i love the way GW handled moving the story forward. If you help the farmer get the bees back in their apiary, they STAYED in the apiary. The didn't reset. i hated that in WoW. No matter how many whatsits i kill, there's always more. i found the hirelings to be useless in the second phase of the game (where i quit).
The cartoony graphics makes the game easier to make look good on low end machines. It's basically inspired by Warhammer. i found MRPGs that when for realism (like Vanguard) to run slower and look uglier. Going for a stylized look makes (most) viewers easier to please.
You might want to check out Aion (by the same company that did GW). It's BEAUTIFUL. Aside from adding flight, it's a reskinned EQ/WoW.
For a truly different MMO experience, check out PlanetSide (an MFPS). Runs on old machines, no noob stomping (shallow power curve), no grinding, no farming, no twinking, no gathering flowers to you can gather other flowers, no quests to bring back rat spleens. It's all about skill, understanding the game and being in an organized team. You can solo, but it'll be dull unless you're a cloaker. It's pure PvP. The only AIs are the robotic turrets. There are only two instances, North America and Europe.
Make a Vanu Sovereignty character on the Gemini (North America) server. Log in around 730 eastern. Go to the tower next to Warpgate tower B. You'll see 30 to 50 of us gathering for the raid. Look for an outfit (guild) called Ghosts of the Revolution.
The legal aspect of the term hate crime was invent to make sure such crime were actually PROSECUTED. Not long ago, crime A by person type B against person type C was no big deal. Stomp a fag to death, burn a cross on a nigger's lawn, no problem. The people enforcing the laws were the same as the people breaking them, so often the crimes were unpunished. Enter hate crimes. Now it's harder to get away with it.
Some hate crimes are meant to terrorize, which makes them actually WORSE than the act itself. For instance, swastikas on the synagogue. If some kids painted smiley faces, it's just graffiti, destruction of private property. The swastikas imply... "get out or we'll come back with something worse".
I have the right to commit crimes in privacy! It's bad enough that people lock their houses when they leave, but this is going to make my work all the harder. Shit, now i'm going have to switch cars and double back through tunnels. Won't somebody PLEASE think of the criminals!
Thank goodness this system wasn't in place after I robbed that 7-11. They might have tracked me to my own home. What kind of country do we live in where "cops" can make me accountable for my actions? Not any kind of country I want to live in.
And these speed cameras are infringing on my God given right to go as fast as my car's engine will take me. Now I have worry about being watched as I do 50 in the suburbs. If some kid runs out in front of me, he'll learn his lesson, and he won't do it again. Damn nanny state expect us to watch out for everyone. Who's watching out for us???
I shouted fire in a crowded movie theater and they had the nerve to arrest ME for using my right to free speech. No one was in any danger, as there wasn't a fire. I was just yanking their chains. What a bunch of humorless wussies we've become.
Just the other day some cop told me I shouldn't drive while using my cell phone. I said, "I can handle doing two things at once" and he whined about 'putting other drivers and pedestrians at risk'.
There I am going to visit my pal Jim. And THEY'RE watching me. Why do they care that I'm visiting Jim?You know why they're doing all this? Because they're onto me. They know how important I am. I know the truth, man. Of the millions of people in my area, they're watching ME. They have nothing better to do! I'm the center of the damn universe and they know it. I'm just trying to commit my crimes in peace. Is that so wrong?
i don't know if this is the case in other cultures, but in America, we seem to hate anyone who is better than us at anything. We are incapable of simply being happy for each other or grateful for what we have. This seems especially true of intelligence/education. We HATE smart people. If you correct someone's grammar, spelling, punctuation or the like... instead of making a note to try to do it right... they'll call you pedantic or a grammar snob or elitist or something else. A semi-educated person will call you a prescriptivist. Anything to avoid admitting ignorance or that you're right. It's odd to me that a nation so obsessed with accomplishment, despises anyone who accomplishes.
Then there are the one uppers. If you tell them your house is yellow, their house is yellower... or they've seen a house that was yellower. Can't you just nod and say, "oh, yellow house, nice"? If you have a headache today, they have migraines everyday!
There was a study saying that most Americans would rather that all their coworkers make 50K and for them to make 100K, than for everyone at the company to make 200K.
