"Somehow I think this "evolution" started well before someone thought to take a truck and bolt a "trunk" on it."
Actually SUV's are Minivans with Trunks. Trucks by design have a seperate cab from the bed and that resulted in too many complications when trying to design SUVs. So the solution was to take a minivan and convert it by giving the front of it a "truck look" to make it appeal to men.
Basically the SUV was designed for people who have lots of kids but are too insecure to buy the minivan to accomodate them.
In the event that you actually manage to send enough units to beat your opponent in the past and the time wave moves forward and wipes out your opponent in the present you are still stuck with one problem.
What if the other player has started reversing time when they notice they are losing and is now back to the beggining creating his first unit again when you wipe out his base in the future?
"Hey I won!" - "No, you didn't, I'm just starting." "Well you're dead in the future." - "The future is not written. I'm just starting." "This is Bullshyt, man!" - "Pardon? Why dont you create a unit and stop typing because i'm about to zerg rush you." "aaaaahhhh!"
"Why don't we ask him to write about homework ("a near-epidemic in America")"
Probably because he's not an American?
He over generalizes throughout the entire report and failed to backup any point with real study statistics. This entire report is basically one kid's opinion of how his friends prioritize their extremely limited expenses. Why on earth this generated so much attention is beyond me.
The worst part? He's now in a position to leverage this momentary popularity to continue spouting his BS as fact.
Blizzard used to make games because they were fun to play?
Given that Blizzard has basically dominated the market why do they continue to stray from their roots... Remember KALI? Warcraft 2 owed ALL of its success to KALI and that would have never existed if LAN play wasn't an option. But battle.net takes in HUGE profits all by itself so I guess its better to force players to use it then make it optional. Control is the name of the game these days. Oh yah.. I forgot, DRM and other Piracy measures work sooooo well don't they?
It is not a search engine but rather a factual answer database. It is quite impressive actually and I look forward to it's release as it will provide an awesome new resource for everyone. Especially students!
Google - search for websites.
Wolfram - search for answers.
"There was a great deal of discussion about Wrath of the Lich King at Blizzcon"
Translation - How can we prevent the loss of players moving to Warhammer for serious pvp?
"Players will be able to swap between two specs in order to facilitate their participation in both PvE and PvP."
Translation - For the first time since release players will be able to enjoy the game and have decent gear! OMG!
"Blizzard wants to diversify the options for PvP and take the focus off arenas. They also want to develop more and more PvP content and create some sort of mechanism for players to gain experience in battlegrounds."
Translation - Ok guys... everyone who used to enjoy PvP is going to warhammer, quick, steal their ideas!
"They said they wanted to help the shortage of tanks by creating another class that could fill the role."
Translation - After 4 years of every class who tanks asking for a viable method of actually tanking we've decided to offer them the option to reroll. LOL
"Another major goal was to get each talent tree for each class a specific playstyle"
Translation - We hope that this time around we'll give all classes 3 actual trees instead of just our favorites.
"Blizzard considered revamping the dispel system too -- they aren't satisfied with the current implementation -- but said they didn't want to introduce another huge set of changes at this time."
Translation - There were talks here at blizzard of allowing certain classes to use more then one button in raids and still win. Sadly, that was shot down because we don't want everyone having fun.
"In addition, they talked about their decision to unify several itemization stats in order to make it easier on some classes to switch roles, and to reduce the number of items required to support all possible specs."
Translation - THIS JUST IN! Hybrids are going to finally have a functional inventory!
"As you may recall, we asked you for interview questions for various Blizzard employees; stay tuned, their answers will be up soon."
Translation - You are cordially invited to watch us stroke our Massive E-Peen.
"she sometimes looks back and wonders where the last 5 years went, tries to stop for a couple of days then back to raiding - she plays 18-20 hours a day, never leaves the house, or even the desk for that matter."
I'm not about to judge you or your wife sir, but I would like to point out that this could become quite a serious problem. You discuss this information, which is borderline shocking even if you are exagerating, as if it just a matter of fact, like you don't really care. That is scary! What is it that you do with all this spare time you have while your wife is a vegetable in front of a screen?
