If you're already buying an acre or more of heliostatic mirrors, it'd probably be cheaper and more efficient to use a solar fired steam turbine to do the generating. Then, if you use a molten salt reservoir, you have some energy storage for night-time power generation as well.
Along the same vein, I justify driving my old, fuel-inefficient sports car by taking the dinosaurs' viewpoint. They were wiped out by global cooling, man! Releasing all this sequestered carbon dioxide is just my way of saving the planet. Someday when your grandchildren are living in the subtropical paradise that Antarctica will become, you'll thank me.
Hmm, sounds exactly like the amount of playtime I was talking about.
You might want to re-read the second sentence there, bucko.:P I'm 'casual' compared to my guild (who are working on Algalon now) but I play a lot more than, say, my wife, who will spend a couple of hours maybe two or three days a week levelling alts and tradeskills.
What I was saying was that with a 'normal' level of play it'd still be possible to make progress on one of those alts, OR to play a bunch of arena games, or whatever. Obviously if you're doing all of the above it'll take more time.
This is more about making 55 the new starting level for players who ALREADY have a level 80 character(s). I have no sympathy for these players since they should be more than competent to level though faster than any new player and spend a minimal amount of time doing it.
Obviously they won't find it 'hard' to level. I watched my wife level her mage to 70 as a 'melee magetank' so anything's possible. O.o Can you explain to me why, though, someone should have to spend 5 - 10 days of their life redoing trivial tasks in order to have another high level character? It's not hard, it's not new, all it is is a waste of time.
I'm maybe slightly younger - I think my first experience with an FPS was likewise Wolf3D, but I would have been 10 or so then, and my parents limited my exposure to violent movies (even ones like Terminator which by today's standards are incredibly tame and which most people would probably let a 10-year-old) so I'm probably not the average case.
What this 'argument'? Thog just make man with straw. Me think silly, but then it cold and lots snow come and fire nearly die! Me put man on fire. Man burn good. Thog good friend, Thog make straw man!
What about having no direct penalty for refusing an identity card... but make virtually everything require said identity card? "I'm sorry, sir, you cannot use a pharmacy without showing your Medicare card. I'm sorry, good citizen, you may not drive your car without having your drivers' license on your person. I'm sorry, sir, if you wish to buy a long-distance train ticket we require your passport." Since all of the above have the same key details on them, they're pretty much equivalent. It's not what I like but it's what we've got.
To be fair, though, he's right. I did miss the bit about Dyslexia ('Ive', 'i', 'im' made three strikes and I pulled out the sarcastic jokeotron) and what I said was the equivalent of seeing a guy with a gammy leg walking down the street and yelling "HAHA LOOK AT THAT GUY HE WALKS FUNNY". My apologies, VegetaFH1.
If Thog just think about it, me think maybe OK. If Thog make straw man with my face on, and spend month bashing straw man with shiny rock, me maybe worry little bit.
Or maybe the older you get, the better you understand your own mind and those of people around you? It's nothing to do with blame, and everything to do with the simple observation that inhibitions against any action fade as you rehearse that action.
Sorry, the point I was trying to make was that the injunction stopping the friend from carrying out the murder grows successively weaker with each ultra-realistic simulated murder, to the point where when the opportunity arises, he's already desensitised himself to it. Other posts here have mentioned operant conditioning, and while it's incomplete as a theory it does explain this quite well.
And I guess I must have stepped on someone's toes, I'm getting -1 Overrated mods.:P
Not kidding. It's still easy to draw the line, now, but there's already a huge difference between the old 31cm TV that I first played games on and my 24" full-HD widescreen LCD. The experience on the latter is far more immersive.
I can still 'look outside my screen' now, but in 20, 30, 40 years' time? We could easily have Matrix-style total immersion VR. And when that VR looks identical to what does go on in real life, your brain will carry lessons over from one to the other.
Not if they keep doing it until that emotional backlash subsides and they see "things that look and act exactly like humans" as empty cybernetic shells rather than as people. Because once they start seeing "things that look and act exactly like humans" in that way, they'll see humans like that too. They will become psychopathic.
I think in most people there is a side that actually would want to do that to a real person, sick as it sounds. You probably have that side, even if you haven't recognized it yet.
