Dwe warship Dogar and Kazon!

Unvanquished is a successor to Tremulous a free, open source game that was originally a quake 3 mod (but has been its own standalone game for quite some time). It is an asymmetric FPS, aliens vs humans that has some similarities to Natural Selection, but has been around much longer and is much better balanced.

Tribes Ascend is a good free-to-play FPS based upon the original Tribes series. Jetpack skiing with explosive discs is fun.

Dwarf fortress is a surprisingly detailed simulation game about dwarves, who build fortresses. So yeah. Losing is fun.

EVE Online is an MMO that is unique in having an impressively detailed economy, and largely lives and breathes by player-directed drama. It also boasts some rather good parody songs like this one.

Do be aware that some similar sites may already exist, or in the case of technocrat.net, have already existed.

I didn't even hear the past two times this happened, but that's because to a large extent I wasn't really here back then.

Please note that you cannot train for that ship with a trial account, on account of the fact that you cannot train Cloaking or Covert Ops. A complete list of skills you cannot train on a trial account can be found here. Furthermore, ultimately, even though you could train fleet command in about 20 days, actually fitting a cheetah would take closer to 30 (small projectile turret, motion prediction, basic fitting skills, etc).

I think a large reason for the skills that cannot be used on trial accounts is the fact that some skills with attractive names cannot actually be effectively used within a few weeks (battleship fleet command), or are really only useful to established players anyways (cynosural field generation). Cloaking is probably an exception here, but hisec might be a more dangerous if people's trial alts could cloak up.

Well, it depends on what you are doing. Guaranteed ISK is very hard to get starting out, but you could be making 2M ISK an hour mining tritanium (which requires a not quite AFK level of attention) in a venture in hisec after a couple hours of play. However, doing nothing but sit and mine is boring, and in the grand scheme of things, not that profitable (though probably a great deal more profitable after something like this happens). You can do missions in lieu of this, in fact I recommend it to some extent because that will give you some insight into how to perform other tasks in the game, but will be less profitable starting out.

After some small amount of training, you can start "exploring" (this is an eve term with a specific meaning). In hisec, the profitable ones are primarily data sites and combat signatures, though relic sites can be worth your time. Combat signatures are only profitable if they escalate, but I digress. Ultimately, your goal is to score an expensive item from one of these, which could easily be worth over 100M ISK, quite possibly significantly more. If you focus on this, and especially if you can get someone to help you with combat signatures early on, you could have such an item found and sold within a week of exploration.

Once you have some capital to play with, options of earning more ISK open up to you.

For this reason, 16M ISK generally falls into the category of "very disposable" by established players. Such players could buy almost 14,000 rounds of PvP ammo (in this case based off of the current Jita price for Republic Fleet Phased Plasma L) to be fired at the rate of 4 per second or something like that, all for about that same price.

"Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice"

- Hanlon's Razor

Mod parent up.

When used improperly, statistics are a dangerous tool.

Enter RequestPolicy, an add-on for firefox that does essentially this.

There are some people, and a considerable number of them, for whom that doesn't really matter. Cheap house, cheap car, decent food, good computer, good internet. I don't need that many luxury goods. I just wish I had more time to make use of what I have.

More importantly, if people are becoming more efficient (since machines and computers can assist with or even take over some tasks that humans used to do), but don't work less, then we must find more to do. Finally and perhaps more interestingly, working less may make people more efficient, which should presumably increase the standard of living.

Hrm, I'm not entirely sure what makes this insightful. You are completely misrepresenting the four posts you disagree with.

Firstly, the post you link to isn't saying that companies shouldn't turn up a profit, but that managing a company with money as the goal tends to cause the company to lose its focus on what it produces (after all, the focus is on the money). While a company can decrease the quality of its goods or services and seem unaffected for some time, in the long-term that is unsustainable. Surely you have heard the countless stories of companies being run into the ground to enrich the shareholders and leave management with golden parachutes.

As to what you are arguing here, that companies exist to make a profit and have an obligation to do so, I have a question. Make a profit for whom? Naturally, since I am neither upper management, nor a major stockholder, I would prefer that a significant share of the profit go to the employees, including management (indeed, they deserve to be paid well, given some of the shit they put up with), but not to the extent that is common now. I also believe that companies should charge for their services fairly, not pushing their prices up as far as they can, as that leads to economic instability, among other issues. Now attempting to enforce good corporate behavior of any sort can be problematic itself, but what I am trying to say here is that a company does not and should not exist for the profit of its owners alone. To say that a company has no other reason to exist than to turn up profit is an incredibly cynical and (in my opinion) dangerous point of view.

