We can't draw final conclusions from those stats
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That is not necessarily a 70% acquittal rate. Dropping charges after they were filed certainly sounds like it would also show up in that stat.
That is not to say filing charges and then later dropping them isn't bad, just that I don't think that the 70% means they fail that often during trial.
SirWired
I looked over that case.. it doesn't look that bad
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Wow, okay, I retract my earlier statement that convicting without physical evidence is necessarily bad. From that newspaper article, a conviction certainly looks reasonable. (I couldn't pass actual judgement since I wasn't at the trial.) Certainly the constitution does not require physical evidence to convict.
Unless every single one of the many witnesses were co-conspirators, it seems fairly solid.
Yes, one of the star witnesses was about a confession, but the other witnesses certainly testified about some behavior that backs up the confession.
SirWired
If you don't plead, DOJ only has a 30% rate
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Doing some simple math with those statistics, they tell us that if you don't plead guilty, there is a 70% chance you will get off. (Either the charges are dropped, or the DOJ loses in the courtroom.)
From those stats, I'd say it is possible our justice system is fairly healthy.
No eyewitnesses is pretty standard. (I am assuming that is what you meant, since every trial has some witnesses.) No body is certainly no impediment for a murder conviction. If a murder conviction absolutely required a body, it would make it nearly impossible to convict any criminal with an IQ above 50. Disposing of a body isn't that tough.
However, convicting somebody with no evidence would be pretty bad.
This is not a submarine. This is a boat that happens to float two meters below the surface of the water.
Depth control consists of him swimming to the surface, filling a bladder with air, and then attaching it to the sub.
And I'm not impressed with his claims that it practically "swam by itself." Getting something to move horizontally when provided with vertical buoyancy and travel is not exactly what one would call difficult, and it has nothing to do with how efficient the boat is or isn't under power.
Yes, if you forge a Notary stamp, it is fairly trivial to get the Deeds office to record whatever you want them to record.
However, eventually the bank will notice when you stop paying them and they attempt to foreclose. Also, this is the sort of crime the local DA usually does find time to prosecute.
As with society, this mechanism relies on the vast majority of the populace being honest. Just like the locks on my house are no real deterrent to a determined thief, the requirement to have a Notary stamp is no real barrier to somebody who would like to commit title fraud.
This sort of crime is also while virtually all mortgage banks require the purchase of title insurance when buying a house.
When the deed was recorded at the local records office, the fact that the bank has a lien on it is recorded along with it. The only way to clear that lien is to get the lienholder to have a letter saying so attached to your deed, or you have to have a court do it.
I agree that home charging is quite feasible, at least after major upgrades to the grid in general. (The grid simply does not have enough current reserve capacity to meet more than a fraction of our transportation needs.) The only point I was making was that those advertised recharging specs were completely pulled out of thin air. There is simply no way they have developed a 100-mile battery that can take a charge in ten minutes. Ultracapacitor bank, maybe, but not a battery. At least not outside of a lab with a cryogenic plant to keep the battery from exploding.
To me, this simple fact makes the whole article suspect.
Also, if charging a car took ten minutes, (twice as long as gassing it), a normal eight-pump station along a long-haul route is going to need about 48 chargers. (Twice as to charge long vs. filling a tank, 1/3 the range as gasoline.) That's a 13MW feed for one piddly little quickie-mart along an interstate. A larger gas station like the kind commonly found along major routes (again, long-haul routes where trickle charging isn't going to be an option) could easily require three times as much. A 39MW feed for one gas station, easily!
There isn't any practical solution for this obvious problem any time soon, which is why I think hybrids are going to be it for the forseeable future. (Or maybe people will own a EV for commuting, and rent a hybrid or conventional vehicle for long trips...)
Crunching some quick numbers, and assuming a car about as economical as the published specs for the volt, charging a two 100-mile battery packs at once (needed for a commercial station) in 10 minutes would require approx 1300 Amps at 210V. Now I know that the voltage would not be stepped down that low at the curb, but that should give you an idea of how inconceivable that stress on the grid would be. Yes, every factory has a feed that large, but there are a heck of a lot more cars than factories. And a 100-mile range is nothing. Could you imagine every long-haul car on I-95 pulling that kind of load every hour and a half during the day?
