Niall @3:
AFAIK, tape can be used to get a more fitted grip, but some gun nuts and criminals put it on because they think it will make the weapon harder to trace (wearing gloves and/or wiping down the weapon after you use it is better, but nobody said they were smart).
I assume that these guys were doing it for the latter reason and got flustered when they were called on it. It's not the sort of thing real federal agents would do.
There are three basic motivations for people to carry out inhuman acts against other people:
* money
* power
* hatred
Money is why the drug cartels are shooting up northern Mexico.
Power is why the Iranian government is shooting up its own people.
Hatred is why (typically right-wing and/or religious) extremists across the world carry out terroristic acts.
I don't think an extreme viewpoint is enough to motivate this sort of things. I think you have to dehumanize the people you are attacking first, to the point where murder is justifiable. And the Right deals so openly in dehumanization and hatred, even in the "mainstream media", that it's hard to understand why we don't see more of this stuff happening.
In my experience, the killer is not necessarily the number of SQL queries that must be done, but rather the time each query takes and the amount of data that must be transferred between the SQL server and the PHP process (and then, of course, across the interwebs to your browser).
For example, to retrieve the most recent 20 posts, you might do:
SELECT * FROM comments WHERE email = 'foo@bar.com' ORDER BY postdate DESC LIMIT 20
And to get the earliest one, you'd query:
SELECT * FROM comments WHERE email = 'foo@bar.com' ORDER BY postdate LIMIT 1
Now, if both 'email' and 'postdate' are indexed (i.e. hashed into some internal quick-lookup mechanism for fast retrieval and sorting) then these are both very, very fast operations even for very large databases. Effectively, the SQL server will only look at a total of at most 21 entries, because it knows where to find them. The only added overhead for including the second query is the back-and-forth time for the PHP script to talk to the SQL server, which is not very much compared to the transport time for it to send the response back to your browser.
On the other hand, if neither 'email' nor 'postdate' are indexed, the SQL server will have to manually search 300,000 entries and sort the results for each query, so the overhead for multiple queries is prohibitive.
Smart indexing is one of the most important keys to good database design.
I have both PHP and CSS experience, but none with the MT framework. I would be happy to answer questions regarding either, if there is a problem you cannot solve or if you need some advice, but I do not feel qualified to do the upgrade myself.
Bruce @ 77
That would make an interesting read, if a little exposition were in order. Details?
chris @75:
You said this much better than I did. The whole "unrealistic and idealized" bit is something I've written about before; I think there is a general tendency for characters to become more physically attractive over time as the artist's style matures. It's kind of a feature of the medium.
I think there are a number of factors, conscious and unconscious, that cause this to happen, but you can't really criticize an artist for it. Heck, most traditional print comics have "unrealistic and idealized" characters. Along with most TV shows, movies, etc. Plus most traditional art and literature.
The squicky stuff, on the other hand... it's situational at best. Is the artist doing it because (s)he likes drawing nudes? (I bet that covers a lot of classical artists!) Because it placates fans who support the comic? (A little more squicky, but you gotta eat.) Because (s)he is creepy? Several/all of the above?
True squick is something that falls under the "I know it when I see it" heading. And when I do, I'm going to delete that bookmark. I've done it many times before, and I'll do it again.
Xopher @56:
When did you give up on Erfworld? It got slow for a bit, but things are moving along at a significant clip now. And they're just starting to get _really_ interesting...
Gdr @30:
Except it's been mentioned that Diaz has a large female readership who don't consider the character to be exploitive? I dunno. Talk to Cadence - I just like reading the comic.
Current culture - music, fashion, art, etc. - is characterized by a sort of irony that borders on earnest sincerity. All the '80s nostalgia, or the indie rock scene, or what people do with webcomics... Only the artist really knows what he or she is trying to do, and if some people appreciate the irony while others enjoy the content at face value, the artist just has a larger audience.
On a related note, is fanservice okay if both the artist and the audience recognize it as such?
