jryan
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"Contemporary" is also not synonymous with "correct". I prefer to use words that are differentiated and have actual meaning rather than the "we're "progressive" this week... no wait.. "liberal"! You sure don't seem to share many planks with classic liberalism or Libertarianism. A while ago I made the following light hearted diagram to describe the similarities and differences between liberal (progressive), Liberal, and Libertarian: One day I think I will expand it to include some other ideologies, but Progressive, Liberal and Libertarian share enough in common that it was just easier to make this version... and it was in response to a question about these ideologies on another website.
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Progressive and "liberal" are more or less synonymous in the same way that regardless and "irregardless" are synonymous. One if the right word and the other is the wrong word for the same thing. Your version of "liberal" does not believe in the tenets of "Liberalism"... if that sits right with you then feel free to keep using it. I have used it myself on occaission, but I am increasingly trying to use "left" in place of "liberal" because as you yourself have said, your side can't really settle on a term... but "left" always works.
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True. The original Progressive movement in the US was started by Teddy Roosevelt (aka The Bull Moose Party), but his movement bore little resemblance to the Progressive movement a few decades later. But reading the intermingled history of Liberalism, Socialism, National Socialism and Progressivism in the US it is easy to see how many can get the terms confused today. I think the reason socialism and progressivism often get confused is that their fundamental view of what the problems are are almost identical. Social inequality, tyranny of corporation and social injustice are the central themes of both movements. Socialism advocates a government takeover of industry to control equality of outcome while Progressivism seeks amelioration through legislative and regulatory means. In this way Progressivism is similar to National Socialism, which unlike straight socialism (read: communism) National socialism advocates private ownership of industry with direct participation of owners (often called "corporatists") in national governance. These movements share/shared a common rhetoric as well (equality, social injustice, etc.).
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The Progressive Movement (Progressivism) is not synonymous with "liberal". it was actually the Progressive Movement that co-opted the "Liberal" name when the Progressive Movement stalled after WWII (after it had thrown in with the Soviet Union ideologically) Having lost their name, classic liberalism (often called "Big L Liberalism") "became" Libertarianism. I say "became" only because there is some level of change in all ideological shuffling such as this. I don't think anyone really confuses "liberal" and "progressive" without there being a fundamental misunderstanding of the terms.
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Hah! Half Life 1 was more innovative than Half Life 2... you could make a case for Portal, though.
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Of course. But it was inferior to Half Life 1.
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Which is the exact opposite of what I am arguing. I am arguing that history can teach up through it's mistakes. It was horrible in many ways, filled with hard lessons that we today seem intent to ignore. The music was better, though. Which is a goofy argument because you can probably name off the top of your head 5 websites you feel are right wing propaganda while also bemoaning the persistence of numerous scandals due to right wing bloggers (climategate, health care reform, etc.). So I wouldn't really say that liberalism completely dominates the internet information sources either.
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Being that I am in the field I would suggest that you focus on networking and data storage networks, familiarity with the basics of common systems engineering is also a plus. Applications, hardware and operating systems that will be huge over the next 10 years (in my estimation): Data Storage - NetApp is a very hot contender right now in the data storage market. EMC, on the other hand, is fairly well saturated and will give you some good entry work... but I see NetApp winning handily in the next 10 years. They don't have all the gee whiz beels and whistles of EMC, but they do the job of mass data warehousing amazingly well, on the cheap (comparatively), and easily. Another nice bonus is that NetApp has a "bad" habit of hiring up everyone with skill in their product to keep them off the streets and boost their maintenance products. Good for you, in the long run. Virtualization - This is the future of systems engineering. Business focus on uptime and reliability all but forces IT and CS to move away form to-metal OS installs and move to the virtual server configurations. In the virtualization world the sun rises and sets on VMware and it's line of products. Granted this is mostly systems engineering and not really the direct realm of a CS degree, but in the IT world the employee that knows VMWare and NetApp will be well placed for a fast rise in the industry. Now, if you tied a knowledge of VMware, NetApp and a CS focus on security and networking together you would be king in the world of Government contracting.
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That can be leveled at any those on any side of an issue, Pangloss. A person can be up to speed on the latest 9/11 Truther conspiracies too, but that doesn't make them any better informed. What the extremes are lacking is wisdom. Bascule's comment comes off less as an insult against conservatives and more as an assertion on his part that the past doesn't have lessons to teach us. He followed this comment two minutes later by another "living in the past" comment tossed my way over in a game thread in general discussions. Though I would assume that even Bascule can find some moments in history that he finds valuable as instructive examples.
