If there's one thing I've learned from watching 10,000 cop procedurals, it's that if the DA dares charge even en ex-cop with anything, all the other cops will "lose" evidence resulting in a 0% conviction rate, and then he won't get reelected because he'll seem incompetent.
"I saw it on Law and Order, so it must be true!"
You do realize how ridiculous that sounds?
TV Shows are not real. Even the ones "ripped from the headlines."
The only thing those shows get right is that officers always protect their own.
Fact check. Sorry if this makes me a "hater" or a "hand-waver" but there *was* a market, however small, for portable mp3 players before the iPod. The Diamond Rio and the Creative NOMAD are the most memorable fore-runners. Similarly, there was already an almost 10 year-old market for "smart" phones before the iPhone came along, satisfied by offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Or didn't you know that? Maybe you need to turn in your geek card?;)
I think the grandparent was correct. sjobs had a big part of creating the market -- not necessarily creating new types of products. His strength was always in taking existing products and refining their designs and usability in a way where everyone actually wanted to use them. Looking back too, the choices just -look- so easy, easy enough so that you wonder why Creative hadn't done it. Or Nokia, or Palm (but we already know why Blackberry didn't, sadly).
That teacher sounds like an imbecile, and ought to be sued on principle. His counter-argument is for a steady state universe? Wasn't that debunked like, a century ago? And then re-debunked when morons like this guy tried to bring it back by saying that a constant stream of matter was being created from nowhere at just the right rate to keep the universe expanding forever?
Well he is a history teacher, not a science teacher. Why this topic came up in the first place is inane.
Does this mean that you would support a teacher with a belief in creationism teaching his opinion in a public school?
I have my doubts.
In a religion class, sure. In a science class, I would expect that science be taught, along with the conflicts of different scientific theories. However, a science class is not the place for science vs non-science theories, which is why "teach the controversy" is bullshit.
Unfortunately, this all happened during history class, and this particular professor is known for being a dick in this topic.
Probably the guys bragged about how many girls they didn't score with since the last meeting.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not, but I think that's likely to be accurate. Talk about how they were tempted, and how their strength in Christ allowed them to resist, and how much better for it they were.
The atheistic version of current cosmological theory says that not only didn't the Big Bang have a cause, it could not have had a cause (there was no "before" the Big Bang).
A number of theologians have believed the same thing, Constantine among them. The notion that time itself had no meaning before creation.
The universe could in fact have always existed, we simply haven't figured out how yet
If the universe had always existed, then the stars would have been shining for an infinite amount of time and they would have radiated enough heat to heat the universe up to their temperature. The whole sky would be as bright as the sun because everywhere you looked would be a star, or a cloud of dust, or something heated up until it was as hot as the stars. That the sky is not glowing in every direction implies that something happened in the past to make the stars light up a certain time ago.
Hubble discovered that the stars were not in fixed positions, that galaxies were moving away from each other. The further the galaxy, the faster it was moving! The universe is expanding, which means the galaxies must have been very close together at some point.
(Proper attribution for this theorizing goes, once again, to Stephen Hawking).
I love how the anti-Creationists love to refute religion by citing evidence of evolution - but no one has a good explanation of time=0
Stephen Hawking, who had quite a bit to do with the formation of the Big Bang Theory, said "but suppose this chain has a beginning. Suppose there was a first event. What caused it? This was not a question that many scientists wanted to address. They tried to avoid it, either by claiming, like the Russians, that the universe didn't have a beginning or by maintaining that the origin of the universe did not lie within the realm of science but belonged to metaphysics or religion. In my opinion, this is not a position any true scientist should take. If the laws of science are suspended at the beginning of the universe, might not they fail at other times also? A law is not a law if it only holds sometimes. We must try to understand the beginning of the universe on the basis of science. It may be a task beyond our powers, but we should at least make the attempt."
We know a decent amount about the early history of the universe because given the laws and theories we believe to be true, those are the conditions that could result in the universe we see today. The early theories of the formation were used to predict the existence of the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation, and its existence was verified twenty years later.
All we really know is 3 dimensions and linear time
All you know is three dimensions and linear time. Other dimensions have been formulated to explain the nature of matter on a quantum level, but have little effect on a macro level. We know that if there were four or more flat dimensions, the gravitational attraction of objects would grow much faster the closer they approached each other. Planets could not attain stable orbits around their suns. Similarly, the orbits of electrons could not remain stable, so matter as we know it would not exist. Only histories of the universe with three flat dimensions will contain intelligent beings capable of asking the question "why are there only three dimensions?"
