A person who lived through the collapse of the soviet union once pointed out that in America, the only relevant political parties are the Capitalist party and the Capitalist party. Democrats and Republicans disagree on a handful of very minor issues, despite all the media trumpeting about one being "left" and one being "right." The Democrats will still pass legislation that favours big businesses, just a different group of businesses. No president since the 1950s has served an entire term without engaging America in some foreign conflict. The use of signals intelligence operations to spy on foreign businesses and pass along their trade secrets to US businesses has occurred during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, and during both Democrat and Republican control of Congress.
I don't know if you understand the significance of this election, so let me spell it out for you:
Barack Obama promised to refuse lobbyist and PAC money, and he kept his promise.
His entire campaign was financed by individual donors.
If you don't understand the significance of this, and why it means a change from the politics of the past, I can't really help you. You might start by avoiding the right-wing media which seems to have brainwashed you into believing you don't have a choice.
We do have a choice, and we chose Obama because he is different. Wait and see what happens; it will be awesome.
The problem is that we don't really know what Obama thinks. He's avoided most of the tough issues and done his best to not take any firm stances on anything.
I don't think that's accurate at all. Obama has had clear and easy to read information on his website for months now stating his policy on the Iraq war, the Economy, Healthcare, and other major issues. He came right out and had the most no-nonsense tax policy ever, and he clearly beat McCain on taxes.
At least with Obama, he was up front and said "if you make more than $250,000 you might see a tax increase." McCain doesn't even tell you that the $5,000 tax credit you get back for medical insurance probably won't cover the average family of 4's insurance premiums, costing the middle class more. McCain hid a middle class tax hike by not being truthful with the American people. Obama was up front that we'd all have to make sacrifices, and you know what? It paid off. Obama got a higher percentage of the voters that even make $200,000 or more! It goes to show that even affluent, educated Americans in the higher tax brackets don't mind making a few sacrifices instead of borrowing against our children's future.
As soon as the Republicans move away from the slash-and-burn, anything for a quick buck, overspend and hope our kids will bail us out economic policies of the neocons, then they can finally start rebuilding their party.
Where are all the so-called "conservative" Republicans, and what did the religious wackos and crazy spending neocons do with them?
I voted straight Republican, because I think they are unfairly being blamed (by folks like you) for the current mess, which properly lies on the head of ONE man (Bush).
The problem with your argument is that it just doesn't hold water. Bush was not a lone "cowboy" enforcing his will on the US. The fact is that he dictated policy to the Republican controlled congress and they just wrote whatever crazy idea he had into law, which he would then sign. It's truly bizarre for you to go ahead and blame all of the problems of our country on one man, Bush, when he had to have the complete cooperation of the House and Senate to even write all of the crazy laws that were passed in the last 8 years.
It may also surprise you that, in retrospect, experience is not correlated to being a good president, and in fact some of the the most inexperienced presidents have been some of the most successful.
Speaking of experience: I'll take a constitutional law professor over a career politician any day when it comes to protecting my rights. Unlike Bush, Obama knows the constitution is more than a "piece of paper" and when he swears to protect and uphold it, I believe his words have credibility and meaning.
So, when you're driving down a residential street with the light streaming between the leaves, the white lines on the speed bumps turns into a pseudo-camouflage and, again, you end up driving over the speed bump at (heaven forbid) the speed limit.
You should see what happened in the New England town I live in. A condominium complex installed those god awful speed bumps because the home owner's association had a bunch of "concerned" parents who didn't want people speeding by and wanted to let their brats play out in the street. The city told them that if they wanted to receive emergency fire and medical service, they had to take them out. Apparently the city doesn't want their fire trucks damaged by speed bumps when responding to an emergency.
It was sweet. The HoA looked justifiably bent out of shape when they had to tear the speed bumps out, and all those "think of the children" fuckers got what they deserved. Maybe next time they'll think twice before spending their hard earned money on devices that are intentionally designed to damage vehicles.
AMD was brave enough to quit using FSBs in PC CPUs and replaced them with HyperTransport. Years later, Intel also says goodbye to FSBs and uses a similar technology. The innovator took all the costs, and now someone with more resources gets the marketshare. After all, the consumers only want a speedy CPU, they don't care who was the innovator, and speedy CPUs are more readily available by whoever has the most resources to build them. It is, therefore, seen that being the innovator is not always a smart movement in the business chessboard, at least not if you cannot build your innovation in sufficient quantity. That said, I congratulate Intel for finally bringing the cores closer to the RAM, which is a much better technical solution than using an FSB. They should, perhaps, have done that much earlier.
