Well Ultima IV did introduce the Ultima series in its modern form: to become the avatar of virtue. You guide a civilization onto the path of virtue by your actions. Pretty heavy stuff.
Ultima VI is a big favorite, the end of the trilogy of the Virtues it started to turn everything you believed on its head. Even more heavy stuff, especially when you found out who the false prophet is and what havoc has been wreaked.
Ultima VII is the BIG world changer. You now appear in Brittania 200 years after your last visit. The virtues are an archaic religion and people have turned to the new Fellowship cult who follow the Guardian. Many in the cult seem to do good works, but the cult itself insidiously (and unknown to even Lord British) promotes systemic persecution of non-members.
The white headphones may be cool, may be uncool. Whatever. But after the price of the player you'd better believe that the "free" headphones that came with it are good enough for me.
Do you run some kind of market prediction or tech future column? I want to be sure to avoid it.
Points:
How is Apple not competing directly with Microsoft now?
Demonstrate how Apple's focus has been primary on iPod/iTunes. Did we not see the release of a greatly improved OS X version about every 18 months? Has iLife not been expanding and also greatly improving each year? Is iWork just a throwaway package?
Do you think that Apple is somehow cloaking OS X from Microsoft? That if Microsoft notices the fancy OS under its nose it will quash it with some kind of super marketing blitz?
Whoa...you want to complain about buzzwork repetition and ego masturbation? You seriously need to listen to an episode of Geeks in Space.:-)
I've never even heard of Leo L-something until I found TWiT a few weeks ago. I find the shows amusing and reasonably informative. Security Now! is even better but more focused.
My brothers and I used to bank basketball shots off the top of the third story roof on our house. If you threw it just right it would bounce once and then swish into the net.
If we weren't careful we'd throw it too far and it would roll right over to the other side of the house.
When I worked in the theatre we used to toss minor things up to people the lower level grid which was exactly 40 feet high.
You should read about their history before Buddhism came in. No its not recent (Buddhism was introduced hundreds of years ago.), but it's just funny to me that one of the most martial cultural groups are now considered one of the most peaceful.
Anyhoo:
If you know about Tibet's actual history then you know that the Tibetan peasantry were dominated by the ruling Buddhist priest class. Sure it's all well and good to give up everything for the religion if thats what you want, but if you didn't then there wasn't anything you could do about it.
Nowadays many peasant farmers have a picture of Mao next to a picture of the Dalai Lama because "The Lama grants me heaven (in English, somewhat different concept in Tibetan) and Mao gave me land."
Yes I've studied Tibetan history specifically.
If you want to get irate over the absorbtion of differing cultures by what we now call China then you have your work cut out. There are no less than eight languages spoken in China, and dozens of dialects --- the only thing that nominally holds these languages together is that the use the same writing system.
Emperor Qin unified a great number of disparate people, not just the Han. Sure they were Han when he was through with them, but not necessarily before. That map is also overly simplistic, wikipedia's article isn't perfect but its decent enough to start with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Dynasty
You just have to face the fact that China is an alien culture. Yes their human rights abuses need to stop, but if you compare US in the early 1900s when the pace of modernization was wreaking all sorts of social havok with that of modern day China which experienced and is experiencing similar growing pains; China has done a great deal better. Compare Native Americans to Tibetans. Unless you argue that we should return all land stolen from the them by the early Americans (which is a valid argument from a human rights standpoint) then you cannot speak too loudly about the Chinese encroachment into Tibet.
The native Tibetan people get to own their land. They haven't been moved to reservations. Their economy is almost 100% subsidized by the Beijing government. In short, many Tibetans are better off now than they were before 1949.
40 feet is high? You're kidding. If anything it sounds low. But they probably couldn't get it to go higher because of its thin shape and little mass.
Re:Off topic, slightly ranty, but I have a point
on
Controlling Hurricanes?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes. We should cut off those parasites and let them die like the animals they are. Ticks get a cigarette...
Yeah, hear how insane that is? BTW, cite examples of the welfare parasite that aren't from tv or Ronald Reagan's (and the conservatives that follow) old and tired whinings. Oh, wait. That's a myth!
The truth is that welfare *penalized* people for working while on the system. But the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996 took a step in the right direction and, guess what?, tons of people on welfare jumped at the chance to work and contribute without losing everything for it.
Fuck, my main point. Obliterated by my irritation.
Evolution is a REACTION, not a progression.
While my argument clearly indicates that I meant to say thus, most people will only read the first line. And most people won't read this correction. Yay.
Dammit, evolution is a REACTION not a progression. That'll teach me to post without coffee. But did you read the read of my post which clearly argues the other point (which I intended to make)?
Did you not read about sickle-cell anemia and malaria?
