Why do I always see PREGNANCY listed as an unexpected unanticipated unplanned thing? It's not freaking rocket science. Birth control methods are so effective and cheap nowadays there really is no excuse for getting pregnant when you don't specifically want to. Never was there a better example of "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!"
If you have a kid when you aren't capable of supporting them you should be brought up on child neglect charges immediately after the birth. Getting pregnant and then having your life circumstances change beyond your control is acceptable but having a kid by "accident" should be criminal.
The case of a church giving charity to someone is the same as if a single person had offered that charity. The resources of the church were given to it by it's congregation to use as the church's leadership sees fit. The difference here between a church and the government is that there are millions of churchs in the USA alone for you to choose from and you aren't required to make donations to anyone of them if you don't want. Whereas the government will have your money to hand out as charity however they see fit, admittedly we can influence government charity to a degree through the democratic process. But that's much like trying to drive a car in D.C rush hour via remote control from pluto by large comittee. As an anecdote I have a friend that was a social case worker in California. Part of her job was to review applications for welfare of one sort or another. She said the number of blatant attempted fraud she found on a daily basis was rediculous, so much so that she gave up on reporting them and just denied them.
I think the biggest issue on welfare is what is really required to basically sustain human life without hindering a recipient from recovering.
I haven't read enough on SS to understand what progressive SS is unless it's paying a higher % towards it the higher your income goes. But I believe what the poster was saying is that SS is being commonly utilized before a person is no longer able to work for a living. Hence your statement that I agree with that the age of retirement should be reconsidered.
That depends entirely on where you are living and the standard of living which you consider poverty. A few years ago I lived in a largish city, Columbus Ohio, and made a little over 20k a year. I ate out for 95% or more of my meals. I drove a car that got around 12 mpg and in general blew my money however I wanted.
20k a year is plenty so long as you aren't trying to live beyond your means.
My wife was just telling me about a co-worker of hers last night. Apparently this woman that is a counselor to juvenile delinquent females is pregnant by a boyfriend she hopes will marry her sometime in the next year or so. In the meantime though she's gonna have her mother take care of the baby full time for at least six months. The best bit is that her mother lives more than an hour away and she plans to maybe visit her kid on the weekends. What kind of mental deficiency leads people to have kids that they can't care for or provide for?
Ever since I found out what Day Light Savings was about I was annoyed with it. And principally the same thing with different time zones. Why not just go off global time, that way whenever you see someone's business hours you know exactly what time they open and close, no special considerations about where they are or anything.
I agree. The arguement that it's for security's sake is bogus. People that are concerned about item duping and other cheats and hacks would play on the closed battlenet servers. Because it provides for all of that by keeping the character save files on the server. LAN play is just about having fun, most people who go to a LAN party aren't going to be using cheats and hacks without their friends knowing about it.
In Diablo 2 the characters I didn't want to cheat with, I didn't cheat with, those that I did, I did. It never affected anyone except myself and my own enjoyment of the game. I never played on the closed battlenet system because it removed that option from me and I didn't want to put up with the lag in a game where a split second can get your character killed and cost you hours of exp or more.
PQ's: A. The way rewards are handed out does kind of suck in a way. The bonus for contributing can easily be nullified with a bad or average roll with a slacker just getting a really good roll at the same time. If you do a PQ a few times though you are likely to get a reward it's just a numbers issue. Maybe a higher modifier for contribution is warranted but the system still works. B. So far on the destruction side, I have characters in each area, I haven't really noticed a problem with not being able to finish a PQ if there are enough people around. There not being enough people is directly relateable to WoW when you get a group quest that you can't manage to solo or requires more people than you seem to be able to round up. The closest I have come to not being able to finish a PQ when there was an appropriate number of players was in the Dark Elf area, no tank classes. But we still managed because there were enough healers that we could all stack our heals on whomever was tanking at the moment. C. Influence rewards are earned from the influence for doing PQ's. So yes if all you want is the influence reward then go ahead and farm the influence however you wish.
