Someone kept a table of the professions various people had to master to become a Jedi (well, to open up the "forse sensitive" character slot so you could create a Jedi) in the ultimately vain hope of discerning a pattern. Some hapless souls had upwards of 16 masteries before triggering it.
Later on, you could buy holocrons (for one million credits, a hellacious amount) that would tell you what to master for the first four, but not fifth, profession. For the fifth you'd just have to go back to guessing. Some, like dancer or musician, could mercifully be cranked out in a few days to a week by leaving your character dancing via script 24 hours a day in a group in a cantina. Others, well, woe be to the poor sap who had to become a master bounty hunter, an elite class requiring being a master of several other class trees before even beginning.
> which meant that literally I could sit there firing at > the player for an hour and not do any damage.
It was a clever trick. Since you could pick from 4 branches, 4 levels per "onion" = 16 choices, for each of the 36 classes (well, most of them, depending on what you'd "opened up") so at any given moment, you'd have basically a hundred things to choose from to dump your xp into. So why not pick and choose all the defensive ones? A little bit from the martial arts Tendo Ken or whatever it was called, a little bit from this, a little bit from that so you could wear that armor effectively. Quickly, they built up an AC (armor class) that greatly exceeded the max you'd get following any single profession to master level.
Then two or three of them would wander into Anchorhead and kick all the rebels out. =D
My master dancer/not master pistoleer used to be dancing most of the time and adventuring some of the time. Now that pistoleer is stripped from her, WTH do I do? I presume I can still decently pistol with my decent sliced pistols, but that presumes I can find someone.
It's interesting that both the Matrix and SWG have "hacking" built into them. But don't you dare actually hack at the game!
In SWG, you could hack, or "slice" your weapons to make them more powerful. Some people found out how to re-slice things multiple times, making the weapons even more powerful. Heck, they almost approached how deadly an actual flamethrower would be in real life.
Banned! Sorry, Charlie. You hacked in a way the Empire actually disapproved of. And someone far more potent than Vader and the Emperor combined came and got you.
I'm sure the Matrix Online has something similar, although there may not be enough people playing to figure out things that can only be determined by trial and error. And one of them would not be me, who quit that PoS after only 2 months. Strange, but the ultimate online game actually had very little original to do in it, being a grimy world of little more than human (or human-looking) thugs.
The HAM concept was clever. It's the interface that was incredibly clumsy for combat.
City of Heroes has gotten it the "rightest" so far. Bind a key (say, "g") to/follow, and presto! Your scrapper is in business. tab or alt-tab to go through targets, hit the number keys to fight and queue your next melee move, hit g to stick to the monster you're scrappin' and as it's about to die, hit tab to target the next monster, don't worry, you're final swing will still hit the current one, then immediately hit g and off you go again.
Fast, marvelous, wonderful. Too bad about them kicking you in the balls with the Erectile Dysfunction ("Enhancement Diversification" super-nerf.) Buh and bye.
> Jabba's palace should be one of the high level bounty > hunter spots. You should get missions there, they can > try and make it a social and trading center too.
As a dancer, I went there, pushed through all the missions, and finally made it to Jabba. Would he offer me a job as a dancer in his palace? I even had the fishnet bodysuit just like the girl in the movie! Gosh! What would happen next? Would he give me some nice dancer missions instead of the stupid ones from the terminals (talk about a starving artist life)? Absolutely not. Another brilliant, and obvious concept that they choked on.
Ok, you finally worked your way up to Jabba. BFD, as it turns out.
One of the worst things EQ did was to remove any use of giving your skeleton pet a weapon. First, you could, and your pet would adopt the speed of the weapon, but keep its damage. Decent, you can give your pet a power up by giving it a dagger or two.
Oops! "Too powerful". Now you can give your pet the weapon, but it won't adopt the speed anymore. But as a bone, if the weapon has more damage than the pet, your pet will do the weapon's damage. Not that your pet will get a little damage bonus. This was basically only useful at low levels by buying a 5 plat sword. Maybe that's even been nerfed for all I know. It's little more than cosmetic, anyway.
