You can also get Hyponatrimia (I may be misspelling) if you sweat alot over an extended period and drink too much water but don't replace the sodium and potasium lost. It can make you tired, dizzy, affect judgement, and eventually cause you to pass out. The basic jist is that you dilute your blood with too much water, upsetting the electrolyte balance and causing all sorts of things to go wacky. I can tell from experience, it's not fun stuff.
Megaman would be awesome for a Super Smash Brothers character. It's such a good idea, I almost have to wonder if there's some licensing issue that has kept them from doing it in the past.
The sensors inside can detect relative motion, so it can figure out if it's been moved and roughly how far. I got the impression the sensors on the TV were more to figure out which part of the screen you were pointing at.
I'm not a tax lawyer, but I've recently had to learn about some related issues to do my taxes. I think most of us could legitimately argue that MMOs are a hobby for us, under the IRS definitions of a hobby versus a business. Any normal person wouldn't make enough dollars to offset the costs. If you did claim such sales as business income, you could also write off some expenses, such as your PC, broadband bill, ect... which the IRS does NOT want to get involved in.
However, I can forsee the government's argument that purchases of virtual currency are still purchases and may be subject to sales tax imposed by the state and/or locality of your residence. This accompanies the attempt by states to impose sales tax on internet purchases.
So, I suspect we won't have to worry about income tax issues here, but sales tax is a different problem.
Economists will tell you that a 0% unemployment rate is extremely unhealthy. Although they won't agree on the exact numbers, consensus figures of around 4-5% are usually cited.
We still have to fax things at work. However, this is exclusively because our company is nationwide, and the accounting people who approve travel expense reports work on the other side of the country. The company subscribes to a scanning service and to submit receipts for expenses we have to print out a cover sheet from the expense reporting software and fax that sheet and all receipts to a specific fax number. Five minutes later, the scans are automatically visible inside the expense reporting software. I think this is a way to avoid buying scanners, and instead we have big combo printer/copier/fax machines. It certainly is more efficient than physically mailing receipts somewhere.
We also have to occasionally fax signed forms places, especially for security related things where they don't want to trust e-mail and snail mail is too slow.
That's a damn good idea. I know they'd make a ton of money off people like my wife. At the moment, she will walk out of many movies saying she wants a copy, then has to remember to go home and preorder it on Amazon. If she doesn't preorder, she usually forgets unless reminded by the pre-DVD release advertising blitz. You'd think the distributor would be delighted by this idea just for the prospect of selling more discs and avoiding the extra ad costs.
It doesn't seem like it would cost the theatre very much. You'd need a small booth and one employee to run it, with an extra cash register. You don't need a lot of display space, just a "Take home the movie you just saw, Today!" sign and a glass case with the current offerings in it.
I am not an optometrist, but my rough understanding from a bunch of neuroscience talks in grad school is that vision is sort of pipelined, where there are a series of processing phases. One stage looks for lines (vertical, horizontal, diagonal) while the next responds to shapes formed by these lines (circle, square, ect...) and the next recognizes complex patterns composed of shapes, like faces. Movement and color gets factored in somewhere.
Incidentally, the research into this partly done by strapping locusts to a table, putting electrodes in various parts of their brain, then showing them pictures and moving the pictures around and measuring which neurons fire...it was probably one of the stranger experimental setups I'd heard of.
Back on topic, it doesn't surprise me that this technique works, as science seems to be demonstrating that neurons and synapses are surprisingly flexible and can be retrained to perform differently.
Now that you mention it, large portions of Episodes I, II, and III seem to be either crafted specifically for videos games or inspired by them. Some specific examples include the nonsensical battle through the factory in Episode II (complete with NES Era stomping machine) and the duel in Episode III between Obiwan and Anakin (lava level with silly jumping puzzle).
Battle rank 6 gets you practically nothing, even with the shifts last year to make starting players more powerful. I was beginning to hold my own by rank 12, before my outfit collapsed and I lost interest. If they can get people to play this, it will only result in more kills for the real players. It's ridiculous the ammount of carnage one small, experienced team can exact against a horde of zerglings. Almost makes me want to restart my combat engineer for the sheer joy of laying minefields and autoturrets.