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. "Flaws" according to evolution are mismatches between environment and species. While we can modify the environment to some extent, it still acts on us and we become the "perfect" species to suit it. We can't not!
But if we start to impose an artifical "natural" environment to further progress toward a more perfect being then we are only setting ourselves down an artifical evolutionary path.
Imagine the species as one human, in a room with hundreds of doors. Each door leads toward a particular evolutionary development. (Keeping it simple, obviously this would be more like an interconnected labyrinth.) The more diversity we have, the more doors we have. If WE choose to fuck with evolution by selecting for things that WE consider more perfect (smarter, stronger, less disease in our understanding) then WE start to walk through doors and close off areas that may be necessary someday.
It is in our best interest to keep as many doors as possible.
Now YOU are perfectly able (indeed, heavily encouraged by nature) to practice genetic selection of your mate for your own progeny. But no one is capable of predicting what genetic variances that the species will need in the millions of years to come.
How many times do I have to say this before you people get it?
It is our best interest as a species to keep as large genetic toolkit (diversity in the gene pool) as possible. Civilization helps us hold to that diversity by allowing as many people as possible to reproduce.
You see it as somehow halting our progression to that perfect being but let me clue you in: there is no perfect being. A being can be perfectly suited to its conditions, but then it is dangerously tied to those conditions. If a being has evolved too much and its environmental conditions change then it has no way to adapt quickly enough to survive.
Additionally, as a species we need all the diversity we can get. Our gene pool is incredibly small compared to other primates (a strong indicator that we came from a very small population), so while we aren't exactly Dodo-like, we aren't as far off as we like to think.
Let me reiterate, slowly.
Environments change. Evolution is the process through which a species changes to adapt to new environments. Evolution needs genetic diversity to function well. So greater diversity makes a stronger species.
We don't know what genes will play a vital role in our species' survival.
Read about the link between sickle-cell anemia and malaria if you don't think that a "bad" gene can have good effects in the right conditions.
In my opinion, albums like that weren't mean to be split into tracks. I'd just keep one album as album_merged for the purist in me, and one not for the practicalist.
My brothers and I pooled our money to buy Street Fighter II for $75 the _day_ it came out from the only retailer who wasn't sold out: Toys 'r us.
That was some of the best use of gaming money that we ever did. We played that thing just about every single day for months.
No figher since has ever really captured that same feeling. Not Tekken, Dead or Alive, Guilty Gear, Soul Calibur, certainly not Street Fighter One BillionX2 Hyperturbo+++ Extreme-a-rama, etc. Too bad really.
That was his point. People want the high resolution, high contract look of paper. Once you can carry around a piece of "paper" that looks, feels, and in all respects is paper that is also a high powered computer then we might see the start of the paperless office.
Sure we'll still have our computer paper, but as it can be reconfigured on a whim to display whatever we need then we'll all probably only need a few pieces.
More from the city, when society turns it back on people; people turn their back on society and do all the things that they would do, but they don't want to go to jail.
When you take consequences and punishment away, the people who would be criminals but aren't in normal society become criminal. All they needed was opportunity and I'm sure that you would be sad to discover just how large that portion of the population is.
=== From Interdictor on Livejournal ===
Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.
There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.
Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.
The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.
Where did I say that Neanderthals were successful? I merely take great issue with the idea that we are utterly superior to the "primative" Neanderthal.
I'm not at all sure that they died out. And yes, Homo Sapiens Sapiens is an amazing species. Our superb adaptability thanks to our delicious brains enables us to kick all kinds of ass.
Slashdot Mirror
What would you say about Shaolin Monks?
No lawyers and patent officers? I guess your world is dominated by the whims of powerful corporations. Whee.
Well Ultima IV did introduce the Ultima series in its modern form: to become the avatar of virtue. You guide a civilization onto the path of virtue by your actions. Pretty heavy stuff.
Ultima VI is a big favorite, the end of the trilogy of the Virtues it started to turn everything you believed on its head. Even more heavy stuff, especially when you found out who the false prophet is and what havoc has been wreaked.
Ultima VII is the BIG world changer. You now appear in Brittania 200 years after your last visit. The virtues are an archaic religion and people have turned to the new Fellowship cult who follow the Guardian. Many in the cult seem to do good works, but the cult itself insidiously (and unknown to even Lord British) promotes systemic persecution of non-members.
The white headphones may be cool, may be uncool. Whatever. But after the price of the player you'd better believe that the "free" headphones that came with it are good enough for me.
(some women also enjoy scantily clad men , look at the success of male strippers )
SOME women? Obviously you weren't around a lot of them when the last episode of Battlestar Galactica aired.
Of course, that's a show that gets everything right: eye candy for women, eye candy for men, eye candy for scifi fans, and mind candy for all!
