Apparently his career resurfaced on one of those many generic network TV crime drama shows, but I recognized him from the dreadful Batman & Robin movie that came out about a decade ago that I wish I could forget.
Seriously, isn't "Hollywood" one of the most ridiculous phenomena on the planet?
It is exceedingly ridiculous. Fortunately Hollywood the neighborhood of Los Angeles isn't very much like "Hollywood" the film industry. I wish someone would explain that to all of the tourists though.
I live in Hollywood and have this happen to me a lot. I've seen a handful of celebrities over the years I recognized and probably dozens more have passed me on the sidewalk without even registering as "someone". It took me about 5 minutes to figure out Chris O'Donnell was in line in front of me once and I still had Google after the fact to be sure since I was too timid to just ask while he was standing there instead of just looking awkward.
Wouldn't government ownership of fiber be anti-business and against the Tea Party platform of smaller, weaker government? I expect the Tea Party to advocate government takeover of fiber lines around the same time they also advocate more stringent regulations on banks and insurance companies (i.e. never).
My point is free markets don't exist for a variety of reasons in the real world, hence it doesn't make sense to treat corporations as if they do.
If corporations were forced to properly account for their externalities I would agree they don't owe you anything other than offering trade. The reality is they frequently aren't, so it's not unreasonable for us as a society to place additional demands on them as we bear the burden of their externalities. Reasonable demands often being regulations and taxes that do force them to account for the full costs of their operation.
This is true of so much more than just healthcare. In many cases helping the other guy (no matter how apparently "undeserving") generally benefits you too, even if in ways that are hard to measure directly. The problem is so few people seem to make this connection because spending a few extra percent in taxes to make sure there are proper societal safety nets doesn't have a directly measurable impact on your life when you live in a gated community and make more in a bonus that most make in their entire lives.
Sadly, in the real world "truly free" markets do not exist. Information between market participants is not perfect or symmetric, market participants are rarely rational, externalities are not properly accounted for in the market, and market failures can and do happen. Also, this analogy fails spectacularly in the case of necessary goods. It does not take much imagination to envision a more realistic scenario wherein the baker through devious tactics ensures he has monopoly or oligopoly status and fixes the price of bread to what people can afford to pay because he knows they have to instead of what the price would be in a truly competitive market.
Actually, this scenario is not far from what we see in reality. Corporations rake in record profits that go largely to the executives in charge who are rarely accountable to the stockholders (only to the board made of like-minded executives). Many of the spectacular failures we have seen recently (Lehman Brothers comes to mind) feature the every day workers being punished (by unemployment) for the mis-deeds of the executives who walk away with record bonuses even after their companies are driven into the ground.
Given the disastrous effects the "truly free" market can have on society, I would say yes, they DO owe us beyond the economical exchange. They owe us to behave as responsible citizens of society. Unfortunately because our markets largely don't account for externalities corporations frequently have a perverse incentive to do bad things at the expense of society as a whole.
Of course it does, but the reflection from the glass is what keeps some of the energy in, raising its temperature. CO2 is put into the greenhouse (sometimes), not to raise the temperature further (it doesn't do this), but to improve plant growth.
CO2 in the atmosphere has the exact same effect in absence of other factors. See for example Venus. Unless you want to discount a century of physics this is not in any way in dispute.
CO2 is the reason Earth isn't frozen. You do accept that, right?
Absolutely not. I don't accept that at all, no. There's no correlation, in geological history, between temperature and CO2 levels. Indeed, there's not much correlation now. PDO and solar activity correlate better than CO2 does.
Uh, what? Yes, yes there is. You only have to look to Venus to see what CO2 can do. If you didn't notice, it has a gigantic CO2 atmosphere and is hotter than Mercury. If you were to take the albedo of Earth and the solar energy input to the planet and calculate the mean temperature the Earth would be a frozen wasteland. This is an elementary homework exercise in planetary science. Are you calling Arrhenius a liar?
Then you continue to gather more observations and see if the theory continues to hold up
And if it doesn't (which it doesn't at present), you continue on as before, making new claims about your existing thesis that won't be tested for another three decades.
Please elaborate on which part of current theories you believe to be incorrect and continuously repeated without updating. Do you disagree with the reconstructions of the global temperature record? The ensemble of climate models that predict a long term trend of increasing global average temperatures? The ocean circulation models? Perhaps you disagree with climate feedback models for polar ice caps? The volume of work and literature in this field is enormous. There is no one single "Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming". There is a general consensus among thousands of researchers and scientists that all available evidence suggests increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase the mean global temperature.