They also say they will absolutely not add a catapult and arrestor gear to the new carriers. They might add arrestor gear, but word is no chance on the catapult.
I spent three summers working in a trailer less than 50 meters from this machine. It always creeped me out a little. Several times a day, the sirens and flashy lights would go off outside the building, then about a minute later, we'd hear this huge "WUMPH". Our whole trailer would shake and the monitors vibrate. Despite understanding what was going on, I couldn't help but wonder about the safety of sitting next to an array of giant capacitors which get rapidly discharged all at once.
However, I must admit it does make cool pictures. The bright lines you see on most pictures are supposedly spare charge arcing across the giant pool in which they have to keep the whole thing submerged.
Keep detailed records of what you spend and what you spend it on. Keep receipts if at all possible. Read the IRS guide on moving expenses. Your company will likely cover slightly different things than the IRS allows, so you need to keep records carefully in order to maximize your reimbursements. The IRS gives you a credit (even better than a deduction) for some moving expenses, which can make a hefty difference in your tax return.
If you have to pay the movers, be sure to work out in advance how they want to be paid. I was on the road the day my movers decided to tell me they needed to be paid before they would deliver anything, and then decided to tell me they don't take American Express.
Changing banks is a huge headache. The likelihood of having the same bank in both locations is low, so you will probably need a new account at a local bank after you move. Unfortunately, you also have to close accounts at the old bank in person. One other hitch, large deposits made when opening an account often take quite some time to fully clear, meaning your money can be stuck in limbo for a week or more. If you plan right, you should open the new account while on a househunting trip, make a sizable deposit so you have some cash to live on, pay rent, and write checks with when you arrive. Then, just before leaving your old town, you can close that account and take the balance with you. This way, you'll never be without a valid ATM card and checkbook.
Um, you could do it the way they did things 10 years ago - walk out of the room. They are only proposing this in isolated rooms/buildings, all of which have fire alarms and ground-line telephones that work perfectly well for emergency alerts.
There's got to be a typo in that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere [Wikipedia] says that people who travel 50 miles up are considered astronauts, which sounds like a much more reasonable number to me.
Heck, the Earth's radius is less than 6400 km, which is a lot less than 62000 miles.
Probably got some extra 0's in there, or posted the wrong units.
It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to combine the available ratings info with Googles information about the users in a household. It should be feasible to figure out how many users in a household, their rough age, gender, and interests, then crossreference with the known audience makeup. This would let them decide that there's a 90% chance my wife is watching and a 10% chance that I'm watching, and serve up adds that match those likelihoods.
I for one would volunteer to give Google information about my viewing habits if it would increase the odds of interesting ads instead of obnoxious ones. I recognize that the ads are necessary to maintain the programming and would rather hear about geeky products than arthritis rubs and ambulance-chasers.
Oh, I agree with you. I didn't mean to put it all on the NGE. I also admit that my opinions are biased by social considerations, not strict gameplay, as all my friends and guildies gave up and left long ago, so my memories of the "good old days" are naturally biased.
Another major complaint about the new system you didn't touch on was the almost complete lack of documentation for the changes. They detailed the new professions and leveling system, but didn't publish manuals on how to play. For an existing character who got respec'd to a level 80 character right off, adapting to the new system was a ridiculous learning curve. We're still trying to figure out all the (nonsensical) hotkeys for opening various menus.(Why would you make 'k' the datapad?)
While I think the author writes a good and thorough review of the changes, He fails to recognize that the NGE removed some of the critical elements which made the game special. It's now just EQ-in-Space.
For example, I used to greatly appreciate the ability to group with almost anyone, regardless of how far they had progressed in their combat abilities. We'd sometimes get our whole guild together for hunting trips, from the Master Bounty Hunters to the dancers who had just a little bit of rifle skill. We'd all go out hunting, and everyone would have fun, earn money, and gain experience. However, with the new system (and the previous Combat Upgrade) you had to face the same old problem of finding other players who were close enough to your level, then finding the monsters closer enough to your level, in order to actually do anything. My lvl 80 Doctor can no longer play with my wife's lvl 56 Spy, except to follow her around, fighting mobs that are gray to me, dropping the occasional heal on her.
