But even print Encyclopedia's would include intentially false information so that people blindly copying from them would easily be identified.
Earlier versions of the Britannica had Thomas Paine as an athiest despite writing "The Age of Reason" which advocates Deism.
Further, all these articles are written by people with opinions. It's pretty much our job as readers to confirm claims from other sources and not take anything totally on faith. __________________________________________ __
Okay, I cannot cite the Encyclopedia Britannica, but not for that reason. The reason is that anything acutally in an encyclopedia is going to be so general that you don't need to reference it.
However this is where Wikipedia shines. There are really specific things in Wiki which would be in no normal Encyclopedia: take an unusual form of magnetism called "spin glass". Just checked Britannica.com - nothing there. Wiki: you get an article complete with references.
Say you are writing about magnetism in general and want to mention spin glass as a bizzare case. You just mention it in passing but want to provide a citation. Why not use Wiki? Your alternative, honestly, is something like a scientific dictionary (or, in this case, physics dictionary because the field is too specific) because nothing else is going to have it.
If you want to go deeper, Wiki articles should provide good online and offline (dead tree) references you can persue. _________________________________________
Just referenced, not copied. Many references in a paper are to papers you are comparing with: e.g. disagreeing with. Further, some you just use as background. I suppose you could say extended upon - but usually if you are "extending" a theory it is because there is some problem with the existing theory. Further, once a theory (or, say, an experimental technique) becomes standard, it is no longer referenced and that space is given over to either a review article or a text book.
Let me give an example. Suppose someone invents a new technique, say call it "cat splattering spectroscopy" (CSS) and it's useful for looking at widgits. The authors want to get the results out quickly so they submit a Physical Review Letter, max 4 pages, half of which is pictures of widgets. Although the technique may be simple, if it was not discovered until the 21st century, it is likely complicated. Since it is complicated, a page, say, is not sufficient to really explain what CSS entails, but that is all the room they have. This paper is the original, it may be referenced often, but it eventually it will become a poor reference for describing CSS.
Eventually, someone (perhaps the original team, perhaps not) will write a really good paper on CSS and this will be referenced widely, also, eventually replacing the original paper.
Counting citations is a pretty poor way to measure the impact of a paper, but I'm sure these papers are all very good because you can't be cited that many times without having something going for you.
There are many other problems, of course. _________________________________________ ____
In America it is very unlikely to happen because of the politics of it. Basically neither side is willing to sacrifice their interests (the people or the corporations) until the other becomes more responsible. To break from that pattern would make it very hard to get elected. But I believe we both live in democracies, so eventually if the people really want this, it will happen. Perhaps the best thing we can do is raise our children to be responsible. ____________________________________ ______________
In my (limited) experience, people do take action, then get frusturated, then just bitch and complain instead of taking further action. Voting is a given: people either vote or I give no heed to their complaints. Jury duty is another. If you get out of jury duty, which in the US is pretty easy to do, I have no sympathy for complaining about bizzare jury decisions.
But honestly, some people are going to live in parts of Florida which are (periodically) devistated by hurricanes. Someone has to take out the garbage. Someone has to ask "would you like fries with that". Statistically, these are certainties - yet the people doing them have free will to do otherwise.
Unionize, you say? This actually has happened at none other then McDonald's itself. One store totally unionized - and that store was shut down. You can read about it in Fast Food Nation, the book.
Lastly, no discussion about "personal" responsibility is complete without corporate responsibility being discussed. Mass murder was committed by the electricity companies in my home state of California, USA, when they colluded to cause rolling blackouts.
Many home care patients who needed electricity for, say, breathing died. Buy a generator? They sold out very quickly. There is not normally a large market for generators. Supplies generally went to the highest bidders. Generally they were rich law firms, accounting firms and certainly not granny getting US$381 per month from social security.
I'd like to see a trial for someone involved for murder. I'm not saying electric chair, first degree, premeditated murder - just 3rd degree (manslaughter). If a person sets a fire in a forest, even by accident, and anyone dies from that fire it is manslaughter. Those responsible for the California blackouts are just as, if not more, guilty.
Personal without corporate responsibility would be very poor policy. One of our parties (right wing, Republican) only talks about personal, the other (left wing, Democrat) only talk about corporate. No one is talking about both except perhaps the Libretarians (essentially anti-government intrusion in all forms). _________________________________________ _______
So I own this game and like most strategy boardgames it takes a long time to play, similar to the "original" civilization board game. It is fun and the rules are relatively easy to learn. However, there are exploits in the rules which allow a pair of players who totally trust one another to trade technology back and forth and buy up new technologies very easily, and cause the ages to go by very fast and effectively end the game extraordinarily quickly (IIRC cost is effectively proportional to the number of technologies you own, thus by trading away some you can buy others very easily). We could find no elegent solution to prevent this without neutering the trade system, and thus no longer play.
If anyone has a solution, or a link to a cite with alternative rules please reply! __________________________________________ _____
I agree with grantdh above, but the above statement is a really odd way of presenting the matter.
grantdh wrote: "Society is NEVER to blame. People are to blame.
Society is made of people - so this statement is self-contradictory. I think what you are trying to say is that a person is responsible for their actions, because earlier grantdh wrote: "Every single person is responsible for where they are." But this is a really strange statement.
