...once upon a time, stupidity of this magnitude from public officials would not have been tolerated, let alone encouraged by any significant percentage of the public. If they thought the public would like it, our senators and representatives would rush to create and pass a bill titled "Resolution To Make Bad Things Go Away". It's frightening how close we seem to be to that level of problem solving and critical thinking in the legislative branch of our government.
It is precisely your attitude that scares me more than most other political trends currently active in the United States. It's so enormously illogical for any group of people to deliberately and willingly eliminate their capability to defend themselves, that I simply cannot comprehend the necessary mindset. Others have already explained sufficiently elsewhere why the attitude of self-disarmament is ultimately a poor one. But it's your last sentence that alerts me to the true nature of your beliefs: the assertion that only "we" the government can be trusted with dangerous things, because "they" the people are unsafe and unfit to possess such deadly objects such as sniper rifles, handguns, and steak knives. The path that train of thought leads down ends in a place that we really, really don't want to be.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
You seem to be the only other person here who actually watched the video with an eye towards gameplay.
In my estimation, there's several big warning signs that Spore is going to be a disappointment once people start playing. First, those procedures Wright kept talking about in the video had better be both damned detailed, and broad enough to allow serious innovation. He shows us that the engine can handle a three or four legged creature, but can it cope with one leg? None? Crawling mechanisms? Wings-for-legs? More importantly, can it do each of those things in a reasonably convincing manner? The crux of the early game is going to be its capacity for creativity, and Wright's previous games may not provide an accurate scale for comparison, because I don't believe anything he's ever produced has required anywhere near the level of complexity Spore will need.
At the higher levels, I fail to see how this game is offering us anything new. We've got some sort of cartoony small-scale RTS, followed by an open-ended space exploration. I'm sorry, but years and years of Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, etc etc have jaded the market. Wright's proposing that an entire segment of Spore consist of an ambiguous attempt at a genre that already possesses a very high standards level. How can this possibly be a good idea?
Once the player is finally set loose in the galaxy, the inevitable question is what they're going to do. This might have real potential, but only if the game designers prevent it from becoming stale. Allowing real-time multiplayer interaction would have to be on a non-competitive basis, but the question becomes what activities a fleet of Genesis-ray-equipped flying saucers can do together.
The definition of a good game is one that people can enjoy playing for a long time. If Spore can provide continuing entertainment value past the first few hours, then perhaps it might make for a great game. But based on what's been shown so far, with vague gameplay and questionable mechanics, I'm not holding out hope that Spore will be a success.
But do we know precisely what that person was told? Or why they decided to structure their withdrawals? Perhaps she went in that time, and they told her "If you withdraw $10,000 or more, it's going to put a flag in your file" and she interpreted that to mean "It's better not to withdraw more than $9,999 at a time".
What is the actual harm caused by deciding to avoid creating reports? Who does it hurt? What is intrinsicly wrong with it?
And then they make a movie out of it named "Musicana" and a handful of people think about it for a little while, do nothing, and the world keeps on turning.
Hollywood has never succeeded in being as cynical as the real world.
Once upon a time there were a couple record companies. Through the years, their product was the creation, publishing, and distribution of music on various analog media. As technology progressed, they were able to condense even more songs into a smaller product, at an even lower cost to themselves.
One day, a new technology came along that allowed customers to take songs and give them amongst each other, for free. This new technology allowed instantaneous and essentially free distribution. At first the companies attempted to stop customers by making their activities and technologies illegal. Slowly, however, they began to consider adopting this new method of distribution themselves.
But instead of reducing their prices to reflect the change in cost to deliver the product to market, these companies decided to increase their costs, in the name of profitability and growth and investors. When customers saw that the companies were overcharging them, they began to deliberately turn away, continuing to take the product, but without paying for it. In turn, the companies decided to increase their prices further, to make a greater profit off of the shrinking market. But the more they increased the cost, the fewer customers they seemed to have...
