They are both war mongering liars, you are correct. But in this case, there's video of the Anti-aircraft battery being driven back into Russia missing 1 missile. That's pretty cut and dry.
Sides are not equally wrong, and truth is not somewhere in the middle. There is a very clear wrong side - Russian equipment operated by Russian-sponsored terrorists and/or Russian military misidentifying civilian aircraft and shooting it down. Anything else is intentional misinformation.
"Terrorist" is the wrong word, it's obvious from the intercepts this was a tactical error on someone's part.
Terrorism isn't defined by actions so much as the reason. For the love of Jebus, it has a well understood meaning folks, look it up.
Yes, but they're terrorists for acts outside of this lone incident. If you look at the same groups acts over the past 10 months or so, they are clearly terrorists, independent of this particular accident. They are trying to "Terrorize" the Ukrainian government into giving them sovereignty.
Not that the use of that lone word makes much of a difference anymore anyway.
The plane was 10km up. It wasn't shot down by something bought for $50,000 from Bob's Quality Used Implements of Death and Destruction and delivered to you by a courier van. The suspected weapon system requires at minimum one tank sized tracked launcher vehicle, and for full capability it requires three such vehicles. This is way out of Bob the arms dealer's league. Although I'm pretty much guessing here, the missile alone I expect would cost over a million dollars to manufacture.
Having said that, the possibility exists that rebels with military experience seized such a weapon system from an overrun Ukrainian military base.
There's video of the launcher being driven back into Russia short 1 missile.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2...
It is, almost undoubtedly a Russian system.
Actually, I suspect that neither side knows the truth. Or at least neither government does. This strikes me as an act of somebody or some organization that was acting entirely independently of government authority or sanction (and most likely used illegally purchased munitions to achieve it).
It was a russian missile battery. They gave it to them for the purpose of shooting down planes. I don't think they intended for them to use it on civilian craft, but that's what you get when you give a bunch of drunken thugs a multi million dollar surface to air missile system.
One biased side is fighting edits from an even more biased side.
The first casualty of war is the truth. In this case both sides are trying to pummel truth's dead body into a hamburger.
I don't discount the fact that there's propaganda all around on this. Everyone seems to forget that this entire affair started because of a European/US backed coup overthrew and elected pro-russian government.
But...
The Russians backed the separatists, armed them and many of the people in command of those troops are in fact ex-Russian military.
The missile system that shot it down was a Russian system. Not one they sold to anyone, or one that got stolen, it was an active Russian military missile battery that was driven into Ukraine, shot down the jet and then was driven back. There is first hand footage of the truck leaving the area with a missile missing from the rack. Google the video, it's fairly obvious.
Unless the US and Europe have gone full "Fake moon landing video" on us, this is 100% the Russians fault and altering that line on wikipedia was a flat out lie.
How is that in any way a scam? They say, right there in big block bold letters "THIS IS A SOLICITATION FOR THE ORDER OF SERVICES NOT A BILL OR INVOICE" and "You're not obligated to renew with either your existing provider or us, review our prices and decide for yourself" as well as making it perfectly clear several times that if you accept their offer, you'll be switching to using them.
If you consider that a scam, then you're evidently just an incredibly thick person. They're competing for business in a free market.
Just because the only people you ripp off are stupid, doesn't make you any less of a con artist... it just makes you a shitty con artist.
I have an alternative theory... the minimum wage has no affect on job growth at all.
The majority of minimum wage workers are highschool students work in fast food. If the employer wants to pay less, they hire illegal immigrants that can't report him, or let his workers work off "Tips" so they think they're making a lot of money when they're really not.
What drives job growth in a state are taxes and the regulatory environment. Or, at least, those are the only factors the government has any control over. The minimum wage is nothing more than a red herring for the democrats and republicans to argue about to make it appear like they give a shit.
The people that have a real problem with job placement and wage are the huge numbers of people that have felonies on their records for things most of us wouldn't consider a crime worth life long punishment... Expunge all felonies that are over 5yrs old, for people that have no re-offended and their crime was non-violent (i.e. drug offenses, DUIs, statutory rape, etc...) and watch poverty rates plummet.
There's a false comparison being made here... who says the Nokia engineer or the Xbox content maker being laid off has the same skills as the programmer they are wanting to hire?
Right... The majority of the layoffs appear to be on the factory floor of Nokia. A shame... but those jobs have nothing to do with H1B workers.
