what is with the mad rush to level up anyway? I enjoy the content at the low and mid levels just as much as at high levels. It's only a 'grind' if you want it to be and you are dead set on getting to max level ASAP at any cost. I never understood that mentality though. Enjoy the path, not just the destination.
Aion is a PVP game, on some of the servers. The first time (or ten times) you get ganked by people who are five or ten levels higher than you, you will understand the desire to not be at such a disadvantage. The people who level first are the first to have higher level skills, access to better gear, better PvP rewards, and so on -- all of which boils down to them killing you more easily. It's very much an arms race.
They wouldnt need all of those resources if I went to school remotely....
A law degree for example would I assume take very little resources from a university. In essence I think a person could earn a law degree from their home. So all of that overhead really doesn't apply to that degree.
Sitting in a classroom or at a table with other students discussing issues is, for many people, vastly more effective than doing it online. The personal interaction is important, and allows a less hindered flow of information. Online classes have their benefits (such as being able to compose your thoughts at your relative leisure, and edit them for mistakes, and reference things better), but I doubt that an online legal degree would be nearly as good as one in which you sit in a room with other lawyers and law professors (and future lawyers).
"PMITA" stands for "pound me in the ass" -- a tasteless gallows-humor joke about the prevalence of rape in the US prison systems. (I first heard the phrase in the movie Office Space.) Many of us Americans fear that, were we to go to prison, we'd be raped. I have no idea how rational this fear is, but it's very prevalent. Pretty much anyone in the US that you talk to about prisons will have the idea that if you go to prison, someone will be getting raped.
It's despicable, reprehensive, and barbaric. I wish it were not something we felt we had to joke about (ha ha only serious). Perhaps people would be more willing to go to prison for a few months or a year (rather than stacking appeals until they're out of money) if they knew they'd be safe from being raped.
Your paying largely for teacher interaction..... Why does a degree in economics / business cost even close to the same as a person studying to be a molecular biologist / robotics engineer / etc that has to have some serious expenses.
As a student, you see mainly teacher and TA interaction, and think, "Why am I paying this much for so little?"
You often don't see (as a student) the herds of administrative people making sure your transcripts are in order, that tuition is payed properly, that tutoring positions are filled and made available to the students. You sometimes notice janitorial staff, library staff, campus police, and guidance counselors. You nearly never see (as school employees) the people who are planning and building new facilities (such as new classrooms, computer labs, parking structures (or lots), and dorms) or the large number of people that maintain the infrastructure. Universities have in-house staff for plumbing, electrical, IT, air conditioning, and other infrastructure.
ALL of these people cost money to pay in a competitive manner, and I'd argue that there are often at least as many of them as there are teaching staff. That's a large part of where your tuition goes, not merely to the professors and TAs (who are often largely funded by grants and other research work). All students incur similar levels of infrastructure needs, with the exception of those who also need lab space. You all park in the same spaces, and sit in air conditioned lecture halls.
That's an interesting fine point. You only needto give source code when it's requested... to people who had it distributed to them, right? So, once you've distributed a program (and code) to another person, you're not obligated to give ME the code? In a way that sounds counterintuitive, but I do like that it basically means you're not obligated to distribute your (derived) program.
What level of granularity do we accept for a "company or organization"? Would the University of California, Berkeley, need to GPL something they are giving to other UC schools? In some ways, they're all part of the UC system, but I'm curious if UC Berkeley would be considered a separate organization from UC Riverside or UC Irvine.
I have profound sympathy for his plight of being incessantly tormented. That shouldn't happen, and I wish his supervisors and coworkers would have been properly punished. [assuming it's true].
However, I *DO NOT* condone his beating of the coworker, nor do I have any sympathy for him as far as a potential assault charge. Mature adults are aware of the consequences of their actions in matters like that, and short of self defense, it's just damned stupid.
It's possible the camera would mistakenly ticket you for driving properly, if it associates someone else's speed with your car. The solution to this is to take multiple pictures, and have evenly-spaced lines in the camera view that an expert witness can use to calculate the speed your car was going from the photographic evidence.
