Possibly, but not certainly. While there is a limit on how much drive space you need, it is difficult to further miniaturizing batteries, and battery life is always important.
Plus, there is a limit to how small a thing needs to be before it is no longer an asset. A laptop so small that it is hard to read the screen or type on the keyboard is no longer benefitting from its small size for many users, and similarly a stamp-sized mp3 player would be too small for some.
My older iPod broke and I decided to replace it with a mini, which I like and is big enough for half of my music collection (the other half has a lot of crap I don't really need anyway). But when it starts getting this small, I can see someone choosing a model with 50% more volume for double the battery life.
You say lawyers and cops are boring. I'm not personally a big fan of the Law&Order type genre, but its a very significant genre in television, movies, and books. Of course you don't fictionalize all the boring parts of a profession, you streamline it and dramatize it to enhance the exciting parts of it and downplay the tedium.
In a "realistic" fantasy game, if that isn't a total oxymoron, you'd spend 99.9% of your time travelling, acquiring food, sleeping, and just generally being bored. And when the action came, there would be a 50-50 shot your character would be permanently dead and the game would be over. A terrible game. But games don't have to be realistic.
There is plenty of lawyer and cop material to make for interesting games. It just isn't done much because game companies like to clone each other's successful games rather than experiment with new genres. In a truly interactive multiplayer world, playing a fictionalized game version of a lawyer or cop could be far more fun than hacking away at dragons. A few MMOG games are pk anarchy with few rules, but most have very rigid limits on what you can do to other players. With a decent in-game legal system, the rules of behavior could be loosened without eliminating accountability. Hunting down a real criminal player as a cop would be far more entertaining and rewarding than ganking strangers for loot. Keeping that player free or successfully convicting him could be a fun and challenging social experiment for the lawyers. But the game mechanics would have to allow for the same sort of ambiguity and evidence gathering as in other fictional mediums to make lawyering really be engaging.
Many games have had inventor type classes, it just depends on the genre. Unfortunately most of them aren't well implemented, so its just a part crafter part wizard with gadgety names for its spells. If it were well done, and had enough complexity to allow people to actually discover new combinations of effects, it could be quite fun. But most games tend to dumb down any systems like that so that the lowest common denominator can enjoy the class, making them trivial and less interesting to play.
I bet they also charged you a monthly fee and it took months to get to max level. Its awful how they treat Mac users!
Oh wait, no demo, trial accounts, and a $50 box are exactly how most commercial MMORPGs operate, including Everquest for the PC.
They did screw mac users over with the special server though, since if you're going to get an older mmorpg, often times it will be because you already know people who are playing. They probably discontinued support because they just didn't have a large enough user base to justify the expense of supporting it, which is not surprising since they released mac support too late. That isn't what killed it, that was how they admitted that it had already failed.
In a free market, having a minority OS means that fewer game companies will target games toward you. No sense in complaining about it. For linux I would say dual boot with windows for commercial games, but for mac I would say don't buy one in the first place unless you're willing to live with a very limited selection of games.
Guess you've never flown anywhere (I can't think of any major airports without some) or spent much time in a major us city. They have around 8000 stores. A major percentage of all coffee shops are now Starbucks. Its gaining on the number of McDonalds locations, and presumably you've been there at least once.
As for whether you're missing much, no. They actually do have decent coffee, but so do virtually all competing coffee places by now. If you go to a dedicated coffee shop (not a restaurant that happens to have coffee) that makes an effort to have good quality coffee, then they're probably as good or better than Starbucks. But they did help raise the bar, and it was harder to get a decent cup of coffee in much of the US 10 or 20 years ago.
What game are you playing? It is a grind. Missions are cool, but you'll run out of them, and they can be a grind too when you get used to them. I think its a cool game, but it got to be too much of a grind for me. I made it to 16 pretty quickly and enjoyably, but had to grind to 19, where I got bored and quit. And playing other characters even at low levels is all grind since I've seen it all before. I can still see the appeal of the game, but its too much of a treadmill for me.
Bouncing around the room and colliding with a statue falls within the normal and acceptable range of 5 year old behavior. If he was 13 and impaled himself while pretending to be spiderman, it would be dumb. This was just an unfortunate accident, not stupidity. Any lesson about being careful around ivory tusks that the child needed to learn was more than sufficiently reinforced by nearly getting killed, so a little comfort from his parents is much more appropriate than further punishment heaped on top of it. Sometimes things go wrong and there is reason to blame someone, but other times there is no reason to blame anyone. Its a mistake to always try to assign blame, just as much as to never try to assign it.
