Nethack is playable because...
on
Nethack 3.4.0
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It is not designed such that the player is ensured to eventually win. Almost every commercial game uses the same psychological feedback formula of "optimal" reward that essentially makes every game blend into each other.
Although Diablo/Diablo2 might perfect that formula such that playing all the way through is very engaging, the replayability is low due to the fact that you know the game is designed for you to win.
Nethack is a universe that is vast enough that winning is exceptionally difficult, even if you read all the spoilers. Yet you still have the impression that it is easy throughout.
Maybe though if there is one hint to take to heart it is to learn how to use and make holy water.
Survival of the United States. Unlikely to come into play, but if the survival of the United States(I mean the 50 states and various territories, not our embassies and overseas military bases) is threatened or another nation is close to conquering parts of our territory, repel them by all means necesary, including nuclear weapons.
Under this principle then, Iraq would be morally entitled to WMD US troops if US attempted an invasion?
Furthermore, if Iraq cannot counter the US military through any other means, it should resort to whatever is effective?
I'm curious as to what moral principle justifies only one of these positions.
As much as you tried to dance around it, no one objects to deterrence.
The principle of no questions asked nuclear retaliation is a good one. This NPR advocates far more creative uses for nukes than this.
The only other sensical argument that's made which you mostly hinted at, is that if we try to simply appear to be the deranged lunatic nuclear cowboy caricature that is made of us, we dominate our opponents because they will cower to our presumptively depraved tyranny.
The downside to this is that it legitimizes all attacks on us, because we officially endorse the pricinple that "if there is no conventional means, our policy is to use extreme ones."
So first strike nuclear attacks against us, and using civilian aircraft as bombs, are according to our principles, entirely valid within our war morality. Plus, now there is a new justification of pre-emptive retaliation. A first strike against us as a retaliation for our supposedly impending first strike.
Re:Pay-per-view, pay-per-use, micropayments, etc.
on
More on MPEG4
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· Score: 2
Users hate the implementations so far, only because manipulation from power mongering fucks (PMFs) such as those you appologize for.
Lack of support (or implicit discreditation if you prefer) from banks and governments for micro-payments means the necessary confidence from consumers and businesses to accept them is missing.
Paying someone 5 cents is only attractive if you already have an account. Your privilege of giving someone a 5 cent tip is not sufficient motivation to get an account. You need some assurance that your micropayment provider won't skip to the bahamas with your 25 cents in the account, or result in fraud against you.
There is an exception: Paypal. It achieved acceptance through deep pockets, and providiing legitimate consumer need. Since its inception, piggybacking other transactions than ebay, becomes more attractive since the users already have accounts.
Micropayments provide genuine value... its simply not value the banks are willing to compromise their core business for. Retards such as yourself necessarily pop up to appologize for them.
By Not paying MS for software, foreign companies do not get a tax deductible expense for license fees, so they pay more tax, or spend the money on other in country expenses that will result in tax revenue.
For US Government,
By Not paying MS for software, US companies do not get a tax deductible expense for license fees, so they pay more tax.
When they do pay MS for software, the Government gets less tax because MS never pays income tax (or hasnt in a long time).
Your charging plan is exceptionally fair, and I wish you luck and success.
It is demonstrably less evil (anti-consumer) than I would be given free tyranical reign, and I believe this is an important ingredient in the success of internet commerce.
I don't know if I will subscribe to slashdot, but I would be more intested in MMORPGs under similar financial terms.
I don't play online MMORPG. The reason is that I would be paying to knowingly suck time away, and since I've had previous bouts with game addiction, I'd be setting myself up with motivation to get the most out of my $10/mo expense.
If on the other hand, the game company had a purely and explicitly laisser faire policy on item sales, as an outsider, It would greatly enhance my odds of paying and participating.
Its less of a time waste if there is an opportunity to cash out. Odds are I would probably never bother selling, but the assured choice makes all the difference in my decision to play.
I'm sure lots of people will be annoyed at new restrictions imposed on them even if the limit were 100GB/Mo.
