Most windows (for residential construction, anyhow) already have an insect screen. These days most of these are plastic, but they used to be made from aluminum, which would shield the window quite nicely. And no, they don't look all that bad either.
What makes Civ enjoyable is the strategy, but all those clicks the article complains about is about tactics. Deciding how many workers to assign to building a railroad is strategy, telling each worker how to get to the building site is tactics. Figuring out the best way to transport a hundred units to another continent is strategy, actually trasporting them is tactics. The computer can not do strategy, but it can do tactics. In fact, it can do tactics a million times better and faster than any human. Your "human ingenuity" of applying your limited resources in the most optimal way possible is vastly inferior to the computer's. You can not keep track of all details simultaneously, the computer can. You are not going to model different allocation strategies and pick the optimal one, the computer will. Face it, the computer will always win at micromanagement; it's what the computer is for, and when you try to do the computer's job, it is no fun at all, being mechanical, tedious, and unrewarding.
The terrorists are doing this because they really care about your comfort. Why spend a whole miserable day cramped into a tiny seat with deafening engines destroying your hearing, when instead you can spend your journey in a comfortable cabin on a cruise ship? Ships have many advantages over flying. From travelwizard:
Imagine being pampered from sunup to sundown. Having your every need and whim met, being treated as if you were alone in the center of the universe. Today's cruise ships are floating resorts. Destinations in themselves, offering everything you would expect in a five star resort. Fine dining. Dazzling entertainment. Activities galore. You'll never be bored.
Being at sea gives you a feeling of freedom few places can offer. There's plenty of room. And it'll probably take you two or three days just to discover what's on board. Plus, you get the added adventure of exploring new and exciting ports of call. Cruise ships are like floating resorts, with all the things fine resorts have to offer. You can be yourself and lie back on a lounge chair, breath in the sea air, soak up the sun, read good books or watch the ever-changing view. Or join in exercise classes, dance classes, sports contests and other organized deck activities. Perhaps you can practice your tennis strokes, drive golf balls, shoot some skeet or basketballs. You can go for a swim, stretch out in the sauna or work out in the gym. You can see a feature movie, attend lectures by renowned experts, play backgammon or bridge.
Considering that it only takes two to four days to cross the ocean on a ship, it is well worth considering as an alternative to the fascist treatment you get when flying. Be nice to yourself!
> Is highbrow merely a synonym for "pretentious and boring"?
Sometimes it is, though it may be due to hypocrisy rather than intent. The culture of the elite is supposed to portray the best traits of humanity, its noblest and worthiest virtues, its most beautiful aspirations, and the perfection of taste. One might contrast this with the culture of the "proles", which tends to glorify mediocrity and small aspirations, encouraging its consumers to adhere to a "steady-state" life of simple wants, of "living for today", of thinking as little as possible, and generally enjoying what they have.
The danger of striving for perfection lies in the inability of some people to objectively judge their own abilities and achievements. The culture of the elite naturally incorporates the belief that a man can better himself, and unless this man knows what "better" means, he could simply assume he is already "better" than everyone else. These are the "highbrow" types that we normally call "prudes".
> Is highbrow something like "acquired taste"?
It is a taste acquired when a man acquires the set of moral values that goes with it.
> Is highbrow "difficult to understand"?
If you do not possess those moral values, then it is impossible to understand. Likewise in this situation, the "highbrow" type will find it impossible to understand your culture because he will not have your moral values.
The number of "highbrow" people has been in steady decline since the fifties. What we called high culture then has been becoming less and less popular concurrently. The modern man does not go to museums, listen to operas, read poetry or serious fiction, or, for that matter, read much of anything at all. He has replaced it with television, its reality shows and Fox news; he buys widescreen sets, useless (but entertaining) gadgets, and ugly comfortable couches upon which to sit and drink beer on sundays. Most don't own any books, paintings, or musical instruments. Playing music has pretty much died out and only listening to it is still popular. The type of music also has migrated away from "highbrow" classical styles and has been replaced with obscenity-laced rap. So it is with video games and most other areas of cultural expression, all of which must be tailored to the audience. The products of a culture degrade with the degradation of the tastes of its citizens. Nothing surprizing here.