And time has been shown experimentally to not entirely be a straight line, at least not in every circumstance. It can be curved (and spacetime is certainly curved).
Today it is a DPS race, and the tank as well only needs to DPS, no significant player ability for tanking is needed. DPS is coming from gear and not from secret DPS skills.
Mmm, I don't really buy that, I see a lot of dpsers who -should- be capable of far more DPS given their gear than they are putting out. Gear does not equal DPS, it sets a cap on the highest potential. With every boss having an enrage, soft or hard, there's a lot of pressure on the dps to maximize performance. DPS races are the new norm. I don't see how that's no pressure on the dpsers.
And as a warrior who did top-end damage in both Wrath and Cataclysm, I can attest that DPS in general is far more difficult now than it was even just a year ago. The rage changes alone make resource conservation as important for a warrior as mana conservation is for healers.
I'll concede PvP since I haven't PvPed in years (and not on a warrior since Vanilla).
I've been playing WoW for 6+ years, and I think WoW has definitely slipped and it has a lot of huge problems... But raiding is the big area that I think they've really gotten right and improved over time. Firelands is fantastic.
What made things interesting pre-cata was running all the quests in the original expansion before setting foot past the gate
Do you mean the original non-expansion, aka vanilla?
With the 90% XP nerf, people are essentially forced into lockstep linear progression with no real choice of changing stuff around, especially with alts.
I'm not really sure what this means. It's far easier now than it used to be to skip content. You get far more XP now from doing quests and dungeons than you used to, and the entire time from the release of Burning Crusade until the release of Cataclysm, you couldn't do old-world instances. No one wanted to do them, there was no facility for getting groups together. I'm doing instances like Wailing Caverns at level with alts for the first time in five years!
The real problem is that the low level content has been invalidated by Bind on account equipment items that scale better than any other items you can get in dungeons/quests for your level and boost the amount of xp you get as well. Basically the only interesting content is the end-game raiding content.
But... you don't have to use those items or even buy them. In fact, they even added an NPC to Orgrimmar and Stormwind who would completely disable experience gains so that you don't out-level the content that you want to do.
The problem that I've found is that even just using items found during questing, the content is much, much easier than it was. It's no challenge at all.
Oh yes... there goes the pull arrow.... and behind it flies the crit fireball...
Haha, as a tank I actually didn't mind that, as long as I didn't have some large AoE pull and had to switch targets. If a dpser crits on the pull, then I can taunt and shoot up immediately in threat and not have to worry about any of the above dpsers. Starting a pull with a taunt, that was the mistake.
throw more and more weak content and grindfests at the players while ignoring what many wanted
While I think WoW has fallen far, I think Blizzard's problem has been too much of "giving people what they asked for."
Like, "leveling to 60 is such a grind, I want to just get that over with quickly because the endgame is where it's at anyway." That was an extremely popular mantra repeated over and over again. So now it's brain-dead easy and way too fast to level. For me, alts were fun and challenging, and now it's so easy that even iron-manning it (no support from other characters, no pimping out new characters with account-bound items, just using whatever you find while questing) isn't difficult. With no challenge, there's no fun.
1. They killed our raid alliance by making 10- and 25-man raids mutually exclusive. I said it would ruin lots of raid groups where the core players pushed 10 on hard but enabled larger 25 groups to play on normal, and it did. Grats Blizzard, the 15 that got excluded aren't having fun any more.
It sucked... SUCKED going through ICC multiple times per week on the same character. Having different 10 and 25-man groups meant you got sick of doing a specific raid much faster than in days of yore. This was even moreso for Coliseum, which had different instances and lockouts for heroic versions of the same group number, so if you were particularly masochistic you could do that instance four times in a week on the same character. Not that groups going through 25-man heroic Coliseum would see any gain from going through 10-man normal.
This was particularly a problem when ICC was the last major instance of the expansion, and the next expansion didn't come out for a full year afterwards. If the same happens here (the next raid, featuring Deathwing, will be the last raid of Cataclysm) and the next/final expansion comes out late 2012, I think the cancellation numbers will make last quarters' look like a drop in the bucket.
I think the part where you said "Everything that once was complicated is now super simple."
Fact is: NOW RAIDS are simpler!
You could macro a spell rotation... and?
