In the case he cited in City of Heroes, it's just the natural result of the sidekicking system. You only need be nearby to a battle to get xp credit for it, and the lower you are, the more of an xp bonus you get (under the quite reasonable assumption that friends are adventuring together, so you accelerate the bottom so it catches up in level to the top.)
Unfortunately, being nearby doesn't mean you have to help in the fight. And in this particular case, the people doing the fighting were level 50, the max level, so there was no big deal because they weren't getting xp anyway. Combine that with a fire tank with a very weak AOE flame shield, plus 90% of an entire zone pulled, and blam! Fast levelling.
Not quite as fast as my two level 1 characters in Icewind Dale II, who dinged after killing their first orc in Heart of Fury mode, but pretty fast anyway. (Yes, possible, without even importing any items. What? Your level 20s who finished the game once had a tough time starting Heart of Fury? That's why bards sing songs about the adventures of me, er, them, and not you.)
I remember when they opened a new continent and had an invasion of dark elves. First they attacked leading up to Highpass Hold in the nearby zone. This was level 30's and they dropped tainted weaponry.
After that phase was done, level 50 dark elves invaded Highpass Hold itself a few minutes later. I had just died at the entrance in the forest, and was running invised by Highpass Hold when this happened. The dark elves proceeded to kill every player character (except me), but the HP guards just stood there and didn't defend anybody. Height of lameness. Way to go, immersion designers in that asinine game.
Also, research in any particular area, like evolution or neural networks, or anything else scouring a gradient descent space, moves in fits and starts. If you look closely enough at processing power, RAM, or storage space, you'll see this; its just that its fits and starts are on the order of six months to a year, i.e. less than the buying cycle of the average computer buyer.
I'm sure there are computing systems around today that hobbyists will load up with functioning AIs once they code up a working AI, the way people today write a HAL layer for Linux to bring it up on a wristwatch or a Coleco Adam or some such (has that been done? Vic 20?)
>> Artificial intelligence, i.e. thinking machines, are always about >> 10 years away. They have been for years. > > That's not quite true. AI used to be always 50 years away. Not that > that means much, of course. I believe we still have no idea what > it is we're actually looking for, and keep redefining it (people > used to think that a computer playing chess would be AI).
For god's sake, according to science fiction, by 2006 I should have long since been taking my flying car home from work after my 2-hour, 3-day-a-week workweek, watch some 3D TV as the robot brings me a delicious meal and a drink, and then enjoy copulation with a flesh-covered sexbot whose custom-tailored pheromones fill my nose.
I doubt they're gonna cure death before I die, which really pisses me off because I know I'll be this close, when viewed over how many millenia humanity has existed.
Your spaceship has to travel to get there? The other end of mine is sticking out into that other galaxy.
Re:like looking at the milky way through 3d glasse
on
New Galactic Neighbor
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Actually, things at that distance are far less 3D to your eyes than the molecules making up the things in the picture on a flat piece of paper on the table in front of you.
This just gets worse and worse. First, we're a lovely spiral galaxy, Queen of the Galaxies. Then we're an ugly bar-spiral, with a sombrero bulge. Then, just a few days ago, they reveal we're warped and distorted.
I once "won" a copy of Mac Lisp, a $500 value, way back around 1990, at the IJCAI conference (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.) I did this by putting my business card in a fishbowl, and got a mail weeks later.
Interesting to "win" this, because a few weeks after I got it in the mail, I got sent a letter that for an additional fee, I could get the major update.
Reminds me of "winning" $200 off the purchase of a $400 set of luggage. Around 1990, my brother also "won" the right to build a house on a few hundred square feet in Mexico -- good until the year 2000, for only $10,000. (The right to have a house on that piece of land, which you would not own, was good undil 2000. What happened after that point, I don't know.)
> Viewed sideways, one half of the hydrogen disk appears to stick up > above our galaxy's plane of stars and gas, while the other half > dips below the plane for a bit and then rises upward again farther > away from the galaxy's center.
First we're a pretty, spiral galaxy. Queen of the galaxies. Then we're an ugly, bar-spiral. Or maybe one of those cloud, obese sombrero thingies. Now our disk is warped, too? As the center of God's universe, we keep gettin' uglier and uglier!
Thanks, Yaweh! I want a newer, better, more powerful God next time.
> Someday, Congress and the Senate might even use programs such > as this to resolve conflicting bills. The possibilities are endless.
Yes. Congress already has so many laws that reviewing them every five years is considered impractical. Indeed, merely reading and understanding their gigantic laws [b]before voting on them[/b] is considered impractical.
