Maybe the class I picked was just stronger or something but I didn't find D3 to be grindy, in the sense that I had to repeat areas for loot in order to progress, until the second Act on Inferno. On inferno difficulty Act one was pretty challenging in fact it was gratifyingly tough. But then I started Act two and all of a sudden normal mobs were impossibly hard, let alone Champion and Elite packs. I bought items on the Gold AH throughout though so that could have an impact. When I really tried to optimize my build and gear though so that I could make progress again all it did was make Act one less challenging but Act two remainded well out of reach. There were some breakpoints that you needed to reach apparently in regards to HP, DPS and resistances. I gave up on it because it looked like it was going to take hundreds of hours or dollars to accomplish.
All that said I patched up the game last night to see what had changed and gave it a try. All I did was the latter half of Act one Inferno and it seems to have been toned down a good bit. Even without having played in a very long time it was fairly easy for me to get to and kill the butcher. Tonight I'll try out Act two and see how that goes. The other nice thing is that because of the way these economies always work gear on the gold auction house has come down in price and I should not be able to afford a weapon that'll increase my DPS by more than 50% for just a couple million gold, whereas before it would have been 100 million or some such silly amount.
I played on and off for probably a total of a year over the course of two ladder seasons. And I actually saw a Jah drop once in the throne room. Of course I was half way across the room from it and the hammerdin bot probably auto picked it.
Sadly enough this already kind of happened once in recent history. When Ross Perot ran he got a significant share of the votes, but most of them came from the Republican base. This resulted in the Republicans losing the presidential race. Since then both parties have cooperated to put into place more hurdles and restrictions to try and prevent such a thing happening again. So it might still be possible for a third party to win but the likelyhood of it happening now is probably lower than it has ever been in our history.
Most people do actually pay for their garbage removal. The cost is just usually lumped in with some other bill and isn't variable depending on how much they generate. I know my waste disposal fee is lumped in with the sewage and water. The annoying thing where I live is that we don't have curb side recycling at all. We have to sort it and then go find a municipal container that we can cram it into. So as a community our recycling is even less efficient because each individual has to drive to the silly containers.
I like the changes to legendaries, or at least the idea they are floating for it. One of the fun things in D2 was items that could change the way you played your character in a huge way. Although in the case of the Enigma runeword it was kind of game breaking.
From my understanding of HDD technology part of the issue would be that HDD's are most likely to fail within their return period on their initial powerup or very early in their life. So for the most part if your HDD fails it will be early enough in it's usage life to send back, whereas with SSD's the problem is that they have a definite usage limitation. The SSD is very unlikely, compared to the HDD, to be dead on arrival or brick early in it's service life. So the SSD will get used and eventually wear out but it will probably be past it's warranty period and so not be returned.
Also proper use of SSD's is important. If you fill the drive up it will last considerably less time than if you use it sparingly. And of course that then brings up, if I can't use the drive why am I buying it?
Also stuff like your temporary files, libraries (documents, music, pictures, videos), page file and such can all experience quite a bit of churn and hog space. So what I've done is symbolically linked all of the directories that I expect to go through a lot of data churn to a Hard Drive. All of the stuff I expect to be pretty stable like the OS and installed programs go on the SSD, which is then backed up to a Hard Drive.
Making a blaze farm is kind of a PITA. First of all you have to find a damn fortress. Then fight through it to actually find a spawner and then deactivate it, build your trap around it, build some transport to get back and forth, make that transport immune to randomly spawning zombie pigmen, and on and on. It's a PITA, but ultimately worth it I guess for the fast enchanting.
Personally I don't usually bother with blazes for a long time. I build a sky trap based on Monkeyfarm's triangular platform farm. That is usually plenty good enough.
You really don't need to make gobs of enchanted equipment anyways. Once you have a good tool you don't have to repair it, just use it to enchant a new item. That method is much cheaper exp wise.
i don't doubt that he was feeling a lot of pressure to succede wildly again. But I do agree with you that it just didn't sound like much of a game. In fact I would have liked the idea of it a lot more as a straight up expansion or addon for Minecraft. Simply enabling the building of space ships. You could keep the computer programming and maybe add robots and such that you can build and program to do your bidding, whether that is flying your ship, gathering materials, automating mining and construction on larger scales, manning the defenses of your ships, stations, and fortresses.
I was always curious about this game idea because frankly it didn't sound fun to me at all, which I kept assuming meant I just didn't understand the whole concept yet.