Renown gain: A. The points you recieved are a bonus to everyone in the zone when your faction gains control of all the zone's RvR Objectives. This happens pretty infrequently most of the time so relying on it as a strategy to level your renown is silly. Doing a single 15 minute scenario can net you far more renown than an event that might happen every few hours. B. The amount of renown for the zone bonus makes less and less of a difference as you level. I of course am too lazy to do the numbers but you could possibly make the first 20 renown ranks in a year of AFK'ing 24/7 as you suggest. Hardly worthwhile as both of my rank 16 characters have had no trouble keeping their renown levels close to their rank levels.
Equipment without Renown rank: A. The marketing for this game was all about the RvR aspects. I think they said they would have PvE but it was a sideline to the RvR. B. I am pretty sure most PvE dropped equipment doesn't have a renown requirement. So if you want equipment that doesn't require RvR go check the Auction house in your capital city or farm mobs to your hearts content. Quest equipment might also not require renown, I don't really know because I've never had a problem with not having enough renown. C. WoW never had worth while equipment purchaseable from vendors that didn't require end game raiding or PvP. You are playing an MMO, if you want to advance learn to network and take advantage of the fact you can play with others and trade stuff around. Try playing the game as it's designed and not how you wish it was designed before you complain about it not being well done.
Talents and Character customization: A. There are two seperate ways in which you can earn "talents" of a sort. There are core mastery points that you earn every few levels starting at rank 11. These can be used for improving your classes core abilities and even purchasing a few extras in some cases. The other "talents" are from earning renown ranks and these can be spent to earn more stat points and such. B. Even if you never earned renown rank 1 you could level to 40 and distribute all your core mastery points. The renown points you only get if you earn renown. C. You didn't mention it but WAR has the ability for you to dye most of your visible equipment. Depending on your tastes this is or isn't well implemented. Some item slots have multiple areas you can dye. There is a smallish selection of dye's available from vendors and more from crafters though I haven't seen if they are actually different from vendor dye's yet. My biggest complain is that I can't dye my Chosen's huge shield at all.
Class Mechanics: A. All classes use Action points, not mana, I realize this might seem like semantics to you but it's important. Most people reading that will view it from a W
The military can serve this purpose but only in some ways. I enlisted as a Computer Programmer. I actually got experience programming in Java, Oracle Forms and Reports and PL/SQL. I also played DBA for my development shop for a couple years. I ended up getting a job with a Defense Contract company and am now plotting for a civil service job.
I was kind of lucky though, I know a number of people that spent a lot of their time working in a call center resetting air force portal account passwords. There are a number of career fields in the military that don't apply well to civilian careers, or require a lot of ambiguous wording on resumes.
I am a big supporter of Vocational schools. I went to one myself for Criminal Justice, you could procede to police or private security work when you finished or continue to college and be a lawyer. I didn't end up staying with law enforcement as a career but I did a couple years before I enlisted and realized I could make a living at this. But I still have all that I learned in the vocational school and can fall back on it if necessary. If anything attending a vocational school widened my options as opposed to narrowing them.
I was military and it has nothing to do with whether or not I would risk my life to save another. Most people who join the military because they want to be there, not as an escape from their current life, probably share my belief that all people deserve to be protected from murder. I joined the military for a number of reasons but one of them is I count myself as a protector.
They can't sue you if they are dead. Granted their family can still come after you for wrongful death. But at least you'd get the satisfaction of the criminal not gaining by it.
Although I'd like to point out that only a fool would say they were shooting to kill someone where it's recorded or part of a court procedeeding. You should always be shooting to stop the criminal from harming you or another person. It just so happens that shooting for center of mass is the best way to both stop them and lead to their eventual death.
So far as civilization goes, those that are willing to steal and threaten others lives only damage society and are best removed.
I can't tell you how many times I counted myself lucky to have married a lady more frugal than myself.
