I think this is a question of whether the ends justify the means. From a personal standpoint, it doesn't matter, because from a legal stadpoint, it's very clear.
If you feel you want more for the house, you're allowed to refuse to sell before it has been agreed on, or to ask for more before it's been agreed on. What you are NOT allowed to do is also pretty clear, though- you're not allowed to resort to fraud. This means that having collusion (your friends or the lending agents) feed you insider information; you're not allowed to have people pose as buyers who have made a good faith offer for the house, and you're not allowed to deny problems with the house or make untrue claims about it. This is very basic stuff, because the principle of the law is that the ends DO NOT justify the means.
This is to prevent you from keeping them from a fair search. Yes, you could argue that they still could walk away, but they have you and your friends lying to them in an attempt to create psychological pressure to buy.
In turn, THEY aren't generally allowed to make an agreed upon offer, and then back out- there are often penalties written right in to the contract about this that amount to, "If you change your mind, you forfeit $X," just to keep people from making offers that are NOT in good faith, thus interfering with your ability to sell the house to anyone else.
It doesn't matter what one's moral stance is; from a legal standpoint, deception in the sales process is not all right.
the problem is that the raid gamers skew it against casuals, because they cange te standard. It doesn't help that people come up to me and mock my lowly armor (most of which i made ingame myself!) just because i'm not a raid gamer.
i like the game... i'm growing to dislike some of the players...
there are TWO stories. One is the background, which i can't recite because i ignore it every chance i get. The second is that they frequently have world event- where there is a battle, with war preparations, or there is a new enemy who appears for awhile, or things like that.
I try to ignore those, too.
So yes, there is a story, and there is endgame content that people can do, but not everyone bothers and it isn't really worth it to me as a casual gamer.
In fact, as long as i'm posting in a gaming thread: Hey blizzard! More stuff for casual gamers!
The guy has done something that even einstein couldn't do: He made serious physics breakthroughs accessible to and understandable for the little guys, those of us who DON'T get it and need someone to not talk down to us while we try.
he's almost unreal for most of us, a kind of science god. His illness is our only reminder that he's one of us at all. I applaud him for being able to laugh at it, while i am overwhelmed by his science-fu.
I'm not qualified for the job, but i envy the lucky s.o.b. who is.
And you know what? physical access to places depends on stairrs, or sometimes, wheelchair ramps- in science, it depends on the mental ability, and he climbs stairs three at a time there while i'm hanging on to the handrails and crawling up hanging onto other people's feet. i'm amazed by how much of the physics universe the guy as claimed as his own. The rest of us are wheeling slowly up the ramps he built to make science more understandable, and damned grateful to have them.
i don't want to raid. I don't want to join 39 people i don't know to bicker over loot. I want to play the game, stop when i want to stop, get to sleep at a reasonable hour, and pick up again on another day. I want more chains of quests that are interesting and not more "Get me that book," or "go talk to the person in the next room."
I don't want PVP, but i am perfectly happy with there being pvp servers for those that do. The raids are out of hand, some of us just want to play solo, in a world with other players, and blizzard doesnt' support that very much at all.
We are running out of patience for it, largely because our server has lots of idiots. We figure we probably will get to max out 1 character each and then maybe just stop.
We refer to it as 'that stupid game.'
it's fun, and obsessively interesting. it's BIG, there are a lot of places to go and things to do. But it's also like the real world, in that the biggest problem is other people. And anonymity + interaction=complete and total anarchy, for a lot of people.
Not for us, which is why we ended up with a 2 person guild and don't raid. the game absorbs a huge amount of time, and we already have a lot of other projects. It's mostly what we do when we would otherwise be playing with the console games.
(He is great at FPS, i'm the point and click gamer, so we've compromised and ended up in WoW. I'm curious to see what we agree on next.)
Actually, a lot of players DO see it as paying twice, and are therefore *willing* to on those grounds. If you can, it must be ethical, right? they argue that their time is worth more than the gold farmer's, and so they aren't losing anything by paying for their progress. (This is also the rationale used by account-sharing 'power levellers,' who pay other people to level their characters. This is also against the terms of service agreement.)
People spending the money think that they are therefore getting ahead, you're correct. And they are (sort of, if getting further along a track that doesn't go anywhere can be considered 'ahead...')but they're doing it in a way that breaks the terms they agreed to in making an account.
heh. Tough part is, the spells never worked unless you got the words exactly the way they were spelled in the game. Bad game for people who type poorly.:(
Plus, how many times can you kill the same dragon?/looks at my own username, backs away slowly
*never mind*
kill dragon, get potion. Kill dragon, get potion. At least in WoW, you can play forever without having to lose stats.
