Religious Sim is kinda ambigious: -If you mean playing a god, then other people have pointed out examples (black and white) -If you mean organizing a religious institution (as a bishop or a cardinal) it's a completely different type of game.
Think about the pleasures of the game: -Wage a morality war to censor movies, and videogames. Prove the connection between Heavy Metal, D&D and Satanism. -Convince your flock to give you all their worldly belongings in preparation for their final journey with aliens. (Remember: if you eat the jello it's game over) -Discourage your priests from molesting choirboys. (optional) -Send missionaries to far away lands, teach them the errs of their culture. -Teach your followers the joy of their new family. Prevent them from leaving the compound. -Recruit Soldiers of God and direct them to burn down clinics, fight for the holyland, or terrorize decadent lifestyles. -Form inquisitions, burn heathens at the stake.
The addictiveness of everquest (besides the social contacts) is an unhealthy amount of player competition. (players compete against players to beat X, rather then players competing against X) The hardcore players aren't playing to have fun, but because they have something to prove.
A lot of the hardcore players play because they need to get to the top and stay on the top. They'll even resort to sabotaging other guilds (In everquest such as racing to kill key mobs they don't need, just so another guild can't get access to a zone). I wouldn't classify it as griefing since their goal is not to cause misery, but to remove the competition.
This is why everquest is so popular, because in the other games it's relatively easy to reach the peak. The players then realize they're only a big fish in a small pond. When a game is first released you'll see the players racing to the top in a most unhealthy manner, only to quit when they reach the top. Afterall, if you're going to try to the compensate for the size of your.. shoes, you'll want to show off where there's a large playerbase.
Furthermore Everquest is one of the only MMORPG's that doesn't rank players. This allows players to make their own arbitrary rankings to skew it whichever way they want. Most of the MMORPG's give a score (such as pvp kills) which means less dispute over who is the most L33T. "We killed super_mob_a first" "Well we killed super_mob_a with only 30 people" "Ha! but you used cheap_method_B, you're pathetic!" They can argue forever when ranks are subjective...
I stopped playing MMORPG's when I realized I was buying into that attitude that one has to compete against someone that is not their enemy. Unfortunately the MMORPG encourages this competition more then any other gaming genre.
But our whole society is based on ranking people.. does my High/. ID make me inferior?
That makes sense then and sounds like bureaucracy.. they didn't make the total by adding the parts.. they took a total and itemized it;) But at least financial aid covers it then..
We had to petition to get out of the food plan, cuz the prices were excessive ($8 a meal) and the meal hours just didn't work (closed at 6:30) cuz they overlapped with my work. If you were going to miss a meal you could cash it out in their ministore for $2 credit at their inflated rates.. that $2 would buy a pack of poptarts(2), and a can of soda. (for which I put $8 in at start)
It was a pain in the ass, but they eventually gave in.. I guess all the money goes into the same fund, and the food plan was one of the profit areas.
I shouldn't bother replying to the troll, but I never said the pricing was fair...
All I said is when that's THEIR business model that they're selling me, I'll milk it for all it's worth. If it's a bad business model then they should change it, rather then blaming the customers for using what they're paying for.
If someone offered to rent me a car and guarenteed unlimited gas.. then yes I might choose to drive excessively... but fortunately the rental companies are smart enough to not do that.
I'm not one of the affected, and if my ISP moves to a more restrictive policy.. I probably will move to a less restrictive one.
Furthermore -I don't pay $50 -I don't have 1.5Mbps -Risk from RIAA is zero (nice assumption you made there) -I don't have a 10 gig limit -I must of got a good deal when I bought 20 gigs for $8 (webhosting), or maybe your prices are full of %*#^.
Should I write up your whole post as nonsense or was there any part of it that was true?
Sounds like a good implementation but the prices seem overly excessive... 2gigs for $20??? If you're paying for the dorms, they should just make those 2gigs free completely. Our school had free network.
Does that 2 gigs include intranet traffic? (I.e. sending files to someone across the hallway)
Sharing killed our school network, at first they did caps on the whole building rather then per-room. After I left I heard they filtered out all p2p packets.
