I know you're going for "informative" or whatever, but seriously - even Amazon acknowledged that they fucked up big time by remote-nuking 1984, and reversed it. While you'll never know for sure (unless someone is dumb enough to risk their business by doing that again) if this device or any other has that capability, I think it's reasonable to think that most businesses making such devices don't want to shit where they eat by doing a known bad thing.
I have a Kindle, and when I turn the wireless feature off, I've had a single charge last for 2 weeks of reading averaging 2+ hours a day, at a pretty regular rate. With eInk displays, it's the number of page turns that eats power - slower readers might have better results.
A second reason is that the iPhone display, while nice, is still back-lit and still gives me headaches if I read off of it for extended periods of time. eInk looks more or less like paper and doesn't operate by shining a bright light in my face.
I'm not getting a flu shot because I think I'm going to die from it...
I'm getting a flu shot because I don't want to be sick as a dog from this thing and miss a week of work.
The $30 I spend (via insurance) on a flu shot every year pays for itself in that I'm not freaking the fuck out about catching up on work, not having to spend time I'm not at work laying in bed feeling miserable, and not having to shell out $15 a box (and show my ID thanks to meth makers) for pills that'll make me feel slightly less miserable.
I used to not get flu shots, and I got sick as a dog at least once a winter with whatever was going around. I now get flu shots and for the last 3 winters I haven't been sick with anything more than the sniffles, and I work in an office that seems to have plagues running through it at least once a quarter.
There are certainly many tweaks that would need to be done to make the set-up as painless as possible for as many people as possible, but the general thing this solves is that it lets people play "together" with any other player in the game, without forcing EVERYONE to be together in the same hot-spots. Maybe things as simple as any/universalzonechat text that has LFG, LFM or other key strings automatically gets routed to a universal LFG channel, or whatever.
When I think about things realistically, in WoW, while there may have been several thousand people on the server, at most I was directly playing with only 80 (battlegrounds) at most at any given time, and ONLY with 80 people chosen from the server/battlegroup my home server was in, so maybe 20k people at most I could possibly interact with, out of 12 million subscribers. The way Champions handles it, I am playing with a maximum of about 100 people at any given time, but I can, if I choose to move around instances, potentially play with all subscribers to Champions, not just the ones who happened to roll on my server.
I dunno, I found "/zone Looking for team to take on Telios' Tower" while I was in the instance for that mission pretty intuitive & obvious. When I would game late at night (off US prime time), recognizing that the population was sparser made shifting zones to be an obvious solution.
The best solution is make/zone reach all instances of a zone - and I'm pretty sure that, or something like that, will be happening in the near future.
Launching a bunch of consumable stuff into orbit cheaply would allow all kinds of projects to get underway that are currently hideously expensive because they involve very expensive launch.
Wanna go to Mars quickly? Launch a whole lot of fuel cannisters, food, water, whatever into space this way, then launch your crew vehicle traditionally. Water tanks are attached to the crew vehicle in orbit (to provide some radiation shielding), fuel pods are launched ahead for the craft to make a rendez-vous en route... Suddenly things like getting to Mars (or whatever other destination) get a LOT cheaper since you aren't having to launch food, fuel & other consumables conventionally.
If a Gates or Buffet type who want to change the world with their fortunes would get involved - half a billion is virtually pocket change to those sorts - I can think of a lot of worse things to spend the money on.
It seems to me like the problem isn't the game, but you - not being mean, but really, ask for groups in zone chat.
If you're in Canada and want a group for Telios' tower, just ask in zone. If you don't get any responses, look at your map, click the change instance button, and pick a different instance or one that has more people in it and ask again. There are tons of people in Canada who need to do the team instances in Canada, it only makes sense to ask about that in Canada. There is no ironforge because there's no need for it; there are trainers in most every zone, stores too, so people have very little need to go to a hub to ask for groups.
I knew nobody in CO - none of my cohorts from WoW have come over to CO yet, but over the month I've been playing, I've made "friends" with about 30 people, most play regularly, and have characters in 3 different supergroups that have another 50 or so people in each.
Again, not being mean, but if you're not meeting people in this game it's because you're going about it the wrong way.
And to think, those purple fingers came at the low, low cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives! It's also really great that, since Bush fucked up the prosecution of one "just" war (Afghanistan) to try and not fuck up a completely unprovoked one (Iraq), that in a few years we might get to go back in there and liberate whatever Afghanis have survived the first liberation ALL OVER AGAIN!
Isn't that just marvelous? I know all the people with purple fingers (and their children, many of whom don't have fingers, hands or arms thanks to Bush the Liberator) will be just totally thrilled when we come back! Yay! That is, unless they come over here, first, to let us know how happy they are having lost mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons in exchange for a few purple fingers and an elected puppet.
Seriously, if you think Bush waged war to get women the vote, you're stupid and/or insane. If you think those votes actually counted, you're a bit naive. And if you think that anything stable was created over there as a result of Bush's intervention, you're living in an alternate reality.
The AIDS in Africa thing I can sort of agree with, but you should have left it at that.
I don't know about that - I play lots of games at work that are intended to help me understand reality a lot more: epidemic simulations in which I tweak various factors, for example, sure feel like games to me, even if they're really for work. The simulation programs I've been using lately sure feel very similar to some of the Sim series of games.
