You missed his point completely. Tesla might not exist at all in 5-7 years. You won't be able to buy a new one, and if you got one used it could be very difficult or expensive to get replacement parts as they wear out.
Mercedes, on the other had, will almost certainly exist in some form, even if it gets bought out or merges with another car company. You will continue to be able to get replacement parts at reasonable prices (or at all).
Perhaps Tesla will become huge. There's no way to know. But right now, for most consumers the safer bet is to buy something else.
You can put the user ID number into a URL that will bring up your profile page, if it's public. If you don't want your profile info to be public, don't make it public. The data can't be scraped from non-public profile pages.
I'm not really sure how your favorite TF2 loadout could constitute "sensitive data." And if you're using Steam's IM feature to send messages you don't want others to read, you should probably stop now because they're not encrypted and everyone on the internet can read them in the clear, not just the NSA.
There's a third type of person who never tweets. One that essentially uses Twitter as an RSS feed, news aggregator, and/or joke-a-day (or joke-a-five-minutes) feed. They could still be considered "active" users, in that they use the service, but don't feel the need to post.
"Free-to-play" does not literally mean "free to play." It means a game that is specifically designed around microtransactions. A game that was designed, scoped, and balanced around the idea that you will just barely not be able to succeed, or just barely not be able to get what you want done, unless you fork over some cash a little bit at a time.
In order for a shareware classic like DOOM to be designed in the Free-to-Play model, imagine that instead of the levels having 3 colored key cards with associated doors, they had 10 colored key cards, and you could only pick up one per day. You might reach the second key, but you would have to wait a day or fork over $0.50, or have someone click your post on Facebook to pick up the next card. Not only that, but as you progressed through the level, monster health, damage, and density increased, to the point that it would generally not be possible to complete a level unless you paid for a "boost" such as bonus healing or ammo or a temporary damage power up. There would also be no cheat codes in the game, and no difficulty level selector at the start. But you wouldn't have to pay for episodes 2-4! They'd be included but extremely hard to complete without paying for boosts, and without paying for the extra keycard access it would take you weeks to reach them.
So yes, the current "free-to-play" design paradigm is completely different from the old shareware system. In a shareware system, the most unscrupulous thing a game designer might do is front load the best level designs into the first episode, and get lazy with the designs of the later episodes, but they still had to actually make the core gameplay and difficulty progression fun, and the main gameplay loop fun. In the F2P model you create a core gameplay loop that is fun and balanced, and then you intentionally skew it to be impossible, time consuming, or frustrating, and add payment opportunities at those points of near defeat or frustration or "I'm just 2 points away" or "I just want to play one more level." And the worst part is that once you actually fork over the money, and the restrictions are released, the resulting game is bland and repetitive. The challenge disappeared because the only challenge the games usually provided were in the management of limited resources. You literally just paid $1 to make the game less fun for yourself by effectively cheating. It leaves you feeling empty and unfulfilled.
My point was that if the computer can figure out the context of the other 90,000 languages it runs into, it can figure out the context of language #90,001. Else it wouldn't have been able to figure out the context of any languages, including ones on earth. The entire episode hinges on the dumbest thing ever and it's not even internally consistent with itself. When the viewer can figure out the gist of what they guys are trying to convey just through body language and expression within the first 5 minutes of the episode, it gets pretty ridiculous that Picard and his crew, ostensibly a group of people whose entire job involves contact with bizarre and alien cultures can't figure that shit out for another 45 minutes and it costs a man his life to do so.
This article is a bunch of Chinese expressions that make zero sense in English when translated literally. But we're able to translate them because of the context in which they are used. All languages have metaphors and idioms like that all over the place. If the universal translator really wasn't capable of using context to figure out meaning, it wouldn't be able to translate any languages at all. That's why the episode is so dumb. If I heard you say "Picard at Farpoint" a few dozen times over the course of a conversation, I could figure out what it meant, even if I never found out what "Picard" and "Farpoint" meant. I'd learn what the phrase meant and ignore the literal translation. Using a phrase to convey a meaning is functionally identical to using a specific word for it. If a person can do it, the Enterprise's computer could do it. The entire premise of the episode is idiotic.
It's not about idioms. It's about meaning. Meaning can be conveyed either through a set of words or a single word. Either way it still requires context and can be translated using that context.
We don't have any trouble turning those literal Chinese phrases into common English phrases, despite the fact that their literal meanings make almost no sense without context or prior knowledge. By the logic in that episode, the TNG Universal Translator would fail to turn Chinese into English. It'd be a useless piece of shit and not work for any language.
But you don't have to know who Samantha is or watch Sex and the City to learn the context of that reference. That's exactly how ALL language works. "Samantha" is no different from "bitch." "Bitch" requires the context of knowing that "female dog" is an insult. (I'm not saying "Samantha" == "bitch", I've never watched the show, I'm simply using that as an example of how all language requires context).