Cadence @23:
The odd thing is that I'm not one of those guys who reacts like Solomon - though I was also aware from the first time I saw the comic that Kimiko was the type of character that "fanboys" would drool over.
Knowing that Diaz has a large female readership puts the character in perspective - it's not so much that Kimiko is a spoof on a common comic/anime/whatever trope, but rather more of a Superman for geeky/techy girls.
Though it doesn't change the fact that Diaz also likes to draw her in various states of undress. Which is okay, but I'm really not interested, and it makes it harder to check for updates at work. Meh.
Cadence @15:
I think this discussion probably warrants its own thread, and maybe its own blog as well. Sorry if I squicked you out - I was mostly responding to Solomon's remarks, which were very much in that vein.
Nobody denies that there are intelligent, attractive men and women in real life who are interested in things like technology and science fiction - many of those people post here :)
... as opposed to, say, typical female characters in most internet/gamer comics, who are just hot gamer guys with boobs, in a disturbingly sincere and unironic way.
Sorry for the split post.
Unfortunately, while John Solomon has several good points, he is neither creative nor funny in making them, which makes reading his long, pointless screeds a complete waste of my time.
Just sayin'.
And I think he's missed the point of Kimiko - I always read her being a stylized object of male internet nerd/gamer lust as an intentional, ironic gesture by the author. As opposed to, say,
And for those of you who like good art, good writing, and layers within layers of pop culture, gaming, and (mostly fantasy) literature references, try ErfWorld (start here).
You forgot this standalone:
Excorcizing Laplace's Demon
Mostly questions about TN, OR, HI, MA, RI, and AZ. It does seem like they picked states that were in different parts of the country from where I now live (VA). However, I am also originally from Massachusetts, so perhaps that screwed up my results :)
Yes, it's clearly a psychological study gauging peoples' ability to do statistics. This is typically how these studies are done - they "fool" the subject into thinking it's about something (the election) other than what it's actually about (how people think about probability); this helps mostly erase the effects of people over-thinking whatever thing they believe the study is testing them on.
That's not to say that I didn't take the test and put my email address down - I'd love to get free money. (I did also find the "supposing" questions interesting.)
I'm not sure you're approaching this correctly. The question is, specifically: "Can God create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it" (or some variation thereon).
But this question does two things. First, as you've already identified, it requires a reasonable definition of "lift", which one should probably take to mean "to apply force to move an object counter to the direction of the gravitational pull on it". Though we could likely substitute any force for gravity and have an equivalent problem.
This is reinforced by the second requirement, namely that the *reason* God could not lift the hypothetical stone would have to be that it was too heavy. Without this notion of "heaviness" - and without the requirement that the reason for failure be the weight of the stone - the question is about as meaningful as "Could God create a rock so purple that he couldn't lift it?".
For example, even within our universe, it would be easy to find a place that even a small rock could not be "lifted" by applying any amount of force, no matter how large. God need simply place the rock inside the Schwarzchild Radius of a black hole, where the curvature of space itself prevents any movement away from the collapsed star. But the question is not "can God place a rock somewhere that he could not lift it", and this example has nothing at all to do with the weight of the stone.
Equally meaningless is an alternate physics with no force, or where force in the sense we understand it has no effect. In such a universe, "weight" would also have little to do with an object's movability. It may be possible to conceive of a physics where an object ceased to be "liftable" by any amount of force after a certain mass threshold *without effectively creating a black hole* (and therefore returning to the problem of it being a positional issue rather than one of weight) but I can't think of any way to do it right now.
So really, I think you have to conclude that, in any reasonable universe, God cannot create an object that - by virtue of its weight alone - cannot be lifted by an arbitrarily large amount of force. And one would assume that an omnipotent God would be able to apply an arbitrarily large force to the object of his choosing, so the answer to the initial question must be "no".
The FSM is just an upstart, and his followers are blaspheming heretics!
Everyone knows that the true atheist deity is the Invisible Pink Unicorn (pbuh)!
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 16 |
| 2008 | 3 |
| 2007 | 5 |
| 2006 | 2 |
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