What's hilarious to me about complaining about such matters here is that Slashdot [slashdot.org] is a haven of free software buffs--that is, people who champion the idea that people should pay to produce stuff (you do have to eat while you code) but you shouldn't have to pay to use stuff (you don't pay for the result of all that free software that it cost someone to produce).
I thought Slashdot believed that everything should be free and I can optionally pay for if I think it has value. Like, I should be able to LISTEN TO THE DAMN CD before I have to pay for it. The WHOLE THING not just like one track. I should be able to READ THE DAMN BOOK before I have to pay for it. It's no good spending $50 on a book if it doesn't contain the knowledge I need. I should be able to _WATCH THE DAMN MOVIE_ before I pay for it. That's why I download, so I know if a movie is worth buying or not. I buy _MORE_ movies because of this, and MORE CDs and MORE books. I also should be able to drive my car before I buy it, and not for like 5 miles but DRIVE IT UNTIL I AM DONE WITH IT. It's stupid that I have to pay for a car when it might turn out to not work for me in 5 years when gas prices go insane. I should be able to LIVE IN THE DAMN HOUSE before I have to pay for it. How do I know if I'm going to like going up and down stairs to do laundry, or what if a tornado hits it and ruins it? I wouldn't ever have bought it in the first place if I knew that was going to happen. It's such crap that I have PAY for things before I get to use them. What's next? Are they going to expect me to BUY MY FOOD before I eat it? How am I supposed to know whether or not I like it until I've eaten it? And if it sucks why should I have to pay for it? That's such bullshit. It's all corporate greed, trying to screw me over.
Garage Games has an open-source 3D engine that you can license for $100. You can even sell the final product (up to $250,000 worth of it) without paying a dime more.
The WoW service frequently has unplanned outages, slow performance, server crashes, rollbacks (where you lose X minutes/hours of play development), and occasionally actual bugs.
I haven't seen much of this lately. There was a 2-week period where our server was unplayable for several hours every night, but it's been cleared up. The biggest issue right now is that if you land at Tarren Mill, you are going to die 15-20 times. The entire area is under constant attack, with rogues camping the graveyards and patrols watching the outer edges of the rez range.
Anyone who denies this or defends Blizzard's track record here simply doesn't play often, or plays on one of the rare low-population servers.
I play on Azgalor, a medium-to-high population PvP server. We got the queue for awhile until they upgraded our hardware, and the server was an unstable mess for several weeks, but it's been fine for probably 97-98% of the time. I don't LIVE on there all day, but I play a few hours a day and will usually spend most of Saturday on high-level raids. So I agree, I don't think this is nearly as big of a problem as it used to be. Maybe we're just lucky that Azgalor has been "fixed". There's still problems with population lag. I run around a corner into 15 alliance and my graphics lock up long enough for me to be dead.
And ain't my machine.
And despite seeming like an obviously useful option, Blizzard has been extremely reluctant to allow character transfers.
Yet, they have. On Whisperwind we all had the option to relocate our guild to another server, since Ironforge and Dun Morough were lagged beyond playability.
At this point I believe that's because their game is very poorly designed, at least with respect to how they manage character data.
Knowing nothing about the technical organization of their data, I don't feel qualified to respond to that.
There is no valid excuse or defense against the claims I make. My experiences are mirrored by thousands of other players.
The opposite experience is mirrored by thousands, too.
Anyone who isn't experiencing these issues simply isn't playing often,
Every day since launch, was one of the first 60's on my server. I play too much, really.
isn't playing on a moderate/high pop server
Whisperwind was at one point one of the top 5 most populated servers in the game. Azgalor isn't nearly as big but it's at least moderate.
or isn't willing to concede that a previously high quality game company has slipped.
Slipped? I'd say they underestimated the interest in their product and built an infrastructure that isn't capable of handling the workload.
Building an application like WoW is non-trivial and I think they've done an admirable job of trying to satisfy everybody. They're trying to fix the lag issues, upgrade hardware, fix the login server on the WoW boards, maintain a web site, add content, find/fix bugs, test new features, balance classes, design new game elements, read player feedback, add new recipes, tweak quests, improve architecture, manage 100 server farms, the amount of raw WORK that goes into the game and still needs to be done is staggering. The fact that they manage to do ALL of this simultaneously is impressive.
The lag isn't completely FIXED, but it's better.
The classes aren't totally balanced, but they're close.
Everything about the game improves in incremental steps, and frankly I'd much prefer that than to log in after a patch and have to start learning the game all over again because they've ripped apart huge chunks of the game's content or mechanics and rebuilt it, and my class is no longer recognizable as the same one I spent a month levelling to 60.
...instead of marketing the hell out of your product by artificially fluffing up support and enthusiasm for it, why not just actually make a superior product that people will naturally get excited about on their own? Then you don't have to hire people to pretend to be excited about it.
The entire Voyager mission cost less than 1 space shuttle launch does. So you could fund a Voyager-type mission with the price you're paying for a single Shuttle mission to re-stock the Space Station.
Also, one space shuttle launch costs is on the order of $600 million.
