Entirely this.
I'm an engineering student and I have noticed that most of the time, the general theorem that applies is that the interestingness of lecture is inversely proportional to the technologic level used.
In other words, someone in the theatre who'll use blackboard/scribbled projection tend to be almost universally amazing, those that use common "fill in gaps" projections tend to be OK , and lecturers using powerpoint tend to be the "gouge out eyes" sort of boring.
Ookay, just what am I missing , exactly?
Company is happy for they make a profit (well, otherwise they wouldn't be making updates and overall being supportive to the community)
I am happy, for I can play for free.
Paying players I know are happy because for just a few bucks they can get premium and faster XP and credit gain that way.
It isn't the free lunch, it's the basic principle of economy, where everyone participates in the transaction because they are getting more relative (sometimes perceived) value out of it than they are putting in.
Oh Bastet.
I know exactly what it is. Wheaton's law. I mean, there are people out there who'd yell 'unfair' if you killed their PzIV with a loltraktor. Their opinion comes nowhere near fact.
The gold tanks aren't brilliant, actually , asides from Type 59 (which produced incredible whinery in some people) and Lowe, they aren't even that good., What justifies their existance is the higher earnings, meaning someone can use a high-tier premium to support his own tier 8,9,10 tanks instead of doing it with tiers 5,6, and if he's very skilled, 7.
The only thing that could ever be considered P2W would be the better properties of premium ammo which does give anyone using it an edge... but then, not like anyone sees that, never mind that it's perfectly possible to play and win without it.
I used World of Tanks as the main example and that one is F2P from the start.
You are right about TF2 not being good to use to illustrate such a point (though, I disagree about it not working from beginning), however, well, it's the only other such game I play in any sufficient time, and one can only talk about that which he knows well.
Yep. And there's a difference between a new business model that attempts to bypass fair use policies and alienate their own userbase,and one that doesn't, much like there's a difference between a new position from kamasutra and unpleasant things involving ass and a broom handle.
In other words, i'm not saying we won't be seeing such attempts, but that they are flat out wrong, and I don't feel like letting myself be ripped off.
I dunno - I have been playing it since the closed beta, and didn't shell out a penny, yet i don't see getting steamrollered just because of that. If i'm getting screwed somehow, then i'm pretty fucking happy about it.
Even better example would be TF2 where the things that are exclusively for purchase don't affect game balance at all.
The point is though - yes, this is a business model, and yes , it's aimed at generating revenue, but it is remarkably customer-friendly. The business model mentioned in the article above is just heavy duty assholery attempting to bypass existing laws and screw customers over.
Correct.
A lot of people will buy a game, mess with it, and if they get enough, or if they don't like it all that much , they'll pawn it.
Take that away and they will become far more wary of what to pay for.
Um, perceived entitlement?
There's something called the first sale doctrine , which applies to books and which logically should extent to all media.
These are attempts to cheat it, just like DVD regions are a cheat attempt at price fixing.
Call things by their true names, will ya?
And frankly? I'm fed up with them, and so are thousands of gamers all across the world. And well... we do have an option - these days, F2P games are becoming increasingly plentiful, like the excellent World of Tanks, and given that old-time designers were apparently not as big douchebags, there's still the availability of older quality titles which are both cheaper and more worthwhile than most of what is produced these days.
And for everything else, there's DnD 3.5.
Of course, the resulting sales failure *will* get blamed on piracy.
A man that made his money off "piracy" is any day more likeable than those who make equivalent sums by exploiting workers.
Nobody seems to complain in those cases, though.
Neat , saves material, too - even though manufacture is more expensive, I guess the saving on copper is worth it.
I guess the thing it exploits is that at high voltages you only get current near the surface of a conductor (which is why many things use braided wire)
Talent is irrelevant in this case.
