There is a good argument that can be used to test if someone is agnostic, atheist or just confused. Answer the below questions:
1. Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in God?
2a. If you answered atheist to question 1: You are an atheist. Good for you.
2b. If you answered agnostic to question 1: Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in Santa Claus, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Invisible Pink Unicorn and Fairies?
3a. If you answered agnostic to question 2b: You are an agnostic. You believe anything is possible even though there is no proof either way.
3b. If you answered atheist to question 2b: Why are you questioning your unbelief in God, but not your unbelief in Fairies? Both have just as little proof of their existence. Think about it carefully before doing the test a second time. If you arrived at this point for the second time it must be because you have a special reasoning concerning God. Call yourself an agnostic if you want, but be aware that atheists will think that you just like sitting on the fence post unless you give a very good argument for your reasoning.
I think you missed the parents point. What you just described is a method that prevents eavesdropping.
What the parent suggests is the man-in-the-middle Dave intercepts both all and any communication between Alice and Bob. Alice sends a stream of photons over the quantum line, and Dave intercepts. Afterwards Alice does the public announce to check that bits havn't been intercepted, but Dave intercepts this message also, and this time acts as Bob to verify the photons recieved. Alica and Dave agrees that there isn't an eavesdropper on their line and starts communicating.
So know Alice is communicating with Dave instead of Bob. Dave repeats the same with Bob, but now as the sender. Bob believes that Dave is Alice and they get a link established. Now Dave has one line open to Alice and one line open to Bob and can retransmit what he wants. Nothing of this violates Quantum Theory, because instead of eavesdropping, Dave has created two communication channels.
The only problem Dave has to implement this is that he has to be able to intercept both the quantum channel and the public channel.
Coming from the typical "stand up for yourself", "hit them back", "ignore them" person. And it looks like you got a few people who agree with you. Yes, it is possible to block them, but they could switch screen names, and more than anything else you fail to see the real problem.
People want other people to acknowledge and like them.
That one sentence describes what bullying is all about. Here is a basic guide to bullying (I am using male descriptors for the victim):
1) Find a person that don't have many friends and therefore has low self-confidence. 2) Begin bullying that person 3) If the person fights back he isn't a bullying target, restart at 1. (As a few slashdot posts shows, some people fight back. However, not all people have that strength/confidence) 4) Now you have found a perfect bullying target. Keep decreasing that persons self-confidence by emphasizing his flaws. Convince him that noone could possibly like him and try to alienate him from the rest of his peers. 5) Get some shallow sastisfaction that there is now someone that has it worse than you. optional 6) Watch as the bullying victim commits suicide because of low self-confidence, or maybe goes berserk and commits mass murder since noone in the world cares about him.
What could really have prevented the above sequence.
* Standing up for yourself
Doesn't work, because the victim doesn't have the self-confidence or personality to do that in the first place. If he had, he wouldn't have become a long term bullying victim in the first place.
* Authority figures (grown-ups) telling the victim to stand up for himself
Ouch. Even worse. There is a slight possibility that it works, but if it doesn't and the victim still doesn't have the confidence or personality to stand up for himself, you have just dealt the killing blow to the victim. The victim will now think (and possibly may be correct) that the autority figure dispises him because he didn't have the "guts" to stand up for himself. His self-confidence basically decreases even further and he will most likely not trust authority any longer.
The same reasoning is also true for non-authority figures telling you to stand up for yourself.
* Have authority punish the bully
Doesn't work very well. The victims self-confidence has most likely already been damaged, and even though authority intervenes, the victim doesn't get any real confidence back from it. It is still better than doing nothing of course.
* Teach everyone to stand up for and protect bullying victims
This is the best way in my opinion. The one thing that a bullying victim needs is for others of the same status (in other words, not authority figures) to acknowledge him. That acknowledgement will negate most damage that any bully tries to do, and make future bullying attempts less effective.
Please don't cite supply and demand when discussing intellectual "property".
The theory of supply and demand was created explicity to deal with situations where the supply is limited. Todays market where coorporations tries to artifically limit supply using different means is nothing more than an abomination that spits right in the face of the words "free market".
Also note that while the free market is the most efficent way to deal with supply and demand issues, it may not always be the best way. I personally am against pure free market on labor, not because it isn't efficent, but because it also has a huge impact on the happiness of society due to the large salary gaps between different people. Treating humans as things without feelings is a fault and downfall of many economic theories.
