explainplease

This is bizarre. Is there any other technology, any other quality-of-life issue, in which people would advocate or settle for regression? Technology is advancing faster than ever before, the pace is still increasing--yet people are saying that we should go back to not having personal vehicles, not travelling much...

What's going on here?

Why?

  > No more regenerative braking
  > 35 mile range now
  > Using the QC (quick charger?) more than once a day voids battery warranty

Do you have any numbers, or are you guessing?

No, an argument is strong or weak regardless of whether you like the words used to express it.

Suggestion: place powerups in areas of the map that have not seen combat recently.

It seems like almost all the combat is over Europe, and the other areas of the map are almost always completely unpopulated. The most fun fight I had was when one other aircraft and I got into a dogfight near SA/Antarctica. It lasted several minutes, just the two of us. Even so, it only happened because I followed him there, and apparently he was just exploring the map.

So if you were to track combat activity on something like a heat map, you could spawn upgrades and powerups in cold areas of the map. This would encourage players to go hunting for them. As a result, different areas of the map would see combat regularly, and the hotspots would move around.

Also, if you spawned players in away from other players, it would encourage encounters around the map instead of concentrated in one area.

Finally, I use WASD in home-row position, and I'd like to rebind the the shoot and action keys. If you could make this possible, it'd be great.

Thanks for sharing your work. It's a fun game.

1. I presume this requires "bug-for-bug compatibility." How feasible is this without access to either the Windows source code or a lab full of machines and QA staff?

When a user gets a ReactOS BSOD because of a bug in the ReactOS driver ABI, what do they do? Even if they can report a bug and it eventually gets fixed, what do they do in the meantime? The answer is, probably, boot back into Windows and get their work done. Then they have to justify to themselves taking the time to try ReactOS again sometime in the future.

2. How many machines in the wild can run without any Microsoft-made drivers included in Windows releases? If the answer is less than 100%, those users will still have to own a copy of Windows.

I just don't understand. WINE is like a necessary evil, a noble sacrifice of its developers' time to enable users to switch from Windows to a free, open platform for the applications they can't run on one natively. It's a sensible abstraction that enables something that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

But why reimplement Windows, the whole OS? If the devs enjoy it, it's their time to use as they choose. But the end result would be much more beneficial for users if it were put toward WINE so users could leave the Windows platform behind.

But even if that all works as well as it does in Windows, it's still inferior to Linux. Users are stuck with whatever binary drivers they can get, and whatever reverse-engineered, bug-for-bug compatibility the ReactOS developers can manage. It would be much better for users if they could run WINE on Linux.

There are lots of people who could switch to Linux if certain apps worked well under WINE. With the anti-user shenanigans Microsoft is doing in Windows now (e.g. using upstream bandwidth to seed updates, sucking up people's Internet connections, and potentially busting their data caps), this is needed now more than ever.

But no one's going to replace Windows with ReactOS. For example, is ReactOS going to keep up with drivers for current hardware? Of course not. Do they regularly release security updates? No. But Linux and Linux distros already do. So improving WINE helps people actually switch off Windows to a safer, less anti-user system.

    curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tldr-pages/tldr/master/pages/common/$1.md | pandoc --from=markdown --to=html | w3m -T text/html

    $ cat ~/.bin/eg
    #!/bin/bash
    man $@ | awk '/^EXAMPLE/ { getline; while ($0 !~ /^[A-Z]+/) { print $0; getline; } }'

https://gist.github.com/alphapapa/3cba3ff196147ad42bac#file-...

    $ man test -e

           STRING1 != STRING2
                  the strings are not equal

           INTEGER1 -eq INTEGER2
                  INTEGER1 is equal to INTEGER2

           INTEGER1 -ge INTEGER2
                  INTEGER1 is greater than or equal to INTEGER2
    --

           INTEGER1 -ne INTEGER2
                  INTEGER1 is not equal to INTEGER2

           FILE1 -ef FILE2
                  FILE1 and FILE2 have the same device and inode numbers

           FILE1 -nt FILE2
                  FILE1 is newer (modification date) than FILE2
    --

           -d FILE
                  FILE exists and is a directory

           -e FILE
                  FILE exists

           -f FILE
                  FILE exists and is a regular file

I agree with you: without a higher power, there is no logical reason for objective morality. The closest that one may come is a purely utilitarian argument that society benefits as a whole if people refrain from actions such as murder, and that such societal benefits then pass to an individual who chooses to refrain from them. But, of course, that does not necessarily preclude an individual committing murder in a certain case if he calculates the benefit to himself to exceed that of refraining, if he thinks he can get away with it.

