Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
Sometime between the time Clinton left office and Obama entered office the Federal budget surplus disappeared.
Now where did it go? Hrm?
Secondly, the national debt went from 6 trillion in 2001 to 10 trillion in 2008? (I'm rounding up)
Now where did that money go? It could have been useful to have when the economy collapsed in 2008?
Keep in mind the President had veto power and up until 2006 a majority in the house and senate so anything that got approved for spending crossed his desk.
I'm saying this as a person who support conservative government fiances in time of plenty and who donated to Ron Paul. As it is... 8 years is a long time to be in charge. Anything we have to deal with today was because of that.
And don't say Clinton is at fault either because he had 8 years to undo any problems he had caused if such is the reason.
It sounds interesting, but I have to wonder about the long-term viability of a game based on legitimizing trolls.
APB is basically Grand Theft Auto but multiplayer on a larger scale.
And GTA gameplay itself in single player was about doing troll things to the NPCs but now you are going to direct this to other players.
That said, its all PvP so its like calling people who taunt in Counter Strike and Halo trolls. I mean they are but its basically all smack talk because you basically can just shoot them on an equal basis (depending on your current weapon) whereas in an standard WoW MMO, you often can't kill each other or the levels are so imbalanced one person pushes a button and ganks the other player.
And lastly, the idea of smack talk and trolls make sense to a game which is about gangs vs gangs and police vs gangs.
Like the good old Jets vs Sharks where people are going to talk big and then rumble... The gameplay is designed for that.
Personally I'd like to play as a suit and tie FBI agent and then take the law into my own hands, but that is just me.
The author's analogy belies the fatal flaw in his though process: HF communications may be older and slower than the internet, but the internet is highly unreliable and fails when communications are most critical.
The internet's original creation was to create a communication system that would survive a nuclear attack. HAM and military shortwave radios would not be able to deal with all the EMP interference with the resulting aftermath.
That said, its no longer maintained by the military and the telcos aren't exactly building to that spec anymore.
If the internet was done right as it was intended then it would work fine in the event of a disaster.
So your friendly neighborhood Ham will fire up his rig on battery or generator, relay a message to another Ham in Huntsville, who picks up a phone and calls your mom in Chicago.
I'm curious... If you are concerned about an emergency, wouldn't it be easier to use satellite?
Secondly, using a limited communication system just to tell someone is ok is most likely a bad idea in the grand scheme of things. It may seem cold, but emergency situations and the communications related to life and death situations should always take precedence over "Hi mom. I'm ok."
If your ok. Then there are ok. No matter of lack of communication will change that.
You can always tell them the story when the ordeal is done. If you don't stay safe then that is the real problem.
We've had ComSat for a couple of decades now, and most first reposoners, especially those doing so for planned disaster relief, have access to handheld comsat systems.
And if all the satellite systems are out, chances are something bigger than you can imagine has just happened and being able to call for help won't do you any good because the person at the other end has problems too.;)
That's why I quit editing Wikipedia. I got too sick of people not wanting their articles to be improved.
That's a shame.
Personally I have created 1 article in Wikipedia with the full intent of others to edit it.
Back in 2005 to my dismay I found that there was no article on the Gunkanjima island so I put together a three sentence article with some links to show that it existed.
It went through some name changes and merges and I am sure I could have edit wars whether Gunkanjima or Hashima island was the better name but I was always pleased that someone more knowledgeable saw the article and put some real effort into it.
If I was determined that my early article was the best it could be... Then well I would be just dumb and stupid.
They say that democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's a simplified metaphor to point out a crucial flaw of majority voting.
To be fair, (and not to goodwin this) there is a reason that the modern state of Germany has outlawed referendums simply because Hitler used a public vote to dismantle democracy legally.
Also remember that he was elected legally in 1933 too.
My point is that the reason that the founding father's created a republic rather than a direct democracy is because a tyranny of the majority is still a tyranny. People will vote their rights away and for things that are contrary to the spirits of freedom with all due process of law.
In that sense, the minority needs just as much protection from the majority as it does of them.
Then again, his neighbor would be hard pressed to repair a fence. Was he stupid? I don't know, I didn't know the neighbor well enough. Maybe he had simply never needed to repair a fence, and had never been taught. Could you?
Stupid is not "not knowing" how to do something but rather the inability or unwillingness to learn a new task when needed or getting frustrated at people who are willing or knowledgeable when they try to assist with the task.
In the computer world, I don't mind people who don't understand computers where it isn't really their job. When it is there job to know and they aren't willing to learn, then that is a problem.
What is more frustration is when they act like they know but aren't willing to learn.
