I think most people, including the GP, would call livestock deaths as "killed", but would refer to having a pet killed purposefully by a neighbor as "murder".
The definition you list is arbitrary and not representative of how the term is actually used.
I'm pretty sure BadAnalogyGuy is not against killing animals in general. He was referring specifically to premeditated and illegal killing of animals. Hence "murder".
they give you 250 servers already replicated and working in one day, using the replication fairy?
Yes, they do - that's why they're special. Maybe you're using some new definition of cloud that isn't what I'm thinking of, but they do this by making you engineer your software as basically read-only. Any outputs go to another (equally scaleable) output service.
They aren't sitting there replicating a full OS install to a dedicated server. They're running the same read-only software image and executing it from an extra 250 virtual servers.
Thankfully most people have figured out how to search google or within websites for meaningful keywords, instead of trying to verbally communicate URLs within a domain.
The only problem that tiny url services "solve" is twitter. And you're still left with a major problem: you use twitter.
Did you play with a guild or other friends? A lot of WOW players do so socially. Compared to any single player game thats equally addictive, WOW has an awful lot of emotions and drama;)
I think this especially has to do with the fact that things like bullet points next to "wireless", "FM", and "X GB" are easy to communicate in a press release.
Size on the other hand, is very hard to communicate well in a press release or website or newspaper article. But when you hold a phone or ipod in your hand and compare it to other bulkier ones, you tend to have a feel for what size is right. What will fit in your pocket? How will you carry this thing?
That's a advantage Apple has pressed with the ipod, and other device makers are still struggling to understand it.
If you enjoy reading about class balance, you can see a lot of insight from the WOW game designers (especially Ghostcrawler, lately) at the following sites:
The latter is a compilation of every Blizzard post in the WOW forums, while the former is just the highlights of meaningful class changes and discussion.
The Blizzard devs used to be much quieter, but coming into the latest expansion Ghostcrawler started exposing a lot of detailed reasons behind their design and balance decision. Of course everyone still QQs massively when their class gets nerfed.
But anyone willing to take a step back and think about game balance has all the design reasons there in the forums to explain why they make the changes they do. Blizzard even had a "Class Q&A" recently that covered a lot of questions about the design goals and directions for each class.
Unfortunately the blizzard devs get a ton of trolls and QQ in response to anything they do (no matter how kind or innocent). So be sure to watch this peephole into the design process while you can, before the whiners get Blizzard to revert to silence about their design reasons and goals.
Blizzard completely abandoned the notion of difference between Horde and Alliance in WoW, in favour of focussing on class balance.
The reason Blizzard abandoned the difference was essentially because of player QQ, not because it was hard (or impossible) to balance.
In the original WOW, alliance vastly outnumbered Horde on most servers. Thus you had 2 alliance saying Shaman were overpowered (cause they died to one once, of course) for every 1 horde saying they weren't. Add in the fact that the Shaman was a more offensive class than the Alliance Paladins, and was a class that was severely effected by RNG (windfury crits), and you had a huge storm of Alliance QQ.
Fast forward to BC when Alliance got shaman, though. And now the LK expansion too. Shaman have been MASSIVELY buffed since the original WOW, and are still generally considered underpowered in PVP. If Alliance didn't get Shaman in BC, the devs could never have gotten away with buffing the (long underpowered) Shaman class.
Making classes identical and balancing classes are NOT the same thing.
The WOW designers, for instance, constantly bring up the fact that they want to avoid homogenization as much as possible. People always want ability X that some other class has that's awesome. But if their class needs improvement, it should be in a unique way that works with that specific class.
Although your post is really more about wanting to play a game that's not there. If you want to roll a class in Warhammer Online that let's you mortgage a house and pay it off by running errands for cute fuzzy animals, you should play Animal Crossing not Warhammer.
The game of Warhammer Online is about doing damage to enemies, and thus all classes need to be able to damage to enemies equally but in different ways.
Even if you DO want to play a monk who stares at blades of grass all day, having the monk class balanced so it can also do damage equal to the other classes does not hinder your ability to sit around staring at grass.
Mod parent up, I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, it's technically plausible to spam dna fragments to match a test, but orders of magnitude easier to just grab a hair from the guy you're trying to frame.
It would be very interesting to be able to watch the same movie with and without the shaky cam, to see how much of the effect was the shaky cam, and how much was good settings/scenery/acting/CG.
