I just don't get developers sometimes. Somehow, some way, franchises stricken with Stupid Sequelitis like Madden, Need for Speed, Halo, Jak, Ratchet and Clank, and Splinter Cell receive installment after marginal installment, even though many (I won't say most) gamers that I know or talk to agree that these are just rehashes of more of the same, and the quality invariably declines with each iteration. Yet they keep coming, because some marketroid decided that there's still milk in that franchise cash cow despite the fact that to the nearest decimal point, nobody cares. (Though halo 3 was an exception to this, as plenty of people did care, and still do.)
Yet, for similarly braindead reasons, developers of these amazing, cult-following sorts of titles steadfastly refuse to make sequels to their games even when millions of people all over the globe are clamoring for them.
Hey, Doublefine! What the fuck is wrong with you? Free money over here!
Christ. The same thing happened with Sam and Max before Telltale revived the idea, the same thing was going on for years with System Shock before Irrational finally stepped up to create Bioshock... Ditto with Beyond Good and Evil as well as Psychonauts - which, might I add, both left us with setups for sequels right there in the endings.
Well.
In the Super Mario RPG, it was revealed that the whole Bowser/Mario/Princess thing was pretty much just a traditional, expected, almost friendly sort of thing. Bowser kidnaps the Princess, Mario kicks his butt, everyone expects him to try again soon and, strangely, nobody seems to be too shocked or even worried about it. But then, at and during the Smithy incident, the whole quaint little affair is thrown out of whack and the Princess (and Bowser...) joins up with Mario to kick butt right along side.
She does get kidnapped by Booster at one point, but as I recall she left a big red palmprint on the side of his face for his trouble (after Mario and co. kicked his wedding cake's ass).
In Paper Mario, she's clearly smarter and more resourceful than Boswer, Kamikoopa, and all of their forces combined. I get the feeling she only sticks around the castle to gather intel for Mario and out of loyalty for the others kidnapped and held in the castle. With that disguise parasol and the parked clowncopters in the hangar she could totally be out of there the instant she felt like it.
In Mario 2 USA she's easily the best character in the game. Honestly, after discovering that the Princess could float, who actually bothered to try to beat the game with any of the others? I didn't think so.
You haven't looked back far enough. The Final Fantasy series' base "job class" model has been used quite a number of times. It was fairly inflexible in the first game, but FF3 pretty much hit the modern incarnation dead center. It was used again in FF5, and to very good effect in FF Tactics and FF Tactics Advance.
FF1 - D&D Style "pick it and you're stuck with it" job class system FF2 - Story driven fixed abilities/classes FF3 - Flexible job class system FF4 - Story driven fixed abilities/classes FF5 - Flexible job class system FF6 - Esper system with fixed character abilities thrown in FF7 - Materia system FF8 - GF junction system FF9 - Story driven fixed classes, "equip to learn" ability system FF10 - That funky grid system
FF Tactics/Advance - Flexible job class system FF Mystic Quest - That funky, simplified weapon switching system
That would just make it work even better. Make the warhead go critical and explode in space, where there really isn't much real estate to damage (never you mind the highly radioactive waste mass raining down on the Earth later, or clearing out a nice big sphere in the population of whatever low-altitude satellites are hanging around in the area) and Bob's your uncle.
Though one also wonders what would happen to the slice of the planet behind the target, as well...
Sure, I have unmitigated access to everything that comes, goes, or happens in my company. And if I don't have access to some particular facet of the boss's operation it's pretty trivial to give myself access. But do I snoop through other employees' email or documents or browsing records or whatever? No. But, admittedly, not because of any particular integrity or high moral standards on my part.
I just don't care. Yeah, it might be nice to intercept early the memo that says I'm going to get canned tomorrow (or whatever) but I have more than enough things on my plate and no time, motivation, or incentive to play Secret Squirrel with other people's stuff. I have news for you: 99.9999% of what happens on a business network is mind numbingly boring. Memos. Transmittals. Materials lists. Spreadsheets. Schedules. Business correspondence so packed with legalese and ass-kissing and meaningless paradigm shifting buzzword bullshit it makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.
