Neglecting MMORPG inflation (bread = 1 gp rather than 1 copper), this morning gold is $928/ounce. IIRC, in original D&D, a gold piece was 1/10 a pound, yielding a value of about $1484.
A 100gp diamond is thus a $148,400.00 diamond.
Checking google, you can get a high quality 7+ carat diamond for about $150k. I presume the gods to whom this is a sacrifice only want high quality diamonds.
So the conclusion is a raise dead spell is "worth" about $150,000 just for the ingredients alone.
Just one more costly item as to why health care spending continues to go up -- new treatments and cures.
That's one of the cool things about City of Heroes. They don't treat "exploits" as exploits.
See, exploits (as long as they don't do things like crash the game or tangle with the code) are better known as "strategies", which are a big wow factor when people figure them out.
Telling a guy in EQ or EQ2 that standing on abridge and casting down on something that has a hard time pathing up to you, that he's evil and exploiting gets the customers pissed off.
Rather, fix the code, doofs. With a special hack just for that area if necessary.
CoH, being a true 3D game with full 3D movement built in by design from day 1, there are no such exploits. Even things like creating a super-tanker who pulls a whole outdoor map full of monsters to a corner and "fire auras" them all to death over five minutes, gets fixed rather than the players blamed For Being Evil.
EQ was the only true 3D MMORPG of any note (Meridian 59 was neither of note nor true 3D, being more of a Doom/Duke 3D-level engine. Ok, ignore the "of note" dig if it pisses you off.)
EQ did things that, had there been competition, would have relegated them to also-ran status, like having casters "meditate" to gain back mana faster, which was to say, have your magic book up in your face, completely blocking your view of the new, novel, 3D world, for most of the gameplay.
Brilliant!/aside Oh, and regarding your humoro-sarcastic.sig:
> In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce
How'd that work out for them, compared to the opposite?
Except, in MxO, bullets did very little damage, being of the MMORPG wiffle-weapon design for longer duration fights.
Last time I checked the movie, both Neo and Agent Smith would take mortal wounds from a single bullet, even if Neo could, eventually, just shrug it off.
So it wasn't like the movie at all in that respect. Which is what was exciting about the movie.
Personally, I'm disgusted by MMORPGs where a 10 foot tall, 4000 lb. ogre PC can stand in the face of a wimpy, cloth-wearing caster PC and chop them multiple times, not even disrupting their delicate hand movements, when said delicate hand movements are the technobabble as to why they can't wear armor to begin with.
Even the super-dodging argument doesn't hold up as the hands must remain relatively fixed to their delicate movements, and all but the crappiest fighters would just lop them off as a course of action, and it would be in Fighter 101 class by any trainer.
Personally, I wanted to be a female with Monica Bellucci's clothing, but anything remotely sexy was high level, i.e. not immediately available.
Having been recently disillusioned by Star Wars: Galaxies Online, when they eviscerated the classes with their redesign, and my Master (Mistress?) Dancer with her Naboobian pew-pew handgun found herself no longer able to use that mid-high level weapon because I was now just only a dancer (one class only), I came to MxO at the tail end of the final public Beta.
After 3 days of effort, I finally got online with an hour to go to see numerous Morhpi running around in an end-of-the-world event.
Within 2 weeks of retail, I had quit. Aside from the clothing frustration, the missions were very repetitive, being all building-based. Which wasn't bad, except the fights were all identical.
It's ironic that the "franchise" that seems best suited, ever, to turn into an MMORPG turned out to be boring as hell.
Even heaving it into the clusterf*** that is Sony's bag-of-also-rans, where you pay a single monthly fee and get access to a dozen and counting failed and outdated MMORPGs didn't intice me back.
I have a hard time believing there are so few MxO players it's not worth it to keep even one server going, given one modern machine can probably handle the entire world, just to keep it as part of the "suite".
I have no problem with restricted access to certain scientific data that the government sponsors, with restriction to the principle investigators for a limited time, say 1 year.
This is frequently done with things like Hubble photos and whatnot, to allow the PI who came up with the idea first dibs on publishing any novel discoveries.
However, having said that, if the government is using this particular data to drive climate change debates for the purpose of altering or passing laws, then indeed it should immediately be made fully public.
And if the data is private, then it should either be bought out by the government, voluntarily (by the private individuals) or the government should duplicate it, first, then release it and use it in a public debate for laws.
> They don't give a shit about hosting a zombie botnet. If they did, > they'd cut their users, but that in turn would cause angry phone > calls to their support center and a lot of canceled contracts.
