1. I don't know where you live, but around here with all the taxes the cigarettes are probably the most expensive imaginable way to get your nicotine fix.
If you're smoking R1, as an extreme example, you're paying 4.4 euro for 1.7mg nicotine total. Or about 2.6 euro per milligram. For other brands of cigarettes, ok, you can get up to 10 times cheaper per mg, but it's still bloody expensive.
I'd think that the expensive patented stuff could gouge you like the medieval tax collectors -- or like HP for ink as a modern day equivalent -- and still be a lot cheaper.
2. You obviously skipped past half the sentence you answer to. The problem with just using the (not so) cheap natural stuff is:
A) it's extremely addictive stuff. And actually the real problem with that isn't the obvious "OMG, it's getting people addicted." It's that, like all physiological addictions:
- you're building resistance to it
- it's moving the baseline state to worse
So soon you'll either need more and more nicotine to actually fix that schizophrenia, or you'll need your regular fixes just to keep yourself at the point where you'd be if you never started with it in the first place. And you'll actually be worse off when you can't get your fix.
B) it creates a bunch of other problems. E.g., that it's a vasoconstrictor (which is actually the root of more smoking-related health problems than the smoke in the lungs), or that it inhibits osteoblasts (so if you treat someone post-menopause generously enough with it, they'll get fractures), etc.
C) nicotine is a poison. It's only safe to use because there's very little in a cigarette, and most of it burns. You're actually getting very little of it in your system. But there just isn't that much margin between that and when things start to get uglier. So especially in view of problem A, you don't want a treatment which will over time escalate dangerously close to the toxic dosage to do anything.
Well, that's sorta what I was wondering about: how far can you go with making it educational, before it ceases to be fun to play at all.
Since we're in a sub-thread about history, history isn't really just about when some fun (at least in the RTS implementation;) battle happened, but even more importantly the historical political and occasionally economic conditions that led to the conflict.
Ok, Agincourt is easy, but let's take Manzikert. The battle itself would be trivial to implement, but the battle itself is really the least interesting there. Byzantium obtained a white peace there, in spite of technically losing the battle badly. But what happened after it, and partially before it, is why it's credited with being the beginning of the end for the Eastern Roman Empire.
Or as another example, take the decline of Rome, through the moving of the capital at Ravena and the final fall to Odoacer. Sure, one can make a great game out of it. Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion focused on that era and was heaps of fun. But it didn't even scratch the surface of how the Western Roman Empire really imploded. In reality, the Barbarians were weaker than the game credits them. It was Romes's own political instability, plagues, etc, that did it in.
How much of that can one pack in a game, and still have people want to play it?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing games as such. It's just that, yes, it seems to me like the best they can do is get someone above the level of the average teenager who didn't pay attention in history class. Better than nothing, to be sure, but still not _that_ great in the education aspect IMHO.
It kinda makes me wonder though if at that point it's really an educational game, or just a fun RTS that's just vaguely historically themed.
E.g., at Agincourt,
- it wasn't on a hill, it was on flat ground. The hill was at Crecy.
- it wasn't just archers. About 1/5 of the English army were dismounted knights functioning as a heavy pikemen in front of the archers. The hail of arrows and the mud were one factor, but without that wall of pikes the French heavy cavalry would have reached the archers and cut them down. With heavy losses, but they would have.
In effect, what really happened was more of a "the knights lost to combined arms" case than "the knights lost to archers."
- the terrain played a more massive part than just the mud. There also was the fact that it was flanked on both sides by heavy woods, which was as good as impenetrable during a battle. (Anyone trying to make their way through it, would have arrived the next day at best.) Which allowed the relatively small number of pikemen to form a phalanx 4 rows deep and still completely prevent access to the archers, as well as be immune to flanking. (When facing lots of cavalry, flanking is your #1 worry. That's what the cavalry is there for.)
Plus, it severely limited how many french could actually get into melee with the English. Even on foot and packed shoulder to shoulder, there seems to have been room for a little over 200 in a line. Which severely blunted the whole numbers advantage of the French. By contemporary French accounts, those in the third row of the attack wave already couldn't use their swords against the English.
Worse yet, the French ended up packed in a tight formation, which is the worst possible kind against missile fire.
On an open hilltop, the story would have been very different.
- the french heavy armour played a much lesser role in their delay. The heaviest armour (chain or plate alike) at the time was about 40 pounds, and it would be almost another 200 years before plate got to be 60 pounds. Compared to the weight of the human and the horse, that was peanuts.
The terrain there was freshly ploughed earth and literally soaked in water. Some people have actually drowned in that mud, which gives an idea of how liquid it was. Even without armour, marching through it would have been a pain.
On the whole, probably the armour still actually helped. Otherwise they'd be dead even sooner.
