MY rambling

Found this post on slashdot (and originally written by a Marine, so take with a grain of salt). I think it makes a pretty eloquent argument for the carrying of personal arms, and would like to discuss.

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Maybe not the best place to ask for advice, but here's the situation:

I got a new computer about a month ago with twin Seagate 250gb hard drives. I loaded XP to one, and Vista to the other (just in case - the license lets me use both, so why not?). And after a while, XP stopped booting - frozen at the black "Windows XP" screen with the little bar going on at the bottom for over 20 minutes, the hard drive LED on the whole time. Vista loads fine.

So I boot into Vista, and run chkdsk on my XP drive. It finds errors and fixes them. XP now loads, but hard drive access is horrible - an average of .5mbps read/write, and a max of 1.2mbps. Same utility shows 70mbps for the same drive when run from Vista.

I'm thinking XP was corrupted, but am so lazy that I want a faster fix than reinstalling it. Any ideas?

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So we use language to convey our ideas. Very cool tool.

But sometimes we misunderstand each other! Oh no!

Natural languages allow for lots of ambiguity, and the correct meaning is supposed to be inferred from the context. But sometimes it is not, and text-only language has the added hindrance of not having body language and intonation to help add context. So I see a lot of people misunderstanding each other, and getting angry when really there is no issue.

Take for example the thread in the General Forum labeled "Spain racist towards Chinese?" I'll ignore the misleading title for now.

Travis says "why is this a problem?"

Some interpret this question as saying "racism is OK." Cue flames.

Perhaps another interpretation is that Asians really do have slanted eyes, so Travis doesn't see why depicting them as having slanted eyes is a problem. (My preferred interpretation, as it agrees with my thoughts.)

Point is, lots of people spend lots of time arguing with a position that no one is holding. Spend the extra minute to make sure you understand what the guy's saying before you spend an hour arguing with him!

From slashdot.

Gosu.

Oh, and because I just have to show off how gosu of a sc analyzer and predictor I am...

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I'm tasked with writing and updating some manuals. We have 3 software manuals, and like 7 versions of hardware manuals for different models which are all slightly different from each other. And maybe 15 option manuals. So when some basic feature gets updated, I get to have the fun of going through maybe 10 documents to change a paragraph and a few pictures. And sometimes adding a picture to the middle of a word document, and renumbering all of the following pictures (Figure 1-5 now is Figure 1-6, and what was Figure 1-6 is now Figure 1-7, ad nauseam). Or a new feature is added, which means a new chapter needs to be added, which means all the following chapters need to be re-numbered, including section numbers and sub-section numbers and image numbers.

So I get to thinking, there's got to be a better way to do this. (I tend to start thinking when doing something that boring.) Instead of keeping 20 different Word files, I'd really like to keep maybe 100 different smaller files, each holding a chapter. And a database of images.

Then when we need a manual for System X, we pull together the needed chapters and compile them, inserting the chapter number wherever a special character that marks "chapter number here" is found. Images are linked to the database, not contained within the document themselves. Template based on a single document, referred to at time of compilation.

Aside from being motivated by laziness, I think this would result in a much better maintained set of documentation. 5 minutes on Google tells me nothing exactly like (or even very close to) what I'm thinking of has already been done. So what obvious problems are here, other than the fact that I'd probably work a lot harder making such a documentation-handling software than I'd ever do updating stuff by hand?

As I'm typing this, I am looking at



What the hell? The only reason I clicked on it was because I'm on a touchpad and it clicks instead of moving if you tap it, which I apparently did by accident. I'm not interested in reading the small-ass text that uses a fucking emoticon in the middle of a graphical banner ad, and has nothing to do with the rest of the image. Yah, a marine with an explosion in the background, and the text says "we don't hate you come to our site."

So my boss tells me that I need to update our image analysis software's manual. Fine. Changelog...

Note: After writing all that, I've realized that I'm not talking very much about "rights" at all. Sorry to the folks who came expecting some rant on ethics. PM me if you want one.