Clearly, people are responsible for their actions - even under duress there is responsibility. Even when mentally ill, there is responsibility - but we weight these factors in courts and I think the poster wouldn't have a problem with these typical issues.
But to use the phrase "where you are at" seems to imply you are responsible for your economic and social situation. (Taken literally, I am responsible for Northridge, California, the city where I live. And that is true, to a very limited extent, but I'll go with the economic/social situation because I think the other is obvious. Let me know if I'm wrong.)
For most of history, most people were not responsible for their (broad) economic situations: they were (and many are) born into them. Of course, if they didn't work hard enough they might starve, but bad weather also caused mass starvation.
Currently, in my region, most jobs suck. Workers will be replaced by illegal immigrants - many of whom are paid off the records at less then minimum wage. The government is responsible to enforce the laws, but it doesn't happen. Clearly the statement "society is responsible" is closer to the truth then: "the worker is responsible" - although both are misleading.
But again, the society is made of people - those people are responsible. (Even if they are not elected, even if it is a tyrany, the people are responsible for not overthrowing them, but to a lesser extent).
Let us take the poster child for the personal responsibility movement: the person who spilled coffee and burned themselves and sued the coffee purveyor. The argument was that the consumer has a reasonable expectation that the coffee should be heated, but not past boiling. The purveyor heated the coffee under pressure to raise the boiling point and thus the coffee was hot beyond reasonable expectation. (This was the court arguemnt, according to a lawyer I know who read about it in school. I am not a laywer, have not read the case.) It is, of course, totally absurd scientifically. Even if superheated, once that coffee spills out of the resovier into the cup, it is no hotter then if it came out of a conventional non-pressurized coffee maker. However, as a physicist, I cannot use that knowledge as a juror it is against the rules. When I serve as a juror I am asked to set aside all knowledge which could help me (scientifically) differentiate the opinions of the expert witnesses for each side (this is US specific - I have no idea what your nation's rules are it is only an example). Again, is it not closer to the truth to say this (juror instructions) are society's fault then it is to say they are the juror's fault? (Naturally, spilling the coffee is the spiller's fault - a fact not disputed in the case, IIRC).
My favorite topic for this is campaign finance reform in the US elections. All that money buys TV ads (and mail ads, etc) but it's not like anyone even knows who you voted for (as an individual) - much less offering a personal bribe. Sure I think large campaign contributions are, effectively, bribes and should be forbidden but not because they actually should swing the election only because they hold influence once the election is won.
So there is shared responsibility and it is a question of who has how much of it. Aside from acts of nature (weather, mental illness) it is all people - yet we cannot say one person has all of it for one event. Campaign finanace reform is a case where I believe the large doners should be (and are) nearly irrelivant to t
karmagardless wrote: This was done at Bell Labs on their dime. They let Berkley, and some others, have copies to evaluate and improve, thus causing BSD, and other variants....and it wasn't just Unix that Bell Labs was paying for. It was one of the greatest places to do physics for decades. I've recently started to study biophysics and many, perhaps half, the most significant founding papers from the 50's and 60's were written by people in large, for-profit companies. Some working in "the physics department" or "the chemistry department" in, say, GM or Dupont.
Obviously, the consumer was paying for all this, in the end.
I'm not saying it was better or that we should go back to that era; clearly fundamental research is still done at Universities - and maybe that is where is belongs I don't care to argue that point. It is just interesting to note that it happened - and it is happening to a far, far lesser ammount now. (I have spoken to a physicist working for GM now and I know how closely the science they do relates to products they sell - in stark contrast to the past).
I imagine it similar to the drug industry today. The US pay exorbitant prices for drugs fueling rapid progress which benefits the entire world. Except instead of paying a bit more for paint, a car or a phone call, people now are loosing health insurance and thus going untreated - and ultimately dying - for scientific advances which actually are patented and the sale of which fuels corporate profits - instead of lots of science in which many advances were given away. ___________________________________________
I did some work detecting automated clicking a few years back. One thing to check for is if a large ammount of your traffic comes from open proxies - one computer running the autoclick program can hit many open proxies and tell them all to request a page. Telling if IPs are open proxies is not so hard as it can be tested emperically. Further, large ISPs (AOL, say) have many proxy servers which are (intentionally) open to their users (or at least they were years back - maybe not now) - thus one AOL account can start hitting all those servers making it look like the clicks are coming from all over.
Certainly there were obvious cases of autoclicking way back then, which were easy to detect. I imagine it has become more interesting now. __________________________________________
Re:How would you eat then?
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TMBG on DRM
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They have been surviving for 20 years without traditional record contracts most of the time.
They are selling the new songs, US$1 per, in addition to concerts and assorted materials. If they were giving away all the songs for free I would see the relavance of the question. Currently, I do not. ___________________________________________
There is a documentary on the band called Gigantic, which, if you are a fan, I feel would be pretty amusing. I am not much of a fan but I have heard some of their stuff from 15 years back and I enjoyed the movie. ______________________________________
Website: www.thislife.org look up show number 265: fake science. Act two has the relivant part: "Act Two. Government Science. The Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a report condemning the Bush Administration for what it called "distorting and censoring scientific findings that contradict" Administration policies. One of the cases sited in the report involves something called the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning. Alex Blumberg reports on the fights over who'll serve on the committee, fights in which each side believes the other practices fake science. (14 minutes)"
Apparently, one of the people appointed to this Advisory Committee has never done any research on lead poisoning. He is a pediatrician. He sees children, assumedly some may have had lead poisioning. He just feels it is not a big problem. He doesn't feel they get it from paint. He testifies to this in court (in suits against paint manufacturers).
