Maybe by delaying that multi-million dollar building project.
That's great for a school that currently has no facilities, but for the vast majority of schools, the sudden and nearly absolute cut off in student base means that not only can they not afford to build a new facility, but that they can't aford their existing facilities. Virtually every non-ivy league school would be facing bankruptcy within months of the change.
Maybe by requiring teachers to use online books only, not paper books.
The cost of books is not the print, it's the copyrights. Switching from print books to online books won't save any significant amount.
Maybe by asking the professors to each teach one more class.
This is a double-down bad idea. First, the issue the school is having is a sudden loss in customers. What sense is it going to make to push your employees harder when there is suddenly less work?! Or are you suggesting that schools lay off their english and social studies staff and have their math and sciences instructors fill those roles as well? I'm sure that would result in some high quality education. Heck, at one of the colleges I attened with accelerated classes (4 hours, twice a week) some teachers already carried 3 classes. Pushing them to four classes means that each one is going to be putting in 12 hour days every day all week, which isn't going to lead to any sort of long term stable solution.
Maybe by tapping the ever-increasing endowment funds.
Most non-ivy league schools don't have endowment funds, let alone ever-increasing ones. And even those that do have endowment funds, unless they're in the mood to make exceptionally poor decisions, will limit their spending to dividens. Blowing the fund itself is a great way to become poor.
Some other universities (Pell grant mills) will simply go out of business
I disagree. I think those establishments would be the most likely to succeed. They have next to no overhead, they can overload the teachers as most of them are online only, they can put forward the most minimum effort and generate a piece of paper, which is what many people view as the valuable result of college.
Still others who fail to adapt will feel it on their bottom line.
If by "others" you mean "virtually every other school" and "feel it on their bottom line" you mean "go bankrupt in a few months" then yes, I agree with you.:)
I'm not saying that our current system is working well. Loans have undoubtedly lead to an increase in tuition costs. But the magical libertarian bullet causes even more problems than it solves.
It would have virtually no effect on Ivy League schools as their customers are for the most part not taking loans to attend. It would virtually immediatly bankrupt all other colleges and universities with campuses. Some tech schools might be able to make it by partnering with local businesses. And the online diploma mills that you deplore would be the only entities with no campuses to drive them under and the ability to reduce costs to be afordable to the shrinking middle class.
So yeah, maybe eventually new schools would start opening, but realistically, you'd be looking at a complete collapse of the US post secondary education system.
After which, the rich would continue to get a good education, and the poor would get worthless pieces of paper.
Like I said, I'm up for corrective action, but throwing the baby out with the bath water, then lighting the house on fire isn't the solution.
Lets just say that 60% of folks who start college graduate on time. And of them, lets say that 80% get jobs in their career field that enable them to pay off their student loans.
So out of every 10 loans made, give what I would guess are some very optimistic numbers, maybe half of them are going to get paid off on schedule. Of the other half, some will get paid off on a delayed schedule and the majority will default.
What type of interest rates are banks going to have to charge to cover the spread?
Assuming 15 year amort schedules, you're talking in the range of ~18% APR to cover the lost money and the margins that would match the current ~4% garunteed loans.
That means a $20,000 CS assoc degree is going to cost $55,000 over the full schedule. $305 a month, instead of the $150 a month it would cost at 4%.
To switch to a ungarunteed private bank system would all but garuntee that the ONLY people getting college loans are children of well off parents (ie, the top ~20% of the country), and they would pay over double what the loan would cost under the current system.
Of course, if you already have money, why bother taking a loan? Or why not take a personal loan at 10-15% instead of a student loan at 18-20%? Again, this just reinforces the wealth and education gap in the country. Those who have gain more, those who don't lose what little they have.
Yes, if you get a student loan through the federal program, you can not get out of your debt.
But one would assume, that if Ron Paul had his way, not only would the federal student loan program be axed, but so would any federal garuntee of the loan.
The end result would be that banks would not have the default protection they enjoy now, and students would default.
My appologies for making that leap in logic, I should have spelled it out more carefully in my post instead of just infering it.
Not a bad plan at all! I myself am a result of such a process. I spent a fair bit of my Junior year drunk and stoned. I could have done quite well at high school, but I didn't have any drive to.