We also hate anyone/thing that makes us question our beliefs. We think that because we have the right to have any belief that our beliefs should be unquestioned. That somehow we have the right to spout our beliefs at others, while anyone disagreeing with us must be silent. Free of speech/religion seems to apply only to the privileged Christians. The rest of us should just shut up and be grateful to be allowed to live. After all, we'd be put to death in Iran, right?
Would the result be the same if it was a less attractive partner, but one who was still a great turn on? Like a plain looking woman who can talk at length about the Uncertainty Principle and knows where your buttons are....
By the way, this isn't about being "superficial" this is about enhancing the likelihood of healthier, arguably better members of the species passing on genes. Nature isn't superficial... it's pragmatic. Superficial is a word invented by ugly people to hurt the feelings of better looking people. It's not my fault i like big boobs, slender waists and bright blue eyes. i didn't choose that.
Artists (read: labels) should pay internet radio to play their songs. A song is a commercial. Paying to listen to commercials is stupid in the extreme. Take a page from broadcast TV. They charge us in the form of making us watch/skip commercials. The content is free to the viewer. HBO is the other correct model. You pay to watch it, but they don't have commercials (beyond telling you about other content).
That's the way it SHOULD be.
Basic cable fucks us coming and going by charging us for content AND making us watch/skip commercials.
Are lighters destroying the skill of starting fire with sticks?
Are street lights destroying low light vision?
Did video kill the radio star?
Are pen/print and paper destroying rote memorization?
Technology is pretty much all about destroying the old way of doing things. Instead of going out in the woods to chop down trees to cook, i turn on my electric oven. i don't need to know how to calculate square roots if i have a calculator. As navigation tools, maps suck. My Garmin tells me where to turn so i don't have to squint at a map.
Technology off loads work we don't want to do, or can't do. Like move 60 MPH. i can't do that. So i bought a car. i don't want to carry bags of groceries, so my car has a trunk. My life is fairly dull so i watch movies of people with lives more troublesome than mine. My walls are blank and boring, so i put paintings and posters on them. i find gathering cotton and weaving boring and time consuming so i went to Target and bought a t-shirt.
This is what we do. We try to make our lives easier. Keywork: try. Can we stop asking obvious and meaningless question yet? Is there a technology for 'Getting Over It Already'?
i LOVED that aspect of GW! NC Soft's new game, Aion, does not seem to have it:(
As for user generated content, i'd like to see a D&D 4E game centered on Planescape. Sigil would serve as hub to which official and unofficial content could link. i could pop into Ravenloft or Dragonlance. Or i could create my own realm with stupid over the top rules and powers. Users could rate and tag my content. WotC could sell/license an SDK and connections to Sigil.
You should PAY radio stations to play your music, thus making it free to listeners. A song is a commercial for your album and tour. Facilitate getting what you want (heard, sold) by making it easy for us.
i'm going to listen to Pandora less now, or maybe not at all. Your commercials were annoying enough. Your station is nothing BUT commercials, really. So why are you making me listen to MORE ads? Why the hell should i PAY to listen to ads? Charge the bands, charge the labels. Integrate with iTunes and give a discount for purchases. This will establish the connection between giving us what we want for free and us buying stuff.
i'd say, leave the answers in there. If it's a math class they still have to show their work. If it isn't a math class, ding them for copying out of the book. Or, don't have questions in the book.
Let the teacher make questions. Have homework be something other than "answer 1-15 on page 142". i always hated busy work like that.
Or, we simply have the OS Textbook include a link to another document called The Answers.
Or... have a teacher's edition. There's no reason to NOT. Books aren't software and don't have to include the full functionality that a teacher edition just because you thought so. Full disclosure doesn't have to apply.
We have two words for a reason. In something like GTA, you're largely murdering. In Bioshock, you're fighting for your life. Killing a prisoner at your mercy is murder. Killing an enemy combatant on the field is not.
Some games are a bit to violent and a bit to gory. But let's not use the wrong word to provoke an emotional response.
Why would they make one that was LESS stealthy? Does the Air Force work on making bombs less accurate? Does Porsche try to make their cars more sluggish? Is intel working on a chip that gets hotter?
This is like those stupid info bites where they pretend a change in any statistic is meaningful. "Unemployment is the highest it's been all month!" So what? You can always find some point in the past to say it's breaking some record. "This is the purplest purple since, um, 20 years ago. Wow!" That it beats some arbitrarily selected mark is not inherently meaningful. Especially in the case of arms races. Intel made a faster chip? No shit, Sherlock. That's their JOB.
