There was a "semi-public" beta(anyone who preordered). TBH it had network and matchmaking issues throughout the beta(I was in it). I don't doubt that piracy exacerbated this by an order of magnitude, but the matchmaking was never "good" for Demigod at any point at any point I played it.
While the information does appear to be leaked by Richard Armitage, the fact he's a good friend of Rove and the highly fortuitous timing of the incident suggest it does not end with Armitage.
There are such things as coincidences, but I wouldn't say the link to the Bush administration has been "proven false" or even much diminished. Due to Libby's perjury and further pardoning by GWB we will probably never have good evidence for either scenario.
Your point is fair, but I'd also point out that taxing cigarettes is also supposed to offset the costs imposed on the healthcare system which the taxpayer ends up paying anyway.
Maybe a similar case could be made for video games and gun crime, but I doubt it. I doubt the cause and effect, and that the NRA and similar lobbying organizations would let such a precedent be set.
Anyone know how much of the cigarette tax goes to anti-smoking campaigns and other health related spending?
Wouldn't this still destroy network neutrality? All the customers that have "nothing to hide" and have their packets deep inspected so they can be "more efficiently routed"(true is most cases to be sure, but opens the door to:"you meant to go to the that search engine? Sorry, but all our packets redirect to this search engine because it provides better QoS") and all the "free" customers would be stuck with the bandwidth leftovers.
There are so many possibilities with some scientific basis and the whole environment as a system is so complex that we can't predict details. We can paint broad strokes of the future but saying the sea level is going to raise 2.37 feet and believing that the sea will raise exactly 2.37 feet put blinders on you just like believing that a Divine Being created the universe in 6 days.
Some of you seriously need to stop beating the Global Warming Manifesto like it is a Bible.
I'm probably getting trolled here, but talk about a specious comparison. 2.37 feet(if I'm assuming correctly you pulled it from the article and didn't just make it up) would be a scientific guess or hypothesis. It's based on what we know about the world(rough volume of ice, salt content of seawater, rough volume of oceans, absorption of CO2, etc).
There is no believing required or welcomed. If you think you have a more accurate hypothesis show us what calculations you used to get there and explain why these are better models. I don't see anyone "beating the Global Warming Manifesto", especially since no such thing exists.
Think, don't believe. You don't have to agree, but throwing up your hands and saying "it's too complex for us to understand" is the antithesis of science. You can't learn anything that way.
So their wireless network is superior but ridiculously expensive and their Fios support is good and cheap, but hardly anywhere.
I wonder what path this will take?
I can't help but wish Google had won the auction. Yes their a corporation like the others, but I like their products and prices better than Verizons' products and prices in general.
As for Vista, adoption rate speaks louder than words. This seems appropriate:"Everytime the topic comes up, your type gets shot down... here I thought you'd learn."
I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than hear shouts of "I'm being oppressed".
First off, it makes no sense to tag a GNU/Linux post "shill or astroturfing". You could tag it "flamebait", but shill implies being paid by a product's company to promote that product(or disparage its competitor) as if it were "news".
Second, this guy wrote an entire book on why everyone should switch to Vista. Even Windows has given up on Vista as a mistake, so I'd say "shill" is just calling a spade a spade in this case.
While I appreciate the Sirlin paraphrasing you're doing, I don't entirely agree with letting OP strats run rampant. Sure competitive players may be able to find a solution, but that doesn't mean that solution is available or practical at a casual level of play. If a game is broken at a level of play newbie, competitive, or casual, it is still broken, and that will cost the developer players.
I wonder if how the virus was spread could give clues to "who knows who"? IE: Did all the machines infected at ScottTrade start from a single intrusion, or was there some type of sharing of data between ScottTrade and TD Ameritrade? Not necessarily illicit, but seeing formal and informal alliances.
I agree. I've been trying to figure out how to tell people that Obama is a man who happens to be black, and because of this hysteria, he has arguably been given far more trust than any president should be given.
I partially agree with you. I think that because of his charisma people want to believe what he says. I also think his actions have been far more scrutinised than previous presidents. I don't think the trust, but verify model is a bad model.
