It dismays me that an institution I was raised to revere as "the best in the world" sucks so hard now. Honestly, how have we gotten to this point?
There's your answer, imo. Public schooling especially takes children from their parents and raises them in authoritarian factory schools with messages like, "USA IZ NUMBA ONE!!1" instead of messages like, "A republic, if you can keep it."
I don't mean to jab you or your childhood personally. This is just an overall trend I've noticed.
Let's face it; he hacked the email account of a Vice Presidential candidate. Regardless of how one feels about Sarah Palin (I can't stand her myself...the things she says makes me want to slam my head in a file cabinet drawer) it's not rocket science to recognize that what he did is a bit more severe (and consequence-prone) than going after your typical person. He should consider himself lucky that he only got a year, really...I figured they'd do much worse.
Yes, hacking the e-mail account of a member of the ruling class is a serious crime. The scoundrel should have been placed in the stocks for a day before being drawn and quartered. God save our gracious Queen.
In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good. If even small bugs irritate you, then the game is probably best avoided for now. Otherwise, I would say that the PC version is playable enough right now to be worth your money and time.
If that's how you feel, you should DEFINITELY give Fallout 1 and 2 a try. They're pretty much exactly what you described re: New Vegas, but they're more cerebral and not as over-produced as the Fallout 3 games. Just my two cents.
As a leftie, I have to say that I am dismayed at the rapid disintegration of our individual liberties and freedoms since President Obama came to office, and at the utter lack of discipline of the rest of the party, causing the recent realignment of the House.
(emphasis mine)
This isn't a liberal-conservative issue. This is an authoritarian-libertarian issue. I consider myself a "conservative" but I am by no means supportive of any of the crap Obama and Bush 43 have done w.r.t. airport "security".
If you frame a discussion within vague liberal-conservative parameters, you're opening the floor up to kindergarten-style name calling and tribalism, regardless of your intent.
Why nuclear power? It is carbon neutral, inexpensive, has a lot of energy generating capability in a small area, and the technology is very mature.
A couple thoughts about the section I bolded...
Carbon neutrality is certainly one advantage to nuclear power, but I think it's far from the best. Carbon dioxide's damage to the earth's biosphere is far from being as well understood as the damage caused by coal power's potpourri of radiation (dumped into the goddamn SKY), acid rain, particulates, organic mercury (the worst form of mercury), and coal mining (accidents especially). With coal, we don't have to rely on a computer model's prediction of the future to judge the negative externalities.
As for the expense aspect, that's actually a huge problem right now. We need more nuclear plants today, but they're REALLY expensive to build. It's partly because Greenpeace's FUD has ensured that it's hard to secure liability insurance in case of a near-impossible Chernobyl v2.0, but it's mostly because (IIRC) every nuclear power station in the US is of a unique design. Every new nuclear plant requires millions of dollars to draft/review/get approval for blueprints, etc. I don't know what's stopping the NRC from signing off on a few pre-fab designs, it would really cut down on all the red tape for a new reactor. Like you said, nuclear is a mature technology; building more of it should be simple and cheap by now.
The biggest problem the world has is the damned fools that think they, and only they, can see the future, and if the world doesn't start working on their pet solution RIGHT NOW, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
Mod parent +6 correct.
I'll just add that any biologist will tell you that evolution proceeds more quickly with smaller groups. Keep that in mind the next time someone mentions some globetrotting demagogue's latest speech.
Movies like Toy Story are rendered with raytracing; this is a very visually accurate but very demanding form of rendering. Even Pixar cannot render Toy Story 3 in real-time, which you would need for your idea.
While real-time raytracing is asking for the moon, I kind of wonder - one can get a beastly PCIe graphics card, a fast multicore CPU and gigs of memory for less than $200 these days - barely more than a bluray player. What if set-top boxes had the ability to play cinematic movies, a sort of feature-length cutscene in an Xbox 360 game? If you designed all the virtual sets to provide consistent fps in all the scenes, you could give the viewer arbitrary control over the scene.
Think of all the dorm-room dwellers with beanie hats who'd love to chuckle and zoom in on Scarlett Johansson's bosom.