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You're a good candidate for Dwarf Fortress then, Mr. Skeptic! It even has an adventure mode where you can control the life of one dwarf much like NetHack... and if you play the Fortress mode and lose you can load the same map in adventure mode and visit the ruins of your old fortress. More cool stuff: 1) Dwarves have individual personalities that express themselves in their work. Most notably in engraving. In that profession dwarves given the task of carving bas-relief in your fort will carve images that interest them, or great moments in the history of your clan, or your fort. At one point in a game my fort was taking it on the chin from repeated goblin sieges and all my engravings from those years were of goblins killing dwarves, or dwarves killing goblins, depending on the mood of the engraver. 2) In an upcoming release the outside world (the rest of the vast generated world) will take on a life of it's own that will parallel your play. So wars can and will be waged with your fort as a pawn, with real armies from other towns being amassed and sent... or even simply two factions waging war around your fort. You will also be able to build armies and send them to conquer other towns. Right now the outside world exists in a snapshot, and raiding parties that attack you are just selected from existing entities in the world and essentially teleported to the edge of your fortress map. This step worries me though as the game already crunches so many numbers that my computer takes a serious processor hit when my forts get above 100 drwaves (you can edit the population cap, but by default it's 200). 3) The community of programmers that love this game has recently overhauled the underpinning graphical prowess allowing you to resize the game window on the fly (I can no longer live without the new full screen mode!) and opened the game up to some greater graphics mods (the best end up looking a bit like an old Nintendo game.. like NetHack graphic versions). But there is also a group of lovely individuals working on a project titled "Stonesense" that have written a rather impressive 3/4 view wrapper for DF, though it is not a fully realized project yet as there are still hard coded entities that there mem-hacked wrapper can't see. I would suggest that if you choose to try out DF that you download the "40d17" version (the last 5 digits of the file name). It is the latest OpenGL version of the current 40d build. Or you can wait for the new release in a month of two when the OpenGL code will be built into the standard release. This game has started getting so much indie notoriety that it has been tossed around a s"Game of the Year" by a few publications. People who dismiss this game on graphics and never climb the sheer cliffs of it's learning curve are missing one of the best and most unique gaming experiences around. Also, if anyone decides to give it a try feel free to ask me questions. I have a fairly good grasp on the basics of the game and can help you get a thriving fortress up and running, or answer some questions about the less intuitive features of the game.
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Oh, and also I have no real interest in Starcraft2 because I don't have a great afinity toward RTS, though non-formulaic RTS can be great fun (try Kohan 2 sometime!), and I have always been disappointed with Civ games as the late game seems like such a chore. So no, not really interested in those games. I just like games that have a lot of meat on their bones and don't really care about the graphics all that much. But I can admire a pretty game too. Crysis was fun, and Half Life 1 was the best shooter ever made (and pretty for it's day) Dwarf Fortress is a game within a game within a game, however. And playing the ASCII game activates the same part of the brain that is active when reading. It's like the exact opposite of The Matrix, I start seeing the world through the code. I dare anyone to play long enough to get a thriving fortress and not love the game from that point on. It's an amazing piece of work.
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I also read books with real paper pages!
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You miss my point. Both "lie detectors" and your articles study test stress, and both fail in trying to turn subjective interpretations of the meaning of the response into some objective measurable. I think they both fail on that ground. Rather we are more likely to consider repercussions of our actions before moving forward. I think you and I disagree in that I think no large problem can be solved by conservatives of liberals alone. And it's the large problems that politics is really meant to address. Sort of, between saying that I am fearful and more likely to shoot pranksters in the face. Ah, but see we look back at all the old junk ideas and get to see how they turned out. Liberals aren't very good at taking our advice that it has indeed been tried before and failed. No man, I was making a joke at your expense given the flood of generalities you have thrown at conservatives way based on a stress test on 46 test subjects in Lincoln, Nebraska. Do smilies mean nothing to you? I thought it telegraphed the joke rather obviously. Funny thing about war though, it finds you whether you like it or not. It is the existent of the hyper-vigilant that gives us civilians the opportunity to consider liberal ideas. Let's accept your hypothesis for a moment: Now find me a time in human history that is absent of either of your proposed sources of danger.