Play can be used in lots of ways to get very useful things done - saying it's only for escaping reality is really giving play short shrift.
I homebrewed a set of scripts that would take data from Nike+, my daily pic of me in the same pose, outfit & lighting, and a nutritional spreadsheet I built and throw them on my blog. It's "automatic" in that every day it checks for updates in the folder I store the output/Nike's site.
Nothing fancy, just a little hackery to keep my skills sharp.
Well, it looks like I was right. Excellent troll - but really, if you want to improve the number of bites you get, your long game needs to be better. Instead of just saying "that's stupid" when people bite, you need to have something else to throw at them to keep them in the fight. "That's stupid," doesn't really give them anything to really respond to, and it tips your hand way too early. You have to make people think you actually believe the stuff you're saying - and that means being at least somewhat familiar with the common counter arguments.
I look forward to seeing your technique improve in the future - I rarely bite on trolls any more, so it seems like you might have potential.
I would absolutely suggest heavily political books, as long as they are well written examples of science fiction and fantasy.
There's a difference between needlessly stirring up controversy by recommending shitty books with a stupidly heavy-handed political/religious agenda to students, and encouraging discussion by having students read thoughtful books that may provide alternative viewpoints to what many students have been exposed to (whatever they are).
I'd avoid the gigantic books (pretty much anything but Snowcrash by Stephenson, for example) not because they're discouraging, but because let's face it, kids won't read the whole thing because they have 80 other things going on in any given day, and very large reads that are worth assigning deserve better than the 30 minutes at best the kids will be able to give 'em.
One of my nephews was recently in a sci-fi/fantasy class at his high school aimed at seeing how literature explores various key themes, and in this case the focus was on religious vs. secular attitudes. Half of the parents were enraged when the kids were given the "Left Behind" books to read, the other half were enraged when the kids were given "Revolt in 2100" by Heinlein. Personally, I was just disgusted that they couldn't think of books that were well written, but I absolutely think the discussion that it sparked was an important one.
It's pretty fucking ironic that you're making that argument - and being modded insightful! - on a website that was primarily started and is now largely populated by rabid advocates of open source software, specifically an OS that was originally built to scratch an itch, the primary mover behind it being a guy who presumably could have made a lot more money with it than he has...
As to the rest of your point - especially the nonsense about healthcare - are you actually that stupid, or are you parodying the libertarian bullshit that gets spewed here regularly? It's hard to tell sometimes.
In case you're serious, the counter to your ridiculous argument is covered in the post you made: The will to do things comes not from mere profit; if it did, you wouldn't have "bored clerks with 1 inch fingernails" muddling through a day, because they'd be totally fucking psyched over a paycheck. The will to do things comes because you WANT to do them in the first place, and would do them for free if you didn't have to worry about survival. People who are only doing something for a financial motive are among the least productive, least useful, least satisfied people in existence. People who are doing something because they *NEED* to, deep down in their souls, are the ones who'll change the world.
Profit is great, but when the quest for profits and the protection of same wind up harming other people - you know, the health insurance companies and managed care companies denying claims of people in order to make sure they make a profit - it's gone too far. Ask anyone who is massively accomplished in the world - anyone who has REALLY made a difference, who has REALLY developed something that has changed the world, and I daresay money is one of the last things they'll mention as a driving force (though, as often happens, they make a ton of it in the course of scratching their itch.)
If you are serious, I feel very, very sorry for you. You have such an incredibly limited and mundane view of humanity. It must be terribly depressing to think of yourself simply as a greedy thing bent on acquisition.
This always seems to come as a shock to people on slashdot, but... Not everyone thinks like you do, or does the same things for the same reason.
For instance, some people (me, and several other folks I know) are interested in getting data on their progress when exercising - it can be interesting to see if subjective experiences of a workout/performance/improvement over time match up with the objective information. It can also be a great motivator - I started on the "couch to 5k" running thing a while back and it was really interesting to look back over the data from runs and see at what time & distance points my pulse was shooting up and at what points it slowed down, or how long it actually took me to cool down to a normal heart rate after a run, etc. It's also been motivating for a few of my friends and family as well as myself - I have a fitness blog that tracks my progress automatically, and when I *don't* run, I've gotten email from my mom asking me if I skipped the day. My father - who is 84 - promised me that for every mile I run, he'll walk. My best friend, who was morbidly obese, said that having photographic evidence of me dropping 20 lbs., and who got to see it happen gradually, said seeing the progress like that helped motivate her - she's dropped almost 40 lbs. in the last year. My ongoing efforts - tracking changes I've made to nutrition, exercise, stretching, all supplemented with data - it's been an interesting project for me to work on. You may find such data pointless, but that's you, not everyone else.
As to your reasons why people should work out... When I run, I don't *want* to socialize with people. I run for me. I run to forget the stresses of work. I run to not have to think about other people at all. I run to enjoy the way my body feels as I crank out the miles. I run to think things over. I run and have time to listen to things I don't have the time to listen to at other times of the day. I have puh-lenty of socialization going on in my life, plenty of opportunities to hang out with people in many capacities, and exercise is my refuge from that. You may feel like your time spent working out is time for you to be social, and that's great for you if it makes you happy, but I would be really annoyed if someone tried to chat with me while I was getting my me time on the paths.
