They have every right to tell you that you can't put their software on your machine if you don't agree to play the game as they dictate. They can't tell you how to use your machine, but it's not your code so it's not your call.
On OUR OWN computer, we have EVERY right to do whatever we want.
You're free to generate your own art and programming and storyline, and then run it to your heart's content. However, it's not your code, and it's not your pictures and sounds, so you don't get to do whatever you like just because it's stored on your machine. If you pay them for the right to put it there, then you play it by their rules. If you don't want to play by their rules, you're free to use your computer to play some other game.
You used software written by Blizzard in a way that they didn't approve. If you didn't click the EULA, then you have no license to use it at all, and if you did, then you agreed not to use it with an alternate server. The business case for forbidding it is that you may get a lot of users who want to use bots logging into your server. Since it's your server, they don't have to pay Blizzard a monthly fee to play WoW, and therefore you're costing them subscription fees.
The player wants the boots because they're a PvE upgrade, but they have no interest in PvP and a more fun option for the player is to just load a bot and go do something else until their boots are handed to them.
Here's where the problem lies. The player wants the boots. Who cares about the other players in the battleground who get a badly-performing bot on their team and end up losing their battle? This player gets his shiny boots that he wants but doesn't need (these boots aren't the only boots in the game), and jams up the fun of a bunch of people who actually want to fight in a battleground. This is the perfect argument for banning a bot, because you've proven that you don't even understand how you're interfering in a bunch of other players' fun just to get something that you could do without. If you don't want to participate in battlegrounds, then go get some other set of boots or do without.
This is where the crowd separates. See, the simple fact is the leveling grind is fun, in and of itself, the first time (or the first few times). I've met vanishingly few people who simply dropped the cash necessary to buy a top level character without playing the game first. There are some of those types out there, but they tend to get bored quickly. The problem is, when you have several high level characters, you've played out a lot of the low level content. When you have a level 80 hunter and warrior and mage, you may find that you'd really like to try out a shaman but the prospect of running through the 1-60 quests for the fourth time can get wearying. The temptation to run MMOGlider or just buy a level 80 shaman is there. For someone like this, I'm inclined to say that they've payed their dues.
The problem is, there are also a lot of rank newbies who paid to play their way through for the first time. On the other side of this, there are far too many farmers who will buy in as well or run Glider, and they can really jam up the people who are running through the content for the first time. A bot can really ruin the experience for someone doing it honestly, and can make it nearly impossible for a large swath of low level characters to progress through the game fairly. If a bot is crawling all over Durotar mining 24/7 and flooding the auction house with copper ore, then hundreds of low level players are denied a reasonable way to level up their own skill and turn some coin for gear upgrades. It's for them that I want to see Glider blocked. Sure, the person who uses it to level up the fishing skill on their seventh toon may not be wrecking the game for others, but it's the thousand farmers that are using it to make real-world cash that spoil it. Because there's no reasonable way to make sure that people won't disrupt others' play to gain for themselves, Glider needs to stay out of the game.
Sorry, but no. Even if you have call waiting, it won't make a signal audible when you're not holding the phone. This means that for every telemarketing call you're requesting that each call recipient give up some span of phone service. I won't do this because it makes my phone inaccessible to those I want calling me, and to me if I want to place a call. I'd rather take the call long enough to identify the telemarketer and then sic the authorities on them so they get driven out of business. The Do Not Call list is their problem, not mine.
That would quickly become a not-at-all-cool MMO. The problem it has is that it's vulnerable to griefers. All it takes is one person who decides to defoliate the world for fun and soon you wouldn't have any plants around. One group could decide to exterminate stuff and there'd be nothing left to kill. To give you an example of this "I have fun by taking away other player's fun" mentality, there was recently an event in World of Warcraft where there was a big tree set up in a city, and players could get gifts from under the tree. Several players put themselves on their very sizeable mounts (big bears and mammoths) and stood on the presents for hours, to the net effect that most players couldn't get their presents because they couldn't click on the polygons. This served absolutely no purpose except to cause anguish for others just because they could, and they jeered and taunted the people asking them to move until they were forcibly logged out by a gamemaster. If someone will do this for fun, you can imagine the damage they could do to a world where their actions had permanent consequences. You could conceivably build in some method of enforcement to allow players to establish "laws" against this sort of behavior, but then you'd face the other side of that coin in that a group or guild could functionally take over a server and disallow anyone else from doing anything, to the point of repeatedly killing off any character that wasn't in their power structure.
It's a reasonable idea on the surface, but MMOs can't really let the players have a gross effect on the world because there are so many of them and not everyone will play nice.
