the answer, at least villain-side, could be that one of the debt badges (2nd or 3rd - 1.2 million debt or something obscene) goes toward a +hp accolade. So if the debt forgiving went towards that badge on a high level toon, that would make a pretty big dent towards the badge (~300-500k debt maybe?). Not that it's terribly painful to work off anyways, but there ya go
Heh. The debt badges don't work that way. They don't count debt incurred, they count debt repaid. So if you were after that badge, heh, being forgiven of 300-500k xp in one fell swoop is going to just move you a bit further away from the badge. Now you'll have to go faceplant a few times to get that badge back.
So, hmm, nope, I still don't see that as too abusable.
Until level 10 there is no debt at all, and below 20 or so, debt is a silly joke. Doubly so between levels 10 and 13, which is where people do it the most. (Because at 14, as you know, they get a travel power.) That's why people do that: because it doesn't matter at that level. The first couple of groups in a solo mission will clear that hospital teleport debt.
So now look at the GGP post or so, claiming that people will abuse that debt forgiving. What's the worst that can happen there? That a couple of frustrated newbies will be forgiven of 100xp debt because they hospital-ported from the Hollows?
Well, good, because God knows that the Hollows can be a kick in the nuts when you get a mission at the opposite corner, you're level 12 and your Zero G pack just ran out of fuel. (Though admittedly it was an even bigger pain in the nuts before they introduced the safeguard missions and those temporary travel powers.) You know, whop-de-do, such a game-breaking exploit it will be that someone might actually have fun instead of running through purple trolls and COT.
Or, what, will the level 49's start doing that too now, just to exploit the debt forgiving? Never mind that anything that can kill a level 49 is in PI, and it takes less time to even run with Sprint+Swift to the hospital than to go looking for a group that can kill you, and wait for them to finish the job.
Basically that's all I'm saying: I don't see how that's abusable.
Yes, yes, I know nitpicking at the details is a national sport on Slashdot, but take a pause and think about it a bit. You get to run back to the mission, if you want to continue it, and to roughly where you were when you faceplanted. Because, you know, you have to continue from there. Same thing, whether there's a corpse on the ground or not.
Debt was already capped, so you're not getting that much. Plus for everyone who was at level 50, debt had no effect whatsoever, so, you know, why bother?
And running an xp debt on purpose is a bad idea anyway.
1. It means running up a lot of death, which means a lot of running back to your corpse instead of doing quests and killing NPCs. Plus, it's demoralizing for most people. It's associated with a failure, no matter how minor.
2. Until NCSoft forgives it, you'll get half xp, as the other half goes to paying back the debt.
Planning to faceplant lots just so NCSoft will forgive it, umm, sounds like just about the dumbest thing one could do. You could just finish the quest the old fashioned way in that time, and get more xp in the process.
I just had to go look at the Fusion IO page and their FAQ and... well, let's just say, does anyone have an URL for marketting-bullshit-bingo to English babelfish please?
By the half of the page I had developped an extreme allergy to the word "leverage". Two sentences out of three were just saying that the lever some (supposedly awesome) proprietary technology. And more importantly, I was none the wiser. There wasn't a single sentence that even said what it _does_. What makes that technology so awesome? What's the MTBF? You know, some actual technical data.
The more I think about it, the more I doubt that it was actually a Frequently Asked Questions. More likely just something that a marketter thought up, along the lines of:
Q: Are you awesome? A: Yes, we leverage proprietary technologies to be uber-awesome. We leverage Buzzword(TM) and Uninformative Trademark(TM) and Tech-Sounding-Word-We-Made-Up(R) to be so awesome, that you can't even imagine how awesome we are. And we'll leverage that too. Leverage. Leverage. Leverage.
Q: Does it rock? A: Yes, we leverage proprietary technology that really really rocks. We liberate enterprises from legacy architectures, we're scalable, we put enterprise-level SANs in your palm, we solve world hunger, cure aids, and probably filled your bullshit bingo card already. That's how much we rock.
Q: Will it rock my socks off? A: Yes, our awesome leverage proprietary sock-rocking technology. We're that awesome. And did we mention "leveraging" yet? We leverage a lot.
Not exact quotes, but let's just call it an artist's impression. I haven't heard a more content-free text since someone accidentally sold us 100% tech-illiterate merketers when we thought we wanted a technical workshop.
Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that their engineers probably know their shit. But that's what happens when you leave the FAQ writing to a marketer who doesn't know his arse from his elbow, and obviously think that using enough words will hide the fact that there's no information there.
And just to beat a dead horse some more, what annoys me isn't as much the use of buzzwords, but that they're used to obscure and mis-inform.
E.g., so they say it's "scalable"? How? Your typical motherboard has only one 4x PCI-Express slot, and on half of them it will be under the heatsink of any high end graphics card. So how _do_ you scale there? Throw the card away and buy a bigger one? How's that more scalable than buying a new hard drive? Even if you had more of those slots on some special motherboard, how's that more scalable than buying more hard drives? No, seriously.
E.g., the claim to replace an enterprise SAN and all the infrastructure... is omitting why that infrastructure was there in the first place. If anyone just needed more storage on their local machine, it's trivial to add more than 640 GB hard drives locally for a fraction of the cost. A hard drive, even on a card, is not a SAN replacement.
E.g., video games are hard-drive intensive? No shit? What video games were they playing there? Database Larry Rebuilds The Indexes 3D? Looks to me more like they wrote a list of every single use they could think for a computer, than actually having put some thought into it.
Etc.
Again, I'm willing to give their engineers the benefit of the doubt. I can see why such a card would be nice. Just saying that it would be nice if their good work was presented to the world by someone less blatantly clueless.
Um, Nintendo has won several awards for their Wii marketing.
Which is still not what I meant. Kudos to them, but it can just as well mean that they lie better.
Um, no. They went down for a while, along with other consoles. They are now picking up again. This is normal just before the holiday season. And remember, Wii hadn't had any recent killer games until SMG was released the other day.
Have a look at this graph lemming. In just 4 months, the sales dropped to a quarter. In a period where those other consoles were slowly gaining groud, so don't give me stupid texts about being normal: if it were normal for everyone, you'd see the same dip for the other two.
So, while it still ahead, if you don't see a problem with that... well, I see no point in arguing any further.
The "gimmick" is selling far better than other consoles. If you have to comfort yourself with the fact that Wii doesn't outsell the others by that much, then that speaks volumes about the "gimmick" you are being so hateful about.
And if you need to think anyone who doesn't worship your idol must be hateful and getting some weird joy out of that nose dive, it speaks volumes about you. Believe it or not, lemming, some of us just couldn't care less either way. I'm just looking at that graph as it is, not through wishful thinking goggles.
And the way it looks, it says they have a problem. Objectively. If nothing else because, even if I'm wrong with the extrapolation, others saw the graph too and did the same extrapolation. Some devs are already talking about jumping ship if that continues. There's even been at least one story even on Slashdot about a Japanese publisher saying just that in an interview.
Can't blame them. With game development taking years, you have to plan years ahead. So if sales dropped to a quarter in a mere 3 months, you just have to ask yourself where they'll be next year. At any rate, that's what makes it a problem: that others saw the same graph and asked themselves just that.
Yes, they probably need a killer app. But equally if Iwata has a brain (and I'll assume he does, until proven wrong) he probably is already making contingency plans. You don't get to be a successful director of corporate planning if you don't. Fanboys may be content to paint it all rose-coloured and think that just blind faith in the Master will solve anything, but CEOs and directors of corporate planning have to react to market trends, plan and have a plan B (and maybe C and D), just in case. Those who don't... well, as they say, "People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan."
It's that simple.
And I wouldn't be too surprised if one of the contingency plans thrown around the office is to not stick to the cycle, and release a successor early. Which would then have to be gradually instilled to the press. And this announcement _might_ be just that.
But I guess it just doesn't fit the whole "us vs them" fanboy mentality, does it? You just have to imagine that everyone who doesn't worship your idle, is some sort of 60's super-villain hating all that's good and pure, don't you?
I swear some people should have had 4 paws and a tail, the way their mind works like a dog's...
To some extent. Sony and MS have at least refrained from outright insulting their customers, devs, etc. The "old" Nintendo was a lot more hardline. Often they didn't even bother with some palatable sophistry, they just went ahead and told a heartfelt "fuck you" to, say, RPG gamers when they didn't have RPGs. So I found it a proportionally more distasteful.
Well, at least until recently. Sony's recent interviews regarding the PS3 sure seemed... well, maybe not always exactly as hardline, but they more than made up in surrealism.
Still, you know, I never thought "everyone does it" to be a blanket excuse. It wasn't an excuse even in kindergarten. If little Johnny was hitting the other kids, it wasn't considered an excuse to start doing the same.
You're right that MS and Sony aren't "good", but that just means I'll take their PR with a grain of salt too. If everyone lies, then I'll just won't take anyone's PR announcements and interviews as gospel.
It's odd, then, that under Iwata, Nintendo has only experienced major successes. DS was Iwata's first system as head of Nintendo, wasn't it?
In regards to what they produce, maybe. In regards to PR, which is what I meant, I'll wait and see. He certainly is more diplomatic, but I'll wait and see if he's also more honest. They're entirely different domains, you know.
As for only successes, depends on how you define success. The Wii sales are already plummeting in Japan, and it's not too far ahead of the 360 and PS3 at the moment, as I was saying. And I seriously mean it. It's not as much declining, it's taking a nose dive. The Wiimote gimmick sure didn't hold Japan's attention for long.
Even skipping over that there's no telling how long until the USA follows, they tend to be especially fond and territorial about the Japanese market. Partially for pragmatic reasons too. Not only there's good money to be made there, but it's also key to keeping the Japanese developers. And some of those are already openly worried by those plummeting sales.
