Today is also trade like a pirate day. Since the administration has just ruled that all the shorts should just hand over money to the longs.
Shiver me timbers! That's good news you bring me, matey. This won't be the first time I be glad that I be a "long", though always before it be more help with the wenches than with the plunderin', harr harr!
Wait, you be talkin' 'bout lily-liver land-lubber investments?
Is "Ebenthorin" elven or whatever for "Squig Herder's Bitch"? I'm not sure I'd want to carry the title earned by getting my ass whuped by something heh.
Anyway, yeah, the game is in fact sounding better and better. I had heard lots of good things about DaoC, and this one is sound real good too. I may have to give it a try if I'm not hearing anything calamitous about instability or what not in the next couple weeks.
It's challenging because you're encouraged to think how to beat the enemies, instead of simply grinding a huge mob one enemy at a time, dying, respawning, and repeating everything all over again.
It either requires strategy to beat the enemies, or it doesn't. Having a penalty for death doesn't change that. If your problem is that it's possible to kill one enemy, die, then return to one less enemy than before, well take heart, because even in care-bear WoW the hardest mob packs and all boss encounters will fully respawn after you die and most mobs respawn after a period of time. That's not a penalty, that's reseting the encounter, and clearly not all you're asking for.
Now, I don't like the idea of losing your gear either (though it seems EVE managed to implement that quite well), but I don't see the problem with Diablo 2's EXP loss, or Guild Wars' Death Penalty in which you get lowered max HP and Energy until you either return to a town or kill enough enemies without dying to compensate.
You see a big problem with timesinks, but don't see a problem with forcing players to re-play many hours of gameplay to return to the exact same point they were? Isn't that the definition of a treadmill, running to stay in place? And especially in the context of Diablo II, where the game was ridiculously easy 99% of the time, and then you'd get a cheap insta-death that would result in the exp penalty. This is your idea of a good system?
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You aren't trying to make the game an actual challenge. You're trying to make it punishing. The actual difficulty of the game isn't the issue, it's that if you fail for whatever reason (lag, cheap insta-deaths, oh and hey maybe actual challenge) that you are penalized.
That's not challenge, that's just stupid.
Then maybe what you need to fix is MMOs being punishing timesinks, instead of worrying that some people want the game to actually need some skill? beats me why people simply accept weekend-long grinds as a way of life in MMOs, yet cry foul against anything resembling challenge.
I agree completely that MMOs need to reduce the timesinks and find another way to keep players paying monthly fees, however I disagree entirely with your concept that "need some skill" means "are punished if you screw up". Because they are not and never will be the same. If you can't make a game challenging without making it punishing, then you suffer from a greater lack of imagination than the game designers who can't get rid of timesinks. Since the only thing I've heard from you regarding the concept of "challenge" is "penalty", I feel confident that this is the case.
Besides, if you think death penalties make for greater "challenge", then as far as I'm concerned nothing less than perma-death is acceptable. Nethack, or gtfo. What, scared of the challenge?
Which is stupid, becasue even a genius will dig a ditch to survive. If you have an abundance of Geniuses, then they will do what the need to and make a buck. They may design a better way to do it, but it will get done none the less.
Um, yeah, but those ditch-digging geniuses might decide that they are the ones that deserve to be running the country instead of digging ditches and try to depose the geniuses who decided it should be the other way around. That's bad, if you're the country-running genius; and in fact as mentioned as having resulted in civil war when they actually tried it.
That was the whole point of making the lower classes deliberately stupid, of encouraging promiscuous sex and the rampant use of "soma" a drug that was kinda like ecstasy and prozac in one. Keep them dumb, happy, and numb so they won't worry about their place in life and in fact be happy about it. The lower classes were taught to be glad that they weren't stuck with the responsibility of the upper classes, while simultaneously look down upon classes lower than them.
Brave New World is a dystopia, after all. Much like 1984 (though differing greatly in specifics and many of the themes), it's about how the controllers of a society decide to embed their control so deeply into the society itself that it can never be broken. If that was your goal, making an unlimited number of geniuses would be the last thing you do!
Because they thought that the pre-WoW MMO market, which was stuffed full of generic Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds, made sense to enter with a Warmhammer MMO? I mean, back when all you had to do was beat Everquest it seems like it would have been an even better idea. Though I doubt they're expecting to replace WoW, and would be happy with a small slice of the now much larger MMO pie.
