It's a bit unfair to compare Champions Online (which came out in 2009) with City of Heroes (Which is nearly 6 years old). I beta tested and played City of Heroes for about 3 months after it launched, and it was probably worse than Champions Online at launch. Champions is basically a very streamlined version of vanilla City of Heroes. I'd say most of it's systems are superior to the systems that CoH shipped with. That said, City of Heroes has 6 years worth of content additions and bug fixes, where CO has less than a year. If you want to play a superhero MMO, I'd suggest CoH over CO any day. However, unless City of Heroes does some upgrades in the next 2-3 years, City of Heroes is going to look very dated compared to CO, and by that time CO will have a lot more content (as long as people keep playing it).
It's no different than any other medium for storytelling. How many televisions shows or movies are just variations or hybrids of some other works? The question is, are they good variations or bad? Since this is amateurs at work, most of the stuff you're going to end up with will be crap, but it only takes a few great missions to make the whole system worth while.
If you want exclusive tracks, make your own. I was doing that 15 years ago with computer multi-track software and a CD burner that cost me $350 at the time. The new DJing software was designed with mash-ups and remixing in mind, that's why it's loaded with beat-syncing and a tons of effects to play with.
If that doesn't strike your fancy because it's not wax, check out the Vestax VRX-2000. You can cut your own records from any source with that.
If you're still spinning records like it's 1989, you're carrying around a flight case containing 2 turntables and 1 multichannel mixing board with cross-fader. You've also got at least 1 amp, two speakers and a box full of various cables, jacks and plugs in case shit breaks. In addition to all that you've got several crates full of records; any self-respecting DJ wouldn't travel with less that 3 crates of the hits, unless they're playing a preselected playlist with no requests.
In order to carry all of this equipment around, you'll be required to have a large car, or van, which means you can't drive a cool sports car to work; you gotta show up in your crappy perv van, complete with the shag carpet interior - or worse - You have to borrow your moms mini van, complete with audio books with Fabio on the cover. And you have to load and unload that equipment not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR TIMES! Why? Because if you're a mobile DJ your music and equipment isn't insured unless you're doing really well. You haul it to the van, drive to work, haul it into the club, do the gig, haul it back to the van, drive home, then haul it back in the house. I did exactly that from 1993 to 1997, and I swore I'd never do that again.
By 1997 I got my first dual CD player with pitch controls, so I was able to fit all my music and equipment in the trunk and back seat of my car without too many problems. That lasted until 2000, when I quit DJing to get a job as a computer technician.
6 months ago I decided to check into what was new and cool these days. I found a subscription to a CD/MP3 music pool that has all the current songs and remixes for a lot lower price than what I was paying 10 or 15 years ago. I also got a "complete" DJ package in a Numark Omni MIDI Control and a copy of Traktor Pro. Sure, not top-line stuff, but I was amazed at how simple mixing is today.
With beat-grids you don't have to worry about fighting the pitch during a mix; the computer syncs everything. If you need to nudge it a little, there are marked buttons on the controller that work like a charm. In fact, while I'd say the controllers are still early in their design, I can manipulate my music in ways I couldn't even try with CDs or Turntables. Mixing with 4 turntables is exercise. Mixing with 4 audio players was so easy that I wanted to get another 4 players going, but the software is limited to 4.
That said, when I walk into a club now I'm only carrying my backpack (laptop, midi controller, back-up HDD). I drive a MINI Cooper so I had to stop taking jobs at clubs with no sound systems of their own, but I think it's much more enjoyable being a DJ now than it ever was before.
Joe Mallozzi, former showrunner of Atlantis and a consulting producer on SGU, has stated on his blog that the "Ancient Technology Activation gene" won't be featured on Universe, or at least hasn't been mentioned in the currently filmed episodes (of which I think there are 19?). It sort of makes sense, since Atlantis and all of that stuff is much newer than the Destiny and the gate-building ships in the franchise.
They just merged the last couple servers together, so they're down to 1 server now, but I've read population is still pretty decent. They probably still have around 10-20k active subs, with maybe 1500-2000 people on at prime time. Planetside just missed the mark. The combat was fun when it was remotely balanced, and even then you could still have a lot of fun. Vehicles rocked. Weapons and armor rocked. BFRs were probably where I lost interest. Or was it it the cave expansion... Like I said, they just missed the mark.
