Having played Everquest for a while, I am surpriesed that there has not been more freedom to dress your character in more or less suggestive attire as desired. I jokingly refer to this as the/slutty option which you can turn on or off. Actually, I think there is room for a few options: just give people a few (say 3) different looks: encased in steel (most conservative), encased in steel...but with curves in the right places, and revealing...which I will leave to your imagination.
Essentially, the same could be done for male characters, and the details of which I will leave up to your imagination.
None of this has to involve more graphics. Currently it can all be done via "hiding" certain pieces of armor, to reveal the default clothes underneeth. Many of us in Everquest want a/hidehelm option since we are allowed to do pretty nice customization to our faces with the/pickface command - but then *no one can see it* because we ware these giant helms.
I know people who intentionally pick "crown" type helms which do not show up just so that people can see their customization. This is particularly important to women, in my experience. They want to look nice in game - and *all* female character models which don't look like monsters having huge breasts annoys them.
I think game designers would garner way more female and casual player interest with three things: (1) a large degree of avatar customization (Everquest does okay, but there are problems - see above). Give people the option to dress as flirty or elegent or conservative as they want, and obviously allow them to change from one to another. (2) cooperative gameplay (Everquest is great at this: you gain so much benefit from cooperation with others in groups and in guilds and there really is no emphasis on player killing except on specific servers) (3) downtime. I know downtime is unpopular, but if you have no time to pause and rest up a bit you will never get to know anything about anyone you are playing with because you will have no time to chat. All MMORPGs probably have great chat tools, but if you have no time to use them... Of course, too much downtime is really bad - its just going to get boring.
Originally I thought GM events and dynamic content would keep me coming back to Everquest, but ultimately it is the players themselves. They have helped me out in the past so I want to help them out in the future, and together a great group of friends makes the game both much easier and more pleasent. Face it: gameplay is always going to be better in single player games but after playing a MMORPG, I really can't bring myself to play normal offline games much. So I can build a great city in Simcity or conquer the galaxy in Masters of Orion...so what? If I have a positive interaction with someone in Eq, its far, far more rewarding.
It is the casual players, the players who bring their girlfriends/boyfriends etc. which will continue to grow the market for these games. Hard core gamers will always be there, but (1) there are not too many of them and (2) people who commit to play (with their guild for example) every night for 4-8 hours are just plain scary - as a game designer, you are not getting any more money from these people but you are going to get alot more problems from them.
Sure you have to factor in that it is not always noon, you might get clouds, the pannels might not last the full 20 years, etc. Let's say it really costs 10 times this much. That is still only 1.1 cents (US) per kilowatt hour! This doesn't seem realistic.
The red flag for me was that the cited price for fossil fuel was also stated in watts (US$ 0.40 / watt I think) but I can buy a solar pannel which, while it is operating, puts out 1 watt. Fossil fuels are consumable. All I can imagine is that they asked: how much oil would it take to generate one watt for 20 years? And they came up with US$ 0.40? That just can't be right. The price is far higher than that. That would mean a continuous feed of 10 kilowatts over 20 years would only cost $4000, or $17/month? At the cannonical figure of $0.10/kW*hr, it costs: $175000 or $730/month. Are they not accounting for costs of transportation or refining the crude oil? The number are off by a factor of 43 or so.
In summary, I am not really sure what the CNN article is trying to claim, and I have no idea what their numbers mean.
I have looked into solar and it can be cost effective but there is a large initial investment which you will earn back over a realatively long time (say 15 years). If they can decrease the costs of the pannels by 10x at the cost of 1/3 efficiency loss, that is a net gain of about a factor of 7.5 thus you are looking at making your money back in 2.5 years instead of 15 and loads of people will do it.
I expect this will be totally ignored, but I guess after a half dozen or so of these arguments I will try.
When I write professionally, British English is expressly forbidden from the journals I publish in. I would imagine that is because they are American journals. This is, effectively, an international website and no one adheres to any standards of any kind. You might want to try to write so that other people can understand you, but believe me there are people who do not. If I were to publish in an English journal, and they required OED spelling I would do it. If American physics journals switched to British English, I would adapt - and maybe even start writing that way in my personal communications - but they do not. I doubt they would even consider it.
I love local color. I want southerners to keep the accent they have, and the Welsh too (even though I have difficulty parsing it). Why would you want to destroy other people's long established traditions? Lots of people speak English in their own ways and lots of unique quirks would be lost if we all just stopped using our slang and aligned to the OED like iron filings in a magnetic field.
The funny thing is that you all can understand each other perfectly (thus you can argue about it) so this obviously is not about communication, which is what language is for, anyhow. _________________________________________ _________
Ok I seem to recall Traveller as the sci-fi gaming system in which it took hours to roll up a character because it included a very detailed personal history - all randomly generated - which could include virtually any conceviable life event...including death...only RPG I know where you can die before you even start a real gaming session
Disclaimer:...however this is a pretty hazy memory from the rules of the 1980s and I did hear that newer versions of the rules have been published. Perhaps the newer rules are faster? _________________________________________ _________
Storing the waste is very controversial. Here in Southern California, roughly 20% of our power comes from Nuclear (mostly from San Onofre) and the storage tanks there are nearly full. The US government before the plant was built agreed to find a perminant home for the waste. A facility exists in Nevada. I believe it is in a mountain, in an area where there is low rainfall, etc...all to assure there is a negligable chance of leakage. Moving the waste from point A to point B is (last I heard) not happening. When I toured San Onofre there were years left (as in single digit: less than 10) until all the containers on site were full. Of course, congress will probably just order new ones built. (Just drove by there last weekend and I think there were new buildings - perhaps this has already happened? Building nuclear waste storage areas doesn't seem like something you really want to do at the last minute).
Of course, all this stuff was dug out of the earth originally. There are no mad scientists conjuring up radioactive elements with giant "lasers" or anything. We could just re-bury it in the exact proportions in which we found them. People living nearby would probably have kittens over it, blame all future cancer cases on it, and sue someone until the cows come home. (Hey - it is America). But realistically, we've done these people a huge favor by removing all that nasty radioactive stuff to begin with; all we would be doing is taking it back. ___________________________________________ _____
It is possible to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and reuse it in different nuclear reactors. Reprocessing involves more handling of the spent fuel and (as far as I know) is not done in the US but it is done in Europe. I worked at a lab in France where some of this handling is done (either just testing or reprocessing - I'm not sure I was just there to use the magnetometer). Apparently radiation leaks do happen. Thus I'm not saying this is definately the way to go. It may be better than the alternatives, for now at least.