Yes, microsoft certification probably isn't the hardest thing ever to get, on the other hand, she did it at 9 which is definitely some sort of an achievement. And of course , it attracts publicity to such a case
I can see some people being pissed at "what is this doing on slashdot" but regardless , someone such young age dying isn't something to be happy about , unless they are a robber shot by someone in self-defense (you know the broad class of people i'm referring to).
As for the comment somewhere above, I agree with making fun of the shit that happens, but dark humour has two components - dark and humour. The comments in this thread don't show much of the second..
All right. When I saw the title of the post, i thought this will be bad, but congratulations, you have managed to dig under my already low-set hurdle
Firstly, newspapers definitely don't side away from real issues... except that their definition of real issues isn't constantly poking the same stale issue, which is how both Slovak National Party and SMK, Most-Hid or whatever the hungarian party is at the moment get their votes.
Now, let's address things in turn.
I don't think i have ever seen Moravians seriously wanting their own government, of course if we don't count Slovakia getting one, since we are essentially the same people , having been severed from Greater Moravia when the Hungarians showed around.
No, Bolek Polivka and his joke "Wallachian Kingdom" doesn't count.
Now, ignoring your pointless jab at the Czechs, let's say something about the idiocy that you try to pass as historic fact.
To uproot these misconceptions we have to look before 1914. During that time , the land that now constitutes Slovakia (and Subcarpthian Ruthenia, but that's another story) was a part of Uhorsko, or Greater Hungary - the second half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Now, if we are to ask what were the national rights of Slovaks, Romanians, Ruthenians or whoever else living in this country, the answer is simple - none at all. State provided education was hungarian only, and people of other nationalities were treated as second-class citizens on their own land. Both of these factors provided a mechanism for hungarisation of the population - even to this day, there are jokes about "madaroni" - slovaks that tried hard to pass off as hungarians, going so far as to hungarise their names and try to dig in their history for a gramme of hungarian ancestry. I cannot say, but I am pretty sure that similar things were happening in the other regions as well.
Now, a partial result of this was,that indeed, when the borders of Czechoslovakia were drawn after the first world war, a part of the land did indeed contain significant proportions of hungarian population, in the same way as the border part of hungary contained a significant slovak population.
However, over the years (For now on , i will ignore the second world war and the so-called "small war" where hungarian armies invaded the Slovak State, supposedly their ally, and claimed land up to Nitra) hungarisation has been still going on in hungary, while in Slovakia, the hungarian minority has had relatively extensive rights.
As a result, the slovak population in Hungaria was assimilated while the hungarian population in Slovakia still tends to differ from the main population
Now, let's look at the present situation. Slovak hungarians have state-issued hungarian textbooks and can learn in their own language, there are two-language sign tables in many places - a good example would be the district hospital in Galanta, and there are two hungarians representing Slovakia in the European Parliament who interestingly enough refuse to talk in Slovak, while babbling about how discriminated they are.
In comparison, Hungarian slovaks have none of the above, furthermore , they had trouble from the Hungarian government even gaining a place for their own House of Culture.
If you still talk about "Slovakisation" with all that going on, you are either stupid, or a liar. Furthermore, the talk about hungarian villages, while true, is demagogy, because alongside them, there are villages that have been slovak for a thousand years. It is simply that the population naturally segregates as each nationality tends to live with their own.
As a final point, it needs to be said that the reason for the often needless concessions to the hungarian minority in Slovakia is that the government of Dzurinda, starting in 1998 has , among others, relied on SMK, the hungarian party, to defeat the immensely popular Vladimir Meciar - it's an issue of a political trade-off. As such , they have encouraged and went nodding to any Hungarian complaints to the west - it is sadly a slovak nature that we'll do bad to ourselves just to spite our enemy more so - which has created an illusion about the large-scale mistreatment of ethnic hungarians in Slovakia.
My mother was translating a few of his books.
At least two i know anything of sound one unexceptional ( the history of a gift elephant) and one utterly boring (following the life of denizens of a six appartment house over some time period)
Fellowship of the ring does get boring at times - I set it away once,and returned to it later, finishing off the series. By then, I was like, 10-12 years old, too.
