I've been playing MMORPGs for a few years. While on one hand, I take strong difference to people who use the words, "It's just a game," to defend their being assholes and preventing those around them from having fun, I do side with them when it comes to in-game belongings.
Last year, I had a trial member in my guild abscond with two pieces of Rune armor totaling about 30 million gp. In the process of killing him to get them back, I lost their matching sword (worth 300 mil) and leggings (50 mil), and only came away from the whole mess with a 1 mil sword and 150k worth of low-end elemental amor to show for a good 400 mil loss. That's about six months worth of very hard gaming, or (in my case) six minutes of very good luck against a very dumb PK, reduced down to dragon candy items I had a dozen of anyway. I know somebody who paid US$100 for a full set of rune armor. Heck, I even had the opportunity to sell my set for almost as much. But I got it the hard way and I lost it the hard way.
Did I care? Sure. Did it effect me at all? Not really. I got pissed, killed a few random people for no good reason, and then went back to work recovering from the losses. As far as I'm concerned, I'm playing to have fun. As long as I have a half-decent weapon and some farming tools and can stay away from the dumbasses, I can be self-sufficient and write off just about any loss (the only time I actually get bothered about loosing stuff is when it's borrowed from a friend or guildmate), and I tend to lose things at about the same rate I get them.
Saturn V? Isn't that going a bit overboard? A quarterstick will accomplish the same thing, plus the added bonus of taking out that annoying tree stump you've broken three lawnmower blades on.
I can't speak for the country as a whole, but mid-Michigan is mainly natural forest now. There's not much of it, especially sine the Tri Cities and Flint have been building out, but they aren't farm trees.
Much of it is abandoned farmland. Some from the Depression, when farmers started letting land fall into disrepair and only growing enough to support their community instead of growing food they can't sell, and a lot of it from people moving into the cities to work for GM and Ford.
Thomas Township, near Saginaw, used to be all farmland. At the start of the 1900's, there was barely a tree standing. However, there's almost no farmland there now. Most of it grew back into pine forests. They're clearing a lot of it for the commercial district along Gratiot, Tittabawasee and US-10, but even now, there's heavy trees right up to the edge of the parking lots. A few years ago, there was even a deer that wandered into a supermarket and caused some moderate chaos.
They were both excellent powers. I couldn't remember if they were light side or universal, though. But, like you said, no zappy. The Dark side powers looks really, really sweet - which is where all the alure of the dark side comes from, I suppose. You're not only powerful, but you get to look like a total badass by choking somebody accross a room and then electrocuting them. Down the light side, you're still pretty powerful (moreso, if you play your cards right), but you don't look nearly as cool.
Re:I think is was said somewhere else...
on
P2P Leaks Surprises
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· Score: 1
Possible, but I'm pretty convinced at least some of it is real. A good deal of what he posted were personal photos, not sensitive information, meaning the leaks were probably at the soldier's home (time to ground the kids off the computer for a few days, IMO), not at a military installation.
I decided to play the dumbass after seeing the site. I turned up a user on eMule who shared c:\, and had a number of interesting things up for download - judging from the filenames and the directory, the inventory, employee, payroll, customer, and bank account information of what seemed to be a grocery store, all in Word and Excel format. Enough people are just stupid enough to share c:\ that it doesn't suprise me if a few top-secret docs slipped out. Even if some/most of it is misinformation or a hoax - or even if all of what this guy found is fake - there's definitely stuff out there that could cause lots of people - government, corporate, and private - lots of problems.
The high level light side powers weren't lame, just nowhere near as spectacular as the dark side ones. If you throw up all those light side combat buffs, then you can dish out much more lightsabre damage, and make yourself pretty much invincible.
They'll be in the spaceflight business either way, of course. They've invested too much not to at this point. But, like I said, the X-Prize will be the first industry award in commercial spaceflight, and will be worth far more for advertisement and name recognition than actual cash payoff, at least in the short run.
I think they can not only fill Bioware's shoes, but exceed them. Remember that Obsidian has a lot of Black Isle talent behind it, and I can't think of one Black Isle game that I didn't completely love.