And what? Be a poor example of your spec? In vanilla a mage could do nothing but spam frostbolt. A warrior could mortal strike and whirlwind (and not much else). A paladin could dance until the raid leader told him to stop messing around and go back to healing. At least warlocks were always pretty complex, that was a class that was more interesting than the others from day 1. The recent redesign turned many classes that were formally strict rotations into priority systems, priorities that you have to properly use if you want to do top-end DPS. Sure, you can always spam the same keys in order if you want. But you could always do that.
Some vanilla raids had some very challenging tanking mechanics (most of AQ40, some of BWL) but Molten Core was brain dead in design -- the encounters were of a level of ease that if they were done today everyone would claim they were totally half-assed. Even BWL, as much as I loved that instance, had a number of encounters that are dead simple compared to most Cata raid encounters. It wasn't until later that the concept of an enrage was even added, so the fight could last as long as you wanted it to last -- no pressure on the dpsers!
From my experience attacking much lower level characters seemed to be the point of world "pvp", well, when those skull level players weren't busy wiping out all your quest npcs.
Sometimes. But that actually became more of a problem once Battlegrounds came out and world PVP had mostly died out, so there was no one to respond to people griefing in another faction's town. Many PVP grindfests, like Southshort/Tarren Mill scrums, could be incredibly fun, even though they often resulted in Tarren Mill left as a ghost town. More than normal (haha, undead joke. Right?)
Then again, I only ever played on PvE servers. PvP servers sounded like an exercise in frustration from day 1, especially since I like to pause the game a lot. When standing in the wilderness. I don't want idle == free HK, nor do I want to be hassled when I'm trying to relax late at night with some low-level alt questing.
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If there's one thing I've learned from watching 10,000 cop procedurals, it's that if the DA dares charge even en ex-cop with anything, all the other cops will "lose" evidence resulting in a 0% conviction rate, and then he won't get reelected because he'll seem incompetent.
"I saw it on Law and Order, so it must be true!"
You do realize how ridiculous that sounds?
TV Shows are not real. Even the ones "ripped from the headlines."
The only thing those shows get right is that officers always protect their own.
Fact check. Sorry if this makes me a "hater" or a "hand-waver" but there *was* a market, however small, for portable mp3 players before the iPod. The Diamond Rio and the Creative NOMAD are the most memorable fore-runners. Similarly, there was already an almost 10 year-old market for "smart" phones before the iPhone came along, satisfied by offerings from Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and Blackberry. Or didn't you know that? Maybe you need to turn in your geek card? ;)
I think the grandparent was correct. sjobs had a big part of creating the market -- not necessarily creating new types of products. His strength was always in taking existing products and refining their designs and usability in a way where everyone actually wanted to use them. Looking back too, the choices just -look- so easy, easy enough so that you wonder why Creative hadn't done it. Or Nokia, or Palm (but we already know why Blackberry didn't, sadly).
3% is not 1/3 of my finger
Well, roughly it is, if you count thumbs as fingers, and you're a normal person so you have 10. A finger is 1/10th your total fingers.
3% is about a third of 1/10th.
That teacher sounds like an imbecile, and ought to be sued on principle. His counter-argument is for a steady state universe? Wasn't that debunked like, a century ago? And then re-debunked when morons like this guy tried to bring it back by saying that a constant stream of matter was being created from nowhere at just the right rate to keep the universe expanding forever?
Well he is a history teacher, not a science teacher. Why this topic came up in the first place is inane.
Does this mean that you would support a teacher with a belief in creationism teaching his opinion in a public school?
I have my doubts.
In a religion class, sure. In a science class, I would expect that science be taught, along with the conflicts of different scientific theories. However, a science class is not the place for science vs non-science theories, which is why "teach the controversy" is bullshit.
Unfortunately, this all happened during history class, and this particular professor is known for being a dick in this topic.
What if a student believes dinosaurs are an evil deception?
No, the Dinos were Autobots not Decepticons, led by Grimlock, who declared himself king of Autobots when Optimus went missing.
Every student should be versed in this history by now. What are they teaching kids in school these days?
Didn't RTFA, did ya?
I read his notes. The teacher goes out of his way to be disrespectful and denigrating.
Probably the guys bragged about how many girls they didn't score with since the last meeting.
I'm not sure if you're being serious or not, but I think that's likely to be accurate. Talk about how they were tempted, and how their strength in Christ allowed them to resist, and how much better for it they were.
The atheistic version of current cosmological theory says that not only didn't the Big Bang have a cause, it could not have had a cause (there was no "before" the Big Bang).
A number of theologians have believed the same thing, Constantine among them. The notion that time itself had no meaning before creation.
