IMHO it isn't Madison Avenue, it is the Fashion industry. It is pretty much run by homosexual men. In most industries I'd say we shouldn't care, but in this particular one, it makes a difference.
The problem that comes in is that this means that the people deciding how women should look are people who don't particularly care for real women's bodies. This is why models are expected to be tall, with at little female shape to their bodies as possible. In order to get that "boy" shape, they have to starve themselves.
Ever notice that the models on the front of actual (hetro) men's magazines look absolutely nothing like fashion models? This is the difference.
If anything, this photoshopping is a humane act. No model was actually forced to starve herself to look like that.
Anyone who doesn't already have at least a couple of essays of roughly that length that they did for school assignments floating around on their hard drive probably doesn't belong at MIT anyway.
When I applied to colleges that required essays, I just freshened up one of my old ones and sent it in...and that was back in '85 when we used floppies.
Not throwing anything away just wouldn't be cleaning. When I get serious about it (twice a year or so) I typically throw away two entire lawn bags full of trash, broken toy pieces, and fast food "prizes" just from the living room and dining room alone.
Actually, proposing Fourth Laws is sort of a minor industry. There are tons of them out there. This one is just mine.
My problem with the one you list is that it presupposses that the Laws are all about heat. (Thermodynamics, right?) However, to me they have always been all about entropy. So for my money, any real Fourth Law would have to say something new about entropy.
I always found the last phrase of Hofstadter's law to be an unnesecary crutch for the logically impaired. Plus it removes most of its punch. I didn't feel like making the same mistake myself.
Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults, you might notice that I've given this issue a lot of thought already.
If I may state the obvious, RMS is a hardliner with zero tolerance or forgiveness. Fine. This appeals quite well to many people (myself included). Now, de Icaza seems to be more of a bridge builder than a bridge burner and is looking for in roads into Microsoft.
The problem there is that, as the GP tried to point out, Microsoft is not an innocent disinterested player succeptable to being steered around. They have made it quite clear that they consider "Open Source Software" a mortal threat, and are going to fight accordingly. Subtle and overt, legal and extra-legal, it is all fair game to them. Appeasement with somebody with that mindset is a fool's game. If anyone is going to be manipulated here, it isn't going to be Microsoft.
Pathologist Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland won for a study they did to determine whether an empty beer bottle does more or less damage to the human skull than a full one in a bar fight
Hey now, this one is actually useful information! You now know which bottle to pick, based on how much (or little) damage you actually want to do.
Admittedly, I don't think I'd willingly go out drinking with Dr. Bolliger...
The really depressing thing is the article comments. It seems the Creationists found out about the article, and are pinging the bejeezus out of it in the comments.
My personal favorite bit of ignorance starts like this:
am nor a scientist or even an academic of any kind but as I understand it and please tell me if I am wrong but for a Theory to become fact it has to...
I had an object wedge itself in between my bicycle's front fender and the wheel, stopping it instantly while I was at speed and essentially throwing me to the pavement. In the middle of an intersection.
Going off road once I hit a log hidden in some high grass. If you know anything about momentum...the bike stopped, I didn't. Next thing I knew I was on my back on the ground, wondering how I got there. Two feet to the left was a ragged stump that could just as easily have been sticking up out of my abdomen had I landed there.
Then there's the fact that bikes are sharing the road with 1+ ton automobiles going 3-10 times their speed which don't expect them to be there at all and which they are essentially helpless to avoid should something go wrong. I'm sorry I don't have a personal anectdote on this one; the people that do are dead.
I don't know where this idea got around that bicycles are particularly safe, but do know it wasn't from experience.
A software failure at 3MPH isn't exactly high on my list of worries.
I just went and installed it (stuck w/ IE here by fiat), and see no difference whatsoever. From a quick reading of the avilable docs, it looks like their renderer just sits there in the background twiddling its thumbs unless it hits a website with the special "Google, save me!" tag embedded in it.
Unless and until a large percentage of the web chucks the "Google, save me!" tag into their pages, this isn't liable to affect you as a user. However, it is nice for web developers, as they can now "support" IE by checking for support of the tag, and kicking IE users without it to the Chrome plugin install page.
Actually, I just found it this morning (after some cryptic mention of it in yesterday's patch notes). You are right about it needing a lot of work. Everyone I found with it this morning wasn't actually logged on. I know it doesn't just find all players, because I tried searching for my wife's account with it, and got nothing.
Just like any other decent MMORPG, the universe of the old product isn't much more than flavor. Games that tie themselves too tightly to lore developed for a totally different medium might as well tie themselves to a boat anchor and be done with it.
