Re:Well written book, but it left me disappointed
on
The Magicians
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· Score: 1
The magic theory i've always liked is that will/intelligence/life is different or special, as compared to energy/matter. Life can make matter and energy behave in ways they don't on their own. Plants, animals and microbes work a sort of minor magic in the form of biochemistry. In some cases through intent/desire they can move and change things deliberately. Sticks don't naturally stack themselves into shelter. Life can. Enter sapience.
Intelligent beings can make matter do things to other matter (science/technology). In the case of a magic setting, intelligence can also will things to behave unnaturally. Will can summon a massive amount of heat to appear in one place and cause a ball of fire to appear. Or it can be subtle.
Investment Magic - Emotion/time/understanding can alter reality in small ways, like making food taste better. Three cooks make you the same meal, following the same recipe. One is a stranger, just following steps, making a product for another stranger. The second is a master chef who has studied for years and made this meal a thousand times. The last is your mother, making your favorite meal. If you try all three, the first would be palatable. The second would be delicious, but the third, even if it doesn't taste as good as the second feeds your heart. The chefs knowledge and practice charges the food to be better. Your mother's love does the same, even if she's only a so-so cook. Flowers from the local store might impress a girl, but flowers from the top of the mountain would knock her socks off (and perhaps petticoats). Hatred could also hold sway over reality just as easily.
Wizards are like chefs. They "know" the underlying rules. Bippity boppity boo is just as potent as abracadabra. The power doesn't come from the words, but from the investment behind them. The mage studied for years under the harsh tutelage of cranky wizards with stinging wands. The investment doesn't come from the just the moment of casting, but from all the time, effort and emotion behind it.
i had a bit in a D&D game where a wizard sent the party to retrieve the dust of a Lich his adventuring party kill ages before. On the way out of the dungeon a wraith killed one of the PCs. Had the next session occurred, the wizard would have examined the dust and found them to be much more than he asked for and offered them a bigger reward. He would have explained that the death of the comrade would have charged the dust to be even more potent. He could have teleported to the lich and got it himself but he wanted primo shit, not just dust.
You're right about the control. That's how they shape the "Apple Experience". i despise Apple and it's products, and most of their fans. But i can tell you this from my conversations with Mac Heads on/. and Fark: Apple is all about the experience of a system that is hard to mess up. They trade freedom for security. Apple's control is about giving you a standard issue item. "You'll have it our way and like it". Not out of meanness or just to make more money, but so that the users have that sense of "everything is going to be ok and just like it was yesterday".
Windows has to run on perhaps hundred of mother boards. OSX has to run on a handful... all of which are made by Apple. Remember, Apple is a hardware company, not a OS company. The flexibility needed in Windows to run on hundred of possible combinations of mobo, RAM, HD and CPU means that it can't be quite as tight as OSX. OSX gets part of its stability and predictability from the fact that the hardware is all known and tightly controlled. If Dell was the ONLY way to get a Windows machine you'd quickly see it become far more stable as there would be fewer variables (and fewer options).
Console -- Mac -- PC -- Linux
That might be the Security to Freedom continuum. Consoles are hard coded and pretty hard to mess up. A PC is easy to mess up for an incompetent user (i never have the problems people who bitch about windows seem to have). Linux might be the most at the mercy of the user. Alas, there's just not much compatible with it.
Having an Apple product is like living with over protective parents. They love you, they take care of you and give you all kinds of treats. But ultimately you're very limited. In the case of their products, i guess it's a trade off the user must make. The warm cocoon, or the scary wilds. i prefer the scary wilds... because i can handle it.
Also you could point out the grammatical error in the slogan....
Kids, you can't pre$VERB. Pre- is for events. But let's pretend that you can. Preheat would mean before heat... what the summary describes is HEATING the water. When you put water in a pot and place that pot on a stove, and turn on the element to boil the water... you are heating the water. There's no need to add pre-. When you walked to the store yesterday, you didn't postwalk to the store... you walked. If you plan to walk to the store, you are not going to prewalk... you're just gonna walk.
