Ginger_Warrior

Looks it: http://upload.wikime...itehorse_-b.jpg a: Downtown Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon territory. (Gareth Sloan, 2008) I can literally see no life at all in that picture. It's quite... haunting. :unsure:

One aspect yet unexplored is the relative levels of violence in a society. Though gun ownership has been shown to have a positive correlation with gun-related mortalities, it's not a direct correlation. Switzerland also has widespread gun ownership, but the rates don't match up to the US's figures. There *has* to be another variable. Interestingly, there's an article about Blue Valentine on the BBC website about how America seems to censor sex much more than it does violent scenes. It wouldn't have as much of an effect on adults, but if you're a impressionable child and you grow up watching violent scenes on films (of which America produces and consumes is much larger quantities than the rest of the world), won't you become more tolerant to a violent society? Hence the violence is reinforcing itself. Surely, rates of violence also have an effect on gun-related deaths.

Iraq isn't included because it's not in the top 35 richest nations as they were in 2004. In fact, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Afghanistan one of the poorest (or at least the most impoverished)?

The thing is, there's more to this issue than most non-Europeans would appreciate. There are hidden political motives behind the opposition to the Common Fisheries Policy which are aimed largely at the EU itself by people who just don't like the place. The solution on the FishFight website is a perfectly good one; we need to change our diet so changing the demand, but unfortunately, there's a load of people on the Euro-sceptic bandwagon who want to go down the "Let's take down the EU" route and use this issue as a hook to vent their anger. It veers the discussion away from the issue at hand and isn't useful. It's also not helped by our government's main party effectively marginalising itself in the EU debating chamber whilst it flirts with the far-right parties on the continent, because this basically means we have no debating power in the EU itself and therefore no influence over the future of the CFP. It's also not helped by people like Jamie Oliver... the man doesn't seem to understand that personal morals have to be weighed against what other people can realistically be expected to do. People only have so much to spend, we spend it on those particular fish because that's what we can physically afford, and that's not likely to change whilst there's mass unemployment and further job losses forecast in the public sector. So unless he's offering us an allowance through Sainsbury's so we can 'celebrate lesser known delicacies of the deep,' his personal convictions may as well be paper promises. I'd like to think I'm conscientious about the environment, and yes, overfishing will lead to an environmental disaster, but it's an inescapable evil in the current political and economic climate.

Before the inevitable America vs the World paradigm comes into play, here's some facts found by quick googling 'Global epidemiology of gun-related deaths'. They're from 1998, which I guess instantly discounts the widespread use of FPS games as the sole cause, much to the annoyance of neurotic mothers everywhere - CoD and GTA simply weren't around then so cannot be blamed as the sole environmental factor. Seems that it's not so much the US that has a problem with guns, so much as the whole of the Americas (Canada aside). The low rates in east Asia are staggering. :blink: There's a list on Wikipedia showing more up-to-date figures but they aren't significantly different.

We've establish the link between free trade and wilderness is only one-way, there's no vice versa at all. This is important because if it weren't for It used to be like that", which isn't really an argument so much as an appeal to sentiment, you guys wouldn't have a leg to stand on in saying Wilderness must be released with Free Trade. We also used to have no Wildy ditch/wall/forcefield when free trade was around. Should we put that to the way it was too, just because "that's how it used to be".

So because that's how it was before, that's automatically how it ought to be? Why?

Again with the moral highground stuff. Y'know, killing other players for loot ain't too saintly either, but you don't find me trying to degrade you. That's not what we were talking about either, but there you go. We were talking about how the poll treats the Wilderness and Free Trade as the same thing, drawing the illogical conclusion that 91% of people want Free Trade and the Wilderness back. Just because they were removed over the same issue, and just because the Wilderness required Free Trade to function does not mean that I have to agree with the Wilderness just to believe in Free Trade. Until you prove otherwise, I'll continue to hold that viewpoint.

Riiight... you can't prove that Wilderness and Free Trade are one and the same, so you've resorted to the moral highground where anyone who disagrees with one but not the other is "selfish". Whatever. :rolleyes: In any case, you've not been able to prove the vote isn't systematically biased.

I'm not asking for a history lesson what Jagex have done and why they did it. I'm asking you to prove that Free Trade needs the Wilderness to exist.

But the reason they removed free pking and staking was because of problems with free trade. And? What Jagex may or may not have done has nothing to do with someone just not liking the Wilderness, but still liking Free Trade. How does 'it makes sense' prove that Free Trade must have the Wilderness in order to exist?

Fair point, but I don't see what makes Jagex stand out from every other company in history that has tried to combat botting, and failed. The line "We couldn't do it before but we can now" doesn't really convince me otherwise without details.

