Can you honestly not think of one single non-evil reason for offering a free web proxy? How about filling in the missing gaps? Those webpages that are not linked and thus generally unsearchable?
Or maybe that 500+ digital is because they provide a degraded signal in order to squeeze in more channels to sound more appealing than their competitors.
Yeah, let's just stop worrying about security and transmit all our attack tactics in the open!
There's always going to be a security risk. The key is minimizing the risk for each component of the system in order to reduce the overall risk. With a setup like this, the network is considered to be 100% secure. Now we can begin to work on the other pieces of the puzzle.
And don't doubt that the government doesn't have sophisticated bug detectors....
Actually, in the case of quantum key exchange, the whole point is that you can tell if someone has eavesdropped on your quantum channel and thus discard that bit of the key and resend something new.
I've always wondered if this is susceptible to a DoS attack, though.
It's an interesting question. To wax intellectual about it (or perhaps to discuss semantics or be overly pedantic), I think that parole is not forced upon a person. In theory, you could choose to refuse the terms of parole and instead, stay in jail. This would not be lifetime parole if the tracking was not an option.
So under the assumption that this is not a "lifetime parole" situation, we have to assume that the person receives all the freedoms associated with a felon who has served out his sentence. That is, they are now free to leave the country. If they do, what happens with the GPS? I suspect they wouldn't be allowed on the plane with an electronic anklet/bracelet. If we're talking about a subdermal implant, it seems this should be a violation of human rights. I should be able to expatriate and lose the tracking device--something that seemingly would be difficult with an injected unit.
2) Douglas Adams is dead, so he didn't pay anything anyway.
3) If you don't get it in your contract that you can use something you created for a company, you don't get to use it. Imagine trying to reuse some code you thought up for Microsoft. They'd sue in a heartbeat.
Seeing the new McFarlane "Twisted Land of Oz" toys got us thinking about American McGee's Oz, about which fairly little is known. We do, however, have some insights on his next project.
I'd completely forgotten about Oz being the purpose of the satire. But there you go. From the context of the news article, I think it's fairly clear who PA was mocking.
You can even scroll further down the page to see what the other half of PA has to say about the subject--again, he mentions McGee, not American Greetings.
Making something gross or sexual or both is probably the easiest thing in the world to do. Just look at the margins of any 7th graders homework. You will find plenty of doodles on par with anything McGee has produced. American has said that his new game OZ will stay fairly true to the books but it will be "darker". It's sad that is the best he can come up with. American has the opportunity to take these well known and loved stories and re-imagine them for the world of video games, a medium with unlimited possibilities. When he made Alice I gave him credit for taking the story in a new direction even if it wasn't a terribly interesting one. Now with OZ he's doing the same thing and it shows that Alice was not some creative masterpiece. This guy is just a pervert and this is all he knows how to do. It's like he has some kind of huge fucking machine. Beloved stories and characters go in one side and junior high quality goth crap comes out the other.Yeah, Yeah McGee, we all know you are very angry. You should save yourself some fucking time and just wear a T-shirt that says "I am dark and brooding".
If that isn't a clear cut explanation that they were Satirizing McGee using American Greetings, I don't know what is. McGee took Alice, turned it dark. McGee then too Oz, made it dark and sexual (or at least added a BDSM-style element). In my mind, PA looked for the most childish thing they could, found Strawberry Shortcake, and made fun of McGee by turning it into a dark, sexual comic.
The problem is that they were criticizing the "I Love New York" campaign, which uses the song "I Love New York". As such, they were operating within section 107.
Penny Arcade was using Strawberry Shortcake in a parody of American McGee.
You may recall that American McGee created a dark game revolving around Alice in Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland, though the original story is a dark parody itself, has become more of a lighthearted story through Disney's version. Most people think of that version when they hear the name. As such, PA was showing what could eventually happen if McGee continues in this line of thinking, by taking a popular children's icon and transforming it into something dark.