So after graduating, I did a short foreign exchange program, then I joined the military. Toured the world, got a bit of experience in my desired field (software development). Got out, did the consulting thing for a while, but in the post-dot-com bubble period, work was hard to come by, so I went back to school.
And I took student loans. I had a pregnant wife, a rent abaited apartment, a 15 year old car I maintained myself, a 3/4 time job, and an accelerated education program.
I would absolutely LOVE to see the feds open up more GI Bill rewarding programs, specifically in programs that get 18 year old kids out of their homes, out of the neighborhoods they know, and get them into situations where they can learn more about themselves and the world.
Not at all, it would just trend back towards where it was prior to the creation of the federal student loan program, and with the colapsing of the middle class, back to what it was prior to WWII.
Which is to say, we would have a 2 education system solution: Ivy League schools where the children of the rich go, and trade skill schools/apprentiships/OJT for everyone who won't ever have the opportunity to be rich.
It's just another way for the plutocracy to further strengthen its own position and isolate themselves from everyone else.
$45k is about the median HOUSEHOLD income, not the average national wage.
If you're looking at individuals, depending on a number of way of categorizing folks you're looking at a number between $19k and $33k with a median right around $26k.
So by your 5% value, that's about $1,300 a year in financial aid, which will pretty much prevent the vast majority of students from continuing their education.
How many 18 year olds do you know with good enough credit to buy a car, let alone a house?
How many private banks are going to be willing to fork over $20,000-200,000 for an education for an 18 year old kid with no credit history, no job, and a low likelihood of gaining employment in their first 5 years that will pay anything close to enough to be able to aford the payments on that loan?
The reason the federal student loan program exists is because it ISN'T profitable to make that loan. Most kids are going to default, and the banks will be left holding the bag.
The government program exists in a market where the private market doesn't want to go. That's a significant purpose of the government in a capitalist society.
Of all the spells you have in your arsenal (assuming you are a Warlock), only 5 have cast timers longer than the GCD. And one of those is a PvP spell and the others you're only casting a handful of due to your spec:
2 Seed of Corruption 2.5 Incinerate 4 Soul Fire 2 Immolate 3 Shadow Bolt
Everything else is 1.5 seconds or shorter. So I would say that the GCD is absolutely important to your DPS. Losing even just a 1/4 of a second per click will cost you about 15% of your peak DPS. Waste a 1/4 second on any of those above spells, and it's even worse.
Gear is virtually negligable. For example, the folks who clear heroics as the server first hits max level have no gear. Heck, the people who raced ahead don't even have the best quest gear. Nor do they have rep gear, wellfair epics, or anything else. Folks run into Heroics with the bare minimum ilvl, in greens and blues.
People who run raids as soon as they come out don't have gear, heck, when the first batch of Cataclysm raids came out, people were scraping by to hit the ilvl marker, holding on to a healy item in their inventory to make it to the cap. And you know what? They made it through those raids.
Point being, when it comes to WoW, untill your gear level is completely out of whack with the tuning level of the instance, Skill trumps gear. Once you have uber gear though, anything not tuned for that level is going to be silly easy and Skill becomes unimportant (with the exception of raid-wipe mechanics such as Heroic Litch King)
So stop blaiming your gear. If you want to increase your DPS, learn more about your spell priorities, situational awareness, and ABC.
Use distribution groups, when you sent the email, it's only getting sent to one address, the target email server will handle the resolution of the distribution group to individual email addresses.
And second, 50 emails a day, each with 4 recipients, where none of those recipients are repeated? That's a bit of a stretch isn't it?
I mean, I send a lot of emails in a day to a lot of people, but I'll often be CC'ing the same PM's, Analysts, SMEs, developers, managers, etc... Yeah, an email to Brazil will go to 4-8 people, but all of my emails to Brazil will go to someone from that same 4-8 people group. So even if I send 50 emails to Brazil, it's still only 4-8 recipients.
The first recommendation that is almost always a help is ABC: Always Be Clicking.
If a fight is 1 minute long, and you have 0% haste, you have a max of 40 possible casts thanks to the 1.5s global cooldown.
If you're not hitting long cast spells (ones that are longer than the GCD) you should be doing everything you can to get close to that 40 casts number.