There IS a side like that, and not just in 'most' people. We're killers, that's why we're here and not the descendants of the Neanderthals that we wiped out.
However, we're also social animals and we've covered our killer side over with social responsibility and ethics and laws. The problem is that every time we kill, we reinforce the killer side and we weaken the restraints on it. If we're only killing pixellated mushrooms then the effect is minimal. If we're beating some virtual unfortunate's head in with a claw hammer, the effect is much stronger. Just think of the first time you played an FPS or fighting game - unless you were already acclimatised to violence via movies and TV, you probably felt a little queasy at all the killing. Then you got used to it and payed it no mind. The first time a quest asked me to kill a female human NPC in WoW, I felt distinctly uncomfortable - now, I'm used to it and don't even notice. When games go from stylised combat to full body virtual reality, it's going to be even more challenging for people to commit this virtual slaughter... at first. When what we're practising (and becoming acclimated to) is indistinguishable from what our conditioning is preventing us from doing, then the practice must necessarily weaken that conditioning.
OK, imagine that it's 2050 and computers can create seamless virtual realities that we have trouble telling apart from 'real' life. Imagine that your friend buys a new game, "Virtual How-to-host-a-murder 2050", and spends the next month solid playing it. It's very realistic, you go through endless scenarios where someone in the dinner party gets bludgeoned - except that in this game, it actually happens, and your friend is acting out beating someone to death with a lead pipe in the Conservatory. Over, and over again.
You decided to have an 'IRL' dinner party, and thinking nothing of it you invite your friend.
Halfway through dinner your friend heads to the bathroom, and before they come back the power is cut.
How sure are you that your friend has equally strong injunctions now against killing that guy he doesn't like / his ex's new partner / you because you beat him in Virtual Poker? He's been doing it in a photo-real environment for the last month, it's exactly the same to him apart from that little voice in the back of his head saying "there's no reset button on this one". How strong will that voice be?
The reason we have so much violence in games these days is that in the very early arcade games, that's how things were scored. Mario jumped on goombas for points and self-defence. The aliens in Space Invaders had to die to protect the Earth. That worked, from a gameplay point of view, so we kept going with it, never thinking that in 30 years' time the aliens in Space Invaders would have realistic anatomies and motivations and a family back home who's relying on them to bring Earth's cows back for dinner.
Which brings us back to the initial point: Why would you WANT to kill that alien? The first games, killing enemies was the moral equivalent of stomping on ants. Sure, they die, but how much actual life experience have they lost? Now the games are increasingly realistic, it's no longer ants we're killing. Sure, there are scenarios (like war games) which people want to re-enact virtually, but games like Manhunt are explicitly designed around killing defenseless strangers. Maybe it's time to put games like that on the same level as rape simulators?
This, very much this. It's like MP3s - there are many new formats that are technically better for various reasons than the MP3 format, and yet music is still stored almost exclusively as MP3. It's not because MP3 is any better, it's simply good enough. The same thing is happening with operating systems here - Win98SE was very close to 'good enough' and people took a long time to move on to XP simply because there was little reason to upgrade. XP still had a pretty solid edge when it came to things like stability, networking support, and gaming support, so people eventually moved to XP and it was good. Not just good, it really IS 'good enough' for home users if they're remotely capable of 'not clicking on the virus spam'. If Microsoft is having to resort to nasty tricks like dropping XP support for DirectX 10 in order to force people to upgrade to Vista, that's a sign that they can't come up with any important improvements.
There's mission critical and then there's mission critical. If you're using the software to target ICBMs or to run nuclear power plants or fly passenger aircraft, then no, you wouldn't trust Windows. But if you're using the software to write TPS reports and run spreadsheets then I think you can probably trust Windows enough to use it. There are more big businesses that need TPS reports and spreadsheets than there are that need ICBMs and nuclear power plants.
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It won't, for the simple reason that it, like everything else in this world, cannot understand the pain you feel.
I suggest installing one of these novelty light-up toys instead.
If you're already buying an acre or more of heliostatic mirrors, it'd probably be cheaper and more efficient to use a solar fired steam turbine to do the generating. Then, if you use a molten salt reservoir, you have some energy storage for night-time power generation as well.