- it wasn't really "a few" archers. It was 5000 archers, raining a total of 1000 arrows per second upon the enemy. To give you a comparison, it's the equivalent of over a hundred M-60 machineguns on full auto, non-stop. It wasn't just missile fire, it was concentrated missile fire, the kind that would not be seen again until WW1.
Etc.
So basically did that game really teach you much history, or was it just a game? I just have to wonder.
Once something is on Google, the up side is: any computer with internet access can log in and access it. The down side is the same: any computer with internet access can log in and access it.
If something is on your internal network, that already puts a bit of a limit on who can access those files. It's not bulletproof, and you can still get rooted, but it's a limit. The average Tom, Dick and Harry are as good as physically separated from that data, even if they can guess your password.
Once that stuff is on Google, essentially anyone who can guess your password is good to go.
For example, you only need one employee who uses the same password everywhere (it happens more often than you'd think) and has ever shared their home email password with their spouse, or their WoW account with the chinese guy who power-levelled it, or whatever. Or they only need the same password somewhere where you need to guess their mother's maiden name to get that password. (Again, you'd be surprised how many put the real maiden name there.)
Or some passwords are that easy to find out, because they're weak. People use their nickname, or pet's name, or whatnot as passwords all the time.
Some passwords aren't even kept secret. I know the logins for a local hospital _and_ the emergency medical service, without ever having worked there, just because the former was taped to the monitor and the latter was spoken out loud while I was there. And yes, apparently veryone there used the same. So every ex-employee knows those too. Plus any patient who can read or has ears.
So, ok, now you know a name and password for the hospital computers. Now what?
In a traditional IT scenario, they're only accessible from the internal network. Sure, you can try to sneak into a room and use their computer, but you can be caught, so most people won't. Sure, you can try to get them rooted somehow, but again most people wouldn't even know how.
Now move those files on Google, and you have a real extra problem. If that hospital ever moves its data to Google, every single patient who ever read the post-it on a monitor, can try it from their own home. No having to sneak anywhere, no risking that someone walks in on you, no l33t haxxx0r skillz needed. Just point your browser at Google, log in as a doctor, and read the medical data of everyone who ever used that hospital.
So, I'm curious, what did you think the games section was for? Strictly for when Pingus will actually get more than the tutorial levels?
And hasn't the previous content of the games section kinda give you an idea, yet? What did you think all those stories about Eve, WoW, WAR, COH, GTA, and the like were about? About ports to your iPhone?
Basically here's an innovative idea -- and I know it might sound crazy, but give it a thought anyway -- just don't read a story about games, if you're not interested in games. Sometimes the rest of the world is as insensitive as to not filter out the exact stories that Your Highness doesn't want to read. But you can take matters in your own hands and, here comes another crazy idea, just don't click on a link that's clearly about The Sims 3 if you don't want to read about The Sims 3. I know, crazy stuff. But wait, maybe you mis-clicked and now you're trapped in a The Sims 3 thread. Here comes the really crazy stuff: see that Back button in the browser? It takes less time to click it than to whine about why a TS3 story is on Slashdot. Yeah, it blew my mind too when I found out about that button;)
Well, someone tricked me into thinking it's got stuff that's actually interesting for nerds. Oh, wait... you didn't mean the trap of reading Slashdot, did you?;)
This is just a simple way for geeks to get back their lunch money.
It would be if the kind of person who took your lunch money were actually into willy waving about their score in a console game.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a gamer. I like games a lot.
But the chances you'd compete against the kind of person who ostracized you for being a computer nerd are slim to nil. They were against you because they weren't like you, and didn't understand that obsession with computers. It's a pipe dream that some day they'll see the light and come groveling to learn the secret Tetris-fu from you.
Even _if_ they started playing online stuff, it will be casual-gamer-friendly stuff that they can dump one hour into after they watched the news, put their kids to bed or whatnot. You'll find them in the likes of WoW or some Wii sports game, not in Halo. And they're not going to bet money to measure their penis size by some online score, against some 12 year olds who have nothing else to do for 8 hours a day.
You're simply most likely to play against other geeks, and lose your money to someone else who thinks he's vindicating himself for playing in mom's basement when other teenagers were going on dates.
And this is funny because...? Oh, right, because you've transplanted the current strain of American paranoia into a completely different part of the world to make a lame dig using current context. Bah. Go start a war or something.
I see. So you're the appointed joke police and platinum standard of what every human on the planet should find funny, right? I mean, it can't possibly be that someone else has different tastes in jokes that you do, right?;)
Why is this modded "+4, Funny" instead of "-1, Untactfully Racist" ?
Really? Racist? Wasn't that supposed to be about race instead of about a <insert holy book>-thumping fundamentalist sect?
There is nothing racial about the burqa. There isn't even anything muslim about them. They're the product of one single reactionary sect pining for the good ol' 7'th century days.
