So if a technology doesn't work right now for everybody we should abandon it? This might be the wrong website for such a position. Teslas with autodrive are expensive now but the same has been true of every life-saving technological improvement at some point. In the late 70s early 80s would you have said "These ABS systems only benefit the rich. Fukkit and redirect the money to better drinking water"? That technology saves a ton of lives now. It's not Elon Musk's job to provide and legislate universal helmet access. If you think it is then I suggest that instead of posting stuff on the internet your time would be better spent raising money for more helmets.
If you want someone to understand your meaning unambiguously across multiple platforms why not try grouping the subset of emojis call "text" together into repeatable and recognizable patterns called "words"?
If I'm depending on the ability of someone else's software to properly render my high-fiving cats (or whatever) and the fact that one cat turns out to have different whiskers than I intended means that people go to the wrong restaurant I'm probably "communicating" incorrectly.
An example of loony was Al Gore claiming in 2005 sea levels would rise by a meter or more in 10 years unless we did what he told us and made him a billionaire.
You live in a very interesting parallel universe. Can you share more of your alternate history? It sounds fascinating and definitely an example of loony.
Wow....I read that headline too fast and it came out "Ancient Robot Wars Programmed by Pope" which, frankly, would have been a pretty interesting story. I'm disappointed now.
Would a book by the Marquis de Sade qualify as violent pornography? I remember that my high-school library had a copy of one of his books. I recall the imagery as being quite violent and there was certainly sex involved so I have the feeling it's violent pornography. Someone better call all the libraries so they can burn their illegal books before someone has a chance to read one and get some double-plus ungood ideas.
Isn't this a good sign that we're already a long way down the slippery slope? Rape is illegal. Assault is illegal. Surely violent pornography involves consensual acts otherwise it would be one of those two things? Why should posession of imagry of people engaged in consensual acts be illegal?
I'd say "I'm glad don't live in the UK" but I think the number of countries that remeber the concept of "Freedom" is diminishing so fast that by the time I finished saying it I'd already be living in the equivalent.
For those who are utterly tired of WoW and wish not to hear any more about it try reading this link instead. It's about the upcoming "Kali" expansion to CCP's EVE-Online. A game that actually gets better the more you play it. Who could have thought?
It's understandable that you gave up on EVE. Unlike most massives the content is heavily loaded towards the more advanced characters. I've never played WoW but I've heard from many people how it's lots of fun until they hit 50 and then it sucks. EVE is exactly the opposite in that the more time you have in the more options and opportunities open up before you. I've been playing EVE for 3 years now and I still haven't tapped out all the content because every 8 months or so they add a new level of complexity to the game (for free of course). When Kali launches there will be a whole new range of PvP interactions and PvE complexity. That being said for the new player with no friends in-game it can be quite daunting and there are no manuals to tell you how flipping awesome it gets once you've put in some time. If you want to know more PM me, I try not to boost EVE too much on/. because the more people who play the more the economy risks getting foobed by RL money makers.
At least CCP is privately held and so is slightly more difficult to aquire. I have faith that the people who started CCP and who have built it up love it enough to want to keep it themselves. My evidence for this is that CCP actually seems to give a damn about customer relations and the player experience.
Keep in mind that the guys at the top of CCP are the same guys who as MMO enthusiasts decided to make their own back in the day so they have a very real sense of personal ownership. With a very stable cashflow the only speck of worry on the horizon is the launching of the Asian server. But it seems like they have enough cash to set that up without being forced to go public to raise funds.
All good but for one thing. A large number of the species going extinct these days are not doing so as a result of Natural Selection wher-in they are out-competed and replaced in an ecological niche by some fitter successor. They are being killed off by us as we carpet-bomb the ecology. We don't replace any of the things we kill off (except for the large predators we offed early on in our rise to bad-assitude). Thus we are not a happy part of the happy circle of life. We're not pruning the evolutionary tree; we're chopping it down.
