At launch the game wasn't finished and complaints were grounded in reality. But the fact that Funcom has worked hard on the game for a year, fixing problems, adding content, rethinking bad design decisions and actually ended up with a polished, *genuinely good* MMORPG has gone completely unnoticed.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you got Funcom-ed!
>>and to this day I subconsciously know what way is north, no matter where I am
Yeah, that was the first thing I thought when I read this article.... people can do this already. We don't need vibrating belts to figure out north. Two nights ago I was in Paris, and got lost walking back to my hotel, and even when taking non-orthogonal streets I'd never seen before, ended up turning a corner and coming right to the front door.
I only get disoriented after taking a metro in an unfamiliar city, or if I fall asleep in a plane or something and wake up after dark. Then I ask someone which direction is north, and my direction sense resets.
It's actually kind of an interesting feeling - my brain will naturally assume a certain direction is north, even if I don't know, and when I find out which way actually IS north, it's like the world whirls around me and resets into position.
>>Humans already have the capacity for "mapmaking", it's not limited to birds.
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting research on how humans map out spaces. As it turns out, your brain takes a shortcut - the act of walking spurs neural growth, so that your brain can learn a new area quickly. So you actually map out an area faster on foot than in a car, though of course a car lets you cover more ground in the same amount of time.
>>Tabs are popular because (gasp!) they work extremely well in a browser.
Meh. TabKiller is an extremely popular addon because so many people hate tabs. The downside is it breaks certain actions happening (like resuming firefox windows after a restart and some popup windows), so I'd send the FF devs a cookie if they would rip tabs out entirely, or at least make it an option.
I already have a taskbar, I don't need a second one, thanks.
Basically. While the sympathetic media reports them as "gaffes" if any Republican said half the stuff that he did, he'd have a lower reputation than Quayle.
>>If drones start to significantly hurt their business, they will invest in the development of anti-drone technology.
Huh, I just can't see a bunch of Colombians walking into General Dynamics and investing in anti-drone technologies. I mean, maybe they'll figure out that a 30 ought 6 can take one out, but that doesn't take billions. It also doesn't have the slightest impact on Columbia, since they probably don't need to use grow lights. And if they shut down production in the Netherlands, well, more demand for them to supply, right?
Fortunately, aerial flyovers of houses with thermal sensors scanning for grow lights was ruled unconstitutional in America (unconstitutional search and seizure) without a warrant, IIRC.
>>If you think you've found a bug in a compiler, or an operating system, or a programming language, or a well-known commonly used library... you're wrong.
You apparently never tried doing template coding in C++ ten years ago. =)
>>It's more like socialism in practice. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but let's call it what it is.
Government-backed monopolistic corporations are another form of Socialism. Time Warner, in this case, is no different from France Telecom, or other Government-backed "private" corporations. The difference between government-owned and government-backed is less significant than you'd think.
Capitalism is about competition, Socialism is about anti-competition.
I think his problem was that he didn't have a network cable with arrows painted on it to guide the electrons to their source. That's where his slowdowns were coming from.
The buildings having stairwells next to the elevator are trading a lot of structural strength for lazy people. These buildings are not as structually sound as when the stairwells are away from the elevator shafts.
Huh. Most of the hospitals (in California) I've seen have stairs next to or close to the elevators (for doctors to run up and down). I'd think that hospitals would care about not falling down in earthquakes.
The premise of the Kyoto agreement is: they are the ones that have created the problem so far, they're the ones that are already industrialized and have most of the money. They are therefore the ones best positioned to come up with technical solutions and ways to meet lowered targets
Lol, what a load of crap. The solution industrial nations come up with is to move their industrial production to China.
>>A 3% tax hike (actually, expiration of a previous tax cut) on the top 5% of taxpayers is not a march towards socialism, it's a sound fiscal move.
Math check.
The AGI of the top 5% of income earners was $2.9T in 2006. (The last year I could find data for.)
The Obama Nation is increasing our budget deficit from about $450B under Bush 2.0 in 2008 (already up sharply from ~$150B in 2007) to $1.85T (CBO estimate) or $1.75T (White House estimate). This is estimated to go down to $1.25T in 2010 and $900B in 2011, reaching a low of $600B in 2012 then back up to $1.2T in 2019 (CBO) or $900B (White House).
I think you failed your Sense Motive check on Obama. There's no way squeezing just 3% more from $2.9T will ever equal $1.2T. If he is serious about only taxing the top 5% (which is what got him elected remember - if he pulls a Bush 1.0, even Palin could beat him in 2012), the tax rate on the top 5% will need to RISE 41.4% (not be set to 41.4%), which will put it at 80% or so.