And maybe children don't get lead poisioning from paint - I'm not saying I'm an expert.
However, probably the people on the committee should actually should be. ___________________________________________
UCS also published a report on Clinton. It also discussed policies where that administration abused science in making policy. I signed that report, too. Kind of undermines the whole "UCS is crazy liberal" claims.
I have not read everything the UCS has ever published. I totally agree with the reports I have read and signed. All they are saying is that if you are going to say a decision is based on science, you have to include the science in the report. _________________________________________ _______
Got on last night, finally. Two quick hints: first, make yourself a quick reference card for all the commands, and second get yourself a map of the Caribbean. ______________________________________ _____
Step one: have level limited quests. Say, you have to be under level 20 to participate. You collect orc battleaxes, or whatever, and turn them into a quest NPC in the city. The more that are turned in, the more a small camp grows in the newbie hunting area, making it easier for newbies to run to the vendor and sell stuff. First you get a wandering vendor, then maybe a wandering guard, then maybe a fixed location vendor with a tent, then another vendor which sells more usefull stuff (food, water, arrows, other consumables) and the tent becomes a house. Eventually you get a small walled city.
When you move on to levels 20-30, say, you hunt in more remote areas making the extra servies even that more valuable.
Of course, this is not advancing a storyline. A storyline is, by it's nature, uni-directional, e.g. when you kill the bad guy, he stays dead. When you storm the castle, it is taken over and used by the forces of good (or evil as the case may be).
Side note: I haven't done any static content in Eq for months. With Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion, there is no reason to. Lately I've been doing some triggered events for quests. It's probably been a year since I sat in a safe spot in some static wilderness zone with a group and had stuff pulled to us - which was the old standby for years in Eq when everyone played in North Ro, Oasis, Lake of Ill Omen, the Overthere, the Dreadlands and then finally started exploring dungeons - which was probably how people did it back when you played.
So assuming you have a story, should the players become involved in it?
If so, you are only catering to the few hardcore players who are at the point where you can make that kind of difference. Everybody else is re-doing content they have already seen, discovered, and posted all about on their guild website a month or a year ago.
If not, you have a storyline like in Everquest. Why should I bother to read any of it when it no one can advance it?
I read that A Tale In the Desert had rules which the players could change. This is *like* a story, sort of, but more like politics.
I'm just not sure what a "story" would do for a MMORPG. Let me give an example. Please fix it, or offer a counter-example as to how a story would work.
Let's say there is a storyline where Orcs are in constant battle with the Elves in this wooded area. As a young elf, I go kill Orcs. "Storylines" like this abound. But I cannot change the world - and even if I could, it would already have been done. People have compared killing Orcs to social work, or street cleaning. Not exactly heroic, as a heroic effort would actually defeat the orcs once and for all and there wouldn't be anymore for the next generation of young elves to kill, ruining the game for them.
Perhaps instead we could have the orcs replaced later by, say, goblins? But again, no real progress is made: ultimately no real change occurs. If it did, it would ruin the game for the next generation.
Note: this is implemented (in a form) in Eq in the semi-infamous "Hollowshade Moore War" where various factions occupy a zone and you can defeat one to spawn more of another. It has technical problems (which involve GM intervention, which is very rare: unless you play on the US$40/month server "legends" in which case the GM will "reset" the war 24/7.)
We could have limited time quests, where say if 100 people do a quest then it ends and a new quest takes it's place. Again, it cuts out the later people for the benefit of the uber gamers now - and I'll bet you anything they will just redo the quest over and over to get to the new content and be the first to do so.
I would love to fix this problem and am interested in any ideas people may have. _______________________________________
So I finally downloaded the client and was hoping to jump online to check out this game, but it seems the server(s) are full. I checked the official game forums and it seems this is pretty common problem right after the/. story came out here. Perhaps the furor will die down in time.
TheSacrificialFly wrote: Totally, it felt like everquest's crafting system except that was the whole game. (arrgh, metal bits, no more!)
I just wanted to add that Everquest has revised the tradeskill (craft) interface to give you two options: the old way, and the new one where you learn new recipies by trying things and then they are added to a list. Once on your list, you can click once to automatically place all the items (from your inventory) into the tradeskill container and then one button to attempt the combine. This system limits you to one attempt per second by a timer.
This was a huge step forward for the game, I feel. I did tradeskills extensively the old way, and after just a few tens of combines, (each of which could require ten+ clicks to set up) I was done for that session. Sometimes, I would be applying ice to my hands later and worrying a bit about repetitive stress syndrome.
In everquest II they are talking about having some kind of in-game arcade game you play to craft superior things. Imagine tetris: you clear a certain number of rows, or you fail on that item. You clear twice that many rows, and you actually create a better item. Thus, you and your character are actually both "improving" at a skill. I'm not really sure about this system - obviously I've not actually seen it - but I just mention it here as an idea being talked about.