This isn't rational. There are more choices in this continuum than "shoot him dead" or "he gets away with no punishment". Why do you assume that he'll escape entirely if you don't personally kill him where he stands? Presumably if you can shoot him you can see him well enough to identify him, and also presumably if you present the fact that you're armed, he'd leave in all haste without your goods in hand. If you're talking about plugging someone after the fact, then we in civilized society call that "vigilante justice" and we condemn it for very good reasons.
Or, you could go up in one of the many three or four story buildings that aren't directly on the waterfront if you're on one of the more populous islands, which is what most of the residents did. Or, if you're out on one of the resort islands you could leave your bungalow in one of the ferryboats, go out five hundred yards into the ocean and let the tsunami pass under you, which is what a lot of the other residents and tourists did.
You're a nitwit. Aircraft carriers hold a crew of 5,000, so by stretching it to extremes you could fit 25,000 people on it. The poulation of Maldives is 350,000. Also, they're not dirt poor refugees. Maldives makes a lot of money from tourism. Does this city look like shacks and hovels? It's the capital of Maldives.
You might want to read up on Maldives. Your assumptions about the level of technology and their needs seems to be very out of step with the reality. Canals "wide enough to pass two canoes next to each other"? This is the capital of Maldives, which shows a level of tech far in excess of "floating oil barral" ships. Also, the entire population of Maldives is less than 400,000 so relocating "150 million people" is meaningless.
That's a very different animal. You don't live on an island surrounded by water in a typhoon-ridden area. You only have a relatively small coastline compared to your borders, and a relatively small portion of the country in the areas below sea level. The Maldives islanders are at risk of being simply washed off the top of their mountain and therefore they have to look at other options than ending up living in a huge cofferdam.
"I think that in a swordfight you should have much more control over the sword, as close to really holding it as can be. In Oblivion you just click an attack button, so it comes down to levels again, but I think it would be better if the mouse really controlled the position of the sword. That way it would be more about real skill than some dexterity rating."
That's been done. Ultima Underworld used a real time, first person interface that included actually moving the mouse around and clicking to swing the weapon. I loved that game, but honestly, the interface put off an awful lot of people. I play WoW with a large group, a number of whom are older people who have difficulty with the interface for WoW. If manual dexterity with the mouse was necessary to win any fight, they'd quit the game. It turns out that I'd probably not go for that kind of game myself, because I'm not as fond of forced first-person stuff any longer.
You'd only relocate the problem. Botting to collect gold would simply migrate to botting to make superpowered "helpers" who would then be hired out to powerlevel those who could pay them, or simply sold outright on the open market. The power gamer would still be competing against a machine (or a toon who was built by a machine), and in WoW, PvP conflict is a relatively integral part of the higher end game. Even if the person buying the account is very inexperienced the fact that they'd have absolute top-end gear would still skew the balance badly. Add to that the fact that you'd have to perform every skill yourself (for example, every toon you made would need to practice cooking to have good stat food, meaning you would have to repeat that progression every time you made a new character) and all you're doing is relocating the grind to other places and you haven't fixed the issue. In any game where real people interact, an economy will develop, and simply trying to eliminate that economy will never work. No trading simply means that barter will become the gold of the realm, and there's nothing stopping a gold farmer from moving to bartering. Eliminate anything that can be bartered (like grouping), and you've reduced your game to an offline adventure game with a chat window.
> Those are all well and good, but none of them are excuses or reasons for failure.
This is where your flaw surfaces. This statement contains two ideas, and taken as a single statement it's a failure. I agree that the reasons cited by the above posters should not generally be used as an excuse not to try to succeed, but in many cases, they are indeed a reason to fail. You continually fall into the assumption that because you personally managed to surmount the things that might hold you back, that everyone else can do the same and as a result, their failure to thrive in your fashion is because they didn't try hard enough. That's a bad road to travel, because it assumes that everything involving fortune is both surmountable and predictable. To give you a personal example from my own family:
My grandfather worked hard for his whole life. His family lived very cheaply, and they saved their money for a rainy day. By the time he reached retirement, he had a decent life savings built up, and worked to set himself up with his pension so that they would be self-reliant for the rest of their lives. They lived in a house they inherited from his wife's parents, so they had better luck than average in that regard. Shortly after he retired, my grandmother fell in the living room, functionally destroying her ankle in the process. Not only did the injury completely incapacitate her, but the resulting health challenges eventually caused her death. It took her more than a year to die, and in the interim they had to spend a huge amount of money making up for deductibles on insurance that was much better than industry standards, and on refitting their house. Shortly after her death he was diagnosed with asbestosis, and the only reason the insurance company paid up was because he was a long-standing member of the IBEW and so they sent in the lawyers for his benefit. The company he worked for had long ago disappeared, so they weren't a reasonable target for a lawsuit to pay the bills, and even with the insurance company paying more than 90 percent of his bills by the time he died, he passed away with less than the funds needed to bury him. The sale of their house netted virtually nothing because the neighborhood they lived in, while a wonderful place in my dad's youth, was in the middle of a major city and the area had deteriorated into a slum.