And frankly, I see no reason to be tactful about a group which routinely violates human rights and treats their women like slaves.
Briefly: sorry, I never bought into the moral relativism idea. I'll be sensitive about their culture when it stops being an excuse for evil.
Somewhere, someone was either very desperate, brave, stupid or all of the above to be getting busy with a gorilla.
That or it was from a country where the most you'll see of your bride before you've bought it, or of anyone else's wife at all, is akin to a gant cloth dildo with a small netted slit at eye level. So, you know, you could pay four camels to Abdul for his daughter, and maybe she'll be as ugly as the last one when you take the burqa off, or you could get a gorilla for free and you know what you're getting;)
And if you keep it clothed, nobody would probably even notice. I mean, I can just see it:
Achmed: "Say, Hassan, did your wives just go 'ook, ook'?" Hassan: "Erm, they're foreign. Haven't learned the language yet." Achmed: "And by Allah, look at that one. She's broader shouldered than the two of us together." Hassan: "Yeah, I bought me big wife so she can bear me lots of children. Ha ha." Achmed: "If you say so..."
Come to think of it, it would make a good marketing slogan: Burqas, helping ugly chicks get laid wherever alcohol is forbidden;)
After seeing yet another batch of twits essentially tell me that I have some psychological problems if I'm not awed by their toy? Even the summary essentially plays armchair shrink. Yes, you could say I'm a tad miffed by now. Like any other fanboyism, it's already got old.
True, you have a point. I for one am for anything which lets people compete in the Darwin Awards. Strap some incendiary chinese batteries and a stick of TNT on it, and it'll have my support. I still wouldn't buy one, but anyone who does would have all my heartfelt encouragement to continue using it;)
Well, to get back on topic, though, I think there is one thing which would go a longer way to end the derision: get the users to jolly well stop trying to tell everyone else that, (A) they're so cool because of that toy, we just don't want to admit it, and (B) that it's somehow about money envy after all, i.e., that it really works as conspicuous consumption, and (C) that we all have some deep psychological problems if we're not awed by their toy.
Seriously, I don't even see the thing as about the Segway itself. Sure, most of us think it's a useless toy, but we're nerds, we understand buying useless high-tech toys. Way I see it, the derision is really about the users. There's no shortage of trying simply too hard to convince the rest of us that we really somehow envy them for that toy. And that creates the same derision any other fanboys get.
No. I think most people resent Segway owners because they can _afford_ a multi-thousand dollar replacement that the rest of us poor suckers have to earn using the old left-foot->right-foot technique.
If Segway's had a reasonable cost that resentment would go away really quick.
Except we're on Slashdot, not on some inner city single black moms site. (No offense to those, just using them as an example of someone who actually has financial problems.) We have plenty of people here who were arguing against taxing incomes over 250k a year because it would personally affect them.
Trust me, there are plenty of us who could afford a Segway without problems. Not to brag, but I could buy one out of my day-to-day account at the moment, no need to even withdraw from the savings account or cancel any investments.
There also are a lot of us around who are into new gizmos and gadgets just because they're new gizmos and gadgets.
When the combination of the two tells you that they see no point in a Segway, then maybe, just maybe, and I know it might sound crazy, they just don't see the point of a Segway.
What for? It doesn't really go any faster than I can walk, it doesn't even go everywhere where I can walk, it's nowhere as maneuverable on a crowded sidewalk as walking (wake me up when it can just sidestep to get out of the way of someone running), it's extra effort to haul it to where it can be recharged after each trip (it can't go up or down stairs), it takes up space in your trunk if you want to drive anywhere and still use it there (it's not like you can just commute on it), etc. And most importantly, standing for long periods of time is actually less comfortable than walking.
Plus, you need _some_ movement or you'll get thrombosis sooner or later, and/or end up looking like a beached whale. So the few calories you save by just standing on it, it's calories you'll have to exercise to shed later. You haven't actually saved any effort, you just did the opposite of smart time management. Instead of profiting from that short walk to the groceries store to also get some minimal exercise out of it, you've just created the case for allocating more time for it later. It's a net loss.
In Las Vegas fat or lazy people can rent sit-n-go scooters to cart them around the casino because walking would be too much effort. And at that point, you're doing less work than someone standing and only slightly more work than someone sitting in a chair. It's popular because it's cheap, and people have absolutely no shame in using them if they're just lazy.
Yes, but it's sit-n-go. At least it's more comfortable than walking, if you're tired or lazy, whereas standing isn't. Do you understand that point? It doesn't even have that saving grace.
And interesting theory that there are deep psychological issues but way off the mark. They just cost too much. If they were $500 everyone would have one.
Or maybe the only ones with deep psychological problems are the twits who need to project them on everyone who isn't awed by their conspicuous consumption.
In fact, I suspect that if segways did cost only 500, they'd actually lose sales, because then those twits would need something else to say, "look at what I can afford."
