Listen to the products giant, evil pharmacoms produce, just like you listen to Ford, GM, and Toyota for your automobile information, instead of buying that "water-to-gasoline" pill the guy down the alley behind the herbalist "complementary medicine" store is trying to sell you.
Legitimate corporations, doctors, and pharmacists will still be on the hook for liability issues and telling the truth about the known issues with the drugs.
Car companies get their asses handed to them in court on a regular basis. Woe be to the company that knew of a defect and didn't acknowledge it.
> Yeah, like Thalidomide. Approved overseas, where > it caused thousands of babies to be born with very > severe birth defects. Not approved in the US, because of the slow FDA process.
It's my understanding the FDA process of the time would not have caught this problem, either. So you cannot hold it up as an example of an FDA success -- just as an example of bureaucracy at work.
Now before you yelp, how many people suffer injuries and death because of drugs delayed to market? If you invent a drug that can save just a fraction of heart attack victims, you've saved what, a few hundred thousand people a year? [b]Now delay that drug 5 more years.[/b]
Still feel like you're a friend to humanity against those evil drug companies?
What if...what if the FDA caused far more misery and death by slowing (or preventing) drugs from being introduced than would have occured by drugs being released too soon, and only pulled after bad side effects were discovered? The FDA and similar organizations in other countries may have been the biggest mass murderers last century.
It takes a crisis and protests like for Aids before governments move and get out of the way for "fast track" drugs.
Nah, the FDA is beneficial. It must be. It accidentally stopped Thalidimide in the US, plus we've been told it's awesome all our lives, plus it must be awesome because the drug companies are evil bastards who would sell us rat poison if there wasn't the goodness of government to protect us.
And what's wrong with complete vaporization? The atoms will quickly disperse, end of problem.
Actually, unless it was an extremely violent (i.e. rapid) vaporization (and maybe even then) you'd partially ablate material on one side, driving the thing rapidly in the other direction. With high enough accuracy, you could put this to work to drive it down into the atmosphere with far less energy usage than complete vaporization.
With even more skill, you could start herding the pieces together into a big ball and provide a ready source of potentially useful mass.
And they wouldn't have a 35k differential in orbit speed, although eliptical orbits as these things decay might get up to hundreds of miles per hour different, up to rifle bullet speeds, which would punch through the skins of ships and satellites.
Outside the atmosphere, the apple and feather fall at exactly the same rate.
However, a feather's orbit may decay faster, since it's much lighter in relation to its average cross sectional area, and hence would be slowed down faster by stray atoms/gas and microdust in the area it collides with.
The AI community has suggested that what humans believe is some kind of "deep understanding" is nothing of the sort. We have just learned to push symbols around, too.
Consider the "deep understanding" of simple mathematics. But is your instant recall of 6 x 8 (assuming you can) anything deep, or just memorized, along with the symbol pushing to mechanically figure out tougher problems?
The problem lies in tying up a "symbol" in the mind (which may be more than literally a string of characters. However, it is an object) and something "out there". That's the tough issue, not the symbol pushing itself, necessarily.
I recall an article about 10 years ago (at least) where people discussed text-based MUDs (which was all there was at that time), one of which had mechanics such that people could be "virtually raped". Or maybe someone was just being creative with/emote, who knows?
> I assumed that "forced sexual relations" was > used to describe "rape" without having to use that word,
Similarly, many MMORPGs have "rogues" and "scoundrels" instead of lying, cheating, stealing, bastard thieves.
Don't wanna be seen as teachin' kids how fun and profitable it is to steal things, now is it? So you make the thief class anyway and call it "sugarlover" and hope no slimeball politician notices and tries to use it to their advantage.
> and individual employees are forced to apply security patches with > little or no notice, under threat of their machines loosing network > access, if they do not comply by the deadline.
You have a lazy-ass IT department. Ours has things set up to automatically update whatever they want whenever you log on or reboot.
Oh, you may fight similar types of monsters through the game, but the environment is constantly changing. The games are designed for you to "clear the world", and hence the experience is tied to doing just that.
Indeed, in Knights of the Old Republic (I), it was to your benefit to refuse to level up until after you trained to be a Jedi. Normal progression would have you complete the first half of your career at level 10. However, you never actually had to train. I think I got to be a Jedi at level 3 or so (some encounters were too hard and I just had to level a little to get past them), giving a good 17 levels of Jedi.
