If so, please explain how that's different from using adblock.
Now I'll tell you how using a DVR is different from using adblock. I haven't seen a TV commercial that an infect my TV and make it quit working or invade my privacy or steal my identity. I have seen very widespread Flash advertisements on web pages that will do exactly that.
Agreed. If there was a flash block extension and an extension to un-animate animated GIFs and such I'd use chrome. I don't mind Google's ads. Until then, I'll make do with Firefox.
That covers nearly everything I was going to post.
There are a lot of little things that look like total bullshit that really make a difference. I can say that, I've been married for almost 15 years now. So I have a little cred here. Always, every single night, ask her how her day went, and ask questions as she goes through it. You know you're doing this right when you can name her boss and at least two co-workers she interacts with daily and describe their personalities to some degree. Once again, sounds like bullshit, but it's a big impact.
There are two styles of conflict resolution. Some couples use direct confrontation, and some negotiation. We negotiate. They key is to find consensus, something you can both agree on completely. If you reach a decision and realize that you didn't win, she didn't win, but you won as a couple, then you're doing it right.
I think it was Heinlein who said "If you're wrong, apologize immediately. If you're right, apologize even faster." A bit harsh, but what he means is don't celebrate when you're right, and downplay it quickly. The problem is, that if you look victorious, she feels like she's lost. And that's not going to end well.
Every day, try to sit down to one meal a day together. Even if it's at McDonalds or something. This is where the "how'd your day go" conversation should happen.
A lot of people will tell you to do everything together. They're wrong. Do what you both enjoy doing together. Do what you don't both enjoy doing apart. I play video games. She knits. I ride my bike. She watches tv. We do cook together, go on road trips together, and a bunch of other stuff. But don't do stuff together just for the sake of doing stuff together. One of you will look bored, and the other will try to rush through things and not enjoy it. And that'll end badly. So just decide to do stuff apart sometimes.
In a campaign financed with big money from actors, musicians, movie studios, producers, and so on, nobody has any RIGHT to think anything but this would happen. THE MAN HAD BIG NAME MUSICIANS ON STAGE PERFORMING BEFORE HIS SPEECHES. They weren't doing it solely out of the kindness of their hearts. And if you think they were, PLEASE STOP VOTING BECAUSE YOU ARE AN IDIOT.
Seriously. Anybody who expected an "information wants to be free" pro-copyright-reform president is way out of their fucking skull and shouldn't be voting.
He's got to do this, and copyright enforcement is going to be a very big priority for the incoming administration, just like anti-porn enforcement is for the outgoing administration. They have to pay off their constituencies. That's how the game is played. The game didn't change, no matter what the slogan was.
So why'd I vote for him? Same reason I ever vote, lesser of two evils. They would have done the exact same things economically (none of which will work) and spent the exact same amounts of money causing the exact same amounts of debt, pulled us out of our foreign expeditions at the exact same time. McCain would have put pro-life creationists on the Supreme Court, and Obama won't. That's the only difference worth voting on.
WoW didn't do any public quests. I really liked that in Warhammer, it was a lot of fun.
AoC's instanced cities had issues, but they had a *very* stable launch, which is the only good thing that can be said about the game. It was very popular at launch and they engineered well for it.
Honestly the only thing that kept me out of Warhammer is that most of my friends play on Macs, and they won't put out a Mac version. Then I started reading that they've fixed the class I played the most (warrior) in WoW and it was all downhill from there. WaR is a great game, but I don't know that they'll have the subscribers long term to generate the capital to do the really cool stuff that WoW has now.
Warhammer also had one of the greatest anti-ganking mechanics I've ever seen. Simple, smooth, and effective. It's a great game, and if you don't like the cartoony feel of WoW and want to play an MMO, Warhammer is a ton of fun.
I guess it depends on what you call "Grinding". For me, grinding is repeatedly killing the same set of mobs over and over in hopes of a random 1% chance drop. I've done grinding in WoW, and it's got it's own rewards (trying to improve your own efficiency) but it's not fun really. The only real grind left in the game is fishing. And that's something I do while I'm chatting with my friends on Ventrilo anyway.
When I run a 45 minute instance 6 times over 2 weeks, I don't think of that as grinding. When I have to kill the same 25 mobs standing outside black temple for 3 hours a day for cash for my epic mount, that's grinding. Pretty much grinding for cash left the game when the daily quests started. Grinding for reputation was still in, but the reputations got less and less important later in Burning Crusade. While reputations are very important in Wrath, they're also very easy to get and there are many varied places to get reputation, so it doesn't feel like a grind. Let me put it this way about reputation: Right now I'm trying to figure out what reputation to work on because none of them offer me any life-or-death upgrades. I think I'm going to work on the one that lets me buy the cool dragon mount. I started working really hard on reputations last Saturday morning. I finished all the regular quests, ran all the daily quests for Ebon Hold and ran 2 different heroic instances and had the faction done at the end of Saturday. That's not a grind. That's a day's play.
