Interesting point, and while Guild Wars is not technically a F2P game because they have an initial entry cost, the game does have a number of F2P features (no monthly cost, an in-game store with speedups like skill unlock packs, etc). I agree the game is very fashion driven - there is no reason to get Obsidian Armor other than aesthetics, because it is extremely expensive and offers no defensive benefit over cheap armor that is 1/100000 the price. The real trick with a store is you need to sell something players want and not over-saturate the game with that item. For instance, an in-game example: elemental swords were extremely valuable at one time, then raptor farming came along and you're now lucky to get 5000 for them. The same problem happened with Chaos Axes and Underworld farming.
Which makes sense - while the game would play on something significantly less, the OS and libraries would take significantly more resources.
And man, does that bring back porting nightmares - I ported some stuff from DOS to Mac circa MacOS 7 (maybe even 6... long time ago - pre-Codewarrior, which was my preferred mac tool later on) and having to deal with 64k and 640k barriers on DOS and 32k paging on the mac was probably the most frustrating thing about it. The code was all C and printed lots of C strings, so I also had to add lots of Pascal string endings on the mac, which was also a pain (and no, it was not easily localizable - if I had the same situation today I would have moved those strings to resources). Probably the easiest thing was porting the graphics, which was more because I wrote the Quickdraw code from scratch (all of that code was assembly) and created the palette visually in rezedit.
True, but to be honest, that is an entirely different issue.
I sometimes have trouble falling asleep, even when on a strict schedule and perfect quiet, but when I'm out, I'm out. In college I lived on a very busy street (first ave and third street in a downtown - a city, but not a major one) slept through loud traffic, gunfire, a semi-to-semi head on accident and supposedly a mass of police cars with flashing lights (my roommates wondered how the heck I slept through that), and when I was on campus before that place I almost slept through a (false) fire alarm that drunk kids probably set off (the RA said he had to shake me for a minute to wake me). That is strictly middle of the night, though - as long as I got enough sleep, I will wake up with my alarm (if I have one set).
An interesting study would have been my college roommates from on campus my second year of college - it was a 4 person apartment and the only "normal" kid there was my bunkmate (he studied, he partied on weekends, he slept normal nights, and got B-ish grades). The other two guys were really weird memory/sleep-wise - one slept at most 40 minutes at a time, and never on a schedule (so not really polyphasic). When I saw him sleep, it usually was on the couch and not in bed, and he worked a full time night job and was full time in school. The other slept about 4 hours a night and never napped, had an eidetic memory as well as an excellent memory for engineering problems and never studied (going to class and paging through the textbook to see equations not covered in class was enough), which drove me nuts because I had to studied my butt off in the same classes. Both of those guys were still running 4.0s when I transferred schools (and the guy that didn't sleep was almost done).
True, and the studies I've seen seem to have fatal flaws.
For instance, the comparison study Focus group 1 plays Wolfenstein 3D Focus group 2 plays Myst
The findings: focus group 1 is more aggressive and penalizes people longer.
The problem is that Myst is just not an adrenaline producing game - a fair comparison would be, say Myst vs Civilization or some other violent turn based strategy game. I could probably get the exact opposite result by comparing Tetris to Chess. Tetris vs Wolf 3D would have been a much better, much less loaded study.
The problem is video games are unfairly targeted and essentially the scapegoat, when all media is to blame, and regulation should be for all media.
A US Secret Service study on school shootings found these influences: Violent Movies: 27% Violent Books: 24% Violent Video Games: 12%
BOOKS have TWICE the impact of video games and they aren't regulated AT ALL - where's the uproar? the book burnings? the parent outrage?
In the 1990s when violent video game sales were at an all-time high, what was at an all time low? Juvenile violent crime.
according to the ESA, 93% of children only buy games with their parents and parents permission. That means only 7% are buying games without their parents knowledge or permission. That kind of spits in the face of California, which seems to think 99% of kids are doing it.
Speaking of California, California wants violent video games to have a 2 inch label indicating content. Current ESRB labels are 1" and consistently labeled in the bottom left corner. Movie labels? around 1/4" on most I own, but sometimes in a 1 1/2" box (to help find them easier and explain the rating). And consistent? Hell no - you can find movie labels anywhere on the box. Heck, the two videotape Titanic is rated UNDER the box (and yes, I just looked - I was trying to find the largest label - and no, we don't own Titanic - it was forgotten here long ago by a friend of my wife). Books never are labeled.
