Nevermind the fact that this gun is impractical for any realistic purpose, all of which have already been gone over elsewhere
Actually, they've gone several steps further with another design, having printed a lower receiver for an AR-15 (the one part that, under BATF regulations, constitutes a gun), and have raised its reliability from the original six rounds before breaking to more than 600 rounds before breaking (they're discovering that the printed part has different design constraints -- where a milled aluminum receiver has sharp corners, a printed part needs to have curves to reduce points where stress concentrates, because the plastic is weaker). However, as assembled, it's hardly a concealable or undetectable weapon, with the sixteen-inch metal barrel, upper receiver, and action. However, as you allude, a wholly 3D-printed firearm has a long way to go before it's as effective as the cheapest 'Saturday Night Special'. But to a politician, that's not important; what's important is that the fear and paranoia be whipped to a frenzy now, so that draconian knee-jerk measures can be put in place while people are feeling about the subject, not thinking about it; it's so much easier to whip up emotion than reason.
If they really can't afford $50/mo (I presume they use WiFi at McDonald's) then why wouldn't they just keep using the version they have? Nobody who is a professional graphic artist and cannot afford $50/mo needs to always have the latest-and-greatest.
I think the point of this is that Adobe is actively working to price itself out of consideration for graphic artists who are entering the freelance market without having an old copy of Photoshop of their own, because their school only had the SaaS versions, so they're faced with either coughing up the full subscription costs, finding other alternatives, or pirating a prior version.
BYOD is no different than using a personal car, or a breifcase, and having company documents in either.
Except that a company can't rip out the interior of your car while you're driving down the freeway; If you have a smartphone that integrates with Microsoft Exchange, for example, connecting to an Exchange server automatically provides the server administrators the capability and permission to remotely wipe your smartphone at any time.
However if you consider your rights to be self evident, you don't need a document defining those rights for you.
The purpose wasn't to define them for you, it was to enumerate them as being specifically beyond the ability of the government to take away. Unfortunately, the interpretation of the Constitution has gone from the original "The government is empowered to act only where specifically granted authority" to "The government is empowered to act whenever not specifically denied authority, and if government lawyers can come up with some pretzel-like, taken-out-of-context, and misinterpreted reading of a specific prohibition that makes it not say what the plain text says, then the government can act there, too."
My last experience involved a pat-down with a TSA agent at MIA. He asked me, "May I ask what your objections are to the scanner?" I said, "No, you may not."
That's actually not true; they can always ask. You're under no obligation to give them an answer, though.
I notice that they retained the "I'll just randomly decide to hide the browser window you're looking at under all the other windows on your desktop" 'feature', though...
The intent was that the government would be unable to deny private citizens the right to own and carry weapons equivalent to those that the members of a standing army would carry. There aren't many gun-rights advocates who would argue that the 2nd Amendment protects the individual right to own an ICBM, for example (although the unrestricted private ownership of cannon and armed ships in that period provides the basis for the argument that private ownership of any weapon a standing military employs is protected). However, the ownership of assault rifles (the select-fire shoulder arm, not the media invention "it looks like a military weapon, so it's evil" tern 'assault weapon') would be protected, because these weapons are issued to individual soldiers.
I especially love this statement: " By the Pentagon's own admission, building and operating three versions of the F-35 — one for the Air Force, one for the Navy and one for the Marines — will cost more than $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, making it the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken". The implication being even the military thinks it too much, which they don't. Such a statement implies something that doesnt exist, and conveniently ignores that the entire reason for developing a common platform for multiple roles is to save money. Yes, that one single platform is 1.4T.
And you have to wonder how much of the 'increased in cost by 75%' is due to actual cost increases and how much of it is due to reducing the number of airframes that are actually procured, with the corresponding flaky math: taking the development cost -- money that has already been appropriated and spent -- and dividing it by the number of airframes built, then adding it to the manufacturing cost of a single airframe, and saying that the resulting number is the 'cost' of the airframe. What people don't understand is that the development cost is gone; canceling the program outright isn't going to get it back. All you're going to get back is the funding for the planes that haven't yet been built -- and the production cost for a single airframe is much, much less than the 'total' cost for one low-production-run airframe plus that airframe's share of the development costs.