Unfortunately, they chose something which is not in the public domain. They were not parodying Strawberry Shortcake, so the use of Strawberry Shortcake images and the name did not fall under section 107.
Well sending all the GOPs would basically mean sending the entire DVD to each processor. That's a pretty big burden on your network (and it doesn't scale well--imagine a cluster of 10 CPUs doing this--you're looking at sending up to 90gigs of data just to start the processing) not to mention the memory footprint per processor of doing this.
A more reasonable solution would be to have the host/controller PC (the one with the DVD in the drive) allow the slaves to request GOPs that they aren't processing. Also, to streamline it a bit, slaves should process a sequential series of GOPs to minimize excess dependency requests.
Of course, any distributed solution is probably going to require closed GOP for the finished product, which diminishes the compression efficiency (slightly).
Standard GOP size for NTSC on DVD is 18 frames. That's actually less than 1 second (progressive movies are 24fps). You will have an issue if the GOP isn't closed--that is, if there are B-frames at the end of the GOP. Since B-frames are bidirectionally independant, a B-frame at the end of a GOP means that it depends upon frames in the next GOP. Of course, you could send just enough information from that GOP to perform the re-encoding, but this does increase the bandwidth requirement.
1) Yes, but the DMCA explicitly forbids circumvention of an anti-copying measure. How this interacts with Fair Use has not yet been tested in courts, and since Fair Use is intentionally ambiguous, the legality of an action under Fair Use/requires/ determination by a court of law. As such, we cannot know whether backups of encrypted DVDs are legal in the US.
2) For civil court, the MPAA would have to convince the court that there is a plausible link between the person and the username as well as show that it was likely that he was at the computer browsing Slashdot at the time the story was submitted (assuming they could even subpoena the details of when the story was submitted and who the username refers to).
For criminal court, a halfway decent defense attorney would never even let them introduce the "evidence".
3) For the sake of argument, let's assume that it isn't a criminal copy--for some reason, this was a DVD with no digital copyright protections. In a civil matter, we're only concerned with a one side having a more plausible case than the other side. In the case of a single DVD copy amidst 100 legit DVDs with their respective backup copies, no jury in the world would award any damages to the MPAA. If there were 100 copies stored offsite and an insurance claim for a fire to the house, similarly they would be likely to find for him rather than the MPAA.
In a criminal court, it's harder to say. It would depend upon making a fair-use argument to argue that he had the right to copy it in the first place. After that, it would be the prosecution's responsibility to show that he illegally copied it without owning it, which is unlikely to happen if he did, in fact, legitimately own it at some point.
Many DVD-Roms are hardware locked to between 2x and 3x when decoding CSS, which is why ripping can take a long time. Sometimes you can get a BIOS flash that will remove this lock. If you can find one ofr your drive, you can use the full speed of the drive to rip, which, for a brand new drive, makes ripping a full DVD take minutes.
This doesn't change the fact that web developers use IE-only content. Right now, I don't know of any site that works in Moz/Firefox that doesn't work in IE. The opposite can not be said to be true.
I've mudded for years, and only recently gave it up (as the last mud I played on had shitty admins, and they pretty much spoiled the experience for me.) During my times of mudding, I played Ultima Online through the first expansion. UO only held my interest as long as it did because I loved the world. I'd played all the Ultimas (not in order, sadly) and was infatuated with them, so UO was the next obvious extension. I never spent a dime on virtual goods there.
Next was Everquest, which I picked up relatively cheap and put down relatively quickly. I don't think I even paid for a month of it, honestly. In large part, it was because it seemed like there was no soloing past level 10, and since I was a dedicated student at the time, I didn't want to spend the time it would have taken to keep up with my friends. This got boring quickly, so I stopped playing it.
Then I tried Dark Age of Camelot. I loved the game and world, and for whatever reason, it didn't seem like I had to play as often to keep up. Maybe my buddies weren't playing as often either, so we were always around the same level. Regardless, I eventually put it down as the inevitable boredom with any game set in.