Her rings turned out to be on sale and we got them for $1,500 instead of a little over 2k. Her dress was less than $200, she hired a seamstress she knew through church. I think we budgetted $150 for decorations. $200 for refreshments, I think our cakes were $300 but they were no joke the best cakes I have ever had in my life. I am seriously considering getting a birthday cake from the same lady this month, she must use an egg per serving of cake or something. I think our one big extravagance was for dance lessons. But even there we've been taking ballroom lessons for over a year and the cost for having our dance choreographed was added into the purchase of a package of lessons.
I don't know if translations would really be worth it without them being very large collaborative works. The issues of translating anything into another language are I think widely known. And are only complicated in instances like this where the source material is so old. Ones own religious views and such are bound to slant any project like this.
One of my friends had a setup to play that game. He wired his computer to his projection big screen TV and mounted a fancy steering wheel and pedal set to a wooden frame. All set up so he could play comfortably from his couch. It was very impresive to me for what it was. My big complaint about all driving sims is that even with forcefeedback controls a lot of sport driving is felt through G forces and your body's sense of balance. It certainly is a lot cheaper to wreck in a simulation though.
Are you saying you want an RPG that resolves combat more like a FPS? If so you're probably just out of luck.
One of the draws to RPG's for me has always been that though combat happens at a slower pace it allows me to strategize more effectively. In most FPS my strategy consists of mulling over what got me killed last time and trying to change my behaviour in the future to allow for a win. But adapting strategy in the middle of a fight is pretty much an impossibility because combat resolves in a matter of a couple seconds.
Hellgate London was probably the best bet at a RPG/FPS and it looks like it didn't have the customer base to keep going.
I'm confused, what is it exactly that you want the combat to be like?
Every RPG game I can think of that had interactive combat at all was basicaly a challenge of managing abilities on timers. Even in console VS. style fighting games there are timers and cooldowns inherent in the system that you aren't dirrectly shown but are there regardless. In FPS's your weapons have varying rates of fire and variables for accuracy and damage.
How would you implement a combat system that doesn't boildown to timing abilities and counter abilities? Keep in mind that if it becomes a challenge of who can mash buttons the fastest a computer will always win.
Star Wars Galaxies handled damage in a different way. Characters had three different pools which could be damaged Body, Action and Mind. If any one pool dropped to zero or lower your character would be KO'd or possibly killed.
Attacks where randomly assigned as hitting your Torso, Legs, Feet, Arms, Hands, of Head. A hit to your torso reduced your Body pool primarily. A head hit affected your mind pool mostly. Hands and feet hits damaged your Action pool and I think legs and arms affected action and body. There were special attacks that you could learn that would let you specifically target and hit various areas. But normally an attack would be randomly assigned to any one of those areas with varying probabilities,Torso hits being the most common and head hits being the least likely.
There was a huge variety of armor types available in the game each with individual stats for protection against different types of damage, the best of which was very cumbersome to wear. The Majority of players had a far smaller mind pool than anything else and so most people would take headshot type abilities. Which resulted in most people running around with the very best helmet they could find and a chest peice to match, maybe some leg armor and then just leave the rest exposed to try and keep their encumbrance down.
There was a lot more too it but that's the gist of it. I found it an interesting system though really too complex to become widely popular.
Part of the enlistment contract basicly ammounts to anything you do that we can profit from is ours unless we are too lazy to take it. You have to obtain legal approval from the USAF lawyers and your commander if you want to do any other kind of employment. He also brought it in to work and accustomed his co-workers to using it in the course of their duties which makes it the Chair Forces if they want it. I'm not saying all of that is fair but it's what the rules are that he enlisted under.
That's not entirely accurate so far as living on and off base goes.
Depending on the local economy and your personal standards of living it's cheaper to live off base sometimes. Where I live the BAS and BAH come to around $1,200 a month for an E5. If you can't live on the economy here for less than that you have some seriously out of whack standards of living.
