I'm sorry, but I disagree with standard slashthink in this regard. I think the anonymity of the internet is its greatest weakness, not strength. I'm a huge believer in freedom of speech - that is, you have the right to say what you want, and no government should take that from you. However, that doesn't mean you have the right to hide. They are different concepts altogether.
I think the internet would be a far better place if people who spoke up did so under their real identity.
Activist: The united states sucks! Gov: Activist: No, really this time! Gov: Activist: No, we really mean it, we have numbers and stuff! Gov:
I'm not disputing the science, I'm suggesting that "global climatologists" (whatever that means) have a hard sale coming after 50 years worth of eco-loonies spouting the most outrageous claims, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb. It gets increasingly hard to sell when the governments of the world all point the finger at the US and refuse to commit themselves.
Less "we hate the US", and more "we are making these changes ourselves, if you will join us." would impress me a whole lot more.
If it wasn't for the games, I wouldn't even consider vista. I have a mac laptop, and that serves most of my needs just fine. However, the selection of games on a PC is better, so I keep upgrading mine to play them.
However, I'm starting to challenge my gaming habit, as it is getting tiresome to keep that PC going. It's not a technical challenge - I'm a typical slashdotter with experience in PCs, Macs, Unices of various sorts and so on. Nor is it a financial challenge; I have a decent job and could replace my PC now.
The issue is the work involved just to maintain a security hole for gaming, especially when there are a few decent games available on the Mac. They may not all be exactly the games I want, but they're decent and it's only gaming.
Now add a substantial OS upgrade to the mix, and I really am having a hard time justifying upgrading my PC more. Maybe I'll just get a console for choice in my games.
I've seen this before, is the problem. I was raised in the US, and was taught about global warming, global hunger, acid rain, pesticide use, the evils of nuclear power, the good that is solar power, the silliness that is "gaia", species evolving to block dams, and other things that I forget at this moment. At this point, you can color me jaded and skeptical, and rightfully so.
As for global warming specifically, the rhetoric I see is generally very nasty and one-sided. The US is evil, its citizens need to endure a recession/depression to save the world, etc. When the rhetoric becomes serious, rational, and includes everyone, give me a call. When you do, please stop sounding like con-artists and try to sound like rational human beings.
I live in the DC area, and many years ago commuted to NYC on a weekly basis. In the process, I used taxis quite often, and never had the problems you describe there. In particular, I remember cabbies cutting through central park, others taking the highways on the outside of the island to bypass the crowded inner streets, and one cabbie in particular who one day got me downtown through a maze of lightly traveled side-streets while I could see rush-hour traffic one block away.
There are other anecdotes, but the point is that in my experience the NYC cabbies did a good job. They may have been "rough around the edges", but they knew their city.
yes very correct. But in the grand scheme of things, we're more likely to be classified as a 'parasite' on the planet since 'modern' civilizations haven't been able to live in harmony with the environment we occupy.
*Successful* parasites don't kill the host...we on the other hand are doing are best to kill the earth, our 'host'. Please keep your new age nonsense out of this. The reality is that all life exists at the expense of other life. The human lifeform is out-competing many species and those species are dieing. On the flip side, many other species are adapting and thriving (e.g. pigeons, different diseases, etc).
If you said "I liked white dolphins, they were cool, I wish they were still here." I'd understand. But don't turn this into some kind of morality lesson. Humans are animal on this planet like any other. There is no more complexity to the situation than that.
"I think that's rubbish, there's no way a kid under the age of 15 would spot the danger of talking on a cellphone while driving unless it was explained to him/her by their parents althought I don't see a good reason to at that age."
You obviously have never seen a kid under the age of 15. Any deviation from the norm is instantly spotted and reported loudly.
-Jeff
P.S. I remember driving a friend's kid (10 at the time) to a store. He complained when I only had one hand on the steering wheel.:-)
"I think they definitely felt those frustrations and burn-out. But I think they felt it to the degree to which they had control over their lives."
