and in geological time, a rapid N-S reorientation will still take what, decades?
Don't know what 'geological time' means, exactly, but in human time they seem to be estimating 3000-5000 years for a excursion and twice that if it actually involves the core as well.
No, that was not the magnetic pole shifting. Stop watching movies like 'The Core.'
I hate this site sometimes, largely because I'm about to be blasted for saying this... but...
The Core is only partially terrible science.
PLEASE DON'T MURDER ME. Let me speak...
The magnetic field over the earth DOES in fact shift around, and it is, at least some of the time, due to changes in the core. Also it is assumed to cause bad things to happen.
So the premise of the film, being that the Earth's core is messed up and is causing us a bad time of it, isn't really all that flawed.
Now the laser-worm with the bombs and all that, THAT is crap. But birds falling from the sky can and does already happen due to magnetism. Check out pigeon races and how they have to plan them around these fluctuations.
Right, but you do realize that vaccines are not her only finding, right? You're completely informed on her position and aren't just debunking a single characterization of it, RIGHT?
So the choice for many is to teach using a watered-down version or avoid it altogether. Given that choice, watered down is better than nothing at all.
That's false. This isn't just some story by just some American author we're discussing here. This is the book Nixon brought to Chairman Mao when we established relations with China. It talks about who we were and where we came from and, most importantly, how far we have come since then.
Removing the satire from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read.
That's an interesting opinion. So she doesn't love her son and doesn't wish to enable his well being? What's your basis for this assertion? That she's female and used to pose naked? Solid evidence, that. Got anything else?
That's incorrect. You can and do become immune to the virus you've been in contact with - otherwise it kills you.
Further, you're unaware I can tell, but in many, many, many situations flu vaccines are not only for sale but are actually mandatory for non 'at risk' people.
Does she claim to have the knowledge, or does she have access to the people who do?
Further, say she gets a wild idea, doesn't she have the means to test it?
There's a pill that I think might cure the disease, but I could neither afford it nor bribe a doctor to prescribe it for this use. A celebrity would not have those barriers.
Or is this the truth? There are dark murmurings from scientists and doctors asking, Was her son ever really autistic? Evan's symptoms — heavy seizures, followed by marked improvement once the seizures were brought under control — are similar to those of Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a rare childhood neurological disorder that can also result in speech impairment and possible long-term neurological damage. Or, as other pediatricians have suggested, perhaps the miracle I have beheld is the quotidian miracle of childhood development: a delayed 2-year-old catching up by the time he is 7, a commonplace, routine occurrence, nothing more surprising than a short boy growing tall. It is enraging to the mother to hear that nothing was wrong with her boy — she held him during his seizures, saw his eyes roll up after he received his vaccines — and how can you say that she doesn't know what she knows?
This entire thing is a straw-man anyway, even as presented in the article. It sums up as 'if her son never had Autism, can vaccines be harmful?'
Anyway, even the original case, Donald T, travels to foreign countries alone these days. Does that mean that HE is not Autistic as well??
How is a vaccine preying on faults in human behavior?
By presenting vaccines as a mechanism to prevent infection. They're not. In fact they cause infection so you'll build an immunity. You could likewise build such an immunity on your own. Any honest appraisal of a vaccine would need to measure the impact of the drug itself against the risks of developing an immunity naturally.
For Polio, this is clear. For flu, decidedly less so. Yet because both are vaccines they're given equal power. Because EVERYONE knows that vaccines PREVENT infection. Ergo, preying on human fears and behaviors to sell products of dubious need.
Imus? How about Jenny McCarthy? At what point did people think that following celebrities for things that are scientific was a good idea?
Jenny McCarthy and I each have an autistic kid. What she has, though, which I do not, is a lot more money, lack of a job, etc. If she's able to use that power to explore more solutions to this issue than I am, then why would she be less likely than I am to find a solution?
Even the author of TFA relies on fans for feedback. Just not every single fan, but a limited cadre of fans who have proven themselves useful.