Do you really, truly think that young children and teenagers turn on CNN and read the newspaper and as a result relate America's foreign policies to their own actions in any concievable way? I've yet to ever hear a child say "If American can bully other countries, why can't I bully other kids?". And I'm fairly certain I never will hear any kids say it. I'm sorry, but that is, to be blunt, an idiotic theory, if that's what you're actually trying to say.
If you want to do anything worthwhile in WoW, then you CAN'T play solo, or infrequently. You have to be in a guild, and you have to play daily at certain times. That's what sucks about it: it rewards dedication to logging on and doing the same thing over and over again. This is what gold farmers do, and they get paid to do it. The player base pays Blizzard to do this monotonous work, and then pays the farmers a second time when they want to skip the really boring parts. WoW isn't a game, it's a job. Sure, the process up to level 60 is fun, and qualifies as a game, but once you hit 60 you're working a job, except you're paying for the privilege of working.
While your comparisons are insightful and valid, you miss one major, extremely important fact.
To succeed in WoW (and by succeed I mean Tier 2+) you need to spend damn near as much time in WoW as you do in real life. The ultimate point the author was trying to make was that a game is something someone does for fun as part of their normal life, but that to play WoW successfully you need to trade away your real life.
Consider the normal guild requirements...raiding four or five times a week for 4-6 hours each? As I recall, my old guild, a relatively minor one at that, required its members to do MC two nights a week, Onyxia one night, ZG twice a week, and was starting in on BWL. What this really meant is that on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays you'd log on at 7PM or so after dinner, and play until 1 or 2 in the morning before going to sleep. No socializing with friends in real life, or going places, or watching TV, or otherwise doing non-WoW activities. Oh yes, or doing homework.
On top of the time demands placed by WoW, you had to deal with the social stresses inside the game. Your typical end-game guild is probably around 60-80 players, and you've got to interact with most of those people on a regular basis. You're going to have assholes, power freaks, idiots, and lunatics. All of the things that make real life annoying, carry over into WoW. This isn't a good thing. Why should it be? World of Warcraft is supposed to be something you play for fun, for enjoyment, not a replica of the day-to-day 9-5 grind. It sucks to play it these days precisely because that seems what Blizzard wants to make it into.
Maybe because in real life you don't whore your way up to the top, suddenly realize the moral consequences of your actions, and fall over dead (Game Over). Instead, the thought process is usually "Damn, that was really cold of me. But boy, it feels nice having 15 million in an offshore account. I think I'll go buy a new house today." Or else people just block it out in their minds altogether.
In the long term, I'd bet that most of the people "at the top" have probably done some pretty cold or unsociable actions to get there. If you're charged with a crime, wouldn't you want your lawyer to be well-skilled in dirty, underhanded methods of winning? Or if you're an investor, do you want someone who's aware and capable of how to deal in and protect against corporate espionage, to be running your company?
I stopped reading at the exact same point. I realized that if the man is foolish enough to make a statement that horrendously, unspeakably idiotic, then anything else he has to say is not likely to be worth my time to read.
There may well be a good argument for the preservation of conventions in the English language, but the author of that article is not the one to make it. I'd be more interested in carefully planned, objective research on the topic, for the purpose of determining precisely whether changes in written communication have had a statistically significant influence upon the ability of people to communicate effectively and think clearly. I'm somewhat disappointed that Wired is even associated with this quality of mindless ranting. Then again, I'm somehow not surprised it was linked onto slashdot.
Orwell's point was that by manipulating language, the ability to think undesirable thoughts could be removed by eliminating the very language necessary to produce such thoughts in the first place. One can think of the resulting society as "simple" (with the connotations of a resulting lower level of intelligence amongst its members), but I don't believe that was Orwell's intention. Nor is there any particular evidence to support this theory in the parent's post. Newspeak was certainly intended to allow complex thought, even if only in the scientific fields.
Anyone else thinking of Isaac Asimov's short story "The Dying Night"? Where scientists use a form of camera, that's basically a hand-held scanner device, in order to store images of written paper? Asimov basically had this device down pat, except he imagined it being mechanical in nature, with film as its storage medium, instead of digital, with a computer chip.