On slashdot, we like facts... we like them so much that if they agree with our opinion we don't even care if they're true.:-)
wow... I dont know why I bother. You don't understand peering... at all...
Learn more here: http://drpeering.net/
Here's a very dumbed down example of what I think is going on. No I don't have proof, but this would be typical of one of these disputes... and no, peering negotiations are never nice and friendly. They more resemble bar brawls.
http://i.imgur.com/uLQvkIi.jpg
there should be some treaties in place that would only allow space warfare if they properly handle the resulting space junk, otherwise space will become a no man land. perhaps this would result in non explosive/kinetic attacks, capture and burn in the atmosphere attacks, and repositioning attacks.
We were also under treaty to assist Ukraine should they be invaded...
The bitcoin community is highly technical. They will probably sell a lot of systems making it available as an option. They will convert their bitcoin to cash instantly minimizing currency risk.
I know a lot of highly technical people, and I don't know a single person that owns a single bitcoin... so I question your conclusions. I hear a lot of talk about bitcoins, but not much about who has any sizable assets in bitcoins so I sometimes question if the entire market might just be 1 random guy scamming us all.
Given that the US is almost assuredly got armed satellites in orbit, and the US Airforce has a unmanned space shuttle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
I think it's a bit silly to call this anything other than "Common sense" on China's part. At the very least during an armed conflict the US could use these satellites to spy on China... at worst they could nuke them from orbit. If they didn't have an anti-satalite program they'd be remiss in their duties I'd think.
Level3 to Netflix: "If you get a 10gig trunk through us and only us we'll give you half off!" Netflix to Level3: "SOLD!!! Hell yea!" Verizon to level3: "Our traffic from netflix moved over to Level3 last night... very strange, anyways we need to increase our capacity..." Level3 to Verizon: "Ok, that will be $X" Verizon to level3: "um... That's 300% higher than any other provider out there..." Level3 to Verizon: "suck it... your monies are belong to us" Verizon to Netflix: "We need to talk about peering. Level3 is totally trying to rip us off." Netflix to Verizon: "No thanks, we got a great deal. By the way, Level3 sends their regards" Verizon to Netflix: "ok, we're not going to increase capacity with Level3, if you want to serve your customers properly, you're going to have to buy a truck from a more affordable peer. We can even offer you a deal on our network if you'd like." Netflix to the world: "Net Neutrality! People unite!"
I get tired of being the only person on slashdot that understands this...
The problem isn't the interconnect. The problem is between the local remote that feeds your house and the Central Office. When that much data comes from Netflix all at the same time, the remotes trunks can't handle it. Upgrading THOSE trunks costs a fortune. Throttling netflix at the peer reduces load on those trunks without affecting other services. That's what's going on and why Verizon (and others) are throttling Netflix. They have no other way of targeting netflix traffic directly without sending the FCC into a tizzy.
Netflix-------> Level3-------> Verizon core network-------> Verizon local CO----(the problem is here)---> remote-------> your house
You can argue that Verizon should fix that trunking themselves, we'd have a different argument then... but what this "Story" is about isn't even what's wrong. You can't just look at one section of the cheapest part of Verizons network and claim how easy it would be for them to fix. They've got a huge multi-billion dollar network to maintain and the front door to that network is the least of their concerns.
Consider if your car had a black box, which it should.
No it shouldn't. It's my car, go to hell. If I drove a buss or something, that would be different. But you can't preemptively determine that at some point in the future I will break the law, cause an accident and therefor put a surveillance system in my car. By your logic I should be required by law to have video cameras in my home filming me just in case I murder someone so the police can come along later and watch the video.
One already gets speeding tickets automatically when your fast lane toll pass records you traveling between toll plazas faster than you should be. Imagine if that was all the time.
Why does everyone always think "Where I live, things are like X, therefor things are like X everywhere on earth"??? We don't even have TOLLS in my state, much less tickets by toll. In the states that border mine they have tolls and they don't do that. I think I've only driven through one state where they can legally give you a ticket for speeding based on when you get on and off the tollway. They said I was speeding, I said "No I wasn't" and they said "oh... well be careful" and no ticket.
Why haven't all airplanes been upgraded so the black box data is streamed to satellites/ground stations? It's so dumb to have to search for a airplane to find the data, that should be the fallback plan. Hey FAA, you listening?