If you had to choose a limit that is fair to both the ISP and its customers, with deferrence to the customers perspective of fair, then I think 10Gb/mo is the number.
Unfortunately, I expect the limit we see will be closer to 3Gb/Mo.
10Gb is 333Mb/day. Most people could cut down their internet use to this figure, rather than drop their ISP. 3Gb is going to piss off customers.
A 10G/mo limit at current prices would be accepted by most. Potentially, it would improve service for most of us too.
Basically, 10G would be the fair limit as seen by consumers. I expect that Rogers will choose a lower limit, because they think it will provide higher revenue.
On another note, the following support calls should increase in volume.
Some 14 year old I nuked, is ping flooding me 100GB per day using 25 Zombie nodes on your network. Please credit my account $5000.
35 of the 50 spammers I reported last month are still spaming me, despite the fact I've repeatedly sent you their emails! Credit my account 10 cents now, you pigs.
My download was interrupted and now I have to start over... Are you retards friggin incompetent?
is limited to being republican or democrat or any other party that can raise.5 billion in PAC money.
To the Government's credit though, he is still alive. I guess he's too insignificant of a runt to have him off'ed, or maybe government resources are spread a little thin what with the war on vague nouns and all.
Even, the link you pointed to says its $199 in the US like other links have said.
I'm as cheap a fuck as they come, but I feel their pricing is reasonable considering that you get some assurance that the stuff will work. Its comparable to buying stuff from IBM, rather than your local mom&pop shop.
Can any of us find a creative way of getting software written by us or our creative internet community partners running on our PS2 with ethernet and HD access?
Hell even if the HD was so small as to only allow a core linux system, ethernet would let you mount fat32 partitions accross the network.
I agree that lack of TV output is my only complaint with their package.
I somehow doubt that X can't run on interlaced NTSC, but rather that text is ugly and difficult to read at typical font sizes.
The option of running at 640x480 or even less if necessary would increase acceptance even if a monitor were recommended.
Another cool application would be dual monitor support (including TV plus RGB). I have no idea how the connectors work, and this is more viable if VGA is a seperate connector rather than an adapter for s-video or something.
Virtual desktops in X window managers would let you direct apps to monitors of your choice (say TV displays desktop 2 and 4, and VGA 1 and 3).
The low supply of people selling accounts serves to set an intially inflated exchage rate.
The self-fulfilling desire for traders to get those high initial prices motivates some to buy virtual crap for resale purposes, thereby maintaining those high prices.
20 years from now (or much sooner), all the accounts and virtual items will be worth exactly 0$.
Sometime between now and then, the number of players joining the game will be less than the number abandonning the game. A rapid deline in the value of the currency will result when those abandoning the game dump their accounts.
cost about 5 times more than concrete, is made offsite in pre-fabricated blocks, has exceptionally vivid transparency, and is available today.
Granted, its probably a lot more than 5 times more expensive, but if cost is a concern, and you will settle for the bear minimum of translucency, use plastic.
I've lived in a house with too many windows, and its hell. You would not want every outside wall in your building transparent. If only because furniture is designed to have its back hidden.
There's lots of comments here that are objections to rich people having an advantage.
Sanctum, MtG have shown that this doesn't cause much if any resentment. Mostly because those games all require skill in combining the most expensive and rare equipment (cards) into a set.
For RPGs though, the skill involved is in getting the equipment. If you are stocked with the best of everything you can in fact beat a player who's much better but has spent $40-$80.
The company though can compensate by providing freebies and prizes to talented players.
What they absolutely can't get past for me, is their decay model. I mean, I don't buy potions in RPGs because they're expendable items. I tend to buy assets like weapons and armour because they have durability, and can be resold after use.
If anything, this model encourages people to fight squirels in their underwear to gain levels and gc. You can go through any RPG slower so that you're level 60 with crap gear, and do much better than a character that's level 30 with primo magic everything.
In a household with kids, some good arguments for not keeping all computers on a direct connection with the world.
Either keep the kids computer use behind a proxy, so that you can control their access: prevent excessive game playing, filter sites they can access, etc...
