Mass effect is barely even in the category of "RPG." Although the quest system is pretty good, the equipment and skills were lacking. No, what OP (I suspect) is talking about is games more like The Witcher (1&2, especially 1), KOTOR (going back a ways), Oblivion (kinda), even Dragon Age or the soon to be released Diablo III. None of those games can be played by sitting something on the controller and walking away which is what can be done with some of the new ones (I think this sums it up nicely).
The Last Remnant, which I did play and while fun, was a terrible RPG (worse than Mass Effect. Seriously) 3rd person cover shooters are more innovative RPGs than this (in fact, they actually did involve innovation at the time.) Walking down a single pathr, absolutely no choice of skills to update (you can choose which ones a character focuses on... that is all), 2-3 choices (which you don't entirely control) for combat, group-based fighting. Honestly, it's fun for a while especially since it is more or less the only JRPG I ever played, but I cannot see how people could ever spend massive amounts of time playing games like that. I tried one of the recent FF (13 I think) games for about 30 mins once. It... didn't even feel like an RPG, it felt like walking down a narrow corridor holding down a button.
Also, neither Magicka nor Torchlight were very good RPGs, no idea why you chose those as examples. They were a lot of fun, but deep RPG action they were not. OP is right: Western RPGs have, if not grown deeper, at least expanded and experimented in the genre. JRPGs seem to have devolved.
You have a valid point about minor changes adding up to produce a version that doesn't look anything like other versions with the same number (the same argument justifies upgrading the Linux kernel to 3.0). And it is perfectly valid to decide after, say, 12 minor releases "ok, next one will increment the major number." This will not make nerds rage (ok, it'll make a few mad, but you can safely ignore them.) It is much different to suddenly say "our version number is for marketing purposes only and means nothing technically" and increment the major number for every single release. A Year/Month system would be far preferable to what they are doing now, if they insist on a rapid release cycle, we definitely agree on that.
While it used to be true that people compared software by version number, and it certainly is for products that are still in the v1.0 (or maybe 2.0 even), how many people today really compare software by version number any more? Or even know what version they are using (especially of Chrome, which doesn't even advertise it unless you look closely), unless they are fairly nerdy? More relevantly, is there seriously a large group of people (I realize there is at least one person) who didn't use Firefox because it was "only" version 3? And more importantly, was it worth pissing of the very group of people who made your product popular in the first place (i.e. the techies)?
Software versions are supposed to have meaning. Major numbers are for important new features and UI overhauls, minor numbers are for minor features (or large technical fixes) and other small changes, and final digits are for bugfixes. I should be able to look at a version number and be able to estimate how much the software changed since another version. That has been the standard for years, and there is absolutely no reason to change it. Firefox has completely destroyed that. They didn't start it, true, but they also shouldn't have given away to it.
For commercial software, obviously, using the year as a version number makes quite a lot of sense (besides even just selling new copies every year), or for a driver (like AMD does). But for a browser? What sense does that make? Why bother? Why not just do what has worked quite well for years and use a proper version system? That is why people are annoyed at Mozilla. Because the change makes no goddamned sense.
Did you read the part where I mentioned previous theories were not disproven by more people looking at them, but by things we couldn't observe before? Technological innovation allows for new scientific theories to be created. It matters much less how many people are looking at a theory, and more about how well they can look at a theory. Because of the nature of relativity, it is very difficult to confirm absolutely. In fact, there are only a handful of direct observations that confirm it's predictions (specifically, thing like gravitational redshift and the precession of Mercury's perihelion. There are a few others as well.) Because neutrinos fit that category quite precisely.
More importantly, though, you should note that both the theories I referenced hold correct to within a certain degree of precision. I have absolutely no doubt that general relativity holds good to a very high degree of precision. That is different, though, from being perfectly correct. And no matter how many scientists examine a theory (it can be literally infinite: it won't matter), so long as none of them have the ability to create a test that measures beyond the theory's precision, absolutely every single one of them will agree with the theory. And that was my whole point: the number of tests of General relativities validity, while important, only goes to show that it holds good as far as we can tell. Again, it simply doesn't matter how many people examine it.