Remember, the US elected the man who wanted to use "clean coal". (This statement rings in my memory as it singlehandedly changed my friend, a former US Marine, away from voting for Bush.)
I have thought of a cellular biology game in which you "build" parts of a cell and collect resources from the passing blood. Mitochondria for energy, Golgi apparatus as a warehouse, Lysosomes for digestion of foreign material/junk, etc. When you have enough resources your cell can divide...
I could imagine a strategy game (real time or turn based) where you fend off viruses and maybe zoom around a 3-d view of your cell (as an action part?).
Anyhow, there is really a lot of background material to choose from and to my knowledge no one has done anything like it (famous last words). Not all of it would have to be rigerous but it would be ideal if these "grey areas" were colored differently or noted in the manual. Perhaps there could be various settings. There are lots of things I would love to know about cells like how much room is devoted to each kind of organelle and what happens if each one goes wrong, and what various viruii do to cause malfunctions. I don't strictly need to know all of this but as general background material it would be nice.
A more sophisticated idea would include a really simplifed DNA where you get to pick certain characteristics in the DNA to generate certain parts of the cell to help it survive in different environments. I was thinking about single celled life forms with flagellum to cause forward motion. You would devote "space" in the DNA chain for various parts of the cell for defence or offence (eating?) or motion, etc. Too long DNA chains would either take longer to replicate or have higher chances of mistranslation (perhaps DNA length is not the ideal "scarce resource" perhaps there could be an "energy cost" for each organelle?) Anyhow, I imagine tossing varients into an environment and then seeing how they survive (and compete against one another) and then see how robust they are to changes in pH or temperature or new viruses or perhaps scarcity of resources. It would almost be like those old "Ogre" like tank games where you program your tank and compete with other tanks to see who's algorithm is better. Perhaps an online competition/forum for various DNA combinations is possible.
Partly I am tossing ideas out here because the game industry devotes huge resources to yet anothe r FPS or MMORPG and someone should be writing new games.
Here is the list of "some" prefixes from Serway & Jewitt (Principles of Physics 3rd Ed.)
Power Prefix Abbreviation -24 yocto y -21 zepto z -18 atto a -15 femto f -12 pico p -9 nano n -6 micro \mu (greek lower case m) -3 milli m -2 centi c -1 deci d 1 deca D 2 hecto h 3 kilo k 6 mega M 9 giga G 12 tera T 15 peta P 18 exa E 21 zetta Z 24 yotta Y
Handy when you are working on things of these sizes, but both extremes are rarely used (at least by physicists I know) so saying you measured a planet with 1000 yotta grams of mass (about the size of Jupiter) will almost assuredly lead to the question: "wait, yotta...that what exponent?"
Oh, when using a magic lamp do NOT wish for one peta kitty if all you want is to pet a kitty.
That didn't seem to do it for the Clippy that I encountered. (Years ago, word '95 or '97 I believe). I recall this was the main complaint about Clippy - that "he" was rather hard to perminantly relieve from duty. In fact, I seem to recall detailed (like 3-5 menu level deep) instructions being written in PC Magazine about how to turn this little joker off for good. Perhaps I am misremembering or perhaps you are writing about a different product.
I agree this is a very impressive feat - but remember the pyrimids are really big - it's not like they are placing all those block one on top of another. They likely pulled them up onto the working level of the pyrimid from several directions at once.
Anyhow, as I understood the article, the man seems to be claiming that he understands how they transported the blocks to the site. He is quoted as saying, "I've reduced moving rocks to the pyramid to a mom-and-pop operation." (emphasis mine). Look, I don't know the local geography but obviously this only makes sense if the local terrain is reasonably flat (rather, if it was at the time of construction...). It seems many here are talking about how the pyrimids were actually constructed (e.g. how one block arived atop another). Assumedly they used big ramps. Someone mentioned the quantities of bodies in the pyrimids - all I have to say is if they rocked/rolled the bricks up the ramps I don't wanna see what the ramps looked like afterwords. _____________________________________ ____________
The article reads, in the beginning, "[T]he idea was to see how well this business-oriented operating system/application software bundle worked for a moderately technical user working in a Windows-dominated world" (emphasis mine). Yet they go on to find major failings because of difficulty getting things like Samba to work, multiple attempts at installs, etc. I would think this would be the system admin's problem.
The article gives us no background on those who are installing the system - so I guess it would be safest to assume they are "moderately technical users" - of Microsoft Windows. Given that, I'm pretty impressed they got as far as they did. All they needed was one real guru to come install all this stuff for them and they would be set. One good thing about Linux (in my humble experience) is that once set up it just flat works. The real question they asked is, what would happen then? And that question remains unanswered.
The only section in which they discuss what happens once the system is running is under "Ease of Use" which is pretty mild stuff. Sure, they had trouble cutting and pasting to and from Mozilla - but this begs the question (and I am no expert so I can't answer it) is this just because they have a bad driver? Is it really a user-level issue?
As a side note, they mention they do lots of copying and pasting between browser windows. I would imagine they would have kittens when they discover in Linux we have tabs in our browsers, but it didn't sound like they got that far. Further, if they are playing around with a few IE windows open at once, perhaps they experience the (more than occasional) MS Windows crash...if so perhaps Linux would be an improvement. (Not if they try out loads of new hardware...)
I would love to see more role playing in MMORPG's. However, I would not consider the lack of it "ruining". There are *lots* of reasons I really can't bring myself to log into Everquest these days. (I used to MUD then I Everquested for *cringe* about three years - I have not tried any other MMORPG but I do read the reviews...)
1. Dynamic Content. When I bought Eq, I figured some of my monthly payment would go to create a continuously changing world. The changes don't have to be major, but it's pretty crazy how well nailed down things are in Eq. People know exactly where and how frequently important monsters appear, what they drop, and what level they are. When I started there were things called "GM events" in which the rules changed and actual people ran encounters. Sure there were problems, which have been solved by basically not having such events.
2. The Time Scale - realistically I can play about 2-3 hours per week. Past a certain level, there is really no way for me to advance because no group will accept you for only a couple hours. I don't blame them. These people play for many hours straight and its too difficult to find a replacement - it may literally take hours - so I would be wasting all their time. Further, people won't take you seriously if you can only play for a couple hours per week and, since joining their group may cause them to get killed and thus waste more of their time, they will not accept me. Again, I don't blame them it is not worth the risk to join with someone who is, potentially, going to waste your time.