> If their code is smart enough to know a keyword "ServersCheck" is listed on webpages with the other keywords > "ServersCheck crack", "ServersCheck keygen" or "ServersCheck pro crack" they should be able to put a filter in for it
There is no way Google has keyword rules like that. It is impractical for the size of their dataset. A much more likely method for making suggestions is to find other keywords a particular word appears with on the same page, sort the results by number, and display the top three or so. This sounds exactly like the sort of stuff their search engine already does, and because of that is likely require very little code to implement.
Now, what's happening with ServersCheck is that their software is really pricey -- $1500/copy, ok for corporate giants, but no good to anyone else; especially considering how very little it does. So, naturally, everyone just pirates it instead, and as a result, the cracks and keygens show up on thousands of those trash sites where you can play find-the-download-link forever in a sea of porn and ads. These sites are so numerous that "ServersCheck crack" probably has a higher correlation than any other terms related to the company and as such show up first on the suggestions list.
"Fixing" this is not possible in general; there is no way to tell if a particular keyword is illegal somewhere just by looking at it. It is possible to add a secondary filter on the suggestions list on which keyword pairs would be placed by request. Depending on how extensible the search engine itself is, this may be easy or hard, but is definitely a bit of extra work.
I certainly appreciate your gracious offer of friendship and, according to my philosophy, will immediately start treating you like one. In the name of our newly-forged friendship, I am wondering if you would be kind enough to advance me TEN THOUSAND US DOLLARS ($10,000.00) to rescue your troubled friend and his container. Surely, as a president of a bank, you ought to have no difficulty in procuring these funds and loaning them to me, your dearest friend, would you? In return you will have my ETERNAL gratitude and that tingly warm feeling that comes from receiving it. I'll then be VERY HAPPY to rescue your friend's container in return for only ONE MIEEELION US DOLLARS ($1,000,000.00).
The problem is not with the lack of nonverbal cues, but with people who are easily offended. Such people simply assume that everyone hates them and everything else in the world. Obviously, such mindset leads to interpreting every sentence in the worst possible way, seeing insult in place of irony, personal attacks in passionate arguments, and hatred in the omission of flattery. The email world would be a far friendlier place if everyone assumed goodwill in correspondence instead, choosing to interpret every statement as if it came from a dearest friend, trustworthy and kind, if perhaps sometimes absent-minded. The best way to become friends with any man is simply to start treating him like one.
I recall reading a book about a nanotech mountain suddenly appearing on earth. It was in the Death Valley though, and was actually a fake spaceship, placed there by hostile aliens about to destory the planet. We ought to look around there and see if there are any anvil-headed aliens lying nearby. The book was The Forge of God by Greg Bear, and it wasn't particularly good, although one might want to read it for background, complimentary to its sequel, The Anvil of Stars, which is superb.
I wonder when idiot web designers will stop trying to make the web look like a postcard instead of a text document. The article's formatting has got to be one finest examples on how not to design a web page. Custom controls for scrolling? Background that can't be turned off? (white, of course, just to add some extra whallop of razor pain in the eye to the content) Reading window constrained to about a quarter of my screen area and centered like a postcard? Who hires these people, and why? The fact that the article's content is about a text-based game makes the above doubly ironic.
They have forgotten to ask the one question that is surely uppermost in the minds of Slashdot readers; namely, what brand of console does one buy to maximize his chances of getting laid?
Perhaps so. It is one of my perpetually scratched festering sores. Sadly, this one is well justified.
> I don't think developers demand or necessarily deserve reverence.
You haven't spent much time working with OSS developers then. I do try to help out with various projects now and then, if only to get them to compile clean. You'd be amazed at what rude, arrogant, blistering morons I have ran into. It really saps any faith one might have had in the future of the human race to begin with.
> Just that there seems to be a lot of complaining about free help here on/.