So let's do this, too. After all, why not pass laws by machinery? We only have to follow them.
I think Jefferson once said that any nation with 10,000 laws makes a mockery of the rule of law. You currently live under excess of 60,000.
Automatic sunset provisions with requirements to re-approve, anyone?
On the other hand, like it or not, the news company realized the boycott might gather steam. As evidenced by the election, the vast majority were not behind any Iraq demonstrations.
And somehow I missed the violent police actions breaking these demos. Damn that CNN who hides it on behalf of Bush.
> Of course, this is all philosophical. Corporations don't care > about what's moral or immoral, they care about what makes > them money (and/or "market share"/power). This is true not > only of Microsoft, but of essentially every other for-profit corporation.
Of course, this is all philosophical. Governments don't care about what's moral or immoral. They (politicians) care about what gains them power (and/or control). This is true not only of China, but of essentially every other power-controlling government, democracy (abstraction of might makes right) or not.
> Like the suppression of independent, free thought? > Way to support 'em, Microsoft! Sleep well at night!
While it is rather smarmy for a corporation to do, if you have a problem with it, talk to your own government.
Foreign policy is one of the functions of the government, and currently, the strategy is balls-to-the-wall capitalism with China, presumably in the hopes it opens up their nation.
> The theoretical engine works by creating an intense > magnetic field that...would produce a gravitational > field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if > a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft > would slip into a different dimension
And if even more power is applied, the magnet field will be powerful enough to attract a female for actual copulation.
That plus the fact the rules melted until they resembled other MMORPGs out there. The D&D you play now isn't the same game played by those of use who played it with pencil and paper in the '70's. I'm not predicting too much from it.
Slashdot Mirror
In the case he cited in City of Heroes, it's just the natural result of the sidekicking system. You only need be nearby to a battle to get xp credit for it, and the lower you are, the more of an xp bonus you get (under the quite reasonable assumption that friends are adventuring together, so you accelerate the bottom so it catches up in level to the top.)
Unfortunately, being nearby doesn't mean you have to help in the fight. And in this particular case, the people doing the fighting were level 50, the max level, so there was no big deal because they weren't getting xp anyway. Combine that with a fire tank with a very weak AOE flame shield, plus 90% of an entire zone pulled, and blam! Fast levelling.
Not quite as fast as my two level 1 characters in Icewind Dale II, who dinged after killing their first orc in Heart of Fury mode, but pretty fast anyway. (Yes, possible, without even importing any items. What? Your level 20s who finished the game once had a tough time starting Heart of Fury? That's why bards sing songs about the adventures of me, er, them, and not you.)
I remember when they opened a new continent and had an invasion of dark elves. First they attacked leading up to Highpass Hold in the nearby zone. This was level 30's and they dropped tainted weaponry.
After that phase was done, level 50 dark elves invaded Highpass Hold itself a few minutes later. I had just died at the entrance in the forest, and was running invised by Highpass Hold when this happened. The dark elves proceeded to kill every player character (except me), but the HP guards just stood there and didn't defend anybody. Height of lameness. Way to go, immersion designers in that asinine game.
Hey, I bailed on City of Heroes after a year when the ED super-nerf came out.
Also, research in any particular area, like evolution or neural networks, or anything else scouring a gradient descent space, moves in fits and starts. If you look closely enough at processing power, RAM, or storage space, you'll see this; its just that its fits and starts are on the order of six months to a year, i.e. less than the buying cycle of the average computer buyer.
I'm sure there are computing systems around today that hobbyists will load up with functioning AIs once they code up a working AI, the way people today write a HAL layer for Linux to bring it up on a wristwatch or a Coleco Adam or some such (has that been done? Vic 20?)
>> Artificial intelligence, i.e. thinking machines, are always about
>> 10 years away. They have been for years.
>
> That's not quite true. AI used to be always 50 years away. Not that
> that means much, of course. I believe we still have no idea what
> it is we're actually looking for, and keep redefining it (people
> used to think that a computer playing chess would be AI).
For god's sake, according to science fiction, by 2006 I should have long since been taking my flying car home from work after my 2-hour, 3-day-a-week workweek, watch some 3D TV as the robot brings me a delicious meal and a drink, and then enjoy copulation with a flesh-covered sexbot whose custom-tailored pheromones fill my nose.
I doubt they're gonna cure death before I die, which really pisses me off because I know I'll be this close, when viewed over how many millenia humanity has existed.
Your spaceship has to travel to get there? The other end of mine is sticking out into that other galaxy.
Actually, things at that distance are far less 3D to your eyes than the molecules making up the things in the picture on a flat piece of paper on the table in front of you.