This is precisely why Cryptic gave up on Marvel and bought Champions outright.
Well, I was around at release on CoH too, and it also came out w/ no grouping tools. They added the LFG tool soon after release, and improved it with filters and whatnot periodicaly afterwards. I'm assumeing the Champions devs will do the same, because this is such an obvious problem. But for now it is a serious issue.
I want to build on this, because it leads to an important implication of the total lack of grouping: no specialization.
You see, since there is almost no grouping, every toon has to be capable of soloing. By mid levels this means no glass-cannons, no pure DPSers, no support characters or healers. You could try to play a low-DPS tank, but you'd get tired of the slow leveling farily quickly.
There are all sorts of nifty offensive or support stance-like passive skills that it would be cool to build characters around, but it doesn't matter. Since everyone has to be able to solo, everyone has to use one of the 4 viable defensive passives instead (some would argue there are only 3 or even 2 viable ones). Everyone has to take a self-heal. Everyone needs their own hold of some kind. At higher levels, everyone needs some kind of flight.
So ultimiately, the lack of grouping support not only isolates the players, but homongonizes the characters as well.
I have found a mild hole around 13-14. For me this is no big deal now that they have the Prison Breakout quest public quest fixed. I'm quite happy to make up the level or so doing the public quest over a few times. You could instead go back and to the latter quests in the alternate starter area until you hit 15. That's what I did when the PQ was broken. For the most part, I have more trouble getting my quest log full (20ish quests I think) and not being able to take the spontanious missions.
As for crafting, this is actually the first MMORPG ever that I haven't totally bailed on crafting after leveling the first few toons. It is particularly important for weapon-using toons, as it is a very important source of alternate weapon looks. For instance, if you want to use axes (or clubs, or longswords, etc) rather than kitanas in single blade or dual-blade builds, your only sure way to get them is by carfully picking the right crafting discipline. Ditto if you want old-timey guns for your munitions toon, or knives instead of "claws" for your stealthy claws toon.
PvP I can't comment on (it is pointless in most games, folks still like it. Go figure). However, the writing is anything but bland. I'm constantly chuckling and calling the wife over to look at some clever bit of text on a mission or item. Make sure to read all your item descriptions. Some of them are hilarious.
I'm enjoying the game immensely, but I've seen no mention of the game's most glaring ommision, if not what might actually kill it: Total lack of LFG support.
Getting out and meeting other players is what MMORPGs are all about. To support this, modern games all come with some kind of built in interface to help players looking for groups and groups looking for more players meet up. Champions has...nothing.
In a way, it is actually worse than you might imagine. At least in most games you can fall back to spamming global chat with "LFG" messages. However, Champions' shard design means that any such message will only go to the 40 or so players who happen to be on your shard. There could well be 20 people sitting around waiting at the entrance to some group quest and spamming zone chat for teammates, but they will never meet up if the game happened to put them all on different shards.
What this means in practice is that groups are very rare. I have seen a few supergroup-tagged heroes running around, but they are a minority. If you want to find a good group, you will probably have to find some offline way to meet up with them.
The flip side of this is that once you do find some friends to play with, meeting up with them couldn't be eaiser. Since there are no servers, you don't have the situation where friends get stuck with mains on different servers, or have to develop chars (perhaps the same char!) on different servers so they can play with friends and with their guild.
You also don't have to do silly things like write down your friend's alt names of a slip of paper to keep track of them all, and add all 30 of them to your friends list. Characters are designed using a "Toon name@account name" format, and adding the account name as a friend (or guildmate) is sufficient to get all of their alts, now and forever. Chats work the same way. You don't have to care about servers or alts; if a friend is playing the game, you can find out and chat with them.
You might not get the law, but as someone with a 14yo son you've certianly convinced me. I'll be signing him up for such a course when he's old enough to drive, if I can find one.
...not to mention that the reasonably priced OEM versions of Windows 7 won't allow upgrades. (After all, this is an OEM copy that supposedly goes w/ a new machine. What could you possibly be "upgrading" on a new machine?) The only people with the "upgrade" option will be the folks who pay full price for a retail copy of the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I'm a bit hesitant to click on a link to a website named "cracked.com". So I guess we have something in common.
IMHO it isn't Madison Avenue, it is the Fashion industry. It is pretty much run by homosexual men. In most industries I'd say we shouldn't care, but in this particular one, it makes a difference.
The problem that comes in is that this means that the people deciding how women should look are people who don't particularly care for real women's bodies. This is why models are expected to be tall, with at little female shape to their bodies as possible. In order to get that "boy" shape, they have to starve themselves.