Where's the line? For me it's when it quits being fun and starts being tedious. There's enough variation in the game so far that it hasn't happened. The daily quests range from the "go kill 5 of these and 5 of those" to "go enslave a giant abomination, run it into the middle of a big group of bad guys, and blow it up". The quest variety is huge.
I don't really count instances as grinding, because I'm playing with friends, and saying that's a grind is like saying a weekly bridge party is a grind. It's the constant solo activity that really spells out grind for me. And I haven't seen any of that. I can't even think of anything to be gained by killing the same set of 25 mobs over and over again.
Over the last year, I've played Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Age of Conan.
I really feel sorry for both of them.
The bar's a bit higher now. The sheer variety of quest types now in WoW is just ludicrous. They put in a medevac quest.
Just mull over that a second. A fantasy MMO with a medevac quest. Fly in, pick up people in a siege zone, and fly them out.
And yes, it was awesome.
Quest lines where they basically give you invincible superpowers just so you can see the lore happen. The implementation of phasing really made me feel like I was part of what was going on and I was changing things in the game.
This is such a huge turnaround for Blizzard, who put all of the big lore-presentation bosses at the back of huge hardcore instances for so long. If you quest up through the game, you'll see Arthas, the Lich King, at least 4 times, and each time he's doing *something* that directly impacts *you*.
The shortfalls, however.
Crafting, except for jewelcrafting, is completely borked. Jewelcrafting has a lot of great self-buffs and very powerful things that can only be used by jewelcrafters. Other professions have very little, and my blacksmith has no reason to level over 415 (out of 450) in that skill.
Wintergrasp (the world pvp zone) needs some help. In order to balance the force, if one side is vastly outnumbered they get a stacking buff to their hit points, damage, and healing to compensate. This really means that the alliance on my server are basically fighting 10-man raid boss-level horde in PvP. It's not fun. They really need to fix the factions so we can temporarily swap to the other side or something. The horde is not much of a horde when they're outnumbered 10-1.
Certain class balance issues are still present, but not extreme. Warlocks are still an extremely fussy class to play, as opposed to other classes that rotate abilities or chain chance-on-hit abilities into combos, Warlocks basically stare at a set of timers and recast spells on a non-fixed rotation. Not fun.
All in all, they far exceeded my high expectations, for everything from content quality to quality of service. The servers haven't been perfect, but they also weren't the utter crapfest they were when Burning Crusade launched.
I've got one level 80 character and I don't remember any grinding. I remember repeating *one* set of daily quests to get a faction, and the rest was doing quests. And while there are some "go kill 10 bears" quests, there are a lot of "take this hippogryph and fly over the besieged town and pick up civilians and bring them back here". Or "here, take this harpoon, go up to this arena that's a thousand feet in the air, and use the harpoon to latch onto another hippogryph, swing up to it, defeat the rider on the hippogryph, and then swing to the next. Oh, and don't fall off it's a long way down."
The depth and breadth of quests and quest types is just amazing. And even the daily quests have a huge variety to them. It's a grind when I have to go kill a thousand mobs. It's not a grind when I have this many choices and I can mix and match them up to keep fresh.
I remember grinding for recipe drops, and those are gone now. There are very few recipes that drop for crafters, and the ones that do aren't necessary nor do they particularly sell well.
I remember grinding for reputation, and that's nearly gone now. I've repeated exactly one set of daily quests, and that's hardly a grind, and I got a really darn cool sword.
I remember grinding for cash way back when, but I finished up level 80 with 2,000 gold earned and sitting in the bank. Sure if I want a mammoth mount I've got some grinding ahead of me, but who has the time for that. My raiding budget is going to be a few hundred gold a week, but raid bosses are dropping huge amounts of money now (140g per boss in Naxxramas, so 14g per peson) which allays a lot of those costs.
Besides expenses (consumables, repairs) all of the stuff that money buys is either cosmetic (new mounts, which have no more speed or abilities than old mounts) or easily replaced by playing the other parts of the game.
They've even made grinding for gear if not an obsolete concept a really flexible one. It's hard to believe in a grind when I can do daily quests, do any of the level 80 instances in either heroic or normal mode, or go do a 10-man raid, or any combination, to get the gear I want.
The only thing they got right over WoW on launch was their server capacity. It was a very stable experience with no lag. This is because of their very nice instancing architecture. It works really really well. While WoW may set the standard for polish and finish on games, AoC definitely did a great job on server capacity. Hats off to your ops team.
However, Funcom managed to screw up almost every other aspect of the game, from UI layout to weapon speed, at launch. Itemization at low levels, lack of quests in middle levels, guild housing that just plain didn't work, and so on. Females had a lower weapon speed than males, because it took more time to animate the jugglies. I have a very hard time believing there was any QA done on the game despite the long beta period.
Labor costs figure in to a *very* large degree in automotive design. This is actually something I know about.