Yeah, D2 multiplayer is hard to beat. I've been (unsuccessfully) attempting to sway Wow-playing friends of mine towards D2 for a while. I don't like "massively multiplayer RPGs". I just like RPGs with a multiplayer option, thank you.
That and if you create characters with a friend solely for multiplayer use you can design your skills/stats/item choices to create one lethal unified strategy between two characters that would be helpless on their own.
Ever played F.E.A.R.? AI doesn't just have aim on it's side, those bastards use legit tactics and coordinate against you.
In my experience, the opponents in FEAR were cattle to the slo-mo slaughter; I never noticed or really looked for any tactics on their part. Maybe I just never cranked up the difficulty high enough.
When I was still playing it, I thought it would be fun to go through the whole game without using slow motion, but my computer just couldn't pull high enough FPS for that, and I don't think I was in the minority there.
What is the solution? One possibility would be if society - as a whole (not just small segments of the population) - was very generous about donating to authors. This way, authors wouldn't be forced between: (1) having copy restrictions on their work and getting paid vs (2) having no restrictions on copying their work, but not getting adequately paid for their work / going bankrupt.
I don't think it's necessary for society as a whole to be very generous to authors. I've been thinking about this for a little while and I think I have a system that might work, especially for authors of fiction. Set up a combination author's website and online store and stock the store with products that appeal to each type of customer:
1. Leechers. They aren't going to pay you anyway, so at least let them get a free eBook directly from your site (or from an author-endorsed torrent). That way they'll think you're cool for it and be more likely to tell others about your book, even if only because your distribution model is neat. With this group, you are selling your eBook for the price of publicity. If the going gets rough, put banner ads up on your site.
2. Cheapskates. These people are willing to pay, but they don't want to spend $35 for a hardcover. Let them download the eBook for free, just like the first group. Unlike the first group, this group will open their hearts/wallets when they see your "Paypal - Donate" ad on your site and in the foreword to your book. Little donations add up, and donating a portion of income to charity helps loosen wallets.
3. People who prefer dead trees. Many people like to have a paper book in their hands, and since a paper book is a physical object, only thieves and library patrons (the latter being a surprisingly uncommon species these days!) will expect to get one for free. Use on-demand publishing and an online store to sell cheap paperbacks and expensive hardcovers.
4. Die-hard fans and/or people with fat wallets. If your book is really worthwhile, a few people will go totally ape for it. Provide a special, lucrative way for your hardcore fans to connect with you. Look at what video game and DVD publishers do with their "limited edition" releases and adapt it to books. Sell pricey limited-edition hardcovers with gold-leaf binding, sell the original manuscripts w/ editing marks (if you wrote them up by hand), sell an expanded version with material you originally left out (see Stephen King's The Stand), or sell some autographed copies of the book. Even if you've never written a book before in your life, act like you're a writing demigod worth a $100 signed copy and see if you can't fool a few people. Be sure to sell recognition to the big boys - continually revise the foreword to include their names if they like (hey, it works for PBS).
My plan does not rely so much on people's altruism as it does on their tendency to pay what they think something will cost. How many people do you know who buy Tylenol for quadruple the price of generic acetaminophen? How many people do you know who pay $3.00 for black coffee? How many people do you know who pay thousands for diamond jewelry? I know loads of people who do all three. They're not necessarily stupid or bad with money, they just don't like to concern themselves with what they see as negligible amounts of cash. I think this plan could provide an author with a tidy profit without resorting to holding a work of art for ransom.
I doubt it would be on interest to the vast majority of/. audience, given that the books are not in English.
So while we're not interested in knowing the store's name, you think we're interested in knowing that you think we're not interested in knowing the store's name?
Speaking as a graduate student who still has a G4 Powerbook, I've loved it but honestly in the past 2 years I've been looking to replace it with something that can actually stream flash videos and show a block of animated gif smilies on a forum reply page without being choppy or using full CPU... My first choice would be a 13" Macbook Pro, but Apple seems to have left that one useful model on the short bus and gave it a Core 2 Duo while the other pros in the line have decent current-generation chips. I've talked to other friends about it and I know at least 2 other people that would go out and buy a 13" within the next month if only it had a better processor.