My big problem with buying wow gold is that really, i'm then paying NOT to play *the game i pay money to play.* The illogic of it hurts my brain. A lot of people justify it by saying that they're enhancing their gaming experience, but honestly, that's the goal of ANY money-making experience, in any economy, and the ethical questions don't disappear just because it's an ingame experience not the day-job world.
(i wonder how weird it must be to be a gold farmer, and have the ingame world BE the day job world)
For Kesmai, all i have to say id: asak nungi irga lubluyi.
And i probably spelled it wrong.
Here's the problem with farmers. A casual player can make gear that sells for 10g in the auction house. This will enable them to equip their character pretty well, not great but not bad, with a new item that someone else produced or looted.
But wait! Gold farmers mean that for a little real money, everybody who is willing to pay can suddenly have as much gold as they need.
This means that prices go up, because the standard is now that everyone has 1000 gold, not 10.
Damn.
Now all of a sudden, everything costs more- to anyone who doesn't buy WoW gold. Before, only a few players had thousands of gold. That kept the playing field relatively even. Now, the playing field gets evened once again, but at higher prices.
This creates problems. a.) the gold farmers sell low level items (potions, etc) far cheaper and drive down the prices i'll get for anything low level i make
b) they increase the prices on everything else, because everyone can afford more.
So anything i can farm, i lose out on the profit of because there are so many gold farmers doing this to get the gold in the first place (items that other people need for potions, or the potions themselves, for example, are cheap. This is useful for those buying potions but not useful as a production skill anymore, because what's the point when you won't for them what you need? The whole skill class has basically been outsourced to third world countries because people want WoW gold and are willing to spend money but not time on it. It's not as much of a problem in a larger economy, but in WoW you have a small, server-wide economy with money pouring in from the farmers.)
and anything that's a dropped item somebody else would sell is infinitely MORE expensive because they assume we all have bought the gold to pay for it.
If you are the only kid in third grade with a $1 allowance and everybody else has $10 allowances, that's what this becomes. The kids are trading $10 things at $100 rates. If i played full time, i'd get gear drops i could sell for high rates- which would still continue to buy me less and less as farmed money poured into the economy.
Inflation in games is a lot easier to trace than inflation in the real world. It's a much smaller economy- until you drag the 'outer' economy into it.
I think we should be banned from BUYING gold, too.
Report sellers, report bots, the next time someone whispers to you ingame to visit their WoWgold site, report it under the behaviour tag in the reporting options. This becomes especially important for casual players, who just can't compete.
I know, isn't that just an artificial control? No, it's more like cracking down on forgery- this is wealth that was created for the purpose of selling it, which makes it an otherwise unnecessary element in the economy that hurts the whole.
I say yay, keep up the farmer bans.
On an unrelated note, every time i clean out my bookbag, i wish vendors in real life bought the trash...
Now, with that out of the way: i'm wondering whether this can be turned to practical application in the near future with cancer treatments. How far away is this?
And what happens if the markers used go awry? How easy would it be to end up with the wrong dose in the wrong place? I know if this were being used on me, i'd only agree to be an 'early adopter' in one of two circumstances- illness with a high risk of fatality, in which case the risks of treatment would outweigh the risk of dying without it, and very minor complaints with very safe remedies, because that way the risks even in the even of misfire are still low.
That leaves a lot of room for serious illnesses to go untreated in the middle, so i'm going to be very curious to watch this technology and see what happens with it.
a.) offtopic- sometime i'm going to have to ask you to explain one of those statements, tom, but not now.
b.) ontopic- people DO pay for 1 atmosphere-level air... anyplace they can't get it naturally. That it is the same is part of its worth, not a detraction from its worth.
nothing else to add, just the observation that even regular air works as an analogy, because you're making something free but not always convenient (software) into something CONVENIENT but not always free for people (cd). A lot like the bottled water- some of which IS tap water.
Instead of being in a tap (online) it's from a bottle (cd.)
This does make the landscape a little more interesting.
A copyright is what the owner has, that cannot be taken away. A restriction is what everyone else gets, to prevent them from trying to infringe upon it, set either by governmental authorities or the artist in conjunction with those authorities.
You have the "right" to free speech; i am "restricted" from interfering with it.
In this case, they may or may not have the right to govern discussion regarding players' technical performance, but the question is to what extent the statistics are an original work.
This determines how restricted the rest of us will be legally, in what we do with it.
That's valid. It's good that you are considering these things, even if nothing changes as a result.
The end result is probably a compromise between what you feel is slashdot, and what works when used by thousands, and it ought to trend more towards what you intend than what we ask for. After all, we did start visiting it exactly as it was, and continue visiting with it exactly as it is. Actions are vastly louder than words.
(For what it's worth, i like the green colour. It's the prettiest of all of the news aggregation sites that i'm addicted to.)
