And here a few ways one might go about handing him his... wrongness.
There was a time where the life expectancy was my current age, and I don't have kids (yet). We are getting older. In fact, put yourself in the shoes of a male homo ergaster whose balls have just dropped; you walk around, suddenly you see a girl crawling around on all four, with a good rear wiev of her pussy. Do you (A) get horny as hell and fuck her will she nil she; or (B) don't do anything?
Also, our collective cognitive skill (as measured by IQ) is steadily increasing. There was a science or fiction on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (an excellent science podcast) saying exactly by how much, which of course I can't remember. Three point per decade or so? Okay, IQ is influenced by environment to some degree, but just maybe one might demonstrate that some of it is due to evolution; consider the Darwin Awards, for instance.
In any case, by far most mutations are (AFAIK) harmful, so it is in no one's self-interest to have kids later than sooner (to a point, with a sweet spot somewhere in the twenties). Do we force people to have kids later than they want, just so we can evolve?
I'd rather we go along with slow evolution until we can do some genetic engineering on ourselves. Besides, by using our hands and frontal lobes, we have this great ability to adapt our environment to us instead of the other way around. Do we have any unadaptive features we desperately need to grow out of as a society?
I've seen some numbers thrown around showing the amount of tourism money lost in the last several years amounts to some tens of billions of dollars. Which isn't that much on the scale of our whole economy
It's more than half of NASA's budget (http://foofus.com/amuse/public/Fedspending-2008-linechart.jpg).
After all, if you're trying to destroy a government, which conservatives admit is their plan, you really don't look for a great leader. Just a chump who likes to stand and wave. That's McCain.
So sayeth Douglas Adams, on the matter of the Imperial Galactic Government:
The President is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.
Good luck porting over LoadDLL("C:\\windows\\system32\\mylib.dll");.
The existence of a working mono is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, for porting an application. Whether that condition is fulfilled and to what degree, I'll leave up to you to discuss.
Portability comes from being largely independent of the differences between the platform you want to port from and the one you want to port to. Good portability engineering consists of gathering all the platform-specific bits into one unit with a uniform interface, such that it's easy to write platform-specific modules for all the platforms you want to support; then, make sure to test on all your target platforms.
For a good piece of engineering, see Simon Tatham's puzzle collection (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/). To see the importance of testing on all your target platforms, see the state of synergy on the Mac (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ -- "The Mac OS X port is incomplete [...]"). To see the importance of isolating your platform dependence, see any code that makes liberal use of fork and ioctl everywhere [sorry, I can't name an example].
Also, good portability engineering done up front is much less work (i.e. cheaper for your employer) than when the project is already deployed on windows only.
This is my rationale too - If an artist only gets 25% of my money currently, I'll happily pay them that amount directly (or a little more) as it is cutting out a huge swathe of arseholes all taking a cut and contributing nothing of value.
Having auditioned for an amateur band and listened to their recorded music, I can tell you that good production quality is very important for the resulting listening experience. So some of the assholes are actually of value;)
That being said, if we donated directly to musicians, and a bit more than they make from sales right now, we could pay for the production indirectly by giving the musicians enough money to buy/hire/loan good production staff and facilities themselves.
There's also marketing: if you don't know the song exists, you're not going to pay for it. That can be fixed on the cheap by teaching everybody to go to $WEBSITE for new music (for some value(s) of website), if possible. That also solves distribution on the cheap.
(maybe the musicians would be overwhelmed by the choices of production staff/facilities and marketing platforms; perhaps they could hire someone dedicated to manage those choices; maybe those kind people could form a company offering their services, including in-house production staff:D)
Funny anecdote: I played Line Tower Defense* in WC3 with two of my friends. We apparently spawned enough monsters (thousands) to crash the game. That's one process death that might have been prevented with a hard unit cap [but not just a food cap, the units didn't require food]. I'm not sure why you couldn't just stress-test the program and fix any bugs, but maybe there still is a use for hard caps.
* not sure if that's the exact name, it's a map with $MAXPLAYERS trenches where each player buys monsters that are sent at the next player.