Do aircraft have fully autonomous co-computers that can recognize an unexpected fault and take full control of the plane? That's why commercial aircraft have co-pilots. A secondary system running the same code with the same flaws as the first doesn't cut it in this context.
Why not do what the military does?
Just have the ground take control. Most of the time the joystick controllers let the thing fly on auto to target and then push the button when to fire.
Speaking of which, most commercial airliners are 99.9% run by autopilot these days.
And with these "trees" being full of methanol/hydrogen, one spark or too MUCH sun/heat and the whole place goes up like a bomb.
I dunno... You'd think we'd have similar structures that contain large flammable liquids for processing... And they had the same problems with big explosions and learned how to deal with it?
That is assuming the trade is done entirely in-game. What is to stop the player giving the ISK to another player in game in exchange for real money (or other useful commodity) paid by some other means?
You can, but that is the point of this argument the article is making because it is less convient and not that trustworthy.
Either you can pay pal some guy in Asia and hope he will give you the isk or you use the in game method which guarantees you delivery.
Secondly, the non-official method is against the TOS, and when they ban that account the actually revoke all transactions the account ever made!
Which means when they ban the Gold (ISK) seller, your money is removed from your account retroactively.
When your ship is destroyed, the resources (minerals, basically) that were used to create it are forever gone from the game, but the currency you paid is not removed from the game, just transferred to someone else.
All right then how about rigs then?
Generally you can only get the parts for most of them by salvaging and more than not, people always don't get your rigs when your ships is blown.
Also, a lot of people don't insure ships all the time simply because they have more isk than the premium is worth to them.
$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a currently unemployed someone in a poverty sticken nation who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
The way EVE works is that you can trade ISK only for game time and not the other way around. So you buy game time from CCP and then trade it with another player.
That player cannot sell that game time for actual money.
They just get to play the game for free for 30 days.
One of the things that kept EvE stable was that inflation was nominal, if existant. It's the only MMO I know where prices remained almost rock solid stable over the course of its existance.
There is an inflation sink in EVE that most games don't have.
Its called unmitigated and total loss of your ship which is basically where all the ISK goes.
Since PvP is rife in the game, a lot of people need to replace their destroyed ships on a regular basis.
I often see the annoying spam from ISK sellers, and their stuff is more expensive than the current cost and return of game time cards. I hope they die from this game soon.
Hehe. My block list lags the game when I try to view it because it is so long in EVE.
The thing is money is the rare source in EVE but rather the skills gains that are basically you waiting a few weeks to get over time. Money helps but not that much.
It usually relies on us getting lucky because somewhere an enabling technology or knowledge was discovered. The only reason Europe emerged from the dark ages is that crusades brought back the Arabic numbers, for example.
Eh. I'd say you are wrong about middle ages Europe being backwards technologically.
Socially yes. Politically yes.
But they had engineers and armor makers that would put any roman legion to shame. The shock the western knights had on the eastern forces was quite great. In the 1200's 10,000 western knights basically beat 60,000 Byzantium soldiers and they were the peak of the Roman era tech.
If you ask where their coliseums and aqueducts were, I'd point the great cathedrals which at the time were archetically more advanced than anything the Romans put together.
As a PC Gamer, I want to BUY my games. Why is every company trying to take that away from me? I want to walk into a store, pick up a box with a DVD in it, pay at the register, go home, and play.
I suspect the same reason why you can buy your music with iTunes and Amazon.
Hell... I haven't bought a physical music CD in ages, so why do I need to do the same with games?
Of course I prefer to buy from the online distributors that have little or no DRM like Gamersgate.com which I can make backups and move it to a new computer. I mean I refused to buy music from iTunes and stuck with Amazon simply because of the DRM issue but now that the dropped it, I consider them when buying.
Just because you like to have a physical copy doesn't mean everyone else does. I found myself more annoyed hunting down cds in boxes in my basement than buying it online (yeah I bought a game twice simply because I lost the box in a move).
You can still buy music cds in the store and you still can buy games. Just because people want to offer a different choice doesn't make your life any worse for wear. However, its the DRM issue that is the problem.
Even 50-100ms lag will be *really* noticeable when you're just moving mouse to look around. And in some fast games when you see the enemy you'll be already dead on the server.
I'm not sure what games you've been playing, but if I can get a 64 player FPS server to get me 50-100ms pings then I'm doing good.
With big games like EVE and WoW, I can expect pings of 100-200ms depending on what time of the day.
I think the revolution will be more along the lines of accessibility with MMOGs and Gaikai simply because you have to have an internet connection either way.