Like someone else said it's rarely all or nothing on each aspect. For me the paycheck comes before everything else. But right after that is pride in providing quality service. I generally like my job and especially the people I work with. But without a paycheck, or if the pay was significantly worse I would not keep doing it. Providing for my families needs is critical to me, everything else is secondary.
I agree that the risks of relying on your own grown food is significant should it all fail. That is something we could test in LEO first though, and I would suggest testing all such methods that way whether it is fish or insects or just plain plants. All of those methods share a lot of the same risks.
The reason I like fish though is that they form a more symbiotic relationship with the plants in a hydraponic situation. You feed the fish vegetable matter that you don't want to eat, the fish grow into meat and crap out fertilizer for the plants. The plants use the fertilizer that would otherwise toxify the water for the fish. So long as you have them balanced you shouldn't ever have to purge the system. In Hydraponics alone the water often becomes toxic and requires purging which cuts down on the efficiency of the whole thing. In an Aquaponic situation the only water losses should be through evaporation and harvested vegetables and fish.
I suppose all of that isn't as important if they want to grow stuff directly in dirt. But that seems a little silly since water will be a scarce resource, even if it's not entirely rare it will require a lot more work, energy and machinery to gather. So wasting water by farming in regular soil seems wasteful to me.
I was pretty sure it had something to do with the reduced air pressure also. It's the same issue that they have on airplanes with inflight meals always tasting bland. The lower air pressure reduces the effectiveness of taste buds somehow. And the low humidity affects your sense of smell, which is where a lot of perceived flavor actually comes from.
Refrigeration probably isn't all that expensive weight wise, hell they just need to insulate the container from the internal environment and keep it out of the sun.
For most MRE's hot water isn't even necessary, it's just a nicety because people like hot meals for whatever reason.
I'm curious as to why you don't think fish would be viable. Awhile back I was very interested in Aquaponics, a combination of Hydroponics and Aquaculture, and it strikes me as a very good method for growing food both vegetable and meat. The systems I looked at took up relatively little space and were pretty self contained, the only real inputs being fish food. And you could grow duckweed for the fish food.
WTF, no business has any right to even a single % of marketshare, least of all charities. The whole point of a charity is to fulfill the needs of an under served group. If a charity in some market isn't feasible because the market is already getting exactly what it wants at a price better than the charity can offer, that by definition is success.
If tomorrow a cheap cure for cancer was discovered by a federal researcher and the government decided to simply provide it to every US citizen free of charge and license it for free to every other nation, would you then rant and rave about how unfair it was that the government discovered a cure and put all the cancer charities out of business?
I have to nitpick a little here. The Executive can always in practice pick and choose which laws it will enforce. Despite the size and funding of the Executive branch the resources are still limited and as such they end up with a lot of leeway in selective enforcement. Just as a police officer can choose to give a reckless driver a simple verbal warning or arrest and cite them for every singe minor infraction they can find. Even for things like Drunk Driving in practice an officer can just give a warning, and I've seen it happen. That Officer might have to face repercussions from his own superiors and the community if the incident became public enough, but they are frequently given a lot of room to manuever when making those kinds of decisions.
Much like Jury Nullification this can be both a good and bad thing. I'm pretty sure the majority of people in states where weed has been legalized would appreciate it if the feds would lay off the prohibition laws within their state. The important thing when it comes to the Executive branch picking and choosing the laws they will enforce is that we hold them responsible as an electorate, and that we do so swiftly.
I'm reminded of a scene from a movie I watched a few years ago. A captured criminal is sentenced to 100 lashings. The Captain who isn't a particularly nice guy himself objects on grounds that it would certainly kill him. His superior demands it anyways and most of the residents turn out to watch with eager anticipation. The lashings begin and soon the film cuts and when it returns to the scene the Captain is wringing the blood out from the leather scourge, which forms a disturbingly large pool of blood in the dusty roadway. The onlookers who were previously so excited to witness the punishment are turning away some of them visibly sickened by the sight. At this point you as the viewer think that the lashing must be done with, but then the lawman prepares to swing again and voices the count, which is somewhere in the 30's.
You don't need to have probable cause or be a law enforcement (LE) officer to follow someone in a public area. You are also free to ask people questions, even uncomfortable ones, in the same public places. What Zimmerman, or any other non-LE personnel, lacked the authority to do would be to actually physically detain or make verbal claims to have that authority. He also could not legally compel any answers, which even an LE only has limited authority to do.
