Although you're entitled to your opinion, I don't feel you deserve the Insightful tag.
It's not about learning; it's about getting through school at all costs.
Look at the converse -- it's not about teaching, it's about revenue at all costs.
You get screwed by "teachers" and robbed by the schools, you can suddenly find yourself less... respectful... of the notion that honesty plays well, especially when you can't detect a shred of it on the part of the/people you're paying more money than you've ever had in your life/. Or ever will have, *unless you get through the course*.
When you're stuck taking Bullshit 201 or Recite The Teacher's Opinion As If It Were Fact 104 and paying dearly for the privlege... well, them's the breaks.
"Academic honesty" starts with the academics, and I haven't seen enough of it yet to continue this discussion. It's taking responsibility for your own failures -- remember the Stanford "We Can't Code So If Someone Looked At Your Files We'll Just Blame You" scam from last year? It's teachers who either teach the material or get out of the student's way. It's settling on one goddamn revision of the $150 textbooks -- are you REALLY telling me the universities couldn't put their foot down about this if they wanted to? Hah.
Am I the only one who read Heinlein's later novels?
If Mr. Robinson stays "true to form", it's going to be all 12-year-olds trying to get into the grizzled old man's pants.
Look, nobody cares about Piers Anthony, he can get away with -- with -- with whatever he wants to, twice, chocolate-covered. It always amazes me that Heinlein gets a pass on the latter end of his Future History.
Those Phase I testers have some major balls or testicular-equivalents.
"Yeah, okay, your tests came back, you're clean. So now we're gonna stab you and your friends with this needle full of some HIV we hacked up, and if any of you guys die we'll know we screwed up somewhere."
"Sounds good. Let's do that."
I don't know what it'd take to convince me to do that. Brr.
Well, no, pretty much everyone disapproves of that.
Similarly, I am not fond of using a wrench to drive nails, and have found a hammer remarkably unsuited to the task of sawing wood.
(Score 5, Insightful) my ass. Yes, Writely's one step less secure than even email -- the entire point is publishing and collaborating on content. This probably isn't a good place for your credit card numbers, no, and nobody sensible said it was.
You can earn "Command Rank", which is unique from Battle Rank (conventional XP), and earning CR actually renders you ineligible for some BR awards. CR buys you access to higher level chat channels, certain strategic powers, the right to broadcast to your faction... it, at least allegedly, makes you a person worthy of some measure of respect. Politics aside, if a CR5 says something is worth doing, someone will likely heed him.
As for factions being unequal... Planetside went with/three/ factions. Can one faction totally wail on another? Yes, I've done it. We took land and took land and took land until eventually one entire faction was locked up in their home continent while we tooled around in their enormous tanks we seized by Right Of Sanc-Lock. Did that last long? No, because of all the places in the world that faction could be fighting, we concentrated them in one tiny place, while the third faction was rampaging through the world virtually unopposed. That little stunt cost us several hours of losses.
As for "everyone starts out equal"... in Planetside, levels don't get you new awesome gear nobody else can use. Game doesn't even HAVE an economy. Levels earn you the right to do two things at once -- be a fighter pilot AND a support medic, or a ninja AND a heavy weapons specialist.
Give it a try! Heck, give it a try FOR FREE -- Planetside Reserves, free play up to BR6.
I know it's fun not being accountable to anyone, but Google my friend, you only get to pull that stunt as long as you're a monopoly. Eventually, with increased competition from yahoo and microsoft, you'll actually have to start treating your business partners with some modicum of respect.
Google just libeled the hell out of those guys, so it should be quite easy for them to win a lawsuit, even against the scary Google. They grab a lawyer, they sue, Google can't use the one absolute defense against such a suit -- the truth -- the click-fraud "detectors" win, they get infinite dollars and are a household word forever.
Seems pretty clear-cut to me. You lemme know when that happens.
It's a social game. You go out, and you go sailing. On a pirate ship. And you shoot at ships. And you take their stuff. And then you go home, and gamble your winnings away in poker or spades, or buy clothes, or furniture, or invest the winnings in your shop.
It has a multi-tiered economy -- and we're not even talking about micropayments, yet. It has the most fiendishly sophisticated chat filter I've ever seen -- it doesn't just convert profanity, it actively attacks acronyms, net slang, and inappropriate use of Caps Lock. You log on to Puzzle Pirates, and the world is instantly literate. Try "a/s/l"ing sometime and see what happens.