And this is why Neuromancer was far-and-away a superior novel to Snow Crash. Neuro had a slow and steady progression to the climax (Case's breakthrough into the system+the combination of the AIs) that was perfectly paced. And then it cut cleanly to a single follow-up scene, that explained enough, while still leaving some room for questions. Snow Crash had to explicate every last goddamned thing until it became boring. That's why it went from great to teh sux in the matter of a few chapters. Explaining who the hell that Raven character was helped the reader understand, but laying open the inner workings of the Mafia and the media monopolist was a piss-poor decision. When the all-pervasive, evil force, is revealed to be some old crazy dude with a few hundred billion dollars to throw around, the story becomes trivialized. And when you conclude by having the two controlling quasi-deity figures in the book wrestling on the tarmac, it should be a wake-up call that you need to seriously revise the story.
The first few chapters were great because you were recieving only glimpses of the full truth. The rest was up to the reader's imagination. Consider almost every great piece of science fiction: they all leave a great deal up to the reader's imagination. We don't see how the machines rose to power in The Matrix. We don't see what the off-world colonies look like in Blade Runner (nor, for that matter, do we ever learn for *certain* whether the main character is even human). Neuromancer just drops hints of what's out there in the rest of the world. As soon as you replace something like the phrase "massive arcologies in the distance" with half a dozen chapters talking about the minutae of the social life in those structures, it becomes stale and stupid.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the key to good story-telling is never letting the reader know everything. You have to explain the events of the story to them, but you don't have to kill off every last interesting detail in the process. The only book I can think of that skirted that line and still succeeded was Dune. And it did that by focusing heavily on mysticism, which is itself a tremendous unknown, and can allow a certain amount of over-detail to creep in. That, and the fact it was set on such a large scale, were the reasons it succeeded. Snow Crash involves basically some lame hacker trying to prevent a very mild social re-ordering (the mass killing of a few thousand programmers) at the hands of some media tycoon. Woopee.
When you shoot a.50 BMG rifle, you can almost *see* the pressure wave. The shock goes straight through you, blasting past. You can't shoot weapons like that without some form of hearing protection, and to make speakers capable of putting out that level of noise (150+ decibels, minimum) on a continuous basis, would probably be close to impossible I'd guess.
The goal: throw a spacesuit filled with radios off the ISS, that will act as a public relations stunt by getting the attention of kids around the world for several days.
The result: spacesuit transmits for an hour then dies.
The verdict: NASA can't seem to succeed even at polluting space properly.
This wasn't an "experiment" this was "throwing a radio out an airlock as a PR stunt". The fact that they failed at even something that simple is rather sad.
OR, the rational response to this legal conundrum is that we re-think the idea of intellectual property and the definition of "fair use". Rather than treating this as an enforcement problem, it needs to be looked at as an example of why the current copywrite system needs to be replaced.
Gold farmers in WoW don't take part in high-end group activites. There's no need for it. From what I've seen, they get them up to the max level (60), get them some mediocre gear, give them instructions on how to farm, and then set them loose and begin training the next person. How do I know a farmer? It'll be someone who has a non-epic mount (means they move slowly, and haven't invested serious effort into the game), crappy Uncommon items/items from a low-level group, and who travels the same path over and over. Also, they won't speak to you much, if at all, if you query them. Furthermore, they make extremely easy prey for the enemy team, as from what I've seen they're not trained to fight back, and so usually get their ass kicked.
The more important question in my mind is what the economic effect of farming is. On one hand, it would mean that if I farm, say, Essence of Water, I'll probably get twice what I pay now for it. On the other hand, if I need to actually get some Essences for crafting something, I'm going to be paying even more. It seems to me farmers act as pure inflation, but remember that they're also increasing the quantity of rarer items in circulation by their farming, and ultimately making it easier to purchase things like Arcane Crystals. So I don't think there's a clear-cut answer to whether we should count them as a benefit or a detriment. Unless they're stealing my damned thorium vein, in which case my sympathy for them approaches zero.