You seem to think that tracking the data is incompatible with more "human" reasons for working out, and in my case, and in the cases of many other people, that's just not the case - I'd say it's helped me form better connections with some people at best, and at worst it's simply entertaining for me. I'd suggest learning how to step outside of your own viewpoint and try to see things from different points of view - just as you find the cyclists ignoring the rest of the world around them depressing, I find it a bit sad whenever I see someone who can't seem to understand that other people are different from themselves.
City of Heroes mission architect lets players create missions & campaigns that can be do most of the stuff that the developer-made missions & campaigns can do. Within the first 48 hours, if I remember right, there was more player developed content than there was developer created content. 99.99% of it was, doubtless, absolute shit, but some of it was decent, and some was really quite impressive & interesting.
The problems with CoH's system were:
1) Because it was just a virtual reality type sim in game - that was more or less the canon explanation of it - it didn't really matter to players on any kind of meaningful level; it required a double suspension of disbelief. First to just get into the CoH game itself, but then to get into the game inside the game - not an easy task. If they'd just made the explanation something like "the Portal corporation has opened up a bunch of new dimensions, go scout them out for us. Be warned, some might be a little... odd..." that would have been better.
2) They gave in-game benefits (badges/achievements) for content creation, which was just begging to have the rating system abused. Cartels were formed that would vote up/down MA creations just so people could get badges or to keep people from getting badges. People were going to make content no matter what - no need to give a special incentive. In fact, I daresay that the people who were motivated by the badges/achievements who wouldn't have made content otherwise probably didn't make anything terribly interesting. By all means, have a rating system, but remove the incentive for people to game it.
3) They allowed it to be a way to farm levels & loot. You could make missions that had absurd rewards for absolutely no risk. It was possible to have passive, completely invulnerable NPCs follow the players around and make them completely immune to damage. It was possible to fill the missions entirely with opponents who were trivial to kill but who gave ridiculous amounts of experience. The worst of the offenders in this case had missions in which a crowd of these low-difficulty-high-XP opponents would huddle around BOMBS, and you could just shoot the bomb to make all the opponents die, yielding full xp. To top it off, you got a lot of tickets, which were redeemable for prizes after completing the missions, those prizes being recipes for things that could be sold for a ridiculous amount of in-game money. People farmed the hell out of these missions for that purpose, and were able to get characters from level 1 to level 50 (the cap) in as little as 4 hours in some cases. A lot more thinking needed to go into how to prevent missions from being exploited - even if it was just a hard cap of "only this much xp will be allowed to be accrued over x amount of time in player-created missions."
Fix those problems and you can have an explosion of creativity that won't wreck games. You'll also have an explosion of really stupid content created, but it'll be more reasonable to sift through since there won't be an incentive to create bad content to gain advantage.
Attraction is almost never rational, or, at least, the underlying bits are rational if you think about it but there isn't always a lot of conscious thought involved. Thus, even if the underlying bits make perfect sense, it's still not rational as being rational requires thinking.
Anyway, as a woman, I'll offer this bit of insight that may explain part of this (not very) baffling phenomena. I may get my chick card revoked for sharing this, but my ties to the nerd community are more important than the duties of sisterhood, so here goes:
Most of us tend to like guys who aren't self-important assholes. That means guys who can have fun, often at their own expense. So, guys who can get into a game like Rock Band and act like fools at it in a charming way are probably not self-important assholes. Assuming they are fair to middling in all other respects, demonstrating a capacity for merriment with plastic instruments can, therefore, tip the balance and lead to nookie.
Interestingly, many guys I've met who can play guitar (and ALL of the guys I've met who find it necessary to whine that Rock Band and Guitar Hero aren't REALLY playing guitar) are, in fact, self-important assholes who take themselves way too seriously, and thus almost infinitely unattractive.
I agree - the fraction I'd be happy with would be 9/10ths. Totally reasonable!
Being serious, this is only indirectly for end users, and people bitching about slow connections here would be like me bitching in a NASA thread about how it isn't fair that NASA has crafts going 20,000 MPH while my bicycle is still stuck at a max of about 30mph. Different toys for different uses. This is clearly an infrastructure tool, one that offers much better speeds and lower costs of deployment than the current stuff.
That said, I'd really be happy if I could just get FIOS where I live. It is absurd to me that, living in downtown Chicago, I can't get anything better than Comcast cable.
It's the "social progressives" of today who are somehow responsible for when, in the 1940's & 50's the German constitution was re-written to forbid Nazi imagery?
Given that you apparently think the "social progressives" of today have access to time travel, I'd suggest that you have more urgent things to worry about than censorship, namely finding a good psychiatrist.
Interchangeable? No, no, and again no! The Mac store people are absolutely not interchangeable with other mall people. Can a Mac store associate make me an Orange Julius? No. Can he or she pierce my ears? No. Can any of them even build a teddy-bear for me? No. Make me some corndogs? No. Sell me 20 different cases for my cell phone? No. Convince me that the boots I just tried on are kicky? Probably, but then again, they usually wear Chucks, so possibly not.
Not all of the Trek games were shit: 25th Anniversary was REALLY good, and captured the feel of the show VERY nicely.