With earthlink ADSL though haven't had any problem with "going over the limit" but my upstream is still ridiciously low 12-15KB.. I generally download about 1-2 gigs a day (unlicensed anime).
Back when I was in dorms, they decided that the traffic was getting to high in the "Computer-Interest Dorm" building.. so they capped the whole building. As anyone can imagine, this didn't stop the dozen people from doing unlimited bandwidth sharing but just made it so everyone else in the dorms couldn't open web pages.
After talking to the sys admin, he said they weren't willing to send out warning letters to the worst offenders.. and he even said there was plenty of bandwidth for everyone after the cap if people would just be responsible.
Of course now that I'm out of the dorms and paying for my bandwidth, I expect to be able to use every last bit (pun intended) of it.
Let's face it, with all the dumbing down of games, I don't think I could face a fallout 3. Let's not forget Lionheart..
I'm afraid Interplay sunk their fangs to far into Black Isle and it's just unlikely that fallout 3 would be of the same caliber if it ever comes out. It'd be to painful to see the fallout line ruined.. (ya ya FO:Tactics sucked, but it wasn't meant to be a fallout game at first)
At least UFO: Aftermath didn't have the X-Com name and Lionheart was it's own brand too... but they ruin my faith in these developers.
Causility doesn't mean the cause is known or understood, it just mean it exists.
For example to a Determinist, the green eyes is just caused by DNA, which is caused by the molecules combining into strands, which is caused by the atomic physics etc. The basic idea is that everything follows a set of laws.
The point of common contention is quantum physics... scientists argue these subatomic particles act in a truly random fashion.
At which point the determinist says there's a hidden variable providing the causation for quantum mechanics, and since we can't detect this variable, it appears the particles are moving randomly.
At this point the argument is futile, since there's no degree of falsifiability. In other words, since the determinists are arguing something that CAN'T be proven false, then there's no point in trying to prove them wrong. Although it's still possible to prove quantum physics false (if someone manages to find a hidden variable), it will never be able possible to prove it true. Divine Theory also is not falsiable.
And my disclosure is that I lean to determinism, which is more intricate version of causility. It is generally frowned upon by a scientific community (who lean towards quantum theory).
In "Iraq" they use arabic characters, so when we translate it to a Roman alphabet we just adopt a spelling based on the phonetics.
Since every language has a different set of phonetics, it gets spelled differently. I can't guess the justification of it being "Iraq" in english, since we have no phonetics.
Other times we make up names that have little to do with the original cultural names, which in fact happens most of the time.
Except you don't mention is a single barrel is enough to kill every person on this planet.. a single barrel that doesn't need food, water, or air.. or in other words can be buried. Look at how long it took to find Saddam Hussein... if there's only a single barrel, I think it's safe to say it may never be found.
I don't believe they were an imminent threat, however I think it's pretty conclusive that Iraq had a CBW development program.
As far as infrastructure... they found the infrastructure..
Chemical Warheads: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dy n?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A15557-2003Jan19¬Found= true
Live Botulism: Kay report, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/2003 1002-1830-kay-text.html
Mobile Labs: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/14/s prj.irq.labs/
I remember the last time my face was stolen for my passport picture, I had to get my face changed. Thus they should remove the photos from passports too. Get real.
Biometrics won't replace password authentication (at least not anytime soon). But there's a lot of places that you DON'T have a registered account that they can just do a password lookup. It's just not practical to have an international database of people and passwords (or a series of individual databases). With all the bureacracy and red tape, do you seriously think it'll be more secure?
So when the comparison is done by customs clerk comparing your face to your photo... or a computer and a clerk (probably trying less now) doing the comparison.. which is more secure?
False Positives? There will be obviously be a lot less then before... And yes if it's for criminal intent, it'll still result in the passport holder getting investigated (but how is this different then what happens with photos?).
False Negatives? I'll admit, I have no idea what kind of threshholds they'll use, so these can be lower or higher then before. But the consequences are basically the same, they have to take you aside and verify who you are.
