I used to play Nethack a lot. Every so often, I come back to it. It's very replayable. And yet, I keep running into the same problem with it: the longer you play any class in it, the more that character resembles a GDSM+5-wearing, Tsurugi+7-wielding, AoLS-adorned, all-spell-knowing, full-resistance-having generic level-30 adventurer with a towel, pickaxe, blessed unicorn horn, and/death in a blessed bag of holding (inside an oilskin sack).
You can enjoy some variety if you try for a quicker game or for conducts (a big part of NH's replayability), but the fact remains: the classes tend to converge in the limit, because they're not really constrained. Everyone can pretty much wear, wield, and use everything, and there tends to be One Best Set of Gear. If you like to play NH sessions of epic lengths, then you pretty much know how they're going to end. From a class-skill standpoint, NH gives you rather distinct roles (classes) at first, which become almost non-existent factors in the endgame due to its skill system.
It might be more interesting with more divergence. I'm sure it's been discussed in the newsgroups. I don't know of any consensus on the matter. I suspect most fans are fine with the system as-is, and if so, I suppose that's well and good.
Richelieu was a hack that wouldn't last two days on a real Internet.
Let him put his "gotcha" up for public consumption, and a thousand more Armchairelieus would Huxley him into a puddle of goo with a mitre floating on top.
I recognize the intuitive validity of your rule. The problem here is that by stipulating this rule, you've reified another power structure (namely, an authority on humor), which is then vulnerable to more humor.
Given that, it is completely reasonable to assume that the parent post was a step ahead of your rule. You might say, well, the parent post wasn't humor - but then, neither was your post.
Hard to understand? Or obvious, and already in the past?
C'mon, we're talking about a series where two advanced races spend thousands of years and unimaginable amounts of effort to influence the evolution of the galaxy only to suddenly pack up and leave because, at the denoumont of the entire serious, Bruce Boxleitner yells "Get the hell out of our galaxy!". The cheese was too thick to get past. "As my grandfather used to say, 'cool!'"...
I dunno. I liked that scene. It conveyed a strong sense to me of what power at that level does to your culture. The Vorlons and the Shadows had reasons behind their evolutionary agendas, and those reasons were finally toppled by years of developments culminating in Sheridan's speech. At that level of power, the story seemed to say, it's possible that a rhetorical argument at the right time and from the right source is enough to make you decide "fuck it" and go home.
It wasn't just his speech I was detecting, either; I was seeing that really old alien's influence, all the other Old Races at the battle, the brouhaha over the telepaths, and millenia of implied sophistry between the Vorlons and Shadows.
Indeed. Remember the big news of a US marine shooting an Iraqi POW? That was broken primarily by MSM, yes. But for the full story (or at least a fuller story), you might want to read the photojournalist'saccount.
Interesting you should bring up the Libertarian isolationist platform. (Disclaimer: I haven't fully researched the breakdown of big-L Libertarians' positions on isolationism, so I don't know if you're correct or not.) I've heard this point made before, and if it's true, it's one thing that would keep me from being fully a big-L Libertarian, too.
Badnarik's apparent nuttiness was just a huge timing mistake, too. If the Libs had a really good candidate this year, this could have been the Year It Turned Around. Not to say they'd take the Presidency. They don't have enough marketing to reach the off-Internet crowds. But with all the mudslinging and antagony from the Reps and the Dems, the Libs could've made a decisive dent in the two-party system that would shift the nation.
Anyway. Lately I've found myself wishing for an Objectivist party. Sorta libertarian domestic ideals with more foreign policy realpolitik.
Just to save anyone trouble who reads this far into the thread: Apollo Diamond was generating diamonds at a cost of $5/carat, according to the article, which is dated September 2003. Assuming this is a metric carat, five of which equal a gram, a kilogram of this material would cost $25000.
According to another article from August 2003, Apollo Diamond was predicting diamonds as heavy as 3 carats in "the near future". So even if the price/carat has gone down, there are other problems to solve, such as how to make larger structures almost wholly out of these diamonds.
I'd be interested in seeing the price of other industrial materials for comparison, but not interested enough to research it myself.:) Steel? Various varieties of plastic?
Any libertarian railing against this administration is probably thinking he'll also be railing against a Democrat administration in 2004-2008 if that wins, and so is having to pick his poison.
Given the choices, I'd rather have an unruly debate with lots of stupid questions and time wasting than have two guys spending an hour parroting their party line before stepping off the stage.
Given the above choice, either way I'll get zero from either candidate.