Author of TFA sounds, well, weak to me. He seems to be selecting yes-men in order to keep 'the wrong things out of his head'. That's a problem. Heads are big on the inside and they have room for lots of things in them. Even the advice 'build a thicker skin' is largely wrong, because that keeps stuff on the outside. You need to be able to read, understand, think, and disagree succinctly. That would be the ideal. Simply avoiding the 'read' part, though, doesn't earn a lot of respect from your users. Replacing that with a hand-selected group of people who are likely to never make you have 'bad thoughts' is largely masturbatory.
Alright, so you're obfuscating the issue behind paragraphs of math and emotion. Spiffy. Got anything that demonstrates how that other 99% actually feels?
And when you can reasonably assume your audience is much, much larger than the people saying anything at all, and apparently what you're doing isn't enough to trip that unseen audience's pathetically low complaint threshold, AND you factor trolls and the overall Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory into the whole mess, if that's all the complaints you're getting, you can be assured that, unless you yourself can also see and agree with the problem they're mentioning, you're doing more right than wrong.
That house of cards is built upon a myriad of assumptions, each of which may or may not be true or false depending on a wide range of factors. Ergo mythology, rather than fact. The fact remains that the opinion of the unspoken remains unmeasured.
...would you immediately deaden the taste, no further questions asked? No. That'd be the wrong way to do business.
The alternative you're suggesting is to never measure any feedback at all, and you're propping this up as a better way to do business. That's beyond insane, and reeks of laziness.
There is no war game, simulation or RPG mechanic so utterly baroque that someone won't decry streamlining it as 'dumbing down' the game.
Well, those things are synonymous, so that's basically a non-statement, isn't it? You simply cannot remove complexity without resulting in a less-complex game. You can, if you want to get pedantic about it, disagree that 'simple' 'dumb', but that's an entirely separate discussion, and at least slightly dishonest intellectually.
People got unbelievably pissed off when Dungeons and Dragons got rid of THAC0 and made higher armor classes better. All THAC0 did was complicate the rules set and give newcomers one more reason not to play past their first game.
People always get unbelievable pissed when D&D launches a new version. Mostly because they're horrible at launching new versions. They have no identity and tend to rip and replace things without regard to any particular purpose. Gygax and company are long, long gone these days, and the principles have left with them.
Anyway, you've completely oversimplified the change from 'AC is low' to 'AC is high' by focusing only on the complexity angle. What about compatibility, for example? What about balance? There are a lot more ways than one to skin a cat, but in 3e Hasbro decided to unify all the rolls onto a single, upward-slanting d20 roll. Which is fine, but tends towards stat inflation, as we saw later on with the myriad of 'supplemental books'.
D&D 4e among many other things eliminated enemies that drain levels on touch...
3e did that first by changing these kinds of effects to apply flat modifiers, usually to a single stat, but go on...
...since permanently weakening a PC sucks, it disproportionately hits melee classes, and it brings the game to a halt as you recalculate everything every time someone gets hit.
Permanently weakening a PC adds danger to the game. Whether or not this is a good thing is up to the Dungeon Master to decide. Period.
Melee classes in D&D are 'disproportionately hit' by leveling, period. A high level caster traditionally dominates every play group because there's no plan to balance them out. They're supposed to be Gandalf. Whether or not this is good design is debatable, but this has basically zero to do with the symptom of level drain.
And again, 3e solved the recalculation issue in a rather elegant way.
Ultimately, designing a game is a different skill set from playing the same game. Players can give an idea of what they personally liked and disliked, but as a rule have a pretty terrible idea of what's possible and what's balanced. Designers who forget that are begging for trouble.
That's not strictly true, and is a statement propagated mostly to shore up design salaries. The original games were all developed during play, not in the board room. Looking back at Gygax and Arneson, for example, both of these guys were wargamers with zero education in game design. Together they created the RPG. They did so from their experience playing other games. I'm aware that you can presently get degrees in such things, but I fail to see anything as revolutionary as what was done by this high school dropout and his security guard friend.
The problem is that there are games where there are unified calls - nigh unanimous - and STILL the developers aren't f'ing paying attention.
Your specific example notwithstanding, the wiser developers know full well that "nigh unanimous" complaints on a forum, in general, means "unanimous only among the people complaining", given the people who are happy with (or just don't mind) whatever "unanimously" needs to be changed aren't going to manically gush on and on about every bit of minutia they love about the game.