In any case, that 10-minute number for batteries sounds pretty suspect. For a cap bank, maybe, but not batteries. They'd catch on fire without some super-elaborate cooling setup.
Recharging a battery that could run a car that size, that long, in ten minutes would require far more current than an electric grid could reasonably deliver, at least to more than a token few cars.
While certainly OSS could introduce cost savings, frankly it is freaking rounding error compared with the current budget deficit. A copy of OEM Vista, is what, $80?
And low-paid govt. IT that can't secure what they have now would hardly do a better job securing OSS.
It may help, but it isn't some kind of magic wand, and it introduces costs of its own.
Liquidation sales usually suck. The Liquidator starts by marking up all items to full List price (or beyond), and then giving you a "sale" price off of that new inflated price (which nobody ever paid, and was never charged.)
By the time the "discounts" get down to a level that can significantly beat, say, a retailer that isn't going out of business, the store has been picked clean by the uninformed masses that buy stuff, and only when they get home realize they got a lousy deal. (All Sales Final)
OTOH, if you run a retail store, you can often get great deals on the shelving units. (When they say "everything must go" they aren't kidding. Everything not bolted down (and even some that is) goes out the door.
If they weren't abusive, why on earth did they ever remove the Add/Remove Programs option? I could buy your statement that it was the user's fault if the option was there the whole time, but it wasn't.
A better tactic than installing unremovable crapware separate from the download would have been to tie the two programs together. You want to get rid of the ads, you uninstall the program you got for free too. And plenty of folks ended up with the DR crapware (with DR's full knowledge) through IE exploits... those weren't trying to get something for nothing.
No, they were not convicted of criminal charges, but they did all but admit wrongdoing to the FTC, and they didn't lose any suits because they went under before the suits were completed.
Yeah, you worked there, and must have drunk the kool-aid too.
"To get that oh-so-useful uninstaller you had to go to a website, answer a survey, and only then could you download it. If they genuinely wanted to make it easy, they would have put it in Add/Remove Programs, and stuck their survey in there."
So it takes 5 minutes instead of 2. They didn't want to make it easy to uninstall (of course they didn't) but they didn't make it very difficult.
If I was uninfecting a machine with that awful crap, I wouldn't have touched that uninstaller with a 10-foot pole. To get it, you had to go to "mypctuneup.com", supply your e-mail address, and answer a survey. After getting crappy software on your machine, would YOU go to a sketchy-sounding website, supply your e-mail and install anything it gave you? That's a real easy way to get more crapware on your box, and piles of spam to boot. I'd rebuild the OS before doing something that stupid.
Providing the uninstaller that way is about as useful as the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of a spam: sure, there is the off-chance it works, but it is far more likely to be the prelude to more evil.
"And their distributors were complete scum that Direct Revenue did very little to police. Yeah, they suspended any that were complained about (if the hapless users even had any clue how they got the software), but those rogue distributors would just sign up under a new name."
"I can't believe he thought this job was a "net positive" simply because he wiped out the other guys' malware more than he installed."
I think that's a rational, logically correct, statement for him to make. Overall, because of him there was net adware around. He didn't say that it cleared him of blame or made it morally excusable. He leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about that.
Just because this clown uninstalled the competition on somebody's PC didn't actually help the user; it just provided more room for his software to waste the user's time. The only "positive" for the user would be an actual clean PC, which they didn't get. His actions were about as useful as giving a drowning scuba diver a tank of air attached to a 500-lb lead weight; yeah, they can now breathe... too bad they're still screwed.
To get that oh-so-useful uninstaller you had to go to a website, answer a survey, and only then could you download it. If they genuinely wanted to make it easy, they would have put it in Add/Remove Programs, and stuck their survey in there.
I don't know about you, but after getting sketchy software on my machine, the LAST thing I want to do is go to some random website and download even MORE crap. I wouldn't trust that download one bit.
And the bit about "it was also designed to be very difficult for other adware to kick off" is complete hand-waving B.S. It was designed to be very difficult for anti-virus packages and anti-spyware packages too. In fact, anti-malware packages were probably the primary target of the persistence code.