If you were married to someone who watched TV 20 hours a day would you put up with it for 5 years or do you feel this is O.K. because she's being social with internet friends?
Again, i'm not trying to judge you, I just read something like this and wonder what is going on in your head. How can you say there are no actions for you to take? There are always actions and options if you love your wife and want to help her move on.
I would recommend you ask a few of your friends who don't play video games what they think of your wife's lifestyle. I would argue even professional atheletes don't spend as much of their life practicing their sport.
Maybe if they stopped dumping all my money (and every other tax payer) into attacking website owners in foreign countries and focused on getting our economy out of the shithole its in right now I'd have some respect for them. I honestly think over the years the US has become the most pathetic country on the planet. Gotta give props to the top 1% of the public officials and business owners though... they've mastered stepping on the entire planet for their personal gain.
I wonder if there was a time when the government in this country gave a flying shit about the people it was created to serve or if it always about racketeering?
I agree with this. I pretty much purchase my music exclusively from Itunes ever since I bought my Ipod a year or two ago. I believe in purchasing music worth listening to in the hopes that it will encourage the artist to make more music. On the other hand, reaching a level of frustration that I cannot express over the built-in limitations to Itunes format has brought me to the edge.
I am not saying I'm about to start pirating all my music tomorrow, just yet. However, I would rather they (the music industry) celebrate me for purchasing music when its so easy to steal it rather than going out of their way to punish me with trivial limiations.
Do the media giants honestly believe making I-tunes a pain in the ass helps them?
And it is fought because there's a "HOW DARE YOU MAKE MONEY ON ---MY--- GAME!?!" mentality. I would point out that your argument might be a little off. I'd say most of the cheaters are the people who reap the rewards from those who are out for profit. I'd be for every one farmer there's about 50 players waiting to buy their gold. Who are the real cheats? The one guy out for profit or the 50 players waiting to pay him for his time?
I think MMORPGs are similar to a rat on a wheel in nature. The idea is the keep the rat running as long as possible. MMORPG's are totally different breed. Unlike other games the developers arn't trying to pack as much fun into a game as possible and move onto a new game. All they really want is to keep everyone paying their monthly fee as long as possible. Grinding is the easiest way to ensure a player spends the maximum amount of time possible doing a task that requires the least amount of development money.
Creating new content is expensive and reduces profits. Forcing players to re-engage the same, already developed content over and over again is purely profitable.
I'd bet the formula goes something like this:
Game model = (Smallest amount of code + Smallest amount art) / Maximum player time investment
No where in there is fun even a factor. These games stopped being about fun the moment the developers realized they could charge a monthly fee. Its a service now. My advice, don't ever play a game with a monthly fee, period. It is almost like taking on a second job only... you pay the employer for the right to work there. It's bogus.
Yes, I'm a former WoW player and I will never play another MMORPG for these reasons.
I'm not going to tell you people that he isn't an asshole. Nor am I going to tell you that he doesn't pray on the weak minded and bend the laws to serve his disturbed needs.
All i'm going to do is play devils advocate and point out that he found a niche part of law practice that most people ignore. Gaming is in many eyes similar to the anti-christ and Jack is no fool about using that opinion. I'd be willing to bet the man has made millions without actually trying a single case that is going to actually benefit anyone. That's basically a lawyer's wet dream isn't it?
Here's my take on this, I call my opinion natural selection.
Any idiot who plays a game so long he dies deserves his fucking fate.
What kind of person could really be that stupid? There had to be some sort of brain malfunction with this man. The world is better with people like this removing themselves from the gene pool by their own hand.
This is basically no different then a drug overdose in my mind. Except that drugs prevent you from utilizing your conscious mind to make intelligent decisions and games do not. If anything, this is far worse than a drug overdose for just that reason.
Maybe he was trying to reach nirvana or something, in which case I wish him well in his ascension to the sublime plane of existence that so many have died trying to reach.
"If we'd taken the half a trillion dollars we squandered in Iraq we would be well on our way to Mars, or to developing clean renewable energy sources. Unfortunately we are a deeply flawed species, and the intellectual gift we've been given is usually misguided and misdirected, especially when we elevate people to be our leaders who seem to have little or no intellect at all."
