IMHO, or the opinions of others.
There has been a lot of discussion lately, in the Run-Up to Blizzcon, about Auto-leveling. Apparently there has been rumor and speculation about the next expansion deploying the same style of auto-leveling across all of the game that is employed in Legion areas, where the mobs around you are leveled to your strength [level?] or vice-versa.
I vote NO on this. There are too many aspects of the game that have grown up over the years that would be trashed by this change.
Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrum and others have been warning of “The Singularity” for some time now.
In their scenario, an AI wakes up one day and is suddenly smarter than any human, and alone, or by coercing humans to help it, this single AI either takes over the world, or helps we poor dumb humans out of all of our problems in a flash of intelligent light.
On the other hand, Daniel Dennett talks at length on youtube and in his books about the power of culture, the power of memes and “Intuition Pumps” and other tools for thinking. It seems to me that the Singularity Folks have it wrong and Dennett is a lot closer to the truth.
Let’s run the numbers. For a private University- Such as Harvard.
The Endowment is about $40 Billion and the Operating Budget is a little over $4 Billion.
So what does it cost to go to Harvard?
So, based on the student population and the expenses per student, the students only contribute about 10% of the annual budget of the University. So it could easily be FREE to go to this University and the University would not go broke. After all, they are making more then 6% on their huge endowment, which is more than $2 BILLION with a B every year in income on their endowment. On which they pay no taxes. Yep. Universities pay no taxes. So what about the students in “Professional Programs”? Well those folks “Live at Home” and their expenses are paid by their employers, right? No? Shame on them.
Other private institutions and I dare say, state institutions are in a similar situation. So why is college tuition going up? Why are these institutions hoarding their endowments rather than making college affordable? Why is Yale running an expensive golf course at government expense – that is, not paying taxes on it?
Pick the college that you are interested in and Google it for yourself.
University should be free for everyone in the US – Tuition and Reasonable on-campus expenses should be paid. The Rip-Off business of College Loans should Go Out of Business and all student debt should be forgiven. Colleges are in the business of selling mortgages on the futures of our young people and we as a society should stop it.
That’s my 2 cents.
:ww
So just how do you level these days?
I’m back to Wow after playing back in 2011 – 2013, so a lot of things have changed. As I mentioned in my last Wow post about Economics, the leveling experience is different in many ways. When I restarted in the May 2017, I had some characters up to 85 or so, both Horde and Alliance, and some saved gold. My goal was to build a realm of about a dozen Alliance toons starting with a DK that was already 85, a Hunter in low 80’s and a few other lower level toons. I’m an Altaholic so I try to play all the classes and many of the races.
Here are some tips that I’ve learned about how best to level.
(1) Take advantage of Heirlooms. With a 10% Exp boost for each piece and the power they give, they are worth the gold, even if you need to use a Wow Token to get and upgrade them. I splurged and have both Agility and Intellect Mail as well as Plate and Cloth sets. 32 Total, all upgraded to Level 100. Sure I could get 3 more for the side car mount that comes with the Achievement at 35, but I don’t have any more toons lower than level 20, so everybody already rides. Honored rep with your guild allows you to buy helms and legs, so that can be four pieces of armor. At 10% XP boost per piece that’s 40% XP boost per kill or quest – I think. At least I’m leveling a lot faster than otherwise. I’m leaving areas about half way through as I quest. The heirloom weapons are very powerful too. So that’s a minimum of five heirlooms per spec type. But there’s a lot of overlap. Druids and Shaman can both use the Mace with Intellect or Agility for example.
Of course there is the new Valkyrie class. She’s a babe with attitude, but that’s no different from all the recent class additions. All female, all gender / culture locked and all over-powered. I’ve been away from Tera for a while doing other things. Guild Wars 2, Wow Private Servers, and Guild Wars 1. I left Tera back a while ago when they nerfed Guilds. Took away the guild bank unless you had lots of dedicated players, so the guild bank was locked away from family or multiple account players. But I’ve come back to try Valkyrie and found a few things had changed.
They seem like minor changes and they simplify the game, but some of these changes appear to have had unintended, or at least disappointing consequences.
Update: Pics of Level 53 Armor
Well it’s certainly not ugly. But these folks have not been paying attention. While the game looks great, the developers are stuck in a game design from years ago.
What’s wrong out of the box? I know that the modern way to review games with with a Youtube video where I shout at the screen while I deal with the frustrations of the game. But here is the old style blogging review. Here are my first impressions after a couple of hours with Revelation Online Open Beta.
So Walmart had their WiFi crockpots on sale for $30. Seems like they are getting rid of them. Reviews on Walmart’s website shows that they have problems – mostly connecting.
But think about this. A Crockpot is a reasonable price at $30, so the WiFi stuff is all free. That means that WiFi control, and the little ARM SOC [System on a chip] that it takes to do this is pretty cheap too. And that’s probably right. After all, low end smart phones are $30. And this application has no battery and no large screen.
Looks like some folks are selling this WiFi Crockpot for a lot more.
And here’s the App on the PlayStore.
But what about my Pellet Stove, which costs about 100 TIMEs what this crockpot does. Yep, pellet stoves are about $3000. So doesn’t my Pellet Stove deserve a WiFi enabled computer controlling it. Ok, so my Pellet stove was designed about 10 years ago and it has a really dumb controller.
My name is Malakai Laplante, and I am an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist. Here in Divinity’s Reach, I have finally completed over 15 years of research on the origins of the Tyrian Races and I would like to present my preliminary results.
Let me start by saying that my results do not intend to contradict any of the accepted histories laid down before me, but rather to fill in some gaps and origins of the races of Tyria. I have started my work based on the well known Timeline of Tyrian history, but expanded that information with biological data and some archeological findings of colleagues.
Let us start by reviewing what the analysis of the genomes of the races of Tyria tell us. The sciences of Biochemistry and Genomics have become quite advanced in recent years and while it takes long and painstaking work to study the genetic material, or to produce significant, although as still incomplete sequences of that material, we have made great strides.
I am getting sick and tired of signing UP for every site. And I don’t want to expose my facebook / google or some other identity to every site I use. My lastpass vault has 100s of sites in it. Just try and ask a question on a forum and you have to SIGN UP on that site.
And then visit your email address to confirm a link. Look at this nonsense.
That’s the last link I got to confirm. Looks like they dumped the whole cookie they have for me in hex and that’s the link to confirm. That’s enough to be the entire context of what they might know, or they think they know about me. Rather than a hex of a database link or some other short unique number – like 64 bits long. They have this trash.
Save me from this, SQRL.
There is much recent discussion about our living in a simulation:
I have studied the subject of whether or not we are living in a simulation for quite some time in a number of ways and I have never seen someone classify all the possibilities for those possible simulations. So here goes. If you need background on this idea, I’ll provide some links at the bottom of this paper.
Alternative Title: Living in a Simulation? – Let Me Count the Ways
First of All
First of all we need to talk about some generalities. These are properties of our simulation or the outer simulation, and the possible properties of our current simulation. Continue reading “Our Simulation – A Taxonomy”
Windy Weather 