Could you please give me a link to the source code [preferably with a link to a repository] for the full game? I drown in a sea of "Download PC Demo", "Buy Now" and "Website.swf".
Comments on Ubuntu Brainstorm would suggest that it isn't open source (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4398/).
That was good; a fine mix of facts [which are objective] and your subjective opinion about those facts [which of course are purely subjective]. I would have liked to see your criticism directed at particular games where applicable.
I have yet to find a FOSS FPS with a single player mode that was long enough to really count
Nexuiz and OpenArena are both around the 25 map mark last I checked. While it doesn't measure up to quake 1 (38 maps), I think "not long enough to count" is stretching it a bit.
even Quake 2 had enough of a story to hold the gore together
I don't remember that game very well; isn't it something along the lines of "you're the sole survivor on $PLANET; get to $POINT so that you can [blow stuff up | repair your ship], and kill all that moves on the way"? Sauerbraten has a few words to the same effect that serve to motivate the killing.
But by and large, your point is taken; not much story.
I've also run into games that won't let you set custom keyboard controls.
I've run into a few games like that, but mostly they're arcade games where you only need four arrows and a fire button... You've run into FPSes like that? I'm shocked. A bug should be filed and it should be fixed; one can work around it with xmodmap and wrapper scripts, but that sucks. Which games are you talking about here?
I have run into games that expect you to learn the ins and outs of a half dozen HUD menus, all of which require separate bind keys, to do various game-critical tasks
Which games? Which menus?
I've found that the path from main menu to either setting up and playing the game or configuring stuff to be [for the most part] reasonably short (two to three layers of nesting) and navigable with the mouse and number entry; no keybindings needed.
By HUD menus, what exactly do you mean? Like the buy-gear one from counterstrike? In Nexuiz there's the choose-team menu when you join or go to a new map which is brought up automatically, and the vote-for-next-map at the end of rounds, which again is automatically brought up.
Do you know of any worse examples? Please share them, then; I'd like to see the horrors... Is tremulous one of them? What are the others?
I have also found that most suffer from controls which are either incredibly arcane or maddeningly simplistic.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by controls; is it the vocabulary of verbs in the game that's too small, or is it the mapping from input actions to those verbs that's problematic [which is almost always configurable], or is it the set of possible mappings from input actions to verbs that's somehow wrong, or is it that there are too many verbs you need to use in order to play well?
I find that none have compelling, well balanced weapons. [...] The rail gun has been done to death, and everybody has a generic machine gun... I'd like to at least something a little different, and if you can make the staple items truly stand out that is best.
The Nexuiz weapons are not all vanilla (IMO): the low-damage infinite-ammo gun also serves as a jump tool and can be used to push others around. The rocket launcher can be used defensively against incoming rockets by detonating your rockets near the incoming one. The machine gun in alternate fire mode is usable as a low-powered long-range weapon if you don't have the sniper rifle. And there's of course the Electro which can be used to set up traps and shoot around corners, as well as building up for a huge blast in face-to-face combat.
If that isn't a little different from other games, then each feature of each weapon must be found in some other game; where do you see something like the electro? Where do you see a non-rocket jump-tool/weapon?
Point is, you can copy without having the high level of literacy required for proof reading.
You can copy without having even the tiniest understanding of the language; just put a large table of symbols up on the wall and look at it every day, you'll know which doodle maps to which symbol. Ask your more experienced colleagues when you're in doubt.
I'm basing this on having copied one or two hundred Cyrillic letters before learning anything about Russian pronunciation [and my current understanding is still rough]; I'm sure that with enough practice, one could get a solid grasp of which letter is which without learning the language. I haven't had a good opportunity to read something written by hand using the japanese phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), but I suspect that by just knowing the symbols and not understanding the language, I could copy them just fine with enough experience.
I just had a quick look at some gameplay videos from other, commercial games; you could still see that the rock was a convex polytope with a texture stapled on, and not a real rock. Crank up the Nexuiz graphics to the max, and I'd probably be just as blown away as by the commercial games (if my card could pull it). I'm not sure what you mean by playability, but I know that I find the games entertaining.
