I seriously cannot believe some of the idiotic posts I'm seeing in this thread. Why do people think you're supposed to be able to play an MMO constantly, forever and ever, and always be able to have new content available to play? Are you people fucking retarded? It takes ten to a hundred times as much time and effort to create interesting content as it does to experience it. Hey, did it ever occur to you that maybe once you hit level 60, if you don't like raiding or grinding for loot, and you've finished all the available quests, you could stop playing WoW? GASP! NO! YOU MUST RAID THE SAME DUNGEON A BILLION TIMES!!! RAWR!!!!!!!111dragon
I mean, it's not like WoW has 3,000 or so quests, most of which you probably didn't do on your way from 1-60 with a given character. It's not like there are eight other classes you could play, or seven other races, some of whom have large swathes of entirely different quests. No, no, I'm going to bitch because I got to level 60 AND THERE'S NOT INFINITE MORE CONTENT TO PLAY! OMGWTFBBQORLY!!
Jesus. If you don't like raiding, and you don't want to start a new character (try the other faction! They have an almost entirely separate set of quests to do!), and you're bored with the game, STOP PLAYING. You played for a few months, Blizzard got some of your cash, it's quite a fair trade. Quit bitching like you're entitled to something which is impossible to create. Christ on a crutch.
(Lest anyone impugn my qualifications to rant on this topic, I have a level 60 warlock, 60 priest, 44 warrior, 35 hunter, 30 mage, 25 rogue, 24 paladin, and 10 druid. That's on ONE server. I played a lot until a few months ago (don't have the time now). Oh noes!)
The problem with Slashdot is that the signal to noise ratio of comments has been getting worse and worse.
That's preposterous. Go back and look at stories from a year, two years, five years ago; there was just as much gibberish and nonsense back then as there is now.
I have found software from Chessbase (Fritz, etc) to be pretty demeaning to women. In response to moving the queen for the first time in Fritz 7, for example, the opponent replied (audibly): "A woman's place is in the kitchen." I have read reviews (can't find them now, though) that Fritz and Chesster have similar comments, especially in the multimedia sequences and that these cannot be skipped. So unless you want your daughter being repeatedly told how inferior they are, or your son exposed to such sexist views, I would stay away from F & C.
I've just spend a little bit trying to Google for anything about Fritz or Chessbase involving women, kitchen, misogyny, insults, or anything else that might refer to what you're talking about, and I can't find anything. I find it hard to believe that there wouldn't be a significant uproar about such things if they actually did exist. Do you have any reliable source or reference for these supposed comments that Fritz makes?
While you sniveling liberals are sitting up in your ivory towers, making all your pointless, academic distinctions, George Bush is plowing straight ahead,
I'm envisioning Dubya at the controls of a 767, plowing directly into the ivory towers...
Because we allow any citizen, even those who can't read or write, to vote.
Yeah! We should institute some kind of test before people are allowed to vote. The test will of course be totally unbiased and impartial, since it will be written by humans, who are unbiased and impartial. This will ensure that everyone who is allowed to vote does not just happen to think the same way we do.
Oh, that's right! As it turns out, the only way to have a just society is to let all its members vote, regardless of how stupid they think the other guy is. It turns out that the real reason Bush won was a combination of fearmongering (old people went out to vote against gay marriage, and just happened to vote for Bush, too) and a dash of election fraud in those uncomfortably contested places.
Unlike most Americans, I recall that as a "child", (12, 13, etc.) I was quite horny and would have welcomed the opportunity to have intercourse with an adult, regardless of whether there was a camera rolling or not. I thus don't see "child porn" as a universal evil.
You probably would have ended up with an even more fucked-up attitude toward sexuality than you appear to have now. Just because you thought it was a good idea when you were twelve doesn't mean it actually was a good idea. When I was 14, I thought it would be a good idea to throw rocks into my neighbor's swimming pool. I also had an IQ of 140+ back then. So what?
But most people nowadays (at least here in the States) don't like to judge things on a case-by-case basis; they like blanket statements, sweeping moral judgements that apply to all instances of a particular thing.
You know, there are actual reasons that every industrialized society in the world uses age as a fundamental criteria for the advent of certain rights. For one thing, individually assessing anyone for a given right, regardless of age, would require vastly more resources -- if anyone at any age can demand to be tested for the right to drive, then instead of testing someone once or twice when they're sixteen, you have to start testing them when they're (say) five or six, because they demand it. Even if you have a one-year wait between tests, that's still 10+ tests for that one person, instead of one or two. These things take time, energy, and money. Plus, you have to add physiological criteria for a lot of things -- the age of 16 generally means you are tall enough to reach the pedals and strong enough to turn the wheel. So not only are you performing ten times as many tests, the tests are more involved because now you have to measure the height and weight and arm reach and reflexes and attention span of everyone who takes it!