So I've seen two "Earthling" blogs in the past week (possibly there were more that I haven't seen). Both linking to videos (possibly the same one). Both saying "this is what we're doing, we should stop."

And I'm here to do the same! Without the video. But hopefully more coherently.

Terminology note: "Vegan" can either be a noun, referring to a person who does not consume animal products, or an adjective, referring to anything that does not consume (or include in its material or manufacture... or development) any animal products.

Let's list some starting points, and grab more on the way as we need them. But I hope everyone will agree with these starting points.

#Humans consume (and create) products, including food, clothing, and cosmetics, which in their manufacture require the use of animals.

#Said use of animals is usually painful to said animal, and mostly results in its death.

Given just these two, it's hard to come to some sort of conclusion. We also have to answer such questions as:

How important are these products?

How important is the treatment of these animals?

Now, these PETA crazies will have you believe that the answer to the first is "not very," and the answer to the second is "more than Starcraft." Depending on your own value system, your own answers might vary wildly.

There are many ways to answer these questions, and as I have way too much time, I'll offer a few options. Keep in mind that this is not meant to be comprehensive, so don't complain that I left something out.

How important are animal products?

From a consumer's standpoint, animal products are not inherently different from vegan products, other than perhaps an emotional value attached to "the real thing" or "cruelty-free," depending on what one prefers. Other than that, the taste, texture, quality, price, whatever has, does, and will vary with the state of the market and current technology.

Historically speaking, the "real" stuff, the animal products, have generally been better. Real meat tastes better, real leather lasts longer, whatever. However, it's not so clear these days. Plastic leather and soy steaks and rice ice cream aren't quite indistinguishable from the real thing, but they're getting close and there's no reason to believe they won't get there.

There's no clear-cut answer. Animal products aren't necessarily better, but they're not necessarily worse.

On a health perspective, which is actually a subset of the above, there are some memes floating around that animal products are essential to human health. They're simply wrong. There is nothing, absolutely nothing in animal products that you can't find in vegan products in reasonable amounts. I'll concede that they're possibly not as convenient to obtain or tasty to eat. But I'm talking about the health memes here, like "you'll run out of Vitamin E and die in 4 years if you truly turn vegan." Or "you'll get osteoperosis if you don't drink milk."

On an economic perspective, going vegan will hurt the industries that produce animal products, because your money won't go to them any more. Just a drop in the ocean, of course, but what would happen to all the ranchers and butchers and burger flippers and hot dog stands if we all suddenly went vegan? This is seriously a non-issue, but is sometimes brought up as an argument against veganism. The answer? See what happened to the candlemakers and lampmakers when the electric light bulb came about.

On another economic perspective (which might have a bigger impact considering today's world economy), meat-growing is very inefficient. Most of the food eaten by animals turns into energy keeping the animal alive (in the end, heat). Something like 6% of the calories eaten by animals turns into edible food. Considering the rise of grain prices and food riots and all, meat seems at least slightly less attractive.

How important is the treatment of animals?

I believe this depends heavily on the individual's ethical code, which I won't argue with here (pm me if you want a discussion on that). It can range from "complete deal-breaker" to "hey, it's our right to do as we want with them." And we can't prove it one way or another unless we first agree on an ethical system we'll both adhere to, which I doubt will happen.

Introduction:

This is a compilation of my pet peeves in the Warcraft III UMS game Defense of the Ancients, or DotA (or just dota because I'm lazy). I'm posting it here because maybe the Let's Play! thread in the Sports & Games forum isn't the best place to bitch about people. I'm probably going to edit and re-edit this OP to add more shit. I don't see me removing anything, so feel free to point out inconsistencies; I won't pull anything.

If you've read my posts in that thread, some of this stuff will seem familiar. I don't care, I'm writing this for me, not for you.

Anyone and everyone is welcome to chime in with their own peeves or tell me to go fuck off.

