I'm sorry, I played CoH back around when it first came out, and at that point, the grind was LITERALLY all there was to the game.
While this is true, it also made the vast majority of it a) soloable for virtually all characters (I still remember the problems I had with a Controller in the 'teen levels, an issue which has been to some degree rectified), and b) inside instances where you weren't competing with everyone else for the mobs you needed to complete your missions. "Defeat all Clockwork in office" may not be any different, at its core, from "Bring me ten rat tails", but it doesn't matter how many people are in the zone with you; the moment you step through the door into the office building, none of them can do a thing to interfere with you completing the mission, whether by defeating the mobs you need or by training higher-level mobs to you to get you killed.
Then, too, during the first few years of CoH's existence, the features and development of the game were controlled by one person's concept of 'what the game should be' and what was 'fun'; once NCSoft bought out Cryptic, hired away most of the development team, and set up CoH development in-house, it became much more responsive to what the players were asking for, and the rate at which new features were added to the game skyrocketed.
The judges that ruled in favor were not considering that when a person is taken into custody searched and examined, it is not for personal information, rather the safety for the officers and the accountability of returning and cataloging the property
Actually, I suspect that the reasoning was extended from an earlier precedent that allows the police to search your car if you are arrested while driving, which I find equally reprehensible, but has been in effect for enough years that, in the current 'presumed to be a terrorist until stripped, fondled, and proved otherwise' climate, it is unlikely to be overturned.
If the USPTO suffers a complete lack of its normal idiocy and grants the patent rationally, they'd grant it for clicker devices used in conjunction with Microsoft Office and no further. And the proprietor of the Alternate Destination will announce a cooling trend and the opening of a ski resort in Malebolge.
Slashdot was in favor of net neutrality, but it's against COICA? Both involve the government regulating internet traffic. The only thing I can see that makes Slashdotters against COICA is that it specifically targets piracy.
When the government makes regulation that censors the Internet, that's bad. When the government makes regulation that keeps corporations from censoring the Internet, that's good. Censorship is evil, freedom is good. It's that simple.
A car analogy: If the government made a law that prevented you from driving to California, that would be very bad. If a toll road operator forced you to tell your destination and charged extra if it was California, and the government would bitchslap them for that, it would be very good.
Good is good, whether it's done by the government, corporations, or anyone, and evil is evil, whether it's done by the government, corporations, or anyone. This is an entirely consistent position.
Your analogy for COICA isn't really on all fours; it's more as if the government were able to say "There have been reports that your car was seen to be speeding; no one has presented any proof of this, but just to make sure you aren't going to violate the speed limit, we're confiscating your car."
What about the other sides, were the negative effects persistant? Did you just create a group of idiots? Is this legal?
The sense I got from the articles, as well as the last sentence of the posting blurb, is that the increased or decreased function was with regard to the particular problem(s) that they were attempting to solve while the current was being applied, not to their general capacity to solve math problems.
It does lead me to wonder, though, how quickly we'll see some entrepreneur out for a quick buck to turn out a "thinking cap" that has the electronics to provide the proper stimulation to the parietal area and market it as a cramming tool for students having problems with math...
Actually, I would think that the people who block ads are the best customers, because they care about quality and details. They're not morons, they' know what they want, and if they dont, they will research it. They are generally the best, most informed shoppers because they are not interested in being told what they want, but instead are interested in buying what they want.
The problem is that the recognizably better products don't need cram-it-in-your-face advertising to convince you to buy them; it's the mediocre products or products in a market where there's nothing significant to distinguish one brand from another except brand that need the advertising, to sway the people who don't research their purchases, and the people who are going to be swayed by advertising like that generally need to have it rubbed in their face again and again and again for them to remember it long enough for them to make it to the store.
However, that's only with regard to a violation of copyright. Although you can argue that Stonehenge is a work of 'artistic craftsmanship', given the number of millenia since its creation, the copyright on it has long since expired (even Disney hasn't managed to lobby an extension of copyright to that degree), which would render any issue of copyright under that clause nugatory.
