I had to turn off downloading of content in Counterstrike because of the excessive and annoying sound files that servers kept wanting me to download. One other thing I noticed though, one particular mod that a server ran downloaded a wall decal onto my client and replaced one of the in-game textures with, as George Carlin would put it, it's "logo feces". If in-game ads bother you that much, I suggest you override Valve's default using this same trick, provided they don't take special care to prevent that.
the second is, is it that much cheaper to use a simulator than small craft? i'm not sure what the slowdown is there. unless maybe a single instructor can watch over more than one student at a time in simulators.
Where I rent planes the cost of the instructor's time is dwarfed by the cost of renting the plane. $35 per hour for the instructor, $110 per hour for a Cessna 172R. See also $100 Hamburger.
Very true, but I remind you that this is a conversation started by a post relating to addiction. In that vein, telling a WoW addict to not go after loot is akin to telling a crack addict not to go after his next fix. And don't think I'm being clever, the comparison of WoW addiction to crack addiction happens daily in hardcore raiding guild channels, I have even seen WoW being given higher addiction value by a guild member who has experienced both! For those occasional moments of clarity where the addict has the will and desire to quit, I remind you of the friends I mentioned, they are all well-meaning, good people, but it may very well be the case that if you don't attend the raid, those 39 people, your friends, the people who poured an equal amount of their souls into the soulbound purple and orange gearyou are wearing don't get to have fun. I have seen raids be canceled because key individuals or classes were not available. On top of this consider I was in a leadership position. In spite of the fact that the guild recognizes people have outside lives, in that role it was my duty to set an example and attend as many raids as possible.
In any case I wish you luck in MC. When you get to the point where you and your guild are completing it start to finish in under 3 hours, and BWL in under 5, I invite you to look back and make sure you have not become what I had become. If you do not understand yet, I think you will by that point whether by seeing it in someone else or yourself.
Please post again in a tone that does not make you sound like a raving crack addicted troll fearfully lashing out at phantom attackers while desperately clinging to the false hope you can quit any time you want to.
Personally, I believe that WoW addiction is just another sign that our society has something wrong with it that no one is paying attention to.
I am someone who has recently given up WoW after being an officer one of the top raiding guilds on a maximum population server for the last year and a half (over 110 days/played and enough epic items to gear my characters 3 times over). What kept me coming back was partly the friends I made online, and partly the obligation I felt not to "let them down" by not being there when the guild needed me. I also felt like I would fall behind every time a missed a raid, as someone might pass me in DKP and then I'd have to play even more to get the loot I was after. The scarcity of loot in WoW puts players in competition with one another and drives them to play more than the other to get what they want. And if I wanted to see that brand-spanking new instance the day it came out (and what gamer doesn't love seeing cool new stuff the day it comes out?), I had to be there get geared up to take it on beforehand. The only things I see that could be seen as "faults in our society" in my case are the pressure to excel, being a team player, or hard-worker; all of which prove very much to one's advantage in other situations. WoW seems just to have taken those things and put them in a context where they drive people to self-destruction.
All things considered, for me, WoW was one viscious self-perpetuating positive feedback loop. I'm glad I'm done "doing time".
I had to write a term paper back in college where I compared two languages assigned to me, mine happened to be Ruby and Python. I knew neither at the time. Since I already knew Perl, I threw in little tidbits about it as well. One of the things that impressed me the most (and this may have changed in the past 3-4 years) was if I wrote something where whether or not a variable had a binding was determined at run-time like
in all three languages, Ruby was the only one that bombed out during parsing, before anything ever ran. When I saw that I instantly became a fan. In either of the other two languages that could have become a nasty surprize down the road. (Yeah, the above is a Perl fragment. So sue me.)
Not a bad sceheme but I don't think its fool proof. As with any public key encryption (I'm assuming this because of the words "console's key") if you could MitM the initial key exchange (not an unreasonable assumption given they're already using bridges) you can just have 2 sets of keys in play. One between the console and the proxy, and one between the proxy and the peers or server.