-Pinkoir
I'll tell you why EVE won for favorite game over a title which has about 100 times more subscribers. It's the endgame. All over the net you see people talking about the Lv60 cap and the grinding to get top level gear. I've been playing EVE since a month after launch and I am nowhere near any kind of level cap. That's because there isn't one. Because there aren't any levels. I admit I haven't played WoW but it seems like it has the same failing as in other titles I've played where once you cap-out there really isn't anything to do except engage in some relatively pointless PvP. In EVE the more skilled your character gets the richer your experience becomes because the endgame isn't against some bajillion-person raid instance but against the rest of the playerbase. In EVE it is the players themselves who are developing the storyline through the alliance conflicts and with the addition of even more complex levels of play-controlled structures in the (free) cold-war and red-moon-rising expansions this empire vs empire interaction becomes just that much more meaningful. I think the fact that everybody lives in the same universe is a great aid to this. In addition, PvP has real impact because you can actually lose substantial virtual assets (both "material" and political) on failure as opposed to games like GW where there are no negative consequences for loss at all.
Anyway, if you like rewarding PvP and haven't played EVE yet you should really try it out. And if you do drop me a line in-game:) AWM is on the move again and we're always looking for new recruits.
Now let's all go build a Mega-Blok castle on Hans Island and really teach those bastards a lesson.
As an aside, since they are made in Montreal would they be Mega-Blok Quebecois? And if so is it ironic or paradoxical that separatist cubes would be specifically designed to stick together with things.
I refer to much greater market penetration of higher-tech products such as HID front-lighting and LED signal lighting as well as the adoption of advanced systems such as AFS and bend lighting. And for what it's worth I'm not European; I personally prefer the macho NA headlamp beam-pattern to the wussy don't-hurt-anybody-else European one but there is no doubt in my mind that the NA regulatory system is falling behind the rest of the world in this area.
When LED headlights are ready for market I'm sure the auto industry lobbyists will see to it they are approved.
IAAAIL (sort of) and the way things are going it ain't gonna happen. LED headlamps are legal in the US right now but only in a crippled form where the whole thing has to be sealed up and replaced as a complete unit. The technology in Europe will be "freer" (but not as in beer you can be damned sure).
Oh, and European headlamps are waaaaaay less glaring in general than North American ones. Not the OEM's fault if end-users are tools who can't properly adjust their equipment
I think UN control of anything technological will fail. They take far too long to make up their minds, so any technological standards that need to be implemented will be agreed upon when they are obsolete
This isn't true. Take the example of high-tech automobile headlamps. The UN body responsible for global headlamp regulations (GRE) is very close to finishing rules that will allow for LED headlamps. NHTSA, which does the same thing in the US has completely given up on making _any_ LED regulations for the forseable future because it's so hard to get safety related stuff through congress. In this case the UN is far ahead of the US in technical rule-making and you can see evidence of this in the relative technology contents of a typical American vehicle and a typical European vehicle.
A similar thing occurs with wasp larvae and spiders. The spider basically flips out under the control of the larva's venom and spins a web unlike anything it would normal have spun but which has a little protective pouch. The spider would then go into the pouch and wait until the larva kills it at which point it would be eaten. Here's a link to the abstract at nature.com for anybody who has a subscription there.
I think my alltime favorite game music is the Dungeon music from Ultima VI. I figured out how to play the melody on the piano and pissed off my Mom by playing it all the time. Anybody know where a torrent of such a thing would exist? I feel in the mood for some nostalgia.
Can anybody tell me why Games Workshop thinks a Warhammer massive will work when they didn't think so a year and a half ago? Also how much of the initial work done on the first Warhammer game (which sounded pretty frickin' cool to me) will be recycled in this new one? The other one was very different from other massives on the market I'm worried this new one will be a same ol' same ol' WoW knockoff.
-Pinkoir
Sigh no-one ever talks about EVE
on
Massive Quickies
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· Score: 4, Informative
For what it's worth EVE just put out a new content patch as well. Added a metric fuck-ton of new content including new ship classes, new styles of PvE story-line encounters and some new Player Manufactured stations which will give the already amazing PvP system even more strategic (and yes I mean strategic) depth. The game just flat out owns. And I'm not afraid to say that since it's almost 14-year-old proof. People tired of meaningless arcade PvP in other massives should try out EVE, where your actions actually make a difference.