I can't imagine that they had any more feelings of control than we do. In fact, it most certainly had to be less. I'll draw up a few points:
- disease: with no understanding of disease, it was an entirely random, deadly force. - weather: even today, farmers live at the whims of the weather god. Again, a totally chaotic force with massive control over their lives. - politics: humans throughout most of history had no control over who ruled them, and little to no ability to change their lives. When you work all day simply to subsist, and the people above you have the best armor, the best food, the best training, etc, you stand no chance. - illiteracy combined with less science: I won't dive deeply into this, but just state that a lack of learning is another area that lessons control over one's life.
Now add in the complexities of societal living. For example, you inherited three rows of the north field as your own. Your wife brought an additional two rows of the east field. Your wife helps the tailor, and in exchange your family gets a corner of the tailor's vegetable garden. Part of your "taxes" involves working 2 1/2 rows of the south field and one other row in the east field. You have rights to 3 days supply of milk from one of the town's cows, but in exchange you owe a quarter of your yearly grain and bean harvest from your fields. Your children work the cabbage fields, and in exchange you get some pickled cabbage for the winter time. And so on...
The point is that these people could led dizzying complex lives, with no learning, no modern organization (e.g. money), all subject to the whims of frightingly powerful forces totally outside their control. Did they burnout? If they did, it meant death for them and their family, so I suspect the answer is no.
So again, I'm going to buck the feel-good trend here. I think people have ups and downs in their lives, and labelling the downs "burnout" and trying to treat it as something special is silly.
I'm wondering if our farming ancestors back in the day when everyone farmed ever suffered from burnout. Did they ever stand up and say "that's it, no food this winter, I'm not plowing one more row!" After all, these farmers had no room for personal growth, very little way to express themselves creatively on the job, had very hard deadlines, and most of their lives were affected by things well outside of their control (weather, taxes).
Sorry if I'm bucking the feel-good trend here, but I think this is a load of nonsense. Of course I have bad days, even a bad week or so. But that's all it is. Life has its ups and downs, and you learn to roll with them as you grow up. Giving those downs special names and wondering if we should call them an illness seems far-fetched and frankly silly to me.
...and add in the maintenance cost, and the extra work you probably need to do to keep it clean.
I'm not sure I like the idea of solar cells on my roof - modern homes are already fantastically difficult to keep up as is - I don't need yet another item to learn about.
This all goes back to using vague terms to label people as "bad".
I can't see the article, so I'll ask: do they have specifics? Are we simply judging by the amount of time? If so, who are we to judge how people spend their time?
Or are they basing it on real things, like losing jobs, flunking schools, etc? If 1 in 9 wow players have either lost a job or flunked out of school in the past year, that's a pretty ugly stat.
"There are laws against breaking and entering, but do they work? No, locks do. In situations where locks don't work, alarms work. In situations where alarms aren't enough, a Colt 45 used once usually fixes that situation. The law has almost no effect on crime other than raising the profit for those willing to take the risk."
It's not a crime unless it's against the law, by definition. If breaking and entering wasn't a crime, then you the home owner would be the criminal if you shot someone entering your home. You would also be disturbing the peace with your alarm.
Oh, and locked doors don't do squat against bricks through a window. Locks generally only keep honest people honest - they are a trivial defense against people.
I've read rants like yours in forums across the internet. They always are confused, and miss a key point.
Part of the maturation process is learning to deal with winning and losing. The people who can't handle winning or losing are the immature ones. It has little to do with the boasting/whining - you can always/ignore in any of these games - it's the people who can't handle winning or losing.
I'm not saying that's *your* problem. But let's keep our eye on the ball here: it's about people who can't handle running around, smacking people around, and then moving on.
"We'll get an EVE tabletop RPG, and CCG. They'll be supported for a couple of years, and then abandoned due to poor sales."
Sure, agreed. Not sure that's as bad as you make it sound - these are RPGs, you can run campaigns with them for years without anything but the book.
