This needs slapping with a massive [citation needed].
How about a massive "go away wikitroll."
A mere 400 years is not enough time for significant evolutionary changes.
Oh, really? We have an immense number of people today living through all sorts of illnesses that they would have died from earlier. We have joint replacements for almost every imaginable joint. We have infertility treatments to propagate the genes of those who, normally speaking, wouldn't reproduce.
Selective breeding - and don't kid yourself, humanity is nowhere close to being a "natural population" - produces amazing changes in a species in as little as 4 generations. Given a human generation of ~20 years, 400 years = 20 generations.
Humanity has been pushing in every possible way - environmental control, waging a virtual war on certain pests, "managing" our waste. Further, as a gregarious species, we try to keep members of our particular "tribe" going even when their presence is detrimental. Hell, we try to make sure that those of us who show the worst genetic problems can breed. And this has been going on far longer than the 400 years I allotted to the breeding-for-stupidity problem, this has been going on for millenia.
The saving grace of our species is, and has always been, our brains. We're not, pound for pound, nearly as well equipped for survival as most species. We don't have tough armor, in the form of exoskeleton or thickened hide. We've lost almost all of our protective hair for temperature regulation. We don't have nicely built-in natural weapons like claws or fangs. What did we do? We made knives. We skinned other animals and stitched their hide into clothing for warmth and armor. We worked out how to make slings and bows. We started altering the environment to suit our own needs, rather than adjusting ourselves to the local environment.
The downside of this is that we don't breed for "strength", at least not exclusively. The physical improvement of humanity has not progressed like the physical improvement of other challenged species would seem to. In fact, certain things seem to be atrophying quite regularly - like the shrinking of our teeth, since the need for tougher teeth (to handle the wear and tear of tougher foods) has vanished with the advent of the cooking process and pre-softening everything.
Worst yet now, as more and more countries have entered the "welfare state" model, is that even intelligence isn't a requisite to pass your genes on to the next generation. The intelligent, responsible people have maybe 1-2 kids on average and practice birth control (how ironic, withholding their genes from the next generation) while the dumbshits living on handouts have 10 or so kids, who then spend their lives pissing in the gene pool the same as their parents.
Humans actually have one of the weakest immune systems out there, mostly because we've been breeding less and less for hardiness (and worse, in the past ~400 years less for intelligence as well) thanks to the "contributions" of the few bright sparks who come up with things like, say, "the crapper" and make it so that those with downright piss-poor immune systems pass them on to the next generation.
Fish don't care that they live in water in which they, and all the other fish as well as plenty of mammals and birds, have pissed and shit. There are organisms out there that take advantage of it - one animal's waste is another's food.
Greywater systems actually result in better plant growth than irrigating with "cleaned" tap water, because it feeds extra nutrients into the soil that the plants can take advantage of. Proper in-home treatment systems (or even the mere dilution of "blackwater" with greywater) could easily make it possible to clean up "used" home water even further and reduce waste.
What you're talking about - the "not really safe to put back in there" - is industrial contaminants, which we do need to deal with. The rest? Compost. Fertilizer. Eventually, back around to food.
We're talking about an MMORPG that has never taken its own EULA seriously, never done serious work to curtail the influence sellers (read: gold farmers), and never done anything to fix the various missions they themselves created that were being used as farms.
In other words, they already had a broken system. The fact that Mission Architect broke it even further should surprise no one.
New players rarely, if ever, come to CoH/CoV any more. If they do arrive, the chance of their being treated well and learning the game and having fun is virtually nil. Getting into anything on the high-level scale is either a function of grinding all day and all night (not fun) or worming your way into one of the insular and unhelpful "Supergroups" (guilds) in the game, also not fun since you're just signing up for all the usual drama-queen stuff that goes on with any organizational setup like that.
If they really wanted to improve the game, focusing on making it fun at all levels would be the way to go. Unfortunately, the game's not set up like that, and so the race to 50 (or 46 and then locking, if you're making a "bridging" character for the powerleveling crap) will continue unabated.
I think MS needs to rethink their naming. I doubt this is what they have in mind. Besides, the Wii beat them to it in designing a controller that looks like a sex toy.
That's easy enough to get around, and I saw how they did it.
The Prof gets an advance from the publisher for each edition. Since it's every 1-2 years, that's a steady stream. Sure, they "make nothing" from the sale of the books at our particular college, but they still make plenty with a decently sizable advance, and since they can guarantee a captive market, the "advance" for the next edition is pretty much assured.