The labor cost to build a small SUV (say a Ford Escape) and the labor cost to build a small car (say a Ford Focus) is almost the same. The parts count is very similar, the only real difference is the physical size of the parts. Both vehicles have 3 seating surfaces (2 front seats, rear one-piece seat), 4 wheels, one engine, one transission, a hatch back, and so on. The problem is that people are willing to pay twice as much for an Escape as a Focus. So our small cars have lower quality parts, lower quality QA, and so on, to make up for the higher labor costs and still be able to bring a good product to market. If labor costs were less, the cars would cost less or they'd be better, and I'd be willing to bet that they'd actually be better cars, with better design.
So in effect, by demanding more benefits, more pay, and more pension, the increasing labor costs has made it almost untenable to make a small car in a union shop. The labor cost is too high, the profit is too small to nonexistant.
The floor workers weren't to blame for the plants closing, but why do you suppose nobody stepped in to buy the plants and keep them open and build more plants? If the orignal ownership went bankrupt, or got into a position where they wanted to sell plants, why didn't the Japanese and Chinese investors just buy plants here instead? Why is it, in effect, cheaper to send the ore (very heavy) overseas to have it smelted and brought back? It's because the overseas labor and environmental costs are so much lower. So while you think my history may be deficient, my present's pretty spot on: labor is too expensive here, because of the unionized labor, to actually do the work.
And you know, it never occured to me because space heaters were fine. It was just computers. Only computers. Space heaters: okie dokie. Computers: Nope. Space heaters: plug in and be comfie now! Computers: Wait 3 days, don't do anything because they already unplugged and moved your old computer into the new cube so you can't do anything but show up for 8 hours a day and look at a computer with no electricity. That's the union mindset though: if I plug that in, I'm taking work away from Benny, the electrician. And Benny's paid his protection money this month, his union dues are all paid up, and it'd be a shame if anything happened to your car out there in the parking lot, so why don't you just wait for Benny, he'll get around to it soon. Is that *really* the environment you want to work in? Sort of an organized crime cube farm? I think I'll pass.
After which, the paychecks will disappear to India and the benefits will go away, but the hours will be much better.
Old school was that the jobs couldn't go away. I've got news for you: they can. Global Economy. That means unless you're in a very location dependent profession (Mining, Trucking) you can get outsourced. Don't believe me? Drive through Detroit sometime. Or Flint. Good union towns.
Pensions. That's funny. I just read an article about GM's pension system. Turns out it's not funded, and very likely to not get paid. Oops. All through Delphi. All it takes is them going bankrupt and a judge saying "Yup, no way you can pay that off" and you're done. And they're > that close to going bankrupt.
The auto workers, who have watched 90% of their jobs go to Mexico, Japan, China, Korea, and India. The auto jobs that are here (and aren't in danger of being lost by imminent bankruptcy of GM, Ford, and Chrysler) are the non-union jobs from Honda, Toyota, and Nissan. These companies have been downsizing their workforce, but in case you didn't notice cars and trucks aren't selling very well right now, so there's less demand. Gee, the manufacturers who are able to respond to demand are doing OK, and the ones who have inflexible union rules prohibiting that are almost bankrupt. Nope. No pattern there at all.
The textile workers, who have watched 100% of their jobs go to Thailand, Malaysia, and China.
The steelworkers, who through a combination of union tactics AND environmental laws, have seen nearly all their jobs go to China. It's now cheaper to ship ore to China and import the steel than it is to refine it and form it here.
The fastest way to send jobs overseas is to unionize them. The only unions I can think of that haven't outsourced themselves are the miners and truck drivers, because they're actually location dependent. IT jobs are not now, and never will be, location dependent.
Another thought. I remember working in a union shop, doing some programming. I needed to move to another cubicle, right next to the one I was in. So I packed my stuff and moved it. And immediately got in trouble. See, I was supposed to wait for one of the union electricians to come over and move my stuff. Which would have been 2 days later. Mhmm. I want to work in that kind of shop. So does that mean I'd be able to file a grievance against our receptionist for setting up an out-of-office message? I mean, that's programming, RIGHT?
But it gets a solid pass for the rest of my browsing. Why? No ad blocker pro. No flash blocker. Until those happen, Chrome has dancy happy shit running all over my screen, automatically playing flash movies, and all the shit that I don't like.
There were two parts of the platform related by Ars Technica. The first part was increased copyright enforcement, and the second was patent reform.
The question's coming up, bear with me, some setup involved.
There are, basically, 3 industries that benefit from copyright: Music, Movies/TV, and Software. Copyright enforcement helps all 3, but (at least for short term profits) patent reform is not good for the software industry. So overall, this part of McCain's platform really only helps the Music and Movies/TV industries.
That's part 1 of the setup. Here's part 2:
The Music and Movies/TV industries are populated *mostly* by people who support Obama. Furthermore, the Christian Right in this country very much hates those two industries and would like to see them die in fires of hell for promoting vice. Oh, and the Christian Right hates the software industry, because all they do is make games full of murdering.
That's part 2. Here's the question:
Is there a reason that McCain's platform serves to (1) increase the profits of industries that hate him and give TONS of money to his opponent, and (2) Provides legal protection for industries that his primary voting base despises?