While I agree that the money we squandered in Iraq and just about every military dollar that isn't spent on homeland defense is wasted, I dont think we'd have choosen a more productive location for those funds either. Clearly you agree with that by your comments on our misguided and misdirected 'intellectual gift'. To think that we would have addressed all the problems with populating or teraforming mars, even just as a facility to mine resources, just by throwing money at it seems a little idealistic to me. There are still lots of resources on this planet that are awful lot more efficient to gather than space transported ones.
Why exactly do we elevate our leaders who are little more than rich kids who grew up and learned the fine art of BS and gaining popularity? My guess is that the system was founded by men like this, it was propagated by men like this and we are too young of a species to overcome our nature and instincts with rational thought. Altruism adopted on a global scale is quite aways away. But I honestly believe if we can just keep from wiping ourselves out we will get there. Globalization and the rise of third world countries to industrial status as well as the ever growing mixing of populations will slowly but surely unite the world. Eventually, might be 100 years might be a few thousand, but eventually the barriers between us will fall.
Luckily, technology, mostly created to serve corrupt and harmful purposes (such as the internet) will have public runoff that benefits the rest of us. Clearly the best thing to come from the last 100 years is the massive communication bridge that we've built across the majority of the planet. We've come further in the last 100 years in the ways of global communication than all of the last 10,000 years combined. That's a pretty damn positive thing if you ask me, and it's all I need to put faith in the hope that we'll eventually start to use our gifts for good.
Like I said, we just need to avoid that little problem of self annihilation. The only really depressing thing is that our technology growth is outpacing our development of the wisdom to use it by an alarming rate.
Devils advocate more than glass half empty I'd say. And not to point out the obvious, but your thoughts on the destruction of mankind by our own hand being imminent is hardly a glass half full concept. Your posts have been increasingly positive in the past few months though. Found someone special perhaps?
Anyways, back on topic. Yah you have some good points about the technology and what not. I think the last time I caught one of those discovery shows on mars teraforming they said it would take about 500 years before it could thrive. I wonder how much money a project like that would require. I also wonder why/how we could invest that kind of money when we're struggling so much to keep from teraforming our own planet in a negative fashion. Maybe because the only people on mars would be there to help the place become another earth. And Earthlings are rather bent on destroying this planet and those with that mind outnumber the ones who want to help it.
I just hope they dont establish the Mars economy as free market. That would be bad. Who would be the first named rock reseller I wonder?
And what about the fact that Biodomes have routinely failed as humans have tried over and over again to create totally internal sustained environments. Things always go wrong and the failures tend to be fatal outside of the simulation. There may have been a sucessful biodome creation in the past few years, I haven't really seen much about it. But at last check the chance of failure was drastically high. And this using earth as the external environment in which the domes had to function. We cannot predict what mars atmosphere will provide or hamper as far as a dome's functions are concerned.
Also, how do you prevent insanity when you are forced to live with less than a hundred people for your entire life in a confined space? Human mentality breaks down, all it takes is one person to start losing it and it will have ripple affect on the others in such a confined space. Martial law would also be in effect in such a situation. They'd have to govern themselves entirely. We know justice and jugement was swift and hard in frontier towns. Exile was the best way of dealing with them back then. But on mars you cant do that obviously.
demachina,
I just wanted to let you know that I have had you on my bookmark list for several months. I really enjoy reading your posts as much as I enjoy the slashdot website in general.
For those of you who dont have it: http://slashdot.org/~demachina/
I highly recommend reading all his stuff. I must say I really enjoyed your post on "Lack of Ethics" more than anything else you've written.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=202852&cid=165 98790
"So the bottomline is there is are a host of reasons why government in developed countries engage in social engineering favoring the married with children occurs and is unlikely to ever stop. Religious bias among politicians also compels them to promote the Adam and Eve family."
I mean this line alone I've quote in many many conversations and it always makes for a fun topic.
Anyways, just wanted to say thanks and I hope you keep posting.
-G
Slashdot Mirror
Now they can't throw stones in the space station!
"Somehow I think this "evolution" started well before someone thought to take a truck and bolt a "trunk" on it."