But it can't copy our illogical decisions. Because our Illogical decisions are just based on poor logic.
You can program a computer to make a mistake - but its not the same.
Actually, I find that human broken logic is quite well studied by now. For example, there are a finite number of fallacies that get reused all over the place.
E.g., it should be quite easy to program an AI that commits "post hoc ergo propter hoc" or the closely related "cum hoc ergo propter hoc". All it would have to do is be able to observe and notice sequence or correlation. From there it will commit those two fallacies like a pro. It too can conclude that the sun rises because the cock crowed just before it:P
Then there's the very common human problem of selective confirmation. Again, it's actually pretty trivial to program it. You just have to filter out some of the observations if they don't fit the already drawn conclusions.
But that brings me to actually _the_ greatest cause of poor logic in humans: wanting some conclusion to be true (e.g., because of a cognitive dissonance) and working backwards to some rationale to support it. Most humans don't actually have a problem with just following some premises to a conclusion. Where they get caught in their broken logic is when they work backwards, from "I want a pony" to what rationale could I present that would have "you must buy me a pony" as a conclusion.
This is IMHO neat because it would tell the AI when to use those fallacies realistically.
As an example, let's imagine an NPC who literally wants a pony. She's a little girl. "Mom should buy me a pony" is the given conclusion she must reach with her logic. There are many ways one can justify that, but after a dice toss, we'll go for "it's an investment in the future and practically pays for itself." But how to support that? Well, let's do a "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" and correlate that all rich people have a horse, therefore they're rich because of the horse. Hence a pony would ensure her a brighter future too. Let's even add an appeal to emotion and go "and what loving mom wouldn't want that for her daughter?" It's not outright spelled out, but the implication is there. At this point maybe we have a bit of space left in the dialog or quest text, so we could backtrack a bit and spice it up with an argumentum ad populum, like, say, "all my friends like ponies, which shows that all kids should get one." Not the strongest form of that argument, but we are talking about a child, so it fits the character.
Or various other ways. Think of those fallacies as a Lego or Tetris set of pieces. You start from your conclusion and connect, connect, connect.
Of course, if it's only fallacies it gets predictable, so we'll mix the bunch of proper inferrence modes in the allowed pieces too. Keeps the user on his/her toes.
But do they? A lot in the difference in costs is past the retirement age. If you're telling me that someone sitting on his porch yelling at kids to get off his lawn is actually contributing hundreds of thousands to society, I'll have to ask: in what way? Or since a cost that was mentioned were anti-dementia drugs in the old age, how/what do you figure someone with MS or Alzheimer's contributes to society?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing to kill them or anything. But at least let's stop pretending that they totally contribute more than the cost of that medicine.
Ok, I must apologize in any case. My tone was out of line and the assumption was unwarranted.
It's just that I've heard the "I can tell them to stop because it's my money" argument before, about everything from smoking to abortions, that I am a bit irked by it by now.
But of course it doesn't justify my lashing out at innocents. Sorry.
Ultimately, the thin and healthy group cost the most, about $417,000, from age 20 on.
The cost of care for obese people was $371,000, and for smokers, about $326,000.
And that's just the costs. The smokers and the obese are simply cheaper. Even without the other factors, repeat after me, an obese smoker costs less than a thin and healthy person.
It doesn't even yet include the pension contributions (which someone who dies earlier will benefit less from), money given to the government in tobacco taxes and VAT (without smokers, to get the same services from the government you might have to pay more in taxes), etc.
Actually, last I've seen an actual study of healthcare costs, the smokers and the obese actually pay for everyone else's healthcare. Yeah, they get sick earlier, but that's actually the point. They die quicker than they'd get to use their contribution to healthcare, and in many cases to the pension fund too.
Smokers get some cancer, get some chemotherapy or radiotherapy for months or a couple of years tops, then they die. End of expense, and it wasn't even the most expensive medication to start with.
They and the obese, occasionally get a heart attack or stroke, a lot just die right there. End of story, no medical expenses.
Etc.
And an obese smoker, now that's someone who really gets shafted out of their contribution to that universal healthcare and is paying a pension contribution for nothing.
The ones who actually cost healthcare a lot more money than they contributed, are those who live until 90 years old, and were on expensive anti-Alzheimer's medication or the like ever since they were 65.
So please spare me the BS pretense that you somehow subsidize those. They're the ones who subsidize you. And it already is a non-existent moral ground to complain about society's money going to them, when really nobody else actually gives them a buck. But it's already surrealistic to complain about paying money for them, when actually it's them paying your medical cares. Have a bit of decency, will ya?
I used to make the same argument, but it seems to me like that isn't true any more.
Ever since they got hard drives, console games routinely get installed to hard drive first. I.e., there goes that "just want to put the disk in and play." It's only true in the same way as for a PC game.
