a fixed 20 second delay doesn't affect anything. getting into the queue 0.002 seconds ahead of the next guy still matters just as it does with no delay.
0.001% fee on all trades -- ok, but not great; and doesn't really solve the problem.
These are what I consider to be good solutions:
a 1 cent fee on all orders placed (not executed trades) == HFT becomes expensive, since they place millions of uncompleted orders (orders that are cancelled or withdrawn before closing).
10 minute resolution (all trade offers are queued up, and then matched and executed at 10 minute intervals. Eliminate the advantage to beating the next guy by 0.002 seconds or even by 2 minutes.
I think that's his thought... jam the plane when you get close to it. Just how close does it have to get? If the drone remote operator can't fire counter measures and take evasive action once the missile is within X meters due to jamming, the missile is going to have a much easier time hitting the target.
It's bulkier (thicker) and heavier, making it "worse" from a tablet comparison.
0.7mm inches thicker than the original ipad, and about 240grams heavier than the heaviest ipad.
To put that into perspective the case on my ipad adds 450grams, and almost 5mm, and the ipad is still perfectly usable.
You were right to put quotes around 'worse'. Moaning about the weight difference is immaterial. I would gladly buy an ipad less than 1mm thicker, and a fraction heavier if I could use proper OSX on it, at will. Hell, we might yet see an "ipad pro".
The legitimate criticisms of the surface pro as a tablet were battery life, and heat. Perhaps they've got those in line with the 2.0.
That was in the days when Lotus 123 and WordStar represented the very state of the art in user experience. Normal people had to be paid to use computers in those days
lotus 123 and wordstar? When a fast 386 with 2MB RAM was $15,000? And the alternative to lotus 123 was 50 pounds of ledgers?
Windows 3 was a godsend to productivity. Windows 95... people lined up at stores to get it for their home computers, all 25+ 3.5" floppies of it if they didn't have a new fangled cd rom yet. Sure BSODs sucked, but not as bad as using a pen and ruled paper.
Yeah there's been some stumbles... ME was a mess; Vista was terrible on underpowered hardware... but people didn't hate using windows.
The era that windows was despised? That viruses ruled... that was the XP era... mass internet adoption for an OS not designed for security and 98/2k were all piled onlline as well... when OSX finally made apple not a joke. When Microsoft wasn't scrappy and innovative but was leaning on its desktop monopoly to crush netscape etc. That's all a LOT more recent than wordstar and lotus 123.
Gaming, yeah, slightly different. But not all that much. MS had one game that was really loved: Flight Simulator. They killed it.
They launched that whole xbox franchise. Did you miss it completely?
The niche of "half bad-tablet, half bad-laptop" has been tried hundreds of times and failed every time.
How is the surface pro a "half bad tablet"? Its a perfectly good tablet. Its nothing like the convertible laptops that have been tried before. Its a tablet first, and an ultraportable laptop distant second... but unlike an ipad it does do unltraportable laptop when you need it.
They have been around for years, and nobody wanted them. Touch screen "convertible" laptops were a rage for a couple years. Nobody bought them, but everyone made them. Or the ultra-portables (under 3 lbs, full desktop OS), also a failure.
Right everyone much prefers the tablet as a form factor, the tablet-centric UI, etc.
But they -still- need a the desktop sometimes. The surface pro is that device, its a proper tablet like the ipad -- not windows XP with a crappy touch UI.
But when you need a laptop, it does that too. And with the keyboard add on it does it pretty well. Its a proper tablet that can be a crappy "ultra-portable" on demand.
It satisfies that niche... want a tablet and a tablet does most of what you need, but are still stuck carrying a laptop as well because the tablet can't run X and you still sometimes absolutely need X.
You can run desktop applications on an iPad or Droid slab by using Remote Desktop, VNC or similar, except that in the time it takes to try and control an application designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse on a touch screen, you could drive back to the office and just do it on your desktop computer.
Which is why the surface pro users in question have a keyboard... works out just fine. Nobody is using those apps just with touch.
RDP is another option, but the disadvantage to RDP is cost Terminal servers, CALs, RDS CALs, and then maybe some 3rd party sugar on top of that... Citrix etc.