If you're in the 20-30 range, even with the perfect rotation, you'll always come in low on DPS.
I'd recommend getting the mod Quartz. It replaces your cast bar with a new one that indicates lag. As soon as the cast bar gets to the red, hit your next ability.
If you are working a 16 hour day, that's 1 email per 2 minutes, all day long.
I work with folks who blow through emails all day, pulling 12 hour days working between US, Brazil, EU, SE Asia, and Australia, and none of them would hit the 500 recipient cap.
Unless you're spamming advertisements through your email server, which really, there are significantly better options for anyway, you're not going to have an issue.
Heroic Litch King has a number of issues that are completely non-gear determinent.
If you can't move out of the blast wave, you'll get knocked off the platform and die. Doesn't matter how much health you have, if you can't move, you die.
If your raid doesn't burn the angel chicks, the member they are carrying dies, again, doesn't matter what gear that person has, if folks don't switch targets, the person dies.
If people are standing in the black puddle, it will grow and encompass the entire platform. With a huge overgearing, you can survive this for quite a while, but odds are, you're going to wipe the raid if people don't get out of it.
With Tier 11ish gear, the disease is pretty well mitigated, especially since the DPS should burn through phase 1 waaaay faster. But if you're not careful with cleanses, or your DPS is really slacking, and people aren't doing the disease dance, the raid with wipe.
Gear can help, predominently in the following ways: 1) DPSers - more gear = more DPS, reducing phase and fight durations, less time = less chances to screw up = better odds of success. 2) Tanks - more gear = less healing, more heals for DPSers that would otherwise be dieing, or dropping a healer for a DPSer (see #1) 3) Healers - more gear = more efficient healing, less OOM issues, less healing pressure, possibility of swapping a healer for a DPSer (see #1 again)
Virtually every fight in WoW can be simplified by just adding more DPS. LK for example, if you have enough DPS to burn through Phase 1 before the explosion, it's way easier. Phase 2, the more dps, the faster the angels die, making it less likely that people will die, and the shorter the phase is meaning less angels and less black pools. and so on. So if your tanks are surviving the hits, and your healers aren't running OOM, it's all about the DPSers not dieing to raid mechanics and doing as much damage as they can.
If you are the first to die, especially at level 85 doing Litch King content, the issue isn't your gear.
The issue is almost NEVER gear, atleast for PvE.
The issue is almost always player knowledge/skill with their class, situational awareness for avoiding extraneous damage, and lack of knowledge of raid mechanics.
An excess of gear will allow players to overcome MOST mechanics. If your tank has 250k health and you're dealing with bosses that are only hitting for 20-30k, your healers can be half asleep and keep him up.
A green geared 85 putting out 10k+ DPS going back to an instance geared around 5-8k DPS should have no problems beating enrage timers.
For the most part, if you are the first to die, you did something wrong and while more gear might have mitigated it, it was your mistake to be in the position to die.
You're casual! Great, so am I these days. But I still make sure to take a couple of minutes and review the boss fights, or ask for a clear description of the fight, what my responsibilities are, and what I should look out for. Being casual doesn't mean you get to be ignorant and depend on others to carry you. It just means you can't grind like the hard core folks.
Red vs. Blue doesn't have the sort of audience reach they're looking for. Now I can't speak for the demographics of "Dorkness Rising," but...
I supose that no program has the audience reach they're looking for, until they advertise and push it.
I mean, LotR and the Hobbit shouldn't have any sort of audience reach either by that measure, but they get advertised and pushed to the point that the insignificant cult following that they enjoy is moot compared to the massive throngs of consumers who have been convinced that it's the greatest thing ever invented for the next 5 minutes.
Just saying, I'd much rather see them come up with 100 hours of a wide variety of content from small house producers than 3 hours of generic retred with the stars for the same cost.
Really, $100 million for a retred of yet another generic format TV program? Where the only thing that entertains anymore is putting extreme gore/fear/violence/sex into the content.
We have tons of small-house production studios that are doing amazing work on a shoe-string budget comparitively.
For $100M we could have a dozens full length Journey Quest seasons, or a bunch of new Dorkness Rising movies with even better production quality.
Instead it's "Hey look, Jack Bower disembowls a terrorist and feeds his intestins to a 5 year old to get him to admit that he hid his keys!"