I am not familiar with other MMORPG's tradeskill systems, but I am curious. ________________________________________ _______
In the state of California, you can get earthquake insurance through the state. As far as I know you have to go through an insurance company to get it. It's probably going to run you US$50-100 per month, depending on the risk of your location. Can you afford not to have it?
I have heard there are types of natural disasters (volcano? landslide? avalanch?) which a person just cannot get insurance against. At least in California, earthquakes is not one of them. ___________________________________________ ___
But in total, earthquakes pale in comparison to the dollar and life damage caused by hurricanes - because hurricanes are far more common then earthquakes of equal destructive power. __________________________________________ ___
Of course I totally agree the book is a classic, but some major portions of MMM, to my knowledge, have never gained favor, such as the surgical team analogy to working on code, where there would be like six people involved on any major code change. Certainly the man month is mythical, but IIRC that is just the early chapters. Read on and there are other things - many true, but as far as I know, many unpopular and/or untested.
Like many great works, Brook's discription of the problem is excellent, but his attempts to solve it are not all perfect. Thus, I would not hand it to a manager to read without some preface to it. ____________________________________________
Does anyone else find it ironic that Pixar is an entertainment company, and that the poster is saying if one has spare time to not, effectively, waste it patronizing a form of entertainment.
Second, the argument hinges on studying - not school - but a different set of skills which are not taught in school, but (apparently) were more important. Basically the poster is saying he knew better then then his department what areas of the field to study. And maybe this is still the case in computer science - I don't know - but if I were going to make this claim, I would say what people should be studying now and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Further, the poster was studying programming in the early 80's. His field was about to grow like a man on steriods. He probably could have picked any field of CS and done very well. I commend him for his foresight.
I studied physics so its a bit different from CS. It is not a growth industry, and the average physics undergrad is not going to become a physicist. I did have side projects in physics as did many of my classmates. I don't regret them, but strictly professionally studying my coursework would have been more beneficial. Of course, if I had chosen different side projects it might have been different. Physics is a small community, so I still see people I met in undergrad. The ones who are really successful now were not the ones with really cool side projects: instead they are the ones who emphasized class work. In short, none of us had great foresight.
The original thread is not really games vs. professional development, which is a pretty easy question, but instead games vs. relationships which is far thornier. In this light, I agree with the closing sentiment of the parent: You only get one life*.
I don't know anyone who regrets not working more hours. I know plenty who regret not spending time with people. __ * Although I disagree with the following statement "Start living it" because, if I said that, I would be saying that some action a person takes is not "living" and another "is living". That is a very harsh condemnation of someone's choice - whether that choice is computer games, reading novels, sports, meditation or underwater basket weaving. I would just say you go reflect and figure out what you want to do (because, of course, you already are and have to). ____________________________________________
I apologize for my ignorance, but couldn't you just use parentheses to enforce precedence instead of having separate operators?
I'm not saying the language shouldn't have any redundancy. I'm just asking if there exists some expression which can be done with one but not the other?
I'm not a perl programmer, just a curious observer. _______________________________________ ______
Expansion is severely reduced near massive objects - thus massive bodies do not expand with the rest of the universe, but at a tiny (or perhaps zero) fraction of the Hubble rate.
My source? I asked this in the context of the distance from the Sun to Pluto increasing over time of John C. Baez, who works on gravity and has written books on it, so I would say he is a good authority.
His response was that space does not expand (much) near massive objects - meaning even between the Sun and Pluto the expansion will not occur at anywhere near the rate it occurs in free space.
Yes, you have to learn general relativity to understand why. It is not simply that local (Newtonian) gravity overcomes it - I asked that specifically. No, I have not taken GR so I cannot give any further insight into this issue.
If the uniform expansion did occur uniformly between the Sun and Pluto, we could measure the Hubble constant by watching Pluto slowly receede from the Sun. It would be measurable using current values of the Hubble constant over years or decades. The effect is tiny beyond measure, apparently.
Note: I cannot recall if there is truely *no* expansion between the Sun and Pluto, or if it is just really small. I have thus opted for the really small in this post as it is the more conservative option. _________________________________________ ________
So since MMORPG's are infamous for addiction, all one needs is to connect it to use a DDR pad as part of the input. Instant weight loss. I imagine the legal warnings - people with health problems will have problems - to be issued will be prodigious. Clearly, you'll need a keyboard for chatting between fights otherwise you'll loose the community which is why people keep playing games with horrific gameplay value and poor graphics. I'm envisioning using the DDR pad to either move around or to fight and do special attacks.
Currently, in Everquest, we smack the auto-attack button and maybe one or another button every few seconds. Yet with the DDR pad, perhaps you could have certain rythmic steps to *keep* autoattack up and have other steps to move your character around (reposition them) and to keep other things going, too. Obviously, you'd need difficulty settings.
Actuallly, maybe the DDR pad would work better as input for a fighting game, or a sports game (how ironic). Trouble would be, in one player versus another human player mode, the more physically fit one would have an edge - the degree of which could be tweaked by game mechanics.
Nevertheless, somebody (not me) should take advantage of the new DDR as an input device for new, other, games.