And that's just driving. How do you fairly devise a test to determine whether someone is psychosocially ready to start having sex, especially considering the extremely divergent views on sexuality in our culture? Or to vote? Or to be allowed to drink alcohol? And any such test, which would (for feasbility reasons) have to consist entirely of questions, could be passed by any kid who was coached properly, even if they weren't "really" ready for it in any realistic sense.
Let's say that parents are allowed to decide those things for their children. If the kid really is ready to do something, he ought to be able to convince his parents that he's ready, shouldn't he? But we can't just let parents approve these things; we all know how many bad parents there are out there who will give their kids anything they want. There will likely never be an 8-year-old who should be allowed to vote or drink.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot of ways our attitudes toward children are screwed up, and I don't think all age restrictions should remain as they are. But insisting that everyone should be individually assessed for their readiness to drink, smoke, or fuck is absurdly unrealistic.
Uh... ID is a sham by definition. The entirety of ID can be summed up in two short sentences:
"We think that evolution can't explain the diversity of life. Therefore, a deity must have caused it."
It's not a scientific hypothesis, scientific theory, or scientific anything. It's not science. And yet many people are trying to claim that it is science. It's not, and no amount of wordplay will ever change that.
However they will do nothing for the kamikazee use of the comma!
Agreed. Our current laws (of grammar) are insufficient for handling suicide commas. We need to enact the PUNCTUATION Act (Proper Usage of Nearby Commas To Understand... uh... Abbreviations... shit.)
Today I saw that cute boy Jimmy, who offered me cheap c14li5, and he was totally like "Pssh, whatever," but he's SOOOO adorable, and then Nmebe Mboko of Nigeria contacted me about some money in a bank account, and Jenny was all totally drooling, she's goes so crazy over like the lamest guys, and then Melanie said that she'd gotten a really low-rate mortgage, and I was like, that's totally cool!
But someone had to write the first compiler, by hand, in machine code. The biological analogy is constructing the cellular machinery atom by atom until you've got something that can process DNA code.
You'd think a company that sponsors things like the Summer of Code would at least let people TRY to get their product running under something like Wine.
What exactly makes you think they AREN'T making a Linux version? These things take time.
The constant that I can think is the speed of light. Apparently, c has decreased over the last 100 years, as measured in the various experiments that have been performed. I haven't heard about it in a while, so it might have been disproven.
It was disproved probably three or four days after the "hypothesis" was proposed, in 1981. Read this. And do some other searching; the speed of light has not decayed at all. Don't take this the wrong way, but the whole idea is nothing but creationist propaganda:)
Sophisticated ID advocacy requires that the public face of the movement be very quiet about its religious motivations, for fear of exactly what happened in Kitzmiller.
Which is why it's important to point out every time you mention ID that ID is creationism. They're the same thing, with a new name. Always reinforce the (true) idea that ID and creationism are the same thing.
Is it really going to hurt anyone if they do say 2 classes on ID showing it's negative sides and what ID supporters call evidence?
If it's framed as an example of what is not science, then yes, it could be very useful. I think part of the problem in basic science education is that kids aren't really taught what science is -- they're just taught a lot of random basic scientific facts (our solar system has nine planets! woo!), and maybe given the usual rundown on observe-predict-experiment-repeat, without really coming to understand the large-scale implications of science. Maybe that stuff is too complicated for kids, but high school students should definitely be able to understand it.
Of course, I'd be wary of the anti-ID classes being corrupted to actually present ID or other crackpot theories, but... it's something to consider.
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously cannot believe some of the idiotic posts I'm seeing in this thread. Why do people think you're supposed to be able to play an MMO constantly, forever and ever, and always be able to have new content available to play? Are you people fucking retarded? It takes ten to a hundred times as much time and effort to create interesting content as it does to experience it. Hey, did it ever occur to you that maybe once you hit level 60, if you don't like raiding or grinding for loot, and you've finished all the available quests, you could stop playing WoW? GASP! NO! YOU MUST RAID THE SAME DUNGEON A BILLION TIMES!!! RAWR!!!!!!!111dragon
I mean, it's not like WoW has 3,000 or so quests, most of which you probably didn't do on your way from 1-60 with a given character. It's not like there are eight other classes you could play, or seven other races, some of whom have large swathes of entirely different quests. No, no, I'm going to bitch because I got to level 60 AND THERE'S NOT INFINITE MORE CONTENT TO PLAY! OMGWTFBBQORLY!!