Amen. I'm tired of explaining to my colleagues why AMD Opteron servers outperform Intel for use in database servers because of memory bandwidth and ccNUMA architecture. It's nice that Intel has finally realized that they can't keep designing processors for desktop PCs and not care about I/O bandwidth. This does mean I can finally be confident that when I buy a new 8-CPU, 8-core (64 total core) database server from Intel I don't have to worry about my poor MCH (memory controller hub) choking access to that nice 512GB of RAM I have hanging off of it.
Those of us building database servers, VMware clusters, and other high memory bandwidth applications can rejoice because the Nehalem architecture is finally almost here.
The instinct looks very much like an iphone but has a camera and speech recognition and I can stay with sprint.... oh and its $50 cheaper than the iphone. It acts and looks just like the Iphone but its not as drmed.
The Instinct isn't a real smartphone. It's a regular cellphone with some basic internet email and browsing functionality tacked on. It doesn't support ANY third-party software. How can you say it's not DRMed when it runs nothing else besides what Sprint allows you to run on it? At least with iPhone there is a software store where you can buy pre-approved apps. Sprint has nothing except a few cheap iPhone imitating apps.
1 slide switch: silent mode; during conversation it turns on speaker mode
Nitpick: What if it's already in silent mode and you want to turn on the speakerphone? Or vice versa? Does the switch always go to speakerphone if it's moved to the opposite position?
Water resistant: sound quality often sucks anyhow
You can't make a water resistant phone that also has a speaker and mic. I've never seen one, and they don't exist. I believe the only water resistant phone you could make would need an external headset, using either bluetooth or a hard-wired headset. Speakers and mics don't like water...
You seem to want a smartphone for blind people. Do you realize how difficult it would be to edit/create a phonebook with 100 address entries without using a display? Are you going to dictate all of your names and phone numbers into the phone? What happens when you want to update or delete an entry? Do you say "change entry Dave," then "no I mean the other Dave, err no, not that Dave, David A?"
Keep in mind, more and more countries are starting to consider moving away from being so dependent on the USD and thus leaving "Zimbabwe". If this happens, then the US Gov cannot print money so easily anymore - otherwise the rest of the world would just laugh as the USD becomes worthless - since they aren't holding much of it.
Really? Because have you noticed that the value of the dollar just rose by about 25% in the last couple of weeks? Apparently foreign investors are buying up USD assets during the crisis like scared old housewives stuffing cash in their mattress. Because when the shit really, really hits the fan, and countries all over the world find their economies in the trash, the strength of the US economy is about the only place people trust.
I don't disagree that our economic policy has done some harm in the world, but if you look at the world as a whole, the strong economy of the US has helped most people to live a better life. As they say, "a rising tide lifts all boats." You can't deny that in the last 60 years since WW2 ended, the US and the world has enjoyed a relatively nice economic outlook. It's too bad a lot of problems hit us all at once though and now we're all beginning to pay.
Indeed. I'm in the 33% bracket, and my wife and I together don't even have a 6 figure income.. and Obama think it's MY responsibity to "life up" the guy behind me? Fuck that. I'm still paying student loans from college, and so is my mom. Where are the people to lift US up??
Are you completely dense? If you make less than 6-digit income, you'll get a tax CUT from Obama. Damn, you Republicans get brainwashed at an early age don't you?
When I called EA, explained the situation, and asked how to get replacement media, the answer was "We have no way of knowing you really owned those games. Feel free to buy them at full retail again." When I asked what the point of all the registration cards I'd dutifully mailed in was, the answer was that "Those go to marketing, we don't have any record of them."
While that is indeed kind of a rude thing for the company to do, your homeowners or renters insurance should have covered the replacement cost of all your things, including your video games and other media.
"Lifetime Subscription" refers to the lifetime of the online subscription component for Hellgate: London, not the user's lifetime. http://www.hellgatelondon.com/beta
Regardless of whether the lifetime is mine or their games, I received a refund based on the fact that the page promising certain features that the Founder's Offer delivers is not accurate. They promised features such as extra classes, extra monsters, raid level content, etc, that do not and never will exist in the game.
