Making an over-glorified bar code analog into a stamp which allows one to easily be linked to content is just a worthless ploy to generate revenue, as each time a poor yob scans one, they will likely make more off the resulting page hit (Thanks Advertising!) than they will from the sale of the stamp less the cost of delivering the letter.
I would wager that if someone has a phone which is capable of reading these "intelligent" stamps, they most likely know how to get more information than they wanted dealing with conceivable topic which a stamp could express in less time than installing the software to read the stamp.
Just the name screams marketing ploy and literally adds nothing to an infrequent, inconvenient, but occasional legally useful way of sending typed or written communication.
Just because you can't see it and you can't hear it in no way means that it is private.
It's like the RIAA driving around in a car with the windows down blasting tunes and suing anyone within earshot...
The only thing a user with a non-encrypted wi-fi access point should have a reasonable assumption of is the lack of security.
Yes. It's called ex post facto law. They can't pass a law against something in 2007 and arrest you if they have evidence you're doing it in 2006.
Correct, so long as whatever got discovered dosen't get you labeled as a "terrorist" by the parties that be.
I, for one, refuse to subject myself to the posiblity of someday somebody misconstruing something I have written then combining that with anything which may be misconstrued to become evidence to label me in such as fashon as to interrupt my life, however temporarily, for any period of time.
Avoiding the possibility, especially in these days of increasingly wild lawmakers, is assurance in and of itself. Granted running your own solution may be at some points complex, but a little time now to save the potential of a losing a lot of time later is it's own reward.
From TFA: ...being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc.
What? You expect him to applaud? Think 'ol Bill is gonna back something supported by a large rival?
And so what if his "ultra-mobile" computer sells for $600-$1000; windows XP sells for a chunk of change too, but that didn't seem to stop him from dropping the prices and doing what he had to do in order to get the product to the target audience.
If memory serves, the last time the issue of the $100 PC came up,/. had some comments similar to Bill's...
If memory serves correctly, the last time AMD was fairly absent in the processor market and "resting on it's laurels", they rocked the world with the XP-class processor
Anyone who has been keeping tabs on AMD knows they are in the process of expanding their manufacturing capability/capacity.
I think AMD is playing the part of "lion in the weeds"..........again.
I happen to disagree. Inadequacy would depend on the extent to which the monitoring is done. Statistical analysis + human observers might cost some cash, but would IMO be adequate.
Impossible? I don't think so. Blizzard has a ton of resources at their disposal.
Unfeasable? You mean you think it would cost too much for Blizzard? Or hamper gameplay too much? If Blizzard loses more business through client-side monitoring than they would spend on server-side monitoring, then they'll do server-side monitoring.
If you've been keeping up with WoW news since release, you can see evidence of their server side monitoring, this is what caught the dupers shortly after release who saw their accounts closed. The server is pointless without the clients, and to ensure the best possible gaming environment, some steps must be taken to assure nobody has a particular advantage over anyone else, both from the client perspective and the server perspective.
The end result of which would be statistical anomalies that are relatively easy to detect. Have an observation team "follow" anomalous characters for a while, take action based on observations.
Apparently not, it took Sony over a year to realize that some players could see if the big boss was up without actually going in to look.... And they only did that because the application got so much popularity that it made front-page on several gaming news sites. Passive applications may affect player behavior, but in no way do they define player behavior beyond a reasonable doubt. All you have to do is start banning people based on trends-and-analasys and you have a mass desertion waiting to happen when you ban someone who was doing nothing wrong but happened to fit your cookie-cutter. (you can follow a player with showEQ running all around the world and it will look like he's running randomly from here to there, popping into places then poping out, then again, you don't know if he has showEQ unless you can see whats on his computer, who can say that he's not simply mucking about of his own volition?)
That's a red herring. Any executables a user installs from anyone other than Blizzard has nothing to do with Blizzard's EULA, or whether Blizzard does server- or client-side monitoring. Anyone who installs a third-party interface is asking for their account info to be stolen.
