(owned by evil monopolies who exploit and underpay innocent musicians)
So the best way to fight evil is to commit evil acts yourself?
Is killing the only way to stop murder? Is slavery the only way to stop oppression? Is violence the only way to stop aggression? Is stealing the only way to stop theft?
And by the way, I do not see too many mainstream musicians being underpaid. I see them simply flying around in their private jets and spending millions of dollars on jewelry.
No, stealing is any time that someone acquires property without the owner's permission. The owner does not have to lose the property for it to be considered stealing.
People on Slashdot often complain that laws cannot keep up with technology, but here is a case where people refuse to let the law catch up. Copyright law is something that was created to stop theft, just a different type of theft than simply breaking into someone's house and taking a car.
"stealing intellectual property" is not even possible, by definition
You make this statement in such a way that it seams you actually believe it. Theft is any time that someone acquires property from someone without their permission. Intellectual property is something that someone has created that may not be a physical object, but still has some commercial value.
Just because the victim does not lose his intellectual property does not mean it isnt stolen. If a teenager stole my car every night and when joyriding but brought in back every morning before I left for work I would still consider it stealing.
Stealing is acquiring property without permission, so how is "stealing intellectual property" not possible?
This is a strange new idea, instead of following the law you instead try to gain political power and change the laws. I know there are a few people out there that actually can convince themselves that they are not stealing, but I doubt they could get 4% of a country to feel the same way.
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
the Heritage Foundation is nothing more than a flim-flam mouthpiece for the Neocons
Again, you throw out statements without backing them up. While the Heritage Foundation is cleary more conservative than liberal, why is that inherently a bad thing? You say that they represent the offshoring industry, so where is the data that backs this up?
I have been searching the Heritage Foundation and the Offshoring industry, and havent found any correlations. Where is your supposedly reputable source that makes this link? You talk about paymasters, but the Heritage Foundation recieves its money from many individual donors, none of which fund a large percentage of their annual donations.
You like to call people morons and clowns, but you dont have any valuable information to give in any of your posts. It is all just empty rhetoric. You claim that one source is better than another, but never give a reason why. You may be an intelligent person who simply doesnt have much time to spend posting on Slashdot, but you come off as someone who has no idea what he is talking about.
Actually, I do read the news, both online and local newspapers. And I do not see these doomsday scenerios that you apparently see. You can claim that I am just ignorant, but I think that it is just because you like spouting off lies and then covering it up with derogitory talk.
I did a quick search on Google with the phrase "IT jobs outsourced overseas 2005", and almost all of the pages described how outsourcing is not a problem. Since I am not afraid to give links, here is one:
Another day, another business that dada21 has owned for years. I wonder what business he will own tomorrow?
There is only one thing in common among all of the business that he owns, which is that they all neatly coincide with whatever topics are currently on Slashdot. I think it is amazing that someone can own at least 365 companies (one for each day of the year), and still have financial problems that are caused by the government.
Where is this hard data? I am not saying that it doesnt exist, I have simply never seen it. I have never seen any hard data that shows how many jobs are being sent overseas in the IT business. And simply counting how many outsourced jobs there are in india/china doesnt count, because some of those jobs probably wouldnt exist if they had to pay American wages for them.
Dude, you obviously have a very limited awareness of your environment
Why is it that I have a limited awareness of my environment? Because you say I do?
I admit that I have only been in the IT industry for about 8 years, so it isnt like I have been around since the industry began. But that is enough time to know alot of people who work with computers, in many different disciplines. I am a developer now, but I have worked in tech support and sys admin jobs in the past. I still have dozens of friends who work in these fields, and still have contacts with far more people than that.
The computer industry is very new, it isnt like doctors or lawyers who were around before the time of christ. When you get a job in the IT industry you most likely are not geting a job for life. Most skill sets that you learn in this business are going to become obselete. If you do not continue to learn new things and keep yourself employable, you WILL lose your job.
While I do know competent people who have lost jobs over the past few years, they have all found new ones with a minimal loss in pay if any. The only ones I know who took serious pay cuts or simply could not find another job are those that were simply unemployable. They should go back to school and get a teacher's certificate or something.