"In a few months, we'll get an announcement *with screenshots* about a "World of Darkness" online MMORPG game."
Well, that's precisely what the article said..."Conceptualization and early development has begun to bring White Wolf's World of Darkness, one of the world's strongest gaming properties, into the online world.".
It's easy to be negative - I've seen tons of MMORPGs die before birth. But this is not a bad merger on the surface. Eve has run a long time and has grown during that time (they had 30k simultaneous users at one point, which put them in DAoC territory or past it), and WW has a very recognized property.
It could be very neat playing online vampires, depending how they setup the world. Well, basically when you kill the rats at lvls 1-10, you suck their blood and that's all the difference, but it's all in the atmosphere, right?
I have many friends. Some of them I would never be willing to work with. Others I'd have no problem working with, even if we aren't the best of friends.
I can't imagine how "gaming with each other offline" would be a factor in job choice. You want people who you can work with on a daily basis. Are they finger-pointers? Do they build fiefdoms at work? Are they helpful? Bureaucratic (which is both good and bad, depends on situation)?
Others have said it, but you need to factor (in random order, not priority):
1) Money 2) Time spent (including travel) 3) responsibilities vs your expectations (are you being asked to program 80%, manage 20%, when you want 20/80? etc...) 4) satisfying work (not the same as fun). 5) vague - environment (you seem to like the perl place's environment, but these things change when you work there)
Perl vs.Net? for fun, who cares - both languages let you express yourself. For resume building,.net for sure (and I'm a unix/oracle admin).
I'm curious why the submitter over-hyped the article. As numerous others have pointed out, the original article clearly states uncertainty as to the exact function of the gene in question, and the evidence for the mixing (and resulting gene transfer) is indirect. It's a bunch of maybes.
At the same time, I'm surprised at the strong slashdot reaction to an open discussion on race. There are obviously 3 major variants of humans, with differences in hair, skin, susceptibility to different diseases, conditions, etc. The tone people use to fight any discussion as to how and when these variants came into being is amazing.
Seriously, beat up the article and the poster for inadequate science, but let's tone down the racism charges. Noting differences and guessing is not *automatically* racist.
-Jeff
P.S. As a reader of history, I am of course sensitive to how "genetics" has been used in the past to justify all sorts of crimes (e.g. aspects of colonialism). But that's no excuse to leap in, swords drawn, at the first hint of such a discussion.
Personally, I've seen tons of code monkeys in my time. Lots of people who coded zillions of lines day and night. What I want is a developer - someone who writes maintainable code (this starts with comments, it doesn't end there), who develops clean unit tests, who works within QA and Production rules rather than griping about the rules, and who takes on the bureaucratic tasks outside of design, coding, and testing again w/o griping.
As for Pay... I really think that pay is overrated as a motivator. People want free time. Not simply hours per week, but a company that treats people's private lives as important even when dealing with the customer. When asked to add feature "X", they don't say "sure, we can have Joe put in the next 2 weekends"; they suggest a schedule inline with human life.
People always play this stupid game - it's about life and death, who cares about [insert lesser issue].
So we shouldn't build roads, fund museums, build schools, create wildlife sanctuaries, and so on. All of our cash should go to immediate life-saving projects.
OH, and for the record, while I'm not in either "camp" and don't give a squat about the sexual practices of NJ males, it was never really about that. It's all about the money (government benefits to spouses), and it always is. Both sides put a bunch of nonsense up on the airways and refuse to talk about what matters in grownup land - how much does it cost.
Personally, I think government should get out of the marriage promotion business altogether and just concern itself with guardianship laws and contract law. But hey, now both sides can target me for not caring.
The difference between you (and me) and this guy is that he *does* derive satisfaction from playing obscene hours, regardless of the circumstances (deadlines, pressure to win, etc). It's what makes a pro a pro.
It's similar to everything I've read about the geniuses in history - a major factor that set them apart was an ability to focus on one problem far longer than anybody else. Consider Einstein spending years of his life learning the advanced math he needed to tackle general relativity.
