The thing is, that's life. As you move through life, the ability to react immediately to never-before-experienced situations should decline in favor of the ability to apply experience to a familiar problem.
Some cog sci people believe that the very root of consciousness is the gradual development of a world model over time. Babies don't have memories, under this theory, because they have no framework of the world to hang memories on, and only become truly conscious entities once they've figured out to a certain extent how the world works. I wouldn't be surprised (if this idea was true) that as we get older and "figure out how the world works" we no longer need to work so hard to challenge it -- even though it might be wrong, or, worse, we're getting set in our ways.
>>Some people claim that hit rates aren't really that low (people are always trying to optimize, so few people really have "average" characters) and that team cooperation can more than make up for it.
Low level combat hides the problem.
A second level paladin attacking irontooth, with a 20 Charisma (as optimized as you can make it), will have a +6 to hit. Irontooth is AC18. That's a 12+ (45% hit chance). With flanking, that's a 10+ needed (55% hit chance), which seems about on par for the design of the game. If they happened to have picked up a +1 weapon by second level, then the odds are 50%/60% with flanking, which is where WOTC wants it to be. The point is, there's not a whole lot you can do after this point - actually, if you're just using the PHB, there's *nothing* more you can do to improve your hit bonus unless you have a teammate pop some power for another +2 to hit.
When fighting Orcus, the same paladin picks up +14 to hit from levels, +4 from stat bumps, and uses a +6 weapon. He might become a demigod, which is worth another +1 from stat bumps. Looking at a total bonus of +31. Orcus is AC48 (and a brute, which means his AC is lower than default), so you're now looking at the same fully optimized character hitting on a 17+ (20% hit rate). If you were unfortunate enough to start with a 16 in your attack stat, then by default you need a 19 or better to hit Orcus.
And trust me, combats are really lame, and really long when you need a 19+ to hit a monster. I've played just such a combat in LFR a couple weeks ago, and it was really, really annoying. My 7th level barbarian really couldn't do much against the AC31 monster. +12 to hit = a 19 or better needed on the die roll.
So there's a problem somewhere. If 4ed is designed around a PC hitting around half the time, where is the loss coming from? Mainly it's from the fact that monster armor classes scale linearly, but PC attack bonuses increase in fits and starts. When my barbarian in LFR went from 7th to 8th level, he gained +3 to hit - +1 from a stat gain, +1 from level, and +1 from acquiring a new weapon. So the combat he'd just played against would have become a lot more manageable - the 19+ would have turned into a 16+, which then could have been lowered another +2 from a flank to a relatively reasonable 35% hit rate. It's still not fun to miss that often, but it still represents a 3.5x increase in hit rate from needing a 19+.
And these fits and starts don't quite keep up with monster AC. So my guess is WOTC ran into some issues playtesting the game AFTER the game was already out, and so settled upon this approach as the best way of making up the math deficit.
One of the major problems with 4th edition is how hard it is to hit things. When I sat in on a Gencon panel with the 4ed designers last summer, they said they balanced the game around a 50%-60% hit rate. While this may have made their math easy, it doesn't make the game fun. Seriously - when you use your awesome encounter ability and it misses half the time, it kills a lot of the fun in the game.
Worse, over the course of the 30 levels 4th Edition is designed for, PCs pick up a net -5 to hit along the way (Monster AC goes up linearly with level, PC's attack bonus goes up proportional to half your level (a -15 to hit change), but +6 for using a magic weapon, +4 for stat bumps), meaning that PCs end up missing 75% of the time or so without using anything special. This means that PCs that needed 11s or better to hit Irontooth (a +2 level monster) need 17s or better to hit Orcus (a +3 level solo). Sure, there's powers like Lead the Charge that give a large bonus to hit, but in order to apply the bonus, you have to hit with it.
4th edition has been very cautious at assigning bonuses to hit - almost all feats in the game (like Weapon Focus) were rewritten to add bonuses to damage instead of bonuses to hit. There's only very limited ways of gaining bonuses to hit (Tieflings using fire attacks have a feat available, as do Warforged with another ally adjacent to the target).
