In most cases these days we are not striving to lower cradle to grave energy use. We are trying to reduce gasoline usage. If a car uses, effectively, twice as much energy to get from point A to point B, but uses solar or some renewable resource (even centralized electricity from hydro plants say), then it's better than gasoline.
My half elven paladin has exactly the same thinking as an astronaut. He knows the risks. He knows that no matter how many elixirs of healing he brings, no matter whether his friend Drugar the Troll Barbarian is sober or not, things might go south. You think you're raiding an underground goblin camp, you open that door and BAM! Red frickin' dragon. Not much you can do about a red dragon at close range except poor some good ol' A1 steak sauce on yourself to make a worthwhile meal.
Sometimes you rummage around in your sack for treasure and it turns out to be a bag of devouring. That's all I'm sayin'.
"Why, of course you can see the source code. But no, you can't view it out of this courthouse room. And yes, it's all printed out for you in three ring binders. No, no real organization -- we pretty much just dumped the precompile code and libraries at random into the printer and broke it into 250 page binders. I realize there's no room for a desk with all these boxes of binders, but there's plenty of space for your reviewer to step into the room and close the door. He can make annotations on a clipboard."
He wrote Pan's Labyrinth (one of the more disturbing films I've seen in the past, well, my life) and Hellboy 2. He has a distinctive style but the creatures in both films had a similar look and feel about them. I never saw Hellboy 2, only the previews, but the look of the film was similar, even with the light-heartedness of Hellboy's character. If nothing else, he should give an interesting take on the Hobbit, and it will likely be very different from Jackson's more traditional view of the epic series of books.
The Lord of the Rings books, to me and to many others, consolidated our mythology of elves and orcs, swords and dragons. If you've played nethack (rogue), then you've probably heard of lembas wafers (elven waybread from the books). If you've played D&D, then you'll know the orcs, goblins, trolls...all based on mythology...were fleshed out in the Lord of the Rings and transferred to the D&D system. Only elves, oddly, are slightly different, probably for balance reasons as in the books they are basically superhuman immortals, better than humans in almost every way.
The movies held true to the main plot, especially if you watched the extended editions (which saved Faramir's character). I have no idea why they wasted 5 minutes of movie time on the collapsing bridge scene in Fellowship of the Ring ("No one tosses a dwarf!"). I guess is it was just to build up to the balrog scene, which was pretty much spot on in terms of what the book says it should be. I don't love the movies since I'm a big fan of the books and find them better. But I appreciate them and find them very watchable. I know people who never read the books that consider those movies some of the best ever made, and I can see why. They really are a spectacle in terms of movie-making, especially the huge battles at the end of the 2nd and 3rd films. There's a fair amount of cheese and kiddish happenings, but they really do play to all audiences.
I think the question isn't "Will your linux computer be able to access university services?" but "Will the campus help desk be able to help troubleshoot my linux computer when I have prolems accessing university services?" If all they can tell you is "Click on the Start/Apple menu..." then the answer would be "no". If they can talk about ifconfig and rc.local, then you may have a shot.
It isn't the hardware, it's the data. The company could sue for access to your wife's computer if they thought you might have their data on it. They may or may not be granted access by a judge, and it may make it a little easier if they claim the hardware is theirs. If you think there's reasonable suspicion your employer may want to look at your computer for their data, have them buy you one outright because then there's no trust, it's just business.
I'm not certain of how the stimulus was delivered, but it seems it would have made a lot more sense if, rather than just giving money to the ISPs, the government hired them for a particular task. I think most of the giant ISPs are flush with cash, they just need someone to tell them how to spend it. This, by the way, is another failure of capitalism: people tend to horde the money rather than pay for maintenance.
But if you're going to have a digital time capsule, why bury it? Why not just keep it in some password protected online file storage. Keep an eye on the company -- if they are going under, move the data to another online file storage company. When the person opens the physical time capsule, have inside it the URL and password of the online site. If you're burying said time capsule, that might be a bit tricky (since online companies come and go) but perhaps you can designate someone as caretaker and provide a name, relation, and current phone number (at the time) of that person in the capsule.