More likely they'd have to stop collecting on a prorated rate per day each user was cut off. Back in the modem days, many localities passed such laws precisely because the calls to sign up were quickly answered, while the tech service calls were hours, leading to days and days of frustration.
$30/month is $1 per day x 2,000,000 = $2,000,000 per day, just to pull reasonable numbers out of my ass.
> "Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more > beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman > ancestors. The researchers have found beautiful women have more children > than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those > children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive > and so repeat the pattern."
I'm confused as to why this is a Slashdot article, when this has been known for decades. "Sexy women 'get totally hit' more often, producing more babies, in accordance with evolution."
IIRC, it precedes knowledge of evolution by millennia.
It's why female breasts are ridiculously large, why most subspecies of humans around the world have big lips (actually, Europeans have small lips. Think about it.) and females have tiny waists but wide hips and big butts.
One need not even rationalize it with "big butts are a sign of health." There's a reason women like Kate Winslet, Shakira, and JLo spend years if not several decades at near the top of "Men's Lists", while women like Megan Fox spend a year or two there, then drop back down towards the end, then off.
> 105 days of isolation in a mock spacecraft, still smiling after testing > the stresses that space travelers may face on the journey to Mars. They > had no television or Internet...
"One of the 'astronauts' exclaimed he was glad to be out because, "Boy, did that place smell like butt!"
> Recently several Visa card holders were, um, overcharged for certain > purchases, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on a single charge
$23 quadrillion and change, eh?
"When the customers called the 800 help number, they were directed to "just pay it for now" and eventually they'd be credited with the amount. When one pointed out this was roughly a thousand times the cost of everything on Earth, they were transferred to the installments department."
> Three years ago the park had a population of 24 tigers, however none were found this year.
In a completely unrelated story, 24 flabulously wealthy men around the world are suing an undisclosed business because they were not actually able to get erections after taking a certain hideously expensive medicine.
Well, the foolishness of quitting a hit show early on with people whispering in your ear how awesome you are, followed by a permatanked career, most definitely was a well-established physical entity by that time. Just ask Suzanne Somers, Farrah Fawcett, or McClean Stevenson.
> its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio- > tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals" > without their knowledge or consent.'"
> There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major > factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication > interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness > to give up a tool that's so familiar.
I thought the major factor was, "Google Apps, wut?"
As opposed to, oh, I don't know. Some idiots opening a 30-story portal into a demon world where the demons are eternally on the verge of taking the portal and coming through?
I'm so old I remember being taught algorithms for ancient reel-to-reel computers (think background of stuff in the '60s TV show Lost in Space) for merging, sorting, and so on, giant databases based when having access to 1, 2, or 3 reels and a severely limited amount of RAM. Efficient in that context can be way different from the modern World of Plenty programming.
Six hundred years ago, I once made a joke somewhere about how bad the lag would be playing a game of Quake intercontinentally using courierred tape reels.
> "I've been studying programming languages (C++, Java, C, Visual Basic) on my own > with the self-guided, basic textbooks and tutorials, and I'm starting to get > tired of working with examples that are not put into real use
Here's some hard-won lessons from the real world:
1. "Write as if the utility/OS/other stuff is flawless" -- Doesn't sit too well with a customer if it's Microsoft's fault. We're spending 1.2 million on it, just fix it, thxbie.
2. References are only useful if you're familiar with the stuff. If you don't know what some system's equivalent of printf is, or how to add numbers in some other langauge, you can't look it up because you don't know that terminology.
3. Don't try to initialize what a FILE * points to. Not the pointer itself, that's fine to set to NULL. But *ptr = xxx.
4. "Pass by reference" and "Pass by value" are backwards from their intuitive meaning, which, as most programmers will forget, first seems like "pass by a copy of" and "pass the actual variable so it can be modified for the caller". The first is actually "pass a pointer to the variable so the function can change it for the caller" and "pass a copy of the value that will have no affect on the variable in the caller no matter what the function does with it."
5. Global and local variables are "automatic" because they're created on the stack, not allocated as by malloc or new. What this means is mumbo jumbo, but you need to know that generally you can't pass the address of such a thing to a different thread in your process, while you can do that with an object that was allocated with malloc or new. The first address is really an offset from the stack pointer while the new'd addresses are a full pointer within the processes' virtual address space mumbo jumbo.
