I wish I lived in your UK not my UK... I live in the centre of a small city in the midlands, yes city, and I get 8mb you got 3-4 miles away from me to the outskirts and you will get 1-2mbit if you are lucky.
We had the same rules from College through University here (UK). So that's 1999 onwards, some preferred to have the phone on your desk, off, face up. Others were happy with it being off in a bag underneath your desk. Or if you didn't take a bag I often had my phone just on the floor under my chair, simple and easy and no way I could be cheating with it.
Never heard a phone go off in an exam to be honest, when it's your future on the line why risk it?
This always really pissed me off...
I am relatively young, and have reasonable savings coming from a well off family (put one tick in the lucky start box) but that money has been sitting in the bank now for a while just doing its job earning interest etc.
I claimed job seekers (our unemployment benefit) after being made redundant when everything went pear shaped in 2008, because of my savings I was given £63 a week, everything else was taken away from me.
Now I'm fiscally responsible. I save weekly, and I have money working towards my retirement in the future. However if I had been a complete idiot with my money, spent every last penny on a brand new plasma TV and all that jazz I would have been given:
£63
+Fuel bills £40 a month
+Money for food/rent/mortgage £150-200
So by being an idiot with my money, the government will give me 3-4 times MORE a month!
Next time I am unemployed if I am ever that unlucky, my money will be doing a disappearing act into other family members accounts before I claim that's for sure.
I actually do have a Urostomy with an external bag (read pouch but I've always called it that). I was pretty sure I would never visit America by choice due to these current rules (Englishman here) but work MIGHT require me too one day. So for my career I will be forced to experience a pat down of this nature and have a fun conversation with someone about how I am not carrying too much liquid on my person because it is in fact... piss.
So because someone is operating technology they are not able to safely use they should be free of reprimand? Spam causes real financial trouble and being infected either means Windows and therefore Microsoft are at fault, or the user is at fault. Someone has to be responsible, if you left the keys to your car in the open and someone took it for a joyride, crashing into a store front and smashing up a bunch of televisions, that's exactly the same as letting someone steal bandwidth and clock cycles for spamming people.
I don't know which is more disturbing, that you want to procreate with a computer game, or that you are a tom-cat able to type in English on a message board with paws
I assume from your comment you do not enjoy JRPG's then? As Square Enix have made available a number of classics in Final Fantasy 1 & 2 and even an iPhone exclusive which the name of escapes me now. Whilst this is definitely not teaming with RPG's I too hope that they start to come out more and more.
But then you are just spreading those precious beakers around! =( I want tech breakthroughs in less turns... Oh and I want Leonard Nimoy to read out the breakthroughs to me too!
One of my personal favourite stories as a 12 year old and one of my few claims to fame (I jest!) Is that I was asked with my friend, mother and sister, to leave a Pizza Hut restaurant during the day at a shopping mall in England for eating to much and denying other customers food...
They would bring a new pizza out during the all you can eat lunch and between me and my friend we would devour about half of it, and they couldn't cook them fast enough:D I loved it! Still, you can understand it since it was actually negatively impacting other customers but damn I loved pizza...
I have loved this sale... My steam collection went from about 4 games that had to be installed with it and the X-com Collection (seriously, 5 games for £5 and 2 of them should be played by everyone everywhere at least once) to around 15 games now I think, for a grand total of maybe £15? I have both Serious Sams which brings back Lan Party memories, classic AVP, both Max Paynes, just cause I loved the first one but never paid for it back then and a few others.
It's impluse buying madness but I am happy to pay for things that are good for £10-£15 and not £40.
Final Fantasy 7 is worth $40 still, I have yet to play a better RPG game than that in my 20 years of gaming. I own it in multiple formats and would do almost anything for them to just remake it exactly the same with improved graphics for the PS3, and I'd pay full price for it again.
5 years ago you popped a CD in the drive and played the game, if you wanted to play multi your mate came over, installed it too, and you had fun.
