Scripting the fight is by far the most reliable for the developers to guarantee that the players have fun.
That depends on the players.
I read "scripting the fight" and I (having gotten bored of WoW's repetitive grinding and abandoned it at level 47, well before even hearing of Ragnaros) hear "making sure that if 100 groups of players attack him 5 times per group, that he will behave the same way in all 500 fights". BO-RING! If he follows the same script every time, then that implies that the players can also follow the same (presumably optimized, given enough replays of the battle) script to beat him every time - at which point you may as well remove the players from the equation and just have your computer run the script for you. That's supposed to be fun?
I'm with the original "Turing" poster. Give me NPCs who don't do the same thing every time. Make them smart. Make them unpredictable. Make them change from one time to the next - changed strategies, changed stats, changed drops, you name it. Eternal sameness is boring.
I think you may have missed the part about telling the user where in their area they can obtain non-throttled access. I read this not as an attempt to get laws repealed (or prevent their passage), but rather as a contingency plan for informing the users that they're being screwed by their ISPs and helping them find an alternative ISP who won't screw them. Unfortunately, it relies upon the presence of non-throttling ISPs, which I don't think would be likely to exist in all areas.
the violence is structured (i.e. rules dictate when killing is appropriate and when it is not, and the player is rewarded or punished as necessary)
Yes... Like the daedric quest (I forget which shrine it came from, but just east of the road north to the Nord city) which sends you off to a small village to murder the heads of the two families living there and plant evidence so that the other villagers will kill each other to avenge the murders and then "punishes" your inappropriate killing by giving you a powerful artifact.
And then there's the Dark Brotherhood, a faction of assassins which you can't join without committing at least two murders (one to get their attention so that they'll contact you, then a second to gain full membership).
And this is just the most-readily-found cases where the violence is clearly not legally appropriate (the game consistently uses the word "murder" to describe these quests and, if you are seen carrying them out, it will be treated as a crime) and you are then rewarded for it.
I don't have any problem with anything that I've seen in the game so far, but it's just dishonest to try to sweep the mature or potentially-objectionable parts of the game under the rug and pretend they don't exist.
Sounds like you want it to be based on a high-potential equilibrium rather than a low-potential case, which means that there's a lot of energy to release if that equilibrium is somehow disrupted. I wouldn't want to be standing anywhere nearby if any part of the system breaks/malfunctions, because the remaining pieces will be going somewhere unpredictable and doing so hard and fast. Not what I would call a safe failure mode...
I'm not going to make any claims one way or another about "passion", but you've got to be nuts if you actively believe that work shouldn't be fun. You shouldn't burn your entire life there, no, which is what I suspect your real point was, but that doesn't mean it has to be a pure case of "You go to work, you get the job done, you leave... rinse, and repeat," either.
As for myself, I'm not a workaholic. I have had a policy from day one of not working overtime on a routine basis and not working unpaid overtime, period. But I also seek out jobs where I'm doing work I enjoy and, if they stop being fun for more than a month or two at a stretch, I quit, take some time off, and find something else interesting to do. (No, I'm not rich and the cycle does have a bit of a tendency to end up looking like 'take time off work, get into debt, find a job just in time to avoid totally running out of money, pay off debts, quit, repeat'. Not exactly the model of what most would consider to be "financial responsibility", but I enjoy life a lot more this way than I did back in high school/college when I worked jobs I didn't like just to pay the bills.)
If they've released an expurgated US version (I have a pre-order copy of the standard US version) with that line changed, it doesn't even make sense, really. The Mages Guild may have banned necromancy, but it's still technically legal, so why would there be any question of fines for its practice?
And, yes, I've just double-checked - with the subtitles on - and the word is most definitely "necrophilia", not "necromancy". As far as them being quite different beasts, I suspect that necromancing would be more akin to necrophilia than to necromancy.
I can't help wondering whether the ESRB has noticed yet that there's an NPC (with fully-voiced dialogue!) who asks whether you know what the local penalties are for necrophilia, then nervously attempts to pass it off as idle curiousity.