FTA: "The prototype uses a laser to display bright, high-contrast, full-color images on a screen that would be mounted above the dashboard, between the driver and the windscreen. To the driver the projected images would appear in the lower part of the windscreen."
Gives new meaning to the term 'distracted driving'
Not until Amazon.com releases a Kindle app for it.
Whats worse is that if this works they'll eventually change a $50 one off fee into $x per month to keep it at the higher speed. Welcome to the era of rented hardware DLC.
I don't think so... If the 'upgrade' could be turned off, imagine how many gigatonnes of sewage Intel's going to take in the face when (not if) the first piece of malware shows up that derates your CPU again, when by making it a one-way transition they could have prevented it.
The early days of stereo audio are known as the ping pong days because of the vocals and instruments bouncing back and forth between the two channels. If you listen to, for example, some of the early Beatles recordings, you'll hear the ping-pong effect.
.When you add another dimension to a playback medium, the first temptation is to exploit that new dimension to the point of exaggeration. That is where 3-D TV is now.
3-D TV is at the point were 3-D movies were when they were introduced, when things would be thrown out 'into' the audience, specifically for the "SEE! THIS IS 3-D!!!" effect. I had hoped that, with the years of schlock "3D for 3D's sake" that the movies went through, that 3D television would be able to skip past the same "the effect is more important than what it brings to the content" dead-end, but it appears that we'll have to wait for the manufacturers'' 'gosh-wow' period to die back.
Large chunks of destroyed flesh might be more detrimental to someone's operation than a cauterized air-hole, depending on where you shot them.
This is a misconception that seems to persist across the years in defiance of physics. If you have a laser or other directed-energy weapon that delivers a pulse of energy onto a target with sufficient energy density to 'burn a hole in the target', you're not going to get neat, cauterized holes in bodies; you're going to get nasty shredded wound cavities. Why? Two words -- 'steam explosion'. One mole of water -- 18 grams (about a fluid ounce, 1/12 of the contents of a soda can) converted from liquid to gas (which you'd have to do to 'burn a hole' in the target) occupies, at one atmosphere of pressure, 22.4 liters of volume. That volume of water, when it is converted to steam and before it has a chance to expand will be at more than 1200 atmospheres of pressure; the expansion act just like an explosive charge going off at the point of contact.
This was my immediate thought; shares of that $16M will just be charged back to the albums they're suing over, which helps ensure that they aren't stuck having to admit that the album turned a profit, which would force them to actually pay royalties to the artists.
All the nuts head west.......when they reach the Pacific they can't go any further.
They can always go over into the water and drown, like the lemmings in those 'nature' films so carefully staged by Disney where film crew were off-camera pushing the lemmings toward the edge...
Speed and red light cameras become useless too, I can see a huge underground industry built up around this because there's no way in hell what ever "encryption" they use will last.
RTFA and the proposed legislation -- the electronic billboard would only replace the rear plate; speed and red-light cameras that take a picture of the front of your car would not be affected.
That rings very true to my own educational experience. Also, based on my own experience and from watching other students in the past, when you're looking for something specific in a textbook you're most likely going to flip through looking for a picture, diagram, or a certain page layout. You may even remember approximately how far in from the front or back of the book the section is you're looking for (ie. you may remember it's about half an inch or one finger's thickness from the back of the book). None of these visual cues would work as well with an ebook reader, and as Roesner said, would be a lot slower.
And the Kindle falls down badly on the way you often use reference texts, where you would go to a particular part of the text, possibly from the index, based on a particular search criterion, then find you need to jump back a couple chapters to where it explains something that's glossed over in the material where you were looking, or flip back and forth between two or three possibly widely-separated points in the text that you are using in that combination only for the particular task you're doing right then, and probably never again, so bookmarks wouldn't help.
It's still much easier to flip back and forth through large chunks of a book if it's hardcopy in your hand, and it's likely to remain that way for some time.
To be fair to HP, some of their concern over image quality is founded in fact; the print heads for HP ink-jet printers are on the cartridge, and are replaced when the cartridge is, so HP doesn't put a lot of work into keeping the print head functioning past the expected usage to empty the cartridge. Also, the print head actually vaporizes the ink with heat to blow a dot of ink onto the paper, and the ink itself provides cooling for the print head elements; if you run a cartridge dry, lack of ink behind the print head could allow the print head element to burn out, degrading the printing.