Something like this will be possible one day, but my layperson's understanding of how the brain works is fundamentally different from how computers work.
Yes, but they both are made of atoms and both adhere to the laws of physics.
Therefore, science can be used to understand both concepts... Eventually.
Certainly, we can sympathize with them if they truly could not help themselves, but the fact remains that we'd like to have as few puppy stabbers running around as possible. "3 hots and cot" seems like the best option to me; isolate them from the society that they can't fit into for that society's benefit, but don't go out of your way to make life hell for them either.
But that doesn't solve the problem.
Either we either accept we need to figure out how to modify their brains and identify those who have not committed crimes in the field but as potential criminals or we accept that perhaps the eugenicists were somewhat right and that you can't allow a portion of society to bread because they are passing along psychopathic genes?
Do you think society will accept that answer after all these years?
I doubt it.
Most likely the best method is the first which is to modify the genetics of those already identified and committed crimes.
When/if the singularity happens, and our personnae can be loaded as a self-morphing program into a computer, can't it be clearly demonstrated that the program does exactly what its structure dictates? Are we going to find MS Word guilty of having Clippy pop up in annoying ways, or do we just accept that it's the way it's constructed and thus has no real choice in the matter?
If you are going to throw the singularity out there, then you leave us with a conundrum.
Which the tools to simply modify our genetic makeup to be whatever we want to be and feel whatever we want to feel, then based on the idea we are predisposed to making decisions then what will we modify our predispositions to be?
I suspect most people might end up in a pleasure loop syndrome where they just turn on those parts of the brain and since that is simply the original human nature to aim to please impulses.
However, if one simply writes limitations that we still must have boredom and some type of scarcity in our minds, then we won't simply become mindless zombies simply sitting with electrodes in our brains for the rest of the lives.
Now, if we do force ourselves to have some rules and limitations on what we can experience then that isn't really true freedom either. Soooo... We're back to the starting problem of genetics or some limitation preventing us from making true choices.
Either way... I'd rather have the choice of living in a singularity or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Please don't toss out "Iraq". That old throw away line was childish during Bush's years and just as tired now. Iraq had no bearing either.
Sometime between the time Clinton left office and Obama entered office the Federal budget surplus disappeared.
Now where did it go? Hrm?
Secondly, the national debt went from 6 trillion in 2001 to 10 trillion in 2008? (I'm rounding up)
Now where did that money go? It could have been useful to have when the economy collapsed in 2008?
Keep in mind the President had veto power and up until 2006 a majority in the house and senate so anything that got approved for spending crossed his desk.
I'm saying this as a person who support conservative government fiances in time of plenty and who donated to Ron Paul. As it is... 8 years is a long time to be in charge. Anything we have to deal with today was because of that.
And don't say Clinton is at fault either because he had 8 years to undo any problems he had caused if such is the reason.
Or the Chinese. They'll probably be there in less than 10.
Wut? Where is "intrigued" or "dubious" in all of this?
It sounds interesting, but I have to wonder about the long-term viability of a game based on legitimizing trolls.
APB is basically Grand Theft Auto but multiplayer on a larger scale.
And GTA gameplay itself in single player was about doing troll things to the NPCs but now you are going to direct this to other players.
That said, its all PvP so its like calling people who taunt in Counter Strike and Halo trolls. I mean they are but its basically all smack talk because you basically can just shoot them on an equal basis (depending on your current weapon) whereas in an standard WoW MMO, you often can't kill each other or the levels are so imbalanced one person pushes a button and ganks the other player.
And lastly, the idea of smack talk and trolls make sense to a game which is about gangs vs gangs and police vs gangs.
Like the good old Jets vs Sharks where people are going to talk big and then rumble... The gameplay is designed for that.
Personally I'd like to play as a suit and tie FBI agent and then take the law into my own hands, but that is just me.
The author's analogy belies the fatal flaw in his though process: HF communications may be older and slower than the internet, but the internet is highly unreliable and fails when communications are most critical.
The internet's original creation was to create a communication system that would survive a nuclear attack. HAM and military shortwave radios would not be able to deal with all the EMP interference with the resulting aftermath.
That said, its no longer maintained by the military and the telcos aren't exactly building to that spec anymore.
If the internet was done right as it was intended then it would work fine in the event of a disaster.
So your friendly neighborhood Ham will fire up his rig on battery or generator, relay a message to another Ham in Huntsville, who picks up a phone and calls your mom in Chicago.
I'm curious... If you are concerned about an emergency, wouldn't it be easier to use satellite?
Secondly, using a limited communication system just to tell someone is ok is most likely a bad idea in the grand scheme of things. It may seem cold, but emergency situations and the communications related to life and death situations should always take precedence over "Hi mom. I'm ok."