I dont care if the number is 5% or 50%, those jobs that are leaving the country are jobs that probably should be in the third world. I am sure that anyone could come up with a dozen exceptions of a random research center being opened overseas, but those are an exception. Jobs for qualified engineers and computer scientists are simply not going overseas in large numbers.
I agree that the way things are going now, "College != Preperation".
But I think that this is a tragedy, and a dis-service to our country's college students. College students are in post secondary schooling for 4-5 years, that is a hell of a lot of time. It does not take that much time to teach someone a field such as computer science. Someone should be able to self-teach themselves everything needed to not only be a programmer, but a true "computer scientist", in 4 years. And along the way they should also be able to pick up skill sets needed to be an effective worker. College should be making it even easier on the students in school because they are paying the university to help them learn.
If I hired someone and was willing to give them 4 years to learn how to do the job, I would expect them to be far more competent than even the top 10% of current college graduates. If I want them to know how to program in any language I ask them to, they better be able to do that after 4 years. If I want them to understand optimization and things like Big-O notation, they better be able to do that after 4 years. They better be a very efficient and useful employee after 4 years.
Kids pay these colleges for years and should be fully functional adults by the time they get out. There is no excuse for them to not be productive with very minimal on the job training. I still put most of the blame on the students themselves for never learning anything that isnt in their textbooks, but some of the blame is also on the schools.
Why shouldnt we expect college graduates to be useful employees?
I agree that the IT job market is no where near dead. I work at a small internet company, and hiring competent IT employees is always a hassle. The problem is not that it is hard to find a job in the computer industry, it is that there arent enough competent people.
The only people that I know that are having trouble finding jobs are those without enough skill sets. Being a computer nerd, playing alot of video games, and running your MMORPG guild's website are not marketable skills. You need to actually be useful. Probably at least 95% of those 5% of jobs going overseas are just taking away jobs from the morons in the computer industry.
And colleges are turning out incompetent programmers at an alarming rate. Going to a college to find a competent IT worker is barely more fruitful than going to your local Walmart. I wish they would start teaching these kids something instead of just having TAs on hand to basically do the student's work for them every time they have a problem. I actually have a friend who complained that his boss wouldnt help him enough whenever my friend had a problem with his work. I couldnt believe what I was hearing.
How will the male enhancement industry survive now? I dont think that anyone actually wants those stupid emails in their mailbox, so they will have to try another marketing scheme.
Damn, talk about a light weight. Three beers is what you drink while you are getting ready to pregame before you head to the party and drink. If you get a buzz from 3 beers then you are either an 110 pound female or you havent eaten anything for 3 days.
How is it fair that a person that is more successful has to pay more a percentage of their income? That has never been fair, you are just used to it and brainwashed into thinking nothing else can compare
Why is it unfair. You say that it is unfair, but do not describe why. Most rich people are either very smart or very lucky. And if they are smart, then they are very lucky that they are smart because most people are just not born smart enough to be incredibly successful in life. These lucky rich people have an obligation to help people less fortunate than themselves.
I am pretty well off, mostly because I was gifted with being born intelligent. And I have no problem helping out my girlfriend's sister and some of my poorer friends by paying a higher tax rate. I guess that is because I like to consider myself responsible instead of greedy.
I dislike the flat tax because it unfairly impacts larger families
Why is this a bad thing? Oh wait, I guess this makes me one of those "population nazis" that you mentioned in your post. There SHOULD be tax penalities for having kids, so that poor people will stop having so many babies. Every single problem in the world, every single one, is made worse by over-population. Pollution, poverty, war, disease; all of these problems would be lessened if people werent popping out so many kids.
This best way to stop these things is to make people with children pay more taxes. These tax breaks for dependents are rediculous. If you can make it harder to afford having many kids that would be a good thing. You dont have to make the penalities high for the first kid, so young single mothers arent hurt to bad, but then make the penalties for more kids be much higher.
The legislation would apply only to businesses with more than $5 million in "gross remote taxable sales" each year.