Along the same vein, I justify driving my old, fuel-inefficient sports car by taking the dinosaurs' viewpoint. They were wiped out by global cooling, man! Releasing all this sequestered carbon dioxide is just my way of saving the planet. Someday when your grandchildren are living in the subtropical paradise that Antarctica will become, you'll thank me.
Hmm, sounds exactly like the amount of playtime I was talking about.
You might want to re-read the second sentence there, bucko. :P I'm 'casual' compared to my guild (who are working on Algalon now) but I play a lot more than, say, my wife, who will spend a couple of hours maybe two or three days a week levelling alts and tradeskills.
What I was saying was that with a 'normal' level of play it'd still be possible to make progress on one of those alts, OR to play a bunch of arena games, or whatever. Obviously if you're doing all of the above it'll take more time.
This is more about making 55 the new starting level for players who ALREADY have a level 80 character(s). I have no sympathy for these players since they should be more than competent to level though faster than any new player and spend a minimal amount of time doing it.
Obviously they won't find it 'hard' to level. I watched my wife level her mage to 70 as a 'melee magetank' so anything's possible. O.o Can you explain to me why, though, someone should have to spend 5 - 10 days of their life redoing trivial tasks in order to have another high level character? It's not hard, it's not new, all it is is a waste of time.
I'm maybe slightly younger - I think my first experience with an FPS was likewise Wolf3D, but I would have been 10 or so then, and my parents limited my exposure to violent movies (even ones like Terminator which by today's standards are incredibly tame and which most people would probably let a 10-year-old) so I'm probably not the average case.
What this 'argument'? Thog just make man with straw. Me think silly, but then it cold and lots snow come and fire nearly die! Me put man on fire. Man burn good. Thog good friend, Thog make straw man!
What about having no direct penalty for refusing an identity card... but make virtually everything require said identity card? "I'm sorry, sir, you cannot use a pharmacy without showing your Medicare card. I'm sorry, good citizen, you may not drive your car without having your drivers' license on your person. I'm sorry, sir, if you wish to buy a long-distance train ticket we require your passport." Since all of the above have the same key details on them, they're pretty much equivalent. It's not what I like but it's what we've got.
DNA is ... easy to share...
For your average /. reader?
Still happy?
No. :/
Now that you mention it... yes, yes I am. O.o
To be fair, though, he's right. I did miss the bit about Dyslexia ('Ive', 'i', 'im' made three strikes and I pulled out the sarcastic jokeotron) and what I said was the equivalent of seeing a guy with a gammy leg walking down the street and yelling "HAHA LOOK AT THAT GUY HE WALKS FUNNY". My apologies, VegetaFH1.
If Thog just think about it, me think maybe OK. If Thog make straw man with my face on, and spend month bashing straw man with shiny rock, me maybe worry little bit.
If they're using it offensively rather than destructively then evidently your using it defensively is effective. ly.
iLittlePony? :P
Or maybe the older you get, the better you understand your own mind and those of people around you? It's nothing to do with blame, and everything to do with the simple observation that inhibitions against any action fade as you rehearse that action.
Sorry, the point I was trying to make was that the injunction stopping the friend from carrying out the murder grows successively weaker with each ultra-realistic simulated murder, to the point where when the opportunity arises, he's already desensitised himself to it. Other posts here have mentioned operant conditioning, and while it's incomplete as a theory it does explain this quite well.
:P
And I guess I must have stepped on someone's toes, I'm getting -1 Overrated mods.
Not kidding. It's still easy to draw the line, now, but there's already a huge difference between the old 31cm TV that I first played games on and my 24" full-HD widescreen LCD. The experience on the latter is far more immersive.
I can still 'look outside my screen' now, but in 20, 30, 40 years' time? We could easily have Matrix-style total immersion VR. And when that VR looks identical to what does go on in real life, your brain will carry lessons over from one to the other.
Not content with your slaughter of innocent virtual entities, you then proceeded to disembowel the English language?
The difference between real life and a game is becoming increasingly fine. That's kind of the point of the article.
I *wish* I had a bar within walking distance of where I live. :(
:P
Ah well, maybe I can start a bar fridge brawl vs my cat.
