>>It also is a stupid weapon. I remember reading about it. Its fallout radius was less than its range. Which meant whatever soldiers were unlucky enough to have to fire the thing, and any in the vicinity would be exposed to a lot of Rads.
How many rads with a 78 ton-equivalent mini-nuke produce? A lot less than conventional nukes, that's for sure.
An uncle of a roommate of mine was involved in developing nuclear anti-air missiles. If the soviet bombers were flying in overhead, they'd detonate one above the fleet - since airplane wings are not designed to deal as well with downward stresses than upwards ones, they'd rip the wings off the planes. The radiation and fallout from them was not a threat to the people on the ground shooting the nukes straight up.
>>Even going all the way back to the despised Zonk days can I think of another article so utterly inane as this one.
Yeah, it's like they finally discovered the mod community after 15 years.
Kinda like how Quake 1 was moddable, and the TF guys made TF for it, then I made CustomTF from that, then some aussies made Aussie CustomTF from that, then a Portuguese guy made ProzacTF from that, and then I made a new version of CustomTF from ProzacTF, then some other guys wrote additional code from that...
>>I was on a network with 22 others and they all connected (through 2 switches) to one router. I've played half of my time with more than 400ms lag.
400ms is playable. In my WoW days I played it so much I tried doing an AV using my cell phone's internet mode. Unplayable, so I didn't play it.
Besides, the guy the OP is talking about is probably in some sort of guild (most hardcore players are). You just need to disconnect him once or twice per raid and either he or they will give up on it.
>>Perhaps the best thing to do for the time being would be to back off on the unbreakable-privacy goal until a reliable system arises, and use a database like the rest of us.
Yeah, it seems to me that having heat-entropy-death-of-the-universe encryption on a frail system - that is apparently so dependent on a central server that even before it becomes well known by people on the internet it dies under the load - seems to be rather silly.
A system is no better than its weakest link, and having a distributed anything run through a weak central point is simply not going to work.
Since they're already in the field of "cloud computing", they really don't have an excuse not have a distributed server architecture.
>>It's from the [thy shall not do stuff onto others that you do not want to receive yourself]. >>And if you step back, then it's an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival.
Is it? One of the annoying things about evolutionary psychology is that you can use it to prove anything (and if you can use something to prove anything, it's not science). If people tended to murder each other instead of not murdering each other, you could argue that was an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival. You can use that phrase on *anything*.
Moreover, it's telling that primitive peoples (the ones without that thou shalt not stuff) have radically higher rates of murder before Christianity is introduced rather than later. If thou shalt not murder was an evolved behavior, then primitive people should be closer to the evolutionarily influenced behavior, no? But we see the opposite.
>>And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons.
There's also no scientific explanations that explain subjective experience at all. Which is why Penrose theorized the idea of quantum tubercules. Essentially, there's two possibilities for explaining consciousness, neither one of which are very palatable: 1) There's something special about the human brain, and silicon chips can never be conscious. Though they might be able to accurately simulate a human brain, they are not actually conscious - they are just running a physics simulator. But what about neurons makes them so privileged as being the only things in the universe to support subjective experience? It's deeply suspicious.
Or:
2) There's nothing special about the human brain, and any physical process that has some (currently not understood) criteria causes subjective experience to arise. Some people think that 60Hz brain waves are the fundamental unit of consciousness, but that implies panpyschicism - everything meeting the basic requirements are conscious. 60Hz waves are the fundamental unit of consciousness? Then our entire power system has subjective experiences, though it probably wouldn't be very interesting. Chalmers thinks that all information processing systems have subjective experience... so your CPU and your thermostat have an internal life to them. Which is also a bizarre, counterintuitive notion.
Is it? I was thinking that if you were an addict's roommate, you could play games with the router to suck all the fun out of an MMORPG. Hell, just a latency of 800ms and 25% packet loss makes any game feel like pulling teeth. Or if you don't want to make it obvious that you're messing with him, ~450ms and 25% packet loss. It'll become so frustrating it will no longer be fun. And for all the talk about addicts and addictive behavior, at the heart of it, people play MMORPGS because (they think) they're having fun.
