It takes more energy to make hydrogen than what you get back out of it.
Well of course! Hydrogen has to obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics just like oil does, except that oil has the advantage of having the energy put into it millions of years ago.
Either I got trolled, or you are just looking for the situation where you can make yourself feel good by bashing Americans.
As an American I have to side with the Europeans on this. Hummers are basically monster trucks in comparison to their cars.
But more seriously, we should really listen to them on the reasons why they don't need our type of cars and maybe adjust our way of life to be less needy of cars.
Of course 60 years of lobbying by Detroit ruined many east coast cities public transportation systems and we have to thank them by writing a bailout check when their "monster cars" no longer sell because people can't afford to pay for gas.
If you haven't already I'd watch End of Suburbia and start considering to yourself that without alternative energies like hydrogen that sometime in the future that if you can't use public transport, bike, or walk to a grocery store then you'll do without.
Of course if they do get alternative energy to work, we may have to deal with European sized cars.
Conspiracy theorists who hint darkly about secret councils that burned books or suppressed certain ancient Christian beliefs tend to forget that, even if that was possible, there were no such organizations or counsels like that for many, many centuries.
No seriously. What about it? It is there and it is real. This isn't a conspiracy theory. Why isn't that in the Bible? Why are the dead sea scrolls different from what we have today?
And why does the Orthodox and Western Bibles differ slightly since the schism?
Secondly what remains of other religions of the time that we still have records of? Like Druidism which the Romans persecuted as much as the Christians. Of course they weren't destroyed on purpose, it is just that 2,000 has a toll on ancient documents (including fires of libraries) and that most people at the time didn't have a need to keep documents that weren't deemed official by the Church.
Most people couldn't read bad then so they didn't know... The few people who could read and write started copying the official versions when they came out in 400AD and from there the old copies were simply lost because of time problems.
Not to mention that for Europeans owning any non-approved paper work in the 1500 to 1600s were put to the stake so if they had any ancient heretical texts they most likely burned them at that time as well. Every now and then we find something like the dead seas scrolls and we find out differences.
It isn't a conspiracy, but Europe in general was a great place to store non-official religious texts long term for 2,000 years.
The problem is that levels themselves are throw back to a system where it would be very difficult to measure success another way on pen and paper.
Since the first MUDs and CRPGs just emulated the pen and paper systems, they never considered that there might be better ways.
Ultima Pagan and Ultima Online (and plenty others that it would take too long to mention) tried other system, but it developers unfamiliar with anything else kept with the old model in future MMOs because the formula worked.
Now the key problem with leveling in MMOs is that it first and for most segregates your gaming populace with what content they can share and interact with.
Warhammer Online resolves this simply by making it easy to grind to level 40 so everyone really just play the games at that point. The games go other problems but player segregation isn't one of them.
Now this is nothing to be said about skill at this point, but there other ways a game can have progression rather than arbitrary levels.
Personally if a publisher handed me a bunch of cash and said "Go make a game" I would opt for something along the lines of giving out 1000 skill points to a player at the character creation and that would be it. They could design him anyway they choose (and go back and redesign later) and let them go with that instead of level grind. There would need to be something else that involves them to keep playing so you would have to create player made content and politics at the same time finding a way to prevent over greifing with said content.
People are getting bored of the level grinding for sake of leveling... I mean I'm bored it of it. I don't want to play those games anymore. Give me a breathing world without mob killing to level.
Maybe Ultima Online spoiled but its been 10 years and no developer has done better.
I forget where I heard it, but someone recently said something to the effect of "Many math nerds have lost plenty of money because they saw the stock market as a simple system of cause and effect."
Well there is a faction of the trades that fully believe in the holiness of the charting methods without taking human irrationality and emotions into account. I think everyone last fall failed their save rolls on the 401K. Its more like random rolling of the dice. You will get bad rolls.
I think Keynes said it best but I won't requote him here about it.
There was always a segment (the ones Bartle called "killers") who'd whine at length that if you don't let them repeatedly gank newbies:
I don't know about the newb gankers, but I've always argued that restricted newb ganking is a kin to outlawing anonymous speech.
