Same here, except I'm very against them being so deletion happy. Disk space and bandwidth are cheap. Unless it's a clear violation of the law, there's no reason to delete anything. Instead, stuff gets tagged as "not notable" and is disappeared forever.
I understand wanting to have standards (i.e. the need to cite sources and whatnot), but a simple "This article currently has no sources or citations - find some!" and a hell of a lot more leniency will make Wikipedia suck a lot less.
Some kinda magic karmic meter won't keep people staying around Wikipedia. Getting rid of the assholes and/or the asshole policies is the way to go.
I think we could make even the "bad" energy industries more environmentally friendly. For instance, why not just have all the natural gas pipes angled so the gas flows downhill?
If something like that ever happens, we as a people will rise up and fight for our lives side by side against the horrible monstrosities we face. And after we're done, we'll find a nice home for the mutant frogs. Perhaps Montana, I hear they have a lot of extra space.
Unfortunately, we're in an economy where most people - even experienced, educated people - don't have a choice in where they work or the option to shift to another company, so "quit signing things you don't understand/don't agree with" equates to "quit making money, because you'll have a hell of a time getting hired".
Casual players are going to be cannon fodder at best and constant targets at worst. EVE is not really what one could call a newbie friendly game. The basic tutorials to get a grasp on the game will take the average player 1-4 hours just for them to get a handle on piloting and using your equipment. Then there's other factors (transversal, optimal range, ammo type, etc.) that take several more hours just to learn. The combat in EVE is in-depth but also very unforgiving, and the game is very, very PvP heavy. You can technically be blown up by anyone, anywhere. Although in-game NPC police will attempt to save your ass in the higher security zones, there are ship builds that are designed to destroy a ship in the 4-20 seconds it will take for the cops to show up. (Usually, this scenario is a profit motivation - you might lose a 10 million ISK ship, but the enemy loses a 20 million ISK ship and therefore it's a net gain.) And, of course, sometimes wealthy in-game players do it just to be a dick.
$68 is not a lot for a certain really, really insane subset of EVE players.
I used to play EVE and would still play if it weren't for the fact that the group I ran with fell apart.
Firstly, an important example. EVE has a legitimate backdoor to Real Money Trading. You can buy "PLEXes" (Pilot's License EXtension) with real money. You get 2 PLEXes for $30 or so, and each PLEX extends game time by 30 days. It's not all that different from the regular subscription, with the exception that the PLEXes are in-game items that you can sell for in-game currency. Therefore, you can, say, buy 2 game time cards, use one for yourself, and sell the other for in-game money (and the prices have stayed relatively stable). Conversely, once you have reached a certain level of skill, you can use in-game money to buy PLEXes and never have to spend real money on game time. With moderate skill you can earn enough in-game money in about 30 hours, and anything you play after that equates to profit.
Secondly, a Russian man named SirLodex spent $100,000 on PLEXes and used the ISK (in-game money) to bankroll an entire player alliance called RED.Overlord a couple years ago. If you look at the automatic territory control map, you can see that they still exist today. (As the map changes daily, here's the archive version of the map for the day this post was made.) Granted, SirLodex is a wealthy man who seems to enjoy playing EVE like a RTS but with real people, but it's not uncommon for people to buy a few PLEXes and sell the spares for a quick infusion of ISK.
Lastly, there are more than a few people who have multiple accounts that they run at the same time. I've known people who ran 2-5 accounts simultaneously - which equates to $30-75 a month - and some people have reportedly ran 10 accounts at once. These are people paying the same amount in subscription fees every month as most people do in a year. They can command a small fleet by themselves through ingenious use of macros, multiple monitors, etc.
In short, there is a small subset of players that will see $68 as no huge deal.
Even WoW had its problems at Vanilla. An example would be the Tauren's "Plainswalking" - rather than get mounts, Taurens would get a skill where they could basically ramp up to mounted speeds (after reaching the same level you could get a mount). The issue was that, of course, it wasn't exactly the same as using a mount and therefore unfair to the Tauren.
I think this is true with nearly any game, but it's especially true with MMOs: your best bet is to catch 90-98% percent of the bugs. Some stuff you won't catch with a hundred or a thousand beta testers, because one of them won't think to try a particular item combination or use a specific skill in a certain place, etc. It's very near impossible to release a completely bug-free piece of complex software, and the impossibility rises as the complexity rises.