Would you say "I'm going to pre-open this door so I can walk through it"? No, you'd leave off the pre-. Even if you open the door five years before you plan to go through it, you'd just be opening. Nothing magical about it. Adding pre- contributes nothing. It's just ignorance and pretension. Commonly used/accepted != right.
Don't add pre- to things just to make it sound more technical.
Pre- is for delineating what happened before the event. Every day before 9/11 would be pre-9/11. The steps you take before you heat the oven would be preheating. Once you turn on the oven, it is heating. You are now in the era of the oven heating.
|*turn on oven*|*oven is hot*
Preheating would be everything to the left of *turn on the oven*.
So instead of "preheat the oven to treefitty". It should be "set the oven to treefitty. While the oven is heating, do steps B, C and D".
Hit reply to post some lame excuse about "language's change over time get use 2 it at, LoL". i won't read it. Use your karma to "bury" my comment if it makes you feel better about being ignorant. i'm OK with that. OR - Learn what words actually mean and how they should be used (and not).
We're hearing tons about how education should happen (home/school). But nothing about "What are the goals of education?". What is the desired product/result of education?
Do we want happy workers? Independent thinkers? Drivers who use turn signals?
Until we know what the systems should strive to achieve, how doesn't matter. Once we know that we want kids to able to type, drive a car, read a newspaper, balance a checkbook, memorize pi to 100 places, know that using a condom is ok/evil... then we can figure out the how.
>"Karma" (something different to what I've got on SlashDot, whatever that is?)?
In the context of games, karma could be the same as mana, but with the implication that it was divine in origin.
>"Shallow power curve" (it's hard to stall your car, but it doesn't accelerate terribly fast?) ?
Words and phrases have different meanings in various contexts. In the case of RPGs and video game RPGs (and other types of games), power curve refers to how powerful characters become over time. In D&D and the games inspired by it, there is a steep power curve. Meaning that a 10th level character is vastly more powerful than a 1st level character. PlanetSide has a shallow power curve. A first level character and a maxed out character have access to the same abilities and weapons. The high level character is more flexible.
>"Ganking" (is it legal, in private, between consenting adults? Or doe it require too many consenting adults to be private?)
It generally means for a high powered character to kill a low powered character. Or for a group to kill a lone player. The problem lies in that the victim has no chance to win, survive or escape. It's a by product of steep power curves.
>Is that English, some arcane dialect of Albanian, or mispronounced Klingon?
Go fuck yourself.:)
> Sounds workable at a first glance, but unless you have dictats in the game code that only certain "[game]company code" can generate new currency, then you're going to end up back in the same problem of random players generating "money" (= fuel, or bread, or beer, or whatever you're token of value is). And you'll end up back into having 3rd-world geeks wage-slaving for first-world real currency to produce in-game value. Gold farming, again.
And thus my objection to player trade driven by scarcity. In PlanetSide there is no scarcity, there's no point in trading or hording. There's nothing worth buying with real world money, aside from saving some time by purchasing a high level character.
i'd like to see emergent behaviors if consumable resources were the defacto currency.
>Problem is... if you want to have credibly real in-game physics, then you're going to have to have some things like mineable resources, or orbital hydroponics stations that take in raw material like water-CO2-ice and trace elements and sell higher value rocket fuel and food, only taking in-game effort and sunlight to do it. Which is territory for gold farming and such like evils again.
A higher level of abstraction might do it. Instead of have a hydroponics segment producing X units of food per Y unit of time, just say "You need to build another HP segment before you can add to this station." i build a mine on an asteroid and as long as the mine exists i can build unit types A, B and C. If i have 5 mines i can build units D, E and F.
Or just prevent the quantities of stuff extracted from being traded. My mine generates 500 Iron units per hour, but i can't trade them.
