There is freedom - if you don't want to have to take classes in things you aren't interested in, don't go to college. If you don't want to have to fulfill the requirements it takes to get a degree, don't go to college.
People who say "I want what I want, when I want it, how I want it," can do that when they order fast food, but with an education, sorry, not an acceptable attitude: you want the degree, you have to do what the people granting the degree want you to do. If you don't like the way one school does it, find another school that does. It isn't like people *have* to go to college, and it isn't like they *have* to go to a particular school.
Also, this is the reason that most schools have a core curricula and then allow electives - it gives people some choices and leeway, but also acknowledges that sometimes they know best what kind of things are essential for an education. By definition, going to a university is not a relationship of equals - the instructors damn well *should* know their field better than the students, and yes, they should be able to say "these are things you need to know, even if you don't want to."
When I went back to school, I approached it with the attitude that there would be some classes that bore me to tears, but that I would take those courses and pretend that there was an important reason for them - I would look for the reason that people thought they were essential. At the least, I would satisfy myself that there wasn't anything I needed from them, but at best I had a few epiphanies that helped me really expand my horizons. I guess I just have a positive attitude.
Sure they do. You looked at the Norse mythology stuff because you were interested in it and wanted to - do you regularly wiki subjects that are absolutely of no interest to you? Do you regularly put *effort* into studying those things to demonstrate a mastery of the material? Taking a class and being required to put some effort into the work will require that you spend time being exposed to things and working on them when at first blush you might have blown them off.
You're also taking a very geek-centric view of the world. If someone already likes to learn, they are more likely to surf wiki; geeks usually like to learn new things. But what about people who've grown up in environments that actively, in some cases, discourage intellectual curiosity? Where you get your ass kicked for going to school? Those kinds of people - the ones who make it out and can go to college - can get more actively exposed to new ideas; they may initially go to college to get a better job, but in the process they can be exposed to a lot of things, and maybe discover a joy in learning that had been repressed.
The school I went to for my recent degree was a state school, not remotely difficult to get into, and not all that remarkable for anything; almost exactly the kind of school you're talking about. Probably 90% of the students in each class I took were just there to mark time. The in-state cost of classes was about 5k/year, with almost all of that being waived for most in-state students if they didn't have means. I applied for tons of scholarships (being a minority and female helps a lot) and wound up actually making about 3k a semester just for writing a lot of letters to various scholarship organizations.
The remaining 10%:
- Joined the honors college, various "societies" (psi chi and stuff like that) and numerous different student organizations as a way to get more out of the experience. - Did research. Every semester (and during the summer breaks, sometimes) I worked in various labs around campus, getting as much exposure to different research programs as I could. When it came time to get letters of recommendation, I was limited to submitting 5; I had to cull 6 really good professors who *asked* me if I would take a letter from them because they really wanted to do something good for me. - Volunteered. I tutored students in various courses that I'd aced, which helped me get a deeper understanding of the materials. - Did independent study. For one of my professors, I wound up doing a ton of legwork going to old movie theaters around Chicago and finding about their various incarnations and writing about it - it was a blast (got to see a lot of movies for free), and I learned some interesting history.
If you didn't want to do those things, that was totally fine - you could, as I said, just phone it in and get your degree. But if you wanted more you could get it and make it happen. Several times I just approached professors and asked if I could get a rundown on what it was they did, and if I could work with them if that interested me; most were thrilled, though some were too busy to take on new students in anything but an official capacity.
We are not empty vessels, waiting passively to have an education given to us - you have to work for it, and want it. It's probably easier to get a degree with minimal effort now than it used to be, but a student that wants it can sure as hell get it, and not expensively.
(Yeah, I'm pretty proud of my achievements going back, but I'd say I earned that right.)
That's a bad teacher, and certainly not a universal thing. I've had Maths classes that were taught by egomaniacs, and I've had fluffy basket-weaving type classes taught by the marquee experts in their fields who were completely down to earth. Get good instructors, and it'll be great. I'd say that my experience of ego-freaks in electives vs. ego-freaks in required courses was about the same, so it isn't that one's more likely than another.
Potentially benefit massively from in ways completely removed from work? Yes.
More education gives people a more broad experience of the world in that it opens up areas they may not have otherwise been exposed to. Sometimes this is frustrating (witness many/.ers bitching about how they had to take english lit classes when they just wanted to be engineers) and obnoxious, but it helps folks to avoid the tendency to becoming hyperspecialized drones.
A lot of people who were self-taught think that anyone who wants to know about something will just go look it up - but usually these self-taught individuals are completely unaware of huge swaths of ideas and terrain that have been explored because they weren't required to take classes in subjects that initially didn't interest them.
Full disclosure: I was sort of like that myself - I absolutely loathed the idea of certain classes that were just not interesting to me. Then I grew up, and discovered that there's more to conversation than whatever was on TV last night, there's more to life than work and talking about work, and in fact, I've been turned on to many new activities and interests thanks to some of those "useless" classes.
It also wound up having a TREMENDOUS impact on my career: I used to work in tech, and when I went back to school I wound up surveying a couple of psychology courses, and it turns out that the "expreimental design in psychology" course that I took was INCREDIBLY fascinating. Trying to design experiments with human subjects - subjects who can and will lie, try to wreck the experiment, or otherwise do the least amount of work to get their pay - is VERY challenging, VERY interesting, and VERY fun. Even better for me, I was able to bring my technology skills into a field where there is not a lot of technological know-how, and so some incredibly obvious things I developed and implemented wound up being very valuable to my lab, and helped to really accelerate my career; despite coming to the field I now work in so late in my life/career, I've been promoted several times and in the 1.5 years that I've been out of school since getting my new degree, I've been made a director at my lab.