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It has a pretty steep learning curve if you want to learn every aspect of the game. The basics are really just learning how to make farms, what plants to grow, and how to make barrels for storing food and drinks (dwarves need alcohol to work)... once you learn how to keep dwarves alive then you learn how to make them happy... then rich... then defenses and armies (rich dwarves draw the attention of powerful enemies). I can make my dwarves happy and feed them and I can make them rich if my map has resources.. and I am getting the hang of defenses but my forts are still doomed to calamity due to attrition or incompetence. I once forgot where I was while digging a tunnel and ignored the "the stone here is wet" warning and tunneled into the underside of a river.. drowning everyone in my fort. Even funnier was when I embarked on a cliff and performed the same idiot dig.. except this time the flood of water swept my dwarves off the cliff and to their death. The only member of the embark team left alive was one very confused mule.
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It is! I was first introduced to the game when it was still 2 dimensional (no mountains, etc.) when someone linked me to a coop game that a group was playing. They would each take a year of game time (about 3 hours maybe) and take control of a fortress, designating their own dig-outs, decorating, and death trap making. At the end of each year they would write a diary of their year (complete with pictures in-game) and pass the saved game on to the next person. Oh, also, the game has a very rudimentary language system that randomly generates "meaningful" names for people and places but I think it's just another bit of humor by the game creator. The names tend to be rather silly when translated from the Dwarvish. So I bring you, without further ado: Fortress Boatmurdered. Enjoy the read! The game has become even deeper and more complex since then. The only thing that has become less complex is cave-ins, but that is because the physics of cave ins in a 3D fluid terrain is not something the programmer wants to tackle just yet. But given that he already has a pretty nifty fluid mechanics system built in (that almost fully accounts for viscosity and pressure) I think the cave-ins won't be too far off. The release of the next alpha build in a month or two is anxiously awaited by millions of indie gamers the world over. On top of adding more complex combat mechanics, doctors, medical equipment better AI.. which is already some of the best I have ever seen (he recently posted about how his doctors in his test game were setting and suturing compound fractures, bandaging and splinting the limb only to have the injured dwarf tear it all off because they didn't like them as clothing).. he is also adding equally complex underground environments and civilizations and the beginnings of an evolution mechanism where traits are inheritable. On top of that there will be special beasts in the game that are mishmashes of various traits for various animals. His combat system required that he create physical feature databases and then build individuals from parts... so a dwarf has humanoid upper arms, forearms, chest, fingers, etc. etc. Each come with tissue layers and uses (hands with fingers can grab and manipulate, hands with crab claw can grab and cut.. etc). In the new game he will have beasts that are generated at world gen that randomly select head, torso, limb type and number, etc. .... in one case he had an elephant sized shrimp with purple tentacles crawling around in a cave lair. In one alpha release there was a hilarious bug where cats mistakenly thought they had fingers, so every time they would kill a mouse they would try to pick up the mouse with their "hands", realize their paws had no fingers, assume they were amputated, and panic. I remember laughing in the following release when Tarn, the creator, reported "unfortunately, that bug has been fixed." Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedHere is a snapshot in game of me looking at the thoughts of one of my dwarves. As you can tell my dwarves have been rather busy brewing and drinking and not so busy cleaning or making furniture...
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I'm playing Dwarf Fortress. recently I failed to properly guard my magma foundries from intrusion and an imp got into my foundry room. Normally this isn't a problem as imps have all the melee ability of a marmoset... but in this rather large foundry chamber I had designed he was able to fire off a fire ball before my dwarves could properly run screaming form the room. One of my furnace operators, Inid Leafwarped, was set ablaze from a direct hit. He then proceeded to run out of the foundry and down the hall screaming all the way, sending dwraves everywhere into a panic. When panicked dwarves tend to congregate, and many of them ran to the safe confines of the brewery.. which is good in any other situation because I created a lever in the brewery which would close a large floodgate over the entrance... they could all drink it up while the troubles outside were dealth with. It worked great for goblin raids..... Except this forge worker wasn't running in the direction of the brewery, so why close the gate? No reason to trap innocent dwarves outside, and there was nothing I could do for the poor guy anyway. So off he ran, filling the tunnels of my fort with acrid smoke, and frightening dwarves everywhere. Inid eventually succumbed to the flames and collapsed... into my wood pile in the carpentry room... Now my wood working industry was in flames... worse yet, due to poor planning on my part, I had my masonry workshop next to my carpenter... it seemed like a great idea as stone and wood furniture oculd be easily stored in one convenient location without excess hauling of materials and finnished goods... except... Well, I like to make dumps in my fortress as a way of doing mass cleanup... I can do a select of a newly dug-out room and dump the stone, so it will all be hauled and dropped in the space of my choosing. So my masons shop had a big pile of stone next to it. A pile that contained lignite.. which ignited.... Now I have a very smokey wood fire blazing along with an even hotter and smokey coal fire raging. The coal fire was so hot that it was melting the nearby marble blocks! At this point a rather hot yet tough as nails hammer lord wandered in the near vicinity of the coal fire and... burst into flames. Now, I will give him credit for being such a stud that he didn't go the Inid route and run screaming at random... but this ultra-tough dwarf instead thought "Gee, it's hot! I could sure use some rum!"... So he wandered into my brew room, and promptly set the place ablaze. By the end of the conflagration -- exacerbated by numerous dwraves running screaming and burning all over the fortress -- I was down to 4 dwarves of the previous 80 left alive. Two of them fell into inconsolable moods and committed suicide by drowning themselves in my underground reservoir, a third went stark raving mad and died at the hands of dwarf number four... who then went fishing. Then end.