Which is sad because it was a fantastically fun, cool aspect to the game. Hence it had to go, along with your pet standing guard and killing anything not friendly that came your way, even if it wasn't kos to you. Don't want the pets actually keeping a safe zone around you in a newbie area.
> Smed references EQ. Smed neglects to mention that they > got away with most of the egrigious shit they pulled > in EQ because they were at the time (effectively) the > only game in town. Not so now. They're not even the biggest fish anymore.
Good god, you have no idea how correct this is. They had made some incredibly stupid decisions that, had there been any competition besides non-3D Ultima Online and archaic Meridian 59, would have made EQ dead on arrival.
Imagine some modern game making you have 5-10 minutes of downtime between fights? And for that, half of the classes had to sit with a spellbook in their face, i.e. blocking the brand new, novel, beautiful 3D world that was the entire draw of the game? For five minutes at a crack? And why? So once in awhile a trained giant would swat you on the head?
And the gigantic nerfs constantly. After finally quitting, I vowed I'd quit any game that did that to me again. And I did, I quit City of Heroes shortly after City of Villains came out because of a mega-nerf to all classes. Too bad more of you didn't, to teach these companies a lesson. It's a pity, because the scrapper class actually felt powerful, and was fun to play in a first person shooter sort of way. Was.
So now I'm stuck, don't want to back to EQ or CoH, WoW thrills me not, SWG I'm tired of being a dancer after 6 months, and the NGE thrills me not, even the Jedi class, and AC, Horizons, and Dark Age of Camelot were all "I'm sorry I bought it's".
Pardon the saying, but is anything decent on the "horizon"?
As far as SWG goes, since I only played a dancer/pistoleer, the NGE basically just made me lose my pistoleer status. Although I am now a master musician (which I didn't care about) and master beautician (which is handy although they haven't introduced many hairstyles recently.)
> but most customers will resist to various degrees > having something "forced" on them just to bolster > profits because of a poor business model.
Does anyone remember the drooling joy of awaiting Horizons, from the original concepts? Drool that had only existed before for Ultima Online (first of such games to be significantly beyond a mud) and Everquest (first true 3D mud)?
Here's what was promised:
1. Be a dragon -- it'll take a solid year of work, but a top end well-played dragon will be able to defeat any three other top end characters of any class. (Presumably the Jedi class should have been like this.)
2. True 3-D movement -- flight abilities integrated in. Currently, only City of Heroes has true flight built in and not just "flight", i.e. hovering a few feet above the ground as a drawing offset from running on the ground.
3. Underwater and underground tunneling.
4. Pixie style classes that could also fly, be tiny!
5. Dragons had "hordes" that they'd place in their lairs and other adventurers would try to come claim it. Almost a mini-Dungeon Keeper game going on, fantastic!
All gone, nothing there, lame. Instead you got to be an overweight dragon child who hung out in human towns and had to buy or craft things for your "dragon horde". This "horde" was just an ethereal number on your character sheet, wherein you de facto simply destroyed valuable items "putting them in your horde" to make your horde bigger and gain some mild power ups.
Well, when flunking college and high school students who have the time to sink to "unlock" their Jedi are not enough to make money then you have to do something.
Contrary to most of you Battlefront lovers, I have no desire to play a Star Wars game as anything other than a Jedi. And a powerful Jedi at that, not some punk with a glowing sword that might as well be a dull butter knife.
So a dancer I was, as it was the only thing besides a Jedi that was mildly interesting and different from, oh, I don't know, every other damned MMORPG out there. Upon hearing tales of high level bounty hunters soloing Jedi, I became thoroughly disgusted.
So back to play KoToR II for the fourth time. Let's see if, playing on "hard", I can get the second encounter with the undead guy down to a 1 shot kill from merely a 2-shot kill.