And their distributors were complete scum that Direct Revenue did very little to police. Yeah, they suspended any that were complained about (if the hapless users even had any clue how they got the software), but those rogue distributors would just sign up under a new name.
I can't believe he thought this job was a "net positive" simply because he wiped out the other guys' malware more than he installed. That just means he is a very sneaky coder... That's like a embezzeling salesman saying he was a "net positive" because he generated more profits than he stole. It may be true, but it doesn't make him any less of a scumbag.
The ethics code requires contributions by others to be "properly credited." It by no means requires the contributors to be paid (unless of course pay was promised.) Also, if credit is explicitly not promised (as in this case), failing to credit is not against the code.
No quests? Are you nuts? What exactly are you supposed to do all day long in the game then?
From your reply, it sounds as if your only goal is to replace XP and quest grinding with a grind for food, money, faction, etc. I don't necessarily see this as much of an improvement. You are still grinding, you are just grinding for a different goal.
I'm not seeing a whole lot of motivation in your game. Okay, I steal food from the NPC King which pisses him off, (or reduce my faction, if you want to translate into MMO terms) to feed the NPC Orphan. (Maybe that kicks my alignment around some.) Now what? Okay, maybe now such-and-such barmaid will notice my kindness and give me a place to crash for the night so I don't freeze.
All I did just now was faction farm in exchange for shelter, and I'm going to have to repeat the whole process tomorrow in some form, since I have no overarching quest to do. I'm not seeing the fun here...
If you don't like quests, you don't need a new game to avoid them; simply don't accept or complete any quests, and turn yourself into a Money/Food/Faction grinding robot. You can do this now in WoW, but I'm afraid you'll end up looking like a Chinese Gold Farmer.
For better or worse, quests provide motivation for players to go to new places, obtain new gear, improve their stats, along with providing plot tidbits, which are triggered by their completion.
The GM's you are calling for aren't real GM's. Removing corpses and spawning some new NPC's can be done by the computer already without any help. And if those NPC's aren't handing out quests, what are they doing other than more-or-less the same thing they were doing yesterday, just plopped down in a different place with new stats?
If a GM is spread out among 1000 players how much individual growth could he possibly provide? I don't see this as being any better than the current model of content patches providing new things for all players to do.
Tabletop "was" the best for providing individual player growth? You do know that tabletop still exists... there are a huge number of games out there, with countless others under development, along with enough content to keep you busy until you die.
And yes, I will be so bold as to say that this is something computers "can't" do. Computers can't do plot. This isn't pessimism, it's realism.
If you want an individualized experience with complex moral dilemmas, plus a long-term story, you simply cannot deliver that inside of a Massive game. Can't be done.
If you want quests that have never been done before, will never be done again, yet still integrate with a long-term plot, affect your character for a long time, and involve real moral decisions, you are simply looking in the wrong place. What you are asking for requires the services of a living, breathing Gamemaster. Period.
If this is the sort of this thing you are looking for, you need to go back to pencil and paper gaming, and stop looking on the computer.
Too many of the questions are random historical trivia rather than testing understanding of the knowledge of the structure of the United States Government and Economy.
Interestingly, other than a couple of questions on the Supreme Court the test is devoid of questions on the Judicial system. Nothing about trial rights, jury service, criminal rights, etc.
I would have classified many of the questions as History questions, not Civics questions. And even them, some of them are sufficiently obscure and/or inconsequential that they would be poor questions on a general test of US History also.
The court had absolutely no problem understanding plain English. Your problem is to take the broadest definition possible of "servitude", instead of the meaning which the authors of the amendment clearly meant to use.
If you were to read it broadly and stupidly, the 1st amendment prohibits the government from stopping the false shout of "Fire" in a crowded theater, if you want to use the classic example of permissible restrictions on "speech".
Likewise, the that broad reading of the 1st amendment prohibits laws against slander or libel, yet if you were being obstinate, those could be considered "speech" also.
