The length? considering just the Terran campaign matches the length of the original Starcraft, and has infinitely more atmosphere and depth... (just ignoring Jim Raynors speech, yeah)
no, SC2 WoL has the worst story of all blizzard games, period. It doesn't even hold the candle to its predecessor. Story is an incoherent garbage with total disregard to the lore established in SC1 and full of filler (maybe 10 out of 26 missions push the action forward). Only technical side is superior which is what you'd expect after 10+ years. Everything else is a step back.
Raynor became an emo whose girfriend is infested and completely forgot how she backstabbed him and his friends repeatedly. He vowed to kill her after the death of Fenix near the end of BW and in SC2 he sighs to the picture of hers right off the bat? WTF. Fenix, one of the biggest badasses in SC1, is not mentioned even once - he got retconned out because his existence, death and Raynor's promise was a huge problem for the happy ending love story sc2 was to become. Established villains from SC1 are simply cartoonish and boring, if you happened to like their badassness in SC1 your heart has to ache now. Mengsk and Kerrigan are not smart and manipulative anymore, a bunch of outcasts does everything it wants and they can't do shit about it. Seriously? And what about a 180 degree turn in case of the Overmind? He was cool, because he wanted to assimilate and evolve, nothing more, nothing less. A brutal unstoppable force of nature elegant in its simplicity. Now it appears that he was a slave of mysterious higher power in reality and had a brilliant plan to set his 'people' free. What kind of bullcrap is that? And Tassadar's ghost 'ok, i am only half dead'? doesn't it diminish the magnitude of Tassadar's sacrifice? SC2 story is a carbon copy of Warcraft. Loremaster Metzen has run out of ideas so he mixed in everything from his fantasy genre playbook. Prophecy as an engine of the story? Ancient artifact you happen to complete pretty much by accident as the ultimate problem solver? Talk about lazy. SC was about 3 races battling in old fashioned way for domination, no supernatural stuff (except psionic powers) and that was cool. Now we got heroic fantasy in a scifi setting.
some guy works his ass off to provide an added value to their game for free, his map worked its ass off to get strong following and climb the broken popularity system and it's ok to ruin his work with a single mouse click because some bored mod followed some loosely defined rules?
Maybe there is a new version but my bet is it was not unbanned but reuploaded with a different name and will have to gain popularity from 0, because the score of the old version doesn't count. Add transferring any rights to the content to blizzard to that mess and tell me how exactly such things don't discourage mapmaking? Blizzard does their best to kill any enthusiasm left. If all maps have to be uploaded to blizzard and are stored on their servers, their system can check the map code for inappropriate words and autogenerate a message to the mapmaker with warning. Even better - implement the filter in the god damn editor and update it if necessary (always online crap). How hard is that?
quite recently they outright banned a game called Nexus Wars. It is a words based game and has a dictionary with 30k words attached to it. Long story short the dictionary spewed 'dike' randomly and the game was banned with no warning (so creator could not remove the word from the pool) for inappropriate language. Their system has ambiguosity written all over it - nobody knows the full list of bad words and judging from the chat filters it's ridiculous if anything like it (chat filters out words: black, white, trans- rape but also grape...). Maybe they fixed the mess already and unbanned it but even if, if it took more than 2hrs to get it straight that's a huge fail on blizz' part.
there are people who farmed all achievements already including ones like 1000 wins with a race (including random) how is that possible? you need at least 3k wins to do that, 6k assuming matchmaking aiming for 50% win ratio?
1. join 4v4 game 2. leave as soon as it starts 3. ? 4. profit
wtf you ask? if your team wins you get a win, so why bother with playing at all. Join as many games as you can, your 50% will get you enough good teammates that you won't be needed and you get 10-20 wins/hr (reportedly they fixed it recently but in the mean time 3v3 and 4v4 devolved into a complete chaos and people were abandoning these game modes in droves) another example: people throw games to stay in the lowest league only because they can do annoying achievements there faster (no league level requirement) - nooblets can't defend against cheese. One guy is famous for SCV rush at the very beginning and that works good enough against bronze league players.
In such a situation I don't really see any harm in using haxx for achievements when the whole system is already broken by design and gamed left and right.
according to good WC3 players they were forced to smurf to get any games at all, after many changes to auto-matchmaking system specifically targeted at smurfing.
