Wait - you want the people who can benefit from policy choices, potentially at the cost of the public good, to inform on policy?
What's good for one businessman or company is not necessarily good for all business or the economy. CEO advice is certain to be tainted by this conflict of interest...
Etc., etc. Now, the fact that Tibet was formerly ruled by an oppressive, fanatical, and theocratic regime characterized by slavery doesn't make what China is doing now correct.
However, from the perspective of someone fighting for human rights, claiming that it was some sort of "peaceful paradise" can only undermine positive efforts.
Acknowledge that life in pre-China Tibet was absolutely terrible for the average person, acknowledge that life for the average Tibetan has improved dramatically in terms of education, quality of life, etc., and then, from this more realistic position, demand more.
Propping up what is understood by anyone knowledgeable about Tibet as a myth only hurts efforts to improve human rights and religious freedom in China.
The evolutionary tautology is more, "Organisms that survive long enough to reproduce, reproduce."
The only question was how organisms transferred traits to their offspring, and this has since been answered to the professed satisfaction of even the creationists. Genetic passage of traits is indisputable, and evolution is a straightforward corollary.
English is a required course of study in every Chinese school, starting in the 4th grade.
I'm not really sure that there's a point to continuing to block the Chinese Wikipedia. Maybe they're trying to prevent an inflammatory edit-war with Taiwan?
I think the idea is to try and take advantage of buy fervor, and also to place the item higher on lists organized by lowest price.
In this case, if the bidding was anonymous to other bidders, then bidding against your own bids might serve to make the "item" seem more valuable than it actually is. An item continually being bid on certainly must have something going for it. I don't know that that's how it actually worked, though.
Because open source projects don't have the funds to lobby the government. The people deciding what voting machines/software to use aren't savvy enough to realize that the people saying "Our stuff is safer because our code is secret!" are full of it.
Democratize is the wrong word - what they mean is news coverage akin to the Greek jury model: the number of news sources becomes so large that bribing or intimidating enough of them to have an effect becomes staggeringly difficult.
I think the issue is that after you've grown accustomed to the mouse, it's very difficult to (or back to) the controller. You feel sluggish and unresponsive - it's like playing a competitive sport sober, and then after ten beers. I've actually changed my position from previous years: If you enjoy console FPSes now, don't start playing with the mouse - you'll rob yourself of all the enjoyment you derive from them.
On a semi-related note, one of the best ways of judging how drunk you are (for all you old school FPSers out there) is to rotate your head and estimate the framerate of your vision. Yes, I am a huge nerd, but don't let that stop you from trying this technique.
Just so you don't feel like you've wasted the effort: I have to note the irony of lumping atheistic and blind together when the latter property is actually a critical component of faith...
But otherwise, you're right on. And even if it works for the short term, when it comes time to decide what to teach or not teach to the kids, the situation is liable to turn vicious.
And by pirates, you mean anyone they suspect of downloading songs, or just someone they want to make an example of. Is there a good writeup somewhere on the net of the actual process the RIAA uses to decide who they prosecute? I realize this is going to spawn a host of sarcastic comments, but I'm totally serious here.
I think the common perception of unnatural has come to mean "resulting from technology" more than anything else. And while the distinction may very well be arbitrary and artificial, it has very little to do with the ability to reason. Our nomadic ancesters 20,000 years ago had similar reasoning capacity (though much less formalized), and I doubt anyone nowadays, including mathematicians and scientists, would consider them to be unnatural. But their stone tools probably would be.
More like the reverse. All those HD-DVDs (the new bases) do nothing for you if you can't play them with the correct player (tRNA). But yes, not immediately useful.
recall that most monsters don't have multiple attacks based on their BAB
Actually, they do. You just use a different dynamic when attacking with natural attack routines. For example, a dire bear could attack with:
2 claws +19 melee (2d4+10) and bite +13 melee (2d8+5) Or:
Unarmed strike +18/+13 (1d4+10) Or(and this one usually goes unnoticed!):
Unarmed Strike +18/+13 (1d4+10) and 2 claws +13 melee (2d4+5) and bite +13 melee (2d8+5) But since the bear doesn't have Improved Unarmed Strike, it usually won't do that.