For example, say that you spent $1000 developing a device, which you can produce for $1 per copy. If you make a thousand of them, the 'cost' of each device is $2, counting your development costs. If you make a hundred of them, the 'cost' is $11 for each device -- more than five times as much. But making one more device isn't going to cost you $11; it's going to cost you $1. But whether you produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand, the $1000 you spent on the development is already spent; you can't get it back by deciding not to put the device into production.
If you were going to spend the kind of money that would be required to have the house computer be able to recognize the fish and its position, and illuminate the lines where you need to cut, you might as well spend the money to upgrade the lasers so that the computer would be able to actually make the cuts itself, rather than rely on your eye-hand coordination not to screw it up.
I think the best way to scuttle this bill would be to amend it to require equal space and time for the 'exploration' of the creation doctrine of every significant world religion, because not all "intelligent design" follows the Biblical creation, and teaching only the Christian creation doctrine is illegitimately establishing a preference for Christianity, thereby being prejudicial to other religions.
In fact pretty hard to show what the MPAA members' loss is - and this case was about a crafty attempt by the MPAA to avoid that difficulty.
Now if we could only get a court to rule that the MAFIAA (Music And Film Industry Association of America) has to prove that a person who downloaded a pirate copy of a work would have bought a copy of that work if the pirated copy were not available before that download could be considered a 'loss', and that the value of the loss was limited to the wholesale cost of the work (i.e., the price the record publisher sells a CD to retailers), then maybe the MAFIAA lawyers would have to go back to chasing ambulances, rather than trying to recoup phantom profits 'lost' because people don't think the MAFIAA's products are worth the prices they're gouging.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
If we defined "arms" as those tools available at the time, then we could define the "arms" of today as something completely different and not valid under the 2nd Amendment. Do you need a trebuchet? Maybe a large vat of hot oil? Where does "firearm" end and "mass death machine" begin?
"Arms", for the purposes of the 2nd Amendment, are weapons that can be expected to be carried by a common soldier. Which could reasonably cover, say, a LAW or a grenade launcher, but not artillery, tanks, or combat aircraft.
If we were to take your argument to its logical extension and apply "available at the time" as a limit to other protected rights, then 'freedom of speech' would apply only to vocal speech not utilizing any mechanical or electronic amplification or transmission, and written material created either longhand with a dip pen or via a single-sheet hand-cranked printing press (as in this image) using hand-set individual type. The high-speed printing presses used by publishers, radio and television broadcasts, the Internet, telephone systems, telegraphs -- all of these could be censored at will by the government.
Just as a random bit of trivia, in Texas, a state which has been characterized as 'gun-happy', it is illegal to hunt deer with an M-16 assault rifle.
Not because it's a fully-automatic weapon. Because it's not powerful enough; a hunter with an M-16 would not be able to reliably kill a deer they shot, causing unnecessary pain and suffering to the deer.
Most people would call a full-auto M16 an assault rifle.
That's the point. "Assault rifle" has a specific definition, being a selectable semi-/full-auto shoulder arm firing a rifle-caliber round; a selectable semi-/full-auto shoulder arm firing pistol rounds is a submachine gun, and a selectable semi-/full-auto handgun is a machine pistol. "Assault weapon" is an invention of the media, defined as "any semi-automatic weapon that looks evil by dint of possessing one or more cosmetic aspects of a military weapon, these cosmetic features including, but not limited to, bayonet fittings, bipod attachments, pistol grips on a shoulder arm, removable box magazines, flash hiders, or any other characteristic that we deem to be sufficiently 'icky', making them suitable for conflating with actual military weapons when fanning public fears about gun violence."
If WWII video games taught me anything is was... pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,PA-TING! Reload!:)
Actually, WWII video games don't let you do it the way the experienced soldiers did it; it was 'pop, pop, pop' *toss a spent clip against a rock* PA-TING! 'pop, pop, pop' -- faking the sound of your Garand's clip ejecting, then shooting the German soldiers who were listening for the sound and jumped up to advance while you were reloading.
I'm not sure that the people who want bills to amend the state/federal constitutions to explicitly state "a marriage may only be made between a man and a woman" would recognize the irony that all it would take to back the legislation up a couple hundred years would be to change the wording to put "white" in front of both 'man' and 'woman'.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The 2nd Amendment was written in a time when people had muskets in order to enable a well-regulated militia to defend themselves from colonial powers and attacks by native Americans, not the federal government. The militia kept their muskets locked up in an armory away from home until they were needed. We still have that, it's called the National Guard. Go sign up if you want to, but you don't get to bring your service rifle home with you.