My sympathy level dropped by several levels when I found out he's making college textbooks.
Why? Because I've been through that ugly racket. Not one of my college textbooks was under $250. All of them were written "by the professor", or co-authored by same, and then required for their courses so that they had a captive audience to "sell" to. "New editions" came out every other year, the only difference between which was the numbers inside the practice problems and the page count (altered by resizing the font). The full textbook + labbook + "labpack" (a set of components that could have been bought for 1/10 the cost at the local Fry's, but for which they "assessed" the fee without giving us a choice to look elsewhere) set for my courseload actually came out more expensive than in-state tuition my first semester.
For every "change" or "new edition" that actually included new research in the field, there were 100 more that were nothing but crap-ass "planned obsolescence" maneuvers designed to squeeze students for every penny by destroying the used-book market. One of these asstard professors actually forced people to hand in the back cover of their book with the final exam or take a zero grade, in order to make sure that there were no second-hand books on the market.
I would have loved to see a book available for $50. I'm impressed that it retails for that. I wish you well as a writer. But I have much less sympathy for you based on your line of work, having been abused by your peers.
I have not bought a Kindle. This nutter thinks that newspapers could "save" by distributing over Kindle instead of on paper.
Guy down later in the forum has it exactly right. You can't put a Kindle in your waiting room. If your "copy" of the paper is on a Kindle, you can't read the sports page while someone else has the world section or the comics. You can't hand "your copy" of the paper to someone else, or leave it behind once you're done with it if it's on a Kindle (something I do regularly - hey, I don't know the next person coming by, but I imagine they might want to read something too).
Hell, if it's on a Kindle, we lose yesterday's newspaper - so how will we wrap today's fish?
In all seriousness, that's the problem with DRM. It's never about "protecting copyright." It's always about some more nefarious purpose, like destroying the doctrine of first sale. Remember how $ony patented a method to have video games "signed" by the first console they were put in, and subsequently refuse to run on any other console? That was just one of them.
Most of the drain users see today is OS bloat and Virus scan software bloat. Face it, A "fully updated" WinXP SP3 with a fully updated, modern antivirus package needs ~4 times the hardware a base WinXP (or even Win2K SP4) system would want.
Hell, people bought the crappy "Chrono Crusade" anime, even though it had nothing to do with the games, on the basis that ADV re-drew the logo to look vaguely similar and encourage brand confusion...
Give three little boys each a cardboard tube. Two of them will begin smacking each other on the head with it. The gay one will start drawing little flowers on it, before the other two realize what he's doing and start smacking HIM over the head.
It's life. You say that "something especially barbaric is stirring in our collective unconscious" - DUH. Why do we like seeing explosions, big boom, loud noise? Why do we have a visceral need to stop and stare if there's been a car crash? Why do we enjoy hearing ghost stories around a campfire?
Humans are omnivores. We eat both plant and animal matter. We evolved with two sometimes-conflicting urges, thereby; the urge to harvest and hoard (gatherer) and the urge to HUNT. We evolved just as much to enjoy munching down some berries as we did to enjoy the thrill of the chase.
You're damned right we have something "barbaric" in our collective unconscious. We like physical exertion (at least, the ones that haven't turned into blobs on the couch). We play sports. We run and cycle and swim. We lift weights at the gym. Our brains get a kick out of a bit of adrenaline, whether it's from hunting food or dropping down that first steep drop of a roller coaster.
And yeah, even the couch potatoes have something they can do now. Hell, those of us that aren't couch potatoes can still sit down and enjoy a good game, whether it's the mindless team laser-tag style stuff (Halo, Quake, etc) or the more cerebral/visceral Bioshock style.
Oh, and by the by - congrats on raising some really gay kids, if you're going to force them to ignore and abhor, rather than understand and accept and live peacefully with, their baser urges.
Y'know, as an interactive medium, games have the ability to show us far more amazing, detailed, and yes, shocking insights into the human condition.
Consider the various moral choices in Fallout 3. Functionally, the game allows you to decide what you want to be. If you want to be a slaver? It is possible. If you want to, instead, rescue slaves? Very much also possible. They could have made a game that railroads the player into a goody two-shoes mentality, but they left it open, and the play experience (and corresponding rewards/penalties) are as varied as the people and the approach they decide to take. Heck, if you're "too good" in the game, you'll step on some bad guys' toes and get a price on your head - but at the end of the day that's decidedly realistic, there are indeed certain people in the world who don't like it when someone else is "too good" or, by virtue of doing a good deed, gets in the way of their personal profits/goals.