The New Horizons mission to Pluto is $650 just for the probe. I don't think you could launch a Voyager-style mission for under a billion dollars these day, and certainly not keep it under the price tag of a shuttle launch over a 30-year duration.
The entire Voyager mission cost less than 1 space shuttle launch does. So you could fund a Voyager-type mission with the price you're paying for a single Shuttle mission to re-stock the Space Station.
Voygar's total price tag was approaching a billion dollars (granted, over a 30 year period), and that's including some dollars spent in 1972 which would translate into many MORE dollars today.
I'm besmirching Voyagar or its science. But launching small single-purpose missions like this gets us a LOT of feedback and a lot of information, with much less risk. What if Voyagar had been destroyed at Jupiter? We'd never have done any flyby of Saturn until this year, and still have nothing on the other two gas giants.
Compare that to designing a narrow-mission probe for each planet and launching. The TOTAL cost may be more, but the total science is going to be insane, and if one fails, we've got others. That's why Spirit and Opportunity were paired up, mission redundancy.
I agree with you also on your implication that the space station is a resource hog.
Disagree with your assessment of Voyager as a probe with a narrow purpose. Exploring three planets with one probe is pretty ambitious, and at serveral points they thought the probe would be lost, on approaches to both Uranus and Neptune. I really think some good luck has played into the success of the Voyager program.
Considering the Martian soil is practially all sand (at least where they like to land) wouldn't it be better to use hovercrafts there? there's plenty of atmospheric gasses (CO2 mostly) and i think this doesn't get all that affected by dust.
Somebody else mentioned treads as well. I'm guessing these things were considered and discarded due to the extra complexity, weight, and power requirements of those modes of locomotion.
Wouldn't it be amazing if they both lasted long enough to eventually meet up somewhere? It'd probably take years but talk about publicity! Two robots designed for 90-day missions circumnavigating another planet! I wonder if it's even possible, given their design and Mars' terrain.
NASA has definitely gotten their money's worth out of these two golf carts. These missions have exceded their design specifications by like 500% or something. Weren't they meant for a 90-day mission? We're going on over a year. That's nuts.
As much as my Nerd Gene wants a manned mission to Mars, it's hard to argue with the scientific value of (relatively) cheap missions like this. NASA shifted in the late 90's to a series of relatively inexpensive probes with a narrow purpose (as opposed to the Voyager-class missions). These probes make sense. For one, there's less financial damage if one fails or is destroyed. And two, they can be put together, tested, and launched more cheaply and more quickly.
And we're getting some excellent science from them. The Mars rovers were an hour-by-hour news story, then a day-by-day news story, there was a lot of public interest in them during those first few days. These kinds of missions are, I think, more crucial to human space exploration than launching a dude to Mars.
There's some things you must have people in space to accomplish, but we've got a lot to learn yet through frugal unmanned space exploration and I hate to see so much of NASA's focus being shifted towards manned operations. Honestly, I hate to see NASA continuing to be involved in the production and operational side of space exploration. I think NASA should be reformulated as a primarily science and research-oriented organization and launch operations should be almost entirely privatized. NASA does too many things and most of it not that well, and none of it efficiently.
Before most of us were cognizant of the tax structure, many states had personal property taxes that you paid for luxuries like television sets. People used to squirrel way electronics in case the auditor showed up, to avoid paying the tax on it.
I agree with the consensus here: it's absurd and ridiculous. Tax systems in general are.
If NASA plans on setting up a Mars Colony, they could harness an endless supply of solar and wind power. Maybe it can teach us earthlings how we can better use our own free natural resources to power our grids instead of burning coal, oil and gas? Just a thought.
I don't think that's a fair analogy. Powering two golf-cart sized rovers to crawl slowly over the Martian terrain using solar cells fueled by strong sunlight from the thin atmosphere isn't really analogous to powering even a modest compact car or my house.
It's because the Star Wars universe consists of more than just the movies. After the original trilogy many novels have been written about what happens to the characters after "Return of the Jedi." All of the plotlines in these novels are approved by George Lucuas himself. Therefore, if he were to create sequels, they would either A) make the novels no longer relevant since he's making movies that don't reflect those stories, or B) He would just be making the novels into movies. (Timothy Zhan's sp?) Admiral Thrawn series would be excellent.
And we know, from the Harry Potter franchise, that there's really no reason to make films out of novels that everybody who would be interested in the film has most likely already read.
Bullshit. I run my own company and own shares in quite afew others, yet Im an environmentalist. Dont make assumptions about a political group you know so little about.
Don't extrapolate a sample of one (you) to a population of millions.
Im also very pro hi-tech, as long as that tech is responsible, ethical and safe.
You don't strike me as being part of the group of people I was describing.
You may live in a very very nice part of planet earth, with relatively little smog or air pollution,
No, I live in St. Louis, so your description isn't accurate at all.
not much in the way of threat from climate change in the short term, no tsunamis, freak weather or rising sea levels.
Well I live a few hundred miles from the New Madrid Fault and we get tornados a lot, but earth quakes and tornados are generally classified as natural disasters rather than environmental problems caused by mankind.
Bully for you.