Re:Are we really making it better for us, or worse
on
Finding New Code
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· Score: 1
Seeing commercial companies violating licenses like that sucks. It is not unexpected due to the fact that coorporatism is a breeding ground for greed and selfishness, and buisness laws often fail to protect the rights of those who aren't in the business of making big money themselves.
Categorizing "free software" under freeware however isn't really incorrect. The only license part of "free software" that could cast into doubt the validity of "free software" being freeware is the redistribution part. "Free software" has a couple of redistribution restrictions, but so does many programs considered freeware that are only availible from an official source. It could be argued that under a strict definition of freeware there may not be any redistribution restriction but that is question of how freeware is defined.
The source code modification clauses of "free software" provides extra opportunities for anyone wanting to create derivations of the program. These clauses aren't restrictions however, but an extra opportunity above and beyond that of ordinary freeware that don't allow you to modify the source code at all.
9/11 may have been the reason for the Afghanistan war, but anyone who thinks the US attacking Iraq had anything to do with terrorism needs to get their head examined. The adminstration had wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11. The anti-arab sentiments coupled with some well timed WMD propaganda just made it so much easier.
The only thing I don't get a 100% is why the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq. Most likely a combination of factors, ranging from money (oil, war contracts) to diplomatic (Saudi Arabis, Israel) and even personal reasons (Bush Senior not finishing Hussein off).
It was a very costly decision for US though. Not only is the war costing lots of resources and lives. It also managed to use up an incredible amount of goodwill worldwide (Far more than the US gained from the 9/11 attack).
So get off you high horse and admit that it is the computer scientists fault for trying to change the definitions of an already existing prefix system to fit their own domain.
I think he meant was that as long as legitimate movie sites can't provide Fair Use compatible downloads (specifically no Digital Restriction Management), he will continue to use the illegitimate sites because of their greater respect for the "customers".
Compared to the fear, insecurity, and single-minded drive that some people have against the goverment? This isn't to say that you are wrong. I just don't think that public cameras (which is a neutral tool) is where the problem lies. It is just a convienient thing for anti-goverment propaganda to focus on, since most people don't like to be watched.
The real problem is abuse of power and laws/regulations that don't punish/restrict that abuse. When people can get imprisoned without a fair trial (Guantanamo Bay) or get imprisoned because of stupid laws (Genarlow Wilson) or juries aren't informed/allowed to use their power (Jury Nullification) or... the list goes on.
It is no wonder people are afraid of the goverment watching them, because the US goverment (and this isn't about Republicans vs Democrats) as it currently stands is abusive. Unfortunally, I see very little chance for this changing as long as people keep getting terrorized by media companies and politicans into accepting these bad laws.
Re:People complain about the voting machine
on
Brave New Ballot
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· Score: 1
Only for presidential election. For the senate/congress, the problem is completly different. Having seperate elections for each spot in senate/congress is a terrible mistake. At first it may seem like a good way to get representation from every part of the country, but it completly fails in regards to representing the will of the people. Imagine a 3rd party that evenly has 20% of the votes across the country. It will end up without a single spot in the senate or the congress.
If the less populated states feel that they would get less representation, just multiply votes from those states with a predecided factor. It may seem unfair to those living in more populated states, but the current voting system is just as unfair, so it wouldn't be a change in that regard.
This would of course never happen, because the majority of the people as well as the people in power are republicans and democrats and don't want a change. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
"And, in the end, the ISP doesn't care if they're BitTorrent packets or not. If you're filling your inbound pipe for days on end, then throttling whatever it is that you're doing is a good thing, from their perspective."
And that is the right kind of throttling. ISPs should not care what is in the packets. If I have been using more than my share of bandwidth, throttle me. However, don't peek at my packets and decide that some of my traffic is worth less than the other. The ISP may give me x bandwidth for bulk traffic and y bandwidth for priority traffic, but it isn't the job of ISP to decide what traffic is bulk and what is priority.
"Abuses by government has been orders of magnitude worse than any abuses by business."
Only because goverments are more powerful. A business the size of america with its own army would be a frightening thing to see. Big goverment will abuse everyone, while pretending that they are actually helping you. Big business will just abuse everyone.
"Power corrupts" is the golden rule. They only way to limit abuses of power, is by limiting the power. That is true for both businesses and goverment.
