Nidi62 said nothing of money. There is more to cost than just a currency you throw around to get shit done. If it came down to mass-extinction levels of 'doomsday', money wouldn't mean shit. You need people, and you need resources. The US has plenty of both to throw at the problem. And if people are faced with donating their time and effort versus mass extinction, people would throw down and work for free. And if we turn out to be a species that is so obsessed with money and possessions that we can't ignore that for the survival of our species, we sure as hell don't deserve that survival.
It actually seems to me that 7 years would be plenty of time to move all of the people in the US into China, and all the Chinese into the US. Who's fucked now, bitches?
If you run a company that only makes a minimal profit margin while charging a price that the consumers find grossly overpriced then I think you need to deeply examine your infrastructure. It really is sad that enough people go along with it to keep this sort of broken business model alive. Makes me happy that I'm a prepaid user that only feeds these fools about $20 a year.
So don't change phones. Unless you move from a CDMA carrier to a GSM carrier or vice versa, just have your phone unlocked and take it to your new carrier. Most carriers will unlock your phone for free after the end of your contract, and if not you can usually find someone to do it for you for $10-$20. You have options, it just sounds like you need to be informed of them.:-)
SMS messages are a stripped down version of email messages. Fewer headers, plaintext only, and a limited character count. But that's it. Both traverse the internet the same, and both end up in an inbox. You can use any email client you wish to send text messages to someone's phone, and vice-versa. Enter an email address into your phone instead of a phone number and you'll see what I mean. The only caveat is that you have to know the carrier for the person you're emailing a text so you can get the host correct (since you have to enter PhoneNumber@tmobl.net, for example.) But even that is trivial, as most reverse phone number sites on the interent will tell you the carrier, and looking up the SMS host for a carrier is readily available information as well.
The only reason full featured email won't replace texting is because the telephone infrastucture isn't (and likely never will be if these prices are any indication) configured to support it. The cell towers recognize SMS and MMS messages and route them accordingly, but are set to ignore 'data' so they can overcharge you for it. Since we have DSL in homes I'm reasonably certain cell towers could route data traffic rather easily if the carrier allowed them to. But they would rather set up 3G and 4G networks for this and overcharge everyone to use it. Despicable really.
How can we punish them with defection when we are stuck with contracts where they can punish us for such a move?
By changing the terms of the contract, the carrier themselves must legally terminate the existing contract and attempt to replace it with the new one. Since they terminated the old contract, you are not subject to the early termination fee. They will likely try to surreptitously get you to agree to the new contract (go online and read the new agreement, which is 8000 pages of legalese) and also try to charge you for termination if you disagree. Don't let them. Just make sure you leave before 'agreeing' to the new contract, otherwise you are legally allowed to be charged the early termination fee. Carriers just like to take advantage of people that aren't aware of their rights.
Also, be aware that changes to privacy policies and other corporate policies are great times to break ties with a carrier without paying the early termination fee.
Indeed it is. Personally it annoys the hell out of me that it so many homophones. Makes it far to easy to know what you want to say but still say it incorrectly.:-/
Ah ha! So Obama is one of those brownies I've been hearing so much about. I wonder how many merit badges he's earned, because I've sure as hell never seen him in uniform.
With an electronic system you could, yourself and nobody else, verify that the source code is correct. Thousands, millions of people could, every one of them do the same check. With a well designed system there could exist a way to check that the voting machine has that same software installed.
Electronic voting systems are, potentially, the most secure alternative.
