With regards to guildwars, its one i've thought about giving a try and very well might once summer is nearing an end and the nights are getting cold and dark again.
I wouldn't bother. The game is going downhill pretty fast because ANet stopped maintaining it in any serious way long ago. It was definitely a fun game and I enjoyed it, but since nobody is updating it in any real way the playerbase is decaying pretty rapidly and it can be very difficult to find groups. You can use the henchmen for everything, but if you're going to do that you might as well just play a single player game to begin with.
Actually, they are required to serve the public interest to some extent or another, at least in the U.S. They're obligated to preempt regular programming for emergency broadcasts, for example, and the FCC mandates certain standards for educational and informational programming:
I think, however, that if you have a problem with them not fulfilling these roles, it's on you to complain about it, same as obscenity complaints. From time to time I've seen different local broadcasters put up announcements that the station's license is up for renewal at some date in the future and that if you want to comment on their application to the FCC or see their records about educational and informational programming, you can stop by their offices to do so.
The truth of all this aside, since I can't participate in that particular angle of the discussion (well, at least not intelligently, which I realize is not normally a hindrance to internet "conversation") since I've never watched it, if all the things the submitter said about the show were true, he'd be right.
Fox doesn't like complex narratives because complex narratives don't bring in the viewers, which means they don't bring in the advertisers. Fox is number one right now because of one thing and one thing only: American Idol. That's not a cheap shot at them or their viewers, it's a stone cold fact. American Idol is currently the bread and butter of the Fox lineup and it basically subsidizes experiments like TSCC. Fox is in the business of making money, and they've hooked the lowbrow demographic. Little potshots into "higher art" are really just stabs in the dark meant to try and get that rare unexpected success, and if they don't blow up quickly into reliable revenue streams, they get cancelled so that American Idol's simplistic, popcorn-style entertainment can fund another experiment.
Art and business don't work well together for a reason: they're motivated by different things. Anytime you have widely successful art in both a cultural and financial sense, it's pure dumb luck. Until sci-fi nerds start recognizing that fact, they'll just be disappointed over and over again.
It doesn't matter how smart, complex, or artistic something is, if it's on network TV, it's there to make money, and if it's only appealing to a small, highbrow crowd (whether that applies to the particular show under discussion or not, I have no idea), it's not going to do that, and it won't last long.
Why the hell are we selling 64oz of ANYTHING for single human consumption?
Because consumers demand it. Same reason New York will get away with this tax.
I have a hard time finding any sympathy for those opposed to this sort of thing. If you don't like it, don't buy the products and choke the revenue source off. There are few more effective and less violent ways to correct an unfair government mandate than by choking a revenue stream. You can yell and scream until you're blue in the face and nothing will happen, but take away their money and they'll sit bolt upright and listen quite intently.
But that won't happen, because if people can't put down their cigarettes and two pound bacon burgers to keep from dying of a massive heart attack at 45, they sure as hell won't do it to save $0.30 in taxes each time they indulge their dirty little habits.
Until people in this country start acting in ways that show at least a GLIMMER of motivated self-interest, this sort of thing will just keep happening state to state and eventually at the federal level. We whine and gripe about it, but, in the end, nobody will actually do anything about it, it will become part of normal life, and we'll all forget that there ever was a time when we didn't pay for the privilege of stuffing our faces with Cheetohs and Mountain Dew.
Never saw that argument before. Certainly not several times in every single article about this topic for the last ten years.
Ahem.
Content costs money to produce, the costs are determined by the expected sales, by obtaining and consuming the content you have justified your position as an expected sale without compensating the artist, programmer, or producer for their work. You have caused clear financial harm and so you are wrong legally and morally, your argument is absurd and would never stand up in any reasonable debate on the ethics of the matter and certainly will never hold water in any court of law.
You're comparing people who are demanding a proscribed product that they purchase and consume outside the law with people who just don't like how much the product costs or how its distributed. The government denying you access to a good or service you demand is not the same thing as a private company offering a good or service in a way or at a price you don't like.