The only other Star Wars thing coming up that's of mild interest will be the RTS, although I'm terrified it'll be another Warcraft III clone, like the abysmal D&D RTS was. Glad I downloaded the demo. Here I thought I'd be "rolling up" fighters and magic users and whatnot, but it was premade Warcraft III-style units whose actions had little to do with D&D per se. Worst of all, it contained the horriffic bane of all recent RTS games, the Hero Unit. Ok, fine if you love hero units, but god damn it, that has nothing to do with D&D.
Thank you lord for the demo so I didn't waste fifty bucks on that monstrosity.
Was sitting in the lunchroom of East Quad at U-Mich when someone mentioned the shuttle had blown up.
Was at work (Detroit area) when I heard the first about a plane hitting the WTC. Checked it out at work on CNN, which shortly rolled into "emergency lite HTML mode" due to all the hits. When the first one collapsed, the news had suggested the building had only half collapsed. I left work early at the request of my wife "in case we had to go north" to her mother's. Got home (before her, she was gettin' the kids) and saw the live video, a cloud of smoke cubic miles in size, and started crying.
Was, respectively, lying in bed at home as a child, in bed at college, and taking an astronomy test when I felt the 3 mild Michigan earthquakes.
Was coming home from Jr. high when my gradeschool brother met me at the door, "The president's been shot!" (Reagan)
> This year was just the peak of the active cycle. > The cycle is approximately 30 years in duration.
I hereby predict the next 10-15 years will show a decrease in temperature, and it will be claimed Kyoto will be the cause of it (and everyone will conveniently forget that the Kyoto promotors are, at the current time, whining that this will actually do very little to slow down global warming.
Given the Maunder Minimum, I don't see how anyone can begin to take drawing conclusions from time periods shorter than 30-100 years seriously anyway, and even then just barely. And you get into hundreds to thousands of years, you're butting up against the ice age cycle. For all we know, we just staved off another one.
> That's the problem. There are no experiments you > can do on ID, unlike the theory of Evolution.
Well, sort of. The religious used to claim that species could not go extinct, until it was proven otherwise. However, ID does have problems explaining things like the tailbone -- a bunch of fused, degenerate vertebra. If the tailbone is so necessary, why is it not a solid bone process instead of fused vertebra? That's hardly parsimmonous design. Also, ID has a tough time explaining the presence of hidden DNA that is disabled inside animals that (according to evolution) evolved away certain structures. These include functioning tails on humans, and legs on whales, both of which occasionally appear. Evolution explains it -- they evolved away, and did so partly by messing up the relevant DNA portions, and partly by disabling that portion's activation. Why do these partly corrupt, disabled DNA instructions exist in an "intelligently designed" animal?
Indeed, it even suggests experiments to look for more such sequences, many of which are known already to exist.
And no, ID, I reject the theory that the devil did it.
> The theory of evolution is in no better shape than most > of these "religious myths" since it isn't anything more > than a theory and has some rather large holes in it
1. Please list these "rather large holes", that are meaningful to actual scientists and not just the religous grasping at fraudulent straws, like the "2nd law of thermodynamics" fraudulent counter-argument.
2. If evolution has "rather large holes", ID/Creationism have holes the Death Star could fly through, even with the Super Star Destroyer sticking out of it.
> Life has always existed and thus has no beginning.
Although the theory of panspermia may suggest life did not originate on Earth, but on some other planet much early in universal history. Large asteroid collisions may knock intact bacteria or other complex chemicals (amino acids, protiens, DNA, whatever) out into space where they are preserved and travel for millions of years or more, before crash-landing on some other planet, and life takes off again.
Of course, how the initial planet (assuming it was a planet) got the first life is another question. Mercifully, evolution suggests a solution to that, too.
Of course, if scientists create life in a lab, the religious will be up in arms that Man is treading where it was not meant to be, and this was all guided by intelligence -- of the scientists -- so it doesn't count.