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"The Americans will always do the right thing . . . After they've exhausted all the alternatives." - Winston Churchill Also, Glenn Beck isn't the only person out their driving single-issue politics. According to Obama we really just need universal health care...
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Well, the study, in essence, connected subjects to a lie detector and suffers the same attribution problems when attempting to link the response to actual real world causation. I think you may be looking at this a little skewed, but I can see what you are getting at. In my estimation the answer is not a matter of "fearful" versus "calm" but rather "careful" versus "impulsive"... at least in politics... or to soften that a bit, as I said before, a matter of measuring the change against history versus measuring a change based on the desired outcomes. I can certainly see where "fear" and "calm" could be interpreted from those reactions. Also, I was trying to show that "liberal" and "conservative" are both necessary. There is an old saying that I like a lot that says "Conservatism is the worship of dead liberals". There is a lot of truth in that.. but where liberals interpret that incorrectly is they believe it says "conservatism is the worship of ALL dead liberals", which isn't the case. Most new ideas are junk and should be treated as such. The more interesting question for me is who was the guy shouting "Boo!"? By your argument it is more likely a liberal. Oddly enough, your approach to guarding would better be described as reactionary. I've known a lot of snipers in my life and career and I wouldn't count "liberal" as among their more common characteristic. That depends on the threat, doesn't it?
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Of course, but they don't elevate your opinion above the level speculation or the point of your statement above simple derision. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Good clarification. I was simply trying to elevate the discussion above the "some".
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That's not a very helpful or illuminating analysis and does nothing but contribute to the ongoing derisive nature of the ideological discourse between conservatives and liberals.
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I think you may be on to something there. Obviously it's not just conservatives, and may be driven more by real-world concerns and generational differences than ideologies, but as trends go I think you're probably right. (I'm 44, and more than half of my friends still have 4:3 televisions and no digital sound. About half are on Facebook. If the sampling wasn't so small I'd say that I'm on some kind of technology cusp.) Also worth considering here is young conservatives who are actively political and extremely well connected with technology. While they have been overwhelmingly Democratic in their registrations, they don't seem to like the guiding ideologies of their elders very much. There were reports in late 2008 of large numbers of youths from the religious right who were voting for Obama, for example, but even the liberal ones seem to be more in tune and empathetic with conservative concerns than previous generations. They may want marijuana legalized, but they want their guns, too. Maybe it's that video game influence. Good post. I agree it was a good post, but I disagree with you on the statement above. It employs the "let them eat cake" logic. Of course liberals change their viewing habits from one station to the next.. it's because they have multiple sources to choose from. Also, I'm not convinced that were CNN to become more harsh towards conservatives that many liberals would tune out. Like their conservative counterparts they would view the crack down on the opposition as justified. Arguments toward that end have been made in this very thread, actually. Also, I would not classify Fox as "damaging every minute it is on the air", nor would I feel the same for MSNBC. There is great benefit to the public discourse to have the more radical wings of the left and the right voiced openly and debated openly... where we suffer is when the Becks and Olbermanns of the political spectrum perform their machinations in private. Lastly, this notion that is often put forward by more liberal people that conservatism is about status quo is incorrect, and should be set straight. I have argued this topic for years and have come up with a fairly simple phrase that seems to help the discourse a bit. I think it fairly demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of both ideologies: "Conservatives judge new ideas through the lens of history. Liberals judge new ideas through the lens of posterity."
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If it means anything, I am an independent. But I am a conservative independent. I think that we are drifting away from party politics and toward a greater reliance on ideological politics. But then it's easy for me to admit that because more of the country is conservative than liberal.