I was thinking about this a little further this morning, if they're truely using P2P as was said in some other posts then there has to be some traffic that says "Alice shoots in direction V from origin V'" which on a hit would be acknowledged by something like "Bob is hit by Alice's shot" OR "Alice shoots in direction V from origin V' and hits Bob". In the first case suppose Bob chooses to drop all the hit acknowledgements, in the second suppose Alice chooses to hit Bob with every shot. Of course your could do things like line of sight checks but how do you really prevent cheating in this manner in P2P?
Not only that, they aren't evening using any really nasty networking tricks. The article suggests they basically just drop packets at will. In the world of PC games we have (among other things) these nasty things called "aim proxies". Cheater's game connects to another machine under his control which maintains the actual connection to the server and monitors the game state as the traffic passes through. Every time he fires a shot, it changes the outbound traffic of what he was aiming at to say, the head of the nearest enemy player. Go ahead and scan his client/PC for cheats, its perfectly clean. Nasty.
What language you learn is irrelevant. There will be occasions where you can use either in the future, and learning more languages of the same class (logic, imperative, functional, et al) once you know one becomes almost trivial. What is important are the concepts set forth in the class. Heredity, data hiding, motivation for using OO, etc... are the importants concepts to take away from the class. An Object Oriented Programming class is for studying OO, not languages.
You find yourself before indistinguishable two doors, each with a statue. One door will lead to salvation, the other to death. The statue that guards the door to salvation always tells the truth, the statue to the door to death always lies. You may pose only one question to only one statue. What do you ask to determine which door is which?
Answer(ROT13): Nfx nal dhrfgvba gb juvpu lbh nyernql xabj gur nafjre. Gb qrgrezvar juvpu qbbe vf juvpu lbh arrq gb xabj gur eryngvbafuvc bs gur nafjre lbh ner tvira gb gur gehgu. Gur guvat V yvxr nobhg guvf evqqyr vf vg sbeprf lbh gb pbafvqre gur bcrengbe va gur ybtvpny fgngrzrag gb or gur inevnoyr. Nqqvgvbanyyl crbcyr nera'g hfrq gb nfxvat dhrfgvbaf jura gurl nyernql xabj gur nafjre fb gurl graq abg gb or noyr gb guvax bs n fbyhgvba evtug njnl. Gur jubyr guvat orpbzrf boivbhf jura lbh cbfr n dhrfgvba fhpu nf "Ner gurer gjb fgnghrf urer?"
Kiddie Porn? You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Regular Porn? You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Nazi/Skinhead sites? You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Anything YOU think is a 'hate site'? You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Anything ANYONE things is a 'hate site'? You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Anything anyone objects to for any reason? You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Business competitors? You have to look them up, they don't come to you.
Political opponents? You have to look them up, they don't come to you.
I draw the line at: If it's actively pestering you without any sort of provocation and without any way for you to stop it by other means, you have my support to knock it off our internet. This is my intuition on where the line is, please poke holes in it so we can move toward the correct solution. Spam is the only thing that readily comes to mind that falls on the other side of this line.
Spam itself is a form of DDoS attack: when you get enough of them email will become worthless to you, which is exactly how any DDoS attack works at some level.
My first thought was "Spacecraft? is that a new Starcraft clone I hadn't heard about?". It was then I realized I've been hanging out on the Game Programming Wiki too much lately.
I use quotes since Perl 5 regexps are already marginally more powerful than "pure" regexps
Are you sure? I looked into this because my instinct told me you were right and I wanted to know how much more powerful but then I found this line in the Camel Book: "The Perl Engine uses a nondeterministic finite-state automaton (NFA) to find a match" (Programming Perl 2nd ed., page 60). If correct that would suggest that Perl regexps and "pure" automata regexps are equivalent.
