If somebody interprets any disliking of their beloved icon as a hostile attack, regardless of intent, I'm pretty sure he falls under the definition of "fanatic".
The gold on WoW servers appears magically as far as the game is concerned. There is no limit on the amount of gold on a WoW server, in any practical sense.
Technically true, but irrelevant. What matters for inflation purposes is the amount in the *players' hands*, and that can (and is) limited by Blizzard through manipulation of drop rates, in-game fees for services, equipment and consumables, and such measures. By buying gold, you alter that balance leading to inflation leading to anger from non-cheaters leading to calls to ban your cheating ass from the server. Simple economics.
Regardless, intelligence says nothing of character or morality. Even if cheating *does* hurt other people, being intelligent doesn't necessarily mean a person wouldn't chose to cheat anyway. Intelligent people can be assholes too.
Actually, that's debatable. There are whole schools of thought formed around the idea that only the stupid and the ignorant commits evil. Regardless, however, by most definitions of the word somebody who negatively impacts himself without a comparatively larger, positive impact on others *is* an idiot, the proof that cheaters doesn't positively impact others' enjoyment of the game ought to be obvious, and as I (and many others) have shown, cheating does impact yourself negatively at mid- and long-term, therefore cheating *is* idiotic.
Let me explain: what I want is a game where not only the world doesn't adapt to how I play but, also, that it's not even designed to how the developers *think* I'm gonna play. Things like Final Fantasy VII, for instance, where even the strongest bosses in the first few areas would be killed in a single hit from the random encounters you get at the final dungeon. I want a game where I feel I was just thrown in a different world, that I'm merely a participant in something bigger, rather than The One True Hero around whom the whole world is built.
STALKER did this, to a degree, where in the beginning with your trusty pistol and simple jacket you're forced to run from mere bandits, while in the end-game you can hunt military soldiers for fun and profit with your customized AK-74 and bulletproof suit. It did have an "NPC difficulty curve" (mostly due to quests leading you to more dangerous areas as the game progressed), but it was flatter than most and that worked to the game's favor, IMHO.
For the most part, yeah, but the Titan quests of Prophecies do take part in areas formerly populated by lv6 Charr and even in Normal mode now hold lv24 critters that can kick your lv20's sorry rear with ease.
Of course, they're only a tiny part of the whole game and the rest is, as you say, mostly static so dunno why the GP used Guild Wars as an example when there are plenty of games that would've served his argument better.
If she gave him the keys for her house, didn't ask for them back at the trial, and didn't change her locks after getting the restraining order, yeah I believe it should be nullified, why wouldn't you?
What if they're both submitting write-in bids to a well-established auction house? What if they're both writing commentary to their local newspaper? What if they're both competitive Scrabble players climbing through the ranks of the local Scrabble circuit?
By the wording of your post, I assume you meant to say that being 'over the internet' or not is irrelevant, and that the same thing will happen regardless. So as a regular, law-ignorant Slashdotter I must ask: what *does* happen in those cases? inquiring minds want to know.
If you are one of those people that spends all of his free time coding, I urge you, take a break. You don't have to do any specific thing, just leave some time open for life to happen.
Why must it be all-or-nothing? why should we be either mindless drones working 9 to 5, never learning anything other than what's required for our particular job at hand, or mindless nerds living in a basement with no life outside computers?
Or perhaps its just that both sides of this particular debate have a strong liking for red herrings.
Thing is, staying relevant on a fast-evolving industry like programming pretty much *requires* you to love doing it enough that you take it as a hobby by itself, otherwise eventually either you stop trying to stay relevant, or the stress of it becomes too much to bear.
Or to put it some other way: I've yet to meet a programmer over 35 who doesn't code on his free time and whose knowledge isn't hopelessly outdated for most decent jobs.
Internal mental discipline is both useful and rewarding, but nobody else is going to care. Yet.
Care to mention some uses? the ability to think in abstracts instead of in any given "language" is certainly useful, as all languages have limitations in their expressivity, but mental discipline as the GP described, the ability to achieve complete mental silence and/or give complete regards to a single thought, seems useless at best and harmful at worst by impairing the ability to mentally "multitask".
The problem is probably the "each character" part, implying more than one. Why did RPGs suddenly stop being about *role playing*, and start being some oversimplified, menu-driven tactical game?
Make it a single character, though, and there's no reason why it couldn't work. STALKER already has hunger needs and with the Complete mod you also need to sleep, yet far from making the game a chore it only makes it more interesting, and enhances the feeling of being stuck in a radioactive wasteland. And its an FPS, so it's theoretically a game even less suited for such a thing than your average, run-of-the-mill RPG.
Generally speaking, they aren't. In Europe they may be, but everywhere else Steam costs the same or less than retail, specially here in South America where it's common for the same game on Steam cost a third of what it sells for in retail.