So, this man worked, scrimped and saved for his entire life, and in the end due to an injury, an illness and the deterioration of his neighborhood died penniless. Do you really think that such things as this are rare? If you really look at it, the one event that changed his fortunes was his wife's injury due to a fall, since his lung disease ended up not costing him much and would not have required refitting the house, and they weren't expecting to sell the house so the depreciation in value wouldn't have affected their lifestyle. If one simple accident can make the difference between living and dying with a good nest egg and having your kids footing the bill for your casket, you can see why I consider that it's disconcertingly arrogant of you to say that "...none of them are excuses or reasons for failure." Bad luck, even a single event of bad luck, can indeed make all the difference. Bully for you that your first wife didn't manage to drive you to bankruptcy (by, say, getting stoned and driving, and injuring someone who could then sue you into the poorhouse), and that you got lucky enough not to run afoul of healthcare insurance issues, but that doesn't make your way of life into a magical panacea for any problem that could crop up.
Virg
P.S. There are a number of people who lost a huge amount of money due to Katrina that had flood insurance. Due to governmental problems with reestablishing flood levels for reconstruction there were people who could not collect insurance money nor rebuild their homes and businesses for upwards of a year. Many small business owners who could not get insurance payouts due to this bureaucratic issue ended up going bankrupt. Do you think it's fair to say they were just too dumb or too lazy to solve the problem?
I'm not going to jump in on the rest of the commentary about the Dark Ages because I can't expend the time at the moment to do the necessary research, but you're doing exactly what you're decrying in the parent post to yours.
> Copernicus was both a Catholic Priest and a scientist. Oh, wait, that punctures your world-view that the Church was opposed to science, doesn't it?
I'm left thinking, "that's one." If you think that the existence of Copernicus means that the Roman Catholic Church didn't oppose most scientific thought at the time then you're a fool. The very example of Galileo, who was only "restricted to his palatial estate" because he actually recanted (he was threatened with death if he didn't, in case that detail was lost on you) negates your statement. The RCC vehemently opposed any science that didn't mesh easily with their dogma, through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance.
> Never mind that he was so "brilliant" that he thought comets were optical illusions.
Even the greatest minds make some mistakes. Taken against the full body of his work you can't seriously expect anyone to take you seriously in saying that this means he wasn't brilliant.
I think he means the physically impossible rotary pivot. To test this against diving, get up on a diving board, jump off, pivot ninety degrees to the right by the time you're halfway to the water and then stop pivoting. Most game engines allow this sort of thing, even allowing a player to jump forward, turn to the side to shoot, and then turn to the front again to land and run, which is completely unrealistic.
Although it requires you to go back to the darker days of early Windows, the Might and Magic series is great for this. For example, M&M 9 was played in first person, in real time...until you press enter. Then it switches to turn-based movement and action, even if you're not in combat. It's a great interface, since you can "fall into the world" by moving around in real time for exploring and interacting with NPCs, but at the same time, when you're ready to jump out of the bushes and tackle that orc or a skeleton gets the jump on you, a quick smack on Enter and you've got the time you need to formulate your combat strategy. It's one of the best interfaces I've used for a CRPG. Add to that the idea that you start the game by winning a castle, only to find that it's a deserted dump occupied by all sorts of riffraff and you need to clean it up yourself. Also, you start as one character, but you can find, hire or rescue others (even getting a dragon to join you if you're good!) so you can build a party to suit your style. You get to choose between being good and evil, with all of the benefits and detriments that entails. You can affect the world around you (for example, building your castle up makes it a town for buying/selling and healing, but if you do a quest to steal something from another nearby monarch his army will show up while you're gone and destroy your castle for revenge).
> If the French never won America would be a monarchy run by a King named George - hang on - you may be right.
Actually, the French didn't win the American Revolution, they just made it so that the Americans could. The French contribution was that their presence made fighting in the New World so costly that the British simply could not continue the conflict, lest they start losing stuff to the French for real. But, in realistic terms, since the American colonies were not lost to the French it can't be said that the French won the American Revolution.