Anyways, trying to steer away from a pit of subjectivity: you say that the free FPSes are not on par with what you see in the non-free/commercial world (e.g. hl plus mods). What's missing? Please try and be scientific-ish, i.e. objective and measurable; don't just say "but $NAME is more fun and immersive", describe *why* that is so.
(I'm not trying to throw the glove down, I'm trying to solicit more information so that I can say that I learned something today even though I had the day off:D)
I wish I had a cluebat right now. [...] That's the whole point flying right over your head...
Fearing that I sound like a broken record of slashdot memes, Oh the irony! I'd like to apply the cluebat to yourself and those who modded you up.
Note how I italicized parts of the text for emphasis, the part about the games being packaged and trivially easy to install. Note also how you don't include that emphasis in the part of my post you decided to quote. My point was that, despite what my parent said, there are games for Linux, and they are easy to install.
Now, the point I think you claim went above my head is that most people won't use aptitude successfully. I agree, and I had realized this prior to posting. That's why I moved the emphasis away from the particularities of aptitude, and why the existence of the graphical mouse-driven interface is a good thing.
See also my comment about the blinking twelve syndrome: I get that there are people who don't want to invest their time in learning how to use their technical equipment most efficiently, possibly from a belief (whether right or wrong) that any time they do spend will be fruitless.
[Pidgin] can easily be viewed as some kind of cruel joke by someone spoilt by the niceties and features of the official MSN client...
You're talking about the ads, yeah? Or the lack of support for other instant messaging protocols?
[because it's so frigging nice having to run four different apps and switch between them, and it gets even nicer when you don't have virtual desktops./rant]
Just to straighten things out a bit, I recommend you try a few of these games:
FPSes:
Nexuiz
OpenArena
Tremulous
Warsow
Sauerbraten
Alien Arena
Strategy (mixing real-time and turn-based):
Battle for Wesnoth
FreeCiv
bos
boson
Others:
xmoto
Frets on Fire
Supertux
Cowsay
mu-cade, noiz2sa and `apt-cache search kenta cho`
Those are all packages I found with a quick `aptitude search "~i~sGames"; that is, these are games that are packaged and trivially easy to install straight out of the box.
You can of course also install wine and create bottles for Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo II if you have those games [or you can buy them at blizzard.com], among many others (so I hear).
Or you can install DosBox and play your old dos games (One Must Fall is the win). Or you can install uae (Amiga), vice (Commodore: Pets, VIC-20, 64, 128, CBM-II, PLUS/4), pscx (PlayStation), xmess (Atari 400/800/2600, Lynx, NES, SNES, GameBoy, Sega Master System, Sega Megadrive) or mame. Apologies to all emulators that I left out.
I'm not saying that Linux is just as great a gaming OS as windows. But claiming that there are next to no good games that are runnable on linux is simply being uninformed. And the cowsay bit, that was just making fun;)
What you describe sounds more like what a psychologist/counselor; my understanding is that the job of a psychatrist is similar to that of your general care physician except applied to mental health: diagnose badness and suggest/prescribe interventions, and if the intervention is psychotherapy also carry it out.
In some cases, cognitive therapy may be as simple as you make it out to be, but there's more to psychiatry than meets the eye (I would think). OTOH, there may be not much more to psychquackery than that.
Even if static electricity is smarter than many of the voters, American politics is still doomed to be a two-parity system. Maybe if you adopted an election system based on Single Transferable Volt...
It'd be interesting to know what the median, min and max value is
a few big ticket items, and then lots [...] of some small item.
The median, min and max might shed some light on the likelihood of this being correct. The number of items would certainly suggest this, though.
The theft included [...] software
Exactly how did he steal software? Did he make a copy? Did he make a copy and then deleted the copies at his lab? Did he transfer the license from the lab to himself [by forging someone's signature, perhaps]?
