I think you hit at the problem exactly with the cycle of thinking on rates vs fines.
In the end, its just an extension of the failed attempts to control a problem of social attitudes and infrastructure investment, with the wrong tool for the job.
If there are so many cars, there should be places to park them. The answer is really to look into how you get people using other transportation OR provide ample parking. Seriously, its a failure to plan upfront. An understandable one but... that is what is really being addressed here. No amount of tweaking the system of fines and penalties is going to magically fix the parking issues.
Honestly the pace of that didn't bother me as much as the total linearity of the story. I don't mind a 10 hour intro.... if its an 80 hour game that is going to provide more ability to explore. There is no exploration in 13. I stopped shortly after I started thumbing through the strategy guide and saw that the majority of the maps had no branches at all... and none were towns.
It wasn't an RPG as much as a complicated, faux-real time, action-adventure.
I have been playing the FF series since I had to come back and kick Garland's ass all over again. It has always been about the exploring, finding the key to open the chest off on the beaten path, or searching for some cave with a quest item, or farming ogres to buy more magic instruction for your mages so they can contribute in battle.
FF 13 was just about running from battle to battle, with some dialogue tossed in between to tell a story.
I pretty much agree though, I have to say, 13 had potential. I payed it for...actually about 13 hours before I gave up "waiting for the tutorial to end". I am used to FF being pretty linear for the first 10 hours or so...but...when I realized there would be no opening up of the world, no towns....
I liked the battle system, I would have rocked a game based on it...but...not a gratuitous battle system game.
Actually I am only half kidding! I was interested in this myself recently and found that there is a Yale proff teaching game theory that puts his lectures on youtube. I sat through two lectures on Nash Equilibrium a few months back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oASpaBdDMs
Course it couldn't hurt to get a text book, but, it would be trivial to lookup the required books for these or other similar classes, and go buy them at any college book store. Just walk right in and buy them, or find them online.
Is it the best way? Dunno.... but its a resource that you can use.
You know.... after I hit submit I was thinking the same thing...
I am especially looking forward to new forms of "extreme gaming" that will come out of illicit environment. I always thought a game like counterstrike, but where every player's machine was rigged to hit him with a stun gun when he died in game. I imagine that it would quickly change the dynamic of the game and make it quite intense.
I can't wait...bring on the bans and the party vans!
So the Food and Drug Administration is now taking its cues from the laughably named "Defense Department" ("Team America World Police" has been a more appropriate name for, at least the lifetime of my parents...) and branching out. Good for them I guess.
It does however make me wonder whether I will be able to play these games without a prescription? Will I be labeled a "recreational player"? Perhaps I should refer to roaming the New Vegas Wasteland as "self medicating"? Will gangs kill each other over the ever escalating prices of black market games? A rash of wild illegal "lan parties" where addicts setup illicit temporary networks.
Eventually they will setup game courts and monitor people to make them kick their habit, which will actually result in a black market for secondary computers that can be hidden inside normal looking furniture.
And no matter how many times you mistake accuracy and precision, you are still wrong. The whole story here is the precision, since they don't know how accurate it is yet, thats why someone else with different instruments needs to try doing it.
Ok so.... quick one...
Accuracy vs Precision.
Accuracy - closeness to defined standard Precision - closeness of repeated results.
So.... if I throw 100 darts at the bulls-eye of a target....
Precision is the size of my cluster, Accuracy is how close the center of my cluster is the bulls-eye.
If my cluster is tight around the bulls-eye, I am accurate and precise. So if my darts are all over the target, but center around the middle, I am accurate, but, not precise. If my cluster is tight...and 4 feet off to one side of the target on the wall... I am precise but not accurate.
So all the measurements with a broken ruler are still precise, if the ruler gives consistent measurements. However, they are not accurate, unless they match other rulers.
Japan actually attacked us AND had a military to back it up.
These guys managed to get a few people to kill themselves attacking us. Their first line attackers died the very day they attacked and...in an entire decade, they have mustered jack shit beyond that. They were never a real threat. Japan was at least a threat beyond the ability to commit a large and tragic crime.
Your analogy doesn't hold. WWII was at least arguably legitimate defense. These current conflicts are basically excuses to bolster the profits of the private contractors in the military industrial complex at BEST. They have nothing to do with real defense from an enemy with a real ability to mount a real threat.
Anybody can blow something up, or take down a building.... there is a huge difference between a threat, and someone who can produce a tragedy... every once in a great while.
OH I get that, its just, I have no faith in any system that isn't well protected from it's association with a physical location in terms of being beyond the reach of major national governments, and particularly that of the Team America Police Force (fuck yeah!). If they want to get to your registrar bad enough, they will find a way. Best to trust a registrar that can't be bought and doesn't exist in only one place.
