Just because one thinks one is more important doesn't imply one thinks the other is wrong. You can think both are important and then do a value-judgement on which should take precedence. Personally, I think history shows the latter over the former. "Legally anonymous" whistleblowers are a good, but woefully inadequate, watchdog on a government with the legal ability to censor.
"In an encouraging move affirming freedom of the press in Britain, a British judge has ruled against newspaper censorship, saying that a newspaper has the right to publish the name of a blogger if they are able to find it."
Oh, wait. That's the same as the anti-spin to TFA. My bad.
The only thing worse, historically, than newspapers ferreting out and publishing information is the legal ability of a government to prevent that. Yes, it's bad for this particular whistle blower. But not as bad as direct censorship.
> "the US State Department has asked Twitter to delay system maintenance to prevent > cutting off Iranians who have been relying on the service during the post-election crisis."
> How big of an egotistical prick do you have to be to care? > > I don't give a dog's dick if my specific genes are here after I leave..
Good. Nastiness is probably something we can do without. So, too, your general averageness.
You do realize that the argument from moral, i.e. emotional, intimidation you used above is a meme that's designed to control others and coerce them to your own completely arbitrary worldview on this subject, don't you?
> The kicker? A physical therapist diagnosed my problem
Which was?
While a college student, my brother went from doctor to doctor for six months for intestinal and stomach problems. Nobody could figure it out.
Eventually he figured it out. He was drinking the equivalent of 2 two-liters of Coke a day.
I find it hard to believe physicians wouldn't ask what you eat on a regular basis when having reports of long-term gastrointestinal issues.
On the other hand, if you're one such doctor, add drinking waaaaaaay too much pop as something to check in the first round of diagnosis, especially of younger people.
Hehe, two 2-liters' worth a day. Would make a good House case.
From the description, this Hawking radiation sounds like the ability to close the deal. Occasionally, a human is born too close to an event horizon, and their ability to close the deal splits into a brief virtual pair. One goes into the black hole, and the other goes flying off. But the human is left without any ability to close the deal.
> "The EU passed the Data Retention Directive years ago, a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data > long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems)."
Ummmm. Someone has their "big problems in human history" studies bass-ackwards.
Well, as has been pointed out, 24, though Jack Bauer is the central and popular character, in theory he could die and the show would continue, just with other characters, new or old, stepping into the superagent role.
But Terminator's storyline itself was about that one key point, and, if it occurred, story over (at least if it didn't happen in the first half of the episode, and you knew something would come along to reverse it in the next 22 minutes...:)
Of course, they could shift the story again to a different JC or some other future timeline insinuating itself with a wholly unrelated character but the same basic predicament, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Nah, the only thing more inviolable than a story like Terminator's key plot point would be killing off, say, the character, in a show named after the real-life actor playing that character. E.g. killing off Bob in The Bob Newhart Show.
> The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic > that has been spun flat onto a glass substrate and multiple data patterns can > be written and read within the same area in the material without interference.
You realize guys like Dr. Doom, Thanos, Darkseid, etc. are so god damned smart they can just invent stuff like this spur of the moment, as the need arises, don't you? >:-(
> "If the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch- > down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke"
Well, if you let them take off the gloves, they could just say to this or that farmer who didn't want towers or a station (or demanded an unreasonable amount, knowing they were the last link to be bought out) that, "Ok, you make us go around you, then we just won't attach this service to your house. Ever."
Some will say, fine with me! And that's the way it goes.
Remember it was politicians in cahoots with businessmen who ginned up the rhetorical device that "some things are too hard for business to do -- so let's get government involved", to which business quickly attached, "...and there shall be one and only one company to run that utility," for reasons obvious to the rhetoriticians.