I mean, if New Version B can't do stuff that Old Version A does... why the hell would you upgrade to New Version B? On a personal level, Windows Vista was crap, so I stayed with XP. I know that a lot of the time you have to upgrade (i.e. a client will send you files in a 2011 format which you can't read with 2010 software), but since the new version seems so universally hated this seems to be a practically nonexistant problem.
This is probably gonna sound stupid, but I don't care if it does because I'm genuinely curious. Aside from the damage to the scenery, are there any environmental consequences of shaving off the top of a mountain? I can't think of any offhand (that's not to say they don't exist; I'm genuinely ignorant of them).
Interesting read. The Escapist is really underated; a lot of people just go there for Zero Punctuation and ignore the well-written articles. I especially enjoyed the advice you wrote to game/MMO devs at the end, which I'm going to parrot here because it's awesome:
If your licensor wants you to launch your game before it's ready, cancel it.
It's the community, stupid.
Many players don't experience a persistent online world as "a game." They experience it as "my life." An online world's hardcore players view themselves as citizens. Some want to be good citizens, some bad, but the entire core wants to believe they belong to something permanent.
Big changes after launch drive away existing players and make newcomers mistrust you.
"Fix the bugs before release, or release now and fix later?" The NGE (among dozens of disastrous launches) confirms it beyond dispute: Fix the bugs. If you can't fix them, cancel the launch.
The common problem is that a politician will promise X during their campaign and then not deliver.
Thankfully the age of the Internet (see stuff like the Obameter and Political Facts) makes it easy to track whether or not politicians keep their promises. I think it's a bit unreasonable to expect a politician to be able to hit 100% when a promise usually involves cooperating with other politicians (and therefore making compromises) - this is especially prevalent in things like the Senate; less so in smaller, local governments like city, county, and state.
People seem to forget that a lot of places have a right to recall - that is, initiate a vote to remove a government official from office by acquiring enough signatures to a petition. Former Governor Gray Davis of California was famously recalled over the California State Budget, but he was (depressingly) the second governor ever to be recalled. We have the power in a lot of places, we just don't exercise it.
Unfortunately, things like the 17th amendment of the U.S. Constitution and other actions have prevented us from having this sort of power over Federal government. I'd really like to see it reinstated one day.
One aspect of the government rarely punishes another. I'd love to see courts take a police officer to task for smashing up a camera or something similar, but it doesn't happen all that often, does it? =|
I agree with that, the whole cost-cutting thing really is stupid and short-sighted.
Honestly though, we have power plants that are 30-60 years old and are full of highly dangerous material, and we've had a handful of accidents. I think that's a tribute to the engineering of the time. I don't see why we can't build plants just as good, if not better. It should be highly criminal to do otherwise.
I'm not too worried about the whole thing. See, I think we've been doing a pretty good job of raising kids with certain values - empathy, sharing, fairness, tolerance, etc. I think each generation is more liberal (in a sense) than the previous. As an example, 50 or 60 years ago interracial marriage was, at best, looked down upon by a lot of mainstream America. Now it's no big deal, and gay marriage is the big whinefest. 50 years from now no one will care about two men or two women or two people who choose not to identify with their biological gender get married.
We push tolerance left and right. Tolerance, tolerance, tolerance. Those poor teaches have to put up silly posters where every conceivable skin color, ethnicity, and disability is represented. As a result of this, when these kids grow up to be adults they kind of have a hard time with the inherent hypocrisy of "love they neighbor, except for those gay ones who are gonna burn in hell, or the stoner down the street who smokes a plant. Yeah, it's a naturally growing plant - I guess God fucked up!"
It's all a matter of time. 10, 20 years from now we'll have sane drug laws, at least in regards to marijuana. That won't curtail the war on drugs very much, though - a lot of effort is put into controlling coca (the plant that is used to make cocaine), probably just as much as is put into handling marijuana. And then of course you have the problem of stuff like meth which any idiot can cook up in a bathtub, sometimes with explosive results.
It's been an unfortunate realization of mine that the only way we'll usually get real progress on getting rid of stupi laws, principles, or ideals is by the old idiots who believe in it dying off and being gradually replaced by a politically-oriented youth who has a much smaller tolerance for bullshit.
