Did you ever play a Sorcerer in 3e or 3.5e? Or any of the other spontaneous casters? They generally had no trouble with spell preparation. They were still kind of weak until higher levels, though using summons and remaining invisible all the time was a good tactic, at least in 3e anyway. In 3.5e, summons don't really last long enough. Heck, Wizards or even Clerics (with the proper domain) could do that nonsense. And Mystic Theurges? Hoo boy.
Is it any wonder that approval numbers for the House and Senate are lower than Bush's? All we can hope for is that the same sociopolitical forces that lead to the defeat of the recent immigration bill will stay in play long enough to appropriately stymie future legislative misbehavior.
1).I do realize that a unionized, legalized immigrant workforce would earn higher wages if they could remain employed. I estimate that any undocumented workers who attempted to "go legal" and then unionize would find themselves out of work or suffering major layoffs, just the same way many unskilled or low-skill union laborers have already suffered in this country.
Furthermore, many of these workers have even lower levels of education, literacy, and English-fluency than native-born highschool dropouts. Not all of them, but many of them. Once they start demanding $10-$12 per hour instead of the $3-$7 per hour they were making when undocumented, do you think they will find employers lining up to hire them? They will be competing with Americans and legal immigrants who will have numerous advantages over formerly-undocumented converts.
2). Current estimates place immigration rates from Mexico to the United States at 1-3 million per year. Not all of them stay, of course, but that's a lot of people. Our current crop of undocumented workers can be replaced in the space of maybe 4-5 years, minimum, and that only assumes that they all "go legal" (which I doubt that they would). Considering the fact that it took us 21 years since our last amnesty bill to get up to an estimated 12 million illegals, it is not a stretch to assume that business owners and corporations will let more illegals flood in to replace legalized migrant workers over the next 4-15 years.
3). Cheap labor is preventing technological development primarily in the agricultural sector. There are numerous crops, ranging from lettuce to tomatoes to oranges, that are still harvested by hand because, according to growers, "you can't harvest those with machines". Of course, that's doublespeak for "we don't really want to invest the money necessary to buy first-generation harvesters that people haven't invented yet, even though we know that people would put more work into making such machinery were we actually interested. But hey, we can get illegals to do it for $7/hour, so why rock the boat?". I suspect that the presence of undocumented workers in the construction and meatpacking industries may also be serving as human impediments to progress, of a sort. Eventually, someone will figure out how to beat the cost/benefit ratio of hiring illegals and automation will take over anyway, but it'll take much longer as long as cheap human labor is available.
Also, it should be noted that slavery, by the end of the 18th century, was anything but cheap. As an institution, however, slavery stunted the growth of the Southern (and American) economy for years and years until plantation owners began to realize what an economic dead-end it could be (well, some of them anyway). Furthermore, while slavery in America (and elsewhere in the Western world) may not have necessarily stymied the development of the steam engine, it quite possibly prevented the ancient Romans from inventing steam power. But that's all speculation at this point. Whatever damage child labor may have done to technological development in the paste is also nearly impossible to estimate, but I can guarantee you that technological development in the textile industry in low-wage foreign countries (Bangladesh, China, and elsewhere) will likely be stunted so long as labor stays so cheap and plentiful. Why increase worker productivity beyond current levels when they can just throw more disposable humans at the problem? Why replace workers with machines when the workers do the work so cheaply?
The problem is that illegal immigrants (or undocumented workers, however you want to label them) only last as long as they do here to serve the whim of corporations that frequently use them as underpaid employees that will not unionize, will willingly work in hazardous work environments, and will only rarely leave their job voluntarily (for better pay, better work, etc). If you bring them out of the shadows, you bring to light all the abuses they have willingly suffered over the years to avoid even worse work conditions and pay in their home countries. Employers of newly-legalized immigrants will be forced to clean up their acts and raise pay for their formerly-undocumented workforce if they wish to continue employing said immigrants. Logically speaking, one should conclude that legalized immigrants will lose their jobs, probably to a new wave of illegals that will flood in as replacements.