Oh ya that guy that stole your face/fingerprints/DNA... how many times do you think he can use that before he gets caught. Isn't it convenient that he'll be standing in the middle of a bunch of guards. He's not sitting halfway across the country in some kinko's. In the meantime (before the guy gets caught) the victim can be given a temporary password or other verification card to distinguish you from the criminal.
There's times when biometrics are appropriate and this is one of them. It's a completely different risk model.
The games out there aren't worth it. Better to program on their own private projects (that they can own the code for), or start an open source project (GPL).
There are lots of old games that have their engined released as GPL after their lifespan. (Quake 2, Descent Freespace 2, etc)
There's plenty of better places to code without giving the code to private companies.
So in other words you want game companies to hire programmers under typical professional relationships except pay them peanuts.
Why would programmers volunteer their (derivitive) code to be copyrighted by other people without compensation ($$$)
NDA's only work with existing business relationships.
What could be done is the companies publish the formats for their game resources (media, scripts, etc). So that only the engine needs to be rewritten by GPL projects without a lot of reverse engineering.
GPL version of infinity engine: http://gemrb.sourceforge.net/index.php
/sarcasm off
Wasn't the point of the game to be crude and offensive?? That's what makes it fun. If they're going to censor themselves they have a lot of work ahead of them
... but I don't think they'd appreciate those sorts of inquiries from an employee of a competitor:)
Ya it's a bad idea to answer questions that give away the secrets of an opensource project.:)
Always worth a try
Actually Enron wasn't even in the top 10 of the companies overcharging California.
Want to know who was charging the highest rates for energy? a Californian government agency.
Which is why California is so screwed up, there's waste at every level and only a third of the state's money actually gets where it's intended.
Slashdot Mirror
Religious Sim is kinda ambigious:
;)
-If you mean playing a god, then other people have pointed out examples (black and white)
-If you mean organizing a religious institution (as a bishop or a cardinal) it's a completely different type of game.
Think about the pleasures of the game:
-Wage a morality war to censor movies, and videogames. Prove the connection between Heavy Metal, D&D and Satanism.
-Convince your flock to give you all their worldly belongings in preparation for their final journey with aliens. (Remember: if you eat the jello it's game over)
-Discourage your priests from molesting choirboys. (optional)
-Send missionaries to far away lands, teach them the errs of their culture.
-Teach your followers the joy of their new family. Prevent them from leaving the compound.
-Recruit Soldiers of God and direct them to burn down clinics, fight for the holyland, or terrorize decadent lifestyles.
-Form inquisitions, burn heathens at the stake.
I think it could sell
I apologize for anyone I forgot to offend.
The addictiveness of everquest (besides the social contacts) is an unhealthy amount of player competition. (players compete against players to beat X, rather then players competing against X) The hardcore players aren't playing to have fun, but because they have something to prove.
/. ID make me inferior?
A lot of the hardcore players play because they need to get to the top and stay on the top. They'll even resort to sabotaging other guilds (In everquest such as racing to kill key mobs they don't need, just so another guild can't get access to a zone). I wouldn't classify it as griefing since their goal is not to cause misery, but to remove the competition.
This is why everquest is so popular, because in the other games it's relatively easy to reach the peak. The players then realize they're only a big fish in a small pond. When a game is first released you'll see the players racing to the top in a most unhealthy manner, only to quit when they reach the top. Afterall, if you're going to try to the compensate for the size of your.. shoes, you'll want to show off where there's a large playerbase.
Furthermore Everquest is one of the only MMORPG's that doesn't rank players. This allows players to make their own arbitrary rankings to skew it whichever way they want. Most of the MMORPG's give a score (such as pvp kills) which means less dispute over who is the most L33T. "We killed super_mob_a first" "Well we killed super_mob_a with only 30 people" "Ha! but you used cheap_method_B, you're pathetic!" They can argue forever when ranks are subjective...
I stopped playing MMORPG's when I realized I was buying into that attitude that one has to compete against someone that is not their enemy. Unfortunately the MMORPG encourages this competition more then any other gaming genre.
