nt

it's not rare, it's just well concealed ;)

Guild Wars 1 had some skills that split to PvE and PvP versions for balancing reasons. The PvP stuff takes in effect in PvP matches.

Too bad Arenanet/NCSoft has mostly abandoned Guild Wars 1 and only a few play it nowadays.

It was a great game from the game mechanics perspective. Many like to praise Guild Wars 2 for doing away with the Holy Trinity, but the fact was Guild Wars 1 wasn't really based on the Holy Trinity from the start. In both PvE and PvP there were far more possible roles than Tank, Healer, DPS. There are shutdown builds, PvE minion masters, PvE runner, PvP split, PvP flag runner, frontline, linebacking, later on there was stuff like PvE spirit spammers, shadowform assasins and so on.

For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
This is a Guild vs Guild game where two split elementalists split off from their main team to go against a monk (healer) who is supposed to help defend the base (and who should have called for reinforcements on seeing more than one split ele).

Then there are spike team builds where you need a bit more timing and coordination: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Then here's a guy playing a shutdown mesmer: http://www.twitch.tv/koodikoir...

And not least for PvE you can have Heroes - which are a bit like semi-autonomous player controlled NPCs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
(there used to be PvP where you had heroes, but Anet removed that PvP format, shame really).

Problem was/is Guild Wars 1 was not so great from the community and social perspective (you can't send messages to people who are offline, no auction). And you can't queue up for PvP matches while doing PvE or other stuff.

On a related note:
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazi...

Seriously, in my opinion if an entity can declare in the USA (for example) earnings and other stuff as its own, borrow money using it as collateral, and decide how that $$$$ or stuff is used, then that entity actually owns the stuff and should pay the relevant taxes.

So many corporations are saying to shareholders and everyone else that the huge profits are theirs and yet turn to the tax dept and say no they didn't make any profit - the profits belong to some company in Ireland or wherever else. In my opinion that's fraudulent from an ethical point of view.

Say you tried to do the same thing - declare some $$$$$$ income in official public announcements/filings to everyone, borrow money using that income, order "unrelated people (who somehow have similar names as yours)" to use that income to buy stuff. Do you think you'd get away with telling the Tax Dept that the income isn't yours and you don't have to pay taxes on it?

Maybe this would cause some companies to fully move out from the USA to other countries. But at least they would no longer benefit from what the USA provides without paying their fair share.

Uh the pixar lamps have more emotion than the actors in the phantom menace.

That movie was so bad - it seemed to me like most of the actors were just reading their lines for the first time, and then George Lucas goes "CUT! OK that's good, let's go make more dresses for Amidala".

It's like someone doing a presentation for the first time and reading what's written on it line by line vs someone doing it for the 100th time and going "fuck the slide, now let me tell you a story". It takes a while for actors to figure out who their character should be and how the character would and should act.

And that sort of thing results in Han Solo's famous in-character "I know" to Leia's "I love you" instead of the boring forgettable "I love you, too" that was apparently in the script.

That's why you hire actors - for their input - they'll tell you that their character shouldn't do X and should and would do Y instead. They might not always be right, but the good ones often are since they're focusing on that one character whereas you as the director are doing a lot of other things. The original writer might write a lot of stuff that works in a book, but doesn't work in a movie.

Someone earlier said acting was lying. But it's a higher form of lying where you are true to the character. Just like the Joker hospital explosion scene when not all the explosions went off as planned, and Heath Ledger improvised and turned the fault into a cool feature.

A nonactor like me could "tell the same lies" but not be believable as that character at all.

How about this: http://www.businessinsider.com...

I don't really know how good the research actually is, given its claim that nobody could see blue till modern times. I'm pretty sure the Israelites knew and saw blue quite a long time ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But that article is also about how language may change how you see the world ;).

I think the next job would be to see what happens when it starts rusting a bit or gets scratched/nicked or gets heated up or temperature cycled. See how much of the strength is lost.

I wouldn't rely on the material for important stuff till I knew how the material can fail and how well it fails.

And the point of submarines with nuclear missiles is to make a nuclear capable enemy more convinced that MAD is really MAD. They can't wipe out all your nuclear missile silos and survive because you have enough hidden "nuclear missile silos" aka submarines in the ocean to wipe them out.

The oceans are big places, you might be able to locate submarines that you already know the rough location of. But how are you going to bounce laser light off a hull if you're not even within 50km of the submarine?

Wake detection could work better, however if the submarines don't move that fast and if they are deep underwater they won't leave as big wakes.

