For this to make sense, you need to have an objective sense of the word "value". Describe to me, without any subjective principles, why a car is worth more than the raw iron ore, bauxite, plastics, leather, etc. of which it is composed. Then explain to me how manufacturing produces objective value in a way that "services" do not.
...once you take land out of agricultural use, it is never used for agriculture again.
What the heck are you talking about? This may be true in practice, but that's only because we're vastly more efficient growing crops than we've ever been before... which is what this article is about. This isn't bad news, for crying out loud!
It certainly isn't true in principle that once a building goes up, that's it for agriculture for that city block. So what's the problem?
Re:The more I learn about JavaScript...
on
GWT in Action
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· Score: 1
I agree, Javascript is fine as a client side language only. My point wasn't that we need to turn it into a server side language (although this is already being done in a proof-of-concepty way, so it's sort of too late to make this point), but rather that improving Javascript isn't going to magically turn it into Java.
Re:The more I learn about JavaScript...
on
GWT in Action
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Not. Java doesn't have closures. Java functions aren't first-class objects.
JavaScript, OTOH, isn't typed.
There's loads of differences between them. All I'd want from JavaScript is more performance, namespaces, and possibly some very basic native OO concepts so that I can define an inherited class without three or four declarations and maybe have private and static members.
I know how people want this case to go, but it seems that is a pretty reasonable legal argument at this point.
Really? This seems like a reasonable legal argument to you? I think we should sue the government under the FOIA for every bit written to any government computer from now on, and see how quickly this sort of crap stops.
Good point, because it's well known that almost all women are stronger than every man, except for that one woman who lives in Peoria, IL, who is so weak she brings down the overall average. Damn her, ruining it for everyone else!!!
So, taking your argument one step further and combining with the parent post, you think it's likely that 12-foot flightless birds exist somewhere else in the universe?
Because what matters is the galactic plane, not the solar ecliptic. It's going to take a while (read: about as long as it'll take the Solar System) for the probe to get a decent reading.
60% of the "free condoms" split at 3 PSI in a Consumer Reports test. 2% of Trojans did.
Just keep your sex well below 3 PSI. No problem.
As far as HIV goes, the chance of (a) having sex with a random woman who has it (it is more prevalent among men), (b) having a condom fail and (c) getting infected from the woman (which is less likely than the reverse) is very very small.
Next on my list: to get them to call it the "Scopes Ape Trial".
Not to get too pedantic (I can't avoid a little pedantry with the triviality that I'm about to discuss), but the Scopes trial carries the moniker of "monkey" because William Jenning Bryan used the term to denigrate evolution. "This man wants you to believe that we evolved from monkeys!" This is a common tactic by Creationists - it both misstates the argument (modern monkeys and humans are on exactly the same "rung" of the evolutionary "ladder") and plays a false reductio ad absurdum card.
Actually, since there are two knights, two rooks, and two bishops per side, it would be less than 8! times 8!. Specifically, for each side it would be 8!/2/2/2 = 7! So the total is actually 7! times 7! = 25,401,600.
I prefer to play chess where the back rank is fixed, but the pawn positions are randomized on the second rank.
I guess the difference is also that your concept of quests introduces a sense of randomness into the game that currently doesn't exist (much). When building a wonder, I know how long it's going to take. I know that if I shift one of my citizens from working that irrigated grassland square to that mined hills square, I'm going to finish the wonder exactly N turns faster (modulo events later in the game). I can balance the short-term goal of finishing the wonder against the longer-term goal of expanding the population of my city.
The great people system works the same way. You know when you're going to get great people; it isn't random at all. You can control it. You can make trade-offs. If you need a great person for something badly enough, you can basically focus a city on great people and get it, especially in the late game when you have flexible civics.
Quests change this dynamic because now I have to play a little RPG - which would presumably have randomness built in, or else it's a pretty boring RPG - to see whether I get the great person at all. It's a similar problem to the way Civ 3 handled Great Leaders. They were generated randomly via combat. So you could improve your chances of getting one by fighting a lot. Since Great Leaders were actually pretty useful (until the late game they were the only way to build an Army, and ISTR that they would finish a Wonder in one turn, too), this encouraged lots of senseless combat. But the real problem was that they were useful and random.
But I guess fundamentally I just don't want to play an RPG when I'm really playing a strategy game. Sure, I wouldn't have to play the RPG to win, but why should a major piece of strategy be denied me? To get Great People in the current system, I just play the game. Great People Points are just another resource to accumulate. Jumping into an RPG would be too much cognitive dissonance.
Personally, I would hate this. Civilization is (to my mind) a strategy game with a large-scale strategic focus and, furthermore, an open-ended strategy. That is, there are almost no "wrong moves." But quests are closed-ended with fixed goals, which completely reverses the Civ paradigm. I don't think they would mix well.
Yet, when it reaches the market it cost 4x it's predecessors. When will something actually be cheaper and benefit us?
In a market with one supplier and many consumers, the price is (essentially) set by demand, not production cost. Only with many suppliers will the price be related to production cost. When products first come out, there are few suppliers and demand can be high, so prices are high. If the product becomes commoditized and production costs are low, prices fall.
Also, I don't know what you can possibly mean when you say that nothing since '81 has become cheaper and also benefitted us. What was the hard disk price per GB in 1981? There have been dozens of brand-new innovations in hard disk technology since then that were touted as the Next Big Thing - and actually were.
