I started playing WoW a number of years ago, and at first, actually did have a lot of fun leveling, seeing all the sights and everything. But I quickly realized that the real fun was at endgame, and when I got there, I wasn't proven wrong. Raiding -was- a lot of fun. And every so often I'd decide I had some time to blow, and level another alt, which I also for the most part enjoyed.
Then I noticed that they felt compelled periodically to introduce boring grindy crap even at levelcap, if you wanted to raid optimally. Daily dungeons for badges were bad enough, and the once-per-expansion crap with new faction rep, but when they introduced that ridiculous set of unlockable gear midway through this expansion (the stuff up in Firelands), that was the first sign of the end of WoW for me. When I got to the last step in the legendary staff quest, and realized it'd be about 3 months more of grinding the same Firelands bosses that no longer dropped anything even remotely useful to anyone, that was the final one. Ironically, I continued to show up every week for that grind, so our guild could get the achievement and the pet - wouldn't want to be a jerk about it - and after receiving the legendary staff... pretty much never logged in again. It's been a few months now, and I think my life is better for it.
My favorite part of this post: the realization that everyone uses "monopoly money" as a convenient shorthand for "stuff that looks like cash, but has no value", despite the fact that it actually -does- have value. Not its printed value, obviously, but you can buy it at Amazon, and I bet if you put yours on craigslist or had it out at a yardsale, someone would buy it. Voila! Value!
Indeed, the same value that bitcoins have. I would argue that bitcoins -don't- have the same inherent value that currency-backed-by-nations have - that would be the "you can't pay taxes with them" argument. But they do have value in exactly the same way that anything else people buy and sell has value - if someone will buy the stuff with a currency-backed-by-your-nation, there's an equivalence between them.
I assume the latter. I mean, when I'm programming a new component, I often start with the easier component while I'm figuring out the harder stuff, even if the harder stuff could be useable by itself and the easier stuff requires the harder stuff to work (at which point I would just put up a placeholder for testing purposes). Granted, I'm talking about days of one developer's time rather than years of a whole company's, but the principle is similar. Once you had a terrestrial space elevator, you'd want a lunar one too, so might as well practice on the easy target first.
But yes, I was also depressed, when I just saw "[company] wants to build space elevator by 2020", and missed the "on the moon" originally. I was all excited that we might actually see a useful space elevator in my lifetime. (Useful in this case being defined as "would let me exit earth's atmosphere at the cost of less than a bajillion dollars per trip.")
As a kid, you tend to believe what parents or other authority figures told you was true, because that's how we're wired - as makes perfect evolutionary sense. As a human, it's difficult - but happily not impossible! - to unlearn incorrect facts one has thought of as Truth for their whole childhood. Why religious brainwashing of small children makes me so sad, and exactly what Nye is trying to combat, for which I commend him. But blaming someone for believing the religious brainwashing they got as a child isn't totally fair. My girlfriend is an atheist despite having been sent to a semi-fundamentalist Christian school, but it takes a lot more willpower to decide what you were taught growing up is all lies than it does to figure out that religion is lies having only ever learned about them (and generally, at that point, about -multiple- of them) from a sociological perspective. She was lucky. (And smart, but also lucky.)
I use the number row a bit... for playing Nethack. Never use it for entering numbers. I don't think it's cause I'm left-handed, though, it's just kind of out of the way, and I rarely, if ever, have to enter large numbers of numbers at once.
Do you count scissors or pens as technology? Cause, as a left-handed person, those are annoying. But I've never had a problem with a phone, laptop, keyboard or printer. I've always used a mouse right-handed, though - I write left-handed, but I'd feel weird putting a mouse in that hand.
I'm not going to mod you down either. I am not a pothead. I've done it a few times in my life (mostly in college, when a friend I trusted offered it to me), but I don't go out of my way to find it all the time, and to be honest, kinda look down on those who do. I remain unconvinced that pot (as opposed to harder drugs) have any -permanent- effect on your intelligence or anything else, but they certainly do have a quite strong temporary effect, that if you were taking it constantly would make you just as constantly dull.
Thing is, I did know a few potheads in high school, and they were mindless, no-ambition goof-offs, just like you described. I'd be surprised if any of them had jobs or lives, 10 years later. But I suspect that, without the pot or any other drugs, they would -still- have been mindless, no-ambition goof-offs, they just would have enjoyed it slightly less. To quote a random guy on a forum a long time ago whose statement I liked enough to right it down: "Drugs didn't make your friends idiots, they were idiots beforehand and you just didn't notice."