For me, the defining-element cluster is skewed more towards the journal circle, and the community, than the front page.
Don't get me wrong, i still read the front page- but it's the people who have kept me here. For all of the trolls and the jerks, there are a lot of people who post genuinely useful stuff. I don't come here to hear it first, i come here to hear it in depth. I come here when i've already read most of the news i'll read for the day. Sometimes that community conversation doesn't work as well, but sometimes it offers a lot more background and related information than a news site could. It depends on the day. When it does, it's worth the days that it doesn't.
If you edit and check it, you stand behind the work submitted and posted, right?
This is not posted as a tongue in cheek jab about editing. I understand that you are serious about the site, and since you are serious about the site, you don't want to have to worry about popularity contests or such nonsense.
Well, there's an easy fix.
Take away the popularity incentive for submitting stories. The only people who need to know are you and the submitter. Award some other incentive, if you need to- submitter points, which can be used for something, i don't know.
What about just... posting the number of approved stories on their info page? All of the prestige... without the front page description of which story is theirs. Or, if attribution is necessary, no links for anyone, just a byline. Since most submitters are NOT submitting their own work, and are arguably mostly getting their news from other news aggregation sites, this is not like they are submitting something that needs extensive citation.
The other result of taking away that link, and possibly the direct byline, is that it would increase the responsibility on the editors, which would lead to less public muttering about irresponsibility (regardles sof whether warranted in that instance or not.) There can't be any question whether the editor read it if the editor's is the name on the piece. It means that they didn't just accept it because of who submitted it- they had to read it, make sure it was informative and editorially sound, and then post it on the site.
i think (disclaimer: i am not an economist, and haven't balanced my chequebook in long enough that any financial advisement from me should inspire skepticism, at best) that making everything free doesn't destroy business in the traditional healer realm- how much interest in tourism, etc, will be drummed up by having this cultural background available for people to peruse? Completely aside from any medical value the therapies may or may not have, this is interesting from a cultural standpoint, and for that reason, making it free and available- in particular, the being free lends to its availability for all- increases interest in where it's from.
More importantly, how much more valuable to the country will this information be when displayed as originating from that country, than it would be as "Dr. ___'s" own concoction?
It also allows anyone to treat according to these recipes, which (again, regardless of medicinal merit, which doesn't enter into this)increases wealth, doesn't it? With more people able to provide a thing, doesn't that mean that more goods and services will be changing hands?
I can't answer to the art portion of this; medicine, in my view, is more like mathematics- they're basically offering he formula to the people, so that no one can charge you five bucks every time you use a square.
Mostly because i've been 'solemndragon' online since '94.
It's derived from my name, and i guess i'm pretty attached.
It bothers me when other people use it, because i feel there should be some recourse for the user of an online name. I would like to be able to say that there were no other solemndragons. Never happen- the more i use it, the better the odds that someone will like it and steal it- but it's still mine, and it was original when i came up with it.
(On the other hand, i had a great uncle named john smith, and he wasn't able to use his name anywhere without someone assuming it was fake. There were so many John Smiths in the world, both real and alias, that his name lost value. He said it came in handy when people WERE looking for him. He liked his name, but there were too many similar ones for his to be identifying. A superunique name loses value when copied, a common name comes in handy when trying to hide but not when trying to stand out. The world needs more 'anonymous' possibilities so that we can choose which aspect we want.)
Know what I'd like? A name registry, same as we use for our websites. If i can demonstrate being solemndragon for ten+ years (or at least that no one else was before me) then i should get my name and the rights to use it. And be allowed to refer to that in using my name on games sites, etc.
I know it won't happen, and if it were, there are a half dozen problems with it that i haven't foreseen (buit someone will surely point out in triplicate) but i can still wish.
So I get it. It's not about can or should or how or why, it's about hey, you were you, and now you aren't that version any more on their game, and maybe some discussion of this is not really such a bad idea. I see this as relevant because it's related to online identity in a vital way. It's not quite 'your rights online,' but it's at least an opinion piece on the value of a name.
You think about it- retirees, with lots of free time, not a lot of mobility in some cases, and in all cases, they've seen enough to have an appreciation for where gaming comes from that the youngest gamers just don't have...
it seems pretty natural.
Maybe the answer to the game design is similar to the answer to getting games aimed at women- involve some in the design. I'm sure there are some out there who would be great at it.
because we like to see them judged by humans; it lends us the sense that we are wiser than machines. But it's changing, they use cameras, RFID chips for marathon runners (Thank you rosie, we now have 'rosie chips') so i think that as long as we have PEOPLE supervising the tech involved, we'll be a lot more comfortable. If it's announced by a person, it's still a human game.
