You eigther have better traffic law firms or pay a lot for better lawyers, here all they do is walk up to the prosecutor and say "hey Fred, got three more here, got some non-movings you can change them too that costs twice as much, you do thanks, see you at the golf course wednessday."
Maybee not exactly that, but invariably you wind up paying the court twice as much for a non-moving violation and your lawyers about a hundred bucks.
The two times I reached an agreement with the prossecutor it cost me about half without the lawyers fees and twice the cop didn't show, and once the prosecutor failed to return after the lunch break.
You didn't point out a 'flaw' in my logic, I presented none. You pointed the reason behind my observations.
And I pretty much do fight every ticket that is bogus. I do it myself and have only had to go up a level once, and haven't had to pay fines on several over the years (I do a lot of driving, and much through a municipality known for "if it moves ticket it!").
I have hired the local ticket fixers (traffic law firms) once or twice, once when it was clear the P.A. wouldn't plea bargin, once when I did screw up (my fault, but I feel that offence chosen was excesive and less accurate than a lesser), and the first ticket I ever got a long time ago.
If you go to court for a trial the officer often doesn't show (if you 'apeal' the odds of him showing up for both is pretty low in my limited experience) and this gets the case tossed.
It's not, for the most part, a 'justice' system. It's a leagle system. Try fighting a wrong ticket where the officer checked 'pace' on the ticket. Innocent till provent 'beyound a reasonable doubt' my ass.
If you can't prove the officer's allegation wrong (and that's flat out prove, not put a lot of doubt on it) on any ticket the judge just rules against you.
IANAL, but while I suspect in #1 the 'buyer' is almost certainly in the wrong here.
I don't think #2 hurts the 'buyer' at all. It's not up to the buyer to determine who has what authority to set prices. The Cashier is clearly an employee of the company and the customer can reasonably assume the price charged by the casier is o.k. with the company.
Now if the price is clearly ridiculous, say a $5000 plasma tv for $29.95, then shure one might argue the customer should recognize that an error has likely occured. But if the the same tv is rung up at 2999.99 then he could reasonably assume a sale or even that that's the normal price.
Put simply it's not reasonable for the customer to have intimate knowledge of the scope of authority or inner workings of any place he shops. In the case of the #2 the casier gets fired and the customer gets a good deal and the company in question takes a loss and hopes the customer goes around telling his friends how great a deal he got giving them some positive word of mouth.
Can't say as I agree, yes there were some elements of 3e I was concerned with (the feats looked alot like the special power trees in diablo),but overall the game went from the mess 2.0 made of AD&D to a coherent system, which 3.5 smoothed out and debugged for the most part (not entirely, a few glitches).
For reference I've been playing since 1982 (remember the efreet cover on the dmg?).
Not that your criticisms are invalid, indeed most strike me as a matter of taste not innate good or bad.
I did have a player who's character needed a flowchart to track damage and attack bonuses with a bow, of course he IS a been counter (more or less, he was a final year economics major who has sense gotten a job in DC making a good tidy sum) and kept said flowchart in head. The smallest numbers on both were frighteningly good ('bean counters' can do some serious stat crunching!) though outside of archery his char was fairly normal.
But the main thing is it IS a system, not the hodgepodge of semi-arbitrary rules patched on top of a small kernal that 2.0 was (and 1.0 to a lesser degree).
The fact that it IS a system is why house rules need more thought than in 2.0, which was largely a collection of house rules.
Vin Diesle (sp?) also used to play D&D, he even wrote a forward for the recent 'retrospective' book on the game. I don't think he has any shortage of women interested in him.
Nor has he failed to make a very good income.
What's scary is that the sliders and setting in-game for oblivion don't let you set the highest/most agressive settings the game is capable of. You have to edit the config file for that, though you'll be lucky to get 5fps if you do set them all the way up.
Also oblivion favors ati cards so crossfire would be a better option than sli in this case.
I'm not talking about putting on the breaks as thier aproaching you. I'm talking about slowing down when they get behind you to close and stay there, and doing in carefully.
If you are doing 65 with someone <10' (about 3 meters) behind you and have to hit the breaks for any reason it's going to be bad. At lower speeds you have better odds.
And frankly it's the tailgater that's being a jerk risking lives and the people he's jepordizing have every right to be mad.