So where does PHB II's power creep come in? The major, obscene jump in power is a pair of feats called Weapon Expertise and Implement Expertise, that add +1/+2/+3 to hit at the heroic/paragon/epic tiers. It's approximately 10 trillion times better than any feat released before (the Warforged feat mentioned above - which is a racial feat - only gives a +1 bonus, and only when you have another ally touching the monster), and obsoletes immediately those feats that have tried to give a bonus to hit.
This is combined with melee mastery, which lets you swap out strength for your highest stat when making basic melee attacks. So a 10 Str, 20 Cha Paladin - who'd flail weakly at any enemy provoking an Opportunity Attack before - picks up the equivalent of +5 to hit and damage.
Sorry for the math, but the nutshell idea is: with just two feats, it works out to a +8 bonus to hit, which is insanely out of whack with everything they've done before.
The current theory is that WOTC realized they screwed up the math in their to-hit rolls and/or realized that PCs missing 75% of the time is simply not a very enjoyable way to spend an evening (my group is ready to go back to 3rd Edition, they're so pissed off at missing all the time), that they released this "patch" to correct the problems in their math. Which sounds fine at first, until you realize that they probably should have just patched the system to give a +1 bonus to hit at 5th/15th/25th levels. Creating a feat to do the work for them is bad, since it just set the new standard in feat design, and because the feat is now mandatory for all characters, and feats are supposed to be minor options that people can use to tailor their specific characters. No feats should be mandatory.
The rest of the PHBII seems to follow this theme. Bards have a paragon path that lets people automatically hit. Avengers get to roll twice every time they attack, and take the better roll, etc.
While this is all welcome news for those of us that play the game: 1) It reveals how badly made 4th Edition was and is. 2) It is a tremendous power creep, which is rather the opposite of what the reviewer for Slashdot said.
4th Edition is the snack food of the role playing world.
Thus you have "qiche" (two characters) meaning "car" or "to ride a bicycle" - the ambiguity being an artifact of my inability to conveniently represent the tones of the language.
qi4 che1
That said, Chinese is still really fucking ambiguous, especially when you are at a not-very-proficient level like I am, and so you don't know the words that make up the context either. Miss the context, and have the speaker not speaking tones very clearly, and I won't be able to understand you, even if I know all the words you're saying.
>>My wife and I enjoyed viewing the Dresden Files and Moonlight
Eh, as much as I like Jim Butcher's work (the Codex Alera is one of the best fantasy series of all time, IMO), the Dresden Files TV show was just kinda lame. My wife and I gave up on it after three episodes or so.
That said, I just loaded up the game, and it's pretty amateurish. Clicking on a popup window for the tutorial clicks on the icon below it, and then the tutorial bitches at you for leaving the tutorial, and the link to continue turns into a back link, and you get stuck.
Developing games for the web is totally different from developing games for facebook. I'd claim that I was surprised that the summary got this wrong, but hey. Slashdot.
IMO, charge for the damn features away, and tell people they were lucky to have tested them for free, at the same time rolling out the next set of free features to test. Over time, people will get used to the idea.
But you'll never be able to eliminate all the bitching from internet games. Even if you write games for fun, for free, as I do, people will still bitch all the time, and if you give in to the bitching, then suddenly other groups of previously silent people will start complaining. It's best to just do whatever it is you think is best for the game, and ignore everything except well made arguments.
>>"Scientism" is usually used by religious fundamentalists who feel threatened by the progress of science.
Actually, it's used by philosophers. But, apparently, not by philistines.
>>And you think anyone who doesn't believe in your god is arguing stridently.
Oh, bullshit. But to give a counterexample so you understand: Dan Dennett is an example of an atheist that isn't strident (most of the time, at least). Hitchens, Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, are. For example, they go out of their way to make statements not in order to make some logical point, but in order to piss people off. Books entitled by these guys include God is Not Great, The God Delusion and The End of Faith.
If you think it's okay to be a total jackass to Xians just because you think they're wrong, well, then you've rather proved my point.
>>Your high-def TV is the most expensive monitor in your house. Use it for something!
I do. I hook my laptop up to it sometimes when my wife is taking over my main computer. With EVE running on it, it makes for a very nice looking screensaver.
>>Very insightful post, but I'm wondering why you call Fry's "the worst of all".
I agree, Grishnakh (which is, by the way, the name of my favorite D&D character, a dwarf who was raised by trolls). Frys is actually the best store for nerds. I love how you can just go in and buy a handful of op-amps for your breadboards, or all sorts of weird fringe items.