So would you or I get burned out? Sure. That's why we're not ever going to turn pro.
I find your comment bizarre. Before I let someone in my house, I ask who it is. This is a basic courtesy dating back to ancient times. This is no different, and there's a very real security threat to many people involved.
Now, if the US refuses to reciprocate, then there's a problem. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, etc.
-Jeff
P.S. Please do not read this as "the us is perfect, us security is perfect, etc". I'm only commenting on the exchange of information.
----- As such, I will say that free people have a "right to steal" and have most likely never granted the United States government - or any other government - any authority to restrict it. As far as I'm concerned, any law restricting stealing is invalid, null and void and should be ignored. -----
I'm closest to a libertarian in philosophy. I too do not like rules restricting gambling (along with most "victimless" crimes, e.g. seat belt laws). However, your argument is so generic as to be pointless, IMO.
"Also, a superhero game with a license is the silliest idea ever. Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window. People play license games to 'be the hero' so to speak, and that doesn't work in a MMO. The concept is just broken out of the gate."
You need to show some imagination. What if players are all bands of x-men or avengers? Also, it's not just the heroes, now I can fight Doombots or molemen.
I'm hoping, really hoping, that they design pvp into the system from the start. I liked CoX pvp, but it was very much "bolted-on" and had lots of minor issues. But the bottom line is that it's a blast leaping around smacking people.:-)
-Jeff
P.S. "PvP" - I mean that generically. I'm not suggesting all-the-time pvp, dueling, battlegrounds, frontiers, or whatever. I just hope they have fun PvP as an element of the gameplay that's designed into the game from the start.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but I disagree with standard slashthink in this regard. I think the anonymity of the internet is its greatest weakness, not strength. I'm a huge believer in freedom of speech - that is, you have the right to say what you want, and no government should take that from you. However, that doesn't mean you have the right to hide. They are different concepts altogether.
I think the internet would be a far better place if people who spoke up did so under their real identity.
-Jeff
Activist: The united states sucks!
Gov:
Activist: No, really this time!
Gov:
Activist: No, we really mean it, we have numbers and stuff!
Gov:
I'm not disputing the science, I'm suggesting that "global climatologists" (whatever that means) have a hard sale coming after 50 years worth of eco-loonies spouting the most outrageous claims, e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb. It gets increasingly hard to sell when the governments of the world all point the finger at the US and refuse to commit themselves.
Less "we hate the US", and more "we are making these changes ourselves, if you will join us." would impress me a whole lot more.
-Jeff
If it wasn't for the games, I wouldn't even consider vista. I have a mac laptop, and that serves most of my needs just fine. However, the selection of games on a PC is better, so I keep upgrading mine to play them.
However, I'm starting to challenge my gaming habit, as it is getting tiresome to keep that PC going. It's not a technical challenge - I'm a typical slashdotter with experience in PCs, Macs, Unices of various sorts and so on. Nor is it a financial challenge; I have a decent job and could replace my PC now.
The issue is the work involved just to maintain a security hole for gaming, especially when there are a few decent games available on the Mac. They may not all be exactly the games I want, but they're decent and it's only gaming.
Now add a substantial OS upgrade to the mix, and I really am having a hard time justifying upgrading my PC more. Maybe I'll just get a console for choice in my games.
-Jeff
I've seen this before, is the problem. I was raised in the US, and was taught about global warming, global hunger, acid rain, pesticide use, the evils of nuclear power, the good that is solar power, the silliness that is "gaia", species evolving to block dams, and other things that I forget at this moment. At this point, you can color me jaded and skeptical, and rightfully so.
As for global warming specifically, the rhetoric I see is generally very nasty and one-sided. The US is evil, its citizens need to endure a recession/depression to save the world, etc. When the rhetoric becomes serious, rational, and includes everyone, give me a call. When you do, please stop sounding like con-artists and try to sound like rational human beings.