The universe could in fact have always existed, we simply haven't figured out how yet
If the universe had always existed, then the stars would have been shining for an infinite amount of time and they would have radiated enough heat to heat the universe up to their temperature. The whole sky would be as bright as the sun because everywhere you looked would be a star, or a cloud of dust, or something heated up until it was as hot as the stars. That the sky is not glowing in every direction implies that something happened in the past to make the stars light up a certain time ago.
Hubble discovered that the stars were not in fixed positions, that galaxies were moving away from each other. The further the galaxy, the faster it was moving! The universe is expanding, which means the galaxies must have been very close together at some point.
(Proper attribution for this theorizing goes, once again, to Stephen Hawking).
I love how the anti-Creationists love to refute religion by citing evidence of evolution - but no one has a good explanation of time=0
Stephen Hawking, who had quite a bit to do with the formation of the Big Bang Theory, said "but suppose this chain has a beginning. Suppose there was a first event. What caused it? This was not a question that many scientists wanted to address. They tried to avoid it, either by claiming, like the Russians, that the universe didn't have a beginning or by maintaining that the origin of the universe did not lie within the realm of science but belonged to metaphysics or religion. In my opinion, this is not a position any true scientist should take. If the laws of science are suspended at the beginning of the universe, might not they fail at other times also? A law is not a law if it only holds sometimes. We must try to understand the beginning of the universe on the basis of science. It may be a task beyond our powers, but we should at least make the attempt."
We know a decent amount about the early history of the universe because given the laws and theories we believe to be true, those are the conditions that could result in the universe we see today. The early theories of the formation were used to predict the existence of the Cosmic Background Microwave Radiation, and its existence was verified twenty years later.
All we really know is 3 dimensions and linear time
All you know is three dimensions and linear time. Other dimensions have been formulated to explain the nature of matter on a quantum level, but have little effect on a macro level. We know that if there were four or more flat dimensions, the gravitational attraction of objects would grow much faster the closer they approached each other. Planets could not attain stable orbits around their suns. Similarly, the orbits of electrons could not remain stable, so matter as we know it would not exist. Only histories of the universe with three flat dimensions will contain intelligent beings capable of asking the question "why are there only three dimensions?"
And time has been shown experimentally to not entirely be a straight line, at least not in every circumstance. It can be curved (and spacetime is certainly curved).
The vast majority of that suffering is brought about by excess population, which all of the Abrahamic religions seem to promote.
Of course.
The society that propagates more and can grow larger and larger pushes the others aside. It's no surprise that this feature appears in the "winner."
Achmed will be able to make his 7pm WoW raid on Ragnaros in the Firelands.
Today it is a DPS race, and the tank as well only needs to DPS, no significant player ability for tanking is needed.
DPS is coming from gear and not from secret DPS skills.
Mmm, I don't really buy that, I see a lot of dpsers who -should- be capable of far more DPS given their gear than they are putting out. Gear does not equal DPS, it sets a cap on the highest potential. With every boss having an enrage, soft or hard, there's a lot of pressure on the dps to maximize performance. DPS races are the new norm. I don't see how that's no pressure on the dpsers.
And as a warrior who did top-end damage in both Wrath and Cataclysm, I can attest that DPS in general is far more difficult now than it was even just a year ago. The rage changes alone make resource conservation as important for a warrior as mana conservation is for healers.
I'll concede PvP since I haven't PvPed in years (and not on a warrior since Vanilla).
I've been playing WoW for 6+ years, and I think WoW has definitely slipped and it has a lot of huge problems...
But raiding is the big area that I think they've really gotten right and improved over time. Firelands is fantastic.
What made things interesting pre-cata was running all the quests in the original expansion before setting foot past the gate
Do you mean the original non-expansion, aka vanilla?
With the 90% XP nerf, people are essentially forced into lockstep linear progression with no real choice of changing stuff around, especially with alts.
I'm not really sure what this means. It's far easier now than it used to be to skip content. You get far more XP now from doing quests and dungeons than you used to, and the entire time from the release of Burning Crusade until the release of Cataclysm, you couldn't do old-world instances. No one wanted to do them, there was no facility for getting groups together. I'm doing instances like Wailing Caverns at level with alts for the first time in five years!
The real problem is that the low level content has been invalidated by Bind on account equipment items that scale better than any other items you can get in dungeons/quests for your level and boost the amount of xp you get as well. Basically the only interesting content is the end-game raiding content.