3. The large death penalty - I can accept my own character's death and loss of experience. However, I cannot leave (potentially) five other people to suffer the penalty just because of me. It can take a great deal of time to get "rezzed" which restores some of the lost experience and getting a "rez" must be done immediately or it is not possible. My character is quite useful at gathering together our corpses after a spate of deaths so sometimes I find myself spending more time online than I can really afford. At lower levels this was not a big deal because the penalty was smaller and people are not as intense - often it is easy to get a rez from a high level just passing through or to call on a higher level friend. However, when you are rather high level, it is very dangerous for another high level to come and help you out. A single death may take hours of time to recover from in terms of getting a rez and regaining lost exp.
4. Camping - the safest and thus most accessable way to advance is to sit in one place and kill the same creatures over and over. I wish there would be some explicit reward for utilizing more of the game. Eq has a huge world, most of it unpopulated and some of it badly crowded. There are quests which access most of the game world, but there is really no benefit from most of these quests. If I spend about 10 hours camping in a certain place I will gain a level. If I run around and do quests for 10 hours, the experience I gain will be minimal and any gear I get will be rather poor - I could spend the time camping certain trivial mosters (called farming) and sell the loot to other players (mostly for tradeskills) and get far more than enough cash to buy better gear. Note: at extreme high levels there are good quests, but I'm not there yet.
5. Training - dungeons in Eq are great! However all those twisty corridors and narrow points become death traps if a single person - usually not in your own group - makes a mistake and leads a monster (or a few...) to you. Why not make a copy of the dungeon for each group which enters? I believe other games do this. It would certainly benefit Eq. This would go great with dynamic content. Why not make random changes in dungeons each time it is created - and why not have the computer judge the strength of the party as it enters to set up challenging battles?
6. Lack of alternative paths - currently there are three paths: gaining experience, money/gear, or t
Yes, the American Physical Society accepts LaTeX files submitted electronically. It is pretty big news that they are now about to accept Microsoft Word format as well. (Note that they just began accepting Word format this June - although PRL (the rapid communication journal) has been accepting since all of July 2002!)
The learning curve to latex is steep but not really long. Whatever you are thinking about doing in LaTeX has probably already been done, so try to get a template if you can and just begin playing around with it - this is the best advice I can give you.
I used word until I began my thesis. Then I learned latex, beginning with a sample thesis file from my friend. (But most universities have sample files on file somewhere if you ask around.) At the end I handed it in to be checked and the graduate division found about 4 or 5 formatting problems. The nice lady who broke the news to me was quite used to pitched battles with M$ word users unwilling to go back and even try to get word to make their margins line up - even with the help of good old Clippy. I told her none of the things she talked about were difficult to fix, and I had the new copy back in a few hours. She almost had kittens.
I now use latex for quizzes because it takes me about the same time to write the entire quiz that it would for me to enter two equations into the M$ word equation editor - and this is something that latex is kind of bad at (since consistant formatting, which is one of latex's strengths, is unimportant). At the end of last semester I ran dvipdf on all the quizes and put them up on my homepage. No one complained about unreadable formuli. I have tried this with Word files and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. __________________________________________ _______
my dogs. They are Aspen and Tahoe. The other name I liked to use is Yossarian. In Everquest, when I got a last name for Yossarian, I used "RunYoYoRun". I had a few comments on Yossarian, particularly from people who had read the book (Catch-22). However, I got the strangest comments playing Tahoe. Some guy: "Where do you live" Me: (after some thought) "I come from the fair forest of Kelethin".
Some guy: "No really, where do you live? See, I live on the lake and was wondering if you were a neighbor." Me: "Oh, no no I don't live there, as much as I would like to, I just named myself after my dog."
Also, there is this thing in Everquest called "dude-speak" where you write things like a twelve year old and in "dude-speak" you use "Ta" to mean "The". So anyhow, some guy runs right up to Tahoe and says, "You don't look like a hoe." It took me a minute to figure out why he said that, but then I realized I bet he was expecting "Tahoe" to be some really hot chick. Oh, I can only imagine the dissapointment. _________________________________ _________________
US National Public Radio did an interview with a former Clinton aide who was involved with massive declassification of information near the end of Clinton's term (sorry forgot the name). Two things he said stuck. First, many stories from newspapers and magazines were classified. What, exactly, is the use of classifying something potentially millions of people have already read? Second, he said either most or all of what was declassified sits in giant trailers outside CIA headquarters (my memory is hazy on this point - I believe it was outside some headquarters). Sure, you can go there are request any piece of information you want - but it doesn't seem exactly easy access.
First, it seems like a waste of resources. Even if there is a great reason to classify, say, a New York Times article about the stealth fighter wouldn't those resources be better spent on something else?
The primary point of the Clinton aide was that mindless classifying of events fosters suspicion of government.
As another example, I saw a History Channel documentary on the early years of modern Israel and apparently in one military action, Israel shot at an American spy ship which was disguised as a fishing ship. The Isralies will speak openly about the event, but on the US side it is classified. Why? This happened about 50 years ago?
Yes, yes, you found out our dirty secret. We were all idiots - in fact most physicists are idiots. We have great propensity to lock our keys in our offices and can't dress ourselves without looking like a Father's Day Gone Wrong.
You know algebra, right? Go pick up Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler. Read chapters one and two and do the exercises at the end. That's what I did for fun one afternoon.
I encourage you to do so not because I think you are not smart enough. I actually think you are - heck I think anyone who can grasp algebra as in: "x is a number, but we don't know which one yet, mkay?" can learn virtually everything we do. It just may take a bit of time.
By the way, if you really understand Taylor and Wheeler you will know why you can get in a fast enough rocket ship and (if you can stand the acceleration) travel anywhere in the galaxy within your life time, but when you return to Earth many, many years will have passed by.
I have shown this book to many people. It even has a little cartoon bird in it and lots of pretty pictures and nice, friendly large print. They don't get it within a few hours. People just are not used to thinking along these lines. They see the square root of one over one minus v-squared over c-squared and their eyes gloss over.
Perhaps intelligence is just not being afraid, intellectually. It seemed to indicate that in the article.