The point to this is that we are not insects, we are not our jobs, and learning new things - even things that are possibly frivolous - is tremendous. EVERYONE in the world can benefit from learning new things, especially the people who don't have the finances to attend more expensive schools; I'll say those people are probably the ones who benefit most from exposure to new ideas and ways of being.
If your college degree is only helping in your job, or if you're going to college solely to get a better job - well, that's certainly your right, but you're really missing out on 90% of what an education can (and IMO, should) be.
Robots do REALLY well in predictable situations, but not as well in conditions that are unknown. It's possible that some very simple kinds of robots could be landed to do things - maybe diggers or things that could harvest certain materials - but I think the cost of developing robots capable of dealing with the unknown would be pretty high. Much cheaper, and easier, would be to just build modular things that could be quickly assembled into usable structures, I think.
Massive quantities of supplies (and the equipment to build hydroponic or other renewable food supplies) from numerous care-packages sent from Earth.
I see no problem with the idea of sending several tons of stuff every month over the course of 10 years in cheap (slow) trajectories before sending a team to Mars. When they got there they'd have quite a bit of material to be able to use to build shelters & set up hydroponic farms, & basically have a spartan but survivable place. Even if hydroponics or other farming methods weren't possible, they could survive on tons of freeze-dried rations sent by dumb couriers.
Water is a problem, but again - tons of water sent (or, eventually, if it turns out to be feasible, scavenged from the planet itself) ahead of time. It could also double as a radiation barrier with some clever design. And water will need to be brought along anyway with the colonists - LOTS of water - to act as a radiation shield for the ship.
Though, to be honest, the real problem here is that we just won't try to develop real propulsion systems for use in space - Orion (not the new Orion, but the one from the 60's using nukes for propulsion) would be fantastic out in space...
You can double click on your quest and it shows you where your quests are by shifting your minimap. You can also hit "m" and it shows a larger map with the areas your quests are in circled in green - an arrow would be nice, but it's absolutely not necessary. I didn't play at all in the beta but got in with the headstart, and I have not had *any* problems figuring out where to go or what to do with quests using the built in features.
Quest/kill stealing is not a problem... everyone who does a reasonable amount of damage to an opponent will get credit for it. I've never once lost a quest to someone who "kill stole" or whatever.
You can also see "future powers" I believe by having it show "unavailable" powers in the power list. I am not 100% sure, but I think I remember doing this - it made things a lot easier.
Honestly, it sounds like your problems with the game stem more from not knowing the UI than the UI itself; there are weak spots, to be sure, but the things you mention are, by and large, not actually insoluble.
Better in that you have more different areas that you can change - face and body are much more customizeable, you can add more colors than COH allows, more material options, can even change finger/hand/feet a lot more. There is also the ability to change the "style" your character walks around with - in CoH, no matter how beastial you make yourself look, you're still mincing around if female, or sort of stomping about if male; in Champions, you can be "heroic" (kind of "Yeah, I'm badass"), average, or crouched around and kind of running on all fours like a beast. Also, the graphics are VASTLY superior to CoH.
Worse in that you don't have quite as many options with regard to patterns or wardrobe choices as CoH does. But, I imagine that will be getting fixed pronto as they add more and more options.
Overall, Champions is vastly more customizable, with the only shortfall being something that's obviously temporary, and not always in CoH's favor. For example, Champions gives you a LOT more non-human options, a LOT more options for various wing sets, capes to begin with, etc.
I've made a character who looks EXACTLY like Marvin the Martian (pipe-stem arms, comically oversized head), another that looks pretty close to Bugs Bunny (Marvin needs a nemesis...), made another that looks like a zergling, and so on. SO much more potential than CoH has.
You're missing the point, but that's OK. Here it is in condensed form:
If you (the general you) believe that you are so smart that your depression is caused by seeing societies ills, and by having to deal with the mundane requirements of civilization (bills, banks, whatever), then why aren't you smart enough to either:
1) Figure out a way to fix some of societies ills so that you aren't depressed by it 2) Figure out a way to use societies ills to make enough money to leave society so that you aren't depressed by it 3) Muster up the motivation to work within society to make enough money to leave society behind (in a way that requires only hard work and extreme frugality) so that you aren't depressed by it
The answer is: you ain't that smart, and maybe you should get the fuck over yourself. Smart people *solve* their problems, whether by changing the conditions they find themselves in or changing themselves to better handle the conditions.
On the topic of Fuck You Money: FYM is whatever it takes for the individual in question to be able to say Fuck You to having to work while still meeting their needs and wants that require money. For someone with incredibly modest desires, this might be very close to zero. For someone who has more traditionally American notions of consumption, this could be into the $100 million range as you suggest. I had my magic number, you have yours, someone else has theirs - it's not my place to tell people what it is. What I offered was one way that is very nearly foolproof (assuming one has the discipline for it) of making enough money in a reasonably short period of time that will enable them to walk away from the burdens of western civilization if they are willing to live within certain reasonable conditions.
Given that the person I was responding to was insisting that they are so frightfully intelligent that they cannot possibly be meant to stay in this mundane world, ????? should not be an opaque or unknown concept to them - they should be smart enough to think of the answer. Plenty of incredibly stupid people make tons of money, so this shouldn't be a problem for people so much smarter, right?
However, assuming that the precious snowflake in question cannot put his or her vast intellect to the task of finding some truly great and remunerative idea, or has no skills there are some very simple things that can be done to generate the funds to drop out of society if one is truly motivated and willing to delay gratification for 5-10 years.
1) Cut your expenses to the bone. I don't mean "Live like you make 20k a year when you make 40k" - I mean "Live like you make 6k a year." Seriously, it's possible. It's not fun, it's not comfortable, but it's possible. Even in a city. A friend of mine in Chicago lives on a little under 6k a year while he's in school - he lives in a "commune," grows much of his own food, and ruthlessly exploits coupons when he goes shopping for what he can't grow. If you have kids or a family or other obligations, I guess it's tough luck for you - perhaps you should have considered the whole "drop out of society" thing before having kids.