I think there's several things wrong with your implied argument. First, they're not "tightwads". I'd claim people in that bracket tend to be the most attentive to their finances, meaning they'll tend to do as much as possible to grow their holdings. They don't do that by buying a giant CD and earning interest, either; they invest it in businesses, which in turn spend it on supplies, salaries, services, etc. Even if the people at the top are corrupt, that money is eventually being spent somewhere. (A good question, to me, would be where exactly that money is spent; for instance, is it spent here or overseas?)
Secondly, that money isn't being given to the "tightwads". It's being returned. It was taxed out of them in the first place. The poor pay almost no tax relative to the wealthy. (I wonder what would have resulted if Bush had pushed for a gas or sales tax break instead of an income tax break.)
Thirdly, ranting doesn't help. You might be 100% correct, and yet your tone makes you sound like you're complaining about all the money going to the tightwads simply because you're not one of the tightwads.
No. (And it would be ludicrous for me to ever be happy with it. Find it tolerable for the moment, maybe, but never happy.)
Generations, probably, as it is a social problem. (Or rather, it is the symptom of a social problem.) In the mean time, slap them down with increasing force until they stop, or resort to non-violent techniques. I respect the argument that they don't seem to have stopped so far; however, I don't believe they will continue indefinitely. (After all, Germany and Japan didn't exactly give up right away, either.)
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
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· Score: 1
IP didn't need to be "invented" until recently. Specifically, when a typical middle-class business man acquired the means to make a perfect copy of information, spending less money per copy than each copy was worth. In other words, we didn't need IP until desktop computers came along.
I agree that we should avoid restricting information flow; however, I would argue that the incentives lost from abolishing all IP would result in the cutting off of information flow at its source. The only innovation we would get would be that motivated solely by altruism, and that would be only a trickle.
Re:Removing motivation to create innovative IP
on
Is IP Property?
·
· Score: 1
Not to denigrate you, but I consider the need for this financial incentive to be obvious on its face.
Suppose you had an idea you were sure could be developed into a product that could help millions of people. You do some research, and indeed, no one's tried this idea yet, and a few of your friends agree it's worth working on. So you get some investment capital, put in several thousand dollars from your savings, quit your day job, and start busting your ass.
A year and $500k of investment later, you roll out your first product line, and start raking it in. BigCorp buys one of your products for $50, spends $5 million working on their own version, and rolls it out a few months later. They make $50 million over the next two years alone; you got forced out (their product had more features) after making about $600k, netting you $100k to spread among you and the ten people you hired.
Inventors are likely smart enough to see this possibility when they first get the idea. Without patent protection, most of them (reasonably) wouldn't even bother trying.
This is why I feel patent law is justified. That said, I, like you, oppose going overboard on it. But as long as I have to labor for years on an innovative idea with the looming fear that Oracle Inc. can put me out of business just because they have more money than I do right now, I will be grateful for some reasonable amount of protection.
Meh. I want fewer bad laws, but I also want to scare terrorists away so that I'll still be around to do something about all the bad laws.
Yes, I'm sure you'll respond that Dems will scare terrorists away better than Reps will, but guess what? I happen to disagree, for what I (and many, many other people, btw) consider good reason. So what then? Shall we just go back to writing each other off as "wrong" or "idealist" or "evil"? I consider myself pragmatic, too, and pragmatically, this dismissive bickering ain't helping anything.
Indeed. Most creative work probably still happens among small businesses and individuals, rather than the powerhouse research labs funded by large companies. "Little guys" should have the right to try and develop their ideas on their own, and reap the rewards; this is the American dream. They shouldn't be forced to either sell their idea to a big guy unless they want to (many do).
I tend to be libertarian, and oppose government-mandated regulation on principle; however, I cannot see a solution here without at least some IP law. Otherwise, a big company could simply find an innovation, devote its massive resources and existing infrastructure to developing and productizing it, and systematically force out the innovator. It's the main reason I dislike Microsoft so much. I'd love to see a free-market solution to this, but when I wear my consumer hat and consider Joe Bogie's Voice Recognition Software vs. Microsoft Voice (based on Joe's idea), my money's so much better spent on Microsoft in the short term that it's too hard to recognize the long-term drawback: Joe Bogie and others go out of business, and decades later I'm left wondering why it's so hard to get good software despite all the smart people around.
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I used to play Nethack a lot. Every so often, I come back to it. It's very replayable. And yet, I keep running into the same problem with it: the longer you play any class in it, the more that character resembles a GDSM+5-wearing, Tsurugi+7-wielding, AoLS-adorned, all-spell-knowing, full-resistance-having generic level-30 adventurer with a towel, pickaxe, blessed unicorn horn, and /death in a blessed bag of holding (inside an oilskin sack).
