I've never had an accident where I needed witnesses but my Wife has. Twice she has been hit by other drivers that failed to obey a stop light or stop sign. In the stoplight accident no witnesses bothered to stop and wait for the police so it became her word against the other drivers. That resulted in a no fault decision and her having to eat the cost of the accident. The stop sign accident had an elderly couple stay around to act as witnesses which helped a lot when the police assigned fault. Although the other driver was from out of state and it turned out his insurance wasn't up to date, so we had to cover it anyways, and we don't know that the officer did actually ever cite him for anything.
While I find no issue with the land owner owning the bones and fossilized remains and such, the issue is a little different when it comes to artifacts that aren't quite as old. Native American Indian artifacts that are now discovered might not be older than a few hundred years. And there can be little doubt in many cases that the land they are found on was at some point taken in a morally wrong way from the native inhabitants. And living descendants of those people might readily be found. So I can see how that might be a relavant issue in some cases.
When I was a kid a golf course near where I lived was doing some digging as part of renovating their course. They discovered what has since been known as the Burning Tree Mastadon. The lead archaeologist Paul E. Hooge ended up being expelled from many of the professional organizations he was a member of, because he helped the owner find a buyer. This was an amazing find and no museums were interested in giving anything like a fair value for it. It was eventually sold for $600,000 to someone in Japan.
Can't watch the video's from work but I remember my father talking about a kid, I'm assuming a teenager, some where in a third world country that produced exceptionally high quality vacum tubes. This was in reference to HAM radio equipment I think. Anyways apparently the guy/kid assembled, vacumed and sealed all his tubes by hand. Apparently it involved the tube being created as one peice of glass with an attached peice of glass made such that you could drip mercury through it. Each droplet of mercury would trap some of the atmosphere between it and the previous drop. Once the pressure in the tube reached the desired level it would be seperated and sealed in the same action.
I don't know that there is actually a higher percentage of attractive women in large cities compared to anywhere else. You just see a lot more people throughout the day than you would if you lived somewhere in a small town. And the population churn is much higher in a city as well. I can go back home and odds are good that I'll see several people that I recognize if I go out to eat. Not so much where I live now even though it's a smaller city at only 300k or so.
Yes, basically every automobile is a copy of the Model-T, well actually probably the steam powered novelty cars from even earlier. The big difference being that the newer the vehicle typically the more reliable, fast, and feature filled it is. There isn't anything wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with DDR, Guitar Hero and Rockband, I just think that they are lame.
That's an opinion and it shouldn't matter in anyway to you or anyone else. To me all these games are just souped up versions of Simon that don't add significantly enough to the game play to justify me playing them. Not to mention the horribly bad renditions of the songs that are used.
That was easily one of the worst movies I have ever forced myself to sit down and watch. I still remember the twenty minute scene where the spaceship/rocket is landing on the moon or something. I kept waiting for it to explode or for something to go wrong. Pretty much anything to happen except for it to slowly, slowly, slowly descend and have a completely uneventful landing. It wasn't even like the landing sequence was complicated and interesting to watch.
A colony on Mars heavily dependant on resupply from Earth is a bad idea, if it can't survive on it's own it would be best to avoid the one way trip plan.
Why on earth... or Mars would seclusion from any entertainment device be necessary? We are perfectly capable of sending and receiving transmissions of data that far and we've even managed to remote control the rovers. Not to mention for say ten kilo's of weight you could take more media to watch and listen too than you could probably use up, without having to transmit any.
Holy cow! No one said we had to stop having wars if we launched a manned Mars mission. Hell we could get the Russians and the Chinese to send colony ships aswell and have a small three way war on Mars! We could get double the inovation.
I'd happily sign up for a one way trip to Mars. I'd never get picked though, I'm too old and have a family now. But space exploration has always been a dream of mine and being a part of something like this would be awesome. I bet you could get a couple thousand volunteers at the drop of a hat
I can understand the naysaying about how costly it'd be compared to sending lot and lots of robotic probes. But there is a good bit to be said for the psychological affect of actually putting people on Mars.
I don't really mind the idea of a global patent system, which of course individual countries can opt to utilize. What I object to is the idea of simply copying our current system and expanding it to the global level.
Of course I don't really object to the idea of a world government either so long as it is founded and governed on the principles of human rights being sacrosaint. And I don't really care if it's based on our government or not so long as it's run properly. Nationalism is in my opinion a waste of energy when there are bigger fish to fry.
