I have to disagree, due to a single shining example in a world of darkness - the original Bushido Blade for PS1. The second game was movie style combat, and thus not nearly as good, but the first Bushido Blade made a really good attempt at a combat game with realistic rules. If you've never played, I suggest you find a way, it's really fun. It's slightly toned down, of course, any shot that would sever a limb and kill you in a couple minutes just kills you outright, as do major shots to the hips, thighs, or belly that would also be "slow kills." Dismemberment isn't portrayed, just an red splat of blood from the impact site for fatal shots and a little spark of it for wounds. It does MANY things right, though. A significant but nonfatal wound to a limb will render it useless, leaving an arm limp at your side or you crawling around on your knees to fight. A couple very small wounds do slow you down over time, making your attacks cumbersome and your guard easier to overpower. You can match any character with any weapon, though clearly, agility and power of a character will make some better choices than others, though always in interesting ways: a more agile character uses a lighter weapon much more quickly than more powerful character does, however, the more powerful character will be able to guard against attacks from the lighter character VERY quickly with the same weapon, and be more able to break the guard of the less powerful one. Both weapon size and character power strongly affect impact from a swing. The game mechanics, and in fact the game title, strongly affect the game story line. There is no arena in the story mode, except for the last couple fights, you're free to move about the entire dojo grounds, with a slightly interactive environment(you can get muddy from being knocked down in the mud, and slice down bamboo). Killing your opponent when they are talking to you before a match, or when you have knocked them to the ground will end the story line, and you lose, for dishonorable conduct. However, even if you win the game that way, you lose, because the fighters following you have all been your friends and associates from the dojo, tracking you down under orders from the dojo master because you were believed to have gone rouge because you ran off. The only way to get the REAL ending to the game is to refuse to kill your comrads, and win using the game environment. To do that, you must get to a well leading to an escape route from the dojo, without killing any of your friends on the way. You can have the first one follow you all the way, or lose a couple on the path(there are a couple locations where you can knock them off a large edge they can't climb up to resume combat, which will lead to a victory for you and the next opponent tracking you down shortly). Then, before jumping down into the well, you have to injure your opponents legs so they can't follow you down. Once in the well, you have to beat the challenge there. This is also one of your friends, but the animations shown after the fight show that at least for a couple characters, your victory didn't kill your opponent. After this, you escape across a helipad near the water, and encounter a gun wielding assassin, clearly hired from outside to kill you. You find out the dojo master hired him, and realize your friends have not turned on you after all, but that the doja master has declared you traitor and ordered your death. When playing strait through killing everyone you fight, this is some very bad news, but it's good news if you went way out of your way to NOT kill your comrades. This causes you to return, rather than escape, to kill the dojo master and make things right. After you defeat him, IF you have had a perfect game(followed the instructions here perfectly, AND not taken a single wound of any kind, even superficial) you get to fight the demon that had consumed the soul of the dojo master and had him turn on you. If you defeat the demon, you get your GOOD ending. Best sword fighting game EVER made, by far. The graphics are out of date, but the gameplay is still really fun, I recommend it to anyone that wonders what it might be like if a blade cut in a game, instead of taking tiny notches off an energy bar.
I thought pencils could generate graphite dust, and splinters of broken graphite when points broke, and creating shavings which have to be stored when sharpened. Of course, I think the Russian space program found these troubles acceptable.
This thing can only burn about 5 of the 300gb disks per day. Keep in mind CD media were "projected" to last nearly 100 years. The article also makes no mention of the media being rewritable, so you will be buying new 300gb disks for every single backup, anyway. This is STILL the technology of the future.
My main question is, why should I believe the media will actually last 50 years? According to design specs, current optical media should last at least that long. But even the well made stuff barely lasts 1/3 the time. We won't know for sure until at least 15 years from now how well the holographic discs actually hold relative to a high quality optical media, or if something unexpected will cut their reliable life to a small fraction of what is expected.
I'll take my chances on the small risk of danger from kidnappers and the ilk rather than the given total decay of privacy. It doesn't even matter if any if it is admissible in court, they just give the local police a "anonymous tip" and then they show up and search people, all you need for a search is reasonable suspicion, it's not near as restrictive as getting a warrant. I'll take the TINY risk from criminals over the certainty of abuse.
for what it's worth, I've found canceling the auto reboot and logging off then on makes every software or high level update I've tried work fine. I'm guessing I'll only have to actually reboot for low level security updates.
My thesis adviser and professor Lynn Winters lent me some edition of this book:
http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/psychology/runyon/
Which was quite helpful, went into WHY a particular statistical method is good for a particular data set, rather than just saying "for this, use this."
