Just FYI, this is probably the specific change that fixed the crystal drop problem:
If you quit 6 months ago or so, that was right after the NA release, and nobody was getting crystals. Crystals don't drop in regions controlled by beastmen. Since all the noobs were running out when they got the game and getting killed left and right, beastmen controlled all areas near towns. I had the game for 3 weeks before I saw a single crystal (on La Theine Plateau, for those who play the game - Ronfaure was always under beastmen control).
Probably about the time you left, they changed the rules so people under level 4 or 5 (I forget) don't affect the control of a region when they die, and now crystals are common drops in the noob zones at low levels.
For those not in a reading mood, your sex generally considered to be what your chromosomes and organs say (assuming they agree, which they don't always), while your gender refers to learned social roles.
We also moved from Dark Alliance to Dark Legacy (and marveled over the similariy in even the names), and you'll probably be happy with it. The only major complaint I had was that if you're playing two player, Gauntlet is a little too easy, and if you get 3-4 players together it's just a hackfest, but it makes up for it by being fairly long; I forget the exact number, but there's something like 40-50 levels.
Thanks. I'm already pretty sickeningly happy. Now, if I can just get this wedding thing out of the way (we're planning and preparing the whole affair almost entirely by ourselves), we can get to the marriage part...;)
Would she give it a shot if you promise to insulate her from the RPG parts? My girlfriend (wife tomorrow!) is too daunted by RPGs, even relatively linear and action-oriented ones like Final Fantasy X, but Dark Alliance is her favorite game because she can ask my advice on equipment and spells, then play the game basically like Gauntlet but with less hacknslashing and more interesting magic.
For the really RPG-phobic, isn't there an option to turn off the damage number popups? Then you could do her equipment shopping for her and she can pretend she's playing Gauntlet: Dark Alliance.;)
Well put. Now, before anyone else gets confused about what's compilation and what's not:
(I'm thinking back to old CS classes here, so correct me if I'm wrong...)
Compilation, in common usage, means converting a source file in whatever language into an executable, since most people rarely if ever compile without intending to immediately generate an executable.
Compilation, in the more technical definition most commonly given by CS professors and people who wrote code before 1980;), is the process of converting a higher-level language into assembly code, which is then assembled into an executable. (I'll avoid the thornier issues of linking here.)
The term Compilation gets used in both of the above senses, but if you're going to use one, keep the other one in mind so you know what other people are talking about.
And on a side rant, contrary to what some people seem to believe, assembler is not just a prettier form of machine language, though it's close. For example, in x86 assembly, the assembly opcode and arguments MOV x,y can translate into several different machine language instructions, depending on whether x and y are registers, memory locations, memory locations with segment offsets, etc. in any combination (i.e. MOV reg,mem is one instruction, MOV mem,reg is another, MOV reg,[seg]mem is yet another, etc.). Other instructions work the same way, which is why the x86 instruction set has about 3,987,236,231,235 valid instructions.
Hope I remembered all that right. If not, correct me, because I'm getting rusty on my low-level stuff.;)
Good point. I think the ISPs generally use the same argument here that the USPS uses - that the amount of material they carry makes it logistically impossible to know what they're carrying.
The people who try to enforce blocking lists think that it solves this problem, since they tell you exactly what you're not supposed to carry, but they apparently don't realize that their list of inappropriate/illegal sites is out of date in a very short time, so it doesn't solve anything unless it's constantly verified and updated.
Well, one idea (and maybe I'm just being a conspiracy theorist here) could be that according to the Pennsylvania Attorney General's web site, he ran for Governor in 2002 and is apparently up for re-election soon. Now, with that in mind, he doesn't have the power to take down child porn sites that are almost certainly overseas and way out of his jurisdiction, but he does have the power to enact something like this, so when he tries to get re-elected or takes another stab at Governor, he can be The Man Who Kicked Internet Child Pornography Out of Pennsylvania.
And a substantial number of voters will probably buy it.