If there were one change I'd have made to Fallout 3, I'd have included the ability to have lovers/wives/etc. There are enough subplots in the game involving family, enough families, heck the whole Republic of Dave thing, that it would have added another element to the game. The unfortunate problem with this is that American society is prudish and stunted when it comes to sexuality, to the point where what is considered "normal" is actually quite unhealthily repressed.
As for the rest... well, let's face it. Today, there are parents trying to get rid of video games. In the 80s, it was certain music. In earlier decades, there were parents pissed off about cowboy books. Sometimes, you just have dumbass parents out there, and in groups they can get even worse.
At around $100/tank of fuel, and a little less than 1 tank of fuel per week it comes to around $7k/year
If it costs you $100/tank, you're in one of those shithole commie countries where 90% of the cost of fuel is taxes, or else you were driving something like a Hummer. Even at the height of gas shock, I was still under $50 for a 300-mile fillup. My loan payments were $650/month Insurance payments were another $450/month
Again lending credence to the idea that your "savings" are due to the fact that you had a stupidly overpriced, oversized vehicle.
I could "use public transportation." I'd still drive 5 miles roundtrip to the station every day. And of course, the station is only available 6:30am-8am and return trip 4pm-7pm. So if I need to stay late at work I need my car. If I need to go help a friend after work, or pick up kids, I need my car. If I want to go somewhere after work, or during lunch hour, I need my car.
In other words, if all I did was ever go to work exactly on time, and come back to home exactly on time, I could do it. But my life isn't predictable like that. Imagine you're a normal family now, mom, dad, 2.5 kids, possibly older parents to take care of. On any given day something could happen and you need a car to go help someone out.
If public transportation were ubiquitous, hey, no problem. But it's not. Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas. It may mean some nights, an empty bus is going up and down the street, but the alternative is people NOT riding in the morning because they're afraid of not being able to get a bus in the evening.
If anyone who knows what they're doing have to waste their time beating their heads against a wall composed of overweight teenagers living in their parents' basements, they're going to give up and go back to the real world every time.
There we go.
The problem with Wikipedia, in a nutshell: clueless morons with no life, no social skills beyond MMORPG-style "how do I game the system to become an admin" playing, and no expertise in anything (least of all writing and grammar) are given the ability not simply to edit, but to ban others from editing.
This is the equivalent of giving someone who's been on cocaine for 20 years a badge, a loaded gun, and telling him to shoot anyone that he thinks might be breaking the law first and ask questions later.
The "most likely spot" to hit, is actually depending on the following factors: - Speed of collision - Braking/coasting/accelerating (braking typically causes a vehicle's nose to dip, accelerating causes it to rise) - Height of the pedestrian in relation to the height of the vehicle's front bumper/grille. - Angle of collision (pedestrian motion will be different if hit head-on, as opposed to someone trying to whip around a right-hand turn and blindsiding someone who's crossing properly; angle also changes if you're not at a right-angle intersection)
The other problem is, does this truly cushion the blow, taking the energy into the crashbag and causing the pedestrian to be more likely to remain on the stopped vehicle, or is it more elastic, imparting acceleration back into the poor pedestrian in time for them to slide off the car - now accelerated to a good 15-20mph or higher - and then hit their head on the cement?
One of the most underutilized - but most fun - options on the original Xbox was the ability of certain games (especially the Tony Hawk series) to replace the default "in-game" music with music ripped from CD's. Make a custom CD with your own chosen playlist, drop it on the box, and boom, you had a completely different experience. I couldn't stand half of the crap-rap they put in, for instance, but I could tell it "never play" those songs, and add in, say, a bunch of Frank Sinatra to the list, or pretty much anything else I decided to put in.
I wish more games had that option. It's one thing if you have a cutscene with dedicated music or something, but something else for sports games or games that wind up trying to have a "top 40s" playlist stuck in as an afterthought. I know I, personally, get bored with games quicker if I don't like the music that's being blared.
No, these are the same people who show up whenever the military tries to recruit, by whatever means. They don't care about the means, they just hate the military.
As to why I'm not in the military, there are certain medical conditions (such as congenital heart conditions) that pretty much disqualify you from any military service. I had the bad luck to get one.