It's an archaic usage except with regard to shotguns, but when you regulate a firearm, you are adjusting it so that the bullets you fire go where the sights are pointing, so that you will hit what you're shooting at. A well-regulated militia, in the usage of the time, was one that was trained well enough to be able to reliably hit what they were shooting at. The 2nd Amendment was written at a time when muskets were the norm and rifles were too expensive to equip run-of-the-mill troops with; it says 'arms' because the Founders understood that technology advances, and since the intent was to preserve the right of individuals to keep weapons comparable to those carried by soldiers, they didn't tie it down to a particular technology.
The National Guard is the militia? Not for years. The militia can't be sent beyond the borders of the United States; back during Desert Storm, several governors filed suit to prevent National Guard units from being deployed to the Middle East. SCOTUS ruled that the National Guard was part of the standing military, not the militia, and could be deployed anywhere in the world. The militia kept their 'muskets' on the wall of their homes, where they would be available when they were called up; otherwise all that would be necessary to do would be to use a small force to seize the armory in order to neuter an entire community's ability to resist.
Look, people, its just a SHORTER CRANK arm. Its a gimmick, and you can't say anything about its main claims unless you look at the number of teeth on the chain ring.
No, it's not a shorter crank arm; in the video on the physicsbuzz page linked from the article, the talking head specifically points out that the pedal attachment point is at the same distance from the crank axle as it is with a normal crankset. All the Z-Torque crank does is draw an obtuse triangle between the crank axle, the pedal, and a third point with the obtuse angle at the crankset, and have the crank run along the other two lines, rather than along the line between the pedal and the crank axle; the apex of the crank is farther out than the pedal distance, but the pedal itself is at the same distance. And all the physics I remember tells me that a standard crank and a Z-Torque crank would be functionally identical in the total power deliverable over a full stroke, with the two exceptions that the Z-Torque crank would have a high level of strain at the apex of the crank for most of the cycle, requiring additional material for strength (and creating an extra point of failure), and would be heavier than a standard crank.
My daughter actually has quite severe Amblyopia and even with glasses cannot see properly from one eye. She just can't watch 3D movies - it's too uncomfortable. I would hate to see the day when there is no 2D version offered by cinemas.
The solution at that point is simple -- de-3D glasses. These look just like the 3D glasses you use to watch a 3D movie, except that both lenses have the same polarization (circular or tilted), so that both eyes see only one of the two images being projected, and you get a 2D image again.
From a comment in an interview for OnRPG with Matt "Positron" Miller and Melissa "War Witch" Bianco, lead developers on City of Heroes, going F2P increased their revenue, allowing them to put more work into development than they had originally planned, increasing the amount of content that they released to the players through the in-game store (article here):
Matt: Oh my goodness was F2P the right move for us! We were making a LOT more money per month than the normal subscriptions brought in. This allowed us to leverage even more for the Paragon Market. If we were not doing well we wouldn’t have been adding as many costumes and power sets to the market over the past year and planned out as many as we had.
I'm sorry, but if you had trouble soloing with any archetype, you were doing something fundamentally wrong.
If their experience was solely from before the addition of the archetype inherents -- Containment, Defiance, et al., then they were correct; I remember with my Fire/Rad Controller back in 2004 that solo advancement choked off in the early teens, because you didn't get the damage output you needed to defeat mobs quickly. Yes, sure, you drop Fire Cages on them to lock them in place, slap down Radiation Infection on one, and then you can stand there Brawling them to death one by one as they keep missing you, but until Veteran Rewards were instituted you didn't have a good attack until much later in the game. Of course, once you hit 32 and got your pet(s), all bets were off. Illusion Controllers had it easier; they got Phantom Army at 16, and even earlier than that could use Deceive to completely mitigate incoming damage while they ground opponents down, but the original game design had some definite gaps in solo ability between the various archetypes.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevermind the fact that this gun is impractical for any realistic purpose, all of which have already been gone over elsewhere
Actually, they've gone several steps further with another design, having printed a lower receiver for an AR-15 (the one part that, under BATF regulations, constitutes a gun), and have raised its reliability from the original six rounds before breaking to more than 600 rounds before breaking (they're discovering that the printed part has different design constraints -- where a milled aluminum receiver has sharp corners, a printed part needs to have curves to reduce points where stress concentrates, because the plastic is weaker). However, as assembled, it's hardly a concealable or undetectable weapon, with the sixteen-inch metal barrel, upper receiver, and action. However, as you allude, a wholly 3D-printed firearm has a long way to go before it's as effective as the cheapest 'Saturday Night Special'. But to a politician, that's not important; what's important is that the fear and paranoia be whipped to a frenzy now, so that draconian knee-jerk measures can be put in place while people are feeling about the subject, not thinking about it; it's so much easier to whip up emotion than reason.