But no one is going to do that anymore, so whilst they may want me to login once to activate the game, thats the best you are going to get. Considering the original battle.net is still up for D2 and Warcraft III I don't see any problem believing this won't be an issue. Those games aren't going anywhere, and Blizzard removed the CD check for Warcraft III over a year ago at least now (your CDKEY must still be valid for online play, but everything else doesn't need a thing after install)
DRM is bad, we know that because you still get a more useable copy when you download it. But when it comes to who is going to get my £40 for a game, its someone like Blizzard and not Ubisoft, I know I have missed out on Settlers 7 because of my principles over that crap DRM and I really enjoyed the beta. Fuck you Ubisoft.
How is a single online account signup, your key is then bound to this account, any real form of DRM?
I paid for the game, I bind it to my battle.net account which has 4-5 other games on. I can log in and play whenever I want with no restrictions. No install limits, nothing. I can sell my account with all the games bound to it. Or create multiple battle.net accounts one per game and sell them seperately. There's no DRM/DLC or crap like that being pushed by other companies.
If you count a simple restriction of a login to prove the account you logged in with at some point legally bought the game (note the person using the account didn't have to buy it, you could lend it to a friend, or whatever). Then you've missed the point. I download stuff as much as the next guy, but when a company lets me use my purchase of the game the way I want. Then thats a good thing and should be applauded.
I fail to see anything restrictive about what they are doing.
Seriously, this is why I love this company. Ever since being a young kid playing Warcraft Orc and Humans, then playing multiplayer against my dad, I've known they make quality games, how they want, when they are ready. I still play Diablo 2 to this day, completing Hell difficultly on Hardcore still gives me a feeling of achievement lacking in recent games!
[snip]If most Muslims followed their faith without enforcing their beliefs on others[/snip]
The problem is, their book clearly states that we (atheists, non-believers) must be killed if we do not convert. Christians and Jews are allowed to pay a tax, to live. Non-believers _must_ be killed. Anyone who thinks there can be a peaceful muslim faith is having a laugh.
I've got nothing against Christians or Jews or pretty much any other religion, I can think they are stupid, they can think I am going to serve an eternity in a pit of fire. We don't bother each other.
The muslim faith should be banned, utterly. It is a world domination religion and nothing more or less. It needs to be eradicated. Judge me all you like for saying it, but it is left-over disease from the past, time to cure it and move on. Maybe my English bias is showing here, but they are an absolute corrupting force, and I dispise every one of them for what they are doing to my country, through politically correct bollocks!
The simultaneous moves system functions very well to speed up multiplayer. This isn't to say on a world map my friend and I have beaten 4-5 Monarch computers in around 36 hours played over a number of sessions.
The great part about civ is you can really save any turn (if you can beat the Just One More Turn... desires!) and pick it up again whenever you are ready.
Turn time limits also work in a bigger game competitively, the timers are Short Medium Long, and function as a multiplication of how many units / cities you have, it is very generious but definately keeps things moving along.
WoW has changed a lot over its five years. I have been playing since day 1 EU, I started out with 2 real life friends leveling to 60, this was back in my 2nd year of university. Since then I've made many new friends from all over Europe, had one pretty successful relationship from the game with a Swedish girl (I'm English) she moved to England etc etc, and I talk to people from variety of places that I do intend to visit now that I have a job and money. I think anyone who is socially average can balance a game and normal activities. I make sure I am a member of a guild that doesn't raid Friday/Saturday, those nights and my weekend are free and I spend most of it out of the house drinking and doing the kind of things a 26 year old bloke does...
Raiding originally took a lot of hours, Molten Core the first instance was a sprawling dungeon that my guild achieved Alliance first Rag on the server, so we were pretty hardcore back when no one really understood raiding (WoW brought in a lot of people that had never played an MMO before even at the begining). That place would take 4 hours or so to clear, 5+ if you weren't farming it. Then Blackwing Lair, and AQ40, and Naxx, all of it was very big, and very long. TBC cut the instance size down a notch with some more single encounter raids, and the shorter "Eye" and "Hyjal" taking much much less time to do.
Now in WoTLK the first instance was Naxx from Vannilla, easy for any old player, Ulduar was more regular sized, Trial of the Crusader was VERY short (you can do it all in 30-40mins now even in heroic mode) and Ice Crown is being released slowly. All in all I raid about a quarter of the time I used to five year ago.
