Business methods aren't necessarily patentable, because they're generally mental processes.
Except of course, that running through a mental process absolutely results in a measurable physical change - in my mental state, in slight alterations in brain chemistry, it its electrical signatures.
As we move towards quantum mechanics, and equate mass to enegery, and learn about the conservation of information in black holes... things break down. The crude terms of 'machine' and 'physical' that patents are defined on cease to have any credible distinction from energy, and thought.
A "mental process" at this level is not some exotic special thing... its a simple "physical process" not fundamentally different from any other.
The difference seems to be confusing a lot of people.
Its confusing because there is no difference.
A book of fiction is equivalent to a large number, the organization and arrangement of matter and energy in the universe that allow us to represent that number (in our minds, on paper, or in a computers memory) could just as easily be re-purposed to being the circuitry of a quantum computer circuit, nano-machine, or a hammer.
They're not even all the right direction... shoop da woop?
Swastica's turn to the right... other similiar symbols turn to the left. However, in 'cookie cutout' form changing one to the other is as simple as turning them over.
Re:The reviewer is missing the point of the book
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I don't know when people decided that they already knew enough words...Historically, sci-fi authors often invented words for new concepts.
new words for new concepts is tolerable. New words for concepts we already have plenty of words for: generally self indulgent and annoying, and increasingly so the more of them in use.
younglings, padawan,.... makes me just roll my eyes grok... in contrast is a perfectly cromulent word.;)
Re:have a problem with made up words?
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Don't read Tolkien's less common stuff. By less common, I mean, haven't had a movie made out of it yet. I've been working on the tales from middle earth/unfinished stories boxed set...
A lot of tolkiens work wasn't really meant for publication. Choosing to read it is like digging through an authors rough drafts, background notes, story ideas... bits that hit the editing room floor, etc.
Woah, talk about a lot of propper names! Names for places, elves, dwarves, dragons, etc... Add to that the fact that one person may have 5 names over time (big characters like gandalf have more.)
Tolkien was an english professor, with an interest in language, etymology, linguistics, grammar, etc. Middle Earth for him was as much a personal playground for him to play with language as it was a vehicle to deliver a narrative. Because it was his interest and vocation, he spent more time on the languages themselves in Lord of the Rings, how they sounded, how they related to each other, how ideas were expressed in them, how they were written,... he spent more time on THAT then most authors spend writing their entire books.
This might seem self indulgent to an extreme, and in a sense it is, but its understandable and forgivable, because, as I said, Middle Earth was really his personal linguistic playground.
That's what makes Tolkien's "made up" language so eminently tolerable, where from most authors its grating, and stupid. Because even if you aren't a linguist, you can appreciate the authenticity and cohesiveness of it. And if the subject interests you, you can spend hours peeling away the layers and exploring the ideas Tolkien put together. Its not just a bunch of gibberish.
Add to that the fact that one person may have 5 names over time (big characters like gandalf have more.) AND that he'll throw out a name, expecting that you know it, even though it may be the first/only time ever used, or you would have had to read a previous/later work to know it.
Mostly he just expected himself to know it. These works were not intended to be published as-is. The stuff that actually did go through a normal editing process introduces characters reasonably well.
The Enemy of Sauron Gandalf - name given by the Men of the North, the Dunedain. Gandalf the Grey Gandalf the White Gandalf Greyhame - name given by the Rohirrim Grey Fool Grey Pilgrim - translated from Sindarin Grey Wanderer Incanus Lathspell - "Ill News" Mithrandir - Sindarin Elvish name "Grey Pilgrim" Olorin - name in Valinor Tharkun - name given by Dwarves White Rider.
You missed "Stormcrow".;)
That's sort of the linguistics game that is part of Lord of the Rings. The idea that names are not absolute. They they are relative to who you are within a context, within a culture, within a language, and change over time and with history. For Tolkien the language was as important, if not more important, than the plot.
Tolkien's work can almost be considered an epic of fictional language.
Gandalf is lingustically like Constantinople (er should I say, Konstantinoupolis (by the Greeks) or Constantinopolis (in Latin) or Konstaniniyye in Ottoman Turkish...which was the imperial capital of several empires.. and had several names... Byzantium, and Nea Rhome (Greek) or Nova Roma (Latin) (both "New Rome"), Stamboul, and of course, Constantinople. And of course today, its Istanbul.
Even cities with much shorter histories... New York, The Big Apple, Gotham, The City that Never Sleeps, Metropolis, and formerly Nouvelle Angouleme, and later New Amsterdam, before being named New York.
Or how "Germany" is known as Germany, Allemagne, Druitsland, Deutchland, Germania, Alemania...
That sort of thing interested Tolkien, understanding of the when and who and why of this progression (and often simultaneous use of names) as language and cultures change over time, how some of them had common roots and others didn't, etc.
You were replying to a comment (even quoting it) where the poster was complaining about MS preventing him from modifying some files on his computer's HD.
Yes, and HE was responding to MY previous comment about Apple's vender control, which was itself a response to:
"This means I have to live with Microsoft's brain-dead default settings that eat up valuable screen real estate for no good reason...except that this way Microsoft can move people one step closer to "have it our way...we know best"
Thus the actual context of this conversation thread is the attitude of "Microsoft forcing people closer to a 'have it our way, we know best'"; not some minor detail about whether a root account can modify files on a given OS.
And I don't think there is any question that Apple exudes a stronger attitude of "'do it our way', we know best" than Microsoft.
I'll add that, by manually editing certain config files on a Mac, you can alter the system's settings much beyond what's possible with the provided GUI tools. So, from the point of view of configuration editing, MS is clearly exerting more vendor control than Apple.
By manually editing the registry, you can alter a windows system's settings much beyond what's possible with the provided gui tools. So from the point of view of configuration editing, I'd say its largely a wash. And overall, I'd say Microsoft exposes a lot more configuration editing options than OSX to the user.
It depends on what the goal of the mechanic is. In the case of WoW, it streamlines the experience and lets people get to the "fun parts" of building up a character faster.
Precisely. It streamlines away part of the game the majority of the players don't want to play. Why not just finish the job, and streamline it right out of the game? Its not like anyone actually enjoys sitting there using the auction house. Its just a "housekeeping" chore that they attend to. It still takes time away from doing the "fun parts" of building up a character faster.