I agree with you on your last point. They do have the potential to be the most secure form, but unfortunately that relies entirely on a chain of trust. Trusting your own computer to not have malware, trusting your ISP to not block submissions and craft valid acceptance responses, trusting the server to agregate results properly, and trusting that the people announcing the results aren't lying. You can only fully trust the first link in that chain. Through collusion, ISPs could easily gain the ability to block submissions and send you a falsified acceptance response. Code review only grants a false sense of security because you have zero guarantee that the code you reviewed a week prior to the election is the code actually being run on election day. Electronic voting machines could simply present you with the 'good' source code while running something else. The switch could be hidden at the hardware layer, embeded in a custom IC, and unless you have direct access to the hardware and the tools to reverse engineer it to discover its behavior you're beat. Even then you're beat because they could set up patsy after patsy on the boards so you end up searching so long that you either give up and trust it's secure, or you find the dupe way too late to contest the results. Web clients could easily be falsified to give the appearance of running the software you already reviewed. Your only recourse would be a client side application that you have to compile yourself, so you are assured that the code is legit. But even then, you have no guarantee of what the server side software is doing or if it has been compromised since the code review. And of course, the last link in that chain, the people reporting the results, can never be trusted.
Any online/electronic system you come up with that has verifiable integrity at every one of those links will be overly cumbersome and outright refused by the general public. Joe Q Public does not want to have to compile his own source code just to vote. Joe Q Public wants his nice shiny website that makes it all click click submit. Any system readily adopted by the public will have too many points of failure to be trustworthy. Now I have to admit that our current system has plenty of points of failure and compromise as is. But switching to an electronic voting system would introduce so many new avenues of attack it isn't even funny. We've seen how easily Anonymous can vandalize and steal from government systems, do you honestly think the voting systems would be any more secure?
An electronic system could never work, because at all points of trust, you need someone in charge who is trustworthy. And who would we have calling all the shots for a new system like this? The government. That group of people known for the most despicable and rampant corruption in the last century plus. Corruption begets corruption, making the entire system untrustworthy from day one. (Note that this is not to say Canada would have the same problems as the US; I lack required knowledge of their government.) People are corruptable. You need people to design and run these systems. The systems can never be trusted. As much as would love to see a system that could be trusted, I just see it as a virtual impossibility. I'd much rather we stick with the system we have now.
Agreed. Given my experiences and observations of the world, there's no way that, if a god should happen to exist, he/she/it is anywhere close to as benevolent as the Christian based faiths make him out to be.
I actually don't know dick about the technical side of singing. I was genuinely confused about the argument you were making; I apologize if you took it as a slight. It sounded to me that you were the one claiming singing in tune was the only important thing, in which case your argument sounded rather dense. Thank you for expounding upon the topic for me.:-)
Of course having read the other comments it becomes apparent that they are capturing the photons that are normally not emitted anyway due to being absorbed by the polarizing filters. So both our comments are rather moot.:-/
Remind me why you needed Lulu's ultimate weapon (I genuinely forget what it had on it.) Was it 1MP cost, or double cast, or both? I remember Yuna's ultimate weapon had both 1 MP cost and double cast which made every fight trivial once you teach her flare and then even more trivial once you teach her holy. Hell, Yuna could solo the final boss in about 10 turns with that setup. Maybe you could use that instead?
More on topic though, I agree with you some of the shit in that game was a rediculous grind. The lightning dodging being a prime example, and beating the chocobo race with a time of 0:00'00 was rediculous as well. Though, I did complete the game probably 97%, including the optional summons and the secret cutsceen you got in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth (where you find Yojimbo) if you went there after you reached the final area of the game. The game and story was great, but parts were just totally horrendous.
Agreed to a point. But there are points in many games where you consistently have trouble passing the obstacle in your path. Being presented with a box after your 5th death asking if you'd like to skip ahead 2 minutes would be a boon in some places.
Of course some games attempt this and fail utterly. It was either God of War 1 or 2 that allowed you to turn on "easy" combat after a certain number of deaths. Except they didn't pay attention to how you died. I never once died in actual combat. Hell I enjoyed the hard combat, and was damned good at it. Instead I repeatedly died to the poorly designed jumping puzzles with instant death pits. Hello? If I keep falling in the same fucking pit over and over I don't need the enemies to be easier, I need to skip that fucking jump. DERP.