Which is no more revolting than the replies to them, stating that free help is sacred and not to be criticized. Free or expensive, if it's garbage, it still stinks. You have no idea how riled I get at these people who think everyone should be falling over with gratitude just because those selfless paragons of virtue work for nothing. I can hardly think of any human behaviour that is more disguisting and despicable.
Damn right! You know why? Because I am one. I happen to be one of those who actually write documentation, and I can't tell you how lonely I've felt in this:)
> Those reactions are heavy stereotypes, unless you always ask flamebait > questions or are running before you can walk.
Those reactions are actually direct quotes. There was a Slashdot article about that some time last month. In my personal experience, tech support for OSS projects has gotten meaner and more desperate every year. Not that there aren't nice developers out there who won't help you out; but you will spend lots of time searching for them.
> And on getting the occasional insult because of a wrong assumption, maybe you > could just accept it as collateral damage of getting free help.
"You should be thankful you get anything, you ungrateful n00b; I give away my soul for free and what do I get in return? Nothing!"
Such typical communist tripe. If you give away stuff for free, don't expect gratitude. Once the transaction is complete, I don't owe you a thing. That's capitalism; the only fair economic system in the world. If you disagree, maybe you could just accept as collateral damage the fact that you aren't making any money.
> Cutting edge developer distros don't have time to explain how to use a terminal
Why don't they have the time to make things work when they are installed? Why does it require all my technical expertise to print to a printer share from a Windows machine? It is absolutely the most common scenario for a home user, and yet the setup is a nightmare. Or how about playing DVDs? Or burning CDs, which on my machine still requires being root since cdrecord can't allocate a buffer otherwise for some reason and I don't have time to waste on debugging it.
Face it, Linux is in such a pathetic stone age, I can't even begin to list all my complaints. And yes, I know what you are going to say; it is the favorite OSS refrain when backed into a corner: "you got the source, why don't you write it, wise guy?" Because I have other things to do. Because what I have now sorta works, letting me do those things. Because I am just one man, and while I am indeed working on improving the Linux environment, it will take years for me to finish.
And yes, feel free to mark this down as flamebait. That's what happens when anyone criticizes the state of Linux here. We wouldn't want all those developers to unbury their heads from that comfortable sand, would we?
The community becomes more and more important every day. Since many developers "forget" to write documentation for their applications, the end users are more and more dependent on the community to get their free stuff working. And every remark like "did you RTFM, you $%#$ing n00b?" or "go play with your Windows, loser, if you don't want to learn stuff", certainly makes a lasting impact in the mind of the user community.
The article doesn't appear to mention this, but there is a C99 standard header stdint.h, which defines fixed width types. I haven't seen any OSS project use it, for some reason, but it has all the types you need for portable development; int32_t, uint64_t, constant wrappers like UINT64_C, and, of course, limit constants for all of the fixed-size types. Using these is much better than all those size-based #ifdef'ed typedefs I see people use all over their code.
> I see environmentalists as having their priorities fucked up. Why is an owl more important > than a logger's family? Why is old-growth forest more important than a parking lot? Why are > we worried about dolphins?
Because we like them! I personally like them too. I like dolphins and would like to see more of them. I would rather walk around in an old-growth forest than on a parking lot. And I would much rather spend time with an owl than with some logger who is a complete stranger to me. So, no, my priorities are very much in order, thank you very much!
If one saw, in real life, a beautiful woman wearing an exquisite evening gown, with a cold sore on her lips, the blemish would mean nothing but a minor affliction and one would ignore it. But a painting of such a woman would be a corrupt, obscenely vicious attack on man, on beauty, on all values -- and one would experience a feeling of immense disgust and indignation at the artist. (There are also those who would feel something like approval and who would belong to the same moral category as the artist)
And on the purpose of such art:
Since man lives by reshaping his physical background to serve his purpose, since he must first define and then create his values -- a rational man needs a concretized projection of these values, an image in whose likeness he will reshape the world and himself. Art gives him that image; it gives him the experience of seeing the full, immediate, concrete reality of his distant goals.
I'll finish with a definition of art according to the author:
Art is a selective recreation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgements.