Because there's probably way too much data for that to be a reasonable idea. Have you any idea how many planes there are flying at once?
And how much data does the flight recorder capture? 56k? and it doesn't even need to send it all. Location and some very low quality audio of radio communications would solve 99% of the problems we're having. It's kind of like the brain implants they've built for the blind in recent years. The first one they put into a guy only had a resolution of about 20 x 20 pixels. When asked how it was to see with such terrible resolution he said "I don't mind. If it stops me from getting hit by a car, I'll worry about being able to see a sunset for another day.
That's a good point, but its a small percentage of flights that have Internet access. Even in the US.
Even in the US? I've never seen internet access on a US flight. Flying across Europe, the middle east and Africa, pretty much every plane I got on either had direct internet access or the plane offered streaming data you could pay for (i.e. it had internet, just no wifi) The lack of internet access in the US is entirely due to the FAA being stuck in the 1950s.
It's called eating well, exercising and losing a significant amount of weight. I know, I came very very close to having it. Break the sugar addiction, quadruple your vegetable intake, vastly reduce your sugar / heavy foods intake and do a little, tiny bit of basic light exercise.
I haven't bought an SOE product in 10yrs because of the Foglok fiasco... I was actually banned from their forums for a few months back in the day for suggesting they didnt exist, only later find out I was right.
What do you mean froglok's don't exist, I've seen them. There was a HUGE underground fortress/city FULL of them down south near the Ogre/Troll town in EQOA. High level Froglok paladins and such.
They were NPC's in the original EQ release too. Ykesha made them playable.
lol... Ok, I'll enlighten you. I was hardcore into EQ1. I played on a PVP server and we did all the hardcore raiding stuff... we carried pagers so when rare mobs popped we'd get paged and go home from work sick. Some of us carried laptops to work so we could log in from there, etc...
So EQ2 was a highly anticipated release. We all had the game and were in it within seconds of the servers coming up. Our guild was formed and we were off. One of my primary roles was cataloging and documenting quests. My guild (and a few others) solve a lot of the original quests and raid content. You know all those guides you follow to finish a quest? I (and others like me) wrote a lot of the first ones. I loved doing that... there were many in my guild that solved the riddles, or sometimes it would be a combination of the top raiding guilds. My guide for Nektropos Castle was one of my favorite's because it reminded me so much of EQ1's crazy complicated quests.
But at the time of the games release, THE quest to solve was the Froglok unlock quest. SOE said the game included frogloks from the start and that there was simply a quest we had to figure out to unlock them. No one had done it, if they had it would have been obvious because we'd see a froglok running around. From the start we suspected something was up. We invested huge amounts of time trying to solve the riddle. I was personally putting in 12hrs a day trying to figure it out. We went to every corner of every map, talked to every NPC. We had spreadsheets filled with data but none of it made sense. It seemed like there were broken quests related to it all over the place. But the real giveaway that something was wrong was the fact that the few Froglok npc's in the game never moved. We suspected they'd not finished the animations in time. So we took to the forums. I cataloged what I could, and made my points. We got posts from SOE themselves stating they were in the game, we had to just keep trying. So we did, for months. Then a guy hacked the client, and got it to load the character creation screen for the froglok and took screenshots. It was missing bits and pieces of its body. That was it, they were lying. So we went back to the forums, I got into a huge argument with moorguard amongst others and got banned for spreading misinformation or some such... I suspect there were others that got banned but was never sure. Then a few weeks later they had a press release... Frogloks were never in the game, they were going to patch them in, the quest didn't exist yet. We'd pushed them to ask enough questions and the truth was revealed. Quietly my ban was lifted without apology. I suspect upper management had been lying to the community team for plausible deniabilities sake.
A while later, maybe a few months? There was a big patch and unlocking the frogloks was one of the simplest, stupidest quests you can imagine. It was clearly an afterthought. The entire "unlock the froklok" thing was a lie to cover up the fact that the game hadn't been finished at release. I quite playing and later entered the Vanguard Alpha testing... but that's a tale for another time;-)
I got a 6yr old now... no more time to waste on MMOs.
I see that mistake so often. It should be "star system" because only our star system is called "Solar system" because our star is called Sol.
Funny thing is, often words have multiple meanings:
Solar system noun 1.the sun together with all the planets and other bodies that revolve around it. 2.a similar system with celestial bodies revolving around a star other than the sun.