While the GP has a point that its consumer parts selection sometimes isn't the best (they tend to lag about 3 months behind, say, Newegg when a new mobo or video card comes out), they're so much better than Best Buy or Circuit City that it isn't even funny. Best Buy doesn't sell components for half the things you want (new CPUs, for example), and their video card selection is laughable. The last time I went in there they were selling an NVIDIA 7600 (a not-top-of-the-line video card from three or four years ago) for $300. $300! I just picked up a new 285 on Newegg for that - with a free copy of the new CoD game. The 285 is, what, 50x faster than a 7600?
I once talked with a Frys employee trying to find out why they didn't have the mobo that I wanted, when I was looking to put together a new computer. Even though Newegg is across the board about 10-15% cheaper than Frys, I like being able to return parts that don't work the same day... Newegg irks me when a part comes in bad, and I have to wait 4 or 5 days to get the new part in so I can start playing with my new toy. The employee said the buyers for Frys don't really know the slightest thing about what computer enthusiasts want, and oftentimes will buy 100 units of some neon-lit POS because it looks like something that they think that we think we want, even though there's a new model of motherboards just come out that is what people actually want.
>>I think the life begins at conception idea is just a left over from ancient attempts at science. It uses the same ideas behind "Spontaneous generation", that life comes from inanimate matter.
So... you're trying to say that none of us are alive, then?
Oh, thank goodness that's settled.
After all, as Dr. Manhattan says, all the atoms are still there in a dead human being. There's really very little difference.
Actually, life beginning at conception is quite logical. It's the first point that you have a diploid cell. A gamete is a haploid cell, and is incapable of becoming a human life. In other words, as far as thresholds go, the ancient opinion on this matter is more scientific than probably whatever hand-waving-based argument you were trying to make, talking about snakes and Pasteur and such.
>>Atheism is not a "worldview". Atheism is not believing in God. That's it.
You know as well as I do the atheist worldview espoused so often here on Slashdot that all that matters is science, and anything that can't be scientifically proven is meaningless.
It's also called logical positivism combined with scientism, but most people don't know what those terms are.
If you can provide me with a list of people, who, having early access around the same time-frame (say 1968-1970/1 to begin with) that Joy/Gates would have been learning to program, who also managed to put in the same large chunk of time (about 10,000 hours worth of programming) just before the world writ large suddenly found a need for their skills (sudden crops of personal computers required sudden computing gurus), and didn't become successful, I will concede your point in this matter. For one thing, computer access wasn't quite so rare as Gladwell makes it out to be during that time period. I was just giving a seminar in the middle of nowhere (El Centro, California), and one of the teachers there was a computer science geek that had basically the same story as Joy and Gates. Without the billion dollar company though; he ended up going into the military and doing quite well there.
The book itself talks about Gates' and Joy's classmates who quite obviously had the same opportunities, and apparently even put in the same number of hours. Even if we're talking about a pool of just 100 people who had access to 10,000 hours with computers at the time (which was probably grossly understated, as I mentioned above - let's say 50,000 would be a better number), what was it about Gates and Joy that set them apart?
Ok, sure, their individual talent was perhaps not enough to raise them to be the top nerds out of a nation of millions, but they still had to do something to become top nerds out of a pool of tens of thousands, and it's *this* factor that Gladwell tries to handwave away via his book.
You think that's bad? In San Francisco, if you evict a tenant you have to pay for their moving costs (up to $1,200) to move to a new place where they can hustle that new landlord.
>>So you advocate going back to a barter based system? Seriously, any investment requires some sort of a model.
Well, to a certain extent I think that certain types of derivatives should be regulated a lot more heavily than they are now, since they're a prime example of how math models for the future can translate into massive losses for a national economy. They let people gamble, and then force the feds to bail them out when they lose their bets - this is not a good situations.
But overall, as Black Swan talked about, having simple models and assumptions appears to work best. It's when we outclever ourselves and think that we've tamed risk and start believing the numbers more than reality, that we get these sorts of problems crop up. And they're quite serious problems.