Next? Battle.net 2.0 limits you to a single CD-Key per person. That’s it. That’s your sixty-dollar purchase. According to the company, this is because you are an asshole.
“Really good players, they don’t necessarily want to play themselves. They want to go beat up on the noob because that’s really fun.” – Rob Pardo, Vice President of Game Design, Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard Entertainment paints smurfing as an ego boost. That Blizzard gamers were beat up in school and need a trauma bandage. Forget that smurfing is a necessity for learning off-races and honing gimmick strategies. I played Warcraft III. We don’t smurf because we enjoy it. We smurf because in 2004, the company’s matchmaking changes were designed to eliminate smurfing. Search criteria is configured for 2004s player activity. 2004s crappy Warcraft III players are now 2010s crappy Defense of the Ancients players. Smurfing has evolved from a scapegoat to a necessity.
Consider Warcraft III Four vs. Four Random Team. “Top-level play” is dominated by posers, players who managed enough mediocrity to find games and max out their experience level. Elite players can’t find games. In my last season with substantial playing time, my Warcraft III record was 55-39. During the day? Hour search times. Night? Forget it. When all I want to do is play, it’s easier to make a new name and start over.
what about economic reality? millions of people getting the completely worthless liberal arts degrees, who won't work a single second in their area of expertise in their entire lives could as well save that 50 or 100 grand and do something more productive with those 5 years, build real life experience and whatnot. If you treat studying as an investment, majority of people get extremely lousy return on it, if not a fat net loss.
FruitDealer dominated his games from start to end, ultras were an icing on the cake. The truth is they offer much less bang for the buck than they used to in sc1. They have splash damage, but they are so huge now and that makes them a pain to micro effectively. They don't really synergize with other zerg stuff. Remember ultraling+dark swarm?
i get what you say but given that we are still in the lost decade on Dow http://stooq.pl/q/?s=djia&c=30y&t=l&a=lg&b=1 (30 years) http://stooq.pl/q/?s=djia&c=10y&t=l&a=lg&b=1 (10 years) i very much prefer to be paid for holding the stock too, thank you very much. All-paper stocks provide no cushion for the unlucky. Promise to make buck 10 years later is not enough. Downturn drastically changes perception of value and there is nothing to prevent the bottom falling out.
of course there is no 100% safe investment and i can bet that fundamentals couldn't justify 2007 price of MSFT
either way, in such scenario the perception is not all there is to the price. As long as dividend is at least at the level of inflation you don't lose anything and if it's higher then it actually adds to your account which is not apparent when you look at the graph alone. Such stocks are not spectacular but they are safer and i'd rather keep my money in them than in the all-or-nothing type of stocks.
inflation - 5% stock with no dividend - at least 5% to break even stock with dividend - for example 3% price + 2% dividend to break even such stocks they may look worse on charts when compared to growth champions but as we can see that doesn't mean shit in reality. From the owners perspective it's pretty much the same if not better, he gets money all the time and can make use of it, not only at the end.
why do you think i am ignorant? I simply don't care about superficial stuff like P/E thresholds and whatnot. I prefer to pay attention to rather oldschool values which say that buying piece of paper to sell it higher is not an investment, doesn't help to create viable businesses and doesn't produce actual wealth. It's a speculation, however you slice it.
Dividend means that business has to be stable, viable, economically sound and profitable in long-term perspective and that means nobody is interested in manipulating company's value to pump-n-dump or whatever. Dividend yield provides some 'objective' part of value other than 'it's all in the eyes of the beholder', it's the non-zero bottom of the stock price range.
What you say works only because people play the same game, they generally agree that P/E = 10 means something and P/E = 20 means something else. As long as you keep your money in the stock you get no money, you only hope that when you need it you will find a buyer. If you can't, you can wipe your ass with it.
Why don't you put the money in the bank and let them give you nothing for it, after all it's better for you when the bank gets bigger and they should make use of your cash. No, it's only better for you when you are paid to keep your money in their account. Same thing with bonds. I don't see why it should be different in stock market, after all that's how it worked initially.
with the fed printing dollars like there is no tomorrow? no thanks, i'll pass. The US will try to inflate the debt away, screwing the bond holders in the process. Why there are suckers buying US bonds (or any bonds in general) is a mystery to me.
Big part of modern markets are virtual goods and i simply don't like it. They tend to be extremely profitable so everybody loves them, but they are also very risky and you lose big time in times of downturns. I guess people love spectacular gambling, not slow, steady, boring, economically sound investment.