6. Generally, the qsort library function takes a pointer to a C, not a C++ function. This can cause you to have to give it a C-style function declaration if done inside a C++ file. Otherwise nasty stuff occurs.
7. Program defensively -- Always use a block {} after things like if and for and while and not just a single line with a ; . Also, when creating the opening block, create the closing block. Always init everything even if it's first use is assigning it to something else. Always init pointers to NULL if not to an address in their declaration. Always test for NULL before using the pointer. You can get rid of that later for true tight inner loops in intensive calculations, but it's rare you'll ever get anywhere near that type of calculation.
8. Always save off a copy of your file from time to time if you aren't checking it into a version system regularly. Once every half day is fine -- if you don't mind losing a half a day's worth of work. Eventually, this will kick your ass. You do something stupid like accidentally hit a key combo that translates roughly as "delete everything from the cursor to the end of the file" and you don't notice it and save the file.
Especially do this if you're gonna put in major changes. Also, save off a copy of "the last version that worked" as you progress on a more complicate feature with sub-steps. I have had files that I recreated by hand and they worked, even though they seemed identical. Some stray character or symbol somewhere throws off the compilation without generating a syntax error, and you can't find it for love or money. This, too, will eventually kick your ass.
Toyota's goal is not to become rich because the public demands these cars, making it worthwhile for Ford & Co. to rent the patents, but rather to get in the way for impending US legislation that requires auto makers selling into the US to have this or that fuel efficiency standard, or this many or percent of alternative fuel vehicles sold.
It's the opposite of what patents help with: driving innovation to spur economic growth.
Slashdot Mirror
Neglecting MMORPG inflation (bread = 1 gp rather than 1 copper), this morning gold is $928/ounce. IIRC, in original D&D, a gold piece was 1/10 a pound, yielding a value of about $1484.
A 100gp diamond is thus a $148,400.00 diamond.
Checking google, you can get a high quality 7+ carat diamond for about $150k. I presume the gods to whom this is a sacrifice only want high quality diamonds.
So the conclusion is a raise dead spell is "worth" about $150,000 just for the ingredients alone.
Just one more costly item as to why health care spending continues to go up -- new treatments and cures.
"She'll pretty much have to."
Full circle!
No no no you guys!
"Wound" as in "gash". Jeebus help me.
> The Chinese government has now begun implementing those plans,
> starting with games that involve gangs.
Let's play Pick-Ur-Punchline!
A. So much for City of Villains
B. I presume this outlaws all simulations of the Chinese government itself.
That's one of the cool things about City of Heroes. They don't treat "exploits" as exploits.
See, exploits (as long as they don't do things like crash the game or tangle with the code) are better known as "strategies", which are a big wow factor when people figure them out.
Telling a guy in EQ or EQ2 that standing on abridge and casting down on something that has a hard time pathing up to you, that he's evil and exploiting gets the customers pissed off.
Rather, fix the code, doofs. With a special hack just for that area if necessary.
CoH, being a true 3D game with full 3D movement built in by design from day 1, there are no such exploits. Even things like creating a super-tanker who pulls a whole outdoor map full of monsters to a corner and "fire auras" them all to death over five minutes, gets fixed rather than the players blamed For Being Evil.
EQ was the only true 3D MMORPG of any note (Meridian 59 was neither of note nor true 3D, being more of a Doom/Duke 3D-level engine. Ok, ignore the "of note" dig if it pisses you off.)
EQ did things that, had there been competition, would have relegated them to also-ran status, like having casters "meditate" to gain back mana faster, which was to say, have your magic book up in your face, completely blocking your view of the new, novel, 3D world, for most of the gameplay.
Brilliant! /aside .sig:
Oh, and regarding your humoro-sarcastic
> In Soviet Russia, the government controls the commerce
How'd that work out for them, compared to the opposite?
There is no toon.
Except, in MxO, bullets did very little damage, being of the MMORPG wiffle-weapon design for longer duration fights.
Last time I checked the movie, both Neo and Agent Smith would take mortal wounds from a single bullet, even if Neo could, eventually, just shrug it off.
So it wasn't like the movie at all in that respect. Which is what was exciting about the movie.
Personally, I'm disgusted by MMORPGs where a 10 foot tall, 4000 lb. ogre PC can stand in the face of a wimpy, cloth-wearing caster PC and chop them multiple times, not even disrupting their delicate hand movements, when said delicate hand movements are the technobabble as to why they can't wear armor to begin with.