There are plenty of arguments for why we should have space based weapons. If you read the right books, we need them to be prepared to repel alien visitations. Other opinions are equal to the notions of what would have happened if the US had decided that we don't need automatic weapons.
In the end, you will have them. The only question is how much damage are you willing to sustain before deciding to build them.
Sorry, but space based weapons to repel aliens? I want to believe as much as the next/.er, but don't fool yourself. Normal Earth targets(humans) would be the goal of these weapons. They wouldn't stand a chance against any civilization who could travel here.
As for "automatic weapons," I see no reason why a spaced based warhead would be able to do any more damage than a "conventional" warhead now or in the future.
There is another angle. Space based weapons can be built using civilian space travel/exploration technology and the other way around. I don't think it's a case of having to pay twice as both programs can share development costs in various ways.
Obama has made several statements that lead many of us to believe that he's not quite sure WTF he's doing. Nobody is perfect, but this 180 degree shift doesn't make sense unless he is just pushing the program underground or plying for political favor somewhere. Neither of those options speak well of him, and neither explanation bodes well for the security and safety of the citizens of the USA.
I'd say the opposite. Spend the "space money" on civilian projects instead of useless "space weapons".
Those who criticize him for it are quite right to do so, not to mention they are within their constitutional rights to do so. We need to think critically and criticize where it is appropriate. Letting the executive branch run around wildly is what happened over the last 8 years. Time for that to stop. If that means Obama has to explain himself in detail and quite often, so be it. We need transparency and wisdom in the Whitehouse.
Saying that any criticism of Obama is racism is exactly the kind of thinking that Bush used: Any criticism of the Executive branch is unamerican. This, my friends, is what fascism looks like.
I haven't heard anyone from this administration imply that criticism of his policies is racist. If you can point me to a quote I would like to see if that will be the tone of this administration. If you can't I'm going to assume you're building a strawman and inventing repression to explain why people aren't listening to you.
You think that's bad??? I'm still waiting for my CHANGE!!!
Yes because you've been patiently waiting those whole 1.5 days he's been in office.
Also, reversing the previous administration's policies on the FOIA and closing Guananamo isn't change? Or do you really expect him to walk on water and heal the rifts in the middle east?
I wouldn't have bothered replying except you were somehow modded insightful for spouting the same cynical catch-phrase that's replaced all of the "talking-points" as of late. I'm sure he'll screw up soon and I'll see plenty of the "this is the change you were hoping for?" posts then. Right now you're just whinging.
I find no-crit servers extremely unsatisfactory although I want to play on them to remove the random "you die now without any recourse" moments.
TF2 was built with crits in mind; the game depends upon it to break up stalemates at choke points. I see why it's important for competitive games, but on public servers it just breaks the flow of the game.
I see the article as more of a "design pattern/paradigm" for games. I think Yvanhoe and article author are close but I would change things a little bit. "Learning curve" and "easy to learn" are the same thing for a game. "Hard to master" is built up of two things: depth(of choices) and skill moves(like aiming). Depth is what you're mentioning, Yvanhoe, when you say "hidden content". "Skill moves" are a major part of "sentiment of progression" along with depth. However, a game with a lot of "hidden content" and skill moves is going to be hard to teach to a new player. I could see a program that keeps track of the balance of these variables, but I doubt it could offer meaningful solutions.
its about being disconnected from the sources of your food, about being coccooned from the roots of the highly processed products that define your life from infancy, and having no bearings or anchor to the larger, natural world
This is true, and the only reason I would consider what organizations like the PETA do noble. Living in America, most of the meat I eat comes from factory farms and not the green pastures of Montana. I'd have no qualms about eating meat if I knew that cow/chicken/pig was raised on an actual farm, but unless I find more ways to eat locally that's not going to happen.
IMO the PETA should focus less on making people vegetarians and more on preventing cruelty. There is sense to making people ask where the food they eat is coming from, but it's not that the animal is killed, it's how it lived.
Disclaimer: I still eat meat because I've eaten it all my life, but I avoid places like fast food restaurants and eat vegetarian where I can. Doesn't invalidate my point though.