Darmok is not a good episode. To be fair, it's not among the worst episodes. It's about average or below average. But it's not a good episode, because it's dumb and goofy. But it's dumb and goofy in a way that's fun, so I still enjoy this episode, but it's a guilty pleasure.
While the Diablo games are known for mowing enemies down for hours on end, in order to get to the maximum level pre-expansion you need to beat the game 3 times in a row. It gets tiresome the first time you do everything again. Try levelling more than one character and maintain your sanity... go on... try. D2 had pacing such that you would hit the level cap somewhere in your 3rd play through, though you could certainly grind at a lower level to give yourself better stats in the 2nd or 3rd run.
For one, you had to play Diablo 2 three times to get to the highest difficulty level, too, and you were playing through the same content a million times anyway, just like Diablo 3. In this aspect, D2 and the release version of D3 were identical. For two, you could still keep playing old difficulties and getting xp in the release version of D3, precisely like D2. Additionally, in D2, you reached the level cap after literally months of grinding, whereas in D3 you can reach the level cap in a weekend or faster.
There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike the original released version of Diablo 3 (always online, auction house, impermanence of choice, etc.) that you don't have to make up ones that are fake.
Furthermore, this argument is now completely moot, because as of the 2.0 patch, the game no longer uses the traditional D2 difficulty system. You can select whatever difficulty you want at the start, and rather than having static monster levels per difficulty, the monster levels always scale to match the level of the party leader (you, if you're playing by yourself), and then damage/health/xp/gold is scaled based on the difficulty. A single normal playthrough of acts 1-4 will get you to level 45 or so, and 60 before you finish act 1 again. And if you play on a harder difficulty (much harder difficulty) you can reach level 60 within your first playthrough.
What about equal time for my dissenting view that the entire universe was created in its current state exactly one millisecond ago... NOW. If there is literally an all knowing all powerful creator god, that exists outside of our dimension and outside of time, and who has full power over all matter and physical laws, this should be possible.
And that's why creationists don't make sense to me. What is wrong with a god who created the universe in 7 days 7,000 years ago (or whatever), but set up the entire universe and its laws and current state to make it *appear* to internal observers to be 8 billion years old (or whatever)? If god truly is all powerful and all knowing, this is certainly within his abilities, and researching this universe he created with the appears of being X billion years old does not stop one from believing that he actually created it Y thousand years ago. At that point it's no longer a matter of science but a matter of faith. We can only use science to describe the universe as it currently appears to us humans. We can't use science to describe what ones faith tells them to believe.
For starters, you already did the work of installing Origin and setting up an account. So even if you deleted Origin, you still already have an account so that work is a sunk cost. Second of all, you would have had to install that multi-gigabyte patch regardless of if Origin existed or not because you wouldn't have been able to connect to the game servers and play without it, so that has nothing to do with Origin. Third, the browser plugin is specific the the Battlefield Battle log feature. The game was designed to use a web browser as its server browser. It's something specific to BF and you would have had to do that to play it regardless of if Origin existed or not, and it's not a feature of Titanfall so you wouldn't have had to do that again to play Titanfall.
So right now, if you wanted to play Titanfall, your steps would be: 1. Install Origin. 2. Install Titanfall. 3. Log into Origin. 4. Possibly download a Titanfall patch (I don't know if there's a patch because I didn't buy it because I'm not a fan of CoD style shooters), which you would have had to do regardless of Origin's existence or non-existence. 5. Play.
That's it.
Seriously, 90% of your problems with "Origin" were problems with Battlefield.
This is a complete mischaracterization of what's going on. It's not that they don't want to compete with Tesla, it's that they want a cut. Right now, it's illegal for automakers to own car dealerships in most states, because when cars were in early adoption the state government didn't want to allow a situation where a car manufacturer pulled out of a state completely because it was unprofitable, leaving the citizens of that state unable to buy cars easily. So dealerships are independent from the manufacturers. Tesla is bypassing this 100 year old, out of date system, because it no longer makes sense, but the dealers aren't afraid of electric cars, they just want to make Tesla "play by the rules" and let the dealers sell (or not) the Tesla cars, so that they an make a profit off them like they do every other car manufacturer.
So far, robots don't know how to manufacture their own bullets/missiles. We'd just have to send wave after wave of our own men at them until they ran out.
Dungeon Keeper is the culmination of nothing. Just because they finally slapped a name you recognize on one of these pieces of shit doesn't mean they've reached some apex. Dungeon Keeper isn't even one of the worst offenders. This is the Facebook/mobile game model that's been popular for like 6 years.
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They might be, but they might not. It's a risk. Mercedes is decidedly less of a risk.
You missed his point completely. Tesla might not exist at all in 5-7 years. You won't be able to buy a new one, and if you got one used it could be very difficult or expensive to get replacement parts as they wear out.