How does this work on a road with only two lanes inyour direction? Does everyone drive in the right lane, except the people in the left lane who are "passing" a neverending stream of cars? Or, everyone drives in the right lane, and the left is empty except for the occasional person leapfrogging? I'm honestly baffled as to the practical workings of a "left lane is passing-only" policy. Please explain, so that should I ever visit your state, I won't be a jackass.:)
Except, that's a good thing. The panic feeling when you do your pocket-patting routine and don't feel your keys immediately makes one want to ensure the safety of one's keys.
I do similar to the OP.
Pocket 1: car keys. Pocket 2: House/work/etc keys. These are split with a ~3 inch chain between two normal keyrings, so that it is easy to tell which half has the keys I want at the time. Pocket 3: cellular phone. Pocket 4: wallet
Two-pocket pants drive me batty, as you might imagine.
Re:You signed away this "right" by picking Apple.
on
Flash Is Not a Right
·
· Score: 1
You make me glad that I read Funny mods at -2, instead of -5.:D Thanks!
Maybe it's that I'm getting older, thus not longer feeling compelled to "beat" a game, but I haven't felt the urge to actually "complete" a game recently. At some point it becomes repetitive, requiring the same steps to be repeated over and over and over, and it's usually that point where I decide that it's just not worth it.
I have not finished Zelda: Twilight Princess yet. I'm a couple chapters in, I've met the princess, been in the shadow realm a few times, and CANNOT bear to pick it up again.
The game is fun to play as far as micro-encounters go. I still like hitting monsters and solving puzzles.
However, I have no damn clue what I'm supposed to be doing plot-wise or quest-wise, because it's been months since I last played it, or perhaps I missed what that one NPC told me to go do. I'm un-eager to muddle through re-starting the game, but I've forgotten enough major plot points (or objectives) that I've been really frustrated the few times I tried to continue.
I like having quest logs (even ones like in Oblivion which are somewhat obscure sometimes) and lists of objectives that I can open and review if I need to. Being able to re-watch (as well as skip;)) cutscenes from chapter beginnings / ends or transitions would do a TON to help me understand What i'm supposed to do and Why.
By "didn't make a good enough attempt" did you mean "did not optimize one's character specifically for killing them"? Many "X special NPC is killable" situations rely on things like having just the right item handy or using some exploit, or being very high level [and having level scaling NPCs turned off], or the like. At least in Fallout3, if I wanted to walk into a town and level it, I could [u]try[/u] -- and barring only ammunition constraints and kiting distance, I pretty much could clear-cut most friendly towns if I wanted to. (I never have wanted to.)
In the board game, it's not so bad. MG-boats were quite powerful in our games, for the same reason massed ER Laser boats were: In 15-20 shots, you have a high chance to hit the head, which triggered a chance for knocking out the pilot. Combine that with MGs generating no heat, and you could load up quite a bit of shots at a time. It got absurd if you allow multiple weapons to use the same ammo stockpile - as we did. 1-2 slots of ammo, and a bloatload of MGs. I'm pretty certain we were reading the rules incorrectly, but then I don't recall them saying you specifically needed separate ammo for each weapon, esp when you could carry multiple types of rounds for missile launchers and could have your AC ammo stored in other limbs than the weapons.
ER medium (and small) laser collections were fairly effective as well, and translated frighteningly to the computer games. I remember MW2 with some medium 'mech that had like 8 or 12 ER medium lasers... and an alpha strike would peel off the leg or arm of nearly anything.
Interestingly, my friends and I really liked optimizing (read: Scratch-building;)) custom mechs for every game. The stock ones _sucked_ in many ways: - Alpha strikes would shut you down - No close-range ability if you mounted too many LRMs - etc.
It was so much more _effective_ to load up your 75, 80, or 100 ton 'mech with PPCs, medium lasers, or large lasers, and enough heat sinks that you could fire them all every turn, rain or shine, with perhaps some excess heat generation which might reward standing in water sometimes. (A risky proposition, though.) You lost out on potential alpha strike damage, but it played well as a mobile skirmisher who could harass continuously with heavy hitting weapons.
Similarly, often their choices of armor allocations, or engine size/speed, were suboptimal. If you're not maxing your armor, what's the point?:D Same goes for smaller 'mechs that didn't optimize their mobility well, since the to-hit penalties for target movement didn't scale terribly well (but were excellent if you could move fast enough to get to cover).