It has unlimited PvP... but you risk a terrible penalty if you attack a weaker vessel.
And those old, tired puzzles -- you know why they're tired? Because they're friggin' classics of the genre, that's why. Dr. Mario? Puzzle Fighter? A demented two-fisted version of Snood? And when you do them, you aren't playing a puzzle, you are chasing down a merchant frigate or frantically repairing combat damage or meticulously decanting strange and wonderful elixirs.
It's a silly idea, crafted with loving attention to detail and populated by rum-swilling fiends. It might not be for everyone, and no, of course that's not two million active accounts, but it's a milestone none the less.
I ran #gnuwarez on EFnet for a year or so. Zero-day Debian releases, FreeBSD -- you name it, I had a vast network of affiliate networks capable of getting it out to you. Mad greetz to the SourceForge guys.
They want this trash because they can sell improbably expensive networking gear to starry-eyed ad executives. The fact that net neutrality -- the de facto standard until today -- brought them to this point is irrelevant.
Yes, I know they're publicly-held companies; yes, I know that their apologists will shrug and say they have to be utter bastards. Not the point.
What are you talking about? SS2 didn't have AI, just terrifying atmospherics and cunning placement of creatures. The "AI" had two settings, "run at you and kill you" and "shoot at you from a distance".
Of course money from drugs funds terrorists. Why not? Terrorists want money, and they don't care about laws. Terrorists would sell singing telegrams if it got them large sums of untraceable cash.
This is not because terrorists are unusual. Lots of bad people happen to enjoy large sums of untraceable cash.
So instead of wondering how to keep the giant piles of all-corroding money in the hands of homegrown murderers, could we please focus on the bigger picture? Why is there so much money in drugs?
Because the laws of the United States influence the supply, and drugs are not somehow immune from basic economic theory.
There is no argument. There is no appeal. Bad people sell drugs not because they are bad people, but because they like money, and we have created a situation with great rewards, low perceived risk, and managed to alienate every single citizen with even the dimmest understanding of the principles our nation was founded on in the process.
I don't know what to do. I don't understand why this is not obvious. Is it a conspiracy, or is everyone else just stupid? Generally, it's a bad sign when a chain of reasoning leads me into "Fools! I'll show them all!" territory, but... we created the Mafia. We struggle to sustain the drug trade. Billions of dollars spent to create billions of dollars profit for the drug cartels. These people -- not some stupid Arabs with box cutters and a novel physical security hack we've since patched against -- are the enemies of my nation. Why do we keep writing them checks? I'd... I'd like that to stop.
My enemies -- and enemies they are -- are hitting me with a hammer. It happens I can use this hammer to enforce my will.
It is neither inconsistent nor foolish to simultaneously use this tool to the best of my ability, if that's the best answer I can come up with, while calling for the abolition of the tool.
We'd be better off with seven-year copyrights. It happens I can use the GPL and do something pretty neat. That's nice -- but forced to choose between the GPL protecting code until the heat death of the universe plus 75 years or repealing laws that fuck the Constitution up against a tree...
GPL? Pretty nifty. What little I write uses it. Would I rather live without it and all other copyrights? Or just have copyrights that last "for limited times"?
I support the Bush Administration's care and attention to detail in this matter. George W. Bush has shown unusual insight and respect of the scientific process. I did not think we'd see a president so careful of these proprieties he'd actually refer to the "theory of God" or "Jesus-theory" in his speeches, but it seems in this man we have--- what?
Many stores have a "no photos" policy simply to reduce competition. Otherwise you could walk into the store, take a few photos, and have a reasonably accurate snapshot (pardon the pun) of their inventory line and pricing.
Does remind me. When I rule the world, having and maintaining a complete, publically available list of your merchandise and its current price will be part of having a business license.
What the MMOFPS scene needs is a more progressive environment to catch, and keep, the interest of the players that are currently igoring the whole genre. Until they can develop this I'll gladly take the '+3 battleaxes of dorkdom' - the equipment itself being a type of progression.
Planetside does not have mobs and they do not drop rare but powerful items you require for success.
Planetside does have a level system, but right out of the gate you can use the most powerful weapons and most of the vehicles in the game, if you choose, and no point of XP is ever wasted because you can sell back skills 1-for-1.