Direct Democracy: People vote on laws Democracy: People vote on People that vote on laws Republic: People vote on People that vote on People that vote on laws. Monarchy/Dictatorship: Self-Acclaimed Leader vote on Laws
Republic is basically Democracy with one extra step of indirection.
I didn't miss the point. I hit a bullseye. A MMORPG must the fun from the absolute start, or players will quit before they become hooked. EVE Online fails in that aspect. It may get better later on, but I (and many others) will never know.
THe problem with EVE-Online is that it starts so boring that almost noone stay until it gets better.
WoW is better at the start, and therefore they got the subscribers. Basic psychology. A drug needs to be addictive from the start. Once you are hooked, there is no turning back even if it gets worse.
In my experience guild members are elite whores that love to wiggle their behinds at those who aren't in the guild, so as to show their "superiority". And even if they don't do that, they will demand that you be online atleast x hours per week at specific hours, and do the same thing over and over. Not really my idea of fun. There are of course exceptions. There are guilds that don't do this, but they won't be able to play the endgame because those interested in the endgame will flock to the elite guilds like sheep.
Blacklisting is a far simpler way to track dumbasses, that doesn't require guilds that usually create more problems than they are worth.
Guilds may on the surface seem like they build communities, but if you are not careful they actually segregate the community. If people group with the same people all the time, they will never meet any new people. That is the opposite of creating a social environment.
Raiding is one of the absoulte worst inventions ever. While at first, it may look like an excellent idea, it suffers from one serious flaw. It effectivly limits every single character(class) to what they are absolutly best at. (And if they are an all-round character they can just go home)
What you end up with is heal bots, buff bots, tank bots and damage bots. Whereas in a five man group, players will need to use their secondary skills because there isn't anyone in the group that has that skill as a primary. Five man groups also can contain more interesting combinations, while a raiding group always is constructed after the same formula.
The absolute worst part about raiding is how it tears the community apart. Unless you whore (whoring is the correct term since you effectivly is selling your body and soul) yourself out to a raiding guild, you will have no access whatsoever to the high end content. A pickup group of 5 people is workable. 10 people is possible, but tough. 25-40 people is impossible.
World of Warcraft had two big selling points. Excellent level 1-60 solo/party fun. Secondly it is a Blizzard product which automatically created a big fanbase (Although Blizzard has lost most of its original developers by now). After the release they have added a lot of raiding, and simultanously destroyed PvP due to messed up items strengths. Level 80 items doesn't work when you have level 60 special abilities, where some of the abilities scale with item strength, and others don't.
It also suffers from the same flaw as other MMORPGs. Beginner areas quickly empty, and at the end you end up with all the people in high level zones (Or instances). This is however something that I have no idea how to fix.
Terrorism: Ruling (Pushing ones agenda) by using fear/threat of a "bad" future. ("bad" futures could be ones involving terror acts, but other threats like doomsday prophecies are also possible)
Most so called terrorists are actually very bad at terrorism, because they do terror acts to create fear, but fail at pushing their agenda. The most successful terrorist instead use the threat of other people's terror acts, to push their agenda. This is an increasingly common tactic among politicians in western countries.
The most difficult part is to tell the difference between someone who is pushing their own agenda, and someone who is just trying to prevent the "bad" future.
Capitalism is quickly becoming just as inefficent as communism once were. As companies has dicovered that advertising/marketing is far better at selling products than quality or even price. It is an armsrace that is very costly for society.
Just look at tv advertising. 2.5 hours per day times 17minutes is over 40 minutes per day. Using a salary of $10, and assuming only half of advertising time is wasted time for the watcher (The rest is spent going to the toilet), that makes $100 wasted per month and person. Free time should also be valued more than work time (otherwise the optimal decision would be to work more).
What I have pointed at right now is just the direct cost to society because people are watching advertising instead of doing something they find more fun. Other costs are, production of advertisment, paying telephone marketers and of course the hidden cost of "uninforming" the consumer, which is very damaging in a market economy that relies informed consumers.
And saying that tv advertising is needed or otherwise it would costs more for cable, is just using the broken window fallacy. If advertising didn't exist, the products would be cheaper and the money you saved could be spent on the more expensive cable.
PC games should focus on utilizing the mouse. First Person Shooters are ok for that, but not the best. There is also an over saturation of first person shooters, because it is an easy concept to do.
"Sorry, but all the DRM in the world wouldn't make HL2 a "crappy game"."