I also liked - well, I liked the idea of, though the execution was lacking - Birth of the Federation. It was an interesting game, and had it been moddable to make some parts more reasonable, that would have been great. The problem was that the balance was really, really off in some places (send in the birds of prey! Everything dies before it can fight back; who cares if you can't stay cloaked while firing if everything's dead since it's turn based, not RTS combat?), and in other places, even if you were 50x larger than your opponent's empire you didn't have much of an advantage.
There was another game - an RTS, I can't remember the name of it - that was pretty fun to play also. I remember one mission was going after some kind of Romulan power source.
Within 25 years, it's going to be a trivial thing to just upload a picture of someone to google facesearch (or whatever else) and instantly have results for every single picture of the person/people in that photo sent back, probably including a whole bunch of information about the other people or places in that photo (who you associate with or where you go and why are relatively easy to get). Probably such a system would be capable of identifying individual items in the picture/on your person, and a number of other things as well - things most people wouldn't notice.
While probably less likely, it wouldn't be shocking if there were software capable of building profiles for people based on publicly available information, building a linguistic profile based on publicly available writings, and then coming up with a reasonable guess as to who wrote what on supposedly "anonymous" boards or sites, or whatever else you care to mention.
Privacy is dead. Anonymity (via the vehicle of nobody really giving a shit who you are) is the next best thing. While I generally take pretty decent steps to protect my privacy *now* (and well enough for, say, the next 5-10 years), I generally figure it's only a matter of time before anyone who wants to can figure out pretty much anything they want to about me at whim. So I conduct myself in a way where, if my life were to truly become an open book, I wouldn't be ashamed of any of it. Call it the techno-atheist's version of judgment day:p
About the only thing I'd feel bad about are a few dozen usenet posts I wrote when I was going through my first run through university... I did *not* need to be such a bitch to people when I disagreed over Kirk vs. Picard. Also, sorry to CleverNickName for the handful of posts on alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die...
Well, that's cool, since you completely missed my point, and obviously don't know anything about the game. For example:
- A "full respec" in this game would be the same as changing your class & race in WoW. Would you pay 1000 gold to be able to change from being a level 80 Draeni Paladin to a level 80 Troll Mage? Because THAT is what a "full respec" in CO is like. The only thing that doesn't change is your name & gender. Tell me, how many days of playing WoW do I need to engage in before I can turn my one level 80 character of one race/class into another level 80 character? Oh, what's that you say, I can't, unless I do the faction transfer thing for real money? You mean I'd have to roll *another* character to experience *another* way of getting levels? Oh, what's that, you say - it would be quicker for me to just roll an alt rather than pay to respec completely into an entirely new character? Gee! It's almost as if that was... by design...
Further, in WoW, there is no "try before you buy" situation. I cannot get any idea - other than by reading forums or asking people - how good certain talents or abilities are before I get them. Can I do that in WoW without a full respec? In WoW, if I fumble finger and misclick when respeccing, can I unspend that point? What happens if I pick a talent that looks good but because of a tooltip erorr it actually sucks? In CO, I can try out any power before I buy it. It isn't perfect, but I can punch out a target dummy or get shot by a laser or duel another player to get at least some idea of how good/bad/useful/fun a power will be before I commit to it. And, I can sell off my most recent couple of powers (basically respeccing the last 5 or so levels of talents & powers) pretty cheaply if I need an undo button.
I'm not in favor of punishing noobs for making bad choices. I'm in favor of not making it so that anyone with 1 character at max level suddenly and cheaply has *every possible spec* at max level instantly available to them. If I have 1 character in WoW at level 80, do you think I should the ability to spend 100 gold every time I want to switch to be ANY class of ANY race without having to level it up? Because that's what you are arguing for here.
Further, the game has been out - officially - since September 1st. It is now September 16th. In that time, I have gotten 1 free full respec on all of my characters because of substantial changes made to one particular class of powers. I have seen respec costs drop somewhat. I have seen the policy on respecs go from "ONLY the last 10 choices can be respecced" to "you can respec all the way to zero, but it will cost you." The 280 days of playing figure - I don't even know where that comes from - but even if it is based on the drop-rates, this is an MMO, and given how things have changed in the last 15 days, I really think it's absurd to think things will stay the same for the next 265 of them, you know? Maybe I'm crazy, but as I said before, I just can't get alarmed over something I simply don't think is going to be an issue in the future given that so far it hasn't been an issue, and the things the devs have done have been in the "good" direction rather than the reverse.
Finally, what's with the bitterness? I'm "apologizing" for a system? Gosh, I thought I was explaining it - because it sure seems like you know absolutely nothing about it, but want to keep on making false assumptions about it and getting all up in arms over your misunderstandings. I never once mentioned doing research or interviewing people about the game, never once mentioned "go to the forums to learn about powers" or anything of the sort - every bit of learning I've talked about doing is stuff that anyone can do in the game itself. I suppose it's easier to get upset at someone when you just make shit up to get upset about, but it's really not particularly helpful, you know?
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I know you're going for "informative" or whatever, but seriously - even Amazon acknowledged that they fucked up big time by remote-nuking 1984, and reversed it. While you'll never know for sure (unless someone is dumb enough to risk their business by doing that again) if this device or any other has that capability, I think it's reasonable to think that most businesses making such devices don't want to shit where they eat by doing a known bad thing.