I could be wrong, but I think the difference is if you send something illegal through the mail, you get charged with a crime, not the USPS, post office, or mail carriers involved. So applied to this situation, the ISP is innocent and the content providers are guilty.
If you can't get to the content providers to arrest them, that's not the ISP's fault.
I've used TurboTax (the online version) for 3 years with no problem. Granted, my taxes are also relatively simple (a couple of W-2s, some taxable interest, and some dividend income), so I can't personally recommend it for anything complex, but if your financial picture is as simple as mine, TurboTax online only takes maybe an hour to go through and is quite painless.
Of course, I live in a state that only sort of supports e-filing (I still have to fill out a form, sign a voucher, etc. and mail it), but that's a whole other issue.
1. No one lived in a rural area. Out in the sticks, you might have to drive an hour to even get to a retailer who has the item you want, if it's high-tech or some other specialty.
First off, that is not an argument against the validity of the concept of opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is a very simple idea - if you go to college instead of taking a job, the cost of college isn't just tuition etc. but also the money you didn't make by taking that job for the duration of your college education. That's the opportunity cost of college, and every time you have to make a choice, that choice has an opportunity cost.
I will proceed with the assumption that you're actually questioning whether opportunity cost is meaningful in this situation where the loss is incurred by a third party, since that's more interesting.
Yes, all other things being equal (a fairly big jump, socioeconomically), people in rural areas would be more likely to order things online. Following that logic, people in cities would, by the same token, be more likely to buy locally compared to their rural counterparts. Since we're dealing with state taxes, not local taxes, these factors would average out state-wide according to the overall population density of that state to give a certain percentage of shopping done online. Therefore this is a matter of degree, and does not affect the fact that money is being moved out of the taxable commerce within the state.
2. I could count sales lost to my competitor on my taxes as a business loss. Every sale that could have been mine but went to a competitor must be a loss as well!
No. Not remotely the same thing.
First, I'm not sure where you got the idea that businesses can write off losses of just any kind to be magically reimbursed by the federal cash cow, but it just isn't reality.
Second, it seems that everyone who has replied to me in this thread is assuming that, when I say money is lost, that somehow implies a legal or moral right to regain that money. That was never said or implied, and I even specifically stated in the beginning that I was not endorsing the idea of letting states somehow regain that money. Please STOP reading things into posts that are not there. Loss is not the same thing as theft - that's why they're two different words. Even if it only costs $1, if I make the choice to buy something online instead of locally when both options are available, the state has lost the tax on that sale, regardless of whether or not they have a right to regain that money.
Having worked in a VB shop during college while studying Java in class, I'd say one of the big reasons people use VB in a business environment is because of the relatively quick turnaround for GUI apps. There are lots of apps that get developed in certain business environments solely as simple data front-ends because the people working with the data are non-technical and need a nice interface, but the app is only expected to be needed for a few months, or maybe even weeks, so a full development cycle in a more robust language really isn't practical. What you toss together in VB may not be as efficient or elegant as it could have been, but it generally does what it needs to do and gets done fast.
Sure Java can do a nice flexible cross-platform (in theory, anyway) GUI front end, but even setting aside the performance issues of Swing, it generally takes a good bit more time to set up than a comparable VB interface.
>The goods an services of one state may not be
taxed by another state.
>Even if such tax bills were passed they would
be overturned.
As I said before, "I make no judgement on taxing online purchases here." The fact that tax money is being lost does not imply any belief that states have a legal right to regain that money.
Please read posts in their entirety before replying.
"Assuming that consumers would buy the same goods whether online or in stores..."
Come to think of it, I can see how that statement could be misread. Put another way, this is assuming that a given consumer will buy certain products they want/need no matter what, and the variable is how much is bought online versus how much is bought in local stores. This as opposed to the idea that people on average are spending more money overall because of online sales.
