I wanted to do this on a slightly lower scale, maybe a 1/4 mile range or so.
But I wanted to tie it in with a scrolling LED sign in my rear window that displays the "Now Playing" and perhaps another LED sign that displays my broadcast frequency: "Now Broadcasting On..."
I don't think that my antenna has to point up, in order to save power. An effectively two-dimensional antenna that eminates in a maybe 5-degree arc, 360 degrees about a point on the roof of my car. This would hopefully increase the effectiveness of my radio transmission and keep me under the FCC regs that would require a license.
I put the cost for this at about $300 to put together, plus time, effort, and all that. Also, it kind of necessitates having an in-car computer, because you need to populate the scrolling display somehow. (serial interface usually, could probably work out a way to interface with that minty mp3 player that ladyada made. Decode the id3 tag and push it out to a buffer of some kind which spits it to the scrolling display when it's ready)
Regarding #2 there, I have a question: why isn't firearm usage and safety taught in schools? You'd think it would help cut down on the accidental shootings that kids keep getting themselves into.
High school is not necessary, I wish they'd just abolish it and just move people into college sooner.
Most people convicted of DUIs, however, are repeat offenders. So while it may be everyone's best hope to prevent all DUIs, I would think that preventing some DUIs would also be acceptable to the majority. This is kind of like how they won't make every citizen pee in a cup every week to prove they aren't using drugs, but they make those with drug convictions do so.
Read John Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education" -- it will open your eyes to what enforced, required schooling has done to the minds of America. It's turned us into perfect industrial "worker bees" but the industrial revolution is over and the entire push behind forced schooling doesn't really exist anymore. We aren't a nation of factory workers anymore, with most companies' manufacturing operations having long ago moved overseas.
Now we're locked into a system which was created to solve a problem that doesn't exist any longer. Not only are we locked in, but we don't know how to fix the system to solve the current problems. Things like children not knowing their currency (the few recent stories I've heard about people freaking out over $2 bills for example) or not knowing their civil rights ("no officer, you cannot come into my daddy's house without a thing called a warrant, bye mr. police man.") are things that I see as problems.
Homosexuality is another issue that nobody will touch with a ten-foot pole at any time during a child's public education. I don't think that homosexuality is a problem, but the lack of understanding of homosexuality creates a problem. It creates problems of prejudice, fear, uncertainty, and so forth. One errant "fag" comment in a lockerroom can turn Bobby Jones into Bobby McFag for the rest of the school year if all they have to go on is a father-instilled belief that anybody with a lisp likes it in the poop chute. Have you noticed that "fag" is probably the most common insult among teenaged children these days? Saying something is gay or homosexual, it's like the top-notch insult. Might this have anything to do with us treating homosexuality as so hush-hush/weak/taboo/evil/must-not-speak-of/etc?
So many people are shot by other people who claim, often proveably, that they did not expect the gun to shoot, though it did. That's an unsafe product, like a car with bad brakes, which manufacturers should know could be safer, and could redesign for greater safety, but don't.
Actually, no, guns are neither unsafe nor are they anything like cars with bad brakes. New gun operators, however, are a lot like unlicensed automobile drivers. People who don't know how to operate a weapon, handling a weapon, and discharging it by accident--this is much more easily paralelled with people who don't know how to operate a motor vehicle driving it into a wall, by accident.
I say "unlicensed" because, before getting behind the wheel of a car to drive on a federal, state, county, or city road, you must be licensed and in most states, this requires taking a driver training course and passing both a written and a driving test. There are no such requirements for firearms in my own state, though I don't know about the others. This fact serves to reinforce my belief that operator error is responsible for most handgun-related accidents. And operator error is not some new phenomenon that has never plagued gun-using society before; accidental firearm discharges were a top killer among those traveling the Oregon Trail.
It has nothing to do with the safety of the device, it has to do with the device operator's lack of cognizant understanding of the device's function and functionality.
Translated: ignorance may be bliss, but it also tends to be deadly.