Well yeah. I'm sure when "Web 2.0" happened, businesses were racking their brains figuring out how to do the whole "social" thing. Now it amounts to "Put this Facebook/Twitter/Stumbleupon/etc. button on your page." It's a ready-made social network that's easy to integrate with. And yes, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Fuck the police.
I'm pretty sure someone thought it was silly to launch airplanes off of boats a hundred or so years ago.
You're missing a crucial bit here. The whole thing is about mobility. Let's say that we need to deploy a whole butt-ton of UAVs somewhere and fast. There really isn't a rapid deployment system for a fleet of UAVs as far as we know.
A carrier plane would allow more than a few possibilities. First, you can resupply and re-arm closer to the actual deployment zone. Broken UAVs can make it back to "base" before they run out of fuel and have to be scuttled. The base is "mobile" and better able to defend itself than a stationary trailer sitting in the middle of the desert somewhere. Got a target that you need to blow up with firepower a UAV doesn't have? Launch more UAVs, or use bigger caliber weapons on the mothership.
It might be a bit silly, but I think it has potential. Even if it's not used as home base and they're still controlled from halfway around the world, something like this would still need to be used to deploy UAVs en masse rapidly until they figure out how to stick one in a missile (like a sabot) and just shoot it in the general direction of where they want to deploy it.
You can only compress data and prioritize packets so much. We're getting ever closer to critical mass.
I think the real message here is that it takes Vint motherfucking Cerf to say it for the message to get through. Knock knock ISPs, you have to actually upgrade your networks.
I've (woefully) had the same ISP for 6 years and change now. I've seen my speed gradually go down over time, because more and more people are using the Internet for things that are bandwidth intensive like streaming video. What's the solution here? Packet-shaping, queuing, compression, waiting, tiered service, whatever... none of that solves the problem that there is very clearly not enough bandwidth to go around and the only real way to fix that is to add more.
Yeah, but "everyone" was on Myspace as well when Facebook beat them into the ground. The hard part is trying to picture what sort of service would have enough things better than Facebook to get a lot of people to move over to it.
It would have been nice if they had a chart showing the logos and explaining them. Yes, we get it, most of those are there as proof of passing certification... but which ones mean what?
Slashdot Mirror
I imagine knitting an Afghan would look something like this.
Same here, except I'm very against them being so deletion happy. Disk space and bandwidth are cheap. Unless it's a clear violation of the law, there's no reason to delete anything. Instead, stuff gets tagged as "not notable" and is disappeared forever.
I understand wanting to have standards (i.e. the need to cite sources and whatnot), but a simple "This article currently has no sources or citations - find some!" and a hell of a lot more leniency will make Wikipedia suck a lot less.
Some kinda magic karmic meter won't keep people staying around Wikipedia. Getting rid of the assholes and/or the asshole policies is the way to go.
I think we could make even the "bad" energy industries more environmentally friendly. For instance, why not just have all the natural gas pipes angled so the gas flows downhill?
If something like that ever happens, we as a people will rise up and fight for our lives side by side against the horrible monstrosities we face. And after we're done, we'll find a nice home for the mutant frogs. Perhaps Montana, I hear they have a lot of extra space.
Working at a community college? Well, $25 will probably be 4 or 5 hours of his time.
Unfortunately, we're in an economy where most people - even experienced, educated people - don't have a choice in where they work or the option to shift to another company, so "quit signing things you don't understand/don't agree with" equates to "quit making money, because you'll have a hell of a time getting hired".
Casual players are going to be cannon fodder at best and constant targets at worst. EVE is not really what one could call a newbie friendly game. The basic tutorials to get a grasp on the game will take the average player 1-4 hours just for them to get a handle on piloting and using your equipment. Then there's other factors (transversal, optimal range, ammo type, etc.) that take several more hours just to learn. The combat in EVE is in-depth but also very unforgiving, and the game is very, very PvP heavy. You can technically be blown up by anyone, anywhere. Although in-game NPC police will attempt to save your ass in the higher security zones, there are ship builds that are designed to destroy a ship in the 4-20 seconds it will take for the cops to show up. (Usually, this scenario is a profit motivation - you might lose a 10 million ISK ship, but the enemy loses a 20 million ISK ship and therefore it's a net gain.) And, of course, sometimes wealthy in-game players do it just to be a dick.