If someone tailgates me I'm not slowing down to piss him off, I'm doing it because I want the SOB the hell away from me, and barring that I want better odds if someting does happen.
In my experience the people going 15-25 over typically ARE taking longer to get somewhere. One simple reason is they have to keep changing lanes to keep this up (at least that seems to be thier thinking) and eventually get stuck behind the guy going 20 under and CANT go around him without getting nailed by everyone else driving at a normal speed.
I put about 40-50k miles (65000+KM) a year on the road and see these idiots all the time. They run up at +20kph till thier 1/2 car length or less behind someone, who of course slows down (would you rather get in an accident at high speeds or lower speeds?) and spend forever behind the guy they are tailgating. Since they often have just switched to that lane because the other lane was marginally slower at the moment they are now locked behind two cars untill the person thier behind slows enough they think switching lanes AGAIN will help, only to repeat the same mistake of tailgating so bad the other guy slows down.
The fastest way is to get the lane that typically goes fastest on average and stay there at a reasonable distance till you get where your going. This of course assumes you've planned your route out intelligently and left with plenty of time, fail those and you might as well sit in the slow lane behind the 95 year old who thinks 45mph is scary.
It's not going faster that gets you there quicker, it's avoiding the delays, and speeding is more likely to cause a delay. (as above, getting pulled over, getting in a wreck, missing your turn because you tried to go around the 'slowpoke' and got shut out of the turn lane, etc.)
Hold down the Shift Key and left click on the item to be droped in your inventory. The Item may act like you threw it hard, but it'll go somewhere other than your inventory.
I've never got the no room message except when trying to drag it out of my inventory rather than when using shift-click.
I've found turning in place to drop something elsewhere usually helps with the no-room messqage when dragging items out of my inventory as well.
Well that makes three of us at least. ONLY when I'm already quiting the game to get a crash.
Some lowish framerates whent things get crowded or the occasion 1/2 second pause during combat, but nothing real bad.
I can usually fix the slight slowdowns by backing the grass draw distance off from max.
Speaking of tips, the grass is TOO realistic at times. If you are having any issues finding see-ing things on the ground, ect. turn grass distance down to 0 and it gets ALOT easier to find stuff, especially alchemical ingredients. FWIW I'm running and AMD-64 3500+ (newcastle) with 1 gig pc3200 ram (faster side of normal, nothing special) on an asus a8v-delux MB with a X800XT AIW (agp) and the original Soundblaster Live platinum. Running under xp-pro w/sp2.
That said I saw a comment by a guy runnin a system only slightly weaker (amd3400+,rest simular) except his vid card was about a half gen back from mine and Nvidia. The game was nearly unplayable for him with framerates in the low teens and lots o crashing even on the bottom end settings.
The game is definately very picky about the system it runs on right now. My Brother has a few more glitches than I do and has to turn a few thing down a bit even though he's running an amdxp-2600+, same vid card and ram amount though ram is pc2700 and not 3200.
We're borderline off-topic here, but... Scotty didn't actually 'beat' the Kobyashi Maru, he just got far enough to find out that A)the physics simulation for events in it went on known theory instead of fact, and b) the test doesn't give up and keeps throwing more enemies till you loose. The number is highly unrealistic by the time you get as far as Scotty did, but not impossible.
The physics issue Scotty exploited was that in theory if you used the transporters to place a Photon Torp at the point where two or more ships shields were interlinked (apparently klingons of the time did this to strengthen thier defenses when attacking in groups) it should detonate in very bad way for the ships involved.
Scotty explained that this doesn't really happen and a paper based on actual experimental reselts had been publish a few before showing this gap between reality and theory (Scotty thought they knew it wouldn't work and he was being called in for cheating) when asked if he was shure that's what the paper said to which Scotty replied he was shure as he'd been the experimenter and had published the paper. The time frame is such Scotty would have to have been in his mid teens at the time.
The improbably part of the senario is that the number of front line war ships that the klingons were tossing out double each wave and Scotty was on the fourth or fifth wave before the time lag between the orders he was giving and thier implimentation was too long for the dynamics of the situation.
gak, so thats what preview is for. I meant Dark Brotherhood, there being more than one 'brother' in the group, just sometimes not more than one active braincell in my head when it comes to typing.