In each case, how do you determine the value? Is it how much he would have to pay to use the software himself in the way he does, or is it the price increase if the company wanted to purchase a license allowing him to use it the way he does [which might need to be negotiated first], or is it the price the company paid for the license [which seems hard to justify in the non-transfer cases], or is it the damages he would have to pay to the software vendor if found guilty of copyright infringement [I guess you take the average damages paid for all cases in the past that are exactly like this one]?
Putting a price tag on something that's not a sale is non-trivial. It becomes highlier non-trivial for copyable goods. Interesting figure, none the less.
Isn't it great that we have such an easy, convenient system that is focused around the needs of us humans, and not the needs of the computers
My ironymeter went out of batteries this morning, so if it's there I wouldn't know for sure.
Now, one of the properties doesn't have the unit "bits" or "bits per second", but simply "per second"; that'd be the CPU speed. That being different from the rest is manageable. [Aside: GNU units is a wonderful program; if you're a little into physics, you may learn something interesting from reading units.dat]
But the differences for the rest seem pretty dumb; it means I have to remember a lot of crap with no rhyme or reason. It'd be much easier for this particular Homo Sapiens [and all his Silico Sapiens companions would be indifferent] if everything was in one base.
Especially "interesting" is that I can look at how much disk space my OS says I'm using, buy a disk "that big", and not have the data fit on it.
Also, it'd be an improvement if all {K,M,G}{b,B} figures had an annotation stating "this is $n bits".
Slashdot Mirror
And here a few ways one might go about handing him his... wrongness.
There was a time where the life expectancy was my current age, and I don't have kids (yet). We are getting older. In fact, put yourself in the shoes of a male homo ergaster whose balls have just dropped; you walk around, suddenly you see a girl crawling around on all four, with a good rear wiev of her pussy. Do you (A) get horny as hell and fuck her will she nil she; or (B) don't do anything?
Also, our collective cognitive skill (as measured by IQ) is steadily increasing. There was a science or fiction on The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe (an excellent science podcast) saying exactly by how much, which of course I can't remember. Three point per decade or so? Okay, IQ is influenced by environment to some degree, but just maybe one might demonstrate that some of it is due to evolution; consider the Darwin Awards, for instance.
In any case, by far most mutations are (AFAIK) harmful, so it is in no one's self-interest to have kids later than sooner (to a point, with a sweet spot somewhere in the twenties). Do we force people to have kids later than they want, just so we can evolve?
I'd rather we go along with slow evolution until we can do some genetic engineering on ourselves. Besides, by using our hands and frontal lobes, we have this great ability to adapt our environment to us instead of the other way around. Do we have any unadaptive features we desperately need to grow out of as a society?
I've seen some numbers thrown around showing the amount of tourism money lost in the last several years amounts to some tens of billions of dollars. Which isn't that much on the scale of our whole economy
It's more than half of NASA's budget (http://foofus.com/amuse/public/Fedspending-2008-linechart.jpg).
After all, if you're trying to destroy a government, which conservatives admit is their plan, you really don't look for a great leader. Just a chump who likes to stand and wave. That's McCain.
So sayeth Douglas Adams, on the matter of the Imperial Galactic Government:
The President is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.
Zaphod McCain and Tricia Palin?
-- Jonas K
Good luck porting over LoadDLL("C:\\windows\\system32\\mylib.dll");.
The existence of a working mono is a necessary condition, not a sufficient one, for porting an application. Whether that condition is fulfilled and to what degree, I'll leave up to you to discuss.
Portability comes from being largely independent of the differences between the platform you want to port from and the one you want to port to. Good portability engineering consists of gathering all the platform-specific bits into one unit with a uniform interface, such that it's easy to write platform-specific modules for all the platforms you want to support; then, make sure to test on all your target platforms.
For a good piece of engineering, see Simon Tatham's puzzle collection (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/). To see the importance of testing on all your target platforms, see the state of synergy on the Mac (http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ -- "The Mac OS X port is incomplete [...]"). To see the importance of isolating your platform dependence, see any code that makes liberal use of fork and ioctl everywhere [sorry, I can't name an example].
Also, good portability engineering done up front is much less work (i.e. cheaper for your employer) than when the project is already deployed on windows only.