You can enjoy some variety if you try for a quicker game or for conducts (a big part of NH's replayability), but the fact remains: the classes tend to converge in the limit, because they're not really constrained. Everyone can pretty much wear, wield, and use everything, and there tends to be One Best Set of Gear. If you like to play NH sessions of epic lengths, then you pretty much know how they're going to end. From a class-skill standpoint, NH gives you rather distinct roles (classes) at first, which become almost non-existent factors in the endgame due to its skill system.
It might be more interesting with more divergence. I'm sure it's been discussed in the newsgroups. I don't know of any consensus on the matter. I suspect most fans are fine with the system as-is, and if so, I suppose that's well and good.
Richelieu was a hack that wouldn't last two days on a real Internet.
Let him put his "gotcha" up for public consumption, and a thousand more Armchairelieus would Huxley him into a puddle of goo with a mitre floating on top.
I think the phrase you were searching for is "complete waste of time".
How in the world did you have time to have the baby in the first place??
I recognize the intuitive validity of your rule. The problem here is that by stipulating this rule, you've reified another power structure (namely, an authority on humor), which is then vulnerable to more humor.
Given that, it is completely reasonable to assume that the parent post was a step ahead of your rule. You might say, well, the parent post wasn't humor - but then, neither was your post.
Hard to understand? Or obvious, and already in the past?
You left out:
4. Stay home, get fired, run out of money, starve, can't see a thing.
Politicians aren't ethical. And I have the scientific study to prove it.
Look at about 100,000 pictures of naked people on the Internet and see how selective your tastes get.
C'mon, we're talking about a series where two advanced races spend thousands of years and unimaginable amounts of effort to influence the evolution of the galaxy only to suddenly pack up and leave because, at the denoumont of the entire serious, Bruce Boxleitner yells "Get the hell out of our galaxy!". The cheese was too thick to get past. "As my grandfather used to say, 'cool!'"...
I dunno. I liked that scene. It conveyed a strong sense to me of what power at that level does to your culture. The Vorlons and the Shadows had reasons behind their evolutionary agendas, and those reasons were finally toppled by years of developments culminating in Sheridan's speech. At that level of power, the story seemed to say, it's possible that a rhetorical argument at the right time and from the right source is enough to make you decide "fuck it" and go home.
It wasn't just his speech I was detecting, either; I was seeing that really old alien's influence, all the other Old Races at the battle, the brouhaha over the telepaths, and millenia of implied sophistry between the Vorlons and Shadows.
On the downside, they've been moved to Fridays at 8pm.
7 Central.
Indeed. Remember the big news of a US marine shooting an Iraqi POW? That was broken primarily by MSM, yes. But for the full story (or at least a fuller story), you might want to read the photojournalist's account.
Interesting you should bring up the Libertarian isolationist platform. (Disclaimer: I haven't fully researched the breakdown of big-L Libertarians' positions on isolationism, so I don't know if you're correct or not.) I've heard this point made before, and if it's true, it's one thing that would keep me from being fully a big-L Libertarian, too.
Badnarik's apparent nuttiness was just a huge timing mistake, too. If the Libs had a really good candidate this year, this could have been the Year It Turned Around. Not to say they'd take the Presidency. They don't have enough marketing to reach the off-Internet crowds. But with all the mudslinging and antagony from the Reps and the Dems, the Libs could've made a decisive dent in the two-party system that would shift the nation.
Anyway. Lately I've found myself wishing for an Objectivist party. Sorta libertarian domestic ideals with more foreign policy realpolitik.
FWIW, googlelovesjesus.com is available.
At least for the next few seconds.
Just to save anyone trouble who reads this far into the thread: Apollo Diamond was generating diamonds at a cost of $5/carat, according to the article, which is dated September 2003. Assuming this is a metric carat, five of which equal a gram, a kilogram of this material would cost $25000.
:) Steel? Various varieties of plastic?
According to another article from August 2003, Apollo Diamond was predicting diamonds as heavy as 3 carats in "the near future". So even if the price/carat has gone down, there are other problems to solve, such as how to make larger structures almost wholly out of these diamonds.
I'd be interested in seeing the price of other industrial materials for comparison, but not interested enough to research it myself.
Speaking of making up shit, hows the search for WMDs goin nowadays?
It's slow go, what with all the mass graves they keep having to go through.
Any libertarian railing against this administration is probably thinking he'll also be railing against a Democrat administration in 2004-2008 if that wins, and so is having to pick his poison.
Hurts business. Check.