Red herring indeed, The Warden is there to protect the players and the game from foul play. There is nothing which says for or against banning players based on anything running on their system; But if one person got their account, and thus their personal information, ganked by a program this person installed, it's likely they would blame Blizzard for it. The really sorry thing is that without any client-side monitoring, there is no way for Blizzard to remove itself from the shadow of doubt; Doubly so given today's cut-throat media.
In the end it comes down to protecting one's interests. The Warden is not the first and will not be the last client-side anti-cheat utility. It is a good solution in that its nature is clearly mentioned in the EULA and it does not overstep it's bounds IMO of a good threat monitoring application as well as cost effective method of mitigation.
Wonderfull that you can essentially tell any tin-foil-bodysuit fool who dosen't like it that he should have read the terms of service, as it was clearly spelled out in plain f'in english.
INAL, you have 3.5 million people to monitor. You can do it through a) paying your programmers to make an automated program to do this for you or b) paying people decent money to follow other folks around that you may be suspicious of, all the while assuming increased risk of blowing your own foot off and banning an innocent because he fit the profile... I'd vote for a hybrid of the two, which is exactly what Blizz has done, autonomous program doing the bulk monitoring on both ends, people double checking the facts from all monitoring, then making decisions based on that.
What MMORPGs need to do is implement better server-side analysis to identify cheaters. Difficult? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But probably less difficult and less expensive that losing craploads of clients, and hiring craploads of lawyers. Then they won't need to have the invasion clause in the license for their games.
Perhaps yes, but with the multitude of people playing and the varying playstyles makes ruling out cheaters from a server perspective inadequate, impossible and unfeasable. Most all decisions in game are made or at least adjudicated through the server. Try getting disconnected while running/fighting/crafting and you'll see what I mean.
The bits that the warden appears to be combatting are things which monitor for elements of the game in memory. Remember ShowEQ from about 5 years ago? It would scan the memory and show you every NPC or PC in the zone you were currently in. This was a huge boon for gamers who were targeting specific toons/characters.
One must also take a look at the extensive interface modifications available for the game, there is the potential that an inept user could incidently install something malicious from an interface package ("Oh, it's a self-extracting executable, nothing bad could ever come in one of these...") which could steal account information.
If you want to be really open minded about it, this malicious program could be designed to make the installation of WoW it's installed to appear to be cheating, and thereby get banned. It's not too-far fetched to think that DoS attacks could initiate/propigate at this level, I think we all are aware that social engineering is the greatest damage spreading tool in history. Once they are discovered and processes are known to Blizzard, this would be an ideal use for the warden.
It's my belief that the warden exists to protect both Blizzard's interests as well as the players. It works towards providing them with a fair play environment and, as expressed above, could be used to protect players from themselves to an extent.
It would seem to me that placing it in a foil bag would be a bad idea. Lithium batteries don't much like to be short-circuited, remember the exploding Nokia phones of yore? Same concept. Granted they may have electronics inside the pack to prevent this, but if they don't you could end up with a pocket full of flaming lithium...
I don't agree with ISP's doing anything more than providing the internet to me at high speed and for a nominal fee.
Wether or not I download copyrighted material is none of the ISP's buisness assuming it dosen't put them in jeapordy. That issue lies between me and the copyright holder.
Trying to make the ISP limit people based on traffic patterns is essentially the ISP shooting itself in the foot.
I download about 20 gigs a month of perfectly legal content. Most of it is for Half Life 2, such as maps, textures, constructs and any other cool development resources I can grub up. Should I be shut down because of someone else's paranioa? I think not.
Slashdot is not the place to waste the time of the readers of this site with answering one persons personal question. That persons question should have been sent to a newsgroup or something and not broadcast to everyone. Its just a waste of time for the countless people who cannot relate to that persons problem.
It appears as if you may have missed the entire point of the AskSlashdot section.