It's not really quantity vs quality, more like open ended vs storyline on rails. yeah a few of the dungeons and quests available are pretty run of the mill, but some are pretty interesting with good story and the kind of choices that make you want to try all the options.
Oblivion (sofar) tilts more towards the interesting quests than Morrowind, which in turn was better than Daggerfall (with lots of very generic "go get $rand_item from $rand dongeon" and such).
The point of the games (more and more so) is you create a character that happens to be in a position to be involved the BIG events going on, but then again you could just run for the hills, or better yet keep bussy doing whatever untill you feel ready to face up to what fate (Bethsoft) has placed at your feet (but not forced you to pick up).
You really can play Oblivion in small pieces here and there without necessarily worring about the main quest.
Also Morrowind and Oblivion have some pretty good modding tools out (comes with it's own disc and the moddable content pre-depacked for Morrowind, and is a 6.5MB download for Oblivion). The Modding community has done a few LOC's for Morrowind, and I have no doubt they'll do the same for Oblivion. The games are both built with modding (and expansions of course) in mind.
Do that in Ovlivion and next time you take a rest the Dark Brother will offer you membership, not shure if declining is an option they're prepared to accept.
You should be able to play the game, unless your vid card is holding you back and I don't think it'd be that much.
FWIW I'm running the game on an AMD64-3500+ with 1gig ram and and ati x800xt aiw with all the eyecandy on (except hdr lighting, the x800 don't do that) and only get noticeably low frame rates (the occasional brief stutter) in crowded situations, and those usually improve after half a second or so as the game (I assume) adapts.
My brother is doing fine with only marginally less agressive settings also with the same vid card except his ram is slower (pc2700) and he's running an xp2800.
The vid card itself is agp8x (vid cards are just now starting to push the limits of what agp can handle, the next gen will be the first to need pci express except for sli/crossfire).
I suspect you may need a different driver version for your vid card, my brother is using a different driver version than I am (he upgrades just because he can, me I only do so when I need to or whim strikes me) and has more glitches with his game. I've only got one and that's when I close the game it tends to crash as it exits (but after it's done everything but surrender the screen back to the desktop so no harm that I've seen yet). FWIW I'm running catalyst version 05.13.
I rarely hit 100% with a 3500+ so a 3400+ shouldn't hit 100% very much more often unless it's taking up slack for the vid card. My brothers machine with it's slower 2600+ dosen't hit 100% often eigther.
It's an unfortunate fact of modern gamming that they almost always need at least one patch to be stable, and sometimes several before everything is working right.
There is Yoda's words to Obi about excitement and adventure and reckless, those could be twisted a bit to imply he did have some pre epIV adventures.
Not that they need much considering "was I any different when you taught me" and "to Yoda you will go, the Jedi master who trained me" got pretty much mangled with epI and the addition of Qui-Gon.
As I understand it there is a LOT of oil lock up in oil shale in the US and Cannada. The reason we don't go after it now is that even at $65 a barrel it's still cheaper to import. However it becomes econical to exploit it at somewhere between $75-$80 a barrel IIRC.
So if oil does climb much above that point and look to stay there you can bet we'll start in on deposits here in north america.
$150/barrel wouldn't last. Would such majorly in the mean time, but it wouldn't last.
Actually 1.44 was thier most common (by far) capacity, however IIRC some software (Microsoft's?) came with slightly more the disk that made it hard to copy, yet could still be read by 99.9% of the drives out there.
The 1.2 size he mentions is the 5.25" HD floppies.
Not shure, he just said the game should require an online account. For online only games this sort of system makes some sense, still not perfect, but at least it makes sense.
FWIW I get eigther 26.4 or 28.8 here, yet just a couple miles away there is both cable and adsl available.
At least you got satalite, I might be able to do that, but with all the hills in the los it's not a certainty by a long stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
You eigther have better traffic law firms or pay a lot for better lawyers, here all they do is walk up to the prosecutor and say "hey Fred, got three more here, got some non-movings you can change them too that costs twice as much, you do thanks, see you at the golf course wednessday."
Maybee not exactly that, but invariably you wind up paying the court twice as much for a non-moving violation and your lawyers about a hundred bucks.