Not necessarily. Wikipedia's entry on the topic suggests that Lucas always meant Stormtroopers to be clones (as per commentary of Episode II) and has an uncited comment by Lucas that some Stormtroopers were clones and some were conscripts. I believe the main giveaway that stormtroopers are clones is Princess Leia's line in IV, as Luke enters her cell in a trooper outfit:
I played the original EQ for a couple years. The thing that kept me playing was the social aspect...but it works both ways. I played because I had people I liked to play with. However you also wind up beholden to people because it's not just a game you can save and quit.
Case in point: I rounded up a pickup group of people to take on a new dungeon...just 6 of us but all strangers to one another. We made it to the bottom of the dungeon and were just camping XP when the shaman's dog pulled an extra couple spiders. Things got out of hand and I was the only one to survive the long run out from the bottom. It was dangerous corpse runs for everyone else.
Only my girlfriend called and asked me to come home for dinner. So I do what I can to find some higher levels to help out with the corpse run, apologize, and sit to log out. I get a PM, friendly, from the shaman telling me these are real people in dire straits and need my help. Sigh. So two deaths, two hours, and 4 other corpses later, all but the other paladin is safe. She rage quit after the original massacre.
And that's why I don't play MMOs anymore. People are too serious about their time.
If their research shows that not enough people are using a feature make it worth developing and supporting, why should they waste resources on that feature?
As another poster replied, we do have other outlets to release pent up emotion. The best one to defuse a pending explosion (or to contain one perhaps) is exercise -- go for a sprint, hit the heavy bag, jump rope. Something mindless that wears you out. It won't solve what got you to that state in the first place, but most people don't live in a state of impending explosion...some are just quicker to get there because of their circumstances or general attitude.
Interesting question though -- do cold blooded pistols at dawn really satisfy anything primal? I mean, your heart is likely racing, and there's the nice loud report...but I'm not sure the intention is to release emotion. I think it's to serve a duty. Definitely not the same, and decidedly more barbaric, in some ways, than punching something in the nose because you're angry at the situation.
The man obviously made an affront to the tech's honor which the tech was obliged to address. It once was these incidences were decided by a brush of a glove across one's cheek and a dawn meeting, grim and immutable. To merely be bloodied about the nose describes a situation where the homeowner got off lightly. How far we've fallen from the civilized world of yore.
He shouldn't need to show identification. All Verizon guys walk around with an entourage of hundreds of jumpsuited, smiling techs and assistants. You really can't miss them.
This class vs skills discussion has been kicked around since the beginning of MMOs of not since the beginning of pen and paper games (DnD vs Marvel, for example). Here are my thoughts, selectively culled over years packed with wisdom and experience (translation: "off the top of my head") --
HEALING Cut healing from a distance and hit points too. Your character gets injured and this effects swing speed, concentration, movement, etc. It doesn't lower a health bar. Healers are battle clerics or paladins. No one just hangs out in back meditating.
CLASSES Classes right now are player-dependent, not world-dependent. Designers create a world with lore and interesting features, then let people play X number of classes per race. Races and classes should be based on the lore of the world. Perhaps death and healing can't go together easily -- hence you can't distance heal the beserker while he's dicing creatures. If you want to be a paladin (a warrior with powers of light and healing), you can't go around hunting intelligent creatures without cause or you'll lose your paladin powers. If you want to be a combination of warrior/mage/healer -- there are certain things that don't overlap. Perhaps certain magic doesn't work while wielding or wearing (or even carrying) certain types of iron. Perhaps you can't have damaging magic mixed with healing magic -- you can be a utility sorcerer and healer, but not a fireball caster and healer.
Then don't make definites either. Allow people to play what they want with penalties. If I'm wielding a sword but could really use a fireball right now, let me cast it, with non-reliable results: perhaps it explodes in my face; maybe my sword disintegrates; maybe it casts, but knocks me unconscious; maybe it works just fine.
Let players make decisions with more than just "which template should I pick" but based on the positives and negatives delivered by the world's lore.
QUESTS Allow players to quest for powers; allow them to quest to overcome penalties for conflicting cross-skills; make it fun to do these things.