If no one is doing this already (which I doubt) it would be a great opportunity for an open source game. _________________________________________
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But even print Encyclopedia's would include intentially false information so that people blindly copying from them would easily be identified.
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Earlier versions of the Britannica had Thomas Paine as an athiest despite writing "The Age of Reason" which advocates Deism.
Further, all these articles are written by people with opinions. It's pretty much our job as readers to confirm claims from other sources and not take anything totally on faith.
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Okay, I cannot cite the Encyclopedia Britannica, but not for that reason. The reason is that anything acutally in an encyclopedia is going to be so general that you don't need to reference it.
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However this is where Wikipedia shines. There are really specific things in Wiki which would be in no normal Encyclopedia: take an unusual form of magnetism called "spin glass". Just checked Britannica.com - nothing there. Wiki: you get an article complete with references.
Say you are writing about magnetism in general and want to mention spin glass as a bizzare case. You just mention it in passing but want to provide a citation. Why not use Wiki? Your alternative, honestly, is something like a scientific dictionary (or, in this case, physics dictionary because the field is too specific) because nothing else is going to have it.
If you want to go deeper, Wiki articles should provide good online and offline (dead tree) references you can persue.
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Just referenced, not copied. Many references in a paper are to papers you are comparing with: e.g. disagreeing with. Further, some you just use as background. I suppose you could say extended upon - but usually if you are "extending" a theory it is because there is some problem with the existing theory. Further, once a theory (or, say, an experimental technique) becomes standard, it is no longer referenced and that space is given over to either a review article or a text book.
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Let me give an example. Suppose someone invents a new technique, say call it "cat splattering spectroscopy" (CSS) and it's useful for looking at widgits. The authors want to get the results out quickly so they submit a Physical Review Letter, max 4 pages, half of which is pictures of widgets. Although the technique may be simple, if it was not discovered until the 21st century, it is likely complicated. Since it is complicated, a page, say, is not sufficient to really explain what CSS entails, but that is all the room they have. This paper is the original, it may be referenced often, but it eventually it will become a poor reference for describing CSS.
Eventually, someone (perhaps the original team, perhaps not) will write a really good paper on CSS and this will be referenced widely, also, eventually replacing the original paper.
Counting citations is a pretty poor way to measure the impact of a paper, but I'm sure these papers are all very good because you can't be cited that many times without having something going for you.
There are many other problems, of course.
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In America it is very unlikely to happen because of the politics of it. Basically neither side is willing to sacrifice their interests (the people or the corporations) until the other becomes more responsible. To break from that pattern would make it very hard to get elected. But I believe we both live in democracies, so eventually if the people really want this, it will happen. Perhaps the best thing we can do is raise our children to be responsible._ ______________
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In my (limited) experience, people do take action, then get frusturated, then just bitch and complain instead of taking further action. Voting is a given: people either vote or I give no heed to their complaints. Jury duty is another. If you get out of jury duty, which in the US is pretty easy to do, I have no sympathy for complaining about bizzare jury decisions.
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But honestly, some people are going to live in parts of Florida which are (periodically) devistated by hurricanes. Someone has to take out the garbage. Someone has to ask "would you like fries with that". Statistically, these are certainties - yet the people doing them have free will to do otherwise.
Unionize, you say? This actually has happened at none other then McDonald's itself. One store totally unionized - and that store was shut down. You can read about it in Fast Food Nation, the book.
Lastly, no discussion about "personal" responsibility is complete without corporate responsibility being discussed. Mass murder was committed by the electricity companies in my home state of California, USA, when they colluded to cause rolling blackouts.
Many home care patients who needed electricity for, say, breathing died. Buy a generator? They sold out very quickly. There is not normally a large market for generators. Supplies generally went to the highest bidders. Generally they were rich law firms, accounting firms and certainly not granny getting US$381 per month from social security.
I'd like to see a trial for someone involved for murder. I'm not saying electric chair, first degree, premeditated murder - just 3rd degree (manslaughter). If a person sets a fire in a forest, even by accident, and anyone dies from that fire it is manslaughter. Those responsible for the California blackouts are just as, if not more, guilty.
Personal without corporate responsibility would be very poor policy. One of our parties (right wing, Republican) only talks about personal, the other (left wing, Democrat) only talk about corporate. No one is talking about both except perhaps the Libretarians (essentially anti-government intrusion in all forms).
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So I own this game and like most strategy boardgames it takes a long time to play, similar to the "original" civilization board game. It is fun and the rules are relatively easy to learn. However, there are exploits in the rules which allow a pair of players who totally trust one another to trade technology back and forth and buy up new technologies very easily, and cause the ages to go by very fast and effectively end the game extraordinarily quickly (IIRC cost is effectively proportional to the number of technologies you own, thus by trading away some you can buy others very easily). We could find no elegent solution to prevent this without neutering the trade system, and thus no longer play.
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If anyone has a solution, or a link to a cite with alternative rules please reply!
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I agree with grantdh above, but the above statement is a really odd way of presenting the matter.
grantdh wrote: "Society is NEVER to blame. People are to blame.
Society is made of people - so this statement is self-contradictory. I think what you are trying to say is that a person is responsible for their actions, because earlier grantdh wrote: "Every single person is responsible for where they are." But this is a really strange statement.