Although I agree with you about the hysteria over sex/nudity being uncalled for, I have to disagree about this being the same as a purely-third-party mod. Hot Coffee supposedly just unlocked content which was included in the game by the publisher, just in a disabled form. The original Oblivion topless mod was taking a topless mesh which Bethesda had included in the game and made it available for play (and, incidentally, first became available before anyone had figured out how to create third-party meshes). The bra/panty mods, in contrast, are new textures created by a third party. There is, IMO, a very big difference between content included in the game by the publisher (even if inaccessible) and content created by a modder.
You could technically mod nudity into any PC game, yes, but, in this case, the original topless female mesh was already present in the game as distributed, it was simply not usable until a mod enabled it (by pulling the resource out of an archive and placing it into a separate file, overriding the normal female upper body mesh).
Haven't you been following the news lately? There was a recent piece from, IIRC, the Boston Globe which takes a nice, long look at Bush's history of signing bills into law, then tacking on a signing statment which essentially says "Congress has no legal right to restrict my actions, therefore I will consider this to be advisory." If he starts vetoing bills, then that gives Congress a chance to override the veto. Much safer to sign them into law, then quietly ignore them and send Gonzales out to say that the law attempted to restrict his inherent Constitutional authority if anyone notices.
1. None of these is true. Encrypted SMTP, POP and IMAP all exist and we've been using encrypted POP/IMAP where I work for over two years now.
In the article it is clearly stated, that you may encrypt the traffic between the client machine and the server, but once there, the traffic between SMTP hosts is not encrypted.
So let me see if I've got this straight... You're saying that encrypted SMTP is not encrypted?
You missed that the print only executes if $likes == $people, thus the values of $likes and $people must be numeric if that test is correct. Also note my statement earlier in that post that, judging by the names of the variables, "likes" and "people" as scalars (rather than arrays or hashes), it would be most logical that they would be numeric ("Cedric" is a person, not a people, and "ice cream" is a like, not a likes), so I was proceeding with that (explicit and explained) assumption.
As far as the value of $tmp[$likes], I did slip there - "push( @tmp, $people );" was the only way shown in the example for values to get into @tmp and I made an unwarranted assumption that @tmp would, therefore, only contain numeric values (since $people would be numeric), ignoring that the example was not of a complete program, so non-numerics could get in there from somewhere else.
(Arguing over just how messed up a half-assed, off-the-cuff example of bad coding practices really is? Yep, I'm on Slashdot, alright.)
Speaking for myself only, I feel that it reduces flexibility (the post I replied to earlier seemed to consider that an advantage, I don't), it provides marginal benefit (if you want strong typing, why not just use a strongly-typed language instead of adding alphabet soup to a weakly-typed language?), and it's damn ugly. Probably the worst, though, is that adherents of Hungarian tend (or at least tended, 10 years ago; I haven't heard much about it lately until today) to be rather evangelical and prone to trying to inflict it on everyone else around them, even after being told that it purports to solve problems that I've only very, very rarely encountered in the first place.
As I said earlier (and, for that matter, so did the person who first mentioned Hungarian), well-chosen, descriptive variable names will tell you far, far more about a variable - and it will be far more relevant 99% of the time - than tacking on a cryptic indicator of what data type it's supposed to be. (Don't bother trying to claim that Hungarian isn't cryptic once you learn it. Regular expressions or Perl code that makes heavy use of the language's special variables can be perfectly clear once you learn them, too, but I (as a Perl and regex fan) am still one of the first to admit that they're cryptic.)
Oh, and I'm no fan of IDEs either. I code pretty much exclusively in vi. (Did I just start another holy war?)
Some informative comments on the variable declarations would definitely make it clearer. However, assuming that the names were sensibly chosen, I'd assume the use of numeric comparisons is appropriate, as "people" and "likes" are both plural forms of the nouns, but those variables are scalars, so only hold a single value, therefore, that value would most sensibly be the number of people and number of likes. But, then, "I find that 3 is shared by 100% of people named 7" doesn't make much sense, so the variable names are clearly chosen poorly. ($people and $likes could also be appropriate names for references (pointers for the non-Perl types out there) to arrays instead of being numbers, but the syntax would be substantially broken in that case anyhow, so we can dismiss that possiblity. Also, the use of $likes as an array index pretty well means that it has to be numeric, unless you have warnings turned off and/or are ignoring perl's complaints about its inappropriate use.)