Still, if you want to go that far back, wasn't there some guy back in the day from France who did some decent fighting? I think his name was Napoleon, but I could be wrong.
> For example, a study in Arizona found that 70% of sex offenders eventually return to prison for a new sex crime, looking at a 15 year period. The study you quoted looks at a 3 year period.
This is the problem I have with your statement. You state that there's data and there's interpretation, but the study I pointed out shows that you're wrong, and the study you point out has no statistical "control" set. Where's the study for non-sex offenders that return to prison for non-sex crimes over a fifteen year period? Since there's nothing to place it against, your statement is pure speculation, and the danger is that people will believe you when you're just inventing. More importantly, that part that you don't cover is that even your statistic itself comes from a subset of the sex offenders covered (the 51.4 percent released into parole supervision). The telling number that compares to the study I cited is this:
Among the 3,205 released sex offenders, 25.2% returned to prison in Arizona at least once within an average follow-up period of 6.85 years.
That's the proper statistic in the Arizona report to compare at all to what I cited, and it meshes pretty well with the numbers on the USDOJ report.
In short, stop saying that sex crime recidivism is higher than other crime until you have some real reason to say so. Since my study says you're wrong and your study doesn't cover non-sex crimes you have no basis to say what you did. There is data and there is interpretation, but there's not very much room to argue unless you're willing to "interpret" to your choice of end, or just make it up wholesale.
If you want to be taken seriously you might consider that there's a small bit of continuum between a 16 year old girl letting her boyfriend take a nude photo of her and "...supporting those girls as they start a pornography career (under the influence of others)...". Your argument strays outside of reality at this point.
> One reason (and I don't claim this is the only one) for the difference is recidivism rates (i.e. chance to repeat the crime). Recidivism rates for sex offenders are among the highest. Recidivism rates for murder are significantly lower.
You are absolutely wrong. According to this post the Department of Justice says you're mistaken, and this is the government agency tasked with keeping crime statistics. What say you now?
Your suggestion is contradictory to your first statement. You complain that powering off a machine puts mechanical stress on fans, hard drives and components, but what low power mode are you using that doesn't power down the hard drive and most of the fans, and allow the CPU and motherboard to cool by not using them? By your logic, the machine should be up and running in full power mode at all times. If you put it to sleep, it's not going to stress it any worse to power it off.
Still, I'm with you in that the machine doesn't need to be powered off. I switch off the monitor, and for safety from the outside world I put the firewall on a power strip. Turn that strip off, and the local machines are cut off from the world at large, but not each other in the house (and it's all hard-wired, so there's no remote exposure for wireless devices). Flip it on, and in seconds I'm on the 'Net.
> Well, the pendulum could swing both ways. I really can't remember the last time any adware popped up child porn.
You're crossing your cases here. The substitute teacher convicted of endangerment, who argued that popups did the dirty deed, wasn't in trouble for child porn. In her case, it was regular porn, but displayed to minors. It's Matt Bandy who got in trouble over child porn, which was found on his PC when a search warrant was executed.
Firstly, nothing in your descriptions requires a deadman switch. If you want folks to know your passwords after you die or are incapacitated, try a safe deposit box. If you have incriminating stuff on your machine, encrypt it and then don't include those passwords in the list in your safe deposit box. If you get in trouble for something that you don't understand, like the teacher with the porn in her browser cache, how are you supposed to know it happened or know enough to eliminate it? Moreover, the jury didn't believe the defense, but there's no reason at this point to believe that they rejected it because they don't understand how spyware works. I've had people blame spyware for plenty of things in the past, and some of them were covering up. Without all of the details of the case, I can't make a clear call if that's what happened here.
For the last, you'll need to provide a case file before I'll buy it, even in light of this case being entirely irrelevant since there's no deadman switch that would solve the problem presented. In the face of circumstantial evidence (the book) and reversing corroborating evidence (eyewitnesses placing the suspect out of range) there would have to be something you skipped to see a conviction. Even the worst public defender coudn't lose that case, and it would certainly never survive an appeal to an appellate judge. If he was convicted, then the case is public record, so cite it please.
> Just changed enough to seem more realistic or plausible.
My point is that you haven't presented a single case that I find either realistic or plausible. Sure, in all of these edge cases I can see where a properly designed deadman's switch might help, but in every case you presented a series of events would need to transpire that are extremely unusual, and on top of that the stuff you have to hide would also need to be somewhat horrific. That's not realistic.