Many schools will let you get a degree just writing really well, with the entirety of your "research" being interviews. I went to school for psych and saw this constantly. I fell in with the cognitive people and did work you could do an ANOVA on.
Having majored in psych, I can say there is a distinct and LARGE group of people in the field, especially undergraduate, that got into it from the psych history/theories side and are "language people" who just do not fundamentally get math. They can write brilliantly on the results, and interpret their meaning within relevant work in the field, but must get a "math person" to decide what tools and scales to use and what statistical analysis to do to determine what it is they need to write about.
Actually, my last girlfriend was disabled. So I know exactly how these things work, I was there to push her wheelchair when she was in particularly bad shape. We're not talking about physical limitations preventing someone from showing what they know, we are talking about cognitive enhancement. It's ALL just a matter of degree of ability. What you are saying is that if someone does worse than average on some mental task, they should get special advantage to be competitive with average people, but anyone at or above average should not be able to do anything to boost their performance and make them competitive with YOU. You want to eliminate the bottom end of the bell curve, but not alter is so much as this gets up to your end. There is a reason average people RESENT when people a bit below average get special treatment which makes them score as well. I'm not saying it's justified, only, that your feeling about having to compete with people using cognitive enhancement is the same feeling those people have about competing with people with cognitive disadvantages who get drug treatment. Everybody can't be average, you push one person up, the bell curve just redistributes. Someone who needs longer to compose a physical response because they know but they can't indicate so as readily is also a whole different ballgame, we're talking about mental enhancements here. Let me put it to you this way. My mother has MS, and if we see a cure or really effective treatment from someone using a cognitive enhancement drug, thats fine with me. These things aren't some "cheat" that lets you LOOK better, they actually improve your performance. They also don't improve it all that much, it's a small boost, or a way to get through days where you couldn't sleep the night before and are uselessly tired.
Personally, if the placebo effect gets my mother a cure for MS faster, I think I can live with that. On the other hand, if actual concentration enhancements get her a cure faster, I think I can live with that.
Why is a difference in natural advantage fair to eliminate for these children, but not for someone competing with you? What about their schoolmates who are now competing for scholarships with students who would previously have been to scatterbrained to be competition? It's not "fair" anywhere on the spectrum.
Of course, we could afford to do this for hundreds of times as many people as it would actually happen to with the money that would be saved ending the war on drugs, and from vast decline in emergency room visits you are paying for violent criminals now.
A distinction between "addiction" and what? The general lack of a solid brain-function model of addiction that doesn't also apply to many things that aren't considered addiction is what I'm criticizing. The way "addiction" is commonly used, it's indistinguishable from liking something. If the more specific definition in which it is only considered an addiction if it has a destructive effect on your personal or professional life is the correct one, then alcoholics who get up for work every morning, stay sober when driving, for family functions or to get things that need doing done aren't addicts, even if they are drinking an average of over ten drinks a day and get withdrawal symptoms if they are sober for 4 days strait. I'm pointing out the lack of a salient and universal definition or model, not indicating one.
This type of thing is why, coming from a psychology background, I dislike the entire current conception of addition. Our brains like to offload work and analysis by simply keeping up behaviors that have been previously sustained. Pleasurable behaviors where we consciously associate enjoyment with specific behavior are easier to designate as addictions, but it's really all the same, offloading the work of deciding if we should do something or not by simply setting up automatic responses. Sometimes these responses are so closely worked into normal brain function that ceasing them causes a disruption in expected brain function, in a full spectrum from nearly undetectably minor(A passing question to the self on the way to work of "am I less sharp because I missed my coffee today?") to so much a part of our expected brain chemistry that function without them can take a LONG period of adaption(I WILL KILL SOMEONE if I don't get a cigarette soon). Obviously with examples where we're adding an outside chemical to our brain chemistry it gets a bit more complex vs systems where we're simply behaviorally altering our internal chemistry, but it's all still the same basic system. I strongly believe that this makes the term "addictive" nearly meaningless as it is typically used today.
Thats a very uncommon version of common sense. Check out:
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/
For ways to determine actual threats vs imagined and avoid real ones easily without changing your lifestyle. It's a self defense site built around understanding how violence occurs and stopping it before it starts, rather than teaching how to hurt people first then get arrested later.