Anyway, I suck at writing these kind of posts coherently, but my main point is, WoW has been probably the most enjoyable game I've played in 5 years. I laugh, joke, and chat about all kinds of things with real life friends who I drink with on a weekend, and guys I now know from Denmark,Sweden,Norway,Germany and even Greece. Some people will always have addictive personalities, and just like gambling can ruin a life so can WoW. But to anyone balanced WoW can be a great social experience and the game isn't bad either:)
JFYI: The item classification Rare, Epic etc, actually affects the items stat weights and "Budget" an ilevel 100 blue, is generally weaker than an ilvl 100 epic. I can't explain any better than that because its all maths I've never delved into.
Obviously they could change this, but simply re-colouring things at this stage wouldn't work without changing item budget mechanics.
They should however, do it on the push to 85 later next year.
The volume control thing is so true... 2,4,5,6,8,0 are all acceptable, even if say 21 is the perfect volume, I just bugs me too much so I will turn it down to 20:(
During a dry early year a few of my friends and I re-installed Diablo 2 and had some of the best gaming we have in a long time...
We'd never completed it on Hardcore mode, and 3 weeks later and a lot of gaming, and a few dead characters a peice, we all killed Hell Diff Baal. To great feelings of satisfaction.
D3 can't come out soon enough, SC2 has been gutted with no LAN, everything is stupidly online with not enough CO-OP modes.
Randoms online are almost always complete tards to strangers, and/or will quit as soon as they are not winning. I have a few good friends who are as avid gamers as me and we want to co-op everything, but no one seems to care...
Still one of the proudest moments of my life when I was 16, was being asked to leave a Pizza Hut with my best mate in a shopping mall in the UK because every time they brought a new pizza out we devoured about half of it immediately:P sadly my eating-fu has diminished massively since =(
p.s. I'm only 26, so yeah, this ranks up there in great achievements!
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I lived in your UK not my UK... I live in the centre of a small city in the midlands, yes city, and I get 8mb you got 3-4 miles away from me to the outskirts and you will get 1-2mbit if you are lucky.
We had the same rules from College through University here (UK). So that's 1999 onwards, some preferred to have the phone on your desk, off, face up. Others were happy with it being off in a bag underneath your desk. Or if you didn't take a bag I often had my phone just on the floor under my chair, simple and easy and no way I could be cheating with it.
Never heard a phone go off in an exam to be honest, when it's your future on the line why risk it?
Surely the woman said "Sluta" :)
This always really pissed me off...
I am relatively young, and have reasonable savings coming from a well off family (put one tick in the lucky start box) but that money has been sitting in the bank now for a while just doing its job earning interest etc.
I claimed job seekers (our unemployment benefit) after being made redundant when everything went pear shaped in 2008, because of my savings I was given £63 a week, everything else was taken away from me.
Now I'm fiscally responsible. I save weekly, and I have money working towards my retirement in the future. However if I had been a complete idiot with my money, spent every last penny on a brand new plasma TV and all that jazz I would have been given:
£63
+Fuel bills £40 a month
+Money for food/rent/mortgage £150-200
So by being an idiot with my money, the government will give me 3-4 times MORE a month!
Next time I am unemployed if I am ever that unlucky, my money will be doing a disappearing act into other family members accounts before I claim that's for sure.
I actually do have a Urostomy with an external bag (read pouch but I've always called it that). I was pretty sure I would never visit America by choice due to these current rules (Englishman here) but work MIGHT require me too one day. So for my career I will be forced to experience a pat down of this nature and have a fun conversation with someone about how I am not carrying too much liquid on my person because it is in fact... piss.
So because someone is operating technology they are not able to safely use they should be free of reprimand? Spam causes real financial trouble and being infected either means Windows and therefore Microsoft are at fault, or the user is at fault. Someone has to be responsible, if you left the keys to your car in the open and someone took it for a joyride, crashing into a store front and smashing up a bunch of televisions, that's exactly the same as letting someone steal bandwidth and clock cycles for spamming people.