This study didn't seem to have determined the difference between IQ being lowered by pot use, vs people of lower IQ being more likely to take pot.
"How long would it take to read every book?" If everyone else got the immortality pill too, I would hazard a guess, infinitely long, cause you'd have a growing, potentially unbounded number of writers to read the works of as time went on, too. (Plus, I find it enjoyable rereading a particularly good book I've read after even a year or two; imagine reading a book you hadn't read for centuries. It'd probably be pretty new to you again.)
I would want to live exactly as long as I could still be happy with the state I was in. If I get in a car accident tomorrow and wake up mostly-paralyzed and mentally retarded, I will hope my family has the smarts to just pull the plug and save themselves the prolonged grief, not to mention time and money. Conversely, if I'm 95 years old and still healthy, I hope to keep living until I'm not. If they came up with a miracle drug that let us live healthfully and actively until we were 300, I'd take it. If it let us live until we were 1000, I'd take it. If it let us live forever, assuming we could turn it off, I'd take it. (-Eventually- we might find ourselves bored of life, given truly infinite extensions, but I imagine I'd discover the finiteness of the supposedly-infinite miracle treatment before I felt like taking advantage of that.)
Granted, once we had that, we'd have as a species a much harder time surviving without figuring out how to successfully terraform and colonize other planets, so that's just an added benefit, cause maybe it'd actually happen then.
Incorrect. If you manage to get on a jury, despite believing that the crime under consideration should not be a crime, you -are- completely legally allowed to say not guilty even if you think the guy (or in this case corporation) is guilty of something you don't believe he should be punished for. For both good and bad, this is totally a thing - it's called jury nullifcation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
(Fun fact: admitting that you know this fact is apparently a great way to get out of jury duty...)
It is kind of depressing - not because it's all DRM'd, because it isn't. Anytime I get any media that does have any DRM on it, which I do occasionally when it's the easiest way to obtain something I want, I then immediately find a way to strip the DRM off it - it's the principle of the thing.
Still, when I die, I do expect all my music will die with me, just because who in my personal life is going to -want- a hard drive with a giant collection of mostly random mashups and covers and remixes?
My books won't die with me, though - they're all hard copies. People still buy those, and I like to think decades from now, they'll still be happily coexisting with ebooks or whatever else.
Oh, I wouldn't want every session to be like that - I remember those two sessions specifically because they were exceptional, and hilarious. (I actually wouldn't -mind- playing a game with D&D 3.5 rules but intentionally deathmatchy sometime, but I agree it wouldn't be at all like playing proper D&D.)
And yes, Potato (the nickname of the player who asked that DM whether he could secretly be evil) was -totally- a RL troll. But the good kind.
I disagree completely with your first statement. Two of my best memories of campaigns I was in in college were: one, when our characters finally discovered what we as players had suspected, that one of our party members was totally evil and messing with our plans for his own luls, and knocked him unconscious and threw him off a cliff, and two, when a lycanthrope bit half our party and turned them temporarily evil. I got to be a whiny 13 year old thief who now temporarily wanted to murder everyone - how is that -not- awesome?
Why would I go out with someone who didn't even know what RPGs were? I'm not even that much of a pen-and-paper gamer these days, but still. If a person doesn't even know what an RPG is, there are probably other things that person also doesn't grok that would make us not particularly compatible. Both of the decent-length romantic relationships I've had (that is, the one I'm in now and one previous) were with people who had, at the time I met them, DM'd games far more recently than I had.
My mom, though, I've tried to explain it... I'm just happy when she doesn't call it a Nintendo game. Cause she does, sometimes.
Huh? What's IE? Oh, right, it's that icon I hit in the bottom right corner of a FF window to open the page in compatibility mode if a web site's developers assumed that everyone is using IE and it breaks on other browsers.
Screw instant search, screw the lack of a proper start menu that -doesn't- assume I hit the start key because I want to search for something, and doubly screw Aero and its ugly flashiness in an attempt to look pretty.
Security certainly was improved greatly, and to be honest, it's way more stable than XP, too. But I'd still take XP if I had the choice (and could use it just as well on modern hardware, which you really kinda can't.)
But seriously, why should I care what version of IE came on a particular browser, or that other users who are not me are clueless about the internet?