Admittedly I don't know the details of this, but am I the only one who hears "floating wind generator" and thinks "Dipshits"? If it's tethered, you're going to run into a huge amount of problems. Small planes, birds, etc would all be problematic, as would the consequences of a broken tether. If it's NOT tethered, then I'd be curious as to how it functions, let alone safety. Large wandering structures floating through the upper atmosphere tend to not to appeal to airliners and the military.
It's incredible how people can completely fail to comprehend the most obvious of messages. Granted, perhaps the parent's post was a bit complex for some people, but the underlying concept isn't that hard: the crime of subverting the Constitution is something that is worthy of disapprobation regardless of WHO is guilty. The parent pointed out: organizations with power tend to try to conserve their power. This is contrary to the ends of society, and thus should be considered wrong.
I applaud you on your over-the-top comparisons of Bush to Hitler and your amazing ability to name-call.
No, the poster was comparing the methods Hitler used with those people just like you are using to dismiss calls of attention to the important issues. Do you dispute that shifting public attention away from the important issues is one of the primary tactics of a totalitarian or dictatorship government? If you disagree, then you're quite frankly a fool. Once you realize it's true, then the topic becomes one of debating what is an "important issue". Which is where this conversation should be in the first place. But Mr. AC seems uninterested in such a reasoned exploration.
Except that the odds of even one in ten thousand malls going "kaboom", resulting in the death of even a single person, is astronomically small. The threat isn't real. Or else we'd already have seen it. And look at Israel, and ask how many malls, buses, restraunts, stores they've had explode in the last twenty years. By your logic, they should have thrown away every last civil right imaginable, and become a totalitarian state.
Slashdot Mirror
...once upon a time, stupidity of this magnitude from public officials would not have been tolerated, let alone encouraged by any significant percentage of the public. If they thought the public would like it, our senators and representatives would rush to create and pass a bill titled "Resolution To Make Bad Things Go Away". It's frightening how close we seem to be to that level of problem solving and critical thinking in the legislative branch of our government.
It is precisely your attitude that scares me more than most other political trends currently active in the United States. It's so enormously illogical for any group of people to deliberately and willingly eliminate their capability to defend themselves, that I simply cannot comprehend the necessary mindset. Others have already explained sufficiently elsewhere why the attitude of self-disarmament is ultimately a poor one. But it's your last sentence that alerts me to the true nature of your beliefs: the assertion that only "we" the government can be trusted with dangerous things, because "they" the people are unsafe and unfit to possess such deadly objects such as sniper rifles, handguns, and steak knives. The path that train of thought leads down ends in a place that we really, really don't want to be.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.
You seem to be the only other person here who actually watched the video with an eye towards gameplay.
In my estimation, there's several big warning signs that Spore is going to be a disappointment once people start playing. First, those procedures Wright kept talking about in the video had better be both damned detailed, and broad enough to allow serious innovation. He shows us that the engine can handle a three or four legged creature, but can it cope with one leg? None? Crawling mechanisms? Wings-for-legs? More importantly, can it do each of those things in a reasonably convincing manner? The crux of the early game is going to be its capacity for creativity, and Wright's previous games may not provide an accurate scale for comparison, because I don't believe anything he's ever produced has required anywhere near the level of complexity Spore will need.
At the higher levels, I fail to see how this game is offering us anything new. We've got some sort of cartoony small-scale RTS, followed by an open-ended space exploration. I'm sorry, but years and years of Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Total Annihilation, Age of Empires, etc etc have jaded the market. Wright's proposing that an entire segment of Spore consist of an ambiguous attempt at a genre that already possesses a very high standards level. How can this possibly be a good idea?
Once the player is finally set loose in the galaxy, the inevitable question is what they're going to do. This might have real potential, but only if the game designers prevent it from becoming stale. Allowing real-time multiplayer interaction would have to be on a non-competitive basis, but the question becomes what activities a fleet of Genesis-ray-equipped flying saucers can do together.