Anyhow... I think the real lesson from your example is that well-chosen, descriptive variable names and comments explaining why you're doing things (and occasionally what you're doing, although, with well-chosen names and clear algorithm designs, that should usually be self-evident) are important, which I agree with wholly. But slapping some alphabet soup on the beginning of a variable name doesn't make it any better. Your example wouldn't make any more sense if the scalars were named $fPeople and $iLikes (or $lpsznqtuvwxyzPeople) than it does now.
Oh, and you say "What if I want to treat a float like an int? A decent language won't even let you.", I say a decent language doesn't make that distinction. They're both numbers so why does it matter which is which unless you're in a performance-critical situation?
I knew a woman in college who was in the Army Reserves and once mentioned that her CO was a Major by the name of Richard Head. And, yes, he did prefer to be addressed as "Major Dick Head", thankyouverymuch.
No, I'd say the problem in the US is that so many people think that "creat[ing] wealth", "increas[ing] personal income and purchasing power", and whatever may be declared "good for the economy as a whole" this week are the keys to happiness or that they are inherently good for some other reason. And I suppose that belief may be justified from a purely materialistic, "whoever dies with the most toys wins", perspective.
But some of us disagree and would rather have our time than more money. Personally, I've gone off into consulting to increase my hourly income and I'm taking advantage of that increase to allow me to work fewer hours, not to send my personal income through the roof. All the money in the world is worthless without the time to enjoy it.
Just imagine the massive imbalance of power. Although I greatly prefer privacy, I could possibly deal with something like Brin's "Transparent Society", as it remains equitable. But a surveilance state in which the government, no matter how well-meaning or benign, knows everything about everyone, but does not give its subjects that same omniscient access to all information within and about the government, is practically the definition of absolute oppression: you can take no action without the government's approval or else you will face its wrath. Even if the government is absolutely perfect in its laws and practices and it approves of anything and everything you might ever want to do (well, aside from evading its view), the fact of being totally subject to its will remains offensive.
Surveillance is an expression of power and I choose not to grant anyone the unchecked power of pervasive surveillance over me.
(And that's without going into questions of whether centralized power is actually preferable to individual power, whether power does indeed corrupt, whether the tax savings you claim from the reduction in police forces would actually be enough to cover the costs of pervasive surveillance programs, how government officials and agencies will behave when allowed to aquire unchecked power, the lack of an inherent connection between law and justice, whether you can conduct civil disobedience as an act of protest when crime is effectively impossible, the near-certain harassment of innocent people due to false matches, etc.)
If you read LAMP as LAM(Perl) rather than LAM(PHP), logic and interface can most certainly be separated. I've been told that this is possible with PHP also, but I've never used PHP, so I can't verify the truth of that claim.
Not all LAMP code is embedded in HTML pages or printing the HTML directly from code... We have template systems, XML/XSL, and the like, too.
The others seem to be more developer features than language features. I've banged out quick prototypes in C and written scalable, maintainable systems in Perl. Just because most people take the time to do C right (even when it's not needed) or write Perl that looks like line noise doesn't mean that those languages have to be slow to develop or unmaintainable.
Perhaps if someone could provide a coherent explanation of how allowing gay marriages would be "changing the very foundations of our society", I might be able to understand why people are against it. Thus far, however, I have seen only assertions (such as yours) that allowing gay marriage would undermine our society, but with no attempt made to back the assertion up with anything.
#1 is simply false. Value is measured in terms of what is willing to be exchanged for the product.
I've seen this argument twice in this thread now, and I call bullshit.
#1) Yes, monetary (or, if you prefer, trade) value is measured in terms of what someone is willing to exchange for it. This is not the only kind of value. Gifts are not inherently worthless, even if they happen to be made of paper and ink and of no interest to anyone other than the recipient.
#2) Your own argument is that "value" is measured in terms of what someone is willing to exchange for it, not what they actually do exchange for it. If I hand you a free million dollars, the fact that I accepted nothing in return does not mean that the million dollars has no value.
Also, reread the grandparent's #1. "The same program is worth more if you get the source with it." If I sell you a piece of software as a binary alone it has a certain value. If I give you that exact same piece of software, plus the source code for it, the value is obviously higher (same thing plus something additional and beneficial equals higher total value). Suggesting that the value drops to zero simply because I didn't require anything in return is absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming "multi-player" = "deathmatch". Story can be just as important to a cooperative multi-player game as it is to a single-player game.