Not if they keep doing it until that emotional backlash subsides and they see "things that look and act exactly like humans" as empty cybernetic shells rather than as people. Because once they start seeing "things that look and act exactly like humans" in that way, they'll see humans like that too. They will become psychopathic.
I think in most people there is a side that actually would want to do that to a real person, sick as it sounds. You probably have that side, even if you haven't recognized it yet.
There IS a side like that, and not just in 'most' people. We're killers, that's why we're here and not the descendants of the Neanderthals that we wiped out.
However, we're also social animals and we've covered our killer side over with social responsibility and ethics and laws. The problem is that every time we kill, we reinforce the killer side and we weaken the restraints on it. If we're only killing pixellated mushrooms then the effect is minimal. If we're beating some virtual unfortunate's head in with a claw hammer, the effect is much stronger. Just think of the first time you played an FPS or fighting game - unless you were already acclimatised to violence via movies and TV, you probably felt a little queasy at all the killing. Then you got used to it and payed it no mind. The first time a quest asked me to kill a female human NPC in WoW, I felt distinctly uncomfortable - now, I'm used to it and don't even notice. When games go from stylised combat to full body virtual reality, it's going to be even more challenging for people to commit this virtual slaughter... at first. When what we're practising (and becoming acclimated to) is indistinguishable from what our conditioning is preventing us from doing, then the practice must necessarily weaken that conditioning.
OK, imagine that it's 2050 and computers can create seamless virtual realities that we have trouble telling apart from 'real' life. Imagine that your friend buys a new game, "Virtual How-to-host-a-murder 2050", and spends the next month solid playing it. It's very realistic, you go through endless scenarios where someone in the dinner party gets bludgeoned - except that in this game, it actually happens, and your friend is acting out beating someone to death with a lead pipe in the Conservatory. Over, and over again.
You decided to have an 'IRL' dinner party, and thinking nothing of it you invite your friend.
Halfway through dinner your friend heads to the bathroom, and before they come back the power is cut.
How sure are you that your friend has equally strong injunctions now against killing that guy he doesn't like / his ex's new partner / you because you beat him in Virtual Poker? He's been doing it in a photo-real environment for the last month, it's exactly the same to him apart from that little voice in the back of his head saying "there's no reset button on this one". How strong will that voice be?
The reason we have so much violence in games these days is that in the very early arcade games, that's how things were scored. Mario jumped on goombas for points and self-defence. The aliens in Space Invaders had to die to protect the Earth. That worked, from a gameplay point of view, so we kept going with it, never thinking that in 30 years' time the aliens in Space Invaders would have realistic anatomies and motivations and a family back home who's relying on them to bring Earth's cows back for dinner.
Which brings us back to the initial point: Why would you WANT to kill that alien? The first games, killing enemies was the moral equivalent of stomping on ants. Sure, they die, but how much actual life experience have they lost? Now the games are increasingly realistic, it's no longer ants we're killing. Sure, there are scenarios (like war games) which people want to re-enact virtually, but games like Manhunt are explicitly designed around killing defenseless strangers. Maybe it's time to put games like that on the same level as rape simulators?
This, very much this. It's like MP3s - there are many new formats that are technically better for various reasons than the MP3 format, and yet music is still stored almost exclusively as MP3. It's not because MP3 is any better, it's simply good enough. The same thing is happening with operating systems here - Win98SE was very close to 'good enough' and people took a long time to move on to XP simply because there was little reason to upgrade. XP still had a pretty solid edge when it came to things like stability, networking support, and gaming support, so people eventually moved to XP and it was good. Not just good, it really IS 'good enough' for home users if they're remotely capable of 'not clicking on the virus spam'. If Microsoft is having to resort to nasty tricks like dropping XP support for DirectX 10 in order to force people to upgrade to Vista, that's a sign that they can't come up with any important improvements.
There's mission critical and then there's mission critical. If you're using the software to target ICBMs or to run nuclear power plants or fly passenger aircraft, then no, you wouldn't trust Windows. But if you're using the software to write TPS reports and run spreadsheets then I think you can probably trust Windows enough to use it. There are more big businesses that need TPS reports and spreadsheets than there are that need ICBMs and nuclear power plants.