I also rather firmly agree with the book that people use Gaussians in models where there really shouldn't be Gaussians. Cauchy curves and other fat-tailed distributions (Taleb likes fractals or something) mimic the fact that real life throws us a curveball a lot more often than would be predicted by Gaussian models. But people use them just because half the time that was the only curve they learned in stats class.
I think that the large health care company that is funneling millions of dollars of work to a *specific arbitration company* (at least, it is that way with Kaiser) is not going to get equal justice in such a setup. Or, rather, Kaiser will get justice, and patients will get nothing. I got to watch all that when my father tried to sue them after they nearly killed him (they injected him with radioactive iodine, which he turned out to be hideously allergic to, and then left him alone for three hours as he was weakly pushing the nurse call button over and over - my mother ended up sneaking in to see what was wrong with him since she thought she heard he was calling for help... and was right). The arbitration company that Kaiser funnels said millions of dollars to a year issues a blanket ruling absolving Kaiser of any wrongdoing in the matter. My dad then sued the arbitration company for a conflict of interest, and lost in a real court.
>>Now that's not true. I've only been online about 10 years and i can actually notice the exponential increase
Hmm, here is my history of internet speed: 1993-1995: 14400 b/s modem dialup 1995-1996: 10Mbps ethernet 1996-1997: 10Mbps ethernet (local connection only - we wired our apartment for ethernet, but had no internet access) 1997-2003: "10/1 Mbps" cable modem shared with community 2004-2007: 1.5/384 "elite" DSL line 2007-Present: 768/384 "basic" DSL line
So by extrapolating from current trends, I'll be sending emails by the postal service again in 10 years.
>>You need some kind of objective metric, and wealth is a world wide accepted one.
But why? I'd consider Benjamin Franklin the most successful person of early America, and he was only moderately wealthy.
With the Beatles, it's a little different since money is like a scorecard of how many people listened to them. If 10 million people bought a Beatles' LP, but only a million bought an Animals' LP, then it's fair to say that people likes the Beatles' music more to a certain extent. They were the more successful group.
But was Franklin Raines' successful? He was "The First Black Man to Run a Fortune 500 Company", and ended up becoming a lot more wealthy from Fannie Mae than was probably legal, so if we're counting personal wealth as a scorecard, he should be considered a shining success. Regardless of the fact that he was instrumental in starting the subprime mortgage crisis, something of a thief, and didn't legitimately earn nearly any of his personal fortune.
>>How do you propose to measure "happiness"?
There's actually a lot of research rating different cultures by happiness. It's not an especially difficult problem.
>>Not at all - there's a world of difference between the successful software guy and Microsoft (insert joke here).
What I'm saying is that the guy that makes $250,000 a year, is happily married, has written some code that has been used by millions, and has enough free time to enjoy life and play video games in the afternoons sometimes is more successful in my book than the unhappy billionaire who never gets the chance to enjoy life, and whose kids hate him because he's never home.
Heck, I remember a first grade math question from the teacher: if it takes 8 minutes to boil an egg, how long does it take to boil two eggs? Was the answer 8 minutes? 'Cause you can always toss a second egg in the pot. =)
But yeah, I remember getting into an argument with my 5th grade class. I was trying to convince them (unsuccessfully) that 10/100ths was the same as 1/10th. Their argument? The 100thes were just "too small" to ever add up to a tenth. The teacher? Took the side of the kids.
I remember nearly crying with frustration sketching out a 10x10 grid on the blackboard, diligently coloring in 10 of them, circling it, and showing that it was the same size as a 1/10th slice of an equal sized square, and they still didn't believe me.... grr.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, that's life. As you move through life, the ability to react immediately to never-before-experienced situations should decline in favor of the ability to apply experience to a familiar problem.
Some cog sci people believe that the very root of consciousness is the gradual development of a world model over time. Babies don't have memories, under this theory, because they have no framework of the world to hang memories on, and only become truly conscious entities once they've figured out to a certain extent how the world works. I wouldn't be surprised (if this idea was true) that as we get older and "figure out how the world works" we no longer need to work so hard to challenge it -- even though it might be wrong, or, worse, we're getting set in our ways.
>>Some people claim that hit rates aren't really that low (people are always trying to optimize, so few people really have "average" characters) and that team cooperation can more than make up for it.
Low level combat hides the problem.