All the while, you continue to rake in grant money for your graduate students.
I see. You see a conspiracy of scientists to enrich themselves. The $24,000/yr stipend I survived on as a graduate student really enabled me to live well beyond my means in Los Angeles. It is eminently more likely that there is a broad conspiracy among thousands of scientists vs. a sustained campaign of mis-information from a small conglomerate of multi-billion dollar a year energy companies who stand to lose substantial sums of money if the political consensus ever concludes that maybe we should do something about this. The logic of "follow the money" very clearly points to the scientists here who last year raked in record profits... oh wait.
Uh, what? Perhaps you are confusing local phenomena with global averages?
Yes, it's "weather" when it's cooling and "climate" when it's warming. You have both bases covered. Clever!
No, it's weather when we are talking about the short-term local behavior. It's climate when it's a trend lasting the better part of a century. No worthwhile model has said it will uniformly get warmer everywhere on the planet every single year.
no one in their right mind would claim that a global climate model intended to be run over centuries would make any specific predictions about the winter weather for a given year. The global climate is best described by weakly non-linear equations, which means the climate is chaotic in the short term, but there is useful information in long-term means
This is, frankly, ridiculous. Linear equations are time-reversible. Why do you think you can correctly forecast 100 years when you can't correctly hind-cast 100 years? Models calibrate with historic data (in essence an exercise in curve fitting). The argument you make here is disingenuous in the extreme and I'm sure a clever fellow like yourself will immediately see his error.
The error I see is that you apparently didn't read what I wrote. Let me quote it again for you:
weakly non-linear equations
So yes, linear equations are time-reversible. We aren't talking about linear equations, however, so I don't really see what point you are trying to make.
Some climate models do calibrate with historic data, no one ever disputed that. Especially for models that operate on short time-scales if your model given known forcings and a reasonable set of starting conditions can't produce something that looks reasonably similar to the historical data it's likely not a very good model. There are hundreds of variations on climate models out there, some use historical data, some don't. Some simply use a reasonable approximation of Earth and reasonable starting conditions and see if they produce long-term behavior that looks like reality.
I really don't see the p
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with) and secondly the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, in a strict scientific sense.
The first part of this is true of any observational science (like Astronomy). While the idea that you hypothesis and experiment and see if your experiments confirm your predictions is cute and all, if that were a criteria we would throw away vast swaths of scientific knowledge. In such situations you instead collect data, make hypothesis, and see which hypothesis best explains the data. Then you continue to gather more observations and see if the theory continues to hold up. More likely than not you end up modifying the theory to accommodate new observations. This is how we ended up with the big bang theory, theories of stellar evolution, theories of galactic dynamics, etc.
We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling.
Uh, what? Perhaps you are confusing local phenomena with global averages?
The models that we were told predicted the future centuries ahead, didn't predict harsh winters. They do now of course, because there are so many parameters to twiddle with you can pretty much come up with any projection you like (it's called confirmation bias).
No. Emphatically no. I have personally worked on such models as a grad student, no one in their right mind would claim that a global climate model intended to be run over centuries would make any specific predictions about the winter weather for a given year. The global climate is best described by weakly non-linear equations, which means the climate is chaotic in the short term, but there is useful information in long-term means. An (admittedly poor) analogy would be a noisy analog amplifier. As you turn up the gain the system on average gets louder, but the oscillations from noise also get larger (i.e. the variance increases). In the same analogy the models actually do predict harsher winters along with hotter summers. Pumping CO2 in the atmosphere causes the global climate system to retain more heat (and hence more energy) effectively amplifying the chaotic deviations in the system while also increasing the global average temperature.
Neptune is more massive than every other body combined in its region of gravitational influence, that is typically what is meant by "cleared". Pluto and most of the Kuiper Belt Objects are in resonant orbits with Neptune, which is how they maintain the orbits they have. As another example you have the Trojan Asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit because they hang out in the Lagrange points.
Definitions that are reasonable and include Pluto make the number of things we then have to call planets a rather large number. The current definition has some footing in our understanding of how planets form, which is that bodies like Pluto are essentially the remnants of areas of the solar system that failed to coalesce into planets, namely the Kuiper Belt and Asteroid Belt.