Global warming is so far from being important in my life even as a fairly aware person. I care much more about when Diablo 3 will be released than whether or not any Polar Bears will being living in the wild by the time it is. Change has been a part of our world since recorded history started. And we're clever enough animals I don't think it will bite us in the butt in a serious way for another couple centuries. People talk about saving our world for the generations to come, well I had to live through the 80's and they didn't, so screw them!
over population is a localized problem not a global one. And those large areas that are suffering food shortages have partly brought it upon themselves, or their governments have. And in most cases it's an economics problem starving them not a world shortage of food. Ever notice how those feed the children adverts on TV ask for money and stress how little money it takes to feed a kid for a day. It's because all that organization really needs is money to purchase food and trasnport it. Otherwise they'd promote eating less food so that what we have goes further.
Hmm as a space weapon it would be awesome. You wouldn't even have to make it capable of killing anyone on the surface. Just make it strong enough to sterilize everyone in whatever other country is annoying you. That way you only have to put up with their shenanigans for another 75 years or so. Possibly even less because towards the end they'd be a nation entirely of geriatrics with an ever dwindling population. This would of course need to be done before anyone figures out how to clone people at a high success rate.
I can still remember learning about the internet in one of my High School computer classes. We talked about the different methods you could use, gopher vs. HTML and such. We even participated in a bulletin board with another school. But we didn't have a connection at the school so our teacher would put all the updates on a floppy and take it to his University office where he could upload it and download any updates from the other end. I remember Cell Phones being full blown hand sets that required a heavy shoulder bag for the battery and transmitter.
Technology really seems to have grown explosively within even the last 20 years, I'm only 30 years old and I can see the drastic changes and developments that have happened.
I specifically remember wanting my own phone for awhile as a kid. I'm not sure what for though really. As I didn't have anyone that I would have wanted to talk to for extended periods or anything.
I got a bedside lamp on a scissor style extension arm at some point when I was around 12. I was able to use this in a clever way to stay up and read all night. Before I was unable to do this because most light sources would throw light onto the trees outside my window, which my father could see from his window. The lamp I shaded such that it let out just a sliver of light to read by.
That's a battle I hope to avoid entirely. In another ten years cell phones will probably have become so common place that I'd be considered a throwback if each of my children didn't have one. For now though I would like a child of mine to have a cell phone to use in an emergency. My wife wants essentially the same but her idea of what would be suitable and unlikely to be abused in the way of prepaid minutes is quit different from mine.
My family canceled our DirecTV subscription a few months back. It was just too expensive for what we got out of it. Only one of the Major Networks would even let us get their channels from the satelitte which we had to pay a premium to get, and the rest were impossible to recieve without sinking more than $200 into antenna's and such.
So now we spent the couple hundred bucks on antenna's and such and still get crap service. CBS, ABC, Fox and CW are all broadcast specifically for my city, Montgomery AL. But the towers are located 28+ miles from my house in two seperate cardinal directions. Even in clear weather those channels are prone to poor reception. And in inclement weather the channels that are less than 5 miles away often flake out aswell.
The Digital transition from my point of view has been a failure overall. As a kid all our channels were coming from over 30 miles away and even in the worst weather the picture and sound would get a little fuzzy but remain entirely comprehensible.
There was an article a while back that had a video of a robot designed to be a pack animal of sorts. It's legs didn't move in the same way as a dog's, they were hinged backwards, but when it was shoved, kicked or slipped on ice it reacted just like a four legged animal in ordre to regain it's balance.
Except that the fake taunt as you call it is just as plausible as the magic user that puts out fireballs. Taunt is just a mind trick of sorts that focus's the targets attention, it works in the same kind of way that a mezmerize type spell would.
And why shouldn't taunt work exactly the same in PvP as it does in PvE? Your reasons against this is that you lose control of your character. Well guess what, all the other crowd control type affects do the same thing by inhibiting control of the character. At least when taunted into attacking another player you are still attacking someone.
The whole idea of a Taunt is to goad someone into acting irrationally, why is it such a stretch to have a more affective taunt in a game with spells and dragons?
Personally I'd rather see a game made where players are very fragile regardless of armor, unless it's taken to a huge extreme. That's one of the reasons that the Shadowrun PnP game appealed to me. Everyone essentially had ten hitpoints, combat became more about avoiding taking damage and manipulating the situation to be most favorable to your characters.
If that means not having huge boss fights with epicly long encounters that boil down to playing Simon and Dance Dance Revolution at the same time, so be it!
Once you are making a few skills the "must haves" you've thrown out much of the purpose of a skill or talent based system. Or at least the distinction between it and a class system is eroded.
I particularly like the idea of gear having qualities that inhibit or affect spell casting both negatively and positively. I would want it to be a semi-hidden attribute for every item that a character could carry around or wear. You could even assign values to parts of the environment, if wearing too much iron affects your spell negatively so should iron in the surrounding environment. And making the targets equipment a part of the equation would also be cool.