My 1,900 squarefoot house's mortgage payment is only $754. If you bought a house in today's market it should be even less, you have to pay utilities but even then you are doing pretty well. If nothing else get a lease where your utilities are included.
Those BAH dollars actually count for even more money when you get to the end of the year and all the interest on the mortgage is tax deductible. So I was paying for something with tax free money that earned me tax savings, that is full of win. If you live on base all that money just disappears. They recenlty privatized the base housing here and now those people have to lease their homes and pay for their utilities. The cost of their lease is dependant on rank so your aging home costs more and more every promotion.
And so far as enlisted people getting into more trouble:
That's a nice stereotype to push. While enlisted people are younger in general when they start their careers they aren't necessarily more trouble because of it. Although an Officer isn't going to get in trouble for underage drinking because they aren't in the military when their eligible for that offense.
Officers aren't forced to live in dormitories until they meet time and rank requirements. The majority of trouble with young enlisted people seems to happen as a result of living in the dormitories. I'd bet it's much like your odds of avoiding trouble if you don't live in the frat house at college.
And as an aside last time I checked a retired captain made more than a retired chief mastersergeant, that's a retired O3 making more than a retired E9. If you make E9 by 15 years you are probably either the greatest brown noser in the world or a truely exceptional person. If you haven't made captain by the time you are in for 6 years you probably are actively trying not to be promoted. I would have been much more invested in the Chair Force if the military was organized as one path of leadership advancement instead of two unequal ones.
The way the rules where explained to me when I enlisted it worked like this.
1) Anything you did in your own off duty time was yours so far as it didn't interfere with the Air Force or reflect poorly on them they didn't care.
2) Anything you worked on at work or on duty time was the Air Forces, whether or not they saw an immediate use for it at the time.
3) Anything that you brought in from home to aid you in the accomplishment of your job and was eventually found to be a necessary part of getting the job done was now theirs.
From what I read in the article it appears what he did was both 2 and 3. He may not have developed it at work or on work time but he tested it at work, and testing is a vital part of any software's development. And it would seem that once the office started using the software it was deemed to be necessary for getting the job done and hence allowed to be comandeered(sp).
I don't like the way the court ruled on the issue but when I was enlisted I understood if I did anything like this it would become the USAF's property. I had a friend that worked on something for his own personal use not relating to work. His way of avoiding trouble was to develop it under an open source license, then again he wasn't looking to make money with it.
Here in Alabama, atleast in Montgomery, you don't need any other information on the temp tag than the words "Tag Applied for." I can't tell you how often I see cars driving around with a sheet of notebook paper in the rear window with that on it. I work on a Military installation where you have to show proof of registration and insurance or a military ID card at the gate to come on. There is always a number of cars parked just outside the gate driven by people that don't have registration or insurance and have to walk on.
What amazes me about that incident is that he had the time to do all of that. The article I read earlier today seemed to indicate that the other passengers noticed what was going on almost immediately and hustled off the bus pretty fast. But apparently no one tried to stop him from continuing his violence against that victim. They found weapons with which to keep him contained on the bus until the authorities arrived but there was no indication of anyone trying to stop him when he actually was in the act of killing that person.
Actually with more sensors it should be able to read eye movement like that. Right now it just seems to read muscle tension in your face generally with one of the sensors so it could only do up and down or side to side. But if you had more sensors you should be able to detect where you are looking pretty accurately after some calibration.
So far as making it point and fire on a thought command you could in theory already do this if you use an aimbot or some other cheat that lets you do that with a single command, just bind it to the appropriate mental trigger.
Maybe we will eventually have a mask of some sort so that we could have more sensors to detect specific muscle movements and such on top of detecting brain waves.
Large caves might be ideal for this as you wouldn't need to add much in the way of cooling, though heating might be necessary. You'd have to use growth lamps which I imagine would be very costly to operate on such a large and longterm scale. Although if you developed this along with a pot cave , the illegal sales could subsidize your underground hardwood farm.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I always see PREGNANCY listed as an unexpected unanticipated unplanned thing? It's not freaking rocket science. Birth control methods are so effective and cheap nowadays there really is no excuse for getting pregnant when you don't specifically want to. Never was there a better example of "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!"
