I certainly don't advocate taping peoples eyelids open and forcing them to watch Little House on the Prairie while under the influence of LSD and shock therapy.
I am very sad for all of you who have to mod -5 troll an argument for charity. What will it take to teach people to work together instead of against each other? I am not damning capitalism. I am just saying that abuses made by the rich and powerful affect us all. And the only way to combat such abuse is to unite together. Either under government or some other means.
What you are talking about is not a matter of distribution. At how many levels does Monsanto get to control distribution?
I could maybe see some reason for suing him if he harvested the crops to re-sell the seeds.
But if he sold the seeds as feed. Screw it thats enough of a white lie to fly in our fucked up system of governance. It's not any worse then the current laws.
Some of us would love any kind of job we could get. Some of us have resumes that 10 years ago would have landed us a job in a week at almost any entry level position in the great capitalist machine.
Some of us had the ability to start our own businesses and run our own lives. Before the price became to great to compete.
(Sarcasm inc) We also owe society a permanent debt. Didn't you learn that in gradeschool?
But seriously when some are above the law. And most have no chance at controlling their fate. It's really fascist of you to demand we "kill off all the chaff". Especially when we have the means of providing everyone a clean and safe environment to live in with plenty of food. It doesn't matter if their oppressed. Unwilling to fight for themselves, or unable to. The better man will enlighten them and guide them on a path to success and liberty. You don't OWN this planet, and no one does. Maybe you should learn to share it?
But the technology and means of distribution has been suppressed by the rich dynastic few. Your entitled to not believe this. But I promise you are wrong. This is about the only thing I can know with a certainty any more.
There was actually a WoW classic server somewhere that was getting a lot of interest. But I wasn't interested in it. Because if you wanted hardcore mode EQ Kunark+Velious fits the bill perfectly.
A sad analysis. But I would have to generally agree that this is the way things seem to be moving.
There are (grammar?) some less complicated places to live on earth. But they are either not easy or (politically?) unpleasant. Siberia being a hard, but perhaps simpler place to live as an example.
But you cannot de-urbanize the densely populated cities of the United States over night. Also people who don't fit into a metropolitan life style can't migrate away easily or believe it is beneath them even.
No, but enjoy living in a prison system instead of creating a society that doesn't revolve around petty bullying. And haves vs have nots. Your logic is not wrong. But I disagree with your principles.
Lets assume your rent is 300$, and you work enough to earn that rent. Then buy some beer and go out to the movies, and maybe take a girl out, so you work 6 days that month and earn 600$. You are still subsisting.
You then don't factor in the cost when someone either resists and completely destroys you for voilating their person. Or you get caught and end up getting assraped. Sure in some jurisdictions you may spend a night in prison, get a quick trial the next morning and end up out on probation where you can steal some more to pay off the officer or the court for getting caught again.
But you are doing yourself and society no good. And eventually you will have no retirement. I hope you start thinking more about the bigger picture then just the quick "Me".
I can understand wanting a life of excitement and freedom. I really can. But, if your so good at stealing and breaking the phones. Why don't you start up your own phone repair business, or phone hacking service? It doesn't have to be legitimate. You don't have to worry about paying taxes to start. It's better then violently robbing people. You can make more money providing a service then being a nuisance. If you grow it you can higher someone else to do the sales and answer the phone. At some point you could build it into a legitimate store which pays it's dues to the better protection racket then the local thugs.
Maybe that isn't a great option because phones don't need much service done to them or people aren't that interested in free apps and games or whatever. But I hope you get the idea I'm trying to get across.
Yes, then they can chome plate them so they can steel chrome google smartphones.
English is stupid. We need to update the language so all meanings and words are symbolic and unique and new configurations are easy to understand and do not replicate previous words without a great deal of memorization.
Anyway, stealing smart phones are not going to give you upwards mobility even in the criminal career path. I bet they are most likely stuck doing that or thats not the only thing they steal. Anyway this just sounds like the new cool thing on the block to do for those permanently indentured to a life of crime. Steal just enough to pay for your low class lifestyle until you get caught.