What they really messed up was releasing the game without having base and continent capture down to a fun experience. Back in the day you basically had a free-for-all. You had single hackers capping bases because there were no cap rules. Then they added in the lattice/matrix, where bases had to be capped in order, and it made the game a little more concentrated and fun. Until you've captured the same base from the same direction 27 times, then it gets kind of boring.
Since the announcement of Dust 514 there's been talk of a Planetside 2 being considered over at SOE. I'm not really sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm hoping they extensively play-test it before it's released into the wild. Ah, who am I kidding...
So instead you have 1 commander and 2 lieutenants. The 2 lieutenants can be put in charge of secondary objectives and routing information for the commander. That way they get some commander exp, but they can't completely mess up a campaign.
Well, intelligence is relative. Compared to what we evolve into in the next ten million years we probably AREN'T intelligent.
But what about the dolphins?
Dophins are intelligent but that's not the sort of intelligence we're looking for. If we were to find out that dolphins are more intelligent than humans when it comes to abstract conceptualization, it's be a huge discovery but it wouldn't really change the world because dolphins don't have technology and they don't have libraries of stored knowledge. It's really the use of tools and the storing of knowledge that sets us apart from every other living creature on Earth. Now we need to know if it sets us apart from every alien creature in the universe.
that is could falsify the theory? if so then go for it.
I mean, they don't have to exist, there are other theories out there.
In science the word "Theory" means "the best possible explanation that hasn't been disproven". Notice the first half of the sentence. You can't have multiple "best possible explanations".
I'd wager this device won't alert drivers when they're tailgating. Tailgating is way too common these days for a car manufacturer to implement something like that unless it was a federal mandate for safety (which isn't a bad idea). Ford would piss off way too many of their customers with a car that tries to tell the driver how to drive.
PlanetSide was a lot of fun, but when it first came out it was completely directionless. Besides the need to gain levels and acquire skills, there was no game there. It was like a massive death match with some bases and towers that could be captured. Later they added in the "lattice system" for base capture and it helped a little, but it still seemed like a grind after a while. There was no story behind base captures, no real motive to capture bases except that they were there, and you'd get a slight bonus for your team.
I've subscribed to PS several times since it's come out, and the real reason it only has ~20,000 subs these days is because it's a game that was released with limited to no direction. If they could come up with a couple more game systems that would help give the game direction, I'd gladly re-sub again.
In the television series StarGate SG-1 and StarGate Atlantis they have a top secret alien-human tech derived aerospace fighter called the F-302. It uses 3 forms of propulsion in order to do what it needs to do:
2x regular air-breathing jet engines for low altitude operations.
2x scramjets for high altitude operations.
1x Rocket booster to get into orbit.
Unions are bad because it's still a division of labor and capital. There's no reason to have a division of labor and capital at all. There are things called "Co-operatives" where the labor and capital are one and the same.
I was able to play about 50-60 hours worth during the open beta, so I had lots of time to play around with things. The parent is dead on with this game having an awesome character creation system, but it's not anything new; it's pretty much the same system in City of Heroes/Villains, but with higher resolution textures and models. A major difference with Champions Online is that there are costume parts that are unlocked by getting items during play, and while they're marked as costume items, it's a kind of cumbersome dynamic.
The power systems are basically identical to City of Heroes/Villains, except there are no restrictions to the powers you can gain from any framework in the game. So you could shoot beams from your eyes, fly and run really fast, and you could be super strong and tough, if you wanted to be. Once you get the powers you want, you can upgrade them, but the points used to upgrade your powers are not the same points used to buy powers, so you end up with a lot of powers that you'll use once in a while, and you'll end up punching the same combo of 5-6 attacks.
I like how they made the generic auto-attack into a "power builder" attack, though I think it could use some more refining. It just seemed like another excuse for me to have to click another button, not an integral part of the combat system.