This isn't a new idea. People tend to get less involved in games that are so open about in-game wealth being based on how much real wealth you spend. Particularly when the game is described like this, primarily in terms of its business model, instead of in terms of gameplay and atmosphere like other games. When they are willing to spend money on auctions its because they want to be ub3r in a game where everyone else had to sink a lot of time into being ub3r. I like MMOGs in theory, but in reality I'm turned off by almost all of them because of the blatant time (and in this case money) sinks.
Every once in a while you'll hear a news article about an "Irish Traveller" in a southern US state committing some kind of fraud or petty theft. They definitely exist in the US, they're just rare compared to in the UK, and limited to certain regions of the country. They aren't really nomads here who would be camping out and bothering farmers. They're more likely to settle down in areas with cheap real estate and take odd-jobs. Of course, a subculture like that can only persist when enough people stay together to keep the subculture alive, so in most parts of the country, "traveller" immigrants were probably just completely absorbed into mainstream society without any remnant of that subculture.
I can see how the interface wouldn't suit everyone, but I personally disagree. I use my iPod (2nd gen, 3G) only when moving, either at the gym, walking, or biking, and I don't have any troubles with the interface. It does require toggling the "hold" switch on and off frequently, but the device is so small in the palm of the hand that I don't find that to be inconvenient. And when I had an old-school flash mp3 player, I had to do the exact same thing, because even push buttons can be pushed accidentally when the player is in a pocket or being bounced around. I recently "downgraded" to a mini, and the interface is even less susceptible to those sorts of problems because its a combination of push button and touch sensitive slide wheel, so the worst that happens from a minor accidental touch is that the volume is slightly adjusted.
And I've stopped playing games for being too simple. For example, while FF1 was great on the Nintendo, since then the bar for RPGs has been raised, and I find the modern FF games too simple to be interesting. If I wanted to watch a movie, most actual movies have better plots, and if I want to play a game I need something engaging.
A game like Morrowind, while not a perfect game, held my interest for a lot longer. A complex game like ATITD held my interest for a lot longer than a very well-done but very simple MMORPG like City of Heroes. I always go for complexity and game mechanics over the story and feel.
Thats why its great that there is variety. So each person can choose what suits their own tastes. I think its wrong to argue that games in general should be more or less complex. Some games should be complex, and some simple. Some should tell great stories, while others have immersive gameplay but a perfunctory story. Which is how it is now.
The one thing that gamers really need is more diversity, more genre-breaking, more experimentation, and fewer cookie-cutter clones of whatever recent titles were popular and are easiest to develop. 80s games haven't all aged well due to their simplicity, but one thing they had going for them was that because of the simplicity they could be developed by individuals or small teams, which lead to a lot of variety and experimentation that is often lacking in modern big-budget games. Art resources, 3d rendering, and a movie license are no substitute for originality in gameplay.
And not only is the MMOG market so saturated that MMORPGs have been getting cancelled left and right, but its one of the most expensive and time consuming genre to develop for. Not an ideal undertaking for a company that is narrowly avoiding bankruptcy. The Fallout games were great and I'd love to see more of them, but I don't think they'd be able to pull off an MMORPG right now.
A console RPG might work out well for them. Fallout seems like it could work really well for XBox or XBox 2, and the XBox could really use some more good RPGs in its lineup. A well done console Fallout title could be very successful, and it wouldn't take nearly as much time and money as an MMORPG, or face such stiff competition.
Re:What's he going to swing on?
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Spider-Man in India
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't disagree, but I don't think they're actually trying to start an ongoing comic book franchise. They just want to print a limited series of them to help promote the Spiderman 2 movie. The original Spiderman movie was a huge success in India for a Hollywood movie, so apparently the character already does have some appeal for many Indians.
There are animals with similar genes, such as cattle bred for more lean meat, and this trait has already been studied in these animals, just not identified in humans. Nobody has mentioned that cattle with these traits are sickly. Of course, we wouldn't really notice anything but the most severe health problems since animal health problems aren't monitored the way human health is.
This gene affects one pathway by which muscle growth is regulated. But organisms evolve with plenty of failsafes and redundancies. One mutation isn't necessarily going to be lethal. There are other ways in which the body keeps tissue growth in check.