If I want to abuse my authority and misappropriate company time and network access, it's easier and less mind-frazzling to just delegate the job to somebody else and go read Slashdot.
In complete darkness, "army spec" night vision requires an illuminator (which is nearly always infrared). Generation three (current mil. issue, insofar as I'm aware) gear requires considerably less onboard illumination than old generation one stuff does, but it still requires some form of light to amplify in the first place. Standing outside in the desert with decent mil. spec night vision equipment with a partial moon showing means you'll probably be able to at least spot a man standing a considerable distance away with no IR illumination (though probably not identify him) but in a closed room with no light source you wouldn't be able to see spit.
By the way, playing with gen. one night vision is a pretty cheap game if you want to try it, as simple monoculars can be bought for less than a hundred bucks from Harbor Freight, Sportsman's Guide, et. all these days. The illuminators on this gear are exactly the same dull-red-glow technology as consumer camcorders, though usually with something resembling variable focus and a little more power.
The MP3 is already different from the original CD track by definition. It's lossy compression. Those of us who aren't FLAC monkeys (dear god, I've been waiting to use that turn of phrase for about three years) tend not to be bothered so much if there's a slight change in the "true" audio data as long as it still sounds good - or at least tolerably so.
Any tiny generational change imparted by removing the watermark is unlikely to faze most media pirates. These are people who rip out or recompress the music and movie files in games so they can fit them into Usenet posts, vise MP3's down to 92 kbps so they can share them en masse on Limewire, compress the hell out of dual layer DVD movies with DivX so they'll fit on a single CD-R, and so forth.
If one of these laser devices is powerful enough to heat air into plasma, what's going to happen to the poor sap who stands in the wrong place and catches one of the beams in the eye? I've got a 125mw visible light laser that's enough to cause eye damage instantly with exposure over a considerable range, and it's still a long ways away from creating any blooming effect (which is what this seems to describe). Seems to me this invention won't be safe for non-laboratory use no matter how you slice it.
My company is not moving to Vista. I moved to Linux on my work desktop right around the Vista retail launch, and the entire company will shortly be moving to follow suit.
We have no qualms about paying for operating systems/software when the situation merits (hard working programmers ought to be paid for said hard work, in many cases) we're not too thrilled with Microsoft's confusing, expensive, and sometimes outright predatory "licensing" schemes. Under Microsoft's rule, we frequently pay considerably more for software that does the same thing or in some cases is the same software as normal users because just because we are "corporate." We pay assloads of money for an MSDN subscription that basically stipulates that we aren't allowed to use any of the software except for "evaluation and testing," at which point we're expected to pay for a retail license for said software. It's stupid.
Vista's DRM-in-your-face design philosophy was the last straw for us. We might maintain a (probably pirated) Vista box somewhere in the office for when we need it for compatibility purposes, but it'll spend most of its life unplugged under somebody's desk. It's "legacy" Windows and Linux for us.
I have an experiment: Go look at the sun for a while and report back to me if that incoherent light didn't manage to cause you some ocular damage. It's considerably easier to cook someone's retina with a laser as opposed to a more diffuse light source, but it's far from impossible with the latter.
True. This is a problem (and an onoging one) with many/most "brand name" computer manufacturers. But if you don't like it, it's a pretty simple choice: Go to Newegg, buy an Asus/Gigabyte/Abit/whoever motherboard, buy a power supply from whoever you like, and build a PC. Haven't seen anyplace that lets you do that with Mac parts yet.
The various Canons that take two black ink tanks actually have two black print heads. In the case of mine, the smaller tank (the 5 black) is routed through the normal print head for printing photos and graphics, and the larger tank (8 black) is used with a separate, wider head that's used only for printing text. This lets the printer crank out plain black text faster - but I imagine at a lower resolution or something - than pure graphics.
Canon allege that the types of ink in each tank are different, with a "pigment based" ink in the graphics tank and a "dye based" ink in the text tank. I fill 'em both with the same ink from my mail order refill kit and they work just fine.