You are right. Linear non-inventive gameplay makes HL2 a "crappy game". Ok, crappy may be a little harsh, but it is very much overated, which is common for a hyped massmarketed game, that isn't pure crap. The only remotely interesting thing in HL2 is the physics engine. HL2 is basically the prime example of why companies are spending so much time on graphics, and so little on gameplay.
What I often find amusing is how Doom 3 is considered bad while HL2 is considered good. HL2 and Doom3 are basically equals. Replace the HL2 physics engine for the Doom3 light (umm..unlight) engine and you got the same kind of game. A linear shooter that looks great, and with a single unique gimmick.
There are fortunally still good games being released for PC if you look further than what is advertised as the next mega title.
Compared to Bush it could be considered an improvement by some.:)
It is however true that the dice method probably doesn't work that well for single person positions. You need a large enough selection to get a decent statistical representation, like the senate or congress.
The only reason I like mentioning it is because it the only election type that I can think of that avoids being a magnet for power hungry people. The real question is who would a better job. The current well educated lawyer that has been influenced by various "sponsors", or the average joe. I have very little trust for politicians nowadays, so my belief is that the average joe would fail to do more damage than the career politician.
There are four ways of cheating in an election that comes to mind.
* Manipulating votes. * Voting as someone else (often someone who is dead). * Keeping someone from voting. * Influencing someones vote.
To avoid vote manipulation, the simplest way is to user paper ballots with pencils, never move the ballot boxes (count at the voting location), and have representatives from each party to monitor at each voting location.
To keep dead people from voting you either need a good identification system, or a way to mark people that lasts for a full day and can't be removed.
To make sure that people are allowed to vote you need non-corrupt law enforcement and/or enough honest non-passive citizens.
To keep people from influencing others votes you need secret ballots and/or strong laws against it (so it isn't worth the risk).
Finally, I think that the best way to vote is to place the names of all the citizens on a big list and roll the dice. It is the only way to ensure that you don't get powerhungry, coorporation sponsored people in power. And if you elect enough people it should statistically represent the people. Much better than they are represented now at least.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a good argument that can be used to test if someone is agnostic, atheist or just confused. Answer the below questions:
1. Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in God?
2a. If you answered atheist to question 1: You are an atheist. Good for you.
2b. If you answered agnostic to question 1: Are you agnostic or atheistic about your believes in Santa Claus, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, The Invisible Pink Unicorn and Fairies?
3a. If you answered agnostic to question 2b: You are an agnostic. You believe anything is possible even though there is no proof either way.
3b. If you answered atheist to question 2b: Why are you questioning your unbelief in God, but not your unbelief in Fairies? Both have just as little proof of their existence. Think about it carefully before doing the test a second time. If you arrived at this point for the second time it must be because you have a special reasoning concerning God. Call yourself an agnostic if you want, but be aware that atheists will think that you just like sitting on the fence post unless you give a very good argument for your reasoning.
I think you missed the parents point. What you just described is a method that prevents eavesdropping.
What the parent suggests is the man-in-the-middle Dave intercepts both all and any communication between Alice and Bob. Alice sends a stream of photons over the quantum line, and Dave intercepts. Afterwards Alice does the public announce to check that bits havn't been intercepted, but Dave intercepts this message also, and this time acts as Bob to verify the photons recieved. Alica and Dave agrees that there isn't an eavesdropper on their line and starts communicating.
So know Alice is communicating with Dave instead of Bob. Dave repeats the same with Bob, but now as the sender. Bob believes that Dave is Alice and they get a link established. Now Dave has one line open to Alice and one line open to Bob and can retransmit what he wants. Nothing of this violates Quantum Theory, because instead of eavesdropping, Dave has created two communication channels.
The only problem Dave has to implement this is that he has to be able to intercept both the quantum channel and the public channel.
Coming from the typical "stand up for yourself", "hit them back", "ignore them" person. And it looks like you got a few people who agree with you. Yes, it is possible to block them, but they could switch screen names, and more than anything else you fail to see the real problem.
People want other people to acknowledge and like them.
That one sentence describes what bullying is all about. Here is a basic guide to bullying (I am using male descriptors for the victim):
1) Find a person that don't have many friends and therefore has low self-confidence.
2) Begin bullying that person
3) If the person fights back he isn't a bullying target, restart at 1. (As a few slashdot posts shows, some people fight back. However, not all people have that strength/confidence)
4) Now you have found a perfect bullying target. Keep decreasing that persons self-confidence by emphasizing his flaws. Convince him that noone could possibly like him and try to alienate him from the rest of his peers.