Why is it that us, the capable, intelligent masses, limited though we are in number, are kept from the options we so desire? It's not that everybody wants to use / would use a particular feature, but what is the ultimate restriction-mentality about "implement it only if everyone will use it, do not implement advanced functionality because it may confuse most users."
Why can there not be a button, a magic button that says "Turn on all advanced features" which enables things like tabbed browsing and perhaps neat things like mouse gesture navigation and session management options. The one thing that I *love* about Opera is its Session Management functionality, limited though it may be. In the event of a browser crash, a system failure (power failure, cpu fan failure, spill lots of liquid [something], etc), or some other such unfortunateness, the state of all the windows and their contained tabs can be restored. These sessions can be saved, I have a perl script that I use to copy my "autosave.win" (I believe it's called, it's been a couple years since I've touched the script, I just give it the nod every night at midnight when it runs as a scheduled task) to a filename descriptive of the date/time at an archive location.
I do a lot of reading about a lot of diverse topics. I have a lot of diverse interests and pursuits. Opera enables me to have 50 tabs or more open per window and stil be easily navigable. I like the ability to more or less completely saturate my brain with information by way of Opera's tabbed browsing features, and how their session management ties into it.
You know what's ultra-hot? The rough equivalent of tabbed desktops. It's called a VWM: Virtual Workspace Manager. If you tell Explorer to "suck your wang" (I've told it so many times. Oh Explorer, how I loathe thee!) you can actually use anything as your shell. I like Litestep, for now. Litestep's VWM allows me to have a grid four "virtual desktops" wide and two virtual desktops tall. I can click and drag windows between workspaces, from the VWM. I can switch workspaces from the VWM. I like to think of the litestep UI, as it is highly skinnable, as a "HUD" in a conventional game. If you think of any conventional game, the information is NEVER concentrated in one location. Certain relavent pieces of information should be in certain locations, and other pieces of information could/should be obscured. For example, I like having a huge clock in the lower right-hand corner of my screen, but there's no system tray down there. The system tray is a small bar at the top of the right hand side of my screen. There's also the interesting little shortcut buttons that Litestep offers me... These buttons can be set up to perform a different action depending upon the type of click it receives. I've currently got the first one set up so that a left-click launches Firefox, and a right-click launches Eudora. The next is text/graphics editor for left/right clicks respectively. There's a few more, but I believe you understand the functionality that pleases me about the ui in general: it's customizable, modular (the ui is driven by an underlying plug-in based architecture which enables the programmatic creation of arbitrary "HUD elements" as I'll call them), free (free is important), and empowers the user if they choose to be empowered. There are basic interfaces available, and there are skins that make use of modules that will rock your socks: System Monitoring, VWM, a built-in set of media player controls, advanced menuing functionality (ever wanted a system sub-menu buried inside some other menu to stay around for a while? Well, you can just grab a small bar at the top of just about any litestep menu and do so by dragging it away from the menu that it was opened from) and so forth.
As a total tangent, do you know what keeps me off Linux? Games. The games on Windows PCs are just hands-down better than the ones offered on Linux or any of the consoles, and have been for years. At least, the games I've been wanting to play. And my PC is able to emulate older game systems, allowing me the ability to enjoy console games that I have enjoyed in the past.
They don't care what your aim was, all they care about is that some kid is doing stuff they shouldn't be.
Oh, so true. School has so little to do with encouraging and enriching the lives of children and so much to do with putting them into boxes and ensuring that you "know your place."
A book I enjoy on the topic begins with this:
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.
This man, John Gatto, was NY State teacher of the year--the same year he quit, on the grounds that he wanted a career where it wasn't his job to hurt children any more. He's written a book called "The Underground History of American Education" which is available in its entirety online. Enjoy the read.
Your argument is kind of wonky and leaves out important details. Here's a better one:
I have a television with a subscription to a certain channel that airs a certain show. It should be acceptable for me to watch a recording of that particular show that somebody else has made from their television.
So to liken it to radio would be thus:
I have a radio which can tune in a certain channel that plays a certain song. It should be acceptable for me to listen to a recording of that particular song that somebody else has made from their own radio.
