Just one of many things that make the game not at all like D&D.
Wow, if your D&D campaigns have been that hack and slash, they must be a PnP version of treadmilling. Hell, even the 3rd edition rules don't just give you XP for killing things, they give you XP for beating an encounter, which may not involve killing at all. In fact, you can get XP for an encounter by completely avoiding it. And that's the "do it by the book" standard, not just some house rules.
I enjoy a good hack and slash adventure as well as anyone, but "kick the door in, kill the monsters, take the treasure" hasn't been the standard idea of an adventure for ages. And this is from someone who really enjoys playing fighters of various sorts.
I do agree that DDO seems to be quest level, rather than encounter level, but they're definitely following the spirit.
I agree that imitation is very helpful, but I think it was due to truly non-obvious goals, not something like spear making, which has obvious uses, even to a small child. I believe it truly helped humanity for things that would be completely non-obvious, such as storing food for an upcoming season of scarcity. Why would you save food in a bag when you could eat it now?
Another example would be protection from predators. Say leaving when signs of a certain predator are seen in the area. If you're doing your imitating right, you'll never see why you're performing the action in the first place.
I don't even call it a problem; it's just something you learn to work around. It's like, there was such a cleaner, good approach to it and they did this stupid thing. But remember, the people who wrote the OS X weren't the people who developed the Lisa and Macintosh. Those guys are gone.
If you review the article, this is actually a reference to user centric design, not a reference to anything technical about the underlying operating system. Woz was actually talking about the way the early Mac and Lisa were designed around what the user wanted/expected, not around making the user adjust to the workings of the system.
You might want to remember that user experience is (mostly) independent of technical underpinnings. You can have a crap UI on top of a modern OS (say AIX running only ksh) or a great UI on top of a really crappy OS (pre-X MacOS is a pretty good example).
What about non-general purpose CPUs? One of the major reasons for this research is to do optical switching without having to do the optical to electronic change at every switch in a fibre network.
Even if it's horribly inefficient, it'll be more efficient than moving to electron space, letting the electronic CPU figure out where each packet has to go, and then switching it back to photon space to actually be sent.
Am I the only one who feels old? When I left home for college in 1991, the computer that my parents gave me was an already-ancient Apple//c (the pseudo-portable of its day because it had a handle). I actually used a graphical word processor with it to write papers along with its serial mouse.
The fall of my second year, I purchased a Mac IIsi with 9 megs of ram and a 40 meg hard disk for about $1200 (a real steal through the campus store). It ran a 68030 at 20 megahertz, with no math coprocessor. It was about the last generation of desktop computers that actually ran the processor at the same speed as the memory bus, since the next generation (both the 486 and 68040) had at least parts of the chip running some multiple of the bus's clock speed, though Motorola never advertised the fact like Intel.
That IIsi system served me through undergrad and into grad school as my home machine. In about 1996, I bought a used network and math coprocessor card for the IIsi's PDS (Processor Direct Slot) from a seller in the newsgroups (the eBay of the day) to set it up as a NAT router and autodialer for our house network connection running NetBSD. Yep, that's right, a house network over an external 28.8 baud modem shared between about four machines, including the NAT router. We used that for about two years until cable modem came into the area and we got a dedicated router. Though I haven't tried it in about 4 years, last I checked it could still run NetBSD 1.6 with X-Windows at an amazing 640x480 with a stunning palette of 256 colors.
Frankly, the machine outlived its usefulness; it can manage text-only email just fine, but it doesn't have the power to browse the web over it's 10 Mbit ethernet connection, which is the fastest that it ever can be upgraded to. My Palm PDA has more processing power, memory, and storage (my smallest SD card is the same size as the IIsi's upgraded hard disk at 256MB) and can network using its wireless card. Now, I will admit that the PDA's screen is smaller (480x320), but it supports a heck of a lot more than 256 colors.
I've worked on CMM level 3 projects that have death marches. Oh, they were very well documented death marches, but they were still death marches. If a project was poorly estimated, it doesn't matter what CMM level you're at, you either let it run late or you work the hours.