Then, Diablo 2 (although Diablo 2 is not a persistent MMORPG, certainly), which did get QUITE a bit of playtime. Diablo 2 was where I first shelled out a little money for a particularly hard to get item. Why? Because I didn't have time to run through the Sanctum 40 times just to get a chance at one item. I learned my characters and could play them well, but I also wanted them to improve. Past a certain point, improvements come largely through equipment (the diminishing returns for XP made levels hard to get, and you certainly can't buy those.) I never bought a character/account, but I did purchase some items.
Most recent is World of Warcraft. Here is where I see a true flaw in your argument. You can learn your characters and still be short in-game items/gold that really makes them shine. But also, you need in-game gold in order to try different talent builds with the same character. It's unreasonable to assume that a person will start multiple mages to see if Ice/Arcane is better than Fire/Arcane--that would probably take longer than the time it would take to respecc, even for a small 20 levels, to say nothing about higher levels. Then come the "bug fixes" and nerfs, which mean an entire set of equipment or talent build might become virtually worthless. Blizzard did a good thing in making it so that talents could be forgotten/relearned, but the cost of doing so in the case of a nerf is significant enough that it can put a pretty big dent in your overall plan. Here's a case where I wouldn't mind paying someone a little real money for the gold I need to respecc, or to buy my new spells (which really starts adding up), etc.
Also, a death in WoW particularly isn't all that horrible. You get a 10%-35% durability hit and potential resurrection sickness (only if you can't find your corpse). This means that those people who don't know how to play their class don't do nearly the damage to you as, say, losing levels or experience in other MMORPGs. Someone can't play worth a damn and gets you killed? Don't party with them. It's easy enough.
Also, remember that I suggested that things needed to be balanced with regard to how much could be spent in a RL auction (which assumes that the auction is held on the game producer's servers). A hard limit of currency, or perhaps decreasing how much you can spend based on how many hours you logged last month would go a long way towards coming to the balance I proposed was needed--that is, time vs. money. The company can take a cut to line their pockets/help pay for updates, the seller gets a little help paying for their account, and the buyer gets an item they would otherwise have had to spent days looking for.
Oh, and as for training, WoW solved that, too. The game just has to be designed so that the idiots don't ruin the fun for everyone else, then who cares if they buy their way up to the max level?
I agree. There have been two reasons I've read about for companies banning the sale of in-game items. The first is that it promotes farming/camping which is detrimental to the game because it prevents players who aren't trying to make a buck from getting the items. This inherently implies that making a buck is a bad thing (it's not). Also, with the farming that still goes on in WoW, it's pretty clear that banning auctions isn't a total solution to this problem (although I see that WoW auctions still pop up on Ebay pretty regularly--hadn't they quashed that?)
The second reason for preventing sales of in-game items has been the claim that it makes people with lots of money advance more easily than people without much money. I've always taken offense to this argument, largely because these games are already biased towards people who have a lot of/time/. If you have 16 hours a day to grind in a MMORPG, you are going to advance faster than someone who can play for 4 hours. In a world where time is money, I think it's only reasonable to allow the equalizer of paying a bit more for a benefit. Let's face it, if you're playing 16 hours per day, you're probably not going to be able to pay real money for in-game items. Conversely, if you've got a real job that takes up most of your day, you likely have enough disposable income to pay a little extra.
The only thing I can blame SoE for is not thinking of this sooner. EQ2 probably wasn't designed with this sort of thing in mind, and that means things could break. If a game was designed from scratch to allow auctioning (with appropriate restrictions kept in mind), it could truly be a fair system to those with either more time or more money.
The GC controller/has/ two analog sticks. The yellow thingy under your right thumb. It's analog. It's a stick.
As for the triggers, I think they work ok. I played Crazy Taxi, which uses the analog form of the triggers for accelerate/brake, and it worked fairly well. It's not Nintendo's fault that the game designers (overall) don't make full use of this feature.