Evolution does not suggest a cell suddenly came into existance via random rearrangement of atoms or even molecules.
A cell wall, nucleus, and the machinery inside the cell are not needed to start off self-replication of chemicals. While mechanisms for this are still under study (pools of slime, clay, crystal lattice formations, et al.) no one is suggesting that something as tremendously complex as a cell was the first large conglomeration of atoms that could be remotely called "life".
Note, now if you ever make that claim in the future, you will be a bad Christian because you will be knowingly lying.
> {Evolution]'s been around longer than relativity or > quantum theory, and I'd wager it'll be around far longer still.
Those two, while flawless vs. all measured reality, at least have the novel problem of being in conflict with each other, and physicists have a gut feeling it'll take more than a little tweaking to reconcile them. Evolution has no known brute fact problems that give rise to a feeling that it'll take a complete rewrite rather than tweaks to resolve. Even the origin of life itself is seen to be just another part of evolution from non-living chemicals through self-replicating chemicals.
> However, no reasonable theory has ever been introduced which > explains how major life forms developed, how "natural > selection" can account for the variety of organisms we see today
But that is exactly what evolution does explain. Bacteria + millions of tiny changes = humans, or palm trees. And the gradient descent space of natural pressures (a dynamic space) drives variation.
> Noone seems to be educated on basic physical laws, > such as the 2nd law which has been categorically > proven to require an intelligent direction of > energy in order to produce a more complex mechanism or use of energy.
Actual physicists laugh at this idea, and it is only held by the creationist crowd who grasp at straws.
Now go back to eating your wheat, corn, beef, lamb, tomatos, potatos, and chickens, then pet your Pekingese and Siamese, then go to bed.
All built using evolutionary techniques. If evolution were false and creationism/ID true, breeding would not be possible since they claim only small deviations are possible, and that these cannot "add up" generation after generation. "Bears can only give birth to bears, not dogs" and all that.
Had no one thought of breeding animals and plants, evolution would have predicted it as a possibility. Furthermore, antibiotic-resistant bacteria also demonstrate evolution in action.
Furthermore, evolution allows us to predict that using more than one antibiotic at a time (say, 3) would make it far harder for one miraculous mutation to make it resistant to all three. This is in fact what happens, and medicine are exploring such use, though it is somewhat hampered by severe side effects of one antibiotic at a time, to say nothing of three or five.
> There isn't any real accumulation of snow like we used to get.
Because we all know the length of your living memory is long enough to get a good statistical distribution on the variance in both temperature and snowfall on a planet four and a half billion years old.
> But monthly fees have been "a significant barrier" to growing > the market, said John Smedley, president of Sony Online > Entertainment, based in San Diego.
No, slapping your customers in the face with massive, constant nerfs to their beloved characters that, often, they may have more hours invested in than your own workers do in the game programming and design!
In any case, you get rid of fees, you pick up on initial sales, but you lose the fees. So you get a bunch of teenagers who are too lazy to take out the trash and earn an allowance. BFD. What do you want, initial sales or fees?
And, as WoW showed, the market for one single game is much larger than all your games put together, of all subscribers you've ever had. Clearly the monthly fee is only a part of the equation, and a much smaller part than you believe.
Indeed, more regular matter would ensure the complete annhilation of the antimatter without leaving any extra behind to mess things up later.
Besides, we all know it's the correct temperature that's more important, although a controlled cold start implosion can propel the ship through normal (not warp) space faster than the speed of light, thus sending you backwards in time. This was when time travel on Trek was cool, before the bastard, illogical "slingshot" method was introduced. Sigh. I'll never forgive them for that.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone kept a table of the professions various people had to master to become a Jedi (well, to open up the "forse sensitive" character slot so you could create a Jedi) in the ultimately vain hope of discerning a pattern. Some hapless souls had upwards of 16 masteries before triggering it.