Second, console games routinely get patches too nowadays.
Third, since a heck of a lot of games are launched for both PC and consoles nowadays... if you think your XBox copy of Fallout 3 is somehow magically better quality than the PC version, no offense, but then I have some logging rights in Sahara to sell. They're the same codebase, with the same bugs, and if you're lucky they'll get the same patches.
Fourth, you may not have heard about it, but PC drivers have gotten a lot more stable in the meantime. The days when you had to muck with different driver versions for different games are over, and have been over for some years now. E.g., I don't think I actually installed any new drivers on my gaming rig since I put the GTX 290 graphics card in it. (And I'm not saying that in the sense that I had to do it with the old ATI card either, but merely that that change was a point where I had to install a new driver.) I've yet to see any game which shits itself because I don't have the latest beta +0.0.0.1 driver release.
Fifth, you can hook a PC to a big screen TV or beamer too, if that's what floats your boat. TV out connectors have been pretty much standard for some years.
Sixth, it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it. At least that's what my SO keeps telling me;) Ok, joke aside, what matters isn't how big your screen is (except maybe for willy-waving rights), but how much of your FOV it feels. A 20" TFT screen at 3 ft distance fills just as much of your FOV as a 60" screen at 9 ft distance. Things look exactly as big. It's elementary geometry, see?
Slashdot Mirror
_If_ a non-addictive synthetic painkiller existed that worked just as well, then they wouldn't get the addictive opioids either.
1. I don't know where you live, but around here with all the taxes the cigarettes are probably the most expensive imaginable way to get your nicotine fix.
If you're smoking R1, as an extreme example, you're paying 4.4 euro for 1.7mg nicotine total. Or about 2.6 euro per milligram. For other brands of cigarettes, ok, you can get up to 10 times cheaper per mg, but it's still bloody expensive.
I'd think that the expensive patented stuff could gouge you like the medieval tax collectors -- or like HP for ink as a modern day equivalent -- and still be a lot cheaper.
2. You obviously skipped past half the sentence you answer to. The problem with just using the (not so) cheap natural stuff is:
A) it's extremely addictive stuff. And actually the real problem with that isn't the obvious "OMG, it's getting people addicted." It's that, like all physiological addictions:
- you're building resistance to it
- it's moving the baseline state to worse
So soon you'll either need more and more nicotine to actually fix that schizophrenia, or you'll need your regular fixes just to keep yourself at the point where you'd be if you never started with it in the first place. And you'll actually be worse off when you can't get your fix.
B) it creates a bunch of other problems. E.g., that it's a vasoconstrictor (which is actually the root of more smoking-related health problems than the smoke in the lungs), or that it inhibits osteoblasts (so if you treat someone post-menopause generously enough with it, they'll get fractures), etc.
C) nicotine is a poison. It's only safe to use because there's very little in a cigarette, and most of it burns. You're actually getting very little of it in your system. But there just isn't that much margin between that and when things start to get uglier. So especially in view of problem A, you don't want a treatment which will over time escalate dangerously close to the toxic dosage to do anything.
Obviously so did porn. Not sure if "scratch" is the right word there, though ;)
Well, that's sorta what I was wondering about: how far can you go with making it educational, before it ceases to be fun to play at all.
Since we're in a sub-thread about history, history isn't really just about when some fun (at least in the RTS implementation;) battle happened, but even more importantly the historical political and occasionally economic conditions that led to the conflict.
Ok, Agincourt is easy, but let's take Manzikert. The battle itself would be trivial to implement, but the battle itself is really the least interesting there. Byzantium obtained a white peace there, in spite of technically losing the battle badly. But what happened after it, and partially before it, is why it's credited with being the beginning of the end for the Eastern Roman Empire.
Or as another example, take the decline of Rome, through the moving of the capital at Ravena and the final fall to Odoacer. Sure, one can make a great game out of it. Rome Total War: Barbarian Invasion focused on that era and was heaps of fun. But it didn't even scratch the surface of how the Western Roman Empire really imploded. In reality, the Barbarians were weaker than the game credits them. It was Romes's own political instability, plagues, etc, that did it in.
How much of that can one pack in a game, and still have people want to play it?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing games as such. It's just that, yes, it seems to me like the best they can do is get someone above the level of the average teenager who didn't pay attention in history class. Better than nothing, to be sure, but still not _that_ great in the education aspect IMHO.
It kinda makes me wonder though if at that point it's really an educational game, or just a fun RTS that's just vaguely historically themed.
E.g., at Agincourt,
- it wasn't on a hill, it was on flat ground. The hill was at Crecy.
- it wasn't just archers. About 1/5 of the English army were dismounted knights functioning as a heavy pikemen in front of the archers. The hail of arrows and the mud were one factor, but without that wall of pikes the French heavy cavalry would have reached the archers and cut them down. With heavy losses, but they would have.