Do you run some kind of market prediction or tech future column? I want to be sure to avoid it.
Points:
How is Apple not competing directly with Microsoft now?
Demonstrate how Apple's focus has been primary on iPod/iTunes. Did we not see the release of a greatly improved OS X version about every 18 months? Has iLife not been expanding and also greatly improving each year? Is iWork just a throwaway package?
Do you think that Apple is somehow cloaking OS X from Microsoft? That if Microsoft notices the fancy OS under its nose it will quash it with some kind of super marketing blitz?
Whoa...you want to complain about buzzwork repetition and ego masturbation? You seriously need to listen to an episode of Geeks in Space. :-)
I've never even heard of Leo L-something until I found TWiT a few weeks ago. I find the shows amusing and reasonably informative. Security Now! is even better but more focused.
My brothers and I used to bank basketball shots off the top of the third story roof on our house. If you threw it just right it would bounce once and then swish into the net.
If we weren't careful we'd throw it too far and it would roll right over to the other side of the house.
When I worked in the theatre we used to toss minor things up to people the lower level grid which was exactly 40 feet high.
Tibet? Peaceful? Ha! :-)
You should read about their history before Buddhism came in. No its not recent (Buddhism was introduced hundreds of years ago.), but it's just funny to me that one of the most martial cultural groups are now considered one of the most peaceful.
Anyhoo:
If you know about Tibet's actual history then you know that the Tibetan peasantry were dominated by the ruling Buddhist priest class. Sure it's all well and good to give up everything for the religion if thats what you want, but if you didn't then there wasn't anything you could do about it.
Nowadays many peasant farmers have a picture of Mao next to a picture of the Dalai Lama because "The Lama grants me heaven (in English, somewhat different concept in Tibetan) and Mao gave me land."
Yes I've studied Tibetan history specifically.
If you want to get irate over the absorbtion of differing cultures by what we now call China then you have your work cut out. There are no less than eight languages spoken in China, and dozens of dialects --- the only thing that nominally holds these languages together is that the use the same writing system.
Emperor Qin unified a great number of disparate people, not just the Han. Sure they were Han when he was through with them, but not necessarily before. That map is also overly simplistic, wikipedia's article isn't perfect but its decent enough to start with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qin_Dynasty
You just have to face the fact that China is an alien culture. Yes their human rights abuses need to stop, but if you compare US in the early 1900s when the pace of modernization was wreaking all sorts of social havok with that of modern day China which experienced and is experiencing similar growing pains; China has done a great deal better. Compare Native Americans to Tibetans. Unless you argue that we should return all land stolen from the them by the early Americans (which is a valid argument from a human rights standpoint) then you cannot speak too loudly about the Chinese encroachment into Tibet.
The native Tibetan people get to own their land. They haven't been moved to reservations. Their economy is almost 100% subsidized by the Beijing government. In short, many Tibetans are better off now than they were before 1949.
40 feet is high? You're kidding. If anything it sounds low. But they probably couldn't get it to go higher because of its thin shape and little mass.
Yes. We should cut off those parasites and let them die like the animals they are. Ticks get a cigarette...
Yeah, hear how insane that is? BTW, cite examples of the welfare parasite that aren't from tv or Ronald Reagan's (and the conservatives that follow) old and tired whinings. Oh, wait. That's a myth!
The truth is that welfare *penalized* people for working while on the system. But the Personal Responsibility and Work Act of 1996 took a step in the right direction and, guess what?, tons of people on welfare jumped at the chance to work and contribute without losing everything for it.
Too late, This Week in Tech is seriously better than anything /. could put out.
Fuck, my main point. Obliterated by my irritation.
Evolution is a REACTION , not a progression.
While my argument clearly indicates that I meant to say thus, most people will only read the first line. And most people won't read this correction. Yay.
Dammit, evolution is a REACTION not a progression. That'll teach me to post without coffee. But did you read the read of my post which clearly argues the other point (which I intended to make)?
Did you not read about sickle-cell anemia and malaria?
You have a fundamental misunderstanding of evolution. "Flaws" according to evolution are mismatches between environment and species. While we can modify the environment to some extent, it still acts on us and we become the "perfect" species to suit it. We can't not!
But if we start to impose an artifical "natural" environment to further progress toward a more perfect being then we are only setting ourselves down an artifical evolutionary path.
Imagine the species as one human, in a room with hundreds of doors. Each door leads toward a particular evolutionary development. (Keeping it simple, obviously this would be more like an interconnected labyrinth.) The more diversity we have, the more doors we have. If WE choose to fuck with evolution by selecting for things that WE consider more perfect (smarter, stronger, less disease in our understanding) then WE start to walk through doors and close off areas that may be necessary someday.