I, personally, favor abandoning traditional DNS in favor of alternatives like the.onion or, when they become operational, decentralized models like bitdns (not sure if that ever went anywhere) idea.
Without such things, the idea of a TLD that is beyond US thugs ability to take down is non-sequitor. Of course they can be taken down, it just requires the right pressure, and they have no scruples about turning the screws...especially if they can farm it out to someone else to do the actual screw turning.
> Like when we recently got Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the #2 man in Al Qaeda, an organization sworn to our destruction and constantly threatening us.
Oooh he threatened us....yes we should be so scared shitless that we give up on our entire model of apprehending people and putting them on a fair trial for their well defined crimes, and just kill him for "threatening"
Nope.... not a fan at all. Frankly, I don't even think the legal system presents a high enough standard to be allowed to kill. Never mind extrajudicial murder programs
Well I would actually hope that they just stop going around killing people with UAV that are not even threatening our "homeland". I would hope it does not stay that way, simply because this "Team America World Police" BS line has gotten old. We need to stop adventuring in other people's homes, and stop praising the people who take a paycheck to do it.
In the mean time though, I will settle for them still using humans to make the decisions and do the killing.
No Andre. or am I missing the joke? Andre Pellbone out of Chicago. One of the best con men I have ever dealt with...when he left man.... I felt like I got screwed by a professional. I was actually more in awe than pissed. He even managed to run up an $800 phone call on my landline before he skipped town. It was..... impressive.
Actually.... I would think that what you do is make a decision based on the current situation.
Yes, maybe...even probably you CAN sue (hell, you can always file a suit right, even if you don't have jack shit). However, that doesn't mean that its your best move, or even a smart one.
Take the ex-roomate who screwed me out of rent and bills. I had options, a lawyer advised me i could sue him outright, or I could call each incident a separate incident, and keep it in small claims court to do myself on the cheap. Either way, I was likely to win judgements for much of it, if not all.
That said.... the guy was a con artist, had little to nothing in his own name, and skipped town. Winning would have been purely symbolic if he had nothing that the courts could make him give up.... in the end, it may have cost me more...with no ultimate benefit.
So depending on whether it is worth sueing, maybe you do decide to "go with what we have"....if doing so is worth more than winning the lawsuit. Likely it is here. A lawsuit might recoup some, might lose a little.
So you can take door number one with a chance of recouping some of your money with a possibility of just losing more in the end.... or... take door number two, where you expect to likely make a tidy profit, possibly the same profit that you planned in the begining.
I don't think the point was "The US Sucks", though, I do tend to think warmongers suck and we haven't been in a necessary war in...well... mine nor say... may parents lifetime (they were born just after WWII). In fact, my Grandfather was in Korea... a useless war that we should never have been involved in...yet... are still there... defending a country with state imposed censorship.... so glad we are keeping them "free".
I would say.... we need this like we need any military beyond 50, well run, state militias....not at all.
But...beyond that... the point is... when you send machines to kill, they will kill indiscriminately. I kind of like that the people doing the killing may have a moral compass, and might have to wrestle with the question of "DO I follow this order, or do I live the rest of my life knowing I am not a monster". No machine has yet developed a conscience.
Then perhaps you would like to point out where I am factually wrong, and what the correct facts are?
So are you stating that the Cartels would exist, and be as powerful in the absence of the war on drug users and their families which created the black market?
Are you, furthermore, stating that the current rounds of violence did NOT start with the Mexican "government" thugs attempting to crack down on the cartels (which you seem to believe that they did not create via inexcusable policy)?
Because, for someone claiming that I have it wrong, you managed to not even attempt to address a single one of those points. Yes, the cartels are bad... but they don't exist in a vacuum. They were created by the "hard work" of these two governments cooperating on their treasonous wars against their own people's. That is my thesis, and I see no evidence which even attempts to convince me to abandon it.
Actually.... they are attacking the EVIL guys. The ones who perpetuated the drug war, the ones who created the cartels by creating the most lucrative black market in the history of mankind. Then, after adopting this evil policy, which I have to call evil since it means threatening people with violence and jail time who are not violent and commit no offense that has any victim, the 'perp' ina drug case is the victim of the law.
Then, to top it off, after creating these beasts, they started a war against them. The Mexican government fired the first salvos in this conflict, now they reap what they have sown for decades.
Anonymous is attacking EVIL here....once again. The EVIL that created the whole situation in the first place, the Mexican Government & US Government, without whose cooperation, the Cartels would never have existed. Good work evil doers.