I was asked the 12 coins: one either heavy or light find which one and whether it is heavy or light - question when a graduate student in physics, along with my 11 classmates. None of us came up with the answer for one week - and then we only proved the answer was 3. Anyone who would want to try to solve this problem in, say, 10 minuets is just going to find people who have already seen the problem (in my opinion).
Now, I'm not saying *no one* could figure it out in 10 minuets, (although you might start seeing lots of autistic people working for you...) but if 11 people studying for Ph.D's in physics can't do it in under an hour it seems a poor question.
By the way, there is a similar test we take in physics called either the qualifier or the comprehensive exam. Professors just ask the questions they did not get as grad students. However, we study for months ahead of time (conventional wisdom is about six weeks will do it) and most do rather well.
It is common in physics to say the last time I knew how to do that was when I took the comp's.
My reaction to Microsoft(M$) asking questions like this is that they will begin to get a bunch of cheaters (people who just looked up some questions ahead of time and memorized a bunch of answers - then just got lucky.)
These people may fit perfectly into the M$ culture.
I would imagine it would make a rather Machiavellian culture. At the end of the day you can't pay me enough to work with jerks. Unless it was enough to retire on within a few years, which I suppose at M$ it used to be.
Yep, the USA spies on loads of countries. Yep, it is horrible. However, spy operations in relativly friendly countries have been represented to me as training exercises and ways to work out and find potential means of detection.
If, say, the USA gets caught tapping, say, the Netherlands foreign embassy phone, there may still be enough goodwill between nations to enchange information as to how detection occured. I have read this is kind of tolerated within NATO countries as the price of joining.
Again, I am not saying this is justified. The USA should behave as a paragon of virute. Even if it costs lives in the short term because in the long term I believe it will pay us all back many times over.
Mostly I am commenting to ask if anyone else has better information than I do. My source on this is the History channel (rather my memory of the History channel program from over one year ago).
A small company called Spiderweb Software released a game for Linux called Exile III - it is similar to the classic Ultima IV or Ultima V style. It is shareware, so you can try before you buy (even for Linux). I am kind of disapointed they only released one game for Linux as they released so many for both the Mac and the PC - including scenerio design tools - and this was way before Neverwinter Nights. Sure the graphics are not overwhelming but worth a look. Here is a link to the game.
I personally bought and played Exile I-III on the PC around 1998 and was very satisfied. Currently, there is NWN and Everquest and many others to choose from, but I felt it was the best comptuer RPG at that time.
But the reason I bring this up is that apparently it did not sell well under Linux - perhaps it was piracy, perhaps just not enough of a user base (note: I did not play under Linux maybe it is ultra buggy or something) but for whatever reason an ideal candidate for producing Linux games was turned off.
Quote from Fred Baker, "There are two sides. One is that Cisco as a company needs to let its customers abide by the law. The other is the moral and ethical issues. There are two very separate questions."
First of all, this makes it sound like there was a law passed which specifies all routers must have this kind of capability. I sure have not heard about that.
It sounds like currently an ISP can be subpoenaed to find out what a particular person is sending. Currently, the ISP seems to provide complete logs and allows law enforcement to sort through it. This just sounds like bad practice of law. If we lived in John-Ashcroft's-wet-dream-land where every packet has a personal ID number on it which could not be forged or faked, sure you could ask for what a person sends. This is so far from the case that it is a joke. Even if I only use one computer and it has one IP address, what if someone else uses it? Even if the email has a name on it, what if it was forged? It would be laughably easy to plant evidence on, say, a business rival. Bottom line: computer are not very secure, in general. (Side note: sure, your computer may be very secure but visit, say, a law office. You may be surprised - even by very large law offices with nice wood panneling and mugs with the partner's names on them.)
If subpoenaed for John Q. Terrorist's internet activity, knowing what we know, we cannot hand anything over with a clean consience. If, on the other hand, all of IP address 64.22.xx.xx is subpoenaed, sure, we have to hand it over but we cannot say who did what with any great certainty.
Lastly, Mr. Baker seems to indicate providing a product is separate from morality. This is a very disjointed view of work - almost on the verge of: "what I do at work should be totally separate from morality." This is quite frightening. Perhaps this is too strong. He is clearly saying if the company follows the law, this is completely separate from morality. Again, this should be frightening: if you follow the law, morality is not at issue? The most obvious reaction is that if the law is wrong, in America, you have a responsibility to not follow it. Being part of a corporation does not absolve you of your duties as a citizen.
In my opinion, the workplace is where people are least moral (in my experience) and thus it is exactly where people need to be thinking of morality the most - certainly not separating it and arguing "we are just following the law".
Yes, yes I would have to agree that if we were the only life in the Universe, that would make God as likely as the non-existance of life elsewhere is unlikely.
Let me rephrase: if life existing elsewhere were 99.9% likely, but it didn't happen, then I would say there was a 99.9% chance that it was, indeed, a divine plan. No matter what the numbers, there would always be uncertainty.
Now for the big however.
However, how the heck could we (a) prove that no life exists anywhere in the Universe? It is a rather large place. Then (b) we would have to compute the odds of Universes having life.
Look, this is speculation at best. Let us just consider if life does evolve by luck. The only real way would be to *know* is to look at other Universes and count how many have life and how many do not. Maybe life on Earth-like planets can evolve with a very, very small probability. Let's say this odd is very slim, I don't know something like 1 is 10^100 or something like that. Fine. Let's say there are only 10^10 Earth-like planets in every Universe, thus the odds of a Universe having life is only 1 in 10^90, and life evolving twice in one Universe would be an astounding 1 in 10^180. This is rediculasly slim. However, the people on those worlds where they were the only life would think: "Holy cow this is unlikely! It must be God!" - but they didn't see the other 10^90-1 Universes which have no life, thus they don't know that is just was luck. And if they did see the other 10^90-1 empty Universes, what would they think?
Lastly, you should be aware there is some evidence that amino acids have been found in inter-steller material which has fallen to Earth. There is also some evidence that an electric current passed through basic non-organic material can generate amino acids, too. Thus the materials for life are quite prevalent. If we consider a virus life, this is quite close to good evidence that viruses should be found almost anywhere.
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What was in the expansion which was so horrible? (I know nothing about UO I'm just curious perhaps it should be a caution for other game designers...)
Having played Everquest for a while, I am surpriesed that there has not been more freedom to dress your character in more or less suggestive attire as desired. I jokingly refer to this as the /slutty option which you can turn on or off. Actually, I think there is room for a few options: just give people a few (say 3) different looks: encased in steel (most conservative), encased in steel...but with curves in the right places, and revealing...which I will leave to your imagination.