-Jeff
I live in the DC area, and many years ago commuted to NYC on a weekly basis. In the process, I used taxis quite often, and never had the problems you describe there. In particular, I remember cabbies cutting through central park, others taking the highways on the outside of the island to bypass the crowded inner streets, and one cabbie in particular who one day got me downtown through a maze of lightly traveled side-streets while I could see rush-hour traffic one block away.
There are other anecdotes, but the point is that in my experience the NYC cabbies did a good job. They may have been "rough around the edges", but they knew their city.
-Jeff
*Successful* parasites don't kill the host...we on the other hand are doing are best to kill the earth, our 'host'. Please keep your new age nonsense out of this. The reality is that all life exists at the expense of other life. The human lifeform is out-competing many species and those species are dieing. On the flip side, many other species are adapting and thriving (e.g. pigeons, different diseases, etc).
If you said "I liked white dolphins, they were cool, I wish they were still here." I'd understand. But don't turn this into some kind of morality lesson. Humans are animal on this planet like any other. There is no more complexity to the situation than that.
-Jeff
"I think that's rubbish, there's no way a kid under the age of 15 would spot the danger of talking on a cellphone while driving unless it was explained to him/her by their parents althought I don't see a good reason to at that age."
:-)
You obviously have never seen a kid under the age of 15. Any deviation from the norm is instantly spotted and reported loudly.
-Jeff
P.S. I remember driving a friend's kid (10 at the time) to a store. He complained when I only had one hand on the steering wheel.
Hardly. Throwing more vegetables in your stew doesn't automatically make it better.
-Jeff
"I think they definitely felt those frustrations and burn-out. But I think they felt it to the degree to which they had control over their lives."
I can't imagine that they had any more feelings of control than we do. In fact, it most certainly had to be less. I'll draw up a few points:
- disease: with no understanding of disease, it was an entirely random, deadly force.
- weather: even today, farmers live at the whims of the weather god. Again, a totally chaotic force with massive control over their lives.
- politics: humans throughout most of history had no control over who ruled them, and little to no ability to change their lives. When you work all day simply to subsist, and the people above you have the best armor, the best food, the best training, etc, you stand no chance.
- illiteracy combined with less science: I won't dive deeply into this, but just state that a lack of learning is another area that lessons control over one's life.
Now add in the complexities of societal living. For example, you inherited three rows of the north field as your own. Your wife brought an additional two rows of the east field. Your wife helps the tailor, and in exchange your family gets a corner of the tailor's vegetable garden. Part of your "taxes" involves working 2 1/2 rows of the south field and one other row in the east field. You have rights to 3 days supply of milk from one of the town's cows, but in exchange you owe a quarter of your yearly grain and bean harvest from your fields. Your children work the cabbage fields, and in exchange you get some pickled cabbage for the winter time. And so on...
The point is that these people could led dizzying complex lives, with no learning, no modern organization (e.g. money), all subject to the whims of frightingly powerful forces totally outside their control. Did they burnout? If they did, it meant death for them and their family, so I suspect the answer is no.
So again, I'm going to buck the feel-good trend here. I think people have ups and downs in their lives, and labelling the downs "burnout" and trying to treat it as something special is silly.
-Jeff
I'm wondering if our farming ancestors back in the day when everyone farmed ever suffered from burnout. Did they ever stand up and say "that's it, no food this winter, I'm not plowing one more row!" After all, these farmers had no room for personal growth, very little way to express themselves creatively on the job, had very hard deadlines, and most of their lives were affected by things well outside of their control (weather, taxes).
Sorry if I'm bucking the feel-good trend here, but I think this is a load of nonsense. Of course I have bad days, even a bad week or so. But that's all it is. Life has its ups and downs, and you learn to roll with them as you grow up. Giving those downs special names and wondering if we should call them an illness seems far-fetched and frankly silly to me.
-Jeff
...and add in the maintenance cost, and the extra work you probably need to do to keep it clean.