Furthermore, you have a legitimate means to air your grievances: don't buy. Not only do you send the clear message that you are unhappy with the product or service, you maintain the legal AND moral high ground in the debate.
If interactivity like this is an option, can we make one that delivers increasingly powerful electric jolts to the idiots who spam trade chat with Anal [Skill] links or Chuck Norris "jokes" over and over?
I used to get dragged to church as a child, but our church was a dinky little thing in a podunk town of no consequence full of geriatric hillbillies. Sunday school rarely consisted of more than a gripe session, lead by the head hillbilly who worked in the "big city" (of about 120,000) over the mountain. The sessions generally revolved around the most recent topic Agnes had heard on the nightly news, which usually meant I sat their for an hour listening to people with multiple missing teeth bash immigrants, gays, liberals, and basically anybody - other than the group leader - who had been more than 10 feet past the county line in any direction in the past 30 years.
I guess what I'm saying is, my church-going experience was largely shaped by ill-informed, shrill idiots with minimal exposure to the outside world and strong opinions on things they had no capability to understand, so I really can't think of a more fitting place to send them than the Internet.
While I agree in principle with the sentiment regarding copyright law and corporate abuse in the matter, I would point out that the people have an unflinchingly clear moral AND legal leg to stand on here: don't buy the products.
Joe may be a little 14 year old pothead, with a $25 dollar allowance.
We could assume Joe has somehow welded himself to the floor and that's why he didn't go out and buy it, but I don't think it's a useful assumption. My point is only that if we're going to set up a generic target for our discussions that it ought to be a generic person relevant to the topic. Since all we know about Joe is that he copied the game from someone else, all we know is that he is a video game player. In all likelihood then Joe is a male, 18 to 45, with a stable job and plenty of disposable income.
That's your pirate, at least until additional research comes out on the subject (which of course there may already be that I'm just not aware of). There are, of course, other people out there copying games, but they're not really useful to talk about in a general sense because they're in minorities or they're simply unknown.
I understand what you're saying, but the "wasn't going to buy it anyway" argument isn't valid. Software's costs are assumed almost entirely in the development phase, and those costs are driven by expectations of the future. If Joe is in the target demographic for the game, and then Joe copies the game instead of buying it, Joe's interest has already been factored in - correctly - but he will not generate the expected sale because, instead, he stole it.
It may well be true that Joe never intended to buy it, but in that case, the developer made the mistake. If they build the game and Joe isn't interested, then it's their own fault and their error. But if they build the game and Joe copies it, Joe obviously IS interested, and Joe is enjoying a product that was, in part, built for him. They took him into account, they paid to make a product he enjoys, and he did not reimburse them for their expense and effort.
Joe caused them an economic loss just the same as if Joe had simply stolen the game off the shelf.
Part of the problem in illustrating this issue is that software is more of a service than a good. Joe isn't really paying for a good of any kind, although he may get a box and a disc and a manual. Joe is actually paying for somebody to take the time to understand what he enjoys, make it and test it for him, then distribute it to him. In that way, software piracy is similar to a theft of service rather than the theft of an actual tangible product. Theft of service is a very real and very punishable offense, and I think software/music/movie piracy ought to be viewed in the same light.
Distinction without a difference. If we're going to make random assumptions about people's motivations in stealing video games, why would we assume things to be the way you claim in your post? If Joe copies the game from Jerry, then Joe is a player just like Jerry, but unlike Jerry, Joe didn't buy the game. Seems to me that Joe has demonstrated his interest in the game at that point and it makes more sense to assume that Joe is a lost sale and therefore financial harm was inflicted.
People here seem to live in this weird little bubble world where the rules of business are some sort of bizarre mutation of reality. Game companies don't just magically produce a zero cost product and then start turning a profit as the game sells. There is an up front cost associated with development, often huge, and they operate in the red until they meet the break even point. If they spend $1 million dollars developing a game, and then make $750,000 selling it, and $500,000 worth of copies are pirated, they've not only suffered $500,000 in economic damage, they've actually lost real money as a result of the piracy.
You can sit and twist and contort it however you want, but people pirating games costs other people money. Making a bit-for-bit copy of someone's software is not a consequence-free act no matter how much some people here want to believe otherwise.