Later on, you could buy holocrons (for one million credits, a hellacious amount) that would tell you what to master for the first four, but not fifth, profession. For the fifth you'd just have to go back to guessing. Some, like dancer or musician, could mercifully be cranked out in a few days to a week by leaving your character dancing via script 24 hours a day in a group in a cantina. Others, well, woe be to the poor sap who had to become a master bounty hunter, an elite class requiring being a master of several other class trees before even beginning.
> which meant that literally I could sit there firing at
> the player for an hour and not do any damage.
It was a clever trick. Since you could pick from 4 branches, 4 levels per "onion" = 16 choices, for each of the 36 classes (well, most of them, depending on what you'd "opened up") so at any given moment, you'd have basically a hundred things to choose from to dump your xp into. So why not pick and choose all the defensive ones? A little bit from the martial arts Tendo Ken or whatever it was called, a little bit from this, a little bit from that so you could wear that armor effectively. Quickly, they built up an AC (armor class) that greatly exceeded the max you'd get following any single profession to master level.
Then two or three of them would wander into Anchorhead and kick all the rebels out. =D
My master dancer/not master pistoleer used to be dancing most of the time and adventuring some of the time. Now that pistoleer is stripped from her, WTH do I do? I presume I can still decently pistol with my decent sliced pistols, but that presumes I can find someone.
It's interesting that both the Matrix and SWG have "hacking" built into them. But don't you dare actually hack at the game!
In SWG, you could hack, or "slice" your weapons to make them more powerful. Some people found out how to re-slice things multiple times, making the weapons even more powerful. Heck, they almost approached how deadly an actual flamethrower would be in real life.
Banned! Sorry, Charlie. You hacked in a way the Empire actually disapproved of. And someone far more potent than Vader and the Emperor combined came and got you.
I'm sure the Matrix Online has something similar, although there may not be enough people playing to figure out things that can only be determined by trial and error. And one of them would not be me, who quit that PoS after only 2 months. Strange, but the ultimate online game actually had very little original to do in it, being a grimy world of little more than human (or human-looking) thugs.
The HAM concept was clever. It's the interface that was incredibly clumsy for combat.
/follow, and presto! Your scrapper is in business. tab or alt-tab to go through targets, hit the number keys to fight and queue your next melee move, hit g to stick to the monster you're scrappin' and as it's about to die, hit tab to target the next monster, don't worry, you're final swing will still hit the current one, then immediately hit g and off you go again.
City of Heroes has gotten it the "rightest" so far. Bind a key (say, "g") to
Fast, marvelous, wonderful. Too bad about them kicking you in the balls with the Erectile Dysfunction ("Enhancement Diversification" super-nerf.) Buh and bye.
> Jabba's palace should be one of the high level bounty
> hunter spots. You should get missions there, they can
> try and make it a social and trading center too.
As a dancer, I went there, pushed through all the missions, and finally made it to Jabba. Would he offer me a job as a dancer in his palace? I even had the fishnet bodysuit just like the girl in the movie! Gosh! What would happen next? Would he give me some nice dancer missions instead of the stupid ones from the terminals (talk about a starving artist life)? Absolutely not. Another brilliant, and obvious concept that they choked on.
Ok, you finally worked your way up to Jabba. BFD, as it turns out.
One of the worst things EQ did was to remove any use of giving your skeleton pet a weapon. First, you could, and your pet would adopt the speed of the weapon, but keep its damage. Decent, you can give your pet a power up by giving it a dagger or two.
Oops! "Too powerful". Now you can give your pet the weapon, but it won't adopt the speed anymore. But as a bone, if the weapon has more damage than the pet, your pet will do the weapon's damage. Not that your pet will get a little damage bonus. This was basically only useful at low levels by buying a 5 plat sword. Maybe that's even been nerfed for all I know. It's little more than cosmetic, anyway.