What you say is true, the maximum speed of particles (such as an electron) must still be the speed of light (another way of saying this is that light travels as fast as possible). However, it is possible that they, too, are affected by the same influence in empty space that light is. So, they would asymptotically approach the speed of light (as predicted by Einstein), but that wouldn't be the true maximum speed. Something like neutrinos that isn't slowed by this hypothetical resistance would be able to exceed the speed of light in vacuo, since that isn't the true maximum speed.
So all our predictions would still hold absolutely true, but some objects could travel faster than light, since light isn't traveling at the maximum possible speed. Essentially, neutrinos aren't being held back like everything else is, but their speed is still limited. I'm not sure this still doesn't have some serious problems, but it seems at least possible.
And yet General Relativity isn't even as well established a theory as Newtonian mechanics was (which had a century of observational evidence backing it up), or for that matter geocentric theory, which had millennia of observations backing it up (every scientists before and during Galileo's time believe the Earth was stationary, except for a very very tiny handful. It was actually the scientists, not religion, that rejected Galileo's theory when he first presented it.)
Both of them were overturned by more careful observations, in ways and of things we couldn't or hadn't observed before. We already know General Relativity has issues (specifically, with quantum mechanics), and while its predictions fit well with our observations so far, it hasn't actually been proven definitively. It is entirely possible that it is very accurate, but not precisely true. In fact, judging from the history of scientific theory, that is by far the most likely possibility.
New science is nearly always happens when scientists find something they don't expect. These observations may be an error, or they may be the beginning of the discovery of an entirely new theory that explains General Relativity even better, just as Relativity explained Newtonian physics better.
In Opera, you can right click with Facebook loaded, select site preferences, cookies, and check "delete new cookies every time I exit Opera". Only deletes cookies from Facebook, so other sites won't break. Also, erase existing cookies. Won't stop the cookies during the same session, but it'll help. Also, Ghostery prevents this (as others have mentioned.) I use Facebook to stay in touch with friends, but that doesn't mean I want them to know anything about any other sites I visit, TYVM.
And then your argument is: 1. Have as much sex as you want. 2. Use a condom.
Surprise surprise, people, especially in poor countries, often only listen to the first part. So, using your quote of Feynman (in fact, in my case it's more applicable, since condoms are an actual technology), condoms are not a practical solution.
No, the religion isn't the problem. The problem is people only listening to part of what the religious people are saying. Most (all?) of the religions that forbid condoms also preach sex for procreative purposes in marriage only. If you have sex with one person (and only one person), and they do the same for their entire life, it's nigh on impossible to get an STD. In fact, I'm pretty sure the safety margin is far, far higher than that with condoms. From wikipedia, the risk reduction from using a condom is about 85-95%. Much better than unprotected sex, but definitely not 100%. Condoms are NOT a preventative of STDs, they only reduce the chances (considerably). Now, maybe if everyone used condoms all the time, STD rates would (collectively) drop, but any scientist, who is being honest, would tell you that if people had as much unprotected sex as they wanted, but with only one person, STDs would vanish in about a single generation.
I should also add that humans cannot use condoms 100% of the time, as it would mean devastate our population. Japan is a pretty good example: their birth rate is currently significantly lower than their death rate (~40% lower, and that is only likely to become worse as their population ages). Condoms are at best an imperfect solution to STDs. At worse, they encourage more sexual promiscuity, which because they aren't 100% effective can easily lead to an increase in the risk of infection (over less unprotected sex.) Not saying that actually happens in practice, I don't know. However, I feel I should point out that if people actually listened to what those missionaries you so deride really say, AIDS would vanish much, much faster than it would merely through condom usage.
We shouldn't trust the schools. The parents should be talking to their children and looking for any signs of sexual conduct between them and their teachers. For that matter, they should be looking for any sexual activity by their children period.