So, then, my question is this: if a person wants to commit murder for purely selfish reasons (e.g. revenge, financial, power, etc), would it be acceptable to you? If you were the only witness, would you turn him in and testify against him?

It's very simple: do you think murder is wrong? Yes or no?

If your answer is yes, then we can talk about the definition of murder as opposed to war, justified homicide, etc.

If your answer is no, then we can talk about objective morality, and why it wouldn't be ok for me to kill you just because I feel like it--i.e. why there is objective morality, because if there isn't, then there is no moral reason for me not to kill you and take all your stuff whenever I feel like it.

> I'm sorry if I took your response of "many people think this" as a serious response. ... And if you can't answer my questions about murder, which apparently is such an easy moral issue for you.

You literally asked, "Who says murder is wrong?" I literally answered the question. Your question was obviously rhetorical, yet pointless, because you didn't make a point by asking it. So I then asked the relevant, next, serious question, to move the discussion forward. You then declined to answer it, instead making silly personal attacks, as if performing for an audience. Note, BTW, that I haven't said anything about taxation.

It seems to be you who is not interested in seriously discussing objective morality, yet it is you who raised the topic, and you obviously know that most people disagree. Therefore you seem to be trolling. A shame, because it could be an interesting conversation.

Please prove me wrong by taking the conversation seriously now.

> There are shades of grey to all morality, you pretending otherwise does you no service.

I'm not pretending that. Please don't jump ahead in the discussion.

> Having popular opinion on your side does not make your morality "objective". That's not how this works.

Again, I haven't claimed this. It will be hard to discuss this if you ascribe to me positions I haven't taken.

BTW, please don't troll. If you're just asking, "Who says murder is wrong?" to be rhetorical or make a point, don't. Instead, make your point explicitly in the first place, so that we can move forward in the discussion. I'm not interested in playing games, but I am interested in seriously discussing the topic.

So, either you think murder is wrong, or you don't--or you think that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't, which boils down to isn't. So which is it?

Then why is murder wrong?

It is foolish, for anyone who cares about truth, to advocate suppression of information or opinions, by legal or other means. Because history demonstrates that, whenever such suppression is legitimized, it will be used by evil people to suppress truth.

Yesterday the cardinal sin was heresy against the church. Today the cardinal sin is racism. Tomorrow the cardinal sin will be something else. Someday the cardinal sin will be your own opinion. Only evil people and shortsighted fools advocate censorship of opposing views.

So now, when the friend says, "Hey, meet me at $PLACE tonight at $TIME and we'll do $ACTIVITY," you say, "Yeah, right," and don't bother to go, because there's a good chance he won't show up, or he'll leave after 5 minutes, and you'll have to pay his tab.

Well, I see that you wrote this response after your others, so I guess you realized I wasn't talking about you earlier. :) I also appreciate your thoughtful response.

> but I reject this premise as a matter of theory.

And I, yours. :)

> The intent of communism was to create a distributed system of governance in which workers would delegate some of their number as administrators, who were subject to recall at any time and who were expected to both legislate and administrate.

This is the fundamental problem with communism, which I addressed in my first comment: its theories do not work in practice, because they do not account for the realities of human nature. Therefore, it is GIGO: theory is built upon incorrect hypotheses, and when put into practice, it leads to poor results. The intentions of medieval alchemists are irrelevant, because their theories were wrong. In the same way, the intentions of Marx, et al are irrelevant; what matters is end results. And the end results are 100 million dead people in the 20th century, as well as significant suffering among those who survived. In contrast, capitalistic nations have achieved prosperity and liberty far beyond any others in human history.