I have a Kindle, and when I turn the wireless feature off, I've had a single charge last for 2 weeks of reading averaging 2+ hours a day, at a pretty regular rate. With eInk displays, it's the number of page turns that eats power - slower readers might have better results.
A second reason is that the iPhone display, while nice, is still back-lit and still gives me headaches if I read off of it for extended periods of time. eInk looks more or less like paper and doesn't operate by shining a bright light in my face.
I'm not getting a flu shot because I think I'm going to die from it...
I'm getting a flu shot because I don't want to be sick as a dog from this thing and miss a week of work.
The $30 I spend (via insurance) on a flu shot every year pays for itself in that I'm not freaking the fuck out about catching up on work, not having to spend time I'm not at work laying in bed feeling miserable, and not having to shell out $15 a box (and show my ID thanks to meth makers) for pills that'll make me feel slightly less miserable.
I used to not get flu shots, and I got sick as a dog at least once a winter with whatever was going around. I now get flu shots and for the last 3 winters I haven't been sick with anything more than the sniffles, and I work in an office that seems to have plagues running through it at least once a quarter.
I read my Kindle in the tub all the time; I put it in a big ziploc baggie and it stays perfectly dry.
There are certainly many tweaks that would need to be done to make the set-up as painless as possible for as many people as possible, but the general thing this solves is that it lets people play "together" with any other player in the game, without forcing EVERYONE to be together in the same hot-spots. Maybe things as simple as any /universalzonechat text that has LFG, LFM or other key strings automatically gets routed to a universal LFG channel, or whatever.
When I think about things realistically, in WoW, while there may have been several thousand people on the server, at most I was directly playing with only 80 (battlegrounds) at most at any given time, and ONLY with 80 people chosen from the server/battlegroup my home server was in, so maybe 20k people at most I could possibly interact with, out of 12 million subscribers. The way Champions handles it, I am playing with a maximum of about 100 people at any given time, but I can, if I choose to move around instances, potentially play with all subscribers to Champions, not just the ones who happened to roll on my server.
I dunno, I found "/zone Looking for team to take on Telios' Tower" while I was in the instance for that mission pretty intuitive & obvious. When I would game late at night (off US prime time), recognizing that the population was sparser made shifting zones to be an obvious solution.
The best solution is make /zone reach all instances of a zone - and I'm pretty sure that, or something like that, will be happening in the near future.
Are you kidding?
Launching a bunch of consumable stuff into orbit cheaply would allow all kinds of projects to get underway that are currently hideously expensive because they involve very expensive launch.
Wanna go to Mars quickly? Launch a whole lot of fuel cannisters, food, water, whatever into space this way, then launch your crew vehicle traditionally. Water tanks are attached to the crew vehicle in orbit (to provide some radiation shielding), fuel pods are launched ahead for the craft to make a rendez-vous en route... Suddenly things like getting to Mars (or whatever other destination) get a LOT cheaper since you aren't having to launch food, fuel & other consumables conventionally.
If a Gates or Buffet type who want to change the world with their fortunes would get involved - half a billion is virtually pocket change to those sorts - I can think of a lot of worse things to spend the money on.
It seems to me like the problem isn't the game, but you - not being mean, but really, ask for groups in zone chat.
If you're in Canada and want a group for Telios' tower, just ask in zone. If you don't get any responses, look at your map, click the change instance button, and pick a different instance or one that has more people in it and ask again. There are tons of people in Canada who need to do the team instances in Canada, it only makes sense to ask about that in Canada. There is no ironforge because there's no need for it; there are trainers in most every zone, stores too, so people have very little need to go to a hub to ask for groups.
I knew nobody in CO - none of my cohorts from WoW have come over to CO yet, but over the month I've been playing, I've made "friends" with about 30 people, most play regularly, and have characters in 3 different supergroups that have another 50 or so people in each.
Again, not being mean, but if you're not meeting people in this game it's because you're going about it the wrong way.
And to think, those purple fingers came at the low, low cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives! It's also really great that, since Bush fucked up the prosecution of one "just" war (Afghanistan) to try and not fuck up a completely unprovoked one (Iraq), that in a few years we might get to go back in there and liberate whatever Afghanis have survived the first liberation ALL OVER AGAIN!
Isn't that just marvelous? I know all the people with purple fingers (and their children, many of whom don't have fingers, hands or arms thanks to Bush the Liberator) will be just totally thrilled when we come back! Yay! That is, unless they come over here, first, to let us know how happy they are having lost mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons in exchange for a few purple fingers and an elected puppet.
Seriously, if you think Bush waged war to get women the vote, you're stupid and/or insane. If you think those votes actually counted, you're a bit naive. And if you think that anything stable was created over there as a result of Bush's intervention, you're living in an alternate reality.
The AIDS in Africa thing I can sort of agree with, but you should have left it at that.
I don't know about that - I play lots of games at work that are intended to help me understand reality a lot more: epidemic simulations in which I tweak various factors, for example, sure feel like games to me, even if they're really for work. The simulation programs I've been using lately sure feel very similar to some of the Sim series of games.
Play can be used in lots of ways to get very useful things done - saying it's only for escaping reality is really giving play short shrift.