It is so difficult to stay on top in any field, let alone atop a technology that changes virtually overnight, that even Microsoft's relatively short run as apex predator was commendable.
You can make a hundred correct predictions in a row as to where the market is heading, and then whiff on two, and an apple or a google gain a foothold.
It's not rocket science... it's way harder than that.
I don't know about that. Microsoft made some pretty asinine mistakes along the way. The search engine problem was obvious, and everyone knew it. It basically became impossible to find anything on the net, and yahoo and others were flooding their front pages with so much crap, half the time you couldn't even find the search bar. Then came Google... sifting out all the ads, even from their own front page. It was like they were selling Viagra at a hooker convention. That could ahve been Microsoft but they missed the most obvious boat in the history of the internet. Then even Microsoft fell for Apples marketing and saw them as the threat and tried to copy their model of locked in everything... what a joke... Once again Google walked in with a free and open alternative and destroyed them both.
Microsoft has one chance to survive the next decade. Make windows free and open up most of their source code. Offer integration services and charge game manufacturers for... I dunno... something involving DirectX. Baring that, the Microsoft we know is dead and will be replaced by a company that lives vampirically off their old patents and businesses that just can't get rid of Office no matter how much they try.
but keep in mind, more people than that are dieing daily under where that plane was flying.
Yeah. Of old age, disease, accidents, pretty much like everywhere else on the planet. The amount of dead due to the conflict probably doesn't rise up to 300 since it started.
Just the initial protests at the end of last year resulted in well over 100 deaths, plus a large number of unidentified bodies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... and we have no idea what's going on there now. I suppose I shouldn't have said "Daily" I should have phrased that different... people die in the hundreds when conflict arises which is sporadic. The Russians over ran several military bases and that lead to large numbers of deaths, as well as when they pushed out the Ukrainian military and police from various cities. The death toll is, at least, in the thousands.
Slashdot Mirror
They are both war mongering liars, you are correct. But in this case, there's video of the Anti-aircraft battery being driven back into Russia missing 1 missile. That's pretty cut and dry.
False equivalence.
Sides are not equally wrong, and truth is not somewhere in the middle. There is a very clear wrong side - Russian equipment operated by Russian-sponsored terrorists and/or Russian military misidentifying civilian aircraft and shooting it down. Anything else is intentional misinformation.
"Terrorist" is the wrong word, it's obvious from the intercepts this was a tactical error on someone's part.
Terrorism isn't defined by actions so much as the reason. For the love of Jebus, it has a well understood meaning folks, look it up.
Yes, but they're terrorists for acts outside of this lone incident. If you look at the same groups acts over the past 10 months or so, they are clearly terrorists, independent of this particular accident. They are trying to "Terrorize" the Ukrainian government into giving them sovereignty. Not that the use of that lone word makes much of a difference anymore anyway.
The plane was 10km up. It wasn't shot down by something bought for $50,000 from Bob's Quality Used Implements of Death and Destruction and delivered to you by a courier van. The suspected weapon system requires at minimum one tank sized tracked launcher vehicle, and for full capability it requires three such vehicles. This is way out of Bob the arms dealer's league. Although I'm pretty much guessing here, the missile alone I expect would cost over a million dollars to manufacture.
Having said that, the possibility exists that rebels with military experience seized such a weapon system from an overrun Ukrainian military base.
There's video of the launcher being driven back into Russia short 1 missile. http://news.nationalpost.com/2... It is, almost undoubtedly a Russian system.
Actually, I suspect that neither side knows the truth. Or at least neither government does. This strikes me as an act of somebody or some organization that was acting entirely independently of government authority or sanction (and most likely used illegally purchased munitions to achieve it).
It was a russian missile battery. They gave it to them for the purpose of shooting down planes. I don't think they intended for them to use it on civilian craft, but that's what you get when you give a bunch of drunken thugs a multi million dollar surface to air missile system.
One biased side is fighting edits from an even more biased side.
The first casualty of war is the truth. In this case both sides are trying to pummel truth's dead body into a hamburger.
I don't discount the fact that there's propaganda all around on this. Everyone seems to forget that this entire affair started because of a European/US backed coup overthrew and elected pro-russian government. But... The Russians backed the separatists, armed them and many of the people in command of those troops are in fact ex-Russian military. The missile system that shot it down was a Russian system. Not one they sold to anyone, or one that got stolen, it was an active Russian military missile battery that was driven into Ukraine, shot down the jet and then was driven back. There is first hand footage of the truck leaving the area with a missile missing from the rack. Google the video, it's fairly obvious. Unless the US and Europe have gone full "Fake moon landing video" on us, this is 100% the Russians fault and altering that line on wikipedia was a flat out lie.