Your demonstrated reading comprehension, meanwhile, makes me wonder if you are perchance a chimp in a zoo?
Everyone's opinion here - in essence - can easily be boiled down to "waah I hate the military so they shouldn't be able to recruit."
Why not? After all, you people are all gung-ho on fucking the military, making sure that they don't have proper equipment, making sure that every battle they walk into is a losing one because they're tied down with a list of orders and restrictions thicker than a novel by Tolstoy.
Know what? The military recruits. We have a VOLUNTEER military. We have to ask people to join. We call that "recruiting." Showing them simulations of actual military operations today, is no different than they used to do in my childhood when they'd come around to places like our church festivals, give all the kids a tour of a tank, show them what the (unloaded of course) weapons really felt like, what the uniforms looked like.
They were "recruiting" kids just as much then as now. Or did you not play with GI Joe figures as a kid? Oh, wait - that's right, you were probably one of the boys playing with frilly dresses and trying on your mom's bra instead.
There is no difference. Then as now, there are a bunch of bleeding heart idiots who hate the same military that exists to keep them safe and serve them. The people who go out, fight, and die for the right of some left-wing bleeding heart asshole to come piss on their grave and everything they stood for later. And then, just as now, those same fucking ass retards are trying to stop the military from recruiting - to kick them out of malls if they set up a recruiting office, to kick them off college campuses. Hell, some of these ass-tards actually object to the existence of the GI Bill because it "recruits" people who haven't yet been through college yet - and yet it's proven to be a wonderful opportunity for many great citizens to get an education after serving their country.
Slashdot Mirror
This needs slapping with a massive [citation needed].
How about a massive "go away wikitroll."
A mere 400 years is not enough time for significant evolutionary changes.
Oh, really? We have an immense number of people today living through all sorts of illnesses that they would have died from earlier. We have joint replacements for almost every imaginable joint. We have infertility treatments to propagate the genes of those who, normally speaking, wouldn't reproduce.
Selective breeding - and don't kid yourself, humanity is nowhere close to being a "natural population" - produces amazing changes in a species in as little as 4 generations. Given a human generation of ~20 years, 400 years = 20 generations.
Humanity has been pushing in every possible way - environmental control, waging a virtual war on certain pests, "managing" our waste. Further, as a gregarious species, we try to keep members of our particular "tribe" going even when their presence is detrimental. Hell, we try to make sure that those of us who show the worst genetic problems can breed. And this has been going on far longer than the 400 years I allotted to the breeding-for-stupidity problem, this has been going on for millenia.
The saving grace of our species is, and has always been, our brains. We're not, pound for pound, nearly as well equipped for survival as most species. We don't have tough armor, in the form of exoskeleton or thickened hide. We've lost almost all of our protective hair for temperature regulation. We don't have nicely built-in natural weapons like claws or fangs. What did we do? We made knives. We skinned other animals and stitched their hide into clothing for warmth and armor. We worked out how to make slings and bows. We started altering the environment to suit our own needs, rather than adjusting ourselves to the local environment.
The downside of this is that we don't breed for "strength", at least not exclusively. The physical improvement of humanity has not progressed like the physical improvement of other challenged species would seem to. In fact, certain things seem to be atrophying quite regularly - like the shrinking of our teeth, since the need for tougher teeth (to handle the wear and tear of tougher foods) has vanished with the advent of the cooking process and pre-softening everything.
Worst yet now, as more and more countries have entered the "welfare state" model, is that even intelligence isn't a requisite to pass your genes on to the next generation. The intelligent, responsible people have maybe 1-2 kids on average and practice birth control (how ironic, withholding their genes from the next generation) while the dumbshits living on handouts have 10 or so kids, who then spend their lives pissing in the gene pool the same as their parents.
Urban greywater - on a building-wide or city-wide level - could be implemented fairly simply, actually.
Sigh.
Humans actually have one of the weakest immune systems out there, mostly because we've been breeding less and less for hardiness (and worse, in the past ~400 years less for intelligence as well) thanks to the "contributions" of the few bright sparks who come up with things like, say, "the crapper" and make it so that those with downright piss-poor immune systems pass them on to the next generation.
Fish don't care that they live in water in which they, and all the other fish as well as plenty of mammals and birds, have pissed and shit. There are organisms out there that take advantage of it - one animal's waste is another's food.