Of course, most level 3 organizations that I've been with basically completely forget anything resembling documentation, repeatability, etc. once they realize that a project is overtime and/or overbudget.
Nobels aren't generally rewarded for utility; I've seen that they're awarded for major turnovers in science. This may not be the greatest treatment in the world, but realizing that ulcers were caused by bacteria after several decades of the medical community saying that it was stress is pretty impressive.
Actually, if you take a broader view, bettering yourself has a lot to do with natural selection. Since those who better themselves generally will be more interesting to mate with and thus will have children (who will be prone to better themselves, through both biology and upbringing, etc.).
Remember, natural selection isn't just about you; it's about your children and their children, etc.
Also, natural selection isn't about being the best, it's about being just good enough. In fact, being the best can sometimes be a negative value if your environment changes rapidly on you. You can toss the best carnivore on the planet into a vegetable-only environment and it'll starve. The human brain from a purely biological perspective is actually a hinderance; it uses a ton of resources unnecessary to survival. What makes the brain so special is that it allows us to be "good enough" in a number of environments where our biology would count us out. For example, as hunters, we basically suck: we're not fast enough, we've got no natural weapons good enough to harm prey, etc. But give us some tools and strategies and we can eat just about anything that moves.
Years ago, I worked on the OnStar desktop app used by the call center folks to talk to the people in the cars, so I know a bit about how the system works. Of course, my information is out of date, but I doubt a lot has changed since most of the limitations were hardware related.
OnStar was originally envisioned to use something other than cellular to handle the communications (I think it was microwave towers or something like that). It was proposed by some aerospace/telecom company that GM bought. Early in the design process it was switched over to a cellular system, but, at least in the generations that I worked with, it had a lot of limitations. (And not just bad cellular reception.)
The first and second generation systems (the latest I worked with), could not get information from the car and speak to the customer at the same time (most likely this is still true, since there's only one cell phone per vehicle). Basically, when a call is connected, while the nifty little message is playing in the car saying that it is connecting, it connects to the call center in data mode (just a modem installed with the phone) and lets the center know the state of the vehicle, which for a normal customer call is the location of the car, whether your lights are on, state of the locks, etc. Then the phone switches over to voice mode (which is a line transfer at the call center) and the "This is Bob at OnStar, how may I help you?" speel starts. If the airbag deploys, the car calls by itself and Bob's message is different, but otherwise things stay the same technically.
Of course, this means that anytime you need something done in the car while the OnStar agent is speaking to you through the car, you get put on hold. Generally, this isn't a problem, since if you need your car unlocked or something, you're probably outside of your car (I think you do get put on hold anyway as the data call is placed). The problem comes in when you're trying to get directions to somewhere. The car can only transfer your location when in data mode. So if you're driving down the highway at 75 mph and you missed the exit you were told to turn at by Bob, Bob still only knows your location when the call was first made, not where you are at that moment.
Though the using the cell phone to actually make voice calls was just being tested when I left (at least through a voice recognition system so you wouldn't have to talk to an agent), basically all the calls go through the same call center and are then connected to the requested number. You'll notice that GM vehicles don't have a numeric keypad in them; the cell phone in the car can only call one place, so it would be pretty easy (as another post spoke about) for a OnStar agent to listen in.
Also, the hardware in the car has hooks really, really deep into the system. An OnStar agent has a special demo mode they can go into to show it off at dealships where they honk the horn, flash the lights, unlock the doors, etc. What they don't tell you is that the hardware also has hooks into the ignition system. When I worked there, there wasn't any way for the desktop software to actually start or stop the engine, but the hardware is there. I'm not really fond of the thought of some call center employee shutting off my engine while I'm on the highway, but the potential is there.
As other people have suspected, when the call center connects to your car, there isn't any warning. I think this was originally intended to get the cars location, etc. if the car was stolen, but there's no reason that it's limited to that alone. In fact, I heard stories from the call center about a guy calling OnStar to locate his car and finding it in the middle of a corn field with his wife and her lover in it.
Doctors do amputations fairly regularly for a variety of reasons due to limb deficiency. Of course, they remove as little as possible, etc., but it's not that uncommon.