Another major problem is they've removed the ability to dabble. I used to love having just enough crafting skill to run my own harvesters and craft a few things, without forcing me to do nothing but that. My wife was a Master Image designer because she loved doing it, but can't do it all the time. Sometimes she'd like to grab her pistol and tour the Galaxy with me. Now, I can't craft, and she's had to give up Image Design, as it's been rolled into the Entertainer profession, which is strictly non-combat.
Don't get me wrong, I like EQ-style games (we play EQ2 quite a bit as well) but SWG kept me playing because of it's unique features. Now, the lack of content and removal of unique features may drive us away entirely.
Does anyone else find it odd that only half of the Forbe's article is actually about the Xbox 360, and the other half is a wistful trip down memory lane, longing for the Atari 2600? I agree with their points about the 360 bundles and lack of games, but most of the `criticisms', which the author claims the Atari and "Dragonstomper" performed much better on, are not particular to the Xbox 360 at all, but rather modern gaming systems and games in general.
Further, while I'm all for carefully crafted games which offer good gameplay over superfluous graphical glitz, there are many gameplay elements which depend on having a more complex controller available. There's only so much you can do with one button and a joystick without relying on a GUI and deeply nested menus. Even the NES realized the extra latitude provided by a "B" button. Controller design may well have passed the point of extra latitude some years ago and devolved into "Must cram on more buttons than our competitors", but the old Atari joystick is not the answer.
That's what he means by PvP. There will be zones where CoH players can combat CoV players. Or do you mean CoV Players taking on some of the NPCs from CoH?
My wife was so frightened by that section of the game, she had to leave the room while I finished it for her. She was thinking of starting a new game at one point, but the thought of having to do the Ocean House again was so upsetting, she simply quit playing the game altogether.
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You can also get Hyponatrimia (I may be misspelling) if you sweat alot over an extended period and drink too much water but don't replace the sodium and potasium lost. It can make you tired, dizzy, affect judgement, and eventually cause you to pass out. The basic jist is that you dilute your blood with too much water, upsetting the electrolyte balance and causing all sorts of things to go wacky. I can tell from experience, it's not fun stuff.
Megaman would be awesome for a Super Smash Brothers character. It's such a good idea, I almost have to wonder if there's some licensing issue that has kept them from doing it in the past.
The sensors inside can detect relative motion, so it can figure out if it's been moved and roughly how far. I got the impression the sensors on the TV were more to figure out which part of the screen you were pointing at.
Sadly, I've read reports that Second Life has had virtual prostitution for some time.
I'm not a tax lawyer, but I've recently had to learn about some related issues to do my taxes. I think most of us could legitimately argue that MMOs are a hobby for us, under the IRS definitions of a hobby versus a business. Any normal person wouldn't make enough dollars to offset the costs. If you did claim such sales as business income, you could also write off some expenses, such as your PC, broadband bill, ect... which the IRS does NOT want to get involved in.
However, I can forsee the government's argument that purchases of virtual currency are still purchases and may be subject to sales tax imposed by the state and/or locality of your residence. This accompanies the attempt by states to impose sales tax on internet purchases.
So, I suspect we won't have to worry about income tax issues here, but sales tax is a different problem.
Economists will tell you that a 0% unemployment rate is extremely unhealthy. Although they won't agree on the exact numbers, consensus figures of around 4-5% are usually cited.
We still have to fax things at work. However, this is exclusively because our company is nationwide, and the accounting people who approve travel expense reports work on the other side of the country. The company subscribes to a scanning service and to submit receipts for expenses we have to print out a cover sheet from the expense reporting software and fax that sheet and all receipts to a specific fax number. Five minutes later, the scans are automatically visible inside the expense reporting software. I think this is a way to avoid buying scanners, and instead we have big combo printer/copier/fax machines. It certainly is more efficient than physically mailing receipts somewhere.
We also have to occasionally fax signed forms places, especially for security related things where they don't want to trust e-mail and snail mail is too slow.