And the quote that got my goat in the California deal was "the movie industry self-regulates, the video game industry should as well." - I ask where do they self-regulate? In the theater? I bet at least 7% of 15-16 year old kids either buy a ticket and don't get carded or buy a ticket for one movie and sneak in to another. I certainly did when I was 16, and so did all of my friends, and I still see it happen - that seems like regulation fail to me. And how about in retail? Does Best Buy give a flying f*ck if you're 14 and buying an R rated movie? These are the same stores where the video games are being purchased, so obviously an apples-to-apples comparison is not being made.
My only guess is it mentions Breakout. Breakout was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow at Atari and eventually contracted to HP Engineer Steve Wozniak by Steve Jobs. Those two later worked together to make the Apple and Apple ][ line of computers. One of Woz's driving goals for creating the Apple computer was to make a software only version Breakout, and the version he created was included with the computer, written in Woz's own Integer Basic (the other version of BASIC on the Apple ][ was actually written by Microsoft).
Probably the same info on wikipedia, but I'm a walking wikipedia for this sort of crap;)
That doesn't surprise me - laptops with GPUs run very hot - I generally have mine on a thermal mat for just that reason (after blowing an 8600M twice [first replaced under warranty, second blew 3 days out of warranty], I decided my new laptop with a 9800M GT should sit on a thermal mat - and no, my laptop is not my main game machine - more of a workhorse road warrior machine I use occasionally for games. I also suck out the fans and keyboards on all my computers with a shop vac about twice a year, which works much better than CO2 cans.
The fix is actually in TFA, though maybe it was added.
I've never seen a melted GPU - unless they have a flawed design, they should throttle slower and/or shut down before hitting such a temp. I have seen a CPU start a motherboard on fire (well, smoldering, but close enough), but that was a long time ago and before CPU temperature monitoring.
Well the grandparent (or whatever it was) is correct in that if the impedance is high, you will have a highly lossy signal, but if impedance is high you will likely also have a very hot cable (by the laws of thermodynamics).
So yeah, in general, any crappy cable should do for a digital signal.
Monster is more of a status brand, anyway - people buy Apple computers and Stoli vodka, too, and there are perfectly good alternatives (hell, if you just want to get drunk, bathtub gin works just as good as Stoli).
heh - reminded me of the nonsense papers generated by a program called babble 123 (or babel 123 or something like that) on the Apple ][ in the early 1980s. You'd pick a subject, add some related buzzwords and pick a level of technical detail for the paper (high school, college, or PhD, I believe) and the program would auto-generate a paper for you. It was quite amusing.
Actually, that is basically the argument most creationists fixate on - if we all evolve slowly, why hasn't X creature evolved?
They then point out that we can watch hundreds of generations of bacteria and fruit flies and they never evolve, thus disproving Darwin's theory that all creatures evolve over time.
Of course, that ignores the amendments since then (I believe even Darwin made such an amendment) that suggest some stressor is needed, and that testing with fruit flies in managed conditions did force evolutionary changes in them. In your case, said monkey did not have a stress condition (scarce food, too hot, too cold, etc) that forced an evolutionary change like human ancestors did.
Well, if you go by the Jehovah's Witnesses I talked to, the devil created DNA to fool us into thinking each human wasn't created by intelligent design. Seriously! That was brought up because I argued that DNA existed in human fossils that pre-date their creation date, and their answer to anything older than their calculated creation date is Satan did it. I kept pushing the subject and they pretty much said Satan creates all DNA as soon as it is extracted from the body. That Satan sure is a busy bugger, and God seems very disinclined to stop him from messing with the earth and the people on it.
Hmm... I don't think creationism belongs in astronomy, either - maybe if they had an astrology class...
I don't have a problem with religion per-se, but there is a point when rational becomes silly and silly becomes absurd, and they reached it.
Actually, his rant is about the same thing I said about C++ 10 years ago. C++ is a powerful language, but it is also an extremely bloated language, and has a lot of legacy bolted on. After using the much more streamlined objective-C it was hard to go back. To be honest, I'd say the main reason to use C++ is all OS's include libraries for it.
Sadly, C++ is even less portable than C and included numerous questionable decisions in its design. My personal peeve is wchar_t, which has an undefined length, so localization is a pain in the rear. I also wish there was an easy way to add accessor functions, since I always bolt them on except for low level code (to make it more true OOP). Also there are many convenience classes that have never made it in - like streamlined thread and thread pool classes (therefore, you need to implement them yourself on every platform).
The reason it impacts US marketshare is because Nokia's market share in the US is significantly less than Motorola's - I think Nokia is around 8% and Motorola 20%, so basically they jump from 8% marketshare to 28% marketshare. Nokia does much better in Europe and Asia where phone service is not bundled with the phones.