The two times I reached an agreement with the prossecutor it cost me about half without the lawyers fees and twice the cop didn't show, and once the prosecutor failed to return after the lunch break.
Mycroft
You didn't point out a 'flaw' in my logic, I presented none. You pointed the reason behind my observations.
And I pretty much do fight every ticket that is bogus. I do it myself and have only had to go up a level once, and haven't had to pay fines on several over the years (I do a lot of driving, and much through a municipality known for "if it moves ticket it!").
I have hired the local ticket fixers (traffic law firms) once or twice, once when it was clear the P.A. wouldn't plea bargin, once when I did screw up (my fault, but I feel that offence chosen was excesive and less accurate than a lesser), and the first ticket I ever got a long time ago.
If you go to court for a trial the officer often doesn't show (if you 'apeal' the odds of him showing up for both is pretty low in my limited experience) and this gets the case tossed.
Mycroft
It's not, for the most part, a 'justice' system. It's a leagle system.
Try fighting a wrong ticket where the officer checked 'pace' on the ticket.
Innocent till provent 'beyound a reasonable doubt' my ass.
If you can't prove the officer's allegation wrong (and that's flat out prove, not put a lot of doubt on it) on any ticket the judge just rules against you.
Mycroft
Remember most judges are lawyers with a "promotion". This gives the knowledge you speak of, but it may compromise thier willingness to aknowledge it.
Mycroft
IANAL, but while I suspect in #1 the 'buyer' is almost certainly in the wrong here.
I don't think #2 hurts the 'buyer' at all. It's not up to the buyer to determine who has what authority to set prices. The Cashier is clearly an employee of the company and the customer can reasonably assume the price charged by the casier is o.k. with the company.
Now if the price is clearly ridiculous, say a $5000 plasma tv for $29.95, then shure one might argue the customer should recognize that an error has likely occured. But if the the same tv is rung up at 2999.99 then he could reasonably assume a sale or even that that's the normal price.
Put simply it's not reasonable for the customer to have intimate knowledge of the scope of authority or inner workings of any place he shops. In the case of the #2 the casier gets fired and the customer gets a good deal and the company in question takes a loss and hopes the customer goes around telling his friends how great a deal he got giving them some positive word of mouth.
Mycroft
Can't say as I agree, yes there were some elements of 3e I was concerned with (the feats looked alot like the special power trees in diablo),but overall the game went from the mess 2.0 made of AD&D to a coherent system, which 3.5 smoothed out and debugged for the most part (not entirely, a few glitches).
For reference I've been playing since 1982 (remember the efreet cover on the dmg?).
Not that your criticisms are invalid, indeed most strike me as a matter of taste not innate good or bad.
I did have a player who's character needed a flowchart to track damage and attack bonuses with a bow, of course he IS a been counter (more or less, he was a final year economics major who has sense gotten a job in DC making a good tidy sum) and kept said flowchart in head. The smallest numbers on both were frighteningly good ('bean counters' can do some serious stat crunching!) though outside of archery his char was fairly normal.
But the main thing is it IS a system, not the hodgepodge of semi-arbitrary rules patched on top of a small kernal that 2.0 was (and 1.0 to a lesser degree).
The fact that it IS a system is why house rules need more thought than in 2.0, which was largely a collection of house rules.
Mycroft
Vin Diesle (sp?) also used to play D&D, he even wrote a forward for the recent 'retrospective' book on the game. I don't think he has any shortage of women interested in him.
Nor has he failed to make a very good income.
Mycroft
What's scary is that the sliders and setting in-game for oblivion don't let you set the highest/most agressive settings the game is capable of. You have to edit the config file for that, though you'll be lucky to get 5fps if you do set them all the way up.
Also oblivion favors ati cards so crossfire would be a better option than sli in this case.
Mycroft
I'm not talking about putting on the breaks as thier aproaching you. I'm talking about slowing down when they get behind you to close and stay there, and doing in carefully.
If you are doing 65 with someone <10' (about 3 meters) behind you and have to hit the breaks for any reason it's going to be bad. At lower speeds you have better odds.
And frankly it's the tailgater that's being a jerk risking lives and the people he's jepordizing have every right to be mad.