Later Canons, notably the Pixma series (like mine) use ink cartridges that are actual cartridges. Unlike traditional "cartridges," where a cheap print head is built into the cart, a better print head is built into the printer. The print heads are in the carts to lower the cost of the printer (E.g. Lexmark $19.99 Wal Mart specials) but jacks up the cost of the ink (30-35 dollars for a color cart for said Lexmark...) when the balance of cost could be put elsewhere.
I dunno from the model the OP is describing, but the "cartridges" in mine are just tanks of ink, and they're drop dead simple to refill with one of those As Seen on TV kits or whatever else you can lay your hands on. I've probably refilled the stock carts that came with my printer about... Oh, seventy times by now. I've had it for about three years, and when the urge strikes me to do graphic design I piss away a lot of ink fast.
Look into it. It's probably about the best you're going to get for consumer inkjet printing...
I've tangled with them a couple of times. The first insult was raising my cable internet bill five bucks but dropping my download rate by about 256 k/sec. But that wasn't the good one. I live in a house that's been subdivided into apartments, and Comcast was the only outfit that consistently got my address wrong. My phone people? Fine. Electricity? Fine. Water? Fine. Comcast? Half the time they'd send my bill to my neighbor, and after a while they apparently got confused and insisted that I hadn't paid a bill at all for one month (I did) and demanded the payment and late charges. I got the check returned from my bank as well as the statement showing Comcast mysteriously cashing this check and taking my money, despite their claims to the contrary. After going 'round and 'round with them on this for over a month their position became "we're bigger than you, therefore it is impossible for us to make mistakes, so it must be your problem." At this point, they quit sending me bills entirely, but felt the need to draft rude and nasty people to call my cell phone at all hours of the day and night insulting me and demanding payment for bills I never got, trying to push me into giving them my credit card number (ha!). I dropped their sorry asses about a week into this and went to Verizon. Even without FIOS, Verizon's higher-tier package is cheaper than Comcast and about half again as fast in my area. Duh.
At my sister's place everyone is a lardass stereotypical American TV watcher, so they have Comcast digital cable. Comcast mysteriously tried to charge my sister for over 300 dollars worth of pay-per-view porno one month. Obviously, my sister was a bit miffed. This is a household of three women and my nephew, who shrewdly points out that he has no need for pay-per-view because he has internet access. Comcast claimed that the charges came from the ID number of the cable box in my sister's room, which is barely ever used and when it is... Is used by my (straight, 35 year old) sister. After threatening my sister with legal action, putting black marks all over her credit report, &c., Comcast finally figured out (not that this was much of a stretch) that this actually precipitated from someone using a stolen/hacked cable box randomly trying ID's until they got one that worked. My sister suggested that she get a new cable box from Comcast, even pay for it, and they refused to do it. Naturally, two months later, it happened again. And despite documented phone calls and a letter from Comcast stating that they knew about the problem, they threatened my sister again, and again refused to provide her a new cable box or ID number.
I'm trying to push them to go FIOS and/or take Verizon's digital cable package when it arrives in their area.
Wrong. A wild pokemon will have "stock" base stats that haven't been modified by EV's yet. A Pokemon that you've battled will have EV's accumulated, and as it levels its stats will be greater in some aspects than a wild Pokemon at the same physical level.
1. But your Geodude that you raised from L4 to L30 will be stronger than a Geodude caught at L30. Or possibly even 32.
2. The dichotomy between HM moves (which are generally useless in a fight except Waterfall) and 'real' battle moves is just an element of the game. The fact that trees don't stay cut, rocks don't stay smashed or moved, and so forth is really just tradition since the original games didn't have the memory space to keep track of this. And it's a pain in the ass, I'll admit. The HM moves are just keys that are used Metroid style to force you to progress through the game in the order it wants you to. In Diamond/Pearl this is even more gratuitous than previous generations in that there are eight HM moves, seven of which become essential for beating the game and the eighth (Fly) is just damn useful to have around. Cut, Rock Smash, Rock Climb, Strength, Surf, Waterfall, and Defog (arguably) are all required to progress at certain points of the plot. Rock Climb and Defog are new ones (Flash has since been retired, but it is an optional out-of-battle move for one dungeon) bringing the total of required wasted move slots up to seven, worse than five (originally) and then six (third gen) and tying up a significant portion of your team. The best way I know of it is to get ahold of a Bibarrel (easy) which is unique in that it sucks royally in battle but can learn almost all of the essential HM moves except Fly and I think Defog, which you can relegate to a weak flier. Then you can leave the rest of your team for real battle, and Bibarrel can be your organic multi-tool to cut, climb, shove, and smash as you see fit.