It's imporant to consider that web-based storage of information won't become viable for information other than the odd picture and written document until current internet connections get drasticly faster and more reliable overall.
It's also important to keep in mind that there are several key differences between web-based software and technologies and system-based software and technologies, especially with regards to an operating system.
The third consideration is that while Google is making progress, so is Microsoft. Granted, the G-man could catch MS, but I don't think it's quite as immenent as the article intones it to be.
It's hard to say. Microsoft might be willing to take an embarrasing loss on these systems just to beat Sony to market. They're a big enough company, they'll risk it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft has sold exactly zero systems in the market at a profit. I recall some big hubbub about them losing money on every system purchased back when they were new, and the price has come down by an order of magnitude since then.
I think history is about to repeat itself. With a larger market saturation and Microsoft putting Sony in the "me-too" position [where Xbox was last time around) they just might make out nicely.
Ah, and there you have my failing to grasp the concept.
I was under the impression that the gyros were linked with an attitude control system of some sort. I figured this because the thrusters on the platform do have to be refueled periodicaly. What else would they be used for other than to control the orientation of the platform I wonder?
Oil majors are broken up into an upstream business, a refining business, and a petrochemicals business.
How would one assume the refineries and raw petrochem companies view a new fuel that all but excludes them?
You mention oil supplies being "artficially low" because of OPEC. OPEC keeps the price low because they like the money it brings with higher prices all around. The same type of artificial supply control goes on over in the diamond industry and therefore diamonds are sold at or above 1000% markup.
As listed in an excellent post immediately preceding yours, there is more to the oil industry than just piping gasoline around and pumping it into trucks.
The current massive companies that perform or have an investment in mining/drilling, extraction, crude transport and refineries would be thrown into hard times. They could still function, but their profit margin would be slimmer, as thier "cash crop" would be gone and they'd just be selling the basic lubricants and perhaps diesel (until a replacement was found for it).
The "backshop" of gasoline production would be ground to a halt with billions of dollars of equipment being rendered useless.
After you've joined a faction as an overt or covert memeber, you get points per kill instead of per mission. Once you get your weapon skills up, you can take out some tougher stuff. The tougher the stuff you kill, the more faction points you're gonna get.
The mounts and the vehicles were much simpler overall than the spacecraft are being talked up to be.
A new player can have the skills to make himself a vehicle easily in a weeks time. The materials will take him another week or two to get due to the large amounts needed. Getting a critter to ride around on takes a couple of weeks of playing getting scouting experience and creature handling experience.
Chances are, the spacecraft are going to require many of the master crafters to work in conjunction with each other to create the final product. Each master crafting profession takes either some large investment in equipment or a lot of money to master, and can't be done overnight unless you've just got the cash for it. It took me the equivelent of 1.2 million credits worth of steel (at bargain rates) to get my character to Master Weaponsmith.
Getting pets and vehicles is simple, getting space vehicles is going to be quite a bit more expensive. Particulary if the require us to use large quantites of our precious named resources.
I mis-spoke on the economy, and I stand corrected. The highest I've gotten in combat classes is about halfway, and there is only the occational 2000 credit mission available to me. I still tend to get killed when I'm in a group though, and don't enjoy grouping much at all.
The article lack some technical specifications... Like what is the usable range of the laser, can it fire through clouds. How long can the plan stay in flight.
It's a military product and a damn new invention. When the U-2 came out, did they tell anyone how high it went? When the SR-71 came out, did they tell anyone how fast it went? Do you know what the largest US nuke is and what it's deployment profile is? If you look for those tidbits now, how many conflicting reports will get get?
It's really a one-word answer as far as I'm concerned: Classified.
It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too.
If ethanol were threatening to the oil companies pockets, they'd not be helping research it, but instead shutting up the researchers.
Do you really think that there is some mitigating factor other than greed that has gas prices up over $2 a gallon in some places?