Clearly, people are responsible for their actions - even under duress there is responsibility. Even when mentally ill, there is responsibility - but we weight these factors in courts and I think the poster wouldn't have a problem with these typical issues.
But to use the phrase "where you are at" seems to imply you are responsible for your economic and social situation. (Taken literally, I am responsible for Northridge, California, the city where I live. And that is true, to a very limited extent, but I'll go with the economic/social situation because I think the other is obvious. Let me know if I'm wrong.)
For most of history, most people were not responsible for their (broad) economic situations: they were (and many are) born into them. Of course, if they didn't work hard enough they might starve, but bad weather also caused mass starvation.
Currently, in my region, most jobs suck. Workers will be replaced by illegal immigrants - many of whom are paid off the records at less then minimum wage. The government is responsible to enforce the laws, but it doesn't happen. Clearly the statement "society is responsible" is closer to the truth then: "the worker is responsible" - although both are misleading.
But again, the society is made of people - those people are responsible. (Even if they are not elected, even if it is a tyrany, the people are responsible for not overthrowing them, but to a lesser extent).
Let us take the poster child for the personal responsibility movement: the person who spilled coffee and burned themselves and sued the coffee purveyor. The argument was that the consumer has a reasonable expectation that the coffee should be heated, but not past boiling. The purveyor heated the coffee under pressure to raise the boiling point and thus the coffee was hot beyond reasonable expectation. (This was the court arguemnt, according to a lawyer I know who read about it in school. I am not a laywer, have not read the case.) It is, of course, totally absurd scientifically. Even if superheated, once that coffee spills out of the resovier into the cup, it is no hotter then if it came out of a conventional non-pressurized coffee maker. However, as a physicist, I cannot use that knowledge as a juror it is against the rules. When I serve as a juror I am asked to set aside all knowledge which could help me (scientifically) differentiate the opinions of the expert witnesses for each side (this is US specific - I have no idea what your nation's rules are it is only an example). Again, is it not closer to the truth to say this (juror instructions) are society's fault then it is to say they are the juror's fault? (Naturally, spilling the coffee is the spiller's fault - a fact not disputed in the case, IIRC).
My favorite topic for this is campaign finance reform in the US elections. All that money buys TV ads (and mail ads, etc) but it's not like anyone even knows who you voted for (as an individual) - much less offering a personal bribe. Sure I think large campaign contributions are, effectively, bribes and should be forbidden but not because they actually should swing the election only because they hold influence once the election is won.
So there is shared responsibility and it is a question of who has how much of it. Aside from acts of nature (weather, mental illness) it is all people - yet we cannot say one person has all of it for one event. Campaign finanace reform is a case where I believe the large doners should be (and are) nearly irrelivant to t
karmagardless wrote: This was done at Bell Labs on their dime. They let Berkley, and some others, have copies to evaluate and improve, thus causing BSD, and other variants. ...and it wasn't just Unix that Bell Labs was paying for. It was one of the greatest places to do physics for decades. I've recently started to study biophysics and many, perhaps half, the most significant founding papers from the 50's and 60's were written by people in large, for-profit companies. Some working in "the physics department" or "the chemistry department" in, say, GM or Dupont.
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Obviously, the consumer was paying for all this, in the end.
I'm not saying it was better or that we should go back to that era; clearly fundamental research is still done at Universities - and maybe that is where is belongs I don't care to argue that point. It is just interesting to note that it happened - and it is happening to a far, far lesser ammount now. (I have spoken to a physicist working for GM now and I know how closely the science they do relates to products they sell - in stark contrast to the past).
I imagine it similar to the drug industry today. The US pay exorbitant prices for drugs fueling rapid progress which benefits the entire world. Except instead of paying a bit more for paint, a car or a phone call, people now are loosing health insurance and thus going untreated - and ultimately dying - for scientific advances which actually are patented and the sale of which fuels corporate profits - instead of lots of science in which many advances were given away.
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I did some work detecting automated clicking a few years back. One thing to check for is if a large ammount of your traffic comes from open proxies - one computer running the autoclick program can hit many open proxies and tell them all to request a page. Telling if IPs are open proxies is not so hard as it can be tested emperically. Further, large ISPs (AOL, say) have many proxy servers which are (intentionally) open to their users (or at least they were years back - maybe not now) - thus one AOL account can start hitting all those servers making it look like the clicks are coming from all over.
Certainly there were obvious cases of autoclicking way back then, which were easy to detect. I imagine it has become more interesting now.
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They have been surviving for 20 years without traditional record contracts most of the time.
They are selling the new songs, US$1 per, in addition to concerts and assorted materials. If they were giving away all the songs for free I would see the relavance of the question. Currently, I do not.
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There is a documentary on the band called Gigantic, which, if you are a fan, I feel would be pretty amusing. I am not much of a fan but I have heard some of their stuff from 15 years back and I enjoyed the movie.