Planetside's squad XP sharing and support XP permits you to level without Mad FPS Skillz; I'm getting about a BR every two days of play or so, now; I'm BR11 with something like 30 total kills. (That's two nightly play sessions, not 48 game hours.) I am not a skilled twitch gamer; I'm a support operative.
In my considered opinion, this game is the only non-evil MMO I can name. Most aspects are designed to/fight/ the dread grind and profitless timesink; there is a/button you can hit to go somewhere and shoot someone in the head, right now, just press the button and go/.
No purchased or discovered equipment, no classes, no economy, and the most important choices you can make involve how much you can stuff into your backpack. If you play the game right you spend a lot of time crouched motionless defending vital territory and enforcing fire discipline.
You care to explain how that is going to be a good law?
A good law is one that can be evenly enforced and not trivially circumvented; otherwise, you only punish the honest and foster contempt for the law.
"You can't do/this/ because of/that/" is vulnerable to "prove I knew that" and "prove I did it because of that", both crippling flaws normally and showstoppers when applied to abortion. We've had underground abortion clinics; do we really need -- really and truly need -- underground DNA testing facilities?
The whole frigging Mafia is an example of unintended consequences from well-intentioned legislation "protecting" adults from choices. Try and imagine what amoral psychopaths would do with DNA testing (or engineering!) labs if there were suddenly real money in it.
So if it's really going to be that easy to steal CC numbers, why in the hell would banks do this??
I had one idea that might float: The expected losses due to increased fraud are outweighed by their predictions of increased consumer credit spending, once it becomes easier to use the cards. Since the merchants eat fraudulent charges, anyway, the banks aren't out that much more money if fraud goes up.
I dunno. Wendy's shrugging off checking ID or making you sign documents for credit purchases under a certain amount isn't unreasonable. Those checks take seconds, and seconds do add up. They're already eating fradulent charges anyways, signing things and glancing at poorly-printed IDs isn't stopping 'em. This new feature isn't any different.
I do wonder about your prediction, though. How many purchases a day are you refusing because using credit cards is so difficult?
Are you sure it's a good idea to talk about what brainless, easily-led moderators we have when/you/ are running (Score 4, Insightful)?
The fact is that you're trying to defend a conspiracy to destroy the public domain through perjury, intimidation, and the willful rape of certain lines of our Constitution that you're going to have to get used to having quoted at you.
Look, it's illegal to kill these people, and I'm not rich enough to buy any laws that'll stop 'em. On my budget, Gandhi's probably my best bet.
You could also deal 2 matching hands with only 1 deck. Actually you could deal 4 royal flushes with a single deck.
I thought there was a fallback suit-order rule to deal with such problems. That rule wouldn't work if you could deal two/spade/ flushes.
At this point, if I remember correctly, the money stays in the pot, and goes to the winner of the next round.
Hmm. That's no good for Texas Hold'em, which has rules for players going all-in. Leaving it in the pot and dealing a new hand wouldn't work, since the two tying players wouldn't be able to play.
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Look at the converse -- it's not about teaching, it's about revenue at all costs.
You get screwed by "teachers" and robbed by the schools, you can suddenly find yourself less... respectful... of the notion that honesty plays well, especially when you can't detect a shred of it on the part of the
When you're stuck taking Bullshit 201 or Recite The Teacher's Opinion As If It Were Fact 104 and paying dearly for the privlege... well, them's the breaks.
"Academic honesty" starts with the academics, and I haven't seen enough of it yet to continue this discussion. It's taking responsibility for your own failures -- remember the Stanford "We Can't Code So If Someone Looked At Your Files We'll Just Blame You" scam from last year? It's teachers who either teach the material or get out of the student's way. It's settling on one goddamn revision of the $150 textbooks -- are you REALLY telling me the universities couldn't put their foot down about this if they wanted to? Hah.
The man stole $700,000,000,000 ISK and then posted a bounty on his own head. With the stolen money.
I don't think a few hundred gamers have what it takes to annoy this man. Jesus Christ and all His alts don't have what it takes to annoy this man.
Am I the only one who read Heinlein's later novels?
If Mr. Robinson stays "true to form", it's going to be all 12-year-olds trying to get into the grizzled old man's pants.
Look, nobody cares about Piers Anthony, he can get away with -- with -- with whatever he wants to, twice, chocolate-covered. It always amazes me that Heinlein gets a pass on the latter end of his Future History.
Those Phase I testers have some major balls or testicular-equivalents.