Many thalidomide babies were nearly limbless, removal of the barely formed limbs would probably be done on a case by case basis if they weren't sure of the results.
Believe me, surgeons fix people by cutting them apart, this wouldn't phase them all that much.
The strongest Unions are in work roles where the job takes many years to learn to do correctly and the employee is already valuable simply because they know how to do a very specialized job.
Where do you get this impression? The strongest unions that I can think of off the top of my head are the UAW and the Teamsters. That's unskilled assembly work and truck driving, two things that can be learned in a very short time. In the case of the UAW, it can be learned within an hour for any given job.
Union strength is not based on how skilled the workers are, but the damage to the industry if the workers stop working. If a skilled craftsman union goes on strike, it can mean everything or nothing. Everything, if it brings the industry (or particular company) to a halt, nothing if there are non-union workers perfectly able to fill their roles and the company is able to hire them.
I think, in the recent past, what unions don't understand is that they are dependent on companies to support them. Currently, especially for unskilled labor, there is a huge labor pool both within and outside of the country. The only reason the UAW survives is because they have an agreement with the US automakers that they'll use union labor. Non-US automakers have no such problem and use non-union labor, even in the US.
Even skilled labor unions, such as the boilermakers and electricians, are about the same level as basic IT workers when it comes to actual "skill" in my experience.
Unions were originally created to give workers a reasonable standard of living. They are no longer needed for this reason as things like the minimum wage (which I think is too low) and various labor laws cover this. This is where the unions really lost power. Companies had to be legislated against because they were breaking unions since unions harmed their bottom line. This was supported by the government because without unions company working conditions were horrible. This is no longer the case.
The problem has fallen into the unions' laps now. Companies, if there is no agreement to hire only union labor, can hire outside the union without a problem. For the union to keep their power, they have to make sure the available labor pool will actually join the union, which has led to a number of intimidating union tactics against their own potential members.
I doubt that unions will be able to survive a whole lot longer. Unions would have to expand their influence across country boundaries to every place their work could be done and gain the membership of the majority of their labor pool.
As if the US is much different? Have you seen the debt figures recently? (Closing on $8,000,000,000,000, more than $25,000 per citizen.)
The average American has better than $8000 in credit card debt alone. I don't think that there should be a required company pension, but I don't trust the average American to actually save enough money for next week, much less post retirement. I'd rather not go back to the day when everyone worked until the day the died either though.
Why are they trying to "catch-up" to someone they shouldn't even be competeing with?
Because to Microsoft, everyone is a competitor, no matter what industry the company is in. Sure, they hit the tech related areas sooner than others, but they seem to have all the bases covered.
They didn't have a game console, so they made one. They needed a hit on said console, so they bought a company to make one for them. They didn't have anything to compete in the dial up area, so MSN was created. If you go back far enough, you'll see they've done the same thing with databases, etc. There is nowhere that they won't compete. Hell, they're even selling movie ideas to Hollywood, so they're getting into content creation.
Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't started a record label or making MSToasters, which really won't burn the toast when version 2.0 comes out.
I haven't seen any mention of the Darwine project here yet, which surprises me.
Though I haven't tried it myself, it's a port of Wine to Darwin originally targetted for PPC macs using QEMU for the x86 emulation. They're also working on modifying Wine to use quartz instead of X11 for the user interface calls to make it more Mac-friendly.
It seems to be in the very early stages right now. For example, they seem to be able to run PPC compiled windows apps under darwine on the Mac, but don't have QEMU or the quartz interface working yet. As they say on their page, it'll be much easier to get this running on a x86 Mac.
"It's better to play second fiddle than not be in the band at all."
There does seem to be a bright side to being a second choice, though, truthfully, I haven't ever experienced it, so I may just be talking out of my ass.
I have a bit of a problem with learning logs, since in actuality, they were the calculators of their time. Those log tables that you used were ways to do math quickly without having to do as much work.
Now, they're a much better learning tool than calculators, which just spit out an answer with no work at all, and they're a very clever math shortcut, but they're no longer relevant. I learned them in school as well, but only as a concept rather than a practical skill. Log tables have been replaced by calculators and their teaching should also be replaced by some more useful concepts. Maybe earlier or more algebra?