I'm sorry but games need to be more challenging. I'm tired of MMO's where you have no penalty of death. It's like....Run around get killed, come back to life and do it all over again.
Hey, I'm all for having more challenge in games. A lot of games, and WoW stands out here, are quite easy in the main (WoW has a few moments, but generally the "challenge" comes from party members who are "challenged").
But I'm bloody sick and tired of people who say "I want more challenge... there should be a penalty for death!" Because you know what? Being penalized for death isn't challenge, it's punishment. MMOs are already "punishing" enough as timesinks, they do not need additional punishment for what is supposed to be FUN!
And the punishment doesn't make the game harder, it just makes people who don't succeed the first time (regardless of how easy or hard the game is) realize how retarded taking punishment from a game is and quit. I guess maybe that's the point, drive away the noobs, but it's nothing to do with whether the game is actually hard or not. You could have an extremely hard game with no penalty for death, and hey, it'd be hard! Using punishment as a substitute for challenge just means you can't figure out a real way to make the game hard without also making it cheap.
And cheapness is the biggest reason I'm against punishment in games, because most of them are cheap. UO had a huge penalty for death -- you lost all the gear on you. And if you were a mage/archer and that's the skill that got nerfed into oblivion that patch while the other got buffed to ridiculous levels, then you'd get whacked in two seconds. Or you would get lagged entering a dungeon so you're frozen in place while the gankers on the inside stabbed you to death and took your stuff. How is that "challenge"? Diablo II had a big penalty for death in Nightmare and Hell, in the form of perhaps hours worth of experience lost if you died. It also had retardedly imbalanced mini-bosses who could kill you in one shot before you realized they were there. How is having to spend those extra hours regaining your gear or regaining the exp "challenging", as opposed to "annoying and cheap"?
I don't get what the big deal of "Run around get killed, come back to life and do it all over again" is. If you make the game actually challenging instead of cheaply punishing, and it takes someone 147 deaths before they figure out what they were doing wrong and beat the encounter, why is the extra 10 hours it took them not punishment enough?
Before any Fear Engines get unleashed, he didn't say Warhammer is biting off WoW, he's saying it's a similar enough "generic fantasy world with knights and orcs" that a lot of people won't see enough difference in it to find it unique. And that's probably true.
If you enter an RvR area that is a tier of content lower then you (say a rank 15 person, should be in T2, heads to T1 thinking they'll gank some newbies), you are immediately turned into a chicken. You have 0 armor and 1 hit point. All you can do it run around squawking at people until they kill you, or you leave the RvR area.
Holy crap! Do you get experience for getting killed while a chicken?
I only ask because I can't see myself leveling very fast otherwise... Bawk!
"Other programs offered to treat PTSD include Virtual Airplane, Virtual Audiences, Virtual Heights, Virtual Storm, and Virtual Vietnam."
All but the last are for desenstitization of phobias (as are those for snakes and spiders). The same programs would work for PTSD as they're simply VR of exposure to a particular situation, but I can't recall there ever being a case of audience-induced PTSD.
Ah, I see, that makes more sense. I was kinda wondering how many people were traumatized by an audience.
So, if say I had a phobia of airplanes, and at the same time say a phobia of snakes, then the most optimal treatment would be Virtual...?
Killing people to use their corpses as fuel for your Roadster of Doom may run awry of the "no necromancy or angering the spirits of the dead" rule.
Well since I got married and had kids, I had to sell the roadster and get a Sedan of Doom instead. It'll still do more than 81 mph though especially with fresh bodies of the innocent.
Thanks for the heads up about the rules. I wish they'd make these kinds of things more explicit, but I guess that's just what I'll have to expect in these anti-necromantic times.
I see they're pretty much all recumbent bikes, and that's pretty cool and all, and 81 mph is impressive and stuff, but I think maybe they're perhaps suffering from a lack of imagination. Based off the common usages of "Solar-Powered" and "Diesel-Powered", would it be safe to assume that Human-Powered could also mean Human-Fueled?
Or should I read the fine print before entering the contest?
I'd say that graphene capacitors are as uninteresting as it gets as far as memory technology goes, sorry.
