tobacco heightens all other addictions, the morning cigarette makes people live in drug addictive patterns, and we have not banned that.
Some of our drug problems are heavily correlated to tobacco usage.
It's the silent backdoor drug. You can even get weed addicted because of the tobacco you mix in.

but next to the cancer thing, and some bad breath, tobacco does not seem so dangerous. until other drugs and habits join the tobacco later in life. meth is more obvious, more direct, but that makes it actually less dangerous for the larger population.

I still would not legalize it. Because of the some, who have a moral barrier not to take illegal stuff. And many people think like that.

Laws about drugs should be there to safe people, and help us identify and help those people.

yeah, but does it mean, you build something for sell for 6$, and you have to pay 1200$ just to handle the ingredient, and extra unpaid questions for your customers, just because if somebody buys every can you did in the last year could sit there for a month and extract that stuff for meth?

Is that going to stop meth production? No.
Is meth production the problem? No. It's usage.

You might defend the DEA, because we got to a point, where paranoia rules this world, not just among those who take certain drugs.

linux unfortunately began its victory run in 96, so it was still geekware.

son, reality is a bitch.

but back in the days of 95... ... 95 didnt crash every day, it just got slower. also, it still ran on DOS. .....linux in that time might have run rock solid, but the X server crashed every day. so no, linux was not heaven.

the simple problem, why microsoft products fail, is, because the company itself tries to *own* the market, and always *increase* their position, instead of solidifying their position and products, even accepting to one day become something like IBM.

It is not the imperfect products, which in fact all Software is, because Software is *never* *finished*, it is their Image which in the long run is hurting them. They talk about being the best, while it should be being the most used and RESPECTED by everybody, including your competition.

Some human beings are incredibly rich because of that corporation. So it did not fail. But image is lost if customers start to ask: "why do we have to use this all now ourselves, and where is our money gone?".

Corporations will always fail or find their equilibrium, nothing is forever.
It is impossible that everything just grows and never stops, thats called a tumor.
If you want to have a succesful corp, create one which is remembered positively.

i think it is because humans still combine "gaming" with "kids" and dont take it seriously. which is simply not the truth about games.

you need games in your daily life, since this is the major way to learn and train intelligence (not knowledge). because of our society marking you as "adult" if you reach a certain age, part of this "maturity" is to stop gaming, or at least, hide your gaming habits or even repress them until they express themselves as perversions (like playing games with people).

microsoft is a business company. it evolved in the era of humankind, where serious business evolved into a fantastic myth of adults doing hard and serious stuff and only being a serious managing adult mature business man in a suit and a thousand certificates can be trusted upon, while a playful (childish) person might not be trustworthy. while daily life tells us, actually its the other way round most of the time.

it is this image, which not only haunts microsoft, but currently the whole western civilization. there are lots of other hints about this actually, if you study history, the "cultivation" of the "adult" myth even leads to great misconceptions about children per se, or how we perceive the past, and leads to major crisis in a lot of people's lives, who stay juvenile the rest of their lives (because the juvenile person is the one who tries to negate his childhood)

i could go on and on about this topic, since it even hits deep foundations of christian and jewish faith ("respect your elders" e.g. as a commandment was actually meant for adults, to respect old people because "if you want your days to grow long" means, you should treat an elder person, like you want to be treated if YOUR days get long),...

people are children. and people take the easy route. also, those who really taught the adults how to use computers, actually were their children most of the time.

to realize, your platform is actually successful because it is mostly used for gaming, well, that would conclude not only a lot of things about your customers, your product, but also about yourself.

Since the most powerful people on earth are usually not the most intelligent or reflected ones, even if they think they are, I dont think, this will ever be widely discovered, I rather think, somebody comes along and proves another wild theory which does not involve confessing that actually everybody is just a big child out there, cultivated thru a harsh millenia old society of distrust, and explain, that in reality, windows conquered the market because of stuff like "office", or because of piratery, which may be cofactors, but the reason why you pirated DOS or windoze back in the days, were still games, and they were better than the AMIGA or C64 stuff, so yeah, you started using IBM machines to play civ, bubble bobble or prince of persia.

the games on mac sucked, they had to turn their whole OS into a game to reconquer the market.

so. if you know, its gaming, which makes you use windows, at least you can conclude, being mature does not mean to stop being the child you once were inside, but rather taking responsibility for yourself.

