I think most people speed up to get under a yellow light because they don't feel as if they have sufficient stopping distance to stop safely (e.g. without being rear-ended).
A lot of times its easier to just pay the fifty bucks (or whatever it may be) than to miss work and go to court over it. And if you should lose -- which I think is likely because the traffic courts are a joke -- you had to pay additional court costs.
So it's a catch 22. If you can afford the time off, and maybe some legal counsel, you're not worried about the $50 to pay the ticket. If they $50 is a big deal, you probably can't afford the time off work to go to court to defend youself. And if it's a monkey court, like most traffic courts are, the judge will rule against you no matter what, and you have to appeal at your expense.
If you were generating enough solar power, you could use all the excess generated during the day to produce hydrogen, which could then be used to produce power at night.
I think, as long as religion has been around, that we've heard all the theories that we're going to hear. Any new theories about "god" will likely come from science fiction. Though since the idea of a god is inherently religious, I don't think that science fiction will posit the existence of a god as a real belief, but more of a thought experiment.
I understand what you're saying, but at some point, a new hypothesis about god is just a rehashing of an old one. The argument for the FSM and Allah both make the same basic claims, so if you've decided one makes no sense, you can be sure that the other won't, either.
We wouldn't have electricity, water, or sewage out in "rural" areas if it weren't required by the government. There's just not enough profit there to offer the service to rural areas. Companies will NOT subsidize some customers at the expense of their own profit unless the government makes them.
So really, everyone in a county might pay the same rate for water, even though it costs 5x more to provide it to people in the rural areas. They might even be taking a loss to pipe water out there. But they're still, overall, making money, because it costs so much less to pipe water to the densely-populated areas.
Try telling all that to a judge, so that you can avoid your ticket. And realize you already took a day off work to go to court. It's just so much easier to let them fuck you out of the $50. I got a ticket from one of those cameras because I went through a light that had been red for 0.7 seconds, and you could clearly see from the video that the roads were very wet. I could have went and made your argument a to judge -- who probably would have fined me anyway. I just paid the fifty bucks. I'm still pissed off about that.
Agreed, but it's a fine you get that you really have no recourse except to pay; even if you're innocent (much like a tax). Most traffic courts are a joke, and the officer is always right. And if you look at what tickets are used for -- to generate revenue -- they look even more like a tax.
In my experience, most police officers are assholes. This is not by coincidence -- in many cases, you can't become an officer unless you are. I have a good friend who went through all the training at the academy, and was the top of his class. He didn't get to become an officer, though, and they cited something about his personality. In other words, he wasn't enough of an asshole.
School zones are pretty retarded, if you ask me. I've never passed one where I saw children out by the road. It seems like more of a convenience thing for parents, so they can get in and out more quickly.
If their A-GPS data is accurate for a phone, they could track you anywhere in the service area, and estimate your speed. Phones with a real GPS could do the same, and transmit the information to the carrier. With a closed phone, there's not much you could do to stop it.
I don't know. Once you start analyzing differences using scientific methods, you could try to empirically say one race was "superior" to another in some way.
Because of that slippery slope, I think a lot of people would argue that even suggesting that there might be a difference (beyond skin color) between races is racism.
I think everyone knows this. That's why we made laws against free-for-all immigration. I think your frustration should be with the people who did not enforce those laws, and let the situation get so out of hand.
Of course, you could flip the tables, and look at America's wealthy investor class, and say they're screwing the hard-working middle class in the same ways. At least the illegal immigrants work. Imagine if they didn't work, took money you earned, AND lived like kings. That pisses me off a lot more, to be honest.
Once you've loaded the game's data off the magnetic drive, I think a modern OS is going to try its best to keep that data first in RAM, then in your swap. Windows XP calls it prefetching, and Vista improves upon the technology, calling it SuperFetch. I'm sure there are similar technologies at use on linux and MacOS.
So even if you don't install the whole game on your fast drive, you should still see benefits from having a large swap on it.
If that wasn't good enough, you could install the game to a directory of your choosing on your magnetic drive, then use symbolic links pointing to the game's executables and resources of your choosing that you have copied to your fast drive. However, my experience with games would suggest that unless you moved ALL the resources, you're not helping yourself much. For example: if you move all the video resources, the sound resources will slow you down. In most games I've experienced, the performance of subsystems, such as audio, can affect the overall performance of the game. In some cases, disabling the audio gives a clear performance boost.