Funny, I was halfway anticpating more of the opposite response - that online purchases shouldn't be compared to store purchases because the convenience of shopping from home and the lack of sales tax makes online sales more attractive to some people, particularly when buying large-ticket items (such as electronics) where sales tax is a bigger concern, so the online sales numbers would be inflated compared to what you could expect from traditional sales.
I think both are valid arguments depending on individual preference, and either way, states are still losing money on online purchases - it's just a matter of how much.
> The amount of tax revenue lost by the states is exactly zero.
> 1. You can't lose something you never had.
Sorry, but that's entirely wrong.
Opportunity Cost (definitions: 1, 2) is essentially the issue here. The cost of something also includes the opportunity that is given up, even though it was never actually posessed. Assuming that consumers would buy the same goods whether online or in stores, every purchase online deprives the states of the otherwise-available opportunity to tax that purchase.
This situation is a little different from classic examples of opportunity cost, because the person making the choice is not the one losing the opportunity, but the same principles apply. The states never had that money, but they have indeed lost it because the online purchases removed the opportunity.
I'm no economist myself, so if there's a principle that applies more directly to the situation I'd be interested to hear it. Also, I make no judgement on taxing online purchases here; I'm just pointing out that you don't have to be able to hold something in your hand in order to lose it.
Someone else does that!? Nice. I thought it was just me and my brother with our combined compulsive need to pronounce all technology-related abbreviations pseudophonetically. Of course, some (www, ssl, html...) work better than others (http, ftp...).
I remember back in the good old text-based days of the web (which, as a 24 year old, is a ridiculous phrase for me to even use, but anyway...) there seemed to be a fair number of sites that used "web" as their preferred machine name for the web server. That disappeared pretty quickly, but man I always wished that would come back...
As a big fan of lynx (my first ISP years ago, and the only one available to me for many months, was a dialup shell account), I'll plug the links browser here, which is a fine text-based browser that supports tables, so it can make sense of lots of pages that are unusable in lynx, and it has a somewhat friendlier interface to boot.
Ditto for Opera 7. Right-click on a bookmark folder and click "open," or drag the folder onto the tab strip. I think Opera 6 called it something different, but same idea.
150-250% might be a little wacky, but 100% seems reasonable to me - the book publishing industry is similar to the recording industry in a lot of ways, and bookstores generally get around a 35-45% discount off the cover price while distributors and major stores (Amazon, probably B&N) get the standard "deep discount," which is 55%, so 100% is a reasonable markup estimate for books anyway.
Of course, CDs might use a totally different price scheme, but it seems like a comparable product.
If you're looking to stick with the fantasy genre but want to branch out some from the high fantasy swords & sorcery stuff, try some of Jonathan Carroll's books. Books that are straight solid drama with just a little of the fantastic in the mix. Try Land of Laughs (biographer discovers that his favorite children's fantasy author may have just been writing about the way things are in his home town) or Bones of the Moon (a woman who dreams of another world that may be just as real as her waking life) and see what you think.
Slashdot Mirror
Just FYI, this is probably the specific change that fixed the crystal drop problem:
If you quit 6 months ago or so, that was right after the NA release, and nobody was getting crystals. Crystals don't drop in regions controlled by beastmen. Since all the noobs were running out when they got the game and getting killed left and right, beastmen controlled all areas near towns. I had the game for 3 weeks before I saw a single crystal (on La Theine Plateau, for those who play the game - Ronfaure was always under beastmen control).
Probably about the time you left, they changed the rules so people under level 4 or 5 (I forget) don't affect the control of a region when they die, and now crystals are common drops in the noob zones at low levels.
Gender has more than one proper English usage.
Gender and sex are generally considered to be two separate (related) topics.
For those not in a reading mood, your sex generally considered to be what your chromosomes and organs say (assuming they agree, which they don't always), while your gender refers to learned social roles.
I can also name a couple what about COBOL when was the last time your wrote a COBOL program for Windows??
Now that you mention it, it's a little disturbing how many people really do that.
Here is the page about the free version of AVG.
