Eve also suffers hugely for it. Take exploration, for example. Eve has a huge, persistent and singular (no server shards) universe. But it is essentially impossible for you to actually explore it without carting around your own battlefleet. The two are not mutually exclusive in an MMO.
I only just started Eve's free trial, and so far, it's felt like a well-polished single player game. A friend or two will join me soon, and I'll see what that's like.
I disagree with your example, though. Exploring around the universe might require a battlefleet, but wouldn't it be overtly artificial if it didn't? My empire is at war with other powers, and powerful pirates roam the lesser controlled areas (or so I'm imagining, it's all still new to me).
The point is, I don't see myself entitled to exploring everywhere in the Eve universe. I don't feel it conflicts with my solo play, so long as I have other things that I can do. Having areas dominated by fleets that will destroy me adds an element to the game. Perhaps that was your point, also, except that I've yet to see how it suffers hugely (I know there are a lot of complaints about Eve, but I've chosen to not listen to them so far).
Most likely I'm too new to the game to really make any comments on it, but having played a few single player space games (Homeworld, Sword of the Stars, etc), my limited experience with Eve so far is that I like the solo play a lot more than those single player games. Since it's designed to be able to interact with thousands of other players with ships, things that were a pain in the other games are simplified, and I feel like I'm being immersed in a sci-fi setting, not a sci-fi story (from which I can't escape). That's a requirement for the MMO side, and perhaps the big appeal so far.
- a Karma system, actually 2, one for skill and one for social intelligence. Assholes and retards spoil the game for whomever groups with them, and it's amazing how many of those there are. Blizzard must have the intellectual and financial means to build a karma system that works ?
Intellectual means would be key here. Someone could design an addon that lets you assign karma points, but for it to work it would have to be well thought out, since the assholes and retards will try to take advantage of anyway they can retaliate.
- Multi-player combo moves. Buffs are fine, but having combat combo moves that require several players to collaborate would be oodles of fun.
This actually does exist, although you're probably thinking about something more explicit to game mechanics. In arena (my experience comes mainly from season 3) you can't survive combat without extremely well executed collaboration between team mates. Hell, just the act of killing a paladin is basically a combo sequence.
- Vocal chat. 6 years on, we still have to use very un-ergonomic 3rd party programs. Blizzard could at least buy & re-design those, or help their developpers interface with WoW... WoW's own voice chat make the idiotic assumption that we want to disconnect whenever you're not in the game, or switch toons...
That's a really, really good point. We always stuck with vent because we had the server paid for anyway, and it seemed to have less lag, or be less effected by some people having lag (or we just got the impression). I never really thought about how much we used it in ways that you either can't use the WoW voice chat, or ways that it would be much less fluid to set up WoW voice.
They did at last get the grouping interface mostly right (should take alts into account, though).
Parties, raids, etc, all have benefited tremendously from addons. Granting the ability to script addons is probably the thing Blizzard did best.
Most of my suggestions to Blizzard about WoW would be content and story wise. After I'd run every heroic over and over for badges and drops, and as I moved further into raid content, the game became less and less a game. The only reason to care about any of that stuff was what gear I got, or if I had fun with a particular party. There was no sense that I was fighting any bosses for any reason, especially since I had already killed that boss for whatever tacked-on reason was given plenty of times.
A game of stats and drops is perfectly fine if that keeps you engrossed, but I ended up deciding I liked having more in a game. Especially since the big stuff -- progression raids -- usually involved a few hours playing with nothing on my screen but a giant shin, or arse, while I just watched my CD's and hit macro keys over and over. Worse of all tanking with a druid MT, then it's hours of bear ass.
Still, I did have things to do as a warrior tank: must keep shield block up, maximise TPS, keep track of the hot shot DPS players (pulling threat is NOT a badge of honor, idiot), etc. From what I hear, things like hunter shot rotations are much more repetitive and tedious.
You can't start anew in an "old" MMO that relied on group play, because everyone is already far above your level and unwilling to go back to level yet another toon, and, well, being a group-heavy game you won't get far alone.