Besides... if we could replace the ref with a robot, what i want to know is, how soon can we replace some of the players?
i would add one to this: the concept of need. Lateness on the part of a patient is more inconsiderate than lateness on the part of a doctor.
I had to wait hours once for my neurologist, who ran very, very late. When he came in, he apologised profusely.
I told him what my mum always told me: Never to mind waiting in the doctor's office, because they take the time that is needed with their patients. A doctor who has made you wait will make sure that you get the care that you need, and if YOU'RE ever the one who's in need of the extra time, you'll be glad that they'll disrupt the schedule for it.
In this case, my neurologist had been treating- on an emergency basis- a stroke victim, and couldn't just walk away to pick up a phone. I didn't mind, because if i ever need the emergency care, i'd be glad to know that it was there for me.
i'm [currently] hooked on blizzard. Diablo II. Price of the box and the expansion pack. It's an old game, but you know what? I got into it late because it was still around, bought a copy, bought a friend a copy, watched eight friends buy copies, and my team joined some online buddies a little while back for a group adventure as a change from the usual.
(Go ahead, tell me it's an old game, i'm crazy, just some n00b girl gamer, whatever. i'll wait.)
Done? Good. Here's my point:
They're still selling boxes. Granted, they've got other irons in the fire, but it got some of MY money. I don't think i'll be paying for subscription models. I would rather pay for upgrades and expansion packs... so that's what we're looking for now that we're in the market for a new game. (My team conquered Baal last night!)
I live in Boston, and without mass transit, we'd all have trouble getting to work- the roads are underequipped to handle the traffic we have, let alone more. But that's close to your point- wifi won't improve the economy, and is very likely to be a drain on it in most neighbourhoods. Even the MBTA is only starting to look at options for solving their budget woes, and they are used constantly by a huge percentage of the working population.
there are other places where the money could be more useful. Say, for example, supporting those libraries, where multiple resources are available for all, for free.
But there is one place i think wireless is really splendid in Boston- the airport. People arrive and leave and can use wireless there. It makes sense to me that places where people wait to do business would have wireless. I think that shopping malls, and economic centres might look into it, and that towns might make incentives for them to do so. Because these are places where people congregate, and it would be worth it to know that there were a few places that you could go and be almost sure to get a signal. If it were run by the town, why not have it in parks and public buildings, where people most often gather?
Simply put: they aren't likely to. Mass transport systems haven't gotten rid of the highways, bike trails, or your own two feet, so i figure public WiFi won't kill off cable modems, etc. Public versions of a thing don't necessarily override the free enterprise system, they just try to provide a lowest common denominator.
Whether this effort does this successfully is what's being debated. It's likely that you will be able to get other forms of internet connection, because having a public version will just give the companies who provide it a point of comparison. But people who will be able to have at least that standard, which may be the point.
My problem with this effort is not the government possibly controlling internet access, it's a.) the governments that try to control web _content_, i.e. China, and b.) the fact that WiFi is useless for people too poor to afford computers. Are they going to provide computers, too? Because the cost per person goes up substantially at that rate- without it, though, it's a profound waste of money anyway.
Me, I'd like my town to have more funding for the library, which lets kids use the computers for homework if they don't have them at home. Or the digital bridge projects out there, which provide home computers for families that don't have them- and training to be able to use them.
Burqa. Yes, i agree with you on the *right* to take the picture. It's impossible to tell your intent, and people may get upset, but we're all on camera a lot in our lives. I often cover my face if strangers try to take my picture, but that's just me. I don't object to security cameras, though- seen too many cases of security cameras being the last anybody saw of someone.
as someone whose disability is not clearly visible, i'd have a problem with a random stranger snapping pictures, too. For all she knew, you were just a stalker choosing a mark.
Oh, wait. This was a stranger, not someone you knew, and you WERE taking a picture of her car for the purpose of later identification.
Frankly, i might not have 'retaliated' by snapping your picture; i might have stayed where i was and called the cops, just to make sure you weren't in the habit of trailing disabled women. I understand that you felt that she was abusing parking space privileges, but you have no way of knowing whether she had a disability just by whether she could stand unaided, and really, the way to fight such abuse (in my opinion) is to push for stricter laws and regulation, so that she will have to prove disability under her doctor's care.
I push for those laws- and i'm disabled.
On the other hand, if she was parking without a placard or plate, i'd simply call the traffic division in the hopes that she'd get a ticket... there's a reason those placards are designed to hang in your car, not hide in a purse!/supports enforcement of this rule, too...
What's done is done, but i think i might have been bothered by it, if it happened to me how it's presented here.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this is a question of whether the ends justify the means. From a personal standpoint, it doesn't matter, because from a legal stadpoint, it's very clear.