5) Get some shallow sastisfaction that there is now someone that has it worse than you.
optional 6) Watch as the bullying victim commits suicide because of low self-confidence, or maybe goes berserk and commits mass murder since noone in the world cares about him.
What could really have prevented the above sequence.
* Standing up for yourself
Doesn't work, because the victim doesn't have the self-confidence or personality to do that in the first place. If he had, he wouldn't have become a long term bullying victim in the first place.
* Authority figures (grown-ups) telling the victim to stand up for himself
Ouch. Even worse. There is a slight possibility that it works, but if it doesn't and the victim still doesn't have the confidence or personality to stand up for himself, you have just dealt the killing blow to the victim. The victim will now think (and possibly may be correct) that the autority figure dispises him because he didn't have the "guts" to stand up for himself. His self-confidence basically decreases even further and he will most likely not trust authority any longer.
The same reasoning is also true for non-authority figures telling you to stand up for yourself.
* Have authority punish the bully
Doesn't work very well. The victims self-confidence has most likely already been damaged, and even though authority intervenes, the victim doesn't get any real confidence back from it. It is still better than doing nothing of course.
* Teach everyone to stand up for and protect bullying victims
This is the best way in my opinion. The one thing that a bullying victim needs is for others of the same status (in other words, not authority figures) to acknowledge him. That acknowledgement will negate most damage that any bully tries to do, and make future bullying attempts less effective.
Please don't cite supply and demand when discussing intellectual "property".
The theory of supply and demand was created explicity to deal with situations where the supply is limited. Todays market where coorporations tries to artifically limit supply using different means is nothing more than an abomination that spits right in the face of the words "free market".
Also note that while the free market is the most efficent way to deal with supply and demand issues, it may not always be the best way. I personally am against pure free market on labor, not because it isn't efficent, but because it also has a huge impact on the happiness of society due to the large salary gaps between different people. Treating humans as things without feelings is a fault and downfall of many economic theories.
Seeing commercial companies violating licenses like that sucks. It is not unexpected due to the fact that coorporatism is a breeding ground for greed and selfishness, and buisness laws often fail to protect the rights of those who aren't in the business of making big money themselves.
Categorizing "free software" under freeware however isn't really incorrect. The only license part of "free software" that could cast into doubt the validity of "free software" being freeware is the redistribution part. "Free software" has a couple of redistribution restrictions, but so does many programs considered freeware that are only availible from an official source. It could be argued that under a strict definition of freeware there may not be any redistribution restriction but that is question of how freeware is defined.
The source code modification clauses of "free software" provides extra opportunities for anyone wanting to create derivations of the program. These clauses aren't restrictions however, but an extra opportunity above and beyond that of ordinary freeware that don't allow you to modify the source code at all.
9/11 may have been the reason for the Afghanistan war, but anyone who thinks the US attacking Iraq had anything to do with terrorism needs to get their head examined. The adminstration had wanted to invade Iraq long before 9/11. The anti-arab sentiments coupled with some well timed WMD propaganda just made it so much easier.
The only thing I don't get a 100% is why the Bush administration wanted to attack Iraq. Most likely a combination of factors, ranging from money (oil, war contracts) to diplomatic (Saudi Arabis, Israel) and even personal reasons (Bush Senior not finishing Hussein off).
It was a very costly decision for US though. Not only is the war costing lots of resources and lives. It also managed to use up an incredible amount of goodwill worldwide (Far more than the US gained from the 9/11 attack).
Yes, Giga is latin for billion (10^9).
So get off you high horse and admit that it is the computer scientists fault for trying to change the definitions of an already existing prefix system to fit their own domain.
I think he meant was that as long as legitimate movie sites can't provide Fair Use compatible downloads (specifically no Digital Restriction Management), he will continue to use the illegitimate sites because of their greater respect for the "customers".
Compared to the fear, insecurity, and single-minded drive that some people have against the goverment? This isn't to say that you are wrong. I just don't think that public cameras (which is a neutral tool) is where the problem lies. It is just a convienient thing for anti-goverment propaganda to focus on, since most people don't like to be watched.
... the list goes on.