Funnily enough , I prefer both Silmarillion and Hobbit to the Trilogy - Hobbit is kinda more amusing, while Silmarillion is rather.. action packed - basically it's a chronicle which doesn't dwell much on any individual event, and as such is rather quick paced. I was also older when i read it, which may have helped..
Wouldn't be so sure.
For one, experience and well-honed skills can substitute for cognitive decline provided the person isn't doing stuff he's unfamiliar with
Secondly, you might not enjoy it long - from what I remember,quite a lot of people, specially men, seem to die within a few years of retiring - it seems having nothing to do is bad for your health.
There was a nice slovak , IIRC written by G. Vamos , short story from the 30s how a medical student commits suicide via poison pill out of poverty, and calmly writes in his diary everything he experiences, as long as he's able to.
Almost full agreement with the article
on
How Doctors Die
·
· Score: 2
Certain cases of cancer, like pancreatic, unless found out very early, are rather pointless to treat.
However, what worries me is, wouldn't adhering to his model deprive medicine of data and subjects needed to improve present cures and develop new methods?
I mean... the operation the article mentions has a success rate 15% - triple compared to old type. Suppose that with enough time, someone manages to triple the success rate again, to 45% - by then it's looking reasonable as a method. But if experiments can't be done , we aren't really going to solve anything.
Perhaps the solution would be pruning the uneffective methods, and paying patients who decide to undergo experimental treatment - truly experimental i mean, not just repeating things that usually don't work well.
Not really. I know at least one person that's been on dialysis for most of his life.. and pacemakers are a decently working thing too.
In the end every fix we know is temporary - like that Onion article said, the death rate is still 100%
Slashdot Mirror
Entirely this.
I'm an engineering student and I have noticed that most of the time, the general theorem that applies is that the interestingness of lecture is inversely proportional to the technologic level used.
In other words, someone in the theatre who'll use blackboard/scribbled projection tend to be almost universally amazing, those that use common "fill in gaps" projections tend to be OK , and lecturers using powerpoint tend to be the "gouge out eyes" sort of boring.
Ookay, just what am I missing , exactly?
Company is happy for they make a profit (well, otherwise they wouldn't be making updates and overall being supportive to the community)
I am happy, for I can play for free.
Paying players I know are happy because for just a few bucks they can get premium and faster XP and credit gain that way.
It isn't the free lunch, it's the basic principle of economy, where everyone participates in the transaction because they are getting more relative (sometimes perceived) value out of it than they are putting in.
Oh Bastet.
I know exactly what it is. Wheaton's law. I mean, there are people out there who'd yell 'unfair' if you killed their PzIV with a loltraktor. Their opinion comes nowhere near fact.
The gold tanks aren't brilliant, actually , asides from Type 59 (which produced incredible whinery in some people) and Lowe, they aren't even that good., What justifies their existance is the higher earnings, meaning someone can use a high-tier premium to support his own tier 8,9,10 tanks instead of doing it with tiers 5,6, and if he's very skilled, 7.
The only thing that could ever be considered P2W would be the better properties of premium ammo which does give anyone using it an edge... but then, not like anyone sees that, never mind that it's perfectly possible to play and win without it.
I used World of Tanks as the main example and that one is F2P from the start.
You are right about TF2 not being good to use to illustrate such a point (though, I disagree about it not working from beginning), however, well, it's the only other such game I play in any sufficient time, and one can only talk about that which he knows well.
Yep. And there's a difference between a new business model that attempts to bypass fair use policies and alienate their own userbase ,and one that doesn't, much like there's a difference between a new position from kamasutra and unpleasant things involving ass and a broom handle.
In other words, i'm not saying we won't be seeing such attempts, but that they are flat out wrong, and I don't feel like letting myself be ripped off.