If you feel you want more for the house, you're allowed to refuse to sell before it has been agreed on, or to ask for more before it's been agreed on. What you are NOT allowed to do is also pretty clear, though- you're not allowed to resort to fraud. This means that having collusion (your friends or the lending agents) feed you insider information; you're not allowed to have people pose as buyers who have made a good faith offer for the house, and you're not allowed to deny problems with the house or make untrue claims about it. This is very basic stuff, because the principle of the law is that the ends DO NOT justify the means.
This is to prevent you from keeping them from a fair search. Yes, you could argue that they still could walk away, but they have you and your friends lying to them in an attempt to create psychological pressure to buy.
In turn, THEY aren't generally allowed to make an agreed upon offer, and then back out- there are often penalties written right in to the contract about this that amount to, "If you change your mind, you forfeit $X," just to keep people from making offers that are NOT in good faith, thus interfering with your ability to sell the house to anyone else.
It doesn't matter what one's moral stance is; from a legal standpoint, deception in the sales process is not all right.
the problem is that the raid gamers skew it against casuals, because they cange te standard. It doesn't help that people come up to me and mock my lowly armor (most of which i made ingame myself!) just because i'm not a raid gamer.
i like the game... i'm growing to dislike some of the players...
there are TWO stories. One is the background, which i can't recite because i ignore it every chance i get. The second is that they frequently have world event- where there is a battle, with war preparations, or there is a new enemy who appears for awhile, or things like that.
I try to ignore those, too.
So yes, there is a story, and there is endgame content that people can do, but not everyone bothers and it isn't really worth it to me as a casual gamer.
In fact, as long as i'm posting in a gaming thread: Hey blizzard! More stuff for casual gamers!
All right, I'll say it:
The guy has done something that even einstein couldn't do: He made serious physics breakthroughs accessible to and understandable for the little guys, those of us who DON'T get it and need someone to not talk down to us while we try.
he's almost unreal for most of us, a kind of science god. His illness is our only reminder that he's one of us at all. I applaud him for being able to laugh at it, while i am overwhelmed by his science-fu.
I'm not qualified for the job, but i envy the lucky s.o.b. who is.
And you know what? physical access to places depends on stairrs, or sometimes, wheelchair ramps- in science, it depends on the mental ability, and he climbs stairs three at a time there while i'm hanging on to the handrails and crawling up hanging onto other people's feet. i'm amazed by how much of the physics universe the guy as claimed as his own. The rest of us are wheeling slowly up the ramps he built to make science more understandable, and damned grateful to have them.
Ah wants me a science crutch!!!!
It has to be violas; we all know that violins is never the answer.
i don't want to raid. I don't want to join 39 people i don't know to bicker over loot. I want to play the game, stop when i want to stop, get to sleep at a reasonable hour, and pick up again on another day. I want more chains of quests that are interesting and not more "Get me that book," or "go talk to the person in the next room."
I don't want PVP, but i am perfectly happy with there being pvp servers for those that do. The raids are out of hand, some of us just want to play solo, in a world with other players, and blizzard doesnt' support that very much at all.
my sweetheart and i play WoW together.
We are running out of patience for it, largely because our server has lots of idiots. We figure we probably will get to max out 1 character each and then maybe just stop.
We refer to it as 'that stupid game.'
it's fun, and obsessively interesting. it's BIG, there are a lot of places to go and things to do. But it's also like the real world, in that the biggest problem is other people. And anonymity + interaction=complete and total anarchy, for a lot of people.
Not for us, which is why we ended up with a 2 person guild and don't raid. the game absorbs a huge amount of time, and we already have a lot of other projects. It's mostly what we do when we would otherwise be playing with the console games.
(He is great at FPS, i'm the point and click gamer, so we've compromised and ended up in WoW. I'm curious to see what we agree on next.)
Actually, a lot of players DO see it as paying twice, and are therefore *willing* to on those grounds. If you can, it must be ethical, right? they argue that their time is worth more than the gold farmer's, and so they aren't losing anything by paying for their progress. (This is also the rationale used by account-sharing 'power levellers,' who pay other people to level their characters. This is also against the terms of service agreement.)
People spending the money think that they are therefore getting ahead, you're correct. And they are (sort of, if getting further along a track that doesn't go anywhere can be considered 'ahead...')but they're doing it in a way that breaks the terms they agreed to in making an account.
*Sigh*
heh. Tough part is, the spells never worked unless you got the words exactly the way they were spelled in the game. Bad game for people who type poorly. :(
/looks at my own username, backs away slowly
Plus, how many times can you kill the same dragon?
*never mind*
kill dragon, get potion. Kill dragon, get potion. At least in WoW, you can play forever without having to lose stats.