To illustrate my point, if they added a smithing system, where you could walk up to a smith, design your equipment from the available options. (or even just choose from any piece of equipment that ever hits the AH), pay for it and leave the AH would be dead. The AH is simply a means to an end, nobody actually enjoys it. If something even more streamlined showed up, that would be the end of the AH.
Exactly. And, know what? A lot of old-school MMO game players heralded that as a success. It gets people to the "fun parts" of the game.
Those guys were NEVER really "MMO game players", what they really wanted is a first person shooter with an ability/equipment progression in a fantasy setting. A first person 3D diablo II.
Unfortunately, the grim business reality is that most projects are going to want to aim for this market.
No question about that.
Back when EQ1 was the king of the roost, people wanted MMO projects to be "more like EverQuest!"
I disagree. The challengers to everquest were ALWAYS about "improving" everquest by eliminating more 'downtime', being more solo-able, and allowing you get to the "fun parts" as you call them faster. WoW is really just the first game that "improved" Everquest by effectively removing everything that slowed people down. All the games Post Everquest moved in this direction. WoW just 'mastered it'. Food/water - gone. Difficult travel - gone. Death penalty - gone. Corpse recovery - gone. Trading - reduced to a spreadsheet. Questing difficulty - reduced to finding the exclamation points. Limited Spell slots - gone. Slow natural health/mana regeneration (aka downtime) - gone. Trains of mobs/chain aggro - gone. Faction - essentially gone.
Turns out that in terms of attracting / satisfying a lot of players it was a good move. Blizzard distilled the mmorpg genre to the essense of what people "liked doing". Trouble is, its barely an rpg anymore. I think "first person diablo 2" is surprisingly close to the mark. (And there is nothing wrong with that of course... D2 is a fun game, and WoW obviously appeals to a lot of people. But its not really an MMORPG at all. All that housekeeping stuff - maintaining inventory, quest items, avoiding death, travelling around, figuring things out, etc are part of the genre.
WoW is to an MMORPG what Need for Speed is to a real racing sim.
PS - Interesting comments on the history of Eve. I didn't know that. Its discouraging to say the least.
You forgot the OS x86 project, so you CAN run Mac OS X Leopard in a virtual machine.
I didn't forget it. I ignored it. Its too much hassle. Tricks and pitfalls abound, patching is a gamble, and things like sound and wifi and bluetooth may or may not work... its a neat hobbiest's toy... but I'd hardly call it a 'professional solution'.
As far as IDEs go, XCode is (just) alright, Eclipse is excellent, DevC++ is a blessing, and when it comes down to it even good old vim is great (I've heard about Emacs, but it really needs a text editor;).
I've not used XCode or DevC++, agree about Eclipse, and I actually quite like Visual Studio 2008 (I know I know - I'm not supposed to admit that). I used vi and emacs in university, but we never clicked, though I still can use vi in a pinch. I can't remember enough emacs. Vim is nice and I still use notepad. I used to use Borland (later Inprise) IDE's but we drifted apart in the late nineties.
To be fair, most people play these games for diversion. So, they tend to want to get into the fun quickly. Being able to head to the auction house and then fly to my destination is easier than traveling for an hour or more to the accepted trading location and bartering with people.
Why -bother- with the auction house at all? That's sort of my point. As a game mechanic its fundamentally FLAWED. Its there to appease the players that don't actually want to trade, that want that whole part of the game reduced to the absolutely most efficient and impersonal mechanism possible...so that they can spend the absolute minimum amount of time on it.
So we gave them a global spreadsheet/database application interface six inches from their bankers?!?!
I honestly think it would be better to simply remove trade from the game. If your players want to avoid it that badly, and consider it such a complete waste of their time to that extent, just take it out, and design your game around not having it.
The trouble, or perhaps the beauty of WoW, is that they cater to a (massive) player base who really just want to "kill stuff and get loot" and -anything- that slows down either they want removed or mitigated. Minimal travelling with lots of easy/safe shortcuts, and certainly no "dangerous travelling", no trading, no juggling quest items, no reading, no hunting for NPCs.. they'll barely tolerate running from question mark to exclamation point, provided its on their mini map, and not too far and if it gives them lots of xp or loot.
From my point of view though, its a pathetic ghost of an mmorpg.
IMHO, the solution here is to start making smaller-scale MMOs. There are enough people that share your tastes that a game could be made to cater to you.
I agree, and have advocated this in the past. I don't begrudge WoW players their game, I'm glad they have soemthing they enjoy, but its not for me... everquest, at one time was... but as it evolved, it catered increasingly to the now WoW playerbase, and gave up its soul in the process. (Not that early everquest wasn't flawed... there were PLENTY of flaws.)
Eve proves that niche games can be successful, (though Eve itself does nothing for me, for a variety of reasons.) I have WAR subscription now, but I find it as uncompelling as WoW...
Why not just do your development on Mac and be done with it?
General principle for starters, I refuse to make OSX my primary OS simply because its the one with, by far, the the most restrictive license.
A more pragmatic reason is that I prefer other development environments more.
For a web developer, choice of platform is definitely less of an issue than it might be for many other developers, but even there, given the importance of it working with IE on Windows, a solid case can made for developing on windows. Indeed, for a web developer, if you can get it working in IE, FF, Safari, and Opera -on windows-, you don't need VMs for most of your effort, and testing on other platforms is mostly a formality.
Me? I'm covered to 100K, because at state min, if you slide off a corner (black ice anyone?) and hit a house you are so screwed even though you have insurance.
Around here I think the minimum for uninsured motorist protection you can buy is 200k, and most people have a million plus.
In many MMOs, the quest items are ethereal - you kill stuff and get things, but you never actually have those items on your person - the quest keeps track, and when you get them all, it goes "ding" and you turn it in for a reward. You don't actually tote around 15 horns of some beast, hides, etc.
You haven't played Everquest. The reason the new games don't do this is players are whining retards.
1) "I accidently deleted my quest items/ sold them to a vendor/ dropped them on the ground" wah wah....
2) "Quest items are taking all my backback/bank space, and they're too heavy, and I have to make trips back to town to unload them and I'm not levelling as fast..." wah wah...
