Wireless will be so cheap that we'll just make our own wireless freenet. People won't even need to understand why. "Just put this thing on your roof, and you can have free Internet for life." "Sure, OK!"
Because the article cites no evidence indicating that they were slaves, and significant evidence that they were not. As other commenters said, the notion that they were slaves seems like pure conjecture... and makes good copy for Black History Month.
If you do something that might cause a bunch of 13-year-old losers to sexually harass you, it's your own damn fault!
Re:Nothing wrong with monthly fees!
on
MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 1
But then they dumped a bunch of time and energy into fixing up those zones. I mostly play Alb, and I used to love fighting in the Catacombs of Cordova, Lyonesse, or Llyn Barfog. Nobody goes there anymore, and there's not much reason to; the new zones have so much better drops. Why did they make the new zones, when they could have just fixed up the old ones? Or why not a little of both?
Likewise, none of the old really awesome loot is worth anything anymore, because the new stuff is so much more powerful. It's hard to get people interested in a Caer Sidi raid anymore, even though it had the best loot tables in the game when it came out. All the effort put into designing that dungeon... wasted. Bugs never fixed. It's a shame.
Nothing wrong with monthly fees!
on
MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't mind paying monthly fees. In fact, I'd prefer a game where the business model is driven entirely by that, so there's no incentive to muck the game up with sketchy expansions.
I'm currently hooked on Dark Age of Camelot. One of the things I absolutely hate about it is that each new expansion pack has introduced obscenely overpowered races, classes, and items, presumably to entice everyone to rush out and buy it. In the process, classic races and classes have been rendered obsolete, and whole zones of the game world have been left empty and forgotten. Not only is this a source of frustration for players who don't feel like starting a new character, but from a business standpoint, it seems like a terribly inefficient way to develop a game. They've basically thrown out all the time and energy they invested into designing those old zones and classes. And in their rush to market, the quality control on the expansions is terrible. Trials of Atlantis was released, what, two and a half years ago? They've come out with two major expansions since then, Catacombs and Darkness Rising, yet the ToA encounters are still riddled with bugs, and they're still grudgingly undoing the horrible game balance issues introduced by ToA.
How much does hooking these OpenGL calls cost in terms of game performance, and how big is the resulting data? If this could capture textures (which it currently can't), it seems like it would be a much better way to record video from games than the ubiquitous FRAPS, which eats up about 1GB per minute with its fast but inefficient codec.
If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even run your capture through a raytracer or something that would render it in much greater detail than your machine is capable of in real time.
We've all heard that the gravitational attraction between two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. What difference does it make if gravity is mediated by particles? If the attractive effect of individual particles were fixed (not decreasing linearly with distance, like the article suggests) then their distribution at any given distance would lead to the inverse square law we observe. An object twice as far away would interact with one-fourth as many gravitons.
"I'd love to see a game where the numbers simply aren't available to the players."
Yes! Less stat whoring and more emphasis on exploration, social networking, and perhaps even some role-playing.
I don't think it would be commercially viable on the scale of EQ, DAoC, or WoW, but I think (well, hope) that the day is near when we will begin to see smaller-scale niche MMOGs entering the market. The interest is definitely there; we're just missing the development tools.
OSS may provide the solution. I dream of making my own MMOG, but I know that's not very realistic. But maybe I could make a MMOG-style scene manager and camera system for OGRE, or develop an event notification algorithm that supports hundreds of observers with minimal lag. If I contribute small pieces like this, maybe one day there will be a free MMOG toolkit.
"Of course, somebody born in the last 30 or 40 years might not be able to notice such things by themselves . .."
Oh, believe me, we notice. It's the next generation I'm worried about... kids who idolize Britney Spears and hear her spewing ignorant garbage like, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our President in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." And to hear people honestly say that only those with something to hide have to worry about losing our privacy and civil liberties... gah! Start writing down their names; we'll make them count and bury the bodies after this whole thing blows over.
The LiveJournal development and support staff have always been incompetent. In the past, they've compensated paid users with extensions on their subscriptions because of extended service problems they didn't seem to know how to fix. Most recently, they moved their servers from Seattle to L.A., and for the next month, nobody was receiving their comment notifications. They claimed to have fixed it, then realized they hadn't, then sort of brushed it under the rug. I'm still missing all my comment notifications from the month following November 22, 2005. (And there's no other way to follow threads in communities.)
In many ways, LiveJournal is becoming one of those sites that people only use because it's well-established. If it were new, the glaring problems with the software that runs it would leave it DOA... much like Photo.net and Slashdot.
Something like that. I found out about this whole incident about a week ago when visited the journal of a known non-troll in one of the LJ communities I read. Bantown had taken over her journal and posted a picture of someone fucking a plucked chicken carcass.
It depends how the study was controlled. If they can establish that there is no increased overall cancer risk as compared to people who never use cell phones or wireless home phones, then the reported increased risk on the side where people hold the phone is meaningless. But if they didn't control the study that way, then the whole thing is bunk.
"She acknowledged that there appeared to be an increased risk among brain cancer sufferers on the side of the head where they held the phone. The team, however, did not put this down to a causal link, because almost exactly the same decreased risk was seen on the other side of the head, leaving no overall increase risk of tumours for mobile phone users."
No overall increased risk vs. what? People who have absolutely no exposure to similar sources of radiation, including wireless home phones? If that's not how they controlled it, then I don't buy their logic.