-- Jonas K
make a big 'whooshing' sound. i.e. vacuum.
You geek license is revoked: sound doesn't propagate in a vacuum, stupid ;)
This is my rationale too - If an artist only gets 25% of my money currently, I'll happily pay them that amount directly (or a little more) as it is cutting out a huge swathe of arseholes all taking a cut and contributing nothing of value.
Having auditioned for an amateur band and listened to their recorded music, I can tell you that good production quality is very important for the resulting listening experience. So some of the assholes are actually of value ;)
That being said, if we donated directly to musicians, and a bit more than they make from sales right now, we could pay for the production indirectly by giving the musicians enough money to buy/hire/loan good production staff and facilities themselves.
There's also marketing: if you don't know the song exists, you're not going to pay for it. That can be fixed on the cheap by teaching everybody to go to $WEBSITE for new music (for some value(s) of website), if possible. That also solves distribution on the cheap.
(maybe the musicians would be overwhelmed by the choices of production staff/facilities and marketing platforms; perhaps they could hire someone dedicated to manage those choices; maybe those kind people could form a company offering their services, including in-house production staff :D)
Funny anecdote: I played Line Tower Defense* in WC3 with two of my friends. We apparently spawned enough monsters (thousands) to crash the game. That's one process death that might have been prevented with a hard unit cap [but not just a food cap, the units didn't require food]. I'm not sure why you couldn't just stress-test the program and fix any bugs, but maybe there still is a use for hard caps.
* not sure if that's the exact name, it's a map with $MAXPLAYERS trenches where each player buys monsters that are sent at the next player.
Enemy Territory. [...] open-source
Could you please give me a link to the source code [preferably with a link to a repository] for the full game? I drown in a sea of "Download PC Demo", "Buy Now" and "Website.swf".
Comments on Ubuntu Brainstorm would suggest that it isn't open source (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4398/).
How was that for a start?
That was good; a fine mix of facts [which are objective] and your subjective opinion about those facts [which of course are purely subjective]. I would have liked to see your criticism directed at particular games where applicable.
I have yet to find a FOSS FPS with a single player mode that was long enough to really count
Nexuiz and OpenArena are both around the 25 map mark last I checked. While it doesn't measure up to quake 1 (38 maps), I think "not long enough to count" is stretching it a bit.
even Quake 2 had enough of a story to hold the gore together
I don't remember that game very well; isn't it something along the lines of "you're the sole survivor on $PLANET; get to $POINT so that you can [blow stuff up | repair your ship], and kill all that moves on the way"? Sauerbraten has a few words to the same effect that serve to motivate the killing.
But by and large, your point is taken; not much story.
I've also run into games that won't let you set custom keyboard controls.
I've run into a few games like that, but mostly they're arcade games where you only need four arrows and a fire button... You've run into FPSes like that? I'm shocked. A bug should be filed and it should be fixed; one can work around it with xmodmap and wrapper scripts, but that sucks. Which games are you talking about here?
I have run into games that expect you to learn the ins and outs of a half dozen HUD menus, all of which require separate bind keys, to do various game-critical tasks
Which games? Which menus?
I've found that the path from main menu to either setting up and playing the game or configuring stuff to be [for the most part] reasonably short (two to three layers of nesting) and navigable with the mouse and number entry; no keybindings needed.
By HUD menus, what exactly do you mean? Like the buy-gear one from counterstrike? In Nexuiz there's the choose-team menu when you join or go to a new map which is brought up automatically, and the vote-for-next-map at the end of rounds, which again is automatically brought up.
Do you know of any worse examples? Please share them, then; I'd like to see the horrors... Is tremulous one of them? What are the others?
I have also found that most suffer from controls which are either incredibly arcane or maddeningly simplistic.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by controls; is it the vocabulary of verbs in the game that's too small, or is it the mapping from input actions to those verbs that's problematic [which is almost always configurable], or is it the set of possible mappings from input actions to verbs that's somehow wrong, or is it that there are too many verbs you need to use in order to play well?
