I actually did buy the collector's edition on sale for about $20. That gave me a lot of the "vanilla" characters and $10 worth of RP or so. Part of the problem is that I bought a lot of the wrong runes when I first hit level 20 or so. Y'know, I bought health/level seals and a couple of other things that I thought would be good general use things but now I want to replace them all. That's the bigger problem - you can afford one or two full sets of runes a couple of good characters without too much trouble, but if you want to be able to fill different rolls or tailor your runes to different champions within that role (Amumu, Udyr, and Shen all could use different runes to tank) and to also buy new champions to keep up with the metagame and then buy more rune pages on top of that... There's a LOT that you can spend points on, and if you want to play semi-competitively, then it really helps to stay on top of it all.
I'm asking this as someone who isn't an engineer and is just interested in knowing what the logistics are for setting up a large system like this - why exactly are his calculations way off?
There's apparently some politics going on beneath the surface regarding the various people working on these projects, not the least of which is the mild enmity between people who play League of Legends and people who play Heroes of Newearth (LoL is more casual and follows a Korean-free-game pricing model while HoN is more similar to DotA and just charges an upfront fee). Another DotA figure, Pendragon, hinted at this split in philosophy when he wrote an open letter announcing that he would be leaving the DotA All-Stars project.
"Although I doubt they can beat the price of LoL." There's also problems here. Speaking as someone who currently plays LoL (I might have a solo rating higher than 1250 if I played more than a few games a week), there's a lot of whinging right now about the constant nickel-and-diming of LoL's pricing structure. It is possible to earn nearly everything in the game through just grinding matches (character skins being the only true exception), but the point cost of purchasing new characters and stat-enhancing runes is so high that anyone wanting to play at a truly competitive level ends up needing to spend some money for boosts eventually. It's a model that works fine for purely casual play, but I count myself as one of the people that wishes we could just pay $50 flat and get everything so that we could play high-level matches right away.
Having said all of that, I had no interest in DotA until my friends online got me into LoL, which has been a lot of fun despite some issues. I haven't had much interest in HoN, but I wouldn't mind seeing what the new DotA project ends up looking like.
And last time you wanted to go to war, it was dead easy.
And just think of how much easier it would be if we turned it over to private industry, right? There's a big issue I have with the government-never-does-anything-right argument right here. I dislike the way our army acts a lot of the time. I dislike the way our police treat people sometimes. And I would be dead fucking scared of a country that turned all of that over to private enterprise instead. The fact that government does things imperfectly in no ways implies that private business cannot fuck it up worse. If you think it's bad that the government occasionally censors military matters due to "national security" matters, how much worse would it be if it all gets censored due to "trade secrets?"
In fact, I'm already scared by this stuff - just how much better are we doing by privatizing our prisons and turning half of our Middle Eastern operations over to private contractors?
Many airlines offers passengers who pay for a "first class" ticket improved service for extra money. This extra service for those willing to pay more. In addition to covering the costs of providing the extra service, this revenue helps the airlines lower fares for the other passengers, so its existance helps them as well. Similarly, television providers (both cable and satellite) offer various premium channel packages for extra fees. Nothing is wrong with these business models. Of course, nothing is wrong with a business model that handles all traffic equally either.
The author appears to be saying that it would be good for the development of the internet if certain companies could pay for the privilege of having their websites load more quickly. This is ironic because he posted this screed on a low-rent blog that almost certainly wouldn't get to be one of them. If the tiered internet service plan had come into play, I wonder how many people would have bothered trying to load this guy's site. (Then again, Slashdot would just need one guy on staff with the good internet so that he could load the site and post the summary. No one needs to be able to actually go to the website that was linked in order to post a comment on Slashdot.)
Supply and demand will determine which business models are best just fine, just as described above in the airline and television industries. Congress and the FCC do not need to enforce a particular business models on internet service providers, as it might end up that in the future. It's entirely possible that at some point poorer consumers will be served by options of cheaper, more limited internet. Under net neutrality, however, internet service providers would be prohibited from pursuing such plans.