The definition of a good game is one that people can enjoy playing for a long time. If Spore can provide continuing entertainment value past the first few hours, then perhaps it might make for a great game. But based on what's been shown so far, with vague gameplay and questionable mechanics, I'm not holding out hope that Spore will be a success.
But do we know precisely what that person was told? Or why they decided to structure their withdrawals? Perhaps she went in that time, and they told her "If you withdraw $10,000 or more, it's going to put a flag in your file" and she interpreted that to mean "It's better not to withdraw more than $9,999 at a time".
What is the actual harm caused by deciding to avoid creating reports? Who does it hurt? What is intrinsicly wrong with it?
And then they make a movie out of it named "Musicana" and a handful of people think about it for a little while, do nothing, and the world keeps on turning.
Hollywood has never succeeded in being as cynical as the real world.
How about a new parable that actually fits?
Once upon a time there were a couple record companies. Through the years, their product was the creation, publishing, and distribution of music on various analog media. As technology progressed, they were able to condense even more songs into a smaller product, at an even lower cost to themselves.
One day, a new technology came along that allowed customers to take songs and give them amongst each other, for free. This new technology allowed instantaneous and essentially free distribution. At first the companies attempted to stop customers by making their activities and technologies illegal. Slowly, however, they began to consider adopting this new method of distribution themselves.
But instead of reducing their prices to reflect the change in cost to deliver the product to market, these companies decided to increase their costs, in the name of profitability and growth and investors. When customers saw that the companies were overcharging them, they began to deliberately turn away, continuing to take the product, but without paying for it. In turn, the companies decided to increase their prices further, to make a greater profit off of the shrinking market. But the more they increased the cost, the fewer customers they seemed to have...
Do you really, truly think that young children and teenagers turn on CNN and read the newspaper and as a result relate America's foreign policies to their own actions in any concievable way? I've yet to ever hear a child say "If American can bully other countries, why can't I bully other kids?". And I'm fairly certain I never will hear any kids say it. I'm sorry, but that is, to be blunt, an idiotic theory, if that's what you're actually trying to say.
Except that you're completely and totally wrong.
If you want to do anything worthwhile in WoW, then you CAN'T play solo, or infrequently. You have to be in a guild, and you have to play daily at certain times. That's what sucks about it: it rewards dedication to logging on and doing the same thing over and over again. This is what gold farmers do, and they get paid to do it. The player base pays Blizzard to do this monotonous work, and then pays the farmers a second time when they want to skip the really boring parts. WoW isn't a game, it's a job. Sure, the process up to level 60 is fun, and qualifies as a game, but once you hit 60 you're working a job, except you're paying for the privilege of working.
While your comparisons are insightful and valid, you miss one major, extremely important fact.
To succeed in WoW (and by succeed I mean Tier 2+) you need to spend damn near as much time in WoW as you do in real life. The ultimate point the author was trying to make was that a game is something someone does for fun as part of their normal life, but that to play WoW successfully you need to trade away your real life.
Consider the normal guild requirements...raiding four or five times a week for 4-6 hours each? As I recall, my old guild, a relatively minor one at that, required its members to do MC two nights a week, Onyxia one night, ZG twice a week, and was starting in on BWL. What this really meant is that on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays you'd log on at 7PM or so after dinner, and play until 1 or 2 in the morning before going to sleep. No socializing with friends in real life, or going places, or watching TV, or otherwise doing non-WoW activities. Oh yes, or doing homework.
On top of the time demands placed by WoW, you had to deal with the social stresses inside the game. Your typical end-game guild is probably around 60-80 players, and you've got to interact with most of those people on a regular basis. You're going to have assholes, power freaks, idiots, and lunatics. All of the things that make real life annoying, carry over into WoW. This isn't a good thing. Why should it be? World of Warcraft is supposed to be something you play for fun, for enjoyment, not a replica of the day-to-day 9-5 grind. It sucks to play it these days precisely because that seems what Blizzard wants to make it into.