The former is more RTS, the latter would be EVE - player trade. While that would appeal to me, it might not appeal to power hungry nerds who just want to live out some sociopathic fantasy. Maybe the solution is for people to just decide what kind of game they want to play. If you play EVE, expect people to destroy your days of work, expect people to run off with your money. If not, play something else. *shrugs*
Do you need me to explain what it means to put a verb between asterisks, or can you look for it yourself?
i dare you to yell fire in a crowded building. Or to be more topical, yell bomb or terrorist.
Speech is a power, with it comes responsibility. Does my right to bear arms include shooting anyone who looks at me funny? Does my driver's license entitle me to run over people? Does freedom of speech come with the right to say whatever i like? NO. It doesn't and it never has (at least in the US). There are certain things i am legally obligated to NOT say.
For instance libel and slander are illegal, even if only as a civil court issue. Threatening to overthrow the gov't or to kill the president is not protected either. Inciting a riot or inciting people to commit crimes is not protected. It's not OK for me to cause a deadly stampede in a crowd.
Yeah, i get the Voltaire bit about protecting someone's right to say stupid and evil things... but there is a point were it's not about expression... but about CAUSING HARM.
Words hurt. The sticks and stones bit was something moms tell their kids to say to bullies. It was a load of crap then and it's a load of crap now. People don't commit suicide (the 11 year old boy who was called gay) over being slapped around as often as they do for the words others say. People don't go postal (Columbine) over being slapped around as often as they do over words others say. A well crafted insult hurts way more than a punch. A bruise goes away after a day or two... but someone (far weaker than the awesomeness that is you) might hurt from an insult their entire lives.
The brain records physical and emotional pain the same way. Verbal abuse can cause clinical depression and PTSD.
Oh wait, that's all pop culture psychobabble and we should all just have thicker skins.
The one time a played that game we had to do the old interview scene. "What would you do if...". One of the questions was "What would you do if the Computer committed treason?". I asked the computer if it was treasonous to suggest that the computer COULD commit treason. It said yes, so i killed the high ranking guy giving the test. From then on the computer loved me.
Yup. Except for one aspect, perhaps. That currency is subject to the caprice of one company who can flood the market or end it. End it, as in make it become non-existent with the flick of a switch. Just as my Uber1337 sword of fiery death is not mine, it's Blizzard's. With "real" currency there's a greater sense of permanency. Plus if someone steals my money or screws me over to get it, i have some recourse.
Yeah, it's currency alright. But i'd still call anyone spending "real" money on it to be an idiot and a cheat.
All but the last sentence should be tagged as Insightful. Banks aren't stealing, we're giving them money. Most people just don't know what our currency is, how it's made or what to do with it.
My solution:
Make all banks non-profit credit unions that provide a service, rather than run as a business to make people who do nothing rich.
And/or phase out interest (paid and earned). If we did that we wouldn't need to go back to gold or some other crap.
i'd use something that had intrinsic in-game value, like fuel or building materials. In a fantasy game i'd have it be Mana or Karma. In Eve i'd have an Energon like fuel type. i hand you a note with 1024 Ton AU {TAU} (it could move 16 tons 64 AU). You could use that note to buy other stuff, or take it to the gas station to fill your tank. Or maybe it's a note for 340 Liters of Vespene Gas.
Once you use it, it is destroyed forever. Use currency to represent these materials and allow fluid trade. The server can feed in new energy and materials to regulate the economy. It would be like "god" adding more gold or oil to the planet when needed.
Stories like this take my main objection to most MRPGs to a new level. i've yet to find a game with player trade and currency that i could stand for more than a month. Hence, i'm still playing PlanetSide (which has no economy and a shallow power curve and no ganking).
i question there being a water crisis. i think there are places with a poor ratio of potable water to people. There's plenty of water, supply isn't the problem... demand is. Less people = more water per person. Give these people education, birth control and cable TV. The rest will sort itself.