To be honest, a lot of the things things you posted in the parent to the linked post invoke Poe's law for me, and make me wonder if you are just a troll. You misrepresent the linked to poster as advocating government "dictate" an economy, referring to some sort of "socialists or welfare statists" whom who describe as leeches, running an economy. What the posts in the thread you seem to me to be saying was that the services upper management and shareholders provide are not priced according to their added value, but according to their position of ownership, which is rent-seeking.

  Here is the entirety of the linked post, which I generally agree with:

As for the argument you are making here, it is meaningless definitions. No such free market exists, and I believe that it in fact cannot exist. I believe that that defining free market as equality before the law and not discriminating against people so as to create inequality of treatment contradicts allowing unconstrained and unbridled private ownership and operation of property. Furthermore, though this may be taking what you are saying too far, if the government enforces private property as described, has it not effectively by that action alone dictated an economy?

The first link is a poster that seems to agree with you that deficit spending is bad, and who is arguing deficit spending has nothing to do with Keynesian economics, so I don't know what that link is doing here, except to demonstrate that you don't like Keynesian economics. The poster in the second link appears to be trying to demonstrate how people who borrow money need not have at net worth of less than 0, and that Clinton didn't run a deficit (which is something I won't get into). While the poster in the second link does ultimately contend that borrowing money to pay your debts isn't meaningless in another post, what he means by that is that as long as you can continue to borrow money, you can still spend, whereas if you cannot borrow money, your cheques bounce. I believe congress almost failed to agree to lift a restriction preventing them from continuing to borrow money at one point in the recent past.

As for your the rest of your argument, I agree with you that there is something seriously wrong with some of the things going on with the revolving door between the corporate and political spheres, as well as the national debt. However, that is a very obtuse way to state it, and you seem to be arguing from a viewpoint that taxes are immoral, although its hard to tell because some of the context is lost in your interpretation of the links.

TL:DR, this is largely based on misrepresenting the opinions of others, so I'm not sure why this is at +3.

No, no it really isn't. Its just not that simple. For instance, at least the following conditions must be satisfied for this method to work:

1. The business must believe they have something to gain in order to be amenable to such a change. Somewhat simply, the amount of business lost due to boycott must be greater than the potential amount of lost business due to the perception that the airlines are incompetent or less safe. I'm not quite sure we are even at this point yet.

2. The lost business must be sufficient for the airlines to care about the business of people who refuse to fly on account of the TSA. Business can ignore the demands of large groups of consumers. The television networks, as well as the music industry (the latter somewhat less so than it used to be) are good examples of this with respect to bundling and advertisements. This condition will not be fulfilled, because even if all of Slashdot would boycott flying, it would not be enough pressure to equal the potential shame of having to admit the security theater is useless (and that they previously supported it).

3. The business must acknowledge the cause of their loss of business as being directly related to the TSA. The videogame industry is a good example of how an industry can refuse to acknowledge a particular cause for loss of business. In general, only a portion of the business lost due to the TSA will be recorded by the airlines as such. This compounds the difficulty of point 1 and 2, but also could be its own problem if the airlines decided the problem was due to the inconvenience of waiting in slow-moving lines to be processed (this may or may not even refer to the TSA screening). In that case, they may decide to make the TSA more efficient, rather than removing them.

If they decided that was the case, perhaps they would even be correct about most of their customers.

Additionally,

4. The government must not require the airports to keep the TSA intact. This last one is almost certainly irrelevant if the government is as bought as I think it is, but I place it here because the airlines don't technically operate the TSA if my understanding is correct. The government is currently unwilling to change its position, presumably due to the contractors who like the TSA's existence, and the political difficulty of removing an entire department.

TL;DR, so I reiterate, even if all of Slashdot would boycott flying, it would not be enough pressure to equal the potential shame of having to admit the security theater is useless. And I suspect that between corporate business and business that is indeed absolutely necessary (intercontinental travel in general is a PITA without flight) would keep some of the airlines alive enough to completely ignore anything else. Boycotting is always useful, but it isn't the be-all and end-all of consumer politics.

This is why we are where we are. This is one of the biggest reasons (corporate funding being more important, obviously) the republicrats have consistently won the US elections in recent times. I am always reminded, when hearing sentiments like this, of Douglas Adam's description of a particular (fictional) democracy ruled by lizards. The people are not lizards, they just elect the lizards to rule them. Why do they elect lizards?

“Because if they didn’t vote for a lizard,” said Ford, “the wrong lizard might get in.”

Please, do not sacrifice what is practical for the future for the convenience of the present. Surely, regardless of viewpoint, be it socialist or libertarian or what have you, this remains true: that people tend to get the worst government they (as a community) are willing to put up with.

Mod parent up.

TFA notes that she herself recently made an "off-color" joke (although not necessarily of the same quality)

Hrm, while I agree with a good deal of the rest of your post, how does this manage to not include the bulldozer architecture? As a largely AMD customer myself, I'm not sure I can bring myself to call that a "design win".