Maybe now that he's in office he knows something you aren't privy to? I notice Gitmo is still there, a lot of things he said while running seem to fallen by the wayside. He also has a lot more white hair now. Seems to me being the president is a tough job no matter who it is, because there is a lot of things they just can't tell the general public. Go to Walmart sometime, you think that 90% of those people know anything about the world outside of "made in China" on all the labels and stuff they buy. Most people are dumb and no amount of preaching or standing on soap boxes or posts on slashdot will change that. I'm will to bet that most people out there who think they are smart enough to handle the truth are the same ones who bitch and moan but don't vote, or participate in government to make changes. All the changes in our government are brought about manipulation of the retarded masses. Its very rare that someone with good intentions gets out there and manipulates them for the greater good. SO if you think you know better get out there and get some stupid people to vote for you.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I had fun with the game playing it as just an out there FPS. I wasn't looking for an in-depth rpg.
What I didn't like about it was the subscribe to play content instead of pay X for the content to play whenever you like (see guild wars model). Also the no LAN play. If they had charged per expansion I am quite sure they would still be running today. The whole free players vs subscribers thing was a huge fiasco.
Most people were not willing to pay the monthly fee because no matter how they strutted it, HG:L was not an MMO. It did not have the depth/story/character growth that people expect in RPGs.
What it did have was more than a little bit of twitch action that people like myself find fun in FPS games. Quake - Unreal...
So now that the servers are shit-canned I've got a shiny box game that is worthless.
The business model was flawed and was IMO the primary reason it failed. Bill Roper's plan. Not every game is an MMO but he told investors that it was going to be a steady revenue stream and forced the game to a model it was unsuited for.
I think he might be doing the same thing here, using buzzwords to hype a game to investors not really thinking about the dynamics of the game and its audience.
Of course I could be wrong, perhaps from the ground up this is designed to be an MMO and the payment model may very well work, but I won't be buying it, due to the earlier "Bill Roper Burn".
There was nothing wrong with the game Hellgate London but they screwed the pooch with a bad payment model by trying to sell a game as an MMO that was definitely not an MMO.
I smell a another debacle in the making. Bill Roper at the helm is apparently not a good idea.
Sounds to me like a classic mafia protection scheme./Insert seedy Italian accent/ "You might find your finances in trouble without some.... protection. Pay us and we'll provide that... Else our boss might see to it that you do have an accident."
Yup it hasn't improved. C130 hercs, still have the horrible seating, tiny triangle shitter in the back corner. I do think they did recently add a privacy curtain though. The waste actually goes to a small storage tank. SWAT teams (Shit Water and Trash) take all that stuff out of the tank with a hose everytime the craft touches down.
On the flip-side a C130 can land pretty much anywhere that is remotely flat. Doesn't actually need a paved clean surface like jets. So we still use em.
I think we should go back a bit to that kind of space exploration. Boot-strap, Cowboy style. There are so many regs and safety issues with today's space program that with all the bureaucracy it's a wonder we get anything off the ground at all. Lets just start with some quantity, launch anything with a higher than 50% survival rate.
How many people do you know that would jump on an opportunity for a manned mission to mars? Just to be the first to do it. Even if you don't make it, you'd still provide useful information and go down in history as a great pioneer. Hell there is a certain religion or two down here that have people clamoring all over their selves to die for some glorious amorphous cause. Put them to work. Launch those space monkeys up there so they can be closer to their [Deity].
Please see he definition of "greedy". I am in no way saying that any of your points are wrong, you can install ad-blocker like I did and block the more intrusive ones (Flash Pop-overs being my arch nemesis) like I have done. My post simply pointed out why it is being done on a large scale. Greed is their reason, They don't need an excuse.
The game publishers just want to wow you with something to increase the likely hood of a sale. Probably not the type of people who will miss out on sales to the blind. EA? Oh they are the greediest bastards in the biz. They want your info so they can sell it, again see greed -> root; money.
They are people looking to make more money no matter how sleazy the look doing it. Your salesman example works because you are Face to face with said salesman; he is an entity with which you can express your personal disgust with and work to generate a more conducive if brief interchange. Web pages are faceless corporations.
For the most part Web pages are meant to be mostly one way communication (Like television) and like television the audacity of ads (now every 3-5 minutes instead o 10-15)has increased. Apparently the running theory is that if they throw more ads at you, you will buy more stuff thereby giving them more money.