2) Work like a mercenary. Get a job. Get another job. Get three jobs if you can swing it. Use that glob of jelly between your ears to get skills that will pay. Even if you can't get a job-job, there are PLENTY of things that can be done to get money that don't involve anyone hiring you. I have a friend with 4 jobs - 1 full time, 1 weekend job, and 2 that are "telecommute" project gigs that he farms out to people in India and gives them half the pay. Sales jobs (100% commission) are always hiring since there's very little expense in bringing a new person in, and those can be VERY lucrative if you're willing to make several hundred phone calls a day and develop a skin so thick it transforms the audio-waves for "fuck you!" into "Yes, I *would* like you to tell me more about your fabulous product/service!" I know people who are functionally retarded who make absurd livings in sales because they worked like animals for the first 3-5 years to get good at it.
3) Save everything in safe vehicles that will match inflation or at least not get totally fucked by it.
In 5-10 years of living like this you can amass - easily, if you're really working hard - $250,000-500,000.
Then take that money and move somewhere with an incredibly low cost of living where living on 5-6k a year will actually be like living on 50-60k a year in a city in the US. I know several people who have retired to various south-east asian countries and live *quite* well on interest from less than $1,000,000 USD in assets.
My point here is that if someone is complaining that they are *too smart* for this benighted world, and that this is causing them depression, then they either aren't trying hard enough to drop out of it properly or (much more likely) they aren't nearly as smart as they think.
If I sound like I'm mocking people with the "I'm too smart to function in this world," mentality it's because I am. They're really funny!
Someone who is smart *makes* a place for themselves rather than bitching a moaning about how the world doesn't fit.
If you're so smart and having a 9-5 job, paying bills, etc. doesn't work for you, why haven't you figured out a way to not have to do those things? Survey says: You aren't nearly as smart as you think you are. Someone who is smart will figure out how to game the system and have fun with it, rather than turning into a morose sad-sack who sits at home shaking his tiny fist at the rest of the world, convinced that if only everyone else were smarter, they'd GET IT!
Making "fuck you" money is EASY to do if you really want to, and having that kind of money lets you opt out of many of the things you're complaining about.
Truly smart people don't see problems as something to get depressed about but as things to be understood and solved, subverted or worked around, and they enjoy doing it because it's play.
There are a large number of rather intelligent people who are certainly clued into the way the world works who aren't depressed. I daresay, in fact, that many of the brightest lights in humanity have been smart and happy; curious characters who are quite well aware of how the world works, but are able to find it fascinating rather than depressing, or who take joy in playing with the system of the world.
Chemical imbalances aside, I'd suggest that if someone were *truly* functioning at the high end of the cognitive range for humans, they'd be smart enough to figure out how to enjoy life rather than mope around about it. Being able to reframe painful experiences into good things is, I'd say, a hallmark of emotional stability and high intelligence coupled with good adaptability and problem solving skills.
(By "reframe" I don't mean self-deception - I mean being able to explore painful experiences from a viewpoint that takes what's good out of them and use that to make yourself better. Not "grudgingly, bitterly stronger and able to cope" but I mean, with joy, transcending the negative experience, turning it into and opportunity to grow beyond what one might have been otherwise.)
No, no - the midichlorians are just like, say, critters around a food source - they're an indicator that something is there, but they are not the actual food source. By counting the number, you can tell how big the food source might be, but you aren't actually measuring it.
Well, what I really want is a "phone" that's also a computer and links seamlessly with whatever networks I want to use. So keep that in mind while I describe my perfect "phone":
1) I don't have to think about charging it. This can mean that it is charged wirelessly/beamed power, or it can mean that it runs on something that is essentially endless/minimal maintenance.
2) I don't want to be able to lose it or misplace it. This probably means it would need to be implanted or somehow integrated into clothing.
3) It must give me "augmented reality" overlays - hook into my glasses or smart contact lenses (or into a chip implanted in my eyes) and give me data that way. I *really* want something that can display various information on demand (time, temp, whatever), but also that will enhance my extant senses - maybe a chemical detector built in so I can analyze the air around me, or maybe enhanced audio reception that might recognize certain sounds around me and alert me to them/give me a visual reading of where they're coming from, or maybe facial recognition software that'll tell me who I'm looking at and whatever info they share with me etc. Maps and the like would be nice, too. While we're at it, improve my vision to the infrared and ultra violet as well.
4) Subvocalization capability. I don't want to have to speak aloud to use it - just subvocalize and it'll pick up what I'm saying. Essentially telepathy.
5) Connectivity roughly similar to what I can get with a regular connection to the internet now - none of this edge shit. Even if it was only as good as my current wifi connection at home, that would be a LOT better than my current phone's capability.
6) Agent software that would be capable of handling trivial incoming calls automatically and summarizing them for me via text ("Your mom called, she wants to know your flight details, so I gave her the info; she'll pick you up at the airport." "Your boss had the following notes on your project..." "A telemarketer called, so I played them the 'brown note' and had you placed on the Do Not Call list..."). It should be context aware - it should know that I'm in a movie theater (why should I have to turn it off manually? Just have the theater beam a signal letting smart phones know that they need to not make any noise at all...) and if it's an absolute emergency, I should get a flashing red light in my eye or something like that rather than a ring or vibrate. It should have different screening functions for different levels of people - if I'm working on something important and a guy I went out with once or twice but don't particularly like calls, it should say "She's working, leave a message" and *absolutely* not bother me with it until I want to deal with that. If it's an emergency, again, it should know that I'll want to take the call.
7) It should be capable of - if I want - recording absolutely everything around me, in multiple spectra.