New or old projects, construction is not straightforward. Basically, you go with the lowest bidder for the project. Often, the lowest bidder presents to the architects and engineers their design and many small things slip by which then become the dreaded "change order" which is just what it says: something changed from the original design. And it costs more money than it would if it were designed that way originally, and that's how you get the low bids. So let's say you overstep your place, and your client runs out of money for your change orders. You get what we have in our building: a handicap elevator to the basement which doesn't pass inspection for human occupants and costs more to fix than the budget will allow. So for 20 years, there's been a blocked off handicap elevator no one wants to shovel out $50K to fix.
And if a building has these issues, where a handicap elevator could conceivably be tolerated, think of a plane where, aside from perhaps a microwave oven, there is no non-essential part. If something doesn't pass inspection, and no one is willing to pay, you get delays because SOMEONE has to pay. In a job as complex as a bleeding-edge airliner, your wing, constructed in Chicago perhaps, might have 10 different countries supplying parts to it....If the engine doesn't mount properly, do you call the wing person, the engine person, the nuts & bolts guy...? I'm way oversimplifying, but construction is definitely not, in any way, more straightforward than any other project, no matter what you're building.
And don't get me started on unions. "Hey, you won't take another union guy for your team? You just might find all your newly installed windows shattered when you come in tomorrow morning..."
The botnet code, having been installed as a hidden service in Windows since, oh, summer 2001 when I was bored with dissecting live squirrels, parses only capital letters and takes a lowercase n (without a following escape ') as a space.
No onE would Think of uSing slashdoT As we aRen'T nearly as oBviOus as someThiNg likE Twitter.// Especially with all our talk about supporting Linux and such.
Two comments about him buying the DVDs of the original series, both modded insightful. Let me quote the original poster and you can make your assumptions:
The 1970's show was something I loved as a kid (I remember running to the TV when I heard the theme song come one), and it's something my little kids have enjoyed.
Slashdot Mirror
Permanent internet access. It would be like the Matrix -- perpetually jacked into the system. With less slow motion.
In most cases these days we are not striving to lower cradle to grave energy use. We are trying to reduce gasoline usage. If a car uses, effectively, twice as much energy to get from point A to point B, but uses solar or some renewable resource (even centralized electricity from hydro plants say), then it's better than gasoline.
My half elven paladin has exactly the same thinking as an astronaut. He knows the risks. He knows that no matter how many elixirs of healing he brings, no matter whether his friend Drugar the Troll Barbarian is sober or not, things might go south. You think you're raiding an underground goblin camp, you open that door and BAM! Red frickin' dragon. Not much you can do about a red dragon at close range except poor some good ol' A1 steak sauce on yourself to make a worthwhile meal.
Sometimes you rummage around in your sack for treasure and it turns out to be a bag of devouring. That's all I'm sayin'.
"Why, of course you can see the source code. But no, you can't view it out of this courthouse room. And yes, it's all printed out for you in three ring binders. No, no real organization -- we pretty much just dumped the precompile code and libraries at random into the printer and broke it into 250 page binders. I realize there's no room for a desk with all these boxes of binders, but there's plenty of space for your reviewer to step into the room and close the door. He can make annotations on a clipboard."
I know you're a coward and all, but didn't you just disagree with me in the first sentence, then agree with me in the third?
He wrote Pan's Labyrinth (one of the more disturbing films I've seen in the past, well, my life) and Hellboy 2. He has a distinctive style but the creatures in both films had a similar look and feel about them. I never saw Hellboy 2, only the previews, but the look of the film was similar, even with the light-heartedness of Hellboy's character. If nothing else, he should give an interesting take on the Hobbit, and it will likely be very different from Jackson's more traditional view of the epic series of books.
The Lord of the Rings books, to me and to many others, consolidated our mythology of elves and orcs, swords and dragons. If you've played nethack (rogue), then you've probably heard of lembas wafers (elven waybread from the books). If you've played D&D, then you'll know the orcs, goblins, trolls...all based on mythology...were fleshed out in the Lord of the Rings and transferred to the D&D system. Only elves, oddly, are slightly different, probably for balance reasons as in the books they are basically superhuman immortals, better than humans in almost every way.