When you buy a stock with no dividends, the perception of value is all there is. This is an iherently risky trade and you can get wiped out completely because if nobody is willing to buy the value drops to 0 and there is nothing you can do to get any money back. When you buy copper you get a tangible item (thus it will never have 0 value) plus there are people willing to buy it from you because they want to make things of it. Profitability of their products acts as an anchor of the price of the raw material. Yes, it's also a perception of value but it doesn't exist in a vacuum as opposed to dividendless stocks which don't have any anchor to provide the check on their price.
when you put your money in the bank, you expect to get n% every year. That helps you to estimate viability of your investment. Same thing with stocks with dividends. You see company's profits, you estimate how much they pay the shareholders, you calculate how many years is required for the investment in that stock to pay for itself and any money coming in later is pure profit for you. You have some hard data to work with.
Now apple stock - company may be worth n, may have net profits m/year but that doesn't mean anything, there is no physical bond between price and performance. People create it in their minds (company grows, so stocks must be good thus it rises) but it doesn't mean it's there. Stocks rise only because people think they will rise, not because they expect to be paid reliably for owning the stock from company's profits. Owning the stock alone does you absolutely no good, you have to find a sucker to see your money, period - just like you had to find one to sell a house.
You mentioned delusion and fiction - very accurate. Stock market downturns are so severe lately simply because it's now ruled by faith of the participating players and lots of hot air, not by simple math. Sharks use the math and they screw everybody else over and over.
does Apple pay dividends or are stockholders just a bunch of people agreeing that a piece of paper is worth $n because fertility rate of penguins skyrocketed? After all penguins and performance of Apple have exactly the same influence over the price of stocks, which is 0. People think it matters but they are wrong. Dividends are what allows to evaluate realistic value of stocks. Without that you just trade a piece of paper and your investment is all about finding a greater sucker once you want to get your money back.
How is that different from housing market which crashed not that long ago? 'It can only go up' bullshit and people lined up to buy only to flip the house to somebody else. House doesn't pay for itself (unless you are into rentals) so it's not much of an investment, your only hope is to find a greater sucker. Stock market full of dividend-less stocks is just a game of hot potato, last one will get burned and wiped out.
customization of the login screen? It was made obsolete by the gnome devs not by canonical and the reason for that was faster boot time. Yes, this sucks, I liked keyboard only logging but ubuntu team is not guilty here (unless you think they should keep and maintain legacy software)
RH was so bad omaha beach in RH was the most ridiculous thing i've seen recently, especially with the charge of the hobbits on top of it... seriously, wtf and i didn't like the blatant shortcomings in realism department (everybody and his mother was wearing a chain mail which is nothing to scoff at, yet people fell like flies to single arrow or a sword slash, combat was too clean with no moaning of the wounded, mounted knights used swords exclusively, no lances to be seen)
Somebody has to be the lender of last resort or banks could very easily run out of money at times.
why? if the bank runs out of money it means it overstretched itself and should fail just like any other business running out of money. I don't see why banks should be immune to standard economic laws and have to be rescued when nobody else is. People will lose their money? Oh noes, they lose either way - rescue operation means higher taxes down the road for years to come or losing purchasing power thanks to money printing to fill the gaping hole of budget deficit. The central position of financial institutions in modern economy is what brought the crisis - it has become more profitable to shuffle paper around and play with virtual money existing only in computer memory than to produce actual stuff and add true wealth to the economy.
at least you reduce the waste introduced by each jump of the local->state->fed->state->local path (which is a serious money at $3.55 trillion level - federal budget in year 2010). Also people are more interested in how _their_ tax money is spent on local level because they directly benefit from it and they still feel the pain of paying the taxes. Once the money comes through the federal government people stop to think it used to be theirs, they don't bother to question efficiency of spending, because that seemingly endless money is apparently brought by Santa Claus. the further the money is spent from the true payer, the more fiscal irresponsibility and economical unsoundness are allowed.
You know, a gold watch could buy you a life in the times of WW2 (pretty much the definition of world going to shit) which can't be said about everything else you owned.
not an USian here: if i am not mistaken Tea Party came to life as a result of grassroot efforts tied to the Ron Paul's presidential campaign of 2008 in rep party. Originally it was about returning to the strict constitutionalism - nothing more, nothing less. Now it becomes a sad caricature of its former self as Palins and Becks, seeing the growing discontent among masses and TP's numbers, decided to steal the momentum of the movement. They hijacked it for their own goals, twisting the founding principles.
