Did EverQuest, World of Warcraft, or any other subscription MMORPG cost money to "buy" at launch?
All of them. It's very rare that a non-freemium MMO doesn't have a purchase price.
I do not think they are even remotely comparable to this though. For that monthly fee, you're getting something. There's in-game support, constant development of new areas, improved rules, GM events, etc... You're paying to keep the online servers up, and the development to continue. MMO's are an entirely different animal than other games.
I'd compare it to buying a bowling ball. If you buy a basket ball, you know you can use it where-ever, even setup your own hoop. Buy a bowling ball and you're totally aware that to play that game it's going to cost you $20 every time. It's part of the deal and you understand it. But what this developer is doing is akin to selling you a basketball with a coin slot on the side. You have to put coins in, but you get nothing in return. It's just a money grab.
The vast majority of oil is shipped by pipeline or boat. The amount shipped by rail and truck is very small. It's only been used recently because of environmental opposition to pipelines. We're talking a few percent of what's shipped by pipeline or boat.
Yet train derailments and truck crashes spill more oil than pipelines. The spills are smaller, a few hundred barrels, so they don't make a lot of news. When pipelines or boats spill, its usually either a major national news event because of the volume, or its a slow leak that goes unnoticed for years and adds up over time. With trains/trucks the spills can often be worse because they are often traveling through heavily populated areas and interstates that pass through wild-life preserves. Pipelines and boats aren't allowed near those areas other than their end-points. So the pipeline spills are often in areas where it's not as damaging. Train/truck spills may be of smaller amounts but could be in very bad locations (i.e. next to your kids daycare)
Wouldn't law enforcement just require the account usernames and then get the data from the respective service providers with a warrant? Sounds a bit unprofessional that they would go logging in to the accounts by themselves.
You've never been in court have you?
The primary legal argument in most cases in this country are: "Well we're the police we can do that. Constitution? Sure you could appeal this but the fines $500, you're legal fees on appeal would be at least $5000... tell you what, pay the fine and we expunge the charges in 6 months!"
Yes, this has happened to me. I even got a ticket once for "unlawful use of horn" when I honked at a guy that almost hit me. But he was the cops uncle (cop told me this) he then proceeded to tell me "Sure this would get thrown out of court, but I get paid to go to court. You don't. I can give you a ticket every day you drive through here. How long would you keep your job? Now how about you stop being a jerk and honking at old people?" I called the police station later and spoke with the guys boss who laughed at me and said his officer told him "Some jerk will be calling you..."
The police only follow proper procedure and what-not when they think the case is big enough that it'll mater... i.e. you're going to jail and they know you'll fight tooth and nail. Otherwise they just search illegally, bully and batter people, contaminate evidence (if they even bother to collect any) and then slap a fine on you. If the fines aren't over a couple of thousand and there's no jail involved, its almost always in your financial best interest to just roll over and take it. In the few cases where the person doesn't? They don't care, 100 other people got arrested on the same day.
Uber could have easily made changes to their software that would have made local authorities all across the world a lot less likely to care but they didn't. Given an entrenched industry you're competing with an easy way to put you out of business and they will.
You mean to tell me, in a country where guns are illegal, the number of deaths resulting from guns is lower? I'm shocked!
all kidding aside, lets have some real numbers: The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world... by a HUGE margin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
We have twice as many guns per person as almost every other country on earth. If Guns = murder, then we should also have the highest murder rate right?
We don't: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... We actually have a fairly low murder rate compared to most of the world depending on how you judge it. In comparison to our closest neighbor Canada we're a tad higher... but hey, they're Canadians, the only disputes they get in are over the shape on their bacon.