I don't like the fact that the rich are provided with a different (better) form of justice than the general public, but I also don't think that's the issue here.
But it's reasonable that this is a much lower priority than something that's actually worth a bunch of money
Talk about some cognative dissonance going on here. You have been conditioned by years of living in our society by those with money that they, and their property is somehow more valuable than other individuals.
It should be the governments function to return stolen property, to the best of it's ability, with equal resource for all. It is up to the individual, or in this case corporation, to present the damages incured in civil court to acquire compensation from the theft. And in order to do so, they must be able to prove the damages. Conjecture based on previous market entries is NOT proof. Because as stated before, all of these individuals and corporations have released duds as well as bombs in the past. It is not the court's job to prognosticate what could have happened. It is the plaintifs job to prove what happened.
So you would toss billions at a stolen Zune? Or a Newton? Or a HP Touchpad? Or any of the other thousands of busts that successful companies across the globe come out with every day? Just because that corporation has had previous success?
Or are you suggesting that once that starving artist has had one success, and becomes part of the upper reaches of society, that he deserves the same protection?
One set of protections for the rich, another for the poor? Sounds like a great plan!
So a young playwrite that has his work stolen is not protected by the law, but a corporation that has produced more flops than successes that has a prototype that it released into the wild stolen is entitled to billions?
Because obviously, if some foreign nationals invaded the US and destroyed our military, leaving only "freedom fighters" (aka "terrorist") to attempt to repell them, and in an effort to kill those terrorist, the foreign nationals killed your wife and kids, the first thing you would think is, "huh, I guess I should do exactly what they want me to do so they don't kill me too."
That style of occupation has been working for the Israelis so well for the last 60 years too! I'm sure their constent state of war will come to an end any day now when the Palestinians realise that it's best just to go along with the Israeli demands.
And what, you're going to go building to building and fill each one with impact grenades? I'm sure that will do tons to motivate the locals to help the US.
Not to mention that the M32 is a defensive weapon, full gear and ammo load requires 3 Marines to carry. It is an impressive weapon, but it's use in offensive urban combat and room by room clearing is near nil.
Although, I did have a buddy take an M240-G, clip the carrying strap to the heat shield, forward hand on the barrel swap handle and rear hand on the butterfly, going full Rambo with it. That was at OCS, he scared the crap out of so many cadets...
Heck, why not fill the little bugger with explosives while we're at it?
Urban combat is a nasty process with exceptionally high casualty rates. The last MOUT training I did as a defender (ie: local irregular militia vs significantly larger organized military assault) we inflicted over 70% casualties.
That was a 10+ years ago though, and maybe we've started learning from the Israelis.
But even with flash bangs and grenades, the advantage is in the defender's hands. Especially when you have to be concerned about collateral damage.
Given the assaulter's position, I'd much rather know that I'm about to stack and charge into a room of a family huddling in the corner than toss a grenade in and find out as we're turning over corpses.
Think of the military value though. Toss a ball into a bunker, bounce it around the corner, throw it straight up to see what's on the other side of a wall, etc...
College, especially online courses, has its value determined almost exclusively by the effort that the student puts into it.
We've see living proof that you can go to an ivy league school and leave a moron, and I'm sure we've all met folks who had limited community college experience and we brilliant.
I had some online classes in my BS, and I'm likely going to go for my masters entirely online (looking at Western Goveners University at the moment). And in my experience, you could put in virtually no effort, and pass. But you would finish the class a couple grand in debt and no smarter than you started. Alternatively, you could throw yourself into the class and really challenge yourself (because the teachers/profs sure as hell aren't going to) and you'll come out with knowledge of far more value than the debt.
Slashdot Mirror
Alas I think you are falling into the same trap that so many hard libertarians fall into:
Step 1) Radical change/deregulations
Step 2) ???
Step 3) Perfect life
That step 2 part really kills the theory.
For instance:
Maybe by delaying that multi-million dollar building project.
That's great for a school that currently has no facilities, but for the vast majority of schools, the sudden and nearly absolute cut off in student base means that not only can they not afford to build a new facility, but that they can't aford their existing facilities. Virtually every non-ivy league school would be facing bankruptcy within months of the change.