As a result, we tended to treat mech chassis as "big bags of tonnage and weapon slots", and didn't really care about canonical chassis. It was fun. Our lunchtime games (on a 12x20 hex sheet, or something similarly small) tended to be ruled by the 2x UAC20 lugging monsters, but the PPC-bearing mechs that I preferred seemed to do much better once I could have room to run away. I used the same tactics in MW2 and MW3 -- max armor, pick a good engine, and stock up on lasers and heat sinks. MW4 forced me to NOT do that, which somehow was still fun. Less boring, at least... but I found that I still really enjoyed the 'mechs that I *could* load up with energy weapons and heat sinks. (I also found that lasers were really hard for me to control in the computer games, whereas a mass of pulse lasers could be very powerful in the board game.)
On the other hand, if your garage has FOUR of them, the reaction might be exactly the opposite. It'd go from Uncomfortable Awe to "Can I play too?" for a lot of guys, I imagine.
I didn't play a lot of multiplayer, but as far as Single Player goes, we must have played a different game. I remember MW4 and MW4:Black Knight as Nearly Perfect renditions of my fantasies of piloting giant robots, and MW4:Mercenaries as only a little worse than the previous MWx:Mercenaries was. (I didn't like that there were fewer non-plot missions to play.) The ONLY thing I disliked about MW4 was that the missions expected (and nearly "forced") you to upgrade 'mechs. Mercenaries was less in this direction, but I really enjoyed the dynamics of the Uziel, when it wasn't outclassed by assault 'mechs. Later on, I tried to stay in my Thor as long as possible, even though on the end missions it was almost certainly more effective to be using something like a Daishi loaded up with heat sinks and large lasers.
I loved the slot restrictions, as they forced each chassis to have a "flavor" -- otherwise, I'd do like I did in MW2, MW2:GhostBear, and MW3 and just load up on dual (triple?) PPCs and heat sinks up to my ears. I liked that a Thor vs a Madcat vs an Uziel vs a Catapult was more than merely a difference in tonnage or jump jets, but made an actual tactical difference.
Slashdot Mirror
Aion is a PVP game, on some of the servers. The first time (or ten times) you get ganked by people who are five or ten levels higher than you, you will understand the desire to not be at such a disadvantage. The people who level first are the first to have higher level skills, access to better gear, better PvP rewards, and so on -- all of which boils down to them killing you more easily. It's very much an arms race.
A 1% chance to have your live irrevocably ruined is too much, I believe. Even criminals (IMO) deserve better than that.
At what point does it stop being a "rightful means of exercising freedom" and become destruction of evidence?
Sitting in a classroom or at a table with other students discussing issues is, for many people, vastly more effective than doing it online. The personal interaction is important, and allows a less hindered flow of information. Online classes have their benefits (such as being able to compose your thoughts at your relative leisure, and edit them for mistakes, and reference things better), but I doubt that an online legal degree would be nearly as good as one in which you sit in a room with other lawyers and law professors (and future lawyers).
"PMITA" stands for "pound me in the ass" -- a tasteless gallows-humor joke about the prevalence of rape in the US prison systems. (I first heard the phrase in the movie Office Space.) Many of us Americans fear that, were we to go to prison, we'd be raped. I have no idea how rational this fear is, but it's very prevalent. Pretty much anyone in the US that you talk to about prisons will have the idea that if you go to prison, someone will be getting raped.
It's despicable, reprehensive, and barbaric. I wish it were not something we felt we had to joke about (ha ha only serious). Perhaps people would be more willing to go to prison for a few months or a year (rather than stacking appeals until they're out of money) if they knew they'd be safe from being raped.
Now imagine Samuel L. Jackson saying it. :)
As a student, you see mainly teacher and TA interaction, and think, "Why am I paying this much for so little?"
You often don't see (as a student) the herds of administrative people making sure your transcripts are in order, that tuition is payed properly, that tutoring positions are filled and made available to the students. You sometimes notice janitorial staff, library staff, campus police, and guidance counselors. You nearly never see (as school employees) the people who are planning and building new facilities (such as new classrooms, computer labs, parking structures (or lots), and dorms) or the large number of people that maintain the infrastructure. Universities have in-house staff for plumbing, electrical, IT, air conditioning, and other infrastructure.