This movie was nowhere near as bad as Cloverfield, the main exception is there's a LOT more gore in District 9. Having a shaky cam while ALSO watching a guy pull of his own fingernails...that's a bit tough to stomach.
Watching the movie, you don't really know why the aliens do half the stuff they do.
Agreed, I thought this was great. There was insinuation that most of the aliens were "drones" and not very bright, and also hints at a language barrier when serving the eviction notices especially. The aliens, even the smarter ones, do some strange stuff. They don't act rationally according to our human rules. They *feel* alien.
If District 9 had a message, I think it went over my head. A lot of people try to compare DC9 to Alien Nation and similar. Personally I didn't find DC9 to be very political or even have a strong message at all.
In fact, this is one of the best things about the movie. It's not some ridiculous "side A = good, side B = evil" propaganda. Pretty much everyone in the movie is imperfect and selfishly motivated.
Shakycam can add some flavor/character to a movie. But I think they could do that much with some brief snippets of shakycam, rather than tens of minutes or an entire movie of it.
Even for "documentary style" - kids playing in the front yard while dad walks around with the cam is one thing. But many of the shaky cam scenes would involve a tripod even in a documentary.
In other words, when was the last time you felt nauseous watching an ACTUAL documentary?
(ok so we don't watch a lot of documentaries on the big screen, but I think it still holds true)
carb, coke, icecream, sugar, bread, rice, pasta, cookies, chips even water mellon.
Those things are bad for you whether you're on a low-fat or high-fat diet. The problem isn't carbs, it's refined carbs and sugars. Eat high fiber bread, rice, and pasta, and you'll stop being hungry all the time and start losing weight.
Don't drink calories ever (soda, beer) and stay away from sweets.
This is all common sense. You don't have to go on a potentially harmful ketosis diet to lose weight.
Saw this yesterday, thought it was awesome. At its heart the plot isn't necessarily that original, but the execution is sublime. The "hero" and many of the other characters and weapons/vehicles/etc. feel so much more vulnerable than in any other holywood movie.
In every other movie you shoot at someone and miss completely if they're the good guy. Or your car/spaceship/cat is invulnerable to missiles conveniently. Not in this movie.
HOWEVER, the combination of shaky cam and gore left everyone I went with feeling a bit nauseous. I'm really not even sure if it was the shaky cam or the gore that did it. Please put a bullet in these shaky cams. For whatever reason they're being used, it's not worth it.
Not to mention with digital distribution you can reduce or completely eliminate distribution costs. (effectively, obviously bandwidth still has some costs)
With publishers traditionally taking a huge cut of the profits, this is a great opportunity to increase profits. Of course publishers also took a lot of the risk in the past.
If multiple people are sharing copyrighted material illegally, multiple people should be fined. I can't see any excuse other than pure laziness for ridiculously over-fining random individuals.
Fine large numbers of people a remotely reasonable amount (a few thousand, even ten thousand, but millions??). That would be an actual deterrent. People see their friend, neighbor, someone at their school getting fined an amount that can and will actually be paid, and they'll get scared.
Seeing one person out of millions fined into instant bankruptcy is not a deterrent. It's a spectacle.
I don't think there's any competition between the latest WOW expansion and the previous content. The LK expansion is far far better in every way. Good riddance to the early game.
And its not like your WoW account disappears if you cancel it for a few months. And its not like you can't try out the new game with some friends.
Totally agree. Especially with free betas and trial periods, no reason not to give a new game a try.
Flying begins at level 60, not 70, as the GP stated.
2/4 of the continents and 2/8 (1/4th) of the levels, yes.
However, as with many RPGs, the earlier levels go MUCH faster than the later levels. 70-80 takes about as long as 1-70. This is because they speed up the older content each time an expansion is released.
Also -- Flying does not magically equate to "MOAR BETTER". Travel time in a game is based on world size, quest design, and travel speed. Whether you're traveling on the ground, in the air, or on a shark, is largely immaterial.
Do you think eternal life is possible, even for a given product?
You say "for a given product" as if WOW was stamped on CDs five years ago and has never changed since.
WOW is constantly changing and improving, and through that, getting new players. It doesn't have this ever-shrinking player base as you insinuate.
Toppling WOW is much more comparable to toppling Windows. People have a lot of time invested in WOW, as well as their friends and guild. It'll take a mistake of Vista-proportions to drop WOW.