So, yes, I can easily see him spewing stuff about how the concept of cycles is obsolete. Because if that trend isn't reversed fast, they'll need to release a Wii 2 real fast. So I can just see them hedging their bets and starting talking about how cycles are obsolete early. That way when they scramble to replace the Wii already it will look like it was just what they were thinking all along.
Well, Nintendo has been historically a company known to twist logic in less predictable ways.
E.g., back when the Playstation had more games coming out per year than the N64 had over its whole life, Yamauchi was giving interviews saying that it's Sony who will go bankrupt by releasing that many games.
E.g., back when people complained that whole genres, e.g., RPGs, had gone missing from the N64 for years, Yamauchi gave an insulting interview in which he called RPG players, "depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games."
E.g., when Nintendo had to justify why the GameCube has less horsepower than everyone else (without even having some gimmick like the wiimote to make up for it) _and_ lacks any kind of media playback capabilities, Nintendo just gave a flurry of interviews that somehow that's what will allow them to offer a better gaming experience. See, you'll have better games and a better experience with it _because_ it's underpowered and lacks a DVD player. Illogical as that may sound.
Etc.
Basically, historically the Nintendo way was to take whatever they felt like doing, or were able to do, and proclaim it some Holy Truth of the industry. It's not Nintendo who has a problem, it's everyone else, including the customers, who don't know what they're doing and what they want. They've been the worst example of someone who has no problem telling you a different lie than yesterday, if it better suits whatever they're justifying today.
Even Nintendo's ideas of milking a market have been... weird at times. E.g., in N64 times again, the whole freaking Europe market was used as an experiment in deliberately releasing only half the games, and trying to strong-arm the retailers into not importing the rest. Someone at Nintendo genuinely thought that having only a handful of games, and everyone buying the same games and seeing the same games on the shelves again and again, would make more money. (And while I'll admit that many EU releases were delayed by others too, read that paragraph again: it wasn't because of translation costs or whatever, it was a deliberate experiment in building brand-awareness for just a few games with a minimum of paying for shelf space.)
Now admittedly, Iwata isn't Yamauchi. I know. But, you know, Yamauchi picked Iwata as his successor. We're talking the same Yamauchi who got all his relatives fired from the company so noone could challenge his absolute rule. It makes me at least, skeptical than his chosen heir to the throne would think radically differently. I also notice that Iwata was the head of Nintendo's Corporate Planning Division during Yamauchi's hardline imperialist years, so I'm guessing he can't have had that radically different a vision.
At any rate, I'm betting that, in the tradition of Nintendo, there's no telling what he _really_ means. It could also mean
- "people are still buying the DS, so why bother designing the next one?" or
- "our engineers screwed up and the prototype of the next console doesn't work, so let's pretend that we actually like it that way" or
- "Wii sales are plummeting in Japan and soon even the 360 will overtake us, so we need the next console out _now_, cycles be damned" or
- "we'll pull the same stunt as in N64 times and make you buy a hardware upgrade for a console, instead of going with the cycle of releasing a new console"
Or probably something else that noone would have guessed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not _opposing_ it. In fact, if some idiot will manage to only remove himself from the gene pool with a super-capacitor, I'd actually _support_ it. That's evolution in action at its finest.
That said, heh, you don't seem to have put much thought into it before letting it rip with the sneering answer.
For starters you mostly manage to create and bravely fight your own straw men there. For example, where did I say that anyone will install a transformer between the contacts, inside the capacitor's casing? I mean, huh? Seriously, where did you get _that_ idea from?
Do you even realize how driving a motor off a capacitor must work? Here's some free clue: a capacitor's voltage varies linearly with the charge. This is very much unlike batteries which tend to offer a nearly constant voltage for most of the charge interval. (And then it drops mostly on account of internal resistance rising.) So if you just connected one directly to a motor, you'd get a lot of torque at full charge, and considerably less when your "tank" is half empty, and almost none when it's almost empty. So you'd need _some_ kind of circuitry to convert that variable voltage into... well, a completely other variable voltage to drive the motor.
So, no, you just wouldn't need to cut through the capacitor casing to install a transformer. You'd probably just buy a new circuit board. And install it right where the old one used to be. That's all.
For that matter, I'm not just talking about vapourizing a saw blade, if someone did manage to short such capacitor. We're not talking your average mobo capacitor, we're talking a _lot_ of energy discharged within milliseconds. That energy has to go _somewhere_, namely into a lot of heat within a very short time.
Here's more free clue: explosives work by the same principle: lots of heat and stuff turned into gas in a very short time. Even an atom bomb fireball is a funny thing: it's just air super-heated by a ton of energy released in a very short time. Now this wouldn't be anything even remotely comparable to an atom bomb, but that was just to illustrate the principle. Lots of energy released in very little time = bang.
With a bit of luck, you'll just get a loud bang. With less luck, e.g., if the vapourized stuff is inside that heavy casing, you might get a bit or two of said casing embedded in the nearest wall, or into someone's skull.
But that's again answering to your own strawmen, since I never said someone would cut the capacitor with a saw in the first place.
And so on, and so forth.
Here's one parting thought and friendly advice: posting sneering answers is a bit of an art. The knack is to have actually put some thought into it, and be at least reasonably close to right. Sneering based on pure ignorance, stupidity, wishful thinking and/or straw men, tends to end up just looking completely retarded. So maybe next time try engaging a brain a bit before letting the fingers loose on the keyboard. And maybe get your head out of your arse first, so you can get some oxygen to the brains.
Well, if there's one thing I've learned in my days on MUDs is that there's always a minority who gets their kicks out of being assholes and annoying to everyone else. And they're always ready and willing to twist logic in the most incredible ways to argue why it's a good thing, and you should allow... nay, be thankful that they're doing it in your game. Among other things:
- that it's great fun for everyone, and their victims who complain about it somehow don't know what they really want in a game. Why, they'd probably leave in droves if someone didn't harrass them.
- that it's a pre-requisite for role-playing. (Apparently being killed again and again by someone 30 levels higher than you, and with battlecries of, "LOL! N00B! U SUCK! I FUCKED UR MOM!" is proper role-playing. In fact, the only kind of role playing.)
- that it was testing, if they were using a bug against everyone else, and they were surely going to report it. They "tested" it 100 times a day for a whole month just to be really sure how it works, and submit a really really good bug-report, you know.
- that the first amendment gives them a sacred right to say and do whatever they want, anywhere they want, and to anyone they want. And if you try to stop them, that's the road to tyranny and slavery. (Never mind that the actual text refers to the Congress, not to a privately owned server.)
Etc, etc, etc.
That it's for scientific research... well, now that's a new excuse. Just when I thought I had heard heard everything.
But I hope that everyone will excuse me if I still see it through the eyes of a jaded old MUD coder. The primary aspect is that it's (mild) harassment, no matter in the name of what mis-guided idea or excuse it's done. It's inconveniencing someone else, so don't do it.
Even if it seems like a mild annoyance at best, already there is no shortage of people annoying everyone else. And then there are people who come from a very stressful RL situation to unwind online. Even a mild annoyance just adds to the existing stress, when one is stressed enough. If someone came home after the boss riding his butt for 2 hours, dealing with clueless people for the other 6, and maybe add something like a visit to the dentist and/or an argument with his wife, the last thing he needs is an annoying newbie getting in his face all the time.
And I might even shrug and move on if it were a genuine newbie who barely has enough WASD motor skills to get in that room at all, but not enough to maneuver himself in a socially acceptable position. But it being a (mild) harassment bot and justified as "research"... dunno... just feels... wrong.
That's a bit putting the carriage before the horse, IMHO.
What this really says is that the genome became, more or less, fault-tolerant. The ability to evolve really came out of that.
For starters, there is no part of the genome or ribosomes or whatever that actually produces mutations. On the contrary, most of the complexity in your cells is to prevent mutations, to the best of possibilities. It's the only way to have a coherent organism made of gazillions of cells. You don't want a cell in your palm to think it's supposed to grow into a nose, for example. And you really don't want cells to just start divided uncontrolled.
And you or the mouse have layers upon layers of defenses against that. The very reason why we're DNA based instead of RNA is to allow repairing single-strand mutations. But it goes on from there.
The very fact that you age is, pretty much, a defense against cancer: cells have a maximum division number counter, based on what tumor size still likely wouldn't kill you. (Hence also why larger species tend to live longer: they get a bigger limit there.) When more and more cells have reached that limit, then more and more damage can't be repaired, and you discover the fun of old age. And then you die.
Etc.
At any rate, the major thing is: there is no part in the genome that says you should evolve. Read: mutate. It actually tries to prevent mutations, hence evolution.
But mutations happen anyway, and some will happen in the sperm or eggs, or the first stages of embryo formation. You can't 100% prevent those. They _will_ happen. And the choices from there are basically two: either the result can still live with that mutation, or it dies.
Hence what they discovered here: natural selection favours the kind of genome that can tolerate mutations when they happen anyway. A species where the slightest change results in death will be at a disadvantage, compared to a species where more individuals survive even with mutations.
Sure, in the long term that also means being to evolve and cope with environment changes. No doubt. But I think there's a far stronger short-term pressure to achieve the same result. And most likely that's really what we're seeing there.
1. What the blueprints say, and what people will do to their ultra-capacitor-powered car are two different things. The Darwin Awards are full of people who... did things quite differently than the manufacturer imagined.
So I'll bet someone _will_ take it as necessary proof of manhood to take it apart, cut the cables, and make a dangerous mess, just because, you know, his dad told him that Real Men mess with their car's engine. And if he doesn't take it apart and make a bigger mess (before finally taking it to the mechanic anyway), then he might as well wear a dress and a purse.