If they really can't afford $50/mo (I presume they use WiFi at McDonald's) then why wouldn't they just keep using the version they have? Nobody who is a professional graphic artist and cannot afford $50/mo needs to always have the latest-and-greatest.
I think the point of this is that Adobe is actively working to price itself out of consideration for graphic artists who are entering the freelance market without having an old copy of Photoshop of their own, because their school only had the SaaS versions, so they're faced with either coughing up the full subscription costs, finding other alternatives, or pirating a prior version.
BYOD is no different than using a personal car, or a breifcase, and having company documents in either.
Except that a company can't rip out the interior of your car while you're driving down the freeway; If you have a smartphone that integrates with Microsoft Exchange, for example, connecting to an Exchange server automatically provides the server administrators the capability and permission to remotely wipe your smartphone at any time.
"We had to destroy your freedom in order to save it."
However if you consider your rights to be self evident, you don't need a document defining those rights for you.
The purpose wasn't to define them for you, it was to enumerate them as being specifically beyond the ability of the government to take away. Unfortunately, the interpretation of the Constitution has gone from the original "The government is empowered to act only where specifically granted authority" to "The government is empowered to act whenever not specifically denied authority, and if government lawyers can come up with some pretzel-like, taken-out-of-context, and misinterpreted reading of a specific prohibition that makes it not say what the plain text says, then the government can act there, too."
My last experience involved a pat-down with a TSA agent at MIA. He asked me, "May I ask what your objections are to the scanner?" I said, "No, you may not."
That's actually not true; they can always ask. You're under no obligation to give them an answer, though.
I notice that they retained the "I'll just randomly decide to hide the browser window you're looking at under all the other windows on your desktop" 'feature', though...
Just as you would specify 'wit' or 'witout' for whether you wanted onions on your Philly cheese steak sandwich.
The intent was that the government would be unable to deny private citizens the right to own and carry weapons equivalent to those that the members of a standing army would carry. There aren't many gun-rights advocates who would argue that the 2nd Amendment protects the individual right to own an ICBM, for example (although the unrestricted private ownership of cannon and armed ships in that period provides the basis for the argument that private ownership of any weapon a standing military employs is protected). However, the ownership of assault rifles (the select-fire shoulder arm, not the media invention "it looks like a military weapon, so it's evil" tern 'assault weapon') would be protected, because these weapons are issued to individual soldiers.
I memorized pi out to 35 digits back in high school; I wasn't as interested in e, which I only memorized as 2.71828182845904523536
I especially love this statement: " By the Pentagon's own admission, building and operating three versions of the F-35 — one for the Air Force, one for the Navy and one for the Marines — will cost more than $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, making it the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken". The implication being even the military thinks it too much, which they don't. Such a statement implies something that doesnt exist, and conveniently ignores that the entire reason for developing a common platform for multiple roles is to save money. Yes, that one single platform is 1.4T.
And you have to wonder how much of the 'increased in cost by 75%' is due to actual cost increases and how much of it is due to reducing the number of airframes that are actually procured, with the corresponding flaky math: taking the development cost -- money that has already been appropriated and spent -- and dividing it by the number of airframes built, then adding it to the manufacturing cost of a single airframe, and saying that the resulting number is the 'cost' of the airframe. What people don't understand is that the development cost is gone; canceling the program outright isn't going to get it back. All you're going to get back is the funding for the planes that haven't yet been built -- and the production cost for a single airframe is much, much less than the 'total' cost for one low-production-run airframe plus that airframe's share of the development costs.