Which Atari are you talking about? Atari is the company, not the system. The Atari 2600, for example, distinctly had/one/ button and was definitely a digital joystick.
I'm unsure about the Colecovision. I don't remember it being analog or analog-like (multiple direction "settings" rather than using a potentiometer. I never had an Intellivision, so I can't say for that.
I happen to love analog sticks, except for their durability. I'll wear out a controller within a few months of hard-use, whereas I've still got my original NES controllers, and they still work.
I think Mages are just about the most balanced class for PvE. The talent trees are amazing, they've got multiple forms of creature control, and specializing in any of the three trees will yield someone with about equal levelling power. Frost may damage more slowly, but you can line your enemies up and go from one to the next with no downtime. Fire has a little more downtime for regen and has to be more careful with multiple enemies. Arcane is just absurd damage and reduced threat, meaning grouping becomes easier.
In a sense, mages are overpowered in that they are so very versatile. It's hard to fuck up a talent tree with your mage, and there is no class I can think of that is simply superior to the mage.
Interesting that this was modded as flamebait. Even as an American, this is pretty much how I see things.
Sci-fi doesn't succeed in the States for some reason. I really think it probably does have something to do with the culture. Work yourself to death, come home and turn your brain off. Wash, rinse, repeat. Honestly, how else can you explain some of the tripe that makes millions at the box office?
My favorite portable audio player doesn't play mp3s by default. You have to pay. It plays oggs by default. For free.
Also, some people want to use other formats for the same reason some people want to use Linux--to get away from proprietary/patent-encumbered software.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you honestly not think of one single non-evil reason for offering a free web proxy? How about filling in the missing gaps? Those webpages that are not linked and thus generally unsearchable?
Or maybe that 500+ digital is because they provide a degraded signal in order to squeeze in more channels to sound more appealing than their competitors.
Yeah, let's just stop worrying about security and transmit all our attack tactics in the open!
There's always going to be a security risk. The key is minimizing the risk for each component of the system in order to reduce the overall risk. With a setup like this, the network is considered to be 100% secure. Now we can begin to work on the other pieces of the puzzle.
And don't doubt that the government doesn't have sophisticated bug detectors....
Actually, in the case of quantum key exchange, the whole point is that you can tell if someone has eavesdropped on your quantum channel and thus discard that bit of the key and resend something new.
I've always wondered if this is susceptible to a DoS attack, though.
It's an interesting question. To wax intellectual about it (or perhaps to discuss semantics or be overly pedantic), I think that parole is not forced upon a person. In theory, you could choose to refuse the terms of parole and instead, stay in jail. This would not be lifetime parole if the tracking was not an option.
So under the assumption that this is not a "lifetime parole" situation, we have to assume that the person receives all the freedoms associated with a felon who has served out his sentence. That is, they are now free to leave the country. If they do, what happens with the GPS? I suspect they wouldn't be allowed on the plane with an electronic anklet/bracelet. If we're talking about a subdermal implant, it seems this should be a violation of human rights. I should be able to expatriate and lose the tracking device--something that seemingly would be difficult with an injected unit.
1) We don't know they paid royalties.
2) Douglas Adams is dead, so he didn't pay anything anyway.
3) If you don't get it in your contract that you can use something you created for a company, you don't get to use it. Imagine trying to reuse some code you thought up for Microsoft. They'd sue in a heartbeat.
I'm really trying to figure out a reason that a web comic dedicated to video games would be mocking American Greetings. In any style.
Went through the archives and found this:
Seeing the new McFarlane "Twisted Land of Oz" toys got us thinking about American McGee's Oz, about which fairly little is known. We do, however, have some insights on his next project.
I'd completely forgotten about Oz being the purpose of the satire. But there you go. From the context of the news article, I think it's fairly clear who PA was mocking.
You can even scroll further down the page to see what the other half of PA has to say about the subject--again, he mentions McGee, not American Greetings.