It's important to acknowledge that a TV-Rip from some british television station or a satellite rebroadcaster or the like might have an obnoxious little logo in the corner. It's important to acknowledge that a TV-Rip is not of DVD quality. Hell, it isn't even of TV quality, most of the time.
Downloading a 192kbps 44khz stereo MP3 of some new song ripped from a CD is very different from downloading a 96kbps 22khz Stereo MP3 that was recorded off an FM radio.
This rasies an interesting question though: is it illegal to record FM radio? Is it illegal to record FM radio and convert everything to MP3 at 96kbps/22khz/etc? If I put these songs on the internet, at that point, is that illegal?
Just freaking press escape to stop the page from switching when it tries. All this clicking and mouse navigation is unnecessary. The window has focus, use the key the way it was meant to be used to escape from forbes' auto-proceeding madness.
I have one of these on a 250gb Maxtor drive right now and the drive is totally cool to the touch. The rubber is somewhat unnecessary because my drive used a fluid dynamic bearing motor and therefore makes zero noise to begin with...
I wanted to mod you funny but I doubted anybody else would go to google maps and examine the map. For those that don't: it just shows blue. It shows North America in perfect detail, but nothing else. You can scroll around to where the other countries should be, but they... aren't there, just endless blue ocean. Is this a hint at google's ultimate agenda?!
Sony != Everquest 2. Sony is a very large company with a thumb in many a pie. Their ability to do this in one game may only be a test of their ability to do it for every game they produce from now until the end of time.
This begins to carry some important philosophical implications which go far beyond the capitalistic ones. Namely, we're willing to attribute a value in terms of real wealth to virtual goods. Not even really goods per se, but the license to represent oneself's use of those goods and their perceived effects. If they take the game offline (heaven forbid!) then you lose your items, no matter what you paid for them. Again, read the FAQ. So if the Station Exchange servers are a failure and they decide to just up and take them offline, it doesn't matter if you've just dropped $200 on the armor of death and destruction and five magic arrows of demon-conquering-implosive-fireball, you're ooluck, because they say so.
Anyhow, the ability to attribute real wealth to virtual goods is interesting. Keep in mind that money is not wealth but an avenue--the most common and preferred avenue--through which one's wealth may be expressed and exchanged. There are other forms of wealth such as real estate properties, or stocks, bonds, etc, which may also be exchanged. Adobe just bought Macromedia and included some Stock as part of the deal, for example.
I think that this acknowledges humanity's ability to generate wealth almost at will and to divert our wealth toward the pursuit of this other new kind of wealth. It demonstrates very well that wealth is a highly abstract concept which can be perceived in many ways, and money is simply the prefferred conduit through which acquire those forms of wealth. In short, "we buy the things we like" although "buy" could be "buy/build/fix/repair/keep/maintain/pleasure/help/ enjoy/steal/want/need" and "things" could be "things/personalities/people." When we are surrounded by what we like, we view ourselves as wealthy. There are even more abstract concepts of wealth, such as "being owed a favor" which entertain even more interesting notions of what something is "worth."
I'm not saying that any of this is good or bad, really, just interesting.
Some 80% of the players who play EQ2 never even consider doing any PvP playing. I know that there are PvP servers out there and some people choose to play on them, but by and large people are paying money to slay virtual goblins cooperatively with their friends and family, and paying more money to do the slaying more quickly/effectively is a good thing to most people, I think.
If you're only playing against the environment, then why in the fuck is it a multiplayer game?
Um, because it's cooperative? Because you're playing with the other players, and not against them? You do remember cooperation from grade school, right? Being nice to other people and working towards a common goal? Remember that? Groups and raiding parties are HIGHLY cooperative PvE experiences. The only PvP aspect is the random dice roll at the end to determine who gets the loot. EQ2 necessitates social interaction. You can play a nonviolent merchant class, but you still need to do commerce with other people--that's cooperation, an a standard exchange for items (a currency) facilitates this method of cooperation.
Sony isn't going to let people buy levels. They're going to let people buy items. People will still need to work to advance, but they won't need to work as hard, making the game less like working and more like... well, playing.