In other words, if you give current undocumented workers the same rights, protections, and wages as natural-born Americans or legal immigrants, corporations will have no desire to hire them. For this reason, it is not rational to conclude that anyone currently "in the shadows" will step out and claim their place in American society. To do so would be to face layoffs. Anyone foolish enough to "go legal" would probably sooner become an American welfare case than move back to their home country. It's a lose-lose situation.
If we are so determined to make sure that employers grant fair pay and provide adequate workplace safety as the law demands, and furthermore pay wages as the free market frequently demands, it would be more wise for us to simply deport or otherwise disenfranchise the 12+ million undocumented workers we have now to force employers to hire American citizens and/or documented workers. Contrary to what corporate shills would have you believe, modern Americans will do just about any job you put in front of them provided that the pay is right. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they can even harvest lettuce, tomatoes, and other veggies in the field.
The real question is whether or not significant wage increases for menial laborers in the US would hurt the economy more than our current labor situation in which millions of undocumented workers siphon off public funds in the form of local, state, and federal aid programs due to their pathetic wages. They also wire much of their liquid capital back to their families abroad, all but guaranteeing that they can not and will not serve as an economic stimulus in our country. Raising wages of American workers, on the other hand, would be good for our economy. This point is often made by proponents of minimum wage increases.
And, if you don't believe that there is an untapped reserve of American workers ready to step up and replace our undocumented worker buddies, you might want to reconsider that point. Current teen and young adult unemployment rates (ages 16-24) are staggering. African-American teens, at least according to a recent column by Bob Herbert, suffer an employment rate of 18% nationwide.
Of course, there is the real threat that many unskilled labor positions will vanish altogether due to automation sometime in the next 20-50 years, but we would be better off positioning ourselves today by not encouraging wave upon wave of unskilled, uneducated foreign workers to enter the country when they and their ilk will likely face widespread obsolescence down the road. Additionally, the widespread deportation of undocumented laborers and its associated increase in labor costs will likely spur development of automation technology in the agricultural, manufacturing, and service industries. An automated American economy combined with new, cheap energy sources (LENR anyone?) could potentially provide goods and services at a price far lower than foreign economies with scads of cheap, uneducated workers subjected to deep poverty-level wages, poor work conditions, and lax environmental standards. Such an economic de
Oceanographers are dedicated to the study and, ideally, salvation of numerous aquatic ecosystems that are in a rapid state of collapse. It's one thing to deal with "bad news" on a regular basis. It's quite another to watch the sea dying right before your eyes. Most of us have become comfortable with our oceans' plight by ignoring it; that is a comfort not easily afforded to oceanographers.
The article explains it rather well. The pioneer of elephant vasectomies developed the procedure to help Disney curtail rampant elephant reproduction in there Animal Kingdom park. While elephants may be endangered overall, they were having a field day on Disney's property.
Using excess elephants from Disney's properties to bolster elephant populations elsewhere was likely not economically feasible due to transport costs and other considerations.
Is there any way we could trick this guy into suing Jack Thompson? That would be almost as cool as the infamous Storm Troopers vs. Redshirt Ensigns battle.
You might be able to get them in Q4 2007. With launch dates of August 2007, we'll probably see the actual chips in retail channels by October. OEMs/builders should have products featuring the new Opterons much earlier.
Exactly why is AMD a fool to be concerned with "beating Intel at its own game"? Even Intel tried coming out with a revolutionary new CPU architecture, and look where that got them. Itanic has been undermined by Intel's own Xeon processors. The market has spoken, and it wants x86. Not even Intel has been able to change that (yet).
A smaller firm operating on tighter margins like AMD could easily go belly-up trying to break out with a new CPU microarchitecture. At least Intel could afford all of Itanic's failures.
An old friend of mine had the idea of setting up colocation services on Native American reservations. They have virtual immunity from state and local laws, but I'm not sure how much protection they'd offer from federal law.
Such is the fate of those who bought gaming consoles hoping to use them as media centers. Both MS and Sony have a stake in one particular format which puts console owners at a significant disadvantage when it comes to media support.
Console buyers should have anticipated the eventual emergence of multi-format players. Also, Disney announced their loyalty to Blu-Ray some time ago. Anyone who really wanted to watch Disney movies on their gaming console pretty much had to go PS3.