Huh? Since when? I think you want the forum for billionaires and multinational corps, because the rest of us have no meaningful say at all, and we wont until after the next revolution...though... even that is a bit iffy, but, I figure our chances are better that way than any other at this point.
Law of conservation of energy says that any electrical energy to come from such a device must be AT MOST the amount of shock that it absorbs, minus losses (heat, friction, etc).
Now the amount of vibrational energy that it absorbs may be such a tiny fraction as to not rise to the level of being a detectable amount in most real world situations. However, thermodynamics assures you that it does, and should you devise a test that proves otherwise, you may be up for a nobel prize.
Yes it does... in the same way that the compound eye hints at a universal creator.
Just because an elegant solution to a problem exists, doesn't mean that some person actually set out to solve that problem and devised that solution.... any more than someone devised a way to grow cells into a lens, and others into photosensors. I think it is just as likely that it started as a joke being made at the expense of someone who didn't know what "anonymous" meant as any other origin.
I also have seen footage of police officers with handheld camcorders taking apart a grow house.... whole 3 story house. Multiple flowering rooms, nursurys etc (yes, pot, duh).... this was at a party. The kid sitting in the corner pipped up "This was my brother's house, would you believe he got off when the courts ruled the warrant invalid?".
So.... even so.... still.... say....nothing. Ever.
I doubt it.... sure, you can prevent me from telling a lie...fine. Its no lie at all that I don't want to continue this conversation, and am unwilling to talk any more without a lawyer present. It is also completely true that I wish to remain silent.
Put together? Hell, I have bought equipment at flea markets that was actually an old heathkit someone put together. In fact, just the other day I was rearranging stuff in my basement and found the old HeathKit capacitance meter that I got at the MIT Flea like 15 years ago. It was probably older than I am now, back when I bought it, but, last time I pulled needed it.... it worked just fine (once it warmed up....ahhh....tubes)
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh stuff it Sam, you have no idea." -- Confucius
I think you hit at the problem exactly with the cycle of thinking on rates vs fines.
In the end, its just an extension of the failed attempts to control a problem of social attitudes and infrastructure investment, with the wrong tool for the job.
If there are so many cars, there should be places to park them. The answer is really to look into how you get people using other transportation OR provide ample parking. Seriously, its a failure to plan upfront. An understandable one but... that is what is really being addressed here. No amount of tweaking the system of fines and penalties is going to magically fix the parking issues.
Honestly the pace of that didn't bother me as much as the total linearity of the story. I don't mind a 10 hour intro.... if its an 80 hour game that is going to provide more ability to explore. There is no exploration in 13. I stopped shortly after I started thumbing through the strategy guide and saw that the majority of the maps had no branches at all... and none were towns.
It wasn't an RPG as much as a complicated, faux-real time, action-adventure.
I have been playing the FF series since I had to come back and kick Garland's ass all over again. It has always been about the exploring, finding the key to open the chest off on the beaten path, or searching for some cave with a quest item, or farming ogres to buy more magic instruction for your mages so they can contribute in battle.
FF 13 was just about running from battle to battle, with some dialogue tossed in between to tell a story.
I pretty much agree though, I have to say, 13 had potential. I payed it for...actually about 13 hours before I gave up "waiting for the tutorial to end". I am used to FF being pretty linear for the first 10 hours or so...but...when I realized there would be no opening up of the world, no towns....
I liked the battle system, I would have rocked a game based on it...but...not a gratuitous battle system game.
Actually I am only half kidding! I was interested in this myself recently and found that there is a Yale proff teaching game theory that puts his lectures on youtube. I sat through two lectures on Nash Equilibrium a few months back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oASpaBdDMs
Course it couldn't hurt to get a text book, but, it would be trivial to lookup the required books for these or other similar classes, and go buy them at any college book store. Just walk right in and buy them, or find them online.
Is it the best way? Dunno.... but its a resource that you can use.
You know.... after I hit submit I was thinking the same thing...
I am especially looking forward to new forms of "extreme gaming" that will come out of illicit environment. I always thought a game like counterstrike, but where every player's machine was rigged to hit him with a stun gun when he died in game. I imagine that it would quickly change the dynamic of the game and make it quite intense.
I can't wait...bring on the bans and the party vans!
So the Food and Drug Administration is now taking its cues from the laughably named "Defense Department" ("Team America World Police" has been a more appropriate name for, at least the lifetime of my parents...) and branching out. Good for them I guess.