Um, not correct - Nokia Siemens was not implicated or involved - yes that joint venture was announced before the Siemens scandal, but the company itself is a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens and run as a separate company (with Nokia and Siemens each having a 50% stake in it) and wasn't fully founded until after the scandal. Nokia Siemens is most notorious for supplying deep packet inspection software to Iran.
Siemens itself was fined heavily for bribery, and much of the bribery was in telecom, but it all pre-dates the joint venture (most of the charges were between 2002 and 2006). The real problem in Siemens was because corruption like bribery was an acceptable practice to ensure contracts in Germany, and even tax deductible until 1999 (Germans call it nutzliche Aufwendungen, which literally means "useful expenses"), and Siemens executives and accountants never stopped doing the practice after the practice was banned. The practice was actually run pretty much exactly like the third party loophole for Payola in the United States, where an outside contractor was hired to pay to bribe the customer and recommend the deal (in Payola an outside contractor was hired to bribe the radio stations to play a song).
There are two possibilities here that I can think of - by small scale MMO, he may be referring to a game with a fairly small playing area - maybe the world is only about the size of Oblivion, rather than, say Azeroth. Another possibility is the "programmer lingo" vs the "consumer lingo" is a bit different - as a programmer, I think of MMO as a game/network that scales with player base and has nothing to do with the number of actual players. A "small MMO" would mean the player base for a particular are would be small in comparison to, say, WoW. A practical example would be something like NWN multiplayer without the fixed connection limits (which the world designer/network owner could then set, if desired).
Speaking from my own experience, by 8 I was using computers (an Apple ][ with 16k and a tape drive - the ][+'s with 48k came a couple of years later) and by 12 I was programming assembly language on a ][+ and an expert at BASIC (and thank God we had Disk ][s by then...). This was all self motivated and driven - I had to use reward chips (I was in an alternative school - we got game room/computer room reward chips for finishing our goals) to use the computers.
I think the real problem today is the distraction factor of social media, and kids that age need discipline and filtering, which means usually parental supervision for the entire time they use a computer, and I don't think most parents can do that. Social media needs to be a reward, just like TV time and game time (2600 and Intellivision in my day) was for me as a kid.
Well, they do in certain games, but of course they need to follow traditional faction and empire lines. Nazi Germany at its height is very different than today's Germany, the Huns stretched from Mongolia to Hungary and a large part of Germany in the 500s, the Holy Roman Empire consumed Eastern Europe in the 1600s, etc. Some areas are extremely volatile and have fragmented and rejoined in different configurations repeatedly - see the former republic of Yugoslavia, for instance (ethnic divisions are always fun).
First, people try to divide up games into "educational" and "entertainment." That means "educational" games cannot have gore, cuss words, or anything that promotes that "edgy" feel that attracts a lot of gamers.
why? I've never understood this. Some of my favorite movies are marketed to families and generally target children - heck, Star Wars targeted children. There were no cuss words or gore in Star Wars, so obviously it must have been bad. Songs are obviously better when they are littered with cuss words thrown in randomly, too, right? So movies and video games must be better with them - the more the merrier. Sarcasm aside, I see no reason to ever cuss in a movie or game unless it is to make a point. Sometimes that point is to make a caricature character, like Tarantino does, and I'm fine with that, but honestly, if someone is saying fuck every 5 seconds for no reason, I don't really feel much power in the word when they use it for anything in context (like oh, fuck man, I just got shot).
voice chat - is pretty meaningless. People learn quite well when they work with others - as long as they are paying attention and trying to work through a puzzle together, all should learn from it. Also voice chat in games actually appeals more to boys than girls (seriously - there was a study on this - girls tend to prefer single player games and depend on it less for social interaction than boys), so you would expect girls to excel if voice chat was the reason.
Most ratings systems are broken as far as I can tell. Nudity that could pass a G rating on TV (i.e. topless African tribeswomen) get an automatic AO by the ESRB. I'm not kidding. Sex can be depicted under the sheets and you can get an M rating, but 1/2 second of tit is an automatic AO - how fucked up is that? I'm not talking Johnsons or Vaggies here, I'm talking 1/2 second of African Tribeswomen tit, or breastfeeding mother - automatic AO. The kind of thing that is so ungodly indecent that no 17 year old should ever see such an unholy thing depicted in polygons, but watching it when they are 6 on TV or in a movie is OK. The ONLY reason why there is an M and AO is because WalMart and other "moral" stores wanted it so they could ban AO games - if the ESRB would stop sucking up to them, a sane ratings system could be put in place. I can understand an AO rating, but it needs to be sane - it should be like getting an X for movies, and it currently is like getting a PG-13.