I think it would be in humanities best effort to make more efficient use of what we do have as opposed to distracting ourselves with something else that won't get adopted on a wide-scale until something major hits the fan. While some may disagree, alternate fuels will be nothing more than an alternative until something happens to big oil.
There have been solid-state gyroscopc devices (ring-laser and piezo) in commercial production since the early 80's, if not before. They would seem to be much more suitable for hostile environments than a mechanical device.
Unlike the shutle, the ISS was engineered in much more recent times. Some delving around in the reading material from NASA's website points out that the shuttle was made from mostly 60's technology and more recent updates have brought it in line with tech from the early 80's. The first segment of the ISS went up in 1998. It would only be rational to assume that it had significant technological advances over the shuttle. It's performance, while not completely contrary, is not promising either.
Ring-laser gyroscopes have been in production/service since the early '80s. They are more accurate and more dependable than their mechanical counterparts; They are solid-state removing the need for atmosphere. They've been flying around in planes pulling 7+ g's for years. IMO, and citing a lack of information on the subject, they would be cheaper to buy and run "off the shelf" than engineering a mechanical gyro from scratch or modifying a pre-existing product. They are one of the lowest-maintainance parts on an airframe; They don't break, and they calibrate themselves. There is also the issue of the solid-state piezo gyro, they are a rate gyro, so they are not directly applicable, but could easily enough be adapted to the task of keeping a platform in a relative orientation.
I have an old solid-state piezo gyro I've been using on my RC helicopters since 1997 (when they started becoming affordable). It's survived crashes that have destroyed the airframe it's riding on. I would think that launching it in a rocket would be a cakewalk as compared to hitting the ground at 60 MPH. I'd not be concerned at all sending it up on a rocket.
In a nutshell, I'd say it's a result of the same short-sightedness on NASA's part that resulted in Hubble's mirror being misconstructed.
This makes you wonder what specification of hardware gets used in spacefaring vehicles/structures.
It seems that over history, the spacefaring versions of our technology are quite inferior to what we have planet-side. On typical space vehicles, this is because the vehicles were built so long ago. The ISS is a relatively new invention, and the number of bangs, bumps and hiccups seems to be more or less consistant with it's much older counterparts.
On a sidenote, anyone know if it has enough mass to impact earth's surface if it should come down?
This new expansion is going to drive economic inflation to new heights, as the people with several hundred million will pay it for a starship or components and the crafters know this. Therefore, said crafters won't be selling to the people who haven't bought money or been in the game since Beta and have an established income. I think the space expansion will lead to more people entering the game, but less people actually sticking with it. This rule will generally apply untill there are enough starship products and services in the market to force the prices down to more human levels.
For those of you that are not in the game but are considering it, your average mission payout for a solo mission is about 1200 or so credits. If a starship costs you half a million, it's going to take a LOT of mission running to get there, either that or grouping on the "adventure planets". The payouts are better with missions on these planets, but unless your Guild/Player Association is out there with you, you'll likely have a group of complete fools that will get you killed more often then they will make you money.
On and upward note, Sony has removed the necessity for having a membership to read the SWG forums. If you're interested in getting in and not burning-out before you get your X-wing, I'd be patient and poke around over here [until things settle to a dull roar following release.
Given Sony's history of buggy releases and expansions, being patient but informed may prove to be a much more agreeable path.
"Plus, even if she's not your type, you could have a nice time for one evening. Sometimes a date is *more* fun for both parties if you know there won't be another."
I'm just not that short sighted; If there is no point, then there is no reason to continue if you end up right were you started off at; Home playing with your PS2/Xbox/GCN/PC.
It wouldn't be so hard to just use some compression program to alter the file's contents and thereby thwart the new software.
Either that or people could start trading.ogg files around, that would fix it.
Slashdot Mirror
Making an over-glorified bar code analog into a stamp which allows one to easily be linked to content is just a worthless ploy to generate revenue, as each time a poor yob scans one, they will likely make more off the resulting page hit (Thanks Advertising!) than they will from the sale of the stamp less the cost of delivering the letter.