The movies held true to the main plot, especially if you watched the extended editions (which saved Faramir's character). I have no idea why they wasted 5 minutes of movie time on the collapsing bridge scene in Fellowship of the Ring ("No one tosses a dwarf!"). I guess is it was just to build up to the balrog scene, which was pretty much spot on in terms of what the book says it should be. I don't love the movies since I'm a big fan of the books and find them better. But I appreciate them and find them very watchable. I know people who never read the books that consider those movies some of the best ever made, and I can see why. They really are a spectacle in terms of movie-making, especially the huge battles at the end of the 2nd and 3rd films. There's a fair amount of cheese and kiddish happenings, but they really do play to all audiences.
I think the question isn't "Will your linux computer be able to access university services?" but "Will the campus help desk be able to help troubleshoot my linux computer when I have prolems accessing university services?" If all they can tell you is "Click on the Start/Apple menu..." then the answer would be "no". If they can talk about ifconfig and rc.local, then you may have a shot.
I just look on the bright side - at least the new author will actually finish the series
The end of the Wheel of Time series is like anti-vaporware.
It isn't the hardware, it's the data. The company could sue for access to your wife's computer if they thought you
might have their data on it. They may or may not be granted access by a judge, and it may make it a little easier if they claim the hardware is theirs. If you think there's reasonable suspicion your employer may want to look at your computer for their data, have them buy you one outright because then there's no trust, it's just business.
I'm not certain of how the stimulus was delivered, but it seems it would have made a lot more sense if, rather than just giving money to the ISPs, the government hired them for a particular task. I think most of the giant ISPs are flush with cash, they just need someone to tell them how to spend it. This, by the way, is another failure of capitalism: people tend to horde the money rather than pay for maintenance.
sales
You...pay...for pornography?
But if you're going to have a digital time capsule, why bury it? Why not just keep it in some password protected online file storage. Keep an eye on the company -- if they are going under, move the data to another online file storage company. When the person opens the physical time capsule, have inside it the URL and password of the online site. If you're burying said time capsule, that might be a bit tricky (since online companies come and go) but perhaps you can designate someone as caretaker and provide a name, relation, and current phone number (at the time) of that person in the capsule.
Not necessarily. Wikipedia's entry on the topic suggests that Lucas always meant Stormtroopers to be clones (as per commentary of Episode II) and has an uncited comment by Lucas that some Stormtroopers were clones and some were conscripts. I believe the main giveaway that stormtroopers are clones is Princess Leia's line in IV, as Luke enters her cell in a trooper outfit:
"Aren't you a little short for a stormtrooper?"
I played the original EQ for a couple years. The thing that kept me playing was the social aspect...but it works both ways. I played because I had people I liked to play with. However you also wind up beholden to
people because it's not just a game you can save and quit.
Case in point: I rounded up a pickup group of people to take on a new dungeon...just 6 of us but all strangers to one another. We made it to the bottom of the dungeon and were just camping XP when the shaman's dog pulled an extra couple spiders. Things got out of hand and I was the only one to survive the long run out from the bottom. It was dangerous corpse runs for everyone else.
Only my girlfriend called and asked me to come home for dinner. So I do what I can to find some higher levels to help out with the corpse run, apologize, and sit to log out. I get a PM, friendly, from the shaman telling me these are real people in dire straits and need my help. Sigh. So two deaths, two hours, and 4 other corpses later, all but the other paladin is safe. She rage quit after the original massacre.
And that's why I don't play MMOs anymore. People are too serious about their time.
If their research shows that not enough people are using a feature make it worth developing and supporting, why should they waste resources on that feature?
They would do it for the Slashdot. Wouldn't you?
As another poster replied, we do have other outlets to release pent up emotion. The best one to defuse a pending explosion (or to contain one perhaps) is exercise -- go for a sprint, hit the heavy bag, jump rope. Something mindless that wears you out. It won't solve what got you to that state in the first place, but most people don't live in a state of impending explosion...some are just quicker to get there because of their circumstances or general attitude.
Interesting question though -- do cold blooded pistols at dawn really satisfy anything primal? I mean, your heart is likely racing, and there's the nice loud report...but I'm not sure the intention is to release emotion. I think it's to serve a duty. Definitely not the same, and decidedly more barbaric, in some ways, than punching something in the nose because you're angry at the situation.