I prefer to use my imagination. Currently it is Evil Otto (a bouncing happy face) from the game Berzerk, and a robotic voice is saying "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Stop the Intruder!"
That may be true for meth since manufacture is terribly toxic and generally noticeable, but something like LSD could easily be manufactured in a lab for all we know. And if you go to plant based drugs, they are much more potent and often grown by professionals growers. Some strains of opiates are so powerful that shooting them will kill you (so heroin users snort them), cocaine was purified years ago, and pot is significantly more potent now than ever.
I've known a lot of users over the years and am very glad I stayed away, especially while as a touring musician, where just about everything was available. My touring band was probably my best band, too, but it cost me two long friendships due to drugs, sex, and the band self destructed due to that and too much ego and not enough compromise. Kinda par for the course in the music industry amongst has-been bands that failed to make it.
yeah - it looks like he's using the volume for picking (when the hand is lowest it picks - it may pick at highest volume too - I wasn't paying that much attention - too busy laughing - that part is the metal loop if you aren't familiar with a theramin) and the tone hand handles position (that is the rod, if you aren't familiar with a theramin) - the finger waggling is just for show, since it is air guitar in a lot of ways.
um, where exactly in the Bible does it say pre-marital sex is a sin? Heck, as far as I remember, the only sin it mentions involving sex is adultery (multiple references and books), rape (again a few times) and bestiality (Leviticus, I'm fairly sure).
The Bible does talk a bit about fornication (it says NOTHING about fornication being pre-marital - imply that if you will) and says marriage is a cure for immoral behavior (but since they also talk about adultery, not apparently for everyone). Some people read into that and see that as fornication = unmarried sex = immoral behavior = sin, but the Bible does not say that explicitly. Adultery is a major sin, and I have to assume that is because marriage is supposed to be the cure for immoral behavior, and that would be cure fail. Anyhow, I can think of a wide range of immoral behavior other than just fornication (lets see... streaking, spin the bottle, drinking and dry humping a bedpost, etc), but some people get hung up on fornicating for some reason.
And lets see... if I remember correctly, Sodom and Gomorrah were basically rich pagan cities that didn't conform to Christian morals and their sins were more along the lines of greediness at least in old Hebrew scripture, but they somehow managed to be more carnal in the hands of Christians and later Hebrew scholars. It had something with to do with Lot's daughters or covering some girl with honey and feeding her to bees for being charitable or something like that...
Anyhow, I do remember there was a translation problem involving "to know," which has similar ambiguity in English - if I say "I'd love to get to know you better" I may be genial, as in I want to be your friend and see what interests we share, or I may be implying that I want to sleep with you. It actually relies more on inflection in English - not sure about Hebrew. I do remember it almost never has the sexual meaning, but because they were referring to the people of Sodom, it was assumed to be the sexual meaning, and it is ambiguous in print context (and is really quite dirty in the sexual context - basically the translation could be the people wanted to know who the rapists [I think they were rapists... been a long time] were, or they wanted to fuck them... this wouldn't be ambiguous in any context other than Sodom...).
The Hebrew book of Enoch has the only mention of homosexuality that I remember, but that isn't scripture and I think only one small group of Christians considers it canon (and I looked it up - yep - Ethiopian Christians). I'm a bit skeptical of the whole Noah story (Enoch was his great granddad), personally, since it is really a monotheistic retelling of the Assyrian story of Gilgamesh.
Incidentally, my parents were both Bible thumpers and pure on their wedding night... I did NOT follow in their footsteps - I made it through 18 years of religious indoctrination and then I was outta there (having become highly skeptical or religion, not necessarily God).
The pop stations near me played Weird Al and he was a massive hit on MTV (/me remembers music on MTV...) but if you meant Weird Al wouldn't have done what he did without Dr Demento, then I agree - in fact, I believe the live show where Another One Rides the Bus was largely his breakthrough (he had minor hits before that - My Bologna and such) and he was inspired by the show.
The live and demo recordings were fun, too - in fact, the demo version of Happy Birthday recorded on Dr Demento is FAR better than the one on the first album, which was overproduced, mixed poorly, and lost the guitar and vocal edginess (in fact, it is rather cheesy).