The performance difference between a Core 2 Duo and Core i5/i7 is pretty negligible for this use case:P. Even the 1.66Ghz Core Duo in my 4-year-old Mac Mini doesn't choke on web browsing. As I see it, the main advantage to the Core i5/i7 CPUs is that they have an Intel integrated graphics chip on-die that can be used instead of the nVidia graphics in order to conserve battery power.
For Apple to maintain Mac OS X's reputation of (practically speaking) being virus and ad-ware free, they're going to need a way to hold developers accountable for any malicious application behavior, intentional or accidental.
Of course, whether or not Apple will do that properly remains to be seen.
I think it's also worth noting that Diablo II has seen significant development past the release date. If I recall correctly, they've put out at least 12 major patches and a few minor ones, too. Changes range from bug fixes to added items (Being an item-based game, Diablo II really benefits from this) to (in the latest patch) changing quest rewards.
For all the people out there who haven't played Diablo II in a while, I suggest you patch to 1.13 and try it again. You can respec your stats and skills after completing the den of evil quest (once respec allowed per difficulty level). This is every bit as money as it sounds; it's way easier to power through normal difficulty and then respec to make your character more robust in nightmare and hell. Game on!
The term for freeing an iPhone is "jailbreaking", but here's the question: is it a jail if the user never notices the walls?
You should read Rousseau's Emile sometime. The author makes the (unintentional) point that life within a prison, even if it is invisible to the prisoner, is absurd.
I like to think that the parent was not referring to people who work for the gov't, but rather people who let employers direct most or all of their professional lives. A self-employed person is a rarity these days, and I think that's behind many/most U.S. problems (WARNING: RANT FOLLOWS)
An example: Let's say you're a senior computer programmer at a Fortune 500 corp. You get interesting work, reasonable vacation time, your co-workers and boss are friendly, and the pay is great. The problem here is that you're still working for someone else's (the owner's, the board of directors', whatever) dream, not your own. That means someone else is profiting more from your work than you, that someone else is deciding what projects to begin and what projects to cancel, and that someone else is free to delegate whatever duties they don't find enjoyable. I think that the employee's role as a stone in a corporate pyramid is to be avoided, unless servile habits can somehow be considered virtuous. I've noticed a couple tendencies among employee friends of mine, tendencies that become more noticeable the more heavily said employee invests in his career. They're unhappy, and their personal lives are fixed in humdrum routine. They spend so much time ignoring their own instincts and goals in lieu of company orders that they become listless and unable to motivate themselves to do anything new or bold in their personal lives.
Back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most Americans had their own livelihoods, often organized as family businesses where each worker was involved or at least consulted in most every other aspect of the business. People generally did what they wanted and found a way to monetize it enough to get by. Massive, rigid corporate hierarchies only really emerged after the mid-19th century, when sweatshops and compulsory schooling started to indoctrinate everyone into obediently following the commands of the elite "experts".
Nowhere is this more evident than the way most people participate in elections. They are astoundingly passive, focusing almost entirely on voting, the least important step in the electoral cycle. On average, they don't work for political campaigns, they don't participate in primaries, and they tend to vote for whatever football team ^W^W party they've always voted for (if they vote at all; voter turnout sucks). The really politically active ones usually don't do much more wait until the candidates are narrowed down before voting against someone. Every November, people brag about how they did their civic duty by voting, content to ignore the much larger difference they could have made earlier in the process. With a population as politically apathetic as ours, it's no wonder that those in power treat our wishes with such contempt. They are sure in their ivy-league belief that the electorate is composed of adult-age children who need to be closely managed as wards of the state ("liberals") and/or rallied to the cause of our fearless leader's foreign adventures ("conservatives").
In short, a reluctance or outright refusal to think for onesself is the root cause of many of the U.S.'s failings. This problem could probably stop within a single generation if we got our children out of state schools and into countless work apprenticeships and charities with people of different social classes instead. Just think of the kind of well-rounded, genuinely worthwhile people such a liberal education would produce.