This is mythology, rather than fact. Only in a developer's mind does 'no feedback' equal 'positive feedback'. Imagine you cook a meal and many of the people you serve it to throw a fit about it being too salty. Not a single person steps forward to disagree. Do you assume that just because the total people served is greater than twice the number of people complaining that it was NOT in fact too salty? Of course not.
Oh come on, you're going to tell me that 'has two tanks' means they're always on, ready to tank whatever whenever as needed, but only for you? On what planet?
Assuming 10 3 hour runs is fine. There's no average of 5 bosses being killed in each, though, unless you no longer need the gear. Actually, amend that to 'unless your pug group' because you simply cannot carry anyone at these gear levels. You're also assuming instant queues. 3500 JP is two items. '1/6 useful' wildly assumes that you're don't see the same item drop repeatedly. You also seem to be assuming that those 10 runs won't all be Vortex Pinnacle. You're right on the tabards and the rep, but you've also forgotten to factor in the time to find enchants/etc as well as coming up with the means to pay for them.
Anyway, if you were hardcore like that and equally lucky you might be able to set 30 hours at an absolute minimum. I could be convinced that 80 is somehow a maximum, so I guess we'll just call it a range.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're disagreeing that she does things other than complain about vaccines? Please be very clear.
Really? I'm the only one on all of slashdot to be negative? Are you sure?
Further, if I'm negative, I'm automatically wrong?
That's stupid.
Wait, did I just cause a double-negative there? How about this one:
Being negative sucks!
My head hurts.
and in geological time, a rapid N-S reorientation will still take what, decades?
Don't know what 'geological time' means, exactly, but in human time they seem to be estimating 3000-5000 years for a excursion and twice that if it actually involves the core as well.
No, that was not the magnetic pole shifting. Stop watching movies like 'The Core.'
I hate this site sometimes, largely because I'm about to be blasted for saying this... but...
The Core is only partially terrible science.
PLEASE DON'T MURDER ME. Let me speak...
The magnetic field over the earth DOES in fact shift around, and it is, at least some of the time, due to changes in the core. Also it is assumed to cause bad things to happen.
So the premise of the film, being that the Earth's core is messed up and is causing us a bad time of it, isn't really all that flawed.
Now the laser-worm with the bombs and all that, THAT is crap. But birds falling from the sky can and does already happen due to magnetism. Check out pigeon races and how they have to plan them around these fluctuations.
Right, but you do realize that vaccines are not her only finding, right? You're completely informed on her position and aren't just debunking a single characterization of it, RIGHT?
So the choice for many is to teach using a watered-down version or avoid it altogether. Given that choice, watered down is better than nothing at all.
That's false. This isn't just some story by just some American author we're discussing here. This is the book Nixon brought to Chairman Mao when we established relations with China. It talks about who we were and where we came from and, most importantly, how far we have come since then.
Removing the satire from it removes the entire point of it having ever been written or read.
That's an interesting opinion. So she doesn't love her son and doesn't wish to enable his well being? What's your basis for this assertion? That she's female and used to pose naked? Solid evidence, that. Got anything else?
Labels are fun. Got any facts?
Indeed. Instead of misery and a week off, I get a lowered immunity for months and have to work through it.
Don't try to silence me over minutia such as semantic uses of a word. I'm not a dictionary, and refuse to be held to that standard.
That's incorrect. You can and do become immune to the virus you've been in contact with - otherwise it kills you.
Further, you're unaware I can tell, but in many, many, many situations flu vaccines are not only for sale but are actually mandatory for non 'at risk' people.
That's not true. She's done things to/with/for her child based on her beliefs. She believes further that she can demonstrate results.
Does she claim to have the knowledge, or does she have access to the people who do?
Further, say she gets a wild idea, doesn't she have the means to test it?
There's a pill that I think might cure the disease, but I could neither afford it nor bribe a doctor to prescribe it for this use. A celebrity would not have those barriers.
Jenny McCarthy's son was misdiagnosed.