Ever notice that the models on the front of actual (hetro) men's magazines look absolutely nothing like fashion models? This is the difference.
If anything, this photoshopping is a humane act. No model was actually forced to starve herself to look like that.
Anyone who doesn't already have at least a couple of essays of roughly that length that they did for school assignments floating around on their hard drive probably doesn't belong at MIT anyway. When I applied to colleges that required essays, I just freshened up one of my old ones and sent it in...and that was back in '85 when we used floppies.
Not throwing anything away just wouldn't be cleaning. When I get serious about it (twice a year or so) I typically throw away two entire lawn bags full of trash, broken toy pieces, and fast food "prizes" just from the living room and dining room alone.
Actually, proposing Fourth Laws is sort of a minor industry. There are tons of them out there. This one is just mine.
My problem with the one you list is that it presupposses that the Laws are all about heat. (Thermodynamics, right?) However, to me they have always been all about entropy. So for my money, any real Fourth Law would have to say something new about entropy.
Everything that does anything also contributes to entropy. That's one of the more depressing facets of the Laws of Thermodynamics.
I had a(n awesome) physics professor who used to paraphrase the Laws of Thermodynamics as:
I always found the last phrase of Hofstadter's law to be an unnesecary crutch for the logically impaired. Plus it removes most of its punch. I didn't feel like making the same mistake myself.
Having spent better part of the last decade engaged in a sysephian struggle to clean a house inhabited by three children and two working adults, you might notice that I've given this issue a lot of thought already.
I propose a Fourth Law of Thermodynamics: There's more entropy than you think there is.
Microsoft's frigging address is One Microsoft Way. How much clearer can they make it?
If I may state the obvious, RMS is a hardliner with zero tolerance or forgiveness. Fine. This appeals quite well to many people (myself included). Now, de Icaza seems to be more of a bridge builder than a bridge burner and is looking for in roads into Microsoft.
The problem there is that, as the GP tried to point out, Microsoft is not an innocent disinterested player succeptable to being steered around. They have made it quite clear that they consider "Open Source Software" a mortal threat, and are going to fight accordingly. Subtle and overt, legal and extra-legal, it is all fair game to them. Appeasement with somebody with that mindset is a fool's game. If anyone is going to be manipulated here, it isn't going to be Microsoft.
Anyone got an alternate link? My corporate overlords won't let me hit that site, so I'm just getting Stallman's side of things.
Pathologist Stephan Bolliger and colleagues at the University of Bern in Switzerland won for a study they did to determine whether an empty beer bottle does more or less damage to the human skull than a full one in a bar fight
Hey now, this one is actually useful information! You now know which bottle to pick, based on how much (or little) damage you actually want to do.
Admittedly, I don't think I'd willingly go out drinking with Dr. Bolliger...
The really depressing thing is the article comments. It seems the Creationists found out about the article, and are pinging the bejeezus out of it in the comments.
My personal favorite bit of ignorance starts like this:
am nor a scientist or even an academic of any kind but as I understand it and please tell me if I am wrong but for a Theory to become fact it has to ...
*raaaaaaaaz*! Thanks for playing.
I had an object wedge itself in between my bicycle's front fender and the wheel, stopping it instantly while I was at speed and essentially throwing me to the pavement. In the middle of an intersection.
Going off road once I hit a log hidden in some high grass. If you know anything about momentum...the bike stopped, I didn't. Next thing I knew I was on my back on the ground, wondering how I got there. Two feet to the left was a ragged stump that could just as easily have been sticking up out of my abdomen had I landed there.
Then there's the fact that bikes are sharing the road with 1+ ton automobiles going 3-10 times their speed which don't expect them to be there at all and which they are essentially helpless to avoid should something go wrong. I'm sorry I don't have a personal anectdote on this one; the people that do are dead.
I don't know where this idea got around that bicycles are particularly safe, but do know it wasn't from experience.
A software failure at 3MPH isn't exactly high on my list of worries.
You really don't want to know what the umbrella is used for...
I just went and installed it (stuck w/ IE here by fiat), and see no difference whatsoever. From a quick reading of the avilable docs, it looks like their renderer just sits there in the background twiddling its thumbs unless it hits a website with the special "Google, save me!" tag embedded in it.
Unless and until a large percentage of the web chucks the "Google, save me!" tag into their pages, this isn't liable to affect you as a user. However, it is nice for web developers, as they can now "support" IE by checking for support of the tag, and kicking IE users without it to the Chrome plugin install page.