Playing the actual game is pretty mindless, seriously. The missions are set up like WoW quests, where you have a "contact" who gives you collection, kill, rescue, etc. missions for you to complete. Most of the time they're outside, but there are lots of instance-based indoor missions if you like crawling through sewers and office buildings. The thing is, the mission areas, where your objects are, are clearly marked on the map and mini-map. You don't even have to read the mission text most of the time in order to complete the missions; just by getting to where you have to go, you can usually figure it out in a kill or two. It's like have WoW's questhelper UI built into the MMO at launch, which tells me Cryptic isn't even expecting you to read the mission text.
Other than that, the game is OK. I'd rate it up there with City of Heroes/Villains, but that's only because those games have several years of refining in them compared to Champions Online, which has all that refining built right into it from the get-go.
Like all MMOs these days, it was fun until the game's weaknesses became obvious. Then it became a grind like every other game.
OK, these new flares are small. I get it. But are these new flares 1 billion times smaller than a 'normal' solar flare? That's what the prefix indicates.
Better yet, why didn't they build it underground? I saw an episode of Dirty Jobs where they were digging tunnels to store wine barrels somewhere in California. They built these tunnels right under their fields, and once they were dug out they sprayed the walls with cement for structural support. Seemed like a great use of space to me. In a lot of places if you're down 5-10 meters you're looking at year-round temperatures of 10-13 Celsius (50-55 F). If you're underground, you've got usable land above you for things like agriculture and/or wind or solar power.
Venus is actually quite terra-formable. It does have an atmosphere, an extremely thick one at that, which has caused its high temperature. It also has gravity closer to ours than the moon or Mars. If we could turn the CO2 into O2 and usable carbon (like for soil), we could eventually live on it. Wouldn't be easy, but probably more feasible than terra-forming Mars.
Hah! Venus is not even close to being as easy to terraform Mars.
Step 1. Cool down the planet. I suppose this could be done by placing a single huge or many smaller solar shades at the SOL-Venus L1.
Step 2. As the planet cools, the CO2 in the atmosphere will begin to freeze and fall to the surface. That dry ice needs to be sequestered into a more stable form, like calcium carbonite or maybe even diamond..
Step 3: Venus has a day that lasts 243 Earth days. The only way to speed up this rotation is to smack it with hundreds or thousands of big chunks of rock and ice (more on ice in a minute).
Step 4: Venus is a very very dry planet. Mars is dry too, but for different reasons. The water on Mars is frozen. The water on Venus is gone, baked out of the planet, cracked with UV and had it's hydrogen blow into space. That means that you can't even easily make water on Venus because it doesn't have much hydrogen available. The good thing is, while you're doing step three you can be adding water back to the system in the form of comets and water-ice rich asteroids.
OK, so now you have a colder planet with more water-ice than you started with and a day that isn't almost a year long. At this point, you're about even with Mars.
So what is the value of another Earth-size planet in the terms of real estate, land development, resources, etc?
Is there a fallacy of stereotyping? Doesn't matter. Let me give you some advice: If you don't know what you are talking about, shut up.
The original poster is correct in his/her assumption. Great example of ad hominem though; take notes kids.
As a conservative, allow me to correct you and alleviate your ignorance.
Some of us conservatives are against embryonic stem cell research because it is killing human life for research purposes.
I end the quote there because it confirms the parents original statement:
anti-stem cell research, anti-abortion, and anti-sex education positions of conservatives is primarily motivated by sin.
This is the disconnect, folks: For those who believe the bible to be the words of God, the constitution will always come second. It doesn't matter if abortion, or stem-cell research or sex-ed is legal and accepted by the majority of the country. As long as people continue with this "Gods laws first and mans laws second" mantra, we'll continue to see doctors getting shot, kids getting pregnant and people with diseases untreated. But you get 72 virgins, right?
Look, I'm no expert, but when it comes to life, I like to think that it started some time around 3.8 billion years ago and it's an on-going event. The sperm is alive before conception. The egg is alive before conception. There really isn't any "Life begins here" line in human reproduction. It's the chicken and the egg, and it's a very tired argument.
And why is it that only human life is sacred, and only unborn humans? It's weird how fanatics pick their targets.