I actually hate it when the enemies "scale". It doesn't make any sense. If I run off and level up, why should a goblin suddenly get 1000 times stronger
I take it you've never played a game that actually got the scaling right. Come to think of it, I don't know that I have myself. But there is a right way to do it. That slime you can only barely beat at the beginning of the game shouldn't be able to be one hit at the end of the game, but neither should they take 10 minutes to kill either. You need a sliding scale that allows the bad-ass creepy crawlies to scale in tandem with you (or perhaps slightly faster, so you are forced to play better) mid-level beasties that scale slightly slower than you, and little shits that scale, but rather slowly. This keeps everything in the game reasonably deadly the whole game no matter how strong you get, but most of them you can slowly outpace with enough time invested. These subsets of enemies give a more dynamic feel to the scaling, which would feel more realistic than having a slime be just as hard to kill at the level cap as it was when you started.
Of course all of this can be circumvented by properly balancing game mechanics so that you naturally fare better against weaker creatures. The handy thing about scaling enemies though is that their scaling coefficients can have a modifier applied them rather easily, giving you multiple difficulty levels. Though the same could be said of the static method, by simply modifying enemy HP, chance to be hit, attack & movement speed, etc. My point though is that scaling can be done correctly, but I find myself hard pressed to think of a game that has figured that out yet.
That "Learning to Fly" mission was the absolute worst thing I've ever played... The plane in that mission had the maneuverability of a brick so controlling it with a keyboard was damn near impossible.
Don't feel too bad. That mission sucked dick with the controller it was designed for. It was actually the only mission in that entire game I had any trouble with at all. The rest was cake. Except for those stupid gang wars at the end that always seemed to break out when you were as far as possible from the zone under siege. It got to the point where I just said fuck it, sat down and took over every last territory in one fell swoop. Ended that poorly designed shit right there.
Slashdot Mirror
For one thing, it's rotating in three dimensions
Is it feasible to send more than one and use them as stabilizers?
Probably. Mickey keeps trying to get him to wear pants but the damn dog just keeps scooting out of them...
Nidi62 said nothing of money. There is more to cost than just a currency you throw around to get shit done. If it came down to mass-extinction levels of 'doomsday', money wouldn't mean shit. You need people, and you need resources. The US has plenty of both to throw at the problem. And if people are faced with donating their time and effort versus mass extinction, people would throw down and work for free. And if we turn out to be a species that is so obsessed with money and possessions that we can't ignore that for the survival of our species, we sure as hell don't deserve that survival.
It actually seems to me that 7 years would be plenty of time to move all of the people in the US into China, and all the Chinese into the US. Who's fucked now, bitches?
Oh, you mean encrypted email.
If you run a company that only makes a minimal profit margin while charging a price that the consumers find grossly overpriced then I think you need to deeply examine your infrastructure. It really is sad that enough people go along with it to keep this sort of broken business model alive. Makes me happy that I'm a prepaid user that only feeds these fools about $20 a year.
So don't change phones. Unless you move from a CDMA carrier to a GSM carrier or vice versa, just have your phone unlocked and take it to your new carrier. Most carriers will unlock your phone for free after the end of your contract, and if not you can usually find someone to do it for you for $10-$20. You have options, it just sounds like you need to be informed of them. :-)
SMS messages are a stripped down version of email messages. Fewer headers, plaintext only, and a limited character count. But that's it. Both traverse the internet the same, and both end up in an inbox. You can use any email client you wish to send text messages to someone's phone, and vice-versa. Enter an email address into your phone instead of a phone number and you'll see what I mean. The only caveat is that you have to know the carrier for the person you're emailing a text so you can get the host correct (since you have to enter PhoneNumber@tmobl.net, for example.) But even that is trivial, as most reverse phone number sites on the interent will tell you the carrier, and looking up the SMS host for a carrier is readily available information as well.
The only reason full featured email won't replace texting is because the telephone infrastucture isn't (and likely never will be if these prices are any indication) configured to support it. The cell towers recognize SMS and MMS messages and route them accordingly, but are set to ignore 'data' so they can overcharge you for it. Since we have DSL in homes I'm reasonably certain cell towers could route data traffic rather easily if the carrier allowed them to. But they would rather set up 3G and 4G networks for this and overcharge everyone to use it. Despicable really.