Which is an odd thing to say as things are getting better steadily and have been for a few years now (even before Obama stepped it). But other than that, yes, it's exactly like Vietnam. *yawn*
Where's the offtopic mod when we need it? Or a mod for "preaching to the choir to karma whore"?
Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are a pretty good case for our military's inability to occupy a hostile population. And that's with a military that's mostly willing to fight to fight the enemy. Having been in the military, the vast majority would be on the side of civilians. Most of the Nat Guard units would ignore federal commands.
In my teen years, acquiring music was a big deal. i had to either buy it, borrow it or steal it. And by steal i mean 5 finger discount, not the two click discount. i never actually shoplifted (music). i had to wait until the album came out, ride the train into town/have my parents drive me to town, and fork over the cash out of my allowance. That's assuming i KNEW the album was out. i was an American kid growing up in Germany, which meant that sometimes a new CD could be very expensive if i couldn't buy it at the BX/PX.
For my brother who is ten years younger it was... search on BT, download, listen. There's no need to prioritize which album you'll get, get get them all. It doesn't cost anything in money or time to acquire.
What does that mean for the power/specialness/significance of music for our respective generations? If he can acquire the Depeche Mode discography at the cost of letting it download while he plays TF2, vs. saving my pennies and making several trips to get it piece by piece while choosing to forgo something else.... To me, getting rid of music means getting rid of the effort that went into acquiring it and knowing what it would cost to get it back. For him, it's trivial.
Will future generations have the passionate response of us old coots? If your collection is effectively [anything you or your friends have ever heard of] what is the value of any of it? If you never stood in line in the snow to be the first to have the new album....
First, you're generalizing. Not all environmentalists are like that. You know they aren't but you couldn't have a righteous Rush Limbaugh "haw haw haw" at these hippies if you admitted it. You're painting the whole as being the same as the fringe few (one can be reasonable or one can be environmentalist, not both). The guy who killed the abortion doctor is a Christian, therefore Christians are batshit crazy hypocrite doctor killers. So one can be a murderous anti-choice zealot, or a normal sane person.
As for burden of proof, who does it fall upon for drug companies? They have to prove their products do what they claim and that the side effects are less detrimental than the problem they mean to fix. Car companies must test to show their product is reasonably safe.
But then again, anyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto, an idiot.
Maybe it's like handing out fertilized chicken eggs. You hand out 12 with the assumption that some klutz will drop a few and some will yield males. The 5 females that hatch can produce enough to make up for the few that hit the floor. So the predictable losses are acceptable, because the gains will/should outweigh them. In 3 years my 12 eggs could be a few dozen hens and a truck full of scrambled eggs, despite a few losses. Where there is reward, there is generally risk. Balancing the two is the trick.
This is my plan for terraforming mars. Pull in CO2, bring it to a temp algae likes, pump it in, O2 comes out. i came up with this plan before i knew that the sun was sandblasting away the atmo of Mars.
Overall, i think this system could be very useful. If anyone can find a way to get rich off cleaning the air, it's Americans!
There's also the less measurable benefit of boycotting worse sources of energy. It might not show up in the bank, but for some it's there all the same.
i wish we'd stop looking for silver bullet/panaceas. Instead of hanging our hopes on one systems, i think we should use many sources... the more the merrier. While simultaneously reducing use and recycling.
If we're going to do wind farms, can we please look into the vertical systems that kill fewer birds? Birds shouldn't die because you can't be bothered to turn off the lights when you leave a room.
Have there been any studies as to what will happen when we slow down and disrupt the natural flow of wind? When the wind hits the blade, it loses energy. That wind was heading somewhere as part of the whole big system. If we frack with that, there might be consequences.
Get on David DeAngelo's mailing list. Subscribe to the Interviews with Dating Guru's or get the audio books. Having this knowledge will drastically improve your dating skills (IT IS A SKILL) and your understanding of relationships.
500 isn't that many, that's about 1/4th of the number that died on 9/11. Why you need 3 digits of precision on a number of people? There aren't tenths of a person, let alone thousandths.
Slashdot Mirror
i love the way GW handled moving the story forward. If you help the farmer get the bees back in their apiary, they STAYED in the apiary. The didn't reset. i hated that in WoW. No matter how many whatsits i kill, there's always more. i found the hirelings to be useless in the second phase of the game (where i quit).