I'll second that. When I got my p133 back in 1997, it came with an entire box of documentation. A book with all the jumper settings for the motherboard, maintainence/upgrade instructions, and even a three-inch-thick monster covering all the features not covered in the 25 page Windows 95 manual. Heck, my speakers came with a 50-page manual that even explained how to take the damn things apart and replace the paper diaphram.
But then, I go and buy a computer in 2001, and it had under 30 pages of documentation combined bweteen hardware and software.
Worse yet, I get one earlier this year, and the manual is just one sheet tri-folded, and two-thirds of it is just ads for more RAM and bigger harddrives. I've seen some nightmarish lack of documentation with open source software, but closed-source software and hardware developers are by no means blameless.
Much as I have a rule againt replying to posts that resort to insults, I always end up doing it.
Your problem comes from the fact that you, like so many other people, insist on a ass-backwards concept of how science works.
These scientists are not creating a theory. You don't have a theory unless you have observation to base it on.
They're making a hypothesis, which is just that - a hypothesis. They throw out a few ideas that give them some inkling of what to look for. It doesn't tell us anything, but it grows out of things we already know.
Then, they go to the observation, and try and see what there actually is. You don't need a hypothesis to do observation, but with extremely complex stuff like this, it's a good idea to know what you're looking for first, or you'll be hit with information overload. They've already got a few thousand particles on the books, so if they don't have an idea of a new one they're looking for, they'll never find it underneath all the protons and electrons and pions and morons. If the observations fit the hypothesis, they start throwing it all into equations.
When they derive equations that hold true, it becomes a law. Law still doesn't really tell you very much. So e=mc^2. It doesn't tell you anything useful about mass or energy.
Theory is the highest level of scientific understanding, and is not just far above theory, but it's actually higher on the scale than law (which is why the "If it was true, it wouldn't be a theory anymore, it would be a law" is wrong. You go from hypothesis to observation to law and lastly to theory).
It comes after you've made your hypotheses, observed confimation, and derived laws from the observation. Theory tells you WHY your hypothesis worked (or didn't, as they case may be), and why the laws do what they do. All the fancy things you can read out of e=mc^2 (like mass being variable, energy and matter being interchangeable, and so on) are Theory. Theory outranks law.
All we have here is hypothesis, nothing more. You're trying to equate hypothesis with theory, but they're completely different things, separated by two levels of understanding.
The Net is not an organism, but an environment with many, many organisms in them. We're already taking ineteresting tips from nature within those organisms to protect them from the outside world. The environment doesn't have an immune system, though, and adding one in this way only means more unneeded data clogging up the pipes. I haven't had a worm or virus on any of my computers since 1996 (and that was planted by a mischievious "friend" with a floppy disk), until I picked up Nachi. It's clogged up my local environment to the point that two of my computers had to be taken out of the pond and put in stasis until I have the time to clean them.
Looks like some lame-brain did a really bad google search. 1997 sounds about right for the Special Edition release, but I'm not sure about that either.
I doubt it's really about the money, just the title. SS1's already cost $20 million, so it's not going to make a profit from the prize. However, a few years down the road, when they have an improved model built that can be used for actual commercial venture (passenger/cargo flight, or just taking rich people up so they can see what its like to get motion sickness in zero-g), the "Winner of the X-Prize for Private Spaceflight" will look pretty nifty on the ads.
I don't remember ever seeing any time limit for the launch itself, just the turnaround time, which I suppose is from the first launch to the second landing? Or second launch? Either way, unless they take a week to get from ground to orbit, they should be ok.
62.5 miles isn't the point. It's just a first step. The first cars couldn't drive as fast as a horse could run, and they were very hard to get started (some had a spring loaded crank you had to wind up to start them, others had to be push-started, a few even had lawnmower-style pullcord starters). However, within thirty years, they were going fifty miles an hour comfortably and somewhat safely. The first planes were slower than their contemporary cars, but look at them now: you can get anywhere in the world within 24 hours.