I agree that there are major problems starting anew in an MMO that requires group play, but for a slightly different reason: once an end-game player, always an end-game player.
I realise this won't apply to everyone, but after I passed the point in WoW where I had spent more time at maximum level than I had all other levels combined, a huge part of the game was spoiled for me.
If I wanted to start a new character to say, play with other friends on a PVP server, the first 69 (and later 79) levels were just blown through. The first time I played it, those levels were fun, and meaningful. I remember the first time a friend had a character in the 20s, and how high that seemed. The impossibility of getting one's first mount, the difficulty of low level dungeons, the excitement of training a new ability.
Those experiences all evaporated, and levelling an alt meant mailing hundreds of gold, 16 slot bags, and getting raid geared guildmates to run through all the instances farming drops and checking off group quests. Any efforts I made to band our alts together and spend time doing the early dungeons the proper way fell through, because it was just too hard to drop the end-game focus.
When 79 out of 80 levels are time that just needs to be pushed through and done with in order for the real grind to start, I think the game loses a lot. As WoW has changed to entice a larger user-base, I think the design has encouraged this more and more for those that enjoy the end-game content. Worse of all, when you've had that mindset enough, it easily transfers to other MMORPG's of similar design.
Wow's subscription costs about the same as - 2 movie tickets - half a nice restaurant meal - 1/4th of a new game - a very cheap/bad theater/opera ticket - a new CD - a new DVD -...
you can play very little WoW (6-8 hours/month), and still get more "entertainment time" for your money than you would with more traditional entertainment.
of course, you won't get the same benefits out of it.. it's pretty much a-cultural... but then again, given how bad most recent movies have been...
I look back on my time playing WoW, and adding up everything I spent over a year and a bit, I sort of wish I had that money back. I enjoyed myself tremendously a good 60-70% of that time, and it was definitely the cheapest way to socialise daily with friends who lived 2 hours away in a big city, at a time when none of us had a lot of disposable income. Still, that "golden age" of my experience was shorter than my hope, and I definitely feel like I wasted some time that could have been better spent (and paid money to do so).
At the same time, a friend who started playing as I was winding down, ended up playing much more than I did, first string in a 6 days/week raiding guild. She loved it, and hated her 40 hour/week office job. Coming home from work and playing WoW, if you enjoy it, is actually really, really cheap. The more you play it, the cheaper it is, since you're not doing other things that cost money. After cigarettes and gas, WoW was really her only expense, so she was able to save money very quickly.
At that age, her job wasn't a career and even living in Silicon Valley a temporary thing. Raiding was what she wanted to do with her time, and she was able to work, put a lot of money in the bank, and enjoy herself in the off-time. When it was time to move back home, she made the trip in a gorgeous mint '95 BMW 850ci.
Of course, the cost of WoW goes up dramatically if your guild holds "drunken PVP weekends", but in those cases you would probably be spending the money on nice alcohol anyway.
Anyone who works 13 hours a day, either likes their job or is earning enough money that they are going to retire early.
Or is a workaholic and will be exploited by the corporate machine for their entire existence.
Or is barely managing to pay the bills with whatever work they were able to find to support their kids.
Or are in the middle of a desert in the middle-east getting shot at regularly, out of duty and service rather than personal enjoyment or a lucrative income.
While they may not match up with a lifestyle of playing MMO's in one's off time, there's plenty of scenarios in which a person does not have the luxury to pick hours they like, or a job they enjoy.
No, the numbers can stay the same; the exchange rate doesn't mean the US doesn't see the games drop to those same numbers in US dollars. Games in the UK are just more expensive, I guess.
Dude, have you tried to level a new character recently? It's a long, boring solo grind because so few players are still levelling. It'd be fun to do with a bunch of friends, but face it - the original, populated game that we played back in vanilla is gone. The real game starts at 80.
And I'd like to think it still includes a bitter divide between factions. Fostering the rivalry has always been part of the fun. By your argument, why not let the two factions communicate and raid together? Perhaps that would be all right for those that feel the merit of the game is entirely end-game raiding, but why make the game environment and lore suffer?