Yes, you see, the poor will be better served by developing a separate internet in which only certain sites are available. So does that mean that the Google-and-ESPN-only internet costs $10/month while the full net still only costs $60/month, or does that mean the restricted net costs the current prices but the full net gets ratcheted up to higher prices?
Hey, buddy, guess what - there's already an option for people who want very cheap internet. They call that "dial-up," and you can access every website equally from it.
The common response to this by net neutrality advocates is to reject the Google and Verizon plan and adopt a stronger one instead. Indeed, this is already happening by some advocates. History shows, however, that industry is heavily involved in the regulatory process and puts heavy pressure to implement them in its favor. This is common with regulation, since the benefits to a single given consumer from net neutrality are relatively minor, while the costs are bared by the companies. Since these internet service providers don't really care about much except internet aceess, they have lot of reason to lobby and shape the regulation to their advantage, and bigger providers have more resources to do this.
Okay, so here's what this guy is saying: government regulation is bad because you can't trust the corporations to not influence regulation in their favor. Corporations can be trusted more when you don't do anything to try to regulate them. Essentially, fire all of the guards, and you'll have fewer prisoners trying to escape.
If you don't like the FCC's policies, you are stuck with them unless you leave the United States. If you don't like your internet service provider's policies, you can simply switch to another one.
If the corporations are so inherently untrustworthy, then why would you trust them to do the right thing for customers without regulation?Why, because there will be one good ISP that will not screw you over and you'll be able to just switch over to that one. Easy as pie. As for me, I sure hope that The One Good ISP(trademarked) buys the lines that run to my apartment so that I can subscribe to them, but somehow I'm not holding my breath.
Through crowdsourcing, regulators would make financial data publicly available to the masses, who would do the 'grunt work' of sifting through them to find discrepancies. But would it work?
On the other hand, it is a dog eat dog world out there in the world of finance and investments; I can envisage some banks and trading companies might actually employ people to do this kind of thing full time. Why bother trying to out perform a competitor if you can find enough evidence of possible fraud (well founded or otherwise!) and subject them to a detailed investigation by the SEC or some other regulatory body? Come to think of it, it could be the next growth centre for those countries who specialize in staffing call centres and other such cheap labour body shops.
I don't know if you were being facetious or not, but I actually like that idea. We can't exactly rely on these companies to police themselves, but maybe they could be convinced to police their competitors. That would create some actual antagonism in the process. The greater danger would be that the banks and investors would create a gentlemen's agreement not to point out any corruption to the regulators for fear of mutually assured destruction.
Now they need a stimulus plan to bail out their Banana Bubble, but the Gorillas are opposing it.
And why should the gorillas have to climb a tree to give a monkey a banana? The monkeys should stop being so lazy and get off of banana welfare! See, this is what happens in social banana republics - all of the good bananas get offshored! If these monkeys really wanted a banana that badly, they'd move to Zimbabwe to be where the bananas are! But noooooo, they just expect the zookeepers to keep bringing them bananas, when everyone knows that zookeepers only increase the amount of time it takes for monkeys to go find their own bananas! Don't hate a gorilla just because you don't have as many bananas as he does!
Truth is important, but this isn't a political game in our safe Western political environment. The release of these documents (and especially the piles of needless and real details) has caused incalculable damage to the Free World's ability to get cooperation out of locals
And as a member of the safe Western political environment, how do you know what danger this is causing on the ground? Who told you how things are going as a result of these leaks, and how trustworthy are those sources? This is an honest question - what are the sources for this cry that the Wikileaks release is causing danger to people?
Man up and admit that you would gladly sacrifice a few lives for your ideals to dominate, even if to do so was not to risk your own.
He who would sacrifice liberty to gain a bit of safety...? Yes, of course this puts some people in danger. Keeping information confidential also has the potential to put people in danger by enabling corruption. I don't have the tools to tell you which one of those choices will cause more death.
The oil companies are not stupid. They know the price point at which alternative fuels become competitive with gas and they keep the price a little below that.