We also moved from Dark Alliance to Dark Legacy (and marveled over the similariy in even the names), and you'll probably be happy with it. The only major complaint I had was that if you're playing two player, Gauntlet is a little too easy, and if you get 3-4 players together it's just a hackfest, but it makes up for it by being fairly long; I forget the exact number, but there's something like 40-50 levels.
Thanks. I'm already pretty sickeningly happy. Now, if I can just get this wedding thing out of the way (we're planning and preparing the whole affair almost entirely by ourselves), we can get to the marriage part... ;)
Would she give it a shot if you promise to insulate her from the RPG parts? My girlfriend (wife tomorrow!) is too daunted by RPGs, even relatively linear and action-oriented ones like Final Fantasy X, but Dark Alliance is her favorite game because she can ask my advice on equipment and spells, then play the game basically like Gauntlet but with less hacknslashing and more interesting magic.
;)
For the really RPG-phobic, isn't there an option to turn off the damage number popups? Then you could do her equipment shopping for her and she can pretend she's playing Gauntlet: Dark Alliance.
(I'm thinking back to old CS classes here, so correct me if I'm wrong...)
Compilation, in common usage, means converting a source file in whatever language into an executable, since most people rarely if ever compile without intending to immediately generate an executable.
Compilation, in the more technical definition most commonly given by CS professors and people who wrote code before 1980 ;), is the process of converting a higher-level language into assembly code, which is then assembled into an executable. (I'll avoid the thornier issues of linking here.)
The term Compilation gets used in both of the above senses, but if you're going to use one, keep the other one in mind so you know what other people are talking about.
And on a side rant, contrary to what some people seem to believe, assembler is not just a prettier form of machine language, though it's close. For example, in x86 assembly, the assembly opcode and arguments MOV x,y can translate into several different machine language instructions, depending on whether x and y are registers, memory locations, memory locations with segment offsets, etc. in any combination (i.e. MOV reg,mem is one instruction, MOV mem,reg is another, MOV reg,[seg]mem is yet another, etc.). Other instructions work the same way, which is why the x86 instruction set has about 3,987,236,231,235 valid instructions.
Hope I remembered all that right. If not, correct me, because I'm getting rusty on my low-level stuff. ;)
The people who try to enforce blocking lists think that it solves this problem, since they tell you exactly what you're not supposed to carry, but they apparently don't realize that their list of inappropriate/illegal sites is out of date in a very short time, so it doesn't solve anything unless it's constantly verified and updated.
And a substantial number of voters will probably buy it.
If you can't get to the content providers to arrest them, that's not the ISP's fault.
Of course, I live in a state that only sort of supports e-filing (I still have to fill out a form, sign a voucher, etc. and mail it), but that's a whole other issue.
1. No one lived in a rural area. Out in the sticks, you might have to drive an hour to even get to a retailer who has the item you want, if it's high-tech or some other specialty.
First off, that is not an argument against the validity of the concept of opportunity cost. Opportunity cost is a very simple idea - if you go to college instead of taking a job, the cost of college isn't just tuition etc. but also the money you didn't make by taking that job for the duration of your college education. That's the opportunity cost of college, and every time you have to make a choice, that choice has an opportunity cost.
I will proceed with the assumption that you're actually questioning whether opportunity cost is meaningful in this situation where the loss is incurred by a third party, since that's more interesting.
Yes, all other things being equal (a fairly big jump, socioeconomically), people in rural areas would be more likely to order things online. Following that logic, people in cities would, by the same token, be more likely to buy locally compared to their rural counterparts. Since we're dealing with state taxes, not local taxes, these factors would average out state-wide according to the overall population density of that state to give a certain percentage of shopping done online. Therefore this is a matter of degree, and does not affect the fact that money is being moved out of the taxable commerce within the state.
2. I could count sales lost to my competitor on my taxes as a business loss. Every sale that could have been mine but went to a competitor must be a loss as well!
No. Not remotely the same thing.