I've never seen those devices go for less than $18 in quantities of 2-3000. Blizzard's getting a deal on this. Their support costs for hacked accounts is just ludicrous in terms of time their support people spend fixing things. This should make it a *lot* cheaper for Blizzard, and a lot less scary for me.
one big problem Blizzard should address is that their online forums use the same username/password as the game, so phishers can pick stuff up *even easier* since web browsers in general seem to be so full of security holes you could drain pasta with them.
It is transparent in process, but not in reality. It'd be transparent if the congressmen who were actually voting on things managed to, you know, READ what they were voting on. They don't. After the McCain-Feingold bill passed, many were outraged when they were in the class (the bill was so complicated that it allocated money for a CLASS for congressmen on how to OBEY THE LAW) they said if they'd read the bill they wouldn't have voted for it.
A lot of legislation gets passed, too much for them to read. I guess they should...quit making so many laws then?
More services cost more money! It's this amazing idea where companies actually want to *gulp* make money so they can pay their employees. Instead of doing it DotCom style and just giving everything away and then going out of business, companies today charge money for services, and then use that money to pay back their investors, pay their employees, and invest in new technology and infrastructure to deliver more services.
Looked like you needed a little lesson in how money works. See, if you want more, sometimes you actually have to pay for it. You should be more suspicious of companies that give you more *without* asking you to pay anything.
So how's the unlimited data service on that prepaid plan?
I'm not knocking what you're doing, you're buying a product that meets your needs. But you're knocking a product that meets other people's needs. I'm in operations, and the ability to do more things remotely makes my life easier, to the point that I'm willing to pay to get more free time.
Data services may be a total waste for you. But since they're a total waste for you, you don't seem to want anybody else to have them either. What, everyone should have identical pre-paid cellphones? Why? Maybe other people are *gasp* different? They have different personal and professional interests and needs for communication?
Oh yeah, both candidates say things they don't really mean. I just took that one particularly hard given that I live where he was specifically commenting on. Popping out a comment like that in San Francisco was just...well, beyond ill-advised. Stuff like that gets remembered, and it changes how people think. Yes, that's stupid. Welcome to reality.
Yeah, he won the majority, the vast majority, of democrat voters...in states where democrats are the vast minority. Thinking that Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, or Alaska (1) have enough electoral votes to matter or (2) will even get close to voting democrat is just silly.
Look, McCain's got those states (the ones I mentioned in the paragraph above) sewed up. Unless he shows up on youtube snorting coke off Hannah Montana's tits, that's not going to change. So Obama winning a vast majority of the democrats there is not relevant to the election as a whole.
The way democrats do primaries is just silly, and I really hope they fix it before the next race. Get rid of superdelegates completely. Use a winner-take-all for each state so that the results at the end of the primaries more closely resemble the results for a real election. It's still not perfect, because a democrat will still get votes from Kansas, which doesn't happen during the real contest, but it's closer to reality than the feel-good stuff they have now.
Burger King vs McDonalds Nike vs Adidas Ford vs Chevy Democrat vs Republican
It's all marketing. Since Bush I, the Republicans have torn down all pretense of being small government high liberty, and are just about big governemnt.
The only difference between Hillary and Obama was their war vote. In 6 months, the war won't matter. You're already seeing it get less and less play in the press, because the surge appears to be working. It's going to be a non-issue by November. That's all that Bush is pressing for in his last months in office--get the war in Iraq to a point where it's not a liability for McCain. And McCain's been outspoken enough in the right directions to distance himself to the point where that's already working.
Both parties stand for big spending, big government, and more government done at the federal level and less at the state level. Functionally, there's no difference anymore. The era of Reagan republicans is over, and we've really just got the battle of nanny state republicans vs nanny state democrats, and the only difference is which side can line their pockets more.
Since they're functionally the same, and they don't disagree on any fundamentals, it comes down to War Hero vs Ivy League Lawyer. Being from the midwest, and knowing Obama thinks I'm a depressed and undereducated moron, I'm probably going to vote the other way just to be contrary at this point.
Michigan and Ohio are bleeding jobs like crazy. They have the highest state-level corporate taxes and the most restrictions on employers with respect to hiring and firing. Michigan is one of 2 states that actually *lost* population from one census to the next. People are actively fleeing there. There just aren't any jobs, at any level.
Missouri and Kansas, where I live, are growing, due to a lower tax structure and fewer restrictions on employers.
Ireland has the lowest corporate taxes in the EU, and also has one of the fastest growth rates.
You're right that corporate taxes are a reality of doing business. And they're a reality of doing business...somewhere else too.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and when a bad ad hits my radio, it doesn't cause my radio to give out my credit card number. When a bad ad hits my PC, it installs a keylogger.
Do you use a DVR to skip commercials?
If so, please explain how that's different from using adblock.
Now I'll tell you how using a DVR is different from using adblock. I haven't seen a TV commercial that an infect my TV and make it quit working or invade my privacy or steal my identity. I have seen very widespread Flash advertisements on web pages that will do exactly that.