Actually, I don't even want to have to think about it, really - it should just be something that's more or less omnipresent but in the background, unobtrusive unless I want to notice it. Just like my voice, I don't really think about my capability to speak unless I'm actively speaking to someone - the phone is just a way of projecting speech, right? With the augmented reality stuff, it should be entirely customizable - on, off, anything in between, set it up how I want it. With connectivity I should be able to turn it on, turn it off (even force it to stay off for awhile so I can enjoy being "natural").
I don't think any of this is too much to ask for - certainly we'll have the capability to do all that (at least) in the next 50 years or so.
In my mind, I've simply decided that the midichlorians themselves don't give the powers, but rather a secondary effect of whatever the Force actually is. Basically, they're critters that are attracted to Force, so if you have more Force you have more midichlorians.
Actually, getting deeper into this - maybe Force is the manifestation of energy that comes from a universe higher up than the one Star Wars takes place in. It's literally inexplicable because to understand it you'd have to be part of that higher order universe. Midichlorians could be the critters that feed on Force in that higher order universe, and they have components that appear in the lower order universe that we see in the films. Because Force and whatever the Midichlorians happen to be are in an entirely different universe, one that is by definition impossible to explain, the Jedi can't come up with a perfect theory for them, and also simply transferring them from one person to another won't do anything but piss them off and make them leave to go find a better source.
Jedi and Sith individuals, being loci for the Force, are sensitive to this extra-universal energy and can use it to alter the laws of physics on a localized basis, leading to all kinds of special abilities. Telekinesis and super speed/reflexes are trivial to explain away. Mind tricks and seeing the future can be explained - in that higher order universe, time is just a physical dimension that can be moved through at will, where all possible futures for the lower order universes can be examined. The Jedi or Sith just "copies and pastes" a mind-state from an alternate universe onto their victim - a mind-state in which the victim made the choice the Jedi or Sith wants them to make. Some species may not exist in alternate universes, or maybe they have some sort of quantum connection to all their other minds, and thus they are immune. Reading the future is easy - they just get glimpses of possible/likely futures from the one above 'em.
It takes a LOT of training to be any good at that stuff - similar to biofeedback techniques in our world. Most people can, if they practice a lot, make their blood pressure rise or fall a little bit with biofeedback training; they don't know *how* they're doing it, but by doing it over and over they get better and better at it. Some people get REALLY good at it and can raise or lower their body temperature a bit, change their pulse, etc. - but that takes decades of discipline. The Jedi and Sith get their powers the same way - they learn over time how to make certain things happen, first it's difficult, but as they get better it becomes easier and they're able to do more stuff, eventually doing it almost by reflex.
All of the above might seem excessive, but dammit, I needed to find some way to make midichlorians not suck!
The people complaining that the ideas discussed above won't appeal to everyone are missing the point - the OP is talking about being able to have smaller, niche "biggish but not massively" multiplayer games that will be able to give the people who like whatever kind of idea a place to play.
Having lots of smaller MMOs out there with a smaller investment of effort to set up means that designers can take risks and experiment. I really loved the age of MUDs when you could try out dozens of different games and find some that had interesting mechanics. Granted, there are a lot of clones or stock models, but there were some real gems.
I'm monkeying around with some OSS MMO engines & clients right now and they're really quite a pain in the ass to make work. However, once they've become more stable and usable, I imagine there will be a burst of creativity just like we saw with MUDs, where people can make games that cater to many, many playstyles.
1) No single *human* mind can handle such things and keep them in mind perfectly. Computers are not subject to human limitations on memory. Keeping all the data on the design of a microchip in memory might be impossible for a human, but it is trivial for a computer.
2) Humans don't understand how they work (very well) and are only able to indirectly modify their own programming, not directly modify it. For example, I find myself easily distracted sometimes when working on particular aspects of my work - I can try to train myself to ignore outside distractions, but I cannot simply turn off my ability to perceive those outside distractions.
3) Even a less than average intelligence human can explain ways in which it could be smarter, if not actually make themselves smarter. Combined with essentially unlimited memory and the ability to modify its own programming, an AI with an IQ of about 50 would probably be able to eventually bootstrap its way to becoming an AI of essentially unmeasurable intelligence. Even if it couldn't actually modify itself to become more intelligent, it wouldn't need to: it would simply create many, many copies of itself, modify each one slightly, and engage in an evolutionary process.
A computer intelligence will NOT be the same as a human intelligence - human intelligence was shaped by millions of years of biological evolution on Earth. A computer intelligence will not have that heritage; it will be a discontinuity from biological intelligence, with entirely different strengths and weaknesses.
Just watch out for the ones that are public and allow unrestricted access to their methods. Some of them have some really nasty bugs that may cause an unrecoverable system error.
So give the compliment that *she* looks beautiful to you, even if sometimes her clothing might not. And, to be honest, if you're dating people who do that, as I said, you're dating emotional cripples who use children's tactics to get their needs met. Male or female, people who use such tactics in their relationships for such things as compliments will also likely have a similar level of emotional maturity in other areas.
You're also being a bit wide with your comments when you say "women fish or compliments. It's their thing" even though you qualify it with your own experience (which I'm sure encompasses a representative sample of woman-kind, so that your global statements aren't just misogyny, right?)
Why marry someone so petty and manipulative that they're the kind of person who would put someone they ostensibly love into a no-win situation such as that? My reply was based on the assumption that people weren't marrying emotional cripples or people who are developmentally stuck at approximately age 10.
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There is freedom - if you don't want to have to take classes in things you aren't interested in, don't go to college. If you don't want to have to fulfill the requirements it takes to get a degree, don't go to college.
People who say "I want what I want, when I want it, how I want it," can do that when they order fast food, but with an education, sorry, not an acceptable attitude: you want the degree, you have to do what the people granting the degree want you to do. If you don't like the way one school does it, find another school that does. It isn't like people *have* to go to college, and it isn't like they *have* to go to a particular school.