That is the reason I got a refund. I also got a refund several months ago, before the company actually went out of business. You might have more trouble now.
Bill Roper has gone on record stating the reason for the collapse of Hellgate.
With all due respect, Bill Roper was the CEO, main developer, and pretty much the entire impetus behind HG:L. The fact that the game failed, in such an epic fashion, so soon after release, has everything to do with Bill Roper and little to do with the players, developers, and others that were passionate about the game. At one point in time, I really enjoyed the game (during beta).
I read the interview. It basically boils down to: "We didn't plan on this happening, blah blah blah, we really tried to do the right thing, honest..."
What HG:L showed me is that a game developer can:
1. Come up with a crazy idea, a game idea that doesn't make much sense. 2. Tie it to a past game that was very successful by marketing (Diablo) 3. Outsource all of the actual content creation to Asian developers for pennies on the dollar. 4. Cobble the whole mess together with duct tape and god knows what else. 5. ? 6. Profit!?!?! No wait, we actually went bankrupt.
Yeah, if you really played and learned about HG:L, you'll find out that all of the art assets are designed by some Asian company that they can hire for pennies on the dollar.
It's not too hard to figure out. In fact, I'd bet Electronic Arts and other game houses in the US are basing their entire business model on this exact same thing right now...
If I were the Microsoft CEO now I would focus on either acquiring MacOS X or rewriting Windows as a complete and certified Unix system.
Very insightful post. Microsoft doesn't need to buy any UNIX vendor. They could do what Apple did, use a BSD-licensed kernel, then just port the Windows API on top of it. In fact, that would make a lot of sense.
Edit? I wrote them from scratch! I still have etched into my brain "SET blaster=A220 I5 D1".
Wait, you had editors? I didn't have enough room on my floppy for edit.exe so I had to write out text files manually by typing "copy con config.sys", then pressing F6 to insert an end of file marker...
It's obvious MTV realized that if they wanted to compete with YouTube, they had to have the most popular music video of all time on there, or they just couldn't compete.
On a more serious note, did anyone else notice that their flash player looks almost exactly like Hulu's? I wonder if there is some licensing agreement with Hulu behind the scenes?
I sort of feel bad for those who purchased lifetime subscriptions, but not really.
I was foolish enough to buy a "Founder's Offer" and paid $149.99, plus $49.99 for the game itself, for a lifetime subscription. I did this based on the fact that the beta was a lot of fun, and sure the game had bugs, but it genuinely seemed like a blast the first 25 levels or so, which was about all they would let us play.
After release, when I finished the game, I realized the bugs made it almost unplayable in groups. You could literally form a party, and you couldn't see the players on your own team. All you would see was a floating text name running around on a map. Also, the things they promised such as raid content, end-game, etc. just were not in the game period.
So, I did what any other smart gamer should do when you're sold something that doesn't live up to it's promises by the developer: I called HG:L first and tried to cancel my lifetime sub. Then, they wouldn't allow that, so I called my bank and disputed the credit card charge.
It took a few letters back and forth to the bank. I had to print out the text on their website promising content to lifetime subs that didn't exist. My bank refunded the entire $149.99.
More gamers need to do this. In fact, I'd say, if anyone out there hasn't done it yet, get your money back. There is a time limit on these things, but if you're sold a lifetime subscription and the company shut down the servers, get your money back.
If more gamers did this, we wouldn't have so many crap games getting released like this. For some reason game developers of the more sleazy variety (Bill Roper, I'm looking at you) look at the success of World of Warcraft and think "cha-ching": MMO = Easy money. Those game devs that are just in it for a quick buck need to get out now because you're making the rest of the industry look bad.
I think it's strange that the media has done more digging on a plumber (oh my, he doesn't have a permit to be a plumber - oh noes!) than on the presidential candidate the plumber asked a question of.
That's absolutely false. They have done way more digging on Obama than they ever did on Joe the plumber. The digging they did on Joe was basic stuff. They (the media) probably called a private investigator who has a few "contacts" at the DMV and can look this stuff up. This is not rocket science.