$68 is not a lot for a certain really, really insane subset of EVE players.
I used to play EVE and would still play if it weren't for the fact that the group I ran with fell apart.
Firstly, an important example. EVE has a legitimate backdoor to Real Money Trading. You can buy "PLEXes" (Pilot's License EXtension) with real money. You get 2 PLEXes for $30 or so, and each PLEX extends game time by 30 days. It's not all that different from the regular subscription, with the exception that the PLEXes are in-game items that you can sell for in-game currency. Therefore, you can, say, buy 2 game time cards, use one for yourself, and sell the other for in-game money (and the prices have stayed relatively stable). Conversely, once you have reached a certain level of skill, you can use in-game money to buy PLEXes and never have to spend real money on game time. With moderate skill you can earn enough in-game money in about 30 hours, and anything you play after that equates to profit.
Secondly, a Russian man named SirLodex spent $100,000 on PLEXes and used the ISK (in-game money) to bankroll an entire player alliance called RED.Overlord a couple years ago. If you look at the automatic territory control map, you can see that they still exist today. (As the map changes daily, here's the archive version of the map for the day this post was made.) Granted, SirLodex is a wealthy man who seems to enjoy playing EVE like a RTS but with real people, but it's not uncommon for people to buy a few PLEXes and sell the spares for a quick infusion of ISK.
Lastly, there are more than a few people who have multiple accounts that they run at the same time. I've known people who ran 2-5 accounts simultaneously - which equates to $30-75 a month - and some people have reportedly ran 10 accounts at once. These are people paying the same amount in subscription fees every month as most people do in a year. They can command a small fleet by themselves through ingenious use of macros, multiple monitors, etc.
In short, there is a small subset of players that will see $68 as no huge deal.
Even WoW had its problems at Vanilla. An example would be the Tauren's "Plainswalking" - rather than get mounts, Taurens would get a skill where they could basically ramp up to mounted speeds (after reaching the same level you could get a mount). The issue was that, of course, it wasn't exactly the same as using a mount and therefore unfair to the Tauren.
I think this is true with nearly any game, but it's especially true with MMOs: your best bet is to catch 90-98% percent of the bugs. Some stuff you won't catch with a hundred or a thousand beta testers, because one of them won't think to try a particular item combination or use a specific skill in a certain place, etc. It's very near impossible to release a completely bug-free piece of complex software, and the impossibility rises as the complexity rises.
TSA agents were quoted as saying, "Stop right there, criminal scum!"
Why not just keep using the old version?
I mean, if New Version B can't do stuff that Old Version A does... why the hell would you upgrade to New Version B? On a personal level, Windows Vista was crap, so I stayed with XP. I know that a lot of the time you have to upgrade (i.e. a client will send you files in a 2011 format which you can't read with 2010 software), but since the new version seems so universally hated this seems to be a practically nonexistant problem.
This is probably gonna sound stupid, but I don't care if it does because I'm genuinely curious. Aside from the damage to the scenery, are there any environmental consequences of shaving off the top of a mountain? I can't think of any offhand (that's not to say they don't exist; I'm genuinely ignorant of them).
Interesting read. The Escapist is really underated; a lot of people just go there for Zero Punctuation and ignore the well-written articles. I especially enjoyed the advice you wrote to game/MMO devs at the end, which I'm going to parrot here because it's awesome:
I was a 5 mb update
I was a 12 MB update to my family, although I've always been a pretty big kid.
The common problem is that a politician will promise X during their campaign and then not deliver.
Thankfully the age of the Internet (see stuff like the Obameter and Political Facts) makes it easy to track whether or not politicians keep their promises. I think it's a bit unreasonable to expect a politician to be able to hit 100% when a promise usually involves cooperating with other politicians (and therefore making compromises) - this is especially prevalent in things like the Senate; less so in smaller, local governments like city, county, and state.
People seem to forget that a lot of places have a right to recall - that is, initiate a vote to remove a government official from office by acquiring enough signatures to a petition. Former Governor Gray Davis of California was famously recalled over the California State Budget, but he was (depressingly) the second governor ever to be recalled. We have the power in a lot of places, we just don't exercise it.
Unfortunately, things like the 17th amendment of the U.S. Constitution and other actions have prevented us from having this sort of power over Federal government. I'd really like to see it reinstated one day.
