I think for Gibson-as-sci-fi-writer the ability to concretely visualize emergent trends is critical for him to be able to write about them...If he's sitting down in front of the keyboard and thinking, "Welll crap, from where we're standing, we could go anywhere" that's not really going to allow him to really develop details and a distinct feel.
That being said, I read Pattern Recognition (his last novel) and it was an excellent book, even though it wasn't very futuristic at all. I think he's selling himself short; there is more to sci-fi than futurism.
If anyone hasn't read William Gibson, I recommend him...He's a seminal sci-fi author...Pretty much created the cyberpunk subgenre.
It's almost always cookie cloning or password theft...That's the devil deal with Javascript, and allowing people to put their own widgets on their pages. Set up some XSS stuff, or just make a shiny widget and put in on your page and use it to snag cookie info.
Not much you can do about it other than turn of javascript by default. It's pretty annoying actually...These vulnerablities have been known forever, but patching them would break a lot of code, so they stay open.
Hey, you gotta give 'em credit for a quick turnaround on the openness issue...Only took 'em three hours (according to story submission time) to go from closed to too open.
In the end it's hardly surprising. These sites aren't designed with security in mind, and they allow user code on the pages. Game over man, game over. Blah blah blah SSL, blah blah blah strong passwords, blah blah blah restrict user code...This stuff is all basic.
How do you have access controls without somehow registering the users you want to have access? If you have to register them, then why not just make them register with the community?
I'm not a huge lock-in person, but if you want to use Facebook, then you're locking yourself in...It's like Microsoft. Don't install Windows and then start carping because it's closed source. That's an upfront cost of doing business with them.
Frankly, I think closed is a desirable feature in this case. Aren't people already complaining about a loss of privacy from use of social networking sites? Opening up that data could automate that whole process, allowing for automated spidering of user pages and wholesale data aggregation.
Data monkey that I am, I'd be interested in playing around with that stuff, (e.g. "The phrase "Hooked Up" is 32% more common on the pages of male users than female users") but I don't for a second think that anyone who used that service would be thrilled about it.
I think closed communities are inevitable, and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. Data lock in is a necessary part of that; you can always copy your stuff out the laboriously slow way, but the lack of a quick automated way of doing it protects the average schmo whose password security is bound to be a laugh.
With a retribution spec and decent gear, you can do pretty well. The gear is critical though; you need seriously decent stuff to be able to really be dps competitive...Lot of spell damage and +crit.
Still, when they have all that, you'd be surprised at how nasty they can be. Hardly any class has Holy resistance, so their damage isn't mitigated at all.
Mine's about half that (3/.4), and I live in a city. I can't even get better, because it's not available in my area.
I'd have to say our broadband in this country does suck, by and large. If it was only a problem in rural areas, then it might be understandable, but in many rural areas (sounds like yours is one) the networks are run by co-ops, and the damn speeds go UP as opposed to the big national companies who are whining about how damn difficult it is.
That's not really the way it works in WoW; it's more like you're a shapeshifter who can cast spells. All the shapeshifting abilities use mana, but they're not interruptable, they're not dispellable, and they don't have duration, which makes them different from every other spell in the game.
If that's the way you want to define hybrid though, I'm fine with that for the purposes of discussion.
Both your post and the parent above you miss the point: It's supposed to be hard.
If you could blow through an instance with no effort, then what satisfaction would you get from doing it? Gear? Everyone else would have the same gear. Experience? Everyone else would have the same experience. It would crazy boring.
If you could level blacksmithing (I assume that's what the g-parent was talking about; the eternal instance-only iron grind) as easily as herbalism, no one would want to be a blacksmith. The auction house would be glutted with crafted blacksmith gear, and there'd be no sense of satisfaction that you did something hard, just a sense of boredom once you did this thing that everyone else had done as well.
Yea, BC kept me busy for a while, but once I got done leveling my 60's I pretty much lost interest. Lack of 40 man raid content actually worked against me, because I find that a lot more interesting than the 10 man stuff which is more common in BC.
I so seldom max out my characters in terms of gear that it would be easy to say that I'd never "finished" a MMO.
No way. Feral spec druids are amazing at melee; they're the only class in the game that can be specced for melee dps and tanking at the same time. They actually caught a tanking nerf in the first BC patch because they were out-tanking Warriors in the new instances, and even after it, you could tank raid instances. Cat form isn't as high-powered as bear, but it's still pretty nasty if you've got decent gear, and you can switch back and forth between them pretty much at will because your casting abilities will suck when specced feral.