Maybe quantity of life is a privilege (rather than a right) carved out of the environment with technology and civilization. i think quality of life should be a much higher priority.
Will/. submitters ever think of another way to craft a headline? Instead of asking... make a claim! Or better yet... use the headline as a place to summarize the article. "IEEE Spectrum thinks...". If you're going to make a question headline, at least try to avoid asking a vapid question like this.
What will Japan's power consumption be in 10 to 20 years? They're having so few kids the population should be plummeting soon.
We don't need more power, Mr. Scotty. We need FEWER PEOPLE. Pollution would be less of a problem if there were fewer people creating it. Cutting emissions, conserving and finding cleaner sources of energy while all very good... won't mean shit if our growth is still horrifically out of control. With a smaller population we'd have more resources per person and less waste generated.
Similarly, there are no food or water shortages... there ARE places of the world that that too many people for the available resources. If we have 1 gallon per person per day at a population of 100,000... we'd have 2 gallons per person per day if the population of 50,000.
i'm not talking about killing off people or even letting them die. i'm talking about getting the population to something that is sustainable. The quantity of life is going to start seriously farking with our quality of life... and THEN with the quantity. If we don't get it under control we're going to have more wars, more droughts, more everything that sucks.
"easier said than done"
Really? No kidding! Can i have your autograph before you win the Nobel Prize for Pointing out the Obvious?
"But that's mean"
Mean is kids dying of starvation because their parents had too many kids. Mean will be wars over water.
Looks to me that Disney is buying Marvel just once, not habitually. Perhaps the headline should be "Disney Bought Marvel" or "Disney Will Buy Marvel Tomorrow".
What is the point of having the living who were not responsible apologize to a dead person for the acts of some other dead person?
i don't owe any black Americans an apology for slavery. Sure it sucked for the slaves, but i had nothing to do with it. All slaves and all slave owners are DEAD. It's hollow. We can't punish the offenders or make it right with the wronged. Unless you have a time machine. And don't get me started on reparations. Find me a living slave and owner and i will gladly help pay the costs to free the slave and punish the "owner".
Why are we holding the dead to OUR moral standards anyway? In 50 years things we do all day, every day will seem abominable. Should i start apologizing now? To whom? Shit, now i have to live up to the standards of my contemporaries AND future generations? i don't even know what they deplore yet!
Find some living people who persecuted Turing and we can ask them for an apology (if they feel bad about it, which they might not). Go after the people who are guilty of writing and enforcing the policy. Then we can dig up Alan's corpse and they can make amends. Alan will speak with an otherwordly voice to accept the apology and at last his soul will be able to rest. The current gov't and the people in it are not responsible for it so they don't really owe a corpse a hollow apology.
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
Working together doesn't make them part of the administration. The administration is Obama and his appointees who he will take with him when he leaves.
Senators are not part of any administration. Administration members are not senators either.
If you need to lump them, call them lieberals or libtards. If you need to say they are blindly obedient, call them Obamabots or Obamatons.
MPRGs with Gygaxian power curves are like this... aside from the Warhammer game which turned n00bst0mpers into chickens. i didn't reach level 20 so i can't say anything about the PvP specifically. In general, when you're in a PvP area in a power curve game... bring your friends.
PlanetSide (an MFPS) doesn't have n00bst0mping because it has a shallow power curve. Give it a look.
While playing in the closed beta i had no problems with it.
How is this different than/same as punk buster? Are there systems to prevent cheating in MRPGs that don't involve some program watching the code on the client side?
Slashdot Mirror
The magic theory i've always liked is that will/intelligence/life is different or special, as compared to energy/matter. Life can make matter and energy behave in ways they don't on their own. Plants, animals and microbes work a sort of minor magic in the form of biochemistry. In some cases through intent/desire they can move and change things deliberately. Sticks don't naturally stack themselves into shelter. Life can. Enter sapience.