Maybe by requiring teachers to use online books only, not paper books.
The cost of books is not the print, it's the copyrights. Switching from print books to online books won't save any significant amount.
Maybe by asking the professors to each teach one more class.
This is a double-down bad idea. First, the issue the school is having is a sudden loss in customers. What sense is it going to make to push your employees harder when there is suddenly less work?! Or are you suggesting that schools lay off their english and social studies staff and have their math and sciences instructors fill those roles as well? I'm sure that would result in some high quality education. Heck, at one of the colleges I attened with accelerated classes (4 hours, twice a week) some teachers already carried 3 classes. Pushing them to four classes means that each one is going to be putting in 12 hour days every day all week, which isn't going to lead to any sort of long term stable solution.
Maybe by tapping the ever-increasing endowment funds.
Most non-ivy league schools don't have endowment funds, let alone ever-increasing ones. And even those that do have endowment funds, unless they're in the mood to make exceptionally poor decisions, will limit their spending to dividens. Blowing the fund itself is a great way to become poor.
Some other universities (Pell grant mills) will simply go out of business
I disagree. I think those establishments would be the most likely to succeed. They have next to no overhead, they can overload the teachers as most of them are online only, they can put forward the most minimum effort and generate a piece of paper, which is what many people view as the valuable result of college.
Still others who fail to adapt will feel it on their bottom line.
If by "others" you mean "virtually every other school" and "feel it on their bottom line" you mean "go bankrupt in a few months" then yes, I agree with you. :)
I'm not saying that our current system is working well. Loans have undoubtedly lead to an increase in tuition costs. But the magical libertarian bullet causes even more problems than it solves.
It would have virtually no effect on Ivy League schools as their customers are for the most part not taking loans to attend. It would virtually immediatly bankrupt all other colleges and universities with campuses. Some tech schools might be able to make it by partnering with local businesses. And the online diploma mills that you deplore would be the only entities with no campuses to drive them under and the ability to reduce costs to be afordable to the shrinking middle class.
So yeah, maybe eventually new schools would start opening, but realistically, you'd be looking at a complete collapse of the US post secondary education system.
After which, the rich would continue to get a good education, and the poor would get worthless pieces of paper.
Like I said, I'm up for corrective action, but throwing the baby out with the bath water, then lighting the house on fire isn't the solution.
-Rick
Lets just say that 60% of folks who start college graduate on time. And of them, lets say that 80% get jobs in their career field that enable them to pay off their student loans.
So out of every 10 loans made, give what I would guess are some very optimistic numbers, maybe half of them are going to get paid off on schedule. Of the other half, some will get paid off on a delayed schedule and the majority will default.
What type of interest rates are banks going to have to charge to cover the spread?
Assuming 15 year amort schedules, you're talking in the range of ~18% APR to cover the lost money and the margins that would match the current ~4% garunteed loans.
That means a $20,000 CS assoc degree is going to cost $55,000 over the full schedule. $305 a month, instead of the $150 a month it would cost at 4%.
To switch to a ungarunteed private bank system would all but garuntee that the ONLY people getting college loans are children of well off parents (ie, the top ~20% of the country), and they would pay over double what the loan would cost under the current system.
Of course, if you already have money, why bother taking a loan? Or why not take a personal loan at 10-15% instead of a student loan at 18-20%? Again, this just reinforces the wealth and education gap in the country. Those who have gain more, those who don't lose what little they have.
-Rick
Yes, if you get a student loan through the federal program, you can not get out of your debt.
But one would assume, that if Ron Paul had his way, not only would the federal student loan program be axed, but so would any federal garuntee of the loan.
The end result would be that banks would not have the default protection they enjoy now, and students would default.
My appologies for making that leap in logic, I should have spelled it out more carefully in my post instead of just infering it.
-Rick
Not a bad plan at all! I myself am a result of such a process. I spent a fair bit of my Junior year drunk and stoned. I could have done quite well at high school, but I didn't have any drive to.
So after graduating, I did a short foreign exchange program, then I joined the military. Toured the world, got a bit of experience in my desired field (software development). Got out, did the consulting thing for a while, but in the post-dot-com bubble period, work was hard to come by, so I went back to school.