Agreed. If there was a flash block extension and an extension to un-animate animated GIFs and such I'd use chrome. I don't mind Google's ads. Until then, I'll make do with Firefox.
That covers nearly everything I was going to post.
There are a lot of little things that look like total bullshit that really make a difference. I can say that, I've been married for almost 15 years now. So I have a little cred here. Always, every single night, ask her how her day went, and ask questions as she goes through it. You know you're doing this right when you can name her boss and at least two co-workers she interacts with daily and describe their personalities to some degree. Once again, sounds like bullshit, but it's a big impact.
There are two styles of conflict resolution. Some couples use direct confrontation, and some negotiation. We negotiate. They key is to find consensus, something you can both agree on completely. If you reach a decision and realize that you didn't win, she didn't win, but you won as a couple, then you're doing it right.
I think it was Heinlein who said "If you're wrong, apologize immediately. If you're right, apologize even faster." A bit harsh, but what he means is don't celebrate when you're right, and downplay it quickly. The problem is, that if you look victorious, she feels like she's lost. And that's not going to end well.
Every day, try to sit down to one meal a day together. Even if it's at McDonalds or something. This is where the "how'd your day go" conversation should happen.
A lot of people will tell you to do everything together. They're wrong. Do what you both enjoy doing together. Do what you don't both enjoy doing apart. I play video games. She knits. I ride my bike. She watches tv. We do cook together, go on road trips together, and a bunch of other stuff. But don't do stuff together just for the sake of doing stuff together. One of you will look bored, and the other will try to rush through things and not enjoy it. And that'll end badly. So just decide to do stuff apart sometimes.
I voted for obama too, but....
Really, what the fuck did you expect?
In a campaign financed with big money from actors, musicians, movie studios, producers, and so on, nobody has any RIGHT to think anything but this would happen. THE MAN HAD BIG NAME MUSICIANS ON STAGE PERFORMING BEFORE HIS SPEECHES. They weren't doing it solely out of the kindness of their hearts. And if you think they were, PLEASE STOP VOTING BECAUSE YOU ARE AN IDIOT.
Seriously. Anybody who expected an "information wants to be free" pro-copyright-reform president is way out of their fucking skull and shouldn't be voting.
He's got to do this, and copyright enforcement is going to be a very big priority for the incoming administration, just like anti-porn enforcement is for the outgoing administration. They have to pay off their constituencies. That's how the game is played. The game didn't change, no matter what the slogan was.
So why'd I vote for him? Same reason I ever vote, lesser of two evils. They would have done the exact same things economically (none of which will work) and spent the exact same amounts of money causing the exact same amounts of debt, pulled us out of our foreign expeditions at the exact same time. McCain would have put pro-life creationists on the Supreme Court, and Obama won't. That's the only difference worth voting on.
WoW didn't do any public quests. I really liked that in Warhammer, it was a lot of fun.
AoC's instanced cities had issues, but they had a *very* stable launch, which is the only good thing that can be said about the game. It was very popular at launch and they engineered well for it.
Honestly the only thing that kept me out of Warhammer is that most of my friends play on Macs, and they won't put out a Mac version. Then I started reading that they've fixed the class I played the most (warrior) in WoW and it was all downhill from there. WaR is a great game, but I don't know that they'll have the subscribers long term to generate the capital to do the really cool stuff that WoW has now.
Warhammer also had one of the greatest anti-ganking mechanics I've ever seen. Simple, smooth, and effective. It's a great game, and if you don't like the cartoony feel of WoW and want to play an MMO, Warhammer is a ton of fun.
I guess it depends on what you call "Grinding". For me, grinding is repeatedly killing the same set of mobs over and over in hopes of a random 1% chance drop. I've done grinding in WoW, and it's got it's own rewards (trying to improve your own efficiency) but it's not fun really. The only real grind left in the game is fishing. And that's something I do while I'm chatting with my friends on Ventrilo anyway.
When I run a 45 minute instance 6 times over 2 weeks, I don't think of that as grinding. When I have to kill the same 25 mobs standing outside black temple for 3 hours a day for cash for my epic mount, that's grinding. Pretty much grinding for cash left the game when the daily quests started. Grinding for reputation was still in, but the reputations got less and less important later in Burning Crusade. While reputations are very important in Wrath, they're also very easy to get and there are many varied places to get reputation, so it doesn't feel like a grind. Let me put it this way about reputation: Right now I'm trying to figure out what reputation to work on because none of them offer me any life-or-death upgrades. I think I'm going to work on the one that lets me buy the cool dragon mount. I started working really hard on reputations last Saturday morning. I finished all the regular quests, ran all the daily quests for Ebon Hold and ran 2 different heroic instances and had the faction done at the end of Saturday. That's not a grind. That's a day's play.
Where's the line? For me it's when it quits being fun and starts being tedious. There's enough variation in the game so far that it hasn't happened. The daily quests range from the "go kill 5 of these and 5 of those" to "go enslave a giant abomination, run it into the middle of a big group of bad guys, and blow it up". The quest variety is huge.