And it's all sort of irrelevant anyway. We've all done it and we all know damn well we did it because we're thieving little creeps who just didn't feel like paying for movies/music/games/whatever.
This really isn't that complicated. If Congress passes a law it's the law and it doesn't matter how nonsensical it is. I don't care if they pass a law saying that you have to wear a zebra suit and scream the words to O Canada from the top of a belltower at noon every day or face the death penalty. It's the law and as far as the courts are concerned you're obligated to follow it until you or someone else successfully challenges it and has it revoked. You can sit around thinking it's nonsensical as intensely as you like, but it will do nothing to change the fact that it's the law. You actually have to challenge the law in court or convince legislators to repeal it to have it overturned no matter how stupid it is. That's how stupid laws stay on the books to begin with. Since nobody ever enforces them, there's never anybody with a compelling interest to challenge them, and you wind up with silly morning news show fodder about how in Pitstink, OK there's a law that says you aren't allowed to wax a duck on Sundays. Technically, then, it's illegal in Pitstink OK to wax a duck on Sundays no matter how silly it is.
I don't know how self-centered I'd have to be to think my opinions shaped realities like law, but I really don't care to find out.
It doesn't matter if it's nonsensical. If they pass the law it's the law and you're obligated to abide by it unless it's overturned or repealed.
Which goes back to my original point: yes, it would be absurd, and yes, you could fight to overturn it, but it wouldn't be worth it to most people.
There is a cost associated with fighting back against those sorts of things. You can fight the IRS over a $10 tax bill you shouldn't have to pay, but it's going to cost you thousands of dollars in attorney fees - which you may or may not recover - and many, many frustrating hours. And you may lose the case anyway in which case you'll lose thousands in attorney fees, likely hundreds in penalties and late fees, possibly the attorney fees of the IRS, and your original $10 tax bill.
Saying you should just go ahead and sue is all fine and dandy, and if you're fighting for the principle of the thing that's great, but the cost of being right is often much greater than the cost of just accepting the wrong in these sorts of cases.
Which is all well and good, but like most things involving corporate and government abuse, it's just not worth it. 10k gold in WoW goes for something like $75. That's, what, ten bucks extra on your taxes? Are you really going to spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars trying to defend your point against the IRS?
There are lots of things that we shouldn't pay. I shouldn't have paid Bank of America when they screwed me on a credit card late fee by holding my check past the due date. But it was $39. It would have cost me $60 just to file a claim I had no guarantee of winning, so instead I swore at the guy on the phone, paid their theft fee, canceled the account and never dealt with them again.
Fighting on principles is too expensive in America, which is why few people bother to do it.
He's basically switching because he knows that the republicans won't really back him in-state during the primaries. He was challenged last time and narrowly won, this time around I can just about guarantee that the republicans will come down on him full-bore in the primaries to try and remove him. Specter won't go along with the republican machine in lockstep and they hate it, and they don't think they need him anymore.
The only thing that's going to save him is if the republicans run another extremist in the state against him. Someone along the lines of Rick Santorum. If that happens and the democrats don't challenge him in the primary, he may have a shot, but I think this is basically his curtain call. This state, particularly up through the center simply has too many core republican supporters (read: poorly educated, poorly informed, and highly sensitized against anything "liberal", "socialist", or "democrat"). They're going to hammer him as a "liberal sympathizer", tie him to the "socialist" recovery plan and basically villify him not with anything he's actually done or said, but by simply telling a lot of old and bigoted hillbillies that he's Obama's buddy and a liberal and maybe even a commie to boot.
And it will work.
Personally, that's fine with me. I've supported him in the past but after his vote for Paulson's bailout - which I railed against in several contacts to his and Casey's offices - I'm not going to again. I suspect it will mean I have a farther right Senator replacing him, which I don't care for, but so long as we don't wind up with a whack-a-doodle like Santorum was, it's no big deal.