People may think they want to run desktop applications on a tablet, but believe me, they don't.
In general your right. But in this case your wrong. These people want a tablet (and the surface pro is capable in that regard.) plus the ability to run thei POS app etc... and the Surface pro with the physical keyboard is actually very good at it. They also like it as much a laptop for writing longer email, and formal quotes. I don't want to sound like a shill, but the surface pro is a good fit for this niche.
There are those who would disagree. If your sales software is a thick client bound to Windows, you're about a decade behind the times, chum.
2 decades in some cases. I have clients using software that are little more than the original DOS programs in a 32bit wrapper.
Modern sales interfaces are html based, and friendly (or, at least, no more unfriendly) towards tablets as they are laptops.
Sure why don't they all just abandon their highly customized industry specific and process specific applications that work perfectly fine, so they can get the latest shiny shit in a web app that will likely take another 2 decades to get working properly, by which time you'll be calling them out for being behind the times again.
line of business applications move slow. I work with specialized retailers and their options for good point of sale systems is very limited. Some web client stuff exists, and its certainly getting better as time goes on, but there is little reason to recommend a complete system migration.
Usually they are running industry specific stuff with a lot of customization. There isn't some off the shelf web2.0 solution they can switch to even if they wanted to, and there is no real return on a multi-year migration to a custom HTML solution... and they remember the last wave that went that route -- embrace the future, web apps for the win -- remember them? They're the ones who are stuck on XP with IE6 right now. Yeah, that worked out great right? Do we have any real assurance the newer wave of web apps is going to work out better 10+ years from now?
Now some of them are using tablets with remote-desktop style access to the systems, but that adds infrastructure, and additional licensing costs -- in some cases that's the way to go, but in others a tablet that can 'just run it' is much less expensive, and more capable.
Why do you geniuses assume that people want to run Windows/desktop apps on their tablet?
Did you stop reading when you got to that sentence and then just hit reply? Because I gave an example...
One of the companies I work with has 200+ sales reps (aka users) that wan't EXACTLY that. They want a tablet they can use with their windows Point-of-sale system. Its a.net 4 windows desktop application. There isn't a web client while there is an ios app its a toy for managers to look at a few reports; its little more than tech preview of look we did an app. Its FAR too limited to actually use and the vendor isn't exactly racing to make a full featured version, so Surface Pro is exactly what they need.
Microsoft can dominate the tablet market because business tablets and personal tablets, in terms of usage, are apples and oranges.
True, but microsoft gained dominance on the desktop by being dominant at work. *If* can capture the business tablet market, it may see a halo effect in the consumer market as people will buy "what they know", and what they can use at work (BYOD), etc.
There is also the xbox angle, which is a separate but conceivably compelling route to picking up consumers while also courting enterprises with compatibility.
The only people that care are the ipad buyers who want to buy an ipad because its an ipad, and few could even articulate why they want an ipad instead of an alternative, except that they "know" that's the one they want.
The people buying droid tablets largely don't care that its droid. Sure, some of US do, but that's beside the point.
MS can easily take a bite out of the android market by competing on price, if they want.
MS can also go after the premium market with the competitive advantage the Surface 2 Pro has -- the ability to run windows / desktop apps.
And -yes- this IS something there is a market for. One company I work with for example has all it's outbound reps using laptops to enter sales etc. The reps are clamoring to switch to a tablet for portability etc. Sure the point of sale system vendor could come around with a web interface or ios/droid client at some point, but today that doesn't exist.
So the surface pro works for them today. Microsoft can go after and capture that market, even at 'premium' prices.
They can make all the products they want, but the software that people want runs on an OS owned by someone else.
What software is there that's exclusively on ios or droid that you think "people want to run"? Reality is people don't care about that. ipad has its brand name cachet, and droid has the open community, but the average person? Doesn't REALLY care; and the business user? Could very well see a lot of advantages to windows tablets if microsoft puts out a competent product.
I assumed they'd just send an encrypted copy from the PotUS to the head of the UN via a secured line with the presumption that everyone in the NSA along with any contractors would read it as a matter of course...