And if you don't know how to mess with a router, or you don't have root access to it? Bittorrent. Seriously.
When I was playing a lot of WoW, whenever my roommate started downloading whatever it was he was downloading behind a locked door, I'd have to shut down the game. If it went on for more than a day or so, then I'd escalate to rebooting the router, unplugging his ethernet line, etc., which is why I'd recommend making sure the person conducting the "intervention" keep the router in a locked cabinet or room.
>>Not obeying an officer's request, when they don't have a warrant or otherwise legal right to that information, should be a crime? I hope not.
Actually, that IS the law.
The exact scope of how much an officer can do without a warrant is sort of limited, but legally, the citizenry are required to obey lawful commands given by a policeman carrying out his duty. There's been a number of rulings on these and other 4th amendment topics, with the results actually fairly common sense.
You should probably check your state laws as well to find out what they are (search for "Failure to Obey" and "Interference with Public Duty"), but in general, it's probably a bad idea to ignore a command from a police officer, especially if it's relatively reasonable.
>>Therefore, buying something new (a mouse, a motherboard, a DVD burner, another terabyte of disk or few gigs of RAM) is often a fight.
Separate accounts, man. Separate accounts.
My wife buys things I consider to be kind of silly, she doesn't understand the difference between a NVIDIA RIVA TNT and a NVIDIA 285 GTX, but since we both work and keep separate accounts for everything except food, rent, and the vacation fund, we're both quite happy.
>>funny you don't mention any mmo's that came out before wow, or a regular rpg for that matter
My friends in real life play a LOT of RPGs. LFR nowadays, used to be really big into Living City, less so into Living Greyhawk. Hell, I run a worldwide living campaign with a couple hundred people in it (Living Planar).
I beta tested AC, UO, EQ, PS, and a bunch of other ones. My friends played a pretty even distribution of a lot, some, or none of the pre-WoW games. Most of them played FFXI - we were all in a guild together. All of them are/were unhappy with WoW for one reason or another, but other MMORPGs are worse. WAR doesn't have enough quests to level, and has very boring loot. AoC has next to no loot at all, and they didn't even implement *stats* (even though you could wear +10 strength items, they didn't do anything) until months after the game was released.
Playing FFXI felt like shooting yourself in the foot with a nailgun - you'd wait 3 hours to get a party put together and travel to the same location, then a guy would drop or turn out to be a retard. You'd drop him, and then wait another 2 hours for a replacement. There was no solo play to speak of for most classes, and solo play was mind-numbingly slow.
I probably had the most fun with UO, simply because the open-ended nature of the game (sadly limited more and more as the beta went on) lent itself to very amusing situations. My wife asks me from time to time to tell her stories from the UO beta when she wants to be cheered up. (She's especially amused by the stories of combat chefs, that would run in front of an army and start furiously grilling eggs, in order to get the opponent's GM swordsmen to lose skill points.) But the game had a lack of organized content, and I'm not a person who likes to stand around in a tavern talking with people in a game.
WoW is fairly hideous in it's own way - players have been forced to grind arenas and battlegrounds - the same damn battlegrounds - for years now. The best part about WAR was that it had something like 40 different battlegrounds to fight in, all of which were varied and interesting. Playing WoW for a bit after WAR really drove home how shitty WoW PVP really is.
So, but yeah. Whoever said WoW was the lowest common denominator was right.
That's a laugh. I don't know anyone of the 20 or 30 people that play or have played WoW for thousands of hours that haven't tried out other MMORPGs - Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EVE, a slew of free or freemium ones, etc. Some of them drifted away from WoW when it became clear blizzard really had no idea what it was doing with some of the classes (Spellcasting pushback wasn't balanced properly until about *three years* after WoW came out, for example), others drifted back when it became clear the problems with AoC and WAR were even worse than WoW's problems.
Essentially, it's the "mostly harmless" MMORPG. No love for WoW, but it's there, it's a relatively okay method for wasting some time online, and it's relatively well polished.