After all, if you don't feel the faction divide and find yourself wanting to play on the other side with some friends who are already finished with levelling, it's really not the horrible grind you make it out to be. After all, there are all the lvl 80 friends to whisk you through every instance and throw gold your way.
Factoring in the popularity of alts within a guild, many of those end-game players will levelling toons anyway, so I really don't see a long, boring, solo grind, if indeed you're doing it to play with friends.
So really, you can enjoy experiencing the quests from the faction you haven't been a part of before. You can power through everything with the help of your geared 80 friends. You can level your new toon while your friends are leveling their alts.
And, of course, there's the classic (obviously biased in this case) approach of "friends don't let friends roll alliance" and make them come to you (if only to let them salvage their dignity).;)
"somewhere in the South Pacific, just watch out for the coups that happen every few years."
With the constitution having been suspended just last April, and the military imposed and backed President not holding elections, I think the current situation rules Figi out as a "Freer country", regardless of whether one watches out for future coups.
Just admit you rated a military dictatorship as being more free than the UK, USA, and Australia and move on.
We trust software to route trillions upon trillions of dollars. We trust software to take humans into space. I dont see the problem.
While I've yet to see or write any software that manages to actually take a person into space, it's true that software is used for a lot of important parts of society that require our trust.
It's also true that we have seen software fail horribly at many of these things. Software didn't work so well on wall street in the 80s. Software hasn't exactly performed well with elections. We read about massive security breaches into government systems, or places that store huge amounts of personal info.
It's an easy issue for me; I simply won't trust an IT solution to be implemented in a way that doesn't make my medical information horribly vulnerable.
Even if she admitted guilt and the RIAA agreed to the awarding of minimum damages, she would still be on the hook for the legal fees of the RIAA.
This isn't necessarily true. As we know, this guilty verdict didn't include legal fees with the statutory damages. It's more likely that an admission of guilt would have still lead to that scenario.
Short of somehow convincing a judge to allow her to dismiss this debt by filing Chapter 7, her only option, AFAIK, is to let the RIAA garnish her wages to the maximum extent allowable by law (25% of her income) for the rest of her life, then take all of her assets upon her death.
There are always other options. If the verdict sticks and the situation you describe comes to pass, she can always leave the country and settle somewhere temperate and out of the target-sights.
Leaking product update news isn't Apple's MO. Their history (as I recall it) has always been to stay tight-lipped until official announcement dates, leading to great frustration in many customers who purchased an Apple product only to have a better / cheaper version come out the following week.
I own a G1, and since the 1.5 update, it -can- capture video.
This is one of the annoying things about a G1: I haven't had an easy time finding solid sources of information about it's current usability. Google searches are flooded with G1 reviews from expert sites, but they seem to all be from it's initial release in 2008. Then there are the community forums, which are full of G1 owners who have no need to offer a comprehensive look at how their G1 functions today, since the other forums members all have one.
It seems like Google and T-Mobile might do better with the G1 if they refocused on getting it in the public eye again.
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
I think the obvious is having a centralised source for the search and discovery of content. It's my impression that many independent artists benefit from music stores such as iTunes which have a large user base and can lead interested consumers to the music.
I think the biggest benefit of both physical and online book stores that sell physical books is that they provide consumers with a place to browse books and find things they would not have otherwise.
That isn't to say one shouldn't have both options, but the store has it's benefits.
Amazon's Kindle an enormously popular eBook reader.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
It doesn't seem that the eBook market has really expanded to the point of anything yet being worthy of the "enormously popular" status, AFAIK.
I may not call it "enormously popular", but I'd definitely say it's an "enormously popular eBook reader". Semantics, as someone else pointed out, but I think the latter statement indicates the market in which the popularity assessment is being made, and is a fair way to look at things that is relevant to the conversation topic.
eBook readers take so little power. Why don't they have a solar cell in them like calculators.
I mean, 20 years ago they used to give away crappy calculators everywhere with those little solar cells in them. Now a generation later, little solar cells should be in all devices like eBook readers.
It'd be pretty cool to have them under the screen, so they're hidden, but cover a large area.