Which is sad because it was a fantastically fun, cool aspect to the game. Hence it had to go, along with your pet standing guard and killing anything not friendly that came your way, even if it wasn't kos to you. Don't want the pets actually keeping a safe zone around you in a newbie area.
> Smed references EQ. Smed neglects to mention that they
> got away with most of the egrigious shit they pulled
> in EQ because they were at the time (effectively) the
> only game in town. Not so now. They're not even the biggest fish anymore.
Good god, you have no idea how correct this is. They had made some incredibly stupid decisions that, had there been any competition besides non-3D Ultima Online and archaic Meridian 59, would have made EQ dead on arrival.
Imagine some modern game making you have 5-10 minutes of downtime between fights? And for that, half of the classes had to sit with a spellbook in their face, i.e. blocking the brand new, novel, beautiful 3D world that was the entire draw of the game? For five minutes at a crack? And why? So once in awhile a trained giant would swat you on the head?
And the gigantic nerfs constantly. After finally quitting, I vowed I'd quit any game that did that to me again. And I did, I quit City of Heroes shortly after City of Villains came out because of a mega-nerf to all classes. Too bad more of you didn't, to teach these companies a lesson. It's a pity, because the scrapper class actually felt powerful, and was fun to play in a first person shooter sort of way. Was.
So now I'm stuck, don't want to back to EQ or CoH, WoW thrills me not, SWG I'm tired of being a dancer after 6 months, and the NGE thrills me not, even the Jedi class, and AC, Horizons, and Dark Age of Camelot were all "I'm sorry I bought it's".
Pardon the saying, but is anything decent on the "horizon"?
As far as SWG goes, since I only played a dancer/pistoleer, the NGE basically just made me lose my pistoleer status. Although I am now a master musician (which I didn't care about) and master beautician (which is handy although they haven't introduced many hairstyles recently.)
> but most customers will resist to various degrees
> having something "forced" on them just to bolster
> profits because of a poor business model.
Does anyone remember the drooling joy of awaiting Horizons, from the original concepts? Drool that had only existed before for Ultima Online (first of such games to be significantly beyond a mud) and Everquest (first true 3D mud)?
Here's what was promised:
1. Be a dragon -- it'll take a solid year of work, but a top end well-played dragon will be able to defeat any three other top end characters of any class. (Presumably the Jedi class should have been like this.)
2. True 3-D movement -- flight abilities integrated in. Currently, only City of Heroes has true flight built in and not just "flight", i.e. hovering a few feet above the ground as a drawing offset from running on the ground.
3. Underwater and underground tunneling.
4. Pixie style classes that could also fly, be tiny!
5. Dragons had "hordes" that they'd place in their lairs and other adventurers would try to come claim it. Almost a mini-Dungeon Keeper game going on, fantastic!
All gone, nothing there, lame. Instead you got to be an overweight dragon child who hung out in human towns and had to buy or craft things for your "dragon horde". This "horde" was just an ethereal number on your character sheet, wherein you de facto simply destroyed valuable items "putting them in your horde" to make your horde bigger and gain some mild power ups.
Well, when flunking college and high school students who have the time to sink to "unlock" their Jedi are not enough to make money then you have to do something.
Contrary to most of you Battlefront lovers, I have no desire to play a Star Wars game as anything other than a Jedi. And a powerful Jedi at that, not some punk with a glowing sword that might as well be a dull butter knife.
So a dancer I was, as it was the only thing besides a Jedi that was mildly interesting and different from, oh, I don't know, every other damned MMORPG out there. Upon hearing tales of high level bounty hunters soloing Jedi, I became thoroughly disgusted.
So back to play KoToR II for the fourth time. Let's see if, playing on "hard", I can get the second encounter with the undead guy down to a 1 shot kill from merely a 2-shot kill.