ALL of these people cost money to pay in a competitive manner, and I'd argue that there are often at least as many of them as there are teaching staff. That's a large part of where your tuition goes, not merely to the professors and TAs (who are often largely funded by grants and other research work). All students incur similar levels of infrastructure needs, with the exception of those who also need lab space. You all park in the same spaces, and sit in air conditioned lecture halls.
Have you looked at the web 2.0 suicide machine? I think it's http://www.suicidemachine.org/ . It'll automate a bunch of that.
That's an interesting fine point. You only needto give source code when it's requested ... to people who had it distributed to them, right? So, once you've distributed a program (and code) to another person, you're not obligated to give ME the code? In a way that sounds counterintuitive, but I do like that it basically means you're not obligated to distribute your (derived) program.
What level of granularity do we accept for a "company or organization"? Would the University of California, Berkeley, need to GPL something they are giving to other UC schools? In some ways, they're all part of the UC system, but I'm curious if UC Berkeley would be considered a separate organization from UC Riverside or UC Irvine.
I imagine the intrusive pat-down would be done relatively far out of the way, so no other potential terrorists^W^Wpassengers would get spooked.
I have profound sympathy for his plight of being incessantly tormented. That shouldn't happen, and I wish his supervisors and coworkers would have been properly punished. [assuming it's true].
However, I *DO NOT* condone his beating of the coworker, nor do I have any sympathy for him as far as a potential assault charge. Mature adults are aware of the consequences of their actions in matters like that, and short of self defense, it's just damned stupid.
It's possible the camera would mistakenly ticket you for driving properly, if it associates someone else's speed with your car. The solution to this is to take multiple pictures, and have evenly-spaced lines in the camera view that an expert witness can use to calculate the speed your car was going from the photographic evidence.
How does this work on a road with only two lanes inyour direction? Does everyone drive in the right lane, except the people in the left lane who are "passing" a neverending stream of cars? Or, everyone drives in the right lane, and the left is empty except for the occasional person leapfrogging? I'm honestly baffled as to the practical workings of a "left lane is passing-only" policy. Please explain, so that should I ever visit your state, I won't be a jackass. :)
Hey, if it significantly increases safety of workers, it's probably worth more than the life insurance costs...
Except, that's a good thing. The panic feeling when you do your pocket-patting routine and don't feel your keys immediately makes one want to ensure the safety of one's keys.
I do similar to the OP.
Pocket 1: car keys.
Pocket 2: House/work/etc keys. These are split with a ~3 inch chain between two normal keyrings, so that it is easy to tell which half has the keys I want at the time.
Pocket 3: cellular phone.
Pocket 4: wallet
Two-pocket pants drive me batty, as you might imagine.
You make me glad that I read Funny mods at -2, instead of -5. :D Thanks!
I realize it's unrelated to your search for a webcam, but ... how do I turn off the sound on your page!?
I have not finished Zelda: Twilight Princess yet. I'm a couple chapters in, I've met the princess, been in the shadow realm a few times, and CANNOT bear to pick it up again.
The game is fun to play as far as micro-encounters go.
I still like hitting monsters and solving puzzles.
However, I have no damn clue what I'm supposed to be doing plot-wise or quest-wise, because it's been months since I last played it, or perhaps I missed what that one NPC told me to go do. I'm un-eager to muddle through re-starting the game, but I've forgotten enough major plot points (or objectives) that I've been really frustrated the few times I tried to continue.
I like having quest logs (even ones like in Oblivion which are somewhat obscure sometimes) and lists of objectives that I can open and review if I need to. Being able to re-watch (as well as skip ;)) cutscenes from chapter beginnings / ends or transitions would do a TON to help me understand What i'm supposed to do and Why.
By "didn't make a good enough attempt" did you mean "did not optimize one's character specifically for killing them"? Many "X special NPC is killable" situations rely on things like having just the right item handy or using some exploit, or being very high level [and having level scaling NPCs turned off], or the like. At least in Fallout3, if I wanted to walk into a town and level it, I could [u]try[/u] -- and barring only ammunition constraints and kiting distance, I pretty much could clear-cut most friendly towns if I wanted to. (I never have wanted to.)