But the worlds were always changing as you were constantly exploring.
City of Heroes has done a lot of things correctly.
- Travel powers at level 14 -- very early. Compare vs. level 40 (unless you're a mage, in which case 20) in World of Warcraft -- AND WoW's "travel power", i.e. a horse or something, is very slow compared to an actual horse, to say nothing of CoH's travel speeds.
- Magnificent character customization. Yes, this is needed since there is no item loot per se, but I found it refreshing to have this many options.
- No items to loot = no camping to get the best stuff
- No crafting - I agree with their designers it's the root of evil in these games, in spite of its fun. (There is now limited crafting of superbase items, now that superbases are available, constructing things that can be destroyed by invading PvP supervillain groups and vice versa. That's a different issue than "powering up" your body with crafted items.)
- Scrapper class is the closest thing to FPS-style high speed action I've ever seen in a MMORPG. The idea of a non-squishie who can actually do damage is foreign to the design of most MMORPGs to prevent de facto tank mages who can stand there and not die. Scrappers are in a league by themselves, doing far more than the pathetic "high damage melee" rogues and ranger types in most MMORPGs. They're actually fun to play.
- You are the badass, killing many bad guys, rather than the other way around, where, especially at higher levels, it takes a team of people to take down one random, average orc. You still die, you just do it with five or 20 people beating on you.
The first makes the game much more fun -- it doesn't need to "slow you down" to make your progression slower. This shoots one convention in the foot.
The last two completely flip convention on its head. EQ may have been the worst of these, with its fear that people needed a hyper-challenge everywhere they went, with insta-death, and groups needed to kill singles of even level things, and its outrageous downtime to regenerate mana and health.
Sadly, CoH isn't perfect. The mega-nerf last fall reducing your power to roughly 40% of what it used to be in preparation for the PvP of City of Villains was too much for me to handle, and I bailed after a year in the game.
Still, I hope some other games come along that have something similar to a scrapper and early-getting of travel powers.
Bell curve on the stats, that's where the fun was. Not this modern, computer shit where characters get ever-climbing stats that are rendered meaningless by generalization curves.
You guys understand that AC, etc. are no longer linear scales that you can work to improve, right? That they define a "proper" AC point for a given level, and anything more than 20% below that might as well be naked, even if it's AC 1000, and anything much above that is about 1.20% as effective, end of story? (Note: This must be done to combat twinking, so twinking has corrupted the system behind the scenes. Sad.)
The likelihood of being hit is then scheduled according not to the AC, but to the desires of the developers as to how often you should get hit at that level with "average" equipment, "infinitely good" equipment, and poor equipment (= naked). Average = (say) hit 1 of 4 times vs. average monster that level. Good equipment = 1/4.5 times, and infinitely good peters out to 1/5 times, no more.
It's fine to balance, but removing the linearity makes for much more boring "stat maxing". Hoo-rah. The difference between Super Chestplate of Awesomeness and Super Duper Chestplate of Awesomeness is 1 fewer hits out of 100?!?!?
Are there any games still like this out there, like old-school D&D? Anybody know what I'm talking about? Any "18 ints" out there who can parse the question and give an intelligible answer?
Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit is a "low magic" system. No, not the stupid games (though they may be), but the stories.
Think about it. The two greatest wizards in the world fight and can do little more than a few very light telekenisis-type tricks (lift and throw human body, cause a small avalanch, etc.)
The greatest magical swords could, umm, cut a ghost, but were otherwise not particularly awesome in combat.
Yeah, the invisibility ring was nice, till it got retconned with all that mind control crap and stuff.
We've already blown away teratons of it. The forest cover of the US has been mown down at least twice. Enormous swamp areas have been filled in -- and the populations in those areas grew and prospered and dealt with all the consequences. Lakes created. Lakes drained.
Yet we have more food, and more food options, then ever before. I'll skip the 87 varieties of bananas available at Whole Foods in favor of the ones I get cheaper at a regular market that are all from the same grandpappy tree seventy years ago or whatever.
A lot of the yammering naysayers and industrial apologists partially agree -- these "chicken littles", claiming ths sky is falling, do do more damage to their own cause. And why? To sell a few books and get on lecture tours.