The Problem is the more "in-your-face" they get the more they piss semi-intelligent people off. I don't even turn on the TV any more. ever. If there is a TV series I am interested in watching I just get it on DVD. Read the local paper, check CNN and slashdot and the guild page for one of my online games (not WoW), and that is the extent of my media intake. I read, write, work on my art in all that free-time I have now, and you know what?
I feel better, my blood-pressure is down, I feel much more productive during the day, and I sleep much better. If this gets you so worked up perhaps you need to take a break and go on a media hiatus?
PS. I am not a fan of Captcha's either since half the time I have trouble reading them, but having seen spam bots out of control I understand how they came to be.
"Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible "splash pages", flash animations, and musical home pages. I'm sure in due time people will get their head around some of the other basic issues I've mentioned, but unfortunately people keep coming up with dumb new ideas much faster than that."
You've never seen MySpace have you?
Most of the topics you've covered are that way because someone decided it was a better way to get another opportunity to serve you a targeted advertisement. The download links are that way to prevent other people from stealing your content, denying you ad revenue and leeching your bandwidth... It all comes back to money and some content providers heavily rely on ad revenue to pay their monthly hosting and bandwidth costs.
Others are just greedy.
When bandwidth becomes free, maybe you'll see the reverse to these trends. Maybe. Probably not.
You realize you just described G.W. B. right? I think an added attribute would be to be smart enough to realize they are "wrong" and the "intelligence" and "humility" to admit it. I haven't lived in the states for 6 years now, but I do agree with the sentiment "as long as it's Not Hillary". That should probably be made into a bumper sticker. Not that I have a problem with a female president, I just think she is bat shit crazy, and I am not entirely certain that she hasn't had Bills balls grafted on for more than a few years.
Well if they start testing the sewage the best way around it would be to utilize something other than a toilet for your bodily waste storage needs. Which means drug hovels will become an even more disgusting eyesore in communities, but at lest they'll be easier to spot/smell.
Thanks dude, you rock. I'll pass those on to my mom. I can't stand the damn things either. Seems like the only news that needs to travel fast enough to use a cell phone is bad news.
very true, I was kind of hoping for some feedback about specific phones similar to the one I posted a link to. Mostly I got flames and off-topic remarks that weren't any help at all. lesson learned.
Should have thought to put this in the ORignal post, A. She already has a plan, options involving getting a new plan to get another crappy free phone like she already has is not an option.
B. She is replacing a POS sony Ericcson flip-phone that has horrible reception, sometimes it never rings then it will buzz telling her she has voice-mail...
C. She uses the phone for work, she's in the medical field and is on call a lot, so the phone does get regular use. No they didn't give her a phone from work that isn't the question. Just need a good GSM phone that doesn't cost 300+ dollars to buy unlocked and is ready to use.
No I'd never heard of any services called jitterbug or anything like that. I do not live in the US, my mom does. I've noticed that a lot of google searches tend to come back with results based on your region you are searching from...
But I'm sure this will be ignored and the flamers will continue...
No I'm not fake. My mom has a plan on a GSM network that came with a crappy sony ericson (sp?) phone that loses signal, sometimes doesn't ring then notifies her she has voice mail. She needs a new one, an I don't know crap about phones since I care nothing about having one. Some of the suggestios are good, but most are talking about getting a new cell phone plan which really isn't what she wants.
Yes I always wondered why the law system had to become increasingly more difficult and obscure to actually need a whole class of people whose sole purpose is to "interpret" that law... I'm all for a roll back to the basics with a few minor added laws that anybody above a 3rd grade reading level can read and understand in one sitting. The whole thing shouldn't take up more than 50 pages.
a bunch of nerds with free time just writing kick-ass cool software. Why is it any damn thing done these days you need a "legal team". Am I the ONLY individual out here who is tired of all this damn overly complex legalese that's clouding up the water?
Hows this for a license..
"We made this, we include the code so you can see how, if you modify it pass it along and give credit to original authors. Use it anyway you want."
"PS. If you break something, law or other wise, thats on your dime."
I mean can't these people find something to argue about that actually matters? Like how to keep people from starving to death, stop poaching, and get a government back that actually works for "the People" and not for "the Big Money"? Just break out the damn rulers already and settle it and move on.