I don't really count instances as grinding, because I'm playing with friends, and saying that's a grind is like saying a weekly bridge party is a grind. It's the constant solo activity that really spells out grind for me. And I haven't seen any of that. I can't even think of anything to be gained by killing the same set of 25 mobs over and over again.
Over the last year, I've played Warhammer: Age of Reckoning and Age of Conan.
I really feel sorry for both of them.
The bar's a bit higher now. The sheer variety of quest types now in WoW is just ludicrous. They put in a medevac quest.
Just mull over that a second. A fantasy MMO with a medevac quest. Fly in, pick up people in a siege zone, and fly them out.
And yes, it was awesome.
Quest lines where they basically give you invincible superpowers just so you can see the lore happen. The implementation of phasing really made me feel like I was part of what was going on and I was changing things in the game.
This is such a huge turnaround for Blizzard, who put all of the big lore-presentation bosses at the back of huge hardcore instances for so long. If you quest up through the game, you'll see Arthas, the Lich King, at least 4 times, and each time he's doing *something* that directly impacts *you*.
The shortfalls, however.
Crafting, except for jewelcrafting, is completely borked. Jewelcrafting has a lot of great self-buffs and very powerful things that can only be used by jewelcrafters. Other professions have very little, and my blacksmith has no reason to level over 415 (out of 450) in that skill.
Wintergrasp (the world pvp zone) needs some help. In order to balance the force, if one side is vastly outnumbered they get a stacking buff to their hit points, damage, and healing to compensate. This really means that the alliance on my server are basically fighting 10-man raid boss-level horde in PvP. It's not fun. They really need to fix the factions so we can temporarily swap to the other side or something. The horde is not much of a horde when they're outnumbered 10-1.
Certain class balance issues are still present, but not extreme. Warlocks are still an extremely fussy class to play, as opposed to other classes that rotate abilities or chain chance-on-hit abilities into combos, Warlocks basically stare at a set of timers and recast spells on a non-fixed rotation. Not fun.
All in all, they far exceeded my high expectations, for everything from content quality to quality of service. The servers haven't been perfect, but they also weren't the utter crapfest they were when Burning Crusade launched.
Really? Grind?
Huh.
I've got one level 80 character and I don't remember any grinding. I remember repeating *one* set of daily quests to get a faction, and the rest was doing quests. And while there are some "go kill 10 bears" quests, there are a lot of "take this hippogryph and fly over the besieged town and pick up civilians and bring them back here". Or "here, take this harpoon, go up to this arena that's a thousand feet in the air, and use the harpoon to latch onto another hippogryph, swing up to it, defeat the rider on the hippogryph, and then swing to the next. Oh, and don't fall off it's a long way down."
The depth and breadth of quests and quest types is just amazing. And even the daily quests have a huge variety to them. It's a grind when I have to go kill a thousand mobs. It's not a grind when I have this many choices and I can mix and match them up to keep fresh.
I remember grinding for recipe drops, and those are gone now. There are very few recipes that drop for crafters, and the ones that do aren't necessary nor do they particularly sell well.
I remember grinding for reputation, and that's nearly gone now. I've repeated exactly one set of daily quests, and that's hardly a grind, and I got a really darn cool sword.
I remember grinding for cash way back when, but I finished up level 80 with 2,000 gold earned and sitting in the bank. Sure if I want a mammoth mount I've got some grinding ahead of me, but who has the time for that. My raiding budget is going to be a few hundred gold a week, but raid bosses are dropping huge amounts of money now (140g per boss in Naxxramas, so 14g per peson) which allays a lot of those costs.
Besides expenses (consumables, repairs) all of the stuff that money buys is either cosmetic (new mounts, which have no more speed or abilities than old mounts) or easily replaced by playing the other parts of the game.
They've even made grinding for gear if not an obsolete concept a really flexible one. It's hard to believe in a grind when I can do daily quests, do any of the level 80 instances in either heroic or normal mode, or go do a 10-man raid, or any combination, to get the gear I want.
Yeah, I'm not seeing any grind here really.
The only thing they got right over WoW on launch was their server capacity. It was a very stable experience with no lag. This is because of their very nice instancing architecture. It works really really well. While WoW may set the standard for polish and finish on games, AoC definitely did a great job on server capacity. Hats off to your ops team.
However, Funcom managed to screw up almost every other aspect of the game, from UI layout to weapon speed, at launch. Itemization at low levels, lack of quests in middle levels, guild housing that just plain didn't work, and so on. Females had a lower weapon speed than males, because it took more time to animate the jugglies. I have a very hard time believing there was any QA done on the game despite the long beta period.
WMP doesn't follow windows UI guidelines. I think the UI guidelines for Windows specifically give media players a pass.
Labor costs figure in to a *very* large degree in automotive design. This is actually something I know about.