For Obama, they have been digging up acquaintances from years ago that he just happened to sit on a board with, or went to tea at their house once 20 years ago (William Ayers). Obama has been thoroughly vetted. Don't you think any one of the mainstream news media outlets would love to break a story actually linking Obama to muslim extremists, or radical terrorists of any type? Trust me, Obama has had more people going through his dirty laundry than anyone in history. This isn't a coronation. It's a goddamn all out assault on his character by every mainstream media conglomerate that happens to be part of an umbrella corporation that profits on the war. Do you think it's any coincidence that NBC is owned by GE, who happens to sell weapons systems used in Iraq? There are connections everywhere. That's why our mainstream media is so far right of center it isn't funny. When profit is to be made keeping the never ending wars going, you'd be surprised how far the media will go.
One would do well to actually read 1984 (as opposed to just scream its title every time the Right does something you don't like).
It seems this is a relatively new talking point in the conservative agenda. I've had a couple conservative friends of mine bring up "If Barack Obama wins, welcome to 1984." They conveniently fail to mention that the USA PATRIOT act was passed into law by a Republican house, senate, and signed by George W. Bush. That law has taken us closer to 1984, by putting the tools into the governments hands to make our lives like 1984. Limitless surveillance, thought crimes, everything really scary in 1984 was brought into law by that one thing.
But oh yeah, a vote for Obama is a vote for socialism... The war is double plus good. We have always been at war with Communism... errr.. socialism... err militant Islam.
If we hadn't had things like CRA [wikipedia.org] and community activist groups painting banks that didn't paint lots of bad loans into 'underserved' areas as racists, then we might not have had quite so many bad loans.
I keep having to correct people on this.
The total value of "distressed" mortgages in this country = $150 billion The total value of credit default swaps = $62 trillion
Which one do you think is causing the real problems in our economy? But, by all means, continue to parrot your GOP talking points and blame the poor and minorities. Nevermind the elephant in the room: deregulation.
They believe that ALL money should consist of, or be 100% backed by, a valuable commodity. The value of the money would fluctuate ONLY according to the value of the commodity (and, in the case of "backed" tokens, by the perception of the reliability of the commodity warehousing operation). Thus it would be impossible for the government or its proxies to steal the value out of money already out there to give to its cronies.
Limiting the amount of currency in circulation to the amount of gold in the world creates artificial limits to the growth of an economy, and would essentially doom us to stay in the stone age without much progress.
If you knew anything about the way money and the banking system works, you would know that it isn't just the fed "printing money" that's diluting the money supply. Banks pretty much have a license to print money because for every dollar in deposits (checking and savings accounts) they have, they can lend out about ten dollars. Then, when they get paid back those ten dollars, they get to keep it.
This sounds really bad, but when you realize that those loans create jobs as people have to build the goods purchased with the loan, whether it's a house or a car, or cheap crap from asia, you realize it's a good thing, and more money actually helps all of us.
But by all means, go back to buying gold and hoarding it away until the end times. Myself, I'd much rather have a few bags of rice, some clean water, and a lot of ammunition if the shit really hits the fan. Gold isn't going to do you much good if people are starving to death.
Which are about as "capitalist' as the post office. Government-created monstrosities exempt from the law, which were leaned on by Barney Frank (see also, Barney's Rubble) and Chris Dodd to lend to poor people with bad credit.
The great irony is that you had an essentially government-forced-lending program created and protected by Democrats, while calls by Republicans to regulate it were opposed and called "ideological". And now the free marketers are being blamed! That's like blaming Slashdotters if voting machines failed to work right.
That's a nice strawman argument. Blame the democrats for wanting to give mortgages to minorities and poor people. The numbers tell a different story. There are only $150 billion in total mortgages that are at risk of defaulting or going into forclosure. Out of those $150 billion, the land and homes still back the mortgage, so you can't expect a complete loss.
Then, take a look at the $62 trillion in credit default swaps. Compare $150 billion in bad mortgages (not all of them made to poor people or minorities) to $62 trillion in credit default swaps due to lax regulation.
It's not hard to see who is really at fault here, but go ahead, keep blaming the poor and minorities, like all of the conservatives do. You're just digging yourself into a bigger hole.
And the games cost over $50 a piece, that's a luxury to most people. I can take my wife out for dinner, or buy a video game, both for $65 or so but its at the expense of other luxuries.
Of course games have a large initial investment, but when you break down the entertainment cost per hour, it is very economical. For a $50 game, I might get 100 hours of enjoyment out of it. That equals 50 cents an hour. Taking my wife out to eat 100 times at $65 each would definitely cost a lot more.