Besides, this boy only has about twice the lean muscle mass of his peers. If he were an adult athlete, it wouldn't be that unusual to have more than twice the strength of an average person. Its not like he's the incredible hulk or something, just far above average, which is particularly noticeable at 5 when there is less individual variation in athleticism.
Eugenics can't introduce new traits into a population in a single generation. The best it can do with one generation is very slightly alter the frequency of traits that already exist. The heterozygous form of this gene was in the mother's family since before ww2, and there must be others who have it. This is just the first well documented case in which it came together to be homozygous and scientists were able to identify the trait.
Breed a pretty new strain of beetles or flowers. Learn to brew your own unique blend of beer or wine or spirits and experiment with the local microclimates, hold festivals and max out your tasting skill. Perfect your fireworks displays until they are impressive enough to compete, and get them immortalized to pass some out to others for special events.
Campaign for demipharaoh, win the test of patronage, write a ridiculous law, be a mentor.
Design some puzzles, solve everyone elses puzzles. Go to the plane of wepwawet and climb the tournament ladders for all the games there. Specialize and master a trade like alchemy, paints, wood treating, glass making, or be a pure trader and profit by buying low and selling high and bringing supply to demand. Volunteer for the Nileside Cafe and help others improve their gastronomy. Run your own radio station. Organize a social or special purpose guild to fill an unmet need or enhance coordination.
Most of those activities require some buildings, but for all of them you can find several publicly accessible buildings all over the map that you can use for free, not even counting the buildings you'd have access to by joining any guild. They also require skills, but most of those skills can be freely learned at a university since others have already unlocked them for you.
You could play for months or for your whole game career without ever building much of anything (once you get off welcome island at least), and some people do. If you take away the fighting aspect of most mmorpgs and compare it to atitd without building, atitd definitely comes out ahead in depth and choice of activities.
He talked about playing against 3 kids and said your connection will be laggy. Both of those statements are far more applicable to FPSs, which is only confirmed by his reference to LAN as an alternative to online.
The art discipline in atitd, like the other 6 disciplines, has 7 tests that you compete in. The sculpture you refer to isn't even one of those. Its just the initiation to allow you to sign up for the tests. The tests are all much more in-depth and challenging than the initiations. The initiations are necessarily easy so as not to discourage newbies.
The architecture discipline is really full of tests of resource management, not "architecture", and its only suitable for die-hard players. But every new player starts out thinking that its their calling, since it ties into the very early stages of the game where all you do is build and gather resources.
The fact that you're even talking about bricks and flint shows that you did not in fact play for very long as you claimed. Those are stone age technologies, and there is little reason to spend much time worrying about them. Building your own camp (and they're hardly interchangeable after the very earliest technologies) is entirely optional, and if its not your thing, then any guild would gladly invite you to use their buildings, most asking nothing in return. If you wanted, you could bootstrap yourself to modern technology levels in a matter of days, and get started on any aspect of the game that interests you. And there are dozens of things to do in game that have nothing to do with building.
You don't automate your chess moves, but if you incorporated a chess game into an MMORPG and gave winning any kind of reward, then some moron would use a chess game to tell them what moves to make to increase their odds of winning. If there was a way to play against NPCs for cash or rewards, someone would design a chess bot to get those rewards while they were offline.
The point is perfectly valid. People will automate just about anything they can get away with if its technically and logistically feasible.
The rules of online game were written by a developer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and nearly all the rules apply only to MMORPGs with persistent worlds and rpg character development.
Thus this if you'd read the link you'd see it has absolutely nothing to do with FPSs or RTSs, or anything else that can be played over a LAN. And depending on the game, you probably spend little to no time on PvP against anyone, stinking or otherwise.
You may be able to grow your own car that way, but it wouldn't have a valid registration key, so you couldn't legally register it. Road monitoring systems would report you to the cops as soon as you tried to drive it on a major public road. Eventually there would be an open source car which was legal to grow yourself, but it would be a crappy economy car or a very finicky, difficult to maintain sports car, that you always had to make repairs on. Commercial cars would still be "cooler" for the mainstream, but the open source alternative would keep an upper bound on how much of a premium commercial car companies could profit.
