This is helped by the fact that there is no PvP other than environments of 4v4 or 8v8.
In DAoC, you have basically anything goes PvP. 1v1, 8v8, 100v100, NvM (where N is some positive integer, and M is some positive integer, limited only by the number of people online). For that matter, you can have 1v1v1, 8v8v8, 100v100v100 - there are three sides in DAoC....
Am I the only one who *doesn't* want balanced classes. Part of the fun of an RPG is to make a character who is totally badass, and the best part is to find the things & select the right class which make you badass--then working and grinding for it.
That can be a lot of fun. Until everyone else in the game does the same thing for the same reason.
Dark Age of Camelot (yes, some people still play it) has this sort of issue.
They do not "balance classes", they "balance realms". Problem is that when they tweak some minor class into an overpowered class (because noone much plays it, so it won't affect the realm much if we just tweak it a little bit, we need to give it a solid boost), everyone and his brother switches to that class, and the realm balance goes to shit until they nerf it back into line.
Of course, they also don't "balance for 1v1" (except when they do - there have been classes changed specifically to make them better 1v1, or worse 1v1).
All in all, the only valid balance path is to make all classes about equally capable of functioning in 1v1, and let the groups and zergs sort themselves out.
Per se. This is a wonderful example of someone using a word or phrase that they've heard, but never seen written. And pretty solid evidence as to why you shouldn't try write a word that you've only heard.
There are good politicians and bad politicians, painting them all with the same brush discourages the good ones.
I'll bite. How do you define "good politician"? I've heard that a "good politician" stays bought, but that's probably not the definition you use.
And after you've defined it, name half a dozen that fit your definition. And please spare me from a list of your local council. I'd like politicians at a national level, if you please.
cant recall the last time I sat down with anyone and chatted about "Cirrus clouds", but this is the crap they teach in 5th grade.
You must have boring friends. What do you talk about instead, sports, TV?
This implies that you've (relatively) recently sat down with friends about cirrus clouds. When was this, and what fascinating insights did you all come up with on the subject?
I also can't remember ever chatting with anyone about cirrus clouds. We usually talk about astronomy, the space program, biology, politics, history, philosophy, and the occasional trashy romance....
I think Einstein said it best (and much shorter) with this quote: "The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination."
"The true measure of another man's intelligence is how much he agrees with you" is probably the one most used in the world. It certainly applies to/. and pretty much every other situation I've been in in my life.
The escape velocity for Earth is only 7 miles per second. With advanced railgun technology, it might be possible to launch a human into the sun at a surprisingly affordable price, once the up-front R&D investment is made. A military grade railgun today can fire a 2kg projectile at 3km/s with 9MJ of energy. To fire a 75kg human at 11.2km/s would require 1.26 GJ of energy, so clearly more research is needed.
Yes, I'm aware that this is a joke. But...
11.2 km/s is about escape speed from Earth. It is nowhere near enough to drop someone (or something) into the Sun. For that, you're talking somewhere over 30 km/s.
However, the idea is not to be vigilant for anything that might possibly be abused and prevent it(we'd basically have to all stay locked in our houses and not move in order to achieve this, but to be vigilant for abuse and to fight it when/if it occurs.
The first step in being vigilant for abuse is recognize that something can be abused, and how it can be abused. Once that is done, we can consider ways to punish the abuse.
Assuming that things will always be used in benign ways by default merely allows the hypothetical abusers a head-start in implementing the abuse.
Far better to anticipate them, and head them off at the pass, rather than respond to them once they've already abused you.
What, are you kidding! That's way too sensible! As the other posters have surmised its an evil plot such that the cable operator can watch everything you do from their Skull Island fortress of doom!!!!!
No, the other posters have surmised that if something can be abused by those in a position of power, it will be so abused, sooner or later.
Whether it is first used for a "sensible" purpose or no, sooner or later it will be used for a malicious purpose.
For example, if they said 40 gas-free miles, and then 50 MpG afterwards I'd be OK with it. But Joe Sixpack would either ignore or get confused by the "40 gas-free miles." He'd say "Huh?" or "So it's like a GM-made Prius."
You think Joe Sixpack isn't going to get confused when he buys one and finds that he only gets 100 mpg because he drives 80 miles per day? Not only will he be confused, but he'll be taking the car back to the Dealer and insisting that the Dealer "Fix it!" Or, in States with Lemon Laws (Florida comes to mind, he'll take it to the Dealer and tell him to give him a refund for "this PoS that no way gets 230 mpg"....