Maybe because in real life you don't whore your way up to the top, suddenly realize the moral consequences of your actions, and fall over dead (Game Over). Instead, the thought process is usually "Damn, that was really cold of me. But boy, it feels nice having 15 million in an offshore account. I think I'll go buy a new house today." Or else people just block it out in their minds altogether.
In the long term, I'd bet that most of the people "at the top" have probably done some pretty cold or unsociable actions to get there. If you're charged with a crime, wouldn't you want your lawyer to be well-skilled in dirty, underhanded methods of winning? Or if you're an investor, do you want someone who's aware and capable of how to deal in and protect against corporate espionage, to be running your company?
I stopped reading at the exact same point. I realized that if the man is foolish enough to make a statement that horrendously, unspeakably idiotic, then anything else he has to say is not likely to be worth my time to read.
There may well be a good argument for the preservation of conventions in the English language, but the author of that article is not the one to make it. I'd be more interested in carefully planned, objective research on the topic, for the purpose of determining precisely whether changes in written communication have had a statistically significant influence upon the ability of people to communicate effectively and think clearly. I'm somewhat disappointed that Wired is even associated with this quality of mindless ranting. Then again, I'm somehow not surprised it was linked onto slashdot.
Orwell's point was that by manipulating language, the ability to think undesirable thoughts could be removed by eliminating the very language necessary to produce such thoughts in the first place. One can think of the resulting society as "simple" (with the connotations of a resulting lower level of intelligence amongst its members), but I don't believe that was Orwell's intention. Nor is there any particular evidence to support this theory in the parent's post. Newspeak was certainly intended to allow complex thought, even if only in the scientific fields.
Anyone else thinking of Isaac Asimov's short story "The Dying Night"? Where scientists use a form of camera, that's basically a hand-held scanner device, in order to store images of written paper? Asimov basically had this device down pat, except he imagined it being mechanical in nature, with film as its storage medium, instead of digital, with a computer chip.
Mod parent up.
And this is why Neuromancer was far-and-away a superior novel to Snow Crash. Neuro had a slow and steady progression to the climax (Case's breakthrough into the system+the combination of the AIs) that was perfectly paced. And then it cut cleanly to a single follow-up scene, that explained enough, while still leaving some room for questions. Snow Crash had to explicate every last goddamned thing until it became boring. That's why it went from great to teh sux in the matter of a few chapters. Explaining who the hell that Raven character was helped the reader understand, but laying open the inner workings of the Mafia and the media monopolist was a piss-poor decision. When the all-pervasive, evil force, is revealed to be some old crazy dude with a few hundred billion dollars to throw around, the story becomes trivialized. And when you conclude by having the two controlling quasi-deity figures in the book wrestling on the tarmac, it should be a wake-up call that you need to seriously revise the story.
The first few chapters were great because you were recieving only glimpses of the full truth. The rest was up to the reader's imagination. Consider almost every great piece of science fiction: they all leave a great deal up to the reader's imagination. We don't see how the machines rose to power in The Matrix. We don't see what the off-world colonies look like in Blade Runner (nor, for that matter, do we ever learn for *certain* whether the main character is even human). Neuromancer just drops hints of what's out there in the rest of the world. As soon as you replace something like the phrase "massive arcologies in the distance" with half a dozen chapters talking about the minutae of the social life in those structures, it becomes stale and stupid.
I'm becoming increasingly convinced that the key to good story-telling is never letting the reader know everything. You have to explain the events of the story to them, but you don't have to kill off every last interesting detail in the process. The only book I can think of that skirted that line and still succeeded was Dune. And it did that by focusing heavily on mysticism, which is itself a tremendous unknown, and can allow a certain amount of over-detail to creep in. That, and the fact it was set on such a large scale, were the reasons it succeeded. Snow Crash involves basically some lame hacker trying to prevent a very mild social re-ordering (the mass killing of a few thousand programmers) at the hands of some media tycoon. Woopee.