Parent makes a good point. Since a centralized system of carbon-credit rationing and trading is so so SO ripe for abuse, we should consider that to be one of the last-ditch, desperate options to tackling anthropogenic climate change.
Personally, I think that man's CO2 emissions are causing (overstated) damage to the environment, and that something needs to be done. What is my favored strategy for fixing it, you ask? Doing nothing. Letting it fix itself. And before you label me a "denier" and accuse me of watching Faux News, I feel I should mention that Sustainability Now is on my side. Check out the linked image and you'll see that humanity has been steadily de-carbonizing its energy sources since the 1850s when we moved from wood to coal. And then we moved from coal to oil, and now we're moving from oil to natural gas. Pretty soon we'll mostly be using electricity from nuclear/wind/solar/geothermal/tidal/(your-favorite-renewable-here) either directly or to make hydrogen from water. It's my hunch that "anthropogenic global warming" will be laughed at down the road as a manufactured crisis similar to Malthus' population explosion or the FDA's fraudulent second-hand smoke studies (inquire for details).
I think that letting a cadre of state-sponsored experts tell everyone how to use fossil fuels sets a bad precedent. Since it's an action provoked by extreme anxiety, there will be confirmation bias taking place. I am an anxious person by nature, and I have plenty of experience with confirmation bias. It's the mindset that if you are trying to prevent a bad outcome and do SOMETHING to address it and there is no resulting calamity, that that something you did is definitely what saved you. I know there are some good reasons to be afraid of CO2 emissions and to favor gov't intervention, but consider the possibility (however small you think it is) that global warming does not need any action on our part and will go away by itself. If we surrender to a cap-and-trade system that we don't need, we'll all be celebrating how those economic/environmental wizards saved us, and we'll be more receptive to further control, because hey they were right the first time, eh?
The idea that the dependence on "Middle East oil" could have been lessened is seriously misleading.
BOY have you got that right. The whole idea of "dependent on Middle East oil" is kind of misleading anyway. Unless you think that all the oil the US gets from within its borders, from Canada, from Mexico, and from Nigeria (the top four suppliers of US crude, listed in descending order) has anything to do with the Middle East.
Does anyone out there know what kinds of concentrations of BPA start causing (significant) harm to humans and how it compares to what you get from plastic bottles? Whenever I hear about the horrors of BPA, my inner cynic tells me that it's the new secondhand smoke.
One thing that bothers me about seeing Li-Ion battery-powered devices everywhere these days is the way so many people view them as disposable, when in reality the battery is good for hundreds of charge/discharge cycles, and the device for many times that number.
Take for example the laptop I just bought secondhand today. It's a 2001 Gateway with a pentium 3 and the original li-ion battery. The battery is still capable of FOUR HOURS of constant web browsing and disk thrashing on a single charge. I paid $40 for this thing, and it performs just as well as any "netbook" for about 13% the price. My purchase was environment-agnostic, but if you don't want li-ion batteries going into landfills, finding ways to re-use them like I did is a good way to start.
Well, then, if you expect your opponent to pull something like that, bring in a statistician, qualify him as an expert witness and let him rip the assertion to shreds.
That doesn't always work so well. Read about John Puckett sometime...
Rather than try to sort out the disparities between its numbers and database findings, the FBI has fought to keep this information under wraps. After Barlow subpoenaed the Arizona database searches, the agency sent the state's Department of Public Safety a cease-and-desist letter. Eventually, the Arizona attorney general obtained a court order to block Barlow's distribution of the findings. In other instances, the FBI has threatened to revoke access to the bureau's master DNA database if states make the contents of their systems available to defense teams or academics. Agency officials argue they have done so because granting access would violate the privacy of the offenders (although researchers generally request anonymous DNA profiles with no names attached) and tie up the FBI's computers, impeding investigations. These justifications baffle researchers.
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That alone would solve our pollution problem,
What population problem?
(See attached graph)
It dismays me that an institution I was raised to revere as "the best in the world" sucks so hard now. Honestly, how have we gotten to this point?
There's your answer, imo. Public schooling especially takes children from their parents and raises them in authoritarian factory schools with messages like, "USA IZ NUMBA ONE!!1" instead of messages like, "A republic, if you can keep it."