In the board game, it's not so bad. MG-boats were quite powerful in our games, for the same reason massed ER Laser boats were: In 15-20 shots, you have a high chance to hit the head, which triggered a chance for knocking out the pilot. Combine that with MGs generating no heat, and you could load up quite a bit of shots at a time. It got absurd if you allow multiple weapons to use the same ammo stockpile - as we did. 1-2 slots of ammo, and a bloatload of MGs. I'm pretty certain we were reading the rules incorrectly, but then I don't recall them saying you specifically needed separate ammo for each weapon, esp when you could carry multiple types of rounds for missile launchers and could have your AC ammo stored in other limbs than the weapons.
ER medium (and small) laser collections were fairly effective as well, and translated frighteningly to the computer games. I remember MW2 with some medium 'mech that had like 8 or 12 ER medium lasers... and an alpha strike would peel off the leg or arm of nearly anything.
Interestingly, my friends and I really liked optimizing (read: Scratch-building ;)) custom mechs for every game. The stock ones _sucked_ in many ways:
- Alpha strikes would shut you down
- No close-range ability if you mounted too many LRMs
- etc.
It was so much more _effective_ to load up your 75, 80, or 100 ton 'mech with PPCs, medium lasers, or large lasers, and enough heat sinks that you could fire them all every turn, rain or shine, with perhaps some excess heat generation which might reward standing in water sometimes. (A risky proposition, though.) You lost out on potential alpha strike damage, but it played well as a mobile skirmisher who could harass continuously with heavy hitting weapons.
Similarly, often their choices of armor allocations, or engine size/speed, were suboptimal. If you're not maxing your armor, what's the point? :D Same goes for smaller 'mechs that didn't optimize their mobility well, since the to-hit penalties for target movement didn't scale terribly well (but were excellent if you could move fast enough to get to cover).
As a result, we tended to treat mech chassis as "big bags of tonnage and weapon slots", and didn't really care about canonical chassis. It was fun. Our lunchtime games (on a 12x20 hex sheet, or something similarly small) tended to be ruled by the 2x UAC20 lugging monsters, but the PPC-bearing mechs that I preferred seemed to do much better once I could have room to run away. I used the same tactics in MW2 and MW3 -- max armor, pick a good engine, and stock up on lasers and heat sinks. MW4 forced me to NOT do that, which somehow was still fun. Less boring, at least ... but I found that I still really enjoyed the 'mechs that I *could* load up with energy weapons and heat sinks. (I also found that lasers were really hard for me to control in the computer games, whereas a mass of pulse lasers could be very powerful in the board game.)
On the other hand, if your garage has FOUR of them, the reaction might be exactly the opposite. It'd go from Uncomfortable Awe to "Can I play too?" for a lot of guys, I imagine.
I didn't play a lot of multiplayer, but as far as Single Player goes, we must have played a different game. I remember MW4 and MW4:Black Knight as Nearly Perfect renditions of my fantasies of piloting giant robots, and MW4:Mercenaries as only a little worse than the previous MWx:Mercenaries was. (I didn't like that there were fewer non-plot missions to play.) The ONLY thing I disliked about MW4 was that the missions expected (and nearly "forced") you to upgrade 'mechs. Mercenaries was less in this direction, but I really enjoyed the dynamics of the Uziel, when it wasn't outclassed by assault 'mechs. Later on, I tried to stay in my Thor as long as possible, even though on the end missions it was almost certainly more effective to be using something like a Daishi loaded up with heat sinks and large lasers.
I loved the slot restrictions, as they forced each chassis to have a "flavor" -- otherwise, I'd do like I did in MW2, MW2:GhostBear, and MW3 and just load up on dual (triple?) PPCs and heat sinks up to my ears. I liked that a Thor vs a Madcat vs an Uziel vs a Catapult was more than merely a difference in tonnage or jump jets, but made an actual tactical difference.
More specifically, you can use Web 2.0 Suicide.
http://suicidemachine.org/
It will automate that entire process.