Actually SUV's are Minivans with Trunks. Trucks by design have a seperate cab from the bed and that resulted in too many complications when trying to design SUVs. So the solution was to take a minivan and convert it by giving the front of it a "truck look" to make it appeal to men.
Basically the SUV was designed for people who have lots of kids but are too insecure to buy the minivan to accomodate them.
In the event that you actually manage to send enough units to beat your opponent in the past and the time wave moves forward and wipes out your opponent in the present you are still stuck with one problem.
What if the other player has started reversing time when they notice they are losing and is now back to the beggining creating his first unit again when you wipe out his base in the future?
"Hey I won!"
- "No, you didn't, I'm just starting."
"Well you're dead in the future."
- "The future is not written. I'm just starting."
"This is Bullshyt, man!"
- "Pardon? Why dont you create a unit and stop typing because i'm about to zerg rush you."
"aaaaahhhh!"
Apple: Look, you're suffocating me, we need to take a break.
Google: What's wrong baby? We were doing so well together!
Apple: I TOLD YOU! I JUST NEED SOME SPACE! YOUR APPS ARE ALL OVER MY ROOM!
Google: Fine... Don't come crying to me when your MAPS stop working!
"Why don't we ask him to write about homework ("a near-epidemic in America")"
Probably because he's not an American?
He over generalizes throughout the entire report and failed to backup any point with real study statistics. This entire report is basically one kid's opinion of how his friends prioritize their extremely limited expenses. Why on earth this generated so much attention is beyond me.
The worst part? He's now in a position to leverage this momentary popularity to continue spouting his BS as fact.
Blizzard used to make games because they were fun to play? Given that Blizzard has basically dominated the market why do they continue to stray from their roots... Remember KALI? Warcraft 2 owed ALL of its success to KALI and that would have never existed if LAN play wasn't an option. But battle.net takes in HUGE profits all by itself so I guess its better to force players to use it then make it optional. Control is the name of the game these days. Oh yah.. I forgot, DRM and other Piracy measures work sooooo well don't they?
It is not a search engine but rather a factual answer database. It is quite impressive actually and I look forward to it's release as it will provide an awesome new resource for everyone. Especially students! Google - search for websites. Wolfram - search for answers.
"There was a great deal of discussion about Wrath of the Lich King at Blizzcon"
Translation - How can we prevent the loss of players moving to Warhammer for serious pvp?
"Players will be able to swap between two specs in order to facilitate their participation in both PvE and PvP."
Translation - For the first time since release players will be able to enjoy the game and have decent gear! OMG!
"Blizzard wants to diversify the options for PvP and take the focus off arenas. They also want to develop more and more PvP content and create some sort of mechanism for players to gain experience in battlegrounds."
Translation - Ok guys... everyone who used to enjoy PvP is going to warhammer, quick, steal their ideas!
"They said they wanted to help the shortage of tanks by creating another class that could fill the role."
Translation - After 4 years of every class who tanks asking for a viable method of actually tanking we've decided to offer them the option to reroll. LOL
"Another major goal was to get each talent tree for each class a specific playstyle"
Translation - We hope that this time around we'll give all classes 3 actual trees instead of just our favorites.
"Blizzard considered revamping the dispel system too -- they aren't satisfied with the current implementation -- but said they didn't want to introduce another huge set of changes at this time."
Translation - There were talks here at blizzard of allowing certain classes to use more then one button in raids and still win. Sadly, that was shot down because we don't want everyone having fun.
"In addition, they talked about their decision to unify several itemization stats in order to make it easier on some classes to switch roles, and to reduce the number of items required to support all possible specs."
Translation - THIS JUST IN! Hybrids are going to finally have a functional inventory!
"As you may recall, we asked you for interview questions for various Blizzard employees; stay tuned, their answers will be up soon."
Translation - You are cordially invited to watch us stroke our Massive E-Peen.
All your Domain are belong to us!
This is nothing new... watch your intellectual property or lose it to someone who is.
"she sometimes looks back and wonders where the last 5 years went, tries to stop for a couple of days then back to raiding - she plays 18-20 hours a day, never leaves the house, or even the desk for that matter."