Having said all that, I think using an x64 platform with a game compiled for it, and ample RAM (4+ GB), will help more than anything. If you avoid the need to fetch things off the disk in the first place (beyond the initial load), you're much better off. Even SSD's are woefully slow compared to RAM. And with today's RAM prices, installing 4GB or even 8GB is not terribly expensive. The unfortunate thing is that on Windows, a 32-bit process can only use up to 2GB of RAM, even on a 64-bit version of the OS.
You seem to think IT isn't a business function. Maybe you're thinking of your IT helpdesk or something. Many companies, though, have a CIO. That should be an IT-minded business person. The further down the chain of command you go, the less business and more IT it becomes. But the truth is, I think an IT manager would probably know the operation of the business better than the business manager. Especially if he's gotten into any system analysis or worked with a developer for software you use.
I work for a small company, and without a doubt, I know the operations of our business way better than anyone else in the building. I may not know "the business" (medical physics, in our case) as well, but I know how THIS business operates. I wouldn't think to suggest how to deal with new clients, but you better believe when it comes to the "hows" of processes and managing information, I'm the king.
Really, if your business is Information of some sort, your IT staff may well know the business, in many ways, better than the business people.
I think it's important to understand that when WMP and IE "won" the wars, they were better than their competitors. IE6 was better than Netscape, and WMP was way better than RealPlayer.
The web as we know it today didn't exist back then. There was no youtube or bittorrent or web 2.0.
I guess they dosed the water with chemicals back when the Romans were the height of civilization and knowledge. And also, the Greeks. If anything, I think sexual liberation does just the opposite of what you suggest: opens minds to larger possibilities. Allows people to think outside the box. If nothing is off-limits, then there's nothing you won't think about. I see that as a very clear positive.
But if there is a supreme being, he's either left the place unattended, or he's an asshole. I prefer to believe there's not one. There may be beings that are more "spiritually enlightened" than us, but I wouldn't call them supreme. Besides, the power to create a universe, and have unlimited control over that universe, doesn't really make one "supreme" now does it?
I can make children, but it doesn't mean I'm competent or capable enough to care for them. I mean, whether or not there's a god isn't the question, and I don't think it ever has been. If there is one: big fucking deal. Nothing changes. Humanity has been debating it for centuries, and the god in question has never come down to clear up the issue, so we can only assume he doesn't care. So why do we always make such a fuss of this issue, if he obviously doesn't care either?
The clever way they did that in 3E was with a "spell component pouch". As long as you had it, you didn't need to micromanage what they were. And spells only listed components that were more expensive than what you'd find in your spell component pouch.
What I always did in my games was let players make some skill checks to see if they could harvest any useful "magical materials" off things they'd killed. I'd also let them specifically hunt doing certain things for magical materials to waive the costs for making a magic item. You want a flaming sword, you had to go get something off a red dragon, or a fire elemental, or fire giant, etc. You were free to buy it from the magic shoppe, but you could waive most of the cost by doing a little quest.
And I just ignored the XP costs. That's because I'd work it all out on the backend. If they made a shitload of magic items, their EL's go up, so they're getting less XP. I think it's more fun for the players that way, though. They are free to use their cool feats. They get more powerful. But they don't realize it's not really helping them "get ahead" any quicker. Everything in 3E is a moving target. Plus, then the entire party is paying the XP costs for all the cool items they're getting. So the wizard has no reason to refuse to make the fighter a magic sword. Honestly, I'd never spend my XP on making magic items for another character using the rules as written.
That's assuming a 9th level spells takes the same amount of time to prepare as a 1st level spell, with a minimum of fifteen minutes. I find that a little hard to swallow. If you factor in the levels, I think it does get into something that's a little too complicated for something that's so basic to the class. I also have to ask here: how long does it take to make a scroll? One day per each 1000 GP in the base price. But that's with no minimum. Does that mean you can crank out a 1st level spell with a caster level of 1 in 14.4 minutes? The rules are so vague here without assuming a lot.
As far as equipment goes, Wizards still need all that equipment, if not MORE because of Arcane Spell Failure. That's all in addition to the cost of making magic items. And sure, you can get all that XP back by killing a critter at your level, but that XP is split among the party. So every XP you spend on making a magic item is ultimately an XP that you are behind the rest of the party. I can add up to levels over the course of a campaign.