For a guy who said, "Dont make assumptions about [people] you know so little about", you haven't hesitated for a moment to make some huge assumptions about me.
There ARE people whose homes are dissapearing under risisng sea levels, there are people dying in freak weather, there are places where pollution is causing record levels of disease.
I never claimed otherwise.
The rich west is very good at exporting its crap to the third world and pretending there isnt a problem,
Oh, now I'm rich, too? Well, blimey, gov'nah. The third world exports its crap here too, it's called immigration. ZING! Now I'm a racist! But you kinda explained the immigration problem, since America is destroying the third world they all have to come here where the air is clean, the water is clean and... er... wait. No, no, the environmentalists are always telling me that America is a filthy dirtball. So you've kinda proven my point. Here you are, self-described environmentalist, describing the "west" as a pollution-free utopia due to our culture's tendancy to dump its garbage on the third world. Meanwhile environmentalists here routinely condemn the filth and irresponsibility of America in destroying its own air and water with loose environmental policy, and they look at the pristine and undamaged third world as an example of simple people co-existing with the land. But you're saying the third world countries are the Earth's Cleveland. I really, really appreciate that you took the time to make my point for me.
while at the same time extracting all the finite resources from those very same countries.
Again, I don't doubt that this happens. You completely missed the point.
The point is that political-motivated environmentalist is a special interest group whose goal isn't pro-environmentalism so much as anti-corporatism. This causes legitimat environmental problems, legitimate science, legitimate technology, and legitimate solutions, to be outlawed, banned, overlooked, ignored, or lobbied into oblivion because somebody might profit by it.
First they export culture (homosexuality), now liberty (piracy). What's next? PEACE (collusion)?
For the humor-impaired, this was an attempt to make fun of people who fear culture, liberty, and peace on the grounds that it sounds to homosexuality, piracy, and pupppet governments. Just because it's not funny is no excuse to fail to recognize this as an attempt at humor and not dialog.
I guess my point is that the "environmental movement" is a little conflicted; they apparently either like or dislike centralization and efficiencies of scale, depending on the context.
That's because environmentalism, as a political movement, is based on anti-corporatism, not on pro-environmentalism. They'll embrace whatever particular idea they have to at the moment to blast the Very Big Corporation of America.
Your rank-and-file environmentalist is typically hostile to big corporations (so am I), but the movement as a political force is based on a pseudosocialist backlash against the evils and irresponsibility of big business. They have a point, too, but it's wrapped up in hiking boots and granola bars and sold as a platform meant to save humanity from itself.
I can live with the spin, but the problem is that legitimate environmental issues (and legitimate solutions) are being ignored in favor of trumped-up nonsense and hand-wringing in the media to keep people afraid and nervous.
My other beef with the politico-environmentalists is that they dramatically overstate the danger of various health-shattered aspects of life in our society, and dramatically exaggerate how bad off the planet is. To listen to their press releases, you'd think we live on a gigantic ball of oil and grease surrounded by a black haze of car exhaust and soot. Far from it. A lot of progress has been made, and there's a lot more to come.
I don't think that politico-environmentalists are interested in saving the environment or humanity as much as they are interested in screwing a corporate interests. I don't see them embracing solutions that, while not ideal, are steps in the right direction, simply on the grounds that these solutions end up generating revenue for somebody, and therefor they must be bad. There's this antithetical interaction that they see, where the Good of Nature/Humanity is pitteded against the Evils of Consumption, Wealth, and Technology.
It might sucker in naive college kids but it just convinces me that, even if they're right about a number of the issues they've taken up, I have trouble taking anything they say seriously. When the Bush administration engages in the same kind of doomsday fearmongering, we get our shorts in a bunch over paralyzing people with fear and coercing them into voting Republican to save us from gay marriage and terrorism. The apolcalyptic prophecies politico-environmentalism get dumped into a similar category for me.
For starters, on my Server, Rogues are NOT the most played class. In fact, they are not even in the top 3. So stop making generalizations about the entire game bassed on your experience on one server.
I'll say the same to you, especially since your server is an abberation. Rogues are the top class on most servers.
Next, complete stun lock is a myth. Stun lock ONLY happens if the Rogue gets off the first hit, and is only successful in a one on one environment because any other damage to stunned player will break the key stun in the combo.
In other words, when a Rogue hits first (which is what the class is designed to do) and fights one-on-one (also what the class is designed to do), they can use stunlock for cheap victories.
So players who use the class as designed can capitalize on this trick? Not much of a defense.
Stunlock doesn't bother me that much actually, it's double vanish that I think is crap.
Even IF the rogue executes his perfect stun lock combo... a player of equal level will not be dead. And of course let us recognize that many classes have stun lock counters... such as the mage Blink.
Which doesn't work if you're sitting, which is when a Rogue will hit you if he has any functioning brain cells.
Last, The reason Rogues do not get invited to end content is not because there are so many of them. It is because they are absolutely useless end game.
True. I've never yet seen any reason to have sap in, say, UBRS.
This is readon I ditched mine - a leather wearing aggro whore is not a fun character to be running around with when mobs hit you for 1k damage.