Yes, but how often can you fire your guns with that kind of generating capacity, and how many can you fire? Plus, I'm sure the Navy will eventually be interested in firing rail guns that can achieve a higher velocity projectile and/or higher-mass projectiles.
Considering the fact that traditional naval guns have relied on chemical energy to propel projectiles, the amount of power generation capacity needed on a warship to fire old-school guns is/was likely much lower than that required to fire rail guns.
You can bet the Navy is interested in any portable, high-power energy source that could exceed the efficiency of fission reactors. Those rail guns they're pimping probably take a lot of power to operate.
The problem with enchanting in Oblivion is that it generally produced underpowered items versus those stones you could get from closing random Oblivion gates. That is, unless you gave yourself permanent 100% chameleon using enchanted items . . . that was just plain stupid.
And yes, the Oblivion gates were dull, but the lava tubes were terrible too. At least Oblivion had some decent forts and such. Nothing beats the final dungeon from Daggerfall. That was a nightmare.
It had much-improved combat and character development (with respect to stats, perks, and skills) than Fallout 1, but I think they really messed up the setting in Fallout 2. New Reno was pretty stupid except maybe for the Bishops and their role in the Vault City/NCR conflict. San Francisco was totally underdeveloped and obviously one of the most rushed parts of the game. The Hubologists were, overall, moronic. No matter how much fun it was to wax that lot, it's pretty obvious that they were sort of a joke "bad guy" faction thrown in as a foil to the Shi, when they completely glossed over internal strife within the Shi themselves by allowing you to settle the LoPan/Dragon dispute in a lame martial arts contest. The Enclave itself delved into biased political rhetoric mostly absent from Fallout 1.
Many of the endings are screwed up even after the 1.2 patch, and there are still some game-breaking bugs with delayed time-based effects and changing areas; setting dynamite and plastic explosive charges and then switching areas can cause the game to crash when the explosives finally detonate. Sometimes. Maybe.
Overall, the setting suffered under Urquhart's direction. Fallout 2 was much longer, which was nice, but it just didn't feel right in a lot of spots, and the entire design team chickened out when they decided to disallow playing Fallout 2 with Fallout characters. In fact, the entire plot behind Fallout 2 was influenced by that decision. They had to come up with a plausible reason why the original Vault Dweller couldn't be the main character (or even a companion) in Fallout 2, hence the need for Arroyo.
As good as Fallout 2 was in some areas, all I ever really wanted was the ability to play more Fallout. Fallout 2 only gave me some of that. I have no real reason to believe that Fallout 3 will be any worse, though there is a serious risk that it may wind up being distinctly humorless and wind up being a Mad Max clone of some kind. If we're lucky, the devs will go back to Wasteland and work from that perspective.
Psst, most of the loot has been level-scaled since Daggerfall (if not Arena). There were a few static loot items in both Morrowind and Oblivion, though it was much easier to stumble upon static loot quest rewards in Morrowind than it was in Oblivion (Oblivion had a habit of locking down quest dungeons with unpickable locks).
Honestly, the dungeon design in Morrowind was horrid. Lavatube after lavatube, ugh. Also keep in mind that the setting in Oblivion might have been a little messed-up, but I think they were trying to imitate the general feel of Daggerfall's setting (which they did quite well). I could also see most of the outdoor settings in Oblivion being a sub-tropical rainforest region. It does get fairly lush in some spots.
I hate to break it to you, but most of the complaints you have about NWN2 were equally applicable to NWN, especially before the two expansions and numerous patches. The main campaign in NWN had a truly wretched story.
NWN's graphics engine wasn't as demanding as NWN2's, granted, but that doesn't change the fact that NWN was rather dull without expansions and/or good PWs.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you ever play a Sorcerer in 3e or 3.5e? Or any of the other spontaneous casters? They generally had no trouble with spell preparation. They were still kind of weak until higher levels, though using summons and remaining invisible all the time was a good tactic, at least in 3e anyway. In 3.5e, summons don't really last long enough. Heck, Wizards or even Clerics (with the proper domain) could do that nonsense. And Mystic Theurges? Hoo boy.