Man I loved that game. Came out at just the right time. I missed many a class chilling with my friends, drinking and playing that game.
To this day I still say "Don't get cocky it's gonna get rocky" when someone at work is taking perhaps a too cavalier attitude towards longterm quality issues. When I try to follow it up with "Time to take it down to the next ya'jocky" I tend to lose them though...
It sure sounds evil but only in the "Kill as many babies as you can before the cops get you" kind of way. True evil is more subtle. I think the best test for evilness in tetris clones is to see how cruel the clone can be while still making the player think it is not really that bad. After all, people will quit in frustration if the game is too obvious about its malevolence. You want to string them along, slowly ramping up their frustration, giving them the hint of success every once and a while only to tear their souls slowly from their block-addled minds with a perfectly times sequence of S-bricks.
You would test true tetris evilness in an online competition between the various clones. The evilest would be the one which generated the best aggregate of low average scores and high number of games played. That would signify the tetris which was best able to trick players into thinking it wasn't evil.
Please note that I don't advocate actually undtertaking such a foul endevour. The world has enough evil in it already.
With six years of time, I could see the world working to relocate all that people before the event
I'm confused. In your earlier post you doubted the ability of governments to effectively coordinate a technical response to the meteor threat but now you seem confident that they could get together to relocate the 250 or so million refugees? You honestly think that that's easier?
It wouldn't be to the end of history. It would be to the end of its significance, basically a few centuries after man has left this star system.
That's a good number of centuries more than the vast majority of us can expect. I may not remember the names of the soldiers of the Light Brigade but I do remember Lord Cardigan, I don't know all the names of the fallen of Bastogne but I do remember that General McAuliffe said "Nuts!", I don't know about the poor saps who died of radiation poisoning making the first A-Bombs but I do remember that Oppenheimer was in charge and while nobody will remember the thousands of engineers, scientists and technicians who work on the anti-asteroid program they sure as hell will remember the names of the people on the ship.
Also, being an A/A does not mean you're stupid enough to value an extension in the conceptual knowledge of your existence. And how would you weed out the competent depressed suicidal people from the ones that could lose it at the wrong point?
Everybody has their own philosophy I guess; I think that the conceptual knowledge others have of my existence is pretty much the only real thing about me. Anyway, what about altruism? There's a hundred thousand American troops sitting in a foreign desert right now willing to risk their lives for their odd idea of freedom and a couple thousand guys lined up against them who are perfectly willing to die for their cause. I'd say that the continued existance of our civilization is an idea that a lot of people would be willing to back up with their lives. Hell, think of the Tommies, Anzacs and Canadians going over the top at 3rd Ypres. After two months of the worst hell imaginable they all knew what it meant but they went over anyways and for no more than a sense of duty to their Empire and their comrades. The bare bones fact is that people of our species are willing to die for a cause.
And how would you weed out the competent depressed suicidal people from the ones that could lose it at the wrong point? To me, the answer would be to recruit from the family types. But try $50 mil (EURO)/family.
Done, 500 million would be a pretty small part of the overall bill. You might be right about the family thing but that's why they have psychologists.
No, try 100% probability of dying. No return vehicle, not enough oxygen/food/water.
Works for me. Everybody dies, is there a better way of doing it than helping to save your entire civilization? And don't give me some crap about doing it in bed at 100 since the whole point of this is that if nobody goes then the odds of that happening become substantially reduced.
I guess they could send robots or something...that would be an interesting bit of risk assessment, whether it's better to save mass and send robots which might fail or lift up a bunch of meat-sacs with their lifesupport systems an hope they'll do a better job. I bet in the event of this ever coming to pass they run parallel development streams since that's not the kind of call you want to be wrong about.
Slashdot Mirror
So if a technology doesn't work right now for everybody we should abandon it? This might be the wrong website for such a position. Teslas with autodrive are expensive now but the same has been true of every life-saving technological improvement at some point. In the late 70s early 80s would you have said "These ABS systems only benefit the rich. Fukkit and redirect the money to better drinking water"? That technology saves a ton of lives now. It's not Elon Musk's job to provide and legislate universal helmet access. If you think it is then I suggest that instead of posting stuff on the internet your time would be better spent raising money for more helmets.