Also, this is the reason that most schools have a core curricula and then allow electives - it gives people some choices and leeway, but also acknowledges that sometimes they know best what kind of things are essential for an education. By definition, going to a university is not a relationship of equals - the instructors damn well *should* know their field better than the students, and yes, they should be able to say "these are things you need to know, even if you don't want to."
When I went back to school, I approached it with the attitude that there would be some classes that bore me to tears, but that I would take those courses and pretend that there was an important reason for them - I would look for the reason that people thought they were essential. At the least, I would satisfy myself that there wasn't anything I needed from them, but at best I had a few epiphanies that helped me really expand my horizons. I guess I just have a positive attitude.
Sure they do. You looked at the Norse mythology stuff because you were interested in it and wanted to - do you regularly wiki subjects that are absolutely of no interest to you? Do you regularly put *effort* into studying those things to demonstrate a mastery of the material? Taking a class and being required to put some effort into the work will require that you spend time being exposed to things and working on them when at first blush you might have blown them off.
You're also taking a very geek-centric view of the world. If someone already likes to learn, they are more likely to surf wiki; geeks usually like to learn new things. But what about people who've grown up in environments that actively, in some cases, discourage intellectual curiosity? Where you get your ass kicked for going to school? Those kinds of people - the ones who make it out and can go to college - can get more actively exposed to new ideas; they may initially go to college to get a better job, but in the process they can be exposed to a lot of things, and maybe discover a joy in learning that had been repressed.
The school I went to for my recent degree was a state school, not remotely difficult to get into, and not all that remarkable for anything; almost exactly the kind of school you're talking about. Probably 90% of the students in each class I took were just there to mark time. The in-state cost of classes was about 5k/year, with almost all of that being waived for most in-state students if they didn't have means. I applied for tons of scholarships (being a minority and female helps a lot) and wound up actually making about 3k a semester just for writing a lot of letters to various scholarship organizations.
The remaining 10%:
- Joined the honors college, various "societies" (psi chi and stuff like that) and numerous different student organizations as a way to get more out of the experience.
- Did research. Every semester (and during the summer breaks, sometimes) I worked in various labs around campus, getting as much exposure to different research programs as I could. When it came time to get letters of recommendation, I was limited to submitting 5; I had to cull 6 really good professors who *asked* me if I would take a letter from them because they really wanted to do something good for me.
- Volunteered. I tutored students in various courses that I'd aced, which helped me get a deeper understanding of the materials.
- Did independent study. For one of my professors, I wound up doing a ton of legwork going to old movie theaters around Chicago and finding about their various incarnations and writing about it - it was a blast (got to see a lot of movies for free), and I learned some interesting history.
If you didn't want to do those things, that was totally fine - you could, as I said, just phone it in and get your degree. But if you wanted more you could get it and make it happen. Several times I just approached professors and asked if I could get a rundown on what it was they did, and if I could work with them if that interested me; most were thrilled, though some were too busy to take on new students in anything but an official capacity.
We are not empty vessels, waiting passively to have an education given to us - you have to work for it, and want it. It's probably easier to get a degree with minimal effort now than it used to be, but a student that wants it can sure as hell get it, and not expensively.
(Yeah, I'm pretty proud of my achievements going back, but I'd say I earned that right.)
That's a bad teacher, and certainly not a universal thing. I've had Maths classes that were taught by egomaniacs, and I've had fluffy basket-weaving type classes taught by the marquee experts in their fields who were completely down to earth. Get good instructors, and it'll be great. I'd say that my experience of ego-freaks in electives vs. ego-freaks in required courses was about the same, so it isn't that one's more likely than another.
Need for work? No.
Potentially benefit massively from in ways completely removed from work? Yes.
More education gives people a more broad experience of the world in that it opens up areas they may not have otherwise been exposed to. Sometimes this is frustrating (witness many /.ers bitching about how they had to take english lit classes when they just wanted to be engineers) and obnoxious, but it helps folks to avoid the tendency to becoming hyperspecialized drones.
A lot of people who were self-taught think that anyone who wants to know about something will just go look it up - but usually these self-taught individuals are completely unaware of huge swaths of ideas and terrain that have been explored because they weren't required to take classes in subjects that initially didn't interest them.
Full disclosure: I was sort of like that myself - I absolutely loathed the idea of certain classes that were just not interesting to me. Then I grew up, and discovered that there's more to conversation than whatever was on TV last night, there's more to life than work and talking about work, and in fact, I've been turned on to many new activities and interests thanks to some of those "useless" classes.
It also wound up having a TREMENDOUS impact on my career: I used to work in tech, and when I went back to school I wound up surveying a couple of psychology courses, and it turns out that the "expreimental design in psychology" course that I took was INCREDIBLY fascinating. Trying to design experiments with human subjects - subjects who can and will lie, try to wreck the experiment, or otherwise do the least amount of work to get their pay - is VERY challenging, VERY interesting, and VERY fun. Even better for me, I was able to bring my technology skills into a field where there is not a lot of technological know-how, and so some incredibly obvious things I developed and implemented wound up being very valuable to my lab, and helped to really accelerate my career; despite coming to the field I now work in so late in my life/career, I've been promoted several times and in the 1.5 years that I've been out of school since getting my new degree, I've been made a director at my lab.
The point to this is that we are not insects, we are not our jobs, and learning new things - even things that are possibly frivolous - is tremendous. EVERYONE in the world can benefit from learning new things, especially the people who don't have the finances to attend more expensive schools; I'll say those people are probably the ones who benefit most from exposure to new ideas and ways of being.
If your college degree is only helping in your job, or if you're going to college solely to get a better job - well, that's certainly your right, but you're really missing out on 90% of what an education can (and IMO, should) be.