The real problem is abuse of power and laws/regulations that don't punish/restrict that abuse. When people can get imprisoned without a fair trial (Guantanamo Bay) or get imprisoned because of stupid laws (Genarlow Wilson) or juries aren't informed/allowed to use their power (Jury Nullification) or
It is no wonder people are afraid of the goverment watching them, because the US goverment (and this isn't about Republicans vs Democrats) as it currently stands is abusive. Unfortunally, I see very little chance for this changing as long as people keep getting terrorized by media companies and politicans into accepting these bad laws.
Only for presidential election. For the senate/congress, the problem is completly different. Having seperate elections for each spot in senate/congress is a terrible mistake. At first it may seem like a good way to get representation from every part of the country, but it completly fails in regards to representing the will of the people. Imagine a 3rd party that evenly has 20% of the votes across the country. It will end up without a single spot in the senate or the congress.
If the less populated states feel that they would get less representation, just multiply votes from those states with a predecided factor. It may seem unfair to those living in more populated states, but the current voting system is just as unfair, so it wouldn't be a change in that regard.
This would of course never happen, because the majority of the people as well as the people in power are republicans and democrats and don't want a change. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
"And, in the end, the ISP doesn't care if they're BitTorrent packets or not. If you're filling your inbound pipe for days on end, then throttling whatever it is that you're doing is a good thing, from their perspective."
And that is the right kind of throttling. ISPs should not care what is in the packets. If I have been using more than my share of bandwidth, throttle me. However, don't peek at my packets and decide that some of my traffic is worth less than the other. The ISP may give me x bandwidth for bulk traffic and y bandwidth for priority traffic, but it isn't the job of ISP to decide what traffic is bulk and what is priority.
That is what net neutrality is really about.
"Abuses by government has been orders of magnitude worse than any abuses by business."
Only because goverments are more powerful. A business the size of america with its own army would be a frightening thing to see. Big goverment will abuse everyone, while pretending that they are actually helping you. Big business will just abuse everyone.
"Power corrupts" is the golden rule. They only way to limit abuses of power, is by limiting the power. That is true for both businesses and goverment.
The Pirate Bureau( that runs the pirate bay) and The Pirate Party are two completly different entities.
Direct Democracy: People vote on laws
Democracy: People vote on People that vote on laws
Republic: People vote on People that vote on People that vote on laws.
Monarchy/Dictatorship: Self-Acclaimed Leader vote on Laws
Republic is basically Democracy with one extra step of indirection.
I didn't miss the point. I hit a bullseye. A MMORPG must the fun from the absolute start, or players will quit before they become hooked. EVE Online fails in that aspect. It may get better later on, but I (and many others) will never know.
THe problem with EVE-Online is that it starts so boring that almost noone stay until it gets better.
WoW is better at the start, and therefore they got the subscribers. Basic psychology. A drug needs to be addictive from the start. Once you are hooked, there is no turning back even if it gets worse.
In my experience guild members are elite whores that love to wiggle their behinds at those who aren't in the guild, so as to show their "superiority". And even if they don't do that, they will demand that you be online atleast x hours per week at specific hours, and do the same thing over and over. Not really my idea of fun. There are of course exceptions. There are guilds that don't do this, but they won't be able to play the endgame because those interested in the endgame will flock to the elite guilds like sheep.
Blacklisting is a far simpler way to track dumbasses, that doesn't require guilds that usually create more problems than they are worth.
Guilds may on the surface seem like they build communities, but if you are not careful they actually segregate the community. If people group with the same people all the time, they will never meet any new people. That is the opposite of creating a social environment.
Raiding is one of the absoulte worst inventions ever. While at first, it may look like an excellent idea, it suffers from one serious flaw. It effectivly limits every single character(class) to what they are absolutly best at. (And if they are an all-round character they can just go home)
What you end up with is heal bots, buff bots, tank bots and damage bots. Whereas in a five man group, players will need to use their secondary skills because there isn't anyone in the group that has that skill as a primary. Five man groups also can contain more interesting combinations, while a raiding group always is constructed after the same formula.
The absolute worst part about raiding is how it tears the community apart. Unless you whore (whoring is the correct term since you effectivly is selling your body and soul) yourself out to a raiding guild, you will have no access whatsoever to the high end content. A pickup group of 5 people is workable. 10 people is possible, but tough. 25-40 people is impossible.
World of Warcraft had two big selling points. Excellent level 1-60 solo/party fun. Secondly it is a Blizzard product which automatically created a big fanbase (Although Blizzard has lost most of its original developers by now). After the release they have added a lot of raiding, and simultanously destroyed PvP due to messed up items strengths. Level 80 items doesn't work when you have level 60 special abilities, where some of the abilities scale with item strength, and others don't.