I dunno - I have been playing it since the closed beta, and didn't shell out a penny, yet i don't see getting steamrollered just because of that. If i'm getting screwed somehow, then i'm pretty fucking happy about it.
Even better example would be TF2 where the things that are exclusively for purchase don't affect game balance at all.
The point is though - yes, this is a business model, and yes , it's aimed at generating revenue, but it is remarkably customer-friendly. The business model mentioned in the article above is just heavy duty assholery attempting to bypass existing laws and screw customers over.
Correct.
A lot of people will buy a game, mess with it, and if they get enough, or if they don't like it all that much , they'll pawn it.
Take that away and they will become far more wary of what to pay for.
Uhh....
Where exactly do you see the much more content? I kinda haven't noticed, what with games these days mainly focusing on graphical fanciness.
Um, perceived entitlement?
There's something called the first sale doctrine , which applies to books and which logically should extent to all media.
These are attempts to cheat it, just like DVD regions are a cheat attempt at price fixing.
Call things by their true names, will ya?
And frankly? I'm fed up with them, and so are thousands of gamers all across the world. And well... we do have an option - these days, F2P games are becoming increasingly plentiful, like the excellent World of Tanks, and given that old-time designers were apparently not as big douchebags, there's still the availability of older quality titles which are both cheaper and more worthwhile than most of what is produced these days.
And for everything else, there's DnD 3.5.
Of course, the resulting sales failure *will* get blamed on piracy.
A man that made his money off "piracy" is any day more likeable than those who make equivalent sums by exploiting workers. Nobody seems to complain in those cases, though.
*headdesk* You are absolutely right... I should have remembered from last year, but then, i'm a mechanical engineering student, not an electrician.
Neat , saves material, too - even though manufacture is more expensive, I guess the saving on copper is worth it. I guess the thing it exploits is that at high voltages you only get current near the surface of a conductor (which is why many things use braided wire)
Talent is irrelevant in this case.
Yes, microsoft certification probably isn't the hardest thing ever to get, on the other hand, she did it at 9 which is definitely some sort of an achievement. And of course , it attracts publicity to such a case
I can see some people being pissed at "what is this doing on slashdot" but regardless , someone such young age dying isn't something to be happy about , unless they are a robber shot by someone in self-defense (you know the broad class of people i'm referring to).
As for the comment somewhere above, I agree with making fun of the shit that happens, but dark humour has two components - dark and humour. The comments in this thread don't show much of the second..
If you aren't treated / seen to , you can do things like choke on your own spittle and similar during a fit.
Then why are the Protoss essentially ersatz Eldar?
All right. When I saw the title of the post, i thought this will be bad, but congratulations, you have managed to dig under my already low-set hurdle
,that indeed, when the borders of Czechoslovakia were drawn after the first world war, a part of the land did indeed contain significant proportions of hungarian population, in the same way as the border part of hungary contained a significant slovak population.
Firstly, newspapers definitely don't side away from real issues... except that their definition of real issues isn't constantly poking the same stale issue, which is how both Slovak National Party and SMK, Most-Hid or whatever the hungarian party is at the moment get their votes.
Now, let's address things in turn.
I don't think i have ever seen Moravians seriously wanting their own government, of course if we don't count Slovakia getting one, since we are essentially the same people , having been severed from Greater Moravia when the Hungarians showed around.
No, Bolek Polivka and his joke "Wallachian Kingdom" doesn't count.
Now, ignoring your pointless jab at the Czechs, let's say something about the idiocy that you try to pass as historic fact.
To uproot these misconceptions we have to look before 1914. During that time , the land that now constitutes Slovakia (and Subcarpthian Ruthenia, but that's another story) was a part of Uhorsko, or Greater Hungary - the second half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
Now, if we are to ask what were the national rights of Slovaks, Romanians, Ruthenians or whoever else living in this country, the answer is simple - none at all. State provided education was hungarian only, and people of other nationalities were treated as second-class citizens on their own land.