2. And that's not even counting the millions of clueless rice boys (car modders) and the unscrupulous vendors preying on them. Someone _will_ sell clueless insecure guys a special power cable claimed to increase their horsepower by 10%, or something equally ridiculous. (Same as the 1000$ hi-fi power cables sold to "audiophiles," or 4" exhaust pipes for 1.1 litre engines. Odin knows there's no shortage of buyers for either.) Watch them take the engine apart and do dangerously irresponsible things with the cables.
Or, honestly, it just begs doing dangerous stuff with the voltage at either the capacitor (to increase range), or the electro-motor (since torque and horsepower do increase with voltage.) When some insecure kid's bragging rights depend on how fast he can accelerate, do you honestly think it won't happen? I can see the whole overclocking willy-waving contest happening all over again with cars.
And as with chips, there'll be a bit of variation to how much you can push a part. The fact that there's always a safety margin doesn't mean it's _guaranteed_ to go X% higher. The safety margin is there precisely because you get a bit of a gauss curve, and some parts will fall a bit short. Some motors will cheerfully take twice the voltage, some will have a spot of thinner wire or insulation and short out. Some capacitors will cheerfully take more voltage, some will have a weaker bit of insulation somewhere between those plates, and get an arc right through it if you push them.
Except with overclocking, at most you fry the chip, and tend to see it crashes long before that. With a capacitor you just get a hell of a lot of energy discharged in a very short time. Assuming that the capacitor only holds the energy of, say, half a tank of gasoline, discharging all that energy in half a second is very much equivalent to half a tank of gasoline blowing up. Better yet, stored energy rises with the square of the voltage, so over-volters will get quite the fireworks.
3. Well, what the blueprints say, and what the whole thing looks like after crashing into a tree, are often different things. I'm sure, for example, in normal cars radiator blueprints don't involve it having several breaks and punctures either.
1. I come from the opposite angle. Mom... well, make no mistake, she loved us sincerely, but... entirely too much, you know? It took some almost violent verbal clashes to get her to just leave me alone and live her own life. That started when I was around 30 years old, and continued for some 5 years, give or take.
As far as I can tell, she's still not over it, but has learned to control herself by now.
Her first conclusion was that someone's obviously manipulating me and my brother against her, when I too started telling her to mind her own business. (My brother had been at it since childhood.) Again, as far as I can tell, she still isn't convinced that that's not the case.
So, trust me, noone really wants 100% of their parents' attention and devotion. And if anyone actually thinks they do, I doubt that they'd be happy with it, if they actually got it. Even the most affectionate lap cat needs some time alone, or it _will_ go neurotic. A human, doubly so.
2. That said, well, humans
A) judge each other all the time, so big freakin' surprise that they judge their parents/children too.
B) are judged by the company they keep, or the company they drag you into, all the time. And parents, well, are a company you can't easily change.
Being annoyed by some of your kids' or parents' habits doesn't necessarily mean you want them as a manservant or anything. When you can look at your kids (and/or co-workers, friends, etc) and say that you truly don't care what they do, it's all their choice how they want to live your life, have your full support in anything whatsoever... well, then you'll have earned the right to ask the same in return. Until then, nope. If you've ever thought you're so embarassed of something your son did in front of the guests, then he too has a right to feel embarassed by something _you_ did in front of _his_ friends.
The laser shattered the capsid at low energy: 40 times lower, in fact, than the energy level that harmed human T-cells. Other types of radiation, like ultraviolet light, kill microbes on produce, but would damage human cells.
It seems to me like they're explicitly planning to use it on something that _does_ have cells left, and more specifically also the infected T cells. (Which would then continue to produce virus copies anyway.)
I also notice that they mention "blood" and "blood banks" -- and they say it was Tsen himself who said that -- but I searched for the word "plasma" and I can't find any mention of it in the article.
So, you know, at the very least I stand by what I've said: having read TFA, I don't find anything there to make me worry less.
Now maybe someone smarter will find a better use on it. Maybe on plasma. Who knows? But TFA doesn't say that.
HIV doesn't live long outside the body. Hence, trying to sterilize a disco with lasers would be a bit of a waste.
If you want to get more details as to why, some viruses are composed of just the capsid, some, however, include a viral envelope: a membrane of a double layer of lipids, much like the membrane of your own cells. In fact, it _is_ a piece of the membrane of the infected cell that produced the copies of the virus, plus some viral proteins to help it attach to the next cell it infects.
You'd think that an extra layer would make them more robust, but actually it doesn't. It makes them more sensitive to dessication, so they survive a lot shorter times outside the body.
HIV is one of that kind of viruses with a viral envelope, so...
So, anyway, if you wanted to make sterilize discos against HIV, you'd just need to make sure the air is very dry. I'm sure that can be integrated in the air conditioning, cheaper and more effective than special lasers.
Not that it would make much of a difference, but if you need that warm fuzzy sensation that you've done _something_ against HIV (even if it doesn't actually do anything), it's one way to go.
Of course, neither will do anything for people who've pawed each other at the disco for a few hours and then decide to go have a quick fuck to relieve the horniness. Which is how HIV actually gets transmitted.
1. All proteins in your body, and all proteins your body can possibly assemble for a virus capsid (and it must, because that's how virii multiply) are made of the same 20 aminoacids. The result, however, can range from relatively simple enzymes to gigantic mollecules, and they're folded in lots of funny ways too, to work like they're supposed to.
I.e., I wouldn't be _too_ surprised if for _some_ particular frequencies (i.e., some very narrowly defined types of virii), something else in your cells had a resonance on the same frequency. Even if the total power isn't enough to vapourize a cell, it could still be pretty deadly.
2. A capsid isn't a monolythic thing, it's made of several proteins which assemble themselves in that shape. That's how your body produces more capsids for the viruses an infected cell manufactures. It produces the capsid pieces, and those then assemble themselves around the pieces of viral DNA or RNA that were copied too.
So I'm curious exactly in what way are the capsids "shattered" by that resonance. If it shatters the proteins themselves into aminoacids, yeah, that's the end of it. But then, see point 1, I'd worry which other proteins it can destroy like that. If it just shatters the (relatively) weaker bonds between the individual proteins that make the capsid, I would imagine that at least some of them will simply reassemble. Remember they're proteins which are pretty much built to do just that: connect to each other and form a capsid.
3. Their claim that it can shatter HIV virii, while leaving the T cells intact, seems somewhat missing the point. It's the kind of solution that a physicist would imagine, if he doesn't know much about how a virus works.
So let's get a bit into (a very over-simplified summary of) how a cell works, and a virus multiplies. (Warning: it's still a long read.)
Your cells are basically a chemical computer whose function include building more building blocks for itself, or for more copies of itself. Your proteins, for example, are encoded by your DNA, as triplets of nucleotides. One such triplet is a "codon", and it identifies one aminoacid. (With some redundancy. You use 20 aminoacids, but since there are 4 possible nucleotides and there are 3 of them, there are 64 possible combinations. So it's quite usual that 2 or 3 different combinations mean the same aminoacid.)
When a cell needs more of a certain protein, it first copies a segment of DNA to RNA and lets it loose. Each Then a ribosome reads that just like a piece of tape, one codon (group of 3 nucleotids) at a time, and assembles a chain of aminoacids matching that sequence. For each codon, it adds the matching aminoacid to the chain, and moves one position further. One codon means STOP, and when it reached that, it lets go of the newly built protein and stops.
A virus works much the same. It builds more capsids, for example, by just letting loose a chain of RNA in your cell, which contains the information on how to build a capsid piece. (If it's a DNA based virus, it will first have to transcribe it to RNA, same as your cell does.) When enough of those capsid pieces have been built, they assemble themselves in a capsid around such a RNA chain.
At the same time, of course, the virus will also have to get your cell to transcribe the RNA piece. That, however, is just a sub-case of the previous paragraph. One of the proteins encoded by the virus, is the "RNA replicase". It's an enzyme which copies RNA strands. So the virus will let one piece of tape with that information loose inside your cell, the cell transcribes it to RNA replicase, which in turn starts copying RNA strands non-stop. Some will be surrounded by the capsid pieces to form new virii, but some will just keep getting interpreted by your ribosomes, so the cell keeps producing more capsid pieces and more RNA transcriptase.
To sum it up, an infected cell is, essentially, reprogrammed to keep producing viruses until it bursts. It's those pieces of gene
Hmm, I can't seem to find it on VG Cats. I think it was one of the "old" comics, before the author changed styles, and thus no longer on the site. A couple have been redone in the new style, and include a link to the old one, but I think not all.
Or, of course, it's also entirely possible that my mind is playing tricks on me, and I saw it on a whole other comic. It's been a couple of years, so...
I'm not against raids or raiding guilds... as such. What I was ranting about is the kind of person who'd be in such a raid and think about it as a "project", and as "meeting goals", and of evaluating performance, and of making sure there are conseqences for slackers, and all those other trappings of RL management. And applied to the awfully wrong problem and in the awfully wrong place.
It seems to me like someone has a blurred line between games and reality from the other direction, so to speak, _if_ they genuinely think like that. And I find such people to be not much fun, on the rare occasions when I run into them. They tend to actually act like a PHB, not like someone among equals, who just happens to have more experience and social skills and helps with organizing it.
And even when they it's not blatantly that, at some point you just _feel_ that things have been over-organized to the point where you're a faceless cog in someone else's mechanism.
Look, I'm not telling you how to have fun, if you're having fun and as long as you realize that that's the real goal. If grinding MC or the AQs or whatever was what kept you happy, go for it.