It is inconceivable that shortly after the successful conclusion of a war whose victory relied on the draft the authors of the amendment would have sought to essentially ban the draft in the future. You could call compulsory military service "servitude" if you chose, but that would not be what the authors had in mind.
Likewise, without the compulsion for citizens to serve on a jury, the Constitution's promise to all of a Jury Of Your Peers is meaningless. Is forcing you to appear at the courthouse to serve on a jury under threat of jail and/or fine "slavery"?
The court was stating that some level of service for the needs of the Republic are the basic duties expected of any citizen and are considered neither slavery nor servitude. To equate basic civic duty with slavery is to cheapen the war which was fought to abolish it.
Compulsory service to the state vs. the 13th amendment has already been considered by the Supreme Court and found to be constitutional.
BUTLER v. PERRY, 240 U.S. 328 (1916)
This particular case regarded a law in Florida requiring individuals to labor on the construction of roads in their area, or pay a $3/day fee.
"[The 13th amendment] introduced no novel doctrine with respect of services always treated as exceptional, and certainly was not intended to interdict enforcement of those duties which individuals owe to the state, such as services in the army, militia, on the jury, etc. The great purpose in view was liberty under the protection of effective government, not the destruction of the latter by depriving it of essential powers."
If you read the full decision, you can see that the courts looked at the legislative context from which the 13th amendment was drawn and determined that the authors of the amendment were explicitly outlawing slavery in the form that it was practiced throughout much of the country prior to the Civil War.
Basically, duties that could be reasonably considered Civic Duty are not considered "servitude" for the purposes of the 13th amendment.
FCoE exists to serve a specific market need. That is, to be a simple and inexpensive bridge between Ethernet and FC networks. Inserting upper-layer flow control would defeat the entire purpose of the protocol existing.
Inserting an intermediate protocol layer above Ethernet and below SCSI would of course replace Fibre Channel. While that is an admirable VERY long-term goal, in the short term, it simply is not feasible due to existing investments in FC technology. FCoE can be bridged into an FC network with very little effort. Creating a Layer 3 or 4 flow-control mechanism is a huge effort that is not going to bridge easily into FC, in addition to being far more complex overall than Layer 2 flow control.
This is the reason iSCSI->FC gateways have never taken off; they are just too darn expensive, complex, and buggy.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I am certainly no fan of FC Class 3 "flow control"; indeed you could call it the bane of my existence. I hate the way it is designed, and the implementations are even worse. It is virtually impossible to troubleshoot without $85k bits of hardware no customer ever buys.
What we have right now is awful, but it is what exists, and any plans to completely replace it are so far off that they are not relevant to any vendor's product plans right now.
Personally, I think iSCSI will eventually take over, but not for many years. An SCTP/SCSI would be nice, but I have a feeling that admins and developers are so comfortable with TCP that it will still predominate.
From what I can read on RED, it performs congestion control via pro-active frame drop. This won't work with anything vaguely resembling current SCSI stacks.
To put it simply, the acceptable frame loss rate for a production storage network is approx. zero, and the current driver stacks are written with that expectation in mind. For instance, if you lose the SCSI status frame, the box waiting for it must wait at least two seconds, and usually longer, for that frame to arrive before giving up on it. This is simply not something you want to occur very often when you are waiting for, say, a latency-sensitive DB transaction to complete.
The biggest argument for FCoE is the fact that it maps easily on top of existing FC SANs, adapters, and driver stacks, with few modifications. Once you have modified it for those IP extensions and mapping it onto an IP transport (SCTP, TCP, whatever), you end up with something very much like iSCSI, which, for whatever reason, has yet to really take off in the higher-end space. (I think FCoE will be an iSCSI jumping-off point...)
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That is not necessarily a 70% acquittal rate. Dropping charges after they were filed certainly sounds like it would also show up in that stat.
That is not to say filing charges and then later dropping them isn't bad, just that I don't think that the 70% means they fail that often during trial.
SirWired
Wow, okay, I retract my earlier statement that convicting without physical evidence is necessarily bad. From that newspaper article, a conviction certainly looks reasonable. (I couldn't pass actual judgement since I wasn't at the trial.) Certainly the constitution does not require physical evidence to convict.