An industry has a monopoly, prices go high. Competition shows up, the industry has to lower prices to keep people from leaving them to go to the competitor. They'll sell for as much profit as they can without losing customers. Why is that a conspiracy? That's just how the free market works. If the mere presence of alternative fuels is lowering the cost of conventional fuel just by the threat of competition, then I'd say there's a benefit to having those alternatives right there.
I worked as a hotel valet for about three years. I never got to really "drive" many cars, but I sure parked a lot of different ones. Let me tell you, my favorite cars to park were hybrid Lexuses. Those suckers are incredibly comfortable and whisper quiet. Somebody actually got some comfort for their money when they bought one of those things.
Sorry about the ranting, but watch C-Span for any length of time and your eyes are opened to just how corrupt the whole system is and you start getting a little angry about things.
I would suggest part of the problem is that you watch C-Span for any length of time and your eyes are closed due to just how boring parliamentary maneuvering is.
Contrast that with the Health Care vote, where there were 0 defections from the Democrat side of the Senate. 61 votes yes. Not a single vote no, not even from some of the supposedly conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Despite there being a solid majority against it. Despite most Senators not even having read the bill.
If there were perfect support in the Democratic party, we would've had that bill passed after a month. That sucker stretched on pretty much for more than a year because the entire caucus COULDN'T be brought on. They were trying to tempt over moderate Republican Olympia Snowe, but when she bailed, it came to the point that they had to get every Dem on board. So rather than throw their hands up and say that it couldn't be passed, they bargained, they gave things up, they compromised. And oddly enough, the moderate Dems were willing to discuss and compromise on it. Discussion and compromise are not necessarily signs of perfect authortarian Marxism.
Bush appoints a fairly moderate conservative to the bench with Miers. His opponents, the Dems, figure she's not a terrible ideologue and don't raise too much of a fuss about it. His base, the Republicans, go apopleptic for not appointing a true conservative judge. Bush changes his mind.
Obama appoints a fairly moderate liberal with Kagan. His base, the Dems, argue about it a bit, and several progressives call for a more far left candidate, but they generally go along with her in the end. His opponents, the Republicans, spread rumors of her secret far-left activist plans and hide their displeasure for her liberal political views by accusing her of not having enough "experience." Obama finds no reason to switch Kagan out for someone else.
You want Kagan to lose the nomination? Get Obama's base angry about it, not his opponents, who are going to mostly oppose anyone he nominates anyway.
Do you really feel that car bombs [google.com] are just police work? Let me try to rephrase it for people that are living comfortably: if two car bombs went off in New York city and killed eight, would you just shrug that off as normal everyday police work?
Depends. Is this Law & Order or CSI? I'm pretty sure a car bomb goes off on CSI now and then.
I mean, technically it is "police work" on the same scale that FBI operations are police work and not combat operations. That doesn't mean you can't have different scales of police work. The problem is that soldiers are generally trained for one and not for the other - raiding and holding locations by force aren't always directly analogous to finding out who set off a car bomb and dismantling his organization.
Go a bit deeper than that - the differences between skilled people and untalented people is not that skilled people never make mistakes. It's that the skilled people fix their mistakes fast enough that they don't cause larger problems.
I've gotten hit twice in the past year on making legal right-hand turns on red lights. The first one I thought it so obvious that I was making a legal right turn that I requested a hearing without my presence, figuring that the judge would get it. They still charged me. For the second one, I'm waiting to get my hearing date. Either way, I think that sometimes the "proof" can be logically disputed.
I've played certain Konami music games that also have SS and SSS ratings, for passing with nothing less than a "great" note and nothing less than a "perfect" note, respectively.:D
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I actually did buy the collector's edition on sale for about $20. That gave me a lot of the "vanilla" characters and $10 worth of RP or so. Part of the problem is that I bought a lot of the wrong runes when I first hit level 20 or so. Y'know, I bought health/level seals and a couple of other things that I thought would be good general use things but now I want to replace them all. That's the bigger problem - you can afford one or two full sets of runes a couple of good characters without too much trouble, but if you want to be able to fill different rolls or tailor your runes to different champions within that role (Amumu, Udyr, and Shen all could use different runes to tank) and to also buy new champions to keep up with the metagame and then buy more rune pages on top of that... There's a LOT that you can spend points on, and if you want to play semi-competitively, then it really helps to stay on top of it all.