Except that the speed of the DRAM is greatly affected by the amount of charge they can store in the capacitor to drive the bit lines, which is why DRAM uses special process technology that use deep vertical channels to have as much capacitance as possible but still high density, which is affected by the 2D size of the caps. If there were a practical way to make graphene super-caps on a silicon wafer, then that would be very exciting in terms of DRAM tech, though it would still be fundamentally the same design as before. So I guess that's uninteresting if you want revolutions, but I could get excited over massive increases in speed and/or density of DRAM. Not that I think this would truly be practical. I'm betting graphene caps stay in larger dedicated applications.
And don't forget the patents on playing with your cat with a laser pointer.
Now don't make this patent sound more frivolous than it is. The patent isn't on cat-play, it's on cat-exercise, a much more practical endeavor. Sure from the cat's point of view it's play (meaning practice for the murder of small animals), but the reason why you're doing it is because your cat needs exercise because they are fat. Very fat. I mean, seriously, how do you let your cat get that fat? You know you don't have to give him a treat every time he begs for one, right? Sure he'll be pissed at you for a while if you refuse, mostly because of the huge precedent set by your previous acquiescence, but just shrug it off because at the end of the day he's still a cat. No matter how much he "loves" you, to him you're still "the biped who gives me food, or, in the event of them having a massive heart attack and me not being able to figure out how to work the can opener, is food". Think about that next time he gives you the "I'm so cute, please feed me" look.
Then maybe bust out the laser pointer to help trim some of that cat-fat and you'll appreciate this patent more once every guest in your house stops asking if your cat is named "Jabba". Oh but it is still patented, so don't forget to pay your $699 Cat-Exercise License Fee etc. etc.
Let's play the monopoly game. You have a market monopoly, and I'll name a monopoly propped up by government. Last person to name a monopoly wins. I'll go first, so the game will be over sooner. Your local water company is a monopoly. Now you go. You'll name Microsoft sooner or later. In spite of its being propped up by copyright law, I'll give you that one out of pity. Now I'll go. Your local sewer company is also a monopoly. Now it's your turn again.
Hey, that's a pretty good game. Now let's play the "Libertarian Fantasy" game. It's where first you name a monopoly, and then you say whether or not that monopoly would exist if a market completely free of government regulation existed. Every time you answer "no", you get a point, and every time you say "yes" you lose one. If you end up negative, the libertarian fantasy is B.S.
So far you've listed the water company, and the sewer company. Are you seriously imagining multiple companies running water pipes to every house so the home owner can choose? Different houses on the same block having different water? In the same side of the city? And then are you going to say that the same thing would be done with sewers? No, these are obviously natural monopolies, where there's only room economically for one player because you can't have three parallel sewer lines, water lines, telephone poles, etc.
That puts you at -2 points. Good show.
BTW, Microsoft may be "propped up" by copyright law, but it is restricted greatly by anti-trust law (even with the farce of a sentence they received, go ahead and argue that insufficient enforcement means regulation is bad in the first place). I guarantee you AMD would not exist today if Intel was not concerned with anti-trust.
They still don't get it. Anything you have to agree to with an "I agree" button, no matter what they call it, is a EULA.
No, because there is a fundamental difference between presenting something as though it were an EULA, and an actual EULA. The appearance is not the reality.
The fact that the software installer will not allow you to install/use the software unless you click the "I agree" button does not mean it is legally a EULA. That's simply a function of the software.
If instead of the GPL or a real EULA, the text box that popped up said "Fish are nice," you clicking "I agree" would not in any way represent a legal requirement that you agree that fish are nice. It would just be a bizarre quirk of the program installer. You are perfectly free to lie and claim that you agree that fish are nice, while really you think they suck. If you can bypass said dialog box somehow, that's just fine you aren't in any trouble for not agreeing that fish are nice. "Fish are nice" is not a EULA.
Similarly, the GPL is not a EULA, it specifically says it's not a EULA, and the fact that some installer requires you to "agree" to it before it will do something is meaningless. You can lie and not really agree, you can bypass the installer somehow, and this has no impact on your usage of the software. You can say you agree at the time of the install, but then cease to agree, and it has no effect as long as you don't do anything that would violate copyright law. The MPL is similar in this regard.
On the other hand, Microsoft's EULA is really a EULA. If you figure out a way to install Windows without agreeing to the EULA, you're in violation of that EULA and are using the software (at least theoretically) illegally.
So the biggest problem with the "I agree" button is that it presents the license as thought it were a EULA when it really isn't. That does not make it an actual EULA in any way shape or form. However that means it is misleading the user, and that's bad.