In this sense, they resemble preachers. Claim a secret knowledge of the universe, produce holy writings, and take money from the slobbering suckers.
Sure you can. God doesn't throw thunderbolts. Those come from a buildup of static electricity.
God doesn't cause hurricanes. Those come from massive pressure, humidity, and temperature differentials plus the rotation of the Earth.
God doesn't cause tsunamis. Those come from the massive amounts of energy released via sliding ro shaking bedrock under the ocean as part of an earthquake.
The Earth wasn't created in six days. It took billions of years, and wasn't even started until after 10 billion years. Humanity wasn't created ex nihilo. It evolved from earlier apelike primates.
The problem with Religion is that it does get disproven all the time -- it just is very adept at hiding, scurrying away further and further into the corner, under the rock, behind the furniture. Once something is disproven, the religious aspect suddenly becomes "allegory", and everybody pretends they believed it was so all along.
"God", the end result of competition between religions, a 1-upsmanship that started with animist spirits the result of superstitious behavior (and a few guys seeing they could get money for it) culminated in an infinitely and all-powerful and perfect and good god of whome none better could be. And, of course, this god must highly value belief without proof (nevermind that this is a bass-ackwards take on what really happened -- there's never been any proof, so some money-taking priest realized they'd better explain it. Yeah, God doesn't want to prove himself because he...he...he wants you to believe, to do good, without proof. Yeah, that's the ticket!)
> That rat bastard Mao made all the chinese hungry, > they had been having it so good under the captialist monarchy.
A monarchy is not capitalism. A society high in corruption where you must buy off the local politicians lest they say no to your projects (currently see: Mexico) is not capitalism. What economic movement is made in these societies is made by what remnants of capitalism exists that is not under some politician's thuglike thumb.
> We don't have that today as our currency is constantly stolen through inflation
As the government borrows a third of all money there is to borrow, they increase demand on money, and hence the interest rates charged goes up. Of course, they get the best deal on the interest rates, since they are in the unique position to back their loans with the legal power to tax. It's you who get the worse, lower rates due to this competition to borrow money.
And all borrowers, especially the government, benefit from inflation. It's called "monetizing" the debt -- the US's $250 billion debt from WWII isn't all that much in today's money.
But for business, losing 5% a year to inflation means that, for example, if they buy their raw materials and sell their products 6 months later, they've lost 2.5% of the value of their investment right off the bat. Given a lot of industries would kill for a 12% profit rate, that's a nice bite out of the ass of effort of the businessman. The economy slows.
No fast-rewind to the "stagflation" of the mid to late '70's, and you have no need to wonder about why the economy sucked year after year. Politicians, lovers of inflation and borrowing, spoke of the ennui of the population. But economists understood it well -- it's just that voters don't like being told they can't have this or that.
Government intervention includes environment laws (regardless of the "goodness" or "necessaryness" of the law), so you'd better make sure what you're preventing with the draconian environmental laws is worse than the de facto catastrophe of heavy handed socialism or communism, because that's what you'll bring on.
> This Revenge of Gaia stuff is pure fiction -- but it does sell books.
After Myst came out, there were a rush of CD-based slow adventure games with live action portions. One such I bought, of a handful available for the Mac, was an environmentalist catastrophe story. Gaia goes crazy and starts harming humans (figuring this out was the big point of the game -- what's going on?)
In any event, some of the catastrophes were volcanos erupting, earthquakes, etc. In other words, stuff that, cause-wise, has nothing to do with humans, the biosphere, ecology, environmentalism, or anything else. Humorously, here was a tiny disclaimer there that there was no evidence for Gaia, and that no scientists think that wrecking the environment would actually cause eruptions, especially as "retribution".
Slashdot Mirror
Don't listen to snake oil salesmen, then.
Listen to the products giant, evil pharmacoms produce, just like you listen to Ford, GM, and Toyota for your automobile information, instead of buying that "water-to-gasoline" pill the guy down the alley behind the herbalist "complementary medicine" store is trying to sell you.
Legitimate corporations, doctors, and pharmacists will still be on the hook for liability issues and telling the truth about the known issues with the drugs.
Car companies get their asses handed to them in court on a regular basis. Woe be to the company that knew of a defect and didn't acknowledge it.
> Yeah, like Thalidomide. Approved overseas, where
> it caused thousands of babies to be born with very
> severe birth defects. Not approved in the US, because of the slow FDA process.