I find that none have compelling, well balanced weapons. [...] The rail gun has been done to death, and everybody has a generic machine gun... I'd like to at least something a little different, and if you can make the staple items truly stand out that is best.
The Nexuiz weapons are not all vanilla (IMO): the low-damage infinite-ammo gun also serves as a jump tool and can be used to push others around. The rocket launcher can be used defensively against incoming rockets by detonating your rockets near the incoming one. The machine gun in alternate fire mode is usable as a low-powered long-range weapon if you don't have the sniper rifle. And there's of course the Electro which can be used to set up traps and shoot around corners, as well as building up for a huge blast in face-to-face combat.
If that isn't a little different from other games, then each feature of each weapon must be found in some other game; where do you see something like the electro? Where do you see a non-rocket jump-tool/weapon?
[FOSS FPSes have amateurish graphics]
How so? What makes them look amateurish?
Point is, you can copy without having the high level of literacy required for proof reading.
You can copy without having even the tiniest understanding of the language; just put a large table of symbols up on the wall and look at it every day, you'll know which doodle maps to which symbol. Ask your more experienced colleagues when you're in doubt.
I'm basing this on having copied one or two hundred Cyrillic letters before learning anything about Russian pronunciation [and my current understanding is still rough]; I'm sure that with enough practice, one could get a solid grasp of which letter is which without learning the language. I haven't had a good opportunity to read something written by hand using the japanese phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana), but I suspect that by just knowing the symbols and not understanding the language, I could copy them just fine with enough experience.
Dude... have you actually played any of those?
Yep, all of them.
I just had a quick look at some gameplay videos from other, commercial games; you could still see that the rock was a convex polytope with a texture stapled on, and not a real rock. Crank up the Nexuiz graphics to the max, and I'd probably be just as blown away as by the commercial games (if my card could pull it). I'm not sure what you mean by playability, but I know that I find the games entertaining.
Anyways, trying to steer away from a pit of subjectivity: you say that the free FPSes are not on par with what you see in the non-free/commercial world (e.g. hl plus mods). What's missing? Please try and be scientific-ish, i.e. objective and measurable; don't just say "but $NAME is more fun and immersive", describe *why* that is so.
(I'm not trying to throw the glove down, I'm trying to solicit more information so that I can say that I learned something today even though I had the day off :D)
I wish I had a cluebat right now. [...] That's the whole point flying right over your head...
Fearing that I sound like a broken record of slashdot memes, Oh the irony! I'd like to apply the cluebat to yourself and those who modded you up.
Note how I italicized parts of the text for emphasis, the part about the games being packaged and trivially easy to install. Note also how you don't include that emphasis in the part of my post you decided to quote. My point was that, despite what my parent said, there are games for Linux, and they are easy to install.
Now, the point I think you claim went above my head is that most people won't use aptitude successfully. I agree, and I had realized this prior to posting. That's why I moved the emphasis away from the particularities of aptitude, and why the existence of the graphical mouse-driven interface is a good thing.
See also my comment about the blinking twelve syndrome: I get that there are people who don't want to invest their time in learning how to use their technical equipment most efficiently, possibly from a belief (whether right or wrong) that any time they do spend will be fruitless.
just like everyone's more or less DVD-player-literate.
<blink>12:00</blink>
[Pidgin] can easily be viewed as some kind of cruel joke by someone spoilt by the niceties and features of the official MSN client...
You're talking about the ads, yeah? Or the lack of support for other instant messaging protocols?
[because it's so frigging nice having to run four different apps and switch between them, and it gets even nicer when you don't have virtual desktops. /rant]
Just to straighten things out a bit, I recommend you try a few of these games:
FPSes:
Strategy (mixing real-time and turn-based):
Others:
Those are all packages I found with a quick `aptitude search "~i~sGames"; that is, these are games that are packaged and trivially easy to install straight out of the box.
You can of course also install wine and create bottles for Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo II if you have those games [or you can buy them at blizzard.com], among many others (so I hear).