Wired had an interesting article about the typesetting (or lack of) in ebooks today. That's one area where there's a lot of room for improvement, and would definitely provide incentives for getting the ebook through official channels, even to the point of dealing with a closed format with some light DRM.
In my experience with downloading PDFs of books I own to read in an ebook reader on my laptop, typesetting had been practically non-existent and I'm lucky to get proper paragraph and chapter breaks.
I make no apologies for my writing style. It is ironic that you use the same "technique" to make your own point.
Whoosh? I'm not sure I can call it on the parent poster.
The lack of apologies out of the way, you might consider some possibilities. Some of us have vision problems. Some of us have learning problems. Some of us are doing exactly what we were taught during the course of our lives. Some of us aren't really used to slashdot. I could go on. No need, though.
Wry humour aside, have you considered that my suggestion might be actually be a good one, and worth learning even there is a situation like the ones you describe, or if someone is older and set in his ways?
There are no italics in the spoken language. Since I was taught to write like I talk, that's what I do.
Umm, actually, there are different types of emphasis used in the spoken language, even (as I recently learned), in sign language. That's why caps aren't appropriate as a "blanket" writing device for emphasis.
Would you care to address the content of my post, or just the method of delivery?
Why ask this after I've already posted a reply that addressed just the method of delivery?
Do you agree or disagree with my thoughts?
Your post seemed to be made up with statements containing your feelings toward certain aspects of presidential politics. Are you asking if I think you should have different feelings? If I agree or disagree with your relief that Obama was elected rather than McCain, how would that contribute anything? We know there are lots of people who are relieved Obama was elected, and lots of people who think McCain was a better choice. In short, the content of your post isn't well suited for commentary.
That, I care about.
If you truly care about people agreeing/disagreeing with your thoughts, you should probably care about written communication skills, as they are used to express them. To your point, though, my last comment about your post not being suited to commentary isn't meant to offend, but be an honest reaction to what you posted.
Even so, the phrasing of my original reply actually addresses the content of your post, albeit subtly. The first two sentences don't work without that implication. Overt and loud communication are much more clear than subtleties by nature, but that level of clarity isn't always what's appropriate.
Surface cars are very efficient and increasingly much, much safer.
Not compared to an aircraft that can go point-to-point. My daily commute when I lived up in the mountains in Los Gatos was about 30 minutes, and it would have been a one minute flight or less.
Why did you drive it then, instead of using a point-to-point aircraft? Sounds like a helicopter would have much better than a car.
Roads are not expensive to build in comparison to anything else.
Compare the cost of building roads to the cost of not building roads. QED. Also, the political costs you mention are still costs of building roads. That's a lot of tax money to spend, that air cars wouldn't need.
Hmm, that explains it. You didn't fly to work because of the taxes that fund Caltrans (California Dept. of Transportation). Air cars must be amazing, because you say they don't even need that portion of tax money. Never mind that the cost of owning and maintaining a helicopter vastly exceeds the portion of taxes you paid that went to Caltrans.
Sarcasm aside, building and maintaining roads is more expensive than not doing so, but it doesn't come close to the cost of everyone owning and maintaining a point-to-point aircraft.
Your earlier suggestion that we're approaching the tipping point for flying cars is absurd. If you argued we're on the tipping point for the Linux Desktop, people would disagree with you and that's a hell of a lot more feasible than cars flying everywhere.
Even if the technology for a point-to-point aircraft was remotely affordable for an individual's everyday use, the political climate will be impossible until there's a dramatic shift. I don't really want to go on; there's just nothing connection your suggestions here to reality.
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Eve also suffers hugely for it. Take exploration, for example. Eve has a huge, persistent and singular (no server shards) universe. But it is essentially impossible for you to actually explore it without carting around your own battlefleet. The two are not mutually exclusive in an MMO.
I only just started Eve's free trial, and so far, it's felt like a well-polished single player game. A friend or two will join me soon, and I'll see what that's like.
I disagree with your example, though. Exploring around the universe might require a battlefleet, but wouldn't it be overtly artificial if it didn't? My empire is at war with other powers, and powerful pirates roam the lesser controlled areas (or so I'm imagining, it's all still new to me).