It does however make me wonder whether I will be able to play these games without a prescription? Will I be labeled a "recreational player"? Perhaps I should refer to roaming the New Vegas Wasteland as "self medicating"? Will gangs kill each other over the ever escalating prices of black market games? A rash of wild illegal "lan parties" where addicts setup illicit temporary networks.
Eventually they will setup game courts and monitor people to make them kick their habit, which will actually result in a black market for secondary computers that can be hidden inside normal looking furniture.
Beam of neutrinos? Quick, Somebody call David Hahn and tell him he is going to need a lot more smoke detectors and some beryllium!
And no matter how many times you mistake accuracy and precision, you are still wrong. The whole story here is the precision, since they don't know how accurate it is yet, thats why someone else with different instruments needs to try doing it.
Ok so.... quick one...
Accuracy vs Precision.
Accuracy - closeness to defined standard
Precision - closeness of repeated results.
So.... if I throw 100 darts at the bulls-eye of a target....
Precision is the size of my cluster, Accuracy is how close the center of my cluster is the bulls-eye.
If my cluster is tight around the bulls-eye, I am accurate and precise.
So if my darts are all over the target, but center around the middle, I am accurate, but, not precise.
If my cluster is tight...and 4 feet off to one side of the target on the wall... I am precise but not accurate.
So all the measurements with a broken ruler are still precise, if the ruler gives consistent measurements. However, they are not accurate, unless they match other rulers.
Japan actually attacked us AND had a military to back it up.
These guys managed to get a few people to kill themselves attacking us. Their first line attackers died the very day they attacked and...in an entire decade, they have mustered jack shit beyond that. They were never a real threat. Japan was at least a threat beyond the ability to commit a large and tragic crime.
Your analogy doesn't hold. WWII was at least arguably legitimate defense. These current conflicts are basically excuses to bolster the profits of the private contractors in the military industrial complex at BEST. They have nothing to do with real defense from an enemy with a real ability to mount a real threat.
Anybody can blow something up, or take down a building.... there is a huge difference between a threat, and someone who can produce a tragedy... every once in a great while.
OH I get that, its just, I have no faith in any system that isn't well protected from it's association with a physical location in terms of being beyond the reach of major national governments, and particularly that of the Team America Police Force (fuck yeah!). If they want to get to your registrar bad enough, they will find a way. Best to trust a registrar that can't be bought and doesn't exist in only one place.
I, personally, favor abandoning traditional DNS in favor of alternatives like the .onion or, when they become operational, decentralized models like bitdns (not sure if that ever went anywhere) idea.
Without such things, the idea of a TLD that is beyond US thugs ability to take down is non-sequitor. Of course they can be taken down, it just requires the right pressure, and they have no scruples about turning the screws...especially if they can farm it out to someone else to do the actual screw turning.
The best TLD out there, and the only one that you can be sure you will not be taken down from.
Overall...the only way to really avoid it is to avoid central registrars that are beholden to their political masters.
> Like when we recently got Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, the #2 man in Al Qaeda, an organization sworn to our destruction and constantly threatening us.
Oooh he threatened us....yes we should be so scared shitless that we give up on our entire model of apprehending people and putting them on a fair trial for their well defined crimes, and just kill him for "threatening"
Nope.... not a fan at all. Frankly, I don't even think the legal system presents a high enough standard to be allowed to kill. Never mind extrajudicial murder programs
Well I would actually hope that they just stop going around killing people with UAV that are not even threatening our "homeland". I would hope it does not stay that way, simply because this "Team America World Police" BS line has gotten old. We need to stop adventuring in other people's homes, and stop praising the people who take a paycheck to do it.
In the mean time though, I will settle for them still using humans to make the decisions and do the killing.
No Andre. or am I missing the joke? Andre Pellbone out of Chicago. One of the best con men I have ever dealt with...when he left man.... I felt like I got screwed by a professional. I was actually more in awe than pissed. He even managed to run up an $800 phone call on my landline before he skipped town. It was..... impressive.
Actually.... I would think that what you do is make a decision based on the current situation.
Yes, maybe...even probably you CAN sue (hell, you can always file a suit right, even if you don't have jack shit). However, that doesn't mean that its your best move, or even a smart one.
Take the ex-roomate who screwed me out of rent and bills. I had options, a lawyer advised me i could sue him outright, or I could call each incident a separate incident, and keep it in small claims court to do myself on the cheap. Either way, I was likely to win judgements for much of it, if not all.
That said.... the guy was a con artist, had little to nothing in his own name, and skipped town. Winning would have been purely symbolic if he had nothing that the courts could make him give up.... in the end, it may have cost me more...with no ultimate benefit.