I'm asking this as someone who isn't an engineer and is just interested in knowing what the logistics are for setting up a large system like this - why exactly are his calculations way off?
Perhaps Valve's upcoming DotA like-game could be a game we call can agree to play without getting into HoN vs LoL flamewars.
:D
Are you seriously suggesting that there can be a DotA-like game put out that won't inspire massive flamewars?
There's apparently some politics going on beneath the surface regarding the various people working on these projects, not the least of which is the mild enmity between people who play League of Legends and people who play Heroes of Newearth (LoL is more casual and follows a Korean-free-game pricing model while HoN is more similar to DotA and just charges an upfront fee). Another DotA figure, Pendragon, hinted at this split in philosophy when he wrote an open letter announcing that he would be leaving the DotA All-Stars project.
"Although I doubt they can beat the price of LoL." There's also problems here. Speaking as someone who currently plays LoL (I might have a solo rating higher than 1250 if I played more than a few games a week), there's a lot of whinging right now about the constant nickel-and-diming of LoL's pricing structure. It is possible to earn nearly everything in the game through just grinding matches (character skins being the only true exception), but the point cost of purchasing new characters and stat-enhancing runes is so high that anyone wanting to play at a truly competitive level ends up needing to spend some money for boosts eventually. It's a model that works fine for purely casual play, but I count myself as one of the people that wishes we could just pay $50 flat and get everything so that we could play high-level matches right away.
Having said all of that, I had no interest in DotA until my friends online got me into LoL, which has been a lot of fun despite some issues. I haven't had much interest in HoN, but I wouldn't mind seeing what the new DotA project ends up looking like.
That was the author's argument, not my own, just for the record.
And last time you wanted to go to war, it was dead easy.
And just think of how much easier it would be if we turned it over to private industry, right? There's a big issue I have with the government-never-does-anything-right argument right here. I dislike the way our army acts a lot of the time. I dislike the way our police treat people sometimes. And I would be dead fucking scared of a country that turned all of that over to private enterprise instead. The fact that government does things imperfectly in no ways implies that private business cannot fuck it up worse. If you think it's bad that the government occasionally censors military matters due to "national security" matters, how much worse would it be if it all gets censored due to "trade secrets?"
In fact, I'm already scared by this stuff - just how much better are we doing by privatizing our prisons and turning half of our Middle Eastern operations over to private contractors?
Many airlines offers passengers who pay for a "first class" ticket improved service for extra money. This extra service for those willing to pay more. In addition to covering the costs of providing the extra service, this revenue helps the airlines lower fares for the other passengers, so its existance helps them as well. Similarly, television providers (both cable and satellite) offer various premium channel packages for extra fees. Nothing is wrong with these business models. Of course, nothing is wrong with a business model that handles all traffic equally either.
The author appears to be saying that it would be good for the development of the internet if certain companies could pay for the privilege of having their websites load more quickly. This is ironic because he posted this screed on a low-rent blog that almost certainly wouldn't get to be one of them. If the tiered internet service plan had come into play, I wonder how many people would have bothered trying to load this guy's site. (Then again, Slashdot would just need one guy on staff with the good internet so that he could load the site and post the summary. No one needs to be able to actually go to the website that was linked in order to post a comment on Slashdot.)
Supply and demand will determine which business models are best just fine, just as described above in the airline and television industries. Congress and the FCC do not need to enforce a particular business models on internet service providers, as it might end up that in the future. It's entirely possible that at some point poorer consumers will be served by options of cheaper, more limited internet. Under net neutrality, however, internet service providers would be prohibited from pursuing such plans.