Everyone needs to go somewhere to witness true suffering and have to defend themselves to stay alive so they can get real perspective on what really is important in life. Hint, it's not how some guys in an office are writing some imaginary rules for something that they give away for free.
what a Virus already does. They took DNA, and implanted it into another cell and the cell ran the DNA instruction set... Just like cells are wont to do. Seems like a pretty "Cut & Paste" idea to me; hardly "creating Life", or even steps toward it.
We'll have Artificial Intelligence (synthetic life by my standards) I think, long before we're actually engineering proteins and building an original base DNA sequence of our own making and creating the cell to run it from scratch.
At which point our machine overlords will take care of the rest.:P
You aren't accounting for population growth. More people need more food. It has to come from somewhere, septic tanks don't magically make more material, they'll only contain part of the waste your body produces. You sweat, you pee, you shed skin/hair. All of that adds up over time. It's a big energy leak from the equation even without population growth.
You are trying to describe a perpetual motion machine... only with food made from feces. Simply put you do not excrete all the food you intake, through your anus.
Sorry but even with replicators you wouldn't have a free society because a replicator wouldn't "magically" make an item.
The material it uses to make things would have to come from somewhere and then there is the energy needed to run the thing. Power isn't free either. We would just become an economy based completely on energy and whatever ATOM X is that the replicators are using to make "everything".
So essentially you would still have the "Haves and the Have-nots", it's just the difference between the "Haves" would lessen. Now even if you had solved the power Issue and came up with some near infinite energy source that was free and easy to reproduce, you would still be left with the market of "ATOM X" used to make everything. We'd have to take recycling to a whole new level to not run out in a few months. This planet would probably become a barren wasteland as everything was used to break down into "ATOM X" to feed an ever growing populace (including people, excrement, old items, etc etc.) Eventually you get to the absolute maximum sustainable populace this planet can hold with the resources available without extreme population controls.
That just doesn't sound like a very nice place to live.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe now that he's in office he knows something you aren't privy to? I notice Gitmo is still there, a lot of things he said while running seem to fallen by the wayside. He also has a lot more white hair now. Seems to me being the president is a tough job no matter who it is, because there is a lot of things they just can't tell the general public. Go to Walmart sometime, you think that 90% of those people know anything about the world outside of "made in China" on all the labels and stuff they buy. Most people are dumb and no amount of preaching or standing on soap boxes or posts on slashdot will change that. I'm will to bet that most people out there who think they are smart enough to handle the truth are the same ones who bitch and moan but don't vote, or participate in government to make changes. All the changes in our government are brought about manipulation of the retarded masses. Its very rare that someone with good intentions gets out there and manipulates them for the greater good. SO if you think you know better get out there and get some stupid people to vote for you.
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I had fun with the game playing it as just an out there FPS. I wasn't looking for an in-depth rpg.
What I didn't like about it was the subscribe to play content instead of pay X for the content to play whenever you like (see guild wars model). Also the no LAN play. If they had charged per expansion I am quite sure they would still be running today. The whole free players vs subscribers thing was a huge fiasco.
Most people were not willing to pay the monthly fee because no matter how they strutted it, HG:L was not an MMO. It did not have the depth/story/character growth that people expect in RPGs.
What it did have was more than a little bit of twitch action that people like myself find fun in FPS games. Quake - Unreal...
So now that the servers are shit-canned I've got a shiny box game that is worthless.
The business model was flawed and was IMO the primary reason it failed. Bill Roper's plan. Not every game is an MMO but he told investors that it was going to be a steady revenue stream and forced the game to a model it was unsuited for.
I think he might be doing the same thing here, using buzzwords to hype a game to investors not really thinking about the dynamics of the game and its audience.
Of course I could be wrong, perhaps from the ground up this is designed to be an MMO and the payment model may very well work, but I won't be buying it, due to the earlier "Bill Roper Burn".
Anyone looked up the term "Flagshipped"?
There was nothing wrong with the game Hellgate London but they screwed the pooch with a bad payment model by trying to sell a game as an MMO that was definitely not an MMO.
I smell a another debacle in the making. Bill Roper at the helm is apparently not a good idea.
Sounds to me like a classic mafia protection scheme. /Insert seedy Italian accent/ "You might find your finances in trouble without some.... protection. Pay us and we'll provide that... Else our boss might see to it that you do have an accident."