Funny, but he has a point. I actually program things for websites, as in, I write both client and server application code and SQL. I also maintain the web servers, maintain the operating systems they run on, maintain access controls on the data, run difficult reports that can't be automated for manadrones and usually get called on to lift heavy objects or help fix various building problems because, apparently, being an IT guy makes me somehow qualified to help fix the sink in the break room.
But for all most people here know, I'm no different than the woman on the other floor who "does HTML" - meaning she use's a WYSIWYG to change links or add an image to a page now and then.
Funny. I stopped playing about a year ago because I ran out of things to do (except grind for EotN rep, titles, and prestige armor) and the game is no longer being actively updated.
Not to mention there's no raiding at all. A group of 8 engaging in "elite" content that can often be solo'ed by a clever player is not a "raid". It's a normally sized party of 8 people playing slightly-harder-than-usual content.
It's also very much the same as other MMOs. You click an enemy to start to autoattack, then you click skill icons in succession until someone dies. The only major difference, combat-wise, is that you magically forget about 250 of your skills the instant you leave a town or outpost, restricting you to only eight.
I liked Guild Wars. Good game. But it's no WoW or LoTRO or EvE. They're just now expanding bank tabs to beyond the paltry bit you get by default - and you still have to share your bank among all your characters. The content is much shorter, there's much less interaction between players since the only place you even see other people outside your party is in the glorified chat rooms they call towns, the crafting system is practically non-existant, customization is limited, and the community is absolutely awful. Hell, there isn't even a z-axis so you spend most of your time running around on pre-created paths like it's a rail shooter.
Guild Wars is a fine game in its own right, but in the world of MMOs, it has very little to offer compared to the standard-bearers.
Then quit playing the friggin' game. If you don't like the game, don't play it. Since you are apparently incapable of evaluating your own interests and options, I'll do it for you: go play Diablo. Do you want me to stick around to help you pick out your work clothes tomorrow too, or do you think you can manage that one on your own?
Just like in real life- I enjoy throwing a party, but hire a maid to clean up before it. I enjoy driving my car, but pay someone else to change the oil.
I swear to god, if anybody on Slashdot ever figures out how to make an intelligent and meaningful analogy, I'll probably drop dead from the shock.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't bother. The game is going downhill pretty fast because ANet stopped maintaining it in any serious way long ago. It was definitely a fun game and I enjoyed it, but since nobody is updating it in any real way the playerbase is decaying pretty rapidly and it can be very difficult to find groups. You can use the henchmen for everything, but if you're going to do that you might as well just play a single player game to begin with.
Actually, they are required to serve the public interest to some extent or another, at least in the U.S. They're obligated to preempt regular programming for emergency broadcasts, for example, and the FCC mandates certain standards for educational and informational programming:
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/audio/bickel/amfmrule.html#TV
I think, however, that if you have a problem with them not fulfilling these roles, it's on you to complain about it, same as obscenity complaints. From time to time I've seen different local broadcasters put up announcements that the station's license is up for renewal at some date in the future and that if you want to comment on their application to the FCC or see their records about educational and informational programming, you can stop by their offices to do so.
The truth of all this aside, since I can't participate in that particular angle of the discussion (well, at least not intelligently, which I realize is not normally a hindrance to internet "conversation") since I've never watched it, if all the things the submitter said about the show were true, he'd be right.
Fox doesn't like complex narratives because complex narratives don't bring in the viewers, which means they don't bring in the advertisers. Fox is number one right now because of one thing and one thing only: American Idol. That's not a cheap shot at them or their viewers, it's a stone cold fact. American Idol is currently the bread and butter of the Fox lineup and it basically subsidizes experiments like TSCC. Fox is in the business of making money, and they've hooked the lowbrow demographic. Little potshots into "higher art" are really just stabs in the dark meant to try and get that rare unexpected success, and if they don't blow up quickly into reliable revenue streams, they get cancelled so that American Idol's simplistic, popcorn-style entertainment can fund another experiment.
Art and business don't work well together for a reason: they're motivated by different things. Anytime you have widely successful art in both a cultural and financial sense, it's pure dumb luck. Until sci-fi nerds start recognizing that fact, they'll just be disappointed over and over again.