The point is, I don't see myself entitled to exploring everywhere in the Eve universe. I don't feel it conflicts with my solo play, so long as I have other things that I can do. Having areas dominated by fleets that will destroy me adds an element to the game. Perhaps that was your point, also, except that I've yet to see how it suffers hugely (I know there are a lot of complaints about Eve, but I've chosen to not listen to them so far).
Most likely I'm too new to the game to really make any comments on it, but having played a few single player space games (Homeworld, Sword of the Stars, etc), my limited experience with Eve so far is that I like the solo play a lot more than those single player games. Since it's designed to be able to interact with thousands of other players with ships, things that were a pain in the other games are simplified, and I feel like I'm being immersed in a sci-fi setting, not a sci-fi story (from which I can't escape). That's a requirement for the MMO side, and perhaps the big appeal so far.
- a Karma system, actually 2, one for skill and one for social intelligence. Assholes and retards spoil the game for whomever groups with them, and it's amazing how many of those there are. Blizzard must have the intellectual and financial means to build a karma system that works ?
Intellectual means would be key here. Someone could design an addon that lets you assign karma points, but for it to work it would have to be well thought out, since the assholes and retards will try to take advantage of anyway they can retaliate.
- Multi-player combo moves. Buffs are fine, but having combat combo moves that require several players to collaborate would be oodles of fun.
This actually does exist, although you're probably thinking about something more explicit to game mechanics. In arena (my experience comes mainly from season 3) you can't survive combat without extremely well executed collaboration between team mates. Hell, just the act of killing a paladin is basically a combo sequence.
- Vocal chat. 6 years on, we still have to use very un-ergonomic 3rd party programs. Blizzard could at least buy & re-design those, or help their developpers interface with WoW... WoW's own voice chat make the idiotic assumption that we want to disconnect whenever you're not in the game, or switch toons ...
That's a really, really good point. We always stuck with vent because we had the server paid for anyway, and it seemed to have less lag, or be less effected by some people having lag (or we just got the impression). I never really thought about how much we used it in ways that you either can't use the WoW voice chat, or ways that it would be much less fluid to set up WoW voice.
They did at last get the grouping interface mostly right (should take alts into account, though).
Parties, raids, etc, all have benefited tremendously from addons. Granting the ability to script addons is probably the thing Blizzard did best.
Most of my suggestions to Blizzard about WoW would be content and story wise. After I'd run every heroic over and over for badges and drops, and as I moved further into raid content, the game became less and less a game. The only reason to care about any of that stuff was what gear I got, or if I had fun with a particular party. There was no sense that I was fighting any bosses for any reason, especially since I had already killed that boss for whatever tacked-on reason was given plenty of times.
A game of stats and drops is perfectly fine if that keeps you engrossed, but I ended up deciding I liked having more in a game. Especially since the big stuff -- progression raids -- usually involved a few hours playing with nothing on my screen but a giant shin, or arse, while I just watched my CD's and hit macro keys over and over. Worse of all tanking with a druid MT, then it's hours of bear ass.
Still, I did have things to do as a warrior tank: must keep shield block up, maximise TPS, keep track of the hot shot DPS players (pulling threat is NOT a badge of honor, idiot), etc. From what I hear, things like hunter shot rotations are much more repetitive and tedious.
You can't start anew in an "old" MMO that relied on group play, because everyone is already far above your level and unwilling to go back to level yet another toon, and, well, being a group-heavy game you won't get far alone.
I agree that there are major problems starting anew in an MMO that requires group play, but for a slightly different reason: once an end-game player, always an end-game player.
I realise this won't apply to everyone, but after I passed the point in WoW where I had spent more time at maximum level than I had all other levels combined, a huge part of the game was spoiled for me.
If I wanted to start a new character to say, play with other friends on a PVP server, the first 69 (and later 79) levels were just blown through. The first time I played it, those levels were fun, and meaningful. I remember the first time a friend had a character in the 20s, and how high that seemed. The impossibility of getting one's first mount, the difficulty of low level dungeons, the excitement of training a new ability.
