Seems like there's no real reason to avoid using wind turbines in either study, at least not compared to fossil fuels, and yet inevitably this headline will make the rounds, no one will read the article, we'll all forget last month's study, and in the end we'll just have some wrong, dumb little talking point.
I just a got a computer good enough for gaming last year, and my first online FPS was ET. Yeah, it did take a little while to get the hang of objectives, but it's not really that bad. If you don't know what to do on a map, you can just pick up a Panzer or go Medic until you get the gist of it. I think it's a pretty good starting point (especially since it's free).
My best Magic memories are of playing Chaos multiplayer with big groups of friends. I killed several people the other week with a Jokulhaups because some poor fool had a Dingus Egg out. And every once and a while me and a friend or two in a good position will hold instant-speed direct damage spells and counterspells and threaten poor players with one or two life left into doing our bidding.
If you ever feel like getting back into the game a little bit, draft is very fun. Eight people sit around a table, and you each get three boosters. Everyone opens the first booster, takes a card, passes it to the person sitting next to them, who takes a card, who passes it, etc, until all the boosters have been gone through. Then you make decks out of those cards.
And if you still have your old cards, multiplayer is fun, or if you want to play a little competitively there's always T1 or T1.5, and you won't have to buy new cards for either.
There's also free, less competitive ways to play Magic online. Magic-League uses two programs called Magic Workstation and Apprentice to play games online, and they're both free. You can also draft with add-ons.
Although for the World Championships, the Sideboard Online had some live video coverage. I watched the last part of the Wake vs Wake finals. Grueling, man, grueling. Watching that it wasn't hard to see why ESPN didn't broadcast it.
It is a factor, and you can't play Magic competitively without expecting to spend money on it, but it's not nearly as big a factor as people seem to think it is, especially not if you can become a good drafter.
And (despite what people who have never seen T1 played will tell you), Standard is the most expensive format out of them all if you play it for any length of time; a much better benchmark would be Extended, which rotates only once every several years and which has environment shifts far less drastic than T2. You still spend a deal of money even in Extended, but Magic (done correctly) really is not too bad in the long run when you compare it to other hobbies.
Heh, you'll pay about $300 for two boxes at WotC's prices. But if you look in the right places online, you can get two for $140-170.
The best plan to amass a card fortune, though, is to get good at drafting.
The single best Magic format, however, is multiplayer.
No real winnings or serious competition so the money issue is gone, you're playing with friends so they're mature enough for you, and you don't have to worry about cards rotating out or cards being restricted.
In high-level Magic, the price really isn't an issue. You'll never see someone at a PT playing a sub-optimal list because they just didn't have the cards.
And Draft, widely regarded as the most skill-intensive format, doesn't even require you to own any cards; you sit down at a table with seven other people, pass packs around while you each take a card in turn, and then make decks from the cards you pull.
The only format where price matters and where $300 cards are legal is Type 1, the format that includes all the sets printed (sans Portal and Unglued), and there are no truly high-level T1 tournaments (that's not true, but WotC does not host high-level T1 tournaments, so the difference when discussing Pro Magic is negligible because the prizes in T1 tournaments come mostly from notoriety and success, as opposed to cash winnings).
I won't address the other issues in depth, because skill and strategy depend on what level you play the game, and we don't need to degrade the discussion by bickering over "more from your 'talent' spectrum."
The servers I regularly play on have heavy weapons usually limited to one of each weapon per team, artie strikes weak enough that it can't realistically kill more than one or two until you have four ranks in it, and not enough planes to support more than two field ops per team.
However, even when I play on public servers without those limits, that doesn't happen too often.
On Gold Rush, serious bottlenecking of the Allied doesn't happen (except on the rare occassions when they can't move the tank at all) until the tank reaches the second tank barrier, and there are a few good tricks that engineers can pull to get past there.
Yeah, Rail Gun can be a mess of a map if the Axis don't get the tug to the depot yard quick; the real bottlenecking occurs right past the Axis spawn in that level.
I've never seen a really good bottleneck of Oasis like that, although an unbalanced Axis team can easiliy hold the Old City long enough that the Allies just can't make up for the lost time. The problem with setting up a defense like that is one good Rifle Grenade in the tunnels and you're scrambling to protect the South Gun. Actually, the most solid defense of Oasis might be when the South Gun (I might be getting my directions mixed; I mean the one farthest from Axis spawn) is destroyed and all the Axis are hanging around the other gun.