A second level paladin attacking irontooth, with a 20 Charisma (as optimized as you can make it), will have a +6 to hit. Irontooth is AC18. That's a 12+ (45% hit chance). With flanking, that's a 10+ needed (55% hit chance), which seems about on par for the design of the game. If they happened to have picked up a +1 weapon by second level, then the odds are 50%/60% with flanking, which is where WOTC wants it to be. The point is, there's not a whole lot you can do after this point - actually, if you're just using the PHB, there's *nothing* more you can do to improve your hit bonus unless you have a teammate pop some power for another +2 to hit.
When fighting Orcus, the same paladin picks up +14 to hit from levels, +4 from stat bumps, and uses a +6 weapon. He might become a demigod, which is worth another +1 from stat bumps. Looking at a total bonus of +31. Orcus is AC48 (and a brute, which means his AC is lower than default), so you're now looking at the same fully optimized character hitting on a 17+ (20% hit rate). If you were unfortunate enough to start with a 16 in your attack stat, then by default you need a 19 or better to hit Orcus.
And trust me, combats are really lame, and really long when you need a 19+ to hit a monster. I've played just such a combat in LFR a couple weeks ago, and it was really, really annoying. My 7th level barbarian really couldn't do much against the AC31 monster. +12 to hit = a 19 or better needed on the die roll.
So there's a problem somewhere. If 4ed is designed around a PC hitting around half the time, where is the loss coming from? Mainly it's from the fact that monster armor classes scale linearly, but PC attack bonuses increase in fits and starts. When my barbarian in LFR went from 7th to 8th level, he gained +3 to hit - +1 from a stat gain, +1 from level, and +1 from acquiring a new weapon. So the combat he'd just played against would have become a lot more manageable - the 19+ would have turned into a 16+, which then could have been lowered another +2 from a flank to a relatively reasonable 35% hit rate. It's still not fun to miss that often, but it still represents a 3.5x increase in hit rate from needing a 19+.
And these fits and starts don't quite keep up with monster AC. So my guess is WOTC ran into some issues playtesting the game AFTER the game was already out, and so settled upon this approach as the best way of making up the math deficit.
>>Rules in rpg-games are a guideline, not a rule.
Which is fine and all, but I play in the RPGA, which runs the rules as they're written.
"No power creep"?
Sorry, I have to take exception to this.
One of the major problems with 4th edition is how hard it is to hit things. When I sat in on a Gencon panel with the 4ed designers last summer, they said they balanced the game around a 50%-60% hit rate. While this may have made their math easy, it doesn't make the game fun. Seriously - when you use your awesome encounter ability and it misses half the time, it kills a lot of the fun in the game.
Worse, over the course of the 30 levels 4th Edition is designed for, PCs pick up a net -5 to hit along the way (Monster AC goes up linearly with level, PC's attack bonus goes up proportional to half your level (a -15 to hit change), but +6 for using a magic weapon, +4 for stat bumps), meaning that PCs end up missing 75% of the time or so without using anything special. This means that PCs that needed 11s or better to hit Irontooth (a +2 level monster) need 17s or better to hit Orcus (a +3 level solo). Sure, there's powers like Lead the Charge that give a large bonus to hit, but in order to apply the bonus, you have to hit with it.
4th edition has been very cautious at assigning bonuses to hit - almost all feats in the game (like Weapon Focus) were rewritten to add bonuses to damage instead of bonuses to hit. There's only very limited ways of gaining bonuses to hit (Tieflings using fire attacks have a feat available, as do Warforged with another ally adjacent to the target).
So where does PHB II's power creep come in? The major, obscene jump in power is a pair of feats called Weapon Expertise and Implement Expertise, that add +1/+2/+3 to hit at the heroic/paragon/epic tiers. It's approximately 10 trillion times better than any feat released before (the Warforged feat mentioned above - which is a racial feat - only gives a +1 bonus, and only when you have another ally touching the monster), and obsoletes immediately those feats that have tried to give a bonus to hit.
This is combined with melee mastery, which lets you swap out strength for your highest stat when making basic melee attacks. So a 10 Str, 20 Cha Paladin - who'd flail weakly at any enemy provoking an Opportunity Attack before - picks up the equivalent of +5 to hit and damage.
Sorry for the math, but the nutshell idea is: with just two feats, it works out to a +8 bonus to hit, which is insanely out of whack with everything they've done before.