Once you understand these things, seeing the purpose and the nature of the Hitman ad is trivial.
> targeted pursuit of information that's influenced by the preferences of a person's peer group.
Excuse me, but when I am looking for information, finding only what my peers think is good for me is the last thing I would want. Social conformity is the death of truth.
When I install XP, it always overwrites the boot sector and I have to boot from a CD to put grub back there. How does Boot Camp work around this little "feature"?
Slashdot Mirror
Most windows (for residential construction, anyhow) already have an insect screen. These days most of these are plastic, but they used to be made from aluminum, which would shield the window quite nicely. And no, they don't look all that bad either.
What makes Civ enjoyable is the strategy, but all those clicks the article complains about is about tactics. Deciding how many workers to assign to building a railroad is strategy, telling each worker how to get to the building site is tactics. Figuring out the best way to transport a hundred units to another continent is strategy, actually trasporting them is tactics. The computer can not do strategy, but it can do tactics. In fact, it can do tactics a million times better and faster than any human. Your "human ingenuity" of applying your limited resources in the most optimal way possible is vastly inferior to the computer's. You can not keep track of all details simultaneously, the computer can. You are not going to model different allocation strategies and pick the optimal one, the computer will. Face it, the computer will always win at micromanagement; it's what the computer is for, and when you try to do the computer's job, it is no fun at all, being mechanical, tedious, and unrewarding.
In case anyone is wondering what this "denial of Holocaust" is all about and what exactly is being denied, there is a summary available.
Considering that it only takes two to four days to cross the ocean on a ship, it is well worth considering as an alternative to the fascist treatment you get when flying. Be nice to yourself!
> I have heard from more than a few places that since the internet became
> accessible, sales of paperbooks has increased dramatically, per capita.
Where did you hear that? I don't know about the sales of books, but there are numerous articles about the decline of reading of books.
> Particularly when much of the "low brow" music and art was considered "black".
It still is, it's just cool to be black now. It's also cool to dress like a scarecrow, speak like a jailbird, and act like a pig.
> Who are all of those people I see lined up at the symphony, bookstores and museums
Probably the ones who claim that global warming is not real because of a cool day in their hometown.
> Is highbrow merely a synonym for "pretentious and boring"?
Sometimes it is, though it may be due to hypocrisy rather than intent. The culture of the elite is supposed to portray the best traits of humanity, its noblest and worthiest virtues, its most beautiful aspirations, and the perfection of taste. One might contrast this with the culture of the "proles", which tends to glorify mediocrity and small aspirations, encouraging its consumers to adhere to a "steady-state" life of simple wants, of "living for today", of thinking as little as possible, and generally enjoying what they have.
The danger of striving for perfection lies in the inability of some people to objectively judge their own abilities and achievements. The culture of the elite naturally incorporates the belief that a man can better himself, and unless this man knows what "better" means, he could simply assume he is already "better" than everyone else. These are the "highbrow" types that we normally call "prudes".
> Is highbrow something like "acquired taste"?
It is a taste acquired when a man acquires the set of moral values that goes with it.
> Is highbrow "difficult to understand"?
If you do not possess those moral values, then it is impossible to understand. Likewise in this situation, the "highbrow" type will find it impossible to understand your culture because he will not have your moral values.
The number of "highbrow" people has been in steady decline since the fifties. What we called high culture then has been becoming less and less popular concurrently. The modern man does not go to museums, listen to operas, read poetry or serious fiction, or, for that matter, read much of anything at all. He has replaced it with television, its reality shows and Fox news; he buys widescreen sets, useless (but entertaining) gadgets, and ugly comfortable couches upon which to sit and drink beer on sundays. Most don't own any books, paintings, or musical instruments. Playing music has pretty much died out and only listening to it is still popular. The type of music also has migrated away from "highbrow" classical styles and has been replaced with obscenity-laced rap. So it is with video games and most other areas of cultural expression, all of which must be tailored to the audience. The products of a culture degrade with the degradation of the tastes of its citizens. Nothing surprizing here.