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Website: www.thislife.org look up show number 265: fake science. Act two has the relivant part: "Act Two. Government Science. The Union of Concerned Scientists has issued a report condemning the Bush Administration for what it called "distorting and censoring scientific findings that contradict" Administration policies. One of the cases sited in the report involves something called the Advisory Committee on Childhood Lead Poisoning. Alex Blumberg reports on the fights over who'll serve on the committee, fights in which each side believes the other practices fake science. (14 minutes)"
Apparently, one of the people appointed to this Advisory Committee has never done any research on lead poisoning. He is a pediatrician. He sees children, assumedly some may have had lead poisioning. He just feels it is not a big problem. He doesn't feel they get it from paint. He testifies to this in court (in suits against paint manufacturers).
And maybe children don't get lead poisioning from paint - I'm not saying I'm an expert.
However, probably the people on the committee should actually should be.
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UCS also published a report on Clinton. It also discussed policies where that administration abused science in making policy. I signed that report, too. Kind of undermines the whole "UCS is crazy liberal" claims.
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I have not read everything the UCS has ever published. I totally agree with the reports I have read and signed. All they are saying is that if you are going to say a decision is based on science, you have to include the science in the report.
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Got on last night, finally. Two quick hints: first, make yourself a quick reference card for all the commands, and second get yourself a map of the Caribbean._ _____
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Actually this is a great idea.
Step one: have level limited quests. Say, you have to be under level 20 to participate. You collect orc battleaxes, or whatever, and turn them into a quest NPC in the city. The more that are turned in, the more a small camp grows in the newbie hunting area, making it easier for newbies to run to the vendor and sell stuff. First you get a wandering vendor, then maybe a wandering guard, then maybe a fixed location vendor with a tent, then another vendor which sells more usefull stuff (food, water, arrows, other consumables) and the tent becomes a house. Eventually you get a small walled city.
When you move on to levels 20-30, say, you hunt in more remote areas making the extra servies even that more valuable.
Of course, this is not advancing a storyline. A storyline is, by it's nature, uni-directional, e.g. when you kill the bad guy, he stays dead. When you storm the castle, it is taken over and used by the forces of good (or evil as the case may be).
Side note: I haven't done any static content in Eq for months. With Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion, there is no reason to. Lately I've been doing some triggered events for quests. It's probably been a year since I sat in a safe spot in some static wilderness zone with a group and had stuff pulled to us - which was the old standby for years in Eq when everyone played in North Ro, Oasis, Lake of Ill Omen, the Overthere, the Dreadlands and then finally started exploring dungeons - which was probably how people did it back when you played.
The game has changed a lot.
So assuming you have a story, should the players become involved in it?
If so, you are only catering to the few hardcore players who are at the point where you can make that kind of difference. Everybody else is re-doing content they have already seen, discovered, and posted all about on their guild website a month or a year ago.
If not, you have a storyline like in Everquest. Why should I bother to read any of it when it no one can advance it?
I read that A Tale In the Desert had rules which the players could change. This is *like* a story, sort of, but more like politics.
I'm just not sure what a "story" would do for a MMORPG. Let me give an example. Please fix it, or offer a counter-example as to how a story would work.
Let's say there is a storyline where Orcs are in constant battle with the Elves in this wooded area. As a young elf, I go kill Orcs. "Storylines" like this abound. But I cannot change the world - and even if I could, it would already have been done. People have compared killing Orcs to social work, or street cleaning. Not exactly heroic, as a heroic effort would actually defeat the orcs once and for all and there wouldn't be anymore for the next generation of young elves to kill, ruining the game for them.
Perhaps instead we could have the orcs replaced later by, say, goblins? But again, no real progress is made: ultimately no real change occurs. If it did, it would ruin the game for the next generation.
Note: this is implemented (in a form) in Eq in the semi-infamous "Hollowshade Moore War" where various factions occupy a zone and you can defeat one to spawn more of another. It has technical problems (which involve GM intervention, which is very rare: unless you play on the US$40/month server "legends" in which case the GM will "reset" the war 24/7.)
We could have limited time quests, where say if 100 people do a quest then it ends and a new quest takes it's place. Again, it cuts out the later people for the benefit of the uber gamers now - and I'll bet you anything they will just redo the quest over and over to get to the new content and be the first to do so.
I would love to fix this problem and am interested in any ideas people may have.
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So I finally downloaded the client and was hoping to jump online to check out this game, but it seems the server(s) are full. I checked the official game forums and it seems this is pretty common problem right after the /. story came out here. Perhaps the furor will die down in time.
TheSacrificialFly wrote:
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Totally, it felt like everquest's crafting system except that was the whole game. (arrgh, metal bits, no more!)
I just wanted to add that Everquest has revised the tradeskill (craft) interface to give you two options: the old way, and the new one where you learn new recipies by trying things and then they are added to a list. Once on your list, you can click once to automatically place all the items (from your inventory) into the tradeskill container and then one button to attempt the combine. This system limits you to one attempt per second by a timer.
This was a huge step forward for the game, I feel. I did tradeskills extensively the old way, and after just a few tens of combines, (each of which could require ten+ clicks to set up) I was done for that session. Sometimes, I would be applying ice to my hands later and worrying a bit about repetitive stress syndrome.
In everquest II they are talking about having some kind of in-game arcade game you play to craft superior things. Imagine tetris: you clear a certain number of rows, or you fail on that item. You clear twice that many rows, and you actually create a better item. Thus, you and your character are actually both "improving" at a skill. I'm not really sure about this system - obviously I've not actually seen it - but I just mention it here as an idea being talked about.