It's crystal clear that they unfortunately succeeded, because the father of the movement (Ron Paul) is not mentioned even once in this comment chain and the Tea Party is perceived as a bunch of primitive, thought free, religious loonies and Palin and Beck are called their leaders.
i see a hole in your logic. How can there be a totalitarian state with a constitutionally limited government with majority of powers delegated to the states and with no public education brainwashing the masses? and how on earth the US survived the 19th century? There were no centralized education systems, no social security and no mandatory health insurance, no federal reserve micromanaging the economy.
they refuted that rumor already, besides even if it was true, pro players would have to train in a high lag environment and then play tournaments with low lag which wouldn't make any sense.
have you heard what happened in a first big tournament with $5k prize just 2 days ago? Players repeatedly lagged and in a showmatch Korean pro dropped TWICE in a best of 3 match. Do you think that they had a shitty connection? Thousands of people watched it live, you can imagine how much of a fail that was.
recently LAN thing backfired quite nicely - there was a tournament at gamerscom or whatever that was called and battle.net lagged few times not to mention dropped connections in a best of 3 showmatch. There were thousands of people watching it live and via internet and players were lagging and dropping. Epic F.A.I.L.
I read the forums from time to time and I really hate how when some rather clueless casual player asks '- there is only one profile, how can i share it with my brother?' fanboys counted in dozens rush in to inform him he's being cheap and should fork out 60 bucks for his brother too, because sc2 is the best thing since sliced bread. It doesn't matter that these brothers have only 1 pc.
Recently blizzard announced that 1st name change is free (because many people were not aware of permanence of their handle and typed some junk to play, just like in sc1 where you could have multiple nicknames), but they will charge later. Price is unknown but to charge few bucks for running an sql oneliner? Seriously?
Slashdot Mirror
The length? considering just the Terran campaign matches the length of the original Starcraft, and has infinitely more atmosphere and depth... (just ignoring Jim Raynors speech, yeah)
no, SC2 WoL has the worst story of all blizzard games, period. It doesn't even hold the candle to its predecessor. Story is an incoherent garbage with total disregard to the lore established in SC1 and full of filler (maybe 10 out of 26 missions push the action forward). Only technical side is superior which is what you'd expect after 10+ years. Everything else is a step back.
Raynor became an emo whose girfriend is infested and completely forgot how she backstabbed him and his friends repeatedly. He vowed to kill her after the death of Fenix near the end of BW and in SC2 he sighs to the picture of hers right off the bat? WTF. Fenix, one of the biggest badasses in SC1, is not mentioned even once - he got retconned out because his existence, death and Raynor's promise was a huge problem for the happy ending love story sc2 was to become.
Established villains from SC1 are simply cartoonish and boring, if you happened to like their badassness in SC1 your heart has to ache now. Mengsk and Kerrigan are not smart and manipulative anymore, a bunch of outcasts does everything it wants and they can't do shit about it. Seriously? And what about a 180 degree turn in case of the Overmind? He was cool, because he wanted to assimilate and evolve, nothing more, nothing less. A brutal unstoppable force of nature elegant in its simplicity. Now it appears that he was a slave of mysterious higher power in reality and had a brilliant plan to set his 'people' free. What kind of bullcrap is that? And Tassadar's ghost 'ok, i am only half dead'? doesn't it diminish the magnitude of Tassadar's sacrifice?
SC2 story is a carbon copy of Warcraft. Loremaster Metzen has run out of ideas so he mixed in everything from his fantasy genre playbook. Prophecy as an engine of the story? Ancient artifact you happen to complete pretty much by accident as the ultimate problem solver? Talk about lazy.
SC was about 3 races battling in old fashioned way for domination, no supernatural stuff (except psionic powers) and that was cool. Now we got heroic fantasy in a scifi setting.
some guy works his ass off to provide an added value to their game for free, his map worked its ass off to get strong following and climb the broken popularity system and it's ok to ruin his work with a single mouse click because some bored mod followed some loosely defined rules?
Maybe there is a new version but my bet is it was not unbanned but reuploaded with a different name and will have to gain popularity from 0, because the score of the old version doesn't count.