Suborbital (or even low orbit) travel is the same way. Maybe you're wasting weeks of work to go 62.5 miles now, but in thirty years, you'll be able to get almost anywhere in the world in 90 minutes (with at most a local connection flight in between to get you to an airport capable of handling orbital launches), and quite possibly cheaper than conventional flight (you don't burn fuel in orbit, and even suborbital flight would be ballistic except during launch and landing maneuvers).
The fact that its on a micropayment-like system doesn't cause it to have shitty programming. The fact that they have an addicted userbase that they probably wouldn't lose if they rigged up a system to kick them in the balls every time they logged on means they have much less incentive to fix the problems they have.
Less popular MMORPGs with scavenged userbases who live under constant threat of their userbase going back to Everquest have a good incentive to keep their bugs dead, and they do (or die).
A little technicality about the flag is that it's not standing up anymore. The films from the Apolo 11 launch show that it got knocked over in the engine wash, as did the Apolo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 flags as well, most likely. They were mostly there to look pretty on the cameras, not to stay where they were put.
The difference is that Tsunami aren't very big on the open ocean. They barely rock a midsized yacht in deep water, let alone sink a large freigher. They only kick up when they get into shallow water.
The Great Lakes are considerably worse, although modern navigation has brought that under control, but there are litterally shipwrecks laying on top of one another from the 1800's and the first half of the 1900's, and there's usually one or two accidents a year even now (a last year, a small cargo ship sank near West Branch, this spring, a number of private boats were lost in and around Saginaw Bay, and so on).
There are theories that these sorts of rogue waves sank the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Regina, and any number of other ships, but the most plausible explanation is usually a Nor'Easter. The Great Lakes whip up winter storms that can be stronger than many hurricanes.
I live in Michigan, and used to go out on Lake Superior all the time on vacations. It doesn't have these sorts of waves. I've never seen anything over four feet, and that was in a thunderstorm. I've heard of ten and fifteen foot waves during Nor'Easter storms. It does, however, have monster storms, especially in the winter. The Great Lakes, espeically Huron and Superior, have more shipwrecks per water area than the Bermuda Triangle thanks to the Nor'Easters. The Nor'Easter of 1913 alone sank 16 large ships, with combined crews of 1300.
It's also worth noting that radiocarbon dating would be useless on Mars for two reasons:
1. It only works for formerly living material (all Terrestrial keeps the objective isotope of carbon around in a very specific ratio), and we have no confirmed fossils from Mars, and it would be a very long shot to count on finding them on a future mission. They'd be farther ahead just dating the rocks through other methods.
2. It's a relatively short-term dating (Creationists abuse this fact too, by pointing out that carbon dating on dinosaurs puts them right up to our geologic yesterday. The fact is, dinosaurs have been dead so long that all the carbon 14 in their remais is long since decayed beyond detectability). I forget the exact range, but as I remember, even going back as far as the KT boundry, it's already useless. If there was/is life on Mars, odds are most if not all of it has been dead for a very long time, and would again fall into the realm of more long-term dating methods.
It would be more likely to produce good data if the probe relied on a dating method that could give results over a good chunk of the age of the solar system. On the off chance that we find something new enough to be interesting, I'd call that justification for a follow-up.
It still wouldn't work. Dirty money moves around constantly, and records usually aren't kept very well if at all ($50 to the clerk can do wonders for paperwork). Pressure doesn't work very fast. If it takes more than a few hours, the money's gone and you'll be lucky if anybody even remembers it being there when the new government comes asking.
Too many countries to put pressure on, many of them quite stable first and second world countries without freedom fighters to support, human rights violations to leverage, or even dictators to depose.
"Expulsion, criminal charges (felony - discretion of Saginaw County Prosecutor's Office)." I know its a felony to do it on an election day, but that falls under a different law (obstructing access to a voting site).
As the other people said, it's not that we don't want to use it, don't want to be bothered setting it up, it's that we don't want to be bothered having to get the thing on backorder (when I tried, I got a refund two months later instead of the adapter). This is honestly a component that should have come with the console to begin with, like they had two different adapters shipped with the SNES (old screwdriver tabs and the new (at the time) plugs. I'm pretty sure the coax adapter I used on mine came with it, but I might have bought that)
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Hear, hear!