They're just following Battlestar Galactica's lead and "re-imagining" the Shadowrun universe, I guess.
Scripting the fight is by far the most reliable for the developers to guarantee that the players have fun.
That depends on the players.
I read "scripting the fight" and I (having gotten bored of WoW's repetitive grinding and abandoned it at level 47, well before even hearing of Ragnaros) hear "making sure that if 100 groups of players attack him 5 times per group, that he will behave the same way in all 500 fights". BO-RING! If he follows the same script every time, then that implies that the players can also follow the same (presumably optimized, given enough replays of the battle) script to beat him every time - at which point you may as well remove the players from the equation and just have your computer run the script for you. That's supposed to be fun?
I'm with the original "Turing" poster. Give me NPCs who don't do the same thing every time. Make them smart. Make them unpredictable. Make them change from one time to the next - changed strategies, changed stats, changed drops, you name it. Eternal sameness is boring.
I think you may have missed the part about telling the user where in their area they can obtain non-throttled access. I read this not as an attempt to get laws repealed (or prevent their passage), but rather as a contingency plan for informing the users that they're being screwed by their ISPs and helping them find an alternative ISP who won't screw them. Unfortunately, it relies upon the presence of non-throttling ISPs, which I don't think would be likely to exist in all areas.
the violence is structured (i.e. rules dictate when killing is appropriate and when it is not, and the player is rewarded or punished as necessary)
Yes... Like the daedric quest (I forget which shrine it came from, but just east of the road north to the Nord city) which sends you off to a small village to murder the heads of the two families living there and plant evidence so that the other villagers will kill each other to avenge the murders and then "punishes" your inappropriate killing by giving you a powerful artifact.
And then there's the Dark Brotherhood, a faction of assassins which you can't join without committing at least two murders (one to get their attention so that they'll contact you, then a second to gain full membership).
And this is just the most-readily-found cases where the violence is clearly not legally appropriate (the game consistently uses the word "murder" to describe these quests and, if you are seen carrying them out, it will be treated as a crime) and you are then rewarded for it.
I don't have any problem with anything that I've seen in the game so far, but it's just dishonest to try to sweep the mature or potentially-objectionable parts of the game under the rug and pretend they don't exist.
Sounds like you want it to be based on a high-potential equilibrium rather than a low-potential case, which means that there's a lot of energy to release if that equilibrium is somehow disrupted. I wouldn't want to be standing anywhere nearby if any part of the system breaks/malfunctions, because the remaining pieces will be going somewhere unpredictable and doing so hard and fast. Not what I would call a safe failure mode...
I'm not going to make any claims one way or another about "passion", but you've got to be nuts if you actively believe that work shouldn't be fun. You shouldn't burn your entire life there, no, which is what I suspect your real point was, but that doesn't mean it has to be a pure case of "You go to work, you get the job done, you leave... rinse, and repeat," either.
As for myself, I'm not a workaholic. I have had a policy from day one of not working overtime on a routine basis and not working unpaid overtime, period. But I also seek out jobs where I'm doing work I enjoy and, if they stop being fun for more than a month or two at a stretch, I quit, take some time off, and find something else interesting to do. (No, I'm not rich and the cycle does have a bit of a tendency to end up looking like 'take time off work, get into debt, find a job just in time to avoid totally running out of money, pay off debts, quit, repeat'. Not exactly the model of what most would consider to be "financial responsibility", but I enjoy life a lot more this way than I did back in high school/college when I worked jobs I didn't like just to pay the bills.)
Sunday is 24 hours long, according to most clocks. That's still 4 hours short.
If they've released an expurgated US version (I have a pre-order copy of the standard US version) with that line changed, it doesn't even make sense, really. The Mages Guild may have banned necromancy, but it's still technically legal, so why would there be any question of fines for its practice?
And, yes, I've just double-checked - with the subtitles on - and the word is most definitely "necrophilia", not "necromancy". As far as them being quite different beasts, I suspect that necromancing would be more akin to necrophilia than to necromancy.
I can't help wondering whether the ESRB has noticed yet that there's an NPC (with fully-voiced dialogue!) who asks whether you know what the local penalties are for necrophilia, then nervously attempts to pass it off as idle curiousity.