I don't know which is more disturbing, that you want to procreate with a computer game, or that you are a tom-cat able to type in English on a message board with paws
I assume from your comment you do not enjoy JRPG's then? As Square Enix have made available a number of classics in Final Fantasy 1 & 2 and even an iPhone exclusive which the name of escapes me now. Whilst this is definitely not teaming with RPG's I too hope that they start to come out more and more.
But then you are just spreading those precious beakers around! =( I want tech breakthroughs in less turns... Oh and I want Leonard Nimoy to read out the breakthroughs to me too!
It is entirely right for the man/woman to spend their money exactly as they wish.
One of my personal favourite stories as a 12 year old and one of my few claims to fame (I jest!) Is that I was asked with my friend, mother and sister, to leave a Pizza Hut restaurant during the day at a shopping mall in England for eating to much and denying other customers food... :D I loved it! Still, you can understand it since it was actually negatively impacting other customers but damn I loved pizza...
They would bring a new pizza out during the all you can eat lunch and between me and my friend we would devour about half of it, and they couldn't cook them fast enough
I'm not saying I would act any differently although I'm in the UK. But the future is our own fault if we don't stand up for the rights we do have.
I have loved this sale... My steam collection went from about 4 games that had to be installed with it and the X-com Collection (seriously, 5 games for £5 and 2 of them should be played by everyone everywhere at least once) to around 15 games now I think, for a grand total of maybe £15? I have both Serious Sams which brings back Lan Party memories, classic AVP, both Max Paynes, just cause I loved the first one but never paid for it back then and a few others.
It's impluse buying madness but I am happy to pay for things that are good for £10-£15 and not £40.
Final Fantasy 7 is worth $40 still, I have yet to play a better RPG game than that in my 20 years of gaming. I own it in multiple formats and would do almost anything for them to just remake it exactly the same with improved graphics for the PS3, and I'd pay full price for it again.
I think in all honesty I'm just being a realist.
5 years ago you popped a CD in the drive and played the game, if you wanted to play multi your mate came over, installed it too, and you had fun.
But no one is going to do that anymore, so whilst they may want me to login once to activate the game, thats the best you are going to get. Considering the original battle.net is still up for D2 and Warcraft III I don't see any problem believing this won't be an issue. Those games aren't going anywhere, and Blizzard removed the CD check for Warcraft III over a year ago at least now (your CDKEY must still be valid for online play, but everything else doesn't need a thing after install)
DRM is bad, we know that because you still get a more useable copy when you download it. But when it comes to who is going to get my £40 for a game, its someone like Blizzard and not Ubisoft, I know I have missed out on Settlers 7 because of my principles over that crap DRM and I really enjoyed the beta. Fuck you Ubisoft.
How is a single online account signup, your key is then bound to this account, any real form of DRM?
I paid for the game, I bind it to my battle.net account which has 4-5 other games on. I can log in and play whenever I want with no restrictions. No install limits, nothing. I can sell my account with all the games bound to it. Or create multiple battle.net accounts one per game and sell them seperately. There's no DRM/DLC or crap like that being pushed by other companies.
If you count a simple restriction of a login to prove the account you logged in with at some point legally bought the game (note the person using the account didn't have to buy it, you could lend it to a friend, or whatever). Then you've missed the point. I download stuff as much as the next guy, but when a company lets me use my purchase of the game the way I want. Then thats a good thing and should be applauded.
I fail to see anything restrictive about what they are doing.
Seriously, this is why I love this company. Ever since being a young kid playing Warcraft Orc and Humans, then playing multiplayer against my dad, I've known they make quality games, how they want, when they are ready. I still play Diablo 2 to this day, completing Hell difficultly on Hardcore still gives me a feeling of achievement lacking in recent games!
[snip]If most Muslims followed their faith without enforcing their beliefs on others[/snip] The problem is, their book clearly states that we (atheists, non-believers) must be killed if we do not convert. Christians and Jews are allowed to pay a tax, to live. Non-believers _must_ be killed. Anyone who thinks there can be a peaceful muslim faith is having a laugh. I've got nothing against Christians or Jews or pretty much any other religion, I can think they are stupid, they can think I am going to serve an eternity in a pit of fire. We don't bother each other. The muslim faith should be banned, utterly. It is a world domination religion and nothing more or less. It needs to be eradicated. Judge me all you like for saying it, but it is left-over disease from the past, time to cure it and move on. Maybe my English bias is showing here, but they are an absolute corrupting force, and I dispise every one of them for what they are doing to my country, through politically correct bollocks!