I mean, there is the artificial PvP competition of "I bet you a dollar I can get to level 22 before you!" or whatever, but that's an aspect of social interaction that results from certain players interacting with one another; it isn't a basic condition of the game.
Or imagine that money could buy you more protection under the law, or special legislation that protected your interests... Wait. Nevermind.
Regarding the special protection under the law notion, you should look into a company called PrePaid Legal Services. The founder of the company, Harland Stonecipher, believes that affordable legal protection should be available to everyone, and I agree with him.
It's like legal insurance. You've got health insurance for when your health goes bad, auto insurance for when your auto goes bad, homeowner's insurance for when something goes wrong with your house, so why not legal insurance when you need to consult with a legal professional?
Legal situations don't always involve courts, maybe they involve a bill or a public action. A fellow I know is a member and he was going to have to get his driveway torn up because it violated some housing code, but he just called up the law firm PPL assigned to him and his lawyer got it all taken care of, saving the man and his wife almost $10,000. The same fellow had a lawyer review an investment contract and the lawyer revealed a hokey 500-mile-radius non-compete clause that had initially been overlooked, and that also saved the man from dropping $25,000 into a bad investment.
Public defenders are only available to the bottom 10% of the population and only the upper 10% of the population can afford to keep a lawyer on retainer. The remaining 80% can, for a low monthly fee ($17/month in Washington State where I'm at), always have a lawyer to talk to (they return your calls within 8 hours, guaranteed), to review documents (up to 10 pages. pre-nuptual agreements, wills, living wills, etc). I'm not only a member, but an Associate, so let me know if you want to sign up.;)
Argh. You're doing it too. Everyone is doing it. Nobody seems to understand the difference between PvP and PvE!
Everquest is a Player-versus-environment game, where players slay virtual goblins and dragons in order to gain levels. They do not directly compete with one-another. Basketball or Chess are very PvP (player versus player) activities, and giving one player an advantage "over" another is unfair. However in a PvE game, if I'm a level one newbies with a flaming sword of uberness and I slay goblins with one fell swoop, how am I inconveniencing the other players, except by reducing the supply of available stuff to kill?
Tilting the playing field in EQ in "your favor" doesn't directly impact the other players, because you aren't playing AGAINST them, you're playing WITH them.
Governments control the supply of housing by using zoning to restrict land available, yes, but the government can't flip a magical switch and then suddenly have all of the land in the country be unavailable, while Sony can, any time they feel like it. I mean, the government can post a sign that says "No Tresspassing" but that doesn't stop a tent city from popping up there. When Sony says "No more robes of uberness" they actually mean no more robes of uberness, with the only way to get said robes being to buy them from existing players.
This isn't a "classic" economic system due to the rapidity with which an item can be withdrawn from the market. In a classic economic system, supplies usually dwindle before disappearing. Sony can just push a red button and have all the RobeOfUberness items stop being produced, all at once. No "Our factories are ramping down production of RobeOfUberness" or anything like that. Just cut off the supply and watch the demand (and therefore your bank balance) skyrocket. They're going to be a Virtual OPEC, but about ten times more effective because of the choke-hold they have on the economy, the items, and the game itself.
You just gave two PvP examples; Everquest is PvE. Get it straight before you nitpick.
Letting Everquest players buy better stuff with real money lets them compete against virtual baddies more effectively. In chess, buying a second queen disadvantages your opponent, who is another human being. In Everquest, buying a pair of superUber flaming swords disadvantages the virtual goblins and dragons and makes all the newbie players feel jealous, but it doesn't disadvantage any other players.
People keep making this comparison with Monopoly or Chess and they need to understand the difference between PvP and PvE gaming.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to do this on a slightly lower scale, maybe a 1/4 mile range or so.
But I wanted to tie it in with a scrolling LED sign in my rear window that displays the "Now Playing" and perhaps another LED sign that displays my broadcast frequency: "Now Broadcasting On..."
I don't think that my antenna has to point up, in order to save power. An effectively two-dimensional antenna that eminates in a maybe 5-degree arc, 360 degrees about a point on the roof of my car. This would hopefully increase the effectiveness of my radio transmission and keep me under the FCC regs that would require a license.