Or have a "deadman switch" trigger a script to update it with preset/random stuff, or have some prankster update it for you: http://tech.slashdot.org/comme...

e.g. Justin Morg: Oops... Looks like I'm dead. Damn... :(
Tuesday at 10:00pm

Justin Morg likes 10 ways to tell that you are really dead
Tuesday at 10:02pm

Justin Morg: Anyone have a res handy? Urgent!
                        Justin Morg needs a resurrection! Give him one and you'll get HadesVille points!
Tuesday at 10:13pm via HadesVille

Justin Morg: Where's the restore from quick-save option when you really really need it. Sigh...
Tuesday at 10:17pm

Justin Morg: On the bright side, I guess I don't have to show up for work tomorrow :) @Boss.
Tuesday at 10:20pm

Justin Morg: Hmm, wonder what time the funeral will be tomorrow. I'd hate to be late ;). Haha I kill me sometimes (but not this time, it was Professor Plum with the candlestick!).
Tuesday at 10:32pm

Justin Morg: I guess I'll call it a night, no point doing the graveyard shift, don't want to be like a zombie tomorrow...
Tuesday at 10:50pm

Justin Morg: Good morning! I'm up! OK not so good and not so up. Oh well. At least the mortician made me smile, put stitches in my side too.
Wednesday at 7:30am

Justin Morg likes What's worse than waking up early in the morning? Not waking up at all!
Wednesday at 7:32am

Justin Morg: I guess I'll skip breakfast, no stomach for it today... But I'd die for a cup of coffee :p.
Wednesday at 7:35am

Justin Morg: Wow, people are actually coming to my funeral!
Wednesday at 8:43am

Justin Morg likes a minute of silence
Wednesday at 9:01am

Justin Morg: Aww don't cry... OK so I'll really be forever in your debt, but hey I did say the payback's gonna be "out of this world" right? XD
Wednesday at 9:05am

Justin Morg likes The Sweet By and By
Wednesday at 9:10am

Justin Morg: @MaryNotMarried now's the time to ask that pesky aunt "When's your turn" just like she does to you at weddings... Haha!
Wednesday at 9:13am

Justin Morg likes short sermons and even shorter skirts
Wednesday at 9:20am

Justin Morg: ok Human Torch time!
Wednesday at 9:30am

Justin Morg: getting kinda warm in here... I hate stupid ties and suits.
Wednesday at 9:35am

Justin Morg: SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSMOKIN'!
Wednesday at 9:37am

Justin Morg: Flame on!
Wednesday at 9:40am

Justin Morg: The ultimate fat burning program... Watch the pounds melt away. And never come back- 100% guaranteed!
Wednesday at 9:45am

Justin Morg: ok I guess I can fit in that sexy "size nothing" urn now... Check out my new curves... Hey guys, I'm coming out of the closet! Just kidding! Don't look like you've just seen a ghost.
Wednesday at 9:55am

Justin Morg: It is very dark. I wonder if grues eat ashes.
Wednesday at 10:00am

Plus a lot of the calculations don't take into account a finite lifetime and low social mobility.

If you're some poor guy stuck in some minimum wage job, your odds of ending up with > $100 million are near zero. Now if you started your own business there's a higher chance of you becoming a millionaire or multimillionaire but the odds of getting >$100 million still are low plus the effort is much higher. There are also other risks involved- there are lots of people with failed businesses, just fewer of them sell books or give interviews on how they failed and failed again and still haven't succeeded.
Yes there are people who won the "genetic lottery" and have the energy and endurance to work 2 or more jobs and NOT die/break, but for the rest - what really are their odds of going from burger flipper to having hundreds of millions?

So if you're poor and wanted to be merely normal "rich" don't bother with lottery tickets - just try to invest what little you earn. But if you want to be swimming in hundreds of millions of dollars within your lifetime, buying a powerball ticket is a rational decision (especially when the jackpot gets big).

If you want philosophical, it could be something we might never know for sure.

For example, in theory we could create a simulation of a steady state universe with rules that we decide on. And inside that universe, by that universe's rules the "before" could have gone on for an infinity, and there's no way to know that wasn't the case.

But by our universe's rules we could have started up that simulation 10 seconds ago and taken a week to design it. Or we could even have made copies of it and started up slightly different versions, or even have a few big bang versions. How old would these universes be? Billions of years old? 10 seconds? Depends on your perspective doesn't it?

And how would those "inside" know what's going on for sure? Unless perhaps somehow told by those "outside".

Can you imagine a country where the leaders preach that women have natural defenses against rape, having nukes? You wouldn't credit such a country with having electricity.

It is not just cream that rices to the top.