Jesus. If you don't like raiding, and you don't want to start a new character (try the other faction! They have an almost entirely separate set of quests to do!), and you're bored with the game, STOP PLAYING. You played for a few months, Blizzard got some of your cash, it's quite a fair trade. Quit bitching like you're entitled to something which is impossible to create. Christ on a crutch.
(Lest anyone impugn my qualifications to rant on this topic, I have a level 60 warlock, 60 priest, 44 warrior, 35 hunter, 30 mage, 25 rogue, 24 paladin, and 10 druid. That's on ONE server. I played a lot until a few months ago (don't have the time now). Oh noes!)
Yeah, the world was better back when a random Joe couldn't verify whether or not such a quote was real. Er, wait...
Oh, that's right! As it turns out, the only way to have a just society is to let all its members vote, regardless of how stupid they think the other guy is. It turns out that the real reason Bush won was a combination of fearmongering (old people went out to vote against gay marriage, and just happened to vote for Bush, too) and a dash of election fraud in those uncomfortably contested places.
You know, there are actual reasons that every industrialized society in the world uses age as a fundamental criteria for the advent of certain rights. For one thing, individually assessing anyone for a given right, regardless of age, would require vastly more resources -- if anyone at any age can demand to be tested for the right to drive, then instead of testing someone once or twice when they're sixteen, you have to start testing them when they're (say) five or six, because they demand it. Even if you have a one-year wait between tests, that's still 10+ tests for that one person, instead of one or two. These things take time, energy, and money. Plus, you have to add physiological criteria for a lot of things -- the age of 16 generally means you are tall enough to reach the pedals and strong enough to turn the wheel. So not only are you performing ten times as many tests, the tests are more involved because now you have to measure the height and weight and arm reach and reflexes and attention span of everyone who takes it!
And that's just driving. How do you fairly devise a test to determine whether someone is psychosocially ready to start having sex, especially considering the extremely divergent views on sexuality in our culture? Or to vote? Or to be allowed to drink alcohol? And any such test, which would (for feasbility reasons) have to consist entirely of questions, could be passed by any kid who was coached properly, even if they weren't "really" ready for it in any realistic sense.
Let's say that parents are allowed to decide those things for their children. If the kid really is ready to do something, he ought to be able to convince his parents that he's ready, shouldn't he? But we can't just let parents approve these things; we all know how many bad parents there are out there who will give their kids anything they want. There will likely never be an 8-year-old who should be allowed to vote or drink.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's a lot of ways our attitudes toward children are screwed up, and I don't think all age restrictions should remain as they are. But insisting that everyone should be individually assessed for their readiness to drink, smoke, or fuck is absurdly unrealistic.
"seineeW erA setariP X SOcaM"
Best version:
When I die, I want to go peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather, and not screaming and helpless, like his passengers.
"We think that evolution can't explain the diversity of life. Therefore, a deity must have caused it."
It's not a scientific hypothesis, scientific theory, or scientific anything. It's not science. And yet many people are trying to claim that it is science. It's not, and no amount of wordplay will ever change that.
I'll say this much for design geeks: They're the only ones more annoying than audiophiles. :)
Dear Diary,
Today I saw that cute boy Jimmy, who offered me cheap c14li5, and he was totally like "Pssh, whatever," but he's SOOOO adorable, and then Nmebe Mboko of Nigeria contacted me about some money in a bank account, and Jenny was all totally drooling, she's goes so crazy over like the lamest guys, and then Melanie said that she'd gotten a really low-rate mortgage, and I was like, that's totally cool!
But someone had to write the first compiler, by hand, in machine code. The biological analogy is constructing the cellular machinery atom by atom until you've got something that can process DNA code.
The Earth's axial tilt is the reason for the season. Humans celebrated the winter solstice for thousands of years before Christ was born.
It was disproved probably three or four days after the "hypothesis" was proposed, in 1981. Read this. And do some other searching; the speed of light has not decayed at all. Don't take this the wrong way, but the whole idea is nothing but creationist propaganda
Of course, I'd be wary of the anti-ID classes being corrupted to actually present ID or other crackpot theories, but... it's something to consider.
I think we're witnessing an instance of linguistic evolution in action. "Ironic" is coming to mean something other than its original usage. ;)