How can we punish them with defection when we are stuck with contracts where they can punish us for such a move?
By changing the terms of the contract, the carrier themselves must legally terminate the existing contract and attempt to replace it with the new one. Since they terminated the old contract, you are not subject to the early termination fee. They will likely try to surreptitously get you to agree to the new contract (go online and read the new agreement, which is 8000 pages of legalese) and also try to charge you for termination if you disagree. Don't let them. Just make sure you leave before 'agreeing' to the new contract, otherwise you are legally allowed to be charged the early termination fee. Carriers just like to take advantage of people that aren't aware of their rights.
Also, be aware that changes to privacy policies and other corporate policies are great times to break ties with a carrier without paying the early termination fee.
None. ;-)
Indeed it is. Personally it annoys the hell out of me that it so many homophones. Makes it far to easy to know what you want to say but still say it incorrectly. :-/
Someone with Giraffobia. I mean have you seen that guy? He's a giraffe and he talks. That shit is just creepy.
Ah ha! So Obama is one of those brownies I've been hearing so much about. I wonder how many merit badges he's earned, because I've sure as hell never seen him in uniform.
If I had to guess, the only one I would place as sounding remotely "African American" would be Tim Smith.
Will the answers be revealed, and do I get a cookie if I'm right?
Kudos on your respect for varied races. I'd give you props instead, but I'm white.
With an electronic system you could, yourself and nobody else, verify that the source code is correct. Thousands, millions of people could, every one of them do the same check. With a well designed system there could exist a way to check that the voting machine has that same software installed.
Electronic voting systems are, potentially, the most secure alternative.
I agree with you on your last point. They do have the potential to be the most secure form, but unfortunately that relies entirely on a chain of trust. Trusting your own computer to not have malware, trusting your ISP to not block submissions and craft valid acceptance responses, trusting the server to agregate results properly, and trusting that the people announcing the results aren't lying. You can only fully trust the first link in that chain. Through collusion, ISPs could easily gain the ability to block submissions and send you a falsified acceptance response. Code review only grants a false sense of security because you have zero guarantee that the code you reviewed a week prior to the election is the code actually being run on election day. Electronic voting machines could simply present you with the 'good' source code while running something else. The switch could be hidden at the hardware layer, embeded in a custom IC, and unless you have direct access to the hardware and the tools to reverse engineer it to discover its behavior you're beat. Even then you're beat because they could set up patsy after patsy on the boards so you end up searching so long that you either give up and trust it's secure, or you find the dupe way too late to contest the results. Web clients could easily be falsified to give the appearance of running the software you already reviewed. Your only recourse would be a client side application that you have to compile yourself, so you are assured that the code is legit. But even then, you have no guarantee of what the server side software is doing or if it has been compromised since the code review. And of course, the last link in that chain, the people reporting the results, can never be trusted.
Any online/electronic system you come up with that has verifiable integrity at every one of those links will be overly cumbersome and outright refused by the general public. Joe Q Public does not want to have to compile his own source code just to vote. Joe Q Public wants his nice shiny website that makes it all click click submit. Any system readily adopted by the public will have too many points of failure to be trustworthy. Now I have to admit that our current system has plenty of points of failure and compromise as is. But switching to an electronic voting system would introduce so many new avenues of attack it isn't even funny. We've seen how easily Anonymous can vandalize and steal from government systems, do you honestly think the voting systems would be any more secure?
An electronic system could never work, because at all points of trust, you need someone in charge who is trustworthy. And who would we have calling all the shots for a new system like this? The government. That group of people known for the most despicable and rampant corruption in the last century plus. Corruption begets corruption, making the entire system untrustworthy from day one. (Note that this is not to say Canada would have the same problems as the US; I lack required knowledge of their government.) People are corruptable. You need people to design and run these systems. The systems can never be trusted. As much as would love to see a system that could be trusted, I just see it as a virtual impossibility. I'd much rather we stick with the system we have now.