Or "just" a group of them. (I always had a problem with the zeroth law -- isn't that what a free country is all about? If your neighbor makes a goof, he can't drag you down with him since he can't force you to do what he wants. In this case, the robot is just a well-meaning dictator with the gumption to presume everything he does "is for the best overall", and the problem with that is, of course, how do you define it? In democracies, if often means taxing the hell out of the more capable, regardless of the rhetoric used, which by definition slows them down and disincentivizes them. Typically, the rhetoric responds with "well, the government pays to make up the difference", which is problematic at best, and murderous at worst.)
>> 3). Actual stories with actual plots are, with rare exception, rated poorly or ignored - "this >> is too hard, i'm not getting XP fast enuff"
There's the problem right there. If you could come up with a way to automatically recognize the difference, and have the game downscale the reward, benefit, and rating (or upscale it) based on the actual quality of the mission vs. being deliberately pwnable, you could go a long way to correcting it. But the judgement is hard to do without being like legally defining porn vs. artistic nudity -- "You know it when you see it."
But the automatic detection ship sailed and sunk a long time ago servicing the "twinking" mechanism and the auction house mechanism, both of which basically put an end to characters, aside from the first generation on the server, actually having to earn their actual equipment and so on "out there", the way Pen-and-paper RPGs have you do. Now you just earn loot to dump it and then buy what you really want on the AH. Getting it "out there" is reserved for high-end raid stuff. Almost nobody does mid-level raid stuff because "what's the point, you're gonna blow past it, quickly outleveling that awesome, for that level, raid stuff."
Quite frankly, I'd love to see a 114/\/\4 tag automatically placed on such deliberately exploitable missions and the people who run them over and over. But that would apply to a lot of other stuff, too.
And if that made llamas mad, which it would, then create "not-a-llama" tags for people who avoided all that stuff. Now you have a fair goal for people to shoot for.
But again, that's all based on autodetection of this stuff, which is the problem to begin with.
Enemies with no ranged attacks? Jesus, I hadn't thought of that.
"Ok, on this map, just stand on the ledge and pew pew them to death. It's a target rich environment!"
Which is ironic since taking advantage of the 3rd dimension is, deliberately, an integral part of CoH, given it was designed with true 3D travel in mind, unlike most other games where maps are puzzles mostly because you can't hop over things the height of your waist. (WoW is bad in this, but EQ2 was embarassingly bad, with an entire player race of butterfly people who "flew" in classic EQ tradition -- running along the ground, but translated a few feet up in the air. You still had to "hop" over logs, even if your legs would have cleared it. Worse, there were logs you couldn't hop over, because they were too high for the jump mechanism, but you should have been able to float over without even going up, based on the visuals. And falling off a cliff, don't even get me started.
Nah, EQ2 died a well, well-deserved death, even if its stinking corpse lives on as undead.)
I think the real problem is that it's almost impossible to set it up so people can't game the system.
Given CoH is a game where the average character is way, way more powerful than the average bad guy (it is a superhero game after all -- Batman takes out 3-5 minions by himself, but much more than that, and it's probably the first part of the story where he ends up in the unnecessarily slowly moving dipping mechanism) aside from boss fights, they're fighting medium to large groups of NPCs for every fight.
There are always ways to place monsters so they trigger at ways optimal to the PC rather than the NPC -- especially if the trigger boxes can be placed manually and the tying of NPCs together to co-trigger (or not) is available, neither of which I know in this case.
"Ok, now everyone gather in this room. It's set up so when someone goes into the corner, it triggers 1000 minions, all tied to each other, but 30 feet apart in a long, long line. They'll come in 1 by 1 and we just Cuisinart them."
And that doesn't even address map topologies where pathing, while not getting NPCs "stuck", can be used to delay how long it takes for bad guys to get to you. A clever designer could work around automatic safeguards which prevent the above by sticking all the monsters into one large room (good, from the devs' point of view), then have the trigger far away, and, from testing, he has set up intermediate rooms to slow and peel off some NPCs at each part all along the way, making it almost as good as the other method.
And if they can counter that, well...see, it's a puzzle.