I'm not about to judge you or your wife sir, but I would like to point out that this could become quite a serious problem. You discuss this information, which is borderline shocking even if you are exagerating, as if it just a matter of fact, like you don't really care. That is scary! What is it that you do with all this spare time you have while your wife is a vegetable in front of a screen?
If you were married to someone who watched TV 20 hours a day would you put up with it for 5 years or do you feel this is O.K. because she's being social with internet friends?
Again, i'm not trying to judge you, I just read something like this and wonder what is going on in your head. How can you say there are no actions for you to take? There are always actions and options if you love your wife and want to help her move on.
I would recommend you ask a few of your friends who don't play video games what they think of your wife's lifestyle. I would argue even professional atheletes don't spend as much of their life practicing their sport.
Just a thought.
Maybe if they stopped dumping all my money (and every other tax payer) into attacking website owners in foreign countries and focused on getting our economy out of the shithole its in right now I'd have some respect for them. I honestly think over the years the US has become the most pathetic country on the planet. Gotta give props to the top 1% of the public officials and business owners though... they've mastered stepping on the entire planet for their personal gain.
I wonder if there was a time when the government in this country gave a flying shit about the people it was created to serve or if it always about racketeering?
I agree with this. I pretty much purchase my music exclusively from Itunes ever since I bought my Ipod a year or two ago. I believe in purchasing music worth listening to in the hopes that it will encourage the artist to make more music. On the other hand, reaching a level of frustration that I cannot express over the built-in limitations to Itunes format has brought me to the edge.
I am not saying I'm about to start pirating all my music tomorrow, just yet. However, I would rather they (the music industry) celebrate me for purchasing music when its so easy to steal it rather than going out of their way to punish me with trivial limiations.
Do the media giants honestly believe making I-tunes a pain in the ass helps them?
And it is fought because there's a "HOW DARE YOU MAKE MONEY ON ---MY--- GAME!?!" mentality. I would point out that your argument might be a little off. I'd say most of the cheaters are the people who reap the rewards from those who are out for profit. I'd be for every one farmer there's about 50 players waiting to buy their gold. Who are the real cheats? The one guy out for profit or the 50 players waiting to pay him for his time?
I think MMORPGs are similar to a rat on a wheel in nature. The idea is the keep the rat running as long as possible. MMORPG's are totally different breed. Unlike other games the developers arn't trying to pack as much fun into a game as possible and move onto a new game. All they really want is to keep everyone paying their monthly fee as long as possible. Grinding is the easiest way to ensure a player spends the maximum amount of time possible doing a task that requires the least amount of development money.
Creating new content is expensive and reduces profits. Forcing players to re-engage the same, already developed content over and over again is purely profitable.
I'd bet the formula goes something like this:
Game model = (Smallest amount of code + Smallest amount art) / Maximum player time investment
No where in there is fun even a factor. These games stopped being about fun the moment the developers realized they could charge a monthly fee. Its a service now. My advice, don't ever play a game with a monthly fee, period. It is almost like taking on a second job only... you pay the employer for the right to work there. It's bogus.
Yes, I'm a former WoW player and I will never play another MMORPG for these reasons.
I'm not going to tell you people that he isn't an asshole. Nor am I going to tell you that he doesn't pray on the weak minded and bend the laws to serve his disturbed needs. All i'm going to do is play devils advocate and point out that he found a niche part of law practice that most people ignore. Gaming is in many eyes similar to the anti-christ and Jack is no fool about using that opinion. I'd be willing to bet the man has made millions without actually trying a single case that is going to actually benefit anyone. That's basically a lawyer's wet dream isn't it?
Here's my take on this, I call my opinion natural selection.
Any idiot who plays a game so long he dies deserves his fucking fate.
What kind of person could really be that stupid? There had to be some sort of brain malfunction with this man. The world is better with people like this removing themselves from the gene pool by their own hand.
This is basically no different then a drug overdose in my mind. Except that drugs prevent you from utilizing your conscious mind to make intelligent decisions and games do not. If anything, this is far worse than a drug overdose for just that reason.
Maybe he was trying to reach nirvana or something, in which case I wish him well in his ascension to the sublime plane of existence that so many have died trying to reach.