As you can see, small businesses do not have to worry about this new legislation. Once you make this amount of money, you are no longer a small business as far as the SBA is concerned. And since you can probably pay an accountant around $40k - $50k a year, that is not very much for a 5 million dollar company.
Wow, I guess I shouldnt have posted before I RTFA.
The legislation would apply only to businesses with more than $5 million in "gross remote taxable sales" each year.
This takes small businesses out of the picture. A business with that amount in sales would have no problem having an in house accountant to deal with all the tax issues.
I dont see how this could ever actually happen. This would make starting your own company so difficult that it would hinder the economic growth that the government wants. I am working at a small online startup right now, and it would be a terrible burden to file taxes in 50 states.
If they want to do this, then at least make a single flat tax rate that the federal government can then distribute to each state. But having each company deal with the taxes of all 50 states just sounds rediculous to me.
Very good points, and I guess I have to clarify exactly what I mean by PvP. Player vs player does not mean just killing other players. It can mean competing economically, competing for the same PvE quest, or competing on any other level. The problem is that the second you take away combat between players, all other forms of conflict become meaningless. A valid way to compete for a quest would be to kill your opponent, but that option wouldnt be there. One way of competing in business would be to interupt their business in some way, but that wouldnt be possible.
I have almost never played DnD by rolling up two characters and fighting them. Usually there is a large storyline and many (many) other sideplots in a campaign against opponents that your human DM creates for you. Each enemy is played by an actual person, even if it is always the same person. An MMORPG that has 1 GM for every 10 online players would actually come close to providing PvE conflict that is as fun and involved as PvP conflict, but I doubt many people to pay $50 a month for a game that offers this. (I would, but I am probably the minority)
Most games involve, background, environment, clues, puzzles, some conflict, ethical dilemmas, and most of all, a cohesive story line
Most of the items you detailed above are conflict. Backround causes conflict, by giving reasons to have conflict. Environment gives conflict, but this time against non-sentient factors. Puzzles are definetly a form of conflict, as are ethical dilemmas. And every story line I have ever heard of has a certain conflict at its center. In Dungeons and Dragons, all of these conflicts are controlled by a human. While the DM isnt technically the players' opponent, he plays their opponents in a way that makes it seam like you are fighting actual people.
C0rinthian seems to be talking about improving the elements which the game creaters can use to create a better story. You seem to be talking about improving the arena mechanics so players can have better fights between each other.
I hate arena mechanics. It is a very contrived way to have PvP fights. In fact, I hardly even consider that PvP, it is more like a modified PvE / PvP hybrid. Actual PvP comes from players actually having conflict between them that is not artificial. Your guild having access to hunting grounds where very high level dragons spawn is a very real reason for having conflict between players. That is far more fun, and provides much more replayability, than the actual act of killing those dragons. No computer controlled AI NPC has ever been created that comes close to providing the same gameplay as competing against actual humans.
Even though I definetly believe that I understand your points, I still stand by the fact that PvE and PvP are not very different. They both do the same thing - give players something to fight. In fact, building a storyline for PvE and PvP fighting is exactly the same, the only difference is whether or not you are fighting against random number generators or actual people.
I would rather work out how to cross a chasm in a dungeon using a rope woven from the hairs of my party members than enjoy a good duel with each member.
This actually isnt PvE or PvP. You arent fighting against anything except for an obstacle. You could be on your way to kill a computer spawned dragon or on your way to raid an opposing faction's adamantine mines.
I need the program that they used for this study. I can never tell what is going on in my girlfriend's head, and she always makes different facial expressions that I can never discern. With this I could finally read her mind just like she can always read mine.
If a civilization cannot fight wars effectively, then it is a pretty poor civilization.
Well, we know that such attitudes certainly are not something Christ would say. Similar attitudes existed in Nazi Germany and were the core of their nationalist belief system. Have we devolved that far?
Why would I care if that is something Christ would say? How do you even know what Christ would say? We dont have any writings from him. All we have is a few books written by second hand or worst authors which were chosen by people 300 years later to be put into the Bible.