Mercedes, on the other had, will almost certainly exist in some form, even if it gets bought out or merges with another car company. You will continue to be able to get replacement parts at reasonable prices (or at all).
Perhaps Tesla will become huge. There's no way to know. But right now, for most consumers the safer bet is to buy something else.
You can put the user ID number into a URL that will bring up your profile page, if it's public. If you don't want your profile info to be public, don't make it public. The data can't be scraped from non-public profile pages.
I'm not really sure how your favorite TF2 loadout could constitute "sensitive data." And if you're using Steam's IM feature to send messages you don't want others to read, you should probably stop now because they're not encrypted and everyone on the internet can read them in the clear, not just the NSA.
There's a third type of person who never tweets. One that essentially uses Twitter as an RSS feed, news aggregator, and/or joke-a-day (or joke-a-five-minutes) feed. They could still be considered "active" users, in that they use the service, but don't feel the need to post.
"Free-to-play" does not literally mean "free to play." It means a game that is specifically designed around microtransactions. A game that was designed, scoped, and balanced around the idea that you will just barely not be able to succeed, or just barely not be able to get what you want done, unless you fork over some cash a little bit at a time.
In order for a shareware classic like DOOM to be designed in the Free-to-Play model, imagine that instead of the levels having 3 colored key cards with associated doors, they had 10 colored key cards, and you could only pick up one per day. You might reach the second key, but you would have to wait a day or fork over $0.50, or have someone click your post on Facebook to pick up the next card. Not only that, but as you progressed through the level, monster health, damage, and density increased, to the point that it would generally not be possible to complete a level unless you paid for a "boost" such as bonus healing or ammo or a temporary damage power up. There would also be no cheat codes in the game, and no difficulty level selector at the start. But you wouldn't have to pay for episodes 2-4! They'd be included but extremely hard to complete without paying for boosts, and without paying for the extra keycard access it would take you weeks to reach them.
So yes, the current "free-to-play" design paradigm is completely different from the old shareware system. In a shareware system, the most unscrupulous thing a game designer might do is front load the best level designs into the first episode, and get lazy with the designs of the later episodes, but they still had to actually make the core gameplay and difficulty progression fun, and the main gameplay loop fun. In the F2P model you create a core gameplay loop that is fun and balanced, and then you intentionally skew it to be impossible, time consuming, or frustrating, and add payment opportunities at those points of near defeat or frustration or "I'm just 2 points away" or "I just want to play one more level." And the worst part is that once you actually fork over the money, and the restrictions are released, the resulting game is bland and repetitive. The challenge disappeared because the only challenge the games usually provided were in the management of limited resources. You literally just paid $1 to make the game less fun for yourself by effectively cheating. It leaves you feeling empty and unfulfilled.
You never see the true Dark Lord, working from the shadows.
Right, but if I heard it a few times in context I'd figure it out pretty damn quickly. That's my point.
My point was that if the computer can figure out the context of the other 90,000 languages it runs into, it can figure out the context of language #90,001. Else it wouldn't have been able to figure out the context of any languages, including ones on earth. The entire episode hinges on the dumbest thing ever and it's not even internally consistent with itself. When the viewer can figure out the gist of what they guys are trying to convey just through body language and expression within the first 5 minutes of the episode, it gets pretty ridiculous that Picard and his crew, ostensibly a group of people whose entire job involves contact with bizarre and alien cultures can't figure that shit out for another 45 minutes and it costs a man his life to do so.
I used this in another post and I think it's a really good analogy: http://www.businessinsider.com...
This article is a bunch of Chinese expressions that make zero sense in English when translated literally. But we're able to translate them because of the context in which they are used. All languages have metaphors and idioms like that all over the place. If the universal translator really wasn't capable of using context to figure out meaning, it wouldn't be able to translate any languages at all. That's why the episode is so dumb. If I heard you say "Picard at Farpoint" a few dozen times over the course of a conversation, I could figure out what it meant, even if I never found out what "Picard" and "Farpoint" meant. I'd learn what the phrase meant and ignore the literal translation. Using a phrase to convey a meaning is functionally identical to using a specific word for it. If a person can do it, the Enterprise's computer could do it. The entire premise of the episode is idiotic.
It's not about idioms. It's about meaning. Meaning can be conveyed either through a set of words or a single word. Either way it still requires context and can be translated using that context.
Read this article: http://www.businessinsider.com...
We don't have any trouble turning those literal Chinese phrases into common English phrases, despite the fact that their literal meanings make almost no sense without context or prior knowledge. By the logic in that episode, the TNG Universal Translator would fail to turn Chinese into English. It'd be a useless piece of shit and not work for any language.