I've been playing MMORPGs for a few years. While on one hand, I take strong difference to people who use the words, "It's just a game," to defend their being assholes and preventing those around them from having fun, I do side with them when it comes to in-game belongings.
Last year, I had a trial member in my guild abscond with two pieces of Rune armor totaling about 30 million gp. In the process of killing him to get them back, I lost their matching sword (worth 300 mil) and leggings (50 mil), and only came away from the whole mess with a 1 mil sword and 150k worth of low-end elemental amor to show for a good 400 mil loss. That's about six months worth of very hard gaming, or (in my case) six minutes of very good luck against a very dumb PK, reduced down to dragon candy items I had a dozen of anyway. I know somebody who paid US$100 for a full set of rune armor. Heck, I even had the opportunity to sell my set for almost as much. But I got it the hard way and I lost it the hard way.
Did I care? Sure. Did it effect me at all? Not really. I got pissed, killed a few random people for no good reason, and then went back to work recovering from the losses. As far as I'm concerned, I'm playing to have fun. As long as I have a half-decent weapon and some farming tools and can stay away from the dumbasses, I can be self-sufficient and write off just about any loss (the only time I actually get bothered about loosing stuff is when it's borrowed from a friend or guildmate), and I tend to lose things at about the same rate I get them.
Saturn V? Isn't that going a bit overboard? A quarterstick will accomplish the same thing, plus the added bonus of taking out that annoying tree stump you've broken three lawnmower blades on.
I can't speak for the country as a whole, but mid-Michigan is mainly natural forest now. There's not much of it, especially sine the Tri Cities and Flint have been building out, but they aren't farm trees. Much of it is abandoned farmland. Some from the Depression, when farmers started letting land fall into disrepair and only growing enough to support their community instead of growing food they can't sell, and a lot of it from people moving into the cities to work for GM and Ford. Thomas Township, near Saginaw, used to be all farmland. At the start of the 1900's, there was barely a tree standing. However, there's almost no farmland there now. Most of it grew back into pine forests. They're clearing a lot of it for the commercial district along Gratiot, Tittabawasee and US-10, but even now, there's heavy trees right up to the edge of the parking lots. A few years ago, there was even a deer that wandered into a supermarket and caused some moderate chaos.
They were both excellent powers. I couldn't remember if they were light side or universal, though. But, like you said, no zappy. The Dark side powers looks really, really sweet - which is where all the alure of the dark side comes from, I suppose. You're not only powerful, but you get to look like a total badass by choking somebody accross a room and then electrocuting them. Down the light side, you're still pretty powerful (moreso, if you play your cards right), but you don't look nearly as cool.
Possible, but I'm pretty convinced at least some of it is real. A good deal of what he posted were personal photos, not sensitive information, meaning the leaks were probably at the soldier's home (time to ground the kids off the computer for a few days, IMO), not at a military installation.
I decided to play the dumbass after seeing the site. I turned up a user on eMule who shared c:\, and had a number of interesting things up for download - judging from the filenames and the directory, the inventory, employee, payroll, customer, and bank account information of what seemed to be a grocery store, all in Word and Excel format. Enough people are just stupid enough to share c:\ that it doesn't suprise me if a few top-secret docs slipped out. Even if some/most of it is misinformation or a hoax - or even if all of what this guy found is fake - there's definitely stuff out there that could cause lots of people - government, corporate, and private - lots of problems.
The high level light side powers weren't lame, just nowhere near as spectacular as the dark side ones. If you throw up all those light side combat buffs, then you can dish out much more lightsabre damage, and make yourself pretty much invincible.
They'll be in the spaceflight business either way, of course. They've invested too much not to at this point. But, like I said, the X-Prize will be the first industry award in commercial spaceflight, and will be worth far more for advertisement and name recognition than actual cash payoff, at least in the short run.
I think they can not only fill Bioware's shoes, but exceed them. Remember that Obsidian has a lot of Black Isle talent behind it, and I can't think of one Black Isle game that I didn't completely love.