The current theory is that WOTC realized they screwed up the math in their to-hit rolls and/or realized that PCs missing 75% of the time is simply not a very enjoyable way to spend an evening (my group is ready to go back to 3rd Edition, they're so pissed off at missing all the time), that they released this "patch" to correct the problems in their math. Which sounds fine at first, until you realize that they probably should have just patched the system to give a +1 bonus to hit at 5th/15th/25th levels. Creating a feat to do the work for them is bad, since it just set the new standard in feat design, and because the feat is now mandatory for all characters, and feats are supposed to be minor options that people can use to tailor their specific characters. No feats should be mandatory.
The rest of the PHBII seems to follow this theme. Bards have a paragon path that lets people automatically hit. Avengers get to roll twice every time they attack, and take the better roll, etc.
While this is all welcome news for those of us that play the game:
1) It reveals how badly made 4th Edition was and is.
2) It is a tremendous power creep, which is rather the opposite of what the reviewer for Slashdot said.
4th Edition is the snack food of the role playing world.
Thus you have "qiche" (two characters) meaning "car" or "to ride a bicycle" - the ambiguity being an artifact of my inability to conveniently represent the tones of the language.
qi4 che1
That said, Chinese is still really fucking ambiguous, especially when you are at a not-very-proficient level like I am, and so you don't know the words that make up the context either. Miss the context, and have the speaker not speaking tones very clearly, and I won't be able to understand you, even if I know all the words you're saying.
>>My wife and I enjoyed viewing the Dresden Files and Moonlight
Eh, as much as I like Jim Butcher's work (the Codex Alera is one of the best fantasy series of all time, IMO), the Dresden Files TV show was just kinda lame. My wife and I gave up on it after three episodes or so.
That said, I just loaded up the game, and it's pretty amateurish. Clicking on a popup window for the tutorial clicks on the icon below it, and then the tutorial bitches at you for leaving the tutorial, and the link to continue turns into a back link, and you get stuck.
Well done, lads, well done.
Developing games for the web is totally different from developing games for facebook. I'd claim that I was surprised that the summary got this wrong, but hey. Slashdot.
IMO, charge for the damn features away, and tell people they were lucky to have tested them for free, at the same time rolling out the next set of free features to test. Over time, people will get used to the idea.
But you'll never be able to eliminate all the bitching from internet games. Even if you write games for fun, for free, as I do, people will still bitch all the time, and if you give in to the bitching, then suddenly other groups of previously silent people will start complaining. It's best to just do whatever it is you think is best for the game, and ignore everything except well made arguments.
>>"Scientism" is usually used by religious fundamentalists who feel threatened by the progress of science.
Actually, it's used by philosophers. But, apparently, not by philistines.
>>And you think anyone who doesn't believe in your god is arguing stridently.
Oh, bullshit. But to give a counterexample so you understand: Dan Dennett is an example of an atheist that isn't strident (most of the time, at least). Hitchens, Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, are. For example, they go out of their way to make statements not in order to make some logical point, but in order to piss people off. Books entitled by these guys include God is Not Great, The God Delusion and The End of Faith.
If you think it's okay to be a total jackass to Xians just because you think they're wrong, well, then you've rather proved my point.
>>Your high-def TV is the most expensive monitor in your house. Use it for something!
I do. I hook my laptop up to it sometimes when my wife is taking over my main computer. With EVE running on it, it makes for a very nice looking screensaver.
>>Very insightful post, but I'm wondering why you call Fry's "the worst of all".
I agree, Grishnakh (which is, by the way, the name of my favorite D&D character, a dwarf who was raised by trolls). Frys is actually the best store for nerds. I love how you can just go in and buy a handful of op-amps for your breadboards, or all sorts of weird fringe items.
While the GP has a point that its consumer parts selection sometimes isn't the best (they tend to lag about 3 months behind, say, Newegg when a new mobo or video card comes out), they're so much better than Best Buy or Circuit City that it isn't even funny. Best Buy doesn't sell components for half the things you want (new CPUs, for example), and their video card selection is laughable. The last time I went in there they were selling an NVIDIA 7600 (a not-top-of-the-line video card from three or four years ago) for $300. $300! I just picked up a new 285 on Newegg for that - with a free copy of the new CoD game. The 285 is, what, 50x faster than a 7600?