The labor cost to build a small SUV (say a Ford Escape) and the labor cost to build a small car (say a Ford Focus) is almost the same. The parts count is very similar, the only real difference is the physical size of the parts. Both vehicles have 3 seating surfaces (2 front seats, rear one-piece seat), 4 wheels, one engine, one transission, a hatch back, and so on. The problem is that people are willing to pay twice as much for an Escape as a Focus. So our small cars have lower quality parts, lower quality QA, and so on, to make up for the higher labor costs and still be able to bring a good product to market. If labor costs were less, the cars would cost less or they'd be better, and I'd be willing to bet that they'd actually be better cars, with better design.
So in effect, by demanding more benefits, more pay, and more pension, the increasing labor costs has made it almost untenable to make a small car in a union shop. The labor cost is too high, the profit is too small to nonexistant.
The floor workers weren't to blame for the plants closing, but why do you suppose nobody stepped in to buy the plants and keep them open and build more plants? If the orignal ownership went bankrupt, or got into a position where they wanted to sell plants, why didn't the Japanese and Chinese investors just buy plants here instead? Why is it, in effect, cheaper to send the ore (very heavy) overseas to have it smelted and brought back? It's because the overseas labor and environmental costs are so much lower. So while you think my history may be deficient, my present's pretty spot on: labor is too expensive here, because of the unionized labor, to actually do the work.
And you know, it never occured to me because space heaters were fine. It was just computers. Only computers. Space heaters: okie dokie. Computers: Nope. Space heaters: plug in and be comfie now! Computers: Wait 3 days, don't do anything because they already unplugged and moved your old computer into the new cube so you can't do anything but show up for 8 hours a day and look at a computer with no electricity. That's the union mindset though: if I plug that in, I'm taking work away from Benny, the electrician. And Benny's paid his protection money this month, his union dues are all paid up, and it'd be a shame if anything happened to your car out there in the parking lot, so why don't you just wait for Benny, he'll get around to it soon. Is that *really* the environment you want to work in? Sort of an organized crime cube farm? I think I'll pass.
And the trees were all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw.
After which, the paychecks will disappear to India and the benefits will go away, but the hours will be much better.
Old school was that the jobs couldn't go away. I've got news for you: they can. Global Economy. That means unless you're in a very location dependent profession (Mining, Trucking) you can get outsourced. Don't believe me? Drive through Detroit sometime. Or Flint. Good union towns.
Pensions. That's funny. I just read an article about GM's pension system. Turns out it's not funded, and very likely to not get paid. Oops. All through Delphi. All it takes is them going bankrupt and a judge saying "Yup, no way you can pay that off" and you're done. And they're > that close to going bankrupt.
Agreed.
And you know, it's worked so well for:
The auto workers, who have watched 90% of their jobs go to Mexico, Japan, China, Korea, and India. The auto jobs that are here (and aren't in danger of being lost by imminent bankruptcy of GM, Ford, and Chrysler) are the non-union jobs from Honda, Toyota, and Nissan. These companies have been downsizing their workforce, but in case you didn't notice cars and trucks aren't selling very well right now, so there's less demand. Gee, the manufacturers who are able to respond to demand are doing OK, and the ones who have inflexible union rules prohibiting that are almost bankrupt. Nope. No pattern there at all.
The textile workers, who have watched 100% of their jobs go to Thailand, Malaysia, and China.
The steelworkers, who through a combination of union tactics AND environmental laws, have seen nearly all their jobs go to China. It's now cheaper to ship ore to China and import the steel than it is to refine it and form it here.
The fastest way to send jobs overseas is to unionize them. The only unions I can think of that haven't outsourced themselves are the miners and truck drivers, because they're actually location dependent. IT jobs are not now, and never will be, location dependent.
Another thought. I remember working in a union shop, doing some programming. I needed to move to another cubicle, right next to the one I was in. So I packed my stuff and moved it. And immediately got in trouble. See, I was supposed to wait for one of the union electricians to come over and move my stuff. Which would have been 2 days later. Mhmm. I want to work in that kind of shop. So does that mean I'd be able to file a grievance against our receptionist for setting up an out-of-office message? I mean, that's programming, RIGHT?
A stupid idea.
But it gets a solid pass for the rest of my browsing. Why? No ad blocker pro. No flash blocker. Until those happen, Chrome has dancy happy shit running all over my screen, automatically playing flash movies, and all the shit that I don't like.
There were two parts of the platform related by Ars Technica. The first part was increased copyright enforcement, and the second was patent reform.
The question's coming up, bear with me, some setup involved.
There are, basically, 3 industries that benefit from copyright: Music, Movies/TV, and Software. Copyright enforcement helps all 3, but (at least for short term profits) patent reform is not good for the software industry. So overall, this part of McCain's platform really only helps the Music and Movies/TV industries.
That's part 1 of the setup. Here's part 2:
The Music and Movies/TV industries are populated *mostly* by people who support Obama. Furthermore, the Christian Right in this country very much hates those two industries and would like to see them die in fires of hell for promoting vice. Oh, and the Christian Right hates the software industry, because all they do is make games full of murdering.