It's my understanding the FDA process of the time would not have caught this problem, either. So you cannot hold it up as an example of an FDA success -- just as an example of bureaucracy at work.
Now before you yelp, how many people suffer injuries and death because of drugs delayed to market? If you invent a drug that can save just a fraction of heart attack victims, you've saved what, a few hundred thousand people a year? [b]Now delay that drug 5 more years.[/b]
Still feel like you're a friend to humanity against those evil drug companies?
What if...what if the FDA caused far more misery and death by slowing (or preventing) drugs from being introduced than would have occured by drugs being released too soon, and only pulled after bad side effects were discovered? The FDA and similar organizations in other countries may have been the biggest mass murderers last century.
It takes a crisis and protests like for Aids before governments move and get out of the way for "fast track" drugs.
Nah, the FDA is beneficial. It must be. It accidentally stopped Thalidimide in the US, plus we've been told it's awesome all our lives, plus it must be awesome because the drug companies are evil bastards who would sell us rat poison if there wasn't the goodness of government to protect us.
That list is just more USA bashing. The US is at the top of the list, even though they're only second in terms of total objects.
They only lead in number of probes and amount of space debris, but the list is not sorted on either of those columns.
God damned blame-America-firsters! F*** U!
And what's wrong with complete vaporization? The atoms will quickly disperse, end of problem.
Actually, unless it was an extremely violent (i.e. rapid) vaporization (and maybe even then) you'd partially ablate material on one side, driving the thing rapidly in the other direction. With high enough accuracy, you could put this to work to drive it down into the atmosphere with far less energy usage than complete vaporization.
With even more skill, you could start herding the pieces together into a big ball and provide a ready source of potentially useful mass.
And they wouldn't have a 35k differential in orbit speed, although eliptical orbits as these things decay might get up to hundreds of miles per hour different, up to rifle bullet speeds, which would punch through the skins of ships and satellites.
Outside the atmosphere, the apple and feather fall at exactly the same rate.
However, a feather's orbit may decay faster, since it's much lighter in relation to its average cross sectional area, and hence would be slowed down faster by stray atoms/gas and microdust in the area it collides with.
The AI community has suggested that what humans believe is some kind of "deep understanding" is nothing of the sort. We have just learned to push symbols around, too.
Consider the "deep understanding" of simple mathematics. But is your instant recall of 6 x 8 (assuming you can) anything deep, or just memorized, along with the symbol pushing to mechanically figure out tougher problems?
The problem lies in tying up a "symbol" in the mind (which may be more than literally a string of characters. However, it is an object) and something "out there". That's the tough issue, not the symbol pushing itself, necessarily.
I recall an article about 10 years ago (at least) where people discussed text-based MUDs (which was all there was at that time), one of which had mechanics such that people could be "virtually raped". Or maybe someone was just being creative with /emote, who knows?
> I assumed that "forced sexual relations" was
> used to describe "rape" without having to use that word,
Similarly, many MMORPGs have "rogues" and "scoundrels" instead of lying, cheating, stealing, bastard thieves.
Don't wanna be seen as teachin' kids how fun and profitable it is to steal things, now is it? So you make the thief class anyway and call it "sugarlover" and hope no slimeball politician notices and tries to use it to their advantage.
> and individual employees are forced to apply security patches with
> little or no notice, under threat of their machines loosing network
> access, if they do not comply by the deadline.
You have a lazy-ass IT department. Ours has things set up to automatically update whatever they want whenever you log on or reboot.
What single-player RPGs require repetitive tasks?
Oh, you may fight similar types of monsters through the game, but the environment is constantly changing. The games are designed for you to "clear the world", and hence the experience is tied to doing just that.
Indeed, in Knights of the Old Republic (I), it was to your benefit to refuse to level up until after you trained to be a Jedi. Normal progression would have you complete the first half of your career at level 10. However, you never actually had to train. I think I got to be a Jedi at level 3 or so (some encounters were too hard and I just had to level a little to get past them), giving a good 17 levels of Jedi.
But the worlds were always changing as you were constantly exploring.
City of Heroes has done a lot of things correctly.
- Travel powers at level 14 -- very early. Compare vs. level 40 (unless you're a mage, in which case 20) in World of Warcraft -- AND WoW's "travel power", i.e. a horse or something, is very slow compared to an actual horse, to say nothing of CoH's travel speeds.