For example, say that you spent $1000 developing a device, which you can produce for $1 per copy. If you make a thousand of them, the 'cost' of each device is $2, counting your development costs. If you make a hundred of them, the 'cost' is $11 for each device -- more than five times as much. But making one more device isn't going to cost you $11; it's going to cost you $1. But whether you produce one, ten, a hundred, or a thousand, the $1000 you spent on the development is already spent; you can't get it back by deciding not to put the device into production.
If you were going to spend the kind of money that would be required to have the house computer be able to recognize the fish and its position, and illuminate the lines where you need to cut, you might as well spend the money to upgrade the lasers so that the computer would be able to actually make the cuts itself, rather than rely on your eye-hand coordination not to screw it up.
I think the best way to scuttle this bill would be to amend it to require equal space and time for the 'exploration' of the creation doctrine of every significant world religion, because not all "intelligent design" follows the Biblical creation, and teaching only the Christian creation doctrine is illegitimately establishing a preference for Christianity, thereby being prejudicial to other religions.
In fact pretty hard to show what the MPAA members' loss is - and this case was about a crafty attempt by the MPAA to avoid that difficulty.
Now if we could only get a court to rule that the MAFIAA (Music And Film Industry Association of America) has to prove that a person who downloaded a pirate copy of a work would have bought a copy of that work if the pirated copy were not available before that download could be considered a 'loss', and that the value of the loss was limited to the wholesale cost of the work (i.e., the price the record publisher sells a CD to retailers), then maybe the MAFIAA lawyers would have to go back to chasing ambulances, rather than trying to recoup phantom profits 'lost' because people don't think the MAFIAA's products are worth the prices they're gouging.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
If we defined "arms" as those tools available at the time, then we could define the "arms" of today as something completely different and not valid under the 2nd Amendment. Do you need a trebuchet? Maybe a large vat of hot oil? Where does "firearm" end and "mass death machine" begin?
"Arms", for the purposes of the 2nd Amendment, are weapons that can be expected to be carried by a common soldier. Which could reasonably cover, say, a LAW or a grenade launcher, but not artillery, tanks, or combat aircraft.
If we were to take your argument to its logical extension and apply "available at the time" as a limit to other protected rights, then 'freedom of speech' would apply only to vocal speech not utilizing any mechanical or electronic amplification or transmission, and written material created either longhand with a dip pen or via a single-sheet hand-cranked printing press (as in this image) using hand-set individual type. The high-speed printing presses used by publishers, radio and television broadcasts, the Internet, telephone systems, telegraphs -- all of these could be censored at will by the government.
Just as a random bit of trivia, in Texas, a state which has been characterized as 'gun-happy', it is illegal to hunt deer with an M-16 assault rifle.
Not because it's a fully-automatic weapon. Because it's not powerful enough; a hunter with an M-16 would not be able to reliably kill a deer they shot, causing unnecessary pain and suffering to the deer.
Most people would call a full-auto M16 an assault rifle.
That's the point. "Assault rifle" has a specific definition, being a selectable semi-/full-auto shoulder arm firing a rifle-caliber round; a selectable semi-/full-auto shoulder arm firing pistol rounds is a submachine gun, and a selectable semi-/full-auto handgun is a machine pistol. "Assault weapon" is an invention of the media, defined as "any semi-automatic weapon that looks evil by dint of possessing one or more cosmetic aspects of a military weapon, these cosmetic features including, but not limited to, bayonet fittings, bipod attachments, pistol grips on a shoulder arm, removable box magazines, flash hiders, or any other characteristic that we deem to be sufficiently 'icky', making them suitable for conflating with actual military weapons when fanning public fears about gun violence."
If WWII video games taught me anything is was... pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,pop,PA-TING! Reload! :)
Actually, WWII video games don't let you do it the way the experienced soldiers did it; it was 'pop, pop, pop' *toss a spent clip against a rock* PA-TING! 'pop, pop, pop' -- faking the sound of your Garand's clip ejecting, then shooting the German soldiers who were listening for the sound and jumped up to advance while you were reloading.