That said, the price that the manufacturers charge for ink is still outrageous. Yes, it may be technologically complex to formulate a printer ink. However, that's a one-time cost, and economies of scale mean that it's more cost-effective to produce a printer ink in railroad tank car quantities than it is to produce it in demijohn quantities, and it's perfectly possible to design a printhead to feed ink from large bottles outside the printer -- one of the 'continuous flow' systems, generally with 8 fluid ounces of ink in each ink tank mounted away from the print head, so that there is no need to keep the quantity of ink low to improve print head response.
The Asian MMO's seem to play similar to a hack&slash, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bABf-SL3rQQ&feature=related the action takes a while to get going, but notice what happens when he hits an enemy. HUGE floating damage numbers. No western MMO would do that, you have a health bar somewhere on your hud that tells you this. It might seem a small difference but think about what single player games have huge floating damage numbers and which do not. Beat-em-ups and hack&slash games, Mortal Kombat and Bayonetta (sorry if they are mispelled, they are not my kind of game) vs Fallout and well any Bioware game (why are there only two RPG makers?). I dare say that while I did enjoy a bit of Diablo, on the whole the two types of games cater to different types of players.
Actually, NCSoft's City of Heroes superhero MMO has the floating numbers -- gold for damage you're doing to your target, green for healing you receive, red for damage done to you, grey for the numbers associated with other players (the damage they do, healing they get, damage they take), plus additional information like 'Critical', 'Dodged', 'Deflected', etc. And CoH is a Western-centric MMO; it apparently didn't do well when they tried taking it to Korea.
Aion looks pretty, if you like flashy, at first glance, but its beauty is really only skin deep, it has the same very basic character customization that all asian MMO's have. There is no depth to flash and it lacks functionality. You swing a huge sword around in the same basic animation forever and it never has anything to do with the damage. You can sweep straight through an enemy and miss and do a move on enemy behind you 100 meters and score an instant kill. It is the ultimate example of a spreadsheet game with a disco lightening show bolted on top. Great if you like that, but since servers are being merged, apparently not many do.
Aion's game world has an amazing depth of detail, but the character customization falls into the same 'you are what you wear' visuals that make the choices you had for your character's appearance less and less of a factor as you gain levels and acquire flashier and more powerful gear. And while you acquire new and/or more powerful actions from skill books as you level, more and more of your combat ability comes from your gear, so that the actual attack you use doesn't make as much of a difference unless it has some sort of special effect associated with it (which may or may not be pumped by the weapon's stats). Perhaps I'm just spoiled by the character customization in City of Heroes, where even if you had two characters of the same archetype who picked the same powersets and pools, chose the same powers at the same levels, allocated slots identically, and slotted identical enhancements in them, the two characters may not look even remotely like each other, because a character's appearance is completely independent of their powers. But for all the detail that was put into Aion's world, it seems as though the characters become less and less distinct with increasing level, hidden behind common layers of shiny.
That depends very much on your doctor. I was recently found to be very deficient in Vitamin D. The traditional course of therapy is 50,000IU per week for a month. He could have written out a prescription, but instead wrote out a lab request and attached a Post-It with the words "50K units Vit D/wk." I asked if there was anything special I should look for, and he said, "Just make sure it says 'Vitamin D' on the front of the label." For $8, I got two months' regimen. I need to go back in for testing to make sure that it's recovered, and will be taking 5000 units per week until I can find a better way to get direct sunlight on a regular basis, but that's really it.
I had an analogous situation; my doctor wanted to put me on a cholesterol-control medication, and after discussing the various medications and their possible side effects gave me a prescription for Niaspan, which (being a brand-name medication) had a rude copay under my health coverage. Niaspan being essentially nothing more than extended-release niacin tablets, I did some poking around and discovered that I could get OTC sustained-release niacin tablets with the same dosage, and instead of paying a $50 copay for 30, I could pay $3 for a bottle of 100. With a couple of extra tests to verify that the OTC was working just as well as the prescription would, I dumped the Niaspan prescription.