Battery can be pretty sad, but I would say mostly because of high level covert ops on the Axis side. Build the ramp, die and have it destroyed. Build it again, destroyed again. Apparently, in the new ETPro patch they are enabling the Allies to dynamite the back entrance (although you can no longer spawn at the cp).
I haven't really seen the Axis dominate the Allies completely when it wasn't a case of unbalanced teams.
There are plenty of servers set to prevent spawnkilling and limit powerful explosives. With the servers I play on, it's been awhile since I've seen things like that.
Bottlenecking can still occur, but only when the teams are very uneven.
That's just a monster (I don't remember the name offhand). You face the first stage of them pretty early in the game (I think that one is the second or third?), so you could make at least a first stage one pretty early.
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII you can visit other officers and lieges, and when your bond with that officer is exactly 42, you randomly get chances to assassinate them. If you save at the right time, you can just retry until you get it. So my friend and I made our own Kingdom, and we tried to take over China through assassinations. Apparently if you assassinate all the officers and liege of a kingdom, the kingdom goes away.
In Enemy Territory, I'll forego helping out teammates or trying to win our team the match to practice trick-jumping to cool places.
I don't know how Morrowind is supposed to be played, but my friend has it, and whenever we play, we work on conquering towns by killing all the villagers in it.
Usually I restrict myself to exploiting bugs and loop-holes of the in-game world (as in not blatant cheating), but I used to play this free MMO called Graal (it was based on Zelda, and was originally just Zelda Online until they changed the graphics), and I loved to use trainers in that game.
One of my favorite things to do was help n00bs get their items so that they wouldn't get beat up (PKing was rampant), so when someone would ask me where to get an item, I would tell them to follow me, I would hit the button on my trainer, lift up a bush, and out would fall a lvl3 sword. Unfortunately, the company began to take drastic anti-cheating measures, and the poor n00bs who got my hacked items ended up with their characters in jail! The guilty part of this is that it really made me laugh, and I would have done it to my friends if I could get out of the jail.
Graal was a game with low death penalties and you could hit another player almost anywhere in the game, so one of the best pasttimes was to hunt people down. Me and a friend changed our names and appearance and hunted our newbie friend down once or twice, and I remember one time on a small server when I was a little bored, someone named Lycia was bothering me or something, so I yelled out "Lycia hunt!" and about 6 or 7 of us chased her down and killed her.
Not only can you level up characters in Disgaea, but items as well (by entering into them and fighting, and moving living bonuses around). I have almost 50hrs on that game off of two rentals.
I don't usually like leveling up that much, but I loved breeding strong monsters on Dragon Warrior Monsters, and would go to great leveling up lengths to breed a strong monster (the child's stats were roughly equal to the parents' sum divided by four, iirc). I broke the clock in that game (it stops recording time after a hundred hours).
Why are we arguing morality? We shouldn't be arguing whether it's morally wrong or not, because if it ends up making the recording industry more money noone's going to care.
There is no justification for it, because in the end, you are always damaging the artist in some way.
I disagree. The only artists that might get damaged by piracy are big-name artists and artists who only put one or two good songs on their CD. Because of piracy I get a wide sample of music to listen to, and it greatly increases exposure to indie and small-name bands. I end up making smarter CD purchases, rather than less. As an example, I downloaded most of Refused's The Shape of Punk to Come, then I bought the CD, then lost the CD, downloaded the rest of the CD, and now I'm going to buy it again, because a pirated copy wouldn't be the same. Another example occurs among my friends; one of them downloaded an AMV (another great benefit of P2P networks) with Pikachu singing a song by Mindless Self Indulgence, and now they're all MSI fans. There's no way any of them would have heard the band without P2P networks. They're extreme examples, but my whole CD collection is full of examples, and ones that I wouldn't have heard of without pirating.
Word History: "An official statement of the returns of voters for senators give[s] twenty nine friends of peace, and eleven gerrymanders." So reported the May 12, 1813, edition of the Massachusetts Spy. A gerrymander sounds like a strange political beast, which it is, considered from a historical perspective. This beast was named by combining the word salamander, "a small lizardlike amphibian," with the last name of Elbridge Gerry, a former governor of Massachusettsa state noted for its varied, often colorful political fauna. Gerry (whose name, incidentally, was pronounced with a hard g, though gerrymander is now commonly pronounced with a soft g) was immortalized in this word because an election district created by members of his party in 1812 looked like a salamander. According to one version of gerrymander's coining, the shape of the district attracted the eye of the painter Gilbert Stuart, who noticed it on a map in a newspaper editor's office. Stuart decorated the outline of the district with a head, wings, and claws and then said to the editor, "That will do for a salamander!" "Gerrymander!" came the reply. The word is first recorded in April 1812 in reference to the creature or its caricature, but it soon came to mean not only "the action of shaping a district to gain political advantage" but also "any representative elected from such a district by that method." Within the same year gerrymander was also recorded as a verb.