If your ok. Then there are ok. No matter of lack of communication will change that.
You can always tell them the story when the ordeal is done. If you don't stay safe then that is the real problem.
We've had ComSat for a couple of decades now, and most first reposoners, especially those doing so for planned disaster relief, have access to handheld comsat systems.
And if all the satellite systems are out, chances are something bigger than you can imagine has just happened and being able to call for help won't do you any good because the person at the other end has problems too. ;)
That's why I quit editing Wikipedia. I got too sick of people not wanting their articles to be improved.
That's a shame.
Personally I have created 1 article in Wikipedia with the full intent of others to edit it.
Back in 2005 to my dismay I found that there was no article on the Gunkanjima island so I put together a three sentence article with some links to show that it existed.
Now 4 years later the article evolved into this well done article with maps and pictures and I have not edited the article once.
It went through some name changes and merges and I am sure I could have edit wars whether Gunkanjima or Hashima island was the better name but I was always pleased that someone more knowledgeable saw the article and put some real effort into it.
If I was determined that my early article was the best it could be... Then well I would be just dumb and stupid.
They say that democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. That's a simplified metaphor to point out a crucial flaw of majority voting.
To be fair, (and not to goodwin this) there is a reason that the modern state of Germany has outlawed referendums simply because Hitler used a public vote to dismantle democracy legally.
Also remember that he was elected legally in 1933 too.
My point is that the reason that the founding father's created a republic rather than a direct democracy is because a tyranny of the majority is still a tyranny. People will vote their rights away and for things that are contrary to the spirits of freedom with all due process of law.
In that sense, the minority needs just as much protection from the majority as it does of them.
OK I realized I have a better definition of stupid:
"The inability to understand cause and effect"
Wut? I just compiled that on my Microsoft VBA .NET compiler and I got a bluescreen?
Then again, his neighbor would be hard pressed to repair a fence. Was he stupid? I don't know, I didn't know the neighbor well enough. Maybe he had simply never needed to repair a fence, and had never been taught. Could you?
Stupid is not "not knowing" how to do something but rather the inability or unwillingness to learn a new task when needed or getting frustrated at people who are willing or knowledgeable when they try to assist with the task.
In the computer world, I don't mind people who don't understand computers where it isn't really their job. When it is there job to know and they aren't willing to learn, then that is a problem.
What is more frustration is when they act like they know but aren't willing to learn.
Do aircraft have fully autonomous co-computers that can recognize an unexpected fault and take full control of the plane? That's why commercial aircraft have co-pilots. A secondary system running the same code with the same flaws as the first doesn't cut it in this context.
Why not do what the military does?
Just have the ground take control. Most of the time the joystick controllers let the thing fly on auto to target and then push the button when to fire.
Speaking of which, most commercial airliners are 99.9% run by autopilot these days.
And with these "trees" being full of methanol/hydrogen, one spark or too MUCH sun/heat and the whole place goes up like a bomb.
I dunno... You'd think we'd have similar structures that contain large flammable liquids for processing... And they had the same problems with big explosions and learned how to deal with it?
That is assuming the trade is done entirely in-game. What is to stop the player giving the ISK to another player in game in exchange for real money (or other useful commodity) paid by some other means?
You can, but that is the point of this argument the article is making because it is less convient and not that trustworthy.
Either you can pay pal some guy in Asia and hope he will give you the isk or you use the in game method which guarantees you delivery.
Secondly, the non-official method is against the TOS, and when they ban that account the actually revoke all transactions the account ever made!
Which means when they ban the Gold (ISK) seller, your money is removed from your account retroactively.
When your ship is destroyed, the resources (minerals, basically) that were used to create it are forever gone from the game, but the currency you paid is not removed from the game, just transferred to someone else.
All right then how about rigs then?
Generally you can only get the parts for most of them by salvaging and more than not, people always don't get your rigs when your ships is blown.
Also, a lot of people don't insure ships all the time simply because they have more isk than the premium is worth to them.
$30 isn't much to you or I, but for a currently unemployed someone in a poverty sticken nation who happens to have cheap/free access to a 'net connection and the game by some means, it might be a worthwhile investment of time otherwise spent doing nothing.
The way EVE works is that you can trade ISK only for game time and not the other way around. So you buy game time from CCP and then trade it with another player.
That player cannot sell that game time for actual money.
They just get to play the game for free for 30 days.
One of the things that kept EvE stable was that inflation was nominal, if existant. It's the only MMO I know where prices remained almost rock solid stable over the course of its existance.