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
Tesla was, for the greater part of his life, badly hampered by a severe lack of money to carry out his more expansive projects. Some of this was due to his overgenerous nature, as when he gave up entirely the royalties Westinghouse owed him on the power-generation devices Tesla had designed, some was due to his lifelong habit of chasing ideas off in odd directions without consideration for their economic utility, and some was due to his inability to obtain funding from others -- Westinghouse, for example, refused to fund Tesla's development of a broadcast-power system after Tesla admitted that there would be no way to determine how much power any given end-user consumed, so there would be no way to bill them for it.
There are other articles with more coverage -- Live Science, BMC Biology (PDF of 20-page article with pictures available), New Scientist, Nature, and others. The provisional PDF available at BMC Biology is the full article as it was accepted, and details the experimental procedure that confirmed that these were completely anaerobic organisms.
the sugar lobby is weak (USA). That's why there is so damn much HFC in everything. It's the corn lobby that's strong
Although there appears to be (or have been at one time) a 'sugar Mafia'; years ago, in a restaurant, I noticed that the packets of sugar had an interesting set of statements on the back:
Use real sugar! Only 15 calories per teaspoon Use real sugar! No artificial ingredients. Use real sugar! If you know what's good for you.
The last line had everyone at the table laughing at the mental image of the sugar Mafia coming around to strongarm cooks... "That's a tasty-looking cake you got there... be a shame if something happened to it."
Clearly you haven't read the piece. He would have had to forfeit his fee to get his name off the movie. That's not something a writer can usually afford...
Then he wasn't prepared, as Harlan Ellison was, with a registered pseudonym that he could insist they use instead of his own name; Ellison would use his 'Cordwainer Bird' pseudonym to both distance himself from work that he felt had been mangled beyond repair by others, as he did for the TV series 'The Starlost'.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, I played CoH back around when it first came out, and at that point, the grind was LITERALLY all there was to the game.
While this is true, it also made the vast majority of it a) soloable for virtually all characters (I still remember the problems I had with a Controller in the 'teen levels, an issue which has been to some degree rectified), and b) inside instances where you weren't competing with everyone else for the mobs you needed to complete your missions. "Defeat all Clockwork in office" may not be any different, at its core, from "Bring me ten rat tails", but it doesn't matter how many people are in the zone with you; the moment you step through the door into the office building, none of them can do a thing to interfere with you completing the mission, whether by defeating the mobs you need or by training higher-level mobs to you to get you killed.
Then, too, during the first few years of CoH's existence, the features and development of the game were controlled by one person's concept of 'what the game should be' and what was 'fun'; once NCSoft bought out Cryptic, hired away most of the development team, and set up CoH development in-house, it became much more responsive to what the players were asking for, and the rate at which new features were added to the game skyrocketed.
The judges that ruled in favor were not considering that when a person is taken into custody searched and examined, it is not for personal information, rather the safety for the officers and the accountability of returning and cataloging the property
Actually, I suspect that the reasoning was extended from an earlier precedent that allows the police to search your car if you are arrested while driving, which I find equally reprehensible, but has been in effect for enough years that, in the current 'presumed to be a terrorist until stripped, fondled, and proved otherwise' climate, it is unlikely to be overturned.
So the badly-reprocessed 3D and ever-more-outrageous explosions/stunts/etc. are the early 21st century's equivalent of "font in mouth disease"?
If the USPTO suffers a complete lack of its normal idiocy and grants the patent rationally, they'd grant it for clicker devices used in conjunction with Microsoft Office and no further. And the proprietor of the Alternate Destination will announce a cooling trend and the opening of a ski resort in Malebolge.
When the government makes regulation that censors the Internet, that's bad. When the government makes regulation that keeps corporations from censoring the Internet, that's good. Censorship is evil, freedom is good. It's that simple.
A car analogy: If the government made a law that prevented you from driving to California, that would be very bad. If a toll road operator forced you to tell your destination and charged extra if it was California, and the government would bitchslap them for that, it would be very good.