The cartoony graphics makes the game easier to make look good on low end machines. It's basically inspired by Warhammer. i found MRPGs that when for realism (like Vanguard) to run slower and look uglier. Going for a stylized look makes (most) viewers easier to please.
You might want to check out Aion (by the same company that did GW). It's BEAUTIFUL. Aside from adding flight, it's a reskinned EQ/WoW.
For a truly different MMO experience, check out PlanetSide (an MFPS). Runs on old machines, no noob stomping (shallow power curve), no grinding, no farming, no twinking, no gathering flowers to you can gather other flowers, no quests to bring back rat spleens. It's all about skill, understanding the game and being in an organized team. You can solo, but it'll be dull unless you're a cloaker. It's pure PvP. The only AIs are the robotic turrets. There are only two instances, North America and Europe.
Make a Vanu Sovereignty character on the Gemini (North America) server. Log in around 730 eastern. Go to the tower next to Warpgate tower B. You'll see 30 to 50 of us gathering for the raid. Look for an outfit (guild) called Ghosts of the Revolution.
When is Andrew Elditch going to sue Rosetta Stone for stealing his sound?
The legal aspect of the term hate crime was invent to make sure such crime were actually PROSECUTED. Not long ago, crime A by person type B against person type C was no big deal. Stomp a fag to death, burn a cross on a nigger's lawn, no problem. The people enforcing the laws were the same as the people breaking them, so often the crimes were unpunished. Enter hate crimes. Now it's harder to get away with it.
Some hate crimes are meant to terrorize, which makes them actually WORSE than the act itself. For instance, swastikas on the synagogue. If some kids painted smiley faces, it's just graffiti, destruction of private property. The swastikas imply... "get out or we'll come back with something worse".
I have the right to commit crimes in privacy! It's bad enough that people lock their houses when they leave, but this is going to make my work all the harder. Shit, now i'm going have to switch cars and double back through tunnels. Won't somebody PLEASE think of the criminals!
Thank goodness this system wasn't in place after I robbed that 7-11. They might have tracked me to my own home. What kind of country do we live in where "cops" can make me accountable for my actions? Not any kind of country I want to live in.
And these speed cameras are infringing on my God given right to go as fast as my car's engine will take me. Now I have worry about being watched as I do 50 in the suburbs. If some kid runs out in front of me, he'll learn his lesson, and he won't do it again. Damn nanny state expect us to watch out for everyone. Who's watching out for us???
I shouted fire in a crowded movie theater and they had the nerve to arrest ME for using my right to free speech. No one was in any danger, as there wasn't a fire. I was just yanking their chains. What a bunch of humorless wussies we've become.
Just the other day some cop told me I shouldn't drive while using my cell phone. I said, "I can handle doing two things at once" and he whined about 'putting other drivers and pedestrians at risk'.
There I am going to visit my pal Jim. And THEY'RE watching me. Why do they care that I'm visiting Jim?You know why they're doing all this? Because they're onto me. They know how important I am. I know the truth, man. Of the millions of people in my area, they're watching ME. They have nothing better to do! I'm the center of the damn universe and they know it. I'm just trying to commit my crimes in peace. Is that so wrong?
i don't know if this is the case in other cultures, but in America, we seem to hate anyone who is better than us at anything. We are incapable of simply being happy for each other or grateful for what we have. This seems especially true of intelligence/education. We HATE smart people. If you correct someone's grammar, spelling, punctuation or the like... instead of making a note to try to do it right... they'll call you pedantic or a grammar snob or elitist or something else. A semi-educated person will call you a prescriptivist. Anything to avoid admitting ignorance or that you're right. It's odd to me that a nation so obsessed with accomplishment, despises anyone who accomplishes.
Then there are the one uppers. If you tell them your house is yellow, their house is yellower... or they've seen a house that was yellower. Can't you just nod and say, "oh, yellow house, nice"? If you have a headache today, they have migraines everyday!
There was a study saying that most Americans would rather that all their coworkers make 50K and for them to make 100K, than for everyone at the company to make 200K.
We also hate anyone/thing that makes us question our beliefs. We think that because we have the right to have any belief that our beliefs should be unquestioned. That somehow we have the right to spout our beliefs at others, while anyone disagreeing with us must be silent. Free of speech/religion seems to apply only to the privileged Christians. The rest of us should just shut up and be grateful to be allowed to live. After all, we'd be put to death in Iran, right?