Alternately, you may want to keep "real work"/ important computers and data behind the firewall computer that the kids use to access the net, knowing that they will install privacy compromising software with privacy compromising default settings, and nuke and virus their icq friends.
Knowing that no matter what the kids do, they can't fkup ur data. Alternatively, you may simply need to be protected from your own/MS's stupidity by taking advantage of the builtin firewall features of NAT and proxy connections.
If I were walmart, I'd like to post to a sphere 5 miles around each store telling all who read how great I am.
If I were joe's garage, i'd like to post to a sphere 10 miles wide saying the same.
Presumably some restrictions on the area my message appears will be imposed.
The problem then seems to become I am 10 feet in fron of some restaurant's door that I would like to get info on. Does my phone display the info? Is the message area based on a distance to a point, or distance to a circle's perimeter. If its a distance to a point, shopkeepers would probably choose the front door signage as their point, so as to maximize reach. If I am then standing at the back door of the store, I could get nothing.
The value of Mickey Mouse is the enjoyment he creates in the consumers of Mickey Mouse.
Disney is concerned with the profits they can extract from the enjoyment of Mickey.
If Mickey Mouse costs $30 to enjoy instead of $5 to enjoy for consumers, then fewer of them will be able to enjoy Mickey. Value is destroyed by extending the monopoly power to disney.
If Disney did not have to be paid, publishers throughout the world could offer enjoyment of Mickey Mouse in much greater supply at much lower cost.
Disney through profit maximization philosophies destroys value, and happiness, by hoarding it. Hiding it from those children not capable, or not willing to pay the profit tax.
Disney may be responsible for all children's unhappiness everywhere, and they have stolen the right to perpetuate their evil destruction of value for another 20 years.
When you create an RPM, and upload it to a central depository, the checker would verify that the dependencies your package points to, exist there.
If you have perl21 alpha on your system, but perl 6 is the only version released as an RPM for a distro, then either make a perl21 RPM and upload that as well, or change the dependency to perl6, and see if your software still works.
If distros chose to keep 3 branches of development, they could be renamed.
stable
installable, and
advanced
If a proposed package did not have all of its dependencies in stable and installable, it could not go into either of these upload trees.
Completely automated package management could be made on a system that installs proposed packages, either on a pure system maintained by a maintainer, or in the chaotic user space, where through feedback of the installer, users could report back whether the package actually worked with the claimed dependencies. Automated user feedback systems could decide what goes into stable. Dependency trees could list all of the alternative versions of a single dependency which work, not because the author or maintainer have tested all versions, but automated user feedback has determined what works.
Trolls/hackers who intentionally falsify claims of operation could have an impact, but if there are 2 claims of the same configuration. One works the other doesn't, there is likely a way for it to work with that configuration.
It is not urpmi's fault that most packages have dependencies missing. urpmi's capabilities compared to apt are very similar, and other than the fact that it doesn't work at all (at times when I have tried it), has no reason to be called inferior to any other solution.
Linux's only real deficiency compared to Windows for me, is that the software installation procedure (for new software) doesn't work with the same reliability or simplicity.
Apt and urpmi sound simpler... when they actually work, but if they don't, a lot more expertise than I possess is required to determine and fix the problem.
Commercial software like Kylix sounds very appealing, yet as part of my purchase decision, I'm forced to estimate my competence in executing its install procedure.
The defense of an honest mistake would seem most appropriate.
The mother had no way of accurately predicting that the birth would result in net misery instead of net happiness. She may have also been uncertain about her legal obligations to protect potential misery.
If you want to create a law that forces mothers to consider potential misery when deciding to keep their baby or not, and then holds them responsible if some threshold of hapiness is not created... well thats one thing. Going after the fact, making up laws and civil responsibilities one could not reasonably be aware they had at the time, is wrong.
I think there has to be some malicious self-interest or negligeance involved. Im upset when people sue their rescuers for their mistakes too.