That's how you're supposed to set speed limits. (80th percentile was what I'd heard) When the man realized just how much money they could make by setting the speed limit 10 mph lower than "the natural speed", well we got the stupid limits that we have now.
Yeah. Hence I think a referendum on the issue would be a nice way of getting sanity in our speed limits here in California.
There is a moral difference between the US killing 5000 civilians who get caught up in the crossfire between US troops and Iraqi insurgents and Saddam killing 50 people because they were "enemies of the state."
Meh, there's no point arguing with moral relativists on this one. Mainly, they just dislike the US, so they claim that live was all rainbows and rivers of chocolate under Saddam, and that everything bad in the Middle East is somehow our fault.
>>But man there are so many people involved in that party that remind me of the callers on Art Bell. LP seems to attract the tin foil hat crowd.
Yeah, that's what I mean. And the other half of the party just votes libertarian since they want drugs to be legalized, and are nutty in their own way.
>>Hypokalemia is very dramatic. Not. According to Wikipedia:
My mom doesn't have much of a thyroid left as a result of a teenaged bout of Graves' disease. She has to manually control her calcium levels, and since Na+, K+ and Ca2+ are all interlinked, she has problems if her potassium levels get off, so she carries potassium supplements with her as well if her K+ levels drop too much.
>>Besides, if things did go back in time 25 years, the ruined remains of Vulcan would have also showed up 25 years ago giving them plenty of time to prepare.
Yeah, I'm kind of hoping the next movie involves Vulcan reappearing 150 more years in the past, with those crazy Vulcans going on whacky time travelly adventures, since (according to Spock) that whole paradox thing is just hogwash anyway.
Horrible movie. Cringeworthy dialogue, overwrought melodrama, and as you and other people pointed out, completely nonsensical stuff in it.
As a fellow Judo practitioner and also a former soccer player, I can attest there's one very important difference between breakfalls in the two sports: in soccer people fall over, clutch their legs, and howl in pain until the penalty whistle is blown. Then they stand up and are fine.
Actually, it was shit like that that made me stop playing soccer.
>>And we all know how good the average driver is at assessing those...
In fact, the law assumes that 90% of drivers are driving at a safe speed, and 10% are crazy reckless drivers.
How do you think we get our speed limits set on roads? They conduct speed surveys every 2 or 3 years and take the 90th percentile. Most people drive at the natural speed of a road, speed limits be damned.
There's probably something of a chilling effect on roads which are so over-enforced that people drive at the speed limit instead of the natural speed, and don't get me started on interstates (I think we should pass a referendum applying the same law to the interstates here in California), but I think it's generally a reasonable estimate.
>>Not quite. It's probably a dead end for missions than grant experience but can still be a great part of the content
MMORPGs have been doing user-generated content for decades. MUDs are often expanded / given new content by the players, not the admins. They are usually vetted first, though.
As a modder myself (for Quake, and many other games) I've been waiting for a modern MMORPG to let its content be mod-able or extensible, but the CoH way doesn't seem to be it.
Someone should register a "Disapproval"/"Disillusioned" party - a party with no policies of it's own. The idea of the party is to provide a box to tick to say "Both major parties suck, and third parties are some form of extremism that I don't support"
That's actually the best idea I've ever heard from an AC.
I was in a bind in the last election, since McCain was a wet potato, and Obama looked like he'd do what he ended up doing, and all the 3rd parties are weird in their own way. I ended up holding my nose and voting Libertarian, since it's the only party for limiting the power of government these days, but the Libertarian party is "whacky", to put it mildly.
When you hate someone for having what you do not, you bring curses upon your own head. The classical Greek dramatists pointed this out and it's no less true today.
And what agency carries out this revenge? Karma? The Erinyes?
I mean, sure, being negative in real life is generally pretty bad, and if your employer sees an email from you talking like a lolcat it might affect your ability to get promoted, but people post negative things about other people all the time on the internet. Look at the cesspit that is the WoW Forums, or, hell, your own posts on Slashdot.
I don't care a whit about Cory Doctorow, knowing only passing references from XKCD or him blurbing Accelerando, but from a five minute scan of his stuff, he does seem to be kind of ridiculous.