Even the super-dodging argument doesn't hold up as the hands must remain relatively fixed to their delicate movements, and all but the crappiest fighters would just lop them off as a course of action, and it would be in Fighter 101 class by any trainer.
Personally, I wanted to be a female with Monica Bellucci's clothing, but anything remotely sexy was high level, i.e. not immediately available.
Having been recently disillusioned by Star Wars: Galaxies Online, when they eviscerated the classes with their redesign, and my Master (Mistress?) Dancer with her Naboobian pew-pew handgun found herself no longer able to use that mid-high level weapon because I was now just only a dancer (one class only), I came to MxO at the tail end of the final public Beta.
After 3 days of effort, I finally got online with an hour to go to see numerous Morhpi running around in an end-of-the-world event.
Within 2 weeks of retail, I had quit. Aside from the clothing frustration, the missions were very repetitive, being all building-based. Which wasn't bad, except the fights were all identical.
It's ironic that the "franchise" that seems best suited, ever, to turn into an MMORPG turned out to be boring as hell.
Even heaving it into the clusterf*** that is Sony's bag-of-also-rans, where you pay a single monthly fee and get access to a dozen and counting failed and outdated MMORPGs didn't intice me back.
I have a hard time believing there are so few MxO players it's not worth it to keep even one server going, given one modern machine can probably handle the entire world, just to keep it as part of the "suite".
I have no problem with restricted access to certain scientific data that the government sponsors, with restriction to the principle investigators for a limited time, say 1 year.
This is frequently done with things like Hubble photos and whatnot, to allow the PI who came up with the idea first dibs on publishing any novel discoveries.
However, having said that, if the government is using this particular data to drive climate change debates for the purpose of altering or passing laws, then indeed it should immediately be made fully public.
And if the data is private, then it should either be bought out by the government, voluntarily (by the private individuals) or the government should duplicate it, first, then release it and use it in a public debate for laws.
> They don't give a shit about hosting a zombie botnet. If they did,
> they'd cut their users, but that in turn would cause angry phone
> calls to their support center and a lot of canceled contracts.
More likely they'd have to stop collecting on a prorated rate per day each user was cut off. Back in the modem days, many localities passed such laws precisely because the calls to sign up were quickly answered, while the tech service calls were hours, leading to days and days of frustration.
$30/month is $1 per day x 2,000,000 = $2,000,000 per day, just to pull reasonable numbers out of my ass.
I doubt anyone will read this because there's 850 posts so far.
15 years ago they did a study to see if young students, already shifting to keyboards, learned general English skills as well as handrwiting students.
Answer: No.
It turns out the process of putting out words and letters "the hard way" adds a big chunk of written ability.
> "Scientists have found that evolution is driving women to become ever more
> beautiful, while men remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman
> ancestors. The researchers have found beautiful women have more children
> than their plainer counterparts and that a higher proportion of those
> children are female. Those daughters, once adult, also tend to be attractive
> and so repeat the pattern."
I'm confused as to why this is a Slashdot article, when this has been known for decades. "Sexy women 'get totally hit' more often, producing more babies, in accordance with evolution."
IIRC, it precedes knowledge of evolution by millennia.
It's why female breasts are ridiculously large, why most subspecies of humans around the world have big lips (actually, Europeans have small lips. Think about it.) and females have tiny waists but wide hips and big butts.
One need not even rationalize it with "big butts are a sign of health." There's a reason women like Kate Winslet, Shakira, and JLo spend years if not several decades at near the top of "Men's Lists", while women like Megan Fox spend a year or two there, then drop back down towards the end, then off.
Come up with a search to find the pages shown within 5 seconds?
I'd settle for "lesbian kissing" not turning up 30,000 pages of BJ pictures.
> 105 days of isolation in a mock spacecraft, still smiling after testing
> the stresses that space travelers may face on the journey to Mars. They
> had no television or Internet...
"One of the 'astronauts' exclaimed he was glad to be out because, "Boy, did that place smell like butt!"
> and voter lists are thought to be inaccurate
Really? Well, it's a good thing then that they're choosing not to clone that list for anything important.
> Recently several Visa card holders were, um, overcharged for certain
> purchases, to the tune of $23,148,855,308,184,500.00 on a single charge
$23 quadrillion and change, eh?
"When the customers called the 800 help number, they were directed to "just pay it for now" and eventually they'd be credited with the amount. When one pointed out this was roughly a thousand times the cost of everything on Earth, they were transferred to the installments department."
> Three years ago the park had a population of 24 tigers, however none were found this year.