I put the cost for this at about $300 to put together, plus time, effort, and all that. Also, it kind of necessitates having an in-car computer, because you need to populate the scrolling display somehow. (serial interface usually, could probably work out a way to interface with that minty mp3 player that ladyada made. Decode the id3 tag and push it out to a buffer of some kind which spits it to the scrolling display when it's ready)
Regarding #2 there, I have a question: why isn't firearm usage and safety taught in schools? You'd think it would help cut down on the accidental shootings that kids keep getting themselves into.
High school is not necessary, I wish they'd just abolish it and just move people into college sooner.
Most people convicted of DUIs, however, are repeat offenders. So while it may be everyone's best hope to prevent all DUIs, I would think that preventing some DUIs would also be acceptable to the majority. This is kind of like how they won't make every citizen pee in a cup every week to prove they aren't using drugs, but they make those with drug convictions do so.
Read John Gatto's "The Underground History of American Education" -- it will open your eyes to what enforced, required schooling has done to the minds of America. It's turned us into perfect industrial "worker bees" but the industrial revolution is over and the entire push behind forced schooling doesn't really exist anymore. We aren't a nation of factory workers anymore, with most companies' manufacturing operations having long ago moved overseas.
Now we're locked into a system which was created to solve a problem that doesn't exist any longer. Not only are we locked in, but we don't know how to fix the system to solve the current problems. Things like children not knowing their currency (the few recent stories I've heard about people freaking out over $2 bills for example) or not knowing their civil rights ("no officer, you cannot come into my daddy's house without a thing called a warrant, bye mr. police man.") are things that I see as problems.
Homosexuality is another issue that nobody will touch with a ten-foot pole at any time during a child's public education. I don't think that homosexuality is a problem, but the lack of understanding of homosexuality creates a problem. It creates problems of prejudice, fear, uncertainty, and so forth. One errant "fag" comment in a lockerroom can turn Bobby Jones into Bobby McFag for the rest of the school year if all they have to go on is a father-instilled belief that anybody with a lisp likes it in the poop chute. Have you noticed that "fag" is probably the most common insult among teenaged children these days? Saying something is gay or homosexual, it's like the top-notch insult. Might this have anything to do with us treating homosexuality as so hush-hush/weak/taboo/evil/must-not-speak-of/etc?
You're an ass.
Read my sig.
Actually, no, guns are neither unsafe nor are they anything like cars with bad brakes. New gun operators, however, are a lot like unlicensed automobile drivers. People who don't know how to operate a weapon, handling a weapon, and discharging it by accident--this is much more easily paralelled with people who don't know how to operate a motor vehicle driving it into a wall, by accident.
I say "unlicensed" because, before getting behind the wheel of a car to drive on a federal, state, county, or city road, you must be licensed and in most states, this requires taking a driver training course and passing both a written and a driving test. There are no such requirements for firearms in my own state, though I don't know about the others. This fact serves to reinforce my belief that operator error is responsible for most handgun-related accidents. And operator error is not some new phenomenon that has never plagued gun-using society before; accidental firearm discharges were a top killer among those traveling the Oregon Trail.
It has nothing to do with the safety of the device, it has to do with the device operator's lack of cognizant understanding of the device's function and functionality.
Translated: ignorance may be bliss, but it also tends to be deadly.
It's important to qualify "stole" here.
/b img.aspx.gif icon_customize_it.gif
Their sizes are identical. 1423 bytes.
Did a "save as" with firefox.
>fc
Comparing files img.aspx.gif and ICON_CUSTOMIZE_IT.GIF
FC: no differences encountered
img.aspx.gif is from the Dell Home website. The other is from Microtel.
hmm.
http://penny-arcade.com/images/2000/20001208l.jpg
I still cry when Prime dies.
alright, the "our son nick" = arsenic was a good one.
I was neither trolled, nor was that a postbot.
/ 23/016210&tid=227&tid=222&tid=106&tid=10
The reply the fellow posted was likely intended to be a response to the story about the Linux 3D Input Driver project: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05
You wrote the drivers but you can't post your comments on the right threads.... makes me wonder about other things you've done involving threads...