> "If the speed of a car goes over the posted legal limit, a warning sounds. > If the driver ignores the warning, <b>the device eventually cuts all power to</b> > <b>the car</b> because a cut-off switch has been installed between the accelerator and the engine."
Since it isn't speed, but speed <b>differences</b> that cause the crashes in the first place, I predict power being cut off will cause more accidents.
Since politicians allow people to sue doctors and drug companies who cause deaths, I propose the same actions be allowed against politicians.
> "the UK Government...has invested £1M into over a dozen research projects for the > development of...up to 10Gbps broadband technologies.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: Oh no! One million pounds. Our corporation cannot afford that kind of competition.
Number Two: Actually, sir, last year we invested over $9 billion alone in R&D.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: $9 billion, huh?
Number Two: Yes.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: Well, I see. In the future, could somebody tell me these things? I'm the boss. Need the info.
> "The ultimate aim, the development of pan-European Ultra Fast Broadband, could > give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale."
Slashdot Mirror
So many people are missing the point.
A. Revealing a whistleblower bad.
B. Government censorship bad.
C. B >> A in importance, so says history.
Just because one thinks one is more important doesn't imply one thinks the other is wrong. You can think both are important and then do a value-judgement on which should take precedence. Personally, I think history shows the latter over the former. "Legally anonymous" whistleblowers are a good, but woefully inadequate, watchdog on a government with the legal ability to censor.
How about the truth, then?
"In an encouraging move affirming freedom of the press in Britain, a British judge has ruled against newspaper censorship, saying that a newspaper has the right to publish the name of a blogger if they are able to find it."
Oh, wait. That's the same as the anti-spin to TFA. My bad.
The only thing worse, historically, than newspapers ferreting out and publishing information is the legal ability of a government to prevent that. Yes, it's bad for this particular whistle blower. But not as bad as direct censorship.
> "the US State Department has asked Twitter to delay system maintenance to prevent
> cutting off Iranians who have been relying on the service during the post-election crisis."
Holy crap, someone thunk!
> How big of an egotistical prick do you have to be to care?
>
> I don't give a dog's dick if my specific genes are here after I leave..
Good. Nastiness is probably something we can do without. So, too, your general averageness.
You do realize that the argument from moral, i.e. emotional, intimidation you used above is a meme that's designed to control others and coerce them to your own completely arbitrary worldview on this subject, don't you?
> Really, what could Possibly go wrong with advertising one's position down to the
> nearest 5 yards to hundreds of unknown individuals?
"Lessee, there's a 'gnome' about 300 yards over thataway. STR is 10, DEX 8, CON 5, INT 11, WIS 9, and CHA 3."
Ya, could be a problem, getting too real. Moreover, this guy with INT 11 expects the bad guys to stand there and continue dying in his Wall of Fire.
You have no idea what you're talking about, do you?
> Also it would take 520 years to get here anyway...
I thought they detected this shrinking just now, not 520 years ago.
> The kicker? A physical therapist diagnosed my problem
Which was?
While a college student, my brother went from doctor to doctor for six months for intestinal and stomach problems. Nobody could figure it out.
Eventually he figured it out. He was drinking the equivalent of 2 two-liters of Coke a day.
I find it hard to believe physicians wouldn't ask what you eat on a regular basis when having reports of long-term gastrointestinal issues.
On the other hand, if you're one such doctor, add drinking waaaaaaay too much pop as something to check in the first round of diagnosis, especially of younger people.
Hehe, two 2-liters' worth a day. Would make a good House case.
Any butthole can slap together pipes and hydraulics.
It's the computer control which turns it from novelty that falls over at the first push or incline into a real machine.
And then it gets blown up by a tank anyway since it's a sitting duck.
From the description, this Hawking radiation sounds like the ability to close the deal. Occasionally, a human is born too close to an event horizon, and their ability to close the deal splits into a brief virtual pair. One goes into the black hole, and the other goes flying off. But the human is left without any ability to close the deal.