My big problem with buying wow gold is that really, i'm then paying NOT to play *the game i pay money to play.* The illogic of it hurts my brain. A lot of people justify it by saying that they're enhancing their gaming experience, but honestly, that's the goal of ANY money-making experience, in any economy, and the ethical questions don't disappear just because it's an ingame experience not the day-job world.
(i wonder how weird it must be to be a gold farmer, and have the ingame world BE the day job world)
For Kesmai, all i have to say id: asak nungi irga lubluyi.
And i probably spelled it wrong.
Here's the problem with farmers. A casual player can make gear that sells for 10g in the auction house. This will enable them to equip their character pretty well, not great but not bad, with a new item that someone else produced or looted.
But wait! Gold farmers mean that for a little real money, everybody who is willing to pay can suddenly have as much gold as they need.
This means that prices go up, because the standard is now that everyone has 1000 gold, not 10.
Damn.
Now all of a sudden, everything costs more- to anyone who doesn't buy WoW gold. Before, only a few players had thousands of gold. That kept the playing field relatively even. Now, the playing field gets evened once again, but at higher prices.
This creates problems. a.) the gold farmers sell low level items (potions, etc) far cheaper and drive down the prices i'll get for anything low level i make
b) they increase the prices on everything else, because everyone can afford more.
So anything i can farm, i lose out on the profit of because there are so many gold farmers doing this to get the gold in the first place (items that other people need for potions, or the potions themselves, for example, are cheap. This is useful for those buying potions but not useful as a production skill anymore, because what's the point when you won't for them what you need? The whole skill class has basically been outsourced to third world countries because people want WoW gold and are willing to spend money but not time on it. It's not as much of a problem in a larger economy, but in WoW you have a small, server-wide economy with money pouring in from the farmers.)
and anything that's a dropped item somebody else would sell is infinitely MORE expensive because they assume we all have bought the gold to pay for it.
If you are the only kid in third grade with a $1 allowance and everybody else has $10 allowances, that's what this becomes. The kids are trading $10 things at $100 rates. If i played full time, i'd get gear drops i could sell for high rates- which would still continue to buy me less and less as farmed money poured into the economy.
Inflation in games is a lot easier to trace than inflation in the real world. It's a much smaller economy- until you drag the 'outer' economy into it.
I think we should be banned from BUYING gold, too.
Report sellers, report bots, the next time someone whispers to you ingame to visit their WoWgold site, report it under the behaviour tag in the reporting options. This becomes especially important for casual players, who just can't compete.
I know, isn't that just an artificial control? No, it's more like cracking down on forgery- this is wealth that was created for the purpose of selling it, which makes it an otherwise unnecessary element in the economy that hurts the whole.
I say yay, keep up the farmer bans.
On an unrelated note, every time i clean out my bookbag, i wish vendors in real life bought the trash...
in soviet russia... you assimilate the computer!
Now, with that out of the way: i'm wondering whether this can be turned to practical application in the near future with cancer treatments. How far away is this?
And what happens if the markers used go awry? How easy would it be to end up with the wrong dose in the wrong place? I know if this were being used on me, i'd only agree to be an 'early adopter' in one of two circumstances- illness with a high risk of fatality, in which case the risks of treatment would outweigh the risk of dying without it, and very minor complaints with very safe remedies, because that way the risks even in the even of misfire are still low.
That leaves a lot of room for serious illnesses to go untreated in the middle, so i'm going to be very curious to watch this technology and see what happens with it.
a.) offtopic- sometime i'm going to have to ask you to explain one of those statements, tom, but not now.
b.) ontopic- people DO pay for 1 atmosphere-level air... anyplace they can't get it naturally. That it is the same is part of its worth, not a detraction from its worth.
nothing else to add, just the observation that even regular air works as an analogy, because you're making something free but not always convenient (software) into something CONVENIENT but not always free for people (cd). A lot like the bottled water- some of which IS tap water.
Instead of being in a tap (online) it's from a bottle (cd.)
This does make the landscape a little more interesting.
s
Both occur.
A copyright is what the owner has, that cannot be taken away. A restriction is what everyone else gets, to prevent them from trying to infringe upon it, set either by governmental authorities or the artist in conjunction with those authorities.
You have the "right" to free speech; i am "restricted" from interfering with it.
In this case, they may or may not have the right to govern discussion regarding players' technical performance, but the question is to what extent the statistics are an original work.
This determines how restricted the rest of us will be legally, in what we do with it.
That's valid. It's good that you are considering these things, even if nothing changes as a result.
The end result is probably a compromise between what you feel is slashdot, and what works when used by thousands, and it ought to trend more towards what you intend than what we ask for. After all, we did start visiting it exactly as it was, and continue visiting with it exactly as it is. Actions are vastly louder than words.
(For what it's worth, i like the green colour. It's the prettiest of all of the news aggregation sites that i'm addicted to.)