If you do any arena combat, you see a lot of feral druids...They're really potent for the ability to stealth then shift to a tanking form, charge, stun, etc.
They do all right in pvp...Moonkin form being about the equivalent of plate armor, it makes them by far one of the most durable spellcasters, so even though you're not putting out the spell dps of a lock or a mage, you do pretty well against melee classes and hunters.
For raids though, you're right; unless their gear is off the chart, it's not worth having one around if they're not tanking/healing.
Define "All the way through." I find it hard to play 10 hours a week (an hour a day is about all I can do these days), and I've had two 70's for months. If you're counting only from people who have a full set of Tier 4, or arena gear, then I'd argue that hardly anyone is "finished".
As far as getting to 70, even a casual player has had enough time to do that by now.
By the time this expansion actually comes out (I'd lay money on something like Q1 '09, though I bet they'll shoot for Q4 '08) people will be pretty damn bored with BC content.
What else are you going to call them? They're either strong melee with weak healing/spell dps, strong spell dps with medium healing and weak melee, or strong healing with weak melee/spell dps.
I'd say there are three actual hybrid classes in WoW: Druid, Shaman, and Paladin (don't know where 'warrior' came from above). All three of them can be accurately described as "Melee capable spellcasters with healing abilities."
I don't think it means that really. I think what it's actually for is for people like you (and me) who get to 80 and go, "Well great! Now what the fuck do I do?" Now there is an answer: "Switch to death knight (or whatever the frilly alliance equivalent will end up being), and then level back up to 80!" Leveling is always rife with solo content, so you'd have the fun of switching your class, and doing some more solo play, rather than the eternal instance/raid grind.
Of course, if you're a quest-a-holic this could be an issue because if you've done all the quests, you might have to grind your way back to 80 and that would suck.
If they had enabled SSL be default, they'd be the only free web mail provider to have done so. That's the way it's done. If you don't like it, might try using a service you have to pay for.
What error? Did they ever claim it was secure to send email over an unsecured connection? The service is provided: "...on an AS IS and AS AVAILABLE basis. Google disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Service. Google also reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the Service with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you." Gmail Terms of Use
If you thought anything else, you were out of your fricking mind...It's a free service, and that's free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-beer only gets you so much.
Any decent-sized business would run into SOX problems if they used this sort of service consistently, and as a free service they have a very low duty toward their users. If gmail blew up tomorrow and Google decided to discontinue it, it'd be pretty difficult for any users to recover damages seeing as they weren't paying for anything.
Personally, I can't imagine using a non-guaranteed service for anything "mission-critical". If your mission relies on someone else's beta service, your business is in trouble.
I disagree. It's not their responsibility to make you be secure, especially in terms of using their free service. If you give a damn, you'll add the one letter to the url to secure your connection. If you don't you'll keep blissfully using the service unsecured, and that's your own look out.
Its the same as having an unsecured home wireless connection, or leaving your computer plugged directly into the cable modem with no firewall and file sharing turned on. The user must take responsibility for their own security.
I've always been curious about these services, both for a sort of browsing-without-buying variety, and as a foil against the ever-increasing piles of game crap that infest my storage spaces. Anyone use these services, and have any thoughts? I'm not averse to monthly fees, but if the service is clunky and annoying to use, that would drive me up the wall.
I fail to see how the average person, as usual, being lax about their security is in any way Google's fault. This was something I found immediately, just because I won't check my email without a secure connection.
Nah, weaker individuals wouldn't show up as die offs in the fossil record. You need to lose species.
A long period of increased radiation could very well spell the end for specialized, slow breeding species. A quick blast won't kill you, but having to live through a few millennia of high energy cosmic bombardment? That could do it.
It'd also depend on the individual species. Some would probably be highly resistant and thrive, and others would be more strongly effected and die.
How long until this Staphylococcus aureus becomes resistant to the current anti-biotic cocktail?
Evolutionist: "Well it depends on aquired penicillinase production; it's an enzyme which breaks down the beta-lactam ring of the penicillin molecule. And also on resistances to methicillin, and glycopeptides."
Slashdot Mirror
I think for Gibson-as-sci-fi-writer the ability to concretely visualize emergent trends is critical for him to be able to write about them...If he's sitting down in front of the keyboard and thinking, "Welll crap, from where we're standing, we could go anywhere" that's not really going to allow him to really develop details and a distinct feel.