Yeah, but they might blow up a lot of innocent peoples' property in the process... I love that show, but you have to admit in real life it wouldn't have taken getting framed to land one of them in jail, they would have been in jail by the end of the first season for all the totally-illegal stuff they pulled. (Mostly involving explosives.)
There are like a jillion... I don't feel like trying to figure out which of the jillion of them I have installed at home, not being home, but there are seriously tons of them. Many of them free.
Call me back when someone makes a proper window manager that's as useable and as friendly as Windows (rather: Windows XP. Have to be more specific. Windows has gotten increasingly dumb and unuseable over time, too.)
I was gonna be all like, "haha suckers, that's what you get for living in middle-of-nowheresville! Move to a proper city!" I live right in the middle of a city that might not be in the top 10 biggest in the US by population, but is definitely in the top 50, and I have a choice between 1Mbps and 3. No wonder there are 19m. (Yes, it is annoying. I'm assuming it's a last mile issue.)
I stayed on XP at home until I had no choice but to buy a new machine. I stayed on XP at work, -forgoing- machine upgrades that would have been offered, for most of a year before finally giving in and deciding a faster machine was worth the annoyance. 7 isn't Vista, but it isn't XP, either. XP is still probably the best OS I've used, overall (even if there are -some- things that 7 improved on.)
How do you know he -doesn't- have a hundred grand? 99% of someone's money being in the bank, and having a thousand bucks, are not -necessarily- mutually exclusive...
Regardless, I would imagine if you think someone is after you and they know where you live, but they aren't some crazy giant all-powerful global conspiracy with the power to cancel peoples' bank accounts arbitrarily, you could just drop by the bank, pick up your money and -then- put your whatever disappearing plan into place. If you're worried they're gonna pop you at the bank... if they were going to do that, why didn't they just off you already while you were at home?
I've never done it, I never have any reason to expect that I'll have to do it, but I would imagine the important part of disappearing is staying gone -once- you're off the grid. Why would a few minutes to use an ATM first matter, generally?
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I started playing WoW a number of years ago, and at first, actually did have a lot of fun leveling, seeing all the sights and everything. But I quickly realized that the real fun was at endgame, and when I got there, I wasn't proven wrong. Raiding -was- a lot of fun. And every so often I'd decide I had some time to blow, and level another alt, which I also for the most part enjoyed.
Then I noticed that they felt compelled periodically to introduce boring grindy crap even at levelcap, if you wanted to raid optimally. Daily dungeons for badges were bad enough, and the once-per-expansion crap with new faction rep, but when they introduced that ridiculous set of unlockable gear midway through this expansion (the stuff up in Firelands), that was the first sign of the end of WoW for me. When I got to the last step in the legendary staff quest, and realized it'd be about 3 months more of grinding the same Firelands bosses that no longer dropped anything even remotely useful to anyone, that was the final one. Ironically, I continued to show up every week for that grind, so our guild could get the achievement and the pet - wouldn't want to be a jerk about it - and after receiving the legendary staff... pretty much never logged in again. It's been a few months now, and I think my life is better for it.
My favorite part of this post: the realization that everyone uses "monopoly money" as a convenient shorthand for "stuff that looks like cash, but has no value", despite the fact that it actually -does- have value. Not its printed value, obviously, but you can buy it at Amazon, and I bet if you put yours on craigslist or had it out at a yardsale, someone would buy it. Voila! Value!
Indeed, the same value that bitcoins have. I would argue that bitcoins -don't- have the same inherent value that currency-backed-by-nations have - that would be the "you can't pay taxes with them" argument. But they do have value in exactly the same way that anything else people buy and sell has value - if someone will buy the stuff with a currency-backed-by-your-nation, there's an equivalence between them.
I assume the latter. I mean, when I'm programming a new component, I often start with the easier component while I'm figuring out the harder stuff, even if the harder stuff could be useable by itself and the easier stuff requires the harder stuff to work (at which point I would just put up a placeholder for testing purposes). Granted, I'm talking about days of one developer's time rather than years of a whole company's, but the principle is similar. Once you had a terrestrial space elevator, you'd want a lunar one too, so might as well practice on the easy target first.
But yes, I was also depressed, when I just saw "[company] wants to build space elevator by 2020", and missed the "on the moon" originally. I was all excited that we might actually see a useful space elevator in my lifetime. (Useful in this case being defined as "would let me exit earth's atmosphere at the cost of less than a bajillion dollars per trip.")