I would wager that if someone has a phone which is capable of reading these "intelligent" stamps, they most likely know how to get more information than they wanted dealing with conceivable topic which a stamp could express in less time than installing the software to read the stamp.
Just the name screams marketing ploy and literally adds nothing to an infrequent, inconvenient, but occasional legally useful way of sending typed or written communication.
Just because you can't see it and you can't hear it in no way means that it is private.
It's like the RIAA driving around in a car with the windows down blasting tunes and suing anyone within earshot...
The only thing a user with a non-encrypted wi-fi access point should have a reasonable assumption of is the lack of security.
Troll on over to the game's website and have a gander at the first news listing.
Or for the impatient, check the Draenei page directly.
Yes. It's called ex post facto law. They can't pass a law against something in 2007 and arrest you if they have evidence you're doing it in 2006.
Correct, so long as whatever got discovered dosen't get you labeled as a "terrorist" by the parties that be.
I, for one, refuse to subject myself to the posiblity of someday somebody misconstruing something I have written then combining that with anything which may be misconstrued to become evidence to label me in such as fashon as to interrupt my life, however temporarily, for any period of time.
Avoiding the possibility, especially in these days of increasingly wild lawmakers, is assurance in and of itself. Granted running your own solution may be at some points complex, but a little time now to save the potential of a losing a lot of time later is it's own reward.
From TFA:
...being developed with the backing of rival Google Inc.
/. had some comments similar to Bill's...
What? You expect him to applaud? Think 'ol Bill is gonna back something supported by a large rival?
And so what if his "ultra-mobile" computer sells for $600-$1000; windows XP sells for a chunk of change too, but that didn't seem to stop him from dropping the prices and doing what he had to do in order to get the product to the target audience.
If memory serves, the last time the issue of the $100 PC came up,
If memory serves correctly, the last time AMD was fairly absent in the processor market and "resting on it's laurels", they rocked the world with the XP-class processor
....again.
Anyone who has been keeping tabs on AMD knows they are in the process of expanding their manufacturing capability/capacity.
I think AMD is playing the part of "lion in the weeds"......
I happen to disagree. Inadequacy would depend on the extent to which the monitoring is done. Statistical analysis + human observers might cost some cash, but would IMO be adequate. Impossible? I don't think so. Blizzard has a ton of resources at their disposal. Unfeasable? You mean you think it would cost too much for Blizzard? Or hamper gameplay too much? If Blizzard loses more business through client-side monitoring than they would spend on server-side monitoring, then they'll do server-side monitoring.
If you've been keeping up with WoW news since release, you can see evidence of their server side monitoring, this is what caught the dupers shortly after release who saw their accounts closed. The server is pointless without the clients, and to ensure the best possible gaming environment, some steps must be taken to assure nobody has a particular advantage over anyone else, both from the client perspective and the server perspective.
The end result of which would be statistical anomalies that are relatively easy to detect. Have an observation team "follow" anomalous characters for a while, take action based on observations.
Apparently not, it took Sony over a year to realize that some players could see if the big boss was up without actually going in to look.... And they only did that because the application got so much popularity that it made front-page on several gaming news sites. Passive applications may affect player behavior, but in no way do they define player behavior beyond a reasonable doubt. All you have to do is start banning people based on trends-and-analasys and you have a mass desertion waiting to happen when you ban someone who was doing nothing wrong but happened to fit your cookie-cutter. (you can follow a player with showEQ running all around the world and it will look like he's running randomly from here to there, popping into places then poping out, then again, you don't know if he has showEQ unless you can see whats on his computer, who can say that he's not simply mucking about of his own volition?)
That's a red herring. Any executables a user installs from anyone other than Blizzard has nothing to do with Blizzard's EULA, or whether Blizzard does server- or client-side monitoring. Anyone who installs a third-party interface is asking for their account info to be stolen.