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Interesting point, and while Guild Wars is not technically a F2P game because they have an initial entry cost, the game does have a number of F2P features (no monthly cost, an in-game store with speedups like skill unlock packs, etc). I agree the game is very fashion driven - there is no reason to get Obsidian Armor other than aesthetics, because it is extremely expensive and offers no defensive benefit over cheap armor that is 1/100000 the price. The real trick with a store is you need to sell something players want and not over-saturate the game with that item. For instance, an in-game example: elemental swords were extremely valuable at one time, then raptor farming came along and you're now lucky to get 5000 for them. The same problem happened with Chaos Axes and Underworld farming.
Which makes sense - while the game would play on something significantly less, the OS and libraries would take significantly more resources.
And man, does that bring back porting nightmares - I ported some stuff from DOS to Mac circa MacOS 7 (maybe even 6... long time ago - pre-Codewarrior, which was my preferred mac tool later on) and having to deal with 64k and 640k barriers on DOS and 32k paging on the mac was probably the most frustrating thing about it. The code was all C and printed lots of C strings, so I also had to add lots of Pascal string endings on the mac, which was also a pain (and no, it was not easily localizable - if I had the same situation today I would have moved those strings to resources). Probably the easiest thing was porting the graphics, which was more because I wrote the Quickdraw code from scratch (all of that code was assembly) and created the palette visually in rezedit.
True, but to be honest, that is an entirely different issue.
I sometimes have trouble falling asleep, even when on a strict schedule and perfect quiet, but when I'm out, I'm out. In college I lived on a very busy street (first ave and third street in a downtown - a city, but not a major one) slept through loud traffic, gunfire, a semi-to-semi head on accident and supposedly a mass of police cars with flashing lights (my roommates wondered how the heck I slept through that), and when I was on campus before that place I almost slept through a (false) fire alarm that drunk kids probably set off (the RA said he had to shake me for a minute to wake me). That is strictly middle of the night, though - as long as I got enough sleep, I will wake up with my alarm (if I have one set).
An interesting study would have been my college roommates from on campus my second year of college - it was a 4 person apartment and the only "normal" kid there was my bunkmate (he studied, he partied on weekends, he slept normal nights, and got B-ish grades). The other two guys were really weird memory/sleep-wise - one slept at most 40 minutes at a time, and never on a schedule (so not really polyphasic). When I saw him sleep, it usually was on the couch and not in bed, and he worked a full time night job and was full time in school. The other slept about 4 hours a night and never napped, had an eidetic memory as well as an excellent memory for engineering problems and never studied (going to class and paging through the textbook to see equations not covered in class was enough), which drove me nuts because I had to studied my butt off in the same classes. Both of those guys were still running 4.0s when I transferred schools (and the guy that didn't sleep was almost done).
True, and the studies I've seen seem to have fatal flaws.
For instance, the comparison study
Focus group 1 plays Wolfenstein 3D
Focus group 2 plays Myst
The findings: focus group 1 is more aggressive and penalizes people longer.
The problem is that Myst is just not an adrenaline producing game - a fair comparison would be, say Myst vs Civilization or some other violent turn based strategy game. I could probably get the exact opposite result by comparing Tetris to Chess. Tetris vs Wolf 3D would have been a much better, much less loaded study.
The problem is video games are unfairly targeted and essentially the scapegoat, when all media is to blame, and regulation should be for all media.
A US Secret Service study on school shootings found these influences:
Violent Movies: 27%
Violent Books: 24%
Violent Video Games: 12%
BOOKS have TWICE the impact of video games and they aren't regulated AT ALL - where's the uproar? the book burnings? the parent outrage?
In the 1990s when violent video game sales were at an all-time high, what was at an all time low? Juvenile violent crime.
according to the ESA, 93% of children only buy games with their parents and parents permission. That means only 7% are buying games without their parents knowledge or permission. That kind of spits in the face of California, which seems to think 99% of kids are doing it.
Speaking of California, California wants violent video games to have a 2 inch label indicating content. Current ESRB labels are 1" and consistently labeled in the bottom left corner. Movie labels? around 1/4" on most I own, but sometimes in a 1 1/2" box (to help find them easier and explain the rating). And consistent? Hell no - you can find movie labels anywhere on the box. Heck, the two videotape Titanic is rated UNDER the box (and yes, I just looked - I was trying to find the largest label - and no, we don't own Titanic - it was forgotten here long ago by a friend of my wife). Books never are labeled.