And if you want to share your experience about some easier way to do it (if there even was one), you're welcome.
As long as it's in those terms: Playing a game with some friends, having some fun together, sharing some experience, helping organize a fun evening together, etc.
When I start getting worried is the very notion that someone can't even just sit at the computer, relax and have fun, without their mind regurgitating "project", "goals", and all that RL crap right into it.
Some stuff is even good common sense. If one approach didn't work, sit, think and and try something else. Just please don't think about it in terms of "evaluating performance" and "setting goals" and all that crap. Just kick that stuff aside for once, and think it in plain English, like at a pub with some friends, not like in a management meeting.
That said, again, I'm not accusing the GP poster (nor you) of being a PHB. I probably haven't grouped with either of you, if nothing else, due to the sheer number of servers and guilds, so I can't make that judgment. For all I know, he could just be taking one metaphor too far, or over-dissecting something until something common sense ends up sounding stupid and revolting. I don't know.
In a nutshell, it's more the wording that caused the reaction than the content. But, as I was saying, for all I know, they might not have thought of it in those terms until they started dissecting it for that post.
Well, I'm going to assume that that's just a verbose way of over-dissecting something. That you're not literally playing your game like that, nor literally thinking like that during a game. I haven't met you, I don't know what your play style really is, so I'm going to give you that benefit of the doubt. No need to assume the worst from the start, and all that.
Because, no offense, anyone who literally play the game while thinking about it as setting goals and evaluating performance, and thinking of their team mates as "there has to be consequences for people who are complete flakes"... *sigh* there is no nice way to put it, so I might as well be frank: those are the deranged sociopaths that ruin every last drop of enjoyment for everyone else.
Let's make a couple of things clear:
1. it's just a game. We're all there to have fun. That is the _only_ goal. Getting your MC gear or whatever else is just a prop, not the goal. If you got your prop, but noone had fun in the process, then you've utterly failed the real goal and missed the whole purpose of the exercise.
We're not at work, trying to meet some deadline within a budget. We're there to have fun. We're there to forget the stress of RL, and of dealing with clueless PHBs, and with arbitrary deadlines, and with all that crap. The _last_ thing I want there is some self-appointed PHB to turn a game into the same RL crap that I'm trying to escape from.
Trying to impose deadlines and goals and performance reviews there, is as fucking stupid as doing it when going with your friends at the pub. Do you set goals like "we must go through 100 pints today at all cost" there too? Do you do performance reviews and punish the flakes who drank too little? I should hope not, because it would obviously be just the most idiotic way to ruin everyone's enjoyment at that pub. Then, what madness or idiocy would posses someone to do the same in a friendly online game?
2. Noone is really my boss on a MMO. Sorry. Someone may think that being t3h gr3at guild leader makes him some sort of management, but truth is, that's at most a helper function, with at best advisory powers. It doesn't actually give him much right to tell anyone what to do.
I let some guys tell me what to do at work because they pay my wage. So essentially I sell my work and time in exchange for some money. That's how capitalism works.
That relationship just doesn't work that way in WoW. Unless someone wants to pay me my consultancy fee for my time there, that is. Be warned that it's not cheap, though.
Seriously. If I have to do what someone else tells me, and be subject to performance reviews and pep talks, then that's no longer playing the game, that's _work_. I'm essentially working for that guy, then, instead of having fun. It's only fair that he pays me, if he expects me to work for him.
Briefly, I've seen too many guilds in too many games that plain old sucked, and/or eventually disintegrated because a few people didn't understand point 1 or point 2.
Of course, they often ended up going hand in hand. The ones who didn't understand point 1 and obsessed about finally achieving a bunch of bits and bytes instead of having fun, often ended up grudgingly tolerating a wannabe PHB who didn't understand point 2, in the vain hope that it'll lead them to their precious reward. But then again, sometimes they happen separately too.
1. Blizzard also wasn't known as a MMO company, heck nor as a real RPG company either, before WoW. What people wanted Blizzard to announce at the time was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3. People were actually massively disappointed when Blizzard announced a MMO. (For an admittedly extreme reaction, see the VG Cats strip where Aeris mugs the Blizzard guy that announced they'll make a MMO. I'm sure a few people fancied doing that.) It sounded like something they'll surely botch, and a waste of manpower which could have been better used for something they were good at.
Needless to say, it currently has about 20 times more players than Everquest at its peak, and EQ2 peaked even lower.
2. Actually, WoW is very much playable as a single player RPG too. It does have about twice as many quests for either faction than is needed to get a player to level 70, it has more story and actually better texts than, say, Morrowind, and has more content than 10 Oblivions or so. It's certaily not _the_ best single-player RPG, but it's better than a lot of stuff we were perfectly content with, and even with the monthly fees still it's more content/buck than most.
In fact, that's my main problem with it: over time it's become increasingly difficult to find a real group for anything else than an endgame raid. Oh, you'll find a level 70 guildmate who'll be happy to run your latest alt through the Deadmines. Or even a perfect stranger if you ask nicely. (God knows I too have ran perfect stranger newbies through a ton of low level instances just because they were polite and well behaved and said "please".) But that kind of group does nothing to me. I want to feel like I actually contributed something to that group, and not like, say, may support-character priest was twiddling his undead thumbs while a level 70 mage was nuking the NPCs in wholesale.
Anyway, it _is_ used as, basically, a semi-single-player game by the majority of the population. They group when they really have to, then bugger off back to playing single-player as soon as it becomes possible. (Let's just say that even 90% of the people who were swearing that the massive level-60 MC raids are the meat of the game, went back to soloing 60 to 70 as soon as the portal to the Hellfire Peninsula opened.) The average WoW player _is_ playing a single player game with some multi-user chat channels built-in. Sorta the same as Unreal Tournament included an IRC client, except this time it's available right during the game.
So basically, even if you're a SP player, don't discount it yet just because it's MMO. A MMO can also be a good single-player game, and I wouldn't be surprised if Bioware gets that part even better done than Blizzard. In fact, if anyone can dethrone Blizzard in that one aspect, Bioware is probably the safest bet.
3. Well, allow some of us SW nerds our moment of hope, will you? Some of us awaited the launch of SWG like it's the second coming of Obi Wan. Some people kissed their wives, said goodbye to their friends, and expected to never be seen again in RL once a SW MMO opens.
And, frankly, it only appealed to a minority in the first place and disappointed everyone else. Yes, the (old-style) SWG fans will point out that it had its advantages over other MMOs at the time, such as allowing more customized characters. And I'll concede that. It had some damn good idea. But the rest sucked more ass than the vaccuum toilets on the space shuttle. It was a SW game launched without spaceships _or_ jedi, for a start. And on the ground it was a baren sandbox that made some of us look back on even the old UO more favourably. It was a DIKU with graphics and a lot of computer-generated terrain. _Empty_ computer-generated terrain, where Raph Koster expected players to just create content by role-playing with each other... without even being given much tools or props for that. Add the constant bugs and heavy-handed dev/support team, and it wasn't much fun except for a minority of the most hardcore SW fans.
Well, it's not planted as such. At some point the great game designer in the sky thought it would be fun to have some big stuff running around the high level areas. And some 90 kilo birds that He planned to use later as the Blood Elves' mount.
But you know how that ends up working. You tweak a little here, a little there, and next thing you know they're whining that you've nerfed them to death and start cancelling their subscriptions in droves.
So, you know, cut Him some slack. What do you expect Him to do? Hide that they ever existed? Like that ever works. Try deleting just a post or two on a board and you end up with a whole rebellion on your hand. Try denying that the game ever had dinosaurs? Ooer... noone does... ermm...
Well, OK, so Sony's propaganda machine does try to present the new animal breeding on SWG like some revolutionary new feature, and not, say, like they had animal handlers in the first place and they removed them.
But I figure God is better than Sony, you know? (Ok, ok, so that's not hard to achieve;) He's not affraid to admit that some things weren't that well balanced in the first place and had to be changed.
As I was saying, I wish you guys the best of luck. The elder gods know you have a lot of work ahead of you.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against you or your work. In fact, it was badly needed.
I'm just, well, half wondering and half making fun of:
A) the claim in the summary that you'll take only articles which don't have those tags. I still don't think there are that many, except if they're buried 6 ft deep and noone ever saw them.
B) People who do take a fully-automatic shotgun approach to those tags. I've seen them literally applied to:
- quotes, which included name, source and reference. I just have to wonder how fucking stupid someone can be to stamp a quote with [citation needed]. I mean, seriously.
- stuff that did include a reference
- stuff where checking one of the links at the end would have provided ample proof, even though the individual sentence didn't have an index number next to it.
- stuff where, well, I'm not even sure what went through the idiot's head, but I'd take a wild guess that he/she just didn't like the wording. I've seen articles literally riddled with "weasel wording" or "who says that?" just because the author/editor seemed to have liked writing in the passive voice, or the pseudo-NPOV style of using "X is believed to be Y" instead of "X is Y". Even when they had a long list of references showing exactly who did say that.
- elementary knowledge stuff. You could have a sentence like, to pick the example from the wikipedia style guide, "A square has four sides." and there will still be idiots who feel a need to stamp it with "citation needed" or NPOV.
Etc.
C) The fact that some people _do_ seem to take anything that sounds even remotely like an invitation to vandalize Wikipedia as a sacred duty to do just that. The tag vandalism -- because I can't call it otherwise -- hit in waves after each mention of those tags as some defense against misinformation.