One aspect of the government rarely punishes another. I'd love to see courts take a police officer to task for smashing up a camera or something similar, but it doesn't happen all that often, does it? =|
I agree with that, the whole cost-cutting thing really is stupid and short-sighted.
Honestly though, we have power plants that are 30-60 years old and are full of highly dangerous material, and we've had a handful of accidents. I think that's a tribute to the engineering of the time. I don't see why we can't build plants just as good, if not better. It should be highly criminal to do otherwise.
I'm not too worried about the whole thing. See, I think we've been doing a pretty good job of raising kids with certain values - empathy, sharing, fairness, tolerance, etc. I think each generation is more liberal (in a sense) than the previous. As an example, 50 or 60 years ago interracial marriage was, at best, looked down upon by a lot of mainstream America. Now it's no big deal, and gay marriage is the big whinefest. 50 years from now no one will care about two men or two women or two people who choose not to identify with their biological gender get married.
We push tolerance left and right. Tolerance, tolerance, tolerance. Those poor teaches have to put up silly posters where every conceivable skin color, ethnicity, and disability is represented. As a result of this, when these kids grow up to be adults they kind of have a hard time with the inherent hypocrisy of "love they neighbor, except for those gay ones who are gonna burn in hell, or the stoner down the street who smokes a plant. Yeah, it's a naturally growing plant - I guess God fucked up!"
It's all a matter of time. 10, 20 years from now we'll have sane drug laws, at least in regards to marijuana. That won't curtail the war on drugs very much, though - a lot of effort is put into controlling coca (the plant that is used to make cocaine), probably just as much as is put into handling marijuana. And then of course you have the problem of stuff like meth which any idiot can cook up in a bathtub, sometimes with explosive results.
It's been an unfortunate realization of mine that the only way we'll usually get real progress on getting rid of stupi laws, principles, or ideals is by the old idiots who believe in it dying off and being gradually replaced by a politically-oriented youth who has a much smaller tolerance for bullshit.
Yeah, but if we're going by American averages that makes you, what, 270, 280?
Well yeah. I'm sure when "Web 2.0" happened, businesses were racking their brains figuring out how to do the whole "social" thing. Now it amounts to "Put this Facebook/Twitter/Stumbleupon/etc. button on your page." It's a ready-made social network that's easy to integrate with. And yes, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. Fuck the police.
I'm pretty sure someone thought it was silly to launch airplanes off of boats a hundred or so years ago.
You're missing a crucial bit here. The whole thing is about mobility. Let's say that we need to deploy a whole butt-ton of UAVs somewhere and fast. There really isn't a rapid deployment system for a fleet of UAVs as far as we know.
A carrier plane would allow more than a few possibilities. First, you can resupply and re-arm closer to the actual deployment zone. Broken UAVs can make it back to "base" before they run out of fuel and have to be scuttled. The base is "mobile" and better able to defend itself than a stationary trailer sitting in the middle of the desert somewhere. Got a target that you need to blow up with firepower a UAV doesn't have? Launch more UAVs, or use bigger caliber weapons on the mothership.
It might be a bit silly, but I think it has potential. Even if it's not used as home base and they're still controlled from halfway around the world, something like this would still need to be used to deploy UAVs en masse rapidly until they figure out how to stick one in a missile (like a sabot) and just shoot it in the general direction of where they want to deploy it.
You can only compress data and prioritize packets so much. We're getting ever closer to critical mass.
I think the real message here is that it takes Vint motherfucking Cerf to say it for the message to get through. Knock knock ISPs, you have to actually upgrade your networks.
I've (woefully) had the same ISP for 6 years and change now. I've seen my speed gradually go down over time, because more and more people are using the Internet for things that are bandwidth intensive like streaming video. What's the solution here? Packet-shaping, queuing, compression, waiting, tiered service, whatever... none of that solves the problem that there is very clearly not enough bandwidth to go around and the only real way to fix that is to add more.
Yeah, but "everyone" was on Myspace as well when Facebook beat them into the ground. The hard part is trying to picture what sort of service would have enough things better than Facebook to get a lot of people to move over to it.
It would have been nice if they had a chart showing the logos and explaining them. Yes, we get it, most of those are there as proof of passing certification... but which ones mean what?
Just because his job went tits up doesn't mean he had to be a dick about it.