Greywater systems actually result in better plant growth than irrigating with "cleaned" tap water, because it feeds extra nutrients into the soil that the plants can take advantage of. Proper in-home treatment systems (or even the mere dilution of "blackwater" with greywater) could easily make it possible to clean up "used" home water even further and reduce waste.
What you're talking about - the "not really safe to put back in there" - is industrial contaminants, which we do need to deal with. The rest? Compost. Fertilizer. Eventually, back around to food.
Lawl.
We're talking about an MMORPG that has never taken its own EULA seriously, never done serious work to curtail the influence sellers (read: gold farmers), and never done anything to fix the various missions they themselves created that were being used as farms.
In other words, they already had a broken system. The fact that Mission Architect broke it even further should surprise no one.
New players rarely, if ever, come to CoH/CoV any more. If they do arrive, the chance of their being treated well and learning the game and having fun is virtually nil. Getting into anything on the high-level scale is either a function of grinding all day and all night (not fun) or worming your way into one of the insular and unhelpful "Supergroups" (guilds) in the game, also not fun since you're just signing up for all the usual drama-queen stuff that goes on with any organizational setup like that.
If they really wanted to improve the game, focusing on making it fun at all levels would be the way to go. Unfortunately, the game's not set up like that, and so the race to 50 (or 46 and then locking, if you're making a "bridging" character for the powerleveling crap) will continue unabated.
Oh, come on, there are so many better jokes for that.
"Rod of Lordly Might" comes to mind...
This is the first search result for "magic wand":
http://www.amazon.com/Vibratex-HV-250R-Hitachi-Magic-Massager/dp/B00005M1WE
I think MS needs to rethink their naming. I doubt this is what they have in mind. Besides, the Wii beat them to it in designing a controller that looks like a sex toy.
That's easy enough to get around, and I saw how they did it.
The Prof gets an advance from the publisher for each edition. Since it's every 1-2 years, that's a steady stream. Sure, they "make nothing" from the sale of the books at our particular college, but they still make plenty with a decently sizable advance, and since they can guarantee a captive market, the "advance" for the next edition is pretty much assured.
My sympathy level dropped by several levels when I found out he's making college textbooks.
Why? Because I've been through that ugly racket. Not one of my college textbooks was under $250. All of them were written "by the professor", or co-authored by same, and then required for their courses so that they had a captive audience to "sell" to. "New editions" came out every other year, the only difference between which was the numbers inside the practice problems and the page count (altered by resizing the font). The full textbook + labbook + "labpack" (a set of components that could have been bought for 1/10 the cost at the local Fry's, but for which they "assessed" the fee without giving us a choice to look elsewhere) set for my courseload actually came out more expensive than in-state tuition my first semester.
For every "change" or "new edition" that actually included new research in the field, there were 100 more that were nothing but crap-ass "planned obsolescence" maneuvers designed to squeeze students for every penny by destroying the used-book market. One of these asstard professors actually forced people to hand in the back cover of their book with the final exam or take a zero grade, in order to make sure that there were no second-hand books on the market.
I would have loved to see a book available for $50. I'm impressed that it retails for that. I wish you well as a writer. But I have much less sympathy for you based on your line of work, having been abused by your peers.
No shit.
I have not bought a Kindle. This nutter thinks that newspapers could "save" by distributing over Kindle instead of on paper.
Guy down later in the forum has it exactly right. You can't put a Kindle in your waiting room. If your "copy" of the paper is on a Kindle, you can't read the sports page while someone else has the world section or the comics. You can't hand "your copy" of the paper to someone else, or leave it behind once you're done with it if it's on a Kindle (something I do regularly - hey, I don't know the next person coming by, but I imagine they might want to read something too).
Hell, if it's on a Kindle, we lose yesterday's newspaper - so how will we wrap today's fish?
In all seriousness, that's the problem with DRM. It's never about "protecting copyright." It's always about some more nefarious purpose, like destroying the doctrine of first sale. Remember how $ony patented a method to have video games "signed" by the first console they were put in, and subsequently refuse to run on any other console? That was just one of them.
Or of course there's always the wonderful Northern Snakehead, which is all set to destroy the Great Lakes...
Most of the drain users see today is OS bloat and Virus scan software bloat. Face it, A "fully updated" WinXP SP3 with a fully updated, modern antivirus package needs ~4 times the hardware a base WinXP (or even Win2K SP4) system would want.
It's livin' in the Fridge! you can't stop the mold from groooooowwwiiinnnn...