His first book was a guide on how to publish books, for example.
>>Practically speaking, the HMD does nothing additional other than give you headache.
I used to work for KEO (Kaiser Electro Optics) which makes a variety of heads-up displays for the military, and the only ones that gave a headache were the ones on the ELINT planes that weighed something like 25 pounds (and believe me, you don't want 25 pounds having off the front of your head for 8 hours in a row).
Our highest resolution displays (this was in 1995 or so, mind you) were around 3200x1600 resolution, and cost a couple hundred k apiece. They were built using smaller LCD displays that were glued together with some patented optical coatings to make the seams between them invisible. It was fun to play with military flight simulators on them, run by an SGI Oynx, during lunch breaks.
I got to write software drivers for them (my first job out of high school) to fix various things like individual LCD panels getting glued in upside down - everything high end was bespoke. The commercial goggles were used in the various VR video games that were briefly popular in the 90s, and they actually worked pretty well. The tracker-sensors, with appropriate AB filtering on the motion, would track head motion pretty closely - avoiding the "sim drunk" problem that came from people wearing headsets with a noticeable latency in the tracker sensors. I wrote/helped write a couple VR video games during this time period (a great opportunity for an 18 year old coder), but I don't think we ever sold more than 100 units or so. We did get on Oprah though.
>>In short, don't hold your breath. The VR of the 90's is dead.
Actually, HMDs actually did work pretty well, they're just not really suited to the arcade environment (you have to adjust them for the Intra-ocular distance, and maintain them fairly regularly), but they did and do work quite well. They're still in use in a lot of areas.
Slashdot Mirror
>>It also is a stupid weapon. I remember reading about it. Its fallout radius was less than its range. Which meant whatever soldiers were unlucky enough to have to fire the thing, and any in the vicinity would be exposed to a lot of Rads.
How many rads with a 78 ton-equivalent mini-nuke produce? A lot less than conventional nukes, that's for sure.
An uncle of a roommate of mine was involved in developing nuclear anti-air missiles. If the soviet bombers were flying in overhead, they'd detonate one above the fleet - since airplane wings are not designed to deal as well with downward stresses than upwards ones, they'd rip the wings off the planes. The radiation and fallout from them was not a threat to the people on the ground shooting the nukes straight up.
>>Even going all the way back to the despised Zonk days can I think of another article so utterly inane as this one.
Yeah, it's like they finally discovered the mod community after 15 years.
Kinda like how Quake 1 was moddable, and the TF guys made TF for it, then I made CustomTF from that, then some aussies made Aussie CustomTF from that, then a Portuguese guy made ProzacTF from that, and then I made a new version of CustomTF from ProzacTF, then some other guys wrote additional code from that...
They're a little behind the times, methinks.
>>MS were bundling IE with Windows right back to Win95 with IE2 IIRC.
>>No one complained
What???
You obviously weren't reading /. back then. Microsoft's dirty tricks with IE was huge news, even in the mainstream media.
>>You can slam all you want, but they will continue to own the desktop because they run all the apps you want.
Sure, like how Vista can run MATLAB 2007 oh wait.
(And the code we licensed ONLY runs on MATLAB 2007... grr.)
>>I was on a network with 22 others and they all connected (through 2 switches) to one router. I've played half of my time with more than 400ms lag.
400ms is playable. In my WoW days I played it so much I tried doing an AV using my cell phone's internet mode. Unplayable, so I didn't play it.
Besides, the guy the OP is talking about is probably in some sort of guild (most hardcore players are). You just need to disconnect him once or twice per raid and either he or they will give up on it.
>>Perhaps the best thing to do for the time being would be to back off on the unbreakable-privacy goal until a reliable system arises, and use a database like the rest of us.
Yeah, it seems to me that having heat-entropy-death-of-the-universe encryption on a frail system - that is apparently so dependent on a central server that even before it becomes well known by people on the internet it dies under the load - seems to be rather silly.
A system is no better than its weakest link, and having a distributed anything run through a weak central point is simply not going to work.
Since they're already in the field of "cloud computing", they really don't have an excuse not have a distributed server architecture.