This just gets worse and worse. First, we're a lovely spiral galaxy, Queen of the Galaxies. Then we're an ugly bar-spiral, with a sombrero bulge. Then, just a few days ago, they reveal we're warped and distorted.
And now we're this?!?!? Jesus H. Christ, Yahweh, can't you do a better job than that?!?!?
Darn, I forgot to press Preview, too. a href! a href! Not BBCode URL tag...
Try again on this backward, un-editable BBS. (Slashdot, not this site.)
Don't worry about it; it's all over the Internet.
[URL="http://cronus.com/god/"]Here's the lucky choice from Google[/URL]
I once "won" a copy of Mac Lisp, a $500 value, way back around 1990, at the IJCAI conference (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.) I did this by putting my business card in a fishbowl, and got a mail weeks later.
Interesting to "win" this, because a few weeks after I got it in the mail, I got sent a letter that for an additional fee, I could get the major update.
Reminds me of "winning" $200 off the purchase of a $400 set of luggage. Around 1990, my brother also "won" the right to build a house on a few hundred square feet in Mexico -- good until the year 2000, for only $10,000. (The right to have a house on that piece of land, which you would not own, was good undil 2000. What happened after that point, I don't know.)
> 12 months in a year, 4 weeks in a month and 5 work days
> in a week and 8 hours in a work day
For future reference, your yearly salary is roughly 2080 x hourly. Even more roughly, just multiply by 2000.
And many engineers negotiate a yearly salary, and their pay is just that / 12, or that / 52.
> Viewed sideways, one half of the hydrogen disk appears to stick up
> above our galaxy's plane of stars and gas, while the other half
> dips below the plane for a bit and then rises upward again farther
> away from the galaxy's center.
First we're a pretty, spiral galaxy. Queen of the galaxies. Then we're an ugly, bar-spiral. Or maybe one of those cloud, obese sombrero thingies. Now our disk is warped, too? As the center of God's universe, we keep gettin' uglier and uglier!
Thanks, Yaweh! I want a newer, better, more powerful God next time.
> Someday, Congress and the Senate might even use programs such
> as this to resolve conflicting bills. The possibilities are endless.
Yes. Congress already has so many laws that reviewing them every five years is considered impractical. Indeed, merely reading and understanding their gigantic laws [b]before voting on them[/b] is considered impractical.
So let's do this, too. After all, why not pass laws by machinery? We only have to follow them.
I think Jefferson once said that any nation with 10,000 laws makes a mockery of the rule of law. You currently live under excess of 60,000.
Automatic sunset provisions with requirements to re-approve, anyone?
A missle has hit the block in which you live. Please report to the disintegration chamber.
> the utter wasteland that is the Windows desktop,
> devoid of useful applications and everything in between.
Add applications like streaming video or Internet browsing, and you scream bloody murder. Remove them, and you scream bloody murder.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
On the other hand, like it or not, the news company realized the boycott might gather steam. As evidenced by the election, the vast majority were not behind any Iraq demonstrations.
And somehow I missed the violent police actions breaking these demos. Damn that CNN who hides it on behalf of Bush.
Note to those seven seconds behind the latest, "emo" = emotional.
Emo songs, he went all emo on me.
They're not dorks!
They imagined themselves beating up big bully monsters just yesterday!
Damn! Even asteroids get more action with planets than I do!
> Of course, this is all philosophical. Corporations don't care
> about what's moral or immoral, they care about what makes
> them money (and/or "market share"/power). This is true not
> only of Microsoft, but of essentially every other for-profit corporation.
Of course, this is all philosophical. Governments don't care about what's moral or immoral. They (politicians) care about what gains them power (and/or control). This is true not only of China, but of essentially every other power-controlling government, democracy (abstraction of might makes right) or not.
> Like the suppression of independent, free thought?
> Way to support 'em, Microsoft! Sleep well at night!
While it is rather smarmy for a corporation to do, if you have a problem with it, talk to your own government.
Foreign policy is one of the functions of the government, and currently, the strategy is balls-to-the-wall capitalism with China, presumably in the hopes it opens up their nation.
> The theoretical engine works by creating an intense
> magnetic field that...would produce a gravitational
> field and result in thrust for a spacecraft. Also, if
> a large enough magnetic field was created, the craft
> would slip into a different dimension
And if even more power is applied, the magnet field will be powerful enough to attract a female for actual copulation.
But that remains untested theory.
That plus the fact the rules melted until they resembled other MMORPGs out there. The D&D you play now isn't the same game played by those of use who played it with pencil and paper in the '70's. I'm not predicting too much from it.