WoW made the mistake of forcing players to choose a side from the get-go. The game is Player vs. Environment first, Player vs. Player second, and even though they've been adding more and more PvP content over the years with each expansion, you still have to grind through PvE to get anywhere in PvP. There's no reason why players of Alliance and Horde PvP factions couldn't group and raid together for PvE content, except that Blizzard doesn't want them to. I figure if everyone started out neutral and could group with anybody else in the game, you'd see a lot more grouping and raiding going on and a lot less PvP. You'd also see a lot less re-rolling on different servers or for different factions too.
What they really need to implement is some kind of Lackey/Sidekick mechanism like they have in City of Heros/Villains. Allowing players of different levels to group together makes a lot of sense when they're already limited to those in their PvP faction. Plus that would allow their older content to get more visits, since people might not feel forced to solo most of their way through levels 1-70.
Portal is probably the best example of physics designed around the game, not the other way around. Or maybe not. In either case, Portal was a blast even though it was probably one of the simplest, shortest games I've ever played.
You know what I'd love to see? A scifi game that actually played around with gravity. Every scifi game (where you can get out of a ship and run around) has the same gravity in every location. Take Mass Effect for example: You fly up to a planet and check it out: Most of them have near Earth gravity. Then there's a mission on Earths moon, and guess what? The Moon has the same gravity as Earth! Why? Oh, right, because the game engine only supports a single, unified gravity for any given environment.
This is why scifi games usually suck. When you can't even represent what it would be like to be in lower gravity, what's the friggin point of visiting other planets? How about space stations that use rotational gravity?
But think! These days maps are critically designed to have you go from A to B to C on the prescribed path through the prescribed targets. If you could jump up on a ridge and run past that, well, there goes a bunch of development hours down the tube. But how grand it would be! I miss the freedom of movement in games. The day I logged into a new game and I couldn't jump over a curb, I think I died a little.
Sony made a total hash of Galaxies, so another one is needed.
It was a combination of LucasArts and SOE that borked galaxies. They decided to make a game set during the time of the original trilogy when they had the prequels coming out in theaters. Then there was the decision to have the Jedi archetype in a period when the Jedi were supposed to be extinct or in hiding. Had they placed Galaxies during the Clone Wars, the games release would have followed Attack of the Clones, which would have had cross-marketing working for it and there wouldn't be an issue with Jedi being all over the place. Of course I think they figured this out all too late.
After they finally got space into the game in 2004, the follow-up expansions are all from the prequel movies: Rage of the Wookies added Kashyyyk, a planet featured in Return of the Sith. Then there was Trials of Obi-Wan, which added Mustafar to the game, another planet in Return of the Sith.
Star Wars Galaxies failed because LucasArts and SOE had know idea what they wanted to create. They just wanted a box on the MMORPG shelf as soon as possible. Now it seems that LucasArts has figured out it's mistake and is trying to do it right this time. I'd love to play a game like Mass Effect as a MMO and if it comes with a Star Wars wrapper, even better.
Your description reminds me of SPORE. In development, SPORE was like neapolitan ice cream, in that it had something for everyone. When it went gold, the devs took a knife and removed the chocolate and strawberry ice cream, so what actually shipped was just plain ol' vanilla.
When players asked "Where is the chocolate and strawberry?", EA and Maxis responded with "Silly consumers, we're going to sell those to you at a later time!".
MMORPGs have been doing this for years with expansions. Everquest II even had mini-expansions called "Adventure packs" available for the first couple years.
The idea was that instead of having to build entirely new areas of the game, like continents and lands with cities and dungeons, they could simply create new dungeons & monsters, plop them in existing areas and make profit.
Now, with micro-transactions, they don't even have to make the dungeons and monsters. Instead they invent new items in the game that are "exclusively available only through the EQII online store!"
Sure, they're not game-breaking now, but for how long? It'll only take a few people creating new items to say "well, this doesn't break the game too much, and we can sell it in the store for $3!
Penn & Teller found certain aspects of NASA floundering. Like the bureaucracy in administration and management. Like the fact that administration doesn't listen to their engineers when it comes to safety over launch schedules.
Penn & Teller mostly focused their rage on the "governmental" parts of NASA (go figure).
They praised NASA scientists and engineers over and over, then showed quite a bit about commercial space companies like Virgin Galactic, Bigelow Aerospace, and SpaceX (again, go figure).