What, you mean this Cell?
Is it any wonder that approval numbers for the House and Senate are lower than Bush's? All we can hope for is that the same sociopolitical forces that lead to the defeat of the recent immigration bill will stay in play long enough to appropriately stymie future legislative misbehavior.
IN SOVIET RUSSIA, all your assumptions state YOU!
It looks like OCZ has plans to deliver an actual nanotube product. Anyone seen one of these for sale yet?
1).I do realize that a unionized, legalized immigrant workforce would earn higher wages if they could remain employed. I estimate that any undocumented workers who attempted to "go legal" and then unionize would find themselves out of work or suffering major layoffs, just the same way many unskilled or low-skill union laborers have already suffered in this country.
Furthermore, many of these workers have even lower levels of education, literacy, and English-fluency than native-born highschool dropouts. Not all of them, but many of them. Once they start demanding $10-$12 per hour instead of the $3-$7 per hour they were making when undocumented, do you think they will find employers lining up to hire them? They will be competing with Americans and legal immigrants who will have numerous advantages over formerly-undocumented converts.
2). Current estimates place immigration rates from Mexico to the United States at 1-3 million per year. Not all of them stay, of course, but that's a lot of people. Our current crop of undocumented workers can be replaced in the space of maybe 4-5 years, minimum, and that only assumes that they all "go legal" (which I doubt that they would). Considering the fact that it took us 21 years since our last amnesty bill to get up to an estimated 12 million illegals, it is not a stretch to assume that business owners and corporations will let more illegals flood in to replace legalized migrant workers over the next 4-15 years.
3). Cheap labor is preventing technological development primarily in the agricultural sector. There are numerous crops, ranging from lettuce to tomatoes to oranges, that are still harvested by hand because, according to growers, "you can't harvest those with machines". Of course, that's doublespeak for "we don't really want to invest the money necessary to buy first-generation harvesters that people haven't invented yet, even though we know that people would put more work into making such machinery were we actually interested. But hey, we can get illegals to do it for $7/hour, so why rock the boat?". I suspect that the presence of undocumented workers in the construction and meatpacking industries may also be serving as human impediments to progress, of a sort. Eventually, someone will figure out how to beat the cost/benefit ratio of hiring illegals and automation will take over anyway, but it'll take much longer as long as cheap human labor is available.
Also, it should be noted that slavery, by the end of the 18th century, was anything but cheap. As an institution, however, slavery stunted the growth of the Southern (and American) economy for years and years until plantation owners began to realize what an economic dead-end it could be (well, some of them anyway). Furthermore, while slavery in America (and elsewhere in the Western world) may not have necessarily stymied the development of the steam engine, it quite possibly prevented the ancient Romans from inventing steam power. But that's all speculation at this point. Whatever damage child labor may have done to technological development in the paste is also nearly impossible to estimate, but I can guarantee you that technological development in the textile industry in low-wage foreign countries (Bangladesh, China, and elsewhere) will likely be stunted so long as labor stays so cheap and plentiful. Why increase worker productivity beyond current levels when they can just throw more disposable humans at the problem? Why replace workers with machines when the workers do the work so cheaply?
Yes, amnesty is so bad.
The problem is that illegal immigrants (or undocumented workers, however you want to label them) only last as long as they do here to serve the whim of corporations that frequently use them as underpaid employees that will not unionize, will willingly work in hazardous work environments, and will only rarely leave their job voluntarily (for better pay, better work, etc). If you bring them out of the shadows, you bring to light all the abuses they have willingly suffered over the years to avoid even worse work conditions and pay in their home countries. Employers of newly-legalized immigrants will be forced to clean up their acts and raise pay for their formerly-undocumented workforce if they wish to continue employing said immigrants. Logically speaking, one should conclude that legalized immigrants will lose their jobs, probably to a new wave of illegals that will flood in as replacements.
