Actually, there were two changes that need to be changed back in the special editions, and we can hope and pray that they will be by the time the DVD comes out. One is Greedo shooting first. The other is Luke's scream in Empire.
In the original releases, Vader offers Luke corulership of the galaxy as father and son... and Luke looks him in the eye (well, faceplate), and lets go. And he falls, silently. Very zen, very focused. Now? He screams like a child as he falls. For all we know, he was about to say "Hey dad, I've thought about it, sure! Let's join up! Whoops! I slipped!!" Give us back one of the first signs of real backbone in Luke Skywalker.
How would you feel if you played online chess and discovered that you had been beated 10 times in a row by a chess program he had written? Is that still skill on skill?
I'm going to stretch my analogy to apply to people who can kick your ass in Diablo II not because they are more skilled but because they do nothing but play. Random Dude 1, who works a full time job, can never possibly keep up with Random Dude 2, who is in school and plays Diablo for 30 hours a week. As devil's advocate, I ask why shouldn't Dude 1 be able to level the playing field with money? 1 has money, 2 has time. Why is time considered to be the more acceptable currency with which to purchase online prowess?
There are games out there that wrote this into their business model- the ability to outright purchase, from the game company directly, items and status. For people who have more of the currency "money" than the currency "time". Either way, you're buying it.
In U6 you can also clone LB and get him to fight himself.
http://www.it-he.com/
Lots of evil things to do in Ultima, including killing LB, killing Beren in U8, and solving Ultima IX while only completing 3 of the shrines.:>
Also, they got their Ultima timelines wrong. They described Ultima VI as Ultima V.
Ok. We'll go to fewer dimensions to make it easier to explain. Pretend you live in a 1 spacial dimensional universe. You can move in two directions- call them east and west. This maps to our 3 dimensions of space.
Now, pretend that you don't actually live on a line- you're actually on the outside of a straw. From anywhere on the line you were used to, you can now move north or south as well. However, after going a few steps north, you end up where you started again. Now, shrink the straw's radius. Shrink it so much that you can't tell from observation that there is a north and south- trying to move in those directions almost immediately puts you back where you started, and east and west are still the important directions. No one notices that there is this other, north/south dimension curled up tightly in the universe. But at every point along the east/west line, there is this tiny curled up ability to move north/south.
Expand that to our three spacial dimensions universe- we can move in three directions, and the others are unnoticable because moving along them doesn't noticably change our position. In fact, in string theory, things don't tend to move along those dimensions so much as resonate in them, like a plucked string.
I had a physics professor who couldn't help but giggle when mentioning electrons getting "excited." Don't think he ever made the erection/electron slip, though.
Godel essentially said that any system that is powerful enough to be able to refer to itself cannot be both complete and consistant. The proof is done by creating a statement which reads "This cannot be proven in this system."
NSI is not the only offender. This link is to a story a friend of mine submitted to slashdot, about the total lack of security at register.com. Anyone have a site to suggest registering at that doesn't suck?
What makes all the negative particles fall in and the positive ones fall out?
It's one of those bizarre quantum effects, as I understand it. Basically, the pair comes into existance, and you know that one has positive energy and the other negative (note, not to be confused with positive or negative charge!), but you don't know which. Once one falls into the black hole, the probability waveform collpases such that the one with negative energy is the one that fell in, because the universe doesn't allow the reverse to happen.
I'll confess that I'm going from memory here, though, and don't have time to reference my copy of A Brief History of Time, so if anyone can correct me, please do.
You could imagine the other particle falls into the hole or something...
This is in fact what Hawking predicts. The pair comes into existance and you can think of it as one of them having positive energy and the other negative. If the pair is created at just the right distance from the event horizon, one of the two will fall in and the other won't- and (I believe) the waveform collapses such that the one with negative energy is the one that fell in and the positive energy escaped, as (as far as we know) negative energy particles are not allowed in the universe.
So, we have a new particle that has been radiated away from the black hole, and the black hole has negative energy added to it- which in essense destroys some of its mass.
Most would agree that incredibly dense celestial bodies exist that have the properties we observe in black holes. This doesn't necessarily make them singularities, which is more or less the defining definition of a black hole. If instead of a singularity it is some very dense, but not infinitely dense, form of matter, it might be consistant with all we have observed thus far while not creating the singularities wherein known physics breaks down.