I've heard that Play.com has lower than average prices thanks to abusing some loopholes to avoid paying taxes, too, but I don't know how valid those claims may be.
Agreed. Would Coca-Cola allow devs to use their name for the radioactive Nuke Cola in Fallout? or in a dirty, broken vending machine in Left 4 Dead? hell, even subtler stuff, like the references to consumerism in Omikron's Quanta Cola ads?
For in-game advertising to work, big companies' marketing departments need to approach it maturely. If they insist their stores' virtual replicas must be pristine safe havens in a city gone to hell the advertising will be far too blantant for the gamer to react positively to it and not only will they doom their own brand, but also the concept of in-game ads itself.
Would it not have been better to wait until he got done with his presidency first?
No shit. Charles Kao wins the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery he did in 1966, and Barack Obama gets the Peace one for his first two weeks of presidency.
Kinda highlights the difference between both awards, doesn't it?
Because its cheaper to take stuff from the moon into outer space than it is from Earth, by virtue of its much lower gravity and nearly non-existant atmosphere.
Perhaps actually living on the Moon's surface won't ever be feasible, but there's no reason why you couldn't just, dunno, grab a chunk of it then process it in your theoretical spaceship.
But yeah, capitalism has spawned the ability for a very small minority to amass a very enormous amount of wealth. These people are not contributing more to the world, are not necessarily smarter, and it is immoral to think that somehow they are worth 10,000 times more than the average human being.
Funny, but people in general seem to think they are. Otherwise they wouldn't pay extra for Bono's music, Cruise's movies, and Jobs' computers. Now, it's not a 1:1 relationship between perceived worth and income, of course, but that's less due to capitalism and more about corporatism's state-granted monopolies (copyright, patents et al), disallowing competition and preventing the free market from operating correctly.
Capitalism has given a majority in America the delusion that they too can win the lotto, they too can be the next 10million dollar a year winner but instead they don't realize that they are stuck as economic vassals.
No, that's the US' idiocracy which is independant of economic models.
The pres of my company makes a modest salary by ceo/pres standards. I will work 20 years at a decent salary (top 10%) for my region, save 20% of my salary a year and it will not equal what he makes in one year!
Then go to the company's shareholders and offer your services to them for half his price. They'll clue you in as to his worth to the company and your lack thereof.
Then the implementation of a.NET framework would fall under the aforementioned "gray areas" and, as such, would probably be available only from servers located outside the US like libdvdcss and cryptography stuff is today.
A better question would be whether the "patent-free" parts are useful by themselves, and in my opinion the answer's yes: C# plus GTK# make for a very enjoyable and powerful development enviroment, and that's what most of the F/OSS C# apps are written in, in any case. The full.NET framework would be useful to have some degree of compatibility with Windows-oriented apps, but there's still a need to be filled by the 'pure' enviroment too.
This is the company that wrote the playbook for break compatibility for everyone else.
Actually, no, that was IBM. Yet you see the relationship they have with the F/OSS community today, so the concept of F/OSS working together with Microsoft isn't as crazy as it may sound at first.
Why would we ever want to write code for their platform on their terms?
Because it's not on their terms, it's on ours. Moonlight and Mono are under the GPL so the only 'threat' Microsoft can make is that of patent litigation in the US and Japan, but as hundreds of patent trolls have shown us throughout the years, you can *never* be completely safe from patent litigation as long as the patent system stands.
I believe TFA's point, which the headline fucked over, is that most primary Mac owners also own a secondary Windows machine but most primary Windows users don't own *any* kind of secondary computer, even a Windows one.
In fact, if one were a bit fanboyish about it one could say that it's proof Windows is a more complete OS than OSX, as the owners of the latter still need a Windows machine by their side, whereas Windows users have their needs satisfied by it alone. Though of course that's ignoring the myriad of other factors affecting it, such as household income as noted by TFA, but it should serve to illustrate why is it Slashdot-worthy news.
Common users? Virtualization. Advanced users? that plus IDEs. Gamers? 4 GB is the *minimum* and with good reason (and you need to add the video card's RAM as well on top of the regular one).
And that's today. Tomorrow... well, just look at what time did to the famous (and allegedly apocryphal) Bill Gates quote about 640k being enough for anybody.
Slashdot Mirror
If somebody interprets any disliking of their beloved icon as a hostile attack, regardless of intent, I'm pretty sure he falls under the definition of "fanatic".
The gold on WoW servers appears magically as far as the game is concerned. There is no limit on the amount of gold on a WoW server, in any practical sense.