The man obviously made an affront to the tech's honor which the tech was obliged to address. It once was these incidences were decided by a brush of a glove across one's cheek and a dawn meeting, grim and immutable. To merely be bloodied about the nose describes a situation where the homeowner got off lightly. How far we've fallen from the civilized world of yore.
Carry on then. Cheerio.
Space sperm.
He shouldn't need to show identification. All Verizon guys walk around with an entourage of hundreds of jumpsuited, smiling techs and assistants. You really can't miss them.
This class vs skills discussion has been kicked around since the beginning of MMOs of not since the beginning of pen and paper games (DnD vs Marvel, for example). Here are my thoughts, selectively culled over years packed with wisdom and experience (translation: "off the top of my head") --
HEALING
Cut healing from a distance and hit points too. Your character gets injured and this effects swing speed, concentration, movement, etc. It doesn't lower a health bar. Healers are battle clerics or paladins. No one just hangs out in back meditating.
CLASSES
Classes right now are player-dependent, not world-dependent. Designers create a world with lore and interesting features, then let people play X number of classes per race. Races and classes should be based on the lore of the world. Perhaps death and healing can't go together easily -- hence you can't distance heal the beserker while he's dicing creatures. If you want to be a paladin (a warrior with powers of light and healing), you can't go around hunting intelligent creatures without cause or you'll lose your paladin powers. If you want to be a combination of warrior/mage/healer -- there are certain things that don't overlap. Perhaps certain magic doesn't work while wielding or wearing (or even carrying) certain types of iron. Perhaps you can't have damaging magic mixed with healing magic -- you can be a utility sorcerer and healer, but not a fireball caster and healer.
Then don't make definites either. Allow people to play what they want with penalties. If I'm wielding a sword but could really use a fireball right now, let me cast it, with non-reliable results: perhaps it explodes in my face; maybe my sword disintegrates; maybe it casts, but knocks me unconscious; maybe it works just fine.
Let players make decisions with more than just "which template should I pick" but based on the positives and negatives delivered by the world's lore.
QUESTS
Allow players to quest for powers; allow them to quest to overcome penalties for conflicting cross-skills; make it fun to do these things.
Hey, I liked both those species. You should choose less likable characters.
"Tough call, as it is a Gargamel vs Pikachu kind of fight."
New or old projects, construction is not straightforward. Basically, you go with the lowest bidder for the project. Often, the lowest bidder presents to the architects and engineers their design and many small things slip by which then become the dreaded "change order" which is just what it says: something changed from the original design. And it costs more money than it would if it were designed that way originally, and that's how you get the low bids. So let's say you overstep your place, and your client runs out of money for your change orders. You get what we have in our building: a handicap elevator to the basement which doesn't pass inspection for human occupants and costs more to fix than the budget will allow. So for 20 years, there's been a blocked off handicap elevator no one wants to shovel out $50K to fix.
And if a building has these issues, where a handicap elevator could conceivably be tolerated, think of a plane where, aside from perhaps a microwave oven, there is no non-essential part. If something doesn't pass inspection, and no one is willing to pay, you get delays because SOMEONE has to pay. In a job as complex as a bleeding-edge airliner, your wing, constructed in Chicago perhaps, might have 10 different countries supplying parts to it....If the engine doesn't mount properly, do you call the wing person, the engine person, the nuts & bolts guy...? I'm way oversimplifying, but construction is definitely not, in any way, more straightforward than any other project, no matter what you're building.
And don't get me started on unions. "Hey, you won't take another union guy for your team? You just might find all your newly installed windows shattered when you come in tomorrow morning..."
The botnet code, having been installed as a hidden service in Windows since, oh, summer 2001 when I was bored with dissecting live squirrels, parses only capital letters and takes a lowercase n (without a following escape ') as a space.
I'm not saying that all your base, but I might.
No onE would Think of uSing slashdoT As we aRen'T nearly as oBviOus as someThiNg likE Twitter. // Especially with all our talk about supporting Linux and such.
Two comments about him buying the DVDs of the original series, both modded insightful. Let me quote the original poster and you can make your assumptions:
The 1970's show was something I loved as a kid (I remember running to the TV when I heard the theme song come one), and it's something my little kids have enjoyed.
Emphasis...mine.