Learn how to play your class! That's what people tell me all the time when I criticize the overinflated idea of how powerful any given class is.
if a lot of people are playing them it is because they are fun to level, and they are relatively easy to play.
I was going to correct you but you got it right - they're easy and level fast.
But with two evenly skilled players at level 50+, a Rogue is almost ALWAYS at a disadvantage.
I strongly disagree.
If you think a Rogues are godly in WoW you have either never played on to 60, or you simply dont know howto play your current character.
THERE IT IS! If you can't beat ClassX with ClassY, then you just don't know how to play ClassY!
There's No Such Thing As News
on
Paul Graham on PR
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· Score: 5, Insightful
News stories are often nothing but political opinions or advertisements disguised as press releases. When a local business is having a major event to honor some anniversary, they contact newspapers and local TV stations and request that it be covered. The news programs don't seek out these photo ops, the businesses solicit the TV stations in exchange for continuing their advertising on those stations. What you see on TV is carefully hand-picked to ensure that you see exactly what they want you to see. Although Fox takes a lot of heat for its meticulously packaged news and slanted editorials, they're at least pretty blatant and obvious about it. People watch CNN or ABC and genuinely believe that they're getting unbiased, objective news. People who watch Fox know, in their hearts, that it's a conservative news station and that's exactly why they flock to it. Easier to be steadfast in your beliefs when they're not being seriously challenged.
The other kind of news is the political op-ed that's dressed up like a news story but it's not really a story. These, at least, provide some value to the voter concerned about understanding who he is voting for, but very little value. Countless news "stories" are just recitations of a public figure's opinion. This sounds like it should be valuable to it, but it's a carefully crafted, generally ambiguous and misleading statement, intended to befuddle and confuse the casual reader into agreeing.
For example, say I dislike the new pope. I go find a reporter and say, "I'm concerned and dismayed that the College of Cardinals believe that a former Hitler Youth is the best choice to guide the Catholic church through its unsure future."
This isn't a news story, it's not even an event, it's just one guy saying what he thinks. Now, this has value to intelligent people because we can research the statement and determine that the author is a manipulative jerk and not vote for him. But most of the population fails to do this. I suppose there's something to be said for not depriving the rest of us of information to compensate for the ignorance of the masses.
I don't really have a point to all this either. Oh! I know. By not having a point and just complaining I'm disguising directionless ranting as an intelligent Slashdot post. Ok, just as a Slashdot post. And by doing so, I'm demonstrating by example the very phenomenon that I distrust. Man, I'm brilliant!
First of all, NBC paid almost a billion for two weeks of Olympics coverage 5 years ago. That's just television coverage for two-weeks of an event that happens every four years. What do you think these networks might pay for an event that's never happened before?
ESPN is paying a billion per year for Monday Night Football.
How much do networks pay for the Super Bowl, a one-day event that lasts 3-4 hours? Usually Bowl bids are packaged up with regular reason games, but a few seasons of football plus a Super Bowl of two goes for 5-8 billion dollars. That's for broadcasting a total of a few hundred hours of television.
Second, you vastly overestimate how much this enterprise would cost. If a private enterprise could generate $5-$10 billion in investments, they'd have enough to get there and establish their revenue streams, which would be worth at least $3-$5 billion.
It can be financed, it can be done, the key is to disallow the government from doing it and allow private enterprise to take it on.
Our government said it'd cost $1 trillion to land a dude on Mars and bring him home. That was in the late 1980's, and many of the projects and much of the research that was figured into that $1 trillion figure has already been done. More realistic modern figures place the price tag at $300-$500 billion. Let's be generous and say that it'd cost $450-$750 billion.
Now, that's for the government to do it. Let's not aim so far as Mars, and start with the moon. Cut that figure in half. We're at $225-$375 billion for a manned moon landing. But we want a base on the moon, because that's where our revenue is going to come from. Let's push that back up and just call it $500 billion.
Now! That's the government. Financial analyses of NASA have shown that under 10% of its budget is typically put towards expenses directly related to spaceflight, and the rest is research, bidding, bureaucracy, and government waste. That suggests that the cost for private industry to pull this off is $50 billion. On a side note, the Artemis project has a figure less than a third of this value for a private industry moon base.
The global value of the video game market is well over $20 billion. Business investments of multibillion dollars are not unheard of.
So what are your revenue streams?
Mostly the entertainment industry. Imagine a reality TV show based on people living on the moon. Game shows. Movies. Rights to on-site filming. There's a revenue opportunity for advertising, tourism, the sale of moon rocks, scientific research, all kinds of stuff. The key is having a permanent settlement there.
The key is to get the project out of government's hands, because government is inefficient and has no profit motive to cut costs. In fact, you are on a quest to spend as much money as possible in government so that your budget can be justifiably increased.
Let's say a mission to land a guy on the moon would cost half that.
Of course, this is also why I think that more effort needs to be put into commercial space vehicles, so as to make spaceflight more commonplace.