Time article (lengthy)
This appears to be a rumor. Observe:
Or is this the truth? There are dark murmurings from scientists and doctors asking, Was her son ever really autistic? Evan's symptoms — heavy seizures, followed by marked improvement once the seizures were brought under control — are similar to those of Landau-Kleffner syndrome, a rare childhood neurological disorder that can also result in speech impairment and possible long-term neurological damage. Or, as other pediatricians have suggested, perhaps the miracle I have beheld is the quotidian miracle of childhood development: a delayed 2-year-old catching up by the time he is 7, a commonplace, routine occurrence, nothing more surprising than a short boy growing tall. It is enraging to the mother to hear that nothing was wrong with her boy — she held him during his seizures, saw his eyes roll up after he received his vaccines — and how can you say that she doesn't know what she knows?
This entire thing is a straw-man anyway, even as presented in the article. It sums up as 'if her son never had Autism, can vaccines be harmful?'
Anyway, even the original case, Donald T, travels to foreign countries alone these days. Does that mean that HE is not Autistic as well??
They prey on faults in human behavior.
How is a vaccine preying on faults in human behavior?
By presenting vaccines as a mechanism to prevent infection. They're not. In fact they cause infection so you'll build an immunity. You could likewise build such an immunity on your own. Any honest appraisal of a vaccine would need to measure the impact of the drug itself against the risks of developing an immunity naturally.
For Polio, this is clear. For flu, decidedly less so. Yet because both are vaccines they're given equal power. Because EVERYONE knows that vaccines PREVENT infection. Ergo, preying on human fears and behaviors to sell products of dubious need.
Imus? How about Jenny McCarthy? At what point did people think that following celebrities for things that are scientific was a good idea?
Jenny McCarthy and I each have an autistic kid. What she has, though, which I do not, is a lot more money, lack of a job, etc. If she's able to use that power to explore more solutions to this issue than I am, then why would she be less likely than I am to find a solution?
Even the author of TFA relies on fans for feedback. Just not every single fan, but a limited cadre of fans who have proven themselves useful.
Author of TFA sounds, well, weak to me. He seems to be selecting yes-men in order to keep 'the wrong things out of his head'. That's a problem. Heads are big on the inside and they have room for lots of things in them. Even the advice 'build a thicker skin' is largely wrong, because that keeps stuff on the outside. You need to be able to read, understand, think, and disagree succinctly. That would be the ideal. Simply avoiding the 'read' part, though, doesn't earn a lot of respect from your users. Replacing that with a hand-selected group of people who are likely to never make you have 'bad thoughts' is largely masturbatory.
Neglect breeds contempt as well.
The moderators need to be good and unbiased, of course, or you risk creating a nasty disconnect with your community (see Valve with Left 4 Dead).
This risk is inherent in the suggestion, and could never be logically avoided. You're basically suggesting this:
Disconnect with your forum users by adding a layer of moderation but be careful not to disconnect with your forum users.
That's not strictly sane.
Alright, so you're obfuscating the issue behind paragraphs of math and emotion. Spiffy. Got anything that demonstrates how that other 99% actually feels?
And when you can reasonably assume your audience is much, much larger than the people saying anything at all, and apparently what you're doing isn't enough to trip that unseen audience's pathetically low complaint threshold, AND you factor trolls and the overall Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory into the whole mess, if that's all the complaints you're getting, you can be assured that, unless you yourself can also see and agree with the problem they're mentioning, you're doing more right than wrong.
That house of cards is built upon a myriad of assumptions, each of which may or may not be true or false depending on a wide range of factors. Ergo mythology, rather than fact. The fact remains that the opinion of the unspoken remains unmeasured.
...would you immediately deaden the taste, no further questions asked? No. That'd be the wrong way to do business.
The alternative you're suggesting is to never measure any feedback at all, and you're propping this up as a better way to do business. That's beyond insane, and reeks of laziness.
There is no war game, simulation or RPG mechanic so utterly baroque that someone won't decry streamlining it as 'dumbing down' the game.
Well, those things are synonymous, so that's basically a non-statement, isn't it? You simply cannot remove complexity without resulting in a less-complex game. You can, if you want to get pedantic about it, disagree that 'simple' 'dumb', but that's an entirely separate discussion, and at least slightly dishonest intellectually.