The only other Star Wars thing coming up that's of mild interest will be the RTS, although I'm terrified it'll be another Warcraft III clone, like the abysmal D&D RTS was. Glad I downloaded the demo. Here I thought I'd be "rolling up" fighters and magic users and whatnot, but it was premade Warcraft III-style units whose actions had little to do with D&D per se. Worst of all, it contained the horriffic bane of all recent RTS games, the Hero Unit. Ok, fine if you love hero units, but god damn it, that has nothing to do with D&D.
Thank you lord for the demo so I didn't waste fifty bucks on that monstrosity.
> "The space shuttle. It exploded." (I know this is not technically correct)
Meh, so it was destroyed by an explosion right next to it. The combined launch machine exploded, and the space shuttle was part of that machine.
Just general reminiscing.
Was sitting in the lunchroom of East Quad at U-Mich when someone mentioned the shuttle had blown up.
Was at work (Detroit area) when I heard the first about a plane hitting the WTC. Checked it out at work on CNN, which shortly rolled into "emergency lite HTML mode" due to all the hits. When the first one collapsed, the news had suggested the building had only half collapsed. I left work early at the request of my wife "in case we had to go north" to her mother's. Got home (before her, she was gettin' the kids) and saw the live video, a cloud of smoke cubic miles in size, and started crying.
Was, respectively, lying in bed at home as a child, in bed at college, and taking an astronomy test when I felt the 3 mild Michigan earthquakes.
Was coming home from Jr. high when my gradeschool brother met me at the door, "The president's been shot!" (Reagan)
Yeah, that's about it for flashbulb memories.
For things not related to family deaths anyway.
Or things sexual.
> This year was just the peak of the active cycle.
> The cycle is approximately 30 years in duration.
I hereby predict the next 10-15 years will show a decrease in temperature, and it will be claimed Kyoto will be the cause of it (and everyone will conveniently forget that the Kyoto promotors are, at the current time, whining that this will actually do very little to slow down global warming.
Given the Maunder Minimum, I don't see how anyone can begin to take drawing conclusions from time periods shorter than 30-100 years seriously anyway, and even then just barely. And you get into hundreds to thousands of years, you're butting up against the ice age cycle. For all we know, we just staved off another one.
> That's the problem. There are no experiments you
> can do on ID, unlike the theory of Evolution.
Well, sort of. The religious used to claim that species could not go extinct, until it was proven otherwise. However, ID does have problems explaining things like the tailbone -- a bunch of fused, degenerate vertebra. If the tailbone is so necessary, why is it not a solid bone process instead of fused vertebra? That's hardly parsimmonous design. Also, ID has a tough time explaining the presence of hidden DNA that is disabled inside animals that (according to evolution) evolved away certain structures. These include functioning tails on humans, and legs on whales, both of which occasionally appear. Evolution explains it -- they evolved away, and did so partly by messing up the relevant DNA portions, and partly by disabling that portion's activation. Why do these partly corrupt, disabled DNA instructions exist in an "intelligently designed" animal?
Indeed, it even suggests experiments to look for more such sequences, many of which are known already to exist.
And no, ID, I reject the theory that the devil did it.
> The theory of evolution is in no better shape than most
> of these "religious myths" since it isn't anything more
> than a theory and has some rather large holes in it
1. Please list these "rather large holes", that are meaningful to actual scientists and not just the religous grasping at fraudulent straws, like the "2nd law of thermodynamics" fraudulent counter-argument.
2. If evolution has "rather large holes", ID/Creationism have holes the Death Star could fly through, even with the Super Star Destroyer sticking out of it.
> Life has always existed and thus has no beginning.
Although the theory of panspermia may suggest life did not originate on Earth, but on some other planet much early in universal history. Large asteroid collisions may knock intact bacteria or other complex chemicals (amino acids, protiens, DNA, whatever) out into space where they are preserved and travel for millions of years or more, before crash-landing on some other planet, and life takes off again.
Of course, how the initial planet (assuming it was a planet) got the first life is another question. Mercifully, evolution suggests a solution to that, too.