In other words, if you give current undocumented workers the same rights, protections, and wages as natural-born Americans or legal immigrants, corporations will have no desire to hire them. For this reason, it is not rational to conclude that anyone currently "in the shadows" will step out and claim their place in American society. To do so would be to face layoffs. Anyone foolish enough to "go legal" would probably sooner become an American welfare case than move back to their home country. It's a lose-lose situation.
If we are so determined to make sure that employers grant fair pay and provide adequate workplace safety as the law demands, and furthermore pay wages as the free market frequently demands, it would be more wise for us to simply deport or otherwise disenfranchise the 12+ million undocumented workers we have now to force employers to hire American citizens and/or documented workers. Contrary to what corporate shills would have you believe, modern Americans will do just about any job you put in front of them provided that the pay is right. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, they can even harvest lettuce, tomatoes, and other veggies in the field.
The real question is whether or not significant wage increases for menial laborers in the US would hurt the economy more than our current labor situation in which millions of undocumented workers siphon off public funds in the form of local, state, and federal aid programs due to their pathetic wages. They also wire much of their liquid capital back to their families abroad, all but guaranteeing that they can not and will not serve as an economic stimulus in our country. Raising wages of American workers, on the other hand, would be good for our economy. This point is often made by proponents of minimum wage increases.
And, if you don't believe that there is an untapped reserve of American workers ready to step up and replace our undocumented worker buddies, you might want to reconsider that point. Current teen and young adult unemployment rates (ages 16-24) are staggering. African-American teens, at least according to a recent column by Bob Herbert, suffer an employment rate of 18% nationwide.
Of course, there is the real threat that many unskilled labor positions will vanish altogether due to automation sometime in the next 20-50 years, but we would be better off positioning ourselves today by not encouraging wave upon wave of unskilled, uneducated foreign workers to enter the country when they and their ilk will likely face widespread obsolescence down the road. Additionally, the widespread deportation of undocumented laborers and its associated increase in labor costs will likely spur development of automation technology in the agricultural, manufacturing, and service industries. An automated American economy combined with new, cheap energy sources (LENR anyone?) could potentially provide goods and services at a price far lower than foreign economies with scads of cheap, uneducated workers subjected to deep poverty-level wages, poor work conditions, and lax environmental standards. Such an economic de
Oceanographers are dedicated to the study and, ideally, salvation of numerous aquatic ecosystems that are in a rapid state of collapse. It's one thing to deal with "bad news" on a regular basis. It's quite another to watch the sea dying right before your eyes. Most of us have become comfortable with our oceans' plight by ignoring it; that is a comfort not easily afforded to oceanographers.
The article explains it rather well. The pioneer of elephant vasectomies developed the procedure to help Disney curtail rampant elephant reproduction in there Animal Kingdom park. While elephants may be endangered overall, they were having a field day on Disney's property.
Using excess elephants from Disney's properties to bolster elephant populations elsewhere was likely not economically feasible due to transport costs and other considerations.
We already have the IDSA and the SIAA. And the ESA? Oh my.
I believe the acronym QFT is usually interpreted as "quoted for truth". It's very popular with some posters over on Anandtech's forums.
Is there any way we could trick this guy into suing Jack Thompson? That would be almost as cool as the infamous Storm Troopers vs. Redshirt Ensigns battle.
You might be able to get them in Q4 2007. With launch dates of August 2007, we'll probably see the actual chips in retail channels by October. OEMs/builders should have products featuring the new Opterons much earlier.
Exactly why is AMD a fool to be concerned with "beating Intel at its own game"? Even Intel tried coming out with a revolutionary new CPU architecture, and look where that got them. Itanic has been undermined by Intel's own Xeon processors. The market has spoken, and it wants x86. Not even Intel has been able to change that (yet).
A smaller firm operating on tighter margins like AMD could easily go belly-up trying to break out with a new CPU microarchitecture. At least Intel could afford all of Itanic's failures.
An old friend of mine had the idea of setting up colocation services on Native American reservations. They have virtual immunity from state and local laws, but I'm not sure how much protection they'd offer from federal law.
Such is the fate of those who bought gaming consoles hoping to use them as media centers. Both MS and Sony have a stake in one particular format which puts console owners at a significant disadvantage when it comes to media support.