Yes, you see, the poor will be better served by developing a separate internet in which only certain sites are available. So does that mean that the Google-and-ESPN-only internet costs $10/month while the full net still only costs $60/month, or does that mean the restricted net costs the current prices but the full net gets ratcheted up to higher prices?
Hey, buddy, guess what - there's already an option for people who want very cheap internet. They call that "dial-up," and you can access every website equally from it.
The common response to this by net neutrality advocates is to reject the Google and Verizon plan and adopt a stronger one instead. Indeed, this is already happening by some advocates. History shows, however, that industry is heavily involved in the regulatory process and puts heavy pressure to implement them in its favor. This is common with regulation, since the benefits to a single given consumer from net neutrality are relatively minor, while the costs are bared by the companies. Since these internet service providers don't really care about much except internet aceess, they have lot of reason to lobby and shape the regulation to their advantage, and bigger providers have more resources to do this.
Okay, so here's what this guy is saying: government regulation is bad because you can't trust the corporations to not influence regulation in their favor. Corporations can be trusted more when you don't do anything to try to regulate them. Essentially, fire all of the guards, and you'll have fewer prisoners trying to escape.
If you don't like the FCC's policies, you are stuck with them unless you leave the United States. If you don't like your internet service provider's policies, you can simply switch to another one.
If the corporations are so inherently untrustworthy, then why would you trust them to do the right thing for customers without regulation?Why, because there will be one good ISP that will not screw you over and you'll be able to just switch over to that one. Easy as pie. As for me, I sure hope that The One Good ISP(trademarked) buys the lines that run to my apartment so that I can subscribe to them, but somehow I'm not holding my breath.
Through crowdsourcing, regulators would make financial data publicly available to the masses, who would do the 'grunt work' of sifting through them to find discrepancies. But would it work?
Two words: Facebook badges.
On the other hand, it is a dog eat dog world out there in the world of finance and investments; I can envisage some banks and trading companies might actually employ people to do this kind of thing full time. Why bother trying to out perform a competitor if you can find enough evidence of possible fraud (well founded or otherwise!) and subject them to a detailed investigation by the SEC or some other regulatory body? Come to think of it, it could be the next growth centre for those countries who specialize in staffing call centres and other such cheap labour body shops.
I don't know if you were being facetious or not, but I actually like that idea. We can't exactly rely on these companies to police themselves, but maybe they could be convinced to police their competitors. That would create some actual antagonism in the process. The greater danger would be that the banks and investors would create a gentlemen's agreement not to point out any corruption to the regulators for fear of mutually assured destruction.
Now they need a stimulus plan to bail out their Banana Bubble, but the Gorillas are opposing it.
And why should the gorillas have to climb a tree to give a monkey a banana? The monkeys should stop being so lazy and get off of banana welfare! See, this is what happens in social banana republics - all of the good bananas get offshored! If these monkeys really wanted a banana that badly, they'd move to Zimbabwe to be where the bananas are! But noooooo, they just expect the zookeepers to keep bringing them bananas, when everyone knows that zookeepers only increase the amount of time it takes for monkeys to go find their own bananas! Don't hate a gorilla just because you don't have as many bananas as he does!
Truth is important, but this isn't a political game in our safe Western political environment. The release of these documents (and especially the piles of needless and real details) has caused incalculable damage to the Free World's ability to get cooperation out of locals
And as a member of the safe Western political environment, how do you know what danger this is causing on the ground? Who told you how things are going as a result of these leaks, and how trustworthy are those sources? This is an honest question - what are the sources for this cry that the Wikileaks release is causing danger to people?
Man up and admit that you would gladly sacrifice a few lives for your ideals to dominate, even if to do so was not to risk your own.
He who would sacrifice liberty to gain a bit of safety...? Yes, of course this puts some people in danger. Keeping information confidential also has the potential to put people in danger by enabling corruption. I don't have the tools to tell you which one of those choices will cause more death.
The oil companies are not stupid. They know the price point at which alternative fuels become competitive with gas and they keep the price a little below that.