Add transferring any rights to the content to blizzard to that mess and tell me how exactly such things don't discourage mapmaking? Blizzard does their best to kill any enthusiasm left.
If all maps have to be uploaded to blizzard and are stored on their servers, their system can check the map code for inappropriate words and autogenerate a message to the mapmaker with warning. Even better - implement the filter in the god damn editor and update it if necessary (always online crap). How hard is that?
quite recently they outright banned a game called Nexus Wars. It is a words based game and has a dictionary with 30k words attached to it. Long story short the dictionary spewed 'dike' randomly and the game was banned with no warning (so creator could not remove the word from the pool) for inappropriate language. Their system has ambiguosity written all over it - nobody knows the full list of bad words and judging from the chat filters it's ridiculous if anything like it (chat filters out words: black, white, trans- rape but also grape...). Maybe they fixed the mess already and unbanned it but even if, if it took more than 2hrs to get it straight that's a huge fail on blizz' part.
there are people who farmed all achievements already including ones like 1000 wins with a race (including random)
how is that possible? you need at least 3k wins to do that, 6k assuming matchmaking aiming for 50% win ratio?
1. join 4v4 game
2. leave as soon as it starts
3. ?
4. profit
wtf you ask? if your team wins you get a win, so why bother with playing at all. Join as many games as you can, your 50% will get you enough good teammates that you won't be needed and you get 10-20 wins/hr (reportedly they fixed it recently but in the mean time 3v3 and 4v4 devolved into a complete chaos and people were abandoning these game modes in droves)
another example: people throw games to stay in the lowest league only because they can do annoying achievements there faster (no league level requirement) - nooblets can't defend against cheese. One guy is famous for SCV rush at the very beginning and that works good enough against bronze league players.
In such a situation I don't really see any harm in using haxx for achievements when the whole system is already broken by design and gamed left and right.
according to good WC3 players they were forced to smurf to get any games at all, after many changes to auto-matchmaking system specifically targeted at smurfing.
http://www.the-ghetto.org/content/battle-net-2-0-the-antithesis-of-consumer-confidence
Next? Battle.net 2.0 limits you to a single CD-Key per person. That’s it. That’s your sixty-dollar purchase. According to the company, this is because you are an asshole.
“Really good players, they don’t necessarily want to play themselves. They want to go beat up on the noob because that’s really fun.” – Rob Pardo, Vice President of Game Design, Blizzard Entertainment
Blizzard Entertainment paints smurfing as an ego boost. That Blizzard gamers were beat up in school and need a trauma bandage. Forget that smurfing is a necessity for learning off-races and honing gimmick strategies. I played Warcraft III. We don’t smurf because we enjoy it. We smurf because in 2004, the company’s matchmaking changes were designed to eliminate smurfing. Search criteria is configured for 2004s player activity. 2004s crappy Warcraft III players are now 2010s crappy Defense of the Ancients players. Smurfing has evolved from a scapegoat to a necessity.
Consider Warcraft III Four vs. Four Random Team. “Top-level play” is dominated by posers, players who managed enough mediocrity to find games and max out their experience level. Elite players can’t find games. In my last season with substantial playing time, my Warcraft III record was 55-39. During the day? Hour search times. Night? Forget it. When all I want to do is play, it’s easier to make a new name and start over.
what about economic reality? millions of people getting the completely worthless liberal arts degrees, who won't work a single second in their area of expertise in their entire lives could as well save that 50 or 100 grand and do something more productive with those 5 years, build real life experience and whatnot. If you treat studying as an investment, majority of people get extremely lousy return on it, if not a fat net loss.
FruitDealer dominated his games from start to end, ultras were an icing on the cake. The truth is they offer much less bang for the buck than they used to in sc1. They have splash damage, but they are so huge now and that makes them a pain to micro effectively. They don't really synergize with other zerg stuff. Remember ultraling+dark swarm?
i get what you say but given that we are still in the lost decade on Dow
http://stooq.pl/q/?s=djia&c=30y&t=l&a=lg&b=1 (30 years)
http://stooq.pl/q/?s=djia&c=10y&t=l&a=lg&b=1 (10 years)
i very much prefer to be paid for holding the stock too, thank you very much. All-paper stocks provide no cushion for the unlucky. Promise to make buck 10 years later is not enough. Downturn drastically changes perception of value and there is nothing to prevent the bottom falling out.