Intelligent beings can make matter do things to other matter (science/technology). In the case of a magic setting, intelligence can also will things to behave unnaturally. Will can summon a massive amount of heat to appear in one place and cause a ball of fire to appear. Or it can be subtle.
Investment Magic - Emotion/time/understanding can alter reality in small ways, like making food taste better. Three cooks make you the same meal, following the same recipe. One is a stranger, just following steps, making a product for another stranger. The second is a master chef who has studied for years and made this meal a thousand times. The last is your mother, making your favorite meal. If you try all three, the first would be palatable. The second would be delicious, but the third, even if it doesn't taste as good as the second feeds your heart. The chefs knowledge and practice charges the food to be better. Your mother's love does the same, even if she's only a so-so cook. Flowers from the local store might impress a girl, but flowers from the top of the mountain would knock her socks off (and perhaps petticoats). Hatred could also hold sway over reality just as easily.
Wizards are like chefs. They "know" the underlying rules. Bippity boppity boo is just as potent as abracadabra. The power doesn't come from the words, but from the investment behind them. The mage studied for years under the harsh tutelage of cranky wizards with stinging wands. The investment doesn't come from the just the moment of casting, but from all the time, effort and emotion behind it.
i had a bit in a D&D game where a wizard sent the party to retrieve the dust of a Lich his adventuring party kill ages before. On the way out of the dungeon a wraith killed one of the PCs. Had the next session occurred, the wizard would have examined the dust and found them to be much more than he asked for and offered them a bigger reward. He would have explained that the death of the comrade would have charged the dust to be even more potent. He could have teleported to the lich and got it himself but he wanted primo shit, not just dust.
(This reply is not for popo's benefit.)
You're right about the control. That's how they shape the "Apple Experience". i despise Apple and it's products, and most of their fans. But i can tell you this from my conversations with Mac Heads on /. and Fark: Apple is all about the experience of a system that is hard to mess up. They trade freedom for security. Apple's control is about giving you a standard issue item. "You'll have it our way and like it". Not out of meanness or just to make more money, but so that the users have that sense of "everything is going to be ok and just like it was yesterday".
Windows has to run on perhaps hundred of mother boards. OSX has to run on a handful... all of which are made by Apple. Remember, Apple is a hardware company, not a OS company. The flexibility needed in Windows to run on hundred of possible combinations of mobo, RAM, HD and CPU means that it can't be quite as tight as OSX. OSX gets part of its stability and predictability from the fact that the hardware is all known and tightly controlled. If Dell was the ONLY way to get a Windows machine you'd quickly see it become far more stable as there would be fewer variables (and fewer options).
Console -- Mac -- PC -- Linux
That might be the Security to Freedom continuum. Consoles are hard coded and pretty hard to mess up. A PC is easy to mess up for an incompetent user (i never have the problems people who bitch about windows seem to have). Linux might be the most at the mercy of the user. Alas, there's just not much compatible with it.
Having an Apple product is like living with over protective parents. They love you, they take care of you and give you all kinds of treats. But ultimately you're very limited. In the case of their products, i guess it's a trade off the user must make. The warm cocoon, or the scary wilds. i prefer the scary wilds... because i can handle it.
Also you could point out the grammatical error in the slogan....
News for paranoid cynics.
Kids, you can't pre$VERB. Pre- is for events. But let's pretend that you can. Preheat would mean before heat... what the summary describes is HEATING the water. When you put water in a pot and place that pot on a stove, and turn on the element to boil the water... you are heating the water. There's no need to add pre-. When you walked to the store yesterday, you didn't postwalk to the store... you walked. If you plan to walk to the store, you are not going to prewalk... you're just gonna walk.
Would you say "I'm going to pre-open this door so I can walk through it"? No, you'd leave off the pre-. Even if you open the door five years before you plan to go through it, you'd just be opening. Nothing magical about it. Adding pre- contributes nothing. It's just ignorance and pretension. Commonly used/accepted != right.