But you don't have to know who Samantha is or watch Sex and the City to learn the context of that reference. That's exactly how ALL language works. "Samantha" is no different from "bitch." "Bitch" requires the context of knowing that "female dog" is an insult. (I'm not saying "Samantha" == "bitch", I've never watched the show, I'm simply using that as an example of how all language requires context).
Darmok is not a good episode. To be fair, it's not among the worst episodes. It's about average or below average. But it's not a good episode, because it's dumb and goofy. But it's dumb and goofy in a way that's fun, so I still enjoy this episode, but it's a guilty pleasure.
Flight sims are an extremely niche product. It was likely adopt this business model or never make another MS Flight game again.
Attempting freemium/f2p business models for a game is not tantamount to lack of respect for ones customers.
That's not a problem with Kickstarter. That's a problem with Kickstarter backers.
What is this link supposed to be referencing?
Sony would be worse because it would be a severe decrease in competition in the space.
For one, you had to play Diablo 2 three times to get to the highest difficulty level, too, and you were playing through the same content a million times anyway, just like Diablo 3. In this aspect, D2 and the release version of D3 were identical. For two, you could still keep playing old difficulties and getting xp in the release version of D3, precisely like D2. Additionally, in D2, you reached the level cap after literally months of grinding, whereas in D3 you can reach the level cap in a weekend or faster.
There are plenty of perfectly legitimate reasons to dislike the original released version of Diablo 3 (always online, auction house, impermanence of choice, etc.) that you don't have to make up ones that are fake.
Furthermore, this argument is now completely moot, because as of the 2.0 patch, the game no longer uses the traditional D2 difficulty system. You can select whatever difficulty you want at the start, and rather than having static monster levels per difficulty, the monster levels always scale to match the level of the party leader (you, if you're playing by yourself), and then damage/health/xp/gold is scaled based on the difficulty. A single normal playthrough of acts 1-4 will get you to level 45 or so, and 60 before you finish act 1 again. And if you play on a harder difficulty (much harder difficulty) you can reach level 60 within your first playthrough.
What about equal time for my dissenting view that the entire universe was created in its current state exactly one millisecond ago... NOW. If there is literally an all knowing all powerful creator god, that exists outside of our dimension and outside of time, and who has full power over all matter and physical laws, this should be possible.
And that's why creationists don't make sense to me. What is wrong with a god who created the universe in 7 days 7,000 years ago (or whatever), but set up the entire universe and its laws and current state to make it *appear* to internal observers to be 8 billion years old (or whatever)? If god truly is all powerful and all knowing, this is certainly within his abilities, and researching this universe he created with the appears of being X billion years old does not stop one from believing that he actually created it Y thousand years ago. At that point it's no longer a matter of science but a matter of faith. We can only use science to describe the universe as it currently appears to us humans. We can't use science to describe what ones faith tells them to believe.
That's nice, but you weren't the person I was replying to.
For starters, you already did the work of installing Origin and setting up an account. So even if you deleted Origin, you still already have an account so that work is a sunk cost. Second of all, you would have had to install that multi-gigabyte patch regardless of if Origin existed or not because you wouldn't have been able to connect to the game servers and play without it, so that has nothing to do with Origin. Third, the browser plugin is specific the the Battlefield Battle log feature. The game was designed to use a web browser as its server browser. It's something specific to BF and you would have had to do that to play it regardless of if Origin existed or not, and it's not a feature of Titanfall so you wouldn't have had to do that again to play Titanfall.
So right now, if you wanted to play Titanfall, your steps would be:
1. Install Origin.
2. Install Titanfall.
3. Log into Origin.
4. Possibly download a Titanfall patch (I don't know if there's a patch because I didn't buy it because I'm not a fan of CoD style shooters), which you would have had to do regardless of Origin's existence or non-existence.
5. Play.
That's it.
Seriously, 90% of your problems with "Origin" were problems with Battlefield.
This is a complete mischaracterization of what's going on. It's not that they don't want to compete with Tesla, it's that they want a cut. Right now, it's illegal for automakers to own car dealerships in most states, because when cars were in early adoption the state government didn't want to allow a situation where a car manufacturer pulled out of a state completely because it was unprofitable, leaving the citizens of that state unable to buy cars easily. So dealerships are independent from the manufacturers. Tesla is bypassing this 100 year old, out of date system, because it no longer makes sense, but the dealers aren't afraid of electric cars, they just want to make Tesla "play by the rules" and let the dealers sell (or not) the Tesla cars, so that they an make a profit off them like they do every other car manufacturer.
So far, robots don't know how to manufacture their own bullets/missiles. We'd just have to send wave after wave of our own men at them until they ran out.
Dungeon Keeper is the culmination of nothing. Just because they finally slapped a name you recognize on one of these pieces of shit doesn't mean they've reached some apex. Dungeon Keeper isn't even one of the worst offenders. This is the Facebook/mobile game model that's been popular for like 6 years.