So depending on whether it is worth sueing, maybe you do decide to "go with what we have"....if doing so is worth more than winning the lawsuit. Likely it is here. A lawsuit might recoup some, might lose a little.
So you can take door number one with a chance of recouping some of your money with a possibility of just losing more in the end.... or... take door number two, where you expect to likely make a tidy profit, possibly the same profit that you planned in the begining.
Now which choice do you make?
I don't think the point was "The US Sucks", though, I do tend to think warmongers suck and we haven't been in a necessary war in...well... mine nor say... may parents lifetime (they were born just after WWII). In fact, my Grandfather was in Korea... a useless war that we should never have been involved in...yet... are still there... defending a country with state imposed censorship.... so glad we are keeping them "free".
I would say.... we need this like we need any military beyond 50, well run, state militias....not at all.
But...beyond that... the point is... when you send machines to kill, they will kill indiscriminately. I kind of like that the people doing the killing may have a moral compass, and might have to wrestle with the question of "DO I follow this order, or do I live the rest of my life knowing I am not a monster". No machine has yet developed a conscience.
Then perhaps you would like to point out where I am factually wrong, and what the correct facts are?
So are you stating that the Cartels would exist, and be as powerful in the absence of the war on drug users and their families which created the black market?
Are you, furthermore, stating that the current rounds of violence did NOT start with the Mexican "government" thugs attempting to crack down on the cartels (which you seem to believe that they did not create via inexcusable policy)?
Because, for someone claiming that I have it wrong, you managed to not even attempt to address a single one of those points. Yes, the cartels are bad... but they don't exist in a vacuum. They were created by the "hard work" of these two governments cooperating on their treasonous wars against their own people's. That is my thesis, and I see no evidence which even attempts to convince me to abandon it.
Anonymous is fighting the good fight here.
-Steve
Actually.... they are attacking the EVIL guys. The ones who perpetuated the drug war, the ones who created the cartels by creating the most lucrative black market in the history of mankind. Then, after adopting this evil policy, which I have to call evil since it means threatening people with violence and jail time who are not violent and commit no offense that has any victim, the 'perp' ina drug case is the victim of the law.
Then, to top it off, after creating these beasts, they started a war against them. The Mexican government fired the first salvos in this conflict, now they reap what they have sown for decades.
Anonymous is attacking EVIL here....once again. The EVIL that created the whole situation in the first place, the Mexican Government & US Government, without whose cooperation, the Cartels would never have existed. Good work evil doers.
Huh? Since when? I think you want the forum for billionaires and multinational corps, because the rest of us have no meaningful say at all, and we wont until after the next revolution...though... even that is a bit iffy, but, I figure our chances are better that way than any other at this point.
Actually its more of a shock transformer.
Law of conservation of energy says that any electrical energy to come from such a device must be AT MOST the amount of shock that it absorbs, minus losses (heat, friction, etc).
Now the amount of vibrational energy that it absorbs may be such a tiny fraction as to not rise to the level of being a detectable amount in most real world situations. However, thermodynamics assures you that it does, and should you devise a test that proves otherwise, you may be up for a nobel prize.
Yes it does... in the same way that the compound eye hints at a universal creator.
Just because an elegant solution to a problem exists, doesn't mean that some person actually set out to solve that problem and devised that solution.... any more than someone devised a way to grow cells into a lens, and others into photosensors. I think it is just as likely that it started as a joke being made at the expense of someone who didn't know what "anonymous" meant as any other origin.
Yes but.... even so...
I also have seen footage of police officers with handheld camcorders taking apart a grow house.... whole 3 story house. Multiple flowering rooms, nursurys etc (yes, pot, duh).... this was at a party. The kid sitting in the corner pipped up "This was my brother's house, would you believe he got off when the courts ruled the warrant invalid?".
So.... even so.... still.... say....nothing. Ever.
-Steve
I doubt it.... sure, you can prevent me from telling a lie...fine. Its no lie at all that I don't want to continue this conversation, and am unwilling to talk any more without a lawyer present. It is also completely true that I wish to remain silent.
Put together? Hell, I have bought equipment at flea markets that was actually an old heathkit someone put together. In fact, just the other day I was rearranging stuff in my basement and found the old HeathKit capacitance meter that I got at the MIT Flea like 15 years ago. It was probably older than I am now, back when I bought it, but, last time I pulled needed it.... it worked just fine (once it warmed up....ahhh....tubes)
Actually.... just found one on EBAY.... http://www.ebay.com/itm/Heathkit-IT-22-Antique-Capacitance-Meter-/150647200398
They call it antique but.. the one I have makes this one look like the new updated model (it probably is)