If you're going to have an argument, clouding it with made-up data just makes people not listen to you. The problem with the gun control crowd is their goal is an unconstitutional outright ban and they make no attempt to hide that. Every gun control law isn't passed to limit gun deaths, they're passed in an attempt to ban guns. If the NRA could trust the gun control advocates, I think they'd be a little more co-operative. Increased background checks and required safety classes I think everyone could agree on. But when the anti-gun-nuts then use those background checks to delay and prevent people who are legally allowed to carry a weapon, those people get pissed and just flat out oppose any regulation. The gun regulation problems in this country are just as much the fault of those trying to pass the laws as they are the ones that oppose them.
but it is likely the demands the Directorate will place on Uber drivers, such as mandatory criminal record checks, vehicle inspections and insurance, will make the service in Melbourne unviable.
Those aren't unreasonable demands of someone wanting to carry passengers for hire. They are checks that pretty much the entire Western world has come up with after numerous problems with unsafe, uninsured and unsavoury taxi drivers. If this is enough to make Uber unviable, then I wouldn't want to be one of their investors.
I'd agree with you on that. It would be different if this app was being used for car pooling or just to find someone else going to the museum today. But instead Uber and other companies like them have just turned it into a quasi-legal taxi service with full-time drivers. I'm not sure if I agree with the out-right ban on them. I'd prefer to see them forced to disclose information when you apply for the ride about their insurance, criminal history, etc... in the application.
This bill sucks... and I wondered "Why would the ACLU support this?" But when you really think about it, if your neighbor had a vicious attack dog and you wanted him to take it to the pound, and he came to you and said "Well, I got this $4 leash and tied him to a tree..." are you going to say "Absolutely not!" No, you're going to thank him, wait a few days and then continue to pester him to get rid of the dog. Some restraint is better than none. I suspect the NSA will completely ignore this legislation and the ACLU will use it as legal leverage to file lawsuits and try to reveal more evidence of what they're up to.
Your Cable/Satellite/TV provider has no choice. The content provider sells the channels you want in packages that include other channels that are more profitable to the content provider. So there might be 1 premium channel in a package, but along with it the cable company is forced to also include infomercial channels, shopping channels, channels with nothing but reruns from the 50's, etc... The Cable companies want à la carte channels just as much as the consumers, they just can't risk alienating the media providers. They're the ones that have control of the industry.
When I was a student there was sadly no such thing as pirated books. What was really infuriating was that each class would require you to buy 4 or 5 books. You'd take the class and only open 1 or 2! And then you'd find out that one of the books was authored by your professor!
I quickly learned not to buy any of the books. The first day the professor would ask us to take it out I said "opps! forgot that one in my dorm!" share with someone the first day and pick it up on the way to my dorm. I recommend this strategy to anyone else thats newly attending college. It saved me thousands of dollars.
It would seem they simply consider the environmental detriment more significant than the economic detriment.
And the net effect of their political statement on the coal industry will be 0. The effect on their endowment, however, will not be. If they'd instead used the money they wouldn't have lost due to this change to further studies of nuclear or sustainable energy they'd have done a lot more good. There are those of us in the world concerned with "making a statement" about a problem, and then there are those of us concerned with "fixing" the problem. (and yes, I'm aware that most of us that just want to ignore the problem)
If you need to be private from your spouse/so, you should examine why. Then, alter your current relationship or find a relationship where it's comfortable enough that you don't feel like you have to keep secrets.
If you're keeping secrets, you're not all in, and bad things will come eventually. If you think that not being able to keep secrets constitutes abuse, I think you have a problematic definition.
As I'm very good at this sort of thing because I work in the industry and nothing goes in and out of our network without me knowing about it, it's come up. I explained to her that she would have to trust me that I would never read her mail (which I dont), and I would have to trust her that all of her secret emails involved surprise birthday parties or generalize complaints about me to her sisters (which I could understand). If she did feel the need to be sending the kinds of emails that if I read them we'd have a real problem, just divorce me instead. It will make the emails a lot easier, and I can hit on all her friends.
I look forward to claims along the lines of, "It's not abuse unless you physically injure them," and other quasi-religious nonsense which treats the brain as a perfectly rational ideal rather than just another organ subject to external influence.