It doesn't matter how smart, complex, or artistic something is, if it's on network TV, it's there to make money, and if it's only appealing to a small, highbrow crowd (whether that applies to the particular show under discussion or not, I have no idea), it's not going to do that, and it won't last long.
Did you really just ask if positive and negative reinforcement are similar?
Have you played an MMO lately? The "community" is usually the worst part of the game...
Because consumers demand it. Same reason New York will get away with this tax.
I have a hard time finding any sympathy for those opposed to this sort of thing. If you don't like it, don't buy the products and choke the revenue source off. There are few more effective and less violent ways to correct an unfair government mandate than by choking a revenue stream. You can yell and scream until you're blue in the face and nothing will happen, but take away their money and they'll sit bolt upright and listen quite intently.
But that won't happen, because if people can't put down their cigarettes and two pound bacon burgers to keep from dying of a massive heart attack at 45, they sure as hell won't do it to save $0.30 in taxes each time they indulge their dirty little habits.
Until people in this country start acting in ways that show at least a GLIMMER of motivated self-interest, this sort of thing will just keep happening state to state and eventually at the federal level. We whine and gripe about it, but, in the end, nobody will actually do anything about it, it will become part of normal life, and we'll all forget that there ever was a time when we didn't pay for the privilege of stuffing our faces with Cheetohs and Mountain Dew.
Never saw that argument before. Certainly not several times in every single article about this topic for the last ten years.
Ahem.
Content costs money to produce, the costs are determined by the expected sales, by obtaining and consuming the content you have justified your position as an expected sale without compensating the artist, programmer, or producer for their work. You have caused clear financial harm and so you are wrong legally and morally, your argument is absurd and would never stand up in any reasonable debate on the ethics of the matter and certainly will never hold water in any court of law.
Any questions?
You're comparing people who are demanding a proscribed product that they purchase and consume outside the law with people who just don't like how much the product costs or how its distributed. The government denying you access to a good or service you demand is not the same thing as a private company offering a good or service in a way or at a price you don't like.
Furthermore, you have a legitimate means to air your grievances: don't buy. Not only do you send the clear message that you are unhappy with the product or service, you maintain the legal AND moral high ground in the debate.
Your post is labeled insightful. It is not.
If interactivity like this is an option, can we make one that delivers increasingly powerful electric jolts to the idiots who spam trade chat with Anal [Skill] links or Chuck Norris "jokes" over and over?
I used to get dragged to church as a child, but our church was a dinky little thing in a podunk town of no consequence full of geriatric hillbillies. Sunday school rarely consisted of more than a gripe session, lead by the head hillbilly who worked in the "big city" (of about 120,000) over the mountain. The sessions generally revolved around the most recent topic Agnes had heard on the nightly news, which usually meant I sat their for an hour listening to people with multiple missing teeth bash immigrants, gays, liberals, and basically anybody - other than the group leader - who had been more than 10 feet past the county line in any direction in the past 30 years.
I guess what I'm saying is, my church-going experience was largely shaped by ill-informed, shrill idiots with minimal exposure to the outside world and strong opinions on things they had no capability to understand, so I really can't think of a more fitting place to send them than the Internet.
While I agree in principle with the sentiment regarding copyright law and corporate abuse in the matter, I would point out that the people have an unflinchingly clear moral AND legal leg to stand on here: don't buy the products.
We could assume Joe has somehow welded himself to the floor and that's why he didn't go out and buy it, but I don't think it's a useful assumption. My point is only that if we're going to set up a generic target for our discussions that it ought to be a generic person relevant to the topic. Since all we know about Joe is that he copied the game from someone else, all we know is that he is a video game player. In all likelihood then Joe is a male, 18 to 45, with a stable job and plenty of disposable income.
That's your pirate, at least until additional research comes out on the subject (which of course there may already be that I'm just not aware of). There are, of course, other people out there copying games, but they're not really useful to talk about in a general sense because they're in minorities or they're simply unknown.
I understand what you're saying, but the "wasn't going to buy it anyway" argument isn't valid. Software's costs are assumed almost entirely in the development phase, and those costs are driven by expectations of the future. If Joe is in the target demographic for the game, and then Joe copies the game instead of buying it, Joe's interest has already been factored in - correctly - but he will not generate the expected sale because, instead, he stole it.
