Speaking as someone who has battled with depression (without medication) for years, I can say that people who are depressed don't play video games to treat their depression. They play as a distraction. Instead of sitting there from 6pm until 10pm doing nothing, all you have to do is double click the icon on your desktop and you're in. Rather than having to find the motivation to see if anyone wants to go out. Rather than trying to find the motivation to go have a beer or go for a walk in the park. Rather than trying to find the motivation to hit the books and study for that exam.
One of the major points of depression is lack of energy/motivation. When I'm depressed, I have to force myself to follow my exercise routine. I have to force myself to go out. I have to force myself to do something OTHER than refreshing Reddit and Slashdot while WoWing it up. I enjoy those things, even while depressed, but the motivation to do them just isn't there.
It's not going to be cost effective for some private company to do it and still be able to turn a profit. It'll be so expensive that tickets will be unaffordable. Or the tickets will be barely affordable, but service will be absolutely terrible. If we want this to happen, the government will have to grant money, land, and privileges. Unfortunately, the company that gets to build it will avoid paying the government back, and will just use what they have to further screw the consumer. Then we'll be looking at Amtrak of the 2010s.
.08% BAC is just the amount that they're REQUIRED to arrest. Anything below that is up to the arresting officer.
Really all you have to do to get a DWI is have a measurable amount of alcohol in your system and get pulled over. If you admit that you had one beer, even if it's true, you're in SERIOUS DANGER of getting a DWI. Also, there's no distinguishing between levels of DWI. A DWI after one beer is just as bad as a DWI after fifteen beers. Your life will still pretty much be ruined and you'll still have to go through all the dipshit punishments while MADD mails all your neighbors to tell them to piss/shit on your lawn and kill your pets.
Is it actually legal to sell someone a product with a warranty and then refuse to fix it because business is winding down? Don't closing companies have to keep a certain amount of money for problems like this? Can I put a lien on their property if they fail to meet their contractual obligations and I'm shorted money because of it?
In my opinion, all premium content should be able to be purchased with the in game currency.
The reasoning? Some people are poor, but have a lot of time. For example, the disabled. Rather than absolutely limiting them (they're barely getting by, most likely) to low end items/gear/decor, why not just make the items available in game at a disproportionately high cost? Like for example, your 'stamina' recharge that lets you fight/gain experience/items/etc could cost half a day's worth of grinding and it could cost $2. That fancy hat might cost $10 and take you a couple of days to farm for. There's really no downside to this.
The grinders can grind, the payers can pay. It's economic specialization. Those disabled folks can grind to their heart's content and feel like they're earning something, maybe sell it for some in game currency or *gasp* real cash in a competitive amount with the game servers. Those payers can feel awesome when they get a $0.10 discount on their Fancy Hat because they bought from the grinder.
Nothing will make me stop playing a 'F2P' game faster than setting up obvious noticeable speed bumps to keep the poor poor and the payers on top.
But why should you have to suffer that kind of discomfort?
Most restaurants don't seat you with strangers. Most bus lines don't make four people sit in seats clearly designed for two. Why not designate a whole row for fat people and charge them like 1.5x or 1.2x or something the price of a normal ticket?
This should be thrown out and not allowed to be filed in court again.
This is exactly like me calling the police and reporting my car stolen, so when they arrive to take a statement, I point to my car and tell them that it might be stolen later that night so they're going to have to sit around and wait for it to happen.
You're not too far off center here. The brain is remarkably adaptable in this sense. It has been my experience that if I go to sleep in a slightly noisy area (nap in my car in the parking lot, for example) then I'm quite hard to wake up. If I fall asleep in total silence, I'm easy to wake up.
A judge with a brain won't let it fly that one side of the company supports the site and the other side of the company wants to sue it out of existence. They SHOULD find that once Discovery started 'supporting' the website, they gave it 'permission' for it to exist and didn't have a problem with it until they decided to sue. A company, in the eyes of the law, is one entity.
Google wants the Internet to be free as in speech.
They don't want to be required to set up their own ISP type service unless they absolutely have to, because it would cost them a great deal of money. Also, if everyone started censoring and blocking things out, it would make it really easy for the government to cherry pick what they want people to see and not see. This puts a huge strain on search engines like Google.
"If an ISP can block CP, why can't you just not list them in your search results? Also de-list wikileaks. Oh and you're going to have to remove certain cities from Google Maps because they contain government buildings. WHILE YOU'RE AT IT we want backdoor access to your servers so we can track people's searching in real time and pay them a visit if they search for anything unwholesome."