That's a damn good idea. I know they'd make a ton of money off people like my wife. At the moment, she will walk out of many movies saying she wants a copy, then has to remember to go home and preorder it on Amazon. If she doesn't preorder, she usually forgets unless reminded by the pre-DVD release advertising blitz. You'd think the distributor would be delighted by this idea just for the prospect of selling more discs and avoiding the extra ad costs.
It doesn't seem like it would cost the theatre very much. You'd need a small booth and one employee to run it, with an extra cash register. You don't need a lot of display space, just a "Take home the movie you just saw, Today!" sign and a glass case with the current offerings in it.
I am not an optometrist, but my rough understanding from a bunch of neuroscience talks in grad school is that vision is sort of pipelined, where there are a series of processing phases. One stage looks for lines (vertical, horizontal, diagonal) while the next responds to shapes formed by these lines (circle, square, ect...) and the next recognizes complex patterns composed of shapes, like faces. Movement and color gets factored in somewhere. Incidentally, the research into this partly done by strapping locusts to a table, putting electrodes in various parts of their brain, then showing them pictures and moving the pictures around and measuring which neurons fire...it was probably one of the stranger experimental setups I'd heard of. Back on topic, it doesn't surprise me that this technique works, as science seems to be demonstrating that neurons and synapses are surprisingly flexible and can be retrained to perform differently.
Now that you mention it, large portions of Episodes I, II, and III seem to be either crafted specifically for videos games or inspired by them. Some specific examples include the nonsensical battle through the factory in Episode II (complete with NES Era stomping machine) and the duel in Episode III between Obiwan and Anakin (lava level with silly jumping puzzle).
Battle rank 6 gets you practically nothing, even with the shifts last year to make starting players more powerful. I was beginning to hold my own by rank 12, before my outfit collapsed and I lost interest. If they can get people to play this, it will only result in more kills for the real players. It's ridiculous the ammount of carnage one small, experienced team can exact against a horde of zerglings. Almost makes me want to restart my combat engineer for the sheer joy of laying minefields and autoturrets.
Luckily, with Vista powered overlords, you could probably just keep running until they BSoD and collapse.
They also say they will absolutely not add a catapult and arrestor gear to the new carriers. They might add arrestor gear, but word is no chance on the catapult.
I spent three summers working in a trailer less than 50 meters from this machine. It always creeped me out a little. Several times a day, the sirens and flashy lights would go off outside the building, then about a minute later, we'd hear this huge "WUMPH". Our whole trailer would shake and the monitors vibrate. Despite understanding what was going on, I couldn't help but wonder about the safety of sitting next to an array of giant capacitors which get rapidly discharged all at once.
However, I must admit it does make cool pictures. The bright lines you see on most pictures are supposedly spare charge arcing across the giant pool in which they have to keep the whole thing submerged.
Keep detailed records of what you spend and what you spend it on. Keep receipts if at all possible. Read the IRS guide on moving expenses. Your company will likely cover slightly different things than the IRS allows, so you need to keep records carefully in order to maximize your reimbursements. The IRS gives you a credit (even better than a deduction) for some moving expenses, which can make a hefty difference in your tax return. If you have to pay the movers, be sure to work out in advance how they want to be paid. I was on the road the day my movers decided to tell me they needed to be paid before they would deliver anything, and then decided to tell me they don't take American Express. Changing banks is a huge headache. The likelihood of having the same bank in both locations is low, so you will probably need a new account at a local bank after you move. Unfortunately, you also have to close accounts at the old bank in person. One other hitch, large deposits made when opening an account often take quite some time to fully clear, meaning your money can be stuck in limbo for a week or more. If you plan right, you should open the new account while on a househunting trip, make a sizable deposit so you have some cash to live on, pay rent, and write checks with when you arrive. Then, just before leaving your old town, you can close that account and take the balance with you. This way, you'll never be without a valid ATM card and checkbook.
Um, you could do it the way they did things 10 years ago - walk out of the room. They are only proposing this in isolated rooms/buildings, all of which have fire alarms and ground-line telephones that work perfectly well for emergency alerts.