It is in our best interest to keep as many doors as possible.
Now YOU are perfectly able (indeed, heavily encouraged by nature) to practice genetic selection of your mate for your own progeny. But no one is capable of predicting what genetic variances that the species will need in the millions of years to come.
Evolution is a progession, not a reaction!
How many times do I have to say this before you people get it?
It is our best interest as a species to keep as large genetic toolkit (diversity in the gene pool) as possible. Civilization helps us hold to that diversity by allowing as many people as possible to reproduce.
You see it as somehow halting our progression to that perfect being but let me clue you in: there is no perfect being. A being can be perfectly suited to its conditions, but then it is dangerously tied to those conditions. If a being has evolved too much and its environmental conditions change then it has no way to adapt quickly enough to survive.
Additionally, as a species we need all the diversity we can get. Our gene pool is incredibly small compared to other primates (a strong indicator that we came from a very small population), so while we aren't exactly Dodo-like, we aren't as far off as we like to think.
Let me reiterate, slowly.
Environments change. Evolution is the process through which a species changes to adapt to new environments. Evolution needs genetic diversity to function well. So greater diversity makes a stronger species.
We don't know what genes will play a vital role in our species' survival.
Read about the link between sickle-cell anemia and malaria if you don't think that a "bad" gene can have good effects in the right conditions.
Inappropriate, unadult, immature, unprofessional behavior is why they were fired.
In my opinion, albums like that weren't mean to be split into tracks. I'd just keep one album as album_merged for the purist in me, and one not for the practicalist.
My brothers and I pooled our money to buy Street Fighter II for $75 the _day_ it came out from the only retailer who wasn't sold out: Toys 'r us.
That was some of the best use of gaming money that we ever did. We played that thing just about every single day for months.
No figher since has ever really captured that same feeling. Not Tekken, Dead or Alive, Guilty Gear, Soul Calibur, certainly not Street Fighter One BillionX2 Hyperturbo+++ Extreme-a-rama, etc. Too bad really.
If its that important, then merge the files. If it isn't that important, then it isn't that important.
If you want it done on arbitrary playlists on the fly, then you can hardly bring CD players into the debate.
BTW, I don't notice any gap. Is it a big deal?
Republican in those days (those, great days) didn't mean lunatic right wing.
Where's a socially conscious fiscal conservative to go now?
Right on.
That was his point. People want the high resolution, high contract look of paper. Once you can carry around a piece of "paper" that looks, feels, and in all respects is paper that is also a high powered computer then we might see the start of the paperless office.
Sure we'll still have our computer paper, but as it can be reconfigured on a whim to display whatever we need then we'll all probably only need a few pieces.
Doing well and doing better than before aren't necessarily equivalent.
More from the city, when society turns it back on people; people turn their back on society and do all the things that they would do, but they don't want to go to jail.
When you take consequences and punishment away, the people who would be criminals but aren't in normal society become criminal. All they needed was opportunity and I'm sure that you would be sad to discover just how large that portion of the population is.
=== From Interdictor on Livejournal ===
Although obviously he has no exact count, he estimates more than 10,000 people are packed into and around and outside the convention center still waiting for the buses. They had no food, no water, and no medicine for the last three days, until today, when the National Guard drove over the bridge above them, and tossed out supplies over the side crashing down to the ground below. Much of the supplies were destroyed from the drop. Many people tried to catch the supplies to protect them before they hit the ground. Some offered to walk all the way around up the bridge and bring the supplies down, but any attempt to approach the police or national guard resulted in weapons being aimed at them.
There are many infants and elderly people among them, as well as many people who were injured jumping out of windows to escape flood water and the like -- all of them in dire straights.
Any attempt to flag down police results in being told to get away at gunpoint. Hour after hour they watch buses pass by filled with people from other areas. Tensions are very high, and there has been at least one murder and several fights. 8 or 9 dead people have been stored in a freezer in the area, and 2 of these dead people are kids.
The people are so desperate that they're doing anything they can think of to impress the authorities enough to bring some buses. These things include standing in single file lines with the eldery in front, women and children next; sweeping up the area and cleaning the windows and anything else that would show the people are not barbarians.
The buses never stop.
Where did I say that Neanderthals were successful? I merely take great issue with the idea that we are utterly superior to the "primative" Neanderthal.
I'm not at all sure that they died out. And yes, Homo Sapiens Sapiens is an amazing species. Our superb adaptability thanks to our delicious brains enables us to kick all kinds of ass.
Bear in mind that the people being rescued aren't the ones shooting. They are the ones that the people being rescued are being rescued from!
You seem to have placed our civilization on an unreasonable pedestal. You should learn that we are never far from chaos.
Of course there are no excuses, except for being human.