Obviously anyone who didn't get the memo just isn't doing their job.
The Three Laws were EXPRESSLY invented to show why such a simple system will not work.
The three laws were expressly invented to make a system that works.
He then spent extensive amounts of time exploring them for unintended consequences and corner cases where they did not work.
It is frustrating people think '3 laws safe'.
Its FAR more frustrating that rather than trying to -fix- the edge cases Asimov uncovered with the 3 laws (later 4 laws), we've decided to just go full steam ahead without any laws at all with robots designed for the sole purpose of killing us.
As far as I've been able to tell, most espionage of a materiel type requires spying on companies, as it's those companies that are the true producers of materiel, not governments themselves.
True. And if you were investing a weapons manufacturer in Syria nobody would blink. But Belgium is an ally.
This is like breaking into your friends house without provocation, you know, just in case... uh... something... something... terrorism.
Of course he had to make a rape joke when talking about this, because he's that kind of loser, but it's not even correct. Anything that happened to him here was self-inflicted
Right. I gathered that based on hardcore inferno taking about a month.
But even so "endgame content" is exactly same content you already beat only with bigger numbers.
After going through Hardcore Normal / Nightmare / Hell... what is "Inferno" but just more of the same?
Does it really matter if you never finish that? Its not like you've been deprived of seeing the "whole game". Its not like playing a mmorpg and not being able to do the endgame raids. inferno isn't "endgame", its just same thing you did 3 times before but harder.
Like the original doom, I considered the game beaten after beating it on ultra-violence, and Serious Sam 3 beaten after beating it on "Serious". I never even tried playing on "Normal" in either title.
But the fact that Nightmare* unlocked, and is BRUTAL by comparison to Ultra Violence (fast+respawn), or that Mental unlocked and is brutal compared to Serious (enemies phase in and out of being visible)? So what? I haven't yet beat either game on either difficulty. I don't feel cheated or ripped off.
I would never approach a game and think I'm somehow 'entitled' to beat it on those levels. Its not like I'm missing out on actual "content". I'm sure I -could- if I put in a lot of effort, but I just don't care. I'll play something else that's more fun. I still play nightmare and mental to see how far i can get on one life... and that's about it.:) If someone gets off on pushing through those (or is that much better a player than I am... fine)
To be honest, I never beat diablo ii in hardcore hell (?) was that the top of d2? I don't recall. In any case I'd usually splatter around 85-95th level on some random superunique borderline invulnerable lightning-reflection asshole... or occasionally on a stage boss (duriel or diablo if i wasn't careful/unlucky, those 7 statues a few times...) would I have gone out and paid real money for better gear to take them on and increase my survivability? The 3rd party marketplaces certainly existed... but what on earth for? What would that have accomplished? Eventually I got bored (especially of maintaining mule accounts so I could hang onto perfects, runes, and extra gear) and moved onto other games.
I admit I haven't played D3... blizzards policies and actions the last few years have turned me off playing their output, but I'm still thinking that feeling compelled to play real money to get a leg up in the final extra-super-hard difficulty is a special kind of stupid.
* vs Rage, which has "Nightmare", but its a joke, and the DLC adds "Ultra Nightmare" (and its STILL a joke).
Do you really think that if they could do that to pretty much any American citizen that them being able to see that you forgot to declare a $5 ebay purchase for sales tax is going to make it possible when they otherwise couldn't?
Yes and no.
The mass surveillance on it's own really isn't that threatening. The secret courts, gag orders, and the elimination of full public due process is terrifying.
Its not about them being able to catch you doing some petty unremarkable crime. Its that they can ship you off to hell without having to catch you at all if they can tag your file with the right notes. And full mass surveillance makes that easy... a few out of context snips from your email and phone conversations, video clips of you walking home in an alley 'known to be a meeting place of suspected terrorists', video of you carrying a 'suspicious backpack"... a judge that rubber stamps anything that looks like its been vaguely filled out correctly... and off to hell you go. You don't get a lawyer, or a trial, and the absurdly thin evidence is never challenged in public view.
Intrusive government surveillance makes falsifying evidence a lot easier.