Allright, that makes sense. Thanks for the correction.
There's got to be a typo in that. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth's_atmosphere [Wikipedia] says that people who travel 50 miles up are considered astronauts, which sounds like a much more reasonable number to me. Heck, the Earth's radius is less than 6400 km, which is a lot less than 62000 miles. Probably got some extra 0's in there, or posted the wrong units.
It seems like it wouldn't be that hard to combine the available ratings info with Googles information about the users in a household. It should be feasible to figure out how many users in a household, their rough age, gender, and interests, then crossreference with the known audience makeup. This would let them decide that there's a 90% chance my wife is watching and a 10% chance that I'm watching, and serve up adds that match those likelihoods. I for one would volunteer to give Google information about my viewing habits if it would increase the odds of interesting ads instead of obnoxious ones. I recognize that the ads are necessary to maintain the programming and would rather hear about geeky products than arthritis rubs and ambulance-chasers.
Oh, I agree with you. I didn't mean to put it all on the NGE. I also admit that my opinions are biased by social considerations, not strict gameplay, as all my friends and guildies gave up and left long ago, so my memories of the "good old days" are naturally biased. Another major complaint about the new system you didn't touch on was the almost complete lack of documentation for the changes. They detailed the new professions and leveling system, but didn't publish manuals on how to play. For an existing character who got respec'd to a level 80 character right off, adapting to the new system was a ridiculous learning curve. We're still trying to figure out all the (nonsensical) hotkeys for opening various menus.(Why would you make 'k' the datapad?)
While I think the author writes a good and thorough review of the changes, He fails to recognize that the NGE removed some of the critical elements which made the game special. It's now just EQ-in-Space. For example, I used to greatly appreciate the ability to group with almost anyone, regardless of how far they had progressed in their combat abilities. We'd sometimes get our whole guild together for hunting trips, from the Master Bounty Hunters to the dancers who had just a little bit of rifle skill. We'd all go out hunting, and everyone would have fun, earn money, and gain experience. However, with the new system (and the previous Combat Upgrade) you had to face the same old problem of finding other players who were close enough to your level, then finding the monsters closer enough to your level, in order to actually do anything. My lvl 80 Doctor can no longer play with my wife's lvl 56 Spy, except to follow her around, fighting mobs that are gray to me, dropping the occasional heal on her. Another major problem is they've removed the ability to dabble. I used to love having just enough crafting skill to run my own harvesters and craft a few things, without forcing me to do nothing but that. My wife was a Master Image designer because she loved doing it, but can't do it all the time. Sometimes she'd like to grab her pistol and tour the Galaxy with me. Now, I can't craft, and she's had to give up Image Design, as it's been rolled into the Entertainer profession, which is strictly non-combat. Don't get me wrong, I like EQ-style games (we play EQ2 quite a bit as well) but SWG kept me playing because of it's unique features. Now, the lack of content and removal of unique features may drive us away entirely.
Alright, thanks for the correction. I wasn't sure how to attribute things.
Does anyone else find it odd that only half of the Forbe's article is actually about the Xbox 360, and the other half is a wistful trip down memory lane, longing for the Atari 2600? I agree with their points about the 360 bundles and lack of games, but most of the `criticisms', which the author claims the Atari and "Dragonstomper" performed much better on, are not particular to the Xbox 360 at all, but rather modern gaming systems and games in general. Further, while I'm all for carefully crafted games which offer good gameplay over superfluous graphical glitz, there are many gameplay elements which depend on having a more complex controller available. There's only so much you can do with one button and a joystick without relying on a GUI and deeply nested menus. Even the NES realized the extra latitude provided by a "B" button. Controller design may well have passed the point of extra latitude some years ago and devolved into "Must cram on more buttons than our competitors", but the old Atari joystick is not the answer.
That's what he means by PvP. There will be zones where CoH players can combat CoV players. Or do you mean CoV Players taking on some of the NPCs from CoH?
My wife was so frightened by that section of the game, she had to leave the room while I finished it for her. She was thinking of starting a new game at one point, but the thought of having to do the Ocean House again was so upsetting, she simply quit playing the game altogether.