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They have every right to tell you that you can't put their software on your machine if you don't agree to play the game as they dictate. They can't tell you how to use your machine, but it's not your code so it's not your call.
On OUR OWN computer, we have EVERY right to do whatever we want.
You're free to generate your own art and programming and storyline, and then run it to your heart's content. However, it's not your code, and it's not your pictures and sounds, so you don't get to do whatever you like just because it's stored on your machine. If you pay them for the right to put it there, then you play it by their rules. If you don't want to play by their rules, you're free to use your computer to play some other game.
Virg
And if I didn't agree, what did I do wrong?
You used software written by Blizzard in a way that they didn't approve. If you didn't click the EULA, then you have no license to use it at all, and if you did, then you agreed not to use it with an alternate server. The business case for forbidding it is that you may get a lot of users who want to use bots logging into your server. Since it's your server, they don't have to pay Blizzard a monthly fee to play WoW, and therefore you're costing them subscription fees.
Seems simple enough.
Virg
The player wants the boots because they're a PvE upgrade, but they have no interest in PvP and a more fun option for the player is to just load a bot and go do something else until their boots are handed to them.
Here's where the problem lies. The player wants the boots. Who cares about the other players in the battleground who get a badly-performing bot on their team and end up losing their battle? This player gets his shiny boots that he wants but doesn't need (these boots aren't the only boots in the game), and jams up the fun of a bunch of people who actually want to fight in a battleground. This is the perfect argument for banning a bot, because you've proven that you don't even understand how you're interfering in a bunch of other players' fun just to get something that you could do without. If you don't want to participate in battlegrounds, then go get some other set of boots or do without.
Virg
This is where the crowd separates. See, the simple fact is the leveling grind is fun, in and of itself, the first time (or the first few times). I've met vanishingly few people who simply dropped the cash necessary to buy a top level character without playing the game first. There are some of those types out there, but they tend to get bored quickly. The problem is, when you have several high level characters, you've played out a lot of the low level content. When you have a level 80 hunter and warrior and mage, you may find that you'd really like to try out a shaman but the prospect of running through the 1-60 quests for the fourth time can get wearying. The temptation to run MMOGlider or just buy a level 80 shaman is there. For someone like this, I'm inclined to say that they've payed their dues.
The problem is, there are also a lot of rank newbies who paid to play their way through for the first time. On the other side of this, there are far too many farmers who will buy in as well or run Glider, and they can really jam up the people who are running through the content for the first time. A bot can really ruin the experience for someone doing it honestly, and can make it nearly impossible for a large swath of low level characters to progress through the game fairly. If a bot is crawling all over Durotar mining 24/7 and flooding the auction house with copper ore, then hundreds of low level players are denied a reasonable way to level up their own skill and turn some coin for gear upgrades. It's for them that I want to see Glider blocked. Sure, the person who uses it to level up the fishing skill on their seventh toon may not be wrecking the game for others, but it's the thousand farmers that are using it to make real-world cash that spoil it. Because there's no reasonable way to make sure that people won't disrupt others' play to gain for themselves, Glider needs to stay out of the game.
Virg
Sorry, but no. Even if you have call waiting, it won't make a signal audible when you're not holding the phone. This means that for every telemarketing call you're requesting that each call recipient give up some span of phone service. I won't do this because it makes my phone inaccessible to those I want calling me, and to me if I want to place a call. I'd rather take the call long enough to identify the telemarketer and then sic the authorities on them so they get driven out of business. The Do Not Call list is their problem, not mine.
Virg
That would quickly become a not-at-all-cool MMO. The problem it has is that it's vulnerable to griefers. All it takes is one person who decides to defoliate the world for fun and soon you wouldn't have any plants around. One group could decide to exterminate stuff and there'd be nothing left to kill. To give you an example of this "I have fun by taking away other player's fun" mentality, there was recently an event in World of Warcraft where there was a big tree set up in a city, and players could get gifts from under the tree. Several players put themselves on their very sizeable mounts (big bears and mammoths) and stood on the presents for hours, to the net effect that most players couldn't get their presents because they couldn't click on the polygons. This served absolutely no purpose except to cause anguish for others just because they could, and they jeered and taunted the people asking them to move until they were forcibly logged out by a gamemaster. If someone will do this for fun, you can imagine the damage they could do to a world where their actions had permanent consequences. You could conceivably build in some method of enforcement to allow players to establish "laws" against this sort of behavior, but then you'd face the other side of that coin in that a group or guild could functionally take over a server and disallow anyone else from doing anything, to the point of repeatedly killing off any character that wasn't in their power structure.