I don't need the Wilderness to trade a needle for 200m. Your insistence that both are the same thing is just wrong, simple as. It's true that the Wilderness cannot exist without Free Trade, but the reverse isn't true, so they're both different.

They'll add it in anyway. To say this vote has any statistical weight is an intellectual scandal. Unless you're suggesting they restart the whole voting process so that it is statistically accountable, they'll take 91% vs 7% as valid justification, even if the poll design itself is flawed.

I did take that in mind, hence I only compared the plate. We're talking 500m for the whole set, not 200m. 600K per hour barely costs 0.1% of the total GE value of the set. Small change. By contrast, 80K amounts to 4.4% of a V skirt, no idea what that would be for an hour, but I'm guessing a skirt doesn't last 44 hours.

200K per hour is certainly more expensive than 895gp, granted. But you're telling me someone with 200m in their backpocket for the plate would honestly scoff at 200K an hour? They most likely have money making methods that far outweigh that. The added ability makes more sense though. Glories are used pretty much ubiquitously for those who lack furies anyway.

The vote is systematically biased. You can't even deduce that 7% of people wanted neither back; imagine being someone who wanted Free Trade but not the Wilderness. Do you vote for Free Trade, or not vote for the Wilderness? Some will go one way, some will go the other way depending on how strongly they feel about Free Trade and Wilderness respectively, hence we have bias. This 'vote' is statistically invalid. The only conclusion you can actually draw from this vote is 2% of people don't care, which isn't useful to know at all. The only way you can draw a conclusion about who wants the Wilderness and who wants Free Trade is to treat the two variables seperately, not lump them both together with a 'yes' option. The only practical argument anyone can make against that is that you can't have the Wilderness without also having Free Trade, though this not address people who want Free Trade but not the Wilderness.

Why do people not feel that glories are worthless due to their 'degrading' nature (the use of rechargable teleport casts), but Verac's skirt is worthless? When you're earning millions slaying monsters in addition to anything else you do to make money, does it really matter whether you use 895gp for a Games Necklace or 80K to fully repair that skirt at maximum? They're both negligible amounts. There seems to be a distinction between some items that classes them as expensively degradable, but not others. Why?

Or haven't got word of it yet. Can't imagine that there's any big cheese in the banks looking out for whether Jagex is inadvertently fueling credit card fraud. There's bigger issues on their hands than the relative liberalism of the RS economy and its effect on real world crime. If a company can't be trusted to organise the proverbial drink session in a brewery with the first petition without making it so insecure that basically every account that's ever existed was accounted for, how can they be trusted to take on an issue that plenty of games companies have tried (and failed) to resolve in RWT and botting?

The thing is, from the social perspective of DG, is that they tried this 'forced cooperation' thing with Barbarian Assault more than three years before DG came out. It failed then, they've had time to work it out, they've made another update to BA since to see how that would work, it didn't work and they still didn't understand the reasons why players who have never met each other before find it so difficult to work together in dungeoneering. The added kick in the teeth here is that at least BA has an obligatory tutorial (which most skip, but at least there is one), each person has a clearly specified role, and if one member of the team is a total [bleep] up, the rest of us can kind of get it together enough to scrape through. Plus the waves only last a few mins, and we can just boot the guy later. Dungeoneering has none of those things; no tutorial, no clear roles, floors take hours if not done properly, and best of all, if the keyer doesn't know what they're doing, good luck to you. Point is, "pro teams" wouldn't be needed and wouldn't have the power they have if the social element of the skill had just been designed properly in the first place. It's baffling how they had a clear precedent for how forced cooperation really plays out in-game, and they still [bleep]ed up. Then they get Developer of the Year in a public vote... amazing what you get these days.

My Dad gets on my case all the time about not adding him on Facebook when I moved to uni. I don't really use it any more but that's beside the point; when I did use it, why would I have wanted him knowing every facet of my life story and what I was getting up to? Isn't the whole point of moving away from home to get away from your parents, not to basically give them even more opportunity to spy on your every move? :unsure:

Assange isn't the first whistleblower history's ever documented and he won't be the last. Sure, the witchhunt against him is ridiculous, but before Wikileaks, there were (and still are) newspapers, and before then was the printing press. I don't get this obsession with asserting that the Internet = Free Speech, or even that free speech itself is threatened by the government knowing my online identity.

Meh... that's low.

Agreed. This whole topic arose from the Wilderness thread about 1-iteming in PKing. This is literally the only example where scrubbing can exist in RuneScape, because it's the only place where players directly compete against one another. 'Competing' for granite rock spawns or a slayer monster isn't really competition, not in this context anyway.

The other 1% are undead, obviously. Get your salve ammys, now. Is that Banjo Kazooie in your sig btw?