> "excessive bitterness identified as a mental illness
> named post-traumatic embitterment disorder."
Why don't they work on something more useful, like "ignorant masses empowering slogan-wielding, power-hungry demagogues disorder"?
Well...
> "The EU passed the Data Retention Directive years ago, a law that demands ISPs and search engines hold onto data ."
> long enough to help the cops (but not long enough to cause privacy problems)
Ummmm. Someone has their "big problems in human history" studies bass-ackwards.
Have you looked at the exchange rate between a decent looking, but socially inept hypernerd and his female, ugly-and-or-fatness-of-chick-wise?
And this differs from the overall development of any arbitrary and lucrative and long-running multiple shows franchise just how again?
Well, as has been pointed out, 24, though Jack Bauer is the central and popular character, in theory he could die and the show would continue, just with other characters, new or old, stepping into the superagent role.
But Terminator's storyline itself was about that one key point, and, if it occurred, story over (at least if it didn't happen in the first half of the episode, and you knew something would come along to reverse it in the next 22 minutes... :)
Of course, they could shift the story again to a different JC or some other future timeline insinuating itself with a wholly unrelated character but the same basic predicament, but that's not what we're talking about here.
Nah, the only thing more inviolable than a story like Terminator's key plot point would be killing off, say, the character, in a show named after the real-life actor playing that character. E.g. killing off Bob in The Bob Newhart Show.
> The material is made up of layers of gold nanorods suspended in clear plastic
> that has been spun flat onto a glass substrate and multiple data patterns can
> be written and read within the same area in the material without interference.
You realize guys like Dr. Doom, Thanos, Darkseid, etc. are so god damned smart they can just invent stuff like this spur of the moment, as the need arises, don't you? >:-(
> G1 Google Phone Could End Up the Most Popular Console Ever
Second only to the original Joystick game.
> "If the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-
> down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they'd go broke"
Well, if you let them take off the gloves, they could just say to this or that farmer who didn't want towers or a station (or demanded an unreasonable amount, knowing they were the last link to be bought out) that, "Ok, you make us go around you, then we just won't attach this service to your house. Ever."
Some will say, fine with me! And that's the way it goes.
Remember it was politicians in cahoots with businessmen who ginned up the rhetorical device that "some things are too hard for business to do -- so let's get government involved", to which business quickly attached, "...and there shall be one and only one company to run that utility," for reasons obvious to the rhetoriticians.
Or "just" a group of them. (I always had a problem with the zeroth law -- isn't that what a free country is all about? If your neighbor makes a goof, he can't drag you down with him since he can't force you to do what he wants. In this case, the robot is just a well-meaning dictator with the gumption to presume everything he does "is for the best overall", and the problem with that is, of course, how do you define it? In democracies, if often means taxing the hell out of the more capable, regardless of the rhetoric used, which by definition slows them down and disincentivizes them. Typically, the rhetoric responds with "well, the government pays to make up the difference", which is problematic at best, and murderous at worst.)
>> 3). Actual stories with actual plots are, with rare exception, rated poorly or ignored - "this
>> is too hard, i'm not getting XP fast enuff"
There's the problem right there. If you could come up with a way to automatically recognize the difference, and have the game downscale the reward, benefit, and rating (or upscale it) based on the actual quality of the mission vs. being deliberately pwnable, you could go a long way to correcting it. But the judgement is hard to do without being like legally defining porn vs. artistic nudity -- "You know it when you see it."
But the automatic detection ship sailed and sunk a long time ago servicing the "twinking" mechanism and the auction house mechanism, both of which basically put an end to characters, aside from the first generation on the server, actually having to earn their actual equipment and so on "out there", the way Pen-and-paper RPGs have you do. Now you just earn loot to dump it and then buy what you really want on the AH. Getting it "out there" is reserved for high-end raid stuff. Almost nobody does mid-level raid stuff because "what's the point, you're gonna blow past it, quickly outleveling that awesome, for that level, raid stuff."