The mitigating factor is that once you've beaten the game and seen what there is to see in the plotline there's very little reason to keep most of the HM moves around with the exception of Fly and Surf. Once you beat the Elite 4 and start playing the post-plot events and getting into the metagame you really don't need to keep that crap around as much. Also, by the time you're doing Serious Business like battling powerful trainers, breeding, multiplayer, et. all you'll probably be breeding or trading for Pokemon to round out your ultimate team that won't be the ones you kicked the Pokemon League's asses with. After you win it's pretty painless (and often preferable) to retire your starting team to storage and start breeding/training customized, tuned up ones now that you have access to breeding, the National Dex (and Dittos, for breeding with), enormous piles of cash to buy vitamins and TM's with, and so forth. If you find that you need to whack down a tree or smash a rock someplace it's easy to fly back to a Pokecenter and temporarily grab one of your rock smashers or climbers or tree cutters or what have you. Most transitional obstacles like water or fog can be circumvented once you pass them once with Fly, since you can just fly from town to town right over them.
This smells like trying to open the back door to Treacherous Computing to me, just by way of wrapping it up in buzzwords that'll make otherwise wary geeks accept it thinking it'll make their computers somehow go faster.
Slashdot Mirror
I just don't get developers sometimes. Somehow, some way, franchises stricken with Stupid Sequelitis like Madden, Need for Speed, Halo, Jak, Ratchet and Clank, and Splinter Cell receive installment after marginal installment, even though many (I won't say most) gamers that I know or talk to agree that these are just rehashes of more of the same, and the quality invariably declines with each iteration. Yet they keep coming, because some marketroid decided that there's still milk in that franchise cash cow despite the fact that to the nearest decimal point, nobody cares. (Though halo 3 was an exception to this, as plenty of people did care, and still do.)
Yet, for similarly braindead reasons, developers of these amazing, cult-following sorts of titles steadfastly refuse to make sequels to their games even when millions of people all over the globe are clamoring for them.
Hey, Doublefine! What the fuck is wrong with you? Free money over here!
Christ. The same thing happened with Sam and Max before Telltale revived the idea, the same thing was going on for years with System Shock before Irrational finally stepped up to create Bioshock... Ditto with Beyond Good and Evil as well as Psychonauts - which, might I add, both left us with setups for sequels right there in the endings.
Well. In the Super Mario RPG, it was revealed that the whole Bowser/Mario/Princess thing was pretty much just a traditional, expected, almost friendly sort of thing. Bowser kidnaps the Princess, Mario kicks his butt, everyone expects him to try again soon and, strangely, nobody seems to be too shocked or even worried about it. But then, at and during the Smithy incident, the whole quaint little affair is thrown out of whack and the Princess (and Bowser...) joins up with Mario to kick butt right along side. She does get kidnapped by Booster at one point, but as I recall she left a big red palmprint on the side of his face for his trouble (after Mario and co. kicked his wedding cake's ass). In Paper Mario, she's clearly smarter and more resourceful than Boswer, Kamikoopa, and all of their forces combined. I get the feeling she only sticks around the castle to gather intel for Mario and out of loyalty for the others kidnapped and held in the castle. With that disguise parasol and the parked clowncopters in the hangar she could totally be out of there the instant she felt like it. In Mario 2 USA she's easily the best character in the game. Honestly, after discovering that the Princess could float, who actually bothered to try to beat the game with any of the others? I didn't think so.
You haven't looked back far enough. The Final Fantasy series' base "job class" model has been used quite a number of times. It was fairly inflexible in the first game, but FF3 pretty much hit the modern incarnation dead center. It was used again in FF5, and to very good effect in FF Tactics and FF Tactics Advance.