As for Baccob's Belessed Book. Definitely. But you don't get those from the start. And the first levels are where you'd need it most. As far as the fighter losing his favorite sword... I'm not so sure about that. I think the Wizard has it worse off. Do the cost on replacing a full spellbook. And realize the Wizard is totally useless in the meantime. A fighter can pick up a quarterstaff for free and still be moderately useful.
I'm just saying, of all the things I'd call gaping holes in 3E, spellbooks, spell preparation, and magic items are definitely on the list. They had a good start, but they should have dedicated at least a few detailed pages to the process. But not even Complete Arcana goes into more detail. It's a little depressing.
Another thing I had about "magic materials" is that it never explained what they were. Presumably, someone has to make them from materials that can be collected. If it gave us a little more, it would be easy for the party to naturally accumulate a stock of these from normal adventuring. Maybe with some Profession or Craft skills involved in some of it. Specially prepared inks? What kind of inks? Why couldn't the Wizard make those himself? The same for kobold eyes, dragon scales, lich blood, etc. Again, sure, it's up to the DM, but for someone that so integral to the class, I'd like to have seen more printed rules on it.
I really hope 4E addresses some of these issues. (That's may way of bringing it back on topic. heh.)
1) The book says you can do this, but NO WHERE does it actually detail the rules for it. Like how long it takes to prepare a single spell. I've tried before, to do the math on it taking "an hour" to prepare all your spells, and basing the numbers off that, but you end up with huge charts.
2)It's REALLY stupid to make magic items. Even scrolls. They not only cost XP which only the wizard pays, even though they benefit the ENTIRE parte, but they also cost a CRAZY amount of gold for "magical materials". And that's never explained or defined anywhere, either.
Sure, you can say it's all up to the DM, but that's always rule 0. Something that integral to the viability of a class should be clearly spelled out in the rules. And the Wizard is pretty much suck as much as the GP says, in my experience. Yes, I've thought about your suggestions, but they're just not very good ones, for the reasons I mentioned above.
I won't even get into the issue of being able to lose your spellbook, and the concept of "learning" a spell, even though you need special feats to prepare it without the spellbook.
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I think most people speed up to get under a yellow light because they don't feel as if they have sufficient stopping distance to stop safely (e.g. without being rear-ended).
A lot of times its easier to just pay the fifty bucks (or whatever it may be) than to miss work and go to court over it. And if you should lose -- which I think is likely because the traffic courts are a joke -- you had to pay additional court costs.
So it's a catch 22. If you can afford the time off, and maybe some legal counsel, you're not worried about the $50 to pay the ticket. If they $50 is a big deal, you probably can't afford the time off work to go to court to defend youself. And if it's a monkey court, like most traffic courts are, the judge will rule against you no matter what, and you have to appeal at your expense.
I slam on my brakes now every time the light turns yellow. I got an automated ticket for sliding under the yellow in the rain.
If you were generating enough solar power, you could use all the excess generated during the day to produce hydrogen, which could then be used to produce power at night.
I think, as long as religion has been around, that we've heard all the theories that we're going to hear. Any new theories about "god" will likely come from science fiction. Though since the idea of a god is inherently religious, I don't think that science fiction will posit the existence of a god as a real belief, but more of a thought experiment.
I understand what you're saying, but at some point, a new hypothesis about god is just a rehashing of an old one. The argument for the FSM and Allah both make the same basic claims, so if you've decided one makes no sense, you can be sure that the other won't, either.
We wouldn't have electricity, water, or sewage out in "rural" areas if it weren't required by the government. There's just not enough profit there to offer the service to rural areas. Companies will NOT subsidize some customers at the expense of their own profit unless the government makes them.
So really, everyone in a county might pay the same rate for water, even though it costs 5x more to provide it to people in the rural areas. They might even be taking a loss to pipe water out there. But they're still, overall, making money, because it costs so much less to pipe water to the densely-populated areas.
Try telling all that to a judge, so that you can avoid your ticket. And realize you already took a day off work to go to court. It's just so much easier to let them fuck you out of the $50. I got a ticket from one of those cameras because I went through a light that had been red for 0.7 seconds, and you could clearly see from the video that the roads were very wet. I could have went and made your argument a to judge -- who probably would have fined me anyway. I just paid the fifty bucks. I'm still pissed off about that.
Of course, the rich guy driving the BMW pretty much has that advantage in every aspect of life, not just on the roads.
Agreed, but it's a fine you get that you really have no recourse except to pay; even if you're innocent (much like a tax). Most traffic courts are a joke, and the officer is always right. And if you look at what tickets are used for -- to generate revenue -- they look even more like a tax.