The bitching begins:

"X is at fault, not me." Where X is lag, the player's mouse, his keyboard, his speakers, his sleepiness. Whatever. A player is screwing up, and he's passing on the blame to something out of his control. Except it's not out of his control. This is stuff you can deal with before the game starts. This is stuff you KNOW ABOUT before the game starts (lag might be an exception -- but you still have a reasonable idea of what it's going to be like).

"No missing call for X?" After dying to hero X. There are times when one can legitimately blame the lack of a missing call for his death. Very few. Most of the times, the player would have died after hearing the missing call because they just don't play more carefully anyways. Or he would have died even if that hero wasn't present. This kind of goes with the previous.

"X is imba, let's ban." Where X is.... anything. A certain strategy, a certain hero pick, a certain item(!). I've seen people proposing the banning of: denying creeps, backdooring, stacking/lending, every single new hero introduced for the next 3 versions, luna, terrorblade, techies, pudge, bottle. Others but I can't remember them now. Point is, they see something new, they don't know how to deal with it, and instead of figuring out a counter they bring out the ban hammer. Okay, some stuff like item stacking is arguable... but I'm sticking to my guns and saying that anything the game mechanics allows is fair game.

"You're doing X, which is banned. We didn't say anything about it before, but it is." Similar to previous, except it's worse. It's granted that luna is banned? Since when? According to who? When you play with the same 10 people forever, then go to a pub, don't expect everyone to know and follow your house rules, especially if you don't explain them first.

"I think X is hacking. Banlist him." Okay, it's fair enough to suspect someone is maphacking. It's not fair to turn that suspicion into a "known fact" on a whim. Shut up and play. Watch the replay afterwards, to make sure he wasn't just watching with a ward. Even then, you only have a clue; if it's not definitive, there's still something called intuition and guesswork. Accusing someone of maphacking without even watching the replay is retarded.

"My score is X-Y, and your score is A-B. That makes me better than you." This is so retarded that I don't know how to start. The objective of the game is to break the opposing ancient. Really, it is. Trust me. No, don't trust me, go look at the "Mission Objective" window in the game. Go read Ender's Game. Loser.

Wards. Observer wards, sentry wards. Buy them when you need them, plant them after you buy them. Learn to recognize when you need them. Okay, this doesn't piss me off so much because it's a matter of experience, which you can't blame people for lacking.

Couriers:

Couriers. These used to be only walking ones, and the chicken type, so many people call them chickens. Even the flying ones. That's OK, I do it too, I'm not gonna bitch about what you call it. However, I have so many things to say about couriers that I figure this deserves its own section.

More than one courier isn't necessary for most strategies. With bottle capacity down, it's pointless to relay bottles, too. You won't need more than one chicken. One guy should buy a chicken at the start of the game, and everyone should use it. No one should go to town for the sole purpose of buying an item. So don't buy a chicken if your teammate bought one, and share your chicken if you did.

Okay, why not? Because the guy doesn't trust his teammates to use his chicken well. Sad thing is, many people don't. A chicken shouldn't ever be running from town to a lane holding a gg branch and a clarity potion. The absolute bare minimal item a chicken should be carrying is a portal. Or maybe, just maybe a sapphire water, if you really really need it.

TL Specific:

10 people sitting in a room and we don't start for 20 minutes. Because someone's unhappy about the team lineup. Because we're waiting for a friend to come obs, but he's having problems with his computer or connection or game client. Because we're arguing about strategy, or whether or not something should be banned (the decision of which to save time should be ultimately deferred to the host). We're not playing in a league or tournament where a win or a loss actually matters. What matters is having fun playing the game, and getting better so we can play at a higher level later and have more fun. Your friend can go see the replay. What, he's in the same room after all? Get him over and tell him to look at your damn monitor.

B.net Specific:

15 people joining and leaving a game over a period of 5 minutes. I don't really want a person who can't wait 5 minutes in the game, because I doubt he'll sit through an hour, but dayamn are there a shitload of these folks.