And I foresee that again there will be people -- driven by either some urge to help in spite of their idiocy, or by vandalism -- to carpet bomb everything into oblivion with "citation needed" tags just because you mentioned that.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I wish that upon you guys. In fact, you have my compassion. But I'd be genuinely surprised if it didn't happen. I can't foresee to which extent, though. Maybe they'll run out of attention span after a couple of articles, if you're lucky. But if I had to make a bet, I'd bet that it _will_ happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh. The debt badges don't work that way. They don't count debt incurred, they count debt repaid. So if you were after that badge, heh, being forgiven of 300-500k xp in one fell swoop is going to just move you a bit further away from the badge. Now you'll have to go faceplant a few times to get that badge back.
So, hmm, nope, I still don't see that as too abusable.
Until level 10 there is no debt at all, and below 20 or so, debt is a silly joke. Doubly so between levels 10 and 13, which is where people do it the most. (Because at 14, as you know, they get a travel power.) That's why people do that: because it doesn't matter at that level. The first couple of groups in a solo mission will clear that hospital teleport debt.
So now look at the GGP post or so, claiming that people will abuse that debt forgiving. What's the worst that can happen there? That a couple of frustrated newbies will be forgiven of 100xp debt because they hospital-ported from the Hollows?
Well, good, because God knows that the Hollows can be a kick in the nuts when you get a mission at the opposite corner, you're level 12 and your Zero G pack just ran out of fuel. (Though admittedly it was an even bigger pain in the nuts before they introduced the safeguard missions and those temporary travel powers.) You know, whop-de-do, such a game-breaking exploit it will be that someone might actually have fun instead of running through purple trolls and COT.
Or, what, will the level 49's start doing that too now, just to exploit the debt forgiving? Never mind that anything that can kill a level 49 is in PI, and it takes less time to even run with Sprint+Swift to the hospital than to go looking for a group that can kill you, and wait for them to finish the job.
Basically that's all I'm saying: I don't see how that's abusable.
Yes, yes, I know nitpicking at the details is a national sport on Slashdot, but take a pause and think about it a bit. You get to run back to the mission, if you want to continue it, and to roughly where you were when you faceplanted. Because, you know, you have to continue from there. Same thing, whether there's a corpse on the ground or not.
Debt was already capped, so you're not getting that much. Plus for everyone who was at level 50, debt had no effect whatsoever, so, you know, why bother?
And running an xp debt on purpose is a bad idea anyway.
1. It means running up a lot of death, which means a lot of running back to your corpse instead of doing quests and killing NPCs. Plus, it's demoralizing for most people. It's associated with a failure, no matter how minor.
2. Until NCSoft forgives it, you'll get half xp, as the other half goes to paying back the debt.
Planning to faceplant lots just so NCSoft will forgive it, umm, sounds like just about the dumbest thing one could do. You could just finish the quest the old fashioned way in that time, and get more xp in the process.
I just had to go look at the Fusion IO page and their FAQ and... well, let's just say, does anyone have an URL for marketting-bullshit-bingo to English babelfish please?
By the half of the page I had developped an extreme allergy to the word "leverage". Two sentences out of three were just saying that the lever some (supposedly awesome) proprietary technology. And more importantly, I was none the wiser. There wasn't a single sentence that even said what it _does_. What makes that technology so awesome? What's the MTBF? You know, some actual technical data.
The more I think about it, the more I doubt that it was actually a Frequently Asked Questions. More likely just something that a marketter thought up, along the lines of:
Q: Are you awesome?
A: Yes, we leverage proprietary technologies to be uber-awesome. We leverage Buzzword(TM) and Uninformative Trademark(TM) and Tech-Sounding-Word-We-Made-Up(R) to be so awesome, that you can't even imagine how awesome we are. And we'll leverage that too. Leverage. Leverage. Leverage.
Q: Does it rock?
A: Yes, we leverage proprietary technology that really really rocks. We liberate enterprises from legacy architectures, we're scalable, we put enterprise-level SANs in your palm, we solve world hunger, cure aids, and probably filled your bullshit bingo card already. That's how much we rock.
Q: Will it rock my socks off?
A: Yes, our awesome leverage proprietary sock-rocking technology. We're that awesome. And did we mention "leveraging" yet? We leverage a lot.
Not exact quotes, but let's just call it an artist's impression. I haven't heard a more content-free text since someone accidentally sold us 100% tech-illiterate merketers when we thought we wanted a technical workshop.
Don't get me wrong, I don't doubt that their engineers probably know their shit. But that's what happens when you leave the FAQ writing to a marketer who doesn't know his arse from his elbow, and obviously think that using enough words will hide the fact that there's no information there.
And just to beat a dead horse some more, what annoys me isn't as much the use of buzzwords, but that they're used to obscure and mis-inform.
E.g., so they say it's "scalable"? How? Your typical motherboard has only one 4x PCI-Express slot, and on half of them it will be under the heatsink of any high end graphics card. So how _do_ you scale there? Throw the card away and buy a bigger one? How's that more scalable than buying a new hard drive? Even if you had more of those slots on some special motherboard, how's that more scalable than buying more hard drives? No, seriously.
E.g., the claim to replace an enterprise SAN and all the infrastructure... is omitting why that infrastructure was there in the first place. If anyone just needed more storage on their local machine, it's trivial to add more than 640 GB hard drives locally for a fraction of the cost. A hard drive, even on a card, is not a SAN replacement.
E.g., video games are hard-drive intensive? No shit? What video games were they playing there? Database Larry Rebuilds The Indexes 3D? Looks to me more like they wrote a list of every single use they could think for a computer, than actually having put some thought into it.
Etc.
Again, I'm willing to give their engineers the benefit of the doubt. I can see why such a card would be nice. Just saying that it would be nice if their good work was presented to the world by someone less blatantly clueless.
Which is still not what I meant. Kudos to them, but it can just as well mean that they lie better.
Have a look at this graph lemming. In just 4 months, the sales dropped to a quarter. In a period where those other consoles were slowly gaining groud, so don't give me stupid texts about being normal: if it were normal for everyone, you'd see the same dip for the other two.
So, while it still ahead, if you don't see a problem with that... well, I see no point in arguing any further.
And if you need to think anyone who doesn't worship your idol must be hateful and getting some weird joy out of that nose dive, it speaks volumes about you. Believe it or not, lemming, some of us just couldn't care less either way. I'm just looking at that graph as it is, not through wishful thinking goggles.
And the way it looks, it says they have a problem. Objectively. If nothing else because, even if I'm wrong with the extrapolation, others saw the graph too and did the same extrapolation. Some devs are already talking about jumping ship if that continues. There's even been at least one story even on Slashdot about a Japanese publisher saying just that in an interview.
Can't blame them. With game development taking years, you have to plan years ahead. So if sales dropped to a quarter in a mere 3 months, you just have to ask yourself where they'll be next year. At any rate, that's what makes it a problem: that others saw the same graph and asked themselves just that.
Yes, they probably need a killer app. But equally if Iwata has a brain (and I'll assume he does, until proven wrong) he probably is already making contingency plans. You don't get to be a successful director of corporate planning if you don't. Fanboys may be content to paint it all rose-coloured and think that just blind faith in the Master will solve anything, but CEOs and directors of corporate planning have to react to market trends, plan and have a plan B (and maybe C and D), just in case. Those who don't... well, as they say, "People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan."
It's that simple.
And I wouldn't be too surprised if one of the contingency plans thrown around the office is to not stick to the cycle, and release a successor early. Which would then have to be gradually instilled to the press. And this announcement _might_ be just that.
But I guess it just doesn't fit the whole "us vs them" fanboy mentality, does it? You just have to imagine that everyone who doesn't worship your idle, is some sort of 60's super-villain hating all that's good and pure, don't you?
I swear some people should have had 4 paws and a tail, the way their mind works like a dog's...
To some extent. Sony and MS have at least refrained from outright insulting their customers, devs, etc. The "old" Nintendo was a lot more hardline. Often they didn't even bother with some palatable sophistry, they just went ahead and told a heartfelt "fuck you" to, say, RPG gamers when they didn't have RPGs. So I found it a proportionally more distasteful.
Well, at least until recently. Sony's recent interviews regarding the PS3 sure seemed... well, maybe not always exactly as hardline, but they more than made up in surrealism.
Still, you know, I never thought "everyone does it" to be a blanket excuse. It wasn't an excuse even in kindergarten. If little Johnny was hitting the other kids, it wasn't considered an excuse to start doing the same.
You're right that MS and Sony aren't "good", but that just means I'll take their PR with a grain of salt too. If everyone lies, then I'll just won't take anyone's PR announcements and interviews as gospel.
In regards to what they produce, maybe. In regards to PR, which is what I meant, I'll wait and see. He certainly is more diplomatic, but I'll wait and see if he's also more honest. They're entirely different domains, you know.
As for only successes, depends on how you define success. The Wii sales are already plummeting in Japan, and it's not too far ahead of the 360 and PS3 at the moment, as I was saying. And I seriously mean it. It's not as much declining, it's taking a nose dive. The Wiimote gimmick sure didn't hold Japan's attention for long.
Even skipping over that there's no telling how long until the USA follows, they tend to be especially fond and territorial about the Japanese market. Partially for pragmatic reasons too. Not only there's good money to be made there, but it's also key to keeping the Japanese developers. And some of those are already openly worried by those plummeting sales.
So, yes, I can easily see him spewing stuff about how the concept of cycles is obsolete. Because if that trend isn't reversed fast, they'll need to release a Wii 2 real fast. So I can just see them hedging their bets and starting talking about how cycles are obsolete early. That way when they scramble to replace the Wii already it will look like it was just what they were thinking all along.
Well, Nintendo has been historically a company known to twist logic in less predictable ways.
E.g., back when the Playstation had more games coming out per year than the N64 had over its whole life, Yamauchi was giving interviews saying that it's Sony who will go bankrupt by releasing that many games.