I'm not sure I like the idea of solar cells on my roof - modern homes are already fantastically difficult to keep up as is - I don't need yet another item to learn about.
-Jeff
This all goes back to using vague terms to label people as "bad".
I can't see the article, so I'll ask: do they have specifics? Are we simply judging by the amount of time? If so, who are we to judge how people spend their time?
Or are they basing it on real things, like losing jobs, flunking schools, etc? If 1 in 9 wow players have either lost a job or flunked out of school in the past year, that's a pretty ugly stat.
-Jeff
"There are laws against breaking and entering, but do they work? No, locks do. In situations where locks don't work, alarms work. In situations where alarms aren't enough, a Colt 45 used once usually fixes that situation. The law has almost no effect on crime other than raising the profit for those willing to take the risk."
It's not a crime unless it's against the law, by definition. If breaking and entering wasn't a crime, then you the home owner would be the criminal if you shot someone entering your home. You would also be disturbing the peace with your alarm.
Oh, and locked doors don't do squat against bricks through a window. Locks generally only keep honest people honest - they are a trivial defense against people.
-Jeff
I've read rants like yours in forums across the internet. They always are confused, and miss a key point.
/ignore in any of these games - it's the people who can't handle winning or losing.
Part of the maturation process is learning to deal with winning and losing. The people who can't handle winning or losing are the immature ones. It has little to do with the boasting/whining - you can always
I'm not saying that's *your* problem. But let's keep our eye on the ball here: it's about people who can't handle running around, smacking people around, and then moving on.
-Jeff
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/arrogance
"an attitude of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or in presumptuous claims or assumptions"
In other dictionaries it is defined as "overbearing pride".
Pride is a good thing to have. Arrogance is a negative - an excess of pride.
-Jeff
Since when did creative ambition become "arrogance"?
-Jeff
"We'll get an EVE tabletop RPG, and CCG. They'll be supported for a couple of years, and then abandoned due to poor sales."
Sure, agreed. Not sure that's as bad as you make it sound - these are RPGs, you can run campaigns with them for years without anything but the book.
"In a few months, we'll get an announcement *with screenshots* about a "World of Darkness" online MMORPG game."
Well, that's precisely what the article said..."Conceptualization and early development has begun to bring White Wolf's World of Darkness, one of the world's strongest gaming properties, into the online world.".
It's easy to be negative - I've seen tons of MMORPGs die before birth. But this is not a bad merger on the surface. Eve has run a long time and has grown during that time (they had 30k simultaneous users at one point, which put them in DAoC territory or past it), and WW has a very recognized property.
It could be very neat playing online vampires, depending how they setup the world. Well, basically when you kill the rats at lvls 1-10, you suck their blood and that's all the difference, but it's all in the atmosphere, right?
-Jeff
I have many friends. Some of them I would never be willing to work with. Others I'd have no problem working with, even if we aren't the best of friends.
.Net? for fun, who cares - both languages let you express yourself. For resume building, .net for sure (and I'm a unix/oracle admin).
I can't imagine how "gaming with each other offline" would be a factor in job choice. You want people who you can work with on a daily basis. Are they finger-pointers? Do they build fiefdoms at work? Are they helpful? Bureaucratic (which is both good and bad, depends on situation)?
Others have said it, but you need to factor (in random order, not priority):
1) Money
2) Time spent (including travel)
3) responsibilities vs your expectations (are you being asked to program 80%, manage 20%, when you want 20/80? etc...)
4) satisfying work (not the same as fun).
5) vague - environment (you seem to like the perl place's environment, but these things change when you work there)
Perl vs
-Jeff
I'm curious why the submitter over-hyped the article. As numerous others have pointed out, the original article clearly states uncertainty as to the exact function of the gene in question, and the evidence for the mixing (and resulting gene transfer) is indirect. It's a bunch of maybes.
At the same time, I'm surprised at the strong slashdot reaction to an open discussion on race. There are obviously 3 major variants of humans, with differences in hair, skin, susceptibility to different diseases, conditions, etc. The tone people use to fight any discussion as to how and when these variants came into being is amazing.