I homebrewed a set of scripts that would take data from Nike+, my daily pic of me in the same pose, outfit & lighting, and a nutritional spreadsheet I built and throw them on my blog. It's "automatic" in that every day it checks for updates in the folder I store the output/Nike's site.
Nothing fancy, just a little hackery to keep my skills sharp.
Well, it looks like I was right. Excellent troll - but really, if you want to improve the number of bites you get, your long game needs to be better. Instead of just saying "that's stupid" when people bite, you need to have something else to throw at them to keep them in the fight. "That's stupid," doesn't really give them anything to really respond to, and it tips your hand way too early. You have to make people think you actually believe the stuff you're saying - and that means being at least somewhat familiar with the common counter arguments.
I look forward to seeing your technique improve in the future - I rarely bite on trolls any more, so it seems like you might have potential.
I would absolutely suggest heavily political books, as long as they are well written examples of science fiction and fantasy.
There's a difference between needlessly stirring up controversy by recommending shitty books with a stupidly heavy-handed political/religious agenda to students, and encouraging discussion by having students read thoughtful books that may provide alternative viewpoints to what many students have been exposed to (whatever they are).
I'd avoid the gigantic books (pretty much anything but Snowcrash by Stephenson, for example) not because they're discouraging, but because let's face it, kids won't read the whole thing because they have 80 other things going on in any given day, and very large reads that are worth assigning deserve better than the 30 minutes at best the kids will be able to give 'em.
One of my nephews was recently in a sci-fi/fantasy class at his high school aimed at seeing how literature explores various key themes, and in this case the focus was on religious vs. secular attitudes. Half of the parents were enraged when the kids were given the "Left Behind" books to read, the other half were enraged when the kids were given "Revolt in 2100" by Heinlein. Personally, I was just disgusted that they couldn't think of books that were well written, but I absolutely think the discussion that it sparked was an important one.
It's pretty fucking ironic that you're making that argument - and being modded insightful! - on a website that was primarily started and is now largely populated by rabid advocates of open source software, specifically an OS that was originally built to scratch an itch, the primary mover behind it being a guy who presumably could have made a lot more money with it than he has...
As to the rest of your point - especially the nonsense about healthcare - are you actually that stupid, or are you parodying the libertarian bullshit that gets spewed here regularly? It's hard to tell sometimes.
In case you're serious, the counter to your ridiculous argument is covered in the post you made: The will to do things comes not from mere profit; if it did, you wouldn't have "bored clerks with 1 inch fingernails" muddling through a day, because they'd be totally fucking psyched over a paycheck. The will to do things comes because you WANT to do them in the first place, and would do them for free if you didn't have to worry about survival. People who are only doing something for a financial motive are among the least productive, least useful, least satisfied people in existence. People who are doing something because they *NEED* to, deep down in their souls, are the ones who'll change the world.
Profit is great, but when the quest for profits and the protection of same wind up harming other people - you know, the health insurance companies and managed care companies denying claims of people in order to make sure they make a profit - it's gone too far. Ask anyone who is massively accomplished in the world - anyone who has REALLY made a difference, who has REALLY developed something that has changed the world, and I daresay money is one of the last things they'll mention as a driving force (though, as often happens, they make a ton of it in the course of scratching their itch.)
If you are serious, I feel very, very sorry for you. You have such an incredibly limited and mundane view of humanity. It must be terribly depressing to think of yourself simply as a greedy thing bent on acquisition.
If you're spoofing, well done.
How in the hell is a joke about immortality in a thread about a discovery about aging offtopic?
The joke wasn't particularly funny - obvious and all that - but it's certainly on topic.
This always seems to come as a shock to people on slashdot, but... Not everyone thinks like you do, or does the same things for the same reason.
For instance, some people (me, and several other folks I know) are interested in getting data on their progress when exercising - it can be interesting to see if subjective experiences of a workout/performance/improvement over time match up with the objective information. It can also be a great motivator - I started on the "couch to 5k" running thing a while back and it was really interesting to look back over the data from runs and see at what time & distance points my pulse was shooting up and at what points it slowed down, or how long it actually took me to cool down to a normal heart rate after a run, etc. It's also been motivating for a few of my friends and family as well as myself - I have a fitness blog that tracks my progress automatically, and when I *don't* run, I've gotten email from my mom asking me if I skipped the day. My father - who is 84 - promised me that for every mile I run, he'll walk. My best friend, who was morbidly obese, said that having photographic evidence of me dropping 20 lbs., and who got to see it happen gradually, said seeing the progress like that helped motivate her - she's dropped almost 40 lbs. in the last year. My ongoing efforts - tracking changes I've made to nutrition, exercise, stretching, all supplemented with data - it's been an interesting project for me to work on. You may find such data pointless, but that's you, not everyone else.
As to your reasons why people should work out... When I run, I don't *want* to socialize with people. I run for me. I run to forget the stresses of work. I run to not have to think about other people at all. I run to enjoy the way my body feels as I crank out the miles. I run to think things over. I run and have time to listen to things I don't have the time to listen to at other times of the day. I have puh-lenty of socialization going on in my life, plenty of opportunities to hang out with people in many capacities, and exercise is my refuge from that. You may feel like your time spent working out is time for you to be social, and that's great for you if it makes you happy, but I would be really annoyed if someone tried to chat with me while I was getting my me time on the paths.