Show me someone that only has 100 contacts and I'll show you someone that hasn't left the newborn recovery area.
I attended high school with over 100 people whom I knew by first and last name. Those people have scattered far and wide. In the meantime I spent two years livving at the opposite end of the country. Then I enlisted in the Military and traveled some more for six years. Then I got married and became associated with even more people who live all over the world. On Facebook I might have 60 "friends" but in reality I know hundreds if not thousands of people by name who are now or have been in the past scattered all over the world.
You are right that many of the people we know, know a lot of the same people. But it doesn't take a lot to escape out of that, one contact from a different geographic region, church, socio-economic group and you are off in another burst of completely new contacts.
You are assuming that somehow the private has no contact what so ever with anyone higher than his own sergeant, and essentially the same for each step up. That is beyond incredulous. In reality a private would count his commander as the first hop because he has met and interacted with his commander, even though there are likely to be several layers of ranking supervisors in between. If he didn't know the people in his chain of command to a reasonable degree then the whole thing would go down the shitter in the event that his sergeant was incapacitated because he wouldn't know the next person in the chain except by name, which isn't very wise militarily.
I've met at least one of my congress critters and corresponded via letter with most of them. The one I've actually met sits on the armed services commitee, so in theory I'm only seperated by 1 hop from some of the highest ranking military officers in the nation. I'll bet that 3 hops would cover 80% if not all of the USA.
I've never bothered to return a bad game but apparently policies vary from store to store. If you listen to the software publishers you aren't actually purchasing a physical good, you are buying a license to use their software. And if you decide to not accept the terms of that license there is no logical or legal reason I can think of that they should be entilted to keep your money. So far as I know Valve refuses to recognize any kind of return policy, so backing out the transaction is the next logical choice.
In todays US I doubt such a strategy would work other than to incite riots that'd make the ones in LA look like child's play. In order for that to work you would need a much larger chunk of the population to openly support it than even bothers to vote in elections these days. My own Father refused to carry a firearm in Vietnam as a Medic when people were shooting at him on a regular basis. And even he'd be out in the streets if our legislators passed such a law.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the class I picked was just stronger or something but I didn't find D3 to be grindy, in the sense that I had to repeat areas for loot in order to progress, until the second Act on Inferno. On inferno difficulty Act one was pretty challenging in fact it was gratifyingly tough. But then I started Act two and all of a sudden normal mobs were impossibly hard, let alone Champion and Elite packs. I bought items on the Gold AH throughout though so that could have an impact. When I really tried to optimize my build and gear though so that I could make progress again all it did was make Act one less challenging but Act two remainded well out of reach. There were some breakpoints that you needed to reach apparently in regards to HP, DPS and resistances. I gave up on it because it looked like it was going to take hundreds of hours or dollars to accomplish.
All that said I patched up the game last night to see what had changed and gave it a try. All I did was the latter half of Act one Inferno and it seems to have been toned down a good bit. Even without having played in a very long time it was fairly easy for me to get to and kill the butcher. Tonight I'll try out Act two and see how that goes. The other nice thing is that because of the way these economies always work gear on the gold auction house has come down in price and I should not be able to afford a weapon that'll increase my DPS by more than 50% for just a couple million gold, whereas before it would have been 100 million or some such silly amount.
I played on and off for probably a total of a year over the course of two ladder seasons. And I actually saw a Jah drop once in the throne room. Of course I was half way across the room from it and the hammerdin bot probably auto picked it.
Sadly enough this already kind of happened once in recent history. When Ross Perot ran he got a significant share of the votes, but most of them came from the Republican base. This resulted in the Republicans losing the presidential race. Since then both parties have cooperated to put into place more hurdles and restrictions to try and prevent such a thing happening again. So it might still be possible for a third party to win but the likelyhood of it happening now is probably lower than it has ever been in our history.
Most people do actually pay for their garbage removal. The cost is just usually lumped in with some other bill and isn't variable depending on how much they generate. I know my waste disposal fee is lumped in with the sewage and water. The annoying thing where I live is that we don't have curb side recycling at all. We have to sort it and then go find a municipal container that we can cram it into. So as a community our recycling is even less efficient because each individual has to drive to the silly containers.
I like the changes to legendaries, or at least the idea they are floating for it. One of the fun things in D2 was items that could change the way you played your character in a huge way. Although in the case of the Enigma runeword it was kind of game breaking.