I'll second that. When I got my p133 back in 1997, it came with an entire box of documentation. A book with all the jumper settings for the motherboard, maintainence/upgrade instructions, and even a three-inch-thick monster covering all the features not covered in the 25 page Windows 95 manual. Heck, my speakers came with a 50-page manual that even explained how to take the damn things apart and replace the paper diaphram. But then, I go and buy a computer in 2001, and it had under 30 pages of documentation combined bweteen hardware and software. Worse yet, I get one earlier this year, and the manual is just one sheet tri-folded, and two-thirds of it is just ads for more RAM and bigger harddrives. I've seen some nightmarish lack of documentation with open source software, but closed-source software and hardware developers are by no means blameless.
Much as I have a rule againt replying to posts that resort to insults, I always end up doing it.
Your problem comes from the fact that you, like so many other people, insist on a ass-backwards concept of how science works.
These scientists are not creating a theory. You don't have a theory unless you have observation to base it on.
They're making a hypothesis, which is just that - a hypothesis. They throw out a few ideas that give them some inkling of what to look for. It doesn't tell us anything, but it grows out of things we already know.
Then, they go to the observation, and try and see what there actually is. You don't need a hypothesis to do observation, but with extremely complex stuff like this, it's a good idea to know what you're looking for first, or you'll be hit with information overload. They've already got a few thousand particles on the books, so if they don't have an idea of a new one they're looking for, they'll never find it underneath all the protons and electrons and pions and morons. If the observations fit the hypothesis, they start throwing it all into equations.
When they derive equations that hold true, it becomes a law. Law still doesn't really tell you very much. So e=mc^2. It doesn't tell you anything useful about mass or energy.
Theory is the highest level of scientific understanding, and is not just far above theory, but it's actually higher on the scale than law (which is why the "If it was true, it wouldn't be a theory anymore, it would be a law" is wrong. You go from hypothesis to observation to law and lastly to theory).
It comes after you've made your hypotheses, observed confimation, and derived laws from the observation. Theory tells you WHY your hypothesis worked (or didn't, as they case may be), and why the laws do what they do. All the fancy things you can read out of e=mc^2 (like mass being variable, energy and matter being interchangeable, and so on) are Theory. Theory outranks law.
All we have here is hypothesis, nothing more. You're trying to equate hypothesis with theory, but they're completely different things, separated by two levels of understanding.
The Net is not an organism, but an environment with many, many organisms in them. We're already taking ineteresting tips from nature within those organisms to protect them from the outside world. The environment doesn't have an immune system, though, and adding one in this way only means more unneeded data clogging up the pipes. I haven't had a worm or virus on any of my computers since 1996 (and that was planted by a mischievious "friend" with a floppy disk), until I picked up Nachi. It's clogged up my local environment to the point that two of my computers had to be taken out of the pond and put in stasis until I have the time to clean them.
Looks like some lame-brain did a really bad google search. 1997 sounds about right for the Special Edition release, but I'm not sure about that either.
I doubt it's really about the money, just the title. SS1's already cost $20 million, so it's not going to make a profit from the prize. However, a few years down the road, when they have an improved model built that can be used for actual commercial venture (passenger/cargo flight, or just taking rich people up so they can see what its like to get motion sickness in zero-g), the "Winner of the X-Prize for Private Spaceflight" will look pretty nifty on the ads.
I don't remember ever seeing any time limit for the launch itself, just the turnaround time, which I suppose is from the first launch to the second landing? Or second launch? Either way, unless they take a week to get from ground to orbit, they should be ok.
62.5 miles isn't the point. It's just a first step. The first cars couldn't drive as fast as a horse could run, and they were very hard to get started (some had a spring loaded crank you had to wind up to start them, others had to be push-started, a few even had lawnmower-style pullcord starters). However, within thirty years, they were going fifty miles an hour comfortably and somewhat safely. The first planes were slower than their contemporary cars, but look at them now: you can get anywhere in the world within 24 hours. Suborbital (or even low orbit) travel is the same way. Maybe you're wasting weeks of work to go 62.5 miles now, but in thirty years, you'll be able to get almost anywhere in the world in 90 minutes (with at most a local connection flight in between to get you to an airport capable of handling orbital launches), and quite possibly cheaper than conventional flight (you don't burn fuel in orbit, and even suborbital flight would be ballistic except during launch and landing maneuvers).