So Accuracy, Realism, and Simplicity... pick and two (or one if you're a pessimist).
I'm a pessimist. Always assuming the worst helps when trying to predict human behaviour.
Assuming the car lasts 10 years I'll save $16K just on not paying for commute fuel. Any other driving I do with it will still be more efficient than my pickup (at 11Mpg).
Which means that if (a) it lasts ten years with no major maintenance required (such as a new battery pack), and (b) that it costs less than sixteen grand more than the alternative, then you'll come out ahead on the deal.
Since I don't buy new cars (haven't spent $10K on a car in 20 years), and buy cars with decent (but not exciting) gas mileage, it would have to be incredibly cheap to make it worth the bother for me. Or gas would have to cost $10 per gallon....
It was more a recognition that one's band needed to live in balance with all of its neighbors of various other species, or the outcome would be unpleasant.
And yet, they didn't do this either. They did the way humans always did - bred up to the carrying capacity of the land and a bit beyond, and killed their neighbors when necessary (or starved when necessary) to deal with shortfalls.
The fact that the Amerinds had, in general, a lower population density than Europe (I say in general because the Aztecs had a much higher population density, due to superior agricultural practices) was not due to recognition that not "living in balance with all its neighbors of various other species would be unpleasant", but due to the fact that hunter-gatherers who were constantly at war with one another had a lower population ceiling then agriculturalists.
Projecting attributes of your own culture onto persons who live according to very different values is a sure way to fail at developing a broad base of potential collaborators
And the evidence that the Amerinds lived "according to very different values" is what, exactly? And what, exactly, were these "very different values"?
During the work-week my commute is 22 round-trip, and I rarely put on another 10-20 during a day. That means 90% of the time I drive between 22 and 42 miles per day, I run most of my errands on the way home anyway to save time.
And so, for you, it would be nearly ideal. And would get much more than 230 mpg, on average. Closer to 1000 mpg, in fact.
My objection isn't to the car, or to its performance. It's to a "new standard" for measuring mileage that produces essentially meaningless results - in almost all cases, you'll get either far less or far more than 230mpg. Which means they might as well not have bothered to publish a number.
Especially since some people are going to buy it for the 230 mpg, and then scream bloody murder when it doesn't get nearly that high for them....
The 230 mpg figure is meaningless. If you drive a short enough distance that the gas engine doesn't kick in, then you get really huge mileage.
Once that gas engine kicks in, we're talking maybe 50 mpg at best.
The only conditions under which that "230 mpg" figure means anything is if you drive about 51 miles per day. Lower than that, and your actual mileage will be higher, higher than that, much lower.
This is almost reminiscent of the 5th element with Bruce Willis where he drives a cab in the future, which allows to go into space etc...
Well, Bruce certainly drove a cab. But, alas, the cab he drove couldn't go into space. Which was why he had to "win" that contest to get the tickets to go to that other planet. Which were then stolen, restolen, etc....
As parent post points out, in North America, the construction and use of roads was not compatible with cultures that sought to blend seamlessly with the ecosystem.
And what nineteenth century lunacy makes you think that the native American cultures "sought to blend seamlessly with the ecosystem"?
Sorry, the Amerinds were no more the "noble savages living in harmony with nature" than anyone else in the history of the world....
I gave up caffeine about 20 years ago. The day I decided to stop drinking the stuff, I started taking tylenol as per the dosage recommendation on the bottle, and kept that up for the three days I figured the withdrawal headache would last.
Then I stopped taking the tylenol, and have never had an urge to drink coffee/sodas/anything of the sort since.
Couldn't you file a public notice that if any of the copyright holders are interested in maintaining their copyright, they should contact so-and-so by such-and-such a date.
No, Copyright doesn't change hands so easily as that. If it did, what's to stop, say, Microsoft from doing that with regards to the Linux code? In a VERY obscure newspaper (it's public, even if only 500 people read it). And then claiming the entire Linux codebase as their own, since its Copyright has obviously been abandoned.
Or if you don't like the MS/Linux example, use the works of any well known author, his publisher, and a similarly obscure journal....
What if the trash was almost entirely below the surface, or in pieces too small to see in a panoramic photo of the ocean?