Then they're welcome to come up with ways to make that money. Once they've busted their asses in several jobs, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on investments, and earned their first million, they can suddenely be taxed right back to where they started, because congress thinks they can spend 600,000 of that man's first generated million better than he can.
Taxed back to where they started? Are you crazy? Do you think someone who only makes $400,000 isn't taxed at all?
Hint: Even in our progressive tax system, you do not end up with less money overall by earning more money but then paying more in taxes. You will end up with more money. How is that taking everything? Oh right it isn't. This is just the usual "taxes provide a disincentive to earn more money" canard, or should I say retard.
In other words, "Truthers" are full of shit. They've been debunked countless times and they keep coming back. Accept it, you are wrong. There is no government conspiracy. There was no demolition. Terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into buildings where the heat from the fires caused them to collapse. That is FACT!
And hell, you don't even need to abandon your conspiracy theory! You can still claim the government was responsible, either they knew about the attacks and allowed them to happen or they were in fact colluding with the terrorists and gave them the green light. Not that the latter makes much sense, but hey, you can't disprove it like you can disprove the "controlled -- only not really controlled at all -- implosive demolition". I mean, assume the government knew about the properties of steel and so forth as the NIST report shows and the "Truthers" deny -- why would they go to the trouble and risk of getting caught to have a controlled demolition to guarantee the buildings came down if the planes which actually hit the buildings could do it themselves? It's not even clear that the buildings had to come down to achieve the conspiracy's goal, which was Americans pooping themselves with fear of terrorists and screaming for revenge. That might have just been a "bonus".
I mean, I'm just saying, even in your delusional paranoia you can still work within reality! I demand a higher quality of conspiracy theorist.
Anyway, my opinion of what really happened, which is that the government had no fscking clue about al Qaeda and terrorism at all before the planes hit, but then jumped at the chance to cynically abuse the tragedy to grab as much power for themselves and money for their defense contractor buddies as possible while continuing to foster the environment of fear (which was the goal of al Qaeda for fscks sake) for years, isn't that flattering anyway.:P
UO initially had ecosystems of a sort. Then the players pillaged and burned and plowed salt into the ground.
Ha, I remember that. I had a Grandmaster Ground-Salter. Those were good times.
Anyway, I've thought about how cool an "ecosystem" would be, and also the problem of player abuse. It seems like you could get something a lot better than what we have without leaving it open to complete exploitation by the players. UO's problem was that it tried to remain too "pure" which opened the way to player abuse/boredom, while WoW's problem is that it remains completely artificial with only the tiniest nods towards an ecosystem (i.e. a wolf mob will attack a squirrel or bunny mob that's nearby, and sometimes herd animals actually travel in small herds though usually not). Vicious velociraptors will walk right past delicious zebras without taking notice. Because both are waiting to be slain by the players.
Just add more dynamism. Have the carnivores hunt down the herbivores, and have their respawn rates be relatively related to the number of each. When left alone, the populations will naturally stay in balance. If the players start killing off the carnivores, then the herbivores spawn faster. When the herbivore population rises, then carnivores start to spawn faster too. If the player keeps killing the carnivores, then before you're up to your neck in herbivores, they start to die of starvation. If the player kills lots of herbivores, then carnivores start to die too. But you never have to let the respawn rate reach zero, or even get more than some fraction less than the default spawn rate. Assume, much like you must to imagine Orgrimmar is really a bustling city, that the population that is represented by mobs is really a subset of a much larger one and thus genocide is effectively impossible.
WoW has done a decent job of making sure respawn rates are such that it takes a fair amount of concerted effort to truly keep an area clear. Put some basic safeguards around an ecosystem, and you could keep players from completely wrecking things while also making it much more interesting. UO didn't do that, and had much too low of a base respawn rate anyway (and a much smaller world and much fewer mobs etc etc). I don't think we need to write off the idea entirely because of UO.
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Likewise, the difference between pirate and prat is "ie".
That be quite clever there, you scurvy dog.
Or maybe it be the other thing.
You ain't be that land lubber David St. Hubbins, if it be helpin' you figure out which.
HARR HARR HARR!
Today is also trade like a pirate day. Since the administration has just ruled that all the shorts should just hand over money to the longs.
Shiver me timbers! That's good news you bring me, matey. This won't be the first time I be glad that I be a "long", though always before it be more help with the wenches than with the plunderin', harr harr!