Why is it that us, the capable, intelligent masses, limited though we are in number, are kept from the options we so desire? It's not that everybody wants to use / would use a particular feature, but what is the ultimate restriction-mentality about "implement it only if everyone will use it, do not implement advanced functionality because it may confuse most users."
Why can there not be a button, a magic button that says "Turn on all advanced features" which enables things like tabbed browsing and perhaps neat things like mouse gesture navigation and session management options. The one thing that I *love* about Opera is its Session Management functionality, limited though it may be. In the event of a browser crash, a system failure (power failure, cpu fan failure, spill lots of liquid [something], etc), or some other such unfortunateness, the state of all the windows and their contained tabs can be restored. These sessions can be saved, I have a perl script that I use to copy my "autosave.win" (I believe it's called, it's been a couple years since I've touched the script, I just give it the nod every night at midnight when it runs as a scheduled task) to a filename descriptive of the date/time at an archive location.
I do a lot of reading about a lot of diverse topics. I have a lot of diverse interests and pursuits. Opera enables me to have 50 tabs or more open per window and stil be easily navigable. I like the ability to more or less completely saturate my brain with information by way of Opera's tabbed browsing features, and how their session management ties into it.
You know what's ultra-hot? The rough equivalent of tabbed desktops. It's called a VWM: Virtual Workspace Manager. If you tell Explorer to "suck your wang" (I've told it so many times. Oh Explorer, how I loathe thee!) you can actually use anything as your shell. I like Litestep, for now. Litestep's VWM allows me to have a grid four "virtual desktops" wide and two virtual desktops tall. I can click and drag windows between workspaces, from the VWM. I can switch workspaces from the VWM. I like to think of the litestep UI, as it is highly skinnable, as a "HUD" in a conventional game. If you think of any conventional game, the information is NEVER concentrated in one location. Certain relavent pieces of information should be in certain locations, and other pieces of information could/should be obscured. For example, I like having a huge clock in the lower right-hand corner of my screen, but there's no system tray down there. The system tray is a small bar at the top of the right hand side of my screen. There's also the interesting little shortcut buttons that Litestep offers me... These buttons can be set up to perform a different action depending upon the type of click it receives. I've currently got the first one set up so that a left-click launches Firefox, and a right-click launches Eudora. The next is text/graphics editor for left/right clicks respectively. There's a few more, but I believe you understand the functionality that pleases me about the ui in general: it's customizable, modular (the ui is driven by an underlying plug-in based architecture which enables the programmatic creation of arbitrary "HUD elements" as I'll call them), free (free is important), and empowers the user if they choose to be empowered. There are basic interfaces available, and there are skins that make use of modules that will rock your socks: System Monitoring, VWM, a built-in set of media player controls, advanced menuing functionality (ever wanted a system sub-menu buried inside some other menu to stay around for a while? Well, you can just grab a small bar at the top of just about any litestep menu and do so by dragging it away from the menu that it was opened from) and so forth.
As a total tangent, do you know what keeps me off Linux? Games. The games on Windows PCs are just hands-down better than the ones offered on Linux or any of the consoles, and have been for years. At least, the games I've been wanting to play. And my PC is able to emulate older game systems, allowing me the ability to enjoy console games that I have enjoyed in the past.
hope you enjoyed that.
Oh, so true. School has so little to do with encouraging and enriching the lives of children and so much to do with putting them into boxes and ensuring that you "know your place."
A book I enjoy on the topic begins with this:
The shocking possibility that dumb people don't exist in sufficient numbers to warrant the millions of careers devoted to tending them will seem incredible to you. Yet that is my central proposition: the mass dumbness which justifies official schooling first had to be dreamed of; it isn't real.
http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc1.h
This man, John Gatto, was NY State teacher of the year--the same year he quit, on the grounds that he wanted a career where it wasn't his job to hurt children any more. He's written a book called "The Underground History of American Education" which is available in its entirety online. Enjoy the read.
