There is only so much an organization full of hippies and dedicated to non-violence can do that is actually scary. It's extremely difficult to call them a terrorist organization when they're not actually scary; scary is kinda a requirement.
Terrorist is a label that is attached to a lot of people. It has nothing to do with them being attached to a government and everything to do with whether or not we like them. If we like them, they're not terrorists, they're plucky freedom fighters.
I don't know if it solves more problems, but we do tend to stay ahead of them. Certainly the anti-technological bias of organizations like Greenpeace is counterproductive.
The automobile was originally hailed for it's ability to reduce the horse pollution problem. It was quite the big deal at the turn of the century.
I'm a big fan of nuclear energy as well. Nuclear energy plus a decent increase in fuel economy could solve a lot of our problems for a long time to come.
Demand has increased, but why would they go out of their way to increase supply? Artificially lowering supply is what OPEC is all about.
We need to be a lot less dependent on oil. We can't be self-sufficient in oil, and it's clearly a bad idea to be so dependent on a resource controlled by other people.
Plastic is cheaper, and it's easier to shape...That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
In the long run, plastic recycling will probably become lucrative enough that we'll probably start mining the waste dumps full of stuff that was "cheaper to throw away" back in the day, so I'm not all that worried about the long run, though I do think that we need a better method for recycling/throwing away household electronics...That stuff is full of valuable crap.
We can't be self-sufficient in oil. Period. Blame whoever you want for that.
But if sensible fuel economy had actually been meaningfully enforced in this country, we'd be in a lot better shape right now.
The real cause for the current spike in oil prices is that developing economies like China and India are subsidizing oil imports to keep their economic expansion going, thus artificially lowering the prices inside their respective countries, and keeping demand higher than it would be if the price reflected the actual cost.
I guess you'd rather blame it on anyone else though, to feed your stupid prejudice.
Still, asking those bastards their opinion about any electronics is pointless. They won't be happy until it runs on fairy dust (harvested from free-range fairies, of course).
Greenpeace is a great example of one of the environmental organizations that give environmentalism its freaky leftist reputation. The environment is not a left or right issue; we all live here, we all should care.
But having an organization who honestly believes we should abandon most aspects of our current technological society in order to be more in tune with the planet polarizes the issue, and drives more moderate people away.
This is a great example, along with all the rest of their consumer electronics whinging lately. That stuff is minor league in terms of global pollution problems, but they know that they have a better chance of getting the boomers to protest apple or microsoft than they do of persuading them to give up their hummers.
I don't know. Leading is fun, but playing your role with skill and panache is cool too. Some of the most fun I ever had while raiding was in turning the tide, and holding things together through my own personal uberness for long enough for everyone else to recover.
Arena pvp, on the other hand, isn't as much fun for me. There are certain groupings that have a huge advantage, and the gear advantage quickly became insurmountable. God help you if you're not a standard arena build.
Raiding is awesome; being at the forefront of clearing an instance for the first time is awesome.
I was in a guild that was one of the first to clear Kara, and the amount of work we put into it was mind-blowing. Hours and hours spent farming potions, grinding cash and buffs so we could kill just one more boss. Blowing a thousand gold worth of stuff in a single fight was possible, and necessary.
At this point in the game, kara is simple. Any semi-competent guild can run it, and comparatively cheaply. It was a great achievement in the early days of the expansion, and now it's completely devalued.
My first character was a Pally; I made it on release day, and I played it until June or so (2005?)...I got the "Blade of Hanna" which was one of the best weapons in the game at that point. All my friends were playing Alliance on different servers, so we all went Horde on one server to hang out together, and stopped playing our alliance toons.
But when the expansion came out, I decided to level the old pally, just for fun. In the first zone I got a quest sword for killing some pigs that was better than my coveted BoH...It wasn't an uber weapon by that point, but still. Yea. Welfare is the right word.
I'm not super hardcore, but it's still annoying to see something that was a real achievement become commonplace. Takes the fun out of the game, because nothing is really worth striving for.