But our whole society is based on ranking people.. does my High
That makes sense then and sounds like bureaucracy.. they didn't make the total by adding the parts.. they took a total and itemized it ;) But at least financial aid covers it then..
We had to petition to get out of the food plan, cuz the prices were excessive ($8 a meal) and the meal hours just didn't work (closed at 6:30) cuz they overlapped with my work. If you were going to miss a meal you could cash it out in their ministore for $2 credit at their inflated rates.. that $2 would buy a pack of poptarts(2), and a can of soda. (for which I put $8 in at start)
It was a pain in the ass, but they eventually gave in.. I guess all the money goes into the same fund, and the food plan was one of the profit areas.
I shouldn't bother replying to the troll, but I never said the pricing was fair...
All I said is when that's THEIR business model that they're selling me, I'll milk it for all it's worth. If it's a bad business model then they should change it, rather then blaming the customers for using what they're paying for.
If someone offered to rent me a car and guarenteed unlimited gas.. then yes I might choose to drive excessively... but fortunately the rental companies are smart enough to not do that.
I'm not one of the affected, and if my ISP moves to a more restrictive policy.. I probably will move to a less restrictive one.
Furthermore
-I don't pay $50
-I don't have 1.5Mbps
-Risk from RIAA is zero (nice assumption you made there)
-I don't have a 10 gig limit
-I must of got a good deal when I bought 20 gigs for $8 (webhosting), or maybe your prices are full of %*#^.
Should I write up your whole post as nonsense or was there any part of it that was true?
Sounds like a good implementation but the prices seem overly excessive... 2gigs for $20??? If you're paying for the dorms, they should just make those 2gigs free completely. Our school had free network.
Does that 2 gigs include intranet traffic? (I.e. sending files to someone across the hallway)
Sharing killed our school network, at first they did caps on the whole building rather then per-room. After I left I heard they filtered out all p2p packets.
what happened at my dorms
Uhh that'd be WELL over (4 times over the limit) the limit for most cable systems. (Which I generally hear is about 10gigs)
But it's different since you have SDSL, they're probably aiming towards businesses rather then home users. May I ask how much you pay?
With earthlink ADSL though haven't had any problem with "going over the limit" but my upstream is still ridiciously low 12-15KB.. I generally download about 1-2 gigs a day (unlicensed anime).
Back when I was in dorms, they decided that the traffic was getting to high in the "Computer-Interest Dorm" building.. so they capped the whole building. As anyone can imagine, this didn't stop the dozen people from doing unlimited bandwidth sharing but just made it so everyone else in the dorms couldn't open web pages.
After talking to the sys admin, he said they weren't willing to send out warning letters to the worst offenders.. and he even said there was plenty of bandwidth for everyone after the cap if people would just be responsible.
Of course now that I'm out of the dorms and paying for my bandwidth, I expect to be able to use every last bit (pun intended) of it.
It's just a tragedy of the commons.
Let's face it, with all the dumbing down of games, I don't think I could face a fallout 3. Let's not forget Lionheart..
I'm afraid Interplay sunk their fangs to far into Black Isle and it's just unlikely that fallout 3 would be of the same caliber if it ever comes out. It'd be to painful to see the fallout line ruined.. (ya ya FO:Tactics sucked, but it wasn't meant to be a fallout game at first)
At least UFO: Aftermath didn't have the X-Com name and Lionheart was it's own brand too... but they ruin my faith in these developers.
Causality implies a concious action.
Causility doesn't mean the cause is known or understood, it just mean it exists.
For example to a Determinist, the green eyes is just caused by DNA, which is caused by the molecules combining into strands, which is caused by the atomic physics etc. The basic idea is that everything follows a set of laws.
The point of common contention is quantum physics... scientists argue these subatomic particles act in a truly random fashion.
At which point the determinist says there's a hidden variable providing the causation for quantum mechanics, and since we can't detect this variable, it appears the particles are moving randomly.