It's a reasonable idea on the surface, but MMOs can't really let the players have a gross effect on the world because there are so many of them and not everyone will play nice.
Virg
This isn't rational. There are more choices in this continuum than "shoot him dead" or "he gets away with no punishment". Why do you assume that he'll escape entirely if you don't personally kill him where he stands? Presumably if you can shoot him you can see him well enough to identify him, and also presumably if you present the fact that you're armed, he'd leave in all haste without your goods in hand. If you're talking about plugging someone after the fact, then we in civilized society call that "vigilante justice" and we condemn it for very good reasons.
Virg
Or, you could go up in one of the many three or four story buildings that aren't directly on the waterfront if you're on one of the more populous islands, which is what most of the residents did. Or, if you're out on one of the resort islands you could leave your bungalow in one of the ferryboats, go out five hundred yards into the ocean and let the tsunami pass under you, which is what a lot of the other residents and tourists did.
Virg
You're a nitwit. Aircraft carriers hold a crew of 5,000, so by stretching it to extremes you could fit 25,000 people on it. The poulation of Maldives is 350,000. Also, they're not dirt poor refugees. Maldives makes a lot of money from tourism. Does this city look like shacks and hovels? It's the capital of Maldives.
Virg
You might want to read up on Maldives. Your assumptions about the level of technology and their needs seems to be very out of step with the reality. Canals "wide enough to pass two canoes next to each other"? This is the capital of Maldives, which shows a level of tech far in excess of "floating oil barral" ships. Also, the entire population of Maldives is less than 400,000 so relocating "150 million people" is meaningless.
Virg
That's a very different animal. You don't live on an island surrounded by water in a typhoon-ridden area. You only have a relatively small coastline compared to your borders, and a relatively small portion of the country in the areas below sea level. The Maldives islanders are at risk of being simply washed off the top of their mountain and therefore they have to look at other options than ending up living in a huge cofferdam.
Virg
"I think that in a swordfight you should have much more control over the sword, as close to really holding it as can be. In Oblivion you just click an attack button, so it comes down to levels again, but I think it would be better if the mouse really controlled the position of the sword. That way it would be more about real skill than some dexterity rating."
That's been done. Ultima Underworld used a real time, first person interface that included actually moving the mouse around and clicking to swing the weapon. I loved that game, but honestly, the interface put off an awful lot of people. I play WoW with a large group, a number of whom are older people who have difficulty with the interface for WoW. If manual dexterity with the mouse was necessary to win any fight, they'd quit the game. It turns out that I'd probably not go for that kind of game myself, because I'm not as fond of forced first-person stuff any longer.
Virg
You'd only relocate the problem. Botting to collect gold would simply migrate to botting to make superpowered "helpers" who would then be hired out to powerlevel those who could pay them, or simply sold outright on the open market. The power gamer would still be competing against a machine (or a toon who was built by a machine), and in WoW, PvP conflict is a relatively integral part of the higher end game. Even if the person buying the account is very inexperienced the fact that they'd have absolute top-end gear would still skew the balance badly. Add to that the fact that you'd have to perform every skill yourself (for example, every toon you made would need to practice cooking to have good stat food, meaning you would have to repeat that progression every time you made a new character) and all you're doing is relocating the grind to other places and you haven't fixed the issue. In any game where real people interact, an economy will develop, and simply trying to eliminate that economy will never work. No trading simply means that barter will become the gold of the realm, and there's nothing stopping a gold farmer from moving to bartering. Eliminate anything that can be bartered (like grouping), and you've reduced your game to an offline adventure game with a chat window.
Virg
> Those are all well and good, but none of them are excuses or reasons for failure.
This is where your flaw surfaces. This statement contains two ideas, and taken as a single statement it's a failure. I agree that the reasons cited by the above posters should not generally be used as an excuse not to try to succeed, but in many cases, they are indeed a reason to fail. You continually fall into the assumption that because you personally managed to surmount the things that might hold you back, that everyone else can do the same and as a result, their failure to thrive in your fashion is because they didn't try hard enough. That's a bad road to travel, because it assumes that everything involving fortune is both surmountable and predictable. To give you a personal example from my own family:
My grandfather worked hard for his whole life. His family lived very cheaply, and they saved their money for a rainy day. By the time he reached retirement, he had a decent life savings built up, and worked to set himself up with his pension so that they would be self-reliant for the rest of their lives. They lived in a house they inherited from his wife's parents, so they had better luck than average in that regard. Shortly after he retired, my grandmother fell in the living room, functionally destroying her ankle in the process. Not only did the injury completely incapacitate her, but the resulting health challenges eventually caused her death. It took her more than a year to die, and in the interim they had to spend a huge amount of money making up for deductibles on insurance that was much better than industry standards, and on refitting their house. Shortly after her death he was diagnosed with asbestosis, and the only reason the insurance company paid up was because he was a long-standing member of the IBEW and so they sent in the lawyers for his benefit. The company he worked for had long ago disappeared, so they weren't a reasonable target for a lawsuit to pay the bills, and even with the insurance company paying more than 90 percent of his bills by the time he died, he passed away with less than the funds needed to bury him. The sale of their house netted virtually nothing because the neighborhood they lived in, while a wonderful place in my dad's youth, was in the middle of a major city and the area had deteriorated into a slum.