Robots do REALLY well in predictable situations, but not as well in conditions that are unknown. It's possible that some very simple kinds of robots could be landed to do things - maybe diggers or things that could harvest certain materials - but I think the cost of developing robots capable of dealing with the unknown would be pretty high. Much cheaper, and easier, would be to just build modular things that could be quickly assembled into usable structures, I think.
Massive quantities of supplies (and the equipment to build hydroponic or other renewable food supplies) from numerous care-packages sent from Earth.
I see no problem with the idea of sending several tons of stuff every month over the course of 10 years in cheap (slow) trajectories before sending a team to Mars. When they got there they'd have quite a bit of material to be able to use to build shelters & set up hydroponic farms, & basically have a spartan but survivable place. Even if hydroponics or other farming methods weren't possible, they could survive on tons of freeze-dried rations sent by dumb couriers.
Water is a problem, but again - tons of water sent (or, eventually, if it turns out to be feasible, scavenged from the planet itself) ahead of time. It could also double as a radiation barrier with some clever design. And water will need to be brought along anyway with the colonists - LOTS of water - to act as a radiation shield for the ship.
Though, to be honest, the real problem here is that we just won't try to develop real propulsion systems for use in space - Orion (not the new Orion, but the one from the 60's using nukes for propulsion) would be fantastic out in space...
You can double click on your quest and it shows you where your quests are by shifting your minimap. You can also hit "m" and it shows a larger map with the areas your quests are in circled in green - an arrow would be nice, but it's absolutely not necessary. I didn't play at all in the beta but got in with the headstart, and I have not had *any* problems figuring out where to go or what to do with quests using the built in features.
Quest/kill stealing is not a problem... everyone who does a reasonable amount of damage to an opponent will get credit for it. I've never once lost a quest to someone who "kill stole" or whatever.
You can also see "future powers" I believe by having it show "unavailable" powers in the power list. I am not 100% sure, but I think I remember doing this - it made things a lot easier.
Honestly, it sounds like your problems with the game stem more from not knowing the UI than the UI itself; there are weak spots, to be sure, but the things you mention are, by and large, not actually insoluble.
It's better and worse.
Better in that you have more different areas that you can change - face and body are much more customizeable, you can add more colors than COH allows, more material options, can even change finger/hand/feet a lot more. There is also the ability to change the "style" your character walks around with - in CoH, no matter how beastial you make yourself look, you're still mincing around if female, or sort of stomping about if male; in Champions, you can be "heroic" (kind of "Yeah, I'm badass"), average, or crouched around and kind of running on all fours like a beast. Also, the graphics are VASTLY superior to CoH.
Worse in that you don't have quite as many options with regard to patterns or wardrobe choices as CoH does. But, I imagine that will be getting fixed pronto as they add more and more options.
Overall, Champions is vastly more customizable, with the only shortfall being something that's obviously temporary, and not always in CoH's favor. For example, Champions gives you a LOT more non-human options, a LOT more options for various wing sets, capes to begin with, etc.
I've made a character who looks EXACTLY like Marvin the Martian (pipe-stem arms, comically oversized head), another that looks pretty close to Bugs Bunny (Marvin needs a nemesis...), made another that looks like a zergling, and so on. SO much more potential than CoH has.
The rest of the game is pretty fun, too :)
I'm not sure if you're joking, but...
There were roughly 500 US casualties (wounded) in Desert Storm.
There are some 80,000+ vets of that conflict who have been given some level of disability from the VA for GWS.
Gonna guess, no, that's not the case.
Be sure to label the drives with stickers - "Your competitor's TOP SECRET data!!!" and the like.
God knows, I've worked with people who would fall for that.
You're missing the point, but that's OK. Here it is in condensed form:
If you (the general you) believe that you are so smart that your depression is caused by seeing societies ills, and by having to deal with the mundane requirements of civilization (bills, banks, whatever), then why aren't you smart enough to either:
1) Figure out a way to fix some of societies ills so that you aren't depressed by it
2) Figure out a way to use societies ills to make enough money to leave society so that you aren't depressed by it
3) Muster up the motivation to work within society to make enough money to leave society behind (in a way that requires only hard work and extreme frugality) so that you aren't depressed by it
The answer is: you ain't that smart, and maybe you should get the fuck over yourself. Smart people *solve* their problems, whether by changing the conditions they find themselves in or changing themselves to better handle the conditions.
On the topic of Fuck You Money: FYM is whatever it takes for the individual in question to be able to say Fuck You to having to work while still meeting their needs and wants that require money. For someone with incredibly modest desires, this might be very close to zero. For someone who has more traditionally American notions of consumption, this could be into the $100 million range as you suggest. I had my magic number, you have yours, someone else has theirs - it's not my place to tell people what it is. What I offered was one way that is very nearly foolproof (assuming one has the discipline for it) of making enough money in a reasonably short period of time that will enable them to walk away from the burdens of western civilization if they are willing to live within certain reasonable conditions.
Given that the person I was responding to was insisting that they are so frightfully intelligent that they cannot possibly be meant to stay in this mundane world, ????? should not be an opaque or unknown concept to them - they should be smart enough to think of the answer. Plenty of incredibly stupid people make tons of money, so this shouldn't be a problem for people so much smarter, right?
However, assuming that the precious snowflake in question cannot put his or her vast intellect to the task of finding some truly great and remunerative idea, or has no skills there are some very simple things that can be done to generate the funds to drop out of society if one is truly motivated and willing to delay gratification for 5-10 years.
1) Cut your expenses to the bone. I don't mean "Live like you make 20k a year when you make 40k" - I mean "Live like you make 6k a year." Seriously, it's possible. It's not fun, it's not comfortable, but it's possible. Even in a city. A friend of mine in Chicago lives on a little under 6k a year while he's in school - he lives in a "commune," grows much of his own food, and ruthlessly exploits coupons when he goes shopping for what he can't grow. If you have kids or a family or other obligations, I guess it's tough luck for you - perhaps you should have considered the whole "drop out of society" thing before having kids.