Unless every single one of the many witnesses were co-conspirators, it seems fairly solid.
Yes, one of the star witnesses was about a confession, but the other witnesses certainly testified about some behavior that backs up the confession.
SirWired
Doing some simple math with those statistics, they tell us that if you don't plead guilty, there is a 70% chance you will get off. (Either the charges are dropped, or the DOJ loses in the courtroom.)
From those stats, I'd say it is possible our justice system is fairly healthy.
SirWired
I'm pretty curious about that too...
No eyewitnesses is pretty standard. (I am assuming that is what you meant, since every trial has some witnesses.)
No body is certainly no impediment for a murder conviction. If a murder conviction absolutely required a body, it would make it nearly impossible to convict any criminal with an IQ above 50. Disposing of a body isn't that tough.
However, convicting somebody with no evidence would be pretty bad.
SirWired
This is not a submarine. This is a boat that happens to float two meters below the surface of the water.
Depth control consists of him swimming to the surface, filling a bladder with air, and then attaching it to the sub.
And I'm not impressed with his claims that it practically "swam by itself." Getting something to move horizontally when provided with vertical buoyancy and travel is not exactly what one would call difficult, and it has nothing to do with how efficient the boat is or isn't under power.
SirWired
Yes, if you forge a Notary stamp, it is fairly trivial to get the Deeds office to record whatever you want them to record.
However, eventually the bank will notice when you stop paying them and they attempt to foreclose. Also, this is the sort of crime the local DA usually does find time to prosecute.
As with society, this mechanism relies on the vast majority of the populace being honest. Just like the locks on my house are no real deterrent to a determined thief, the requirement to have a Notary stamp is no real barrier to somebody who would like to commit title fraud.
This sort of crime is also while virtually all mortgage banks require the purchase of title insurance when buying a house.
SirWired
When the deed was recorded at the local records office, the fact that the bank has a lien on it is recorded along with it. The only way to clear that lien is to get the lienholder to have a letter saying so attached to your deed, or you have to have a court do it.
SirWired
I agree that home charging is quite feasible, at least after major upgrades to the grid in general. (The grid simply does not have enough current reserve capacity to meet more than a fraction of our transportation needs.) The only point I was making was that those advertised recharging specs were completely pulled out of thin air. There is simply no way they have developed a 100-mile battery that can take a charge in ten minutes. Ultracapacitor bank, maybe, but not a battery. At least not outside of a lab with a cryogenic plant to keep the battery from exploding.
To me, this simple fact makes the whole article suspect.
Also, if charging a car took ten minutes, (twice as long as gassing it), a normal eight-pump station along a long-haul route is going to need about 48 chargers. (Twice as to charge long vs. filling a tank, 1/3 the range as gasoline.) That's a 13MW feed for one piddly little quickie-mart along an interstate. A larger gas station like the kind commonly found along major routes (again, long-haul routes where trickle charging isn't going to be an option) could easily require three times as much. A 39MW feed for one gas station, easily!
There isn't any practical solution for this obvious problem any time soon, which is why I think hybrids are going to be it for the forseeable future. (Or maybe people will own a EV for commuting, and rent a hybrid or conventional vehicle for long trips...)
SirWired
Crunching some quick numbers, and assuming a car about as economical as the published specs for the volt, charging a two 100-mile battery packs at once (needed for a commercial station) in 10 minutes would require approx 1300 Amps at 210V. Now I know that the voltage would not be stepped down that low at the curb, but that should give you an idea of how inconceivable that stress on the grid would be. Yes, every factory has a feed that large, but there are a heck of a lot more cars than factories. And a 100-mile range is nothing. Could you imagine every long-haul car on I-95 pulling that kind of load every hour and a half during the day?
In any case, that 10-minute number for batteries sounds pretty suspect. For a cap bank, maybe, but not batteries. They'd catch on fire without some super-elaborate cooling setup.
SirWired
It's the 10 minute recharging in the spec that is frightening. Slow charging would be difficult, but doable.
SirWired
Recharging a battery that could run a car that size, that long, in ten minutes would require far more current than an electric grid could reasonably deliver, at least to more than a token few cars.
SirWired
Exaggerate much?