There is plenty of grinding in the lower levels, but there is also progression. You're constantly getting better gear, better skills, seeing new areas, and working toward real goals.
What happens when you max your level? Gear grind. Faction grind. That's it. New skills? Nope. You may pick up a new crafting recipe, but that's it.
And the gear grind is evil, because it's so incremental. You can't just jump to top tier gear (well, not without a whole lotta friends), so you have to run 5 mans until you've maxed 'em. Then you need to run 5 man heroics. Then Kara, etc.
And the true horror? If you're a ground breaker, and I did the ground breaking a few times, you get to watch while the stuff you sweated blood to get through by the skin of your teeth, that accomplishment which you were so proud of, becomes trivial as bliz keeps adding new content and new gear.
I was in one of the first guilds on one of the first servers to clear Molten Core. It was a fricking nightmare; you went through massive amounts of potions, one shot buffs, everything. We were the first ones to down a boss, we were the first to clear the instance. Now you can cream it in an hour with a pug.
It's a fricking rat race, and your achievements are utterly ephemeral, because the next expansion will take it all away.
In some ways it's better; once you get higher up you can get better weapons, better skills, pick up a crafting profession, etc, etc.
But yea, in the end it's just a grind. WoW is better scripted than most, and it's pretty balanced, but, at the end of the day, if killing a million of the same thing to incrementally increase your "experience" isn't your cup of tea, then you're going to hate it. Pvp adds some savor; if you play on a pve server, you'll die of boredom, but having someone jump out of nowhere and kill you makes a difference.
It's a proven formula though; you'll hardly ever find an RPG online or offline that doesn't fall into the whole "Stats, skills, experience" mode.
I've played Eve, actually...It is a good game, and one that you can participate in in a lot of different roles.
And yea, you get the shakes. Trying desperately not to lose a ship because you didn't spring for insurance gets your teeth chattering and your hands shaking. Fight or flight city. Dying in WoW is just tiresome, and it leads to a lot of weird griefing, because there is no cost to dying...In no other game have I seen griefers that are so pimped out with gear. At least in Eve, the griefer's usually have crappy ships;)
Is progression restricted to leveling? Actually...Yes.
The endgame grind requires way too large a time commitment for the casual players that WoW caters to. Lot of people quit or look for other things when they hit 70 and can't come up with anything else to do.
The way the crafting system is set up, it's impossible to be a good crafter and a casual player. All the good recipes require a ton of grinding.
Pvp is too dependent on gear; a person with average gear is helpless in pvp, regardless of their personal skill.
Meaningful PvE requires a huge time commitment; the upper level instances have steep requirements, and you're pretty much limited to pugs for the lower instances, which is a misery.
Not compared to UO or EQ...You have all the same problems, but add to that the hefty death penalties, and the larger time sinks, and you understand the true meaning of futility.
There were times when I played EQ where I was tired, logged on, and then got killed, and sat there staring at the screen while the realization that, if I just hadn't played, I'd have saved myself hours of extra meaningless work.
The WoW endgame is amazingly tiresome. You have to have a guild, which means guild politics, guild drama. You have to run big instances, which is hours and hours of work for occasional payouts, and it's HUGELY repetitive; you'll run the same instances dozens and dozens of times.
And all for what? Incremental equipment upgrades? Lot of people here are complaining about the long upgrade cycles in WoW...They'd lose all their hardcore players if their upgrade cycle was quicker, because you'd just get your full set of top-tier gear when the expansion would come out and it would all be replaced with crappy quest greens.
Too much leisure time is one thing, but most people blow some time on pursuits that are purely pleasure, and WoW is no better or worse than most of those. I used to play WoW; I played a lot during a period where I was freelancing and doing contract work. Played a lot less when I started in on a full time job. Less still when my first kid came along.
If I can find time to play WoW, have a full time job, a kid, and a social life, what's the problem? People always treat it like there is some character flaw in playing an MMO, but they ignore the fact that the person'd be playing some other game, reading a trashy novel, or slacking in front of the TV.
