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Comment Prevention and Protection over Punishment (Score 3, Insightful) 914

I do not believe in punishment. I feel that punishment is the victim's mantra. I feel that a government's first job is the prevention of crime.

One theory is that harsh punishment will prevent crime, as if some jealous person will consider that when they find their spouse in bed with someone else, or some poor staving person or meth-addicted person will consider that before robbing a store, or after the police still won't do anything about the neighbors they will just think of the punishment before they just let bygones be bygones.

Instead we ask our police officers, our lawyers, our scientists, and intimately, we ask our lawmakers to be our agents for revenge.

Comment Bad Legislation With Darker Possibilities (Score 1) 158

This is a piece of legislation dangerous to our freedom. During peaceful demonstrations cellphones could be id'ed can be gathered and be deactivated at will.
If we are ever in a war in the mainland, an invading army could deactivate our cellphones, thereby compromising our infrastructure.

A better piece of legislation would be to require a 3-day delay and used cellphones to be checked against a national database to check for theft.

Comment Mixture of Paid, Free, and Open (Score 2) 531

For all, most platforms: Libreoffice, Speedcrunch (Calculator), 7Zip, Firefox with Scrapbook, and Thunderbird

Windows Utility: FreeFileSync, Nvidia Inspector, PSpad, and Speedfan.
Windows Multimedia: SMplayer, Virtualdub, Avidemux, CDex, Audacity, Winff (Ffmepeg front end),
Windows Games: Thief 2, Guildwars 2,
Graphics and Design: Rhino3D, Photoshop, Inkscape (Going downhill. Pixels is the only unit that makes not sense for vector, WTF), Irfanview (But and looking elsewhere)

Geekie: Arduino, Processing,
Very Geekie Gucs (Circuit Simulator)
Very Very Geekie, Salome (Science Pre/post-processing), Paraview/Volvire (Visualization), Code Aster (FEM)

Linux: Most covered elsewhere.

Android: Colornote (Postits), Papyrus (Vectror Notes), Osman (Maps), Quickpic, Androoffice, Realcalc, FBreader.
Android Music: DaTuner, Simple Metronome, GuitarTabviewer
Need for Android, but not made: Librioffice, Taskcoach

Comment Thief's 1/2 Magic Ingredients were.... (Score 3, Insightful) 110

I have played Thief 1/2/3 and over a hundred Thief 1/2 add on missions. Thief's 1/2 Magic Ingredients were....

There was sophisticated programing for Thief 1/2. Light and sound mattered to the AI. There were locks, puzzles, contraptions, levers. Garret could use the rope arrow on any wood. Garrett could swim.

Thief 1/2 were made in New England, where Thief 1/2 was made, has a marked Autumn season. Notice how many leaves are strewn about in Thief 1. As someone from New England who now lives in Northern California, I will state that it's hard to imagine how creepy it is to be in a graveyard at night around Halloween, when you are a child. In Thief 1, that graveyard, is in the middle of a haunted town that you will have to make it back through, and yes, but you still have to go under it.

There were quite a few women working at Looking Glass Studio on Thief 1/2. It wasn't made in an all-male cloistered monoculture. Women make add-on missions. Women even cos-play Garret. If you want women to buy video games, hire women.

The biggest problem with the Thief reboot is the console game culture, where games cannot require skill to play. Ref: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... You cannot move like a "Master Thief" unless you can control a character.

Sadly, Looking Glass Studio failed. Thief 1/2's (as well as SS2) biggest problem was it's graphics were very polygonal even for their time. Thief was never a breathtaking game visually, but once you got over that it didn't need to be, and that is why there will be many more missions for Thief than there will be for most newer games.

I might check out the new Thief, but for missions, I'm not expecting a mission as excellent as Ominous Bequest, or The Seven Sisters, or a story as good as Saturio Returns Home or The Bathory Campaign. I'm not expecting the care and devotion shown in Thief 2x or The Dark Mod.