Unfortunately, most parents in America abandoned their responsibilities to their children in exchange for personal pleasure (usually, money) quite a while ago, and asked the schools (and/or daycare) to do it for them. Monitoring and raising children is a full time job, and parents just don't want to do it anymore because they would rather have 3 cars, take expensive vacations a couple times a year, and own a couple of iPhones. And no, this isn't (just) because of "financial crises." I know plenty of families (including my own) that only have one parent working. Not to say that some genuinely can't manage it... but the majority could.
I say this as a 21 year-old who was very recently in high school. My parents cared, and sent me to a private school where things were pretty good. Most parents, however, don't really care, and hand off all their responsibilities to teachers, assuming that they will take care of it. Best case scenario: teachers can't take care of all the kids. Worst case they abuse it.
You might want to read that article closer. The ozone hole is closing, even with the effects of CFCs from inhalers still acting on it (plus all the other CFCs still floating around from other sources). Therefore, inhaler based CFCs seem not to be a serious issue.
They may be the most significant source, but the question is whether they're producing significant amounts of CFCs. From what I've heard, the ozone hole is beginning to close, and CFC inhalers are/ were still being used. While it's true that CFCs would ideally not be used period, a certain very carefully measured usage, which saves lives, might not be damaging. The problem is widespread usage, not small amounts.
More efficient != cheaper. In fact, it is usually the opposite. Car analogy: more fuel efficient cars are (usually) more expensive. More power efficient computers: more expensive. Better workers: more expensive. It may well be they pay twice as much for a contractor, who performs twice as much work as an inhouse employee.
Or it might not. However, being supplied with one small piece of information doesn't give the whole picture or determine whether private or public sector employees are more efficient. Could well be those public employees spend all their time on/.
Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't seen one of those before (but I use almost exclusively AMD boards, so I guess I wouldn't.) But note that even that board supports a max of 24GB of RAM, so you couldn't necessarily even get 32GB, even with 6 slots.
Umm, are you aware just how expensive 32GB of RAM is? It isn't quite as pricey as I was expecting, Newegg has 24GB of DDR3 for as low as $160 (holy shit RAM is getting cheap), but that assumes you have 6 RAM slots, and I've not seen a consumer board with more than 4. If you want 8GB DIMMS (for 32GB on a consumer board), you're looking at more like ~$800 USD for 4. On the other hand, a 120GB SSD is around $160. Build a 64GB into a HDD, and it's still cheaper than anywhere near that in RAM.
The whole idea is to have a gradient for caching. RAM for stuff you need really fast, an SSD for stuff you often use and want pretty fast but don't need always, and an HDD for everything.
Seriously, I think we need a person full time just to make spreadsheets and graphs of who is suing whom at this point. Soon, it'll be easy. Just put: "*".
Actually, according to Ars Technica, Fermilab got a similar result, but threw it out because the margin of error was too large. I'm guessing a lot of attention will be focused on neutrinos now.
Or the mobile companies realize they have a near-monopoly on the market, the average consumer will never notice how much they are being gouged, and there is too large a price-of-entry for any real competition to exist, so they gouge their "customers" out the ass. Yes, there is a limit to wireless bandwith, but that isn't why it is so expensive. It is expensive for the same reason many wired ISPs have 5GB caps: because they can. And because the profit is so good they have no interest in actually expanding their network to properly service their customers.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato..."We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't,"
These are real physicists, not armchair ones. They check their godamned results, especially when something like this happens. I doubt it is an error (but could be wrong.) They announced this to see if anyone has any other ideas. For instance, it could be that the transformation of the neutrinos (which the experiment was supposed to be measuring) occurs while in an FTL period, but destroys useful information (completely pulled-out-of-ass theory, but you get the idea). Meaning the result would be correct, but not contradict relativity (non-information-carrying objects can travel faster than light in certain situations.)
Slashdot Mirror
and we don't have a 'suspected drunk driver' watch list.
We do in Minnesota: "Whiskey Plates"
If Facebook finds it expensive and inconvenient to mail out physical CDs, they could agree to simply have the law changed.
FTFY to accord more with reality.