Those experiences all evaporated, and levelling an alt meant mailing hundreds of gold, 16 slot bags, and getting raid geared guildmates to run through all the instances farming drops and checking off group quests. Any efforts I made to band our alts together and spend time doing the early dungeons the proper way fell through, because it was just too hard to drop the end-game focus.
When 79 out of 80 levels are time that just needs to be pushed through and done with in order for the real grind to start, I think the game loses a lot. As WoW has changed to entice a larger user-base, I think the design has encouraged this more and more for those that enjoy the end-game content. Worse of all, when you've had that mindset enough, it easily transfers to other MMORPG's of similar design.
Wow's subscription costs about the same as ...
- 2 movie tickets
- half a nice restaurant meal
- 1/4th of a new game
- a very cheap/bad theater/opera ticket
- a new CD
- a new DVD
-
you can play very little WoW (6-8 hours/month), and still get more "entertainment time" for your money than you would with more traditional entertainment.
of course, you won't get the same benefits out of it.. it's pretty much a-cultural... but then again, given how bad most recent movies have been ...
I look back on my time playing WoW, and adding up everything I spent over a year and a bit, I sort of wish I had that money back. I enjoyed myself tremendously a good 60-70% of that time, and it was definitely the cheapest way to socialise daily with friends who lived 2 hours away in a big city, at a time when none of us had a lot of disposable income. Still, that "golden age" of my experience was shorter than my hope, and I definitely feel like I wasted some time that could have been better spent (and paid money to do so).
At the same time, a friend who started playing as I was winding down, ended up playing much more than I did, first string in a 6 days/week raiding guild. She loved it, and hated her 40 hour/week office job. Coming home from work and playing WoW, if you enjoy it, is actually really, really cheap. The more you play it, the cheaper it is, since you're not doing other things that cost money. After cigarettes and gas, WoW was really her only expense, so she was able to save money very quickly.
At that age, her job wasn't a career and even living in Silicon Valley a temporary thing. Raiding was what she wanted to do with her time, and she was able to work, put a lot of money in the bank, and enjoy herself in the off-time. When it was time to move back home, she made the trip in a gorgeous mint '95 BMW 850ci.
Of course, the cost of WoW goes up dramatically if your guild holds "drunken PVP weekends", but in those cases you would probably be spending the money on nice alcohol anyway.
Anyone who works 13 hours a day, either likes their job or is earning enough money that they are going to retire early.
Or is a workaholic and will be exploited by the corporate machine for their entire existence.
Or is barely managing to pay the bills with whatever work they were able to find to support their kids.
Or are in the middle of a desert in the middle-east getting shot at regularly, out of duty and service rather than personal enjoyment or a lucrative income.
While they may not match up with a lifestyle of playing MMO's in one's off time, there's plenty of scenarios in which a person does not have the luxury to pick hours they like, or a job they enjoy.
No, the numbers can stay the same; the exchange rate doesn't mean the US doesn't see the games drop to those same numbers in US dollars. Games in the UK are just more expensive, I guess.
Undoing a mod-mistake.
Dude, have you tried to level a new character recently? It's a long, boring solo grind because so few players are still levelling. It'd be fun to do with a bunch of friends, but face it - the original, populated game that we played back in vanilla is gone. The real game starts at 80.
And I'd like to think it still includes a bitter divide between factions. Fostering the rivalry has always been part of the fun. By your argument, why not let the two factions communicate and raid together? Perhaps that would be all right for those that feel the merit of the game is entirely end-game raiding, but why make the game environment and lore suffer?
After all, if you don't feel the faction divide and find yourself wanting to play on the other side with some friends who are already finished with levelling, it's really not the horrible grind you make it out to be. After all, there are all the lvl 80 friends to whisk you through every instance and throw gold your way.
Factoring in the popularity of alts within a guild, many of those end-game players will levelling toons anyway, so I really don't see a long, boring, solo grind, if indeed you're doing it to play with friends.
So really, you can enjoy experiencing the quests from the faction you haven't been a part of before. You can power through everything with the help of your geared 80 friends. You can level your new toon while your friends are leveling their alts.