Slashdot Mirror
It is not designed such that the player is ensured to eventually win. Almost every commercial game uses the same psychological feedback formula of "optimal" reward that essentially makes every game blend into each other.
Although Diablo/Diablo2 might perfect that formula such that playing all the way through is very engaging, the replayability is low due to the fact that you know the game is designed for you to win.
Nethack is a universe that is vast enough that winning is exceptionally difficult, even if you read all the spoilers. Yet you still have the impression that it is easy throughout.
Maybe though if there is one hint to take to heart it is to learn how to use and make holy water.
Survival of the United States. Unlikely to come into play, but if the survival of the United States(I mean the 50 states and various territories, not our embassies and overseas military bases) is threatened or another nation is close to conquering parts of our territory, repel them by all means necesary, including nuclear weapons.
Under this principle then, Iraq would be morally entitled to WMD US troops if US attempted an invasion?
Furthermore, if Iraq cannot counter the US military through any other means, it should resort to whatever is effective?
I'm curious as to what moral principle justifies only one of these positions.
As much as you tried to dance around it, no one objects to deterrence.
The principle of no questions asked nuclear retaliation is a good one. This NPR advocates far more creative uses for nukes than this.
The only other sensical argument that's made which you mostly hinted at, is that if we try to simply appear to be the deranged lunatic nuclear cowboy caricature that is made of us, we dominate our opponents because they will cower to our presumptively depraved tyranny.
The downside to this is that it legitimizes all attacks on us, because we officially endorse the pricinple that "if there is no conventional means, our policy is to use extreme ones."
So first strike nuclear attacks against us, and using civilian aircraft as bombs, are according to our principles, entirely valid within our war morality. Plus, now there is a new justification of pre-emptive retaliation. A first strike against us as a retaliation for our supposedly impending first strike.
Users hate the implementations so far, only because manipulation from power mongering fucks (PMFs) such as those you appologize for.
Lack of support (or implicit discreditation if you prefer) from banks and governments for micro-payments means the necessary confidence from consumers and businesses to accept them is missing.
Paying someone 5 cents is only attractive if you already have an account. Your privilege of giving someone a 5 cent tip is not sufficient motivation to get an account. You need some assurance that your micropayment provider won't skip to the bahamas with your 25 cents in the account, or result in fraud against you.
There is an exception: Paypal. It achieved acceptance through deep pockets, and providiing legitimate consumer need. Since its inception, piggybacking other transactions than ebay, becomes more attractive since the users already have accounts.
Micropayments provide genuine value... its simply not value the banks are willing to compromise their core business for. Retards such as yourself necessarily pop up to appologize for them.
For foreign governments,
By Not paying MS for software, foreign companies do not get a tax deductible expense for license fees, so they pay more tax, or spend the money on other in country expenses that will result in tax revenue.
For US Government,
By Not paying MS for software, US companies do not get a tax deductible expense for license fees, so they pay more tax.
When they do pay MS for software, the Government gets less tax because MS never pays income tax (or hasnt in a long time).
Your charging plan is exceptionally fair, and I wish you luck and success.
It is demonstrably less evil (anti-consumer) than I would be given free tyranical reign, and I believe this is an important ingredient in the success of internet commerce.
I don't know if I will subscribe to slashdot, but I would be more intested in MMORPGs under similar financial terms.
I don't play online MMORPG. The reason is that I would be paying to knowingly suck time away, and since I've had previous bouts with game addiction, I'd be setting myself up with motivation to get the most out of my $10/mo expense.
If on the other hand, the game company had a purely and explicitly laisser faire policy on item sales, as an outsider, It would greatly enhance my odds of paying and participating.
Its less of a time waste if there is an opportunity to cash out. Odds are I would probably never bother selling, but the assured choice makes all the difference in my decision to play.
I'm sure lots of people will be annoyed at new restrictions imposed on them even if the limit were 100GB/Mo.
If you had to choose a limit that is fair to both the ISP and its customers, with deferrence to the customers perspective of fair, then I think 10Gb/mo is the number.
Unfortunately, I expect the limit we see will be closer to 3Gb/Mo.