The time to privatize space travel is long overdue. There's an immense revenue stream available for private/commercial spaceflight. Bush ought to be directing NASA's efforts AWAY from being an agency of construction/launch management/exploration, and towards being an agency of mostly science/research. Another, much smaller agency, is needed to oversee the commercialization of space flight. Some government funds are necessary to manage the transition, but it's overdue now by about 15 years.
Yes, I immediately see how not giving you the free music you want is equivilent to refusing cancer treatment.
I knew somebody would post something like this. The point is that they're equivilent. One relates to a right established by the law of the Unittd States. The other is not a right.
You do not the right to health care. I'm not arguing that this is ok, or that the system is fair, or that you SHOULDN'T, or that IP rights are more important than health care.
I'm trying to get you guys to know enough about this stuff so you can debate it intelligently. I'm on your side but every time this issue comes up there's 1,000 people posting opinions based on faulty understandings of your rights and the law.
You missed the point. Is the host of that forum responsible if a user uploads said files?
He could be if he knows it's there, knows it is there illegally, and makes no effort to get rid of it. If I have a party and people show up and start doing drugs and I see it and do nothing, and the party gets busted, I'm on the hook whether I did anything or not. If I kick those people off my property and they sneak around to my back yard and do it, and get caught, I'm in a far better position to defend myself as being innocent of any wrongdoing, or of being a party thereto.
Sort of like how the bar that doesn't cut off drunks is liable if the guy kills somebody.
Usually that kind of liability only comes about because the person most directly responsibility can't afford to cover the cost of the damages. When Joe Q Drunk creams a nun in his I-ROC Z28 and isn't insured, the nun's medical bills are still there needing to be paid, so they're going after the guy who owns the bar. His insurance might cover it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had some mod points, so I could mode this up as Funny! That's the best joke I've heard in months.
I thought Slashdot believed that everything should be free and I can optionally pay for if I think it has value. Like, I should be able to LISTEN TO THE DAMN CD before I have to pay for it. The WHOLE THING not just like one track. I should be able to READ THE DAMN BOOK before I have to pay for it. It's no good spending $50 on a book if it doesn't contain the knowledge I need. I should be able to _WATCH THE DAMN MOVIE_ before I pay for it. That's why I download, so I know if a movie is worth buying or not. I buy _MORE_ movies because of this, and MORE CDs and MORE books. I also should be able to drive my car before I buy it, and not for like 5 miles but DRIVE IT UNTIL I AM DONE WITH IT. It's stupid that I have to pay for a car when it might turn out to not work for me in 5 years when gas prices go insane. I should be able to LIVE IN THE DAMN HOUSE before I have to pay for it. How do I know if I'm going to like going up and down stairs to do laundry, or what if a tornado hits it and ruins it? I wouldn't ever have bought it in the first place if I knew that was going to happen. It's such crap that I have PAY for things before I get to use them. What's next? Are they going to expect me to BUY MY FOOD before I eat it? How am I supposed to know whether or not I like it until I've eaten it? And if it sucks why should I have to pay for it? That's such bullshit. It's all corporate greed, trying to screw me over.
Garage Games has an open-source 3D engine that you can license for $100. You can even sell the final product (up to $250,000 worth of it) without paying a dime more.
I haven't seen much of this lately. There was a 2-week period where our server was unplayable for several hours every night, but it's been cleared up. The biggest issue right now is that if you land at Tarren Mill, you are going to die 15-20 times. The entire area is under constant attack, with rogues camping the graveyards and patrols watching the outer edges of the rez range.
Anyone who denies this or defends Blizzard's track record here simply doesn't play often, or plays on one of the rare low-population servers.
I play on Azgalor, a medium-to-high population PvP server. We got the queue for awhile until they upgraded our hardware, and the server was an unstable mess for several weeks, but it's been fine for probably 97-98% of the time. I don't LIVE on there all day, but I play a few hours a day and will usually spend most of Saturday on high-level raids. So I agree, I don't think this is nearly as big of a problem as it used to be. Maybe we're just lucky that Azgalor has been "fixed". There's still problems with population lag. I run around a corner into 15 alliance and my graphics lock up long enough for me to be dead. And ain't my machine.
And despite seeming like an obviously useful option, Blizzard has been extremely reluctant to allow character transfers.
Yet, they have. On Whisperwind we all had the option to relocate our guild to another server, since Ironforge and Dun Morough were lagged beyond playability.
At this point I believe that's because their game is very poorly designed, at least with respect to how they manage character data.
Knowing nothing about the technical organization of their data, I don't feel qualified to respond to that.
There is no valid excuse or defense against the claims I make. My experiences are mirrored by thousands of other players.
The opposite experience is mirrored by thousands, too.
Anyone who isn't experiencing these issues simply isn't playing often,
Every day since launch, was one of the first 60's on my server. I play too much, really.
isn't playing on a moderate/high pop server
Whisperwind was at one point one of the top 5 most populated servers in the game. Azgalor isn't nearly as big but it's at least moderate.
or isn't willing to concede that a previously high quality game company has slipped.
Slipped? I'd say they underestimated the interest in their product and built an infrastructure that isn't capable of handling the workload.