There is an inflation sink in EVE that most games don't have.
Its called unmitigated and total loss of your ship which is basically where all the ISK goes.
Since PvP is rife in the game, a lot of people need to replace their destroyed ships on a regular basis.
I often see the annoying spam from ISK sellers, and their stuff is more expensive than the current cost and return of game time cards. I hope they die from this game soon.
Hehe. My block list lags the game when I try to view it because it is so long in EVE.
The thing is money is the rare source in EVE but rather the skills gains that are basically you waiting a few weeks to get over time. Money helps but not that much.
It usually relies on us getting lucky because somewhere an enabling technology or knowledge was discovered. The only reason Europe emerged from the dark ages is that crusades brought back the Arabic numbers, for example.
Eh. I'd say you are wrong about middle ages Europe being backwards technologically.
Socially yes. Politically yes.
But they had engineers and armor makers that would put any roman legion to shame. The shock the western knights had on the eastern forces was quite great. In the 1200's 10,000 western knights basically beat 60,000 Byzantium soldiers and they were the peak of the Roman era tech.
If you ask where their coliseums and aqueducts were, I'd point the great cathedrals which at the time were archetically more advanced than anything the Romans put together.
As a PC Gamer, I want to BUY my games. Why is every company trying to take that away from me? I want to walk into a store, pick up a box with a DVD in it, pay at the register, go home, and play.
I suspect the same reason why you can buy your music with iTunes and Amazon.
Hell... I haven't bought a physical music CD in ages, so why do I need to do the same with games?
Of course I prefer to buy from the online distributors that have little or no DRM like Gamersgate.com which I can make backups and move it to a new computer. I mean I refused to buy music from iTunes and stuck with Amazon simply because of the DRM issue but now that the dropped it, I consider them when buying.
Just because you like to have a physical copy doesn't mean everyone else does. I found myself more annoyed hunting down cds in boxes in my basement than buying it online (yeah I bought a game twice simply because I lost the box in a move).
You can still buy music cds in the store and you still can buy games. Just because people want to offer a different choice doesn't make your life any worse for wear. However, its the DRM issue that is the problem.
Even 50-100ms lag will be *really* noticeable when you're just moving mouse to look around. And in some fast games when you see the enemy you'll be already dead on the server.
I'm not sure what games you've been playing, but if I can get a 64 player FPS server to get me 50-100ms pings then I'm doing good.
With big games like EVE and WoW, I can expect pings of 100-200ms depending on what time of the day.
I think the revolution will be more along the lines of accessibility with MMOGs and Gaikai simply because you have to have an internet connection either way.
Something like this will be possible one day, but my layperson's understanding of how the brain works is fundamentally different from how computers work.
Yes, but they both are made of atoms and both adhere to the laws of physics.
Therefore, science can be used to understand both concepts... Eventually.
Certainly, we can sympathize with them if they truly could not help themselves, but the fact remains that we'd like to have as few puppy stabbers running around as possible. "3 hots and cot" seems like the best option to me; isolate them from the society that they can't fit into for that society's benefit, but don't go out of your way to make life hell for them either.
But that doesn't solve the problem.
Either we either accept we need to figure out how to modify their brains and identify those who have not committed crimes in the field but as potential criminals or we accept that perhaps the eugenicists were somewhat right and that you can't allow a portion of society to bread because they are passing along psychopathic genes?
Do you think society will accept that answer after all these years?
I doubt it.
Most likely the best method is the first which is to modify the genetics of those already identified and committed crimes.
When/if the singularity happens, and our personnae can be loaded as a self-morphing program into a computer, can't it be clearly demonstrated that the program does exactly what its structure dictates? Are we going to find MS Word guilty of having Clippy pop up in annoying ways, or do we just accept that it's the way it's constructed and thus has no real choice in the matter?
If you are going to throw the singularity out there, then you leave us with a conundrum.
Which the tools to simply modify our genetic makeup to be whatever we want to be and feel whatever we want to feel, then based on the idea we are predisposed to making decisions then what will we modify our predispositions to be?
I suspect most people might end up in a pleasure loop syndrome where they just turn on those parts of the brain and since that is simply the original human nature to aim to please impulses.
However, if one simply writes limitations that we still must have boredom and some type of scarcity in our minds, then we won't simply become mindless zombies simply sitting with electrodes in our brains for the rest of the lives.
Now, if we do force ourselves to have some rules and limitations on what we can experience then that isn't really true freedom either. Soooo... We're back to the starting problem of genetics or some limitation preventing us from making true choices.
Either way... I'd rather have the choice of living in a singularity or not.