"If we'd taken the half a trillion dollars we squandered in Iraq we would be well on our way to Mars, or to developing clean renewable energy sources. Unfortunately we are a deeply flawed species, and the intellectual gift we've been given is usually misguided and misdirected, especially when we elevate people to be our leaders who seem to have little or no intellect at all." While I agree that the money we squandered in Iraq and just about every military dollar that isn't spent on homeland defense is wasted, I dont think we'd have choosen a more productive location for those funds either. Clearly you agree with that by your comments on our misguided and misdirected 'intellectual gift'. To think that we would have addressed all the problems with populating or teraforming mars, even just as a facility to mine resources, just by throwing money at it seems a little idealistic to me. There are still lots of resources on this planet that are awful lot more efficient to gather than space transported ones. Why exactly do we elevate our leaders who are little more than rich kids who grew up and learned the fine art of BS and gaining popularity? My guess is that the system was founded by men like this, it was propagated by men like this and we are too young of a species to overcome our nature and instincts with rational thought. Altruism adopted on a global scale is quite aways away. But I honestly believe if we can just keep from wiping ourselves out we will get there. Globalization and the rise of third world countries to industrial status as well as the ever growing mixing of populations will slowly but surely unite the world. Eventually, might be 100 years might be a few thousand, but eventually the barriers between us will fall. Luckily, technology, mostly created to serve corrupt and harmful purposes (such as the internet) will have public runoff that benefits the rest of us. Clearly the best thing to come from the last 100 years is the massive communication bridge that we've built across the majority of the planet. We've come further in the last 100 years in the ways of global communication than all of the last 10,000 years combined. That's a pretty damn positive thing if you ask me, and it's all I need to put faith in the hope that we'll eventually start to use our gifts for good. Like I said, we just need to avoid that little problem of self annihilation. The only really depressing thing is that our technology growth is outpacing our development of the wisdom to use it by an alarming rate.
Devils advocate more than glass half empty I'd say. And not to point out the obvious, but your thoughts on the destruction of mankind by our own hand being imminent is hardly a glass half full concept. Your posts have been increasingly positive in the past few months though. Found someone special perhaps? Anyways, back on topic. Yah you have some good points about the technology and what not. I think the last time I caught one of those discovery shows on mars teraforming they said it would take about 500 years before it could thrive. I wonder how much money a project like that would require. I also wonder why/how we could invest that kind of money when we're struggling so much to keep from teraforming our own planet in a negative fashion. Maybe because the only people on mars would be there to help the place become another earth. And Earthlings are rather bent on destroying this planet and those with that mind outnumber the ones who want to help it. I just hope they dont establish the Mars economy as free market. That would be bad. Who would be the first named rock reseller I wonder?
And what about the fact that Biodomes have routinely failed as humans have tried over and over again to create totally internal sustained environments. Things always go wrong and the failures tend to be fatal outside of the simulation. There may have been a sucessful biodome creation in the past few years, I haven't really seen much about it. But at last check the chance of failure was drastically high. And this using earth as the external environment in which the domes had to function. We cannot predict what mars atmosphere will provide or hamper as far as a dome's functions are concerned. Also, how do you prevent insanity when you are forced to live with less than a hundred people for your entire life in a confined space? Human mentality breaks down, all it takes is one person to start losing it and it will have ripple affect on the others in such a confined space. Martial law would also be in effect in such a situation. They'd have to govern themselves entirely. We know justice and jugement was swift and hard in frontier towns. Exile was the best way of dealing with them back then. But on mars you cant do that obviously.
demachina, I just wanted to let you know that I have had you on my bookmark list for several months. I really enjoy reading your posts as much as I enjoy the slashdot website in general. For those of you who dont have it: http://slashdot.org/~demachina/ I highly recommend reading all his stuff. I must say I really enjoyed your post on "Lack of Ethics" more than anything else you've written. http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=202852&cid=165 98790
"So the bottomline is there is are a host of reasons why government in developed countries engage in social engineering favoring the married with children occurs and is unlikely to ever stop. Religious bias among politicians also compels them to promote the Adam and Eve family."
I mean this line alone I've quote in many many conversations and it always makes for a fun topic.
Anyways, just wanted to say thanks and I hope you keep posting.
-G