So while a lot of BS fans were expecting P&T to rip NASA a new one, they mostly had good things to say about it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a bit unfair to compare Champions Online (which came out in 2009) with City of Heroes (Which is nearly 6 years old). I beta tested and played City of Heroes for about 3 months after it launched, and it was probably worse than Champions Online at launch. Champions is basically a very streamlined version of vanilla City of Heroes. I'd say most of it's systems are superior to the systems that CoH shipped with. That said, City of Heroes has 6 years worth of content additions and bug fixes, where CO has less than a year. If you want to play a superhero MMO, I'd suggest CoH over CO any day. However, unless City of Heroes does some upgrades in the next 2-3 years, City of Heroes is going to look very dated compared to CO, and by that time CO will have a lot more content (as long as people keep playing it).
It's no different than any other medium for storytelling. How many televisions shows or movies are just variations or hybrids of some other works? The question is, are they good variations or bad? Since this is amateurs at work, most of the stuff you're going to end up with will be crap, but it only takes a few great missions to make the whole system worth while.
If you want exclusive tracks, make your own. I was doing that 15 years ago with computer multi-track software and a CD burner that cost me $350 at the time. The new DJing software was designed with mash-ups and remixing in mind, that's why it's loaded with beat-syncing and a tons of effects to play with.
If that doesn't strike your fancy because it's not wax, check out the Vestax VRX-2000. You can cut your own records from any source with that.
If you're still spinning records like it's 1989, you're carrying around a flight case containing 2 turntables and 1 multichannel mixing board with cross-fader. You've also got at least 1 amp, two speakers and a box full of various cables, jacks and plugs in case shit breaks. In addition to all that you've got several crates full of records; any self-respecting DJ wouldn't travel with less that 3 crates of the hits, unless they're playing a preselected playlist with no requests.
In order to carry all of this equipment around, you'll be required to have a large car, or van, which means you can't drive a cool sports car to work; you gotta show up in your crappy perv van, complete with the shag carpet interior - or worse - You have to borrow your moms mini van, complete with audio books with Fabio on the cover. And you have to load and unload that equipment not once, not twice, not three times, but FOUR TIMES! Why? Because if you're a mobile DJ your music and equipment isn't insured unless you're doing really well. You haul it to the van, drive to work, haul it into the club, do the gig, haul it back to the van, drive home, then haul it back in the house. I did exactly that from 1993 to 1997, and I swore I'd never do that again.
By 1997 I got my first dual CD player with pitch controls, so I was able to fit all my music and equipment in the trunk and back seat of my car without too many problems. That lasted until 2000, when I quit DJing to get a job as a computer technician.
6 months ago I decided to check into what was new and cool these days. I found a subscription to a CD/MP3 music pool that has all the current songs and remixes for a lot lower price than what I was paying 10 or 15 years ago. I also got a "complete" DJ package in a Numark Omni MIDI Control and a copy of Traktor Pro. Sure, not top-line stuff, but I was amazed at how simple mixing is today.
With beat-grids you don't have to worry about fighting the pitch during a mix; the computer syncs everything. If you need to nudge it a little, there are marked buttons on the controller that work like a charm. In fact, while I'd say the controllers are still early in their design, I can manipulate my music in ways I couldn't even try with CDs or Turntables. Mixing with 4 turntables is exercise. Mixing with 4 audio players was so easy that I wanted to get another 4 players going, but the software is limited to 4.
That said, when I walk into a club now I'm only carrying my backpack (laptop, midi controller, back-up HDD). I drive a MINI Cooper so I had to stop taking jobs at clubs with no sound systems of their own, but I think it's much more enjoyable being a DJ now than it ever was before.
Joe Mallozzi, former showrunner of Atlantis and a consulting producer on SGU, has stated on his blog that the "Ancient Technology Activation gene" won't be featured on Universe, or at least hasn't been mentioned in the currently filmed episodes (of which I think there are 19?). It sort of makes sense, since Atlantis and all of that stuff is much newer than the Destiny and the gate-building ships in the franchise.
They just merged the last couple servers together, so they're down to 1 server now, but I've read population is still pretty decent. They probably still have around 10-20k active subs, with maybe 1500-2000 people on at prime time. Planetside just missed the mark. The combat was fun when it was remotely balanced, and even then you could still have a lot of fun. Vehicles rocked. Weapons and armor rocked. BFRs were probably where I lost interest. Or was it it the cave expansion... Like I said, they just missed the mark.