And not everything about Nazi Germany was bad. They took a country ravaged by a war and forced into submission by its enemies into a very powerful nation. Most of the acts that they committed such as a nation were horrible, but it doesnt make the entire country inherintly evil. And starting wars does not make you evil, the United States started the Revolutionary War by the way.
Those "uncivilized" people may not have had Spanish swords and cannons, but they weren't idiots.
While I do think "idiots" is a harsh term, they were definetly not all that bright. They warred with neighboring enemies just like europeans do, they just sucked at it. You forget that the defining action that any nation must be able to do is defend itself, nothing else matters until that condition is met. Human beings do not have the "right" to live, it is a privledge that must be defended. Most nations have always outlawed killing, but it is the police and soldiers that enforce it, not some arbitrary moral system.
If a civilization cannot fight wars effectively, then it is a pretty poor civilization. So I guess you were right when you said (however sarcastically) that nuclear weapons are a hallmark of civilization. Now we just have to keep proving, like we have for the last 60 years, that our civilization is also responsible enough to use them.
But the better job a game does of giving the players as much PvP conflict as possible without making it too tough on new players, the better the game will be.
Correction: The better the PvP aspect of the game will be.
Actually, I do not think that correction is needed. At their heart PvP and PvE are the same thing: conflict. One is conflict against an actual person (such as in basketball or football), and one is conflict against a ruleset (such as solitaire). I know very few people who honestly like playing games like solitaire over games like football or baseball, except maybe for people who are just bad at most games. PvP is actual conflict, while PvE is manufactured conflict. It is the difference between real Beef and Spam. Since games cannot offer enough PvP conflict for their players, they add some PvE content to fill in the gaps.
Slashdot Mirror
Steal: "To take (the property of another) without right or permission."
Take: "To capture physically; sieze."
First off, you simply took 1 possible definition of Take from 33 meanings on Dictionary.com
Two meanings that better fit the matter at hand are:
"To assume for oneself"
"To obtain from a source; derive or draw"
I do not see how this doesnt declare taking intellectual property as stealing. From these definitions, you could easily declare stealing as :
To obtain the property of another without right or permission.
--
(owned by evil monopolies who exploit and underpay innocent musicians)
So the best way to fight evil is to commit evil acts yourself?
Is killing the only way to stop murder?
Is slavery the only way to stop oppression?
Is violence the only way to stop aggression?
Is stealing the only way to stop theft?
And by the way, I do not see too many mainstream musicians being underpaid. I see them simply flying around in their private jets and spending millions of dollars on jewelry.
No, stealing is any time that someone acquires property without the owner's permission. The owner does not have to lose the property for it to be considered stealing.
People on Slashdot often complain that laws cannot keep up with technology, but here is a case where people refuse to let the law catch up. Copyright law is something that was created to stop theft, just a different type of theft than simply breaking into someone's house and taking a car.
"stealing intellectual property" is not even possible, by definition
You make this statement in such a way that it seams you actually believe it. Theft is any time that someone acquires property from someone without their permission. Intellectual property is something that someone has created that may not be a physical object, but still has some commercial value.
Just because the victim does not lose his intellectual property does not mean it isnt stolen. If a teenager stole my car every night and when joyriding but brought in back every morning before I left for work I would still consider it stealing.
Stealing is acquiring property without permission, so how is "stealing intellectual property" not possible?
This is a strange new idea, instead of following the law you instead try to gain political power and change the laws. I know there are a few people out there that actually can convince themselves that they are not stealing, but I doubt they could get 4% of a country to feel the same way.
Are there really that many people, even on Slashdot, that think stealing intellectual property is not wrong?
the Heritage Foundation is nothing more than a flim-flam mouthpiece for the Neocons
Again, you throw out statements without backing them up. While the Heritage Foundation is cleary more conservative than liberal, why is that inherently a bad thing? You say that they represent the offshoring industry, so where is the data that backs this up?
I have been searching the Heritage Foundation and the Offshoring industry, and havent found any correlations. Where is your supposedly reputable source that makes this link? You talk about paymasters, but the Heritage Foundation recieves its money from many individual donors, none of which fund a large percentage of their annual donations.