>>The US spends 1-3% of its transportation budget on rail. In countries like France, UK, Germany, Japan, etc- it is more like 20%.
Which means they're very unprofitable, if the government has to subsidize them that heavily. It's not a number to be proud of.
America also has an economy about 500% larger than France's, so the nominal dollars going into it is about the same.
The problems with trains in America are: 1) Geography. France is the size of Texas, so the population centers are a lot closer together. 2) Amtrak. It's a dysfunctional company. 3) America has a car culture. 4) Our rail lines suck. We don't have a north/south rail line worth a damn here in California. To go from San Diego to Sacramento, you take a train to LA, transfer to a bus across the grapevine, and then get back on a train in Bakersfield. All told, it takes about twice as long to take a train than it does to drive, even with LA traffic (especially since the buses take you right through the middle of the LA snarl). 5) The price isn't very competitive.
While I'd really really like to see a high speed rail network (I voted for the proposition here in California to build a high speed rail network, mainly since LA's roads suck so badly), we'd need to have a lot more leadership in this area than we've ever seen in American rails.
>>If that's your reaction to the Tractatus, then you clearly didn't read it very carefully or understand it very well.
Writing obtusely doesn't make one intelligent.
Which is ironic, since he considered all philosophical problems just problems with clarity of language, with the job of the philosopher akin to that of a linguistic janitor, cleaning up definitions.
>>...MS hasn't often demonstrated an ability to make major functioning software improvements at the last minute. I suppose we'll see, though.
Sure they did. They added code that checked to see if they were running on Vista for various games (Halo 2, Shadowrun) and had them refuse to work if it was on XP. Now that's what I call progress!
>>WW2 games are tolerated without outrage because it's an OLD war
What, the rule is you can only be outraged about ongoing conflicts? That's kind of an odd principle to adhere to.
I'd like to see how these people explain America's Army, the "official" game of the US Army, set in modern times, with modern equipment, between Army guys and terrorists.
I mean, if soldiers are offended by portrayals of current conflicts only, and (let's assume) the US Army is filled with soldiers, then it would be very odd if this was true.
(Oh - what? It isn't soldiers offended by this? Ok, shut up now Cindy.)
My friends in the military play SOCOM, Rainbow 6, and, well, pretty much anything. A lot of your time in the military is actually quite boring. Though some of the things they see are pretty insane... one friend of mine in the military was engaged in a series of land battles in Afghanistan. They were teamed up with some Northern Alliance folks, including this one Afghan dude who was a total lunatic. Every battle, while the US soldiers would be using cover and maneuver to fight the Taliban, he'd tie this giant red blanket around his neck and go charging into the enemy lines by himself, yelling at the top of his lungs. He had to replace the blanket a couple times - his theory was that the enemies would shoot at the blanket trailing out behind him and not him... and was apparently right. He did this in five battles and never got shot.
I don't see how a video game could ever capture that sort of heroic lunacy.
Perhaps we can launch all of the coal and oil on the planet into the sun as well. That should speed along the technology for the use of magic pixie dust for generation of electricity.
>>A complete map of a brain of someone with and someone without gene XYZ will tell us about the role played by gene XYZ without the ethical or temporal problems...
Uh, no. Brains are plastic entities. A person who has gone to music school will have a much larger map for dealing with processing sound than a cultureless American. (Oh, wait, I'm a cultureless American.) In science, controls are essential for telling what changing variable X does, and unless you can control a person's behavior (thus raising the ethical and temporal problems you're trying to avoid), it will be hard to determine what gene XYZ does unless it's blatantly obvious.
>>A neural network running a simulation of a human brain would be a Turing-complete strong AI.
Uh, no. Or, well, maybe. Strong AI is probably impossible (as Searle has pretty convincingly argued). It would be a great tool, though, and very useful.
Slashdot Mirror
At launch the game wasn't finished and complaints were grounded in reality. But the fact that Funcom has worked hard on the game for a year, fixing problems, adding content, rethinking bad design decisions and actually ended up with a polished, *genuinely good* MMORPG has gone completely unnoticed.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you got Funcom-ed!
I don't trust them in the slightest.
>>I agree. Serving in the legislature should be like jury duty, not a career or a way to get rich.
Athens did this. They even randomly chose their generals.
There's a reason why the founders chose NOT to go with that model.
>>and to this day I subconsciously know what way is north, no matter where I am
Yeah, that was the first thing I thought when I read this article.... people can do this already. We don't need vibrating belts to figure out north. Two nights ago I was in Paris, and got lost walking back to my hotel, and even when taking non-orthogonal streets I'd never seen before, ended up turning a corner and coming right to the front door.