Your argument is kind of wonky and leaves out important details. Here's a better one:
I have a television with a subscription to a certain channel that airs a certain show. It should be acceptable for me to watch a recording of that particular show that somebody else has made from their television.
So to liken it to radio would be thus:
I have a radio which can tune in a certain channel that plays a certain song. It should be acceptable for me to listen to a recording of that particular song that somebody else has made from their own radio.
It's important to acknowledge that a TV-Rip from some british television station or a satellite rebroadcaster or the like might have an obnoxious little logo in the corner. It's important to acknowledge that a TV-Rip is not of DVD quality. Hell, it isn't even of TV quality, most of the time.
Downloading a 192kbps 44khz stereo MP3 of some new song ripped from a CD is very different from downloading a 96kbps 22khz Stereo MP3 that was recorded off an FM radio.
This rasies an interesting question though: is it illegal to record FM radio? Is it illegal to record FM radio and convert everything to MP3 at 96kbps/22khz/etc? If I put these songs on the internet, at that point, is that illegal?
Just freaking press escape to stop the page from switching when it tries. All this clicking and mouse navigation is unnecessary. The window has focus, use the key the way it was meant to be used to escape from forbes' auto-proceeding madness.
I have one of these on a 250gb Maxtor drive right now and the drive is totally cool to the touch. The rubber is somewhat unnecessary because my drive used a fluid dynamic bearing motor and therefore makes zero noise to begin with...
ROFL.
I wanted to mod you funny but I doubted anybody else would go to google maps and examine the map. For those that don't: it just shows blue. It shows North America in perfect detail, but nothing else. You can scroll around to where the other countries should be, but they... aren't there, just endless blue ocean. Is this a hint at google's ultimate agenda?!
Jeffersonian Demoncracy? Will people wear horns instead of wigs, there?
Sony != Everquest 2. Sony is a very large company with a thumb in many a pie. Their ability to do this in one game may only be a test of their ability to do it for every game they produce from now until the end of time.
/ enjoy/steal/want/need" and "things" could be "things/personalities/people." When we are surrounded by what we like, we view ourselves as wealthy. There are even more abstract concepts of wealth, such as "being owed a favor" which entertain even more interesting notions of what something is "worth."
This begins to carry some important philosophical implications which go far beyond the capitalistic ones. Namely, we're willing to attribute a value in terms of real wealth to virtual goods. Not even really goods per se, but the license to represent oneself's use of those goods and their perceived effects. If they take the game offline (heaven forbid!) then you lose your items, no matter what you paid for them. Again, read the FAQ. So if the Station Exchange servers are a failure and they decide to just up and take them offline, it doesn't matter if you've just dropped $200 on the armor of death and destruction and five magic arrows of demon-conquering-implosive-fireball, you're ooluck, because they say so.
Anyhow, the ability to attribute real wealth to virtual goods is interesting. Keep in mind that money is not wealth but an avenue--the most common and preferred avenue--through which one's wealth may be expressed and exchanged. There are other forms of wealth such as real estate properties, or stocks, bonds, etc, which may also be exchanged. Adobe just bought Macromedia and included some Stock as part of the deal, for example.
I think that this acknowledges humanity's ability to generate wealth almost at will and to divert our wealth toward the pursuit of this other new kind of wealth. It demonstrates very well that wealth is a highly abstract concept which can be perceived in many ways, and money is simply the prefferred conduit through which acquire those forms of wealth. In short, "we buy the things we like" although "buy" could be "buy/build/fix/repair/keep/maintain/pleasure/help
I'm not saying that any of this is good or bad, really, just interesting.
Some 80% of the players who play EQ2 never even consider doing any PvP playing. I know that there are PvP servers out there and some people choose to play on them, but by and large people are paying money to slay virtual goblins cooperatively with their friends and family, and paying more money to do the slaying more quickly/effectively is a good thing to most people, I think.
If you're only playing against the environment, then why in the fuck is it a multiplayer game?
... well, playing.