I don't think the problem is level-grind per se. I fall into the same catagory you describe yourself in (played two characters to level 40+), and I found the thing that finally drove me from the game was the unrelenting monotony. Every single mission in the game can be summed up as: "Go here, kill some stuff, click on some glowing objects" or subset of the three. The only way to fail the missions was to let time run out, and some didn't have time limits, and those that did the limits were four times or more as long as it took me to do the mission. With my second 40+ character, I played only two missions, both before level 6. The rest was done grinding thru task forces until level 32, and then soloing with fire imps. CoH has nothing in the way of a item economy, something that I found I sorely missed from my days in Diablo2, and one of the things that still continued the make the game interesting after I had mastered playing it and building characters. Players only very rarely buy enhancements from other players, there's no reason to: even the very high level ones (excluding hamidon, etc.. enhancements, which are totally optional and lack of them doesn't handicap your character) are sold by NPCs who never run out.
This has been happening a lot lately, I suspect the moderators feel they're being ripped off when they moderate someone funny because being moderated funny doesn't add to karma. Just a guess.
from the page's decision quote: "companies like Lexmark cannot use the DMCA in conjunction with copyright law to create monopolies of manufactured goods for themselves just by tweaking the facts of this case: by, for example, creating a Toner Loading Program that is more complex and "creative" than the one here, or by cutting off other access to the Printer Engine Program."
It says specifically "manufactured goods", but overall bnetd seems to have been the same thing.
"I used to be heavy into basketball," he says of his days before Socom. "Now I've been playing basketball again, I've been going to high school football games. I've been going to that youth group with friends. . . . We're trying to keep my schedule busy."
The article doesn't make clear what the difference between being "heavy into" something and being addicted. Isn't this kid just trading one "addiction" for another? Who's to say basketball isn't just less interesting to him than Socom (his video game of choice)? When was the last time you got out your crayons and colored in a coloring book? Perhaps he grew out of basketball?
Parents can discern between misuse and addiction if they notice two important telltale signs in their children: withdrawal and isolation.
Translation: If your child is not interacting with people you can see, [s]he's addicted. By definition you can't play a multiplayer game and not interact with the other players on some level. How many online gamers do you know that sit around in empty games? So aren't they seeking the company of others? As for people playing single player games being withdrawn and isolated, compare with reading a book: both spend hours alone engaged in a single activity and not interacting with others. Why aren't books considered addictive?
She founded Online Gamers Anonymous in 2002, after losing her son, Shawn, to suicide that same year. He had become addicted to EverQuest while being treated for depression. The depression is what killed her son, not the game. There was a point in my life where I played Counterstrike over 50 hours a week, I just flat stopped one day and started doing other things that had greater appeal to me at the time. I didn't get headaches or a nervous twitch or classic signs of addiction withdrawl. You know why? Because it wasn't an addiction. Pulling the same thing with caffeine is a different story.
... of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The second and third presidents of the USA, who both died on July 4th, 1826, 50 years to the day after Independence Day.
I do the same thing on many weekends (however I'd describe myself and most of the people who I LAN with as more as retired hardcore gamers). Have you tried playing games where you all cooperate against the AI? Serious Sam 2 is a blast to play coop if you don't have anything against mindless kill-a-thons, the one-liners keep people laughing and having a good time with the occasional "OH MY GOD!" as someone rushes into an area and is greeted by fifty enemies. If like your FPSs flavored more realistically you might try Rainbow Six 3: Ravenshield or Operation Flashpoint, both of which also have coop options. MMORPGs are also fun to LAN (last weekend we tried out Asheron's Call 2, which has a free download w/ a 15 day free trial) with provided everyone has characters of roughly the same strength to play with so no one is too powerful or too weak (City of Heroes even partially solves that with its sidekick system). Rise of Nations is popular RTS with a couple of my friends, and it offers a rare mix of AI difficulties from the very easy to the very difficult and allows the humans to team up against the AI.
Slashdot Mirror
I had to turn off downloading of content in Counterstrike because of the excessive and annoying sound files that servers kept wanting me to download. One other thing I noticed though, one particular mod that a server ran downloaded a wall decal onto my client and replaced one of the in-game textures with, as George Carlin would put it, it's "logo feces". If in-game ads bother you that much, I suggest you override Valve's default using this same trick, provided they don't take special care to prevent that.