Slashdot Mirror
For this to make sense, you need to have an objective sense of the word "value". Describe to me, without any subjective principles, why a car is worth more than the raw iron ore, bauxite, plastics, leather, etc. of which it is composed. Then explain to me how manufacturing produces objective value in a way that "services" do not.
What the heck are you talking about? This may be true in practice, but that's only because we're vastly more efficient growing crops than we've ever been before... which is what this article is about. This isn't bad news, for crying out loud!
It certainly isn't true in principle that once a building goes up, that's it for agriculture for that city block. So what's the problem?
I don't care to go into details right now, but you're wrong.
Mod parent up, please!
I agree, Javascript is fine as a client side language only. My point wasn't that we need to turn it into a server side language (although this is already being done in a proof-of-concepty way, so it's sort of too late to make this point), but rather that improving Javascript isn't going to magically turn it into Java.
Not. Java doesn't have closures. Java functions aren't first-class objects.
JavaScript, OTOH, isn't typed.
There's loads of differences between them. All I'd want from JavaScript is more performance, namespaces, and possibly some very basic native OO concepts so that I can define an inherited class without three or four declarations and maybe have private and static members.
Really? This seems like a reasonable legal argument to you? I think we should sue the government under the FOIA for every bit written to any government computer from now on, and see how quickly this sort of crap stops.
Good point, because it's well known that almost all women are stronger than every man, except for that one woman who lives in Peoria, IL, who is so weak she brings down the overall average. Damn her, ruining it for everyone else!!!
When I saw the title I was hoping for a Robert L. Forward Dragon's Egg type of thing. But apparently it isn't quite that nearby.
Yeah, try telling that to the IRS.
Including yours?
I'm sure Cage would have heartily approved.
They figured out a way to generate all of Shakespeare using a finite number of monkeys on typewriters. But it still takes an infinite amount of time.
So, taking your argument one step further and combining with the parent post, you think it's likely that 12-foot flightless birds exist somewhere else in the universe?
Because what matters is the galactic plane, not the solar ecliptic. It's going to take a while (read: about as long as it'll take the Solar System) for the probe to get a decent reading.
It was a joke.
Just keep your sex well below 3 PSI. No problem.
As far as HIV goes, the chance of (a) having sex with a random woman who has it (it is more prevalent among men), (b) having a condom fail and (c) getting infected from the woman (which is less likely than the reverse) is very very small.
Not to get too pedantic (I can't avoid a little pedantry with the triviality that I'm about to discuss), but the Scopes trial carries the moniker of "monkey" because William Jenning Bryan used the term to denigrate evolution. "This man wants you to believe that we evolved from monkeys!" This is a common tactic by Creationists - it both misstates the argument (modern monkeys and humans are on exactly the same "rung" of the evolutionary "ladder") and plays a false reductio ad absurdum card.
Actually, since there are two knights, two rooks, and two bishops per side, it would be less than 8! times 8!. Specifically, for each side it would be 8!/2/2/2 = 7! So the total is actually 7! times 7! = 25,401,600.
I prefer to play chess where the back rank is fixed, but the pawn positions are randomized on the second rank.
Extremely Loud Pops?
I guess the difference is also that your concept of quests introduces a sense of randomness into the game that currently doesn't exist (much). When building a wonder, I know how long it's going to take. I know that if I shift one of my citizens from working that irrigated grassland square to that mined hills square, I'm going to finish the wonder exactly N turns faster (modulo events later in the game). I can balance the short-term goal of finishing the wonder against the longer-term goal of expanding the population of my city.
The great people system works the same way. You know when you're going to get great people; it isn't random at all. You can control it. You can make trade-offs. If you need a great person for something badly enough, you can basically focus a city on great people and get it, especially in the late game when you have flexible civics.
Quests change this dynamic because now I have to play a little RPG - which would presumably have randomness built in, or else it's a pretty boring RPG - to see whether I get the great person at all. It's a similar problem to the way Civ 3 handled Great Leaders. They were generated randomly via combat. So you could improve your chances of getting one by fighting a lot. Since Great Leaders were actually pretty useful (until the late game they were the only way to build an Army, and ISTR that they would finish a Wonder in one turn, too), this encouraged lots of senseless combat. But the real problem was that they were useful and random.
But I guess fundamentally I just don't want to play an RPG when I'm really playing a strategy game. Sure, I wouldn't have to play the RPG to win, but why should a major piece of strategy be denied me? To get Great People in the current system, I just play the game. Great People Points are just another resource to accumulate. Jumping into an RPG would be too much cognitive dissonance.
Just my opinion, of course.
Interesting.
Personally, I would hate this. Civilization is (to my mind) a strategy game with a large-scale strategic focus and, furthermore, an open-ended strategy. That is, there are almost no "wrong moves." But quests are closed-ended with fixed goals, which completely reverses the Civ paradigm. I don't think they would mix well.
In a market with one supplier and many consumers, the price is (essentially) set by demand, not production cost. Only with many suppliers will the price be related to production cost. When products first come out, there are few suppliers and demand can be high, so prices are high. If the product becomes commoditized and production costs are low, prices fall.
Also, I don't know what you can possibly mean when you say that nothing since '81 has become cheaper and also benefitted us. What was the hard disk price per GB in 1981? There have been dozens of brand-new innovations in hard disk technology since then that were touted as the Next Big Thing - and actually were.
Well, at least we're better at it than kittens.
It's a 23-page PDF. I read up to the table of contents and gave up.