I would find it amusing if there was a true story about the dumb kid who stole smart phones so hey could later invest in a business or a bus pass out of the slum.
I'm talking about their intrinsic value. And once you've stolen one it still needs to be wiped, reconfigured, whatever. Right now it's pretty easy, but its going to increasingly become cost in-efficient. And any good phone I know bricks itself from a server command. Blackberries.
My 10 year old phone still works fine for SMS, email, browsing the web. The latest shiny shit is just shiny shit. That phone may be 100$ on the new market but its going to be like 40$ if that on the black market.
Steeling the most shiny, but least valuable shit because they just don't understand. They lack knowledge. And if they had it they wouldn't need to resort to steeling it.
I'm not saying this is true in every case, but probably in greater then 70% of them.
Not everyone enjoys getting a game to work on a non-native OS through a api-wrapper either. I can very much understand people wanting to give up. I just duel booted after doing it once when it wasn't as polished as it became down the road.
I think you describe it pretty well. The transition aught to be smooth from those pug raids, but its not, and the pug raids are underwhelming enough to turn off a lot of good players from participating in the real WoW game vs the casual achievement fest.
Aye that would have been great. I don't think ganking or random pvp should be penalized. But having an objective makes all the difference and gives people focus. They care less about getting ganked and more about achieving that goal. That is actually were EQ suffers the most. There's really nothing to do other then control bosses, drops or the server economy. Even in PvP.
One thing I did like about EQ were the heavy penalties. It made running around in a group matter a lot. But its a double edge sword in that you would never wear your best gear in a risky situation. You would always be on edge because you might spend all night doing a corpse recovery. Or you might end up needing to wait a week or call in other groups to get your stuff back. Death and failure really mattered, sometimes more then success.
But all that fueled the adrenaline for when you did succeed =)
* I also have seen very little discussion about DAoC RvR which one of my good friends use to swear by. I could never get into a 3rd MMO deep enough to say anything about it.
I've seen communities swing both ways. Sometimes imbalance can lead to a stronger community and more interesting dynamics. This is where rock paper scissors balance comes into play. Weak classes are rewarded extra for being good at what they do because they become critical in the bigger picture. Good players on weak characters can serve to be a boon during even fights and tip the balance.
Take for example this scenario right out of EQ. I'm going to do my best to draw a picture of this actual battle.
We were in Kunark hunting the entrance to Karnors castle. We are the underdog guild on the server. The other guild routinely controlled all the PvE content via numbers and superior organization. Our guilds overall organization was poor. We did have a few small cliques of players that had good teamwork. This group in KC was one of those cliques. We really didn't play all that much regularly with each other. But we were veterans and knew each others capabilities in PvP thoroughly. I was the cleric, we had a rogue, a wizard, bard, and a monk.
The enemy guild had a necromancer logged out in the basement trying to farm a critical mobs for keys to Veeshans Peak an endgame zone we were not even contending for yet. While we were PvEing we saw them log in.
Since we all knew the zone, and our class abilities, we were able to invis and navigate our way past many hostile mobs, some that required different invisibility spells, or even calm to get past. Or in one case the monk had to agro some down a hallway and feign death them so we could sneak past. It was tricky to say the least. It required us knowing and understanding all of our class abilities.
We ambushed the necromancer taking them out quickly. Shortly after that a group from the enemy guild zoned in from upstairs and proceeded down. They had a druid, wizard, warrior, cleric. All competent and dangerous solo pvp classes and deadly in combination. All better geared then us. We decided to stay down in the basement at the spawn and try to ambush them there. They proceeded to bring the whole dungeon down with them, all the monsters following them. This may have been intentional or not. Most veterans on the server considered this kind of thing a valid tactic anyway, it was still using the game and had its own set of counters, while it was definitely a cheesy and underhanded tactic. When they arrived we engaged. Saw they had too many mobs and the wizard evacuated us from the zone to a wizard portal just outside.