I'm having trouble believing you guys thought I was serious. :-(
Agreed. Given my experiences and observations of the world, there's no way that, if a god should happen to exist, he/she/it is anywhere close to as benevolent as the Christian based faiths make him out to be.
I actually don't know dick about the technical side of singing. I was genuinely confused about the argument you were making; I apologize if you took it as a slight. It sounded to me that you were the one claiming singing in tune was the only important thing, in which case your argument sounded rather dense. Thank you for expounding upon the topic for me. :-)
Of course having read the other comments it becomes apparent that they are capturing the photons that are normally not emitted anyway due to being absorbed by the polarizing filters. So both our comments are rather moot. :-/
Remind me why you needed Lulu's ultimate weapon (I genuinely forget what it had on it.) Was it 1MP cost, or double cast, or both? I remember Yuna's ultimate weapon had both 1 MP cost and double cast which made every fight trivial once you teach her flare and then even more trivial once you teach her holy. Hell, Yuna could solo the final boss in about 10 turns with that setup. Maybe you could use that instead?
More on topic though, I agree with you some of the shit in that game was a rediculous grind. The lightning dodging being a prime example, and beating the chocobo race with a time of 0:00'00 was rediculous as well. Though, I did complete the game probably 97%, including the optional summons and the secret cutsceen you got in the Cavern of the Stolen Fayth (where you find Yojimbo) if you went there after you reached the final area of the game. The game and story was great, but parts were just totally horrendous.
Agreed to a point. But there are points in many games where you consistently have trouble passing the obstacle in your path. Being presented with a box after your 5th death asking if you'd like to skip ahead 2 minutes would be a boon in some places.
Of course some games attempt this and fail utterly. It was either God of War 1 or 2 that allowed you to turn on "easy" combat after a certain number of deaths. Except they didn't pay attention to how you died. I never once died in actual combat. Hell I enjoyed the hard combat, and was damned good at it. Instead I repeatedly died to the poorly designed jumping puzzles with instant death pits. Hello? If I keep falling in the same fucking pit over and over I don't need the enemies to be easier, I need to skip that fucking jump. DERP.
At least I have chicken.
I actually hate it when the enemies "scale". It doesn't make any sense. If I run off and level up, why should a goblin suddenly get 1000 times stronger
I take it you've never played a game that actually got the scaling right. Come to think of it, I don't know that I have myself. But there is a right way to do it. That slime you can only barely beat at the beginning of the game shouldn't be able to be one hit at the end of the game, but neither should they take 10 minutes to kill either. You need a sliding scale that allows the bad-ass creepy crawlies to scale in tandem with you (or perhaps slightly faster, so you are forced to play better) mid-level beasties that scale slightly slower than you, and little shits that scale, but rather slowly. This keeps everything in the game reasonably deadly the whole game no matter how strong you get, but most of them you can slowly outpace with enough time invested. These subsets of enemies give a more dynamic feel to the scaling, which would feel more realistic than having a slime be just as hard to kill at the level cap as it was when you started.
Of course all of this can be circumvented by properly balancing game mechanics so that you naturally fare better against weaker creatures. The handy thing about scaling enemies though is that their scaling coefficients can have a modifier applied them rather easily, giving you multiple difficulty levels. Though the same could be said of the static method, by simply modifying enemy HP, chance to be hit, attack & movement speed, etc. My point though is that scaling can be done correctly, but I find myself hard pressed to think of a game that has figured that out yet.
That "Learning to Fly" mission was the absolute worst thing I've ever played... The plane in that mission had the maneuverability of a brick so controlling it with a keyboard was damn near impossible.
Don't feel too bad. That mission sucked dick with the controller it was designed for. It was actually the only mission in that entire game I had any trouble with at all. The rest was cake. Except for those stupid gang wars at the end that always seemed to break out when you were as far as possible from the zone under siege. It got to the point where I just said fuck it, sat down and took over every last territory in one fell swoop. Ended that poorly designed shit right there.