of course there is no 100% safe investment and i can bet that fundamentals couldn't justify 2007 price of MSFT
either way, in such scenario the perception is not all there is to the price. As long as dividend is at least at the level of inflation you don't lose anything and if it's higher then it actually adds to your account which is not apparent when you look at the graph alone. Such stocks are not spectacular but they are safer and i'd rather keep my money in them than in the all-or-nothing type of stocks.
inflation - 5%
stock with no dividend - at least 5% to break even
stock with dividend - for example 3% price + 2% dividend to break even
such stocks they may look worse on charts when compared to growth champions but as we can see that doesn't mean shit in reality. From the owners perspective it's pretty much the same if not better, he gets money all the time and can make use of it, not only at the end.
why do you think i am ignorant? I simply don't care about superficial stuff like P/E thresholds and whatnot. I prefer to pay attention to rather oldschool values which say that buying piece of paper to sell it higher is not an investment, doesn't help to create viable businesses and doesn't produce actual wealth. It's a speculation, however you slice it.
Dividend means that business has to be stable, viable, economically sound and profitable in long-term perspective and that means nobody is interested in manipulating company's value to pump-n-dump or whatever. Dividend yield provides some 'objective' part of value other than 'it's all in the eyes of the beholder', it's the non-zero bottom of the stock price range.
What you say works only because people play the same game, they generally agree that P/E = 10 means something and P/E = 20 means something else. As long as you keep your money in the stock you get no money, you only hope that when you need it you will find a buyer. If you can't, you can wipe your ass with it.
Why don't you put the money in the bank and let them give you nothing for it, after all it's better for you when the bank gets bigger and they should make use of your cash. No, it's only better for you when you are paid to keep your money in their account. Same thing with bonds. I don't see why it should be different in stock market, after all that's how it worked initially.
with the fed printing dollars like there is no tomorrow? no thanks, i'll pass. The US will try to inflate the debt away, screwing the bond holders in the process. Why there are suckers buying US bonds (or any bonds in general) is a mystery to me.
Big part of modern markets are virtual goods and i simply don't like it. They tend to be extremely profitable so everybody loves them, but they are also very risky and you lose big time in times of downturns. I guess people love spectacular gambling, not slow, steady, boring, economically sound investment.
When you buy a stock with no dividends, the perception of value is all there is. This is an iherently risky trade and you can get wiped out completely because if nobody is willing to buy the value drops to 0 and there is nothing you can do to get any money back.
When you buy copper you get a tangible item (thus it will never have 0 value) plus there are people willing to buy it from you because they want to make things of it. Profitability of their products acts as an anchor of the price of the raw material. Yes, it's also a perception of value but it doesn't exist in a vacuum as opposed to dividendless stocks which don't have any anchor to provide the check on their price.
when you put your money in the bank, you expect to get n% every year. That helps you to estimate viability of your investment. Same thing with stocks with dividends. You see company's profits, you estimate how much they pay the shareholders, you calculate how many years is required for the investment in that stock to pay for itself and any money coming in later is pure profit for you. You have some hard data to work with.
Now apple stock - company may be worth n, may have net profits m/year but that doesn't mean anything, there is no physical bond between price and performance. People create it in their minds (company grows, so stocks must be good thus it rises) but it doesn't mean it's there. Stocks rise only because people think they will rise, not because they expect to be paid reliably for owning the stock from company's profits. Owning the stock alone does you absolutely no good, you have to find a sucker to see your money, period - just like you had to find one to sell a house.
You mentioned delusion and fiction - very accurate. Stock market downturns are so severe lately simply because it's now ruled by faith of the participating players and lots of hot air, not by simple math. Sharks use the math and they screw everybody else over and over.
does Apple pay dividends or are stockholders just a bunch of people agreeing that a piece of paper is worth $n because fertility rate of penguins skyrocketed? After all penguins and performance of Apple have exactly the same influence over the price of stocks, which is 0. People think it matters but they are wrong. Dividends are what allows to evaluate realistic value of stocks. Without that you just trade a piece of paper and your investment is all about finding a greater sucker once you want to get your money back.