10Gb is 333Mb/day. Most people could cut down their internet use to this figure, rather than drop their ISP. 3Gb is going to piss off customers.
A 10G/mo limit at current prices would be accepted by most. Potentially, it would improve service for most of us too.
Basically, 10G would be the fair limit as seen by consumers. I expect that Rogers will choose a lower limit, because they think it will provide higher revenue.
On another note, the following support calls should increase in volume.
Some 14 year old I nuked, is ping flooding me 100GB per day using 25 Zombie nodes on your network. Please credit my account $5000.
35 of the 50 spammers I reported last month are still spaming me, despite the fact I've repeatedly sent you their emails! Credit my account 10 cents now, you pigs.
My download was interrupted and now I have to start over... Are you retards friggin incompetent?
is limited to being republican or democrat or any other party that can raise .5 billion in PAC money.
To the Government's credit though, he is still alive. I guess he's too insignificant of a runt to have him off'ed, or maybe government resources are spread a little thin what with the war on vague nouns and all.
thks for clearing up... press release fked up.
Even, the link you pointed to says its $199 in the US like other links have said.
I'm as cheap a fuck as they come, but I feel their pricing is reasonable considering that you get some assurance that the stuff will work. Its comparable to buying stuff from IBM, rather than your local mom&pop shop.
Can any of us find a creative way of getting software written by us or our creative internet community partners running on our PS2 with ethernet and HD access?
Hell even if the HD was so small as to only allow a core linux system, ethernet would let you mount fat32 partitions accross the network.
I agree that lack of TV output is my only complaint with their package.
I somehow doubt that X can't run on interlaced NTSC, but rather that text is ugly and difficult to read at typical font sizes.
The option of running at 640x480 or even less if necessary would increase acceptance even if a monitor were recommended.
Another cool application would be dual monitor support (including TV plus RGB). I have no idea how the connectors work, and this is more viable if VGA is a seperate connector rather than an adapter for s-video or something.
Virtual desktops in X window managers would let you direct apps to monitors of your choice (say TV displays desktop 2 and 4, and VGA 1 and 3).
The low supply of people selling accounts serves to set an intially inflated exchage rate.
The self-fulfilling desire for traders to get those high initial prices motivates some to buy virtual crap for resale purposes, thereby maintaining those high prices.
20 years from now (or much sooner), all the accounts and virtual items will be worth exactly 0$.
Sometime between now and then, the number of players joining the game will be less than the number abandonning the game. A rapid deline in the value of the currency will result when those abandoning the game dump their accounts.
cost about 5 times more than concrete, is made offsite in pre-fabricated blocks, has exceptionally vivid transparency, and is available today.
Granted, its probably a lot more than 5 times more expensive, but if cost is a concern, and you will settle for the bear minimum of translucency, use plastic.
I've lived in a house with too many windows, and its hell. You would not want every outside wall in your building transparent. If only because furniture is designed to have its back hidden.
There's lots of comments here that are objections to rich people having an advantage.
Sanctum, MtG have shown that this doesn't cause much if any resentment. Mostly because those games all require skill in combining the most expensive and rare equipment (cards) into a set.
For RPGs though, the skill involved is in getting the equipment. If you are stocked with the best of everything you can in fact beat a player who's much better but has spent $40-$80.
The company though can compensate by providing freebies and prizes to talented players.
What they absolutely can't get past for me, is their decay model. I mean, I don't buy potions in RPGs because they're expendable items. I tend to buy assets like weapons and armour because they have durability, and can be resold after use.
If anything, this model encourages people to fight squirels in their underwear to gain levels and gc. You can go through any RPG slower so that you're level 60 with crap gear, and do much better than a character that's level 30 with primo magic everything.
In a household with kids, some good arguments for not keeping all computers on a direct connection with the world.
Either keep the kids computer use behind a proxy, so that you can control their access: prevent excessive game playing, filter sites they can access, etc...
Alternately, you may want to keep "real work"/ important computers and data behind the firewall computer that the kids use to access the net, knowing that they will install privacy compromising software with privacy compromising default settings, and nuke and virus their icq friends.