The primary reason for the dwarf planet classification is the sane definition that would have made Pluto and similar bodies planets was based on having sufficient gravity to be spherical. That definition would have expanded the number of planets to a very large number with many of them being bodies in the asteroid belt. Having a planet being defined as a body sufficiently massive to clear its orbit kept the number of "planets" sane and has some practical connection to our current theories and understanding of the process of planet formation.
Tidal destruction of a moon isn't exactly a new theory to explain the rings. Previous iterations just had trouble explaining the composition of the ring material, hence comets were a more favorable model. What Robin has done here is show how you can tidally destroy a moon and get the right ring composition. I'm not entirely surprised to see this coming from her, she previously did the same with Earth's moon-forming collision.
I was an astronomer once upon a time. As far as I'm aware this is pretty much still the prevailing theory, with some caveats that Jupiter likely did not form in its present orbit, and in fact the process of clearing out mass from the asteroid belt was partially responsible for putting Jupiter in its present place.
The implication here is that if the Justices do rule in favor of Beckstead, what does that say about other government organizations that "audit" citizen's affairs?
If you had read the full article you might also have noticed that the crux of the argument is that the PCOAB is set up as an independent organization independent of the executive or legislative branches. So, if the ruling goes for Beckstead nothing happens to most other "auditing" agencies. I can't think of any off the top of my head that have been granted some manner of legal authority and are not subject to some manner of appointment process by congress or the executive branch (although some of them arguably might be better off if they were).
I don't think that's a very sensible line of reasoning. They're intended for vastly different scales. FrameMaker is overkill for a short one-off document. If you're maintaining a large amount of software documentation that you want to single source into multiple publication channels you'd be crazy to use Word.
When I was researching products for this project I saw a lot of FrameMaker hate, and as far as I can tell it was terrible for a while. Adobe seems to have cleaned up FrameMaker and worked on the interface with RoboHelp to turn it into something very useful for single-source print/application help authoring. It has some annoying bits to it, but the structured authoring tools have been a savior compared to what it would be like in doing the same thing in Word.
As far as I can tell (having never used InDesign) FrameMaker is much more geared towards static vs. dynamic content. Graphics in FrameMaker are still somewhat of a PITA but it seems to have more support for structured authoring. From what I know FrameMaker is the way to go if you just want content done and someone else supplies the layout, InDesign is the way to go if your layout changes frequently.
Depending on the nature of your technical work, LaTeX is a good option. I used that throughout undergrad and grad school to write scientific papers/documents. The learning curve was a bit steep and it was occasionally frustrating, but the end result was quite nice. Another alternative I've just started using is FrameMaker. It's basically a fancy GUI for what is in essence XML and CSS under the hood, but writing a technical document as a structured document is quite handy. This is especially true for long documents. If you can find a nice template to start from (or learn to make your own), you never have to worry about the formatting and can use the same style across multiple documents.
I recently took on a new role coordinating documentation of a rather large software package. Having to work with multiple authors who have no real training in technical writing, I was searching for a way to avoid the nightmare of multi-author long Word documents. LaTeX was one solution I considered, but the learning curve would have been too steep for the other authors. In the end we settled on using Adobe FrameMaker and RoboHelp (since our manual also had to be turned into application help). We're a couple months in and I must say I'm very pleased. It's difficult for authors to do any strange formatting hacks, and dividing the work into sections is extremely straightforward. It also looks like this will be much easier to maintain over the long-term than a Word document ever would have been.
I find this to be true for myself a lot. I generally find solutions to hard problems I'm working on at completely random times like zoning out on my commute home or out walking around. I get more of the hard/creative part of my job done outside of work hours when I'm not trapped in a boring office and then spend my working hours writing and coding whatever my brain came up with when I get there.
Blizzard very much angles the endgame, and even 60+, at groupers. The gear difference alone is staggering. I'm at 63 and my subscription's about to run out. I'll let it. Were the next patch to come with soloable versions of instances I might come back. Don't see that happening though.
Well, isn't the point of an MMORPG to go online and play with other people? If you made everything in the game able to be done solo you might as well be playing Oblivion with a tacked on chat room. From my own personal experience, WoW isn't really a game meant to be played solo. It's quite a bit more fun if you have other friends playing, and even better if you can find a good guild of people you enjoy playing with (and I don't necessarily mean an end-game raiding guild). I hate pick up groups and refuse to do them, which makes me appreciate my guild much more. It's nice to be able to log on and put together a group relatively easily from a pool of people I can generally trust to be likeable and competent.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently his career resurfaced on one of those many generic network TV crime drama shows, but I recognized him from the dreadful Batman & Robin movie that came out about a decade ago that I wish I could forget.