FF1 - D&D Style "pick it and you're stuck with it" job class system
FF2 - Story driven fixed abilities/classes
FF3 - Flexible job class system
FF4 - Story driven fixed abilities/classes
FF5 - Flexible job class system
FF6 - Esper system with fixed character abilities thrown in
FF7 - Materia system
FF8 - GF junction system
FF9 - Story driven fixed classes, "equip to learn" ability system
FF10 - That funky grid system
FF Tactics/Advance - Flexible job class system
FF Mystic Quest - That funky, simplified weapon switching system
I haven't played the rest yet.
Was whoever wrote this paid for each time he/she/it wrote "XEL-1 OLED TV?" I count five instances of "XEL-1" in the summary alone.
That would just make it work even better. Make the warhead go critical and explode in space, where there really isn't much real estate to damage (never you mind the highly radioactive waste mass raining down on the Earth later, or clearing out a nice big sphere in the population of whatever low-altitude satellites are hanging around in the area) and Bob's your uncle.
Though one also wonders what would happen to the slice of the planet behind the target, as well...
Sure, I have unmitigated access to everything that comes, goes, or happens in my company. And if I don't have access to some particular facet of the boss's operation it's pretty trivial to give myself access. But do I snoop through other employees' email or documents or browsing records or whatever? No. But, admittedly, not because of any particular integrity or high moral standards on my part.
I just don't care. Yeah, it might be nice to intercept early the memo that says I'm going to get canned tomorrow (or whatever) but I have more than enough things on my plate and no time, motivation, or incentive to play Secret Squirrel with other people's stuff. I have news for you: 99.9999% of what happens on a business network is mind numbingly boring. Memos. Transmittals. Materials lists. Spreadsheets. Schedules. Business correspondence so packed with legalese and ass-kissing and meaningless paradigm shifting buzzword bullshit it makes my brain hurt just thinking about it.
If I want to abuse my authority and misappropriate company time and network access, it's easier and less mind-frazzling to just delegate the job to somebody else and go read Slashdot.
Free speech is not a citizen right.
Reproduction is not a human right.
Etc. Etc.
"...First three 9x releases..."
Are you counting 98SE, or are you forgetting that Windows ME was the third Win9x release?
In complete darkness, "army spec" night vision requires an illuminator (which is nearly always infrared). Generation three (current mil. issue, insofar as I'm aware) gear requires considerably less onboard illumination than old generation one stuff does, but it still requires some form of light to amplify in the first place. Standing outside in the desert with decent mil. spec night vision equipment with a partial moon showing means you'll probably be able to at least spot a man standing a considerable distance away with no IR illumination (though probably not identify him) but in a closed room with no light source you wouldn't be able to see spit.
By the way, playing with gen. one night vision is a pretty cheap game if you want to try it, as simple monoculars can be bought for less than a hundred bucks from Harbor Freight, Sportsman's Guide, et. all these days. The illuminators on this gear are exactly the same dull-red-glow technology as consumer camcorders, though usually with something resembling variable focus and a little more power.
The MP3 is already different from the original CD track by definition. It's lossy compression. Those of us who aren't FLAC monkeys (dear god, I've been waiting to use that turn of phrase for about three years) tend not to be bothered so much if there's a slight change in the "true" audio data as long as it still sounds good - or at least tolerably so. Any tiny generational change imparted by removing the watermark is unlikely to faze most media pirates. These are people who rip out or recompress the music and movie files in games so they can fit them into Usenet posts, vise MP3's down to 92 kbps so they can share them en masse on Limewire, compress the hell out of dual layer DVD movies with DivX so they'll fit on a single CD-R, and so forth.
If one of these laser devices is powerful enough to heat air into plasma, what's going to happen to the poor sap who stands in the wrong place and catches one of the beams in the eye? I've got a 125mw visible light laser that's enough to cause eye damage instantly with exposure over a considerable range, and it's still a long ways away from creating any blooming effect (which is what this seems to describe). Seems to me this invention won't be safe for non-laboratory use no matter how you slice it.