Do you seriously think that TAs actually have a human side?
It's actually a derivative of "heave to"...
> If their code is smart enough to know a keyword "ServersCheck" is listed on webpages with the other keywords
> "ServersCheck crack", "ServersCheck keygen" or "ServersCheck pro crack" they should be able to put a filter in for it
There is no way Google has keyword rules like that. It is impractical for the size of their dataset. A much more likely method for making suggestions is to find other keywords a particular word appears with on the same page, sort the results by number, and display the top three or so. This sounds exactly like the sort of stuff their search engine already does, and because of that is likely require very little code to implement.
Now, what's happening with ServersCheck is that their software is really pricey -- $1500/copy, ok for corporate giants, but no good to anyone else; especially considering how very little it does. So, naturally, everyone just pirates it instead, and as a result, the cracks and keygens show up on thousands of those trash sites where you can play find-the-download-link forever in a sea of porn and ads. These sites are so numerous that "ServersCheck crack" probably has a higher correlation than any other terms related to the company and as such show up first on the suggestions list.
"Fixing" this is not possible in general; there is no way to tell if a particular keyword is illegal somewhere just by looking at it. It is possible to add a secondary filter on the suggestions list on which keyword pairs would be placed by request. Depending on how extensible the search engine itself is, this may be easy or hard, but is definitely a bit of extra work.
Dear Mr.Smith,
I certainly appreciate your gracious offer of friendship and, according to my philosophy, will immediately start treating you like one. In the name of our newly-forged friendship, I am wondering if you would be kind enough to advance me TEN THOUSAND US DOLLARS ($10,000.00) to rescue your troubled friend and his container. Surely, as a president of a bank, you ought to have no difficulty in procuring these funds and loaning them to me, your dearest friend, would you? In return you will have my ETERNAL gratitude and that tingly warm feeling that comes from receiving it. I'll then be VERY HAPPY to rescue your friend's container in return for only ONE MIEEELION US DOLLARS ($1,000,000.00).
In the name of our sincerest friendship,
Mr.Chemisor
A good friend in need.
The problem is not with the lack of nonverbal cues, but with people who are easily offended. Such people simply assume that everyone hates them and everything else in the world. Obviously, such mindset leads to interpreting every sentence in the worst possible way, seeing insult in place of irony, personal attacks in passionate arguments, and hatred in the omission of flattery. The email world would be a far friendlier place if everyone assumed goodwill in correspondence instead, choosing to interpret every statement as if it came from a dearest friend, trustworthy and kind, if perhaps sometimes absent-minded. The best way to become friends with any man is simply to start treating him like one.
I recall reading a book about a nanotech mountain suddenly appearing on earth. It was in the Death Valley though, and was actually a fake spaceship, placed there by hostile aliens about to destory the planet. We ought to look around there and see if there are any anvil-headed aliens lying nearby. The book was The Forge of God by Greg Bear, and it wasn't particularly good, although one might want to read it for background, complimentary to its sequel, The Anvil of Stars, which is superb.
I wonder when idiot web designers will stop trying to make the web look like a postcard instead of a text document. The article's formatting has got to be one finest examples on how not to design a web page. Custom controls for scrolling? Background that can't be turned off? (white, of course, just to add some extra whallop of razor pain in the eye to the content) Reading window constrained to about a quarter of my screen area and centered like a postcard? Who hires these people, and why? The fact that the article's content is about a text-based game makes the above doubly ironic.
They have forgotten to ask the one question that is surely uppermost in the minds of Slashdot readers; namely, what brand of console does one buy to maximize his chances of getting laid?
> Woah there. I think you overreacted a little.
/.
Perhaps so. It is one of my perpetually scratched festering sores. Sadly, this one is well justified.
> I don't think developers demand or necessarily deserve reverence.
You haven't spent much time working with OSS developers then. I do try to help out with various projects now and then, if only to get them to compile clean. You'd be amazed at what rude, arrogant, blistering morons I have ran into. It really saps any faith one might have had in the future of the human race to begin with.