Or, as in this case, not enough trash to actually make an island the size of Alaska, but trash spread over an area the size of Alaska.
Face it, it would take more trash than we've ever made to make an island the size of Alaska. And this is just the refuse that got dumped in North Pacific-draining watersheds, which is a tiny amount of our total trash....
400-500 mile range cars are few and far between and is a ridiculous expectation to set for electric vehicles.
My Buick - 17 gallon tank, 30 mpg. 510 miles.
My Toyota - 13 gallon tank, 40 mpg. 520 miles.
My Nissan - 15 gallon tank, 35 mpg. 525 miles.'
The tankage listed above is based on the amount of gas I've been able to put into each of them at one time or another. I think you're underestimating the amount of usable gas in a tank.
So you won't be happy until the car has a 500mile range. That's ridiculous. Current gasoline cars have around a 300mile range with many getting far less.
Oddly enough, I haven't owned a car in 20 years that couldn't get 400 miles on a tank of gas. And only one in that time that couldn't get 500 miles on a tank of gas.
Most SUV's can do better than 300 miles per tank, by the by.
Another cure for traffic jams is to make our highways 20-lanes wide (like in Asimov's novels). I guarantee that a nice, wide, open stretch of macadam won't jam up if you have that many lanes to serve the cars.
And noone will ever need more than 640K, either. If you build the road to handle a gozillion cars, there will, inevitably, be 1.1 gozillion cars on that road....
Slashdot Mirror
In DAoC, you have basically anything goes PvP. 1v1, 8v8, 100v100, NvM (where N is some positive integer, and M is some positive integer, limited only by the number of people online). For that matter, you can have 1v1v1, 8v8v8, 100v100v100 - there are three sides in DAoC....
That can be a lot of fun. Until everyone else in the game does the same thing for the same reason.
Dark Age of Camelot (yes, some people still play it) has this sort of issue.
They do not "balance classes", they "balance realms". Problem is that when they tweak some minor class into an overpowered class (because noone much plays it, so it won't affect the realm much if we just tweak it a little bit, we need to give it a solid boost), everyone and his brother switches to that class, and the realm balance goes to shit until they nerf it back into line.
Of course, they also don't "balance for 1v1" (except when they do - there have been classes changed specifically to make them better 1v1, or worse 1v1).
All in all, the only valid balance path is to make all classes about equally capable of functioning in 1v1, and let the groups and zergs sort themselves out.
Per se. This is a wonderful example of someone using a word or phrase that they've heard, but never seen written. And pretty solid evidence as to why you shouldn't try write a word that you've only heard.
I'll bite. How do you define "good politician"? I've heard that a "good politician" stays bought, but that's probably not the definition you use.
And after you've defined it, name half a dozen that fit your definition. And please spare me from a list of your local council. I'd like politicians at a national level, if you please.
This implies that you've (relatively) recently sat down with friends about cirrus clouds. When was this, and what fascinating insights did you all come up with on the subject?
I also can't remember ever chatting with anyone about cirrus clouds. We usually talk about astronomy, the space program, biology, politics, history, philosophy, and the occasional trashy romance....
"The true measure of another man's intelligence is how much he agrees with you" is probably the one most used in the world. It certainly applies to /. and pretty much every other situation I've been in in my life.
Yes, I'm aware that this is a joke. But...
11.2 km/s is about escape speed from Earth. It is nowhere near enough to drop someone (or something) into the Sun. For that, you're talking somewhere over 30 km/s.
The first step in being vigilant for abuse is recognize that something can be abused, and how it can be abused. Once that is done, we can consider ways to punish the abuse.
Assuming that things will always be used in benign ways by default merely allows the hypothetical abusers a head-start in implementing the abuse.
Far better to anticipate them, and head them off at the pass, rather than respond to them once they've already abused you.
No, the other posters have surmised that if something can be abused by those in a position of power, it will be so abused, sooner or later.
Whether it is first used for a "sensible" purpose or no, sooner or later it will be used for a malicious purpose.
You think Joe Sixpack isn't going to get confused when he buys one and finds that he only gets 100 mpg because he drives 80 miles per day? Not only will he be confused, but he'll be taking the car back to the Dealer and insisting that the Dealer "Fix it!" Or, in States with Lemon Laws (Florida comes to mind, he'll take it to the Dealer and tell him to give him a refund for "this PoS that no way gets 230 mpg"....