Sure you end up with stopping a lot of trolling, but you always restrict people who have important things to say but can't do because of retaliation.
That said, when people were cooperating in free for all PvP games say like Ultima Online in the early days there was a said level of respect for the group of people that you were with simply because if you started acting like a jackass, the group might take a karma hit simply make you take dirt nap.
In non-PvP games the griefers still exist but they use other game mechanics to exploit the newbs.
I'd argue that it isn't the pvp, but the fact in order to give players freedom you have to accept there will be people that will abuse this freedom.
I've recently started Eve online and I've got several solicitations from random people to "come out to low sec" to share some loot and I knew damn well that if I did they would kill me.
But it makes the game fun avoiding pirate campers and what not, but I know full well that people are going to be assholes if I'm not careful. I like this game style but its not for everyone.
I don't think its anyones right to gank newbies but without that option in this game then all of us would loose our collective freedom to pvp in low sec territories.
I learned that RPG's are nothing more than fancy statistical simulations that have as much to do with simulating anything as the order of playing blackjack.
Other than the content background which I can get from reading novels, playing RPG's is about as exciting as moving numbers around a spreadsheet.
Someone recently joked on Eve Online in the newbie corp channel about the game being "SPREADSHEETS IN SPAAAAACE!"
But something interesting happened to me about a year ago... Being an avid number cruncher and power gamer in consoles, computer, and pen and paper games, I have fallen in love with the stock market and funds.
There are so many intricacies and rules (shorts, puts, calls, options, long, dividends etc etc) that when compiled you've got a rule book that rivals any pen and paper RPG (except maybe GURPS)
So I thought to myself... Why not?
So I started to self educate myself and lo and behold I'm doing pretty good (sort of considering how everyone else is doing lately) and even though its not going to make me rich overnight, it is fun playing if you learn how to do it.
It is like gambling but the house is usually on your side (most of the time).
Why not? There are a few games which I have bought that I wish I didn't pay full price for.
There are some classics which I have made several backups of for "just in case", but seriously... Do you play games these day? 90% of them are shovel ware and stastically were allays going to get duped by a developer or shiny graphics (I'm LOOKING at you European Total War!) and we wish we didn't pay full price for because in a month we throw the box in a bin and forget about that game.
In other words, it's called "bullshit" or the lesser-known name, "a good way for us to make money selling our drugs to people who don't need them, with no concern for their long-term well-being".
If it makes you feel better than who is to say you don't need them?
Personally, I find it cheaper to get rid of my depression in a nice strong bottle of vodka or red wine.
If people want to smoke pot or pop pills to feel better, that is there business.
If you let a pusher in a Doctor's coat or a leather jacket convince you need to take the drugs, then that is your problem.
If I dropped you at a random spot in Africa, would you rather have a handheld shortwave radio? Or an iPhone?
If that placed happened to be Somalia, I would go with the iPhone. You may think I am joking but I am not.
Arguably I'd rather have an AK-47 and a few bodyguards while visiting, but I should be able to either barrow a wifi signal from an internet cafe or make a call to the US without too much trouble.
For the locals it works fine with the other types of phones they use.
More efficient technology does not mean wider applications irrespective of cost.
True, but solar cells are costly because of the material it is made with currently. If they can take the same material and use less of it to produce the same amount of power, then the price overall goes down.
Now if they invent another material that is more efficient but more costly to produce than the price goes up.
I think the problem is that ants rely on a single queen to lay all the eggs. If a queen was born without the correct pheromones they might instantly kill it.
Now there might be an off chance that a single queen escapes from the original colony and builds her own, but if that colony runs into any other colony they will of course kill the differening colony with simple weight of numbers.
Of course some random human might take that queen to its own island somewhere and then it would work out but... that would be cheating.
Sure, I can throw on a headset and play with friends, but what if battle.net is down? What if I'm getting a lot of lag...fast paced game players don't have the tolerance of players who are into mmo's exclusively.