What does this or any defense of it have to do with religion?
It all depends on the application. So re-using the rocket on earth is not cost effective, because it's cheaper to just use a new one. Ok, I can go along with that. But what about the moon? Mars? Where are you going to get a new rocket on mars? Being able to land and return to orbit from mars would be pretty handy.
I don't know if the guy is full of shit or not... but, I did my own google search.
I found that: 1. He wrote a book that was well received about his injury, though complaints were that it was overly wordy. There were several people that claimed to be mathematicians that reviewed it and said his area of specialty was fractal geometry and that he was so specialized it was uninteresting to them. He was basically obsessed with 1 aspect of geometry. 2. He is an artist, and makes Fractal art. Not that his stuff is that incredible but I doubt a furniture salesman could pull this off. http://fineartamerica.com/prof... 3. Here's photos of him. One includes his doctor: http://www.struckbygenius.com/... 4. That doctors name is Darold Treffert who appears to be am expert on Savant Syndrome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
So it appears to me that the guy actually did develop some Savant abilities. I don't know if he got them from an injury or not. But it appears that those abilities are so specialized that they may not be useful in an academic sense. If he can visualize incredibly complex geometries but can not, for example, do long division, his skill wouldn't really lead him to write a lot of papers.
Practically, the end of Pi is around 760-some digits, where you start to sound like Herman Cain. At that point, diameters won't be more than a Planck length off.
If you're using it for the geometry of the physical world, then you'd be correct. Fortunately however, Pi is used for far more than measuring the physical world.
Funny! While growing up my father was in charge of a team of guys that designed and built GMs first electronic speed sensor. Well, I'm not sure if it was their first but it was the first one to go into wide production and was also not-mechanical. He was working so much I ended up in the lab with him a lot. Watching those guys solve those problems is one of my most vivid memories from childhood. They had to babysit me while I played with all their test equipment and answer my silly questions about their project. Later my dad told me that was good for them. If they couldn't explain it to me, they wouldn't be able to explain it to GMs executives. lol
We did not vote for this. Not one of the executive branch lawyers who write legal justifications for this is elected.
Who appointed those lawyers? Stalin? You voted R or D, whomever won then installed his yes men.
I agree that voting third party is the answer.
I don't. The answer is: Stop voting for republicans or democrats. I don't care who else you vote for... just not them. ANY other candidate, part of a party or not would revolutionize our political system. And no, I don't mean the fake "independent" party that's nothing more than a group of the worst politicians we have that want to switch parties on a whim to suit their political ambitions. I want someone that tells the TRUTH. We aren't going to get that until we break this stranglehold our current 2 parties have on the system. So vote for anyone that isn't them.
They're much more popular in areas where computers are not much of an option like Africa. When I was there, you could stop at little wooden booths on the street and buy Feature phones and calling cards for a few dollars right along with various junk food and mystery meat on a stick. Due to the US cellular market being such a disaster no-one from the US's phone would work there unless you were an AT&T international plan. As a result everyone from the US would get off the plane and immediately buy one of these for $5 and enough minutes to call home.
Are they dead in the US? They were never a "thing" here to begin with. In Africa and other very rural areas with poor infrastructure, they are basically the only computer you can get and are hugely successful. People run full blown businesses off the things. So no, they aren't dead. Most people in these areas have a hard time coming up with the $5 for the phone. The average wage where I was at was $7/month. So the difference between $5 and a fancy $20 smart phone is 3 months salary. Don't get me wrong, these people had wealth (land, livestock, clothes, etc...) . It just wasn't easily transferable to US currency. They bartered a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
Did EverQuest, World of Warcraft, or any other subscription MMORPG cost money to "buy" at launch?
All of them. It's very rare that a non-freemium MMO doesn't have a purchase price.