Where I rent planes the cost of the instructor's time is dwarfed by the cost of renting the plane. $35 per hour for the instructor, $110 per hour for a Cessna 172R. See also $100 Hamburger.
So. Don't go after that loot.
Very true, but I remind you that this is a conversation started by a post relating to addiction. In that vein, telling a WoW addict to not go after loot is akin to telling a crack addict not to go after his next fix. And don't think I'm being clever, the comparison of WoW addiction to crack addiction happens daily in hardcore raiding guild channels, I have even seen WoW being given higher addiction value by a guild member who has experienced both! For those occasional moments of clarity where the addict has the will and desire to quit, I remind you of the friends I mentioned, they are all well-meaning, good people, but it may very well be the case that if you don't attend the raid, those 39 people, your friends, the people who poured an equal amount of their souls into the soulbound purple and orange gear you are wearing don't get to have fun. I have seen raids be canceled because key individuals or classes were not available. On top of this consider I was in a leadership position. In spite of the fact that the guild recognizes people have outside lives, in that role it was my duty to set an example and attend as many raids as possible.
In any case I wish you luck in MC. When you get to the point where you and your guild are completing it start to finish in under 3 hours, and BWL in under 5, I invite you to look back and make sure you have not become what I had become. If you do not understand yet, I think you will by that point whether by seeing it in someone else or yourself.
Please post again in a tone that does not make you sound like a raving crack addicted troll fearfully lashing out at phantom attackers while desperately clinging to the false hope you can quit any time you want to.
Personally, I believe that WoW addiction is just another sign that our society has something wrong with it that no one is paying attention to.
/played and enough epic items to gear my characters 3 times over). What kept me coming back was partly the friends I made online, and partly the obligation I felt not to "let them down" by not being there when the guild needed me. I also felt like I would fall behind every time a missed a raid, as someone might pass me in DKP and then I'd have to play even more to get the loot I was after. The scarcity of loot in WoW puts players in competition with one another and drives them to play more than the other to get what they want. And if I wanted to see that brand-spanking new instance the day it came out (and what gamer doesn't love seeing cool new stuff the day it comes out?), I had to be there get geared up to take it on beforehand. The only things I see that could be seen as "faults in our society" in my case are the pressure to excel, being a team player, or hard-worker; all of which prove very much to one's advantage in other situations. WoW seems just to have taken those things and put them in a context where they drive people to self-destruction.
I am someone who has recently given up WoW after being an officer one of the top raiding guilds on a maximum population server for the last year and a half (over 110 days
All things considered, for me, WoW was one viscious self-perpetuating positive feedback loop. I'm glad I'm done "doing time".
I had to write a term paper back in college where I compared two languages assigned to me, mine happened to be Ruby and Python. I knew neither at the time. Since I already knew Perl, I threw in little tidbits about it as well. One of the things that impressed me the most (and this may have changed in the past 3-4 years) was if I wrote something where whether or not a variable had a binding was determined at run-time like
$blah = ;
chomp $blah;
if ($blah eq 'a') {
$b = 1;
}
print $b;
in all three languages, Ruby was the only one that bombed out during parsing, before anything ever ran. When I saw that I instantly became a fan. In either of the other two languages that could have become a nasty surprize down the road. (Yeah, the above is a Perl fragment. So sue me.)
Not a bad sceheme but I don't think its fool proof. As with any public key encryption (I'm assuming this because of the words "console's key") if you could MitM the initial key exchange (not an unreasonable assumption given they're already using bridges) you can just have 2 sets of keys in play. One between the console and the proxy, and one between the proxy and the peers or server.
I was thinking about this a little further this morning, if they're truely using P2P as was said in some other posts then there has to be some traffic that says "Alice shoots in direction V from origin V'" which on a hit would be acknowledged by something like "Bob is hit by Alice's shot" OR "Alice shoots in direction V from origin V' and hits Bob". In the first case suppose Bob chooses to drop all the hit acknowledgements, in the second suppose Alice chooses to hit Bob with every shot. Of course your could do things like line of sight checks but how do you really prevent cheating in this manner in P2P?