In my experience, most police officers are assholes. This is not by coincidence -- in many cases, you can't become an officer unless you are. I have a good friend who went through all the training at the academy, and was the top of his class. He didn't get to become an officer, though, and they cited something about his personality. In other words, he wasn't enough of an asshole.
It really REALLY needs to be that way everywhere. I've been saying this forever, and I'm glad someone else agrees with me!
School zones are pretty retarded, if you ask me. I've never passed one where I saw children out by the road. It seems like more of a convenience thing for parents, so they can get in and out more quickly.
If their A-GPS data is accurate for a phone, they could track you anywhere in the service area, and estimate your speed. Phones with a real GPS could do the same, and transmit the information to the carrier. With a closed phone, there's not much you could do to stop it.
I don't know. Once you start analyzing differences using scientific methods, you could try to empirically say one race was "superior" to another in some way.
Because of that slippery slope, I think a lot of people would argue that even suggesting that there might be a difference (beyond skin color) between races is racism.
I think everyone knows this. That's why we made laws against free-for-all immigration. I think your frustration should be with the people who did not enforce those laws, and let the situation get so out of hand.
Of course, you could flip the tables, and look at America's wealthy investor class, and say they're screwing the hard-working middle class in the same ways. At least the illegal immigrants work. Imagine if they didn't work, took money you earned, AND lived like kings. That pisses me off a lot more, to be honest.
So did her viper. Right? Maybe it's a Cylon, too.
Once you've loaded the game's data off the magnetic drive, I think a modern OS is going to try its best to keep that data first in RAM, then in your swap. Windows XP calls it prefetching, and Vista improves upon the technology, calling it SuperFetch. I'm sure there are similar technologies at use on linux and MacOS.
So even if you don't install the whole game on your fast drive, you should still see benefits from having a large swap on it.
If that wasn't good enough, you could install the game to a directory of your choosing on your magnetic drive, then use symbolic links pointing to the game's executables and resources of your choosing that you have copied to your fast drive. However, my experience with games would suggest that unless you moved ALL the resources, you're not helping yourself much. For example: if you move all the video resources, the sound resources will slow you down. In most games I've experienced, the performance of subsystems, such as audio, can affect the overall performance of the game. In some cases, disabling the audio gives a clear performance boost.
Having said all that, I think using an x64 platform with a game compiled for it, and ample RAM (4+ GB), will help more than anything. If you avoid the need to fetch things off the disk in the first place (beyond the initial load), you're much better off. Even SSD's are woefully slow compared to RAM. And with today's RAM prices, installing 4GB or even 8GB is not terribly expensive. The unfortunate thing is that on Windows, a 32-bit process can only use up to 2GB of RAM, even on a 64-bit version of the OS.
All business needs IT somewhere.
You seem to think IT isn't a business function. Maybe you're thinking of your IT helpdesk or something. Many companies, though, have a CIO. That should be an IT-minded business person. The further down the chain of command you go, the less business and more IT it becomes. But the truth is, I think an IT manager would probably know the operation of the business better than the business manager. Especially if he's gotten into any system analysis or worked with a developer for software you use.
I work for a small company, and without a doubt, I know the operations of our business way better than anyone else in the building. I may not know "the business" (medical physics, in our case) as well, but I know how THIS business operates. I wouldn't think to suggest how to deal with new clients, but you better believe when it comes to the "hows" of processes and managing information, I'm the king.
Really, if your business is Information of some sort, your IT staff may well know the business, in many ways, better than the business people.
I think it's important to understand that when WMP and IE "won" the wars, they were better than their competitors. IE6 was better than Netscape, and WMP was way better than RealPlayer.
The web as we know it today didn't exist back then. There was no youtube or bittorrent or web 2.0.
I guess they dosed the water with chemicals back when the Romans were the height of civilization and knowledge. And also, the Greeks. If anything, I think sexual liberation does just the opposite of what you suggest: opens minds to larger possibilities. Allows people to think outside the box. If nothing is off-limits, then there's nothing you won't think about. I see that as a very clear positive.
But if there is a supreme being, he's either left the place unattended, or he's an asshole. I prefer to believe there's not one. There may be beings that are more "spiritually enlightened" than us, but I wouldn't call them supreme. Besides, the power to create a universe, and have unlimited control over that universe, doesn't really make one "supreme" now does it?