I do not think they are even remotely comparable to this though. For that monthly fee, you're getting something. There's in-game support, constant development of new areas, improved rules, GM events, etc... You're paying to keep the online servers up, and the development to continue. MMO's are an entirely different animal than other games.
I'd compare it to buying a bowling ball. If you buy a basket ball, you know you can use it where-ever, even setup your own hoop. Buy a bowling ball and you're totally aware that to play that game it's going to cost you $20 every time. It's part of the deal and you understand it. But what this developer is doing is akin to selling you a basketball with a coin slot on the side. You have to put coins in, but you get nothing in return. It's just a money grab.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
I'm even better than the gene at making you smarter. :-p
The vast majority of oil is shipped by pipeline or boat. The amount shipped by rail and truck is very small. It's only been used recently because of environmental opposition to pipelines. We're talking a few percent of what's shipped by pipeline or boat.
Yet train derailments and truck crashes spill more oil than pipelines. The spills are smaller, a few hundred barrels, so they don't make a lot of news. When pipelines or boats spill, its usually either a major national news event because of the volume, or its a slow leak that goes unnoticed for years and adds up over time. With trains/trucks the spills can often be worse because they are often traveling through heavily populated areas and interstates that pass through wild-life preserves. Pipelines and boats aren't allowed near those areas other than their end-points. So the pipeline spills are often in areas where it's not as damaging. Train/truck spills may be of smaller amounts but could be in very bad locations (i.e. next to your kids daycare)
Further reading:
https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/mi...
Wouldn't law enforcement just require the account usernames and then get the data from the respective service providers with a warrant? Sounds a bit unprofessional that they would go logging in to the accounts by themselves.
You've never been in court have you?
The primary legal argument in most cases in this country are: "Well we're the police we can do that. Constitution? Sure you could appeal this but the fines $500, you're legal fees on appeal would be at least $5000... tell you what, pay the fine and we expunge the charges in 6 months!"
Yes, this has happened to me. I even got a ticket once for "unlawful use of horn" when I honked at a guy that almost hit me. But he was the cops uncle (cop told me this) he then proceeded to tell me "Sure this would get thrown out of court, but I get paid to go to court. You don't. I can give you a ticket every day you drive through here. How long would you keep your job? Now how about you stop being a jerk and honking at old people?" I called the police station later and spoke with the guys boss who laughed at me and said his officer told him "Some jerk will be calling you..."
The police only follow proper procedure and what-not when they think the case is big enough that it'll mater... i.e. you're going to jail and they know you'll fight tooth and nail. Otherwise they just search illegally, bully and batter people, contaminate evidence (if they even bother to collect any) and then slap a fine on you. If the fines aren't over a couple of thousand and there's no jail involved, its almost always in your financial best interest to just roll over and take it. In the few cases where the person doesn't? They don't care, 100 other people got arrested on the same day.
Uber could have easily made changes to their software that would have made local authorities all across the world a lot less likely to care but they didn't. Given an entrenched industry you're competing with an easy way to put you out of business and they will.
You mean to tell me, in a country where guns are illegal, the number of deaths resulting from guns is lower? I'm shocked!
all kidding aside, lets have some real numbers:
The United States has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world... by a HUGE margin:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
We have twice as many guns per person as almost every other country on earth.
If Guns = murder, then we should also have the highest murder rate right?
We don't:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
We actually have a fairly low murder rate compared to most of the world depending on how you judge it. In comparison to our closest neighbor Canada we're a tad higher... but hey, they're Canadians, the only disputes they get in are over the shape on their bacon.
If you're going to have an argument, clouding it with made-up data just makes people not listen to you. The problem with the gun control crowd is their goal is an unconstitutional outright ban and they make no attempt to hide that. Every gun control law isn't passed to limit gun deaths, they're passed in an attempt to ban guns. If the NRA could trust the gun control advocates, I think they'd be a little more co-operative. Increased background checks and required safety classes I think everyone could agree on. But when the anti-gun-nuts then use those background checks to delay and prevent people who are legally allowed to carry a weapon, those people get pissed and just flat out oppose any regulation. The gun regulation problems in this country are just as much the fault of those trying to pass the laws as they are the ones that oppose them.