Why don't you pull out the 20 side dice and talk smack like we did before the internet?
Small snacks throughout the day, and especially a proper breakfast, help your metabolism go faster.
I think what you mean is eat when you are hungry, and no when you have to or because the food is in front of you.
This may include having snacks when you feel hungry and also skipping meals if not. If you aren't hungry then don't eat.
I can't remember the word, but in Japan it is something they practice regularly by eating slow and then pushing food away at their table when they are full and not forcing themselves to finish.
I know many westerners find this wasteful and I myself gobble down all on my plate, but generally its why they are a lot healthier and less fat than us.
And considering all the glorious snack food the Japanese make they are not afraid to snack, but only when they are hungry.
I'm certainly not signing up for anything that absolutely requires an active high bandwidth connection to play single player offline games until companies like Comcast have been brought to heel.
The two things that peaked my attention to this were not the offline games but rather the online ones such as WoW and Eve.
This means I could play Eve on a crappy laptop rather than my gaming rig when I want to do tedious tasks downstairs while watching TV with the girlfriend rather than sitting upstairs.
Still needs an internet connection with my gaming rig so I see why not.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course! Hydrogen has to obey the 2nd law of thermodynamics just like oil does, except that oil has the advantage of having the energy put into it millions of years ago.
Yes you can. The storage is the problem though.
Um... Then why do I pay a bill for my electricity?
Cool. So I'm free to smoke cigarettes at the gas station after all?!
Either I got trolled, or you are just looking for the situation where you can make yourself feel good by bashing Americans.
As an American I have to side with the Europeans on this. Hummers are basically monster trucks in comparison to their cars.
But more seriously, we should really listen to them on the reasons why they don't need our type of cars and maybe adjust our way of life to be less needy of cars.
Of course 60 years of lobbying by Detroit ruined many east coast cities public transportation systems and we have to thank them by writing a bailout check when their "monster cars" no longer sell because people can't afford to pay for gas.
If you haven't already I'd watch End of Suburbia and start considering to yourself that without alternative energies like hydrogen that sometime in the future that if you can't use public transport, bike, or walk to a grocery store then you'll do without.
Of course if they do get alternative energy to work, we may have to deal with European sized cars.
Its not trolling... Its simply a fact.
edit... Europe not a great place to store documents long term that weren't going to be copied.
It has too much wet weather and mold in northern Europe as well. *coughs*
Conspiracy theorists who hint darkly about secret councils that burned books or suppressed certain ancient Christian beliefs tend to forget that, even if that was possible, there were no such organizations or counsels like that for many, many centuries .
Um... What about the Apocrypha
No seriously. What about it? It is there and it is real. This isn't a conspiracy theory. Why isn't that in the Bible? Why are the dead sea scrolls different from what we have today?
And why does the Orthodox and Western Bibles differ slightly since the schism?
Secondly what remains of other religions of the time that we still have records of? Like Druidism which the Romans persecuted as much as the Christians. Of course they weren't destroyed on purpose, it is just that 2,000 has a toll on ancient documents (including fires of libraries) and that most people at the time didn't have a need to keep documents that weren't deemed official by the Church.
Most people couldn't read bad then so they didn't know... The few people who could read and write started copying the official versions when they came out in 400AD and from there the old copies were simply lost because of time problems.
Not to mention that for Europeans owning any non-approved paper work in the 1500 to 1600s were put to the stake so if they had any ancient heretical texts they most likely burned them at that time as well. Every now and then we find something like the dead seas scrolls and we find out differences.
It isn't a conspiracy, but Europe in general was a great place to store non-official religious texts long term for 2,000 years.
Heck, why would Paul leave his life of luxury as a Jewish leader stoning Christians if he didn't experience something supernatural?
Like Buddha or Osama Bin Laden?
The problem is that levels themselves are throw back to a system where it would be very difficult to measure success another way on pen and paper.
Since the first MUDs and CRPGs just emulated the pen and paper systems, they never considered that there might be better ways.