/hidehelm option since we are allowed to do pretty nice customization to our faces with the /pickface command - but then *no one can see it* because we ware these giant helms.
_ __
Essentially, the same could be done for male characters, and the details of which I will leave up to your imagination.
None of this has to involve more graphics. Currently it can all be done via "hiding" certain pieces of armor, to reveal the default clothes underneeth. Many of us in Everquest want a
I know people who intentionally pick "crown" type helms which do not show up just so that people can see their customization. This is particularly important to women, in my experience. They want to look nice in game - and *all* female character models which don't look like monsters having huge breasts annoys them.
I think game designers would garner way more female and casual player interest with three things:
(1) a large degree of avatar customization (Everquest does okay, but there are problems - see above). Give people the option to dress as flirty or elegent or conservative as they want, and obviously allow them to change from one to another.
(2) cooperative gameplay (Everquest is great at this: you gain so much benefit from cooperation with others in groups and in guilds and there really is no emphasis on player killing except on specific servers)
(3) downtime. I know downtime is unpopular, but if you have no time to pause and rest up a bit you will never get to know anything about anyone you are playing with because you will have no time to chat. All MMORPGs probably have great chat tools, but if you have no time to use them... Of course, too much downtime is really bad - its just going to get boring.
Originally I thought GM events and dynamic content would keep me coming back to Everquest, but ultimately it is the players themselves. They have helped me out in the past so I want to help them out in the future, and together a great group of friends makes the game both much easier and more pleasent.
Face it: gameplay is always going to be better in single player games but after playing a MMORPG, I really can't bring myself to play normal offline games much. So I can build a great city in Simcity or conquer the galaxy in Masters of Orion...so what? If I have a positive interaction with someone in Eq, its far, far more rewarding.
It is the casual players, the players who bring their girlfriends/boyfriends etc. which will continue to grow the market for these games. Hard core gamers will always be there, but (1) there are not too many of them and (2) people who commit to play (with their guild for example) every night for 4-8 hours are just plain scary - as a game designer, you are not getting any more money from these people but you are going to get alot more problems from them.
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Fine. And if the pannel lasts 20 years that is:
US$0.20/watt * 1000W/kW * 1/20yr * 1yr/365.25days * 1day/24 hours = US$0.0011/kW*hour.
Sure you have to factor in that it is not always noon, you might get clouds, the pannels might not last the full 20 years, etc. Let's say it really costs 10 times this much. That is still only 1.1 cents (US) per kilowatt hour! This doesn't seem realistic.
The red flag for me was that the cited price for fossil fuel was also stated in watts (US$ 0.40 / watt I think) but I can buy a solar pannel which, while it is operating, puts out 1 watt. Fossil fuels are consumable. All I can imagine is that they asked: how much oil would it take to generate one watt for 20 years? And they came up with US$ 0.40? That just can't be right. The price is far higher than that. That would mean a continuous feed of 10 kilowatts over 20 years would only cost $4000, or $17/month? At the cannonical figure of $0.10/kW*hr, it costs: $175000 or $730/month. Are they not accounting for costs of transportation or refining the crude oil? The number are off by a factor of 43 or so.
In summary, I am not really sure what the CNN article is trying to claim, and I have no idea what their numbers mean.
I have looked into solar and it can be cost effective but there is a large initial investment which you will earn back over a realatively long time (say 15 years). If they can decrease the costs of the pannels by 10x at the cost of 1/3 efficiency loss, that is a net gain of about a factor of 7.5 thus you are looking at making your money back in 2.5 years instead of 15 and loads of people will do it.
I expect this will be totally ignored, but I guess after a half dozen or so of these arguments I will try.
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When I write professionally, British English is expressly forbidden from the journals I publish in. I would imagine that is because they are American journals. This is, effectively, an international website and no one adheres to any standards of any kind. You might want to try to write so that other people can understand you, but believe me there are people who do not. If I were to publish in an English journal, and they required OED spelling I would do it. If American physics journals switched to British English, I would adapt - and maybe even start writing that way in my personal communications - but they do not. I doubt they would even consider it.
I love local color. I want southerners to keep the accent they have, and the Welsh too (even though I have difficulty parsing it). Why would you want to destroy other people's long established traditions? Lots of people speak English in their own ways and lots of unique quirks would be lost if we all just stopped using our slang and aligned to the OED like iron filings in a magnetic field.
The funny thing is that you all can understand each other perfectly (thus you can argue about it) so this obviously is not about communication, which is what language is for, anyhow.
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Ok I seem to recall Traveller as the sci-fi gaming system in which it took hours to roll up a character because it included a very detailed personal history - all randomly generated - which could include virtually any conceviable life event...including death...only RPG I know where you can die before you even start a real gaming session
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Disclaimer:...however this is a pretty hazy memory from the rules of the 1980s and I did hear that newer versions of the rules have been published. Perhaps the newer rules are faster?
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Storing the waste is very controversial. Here in Southern California, roughly 20% of our power comes from Nuclear (mostly from San Onofre) and the storage tanks there are nearly full. The US government before the plant was built agreed to find a perminant home for the waste. A facility exists in Nevada. I believe it is in a mountain, in an area where there is low rainfall, etc...all to assure there is a negligable chance of leakage. Moving the waste from point A to point B is (last I heard) not happening. When I toured San Onofre there were years left (as in single digit: less than 10) until all the containers on site were full. Of course, congress will probably just order new ones built. (Just drove by there last weekend and I think there were new buildings - perhaps this has already happened? Building nuclear waste storage areas doesn't seem like something you really want to do at the last minute).
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Of course, all this stuff was dug out of the earth originally. There are no mad scientists conjuring up radioactive elements with giant "lasers" or anything. We could just re-bury it in the exact proportions in which we found them. People living nearby would probably have kittens over it, blame all future cancer cases on it, and sue someone until the cows come home. (Hey - it is America). But realistically, we've done these people a huge favor by removing all that nasty radioactive stuff to begin with; all we would be doing is taking it back.
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It is possible to reprocess spent nuclear fuel and reuse it in different nuclear reactors. Reprocessing involves more handling of the spent fuel and (as far as I know) is not done in the US but it is done in Europe. I worked at a lab in France where some of this handling is done (either just testing or reprocessing - I'm not sure I was just there to use the magnetometer). Apparently radiation leaks do happen. Thus I'm not saying this is definately the way to go. It may be better than the alternatives, for now at least.