I don't mean to jab you or your childhood personally. This is just an overall trend I've noticed.
That doesn't do anything about global warming, though.
Easy, pal. This thread will turn into a divisive political shouting match well enough on its own. No need for that kind of talk.
Oh btw the effect of carbon emissions on global temperatures is overstated YOU LOSE nyah nyah.
Sources:
google.com
yahoo.com
tubgirl.com
Let's face it; he hacked the email account of a Vice Presidential candidate. Regardless of how one feels about Sarah Palin (I can't stand her myself...the things she says makes me want to slam my head in a file cabinet drawer) it's not rocket science to recognize that what he did is a bit more severe (and consequence-prone) than going after your typical person. He should consider himself lucky that he only got a year, really...I figured they'd do much worse.
Yes, hacking the e-mail account of a member of the ruling class is a serious crime. The scoundrel should have been placed in the stocks for a day before being drawn and quartered. God save our gracious Queen.
In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good. If even small bugs irritate you, then the game is probably best avoided for now. Otherwise, I would say that the PC version is playable enough right now to be worth your money and time.
If that's how you feel, you should DEFINITELY give Fallout 1 and 2 a try. They're pretty much exactly what you described re: New Vegas, but they're more cerebral and not as over-produced as the Fallout 3 games. Just my two cents.
As a leftie, I have to say that I am dismayed at the rapid disintegration of our individual liberties and freedoms since President Obama came to office, and at the utter lack of discipline of the rest of the party, causing the recent realignment of the House.
(emphasis mine)
This isn't a liberal-conservative issue. This is an authoritarian-libertarian issue. I consider myself a "conservative" but I am by no means supportive of any of the crap Obama and Bush 43 have done w.r.t. airport "security".
If you frame a discussion within vague liberal-conservative parameters, you're opening the floor up to kindergarten-style name calling and tribalism, regardless of your intent.
Why nuclear power? It is carbon neutral, inexpensive, has a lot of energy generating capability in a small area, and the technology is very mature.
A couple thoughts about the section I bolded...
Carbon neutrality is certainly one advantage to nuclear power, but I think it's far from the best. Carbon dioxide's damage to the earth's biosphere is far from being as well understood as the damage caused by coal power's potpourri of radiation (dumped into the goddamn SKY ), acid rain, particulates, organic mercury (the worst form of mercury), and coal mining (accidents especially). With coal, we don't have to rely on a computer model's prediction of the future to judge the negative externalities.
As for the expense aspect, that's actually a huge problem right now. We need more nuclear plants today, but they're REALLY expensive to build. It's partly because Greenpeace's FUD has ensured that it's hard to secure liability insurance in case of a near-impossible Chernobyl v2.0, but it's mostly because (IIRC) every nuclear power station in the US is of a unique design. Every new nuclear plant requires millions of dollars to draft/review/get approval for blueprints, etc. I don't know what's stopping the NRC from signing off on a few pre-fab designs, it would really cut down on all the red tape for a new reactor. Like you said, nuclear is a mature technology; building more of it should be simple and cheap by now.
The biggest problem the world has is the damned fools that think they, and only they, can see the future, and if the world doesn't start working on their pet solution RIGHT NOW, everything is going to hell in a handbasket.
Mod parent +6 correct.
I'll just add that any biologist will tell you that evolution proceeds more quickly with smaller groups. Keep that in mind the next time someone mentions some globetrotting demagogue's latest speech.
Movies like Toy Story are rendered with raytracing; this is a very visually accurate but very demanding form of rendering. Even Pixar cannot render Toy Story 3 in real-time, which you would need for your idea.
While real-time raytracing is asking for the moon, I kind of wonder - one can get a beastly PCIe graphics card, a fast multicore CPU and gigs of memory for less than $200 these days - barely more than a bluray player. What if set-top boxes had the ability to play cinematic movies, a sort of feature-length cutscene in an Xbox 360 game? If you designed all the virtual sets to provide consistent fps in all the scenes, you could give the viewer arbitrary control over the scene.