Or you can install DosBox and play your old dos games (One Must Fall is the win). Or you can install uae (Amiga), vice (Commodore: Pets, VIC-20, 64, 128, CBM-II, PLUS/4), pscx (PlayStation), xmess (Atari 400/800/2600, Lynx, NES, SNES, GameBoy, Sega Master System, Sega Megadrive) or mame. Apologies to all emulators that I left out.
I'm not saying that Linux is just as great a gaming OS as windows. But claiming that there are next to no good games that are runnable on linux is simply being uninformed. And the cowsay bit, that was just making fun ;)
I felt like psychiatrist
What you describe sounds more like what a psychologist/counselor; my understanding is that the job of a psychatrist is similar to that of your general care physician except applied to mental health: diagnose badness and suggest/prescribe interventions, and if the intervention is psychotherapy also carry it out.
In some cases, cognitive therapy may be as simple as you make it out to be, but there's more to psychiatry than meets the eye (I would think). OTOH, there may be not much more to psychquackery than that.
Even if static electricity is smarter than many of the voters, American politics is still doomed to be a two-parity system. Maybe if you adopted an election system based on Single Transferable Volt...
average value of each piece is $6.08.
It'd be interesting to know what the median, min and max value is
a few big ticket items, and then lots [...] of some small item.
The median, min and max might shed some light on the likelihood of this being correct. The number of items would certainly suggest this, though.
The theft included [...] software
Exactly how did he steal software? Did he make a copy? Did he make a copy and then deleted the copies at his lab? Did he transfer the license from the lab to himself [by forging someone's signature, perhaps]?
In each case, how do you determine the value? Is it how much he would have to pay to use the software himself in the way he does, or is it the price increase if the company wanted to purchase a license allowing him to use it the way he does [which might need to be negotiated first], or is it the price the company paid for the license [which seems hard to justify in the non-transfer cases], or is it the damages he would have to pay to the software vendor if found guilty of copyright infringement [I guess you take the average damages paid for all cases in the past that are exactly like this one]?
Putting a price tag on something that's not a sale is non-trivial. It becomes highlier non-trivial for copyable goods. Interesting figure, none the less.
We better take him out before we put hvsl, the shuttle, into the destructor!
Isn't it great that we have such an easy, convenient system that is focused around the needs of us humans, and not the needs of the computers
My ironymeter went out of batteries this morning, so if it's there I wouldn't know for sure.
Now, one of the properties doesn't have the unit "bits" or "bits per second", but simply "per second"; that'd be the CPU speed. That being different from the rest is manageable. [Aside: GNU units is a wonderful program; if you're a little into physics, you may learn something interesting from reading units.dat]
But the differences for the rest seem pretty dumb; it means I have to remember a lot of crap with no rhyme or reason. It'd be much easier for this particular Homo Sapiens [and all his Silico Sapiens companions would be indifferent] if everything was in one base.
Especially "interesting" is that I can look at how much disk space my OS says I'm using, buy a disk "that big", and not have the data fit on it.
Also, it'd be an improvement if all {K,M,G}{b,B} figures had an annotation stating "this is $n bits".
Well, let's be precise here.
lpszAstronautName = "Simonyi";
++nTripsToSpace;
dZ_EarthAstronaut = cKilometers(36000.0);
hvsl = cShuttle::m_getSingleton();
hdst = rgspcstn[I18N];
hvsl.launch(g_getAstronaut(lpszAstronautName), hdst);
would it kill you to buy a nice shirt and a razor?
I know from a reliable source that RMS owns the Gilette Luxury Pack and a business suit. "Know your enemy" and all that. Besides, he has to defend lisp and scheme (in their emacs and guile dialects): http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/tamir/archive/2008/04/28/computer-languages-and-facial-hair-take-two.aspx
It's the best sexual gratification most of them are going to get all year.
Sigh... at least three months before my next one.
(uberdorky voice) no no no, it's not five, seven, three; it's three, seven, nine. And then Bill has one nut to rule them all.
Even if your team doesn't use [source control] overall
My keyboard used to love soda, but I think this turns it straight into a zombie: "mmm, braaaains..."