What they really messed up was releasing the game without having base and continent capture down to a fun experience. Back in the day you basically had a free-for-all. You had single hackers capping bases because there were no cap rules. Then they added in the lattice/matrix, where bases had to be capped in order, and it made the game a little more concentrated and fun. Until you've captured the same base from the same direction 27 times, then it gets kind of boring.
Since the announcement of Dust 514 there's been talk of a Planetside 2 being considered over at SOE. I'm not really sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing, but I'm hoping they extensively play-test it before it's released into the wild. Ah, who am I kidding...
So instead you have 1 commander and 2 lieutenants. The 2 lieutenants can be put in charge of secondary objectives and routing information for the commander. That way they get some commander exp, but they can't completely mess up a campaign.
While that is a good idea, choose wisely your atheists, watch out for nihilists, they might not even care.
One of these things is not like the other...
Well, intelligence is relative. Compared to what we evolve into in the next ten million years we probably AREN'T intelligent.
But what about the dolphins?
Dophins are intelligent but that's not the sort of intelligence we're looking for. If we were to find out that dolphins are more intelligent than humans when it comes to abstract conceptualization, it's be a huge discovery but it wouldn't really change the world because dolphins don't have technology and they don't have libraries of stored knowledge. It's really the use of tools and the storing of knowledge that sets us apart from every other living creature on Earth. Now we need to know if it sets us apart from every alien creature in the universe.
that is could falsify the theory? if so then go for it.
I mean, they don't have to exist, there are other theories out there.
In science the word "Theory" means "the best possible explanation that hasn't been disproven". Notice the first half of the sentence. You can't have multiple "best possible explanations".
I'd wager this device won't alert drivers when they're tailgating. Tailgating is way too common these days for a car manufacturer to implement something like that unless it was a federal mandate for safety (which isn't a bad idea). Ford would piss off way too many of their customers with a car that tries to tell the driver how to drive.
PlanetSide was a lot of fun, but when it first came out it was completely directionless. Besides the need to gain levels and acquire skills, there was no game there. It was like a massive death match with some bases and towers that could be captured. Later they added in the "lattice system" for base capture and it helped a little, but it still seemed like a grind after a while. There was no story behind base captures, no real motive to capture bases except that they were there, and you'd get a slight bonus for your team.
I've subscribed to PS several times since it's come out, and the real reason it only has ~20,000 subs these days is because it's a game that was released with limited to no direction. If they could come up with a couple more game systems that would help give the game direction, I'd gladly re-sub again.
In the television series StarGate SG-1 and StarGate Atlantis they have a top secret alien-human tech derived aerospace fighter called the F-302. It uses 3 forms of propulsion in order to do what it needs to do:
2x regular air-breathing jet engines for low altitude operations.
2x scramjets for high altitude operations.
1x Rocket booster to get into orbit.
Unions are bad because it's still a division of labor and capital. There's no reason to have a division of labor and capital at all. There are things called "Co-operatives" where the labor and capital are one and the same.
And now for another review.
I was able to play about 50-60 hours worth during the open beta, so I had lots of time to play around with things. The parent is dead on with this game having an awesome character creation system, but it's not anything new; it's pretty much the same system in City of Heroes/Villains, but with higher resolution textures and models. A major difference with Champions Online is that there are costume parts that are unlocked by getting items during play, and while they're marked as costume items, it's a kind of cumbersome dynamic.
The power systems are basically identical to City of Heroes/Villains, except there are no restrictions to the powers you can gain from any framework in the game. So you could shoot beams from your eyes, fly and run really fast, and you could be super strong and tough, if you wanted to be. Once you get the powers you want, you can upgrade them, but the points used to upgrade your powers are not the same points used to buy powers, so you end up with a lot of powers that you'll use once in a while, and you'll end up punching the same combo of 5-6 attacks.
I like how they made the generic auto-attack into a "power builder" attack, though I think it could use some more refining. It just seemed like another excuse for me to have to click another button, not an integral part of the combat system.