Think of all the dorm-room dwellers with beanie hats who'd love to chuckle and zoom in on Scarlett Johansson's bosom.
Yeah, D2 multiplayer is hard to beat. I've been (unsuccessfully) attempting to sway Wow-playing friends of mine towards D2 for a while. I don't like "massively multiplayer RPGs". I just like RPGs with a multiplayer option, thank you.
That and if you create characters with a friend solely for multiplayer use you can design your skills/stats/item choices to create one lethal unified strategy between two characters that would be helpless on their own.
Ever played F.E.A.R.? AI doesn't just have aim on it's side, those bastards use legit tactics and coordinate against you.
In my experience, the opponents in FEAR were cattle to the slo-mo slaughter; I never noticed or really looked for any tactics on their part. Maybe I just never cranked up the difficulty high enough.
When I was still playing it, I thought it would be fun to go through the whole game without using slow motion, but my computer just couldn't pull high enough FPS for that, and I don't think I was in the minority there.
What is the solution? One possibility would be if society - as a whole (not just small segments of the population) - was very generous about donating to authors. This way, authors wouldn't be forced between: (1) having copy restrictions on their work and getting paid vs (2) having no restrictions on copying their work, but not getting adequately paid for their work / going bankrupt.
I don't think it's necessary for society as a whole to be very generous to authors. I've been thinking about this for a little while and I think I have a system that might work, especially for authors of fiction. Set up a combination author's website and online store and stock the store with products that appeal to each type of customer:
1. Leechers. They aren't going to pay you anyway, so at least let them get a free eBook directly from your site (or from an author-endorsed torrent). That way they'll think you're cool for it and be more likely to tell others about your book, even if only because your distribution model is neat. With this group, you are selling your eBook for the price of publicity. If the going gets rough, put banner ads up on your site.
2. Cheapskates. These people are willing to pay, but they don't want to spend $35 for a hardcover. Let them download the eBook for free, just like the first group. Unlike the first group, this group will open their hearts/wallets when they see your "Paypal - Donate" ad on your site and in the foreword to your book. Little donations add up, and donating a portion of income to charity helps loosen wallets.
3. People who prefer dead trees. Many people like to have a paper book in their hands, and since a paper book is a physical object, only thieves and library patrons (the latter being a surprisingly uncommon species these days!) will expect to get one for free. Use on-demand publishing and an online store to sell cheap paperbacks and expensive hardcovers.
4. Die-hard fans and/or people with fat wallets. If your book is really worthwhile, a few people will go totally ape for it. Provide a special, lucrative way for your hardcore fans to connect with you. Look at what video game and DVD publishers do with their "limited edition" releases and adapt it to books. Sell pricey limited-edition hardcovers with gold-leaf binding, sell the original manuscripts w/ editing marks (if you wrote them up by hand), sell an expanded version with material you originally left out (see Stephen King's The Stand), or sell some autographed copies of the book. Even if you've never written a book before in your life, act like you're a writing demigod worth a $100 signed copy and see if you can't fool a few people. Be sure to sell recognition to the big boys - continually revise the foreword to include their names if they like (hey, it works for PBS).
My plan does not rely so much on people's altruism as it does on their tendency to pay what they think something will cost . How many people do you know who buy Tylenol for quadruple the price of generic acetaminophen? How many people do you know who pay $3.00 for black coffee? How many people do you know who pay thousands for diamond jewelry? I know loads of people who do all three. They're not necessarily stupid or bad with money, they just don't like to concern themselves with what they see as negligible amounts of cash. I think this plan could provide an author with a tidy profit without resorting to holding a work of art for ransom.
I doubt it would be on interest to the vast majority of /. audience, given that the books are not in English.
So while we're not interested in knowing the store's name, you think we're interested in knowing that you think we're not interested in knowing the store's name?
*Scratches head*
Speaking as a graduate student who still has a G4 Powerbook, I've loved it but honestly in the past 2 years I've been looking to replace it with something that can actually stream flash videos and show a block of animated gif smilies on a forum reply page without being choppy or using full CPU ... My first choice would be a 13" Macbook Pro, but Apple seems to have left that one useful model on the short bus and gave it a Core 2 Duo while the other pros in the line have decent current-generation chips. I've talked to other friends about it and I know at least 2 other people that would go out and buy a 13" within the next month if only it had a better processor.