And, of course, there's the classic (obviously biased in this case) approach of "friends don't let friends roll alliance" and make them come to you (if only to let them salvage their dignity). ;)
Fiji: Not too bad
Not too bad? Really?
"somewhere in the South Pacific, just watch out for the coups that happen every few years."
With the constitution having been suspended just last April, and the military imposed and backed President not holding elections, I think the current situation rules Figi out as a "Freer country", regardless of whether one watches out for future coups.
Just admit you rated a military dictatorship as being more free than the UK, USA, and Australia and move on.
We trust software to route trillions upon trillions of dollars. We trust software to take humans into space. I dont see the problem.
While I've yet to see or write any software that manages to actually take a person into space, it's true that software is used for a lot of important parts of society that require our trust.
It's also true that we have seen software fail horribly at many of these things. Software didn't work so well on wall street in the 80s. Software hasn't exactly performed well with elections. We read about massive security breaches into government systems, or places that store huge amounts of personal info.
It's an easy issue for me; I simply won't trust an IT solution to be implemented in a way that doesn't make my medical information horribly vulnerable.
Science Fiction has lied to us - where's our VR with sex?
The scientists who were assigned to work on that project haven't been heard from for years now.
Even if she admitted guilt and the RIAA agreed to the awarding of minimum damages, she would still be on the hook for the legal fees of the RIAA.
This isn't necessarily true. As we know, this guilty verdict didn't include legal fees with the statutory damages. It's more likely that an admission of guilt would have still lead to that scenario.
It's not legal.
She lied about her hard drive, thinking it would get her off. I don't like the RIAA, but she deserved this.
You're also assuming that the RIAA's case didn't contain greater legal dishonesty, even if they didn't get held responsible for it.
Short of somehow convincing a judge to allow her to dismiss this debt by filing Chapter 7, her only option, AFAIK, is to let the RIAA garnish her wages to the maximum extent allowable by law (25% of her income) for the rest of her life, then take all of her assets upon her death.
There are always other options. If the verdict sticks and the situation you describe comes to pass, she can always leave the country and settle somewhere temperate and out of the target-sights.
No, actually it is true. You just need multiple antennas in a known orientation.
The claim was that any GPS can compute north, which we know is untrue.
Leaking product update news isn't Apple's MO. Their history (as I recall it) has always been to stay tight-lipped until official announcement dates, leading to great frustration in many customers who purchased an Apple product only to have a better / cheaper version come out the following week.
I own a G1, and since the 1.5 update, it -can- capture video.
This is one of the annoying things about a G1: I haven't had an easy time finding solid sources of information about it's current usability. Google searches are flooded with G1 reviews from expert sites, but they seem to all be from it's initial release in 2008. Then there are the community forums, which are full of G1 owners who have no need to offer a comprehensive look at how their G1 functions today, since the other forums members all have one.
It seems like Google and T-Mobile might do better with the G1 if they refocused on getting it in the public eye again.
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I have yet to understand why we need to insert a middleman store into the chain between producer and consumer.
I think the obvious is having a centralised source for the search and discovery of content. It's my impression that many independent artists benefit from music stores such as iTunes which have a large user base and can lead interested consumers to the music.
I think the biggest benefit of both physical and online book stores that sell physical books is that they provide consumers with a place to browse books and find things they would not have otherwise.
That isn't to say one shouldn't have both options, but the store has it's benefits.
Format war?
PDF wins. It's free, implemented on all platforms, and does everything you need. It even does Javascript, which nobody needs.
Well, that was a fun war. Let's fight video formats now.
We won't see a real format war until typesetting becomes a prevalent aspect of ebook publishing.
Amazon's Kindle an enormously popular eBook reader.
I'm not sure the description "enormously popular" is deserved. Just because it is out selling other eBook readers doesn't make it "enormously popular"; how many of these have actually sold?
It doesn't seem that the eBook market has really expanded to the point of anything yet being worthy of the "enormously popular" status, AFAIK.