But let's say I connect from A to B over the normal (wired) internet.
Slow down cowboy. What is "A" and "B"? They are IP addresses.
The packet goes through router X or router Y.
Correct.
Same with multipath: when wifi fails, use mobile network, and vice versa.
No, In the A-B scenario above there are 2 routes from A to B. Or to be more precise there are 2 routes from "IP Address A" to "IP Address B".
With multipath, A has 2 different IP addresses: A0 and A1. A router knows the routes it has available to send a packet down, but it has no idea that A0 and A1 are different interfaces on the same device, and that it can send packets addressed to A0 to A1.
Indeed, packets arriving on the A1 interface addressed to A0 would be ignored unless the interface was in promiscuous mode.
Only the kernel (it has to set up "virtual" routers for wifi and mobile).
That doesn't solve the problem that the two interfaces have different IP addresses, in completely disparate networks.
If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
How did the first landslide of people make it through? I mean, I'm seeing that inferno/hardcore was beaten by June 20th, 2012 and then beaten regularly since then...in a game released mid May. Did they really all have a full sets of one in 15 billion drops? Of course not.
I'm skeptical that you need the best gear to win. To cake walk it, sure. To maximize your loot+gold per hour ratio absolutely... but by that point you've beaten the game soundly and there's no reason to play more.
The point of the game was to beat the game and get the good gear. If you buy the good gear, and then beat the game with it... like you said... what is the reward? Any player who does that is literally ripping themselves off.
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a fixed 20 second delay doesn't affect anything. getting into the queue 0.002 seconds ahead of the next guy still matters just as it does with no delay.
0.001% fee on all trades -- ok, but not great; and doesn't really solve the problem.
These are what I consider to be good solutions:
a 1 cent fee on all orders placed (not executed trades) == HFT becomes expensive, since they place millions of uncompleted orders (orders that are cancelled or withdrawn before closing).
10 minute resolution (all trade offers are queued up, and then matched and executed at 10 minute intervals. Eliminate the advantage to beating the next guy by 0.002 seconds or even by 2 minutes.
Are you actually using VT-d though?
No. But I'd like to play with it, and I can't. And when I move my current i7 3770K from my main pc into I still won't be able to.
No. The disc version of a steam game is little more than a steam key and a blob to save you some downloading time.
It is no more resellable than buying it on steam.
I tend to make this years gaming rig next years home-office server.
So the core2quad Q6600 I used to use in my gaming PC is now running XenServer 6.
I realize I'm in the very distinct minority here, but still ... it would be nice if i could buy a product that does both.
You realize we're speculating about a short range jammer right on a missile itself right? Not sure HARM etc really applies here.
I'd like to get the raw data to build my own plots, the vendor response is that the FDA will not let them do that, the best they can export is a pdf.
The vendor is lying.
I think that's his thought... jam the plane when you get close to it. Just how close does it have to get? If the drone remote operator can't fire counter measures and take evasive action once the missile is within X meters due to jamming, the missile is going to have a much easier time hitting the target.
It's bulkier (thicker) and heavier, making it "worse" from a tablet comparison.
0.7mm inches thicker than the original ipad, and about 240grams heavier than the heaviest ipad.
To put that into perspective the case on my ipad adds 450grams, and almost 5mm, and the ipad is still perfectly usable.
You were right to put quotes around 'worse'. Moaning about the weight difference is immaterial. I would gladly buy an ipad less than 1mm thicker, and a fraction heavier if I could use proper OSX on it, at will. Hell, we might yet see an "ipad pro".
The legitimate criticisms of the surface pro as a tablet were battery life, and heat. Perhaps they've got those in line with the 2.0.
That was in the days when Lotus 123 and WordStar represented the very state of the art in user experience. Normal people had to be paid to use computers in those days
lotus 123 and wordstar? When a fast 386 with 2MB RAM was $15,000? And the alternative to lotus 123 was 50 pounds of ledgers?
Windows 3 was a godsend to productivity. Windows 95... people lined up at stores to get it for their home computers, all 25+ 3.5" floppies of it if they didn't have a new fangled cd rom yet. Sure BSODs sucked, but not as bad as using a pen and ruled paper.