Mass effect is barely even in the category of "RPG." Although the quest system is pretty good, the equipment and skills were lacking. No, what OP (I suspect) is talking about is games more like The Witcher (1&2, especially 1), KOTOR (going back a ways), Oblivion (kinda), even Dragon Age or the soon to be released Diablo III. None of those games can be played by sitting something on the controller and walking away which is what can be done with some of the new ones (I think this sums it up nicely).
The Last Remnant, which I did play and while fun, was a terrible RPG (worse than Mass Effect. Seriously) 3rd person cover shooters are more innovative RPGs than this (in fact, they actually did involve innovation at the time.) Walking down a single pathr, absolutely no choice of skills to update (you can choose which ones a character focuses on... that is all), 2-3 choices (which you don't entirely control) for combat, group-based fighting. Honestly, it's fun for a while especially since it is more or less the only JRPG I ever played, but I cannot see how people could ever spend massive amounts of time playing games like that. I tried one of the recent FF (13 I think) games for about 30 mins once. It... didn't even feel like an RPG, it felt like walking down a narrow corridor holding down a button.
Also, neither Magicka nor Torchlight were very good RPGs, no idea why you chose those as examples. They were a lot of fun, but deep RPG action they were not. OP is right: Western RPGs have, if not grown deeper, at least expanded and experimented in the genre. JRPGs seem to have devolved.
You have a valid point about minor changes adding up to produce a version that doesn't look anything like other versions with the same number (the same argument justifies upgrading the Linux kernel to 3.0). And it is perfectly valid to decide after, say, 12 minor releases "ok, next one will increment the major number." This will not make nerds rage (ok, it'll make a few mad, but you can safely ignore them.) It is much different to suddenly say "our version number is for marketing purposes only and means nothing technically" and increment the major number for every single release. A Year/Month system would be far preferable to what they are doing now, if they insist on a rapid release cycle, we definitely agree on that.
While it used to be true that people compared software by version number, and it certainly is for products that are still in the v1.0 (or maybe 2.0 even), how many people today really compare software by version number any more? Or even know what version they are using (especially of Chrome, which doesn't even advertise it unless you look closely), unless they are fairly nerdy? More relevantly, is there seriously a large group of people (I realize there is at least one person) who didn't use Firefox because it was "only" version 3? And more importantly, was it worth pissing of the very group of people who made your product popular in the first place (i.e. the techies)?
Software versions are supposed to have meaning. Major numbers are for important new features and UI overhauls, minor numbers are for minor features (or large technical fixes) and other small changes, and final digits are for bugfixes. I should be able to look at a version number and be able to estimate how much the software changed since another version. That has been the standard for years, and there is absolutely no reason to change it. Firefox has completely destroyed that. They didn't start it, true, but they also shouldn't have given away to it.
For commercial software, obviously, using the year as a version number makes quite a lot of sense (besides even just selling new copies every year), or for a driver (like AMD does). But for a browser? What sense does that make? Why bother? Why not just do what has worked quite well for years and use a proper version system? That is why people are annoyed at Mozilla. Because the change makes no goddamned sense.
Did you read the part where I mentioned previous theories were not disproven by more people looking at them, but by things we couldn't observe before? Technological innovation allows for new scientific theories to be created. It matters much less how many people are looking at a theory, and more about how well they can look at a theory. Because of the nature of relativity, it is very difficult to confirm absolutely. In fact, there are only a handful of direct observations that confirm it's predictions (specifically, thing like gravitational redshift and the precession of Mercury's perihelion. There are a few others as well.) Because neutrinos fit that category quite precisely.
More importantly, though, you should note that both the theories I referenced hold correct to within a certain degree of precision. I have absolutely no doubt that general relativity holds good to a very high degree of precision. That is different, though, from being perfectly correct. And no matter how many scientists examine a theory (it can be literally infinite: it won't matter), so long as none of them have the ability to create a test that measures beyond the theory's precision, absolutely every single one of them will agree with the theory. And that was my whole point: the number of tests of General relativities validity, while important, only goes to show that it holds good as far as we can tell. Again, it simply doesn't matter how many people examine it.