I may not call it "enormously popular", but I'd definitely say it's an "enormously popular eBook reader". Semantics, as someone else pointed out, but I think the latter statement indicates the market in which the popularity assessment is being made, and is a fair way to look at things that is relevant to the conversation topic.
eBook readers take so little power. Why don't they have a solar cell in them like calculators.
I mean, 20 years ago they used to give away crappy calculators everywhere with those little solar cells in them. Now a generation later, little solar cells should be in all devices like eBook readers.
It'd be pretty cool to have them under the screen, so they're hidden, but cover a large area.
Wired had an interesting article about the typesetting (or lack of) in ebooks today. That's one area where there's a lot of room for improvement, and would definitely provide incentives for getting the ebook through official channels, even to the point of dealing with a closed format with some light DRM.
In my experience with downloading PDFs of books I own to read in an ebook reader on my laptop, typesetting had been practically non-existent and I'm lucky to get proper paragraph and chapter breaks.
I make no apologies for my writing style. It is ironic that you use the same "technique" to make your own point.
Whoosh? I'm not sure I can call it on the parent poster.
The lack of apologies out of the way, you might consider some possibilities. Some of us have vision problems. Some of us have learning problems. Some of us are doing exactly what we were taught during the course of our lives. Some of us aren't really used to slashdot. I could go on. No need, though.
Wry humour aside, have you considered that my suggestion might be actually be a good one, and worth learning even there is a situation like the ones you describe, or if someone is older and set in his ways?
There are no italics in the spoken language. Since I was taught to write like I talk, that's what I do.
Umm, actually, there are different types of emphasis used in the spoken language, even (as I recently learned), in sign language. That's why caps aren't appropriate as a "blanket" writing device for emphasis.
Would you care to address the content of my post, or just the method of delivery?
Why ask this after I've already posted a reply that addressed just the method of delivery?
Do you agree or disagree with my thoughts?
Your post seemed to be made up with statements containing your feelings toward certain aspects of presidential politics. Are you asking if I think you should have different feelings? If I agree or disagree with your relief that Obama was elected rather than McCain, how would that contribute anything? We know there are lots of people who are relieved Obama was elected, and lots of people who think McCain was a better choice. In short, the content of your post isn't well suited for commentary.
That, I care about.
If you truly care about people agreeing/disagreeing with your thoughts, you should probably care about written communication skills, as they are used to express them. To your point, though, my last comment about your post not being suited to commentary isn't meant to offend, but be an honest reaction to what you posted.
Even so, the phrasing of my original reply actually addresses the content of your post, albeit subtly. The first two sentences don't work without that implication. Overt and loud communication are much more clear than subtleties by nature, but that level of clarity isn't always what's appropriate.
Surface cars are very efficient and increasingly much, much safer.
Not compared to an aircraft that can go point-to-point. My daily commute when I lived up in the mountains in Los Gatos was about 30 minutes, and it would have been a one minute flight or less.
Why did you drive it then, instead of using a point-to-point aircraft? Sounds like a helicopter would have much better than a car.
Roads are not expensive to build in comparison to anything else.
Compare the cost of building roads to the cost of not building roads. QED. Also, the political costs you mention are still costs of building roads. That's a lot of tax money to spend, that air cars wouldn't need.
Hmm, that explains it. You didn't fly to work because of the taxes that fund Caltrans (California Dept. of Transportation). Air cars must be amazing, because you say they don't even need that portion of tax money. Never mind that the cost of owning and maintaining a helicopter vastly exceeds the portion of taxes you paid that went to Caltrans.
Sarcasm aside, building and maintaining roads is more expensive than not doing so, but it doesn't come close to the cost of everyone owning and maintaining a point-to-point aircraft.
Your earlier suggestion that we're approaching the tipping point for flying cars is absurd. If you argued we're on the tipping point for the Linux Desktop, people would disagree with you and that's a hell of a lot more feasible than cars flying everywhere.
Even if the technology for a point-to-point aircraft was remotely affordable for an individual's everyday use, the political climate will be impossible until there's a dramatic shift. I don't really want to go on; there's just nothing connection your suggestions here to reality.