Yeah there's been some stumbles... ME was a mess; Vista was terrible on underpowered hardware... but people didn't hate using windows.
The era that windows was despised? That viruses ruled... that was the XP era... mass internet adoption for an OS not designed for security and 98/2k were all piled onlline as well... when OSX finally made apple not a joke. When Microsoft wasn't scrappy and innovative but was leaning on its desktop monopoly to crush netscape etc. That's all a LOT more recent than wordstar and lotus 123.
Gaming, yeah, slightly different. But not all that much. MS had one game that was really loved: Flight Simulator. They killed it.
They launched that whole xbox franchise. Did you miss it completely?
The niche of "half bad-tablet, half bad-laptop" has been tried hundreds of times and failed every time.
How is the surface pro a "half bad tablet"? Its a perfectly good tablet. Its nothing like the convertible laptops that have been tried before. Its a tablet first, and an ultraportable laptop distant second... but unlike an ipad it does do unltraportable laptop when you need it.
They have been around for years, and nobody wanted them. Touch screen "convertible" laptops were a rage for a couple years. Nobody bought them, but everyone made them. Or the ultra-portables (under 3 lbs, full desktop OS), also a failure.
Right everyone much prefers the tablet as a form factor, the tablet-centric UI, etc.
But they -still- need a the desktop sometimes. The surface pro is that device, its a proper tablet like the ipad -- not windows XP with a crappy touch UI.
But when you need a laptop, it does that too. And with the keyboard add on it does it pretty well. Its a proper tablet that can be a crappy "ultra-portable" on demand.
It satisfies that niche... want a tablet and a tablet does most of what you need, but are still stuck carrying a laptop as well because the tablet can't run X and you still sometimes absolutely need X.
You can run desktop applications on an iPad or Droid slab by using Remote Desktop, VNC or similar, except that in the time it takes to try and control an application designed to be used with a keyboard and mouse on a touch screen, you could drive back to the office and just do it on your desktop computer.
Which is why the surface pro users in question have a keyboard... works out just fine. Nobody is using those apps just with touch.
RDP is another option, but the disadvantage to RDP is cost Terminal servers, CALs, RDS CALs, and then maybe some 3rd party sugar on top of that... Citrix etc.
People may think they want to run desktop applications on a tablet, but believe me, they don't.
In general your right. But in this case your wrong. These people want a tablet (and the surface pro is capable in that regard.) plus the ability to run thei POS app etc... and the Surface pro with the physical keyboard is actually very good at it. They also like it as much a laptop for writing longer email, and formal quotes. I don't want to sound like a shill, but the surface pro is a good fit for this niche.
There are those who would disagree. If your sales software is a thick client bound to Windows, you're about a decade behind the times, chum.
2 decades in some cases. I have clients using software that are little more than the original DOS programs in a 32bit wrapper.
Modern sales interfaces are html based, and friendly (or, at least, no more unfriendly) towards tablets as they are laptops.
Sure why don't they all just abandon their highly customized industry specific and process specific applications that work perfectly fine, so they can get the latest shiny shit in a web app that will likely take another 2 decades to get working properly, by which time you'll be calling them out for being behind the times again.
line of business applications move slow. I work with specialized retailers and their options for good point of sale systems is very limited. Some web client stuff exists, and its certainly getting better as time goes on, but there is little reason to recommend a complete system migration.
Usually they are running industry specific stuff with a lot of customization. There isn't some off the shelf web2.0 solution they can switch to even if they wanted to, and there is no real return on a multi-year migration to a custom HTML solution... and they remember the last wave that went that route -- embrace the future, web apps for the win -- remember them? They're the ones who are stuck on XP with IE6 right now. Yeah, that worked out great right? Do we have any real assurance the newer wave of web apps is going to work out better 10+ years from now?
Now some of them are using tablets with remote-desktop style access to the systems, but that adds infrastructure, and additional licensing costs -- in some cases that's the way to go, but in others a tablet that can 'just run it' is much less expensive, and more capable.