The beauty is that there's a good chance you will ask someone lower level to go do your dirty work for you. You'll pay them for the goods, they'll get XP and gold, you'll turn in the quest. Thus, rather than you getting quests from NPCs, you'll get them from PCs. "Damn - that 37th level fighter just came by and offered to pay me a ton of gold to go kill swamp rats, if I bring him the tails. I guess some wizard he knows needs them."
That's how tradeskills ALREADY work. Except the player interaction is funnelled through the 'auction house' system. And it fucks up the game, because selling trade skill items to higher level players tends to be one of the most profitable things you can do. Kill 100 level 5 critters? make a couple silver. Mine 40 units of copper in WoW or farm 40 spiderling silks in Everquest... and you'll make 100x times that or more.
That is far more interesting than going to the tavern master six times in a row, or bouncing from NPC to NPC in town to get and turn in quests. The strength of a MMO is that there are lots of people playing. Make them part of the world, rather than "just another player".
No. Its far less interesting. You always go to the same place and you deal with a spreadsheet interface instead of an NPC or PC.
Everquest, again, started out without an auction house, and resisted adding one for a long time, because they had a thriving player driven auction house, and the games had areas where people were standing around hawking their wares, traders roamed the servers with Want-to-sell and want-to-buy chatter, and honestly... its was very cool.
But too many players wanted the easy route... they wanted a serverwide searchable database, they didn't want to actually travel to the vendor, they didn't want to acutally have to be online at the same time as the vendor... they didn't want to actually have to haggle and trade... they wanted... well... WoW's spreadsheet system. Sure its more efficient and whatnot.
The only thing close to a living world i've ever played was everquest during the first few expansions. The lack of an auction system, the travel challenges, the wandering high level mobs in newbie areas... it forced players to actually interact.
What killed it? Most player really don't want to interact - it 'slows' them down.
My point is that SANE people are not going to take a car to 200 miles an hour near a school zone or a bus route. Insane people are not going to follow the rule anyway,
Classifying them as sane or insane isn't terribly helpful, unless you can do it in advance, and you plan to imprison them once you classify them. I don't want to live there.
so it doesn't do any good. This is true for all common sense rules.
Really, would I have had car insurance on my first car, at 16-18, when I was essentially asset-free, and perpetually broke? Hard to say.
I also had friends who drove their parents cars from time to time - without having gotten the necessary riders etc for them (due to the significant extra cost of getting insurance that enabled these young drivers to use the cars). Were these people medically 'insane'?
I can also say, they would have driven a lot more often than they did if they'd had the insurance, because the risk of getting caught without out it was significant, especially in an accident. So while making it the law didn't prevent it outright, it seriously limited it.
The other point in here is who learned their states laws in school? Yet you are still responsible for breaking them?
I think that's a good point. People should be educated about the laws.
I am not an anarchist, I want laws... and mostly I was just trying to be funny, but does the law really stop you from speeding? (it never has me, though I am far more careful about it now) Has the law stopped millions from downloading copywrited music? Has the law stopped any big CEO from embezlement? Where a law stops someone, that person was not really wanting to commit the crime anyway.
I disagree. Lots of laws have been very effective. Has the law preventing you from using lead paint in toys stopped anyone from using lead paint in toys? Has the law preventing you from parking next to a firehydrant worked? Has the law preventing you from lighting a campfire during a campfire ban worked (I know I canceled one of my camping trips this summer due to a fire ban.)
There are some stupid laws out there, to be sure. And some that aren't even enforceable. But there are tons of laws and regulations that are sensible and work.
It is just a means to control the masses, and we need that to some extent.
Its more than just a means to control the masses, and you seem to recognize that here yourself.
and that is why I am against censorship of the web.
I'm with you on that one. i just took exception to your banging the 'personal liability' drum while protesting the nanny state. Personal liability is great and I support it, but society has an obligation to protect its citizens that goes further than what can be accomplished simply by holding the people who cause problems accountable. Personal liability isn't a solution. Its, at best, a tool in kit, to be used where appropriate.
In other words, we now force the good drivers to subsidize the mistakes of the bad drivers.
But the point is to understand why that is a better solution than letting bad drivers pay for their own mistakes. Namely: because they can't.
Other people have posted the link. It's really a biased test that is about 1/3 real civics (i.e. questions about how the government works). The rest is history, philosophy, economics, etc (with a conservative slant in economics - at least a blatantly obvious one)
To be fair, this 'civics' quiz is for Americans, and understanding the actual economic structure of America is more important than understand broader economic theory... so its not really a bias to focus on free market questions, any more than its a bias to focus on american history.
That said, one question out of all of them did strike me as 'biased', #27, "Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning because..."
I think the question could and should have been framed in terms of a free market vs a monopoly. As it was written in the quiz I do get sense that their is an implicit judgement that free market is superior to a planned economy...
which is sort of ironic given the last couple months of free market bliss, and the rush to nationalize banks, bail out companies, and introduce massive amounts of regulation. Why... one might inadvertently come to think the free market can only fixed with 'centralized planning'. oh noes.
America is sending all of it's wealth to China anyway and is happily enslaving future generations to chinese investors.
Hee hee jokes on them. Its not going to get paid back. And at the end of the day all the stuff they sent us is worth more than all the paper we printed to get it.
I'm only half joking. Seriously... Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think if this debt spiral continues... when it collapses under its own wate, the US is going to undergo an internal 'revolution', declare that it has no intention or obligation of paying back the previous administrations debts, and if any other country wants to make something of it...well the army is ready.
Yes I know that there are permits and racetracks available to do most of these things, but once upon a time, you were actually liable for what you did! not the state, or other government entity which now writes a new law of what we can not do (or requires special permission to do it) every time they get sued.
And once upon that same time, being liable for what you did left a lot of innocent people in the lurch. That's why the state stepped in in the first place.
Consider your "open the throttle" example -- if YOU and solely you are responsible for what you do, and you open the throttle and crash into a busload of kids/seniors/tourists/commuters... who pays?
You? Of course not, you don't have that much money.
Your insurance company? Maybe, if your coverage actually will cover you at 200+ mph? (it probably wouldn't) and all that assumes you actually bothered to get insurance - which you might not have done, since there aren't any laws forcing you to.