Red herring indeed, The Warden is there to protect the players and the game from foul play. There is nothing which says for or against banning players based on anything running on their system; But if one person got their account, and thus their personal information, ganked by a program this person installed, it's likely they would blame Blizzard for it. The really sorry thing is that without any client-side monitoring, there is no way for Blizzard to remove itself from the shadow of doubt; Doubly so given today's cut-throat media.
In the end it comes down to protecting one's interests. The Warden is not the first and will not be the last client-side anti-cheat utility. It is a good solution in that its nature is clearly mentioned in the EULA and it does not overstep it's bounds IMO of a good threat monitoring application as well as cost effective method of mitigation.
Wonderfull that you can essentially tell any tin-foil-bodysuit fool who dosen't like it that he should have read the terms of service, as it was clearly spelled out in plain f'in english.
INAL, you have 3.5 million people to monitor. You can do it through a) paying your programmers to make an automated program to do this for you or b) paying people decent money to follow other folks around that you may be suspicious of, all the while assuming increased risk of blowing your own foot off and banning an innocent because he fit the profile... I'd vote for a hybrid of the two, which is exactly what Blizz has done, autonomous program doing the bulk monitoring on both ends, people double checking the facts from all monitoring, then making decisions based on that.
What MMORPGs need to do is implement better server-side analysis to identify cheaters. Difficult? Yes. Expensive? Yes. But probably less difficult and less expensive that losing craploads of clients, and hiring craploads of lawyers. Then they won't need to have the invasion clause in the license for their games.
Perhaps yes, but with the multitude of people playing and the varying playstyles makes ruling out cheaters from a server perspective inadequate, impossible and unfeasable. Most all decisions in game are made or at least adjudicated through the server. Try getting disconnected while running/fighting/crafting and you'll see what I mean.
The bits that the warden appears to be combatting are things which monitor for elements of the game in memory. Remember ShowEQ from about 5 years ago? It would scan the memory and show you every NPC or PC in the zone you were currently in. This was a huge boon for gamers who were targeting specific toons/characters.
One must also take a look at the extensive interface modifications available for the game, there is the potential that an inept user could incidently install something malicious from an interface package ("Oh, it's a self-extracting executable, nothing bad could ever come in one of these...") which could steal account information.
If you want to be really open minded about it, this malicious program could be designed to make the installation of WoW it's installed to appear to be cheating, and thereby get banned. It's not too-far fetched to think that DoS attacks could initiate/propigate at this level, I think we all are aware that social engineering is the greatest damage spreading tool in history. Once they are discovered and processes are known to Blizzard, this would be an ideal use for the warden.
It's my belief that the warden exists to protect both Blizzard's interests as well as the players. It works towards providing them with a fair play environment and, as expressed above, could be used to protect players from themselves to an extent.
It would seem to me that placing it in a foil bag would be a bad idea. Lithium batteries don't much like to be short-circuited, remember the exploding Nokia phones of yore? Same concept. Granted they may have electronics inside the pack to prevent this, but if they don't you could end up with a pocket full of flaming lithium...
I don't agree with ISP's doing anything more than providing the internet to me at high speed and for a nominal fee.
Wether or not I download copyrighted material is none of the ISP's buisness assuming it dosen't put them in jeapordy. That issue lies between me and the copyright holder.
Trying to make the ISP limit people based on traffic patterns is essentially the ISP shooting itself in the foot.
I download about 20 gigs a month of perfectly legal content. Most of it is for Half Life 2, such as maps, textures, constructs and any other cool development resources I can grub up. Should I be shut down because of someone else's paranioa? I think not.
Slashdot is not the place to waste the time of the readers of this site with answering one persons personal question. That persons question should have been sent to a newsgroup or something and not broadcast to everyone. Its just a waste of time for the countless people who cannot relate to that persons problem.