It would be one thing to advocate communism 150 years ago, but now we have real data proving that communism produced more human suffering than any other ideology in history. There is no excuse for supporting it now. It's not much different than claiming that Earth is flat when we have circumnavigation and photographs from orbit.

> Clearly there was something structurally wrong about the way the Russians implemented their scheme of governance that made it vulnerable to authoritarian takeover.

I think every form of governance is vulnerable to authoritarian takeover. The best defense against it is a strong constitution, but even that is vulnerable if it can be amended, or if it outlives its society's respect for it.

Again, this is a matter of human nature: humans desire power, and there will always be those who will strive to achieve it at others' expense. Therefore the best way to mitigate authoritarianism is to compartmentalize to reduce the potential authority that can be accumulated. This, of course, is not generally compatible with communism. In theory, it could be, because free people can freely enter agreements and pool resources. But communism only works in theory at a large scale, and that necessarily means enforcement, not liberty--and by so doing it sows the seeds of its own destruction. Humans are not machines, yet they are the "workers" of communism, and communism destroys its workers, and thereby itself.

> You might be surprised o learn that prior to his exily Trotsky had been engaged in a battle of ideas with Stalin where Trotsky was arguing for the maintenance of markets in grain and agricultural equipment because he considered market mechanisms superior to central planning and much more likely to reflect the goals of the people doing the work.

But markets are not communism.

> Had his advice been heeded, at least one disastrous famine might have been avoided.

Or, had communism not been enacted in the first place, over 100 million lives could have been saved. I don't know where you stand on this, but I don't subscribe to the "you must break a few eggs to make an omelet" theory. Those deaths can never be justified, especially not in the name of communistic trial-and-error.

> But anarchy is the end goal of communism - the withering away fo the state...This is anarchy in the definitional sense of 'without rulers' as opposed to the propagandistic sense of general mayhem and disorder.

As I mentioned in another comment, that is not stateless. The system does not function, does not even exist, without rulers.

> and its replacement by voluntary mutualism,

There is nothing voluntary about it, because it's enforced by the state.

> abundance through industrial production

"Abundance" is, not to be rude, but a useless platitude, a distraction, and begging the question. It's entirely theoretical, and the theory was completely disproven by the 20th century. Again, intentions and theory don't matter--only results matter.

> and an equitable distribution of time

What is equitable is necessarily defined by an entity, which is the state.

> with the goal of minimizing work

The goals are decided by the state. The state is not a computer program--it is human beings, who have different opinions, different goals, are greedy, etc.

> and maximizing freedom

Communism is incompatible with freedom, because the system necessarily requires compliance. Compliance != freedom.

The real question is, freedom as defined by whom? The answer is, as the 20th century demonstrated, as defined by the Party, whose members live in luxury, while the People live in squalor--the opposite of all the promises they made to the people.

But communism isn't supposed to work that way, right? Theoretically, the people in charge are all good and selfless and fair and experts in their fields who apply their knowledge impartially to benefit all people equally. But in practice it results in unprecedented evil and suffering, therefore it's a disproven theory.

> The internet qua self-routing persistent network was/is anarchic in many respects

The low-level protocols (theory) are anarchic. The network (practice) is not. Without, e.g. ARIN, ICANN, etc, the Internet as we know it would not exist. Someday there might come to be a usable kind of mesh network with automatic addressing, routing, and naming, but of course, such a system would necessarily be vulnerable to DoS attacks. TANSTAAFL.

> sadly I don't have a general theory of distribution v. resource concentration that allows for concentrations of resources for industrial production without concentrations of authority or its proxies - yet.

I encourage you to not go down that road, friend. Don't waste your time, falling into the same trap that Marx, et al did. It would be like trying to create one enormous computer to take the place of every computer on the Internet. Distributed, federated systems work, the same way that markets and individual liberty work. Build on that, stand on the shoulders of giants; don't go backward into the crab bucket.