That being said, I read Pattern Recognition (his last novel) and it was an excellent book, even though it wasn't very futuristic at all. I think he's selling himself short; there is more to sci-fi than futurism.
If anyone hasn't read William Gibson, I recommend him...He's a seminal sci-fi author...Pretty much created the cyberpunk subgenre.
It's almost always cookie cloning or password theft...That's the devil deal with Javascript, and allowing people to put their own widgets on their pages. Set up some XSS stuff, or just make a shiny widget and put in on your page and use it to snag cookie info.
Not much you can do about it other than turn of javascript by default. It's pretty annoying actually...These vulnerablities have been known forever, but patching them would break a lot of code, so they stay open.
Hey, you gotta give 'em credit for a quick turnaround on the openness issue...Only took 'em three hours (according to story submission time) to go from closed to too open.
In the end it's hardly surprising. These sites aren't designed with security in mind, and they allow user code on the pages. Game over man, game over. Blah blah blah SSL, blah blah blah strong passwords, blah blah blah restrict user code...This stuff is all basic.
How do you have access controls without somehow registering the users you want to have access? If you have to register them, then why not just make them register with the community?
I'm not a huge lock-in person, but if you want to use Facebook, then you're locking yourself in...It's like Microsoft. Don't install Windows and then start carping because it's closed source. That's an upfront cost of doing business with them.
Frankly, I think closed is a desirable feature in this case. Aren't people already complaining about a loss of privacy from use of social networking sites? Opening up that data could automate that whole process, allowing for automated spidering of user pages and wholesale data aggregation.
Data monkey that I am, I'd be interested in playing around with that stuff, (e.g. "The phrase "Hooked Up" is 32% more common on the pages of male users than female users") but I don't for a second think that anyone who used that service would be thrilled about it.
I think closed communities are inevitable, and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing. Data lock in is a necessary part of that; you can always copy your stuff out the laboriously slow way, but the lack of a quick automated way of doing it protects the average schmo whose password security is bound to be a laugh.
With a retribution spec and decent gear, you can do pretty well. The gear is critical though; you need seriously decent stuff to be able to really be dps competitive...Lot of spell damage and +crit.
Still, when they have all that, you'd be surprised at how nasty they can be. Hardly any class has Holy resistance, so their damage isn't mitigated at all.
Mine's about half that (3/.4), and I live in a city. I can't even get better, because it's not available in my area.
I'd have to say our broadband in this country does suck, by and large. If it was only a problem in rural areas, then it might be understandable, but in many rural areas (sounds like yours is one) the networks are run by co-ops, and the damn speeds go UP as opposed to the big national companies who are whining about how damn difficult it is.
That's not really the way it works in WoW; it's more like you're a shapeshifter who can cast spells. All the shapeshifting abilities use mana, but they're not interruptable, they're not dispellable, and they don't have duration, which makes them different from every other spell in the game.
If that's the way you want to define hybrid though, I'm fine with that for the purposes of discussion.
What would be the point then?
Both your post and the parent above you miss the point: It's supposed to be hard.
If you could blow through an instance with no effort, then what satisfaction would you get from doing it? Gear? Everyone else would have the same gear. Experience? Everyone else would have the same experience. It would crazy boring.
If you could level blacksmithing (I assume that's what the g-parent was talking about; the eternal instance-only iron grind) as easily as herbalism, no one would want to be a blacksmith. The auction house would be glutted with crafted blacksmith gear, and there'd be no sense of satisfaction that you did something hard, just a sense of boredom once you did this thing that everyone else had done as well.
Yea, BC kept me busy for a while, but once I got done leveling my 60's I pretty much lost interest. Lack of 40 man raid content actually worked against me, because I find that a lot more interesting than the 10 man stuff which is more common in BC.
I so seldom max out my characters in terms of gear that it would be easy to say that I'd never "finished" a MMO.
No way. Feral spec druids are amazing at melee; they're the only class in the game that can be specced for melee dps and tanking at the same time. They actually caught a tanking nerf in the first BC patch because they were out-tanking Warriors in the new instances, and even after it, you could tank raid instances. Cat form isn't as high-powered as bear, but it's still pretty nasty if you've got decent gear, and you can switch back and forth between them pretty much at will because your casting abilities will suck when specced feral.