2) Work like a mercenary. Get a job. Get another job. Get three jobs if you can swing it. Use that glob of jelly between your ears to get skills that will pay. Even if you can't get a job-job, there are PLENTY of things that can be done to get money that don't involve anyone hiring you. I have a friend with 4 jobs - 1 full time, 1 weekend job, and 2 that are "telecommute" project gigs that he farms out to people in India and gives them half the pay. Sales jobs (100% commission) are always hiring since there's very little expense in bringing a new person in, and those can be VERY lucrative if you're willing to make several hundred phone calls a day and develop a skin so thick it transforms the audio-waves for "fuck you!" into "Yes, I *would* like you to tell me more about your fabulous product/service!" I know people who are functionally retarded who make absurd livings in sales because they worked like animals for the first 3-5 years to get good at it.
3) Save everything in safe vehicles that will match inflation or at least not get totally fucked by it.
In 5-10 years of living like this you can amass - easily, if you're really working hard - $250,000-500,000.
Then take that money and move somewhere with an incredibly low cost of living where living on 5-6k a year will actually be like living on 50-60k a year in a city in the US. I know several people who have retired to various south-east asian countries and live *quite* well on interest from less than $1,000,000 USD in assets.
My point here is that if someone is complaining that they are *too smart* for this benighted world, and that this is causing them depression, then they either aren't trying hard enough to drop out of it properly or (much more likely) they aren't nearly as smart as they think.
If I sound like I'm mocking people with the "I'm too smart to function in this world," mentality it's because I am. They're really funny!
Bzzt.
Someone who is smart *makes* a place for themselves rather than bitching a moaning about how the world doesn't fit.
If you're so smart and having a 9-5 job, paying bills, etc. doesn't work for you, why haven't you figured out a way to not have to do those things? Survey says: You aren't nearly as smart as you think you are. Someone who is smart will figure out how to game the system and have fun with it, rather than turning into a morose sad-sack who sits at home shaking his tiny fist at the rest of the world, convinced that if only everyone else were smarter, they'd GET IT!
Making "fuck you" money is EASY to do if you really want to, and having that kind of money lets you opt out of many of the things you're complaining about.
Truly smart people don't see problems as something to get depressed about but as things to be understood and solved, subverted or worked around, and they enjoy doing it because it's play.
Bullshit.
There are a large number of rather intelligent people who are certainly clued into the way the world works who aren't depressed. I daresay, in fact, that many of the brightest lights in humanity have been smart and happy; curious characters who are quite well aware of how the world works, but are able to find it fascinating rather than depressing, or who take joy in playing with the system of the world.
Chemical imbalances aside, I'd suggest that if someone were *truly* functioning at the high end of the cognitive range for humans, they'd be smart enough to figure out how to enjoy life rather than mope around about it. Being able to reframe painful experiences into good things is, I'd say, a hallmark of emotional stability and high intelligence coupled with good adaptability and problem solving skills.
(By "reframe" I don't mean self-deception - I mean being able to explore painful experiences from a viewpoint that takes what's good out of them and use that to make yourself better. Not "grudgingly, bitterly stronger and able to cope" but I mean, with joy, transcending the negative experience, turning it into and opportunity to grow beyond what one might have been otherwise.)
No, no - the midichlorians are just like, say, critters around a food source - they're an indicator that something is there, but they are not the actual food source. By counting the number, you can tell how big the food source might be, but you aren't actually measuring it.
What do I want from a phone from the far future?
Well, what I really want is a "phone" that's also a computer and links seamlessly with whatever networks I want to use. So keep that in mind while I describe my perfect "phone":
1) I don't have to think about charging it. This can mean that it is charged wirelessly/beamed power, or it can mean that it runs on something that is essentially endless/minimal maintenance.
2) I don't want to be able to lose it or misplace it. This probably means it would need to be implanted or somehow integrated into clothing.
3) It must give me "augmented reality" overlays - hook into my glasses or smart contact lenses (or into a chip implanted in my eyes) and give me data that way. I *really* want something that can display various information on demand (time, temp, whatever), but also that will enhance my extant senses - maybe a chemical detector built in so I can analyze the air around me, or maybe enhanced audio reception that might recognize certain sounds around me and alert me to them/give me a visual reading of where they're coming from, or maybe facial recognition software that'll tell me who I'm looking at and whatever info they share with me etc. Maps and the like would be nice, too. While we're at it, improve my vision to the infrared and ultra violet as well.
4) Subvocalization capability. I don't want to have to speak aloud to use it - just subvocalize and it'll pick up what I'm saying. Essentially telepathy.
5) Connectivity roughly similar to what I can get with a regular connection to the internet now - none of this edge shit. Even if it was only as good as my current wifi connection at home, that would be a LOT better than my current phone's capability.
6) Agent software that would be capable of handling trivial incoming calls automatically and summarizing them for me via text ("Your mom called, she wants to know your flight details, so I gave her the info; she'll pick you up at the airport." "Your boss had the following notes on your project..." "A telemarketer called, so I played them the 'brown note' and had you placed on the Do Not Call list..."). It should be context aware - it should know that I'm in a movie theater (why should I have to turn it off manually? Just have the theater beam a signal letting smart phones know that they need to not make any noise at all...) and if it's an absolute emergency, I should get a flashing red light in my eye or something like that rather than a ring or vibrate. It should have different screening functions for different levels of people - if I'm working on something important and a guy I went out with once or twice but don't particularly like calls, it should say "She's working, leave a message" and *absolutely* not bother me with it until I want to deal with that. If it's an emergency, again, it should know that I'll want to take the call.