And the quote that got my goat in the California deal was "the movie industry self-regulates, the video game industry should as well." - I ask where do they self-regulate? In the theater? I bet at least 7% of 15-16 year old kids either buy a ticket and don't get carded or buy a ticket for one movie and sneak in to another. I certainly did when I was 16, and so did all of my friends, and I still see it happen - that seems like regulation fail to me. And how about in retail? Does Best Buy give a flying f*ck if you're 14 and buying an R rated movie? These are the same stores where the video games are being purchased, so obviously an apples-to-apples comparison is not being made.
My only guess is it mentions Breakout. Breakout was conceptualized by Nolan Bushnell and Steve Bristow at Atari and eventually contracted to HP Engineer Steve Wozniak by Steve Jobs. Those two later worked together to make the Apple and Apple ][ line of computers. One of Woz's driving goals for creating the Apple computer was to make a software only version Breakout, and the version he created was included with the computer, written in Woz's own Integer Basic (the other version of BASIC on the Apple ][ was actually written by Microsoft).
Probably the same info on wikipedia, but I'm a walking wikipedia for this sort of crap ;)
That doesn't surprise me - laptops with GPUs run very hot - I generally have mine on a thermal mat for just that reason (after blowing an 8600M twice [first replaced under warranty, second blew 3 days out of warranty], I decided my new laptop with a 9800M GT should sit on a thermal mat - and no, my laptop is not my main game machine - more of a workhorse road warrior machine I use occasionally for games. I also suck out the fans and keyboards on all my computers with a shop vac about twice a year, which works much better than CO2 cans.
The fix is actually in TFA, though maybe it was added.
I've never seen a melted GPU - unless they have a flawed design, they should throttle slower and/or shut down before hitting such a temp. I have seen a CPU start a motherboard on fire (well, smoldering, but close enough), but that was a long time ago and before CPU temperature monitoring.
yeah, or DisplayPort. I know next to nothing about the standard aside from my laptop has it, it is created by VESA, and it is royalty free.
Well the grandparent (or whatever it was) is correct in that if the impedance is high, you will have a highly lossy signal, but if impedance is high you will likely also have a very hot cable (by the laws of thermodynamics).
So yeah, in general, any crappy cable should do for a digital signal.
Monster is more of a status brand, anyway - people buy Apple computers and Stoli vodka, too, and there are perfectly good alternatives (hell, if you just want to get drunk, bathtub gin works just as good as Stoli).
heh - reminded me of the nonsense papers generated by a program called babble 123 (or babel 123 or something like that) on the Apple ][ in the early 1980s. You'd pick a subject, add some related buzzwords and pick a level of technical detail for the paper (high school, college, or PhD, I believe) and the program would auto-generate a paper for you. It was quite amusing.
Actually, that is basically the argument most creationists fixate on - if we all evolve slowly, why hasn't X creature evolved?
They then point out that we can watch hundreds of generations of bacteria and fruit flies and they never evolve, thus disproving Darwin's theory that all creatures evolve over time.
Of course, that ignores the amendments since then (I believe even Darwin made such an amendment) that suggest some stressor is needed, and that testing with fruit flies in managed conditions did force evolutionary changes in them. In your case, said monkey did not have a stress condition (scarce food, too hot, too cold, etc) that forced an evolutionary change like human ancestors did.
Well, if you go by the Jehovah's Witnesses I talked to, the devil created DNA to fool us into thinking each human wasn't created by intelligent design. Seriously! That was brought up because I argued that DNA existed in human fossils that pre-date their creation date, and their answer to anything older than their calculated creation date is Satan did it. I kept pushing the subject and they pretty much said Satan creates all DNA as soon as it is extracted from the body. That Satan sure is a busy bugger, and God seems very disinclined to stop him from messing with the earth and the people on it.
Hmm... I don't think creationism belongs in astronomy, either - maybe if they had an astrology class...
I don't have a problem with religion per-se, but there is a point when rational becomes silly and silly becomes absurd, and they reached it.
Actually, his rant is about the same thing I said about C++ 10 years ago. C++ is a powerful language, but it is also an extremely bloated language, and has a lot of legacy bolted on. After using the much more streamlined objective-C it was hard to go back. To be honest, I'd say the main reason to use C++ is all OS's include libraries for it.
Sadly, C++ is even less portable than C and included numerous questionable decisions in its design. My personal peeve is wchar_t, which has an undefined length, so localization is a pain in the rear. I also wish there was an easy way to add accessor functions, since I always bolt them on except for low level code (to make it more true OOP). Also there are many convenience classes that have never made it in - like streamlined thread and thread pool classes (therefore, you need to implement them yourself on every platform).