I'm a pessimist. Always assuming the worst helps when trying to predict human behaviour.
Which means that if (a) it lasts ten years with no major maintenance required (such as a new battery pack), and (b) that it costs less than sixteen grand more than the alternative, then you'll come out ahead on the deal.
Since I don't buy new cars (haven't spent $10K on a car in 20 years), and buy cars with decent (but not exciting) gas mileage, it would have to be incredibly cheap to make it worth the bother for me. Or gas would have to cost $10 per gallon....
And yet, they didn't do this either. They did the way humans always did - bred up to the carrying capacity of the land and a bit beyond, and killed their neighbors when necessary (or starved when necessary) to deal with shortfalls.
The fact that the Amerinds had, in general, a lower population density than Europe (I say in general because the Aztecs had a much higher population density, due to superior agricultural practices) was not due to recognition that not "living in balance with all its neighbors of various other species would be unpleasant", but due to the fact that hunter-gatherers who were constantly at war with one another had a lower population ceiling then agriculturalists.
And the evidence that the Amerinds lived "according to very different values" is what, exactly? And what, exactly, were these "very different values"?
And so, for you, it would be nearly ideal. And would get much more than 230 mpg, on average. Closer to 1000 mpg, in fact.
My objection isn't to the car, or to its performance. It's to a "new standard" for measuring mileage that produces essentially meaningless results - in almost all cases, you'll get either far less or far more than 230mpg. Which means they might as well not have bothered to publish a number.
Especially since some people are going to buy it for the 230 mpg, and then scream bloody murder when it doesn't get nearly that high for them....
Once that gas engine kicks in, we're talking maybe 50 mpg at best.
The only conditions under which that "230 mpg" figure means anything is if you drive about 51 miles per day. Lower than that, and your actual mileage will be higher, higher than that, much lower.
Louisiana? I don't remember the exact figure, but I only paid about 10% Income Tax (State and Federal) this past year.
Seems like SpaceX's Dragon capsule is a good start in that direction already. It's intended to carry seven to/from the ISS.
And it has the advantage of being under development already, and under construction already.
Well, Bruce certainly drove a cab. But, alas, the cab he drove couldn't go into space. Which was why he had to "win" that contest to get the tickets to go to that other planet. Which were then stolen, restolen, etc....
And what nineteenth century lunacy makes you think that the native American cultures "sought to blend seamlessly with the ecosystem"?
Sorry, the Amerinds were no more the "noble savages living in harmony with nature" than anyone else in the history of the world....
I gave up caffeine about 20 years ago. The day I decided to stop drinking the stuff, I started taking tylenol as per the dosage recommendation on the bottle, and kept that up for the three days I figured the withdrawal headache would last.
Then I stopped taking the tylenol, and have never had an urge to drink coffee/sodas/anything of the sort since.
No, Copyright doesn't change hands so easily as that. If it did, what's to stop, say, Microsoft from doing that with regards to the Linux code? In a VERY obscure newspaper (it's public, even if only 500 people read it). And then claiming the entire Linux codebase as their own, since its Copyright has obviously been abandoned.
Or if you don't like the MS/Linux example, use the works of any well known author, his publisher, and a similarly obscure journal....
Or, as in this case, not enough trash to actually make an island the size of Alaska, but trash spread over an area the size of Alaska.
Face it, it would take more trash than we've ever made to make an island the size of Alaska. And this is just the refuse that got dumped in North Pacific-draining watersheds, which is a tiny amount of our total trash....
My Buick - 17 gallon tank, 30 mpg. 510 miles.
My Toyota - 13 gallon tank, 40 mpg. 520 miles.
My Nissan - 15 gallon tank, 35 mpg. 525 miles.'
The tankage listed above is based on the amount of gas I've been able to put into each of them at one time or another. I think you're underestimating the amount of usable gas in a tank.
Oddly enough, I haven't owned a car in 20 years that couldn't get 400 miles on a tank of gas. And only one in that time that couldn't get 500 miles on a tank of gas.
Most SUV's can do better than 300 miles per tank, by the by.
No, Medicaid covers that particular case. More often, the problem is "Sorry, you're not poor enough"....
And noone will ever need more than 640K, either. If you build the road to handle a gozillion cars, there will, inevitably, be 1.1 gozillion cars on that road....