I wish I had points to mod you informative but I used them today already. Could you provide some links to the points you've brought up? I don't mean to pull the "Citation Needed" on you, but this is contrary to what I've heard about the case.
Not to mention that the bad loans were only the catalyst and the real killer was bad risk assessment on the part of the larger banks who bought derivatives based on these risky loans and then insured them multiple times with institutions like AIG.
In short, you still can't blame the borrowers over the banks as nice as it would be to blame the poor and "government regulation" for all your problems.
To clarify: the multiple pond hypothesis is only useful (in this context) if you're coming from a creationist's perspective.
I see it as the opposite. The multiple pond approach is looking at it from a statistical perspective, not a creationist perspective. One of the pools had the right conditions for life and life came to be, but there were many other pools on the same planet that didn't have the right conditions.
This doesn't preclude life form forming in other ponds, so it doesn't imply life is "special" in even a statistical sense(although observationally it seems that way thus far).
I think we're of the same mind, but I think you're placing creationist ideals on the anthropic principal when they need not be.
But there are/were many volcanic pools, and in order for that particular cyano bacteria to arise the conditions had to be right for it.
The way I understand it is not the "the pool was created for us", but rather "we were created from the pool" and are inextricably a part of it.
The anthropic/bacteric principle does not imply that the pond was tailored to our needs, just that if the pond was different, we would not be there to see it. Nor does it imply we couldn't be killed off. The anthropic/bacteric principle makes no predictions for the future, just how we came to be.
Slashdot Mirror
There was a "semi-public" beta(anyone who preordered). TBH it had network and matchmaking issues throughout the beta(I was in it). I don't doubt that piracy exacerbated this by an order of magnitude, but the matchmaking was never "good" for Demigod at any point at any point I played it.
While the information does appear to be leaked by Richard Armitage, the fact he's a good friend of Rove and the highly fortuitous timing of the incident suggest it does not end with Armitage.
There are such things as coincidences, but I wouldn't say the link to the Bush administration has been "proven false" or even much diminished. Due to Libby's perjury and further pardoning by GWB we will probably never have good evidence for either scenario.
Your point is fair, but I'd also point out that taxing cigarettes is also supposed to offset the costs imposed on the healthcare system which the taxpayer ends up paying anyway.
Maybe a similar case could be made for video games and gun crime, but I doubt it. I doubt the cause and effect, and that the NRA and similar lobbying organizations would let such a precedent be set.
Anyone know how much of the cigarette tax goes to anti-smoking campaigns and other health related spending?
The CRA is a red herring that has been trotted out and dismissed all ready http://www.businessweek.com/investing/insights/blog/archives/2008/09/community_reinv.html . The long and short of it is most of these subprimes loans were made by firms not even subject to the CRA, so saying they were "forced by the gov't" to take these loans is naive at best.
The GP is spot on.
Wouldn't this still destroy network neutrality? All the customers that have "nothing to hide" and have their packets deep inspected so they can be "more efficiently routed"(true is most cases to be sure, but opens the door to:"you meant to go to the that search engine? Sorry, but all our packets redirect to this search engine because it provides better QoS") and all the "free" customers would be stuck with the bandwidth leftovers.
There are so many possibilities with some scientific basis and the whole environment as a system is so complex that we can't predict details. We can paint broad strokes of the future but saying the sea level is going to raise 2.37 feet and believing that the sea will raise exactly 2.37 feet put blinders on you just like believing that a Divine Being created the universe in 6 days.
Some of you seriously need to stop beating the Global Warming Manifesto like it is a Bible.
I'm probably getting trolled here, but talk about a specious comparison. 2.37 feet(if I'm assuming correctly you pulled it from the article and didn't just make it up) would be a scientific guess or hypothesis. It's based on what we know about the world(rough volume of ice, salt content of seawater, rough volume of oceans, absorption of CO2, etc).
There is no believing required or welcomed. If you think you have a more accurate hypothesis show us what calculations you used to get there and explain why these are better models. I don't see anyone "beating the Global Warming Manifesto", especially since no such thing exists.
Think, don't believe. You don't have to agree, but throwing up your hands and saying "it's too complex for us to understand" is the antithesis of science. You can't learn anything that way.