While it may be true that posting it here is preaching to the converted, the useful purpose it can serve is to harvest permissions. It's all well and good to talk about setting up checkboxes or what have you for the future, but this time around, they want to quote people and don't have the express permission of those people. So, in a move that I personally am glad to see, they can publish here first, and as people see if they are quoted, those people can say "yes" or "no" about the use of their quote in the final, printed work. Then they can rework the final product and THEN publish. The people who need to see it will see it, just not as soon. And when it does get published, they won't have taken the easy way out of being able to say, "well, it was legal!"
What was great about Tapu was not any one banner, but the overall Burma Shave feel of all the banners, and the fact that he kept running for school offices long after he left the school. The Tapu Party was a party of the absurd and was a lot of fun to watch (and read the posters of).
Actually, I have a fake Tapu poster a friend of mine made, which read "Vote anarchist! TApU says, "I like custard in the summer, honey." It's in one of these boxes...
I'm not sure that I'd call the Tapu movement a prank, really, since there were (usually, anyway) actual people running on its platform... but it was fun.
I was 93- Dec 96 (also got out a semester early) and I also well remember the smiley face, which frequently became a frowny face during finals. The tiles were frequently arranged in letters, sometimes spelling out frat names, at least once spelling out monty python jokes, and for a while they spelled out "||O|" for reasons which are not entirely clear. (In fact, it did this three times, in different locations on the walk, once reversed, and one of them lasting for over a year! I think most people just didn't realize it wasn't just random.) It was nice having different things to read (and sometimes puzzle over) while blading to class. Not sure that it's that high in the grand list of pranks, but it was fun in a low key kinda way.
Heh. I'm another RPI grad, and I of course remember that stairwell quite fondly. Windows large enough you can sleep in their curved sills, low traffic. Never saw the drop squad in action, but just about everyone on campus had heard of them.
Personally, I found super bouncy balls to be WAY more entertaining in that stairwell, but that's just me.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, there were two changes that need to be changed back in the special editions, and we can hope and pray that they will be by the time the DVD comes out.
One is Greedo shooting first.
The other is Luke's scream in Empire.
In the original releases, Vader offers Luke corulership of the galaxy as father and son... and Luke looks him in the eye (well, faceplate), and lets go. And he falls, silently. Very zen, very focused.
Now? He screams like a child as he falls. For all we know, he was about to say "Hey dad, I've thought about it, sure! Let's join up! Whoops! I slipped!!" Give us back one of the first signs of real backbone in Luke Skywalker.
The Diamond Age.
How would you feel if you played online chess and discovered that you had been beated 10 times in a row by a chess program he had written? Is that still skill on skill?
I'm going to stretch my analogy to apply to people who can kick your ass in Diablo II not because they are more skilled but because they do nothing but play. Random Dude 1, who works a full time job, can never possibly keep up with Random Dude 2, who is in school and plays Diablo for 30 hours a week. As devil's advocate, I ask why shouldn't Dude 1 be able to level the playing field with money? 1 has money, 2 has time. Why is time considered to be the more acceptable currency with which to purchase online prowess?
There are games out there that wrote this into their business model- the ability to outright purchase, from the game company directly, items and status. For people who have more of the currency "money" than the currency "time". Either way, you're buying it.
Other way around, I think- Gaiman wrote the Neverwhere on TV and then decided he wasn't really satisfied with how it turned out, so he wrote the book.
In U6 you can also clone LB and get him to fight himself.
:>
http://www.it-he.com/
Lots of evil things to do in Ultima, including killing LB, killing Beren in U8, and solving Ultima IX while only completing 3 of the shrines.
Also, they got their Ultima timelines wrong. They described Ultima VI as Ultima V.
Nah. He just thought the name was cool.
He owns Lord British. EA owns the trademarks and/or registered trademarks on Britannia, Avatar, Ultima, Origin, and "We Create Worlds."
I'm just thoroughly amused that Spam Buster quoted the entire source code in the reply.
Ok. We'll go to fewer dimensions to make it easier to explain. Pretend you live in a 1 spacial dimensional universe. You can move in two directions- call them east and west. This maps to our 3 dimensions of space.