You seem to think that tracking the data is incompatible with more "human" reasons for working out, and in my case, and in the cases of many other people, that's just not the case - I'd say it's helped me form better connections with some people at best, and at worst it's simply entertaining for me. I'd suggest learning how to step outside of your own viewpoint and try to see things from different points of view - just as you find the cyclists ignoring the rest of the world around them depressing, I find it a bit sad whenever I see someone who can't seem to understand that other people are different from themselves.
City of Heroes mission architect lets players create missions & campaigns that can be do most of the stuff that the developer-made missions & campaigns can do. Within the first 48 hours, if I remember right, there was more player developed content than there was developer created content. 99.99% of it was, doubtless, absolute shit, but some of it was decent, and some was really quite impressive & interesting.
The problems with CoH's system were:
1) Because it was just a virtual reality type sim in game - that was more or less the canon explanation of it - it didn't really matter to players on any kind of meaningful level; it required a double suspension of disbelief. First to just get into the CoH game itself, but then to get into the game inside the game - not an easy task. If they'd just made the explanation something like "the Portal corporation has opened up a bunch of new dimensions, go scout them out for us. Be warned, some might be a little... odd..." that would have been better.
2) They gave in-game benefits (badges/achievements) for content creation, which was just begging to have the rating system abused. Cartels were formed that would vote up/down MA creations just so people could get badges or to keep people from getting badges. People were going to make content no matter what - no need to give a special incentive. In fact, I daresay that the people who were motivated by the badges/achievements who wouldn't have made content otherwise probably didn't make anything terribly interesting. By all means, have a rating system, but remove the incentive for people to game it.
3) They allowed it to be a way to farm levels & loot. You could make missions that had absurd rewards for absolutely no risk. It was possible to have passive, completely invulnerable NPCs follow the players around and make them completely immune to damage. It was possible to fill the missions entirely with opponents who were trivial to kill but who gave ridiculous amounts of experience. The worst of the offenders in this case had missions in which a crowd of these low-difficulty-high-XP opponents would huddle around BOMBS, and you could just shoot the bomb to make all the opponents die, yielding full xp. To top it off, you got a lot of tickets, which were redeemable for prizes after completing the missions, those prizes being recipes for things that could be sold for a ridiculous amount of in-game money. People farmed the hell out of these missions for that purpose, and were able to get characters from level 1 to level 50 (the cap) in as little as 4 hours in some cases. A lot more thinking needed to go into how to prevent missions from being exploited - even if it was just a hard cap of "only this much xp will be allowed to be accrued over x amount of time in player-created missions."
Fix those problems and you can have an explosion of creativity that won't wreck games. You'll also have an explosion of really stupid content created, but it'll be more reasonable to sift through since there won't be an incentive to create bad content to gain advantage.
Attraction is almost never rational, or, at least, the underlying bits are rational if you think about it but there isn't always a lot of conscious thought involved. Thus, even if the underlying bits make perfect sense, it's still not rational as being rational requires thinking.
Anyway, as a woman, I'll offer this bit of insight that may explain part of this (not very) baffling phenomena. I may get my chick card revoked for sharing this, but my ties to the nerd community are more important than the duties of sisterhood, so here goes:
Most of us tend to like guys who aren't self-important assholes. That means guys who can have fun, often at their own expense. So, guys who can get into a game like Rock Band and act like fools at it in a charming way are probably not self-important assholes. Assuming they are fair to middling in all other respects, demonstrating a capacity for merriment with plastic instruments can, therefore, tip the balance and lead to nookie.
Interestingly, many guys I've met who can play guitar (and ALL of the guys I've met who find it necessary to whine that Rock Band and Guitar Hero aren't REALLY playing guitar) are, in fact, self-important assholes who take themselves way too seriously, and thus almost infinitely unattractive.
I agree - the fraction I'd be happy with would be 9/10ths. Totally reasonable!
Being serious, this is only indirectly for end users, and people bitching about slow connections here would be like me bitching in a NASA thread about how it isn't fair that NASA has crafts going 20,000 MPH while my bicycle is still stuck at a max of about 30mph. Different toys for different uses. This is clearly an infrastructure tool, one that offers much better speeds and lower costs of deployment than the current stuff.
That said, I'd really be happy if I could just get FIOS where I live. It is absurd to me that, living in downtown Chicago, I can't get anything better than Comcast cable.
It's the "social progressives" of today who are somehow responsible for when, in the 1940's & 50's the German constitution was re-written to forbid Nazi imagery?
Given that you apparently think the "social progressives" of today have access to time travel, I'd suggest that you have more urgent things to worry about than censorship, namely finding a good psychiatrist.
Interchangeable? No, no, and again no! The Mac store people are absolutely not interchangeable with other mall people. Can a Mac store associate make me an Orange Julius? No. Can he or she pierce my ears? No. Can any of them even build a teddy-bear for me? No. Make me some corndogs? No. Sell me 20 different cases for my cell phone? No. Convince me that the boots I just tried on are kicky? Probably, but then again, they usually wear Chucks, so possibly not.
Hardly interchangeable.
Not all of the Trek games were shit: 25th Anniversary was REALLY good, and captured the feel of the show VERY nicely.