So, this man worked, scrimped and saved for his entire life, and in the end due to an injury, an illness and the deterioration of his neighborhood died penniless. Do you really think that such things as this are rare? If you really look at it, the one event that changed his fortunes was his wife's injury due to a fall, since his lung disease ended up not costing him much and would not have required refitting the house, and they weren't expecting to sell the house so the depreciation in value wouldn't have affected their lifestyle. If one simple accident can make the difference between living and dying with a good nest egg and having your kids footing the bill for your casket, you can see why I consider that it's disconcertingly arrogant of you to say that "...none of them are excuses or reasons for failure." Bad luck, even a single event of bad luck, can indeed make all the difference. Bully for you that your first wife didn't manage to drive you to bankruptcy (by, say, getting stoned and driving, and injuring someone who could then sue you into the poorhouse), and that you got lucky enough not to run afoul of healthcare insurance issues, but that doesn't make your way of life into a magical panacea for any problem that could crop up.
Virg
P.S. There are a number of people who lost a huge amount of money due to Katrina that had flood insurance. Due to governmental problems with reestablishing flood levels for reconstruction there were people who could not collect insurance money nor rebuild their homes and businesses for upwards of a year. Many small business owners who could not get insurance payouts due to this bureaucratic issue ended up going bankrupt. Do you think it's fair to say they were just too dumb or too lazy to solve the problem?
I'm not going to jump in on the rest of the commentary about the Dark Ages because I can't expend the time at the moment to do the necessary research, but you're doing exactly what you're decrying in the parent post to yours.
> Copernicus was both a Catholic Priest and a scientist. Oh, wait, that punctures your world-view that the Church was opposed to science, doesn't it?
I'm left thinking, "that's one." If you think that the existence of Copernicus means that the Roman Catholic Church didn't oppose most scientific thought at the time then you're a fool. The very example of Galileo, who was only "restricted to his palatial estate" because he actually recanted (he was threatened with death if he didn't, in case that detail was lost on you) negates your statement. The RCC vehemently opposed any science that didn't mesh easily with their dogma, through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance.
> Never mind that he was so "brilliant" that he thought comets were optical illusions.
Even the greatest minds make some mistakes. Taken against the full body of his work you can't seriously expect anyone to take you seriously in saying that this means he wasn't brilliant.
Virg
> Also, you can turn while falling.
I think he means the physically impossible rotary pivot. To test this against diving, get up on a diving board, jump off, pivot ninety degrees to the right by the time you're halfway to the water and then stop pivoting. Most game engines allow this sort of thing, even allowing a player to jump forward, turn to the side to shoot, and then turn to the front again to land and run, which is completely unrealistic.
Virg
Although it requires you to go back to the darker days of early Windows, the Might and Magic series is great for this. For example, M&M 9 was played in first person, in real time...until you press enter. Then it switches to turn-based movement and action, even if you're not in combat. It's a great interface, since you can "fall into the world" by moving around in real time for exploring and interacting with NPCs, but at the same time, when you're ready to jump out of the bushes and tackle that orc or a skeleton gets the jump on you, a quick smack on Enter and you've got the time you need to formulate your combat strategy. It's one of the best interfaces I've used for a CRPG. Add to that the idea that you start the game by winning a castle, only to find that it's a deserted dump occupied by all sorts of riffraff and you need to clean it up yourself. Also, you start as one character, but you can find, hire or rescue others (even getting a dragon to join you if you're good!) so you can build a party to suit your style. You get to choose between being good and evil, with all of the benefits and detriments that entails. You can affect the world around you (for example, building your castle up makes it a town for buying/selling and healing, but if you do a quest to steal something from another nearby monarch his army will show up while you're gone and destroy your castle for revenge).
All in all, quite a fun series. Give it a shot.
Virg
> If the French never won America would be a monarchy run by a King named George - hang on - you may be right.