One Problem with your plan... Poor people need firewood to.
How is that in any way a scam? They say, right there in big block bold letters "THIS IS A SOLICITATION FOR THE ORDER OF SERVICES NOT A BILL OR INVOICE" and "You're not obligated to renew with either your existing provider or us, review our prices and decide for yourself" as well as making it perfectly clear several times that if you accept their offer, you'll be switching to using them.
If you consider that a scam, then you're evidently just an incredibly thick person. They're competing for business in a free market.
Just because the only people you ripp off are stupid, doesn't make you any less of a con artist... it just makes you a shitty con artist.
I have an alternative theory... the minimum wage has no affect on job growth at all. The majority of minimum wage workers are highschool students work in fast food. If the employer wants to pay less, they hire illegal immigrants that can't report him, or let his workers work off "Tips" so they think they're making a lot of money when they're really not. What drives job growth in a state are taxes and the regulatory environment. Or, at least, those are the only factors the government has any control over. The minimum wage is nothing more than a red herring for the democrats and republicans to argue about to make it appear like they give a shit. The people that have a real problem with job placement and wage are the huge numbers of people that have felonies on their records for things most of us wouldn't consider a crime worth life long punishment... Expunge all felonies that are over 5yrs old, for people that have no re-offended and their crime was non-violent (i.e. drug offenses, DUIs, statutory rape, etc...) and watch poverty rates plummet.
There's a false comparison being made here... who says the Nokia engineer or the Xbox content maker being laid off has the same skills as the programmer they are wanting to hire?
Right... The majority of the layoffs appear to be on the factory floor of Nokia. A shame... but those jobs have nothing to do with H1B workers. On slashdot, we like facts... we like them so much that if they agree with our opinion we don't even care if they're true. :-)
wow... I dont know why I bother. You don't understand peering... at all... Learn more here: http://drpeering.net/ Here's a very dumbed down example of what I think is going on. No I don't have proof, but this would be typical of one of these disputes... and no, peering negotiations are never nice and friendly. They more resemble bar brawls. http://i.imgur.com/uLQvkIi.jpg
there should be some treaties in place that would only allow space warfare if they properly handle the resulting space junk, otherwise space will become a no man land. perhaps this would result in non explosive/kinetic attacks, capture and burn in the atmosphere attacks, and repositioning attacks.
We were also under treaty to assist Ukraine should they be invaded...
The bitcoin community is highly technical. They will probably sell a lot of systems making it available as an option. They will convert their bitcoin to cash instantly minimizing currency risk.
I know a lot of highly technical people, and I don't know a single person that owns a single bitcoin... so I question your conclusions. I hear a lot of talk about bitcoins, but not much about who has any sizable assets in bitcoins so I sometimes question if the entire market might just be 1 random guy scamming us all.
I bet 90% of all small businesses still have no real clue data security and about the amount of data their printers, cash registers,.. still contain.
more importantly, when they're selling their POS it likely means they've gone out of business and simply don't care at that point.
Given that the US is almost assuredly got armed satellites in orbit, and the US Airforce has a unmanned space shuttle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
I think it's a bit silly to call this anything other than "Common sense" on China's part. At the very least during an armed conflict the US could use these satellites to spy on China... at worst they could nuke them from orbit. If they didn't have an anti-satalite program they'd be remiss in their duties I'd think.
More specifically this is what's going on:
Level3 to Netflix: "If you get a 10gig trunk through us and only us we'll give you half off!"
Netflix to Level3: "SOLD!!! Hell yea!"
Verizon to level3: "Our traffic from netflix moved over to Level3 last night... very strange, anyways we need to increase our capacity..."
Level3 to Verizon: "Ok, that will be $X"
Verizon to level3: "um... That's 300% higher than any other provider out there..."
Level3 to Verizon: "suck it... your monies are belong to us"
Verizon to Netflix: "We need to talk about peering. Level3 is totally trying to rip us off."
Netflix to Verizon: "No thanks, we got a great deal. By the way, Level3 sends their regards"
Verizon to Netflix: "ok, we're not going to increase capacity with Level3, if you want to serve your customers properly, you're going to have to buy a truck from a more affordable peer. We can even offer you a deal on our network if you'd like."
