runesofdoom

The problem with that sort "that's what amoral corporations do" reasoning is that corporations are permitted to exist because of the idea that they do contribute to the net public good. Once that idea is out the window, then there's no reason for society not to treat corporations as the hungry Lovecraftian nightmares they are and obliterate them with fire and steamship.

I have read (though I can't cite a source at the moment) that what is sometimes taken as limits on talent/skill/material limits on medieval art was more often a stylistic choice.

Or maybe giant corporations failing to perform due diligence internally ought not be a cost that they get to impose on their customers without legal consequence.

The saddest part for me is that the RoP could have done something very similar to what they did, while still staying true to the canon 2nd Age, and arguably telling a much better story. Instead we got sometinf that felt more like ham-handed generic 80s fantasy, coaplaying as Middle-earth.

From the moment it opened with elf-children acting like orcs, it was clear not only that she showrunners had missed the mark, but they lacked enough of Socrates "beginning of wisdom" that they couldn't even understand how they were missing it

We (Americans) have normalized, often explicitly legalized, quite a lot of corrupt behavior in various positions of power.[1] We then look at how comparatively little illegal corruption there is, and the official line is that everything is fine, nothing to see here.

1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.

No! *The "tech people" are not knights and never will be. The "knights" are upper management. The lords are the centimillionaires and up. The rest of us are slaves, peasants, maybe monks if we're "lucky".

"From posts here and elsewhere, I have some idea what a 'life' might be, and how I might get one. But, what is this 'offline'?"

As Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

While he's certainly careful to hedge (much like the scientists he's critizcizing), Mr. Silver's argument boils down to, "I think four scientists published a technically correct but politicially motivated paper, so from now on journalists should consider peer-reviewed publications by reputable PhD's as the equivalent of Johnnie RedHat posting on Twitter".

I am not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that due to the expansion of the universe and the speed of light, the volume of space we will ever be able to access is finite, roughly that of the galactic supercluster we're in.

Curses can be addressed by: 1) blessing everything that matters before you start your ascension 2) carrying inventory in an oilskin sack (which will work fine while cursed, and protect items inside it from being cursed) 3) carrying holy water and/or scrolls of remove curse 4) knowing the remove curse spell 5) certain Artifacts and armor will reduce the effect of curses on your inventory 6) carrying a lot of lightweight junk as a curse "buffer" so that curses will have a lower chance of hitting something critical 7) wielding Magicbane, that blocks 95% of curses.

A lot of this is really just, as mentioned, time spent on planning and execution.

<raises hand>

I played Nethack a lot during school. The only obstacles to ascending any character were my free time, patience, ability to stay focused, and occassionally the unfavorable early-game RNG.

A possibly illustrative example:

A year or three ago, my uncle (mid-50s, telco IT manager, started on a Commodore in the 80s) decided he'd try Mint instead of upgrading from Windows 7. He got it installed and running, and decided he wanted to burn an audio CD.

His install of Mint didn't come with any application to accomplish this. He got something recommended installed easily enough, but it only supported FLAC, not his MP3s. So he removed that and got some different CD burning software that did support his MP3s, but was set to Finnish by default. He got enough Finnish translated to get it changed to English, and then ran into some sort of driver/support issue for his particular CD burner.

At that point, he did the free upgrade to Windows 10 and then burned his CD in less total time than he'd spent not burning a CD via Mint.

I think the idea is that the item isn't scratched. They're just claiming it is to try and get a refund/credit.