/. political thread.
Hurts discourse. Check.
Has terrorist excuse. Check.
Must be another
Have you guys never heard of scope?!
This is SlashDot. Mouthwash is irrelevant.
Given the choices, I'd rather have an unruly debate with lots of stupid questions and time wasting than have two guys spending an hour parroting their party line before stepping off the stage.
Given the above choice, either way I'll get zero from either candidate.
I think there's several things wrong with your implied argument. First, they're not "tightwads". I'd claim people in that bracket tend to be the most attentive to their finances, meaning they'll tend to do as much as possible to grow their holdings. They don't do that by buying a giant CD and earning interest, either; they invest it in businesses, which in turn spend it on supplies, salaries, services, etc. Even if the people at the top are corrupt, that money is eventually being spent somewhere. (A good question, to me, would be where exactly that money is spent; for instance, is it spent here or overseas?)
Secondly, that money isn't being given to the "tightwads". It's being returned. It was taxed out of them in the first place. The poor pay almost no tax relative to the wealthy. (I wonder what would have resulted if Bush had pushed for a gas or sales tax break instead of an income tax break.)
Thirdly, ranting doesn't help. You might be 100% correct, and yet your tone makes you sound like you're complaining about all the money going to the tightwads simply because you're not one of the tightwads.
No. (And it would be ludicrous for me to ever be happy with it. Find it tolerable for the moment, maybe, but never happy.)
Generations, probably, as it is a social problem. (Or rather, it is the symptom of a social problem.) In the mean time, slap them down with increasing force until they stop, or resort to non-violent techniques. I respect the argument that they don't seem to have stopped so far; however, I don't believe they will continue indefinitely. (After all, Germany and Japan didn't exactly give up right away, either.)
IP didn't need to be "invented" until recently. Specifically, when a typical middle-class business man acquired the means to make a perfect copy of information, spending less money per copy than each copy was worth. In other words, we didn't need IP until desktop computers came along.
I agree that we should avoid restricting information flow; however, I would argue that the incentives lost from abolishing all IP would result in the cutting off of information flow at its source. The only innovation we would get would be that motivated solely by altruism, and that would be only a trickle.
Not to denigrate you, but I consider the need for this financial incentive to be obvious on its face.
Suppose you had an idea you were sure could be developed into a product that could help millions of people. You do some research, and indeed, no one's tried this idea yet, and a few of your friends agree it's worth working on. So you get some investment capital, put in several thousand dollars from your savings, quit your day job, and start busting your ass.
A year and $500k of investment later, you roll out your first product line, and start raking it in. BigCorp buys one of your products for $50, spends $5 million working on their own version, and rolls it out a few months later. They make $50 million over the next two years alone; you got forced out (their product had more features) after making about $600k, netting you $100k to spread among you and the ten people you hired.
Inventors are likely smart enough to see this possibility when they first get the idea. Without patent protection, most of them (reasonably) wouldn't even bother trying.
This is why I feel patent law is justified. That said, I, like you, oppose going overboard on it. But as long as I have to labor for years on an innovative idea with the looming fear that Oracle Inc. can put me out of business just because they have more money than I do right now, I will be grateful for some reasonable amount of protection.
Meh. I want fewer bad laws, but I also want to scare terrorists away so that I'll still be around to do something about all the bad laws.
Yes, I'm sure you'll respond that Dems will scare terrorists away better than Reps will, but guess what? I happen to disagree, for what I (and many, many other people, btw) consider good reason. So what then? Shall we just go back to writing each other off as "wrong" or "idealist" or "evil"? I consider myself pragmatic, too, and pragmatically, this dismissive bickering ain't helping anything.
Indeed. Most creative work probably still happens among small businesses and individuals, rather than the powerhouse research labs funded by large companies. "Little guys" should have the right to try and develop their ideas on their own, and reap the rewards; this is the American dream. They shouldn't be forced to either sell their idea to a big guy unless they want to (many do).
I tend to be libertarian, and oppose government-mandated regulation on principle; however, I cannot see a solution here without at least some IP law. Otherwise, a big company could simply find an innovation, devote its massive resources and existing infrastructure to developing and productizing it, and systematically force out the innovator. It's the main reason I dislike Microsoft so much. I'd love to see a free-market solution to this, but when I wear my consumer hat and consider Joe Bogie's Voice Recognition Software vs. Microsoft Voice (based on Joe's idea), my money's so much better spent on Microsoft in the short term that it's too hard to recognize the long-term drawback: Joe Bogie and others go out of business, and decades later I'm left wondering why it's so hard to get good software despite all the smart people around.