Not only that, they aren't evening using any really nasty networking tricks. The article suggests they basically just drop packets at will. In the world of PC games we have (among other things) these nasty things called "aim proxies". Cheater's game connects to another machine under his control which maintains the actual connection to the server and monitors the game state as the traffic passes through. Every time he fires a shot, it changes the outbound traffic of what he was aiming at to say, the head of the nearest enemy player. Go ahead and scan his client/PC for cheats, its perfectly clean. Nasty.
What language you learn is irrelevant. There will be occasions where you can use either in the future, and learning more languages of the same class (logic, imperative, functional, et al) once you know one becomes almost trivial. What is important are the concepts set forth in the class. Heredity, data hiding, motivation for using OO, etc... are the importants concepts to take away from the class. An Object Oriented Programming class is for studying OO, not languages.
You find yourself before indistinguishable two doors, each with a statue. One door will lead to salvation, the other to death. The statue that guards the door to salvation always tells the truth, the statue to the door to death always lies. You may pose only one question to only one statue. What do you ask to determine which door is which?
Answer(ROT13): Nfx nal dhrfgvba gb juvpu lbh nyernql xabj gur nafjre. Gb qrgrezvar juvpu qbbe vf juvpu lbh arrq gb xabj gur eryngvbafuvc bs gur nafjre lbh ner tvira gb gur gehgu. Gur guvat V yvxr nobhg guvf evqqyr vf vg sbeprf lbh gb pbafvqre gur bcrengbe va gur ybtvpny fgngrzrag gb or gur inevnoyr. Nqqvgvbanyyl crbcyr nera'g hfrq gb nfxvat dhrfgvbaf jura gurl nyernql xabj gur nafjre fb gurl graq abg gb or noyr gb guvax bs n fbyhgvba evtug njnl. Gur jubyr guvat orpbzrf boivbhf jura lbh cbfr n dhrfgvba fhpu nf "Ner gurer gjb fgnghrf urer?"
Sounds like a new spin on something Steve Gibson did a few years ago. Very interesting read.
For anyone with a taste for the bizarre (like me), I recommend checking out A Tribute to Ray Harryhausen. (Macromedia Flash required)
Who needs pr0n when you've got two (or as many as you want) bodies of different (or same, whatever floats your boat) genders... :)
Why stop at limbs? Why not bodies? I want to be a hive mind. Just requires a little extra wireless tech and probably a vicious learning curve.
Kiddie Porn?
You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Regular Porn?
You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Nazi/Skinhead sites?
You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Anything YOU think is a 'hate site'?
You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Anything ANYONE things is a 'hate site'?
You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Anything anyone objects to for any reason?
You have to look this up, it doesn't come to you.
Business competitors?
You have to look them up, they don't come to you.
Political opponents?
You have to look them up, they don't come to you.
I draw the line at: If it's actively pestering you without any sort of provocation and without any way for you to stop it by other means, you have my support to knock it off our internet. This is my intuition on where the line is, please poke holes in it so we can move toward the correct solution. Spam is the only thing that readily comes to mind that falls on the other side of this line.
Spam itself is a form of DDoS attack: when you get enough of them email will become worthless to you, which is exactly how any DDoS attack works at some level.
Writing Code for Spacecraft
My first thought was "Spacecraft? is that a new Starcraft clone I hadn't heard about?". It was then I realized I've been hanging out on the Game Programming Wiki too much lately.
I use quotes since Perl 5 regexps are already marginally more powerful than "pure" regexps
Are you sure? I looked into this because my instinct told me you were right and I wanted to know how much more powerful but then I found this line in the Camel Book: "The Perl Engine uses a nondeterministic finite-state automaton (NFA) to find a match" (Programming Perl 2nd ed., page 60). If correct that would suggest that Perl regexps and "pure" automata regexps are equivalent.
That must have been implemented after I quit.