Playing the actual game is pretty mindless, seriously. The missions are set up like WoW quests, where you have a "contact" who gives you collection, kill, rescue, etc. missions for you to complete. Most of the time they're outside, but there are lots of instance-based indoor missions if you like crawling through sewers and office buildings. The thing is, the mission areas, where your objects are, are clearly marked on the map and mini-map. You don't even have to read the mission text most of the time in order to complete the missions; just by getting to where you have to go, you can usually figure it out in a kill or two. It's like have WoW's questhelper UI built into the MMO at launch, which tells me Cryptic isn't even expecting you to read the mission text.
Other than that, the game is OK. I'd rate it up there with City of Heroes/Villains, but that's only because those games have several years of refining in them compared to Champions Online, which has all that refining built right into it from the get-go. Like all MMOs these days, it was fun until the game's weaknesses became obvious. Then it became a grind like every other game.
OK, these new flares are small. I get it. But are these new flares 1 billion times smaller than a 'normal' solar flare? That's what the prefix indicates.
Better yet, why didn't they build it underground? I saw an episode of Dirty Jobs where they were digging tunnels to store wine barrels somewhere in California. They built these tunnels right under their fields, and once they were dug out they sprayed the walls with cement for structural support. Seemed like a great use of space to me.
In a lot of places if you're down 5-10 meters you're looking at year-round temperatures of 10-13 Celsius (50-55 F). If you're underground, you've got usable land above you for things like agriculture and/or wind or solar power.
This seems like a no-brainer to me...
Venus is actually quite terra-formable. It does have an atmosphere, an extremely thick one at that, which has caused its high temperature. It also has gravity closer to ours than the moon or Mars. If we could turn the CO2 into O2 and usable carbon (like for soil), we could eventually live on it. Wouldn't be easy, but probably more feasible than terra-forming Mars.
Hah! Venus is not even close to being as easy to terraform Mars.
Step 1. Cool down the planet. I suppose this could be done by placing a single huge or many smaller solar shades at the SOL-Venus L1.
Step 2. As the planet cools, the CO2 in the atmosphere will begin to freeze and fall to the surface. That dry ice needs to be sequestered into a more stable form, like calcium carbonite or maybe even diamond..
Step 3: Venus has a day that lasts 243 Earth days. The only way to speed up this rotation is to smack it with hundreds or thousands of big chunks of rock and ice (more on ice in a minute).
Step 4: Venus is a very very dry planet. Mars is dry too, but for different reasons. The water on Mars is frozen. The water on Venus is gone, baked out of the planet, cracked with UV and had it's hydrogen blow into space. That means that you can't even easily make water on Venus because it doesn't have much hydrogen available. The good thing is, while you're doing step three you can be adding water back to the system in the form of comets and water-ice rich asteroids.
OK, so now you have a colder planet with more water-ice than you started with and a day that isn't almost a year long. At this point, you're about even with Mars.
So what is the value of another Earth-size planet in the terms of real estate, land development, resources, etc?
The original poster is correct in his/her assumption. Great example of ad hominem though; take notes kids.
I end the quote there because it confirms the parents original statement:
This is the disconnect, folks: For those who believe the bible to be the words of God, the constitution will always come second. It doesn't matter if abortion, or stem-cell research or sex-ed is legal and accepted by the majority of the country. As long as people continue with this "Gods laws first and mans laws second" mantra, we'll continue to see doctors getting shot, kids getting pregnant and people with diseases untreated. But you get 72 virgins, right?
Look, I'm no expert, but when it comes to life, I like to think that it started some time around 3.8 billion years ago and it's an on-going event. The sperm is alive before conception. The egg is alive before conception. There really isn't any "Life begins here" line in human reproduction. It's the chicken and the egg, and it's a very tired argument.
And why is it that only human life is sacred, and only unborn humans? It's weird how fanatics pick their targets.
WoW made the mistake of forcing players to choose a side from the get-go. The game is Player vs. Environment first, Player vs. Player second, and even though they've been adding more and more PvP content over the years with each expansion, you still have to grind through PvE to get anywhere in PvP. There's no reason why players of Alliance and Horde PvP factions couldn't group and raid together for PvE content, except that Blizzard doesn't want them to. I figure if everyone started out neutral and could group with anybody else in the game, you'd see a lot more grouping and raiding going on and a lot less PvP. You'd also see a lot less re-rolling on different servers or for different factions too.