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Remember, the US elected the man who wanted to use "clean coal". (This statement rings in my memory as it singlehandedly changed my friend, a former US Marine, away from voting for Bush.)
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I have thought of a cellular biology game in which you "build" parts of a cell and collect resources from the passing blood. Mitochondria for energy, Golgi apparatus as a warehouse, Lysosomes for digestion of foreign material/junk, etc. When you have enough resources your cell can divide...
I could imagine a strategy game (real time or turn based) where you fend off viruses and maybe zoom around a 3-d view of your cell (as an action part?).
Anyhow, there is really a lot of background material to choose from and to my knowledge no one has done anything like it (famous last words). Not all of it would have to be rigerous but it would be ideal if these "grey areas" were colored differently or noted in the manual. Perhaps there could be various settings. There are lots of things I would love to know about cells like how much room is devoted to each kind of organelle and what happens if each one goes wrong, and what various viruii do to cause malfunctions. I don't strictly need to know all of this but as general background material it would be nice.
A more sophisticated idea would include a really simplifed DNA where you get to pick certain characteristics in the DNA to generate certain parts of the cell to help it survive in different environments. I was thinking about single celled life forms with flagellum to cause forward motion. You would devote "space" in the DNA chain for various parts of the cell for defence or offence (eating?) or motion, etc. Too long DNA chains would either take longer to replicate or have higher chances of mistranslation (perhaps DNA length is not the ideal "scarce resource" perhaps there could be an "energy cost" for each organelle?) Anyhow, I imagine tossing varients into an environment and then seeing how they survive (and compete against one another) and then see how robust they are to changes in pH or temperature or new viruses or perhaps scarcity of resources. It would almost be like those old "Ogre" like tank games where you program your tank and compete with other tanks to see who's algorithm is better. Perhaps an online competition/forum for various DNA combinations is possible.
Partly I am tossing ideas out here because the game industry devotes huge resources to yet anothe r FPS or MMORPG and someone should be writing new games.
Here is the list of "some" prefixes from Serway & Jewitt (Principles of Physics 3rd Ed.)
Power Prefix Abbreviation
-24 yocto y
-21 zepto z
-18 atto a
-15 femto f
-12 pico p
-9 nano n
-6 micro \mu (greek lower case m)
-3 milli m
-2 centi c
-1 deci d
1 deca D
2 hecto h
3 kilo k
6 mega M
9 giga G
12 tera T
15 peta P
18 exa E
21 zetta Z
24 yotta Y
Handy when you are working on things of these sizes, but both extremes are rarely used (at least by physicists I know) so saying you measured a planet with 1000 yotta grams of mass (about the size of Jupiter) will almost assuredly lead to the question: "wait, yotta...that what exponent?"
Oh, when using a magic lamp do NOT wish for one peta kitty if all you want is to pet a kitty.
That didn't seem to do it for the Clippy that I encountered. (Years ago, word '95 or '97 I believe). I recall this was the main complaint about Clippy - that "he" was rather hard to perminantly relieve from duty. In fact, I seem to recall detailed (like 3-5 menu level deep) instructions being written in PC Magazine about how to turn this little joker off for good. Perhaps I am misremembering or perhaps you are writing about a different product.
I agree this is a very impressive feat - but remember the pyrimids are really big - it's not like they are placing all those block one on top of another. They likely pulled them up onto the working level of the pyrimid from several directions at once.
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Anyhow, as I understood the article, the man seems to be claiming that he understands how they transported the blocks to the site. He is quoted as saying, "I've reduced moving rocks to the pyramid to a mom-and-pop operation." (emphasis mine). Look, I don't know the local geography but obviously this only makes sense if the local terrain is reasonably flat (rather, if it was at the time of construction...). It seems many here are talking about how the pyrimids were actually constructed (e.g. how one block arived atop another). Assumedly they used big ramps. Someone mentioned the quantities of bodies in the pyrimids - all I have to say is if they rocked/rolled the bricks up the ramps I don't wanna see what the ramps looked like afterwords.
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The article reads, in the beginning, "[T]he idea was to see how well this business-oriented operating system/application software bundle worked for a moderately technical user working in a Windows-dominated world" (emphasis mine). Yet they go on to find major failings because of difficulty getting things like Samba to work, multiple attempts at installs, etc. I would think this would be the system admin's problem.
The article gives us no background on those who are installing the system - so I guess it would be safest to assume they are "moderately technical users" - of Microsoft Windows. Given that, I'm pretty impressed they got as far as they did. All they needed was one real guru to come install all this stuff for them and they would be set. One good thing about Linux (in my humble experience) is that once set up it just flat works. The real question they asked is, what would happen then? And that question remains unanswered.
The only section in which they discuss what happens once the system is running is under "Ease of Use" which is pretty mild stuff. Sure, they had trouble cutting and pasting to and from Mozilla - but this begs the question (and I am no expert so I can't answer it) is this just because they have a bad driver? Is it really a user-level issue?
As a side note, they mention they do lots of copying and pasting between browser windows. I would imagine they would have kittens when they discover in Linux we have tabs in our browsers, but it didn't sound like they got that far. Further, if they are playing around with a few IE windows open at once, perhaps they experience the (more than occasional) MS Windows crash...if so perhaps Linux would be an improvement. (Not if they try out loads of new hardware...)
I would love to see more role playing in MMORPG's. However, I would not consider the lack of it "ruining". There are *lots* of reasons I really can't bring myself to log into Everquest these days. (I used to MUD then I Everquested for *cringe* about three years - I have not tried any other MMORPG but I do read the reviews...)
1. Dynamic Content. When I bought Eq, I figured some of my monthly payment would go to create a continuously changing world. The changes don't have to be major, but it's pretty crazy how well nailed down things are in Eq. People know exactly where and how frequently important monsters appear, what they drop, and what level they are. When I started there were things called "GM events" in which the rules changed and actual people ran encounters. Sure there were problems, which have been solved by basically not having such events.
2. The Time Scale - realistically I can play about 2-3 hours per week. Past a certain level, there is really no way for me to advance because no group will accept you for only a couple hours. I don't blame them. These people play for many hours straight and its too difficult to find a replacement - it may literally take hours - so I would be wasting all their time. Further, people won't take you seriously if you can only play for a couple hours per week and, since joining their group may cause them to get killed and thus waste more of their time, they will not accept me. Again, I don't blame them it is not worth the risk to join with someone who is, potentially, going to waste your time.