And I took student loans. I had a pregnant wife, a rent abaited apartment, a 15 year old car I maintained myself, a 3/4 time job, and an accelerated education program.
I would absolutely LOVE to see the feds open up more GI Bill rewarding programs, specifically in programs that get 18 year old kids out of their homes, out of the neighborhoods they know, and get them into situations where they can learn more about themselves and the world.
-Rick
Not at all, it would just trend back towards where it was prior to the creation of the federal student loan program, and with the colapsing of the middle class, back to what it was prior to WWII.
Which is to say, we would have a 2 education system solution: Ivy League schools where the children of the rich go, and trade skill schools/apprentiships/OJT for everyone who won't ever have the opportunity to be rich.
It's just another way for the plutocracy to further strengthen its own position and isolate themselves from everyone else.
-Rick
$45k is about the median HOUSEHOLD income, not the average national wage.
If you're looking at individuals, depending on a number of way of categorizing folks you're looking at a number between $19k and $33k with a median right around $26k.
So by your 5% value, that's about $1,300 a year in financial aid, which will pretty much prevent the vast majority of students from continuing their education.
-Rick
How many 18 year olds do you know with good enough credit to buy a car, let alone a house?
How many private banks are going to be willing to fork over $20,000-200,000 for an education for an 18 year old kid with no credit history, no job, and a low likelihood of gaining employment in their first 5 years that will pay anything close to enough to be able to aford the payments on that loan?
The reason the federal student loan program exists is because it ISN'T profitable to make that loan. Most kids are going to default, and the banks will be left holding the bag.
The government program exists in a market where the private market doesn't want to go. That's a significant purpose of the government in a capitalist society.
-Rick
Of all the spells you have in your arsenal (assuming you are a Warlock), only 5 have cast timers longer than the GCD. And one of those is a PvP spell and the others you're only casting a handful of due to your spec:
2 Seed of Corruption
2.5 Incinerate
4 Soul Fire
2 Immolate
3 Shadow Bolt
Everything else is 1.5 seconds or shorter. So I would say that the GCD is absolutely important to your DPS. Losing even just a 1/4 of a second per click will cost you about 15% of your peak DPS. Waste a 1/4 second on any of those above spells, and it's even worse.
Gear is virtually negligable. For example, the folks who clear heroics as the server first hits max level have no gear. Heck, the people who raced ahead don't even have the best quest gear. Nor do they have rep gear, wellfair epics, or anything else. Folks run into Heroics with the bare minimum ilvl, in greens and blues.
People who run raids as soon as they come out don't have gear, heck, when the first batch of Cataclysm raids came out, people were scraping by to hit the ilvl marker, holding on to a healy item in their inventory to make it to the cap. And you know what? They made it through those raids.
Point being, when it comes to WoW, untill your gear level is completely out of whack with the tuning level of the instance, Skill trumps gear. Once you have uber gear though, anything not tuned for that level is going to be silly easy and Skill becomes unimportant (with the exception of raid-wipe mechanics such as Heroic Litch King)
So stop blaiming your gear. If you want to increase your DPS, learn more about your spell priorities, situational awareness, and ABC.
-Rick
Use distribution groups, when you sent the email, it's only getting sent to one address, the target email server will handle the resolution of the distribution group to individual email addresses.
And second, 50 emails a day, each with 4 recipients, where none of those recipients are repeated? That's a bit of a stretch isn't it?
I mean, I send a lot of emails in a day to a lot of people, but I'll often be CC'ing the same PM's, Analysts, SMEs, developers, managers, etc... Yeah, an email to Brazil will go to 4-8 people, but all of my emails to Brazil will go to someone from that same 4-8 people group. So even if I send 50 emails to Brazil, it's still only 4-8 recipients.
-Rick
The first recommendation that is almost always a help is ABC: Always Be Clicking.
If a fight is 1 minute long, and you have 0% haste, you have a max of 40 possible casts thanks to the 1.5s global cooldown.
If you're not hitting long cast spells (ones that are longer than the GCD) you should be doing everything you can to get close to that 40 casts number.
If you're in the 20-30 range, even with the perfect rotation, you'll always come in low on DPS.
I'd recommend getting the mod Quartz. It replaces your cast bar with a new one that indicates lag. As soon as the cast bar gets to the red, hit your next ability.