While certainly OSS could introduce cost savings, frankly it is freaking rounding error compared with the current budget deficit. A copy of OEM Vista, is what, $80?
And low-paid govt. IT that can't secure what they have now would hardly do a better job securing OSS.
It may help, but it isn't some kind of magic wand, and it introduces costs of its own.
SirWired
Liquidation sales usually suck. The Liquidator starts by marking up all items to full List price (or beyond), and then giving you a "sale" price off of that new inflated price (which nobody ever paid, and was never charged.)
By the time the "discounts" get down to a level that can significantly beat, say, a retailer that isn't going out of business, the store has been picked clean by the uninformed masses that buy stuff, and only when they get home realize they got a lousy deal. (All Sales Final)
OTOH, if you run a retail store, you can often get great deals on the shelving units. (When they say "everything must go" they aren't kidding. Everything not bolted down (and even some that is) goes out the door.
SirWired
If they weren't abusive, why on earth did they ever remove the Add/Remove Programs option? I could buy your statement that it was the user's fault if the option was there the whole time, but it wasn't.
A better tactic than installing unremovable crapware separate from the download would have been to tie the two programs together. You want to get rid of the ads, you uninstall the program you got for free too. And plenty of folks ended up with the DR crapware (with DR's full knowledge) through IE exploits... those weren't trying to get something for nothing.
No, they were not convicted of criminal charges, but they did all but admit wrongdoing to the FTC, and they didn't lose any suits because they went under before the suits were completed.
Yeah, you worked there, and must have drunk the kool-aid too.
SirWired
"To get that oh-so-useful uninstaller you had to go to a website, answer a survey, and only then could you download it. If they genuinely wanted to make it easy, they would have put it in Add/Remove Programs, and stuck their survey in there."
So it takes 5 minutes instead of 2. They didn't want to make it easy to uninstall (of course they didn't) but they didn't make it very difficult.
If I was uninfecting a machine with that awful crap, I wouldn't have touched that uninstaller with a 10-foot pole. To get it, you had to go to "mypctuneup.com", supply your e-mail address, and answer a survey. After getting crappy software on your machine, would YOU go to a sketchy-sounding website, supply your e-mail and install anything it gave you? That's a real easy way to get more crapware on your box, and piles of spam to boot. I'd rebuild the OS before doing something that stupid.
Providing the uninstaller that way is about as useful as the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of a spam: sure, there is the off-chance it works, but it is far more likely to be the prelude to more evil.
"And their distributors were complete scum that Direct Revenue did very little to police. Yeah, they suspended any that were complained about (if the hapless users even had any clue how they got the software), but those rogue distributors would just sign up under a new name."
[Citation Needed]
Gladly: http://www.oag.state.ny.us/media_center/2006/apr/Direct%20Revenue%20Affirmation%20of%20Justin%20Brookman.pdf PDF Page 40, paragraph 99. I will modify my statement somewhat: It turns out they did NOT suspend distributors caught doing shenanigans; they allowed them to continue operating with nothing more than a mild warning, even after being caught more than once.
"I can't believe he thought this job was a "net positive" simply because he wiped out the other guys' malware more than he installed."
I think that's a rational, logically correct, statement for him to make. Overall, because of him there was net adware around. He didn't say that it cleared him of blame or made it morally excusable. He leaves the reader to draw his or her own conclusions about that.
Just because this clown uninstalled the competition on somebody's PC didn't actually help the user; it just provided more room for his software to waste the user's time. The only "positive" for the user would be an actual clean PC, which they didn't get. His actions were about as useful as giving a drowning scuba diver a tank of air attached to a 500-lb lead weight; yeah, they can now breathe... too bad they're still screwed.
SirWired
To get that oh-so-useful uninstaller you had to go to a website, answer a survey, and only then could you download it. If they genuinely wanted to make it easy, they would have put it in Add/Remove Programs, and stuck their survey in there.
I don't know about you, but after getting sketchy software on my machine, the LAST thing I want to do is go to some random website and download even MORE crap. I wouldn't trust that download one bit.