If you have a kid when you aren't capable of supporting them you should be brought up on child neglect charges immediately after the birth. Getting pregnant and then having your life circumstances change beyond your control is acceptable but having a kid by "accident" should be criminal.
The case of a church giving charity to someone is the same as if a single person had offered that charity. The resources of the church were given to it by it's congregation to use as the church's leadership sees fit. The difference here between a church and the government is that there are millions of churchs in the USA alone for you to choose from and you aren't required to make donations to anyone of them if you don't want. Whereas the government will have your money to hand out as charity however they see fit, admittedly we can influence government charity to a degree through the democratic process. But that's much like trying to drive a car in D.C rush hour via remote control from pluto by large comittee. As an anecdote I have a friend that was a social case worker in California. Part of her job was to review applications for welfare of one sort or another. She said the number of blatant attempted fraud she found on a daily basis was rediculous, so much so that she gave up on reporting them and just denied them. I think the biggest issue on welfare is what is really required to basically sustain human life without hindering a recipient from recovering. I haven't read enough on SS to understand what progressive SS is unless it's paying a higher % towards it the higher your income goes. But I believe what the poster was saying is that SS is being commonly utilized before a person is no longer able to work for a living. Hence your statement that I agree with that the age of retirement should be reconsidered.
That depends entirely on where you are living and the standard of living which you consider poverty. A few years ago I lived in a largish city, Columbus Ohio, and made a little over 20k a year. I ate out for 95% or more of my meals. I drove a car that got around 12 mpg and in general blew my money however I wanted. 20k a year is plenty so long as you aren't trying to live beyond your means. My wife was just telling me about a co-worker of hers last night. Apparently this woman that is a counselor to juvenile delinquent females is pregnant by a boyfriend she hopes will marry her sometime in the next year or so. In the meantime though she's gonna have her mother take care of the baby full time for at least six months. The best bit is that her mother lives more than an hour away and she plans to maybe visit her kid on the weekends. What kind of mental deficiency leads people to have kids that they can't care for or provide for?
Amen, time zones don't make any sense in a globally connected world as ours is today.
Ever since I found out what Day Light Savings was about I was annoyed with it. And principally the same thing with different time zones. Why not just go off global time, that way whenever you see someone's business hours you know exactly what time they open and close, no special considerations about where they are or anything.
I agree. The arguement that it's for security's sake is bogus. People that are concerned about item duping and other cheats and hacks would play on the closed battlenet servers. Because it provides for all of that by keeping the character save files on the server. LAN play is just about having fun, most people who go to a LAN party aren't going to be using cheats and hacks without their friends knowing about it. In Diablo 2 the characters I didn't want to cheat with, I didn't cheat with, those that I did, I did. It never affected anyone except myself and my own enjoyment of the game. I never played on the closed battlenet system because it removed that option from me and I didn't want to put up with the lag in a game where a split second can get your character killed and cost you hours of exp or more.
I'll see if I can't address some of your issues.
PQ's:
A. The way rewards are handed out does kind of suck in a way. The bonus for contributing can easily be nullified with a bad or average roll with a slacker just getting a really good roll at the same time. If you do a PQ a few times though you are likely to get a reward it's just a numbers issue. Maybe a higher modifier for contribution is warranted but the system still works.
B. So far on the destruction side, I have characters in each area, I haven't really noticed a problem with not being able to finish a PQ if there are enough people around. There not being enough people is directly relateable to WoW when you get a group quest that you can't manage to solo or requires more people than you seem to be able to round up. The closest I have come to not being able to finish a PQ when there was an appropriate number of players was in the Dark Elf area, no tank classes. But we still managed because there were enough healers that we could all stack our heals on whomever was tanking at the moment.
C. Influence rewards are earned from the influence for doing PQ's. So yes if all you want is the influence reward then go ahead and farm the influence however you wish.