My company is not moving to Vista. I moved to Linux on my work desktop right around the Vista retail launch, and the entire company will shortly be moving to follow suit.
We have no qualms about paying for operating systems/software when the situation merits (hard working programmers ought to be paid for said hard work, in many cases) we're not too thrilled with Microsoft's confusing, expensive, and sometimes outright predatory "licensing" schemes. Under Microsoft's rule, we frequently pay considerably more for software that does the same thing or in some cases is the same software as normal users because just because we are "corporate." We pay assloads of money for an MSDN subscription that basically stipulates that we aren't allowed to use any of the software except for "evaluation and testing," at which point we're expected to pay for a retail license for said software. It's stupid.
Vista's DRM-in-your-face design philosophy was the last straw for us. We might maintain a (probably pirated) Vista box somewhere in the office for when we need it for compatibility purposes, but it'll spend most of its life unplugged under somebody's desk. It's "legacy" Windows and Linux for us.
I have an experiment: Go look at the sun for a while and report back to me if that incoherent light didn't manage to cause you some ocular damage. It's considerably easier to cook someone's retina with a laser as opposed to a more diffuse light source, but it's far from impossible with the latter.
Moblin? As in these guys?
True. This is a problem (and an onoging one) with many/most "brand name" computer manufacturers. But if you don't like it, it's a pretty simple choice: Go to Newegg, buy an Asus/Gigabyte/Abit/whoever motherboard, buy a power supply from whoever you like, and build a PC. Haven't seen anyplace that lets you do that with Mac parts yet.
You could do the same thing, minus the near IR blocking, by just grounding your (conductive) aluminum window screens.
The various Canons that take two black ink tanks actually have two black print heads. In the case of mine, the smaller tank (the 5 black) is routed through the normal print head for printing photos and graphics, and the larger tank (8 black) is used with a separate, wider head that's used only for printing text. This lets the printer crank out plain black text faster - but I imagine at a lower resolution or something - than pure graphics.
Canon allege that the types of ink in each tank are different, with a "pigment based" ink in the graphics tank and a "dye based" ink in the text tank. I fill 'em both with the same ink from my mail order refill kit and they work just fine.
Later Canons, notably the Pixma series (like mine) use ink cartridges that are actual cartridges. Unlike traditional "cartridges," where a cheap print head is built into the cart, a better print head is built into the printer. The print heads are in the carts to lower the cost of the printer (E.g. Lexmark $19.99 Wal Mart specials) but jacks up the cost of the ink (30-35 dollars for a color cart for said Lexmark...) when the balance of cost could be put elsewhere.
I dunno from the model the OP is describing, but the "cartridges" in mine are just tanks of ink, and they're drop dead simple to refill with one of those As Seen on TV kits or whatever else you can lay your hands on. I've probably refilled the stock carts that came with my printer about... Oh, seventy times by now. I've had it for about three years, and when the urge strikes me to do graphic design I piss away a lot of ink fast.
Look into it. It's probably about the best you're going to get for consumer inkjet printing...
I mean, while we're all complaining and such.
I've tangled with them a couple of times. The first insult was raising my cable internet bill five bucks but dropping my download rate by about 256 k/sec. But that wasn't the good one. I live in a house that's been subdivided into apartments, and Comcast was the only outfit that consistently got my address wrong. My phone people? Fine. Electricity? Fine. Water? Fine. Comcast? Half the time they'd send my bill to my neighbor, and after a while they apparently got confused and insisted that I hadn't paid a bill at all for one month (I did) and demanded the payment and late charges. I got the check returned from my bank as well as the statement showing Comcast mysteriously cashing this check and taking my money, despite their claims to the contrary. After going 'round and 'round with them on this for over a month their position became "we're bigger than you, therefore it is impossible for us to make mistakes, so it must be your problem." At this point, they quit sending me bills entirely, but felt the need to draft rude and nasty people to call my cell phone at all hours of the day and night insulting me and demanding payment for bills I never got, trying to push me into giving them my credit card number (ha!). I dropped their sorry asses about a week into this and went to Verizon. Even without FIOS, Verizon's higher-tier package is cheaper than Comcast and about half again as fast in my area. Duh.