Why do you geniuses assume that people want to run Windows/desktop apps on their tablet?
Did you stop reading when you got to that sentence and then just hit reply? Because I gave an example...
One of the companies I work with has 200+ sales reps (aka users) that wan't EXACTLY that. They want a tablet they can use with their windows Point-of-sale system. Its a .net 4 windows desktop application. There isn't a web client while there is an ios app its a toy for managers to look at a few reports; its little more than tech preview of look we did an app. Its FAR too limited to actually use and the vendor isn't exactly racing to make a full featured version, so Surface Pro is exactly what they need.
There are LOTs of people in this boat.
Microsoft can dominate the tablet market because business tablets and personal tablets, in terms of usage, are apples and oranges.
True, but microsoft gained dominance on the desktop by being dominant at work. *If* can capture the business tablet market, it may see a halo effect in the consumer market as people will buy "what they know", and what they can use at work (BYOD), etc.
There is also the xbox angle, which is a separate but conceivably compelling route to picking up consumers while also courting enterprises with compatibility.
People don't want Microsoft on their tablet.
The only people that care are the ipad buyers who want to buy an ipad because its an ipad, and few could even articulate why they want an ipad instead of an alternative, except that they "know" that's the one they want.
The people buying droid tablets largely don't care that its droid. Sure, some of US do, but that's beside the point.
MS can easily take a bite out of the android market by competing on price, if they want.
MS can also go after the premium market with the competitive advantage the Surface 2 Pro has -- the ability to run windows / desktop apps.
And -yes- this IS something there is a market for. One company I work with for example has all it's outbound reps using laptops to enter sales etc. The reps are clamoring to switch to a tablet for portability etc. Sure the point of sale system vendor could come around with a web interface or ios/droid client at some point, but today that doesn't exist.
So the surface pro works for them today. Microsoft can go after and capture that market, even at 'premium' prices.
They can make all the products they want, but the software that people want runs on an OS owned by someone else.
What software is there that's exclusively on ios or droid that you think "people want to run"? Reality is people don't care about that. ipad has its brand name cachet, and droid has the open community, but the average person? Doesn't REALLY care; and the business user? Could very well see a lot of advantages to windows tablets if microsoft puts out a competent product.
I assumed they'd just send an encrypted copy from the PotUS to the head of the UN via a secured line with the presumption that everyone in the NSA along with any contractors would read it as a matter of course...
Obviously anyone who didn't get the memo just isn't doing their job.
The Three Laws were EXPRESSLY invented to show why such a simple system will not work.
The three laws were expressly invented to make a system that works.
He then spent extensive amounts of time exploring them for unintended consequences and corner cases where they did not work.
It is frustrating people think '3 laws safe'.
Its FAR more frustrating that rather than trying to -fix- the edge cases Asimov uncovered with the 3 laws (later 4 laws), we've decided to just go full steam ahead without any laws at all with robots designed for the sole purpose of killing us.
As far as I've been able to tell, most espionage of a materiel type requires spying on companies, as it's those companies that are the true producers of materiel, not governments themselves.
True. And if you were investing a weapons manufacturer in Syria nobody would blink. But Belgium is an ally.
This is like breaking into your friends house without provocation, you know, just in case... uh... something... something... terrorism.
Of course he had to make a rape joke when talking about this, because he's that kind of loser, but it's not even correct. Anything that happened to him here was self-inflicted
So autoerotic reputasphyxiatated?
Normal was a cakewalk; almost a tutorial.
Right. I gathered that based on hardcore inferno taking about a month.
But even so "endgame content" is exactly same content you already beat only with bigger numbers.
After going through Hardcore Normal / Nightmare / Hell ... what is "Inferno" but just more of the same?
Does it really matter if you never finish that? Its not like you've been deprived of seeing the "whole game". Its not like playing a mmorpg and not being able to do the endgame raids. inferno isn't "endgame", its just same thing you did 3 times before but harder.
Like the original doom, I considered the game beaten after beating it on ultra-violence, and Serious Sam 3 beaten after beating it on "Serious". I never even tried playing on "Normal" in either title.