7) It should be capable of - if I want - recording absolutely everything around me, in multiple spectra.
Actually, I don't even want to have to think about it, really - it should just be something that's more or less omnipresent but in the background, unobtrusive unless I want to notice it. Just like my voice, I don't really think about my capability to speak unless I'm actively speaking to someone - the phone is just a way of projecting speech, right? With the augmented reality stuff, it should be entirely customizable - on, off, anything in between, set it up how I want it. With connectivity I should be able to turn it on, turn it off (even force it to stay off for awhile so I can enjoy being "natural").
I don't think any of this is too much to ask for - certainly we'll have the capability to do all that (at least) in the next 50 years or so.
In my mind, I've simply decided that the midichlorians themselves don't give the powers, but rather a secondary effect of whatever the Force actually is. Basically, they're critters that are attracted to Force, so if you have more Force you have more midichlorians.
Actually, getting deeper into this - maybe Force is the manifestation of energy that comes from a universe higher up than the one Star Wars takes place in. It's literally inexplicable because to understand it you'd have to be part of that higher order universe. Midichlorians could be the critters that feed on Force in that higher order universe, and they have components that appear in the lower order universe that we see in the films. Because Force and whatever the Midichlorians happen to be are in an entirely different universe, one that is by definition impossible to explain, the Jedi can't come up with a perfect theory for them, and also simply transferring them from one person to another won't do anything but piss them off and make them leave to go find a better source.
Jedi and Sith individuals, being loci for the Force, are sensitive to this extra-universal energy and can use it to alter the laws of physics on a localized basis, leading to all kinds of special abilities. Telekinesis and super speed/reflexes are trivial to explain away. Mind tricks and seeing the future can be explained - in that higher order universe, time is just a physical dimension that can be moved through at will, where all possible futures for the lower order universes can be examined. The Jedi or Sith just "copies and pastes" a mind-state from an alternate universe onto their victim - a mind-state in which the victim made the choice the Jedi or Sith wants them to make. Some species may not exist in alternate universes, or maybe they have some sort of quantum connection to all their other minds, and thus they are immune. Reading the future is easy - they just get glimpses of possible/likely futures from the one above 'em.
It takes a LOT of training to be any good at that stuff - similar to biofeedback techniques in our world. Most people can, if they practice a lot, make their blood pressure rise or fall a little bit with biofeedback training; they don't know *how* they're doing it, but by doing it over and over they get better and better at it. Some people get REALLY good at it and can raise or lower their body temperature a bit, change their pulse, etc. - but that takes decades of discipline. The Jedi and Sith get their powers the same way - they learn over time how to make certain things happen, first it's difficult, but as they get better it becomes easier and they're able to do more stuff, eventually doing it almost by reflex.
All of the above might seem excessive, but dammit, I needed to find some way to make midichlorians not suck!
The people complaining that the ideas discussed above won't appeal to everyone are missing the point - the OP is talking about being able to have smaller, niche "biggish but not massively" multiplayer games that will be able to give the people who like whatever kind of idea a place to play.
Having lots of smaller MMOs out there with a smaller investment of effort to set up means that designers can take risks and experiment. I really loved the age of MUDs when you could try out dozens of different games and find some that had interesting mechanics. Granted, there are a lot of clones or stock models, but there were some real gems.
I'm monkeying around with some OSS MMO engines & clients right now and they're really quite a pain in the ass to make work. However, once they've become more stable and usable, I imagine there will be a burst of creativity just like we saw with MUDs, where people can make games that cater to many, many playstyles.
You are missing several key points:
1) No single *human* mind can handle such things and keep them in mind perfectly. Computers are not subject to human limitations on memory. Keeping all the data on the design of a microchip in memory might be impossible for a human, but it is trivial for a computer.
2) Humans don't understand how they work (very well) and are only able to indirectly modify their own programming, not directly modify it. For example, I find myself easily distracted sometimes when working on particular aspects of my work - I can try to train myself to ignore outside distractions, but I cannot simply turn off my ability to perceive those outside distractions.
3) Even a less than average intelligence human can explain ways in which it could be smarter, if not actually make themselves smarter. Combined with essentially unlimited memory and the ability to modify its own programming, an AI with an IQ of about 50 would probably be able to eventually bootstrap its way to becoming an AI of essentially unmeasurable intelligence. Even if it couldn't actually modify itself to become more intelligent, it wouldn't need to: it would simply create many, many copies of itself, modify each one slightly, and engage in an evolutionary process.
A computer intelligence will NOT be the same as a human intelligence - human intelligence was shaped by millions of years of biological evolution on Earth. A computer intelligence will not have that heritage; it will be a discontinuity from biological intelligence, with entirely different strengths and weaknesses.
Just watch out for the ones that are public and allow unrestricted access to their methods. Some of them have some really nasty bugs that may cause an unrecoverable system error.
Ah, you must have met an Ur-Mother then; they speak for all of womankind.
It's so much easier to treat people as interchangeable objects rather than to bother with that whole "individuality" thing, isn't it?
So give the compliment that *she* looks beautiful to you, even if sometimes her clothing might not. And, to be honest, if you're dating people who do that, as I said, you're dating emotional cripples who use children's tactics to get their needs met. Male or female, people who use such tactics in their relationships for such things as compliments will also likely have a similar level of emotional maturity in other areas.
You're also being a bit wide with your comments when you say "women fish or compliments. It's their thing" even though you qualify it with your own experience (which I'm sure encompasses a representative sample of woman-kind, so that your global statements aren't just misogyny, right?)
Why marry someone so petty and manipulative that they're the kind of person who would put someone they ostensibly love into a no-win situation such as that? My reply was based on the assumption that people weren't marrying emotional cripples or people who are developmentally stuck at approximately age 10.