I don't think the problem is level-grind per se. I fall into the same catagory you describe yourself in (played two characters to level 40+), and I found the thing that finally drove me from the game was the unrelenting monotony. Every single mission in the game can be summed up as: "Go here, kill some stuff, click on some glowing objects" or subset of the three. The only way to fail the missions was to let time run out, and some didn't have time limits, and those that did the limits were four times or more as long as it took me to do the mission. With my second 40+ character, I played only two missions, both before level 6. The rest was done grinding thru task forces until level 32, and then soloing with fire imps. CoH has nothing in the way of a item economy, something that I found I sorely missed from my days in Diablo2, and one of the things that still continued the make the game interesting after I had mastered playing it and building characters. Players only very rarely buy enhancements from other players, there's no reason to: even the very high level ones (excluding hamidon, etc.. enhancements, which are totally optional and lack of them doesn't handicap your character) are sold by NPCs who never run out.
This has been happening a lot lately, I suspect the moderators feel they're being ripped off when they moderate someone funny because being moderated funny doesn't add to karma. Just a guess.
How does this decision relate to the bnetd case?
from the page's decision quote: "companies like Lexmark cannot use the DMCA in conjunction with copyright law to create monopolies of manufactured goods for themselves just by tweaking the facts of this case: by, for example, creating a Toner Loading Program that is more complex and "creative" than the one here, or by cutting off other access to the Printer Engine Program."
It says specifically "manufactured goods", but overall bnetd seems to have been the same thing.
In the same vein, but I like this one even more. :)
"I used to be heavy into basketball," he says of his days before Socom. "Now I've been playing basketball again, I've been going to high school football games. I've been going to that youth group with friends. . . . We're trying to keep my schedule busy."
The article doesn't make clear what the difference between being "heavy into" something and being addicted. Isn't this kid just trading one "addiction" for another? Who's to say basketball isn't just less interesting to him than Socom (his video game of choice)? When was the last time you got out your crayons and colored in a coloring book? Perhaps he grew out of basketball?
Parents can discern between misuse and addiction if they notice two important telltale signs in their children: withdrawal and isolation.
Translation: If your child is not interacting with people you can see, [s]he's addicted. By definition you can't play a multiplayer game and not interact with the other players on some level. How many online gamers do you know that sit around in empty games? So aren't they seeking the company of others? As for people playing single player games being withdrawn and isolated, compare with reading a book: both spend hours alone engaged in a single activity and not interacting with others. Why aren't books considered addictive?
She founded Online Gamers Anonymous in 2002, after losing her son, Shawn, to suicide that same year. He had become addicted to EverQuest while being treated for depression.
The depression is what killed her son, not the game. There was a point in my life where I played Counterstrike over 50 hours a week, I just flat stopped one day and started doing other things that had greater appeal to me at the time. I didn't get headaches or a nervous twitch or classic signs of addiction withdrawl. You know why? Because it wasn't an addiction. Pulling the same thing with caffeine is a different story.
... of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. The second and third presidents of the USA, who both died on July 4th, 1826, 50 years to the day after Independence Day.
I do the same thing on many weekends (however I'd describe myself and most of the people who I LAN with as more as retired hardcore gamers). Have you tried playing games where you all cooperate against the AI? Serious Sam 2 is a blast to play coop if you don't have anything against mindless kill-a-thons, the one-liners keep people laughing and having a good time with the occasional "OH MY GOD!" as someone rushes into an area and is greeted by fifty enemies. If like your FPSs flavored more realistically you might try Rainbow Six 3: Ravenshield or Operation Flashpoint, both of which also have coop options. MMORPGs are also fun to LAN (last weekend we tried out Asheron's Call 2, which has a free download w/ a 15 day free trial) with provided everyone has characters of roughly the same strength to play with so no one is too powerful or too weak (City of Heroes even partially solves that with its sidekick system). Rise of Nations is popular RTS with a couple of my friends, and it offers a rare mix of AI difficulties from the very easy to the very difficult and allows the humans to team up against the AI.