What made them decide that a talent tree was the way to go over more traditional methods of character advancement in tabletop roleplaying?
I'd say the primary factor is incompetence. Just look at the whole critical hit thing. They move from a really elegant, consistently scaling system to something that's dependent on a ton of parameters and thus totally unpredictable.
The weirdest ones are where you can feel your legs(and rest of your body) walking around in the game, but are still controlling your movement with WASD and the mouse. So creepy.
It's not a difficult concept. When you move the mouse, it directly corresponds to the aiming motion of the character, magnified by the sensitivity. When you move the stick, it changes the _rate_ of the aiming motion. There's an extra layer of complexity between your mind and the game - assuming you have the same level of proficiency with both instruments, no increase in sensitivity is going to equal out the difference.
"One gives you better accuracy, the other arguably more comfortable mobility, etc....You can use a 360 controller on PC Halo and do *just fine,*..."
This is absolutely false, for the following two reasons: A) The mouse isn't more precise an aiming implement than the controller - just an order of magnitude faster. Given infinite time, the accuracy is identical. Sadly, most games give you a huge edge for aiming faster than your opponent. B) The speed at which you aim is also the speed at which you LOOK. Being able to look around really fast is something that analog control sticks cannot do. That increased awareness is a significant advantage competitively (and provides a greater level of immersion, but that's another issue altogether).
But I felt that it did highlight one of the flaws of WoW, which is that the targetting system really fails when you have lots of people on-screen. I had almost no way of telling who my target was at any one time, to the point that I'd have to fire off a lightning bolt just to find out where my enemy was. They really should have a big white or blue arrow over the head of your target, kind of like the hunter ability.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait - you want the people who can benefit from policy choices, potentially at the cost of the public good, to inform on policy?
What's good for one businessman or company is not necessarily good for all business or the economy. CEO advice is certain to be tainted by this conflict of interest...
A couple popular ones:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/Tibet.html
http://www.case.edu/affil/tibet/tibetanSociety/social.htm
Etc., etc. Now, the fact that Tibet was formerly ruled by an oppressive, fanatical, and theocratic regime characterized by slavery doesn't make what China is doing now correct.
However, from the perspective of someone fighting for human rights, claiming that it was some sort of "peaceful paradise" can only undermine positive efforts.
Acknowledge that life in pre-China Tibet was absolutely terrible for the average person, acknowledge that life for the average Tibetan has improved dramatically in terms of education, quality of life, etc., and then, from this more realistic position, demand more.
Propping up what is understood by anyone knowledgeable about Tibet as a myth only hurts efforts to improve human rights and religious freedom in China.
The evolutionary tautology is more, "Organisms that survive long enough to reproduce, reproduce."
The only question was how organisms transferred traits to their offspring, and this has since been answered to the professed satisfaction of even the creationists. Genetic passage of traits is indisputable, and evolution is a straightforward corollary.
English is a required course of study in every Chinese school, starting in the 4th grade.
I'm not really sure that there's a point to continuing to block the Chinese Wikipedia. Maybe they're trying to prevent an inflammatory edit-war with Taiwan?
I think the idea is to try and take advantage of buy fervor, and also to place the item higher on lists organized by lowest price.
In this case, if the bidding was anonymous to other bidders, then bidding against your own bids might serve to make the "item" seem more valuable than it actually is. An item continually being bid on certainly must have something going for it. I don't know that that's how it actually worked, though.
As long as we haven't jumped the shark yet...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jump_the_shark
I'd say that in the modern world, cannibalism is a drawback, not a feature.
Or Americans and [insert any other nationionality]. What we in the states really need is a car that auto-liposuctions and runs off of the fat...
Because open source projects don't have the funds to lobby the government. The people deciding what voting machines/software to use aren't savvy enough to realize that the people saying "Our stuff is safer because our code is secret!" are full of it.
Democratize is the wrong word - what they mean is news coverage akin to the Greek jury model: the number of news sources becomes so large that bribing or intimidating enough of them to have an effect becomes staggeringly difficult.
Pat yourself on the back, because a lot of console FPS games throw in autoaiming without even telling you.