It appears as if you may have missed the entire point of the AskSlashdot section.
It's imporant to consider that web-based storage of information won't become viable for information other than the odd picture and written document until current internet connections get drasticly faster and more reliable overall.
It's also important to keep in mind that there are several key differences between web-based software and technologies and system-based software and technologies, especially with regards to an operating system.
The third consideration is that while Google is making progress, so is Microsoft. Granted, the G-man could catch MS, but I don't think it's quite as immenent as the article intones it to be.
It's hard to say. Microsoft might be willing to take an embarrasing loss on these systems just to beat Sony to market. They're a big enough company, they'll risk it.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft has sold exactly zero systems in the market at a profit. I recall some big hubbub about them losing money on every system purchased back when they were new, and the price has come down by an order of magnitude since then.
I think history is about to repeat itself. With a larger market saturation and Microsoft putting Sony in the "me-too" position [where Xbox was last time around) they just might make out nicely.
Ah, and there you have my failing to grasp the concept.
I was under the impression that the gyros were linked with an attitude control system of some sort. I figured this because the thrusters on the platform do have to be refueled periodicaly. What else would they be used for other than to control the orientation of the platform I wonder?
Oil majors are broken up into an upstream business, a refining business, and a petrochemicals business.
How would one assume the refineries and raw petrochem companies view a new fuel that all but excludes them?
You mention oil supplies being "artficially low" because of OPEC. OPEC keeps the price low because they like the money it brings with higher prices all around. The same type of artificial supply control goes on over in the diamond industry and therefore diamonds are sold at or above 1000% markup.
Sounds like greed to me.
Answer: The Distributors.
As listed in an excellent post immediately preceding yours, there is more to the oil industry than just piping gasoline around and pumping it into trucks.
The current massive companies that perform or have an investment in mining/drilling, extraction, crude transport and refineries would be thrown into hard times. They could still function, but their profit margin would be slimmer, as thier "cash crop" would be gone and they'd just be selling the basic lubricants and perhaps diesel (until a replacement was found for it).
The "backshop" of gasoline production would be ground to a halt with billions of dollars of equipment being rendered useless.
After you've joined a faction as an overt or covert memeber, you get points per kill instead of per mission. Once you get your weapon skills up, you can take out some tougher stuff. The tougher the stuff you kill, the more faction points you're gonna get.
The mounts and the vehicles were much simpler overall than the spacecraft are being talked up to be.
A new player can have the skills to make himself a vehicle easily in a weeks time. The materials will take him another week or two to get due to the large amounts needed. Getting a critter to ride around on takes a couple of weeks of playing getting scouting experience and creature handling experience.
Chances are, the spacecraft are going to require many of the master crafters to work in conjunction with each other to create the final product. Each master crafting profession takes either some large investment in equipment or a lot of money to master, and can't be done overnight unless you've just got the cash for it. It took me the equivelent of 1.2 million credits worth of steel (at bargain rates) to get my character to Master Weaponsmith.
Getting pets and vehicles is simple, getting space vehicles is going to be quite a bit more expensive. Particulary if the require us to use large quantites of our precious named resources.
I mis-spoke on the economy, and I stand corrected. The highest I've gotten in combat classes is about halfway, and there is only the occational 2000 credit mission available to me. I still tend to get killed when I'm in a group though, and don't enjoy grouping much at all.
The article lack some technical specifications... Like what is the usable range of the laser, can it fire through clouds. How long can the plan stay in flight.
It's a military product and a damn new invention. When the U-2 came out, did they tell anyone how high it went? When the SR-71 came out, did they tell anyone how fast it went? Do you know what the largest US nuke is and what it's deployment profile is? If you look for those tidbits now, how many conflicting reports will get get?
It's really a one-word answer as far as I'm concerned:
Classified.
It's nice to see that big oil companies are helping fund a project like this too.
If ethanol were threatening to the oil companies pockets, they'd not be helping research it, but instead shutting up the researchers.