Quite frankly, I'd love to see a 114/\/\4 tag automatically placed on such deliberately exploitable missions and the people who run them over and over. But that would apply to a lot of other stuff, too.
And if that made llamas mad, which it would, then create "not-a-llama" tags for people who avoided all that stuff. Now you have a fair goal for people to shoot for.
But again, that's all based on autodetection of this stuff, which is the problem to begin with.
Enemies with no ranged attacks? Jesus, I hadn't thought of that.
"Ok, on this map, just stand on the ledge and pew pew them to death. It's a target rich environment!"
Which is ironic since taking advantage of the 3rd dimension is, deliberately, an integral part of CoH, given it was designed with true 3D travel in mind, unlike most other games where maps are puzzles mostly because you can't hop over things the height of your waist. (WoW is bad in this, but EQ2 was embarassingly bad, with an entire player race of butterfly people who "flew" in classic EQ tradition -- running along the ground, but translated a few feet up in the air. You still had to "hop" over logs, even if your legs would have cleared it. Worse, there were logs you couldn't hop over, because they were too high for the jump mechanism, but you should have been able to float over without even going up, based on the visuals. And falling off a cliff, don't even get me started.
Nah, EQ2 died a well, well-deserved death, even if its stinking corpse lives on as undead.)
I think the real problem is that it's almost impossible to set it up so people can't game the system. Given CoH is a game where the average character is way, way more powerful than the average bad guy (it is a superhero game after all -- Batman takes out 3-5 minions by himself, but much more than that, and it's probably the first part of the story where he ends up in the unnecessarily slowly moving dipping mechanism) aside from boss fights, they're fighting medium to large groups of NPCs for every fight. There are always ways to place monsters so they trigger at ways optimal to the PC rather than the NPC -- especially if the trigger boxes can be placed manually and the tying of NPCs together to co-trigger (or not) is available, neither of which I know in this case. "Ok, now everyone gather in this room. It's set up so when someone goes into the corner, it triggers 1000 minions, all tied to each other, but 30 feet apart in a long, long line. They'll come in 1 by 1 and we just Cuisinart them." And that doesn't even address map topologies where pathing, while not getting NPCs "stuck", can be used to delay how long it takes for bad guys to get to you. A clever designer could work around automatic safeguards which prevent the above by sticking all the monsters into one large room (good, from the devs' point of view), then have the trigger far away, and, from testing, he has set up intermediate rooms to slow and peel off some NPCs at each part all along the way, making it almost as good as the other method. And if they can counter that, well...see, it's a puzzle.
> "If the speed of a car goes over the posted legal limit, a warning sounds.
> If the driver ignores the warning, <b>the device eventually cuts all power to</b>
> <b>the car</b> because a cut-off switch has been installed between the accelerator and the engine."
Since it isn't speed, but speed <b>differences</b> that cause the crashes in the first place, I predict power being cut off will cause more accidents.
Since politicians allow people to sue doctors and drug companies who cause deaths, I propose the same actions be allowed against politicians.
That will clear things up quickly.
> "the UK Government...has invested £1M into over a dozen research projects for the
> development of...up to 10Gbps broadband technologies.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: Oh no! One million pounds. Our corporation cannot afford that kind of competition.
Number Two: Actually, sir, last year we invested over $9 billion alone in R&D.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: $9 billion, huh?
Number Two: Yes.
Cisco CEO Dr. Evil: Well, I see. In the future, could somebody tell me these things? I'm the boss. Need the info.
> "The ultimate aim, the development of pan-European Ultra Fast Broadband, could
> give EU companies a massive competitive advantage on a global scale."
For about two weeks.
Maybe.
> Lawyers for the House of Commons argue that using videos of elected representatives
> without permission constitutes...a contempt of Parliament.
And getting permission from the government to monitor public government activity constitutes a contempt of Freedom.
Fix it at the next elections, Canadians. The US did.