And the bit about "it was also designed to be very difficult for other adware to kick off" is complete hand-waving B.S. It was designed to be very difficult for anti-virus packages and anti-spyware packages too. In fact, anti-malware packages were probably the primary target of the persistence code.
And their distributors were complete scum that Direct Revenue did very little to police. Yeah, they suspended any that were complained about (if the hapless users even had any clue how they got the software), but those rogue distributors would just sign up under a new name.
I can't believe he thought this job was a "net positive" simply because he wiped out the other guys' malware more than he installed. That just means he is a very sneaky coder... That's like a embezzeling salesman saying he was a "net positive" because he generated more profits than he stole. It may be true, but it doesn't make him any less of a scumbag.
SirWired
The ethics code requires contributions by others to be "properly credited." It by no means requires the contributors to be paid (unless of course pay was promised.) Also, if credit is explicitly not promised (as in this case), failing to credit is not against the code.
SirWired
K&R2 is simply the finest book on programming, ever. I like Code Complete, the Camel, etc. just as much as any other Geek, but K&R2 is still the best.
SirWired
P.S. Why is a book that has been in print for a couple of decades, is only a quarter-inch thick, and badly typeset, STILL sold for $40+?
No quests? Are you nuts? What exactly are you supposed to do all day long in the game then?
From your reply, it sounds as if your only goal is to replace XP and quest grinding with a grind for food, money, faction, etc. I don't necessarily see this as much of an improvement. You are still grinding, you are just grinding for a different goal.
I'm not seeing a whole lot of motivation in your game. Okay, I steal food from the NPC King which pisses him off, (or reduce my faction, if you want to translate into MMO terms) to feed the NPC Orphan. (Maybe that kicks my alignment around some.) Now what? Okay, maybe now such-and-such barmaid will notice my kindness and give me a place to crash for the night so I don't freeze.
All I did just now was faction farm in exchange for shelter, and I'm going to have to repeat the whole process tomorrow in some form, since I have no overarching quest to do. I'm not seeing the fun here...
If you don't like quests, you don't need a new game to avoid them; simply don't accept or complete any quests, and turn yourself into a Money/Food/Faction grinding robot. You can do this now in WoW, but I'm afraid you'll end up looking like a Chinese Gold Farmer.
For better or worse, quests provide motivation for players to go to new places, obtain new gear, improve their stats, along with providing plot tidbits, which are triggered by their completion.
The GM's you are calling for aren't real GM's. Removing corpses and spawning some new NPC's can be done by the computer already without any help. And if those NPC's aren't handing out quests, what are they doing other than more-or-less the same thing they were doing yesterday, just plopped down in a different place with new stats?
If a GM is spread out among 1000 players how much individual growth could he possibly provide? I don't see this as being any better than the current model of content patches providing new things for all players to do.
Tabletop "was" the best for providing individual player growth? You do know that tabletop still exists... there are a huge number of games out there, with countless others under development, along with enough content to keep you busy until you die.
And yes, I will be so bold as to say that this is something computers "can't" do. Computers can't do plot. This isn't pessimism, it's realism.
SirWired
You are asking for conflicting goals:
If you want an individualized experience with complex moral dilemmas, plus a long-term story, you simply cannot deliver that inside of a Massive game. Can't be done.
If you want quests that have never been done before, will never be done again, yet still integrate with a long-term plot, affect your character for a long time, and involve real moral decisions, you are simply looking in the wrong place. What you are asking for requires the services of a living, breathing Gamemaster. Period.
If this is the sort of this thing you are looking for, you need to go back to pencil and paper gaming, and stop looking on the computer.
SirWired
Too many of the questions are random historical trivia rather than testing understanding of the knowledge of the structure of the United States Government and Economy.
Interestingly, other than a couple of questions on the Supreme Court the test is devoid of questions on the Judicial system. Nothing about trial rights, jury service, criminal rights, etc.
I would have classified many of the questions as History questions, not Civics questions. And even them, some of them are sufficiently obscure and/or inconsequential that they would be poor questions on a general test of US History also.
(I got a ~94%)
SirWired
The court had absolutely no problem understanding plain English. Your problem is to take the broadest definition possible of "servitude", instead of the meaning which the authors of the amendment clearly meant to use.