Renown gain:
A. The points you recieved are a bonus to everyone in the zone when your faction gains control of all the zone's RvR Objectives. This happens pretty infrequently most of the time so relying on it as a strategy to level your renown is silly. Doing a single 15 minute scenario can net you far more renown than an event that might happen every few hours.
B. The amount of renown for the zone bonus makes less and less of a difference as you level. I of course am too lazy to do the numbers but you could possibly make the first 20 renown ranks in a year of AFK'ing 24/7 as you suggest. Hardly worthwhile as both of my rank 16 characters have had no trouble keeping their renown levels close to their rank levels.
Equipment without Renown rank:
A. The marketing for this game was all about the RvR aspects. I think they said they would have PvE but it was a sideline to the RvR.
B. I am pretty sure most PvE dropped equipment doesn't have a renown requirement. So if you want equipment that doesn't require RvR go check the Auction house in your capital city or farm mobs to your hearts content. Quest equipment might also not require renown, I don't really know because I've never had a problem with not having enough renown.
C. WoW never had worth while equipment purchaseable from vendors that didn't require end game raiding or PvP. You are playing an MMO, if you want to advance learn to network and take advantage of the fact you can play with others and trade stuff around. Try playing the game as it's designed and not how you wish it was designed before you complain about it not being well done.
Talents and Character customization:
A. There are two seperate ways in which you can earn "talents" of a sort. There are core mastery points that you earn every few levels starting at rank 11. These can be used for improving your classes core abilities and even purchasing a few extras in some cases. The other "talents" are from earning renown ranks and these can be spent to earn more stat points and such.
B. Even if you never earned renown rank 1 you could level to 40 and distribute all your core mastery points. The renown points you only get if you earn renown.
C. You didn't mention it but WAR has the ability for you to dye most of your visible equipment. Depending on your tastes this is or isn't well implemented. Some item slots have multiple areas you can dye. There is a smallish selection of dye's available from vendors and more from crafters though I haven't seen if they are actually different from vendor dye's yet. My biggest complain is that I can't dye my Chosen's huge shield at all.
Class Mechanics:
A. All classes use Action points, not mana, I realize this might seem like semantics to you but it's important. Most people reading that will view it from a W
The military can serve this purpose but only in some ways. I enlisted as a Computer Programmer. I actually got experience programming in Java, Oracle Forms and Reports and PL/SQL. I also played DBA for my development shop for a couple years. I ended up getting a job with a Defense Contract company and am now plotting for a civil service job. I was kind of lucky though, I know a number of people that spent a lot of their time working in a call center resetting air force portal account passwords. There are a number of career fields in the military that don't apply well to civilian careers, or require a lot of ambiguous wording on resumes. I am a big supporter of Vocational schools. I went to one myself for Criminal Justice, you could procede to police or private security work when you finished or continue to college and be a lawyer. I didn't end up staying with law enforcement as a career but I did a couple years before I enlisted and realized I could make a living at this. But I still have all that I learned in the vocational school and can fall back on it if necessary. If anything attending a vocational school widened my options as opposed to narrowing them.
I was military and it has nothing to do with whether or not I would risk my life to save another. Most people who join the military because they want to be there, not as an escape from their current life, probably share my belief that all people deserve to be protected from murder. I joined the military for a number of reasons but one of them is I count myself as a protector.
They can't sue you if they are dead. Granted their family can still come after you for wrongful death. But at least you'd get the satisfaction of the criminal not gaining by it.
Although I'd like to point out that only a fool would say they were shooting to kill someone where it's recorded or part of a court procedeeding. You should always be shooting to stop the criminal from harming you or another person. It just so happens that shooting for center of mass is the best way to both stop them and lead to their eventual death.
So far as civilization goes, those that are willing to steal and threaten others lives only damage society and are best removed.