Making something gross or sexual or both is probably the easiest thing in the world to do. Just look at the margins of any 7th graders homework. You will find plenty of doodles on par with anything McGee has produced. American has said that his new game OZ will stay fairly true to the books but it will be "darker". It's sad that is the best he can come up with. American has the opportunity to take these well known and loved stories and re-imagine them for the world of video games, a medium with unlimited possibilities. When he made Alice I gave him credit for taking the story in a new direction even if it wasn't a terribly interesting one. Now with OZ he's doing the same thing and it shows that Alice was not some creative masterpiece. This guy is just a pervert and this is all he knows how to do. It's like he has some kind of huge fucking machine. Beloved stories and characters go in one side and junior high quality goth crap comes out the other.Yeah, Yeah McGee, we all know you are very angry. You should save yourself some fucking time and just wear a T-shirt that says "I am dark and brooding".
If that isn't a clear cut explanation that they were Satirizing McGee using American Greetings, I don't know what is. McGee took Alice, turned it dark. McGee then too Oz, made it dark and sexual (or at least added a BDSM-style element). In my mind, PA looked for the most childish thing they could, found Strawberry Shortcake, and made fun of McGee by turning it into a dark, sexual comic.
The problem is that they were criticizing the "I Love New York" campaign, which uses the song "I Love New York". As such, they were operating within section 107.
Penny Arcade was using Strawberry Shortcake in a parody of American McGee.
You may recall that American McGee created a dark game revolving around Alice in Wonderland. Alice in Wonderland, though the original story is a dark parody itself, has become more of a lighthearted story through Disney's version. Most people think of that version when they hear the name. As such, PA was showing what could eventually happen if McGee continues in this line of thinking, by taking a popular children's icon and transforming it into something dark.
Unfortunately, they chose something which is not in the public domain. They were not parodying Strawberry Shortcake, so the use of Strawberry Shortcake images and the name did not fall under section 107.
-Os, on the other hand, can reduce load times, is noticeable, and is testable.
Not necessarily. Unlike the Internet, LANs can support multicasting and especially subnet broadcasting.
Excellent point.
Would sending each slave a whole minute at a time, plus the following I-frame, work?
Something like that would probably work fine.
Well sending all the GOPs would basically mean sending the entire DVD to each processor. That's a pretty big burden on your network (and it doesn't scale well--imagine a cluster of 10 CPUs doing this--you're looking at sending up to 90gigs of data just to start the processing) not to mention the memory footprint per processor of doing this.
A more reasonable solution would be to have the host/controller PC (the one with the DVD in the drive) allow the slaves to request GOPs that they aren't processing. Also, to streamline it a bit, slaves should process a sequential series of GOPs to minimize excess dependency requests.
Of course, any distributed solution is probably going to require closed GOP for the finished product, which diminishes the compression efficiency (slightly).
It's even lower than that.
Standard GOP size for NTSC on DVD is 18 frames. That's actually less than 1 second (progressive movies are 24fps). You will have an issue if the GOP isn't closed--that is, if there are B-frames at the end of the GOP. Since B-frames are bidirectionally independant, a B-frame at the end of a GOP means that it depends upon frames in the next GOP. Of course, you could send just enough information from that GOP to perform the re-encoding, but this does increase the bandwidth requirement.
1) Yes, but the DMCA explicitly forbids circumvention of an anti-copying measure. How this interacts with Fair Use has not yet been tested in courts, and since Fair Use is intentionally ambiguous, the legality of an action under Fair Use /requires/ determination by a court of law. As such, we cannot know whether backups of encrypted DVDs are legal in the US.
2) For civil court, the MPAA would have to convince the court that there is a plausible link between the person and the username as well as show that it was likely that he was at the computer browsing Slashdot at the time the story was submitted (assuming they could even subpoena the details of when the story was submitted and who the username refers to).
For criminal court, a halfway decent defense attorney would never even let them introduce the "evidence".