As a kid, you tend to believe what parents or other authority figures told you was true, because that's how we're wired - as makes perfect evolutionary sense. As a human, it's difficult - but happily not impossible! - to unlearn incorrect facts one has thought of as Truth for their whole childhood. Why religious brainwashing of small children makes me so sad, and exactly what Nye is trying to combat, for which I commend him. But blaming someone for believing the religious brainwashing they got as a child isn't totally fair. My girlfriend is an atheist despite having been sent to a semi-fundamentalist Christian school, but it takes a lot more willpower to decide what you were taught growing up is all lies than it does to figure out that religion is lies having only ever learned about them (and generally, at that point, about -multiple- of them) from a sociological perspective. She was lucky. (And smart, but also lucky.)
I use the number row a bit... for playing Nethack. Never use it for entering numbers. I don't think it's cause I'm left-handed, though, it's just kind of out of the way, and I rarely, if ever, have to enter large numbers of numbers at once.
Do you count scissors or pens as technology? Cause, as a left-handed person, those are annoying. But I've never had a problem with a phone, laptop, keyboard or printer. I've always used a mouse right-handed, though - I write left-handed, but I'd feel weird putting a mouse in that hand.
I'm not going to mod you down either. I am not a pothead. I've done it a few times in my life (mostly in college, when a friend I trusted offered it to me), but I don't go out of my way to find it all the time, and to be honest, kinda look down on those who do. I remain unconvinced that pot (as opposed to harder drugs) have any -permanent- effect on your intelligence or anything else, but they certainly do have a quite strong temporary effect, that if you were taking it constantly would make you just as constantly dull.
Thing is, I did know a few potheads in high school, and they were mindless, no-ambition goof-offs, just like you described. I'd be surprised if any of them had jobs or lives, 10 years later. But I suspect that, without the pot or any other drugs, they would -still- have been mindless, no-ambition goof-offs, they just would have enjoyed it slightly less. To quote a random guy on a forum a long time ago whose statement I liked enough to right it down: "Drugs didn't make your friends idiots, they were idiots beforehand and you just didn't notice."
This study didn't seem to have determined the difference between IQ being lowered by pot use, vs people of lower IQ being more likely to take pot.
"How long would it take to read every book?" If everyone else got the immortality pill too, I would hazard a guess, infinitely long, cause you'd have a growing, potentially unbounded number of writers to read the works of as time went on, too. (Plus, I find it enjoyable rereading a particularly good book I've read after even a year or two; imagine reading a book you hadn't read for centuries. It'd probably be pretty new to you again.)
(I like books. :p)
I would want to live exactly as long as I could still be happy with the state I was in. If I get in a car accident tomorrow and wake up mostly-paralyzed and mentally retarded, I will hope my family has the smarts to just pull the plug and save themselves the prolonged grief, not to mention time and money. Conversely, if I'm 95 years old and still healthy, I hope to keep living until I'm not. If they came up with a miracle drug that let us live healthfully and actively until we were 300, I'd take it. If it let us live until we were 1000, I'd take it. If it let us live forever, assuming we could turn it off, I'd take it. (-Eventually- we might find ourselves bored of life, given truly infinite extensions, but I imagine I'd discover the finiteness of the supposedly-infinite miracle treatment before I felt like taking advantage of that.)
Granted, once we had that, we'd have as a species a much harder time surviving without figuring out how to successfully terraform and colonize other planets, so that's just an added benefit, cause maybe it'd actually happen then.
Incorrect. If you manage to get on a jury, despite believing that the crime under consideration should not be a crime, you -are- completely legally allowed to say not guilty even if you think the guy (or in this case corporation) is guilty of something you don't believe he should be punished for. For both good and bad, this is totally a thing - it's called jury nullifcation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
(Fun fact: admitting that you know this fact is apparently a great way to get out of jury duty...)
Or even drive a car sometimes, and sometimes, let someone -else- drive a car while you sit in another seat.
It is kind of depressing - not because it's all DRM'd, because it isn't. Anytime I get any media that does have any DRM on it, which I do occasionally when it's the easiest way to obtain something I want, I then immediately find a way to strip the DRM off it - it's the principle of the thing.
Still, when I die, I do expect all my music will die with me, just because who in my personal life is going to -want- a hard drive with a giant collection of mostly random mashups and covers and remixes?