I only get disoriented after taking a metro in an unfamiliar city, or if I fall asleep in a plane or something and wake up after dark. Then I ask someone which direction is north, and my direction sense resets.
It's actually kind of an interesting feeling - my brain will naturally assume a certain direction is north, even if I don't know, and when I find out which way actually IS north, it's like the world whirls around me and resets into position.
>>Humans already have the capacity for "mapmaking", it's not limited to birds.
Yeah, there's a lot of interesting research on how humans map out spaces. As it turns out, your brain takes a shortcut - the act of walking spurs neural growth, so that your brain can learn a new area quickly. So you actually map out an area faster on foot than in a car, though of course a car lets you cover more ground in the same amount of time.
>>Maybe it's just a broom closet. The secret service just tell Biden to practice "covering" in there whenever they need a break from him.
They give him a nice bicycle helmet to play with, too.
>>Tabs are popular because (gasp!) they work extremely well in a browser.
Meh. TabKiller is an extremely popular addon because so many people hate tabs. The downside is it breaks certain actions happening (like resuming firefox windows after a restart and some popup windows), so I'd send the FF devs a cookie if they would rip tabs out entirely, or at least make it an option.
I already have a taskbar, I don't need a second one, thanks.
>>Ahh, the Dem. version of Dan Quayle.
Basically. While the sympathetic media reports them as "gaffes" if any Republican said half the stuff that he did, he'd have a lower reputation than Quayle.
Seriously, google "Biden Gaffes".
>>If drones start to significantly hurt their business, they will invest in the development of anti-drone technology.
Huh, I just can't see a bunch of Colombians walking into General Dynamics and investing in anti-drone technologies. I mean, maybe they'll figure out that a 30 ought 6 can take one out, but that doesn't take billions. It also doesn't have the slightest impact on Columbia, since they probably don't need to use grow lights. And if they shut down production in the Netherlands, well, more demand for them to supply, right?
Fortunately, aerial flyovers of houses with thermal sensors scanning for grow lights was ruled unconstitutional in America (unconstitutional search and seizure) without a warrant, IIRC.
Quake1 is both free and more fun than Quake3. Graphics in engines like FTEQuake work with Quake1 through Quake3 maps, and have shaders, bloom, etc.
Plus you can play CustomTF. =)
http://quake.phoenixlabs.org/
>>If you think you've found a bug in a compiler, or an operating system, or a programming language, or a well-known commonly used library... you're wrong.
You apparently never tried doing template coding in C++ ten years ago. =)
>>It's more like socialism in practice. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but let's call it what it is.
Government-backed monopolistic corporations are another form of Socialism. Time Warner, in this case, is no different from France Telecom, or other Government-backed "private" corporations. The difference between government-owned and government-backed is less significant than you'd think.
Capitalism is about competition, Socialism is about anti-competition.
>>And then, the sun will get angry. You wouldn't like it when it's angry.
Huitzipochtli, is that you??
I stayed in Morgan Hill last month.
It's not really a "city", more like a town south of the Bay Area.
I think his problem was that he didn't have a network cable with arrows painted on it to guide the electrons to their source. That's where his slowdowns were coming from.
>>And China's per capita CO2 emissions were already about 1/4 of those in the US
Having a large percentage of your population living in abject poverty will do that for 'ya.
I don't recommend copying their strategy in that regard.
The buildings having stairwells next to the elevator are trading a lot of structural strength for lazy people. These buildings are not as structually sound as when the stairwells are away from the elevator shafts.
Huh. Most of the hospitals (in California) I've seen have stairs next to or close to the elevators (for doctors to run up and down). I'd think that hospitals would care about not falling down in earthquakes.
The premise of the Kyoto agreement is: they are the ones that have created the problem so far, they're the ones that are already industrialized and have most of the money. They are therefore the ones best positioned to come up with technical solutions and ways to meet lowered targets
Lol, what a load of crap. The solution industrial nations come up with is to move their industrial production to China.
>>A 3% tax hike (actually, expiration of a previous tax cut) on the top 5% of taxpayers is not a march towards socialism, it's a sound fiscal move.
Math check.
The AGI of the top 5% of income earners was $2.9T in 2006. (The last year I could find data for.)
The Obama Nation is increasing our budget deficit from about $450B under Bush 2.0 in 2008 (already up sharply from ~$150B in 2007) to $1.85T (CBO estimate) or $1.75T (White House estimate). This is estimated to go down to $1.25T in 2010 and $900B in 2011, reaching a low of $600B in 2012 then back up to $1.2T in 2019 (CBO) or $900B (White House).