Yup it hasn't improved. C130 hercs, still have the horrible seating, tiny triangle shitter in the back corner. I do think they did recently add a privacy curtain though. The waste actually goes to a small storage tank. SWAT teams (Shit Water and Trash) take all that stuff out of the tank with a hose everytime the craft touches down.
On the flip-side a C130 can land pretty much anywhere that is remotely flat. Doesn't actually need a paved clean surface like jets. So we still use em.
Where can these LEDs be bought in a form ready for insertion into a standard US light fixture? I would buy a few.
Then my 5 digit should put me over the top.
TO ARMS, I SAY!
I think we should go back a bit to that kind of space exploration. Boot-strap, Cowboy style. There are so many regs and safety issues with today's space program that with all the bureaucracy it's a wonder we get anything off the ground at all. Lets just start with some quantity, launch anything with a higher than 50% survival rate.
How many people do you know that would jump on an opportunity for a manned mission to mars? Just to be the first to do it. Even if you don't make it, you'd still provide useful information and go down in history as a great pioneer. Hell there is a certain religion or two down here that have people clamoring all over their selves to die for some glorious amorphous cause. Put them to work. Launch those space monkeys up there so they can be closer to their [Deity].
That comparison dates from 2006... have anything more current?
Please see he definition of "greedy". I am in no way saying that any of your points are wrong, you can install ad-blocker like I did and block the more intrusive ones (Flash Pop-overs being my arch nemesis) like I have done. My post simply pointed out why it is being done on a large scale. Greed is their reason, They don't need an excuse.
The game publishers just want to wow you with something to increase the likely hood of a sale. Probably not the type of people who will miss out on sales to the blind. EA? Oh they are the greediest bastards in the biz. They want your info so they can sell it, again see greed -> root; money.
They are people looking to make more money no matter how sleazy the look doing it. Your salesman example works because you are Face to face with said salesman; he is an entity with which you can express your personal disgust with and work to generate a more conducive if brief interchange. Web pages are faceless corporations.
For the most part Web pages are meant to be mostly one way communication (Like television) and like television the audacity of ads (now every 3-5 minutes instead o 10-15)has increased. Apparently the running theory is that if they throw more ads at you, you will buy more stuff thereby giving them more money.
The Problem is the more "in-your-face" they get the more they piss semi-intelligent people off. I don't even turn on the TV any more. ever. If there is a TV series I am interested in watching I just get it on DVD. Read the local paper, check CNN and slashdot and the guild page for one of my online games (not WoW), and that is the extent of my media intake. I read, write, work on my art in all that free-time I have now, and you know what?
I feel better, my blood-pressure is down, I feel much more productive during the day, and I sleep much better. If this gets you so worked up perhaps you need to take a break and go on a media hiatus?
PS. I am not a fan of Captcha's either since half the time I have trouble reading them, but having seen spam bots out of control I understand how they came to be.
"Thankfully we've mostly gotten rid of the horrible "splash pages", flash animations, and musical home pages. I'm sure in due time people will get their head around some of the other basic issues I've mentioned, but unfortunately people keep coming up with dumb new ideas much faster than that."
You've never seen MySpace have you?
Most of the topics you've covered are that way because someone decided it was a better way to get another opportunity to serve you a targeted advertisement. The download links are that way to prevent other people from stealing your content, denying you ad revenue and leeching your bandwidth... It all comes back to money and some content providers heavily rely on ad revenue to pay their monthly hosting and bandwidth costs.
Others are just greedy.
When bandwidth becomes free, maybe you'll see the reverse to these trends. Maybe. Probably not.
You realize you just described G.W. B. right? I think an added attribute would be to be smart enough to realize they are "wrong" and the "intelligence" and "humility" to admit it. I haven't lived in the states for 6 years now, but I do agree with the sentiment "as long as it's Not Hillary". That should probably be made into a bumper sticker. Not that I have a problem with a female president, I just think she is bat shit crazy, and I am not entirely certain that she hasn't had Bills balls grafted on for more than a few years.
Nice, I am familiar with your work.
Which developer do you work for? I'm a DigiPen grad and will be looking for employment in the not-too-near future.
Currently I am going back for a BS in Art.
Well if they start testing the sewage the best way around it would be to utilize something other than a toilet for your bodily waste storage needs. Which means drug hovels will become an even more disgusting eyesore in communities, but at lest they'll be easier to spot/smell.