E.g., back when people complained that whole genres, e.g., RPGs, had gone missing from the N64 for years, Yamauchi gave an insulting interview in which he called RPG players, "depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games."
E.g., when Nintendo had to justify why the GameCube has less horsepower than everyone else (without even having some gimmick like the wiimote to make up for it) _and_ lacks any kind of media playback capabilities, Nintendo just gave a flurry of interviews that somehow that's what will allow them to offer a better gaming experience. See, you'll have better games and a better experience with it _because_ it's underpowered and lacks a DVD player. Illogical as that may sound.
Etc.
Basically, historically the Nintendo way was to take whatever they felt like doing, or were able to do, and proclaim it some Holy Truth of the industry. It's not Nintendo who has a problem, it's everyone else, including the customers, who don't know what they're doing and what they want. They've been the worst example of someone who has no problem telling you a different lie than yesterday, if it better suits whatever they're justifying today.
Even Nintendo's ideas of milking a market have been... weird at times. E.g., in N64 times again, the whole freaking Europe market was used as an experiment in deliberately releasing only half the games, and trying to strong-arm the retailers into not importing the rest. Someone at Nintendo genuinely thought that having only a handful of games, and everyone buying the same games and seeing the same games on the shelves again and again, would make more money. (And while I'll admit that many EU releases were delayed by others too, read that paragraph again: it wasn't because of translation costs or whatever, it was a deliberate experiment in building brand-awareness for just a few games with a minimum of paying for shelf space.)
Now admittedly, Iwata isn't Yamauchi. I know. But, you know, Yamauchi picked Iwata as his successor. We're talking the same Yamauchi who got all his relatives fired from the company so noone could challenge his absolute rule. It makes me at least, skeptical than his chosen heir to the throne would think radically differently. I also notice that Iwata was the head of Nintendo's Corporate Planning Division during Yamauchi's hardline imperialist years, so I'm guessing he can't have had that radically different a vision.
At any rate, I'm betting that, in the tradition of Nintendo, there's no telling what he _really_ means. It could also mean
- "people are still buying the DS, so why bother designing the next one?" or
- "our engineers screwed up and the prototype of the next console doesn't work, so let's pretend that we actually like it that way" or
- "Wii sales are plummeting in Japan and soon even the 360 will overtake us, so we need the next console out _now_, cycles be damned" or
- "we'll pull the same stunt as in N64 times and make you buy a hardware upgrade for a console, instead of going with the cycle of releasing a new console"
Or probably something else that noone would have guessed.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not _opposing_ it. In fact, if some idiot will manage to only remove himself from the gene pool with a super-capacitor, I'd actually _support_ it. That's evolution in action at its finest.
That said, heh, you don't seem to have put much thought into it before letting it rip with the sneering answer.
For starters you mostly manage to create and bravely fight your own straw men there. For example, where did I say that anyone will install a transformer between the contacts, inside the capacitor's casing? I mean, huh? Seriously, where did you get _that_ idea from?
Do you even realize how driving a motor off a capacitor must work? Here's some free clue: a capacitor's voltage varies linearly with the charge. This is very much unlike batteries which tend to offer a nearly constant voltage for most of the charge interval. (And then it drops mostly on account of internal resistance rising.) So if you just connected one directly to a motor, you'd get a lot of torque at full charge, and considerably less when your "tank" is half empty, and almost none when it's almost empty. So you'd need _some_ kind of circuitry to convert that variable voltage into... well, a completely other variable voltage to drive the motor.
So, no, you just wouldn't need to cut through the capacitor casing to install a transformer. You'd probably just buy a new circuit board. And install it right where the old one used to be. That's all.
For that matter, I'm not just talking about vapourizing a saw blade, if someone did manage to short such capacitor. We're not talking your average mobo capacitor, we're talking a _lot_ of energy discharged within milliseconds. That energy has to go _somewhere_, namely into a lot of heat within a very short time.
Here's more free clue: explosives work by the same principle: lots of heat and stuff turned into gas in a very short time. Even an atom bomb fireball is a funny thing: it's just air super-heated by a ton of energy released in a very short time. Now this wouldn't be anything even remotely comparable to an atom bomb, but that was just to illustrate the principle. Lots of energy released in very little time = bang.
With a bit of luck, you'll just get a loud bang. With less luck, e.g., if the vapourized stuff is inside that heavy casing, you might get a bit or two of said casing embedded in the nearest wall, or into someone's skull.
But that's again answering to your own strawmen, since I never said someone would cut the capacitor with a saw in the first place.
And so on, and so forth.
Here's one parting thought and friendly advice: posting sneering answers is a bit of an art. The knack is to have actually put some thought into it, and be at least reasonably close to right. Sneering based on pure ignorance, stupidity, wishful thinking and/or straw men, tends to end up just looking completely retarded. So maybe next time try engaging a brain a bit before letting the fingers loose on the keyboard. And maybe get your head out of your arse first, so you can get some oxygen to the brains.
Well, if there's one thing I've learned in my days on MUDs is that there's always a minority who gets their kicks out of being assholes and annoying to everyone else. And they're always ready and willing to twist logic in the most incredible ways to argue why it's a good thing, and you should allow... nay, be thankful that they're doing it in your game. Among other things:
- that it's great fun for everyone, and their victims who complain about it somehow don't know what they really want in a game. Why, they'd probably leave in droves if someone didn't harrass them.
- that it's a pre-requisite for role-playing. (Apparently being killed again and again by someone 30 levels higher than you, and with battlecries of, "LOL! N00B! U SUCK! I FUCKED UR MOM!" is proper role-playing. In fact, the only kind of role playing.)
- that it was testing, if they were using a bug against everyone else, and they were surely going to report it. They "tested" it 100 times a day for a whole month just to be really sure how it works, and submit a really really good bug-report, you know.
- that the first amendment gives them a sacred right to say and do whatever they want, anywhere they want, and to anyone they want. And if you try to stop them, that's the road to tyranny and slavery. (Never mind that the actual text refers to the Congress, not to a privately owned server.)
Etc, etc, etc.
That it's for scientific research... well, now that's a new excuse. Just when I thought I had heard heard everything.
But I hope that everyone will excuse me if I still see it through the eyes of a jaded old MUD coder. The primary aspect is that it's (mild) harassment, no matter in the name of what mis-guided idea or excuse it's done. It's inconveniencing someone else, so don't do it.
Even if it seems like a mild annoyance at best, already there is no shortage of people annoying everyone else. And then there are people who come from a very stressful RL situation to unwind online. Even a mild annoyance just adds to the existing stress, when one is stressed enough. If someone came home after the boss riding his butt for 2 hours, dealing with clueless people for the other 6, and maybe add something like a visit to the dentist and/or an argument with his wife, the last thing he needs is an annoying newbie getting in his face all the time.
And I might even shrug and move on if it were a genuine newbie who barely has enough WASD motor skills to get in that room at all, but not enough to maneuver himself in a socially acceptable position. But it being a (mild) harassment bot and justified as "research"... dunno... just feels... wrong.
That's a bit putting the carriage before the horse, IMHO.
What this really says is that the genome became, more or less, fault-tolerant. The ability to evolve really came out of that.
For starters, there is no part of the genome or ribosomes or whatever that actually produces mutations. On the contrary, most of the complexity in your cells is to prevent mutations, to the best of possibilities. It's the only way to have a coherent organism made of gazillions of cells. You don't want a cell in your palm to think it's supposed to grow into a nose, for example. And you really don't want cells to just start divided uncontrolled.
And you or the mouse have layers upon layers of defenses against that. The very reason why we're DNA based instead of RNA is to allow repairing single-strand mutations. But it goes on from there.
The very fact that you age is, pretty much, a defense against cancer: cells have a maximum division number counter, based on what tumor size still likely wouldn't kill you. (Hence also why larger species tend to live longer: they get a bigger limit there.) When more and more cells have reached that limit, then more and more damage can't be repaired, and you discover the fun of old age. And then you die.
Etc.
At any rate, the major thing is: there is no part in the genome that says you should evolve. Read: mutate. It actually tries to prevent mutations, hence evolution.
But mutations happen anyway, and some will happen in the sperm or eggs, or the first stages of embryo formation. You can't 100% prevent those. They _will_ happen. And the choices from there are basically two: either the result can still live with that mutation, or it dies.
Hence what they discovered here: natural selection favours the kind of genome that can tolerate mutations when they happen anyway. A species where the slightest change results in death will be at a disadvantage, compared to a species where more individuals survive even with mutations.
Sure, in the long term that also means being to evolve and cope with environment changes. No doubt. But I think there's a far stronger short-term pressure to achieve the same result. And most likely that's really what we're seeing there.
1. What the blueprints say, and what people will do to their ultra-capacitor-powered car are two different things. The Darwin Awards are full of people who... did things quite differently than the manufacturer imagined.
So I'll bet someone _will_ take it as necessary proof of manhood to take it apart, cut the cables, and make a dangerous mess, just because, you know, his dad told him that Real Men mess with their car's engine. And if he doesn't take it apart and make a bigger mess (before finally taking it to the mechanic anyway), then he might as well wear a dress and a purse.
2. And that's not even counting the millions of clueless rice boys (car modders) and the unscrupulous vendors preying on them. Someone _will_ sell clueless insecure guys a special power cable claimed to increase their horsepower by 10%, or something equally ridiculous. (Same as the 1000$ hi-fi power cables sold to "audiophiles," or 4" exhaust pipes for 1.1 litre engines. Odin knows there's no shortage of buyers for either.) Watch them take the engine apart and do dangerously irresponsible things with the cables.