I also liked - well, I liked the idea of, though the execution was lacking - Birth of the Federation. It was an interesting game, and had it been moddable to make some parts more reasonable, that would have been great. The problem was that the balance was really, really off in some places (send in the birds of prey! Everything dies before it can fight back; who cares if you can't stay cloaked while firing if everything's dead since it's turn based, not RTS combat?), and in other places, even if you were 50x larger than your opponent's empire you didn't have much of an advantage.
There was another game - an RTS, I can't remember the name of it - that was pretty fun to play also. I remember one mission was going after some kind of Romulan power source.
if you're driving... ... and you have headphones in, you have bigger problems than fucking around with buttons, namely that you're an idiot.
Seriously, what makes people think that deafening themselves while operating a multi-ton vehicle at high speeds is a good idea?
(Feel the same way about overly loud music in cars. My lawn; you're on it.)
Within 25 years, it's going to be a trivial thing to just upload a picture of someone to google facesearch (or whatever else) and instantly have results for every single picture of the person/people in that photo sent back, probably including a whole bunch of information about the other people or places in that photo (who you associate with or where you go and why are relatively easy to get). Probably such a system would be capable of identifying individual items in the picture/on your person, and a number of other things as well - things most people wouldn't notice.
While probably less likely, it wouldn't be shocking if there were software capable of building profiles for people based on publicly available information, building a linguistic profile based on publicly available writings, and then coming up with a reasonable guess as to who wrote what on supposedly "anonymous" boards or sites, or whatever else you care to mention.
Privacy is dead. Anonymity (via the vehicle of nobody really giving a shit who you are) is the next best thing. While I generally take pretty decent steps to protect my privacy *now* (and well enough for, say, the next 5-10 years), I generally figure it's only a matter of time before anyone who wants to can figure out pretty much anything they want to about me at whim. So I conduct myself in a way where, if my life were to truly become an open book, I wouldn't be ashamed of any of it. Call it the techno-atheist's version of judgment day :p
About the only thing I'd feel bad about are a few dozen usenet posts I wrote when I was going through my first run through university... I did *not* need to be such a bitch to people when I disagreed over Kirk vs. Picard. Also, sorry to CleverNickName for the handful of posts on alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die...
Well, that's cool, since you completely missed my point, and obviously don't know anything about the game. For example:
- A "full respec" in this game would be the same as changing your class & race in WoW. Would you pay 1000 gold to be able to change from being a level 80 Draeni Paladin to a level 80 Troll Mage? Because THAT is what a "full respec" in CO is like. The only thing that doesn't change is your name & gender. Tell me, how many days of playing WoW do I need to engage in before I can turn my one level 80 character of one race/class into another level 80 character? Oh, what's that you say, I can't, unless I do the faction transfer thing for real money? You mean I'd have to roll *another* character to experience *another* way of getting levels? Oh, what's that, you say - it would be quicker for me to just roll an alt rather than pay to respec completely into an entirely new character? Gee! It's almost as if that was... by design...
Further, in WoW, there is no "try before you buy" situation. I cannot get any idea - other than by reading forums or asking people - how good certain talents or abilities are before I get them. Can I do that in WoW without a full respec? In WoW, if I fumble finger and misclick when respeccing, can I unspend that point? What happens if I pick a talent that looks good but because of a tooltip erorr it actually sucks? In CO, I can try out any power before I buy it. It isn't perfect, but I can punch out a target dummy or get shot by a laser or duel another player to get at least some idea of how good/bad/useful/fun a power will be before I commit to it. And, I can sell off my most recent couple of powers (basically respeccing the last 5 or so levels of talents & powers) pretty cheaply if I need an undo button.
I'm not in favor of punishing noobs for making bad choices. I'm in favor of not making it so that anyone with 1 character at max level suddenly and cheaply has *every possible spec* at max level instantly available to them. If I have 1 character in WoW at level 80, do you think I should the ability to spend 100 gold every time I want to switch to be ANY class of ANY race without having to level it up? Because that's what you are arguing for here.
Further, the game has been out - officially - since September 1st. It is now September 16th. In that time, I have gotten 1 free full respec on all of my characters because of substantial changes made to one particular class of powers. I have seen respec costs drop somewhat. I have seen the policy on respecs go from "ONLY the last 10 choices can be respecced" to "you can respec all the way to zero, but it will cost you." The 280 days of playing figure - I don't even know where that comes from - but even if it is based on the drop-rates, this is an MMO, and given how things have changed in the last 15 days, I really think it's absurd to think things will stay the same for the next 265 of them, you know? Maybe I'm crazy, but as I said before, I just can't get alarmed over something I simply don't think is going to be an issue in the future given that so far it hasn't been an issue, and the things the devs have done have been in the "good" direction rather than the reverse.
Finally, what's with the bitterness? I'm "apologizing" for a system? Gosh, I thought I was explaining it - because it sure seems like you know absolutely nothing about it, but want to keep on making false assumptions about it and getting all up in arms over your misunderstandings. I never once mentioned doing research or interviewing people about the game, never once mentioned "go to the forums to learn about powers" or anything of the sort - every bit of learning I've talked about doing is stuff that anyone can do in the game itself. I suppose it's easier to get upset at someone when you just make shit up to get upset about, but it's really not particularly helpful, you know?