People got unbelievably pissed off when Dungeons and Dragons got rid of THAC0 and made higher armor classes better. All THAC0 did was complicate the rules set and give newcomers one more reason not to play past their first game.
People always get unbelievable pissed when D&D launches a new version. Mostly because they're horrible at launching new versions. They have no identity and tend to rip and replace things without regard to any particular purpose. Gygax and company are long, long gone these days, and the principles have left with them.
Anyway, you've completely oversimplified the change from 'AC is low' to 'AC is high' by focusing only on the complexity angle. What about compatibility, for example? What about balance? There are a lot more ways than one to skin a cat, but in 3e Hasbro decided to unify all the rolls onto a single, upward-slanting d20 roll. Which is fine, but tends towards stat inflation, as we saw later on with the myriad of 'supplemental books'.
D&D 4e among many other things eliminated enemies that drain levels on touch...
3e did that first by changing these kinds of effects to apply flat modifiers, usually to a single stat, but go on...
...since permanently weakening a PC sucks, it disproportionately hits melee classes, and it brings the game to a halt as you recalculate everything every time someone gets hit.
Permanently weakening a PC adds danger to the game. Whether or not this is a good thing is up to the Dungeon Master to decide. Period.
Melee classes in D&D are 'disproportionately hit' by leveling, period. A high level caster traditionally dominates every play group because there's no plan to balance them out. They're supposed to be Gandalf. Whether or not this is good design is debatable, but this has basically zero to do with the symptom of level drain.
And again, 3e solved the recalculation issue in a rather elegant way.
Ultimately, designing a game is a different skill set from playing the same game. Players can give an idea of what they personally liked and disliked, but as a rule have a pretty terrible idea of what's possible and what's balanced. Designers who forget that are begging for trouble.
That's not strictly true, and is a statement propagated mostly to shore up design salaries. The original games were all developed during play, not in the board room. Looking back at Gygax and Arneson, for example, both of these guys were wargamers with zero education in game design. Together they created the RPG. They did so from their experience playing other games. I'm aware that you can presently get degrees in such things, but I fail to see anything as revolutionary as what was done by this high school dropout and his security guard friend.
The problem is that there are games where there are unified calls - nigh unanimous - and STILL the developers aren't f'ing paying attention.
Your specific example notwithstanding, the wiser developers know full well that "nigh unanimous" complaints on a forum, in general, means "unanimous only among the people complaining", given the people who are happy with (or just don't mind) whatever "unanimously" needs to be changed aren't going to manically gush on and on about every bit of minutia they love about the game.
This is mythology, rather than fact. Only in a developer's mind does 'no feedback' equal 'positive feedback'. Imagine you cook a meal and many of the people you serve it to throw a fit about it being too salty. Not a single person steps forward to disagree. Do you assume that just because the total people served is greater than twice the number of people complaining that it was NOT in fact too salty? Of course not.
Oh come on, you're going to tell me that 'has two tanks' means they're always on, ready to tank whatever whenever as needed, but only for you? On what planet?
Assuming 10 3 hour runs is fine. There's no average of 5 bosses being killed in each, though, unless you no longer need the gear. Actually, amend that to 'unless your pug group' because you simply cannot carry anyone at these gear levels. You're also assuming instant queues. 3500 JP is two items. '1/6 useful' wildly assumes that you're don't see the same item drop repeatedly. You also seem to be assuming that those 10 runs won't all be Vortex Pinnacle. You're right on the tabards and the rep, but you've also forgotten to factor in the time to find enchants/etc as well as coming up with the means to pay for them.
Anyway, if you were hardcore like that and equally lucky you might be able to set 30 hours at an absolute minimum. I could be convinced that 80 is somehow a maximum, so I guess we'll just call it a range.
Sure, sure, but Ultimate != Quality either, so what's your point?
Did you actually read that somewhere in what I wrote?
Don't say the A-word on slashdot. The nerds will rage all over you...
But you're telling me that authors should not try and replicate HP and/or that movies like Avatar are a terrible idea?
Isn't hyperbole fun?