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I don't know if you understand the significance of this election, so let me spell it out for you:
Barack Obama promised to refuse lobbyist and PAC money, and he kept his promise.
His entire campaign was financed by individual donors.
If you don't understand the significance of this, and why it means a change from the politics of the past, I can't really help you. You might start by avoiding the right-wing media which seems to have brainwashed you into believing you don't have a choice.
We do have a choice, and we chose Obama because he is different. Wait and see what happens; it will be awesome.
I don't think that's accurate at all. Obama has had clear and easy to read information on his website for months now stating his policy on the Iraq war, the Economy, Healthcare, and other major issues. He came right out and had the most no-nonsense tax policy ever, and he clearly beat McCain on taxes.
At least with Obama, he was up front and said "if you make more than $250,000 you might see a tax increase." McCain doesn't even tell you that the $5,000 tax credit you get back for medical insurance probably won't cover the average family of 4's insurance premiums, costing the middle class more. McCain hid a middle class tax hike by not being truthful with the American people. Obama was up front that we'd all have to make sacrifices, and you know what? It paid off. Obama got a higher percentage of the voters that even make $200,000 or more! It goes to show that even affluent, educated Americans in the higher tax brackets don't mind making a few sacrifices instead of borrowing against our children's future.
As soon as the Republicans move away from the slash-and-burn, anything for a quick buck, overspend and hope our kids will bail us out economic policies of the neocons, then they can finally start rebuilding their party.
Where are all the so-called "conservative" Republicans, and what did the religious wackos and crazy spending neocons do with them?
The problem with your argument is that it just doesn't hold water. Bush was not a lone "cowboy" enforcing his will on the US. The fact is that he dictated policy to the Republican controlled congress and they just wrote whatever crazy idea he had into law, which he would then sign. It's truly bizarre for you to go ahead and blame all of the problems of our country on one man, Bush, when he had to have the complete cooperation of the House and Senate to even write all of the crazy laws that were passed in the last 8 years.
Speaking of experience: I'll take a constitutional law professor over a career politician any day when it comes to protecting my rights. Unlike Bush, Obama knows the constitution is more than a "piece of paper" and when he swears to protect and uphold it, I believe his words have credibility and meaning.
You should see what happened in the New England town I live in. A condominium complex installed those god awful speed bumps because the home owner's association had a bunch of "concerned" parents who didn't want people speeding by and wanted to let their brats play out in the street. The city told them that if they wanted to receive emergency fire and medical service, they had to take them out. Apparently the city doesn't want their fire trucks damaged by speed bumps when responding to an emergency.
It was sweet. The HoA looked justifiably bent out of shape when they had to tear the speed bumps out, and all those "think of the children" fuckers got what they deserved. Maybe next time they'll think twice before spending their hard earned money on devices that are intentionally designed to damage vehicles.
Amen. I'm tired of explaining to my colleagues why AMD Opteron servers outperform Intel for use in database servers because of memory bandwidth and ccNUMA architecture. It's nice that Intel has finally realized that they can't keep designing processors for desktop PCs and not care about I/O bandwidth. This does mean I can finally be confident that when I buy a new 8-CPU, 8-core (64 total core) database server from Intel I don't have to worry about my poor MCH (memory controller hub) choking access to that nice 512GB of RAM I have hanging off of it.
Those of us building database servers, VMware clusters, and other high memory bandwidth applications can rejoice because the Nehalem architecture is finally almost here.
The Instinct isn't a real smartphone. It's a regular cellphone with some basic internet email and browsing functionality tacked on. It doesn't support ANY third-party software. How can you say it's not DRMed when it runs nothing else besides what Sprint allows you to run on it? At least with iPhone there is a software store where you can buy pre-approved apps. Sprint has nothing except a few cheap iPhone imitating apps.
Nitpick: What if it's already in silent mode and you want to turn on the speakerphone? Or vice versa? Does the switch always go to speakerphone if it's moved to the opposite position?
You can't make a water resistant phone that also has a speaker and mic. I've never seen one, and they don't exist. I believe the only water resistant phone you could make would need an external headset, using either bluetooth or a hard-wired headset. Speakers and mics don't like water...