It also suffers from the same flaw as other MMORPGs. Beginner areas quickly empty, and at the end you end up with all the people in high level zones (Or instances). This is however something that I have no idea how to fix.
Terrorism: Ruling (Pushing ones agenda) by using fear/threat of a "bad" future. ("bad" futures could be ones involving terror acts, but other threats like doomsday prophecies are also possible)
Most so called terrorists are actually very bad at terrorism, because they do terror acts to create fear, but fail at pushing their agenda. The most successful terrorist instead use the threat of other people's terror acts, to push their agenda. This is an increasingly common tactic among politicians in western countries.
The most difficult part is to tell the difference between someone who is pushing their own agenda, and someone who is just trying to prevent the "bad" future.
Capitalism is quickly becoming just as inefficent as communism once were. As companies has dicovered that advertising/marketing is far better at selling products than quality or even price. It is an armsrace that is very costly for society.
Just look at tv advertising. 2.5 hours per day times 17minutes is over 40 minutes per day. Using a salary of $10, and assuming only half of advertising time is wasted time for the watcher (The rest is spent going to the toilet), that makes $100 wasted per month and person. Free time should also be valued more than work time (otherwise the optimal decision would be to work more).
What I have pointed at right now is just the direct cost to society because people are watching advertising instead of doing something they find more fun. Other costs are, production of advertisment, paying telephone marketers and of course the hidden cost of "uninforming" the consumer, which is very damaging in a market economy that relies informed consumers.
And saying that tv advertising is needed or otherwise it would costs more for cable, is just using the broken window fallacy. If advertising didn't exist, the products would be cheaper and the money you saved could be spent on the more expensive cable.
You nailed it.
PC games should focus on utilizing the mouse. First Person Shooters are ok for that, but not the best. There is also an over saturation of first person shooters, because it is an easy concept to do.
"Sorry, but all the DRM in the world wouldn't make HL2 a "crappy game"."
You are right. Linear non-inventive gameplay makes HL2 a "crappy game". Ok, crappy may be a little harsh, but it is very much overated, which is common for a hyped massmarketed game, that isn't pure crap. The only remotely interesting thing in HL2 is the physics engine. HL2 is basically the prime example of why companies are spending so much time on graphics, and so little on gameplay.
What I often find amusing is how Doom 3 is considered bad while HL2 is considered good. HL2 and Doom3 are basically equals. Replace the HL2 physics engine for the Doom3 light (umm..unlight) engine and you got the same kind of game. A linear shooter that looks great, and with a single unique gimmick.
There are fortunally still good games being released for PC if you look further than what is advertised as the next mega title.
Compared to Bush it could be considered an improvement by some. :)
It is however true that the dice method probably doesn't work that well for single person positions. You need a large enough selection to get a decent statistical representation, like the senate or congress.
The only reason I like mentioning it is because it the only election type that I can think of that avoids being a magnet for power hungry people. The real question is who would a better job. The current well educated lawyer that has been influenced by various "sponsors", or the average joe. I have very little trust for politicians nowadays, so my belief is that the average joe would fail to do more damage than the career politician.
A republic is 1 wolf convincing 10 sheep that steak for dinner is best for the common good.
:)
-Wildclaw
A republic is nothing more than aristocracy rule, where 1% of the people claims to be smart enough to decide for the remaining 99%.
-Wildclaw
Somewhat contrieved, but I think you get what I mean
There are four ways of cheating in an election that comes to mind.
* Manipulating votes.
* Voting as someone else (often someone who is dead).
* Keeping someone from voting.
* Influencing someones vote.
To avoid vote manipulation, the simplest way is to user paper ballots with pencils, never move the ballot boxes (count at the voting location), and have representatives from each party to monitor at each voting location.
To keep dead people from voting you either need a good identification system, or a way to mark people that lasts for a full day and can't be removed.
To make sure that people are allowed to vote you need non-corrupt law enforcement and/or enough honest non-passive citizens.
To keep people from influencing others votes you need secret ballots and/or strong laws against it (so it isn't worth the risk).
Finally, I think that the best way to vote is to place the names of all the citizens on a big list and roll the dice. It is the only way to ensure that you don't get powerhungry, coorporation sponsored people in power. And if you elect enough people it should statistically represent the people. Much better than they are represented now at least.