Ultima Pagan and Ultima Online (and plenty others that it would take too long to mention) tried other system, but it developers unfamiliar with anything else kept with the old model in future MMOs because the formula worked.
Now the key problem with leveling in MMOs is that it first and for most segregates your gaming populace with what content they can share and interact with.
Warhammer Online resolves this simply by making it easy to grind to level 40 so everyone really just play the games at that point. The games go other problems but player segregation isn't one of them.
Now this is nothing to be said about skill at this point, but there other ways a game can have progression rather than arbitrary levels.
Personally if a publisher handed me a bunch of cash and said "Go make a game" I would opt for something along the lines of giving out 1000 skill points to a player at the character creation and that would be it. They could design him anyway they choose (and go back and redesign later) and let them go with that instead of level grind. There would need to be something else that involves them to keep playing so you would have to create player made content and politics at the same time finding a way to prevent over greifing with said content.
People are getting bored of the level grinding for sake of leveling... I mean I'm bored it of it. I don't want to play those games anymore. Give me a breathing world without mob killing to level.
Maybe Ultima Online spoiled but its been 10 years and no developer has done better.
These types of vulnerabilities affect all browsers.
Except those which do not run on operating systems that do not have Active X?
I forget where I heard it, but someone recently said something to the effect of "Many math nerds have lost plenty of money because they saw the stock market as a simple system of cause and effect."
Well there is a faction of the trades that fully believe in the holiness of the charting methods without taking human irrationality and emotions into account. I think everyone last fall failed their save rolls on the 401K. Its more like random rolling of the dice. You will get bad rolls.
I think Keynes said it best but I won't requote him here about it.
There was always a segment (the ones Bartle called "killers") who'd whine at length that if you don't let them repeatedly gank newbies:
I don't know about the newb gankers, but I've always argued that restricted newb ganking is a kin to outlawing anonymous speech.
Sure you end up with stopping a lot of trolling, but you always restrict people who have important things to say but can't do because of retaliation.
That said, when people were cooperating in free for all PvP games say like Ultima Online in the early days there was a said level of respect for the group of people that you were with simply because if you started acting like a jackass, the group might take a karma hit simply make you take dirt nap.
In non-PvP games the griefers still exist but they use other game mechanics to exploit the newbs.
I'd argue that it isn't the pvp, but the fact in order to give players freedom you have to accept there will be people that will abuse this freedom.
I've recently started Eve online and I've got several solicitations from random people to "come out to low sec" to share some loot and I knew damn well that if I did they would kill me.
But it makes the game fun avoiding pirate campers and what not, but I know full well that people are going to be assholes if I'm not careful. I like this game style but its not for everyone.
I don't think its anyones right to gank newbies but without that option in this game then all of us would loose our collective freedom to pvp in low sec territories.
I learned that RPG's are nothing more than fancy statistical simulations that have as much to do with simulating anything as the order of playing blackjack.
Other than the content background which I can get from reading novels, playing RPG's is about as exciting as moving numbers around a spreadsheet.
Someone recently joked on Eve Online in the newbie corp channel about the game being "SPREADSHEETS IN SPAAAAACE!"
But something interesting happened to me about a year ago... Being an avid number cruncher and power gamer in consoles, computer, and pen and paper games, I have fallen in love with the stock market and funds.
There are so many intricacies and rules (shorts, puts, calls, options, long, dividends etc etc) that when compiled you've got a rule book that rivals any pen and paper RPG (except maybe GURPS)
So I thought to myself... Why not?
So I started to self educate myself and lo and behold I'm doing pretty good (sort of considering how everyone else is doing lately) and even though its not going to make me rich overnight, it is fun playing if you learn how to do it.
It is like gambling but the house is usually on your side (most of the time).
for last 5 years same shit gets posted over and over again - Cheap solar panals
Umm... No. The price to produce them has gone down and is in fact the lowest it has ever been.
It is just that the demand is outstripping supply so economics is causing a price increase.
I will not rent my game software.