Don't add pre- to things just to make it sound more technical.
Pre- is for delineating what happened before the event. Every day before 9/11 would be pre-9/11. The steps you take before you heat the oven would be preheating. Once you turn on the oven, it is heating. You are now in the era of the oven heating.
|*turn on oven*|*oven is hot*
Preheating would be everything to the left of *turn on the oven*.
So instead of "preheat the oven to treefitty". It should be "set the oven to treefitty. While the oven is heating, do steps B, C and D".
Hit reply to post some lame excuse about "language's change over time get use 2 it at, LoL". i won't read it. Use your karma to "bury" my comment if it makes you feel better about being ignorant. i'm OK with that. OR - Learn what words actually mean and how they should be used (and not).
We're hearing tons about how education should happen (home/school). But nothing about "What are the goals of education?". What is the desired product/result of education?
Do we want happy workers? Independent thinkers? Drivers who use turn signals?
Until we know what the systems should strive to achieve, how doesn't matter. Once we know that we want kids to able to type, drive a car, read a newspaper, balance a checkbook, memorize pi to 100 places, know that using a condom is ok/evil... then we can figure out the how.
The dwarves drilled three holes in one of the 7 and used it to bowl the first perfect game in Middle Earth history.
>I think that's probably a sensible answer to my question, but I'm not terribly sure.
"Mana"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mana_point
>"Karma" (something different to what I've got on SlashDot, whatever that is?)?
In the context of games, karma could be the same as mana, but with the implication that it was divine in origin.
>"Shallow power curve" (it's hard to stall your car, but it doesn't accelerate terribly fast?) ?
Words and phrases have different meanings in various contexts. In the case of RPGs and video game RPGs (and other types of games), power curve refers to how powerful characters become over time. In D&D and the games inspired by it, there is a steep power curve. Meaning that a 10th level character is vastly more powerful than a 1st level character. PlanetSide has a shallow power curve. A first level character and a maxed out character have access to the same abilities and weapons. The high level character is more flexible.
>"Ganking" (is it legal, in private, between consenting adults? Or doe it require too many consenting adults to be private?)
Go go gadget google!
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=gank
http://www.wowwiki.com/Gank
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/bart.gif
It generally means for a high powered character to kill a low powered character. Or for a group to kill a lone player. The problem lies in that the victim has no chance to win, survive or escape. It's a by product of steep power curves.
>Is that English, some arcane dialect of Albanian, or mispronounced Klingon?
Go fuck yourself. :)
> Sounds workable at a first glance, but unless you have dictats in the game code that only certain "[game]company code" can generate new currency, then you're going to end up back in the same problem of random players generating "money" (= fuel, or bread, or beer, or whatever you're token of value is). And you'll end up back into having 3rd-world geeks wage-slaving for first-world real currency to produce in-game value. Gold farming, again.
And thus my objection to player trade driven by scarcity. In PlanetSide there is no scarcity, there's no point in trading or hording. There's nothing worth buying with real world money, aside from saving some time by purchasing a high level character.
i'd like to see emergent behaviors if consumable resources were the defacto currency.
>Problem is ... if you want to have credibly real in-game physics, then you're going to have to have some things like mineable resources, or orbital hydroponics stations that take in raw material like water-CO2-ice and trace elements and sell higher value rocket fuel and food, only taking in-game effort and sunlight to do it. Which is territory for gold farming and such like evils again.
A higher level of abstraction might do it. Instead of have a hydroponics segment producing X units of food per Y unit of time, just say "You need to build another HP segment before you can add to this station." i build a mine on an asteroid and as long as the mine exists i can build unit types A, B and C. If i have 5 mines i can build units D, E and F.
Or just prevent the quantities of stuff extracted from being traded. My mine generates 500 Iron units per hour, but i can't trade them.