I can't tell you how many times I counted myself lucky to have married a lady more frugal than myself. Her rings turned out to be on sale and we got them for $1,500 instead of a little over 2k. Her dress was less than $200, she hired a seamstress she knew through church. I think we budgetted $150 for decorations. $200 for refreshments, I think our cakes were $300 but they were no joke the best cakes I have ever had in my life. I am seriously considering getting a birthday cake from the same lady this month, she must use an egg per serving of cake or something. I think our one big extravagance was for dance lessons. But even there we've been taking ballroom lessons for over a year and the cost for having our dance choreographed was added into the purchase of a package of lessons.
I don't know if translations would really be worth it without them being very large collaborative works. The issues of translating anything into another language are I think widely known. And are only complicated in instances like this where the source material is so old. Ones own religious views and such are bound to slant any project like this.
capitalists!
One of my friends had a setup to play that game. He wired his computer to his projection big screen TV and mounted a fancy steering wheel and pedal set to a wooden frame. All set up so he could play comfortably from his couch. It was very impresive to me for what it was. My big complaint about all driving sims is that even with forcefeedback controls a lot of sport driving is felt through G forces and your body's sense of balance. It certainly is a lot cheaper to wreck in a simulation though.
Are you saying you want an RPG that resolves combat more like a FPS? If so you're probably just out of luck.
One of the draws to RPG's for me has always been that though combat happens at a slower pace it allows me to strategize more effectively. In most FPS my strategy consists of mulling over what got me killed last time and trying to change my behaviour in the future to allow for a win. But adapting strategy in the middle of a fight is pretty much an impossibility because combat resolves in a matter of a couple seconds.
Hellgate London was probably the best bet at a RPG/FPS and it looks like it didn't have the customer base to keep going.
I'm confused, what is it exactly that you want the combat to be like?
Every RPG game I can think of that had interactive combat at all was basicaly a challenge of managing abilities on timers. Even in console VS. style fighting games there are timers and cooldowns inherent in the system that you aren't dirrectly shown but are there regardless. In FPS's your weapons have varying rates of fire and variables for accuracy and damage.
How would you implement a combat system that doesn't boildown to timing abilities and counter abilities? Keep in mind that if it becomes a challenge of who can mash buttons the fastest a computer will always win.
Star Wars Galaxies handled damage in a different way. Characters had three different pools which could be damaged Body, Action and Mind. If any one pool dropped to zero or lower your character would be KO'd or possibly killed.
Attacks where randomly assigned as hitting your Torso, Legs, Feet, Arms, Hands, of Head. A hit to your torso reduced your Body pool primarily. A head hit affected your mind pool mostly. Hands and feet hits damaged your Action pool and I think legs and arms affected action and body. There were special attacks that you could learn that would let you specifically target and hit various areas. But normally an attack would be randomly assigned to any one of those areas with varying probabilities,Torso hits being the most common and head hits being the least likely.
There was a huge variety of armor types available in the game each with individual stats for protection against different types of damage, the best of which was very cumbersome to wear. The Majority of players had a far smaller mind pool than anything else and so most people would take headshot type abilities. Which resulted in most people running around with the very best helmet they could find and a chest peice to match, maybe some leg armor and then just leave the rest exposed to try and keep their encumbrance down.
There was a lot more too it but that's the gist of it. I found it an interesting system though really too complex to become widely popular.
Part of the enlistment contract basicly ammounts to anything you do that we can profit from is ours unless we are too lazy to take it. You have to obtain legal approval from the USAF lawyers and your commander if you want to do any other kind of employment. He also brought it in to work and accustomed his co-workers to using it in the course of their duties which makes it the Chair Forces if they want it. I'm not saying all of that is fair but it's what the rules are that he enlisted under.
That's not entirely accurate so far as living on and off base goes.
Depending on the local economy and your personal standards of living it's cheaper to live off base sometimes. Where I live the BAS and BAH come to around $1,200 a month for an E5. If you can't live on the economy here for less than that you have some seriously out of whack standards of living.
