While we're in the UK...

Percy: You know, they do say that the Infanta's eyes are more beautiful than the famous Stone of Galveston.
Edmund: Mm! ... What?
Percy: The famous Stone of Galveston, My Lord.
Edmund: And what's that, exactly?
Percy: Well, it's a famous blue stone, and it comes ... from Galveston.
Edmund: I see. And what about it?
Percy: Well, My Lord, the Infanta's eyes are bluer than it, for a start.
Edmund: I see. And have you ever seen this stone?
Percy: (nods) No, not as such, My Lord, but I know a couple of people who have, and they say it's very very blue indeed.
Edmund: And have these people seen the Infanta's eyes?
Percy: No, I shouldn't think so, My Lord.
Edmund: And neither have you, presumably.
Percy: No, My Lord.
Edmund: So, what you're telling me, Percy, is that something you have never seen is slightly less blue than something else you have never seen.
Percy: Yes, My Lord.

Serious question - have you _TRIED_.

Me and my son have. We made all sorts of things. We had 2 sets - one had a beach buggy style car (with kick ass big wheels) - the other was a motorbike (with even bigger kick-ass wheels). We made a kick-ass Trike.

Yeah - we kick ass.

The way I remember it from 30 years back is I had only a small selection of things. Blocks, roof tiles, window frames, doors and some sort of fence. Fine if you want to make a house.

Now we do have an entirely pre-fabricated chassis and several pieces that make a bonnet. However, that bonnet piece can make a car roof, a lid for something (just attach a hinge) or even a breast plate for a monster robot.

If anything the curse of choice is rearing its confusing head!!

Not to mention the number of little coloured pieces and what have you - we even made a nice blue pond surrounded by all sorts of plants (actually the plants we made were originally supposed to be flames for a monster truck but made damn fine red-hot-pokers like plants).

I think the point is to use your imagination.

'nuff said.

Flame wars with white supremacists, generally antagonising and goading friends, and enemies, on Usenet. Pointless navel gazing arguments about the nature of nothing and everything. Using rude words, racial epithets, the shout down, the noise... maybe even anarchy.

Now everyone seems to be out there busy judging everybody, involving the authorities and more.

Frankly, possibly unfairly, most of the peeps on the net in the early 90s and before understood it was the wild-west of communications... If someone was being a cunt you told them so. If it turned out to be you several folks would probably tell you. These folk were different - I guess, maybe, it went with the territory. It was new and the folks out there bleeding edgers.

It was no place for bruisable egos, political correctness et al - yet, to me, it felt right. People didn't get fired over righteous indignation from some pointless corner of the net. 140 character vomit was not front page news.

The media at large really think that one persons opinion on Twitter is worthy of news... in the old days it was just flotsam and jetsam... if they were being an arse they got called that and that was, usually, that. Either that or the media just see a cheap story in repeating someone's anally generated hyperbole.

*meh*

Not quite.

Sadly the problem with baseball is it doesn't really give you enough time...

I mean - At least with cricket I get the prerequisite 4 or 5 days to get which is _just_ about enough time to get properly drunk (and eat cheese sarnies)

A good friend of mine got into a "conversation" about the Janet Jackson nip-slip incident.

It went roughly like this:

Antagonist: "But what if my children saw it"
My Friend: "But nipples are for children..."

Touche.

http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/468180main_2_Lutetia_and_Saturn_946-710.jpg

With Saturn hanging in the background. Stunning. It's worth it already!

OK. One last time.

These are small.

But the ones out there are far away.

Small... far away.

Ahh... forget it.

Yes - this helps.

What helps even further is the differences between "old" and "new" style coding. No longer do engineers have to go looking for that "1 crazy hack" - that register bit - undocumented, left alone - it gave me 4 MORE PIXELS ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE DISPLAY!... What happens if I take all the $76's out of the framebuffer - crickey! 40 column text... what if... and so on.

These guys write to specs - DX, OGL - probably with a metric shit ton of "insider info" and plenty of extensions - but that can be reverse-engineered out. Posix, WinNT interface - it's all there - mostly public. Mostly these guys develop on PCs.

Getting faithful reproductions of something that outputs 24 bit RGB data over HDMI (and therefore obeys their rules) is many orders of magnitude easier than, say, getting pixel perfect output of a SNES or GBA - a system in which the programmer can hack and bash almost anything at clock cycle accuracy. That concept has vanished too (it just isn't easy to count cycles anymore)

It is unlikely one will need to emulate a BONE at GPU transistor level (or even just plain old bus level). Instead one says "this is mostly going to be DX - let's see what is added/changed". Of course the ideal machine to emulate that on is one with a DX$version graphics card.

Putting the effort into being a real person with a well-rounded life is lot more effort than either a) blaming it on Aspergers, b) whining that INTJ makes it impossible, or c) becoming a libertarian so you can justify being a selfish loner as a rational choice. Or all three.

Adequacy was a lot of fun when we were running it... it was a good idea to end though IMO, there's nothing worse than something great slowly devolving to the point where you end up hating it. I've not seen anything quite like it around in terms of the range and style of stuff. Going through the headcheese archive on the site brings back memories - it's basically every post by every troll account we had on /. during 2001, I'd forgotten half the accounts I had, and some of my personal favourites :)

Ha, that's a good one, could have made a lovely article just out of that gem over on adequacy.org back in the day :)

The original comment of yours I replied to made the point that free speech on its own wasn't sufficient for protest against government, and required firearms to back it up. I made the point that whether or not the populace is armed does not seem to have much to do with whether or not protests, civil wars and rebellions seem to occur, in part because the government is always going to be bigger and better armed than any individual, and whether the individual is armed or not doesn't do much to change that imbalance. Your last post seems to concur with this and argue against an armed populace as being a counter to a suppressive government.

I'm aware of the circumstances leading up to the Gulf War, but I'm not sure how that makes your point. There have been revolutions in countries with guns, and those without, and in countries with free speech, and those without, and I can't think of any revolution where there hasn't been an arms imbalance to start with, whether no guns vs. guns or guns vs. chemical weapons and tanks. Being armed doesn't seem to be a necessary condition for revolution to occur, nor a firm indicator of its success once begun.

I define it the same as you.

However, I know we disagree on what we mean by "rights", and I'm fairly sure we disagree on whether freedom is something all on its own, or just one particular desirable quality for a society which should be balanced against other goals.

That's where we could spend a dozen posts talking past each other and getting nowhere :)

No, just that my definition of freedom differs from yours. Not even libertarians believe in absolute freedom; different people just draw the line at different places, and prize different aspects of freedom.

And yet all those millions of Iraqis with AK-47s didn't change anything in Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Maybe your analysis is a little lacking?