Both of these factors provided a mechanism for hungarisation of the population - even to this day, there are jokes about "madaroni" - slovaks that tried hard to pass off as hungarians, going so far as to hungarise their names and try to dig in their history for a gramme of hungarian ancestry. I cannot say, but I am pretty sure that similar things were happening in the other regions as well.
Now, a partial result of this was
However, over the years (For now on , i will ignore the second world war and the so-called "small war" where hungarian armies invaded the Slovak State, supposedly their ally, and claimed land up to Nitra) hungarisation has been still going on in hungary, while in Slovakia, the hungarian minority has had relatively extensive rights.
As a result, the slovak population in Hungaria was assimilated while the hungarian population in Slovakia still tends to differ from the main population
Now, let's look at the present situation. Slovak hungarians have state-issued hungarian textbooks and can learn in their own language, there are two-language sign tables in many places - a good example would be the district hospital in Galanta, and there are two hungarians representing Slovakia in the European Parliament who interestingly enough refuse to talk in Slovak, while babbling about how discriminated they are.
In comparison, Hungarian slovaks have none of the above, furthermore , they had trouble from the Hungarian government even gaining a place for their own House of Culture.
If you still talk about "Slovakisation" with all that going on, you are either stupid, or a liar. Furthermore, the talk about hungarian villages, while true, is demagogy, because alongside them, there are villages that have been slovak for a thousand years. It is simply that the population naturally segregates as each nationality tends to live with their own.
As a final point, it needs to be said that the reason for the often needless concessions to the hungarian minority in Slovakia is that the government of Dzurinda, starting in 1998 has , among others, relied on SMK, the hungarian party, to defeat the immensely popular Vladimir Meciar - it's an issue of a political trade-off. As such , they have encouraged and went nodding to any Hungarian complaints to the west - it is sadly a slovak nature that we'll do bad to ourselves just to spite our enemy more so - which has created an illusion about the large-scale mistreatment of ethnic hungarians in Slovakia.
My mother was translating a few of his books.
At least two i know anything of sound one unexceptional ( the history of a gift elephant) and one utterly boring (following the life of denizens of a six appartment house over some time period)
Makes me wonder, why should we even care what's "great literature" in the critical sense.
Fellowship of the ring does get boring at times - I set it away once ,and returned to it later, finishing off the series.
By then, I was like, 10-12 years old, too.
Funnily enough , I prefer both Silmarillion and Hobbit to the Trilogy - Hobbit is kinda more amusing, while Silmarillion is rather.. action packed - basically it's a chronicle which doesn't dwell much on any individual event, and as such is rather quick paced. I was also older when i read it, which may have helped..
Starcraft itself is based on Warhammer 40k, apparently.
Wouldn't be so sure.
For one, experience and well-honed skills can substitute for cognitive decline provided the person isn't doing stuff he's unfamiliar with
Secondly, you might not enjoy it long - from what I remember,quite a lot of people, specially men, seem to die within a few years of retiring - it seems having nothing to do is bad for your health.
There was a nice slovak , IIRC written by G. Vamos , short story from the 30s how a medical student commits suicide via poison pill out of poverty, and calmly writes in his diary everything he experiences, as long as he's able to.
Certain cases of cancer, like pancreatic, unless found out very early, are rather pointless to treat.
However, what worries me is, wouldn't adhering to his model deprive medicine of data and subjects needed to improve present cures and develop new methods?
I mean... the operation the article mentions has a success rate 15% - triple compared to old type. Suppose that with enough time, someone manages to triple the success rate again, to 45% - by then it's looking reasonable as a method. But if experiments can't be done , we aren't really going to solve anything.
Perhaps the solution would be pruning the uneffective methods, and paying patients who decide to undergo experimental treatment - truly experimental i mean, not just repeating things that usually don't work well.
Not really. I know at least one person that's been on dialysis for most of his life.. and pacemakers are a decently working thing too.
In the end every fix we know is temporary - like that Onion article said, the death rate is still 100%