If you do any arena combat, you see a lot of feral druids...They're really potent for the ability to stealth then shift to a tanking form, charge, stun, etc.
They do all right in pvp...Moonkin form being about the equivalent of plate armor, it makes them by far one of the most durable spellcasters, so even though you're not putting out the spell dps of a lock or a mage, you do pretty well against melee classes and hunters.
For raids though, you're right; unless their gear is off the chart, it's not worth having one around if they're not tanking/healing.
Define "All the way through." I find it hard to play 10 hours a week (an hour a day is about all I can do these days), and I've had two 70's for months. If you're counting only from people who have a full set of Tier 4, or arena gear, then I'd argue that hardly anyone is "finished".
As far as getting to 70, even a casual player has had enough time to do that by now.
By the time this expansion actually comes out (I'd lay money on something like Q1 '09, though I bet they'll shoot for Q4 '08) people will be pretty damn bored with BC content.
What else are you going to call them? They're either strong melee with weak healing/spell dps, strong spell dps with medium healing and weak melee, or strong healing with weak melee/spell dps.
I'd say there are three actual hybrid classes in WoW: Druid, Shaman, and Paladin (don't know where 'warrior' came from above). All three of them can be accurately described as "Melee capable spellcasters with healing abilities."
Three. You forgot the druid.
I don't think it means that really. I think what it's actually for is for people like you (and me) who get to 80 and go, "Well great! Now what the fuck do I do?" Now there is an answer: "Switch to death knight (or whatever the frilly alliance equivalent will end up being), and then level back up to 80!" Leveling is always rife with solo content, so you'd have the fun of switching your class, and doing some more solo play, rather than the eternal instance/raid grind.
Of course, if you're a quest-a-holic this could be an issue because if you've done all the quests, you might have to grind your way back to 80 and that would suck.
If they had enabled SSL be default, they'd be the only free web mail provider to have done so. That's the way it's done. If you don't like it, might try using a service you have to pay for.
What error? Did they ever claim it was secure to send email over an unsecured connection? The service is provided: "...on an AS IS and AS AVAILABLE basis. Google disclaims all responsibility and liability for the availability, timeliness, security or reliability of the Service. Google also reserves the right to modify, suspend or discontinue the Service with or without notice at any time and without any liability to you." Gmail Terms of Use
If you thought anything else, you were out of your fricking mind...It's a free service, and that's free-as-in-beer and free-as-in-beer only gets you so much.
Any decent-sized business would run into SOX problems if they used this sort of service consistently, and as a free service they have a very low duty toward their users. If gmail blew up tomorrow and Google decided to discontinue it, it'd be pretty difficult for any users to recover damages seeing as they weren't paying for anything.
Personally, I can't imagine using a non-guaranteed service for anything "mission-critical". If your mission relies on someone else's beta service, your business is in trouble.
I disagree. It's not their responsibility to make you be secure, especially in terms of using their free service. If you give a damn, you'll add the one letter to the url to secure your connection. If you don't you'll keep blissfully using the service unsecured, and that's your own look out.
Its the same as having an unsecured home wireless connection, or leaving your computer plugged directly into the cable modem with no firewall and file sharing turned on. The user must take responsibility for their own security.
I've always been curious about these services, both for a sort of browsing-without-buying variety, and as a foil against the ever-increasing piles of game crap that infest my storage spaces. Anyone use these services, and have any thoughts? I'm not averse to monthly fees, but if the service is clunky and annoying to use, that would drive me up the wall.
Ha! Come on, give it up for the troll, that was funny.
They offer it. All you have to do is go to https://mail.google.com/ rather than http://mail.google.com./
I fail to see how the average person, as usual, being lax about their security is in any way Google's fault. This was something I found immediately, just because I won't check my email without a secure connection.
Nah, weaker individuals wouldn't show up as die offs in the fossil record. You need to lose species.
A long period of increased radiation could very well spell the end for specialized, slow breeding species. A quick blast won't kill you, but having to live through a few millennia of high energy cosmic bombardment? That could do it.
It'd also depend on the individual species. Some would probably be highly resistant and thrive, and others would be more strongly effected and die.
How long until this Staphylococcus aureus becomes resistant to the current anti-biotic cocktail?
Evolutionist: "Well it depends on aquired penicillinase production; it's an enzyme which breaks down the beta-lactam ring of the penicillin molecule. And also on resistances to methicillin, and glycopeptides."
Creationist: "God moves in mysterious ways"