Good is good, whether it's done by the government, corporations, or anyone, and evil is evil, whether it's done by the government, corporations, or anyone. This is an entirely consistent position.
Your analogy for COICA isn't really on all fours; it's more as if the government were able to say "There have been reports that your car was seen to be speeding; no one has presented any proof of this, but just to make sure you aren't going to violate the speed limit, we're confiscating your car."
What about the other sides, were the negative effects persistant? Did you just create a group of idiots? Is this legal?
The sense I got from the articles, as well as the last sentence of the posting blurb, is that the increased or decreased function was with regard to the particular problem(s) that they were attempting to solve while the current was being applied, not to their general capacity to solve math problems.
It does lead me to wonder, though, how quickly we'll see some entrepreneur out for a quick buck to turn out a "thinking cap" that has the electronics to provide the proper stimulation to the parietal area and market it as a cramming tool for students having problems with math...
Actually, I would think that the people who block ads are the best customers, because they care about quality and details. They're not morons, they' know what they want, and if they dont, they will research it. They are generally the best, most informed shoppers because they are not interested in being told what they want, but instead are interested in buying what they want.
The problem is that the recognizably better products don't need cram-it-in-your-face advertising to convince you to buy them; it's the mediocre products or products in a market where there's nothing significant to distinguish one brand from another except brand that need the advertising, to sway the people who don't research their purchases, and the people who are going to be swayed by advertising like that generally need to have it rubbed in their face again and again and again for them to remember it long enough for them to make it to the store.
However, that's only with regard to a violation of copyright. Although you can argue that Stonehenge is a work of 'artistic craftsmanship', given the number of millenia since its creation, the copyright on it has long since expired (even Disney hasn't managed to lobby an extension of copyright to that degree), which would render any issue of copyright under that clause nugatory.
FTA:
"The prototype uses a laser to display bright, high-contrast, full-color images on a screen that would be mounted above the dashboard, between the driver and the windscreen. To the driver the projected images would appear in the lower part of the windscreen."
Gives new meaning to the term 'distracted driving'
Not until Amazon.com releases a Kindle app for it.
Whats worse is that if this works they'll eventually change a $50 one off fee into $x per month to keep
it at the higher speed. Welcome to the era of rented hardware DLC.
I don't think so... If the 'upgrade' could be turned off, imagine how many gigatonnes of sewage Intel's going to take in the face when (not if) the first piece of malware shows up that derates your CPU again, when by making it a one-way transition they could have prevented it.
The early days of stereo audio are known as the ping pong days because of the vocals and instruments bouncing back and forth between the two channels. If you listen to, for example, some of the early Beatles recordings, you'll hear the ping-pong effect.
.When you add another dimension to a playback medium, the first temptation is to exploit that new dimension to the point of exaggeration. That is where 3-D TV is now.
3-D TV is at the point were 3-D movies were when they were introduced, when things would be thrown out 'into' the audience, specifically for the "SEE! THIS IS 3-D!!!" effect. I had hoped that, with the years of schlock "3D for 3D's sake" that the movies went through, that 3D television would be able to skip past the same "the effect is more important than what it brings to the content" dead-end, but it appears that we'll have to wait for the manufacturers'' 'gosh-wow' period to die back.
Large chunks of destroyed flesh might be more detrimental to someone's operation than a cauterized air-hole, depending on where you shot them.
This is a misconception that seems to persist across the years in defiance of physics. If you have a laser or other directed-energy weapon that delivers a pulse of energy onto a target with sufficient energy density to 'burn a hole in the target', you're not going to get neat, cauterized holes in bodies; you're going to get nasty shredded wound cavities. Why? Two words -- 'steam explosion'. One mole of water -- 18 grams (about a fluid ounce, 1/12 of the contents of a soda can) converted from liquid to gas (which you'd have to do to 'burn a hole' in the target) occupies, at one atmosphere of pressure, 22.4 liters of volume. That volume of water, when it is converted to steam and before it has a chance to expand will be at more than 1200 atmospheres of pressure; the expansion act just like an explosive charge going off at the point of contact.