So all these innocent people get FUCKED because you fucked up, and the fact that you can be "held liable" doesn't actually mean anything. It doesn't do the people you hurt any good.
Well, watching our neighbors get completely fucked and left in the lurch like this doesn't sit well with normal people, so we decided that collectively, if this happens we'll deal with it...however we don't want to deal with uncessary/preventable problems so we made it a requirement that you have insurance so when accidents that you can't pay for happen, there is money. And we set speed limits to to help minimize the amount of damage that actually happens etc, etc.
Now, granted, a lot of this inevitably becomes corrupted and abused... and we end up with cops hiding behind trees with speed traps at the bottom of a hill in the middle of nowhere generating local revenue. And these sorts of issues need to be addressed.
But there's no going back to the so-called 'good old days' when you had '100% personal liability' because that wasn't really working terribly well either.
So if the state has to step in everytime someone fucks up for more than they can afford, the state gets to set rules to try and minimize the number of fuckups.
Most Linuxes don't have oodles of software that expects to run as root because it has that 38 year history of NOT running as root. Instead of 20 years of history running as root and 3 years of history trying to fix it.
Yes I know that. But 20 years of history is not a 'flaw' of Vista.
I submit to you that if most non-tech types ran linux. They would stick to software in the main repos. Yes they are on their own if they config / make / make install or add the zango channel repo.
And you would be wrong. They would happily have run perl scripts called 'mysexypics' in email attachments, downloaded 'cool smilies for your instant messenger' or 'awesome-goth-toolbar' from random flashing banner ads, and everything else they did on windows.
The topic here is whether MacOS and Linux will be riddled with spyware if they had the market share Microsoft has.
Yes they would. It would be the same users, and they wouldn't be any smarter.
And remember most spyware/malware doesn't really need root if they can get the user to install it, even just within the user space, that is MORE than enough power to launch browser ads, redirect URLs, show popups, send spam emails, read your address book, corrupt your pictures and documents, and most of the other stuff malware does.
The answer page says "D" is the correct answer. I answered "A".
Its probably the trickiest question on the whole test, but D is the correct answer.
This is a little perplexing to me, since D would imply that every person pays the same amount of tax, say $5000, and therefore the Gov't would spend $5000 per person.
It implies no such thing.
"per person" is equivalent to "per head" or in latin "per capita"
Anything measured "per person" or "per capita" represents the total amount divided by the total number of people. It doesn't generally imply the same amount was taken from each person. If I collect 10,000$ in donations from a group of 100 people, I could legitimately say I brought in 100$ per person.
Or when a cereal box of lucky charms says there are 200 calories per 1 cup serving, that doesn't mean every cup will have exactly 200 calories. If one cup has a few extra marshmallow charms than another that cup will have more. But on average, each cup would be 200 calories.
so tax collected per person = tax spent per person simply means: (total tax/total people) = (total spend/total people) which is trivially true.
"A" on the other hand, is trivially false because:
The US debt is 10.6 trillion. If next year, the total taxes collected that year = total government spending that year the US debt will still be 10.6 trillion. It will absolutely NOT be zero. The deficit will be zero, which would be a good start, but that's not the debt.
I thought it was creative and funny at the same time.
Me too... but...
I suspect its also actually quite effective at getting you up mods, which after the joke gets old, is simply karma whoring, and that is sad and pathetic.
And there are plenty more who install the Yahoo and Google toolbars, plus whatever other crap comes up.
To be fair, those often get loaded by accident - as part of installing adobe reader, or java, or skype, or whatever, and of course its defaulted to install, so unless you read every page of the installation wizard, they get you.
The key to that question would be to think about what he would have been allowed to do: three of the four choices require powers the President doesn't constitutionally possess.
That's precisely what stumped me. I didn't think he constitutionally possessed the ability to expand the size of the supreme court at will either.
For me that left impeaching them... and I operated on the theory, that everyone is a criminal if you looked hard enough. So while I didn't think there were likely any legitimate grounds for impeachment, I figured he might have been able to harass them out of the way with impeachment proceedings based on silly grounds.
After all, a Nevada judge, Harry Claiborne, was impeached and removed from office for 'filing a false tax return' back in the 80's.
And the Clinton impeachment strategy, could similarly have been applied... get them on some trumped up charge to force them to testify about the details of their sex lives, and then impeach them for making false statements when they don't admit to having had a 3-way or anal sex or a hooker or a blowjob or something else that you've got evidence they did at some point or other...
Some of the questions initially appear esoteric, but then I realized the way the questions are designed, it's not so much a test of if you know the actual historical event, but if you can, based on your civic knowledge, reason out the correct answer.
Huh? The questions were remarkably straightforward. They were not trick questions. They were not cases of multiple 'right answers and one best answer'. They were not multivalued : a,b,c then d is a and b types. They did not generally have deliberately misleading questions or answers. There were a couple that were slightly tricky... like the last question might trip you up if you don't know the difference between a debt and deficit, but seriously... you SHOULD.
It's not really a fair test for the general public.
I'm curious to see what you think a fairer test would be?
If questions on the same topics were asked in a more straightforward manner, you would get higher scores.
How could they be more generally straightforward?
I don't think many people could get 100% on it without at least a college education.
I think that says more about the american education system than the test. But seriously, the fact that the general public didn't get 100% isn't really the issue... the issue is that elected officials on average, FAILED it.
Its multiple choice with ~4 answers per question. A big enough collection of monkeys doing it randomly should score an average of 25%.
Plus, like most simple multiple choice tests, at least 2 of the answers can be easily eliminated with basic reasoning as being off topic or otherwise clearly wrong, reducing most questions to a 50/50 shot even if you don't have strong knowledge of the topic. So getting 50% on this test should pretty much be a freebie. If you know even a little bit, you should score >50%. And the average should probably be up in the 70's, at least.
I don't think you need college to get 100%, a high school education should be sufficient. But I will agree that the people who didn't go to college include the people who didn't do well in high school, so going to college would definitely be a predictor for higher scores.
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Business methods aren't necessarily patentable, because they're generally mental processes.
Except of course, that running through a mental process absolutely results in a measurable physical change - in my mental state, in slight alterations in brain chemistry, it its electrical signatures.