The reason it impacts US marketshare is because Nokia's market share in the US is significantly less than Motorola's - I think Nokia is around 8% and Motorola 20%, so basically they jump from 8% marketshare to 28% marketshare. Nokia does much better in Europe and Asia where phone service is not bundled with the phones.
Um, not correct - Nokia Siemens was not implicated or involved - yes that joint venture was announced before the Siemens scandal, but the company itself is a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens and run as a separate company (with Nokia and Siemens each having a 50% stake in it) and wasn't fully founded until after the scandal. Nokia Siemens is most notorious for supplying deep packet inspection software to Iran.
Siemens itself was fined heavily for bribery, and much of the bribery was in telecom, but it all pre-dates the joint venture (most of the charges were between 2002 and 2006). The real problem in Siemens was because corruption like bribery was an acceptable practice to ensure contracts in Germany, and even tax deductible until 1999 (Germans call it nutzliche Aufwendungen, which literally means "useful expenses"), and Siemens executives and accountants never stopped doing the practice after the practice was banned. The practice was actually run pretty much exactly like the third party loophole for Payola in the United States, where an outside contractor was hired to pay to bribe the customer and recommend the deal (in Payola an outside contractor was hired to bribe the radio stations to play a song).
There are two possibilities here that I can think of - by small scale MMO, he may be referring to a game with a fairly small playing area - maybe the world is only about the size of Oblivion, rather than, say Azeroth. Another possibility is the "programmer lingo" vs the "consumer lingo" is a bit different - as a programmer, I think of MMO as a game/network that scales with player base and has nothing to do with the number of actual players. A "small MMO" would mean the player base for a particular are would be small in comparison to, say, WoW. A practical example would be something like NWN multiplayer without the fixed connection limits (which the world designer/network owner could then set, if desired).
Speaking from my own experience, by 8 I was using computers (an Apple ][ with 16k and a tape drive - the ][+'s with 48k came a couple of years later) and by 12 I was programming assembly language on a ][+ and an expert at BASIC (and thank God we had Disk ][s by then...). This was all self motivated and driven - I had to use reward chips (I was in an alternative school - we got game room/computer room reward chips for finishing our goals) to use the computers.
I think the real problem today is the distraction factor of social media, and kids that age need discipline and filtering, which means usually parental supervision for the entire time they use a computer, and I don't think most parents can do that. Social media needs to be a reward, just like TV time and game time (2600 and Intellivision in my day) was for me as a kid.
Well, they do in certain games, but of course they need to follow traditional faction and empire lines. Nazi Germany at its height is very different than today's Germany, the Huns stretched from Mongolia to Hungary and a large part of Germany in the 500s, the Holy Roman Empire consumed Eastern Europe in the 1600s, etc. Some areas are extremely volatile and have fragmented and rejoined in different configurations repeatedly - see the former republic of Yugoslavia, for instance (ethnic divisions are always fun).
why? I've never understood this. Some of my favorite movies are marketed to families and generally target children - heck, Star Wars targeted children. There were no cuss words or gore in Star Wars, so obviously it must have been bad. Songs are obviously better when they are littered with cuss words thrown in randomly, too, right? So movies and video games must be better with them - the more the merrier. Sarcasm aside, I see no reason to ever cuss in a movie or game unless it is to make a point. Sometimes that point is to make a caricature character, like Tarantino does, and I'm fine with that, but honestly, if someone is saying fuck every 5 seconds for no reason, I don't really feel much power in the word when they use it for anything in context (like oh, fuck man, I just got shot).
voice chat - is pretty meaningless. People learn quite well when they work with others - as long as they are paying attention and trying to work through a puzzle together, all should learn from it. Also voice chat in games actually appeals more to boys than girls (seriously - there was a study on this - girls tend to prefer single player games and depend on it less for social interaction than boys), so you would expect girls to excel if voice chat was the reason.
Most ratings systems are broken as far as I can tell. Nudity that could pass a G rating on TV (i.e. topless African tribeswomen) get an automatic AO by the ESRB. I'm not kidding. Sex can be depicted under the sheets and you can get an M rating, but 1/2 second of tit is an automatic AO - how fucked up is that? I'm not talking Johnsons or Vaggies here, I'm talking 1/2 second of African Tribeswomen tit, or breastfeeding mother - automatic AO. The kind of thing that is so ungodly indecent that no 17 year old should ever see such an unholy thing depicted in polygons, but watching it when they are 6 on TV or in a movie is OK. The ONLY reason why there is an M and AO is because WalMart and other "moral" stores wanted it so they could ban AO games - if the ESRB would stop sucking up to them, a sane ratings system could be put in place. I can understand an AO rating, but it needs to be sane - it should be like getting an X for movies, and it currently is like getting a PG-13.