What they really need to implement is some kind of Lackey/Sidekick mechanism like they have in City of Heros/Villains. Allowing players of different levels to group together makes a lot of sense when they're already limited to those in their PvP faction. Plus that would allow their older content to get more visits, since people might not feel forced to solo most of their way through levels 1-70.
Portal is probably the best example of physics designed around the game, not the other way around. Or maybe not. In either case, Portal was a blast even though it was probably one of the simplest, shortest games I've ever played. You know what I'd love to see? A scifi game that actually played around with gravity. Every scifi game (where you can get out of a ship and run around) has the same gravity in every location. Take Mass Effect for example: You fly up to a planet and check it out: Most of them have near Earth gravity. Then there's a mission on Earths moon, and guess what? The Moon has the same gravity as Earth! Why? Oh, right, because the game engine only supports a single, unified gravity for any given environment. This is why scifi games usually suck. When you can't even represent what it would be like to be in lower gravity, what's the friggin point of visiting other planets? How about space stations that use rotational gravity? But think! These days maps are critically designed to have you go from A to B to C on the prescribed path through the prescribed targets. If you could jump up on a ridge and run past that, well, there goes a bunch of development hours down the tube. But how grand it would be! I miss the freedom of movement in games. The day I logged into a new game and I couldn't jump over a curb, I think I died a little.
Sony made a total hash of Galaxies, so another one is needed.
It was a combination of LucasArts and SOE that borked galaxies. They decided to make a game set during the time of the original trilogy when they had the prequels coming out in theaters. Then there was the decision to have the Jedi archetype in a period when the Jedi were supposed to be extinct or in hiding. Had they placed Galaxies during the Clone Wars, the games release would have followed Attack of the Clones, which would have had cross-marketing working for it and there wouldn't be an issue with Jedi being all over the place. Of course I think they figured this out all too late.
After they finally got space into the game in 2004, the follow-up expansions are all from the prequel movies: Rage of the Wookies added Kashyyyk, a planet featured in Return of the Sith. Then there was Trials of Obi-Wan, which added Mustafar to the game, another planet in Return of the Sith.
Star Wars Galaxies failed because LucasArts and SOE had know idea what they wanted to create. They just wanted a box on the MMORPG shelf as soon as possible. Now it seems that LucasArts has figured out it's mistake and is trying to do it right this time. I'd love to play a game like Mass Effect as a MMO and if it comes with a Star Wars wrapper, even better.
Your description reminds me of SPORE. In development, SPORE was like neapolitan ice cream, in that it had something for everyone. When it went gold, the devs took a knife and removed the chocolate and strawberry ice cream, so what actually shipped was just plain ol' vanilla.
When players asked "Where is the chocolate and strawberry?", EA and Maxis responded with "Silly consumers, we're going to sell those to you at a later time!".
MMORPGs have been doing this for years with expansions. Everquest II even had mini-expansions called "Adventure packs" available for the first couple years. The idea was that instead of having to build entirely new areas of the game, like continents and lands with cities and dungeons, they could simply create new dungeons & monsters, plop them in existing areas and make profit.
Now, with micro-transactions, they don't even have to make the dungeons and monsters. Instead they invent new items in the game that are "exclusively available only through the EQII online store!"
Sure, they're not game-breaking now, but for how long? It'll only take a few people creating new items to say "well, this doesn't break the game too much, and we can sell it in the store for $3!
Penn & Teller found certain aspects of NASA floundering. Like the bureaucracy in administration and management. Like the fact that administration doesn't listen to their engineers when it comes to safety over launch schedules. Penn & Teller mostly focused their rage on the "governmental" parts of NASA (go figure). They praised NASA scientists and engineers over and over, then showed quite a bit about commercial space companies like Virgin Galactic, Bigelow Aerospace, and SpaceX (again, go figure). So while a lot of BS fans were expecting P&T to rip NASA a new one, they mostly had good things to say about it.
Why do we ship freight in Tractor-Trailers instead of using a bunch of MINI Coopers? It's cheaper. Less man-hours, less fuel.