>>It's from the [thy shall not do stuff onto others that you do not want to receive yourself].
>>And if you step back, then it's an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival.
Is it? One of the annoying things about evolutionary psychology is that you can use it to prove anything (and if you can use something to prove anything, it's not science). If people tended to murder each other instead of not murdering each other, you could argue that was an evolved behavior to increase chances of survival. You can use that phrase on *anything*.
Moreover, it's telling that primitive peoples (the ones without that thou shalt not stuff) have radically higher rates of murder before Christianity is introduced rather than later. If thou shalt not murder was an evolved behavior, then primitive people should be closer to the evolutionarily influenced behavior, no? But we see the opposite.
>>And finally there is no, zero, zilch scientific evidence that quantum processes play a role in neurons.
There's also no scientific explanations that explain subjective experience at all. Which is why Penrose theorized the idea of quantum tubercules. Essentially, there's two possibilities for explaining consciousness, neither one of which are very palatable:
1) There's something special about the human brain, and silicon chips can never be conscious. Though they might be able to accurately simulate a human brain, they are not actually conscious - they are just running a physics simulator. But what about neurons makes them so privileged as being the only things in the universe to support subjective experience? It's deeply suspicious.
Or:
2) There's nothing special about the human brain, and any physical process that has some (currently not understood) criteria causes subjective experience to arise. Some people think that 60Hz brain waves are the fundamental unit of consciousness, but that implies panpyschicism - everything meeting the basic requirements are conscious. 60Hz waves are the fundamental unit of consciousness? Then our entire power system has subjective experiences, though it probably wouldn't be very interesting. Chalmers thinks that all information processing systems have subjective experience... so your CPU and your thermostat have an internal life to them. Which is also a bizarre, counterintuitive notion.
>>That's pretty much the only solution.
Is it? I was thinking that if you were an addict's roommate, you could play games with the router to suck all the fun out of an MMORPG. Hell, just a latency of 800ms and 25% packet loss makes any game feel like pulling teeth. Or if you don't want to make it obvious that you're messing with him, ~450ms and 25% packet loss. It'll become so frustrating it will no longer be fun. And for all the talk about addicts and addictive behavior, at the heart of it, people play MMORPGS because (they think) they're having fun.
And if you don't know how to mess with a router, or you don't have root access to it? Bittorrent. Seriously.
When I was playing a lot of WoW, whenever my roommate started downloading whatever it was he was downloading behind a locked door, I'd have to shut down the game. If it went on for more than a day or so, then I'd escalate to rebooting the router, unplugging his ethernet line, etc., which is why I'd recommend making sure the person conducting the "intervention" keep the router in a locked cabinet or room.
>>Fifth amendment: "... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Do you refuse to pull over for the cops because they're unconstitutionally depriving you of ten cents of gasoline?
Just wondering.
>>Not obeying an officer's request, when they don't have a warrant or otherwise legal right to that information, should be a crime? I hope not.
Actually, that IS the law.
The exact scope of how much an officer can do without a warrant is sort of limited, but legally, the citizenry are required to obey lawful commands given by a policeman carrying out his duty. There's been a number of rulings on these and other 4th amendment topics, with the results actually fairly common sense.
You should probably check your state laws as well to find out what they are (search for "Failure to Obey" and "Interference with Public Duty"), but in general, it's probably a bad idea to ignore a command from a police officer, especially if it's relatively reasonable.
>>Therefore, buying something new (a mouse, a motherboard, a DVD burner, another terabyte of disk or few gigs of RAM) is often a fight.
Separate accounts, man. Separate accounts.
My wife buys things I consider to be kind of silly, she doesn't understand the difference between a NVIDIA RIVA TNT and a NVIDIA 285 GTX, but since we both work and keep separate accounts for everything except food, rent, and the vacation fund, we're both quite happy.
>>funny you don't mention any mmo's that came out before wow, or a regular rpg for that matter
My friends in real life play a LOT of RPGs. LFR nowadays, used to be really big into Living City, less so into Living Greyhawk. Hell, I run a worldwide living campaign with a couple hundred people in it (Living Planar).