If you want someone to understand your meaning unambiguously across multiple platforms why not try grouping the subset of emojis call "text" together into repeatable and recognizable patterns called "words"?
If I'm depending on the ability of someone else's software to properly render my high-fiving cats (or whatever) and the fact that one cat turns out to have different whiskers than I intended means that people go to the wrong restaurant I'm probably "communicating" incorrectly.
Also known to be bearish on surface ice.
An example of loony was Al Gore claiming in 2005 sea levels would rise by a meter or more in 10 years unless we did what he told us and made him a billionaire.
You live in a very interesting parallel universe. Can you share more of your alternate history? It sounds fascinating and definitely an example of loony.
Wow....I read that headline too fast and it came out "Ancient Robot Wars Programmed by Pope" which, frankly, would have been a pretty interesting story. I'm disappointed now.
-Pinkoir
Would a book by the Marquis de Sade qualify as violent pornography? I remember that my high-school library had a copy of one of his books. I recall the imagery as being quite violent and there was certainly sex involved so I have the feeling it's violent pornography. Someone better call all the libraries so they can burn their illegal books before someone has a chance to read one and get some double-plus ungood ideas.
Isn't this a good sign that we're already a long way down the slippery slope? Rape is illegal. Assault is illegal. Surely violent pornography involves consensual acts otherwise it would be one of those two things? Why should posession of imagry of people engaged in consensual acts be illegal?
I'd say "I'm glad don't live in the UK" but I think the number of countries that remeber the concept of "Freedom" is diminishing so fast that by the time I finished saying it I'd already be living in the equivalent.
-Pinkoir
For those who are utterly tired of WoW and wish not to hear any more about it try reading this link instead. It's about the upcoming "Kali" expansion to CCP's EVE-Online. A game that actually gets better the more you play it. Who could have thought?
-Pinkoir
It's understandable that you gave up on EVE. Unlike most massives the content is heavily loaded towards the more advanced characters. I've never played WoW but I've heard from many people how it's lots of fun until they hit 50 and then it sucks. EVE is exactly the opposite in that the more time you have in the more options and opportunities open up before you. I've been playing EVE for 3 years now and I still haven't tapped out all the content because every 8 months or so they add a new level of complexity to the game (for free of course). When Kali launches there will be a whole new range of PvP interactions and PvE complexity. That being said for the new player with no friends in-game it can be quite daunting and there are no manuals to tell you how flipping awesome it gets once you've put in some time. If you want to know more PM me, I try not to boost EVE too much on /. because the more people who play the more the economy risks getting foobed by RL money makers.
-Pinkoir
At least CCP is privately held and so is slightly more difficult to aquire. I have faith that the people who started CCP and who have built it up love it enough to want to keep it themselves. My evidence for this is that CCP actually seems to give a damn about customer relations and the player experience.
Keep in mind that the guys at the top of CCP are the same guys who as MMO enthusiasts decided to make their own back in the day so they have a very real sense of personal ownership. With a very stable cashflow the only speck of worry on the horizon is the launching of the Asian server. But it seems like they have enough cash to set that up without being forced to go public to raise funds.
-Pinkoir
All good but for one thing. A large number of the species going extinct these days are not doing so as a result of Natural Selection wher-in they are out-competed and replaced in an ecological niche by some fitter successor. They are being killed off by us as we carpet-bomb the ecology. We don't replace any of the things we kill off (except for the large predators we offed early on in our rise to bad-assitude). Thus we are not a happy part of the happy circle of life. We're not pruning the evolutionary tree; we're chopping it down. -Pinkoir
I'll tell you why EVE won for favorite game over a title which has about 100 times more subscribers. It's the endgame. All over the net you see people talking about the Lv60 cap and the grinding to get top level gear. I've been playing EVE since a month after launch and I am nowhere near any kind of level cap. That's because there isn't one. Because there aren't any levels. I admit I haven't played WoW but it seems like it has the same failing as in other titles I've played where once you cap-out there really isn't anything to do except engage in some relatively pointless PvP. In EVE the more skilled your character gets the richer your experience becomes because the endgame isn't against some bajillion-person raid instance but against the rest of the playerbase. In EVE it is the players themselves who are developing the storyline through the alliance conflicts and with the addition of even more complex levels of play-controlled structures in the (free) cold-war and red-moon-rising expansions this empire vs empire interaction becomes just that much more meaningful. I think the fact that everybody lives in the same universe is a great aid to this. In addition, PvP has real impact because you can actually lose substantial virtual assets (both "material" and political) on failure as opposed to games like GW where there are no negative consequences for loss at all.