For growing your own house, there may be automated home manufacturing methods that incorporate nanotechnology in their construction, but probably it would require equipment and materials on a scale that would be inefficient for a person to try to do on their own. No matter how the home is constructed, it will require some equipment that it doesn't make sense for a private individual to own just for building one house, and the raw materials and property will cost a major component of the price. While architecture will always be important, its not like the intellectual property of a home is what makes it expensive; its the logistics and considerable infrastructure of actually making it all come together, which nanotechnology won't change.
As for growing your own dinner, once the technology was that good, nothing would try to stop you. Health concerns would be a lasting issue, since it would take lifetimes to really get it right and then be confident that long term reliance on fabricated food had no ill consequences. However, you'd have to pay utility companies for the raw materials and energy in assembling, in much the same way you pay for the regular food that you cook at home. There would be a very long period of time in which it wasn't cost-effective, and an even longer period of time in which the resulting food wouldn't be as high quality as natural food, and would thus be a tradeoff. Even once the typical person started to treat it as commonplace, there would always be a few people who insisted the natural form had health benefits, and some who insist they enjoy natural food more, creating a niche market for natural foods much like organic and gourmet foods now.
In short, I'd say the answer to your question is at least 200 years, but possibly much longer or never. If anyone really knew how to predict the future long term, then either the world would have fallen apart by now, as is constantly being predicted, or we'd all be living like the jetsons already.
There is a negligible amount of actual griefing that occurs in ATITD. Really. What I'm inferring happened is that you were a relatively new player who ran afoul of the unwritten social conventions.
There is a huge amount of land in atitd. In some ways too much land for the few thousand actual players. And resources are spread all over the huge map, meaning that if you look for a while, you can find a place to build your camp and acquire resources without any interference. The problem is that new players start near welcome banners, and usually start building without looking around very long or hard for a good spot. You can't blame them for that, of course, but it does lead to conflicts with more established players who have already built in the area. When new players start building very close to them it causes them problems (the same problems you see from bonfires), so a small minority might respond undiplomatically to what they perceive as an infringement. Also you may build certain kinds of buildings in places that can cause pollution problems for others or collapse their mines. Once you learn the unwritten courtesies of how to coexist with people, nobody would have any reason to grief you. And even if you don't know the rules, most people would try to talk to you first rather than grief you. If you're polite in response, you'll find many people are very helpful to newbies, and you may end up with more in return than you bargained for.
As someone who stuck around for quite a while, I have to agree and disagree with you. It wasn't anywhere near as mindless or repetitive as everquest's crafting. Almost every task that you have to do a lot of can be automated at higher levels of technology. If you didn't have access to those technologies or stick around for long, you might have an exaggerated impression of what the crafting system is like.
However, the legal system pretty much broke down after the first 6 or 8 months. At first it was incredible, no question about it. But as their developer resources stretched thin, new laws were one of the first things to go. Now they're implementing about 2 laws a week, but there is no limit on how many laws may be submitted, which means there is a backlog of laws that have been rotting for several months without even being voted on. That kills the legal system, since any petition written may never be voted on much less implemented.
I do agree with your third point that the larger mmorpgs could learn quite a bit from this game. The broken legal system might not be the best example though, at least not without some modifications to make sure they can actually handle following through with whatever system they implement. The concept is great and really important, its just inherently labor intensive unless they can find a way to make implementing it easier on the developers.
CDs don't last forever. Tape backups are overkill for the average consumer who isn't conducting important business with their home computer. Its hard to really say what will stand the test of time without testing for a few decades, but I have a stack of old hard drives that still work fine, and I have lost several CDs over time. One even exploded in a CD drive, destroying both. If you need 20 CDs to back up important data, you only need 1 to fail to defeat the archive, and its inevitable that 1 will fail eventually.
Using a web based email service has a number of built-in convenience. One of them is automatic backups. Another is being able to easily check email from any computer.
Japan would be easier to map out than the US. There are more people packed into a denser area. Crude 3d info about buildings doesn't have to take up vast amounts of space.
It is quite an impressive feat of data collection though, even if it only covered one major city like Tokyo (and it goes beyond that). Cartographers already need to have people drive through a city recording streets and distances. With clever enough software and some cameras mounted on a car, you could get a crude 3d map of a city by systematically driving through it. You might need the human drivers to track lanes, one way streets, and confirm street addresses though. This is just an incremental improvement over the kinds of data already in GPS navigation systems and online maps, but its quite a visually impressive one.