Still, I hope there is enough in the reboot Thief, to go admit their faults and go on to get everything right.

Comment What diffence would cores make if they cripple? (Score 1) 110

As an owner of several nVidia produts, I appalled what nVidia does to the non-Quadro cards!

So you can choose a crippled gaming cards that can't do math well, or choose a workstation card that can't cool itself, and doesn't really know what to shaders.

Tell your marketing department, a loyal customer will seriously give AMD/ATI a close look the next time around.

Comment NSA Clearly Violated Contitution (Score 1) 698

The NSA clearly searched without probable cause. This is what happens when create an organization without checks and balances. If we have any justice in this country arrests will be made.

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

Comment We Still Need Cheap Processing Power (Score 1) 453

As someone who does a lot of 3D modeling, and who has done professional graphics and game development, I am worried because affordable, powerful systems may become out of the reach of the average person. Cellphone and tablet chips, generally have 1/10 of the processing power than can be found on a desktop computer. You may be able to draw a few lines and rotate a few objects on tablet, but in 3D CAD can be quite demanding. Machines have parts. Circuit boards have traces. Processors have a piece of silicon with lots of little blobs of stuff on it. All of these add up to a difficult problem for even tablets. HD video editing can be demanding.

Beyond the hardware, so little is expected from even tablet software. Is it really a miracle if we can cut and paste? Could you run an entire business on your tablet, a tablet that could have 300 times the processing power than a desktop of the 1990's business system? The problem here is we expect too little. As an example, PhotoShop Touch cannot even edit a 24 mega pixel image from a $500 Nikon D3200 entry-level DLSR camera, but PhotoShop, PaintShopPro or the Gimp could do that an a netbook.

Cellphones and Tablets, Android and iOS are application-centric, not document centric. When we work, we often need to exchange information between programs, and that is not easy to to on iOS. In Android, every program has it's own weird file chooser. We don't have proper shared font folders for these, in fact they tried to get rid of the parent/child folder/file metaphor, which is fine of you never plan to organize anything using a computer.

So many cell/tablet centric computers a married to the cloud so tightly, that you cannot work if your connection is slow, goes down, or something bad happens. The sobering part is: a war or natural disaster could mitigate any productivity of cloud users by offering a single point of failure. Please don't put all of your eggs in one or someone's basket.

What we needed was one OS that worked on "devices" and computers, the difference being than one CAN work autonomously, and they other is a new metaphor for a old idea, the dumb terminal. Microsoft screwed up Windows 8, twice. They should have never made XP into Vista, and now it's too big, let that be your coffin nail. Windows 8, was not about doing the work that was needed to be done, it was about using the code you had. Apple's has tried integration, but remember, Apple likes application centricity. Gnome tried so hard, but we want a 2 pane file manager. We want to use this stuff for desktop applications. Mint chipping undermining Ubuntu Linux throne, suggests that we still want a command bar. We still want multiple window. Where would you have been in your life, if you never compared anything to anything else?

Are we becoming a world of chattering people who can't do anything creatively with one of the greatest machines ever made?

[Lately, I've been having problems even finding laptops with dedicated GPUs. The Intel Integrated GPUs do not seem to have a full OpenGL implementation, and the going gets slow when you need just as much CPU as GPU.]

Comment Not Getting It (Score 1) 117

First, the "beach bums" invented surfing as you know it.
Santa Cruz seems more organic than many of the neighboring cities. It's more family-like. Yes, there are poor people there; but many of them are creative and artsy.

The relationship between "pot smoking" and counter-productivity is bullshit. Forget your stupid antiquated corporate policies, because drugs may in-fact fuel some of the creativity in this area. Even Apple would not have been where they are without some drug use. This is the land of Aspies, and some of us are screwed together just a little too tight to be creative programmers and engineers, yes--without drugs.

In the end, the initiative just looks like an attempt for companies to exploit Santa Cruz's cheaper land, meanwhile, there are so many empty buildings in San Jose and up the peninsula.

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