Building an application like WoW is non-trivial and I think they've done an admirable job of trying to satisfy everybody. They're trying to fix the lag issues, upgrade hardware, fix the login server on the WoW boards, maintain a web site, add content, find/fix bugs, test new features, balance classes, design new game elements, read player feedback, add new recipes, tweak quests, improve architecture, manage 100 server farms, the amount of raw WORK that goes into the game and still needs to be done is staggering. The fact that they manage to do ALL of this simultaneously is impressive.
The lag isn't completely FIXED, but it's better.
The classes aren't totally balanced, but they're close.
Everything about the game improves in incremental steps, and frankly I'd much prefer that than to log in after a patch and have to start learning the game all over again because they've ripped apart huge chunks of the game's content or mechanics and rebuilt it, and my class is no longer recognizable as the same one I spent a month levelling to 60.
...instead of marketing the hell out of your product by artificially fluffing up support and enthusiasm for it, why not just actually make a superior product that people will naturally get excited about on their own? Then you don't have to hire people to pretend to be excited about it.
Before you even start, note that I said it'd be "amazing" if it ever happened, implying that I'm aware of the unlikelihood.
Let's assume for simplicity each rover is exactly opposite the other, so they're 10672 km apart.
Travel time to go 10672 km at 0.036 km per hour is 33.84 years earth time.
But each one need only travel half that distance to meet up, so it's only like 17 years! Huzzah!
Also, one space shuttle launch costs is on the order of $600 million.
The New Horizons mission to Pluto is $650 just for the probe. I don't think you could launch a Voyager-style mission for under a billion dollars these day, and certainly not keep it under the price tag of a shuttle launch over a 30-year duration.
So do you guys not think that we've gotten our money's worth out of the rovers?
Voygar's total price tag was approaching a billion dollars (granted, over a 30 year period), and that's including some dollars spent in 1972 which would translate into many MORE dollars today.
I'm besmirching Voyagar or its science. But launching small single-purpose missions like this gets us a LOT of feedback and a lot of information, with much less risk. What if Voyagar had been destroyed at Jupiter? We'd never have done any flyby of Saturn until this year, and still have nothing on the other two gas giants.
Compare that to designing a narrow-mission probe for each planet and launching. The TOTAL cost may be more, but the total science is going to be insane, and if one fails, we've got others. That's why Spirit and Opportunity were paired up, mission redundancy.
I agree with you also on your implication that the space station is a resource hog.
Disagree with your assessment of Voyager as a probe with a narrow purpose. Exploring three planets with one probe is pretty ambitious, and at serveral points they thought the probe would be lost, on approaches to both Uranus and Neptune. I really think some good luck has played into the success of the Voyager program.
Somebody else mentioned treads as well. I'm guessing these things were considered and discarded due to the extra complexity, weight, and power requirements of those modes of locomotion.
Wouldn't it be amazing if they both lasted long enough to eventually meet up somewhere? It'd probably take years but talk about publicity! Two robots designed for 90-day missions circumnavigating another planet! I wonder if it's even possible, given their design and Mars' terrain.
As much as my Nerd Gene wants a manned mission to Mars, it's hard to argue with the scientific value of (relatively) cheap missions like this. NASA shifted in the late 90's to a series of relatively inexpensive probes with a narrow purpose (as opposed to the Voyager-class missions). These probes make sense. For one, there's less financial damage if one fails or is destroyed. And two, they can be put together, tested, and launched more cheaply and more quickly.
And we're getting some excellent science from them. The Mars rovers were an hour-by-hour news story, then a day-by-day news story, there was a lot of public interest in them during those first few days. These kinds of missions are, I think, more crucial to human space exploration than launching a dude to Mars.
There's some things you must have people in space to accomplish, but we've got a lot to learn yet through frugal unmanned space exploration and I hate to see so much of NASA's focus being shifted towards manned operations. Honestly, I hate to see NASA continuing to be involved in the production and operational side of space exploration. I think NASA should be reformulated as a primarily science and research-oriented organization and launch operations should be almost entirely privatized. NASA does too many things and most of it not that well, and none of it efficiently.
I agree with the consensus here: it's absurd and ridiculous. Tax systems in general are.
I don't think that's a fair analogy. Powering two golf-cart sized rovers to crawl slowly over the Martian terrain using solar cells fueled by strong sunlight from the thin atmosphere isn't really analogous to powering even a modest compact car or my house.
And we know, from the Harry Potter franchise, that there's really no reason to make films out of novels that everybody who would be interested in the film has most likely already read.
Don't extrapolate a sample of one (you) to a population of millions.
Im also very pro hi-tech, as long as that tech is responsible, ethical and safe.
You don't strike me as being part of the group of people I was describing.
You may live in a very very nice part of planet earth, with relatively little smog or air pollution,
No, I live in St. Louis, so your description isn't accurate at all.
not much in the way of threat from climate change in the short term, no tsunamis, freak weather or rising sea levels.
Well I live a few hundred miles from the New Madrid Fault and we get tornados a lot, but earth quakes and tornados are generally classified as natural disasters rather than environmental problems caused by mankind.
Bully for you.
For a guy who said, "Dont make assumptions about [people] you know so little about", you haven't hesitated for a moment to make some huge assumptions about me.