For me, the defining-element cluster is skewed more towards the journal circle, and the community, than the front page.
Don't get me wrong, i still read the front page- but it's the people who have kept me here. For all of the trolls and the jerks, there are a lot of people who post genuinely useful stuff. I don't come here to hear it first, i come here to hear it in depth. I come here when i've already read most of the news i'll read for the day. Sometimes that community conversation doesn't work as well, but sometimes it offers a lot more background and related information than a news site could. It depends on the day. When it does, it's worth the days that it doesn't.
THAT is a defining element of slashdot for me.
Why do we need to know who submitted it?
... posting the number of approved stories on their info page? All of the prestige... without the front page description of which story is theirs. Or, if attribution is necessary, no links for anyone, just a byline. Since most submitters are NOT submitting their own work, and are arguably mostly getting their news from other news aggregation sites, this is not like they are submitting something that needs extensive citation.
If you edit and check it, you stand behind the work submitted and posted, right?
This is not posted as a tongue in cheek jab about editing. I understand that you are serious about the site, and since you are serious about the site, you don't want to have to worry about popularity contests or such nonsense.
Well, there's an easy fix.
Take away the popularity incentive for submitting stories. The only people who need to know are you and the submitter. Award some other incentive, if you need to- submitter points, which can be used for something, i don't know.
What about just
The other result of taking away that link, and possibly the direct byline, is that it would increase the responsibility on the editors, which would lead to less public muttering about irresponsibility (regardles sof whether warranted in that instance or not.) There can't be any question whether the editor read it if the editor's is the name on the piece. It means that they didn't just accept it because of who submitted it- they had to read it, make sure it was informative and editorially sound, and then post it on the site.
Thank you for taking public opinion on this.
i think (disclaimer: i am not an economist, and haven't balanced my chequebook in long enough that any financial advisement from me should inspire skepticism, at best) that making everything free doesn't destroy business in the traditional healer realm- how much interest in tourism, etc, will be drummed up by having this cultural background available for people to peruse? Completely aside from any medical value the therapies may or may not have, this is interesting from a cultural standpoint, and for that reason, making it free and available- in particular, the being free lends to its availability for all- increases interest in where it's from.
More importantly, how much more valuable to the country will this information be when displayed as originating from that country, than it would be as "Dr. ___'s" own concoction?
It also allows anyone to treat according to these recipes, which (again, regardless of medicinal merit, which doesn't enter into this)increases wealth, doesn't it? With more people able to provide a thing, doesn't that mean that more goods and services will be changing hands?
I can't answer to the art portion of this; medicine, in my view, is more like mathematics- they're basically offering he formula to the people, so that no one can charge you five bucks every time you use a square.
I get it.
Mostly because i've been 'solemndragon' online since '94.
It's derived from my name, and i guess i'm pretty attached.
It bothers me when other people use it, because i feel there should be some recourse for the user of an online name. I would like to be able to say that there were no other solemndragons. Never happen- the more i use it, the better the odds that someone will like it and steal it- but it's still mine, and it was original when i came up with it.
(On the other hand, i had a great uncle named john smith, and he wasn't able to use his name anywhere without someone assuming it was fake. There were so many John Smiths in the world, both real and alias, that his name lost value. He said it came in handy when people WERE looking for him. He liked his name, but there were too many similar ones for his to be identifying. A superunique name loses value when copied, a common name comes in handy when trying to hide but not when trying to stand out. The world needs more 'anonymous' possibilities so that we can choose which aspect we want.)
Know what I'd like? A name registry, same as we use for our websites. If i can demonstrate being solemndragon for ten+ years (or at least that no one else was before me) then i should get my name and the rights to use it. And be allowed to refer to that in using my name on games sites, etc.
I know it won't happen, and if it were, there are a half dozen problems with it that i haven't foreseen (buit someone will surely point out in triplicate) but i can still wish.
So I get it. It's not about can or should or how or why, it's about hey, you were you, and now you aren't that version any more on their game, and maybe some discussion of this is not really such a bad idea. I see this as relevant because it's related to online identity in a vital way. It's not quite 'your rights online,' but it's at least an opinion piece on the value of a name.
You think about it- retirees, with lots of free time, not a lot of mobility in some cases, and in all cases, they've seen enough to have an appreciation for where gaming comes from that the youngest gamers just don't have...
it seems pretty natural.
Maybe the answer to the game design is similar to the answer to getting games aimed at women- involve some in the design. I'm sure there are some out there who would be great at it.
because we like to see them judged by humans; it lends us the sense that we are wiser than machines. But it's changing, they use cameras, RFID chips for marathon runners (Thank you rosie, we now have 'rosie chips') so i think that as long as we have PEOPLE supervising the tech involved, we'll be a lot more comfortable. If it's announced by a person, it's still a human game.