I can make children, but it doesn't mean I'm competent or capable enough to care for them. I mean, whether or not there's a god isn't the question, and I don't think it ever has been. If there is one: big fucking deal. Nothing changes. Humanity has been debating it for centuries, and the god in question has never come down to clear up the issue, so we can only assume he doesn't care. So why do we always make such a fuss of this issue, if he obviously doesn't care either?
The clever way they did that in 3E was with a "spell component pouch". As long as you had it, you didn't need to micromanage what they were. And spells only listed components that were more expensive than what you'd find in your spell component pouch.
What I always did in my games was let players make some skill checks to see if they could harvest any useful "magical materials" off things they'd killed. I'd also let them specifically hunt doing certain things for magical materials to waive the costs for making a magic item. You want a flaming sword, you had to go get something off a red dragon, or a fire elemental, or fire giant, etc. You were free to buy it from the magic shoppe, but you could waive most of the cost by doing a little quest.
And I just ignored the XP costs. That's because I'd work it all out on the backend. If they made a shitload of magic items, their EL's go up, so they're getting less XP. I think it's more fun for the players that way, though. They are free to use their cool feats. They get more powerful. But they don't realize it's not really helping them "get ahead" any quicker. Everything in 3E is a moving target. Plus, then the entire party is paying the XP costs for all the cool items they're getting. So the wizard has no reason to refuse to make the fighter a magic sword. Honestly, I'd never spend my XP on making magic items for another character using the rules as written.
That's assuming a 9th level spells takes the same amount of time to prepare as a 1st level spell, with a minimum of fifteen minutes. I find that a little hard to swallow. If you factor in the levels, I think it does get into something that's a little too complicated for something that's so basic to the class. I also have to ask here: how long does it take to make a scroll? One day per each 1000 GP in the base price. But that's with no minimum. Does that mean you can crank out a 1st level spell with a caster level of 1 in 14.4 minutes? The rules are so vague here without assuming a lot.
As far as equipment goes, Wizards still need all that equipment, if not MORE because of Arcane Spell Failure. That's all in addition to the cost of making magic items. And sure, you can get all that XP back by killing a critter at your level, but that XP is split among the party. So every XP you spend on making a magic item is ultimately an XP that you are behind the rest of the party. I can add up to levels over the course of a campaign.
As for Baccob's Belessed Book. Definitely. But you don't get those from the start. And the first levels are where you'd need it most. As far as the fighter losing his favorite sword... I'm not so sure about that. I think the Wizard has it worse off. Do the cost on replacing a full spellbook. And realize the Wizard is totally useless in the meantime. A fighter can pick up a quarterstaff for free and still be moderately useful.
I'm just saying, of all the things I'd call gaping holes in 3E, spellbooks, spell preparation, and magic items are definitely on the list. They had a good start, but they should have dedicated at least a few detailed pages to the process. But not even Complete Arcana goes into more detail. It's a little depressing.
Another thing I had about "magic materials" is that it never explained what they were. Presumably, someone has to make them from materials that can be collected. If it gave us a little more, it would be easy for the party to naturally accumulate a stock of these from normal adventuring. Maybe with some Profession or Craft skills involved in some of it. Specially prepared inks? What kind of inks? Why couldn't the Wizard make those himself? The same for kobold eyes, dragon scales, lich blood, etc. Again, sure, it's up to the DM, but for someone that so integral to the class, I'd like to have seen more printed rules on it.
I really hope 4E addresses some of these issues. (That's may way of bringing it back on topic. heh.)
1) The book says you can do this, but NO WHERE does it actually detail the rules for it. Like how long it takes to prepare a single spell. I've tried before, to do the math on it taking "an hour" to prepare all your spells, and basing the numbers off that, but you end up with huge charts.
2)It's REALLY stupid to make magic items. Even scrolls. They not only cost XP which only the wizard pays, even though they benefit the ENTIRE parte, but they also cost a CRAZY amount of gold for "magical materials". And that's never explained or defined anywhere, either.
Sure, you can say it's all up to the DM, but that's always rule 0. Something that integral to the viability of a class should be clearly spelled out in the rules. And the Wizard is pretty much suck as much as the GP says, in my experience. Yes, I've thought about your suggestions, but they're just not very good ones, for the reasons I mentioned above.
I won't even get into the issue of being able to lose your spellbook, and the concept of "learning" a spell, even though you need special feats to prepare it without the spellbook.