Netflix to the world: "Net Neutrality! People unite!"
I get tired of being the only person on slashdot that understands this...
The problem isn't the interconnect. The problem is between the local remote that feeds your house and the Central Office. When that much data comes from Netflix all at the same time, the remotes trunks can't handle it. Upgrading THOSE trunks costs a fortune. Throttling netflix at the peer reduces load on those trunks without affecting other services. That's what's going on and why Verizon (and others) are throttling Netflix. They have no other way of targeting netflix traffic directly without sending the FCC into a tizzy.
Netflix-------> Level3-------> Verizon core network-------> Verizon local CO----(the problem is here)---> remote-------> your house
You can argue that Verizon should fix that trunking themselves, we'd have a different argument then... but what this "Story" is about isn't even what's wrong. You can't just look at one section of the cheapest part of Verizons network and claim how easy it would be for them to fix. They've got a huge multi-billion dollar network to maintain and the front door to that network is the least of their concerns.
Consider if your car had a black box, which it should.
No it shouldn't. It's my car, go to hell. If I drove a buss or something, that would be different. But you can't preemptively determine that at some point in the future I will break the law, cause an accident and therefor put a surveillance system in my car. By your logic I should be required by law to have video cameras in my home filming me just in case I murder someone so the police can come along later and watch the video.
One already gets speeding tickets automatically when your fast lane toll pass records you traveling between toll plazas faster than you should be. Imagine if that was all the time.
Why does everyone always think "Where I live, things are like X, therefor things are like X everywhere on earth"???
We don't even have TOLLS in my state, much less tickets by toll. In the states that border mine they have tolls and they don't do that.
I think I've only driven through one state where they can legally give you a ticket for speeding based on when you get on and off the tollway. They said I was speeding, I said "No I wasn't" and they said "oh... well be careful" and no ticket.
Why haven't all airplanes been upgraded so the black box data is streamed to satellites/ground stations? It's so dumb to have to search for a airplane to find the data, that should be the fallback plan. Hey FAA, you listening?
Because there's probably way too much data for that to be a reasonable idea. Have you any idea how many planes there are flying at once?
And how much data does the flight recorder capture? 56k? and it doesn't even need to send it all. Location and some very low quality audio of radio communications would solve 99% of the problems we're having. It's kind of like the brain implants they've built for the blind in recent years. The first one they put into a guy only had a resolution of about 20 x 20 pixels. When asked how it was to see with such terrible resolution he said "I don't mind. If it stops me from getting hit by a car, I'll worry about being able to see a sunset for another day.
That's a good point, but its a small percentage of flights that have Internet access. Even in the US.
Even in the US? I've never seen internet access on a US flight. Flying across Europe, the middle east and Africa, pretty much every plane I got on either had direct internet access or the plane offered streaming data you could pay for (i.e. it had internet, just no wifi) The lack of internet access in the US is entirely due to the FAA being stuck in the 1950s.
It's called eating well, exercising and losing a significant amount of weight.
I know, I came very very close to having it. Break the sugar addiction, quadruple your vegetable intake, vastly reduce your sugar / heavy foods intake and do a little, tiny bit of basic light exercise.
In a couple of years, guess what,...?
Watch this: https://www.ted.com/talks/pete...
Get some compassion.
I haven't bought an SOE product in 10yrs because of the Foglok fiasco... I was actually banned from their forums for a few months back in the day for suggesting they didnt exist, only later find out I was right.
What do you mean froglok's don't exist, I've seen them. There was a HUGE underground fortress/city FULL of them down south near the Ogre/Troll town in EQOA. High level Froglok paladins and such.
They were NPC's in the original EQ release too. Ykesha made them playable.
lol... Ok, I'll enlighten you.
I was hardcore into EQ1. I played on a PVP server and we did all the hardcore raiding stuff... we carried pagers so when rare mobs popped we'd get paged and go home from work sick. Some of us carried laptops to work so we could log in from there, etc...
So EQ2 was a highly anticipated release. We all had the game and were in it within seconds of the servers coming up. Our guild was formed and we were off. One of my primary roles was cataloging and documenting quests. My guild (and a few others) solve a lot of the original quests and raid content. You know all those guides you follow to finish a quest? I (and others like me) wrote a lot of the first ones. I loved doing that... there were many in my guild that solved the riddles, or sometimes it would be a combination of the top raiding guilds. My guide for Nektropos Castle was one of my favorite's because it reminded me so much of EQ1's crazy complicated quests.