An industry has a monopoly, prices go high. Competition shows up, the industry has to lower prices to keep people from leaving them to go to the competitor. They'll sell for as much profit as they can without losing customers. Why is that a conspiracy? That's just how the free market works. If the mere presence of alternative fuels is lowering the cost of conventional fuel just by the threat of competition, then I'd say there's a benefit to having those alternatives right there.
I worked as a hotel valet for about three years. I never got to really "drive" many cars, but I sure parked a lot of different ones. Let me tell you, my favorite cars to park were hybrid Lexuses. Those suckers are incredibly comfortable and whisper quiet. Somebody actually got some comfort for their money when they bought one of those things.
Out of curiosity, has anyone ever come across a MTurk assignment that does pay enough money to be worth the time?
Sorry about the ranting, but watch C-Span for any length of time and your eyes are opened to just how corrupt the whole system is and you start getting a little angry about things.
I would suggest part of the problem is that you watch C-Span for any length of time and your eyes are closed due to just how boring parliamentary maneuvering is.
Contrast that with the Health Care vote, where there were 0 defections from the Democrat side of the Senate. 61 votes yes. Not a single vote no, not even from some of the supposedly conservative Blue Dog Democrats. Despite there being a solid majority against it. Despite most Senators not even having read the bill.
If there were perfect support in the Democratic party, we would've had that bill passed after a month. That sucker stretched on pretty much for more than a year because the entire caucus COULDN'T be brought on. They were trying to tempt over moderate Republican Olympia Snowe, but when she bailed, it came to the point that they had to get every Dem on board. So rather than throw their hands up and say that it couldn't be passed, they bargained, they gave things up, they compromised. And oddly enough, the moderate Dems were willing to discuss and compromise on it. Discussion and compromise are not necessarily signs of perfect authortarian Marxism.
Bush appoints a fairly moderate conservative to the bench with Miers. His opponents, the Dems, figure she's not a terrible ideologue and don't raise too much of a fuss about it. His base, the Republicans, go apopleptic for not appointing a true conservative judge. Bush changes his mind.
Obama appoints a fairly moderate liberal with Kagan. His base, the Dems, argue about it a bit, and several progressives call for a more far left candidate, but they generally go along with her in the end. His opponents, the Republicans, spread rumors of her secret far-left activist plans and hide their displeasure for her liberal political views by accusing her of not having enough "experience." Obama finds no reason to switch Kagan out for someone else.
You want Kagan to lose the nomination? Get Obama's base angry about it, not his opponents, who are going to mostly oppose anyone he nominates anyway.
You... need to be banned from the internet for that one. :/
Do you really feel that car bombs [google.com] are just police work? Let me try to rephrase it for people that are living comfortably: if two car bombs went off in New York city and killed eight, would you just shrug that off as normal everyday police work?
Depends. Is this Law & Order or CSI? I'm pretty sure a car bomb goes off on CSI now and then.
I mean, technically it is "police work" on the same scale that FBI operations are police work and not combat operations. That doesn't mean you can't have different scales of police work. The problem is that soldiers are generally trained for one and not for the other - raiding and holding locations by force aren't always directly analogous to finding out who set off a car bomb and dismantling his organization.
No, nix, nil, zilch, zip, nada, null, nuh uh, no way, incorrect, not kosher, wouldn't fly, not good enough for government work, good luck with that.
Go a bit deeper than that - the differences between skilled people and untalented people is not that skilled people never make mistakes. It's that the skilled people fix their mistakes fast enough that they don't cause larger problems.
The photograph IS the proof.
I've gotten hit twice in the past year on making legal right-hand turns on red lights. The first one I thought it so obvious that I was making a legal right turn that I requested a hearing without my presence, figuring that the judge would get it. They still charged me. For the second one, I'm waiting to get my hearing date. Either way, I think that sometimes the "proof" can be logically disputed.
I've played certain Konami music games that also have SS and SSS ratings, for passing with nothing less than a "great" note and nothing less than a "perfect" note, respectively. :D
Boy, I hope they don't ever release a new camera called the "Magic Eye."