3. The large death penalty - I can accept my own character's death and loss of experience. However, I cannot leave (potentially) five other people to suffer the penalty just because of me. It can take a great deal of time to get "rezzed" which restores some of the lost experience and getting a "rez" must be done immediately or it is not possible. My character is quite useful at gathering together our corpses after a spate of deaths so sometimes I find myself spending more time online than I can really afford. At lower levels this was not a big deal because the penalty was smaller and people are not as intense - often it is easy to get a rez from a high level just passing through or to call on a higher level friend. However, when you are rather high level, it is very dangerous for another high level to come and help you out. A single death may take hours of time to recover from in terms of getting a rez and regaining lost exp.
4. Camping - the safest and thus most accessable way to advance is to sit in one place and kill the same creatures over and over. I wish there would be some explicit reward for utilizing more of the game. Eq has a huge world, most of it unpopulated and some of it badly crowded. There are quests which access most of the game world, but there is really no benefit from most of these quests. If I spend about 10 hours camping in a certain place I will gain a level. If I run around and do quests for 10 hours, the experience I gain will be minimal and any gear I get will be rather poor - I could spend the time camping certain trivial mosters (called farming) and sell the loot to other players (mostly for tradeskills) and get far more than enough cash to buy better gear. Note: at extreme high levels there are good quests, but I'm not there yet.
5. Training - dungeons in Eq are great! However all those twisty corridors and narrow points become death traps if a single person - usually not in your own group - makes a mistake and leads a monster (or a few...) to you. Why not make a copy of the dungeon for each group which enters? I believe other games do this. It would certainly benefit Eq. This would go great with dynamic content. Why not make random changes in dungeons each time it is created - and why not have the computer judge the strength of the party as it enters to set up challenging battles?
6. Lack of alternative paths - currently there are three paths: gaining experience, money/gear, or t
Yes, the American Physical Society accepts LaTeX files submitted electronically. It is pretty big news that they are now about to accept Microsoft Word format as well. (Note that they just began accepting Word format this June - although PRL (the rapid communication journal) has been accepting since all of July 2002!)
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The learning curve to latex is steep but not really long. Whatever you are thinking about doing in LaTeX has probably already been done, so try to get a template if you can and just begin playing around with it - this is the best advice I can give you.
I used word until I began my thesis. Then I learned latex, beginning with a sample thesis file from my friend. (But most universities have sample files on file somewhere if you ask around.) At the end I handed it in to be checked and the graduate division found about 4 or 5 formatting problems. The nice lady who broke the news to me was quite used to pitched battles with M$ word users unwilling to go back and even try to get word to make their margins line up - even with the help of good old Clippy. I told her none of the things she talked about were difficult to fix, and I had the new copy back in a few hours. She almost had kittens.
I now use latex for quizzes because it takes me about the same time to write the entire quiz that it would for me to enter two equations into the M$ word equation editor - and this is something that latex is kind of bad at (since consistant formatting, which is one of latex's strengths, is unimportant). At the end of last semester I ran dvipdf on all the quizes and put them up on my homepage. No one complained about unreadable formuli. I have tried this with Word files and there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
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...why do we have to enhance it by playing other MMORPGs within it?
Seriously.
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my dogs. They are Aspen and Tahoe. The other name I liked to use is Yossarian. In Everquest, when I got a last name for Yossarian, I used "RunYoYoRun". I had a few comments on Yossarian, particularly from people who had read the book (Catch-22). However, I got the strangest comments playing Tahoe.
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Some guy: "Where do you live"
Me: (after some thought) "I come from the fair forest of Kelethin".
Some guy: "No really, where do you live? See, I live on the lake and was wondering if you were a neighbor."
Me: "Oh, no no I don't live there, as much as I would like to, I just named myself after my dog."
Also, there is this thing in Everquest called "dude-speak" where you write things like a twelve year old and in "dude-speak" you use "Ta" to mean "The". So anyhow, some guy runs right up to Tahoe and says, "You don't look like a hoe."
It took me a minute to figure out why he said that, but then I realized I bet he was expecting "Tahoe" to be some really hot chick. Oh, I can only imagine the dissapointment.
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US National Public Radio did an interview with a former Clinton aide who was involved with massive declassification of information near the end of Clinton's term (sorry forgot the name). Two things he said stuck. First, many stories from newspapers and magazines were classified. What, exactly, is the use of classifying something potentially millions of people have already read? Second, he said either most or all of what was declassified sits in giant trailers outside CIA headquarters (my memory is hazy on this point - I believe it was outside some headquarters). Sure, you can go there are request any piece of information you want - but it doesn't seem exactly easy access.
First, it seems like a waste of resources. Even if there is a great reason to classify, say, a New York Times article about the stealth fighter wouldn't those resources be better spent on something else?
The primary point of the Clinton aide was that mindless classifying of events fosters suspicion of government.
As another example, I saw a History Channel documentary on the early years of modern Israel and apparently in one military action, Israel shot at an American spy ship which was disguised as a fishing ship. The Isralies will speak openly about the event, but on the US side it is classified. Why? This happened about 50 years ago?
R2.0 wrote:
"Welcome to the new millenium - it's gonna be a long one."
God, I hope it is a long millenium for human-kind. Seems like we are trying our darndest to get it over quickly.
Yes, yes, you found out our dirty secret. We were all idiots - in fact most physicists are idiots. We have great propensity to lock our keys in our offices and can't dress ourselves without looking like a Father's Day Gone Wrong.
You know algebra, right? Go pick up Spacetime Physics by Taylor and Wheeler. Read chapters one and two and do the exercises at the end. That's what I did for fun one afternoon.
I encourage you to do so not because I think you are not smart enough. I actually think you are - heck I think anyone who can grasp algebra as in: "x is a number, but we don't know which one yet, mkay?" can learn virtually everything we do. It just may take a bit of time.
By the way, if you really understand Taylor and Wheeler you will know why you can get in a fast enough rocket ship and (if you can stand the acceleration) travel anywhere in the galaxy within your life time, but when you return to Earth many, many years will have passed by.
I have shown this book to many people. It even has a little cartoon bird in it and lots of pretty pictures and nice, friendly large print. They don't get it within a few hours. People just are not used to thinking along these lines. They see the square root of one over one minus v-squared over c-squared and their eyes gloss over.