When you shoot a .50 BMG rifle, you can almost *see* the pressure wave. The shock goes straight through you, blasting past. You can't shoot weapons like that without some form of hearing protection, and to make speakers capable of putting out that level of noise (150+ decibels, minimum) on a continuous basis, would probably be close to impossible I'd guess.
The goal: throw a spacesuit filled with radios off the ISS, that will act as a public relations stunt by getting the attention of kids around the world for several days.
The result: spacesuit transmits for an hour then dies.
The verdict: NASA can't seem to succeed even at polluting space properly.
This wasn't an "experiment" this was "throwing a radio out an airlock as a PR stunt". The fact that they failed at even something that simple is rather sad.
This decade please, damnit! PLEASE!! PLEASEEE!!!
OR, the rational response to this legal conundrum is that we re-think the idea of intellectual property and the definition of "fair use". Rather than treating this as an enforcement problem, it needs to be looked at as an example of why the current copywrite system needs to be replaced.
Gold farmers in WoW don't take part in high-end group activites. There's no need for it. From what I've seen, they get them up to the max level (60), get them some mediocre gear, give them instructions on how to farm, and then set them loose and begin training the next person. How do I know a farmer? It'll be someone who has a non-epic mount (means they move slowly, and haven't invested serious effort into the game), crappy Uncommon items/items from a low-level group, and who travels the same path over and over. Also, they won't speak to you much, if at all, if you query them. Furthermore, they make extremely easy prey for the enemy team, as from what I've seen they're not trained to fight back, and so usually get their ass kicked.
The more important question in my mind is what the economic effect of farming is. On one hand, it would mean that if I farm, say, Essence of Water, I'll probably get twice what I pay now for it. On the other hand, if I need to actually get some Essences for crafting something, I'm going to be paying even more. It seems to me farmers act as pure inflation, but remember that they're also increasing the quantity of rarer items in circulation by their farming, and ultimately making it easier to purchase things like Arcane Crystals. So I don't think there's a clear-cut answer to whether we should count them as a benefit or a detriment. Unless they're stealing my damned thorium vein, in which case my sympathy for them approaches zero.
or floating high in the air, courtesy of helium
Admittedly I don't know the details of this, but am I the only one who hears "floating wind generator" and thinks "Dipshits"? If it's tethered, you're going to run into a huge amount of problems. Small planes, birds, etc would all be problematic, as would the consequences of a broken tether. If it's NOT tethered, then I'd be curious as to how it functions, let alone safety. Large wandering structures floating through the upper atmosphere tend to not to appeal to airliners and the military.
It's incredible how people can completely fail to comprehend the most obvious of messages. Granted, perhaps the parent's post was a bit complex for some people, but the underlying concept isn't that hard: the crime of subverting the Constitution is something that is worthy of disapprobation regardless of WHO is guilty. The parent pointed out: organizations with power tend to try to conserve their power. This is contrary to the ends of society, and thus should be considered wrong.
I applaud you on your over-the-top comparisons of Bush to Hitler and your amazing ability to name-call.
No, the poster was comparing the methods Hitler used with those people just like you are using to dismiss calls of attention to the important issues. Do you dispute that shifting public attention away from the important issues is one of the primary tactics of a totalitarian or dictatorship government? If you disagree, then you're quite frankly a fool. Once you realize it's true, then the topic becomes one of debating what is an "important issue". Which is where this conversation should be in the first place. But Mr. AC seems uninterested in such a reasoned exploration.
Except that the odds of even one in ten thousand malls going "kaboom", resulting in the death of even a single person, is astronomically small. The threat isn't real. Or else we'd already have seen it. And look at Israel, and ask how many malls, buses, restraunts, stores they've had explode in the last twenty years. By your logic, they should have thrown away every last civil right imaginable, and become a totalitarian state.
So THAT'S where I left my ship! Damnit, I knew it was around here somewhere. Thanks NASA!