Wait, you be talkin' 'bout lily-liver land-lubber investments?
Is "Ebenthorin" elven or whatever for "Squig Herder's Bitch"? I'm not sure I'd want to carry the title earned by getting my ass whuped by something heh.
Anyway, yeah, the game is in fact sounding better and better. I had heard lots of good things about DaoC, and this one is sound real good too. I may have to give it a try if I'm not hearing anything calamitous about instability or what not in the next couple weeks.
It's challenging because you're encouraged to think how to beat the enemies, instead of simply grinding a huge mob one enemy at a time, dying, respawning, and repeating everything all over again.
It either requires strategy to beat the enemies, or it doesn't. Having a penalty for death doesn't change that. If your problem is that it's possible to kill one enemy, die, then return to one less enemy than before, well take heart, because even in care-bear WoW the hardest mob packs and all boss encounters will fully respawn after you die and most mobs respawn after a period of time. That's not a penalty, that's reseting the encounter, and clearly not all you're asking for.
Now, I don't like the idea of losing your gear either (though it seems EVE managed to implement that quite well), but I don't see the problem with Diablo 2's EXP loss, or Guild Wars' Death Penalty in which you get lowered max HP and Energy until you either return to a town or kill enough enemies without dying to compensate.
You see a big problem with timesinks, but don't see a problem with forcing players to re-play many hours of gameplay to return to the exact same point they were? Isn't that the definition of a treadmill, running to stay in place? And especially in the context of Diablo II, where the game was ridiculously easy 99% of the time, and then you'd get a cheap insta-death that would result in the exp penalty. This is your idea of a good system?
See, that's exactly what I'm talking about. You aren't trying to make the game an actual challenge. You're trying to make it punishing. The actual difficulty of the game isn't the issue, it's that if you fail for whatever reason (lag, cheap insta-deaths, oh and hey maybe actual challenge) that you are penalized.
That's not challenge, that's just stupid.
Then maybe what you need to fix is MMOs being punishing timesinks, instead of worrying that some people want the game to actually need some skill? beats me why people simply accept weekend-long grinds as a way of life in MMOs, yet cry foul against anything resembling challenge.
I agree completely that MMOs need to reduce the timesinks and find another way to keep players paying monthly fees, however I disagree entirely with your concept that "need some skill" means "are punished if you screw up". Because they are not and never will be the same. If you can't make a game challenging without making it punishing, then you suffer from a greater lack of imagination than the game designers who can't get rid of timesinks. Since the only thing I've heard from you regarding the concept of "challenge" is "penalty", I feel confident that this is the case.
Besides, if you think death penalties make for greater "challenge", then as far as I'm concerned nothing less than perma-death is acceptable. Nethack, or gtfo. What, scared of the challenge?
I gotta admit, this game sounds better and better. Chicken achievements!
Which is stupid, becasue even a genius will dig a ditch to survive. If you have an abundance of Geniuses, then they will do what the need to and make a buck. They may design a better way to do it, but it will get done none the less.
Um, yeah, but those ditch-digging geniuses might decide that they are the ones that deserve to be running the country instead of digging ditches and try to depose the geniuses who decided it should be the other way around. That's bad, if you're the country-running genius; and in fact as mentioned as having resulted in civil war when they actually tried it.
That was the whole point of making the lower classes deliberately stupid, of encouraging promiscuous sex and the rampant use of "soma" a drug that was kinda like ecstasy and prozac in one. Keep them dumb, happy, and numb so they won't worry about their place in life and in fact be happy about it. The lower classes were taught to be glad that they weren't stuck with the responsibility of the upper classes, while simultaneously look down upon classes lower than them.
Brave New World is a dystopia, after all. Much like 1984 (though differing greatly in specifics and many of the themes), it's about how the controllers of a society decide to embed their control so deeply into the society itself that it can never be broken. If that was your goal, making an unlimited number of geniuses would be the last thing you do!
Because they thought that the pre-WoW MMO market, which was stuffed full of generic Tolkien-esque fantasy worlds, made sense to enter with a Warmhammer MMO? I mean, back when all you had to do was beat Everquest it seems like it would have been an even better idea. Though I doubt they're expecting to replace WoW, and would be happy with a small slice of the now much larger MMO pie.
I'm sorry but games need to be more challenging. I'm tired of MMO's where you have no penalty of death. It's like....Run around get killed, come back to life and do it all over again.