The former is more RTS, the latter would be EVE - player trade. While that would appeal to me, it might not appeal to power hungry nerds who just want to live out some sociopathic fantasy. Maybe the solution is for people to just decide what kind of game they want to play. If you play EVE, expect people to destroy your days of work, expect people to run off with your money. If not, play something else. *shrugs*
Do you need me to explain what it means to put a verb between asterisks, or can you look for it yourself?
i dare you to yell fire in a crowded building. Or to be more topical, yell bomb or terrorist.
Speech is a power, with it comes responsibility. Does my right to bear arms include shooting anyone who looks at me funny? Does my driver's license entitle me to run over people? Does freedom of speech come with the right to say whatever i like? NO. It doesn't and it never has (at least in the US). There are certain things i am legally obligated to NOT say.
For instance libel and slander are illegal, even if only as a civil court issue. Threatening to overthrow the gov't or to kill the president is not protected either. Inciting a riot or inciting people to commit crimes is not protected. It's not OK for me to cause a deadly stampede in a crowd.
Yeah, i get the Voltaire bit about protecting someone's right to say stupid and evil things... but there is a point were it's not about expression... but about CAUSING HARM.
Words hurt. The sticks and stones bit was something moms tell their kids to say to bullies. It was a load of crap then and it's a load of crap now. People don't commit suicide (the 11 year old boy who was called gay) over being slapped around as often as they do for the words others say. People don't go postal (Columbine) over being slapped around as often as they do over words others say. A well crafted insult hurts way more than a punch. A bruise goes away after a day or two... but someone (far weaker than the awesomeness that is you) might hurt from an insult their entire lives.
The brain records physical and emotional pain the same way. Verbal abuse can cause clinical depression and PTSD.
Oh wait, that's all pop culture psychobabble and we should all just have thicker skins.
The one time a played that game we had to do the old interview scene. "What would you do if...". One of the questions was "What would you do if the Computer committed treason?". I asked the computer if it was treasonous to suggest that the computer COULD commit treason. It said yes, so i killed the high ranking guy giving the test. From then on the computer loved me.
Great game.
Yup. Except for one aspect, perhaps. That currency is subject to the caprice of one company who can flood the market or end it. End it, as in make it become non-existent with the flick of a switch. Just as my Uber1337 sword of fiery death is not mine, it's Blizzard's. With "real" currency there's a greater sense of permanency. Plus if someone steals my money or screws me over to get it, i have some recourse.
Yeah, it's currency alright. But i'd still call anyone spending "real" money on it to be an idiot and a cheat.
All but the last sentence should be tagged as Insightful. Banks aren't stealing, we're giving them money. Most people just don't know what our currency is, how it's made or what to do with it.
My solution:
Make all banks non-profit credit unions that provide a service, rather than run as a business to make people who do nothing rich.
And/or phase out interest (paid and earned). If we did that we wouldn't need to go back to gold or some other crap.
i'd use something that had intrinsic in-game value, like fuel or building materials. In a fantasy game i'd have it be Mana or Karma. In Eve i'd have an Energon like fuel type. i hand you a note with 1024 Ton AU {TAU} (it could move 16 tons 64 AU). You could use that note to buy other stuff, or take it to the gas station to fill your tank. Or maybe it's a note for 340 Liters of Vespene Gas.
Once you use it, it is destroyed forever. Use currency to represent these materials and allow fluid trade. The server can feed in new energy and materials to regulate the economy. It would be like "god" adding more gold or oil to the planet when needed.
Stories like this take my main objection to most MRPGs to a new level. i've yet to find a game with player trade and currency that i could stand for more than a month. Hence, i'm still playing PlanetSide (which has no economy and a shallow power curve and no ganking).
i question there being a water crisis. i think there are places with a poor ratio of potable water to people. There's plenty of water, supply isn't the problem... demand is. Less people = more water per person. Give these people education, birth control and cable TV. The rest will sort itself.
Maybe quantity of life is a privilege (rather than a right) carved out of the environment with technology and civilization. i think quality of life should be a much higher priority.