I once talked with a Frys employee trying to find out why they didn't have the mobo that I wanted, when I was looking to put together a new computer. Even though Newegg is across the board about 10-15% cheaper than Frys, I like being able to return parts that don't work the same day... Newegg irks me when a part comes in bad, and I have to wait 4 or 5 days to get the new part in so I can start playing with my new toy. The employee said the buyers for Frys don't really know the slightest thing about what computer enthusiasts want, and oftentimes will buy 100 units of some neon-lit POS because it looks like something that they think that we think we want, even though there's a new model of motherboards just come out that is what people actually want.
>>I think the life begins at conception idea is just a left over from ancient attempts at science. It uses the same ideas behind "Spontaneous generation", that life comes from inanimate matter.
So... you're trying to say that none of us are alive, then?
Oh, thank goodness that's settled.
After all, as Dr. Manhattan says, all the atoms are still there in a dead human being. There's really very little difference.
Actually, life beginning at conception is quite logical. It's the first point that you have a diploid cell. A gamete is a haploid cell, and is incapable of becoming a human life. In other words, as far as thresholds go, the ancient opinion on this matter is more scientific than probably whatever hand-waving-based argument you were trying to make, talking about snakes and Pasteur and such.
>>They are at most minuscule fragments of tissue - kind of like the smears most of you leave on the sheets at night.
I certainly hope not. You do know the difference between haploid and diploid cells. I really hope?
>>We're not giving permission to Anton LaVey to tear the fetuses of misbegotten children from the rancid wombs of unwed women
Oh, thank goodness. If that were true, it'd cut horribly into my margins. I've got some primo grade-A fetuses lined up right now, if you want some.
>>I suspect digital broadcast TV is going to swing the pendulum back a bit.
No way! The summary says that "Facebook killed TV", and I have to agree.
Sitting there staring at my screen for hours waiting for my friends to update is a hundred times more preferable to watching Sister, Sister or 90210.
>>Arguing against something is not "stridency".
No. Arguing stridently is stridency.
>>Atheism is not a "worldview". Atheism is not believing in God. That's it.
You know as well as I do the atheist worldview espoused so often here on Slashdot that all that matters is science, and anything that can't be scientifically proven is meaningless.
It's also called logical positivism combined with scientism, but most people don't know what those terms are.
Mod parent up.
The stridency of the new atheism is at odds with its claim of being the calm, rational, and enlightened worldview.
>>"Hi, *slomo* bye." .. firefights were so short that if there was amazing AI under the hood, I completely missed it.
Yeah, Fallout 3 made for a pretty bad first person shooter for this reason: *Tap z* -> VATS comes up. Click on head. Head shot! OMG, I rock!
By the end of the game, I was refusing to use VATS for no other reason that it was insulting me by assuming that I couldn't aim.
Of course, if I was stuck using the Xbox controllers, I'd be used to being unable to aim, and relying on games to cheat (autoaim) for me. =)
If you can provide me with a list of people, who, having early access around the same time-frame (say 1968-1970/1 to begin with) that Joy/Gates would have been learning to program, who also managed to put in the same large chunk of time (about 10,000 hours worth of programming) just before the world writ large suddenly found a need for their skills (sudden crops of personal computers required sudden computing gurus), and didn't become successful, I will concede your point in this matter.
For one thing, computer access wasn't quite so rare as Gladwell makes it out to be during that time period. I was just giving a seminar in the middle of nowhere (El Centro, California), and one of the teachers there was a computer science geek that had basically the same story as Joy and Gates. Without the billion dollar company though; he ended up going into the military and doing quite well there.
The book itself talks about Gates' and Joy's classmates who quite obviously had the same opportunities, and apparently even put in the same number of hours. Even if we're talking about a pool of just 100 people who had access to 10,000 hours with computers at the time (which was probably grossly understated, as I mentioned above - let's say 50,000 would be a better number), what was it about Gates and Joy that set them apart?
Ok, sure, their individual talent was perhaps not enough to raise them to be the top nerds out of a nation of millions, but they still had to do something to become top nerds out of a pool of tens of thousands, and it's *this* factor that Gladwell tries to handwave away via his book.