I beta tested AC, UO, EQ, PS, and a bunch of other ones. My friends played a pretty even distribution of a lot, some, or none of the pre-WoW games. Most of them played FFXI - we were all in a guild together. All of them are/were unhappy with WoW for one reason or another, but other MMORPGs are worse. WAR doesn't have enough quests to level, and has very boring loot. AoC has next to no loot at all, and they didn't even implement *stats* (even though you could wear +10 strength items, they didn't do anything) until months after the game was released.
Playing FFXI felt like shooting yourself in the foot with a nailgun - you'd wait 3 hours to get a party put together and travel to the same location, then a guy would drop or turn out to be a retard. You'd drop him, and then wait another 2 hours for a replacement. There was no solo play to speak of for most classes, and solo play was mind-numbingly slow.
I probably had the most fun with UO, simply because the open-ended nature of the game (sadly limited more and more as the beta went on) lent itself to very amusing situations. My wife asks me from time to time to tell her stories from the UO beta when she wants to be cheered up. (She's especially amused by the stories of combat chefs, that would run in front of an army and start furiously grilling eggs, in order to get the opponent's GM swordsmen to lose skill points.) But the game had a lack of organized content, and I'm not a person who likes to stand around in a tavern talking with people in a game.
WoW is fairly hideous in it's own way - players have been forced to grind arenas and battlegrounds - the same damn battlegrounds - for years now. The best part about WAR was that it had something like 40 different battlegrounds to fight in, all of which were varied and interesting. Playing WoW for a bit after WAR really drove home how shitty WoW PVP really is.
So, but yeah. Whoever said WoW was the lowest common denominator was right.
"They're WoW players and that's it"?
That's a laugh. I don't know anyone of the 20 or 30 people that play or have played WoW for thousands of hours that haven't tried out other MMORPGs - Age of Conan, Warhammer Online, EVE, a slew of free or freemium ones, etc. Some of them drifted away from WoW when it became clear blizzard really had no idea what it was doing with some of the classes (Spellcasting pushback wasn't balanced properly until about *three years* after WoW came out, for example), others drifted back when it became clear the problems with AoC and WAR were even worse than WoW's problems.
Essentially, it's the "mostly harmless" MMORPG. No love for WoW, but it's there, it's a relatively okay method for wasting some time online, and it's relatively well polished.
That's how you're supposed to set speed limits. (80th percentile was what I'd heard) When the man realized just how much money they could make by setting the speed limit 10 mph lower than "the natural speed", well we got the stupid limits that we have now.
Yeah. Hence I think a referendum on the issue would be a nice way of getting sanity in our speed limits here in California.
There is a moral difference between the US killing 5000 civilians who get caught up in the crossfire between US troops and Iraqi insurgents and Saddam killing 50 people because they were "enemies of the state."
Meh, there's no point arguing with moral relativists on this one. Mainly, they just dislike the US, so they claim that live was all rainbows and rivers of chocolate under Saddam, and that everything bad in the Middle East is somehow our fault.
>>But man there are so many people involved in that party that remind me of the callers on Art Bell. LP seems to attract the tin foil hat crowd.
Yeah, that's what I mean. And the other half of the party just votes libertarian since they want drugs to be legalized, and are nutty in their own way.
>>Hypokalemia is very dramatic. Not. According to Wikipedia:
My mom doesn't have much of a thyroid left as a result of a teenaged bout of Graves' disease. She has to manually control her calcium levels, and since Na+, K+ and Ca2+ are all interlinked, she has problems if her potassium levels get off, so she carries potassium supplements with her as well if her K+ levels drop too much.
Hypokalemia sucks, let's just leave it at that.
>>Besides, if things did go back in time 25 years, the ruined remains of Vulcan would have also showed up 25 years ago giving them plenty of time to prepare.
Yeah, I'm kind of hoping the next movie involves Vulcan reappearing 150 more years in the past, with those crazy Vulcans going on whacky time travelly adventures, since (according to Spock) that whole paradox thing is just hogwash anyway.