Knowing that no matter what the kids do, they can't fkup ur data. Alternatively, you may simply need to be protected from your own/MS's stupidity by taking advantage of the builtin firewall features of NAT and proxy connections.
If I were walmart, I'd like to post to a sphere 5 miles around each store telling all who read how great I am.
If I were joe's garage, i'd like to post to a sphere 10 miles wide saying the same.
Presumably some restrictions on the area my message appears will be imposed.
The problem then seems to become I am 10 feet in fron of some restaurant's door that I would like to get info on. Does my phone display the info? Is the message area based on a distance to a point, or distance to a circle's perimeter. If its a distance to a point, shopkeepers would probably choose the front door signage as their point, so as to maximize reach. If I am then standing at the back door of the store, I could get nothing.
with tremendous fortune, I've never said anything horribly stupid or incriminating on Usenet, under my real name.
That you could be held accountable for things that you thought dropped off the end of a bbs server into nothingness after about one week, is scary.
The value of Mickey Mouse is the enjoyment he creates in the consumers of Mickey Mouse.
Disney is concerned with the profits they can extract from the enjoyment of Mickey.
If Mickey Mouse costs $30 to enjoy instead of $5 to enjoy for consumers, then fewer of them will be able to enjoy Mickey. Value is destroyed by extending the monopoly power to disney.
If Disney did not have to be paid, publishers throughout the world could offer enjoyment of Mickey Mouse in much greater supply at much lower cost.
Disney through profit maximization philosophies destroys value, and happiness, by hoarding it. Hiding it from those children not capable, or not willing to pay the profit tax.
Disney may be responsible for all children's unhappiness everywhere, and they have stolen the right to perpetuate their evil destruction of value for another 20 years.
would be an RPM upload checker...
When you create an RPM, and upload it to a central depository, the checker would verify that the dependencies your package points to, exist there.
If you have perl21 alpha on your system, but perl 6 is the only version released as an RPM for a distro, then either make a perl21 RPM and upload that as well, or change the dependency to perl6, and see if your software still works.
If distros chose to keep 3 branches of development, they could be renamed.
stable
installable, and
advanced
If a proposed package did not have all of its dependencies in stable and installable, it could not go into either of these upload trees.
Completely automated package management could be made on a system that installs proposed packages, either on a pure system maintained by a maintainer, or in the chaotic user space, where through feedback of the installer, users could report back whether the package actually worked with the claimed dependencies. Automated user feedback systems could decide what goes into stable. Dependency trees could list all of the alternative versions of a single dependency which work, not because the author or maintainer have tested all versions, but automated user feedback has determined what works.
Trolls/hackers who intentionally falsify claims of operation could have an impact, but if there are 2 claims of the same configuration. One works the other doesn't, there is likely a way for it to work with that configuration.
It is not urpmi's fault that most packages have dependencies missing. urpmi's capabilities compared to apt are very similar, and other than the fact that it doesn't work at all (at times when I have tried it), has no reason to be called inferior to any other solution.
Linux's only real deficiency compared to Windows for me, is that the software installation procedure (for new software) doesn't work with the same reliability or simplicity.
Apt and urpmi sound simpler... when they actually work, but if they don't, a lot more expertise than I possess is required to determine and fix the problem.
Commercial software like Kylix sounds very appealing, yet as part of my purchase decision, I'm forced to estimate my competence in executing its install procedure.
This was an outrageous lawsuit.
The defense of an honest mistake would seem most appropriate.
The mother had no way of accurately predicting that the birth would result in net misery instead of net happiness. She may have also been uncertain about her legal obligations to protect potential misery.
If you want to create a law that forces mothers to consider potential misery when deciding to keep their baby or not, and then holds them responsible if some threshold of hapiness is not created... well thats one thing. Going after the fact, making up laws and civil responsibilities one could not reasonably be aware they had at the time, is wrong.
I think there has to be some malicious self-interest or negligeance involved. Im upset when people sue their rescuers for their mistakes too.