-Rick
If you are working a 16 hour day, that's 1 email per 2 minutes, all day long.
I work with folks who blow through emails all day, pulling 12 hour days working between US, Brazil, EU, SE Asia, and Australia, and none of them would hit the 500 recipient cap.
Unless you're spamming advertisements through your email server, which really, there are significantly better options for anyway, you're not going to have an issue.
-Rick
Heroic Litch King has a number of issues that are completely non-gear determinent.
If you can't move out of the blast wave, you'll get knocked off the platform and die. Doesn't matter how much health you have, if you can't move, you die.
If your raid doesn't burn the angel chicks, the member they are carrying dies, again, doesn't matter what gear that person has, if folks don't switch targets, the person dies.
If people are standing in the black puddle, it will grow and encompass the entire platform. With a huge overgearing, you can survive this for quite a while, but odds are, you're going to wipe the raid if people don't get out of it.
With Tier 11ish gear, the disease is pretty well mitigated, especially since the DPS should burn through phase 1 waaaay faster. But if you're not careful with cleanses, or your DPS is really slacking, and people aren't doing the disease dance, the raid with wipe.
Gear can help, predominently in the following ways:
1) DPSers - more gear = more DPS, reducing phase and fight durations, less time = less chances to screw up = better odds of success.
2) Tanks - more gear = less healing, more heals for DPSers that would otherwise be dieing, or dropping a healer for a DPSer (see #1)
3) Healers - more gear = more efficient healing, less OOM issues, less healing pressure, possibility of swapping a healer for a DPSer (see #1 again)
Virtually every fight in WoW can be simplified by just adding more DPS. LK for example, if you have enough DPS to burn through Phase 1 before the explosion, it's way easier. Phase 2, the more dps, the faster the angels die, making it less likely that people will die, and the shorter the phase is meaning less angels and less black pools. and so on. So if your tanks are surviving the hits, and your healers aren't running OOM, it's all about the DPSers not dieing to raid mechanics and doing as much damage as they can.
-Rick
-Rick
If you are the first to die, especially at level 85 doing Litch King content, the issue isn't your gear.
The issue is almost NEVER gear, atleast for PvE.
The issue is almost always player knowledge/skill with their class, situational awareness for avoiding extraneous damage, and lack of knowledge of raid mechanics.
An excess of gear will allow players to overcome MOST mechanics. If your tank has 250k health and you're dealing with bosses that are only hitting for 20-30k, your healers can be half asleep and keep him up.
A green geared 85 putting out 10k+ DPS going back to an instance geared around 5-8k DPS should have no problems beating enrage timers.
For the most part, if you are the first to die, you did something wrong and while more gear might have mitigated it, it was your mistake to be in the position to die.
You're casual! Great, so am I these days. But I still make sure to take a couple of minutes and review the boss fights, or ask for a clear description of the fight, what my responsibilities are, and what I should look out for. Being casual doesn't mean you get to be ignorant and depend on others to carry you. It just means you can't grind like the hard core folks.
-Rick
I was actively developing software for the Dell Axiom line from 2003-2005. And in 2002 I was working on tough-book tablets.
To say that tablet/palm computing was "dead" until 2007 is just ignorant.
-Rick
Red vs. Blue doesn't have the sort of audience reach they're looking for. Now I can't speak for the demographics of "Dorkness Rising," but...
I supose that no program has the audience reach they're looking for, until they advertise and push it.
I mean, LotR and the Hobbit shouldn't have any sort of audience reach either by that measure, but they get advertised and pushed to the point that the insignificant cult following that they enjoy is moot compared to the massive throngs of consumers who have been convinced that it's the greatest thing ever invented for the next 5 minutes.
Just saying, I'd much rather see them come up with 100 hours of a wide variety of content from small house producers than 3 hours of generic retred with the stars for the same cost.
-Rick
Really, $100 million for a retred of yet another generic format TV program? Where the only thing that entertains anymore is putting extreme gore/fear/violence/sex into the content.
We have tons of small-house production studios that are doing amazing work on a shoe-string budget comparitively.
For $100M we could have a dozens full length Journey Quest seasons, or a bunch of new Dorkness Rising movies with even better production quality.