Now, pretend that you don't actually live on a line- you're actually on the outside of a straw. From anywhere on the line you were used to, you can now move north or south as well. However, after going a few steps north, you end up where you started again. Now, shrink the straw's radius. Shrink it so much that you can't tell from observation that there is a north and south- trying to move in those directions almost immediately puts you back where you started, and east and west are still the important directions. No one notices that there is this other, north/south dimension curled up tightly in the universe. But at every point along the east/west line, there is this tiny curled up ability to move north/south.
Expand that to our three spacial dimensions universe- we can move in three directions, and the others are unnoticable because moving along them doesn't noticably change our position. In fact, in string theory, things don't tend to move along those dimensions so much as resonate in them, like a plucked string.
I had a physics professor who couldn't help but giggle when mentioning electrons getting "excited." Don't think he ever made the erection/electron slip, though.
Godel essentially said that any system that is powerful enough to be able to refer to itself cannot be both complete and consistant. The proof is done by creating a statement which reads "This cannot be proven in this system."
NSI is not the only offender. This link is to a story a friend of mine submitted to slashdot, about the total lack of security at register.com. Anyone have a site to suggest registering at that doesn't suck?
It's one of those bizarre quantum effects, as I understand it. Basically, the pair comes into existance, and you know that one has positive energy and the other negative (note, not to be confused with positive or negative charge!), but you don't know which. Once one falls into the black hole, the probability waveform collpases such that the one with negative energy is the one that fell in, because the universe doesn't allow the reverse to happen.
I'll confess that I'm going from memory here, though, and don't have time to reference my copy of A Brief History of Time, so if anyone can correct me, please do.
You could imagine the other particle falls into the hole or something...
This is in fact what Hawking predicts. The pair comes into existance and you can think of it as one of them having positive energy and the other negative. If the pair is created at just the right distance from the event horizon, one of the two will fall in and the other won't- and (I believe) the waveform collapses such that the one with negative energy is the one that fell in and the positive energy escaped, as (as far as we know) negative energy particles are not allowed in the universe.
So, we have a new particle that has been radiated away from the black hole, and the black hole has negative energy added to it- which in essense destroys some of its mass.
Most would agree that incredibly dense celestial bodies exist that have the properties we observe in black holes. This doesn't necessarily make them singularities, which is more or less the defining definition of a black hole. If instead of a singularity it is some very dense, but not infinitely dense, form of matter, it might be consistant with all we have observed thus far while not creating the singularities wherein known physics breaks down.
While it may be true that posting it here is preaching to the converted, the useful purpose it can serve is to harvest permissions. It's all well and good to talk about setting up checkboxes or what have you for the future, but this time around, they want to quote people and don't have the express permission of those people. So, in a move that I personally am glad to see, they can publish here first, and as people see if they are quoted, those people can say "yes" or "no" about the use of their quote in the final, printed work. Then they can rework the final product and THEN publish.
The people who need to see it will see it, just not as soon. And when it does get published, they won't have taken the easy way out of being able to say, "well, it was legal!"
What was great about Tapu was not any one banner, but the overall Burma Shave feel of all the banners, and the fact that he kept running for school offices long after he left the school. The Tapu Party was a party of the absurd and was a lot of fun to watch (and read the posters of).
Actually, I have a fake Tapu poster a friend of mine made, which read "Vote anarchist! TApU says, "I like custard in the summer, honey." It's in one of these boxes...
I'm not sure that I'd call the Tapu movement a prank, really, since there were (usually, anyway) actual people running on its platform... but it was fun.
I was 93- Dec 96 (also got out a semester early) and I also well remember the smiley face, which frequently became a frowny face during finals.
The tiles were frequently arranged in letters, sometimes spelling out frat names, at least once spelling out monty python jokes, and for a while they spelled out "||O|" for reasons which are not entirely clear. (In fact, it did this three times, in different locations on the walk, once reversed, and one of them lasting for over a year! I think most people just didn't realize it wasn't just random.)
It was nice having different things to read (and sometimes puzzle over) while blading to class. Not sure that it's that high in the grand list of pranks, but it was fun in a low key kinda way.
Heh. I'm another RPI grad, and I of course remember that stairwell quite fondly. Windows large enough you can sleep in their curved sills, low traffic. Never saw the drop squad in action, but just about everyone on campus had heard of them.
Personally, I found super bouncy balls to be WAY more entertaining in that stairwell, but that's just me.