Hell no. Osama bin Laden became the leader of al-Qaeda not just because of his charisma, but because of his experience in the guerrilla war against the Russians in Afghanistan. Iraq is like Afghanistan times ten. I have to wonder how many bin Ladens have been created by Shrub's goddamned shit-for-brains wtf... I can't even think of a bad enough adjective to describe how fucking short-sighted and stupid this war is.
Slashdot Mirror
Wireless will be so cheap that we'll just make our own wireless freenet. People won't even need to understand why. "Just put this thing on your roof, and you can have free Internet for life." "Sure, OK!"
Because the article cites no evidence indicating that they were slaves, and significant evidence that they were not. As other commenters said, the notion that they were slaves seems like pure conjecture... and makes good copy for Black History Month.
Only if the crew included pregnant women, and they drank stored water from that one location for several months. Possible, but highly unlikely.
How do they know they were slaves?
All you people who measure tragedy by statistics instead of emotions must live in a cold, cold world. The Challenger was indeed very much like 9/11.
If you do something that might cause a bunch of 13-year-old losers to sexually harass you, it's your own damn fault!
Likewise, none of the old really awesome loot is worth anything anymore, because the new stuff is so much more powerful. It's hard to get people interested in a Caer Sidi raid anymore, even though it had the best loot tables in the game when it came out. All the effort put into designing that dungeon... wasted. Bugs never fixed. It's a shame.
I'm currently hooked on Dark Age of Camelot. One of the things I absolutely hate about it is that each new expansion pack has introduced obscenely overpowered races, classes, and items, presumably to entice everyone to rush out and buy it. In the process, classic races and classes have been rendered obsolete, and whole zones of the game world have been left empty and forgotten. Not only is this a source of frustration for players who don't feel like starting a new character, but from a business standpoint, it seems like a terribly inefficient way to develop a game. They've basically thrown out all the time and energy they invested into designing those old zones and classes. And in their rush to market, the quality control on the expansions is terrible. Trials of Atlantis was released, what, two and a half years ago? They've come out with two major expansions since then, Catacombs and Darkness Rising, yet the ToA encounters are still riddled with bugs, and they're still grudgingly undoing the horrible game balance issues introduced by ToA.
More like FDR and LBJ, really.
If you wanted to get really fancy, you could even run your capture through a raytracer or something that would render it in much greater detail than your machine is capable of in real time.
...and secure your place in the history books as one of the greatest leaders of your time.
Worse, people pay top dollar for coffee beans that have been up a civet's butt. In fact, think Slashdot had an article on that not too long ago...
We've all heard that the gravitational attraction between two objects is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. What difference does it make if gravity is mediated by particles? If the attractive effect of individual particles were fixed (not decreasing linearly with distance, like the article suggests) then their distribution at any given distance would lead to the inverse square law we observe. An object twice as far away would interact with one-fourth as many gravitons.
Well, good for him! And good for California, too.
Yes! Less stat whoring and more emphasis on exploration, social networking, and perhaps even some role-playing.
I don't think it would be commercially viable on the scale of EQ, DAoC, or WoW, but I think (well, hope) that the day is near when we will begin to see smaller-scale niche MMOGs entering the market. The interest is definitely there; we're just missing the development tools.
OSS may provide the solution. I dream of making my own MMOG, but I know that's not very realistic. But maybe I could make a MMOG-style scene manager and camera system for OGRE, or develop an event notification algorithm that supports hundreds of observers with minimal lag. If I contribute small pieces like this, maybe one day there will be a free MMOG toolkit.
That's exactly what I would have called it. Yep...
Play with it long enough, and you get committed.
Yeah, it's retarded. I almost missed this article, then thought... wtf is that? Is Slashdot rendering pages wrong in Firefox again?
...your friend is full of shit. I can't believe this was even posted on the front page.
Oh, believe me, we notice. It's the next generation I'm worried about... kids who idolize Britney Spears and hear her spewing ignorant garbage like, "Honestly, I think we should just trust our President in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." And to hear people honestly say that only those with something to hide have to worry about losing our privacy and civil liberties... gah! Start writing down their names; we'll make them count and bury the bodies after this whole thing blows over.
In many ways, LiveJournal is becoming one of those sites that people only use because it's well-established. If it were new, the glaring problems with the software that runs it would leave it DOA... much like Photo.net and Slashdot.
That's why there are personal backup clients for anyone who cares.
Something like that. I found out about this whole incident about a week ago when visited the journal of a known non-troll in one of the LJ communities I read. Bantown had taken over her journal and posted a picture of someone fucking a plucked chicken carcass.
It depends how the study was controlled. If they can establish that there is no increased overall cancer risk as compared to people who never use cell phones or wireless home phones, then the reported increased risk on the side where people hold the phone is meaningless. But if they didn't control the study that way, then the whole thing is bunk.
No overall increased risk vs. what? People who have absolutely no exposure to similar sources of radiation, including wireless home phones? If that's not how they controlled it, then I don't buy their logic.
Hell no. Osama bin Laden became the leader of al-Qaeda not just because of his charisma, but because of his experience in the guerrilla war against the Russians in Afghanistan. Iraq is like Afghanistan times ten. I have to wonder how many bin Ladens have been created by Shrub's goddamned shit-for-brains wtf... I can't even think of a bad enough adjective to describe how fucking short-sighted and stupid this war is.