It is exceedingly ridiculous. Fortunately Hollywood the neighborhood of Los Angeles isn't very much like "Hollywood" the film industry. I wish someone would explain that to all of the tourists though.
I live in Hollywood and have this happen to me a lot. I've seen a handful of celebrities over the years I recognized and probably dozens more have passed me on the sidewalk without even registering as "someone". It took me about 5 minutes to figure out Chris O'Donnell was in line in front of me once and I still had Google after the fact to be sure since I was too timid to just ask while he was standing there instead of just looking awkward.
Antarctic conditions at the equator, while not quite Martian, are pretty damn cold.
Wouldn't government ownership of fiber be anti-business and against the Tea Party platform of smaller, weaker government? I expect the Tea Party to advocate government takeover of fiber lines around the same time they also advocate more stringent regulations on banks and insurance companies (i.e. never).
My point is free markets don't exist for a variety of reasons in the real world, hence it doesn't make sense to treat corporations as if they do.
If corporations were forced to properly account for their externalities I would agree they don't owe you anything other than offering trade. The reality is they frequently aren't, so it's not unreasonable for us as a society to place additional demands on them as we bear the burden of their externalities. Reasonable demands often being regulations and taxes that do force them to account for the full costs of their operation.
'everyone hats unions'
Damn those unions and their millions upon millions of fashionable hats stolen off the backs of the working man.
This is true of so much more than just healthcare. In many cases helping the other guy (no matter how apparently "undeserving") generally benefits you too, even if in ways that are hard to measure directly. The problem is so few people seem to make this connection because spending a few extra percent in taxes to make sure there are proper societal safety nets doesn't have a directly measurable impact on your life when you live in a gated community and make more in a bonus that most make in their entire lives.
Sadly, in the real world "truly free" markets do not exist. Information between market participants is not perfect or symmetric, market participants are rarely rational, externalities are not properly accounted for in the market, and market failures can and do happen. Also, this analogy fails spectacularly in the case of necessary goods. It does not take much imagination to envision a more realistic scenario wherein the baker through devious tactics ensures he has monopoly or oligopoly status and fixes the price of bread to what people can afford to pay because he knows they have to instead of what the price would be in a truly competitive market. Actually, this scenario is not far from what we see in reality. Corporations rake in record profits that go largely to the executives in charge who are rarely accountable to the stockholders (only to the board made of like-minded executives). Many of the spectacular failures we have seen recently (Lehman Brothers comes to mind) feature the every day workers being punished (by unemployment) for the mis-deeds of the executives who walk away with record bonuses even after their companies are driven into the ground. Given the disastrous effects the "truly free" market can have on society, I would say yes, they DO owe us beyond the economical exchange. They owe us to behave as responsible citizens of society. Unfortunately because our markets largely don't account for externalities corporations frequently have a perverse incentive to do bad things at the expense of society as a whole.
Of course it does, but the reflection from the glass is what keeps some of the energy in, raising its temperature. CO2 is put into the greenhouse (sometimes), not to raise the temperature further (it doesn't do this), but to improve plant growth.
CO2 in the atmosphere has the exact same effect in absence of other factors. See for example Venus. Unless you want to discount a century of physics this is not in any way in dispute.
Absolutely not. I don't accept that at all, no. There's no correlation, in geological history, between temperature and CO2 levels. Indeed, there's not much correlation now. PDO and solar activity correlate better than CO2 does.
Uh, what? Yes, yes there is. You only have to look to Venus to see what CO2 can do. If you didn't notice, it has a gigantic CO2 atmosphere and is hotter than Mercury. If you were to take the albedo of Earth and the solar energy input to the planet and calculate the mean temperature the Earth would be a frozen wasteland. This is an elementary homework exercise in planetary science. Are you calling Arrhenius a liar?
And if it doesn't (which it doesn't at present), you continue on as before, making new claims about your existing thesis that won't be tested for another three decades.