The performance difference between a Core 2 Duo and Core i5/i7 is pretty negligible for this use case :P. Even the 1.66Ghz Core Duo in my 4-year-old Mac Mini doesn't choke on web browsing. As I see it, the main advantage to the Core i5/i7 CPUs is that they have an Intel integrated graphics chip on-die that can be used instead of the nVidia graphics in order to conserve battery power.
Mod parent up.
For Apple to maintain Mac OS X's reputation of (practically speaking) being virus and ad-ware free, they're going to need a way to hold developers accountable for any malicious application behavior, intentional or accidental.
Of course, whether or not Apple will do that properly remains to be seen.
I think it's also worth noting that Diablo II has seen significant development past the release date. If I recall correctly, they've put out at least 12 major patches and a few minor ones, too. Changes range from bug fixes to added items (Being an item-based game, Diablo II really benefits from this) to (in the latest patch) changing quest rewards.
For all the people out there who haven't played Diablo II in a while, I suggest you patch to 1.13 and try it again. You can respec your stats and skills after completing the den of evil quest (once respec allowed per difficulty level). This is every bit as money as it sounds; it's way easier to power through normal difficulty and then respec to make your character more robust in nightmare and hell. Game on!
The term for freeing an iPhone is "jailbreaking", but here's the question: is it a jail if the user never notices the walls?
You should read Rousseau's Emile sometime. The author makes the (unintentional) point that life within a prison, even if it is invisible to the prisoner, is absurd.
I like to think that the parent was not referring to people who work for the gov't, but rather people who let employers direct most or all of their professional lives. A self-employed person is a rarity these days, and I think that's behind many/most U.S. problems (WARNING: RANT FOLLOWS)
An example: Let's say you're a senior computer programmer at a Fortune 500 corp. You get interesting work, reasonable vacation time, your co-workers and boss are friendly, and the pay is great. The problem here is that you're still working for someone else's (the owner's, the board of directors', whatever) dream, not your own. That means someone else is profiting more from your work than you, that someone else is deciding what projects to begin and what projects to cancel, and that someone else is free to delegate whatever duties they don't find enjoyable. I think that the employee's role as a stone in a corporate pyramid is to be avoided, unless servile habits can somehow be considered virtuous. I've noticed a couple tendencies among employee friends of mine, tendencies that become more noticeable the more heavily said employee invests in his career. They're unhappy, and their personal lives are fixed in humdrum routine. They spend so much time ignoring their own instincts and goals in lieu of company orders that they become listless and unable to motivate themselves to do anything new or bold in their personal lives.
Back in the 18th and early 19th centuries, most Americans had their own livelihoods, often organized as family businesses where each worker was involved or at least consulted in most every other aspect of the business. People generally did what they wanted and found a way to monetize it enough to get by. Massive, rigid corporate hierarchies only really emerged after the mid-19th century, when sweatshops and compulsory schooling started to indoctrinate everyone into obediently following the commands of the elite "experts".
Nowhere is this more evident than the way most people participate in elections. They are astoundingly passive, focusing almost entirely on voting, the least important step in the electoral cycle. On average, they don't work for political campaigns, they don't participate in primaries, and they tend to vote for whatever football team ^W^W party they've always voted for (if they vote at all; voter turnout sucks). The really politically active ones usually don't do much more wait until the candidates are narrowed down before voting against someone. Every November, people brag about how they did their civic duty by voting, content to ignore the much larger difference they could have made earlier in the process. With a population as politically apathetic as ours, it's no wonder that those in power treat our wishes with such contempt. They are sure in their ivy-league belief that the electorate is composed of adult-age children who need to be closely managed as wards of the state ("liberals") and/or rallied to the cause of our fearless leader's foreign adventures ("conservatives").
In short, a reluctance or outright refusal to think for onesself is the root cause of many of the U.S.'s failings. This problem could probably stop within a single generation if we got our children out of state schools and into countless work apprenticeships and charities with people of different social classes instead. Just think of the kind of well-rounded, genuinely worthwhile people such a liberal education would produce.