I think the issue is that after you've grown accustomed to the mouse, it's very difficult to (or back to) the controller. You feel sluggish and unresponsive - it's like playing a competitive sport sober, and then after ten beers. I've actually changed my position from previous years: If you enjoy console FPSes now, don't start playing with the mouse - you'll rob yourself of all the enjoyment you derive from them.
On a semi-related note, one of the best ways of judging how drunk you are (for all you old school FPSers out there) is to rotate your head and estimate the framerate of your vision. Yes, I am a huge nerd, but don't let that stop you from trying this technique.
Just so you don't feel like you've wasted the effort:
I have to note the irony of lumping atheistic and blind together when the latter property is actually a critical component of faith...
But otherwise, you're right on. And even if it works for the short term, when it comes time to decide what to teach or not teach to the kids, the situation is liable to turn vicious.
And by pirates, you mean anyone they suspect of downloading songs, or just someone they want to make an example of. Is there a good writeup somewhere on the net of the actual process the RIAA uses to decide who they prosecute? I realize this is going to spawn a host of sarcastic comments, but I'm totally serious here.
One has already been filed, I think:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/17/1728225
How successful it's going to be, well...that remains to be seen.
I think the common perception of unnatural has come to mean "resulting from technology" more than anything else. And while the distinction may very well be arbitrary and artificial, it has very little to do with the ability to reason. Our nomadic ancesters 20,000 years ago had similar reasoning capacity (though much less formalized), and I doubt anyone nowadays, including mathematicians and scientists, would consider them to be unnatural. But their stone tools probably would be.
More like the reverse. All those HD-DVDs (the new bases) do nothing for you if you can't play them with the correct player (tRNA). But yes, not immediately useful.
recall that most monsters don't have multiple attacks based on their BAB
Actually, they do. You just use a different dynamic when attacking with natural attack routines.
For example, a dire bear could attack with:
2 claws +19 melee (2d4+10) and bite +13 melee (2d8+5)
Or:
Unarmed strike +18/+13 (1d4+10)
Or(and this one usually goes unnoticed!):
Unarmed Strike +18/+13 (1d4+10) and 2 claws +13 melee (2d4+5) and bite +13 melee (2d8+5)
But since the bear doesn't have Improved Unarmed Strike, it usually won't do that.
What made them decide that a talent tree was the way to go over more traditional methods of character advancement in tabletop roleplaying?
I'd say the primary factor is incompetence. Just look at the whole critical hit thing. They move from a really elegant, consistently scaling system to something that's dependent on a ton of parameters and thus totally unpredictable.
Yeah, and now every time a wimpy kobold hits you, he stabs you in the eye. Seriously, that's better how?
The weirdest ones are where you can feel your legs(and rest of your body) walking around in the game, but are still controlling your movement with WASD and the mouse. So creepy.
It's not a difficult concept. When you move the mouse, it directly corresponds to the aiming motion of the character, magnified by the sensitivity. When you move the stick, it changes the _rate_ of the aiming motion. There's an extra layer of complexity between your mind and the game - assuming you have the same level of proficiency with both instruments, no increase in sensitivity is going to equal out the difference.
"One gives you better accuracy, the other arguably more comfortable mobility, etc....You can use a 360 controller on PC Halo and do *just fine,*..."
This is absolutely false, for the following two reasons:
A) The mouse isn't more precise an aiming implement than the controller - just an order of magnitude faster. Given infinite time, the accuracy is identical. Sadly, most games give you a huge edge for aiming faster than your opponent.
B) The speed at which you aim is also the speed at which you LOOK. Being able to look around really fast is something that analog control sticks cannot do. That increased awareness is a significant advantage competitively (and provides a greater level of immersion, but that's another issue altogether).
I'm sure they would love to offer the client for free (or cheap) and only charge a subscription fee...but the publishers would have a fit.
Just look at what's happening with Valve/HL2 right now...that's why the box costs fifty dollars.
I was in that battle...it WAS absolutely awesome.
But I felt that it did highlight one of the flaws of WoW, which is that the targetting system really fails when you have lots of people on-screen. I had almost no way of telling who my target was at any one time, to the point that I'd have to fire off a lightning bolt just to find out where my enemy was. They really should have a big white or blue arrow over the head of your target, kind of like the hunter ability.