As we move towards quantum mechanics, and equate mass to enegery, and learn about the conservation of information in black holes... things break down. The crude terms of 'machine' and 'physical' that patents are defined on cease to have any credible distinction from energy, and thought.
A "mental process" at this level is not some exotic special thing... its a simple "physical process" not fundamentally different from any other.
The difference seems to be confusing a lot of people.
Its confusing because there is no difference.
A book of fiction is equivalent to a large number, the organization and arrangement of matter and energy in the universe that allow us to represent that number (in our minds, on paper, or in a computers memory) could just as easily be re-purposed to being the circuitry of a quantum computer circuit, nano-machine, or a hammer.
They're not even all the right direction... shoop da woop?
Swastica's turn to the right... other similiar symbols turn to the left. However, in 'cookie cutout' form changing one to the other is as simple as turning them over.
I don't know when people decided that they already knew enough words...Historically, sci-fi authors often invented words for new concepts.
new words for new concepts is tolerable. New words for concepts we already have plenty of words for: generally self indulgent and annoying, and increasingly so the more of them in use.
younglings, padawan,.... makes me just roll my eyes ;)
grok... in contrast is a perfectly cromulent word.
Don't read Tolkien's less common stuff. By less common, I mean, haven't had a movie made out of it yet. I've been working on the tales from middle earth/unfinished stories boxed set...
A lot of tolkiens work wasn't really meant for publication. Choosing to read it is like digging through an authors rough drafts, background notes, story ideas... bits that hit the editing room floor, etc.
Woah, talk about a lot of propper names! Names for places, elves, dwarves, dragons, etc... Add to that the fact that one person may have 5 names over time (big characters like gandalf have more.)
Tolkien was an english professor, with an interest in language, etymology, linguistics, grammar, etc. Middle Earth for him was as much a personal playground for him to play with language as it was a vehicle to deliver a narrative. Because it was his interest and vocation, he spent more time on the languages themselves in Lord of the Rings, how they sounded, how they related to each other, how ideas were expressed in them, how they were written,... he spent more time on THAT then most authors spend writing their entire books.
This might seem self indulgent to an extreme, and in a sense it is, but its understandable and forgivable, because, as I said, Middle Earth was really his personal linguistic playground.
That's what makes Tolkien's "made up" language so eminently tolerable, where from most authors its grating, and stupid. Because even if you aren't a linguist, you can appreciate the authenticity and cohesiveness of it. And if the subject interests you, you can spend hours peeling away the layers and exploring the ideas Tolkien put together. Its not just a bunch of gibberish.
Add to that the fact that one person may have 5 names over time (big characters like gandalf have more.) AND that he'll throw out a name, expecting that you know it, even though it may be the first/only time ever used, or you would have had to read a previous/later work to know it.
Mostly he just expected himself to know it. These works were not intended to be published as-is. The stuff that actually did go through a normal editing process introduces characters reasonably well.
The Enemy of Sauron
Gandalf - name given by the Men of the North, the Dunedain.
Gandalf the Grey
Gandalf the White
Gandalf Greyhame - name given by the Rohirrim
Grey Fool
Grey Pilgrim - translated from Sindarin
Grey Wanderer
Incanus
Lathspell - "Ill News"
Mithrandir - Sindarin Elvish name "Grey Pilgrim"
Olorin - name in Valinor
Tharkun - name given by Dwarves
White Rider.
You missed "Stormcrow". ;)
That's sort of the linguistics game that is part of Lord of the Rings. The idea that names are not absolute. They they are relative to who you are within a context, within a culture, within a language, and change over time and with history. For Tolkien the language was as important, if not more important, than the plot.
Tolkien's work can almost be considered an epic of fictional language.
Gandalf is lingustically like Constantinople (er should I say, Konstantinoupolis (by the Greeks) or Constantinopolis (in Latin) or Konstaniniyye in Ottoman Turkish...which was the imperial capital of several empires.. and had several names... Byzantium, and Nea Rhome (Greek) or Nova Roma (Latin) (both "New Rome"), Stamboul, and of course, Constantinople. And of course today, its Istanbul.
Even cities with much shorter histories... New York, The Big Apple, Gotham, The City that Never Sleeps, Metropolis, and formerly Nouvelle Angouleme, and later New Amsterdam, before being named New York.
Or how "Germany" is known as Germany, Allemagne, Druitsland, Deutchland, Germania, Alemania...
That sort of thing interested Tolkien, understanding of the when and who and why of this progression (and often simultaneous use of names) as language and cultures change over time, how some of them had common roots and others didn't, etc.
You were replying to a comment (even quoting it) where the poster was complaining about MS preventing him from modifying some files on his computer's HD.
Yes, and HE was responding to MY previous comment about Apple's vender control, which was itself a response to:
"This means I have to live with Microsoft's brain-dead default settings that eat up valuable screen real estate for no good reason...except that this way Microsoft can move people one step closer to "have it our way...we know best"
Thus the actual context of this conversation thread is the attitude of "Microsoft forcing people closer to a 'have it our way, we know best'"; not some minor detail about whether a root account can modify files on a given OS.
And I don't think there is any question that Apple exudes a stronger attitude of "'do it our way', we know best" than Microsoft.
I'll add that, by manually editing certain config files on a Mac, you can alter the system's settings much beyond what's possible with the provided GUI tools. So, from the point of view of configuration editing, MS is clearly exerting more vendor control than Apple.
By manually editing the registry, you can alter a windows system's settings much beyond what's possible with the provided gui tools. So from the point of view of configuration editing, I'd say its largely a wash. And overall, I'd say Microsoft exposes a lot more configuration editing options than OSX to the user.
Very misinformed. There are no files on a Mac that root can't change.
I said Apple has no equal when it comes to vendor control, and you go off on a tangent about files you can't change as root?
Hint: Apple does =other= things. And lots of them.
It depends on what the goal of the mechanic is. In the case of WoW, it streamlines the experience and lets people get to the "fun parts" of building up a character faster.
Precisely. It streamlines away part of the game the majority of the players don't want to play. Why not just finish the job, and streamline it right out of the game? Its not like anyone actually enjoys sitting there using the auction house. Its just a "housekeeping" chore that they attend to. It still takes time away from doing the "fun parts" of building up a character faster.