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I have to disagree, due to a single shining example in a world of darkness - the original Bushido Blade for PS1. The second game was movie style combat, and thus not nearly as good, but the first Bushido Blade made a really good attempt at a combat game with realistic rules. If you've never played, I suggest you find a way, it's really fun. It's slightly toned down, of course, any shot that would sever a limb and kill you in a couple minutes just kills you outright, as do major shots to the hips, thighs, or belly that would also be "slow kills." Dismemberment isn't portrayed, just an red splat of blood from the impact site for fatal shots and a little spark of it for wounds. It does MANY things right, though. A significant but nonfatal wound to a limb will render it useless, leaving an arm limp at your side or you crawling around on your knees to fight. A couple very small wounds do slow you down over time, making your attacks cumbersome and your guard easier to overpower. You can match any character with any weapon, though clearly, agility and power of a character will make some better choices than others, though always in interesting ways: a more agile character uses a lighter weapon much more quickly than more powerful character does, however, the more powerful character will be able to guard against attacks from the lighter character VERY quickly with the same weapon, and be more able to break the guard of the less powerful one. Both weapon size and character power strongly affect impact from a swing. The game mechanics, and in fact the game title, strongly affect the game story line. There is no arena in the story mode, except for the last couple fights, you're free to move about the entire dojo grounds, with a slightly interactive environment(you can get muddy from being knocked down in the mud, and slice down bamboo). Killing your opponent when they are talking to you before a match, or when you have knocked them to the ground will end the story line, and you lose, for dishonorable conduct. However, even if you win the game that way, you lose, because the fighters following you have all been your friends and associates from the dojo, tracking you down under orders from the dojo master because you were believed to have gone rouge because you ran off. The only way to get the REAL ending to the game is to refuse to kill your comrads, and win using the game environment. To do that, you must get to a well leading to an escape route from the dojo, without killing any of your friends on the way. You can have the first one follow you all the way, or lose a couple on the path(there are a couple locations where you can knock them off a large edge they can't climb up to resume combat, which will lead to a victory for you and the next opponent tracking you down shortly). Then, before jumping down into the well, you have to injure your opponents legs so they can't follow you down. Once in the well, you have to beat the challenge there. This is also one of your friends, but the animations shown after the fight show that at least for a couple characters, your victory didn't kill your opponent. After this, you escape across a helipad near the water, and encounter a gun wielding assassin, clearly hired from outside to kill you. You find out the dojo master hired him, and realize your friends have not turned on you after all, but that the doja master has declared you traitor and ordered your death. When playing strait through killing everyone you fight, this is some very bad news, but it's good news if you went way out of your way to NOT kill your comrades. This causes you to return, rather than escape, to kill the dojo master and make things right. After you defeat him, IF you have had a perfect game(followed the instructions here perfectly, AND not taken a single wound of any kind, even superficial) you get to fight the demon that had consumed the soul of the dojo master and had him turn on you. If you defeat the demon, you get your GOOD ending. Best sword fighting game EVER made, by far. The graphics are out of date, but the gameplay is still really fun, I recommend it to anyone that wonders what it might be like if a blade cut in a game, instead of taking tiny notches off an energy bar.
I thought pencils could generate graphite dust, and splinters of broken graphite when points broke, and creating shavings which have to be stored when sharpened. Of course, I think the Russian space program found these troubles acceptable.
This thing can only burn about 5 of the 300gb disks per day. Keep in mind CD media were "projected" to last nearly 100 years. The article also makes no mention of the media being rewritable, so you will be buying new 300gb disks for every single backup, anyway. This is STILL the technology of the future.
My main question is, why should I believe the media will actually last 50 years? According to design specs, current optical media should last at least that long. But even the well made stuff barely lasts 1/3 the time. We won't know for sure until at least 15 years from now how well the holographic discs actually hold relative to a high quality optical media, or if something unexpected will cut their reliable life to a small fraction of what is expected.
I want an "It's the truth." mod.
They have the technology to build them to specs, but they do not want to develop the specs themselves, that being the expensive part.
Very much so.
I'll take my chances on the small risk of danger from kidnappers and the ilk rather than the given total decay of privacy. It doesn't even matter if any if it is admissible in court, they just give the local police a "anonymous tip" and then they show up and search people, all you need for a search is reasonable suspicion, it's not near as restrictive as getting a warrant. I'll take the TINY risk from criminals over the certainty of abuse.
Listen to "The Sun is also a Warrior." http://www.seeklyrics.com/lyrics/Fish-Leslie/The-Sun-Is-Also-A-Warrior.html
for what it's worth, I've found canceling the auto reboot and logging off then on makes every software or high level update I've tried work fine. I'm guessing I'll only have to actually reboot for low level security updates.
You can't form a binding contract with someone by sending an unsolicited item to them. See baseball argument above.
My thesis adviser and professor Lynn Winters lent me some edition of this book: http://www.mhhe.com/socscience/psychology/runyon/ Which was quite helpful, went into WHY a particular statistical method is good for a particular data set, rather than just saying "for this, use this."