You do realize that's as much of a cheat as having the opponents just move faster, don't you?
Now, if on "Hard" difficulties the guards had patroled more so that there wouldn't be so many shadows hanging around that they never look into or if they actually got into a defensive position when they were attacked that would be something
Making them hear better isn't any different than making the same dumb-as-a-rock enemy be able to take one more hit than on "Easy".
Sadly, their imagery hasn't been updated in about a decade either. That USGS Digital Orthophoto data is pretty great in that it's one meter per pixel resolution for nearly the whole continental US, but it's only black and white and it's years old.
Since I have bought all the CDs in my collection, yes I own those copies of the music.
No, you own the media that you bought that music on, but not that music itself. Along with your purchase of the CD, you are licensed to listen to that music, in private settings, as often as you want from that media.
There are also some loopholes about fair use (say for educational purposes) and making a backup, but those are special cases; you aren't supposed to listen to the whole thing on anything other than the original media, if it's still in existence.
And note that I said "private settings" above. If you ever play this CD in any way that could be shown as a for profit situation, such as background music for a retail store that you own or DJing for a party where you'd be paid, you have to cough up an additional licensing fee.
Now, this license is nowhere near as bad as those used by software companies. For example, I'm pretty sure that the owner of the music can't ever revoke your right to listen to it on that media you bought, where a software company theoretically (I don't think it's ever been tested in court) can. But it's still an agreement that you've entered under copyright law. Unless you're in someplace like China, where generally the government is pretty lenient with respect to copyright laws and also turns a blind eye to actually enforcing the laws that they do have.
By the same token, why do non-religious people claim that Christians are forcing their beliefs on people when they are doing nothing but worshiping in public or sharing their beliefs?
Because the fanatics aren't just worshipping in public and sharing their beliefs, they're also trying to change the laws that we live by to reflect those beliefs. The recent debate about gay marriage is a good example. If two gay people marry, does this effect how a religious person can lead their life? Does it make these religious people gay somehow? There is no reason that this will effect a heterosexual religious person's life, but they are trying to change laws and make new laws to specifically prevent this, which will effect gay couples who wish to get the benefits that married couples get.
You have to remember that there are varying levels of suspension of disbelief. It's one thing when the crux of a show is complete bullshit, like CSI, where they can zoom in on a blurry photo to a sharpness far beyond its resolution or DNA sequence some random spot of blood in about 35 seconds. The whole show depends on this super forensic knowledge that's without any plausibility at all.
Other shows don't matter so much. Lost is a good example to bring up; they get non-plot dependent details wrong and they're usually somewhat technical. They needed a reason to get this group out into the wild for a bit. But you also have to remember, that there seems to be an invisible monster that runs around knocking down trees, they crashed somewhere in the Pacific but there's a plane full of heroin that seems to be Central American in origin, there's a sequence of numbers that seem to bring good luck to the receiver but bad luck to everyone around him, there's a character who was wheelchair bound but now can walk, etc.
It's like someone complaining when a cartoon character runs off a cliff and then manages to tip toe back after realizing what he's done. And why don't the Simpsons ever age? Hell, Lisa's brilliant, why doesn't she ever get out of elementary school? She's been there for more than a decade!
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, if your D&D campaigns have been that hack and slash, they must be a PnP version of treadmilling. Hell, even the 3rd edition rules don't just give you XP for killing things, they give you XP for beating an encounter, which may not involve killing at all. In fact, you can get XP for an encounter by completely avoiding it. And that's the "do it by the book" standard, not just some house rules.
I enjoy a good hack and slash adventure as well as anyone, but "kick the door in, kill the monsters, take the treasure" hasn't been the standard idea of an adventure for ages. And this is from someone who really enjoys playing fighters of various sorts.
I do agree that DDO seems to be quest level, rather than encounter level, but they're definitely following the spirit.
Another example would be protection from predators. Say leaving when signs of a certain predator are seen in the area. If you're doing your imitating right, you'll never see why you're performing the action in the first place.