Seriously, beat up the article and the poster for inadequate science, but let's tone down the racism charges. Noting differences and guessing is not *automatically* racist.
-Jeff
P.S. As a reader of history, I am of course sensitive to how "genetics" has been used in the past to justify all sorts of crimes (e.g. aspects of colonialism). But that's no excuse to leap in, swords drawn, at the first hint of such a discussion.
Personally, I've seen tons of code monkeys in my time. Lots of people who coded zillions of lines day and night. What I want is a developer - someone who writes maintainable code (this starts with comments, it doesn't end there), who develops clean unit tests, who works within QA and Production rules rather than griping about the rules, and who takes on the bureaucratic tasks outside of design, coding, and testing again w/o griping.
... I really think that pay is overrated as a motivator. People want free time. Not simply hours per week, but a company that treats people's private lives as important even when dealing with the customer. When asked to add feature "X", they don't say "sure, we can have Joe put in the next 2 weekends"; they suggest a schedule inline with human life.
As for Pay
-Jeff
People always play this stupid game - it's about life and death, who cares about [insert lesser issue].
So we shouldn't build roads, fund museums, build schools, create wildlife sanctuaries, and so on. All of our cash should go to immediate life-saving projects.
OH, and for the record, while I'm not in either "camp" and don't give a squat about the sexual practices of NJ males, it was never really about that. It's all about the money (government benefits to spouses), and it always is. Both sides put a bunch of nonsense up on the airways and refuse to talk about what matters in grownup land - how much does it cost.
Personally, I think government should get out of the marriage promotion business altogether and just concern itself with guardianship laws and contract law. But hey, now both sides can target me for not caring.
-Jeff
The difference between you (and me) and this guy is that he *does* derive satisfaction from playing obscene hours, regardless of the circumstances (deadlines, pressure to win, etc). It's what makes a pro a pro.
It's similar to everything I've read about the geniuses in history - a major factor that set them apart was an ability to focus on one problem far longer than anybody else. Consider Einstein spending years of his life learning the advanced math he needed to tackle general relativity.
So would you or I get burned out? Sure. That's why we're not ever going to turn pro.
-Jeff
I find your comment bizarre. Before I let someone in my house, I ask who it is. This is a basic courtesy dating back to ancient times. This is no different, and there's a very real security threat to many people involved.
Now, if the US refuses to reciprocate, then there's a problem. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, etc.
-Jeff
P.S. Please do not read this as "the us is perfect, us security is perfect, etc". I'm only commenting on the exchange of information.
My version s/steal/gamble/:
-----
As such, I will say that free people have a "right to steal" and have most likely never granted the United States government - or any other government - any authority to restrict it. As far as I'm concerned, any law restricting stealing is invalid, null and void and should be ignored.
-----
I'm closest to a libertarian in philosophy. I too do not like rules restricting gambling (along with most "victimless" crimes, e.g. seat belt laws). However, your argument is so generic as to be pointless, IMO.
-Jeff
"Also, a superhero game with a license is the silliest idea ever. Either you have 200 spidermans zipping around (beyond silly), or you can't allow players to play 'name' characters, at which point the whole point of a license goes out of the window. People play license games to 'be the hero' so to speak, and that doesn't work in a MMO. The concept is just broken out of the gate."
:-)
You need to show some imagination. What if players are all bands of x-men or avengers? Also, it's not just the heroes, now I can fight Doombots or molemen.
I'm hoping, really hoping, that they design pvp into the system from the start. I liked CoX pvp, but it was very much "bolted-on" and had lots of minor issues. But the bottom line is that it's a blast leaping around smacking people.
-Jeff
P.S. "PvP" - I mean that generically. I'm not suggesting all-the-time pvp, dueling, battlegrounds, frontiers, or whatever. I just hope they have fun PvP as an element of the gameplay that's designed into the game from the start.