I am not familiar with other MMORPG's tradeskill systems, but I am curious.
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In the state of California, you can get earthquake insurance through the state. As far as I know you have to go through an insurance company to get it. It's probably going to run you US$50-100 per month, depending on the risk of your location. Can you afford not to have it?
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I have heard there are types of natural disasters (volcano? landslide? avalanch?) which a person just cannot get insurance against. At least in California, earthquakes is not one of them.
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But in total, earthquakes pale in comparison to the dollar and life damage caused by hurricanes - because hurricanes are far more common then earthquakes of equal destructive power._ ___
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Of course I totally agree the book is a classic, but some major portions of MMM, to my knowledge, have never gained favor, such as the surgical team analogy to working on code, where there would be like six people involved on any major code change. Certainly the man month is mythical, but IIRC that is just the early chapters. Read on and there are other things - many true, but as far as I know, many unpopular and/or untested.
Like many great works, Brook's discription of the problem is excellent, but his attempts to solve it are not all perfect. Thus, I would not hand it to a manager to read without some preface to it.
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Does anyone else find it ironic that Pixar is an entertainment company, and that the poster is saying if one has spare time to not, effectively, waste it patronizing a form of entertainment.
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Second, the argument hinges on studying - not school - but a different set of skills which are not taught in school, but (apparently) were more important. Basically the poster is saying he knew better then then his department what areas of the field to study. And maybe this is still the case in computer science - I don't know - but if I were going to make this claim, I would say what people should be studying now and not leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Further, the poster was studying programming in the early 80's. His field was about to grow like a man on steriods. He probably could have picked any field of CS and done very well. I commend him for his foresight.
I studied physics so its a bit different from CS. It is not a growth industry, and the average physics undergrad is not going to become a physicist. I did have side projects in physics as did many of my classmates. I don't regret them, but strictly professionally studying my coursework would have been more beneficial. Of course, if I had chosen different side projects it might have been different. Physics is a small community, so I still see people I met in undergrad. The ones who are really successful now were not the ones with really cool side projects: instead they are the ones who emphasized class work. In short, none of us had great foresight.
The original thread is not really games vs. professional development, which is a pretty easy question, but instead games vs. relationships which is far thornier. In this light, I agree with the closing sentiment of the parent: You only get one life*.
I don't know anyone who regrets not working more hours. I know plenty who regret not spending time with people.
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* Although I disagree with the following statement "Start living it" because, if I said that, I would be saying that some action a person takes is not "living" and another "is living". That is a very harsh condemnation of someone's choice - whether that choice is computer games, reading novels, sports, meditation or underwater basket weaving. I would just say you go reflect and figure out what you want to do (because, of course, you already are and have to).
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I apologize for my ignorance, but couldn't you just use parentheses to enforce precedence instead of having separate operators?
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I'm not saying the language shouldn't have any redundancy. I'm just asking if there exists some expression which can be done with one but not the other?
I'm not a perl programmer, just a curious observer.
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Expansion is severely reduced near massive objects - thus massive bodies do not expand with the rest of the universe, but at a tiny (or perhaps zero) fraction of the Hubble rate.
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My source? I asked this in the context of the distance from the Sun to Pluto increasing over time of John C. Baez, who works on gravity and has written books on it, so I would say he is a good authority.
His response was that space does not expand (much) near massive objects - meaning even between the Sun and Pluto the expansion will not occur at anywhere near the rate it occurs in free space.
Yes, you have to learn general relativity to understand why. It is not simply that local (Newtonian) gravity overcomes it - I asked that specifically. No, I have not taken GR so I cannot give any further insight into this issue.
If the uniform expansion did occur uniformly between the Sun and Pluto, we could measure the Hubble constant by watching Pluto slowly receede from the Sun. It would be measurable using current values of the Hubble constant over years or decades. The effect is tiny beyond measure, apparently.
Note: I cannot recall if there is truely *no* expansion between the Sun and Pluto, or if it is just really small. I have thus opted for the really small in this post as it is the more conservative option.
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So since MMORPG's are infamous for addiction, all one needs is to connect it to use a DDR pad as part of the input. Instant weight loss. I imagine the legal warnings - people with health problems will have problems - to be issued will be prodigious. Clearly, you'll need a keyboard for chatting between fights otherwise you'll loose the community which is why people keep playing games with horrific gameplay value and poor graphics. I'm envisioning using the DDR pad to either move around or to fight and do special attacks.
Currently, in Everquest, we smack the auto-attack button and maybe one or another button every few seconds. Yet with the DDR pad, perhaps you could have certain rythmic steps to *keep* autoattack up and have other steps to move your character around (reposition them) and to keep other things going, too. Obviously, you'd need difficulty settings.
Actuallly, maybe the DDR pad would work better as input for a fighting game, or a sports game (how ironic). Trouble would be, in one player versus another human player mode, the more physically fit one would have an edge - the degree of which could be tweaked by game mechanics.
Nevertheless, somebody (not me) should take advantage of the new DDR as an input device for new, other, games.
If no one is doing this already (which I doubt) it would be a great opportunity for an open source game.
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