The fact that its on a micropayment-like system doesn't cause it to have shitty programming. The fact that they have an addicted userbase that they probably wouldn't lose if they rigged up a system to kick them in the balls every time they logged on means they have much less incentive to fix the problems they have.
Less popular MMORPGs with scavenged userbases who live under constant threat of their userbase going back to Everquest have a good incentive to keep their bugs dead, and they do (or die).
but I've played at least three of their games, and I've never heard of Falcom before this.
A little technicality about the flag is that it's not standing up anymore. The films from the Apolo 11 launch show that it got knocked over in the engine wash, as did the Apolo 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17 flags as well, most likely. They were mostly there to look pretty on the cameras, not to stay where they were put.
The difference is that Tsunami aren't very big on the open ocean. They barely rock a midsized yacht in deep water, let alone sink a large freigher. They only kick up when they get into shallow water.
The Great Lakes are considerably worse, although modern navigation has brought that under control, but there are litterally shipwrecks laying on top of one another from the 1800's and the first half of the 1900's, and there's usually one or two accidents a year even now (a last year, a small cargo ship sank near West Branch, this spring, a number of private boats were lost in and around Saginaw Bay, and so on). There are theories that these sorts of rogue waves sank the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Regina, and any number of other ships, but the most plausible explanation is usually a Nor'Easter. The Great Lakes whip up winter storms that can be stronger than many hurricanes.
I live in Michigan, and used to go out on Lake Superior all the time on vacations. It doesn't have these sorts of waves. I've never seen anything over four feet, and that was in a thunderstorm. I've heard of ten and fifteen foot waves during Nor'Easter storms. It does, however, have monster storms, especially in the winter. The Great Lakes, espeically Huron and Superior, have more shipwrecks per water area than the Bermuda Triangle thanks to the Nor'Easters. The Nor'Easter of 1913 alone sank 16 large ships, with combined crews of 1300.
It's also worth noting that radiocarbon dating would be useless on Mars for two reasons: 1. It only works for formerly living material (all Terrestrial keeps the objective isotope of carbon around in a very specific ratio), and we have no confirmed fossils from Mars, and it would be a very long shot to count on finding them on a future mission. They'd be farther ahead just dating the rocks through other methods. 2. It's a relatively short-term dating (Creationists abuse this fact too, by pointing out that carbon dating on dinosaurs puts them right up to our geologic yesterday. The fact is, dinosaurs have been dead so long that all the carbon 14 in their remais is long since decayed beyond detectability). I forget the exact range, but as I remember, even going back as far as the KT boundry, it's already useless. If there was/is life on Mars, odds are most if not all of it has been dead for a very long time, and would again fall into the realm of more long-term dating methods. It would be more likely to produce good data if the probe relied on a dating method that could give results over a good chunk of the age of the solar system. On the off chance that we find something new enough to be interesting, I'd call that justification for a follow-up.
It still wouldn't work. Dirty money moves around constantly, and records usually aren't kept very well if at all ($50 to the clerk can do wonders for paperwork). Pressure doesn't work very fast. If it takes more than a few hours, the money's gone and you'll be lucky if anybody even remembers it being there when the new government comes asking.
Too many countries to put pressure on, many of them quite stable first and second world countries without freedom fighters to support, human rights violations to leverage, or even dictators to depose.
"Expulsion, criminal charges (felony - discretion of Saginaw County Prosecutor's Office)." I know its a felony to do it on an election day, but that falls under a different law (obstructing access to a voting site).
As the other people said, it's not that we don't want to use it, don't want to be bothered setting it up, it's that we don't want to be bothered having to get the thing on backorder (when I tried, I got a refund two months later instead of the adapter). This is honestly a component that should have come with the console to begin with, like they had two different adapters shipped with the SNES (old screwdriver tabs and the new (at the time) plugs. I'm pretty sure the coax adapter I used on mine came with it, but I might have bought that)