Their druid did the same thing, but in their zeal to take us down they left behind their warrior who promptly trained out of the zone at very low health.
We intercepted them on the way back to KC. We had not waited around at the wizard spire to be engaged there. They were disorganized and split up while we were still together and picked them off one by one. I am pretty sure they thought they had us on the run and split up to hunt us. A really bad error on their part.
We had many battles like this on the server. Some where we even stood our ground against superior odds and won because we knew how to game the lag, mechanics, or just which targets to focus on. We took out the best geared player on the server the leader of the enemy guild with their most elite officers in tow when they tried to push us out of a zone. The enemies usually had superior gear, but it was sometimes poorly optimized for PvP.
Despite a wizard or druid being extremely dangerous opponents vs many classes on their own 1v1 they were able to be taken on in groups with a good deal of reliability. As a cleric, if I was solo my strategy was to run, or wear down an enemy. Unless I was higher level and better geared, many times I didn't have the resources to finish off a good pvper. I could get lucky sometimes against weak players who didn't know about stacking buffs, or resists, or pumice, etc..
Of course there were plenty of times were the group I was with were not as skilled or had poor communication and we lost control of a zone rather quickly.
What distro and hardware specs? I had to do a bit of research and tweaking to slackwares core stuff back in version 10 ish to make wow run on it. Linux is not the same universal experience across distros (unless you want to be pedantic about the kernal) but even kernals are configured differently between distros with their own patches.
I think the average age has lowered significantly. Thats just my shitty guess at trends =P
I may be wrong about facebook. I'm very biased. I play a lot of free games, too many to list here. Out of GNU or hobbyist developers which just do it for donations. The only (sort of) tripple A title I mess with is minecraft for its creativity, it also has a very active modding community and tons of user created content. Both PvE, PvP, and "story arch style".. which is really not geared around its crappy combat system and more about exploration and lore of a map.
*** The rest of this post is rambling about what maybe people are nostalgic for or move on to once they mature away from WoW. ***
I still log into an old school competitive FPS for pvp from time to time. It just cannot be beat, the formula was built during the Unreal Tournament and Quake 1-3 era. Modern games have better resilience to lag, but none have the skill factor the older games did. I completely stomp people in games like CoD, yet in quake I routinely still get owned consistently by good players when I'm pinging 50ms.
Best semi modern FPS, Shadowrun which had great rock-paper-siscors and balanced CTF gameplay was shut down =/ I really wish that game stayed in operation. Sure it bastardized the RPG but if it was not called shadowrun, it would have marketed better.
If I want a hardcore PvP MMO experience, I know were to go, and its not any WoW, or clone of wow. Its old fashioned un-balanced, rigorously evil, and exploity as hell EQ. Because the fact that nothing is balanced means skill = player interaction + dedication + game knowledge (like where drops are, and how to navigate a dungeon). However I don't have time to put in 18 hr work days in a game.
If I was going to pick a dedicated retirement MMO I would re-sub to Eve and resurrect my old character.
Amen. Thats how I played wow. I saw everything you could do, did everything you could do solo or 5 man. Then did a few pug raids and quit each expansion, going back to my time honored EQ avatar.
It's my under standing that the few times those lighthouse RTG's or other non-space application RTGs have been opened and recovered by civilians the casualties were low. They didn't kill even 100's of peoples.
Total fatalities due to RTGs to date is probably less then 100. And this is a horrible estimate. Completely inaccurate and unscientific, but leaning on the safe side enough to make a point.
RTGs are not that bad when handled properly. Soviets screwed up by widely distributing them and not decommissioning them.
The U.S. to my knowledge has never had an accident with an RTG.
Slashdot Mirror
I certainly don't advocate taping peoples eyelids open and forcing them to watch Little House on the Prairie while under the influence of LSD and shock therapy.