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I just wanted to share this game with the community as it is both fun and somewhat informative... here is the low down: 1) It's an ASCII game that looks like the old Moria and NetHack... if you can accept that, and you like fairly opaque but incredibly deep games read on! 2) The game takes place in a randomly generated world that can be mind bogglingly large... up to millions of tiles by millions of tiles. The map is truly topographical, with realistic environments, and geology... numerous flora and fauna species, and geologic strata (microline deposits, cinnabar, lignite, etc. etc.). All rivers oceans and lakes are generated organically based on geology(streams form from glaciers, streams flow into rivers, etc.). 3) Once the world is generated the map generator seeds the land with civilizations (human, elf, kobold, goblin and dwarf) along with mythic beasts (giants, dragons, etc.). From that point the generator starts to generate history.. with each civ member and beast going about their daily lives, building homes, getting married, raising children, dying of old age... or calamity... all history is recorded so that you get what amounts to a skeleton of an encyclopedia of the world created that you can peruse. A large map can generate a detailed history of as many as 200,000 individuals! 4) Each individual has their own sets of likes and dislikes, and from those characteristics they can determine spouse choice, career (70+ possibilities from soap maker to hunter to hammer lord)... these likes change over time, and you can have situations like goblins raiding a town and taking elven slaves, only to have golins become accustomed to elves in their midst, grow affections, and eventually have a goblin/elf kingdom... or vise versa. 5) Combat in the game can take many forms from wrestling to archery to melee to magic (though magic is not implimented in playable races yet), and currently has a rather in depth hit, damage and bleed calculators. An arrow can pierce become lodged somewhat harmlessly in a bone, pierce muscle... or can cause brain damage or pierce a liver causing almost certain fatal bleeding. In the upcoming release combat will be even more complex, with an eventual modeling of full sets of internal organs, and tissue layers. In the new release (in a month of so) there will also be a new medical career added where dwraves can diagnose and treat injured dwarves. 6)... Oh, and tere is a game in there, kinda like the Sims, but you are digging into mountains to harvest the rich minerals underground, and design and build your own rooms and traps and hope hat your autonomous dwarves get around to finishing your spectacular fortress before starving, being torn apart by a dragon, a goblin seige, or worst of all.. running out of booze. It is definitely a game that has a steep learning curve, but it is well worth your time to dig in to it and see the deepest game/civ simulator ever made. The Game (about 6 mb download) The Wiki (a must have for beginners)
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No, I say that as if there is no way to quantify real jobs saved, so claiming it is simply wishful thinking. It gets even tougher when the data that is gathered is vastly overstated. But even the overstated jobs created by the stimulus is a paltry 30,000 when the unemployed number close to 20,000,000. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts merged Ah, but see, in 2003 we didn't have the delinquencies that we do today... nor the total unemployment (here is the BLS report from August 2003). I think if Obama suddenly stabilized the mortgage situation and dropped unemployment to 2003 levels many people, including me, would be ecstatic. And speaking of time machines, it sure would have been nice if Bush could have gotten this bill through congress. Barney Frank's comments towards the end of that article are... unfortunate.
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The problem here is that job loss is leveling (let's hope the 400,000+ losses just reported are an outlier!), while production is rising. The problem with increasing production with stagnant job growth or loss (jumped 31,000 last report to 473,000) are clear indicators of a jobless recovery. Essentially we are seeing a return of output due to increased efficiency in the same way that early profit signals on 2009 were driven largely by payroll cuts. To make matters worse, the drop in unemployment from 10.0 to 9.7 is mostly illusory as little of no new employment was created. The Unemployment figures don't count all people out of work, but rather those who are out of work and actively seeking employment. They do not count part time "involuntary part-time" workers (those seeking full time employment but unable to find it), "marginally attached" (those who worked at some point in 12 months but have not sought employment in the month prior to survey), and "discouraged workers" (able bodied people who were actively seeking employment but have stopped without finding a job). Those numbers that are not counted also total in the millions (from bls.gov): "involuntary part-time workers" - 8.3 million (a decrease from 9.2 million) "Marginally Attached" - 1.5 million "Discouraged" - 1.1 million Total unaccounted in Unemployment Percentage: 10.9 million workers. This relates directly to another troubling figure that is not covered in DOW averages or GDP.. mortgage delinquency. The total of actual unemployed persons have been eating through their cash reserves for the last year, and where the first wave of foreclosures were primarily the mortgage holders that didn't plan, there is another round of defaults brewing for people that actually DID save, and do all the right things, but simply couldn't save for prolonged joblessness. So as joblessness bottoms out, mortgage deliquency rates continue to remain high as the full force of unemployed, marginally employed, and discouraged workers run out of means to service their debts: This is leading to another credit crisis or even more debt that the US will be unable to service, eventually.