Heh. The "500 AU" was a nice touch. :-)
Actually, I just found it this morning (after some cryptic mention of it in yesterday's patch notes). You are right about it needing a lot of work. Everyone I found with it this morning wasn't actually logged on. I know it doesn't just find all players, because I tried searching for my wife's account with it, and got nothing.
Just like any other decent MMORPG, the universe of the old product isn't much more than flavor. Games that tie themselves too tightly to lore developed for a totally different medium might as well tie themselves to a boat anchor and be done with it.
This is precisely why Cryptic gave up on Marvel and bought Champions outright.
Well, I was around at release on CoH too, and it also came out w/ no grouping tools. They added the LFG tool soon after release, and improved it with filters and whatnot periodicaly afterwards. I'm assumeing the Champions devs will do the same, because this is such an obvious problem. But for now it is a serious issue.
I want to build on this, because it leads to an important implication of the total lack of grouping: no specialization.
You see, since there is almost no grouping, every toon has to be capable of soloing. By mid levels this means no glass-cannons, no pure DPSers, no support characters or healers. You could try to play a low-DPS tank, but you'd get tired of the slow leveling farily quickly.
There are all sorts of nifty offensive or support stance-like passive skills that it would be cool to build characters around, but it doesn't matter. Since everyone has to be able to solo, everyone has to use one of the 4 viable defensive passives instead (some would argue there are only 3 or even 2 viable ones). Everyone has to take a self-heal. Everyone needs their own hold of some kind. At higher levels, everyone needs some kind of flight.
So ultimiately, the lack of grouping support not only isolates the players, but homongonizes the characters as well.
I have found a mild hole around 13-14. For me this is no big deal now that they have the Prison Breakout quest public quest fixed. I'm quite happy to make up the level or so doing the public quest over a few times. You could instead go back and to the latter quests in the alternate starter area until you hit 15. That's what I did when the PQ was broken. For the most part, I have more trouble getting my quest log full (20ish quests I think) and not being able to take the spontanious missions.
As for crafting, this is actually the first MMORPG ever that I haven't totally bailed on crafting after leveling the first few toons. It is particularly important for weapon-using toons, as it is a very important source of alternate weapon looks. For instance, if you want to use axes (or clubs, or longswords, etc) rather than kitanas in single blade or dual-blade builds, your only sure way to get them is by carfully picking the right crafting discipline. Ditto if you want old-timey guns for your munitions toon, or knives instead of "claws" for your stealthy claws toon.
PvP I can't comment on (it is pointless in most games, folks still like it. Go figure). However, the writing is anything but bland. I'm constantly chuckling and calling the wife over to look at some clever bit of text on a mission or item. Make sure to read all your item descriptions. Some of them are hilarious.
I'm enjoying the game immensely, but I've seen no mention of the game's most glaring ommision, if not what might actually kill it: Total lack of LFG support.
Getting out and meeting other players is what MMORPGs are all about. To support this, modern games all come with some kind of built in interface to help players looking for groups and groups looking for more players meet up. Champions has...nothing.
In a way, it is actually worse than you might imagine. At least in most games you can fall back to spamming global chat with "LFG" messages. However, Champions' shard design means that any such message will only go to the 40 or so players who happen to be on your shard. There could well be 20 people sitting around waiting at the entrance to some group quest and spamming zone chat for teammates, but they will never meet up if the game happened to put them all on different shards. What this means in practice is that groups are very rare. I have seen a few supergroup-tagged heroes running around, but they are a minority. If you want to find a good group, you will probably have to find some offline way to meet up with them. The flip side of this is that once you do find some friends to play with, meeting up with them couldn't be eaiser. Since there are no servers, you don't have the situation where friends get stuck with mains on different servers, or have to develop chars (perhaps the same char!) on different servers so they can play with friends and with their guild.
You also don't have to do silly things like write down your friend's alt names of a slip of paper to keep track of them all, and add all 30 of them to your friends list. Characters are designed using a "Toon name@account name" format, and adding the account name as a friend (or guildmate) is sufficient to get all of their alts, now and forever. Chats work the same way. You don't have to care about servers or alts; if a friend is playing the game, you can find out and chat with them.
You might not get the law, but as someone with a 14yo son you've certianly convinced me. I'll be signing him up for such a course when he's old enough to drive, if I can find one.
...not to mention that the reasonably priced OEM versions of Windows 7 won't allow upgrades. (After all, this is an OEM copy that supposedly goes w/ a new machine. What could you possibly be "upgrading" on a new machine?) The only people with the "upgrade" option will be the folks who pay full price for a retail copy of the OS.