Source: The American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright (C) 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Regarding the SUV commercials: See the about page. The group does want to raise awareness about the reliance on foreign oil, but the commercials were parodies. And dammit, they're hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
Last month, a study was posted in Science that said wind turbines in Africa could boost vegetation in the semi-desert regions at the edge of the Sahara: Study: Large-scale wind and solar farms in the Sahara would increase heat, rain, vegetation
Seems like there's no real reason to avoid using wind turbines in either study, at least not compared to fossil fuels, and yet inevitably this headline will make the rounds, no one will read the article, we'll all forget last month's study, and in the end we'll just have some wrong, dumb little talking point.
With a little work, you could have snuck in a nice little Seinfeld reference.
I just a got a computer good enough for gaming last year, and my first online FPS was ET. Yeah, it did take a little while to get the hang of objectives, but it's not really that bad. If you don't know what to do on a map, you can just pick up a Panzer or go Medic until you get the gist of it. I think it's a pretty good starting point (especially since it's free).
Damn straight.
My best Magic memories are of playing Chaos multiplayer with big groups of friends. I killed several people the other week with a Jokulhaups because some poor fool had a Dingus Egg out. And every once and a while me and a friend or two in a good position will hold instant-speed direct damage spells and counterspells and threaten poor players with one or two life left into doing our bidding.
Type 2 can suck sometimes.
If you ever feel like getting back into the game a little bit, draft is very fun. Eight people sit around a table, and you each get three boosters. Everyone opens the first booster, takes a card, passes it to the person sitting next to them, who takes a card, who passes it, etc, until all the boosters have been gone through. Then you make decks out of those cards.
And if you still have your old cards, multiplayer is fun, or if you want to play a little competitively there's always T1 or T1.5, and you won't have to buy new cards for either.
There's also free, less competitive ways to play Magic online. Magic-League uses two programs called Magic Workstation and Apprentice to play games online, and they're both free. You can also draft with add-ons.
As far as I know, it was a one time thing.
Although for the World Championships, the Sideboard Online had some live video coverage. I watched the last part of the Wake vs Wake finals. Grueling, man, grueling. Watching that it wasn't hard to see why ESPN didn't broadcast it.
It is a factor, and you can't play Magic competitively without expecting to spend money on it, but it's not nearly as big a factor as people seem to think it is, especially not if you can become a good drafter.
And (despite what people who have never seen T1 played will tell you), Standard is the most expensive format out of them all if you play it for any length of time; a much better benchmark would be Extended, which rotates only once every several years and which has environment shifts far less drastic than T2. You still spend a deal of money even in Extended, but Magic (done correctly) really is not too bad in the long run when you compare it to other hobbies.
Heh, you'll pay about $300 for two boxes at WotC's prices. But if you look in the right places online, you can get two for $140-170.
The best plan to amass a card fortune, though, is to get good at drafting.
The single best Magic format, however, is multiplayer.
No real winnings or serious competition so the money issue is gone, you're playing with friends so they're mature enough for you, and you don't have to worry about cards rotating out or cards being restricted.
In high-level Magic, the price really isn't an issue. You'll never see someone at a PT playing a sub-optimal list because they just didn't have the cards.
And Draft, widely regarded as the most skill-intensive format, doesn't even require you to own any cards; you sit down at a table with seven other people, pass packs around while you each take a card in turn, and then make decks from the cards you pull.
The only format where price matters and where $300 cards are legal is Type 1, the format that includes all the sets printed (sans Portal and Unglued), and there are no truly high-level T1 tournaments (that's not true, but WotC does not host high-level T1 tournaments, so the difference when discussing Pro Magic is negligible because the prizes in T1 tournaments come mostly from notoriety and success, as opposed to cash winnings).
I won't address the other issues in depth, because skill and strategy depend on what level you play the game, and we don't need to degrade the discussion by bickering over "more from your 'talent' spectrum."