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Possibly, but not certainly. While there is a limit on how much drive space you need, it is difficult to further miniaturizing batteries, and battery life is always important.
Plus, there is a limit to how small a thing needs to be before it is no longer an asset. A laptop so small that it is hard to read the screen or type on the keyboard is no longer benefitting from its small size for many users, and similarly a stamp-sized mp3 player would be too small for some.
My older iPod broke and I decided to replace it with a mini, which I like and is big enough for half of my music collection (the other half has a lot of crap I don't really need anyway). But when it starts getting this small, I can see someone choosing a model with 50% more volume for double the battery life.
You say lawyers and cops are boring. I'm not personally a big fan of the Law&Order type genre, but its a very significant genre in television, movies, and books. Of course you don't fictionalize all the boring parts of a profession, you streamline it and dramatize it to enhance the exciting parts of it and downplay the tedium. In a "realistic" fantasy game, if that isn't a total oxymoron, you'd spend 99.9% of your time travelling, acquiring food, sleeping, and just generally being bored. And when the action came, there would be a 50-50 shot your character would be permanently dead and the game would be over. A terrible game. But games don't have to be realistic. There is plenty of lawyer and cop material to make for interesting games. It just isn't done much because game companies like to clone each other's successful games rather than experiment with new genres. In a truly interactive multiplayer world, playing a fictionalized game version of a lawyer or cop could be far more fun than hacking away at dragons. A few MMOG games are pk anarchy with few rules, but most have very rigid limits on what you can do to other players. With a decent in-game legal system, the rules of behavior could be loosened without eliminating accountability. Hunting down a real criminal player as a cop would be far more entertaining and rewarding than ganking strangers for loot. Keeping that player free or successfully convicting him could be a fun and challenging social experiment for the lawyers. But the game mechanics would have to allow for the same sort of ambiguity and evidence gathering as in other fictional mediums to make lawyering really be engaging. Many games have had inventor type classes, it just depends on the genre. Unfortunately most of them aren't well implemented, so its just a part crafter part wizard with gadgety names for its spells. If it were well done, and had enough complexity to allow people to actually discover new combinations of effects, it could be quite fun. But most games tend to dumb down any systems like that so that the lowest common denominator can enjoy the class, making them trivial and less interesting to play.
I bet they also charged you a monthly fee and it took months to get to max level. Its awful how they treat Mac users!
Oh wait, no demo, trial accounts, and a $50 box are exactly how most commercial MMORPGs operate, including Everquest for the PC.
They did screw mac users over with the special server though, since if you're going to get an older mmorpg, often times it will be because you already know people who are playing. They probably discontinued support because they just didn't have a large enough user base to justify the expense of supporting it, which is not surprising since they released mac support too late. That isn't what killed it, that was how they admitted that it had already failed.
In a free market, having a minority OS means that fewer game companies will target games toward you. No sense in complaining about it. For linux I would say dual boot with windows for commercial games, but for mac I would say don't buy one in the first place unless you're willing to live with a very limited selection of games.
Guess you've never flown anywhere (I can't think of any major airports without some) or spent much time in a major us city. They have around 8000 stores. A major percentage of all coffee shops are now Starbucks. Its gaining on the number of McDonalds locations, and presumably you've been there at least once.
As for whether you're missing much, no. They actually do have decent coffee, but so do virtually all competing coffee places by now. If you go to a dedicated coffee shop (not a restaurant that happens to have coffee) that makes an effort to have good quality coffee, then they're probably as good or better than Starbucks. But they did help raise the bar, and it was harder to get a decent cup of coffee in much of the US 10 or 20 years ago.
What game are you playing? It is a grind. Missions are cool, but you'll run out of them, and they can be a grind too when you get used to them. I think its a cool game, but it got to be too much of a grind for me. I made it to 16 pretty quickly and enjoyably, but had to grind to 19, where I got bored and quit. And playing other characters even at low levels is all grind since I've seen it all before. I can still see the appeal of the game, but its too much of a treadmill for me.
Bouncing around the room and colliding with a statue falls within the normal and acceptable range of 5 year old behavior. If he was 13 and impaled himself while pretending to be spiderman, it would be dumb. This was just an unfortunate accident, not stupidity. Any lesson about being careful around ivory tusks that the child needed to learn was more than sufficiently reinforced by nearly getting killed, so a little comfort from his parents is much more appropriate than further punishment heaped on top of it. Sometimes things go wrong and there is reason to blame someone, but other times there is no reason to blame anyone. Its a mistake to always try to assign blame, just as much as to never try to assign it.