But... you don't have to use those items or even buy them. In fact, they even added an NPC to Orgrimmar and Stormwind who would completely disable experience gains so that you don't out-level the content that you want to do.
The problem that I've found is that even just using items found during questing, the content is much, much easier than it was. It's no challenge at all.
you need 20% tank for heroics, and about 10% for raids,
Mmmm, not for 10-mans at least! There are rather few 10-man encounters at the moment that require just one tank instead of two.
Oh yes... there goes the pull arrow.... and behind it flies the crit fireball...
Haha, as a tank I actually didn't mind that, as long as I didn't have some large AoE pull and had to switch targets. If a dpser crits on the pull, then I can taunt and shoot up immediately in threat and not have to worry about any of the above dpsers. Starting a pull with a taunt, that was the mistake.
And hey, I actually liked the 3 hour long AV battles.
I liked the 49-hour long AV battles.
(Not an exaggeration, that happened once on my server).
throw more and more weak content and grindfests at the players while ignoring what many wanted
While I think WoW has fallen far, I think Blizzard's problem has been too much of "giving people what they asked for."
Like, "leveling to 60 is such a grind, I want to just get that over with quickly because the endgame is where it's at anyway." That was an extremely popular mantra repeated over and over again. So now it's brain-dead easy and way too fast to level. For me, alts were fun and challenging, and now it's so easy that even iron-manning it (no support from other characters, no pimping out new characters with account-bound items, just using whatever you find while questing) isn't difficult. With no challenge, there's no fun.
But surely a new generation of gamers are there to take their place? Circle of life, baby.
Not necessarily. I'd think for the most part they're looking for newer games and newer environments rather than a 7-year-old one.
1. They killed our raid alliance by making 10- and 25-man raids mutually exclusive. I said it would ruin lots of raid groups where the core players pushed 10 on hard but enabled larger 25 groups to play on normal, and it did. Grats Blizzard, the 15 that got excluded aren't having fun any more.
It sucked... SUCKED going through ICC multiple times per week on the same character. Having different 10 and 25-man groups meant you got sick of doing a specific raid much faster than in days of yore. This was even moreso for Coliseum, which had different instances and lockouts for heroic versions of the same group number, so if you were particularly masochistic you could do that instance four times in a week on the same character. Not that groups going through 25-man heroic Coliseum would see any gain from going through 10-man normal.
This was particularly a problem when ICC was the last major instance of the expansion, and the next expansion didn't come out for a full year afterwards. If the same happens here (the next raid, featuring Deathwing, will be the last raid of Cataclysm) and the next/final expansion comes out late 2012, I think the cancellation numbers will make last quarters' look like a drop in the bucket.
What is untrue in one of my points?
I think the part where you said "Everything that once was complicated is now super simple."
Fact is: NOW RAIDS are simpler!
You could macro a spell rotation ... and?
And what? Be a poor example of your spec? In vanilla a mage could do nothing but spam frostbolt. A warrior could mortal strike and whirlwind (and not much else). A paladin could dance until the raid leader told him to stop messing around and go back to healing. At least warlocks were always pretty complex, that was a class that was more interesting than the others from day 1. The recent redesign turned many classes that were formally strict rotations into priority systems, priorities that you have to properly use if you want to do top-end DPS. Sure, you can always spam the same keys in order if you want. But you could always do that.
Some vanilla raids had some very challenging tanking mechanics (most of AQ40, some of BWL) but Molten Core was brain dead in design -- the encounters were of a level of ease that if they were done today everyone would claim they were totally half-assed. Even BWL, as much as I loved that instance, had a number of encounters that are dead simple compared to most Cata raid encounters. It wasn't until later that the concept of an enrage was even added, so the fight could last as long as you wanted it to last -- no pressure on the dpsers!
From my experience attacking much lower level characters seemed to be the point of world "pvp", well, when those skull level players weren't busy wiping out all your quest npcs.
Sometimes. But that actually became more of a problem once Battlegrounds came out and world PVP had mostly died out, so there was no one to respond to people griefing in another faction's town. Many PVP grindfests, like Southshort/Tarren Mill scrums, could be incredibly fun, even though they often resulted in Tarren Mill left as a ghost town. More than normal (haha, undead joke. Right?)
Then again, I only ever played on PvE servers. PvP servers sounded like an exercise in frustration from day 1, especially since I like to pause the game a lot. When standing in the wilderness. I don't want idle == free HK, nor do I want to be hassled when I'm trying to relax late at night with some low-level alt questing.