I prefer to use my imagination. Currently it is Evil Otto (a bouncing happy face) from the game Berzerk, and a robotic voice is saying "Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Stop the Intruder!"
They are? Of the ones I remember - Kirk, Bones, Scotty, Spock, Uhura, Checkov and Sulu only 2 are dead (Scotty and Bones).
Star trek fortune cookie:
Wear not the red shirt and live a long and prosperous life.
That may be true for meth since manufacture is terribly toxic and generally noticeable, but something like LSD could easily be manufactured in a lab for all we know. And if you go to plant based drugs, they are much more potent and often grown by professionals growers. Some strains of opiates are so powerful that shooting them will kill you (so heroin users snort them), cocaine was purified years ago, and pot is significantly more potent now than ever.
I've known a lot of users over the years and am very glad I stayed away, especially while as a touring musician, where just about everything was available. My touring band was probably my best band, too, but it cost me two long friendships due to drugs, sex, and the band self destructed due to that and too much ego and not enough compromise. Kinda par for the course in the music industry amongst has-been bands that failed to make it.
yeah - it looks like he's using the volume for picking (when the hand is lowest it picks - it may pick at highest volume too - I wasn't paying that much attention - too busy laughing - that part is the metal loop if you aren't familiar with a theramin) and the tone hand handles position (that is the rod, if you aren't familiar with a theramin) - the finger waggling is just for show, since it is air guitar in a lot of ways.
um, where exactly in the Bible does it say pre-marital sex is a sin? Heck, as far as I remember, the only sin it mentions involving sex is adultery (multiple references and books), rape (again a few times) and bestiality (Leviticus, I'm fairly sure).
The Bible does talk a bit about fornication (it says NOTHING about fornication being pre-marital - imply that if you will) and says marriage is a cure for immoral behavior (but since they also talk about adultery, not apparently for everyone). Some people read into that and see that as fornication = unmarried sex = immoral behavior = sin, but the Bible does not say that explicitly. Adultery is a major sin, and I have to assume that is because marriage is supposed to be the cure for immoral behavior, and that would be cure fail. Anyhow, I can think of a wide range of immoral behavior other than just fornication (lets see... streaking, spin the bottle, drinking and dry humping a bedpost, etc), but some people get hung up on fornicating for some reason.
And lets see... if I remember correctly, Sodom and Gomorrah were basically rich pagan cities that didn't conform to Christian morals and their sins were more along the lines of greediness at least in old Hebrew scripture, but they somehow managed to be more carnal in the hands of Christians and later Hebrew scholars. It had something with to do with Lot's daughters or covering some girl with honey and feeding her to bees for being charitable or something like that...
Anyhow, I do remember there was a translation problem involving "to know," which has similar ambiguity in English - if I say "I'd love to get to know you better" I may be genial, as in I want to be your friend and see what interests we share, or I may be implying that I want to sleep with you. It actually relies more on inflection in English - not sure about Hebrew. I do remember it almost never has the sexual meaning, but because they were referring to the people of Sodom, it was assumed to be the sexual meaning, and it is ambiguous in print context (and is really quite dirty in the sexual context - basically the translation could be the people wanted to know who the rapists [I think they were rapists... been a long time] were, or they wanted to fuck them... this wouldn't be ambiguous in any context other than Sodom...).
The Hebrew book of Enoch has the only mention of homosexuality that I remember, but that isn't scripture and I think only one small group of Christians considers it canon (and I looked it up - yep - Ethiopian Christians). I'm a bit skeptical of the whole Noah story (Enoch was his great granddad), personally, since it is really a monotheistic retelling of the Assyrian story of Gilgamesh.
Incidentally, my parents were both Bible thumpers and pure on their wedding night... I did NOT follow in their footsteps - I made it through 18 years of religious indoctrination and then I was outta there (having become highly skeptical or religion, not necessarily God).
The pop stations near me played Weird Al and he was a massive hit on MTV (/me remembers music on MTV...) but if you meant Weird Al wouldn't have done what he did without Dr Demento, then I agree - in fact, I believe the live show where Another One Rides the Bus was largely his breakthrough (he had minor hits before that - My Bologna and such) and he was inspired by the show.
The live and demo recordings were fun, too - in fact, the demo version of Happy Birthday recorded on Dr Demento is FAR better than the one on the first album, which was overproduced, mixed poorly, and lost the guitar and vocal edginess (in fact, it is rather cheesy).