Or, honestly, it just begs doing dangerous stuff with the voltage at either the capacitor (to increase range), or the electro-motor (since torque and horsepower do increase with voltage.) When some insecure kid's bragging rights depend on how fast he can accelerate, do you honestly think it won't happen? I can see the whole overclocking willy-waving contest happening all over again with cars.
And as with chips, there'll be a bit of variation to how much you can push a part. The fact that there's always a safety margin doesn't mean it's _guaranteed_ to go X% higher. The safety margin is there precisely because you get a bit of a gauss curve, and some parts will fall a bit short. Some motors will cheerfully take twice the voltage, some will have a spot of thinner wire or insulation and short out. Some capacitors will cheerfully take more voltage, some will have a weaker bit of insulation somewhere between those plates, and get an arc right through it if you push them.
Except with overclocking, at most you fry the chip, and tend to see it crashes long before that. With a capacitor you just get a hell of a lot of energy discharged in a very short time. Assuming that the capacitor only holds the energy of, say, half a tank of gasoline, discharging all that energy in half a second is very much equivalent to half a tank of gasoline blowing up. Better yet, stored energy rises with the square of the voltage, so over-volters will get quite the fireworks.
3. Well, what the blueprints say, and what the whole thing looks like after crashing into a tree, are often different things. I'm sure, for example, in normal cars radiator blueprints don't involve it having several breaks and punctures either.
1. I come from the opposite angle. Mom... well, make no mistake, she loved us sincerely, but... entirely too much, you know? It took some almost violent verbal clashes to get her to just leave me alone and live her own life. That started when I was around 30 years old, and continued for some 5 years, give or take.
As far as I can tell, she's still not over it, but has learned to control herself by now.
Her first conclusion was that someone's obviously manipulating me and my brother against her, when I too started telling her to mind her own business. (My brother had been at it since childhood.) Again, as far as I can tell, she still isn't convinced that that's not the case.
So, trust me, noone really wants 100% of their parents' attention and devotion. And if anyone actually thinks they do, I doubt that they'd be happy with it, if they actually got it. Even the most affectionate lap cat needs some time alone, or it _will_ go neurotic. A human, doubly so.
2. That said, well, humans
A) judge each other all the time, so big freakin' surprise that they judge their parents/children too.
B) are judged by the company they keep, or the company they drag you into, all the time. And parents, well, are a company you can't easily change.
Being annoyed by some of your kids' or parents' habits doesn't necessarily mean you want them as a manservant or anything. When you can look at your kids (and/or co-workers, friends, etc) and say that you truly don't care what they do, it's all their choice how they want to live your life, have your full support in anything whatsoever... well, then you'll have earned the right to ask the same in return. Until then, nope. If you've ever thought you're so embarassed of something your son did in front of the guests, then he too has a right to feel embarassed by something _you_ did in front of _his_ friends.
In much the same ways that would destroy the host's DNA too.
It seems to me like they're explicitly planning to use it on something that _does_ have cells left, and more specifically also the infected T cells. (Which would then continue to produce virus copies anyway.)
I also notice that they mention "blood" and "blood banks" -- and they say it was Tsen himself who said that -- but I searched for the word "plasma" and I can't find any mention of it in the article.
So, you know, at the very least I stand by what I've said: having read TFA, I don't find anything there to make me worry less.
Now maybe someone smarter will find a better use on it. Maybe on plasma. Who knows? But TFA doesn't say that.
If you shattered all those capsids as thoroughly as you can, into the aminoacids they came from, now the cell would have inside:
- all the viral RNA telling it how to make more viruses, _and_
- a lot of aminoacids from which to make those viruses again
HIV doesn't live long outside the body. Hence, trying to sterilize a disco with lasers would be a bit of a waste.
If you want to get more details as to why, some viruses are composed of just the capsid, some, however, include a viral envelope: a membrane of a double layer of lipids, much like the membrane of your own cells. In fact, it _is_ a piece of the membrane of the infected cell that produced the copies of the virus, plus some viral proteins to help it attach to the next cell it infects.
You'd think that an extra layer would make them more robust, but actually it doesn't. It makes them more sensitive to dessication, so they survive a lot shorter times outside the body.
HIV is one of that kind of viruses with a viral envelope, so...
So, anyway, if you wanted to make sterilize discos against HIV, you'd just need to make sure the air is very dry. I'm sure that can be integrated in the air conditioning, cheaper and more effective than special lasers.
Not that it would make much of a difference, but if you need that warm fuzzy sensation that you've done _something_ against HIV (even if it doesn't actually do anything), it's one way to go.
Of course, neither will do anything for people who've pawed each other at the disco for a few hours and then decide to go have a quick fuck to relieve the horniness. Which is how HIV actually gets transmitted.
Having read TFA, I still worry.
1. All proteins in your body, and all proteins your body can possibly assemble for a virus capsid (and it must, because that's how virii multiply) are made of the same 20 aminoacids. The result, however, can range from relatively simple enzymes to gigantic mollecules, and they're folded in lots of funny ways too, to work like they're supposed to.
I.e., I wouldn't be _too_ surprised if for _some_ particular frequencies (i.e., some very narrowly defined types of virii), something else in your cells had a resonance on the same frequency. Even if the total power isn't enough to vapourize a cell, it could still be pretty deadly.
2. A capsid isn't a monolythic thing, it's made of several proteins which assemble themselves in that shape. That's how your body produces more capsids for the viruses an infected cell manufactures. It produces the capsid pieces, and those then assemble themselves around the pieces of viral DNA or RNA that were copied too.
So I'm curious exactly in what way are the capsids "shattered" by that resonance. If it shatters the proteins themselves into aminoacids, yeah, that's the end of it. But then, see point 1, I'd worry which other proteins it can destroy like that. If it just shatters the (relatively) weaker bonds between the individual proteins that make the capsid, I would imagine that at least some of them will simply reassemble. Remember they're proteins which are pretty much built to do just that: connect to each other and form a capsid.
3. Their claim that it can shatter HIV virii, while leaving the T cells intact, seems somewhat missing the point. It's the kind of solution that a physicist would imagine, if he doesn't know much about how a virus works.
So let's get a bit into (a very over-simplified summary of) how a cell works, and a virus multiplies. (Warning: it's still a long read.)
Your cells are basically a chemical computer whose function include building more building blocks for itself, or for more copies of itself. Your proteins, for example, are encoded by your DNA, as triplets of nucleotides. One such triplet is a "codon", and it identifies one aminoacid. (With some redundancy. You use 20 aminoacids, but since there are 4 possible nucleotides and there are 3 of them, there are 64 possible combinations. So it's quite usual that 2 or 3 different combinations mean the same aminoacid.)
When a cell needs more of a certain protein, it first copies a segment of DNA to RNA and lets it loose. Each Then a ribosome reads that just like a piece of tape, one codon (group of 3 nucleotids) at a time, and assembles a chain of aminoacids matching that sequence. For each codon, it adds the matching aminoacid to the chain, and moves one position further. One codon means STOP, and when it reached that, it lets go of the newly built protein and stops.
A virus works much the same. It builds more capsids, for example, by just letting loose a chain of RNA in your cell, which contains the information on how to build a capsid piece. (If it's a DNA based virus, it will first have to transcribe it to RNA, same as your cell does.) When enough of those capsid pieces have been built, they assemble themselves in a capsid around such a RNA chain.
At the same time, of course, the virus will also have to get your cell to transcribe the RNA piece. That, however, is just a sub-case of the previous paragraph. One of the proteins encoded by the virus, is the "RNA replicase". It's an enzyme which copies RNA strands. So the virus will let one piece of tape with that information loose inside your cell, the cell transcribes it to RNA replicase, which in turn starts copying RNA strands non-stop. Some will be surrounded by the capsid pieces to form new virii, but some will just keep getting interpreted by your ribosomes, so the cell keeps producing more capsid pieces and more RNA transcriptase.
To sum it up, an infected cell is, essentially, reprogrammed to keep producing viruses until it bursts. It's those pieces of gene
Hmm, I can't seem to find it on VG Cats. I think it was one of the "old" comics, before the author changed styles, and thus no longer on the site. A couple have been redone in the new style, and include a link to the old one, but I think not all.
Or, of course, it's also entirely possible that my mind is playing tricks on me, and I saw it on a whole other comic. It's been a couple of years, so...
Perhaps I wasn't too clear. My fault, I suppose.
I'm not against raids or raiding guilds... as such. What I was ranting about is the kind of person who'd be in such a raid and think about it as a "project", and as "meeting goals", and of evaluating performance, and of making sure there are conseqences for slackers, and all those other trappings of RL management. And applied to the awfully wrong problem and in the awfully wrong place.
It seems to me like someone has a blurred line between games and reality from the other direction, so to speak, _if_ they genuinely think like that. And I find such people to be not much fun, on the rare occasions when I run into them. They tend to actually act like a PHB, not like someone among equals, who just happens to have more experience and social skills and helps with organizing it.
And even when they it's not blatantly that, at some point you just _feel_ that things have been over-organized to the point where you're a faceless cog in someone else's mechanism.
Look, I'm not telling you how to have fun, if you're having fun and as long as you realize that that's the real goal. If grinding MC or the AQs or whatever was what kept you happy, go for it.
And if you want to share your experience about some easier way to do it (if there even was one), you're welcome.
As long as it's in those terms: Playing a game with some friends, having some fun together, sharing some experience, helping organize a fun evening together, etc.
When I start getting worried is the very notion that someone can't even just sit at the computer, relax and have fun, without their mind regurgitating "project", "goals", and all that RL crap right into it.