This isn't a new idea. People tend to get less involved in games that are so open about in-game wealth being based on how much real wealth you spend. Particularly when the game is described like this, primarily in terms of its business model, instead of in terms of gameplay and atmosphere like other games. When they are willing to spend money on auctions its because they want to be ub3r in a game where everyone else had to sink a lot of time into being ub3r. I like MMOGs in theory, but in reality I'm turned off by almost all of them because of the blatant time (and in this case money) sinks.
Every once in a while you'll hear a news article about an "Irish Traveller" in a southern US state committing some kind of fraud or petty theft. They definitely exist in the US, they're just rare compared to in the UK, and limited to certain regions of the country. They aren't really nomads here who would be camping out and bothering farmers. They're more likely to settle down in areas with cheap real estate and take odd-jobs. Of course, a subculture like that can only persist when enough people stay together to keep the subculture alive, so in most parts of the country, "traveller" immigrants were probably just completely absorbed into mainstream society without any remnant of that subculture.
I can see how the interface wouldn't suit everyone, but I personally disagree. I use my iPod (2nd gen, 3G) only when moving, either at the gym, walking, or biking, and I don't have any troubles with the interface. It does require toggling the "hold" switch on and off frequently, but the device is so small in the palm of the hand that I don't find that to be inconvenient. And when I had an old-school flash mp3 player, I had to do the exact same thing, because even push buttons can be pushed accidentally when the player is in a pocket or being bounced around. I recently "downgraded" to a mini, and the interface is even less susceptible to those sorts of problems because its a combination of push button and touch sensitive slide wheel, so the worst that happens from a minor accidental touch is that the volume is slightly adjusted.
And I've stopped playing games for being too simple. For example, while FF1 was great on the Nintendo, since then the bar for RPGs has been raised, and I find the modern FF games too simple to be interesting. If I wanted to watch a movie, most actual movies have better plots, and if I want to play a game I need something engaging.
A game like Morrowind, while not a perfect game, held my interest for a lot longer. A complex game like ATITD held my interest for a lot longer than a very well-done but very simple MMORPG like City of Heroes. I always go for complexity and game mechanics over the story and feel.
Thats why its great that there is variety. So each person can choose what suits their own tastes. I think its wrong to argue that games in general should be more or less complex. Some games should be complex, and some simple. Some should tell great stories, while others have immersive gameplay but a perfunctory story. Which is how it is now.
The one thing that gamers really need is more diversity, more genre-breaking, more experimentation, and fewer cookie-cutter clones of whatever recent titles were popular and are easiest to develop. 80s games haven't all aged well due to their simplicity, but one thing they had going for them was that because of the simplicity they could be developed by individuals or small teams, which lead to a lot of variety and experimentation that is often lacking in modern big-budget games. Art resources, 3d rendering, and a movie license are no substitute for originality in gameplay.
And not only is the MMOG market so saturated that MMORPGs have been getting cancelled left and right, but its one of the most expensive and time consuming genre to develop for. Not an ideal undertaking for a company that is narrowly avoiding bankruptcy. The Fallout games were great and I'd love to see more of them, but I don't think they'd be able to pull off an MMORPG right now.
A console RPG might work out well for them. Fallout seems like it could work really well for XBox or XBox 2, and the XBox could really use some more good RPGs in its lineup. A well done console Fallout title could be very successful, and it wouldn't take nearly as much time and money as an MMORPG, or face such stiff competition.
I don't disagree, but I don't think they're actually trying to start an ongoing comic book franchise. They just want to print a limited series of them to help promote the Spiderman 2 movie. The original Spiderman movie was a huge success in India for a Hollywood movie, so apparently the character already does have some appeal for many Indians.
There are animals with similar genes, such as cattle bred for more lean meat, and this trait has already been studied in these animals, just not identified in humans. Nobody has mentioned that cattle with these traits are sickly. Of course, we wouldn't really notice anything but the most severe health problems since animal health problems aren't monitored the way human health is.
This gene affects one pathway by which muscle growth is regulated. But organisms evolve with plenty of failsafes and redundancies. One mutation isn't necessarily going to be lethal. There are other ways in which the body keeps tissue growth in check.