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I've never had an accident where I needed witnesses but my Wife has. Twice she has been hit by other drivers that failed to obey a stop light or stop sign. In the stoplight accident no witnesses bothered to stop and wait for the police so it became her word against the other drivers. That resulted in a no fault decision and her having to eat the cost of the accident. The stop sign accident had an elderly couple stay around to act as witnesses which helped a lot when the police assigned fault. Although the other driver was from out of state and it turned out his insurance wasn't up to date, so we had to cover it anyways, and we don't know that the officer did actually ever cite him for anything.
While I find no issue with the land owner owning the bones and fossilized remains and such, the issue is a little different when it comes to artifacts that aren't quite as old. Native American Indian artifacts that are now discovered might not be older than a few hundred years. And there can be little doubt in many cases that the land they are found on was at some point taken in a morally wrong way from the native inhabitants. And living descendants of those people might readily be found. So I can see how that might be a relavant issue in some cases.
When I was a kid a golf course near where I lived was doing some digging as part of renovating their course. They discovered what has since been known as the Burning Tree Mastadon. The lead archaeologist Paul E. Hooge ended up being expelled from many of the professional organizations he was a member of, because he helped the owner find a buyer. This was an amazing find and no museums were interested in giving anything like a fair value for it. It was eventually sold for $600,000 to someone in Japan.
That's what I was gonna say. A rose by any other name and all that.
Can't watch the video's from work but I remember my father talking about a kid, I'm assuming a teenager, some where in a third world country that produced exceptionally high quality vacum tubes. This was in reference to HAM radio equipment I think. Anyways apparently the guy/kid assembled, vacumed and sealed all his tubes by hand. Apparently it involved the tube being created as one peice of glass with an attached peice of glass made such that you could drip mercury through it. Each droplet of mercury would trap some of the atmosphere between it and the previous drop. Once the pressure in the tube reached the desired level it would be seperated and sealed in the same action.
I don't know that there is actually a higher percentage of attractive women in large cities compared to anywhere else. You just see a lot more people throughout the day than you would if you lived somewhere in a small town. And the population churn is much higher in a city as well. I can go back home and odds are good that I'll see several people that I recognize if I go out to eat. Not so much where I live now even though it's a smaller city at only 300k or so.
Yes, basically every automobile is a copy of the Model-T, well actually probably the steam powered novelty cars from even earlier. The big difference being that the newer the vehicle typically the more reliable, fast, and feature filled it is. There isn't anything wrong with that. And there's nothing wrong with DDR, Guitar Hero and Rockband, I just think that they are lame.
That's an opinion and it shouldn't matter in anyway to you or anyone else. To me all these games are just souped up versions of Simon that don't add significantly enough to the game play to justify me playing them. Not to mention the horribly bad renditions of the songs that are used.
Amazing, how horribly bad a movie can be despite all that. I really liked the book but the movie was just rediculously bad.
That was easily one of the worst movies I have ever forced myself to sit down and watch. I still remember the twenty minute scene where the spaceship/rocket is landing on the moon or something. I kept waiting for it to explode or for something to go wrong. Pretty much anything to happen except for it to slowly, slowly, slowly descend and have a completely uneventful landing. It wasn't even like the landing sequence was complicated and interesting to watch.
A colony on Mars heavily dependant on resupply from Earth is a bad idea, if it can't survive on it's own it would be best to avoid the one way trip plan.
Why on earth... or Mars would seclusion from any entertainment device be necessary? We are perfectly capable of sending and receiving transmissions of data that far and we've even managed to remote control the rovers. Not to mention for say ten kilo's of weight you could take more media to watch and listen too than you could probably use up, without having to transmit any.
Holy cow! No one said we had to stop having wars if we launched a manned Mars mission. Hell we could get the Russians and the Chinese to send colony ships aswell and have a small three way war on Mars! We could get double the inovation.
I'd happily sign up for a one way trip to Mars. I'd never get picked though, I'm too old and have a family now. But space exploration has always been a dream of mine and being a part of something like this would be awesome. I bet you could get a couple thousand volunteers at the drop of a hat
I can understand the naysaying about how costly it'd be compared to sending lot and lots of robotic probes. But there is a good bit to be said for the psychological affect of actually putting people on Mars.
Amen my Brotha!
I don't really mind the idea of a global patent system, which of course individual countries can opt to utilize. What I object to is the idea of simply copying our current system and expanding it to the global level.
Of course I don't really object to the idea of a world government either so long as it is founded and governed on the principles of human rights being sacrosaint. And I don't really care if it's based on our government or not so long as it's run properly. Nationalism is in my opinion a waste of energy when there are bigger fish to fry.