In effect, what really happened was more of a "the knights lost to combined arms" case than "the knights lost to archers."
- the terrain played a more massive part than just the mud. There also was the fact that it was flanked on both sides by heavy woods, which was as good as impenetrable during a battle. (Anyone trying to make their way through it, would have arrived the next day at best.) Which allowed the relatively small number of pikemen to form a phalanx 4 rows deep and still completely prevent access to the archers, as well as be immune to flanking. (When facing lots of cavalry, flanking is your #1 worry. That's what the cavalry is there for.)
Plus, it severely limited how many french could actually get into melee with the English. Even on foot and packed shoulder to shoulder, there seems to have been room for a little over 200 in a line. Which severely blunted the whole numbers advantage of the French. By contemporary French accounts, those in the third row of the attack wave already couldn't use their swords against the English.
Worse yet, the French ended up packed in a tight formation, which is the worst possible kind against missile fire.
On an open hilltop, the story would have been very different.
- the french heavy armour played a much lesser role in their delay. The heaviest armour (chain or plate alike) at the time was about 40 pounds, and it would be almost another 200 years before plate got to be 60 pounds. Compared to the weight of the human and the horse, that was peanuts.
The terrain there was freshly ploughed earth and literally soaked in water. Some people have actually drowned in that mud, which gives an idea of how liquid it was. Even without armour, marching through it would have been a pain.
On the whole, probably the armour still actually helped. Otherwise they'd be dead even sooner.
- it wasn't really "a few" archers. It was 5000 archers, raining a total of 1000 arrows per second upon the enemy. To give you a comparison, it's the equivalent of over a hundred M-60 machineguns on full auto, non-stop. It wasn't just missile fire, it was concentrated missile fire, the kind that would not be seen again until WW1.
Etc.
So basically did that game really teach you much history, or was it just a game? I just have to wonder.
I can testify that that's what my mom and dad did. Quite literally.
Once something is on Google, the up side is: any computer with internet access can log in and access it. The down side is the same: any computer with internet access can log in and access it.
If something is on your internal network, that already puts a bit of a limit on who can access those files. It's not bulletproof, and you can still get rooted, but it's a limit. The average Tom, Dick and Harry are as good as physically separated from that data, even if they can guess your password.
Once that stuff is on Google, essentially anyone who can guess your password is good to go.
For example, you only need one employee who uses the same password everywhere (it happens more often than you'd think) and has ever shared their home email password with their spouse, or their WoW account with the chinese guy who power-levelled it, or whatever. Or they only need the same password somewhere where you need to guess their mother's maiden name to get that password. (Again, you'd be surprised how many put the real maiden name there.)
Or some passwords are that easy to find out, because they're weak. People use their nickname, or pet's name, or whatnot as passwords all the time.
Some passwords aren't even kept secret. I know the logins for a local hospital _and_ the emergency medical service, without ever having worked there, just because the former was taped to the monitor and the latter was spoken out loud while I was there. And yes, apparently veryone there used the same. So every ex-employee knows those too. Plus any patient who can read or has ears.
So, ok, now you know a name and password for the hospital computers. Now what?
In a traditional IT scenario, they're only accessible from the internal network. Sure, you can try to sneak into a room and use their computer, but you can be caught, so most people won't. Sure, you can try to get them rooted somehow, but again most people wouldn't even know how.
Now move those files on Google, and you have a real extra problem. If that hospital ever moves its data to Google, every single patient who ever read the post-it on a monitor, can try it from their own home. No having to sneak anywhere, no risking that someone walks in on you, no l33t haxxx0r skillz needed. Just point your browser at Google, log in as a doctor, and read the medical data of everyone who ever used that hospital.
So, I'm curious, what did you think the games section was for? Strictly for when Pingus will actually get more than the tutorial levels?
And hasn't the previous content of the games section kinda give you an idea, yet? What did you think all those stories about Eve, WoW, WAR, COH, GTA, and the like were about? About ports to your iPhone?
Basically here's an innovative idea -- and I know it might sound crazy, but give it a thought anyway -- just don't read a story about games, if you're not interested in games. Sometimes the rest of the world is as insensitive as to not filter out the exact stories that Your Highness doesn't want to read. But you can take matters in your own hands and, here comes another crazy idea, just don't click on a link that's clearly about The Sims 3 if you don't want to read about The Sims 3. I know, crazy stuff. But wait, maybe you mis-clicked and now you're trapped in a The Sims 3 thread. Here comes the really crazy stuff: see that Back button in the browser? It takes less time to click it than to whine about why a TS3 story is on Slashdot. Yeah, it blew my mind too when I found out about that button ;)
Well, someone tricked me into thinking it's got stuff that's actually interesting for nerds. Oh, wait... you didn't mean the trap of reading Slashdot, did you? ;)
Actually, it kinda reminds me of Fargo's MMO chess idea :P
Dude, again, it's a religious sect, not a race.