Besides, this boy only has about twice the lean muscle mass of his peers. If he were an adult athlete, it wouldn't be that unusual to have more than twice the strength of an average person. Its not like he's the incredible hulk or something, just far above average, which is particularly noticeable at 5 when there is less individual variation in athleticism.
Eugenics can't introduce new traits into a population in a single generation. The best it can do with one generation is very slightly alter the frequency of traits that already exist. The heterozygous form of this gene was in the mother's family since before ww2, and there must be others who have it. This is just the first well documented case in which it came together to be homozygous and scientists were able to identify the trait.
Breed a pretty new strain of beetles or flowers. Learn to brew your own unique blend of beer or wine or spirits and experiment with the local microclimates, hold festivals and max out your tasting skill. Perfect your fireworks displays until they are impressive enough to compete, and get them immortalized to pass some out to others for special events. Campaign for demipharaoh, win the test of patronage, write a ridiculous law, be a mentor. Design some puzzles, solve everyone elses puzzles. Go to the plane of wepwawet and climb the tournament ladders for all the games there. Specialize and master a trade like alchemy, paints, wood treating, glass making, or be a pure trader and profit by buying low and selling high and bringing supply to demand. Volunteer for the Nileside Cafe and help others improve their gastronomy. Run your own radio station. Organize a social or special purpose guild to fill an unmet need or enhance coordination.
Most of those activities require some buildings, but for all of them you can find several publicly accessible buildings all over the map that you can use for free, not even counting the buildings you'd have access to by joining any guild. They also require skills, but most of those skills can be freely learned at a university since others have already unlocked them for you.
You could play for months or for your whole game career without ever building much of anything (once you get off welcome island at least), and some people do. If you take away the fighting aspect of most mmorpgs and compare it to atitd without building, atitd definitely comes out ahead in depth and choice of activities.
He talked about playing against 3 kids and said your connection will be laggy. Both of those statements are far more applicable to FPSs, which is only confirmed by his reference to LAN as an alternative to online.
The art discipline in atitd, like the other 6 disciplines, has 7 tests that you compete in. The sculpture you refer to isn't even one of those. Its just the initiation to allow you to sign up for the tests. The tests are all much more in-depth and challenging than the initiations. The initiations are necessarily easy so as not to discourage newbies.
The architecture discipline is really full of tests of resource management, not "architecture", and its only suitable for die-hard players. But every new player starts out thinking that its their calling, since it ties into the very early stages of the game where all you do is build and gather resources.
The fact that you're even talking about bricks and flint shows that you did not in fact play for very long as you claimed. Those are stone age technologies, and there is little reason to spend much time worrying about them. Building your own camp (and they're hardly interchangeable after the very earliest technologies) is entirely optional, and if its not your thing, then any guild would gladly invite you to use their buildings, most asking nothing in return. If you wanted, you could bootstrap yourself to modern technology levels in a matter of days, and get started on any aspect of the game that interests you. And there are dozens of things to do in game that have nothing to do with building.
You don't automate your chess moves, but if you incorporated a chess game into an MMORPG and gave winning any kind of reward, then some moron would use a chess game to tell them what moves to make to increase their odds of winning. If there was a way to play against NPCs for cash or rewards, someone would design a chess bot to get those rewards while they were offline. The point is perfectly valid. People will automate just about anything they can get away with if its technically and logistically feasible.
The rules of online game were written by a developer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies, and nearly all the rules apply only to MMORPGs with persistent worlds and rpg character development.
Thus this if you'd read the link you'd see it has absolutely nothing to do with FPSs or RTSs, or anything else that can be played over a LAN. And depending on the game, you probably spend little to no time on PvP against anyone, stinking or otherwise.
You may be able to grow your own car that way, but it wouldn't have a valid registration key, so you couldn't legally register it. Road monitoring systems would report you to the cops as soon as you tried to drive it on a major public road. Eventually there would be an open source car which was legal to grow yourself, but it would be a crappy economy car or a very finicky, difficult to maintain sports car, that you always had to make repairs on. Commercial cars would still be "cooler" for the mainstream, but the open source alternative would keep an upper bound on how much of a premium commercial car companies could profit.