I think there is definitely room for something new; a lot of people have been talking about WoW's mass market appeal and it's true that it has a great mass market appeal. It's definitely brought the cult of MMORPG to a much wider audience. I wonder how many people though, have really thought through the implications of that?
The most common implication I've seen tossed about is the whole "WoW has dumbed down MMO's forever, and oh, how I long for the EQ/UO good old days." There is something to that; certainly WoW showed MMO publishers how to make a product that's friendly to the masses. In this case, it's "defer all the annoying repetitive grind until the endgame", rather than forcing you to do it during the leveling process.
What it also did was pull a huge number of non-MMO players into the mix...Players who've picked up the basic skills, and maxed out a half dozen characters, and are now bored to tears with WoW's pointless and repetitive endgame grindfest. For all that it's different from what came before, it's still pretty typical, and lessons learned in WoW will transfer quickly to other MMOs.
Basically, they created the ultimate MMO gateway drug. Now a lot of new products are hitting the market, and I think WoW will see a lot of defections as players who've hit the upper limit and gotten everything it's possible to get in the game, start looking for a new challenge and a less happy candy colored world.
T-Rays are better for this than the current "scan 'em naked" scanners, because they can be tuned to look for only weapons/bombs/whatever.
From WP: Terahertz radiation can penetrate fabrics and plastics, so it can be used in surveillance, such as security screening, to uncover concealed weapons on a person, remotely. This is of particular interest because many materials of interest, such as plastic explosives, have unique spectral "fingerprints" in the terahertz range. This offers the possibility to combine spectral identification with imaging. Passive detection of Terahertz signatures avoid the bodily privacy concerns of other detection by being targeted to a very specific range of materials and objects.
1. Yes, also their skin. 2. T Rays are low energy, so not much profit in trying to kill someone with them. A nice rock would work better. 3. Yes and no. They're better than X-rays for some diagnostics, but, as always, more knowledge = less peace. 4. Yes. Except they don't see through clothes (those already exist) they look through clothes and skin. They also are more effective at spotting explosives, etc, due to peculiarities in their composition. 5. This has always been the case.
Not if it still works. You need to take the old address offline for a while.
Most people don't pay much attention to their DNS infrastructure. The stuff doesn't need much maintenance. If it breaks, they'll notice that something is wrong, but if it continues working seamlessly, they'll ignore it.
I upgraded a corporate DNS once and left the old system in place, just changed the CNAME to point to the new server. The new server (windows) ate itself later, and since the guy whose baby it was had been canned, I just switched the name back to the old servers.
Later, my new boss wanted to switch to a Linux based system, instead of the windows system which I'd already repurposed. I quoted him a modest server, set it up as a secure proxy for some of our internal web applications, and let the original linux system keep chugging along.
I figure I can get at least two more servers out of this, before I actually have to upgrade the system.
Maybe the guys at root-servers just left some hardware running at the old address?;)
They should never have relinquished the address so damn quickly. Turn off the equipment for a few weeks first and let people see that that address no longer works...Don't just let someone move in seamlessly and hijack your junk.
80% of the people are white too. But the median household income for whites is ~48,000 and the median household income for blacks is ~30,000, and for hispanics, it's ~34,000. All according to WP
Don't pretend there is no difference in relative incomes. And don't pull statistical bullshit to cover your prejudice.
So who are they trying to protect, exactly? I thought the whole rational basis for the prohibition of child pornography is the very legitimate concern over the children that are abused to make it.
If there is no abuse, and, indeed, no actual children involved, then what the hell is the justification?
Not to mention the whole, "Whoops I clicked on a non-descriptive link, and my browser cached the imagine and now I'm in jail for kiddie porn" issue.
I'm trying to figure out what other energy would apply. It's more just an honest question (my physics is obviously more of the terrestrial sort). Would something have to shed mass or slam into an orbiting body or something similar, in order to be bound?
Slashdot Mirror
BGs are different; you can do well, depending on your faction, as long as your gear is reasonable.
The real deal is the arena fights. That's a whole different world, and that's where the good pvp gear comes from.