Concepts is about all school is good for teaching anyway. You aren't expected to remember and actually use various special formulas from general chemistry courses in college. You're just expected to be familiar with the concepts, so that if you hear about them again, you already kind of know about them. No employer will (unless you're in a chemistry heavy graduate position) expect you to rattle off all the formulas and such that you need to know. Most likely they have a cheat sheet for those in the labs anyway.
Same thing with programming. No one expects you to be able to jump right into game programming when you get hired into a company. They expect you to be familiar with the concepts and willing to learn their way of doing things (which, even if they use a familiar language, can be very VERY different than what school taught).
The cases were never about the consumer. We, the consumer, never see any money given back to us. Even if representatives of Evil Corporation used their connections to literally steal money from your bank account, you probably wouldn't see it again. You'd file a lawsuit, just like the ten thousand other people it happened to, it would get turned into a class action, and you'd get two dollars off your next purchase of widgets from Evil Corporation. Evil Corporation would have to pay 80% of their gains, and 1% of it would end up going back to the consumers. The lawyers would take the other 79% and split it up amongst themselves.
Meanwhile, everyone shakes hands and congratulates each other on justice and how Evil Corporation got what's coming to them. But the consumers? Nope, they're still out that money from their bank account, less a two dollar coupon. Oh, and you have to give your bank account details again in order to use the coupon, which must be used within ten days of the date it was mailed. Void where prohibited. No cash value.
Back when I used to play MUDs, I remember setting up triggers in Gmud. I idly thought to myself, "What if I could do this with the stock market?"
Back when I used to play World of Warcraft, I remember all the auctionbots people would set up to automatically undercut you down to one copper over what was profitable. You could search for a specific item, see one person selling it for say, 1000 gold, put your item up for 990 gold, search for that item again, and see that all five of their items up for sale are now 989 gold and 99 silver. If you set it somewhere absurdly low like 500 gold, it would be bought out by a bot within seconds of posting it. Of course, after buying it, their prices were back to normal. Of course botting is illegal in World of Warcraft.
Again, I applied this thinking to the stock market. What if you had bots to buy if the price was favorable for very popular stocks, but they could manipulate the market to make the price favorable? This kind of manipulation can and will lead to some dire consequences as people no longer act predictably for fear of the bots manipulating them.
Chernobyl will be uninhabitable for longer than anywhere an A-bomb has hit. For starters, the goal of an A-bomb is to convert energetic radioisotopes into thermal energy. Unfortunately, a lot of radiation is given off as well, and the process isn't nearly 100% efficient. Some radioactive materials are left behind and some more are created by neutron activation.
Chernobyl has a big pile of radioactive death sitting within the casket they built around it. Chernobyl was a 'dirty bomb' compared to the usual nuclear weapons. By 1950, people were rebuilding and living in the bombed out area, so I'd say radiation levels weren't much above background, if any. Most of the radiation threat passes after a few days. The only things you have to worry about are radioactive iodine and other fallout elements that might enter your body.
Trade schools aren't very popular or prolific anymore. There are places like ITT Tech which are more like trade schools than colleges, but they have a pisspoor placement rate and training..not to mention they're very expensive. There are a few trade schools, like for truck driving, but there aren't many places that teach things like welding, pipefitting, plumbing, electrical work, etc. They ARE out there, but they need to advertise! They need some PR!
If you can start out making $40,000 as a pipe fitter after like a one or two year training program which isn't difficult at all, you end up making a similar amount of money as someone who went to college and is making $50,000 after a four year degree that also has $40,000 in debt that needs to be repaid. Contrast to the trade school, which will be dirt cheap in comparison.
"Your honor, I had to run that red light. It was safe to do so, as no one was approaching from either side, it was 3am, and the red light lasts five minutes in the direction I was coming from. My wife was about to give birth in the back seat and bam, my tires busted. The car flipped and now my baby has cerebral palsy and an IQ of sixty. I'm seeking ten million dollars in damages from the state."
It still holds a lot of wisdom for social science in general. For example, you might have to interact with people that stress you (in laws, bosses, etc) in real life, but just as 'vacation' usually entails getting away from all of them, it says that people would love to be away from people that constantly stress them, at least while they're trying to relax.