My 1,900 squarefoot house's mortgage payment is only $754. If you bought a house in today's market it should be even less, you have to pay utilities but even then you are doing pretty well. If nothing else get a lease where your utilities are included.
Those BAH dollars actually count for even more money when you get to the end of the year and all the interest on the mortgage is tax deductible. So I was paying for something with tax free money that earned me tax savings, that is full of win. If you live on base all that money just disappears. They recenlty privatized the base housing here and now those people have to lease their homes and pay for their utilities. The cost of their lease is dependant on rank so your aging home costs more and more every promotion.
And so far as enlisted people getting into more trouble:
That's a nice stereotype to push. While enlisted people are younger in general when they start their careers they aren't necessarily more trouble because of it. Although an Officer isn't going to get in trouble for underage drinking because they aren't in the military when their eligible for that offense.
Officers aren't forced to live in dormitories until they meet time and rank requirements. The majority of trouble with young enlisted people seems to happen as a result of living in the dormitories. I'd bet it's much like your odds of avoiding trouble if you don't live in the frat house at college.
And as an aside last time I checked a retired captain made more than a retired chief mastersergeant, that's a retired O3 making more than a retired E9. If you make E9 by 15 years you are probably either the greatest brown noser in the world or a truely exceptional person. If you haven't made captain by the time you are in for 6 years you probably are actively trying not to be promoted. I would have been much more invested in the Chair Force if the military was organized as one path of leadership advancement instead of two unequal ones.
The way the rules where explained to me when I enlisted it worked like this. 1) Anything you did in your own off duty time was yours so far as it didn't interfere with the Air Force or reflect poorly on them they didn't care. 2) Anything you worked on at work or on duty time was the Air Forces, whether or not they saw an immediate use for it at the time. 3) Anything that you brought in from home to aid you in the accomplishment of your job and was eventually found to be a necessary part of getting the job done was now theirs. From what I read in the article it appears what he did was both 2 and 3. He may not have developed it at work or on work time but he tested it at work, and testing is a vital part of any software's development. And it would seem that once the office started using the software it was deemed to be necessary for getting the job done and hence allowed to be comandeered(sp). I don't like the way the court ruled on the issue but when I was enlisted I understood if I did anything like this it would become the USAF's property. I had a friend that worked on something for his own personal use not relating to work. His way of avoiding trouble was to develop it under an open source license, then again he wasn't looking to make money with it.
Here in Alabama, atleast in Montgomery, you don't need any other information on the temp tag than the words "Tag Applied for." I can't tell you how often I see cars driving around with a sheet of notebook paper in the rear window with that on it. I work on a Military installation where you have to show proof of registration and insurance or a military ID card at the gate to come on. There is always a number of cars parked just outside the gate driven by people that don't have registration or insurance and have to walk on.
http://www.ben.jellybaby.net/ done
What amazes me about that incident is that he had the time to do all of that. The article I read earlier today seemed to indicate that the other passengers noticed what was going on almost immediately and hustled off the bus pretty fast. But apparently no one tried to stop him from continuing his violence against that victim. They found weapons with which to keep him contained on the bus until the authorities arrived but there was no indication of anyone trying to stop him when he actually was in the act of killing that person.
Actually with more sensors it should be able to read eye movement like that. Right now it just seems to read muscle tension in your face generally with one of the sensors so it could only do up and down or side to side. But if you had more sensors you should be able to detect where you are looking pretty accurately after some calibration.
So far as making it point and fire on a thought command you could in theory already do this if you use an aimbot or some other cheat that lets you do that with a single command, just bind it to the appropriate mental trigger.
Maybe we will eventually have a mask of some sort so that we could have more sensors to detect specific muscle movements and such on top of detecting brain waves.
Large caves might be ideal for this as you wouldn't need to add much in the way of cooling, though heating might be necessary. You'd have to use growth lamps which I imagine would be very costly to operate on such a large and longterm scale. Although if you developed this along with a pot cave , the illegal sales could subsidize your underground hardwood farm.