To illustrate my point, if they added a smithing system, where you could walk up to a smith, design your equipment from the available options. (or even just choose from any piece of equipment that ever hits the AH), pay for it and leave the AH would be dead. The AH is simply a means to an end, nobody actually enjoys it. If something even more streamlined showed up, that would be the end of the AH.
Exactly. And, know what? A lot of old-school MMO game players heralded that as a success. It gets people to the "fun parts" of the game.
Those guys were NEVER really "MMO game players", what they really wanted is a first person shooter with an ability/equipment progression in a fantasy setting. A first person 3D diablo II.
Unfortunately, the grim business reality is that most projects are going to want to aim for this market.
No question about that.
Back when EQ1 was the king of the roost, people wanted MMO projects to be "more like EverQuest!"
I disagree. The challengers to everquest were ALWAYS about "improving" everquest by eliminating more 'downtime', being more solo-able, and allowing you get to the "fun parts" as you call them faster. WoW is really just the first game that "improved" Everquest by effectively removing everything that slowed people down. All the games Post Everquest moved in this direction. WoW just 'mastered it'. Food/water - gone. Difficult travel - gone. Death penalty - gone. Corpse recovery - gone. Trading - reduced to a spreadsheet. Questing difficulty - reduced to finding the exclamation points. Limited Spell slots - gone. Slow natural health/mana regeneration (aka downtime) - gone. Trains of mobs/chain aggro - gone. Faction - essentially gone.
Turns out that in terms of attracting / satisfying a lot of players it was a good move. Blizzard distilled the mmorpg genre to the essense of what people "liked doing". Trouble is, its barely an rpg anymore. I think "first person diablo 2" is surprisingly close to the mark. (And there is nothing wrong with that of course... D2 is a fun game, and WoW obviously appeals to a lot of people. But its not really an MMORPG at all. All that housekeeping stuff - maintaining inventory, quest items, avoiding death, travelling around, figuring things out, etc are part of the genre.
WoW is to an MMORPG what Need for Speed is to a real racing sim.
PS - Interesting comments on the history of Eve. I didn't know that. Its discouraging to say the least.
You forgot the OS x86 project, so you CAN run Mac OS X Leopard in a virtual machine.
I didn't forget it. I ignored it. Its too much hassle. Tricks and pitfalls abound, patching is a gamble, and things like sound and wifi and bluetooth may or may not work... its a neat hobbiest's toy... but I'd hardly call it a 'professional solution'.
As far as IDEs go, XCode is (just) alright, Eclipse is excellent, DevC++ is a blessing, and when it comes down to it even good old vim is great (I've heard about Emacs, but it really needs a text editor ;).
I've not used XCode or DevC++, agree about Eclipse, and I actually quite like Visual Studio 2008 (I know I know - I'm not supposed to admit that). I used vi and emacs in university, but we never clicked, though I still can use vi in a pinch. I can't remember enough emacs. Vim is nice and I still use notepad. I used to use Borland (later Inprise) IDE's but we drifted apart in the late nineties.
To be fair, most people play these games for diversion. So, they tend to want to get into the fun quickly. Being able to head to the auction house and then fly to my destination is easier than traveling for an hour or more to the accepted trading location and bartering with people.
Why -bother- with the auction house at all? That's sort of my point. As a game mechanic its fundamentally FLAWED. Its there to appease the players that don't actually want to trade, that want that whole part of the game reduced to the absolutely most efficient and impersonal mechanism possible...so that they can spend the absolute minimum amount of time on it.
So we gave them a global spreadsheet/database application interface six inches from their bankers?!?!
I honestly think it would be better to simply remove trade from the game. If your players want to avoid it that badly, and consider it such a complete waste of their time to that extent, just take it out, and design your game around not having it.
The trouble, or perhaps the beauty of WoW, is that they cater to a (massive) player base who really just want to "kill stuff and get loot" and -anything- that slows down either they want removed or mitigated. Minimal travelling with lots of easy/safe shortcuts, and certainly no "dangerous travelling", no trading, no juggling quest items, no reading, no hunting for NPCs.. they'll barely tolerate running from question mark to exclamation point, provided its on their mini map, and not too far and if it gives them lots of xp or loot.
From my point of view though, its a pathetic ghost of an mmorpg.
IMHO, the solution here is to start making smaller-scale MMOs. There are enough people that share your tastes that a game could be made to cater to you.
I agree, and have advocated this in the past. I don't begrudge WoW players their game, I'm glad they have soemthing they enjoy, but its not for me... everquest, at one time was... but as it evolved, it catered increasingly to the now WoW playerbase, and gave up its soul in the process. (Not that early everquest wasn't flawed... there were PLENTY of flaws.)
Eve proves that niche games can be successful, (though Eve itself does nothing for me, for a variety of reasons.) I have WAR subscription now, but I find it as uncompelling as WoW...
Why not just do your development on Mac and be done with it?
General principle for starters, I refuse to make OSX my primary OS simply because its the one with, by far, the the most restrictive license.
A more pragmatic reason is that I prefer other development environments more.
For a web developer, choice of platform is definitely less of an issue than it might be for many other developers, but even there, given the importance of it working with IE on Windows, a solid case can made for developing on windows. Indeed, for a web developer, if you can get it working in IE, FF, Safari, and Opera -on windows-, you don't need VMs for most of your effort, and testing on other platforms is mostly a formality.
November 31st?
One would have to actually read the -date- to notice that. There are other give-aways too that its not a real post, but that's beside the point.
Me? I'm covered to 100K, because at state min, if you slide off a corner (black ice anyone?) and hit a house you are so screwed even though you have insurance.
Around here I think the minimum for uninsured motorist protection you can buy is 200k, and most people have a million plus.
In many MMOs, the quest items are ethereal - you kill stuff and get things, but you never actually have those items on your person - the quest keeps track, and when you get them all, it goes "ding" and you turn it in for a reward. You don't actually tote around 15 horns of some beast, hides, etc.
You haven't played Everquest. The reason the new games don't do this is players are whining retards.
1) "I accidently deleted my quest items/ sold them to a vendor/ dropped them on the ground" wah wah....
2) "Quest items are taking all my backback/bank space, and they're too heavy, and I have to make trips back to town to unload them and I'm not levelling as fast..." wah wah...