From my understanding of HDD technology part of the issue would be that HDD's are most likely to fail within their return period on their initial powerup or very early in their life. So for the most part if your HDD fails it will be early enough in it's usage life to send back, whereas with SSD's the problem is that they have a definite usage limitation. The SSD is very unlikely, compared to the HDD, to be dead on arrival or brick early in it's service life. So the SSD will get used and eventually wear out but it will probably be past it's warranty period and so not be returned.
Also proper use of SSD's is important. If you fill the drive up it will last considerably less time than if you use it sparingly. And of course that then brings up, if I can't use the drive why am I buying it?
Also stuff like your temporary files, libraries (documents, music, pictures, videos), page file and such can all experience quite a bit of churn and hog space. So what I've done is symbolically linked all of the directories that I expect to go through a lot of data churn to a Hard Drive. All of the stuff I expect to be pretty stable like the OS and installed programs go on the SSD, which is then backed up to a Hard Drive.
Making a blaze farm is kind of a PITA. First of all you have to find a damn fortress. Then fight through it to actually find a spawner and then deactivate it, build your trap around it, build some transport to get back and forth, make that transport immune to randomly spawning zombie pigmen, and on and on. It's a PITA, but ultimately worth it I guess for the fast enchanting.
Personally I don't usually bother with blazes for a long time. I build a sky trap based on Monkeyfarm's triangular platform farm. That is usually plenty good enough.
You really don't need to make gobs of enchanted equipment anyways. Once you have a good tool you don't have to repair it, just use it to enchant a new item. That method is much cheaper exp wise.
i don't doubt that he was feeling a lot of pressure to succede wildly again. But I do agree with you that it just didn't sound like much of a game. In fact I would have liked the idea of it a lot more as a straight up expansion or addon for Minecraft. Simply enabling the building of space ships. You could keep the computer programming and maybe add robots and such that you can build and program to do your bidding, whether that is flying your ship, gathering materials, automating mining and construction on larger scales, manning the defenses of your ships, stations, and fortresses.
I was always curious about this game idea because frankly it didn't sound fun to me at all, which I kept assuming meant I just didn't understand the whole concept yet.
Like someone else said it's rarely all or nothing on each aspect. For me the paycheck comes before everything else. But right after that is pride in providing quality service. I generally like my job and especially the people I work with. But without a paycheck, or if the pay was significantly worse I would not keep doing it. Providing for my families needs is critical to me, everything else is secondary.
I agree that the risks of relying on your own grown food is significant should it all fail. That is something we could test in LEO first though, and I would suggest testing all such methods that way whether it is fish or insects or just plain plants. All of those methods share a lot of the same risks.
The reason I like fish though is that they form a more symbiotic relationship with the plants in a hydraponic situation. You feed the fish vegetable matter that you don't want to eat, the fish grow into meat and crap out fertilizer for the plants. The plants use the fertilizer that would otherwise toxify the water for the fish. So long as you have them balanced you shouldn't ever have to purge the system. In Hydraponics alone the water often becomes toxic and requires purging which cuts down on the efficiency of the whole thing. In an Aquaponic situation the only water losses should be through evaporation and harvested vegetables and fish.
I suppose all of that isn't as important if they want to grow stuff directly in dirt. But that seems a little silly since water will be a scarce resource, even if it's not entirely rare it will require a lot more work, energy and machinery to gather. So wasting water by farming in regular soil seems wasteful to me.
I was pretty sure it had something to do with the reduced air pressure also. It's the same issue that they have on airplanes with inflight meals always tasting bland. The lower air pressure reduces the effectiveness of taste buds somehow. And the low humidity affects your sense of smell, which is where a lot of perceived flavor actually comes from.
Refrigeration probably isn't all that expensive weight wise, hell they just need to insulate the container from the internal environment and keep it out of the sun.
For most MRE's hot water isn't even necessary, it's just a nicety because people like hot meals for whatever reason.
I'm curious as to why you don't think fish would be viable. Awhile back I was very interested in Aquaponics, a combination of Hydroponics and Aquaculture, and it strikes me as a very good method for growing food both vegetable and meat. The systems I looked at took up relatively little space and were pretty self contained, the only real inputs being fish food. And you could grow duckweed for the fish food.
WTF, no business has any right to even a single % of marketshare, least of all charities. The whole point of a charity is to fulfill the needs of an under served group. If a charity in some market isn't feasible because the market is already getting exactly what it wants at a price better than the charity can offer, that by definition is success.