If you review the article, this is actually a reference to user centric design, not a reference to anything technical about the underlying operating system. Woz was actually talking about the way the early Mac and Lisa were designed around what the user wanted/expected, not around making the user adjust to the workings of the system.
You might want to remember that user experience is (mostly) independent of technical underpinnings. You can have a crap UI on top of a modern OS (say AIX running only ksh) or a great UI on top of a really crappy OS (pre-X MacOS is a pretty good example).
I'd pay two bits for that.
Even if it's horribly inefficient, it'll be more efficient than moving to electron space, letting the electronic CPU figure out where each packet has to go, and then switching it back to photon space to actually be sent.
The fall of my second year, I purchased a Mac IIsi with 9 megs of ram and a 40 meg hard disk for about $1200 (a real steal through the campus store). It ran a 68030 at 20 megahertz, with no math coprocessor. It was about the last generation of desktop computers that actually ran the processor at the same speed as the memory bus, since the next generation (both the 486 and 68040) had at least parts of the chip running some multiple of the bus's clock speed, though Motorola never advertised the fact like Intel.
That IIsi system served me through undergrad and into grad school as my home machine. In about 1996, I bought a used network and math coprocessor card for the IIsi's PDS (Processor Direct Slot) from a seller in the newsgroups (the eBay of the day) to set it up as a NAT router and autodialer for our house network connection running NetBSD. Yep, that's right, a house network over an external 28.8 baud modem shared between about four machines, including the NAT router. We used that for about two years until cable modem came into the area and we got a dedicated router. Though I haven't tried it in about 4 years, last I checked it could still run NetBSD 1.6 with X-Windows at an amazing 640x480 with a stunning palette of 256 colors.
Frankly, the machine outlived its usefulness; it can manage text-only email just fine, but it doesn't have the power to browse the web over it's 10 Mbit ethernet connection, which is the fastest that it ever can be upgraded to. My Palm PDA has more processing power, memory, and storage (my smallest SD card is the same size as the IIsi's upgraded hard disk at 256MB) and can network using its wireless card. Now, I will admit that the PDA's screen is smaller (480x320), but it supports a heck of a lot more than 256 colors.
Of course, most level 3 organizations that I've been with basically completely forget anything resembling documentation, repeatability, etc. once they realize that a project is overtime and/or overbudget.
Nobels aren't generally rewarded for utility; I've seen that they're awarded for major turnovers in science. This may not be the greatest treatment in the world, but realizing that ulcers were caused by bacteria after several decades of the medical community saying that it was stress is pretty impressive.
Remember, natural selection isn't just about you; it's about your children and their children, etc.
Also, natural selection isn't about being the best, it's about being just good enough. In fact, being the best can sometimes be a negative value if your environment changes rapidly on you. You can toss the best carnivore on the planet into a vegetable-only environment and it'll starve. The human brain from a purely biological perspective is actually a hinderance; it uses a ton of resources unnecessary to survival. What makes the brain so special is that it allows us to be "good enough" in a number of environments where our biology would count us out. For example, as hunters, we basically suck: we're not fast enough, we've got no natural weapons good enough to harm prey, etc. But give us some tools and strategies and we can eat just about anything that moves.
OnStar was originally envisioned to use something other than cellular to handle the communications (I think it was microwave towers or something like that). It was proposed by some aerospace/telecom company that GM bought. Early in the design process it was switched over to a cellular system, but, at least in the generations that I worked with, it had a lot of limitations. (And not just bad cellular reception.)
The first and second generation systems (the latest I worked with), could not get information from the car and speak to the customer at the same time (most likely this is still true, since there's only one cell phone per vehicle). Basically, when a call is connected, while the nifty little message is playing in the car saying that it is connecting, it connects to the call center in data mode (just a modem installed with the phone) and lets the center know the state of the vehicle, which for a normal customer call is the location of the car, whether your lights are on, state of the locks, etc. Then the phone switches over to voice mode (which is a line transfer at the call center) and the "This is Bob at OnStar, how may I help you?" speel starts. If the airbag deploys, the car calls by itself and Bob's message is different, but otherwise things stay the same technically.