Or, another way to look at it is, we already have such a theory: it's called capitalism. It is not perfect, but nothing is, and by impinging upon it, you necessarily increase state control, reduce individual liberty, and increase vulnerability to authoritarianism.

These problems are political, not economic. They are people problems, not resource management problems. To fix these problems you must fix people, which is ultimately impossible. The best we can do is try to create good, selfless people, who make the system good from the bottom, up.

I've never met you, so I'm not accusing you of having this trait, but: don't have the hubris to think that you can create a general theory to "solve" economics and society and governance. Such a task is beyond anyone. The closest we have ever come is to do the opposite: to compartmentalize and allow individuals to freely associate and govern themselves, to the extent practical; to allow each group to choose the systems most appropriate for their circumstances, and bargain freely with other groups, rapidly iterating freely, borrowing good ideas and discarding bad ones.

This is even more important because of technology. For millennia, technology changed very little, and everything happened very slowly. Just in the last 100 years, the pace has increased by orders of magnitude, and it appears to be continuing to do so. Whether it will ever plateau, no one knows. So while ideas and theories conceived hundreds of thousands of years ago could be valid for a long time, that is no longer the case. The pace of change is now so fast that the useful life of any such theory is far shorter than we expect. The most effective theories will be ones that operate on a small scale, not a universal one.

> Apologies if this seems nitpicky. but to begin from the premise that communism is about increasing state control without acknowledging the explicit aim (in the Communist Manifesto, no less) of deconstructing state power undermines your whole argument, notwithstanding your many correct observations.

No, it's not nitpicky, it misses my point: that communism is fundamentally flawed. Your argument is undermined by your not recognizing that explicit aims are irrelevant--what matters is only results. Early attempts at flying machines failed; it does not matter that the explicit aim of their inventors was to fly. Their aerodynamic theories were disproven, and in the same way, communism has been.

It's false that it deconstructs state power, because it does not exist without state power--it merely reforms and repurposes it. To say that it deconstructs state power is to misrepresent it, and this is what the "anarchists" do to obscure their real intentions. This is how the communists manipulated masses of people into thinking that they were on their side, when what they really wanted was to replace the government and take power for themselves.

That they just want to help; that they want to be fair; that they are altruistic; that it will work this time; that they know how to do it--it's all a big lie, and it always was, full of hubris that men could effectively be gods, omnipotent, solving every problem, making everything optimal.

100 million people dead--that's the truth.

This is what communists always say: "Communism is just misunderstood and has been poorly implemented. We'll get it right this time." 100 million people in the 20th century say otherwise--well, they would, if they were alive to do so, but they were killed by communism.

I'll try to be concise:

1. Communism and anarchy are not the same thing, because in communism, sharing is not optional.

2. Communism is not stateless, because the laws are enforced to enact communism, and whatever entity enforces the laws is the state.

I guess you're thinking that communism is "the people" rather than "the state," but that is a false distinction, because whichever of the people dissent are forced to comply by the other people, i.e. the state.

This is like saying that there is no "state" in the United States, because it is "of, by, and for the People." However, this is a false distinction, because the state is not the People, rather it is authorized by the People, and its powers are delegated to it by the People. It remains a distinct entity.

3. Therefore, anywhere there is a government, there is a state. The only stateless society would be total anarchy, like nomads roaming the plains thousands of years ago. Even then, they had tribes, which were essentially mini-states. So to claim that communism is stateless is essentially playing semantic games.

4. You said, "Communists and anarchists have the same end goal, these two 'groupings' are one and the same in the end." This is interesting, because most of (if not all of) the "anarchists" we see today are actually thinly veiled communists. They advocate anarchy to destroy the existing society, hoping to then create a new communist state afterward. But you seem to think that communists and anarchists are the same because you think that both are advocating for a stateless society (which is not the case). So we agree on your conclusion, but apparently for different reasons.

5. Communism is not classless. Whoever is in charge is in a class above the rest.

> Your whole post is more of an argument against authoritarianism than anything else in my opinion.

Yes, it is--and communism is authoritarian.

For "%return", perhaps "should" or "handle", as in, "This function should return without an error, but if it does, handle it."