There is only so much an organization full of hippies and dedicated to non-violence can do that is actually scary. It's extremely difficult to call them a terrorist organization when they're not actually scary; scary is kinda a requirement.
Terrorist is a label that is attached to a lot of people. It has nothing to do with them being attached to a government and everything to do with whether or not we like them. If we like them, they're not terrorists, they're plucky freedom fighters.
I don't know if it solves more problems, but we do tend to stay ahead of them. Certainly the anti-technological bias of organizations like Greenpeace is counterproductive.
The automobile was originally hailed for it's ability to reduce the horse pollution problem. It was quite the big deal at the turn of the century.
I'm a big fan of nuclear energy as well. Nuclear energy plus a decent increase in fuel economy could solve a lot of our problems for a long time to come.
Demand has increased, but why would they go out of their way to increase supply? Artificially lowering supply is what OPEC is all about.
We need to be a lot less dependent on oil. We can't be self-sufficient in oil, and it's clearly a bad idea to be so dependent on a resource controlled by other people.
Plastic is cheaper, and it's easier to shape...That's pretty much it in a nutshell.
In the long run, plastic recycling will probably become lucrative enough that we'll probably start mining the waste dumps full of stuff that was "cheaper to throw away" back in the day, so I'm not all that worried about the long run, though I do think that we need a better method for recycling/throwing away household electronics...That stuff is full of valuable crap.
We can't be self-sufficient in oil. Period. Blame whoever you want for that.
But if sensible fuel economy had actually been meaningfully enforced in this country, we'd be in a lot better shape right now.
The real cause for the current spike in oil prices is that developing economies like China and India are subsidizing oil imports to keep their economic expansion going, thus artificially lowering the prices inside their respective countries, and keeping demand higher than it would be if the price reflected the actual cost.
I guess you'd rather blame it on anyone else though, to feed your stupid prejudice.
Greenpeace != Terrorist organization
Still, asking those bastards their opinion about any electronics is pointless. They won't be happy until it runs on fairy dust (harvested from free-range fairies, of course).
Greenpeace is a great example of one of the environmental organizations that give environmentalism its freaky leftist reputation. The environment is not a left or right issue; we all live here, we all should care.
But having an organization who honestly believes we should abandon most aspects of our current technological society in order to be more in tune with the planet polarizes the issue, and drives more moderate people away.
This is a great example, along with all the rest of their consumer electronics whinging lately. That stuff is minor league in terms of global pollution problems, but they know that they have a better chance of getting the boomers to protest apple or microsoft than they do of persuading them to give up their hummers.
I don't know. Leading is fun, but playing your role with skill and panache is cool too. Some of the most fun I ever had while raiding was in turning the tide, and holding things together through my own personal uberness for long enough for everyone else to recover.
Arena pvp, on the other hand, isn't as much fun for me. There are certain groupings that have a huge advantage, and the gear advantage quickly became insurmountable. God help you if you're not a standard arena build.
Raiding is awesome; being at the forefront of clearing an instance for the first time is awesome.
I was in a guild that was one of the first to clear Kara, and the amount of work we put into it was mind-blowing. Hours and hours spent farming potions, grinding cash and buffs so we could kill just one more boss. Blowing a thousand gold worth of stuff in a single fight was possible, and necessary.
At this point in the game, kara is simple. Any semi-competent guild can run it, and comparatively cheaply. It was a great achievement in the early days of the expansion, and now it's completely devalued.
My first character was a Pally; I made it on release day, and I played it until June or so (2005?)...I got the "Blade of Hanna" which was one of the best weapons in the game at that point. All my friends were playing Alliance on different servers, so we all went Horde on one server to hang out together, and stopped playing our alliance toons.
But when the expansion came out, I decided to level the old pally, just for fun. In the first zone I got a quest sword for killing some pigs that was better than my coveted BoH...It wasn't an uber weapon by that point, but still. Yea. Welfare is the right word.
I'm not super hardcore, but it's still annoying to see something that was a real achievement become commonplace. Takes the fun out of the game, because nothing is really worth striving for.