Hell, people bought the crappy "Chrono Crusade" anime, even though it had nothing to do with the games, on the basis that ADV re-drew the logo to look vaguely similar and encourage brand confusion...
Give three little boys each a cardboard tube. Two of them will begin smacking each other on the head with it. The gay one will start drawing little flowers on it, before the other two realize what he's doing and start smacking HIM over the head.
It's life. You say that "something especially barbaric is stirring in our collective unconscious" - DUH. Why do we like seeing explosions, big boom, loud noise? Why do we have a visceral need to stop and stare if there's been a car crash? Why do we enjoy hearing ghost stories around a campfire?
Humans are omnivores. We eat both plant and animal matter. We evolved with two sometimes-conflicting urges, thereby; the urge to harvest and hoard (gatherer) and the urge to HUNT. We evolved just as much to enjoy munching down some berries as we did to enjoy the thrill of the chase.
You're damned right we have something "barbaric" in our collective unconscious. We like physical exertion (at least, the ones that haven't turned into blobs on the couch). We play sports. We run and cycle and swim. We lift weights at the gym. Our brains get a kick out of a bit of adrenaline, whether it's from hunting food or dropping down that first steep drop of a roller coaster.
And yeah, even the couch potatoes have something they can do now. Hell, those of us that aren't couch potatoes can still sit down and enjoy a good game, whether it's the mindless team laser-tag style stuff (Halo, Quake, etc) or the more cerebral/visceral Bioshock style.
Oh, and by the by - congrats on raising some really gay kids, if you're going to force them to ignore and abhor, rather than understand and accept and live peacefully with, their baser urges.
Y'know, as an interactive medium, games have the ability to show us far more amazing, detailed, and yes, shocking insights into the human condition.
Consider the various moral choices in Fallout 3. Functionally, the game allows you to decide what you want to be. If you want to be a slaver? It is possible. If you want to, instead, rescue slaves? Very much also possible. They could have made a game that railroads the player into a goody two-shoes mentality, but they left it open, and the play experience (and corresponding rewards/penalties) are as varied as the people and the approach they decide to take. Heck, if you're "too good" in the game, you'll step on some bad guys' toes and get a price on your head - but at the end of the day that's decidedly realistic, there are indeed certain people in the world who don't like it when someone else is "too good" or, by virtue of doing a good deed, gets in the way of their personal profits/goals.
If there were one change I'd have made to Fallout 3, I'd have included the ability to have lovers/wives/etc. There are enough subplots in the game involving family, enough families, heck the whole Republic of Dave thing, that it would have added another element to the game. The unfortunate problem with this is that American society is prudish and stunted when it comes to sexuality, to the point where what is considered "normal" is actually quite unhealthily repressed.
As for the rest... well, let's face it. Today, there are parents trying to get rid of video games. In the 80s, it was certain music. In earlier decades, there were parents pissed off about cowboy books. Sometimes, you just have dumbass parents out there, and in groups they can get even worse.
He was driving in Canada. I was right, shithole commie country where the gas price is 90% tax.
Perhaps not normal, but here's the math:
At around $100/tank of fuel, and a little less than 1 tank of fuel per week it comes to around $7k/year
If it costs you $100/tank, you're in one of those shithole commie countries where 90% of the cost of fuel is taxes, or else you were driving something like a Hummer. Even at the height of gas shock, I was still under $50 for a 300-mile fillup.
My loan payments were $650/month
Insurance payments were another $450/month
Again lending credence to the idea that your "savings" are due to the fact that you had a stupidly overpriced, oversized vehicle.
Hmmm. Either
Almost forgot to add:
- it takes me 25 minutes to reach work in the car.
- it would take 1:30 to get there via public transportation.
No shit.
I could "use public transportation." I'd still drive 5 miles roundtrip to the station every day. And of course, the station is only available 6:30am-8am and return trip 4pm-7pm. So if I need to stay late at work I need my car. If I need to go help a friend after work, or pick up kids, I need my car. If I want to go somewhere after work, or during lunch hour, I need my car.
In other words, if all I did was ever go to work exactly on time, and come back to home exactly on time, I could do it. But my life isn't predictable like that. Imagine you're a normal family now, mom, dad, 2.5 kids, possibly older parents to take care of. On any given day something could happen and you need a car to go help someone out.