If I recall correctly we busted the Russians good. They stole some oil pipeline control software, and we knew they were going to steal it. So we wrote in some malware and a few months later, boom, one of their pipelines explodes because of said malware. The Japanese let the Chinese steal a design for bad capacitors which ended up in everyone's electronics. Perhaps we should let them have a design for a car who's doors weld themselves closed and then the engine catches fire.
A carrier group would be the least of our worries if the Chinese decided to launch a surprise attack. It would have to be a surprise attack, because we wouldn't put our ships within range of them unless we had some plan or some way of negating the threat. Telling a few soldiers to rush a machine gun nest is one thing, but telling a large part of our navy to rush the equivalent of a machine gun nest is quite another. Carrier groups are NOT expendable unless that's our only option.
The scenario could go two ways.
The Chinese launch a surprise attack and there's an 80% casualty rate within a carrier group. We send a few hundred cruise missiles to rain down on their capital and shore line defenses while another carrier group comes to fill in the position. One side backs off when the other starts threatening to launch nukes.
Or, the Chinese declare war on us for some reason and aside from a few slap fights and invasion of Taiwan/Japan/Korea, we don't see much action because we're currently tied up in the cat box of the Middle East. We damn sure don't send a carrier group into hell's maw to die to those missiles.
A build your own console thing wouldn't be a horrible idea in a perfect world. You could have a big list of 'approved' parts and just switch them out as usual. Some games would require 'advanced' parts, some would require 'basic' parts. You could maybe construct it for $100 on the cheap end, and $1000 on the expensive end. You could replace parts as often as you wanted to play new games. It could have a Steam-like system for downloading games and connecting with your friends.
This is just like the idea for a PC, only less flexible. You KNOW that they'd come up with some custom hardware/software that basically forbid you to do most normal PC functions. Then you'd question why you had a PC at all, as would lots of people. PCs would become less widespread in the personal entertainment level, so would piracy.
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Speaking as someone who has battled with depression (without medication) for years, I can say that people who are depressed don't play video games to treat their depression. They play as a distraction. Instead of sitting there from 6pm until 10pm doing nothing, all you have to do is double click the icon on your desktop and you're in. Rather than having to find the motivation to see if anyone wants to go out. Rather than trying to find the motivation to go have a beer or go for a walk in the park. Rather than trying to find the motivation to hit the books and study for that exam.
One of the major points of depression is lack of energy/motivation. When I'm depressed, I have to force myself to follow my exercise routine. I have to force myself to go out. I have to force myself to do something OTHER than refreshing Reddit and Slashdot while WoWing it up. I enjoy those things, even while depressed, but the motivation to do them just isn't there.
It's not going to be cost effective for some private company to do it and still be able to turn a profit. It'll be so expensive that tickets will be unaffordable. Or the tickets will be barely affordable, but service will be absolutely terrible. If we want this to happen, the government will have to grant money, land, and privileges. Unfortunately, the company that gets to build it will avoid paying the government back, and will just use what they have to further screw the consumer. Then we'll be looking at Amtrak of the 2010s.
The lower and middle class people would fill up with whiskey-flavored spirits, while the rich would 'treat' their cars with cognac and Glen Livet.
.08% BAC is just the amount that they're REQUIRED to arrest. Anything below that is up to the arresting officer.
Really all you have to do to get a DWI is have a measurable amount of alcohol in your system and get pulled over. If you admit that you had one beer, even if it's true, you're in SERIOUS DANGER of getting a DWI. Also, there's no distinguishing between levels of DWI. A DWI after one beer is just as bad as a DWI after fifteen beers. Your life will still pretty much be ruined and you'll still have to go through all the dipshit punishments while MADD mails all your neighbors to tell them to piss/shit on your lawn and kill your pets.
Is it actually legal to sell someone a product with a warranty and then refuse to fix it because business is winding down? Don't closing companies have to keep a certain amount of money for problems like this? Can I put a lien on their property if they fail to meet their contractual obligations and I'm shorted money because of it?
In my opinion, all premium content should be able to be purchased with the in game currency.
The reasoning? Some people are poor, but have a lot of time. For example, the disabled. Rather than absolutely limiting them (they're barely getting by, most likely) to low end items/gear/decor, why not just make the items available in game at a disproportionately high cost? Like for example, your 'stamina' recharge that lets you fight/gain experience/items/etc could cost half a day's worth of grinding and it could cost $2. That fancy hat might cost $10 and take you a couple of days to farm for. There's really no downside to this.