Actually, the French didn't win the American Revolution, they just made it so that the Americans could. The French contribution was that their presence made fighting in the New World so costly that the British simply could not continue the conflict, lest they start losing stuff to the French for real. But, in realistic terms, since the American colonies were not lost to the French it can't be said that the French won the American Revolution.
Still, if you want to go that far back, wasn't there some guy back in the day from France who did some decent fighting? I think his name was Napoleon, but I could be wrong.
Virg
This is the problem I have with your statement. You state that there's data and there's interpretation, but the study I pointed out shows that you're wrong, and the study you point out has no statistical "control" set. Where's the study for non-sex offenders that return to prison for non-sex crimes over a fifteen year period? Since there's nothing to place it against, your statement is pure speculation, and the danger is that people will believe you when you're just inventing. More importantly, that part that you don't cover is that even your statistic itself comes from a subset of the sex offenders covered (the 51.4 percent released into parole supervision). The telling number that compares to the study I cited is this:
That's the proper statistic in the Arizona report to compare at all to what I cited, and it meshes pretty well with the numbers on the USDOJ report.
In short, stop saying that sex crime recidivism is higher than other crime until you have some real reason to say so. Since my study says you're wrong and your study doesn't cover non-sex crimes you have no basis to say what you did. There is data and there is interpretation, but there's not very much room to argue unless you're willing to "interpret" to your choice of end, or just make it up wholesale.
Virg
If you want to be taken seriously you might consider that there's a small bit of continuum between a 16 year old girl letting her boyfriend take a nude photo of her and "...supporting those girls as they start a pornography career (under the influence of others)...". Your argument strays outside of reality at this point.
Virg
> One reason (and I don't claim this is the only one) for the difference is recidivism rates (i.e. chance to repeat the crime). Recidivism rates for sex offenders are among the highest. Recidivism rates for murder are significantly lower.
You are absolutely wrong. According to this post the Department of Justice says you're mistaken, and this is the government agency tasked with keeping crime statistics. What say you now?
Virg
Your suggestion is contradictory to your first statement. You complain that powering off a machine puts mechanical stress on fans, hard drives and components, but what low power mode are you using that doesn't power down the hard drive and most of the fans, and allow the CPU and motherboard to cool by not using them? By your logic, the machine should be up and running in full power mode at all times. If you put it to sleep, it's not going to stress it any worse to power it off.
Still, I'm with you in that the machine doesn't need to be powered off. I switch off the monitor, and for safety from the outside world I put the firewall on a power strip. Turn that strip off, and the local machines are cut off from the world at large, but not each other in the house (and it's all hard-wired, so there's no remote exposure for wireless devices). Flip it on, and in seconds I'm on the 'Net.
Virg
> Well, the pendulum could swing both ways. I really can't remember the last time any adware popped up child porn.
You're crossing your cases here. The substitute teacher convicted of endangerment, who argued that popups did the dirty deed, wasn't in trouble for child porn. In her case, it was regular porn, but displayed to minors. It's Matt Bandy who got in trouble over child porn, which was found on his PC when a search warrant was executed.
Virg
Firstly, nothing in your descriptions requires a deadman switch. If you want folks to know your passwords after you die or are incapacitated, try a safe deposit box. If you have incriminating stuff on your machine, encrypt it and then don't include those passwords in the list in your safe deposit box. If you get in trouble for something that you don't understand, like the teacher with the porn in her browser cache, how are you supposed to know it happened or know enough to eliminate it? Moreover, the jury didn't believe the defense, but there's no reason at this point to believe that they rejected it because they don't understand how spyware works. I've had people blame spyware for plenty of things in the past, and some of them were covering up. Without all of the details of the case, I can't make a clear call if that's what happened here.
For the last, you'll need to provide a case file before I'll buy it, even in light of this case being entirely irrelevant since there's no deadman switch that would solve the problem presented. In the face of circumstantial evidence (the book) and reversing corroborating evidence (eyewitnesses placing the suspect out of range) there would have to be something you skipped to see a conviction. Even the worst public defender coudn't lose that case, and it would certainly never survive an appeal to an appellate judge. If he was convicted, then the case is public record, so cite it please.
Virg
> Just changed enough to seem more realistic or plausible.
My point is that you haven't presented a single case that I find either realistic or plausible. Sure, in all of these edge cases I can see where a properly designed deadman's switch might help, but in every case you presented a series of events would need to transpire that are extremely unusual, and on top of that the stuff you have to hide would also need to be somewhat horrific. That's not realistic.
Virg