You think that's bad? In San Francisco, if you evict a tenant you have to pay for their moving costs (up to $1,200) to move to a new place where they can hustle that new landlord.
>>So you advocate going back to a barter based system? Seriously, any investment requires some sort of a model.
Well, to a certain extent I think that certain types of derivatives should be regulated a lot more heavily than they are now, since they're a prime example of how math models for the future can translate into massive losses for a national economy. They let people gamble, and then force the feds to bail them out when they lose their bets - this is not a good situations.
But overall, as Black Swan talked about, having simple models and assumptions appears to work best. It's when we outclever ourselves and think that we've tamed risk and start believing the numbers more than reality, that we get these sorts of problems crop up. And they're quite serious problems.
I also rather firmly agree with the book that people use Gaussians in models where there really shouldn't be Gaussians. Cauchy curves and other fat-tailed distributions (Taleb likes fractals or something) mimic the fact that real life throws us a curveball a lot more often than would be predicted by Gaussian models. But people use them just because half the time that was the only curve they learned in stats class.
I think that the large health care company that is funneling millions of dollars of work to a *specific arbitration company* (at least, it is that way with Kaiser) is not going to get equal justice in such a setup. Or, rather, Kaiser will get justice, and patients will get nothing. I got to watch all that when my father tried to sue them after they nearly killed him (they injected him with radioactive iodine, which he turned out to be hideously allergic to, and then left him alone for three hours as he was weakly pushing the nurse call button over and over - my mother ended up sneaking in to see what was wrong with him since she thought she heard he was calling for help... and was right). The arbitration company that Kaiser funnels said millions of dollars to a year issues a blanket ruling absolving Kaiser of any wrongdoing in the matter. My dad then sued the arbitration company for a conflict of interest, and lost in a real court.
Good times, good times.
>>Now that's not true. I've only been online about 10 years and i can actually notice the exponential increase
Hmm, here is my history of internet speed:
1993-1995: 14400 b/s modem dialup
1995-1996: 10Mbps ethernet
1996-1997: 10Mbps ethernet (local connection only - we wired our apartment for ethernet, but had no internet access)
1997-2003: "10/1 Mbps" cable modem shared with community
2004-2007: 1.5/384 "elite" DSL line
2007-Present: 768/384 "basic" DSL line
So by extrapolating from current trends, I'll be sending emails by the postal service again in 10 years.
>>You need some kind of objective metric, and wealth is a world wide accepted one.
But why? I'd consider Benjamin Franklin the most successful person of early America, and he was only moderately wealthy.
With the Beatles, it's a little different since money is like a scorecard of how many people listened to them. If 10 million people bought a Beatles' LP, but only a million bought an Animals' LP, then it's fair to say that people likes the Beatles' music more to a certain extent. They were the more successful group.
But was Franklin Raines' successful? He was "The First Black Man to Run a Fortune 500 Company", and ended up becoming a lot more wealthy from Fannie Mae than was probably legal, so if we're counting personal wealth as a scorecard, he should be considered a shining success. Regardless of the fact that he was instrumental in starting the subprime mortgage crisis, something of a thief, and didn't legitimately earn nearly any of his personal fortune.
>>How do you propose to measure "happiness"?
There's actually a lot of research rating different cultures by happiness. It's not an especially difficult problem.
>>Not at all - there's a world of difference between the successful software guy and Microsoft (insert joke here).
What I'm saying is that the guy that makes $250,000 a year, is happily married, has written some code that has been used by millions, and has enough free time to enjoy life and play video games in the afternoons sometimes is more successful in my book than the unhappy billionaire who never gets the chance to enjoy life, and whose kids hate him because he's never home.
Heck, I remember a first grade math question from the teacher: if it takes 8 minutes to boil an egg, how long does it take to boil two eggs?
Was the answer 8 minutes? 'Cause you can always toss a second egg in the pot. =)
But yeah, I remember getting into an argument with my 5th grade class. I was trying to convince them (unsuccessfully) that 10/100ths was the same as 1/10th. Their argument? The 100thes were just "too small" to ever add up to a tenth. The teacher? Took the side of the kids.
I remember nearly crying with frustration sketching out a 10x10 grid on the blackboard, diligently coloring in 10 of them, circling it, and showing that it was the same size as a 1/10th slice of an equal sized square, and they still didn't believe me.... grr.