So their wireless network is superior but ridiculously expensive and their Fios support is good and cheap, but hardly anywhere.
I wonder what path this will take?
I can't help but wish Google had won the auction. Yes their a corporation like the others, but I like their products and prices better than Verizons' products and prices in general.
Am I the only person who is completely past the entire concept of April Fool's day?
Yes.
More FUD.
The companies you mention don't have a history of using bloggers to shil. Microsoft does.
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/3000/PX03096.pdf
As for Vista, adoption rate speaks louder than words. This seems appropriate:"Everytime the topic comes up, your type gets shot down... here I thought you'd learn."
I have mod points, but I'd rather reply than hear shouts of "I'm being oppressed".
First off, it makes no sense to tag a GNU/Linux post "shill or astroturfing". You could tag it "flamebait", but shill implies being paid by a product's company to promote that product(or disparage its competitor) as if it were "news".
Second, this guy wrote an entire book on why everyone should switch to Vista. Even Windows has given up on Vista as a mistake, so I'd say "shill" is just calling a spade a spade in this case.
While I appreciate the Sirlin paraphrasing you're doing, I don't entirely agree with letting OP strats run rampant. Sure competitive players may be able to find a solution, but that doesn't mean that solution is available or practical at a casual level of play. If a game is broken at a level of play newbie, competitive, or casual, it is still broken, and that will cost the developer players.
I'll agree to this. I also like how the game had two completely different races in almost every aspect.
I wonder if how the virus was spread could give clues to "who knows who"? IE: Did all the machines infected at ScottTrade start from a single intrusion, or was there some type of sharing of data between ScottTrade and TD Ameritrade? Not necessarily illicit, but seeing formal and informal alliances.
"Once upon a time in a mythical land called Soviet Russia, a big bowl of hot grits had Natalie Portman..."
Fixed that for you.
Has he made a wife-capable Hulu scraper
I can't tell if that's a typo or if you're a fan of Wendell Berry.
I agree. I've been trying to figure out how to tell people that Obama is a man who happens to be black, and because of this hysteria, he has arguably been given far more trust than any president should be given.
I partially agree with you. I think that because of his charisma people want to believe what he says. I also think his actions have been far more scrutinised than previous presidents. I don't think the trust, but verify model is a bad model.
There are plenty of arguments for why we should have space based weapons. If you read the right books, we need them to be prepared to repel alien visitations. Other opinions are equal to the notions of what would have happened if the US had decided that we don't need automatic weapons.
In the end, you will have them. The only question is how much damage are you willing to sustain before deciding to build them.
Sorry, but space based weapons to repel aliens? I want to believe as much as the next /.er, but don't fool yourself. Normal Earth targets(humans) would be the goal of these weapons. They wouldn't stand a chance against any civilization who could travel here.
As for "automatic weapons," I see no reason why a spaced based warhead would be able to do any more damage than a "conventional" warhead now or in the future.
There is another angle. Space based weapons can be built using civilian space travel/exploration technology and the other way around. I don't think it's a case of having to pay twice as both programs can share development costs in various ways.
Obama has made several statements that lead many of us to believe that he's not quite sure WTF he's doing. Nobody is perfect, but this 180 degree shift doesn't make sense unless he is just pushing the program underground or plying for political favor somewhere. Neither of those options speak well of him, and neither explanation bodes well for the security and safety of the citizens of the USA.
I'd say the opposite. Spend the "space money" on civilian projects instead of useless "space weapons".
Those who criticize him for it are quite right to do so, not to mention they are within their constitutional rights to do so. We need to think critically and criticize where it is appropriate. Letting the executive branch run around wildly is what happened over the last 8 years. Time for that to stop. If that means Obama has to explain himself in detail and quite often, so be it. We need transparency and wisdom in the Whitehouse.
Saying that any criticism of Obama is racism is exactly the kind of thinking that Bush used: Any criticism of the Executive branch is unamerican. This, my friends, is what fascism looks like.
I haven't heard anyone from this administration imply that criticism of his policies is racist. If you can point me to a quote I would like to see if that will be the tone of this administration. If you can't I'm going to assume you're building a strawman and inventing repression to explain why people aren't listening to you.