If tomorrow a cheap cure for cancer was discovered by a federal researcher and the government decided to simply provide it to every US citizen free of charge and license it for free to every other nation, would you then rant and rave about how unfair it was that the government discovered a cure and put all the cancer charities out of business?
All of that works on the assumption that sentient life must be very similiar to ourselves.
I'm not sure how else it could evolve or exist but that is kind of the whole point of exploration and scientific inquiry.
I have to nitpick a little here. The Executive can always in practice pick and choose which laws it will enforce. Despite the size and funding of the Executive branch the resources are still limited and as such they end up with a lot of leeway in selective enforcement. Just as a police officer can choose to give a reckless driver a simple verbal warning or arrest and cite them for every singe minor infraction they can find. Even for things like Drunk Driving in practice an officer can just give a warning, and I've seen it happen. That Officer might have to face repercussions from his own superiors and the community if the incident became public enough, but they are frequently given a lot of room to manuever when making those kinds of decisions.
Much like Jury Nullification this can be both a good and bad thing. I'm pretty sure the majority of people in states where weed has been legalized would appreciate it if the feds would lay off the prohibition laws within their state. The important thing when it comes to the Executive branch picking and choosing the laws they will enforce is that we hold them responsible as an electorate, and that we do so swiftly.
I'm reminded of a scene from a movie I watched a few years ago. A captured criminal is sentenced to 100 lashings. The Captain who isn't a particularly nice guy himself objects on grounds that it would certainly kill him. His superior demands it anyways and most of the residents turn out to watch with eager anticipation. The lashings begin and soon the film cuts and when it returns to the scene the Captain is wringing the blood out from the leather scourge, which forms a disturbingly large pool of blood in the dusty roadway. The onlookers who were previously so excited to witness the punishment are turning away some of them visibly sickened by the sight. At this point you as the viewer think that the lashing must be done with, but then the lawman prepares to swing again and voices the count, which is somewhere in the 30's.
You don't need to have probable cause or be a law enforcement (LE) officer to follow someone in a public area. You are also free to ask people questions, even uncomfortable ones, in the same public places. What Zimmerman, or any other non-LE personnel, lacked the authority to do would be to actually physically detain or make verbal claims to have that authority. He also could not legally compel any answers, which even an LE only has limited authority to do.
Show me someone that only has 100 contacts and I'll show you someone that hasn't left the newborn recovery area.
I attended high school with over 100 people whom I knew by first and last name. Those people have scattered far and wide. In the meantime I spent two years livving at the opposite end of the country. Then I enlisted in the Military and traveled some more for six years. Then I got married and became associated with even more people who live all over the world. On Facebook I might have 60 "friends" but in reality I know hundreds if not thousands of people by name who are now or have been in the past scattered all over the world.
You are right that many of the people we know, know a lot of the same people. But it doesn't take a lot to escape out of that, one contact from a different geographic region, church, socio-economic group and you are off in another burst of completely new contacts.
You are assuming that somehow the private has no contact what so ever with anyone higher than his own sergeant, and essentially the same for each step up. That is beyond incredulous. In reality a private would count his commander as the first hop because he has met and interacted with his commander, even though there are likely to be several layers of ranking supervisors in between. If he didn't know the people in his chain of command to a reasonable degree then the whole thing would go down the shitter in the event that his sergeant was incapacitated because he wouldn't know the next person in the chain except by name, which isn't very wise militarily.
I've met at least one of my congress critters and corresponded via letter with most of them. The one I've actually met sits on the armed services commitee, so in theory I'm only seperated by 1 hop from some of the highest ranking military officers in the nation. I'll bet that 3 hops would cover 80% if not all of the USA.
I've never bothered to return a bad game but apparently policies vary from store to store. If you listen to the software publishers you aren't actually purchasing a physical good, you are buying a license to use their software. And if you decide to not accept the terms of that license there is no logical or legal reason I can think of that they should be entilted to keep your money. So far as I know Valve refuses to recognize any kind of return policy, so backing out the transaction is the next logical choice.
In todays US I doubt such a strategy would work other than to incite riots that'd make the ones in LA look like child's play. In order for that to work you would need a much larger chunk of the population to openly support it than even bothers to vote in elections these days. My own Father refused to carry a firearm in Vietnam as a Medic when people were shooting at him on a regular basis. And even he'd be out in the streets if our legislators passed such a law.
Indeed, it says "all men" not "all men holding citizenship".