At this point the argument is futile, since there's no degree of falsifiability. In other words, since the determinists are arguing something that CAN'T be proven false, then there's no point in trying to prove them wrong. Although it's still possible to prove quantum physics false (if someone manages to find a hidden variable), it will never be able possible to prove it true. Divine Theory also is not falsiable.
And my disclosure is that I lean to determinism, which is more intricate version of causility. It is generally frowned upon by a scientific community (who lean towards quantum theory).
In "Iraq" they use arabic characters, so when we translate it to a Roman alphabet we just adopt a spelling based on the phonetics.
Since every language has a different set of phonetics, it gets spelled differently. I can't guess the justification of it being "Iraq" in english, since we have no phonetics.
Other times we make up names that have little to do with the original cultural names, which in fact happens most of the time.
Except you don't mention is a single barrel is enough to kill every person on this planet .. a single barrel that doesn't need food, water, or air.. or in other words can be buried. Look at how long it took to find Saddam Hussein... if there's only a single barrel, I think it's safe to say it may never be found.
y n?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A15557-2003Jan19¬Found= true
3 1002-1830-kay-text.html
s prj.irq .labs/
I don't believe they were an imminent threat, however I think it's pretty conclusive that Iraq had a CBW development program.
As far as infrastructure... they found the infrastructure..
Chemical Warheads:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-d
Live Botulism:
Kay report, http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/world/iraq/200
Mobile Labs:
http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/14/
I remember the last time my face was stolen for my passport picture, I had to get my face changed. Thus they should remove the photos from passports too. Get real.
Biometrics won't replace password authentication (at least not anytime soon). But there's a lot of places that you DON'T have a registered account that they can just do a password lookup. It's just not practical to have an international database of people and passwords (or a series of individual databases). With all the bureacracy and red tape, do you seriously think it'll be more secure?
So when the comparison is done by customs clerk comparing your face to your photo... or a computer and a clerk (probably trying less now) doing the comparison.. which is more secure?
False Positives? There will be obviously be a lot less then before... And yes if it's for criminal intent, it'll still result in the passport holder getting investigated (but how is this different then what happens with photos?).
False Negatives? I'll admit, I have no idea what kind of threshholds they'll use, so these can be lower or higher then before. But the consequences are basically the same, they have to take you aside and verify who you are.
Oh ya that guy that stole your face/fingerprints/DNA... how many times do you think he can use that before he gets caught. Isn't it convenient that he'll be standing in the middle of a bunch of guards. He's not sitting halfway across the country in some kinko's. In the meantime (before the guy gets caught) the victim can be given a temporary password or other verification card to distinguish you from the criminal.
There's times when biometrics are appropriate and this is one of them. It's a completely different risk model.
The games out there aren't worth it. Better to program on their own private projects (that they can own the code for), or start an open source project (GPL). There are lots of old games that have their engined released as GPL after their lifespan. (Quake 2, Descent Freespace 2, etc) There's plenty of better places to code without giving the code to private companies.
So in other words you want game companies to hire programmers under typical professional relationships except pay them peanuts.
Why would programmers volunteer their (derivitive) code to be copyrighted by other people without compensation ($$$)
NDA's only work with existing business relationships.
What could be done is the companies publish the formats for their game resources (media, scripts, etc). So that only the engine needs to be rewritten by GPL projects without a lot of reverse engineering.
GPL version of infinity engine:
http://gemrb.sourceforge.net/index.php
Kill cops.. thats politically correct
Wasn't the point of the game to be crude and offensive?? That's what makes it fun. If they're going to censor themselves they have a lot of work ahead of them
WSU Students Break Wi-Fi - National Record 82 miles @ 2.4 GHz.
Two-way DSSS communication via 2.4 GHz band at a distance of 82 mi.
But it's unamplified.. it just means they had a really big antennas.
and the university bandwidth to back it..
No mention on how (if?) it's secured?
Actually Enron wasn't even in the top 10 of the companies overcharging California. Want to know who was charging the highest rates for energy? a Californian government agency. Which is why California is so screwed up, there's waste at every level and only a third of the state's money actually gets where it's intended.