Technically true, but irrelevant. What matters for inflation purposes is the amount in the *players' hands*, and that can (and is) limited by Blizzard through manipulation of drop rates, in-game fees for services, equipment and consumables, and such measures. By buying gold, you alter that balance leading to inflation leading to anger from non-cheaters leading to calls to ban your cheating ass from the server. Simple economics.
Regardless, intelligence says nothing of character or morality. Even if cheating *does* hurt other people, being intelligent doesn't necessarily mean a person wouldn't chose to cheat anyway. Intelligent people can be assholes too.
Actually, that's debatable. There are whole schools of thought formed around the idea that only the stupid and the ignorant commits evil. Regardless, however, by most definitions of the word somebody who negatively impacts himself without a comparatively larger, positive impact on others *is* an idiot, the proof that cheaters doesn't positively impact others' enjoyment of the game ought to be obvious, and as I (and many others) have shown, cheating does impact yourself negatively at mid- and long-term, therefore cheating *is* idiotic.
But, if you aren't willing to make that time commitment
...the intelligent person realizes its time to switch to another game altogether, and stick to MSN or GTalk for socializing if that's what you crave.
Also, you fail at economics. If gold were truly infinite, so would be inflation and gold's use as currency would be meaningless.
Let me explain: what I want is a game where not only the world doesn't adapt to how I play but, also, that it's not even designed to how the developers *think* I'm gonna play. Things like Final Fantasy VII, for instance, where even the strongest bosses in the first few areas would be killed in a single hit from the random encounters you get at the final dungeon. I want a game where I feel I was just thrown in a different world, that I'm merely a participant in something bigger, rather than The One True Hero around whom the whole world is built.
STALKER did this, to a degree, where in the beginning with your trusty pistol and simple jacket you're forced to run from mere bandits, while in the end-game you can hunt military soldiers for fun and profit with your customized AK-74 and bulletproof suit. It did have an "NPC difficulty curve" (mostly due to quests leading you to more dangerous areas as the game progressed), but it was flatter than most and that worked to the game's favor, IMHO.
For the most part, yeah, but the Titan quests of Prophecies do take part in areas formerly populated by lv6 Charr and even in Normal mode now hold lv24 critters that can kick your lv20's sorry rear with ease.
Of course, they're only a tiny part of the whole game and the rest is, as you say, mostly static so dunno why the GP used Guild Wars as an example when there are plenty of games that would've served his argument better.
If she gave him the keys for her house, didn't ask for them back at the trial, and didn't change her locks after getting the restraining order, yeah I believe it should be nullified, why wouldn't you?
What if they're both submitting write-in bids to a well-established auction house? What if they're both writing commentary to their local newspaper? What if they're both competitive Scrabble players climbing through the ranks of the local Scrabble circuit?
By the wording of your post, I assume you meant to say that being 'over the internet' or not is irrelevant, and that the same thing will happen regardless. So as a regular, law-ignorant Slashdotter I must ask: what *does* happen in those cases? inquiring minds want to know.
If you are one of those people that spends all of his free time coding, I urge you, take a break. You don't have to do any specific thing, just leave some time open for life to happen.
Why must it be all-or-nothing? why should we be either mindless drones working 9 to 5, never learning anything other than what's required for our particular job at hand, or mindless nerds living in a basement with no life outside computers?
Or perhaps its just that both sides of this particular debate have a strong liking for red herrings.
"I only know that I know nothing" -- Socrates.
Simply put, unless your name is Donald Knuth, if you believe you've mastered programming you still have a lot more to learn than someone who does not.
Thing is, staying relevant on a fast-evolving industry like programming pretty much *requires* you to love doing it enough that you take it as a hobby by itself, otherwise eventually either you stop trying to stay relevant, or the stress of it becomes too much to bear.
Or to put it some other way: I've yet to meet a programmer over 35 who doesn't code on his free time and whose knowledge isn't hopelessly outdated for most decent jobs.
Internal mental discipline is both useful and rewarding, but nobody else is going to care. Yet.
Care to mention some uses? the ability to think in abstracts instead of in any given "language" is certainly useful, as all languages have limitations in their expressivity, but mental discipline as the GP described, the ability to achieve complete mental silence and/or give complete regards to a single thought, seems useless at best and harmful at worst by impairing the ability to mentally "multitask".
I believe the GP was trying to keep the w4r3z kiddies away, rather than the RIAA goons. You know, to avoid a second Eternal September.
The problem is probably the "each character" part, implying more than one. Why did RPGs suddenly stop being about *role playing*, and start being some oversimplified, menu-driven tactical game?
Make it a single character, though, and there's no reason why it couldn't work. STALKER already has hunger needs and with the Complete mod you also need to sleep, yet far from making the game a chore it only makes it more interesting, and enhances the feeling of being stuck in a radioactive wasteland. And its an FPS, so it's theoretically a game even less suited for such a thing than your average, run-of-the-mill RPG.