Many schools will let you get a degree just writing really well, with the entirety of your "research" being interviews. I went to school for psych and saw this constantly. I fell in with the cognitive people and did work you could do an ANOVA on.
Having majored in psych, I can say there is a distinct and LARGE group of people in the field, especially undergraduate, that got into it from the psych history/theories side and are "language people" who just do not fundamentally get math. They can write brilliantly on the results, and interpret their meaning within relevant work in the field, but must get a "math person" to decide what tools and scales to use and what statistical analysis to do to determine what it is they need to write about.
Actually, my last girlfriend was disabled. So I know exactly how these things work, I was there to push her wheelchair when she was in particularly bad shape. We're not talking about physical limitations preventing someone from showing what they know, we are talking about cognitive enhancement. It's ALL just a matter of degree of ability. What you are saying is that if someone does worse than average on some mental task, they should get special advantage to be competitive with average people, but anyone at or above average should not be able to do anything to boost their performance and make them competitive with YOU. You want to eliminate the bottom end of the bell curve, but not alter is so much as this gets up to your end. There is a reason average people RESENT when people a bit below average get special treatment which makes them score as well. I'm not saying it's justified, only, that your feeling about having to compete with people using cognitive enhancement is the same feeling those people have about competing with people with cognitive disadvantages who get drug treatment. Everybody can't be average, you push one person up, the bell curve just redistributes. Someone who needs longer to compose a physical response because they know but they can't indicate so as readily is also a whole different ballgame, we're talking about mental enhancements here. Let me put it to you this way. My mother has MS, and if we see a cure or really effective treatment from someone using a cognitive enhancement drug, thats fine with me. These things aren't some "cheat" that lets you LOOK better, they actually improve your performance. They also don't improve it all that much, it's a small boost, or a way to get through days where you couldn't sleep the night before and are uselessly tired.
Don't forget the political fundamentalism, a soft on drugs politician is just some poser that can't get elected in the USA.
Personally, if the placebo effect gets my mother a cure for MS faster, I think I can live with that. On the other hand, if actual concentration enhancements get her a cure faster, I think I can live with that.
Why is a difference in natural advantage fair to eliminate for these children, but not for someone competing with you? What about their schoolmates who are now competing for scholarships with students who would previously have been to scatterbrained to be competition? It's not "fair" anywhere on the spectrum.
Of course, we could afford to do this for hundreds of times as many people as it would actually happen to with the money that would be saved ending the war on drugs, and from vast decline in emergency room visits you are paying for violent criminals now.
I always try to use green on black, it's even my default IM color scheme.
A distinction between "addiction" and what? The general lack of a solid brain-function model of addiction that doesn't also apply to many things that aren't considered addiction is what I'm criticizing. The way "addiction" is commonly used, it's indistinguishable from liking something. If the more specific definition in which it is only considered an addiction if it has a destructive effect on your personal or professional life is the correct one, then alcoholics who get up for work every morning, stay sober when driving, for family functions or to get things that need doing done aren't addicts, even if they are drinking an average of over ten drinks a day and get withdrawal symptoms if they are sober for 4 days strait. I'm pointing out the lack of a salient and universal definition or model, not indicating one.
Thanks for saying this for me, we also make the heads and feet into souvenirs.
Damn you typos that make sense and spell other words. Concept and addiction, right after one another, too.
This type of thing is why, coming from a psychology background, I dislike the entire current conception of addition. Our brains like to offload work and analysis by simply keeping up behaviors that have been previously sustained. Pleasurable behaviors where we consciously associate enjoyment with specific behavior are easier to designate as addictions, but it's really all the same, offloading the work of deciding if we should do something or not by simply setting up automatic responses. Sometimes these responses are so closely worked into normal brain function that ceasing them causes a disruption in expected brain function, in a full spectrum from nearly undetectably minor(A passing question to the self on the way to work of "am I less sharp because I missed my coffee today?") to so much a part of our expected brain chemistry that function without them can take a LONG period of adaption(I WILL KILL SOMEONE if I don't get a cigarette soon). Obviously with examples where we're adding an outside chemical to our brain chemistry it gets a bit more complex vs systems where we're simply behaviorally altering our internal chemistry, but it's all still the same basic system. I strongly believe that this makes the term "addictive" nearly meaningless as it is typically used today.
Thats a very uncommon version of common sense. Check out: http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/ For ways to determine actual threats vs imagined and avoid real ones easily without changing your lifestyle. It's a self defense site built around understanding how violence occurs and stopping it before it starts, rather than teaching how to hurt people first then get arrested later.