An interesting video.
I am very sad for all of you who have to mod -5 troll an argument for charity. What will it take to teach people to work together instead of against each other? I am not damning capitalism. I am just saying that abuses made by the rich and powerful affect us all. And the only way to combat such abuse is to unite together. Either under government or some other means.
What you are talking about is not a matter of distribution. At how many levels does Monsanto get to control distribution?
I could maybe see some reason for suing him if he harvested the crops to re-sell the seeds.
But if he sold the seeds as feed. Screw it thats enough of a white lie to fly in our fucked up system of governance. It's not any worse then the current laws.
Some of us would love any kind of job we could get. Some of us have resumes that 10 years ago would have landed us a job in a week at almost any entry level position in the great capitalist machine.
Some of us had the ability to start our own businesses and run our own lives. Before the price became to great to compete.
(Sarcasm inc) We also owe society a permanent debt. Didn't you learn that in gradeschool?
But seriously when some are above the law. And most have no chance at controlling their fate. It's really fascist of you to demand we "kill off all the chaff". Especially when we have the means of providing everyone a clean and safe environment to live in with plenty of food. It doesn't matter if their oppressed. Unwilling to fight for themselves, or unable to. The better man will enlighten them and guide them on a path to success and liberty. You don't OWN this planet, and no one does. Maybe you should learn to share it?
But the technology and means of distribution has been suppressed by the rich dynastic few. Your entitled to not believe this. But I promise you are wrong. This is about the only thing I can know with a certainty any more.
There was actually a WoW classic server somewhere that was getting a lot of interest. But I wasn't interested in it. Because if you wanted hardcore mode EQ Kunark+Velious fits the bill perfectly.
A sad analysis. But I would have to generally agree that this is the way things seem to be moving.
There are (grammar?) some less complicated places to live on earth. But they are either not easy or (politically?) unpleasant. Siberia being a hard, but perhaps simpler place to live as an example.
But you cannot de-urbanize the densely populated cities of the United States over night. Also people who don't fit into a metropolitan life style can't migrate away easily or believe it is beneath them even.
No, but enjoy living in a prison system instead of creating a society that doesn't revolve around petty bullying. And haves vs have nots. Your logic is not wrong. But I disagree with your principles.
I agree, and I make more mistakes then I would like.
But I tend to enjoy being a smart (dumb) ass on occasion. =)
Lets assume your rent is 300$, and you work enough to earn that rent. Then buy some beer and go out to the movies, and maybe take a girl out, so you work 6 days that month and earn 600$. You are still subsisting.
You then don't factor in the cost when someone either resists and completely destroys you for voilating their person. Or you get caught and end up getting assraped. Sure in some jurisdictions you may spend a night in prison, get a quick trial the next morning and end up out on probation where you can steal some more to pay off the officer or the court for getting caught again.
But you are doing yourself and society no good. And eventually you will have no retirement. I hope you start thinking more about the bigger picture then just the quick "Me".
I can understand wanting a life of excitement and freedom. I really can. But, if your so good at stealing and breaking the phones. Why don't you start up your own phone repair business, or phone hacking service? It doesn't have to be legitimate. You don't have to worry about paying taxes to start. It's better then violently robbing people. You can make more money providing a service then being a nuisance. If you grow it you can higher someone else to do the sales and answer the phone. At some point you could build it into a legitimate store which pays it's dues to the better protection racket then the local thugs.
Maybe that isn't a great option because phones don't need much service done to them or people aren't that interested in free apps and games or whatever. But I hope you get the idea I'm trying to get across.
*is not
Nor do I. I am just trying to point out its the the best way to try and survive even though people might convince themselves it is.
Yes, then they can chome plate them so they can steel chrome google smartphones.
English is stupid. We need to update the language so all meanings and words are symbolic and unique and new configurations are easy to understand and do not replicate previous words without a great deal of memorization.