There is plenty of grinding in the lower levels, but there is also progression. You're constantly getting better gear, better skills, seeing new areas, and working toward real goals.
What happens when you max your level? Gear grind. Faction grind. That's it. New skills? Nope. You may pick up a new crafting recipe, but that's it.
And the gear grind is evil, because it's so incremental. You can't just jump to top tier gear (well, not without a whole lotta friends), so you have to run 5 mans until you've maxed 'em. Then you need to run 5 man heroics. Then Kara, etc.
And the true horror? If you're a ground breaker, and I did the ground breaking a few times, you get to watch while the stuff you sweated blood to get through by the skin of your teeth, that accomplishment which you were so proud of, becomes trivial as bliz keeps adding new content and new gear.
I was in one of the first guilds on one of the first servers to clear Molten Core. It was a fricking nightmare; you went through massive amounts of potions, one shot buffs, everything. We were the first ones to down a boss, we were the first to clear the instance. Now you can cream it in an hour with a pug.
It's a fricking rat race, and your achievements are utterly ephemeral, because the next expansion will take it all away.
In some ways it's better; once you get higher up you can get better weapons, better skills, pick up a crafting profession, etc, etc.
But yea, in the end it's just a grind. WoW is better scripted than most, and it's pretty balanced, but, at the end of the day, if killing a million of the same thing to incrementally increase your "experience" isn't your cup of tea, then you're going to hate it. Pvp adds some savor; if you play on a pve server, you'll die of boredom, but having someone jump out of nowhere and kill you makes a difference.
It's a proven formula though; you'll hardly ever find an RPG online or offline that doesn't fall into the whole "Stats, skills, experience" mode.
I've played Eve, actually...It is a good game, and one that you can participate in in a lot of different roles.
;)
And yea, you get the shakes. Trying desperately not to lose a ship because you didn't spring for insurance gets your teeth chattering and your hands shaking. Fight or flight city. Dying in WoW is just tiresome, and it leads to a lot of weird griefing, because there is no cost to dying...In no other game have I seen griefers that are so pimped out with gear. At least in Eve, the griefer's usually have crappy ships
The endgame grind requires way too large a time commitment for the casual players that WoW caters to. Lot of people quit or look for other things when they hit 70 and can't come up with anything else to do.
The way the crafting system is set up, it's impossible to be a good crafter and a casual player. All the good recipes require a ton of grinding.
Pvp is too dependent on gear; a person with average gear is helpless in pvp, regardless of their personal skill.
Meaningful PvE requires a huge time commitment; the upper level instances have steep requirements, and you're pretty much limited to pugs for the lower instances, which is a misery.
Not compared to UO or EQ...You have all the same problems, but add to that the hefty death penalties, and the larger time sinks, and you understand the true meaning of futility.
There were times when I played EQ where I was tired, logged on, and then got killed, and sat there staring at the screen while the realization that, if I just hadn't played, I'd have saved myself hours of extra meaningless work.
The WoW endgame is amazingly tiresome. You have to have a guild, which means guild politics, guild drama. You have to run big instances, which is hours and hours of work for occasional payouts, and it's HUGELY repetitive; you'll run the same instances dozens and dozens of times.
And all for what? Incremental equipment upgrades? Lot of people here are complaining about the long upgrade cycles in WoW...They'd lose all their hardcore players if their upgrade cycle was quicker, because you'd just get your full set of top-tier gear when the expansion would come out and it would all be replaced with crappy quest greens.
Too much leisure time is one thing, but most people blow some time on pursuits that are purely pleasure, and WoW is no better or worse than most of those. I used to play WoW; I played a lot during a period where I was freelancing and doing contract work. Played a lot less when I started in on a full time job. Less still when my first kid came along.
If I can find time to play WoW, have a full time job, a kid, and a social life, what's the problem? People always treat it like there is some character flaw in playing an MMO, but they ignore the fact that the person'd be playing some other game, reading a trashy novel, or slacking in front of the TV.