Would the result be the same if it was a less attractive partner, but one who was still a great turn on? Like a plain looking woman who can talk at length about the Uncertainty Principle and knows where your buttons are....
By the way, this isn't about being "superficial" this is about enhancing the likelihood of healthier, arguably better members of the species passing on genes. Nature isn't superficial... it's pragmatic. Superficial is a word invented by ugly people to hurt the feelings of better looking people. It's not my fault i like big boobs, slender waists and bright blue eyes. i didn't choose that.
Artists (read: labels) should pay internet radio to play their songs. A song is a commercial. Paying to listen to commercials is stupid in the extreme. Take a page from broadcast TV. They charge us in the form of making us watch/skip commercials. The content is free to the viewer. HBO is the other correct model. You pay to watch it, but they don't have commercials (beyond telling you about other content).
That's the way it SHOULD be.
Basic cable fucks us coming and going by charging us for content AND making us watch/skip commercials.
Are lighters destroying the skill of starting fire with sticks?
Are street lights destroying low light vision?
Did video kill the radio star?
Are pen/print and paper destroying rote memorization?
Technology is pretty much all about destroying the old way of doing things. Instead of going out in the woods to chop down trees to cook, i turn on my electric oven. i don't need to know how to calculate square roots if i have a calculator. As navigation tools, maps suck. My Garmin tells me where to turn so i don't have to squint at a map.
Technology off loads work we don't want to do, or can't do. Like move 60 MPH. i can't do that. So i bought a car. i don't want to carry bags of groceries, so my car has a trunk. My life is fairly dull so i watch movies of people with lives more troublesome than mine. My walls are blank and boring, so i put paintings and posters on them. i find gathering cotton and weaving boring and time consuming so i went to Target and bought a t-shirt.
This is what we do. We try to make our lives easier. Keywork: try. Can we stop asking obvious and meaningless question yet? Is there a technology for 'Getting Over It Already'?
i LOVED that aspect of GW! NC Soft's new game, Aion, does not seem to have it :(
As for user generated content, i'd like to see a D&D 4E game centered on Planescape. Sigil would serve as hub to which official and unofficial content could link. i could pop into Ravenloft or Dragonlance. Or i could create my own realm with stupid over the top rules and powers. Users could rate and tag my content. WotC could sell/license an SDK and connections to Sigil.
You should PAY radio stations to play your music, thus making it free to listeners. A song is a commercial for your album and tour. Facilitate getting what you want (heard, sold) by making it easy for us.
i'm going to listen to Pandora less now, or maybe not at all. Your commercials were annoying enough. Your station is nothing BUT commercials, really. So why are you making me listen to MORE ads? Why the hell should i PAY to listen to ads? Charge the bands, charge the labels. Integrate with iTunes and give a discount for purchases. This will establish the connection between giving us what we want for free and us buying stuff.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/START_I
It's an acronym, not a word.
My pastime is telling people that the word is "pastime" not "past time". It comes from pass time... to pass the time. Not past time... time gone by.
i'd say, leave the answers in there. If it's a math class they still have to show their work. If it isn't a math class, ding them for copying out of the book. Or, don't have questions in the book.
Let the teacher make questions. Have homework be something other than "answer 1-15 on page 142". i always hated busy work like that.
Or, we simply have the OS Textbook include a link to another document called The Answers.
Or... have a teacher's edition. There's no reason to NOT. Books aren't software and don't have to include the full functionality that a teacher edition just because you thought so. Full disclosure doesn't have to apply.
We have two words for a reason. In something like GTA, you're largely murdering. In Bioshock, you're fighting for your life. Killing a prisoner at your mercy is murder. Killing an enemy combatant on the field is not.
Some games are a bit to violent and a bit to gory. But let's not use the wrong word to provoke an emotional response.
Why would they make one that was LESS stealthy? Does the Air Force work on making bombs less accurate? Does Porsche try to make their cars more sluggish? Is intel working on a chip that gets hotter?
This is like those stupid info bites where they pretend a change in any statistic is meaningful. "Unemployment is the highest it's been all month!" So what? You can always find some point in the past to say it's breaking some record. "This is the purplest purple since, um, 20 years ago. Wow!" That it beats some arbitrarily selected mark is not inherently meaningful. Especially in the case of arms races. Intel made a faster chip? No shit, Sherlock. That's their JOB.