I still wonder, what IQ has to do with great scientific contributions?

It might be right, that high intelligence - lets assume IQ correctly measures that - allows greater sums of knowledge to be processed faster achieving to grasp deeper insight, therefore allowing to reiterate your thoughts quicker and conclusively concluding faster and more precise, but it is still dependant on acquiring knowledge itself - which takes time and sources, as learning thinking patterns themselves - which requires teaching, humility and reflection. Any human being can be in the position even with lesser IQ to do this big task, with good education and a well protected life, and social stability, he even might do it quicker, than an overbright being, who burns his brainticks iterating over nonsense, or worse, fears.

relying on inspiration, which requires to turn off logic once in a while and just have a hunch, I might add, is another factor I believe is a needed part of the recipe, and dont forget blessing or otherwise called luck, but those are clearly disputable.

And to finally lift the curtain of inescapable human reductionism, it is never only one person, who does a breakthrough, its just one person who finishes one of many ongoing puzzles and others recognize it.

makes angry, does it not.

hard to swallow that all are talking about it, but hardly any actions are taken.

michelangelo clearly should have patented smiling people watching in the camera on rectangular surfaces.

which one?

that is something many people do not understand. china may not be perfect, and not very pleasing to the individual in our standards, but in its deepest roots they are not warmongers or tyrants either, and they do not want to "attack the world". The chinese people themselves might not be so dazzled by western wisdom anyway at the moment i think, and we might have to listen up sometimes to them, too..

wake up. the western world is as free as china is. here you have to own money (best "partner" or "manager"), there you have to be a good chinese (best "partymember").

the world does not change for the individual over the centuries.

however, of course they mean with the freedom of expression their version of freedom of expression, which might not apply to every topic there is, but honestly, our freedom of expression is worth nothing if you only are allowed to have opinions, which nobody cares about anyway.

hell, if i had more researched using toolkits, than doing the base programming, I would have said that earlier, but without the wisdom I earned by having respect, even fear from 3d programming.

but after spending time in some toolkits, and breaking the 3d barrier relatively late in my studies of programming, I have to say, honestly, 3d is easier and way more boring to do than 2d. It just seems the other way around first. getting a good engine in 2d is way harder, while 3d is just a matter of toolkits you learn.

and on the ground base, its just reading stuff and making vectors.

Now a team of a creative type who has the ideas, and a mathematical type, who does vectors in his sleep, and some mad 3dmax guy, 3d is really fast.

Problem is always the polishing. 3d games are per se too complicated, and 90% of the time you start caring about how to make 3d look good on 2d again.

this might be true and wise. but generally gameplay ideas that are born of a 48 hour gamecamp are not very good ones either.

sometimes you need to first have all the bad ideas until you can reduce it to the simple thing that makes it fun. you dont develop a game to "have a simple game idea" in the first place. because all those, honestly speaking, suck even more.

I think you all are missing the point here.

You fear they do it to serve a closed version as a service. I don't see that scenario. Why? it is too expensive.

What you see there is LO binary running on a server transmitting its looks through an engine which uses GTK internal redraws to transmit the changes to a client with websockets, which in turn has a canvas capturing input and an engine which knows how to draw the deltas into place. Funny nobody yet thought of doing that with VNC.

Imagine a service where everybody can start any amount of instances of this software (for free) on your servers as a successful business solution.

There is none. Because with all respect, You will need to have to run the whole thing on your server still.
So, while using the software to power some lucrative services for the company, releasing the source is even better on the long run.

This is a very nice hack, however, and would be a nice add-on, but it is no mass solution for the "office online public $$$" service. and i think suse/novell knows that very well. Also, the techniques they are using are afaik open, too.

I guess you meant this posting.

gosh, you had me going, almost started a christian flamewar against a religious nut. but its just an antireligious nut with humor.

wtf is with bacteria