I think there is definitely room for something new; a lot of people have been talking about WoW's mass market appeal and it's true that it has a great mass market appeal. It's definitely brought the cult of MMORPG to a much wider audience. I wonder how many people though, have really thought through the implications of that?
The most common implication I've seen tossed about is the whole "WoW has dumbed down MMO's forever, and oh, how I long for the EQ/UO good old days." There is something to that; certainly WoW showed MMO publishers how to make a product that's friendly to the masses. In this case, it's "defer all the annoying repetitive grind until the endgame", rather than forcing you to do it during the leveling process.
What it also did was pull a huge number of non-MMO players into the mix...Players who've picked up the basic skills, and maxed out a half dozen characters, and are now bored to tears with WoW's pointless and repetitive endgame grindfest. For all that it's different from what came before, it's still pretty typical, and lessons learned in WoW will transfer quickly to other MMOs.
Basically, they created the ultimate MMO gateway drug. Now a lot of new products are hitting the market, and I think WoW will see a lot of defections as players who've hit the upper limit and gotten everything it's possible to get in the game, start looking for a new challenge and a less happy candy colored world.
Pre-coffee posting. I NAT'ed it in the firewall rules so the traffic that had been routed to 127.0.0.1 got redirected to 127.0.0.2.
I was redoing some DNS stuff earlier (switching out a server) and I had CNAME on the brain.
Sad that you're the only person who noticed =P
T-Rays are better for this than the current "scan 'em naked" scanners, because they can be tuned to look for only weapons/bombs/whatever.
From WP: Terahertz radiation can penetrate fabrics and plastics, so it can be used in surveillance, such as security screening, to uncover concealed weapons on a person, remotely. This is of particular interest because many materials of interest, such as plastic explosives, have unique spectral "fingerprints" in the terahertz range. This offers the possibility to combine spectral identification with imaging. Passive detection of Terahertz signatures avoid the bodily privacy concerns of other detection by being targeted to a very specific range of materials and objects.
1. Yes, also their skin.
2. T Rays are low energy, so not much profit in trying to kill someone with them. A nice rock would work better.
3. Yes and no. They're better than X-rays for some diagnostics, but, as always, more knowledge = less peace.
4. Yes. Except they don't see through clothes (those already exist) they look through clothes and skin. They also are more effective at spotting explosives, etc, due to peculiarities in their composition.
5. This has always been the case.
Not if it still works. You need to take the old address offline for a while.
Most people don't pay much attention to their DNS infrastructure. The stuff doesn't need much maintenance. If it breaks, they'll notice that something is wrong, but if it continues working seamlessly, they'll ignore it.
I upgraded a corporate DNS once and left the old system in place, just changed the CNAME to point to the new server. The new server (windows) ate itself later, and since the guy whose baby it was had been canned, I just switched the name back to the old servers.
;)
Later, my new boss wanted to switch to a Linux based system, instead of the windows system which I'd already repurposed. I quoted him a modest server, set it up as a secure proxy for some of our internal web applications, and let the original linux system keep chugging along.
I figure I can get at least two more servers out of this, before I actually have to upgrade the system.
Maybe the guys at root-servers just left some hardware running at the old address?
They should never have relinquished the address so damn quickly. Turn off the equipment for a few weeks first and let people see that that address no longer works...Don't just let someone move in seamlessly and hijack your junk.
80% of the people are white too. But the median household income for whites is ~48,000 and the median household income for blacks is ~30,000, and for hispanics, it's ~34,000. All according to WP
Don't pretend there is no difference in relative incomes. And don't pull statistical bullshit to cover your prejudice.
So who are they trying to protect, exactly? I thought the whole rational basis for the prohibition of child pornography is the very legitimate concern over the children that are abused to make it.
If there is no abuse, and, indeed, no actual children involved, then what the hell is the justification?
Not to mention the whole, "Whoops I clicked on a non-descriptive link, and my browser cached the imagine and now I'm in jail for kiddie porn" issue.
I'm trying to figure out what other energy would apply. It's more just an honest question (my physics is obviously more of the terrestrial sort). Would something have to shed mass or slam into an orbiting body or something similar, in order to be bound?