If someone tailgates me I'm not slowing down to piss him off, I'm doing it because I want the SOB the hell away from me, and barring that I want better odds if someting does happen.
Mycroft
In my experience the people going 15-25 over typically ARE taking longer to get somewhere.
One simple reason is they have to keep changing lanes to keep this up (at least that seems to be thier thinking) and eventually get stuck behind the guy going 20 under and CANT go around him without getting nailed by everyone else driving at a normal speed.
I put about 40-50k miles (65000+KM) a year on the road and see these idiots all the time. They run up at +20kph till thier 1/2 car length or less behind someone, who of course slows down (would you rather get in an accident at high speeds or lower speeds?) and spend forever behind the guy they are tailgating. Since they often have just switched to that lane because the other lane was marginally slower at the moment they are now locked behind two cars untill the person thier behind slows enough they think switching lanes AGAIN will help, only to repeat the same mistake of tailgating so bad the other guy slows down.
The fastest way is to get the lane that typically goes fastest on average and stay there at a reasonable distance till you get where your going. This of course assumes you've planned your route out intelligently and left with plenty of time, fail those and you might as well sit in the slow lane behind the 95 year old who thinks 45mph is scary.
It's not going faster that gets you there quicker, it's avoiding the delays, and speeding is more likely to cause a delay. (as above, getting pulled over, getting in a wreck, missing your turn because you tried to go around the 'slowpoke' and got shut out of the turn lane, etc.)
Mycroft
Think cause and effect, not sandles and shorts.
Mycroft
Hold down the Shift Key and left click on the item to be droped in your inventory. The Item may act like you threw it hard, but it'll go somewhere other than your inventory.
I've never got the no room message except when trying to drag it out of my inventory rather than when using shift-click.
I've found turning in place to drop something elsewhere usually helps with the no-room messqage when dragging items out of my inventory as well.
Mycroft
Well that makes three of us at least. ONLY when I'm already quiting the game to get a crash.
Some lowish framerates whent things get crowded or the occasion 1/2 second pause during combat, but nothing real bad.
I can usually fix the slight slowdowns by backing the grass draw distance off from max.
Speaking of tips, the grass is TOO realistic at times. If you are having any issues finding see-ing things on the ground, ect. turn grass distance down to 0 and it gets ALOT easier to find stuff, especially alchemical ingredients.
FWIW I'm running and AMD-64 3500+ (newcastle) with 1 gig pc3200 ram (faster side of normal, nothing special) on an asus a8v-delux MB with a X800XT AIW (agp) and the original Soundblaster Live platinum. Running under xp-pro w/sp2.
That said I saw a comment by a guy runnin a system only slightly weaker (amd3400+,rest simular) except his vid card was about a half gen back from mine and Nvidia. The game was nearly unplayable for him with framerates in the low teens and lots o crashing even on the bottom end settings.
The game is definately very picky about the system it runs on right now. My Brother has a few more glitches than I do and has to turn a few thing down a bit even though he's running an amdxp-2600+, same vid card and ram amount though ram is pc2700 and not 3200.
Mycroft
We're borderline off-topic here, but...
Scotty didn't actually 'beat' the Kobyashi Maru, he just got far enough to find out that A)the physics simulation for events in it went on known theory instead of fact, and b) the test doesn't give up and keeps throwing more enemies till you loose. The number is highly unrealistic by the time you get as far as Scotty did, but not impossible.
The physics issue Scotty exploited was that in theory if you used the transporters to place a Photon Torp at the point where two or more ships shields were interlinked (apparently klingons of the time did this to strengthen thier defenses when attacking in groups) it should detonate in very bad way for the ships involved.
Scotty explained that this doesn't really happen and a paper based on actual experimental reselts had been publish a few before showing this gap between reality and theory (Scotty thought they knew it wouldn't work and he was being called in for cheating) when asked if he was shure that's what the paper said to which Scotty replied he was shure as he'd been the experimenter and had published the paper. The time frame is such Scotty would have to have been in his mid teens at the time.
The improbably part of the senario is that the number of front line war ships that the klingons were tossing out double each wave and Scotty was on the fourth or fifth wave before the time lag between the orders he was giving and thier implimentation was too long for the dynamics of the situation.
Mycroft
gak, so thats what preview is for.