Of course, this means that anytime you need something done in the car while the OnStar agent is speaking to you through the car, you get put on hold. Generally, this isn't a problem, since if you need your car unlocked or something, you're probably outside of your car (I think you do get put on hold anyway as the data call is placed). The problem comes in when you're trying to get directions to somewhere. The car can only transfer your location when in data mode. So if you're driving down the highway at 75 mph and you missed the exit you were told to turn at by Bob, Bob still only knows your location when the call was first made, not where you are at that moment.
Though the using the cell phone to actually make voice calls was just being tested when I left (at least through a voice recognition system so you wouldn't have to talk to an agent), basically all the calls go through the same call center and are then connected to the requested number. You'll notice that GM vehicles don't have a numeric keypad in them; the cell phone in the car can only call one place, so it would be pretty easy (as another post spoke about) for a OnStar agent to listen in.
Also, the hardware in the car has hooks really, really deep into the system. An OnStar agent has a special demo mode they can go into to show it off at dealships where they honk the horn, flash the lights, unlock the doors, etc. What they don't tell you is that the hardware also has hooks into the ignition system. When I worked there, there wasn't any way for the desktop software to actually start or stop the engine, but the hardware is there. I'm not really fond of the thought of some call center employee shutting off my engine while I'm on the highway, but the potential is there.
As other people have suspected, when the call center connects to your car, there isn't any warning. I think this was originally intended to get the cars location, etc. if the car was stolen, but there's no reason that it's limited to that alone. In fact, I heard stories from the call center about a guy calling OnStar to locate his car and finding it in the middle of a corn field with his wife and her lover in it.
Many thalidomide babies were nearly limbless, removal of the barely formed limbs would probably be done on a case by case basis if they weren't sure of the results.
Believe me, surgeons fix people by cutting them apart, this wouldn't phase them all that much.
Where do you get this impression? The strongest unions that I can think of off the top of my head are the UAW and the Teamsters. That's unskilled assembly work and truck driving, two things that can be learned in a very short time. In the case of the UAW, it can be learned within an hour for any given job.
Union strength is not based on how skilled the workers are, but the damage to the industry if the workers stop working. If a skilled craftsman union goes on strike, it can mean everything or nothing. Everything, if it brings the industry (or particular company) to a halt, nothing if there are non-union workers perfectly able to fill their roles and the company is able to hire them.
I think, in the recent past, what unions don't understand is that they are dependent on companies to support them. Currently, especially for unskilled labor, there is a huge labor pool both within and outside of the country. The only reason the UAW survives is because they have an agreement with the US automakers that they'll use union labor. Non-US automakers have no such problem and use non-union labor, even in the US.
Even skilled labor unions, such as the boilermakers and electricians, are about the same level as basic IT workers when it comes to actual "skill" in my experience. Unions were originally created to give workers a reasonable standard of living. They are no longer needed for this reason as things like the minimum wage (which I think is too low) and various labor laws cover this. This is where the unions really lost power. Companies had to be legislated against because they were breaking unions since unions harmed their bottom line. This was supported by the government because without unions company working conditions were horrible. This is no longer the case.
The problem has fallen into the unions' laps now. Companies, if there is no agreement to hire only union labor, can hire outside the union without a problem. For the union to keep their power, they have to make sure the available labor pool will actually join the union, which has led to a number of intimidating union tactics against their own potential members.
I doubt that unions will be able to survive a whole lot longer. Unions would have to expand their influence across country boundaries to every place their work could be done and gain the membership of the majority of their labor pool.
As if the US is much different? Have you seen the debt figures recently? (Closing on $8,000,000,000,000, more than $25,000 per citizen.)
The average American has better than $8000 in credit card debt alone. I don't think that there should be a required company pension, but I don't trust the average American to actually save enough money for next week, much less post retirement. I'd rather not go back to the day when everyone worked until the day the died either though.
Not for long...
Because to Microsoft, everyone is a competitor, no matter what industry the company is in. Sure, they hit the tech related areas sooner than others, but they seem to have all the bases covered.