Anyway, stealing smart phones are not going to give you upwards mobility even in the criminal career path. I bet they are most likely stuck doing that or thats not the only thing they steal. Anyway this just sounds like the new cool thing on the block to do for those permanently indentured to a life of crime. Steal just enough to pay for your low class lifestyle until you get caught.
I would find it amusing if there was a true story about the dumb kid who stole smart phones so hey could later invest in a business or a bus pass out of the slum.
I'm talking about their intrinsic value. And once you've stolen one it still needs to be wiped, reconfigured, whatever. Right now it's pretty easy, but its going to increasingly become cost in-efficient. And any good phone I know bricks itself from a server command. Blackberries.
My 10 year old phone still works fine for SMS, email, browsing the web. The latest shiny shit is just shiny shit. That phone may be 100$ on the new market but its going to be like 40$ if that on the black market.
Steeling the most shiny, but least valuable shit because they just don't understand. They lack knowledge. And if they had it they wouldn't need to resort to steeling it.
I'm not saying this is true in every case, but probably in greater then 70% of them.
Not everyone enjoys getting a game to work on a non-native OS through a api-wrapper either. I can very much understand people wanting to give up. I just duel booted after doing it once when it wasn't as polished as it became down the road.
I think you describe it pretty well. The transition aught to be smooth from those pug raids, but its not, and the pug raids are underwhelming enough to turn off a lot of good players from participating in the real WoW game vs the casual achievement fest.
Aye that would have been great. I don't think ganking or random pvp should be penalized. But having an objective makes all the difference and gives people focus. They care less about getting ganked and more about achieving that goal. That is actually were EQ suffers the most. There's really nothing to do other then control bosses, drops or the server economy. Even in PvP.
One thing I did like about EQ were the heavy penalties. It made running around in a group matter a lot. But its a double edge sword in that you would never wear your best gear in a risky situation. You would always be on edge because you might spend all night doing a corpse recovery. Or you might end up needing to wait a week or call in other groups to get your stuff back. Death and failure really mattered, sometimes more then success.
But all that fueled the adrenaline for when you did succeed =)
* I also have seen very little discussion about DAoC RvR which one of my good friends use to swear by. I could never get into a 3rd MMO deep enough to say anything about it.
I've seen communities swing both ways. Sometimes imbalance can lead to a stronger community and more interesting dynamics. This is where rock paper scissors balance comes into play. Weak classes are rewarded extra for being good at what they do because they become critical in the bigger picture. Good players on weak characters can serve to be a boon during even fights and tip the balance.
Take for example this scenario right out of EQ. I'm going to do my best to draw a picture of this actual battle.
We were in Kunark hunting the entrance to Karnors castle. We are the underdog guild on the server. The other guild routinely controlled all the PvE content via numbers and superior organization. Our guilds overall organization was poor. We did have a few small cliques of players that had good teamwork. This group in KC was one of those cliques. We really didn't play all that much regularly with each other. But we were veterans and knew each others capabilities in PvP thoroughly. I was the cleric, we had a rogue, a wizard, bard, and a monk.
The enemy guild had a necromancer logged out in the basement trying to farm a critical mobs for keys to Veeshans Peak an endgame zone we were not even contending for yet. While we were PvEing we saw them log in.
Since we all knew the zone, and our class abilities, we were able to invis and navigate our way past many hostile mobs, some that required different invisibility spells, or even calm to get past. Or in one case the monk had to agro some down a hallway and feign death them so we could sneak past. It was tricky to say the least. It required us knowing and understanding all of our class abilities.
We ambushed the necromancer taking them out quickly. Shortly after that a group from the enemy guild zoned in from upstairs and proceeded down. They had a druid, wizard, warrior, cleric. All competent and dangerous solo pvp classes and deadly in combination. All better geared then us. We decided to stay down in the basement at the spawn and try to ambush them there. They proceeded to bring the whole dungeon down with them, all the monsters following them. This may have been intentional or not. Most veterans on the server considered this kind of thing a valid tactic anyway, it was still using the game and had its own set of counters, while it was definitely a cheesy and underhanded tactic. When they arrived we engaged. Saw they had too many mobs and the wizard evacuated us from the zone to a wizard portal just outside.