Besides... if we could replace the ref with a robot, what i want to know is, how soon can we replace some of the players?
i would add one to this: the concept of need. Lateness on the part of a patient is more inconsiderate than lateness on the part of a doctor.
I had to wait hours once for my neurologist, who ran very, very late. When he came in, he apologised profusely.
I told him what my mum always told me: Never to mind waiting in the doctor's office, because they take the time that is needed with their patients. A doctor who has made you wait will make sure that you get the care that you need, and if YOU'RE ever the one who's in need of the extra time, you'll be glad that they'll disrupt the schedule for it.
In this case, my neurologist had been treating- on an emergency basis- a stroke victim, and couldn't just walk away to pick up a phone. I didn't mind, because if i ever need the emergency care, i'd be glad to know that it was there for me.
*raises hand*
i'm [currently] hooked on blizzard. Diablo II. Price of the box and the expansion pack. It's an old game, but you know what? I got into it late because it was still around, bought a copy, bought a friend a copy, watched eight friends buy copies, and my team joined some online buddies a little while back for a group adventure as a change from the usual.
(Go ahead, tell me it's an old game, i'm crazy, just some n00b girl gamer, whatever. i'll wait.)
Done? Good. Here's my point:
They're still selling boxes. Granted, they've got other irons in the fire, but it got some of MY money. I don't think i'll be paying for subscription models. I would rather pay for upgrades and expansion packs... so that's what we're looking for now that we're in the market for a new game. (My team conquered Baal last night!)
Any recommendations?
I live in Boston, and without mass transit, we'd all have trouble getting to work- the roads are underequipped to handle the traffic we have, let alone more. But that's close to your point- wifi won't improve the economy, and is very likely to be a drain on it in most neighbourhoods. Even the MBTA is only starting to look at options for solving their budget woes, and they are used constantly by a huge percentage of the working population.
there are other places where the money could be more useful. Say, for example, supporting those libraries, where multiple resources are available for all, for free.
But there is one place i think wireless is really splendid in Boston- the airport. People arrive and leave and can use wireless there. It makes sense to me that places where people wait to do business would have wireless. I think that shopping malls, and economic centres might look into it, and that towns might make incentives for them to do so. Because these are places where people congregate, and it would be worth it to know that there were a few places that you could go and be almost sure to get a signal. If it were run by the town, why not have it in parks and public buildings, where people most often gather?
Simply put: they aren't likely to. Mass transport systems haven't gotten rid of the highways, bike trails, or your own two feet, so i figure public WiFi won't kill off cable modems, etc. Public versions of a thing don't necessarily override the free enterprise system, they just try to provide a lowest common denominator.
Whether this effort does this successfully is what's being debated. It's likely that you will be able to get other forms of internet connection, because having a public version will just give the companies who provide it a point of comparison. But people who will be able to have at least that standard, which may be the point.
My problem with this effort is not the government possibly controlling internet access, it's a.) the governments that try to control web _content_, i.e. China, and b.) the fact that WiFi is useless for people too poor to afford computers. Are they going to provide computers, too? Because the cost per person goes up substantially at that rate- without it, though, it's a profound waste of money anyway.
Me, I'd like my town to have more funding for the library, which lets kids use the computers for homework if they don't have them at home. Or the digital bridge projects out there, which provide home computers for families that don't have them- and training to be able to use them.
Burqa. Yes, i agree with you on the *right* to take the picture. It's impossible to tell your intent, and people may get upset, but we're all on camera a lot in our lives. I often cover my face if strangers try to take my picture, but that's just me. I don't object to security cameras, though- seen too many cases of security cameras being the last anybody saw of someone.
as someone whose disability is not clearly visible, i'd have a problem with a random stranger snapping pictures, too. For all she knew, you were just a stalker choosing a mark.
/supports enforcement of this rule, too...
Oh, wait. This was a stranger, not someone you knew, and you WERE taking a picture of her car for the purpose of later identification.
Frankly, i might not have 'retaliated' by snapping your picture; i might have stayed where i was and called the cops, just to make sure you weren't in the habit of trailing disabled women. I understand that you felt that she was abusing parking space privileges, but you have no way of knowing whether she had a disability just by whether she could stand unaided, and really, the way to fight such abuse (in my opinion) is to push for stricter laws and regulation, so that she will have to prove disability under her doctor's care.
I push for those laws- and i'm disabled.
On the other hand, if she was parking without a placard or plate, i'd simply call the traffic division in the hopes that she'd get a ticket... there's a reason those placards are designed to hang in your car, not hide in a purse!
What's done is done, but i think i might have been bothered by it, if it happened to me how it's presented here.