It may well be true that Joe never intended to buy it, but in that case, the developer made the mistake. If they build the game and Joe isn't interested, then it's their own fault and their error. But if they build the game and Joe copies it, Joe obviously IS interested, and Joe is enjoying a product that was, in part, built for him. They took him into account, they paid to make a product he enjoys, and he did not reimburse them for their expense and effort.
Joe caused them an economic loss just the same as if Joe had simply stolen the game off the shelf.
Part of the problem in illustrating this issue is that software is more of a service than a good. Joe isn't really paying for a good of any kind, although he may get a box and a disc and a manual. Joe is actually paying for somebody to take the time to understand what he enjoys, make it and test it for him, then distribute it to him. In that way, software piracy is similar to a theft of service rather than the theft of an actual tangible product. Theft of service is a very real and very punishable offense, and I think software/music/movie piracy ought to be viewed in the same light.
Distinction without a difference. If we're going to make random assumptions about people's motivations in stealing video games, why would we assume things to be the way you claim in your post? If Joe copies the game from Jerry, then Joe is a player just like Jerry, but unlike Jerry, Joe didn't buy the game. Seems to me that Joe has demonstrated his interest in the game at that point and it makes more sense to assume that Joe is a lost sale and therefore financial harm was inflicted.
People here seem to live in this weird little bubble world where the rules of business are some sort of bizarre mutation of reality. Game companies don't just magically produce a zero cost product and then start turning a profit as the game sells. There is an up front cost associated with development, often huge, and they operate in the red until they meet the break even point. If they spend $1 million dollars developing a game, and then make $750,000 selling it, and $500,000 worth of copies are pirated, they've not only suffered $500,000 in economic damage, they've actually lost real money as a result of the piracy.
You can sit and twist and contort it however you want, but people pirating games costs other people money. Making a bit-for-bit copy of someone's software is not a consequence-free act no matter how much some people here want to believe otherwise.
And it's all sort of irrelevant anyway. We've all done it and we all know damn well we did it because we're thieving little creeps who just didn't feel like paying for movies/music/games/whatever.
This really isn't that complicated. If Congress passes a law it's the law and it doesn't matter how nonsensical it is. I don't care if they pass a law saying that you have to wear a zebra suit and scream the words to O Canada from the top of a belltower at noon every day or face the death penalty. It's the law and as far as the courts are concerned you're obligated to follow it until you or someone else successfully challenges it and has it revoked. You can sit around thinking it's nonsensical as intensely as you like, but it will do nothing to change the fact that it's the law. You actually have to challenge the law in court or convince legislators to repeal it to have it overturned no matter how stupid it is. That's how stupid laws stay on the books to begin with. Since nobody ever enforces them, there's never anybody with a compelling interest to challenge them, and you wind up with silly morning news show fodder about how in Pitstink, OK there's a law that says you aren't allowed to wax a duck on Sundays. Technically, then, it's illegal in Pitstink OK to wax a duck on Sundays no matter how silly it is.
I don't know how self-centered I'd have to be to think my opinions shaped realities like law, but I really don't care to find out.
It doesn't matter if it's nonsensical. If they pass the law it's the law and you're obligated to abide by it unless it's overturned or repealed.
Which goes back to my original point: yes, it would be absurd, and yes, you could fight to overturn it, but it wouldn't be worth it to most people.
There is a cost associated with fighting back against those sorts of things. You can fight the IRS over a $10 tax bill you shouldn't have to pay, but it's going to cost you thousands of dollars in attorney fees - which you may or may not recover - and many, many frustrating hours. And you may lose the case anyway in which case you'll lose thousands in attorney fees, likely hundreds in penalties and late fees, possibly the attorney fees of the IRS, and your original $10 tax bill.
Saying you should just go ahead and sue is all fine and dandy, and if you're fighting for the principle of the thing that's great, but the cost of being right is often much greater than the cost of just accepting the wrong in these sorts of cases.