If you were to read it broadly and stupidly, the 1st amendment prohibits the government from stopping the false shout of "Fire" in a crowded theater, if you want to use the classic example of permissible restrictions on "speech".
Likewise, the that broad reading of the 1st amendment prohibits laws against slander or libel, yet if you were being obstinate, those could be considered "speech" also.
It is inconceivable that shortly after the successful conclusion of a war whose victory relied on the draft the authors of the amendment would have sought to essentially ban the draft in the future. You could call compulsory military service "servitude" if you chose, but that would not be what the authors had in mind.
Likewise, without the compulsion for citizens to serve on a jury, the Constitution's promise to all of a Jury Of Your Peers is meaningless. Is forcing you to appear at the courthouse to serve on a jury under threat of jail and/or fine "slavery"?
The court was stating that some level of service for the needs of the Republic are the basic duties expected of any citizen and are considered neither slavery nor servitude. To equate basic civic duty with slavery is to cheapen the war which was fought to abolish it.
SirWired
Compulsory service to the state vs. the 13th amendment has already been considered by the Supreme Court and found to be constitutional.
BUTLER v. PERRY, 240 U.S. 328 (1916)
This particular case regarded a law in Florida requiring individuals to labor on the construction of roads in their area, or pay a $3/day fee.
"[The 13th amendment] introduced no novel doctrine with respect of services always treated as exceptional, and certainly was not intended to interdict enforcement of those duties which individuals owe to the state, such as services in the army, militia, on the jury, etc. The great purpose in view was liberty under the protection of effective government, not the destruction of the latter by depriving it of essential powers."
If you read the full decision, you can see that the courts looked at the legislative context from which the 13th amendment was drawn and determined that the authors of the amendment were explicitly outlawing slavery in the form that it was practiced throughout much of the country prior to the Civil War.
Basically, duties that could be reasonably considered Civic Duty are not considered "servitude" for the purposes of the 13th amendment.
SirWired
FCoE exists to serve a specific market need. That is, to be a simple and inexpensive bridge between Ethernet and FC networks. Inserting upper-layer flow control would defeat the entire purpose of the protocol existing.
Inserting an intermediate protocol layer above Ethernet and below SCSI would of course replace Fibre Channel. While that is an admirable VERY long-term goal, in the short term, it simply is not feasible due to existing investments in FC technology. FCoE can be bridged into an FC network with very little effort. Creating a Layer 3 or 4 flow-control mechanism is a huge effort that is not going to bridge easily into FC, in addition to being far more complex overall than Layer 2 flow control.
This is the reason iSCSI->FC gateways have never taken off; they are just too darn expensive, complex, and buggy.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, I am certainly no fan of FC Class 3 "flow control"; indeed you could call it the bane of my existence. I hate the way it is designed, and the implementations are even worse. It is virtually impossible to troubleshoot without $85k bits of hardware no customer ever buys.
What we have right now is awful, but it is what exists, and any plans to completely replace it are so far off that they are not relevant to any vendor's product plans right now.
Personally, I think iSCSI will eventually take over, but not for many years. An SCTP/SCSI would be nice, but I have a feeling that admins and developers are so comfortable with TCP that it will still predominate.
SirWired
From what I can read on RED, it performs congestion control via pro-active frame drop. This won't work with anything vaguely resembling current SCSI stacks.
To put it simply, the acceptable frame loss rate for a production storage network is approx. zero, and the current driver stacks are written with that expectation in mind. For instance, if you lose the SCSI status frame, the box waiting for it must wait at least two seconds, and usually longer, for that frame to arrive before giving up on it. This is simply not something you want to occur very often when you are waiting for, say, a latency-sensitive DB transaction to complete.
The biggest argument for FCoE is the fact that it maps easily on top of existing FC SANs, adapters, and driver stacks, with few modifications. Once you have modified it for those IP extensions and mapping it onto an IP transport (SCTP, TCP, whatever), you end up with something very much like iSCSI, which, for whatever reason, has yet to really take off in the higher-end space. (I think FCoE will be an iSCSI jumping-off point...)
SirWired