What you say is true, the maximum speed of particles (such as an electron) must still be the speed of light (another way of saying this is that light travels as fast as possible). However, it is possible that they, too, are affected by the same influence in empty space that light is. So, they would asymptotically approach the speed of light (as predicted by Einstein), but that wouldn't be the true maximum speed. Something like neutrinos that isn't slowed by this hypothetical resistance would be able to exceed the speed of light in vacuo, since that isn't the true maximum speed.
So all our predictions would still hold absolutely true, but some objects could travel faster than light, since light isn't traveling at the maximum possible speed. Essentially, neutrinos aren't being held back like everything else is, but their speed is still limited. I'm not sure this still doesn't have some serious problems, but it seems at least possible.
And yet General Relativity isn't even as well established a theory as Newtonian mechanics was (which had a century of observational evidence backing it up), or for that matter geocentric theory, which had millennia of observations backing it up (every scientists before and during Galileo's time believe the Earth was stationary, except for a very very tiny handful. It was actually the scientists, not religion, that rejected Galileo's theory when he first presented it.)
Both of them were overturned by more careful observations, in ways and of things we couldn't or hadn't observed before. We already know General Relativity has issues (specifically, with quantum mechanics), and while its predictions fit well with our observations so far, it hasn't actually been proven definitively. It is entirely possible that it is very accurate, but not precisely true. In fact, judging from the history of scientific theory, that is by far the most likely possibility.
New science is nearly always happens when scientists find something they don't expect. These observations may be an error, or they may be the beginning of the discovery of an entirely new theory that explains General Relativity even better, just as Relativity explained Newtonian physics better.
In Opera, you can right click with Facebook loaded, select site preferences, cookies, and check "delete new cookies every time I exit Opera". Only deletes cookies from Facebook, so other sites won't break. Also, erase existing cookies. Won't stop the cookies during the same session, but it'll help. Also, Ghostery prevents this (as others have mentioned.) I use Facebook to stay in touch with friends, but that doesn't mean I want them to know anything about any other sites I visit, TYVM.
And then your argument is:
1. Have as much sex as you want.
2. Use a condom.
Surprise surprise, people, especially in poor countries, often only listen to the first part. So, using your quote of Feynman (in fact, in my case it's more applicable, since condoms are an actual technology), condoms are not a practical solution.
No, the religion isn't the problem. The problem is people only listening to part of what the religious people are saying. Most (all?) of the religions that forbid condoms also preach sex for procreative purposes in marriage only. If you have sex with one person (and only one person), and they do the same for their entire life, it's nigh on impossible to get an STD. In fact, I'm pretty sure the safety margin is far, far higher than that with condoms. From wikipedia, the risk reduction from using a condom is about 85-95%. Much better than unprotected sex, but definitely not 100%. Condoms are NOT a preventative of STDs, they only reduce the chances (considerably). Now, maybe if everyone used condoms all the time, STD rates would (collectively) drop, but any scientist, who is being honest, would tell you that if people had as much unprotected sex as they wanted, but with only one person, STDs would vanish in about a single generation.
I should also add that humans cannot use condoms 100% of the time, as it would mean devastate our population. Japan is a pretty good example: their birth rate is currently significantly lower than their death rate (~40% lower, and that is only likely to become worse as their population ages). Condoms are at best an imperfect solution to STDs. At worse, they encourage more sexual promiscuity, which because they aren't 100% effective can easily lead to an increase in the risk of infection (over less unprotected sex.) Not saying that actually happens in practice, I don't know. However, I feel I should point out that if people actually listened to what those missionaries you so deride really say, AIDS would vanish much, much faster than it would merely through condom usage.
Yes. Also, the past. They're commonly called "cardboard boxes", and they fold up quite nicely.
We shouldn't trust the schools. The parents should be talking to their children and looking for any signs of sexual conduct between them and their teachers. For that matter, they should be looking for any sexual activity by their children period.
