanto's leveraged technology and the legal system in ways which are (to me) evil.) That's why I want to see "Made with Monsanto" stickers on things, just as I look for the "certified organic" labels.
I won't touch your "or something" statement. :)
Some of the most engrossing and emotional stories, or parts of stories, I've encountered have been through video games. Sure, many video games don't aim to do that, but many do. Here are some examples that I experienced.
In Rainbow Six (and some of it's sequels), I worked hard to save hostages; I know they're only pixels and yet, the emotional depths of my failure when hostages ran into my line of fire as I was shooting their remaining captor was more memorable than any other failure (or success) in the story. Perhaps it wasn't the intent of the developers to make that, but their quest for "realism" in reactions and ballistics made it possible in a way I'd never seen before. I suppose this doesn't count as art, as it was not deliberate.
In Aliens vs Predator, I crept huddled in the Alien-infested tunnels of a wrecked outpost, listening with ever-increasing panic to the movement tracker, and eyeing my ever-decreasing ammunition count. I was screwed. Those missions conveyed superbly the emotion of being prey. You think a horror movie is bad? Imagine thinking you have control over where the protagonist goes, and he's going to die anyways. With a movie, I can stop watching, or fast forward past a scene, or cover my eyes until that part is over. In AvP, only I could progress the plot, and I had to fight through my fears, drowning in my fear, sweat trickling coldly down my back, or else I would never see the rest of the story. The direct interaction I had with it meant that it was impossible for me to completely escape those feelings. With lights on and after having taken a week-long break from the game, the cold panic gripped me within minutes (seconds?) the next time I started playing it.
In Call of Duty 4, I clung desperately to my harness as our helicopter raced to escape ground zero of an impending nuclear device's explosion. Then, one of our escorts, who had saved my ass several times not ten minutes before, was critically damaged, and her helicopter went down. Marines leave no one behind. (I don't want to die! Get us the hell out of here! We'll never make it! We can't leave her to die here.) So, we fought our way to her copter, dragged her out of it, and got the hell out of dodge. Almost. Sweet victory has rarely soured so quickly. I get choked up about it now. A fictional character, and I'm emotionally invested in my failure to save her, despite knowing that it was scripted, that I could not save her (or myself). In my Rainbow Six example, my victory soured much more sharply, but this was deliberate. This was a Kobayashi Maru which I cannot forget, which the developers gave me. How is that not artful storytelling? It ranks up there on its emotional impact with some of the more gut-wrenching parts of Saving Private Ryan. (Players of ALL of the Call of Duty single player campaigns will likely have memorable stories like this.)
In World of Warcraft, I helped a father rekindle a relationship with his son. His son was trapped in a crusade which no longer was heroic, believing (from a young age) that his father was exiled as a traitor. After I helped him see the truth, he forsook the corrupted Scarlet Crusade, and we made our way to a reunion with his father. When Taelan Fordring was caught and murdered at his father's feet, just at the moment of his redemption, I was witness to an epic event. With his son lying dead before him, Tirion proceeded to exact vengeance, and then rekindled his vows of heroism (and his connection with the Light). It was ... awesome. To watch him do what any father would want to do when facing his child's murders was very emotional for me - perhaps because I was holding my newborn baby close to my chest at the time and prayin
I realize you're likely trolling, but I'll bite. There's no qualitative difference between laws and "guidelines you may be punished for not following". That's all a law is: a social convention which is backed by the threat of force. Whether that threat is of death, imprisonment, caning, amputation, or merely a fine is merely a matter of degree.
You may feel it's unjust or that it's your moral duty to pursue your inalienable human rights, but what you're really doing when you enter a country is agreeing (implicity and sometimes explicitly) that you will be subject to their laws. If you go in and expect to flaunt them, at least do it with the knowledge that if caught, you are likely to be punished according to THEIR social conventions. That may mean caning for spray painting a sign somewhere, or bringing some drugs with you, or it could mean imprisinment for large numbers of years for things which your local oppressive government deems unsavory. It's [b]foolish[/b] to do any of those things, because that risk is there. This is not as low-risk as torrenting a music album.
Someone made a point earlier about the courageous man who stood in front of tanks. He was a hero, a courageous man. He's also dead. Consider whether your goal is to make an impact on history, or whether it is to return home to your loved ones (and relative safety) without having been harmed.
If you only drink mainstream bottled beverages, wouldn't that rule out any local factor in what you are drinking? "Well, he looks like he was drinking some beer brewed in Ireland..." Similarly, Dasani/Sparkletts/Arrowhead all have relatively large sales areas, don't they?
Secretly record the abuse on video. Talk to a lawyer. It's possible she's already abusing the kids while you're away -- we all saw the video several months back of the abusive babysitter, right?
I have no idea how you would get such cameras and storage for the video (not to mention get time to review it) without your wife knowing about it (and thereby modifying her behavior), but if you could, it sounds like it could be some pretty damning evidence.
Exactly. Challenging their authority will lead to all sorts of pain, and potentially ancillary charges like resisting arrest, if they get creative. I'm glad for the info on the phtographer's rights page -- I read that several years ago, and saved it. I'm quite thankful that some people exercise their photographer's rights; it just won't be me, I think.