If public transportation were ubiquitous, hey, no problem. But it's not. Municipalities run it "as a business" rather than admitting it's a service, a public utility, and admitting that hey, we need to put in enough tax money to make it cover enough areas. It may mean some nights, an empty bus is going up and down the street, but the alternative is people NOT riding in the morning because they're afraid of not being able to get a bus in the evening.
Rephrase:
If anyone who knows what they're doing have to waste their time beating their heads against a wall composed of overweight teenagers living in their parents' basements, they're going to give up and go back to the real world every time.
There we go.
The problem with Wikipedia, in a nutshell: clueless morons with no life, no social skills beyond MMORPG-style "how do I game the system to become an admin" playing, and no expertise in anything (least of all writing and grammar) are given the ability not simply to edit, but to ban others from editing.
This is the equivalent of giving someone who's been on cocaine for 20 years a badge, a loaded gun, and telling him to shoot anyone that he thinks might be breaking the law first and ask questions later.
The problem is, impacts are not predictable.
The "most likely spot" to hit, is actually depending on the following factors:
- Speed of collision
- Braking/coasting/accelerating (braking typically causes a vehicle's nose to dip, accelerating causes it to rise)
- Height of the pedestrian in relation to the height of the vehicle's front bumper/grille.
- Angle of collision (pedestrian motion will be different if hit head-on, as opposed to someone trying to whip around a right-hand turn and blindsiding someone who's crossing properly; angle also changes if you're not at a right-angle intersection)
The other problem is, does this truly cushion the blow, taking the energy into the crashbag and causing the pedestrian to be more likely to remain on the stopped vehicle, or is it more elastic, imparting acceleration back into the poor pedestrian in time for them to slide off the car - now accelerated to a good 15-20mph or higher - and then hit their head on the cement?
Yeah, PC titles that had CD-audio tracks in the old days were awesome that way (even if you had to get the occasional no-cd crack to make it work).
Interstate '82 with an early '80s Metallica disc, for instance, or some random hair metal...
One of the most underutilized - but most fun - options on the original Xbox was the ability of certain games (especially the Tony Hawk series) to replace the default "in-game" music with music ripped from CD's. Make a custom CD with your own chosen playlist, drop it on the box, and boom, you had a completely different experience. I couldn't stand half of the crap-rap they put in, for instance, but I could tell it "never play" those songs, and add in, say, a bunch of Frank Sinatra to the list, or pretty much anything else I decided to put in.
I wish more games had that option. It's one thing if you have a cutscene with dedicated music or something, but something else for sports games or games that wind up trying to have a "top 40s" playlist stuck in as an afterthought. I know I, personally, get bored with games quicker if I don't like the music that's being blared.
Yawn.
No, these are the same people who show up whenever the military tries to recruit, by whatever means. They don't care about the means, they just hate the military.
As to why I'm not in the military, there are certain medical conditions (such as congenital heart conditions) that pretty much disqualify you from any military service. I had the bad luck to get one.
Your demonstrated reading comprehension, meanwhile, makes me wonder if you are perchance a chimp in a zoo?
Everyone's opinion here - in essence - can easily be boiled down to "waah I hate the military so they shouldn't be able to recruit."
Why not? After all, you people are all gung-ho on fucking the military, making sure that they don't have proper equipment, making sure that every battle they walk into is a losing one because they're tied down with a list of orders and restrictions thicker than a novel by Tolstoy.
Know what? The military recruits. We have a VOLUNTEER military. We have to ask people to join. We call that "recruiting." Showing them simulations of actual military operations today, is no different than they used to do in my childhood when they'd come around to places like our church festivals, give all the kids a tour of a tank, show them what the (unloaded of course) weapons really felt like, what the uniforms looked like.
They were "recruiting" kids just as much then as now. Or did you not play with GI Joe figures as a kid? Oh, wait - that's right, you were probably one of the boys playing with frilly dresses and trying on your mom's bra instead.
There is no difference. Then as now, there are a bunch of bleeding heart idiots who hate the same military that exists to keep them safe and serve them. The people who go out, fight, and die for the right of some left-wing bleeding heart asshole to come piss on their grave and everything they stood for later. And then, just as now, those same fucking ass retards are trying to stop the military from recruiting - to kick them out of malls if they set up a recruiting office, to kick them off college campuses. Hell, some of these ass-tards actually object to the existence of the GI Bill because it "recruits" people who haven't yet been through college yet - and yet it's proven to be a wonderful opportunity for many great citizens to get an education after serving their country.