There ARE people whose homes are dissapearing under risisng sea levels, there are people dying in freak weather, there are places where pollution is causing record levels of disease.
I never claimed otherwise.
The rich west is very good at exporting its crap to the third world and pretending there isnt a problem,
Oh, now I'm rich, too? Well, blimey, gov'nah. The third world exports its crap here too, it's called immigration. ZING! Now I'm a racist! But you kinda explained the immigration problem, since America is destroying the third world they all have to come here where the air is clean, the water is clean and ... er... wait. No, no, the environmentalists are always telling me that America is a filthy dirtball. So you've kinda proven my point. Here you are, self-described environmentalist, describing the "west" as a pollution-free utopia due to our culture's tendancy to dump its garbage on the third world. Meanwhile environmentalists here routinely condemn the filth and irresponsibility of America in destroying its own air and water with loose environmental policy, and they look at the pristine and undamaged third world as an example of simple people co-existing with the land. But you're saying the third world countries are the Earth's Cleveland. I really, really appreciate that you took the time to make my point for me.
while at the same time extracting all the finite resources from those very same countries.
Again, I don't doubt that this happens. You completely missed the point.
The point is that political-motivated environmentalist is a special interest group whose goal isn't pro-environmentalism so much as anti-corporatism. This causes legitimat environmental problems, legitimate science, legitimate technology, and legitimate solutions, to be outlawed, banned, overlooked, ignored, or lobbied into oblivion because somebody might profit by it.
For the humor-impaired, this was an attempt to make fun of people who fear culture, liberty, and peace on the grounds that it sounds to homosexuality, piracy, and pupppet governments. Just because it's not funny is no excuse to fail to recognize this as an attempt at humor and not dialog.
That's because environmentalism, as a political movement, is based on anti-corporatism, not on pro-environmentalism. They'll embrace whatever particular idea they have to at the moment to blast the Very Big Corporation of America.
Your rank-and-file environmentalist is typically hostile to big corporations (so am I), but the movement as a political force is based on a pseudosocialist backlash against the evils and irresponsibility of big business. They have a point, too, but it's wrapped up in hiking boots and granola bars and sold as a platform meant to save humanity from itself.
I can live with the spin, but the problem is that legitimate environmental issues (and legitimate solutions) are being ignored in favor of trumped-up nonsense and hand-wringing in the media to keep people afraid and nervous.
My other beef with the politico-environmentalists is that they dramatically overstate the danger of various health-shattered aspects of life in our society, and dramatically exaggerate how bad off the planet is. To listen to their press releases, you'd think we live on a gigantic ball of oil and grease surrounded by a black haze of car exhaust and soot. Far from it. A lot of progress has been made, and there's a lot more to come.
I don't think that politico-environmentalists are interested in saving the environment or humanity as much as they are interested in screwing a corporate interests. I don't see them embracing solutions that, while not ideal, are steps in the right direction, simply on the grounds that these solutions end up generating revenue for somebody, and therefor they must be bad. There's this antithetical interaction that they see, where the Good of Nature/Humanity is pitteded against the Evils of Consumption, Wealth, and Technology.
It might sucker in naive college kids but it just convinces me that, even if they're right about a number of the issues they've taken up, I have trouble taking anything they say seriously. When the Bush administration engages in the same kind of doomsday fearmongering, we get our shorts in a bunch over paralyzing people with fear and coercing them into voting Republican to save us from gay marriage and terrorism. The apolcalyptic prophecies politico-environmentalism get dumped into a similar category for me.
I'll say the same to you, especially since your server is an abberation. Rogues are the top class on most servers.
Next, complete stun lock is a myth. Stun lock ONLY happens if the Rogue gets off the first hit, and is only successful in a one on one environment because any other damage to stunned player will break the key stun in the combo.
In other words, when a Rogue hits first (which is what the class is designed to do) and fights one-on-one (also what the class is designed to do), they can use stunlock for cheap victories.
So players who use the class as designed can capitalize on this trick? Not much of a defense.
Stunlock doesn't bother me that much actually, it's double vanish that I think is crap.
Even IF the rogue executes his perfect stun lock combo... a player of equal level will not be dead. And of course let us recognize that many classes have stun lock counters... such as the mage Blink.
Which doesn't work if you're sitting, which is when a Rogue will hit you if he has any functioning brain cells.
Last, The reason Rogues do not get invited to end content is not because there are so many of them. It is because they are absolutely useless end game.
True. I've never yet seen any reason to have sap in, say, UBRS.
This is readon I ditched mine - a leather wearing aggro whore is not a fun character to be running around with when mobs hit you for 1k damage.
Learn how to play your class! That's what people tell me all the time when I criticize the overinflated idea of how powerful any given class is.
if a lot of people are playing them it is because they are fun to level, and they are relatively easy to play.
I was going to correct you but you got it right - they're easy and level fast.
But with two evenly skilled players at level 50+, a Rogue is almost ALWAYS at a disadvantage.
I strongly disagree.
If you think a Rogues are godly in WoW you have either never played on to 60, or you simply dont know howto play your current character.