Generally speaking, they aren't. In Europe they may be, but everywhere else Steam costs the same or less than retail, specially here in South America where it's common for the same game on Steam cost a third of what it sells for in retail.
I've heard that Play.com has lower than average prices thanks to abusing some loopholes to avoid paying taxes, too, but I don't know how valid those claims may be.
That might be fine if youre doing a remake of a ..ah damn what the name of that film again...my memory is shit.
Star Wars: A New Hope?
Agreed. Would Coca-Cola allow devs to use their name for the radioactive Nuke Cola in Fallout? or in a dirty, broken vending machine in Left 4 Dead? hell, even subtler stuff, like the references to consumerism in Omikron's Quanta Cola ads?
For in-game advertising to work, big companies' marketing departments need to approach it maturely. If they insist their stores' virtual replicas must be pristine safe havens in a city gone to hell the advertising will be far too blantant for the gamer to react positively to it and not only will they doom their own brand, but also the concept of in-game ads itself.
Would it not have been better to wait until he got done with his presidency first?
No shit. Charles Kao wins the Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery he did in 1966, and Barack Obama gets the Peace one for his first two weeks of presidency.
Kinda highlights the difference between both awards, doesn't it?
Because its cheaper to take stuff from the moon into outer space than it is from Earth, by virtue of its much lower gravity and nearly non-existant atmosphere.
Perhaps actually living on the Moon's surface won't ever be feasible, but there's no reason why you couldn't just, dunno, grab a chunk of it then process it in your theoretical spaceship.
If peacocks drank alcohol they wouldn't need to.
But yeah, capitalism has spawned the ability for a very small minority to amass a very enormous amount of wealth. These people are not contributing more to the world, are not necessarily smarter, and it is immoral to think that somehow they are worth 10,000 times more than the average human being.
Funny, but people in general seem to think they are. Otherwise they wouldn't pay extra for Bono's music, Cruise's movies, and Jobs' computers. Now, it's not a 1:1 relationship between perceived worth and income, of course, but that's less due to capitalism and more about corporatism's state-granted monopolies (copyright, patents et al), disallowing competition and preventing the free market from operating correctly.
Capitalism has given a majority in America the delusion that they too can win the lotto, they too can be the next 10million dollar a year winner but instead they don't realize that they are stuck as economic vassals.
No, that's the US' idiocracy which is independant of economic models.
The pres of my company makes a modest salary by ceo/pres standards. I will work 20 years at a decent salary (top 10%) for my region, save 20% of my salary a year and it will not equal what he makes in one year!
Then go to the company's shareholders and offer your services to them for half his price. They'll clue you in as to his worth to the company and your lack thereof.
Then the implementation of a .NET framework would fall under the aforementioned "gray areas" and, as such, would probably be available only from servers located outside the US like libdvdcss and cryptography stuff is today.
A better question would be whether the "patent-free" parts are useful by themselves, and in my opinion the answer's yes: C# plus GTK# make for a very enjoyable and powerful development enviroment, and that's what most of the F/OSS C# apps are written in, in any case. The full .NET framework would be useful to have some degree of compatibility with Windows-oriented apps, but there's still a need to be filled by the 'pure' enviroment too.
This is the company that wrote the playbook for break compatibility for everyone else.
Actually, no, that was IBM. Yet you see the relationship they have with the F/OSS community today, so the concept of F/OSS working together with Microsoft isn't as crazy as it may sound at first.
Why would we ever want to write code for their platform on their terms?
Because it's not on their terms, it's on ours. Moonlight and Mono are under the GPL so the only 'threat' Microsoft can make is that of patent litigation in the US and Japan, but as hundreds of patent trolls have shown us throughout the years, you can *never* be completely safe from patent litigation as long as the patent system stands.
I believe TFA's point, which the headline fucked over, is that most primary Mac owners also own a secondary Windows machine but most primary Windows users don't own *any* kind of secondary computer, even a Windows one.
In fact, if one were a bit fanboyish about it one could say that it's proof Windows is a more complete OS than OSX, as the owners of the latter still need a Windows machine by their side, whereas Windows users have their needs satisfied by it alone. Though of course that's ignoring the myriad of other factors affecting it, such as household income as noted by TFA, but it should serve to illustrate why is it Slashdot-worthy news.
Other than the orgy of corporate-sponsored "amateur" contests, that sounds like just a normal day for the US government.
Common users? Virtualization. Advanced users? that plus IDEs. Gamers? 4 GB is the *minimum* and with good reason (and you need to add the video card's RAM as well on top of the regular one).
And that's today. Tomorrow... well, just look at what time did to the famous (and allegedly apocryphal) Bill Gates quote about 640k being enough for anybody.