Um, because it's cooperative? Because you're playing with the other players, and not against them? You do remember cooperation from grade school, right? Being nice to other people and working towards a common goal? Remember that? Groups and raiding parties are HIGHLY cooperative PvE experiences. The only PvP aspect is the random dice roll at the end to determine who gets the loot. EQ2 necessitates social interaction. You can play a nonviolent merchant class, but you still need to do commerce with other people--that's cooperation, an a standard exchange for items (a currency) facilitates this method of cooperation.
Sony isn't going to let people buy levels. They're going to let people buy items. People will still need to work to advance, but they won't need to work as hard, making the game less like working and more like
I mean, there is the artificial PvP competition of "I bet you a dollar I can get to level 22 before you!" or whatever, but that's an aspect of social interaction that results from certain players interacting with one another; it isn't a basic condition of the game.
Or imagine that money could buy you more protection under the law, or special legislation that protected your interests... Wait. Nevermind.
;)
Regarding the special protection under the law notion, you should look into a company called PrePaid Legal Services. The founder of the company, Harland Stonecipher, believes that affordable legal protection should be available to everyone, and I agree with him.
It's like legal insurance. You've got health insurance for when your health goes bad, auto insurance for when your auto goes bad, homeowner's insurance for when something goes wrong with your house, so why not legal insurance when you need to consult with a legal professional?
Legal situations don't always involve courts, maybe they involve a bill or a public action. A fellow I know is a member and he was going to have to get his driveway torn up because it violated some housing code, but he just called up the law firm PPL assigned to him and his lawyer got it all taken care of, saving the man and his wife almost $10,000. The same fellow had a lawyer review an investment contract and the lawyer revealed a hokey 500-mile-radius non-compete clause that had initially been overlooked, and that also saved the man from dropping $25,000 into a bad investment.
Public defenders are only available to the bottom 10% of the population and only the upper 10% of the population can afford to keep a lawyer on retainer. The remaining 80% can, for a low monthly fee ($17/month in Washington State where I'm at), always have a lawyer to talk to (they return your calls within 8 hours, guaranteed), to review documents (up to 10 pages. pre-nuptual agreements, wills, living wills, etc). I'm not only a member, but an Associate, so let me know if you want to sign up.
Argh. You're doing it too. Everyone is doing it. Nobody seems to understand the difference between PvP and PvE!
Everquest is a Player-versus-environment game, where players slay virtual goblins and dragons in order to gain levels. They do not directly compete with one-another. Basketball or Chess are very PvP (player versus player) activities, and giving one player an advantage "over" another is unfair. However in a PvE game, if I'm a level one newbies with a flaming sword of uberness and I slay goblins with one fell swoop, how am I inconveniencing the other players, except by reducing the supply of available stuff to kill?
Tilting the playing field in EQ in "your favor" doesn't directly impact the other players, because you aren't playing AGAINST them, you're playing WITH them.
Governments control the supply of housing by using zoning to restrict land available, yes, but the government can't flip a magical switch and then suddenly have all of the land in the country be unavailable, while Sony can, any time they feel like it. I mean, the government can post a sign that says "No Tresspassing" but that doesn't stop a tent city from popping up there. When Sony says "No more robes of uberness" they actually mean no more robes of uberness, with the only way to get said robes being to buy them from existing players.
This isn't a "classic" economic system due to the rapidity with which an item can be withdrawn from the market. In a classic economic system, supplies usually dwindle before disappearing. Sony can just push a red button and have all the RobeOfUberness items stop being produced, all at once. No "Our factories are ramping down production of RobeOfUberness" or anything like that. Just cut off the supply and watch the demand (and therefore your bank balance) skyrocket. They're going to be a Virtual OPEC, but about ten times more effective because of the choke-hold they have on the economy, the items, and the game itself.
You just gave two PvP examples; Everquest is PvE. Get it straight before you nitpick.
Letting Everquest players buy better stuff with real money lets them compete against virtual baddies more effectively. In chess, buying a second queen disadvantages your opponent, who is another human being. In Everquest, buying a pair of superUber flaming swords disadvantages the virtual goblins and dragons and makes all the newbie players feel jealous, but it doesn't disadvantage any other players.
People keep making this comparison with Monopoly or Chess and they need to understand the difference between PvP and PvE gaming.