It would be if the kind of person who took your lunch money were actually into willy waving about their score in a console game.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a gamer. I like games a lot.
But the chances you'd compete against the kind of person who ostracized you for being a computer nerd are slim to nil. They were against you because they weren't like you, and didn't understand that obsession with computers. It's a pipe dream that some day they'll see the light and come groveling to learn the secret Tetris-fu from you.
Even _if_ they started playing online stuff, it will be casual-gamer-friendly stuff that they can dump one hour into after they watched the news, put their kids to bed or whatnot. You'll find them in the likes of WoW or some Wii sports game, not in Halo. And they're not going to bet money to measure their penis size by some online score, against some 12 year olds who have nothing else to do for 8 hours a day.
You're simply most likely to play against other geeks, and lose your money to someone else who thinks he's vindicating himself for playing in mom's basement when other teenagers were going on dates.
I see. So you're the appointed joke police and platinum standard of what every human on the planet should find funny, right? I mean, it can't possibly be that someone else has different tastes in jokes that you do, right? ;)
Now, now... as long as it was between consenting adults, there's no need to be prudes about it ;)
Really? Racist? Wasn't that supposed to be about race instead of about a <insert holy book>-thumping fundamentalist sect?
There is nothing racial about the burqa. There isn't even anything muslim about them. They're the product of one single reactionary sect pining for the good ol' 7'th century days.
And frankly, I see no reason to be tactful about a group which routinely violates human rights and treats their women like slaves.
Briefly: sorry, I never bought into the moral relativism idea. I'll be sensitive about their culture when it stops being an excuse for evil.
That or it was from a country where the most you'll see of your bride before you've bought it, or of anyone else's wife at all, is akin to a gant cloth dildo with a small netted slit at eye level. So, you know, you could pay four camels to Abdul for his daughter, and maybe she'll be as ugly as the last one when you take the burqa off, or you could get a gorilla for free and you know what you're getting ;)
And if you keep it clothed, nobody would probably even notice. I mean, I can just see it:
Achmed: "Say, Hassan, did your wives just go 'ook, ook'?"
Hassan: "Erm, they're foreign. Haven't learned the language yet."
Achmed: "And by Allah, look at that one. She's broader shouldered than the two of us together."
Hassan: "Yeah, I bought me big wife so she can bear me lots of children. Ha ha."
Achmed: "If you say so..."
Come to think of it, it would make a good marketing slogan: Burqas, helping ugly chicks get laid wherever alcohol is forbidden ;)
After seeing yet another batch of twits essentially tell me that I have some psychological problems if I'm not awed by their toy? Even the summary essentially plays armchair shrink. Yes, you could say I'm a tad miffed by now. Like any other fanboyism, it's already got old.
True, you have a point. I for one am for anything which lets people compete in the Darwin Awards. Strap some incendiary chinese batteries and a stick of TNT on it, and it'll have my support. I still wouldn't buy one, but anyone who does would have all my heartfelt encouragement to continue using it ;)
Well, to get back on topic, though, I think there is one thing which would go a longer way to end the derision: get the users to jolly well stop trying to tell everyone else that, (A) they're so cool because of that toy, we just don't want to admit it, and (B) that it's somehow about money envy after all, i.e., that it really works as conspicuous consumption, and (C) that we all have some deep psychological problems if we're not awed by their toy.
Seriously, I don't even see the thing as about the Segway itself. Sure, most of us think it's a useless toy, but we're nerds, we understand buying useless high-tech toys. Way I see it, the derision is really about the users. There's no shortage of trying simply too hard to convince the rest of us that we really somehow envy them for that toy. And that creates the same derision any other fanboys get.
Except we're on Slashdot, not on some inner city single black moms site. (No offense to those, just using them as an example of someone who actually has financial problems.) We have plenty of people here who were arguing against taxing incomes over 250k a year because it would personally affect them.
Trust me, there are plenty of us who could afford a Segway without problems. Not to brag, but I could buy one out of my day-to-day account at the moment, no need to even withdraw from the savings account or cancel any investments.
There also are a lot of us around who are into new gizmos and gadgets just because they're new gizmos and gadgets.
When the combination of the two tells you that they see no point in a Segway, then maybe, just maybe, and I know it might sound crazy, they just don't see the point of a Segway.
What for? It doesn't really go any faster than I can walk, it doesn't even go everywhere where I can walk, it's nowhere as maneuverable on a crowded sidewalk as walking (wake me up when it can just sidestep to get out of the way of someone running), it's extra effort to haul it to where it can be recharged after each trip (it can't go up or down stairs), it takes up space in your trunk if you want to drive anywhere and still use it there (it's not like you can just commute on it), etc. And most importantly, standing for long periods of time is actually less comfortable than walking.