Those aren't unreasonable demands of someone wanting to carry passengers for hire. They are checks that pretty much the entire Western world has come up with after numerous problems with unsafe, uninsured and unsavoury taxi drivers. If this is enough to make Uber unviable, then I wouldn't want to be one of their investors.
I'd agree with you on that. It would be different if this app was being used for car pooling or just to find someone else going to the museum today. But instead Uber and other companies like them have just turned it into a quasi-legal taxi service with full-time drivers. I'm not sure if I agree with the out-right ban on them. I'd prefer to see them forced to disclose information when you apply for the ride about their insurance, criminal history, etc... in the application.
This bill sucks... and I wondered "Why would the ACLU support this?" But when you really think about it, if your neighbor had a vicious attack dog and you wanted him to take it to the pound, and he came to you and said "Well, I got this $4 leash and tied him to a tree..." are you going to say "Absolutely not!" No, you're going to thank him, wait a few days and then continue to pester him to get rid of the dog. Some restraint is better than none. I suspect the NSA will completely ignore this legislation and the ACLU will use it as legal leverage to file lawsuits and try to reveal more evidence of what they're up to.
Your Cable/Satellite/TV provider has no choice. The content provider sells the channels you want in packages that include other channels that are more profitable to the content provider. So there might be 1 premium channel in a package, but along with it the cable company is forced to also include infomercial channels, shopping channels, channels with nothing but reruns from the 50's, etc... The Cable companies want à la carte channels just as much as the consumers, they just can't risk alienating the media providers. They're the ones that have control of the industry.
When I was a student there was sadly no such thing as pirated books. What was really infuriating was that each class would require you to buy 4 or 5 books. You'd take the class and only open 1 or 2! And then you'd find out that one of the books was authored by your professor!
I quickly learned not to buy any of the books. The first day the professor would ask us to take it out I said "opps! forgot that one in my dorm!" share with someone the first day and pick it up on the way to my dorm. I recommend this strategy to anyone else thats newly attending college. It saved me thousands of dollars.
It would seem they simply consider the environmental detriment more significant than the economic detriment.
And the net effect of their political statement on the coal industry will be 0. The effect on their endowment, however, will not be. If they'd instead used the money they wouldn't have lost due to this change to further studies of nuclear or sustainable energy they'd have done a lot more good. There are those of us in the world concerned with "making a statement" about a problem, and then there are those of us concerned with "fixing" the problem. (and yes, I'm aware that most of us that just want to ignore the problem)
If you need to be private from your spouse/so, you should examine why. Then, alter your current relationship or find a relationship where it's comfortable enough that you don't feel like you have to keep secrets.
If you're keeping secrets, you're not all in, and bad things will come eventually. If you think that not being able to keep secrets constitutes abuse, I think you have a problematic definition.
As I'm very good at this sort of thing because I work in the industry and nothing goes in and out of our network without me knowing about it, it's come up. I explained to her that she would have to trust me that I would never read her mail (which I dont), and I would have to trust her that all of her secret emails involved surprise birthday parties or generalize complaints about me to her sisters (which I could understand). If she did feel the need to be sending the kinds of emails that if I read them we'd have a real problem, just divorce me instead. It will make the emails a lot easier, and I can hit on all her friends.
I look forward to claims along the lines of, "It's not abuse unless you physically injure them," and other quasi-religious nonsense which treats the brain as a perfectly rational ideal rather than just another organ subject to external influence.
What does this or any defense of it have to do with religion?
So when's Slashdot going to fix this text editor?
Oh that's right, Beta...
Space Shuttle Challenger exploded because of one tiny flaw in an otherwise perfect system.
I'd argue that point.