:) AWM is on the move again and we're always looking for new recruits.
Anyway, if you like rewarding PvP and haven't played EVE yet you should really try it out. And if you do drop me a line in-game
-Pinkoir
I'm not sure I'd be smiling as much as Bill is if Bono were standing between me and my wife with such a smug look on his face.
-Pinkoir
Now let's all go build a Mega-Blok castle on Hans Island and really teach those bastards a lesson.
As an aside, since they are made in Montreal would they be Mega-Blok Quebecois? And if so is it ironic or paradoxical that separatist cubes would be specifically designed to stick together with things.
-Pinkoir
I refer to much greater market penetration of higher-tech products such as HID front-lighting and LED signal lighting as well as the adoption of advanced systems such as AFS and bend lighting. And for what it's worth I'm not European; I personally prefer the macho NA headlamp beam-pattern to the wussy don't-hurt-anybody-else European one but there is no doubt in my mind that the NA regulatory system is falling behind the rest of the world in this area.
-Pinkoir
When LED headlights are ready for market I'm sure the auto industry lobbyists will see to it they are approved.
IAAAIL (sort of) and the way things are going it ain't gonna happen. LED headlamps are legal in the US right now but only in a crippled form where the whole thing has to be sealed up and replaced as a complete unit. The technology in Europe will be "freer" (but not as in beer you can be damned sure).
Oh, and European headlamps are waaaaaay less glaring in general than North American ones. Not the OEM's fault if end-users are tools who can't properly adjust their equipment
-Pinkoir
I think UN control of anything technological will fail. They take far too long to make up their minds, so any technological standards that need to be implemented will be agreed upon when they are obsolete
This isn't true. Take the example of high-tech automobile headlamps. The UN body responsible for global headlamp regulations (GRE) is very close to finishing rules that will allow for LED headlamps. NHTSA, which does the same thing in the US has completely given up on making _any_ LED regulations for the forseable future because it's so hard to get safety related stuff through congress. In this case the UN is far ahead of the US in technical rule-making and you can see evidence of this in the relative technology contents of a typical American vehicle and a typical European vehicle.
-Pinkoir
A similar thing occurs with wasp larvae and spiders. The spider basically flips out under the control of the larva's venom and spins a web unlike anything it would normal have spun but which has a little protective pouch. The spider would then go into the pouch and wait until the larva kills it at which point it would be eaten. Here's a link to the abstract at nature.com for anybody who has a subscription there.
-Pinkoir
I think my alltime favorite game music is the Dungeon music from Ultima VI. I figured out how to play the melody on the piano and pissed off my Mom by playing it all the time. Anybody know where a torrent of such a thing would exist? I feel in the mood for some nostalgia.
-Pinkoir
Can anybody tell me why Games Workshop thinks a Warhammer massive will work when they didn't think so a year and a half ago? Also how much of the initial work done on the first Warhammer game (which sounded pretty frickin' cool to me) will be recycled in this new one? The other one was very different from other massives on the market I'm worried this new one will be a same ol' same ol' WoW knockoff.
-Pinkoir
For what it's worth EVE just put out a new content patch as well. Added a metric fuck-ton of new content including new ship classes, new styles of PvE story-line encounters and some new Player Manufactured stations which will give the already amazing PvP system even more strategic (and yes I mean strategic) depth. The game just flat out owns. And I'm not afraid to say that since it's almost 14-year-old proof. People tired of meaningless arcade PvP in other massives should try out EVE, where your actions actually make a difference.