But the fact that Nightmare* unlocked, and is BRUTAL by comparison to Ultra Violence (fast+respawn), or that Mental unlocked and is brutal compared to Serious (enemies phase in and out of being visible)? So what? I haven't yet beat either game on either difficulty. I don't feel cheated or ripped off.
I would never approach a game and think I'm somehow 'entitled' to beat it on those levels. Its not like I'm missing out on actual "content". I'm sure I -could- if I put in a lot of effort, but I just don't care. I'll play something else that's more fun. I still play nightmare and mental to see how far i can get on one life... and that's about it. :) If someone gets off on pushing through those (or is that much better a player than I am... fine)
To be honest, I never beat diablo ii in hardcore hell (?) was that the top of d2? I don't recall. In any case I'd usually splatter around 85-95th level on some random superunique borderline invulnerable lightning-reflection asshole... or occasionally on a stage boss (duriel or diablo if i wasn't careful/unlucky, those 7 statues a few times...) would I have gone out and paid real money for better gear to take them on and increase my survivability? The 3rd party marketplaces certainly existed... but what on earth for? What would that have accomplished? Eventually I got bored (especially of maintaining mule accounts so I could hang onto perfects, runes, and extra gear) and moved onto other games.
I admit I haven't played D3 ... blizzards policies and actions the last few years have turned me off playing their output, but I'm still thinking that feeling compelled to play real money to get a leg up in the final extra-super-hard difficulty is a special kind of stupid.
* vs Rage, which has "Nightmare", but its a joke, and the DLC adds "Ultra Nightmare" (and its STILL a joke).
Do you really think that if they could do that to pretty much any American citizen that them being able to see that you forgot to declare a $5 ebay purchase for sales tax is going to make it possible when they otherwise couldn't?
Yes and no.
The mass surveillance on it's own really isn't that threatening. The secret courts, gag orders, and the elimination of full public due process is terrifying.
Its not about them being able to catch you doing some petty unremarkable crime. Its that they can ship you off to hell without having to catch you at all if they can tag your file with the right notes. And full mass surveillance makes that easy... a few out of context snips from your email and phone conversations, video clips of you walking home in an alley 'known to be a meeting place of suspected terrorists', video of you carrying a 'suspicious backpack"... a judge that rubber stamps anything that looks like its been vaguely filled out correctly... and off to hell you go. You don't get a lawyer, or a trial, and the absurdly thin evidence is never challenged in public view.
Intrusive government surveillance makes falsifying evidence a lot easier.
But let's say I connect from A to B over the normal (wired) internet.
Slow down cowboy. What is "A" and "B"?
They are IP addresses.
The packet goes through router X or router Y.
Correct.
Same with multipath: when wifi fails, use mobile network, and vice versa.
No, In the A-B scenario above there are 2 routes from A to B. Or to be more precise there are 2 routes from "IP Address A" to "IP Address B".
With multipath, A has 2 different IP addresses: A0 and A1. A router knows the routes it has available to send a packet down, but it has no idea that A0 and A1 are different interfaces on the same device, and that it can send packets addressed to A0 to A1.
Indeed, packets arriving on the A1 interface addressed to A0 would be ignored unless the interface was in promiscuous mode.
Only the kernel (it has to set up "virtual" routers for wifi and mobile).
That doesn't solve the problem that the two interfaces have different IP addresses, in completely disparate networks.
If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
To add to my previous post, I'm seeing that diablo 3 was beaten in 7 hours on normal on the same day it was released.
If you dont have ALL of these abilities on most of your gear, you simply cannot complete end-game content.
How did the first landslide of people make it through? I mean, I'm seeing that inferno/hardcore was beaten by June 20th, 2012 and then beaten regularly since then...in a game released mid May. Did they really all have a full sets of one in 15 billion drops? Of course not.
I'm skeptical that you need the best gear to win. To cake walk it, sure. To maximize your loot+gold per hour ratio absolutely... but by that point you've beaten the game soundly and there's no reason to play more.
The point of the game was to beat the game and get the good gear. If you buy the good gear, and then beat the game with it... like you said... what is the reward? Any player who does that is literally ripping themselves off.