Hey, I'm all for having more challenge in games. A lot of games, and WoW stands out here, are quite easy in the main (WoW has a few moments, but generally the "challenge" comes from party members who are "challenged").
But I'm bloody sick and tired of people who say "I want more challenge... there should be a penalty for death!" Because you know what? Being penalized for death isn't challenge, it's punishment. MMOs are already "punishing" enough as timesinks, they do not need additional punishment for what is supposed to be FUN!
And the punishment doesn't make the game harder, it just makes people who don't succeed the first time (regardless of how easy or hard the game is) realize how retarded taking punishment from a game is and quit. I guess maybe that's the point, drive away the noobs, but it's nothing to do with whether the game is actually hard or not. You could have an extremely hard game with no penalty for death, and hey, it'd be hard! Using punishment as a substitute for challenge just means you can't figure out a real way to make the game hard without also making it cheap.
And cheapness is the biggest reason I'm against punishment in games, because most of them are cheap. UO had a huge penalty for death -- you lost all the gear on you. And if you were a mage/archer and that's the skill that got nerfed into oblivion that patch while the other got buffed to ridiculous levels, then you'd get whacked in two seconds. Or you would get lagged entering a dungeon so you're frozen in place while the gankers on the inside stabbed you to death and took your stuff. How is that "challenge"? Diablo II had a big penalty for death in Nightmare and Hell, in the form of perhaps hours worth of experience lost if you died. It also had retardedly imbalanced mini-bosses who could kill you in one shot before you realized they were there. How is having to spend those extra hours regaining your gear or regaining the exp "challenging", as opposed to "annoying and cheap"?
I don't get what the big deal of "Run around get killed, come back to life and do it all over again" is. If you make the game actually challenging instead of cheaply punishing, and it takes someone 147 deaths before they figure out what they were doing wrong and beat the encounter, why is the extra 10 hours it took them not punishment enough?
I have a large symbol on my belly in the shape of a Jolt Cola can that I can use to do some form of...stare... Does this make ME a carebear?
No, it means you had a crazy Jolt bender one night and ended up with a tattoo, and that you are prone to navel-gazing.
Before any Fear Engines get unleashed, he didn't say Warhammer is biting off WoW, he's saying it's a similar enough "generic fantasy world with knights and orcs" that a lot of people won't see enough difference in it to find it unique. And that's probably true.
If you enter an RvR area that is a tier of content lower then you (say a rank 15 person, should be in T2, heads to T1 thinking they'll gank some newbies), you are immediately turned into a chicken. You have 0 armor and 1 hit point. All you can do it run around squawking at people until they kill you, or you leave the RvR area.
Holy crap! Do you get experience for getting killed while a chicken?
I only ask because I can't see myself leveling very fast otherwise... Bawk!
i lost to a chick who was performing live open heart surgery on rats
Amazing, but I sure hope the rats needed the surgery for legitimate medical reasons, or that there weren't any lawyers available.
"Other programs offered to treat PTSD include Virtual Airplane, Virtual Audiences, Virtual Heights, Virtual Storm, and Virtual Vietnam."
All but the last are for desenstitization of phobias (as are those for snakes and spiders). The same programs would work for PTSD as they're simply VR of exposure to a particular situation, but I can't recall there ever being a case of audience-induced PTSD.
Ah, I see, that makes more sense. I was kinda wondering how many people were traumatized by an audience.
So, if say I had a phobia of airplanes, and at the same time say a phobia of snakes, then the most optimal treatment would be Virtual...?
It's only abuse if the drugs don't consent!
You're no fun at all.
Killing people to use their corpses as fuel for your Roadster of Doom may run awry of the "no necromancy or angering the spirits of the dead" rule.
Well since I got married and had kids, I had to sell the roadster and get a Sedan of Doom instead. It'll still do more than 81 mph though especially with fresh bodies of the innocent.
Thanks for the heads up about the rules. I wish they'd make these kinds of things more explicit, but I guess that's just what I'll have to expect in these anti-necromantic times.
I see they're pretty much all recumbent bikes, and that's pretty cool and all, and 81 mph is impressive and stuff, but I think maybe they're perhaps suffering from a lack of imagination. Based off the common usages of "Solar-Powered" and "Diesel-Powered", would it be safe to assume that Human-Powered could also mean Human-Fueled?