That's part 2. Here's the question:
Is there a reason that McCain's platform serves to (1) increase the profits of industries that hate him and give TONS of money to his opponent, and (2) Provides legal protection for industries that his primary voting base despises?
They accomplish a lot!
I mean, all those laptops confiscated and put onto eBay make the TSA employees RICH! I'd say that's a worthy cause, wouldn't you comrade?
I've never seen those devices go for less than $18 in quantities of 2-3000. Blizzard's getting a deal on this. Their support costs for hacked accounts is just ludicrous in terms of time their support people spend fixing things. This should make it a *lot* cheaper for Blizzard, and a lot less scary for me.
one big problem Blizzard should address is that their online forums use the same username/password as the game, so phishers can pick stuff up *even easier* since web browsers in general seem to be so full of security holes you could drain pasta with them.
It is transparent in process, but not in reality. It'd be transparent if the congressmen who were actually voting on things managed to, you know, READ what they were voting on. They don't. After the McCain-Feingold bill passed, many were outraged when they were in the class (the bill was so complicated that it allocated money for a CLASS for congressmen on how to OBEY THE LAW) they said if they'd read the bill they wouldn't have voted for it.
A lot of legislation gets passed, too much for them to read. I guess they should...quit making so many laws then?
NEWS FLASH:
More services cost more money! It's this amazing idea where companies actually want to *gulp* make money so they can pay their employees. Instead of doing it DotCom style and just giving everything away and then going out of business, companies today charge money for services, and then use that money to pay back their investors, pay their employees, and invest in new technology and infrastructure to deliver more services.
Looked like you needed a little lesson in how money works. See, if you want more, sometimes you actually have to pay for it. You should be more suspicious of companies that give you more *without* asking you to pay anything.
So how's the unlimited data service on that prepaid plan?
I'm not knocking what you're doing, you're buying a product that meets your needs. But you're knocking a product that meets other people's needs. I'm in operations, and the ability to do more things remotely makes my life easier, to the point that I'm willing to pay to get more free time.
Data services may be a total waste for you. But since they're a total waste for you, you don't seem to want anybody else to have them either. What, everyone should have identical pre-paid cellphones? Why? Maybe other people are *gasp* different? They have different personal and professional interests and needs for communication?
Oh yeah, both candidates say things they don't really mean. I just took that one particularly hard given that I live where he was specifically commenting on. Popping out a comment like that in San Francisco was just...well, beyond ill-advised. Stuff like that gets remembered, and it changes how people think. Yes, that's stupid. Welcome to reality.
Yeah, he won the majority, the vast majority, of democrat voters...in states where democrats are the vast minority. Thinking that Wyoming, Montana, Kansas, Nebraska, Idaho, or Alaska (1) have enough electoral votes to matter or (2) will even get close to voting democrat is just silly.
Look, McCain's got those states (the ones I mentioned in the paragraph above) sewed up. Unless he shows up on youtube snorting coke off Hannah Montana's tits, that's not going to change. So Obama winning a vast majority of the democrats there is not relevant to the election as a whole.
The way democrats do primaries is just silly, and I really hope they fix it before the next race. Get rid of superdelegates completely. Use a winner-take-all for each state so that the results at the end of the primaries more closely resemble the results for a real election. It's still not perfect, because a democrat will still get votes from Kansas, which doesn't happen during the real contest, but it's closer to reality than the feel-good stuff they have now.
Burger King vs McDonalds
Nike vs Adidas
Ford vs Chevy
Democrat vs Republican
It's all marketing. Since Bush I, the Republicans have torn down all pretense of being small government high liberty, and are just about big governemnt.
The only difference between Hillary and Obama was their war vote. In 6 months, the war won't matter. You're already seeing it get less and less play in the press, because the surge appears to be working. It's going to be a non-issue by November. That's all that Bush is pressing for in his last months in office--get the war in Iraq to a point where it's not a liability for McCain. And McCain's been outspoken enough in the right directions to distance himself to the point where that's already working.
Both parties stand for big spending, big government, and more government done at the federal level and less at the state level. Functionally, there's no difference anymore. The era of Reagan republicans is over, and we've really just got the battle of nanny state republicans vs nanny state democrats, and the only difference is which side can line their pockets more.
Since they're functionally the same, and they don't disagree on any fundamentals, it comes down to War Hero vs Ivy League Lawyer. Being from the midwest, and knowing Obama thinks I'm a depressed and undereducated moron, I'm probably going to vote the other way just to be contrary at this point.
Michigan and Ohio are bleeding jobs like crazy. They have the highest state-level corporate taxes and the most restrictions on employers with respect to hiring and firing. Michigan is one of 2 states that actually *lost* population from one census to the next. People are actively fleeing there. There just aren't any jobs, at any level.
Missouri and Kansas, where I live, are growing, due to a lower tax structure and fewer restrictions on employers.
Ireland has the lowest corporate taxes in the EU, and also has one of the fastest growth rates.
You're right that corporate taxes are a reality of doing business. And they're a reality of doing business...somewhere else too.