The beauty is that there's a good chance you will ask someone lower level to go do your dirty work for you. You'll pay them for the goods, they'll get XP and gold, you'll turn in the quest. Thus, rather than you getting quests from NPCs, you'll get them from PCs. "Damn - that 37th level fighter just came by and offered to pay me a ton of gold to go kill swamp rats, if I bring him the tails. I guess some wizard he knows needs them."
That's how tradeskills ALREADY work. Except the player interaction is funnelled through the 'auction house' system. And it fucks up the game, because selling trade skill items to higher level players tends to be one of the most profitable things you can do. Kill 100 level 5 critters? make a couple silver. Mine 40 units of copper in WoW or farm 40 spiderling silks in Everquest... and you'll make 100x times that or more.
That is far more interesting than going to the tavern master six times in a row, or bouncing from NPC to NPC in town to get and turn in quests. The strength of a MMO is that there are lots of people playing. Make them part of the world, rather than "just another player".
No. Its far less interesting. You always go to the same place and you deal with a spreadsheet interface instead of an NPC or PC.
Everquest, again, started out without an auction house, and resisted adding one for a long time, because they had a thriving player driven auction house, and the games had areas where people were standing around hawking their wares, traders roamed the servers with Want-to-sell and want-to-buy chatter, and honestly... its was very cool.
But too many players wanted the easy route... they wanted a serverwide searchable database, they didn't want to actually travel to the vendor, they didn't want to acutally have to be online at the same time as the vendor... they didn't want to actually have to haggle and trade... they wanted ... well... WoW's spreadsheet system. Sure its more efficient and whatnot.
The only thing close to a living world i've ever played was everquest during the first few expansions. The lack of an auction system, the travel challenges, the wandering high level mobs in newbie areas... it forced players to actually interact.
What killed it? Most player really don't want to interact - it 'slows' them down.
My point is that SANE people are not going to take a car to 200 miles an hour near a school zone or a bus route. Insane people are not going to follow the rule anyway,
Classifying them as sane or insane isn't terribly helpful, unless you can do it in advance, and you plan to imprison them once you classify them. I don't want to live there.
so it doesn't do any good. This is true for all common sense rules.
Really, would I have had car insurance on my first car, at 16-18, when I was essentially asset-free, and perpetually broke? Hard to say.
I also had friends who drove their parents cars from time to time - without having gotten the necessary riders etc for them (due to the significant extra cost of getting insurance that enabled these young drivers to use the cars). Were these people medically 'insane'?
I can also say, they would have driven a lot more often than they did if they'd had the insurance, because the risk of getting caught without out it was significant, especially in an accident. So while making it the law didn't prevent it outright, it seriously limited it.
The other point in here is who learned their states laws in school? Yet you are still responsible for breaking them?
I think that's a good point. People should be educated about the laws.
I am not an anarchist, I want laws... and mostly I was just trying to be funny, but does the law really stop you from speeding? (it never has me, though I am far more careful about it now) Has the law stopped millions from downloading copywrited music? Has the law stopped any big CEO from embezlement? Where a law stops someone, that person was not really wanting to commit the crime anyway.
I disagree. Lots of laws have been very effective. Has the law preventing you from using lead paint in toys stopped anyone from using lead paint in toys? Has the law preventing you from parking next to a firehydrant worked? Has the law preventing you from lighting a campfire during a campfire ban worked (I know I canceled one of my camping trips this summer due to a fire ban.)
There are some stupid laws out there, to be sure. And some that aren't even enforceable. But there are tons of laws and regulations that are sensible and work.
It is just a means to control the masses, and we need that to some extent.
Its more than just a means to control the masses, and you seem to recognize that here yourself.
and that is why I am against censorship of the web.
I'm with you on that one. i just took exception to your banging the 'personal liability' drum while protesting the nanny state. Personal liability is great and I support it, but society has an obligation to protect its citizens that goes further than what can be accomplished simply by holding the people who cause problems accountable. Personal liability isn't a solution. Its, at best, a tool in kit, to be used where appropriate.
In other words, we now force the good drivers to subsidize the mistakes of the bad drivers. But the point is to understand why that is a better solution than letting bad drivers pay for their own mistakes. Namely: because they can't.
Other people have posted the link. It's really a biased test that is about 1/3 real civics (i.e. questions about how the government works).
The rest is history, philosophy, economics, etc (with a conservative slant in economics - at least a blatantly obvious one)
To be fair, this 'civics' quiz is for Americans, and understanding the actual economic structure of America is more important than understand broader economic theory... so its not really a bias to focus on free market questions, any more than its a bias to focus on american history.
That said, one question out of all of them did strike me as 'biased', #27, "Free markets typically secure more economic prosperity than government's centralized planning because..."
I think the question could and should have been framed in terms of a free market vs a monopoly. As it was written in the quiz I do get sense that their is an implicit judgement that free market is superior to a planned economy...
which is sort of ironic given the last couple months of free market bliss, and the rush to nationalize banks, bail out companies, and introduce massive amounts of regulation. Why... one might inadvertently come to think the free market can only fixed with 'centralized planning'. oh noes.
Question-33 seems to not have a valid answer. I believe they want (a) but it ought to say deficit, not debt.
What do you think is wrong with the correct answer? D
America is sending all of it's wealth to China anyway and is happily enslaving future generations to chinese investors.
Hee hee jokes on them. Its not going to get paid back. And at the end of the day all the stuff they sent us is worth more than all the paper we printed to get it.
I'm only half joking. Seriously... Maybe I'm being too cynical, but I think if this debt spiral continues... when it collapses under its own wate, the US is going to undergo an internal 'revolution', declare that it has no intention or obligation of paying back the previous administrations debts, and if any other country wants to make something of it...well the army is ready.
Yes I know that there are permits and racetracks available to do most of these things, but once upon a time, you were actually liable for what you did! not the state, or other government entity which now writes a new law of what we can not do (or requires special permission to do it) every time they get sued.
And once upon that same time, being liable for what you did left a lot of innocent people in the lurch. That's why the state stepped in in the first place.
Consider your "open the throttle" example -- if YOU and solely you are responsible for what you do, and you open the throttle and crash into a busload of kids/seniors/tourists/commuters... who pays?