The simultaneous moves system functions very well to speed up multiplayer. This isn't to say on a world map my friend and I have beaten 4-5 Monarch computers in around 36 hours played over a number of sessions.
The great part about civ is you can really save any turn (if you can beat the Just One More Turn... desires!) and pick it up again whenever you are ready.
Turn time limits also work in a bigger game competitively, the timers are Short Medium Long, and function as a multiplication of how many units / cities you have, it is very generious but definately keeps things moving along.
How on earth do you buy a drink in a pub? Or do you reside soley in your parents basement?
WoW has changed a lot over its five years. I have been playing since day 1 EU, I started out with 2 real life friends leveling to 60, this was back in my 2nd year of university. Since then I've made many new friends from all over Europe, had one pretty successful relationship from the game with a Swedish girl (I'm English) she moved to England etc etc, and I talk to people from variety of places that I do intend to visit now that I have a job and money. I think anyone who is socially average can balance a game and normal activities. I make sure I am a member of a guild that doesn't raid Friday/Saturday, those nights and my weekend are free and I spend most of it out of the house drinking and doing the kind of things a 26 year old bloke does...
:)
Raiding originally took a lot of hours, Molten Core the first instance was a sprawling dungeon that my guild achieved Alliance first Rag on the server, so we were pretty hardcore back when no one really understood raiding (WoW brought in a lot of people that had never played an MMO before even at the begining). That place would take 4 hours or so to clear, 5+ if you weren't farming it. Then Blackwing Lair, and AQ40, and Naxx, all of it was very big, and very long. TBC cut the instance size down a notch with some more single encounter raids, and the shorter "Eye" and "Hyjal" taking much much less time to do.
Now in WoTLK the first instance was Naxx from Vannilla, easy for any old player, Ulduar was more regular sized, Trial of the Crusader was VERY short (you can do it all in 30-40mins now even in heroic mode) and Ice Crown is being released slowly. All in all I raid about a quarter of the time I used to five year ago.
Anyway, I suck at writing these kind of posts coherently, but my main point is, WoW has been probably the most enjoyable game I've played in 5 years. I laugh, joke, and chat about all kinds of things with real life friends who I drink with on a weekend, and guys I now know from Denmark,Sweden,Norway,Germany and even Greece. Some people will always have addictive personalities, and just like gambling can ruin a life so can WoW. But to anyone balanced WoW can be a great social experience and the game isn't bad either
JFYI: The item classification Rare, Epic etc, actually affects the items stat weights and "Budget" an ilevel 100 blue, is generally weaker than an ilvl 100 epic. I can't explain any better than that because its all maths I've never delved into. Obviously they could change this, but simply re-colouring things at this stage wouldn't work without changing item budget mechanics. They should however, do it on the push to 85 later next year.
The volume control thing is so true... 2,4,5,6,8,0 are all acceptable, even if say 21 is the perfect volume, I just bugs me too much so I will turn it down to 20 :(
Sad thing is I read that completely normally...
During a dry early year a few of my friends and I re-installed Diablo 2 and had some of the best gaming we have in a long time... We'd never completed it on Hardcore mode, and 3 weeks later and a lot of gaming, and a few dead characters a peice, we all killed Hell Diff Baal. To great feelings of satisfaction. D3 can't come out soon enough, SC2 has been gutted with no LAN, everything is stupidly online with not enough CO-OP modes. Randoms online are almost always complete tards to strangers, and/or will quit as soon as they are not winning. I have a few good friends who are as avid gamers as me and we want to co-op everything, but no one seems to care...
Still one of the proudest moments of my life when I was 16, was being asked to leave a Pizza Hut with my best mate in a shopping mall in the UK because every time they brought a new pizza out we devoured about half of it immediately :P sadly my eating-fu has diminished massively since =(
p.s. I'm only 26, so yeah, this ranks up there in great achievements!