I meant Dark Brotherhood, there being more than one 'brother' in the group, just sometimes not more than one active braincell in my head when it comes to typing.
Mycroft
It's not really quantity vs quality, more like open ended vs storyline on rails.
yeah a few of the dungeons and quests available are pretty run of the mill, but some are pretty interesting with good story and the kind of choices that make you want to try all the options.
Oblivion (sofar) tilts more towards the interesting quests than Morrowind, which in turn was better than Daggerfall (with lots of very generic "go get $rand_item from $rand dongeon" and such).
The point of the games (more and more so) is you create a character that happens to be in a position to be involved the BIG events going on, but then again you could just run for the hills, or better yet keep bussy doing whatever untill you feel ready to face up to what fate (Bethsoft) has placed at your feet (but not forced you to pick up).
You really can play Oblivion in small pieces here and there without necessarily worring about the main quest.
Also Morrowind and Oblivion have some pretty good modding tools out (comes with it's own disc and the moddable content pre-depacked for Morrowind, and is a 6.5MB download for Oblivion). The Modding community has done a few LOC's for Morrowind, and I have no doubt they'll do the same for Oblivion. The games are both built with modding (and expansions of course) in mind.
Mycroft
Do that in Ovlivion and next time you take a rest the Dark Brother will offer you membership, not shure if declining is an option they're prepared to accept.
Mycroft
You should be able to play the game, unless your vid card is holding you back and I don't think it'd be that much.
FWIW I'm running the game on an AMD64-3500+ with 1gig ram and and ati x800xt aiw with all the eyecandy on (except hdr lighting, the x800 don't do that) and only get noticeably low frame rates (the occasional brief stutter) in crowded situations, and those usually improve after half a second or so as the game (I assume) adapts.
My brother is doing fine with only marginally less agressive settings also with the same vid card except his ram is slower (pc2700) and he's running an xp2800.
The vid card itself is agp8x (vid cards are just now starting to push the limits of what agp can handle, the next gen will be the first to need pci express except for sli/crossfire).
I suspect you may need a different driver version for your vid card, my brother is using a different driver version than I am (he upgrades just because he can, me I only do so when I need to or whim strikes me) and has more glitches with his game. I've only got one and that's when I close the game it tends to crash as it exits (but after it's done everything but surrender the screen back to the desktop so no harm that I've seen yet). FWIW I'm running catalyst version 05.13.
I rarely hit 100% with a 3500+ so a 3400+ shouldn't hit 100% very much more often unless it's taking up slack for the vid card. My brothers machine with it's slower 2600+ dosen't hit 100% often eigther.
It's an unfortunate fact of modern gamming that they almost always need at least one patch to be stable, and sometimes several before everything is working right.
Mycroft
What do wormholes have to do with the Twins Paradox?
Mycroft
There is Yoda's words to Obi about excitement and adventure and reckless, those could be twisted a bit to imply he did have some pre epIV adventures.
Not that they need much considering "was I any different when you taught me" and "to Yoda you will go, the Jedi master who trained me" got pretty much mangled with epI and the addition of Qui-Gon.
Mycroft
Yes I saw that, that's why I found it amusing that he refers to 1.2MB floppies, which are the 5.25" ones.
Mycroft
As I understand it there is a LOT of oil lock up in oil shale in the US and Cannada.
The reason we don't go after it now is that even at $65 a barrel it's still cheaper to import. However it becomes econical to exploit it at somewhere between $75-$80 a barrel IIRC.
So if oil does climb much above that point and look to stay there you can bet we'll start in on deposits here in north america.
$150/barrel wouldn't last. Would such majorly in the mean time, but it wouldn't last.
Mycroft
Actually 1.44 was thier most common (by far) capacity, however IIRC some software (Microsoft's?) came with slightly more the disk that made it hard to copy, yet could still be read by 99.9% of the drives out there.
The 1.2 size he mentions is the 5.25" HD floppies.
Mycroft
Not shure, he just said the game should require an online account. For online only games this sort of system makes some sense, still not perfect, but at least it makes sense.
Mycroft
FWIW I get eigther 26.4 or 28.8 here, yet just a couple miles away there is both cable and adsl available.
At least you got satalite, I might be able to do that, but with all the hills in the los it's not a certainty by a long stretch.
Mycroft