In a completely unrelated story, 24 flabulously wealthy men around the world are suing an undisclosed business because they were not actually able to get erections after taking a certain hideously expensive medicine.
Well, the foolishness of quitting a hit show early on with people whispering in your ear how awesome you are, followed by a permatanked career, most definitely was a well-established physical entity by that time. Just ask Suzanne Somers, Farrah Fawcett, or McClean Stevenson.
True.
> its own advisory committee on data integrity and privacy warned that radio-
> tagged IDs have the potential to allow "widespread surveillance of individuals"
> without their knowledge or consent.'"
Gubmint: Oh, noes!
> There's an interesting article in PC World claiming that the major
> factor preventing businesses from transferring their communication
> interface from Outlook to Google Apps is employees' unwillingness
> to give up a tool that's so familiar.
I thought the major factor was, "Google Apps, wut?"
> Cataclysm
As opposed to, oh, I don't know. Some idiots opening a 30-story portal into a demon world where the demons are eternally on the verge of taking the portal and coming through?
I'm so old I remember being taught algorithms for ancient reel-to-reel computers (think background of stuff in the '60s TV show Lost in Space) for merging, sorting, and so on, giant databases based when having access to 1, 2, or 3 reels and a severely limited amount of RAM. Efficient in that context can be way different from the modern World of Plenty programming.
Six hundred years ago, I once made a joke somewhere about how bad the lag would be playing a game of Quake intercontinentally using courierred tape reels.
> "I've been studying programming languages (C++, Java, C, Visual Basic) on my own
> with the self-guided, basic textbooks and tutorials, and I'm starting to get
> tired of working with examples that are not put into real use
Here's some hard-won lessons from the real world:
1. "Write as if the utility/OS/other stuff is flawless" -- Doesn't sit too well with a customer if it's Microsoft's fault. We're spending 1.2 million on it, just fix it, thxbie.
2. References are only useful if you're familiar with the stuff. If you don't know what some system's equivalent of printf is, or how to add numbers in some other langauge, you can't look it up because you don't know that terminology.
3. Don't try to initialize what a FILE * points to. Not the pointer itself, that's fine to set to NULL. But *ptr = xxx.
4. "Pass by reference" and "Pass by value" are backwards from their intuitive meaning, which, as most programmers will forget, first seems like "pass by a copy of" and "pass the actual variable so it can be modified for the caller". The first is actually "pass a pointer to the variable so the function can change it for the caller" and "pass a copy of the value that will have no affect on the variable in the caller no matter what the function does with it."
5. Global and local variables are "automatic" because they're created on the stack, not allocated as by malloc or new. What this means is mumbo jumbo, but you need to know that generally you can't pass the address of such a thing to a different thread in your process, while you can do that with an object that was allocated with malloc or new. The first address is really an offset from the stack pointer while the new'd addresses are a full pointer within the processes' virtual address space mumbo jumbo.
6. Generally, the qsort library function takes a pointer to a C, not a C++ function. This can cause you to have to give it a C-style function declaration if done inside a C++ file. Otherwise nasty stuff occurs.
7. Program defensively -- Always use a block {} after things like if and for and while and not just a single line with a ; . Also, when creating the opening block, create the closing block. Always init everything even if it's first use is assigning it to something else. Always init pointers to NULL if not to an address in their declaration. Always test for NULL before using the pointer. You can get rid of that later for true tight inner loops in intensive calculations, but it's rare you'll ever get anywhere near that type of calculation.
8. Always save off a copy of your file from time to time if you aren't checking it into a version system regularly. Once every half day is fine -- if you don't mind losing a half a day's worth of work. Eventually, this will kick your ass. You do something stupid like accidentally hit a key combo that translates roughly as "delete everything from the cursor to the end of the file" and you don't notice it and save the file.
Especially do this if you're gonna put in major changes. Also, save off a copy of "the last version that worked" as you progress on a more complicate feature with sub-steps. I have had files that I recreated by hand and they worked, even though they seemed identical. Some stray character or symbol somewhere throws off the compilation without generating a syntax error, and you can't find it for love or money. This, too, will eventually kick your ass.
Toyota's goal is not to become rich because the public demands these cars, making it worthwhile for Ford & Co. to rent the patents, but rather to get in the way for impending US legislation that requires auto makers selling into the US to have this or that fuel efficiency standard, or this many or percent of alternative fuel vehicles sold.
It's the opposite of what patents help with: driving innovation to spur economic growth.