This was my immediate thought; shares of that $16M will just be charged back to the albums they're suing over, which helps ensure that they aren't stuck having to admit that the album turned a profit, which would force them to actually pay royalties to the artists.
All the nuts head west.......when they reach the Pacific they can't go any further.
They can always go over into the water and drown, like the lemmings in those 'nature' films so carefully staged by Disney where film crew were off-camera pushing the lemmings toward the edge...
... next year's April 1 RFC -- "IP over SMS Carrier".
Speed and red light cameras become useless too, I can see a huge underground industry built up around this because there's no way in hell what ever "encryption" they use will last.
RTFA and the proposed legislation -- the electronic billboard would only replace the rear plate; speed and red-light cameras that take a picture of the front of your car would not be affected.
That rings very true to my own educational experience. Also, based on my own experience and from watching other students in the past, when you're looking for something specific in a textbook you're most likely going to flip through looking for a picture, diagram, or a certain page layout. You may even remember approximately how far in from the front or back of the book the section is you're looking for (ie. you may remember it's about half an inch or one finger's thickness from the back of the book). None of these visual cues would work as well with an ebook reader, and as Roesner said, would be a lot slower.
And the Kindle falls down badly on the way you often use reference texts, where you would go to a particular part of the text, possibly from the index, based on a particular search criterion, then find you need to jump back a couple chapters to where it explains something that's glossed over in the material where you were looking, or flip back and forth between two or three possibly widely-separated points in the text that you are using in that combination only for the particular task you're doing right then, and probably never again, so bookmarks wouldn't help.
It's still much easier to flip back and forth through large chunks of a book if it's hardcopy in your hand, and it's likely to remain that way for some time.
To be fair to HP, some of their concern over image quality is founded in fact; the print heads for HP ink-jet printers are on the cartridge, and are replaced when the cartridge is, so HP doesn't put a lot of work into keeping the print head functioning past the expected usage to empty the cartridge. Also, the print head actually vaporizes the ink with heat to blow a dot of ink onto the paper, and the ink itself provides cooling for the print head elements; if you run a cartridge dry, lack of ink behind the print head could allow the print head element to burn out, degrading the printing.
That said, the price that the manufacturers charge for ink is still outrageous. Yes, it may be technologically complex to formulate a printer ink. However, that's a one-time cost, and economies of scale mean that it's more cost-effective to produce a printer ink in railroad tank car quantities than it is to produce it in demijohn quantities, and it's perfectly possible to design a printhead to feed ink from large bottles outside the printer -- one of the 'continuous flow' systems, generally with 8 fluid ounces of ink in each ink tank mounted away from the print head, so that there is no need to keep the quantity of ink low to improve print head response.
However, as Ambrose Bierce pointed out, that, far from being the last refuge of a scoundrel, patriotism is often the first.
The Asian MMO's seem to play similar to a hack&slash, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bABf-SL3rQQ&feature=related the action takes a while to get going, but notice what happens when he hits an enemy. HUGE floating damage numbers. No western MMO would do that, you have a health bar somewhere on your hud that tells you this. It might seem a small difference but think about what single player games have huge floating damage numbers and which do not. Beat-em-ups and hack&slash games, Mortal Kombat and Bayonetta (sorry if they are mispelled, they are not my kind of game) vs Fallout and well any Bioware game (why are there only two RPG makers?). I dare say that while I did enjoy a bit of Diablo, on the whole the two types of games cater to different types of players.
Actually, NCSoft's City of Heroes superhero MMO has the floating numbers -- gold for damage you're doing to your target, green for healing you receive, red for damage done to you, grey for the numbers associated with other players (the damage they do, healing they get, damage they take), plus additional information like 'Critical', 'Dodged', 'Deflected', etc. And CoH is a Western-centric MMO; it apparently didn't do well when they tried taking it to Korea.
Aion looks pretty, if you like flashy, at first glance, but its beauty is really only skin deep, it has the same very basic character customization that all asian MMO's have. There is no depth to flash and it lacks functionality. You swing a huge sword around in the same basic animation forever and it never has anything to do with the damage. You can sweep straight through an enemy and miss and do a move on enemy behind you 100 meters and score an instant kill. It is the ultimate example of a spreadsheet game with a disco lightening show bolted on top. Great if you like that, but since servers are being merged, apparently not many do.