At my sister's place everyone is a lardass stereotypical American TV watcher, so they have Comcast digital cable. Comcast mysteriously tried to charge my sister for over 300 dollars worth of pay-per-view porno one month. Obviously, my sister was a bit miffed. This is a household of three women and my nephew, who shrewdly points out that he has no need for pay-per-view because he has internet access. Comcast claimed that the charges came from the ID number of the cable box in my sister's room, which is barely ever used and when it is... Is used by my (straight, 35 year old) sister. After threatening my sister with legal action, putting black marks all over her credit report, &c., Comcast finally figured out (not that this was much of a stretch) that this actually precipitated from someone using a stolen/hacked cable box randomly trying ID's until they got one that worked. My sister suggested that she get a new cable box from Comcast, even pay for it, and they refused to do it. Naturally, two months later, it happened again. And despite documented phone calls and a letter from Comcast stating that they knew about the problem, they threatened my sister again, and again refused to provide her a new cable box or ID number.
I'm trying to push them to go FIOS and/or take Verizon's digital cable package when it arrives in their area.
You're mixing your Soviets with your Underpants Gnomes.
Wrong. A wild pokemon will have "stock" base stats that haven't been modified by EV's yet. A Pokemon that you've battled will have EV's accumulated, and as it levels its stats will be greater in some aspects than a wild Pokemon at the same physical level.
1. But your Geodude that you raised from L4 to L30 will be stronger than a Geodude caught at L30. Or possibly even 32.
2. The dichotomy between HM moves (which are generally useless in a fight except Waterfall) and 'real' battle moves is just an element of the game. The fact that trees don't stay cut, rocks don't stay smashed or moved, and so forth is really just tradition since the original games didn't have the memory space to keep track of this. And it's a pain in the ass, I'll admit. The HM moves are just keys that are used Metroid style to force you to progress through the game in the order it wants you to. In Diamond/Pearl this is even more gratuitous than previous generations in that there are eight HM moves, seven of which become essential for beating the game and the eighth (Fly) is just damn useful to have around. Cut, Rock Smash, Rock Climb, Strength, Surf, Waterfall, and Defog (arguably) are all required to progress at certain points of the plot. Rock Climb and Defog are new ones (Flash has since been retired, but it is an optional out-of-battle move for one dungeon) bringing the total of required wasted move slots up to seven, worse than five (originally) and then six (third gen) and tying up a significant portion of your team. The best way I know of it is to get ahold of a Bibarrel (easy) which is unique in that it sucks royally in battle but can learn almost all of the essential HM moves except Fly and I think Defog, which you can relegate to a weak flier. Then you can leave the rest of your team for real battle, and Bibarrel can be your organic multi-tool to cut, climb, shove, and smash as you see fit.
The mitigating factor is that once you've beaten the game and seen what there is to see in the plotline there's very little reason to keep most of the HM moves around with the exception of Fly and Surf. Once you beat the Elite 4 and start playing the post-plot events and getting into the metagame you really don't need to keep that crap around as much. Also, by the time you're doing Serious Business like battling powerful trainers, breeding, multiplayer, et. all you'll probably be breeding or trading for Pokemon to round out your ultimate team that won't be the ones you kicked the Pokemon League's asses with. After you win it's pretty painless (and often preferable) to retire your starting team to storage and start breeding/training customized, tuned up ones now that you have access to breeding, the National Dex (and Dittos, for breeding with), enormous piles of cash to buy vitamins and TM's with, and so forth. If you find that you need to whack down a tree or smash a rock someplace it's easy to fly back to a Pokecenter and temporarily grab one of your rock smashers or climbers or tree cutters or what have you. Most transitional obstacles like water or fog can be circumvented once you pass them once with Fly, since you can just fly from town to town right over them.
Where is my damn robot battle maid already?
Whatever, then. I'm building a new computer at the moment, so where are my damn price breaks with this glut of unsellable RAM on the market?
This smells like trying to open the back door to Treacherous Computing to me, just by way of wrapping it up in buzzwords that'll make otherwise wary geeks accept it thinking it'll make their computers somehow go faster.