You seem to want a smartphone for blind people. Do you realize how difficult it would be to edit/create a phonebook with 100 address entries without using a display? Are you going to dictate all of your names and phone numbers into the phone? What happens when you want to update or delete an entry? Do you say "change entry Dave," then "no I mean the other Dave, err no, not that Dave, David A?"
Really? Because have you noticed that the value of the dollar just rose by about 25% in the last couple of weeks? Apparently foreign investors are buying up USD assets during the crisis like scared old housewives stuffing cash in their mattress. Because when the shit really, really hits the fan, and countries all over the world find their economies in the trash, the strength of the US economy is about the only place people trust.
I don't disagree that our economic policy has done some harm in the world, but if you look at the world as a whole, the strong economy of the US has helped most people to live a better life. As they say, "a rising tide lifts all boats." You can't deny that in the last 60 years since WW2 ended, the US and the world has enjoyed a relatively nice economic outlook. It's too bad a lot of problems hit us all at once though and now we're all beginning to pay.
Are you completely dense? If you make less than 6-digit income, you'll get a tax CUT from Obama. Damn, you Republicans get brainwashed at an early age don't you?
While that is indeed kind of a rude thing for the company to do, your homeowners or renters insurance should have covered the replacement cost of all your things, including your video games and other media.
LMFAO!!!! I 3 it when someone posts an obscure Guild Wars reference to a troll that's railing against all MMOs...
Regardless of whether the lifetime is mine or their games, I received a refund based on the fact that the page promising certain features that the Founder's Offer delivers is not accurate. They promised features such as extra classes, extra monsters, raid level content, etc, that do not and never will exist in the game.
That is the reason I got a refund. I also got a refund several months ago, before the company actually went out of business. You might have more trouble now.
With all due respect, Bill Roper was the CEO, main developer, and pretty much the entire impetus behind HG:L. The fact that the game failed, in such an epic fashion, so soon after release, has everything to do with Bill Roper and little to do with the players, developers, and others that were passionate about the game. At one point in time, I really enjoyed the game (during beta).
I read the interview. It basically boils down to: "We didn't plan on this happening, blah blah blah, we really tried to do the right thing, honest..."
What HG:L showed me is that a game developer can:
1. Come up with a crazy idea, a game idea that doesn't make much sense.
2. Tie it to a past game that was very successful by marketing (Diablo)
3. Outsource all of the actual content creation to Asian developers for pennies on the dollar.
4. Cobble the whole mess together with duct tape and god knows what else.
5. ?
6. Profit!?!?! No wait, we actually went bankrupt.
Yeah, if you really played and learned about HG:L, you'll find out that all of the art assets are designed by some Asian company that they can hire for pennies on the dollar.
Outsourced art assets + Licensed engine + mediocre integration = HG:L
It's not too hard to figure out. In fact, I'd bet Electronic Arts and other game houses in the US are basing their entire business model on this exact same thing right now...
Very insightful post. Microsoft doesn't need to buy any UNIX vendor. They could do what Apple did, use a BSD-licensed kernel, then just port the Windows API on top of it. In fact, that would make a lot of sense.
Hey, I don't like Windows very much either, but to be fair, a crappy kernel module can bring Linux down just as easy. Bad drivers are bad, mmkay?
Wait, you had editors? I didn't have enough room on my floppy for edit.exe so I had to write out text files manually by typing "copy con config.sys", then pressing F6 to insert an end of file marker...
It's obvious MTV realized that if they wanted to compete with YouTube, they had to have the most popular music video of all time on there, or they just couldn't compete.
On a more serious note, did anyone else notice that their flash player looks almost exactly like Hulu's? I wonder if there is some licensing agreement with Hulu behind the scenes?
I was foolish enough to buy a "Founder's Offer" and paid $149.99, plus $49.99 for the game itself, for a lifetime subscription. I did this based on the fact that the beta was a lot of fun, and sure the game had bugs, but it genuinely seemed like a blast the first 25 levels or so, which was about all they would let us play.
After release, when I finished the game, I realized the bugs made it almost unplayable in groups. You could literally form a party, and you couldn't see the players on your own team. All you would see was a floating text name running around on a map. Also, the things they promised such as raid content, end-game, etc. just were not in the game period.
So, I did what any other smart gamer should do when you're sold something that doesn't live up to it's promises by the developer: I called HG:L first and tried to cancel my lifetime sub. Then, they wouldn't allow that, so I called my bank and disputed the credit card charge.