Which is an odd thing to say as things are getting better steadily and have been for a few years now (even before Obama stepped it). But other than that, yes, it's exactly like Vietnam. *yawn*
Where's the offtopic mod when we need it? Or a mod for "preaching to the choir to karma whore"?
Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan are a pretty good case for our military's inability to occupy a hostile population. And that's with a military that's mostly willing to fight to fight the enemy. Having been in the military, the vast majority would be on the side of civilians. Most of the Nat Guard units would ignore federal commands.
In my teen years, acquiring music was a big deal. i had to either buy it, borrow it or steal it. And by steal i mean 5 finger discount, not the two click discount. i never actually shoplifted (music). i had to wait until the album came out, ride the train into town/have my parents drive me to town, and fork over the cash out of my allowance. That's assuming i KNEW the album was out. i was an American kid growing up in Germany, which meant that sometimes a new CD could be very expensive if i couldn't buy it at the BX/PX.
For my brother who is ten years younger it was... search on BT, download, listen. There's no need to prioritize which album you'll get, get get them all. It doesn't cost anything in money or time to acquire.
What does that mean for the power/specialness/significance of music for our respective generations? If he can acquire the Depeche Mode discography at the cost of letting it download while he plays TF2, vs. saving my pennies and making several trips to get it piece by piece while choosing to forgo something else.... To me, getting rid of music means getting rid of the effort that went into acquiring it and knowing what it would cost to get it back. For him, it's trivial.
Will future generations have the passionate response of us old coots? If your collection is effectively [anything you or your friends have ever heard of] what is the value of any of it? If you never stood in line in the snow to be the first to have the new album....
i'm not saying it's wrong. It's just weird to me.
How is this tripe insightful?
First, you're generalizing. Not all environmentalists are like that. You know they aren't but you couldn't have a righteous Rush Limbaugh "haw haw haw" at these hippies if you admitted it. You're painting the whole as being the same as the fringe few (one can be reasonable or one can be environmentalist, not both). The guy who killed the abortion doctor is a Christian, therefore Christians are batshit crazy hypocrite doctor killers. So one can be a murderous anti-choice zealot, or a normal sane person.
As for burden of proof, who does it fall upon for drug companies? They have to prove their products do what they claim and that the side effects are less detrimental than the problem they mean to fix. Car companies must test to show their product is reasonably safe.
But then again, anyone who disagrees with you is ipso facto, an idiot.
Maybe it's like handing out fertilized chicken eggs. You hand out 12 with the assumption that some klutz will drop a few and some will yield males. The 5 females that hatch can produce enough to make up for the few that hit the floor. So the predictable losses are acceptable, because the gains will/should outweigh them. In 3 years my 12 eggs could be a few dozen hens and a truck full of scrambled eggs, despite a few losses. Where there is reward, there is generally risk. Balancing the two is the trick.
This is my plan for terraforming mars. Pull in CO2, bring it to a temp algae likes, pump it in, O2 comes out. i came up with this plan before i knew that the sun was sandblasting away the atmo of Mars.
Overall, i think this system could be very useful. If anyone can find a way to get rich off cleaning the air, it's Americans!
There's also the less measurable benefit of boycotting worse sources of energy. It might not show up in the bank, but for some it's there all the same.
i wish we'd stop looking for silver bullet/panaceas. Instead of hanging our hopes on one systems, i think we should use many sources... the more the merrier. While simultaneously reducing use and recycling.
If we're going to do wind farms, can we please look into the vertical systems that kill fewer birds? Birds shouldn't die because you can't be bothered to turn off the lights when you leave a room.
Have there been any studies as to what will happen when we slow down and disrupt the natural flow of wind? When the wind hits the blade, it loses energy. That wind was heading somewhere as part of the whole big system. If we frack with that, there might be consequences.
Get on David DeAngelo's mailing list. Subscribe to the Interviews with Dating Guru's or get the audio books. Having this knowledge will drastically improve your dating skills (IT IS A SKILL) and your understanding of relationships.
500 isn't that many, that's about 1/4th of the number that died on 9/11. Why you need 3 digits of precision on a number of people? There aren't tenths of a person, let alone thousandths.