However it's also a misnomer to say that games have to topple WOW. People can play more than one game. There are also people who have quit WOW, or never played it. Some friends looked at Aion and specifically said "It's a WOW clone. Why would I drop all my characters and knowledge and friends in WOW to play a slightly shinier WOW clone?"
The best bet for a successful MMO in the US will be having a polished game that's very different than WOW. Not just in graphics and genre, but in gameplay.
By "some" I meant rapists and child molesters, if that helps define it better for you.
The goal of the statement was to point out that people who urinate in public and similar are not the intended targets of these laws, they're unfortunate splash damage.
Figures from a 1994 DOJ study on recidivism indicated that compared to non-sex offender felons, a sex offender was 4 times more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime.
Being less lazy, the actual rates listed by the DoJ show it to be a bit contrived. The "four times more likely" is comparing ~1.5% to ~5%, and comparing "non-sex offenders committing a followup sex offense" to "sex offenders commiting a followup sex offense".
So the rate is still only 5% for a sex offender to commit another sex offense, according to that statistic. Which yeah, doesn't sound as bad as the "four times as likely" statistic that I'm pretty sure is what I've heard before.
However the wikipedia article also points out this specific stat, particularly relevant to the OP:
Within 3 years of release, 2.5% of released rapists were rearrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for a new homicide.
Rapists are twice as likely to rape again than murderers are to murder again. Still seems like fairly small percentages overall, but that's also just within 3 years of release.
One is "why are sex offenders treated worse than murderers". The answer is because *some* types of sex offenders have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* murderers are not.
If you're thinking "why are we letting criminals that are almost guaranteed to continue to commit crimes out of jail?", you're probably right.
Your second question is "why are public urination, consumption of porn, and other passive acts categorized together with rape and molestation?"
I don't have a good answer for that one, but it is clearly absurd. Something needs to be done to differentiate the recidivist and harmful crimes from the minor ones and punish the two independently.
Slashdot Mirror
I think most people, including the GP, would call livestock deaths as "killed", but would refer to having a pet killed purposefully by a neighbor as "murder".
The definition you list is arbitrary and not representative of how the term is actually used.
I'm pretty sure BadAnalogyGuy is not against killing animals in general. He was referring specifically to premeditated and illegal killing of animals. Hence "murder".
they give you 250 servers already replicated and working in one day, using the replication fairy?
Yes, they do - that's why they're special. Maybe you're using some new definition of cloud that isn't what I'm thinking of, but they do this by making you engineer your software as basically read-only. Any outputs go to another (equally scaleable) output service.
They aren't sitting there replicating a full OS install to a dedicated server. They're running the same read-only software image and executing it from an extra 250 virtual servers.
Thankfully most people have figured out how to search google or within websites for meaningful keywords, instead of trying to verbally communicate URLs within a domain.
The only problem that tiny url services "solve" is twitter. And you're still left with a major problem: you use twitter.
deaden my emotions to the outside world
Did you play with a guild or other friends? A lot of WOW players do so socially. Compared to any single player game thats equally addictive, WOW has an awful lot of emotions and drama ;)
Sadly, "associate" has become so commonplace I don't even blink when I hear the term. >.
I think this especially has to do with the fact that things like bullet points next to "wireless", "FM", and "X GB" are easy to communicate in a press release.
Size on the other hand, is very hard to communicate well in a press release or website or newspaper article. But when you hold a phone or ipod in your hand and compare it to other bulkier ones, you tend to have a feel for what size is right. What will fit in your pocket? How will you carry this thing?
That's a advantage Apple has pressed with the ipod, and other device makers are still struggling to understand it.
If you enjoy reading about class balance, you can see a lot of insight from the WOW game designers (especially Ghostcrawler, lately) at the following sites:
http://www.mmo-champion.com/
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/
The latter is a compilation of every Blizzard post in the WOW forums, while the former is just the highlights of meaningful class changes and discussion.
The Blizzard devs used to be much quieter, but coming into the latest expansion Ghostcrawler started exposing a lot of detailed reasons behind their design and balance decision. Of course everyone still QQs massively when their class gets nerfed.
But anyone willing to take a step back and think about game balance has all the design reasons there in the forums to explain why they make the changes they do. Blizzard even had a "Class Q&A" recently that covered a lot of questions about the design goals and directions for each class.
Unfortunately the blizzard devs get a ton of trolls and QQ in response to anything they do (no matter how kind or innocent). So be sure to watch this peephole into the design process while you can, before the whiners get Blizzard to revert to silence about their design reasons and goals.