-Pinkoir
Man I loved that game. Came out at just the right time. I missed many a class chilling with my friends, drinking and playing that game.
To this day I still say "Don't get cocky it's gonna get rocky" when someone at work is taking perhaps a too cavalier attitude towards longterm quality issues. When I try to follow it up with "Time to take it down to the next ya'jocky" I tend to lose them though...
-Pinkoir
I have no idea why parent is modded funny. Hormesis is an acccepted phenomenon.
-Pinkoir
Do you really have a network when all nodes got just got dropped?
Hur hur hur...
-Pinkoir
It sure sounds evil but only in the "Kill as many babies as you can before the cops get you" kind of way. True evil is more subtle. I think the best test for evilness in tetris clones is to see how cruel the clone can be while still making the player think it is not really that bad. After all, people will quit in frustration if the game is too obvious about its malevolence. You want to string them along, slowly ramping up their frustration, giving them the hint of success every once and a while only to tear their souls slowly from their block-addled minds with a perfectly times sequence of S-bricks.
You would test true tetris evilness in an online competition between the various clones. The evilest would be the one which generated the best aggregate of low average scores and high number of games played. That would signify the tetris which was best able to trick players into thinking it wasn't evil.
Please note that I don't advocate actually undtertaking such a foul endevour. The world has enough evil in it already.
-Pinkoir
With six years of time, I could see the world working to relocate all that people before the event
I'm confused. In your earlier post you doubted the ability of governments to effectively coordinate a technical response to the meteor threat but now you seem confident that they could get together to relocate the 250 or so million refugees? You honestly think that that's easier?
It wouldn't be to the end of history. It would be to the end of its significance, basically a few centuries after man has left this star system.
That's a good number of centuries more than the vast majority of us can expect. I may not remember the names of the soldiers of the Light Brigade but I do remember Lord Cardigan, I don't know all the names of the fallen of Bastogne but I do remember that General McAuliffe said "Nuts!", I don't know about the poor saps who died of radiation poisoning making the first A-Bombs but I do remember that Oppenheimer was in charge and while nobody will remember the thousands of engineers, scientists and technicians who work on the anti-asteroid program they sure as hell will remember the names of the people on the ship.
Also, being an A/A does not mean you're stupid enough to value an extension in the conceptual knowledge of your existence. And how would you weed out the competent depressed suicidal people from the ones that could lose it at the wrong point?
Everybody has their own philosophy I guess; I think that the conceptual knowledge others have of my existence is pretty much the only real thing about me. Anyway, what about altruism? There's a hundred thousand American troops sitting in a foreign desert right now willing to risk their lives for their odd idea of freedom and a couple thousand guys lined up against them who are perfectly willing to die for their cause. I'd say that the continued existance of our civilization is an idea that a lot of people would be willing to back up with their lives. Hell, think of the Tommies, Anzacs and Canadians going over the top at 3rd Ypres. After two months of the worst hell imaginable they all knew what it meant but they went over anyways and for no more than a sense of duty to their Empire and their comrades. The bare bones fact is that people of our species are willing to die for a cause.
And how would you weed out the competent depressed suicidal people from the ones that could lose it at the wrong point? To me, the answer would be to recruit from the family types. But try $50 mil (EURO)/family.
Done, 500 million would be a pretty small part of the overall bill. You might be right about the family thing but that's why they have psychologists.
No, try 100% probability of dying. No return vehicle, not enough oxygen/food/water.
Works for me. Everybody dies, is there a better way of doing it than helping to save your entire civilization? And don't give me some crap about doing it in bed at 100 since the whole point of this is that if nobody goes then the odds of that happening become substantially reduced.
I guess they could send robots or something...that would be an interesting bit of risk assessment, whether it's better to save mass and send robots which might fail or lift up a bunch of meat-sacs with their lifesupport systems an hope they'll do a better job. I bet in the event of this ever coming to pass they run parallel development streams since that's not the kind of call you want to be wrong about.
-Pinkoir