My books won't die with me, though - they're all hard copies. People still buy those, and I like to think decades from now, they'll still be happily coexisting with ebooks or whatever else.
She's my girlfriend.
Anyone else? No way. (Also see: a slightly unorthodox invoking of that Law of Headlines everyone keeps linking.)
Oh, I wouldn't want every session to be like that - I remember those two sessions specifically because they were exceptional, and hilarious. (I actually wouldn't -mind- playing a game with D&D 3.5 rules but intentionally deathmatchy sometime, but I agree it wouldn't be at all like playing proper D&D.)
And yes, Potato (the nickname of the player who asked that DM whether he could secretly be evil) was -totally- a RL troll. But the good kind.
I disagree completely with your first statement. Two of my best memories of campaigns I was in in college were: one, when our characters finally discovered what we as players had suspected, that one of our party members was totally evil and messing with our plans for his own luls, and knocked him unconscious and threw him off a cliff, and two, when a lycanthrope bit half our party and turned them temporarily evil. I got to be a whiny 13 year old thief who now temporarily wanted to murder everyone - how is that -not- awesome?
Why would I go out with someone who didn't even know what RPGs were? I'm not even that much of a pen-and-paper gamer these days, but still. If a person doesn't even know what an RPG is, there are probably other things that person also doesn't grok that would make us not particularly compatible. Both of the decent-length romantic relationships I've had (that is, the one I'm in now and one previous) were with people who had, at the time I met them, DM'd games far more recently than I had.
My mom, though, I've tried to explain it... I'm just happy when she doesn't call it a Nintendo game. Cause she does, sometimes.
Relevant: http://whistleblower-newswire.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/image0097.jpg
They certainly have the right to say no.
They just also have the right to get beaten to death.
Huh? What's IE? Oh, right, it's that icon I hit in the bottom right corner of a FF window to open the page in compatibility mode if a web site's developers assumed that everyone is using IE and it breaks on other browsers.
Screw instant search, screw the lack of a proper start menu that -doesn't- assume I hit the start key because I want to search for something, and doubly screw Aero and its ugly flashiness in an attempt to look pretty.
Security certainly was improved greatly, and to be honest, it's way more stable than XP, too. But I'd still take XP if I had the choice (and could use it just as well on modern hardware, which you really kinda can't.)
But seriously, why should I care what version of IE came on a particular browser, or that other users who are not me are clueless about the internet?
Yeah, but they might blow up a lot of innocent peoples' property in the process... I love that show, but you have to admit in real life it wouldn't have taken getting framed to land one of them in jail, they would have been in jail by the end of the first season for all the totally-illegal stuff they pulled. (Mostly involving explosives.)
There are like a jillion... I don't feel like trying to figure out which of the jillion of them I have installed at home, not being home, but there are seriously tons of them. Many of them free.
Too bad they all suck too.
Call me back when someone makes a proper window manager that's as useable and as friendly as Windows (rather: Windows XP. Have to be more specific. Windows has gotten increasingly dumb and unuseable over time, too.)
I was gonna be all like, "haha suckers, that's what you get for living in middle-of-nowheresville! Move to a proper city!" I live right in the middle of a city that might not be in the top 10 biggest in the US by population, but is definitely in the top 50, and I have a choice between 1Mbps and 3. No wonder there are 19m. (Yes, it is annoying. I'm assuming it's a last mile issue.)
This so much.
I stayed on XP at home until I had no choice but to buy a new machine. I stayed on XP at work, -forgoing- machine upgrades that would have been offered, for most of a year before finally giving in and deciding a faster machine was worth the annoyance. 7 isn't Vista, but it isn't XP, either. XP is still probably the best OS I've used, overall (even if there are -some- things that 7 improved on.)
Still, I'd take 7 over 8 any day.
How do you know he -doesn't- have a hundred grand? 99% of someone's money being in the bank, and having a thousand bucks, are not -necessarily- mutually exclusive...
Regardless, I would imagine if you think someone is after you and they know where you live, but they aren't some crazy giant all-powerful global conspiracy with the power to cancel peoples' bank accounts arbitrarily, you could just drop by the bank, pick up your money and -then- put your whatever disappearing plan into place. If you're worried they're gonna pop you at the bank... if they were going to do that, why didn't they just off you already while you were at home?
I've never done it, I never have any reason to expect that I'll have to do it, but I would imagine the important part of disappearing is staying gone -once- you're off the grid. Why would a few minutes to use an ATM first matter, generally?