Please elaborate on which part of current theories you believe to be incorrect and continuously repeated without updating. Do you disagree with the reconstructions of the global temperature record? The ensemble of climate models that predict a long term trend of increasing global average temperatures? The ocean circulation models? Perhaps you disagree with climate feedback models for polar ice caps? The volume of work and literature in this field is enormous. There is no one single "Theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming". There is a general consensus among thousands of researchers and scientists that all available evidence suggests increasing atmospheric CO2 will increase the mean global temperature.
All the while, you continue to rake in grant money for your graduate students.
I see. You see a conspiracy of scientists to enrich themselves. The $24,000/yr stipend I survived on as a graduate student really enabled me to live well beyond my means in Los Angeles. It is eminently more likely that there is a broad conspiracy among thousands of scientists vs. a sustained campaign of mis-information from a small conglomerate of multi-billion dollar a year energy companies who stand to lose substantial sums of money if the political consensus ever concludes that maybe we should do something about this. The logic of "follow the money" very clearly points to the scientists here who last year raked in record profits... oh wait.
Yes, it's "weather" when it's cooling and "climate" when it's warming. You have both bases covered. Clever!
No, it's weather when we are talking about the short-term local behavior. It's climate when it's a trend lasting the better part of a century. No worthwhile model has said it will uniformly get warmer everywhere on the planet every single year.
This is, frankly, ridiculous. Linear equations are time-reversible. Why do you think you can correctly forecast 100 years when you can't correctly hind-cast 100 years? Models calibrate with historic data (in essence an exercise in curve fitting). The argument you make here is disingenuous in the extreme and I'm sure a clever fellow like yourself will immediately see his error.
The error I see is that you apparently didn't read what I wrote. Let me quote it again for you:
weakly non-linear equations
So yes, linear equations are time-reversible. We aren't talking about linear equations, however, so I don't really see what point you are trying to make. Some climate models do calibrate with historic data, no one ever disputed that. Especially for models that operate on short time-scales if your model given known forcings and a reasonable set of starting conditions can't produce something that looks reasonably similar to the historical data it's likely not a very good model. There are hundreds of variations on climate models out there, some use historical data, some don't. Some simply use a reasonable approximation of Earth and reasonable starting conditions and see if they produce long-term behavior that looks like reality. I really don't see the p
Firstly, because the hypothesis is unprovable (we don't have multiple Earth's to experiment with) and secondly the hypothesis is unfalsifiable, in a strict scientific sense.
The first part of this is true of any observational science (like Astronomy). While the idea that you hypothesis and experiment and see if your experiments confirm your predictions is cute and all, if that were a criteria we would throw away vast swaths of scientific knowledge. In such situations you instead collect data, make hypothesis, and see which hypothesis best explains the data. Then you continue to gather more observations and see if the theory continues to hold up. More likely than not you end up modifying the theory to accommodate new observations. This is how we ended up with the big bang theory, theories of stellar evolution, theories of galactic dynamics, etc.
We're now asked to believe that warming causes cooling.
Uh, what? Perhaps you are confusing local phenomena with global averages?
The models that we were told predicted the future centuries ahead, didn't predict harsh winters. They do now of course, because there are so many parameters to twiddle with you can pretty much come up with any projection you like (it's called confirmation bias).
No. Emphatically no. I have personally worked on such models as a grad student, no one in their right mind would claim that a global climate model intended to be run over centuries would make any specific predictions about the winter weather for a given year. The global climate is best described by weakly non-linear equations, which means the climate is chaotic in the short term, but there is useful information in long-term means. An (admittedly poor) analogy would be a noisy analog amplifier. As you turn up the gain the system on average gets louder, but the oscillations from noise also get larger (i.e. the variance increases). In the same analogy the models actually do predict harsher winters along with hotter summers. Pumping CO2 in the atmosphere causes the global climate system to retain more heat (and hence more energy) effectively amplifying the chaotic deviations in the system while also increasing the global average temperature.
The above poster summed it up. Learn orbital mechanics and then comment intelligently.
Neptune is more massive than every other body combined in its region of gravitational influence, that is typically what is meant by "cleared". Pluto and most of the Kuiper Belt Objects are in resonant orbits with Neptune, which is how they maintain the orbits they have. As another example you have the Trojan Asteroids that share Jupiter's orbit because they hang out in the Lagrange points.
Definitions that are reasonable and include Pluto make the number of things we then have to call planets a rather large number. The current definition has some footing in our understanding of how planets form, which is that bodies like Pluto are essentially the remnants of areas of the solar system that failed to coalesce into planets, namely the Kuiper Belt and Asteroid Belt.