Unfortunately, most parents in America abandoned their responsibilities to their children in exchange for personal pleasure (usually, money) quite a while ago, and asked the schools (and/or daycare) to do it for them. Monitoring and raising children is a full time job, and parents just don't want to do it anymore because they would rather have 3 cars, take expensive vacations a couple times a year, and own a couple of iPhones. And no, this isn't (just) because of "financial crises." I know plenty of families (including my own) that only have one parent working. Not to say that some genuinely can't manage it... but the majority could.
I say this as a 21 year-old who was very recently in high school. My parents cared, and sent me to a private school where things were pretty good. Most parents, however, don't really care, and hand off all their responsibilities to teachers, assuming that they will take care of it. Best case scenario: teachers can't take care of all the kids. Worst case they abuse it.
You might want to read that article closer. The ozone hole is closing, even with the effects of CFCs from inhalers still acting on it (plus all the other CFCs still floating around from other sources). Therefore, inhaler based CFCs seem not to be a serious issue.
They may be the most significant source, but the question is whether they're producing significant amounts of CFCs. From what I've heard, the ozone hole is beginning to close, and CFC inhalers are/ were still being used. While it's true that CFCs would ideally not be used period, a certain very carefully measured usage, which saves lives, might not be damaging. The problem is widespread usage, not small amounts.
More efficient != cheaper. In fact, it is usually the opposite. Car analogy: more fuel efficient cars are (usually) more expensive. More power efficient computers: more expensive. Better workers: more expensive. It may well be they pay twice as much for a contractor, who performs twice as much work as an inhouse employee.
Or it might not. However, being supplied with one small piece of information doesn't give the whole picture or determine whether private or public sector employees are more efficient. Could well be those public employees spend all their time on /.
Judging from the name, it's a server that shoots sparks and sleeps around a lot.
Thanks for pointing that out, I hadn't seen one of those before (but I use almost exclusively AMD boards, so I guess I wouldn't.) But note that even that board supports a max of 24GB of RAM, so you couldn't necessarily even get 32GB, even with 6 slots.
Umm, are you aware just how expensive 32GB of RAM is? It isn't quite as pricey as I was expecting, Newegg has 24GB of DDR3 for as low as $160 (holy shit RAM is getting cheap), but that assumes you have 6 RAM slots, and I've not seen a consumer board with more than 4. If you want 8GB DIMMS (for 32GB on a consumer board), you're looking at more like ~$800 USD for 4. On the other hand, a 120GB SSD is around $160. Build a 64GB into a HDD, and it's still cheaper than anywhere near that in RAM.
The whole idea is to have a gradient for caching. RAM for stuff you need really fast, an SSD for stuff you often use and want pretty fast but don't need always, and an HDD for everything.
how quickly the MPAA sued the scientists for infringement of copyright
He owns an iPhone, and the instruction manual on how to hold it.
Seriously, I think we need a person full time just to make spreadsheets and graphs of who is suing whom at this point. Soon, it'll be easy. Just put: "*".
Actually, according to Ars Technica, Fermilab got a similar result, but threw it out because the margin of error was too large. I'm guessing a lot of attention will be focused on neutrinos now.
Or the mobile companies realize they have a near-monopoly on the market, the average consumer will never notice how much they are being gouged, and there is too large a price-of-entry for any real competition to exist, so they gouge their "customers" out the ass. Yes, there is a limit to wireless bandwith, but that isn't why it is so expensive. It is expensive for the same reason many wired ISPs have 5GB caps: because they can. And because the profit is so good they have no interest in actually expanding their network to properly service their customers.
"We tried to find all possible explanations for this," said report author Antonio Ereditato..."We wanted to find a mistake - trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects - and we didn't,"
These are real physicists, not armchair ones. They check their godamned results, especially when something like this happens. I doubt it is an error (but could be wrong.) They announced this to see if anyone has any other ideas. For instance, it could be that the transformation of the neutrinos (which the experiment was supposed to be measuring) occurs while in an FTL period, but destroys useful information (completely pulled-out-of-ass theory, but you get the idea). Meaning the result would be correct, but not contradict relativity (non-information-carrying objects can travel faster than light in certain situations.)