Aion's game world has an amazing depth of detail, but the character customization falls into the same 'you are what you wear' visuals that make the choices you had for your character's appearance less and less of a factor as you gain levels and acquire flashier and more powerful gear. And while you acquire new and/or more powerful actions from skill books as you level, more and more of your combat ability comes from your gear, so that the actual attack you use doesn't make as much of a difference unless it has some sort of special effect associated with it (which may or may not be pumped by the weapon's stats). Perhaps I'm just spoiled by the character customization in City of Heroes, where even if you had two characters of the same archetype who picked the same powersets and pools, chose the same powers at the same levels, allocated slots identically, and slotted identical enhancements in them, the two characters may not look even remotely like each other, because a character's appearance is completely independent of their powers. But for all the detail that was put into Aion's world, it seems as though the characters become less and less distinct with increasing level, hidden behind common layers of shiny.
That depends very much on your doctor. I was recently found to be very deficient in Vitamin D. The traditional course of therapy is 50,000IU per week for a month. He could have written out a prescription, but instead wrote out a lab request and attached a Post-It with the words "50K units Vit D/wk." I asked if there was anything special I should look for, and he said, "Just make sure it says 'Vitamin D' on the front of the label." For $8, I got two months' regimen. I need to go back in for testing to make sure that it's recovered, and will be taking 5000 units per week until I can find a better way to get direct sunlight on a regular basis, but that's really it.
I had an analogous situation; my doctor wanted to put me on a cholesterol-control medication, and after discussing the various medications and their possible side effects gave me a prescription for Niaspan, which (being a brand-name medication) had a rude copay under my health coverage. Niaspan being essentially nothing more than extended-release niacin tablets, I did some poking around and discovered that I could get OTC sustained-release niacin tablets with the same dosage, and instead of paying a $50 copay for 30, I could pay $3 for a bottle of 100. With a couple of extra tests to verify that the OTC was working just as well as the prescription would, I dumped the Niaspan prescription.
Note that this article predicts both the Internet and wireless technology, but with no mention of the digital aspects. It also predicts wireless power, such that a ship could be sent across the Atlantic, powered by a single wireless power station on one side. It predicted all of this would happen in something like 5 years.
Tesla was, for the greater part of his life, badly hampered by a severe lack of money to carry out his more expansive projects. Some of this was due to his overgenerous nature, as when he gave up entirely the royalties Westinghouse owed him on the power-generation devices Tesla had designed, some was due to his lifelong habit of chasing ideas off in odd directions without consideration for their economic utility, and some was due to his inability to obtain funding from others -- Westinghouse, for example, refused to fund Tesla's development of a broadcast-power system after Tesla admitted that there would be no way to determine how much power any given end-user consumed, so there would be no way to bill them for it.
There are other articles with more coverage -- Live Science, BMC Biology (PDF of 20-page article with pictures available), New Scientist, Nature, and others. The provisional PDF available at BMC Biology is the full article as it was accepted, and details the experimental procedure that confirmed that these were completely anaerobic organisms.
the sugar lobby is weak (USA). That's why there is so damn much HFC in everything. It's the corn lobby that's strong
Although there appears to be (or have been at one time) a 'sugar Mafia'; years ago, in a restaurant, I noticed that the packets of sugar had an interesting set of statements on the back:
The last line had everyone at the table laughing at the mental image of the sugar Mafia coming around to strongarm cooks... "That's a tasty-looking cake you got there... be a shame if something happened to it."
Clearly you haven't read the piece. He would have had to forfeit his fee to get his name off the movie. That's not something a writer can usually afford...
Then he wasn't prepared, as Harlan Ellison was, with a registered pseudonym that he could insist they use instead of his own name; Ellison would use his 'Cordwainer Bird' pseudonym to both distance himself from work that he felt had been mangled beyond repair by others, as he did for the TV series 'The Starlost'.