THERE IT IS! If you can't beat ClassX with ClassY, then you just don't know how to play ClassY!
The other kind of news is the political op-ed that's dressed up like a news story but it's not really a story. These, at least, provide some value to the voter concerned about understanding who he is voting for, but very little value. Countless news "stories" are just recitations of a public figure's opinion. This sounds like it should be valuable to it, but it's a carefully crafted, generally ambiguous and misleading statement, intended to befuddle and confuse the casual reader into agreeing.
For example, say I dislike the new pope. I go find a reporter and say, "I'm concerned and dismayed that the College of Cardinals believe that a former Hitler Youth is the best choice to guide the Catholic church through its unsure future."
This isn't a news story, it's not even an event, it's just one guy saying what he thinks. Now, this has value to intelligent people because we can research the statement and determine that the author is a manipulative jerk and not vote for him. But most of the population fails to do this. I suppose there's something to be said for not depriving the rest of us of information to compensate for the ignorance of the masses.
I don't really have a point to all this either. Oh! I know. By not having a point and just complaining I'm disguising directionless ranting as an intelligent Slashdot post. Ok, just as a Slashdot post. And by doing so, I'm demonstrating by example the very phenomenon that I distrust. Man, I'm brilliant!
First of all, NBC paid almost a billion for two weeks of Olympics coverage 5 years ago. That's just television coverage for two-weeks of an event that happens every four years. What do you think these networks might pay for an event that's never happened before?
ESPN is paying a billion per year for Monday Night Football.
How much do networks pay for the Super Bowl, a one-day event that lasts 3-4 hours? Usually Bowl bids are packaged up with regular reason games, but a few seasons of football plus a Super Bowl of two goes for 5-8 billion dollars. That's for broadcasting a total of a few hundred hours of television.
Second, you vastly overestimate how much this enterprise would cost. If a private enterprise could generate $5-$10 billion in investments, they'd have enough to get there and establish their revenue streams, which would be worth at least $3-$5 billion.
It can be financed, it can be done, the key is to disallow the government from doing it and allow private enterprise to take it on.
Our government said it'd cost $1 trillion to land a dude on Mars and bring him home. That was in the late 1980's, and many of the projects and much of the research that was figured into that $1 trillion figure has already been done. More realistic modern figures place the price tag at $300-$500 billion. Let's be generous and say that it'd cost $450-$750 billion.
Now, that's for the government to do it. Let's not aim so far as Mars, and start with the moon. Cut that figure in half. We're at $225-$375 billion for a manned moon landing. But we want a base on the moon, because that's where our revenue is going to come from. Let's push that back up and just call it $500 billion.
Now! That's the government. Financial analyses of NASA have shown that under 10% of its budget is typically put towards expenses directly related to spaceflight, and the rest is research, bidding, bureaucracy, and government waste. That suggests that the cost for private industry to pull this off is $50 billion. On a side note, the Artemis project has a figure less than a third of this value for a private industry moon base.
The global value of the video game market is well over $20 billion. Business investments of multibillion dollars are not unheard of.
So what are your revenue streams?
Mostly the entertainment industry. Imagine a reality TV show based on people living on the moon. Game shows. Movies. Rights to on-site filming. There's a revenue opportunity for advertising, tourism, the sale of moon rocks, scientific research, all kinds of stuff. The key is having a permanent settlement there.
The key is to get the project out of government's hands, because government is inefficient and has no profit motive to cut costs. In fact, you are on a quest to spend as much money as possible in government so that your budget can be justifiably increased. Let's say a mission to land a guy on the moon would cost half that.
The time to privatize space travel is long overdue. There's an immense revenue stream available for private/commercial spaceflight. Bush ought to be directing NASA's efforts AWAY from being an agency of construction/launch management/exploration, and towards being an agency of mostly science/research. Another, much smaller agency, is needed to oversee the commercialization of space flight. Some government funds are necessary to manage the transition, but it's overdue now by about 15 years.
I knew somebody would post something like this. The point is that they're equivilent. One relates to a right established by the law of the Unittd States. The other is not a right.
You do not the right to health care. I'm not arguing that this is ok, or that the system is fair, or that you SHOULDN'T, or that IP rights are more important than health care.
I'm trying to get you guys to know enough about this stuff so you can debate it intelligently. I'm on your side but every time this issue comes up there's 1,000 people posting opinions based on faulty understandings of your rights and the law.
He could be if he knows it's there, knows it is there illegally, and makes no effort to get rid of it. If I have a party and people show up and start doing drugs and I see it and do nothing, and the party gets busted, I'm on the hook whether I did anything or not. If I kick those people off my property and they sneak around to my back yard and do it, and get caught, I'm in a far better position to defend myself as being innocent of any wrongdoing, or of being a party thereto.
Sort of like how the bar that doesn't cut off drunks is liable if the guy kills somebody.
Usually that kind of liability only comes about because the person most directly responsibility can't afford to cover the cost of the damages. When Joe Q Drunk creams a nun in his I-ROC Z28 and isn't insured, the nun's medical bills are still there needing to be paid, so they're going after the guy who owns the bar. His insurance might cover it.