I use QT and love it too, but it has some serious drawbacks, from my perspective. The biggest is that it requires a wonky special compilation system. You either have to use the build system they offer (qmake) or you have to manually run their generator yourself (moc - though if you were a masochist you could learn to write out the files moc makes yourself and avoid using it).

I compare every IDE to Eclipse, because that's the best IDE I've seen for any language. But I've never found that CDT, the C++ plugin for Eclipse, is any good. It fails to work out of the box for me and is a pain to configure (but I haven't tried it in a few years). QT Creator, while usable, is really an immature product. There's no support for refactoring, the UI is unintuitive and awkward (for me, at least) and there's lots of little issues with it. Plus you're committed to MingW, which can be a problem depending on what libraries you want to use. Codeblocks is a pretty good IDE, but it doesn't have a QT plugin, so you're left with the problem of dealing with moc files. Visual Studio has a plugin, but it only works with the paid versions.

All of this can be dealt with (and I do) but it's annoying.

So is mine!

Playing sports well does take a lot of mental acuity. Not the same variety that goes into writing good code, but mental acuity all the same. I think it's entirely likely that even if you weren't a physical wreck, you would find it impossible to compete mentally with a professional team-sport athlete in the context of that sporting event.

There's a quality often revered to as "vision" but doesn't actually refer to the athlete's ability to resolve fine detail optically. It refers to having a brain that very quickly sees opportunities, calculates trajectories, and anticipates the movements and intentions of 9-14 other players. If we stuck your brain in a robot body capable of matching their physical abilities, you would still be too stupid (in that domain) to be better than merely good.

Watching sports is another activity entirely, and while some of it certainly is cretinous, jingoism for people with only a couple neurons to rub together, it's entirely possible to be a nerd, an amateur athlete, and to enjoy watching a sport. There are a lot of interesting complexity, strategic decision-making and other highbrow elements even if you disregard the entertainment that is the spectacle of human physical excellence. Personally, I enjoy seeing a guy jump nearly his own height. I think it's neat. I wouldn't watch nothing but that for hours on end, but it seems a little silly to disregard displays of phenomenal ability out of hand.

A lot of people assume that the point of any MMO is to gain levels, items powers and build a character over time, to defeat big monsters, and that anything that detracts from that is bad. Alternatively, you could make a point of a game that isn't about attaching yourself emotionally to some glorified ProgressQuest, and whose interest is the conflict. There's a lot of mileage to be gotten out of the combination of varied builds, fast leveling, player lootings, permanent death, and meaningful in-game factions. Lots of people like quake, and lots of people like MMO style pvp. So what you do is you make a game that combines the interesting aspects of experimenting with a reasonably complex character skillset system, which is something people like about PVP in MMOs, with the action and general painlessness of dieing in Quake.

The other thing wrong with PVP in MMOs is that it is very rarely balanced well. It's often the case that there's either NO pvp or unlimited pvp. A system that allows pvp within a certain power range (as determined by levels, for example) is a way to make it so that PVP doesn't devolve into griefing. Most of the real griefing problems come from letting people of maximum power freely attack those of minimum power. By restricting it within a range that creates at least a reasonable baseline of parity while allowing freedom to fight otherwise, you avoid the stupid kind of pvp which is not fun, and you get a fun style of competition using the RPG style combat mechanics.

I play a mud called carrion fields which works on this model, but it's still a mud (and combines roleplay with the pvp focus I described, which will be a turnoff to people who want pure quake-style action). I've always hoped to see an MMO which applies the same kind of rules, but so far I haven't seen any.

That right there is why your anecdotes are irrelevant to a discussion about what regular users do. Regular people would just laugh at you (Or smile politely while trying not to laugh) if you tried to explain why you use Dvorak. The very idea of someone being *proud* of using a certain keyboard layout is laughable even to me, and I understand what you're talking about.

Aargh. No. Large sample size + random chance causes this. Human brains are lousy at understanding random, so they almost can't grasp that something that appears ordered might be a random fluke. Yes, every now and then you get someone's predictions who are spot on. But guess what, there are millions and millions of people who are constantly making predictions. Purely by random chance, one of those people is going to, on hindsight appear infallible.

Consider a program that generates sets of 365 random 4 or 5 digit numbers and names them. Generate enough such sets and one of them will perfectly predict the dow jones average for every day next year. That is what you're seeing.

There are no amazing people who are always right, there are only amazing people who have always been right so far. My brain is broken like this too and it makes me sad, but the fact is humans are pathetically stupid at apprehending randomness.

People keep saying this system will prevent cheating, but there are still several avenues of cheating possible. Doing so requires either A> hacking the box or B> inserting a device between the box and the internet (possibly as simple as a second ethernet card in your pc, or a local network on which your pc is sniffing and injecting packets).

Possible man-in-the-middle attacks include aimbots (recognize pattern, send inputs that place crosshair over pattern and fire), better-than-human macros (think auto-combos for fighting games), automation (botting in resource-gathering games), etc.

This certainly would eliminate some very common and troublesome cheats, but there's still a lot of stuff it wouldn't stop.

And with traffic slowdowns, biking is often barely slower and occasionally even faster than driving. While biking isn't a good choice for everyone, there are quite a lot of people who probably should bike to work.