Daily, weekly? Irregularly but frequently? Seems like the kind of thing he'd do just the once, not infinitively.
Will /. submitters ever think of another way to craft a headline? Instead of asking... make a claim! Or better yet... use the headline as a place to summarize the article. "IEEE Spectrum thinks...". If you're going to make a question headline, at least try to avoid asking a vapid question like this.
What will Japan's power consumption be in 10 to 20 years? They're having so few kids the population should be plummeting soon.
We don't need more power, Mr. Scotty. We need FEWER PEOPLE. Pollution would be less of a problem if there were fewer people creating it. Cutting emissions, conserving and finding cleaner sources of energy while all very good... won't mean shit if our growth is still horrifically out of control. With a smaller population we'd have more resources per person and less waste generated.
Similarly, there are no food or water shortages... there ARE places of the world that that too many people for the available resources. If we have 1 gallon per person per day at a population of 100,000... we'd have 2 gallons per person per day if the population of 50,000.
i'm not talking about killing off people or even letting them die. i'm talking about getting the population to something that is sustainable. The quantity of life is going to start seriously farking with our quality of life... and THEN with the quantity. If we don't get it under control we're going to have more wars, more droughts, more everything that sucks.
"easier said than done"
Really? No kidding! Can i have your autograph before you win the Nobel Prize for Pointing out the Obvious?
"But that's mean"
Mean is kids dying of starvation because their parents had too many kids. Mean will be wars over water.
Daily? Weekly?
Looks to me that Disney is buying Marvel just once, not habitually. Perhaps the headline should be "Disney Bought Marvel" or "Disney Will Buy Marvel Tomorrow".
What is the point of having the living who were not responsible apologize to a dead person for the acts of some other dead person?
i don't owe any black Americans an apology for slavery. Sure it sucked for the slaves, but i had nothing to do with it. All slaves and all slave owners are DEAD. It's hollow. We can't punish the offenders or make it right with the wronged. Unless you have a time machine. And don't get me started on reparations. Find me a living slave and owner and i will gladly help pay the costs to free the slave and punish the "owner".
Why are we holding the dead to OUR moral standards anyway? In 50 years things we do all day, every day will seem abominable. Should i start apologizing now? To whom? Shit, now i have to live up to the standards of my contemporaries AND future generations? i don't even know what they deplore yet!
Find some living people who persecuted Turing and we can ask them for an apology (if they feel bad about it, which they might not). Go after the people who are guilty of writing and enforcing the policy. Then we can dig up Alan's corpse and they can make amends. Alan will speak with an otherwordly voice to accept the apology and at last his soul will be able to rest. The current gov't and the people in it are not responsible for it so they don't really owe a corpse a hollow apology.
i can't figure out how to answer this question. What is it asking?
It follows that any struggle against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism, like preferring candles to electric light or hansom cabs to aeroplanes. Underneath this lies the half-conscious belief that language is a natural growth and not an instrument which we shape for our own purposes.
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.html
Working together doesn't make them part of the administration. The administration is Obama and his appointees who he will take with him when he leaves.
Senators are not part of any administration. Administration members are not senators either.
If you need to lump them, call them lieberals or libtards. If you need to say they are blindly obedient, call them Obamabots or Obamatons.
Check out PlanetSide. The shallow power curve make level a minor factor. Skill, tactics, and organization can beat higher level and high numbers.
MPRGs with Gygaxian power curves are like this... aside from the Warhammer game which turned n00bst0mpers into chickens. i didn't reach level 20 so i can't say anything about the PvP specifically. In general, when you're in a PvP area in a power curve game... bring your friends.
PlanetSide (an MFPS) doesn't have n00bst0mping because it has a shallow power curve. Give it a look.
Can someone explain to me why this is so bad?
While playing in the closed beta i had no problems with it.
How is this different than/same as punk buster? Are there systems to prevent cheating in MRPGs that don't involve some program watching the code on the client side?