Winston Zeddemore: Ray. When someone asks you if you're a god, you say, "YES!"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Who's the dumb clown in that clip... The one who got them zapped with his spiel? Or the one that provided the punchline?

The prophecies towns and cities are quite empty, but I find that many Eye of the North, Factions towns still have people. And nowadays they have the daily activities stuff which does help the players that are left gather together: http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki...

You can play with heroes too. Yes it's often fun to go with some random PUG (even if you fail) but sometimes you just want to try a custom team build. It's like having your own customizable army - and I actually like that part of GW1.

GW2 can't be like GW1 - you can't have a noninstanced MMO with the same skills and mechanics of GW1. That said they didn't even seem to really try that much to the point that to me it seems like it's closer to WoW/SWTOR than GW1.

Yes - still playing the first one. I prefer the game mechanics - not so much of that skill tree and gear grind stuff you get in many other MMOs (including in a way Guild Wars 2).

I find Guild vs Guild fun even when my team loses (as long as I don't make too many stupid mistakes :) ). Just don't take it so seriously like some - after all nobody is handing out huge prizes for winning anymore.

Nowadays there's even a group starting Fort Aspenwood matches at about 10pm EST. But not enough players for round the clock nonstop matches so it's far from a full blown revival.

But who knows - the game is still decent for an 8 year old game, so more old players might come back and maybe a few new players join too.

Maybe there might be more players if Anet sold a more affordable and sane PvP package with full PvP unlock (e.g. you get to play all the PvP matches/missions, no need to grind faction to unlock skills, weapon modifiers etc).
compare: http://www.guildwars.com/produ...
with this:http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/PvP_Access_Kit
https://secure.ncsoft.com/cgi-...
https://secure.ncsoft.com/cgi-...
So getting everything unlocked for PvP will either cost you a fair bit of $$$ or a lot of time.

Or you could go instead play games like TF2 where you only need to spend money for silly hats ;).

What if you take the money and assuming you succeed you make the resulting product available to the whole world for the same price (could be zero or more) - donors don't get any preferential treatment.

You may get a lower amount of donations but how much less tax would you pay and how much less work would that involve?

Fiction? So you don't experience the "I am" phenomena? I know that I definitely experience it. And more than a few others claim they do as well.

Note: I'm not talking about free-will. I talking about consciousness.

I don't see how the existence of a time delay between an event and my awareness of it indicates that I am not conscious. Especially if I am conscious of the fact that I am conscious.

If you are actually self-aware but your own awareness of your own awareness isn't enough to prove to yourself that you have self-awareness then it's going to be hard to find any proof that will ever be enough to prove anything about anything to you.

To me that's the only thing I know for sure (and even then it's a very tiny knowledge - I don't know why or how or what exactly it is). The rest of what I know, actually requires some faith.

The "I am" is the main peculiar thing- Consciousness. if you just based it on current known math (and science that I'm aware of), there is no obvious reason why there would be this consciousness phenomenon, which at least I experience (I have faith[1] that many other people experience it but I have no hard evidence that they do). Is it emergent? Why? How? And how do we tell between a genuine one and one that's just simulated - or will consciousness magically emerge in all such simulations?

If you use the "Occam's Razor", why would there be need of this consciousness thing? We could be machines behaving like conscious creatures but not have consciousness. There's no need for it right? Or is there?

As for the simulation thing. It's why I think it's silly for people to be so sure there is no Creator of this universe. It's as silly as entities in a fancy computer game claiming that there is no Creator just because the internal rules of the computer game don't require the existence of one.. But yes you could reasonably claim that based on what you know of this universe's rules and information you _believe_ there is no Creator. But being _sure_ there isn't is a different thing.

Heck for all we know those Creationists might be right in a way and this particular universe instance could really have been created 6000 years ago ;). After all if those astrophysicists start a 13 billion year old universe simulation 5 minutes ago - is their universe simulation 5 minutes old or 13 billion years old?
But what if you run it at a slower/faster subjective time, stop, change things and restart it etc. How old is it then?

[1] Yeah I have faith you have an "imaginary friend" that you call "me", but I don't have hard evidence of it other than I experience the same thing and I don't think I'm that special. Even if one day scientists wire you up and turn stuff on and off it'll still be hard to prove things 100% - since they might just be turning off the ability to write to persistent memory the experience of consciousness and not the consciousness itself. You might actually still be conscious while you are asleep or under anesthesia, it could be just that you can't do much "read" or "write" from/to "main memory" - you might still experience stuff from your senses...

Most shopping malls and commercial buildings don't charge you to use their elevators and escalators. They make their $$$$ elsewhere.

So I'm thinking that at least in some places public transportation should be free, and there shouldn't be an assumption that users have to be charged for it.