It all depends on the application. So re-using the rocket on earth is not cost effective, because it's cheaper to just use a new one. Ok, I can go along with that. But what about the moon? Mars? Where are you going to get a new rocket on mars? Being able to land and return to orbit from mars would be pretty handy.
So you don't swerve, you lock up the breaks and accept your fate.
Write a calculator.
Sounds easy right?
Good luck.
I was explaining the afore mentioned posts reasoning. Not agreeing with it.
I don't know if the guy is full of shit or not... but, I did my own google search.
I found that:
1. He wrote a book that was well received about his injury, though complaints were that it was overly wordy. There were several people that claimed to be mathematicians that reviewed it and said his area of specialty was fractal geometry and that he was so specialized it was uninteresting to them. He was basically obsessed with 1 aspect of geometry.
2. He is an artist, and makes Fractal art. Not that his stuff is that incredible but I doubt a furniture salesman could pull this off. http://fineartamerica.com/prof...
3. Here's photos of him. One includes his doctor: http://www.struckbygenius.com/...
4. That doctors name is Darold Treffert who appears to be am expert on Savant Syndrome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
So it appears to me that the guy actually did develop some Savant abilities. I don't know if he got them from an injury or not. But it appears that those abilities are so specialized that they may not be useful in an academic sense. If he can visualize incredibly complex geometries but can not, for example, do long division, his skill wouldn't really lead him to write a lot of papers.
Practically, the end of Pi is around 760-some digits, where you start to sound like Herman Cain. At that point, diameters won't be more than a Planck length off.
If you're using it for the geometry of the physical world, then you'd be correct. Fortunately however, Pi is used for far more than measuring the physical world.
Funny! While growing up my father was in charge of a team of guys that designed and built GMs first electronic speed sensor. Well, I'm not sure if it was their first but it was the first one to go into wide production and was also not-mechanical. He was working so much I ended up in the lab with him a lot. Watching those guys solve those problems is one of my most vivid memories from childhood. They had to babysit me while I played with all their test equipment and answer my silly questions about their project. Later my dad told me that was good for them. If they couldn't explain it to me, they wouldn't be able to explain it to GMs executives. lol
Why is killing people with closed source software morally superior?
Because, if you're a software engineer working on the Linux Kernel you can do so knowing that your work wont be used to kill people.
(ok, they could just ignore the license... but you get my point)
We did not vote for this. Not one of the executive branch lawyers who write legal justifications for this is elected.
Who appointed those lawyers? Stalin? You voted R or D, whomever won then installed his yes men.
I agree that voting third party is the answer.
I don't. The answer is: Stop voting for republicans or democrats. I don't care who else you vote for... just not them. ANY other candidate, part of a party or not would revolutionize our political system. And no, I don't mean the fake "independent" party that's nothing more than a group of the worst politicians we have that want to switch parties on a whim to suit their political ambitions. I want someone that tells the TRUTH. We aren't going to get that until we break this stranglehold our current 2 parties have on the system. So vote for anyone that isn't them.
They're much more popular in areas where computers are not much of an option like Africa. When I was there, you could stop at little wooden booths on the street and buy Feature phones and calling cards for a few dollars right along with various junk food and mystery meat on a stick. Due to the US cellular market being such a disaster no-one from the US's phone would work there unless you were an AT&T international plan. As a result everyone from the US would get off the plane and immediately buy one of these for $5 and enough minutes to call home.
Are they dead in the US? They were never a "thing" here to begin with. In Africa and other very rural areas with poor infrastructure, they are basically the only computer you can get and are hugely successful. People run full blown businesses off the things. So no, they aren't dead. Most people in these areas have a hard time coming up with the $5 for the phone. The average wage where I was at was $7/month. So the difference between $5 and a fancy $20 smart phone is 3 months salary. Don't get me wrong, these people had wealth (land, livestock, clothes, etc...) . It just wasn't easily transferable to US currency. They bartered a lot.