Or should I read the fine print before entering the contest?
I'd say that graphene capacitors are as uninteresting as it gets as far as memory technology goes, sorry.
Except that the speed of the DRAM is greatly affected by the amount of charge they can store in the capacitor to drive the bit lines, which is why DRAM uses special process technology that use deep vertical channels to have as much capacitance as possible but still high density, which is affected by the 2D size of the caps. If there were a practical way to make graphene super-caps on a silicon wafer, then that would be very exciting in terms of DRAM tech, though it would still be fundamentally the same design as before. So I guess that's uninteresting if you want revolutions, but I could get excited over massive increases in speed and/or density of DRAM. Not that I think this would truly be practical. I'm betting graphene caps stay in larger dedicated applications.
And don't forget the patents on playing with your cat with a laser pointer.
Now don't make this patent sound more frivolous than it is. The patent isn't on cat-play, it's on cat-exercise, a much more practical endeavor. Sure from the cat's point of view it's play (meaning practice for the murder of small animals), but the reason why you're doing it is because your cat needs exercise because they are fat. Very fat. I mean, seriously, how do you let your cat get that fat? You know you don't have to give him a treat every time he begs for one, right? Sure he'll be pissed at you for a while if you refuse, mostly because of the huge precedent set by your previous acquiescence, but just shrug it off because at the end of the day he's still a cat. No matter how much he "loves" you, to him you're still "the biped who gives me food, or, in the event of them having a massive heart attack and me not being able to figure out how to work the can opener, is food". Think about that next time he gives you the "I'm so cute, please feed me" look.
Then maybe bust out the laser pointer to help trim some of that cat-fat and you'll appreciate this patent more once every guest in your house stops asking if your cat is named "Jabba". Oh but it is still patented, so don't forget to pay your $699 Cat-Exercise License Fee etc. etc.
Let's play the monopoly game. You have a market monopoly, and I'll name a monopoly propped up by government. Last person to name a monopoly wins. I'll go first, so the game will be over sooner. Your local water company is a monopoly. Now you go. You'll name Microsoft sooner or later. In spite of its being propped up by copyright law, I'll give you that one out of pity. Now I'll go. Your local sewer company is also a monopoly. Now it's your turn again.
Hey, that's a pretty good game. Now let's play the "Libertarian Fantasy" game. It's where first you name a monopoly, and then you say whether or not that monopoly would exist if a market completely free of government regulation existed. Every time you answer "no", you get a point, and every time you say "yes" you lose one. If you end up negative, the libertarian fantasy is B.S.
So far you've listed the water company, and the sewer company. Are you seriously imagining multiple companies running water pipes to every house so the home owner can choose? Different houses on the same block having different water? In the same side of the city? And then are you going to say that the same thing would be done with sewers? No, these are obviously natural monopolies, where there's only room economically for one player because you can't have three parallel sewer lines, water lines, telephone poles, etc.
That puts you at -2 points. Good show.
BTW, Microsoft may be "propped up" by copyright law, but it is restricted greatly by anti-trust law (even with the farce of a sentence they received, go ahead and argue that insufficient enforcement means regulation is bad in the first place). I guarantee you AMD would not exist today if Intel was not concerned with anti-trust.
They still don't get it. Anything you have to agree to with an "I agree" button, no matter what they call it, is a EULA.
No, because there is a fundamental difference between presenting something as though it were an EULA, and an actual EULA. The appearance is not the reality.
The fact that the software installer will not allow you to install/use the software unless you click the "I agree" button does not mean it is legally a EULA. That's simply a function of the software.
If instead of the GPL or a real EULA, the text box that popped up said "Fish are nice," you clicking "I agree" would not in any way represent a legal requirement that you agree that fish are nice. It would just be a bizarre quirk of the program installer. You are perfectly free to lie and claim that you agree that fish are nice, while really you think they suck. If you can bypass said dialog box somehow, that's just fine you aren't in any trouble for not agreeing that fish are nice. "Fish are nice" is not a EULA.
Similarly, the GPL is not a EULA, it specifically says it's not a EULA, and the fact that some installer requires you to "agree" to it before it will do something is meaningless. You can lie and not really agree, you can bypass the installer somehow, and this has no impact on your usage of the software. You can say you agree at the time of the install, but then cease to agree, and it has no effect as long as you don't do anything that would violate copyright law. The MPL is similar in this regard.