Blizzard completely abandoned the notion of difference between Horde and Alliance in WoW, in favour of focussing on class balance.
The reason Blizzard abandoned the difference was essentially because of player QQ, not because it was hard (or impossible) to balance.
In the original WOW, alliance vastly outnumbered Horde on most servers. Thus you had 2 alliance saying Shaman were overpowered (cause they died to one once, of course) for every 1 horde saying they weren't. Add in the fact that the Shaman was a more offensive class than the Alliance Paladins, and was a class that was severely effected by RNG (windfury crits), and you had a huge storm of Alliance QQ.
Fast forward to BC when Alliance got shaman, though. And now the LK expansion too. Shaman have been MASSIVELY buffed since the original WOW, and are still generally considered underpowered in PVP. If Alliance didn't get Shaman in BC, the devs could never have gotten away with buffing the (long underpowered) Shaman class.
Just because it's feasible to occasionally win while playing a severely underpowered class does not in any way imply the game should not be balanced.
It implies that you played against someone who was terribad, or perhaps the game is overly influenced by Random Number Generation (RNG).
Making classes identical and balancing classes are NOT the same thing.
The WOW designers, for instance, constantly bring up the fact that they want to avoid homogenization as much as possible. People always want ability X that some other class has that's awesome. But if their class needs improvement, it should be in a unique way that works with that specific class.
Although your post is really more about wanting to play a game that's not there. If you want to roll a class in Warhammer Online that let's you mortgage a house and pay it off by running errands for cute fuzzy animals, you should play Animal Crossing not Warhammer.
The game of Warhammer Online is about doing damage to enemies, and thus all classes need to be able to damage to enemies equally but in different ways.
Even if you DO want to play a monk who stares at blades of grass all day, having the monk class balanced so it can also do damage equal to the other classes does not hinder your ability to sit around staring at grass.
Mod parent up, I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, it's technically plausible to spam dna fragments to match a test, but orders of magnitude easier to just grab a hair from the guy you're trying to frame.
It would be very interesting to be able to watch the same movie with and without the shaky cam, to see how much of the effect was the shaky cam, and how much was good settings/scenery/acting/CG.
This movie was nowhere near as bad as Cloverfield, the main exception is there's a LOT more gore in District 9. Having a shaky cam while ALSO watching a guy pull of his own fingernails...that's a bit tough to stomach.
Watching the movie, you don't really know why the aliens do half the stuff they do.
Agreed, I thought this was great. There was insinuation that most of the aliens were "drones" and not very bright, and also hints at a language barrier when serving the eviction notices especially. The aliens, even the smarter ones, do some strange stuff. They don't act rationally according to our human rules. They *feel* alien.
If District 9 had a message, I think it went over my head. A lot of people try to compare DC9 to Alien Nation and similar. Personally I didn't find DC9 to be very political or even have a strong message at all.
In fact, this is one of the best things about the movie. It's not some ridiculous "side A = good, side B = evil" propaganda. Pretty much everyone in the movie is imperfect and selfishly motivated.
Shakycam can add some flavor/character to a movie. But I think they could do that much with some brief snippets of shakycam, rather than tens of minutes or an entire movie of it.
Even for "documentary style" - kids playing in the front yard while dad walks around with the cam is one thing. But many of the shaky cam scenes would involve a tripod even in a documentary.
In other words, when was the last time you felt nauseous watching an ACTUAL documentary?
(ok so we don't watch a lot of documentaries on the big screen, but I think it still holds true)
carb, coke, icecream, sugar, bread, rice, pasta, cookies, chips even water mellon.
Those things are bad for you whether you're on a low-fat or high-fat diet. The problem isn't carbs, it's refined carbs and sugars. Eat high fiber bread, rice, and pasta, and you'll stop being hungry all the time and start losing weight.
Don't drink calories ever (soda, beer) and stay away from sweets.
This is all common sense. You don't have to go on a potentially harmful ketosis diet to lose weight.
Saw this yesterday, thought it was awesome. At its heart the plot isn't necessarily that original, but the execution is sublime. The "hero" and many of the other characters and weapons/vehicles/etc. feel so much more vulnerable than in any other holywood movie.
In every other movie you shoot at someone and miss completely if they're the good guy. Or your car/spaceship/cat is invulnerable to missiles conveniently. Not in this movie.