"Yeah, okay, your tests came back, you're clean. So now we're gonna stab you and your friends with this needle full of some HIV we hacked up, and if any of you guys die we'll know we screwed up somewhere."
"Sounds good. Let's do that."
I don't know what it'd take to convince me to do that. Brr.
Well, no, pretty much everyone disapproves of that.
Similarly, I am not fond of using a wrench to drive nails, and have found a hammer remarkably unsuited to the task of sawing wood.
(Score 5, Insightful) my ass. Yes, Writely's one step less secure than even email -- the entire point is publishing and collaborating on content. This probably isn't a good place for your credit card numbers, no, and nobody sensible said it was.
Planetside solved a bunch of these.
/three/ factions. Can one faction totally wail on another? Yes, I've done it. We took land and took land and took land until eventually one entire faction was locked up in their home continent while we tooled around in their enormous tanks we seized by Right Of Sanc-Lock. Did that last long? No, because of all the places in the world that faction could be fighting, we concentrated them in one tiny place, while the third faction was rampaging through the world virtually unopposed. That little stunt cost us several hours of losses.
You can earn "Command Rank", which is unique from Battle Rank (conventional XP), and earning CR actually renders you ineligible for some BR awards. CR buys you access to higher level chat channels, certain strategic powers, the right to broadcast to your faction... it, at least allegedly, makes you a person worthy of some measure of respect. Politics aside, if a CR5 says something is worth doing, someone will likely heed him.
As for factions being unequal... Planetside went with
As for "everyone starts out equal"... in Planetside, levels don't get you new awesome gear nobody else can use. Game doesn't even HAVE an economy. Levels earn you the right to do two things at once -- be a fighter pilot AND a support medic, or a ninja AND a heavy weapons specialist.
Give it a try! Heck, give it a try FOR FREE -- Planetside Reserves, free play up to BR6.
Try Planetside. Not an RPG, but any game that can have three factions fight it out, 133 people a side, can't be ALL bad.
Seems pretty clear-cut to me. You lemme know when that happens.
It's a social game. You go out, and you go sailing. On a pirate ship. And you shoot at ships. And you take their stuff. And then you go home, and gamble your winnings away in poker or spades, or buy clothes, or furniture, or invest the winnings in your shop.
It has a multi-tiered economy -- and we're not even talking about micropayments, yet. It has the most fiendishly sophisticated chat filter I've ever seen -- it doesn't just convert profanity, it actively attacks acronyms, net slang, and inappropriate use of Caps Lock. You log on to Puzzle Pirates, and the world is instantly literate. Try "a/s/l"ing sometime and see what happens.
It has unlimited PvP... but you risk a terrible penalty if you attack a weaker vessel.
And those old, tired puzzles -- you know why they're tired? Because they're friggin' classics of the genre, that's why. Dr. Mario? Puzzle Fighter? A demented two-fisted version of Snood? And when you do them, you aren't playing a puzzle, you are chasing down a merchant frigate or frantically repairing combat damage or meticulously decanting strange and wonderful elixirs.
It's a silly idea, crafted with loving attention to detail and populated by rum-swilling fiends. It might not be for everyone, and no, of course that's not two million active accounts, but it's a milestone none the less.
Oh. Sorry, I almost forgot.
Arrrrrr!
Hah, already beat you.
I ran #gnuwarez on EFnet for a year or so. Zero-day Debian releases, FreeBSD -- you name it, I had a vast network of affiliate networks capable of getting it out to you. Mad greetz to the SourceForge guys.
No, you're not, by definition of the term.
Because if you were willing to defend your freedom to the death, you'd already be dead.
They want this trash because they can sell improbably expensive networking gear to starry-eyed ad executives. The fact that net neutrality -- the de facto standard until today -- brought them to this point is irrelevant.
Yes, I know they're publicly-held companies; yes, I know that their apologists will shrug and say they have to be utter bastards. Not the point.
What are you talking about? SS2 didn't have AI, just terrifying atmospherics and cunning placement of creatures. The "AI" had two settings, "run at you and kill you" and "shoot at you from a distance".
Of course money from drugs funds terrorists. Why not? Terrorists want money, and they don't care about laws. Terrorists would sell singing telegrams if it got them large sums of untraceable cash.
This is not because terrorists are unusual. Lots of bad people happen to enjoy large sums of untraceable cash.