Although I agree with you about the hysteria over sex/nudity being uncalled for, I have to disagree about this being the same as a purely-third-party mod. Hot Coffee supposedly just unlocked content which was included in the game by the publisher, just in a disabled form. The original Oblivion topless mod was taking a topless mesh which Bethesda had included in the game and made it available for play (and, incidentally, first became available before anyone had figured out how to create third-party meshes). The bra/panty mods, in contrast, are new textures created by a third party. There is, IMO, a very big difference between content included in the game by the publisher (even if inaccessible) and content created by a modder.
You could technically mod nudity into any PC game, yes, but, in this case, the original topless female mesh was already present in the game as distributed, it was simply not usable until a mod enabled it (by pulling the resource out of an archive and placing it into a separate file, overriding the normal female upper body mesh).
Oh, they're babbling about Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons rules. As was said in an earlier comment, "Nothing to see here. Move along."
Haven't you been following the news lately? There was a recent piece from, IIRC, the Boston Globe which takes a nice, long look at Bush's history of signing bills into law, then tacking on a signing statment which essentially says "Congress has no legal right to restrict my actions, therefore I will consider this to be advisory." If he starts vetoing bills, then that gives Congress a chance to override the veto. Much safer to sign them into law, then quietly ignore them and send Gonzales out to say that the law attempted to restrict his inherent Constitutional authority if anyone notices.
So let me see if I've got this straight... You're saying that encrypted SMTP is not encrypted?
You missed that the print only executes if $likes == $people, thus the values of $likes and $people must be numeric if that test is correct. Also note my statement earlier in that post that, judging by the names of the variables, "likes" and "people" as scalars (rather than arrays or hashes), it would be most logical that they would be numeric ("Cedric" is a person, not a people, and "ice cream" is a like, not a likes), so I was proceeding with that (explicit and explained) assumption.
As far as the value of $tmp[$likes], I did slip there - "push( @tmp, $people );" was the only way shown in the example for values to get into @tmp and I made an unwarranted assumption that @tmp would, therefore, only contain numeric values (since $people would be numeric), ignoring that the example was not of a complete program, so non-numerics could get in there from somewhere else.
(Arguing over just how messed up a half-assed, off-the-cuff example of bad coding practices really is? Yep, I'm on Slashdot, alright.)
Speaking for myself only, I feel that it reduces flexibility (the post I replied to earlier seemed to consider that an advantage, I don't), it provides marginal benefit (if you want strong typing, why not just use a strongly-typed language instead of adding alphabet soup to a weakly-typed language?), and it's damn ugly. Probably the worst, though, is that adherents of Hungarian tend (or at least tended, 10 years ago; I haven't heard much about it lately until today) to be rather evangelical and prone to trying to inflict it on everyone else around them, even after being told that it purports to solve problems that I've only very, very rarely encountered in the first place.
As I said earlier (and, for that matter, so did the person who first mentioned Hungarian), well-chosen, descriptive variable names will tell you far, far more about a variable - and it will be far more relevant 99% of the time - than tacking on a cryptic indicator of what data type it's supposed to be. (Don't bother trying to claim that Hungarian isn't cryptic once you learn it. Regular expressions or Perl code that makes heavy use of the language's special variables can be perfectly clear once you learn them, too, but I (as a Perl and regex fan) am still one of the first to admit that they're cryptic.)
Oh, and I'm no fan of IDEs either. I code pretty much exclusively in vi. (Did I just start another holy war?)
Some informative comments on the variable declarations would definitely make it clearer. However, assuming that the names were sensibly chosen, I'd assume the use of numeric comparisons is appropriate, as "people" and "likes" are both plural forms of the nouns, but those variables are scalars, so only hold a single value, therefore, that value would most sensibly be the number of people and number of likes. But, then, "I find that 3 is shared by 100% of people named 7" doesn't make much sense, so the variable names are clearly chosen poorly. ($people and $likes could also be appropriate names for references (pointers for the non-Perl types out there) to arrays instead of being numbers, but the syntax would be substantially broken in that case anyhow, so we can dismiss that possiblity. Also, the use of $likes as an array index pretty well means that it has to be numeric, unless you have warnings turned off and/or are ignoring perl's complaints about its inappropriate use.)