The grinders can grind, the payers can pay. It's economic specialization. Those disabled folks can grind to their heart's content and feel like they're earning something, maybe sell it for some in game currency or *gasp* real cash in a competitive amount with the game servers. Those payers can feel awesome when they get a $0.10 discount on their Fancy Hat because they bought from the grinder.
Nothing will make me stop playing a 'F2P' game faster than setting up obvious noticeable speed bumps to keep the poor poor and the payers on top.
But why should you have to suffer that kind of discomfort?
Most restaurants don't seat you with strangers. Most bus lines don't make four people sit in seats clearly designed for two. Why not designate a whole row for fat people and charge them like 1.5x or 1.2x or something the price of a normal ticket?
This should be thrown out and not allowed to be filed in court again.
This is exactly like me calling the police and reporting my car stolen, so when they arrive to take a statement, I point to my car and tell them that it might be stolen later that night so they're going to have to sit around and wait for it to happen.
You're not too far off center here. The brain is remarkably adaptable in this sense. It has been my experience that if I go to sleep in a slightly noisy area (nap in my car in the parking lot, for example) then I'm quite hard to wake up. If I fall asleep in total silence, I'm easy to wake up.
What do you mean 'taxpayers fund your stay'?
You still have to pay the prison that kept you back for the time you spent in it.
A judge with a brain won't let it fly that one side of the company supports the site and the other side of the company wants to sue it out of existence. They SHOULD find that once Discovery started 'supporting' the website, they gave it 'permission' for it to exist and didn't have a problem with it until they decided to sue. A company, in the eyes of the law, is one entity.
Google wants the Internet to be free as in speech.
They don't want to be required to set up their own ISP type service unless they absolutely have to, because it would cost them a great deal of money. Also, if everyone started censoring and blocking things out, it would make it really easy for the government to cherry pick what they want people to see and not see. This puts a huge strain on search engines like Google.
"If an ISP can block CP, why can't you just not list them in your search results? Also de-list wikileaks. Oh and you're going to have to remove certain cities from Google Maps because they contain government buildings. WHILE YOU'RE AT IT we want backdoor access to your servers so we can track people's searching in real time and pay them a visit if they search for anything unwholesome."
Concepts is about all school is good for teaching anyway. You aren't expected to remember and actually use various special formulas from general chemistry courses in college. You're just expected to be familiar with the concepts, so that if you hear about them again, you already kind of know about them. No employer will (unless you're in a chemistry heavy graduate position) expect you to rattle off all the formulas and such that you need to know. Most likely they have a cheat sheet for those in the labs anyway.
Same thing with programming. No one expects you to be able to jump right into game programming when you get hired into a company. They expect you to be familiar with the concepts and willing to learn their way of doing things (which, even if they use a familiar language, can be very VERY different than what school taught).
The cases were never about the consumer. We, the consumer, never see any money given back to us. Even if representatives of Evil Corporation used their connections to literally steal money from your bank account, you probably wouldn't see it again. You'd file a lawsuit, just like the ten thousand other people it happened to, it would get turned into a class action, and you'd get two dollars off your next purchase of widgets from Evil Corporation. Evil Corporation would have to pay 80% of their gains, and 1% of it would end up going back to the consumers. The lawyers would take the other 79% and split it up amongst themselves.
Meanwhile, everyone shakes hands and congratulates each other on justice and how Evil Corporation got what's coming to them. But the consumers? Nope, they're still out that money from their bank account, less a two dollar coupon. Oh, and you have to give your bank account details again in order to use the coupon, which must be used within ten days of the date it was mailed. Void where prohibited. No cash value.
Back when I used to play MUDs, I remember setting up triggers in Gmud. I idly thought to myself, "What if I could do this with the stock market?"
Back when I used to play World of Warcraft, I remember all the auctionbots people would set up to automatically undercut you down to one copper over what was profitable. You could search for a specific item, see one person selling it for say, 1000 gold, put your item up for 990 gold, search for that item again, and see that all five of their items up for sale are now 989 gold and 99 silver. If you set it somewhere absurdly low like 500 gold, it would be bought out by a bot within seconds of posting it. Of course, after buying it, their prices were back to normal. Of course botting is illegal in World of Warcraft.
Again, I applied this thinking to the stock market. What if you had bots to buy if the price was favorable for very popular stocks, but they could manipulate the market to make the price favorable? This kind of manipulation can and will lead to some dire consequences as people no longer act predictably for fear of the bots manipulating them.