Why not? There are a few games which I have bought that I wish I didn't pay full price for.
There are some classics which I have made several backups of for "just in case", but seriously... Do you play games these day? 90% of them are shovel ware and stastically were allays going to get duped by a developer or shiny graphics (I'm LOOKING at you European Total War!) and we wish we didn't pay full price for because in a month we throw the box in a bin and forget about that game.
Tetris can't possible compare to the intense drama that was Solataire the Movie
In other words, it's called "bullshit" or the lesser-known name, "a good way for us to make money selling our drugs to people who don't need them, with no concern for their long-term well-being".
If it makes you feel better than who is to say you don't need them?
Personally, I find it cheaper to get rid of my depression in a nice strong bottle of vodka or red wine.
If people want to smoke pot or pop pills to feel better, that is there business.
If you let a pusher in a Doctor's coat or a leather jacket convince you need to take the drugs, then that is your problem.
What does this have to do with being British?
Oh and...
You're more likely to fail for lack of training, spare parts, support, basic infrastructure, etc.
Won't that give people jobs? Hell if computers and internet worked just fine here we'd all be unemployed or working at McDonalds.
If I dropped you at a random spot in Africa, would you rather have a handheld shortwave radio? Or an iPhone?
If that placed happened to be Somalia, I would go with the iPhone. You may think I am joking but I am not.
Arguably I'd rather have an AK-47 and a few bodyguards while visiting, but I should be able to either barrow a wifi signal from an internet cafe or make a call to the US without too much trouble.
For the locals it works fine with the other types of phones they use.
More efficient technology does not mean wider applications irrespective of cost.
True, but solar cells are costly because of the material it is made with currently. If they can take the same material and use less of it to produce the same amount of power, then the price overall goes down.
Now if they invent another material that is more efficient but more costly to produce than the price goes up.
I think the problem is that ants rely on a single queen to lay all the eggs. If a queen was born without the correct pheromones they might instantly kill it.
Now there might be an off chance that a single queen escapes from the original colony and builds her own, but if that colony runs into any other colony they will of course kill the differening colony with simple weight of numbers.
Of course some random human might take that queen to its own island somewhere and then it would work out but... that would be cheating.
Sure, I can throw on a headset and play with friends, but what if battle.net is down? What if I'm getting a lot of lag...fast paced game players don't have the tolerance of players who are into mmo's exclusively.
Why don't you pull out the 20 side dice and talk smack like we did before the internet?
And and to back up what I said...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7681458.stm
Still can't find the Japanese phrase, but my SO always yells it at me when I eat too fast at diner.
Small snacks throughout the day, and especially a proper breakfast, help your metabolism go faster.
I think what you mean is eat when you are hungry, and no when you have to or because the food is in front of you.
This may include having snacks when you feel hungry and also skipping meals if not. If you aren't hungry then don't eat.
I can't remember the word, but in Japan it is something they practice regularly by eating slow and then pushing food away at their table when they are full and not forcing themselves to finish.
I know many westerners find this wasteful and I myself gobble down all on my plate, but generally its why they are a lot healthier and less fat than us.
And considering all the glorious snack food the Japanese make they are not afraid to snack, but only when they are hungry.
I'm certainly not signing up for anything that absolutely requires an active high bandwidth connection to play single player offline games until companies like Comcast have been brought to heel.
The two things that peaked my attention to this were not the offline games but rather the online ones such as WoW and Eve.
This means I could play Eve on a crappy laptop rather than my gaming rig when I want to do tedious tasks downstairs while watching TV with the girlfriend rather than sitting upstairs.
Still needs an internet connection with my gaming rig so I see why not.
I want to run the stuff on my own box and not somewhere else.
Oh and one more thing...
What about all the times you want to play games on someone else's computer?
Say like when you are at work... When you should be working... Not like I'd do something like that.
Aside privacy conserns, it doesn't make that much sense to run games via internet line.
I don't mean to sound silly but what sensitive information does one put into your video games?
I mean, I try to not name my WoW characters using my SSN or my secrete password hints.