Of course, if scientists create life in a lab, the religious will be up in arms that Man is treading where it was not meant to be, and this was all guided by intelligence -- of the scientists -- so it doesn't count.
Evolution does not suggest a cell suddenly came into existance via random rearrangement of atoms or even molecules.
A cell wall, nucleus, and the machinery inside the cell are not needed to start off self-replication of chemicals. While mechanisms for this are still under study (pools of slime, clay, crystal lattice formations, et al.) no one is suggesting that something as tremendously complex as a cell was the first large conglomeration of atoms that could be remotely called "life".
Note, now if you ever make that claim in the future, you will be a bad Christian because you will be knowingly lying.
> {Evolution]'s been around longer than relativity or
> quantum theory, and I'd wager it'll be around far longer still.
Those two, while flawless vs. all measured reality, at least have the novel problem of being in conflict with each other, and physicists have a gut feeling it'll take more than a little tweaking to reconcile them. Evolution has no known brute fact problems that give rise to a feeling that it'll take a complete rewrite rather than tweaks to resolve. Even the origin of life itself is seen to be just another part of evolution from non-living chemicals through self-replicating chemicals.
> However, no reasonable theory has ever been introduced which
> explains how major life forms developed, how "natural
> selection" can account for the variety of organisms we see today
But that is exactly what evolution does explain. Bacteria + millions of tiny changes = humans, or palm trees. And the gradient descent space of natural pressures (a dynamic space) drives variation.
> Noone seems to be educated on basic physical laws,
> such as the 2nd law which has been categorically
> proven to require an intelligent direction of
> energy in order to produce a more complex mechanism or use of energy.
Actual physicists laugh at this idea, and it is only held by the creationist crowd who grasp at straws.
Now go back to eating your wheat, corn, beef, lamb, tomatos, potatos, and chickens, then pet your Pekingese and Siamese, then go to bed.
All built using evolutionary techniques. If evolution were false and creationism/ID true, breeding would not be possible since they claim only small deviations are possible, and that these cannot "add up" generation after generation. "Bears can only give birth to bears, not dogs" and all that.
Had no one thought of breeding animals and plants, evolution would have predicted it as a possibility. Furthermore, antibiotic-resistant bacteria also demonstrate evolution in action.
Furthermore, evolution allows us to predict that using more than one antibiotic at a time (say, 3) would make it far harder for one miraculous mutation to make it resistant to all three. This is in fact what happens, and medicine are exploring such use, though it is somewhat hampered by severe side effects of one antibiotic at a time, to say nothing of three or five.
> What are anti-science types doing reading Slashdot. Really?
They're looking for something to do in their afterglow from pr0n surfing.
> There isn't any real accumulation of snow like we used to get.
Because we all know the length of your living memory is long enough to get a good statistical distribution on the variance in both temperature and snowfall on a planet four and a half billion years old.
> But monthly fees have been "a significant barrier" to growing
> the market, said John Smedley, president of Sony Online
> Entertainment, based in San Diego.
No, slapping your customers in the face with massive, constant nerfs to their beloved characters that, often, they may have more hours invested in than your own workers do in the game programming and design!
In any case, you get rid of fees, you pick up on initial sales, but you lose the fees. So you get a bunch of teenagers who are too lazy to take out the trash and earn an allowance. BFD. What do you want, initial sales or fees?
And, as WoW showed, the market for one single game is much larger than all your games put together, of all subscribers you've ever had. Clearly the monthly fee is only a part of the equation, and a much smaller part than you believe.
Indeed, more regular matter would ensure the complete annhilation of the antimatter without leaving any extra behind to mess things up later.
Besides, we all know it's the correct temperature that's more important, although a controlled cold start implosion can propel the ship through normal (not warp) space faster than the speed of light, thus sending you backwards in time. This was when time travel on Trek was cool, before the bastard, illogical "slingshot" method was introduced. Sigh. I'll never forgive them for that.