HOWEVER, the combination of shaky cam and gore left everyone I went with feeling a bit nauseous. I'm really not even sure if it was the shaky cam or the gore that did it. Please put a bullet in these shaky cams. For whatever reason they're being used, it's not worth it.
Not to mention with digital distribution you can reduce or completely eliminate distribution costs. (effectively, obviously bandwidth still has some costs)
With publishers traditionally taking a huge cut of the profits, this is a great opportunity to increase profits. Of course publishers also took a lot of the risk in the past.
If multiple people are sharing copyrighted material illegally, multiple people should be fined. I can't see any excuse other than pure laziness for ridiculously over-fining random individuals.
Fine large numbers of people a remotely reasonable amount (a few thousand, even ten thousand, but millions??). That would be an actual deterrent. People see their friend, neighbor, someone at their school getting fined an amount that can and will actually be paid, and they'll get scared.
Seeing one person out of millions fined into instant bankruptcy is not a deterrent. It's a spectacle.
Changing yes. Improving, though is debatable.
I don't think there's any competition between the latest WOW expansion and the previous content. The LK expansion is far far better in every way. Good riddance to the early game.
And its not like your WoW account disappears if you cancel it for a few months. And its not like you can't try out the new game with some friends.
Totally agree. Especially with free betas and trial periods, no reason not to give a new game a try.
Flying begins at level 60, not 70, as the GP stated.
2/4 of the continents and 2/8 (1/4th) of the levels, yes.
However, as with many RPGs, the earlier levels go MUCH faster than the later levels. 70-80 takes about as long as 1-70. This is because they speed up the older content each time an expansion is released.
Also -- Flying does not magically equate to "MOAR BETTER". Travel time in a game is based on world size, quest design, and travel speed. Whether you're traveling on the ground, in the air, or on a shark, is largely immaterial.
Do you think eternal life is possible, even for a given product?
You say "for a given product" as if WOW was stamped on CDs five years ago and has never changed since.
WOW is constantly changing and improving, and through that, getting new players. It doesn't have this ever-shrinking player base as you insinuate.
Toppling WOW is much more comparable to toppling Windows. People have a lot of time invested in WOW, as well as their friends and guild. It'll take a mistake of Vista-proportions to drop WOW.
However it's also a misnomer to say that games have to topple WOW. People can play more than one game. There are also people who have quit WOW, or never played it. Some friends looked at Aion and specifically said "It's a WOW clone. Why would I drop all my characters and knowledge and friends in WOW to play a slightly shinier WOW clone?"
The best bet for a successful MMO in the US will be having a polished game that's very different than WOW. Not just in graphics and genre, but in gameplay.
By "some" I meant rapists and child molesters, if that helps define it better for you.
The goal of the statement was to point out that people who urinate in public and similar are not the intended targets of these laws, they're unfortunate splash damage.
Being lazy and citing wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender#Recidivism_rates
Figures from a 1994 DOJ study on recidivism indicated that compared to non-sex offender felons, a sex offender was 4 times more likely to be rearrested for a sex crime.
Being less lazy, the actual rates listed by the DoJ show it to be a bit contrived. The "four times more likely" is comparing ~1.5% to ~5%, and comparing "non-sex offenders committing a followup sex offense" to "sex offenders commiting a followup sex offense".
So the rate is still only 5% for a sex offender to commit another sex offense, according to that statistic. Which yeah, doesn't sound as bad as the "four times as likely" statistic that I'm pretty sure is what I've heard before.
However the wikipedia article also points out this specific stat, particularly relevant to the OP:
Within 3 years of release, 2.5% of released rapists were rearrested for another rape, and 1.2% of those who had served time for homicide were arrested for a new homicide.
Rapists are twice as likely to rape again than murderers are to murder again. Still seems like fairly small percentages overall, but that's also just within 3 years of release.
You're raising two different (valid) questions.
One is "why are sex offenders treated worse than murderers". The answer is because *some* types of sex offenders have an extremely high recidivism rate. They're very likely to commit repeat offenses, while *most* murderers are not.
If you're thinking "why are we letting criminals that are almost guaranteed to continue to commit crimes out of jail?", you're probably right.
Your second question is "why are public urination, consumption of porn, and other passive acts categorized together with rape and molestation?"
I don't have a good answer for that one, but it is clearly absurd. Something needs to be done to differentiate the recidivist and harmful crimes from the minor ones and punish the two independently.