Global warming is so far from being important in my life even as a fairly aware person. I care much more about when Diablo 3 will be released than whether or not any Polar Bears will being living in the wild by the time it is. Change has been a part of our world since recorded history started. And we're clever enough animals I don't think it will bite us in the butt in a serious way for another couple centuries. People talk about saving our world for the generations to come, well I had to live through the 80's and they didn't, so screw them!
over population is a localized problem not a global one. And those large areas that are suffering food shortages have partly brought it upon themselves, or their governments have. And in most cases it's an economics problem starving them not a world shortage of food. Ever notice how those feed the children adverts on TV ask for money and stress how little money it takes to feed a kid for a day. It's because all that organization really needs is money to purchase food and trasnport it. Otherwise they'd promote eating less food so that what we have goes further.
Hmm as a space weapon it would be awesome. You wouldn't even have to make it capable of killing anyone on the surface. Just make it strong enough to sterilize everyone in whatever other country is annoying you. That way you only have to put up with their shenanigans for another 75 years or so. Possibly even less because towards the end they'd be a nation entirely of geriatrics with an ever dwindling population. This would of course need to be done before anyone figures out how to clone people at a high success rate.
I can still remember learning about the internet in one of my High School computer classes. We talked about the different methods you could use, gopher vs. HTML and such. We even participated in a bulletin board with another school. But we didn't have a connection at the school so our teacher would put all the updates on a floppy and take it to his University office where he could upload it and download any updates from the other end. I remember Cell Phones being full blown hand sets that required a heavy shoulder bag for the battery and transmitter.
Technology really seems to have grown explosively within even the last 20 years, I'm only 30 years old and I can see the drastic changes and developments that have happened.
I specifically remember wanting my own phone for awhile as a kid. I'm not sure what for though really. As I didn't have anyone that I would have wanted to talk to for extended periods or anything.
I got a bedside lamp on a scissor style extension arm at some point when I was around 12. I was able to use this in a clever way to stay up and read all night. Before I was unable to do this because most light sources would throw light onto the trees outside my window, which my father could see from his window. The lamp I shaded such that it let out just a sliver of light to read by.
That's a battle I hope to avoid entirely. In another ten years cell phones will probably have become so common place that I'd be considered a throwback if each of my children didn't have one. For now though I would like a child of mine to have a cell phone to use in an emergency. My wife wants essentially the same but her idea of what would be suitable and unlikely to be abused in the way of prepaid minutes is quit different from mine.
That sounds a lot like rule number twelve from the Evil Overlord list:
One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation
My family canceled our DirecTV subscription a few months back. It was just too expensive for what we got out of it. Only one of the Major Networks would even let us get their channels from the satelitte which we had to pay a premium to get, and the rest were impossible to recieve without sinking more than $200 into antenna's and such.
So now we spent the couple hundred bucks on antenna's and such and still get crap service. CBS, ABC, Fox and CW are all broadcast specifically for my city, Montgomery AL. But the towers are located 28+ miles from my house in two seperate cardinal directions. Even in clear weather those channels are prone to poor reception. And in inclement weather the channels that are less than 5 miles away often flake out aswell.
The Digital transition from my point of view has been a failure overall. As a kid all our channels were coming from over 30 miles away and even in the worst weather the picture and sound would get a little fuzzy but remain entirely comprehensible.
There was an article a while back that had a video of a robot designed to be a pack animal of sorts. It's legs didn't move in the same way as a dog's, they were hinged backwards, but when it was shoved, kicked or slipped on ice it reacted just like a four legged animal in ordre to regain it's balance.
Except that the fake taunt as you call it is just as plausible as the magic user that puts out fireballs. Taunt is just a mind trick of sorts that focus's the targets attention, it works in the same kind of way that a mezmerize type spell would.
And why shouldn't taunt work exactly the same in PvP as it does in PvE? Your reasons against this is that you lose control of your character. Well guess what, all the other crowd control type affects do the same thing by inhibiting control of the character. At least when taunted into attacking another player you are still attacking someone.
The whole idea of a Taunt is to goad someone into acting irrationally, why is it such a stretch to have a more affective taunt in a game with spells and dragons?
Personally I'd rather see a game made where players are very fragile regardless of armor, unless it's taken to a huge extreme. That's one of the reasons that the Shadowrun PnP game appealed to me. Everyone essentially had ten hitpoints, combat became more about avoiding taking damage and manipulating the situation to be most favorable to your characters.
If that means not having huge boss fights with epicly long encounters that boil down to playing Simon and Dance Dance Revolution at the same time, so be it!
Once you are making a few skills the "must haves" you've thrown out much of the purpose of a skill or talent based system. Or at least the distinction between it and a class system is eroded.
I particularly like the idea of gear having qualities that inhibit or affect spell casting both negatively and positively. I would want it to be a semi-hidden attribute for every item that a character could carry around or wear. You could even assign values to parts of the environment, if wearing too much iron affects your spell negatively so should iron in the surrounding environment. And making the targets equipment a part of the equation would also be cool.