It took a few letters back and forth to the bank. I had to print out the text on their website promising content to lifetime subs that didn't exist. My bank refunded the entire $149.99.
More gamers need to do this. In fact, I'd say, if anyone out there hasn't done it yet, get your money back. There is a time limit on these things, but if you're sold a lifetime subscription and the company shut down the servers, get your money back.
If more gamers did this, we wouldn't have so many crap games getting released like this. For some reason game developers of the more sleazy variety (Bill Roper, I'm looking at you) look at the success of World of Warcraft and think "cha-ching": MMO = Easy money. Those game devs that are just in it for a quick buck need to get out now because you're making the rest of the industry look bad.
That's absolutely false. They have done way more digging on Obama than they ever did on Joe the plumber. The digging they did on Joe was basic stuff. They (the media) probably called a private investigator who has a few "contacts" at the DMV and can look this stuff up. This is not rocket science.
For Obama, they have been digging up acquaintances from years ago that he just happened to sit on a board with, or went to tea at their house once 20 years ago (William Ayers). Obama has been thoroughly vetted. Don't you think any one of the mainstream news media outlets would love to break a story actually linking Obama to muslim extremists, or radical terrorists of any type? Trust me, Obama has had more people going through his dirty laundry than anyone in history. This isn't a coronation. It's a goddamn all out assault on his character by every mainstream media conglomerate that happens to be part of an umbrella corporation that profits on the war. Do you think it's any coincidence that NBC is owned by GE, who happens to sell weapons systems used in Iraq? There are connections everywhere. That's why our mainstream media is so far right of center it isn't funny. When profit is to be made keeping the never ending wars going, you'd be surprised how far the media will go.
It seems this is a relatively new talking point in the conservative agenda. I've had a couple conservative friends of mine bring up "If Barack Obama wins, welcome to 1984." They conveniently fail to mention that the USA PATRIOT act was passed into law by a Republican house, senate, and signed by George W. Bush. That law has taken us closer to 1984, by putting the tools into the governments hands to make our lives like 1984. Limitless surveillance, thought crimes, everything really scary in 1984 was brought into law by that one thing.
But oh yeah, a vote for Obama is a vote for socialism... The war is double plus good. We have always been at war with Communism... errr.. socialism... err militant Islam.
I keep having to correct people on this.
The total value of "distressed" mortgages in this country = $150 billion
The total value of credit default swaps = $62 trillion
Which one do you think is causing the real problems in our economy? But, by all means, continue to parrot your GOP talking points and blame the poor and minorities. Nevermind the elephant in the room: deregulation.
Limiting the amount of currency in circulation to the amount of gold in the world creates artificial limits to the growth of an economy, and would essentially doom us to stay in the stone age without much progress.
If you knew anything about the way money and the banking system works, you would know that it isn't just the fed "printing money" that's diluting the money supply. Banks pretty much have a license to print money because for every dollar in deposits (checking and savings accounts) they have, they can lend out about ten dollars. Then, when they get paid back those ten dollars, they get to keep it.
This sounds really bad, but when you realize that those loans create jobs as people have to build the goods purchased with the loan, whether it's a house or a car, or cheap crap from asia, you realize it's a good thing, and more money actually helps all of us.
But by all means, go back to buying gold and hoarding it away until the end times. Myself, I'd much rather have a few bags of rice, some clean water, and a lot of ammunition if the shit really hits the fan. Gold isn't going to do you much good if people are starving to death.
That's a nice strawman argument. Blame the democrats for wanting to give mortgages to minorities and poor people. The numbers tell a different story. There are only $150 billion in total mortgages that are at risk of defaulting or going into forclosure. Out of those $150 billion, the land and homes still back the mortgage, so you can't expect a complete loss.
Then, take a look at the $62 trillion in credit default swaps. Compare $150 billion in bad mortgages (not all of them made to poor people or minorities) to $62 trillion in credit default swaps due to lax regulation.
It's not hard to see who is really at fault here, but go ahead, keep blaming the poor and minorities, like all of the conservatives do. You're just digging yourself into a bigger hole.
Of course games have a large initial investment, but when you break down the entertainment cost per hour, it is very economical. For a $50 game, I might get 100 hours of enjoyment out of it. That equals 50 cents an hour. Taking my wife out to eat 100 times at $65 each would definitely cost a lot more.