How is that different from housing market which crashed not that long ago? 'It can only go up' bullshit and people lined up to buy only to flip the house to somebody else. House doesn't pay for itself (unless you are into rentals) so it's not much of an investment, your only hope is to find a greater sucker. Stock market full of dividend-less stocks is just a game of hot potato, last one will get burned and wiped out.
customization of the login screen? It was made obsolete by the gnome devs not by canonical and the reason for that was faster boot time. Yes, this sucks, I liked keyboard only logging but ubuntu team is not guilty here (unless you think they should keep and maintain legacy software)
wtf, there is an option to change the collection dir in shotwell preferences, don't bother with symlinking
RH was so bad
omaha beach in RH was the most ridiculous thing i've seen recently, especially with the charge of the hobbits on top of it... seriously, wtf
and i didn't like the blatant shortcomings in realism department (everybody and his mother was wearing a chain mail which is nothing to scoff at, yet people fell like flies to single arrow or a sword slash, combat was too clean with no moaning of the wounded, mounted knights used swords exclusively, no lances to be seen)
Somebody has to be the lender of last resort or banks could very easily run out of money at times.
why? if the bank runs out of money it means it overstretched itself and should fail just like any other business running out of money. I don't see why banks should be immune to standard economic laws and have to be rescued when nobody else is. People will lose their money? Oh noes, they lose either way - rescue operation means higher taxes down the road for years to come or losing purchasing power thanks to money printing to fill the gaping hole of budget deficit.
The central position of financial institutions in modern economy is what brought the crisis - it has become more profitable to shuffle paper around and play with virtual money existing only in computer memory than to produce actual stuff and add true wealth to the economy.
at least you reduce the waste introduced by each jump of the local->state->fed->state->local path (which is a serious money at $3.55 trillion level - federal budget in year 2010). Also people are more interested in how _their_ tax money is spent on local level because they directly benefit from it and they still feel the pain of paying the taxes. Once the money comes through the federal government people stop to think it used to be theirs, they don't bother to question efficiency of spending, because that seemingly endless money is apparently brought by Santa Claus.
the further the money is spent from the true payer, the more fiscal irresponsibility and economical unsoundness are allowed.
You know, a gold watch could buy you a life in the times of WW2 (pretty much the definition of world going to shit) which can't be said about everything else you owned.
not an USian here: if i am not mistaken Tea Party came to life as a result of grassroot efforts tied to the Ron Paul's presidential campaign of 2008 in rep party. Originally it was about returning to the strict constitutionalism - nothing more, nothing less.
Now it becomes a sad caricature of its former self as Palins and Becks, seeing the growing discontent among masses and TP's numbers, decided to steal the momentum of the movement. They hijacked it for their own goals, twisting the founding principles.
It's crystal clear that they unfortunately succeeded, because the father of the movement (Ron Paul) is not mentioned even once in this comment chain and the Tea Party is perceived as a bunch of primitive, thought free, religious loonies and Palin and Beck are called their leaders.
i see a hole in your logic. How can there be a totalitarian state with a constitutionally limited government with majority of powers delegated to the states and with no public education brainwashing the masses? and how on earth the US survived the 19th century? There were no centralized education systems, no social security and no mandatory health insurance, no federal reserve micromanaging the economy.
they refuted that rumor already, besides even if it was true, pro players would have to train in a high lag environment and then play tournaments with low lag which wouldn't make any sense.
have you heard what happened in a first big tournament with $5k prize just 2 days ago? Players repeatedly lagged and in a showmatch Korean pro dropped TWICE in a best of 3 match. Do you think that they had a shitty connection?
Thousands of people watched it live, you can imagine how much of a fail that was.
i hear ya
recently LAN thing backfired quite nicely - there was a tournament at gamerscom or whatever that was called and battle.net lagged few times not to mention dropped connections in a best of 3 showmatch. There were thousands of people watching it live and via internet and players were lagging and dropping. Epic F.A.I.L.
I read the forums from time to time and I really hate how when some rather clueless casual player asks '- there is only one profile, how can i share it with my brother?' fanboys counted in dozens rush in to inform him he's being cheap and should fork out 60 bucks for his brother too, because sc2 is the best thing since sliced bread. It doesn't matter that these brothers have only 1 pc.
Recently blizzard announced that 1st name change is free (because many people were not aware of permanence of their handle and typed some junk to play, just like in sc1 where you could have multiple nicknames), but they will charge later. Price is unknown but to charge few bucks for running an sql oneliner? Seriously?
your understanding is wrong, currently the only way to play with friends from other regions is to drop another 60 bux