Instead it's "Hey look, Jack Bower disembowls a terrorist and feeds his intestins to a 5 year old to get him to admit that he hid his keys!"
-Rick
I don't like the fact that the rich are provided with a different (better) form of justice than the general public, but I also don't think that's the issue here.
But it's reasonable that this is a much lower priority than something that's actually worth a bunch of money
Talk about some cognative dissonance going on here. You have been conditioned by years of living in our society by those with money that they, and their property is somehow more valuable than other individuals.
It should be the governments function to return stolen property, to the best of it's ability, with equal resource for all. It is up to the individual, or in this case corporation, to present the damages incured in civil court to acquire compensation from the theft. And in order to do so, they must be able to prove the damages. Conjecture based on previous market entries is NOT proof. Because as stated before, all of these individuals and corporations have released duds as well as bombs in the past. It is not the court's job to prognosticate what could have happened. It is the plaintifs job to prove what happened.
-Rick
-Rick
So you would toss billions at a stolen Zune? Or a Newton? Or a HP Touchpad? Or any of the other thousands of busts that successful companies across the globe come out with every day? Just because that corporation has had previous success?
Or are you suggesting that once that starving artist has had one success, and becomes part of the upper reaches of society, that he deserves the same protection?
One set of protections for the rich, another for the poor? Sounds like a great plan!
If you're part of the 1% at least.
So a young playwrite that has his work stolen is not protected by the law, but a corporation that has produced more flops than successes that has a prototype that it released into the wild stolen is entitled to billions?
And people call the 99% crazy...
-Rick
So the starving artist who had his laptop stolen can claim that he's out billions too because it was his lifes work and it would have sold billions?
Come on. It's a friggin tort. Proof of damages or it didn't happen.
-Rick
Because obviously, if some foreign nationals invaded the US and destroyed our military, leaving only "freedom fighters" (aka "terrorist") to attempt to repell them, and in an effort to kill those terrorist, the foreign nationals killed your wife and kids, the first thing you would think is, "huh, I guess I should do exactly what they want me to do so they don't kill me too."
That style of occupation has been working for the Israelis so well for the last 60 years too! I'm sure their constent state of war will come to an end any day now when the Palestinians realise that it's best just to go along with the Israeli demands.
-Rick
And what, you're going to go building to building and fill each one with impact grenades? I'm sure that will do tons to motivate the locals to help the US.
Not to mention that the M32 is a defensive weapon, full gear and ammo load requires 3 Marines to carry. It is an impressive weapon, but it's use in offensive urban combat and room by room clearing is near nil.
Although, I did have a buddy take an M240-G, clip the carrying strap to the heat shield, forward hand on the barrel swap handle and rear hand on the butterfly, going full Rambo with it. That was at OCS, he scared the crap out of so many cadets...
-Rick
Heck, why not fill the little bugger with explosives while we're at it?
Urban combat is a nasty process with exceptionally high casualty rates. The last MOUT training I did as a defender (ie: local irregular militia vs significantly larger organized military assault) we inflicted over 70% casualties.
That was a 10+ years ago though, and maybe we've started learning from the Israelis.
But even with flash bangs and grenades, the advantage is in the defender's hands. Especially when you have to be concerned about collateral damage.
Given the assaulter's position, I'd much rather know that I'm about to stack and charge into a room of a family huddling in the corner than toss a grenade in and find out as we're turning over corpses.
-Rick
Think of the military value though. Toss a ball into a bunker, bounce it around the corner, throw it straight up to see what's on the other side of a wall, etc...
This could be quite the tool for urban combat.
-Rick
College, especially online courses, has its value determined almost exclusively by the effort that the student puts into it.
We've see living proof that you can go to an ivy league school and leave a moron, and I'm sure we've all met folks who had limited community college experience and we brilliant.
I had some online classes in my BS, and I'm likely going to go for my masters entirely online (looking at Western Goveners University at the moment). And in my experience, you could put in virtually no effort, and pass. But you would finish the class a couple grand in debt and no smarter than you started. Alternatively, you could throw yourself into the class and really challenge yourself (because the teachers/profs sure as hell aren't going to) and you'll come out with knowledge of far more value than the debt.
-Rick