But at the time of the games release, THE quest to solve was the Froglok unlock quest. SOE said the game included frogloks from the start and that there was simply a quest we had to figure out to unlock them. No one had done it, if they had it would have been obvious because we'd see a froglok running around. From the start we suspected something was up. We invested huge amounts of time trying to solve the riddle. I was personally putting in 12hrs a day trying to figure it out. We went to every corner of every map, talked to every NPC. We had spreadsheets filled with data but none of it made sense. It seemed like there were broken quests related to it all over the place. But the real giveaway that something was wrong was the fact that the few Froglok npc's in the game never moved. We suspected they'd not finished the animations in time. So we took to the forums. I cataloged what I could, and made my points. We got posts from SOE themselves stating they were in the game, we had to just keep trying. So we did, for months. Then a guy hacked the client, and got it to load the character creation screen for the froglok and took screenshots. It was missing bits and pieces of its body. That was it, they were lying. So we went back to the forums, I got into a huge argument with moorguard amongst others and got banned for spreading misinformation or some such... I suspect there were others that got banned but was never sure. Then a few weeks later they had a press release... Frogloks were never in the game, they were going to patch them in, the quest didn't exist yet. We'd pushed them to ask enough questions and the truth was revealed. Quietly my ban was lifted without apology. I suspect upper management had been lying to the community team for plausible deniabilities sake.
A while later, maybe a few months? There was a big patch and unlocking the frogloks was one of the simplest, stupidest quests you can imagine. It was clearly an afterthought. The entire "unlock the froklok" thing was a lie to cover up the fact that the game hadn't been finished at release. I quite playing and later entered the Vanguard Alpha testing... but that's a tale for another time ;-)
I got a 6yr old now... no more time to waste on MMOs.
I see that mistake so often. It should be "star system" because only our star system is called "Solar system" because our star is called Sol.
Funny thing is, often words have multiple meanings:
Solar system
noun
1.the sun together with all the planets and other bodies that revolve around it.
2.a similar system with celestial bodies revolving around a star other than the sun.
http://dictionary.reference.co...
It is so difficult to stay on top in any field, let alone atop a technology that changes virtually overnight, that even Microsoft's relatively short run as apex predator was commendable.
You can make a hundred correct predictions in a row as to where the market is heading, and then whiff on two, and an apple or a google gain a foothold.
It's not rocket science... it's way harder than that.
I don't know about that. Microsoft made some pretty asinine mistakes along the way. The search engine problem was obvious, and everyone knew it. It basically became impossible to find anything on the net, and yahoo and others were flooding their front pages with so much crap, half the time you couldn't even find the search bar. Then came Google... sifting out all the ads, even from their own front page. It was like they were selling Viagra at a hooker convention. That could ahve been Microsoft but they missed the most obvious boat in the history of the internet. Then even Microsoft fell for Apples marketing and saw them as the threat and tried to copy their model of locked in everything... what a joke... Once again Google walked in with a free and open alternative and destroyed them both.
Microsoft has one chance to survive the next decade. Make windows free and open up most of their source code. Offer integration services and charge game manufacturers for... I dunno... something involving DirectX. Baring that, the Microsoft we know is dead and will be replaced by a company that lives vampirically off their old patents and businesses that just can't get rid of Office no matter how much they try.
but keep in mind, more people than that are dieing daily under where that plane was flying.
Yeah. Of old age, disease, accidents, pretty much like everywhere else on the planet. The amount of dead due to the conflict probably doesn't rise up to 300 since it started.
Just the initial protests at the end of last year resulted in well over 100 deaths, plus a large number of unidentified bodies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
and we have no idea what's going on there now. I suppose I shouldn't have said "Daily" I should have phrased that different... people die in the hundreds when conflict arises which is sporadic. The Russians over ran several military bases and that lead to large numbers of deaths, as well as when they pushed out the Ukrainian military and police from various cities. The death toll is, at least, in the thousands.
We're now getting reports from the airline that there was an issue on board, so everything, including being shot down, is speculation at the moment.
Reports on sceen are finding multiple wreckage sites. Suggesting it, in some way, blew up. So it's not looking good.