Perhaps intelligence is just not being afraid, intellectually. It seemed to indicate that in the article.
I was asked the 12 coins: one either heavy or light find which one and whether it is heavy or light - question when a graduate student in physics, along with my 11 classmates. None of us came up with the answer for one week - and then we only proved the answer was 3. Anyone who would want to try to solve this problem in, say, 10 minuets is just going to find people who have already seen the problem (in my opinion).
Now, I'm not saying *no one* could figure it out in 10 minuets, (although you might start seeing lots of autistic people working for you...) but if 11 people studying for Ph.D's in physics can't do it in under an hour it seems a poor question.
By the way, there is a similar test we take in physics called either the qualifier or the comprehensive exam. Professors just ask the questions they did not get as grad students. However, we study for months ahead of time (conventional wisdom is about six weeks will do it) and most do rather well.
It is common in physics to say the last time I knew how to do that was when I took the comp's.
My reaction to Microsoft(M$) asking questions like this is that they will begin to get a bunch of cheaters (people who just looked up some questions ahead of time and memorized a bunch of answers - then just got lucky.)
These people may fit perfectly into the M$ culture.
I would imagine it would make a rather Machiavellian culture. At the end of the day you can't pay me enough to work with jerks. Unless it was enough to retire on within a few years, which I suppose at M$ it used to be.
Yep, the USA spies on loads of countries. Yep, it is horrible. However, spy operations in relativly friendly countries have been represented to me as training exercises and ways to work out and find potential means of detection.
If, say, the USA gets caught tapping, say, the Netherlands foreign embassy phone, there may still be enough goodwill between nations to enchange information as to how detection occured. I have read this is kind of tolerated within NATO countries as the price of joining.
Again, I am not saying this is justified. The USA should behave as a paragon of virute. Even if it costs lives in the short term because in the long term I believe it will pay us all back many times over.
Mostly I am commenting to ask if anyone else has better information than I do. My source on this is the History channel (rather my memory of the History channel program from over one year ago).
A small company called Spiderweb Software released a game for Linux called Exile III - it is similar to the classic Ultima IV or Ultima V style. It is shareware, so you can try before you buy (even for Linux). I am kind of disapointed they only released one game for Linux as they released so many for both the Mac and the PC - including scenerio design tools - and this was way before Neverwinter Nights. Sure the graphics are not overwhelming but worth a look. Here is a link to the game.
I personally bought and played Exile I-III on the PC around 1998 and was very satisfied. Currently, there is NWN and Everquest and many others to choose from, but I felt it was the best comptuer RPG at that time.
But the reason I bring this up is that apparently it did not sell well under Linux - perhaps it was piracy, perhaps just not enough of a user base (note: I did not play under Linux maybe it is ultra buggy or something) but for whatever reason an ideal candidate for producing Linux games was turned off.
Quote from Fred Baker, "There are two sides. One is that Cisco as a company needs to let its customers abide by the law. The other is the moral and ethical issues. There are two very separate questions."
First of all, this makes it sound like there was a law passed which specifies all routers must have this kind of capability. I sure have not heard about that.
It sounds like currently an ISP can be subpoenaed to find out what a particular person is sending. Currently, the ISP seems to provide complete logs and allows law enforcement to sort through it. This just sounds like bad practice of law. If we lived in John-Ashcroft's-wet-dream-land where every packet has a personal ID number on it which could not be forged or faked, sure you could ask for what a person sends. This is so far from the case that it is a joke. Even if I only use one computer and it has one IP address, what if someone else uses it? Even if the email has a name on it, what if it was forged? It would be laughably easy to plant evidence on, say, a business rival. Bottom line: computer are not very secure, in general. (Side note: sure, your computer may be very secure but visit, say, a law office. You may be surprised - even by very large law offices with nice wood panneling and mugs with the partner's names on them.)
If subpoenaed for John Q. Terrorist's internet activity, knowing what we know, we cannot hand anything over with a clean consience. If, on the other hand, all of IP address 64.22.xx.xx is subpoenaed, sure, we have to hand it over but we cannot say who did what with any great certainty.
Lastly, Mr. Baker seems to indicate providing a product is separate from morality. This is a very disjointed view of work - almost on the verge of: "what I do at work should be totally separate from morality." This is quite frightening. Perhaps this is too strong. He is clearly saying if the company follows the law, this is completely separate from morality. Again, this should be frightening: if you follow the law, morality is not at issue? The most obvious reaction is that if the law is wrong, in America, you have a responsibility to not follow it. Being part of a corporation does not absolve you of your duties as a citizen.
In my opinion, the workplace is where people are least moral (in my experience) and thus it is exactly where people need to be thinking of morality the most - certainly not separating it and arguing "we are just following the law".
Yes, yes I would have to agree that if we were the only life in the Universe, that would make God as likely as the non-existance of life elsewhere is unlikely.
Let me rephrase: if life existing elsewhere were 99.9% likely, but it didn't happen, then I would say there was a 99.9% chance that it was, indeed, a divine plan. No matter what the numbers, there would always be uncertainty.
Now for the big however.
However, how the heck could we (a) prove that no life exists anywhere in the Universe? It is a rather large place. Then (b) we would have to compute the odds of Universes having life.
Look, this is speculation at best. Let us just consider if life does evolve by luck. The only real way would be to *know* is to look at other Universes and count how many have life and how many do not. Maybe life on Earth-like planets can evolve with a very, very small probability. Let's say this odd is very slim, I don't know something like 1 is 10^100 or something like that. Fine. Let's say there are only 10^10 Earth-like planets in every Universe, thus the odds of a Universe having life is only 1 in 10^90, and life evolving twice in one Universe would be an astounding 1 in 10^180. This is rediculasly slim. However, the people on those worlds where they were the only life would think: "Holy cow this is unlikely! It must be God!" - but they didn't see the other 10^90-1 Universes which have no life, thus they don't know that is just was luck. And if they did see the other 10^90-1 empty Universes, what would they think?
Lastly, you should be aware there is some evidence that amino acids have been found in inter-steller material which has fallen to Earth. There is also some evidence that an electric current passed through basic non-organic material can generate amino acids, too. Thus the materials for life are quite prevalent. If we consider a virus life, this is quite close to good evidence that viruses should be found almost anywhere.
Very funny, but what is more scary is Windows 2000 Registry for Dummies. This book must keep more Windows Admins employed than I can imagine...