Anyhow... I think the real lesson from your example is that well-chosen, descriptive variable names and comments explaining why you're doing things (and occasionally what you're doing, although, with well-chosen names and clear algorithm designs, that should usually be self-evident) are important, which I agree with wholly. But slapping some alphabet soup on the beginning of a variable name doesn't make it any better. Your example wouldn't make any more sense if the scalars were named $fPeople and $iLikes (or $lpsznqtuvwxyzPeople) than it does now.
Oh, and you say "What if I want to treat a float like an int? A decent language won't even let you.", I say a decent language doesn't make that distinction. They're both numbers so why does it matter which is which unless you're in a performance-critical situation?
I knew a woman in college who was in the Army Reserves and once mentioned that her CO was a Major by the name of Richard Head. And, yes, he did prefer to be addressed as "Major Dick Head", thankyouverymuch.
No, I'd say the problem in the US is that so many people think that "creat[ing] wealth", "increas[ing] personal income and purchasing power", and whatever may be declared "good for the economy as a whole" this week are the keys to happiness or that they are inherently good for some other reason. And I suppose that belief may be justified from a purely materialistic, "whoever dies with the most toys wins", perspective.
But some of us disagree and would rather have our time than more money. Personally, I've gone off into consulting to increase my hourly income and I'm taking advantage of that increase to allow me to work fewer hours, not to send my personal income through the roof. All the money in the world is worthless without the time to enjoy it.
Just imagine the massive imbalance of power. Although I greatly prefer privacy, I could possibly deal with something like Brin's "Transparent Society", as it remains equitable. But a surveilance state in which the government, no matter how well-meaning or benign, knows everything about everyone, but does not give its subjects that same omniscient access to all information within and about the government, is practically the definition of absolute oppression: you can take no action without the government's approval or else you will face its wrath. Even if the government is absolutely perfect in its laws and practices and it approves of anything and everything you might ever want to do (well, aside from evading its view), the fact of being totally subject to its will remains offensive.
Surveillance is an expression of power and I choose not to grant anyone the unchecked power of pervasive surveillance over me.
(And that's without going into questions of whether centralized power is actually preferable to individual power, whether power does indeed corrupt, whether the tax savings you claim from the reduction in police forces would actually be enough to cover the costs of pervasive surveillance programs, how government officials and agencies will behave when allowed to aquire unchecked power, the lack of an inherent connection between law and justice, whether you can conduct civil disobedience as an act of protest when crime is effectively impossible, the near-certain harassment of innocent people due to false matches, etc.)
If you read LAMP as LAM(Perl) rather than LAM(PHP), logic and interface can most certainly be separated. I've been told that this is possible with PHP also, but I've never used PHP, so I can't verify the truth of that claim.
Not all LAMP code is embedded in HTML pages or printing the HTML directly from code... We have template systems, XML/XSL, and the like, too.
The others seem to be more developer features than language features. I've banged out quick prototypes in C and written scalable, maintainable systems in Perl. Just because most people take the time to do C right (even when it's not needed) or write Perl that looks like line noise doesn't mean that those languages have to be slow to develop or unmaintainable.
... .tv is a site hosted in Tuvalu (or at least a Tuvalese organization)...
Nope. Not gonna happen.
Perhaps if someone could provide a coherent explanation of how allowing gay marriages would be "changing the very foundations of our society", I might be able to understand why people are against it. Thus far, however, I have seen only assertions (such as yours) that allowing gay marriage would undermine our society, but with no attempt made to back the assertion up with anything.
Would you care to give it a try?
#1 is simply false. Value is measured in terms of what is willing to be exchanged for the product.
I've seen this argument twice in this thread now, and I call bullshit.
#1) Yes, monetary (or, if you prefer, trade) value is measured in terms of what someone is willing to exchange for it. This is not the only kind of value. Gifts are not inherently worthless, even if they happen to be made of paper and ink and of no interest to anyone other than the recipient.
#2) Your own argument is that "value" is measured in terms of what someone is willing to exchange for it, not what they actually do exchange for it. If I hand you a free million dollars, the fact that I accepted nothing in return does not mean that the million dollars has no value.
Also, reread the grandparent's #1. "The same program is worth more if you get the source with it." If I sell you a piece of software as a binary alone it has a certain value. If I give you that exact same piece of software, plus the source code for it, the value is obviously higher (same thing plus something additional and beneficial equals higher total value). Suggesting that the value drops to zero simply because I didn't require anything in return is absurd.