> Just that there seems to be a lot of complaining about free help here on
Which is no more revolting than the replies to them, stating that free help is sacred and not to be criticized. Free or expensive, if it's garbage, it still stinks. You have no idea how riled I get at these people who think everyone should be falling over with gratitude just because those selfless paragons of virtue work for nothing. I can hardly think of any human behaviour that is more disguisting and despicable.
> You seem to have a deep distrust of developers
:)
Damn right! You know why? Because I am one. I happen to be one of those who actually write documentation, and I can't tell you how lonely I've felt in this
> Those reactions are heavy stereotypes, unless you always ask flamebait
> questions or are running before you can walk.
Those reactions are actually direct quotes. There was a Slashdot article about that some time last month. In my personal experience, tech support for OSS projects has gotten meaner and more desperate every year. Not that there aren't nice developers out there who won't help you out; but you will spend lots of time searching for them.
> And on getting the occasional insult because of a wrong assumption, maybe you
> could just accept it as collateral damage of getting free help.
"You should be thankful you get anything, you ungrateful n00b; I give away my soul for free and what do I get in return? Nothing!"
Such typical communist tripe. If you give away stuff for free, don't expect gratitude. Once the transaction is complete, I don't owe you a thing. That's capitalism; the only fair economic system in the world. If you disagree, maybe you could just accept as collateral damage the fact that you aren't making any money.
> Cutting edge developer distros don't have time to explain how to use a terminal
Why don't they have the time to make things work when they are installed? Why does it require all my technical expertise to print to a printer share from a Windows machine? It is absolutely the most common scenario for a home user, and yet the setup is a nightmare. Or how about playing DVDs? Or burning CDs, which on my machine still requires being root since cdrecord can't allocate a buffer otherwise for some reason and I don't have time to waste on debugging it.
Face it, Linux is in such a pathetic stone age, I can't even begin to list all my complaints. And yes, I know what you are going to say; it is the favorite OSS refrain when backed into a corner: "you got the source, why don't you write it, wise guy?" Because I have other things to do. Because what I have now sorta works, letting me do those things. Because I am just one man, and while I am indeed working on improving the Linux environment, it will take years for me to finish.
And yes, feel free to mark this down as flamebait. That's what happens when anyone criticizes the state of Linux here. We wouldn't want all those developers to unbury their heads from that comfortable sand, would we?
All you have to do is sacrifice them, forms and all. The government wouldn't dare to tax your transaction with God, would they?
The community becomes more and more important every day. Since many developers "forget" to write documentation for their applications, the end users are more and more dependent on the community to get their free stuff working. And every remark like "did you RTFM, you $%#$ing n00b?" or "go play with your Windows, loser, if you don't want to learn stuff", certainly makes a lasting impact in the mind of the user community.
The article doesn't appear to mention this, but there is a C99 standard header stdint.h, which defines fixed width types. I haven't seen any OSS project use it, for some reason, but it has all the types you need for portable development; int32_t, uint64_t, constant wrappers like UINT64_C, and, of course, limit constants for all of the fixed-size types. Using these is much better than all those size-based #ifdef'ed typedefs I see people use all over their code.
> I see environmentalists as having their priorities fucked up. Why is an owl more important
> than a logger's family? Why is old-growth forest more important than a parking lot? Why are
> we worried about dolphins?
Because we like them! I personally like them too. I like dolphins and would like to see more of them. I would rather walk around in an old-growth forest than on a parking lot. And I would much rather spend time with an owl than with some logger who is a complete stranger to me. So, no, my priorities are very much in order, thank you very much!
And on the purpose of such art:
I'll finish with a definition of art according to the author:
Once you understand these things, seeing the purpose and the nature of the Hitman ad is trivial.
> targeted pursuit of information that's influenced by the preferences of a person's peer group.
Excuse me, but when I am looking for information, finding only what my peers think is good for me is the last thing I would want. Social conformity is the death of truth.
When I install XP, it always overwrites the boot sector and I have to boot from a CD to put grub back there. How does Boot Camp work around this little "feature"?