Their druid did the same thing, but in their zeal to take us down they left behind their warrior who promptly trained out of the zone at very low health.
We intercepted them on the way back to KC. We had not waited around at the wizard spire to be engaged there. They were disorganized and split up while we were still together and picked them off one by one. I am pretty sure they thought they had us on the run and split up to hunt us. A really bad error on their part.
We had many battles like this on the server. Some where we even stood our ground against superior odds and won because we knew how to game the lag, mechanics, or just which targets to focus on. We took out the best geared player on the server the leader of the enemy guild with their most elite officers in tow when they tried to push us out of a zone. The enemies usually had superior gear, but it was sometimes poorly optimized for PvP.
Despite a wizard or druid being extremely dangerous opponents vs many classes on their own 1v1 they were able to be taken on in groups with a good deal of reliability. As a cleric, if I was solo my strategy was to run, or wear down an enemy. Unless I was higher level and better geared, many times I didn't have the resources to finish off a good pvper. I could get lucky sometimes against weak players who didn't know about stacking buffs, or resists, or pumice, etc..
Of course there were plenty of times were the group I was with were not as skilled or had poor communication and we lost control of a zone rather quickly.
What distro and hardware specs? I had to do a bit of research and tweaking to slackwares core stuff back in version 10 ish to make wow run on it. Linux is not the same universal experience across distros (unless you want to be pedantic about the kernal) but even kernals are configured differently between distros with their own patches.
I think the average age has lowered significantly. Thats just my shitty guess at trends =P
I may be wrong about facebook. I'm very biased. I play a lot of free games, too many to list here. Out of GNU or hobbyist developers which just do it for donations. The only (sort of) tripple A title I mess with is minecraft for its creativity, it also has a very active modding community and tons of user created content. Both PvE, PvP, and "story arch style".. which is really not geared around its crappy combat system and more about exploration and lore of a map.
*** The rest of this post is rambling about what maybe people are nostalgic for or move on to once they mature away from WoW. ***
I still log into an old school competitive FPS for pvp from time to time. It just cannot be beat, the formula was built during the Unreal Tournament and Quake 1-3 era. Modern games have better resilience to lag, but none have the skill factor the older games did. I completely stomp people in games like CoD, yet in quake I routinely still get owned consistently by good players when I'm pinging 50ms.
Best semi modern FPS, Shadowrun which had great rock-paper-siscors and balanced CTF gameplay was shut down =/ I really wish that game stayed in operation. Sure it bastardized the RPG but if it was not called shadowrun, it would have marketed better.
If I want a hardcore PvP MMO experience, I know were to go, and its not any WoW, or clone of wow. Its old fashioned un-balanced, rigorously evil, and exploity as hell EQ. Because the fact that nothing is balanced means skill = player interaction + dedication + game knowledge (like where drops are, and how to navigate a dungeon). However I don't have time to put in 18 hr work days in a game.
If I was going to pick a dedicated retirement MMO I would re-sub to Eve and resurrect my old character.
Amen. Thats how I played wow. I saw everything you could do, did everything you could do solo or 5 man. Then did a few pug raids and quit each expansion, going back to my time honored EQ avatar.
It's my under standing that the few times those lighthouse RTG's or other non-space application RTGs have been opened and recovered by civilians the casualties were low. They didn't kill even 100's of peoples.
Total fatalities due to RTGs to date is probably less then 100. And this is a horrible estimate. Completely inaccurate and unscientific, but leaning on the safe side enough to make a point.
RTGs are not that bad when handled properly. Soviets screwed up by widely distributing them and not decommissioning them.
The U.S. to my knowledge has never had an accident with an RTG.
Zelda Fanatics...
* I am not one.