The primary reason for the dwarf planet classification is the sane definition that would have made Pluto and similar bodies planets was based on having sufficient gravity to be spherical. That definition would have expanded the number of planets to a very large number with many of them being bodies in the asteroid belt. Having a planet being defined as a body sufficiently massive to clear its orbit kept the number of "planets" sane and has some practical connection to our current theories and understanding of the process of planet formation.
Tidal destruction of a moon isn't exactly a new theory to explain the rings. Previous iterations just had trouble explaining the composition of the ring material, hence comets were a more favorable model. What Robin has done here is show how you can tidally destroy a moon and get the right ring composition. I'm not entirely surprised to see this coming from her, she previously did the same with Earth's moon-forming collision.
I was an astronomer once upon a time. As far as I'm aware this is pretty much still the prevailing theory, with some caveats that Jupiter likely did not form in its present orbit, and in fact the process of clearing out mass from the asteroid belt was partially responsible for putting Jupiter in its present place.
The implication here is that if the Justices do rule in favor of Beckstead, what does that say about other government organizations that "audit" citizen's affairs?
If you had read the full article you might also have noticed that the crux of the argument is that the PCOAB is set up as an independent organization independent of the executive or legislative branches. So, if the ruling goes for Beckstead nothing happens to most other "auditing" agencies. I can't think of any off the top of my head that have been granted some manner of legal authority and are not subject to some manner of appointment process by congress or the executive branch (although some of them arguably might be better off if they were).
I don't think that's a very sensible line of reasoning. They're intended for vastly different scales. FrameMaker is overkill for a short one-off document. If you're maintaining a large amount of software documentation that you want to single source into multiple publication channels you'd be crazy to use Word.
When I was researching products for this project I saw a lot of FrameMaker hate, and as far as I can tell it was terrible for a while. Adobe seems to have cleaned up FrameMaker and worked on the interface with RoboHelp to turn it into something very useful for single-source print/application help authoring. It has some annoying bits to it, but the structured authoring tools have been a savior compared to what it would be like in doing the same thing in Word.
As far as I can tell (having never used InDesign) FrameMaker is much more geared towards static vs. dynamic content. Graphics in FrameMaker are still somewhat of a PITA but it seems to have more support for structured authoring. From what I know FrameMaker is the way to go if you just want content done and someone else supplies the layout, InDesign is the way to go if your layout changes frequently.
Depending on the nature of your technical work, LaTeX is a good option. I used that throughout undergrad and grad school to write scientific papers/documents. The learning curve was a bit steep and it was occasionally frustrating, but the end result was quite nice. Another alternative I've just started using is FrameMaker. It's basically a fancy GUI for what is in essence XML and CSS under the hood, but writing a technical document as a structured document is quite handy. This is especially true for long documents. If you can find a nice template to start from (or learn to make your own), you never have to worry about the formatting and can use the same style across multiple documents.
I recently took on a new role coordinating documentation of a rather large software package. Having to work with multiple authors who have no real training in technical writing, I was searching for a way to avoid the nightmare of multi-author long Word documents. LaTeX was one solution I considered, but the learning curve would have been too steep for the other authors. In the end we settled on using Adobe FrameMaker and RoboHelp (since our manual also had to be turned into application help). We're a couple months in and I must say I'm very pleased. It's difficult for authors to do any strange formatting hacks, and dividing the work into sections is extremely straightforward. It also looks like this will be much easier to maintain over the long-term than a Word document ever would have been.
I find this to be true for myself a lot. I generally find solutions to hard problems I'm working on at completely random times like zoning out on my commute home or out walking around. I get more of the hard/creative part of my job done outside of work hours when I'm not trapped in a boring office and then spend my working hours writing and coding whatever my brain came up with when I get there.
Well, isn't the point of an MMORPG to go online and play with other people? If you made everything in the game able to be done solo you might as well be playing Oblivion with a tacked on chat room. From my own personal experience, WoW isn't really a game meant to be played solo. It's quite a bit more fun if you have other friends playing, and even better if you can find a good guild of people you enjoy playing with (and I don't necessarily mean an end-game raiding guild). I hate pick up groups and refuse to do them, which makes me appreciate my guild much more. It's nice to be able to log on and put together a group relatively easily from a pool of people I can generally trust to be likeable and competent.