They didn't have a game console, so they made one. They needed a hit on said console, so they bought a company to make one for them. They didn't have anything to compete in the dial up area, so MSN was created. If you go back far enough, you'll see they've done the same thing with databases, etc. There is nowhere that they won't compete. Hell, they're even selling movie ideas to Hollywood, so they're getting into content creation.
Frankly, I'm surprised they haven't started a record label or making MSToasters, which really won't burn the toast when version 2.0 comes out.
A Modest Proposal
Though I haven't tried it myself, it's a port of Wine to Darwin originally targetted for PPC macs using QEMU for the x86 emulation. They're also working on modifying Wine to use quartz instead of X11 for the user interface calls to make it more Mac-friendly.
It seems to be in the very early stages right now. For example, they seem to be able to run PPC compiled windows apps under darwine on the Mac, but don't have QEMU or the quartz interface working yet. As they say on their page, it'll be much easier to get this running on a x86 Mac.
"It's better to play second fiddle than not be in the band at all."
There does seem to be a bright side to being a second choice, though, truthfully, I haven't ever experienced it, so I may just be talking out of my ass.
Now, they're a much better learning tool than calculators, which just spit out an answer with no work at all, and they're a very clever math shortcut, but they're no longer relevant. I learned them in school as well, but only as a concept rather than a practical skill. Log tables have been replaced by calculators and their teaching should also be replaced by some more useful concepts. Maybe earlier or more algebra?
Now, if on "Hard" difficulties the guards had patroled more so that there wouldn't be so many shadows hanging around that they never look into or if they actually got into a defensive position when they were attacked that would be something
Making them hear better isn't any different than making the same dumb-as-a-rock enemy be able to take one more hit than on "Easy".
Sadly, their imagery hasn't been updated in about a decade either. That USGS Digital Orthophoto data is pretty great in that it's one meter per pixel resolution for nearly the whole continental US, but it's only black and white and it's years old.
No, you own the media that you bought that music on, but not that music itself. Along with your purchase of the CD, you are licensed to listen to that music, in private settings, as often as you want from that media.
There are also some loopholes about fair use (say for educational purposes) and making a backup, but those are special cases; you aren't supposed to listen to the whole thing on anything other than the original media, if it's still in existence.
And note that I said "private settings" above. If you ever play this CD in any way that could be shown as a for profit situation, such as background music for a retail store that you own or DJing for a party where you'd be paid, you have to cough up an additional licensing fee.
Now, this license is nowhere near as bad as those used by software companies. For example, I'm pretty sure that the owner of the music can't ever revoke your right to listen to it on that media you bought, where a software company theoretically (I don't think it's ever been tested in court) can. But it's still an agreement that you've entered under copyright law. Unless you're in someplace like China, where generally the government is pretty lenient with respect to copyright laws and also turns a blind eye to actually enforcing the laws that they do have.
Because the fanatics aren't just worshipping in public and sharing their beliefs, they're also trying to change the laws that we live by to reflect those beliefs. The recent debate about gay marriage is a good example. If two gay people marry, does this effect how a religious person can lead their life? Does it make these religious people gay somehow? There is no reason that this will effect a heterosexual religious person's life, but they are trying to change laws and make new laws to specifically prevent this, which will effect gay couples who wish to get the benefits that married couples get.
They are forcing their views on other people.
More like: "It is unknowable whether he exists or not."
Other shows don't matter so much. Lost is a good example to bring up; they get non-plot dependent details wrong and they're usually somewhat technical. They needed a reason to get this group out into the wild for a bit. But you also have to remember, that there seems to be an invisible monster that runs around knocking down trees, they crashed somewhere in the Pacific but there's a plane full of heroin that seems to be Central American in origin, there's a sequence of numbers that seem to bring good luck to the receiver but bad luck to everyone around him, there's a character who was wheelchair bound but now can walk, etc.
It's like someone complaining when a cartoon character runs off a cliff and then manages to tip toe back after realizing what he's done. And why don't the Simpsons ever age? Hell, Lisa's brilliant, why doesn't she ever get out of elementary school? She's been there for more than a decade!