For growing your own house, there may be automated home manufacturing methods that incorporate nanotechnology in their construction, but probably it would require equipment and materials on a scale that would be inefficient for a person to try to do on their own. No matter how the home is constructed, it will require some equipment that it doesn't make sense for a private individual to own just for building one house, and the raw materials and property will cost a major component of the price. While architecture will always be important, its not like the intellectual property of a home is what makes it expensive; its the logistics and considerable infrastructure of actually making it all come together, which nanotechnology won't change.
As for growing your own dinner, once the technology was that good, nothing would try to stop you. Health concerns would be a lasting issue, since it would take lifetimes to really get it right and then be confident that long term reliance on fabricated food had no ill consequences. However, you'd have to pay utility companies for the raw materials and energy in assembling, in much the same way you pay for the regular food that you cook at home. There would be a very long period of time in which it wasn't cost-effective, and an even longer period of time in which the resulting food wouldn't be as high quality as natural food, and would thus be a tradeoff. Even once the typical person started to treat it as commonplace, there would always be a few people who insisted the natural form had health benefits, and some who insist they enjoy natural food more, creating a niche market for natural foods much like organic and gourmet foods now.
In short, I'd say the answer to your question is at least 200 years, but possibly much longer or never. If anyone really knew how to predict the future long term, then either the world would have fallen apart by now, as is constantly being predicted, or we'd all be living like the jetsons already.
Not entirely true. There are fine steel axes, sledgehammers, scythes, iron blades, and lead mallets. They just aren't used as weapons. :p
There is a negligible amount of actual griefing that occurs in ATITD. Really. What I'm inferring happened is that you were a relatively new player who ran afoul of the unwritten social conventions. There is a huge amount of land in atitd. In some ways too much land for the few thousand actual players. And resources are spread all over the huge map, meaning that if you look for a while, you can find a place to build your camp and acquire resources without any interference. The problem is that new players start near welcome banners, and usually start building without looking around very long or hard for a good spot. You can't blame them for that, of course, but it does lead to conflicts with more established players who have already built in the area. When new players start building very close to them it causes them problems (the same problems you see from bonfires), so a small minority might respond undiplomatically to what they perceive as an infringement. Also you may build certain kinds of buildings in places that can cause pollution problems for others or collapse their mines. Once you learn the unwritten courtesies of how to coexist with people, nobody would have any reason to grief you. And even if you don't know the rules, most people would try to talk to you first rather than grief you. If you're polite in response, you'll find many people are very helpful to newbies, and you may end up with more in return than you bargained for.
As someone who stuck around for quite a while, I have to agree and disagree with you. It wasn't anywhere near as mindless or repetitive as everquest's crafting. Almost every task that you have to do a lot of can be automated at higher levels of technology. If you didn't have access to those technologies or stick around for long, you might have an exaggerated impression of what the crafting system is like. However, the legal system pretty much broke down after the first 6 or 8 months. At first it was incredible, no question about it. But as their developer resources stretched thin, new laws were one of the first things to go. Now they're implementing about 2 laws a week, but there is no limit on how many laws may be submitted, which means there is a backlog of laws that have been rotting for several months without even being voted on. That kills the legal system, since any petition written may never be voted on much less implemented. I do agree with your third point that the larger mmorpgs could learn quite a bit from this game. The broken legal system might not be the best example though, at least not without some modifications to make sure they can actually handle following through with whatever system they implement. The concept is great and really important, its just inherently labor intensive unless they can find a way to make implementing it easier on the developers.
CDs don't last forever. Tape backups are overkill for the average consumer who isn't conducting important business with their home computer. Its hard to really say what will stand the test of time without testing for a few decades, but I have a stack of old hard drives that still work fine, and I have lost several CDs over time. One even exploded in a CD drive, destroying both. If you need 20 CDs to back up important data, you only need 1 to fail to defeat the archive, and its inevitable that 1 will fail eventually. Using a web based email service has a number of built-in convenience. One of them is automatic backups. Another is being able to easily check email from any computer.
Japan would be easier to map out than the US. There are more people packed into a denser area. Crude 3d info about buildings doesn't have to take up vast amounts of space.
It is quite an impressive feat of data collection though, even if it only covered one major city like Tokyo (and it goes beyond that). Cartographers already need to have people drive through a city recording streets and distances. With clever enough software and some cameras mounted on a car, you could get a crude 3d map of a city by systematically driving through it. You might need the human drivers to track lanes, one way streets, and confirm street addresses though. This is just an incremental improvement over the kinds of data already in GPS navigation systems and online maps, but its quite a visually impressive one.