Parent makes a good point. Since a centralized system of carbon-credit rationing and trading is so so SO ripe for abuse, we should consider that to be one of the last-ditch, desperate options to tackling anthropogenic climate change.
Personally, I think that man's CO2 emissions are causing (overstated) damage to the environment, and that something needs to be done. What is my favored strategy for fixing it, you ask? Doing nothing. Letting it fix itself. And before you label me a "denier" and accuse me of watching Faux News, I feel I should mention that Sustainability Now is on my side. Check out the linked image and you'll see that humanity has been steadily de-carbonizing its energy sources since the 1850s when we moved from wood to coal. And then we moved from coal to oil, and now we're moving from oil to natural gas. Pretty soon we'll mostly be using electricity from nuclear/wind/solar/geothermal/tidal/(your-favorite-renewable-here) either directly or to make hydrogen from water. It's my hunch that "anthropogenic global warming" will be laughed at down the road as a manufactured crisis similar to Malthus' population explosion or the FDA's fraudulent second-hand smoke studies (inquire for details).
I think that letting a cadre of state-sponsored experts tell everyone how to use fossil fuels sets a bad precedent. Since it's an action provoked by extreme anxiety, there will be confirmation bias taking place. I am an anxious person by nature, and I have plenty of experience with confirmation bias. It's the mindset that if you are trying to prevent a bad outcome and do SOMETHING to address it and there is no resulting calamity, that that something you did is definitely what saved you. I know there are some good reasons to be afraid of CO2 emissions and to favor gov't intervention, but consider the possibility (however small you think it is) that global warming does not need any action on our part and will go away by itself. If we surrender to a cap-and-trade system that we don't need, we'll all be celebrating how those economic/environmental wizards saved us, and we'll be more receptive to further control, because hey they were right the first time, eh?
BOY have you got that right. The whole idea of "dependent on Middle East oil" is kind of misleading anyway. Unless you think that all the oil the US gets from within its borders, from Canada, from Mexico, and from Nigeria (the top four suppliers of US crude, listed in descending order) has anything to do with the Middle East.
Does anyone out there know what kinds of concentrations of BPA start causing (significant) harm to humans and how it compares to what you get from plastic bottles? Whenever I hear about the horrors of BPA, my inner cynic tells me that it's the new secondhand smoke.
"More unique"? You can't qualify "unique", it's like saying "more dead" or "more binary".
Hey, where's everybody going?
Hey you know what else saves the lives of our beloved GIs?
Not fighting optional wars. (Rimshot)
One thing that bothers me about seeing Li-Ion battery-powered devices everywhere these days is the way so many people view them as disposable, when in reality the battery is good for hundreds of charge/discharge cycles, and the device for many times that number.
Take for example the laptop I just bought secondhand today. It's a 2001 Gateway with a pentium 3 and the original li-ion battery. The battery is still capable of FOUR HOURS of constant web browsing and disk thrashing on a single charge. I paid $40 for this thing, and it performs just as well as any "netbook" for about 13% the price. My purchase was environment-agnostic, but if you don't want li-ion batteries going into landfills, finding ways to re-use them like I did is a good way to start.
Well, then, if you expect your opponent to pull something like that, bring in a statistician, qualify him as an expert witness and let him rip the assertion to shreds.
That doesn't always work so well. Read about John Puckett sometime...
Rather than try to sort out the disparities between its numbers and database findings, the FBI has fought to keep this information under wraps. After Barlow subpoenaed the Arizona database searches, the agency sent the state's Department of Public Safety a cease-and-desist letter. Eventually, the Arizona attorney general obtained a court order to block Barlow's distribution of the findings. In other instances, the FBI has threatened to revoke access to the bureau's master DNA database if states make the contents of their systems available to defense teams or academics. Agency officials argue they have done so because granting access would violate the privacy of the offenders (although researchers generally request anonymous DNA profiles with no names attached) and tie up the FBI's computers, impeding investigations. These justifications baffle researchers.
Source: DNA's Dirty Little Secret