Thanks dude, you rock. I'll pass those on to my mom. I can't stand the damn things either. Seems like the only news that needs to travel fast enough to use a cell phone is bad news.
very true, I was kind of hoping for some feedback about specific phones similar to the one I posted a link to. Mostly I got flames and off-topic remarks that weren't any help at all. lesson learned.
Should have thought to put this in the ORignal post,
A. She already has a plan, options involving getting a new plan to get another crappy free phone like she already has is not an option.
B. She is replacing a POS sony Ericcson flip-phone that has horrible reception, sometimes it never rings then it will buzz telling her she has voice-mail...
C. She uses the phone for work, she's in the medical field and is on call a lot, so the phone does get regular use. No they didn't give her a phone from work that isn't the question. Just need a good GSM phone that doesn't cost 300+ dollars to buy unlocked and is ready to use.
No I'd never heard of any services called jitterbug or anything like that. I do not live in the US, my mom does. I've noticed that a lot of google searches tend to come back with results based on your region you are searching from...
But I'm sure this will be ignored and the flamers will continue...
No I'm not fake. My mom has a plan on a GSM network that came with a crappy sony ericson (sp?) phone that loses signal, sometimes doesn't ring then notifies her she has voice mail. She needs a new one, an I don't know crap about phones since I care nothing about having one. Some of the suggestios are good, but most are talking about getting a new cell phone plan which really isn't what she wants.
That is a pretty nice license and its pretty short too.
Yes I always wondered why the law system had to become increasingly more difficult and obscure to actually need a whole class of people whose sole purpose is to "interpret" that law... I'm all for a roll back to the basics with a few minor added laws that anybody above a 3rd grade reading level can read and understand in one sitting. The whole thing shouldn't take up more than 50 pages.
a bunch of nerds with free time just writing kick-ass cool software. Why is it any damn thing done these days you need a "legal team". Am I the ONLY individual out here who is tired of all this damn overly complex legalese that's clouding up the water?
Hows this for a license..
"We made this, we include the code so you can see how, if you modify it pass it along and give credit to original authors. Use it anyway you want."
"PS. If you break something, law or other wise, thats on your dime."
I mean can't these people find something to argue about that actually matters? Like how to keep people from starving to death, stop poaching, and get a government back that actually works for "the People" and not for "the Big Money"? Just break out the damn rulers already and settle it and move on.
Everyone needs to go somewhere to witness true suffering and have to defend themselves to stay alive so they can get real perspective on what really is important in life. Hint, it's not how some guys in an office are writing some imaginary rules for something that they give away for free.
what a Virus already does. They took DNA, and implanted it into another cell and the cell ran the DNA instruction set... Just like cells are wont to do. Seems like a pretty "Cut & Paste" idea to me; hardly "creating Life", or even steps toward it.
:P
We'll have Artificial Intelligence (synthetic life by my standards) I think, long before we're actually engineering proteins and building an original base DNA sequence of our own making and creating the cell to run it from scratch.
At which point our machine overlords will take care of the rest.
You aren't accounting for population growth. More people need more food. It has to come from somewhere, septic tanks don't magically make more material, they'll only contain part of the waste your body produces. You sweat, you pee, you shed skin/hair. All of that adds up over time. It's a big energy leak from the equation even without population growth.
You are trying to describe a perpetual motion machine... only with food made from feces. Simply put you do not excrete all the food you intake, through your anus.
Sorry but even with replicators you wouldn't have a free society because a replicator wouldn't "magically" make an item.
The material it uses to make things would have to come from somewhere and then there is the energy needed to run the thing. Power isn't free either. We would just become an economy based completely on energy and whatever ATOM X is that the replicators are using to make "everything".
So essentially you would still have the "Haves and the Have-nots", it's just the difference between the "Haves" would lessen. Now even if you had solved the power Issue and came up with some near infinite energy source that was free and easy to reproduce, you would still be left with the market of "ATOM X" used to make everything. We'd have to take recycling to a whole new level to not run out in a few months. This planet would probably become a barren wasteland as everything was used to break down into "ATOM X" to feed an ever growing populace (including people, excrement, old items, etc etc.) Eventually you get to the absolute maximum sustainable populace this planet can hold with the resources available without extreme population controls.
That just doesn't sound like a very nice place to live.