- Magnificent character customization. Yes, this is needed since there is no item loot per se, but I found it refreshing to have this many options.
- No items to loot = no camping to get the best stuff
- No crafting - I agree with their designers it's the root of evil in these games, in spite of its fun. (There is now limited crafting of superbase items, now that superbases are available, constructing things that can be destroyed by invading PvP supervillain groups and vice versa. That's a different issue than "powering up" your body with crafted items.)
- Scrapper class is the closest thing to FPS-style high speed action I've ever seen in a MMORPG. The idea of a non-squishie who can actually do damage is foreign to the design of most MMORPGs to prevent de facto tank mages who can stand there and not die. Scrappers are in a league by themselves, doing far more than the pathetic "high damage melee" rogues and ranger types in most MMORPGs. They're actually fun to play.
- You are the badass, killing many bad guys, rather than the other way around, where, especially at higher levels, it takes a team of people to take down one random, average orc. You still die, you just do it with five or 20 people beating on you.
The first makes the game much more fun -- it doesn't need to "slow you down" to make your progression slower. This shoots one convention in the foot.
The last two completely flip convention on its head. EQ may have been the worst of these, with its fear that people needed a hyper-challenge everywhere they went, with insta-death, and groups needed to kill singles of even level things, and its outrageous downtime to regenerate mana and health.
Sadly, CoH isn't perfect. The mega-nerf last fall reducing your power to roughly 40% of what it used to be in preparation for the PvP of City of Villains was too much for me to handle, and I bailed after a year in the game.
Still, I hope some other games come along that have something similar to a scrapper and early-getting of travel powers.
Recycle unwanted stuff instead of putting it in landfills?
Old pr0n magazines, send 'em right here!
Bell curve on the stats, that's where the fun was. Not this modern, computer shit where characters get ever-climbing stats that are rendered meaningless by generalization curves.
You guys understand that AC, etc. are no longer linear scales that you can work to improve, right? That they define a "proper" AC point for a given level, and anything more than 20% below that might as well be naked, even if it's AC 1000, and anything much above that is about 1.20% as effective, end of story? (Note: This must be done to combat twinking, so twinking has corrupted the system behind the scenes. Sad.)
The likelihood of being hit is then scheduled according not to the AC, but to the desires of the developers as to how often you should get hit at that level with "average" equipment, "infinitely good" equipment, and poor equipment (= naked). Average = (say) hit 1 of 4 times vs. average monster that level. Good equipment = 1/4.5 times, and infinitely good peters out to 1/5 times, no more.
It's fine to balance, but removing the linearity makes for much more boring "stat maxing". Hoo-rah. The difference between Super Chestplate of Awesomeness and Super Duper Chestplate of Awesomeness is 1 fewer hits out of 100?!?!?
Are there any games still like this out there, like old-school D&D? Anybody know what I'm talking about? Any "18 ints" out there who can parse the question and give an intelligible answer?
Was it true, old-school, or some new basic modern starter kit, with printed floors and paper chits for orcs and stuff?
Never had as good a time as with good old graph paper. Those colored, glowing pools, man what an image in your mind.
But I always felt anything from 2nd edition (inclusive) onward was a horrid bastardization. D&D Basic Edition, then D&D, then, wow, AD&D.
Gimme a +3 battle axe and my 18/91 strength, get rid of 19 strength half-orc players, and point me in the right direction...
Lord of the Rings/The Hobbit is a "low magic" system. No, not the stupid games (though they may be), but the stories.
Think about it. The two greatest wizards in the world fight and can do little more than a few very light telekenisis-type tricks (lift and throw human body, cause a small avalanch, etc.)
The greatest magical swords could, umm, cut a ghost, but were otherwise not particularly awesome in combat.
Yeah, the invisibility ring was nice, till it got retconned with all that mind control crap and stuff.
We've already blown away teratons of it. The forest cover of the US has been mown down at least twice. Enormous swamp areas have been filled in -- and the populations in those areas grew and prospered and dealt with all the consequences. Lakes created. Lakes drained.
Yet we have more food, and more food options, then ever before. I'll skip the 87 varieties of bananas available at Whole Foods in favor of the ones I get cheaper at a regular market that are all from the same grandpappy tree seventy years ago or whatever.