I think you failed your Sense Motive check on Obama. There's no way squeezing just 3% more from $2.9T will ever equal $1.2T. If he is serious about only taxing the top 5% (which is what got him elected remember - if he pulls a Bush 1.0, even Palin could beat him in 2012), the tax rate on the top 5% will need to RISE 41.4% (not be set to 41.4%), which will put it at 80% or so.
>>The US spends 1-3% of its transportation budget on rail. In countries like France, UK, Germany, Japan, etc- it is more like 20%.
Which means they're very unprofitable, if the government has to subsidize them that heavily. It's not a number to be proud of.
America also has an economy about 500% larger than France's, so the nominal dollars going into it is about the same.
The problems with trains in America are:
1) Geography. France is the size of Texas, so the population centers are a lot closer together.
2) Amtrak. It's a dysfunctional company.
3) America has a car culture.
4) Our rail lines suck. We don't have a north/south rail line worth a damn here in California. To go from San Diego to Sacramento, you take a train to LA, transfer to a bus across the grapevine, and then get back on a train in Bakersfield. All told, it takes about twice as long to take a train than it does to drive, even with LA traffic (especially since the buses take you right through the middle of the LA snarl).
5) The price isn't very competitive.
While I'd really really like to see a high speed rail network (I voted for the proposition here in California to build a high speed rail network, mainly since LA's roads suck so badly), we'd need to have a lot more leadership in this area than we've ever seen in American rails.
>>If that's your reaction to the Tractatus, then you clearly didn't read it very carefully or understand it very well.
Writing obtusely doesn't make one intelligent.
Which is ironic, since he considered all philosophical problems just problems with clarity of language, with the job of the philosopher akin to that of a linguistic janitor, cleaning up definitions.
>>Tractatus Logico-philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein
I've read it.
While he considered himself brilliant, if he can't even bother to define or defend his own terms and statements, it has no value.
>>As long as you turn off disasters, beamed solar energy is actually a fairly cost effective power solution.
As a resident of Fresno, I'm actually thinking about putting Tinfoil on the roof of my house now.
Or nah.
I mean, what's the worst that can happen when you're beaming 200 Megawatts of energy into my town?
>>...MS hasn't often demonstrated an ability to make major functioning software improvements at the last minute. I suppose we'll see, though.
Sure they did. They added code that checked to see if they were running on Vista for various games (Halo 2, Shadowrun) and had them refuse to work if it was on XP. Now that's what I call progress!
>>WW2 games are tolerated without outrage because it's an OLD war
What, the rule is you can only be outraged about ongoing conflicts? That's kind of an odd principle to adhere to.
I'd like to see how these people explain America's Army, the "official" game of the US Army, set in modern times, with modern equipment, between Army guys and terrorists.
I mean, if soldiers are offended by portrayals of current conflicts only, and (let's assume) the US Army is filled with soldiers, then it would be very odd if this was true.
(Oh - what? It isn't soldiers offended by this? Ok, shut up now Cindy.)
My friends in the military play SOCOM, Rainbow 6, and, well, pretty much anything. A lot of your time in the military is actually quite boring. Though some of the things they see are pretty insane... one friend of mine in the military was engaged in a series of land battles in Afghanistan. They were teamed up with some Northern Alliance folks, including this one Afghan dude who was a total lunatic. Every battle, while the US soldiers would be using cover and maneuver to fight the Taliban, he'd tie this giant red blanket around his neck and go charging into the enemy lines by himself, yelling at the top of his lungs. He had to replace the blanket a couple times - his theory was that the enemies would shoot at the blanket trailing out behind him and not him... and was apparently right. He did this in five battles and never got shot.
I don't see how a video game could ever capture that sort of heroic lunacy.
Perhaps we can launch all of the coal and oil on the planet into the sun as well. That should speed along the technology for the use of magic pixie dust for generation of electricity.
You, sir, have made my day.
>>A complete map of a brain of someone with and someone without gene XYZ will tell us about the role played by gene XYZ without the ethical or temporal problems...
Uh, no. Brains are plastic entities. A person who has gone to music school will have a much larger map for dealing with processing sound than a cultureless American. (Oh, wait, I'm a cultureless American.) In science, controls are essential for telling what changing variable X does, and unless you can control a person's behavior (thus raising the ethical and temporal problems you're trying to avoid), it will be hard to determine what gene XYZ does unless it's blatantly obvious.
>>A neural network running a simulation of a human brain would be a Turing-complete strong AI.
Uh, no. Or, well, maybe. Strong AI is probably impossible (as Searle has pretty convincingly argued). It would be a great tool, though, and very useful.