Do you really think that there is some mitigating factor other than greed that has gas prices up over $2 a gallon in some places?
I think it would be in humanities best effort to make more efficient use of what we do have as opposed to distracting ourselves with something else that won't get adopted on a wide-scale until something major hits the fan. While some may disagree, alternate fuels will be nothing more than an alternative until something happens to big oil.
Good points, all.
There have been solid-state gyroscopc devices (ring-laser and piezo) in commercial production since the early 80's, if not before. They would seem to be much more suitable for hostile environments than a mechanical device.
Unlike the shutle, the ISS was engineered in much more recent times. Some delving around in the reading material from NASA's website points out that the shuttle was made from mostly 60's technology and more recent updates have brought it in line with tech from the early 80's. The first segment of the ISS went up in 1998. It would only be rational to assume that it had significant technological advances over the shuttle. It's performance, while not completely contrary, is not promising either.
Ring-laser gyroscopes have been in production/service since the early '80s. They are more accurate and more dependable than their mechanical counterparts; They are solid-state removing the need for atmosphere. They've been flying around in planes pulling 7+ g's for years. IMO, and citing a lack of information on the subject, they would be cheaper to buy and run "off the shelf" than engineering a mechanical gyro from scratch or modifying a pre-existing product. They are one of the lowest-maintainance parts on an airframe; They don't break, and they calibrate themselves. There is also the issue of the solid-state piezo gyro, they are a rate gyro, so they are not directly applicable, but could easily enough be adapted to the task of keeping a platform in a relative orientation.
I have an old solid-state piezo gyro I've been using on my RC helicopters since 1997 (when they started becoming affordable). It's survived crashes that have destroyed the airframe it's riding on. I would think that launching it in a rocket would be a cakewalk as compared to hitting the ground at 60 MPH. I'd not be concerned at all sending it up on a rocket.
In a nutshell, I'd say it's a result of the same short-sightedness on NASA's part that resulted in Hubble's mirror being misconstructed.
This makes you wonder what specification of hardware gets used in spacefaring vehicles/structures.
It seems that over history, the spacefaring versions of our technology are quite inferior to what we have planet-side. On typical space vehicles, this is because the vehicles were built so long ago. The ISS is a relatively new invention, and the number of bangs, bumps and hiccups seems to be more or less consistant with it's much older counterparts.
On a sidenote, anyone know if it has enough mass to impact earth's surface if it should come down?
This new expansion is going to drive economic inflation to new heights, as the people with several hundred million will pay it for a starship or components and the crafters know this. Therefore, said crafters won't be selling to the people who haven't bought money or been in the game since Beta and have an established income. I think the space expansion will lead to more people entering the game, but less people actually sticking with it. This rule will generally apply untill there are enough starship products and services in the market to force the prices down to more human levels.
For those of you that are not in the game but are considering it, your average mission payout for a solo mission is about 1200 or so credits. If a starship costs you half a million, it's going to take a LOT of mission running to get there, either that or grouping on the "adventure planets". The payouts are better with missions on these planets, but unless your Guild/Player Association is out there with you, you'll likely have a group of complete fools that will get you killed more often then they will make you money.
On and upward note, Sony has removed the necessity for having a membership to read the SWG forums. If you're interested in getting in and not burning-out before you get your X-wing, I'd be patient and poke around over here [until things settle to a dull roar following release.
Given Sony's history of buggy releases and expansions, being patient but informed may prove to be a much more agreeable path.
"Plus, even if she's not your type, you could have a nice time for one evening. Sometimes a date is *more* fun for both parties if you know there won't be another."
I'm just not that short sighted; If there is no point, then there is no reason to continue if you end up right were you started off at; Home playing with your PS2/Xbox/GCN/PC.
It wouldn't be so hard to just use some compression program to alter the file's contents and thereby thwart the new software. Either that or people could start trading .ogg files around, that would fix it.