Plus, you need _some_ movement or you'll get thrombosis sooner or later, and/or end up looking like a beached whale. So the few calories you save by just standing on it, it's calories you'll have to exercise to shed later. You haven't actually saved any effort, you just did the opposite of smart time management. Instead of profiting from that short walk to the groceries store to also get some minimal exercise out of it, you've just created the case for allocating more time for it later. It's a net loss.
Yes, but it's sit-n-go. At least it's more comfortable than walking, if you're tired or lazy, whereas standing isn't. Do you understand that point? It doesn't even have that saving grace.
Or maybe the only ones with deep psychological problems are the twits who need to project them on everyone who isn't awed by their conspicuous consumption.
In fact, I suspect that if segways did cost only 500, they'd actually lose sales, because then those twits would need something else to say, "look at what I can afford."
But do they? A lot in the difference in costs is past the retirement age. If you're telling me that someone sitting on his porch yelling at kids to get off his lawn is actually contributing hundreds of thousands to society, I'll have to ask: in what way? Or since a cost that was mentioned were anti-dementia drugs in the old age, how/what do you figure someone with MS or Alzheimer's contributes to society?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not proposing to kill them or anything. But at least let's stop pretending that they totally contribute more than the cost of that medicine.
Ok, I must apologize in any case. My tone was out of line and the assumption was unwarranted.
It's just that I've heard the "I can tell them to stop because it's my money" argument before, about everything from smoking to abortions, that I am a bit irked by it by now.
But of course it doesn't justify my lashing out at innocents. Sorry.
So, your father is a doctor and somehow he's a bigger authority than those actually paying for those treatments?
The link has already been provided by an AC above, but for whoever can't be arsed to copy and paste into the browser, here it is as actual link http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht-obese.1.9748884.html?_r=1
To recap, from the article itself:
And that's just the costs. The smokers and the obese are simply cheaper. Even without the other factors, repeat after me, an obese smoker costs less than a thin and healthy person.
It doesn't even yet include the pension contributions (which someone who dies earlier will benefit less from), money given to the government in tobacco taxes and VAT (without smokers, to get the same services from the government you might have to pay more in taxes), etc.
Actually, last I've seen an actual study of healthcare costs, the smokers and the obese actually pay for everyone else's healthcare. Yeah, they get sick earlier, but that's actually the point. They die quicker than they'd get to use their contribution to healthcare, and in many cases to the pension fund too.
Smokers get some cancer, get some chemotherapy or radiotherapy for months or a couple of years tops, then they die. End of expense, and it wasn't even the most expensive medication to start with.
They and the obese, occasionally get a heart attack or stroke, a lot just die right there. End of story, no medical expenses.
Etc.
And an obese smoker, now that's someone who really gets shafted out of their contribution to that universal healthcare and is paying a pension contribution for nothing.
The ones who actually cost healthcare a lot more money than they contributed, are those who live until 90 years old, and were on expensive anti-Alzheimer's medication or the like ever since they were 65.
So please spare me the BS pretense that you somehow subsidize those. They're the ones who subsidize you. And it already is a non-existent moral ground to complain about society's money going to them, when really nobody else actually gives them a buck. But it's already surrealistic to complain about paying money for them, when actually it's them paying your medical cares. Have a bit of decency, will ya?
I used to make the same argument, but it seems to me like that isn't true any more.
Ever since they got hard drives, console games routinely get installed to hard drive first. I.e., there goes that "just want to put the disk in and play." It's only true in the same way as for a PC game.
Second, console games routinely get patches too nowadays.
Third, since a heck of a lot of games are launched for both PC and consoles nowadays... if you think your XBox copy of Fallout 3 is somehow magically better quality than the PC version, no offense, but then I have some logging rights in Sahara to sell. They're the same codebase, with the same bugs, and if you're lucky they'll get the same patches.
Fourth, you may not have heard about it, but PC drivers have gotten a lot more stable in the meantime. The days when you had to muck with different driver versions for different games are over, and have been over for some years now. E.g., I don't think I actually installed any new drivers on my gaming rig since I put the GTX 290 graphics card in it. (And I'm not saying that in the sense that I had to do it with the old ATI card either, but merely that that change was a point where I had to install a new driver.) I've yet to see any game which shits itself because I don't have the latest beta +0.0.0.1 driver release.
Fifth, you can hook a PC to a big screen TV or beamer too, if that's what floats your boat. TV out connectors have been pretty much standard for some years.
Sixth, it's not the size that matters, it's how you use it. At least that's what my SO keeps telling me;) Ok, joke aside, what matters isn't how big your screen is (except maybe for willy-waving rights), but how much of your FOV it feels. A 20" TFT screen at 3 ft distance fills just as much of your FOV as a 60" screen at 9 ft distance. Things look exactly as big. It's elementary geometry, see?