Which is all well and good, but like most things involving corporate and government abuse, it's just not worth it. 10k gold in WoW goes for something like $75. That's, what, ten bucks extra on your taxes? Are you really going to spend thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars trying to defend your point against the IRS?
There are lots of things that we shouldn't pay. I shouldn't have paid Bank of America when they screwed me on a credit card late fee by holding my check past the due date. But it was $39. It would have cost me $60 just to file a claim I had no guarantee of winning, so instead I swore at the guy on the phone, paid their theft fee, canceled the account and never dealt with them again.
Fighting on principles is too expensive in America, which is why few people bother to do it.
He's going to lose though.
He's basically switching because he knows that the republicans won't really back him in-state during the primaries. He was challenged last time and narrowly won, this time around I can just about guarantee that the republicans will come down on him full-bore in the primaries to try and remove him. Specter won't go along with the republican machine in lockstep and they hate it, and they don't think they need him anymore.
The only thing that's going to save him is if the republicans run another extremist in the state against him. Someone along the lines of Rick Santorum. If that happens and the democrats don't challenge him in the primary, he may have a shot, but I think this is basically his curtain call. This state, particularly up through the center simply has too many core republican supporters (read: poorly educated, poorly informed, and highly sensitized against anything "liberal", "socialist", or "democrat"). They're going to hammer him as a "liberal sympathizer", tie him to the "socialist" recovery plan and basically villify him not with anything he's actually done or said, but by simply telling a lot of old and bigoted hillbillies that he's Obama's buddy and a liberal and maybe even a commie to boot.
And it will work.
Personally, that's fine with me. I've supported him in the past but after his vote for Paulson's bailout - which I railed against in several contacts to his and Casey's offices - I'm not going to again. I suspect it will mean I have a farther right Senator replacing him, which I don't care for, but so long as we don't wind up with a whack-a-doodle like Santorum was, it's no big deal.
Funny, but he has a point. I actually program things for websites, as in, I write both client and server application code and SQL. I also maintain the web servers, maintain the operating systems they run on, maintain access controls on the data, run difficult reports that can't be automated for manadrones and usually get called on to lift heavy objects or help fix various building problems because, apparently, being an IT guy makes me somehow qualified to help fix the sink in the break room.
But for all most people here know, I'm no different than the woman on the other floor who "does HTML" - meaning she use's a WYSIWYG to change links or add an image to a page now and then.
It can be ery frustrating.
Funny. I stopped playing about a year ago because I ran out of things to do (except grind for EotN rep, titles, and prestige armor) and the game is no longer being actively updated.
Not to mention there's no raiding at all. A group of 8 engaging in "elite" content that can often be solo'ed by a clever player is not a "raid". It's a normally sized party of 8 people playing slightly-harder-than-usual content.
It's also very much the same as other MMOs. You click an enemy to start to autoattack, then you click skill icons in succession until someone dies. The only major difference, combat-wise, is that you magically forget about 250 of your skills the instant you leave a town or outpost, restricting you to only eight.
I liked Guild Wars. Good game. But it's no WoW or LoTRO or EvE. They're just now expanding bank tabs to beyond the paltry bit you get by default - and you still have to share your bank among all your characters. The content is much shorter, there's much less interaction between players since the only place you even see other people outside your party is in the glorified chat rooms they call towns, the crafting system is practically non-existant, customization is limited, and the community is absolutely awful. Hell, there isn't even a z-axis so you spend most of your time running around on pre-created paths like it's a rail shooter.
Guild Wars is a fine game in its own right, but in the world of MMOs, it has very little to offer compared to the standard-bearers.
Then quit playing the friggin' game. If you don't like the game, don't play it. Since you are apparently incapable of evaluating your own interests and options, I'll do it for you: go play Diablo. Do you want me to stick around to help you pick out your work clothes tomorrow too, or do you think you can manage that one on your own?
I swear to god, if anybody on Slashdot ever figures out how to make an intelligent and meaningful analogy, I'll probably drop dead from the shock.
If they just walk away from paying the plan, why wouldn't they just walk away from paying the term fee?