It actually costs a fair bit of money and other resources to charge. Imagine if a subway system didn't need ticket booths, turnstiles, etc and people to check that people pay. So how much more would it cost to run it for "free" if you can phase out all of that? How much more subsidy would you need? Or would it even turn out to be cheaper?

Maybe that's not viable for poor places. But I'm thinking richer cities and countries should be make enough money from other things- like land taxes.

Not saying Jeopardy should change their rules to prohibit this particular thing. But the attitude that it's all the rulemakers fault is wrong.

Some sociopaths (companies and people) do/did a lot of arguably bad things just because the written rules allow/allowed them to. Are you going to blame just the rule makers?

Sure they could add a zillion other rules too to prohibit stuff that hasn't been done yet and make the rulebook too big. Or write "default deny" rules to restrict behavior to only a "allowed behaviors" so much so that fewer participants and viewers are interested.

There are a lot of unwritten rules in games (and society). If you're a person who is well aware there are zillions of unwritten rules in daily life you'll know there are unwritten rules in many games involving humans too.

And it's not all black or white. Certain things might be fine if done just once in a while. Just nobody has sat down to decide the exact line where it becomes unacceptable, and maybe nobody has needed to yet.

Often written rules get added when someone has been too much of an asshole. And then rules alone become not enough and you need to resort to 3rd parties like judges.

Regarding your "bard" exploit example- part of the blame goes to the players who exploited it. Since the game might otherwise still be playable and fun for a long time for everyone if a bunch didn't "collectively piss into the pool" just because they could, especially so if they knew the long term consequences. What if it's a free game and so not so well maintained? You could all have an agreement to not abuse it so the game remains playable for more people, or have more players leave and the remaining players spend hours just doing the same thing, abusing the exploit but not having a great advantage over the other players (who do the same thing after all), while getting an arguably less entertaining game experience.

As it has been said: "The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."

And real slashdotters aren't the same target audience those websites serve.

For example here's why the Beta sucks for "real slashdotters"- it hides user IDs. Real slashdot nerds are not afraid of numbers, we're not afraid of extra info, in fact we often thrive on extra info. I've noticed enough imposters around on Slashdot so we need those numbers to more easily tell them apart. Beta also hides times and dates, and other stuff.

We're slashdotters. What's useless noise to normal people might be location coordinates being transmitted at 1200 baud 7O1 Bell 202 to us. If they trying to turn Slashdot into a tech site for people who can't handle extra info, I might as well go to other websites that do it much better.

So every time Slashdot shows me the beta version, I just go do something else. If it stays the same crappy Beta I will just have to go away for longer. I might end up more productive ;).

It's still printing money.

My left hand borrows money from the future and passes them to my right hand which gives you cash. What does that really look like to the rest of the world in practice?

Or how about this, I lend 9 trillion dollars "from the future" to my friends at below market interest rates. My friends make a few millions or even billions with it and pay me back in full (can't be that hard - it's below market rates after all). So how's that not printing money? It may not be printing trillions but it's printing millions or billions.

Yep. Maybe even the blind can drive in such countries? Just add some soft bumpers that beep on collision.

OK maybe not- I think the cyclists might not be happy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

But will it blend?

Seriously though I was wondering why they were using so many different ways to destroy stuff when they could just use the same method to destroy most of them: very high temperatures.

You're not going to recover much from a hard drive that's been in a pool of molten "lava" for a mere 10 seconds.

If you insulate it well it shouldn't take that much power to maintain a pool of lava. Even easier if the site happens to be next to a volcano ;).

Of course you better have many security cameras just in case people try to dispose of people that way.

Someone should also come out with an app/UI that allowed people to have as many and as large virtual displays as they want, and manage them easily (gestures or hotkeys or whatever).

Then you won't need multiple large physical monitors.

Future versions might have cameras or special optics so that you can do augmented reality or just fade in and out of full virtual reality.

Maybe Microsoft will get off their "Metro" butts and do something about it. Same goes for GNOME, KDE etc.

It benefits them?

Most of these companies don't make much money from the server hardware. And they'd benefit more from better server hardware. So it's better for them to share info so that server hardware improves as fast as possible.

Microsoft might have joined the party late because they had some concerns over whether potential customers might build their own hardware, datacenters and thus not use Microsoft's Azure stuff. But given that OpenComputer is already out there with decent designs, I doubt them staying out will make a difference for those cases.

They should appeal. The courts shouldn't allow BSkyB to have a monopoly over using the word "Sky" anymore than they should allow Microsoft to have a monopoly over the word "Windows" ;). (Or some idiot company and the word "Candy"). There's not big confusion when the word Sky is used together with another word- SkyDrive.

So:
Microsoft Windows, yes.
Candy Crush, yes.
BSkyB yes.
SkyOne yes.