On the other hand, Microsoft's EULA is really a EULA. If you figure out a way to install Windows without agreeing to the EULA, you're in violation of that EULA and are using the software (at least theoretically) illegally.
So the biggest problem with the "I agree" button is that it presents the license as thought it were a EULA when it really isn't. That does not make it an actual EULA in any way shape or form. However that means it is misleading the user, and that's bad.
Then they're welcome to come up with ways to make that money. Once they've busted their asses in several jobs, risking hundreds of thousands of dollars on investments, and earned their first million, they can suddenely be taxed right back to where they started, because congress thinks they can spend 600,000 of that man's first generated million better than he can.
Taxed back to where they started? Are you crazy? Do you think someone who only makes $400,000 isn't taxed at all?
Hint: Even in our progressive tax system, you do not end up with less money overall by earning more money but then paying more in taxes. You will end up with more money. How is that taking everything? Oh right it isn't. This is just the usual "taxes provide a disincentive to earn more money" canard, or should I say retard.
In other words, "Truthers" are full of shit. They've been debunked countless times and they keep coming back. Accept it, you are wrong. There is no government conspiracy. There was no demolition. Terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into buildings where the heat from the fires caused them to collapse. That is FACT!
And hell, you don't even need to abandon your conspiracy theory! You can still claim the government was responsible, either they knew about the attacks and allowed them to happen or they were in fact colluding with the terrorists and gave them the green light. Not that the latter makes much sense, but hey, you can't disprove it like you can disprove the "controlled -- only not really controlled at all -- implosive demolition". I mean, assume the government knew about the properties of steel and so forth as the NIST report shows and the "Truthers" deny -- why would they go to the trouble and risk of getting caught to have a controlled demolition to guarantee the buildings came down if the planes which actually hit the buildings could do it themselves? It's not even clear that the buildings had to come down to achieve the conspiracy's goal, which was Americans pooping themselves with fear of terrorists and screaming for revenge. That might have just been a "bonus".
I mean, I'm just saying, even in your delusional paranoia you can still work within reality! I demand a higher quality of conspiracy theorist.
Anyway, my opinion of what really happened, which is that the government had no fscking clue about al Qaeda and terrorism at all before the planes hit, but then jumped at the chance to cynically abuse the tragedy to grab as much power for themselves and money for their defense contractor buddies as possible while continuing to foster the environment of fear (which was the goal of al Qaeda for fscks sake) for years, isn't that flattering anyway. :P
UO initially had ecosystems of a sort. Then the players pillaged and burned and plowed salt into the ground.
Ha, I remember that. I had a Grandmaster Ground-Salter. Those were good times.
Anyway, I've thought about how cool an "ecosystem" would be, and also the problem of player abuse. It seems like you could get something a lot better than what we have without leaving it open to complete exploitation by the players. UO's problem was that it tried to remain too "pure" which opened the way to player abuse/boredom, while WoW's problem is that it remains completely artificial with only the tiniest nods towards an ecosystem (i.e. a wolf mob will attack a squirrel or bunny mob that's nearby, and sometimes herd animals actually travel in small herds though usually not). Vicious velociraptors will walk right past delicious zebras without taking notice. Because both are waiting to be slain by the players.
Just add more dynamism. Have the carnivores hunt down the herbivores, and have their respawn rates be relatively related to the number of each. When left alone, the populations will naturally stay in balance. If the players start killing off the carnivores, then the herbivores spawn faster. When the herbivore population rises, then carnivores start to spawn faster too. If the player keeps killing the carnivores, then before you're up to your neck in herbivores, they start to die of starvation. If the player kills lots of herbivores, then carnivores start to die too. But you never have to let the respawn rate reach zero, or even get more than some fraction less than the default spawn rate. Assume, much like you must to imagine Orgrimmar is really a bustling city, that the population that is represented by mobs is really a subset of a much larger one and thus genocide is effectively impossible.
WoW has done a decent job of making sure respawn rates are such that it takes a fair amount of concerted effort to truly keep an area clear. Put some basic safeguards around an ecosystem, and you could keep players from completely wrecking things while also making it much more interesting. UO didn't do that, and had much too low of a base respawn rate anyway (and a much smaller world and much fewer mobs etc etc). I don't think we need to write off the idea entirely because of UO.
Yes, that's kinda the point. The prices are rising, but their costs are not. What aren't you understanding?