You like to call people morons and clowns, but you dont have any valuable information to give in any of your posts. It is all just empty rhetoric. You claim that one source is better than another, but never give a reason why. You may be an intelligent person who simply doesnt have much time to spend posting on Slashdot, but you come off as someone who has no idea what he is talking about.
Actually, I do read the news, both online and local newspapers. And I do not see these doomsday scenerios that you apparently see. You can claim that I am just ignorant, but I think that it is just because you like spouting off lies and then covering it up with derogitory talk.
i d/wm467.cfm/
I did a quick search on Google with the phrase "IT jobs outsourced overseas 2005", and almost all of the pages described how outsourcing is not a problem. Since I am not afraid to give links, here is one:
http://www.heritage.org/Research/TradeandForeignA
I ask again, where is all of this hard data that shows how horrible offshoring jobs is?
Another day, another business that dada21 has owned for years. I wonder what business he will own tomorrow?
There is only one thing in common among all of the business that he owns, which is that they all neatly coincide with whatever topics are currently on Slashdot. I think it is amazing that someone can own at least 365 companies (one for each day of the year), and still have financial problems that are caused by the government.
hard data don't lie.
Where is this hard data? I am not saying that it doesnt exist, I have simply never seen it. I have never seen any hard data that shows how many jobs are being sent overseas in the IT business. And simply counting how many outsourced jobs there are in india/china doesnt count, because some of those jobs probably wouldnt exist if they had to pay American wages for them.
Dude, you obviously have a very limited awareness of your environment
Why is it that I have a limited awareness of my environment? Because you say I do?
I admit that I have only been in the IT industry for about 8 years, so it isnt like I have been around since the industry began. But that is enough time to know alot of people who work with computers, in many different disciplines. I am a developer now, but I have worked in tech support and sys admin jobs in the past. I still have dozens of friends who work in these fields, and still have contacts with far more people than that.
The computer industry is very new, it isnt like doctors or lawyers who were around before the time of christ. When you get a job in the IT industry you most likely are not geting a job for life. Most skill sets that you learn in this business are going to become obselete. If you do not continue to learn new things and keep yourself employable, you WILL lose your job.
While I do know competent people who have lost jobs over the past few years, they have all found new ones with a minimal loss in pay if any. The only ones I know who took serious pay cuts or simply could not find another job are those that were simply unemployable. They should go back to school and get a teacher's certificate or something.
I dont care if the number is 5% or 50%, those jobs that are leaving the country are jobs that probably should be in the third world. I am sure that anyone could come up with a dozen exceptions of a random research center being opened overseas, but those are an exception. Jobs for qualified engineers and computer scientists are simply not going overseas in large numbers.
I agree that the way things are going now, "College != Preperation".
But I think that this is a tragedy, and a dis-service to our country's college students. College students are in post secondary schooling for 4-5 years, that is a hell of a lot of time. It does not take that much time to teach someone a field such as computer science. Someone should be able to self-teach themselves everything needed to not only be a programmer, but a true "computer scientist", in 4 years. And along the way they should also be able to pick up skill sets needed to be an effective worker. College should be making it even easier on the students in school because they are paying the university to help them learn.
If I hired someone and was willing to give them 4 years to learn how to do the job, I would expect them to be far more competent than even the top 10% of current college graduates. If I want them to know how to program in any language I ask them to, they better be able to do that after 4 years. If I want them to understand optimization and things like Big-O notation, they better be able to do that after 4 years. They better be a very efficient and useful employee after 4 years.
Kids pay these colleges for years and should be fully functional adults by the time they get out. There is no excuse for them to not be productive with very minimal on the job training. I still put most of the blame on the students themselves for never learning anything that isnt in their textbooks, but some of the blame is also on the schools.
Why shouldnt we expect college graduates to be useful employees?
I agree that the IT job market is no where near dead. I work at a small internet company, and hiring competent IT employees is always a hassle. The problem is not that it is hard to find a job in the computer industry, it is that there arent enough competent people.