Horrible movie. Cringeworthy dialogue, overwrought melodrama, and as you and other people pointed out, completely nonsensical stuff in it.
As a fellow Judo practitioner and also a former soccer player, I can attest there's one very important difference between breakfalls in the two sports: in soccer people fall over, clutch their legs, and howl in pain until the penalty whistle is blown. Then they stand up and are fine.
Actually, it was shit like that that made me stop playing soccer.
>>And we all know how good the average driver is at assessing those...
In fact, the law assumes that 90% of drivers are driving at a safe speed, and 10% are crazy reckless drivers.
How do you think we get our speed limits set on roads? They conduct speed surveys every 2 or 3 years and take the 90th percentile. Most people drive at the natural speed of a road, speed limits be damned.
There's probably something of a chilling effect on roads which are so over-enforced that people drive at the speed limit instead of the natural speed, and don't get me started on interstates (I think we should pass a referendum applying the same law to the interstates here in California), but I think it's generally a reasonable estimate.
>>Not quite. It's probably a dead end for missions than grant experience but can still be a great part of the content
MMORPGs have been doing user-generated content for decades. MUDs are often expanded / given new content by the players, not the admins. They are usually vetted first, though.
As a modder myself (for Quake, and many other games) I've been waiting for a modern MMORPG to let its content be mod-able or extensible, but the CoH way doesn't seem to be it.
Someone should register a "Disapproval"/"Disillusioned" party - a party with no policies of it's own. The idea of the party is to provide a box to tick to say "Both major parties suck, and third parties are some form of extremism that I don't support"
That's actually the best idea I've ever heard from an AC.
I was in a bind in the last election, since McCain was a wet potato, and Obama looked like he'd do what he ended up doing, and all the 3rd parties are weird in their own way. I ended up holding my nose and voting Libertarian, since it's the only party for limiting the power of government these days, but the Libertarian party is "whacky", to put it mildly.
When you hate someone for having what you do not, you bring curses upon your own head. The classical Greek dramatists pointed this out and it's no less true today.
And what agency carries out this revenge? Karma? The Erinyes?
I mean, sure, being negative in real life is generally pretty bad, and if your employer sees an email from you talking like a lolcat it might affect your ability to get promoted, but people post negative things about other people all the time on the internet. Look at the cesspit that is the WoW Forums, or, hell, your own posts on Slashdot.
I don't care a whit about Cory Doctorow, knowing only passing references from XKCD or him blurbing Accelerando, but from a five minute scan of his stuff, he does seem to be kind of ridiculous.
His first book was a guide on how to publish books, for example.
>>Practically speaking, the HMD does nothing additional other than give you headache.
I used to work for KEO (Kaiser Electro Optics) which makes a variety of heads-up displays for the military, and the only ones that gave a headache were the ones on the ELINT planes that weighed something like 25 pounds (and believe me, you don't want 25 pounds having off the front of your head for 8 hours in a row).
Our highest resolution displays (this was in 1995 or so, mind you) were around 3200x1600 resolution, and cost a couple hundred k apiece. They were built using smaller LCD displays that were glued together with some patented optical coatings to make the seams between them invisible. It was fun to play with military flight simulators on them, run by an SGI Oynx, during lunch breaks.
I got to write software drivers for them (my first job out of high school) to fix various things like individual LCD panels getting glued in upside down - everything high end was bespoke. The commercial goggles were used in the various VR video games that were briefly popular in the 90s, and they actually worked pretty well. The tracker-sensors, with appropriate AB filtering on the motion, would track head motion pretty closely - avoiding the "sim drunk" problem that came from people wearing headsets with a noticeable latency in the tracker sensors. I wrote/helped write a couple VR video games during this time period (a great opportunity for an 18 year old coder), but I don't think we ever sold more than 100 units or so. We did get on Oprah though.
>>In short, don't hold your breath. The VR of the 90's is dead.
Actually, HMDs actually did work pretty well, they're just not really suited to the arcade environment (you have to adjust them for the Intra-ocular distance, and maintain them fairly regularly), but they did and do work quite well. They're still in use in a lot of areas.