The servers I regularly play on have heavy weapons usually limited to one of each weapon per team, artie strikes weak enough that it can't realistically kill more than one or two until you have four ranks in it, and not enough planes to support more than two field ops per team.
However, even when I play on public servers without those limits, that doesn't happen too often.
On Gold Rush, serious bottlenecking of the Allied doesn't happen (except on the rare occassions when they can't move the tank at all) until the tank reaches the second tank barrier, and there are a few good tricks that engineers can pull to get past there.
Yeah, Rail Gun can be a mess of a map if the Axis don't get the tug to the depot yard quick; the real bottlenecking occurs right past the Axis spawn in that level.
I've never seen a really good bottleneck of Oasis like that, although an unbalanced Axis team can easiliy hold the Old City long enough that the Allies just can't make up for the lost time. The problem with setting up a defense like that is one good Rifle Grenade in the tunnels and you're scrambling to protect the South Gun. Actually, the most solid defense of Oasis might be when the South Gun (I might be getting my directions mixed; I mean the one farthest from Axis spawn) is destroyed and all the Axis are hanging around the other gun.
Battery can be pretty sad, but I would say mostly because of high level covert ops on the Axis side. Build the ramp, die and have it destroyed. Build it again, destroyed again. Apparently, in the new ETPro patch they are enabling the Allies to dynamite the back entrance (although you can no longer spawn at the cp).
I haven't really seen the Axis dominate the Allies completely when it wasn't a case of unbalanced teams.
There are plenty of servers set to prevent spawnkilling and limit powerful explosives. With the servers I play on, it's been awhile since I've seen things like that. Bottlenecking can still occur, but only when the teams are very uneven.
That's just a monster (I don't remember the name offhand). You face the first stage of them pretty early in the game (I think that one is the second or third?), so you could make at least a first stage one pretty early.
Nah. No Japanese needed.
In Romance of the Three Kingdoms VII you can visit other officers and lieges, and when your bond with that officer is exactly 42, you randomly get chances to assassinate them. If you save at the right time, you can just retry until you get it. So my friend and I made our own Kingdom, and we tried to take over China through assassinations. Apparently if you assassinate all the officers and liege of a kingdom, the kingdom goes away.
In Enemy Territory, I'll forego helping out teammates or trying to win our team the match to practice trick-jumping to cool places.
I don't know how Morrowind is supposed to be played, but my friend has it, and whenever we play, we work on conquering towns by killing all the villagers in it.
Usually I restrict myself to exploiting bugs and loop-holes of the in-game world (as in not blatant cheating), but I used to play this free MMO called Graal (it was based on Zelda, and was originally just Zelda Online until they changed the graphics), and I loved to use trainers in that game.
One of my favorite things to do was help n00bs get their items so that they wouldn't get beat up (PKing was rampant), so when someone would ask me where to get an item, I would tell them to follow me, I would hit the button on my trainer, lift up a bush, and out would fall a lvl3 sword. Unfortunately, the company began to take drastic anti-cheating measures, and the poor n00bs who got my hacked items ended up with their characters in jail! The guilty part of this is that it really made me laugh, and I would have done it to my friends if I could get out of the jail.
Graal was a game with low death penalties and you could hit another player almost anywhere in the game, so one of the best pasttimes was to hunt people down. Me and a friend changed our names and appearance and hunted our newbie friend down once or twice, and I remember one time on a small server when I was a little bored, someone named Lycia was bothering me or something, so I yelled out "Lycia hunt!" and about 6 or 7 of us chased her down and killed her.
Not only can you level up characters in Disgaea, but items as well (by entering into them and fighting, and moving living bonuses around). I have almost 50hrs on that game off of two rentals.
I don't usually like leveling up that much, but I loved breeding strong monsters on Dragon Warrior Monsters, and would go to great leveling up lengths to breed a strong monster (the child's stats were roughly equal to the parents' sum divided by four, iirc). I broke the clock in that game (it stops recording time after a hundred hours).
holy crap, please mod parent funny!
Yeah, I've been illegally attacking servers. Heh, who is going to answer that question?
Whatever, but it doesn't matter, because you're not talking about PC games, you're talking about the RIAA inflating prices.
It may not apply to iTunes, but his point still stands regarding other services.
I think if I got to play video games at work, I'd be willing to take a little less money.
Regarding the SUV commercials: See the about page. The group does want to raise awareness about the reliance on foreign oil, but the commercials were parodies.
And dammit, they're hilarious.