I'm not sure that the people who want bills to amend the state/federal constitutions to explicitly state "a marriage may only be made between a man and a woman" would recognize the irony that all it would take to back the legislation up a couple hundred years would be to change the wording to put "white" in front of both 'man' and 'woman'.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The 2nd Amendment was written in a time when people had muskets in order to enable a well-regulated militia to defend themselves from colonial powers and attacks by native Americans, not the federal government. The militia kept their muskets locked up in an armory away from home until they were needed. We still have that, it's called the National Guard. Go sign up if you want to, but you don't get to bring your service rifle home with you.
It's an archaic usage except with regard to shotguns, but when you regulate a firearm, you are adjusting it so that the bullets you fire go where the sights are pointing, so that you will hit what you're shooting at. A well-regulated militia, in the usage of the time, was one that was trained well enough to be able to reliably hit what they were shooting at. The 2nd Amendment was written at a time when muskets were the norm and rifles were too expensive to equip run-of-the-mill troops with; it says 'arms' because the Founders understood that technology advances, and since the intent was to preserve the right of individuals to keep weapons comparable to those carried by soldiers, they didn't tie it down to a particular technology.
The National Guard is the militia? Not for years. The militia can't be sent beyond the borders of the United States; back during Desert Storm, several governors filed suit to prevent National Guard units from being deployed to the Middle East. SCOTUS ruled that the National Guard was part of the standing military, not the militia, and could be deployed anywhere in the world. The militia kept their 'muskets' on the wall of their homes, where they would be available when they were called up; otherwise all that would be necessary to do would be to use a small force to seize the armory in order to neuter an entire community's ability to resist.
Look, people, its just a SHORTER CRANK arm. Its a gimmick, and you can't say anything about its main claims
unless you look at the number of teeth on the chain ring.
No, it's not a shorter crank arm; in the video on the physicsbuzz page linked from the article, the talking head specifically points out that the pedal attachment point is at the same distance from the crank axle as it is with a normal crankset. All the Z-Torque crank does is draw an obtuse triangle between the crank axle, the pedal, and a third point with the obtuse angle at the crankset, and have the crank run along the other two lines, rather than along the line between the pedal and the crank axle; the apex of the crank is farther out than the pedal distance, but the pedal itself is at the same distance. And all the physics I remember tells me that a standard crank and a Z-Torque crank would be functionally identical in the total power deliverable over a full stroke, with the two exceptions that the Z-Torque crank would have a high level of strain at the apex of the crank for most of the cycle, requiring additional material for strength (and creating an extra point of failure), and would be heavier than a standard crank.
My daughter actually has quite severe Amblyopia and even with glasses cannot see properly from one eye. She just can't watch 3D movies - it's too uncomfortable. I would hate to see the day when there is no 2D version offered by cinemas.
The solution at that point is simple -- de-3D glasses. These look just like the 3D glasses you use to watch a 3D movie, except that both lenses have the same polarization (circular or tilted), so that both eyes see only one of the two images being projected, and you get a 2D image again.
From a comment in an interview for OnRPG with Matt "Positron" Miller and Melissa "War Witch" Bianco, lead developers on City of Heroes, going F2P increased their revenue, allowing them to put more work into development than they had originally planned, increasing the amount of content that they released to the players through the in-game store (article here):
Matt: Oh my goodness was F2P the right move for us! We were making a LOT more money per month than the normal subscriptions brought in. This allowed us to leverage even more for the Paragon Market. If we were not doing well we wouldn’t have been adding as many costumes and power sets to the market over the past year and planned out as many as we had.
I'm sorry, but if you had trouble soloing with any archetype, you were doing something fundamentally wrong.
If their experience was solely from before the addition of the archetype inherents -- Containment, Defiance, et al., then they were correct; I remember with my Fire/Rad Controller back in 2004 that solo advancement choked off in the early teens, because you didn't get the damage output you needed to defeat mobs quickly. Yes, sure, you drop Fire Cages on them to lock them in place, slap down Radiation Infection on one, and then you can stand there Brawling them to death one by one as they keep missing you, but until Veteran Rewards were instituted you didn't have a good attack until much later in the game. Of course, once you hit 32 and got your pet(s), all bets were off. Illusion Controllers had it easier; they got Phantom Army at 16, and even earlier than that could use Deceive to completely mitigate incoming damage while they ground opponents down, but the original game design had some definite gaps in solo ability between the various archetypes.
Guild Wars 2 is a bad example; that was developed by Arenanet here in the US, not by NCSoft.