The only people that I know that are having trouble finding jobs are those without enough skill sets. Being a computer nerd, playing alot of video games, and running your MMORPG guild's website are not marketable skills. You need to actually be useful. Probably at least 95% of those 5% of jobs going overseas are just taking away jobs from the morons in the computer industry.
And colleges are turning out incompetent programmers at an alarming rate. Going to a college to find a competent IT worker is barely more fruitful than going to your local Walmart. I wish they would start teaching these kids something instead of just having TAs on hand to basically do the student's work for them every time they have a problem. I actually have a friend who complained that his boss wouldnt help him enough whenever my friend had a problem with his work. I couldnt believe what I was hearing.
How will the male enhancement industry survive now? I dont think that anyone actually wants those stupid emails in their mailbox, so they will have to try another marketing scheme.
Too bad, so sad.
Damn, talk about a light weight. Three beers is what you drink while you are getting ready to pregame before you head to the party and drink. If you get a buzz from 3 beers then you are either an 110 pound female or you havent eaten anything for 3 days.
How is it fair that a person that is more successful has to pay more a percentage of their income? That has never been fair, you are just used to it and brainwashed into thinking nothing else can compare
Why is it unfair. You say that it is unfair, but do not describe why. Most rich people are either very smart or very lucky. And if they are smart, then they are very lucky that they are smart because most people are just not born smart enough to be incredibly successful in life. These lucky rich people have an obligation to help people less fortunate than themselves.
I am pretty well off, mostly because I was gifted with being born intelligent. And I have no problem helping out my girlfriend's sister and some of my poorer friends by paying a higher tax rate. I guess that is because I like to consider myself responsible instead of greedy.
I dislike the flat tax because it unfairly impacts larger families
Why is this a bad thing? Oh wait, I guess this makes me one of those "population nazis" that you mentioned in your post. There SHOULD be tax penalities for having kids, so that poor people will stop having so many babies. Every single problem in the world, every single one, is made worse by over-population. Pollution, poverty, war, disease; all of these problems would be lessened if people werent popping out so many kids.
This best way to stop these things is to make people with children pay more taxes. These tax breaks for dependents are rediculous. If you can make it harder to afford having many kids that would be a good thing. You dont have to make the penalities high for the first kid, so young single mothers arent hurt to bad, but then make the penalties for more kids be much higher.
The legislation would apply only to businesses with more than $5 million in "gross remote taxable sales" each year.
As you can see, small businesses do not have to worry about this new legislation. Once you make this amount of money, you are no longer a small business as far as the SBA is concerned. And since you can probably pay an accountant around $40k - $50k a year, that is not very much for a 5 million dollar company.
Wow, I guess I shouldnt have posted before I RTFA.
The legislation would apply only to businesses with more than $5 million in "gross remote taxable sales" each year.
This takes small businesses out of the picture. A business with that amount in sales would have no problem having an in house accountant to deal with all the tax issues.
I dont see how this could ever actually happen. This would make starting your own company so difficult that it would hinder the economic growth that the government wants. I am working at a small online startup right now, and it would be a terrible burden to file taxes in 50 states.
If they want to do this, then at least make a single flat tax rate that the federal government can then distribute to each state. But having each company deal with the taxes of all 50 states just sounds rediculous to me.
When I saw this article, I thought that my browser was broken and using cached pages.
:-)
Good to know it wasnt an IE error
Very good points, and I guess I have to clarify exactly what I mean by PvP. Player vs player does not mean just killing other players. It can mean competing economically, competing for the same PvE quest, or competing on any other level. The problem is that the second you take away combat between players, all other forms of conflict become meaningless. A valid way to compete for a quest would be to kill your opponent, but that option wouldnt be there. One way of competing in business would be to interupt their business in some way, but that wouldnt be possible.