So instead of wondering how to keep the giant piles of all-corroding money in the hands of homegrown murderers, could we please focus on the bigger picture? Why is there so much money in drugs?
Because the laws of the United States influence the supply, and drugs are not somehow immune from basic economic theory.
There is no argument. There is no appeal. Bad people sell drugs not because they are bad people, but because they like money, and we have created a situation with great rewards, low perceived risk, and managed to alienate every single citizen with even the dimmest understanding of the principles our nation was founded on in the process.
I don't know what to do. I don't understand why this is not obvious. Is it a conspiracy, or is everyone else just stupid? Generally, it's a bad sign when a chain of reasoning leads me into "Fools! I'll show them all!" territory, but... we created the Mafia. We struggle to sustain the drug trade. Billions of dollars spent to create billions of dollars profit for the drug cartels. These people -- not some stupid Arabs with box cutters and a novel physical security hack we've since patched against -- are the enemies of my nation. Why do we keep writing them checks? I'd... I'd like that to stop.
My enemies -- and enemies they are -- are hitting me with a hammer. It happens I can use this hammer to enforce my will.
It is neither inconsistent nor foolish to simultaneously use this tool to the best of my ability, if that's the best answer I can come up with, while calling for the abolition of the tool.
We'd be better off with seven-year copyrights. It happens I can use the GPL and do something pretty neat. That's nice -- but forced to choose between the GPL protecting code until the heat death of the universe plus 75 years or repealing laws that fuck the Constitution up against a tree...
GPL? Pretty nifty. What little I write uses it. Would I rather live without it and all other copyrights? Or just have copyrights that last "for limited times"?
Yes, I would.
I support the Bush Administration's care and attention to detail in this matter. George W. Bush has shown unusual insight and respect of the scientific process. I did not think we'd see a president so careful of these proprieties he'd actually refer to the "theory of God" or "Jesus-theory" in his speeches, but it seems in this man we have--- what?
Oh. Well, that's just not gonna work, now is it?
Does remind me. When I rule the world, having and maintaining a complete, publically available list of your merchandise and its current price will be part of having a business license.
Planetside does not have mobs and they do not drop rare but powerful items you require for success.
Planetside does have a level system, but right out of the gate you can use the most powerful weapons and most of the vehicles in the game, if you choose, and no point of XP is ever wasted because you can sell back skills 1-for-1.
Planetside's squad XP sharing and support XP permits you to level without Mad FPS Skillz; I'm getting about a BR every two days of play or so, now; I'm BR11 with something like 30 total kills. (That's two nightly play sessions, not 48 game hours.) I am not a skilled twitch gamer; I'm a support operative.
In my considered opinion, this game is the only non-evil MMO I can name. Most aspects are designed to
No purchased or discovered equipment, no classes, no economy, and the most important choices you can make involve how much you can stuff into your backpack. If you play the game right you spend a lot of time crouched motionless defending vital territory and enforcing fire discipline.
This game is awesome.
You care to explain how that is going to be a good law?
A good law is one that can be evenly enforced and not trivially circumvented; otherwise, you only punish the honest and foster contempt for the law.
"You can't do
The whole frigging Mafia is an example of unintended consequences from well-intentioned legislation "protecting" adults from choices. Try and imagine what amoral psychopaths would do with DNA testing (or engineering!) labs if there were suddenly real money in it.
Jesus friggin' Christ.
All our base will belong to them.
Surely you're toking, Mr. Feynman?
I dunno. Wendy's shrugging off checking ID or making you sign documents for credit purchases under a certain amount isn't unreasonable. Those checks take seconds, and seconds do add up. They're already eating fradulent charges anyways, signing things and glancing at poorly-printed IDs isn't stopping 'em. This new feature isn't any different.
I do wonder about your prediction, though. How many purchases a day are you refusing because using credit cards is so difficult?
Are you sure it's a good idea to talk about what brainless, easily-led moderators we have when /you/ are running (Score 4, Insightful)?
The fact is that you're trying to defend a conspiracy to destroy the public domain through perjury, intimidation, and the willful rape of certain lines of our Constitution that you're going to have to get used to having quoted at you.
Look, it's illegal to kill these people, and I'm not rich enough to buy any laws that'll stop 'em. On my budget, Gandhi's probably my best bet.
Hmm. I actually didn't. So how do they break ties? More than one deck means you could deal two matching hands.