Some stuff is even good common sense. If one approach didn't work, sit, think and and try something else. Just please don't think about it in terms of "evaluating performance" and "setting goals" and all that crap. Just kick that stuff aside for once, and think it in plain English, like at a pub with some friends, not like in a management meeting.
That said, again, I'm not accusing the GP poster (nor you) of being a PHB. I probably haven't grouped with either of you, if nothing else, due to the sheer number of servers and guilds, so I can't make that judgment. For all I know, he could just be taking one metaphor too far, or over-dissecting something until something common sense ends up sounding stupid and revolting. I don't know.
In a nutshell, it's more the wording that caused the reaction than the content. But, as I was saying, for all I know, they might not have thought of it in those terms until they started dissecting it for that post.
Well, I'm going to assume that that's just a verbose way of over-dissecting something. That you're not literally playing your game like that, nor literally thinking like that during a game. I haven't met you, I don't know what your play style really is, so I'm going to give you that benefit of the doubt. No need to assume the worst from the start, and all that.
Because, no offense, anyone who literally play the game while thinking about it as setting goals and evaluating performance, and thinking of their team mates as "there has to be consequences for people who are complete flakes"... *sigh* there is no nice way to put it, so I might as well be frank: those are the deranged sociopaths that ruin every last drop of enjoyment for everyone else.
Let's make a couple of things clear:
1. it's just a game. We're all there to have fun. That is the _only_ goal. Getting your MC gear or whatever else is just a prop, not the goal. If you got your prop, but noone had fun in the process, then you've utterly failed the real goal and missed the whole purpose of the exercise.
We're not at work, trying to meet some deadline within a budget. We're there to have fun. We're there to forget the stress of RL, and of dealing with clueless PHBs, and with arbitrary deadlines, and with all that crap. The _last_ thing I want there is some self-appointed PHB to turn a game into the same RL crap that I'm trying to escape from.
Trying to impose deadlines and goals and performance reviews there, is as fucking stupid as doing it when going with your friends at the pub. Do you set goals like "we must go through 100 pints today at all cost" there too? Do you do performance reviews and punish the flakes who drank too little? I should hope not, because it would obviously be just the most idiotic way to ruin everyone's enjoyment at that pub. Then, what madness or idiocy would posses someone to do the same in a friendly online game?
2. Noone is really my boss on a MMO. Sorry. Someone may think that being t3h gr3at guild leader makes him some sort of management, but truth is, that's at most a helper function, with at best advisory powers. It doesn't actually give him much right to tell anyone what to do.
I let some guys tell me what to do at work because they pay my wage. So essentially I sell my work and time in exchange for some money. That's how capitalism works.
That relationship just doesn't work that way in WoW. Unless someone wants to pay me my consultancy fee for my time there, that is. Be warned that it's not cheap, though.
Seriously. If I have to do what someone else tells me, and be subject to performance reviews and pep talks, then that's no longer playing the game, that's _work_. I'm essentially working for that guy, then, instead of having fun. It's only fair that he pays me, if he expects me to work for him.
Briefly, I've seen too many guilds in too many games that plain old sucked, and/or eventually disintegrated because a few people didn't understand point 1 or point 2.
Of course, they often ended up going hand in hand. The ones who didn't understand point 1 and obsessed about finally achieving a bunch of bits and bytes instead of having fun, often ended up grudgingly tolerating a wannabe PHB who didn't understand point 2, in the vain hope that it'll lead them to their precious reward. But then again, sometimes they happen separately too.
Well, think of it this way:
1. Blizzard also wasn't known as a MMO company, heck nor as a real RPG company either, before WoW. What people wanted Blizzard to announce at the time was Starcraft 2 or maybe Diablo 3. People were actually massively disappointed when Blizzard announced a MMO. (For an admittedly extreme reaction, see the VG Cats strip where Aeris mugs the Blizzard guy that announced they'll make a MMO. I'm sure a few people fancied doing that.) It sounded like something they'll surely botch, and a waste of manpower which could have been better used for something they were good at.
Needless to say, it currently has about 20 times more players than Everquest at its peak, and EQ2 peaked even lower.
2. Actually, WoW is very much playable as a single player RPG too. It does have about twice as many quests for either faction than is needed to get a player to level 70, it has more story and actually better texts than, say, Morrowind, and has more content than 10 Oblivions or so. It's certaily not _the_ best single-player RPG, but it's better than a lot of stuff we were perfectly content with, and even with the monthly fees still it's more content/buck than most.
In fact, that's my main problem with it: over time it's become increasingly difficult to find a real group for anything else than an endgame raid. Oh, you'll find a level 70 guildmate who'll be happy to run your latest alt through the Deadmines. Or even a perfect stranger if you ask nicely. (God knows I too have ran perfect stranger newbies through a ton of low level instances just because they were polite and well behaved and said "please".) But that kind of group does nothing to me. I want to feel like I actually contributed something to that group, and not like, say, may support-character priest was twiddling his undead thumbs while a level 70 mage was nuking the NPCs in wholesale.
Anyway, it _is_ used as, basically, a semi-single-player game by the majority of the population. They group when they really have to, then bugger off back to playing single-player as soon as it becomes possible. (Let's just say that even 90% of the people who were swearing that the massive level-60 MC raids are the meat of the game, went back to soloing 60 to 70 as soon as the portal to the Hellfire Peninsula opened.) The average WoW player _is_ playing a single player game with some multi-user chat channels built-in. Sorta the same as Unreal Tournament included an IRC client, except this time it's available right during the game.
So basically, even if you're a SP player, don't discount it yet just because it's MMO. A MMO can also be a good single-player game, and I wouldn't be surprised if Bioware gets that part even better done than Blizzard. In fact, if anyone can dethrone Blizzard in that one aspect, Bioware is probably the safest bet.
3. Well, allow some of us SW nerds our moment of hope, will you? Some of us awaited the launch of SWG like it's the second coming of Obi Wan. Some people kissed their wives, said goodbye to their friends, and expected to never be seen again in RL once a SW MMO opens.
And, frankly, it only appealed to a minority in the first place and disappointed everyone else. Yes, the (old-style) SWG fans will point out that it had its advantages over other MMOs at the time, such as allowing more customized characters. And I'll concede that. It had some damn good idea. But the rest sucked more ass than the vaccuum toilets on the space shuttle. It was a SW game launched without spaceships _or_ jedi, for a start. And on the ground it was a baren sandbox that made some of us look back on even the old UO more favourably. It was a DIKU with graphics and a lot of computer-generated terrain. _Empty_ computer-generated terrain, where Raph Koster expected players to just create content by role-playing with each other... without even being given much tools or props for that. Add the constant bugs and heavy-handed dev/support team, and it wasn't much fun except for a minority of the most hardcore SW fans.
A
Well, it's not planted as such. At some point the great game designer in the sky thought it would be fun to have some big stuff running around the high level areas. And some 90 kilo birds that He planned to use later as the Blood Elves' mount.
But you know how that ends up working. You tweak a little here, a little there, and next thing you know they're whining that you've nerfed them to death and start cancelling their subscriptions in droves.
So, you know, cut Him some slack. What do you expect Him to do? Hide that they ever existed? Like that ever works. Try deleting just a post or two on a board and you end up with a whole rebellion on your hand. Try denying that the game ever had dinosaurs? Ooer... noone does... ermm...
Well, OK, so Sony's propaganda machine does try to present the new animal breeding on SWG like some revolutionary new feature, and not, say, like they had animal handlers in the first place and they removed them.
But I figure God is better than Sony, you know? (Ok, ok, so that's not hard to achieve;) He's not affraid to admit that some things weren't that well balanced in the first place and had to be changed.
As I was saying, I wish you guys the best of luck. The elder gods know you have a lot of work ahead of you.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against you or your work. In fact, it was badly needed.
I'm just, well, half wondering and half making fun of:
A) the claim in the summary that you'll take only articles which don't have those tags. I still don't think there are that many, except if they're buried 6 ft deep and noone ever saw them.
B) People who do take a fully-automatic shotgun approach to those tags. I've seen them literally applied to:
- quotes, which included name, source and reference. I just have to wonder how fucking stupid someone can be to stamp a quote with [citation needed]. I mean, seriously.
- stuff that did include a reference
- stuff where checking one of the links at the end would have provided ample proof, even though the individual sentence didn't have an index number next to it.
- stuff where, well, I'm not even sure what went through the idiot's head, but I'd take a wild guess that he/she just didn't like the wording. I've seen articles literally riddled with "weasel wording" or "who says that?" just because the author/editor seemed to have liked writing in the passive voice, or the pseudo-NPOV style of using "X is believed to be Y" instead of "X is Y". Even when they had a long list of references showing exactly who did say that.
- elementary knowledge stuff. You could have a sentence like, to pick the example from the wikipedia style guide, "A square has four sides." and there will still be idiots who feel a need to stamp it with "citation needed" or NPOV.
Etc.
C) The fact that some people _do_ seem to take anything that sounds even remotely like an invitation to vandalize Wikipedia as a sacred duty to do just that. The tag vandalism -- because I can't call it otherwise -- hit in waves after each mention of those tags as some defense against misinformation.
And I foresee that again there will be people -- driven by either some urge to help in spite of their idiocy, or by vandalism -- to carpet bomb everything into oblivion with "citation needed" tags just because you mentioned that.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I wish that upon you guys. In fact, you have my compassion. But I'd be genuinely surprised if it didn't happen. I can't foresee to which extent, though. Maybe they'll run out of attention span after a couple of articles, if you're lucky. But if I had to make a bet, I'd bet that it _will_ happen.
Oh, right, the power connectors. Well, we'll have to wait and see if anyone invents a better way to connect a power cable, I guess.