You? Of course not, you don't have that much money.
Your insurance company? Maybe, if your coverage actually will cover you at 200+ mph? (it probably wouldn't) and all that assumes you actually bothered to get insurance - which you might not have done, since there aren't any laws forcing you to.
So all these innocent people get FUCKED because you fucked up, and the fact that you can be "held liable" doesn't actually mean anything. It doesn't do the people you hurt any good.
Well, watching our neighbors get completely fucked and left in the lurch like this doesn't sit well with normal people, so we decided that collectively, if this happens we'll deal with it...however we don't want to deal with uncessary/preventable problems so we made it a requirement that you have insurance so when accidents that you can't pay for happen, there is money. And we set speed limits to to help minimize the amount of damage that actually happens etc, etc.
Now, granted, a lot of this inevitably becomes corrupted and abused... and we end up with cops hiding behind trees with speed traps at the bottom of a hill in the middle of nowhere generating local revenue. And these sorts of issues need to be addressed.
But there's no going back to the so-called 'good old days' when you had '100% personal liability' because that wasn't really working terribly well either.
So if the state has to step in everytime someone fucks up for more than they can afford, the state gets to set rules to try and minimize the number of fuckups.
Most Linuxes don't have oodles of software that expects to run as root because it has that 38 year history of NOT running as root. Instead of 20 years of history running as root and 3 years of history trying to fix it.
Yes I know that. But 20 years of history is not a 'flaw' of Vista.
I submit to you that if most non-tech types ran linux. They would stick to software in the main repos. Yes they are on their own if they config / make / make install or add the zango channel repo.
And you would be wrong. They would happily have run perl scripts called 'mysexypics' in email attachments, downloaded 'cool smilies for your instant messenger' or 'awesome-goth-toolbar' from random flashing banner ads, and everything else they did on windows.
The topic here is whether MacOS and Linux will be riddled with spyware if they had the market share Microsoft has.
Yes they would. It would be the same users, and they wouldn't be any smarter.
And remember most spyware/malware doesn't really need root if they can get the user to install it, even just within the user space, that is MORE than enough power to launch browser ads, redirect URLs, show popups, send spam emails, read your address book, corrupt your pictures and documents, and most of the other stuff malware does.
The answer page says "D" is the correct answer. I answered "A".
Its probably the trickiest question on the whole test, but D is the correct answer.
This is a little perplexing to me, since D would imply that every person pays the same amount of tax, say $5000, and therefore the Gov't would spend $5000 per person.
It implies no such thing.
"per person" is equivalent to "per head" or in latin "per capita"
Anything measured "per person" or "per capita" represents the total amount divided by the total number of people. It doesn't generally imply the same amount was taken from each person. If I collect 10,000$ in donations from a group of 100 people, I could legitimately say I brought in 100$ per person.
Or when a cereal box of lucky charms says there are 200 calories per 1 cup serving, that doesn't mean every cup will have exactly 200 calories. If one cup has a few extra marshmallow charms than another that cup will have more. But on average, each cup would be 200 calories.
so tax collected per person = tax spent per person simply means:
(total tax/total people) = (total spend/total people)
which is trivially true.
"A" on the other hand, is trivially false because:
The US debt is 10.6 trillion. If next year, the total taxes collected that year = total government spending that year the US debt will still be 10.6 trillion. It will absolutely NOT be zero. The deficit will be zero, which would be a good start, but that's not the debt.
I thought it was creative and funny at the same time.
Me too... but...
I suspect its also actually quite effective at getting you up mods, which after the joke gets old, is simply karma whoring, and that is sad and pathetic.
And there are plenty more who install the Yahoo and Google toolbars, plus whatever other crap comes up.
To be fair, those often get loaded by accident - as part of installing adobe reader, or java, or skype, or whatever, and of course its defaulted to install, so unless you read every page of the installation wizard, they get you.
The key to that question would be to think about what he would have been allowed to do: three of the four choices require powers the President doesn't constitutionally possess.
That's precisely what stumped me. I didn't think he constitutionally possessed the ability to expand the size of the supreme court at will either.
For me that left impeaching them... and I operated on the theory, that everyone is a criminal if you looked hard enough. So while I didn't think there were likely any legitimate grounds for impeachment, I figured he might have been able to harass them out of the way with impeachment proceedings based on silly grounds.
After all, a Nevada judge, Harry Claiborne, was impeached and removed from office for 'filing a false tax return' back in the 80's.
And the Clinton impeachment strategy, could similarly have been applied... get them on some trumped up charge to force them to testify about the details of their sex lives, and then impeach them for making false statements when they don't admit to having had a 3-way or anal sex or a hooker or a blowjob or something else that you've got evidence they did at some point or other...
Some of the questions initially appear esoteric, but then I realized the way the questions are designed, it's not so much a test of if you know the actual historical event, but if you can, based on your civic knowledge, reason out the correct answer.
Huh? The questions were remarkably straightforward. They were not trick questions. They were not cases of multiple 'right answers and one best answer'. They were not multivalued : a,b,c then d is a and b types. They did not generally have deliberately misleading questions or answers. There were a couple that were slightly tricky... like the last question might trip you up if you don't know the difference between a debt and deficit, but seriously... you SHOULD.
It's not really a fair test for the general public.
I'm curious to see what you think a fairer test would be?
If questions on the same topics were asked in a more straightforward manner, you would get higher scores.
How could they be more generally straightforward?
I don't think many people could get 100% on it without at least a college education.
I think that says more about the american education system than the test. But seriously, the fact that the general public didn't get 100% isn't really the issue... the issue is that elected officials on average, FAILED it.
Its multiple choice with ~4 answers per question. A big enough collection of monkeys doing it randomly should score an average of 25%.
Plus, like most simple multiple choice tests, at least 2 of the answers can be easily eliminated with basic reasoning as being off topic or otherwise clearly wrong, reducing most questions to a 50/50 shot even if you don't have strong knowledge of the topic. So getting 50% on this test should pretty much be a freebie. If you know even a little bit, you should score >50%. And the average should probably be up in the 70's, at least.
I don't think you need college to get 100%, a high school education should be sufficient. But I will agree that the people who didn't go to college include the people who didn't do well in high school, so going to college would definitely be a predictor for higher scores.