You think that's bad??? I'm still waiting for my CHANGE!!!
Yes because you've been patiently waiting those whole 1.5 days he's been in office.
Also, reversing the previous administration's policies on the FOIA and closing Guananamo isn't change? Or do you really expect him to walk on water and heal the rifts in the middle east?
I wouldn't have bothered replying except you were somehow modded insightful for spouting the same cynical catch-phrase that's replaced all of the "talking-points" as of late. I'm sure he'll screw up soon and I'll see plenty of the "this is the change you were hoping for?" posts then. Right now you're just whinging.
I find no-crit servers extremely unsatisfactory although I want to play on them to remove the random "you die now without any recourse" moments.
TF2 was built with crits in mind; the game depends upon it to break up stalemates at choke points. I see why it's important for competitive games, but on public servers it just breaks the flow of the game.
I see the article as more of a "design pattern/paradigm" for games. I think Yvanhoe and article author are close but I would change things a little bit. "Learning curve" and "easy to learn" are the same thing for a game. "Hard to master" is built up of two things: depth(of choices) and skill moves(like aiming). Depth is what you're mentioning, Yvanhoe, when you say "hidden content". "Skill moves" are a major part of "sentiment of progression" along with depth. However, a game with a lot of "hidden content" and skill moves is going to be hard to teach to a new player. I could see a program that keeps track of the balance of these variables, but I doubt it could offer meaningful solutions.
I thought it was mandatory for all geeks to watch Ghostbusters? Don't they know the consequences of crossing the streams?
its about being disconnected from the sources of your food, about being coccooned from the roots of the highly processed products that define your life from infancy, and having no bearings or anchor to the larger, natural world
This is true, and the only reason I would consider what organizations like the PETA do noble. Living in America, most of the meat I eat comes from factory farms and not the green pastures of Montana. I'd have no qualms about eating meat if I knew that cow/chicken/pig was raised on an actual farm, but unless I find more ways to eat locally that's not going to happen.
IMO the PETA should focus less on making people vegetarians and more on preventing cruelty. There is sense to making people ask where the food they eat is coming from, but it's not that the animal is killed, it's how it lived.
Disclaimer: I still eat meat because I've eaten it all my life, but I avoid places like fast food restaurants and eat vegetarian where I can. Doesn't invalidate my point though.
I wish I had points to mod you informative but I used them today already. Could you provide some links to the points you've brought up? I don't mean to pull the "Citation Needed" on you, but this is contrary to what I've heard about the case.
I've seen this a few places, and it sounds great as a free market talking point, but doesn't actually hold water.
Most subprime loans, 75%, were not made by institutions that were regulated by the CRA(the legislation you are talking about that "forces" banks to make loans for lower income borrowers if they pool their resources). http://www.woodstockinst.org/blog/blog/the-community-reinvestment-act-no-smoking-gun/
Not to mention that the bad loans were only the catalyst and the real killer was bad risk assessment on the part of the larger banks who bought derivatives based on these risky loans and then insured them multiple times with institutions like AIG.
In short, you still can't blame the borrowers over the banks as nice as it would be to blame the poor and "government regulation" for all your problems.
To clarify: the multiple pond hypothesis is only useful (in this context) if you're coming from a creationist's perspective.
I see it as the opposite. The multiple pond approach is looking at it from a statistical perspective, not a creationist perspective. One of the pools had the right conditions for life and life came to be, but there were many other pools on the same planet that didn't have the right conditions.
This doesn't preclude life form forming in other ponds, so it doesn't imply life is "special" in even a statistical sense(although observationally it seems that way thus far).
I think we're of the same mind, but I think you're placing creationist ideals on the anthropic principal when they need not be.
But there are/were many volcanic pools, and in order for that particular cyano bacteria to arise the conditions had to be right for it.
The way I understand it is not the "the pool was created for us", but rather "we were created from the pool" and are inextricably a part of it.
The anthropic/bacteric principle does not imply that the pond was tailored to our needs, just that if the pond was different, we would not be there to see it. Nor does it imply we couldn't be killed off. The anthropic/bacteric principle makes no predictions for the future, just how we came to be.