Console buyers should have anticipated the eventual emergence of multi-format players. Also, Disney announced their loyalty to Blu-Ray some time ago. Anyone who really wanted to watch Disney movies on their gaming console pretty much had to go PS3.
Be sure to include a chair-throwing monkey in your next animation.
Yes, but how often can you fire your guns with that kind of generating capacity, and how many can you fire? Plus, I'm sure the Navy will eventually be interested in firing rail guns that can achieve a higher velocity projectile and/or higher-mass projectiles.
Considering the fact that traditional naval guns have relied on chemical energy to propel projectiles, the amount of power generation capacity needed on a warship to fire old-school guns is/was likely much lower than that required to fire rail guns.
You can bet the Navy is interested in any portable, high-power energy source that could exceed the efficiency of fission reactors. Those rail guns they're pimping probably take a lot of power to operate.
More power to em (literally and figuratively).
piz.za time!
The problem with enchanting in Oblivion is that it generally produced underpowered items versus those stones you could get from closing random Oblivion gates. That is, unless you gave yourself permanent 100% chameleon using enchanted items . . . that was just plain stupid.
And yes, the Oblivion gates were dull, but the lava tubes were terrible too. At least Oblivion had some decent forts and such. Nothing beats the final dungeon from Daggerfall. That was a nightmare.
It had much-improved combat and character development (with respect to stats, perks, and skills) than Fallout 1, but I think they really messed up the setting in Fallout 2. New Reno was pretty stupid except maybe for the Bishops and their role in the Vault City/NCR conflict. San Francisco was totally underdeveloped and obviously one of the most rushed parts of the game. The Hubologists were, overall, moronic. No matter how much fun it was to wax that lot, it's pretty obvious that they were sort of a joke "bad guy" faction thrown in as a foil to the Shi, when they completely glossed over internal strife within the Shi themselves by allowing you to settle the LoPan/Dragon dispute in a lame martial arts contest. The Enclave itself delved into biased political rhetoric mostly absent from Fallout 1.
Many of the endings are screwed up even after the 1.2 patch, and there are still some game-breaking bugs with delayed time-based effects and changing areas; setting dynamite and plastic explosive charges and then switching areas can cause the game to crash when the explosives finally detonate. Sometimes. Maybe.
Overall, the setting suffered under Urquhart's direction. Fallout 2 was much longer, which was nice, but it just didn't feel right in a lot of spots, and the entire design team chickened out when they decided to disallow playing Fallout 2 with Fallout characters. In fact, the entire plot behind Fallout 2 was influenced by that decision. They had to come up with a plausible reason why the original Vault Dweller couldn't be the main character (or even a companion) in Fallout 2, hence the need for Arroyo.
As good as Fallout 2 was in some areas, all I ever really wanted was the ability to play more Fallout. Fallout 2 only gave me some of that. I have no real reason to believe that Fallout 3 will be any worse, though there is a serious risk that it may wind up being distinctly humorless and wind up being a Mad Max clone of some kind. If we're lucky, the devs will go back to Wasteland and work from that perspective.
Psst, most of the loot has been level-scaled since Daggerfall (if not Arena). There were a few static loot items in both Morrowind and Oblivion, though it was much easier to stumble upon static loot quest rewards in Morrowind than it was in Oblivion (Oblivion had a habit of locking down quest dungeons with unpickable locks).
Honestly, the dungeon design in Morrowind was horrid. Lavatube after lavatube, ugh. Also keep in mind that the setting in Oblivion might have been a little messed-up, but I think they were trying to imitate the general feel of Daggerfall's setting (which they did quite well). I could also see most of the outdoor settings in Oblivion being a sub-tropical rainforest region. It does get fairly lush in some spots.
I hate to break it to you, but most of the complaints you have about NWN2 were equally applicable to NWN, especially before the two expansions and numerous patches. The main campaign in NWN had a truly wretched story.
NWN's graphics engine wasn't as demanding as NWN2's, granted, but that doesn't change the fact that NWN was rather dull without expansions and/or good PWs.
. . . are they going to add support for epic levels? Once I got epic levels in NWN, there was no going back for me.