I have almost never played DnD by rolling up two characters and fighting them. Usually there is a large storyline and many (many) other sideplots in a campaign against opponents that your human DM creates for you. Each enemy is played by an actual person, even if it is always the same person. An MMORPG that has 1 GM for every 10 online players would actually come close to providing PvE conflict that is as fun and involved as PvP conflict, but I doubt many people to pay $50 a month for a game that offers this. (I would, but I am probably the minority)
Most games involve, background, environment, clues, puzzles, some conflict, ethical dilemmas, and most of all, a cohesive story line
Most of the items you detailed above are conflict. Backround causes conflict, by giving reasons to have conflict. Environment gives conflict, but this time against non-sentient factors. Puzzles are definetly a form of conflict, as are ethical dilemmas. And every story line I have ever heard of has a certain conflict at its center. In Dungeons and Dragons, all of these conflicts are controlled by a human. While the DM isnt technically the players' opponent, he plays their opponents in a way that makes it seam like you are fighting actual people.
C0rinthian seems to be talking about improving the elements which the game creaters can use to create a better story.
You seem to be talking about improving the arena mechanics so players can have better fights between each other.
I hate arena mechanics. It is a very contrived way to have PvP fights. In fact, I hardly even consider that PvP, it is more like a modified PvE / PvP hybrid. Actual PvP comes from players actually having conflict between them that is not artificial. Your guild having access to hunting grounds where very high level dragons spawn is a very real reason for having conflict between players. That is far more fun, and provides much more replayability, than the actual act of killing those dragons. No computer controlled AI NPC has ever been created that comes close to providing the same gameplay as competing against actual humans.
Even though I definetly believe that I understand your points, I still stand by the fact that PvE and PvP are not very different. They both do the same thing - give players something to fight. In fact, building a storyline for PvE and PvP fighting is exactly the same, the only difference is whether or not you are fighting against random number generators or actual people.
I would rather work out how to cross a chasm in a dungeon using a rope woven from the hairs of my party members than enjoy a good duel with each member.
This actually isnt PvE or PvP. You arent fighting against anything except for an obstacle. You could be on your way to kill a computer spawned dragon or on your way to raid an opposing faction's adamantine mines.
I need the program that they used for this study. I can never tell what is going on in my girlfriend's head, and she always makes different facial expressions that I can never discern. With this I could finally read her mind just like she can always read mine.
If a civilization cannot fight wars effectively, then it is a pretty poor civilization.
Well, we know that such attitudes certainly are not something Christ would say. Similar attitudes existed in Nazi Germany and were the core of their nationalist belief system. Have we devolved that far?
Why would I care if that is something Christ would say? How do you even know what Christ would say? We dont have any writings from him. All we have is a few books written by second hand or worst authors which were chosen by people 300 years later to be put into the Bible.
And not everything about Nazi Germany was bad. They took a country ravaged by a war and forced into submission by its enemies into a very powerful nation. Most of the acts that they committed such as a nation were horrible, but it doesnt make the entire country inherintly evil. And starting wars does not make you evil, the United States started the Revolutionary War by the way.
Those "uncivilized" people may not have had Spanish swords and cannons, but they weren't idiots.
While I do think "idiots" is a harsh term, they were definetly not all that bright. They warred with neighboring enemies just like europeans do, they just sucked at it. You forget that the defining action that any nation must be able to do is defend itself, nothing else matters until that condition is met. Human beings do not have the "right" to live, it is a privledge that must be defended. Most nations have always outlawed killing, but it is the police and soldiers that enforce it, not some arbitrary moral system.
If a civilization cannot fight wars effectively, then it is a pretty poor civilization. So I guess you were right when you said (however sarcastically) that nuclear weapons are a hallmark of civilization. Now we just have to keep proving, like we have for the last 60 years, that our civilization is also responsible enough to use them.
But the better job a game does of giving the players as much PvP conflict as possible without making it too tough on new players, the better the game will be.
Correction: The better the PvP aspect of the game will be.
Actually, I do not think that correction is needed. At their heart PvP and PvE are the same thing: conflict. One is conflict against an actual person (such as in basketball or football), and one is conflict against a ruleset (such as solitaire). I know very few people who honestly like playing games like solitaire over games like football or baseball, except maybe for people who are just bad at most games. PvP is actual conflict, while PvE is manufactured conflict. It is the difference between real Beef and Spam. Since games cannot offer enough PvP conflict for their players, they add some PvE content to fill in the gaps.