ICWD's, eh?
Improvised Car War Devices. God I hate it when that happens.
A lot of the yammering naysayers and industrial apologists partially agree -- these "chicken littles", claiming ths sky is falling, do do more damage to their own cause. And why? To sell a few books and get on lecture tours.
In this sense, they resemble preachers. Claim a secret knowledge of the universe, produce holy writings, and take money from the slobbering suckers.
> Religion can't be proven wrong
Sure you can. God doesn't throw thunderbolts. Those come from a buildup of static electricity.
God doesn't cause hurricanes. Those come from massive pressure, humidity, and temperature differentials plus the rotation of the Earth.
God doesn't cause tsunamis. Those come from the massive amounts of energy released via sliding ro shaking bedrock under the ocean as part of an earthquake.
The Earth wasn't created in six days. It took billions of years, and wasn't even started until after 10 billion years. Humanity wasn't created ex nihilo. It evolved from earlier apelike primates.
The problem with Religion is that it does get disproven all the time -- it just is very adept at hiding, scurrying away further and further into the corner, under the rock, behind the furniture. Once something is disproven, the religious aspect suddenly becomes "allegory", and everybody pretends they believed it was so all along.
"God", the end result of competition between religions, a 1-upsmanship that started with animist spirits the result of superstitious behavior (and a few guys seeing they could get money for it) culminated in an infinitely and all-powerful and perfect and good god of whome none better could be. And, of course, this god must highly value belief without proof (nevermind that this is a bass-ackwards take on what really happened -- there's never been any proof, so some money-taking priest realized they'd better explain it. Yeah, God doesn't want to prove himself because he...he...he wants you to believe, to do good, without proof. Yeah, that's the ticket!)
> That rat bastard Mao made all the chinese hungry,
> they had been having it so good under the captialist monarchy.
A monarchy is not capitalism. A society high in corruption where you must buy off the local politicians lest they say no to your projects (currently see: Mexico) is not capitalism. What economic movement is made in these societies is made by what remnants of capitalism exists that is not under some politician's thuglike thumb.
> We don't have that today as our currency is constantly stolen through inflation
As the government borrows a third of all money there is to borrow, they increase demand on money, and hence the interest rates charged goes up. Of course, they get the best deal on the interest rates, since they are in the unique position to back their loans with the legal power to tax. It's you who get the worse, lower rates due to this competition to borrow money.
And all borrowers, especially the government, benefit from inflation. It's called "monetizing" the debt -- the US's $250 billion debt from WWII isn't all that much in today's money.
But for business, losing 5% a year to inflation means that, for example, if they buy their raw materials and sell their products 6 months later, they've lost 2.5% of the value of their investment right off the bat. Given a lot of industries would kill for a 12% profit rate, that's a nice bite out of the ass of effort of the businessman. The economy slows.
No fast-rewind to the "stagflation" of the mid to late '70's, and you have no need to wonder about why the economy sucked year after year. Politicians, lovers of inflation and borrowing, spoke of the ennui of the population. But economists understood it well -- it's just that voters don't like being told they can't have this or that.
Much like today.
> If oil is getting cheaper, it means that we aren't running out.
And yet some people spend more money on their Starbucks or Timmy Ho-Ho's every week than they do on gas, and still complain.
Barring government intervention, prices do tend to fall as a reflection the power of capitalism.
Government intervention includes environment laws (regardless of the "goodness" or "necessaryness" of the law), so you'd better make sure what you're preventing with the draconian environmental laws is worse than the de facto catastrophe of heavy handed socialism or communism, because that's what you'll bring on.
> This Revenge of Gaia stuff is pure fiction -- but it does sell books.
After Myst came out, there were a rush of CD-based slow adventure games with live action portions. One such I bought, of a handful available for the Mac, was an environmentalist catastrophe story. Gaia goes crazy and starts harming humans (figuring this out was the big point of the game -- what's going on?)
In any event, some of the catastrophes were volcanos erupting, earthquakes, etc. In other words, stuff that, cause-wise, has nothing to do with humans, the biosphere, ecology, environmentalism, or anything else. Humorously, here was a tiny disclaimer there that there was no evidence for Gaia, and that no scientists think that wrecking the environment would actually cause eruptions, especially as "retribution".