First, I'm not sure where you got the idea that businesses can write off losses of just any kind to be magically reimbursed by the federal cash cow, but it just isn't reality.
Second, it seems that everyone who has replied to me in this thread is assuming that, when I say money is lost, that somehow implies a legal or moral right to regain that money. That was never said or implied, and I even specifically stated in the beginning that I was not endorsing the idea of letting states somehow regain that money. Please STOP reading things into posts that are not there. Loss is not the same thing as theft - that's why they're two different words. Even if it only costs $1, if I make the choice to buy something online instead of locally when both options are available, the state has lost the tax on that sale, regardless of whether or not they have a right to regain that money.
Sure Java can do a nice flexible cross-platform (in theory, anyway) GUI front end, but even setting aside the performance issues of Swing, it generally takes a good bit more time to set up than a comparable VB interface.
>The goods an services of one state may not be taxed by another state.
>Even if such tax bills were passed they would be overturned.
As I said before, "I make no judgement on taxing online purchases here." The fact that tax money is being lost does not imply any belief that states have a legal right to regain that money.
Please read posts in their entirety before replying.
Come to think of it, I can see how that statement could be misread. Put another way, this is assuming that a given consumer will buy certain products they want/need no matter what, and the variable is how much is bought online versus how much is bought in local stores. This as opposed to the idea that people on average are spending more money overall because of online sales.
Sorry if that wasn't clear.
I think both are valid arguments depending on individual preference, and either way, states are still losing money on online purchases - it's just a matter of how much.
> 1. You can't lose something you never had.
Sorry, but that's entirely wrong.
Opportunity Cost (definitions: 1, 2) is essentially the issue here. The cost of something also includes the opportunity that is given up, even though it was never actually posessed. Assuming that consumers would buy the same goods whether online or in stores, every purchase online deprives the states of the otherwise-available opportunity to tax that purchase.
This situation is a little different from classic examples of opportunity cost, because the person making the choice is not the one losing the opportunity, but the same principles apply. The states never had that money, but they have indeed lost it because the online purchases removed the opportunity.
I'm no economist myself, so if there's a principle that applies more directly to the situation I'd be interested to hear it. Also, I make no judgement on taxing online purchases here; I'm just pointing out that you don't have to be able to hold something in your hand in order to lose it.
Someone else does that!? Nice. I thought it was just me and my brother with our combined compulsive need to pronounce all technology-related abbreviations pseudophonetically. Of course, some (www, ssl, html...) work better than others (http, ftp...).
I remember back in the good old text-based days of the web (which, as a 24 year old, is a ridiculous phrase for me to even use, but anyway...) there seemed to be a fair number of sites that used "web" as their preferred machine name for the web server. That disappeared pretty quickly, but man I always wished that would come back...
As a big fan of lynx (my first ISP years ago, and the only one available to me for many months, was a dialup shell account), I'll plug the links browser here, which is a fine text-based browser that supports tables, so it can make sense of lots of pages that are unusable in lynx, and it has a somewhat friendlier interface to boot.
Yes, they own it.
Ditto for Opera 7. Right-click on a bookmark folder and click "open," or drag the folder onto the tab strip. I think Opera 6 called it something different, but same idea.
150-250% might be a little wacky, but 100% seems reasonable to me - the book publishing industry is similar to the recording industry in a lot of ways, and bookstores generally get around a 35-45% discount off the cover price while distributors and major stores (Amazon, probably B&N) get the standard "deep discount," which is 55%, so 100% is a reasonable markup estimate for books anyway.
Of course, CDs might use a totally different price scheme, but it seems like a comparable product.
If you're looking to stick with the fantasy genre but want to branch out some from the high fantasy swords & sorcery stuff, try some of Jonathan Carroll's books. Books that are straight solid drama with just a little of the fantastic in the mix. Try Land of Laughs (biographer discovers that his favorite children's fantasy author may have just been writing about the way things are in his home town) or Bones of the Moon (a woman who dreams of another world that may be just as real as her waking life) and see what you think.