Chernobyl will be uninhabitable for longer than anywhere an A-bomb has hit. For starters, the goal of an A-bomb is to convert energetic radioisotopes into thermal energy. Unfortunately, a lot of radiation is given off as well, and the process isn't nearly 100% efficient. Some radioactive materials are left behind and some more are created by neutron activation.
Chernobyl has a big pile of radioactive death sitting within the casket they built around it. Chernobyl was a 'dirty bomb' compared to the usual nuclear weapons. By 1950, people were rebuilding and living in the bombed out area, so I'd say radiation levels weren't much above background, if any. Most of the radiation threat passes after a few days. The only things you have to worry about are radioactive iodine and other fallout elements that might enter your body.
Trade schools aren't very popular or prolific anymore. There are places like ITT Tech which are more like trade schools than colleges, but they have a pisspoor placement rate and training..not to mention they're very expensive. There are a few trade schools, like for truck driving, but there aren't many places that teach things like welding, pipefitting, plumbing, electrical work, etc. They ARE out there, but they need to advertise! They need some PR!
If you can start out making $40,000 as a pipe fitter after like a one or two year training program which isn't difficult at all, you end up making a similar amount of money as someone who went to college and is making $50,000 after a four year degree that also has $40,000 in debt that needs to be repaid. Contrast to the trade school, which will be dirt cheap in comparison.
Yeah, that's a 'papers please' law and is pretty much completely illegal. All states recognize licenses/registration from other states. They have to.
I can see the lawsuits now --
"Your honor, I had to run that red light. It was safe to do so, as no one was approaching from either side, it was 3am, and the red light lasts five minutes in the direction I was coming from. My wife was about to give birth in the back seat and bam, my tires busted. The car flipped and now my baby has cerebral palsy and an IQ of sixty. I'm seeking ten million dollars in damages from the state."
It still holds a lot of wisdom for social science in general. For example, you might have to interact with people that stress you (in laws, bosses, etc) in real life, but just as 'vacation' usually entails getting away from all of them, it says that people would love to be away from people that constantly stress them, at least while they're trying to relax.
Wait, you mean people with high security clearances that work for the government can also be disgusting perverts??
Quick, we need to revise the process to make it to where only god fearing Christians that have sex for procreation only can get government clearances!
Who has to pay the bill when a squirrel shorts out two lines and fries itself?
If I recall correctly we busted the Russians good. They stole some oil pipeline control software, and we knew they were going to steal it. So we wrote in some malware and a few months later, boom, one of their pipelines explodes because of said malware. The Japanese let the Chinese steal a design for bad capacitors which ended up in everyone's electronics. Perhaps we should let them have a design for a car who's doors weld themselves closed and then the engine catches fire.
A carrier group would be the least of our worries if the Chinese decided to launch a surprise attack. It would have to be a surprise attack, because we wouldn't put our ships within range of them unless we had some plan or some way of negating the threat. Telling a few soldiers to rush a machine gun nest is one thing, but telling a large part of our navy to rush the equivalent of a machine gun nest is quite another. Carrier groups are NOT expendable unless that's our only option.
The scenario could go two ways.
The Chinese launch a surprise attack and there's an 80% casualty rate within a carrier group. We send a few hundred cruise missiles to rain down on their capital and shore line defenses while another carrier group comes to fill in the position. One side backs off when the other starts threatening to launch nukes.
Or, the Chinese declare war on us for some reason and aside from a few slap fights and invasion of Taiwan/Japan/Korea, we don't see much action because we're currently tied up in the cat box of the Middle East. We damn sure don't send a carrier group into hell's maw to die to those missiles.
A build your own console thing wouldn't be a horrible idea in a perfect world. You could have a big list of 'approved' parts and just switch them out as usual. Some games would require 'advanced' parts, some would require 'basic' parts. You could maybe construct it for $100 on the cheap end, and $1000 on the expensive end. You could replace parts as often as you wanted to play new games. It could have a Steam-like system for downloading games and connecting with your friends.
This is just like the idea for a PC, only less flexible. You KNOW that they'd come up with some custom hardware/software that basically forbid you to do most normal PC functions. Then you'd question why you had a PC at all, as would lots of people. PCs would become less widespread in the personal entertainment level, so would piracy.
That's what this is all about.
Piracy.