3) For the sake of argument, let's assume that it isn't a criminal copy--for some reason, this was a DVD with no digital copyright protections.
In a civil matter, we're only concerned with a one side having a more plausible case than the other side. In the case of a single DVD copy amidst 100 legit DVDs with their respective backup copies, no jury in the world would award any damages to the MPAA. If there were 100 copies stored offsite and an insurance claim for a fire to the house, similarly they would be likely to find for him rather than the MPAA.
In a criminal court, it's harder to say. It would depend upon making a fair-use argument to argue that he had the right to copy it in the first place. After that, it would be the prosecution's responsibility to show that he illegally copied it without owning it, which is unlikely to happen if he did, in fact, legitimately own it at some point.
Many DVD-Roms are hardware locked to between 2x and 3x when decoding CSS, which is why ripping can take a long time. Sometimes you can get a BIOS flash that will remove this lock. If you can find one ofr your drive, you can use the full speed of the drive to rip, which, for a brand new drive, makes ripping a full DVD take minutes.
Presumably, the OP meant repackaging it as just "Tetris." Which would be a practical joke, as it would be the most difficult Tetris imaginable.
This doesn't change the fact that web developers use IE-only content. Right now, I don't know of any site that works in Moz/Firefox that doesn't work in IE. The opposite can not be said to be true.
How much is your guarantee worth?
I've mudded for years, and only recently gave it up (as the last mud I played on had shitty admins, and they pretty much spoiled the experience for me.) During my times of mudding, I played Ultima Online through the first expansion. UO only held my interest as long as it did because I loved the world. I'd played all the Ultimas (not in order, sadly) and was infatuated with them, so UO was the next obvious extension. I never spent a dime on virtual goods there.
Next was Everquest, which I picked up relatively cheap and put down relatively quickly. I don't think I even paid for a month of it, honestly. In large part, it was because it seemed like there was no soloing past level 10, and since I was a dedicated student at the time, I didn't want to spend the time it would have taken to keep up with my friends. This got boring quickly, so I stopped playing it.
Then I tried Dark Age of Camelot. I loved the game and world, and for whatever reason, it didn't seem like I had to play as often to keep up. Maybe my buddies weren't playing as often either, so we were always around the same level. Regardless, I eventually put it down as the inevitable boredom with any game set in.
Then, Diablo 2 (although Diablo 2 is not a persistent MMORPG, certainly), which did get QUITE a bit of playtime. Diablo 2 was where I first shelled out a little money for a particularly hard to get item. Why? Because I didn't have time to run through the Sanctum 40 times just to get a chance at one item. I learned my characters and could play them well, but I also wanted them to improve. Past a certain point, improvements come largely through equipment (the diminishing returns for XP made levels hard to get, and you certainly can't buy those.) I never bought a character/account, but I did purchase some items.
Most recent is World of Warcraft. Here is where I see a true flaw in your argument. You can learn your characters and still be short in-game items/gold that really makes them shine. But also, you need in-game gold in order to try different talent builds with the same character. It's unreasonable to assume that a person will start multiple mages to see if Ice/Arcane is better than Fire/Arcane--that would probably take longer than the time it would take to respecc, even for a small 20 levels, to say nothing about higher levels. Then come the "bug fixes" and nerfs, which mean an entire set of equipment or talent build might become virtually worthless. Blizzard did a good thing in making it so that talents could be forgotten/relearned, but the cost of doing so in the case of a nerf is significant enough that it can put a pretty big dent in your overall plan. Here's a case where I wouldn't mind paying someone a little real money for the gold I need to respecc, or to buy my new spells (which really starts adding up), etc.
Also, a death in WoW particularly isn't all that horrible. You get a 10%-35% durability hit and potential resurrection sickness (only if you can't find your corpse). This means that those people who don't know how to play their class don't do nearly the damage to you as, say, losing levels or experience in other MMORPGs. Someone can't play worth a damn and gets you killed? Don't party with them. It's easy enough.
Also, remember that I suggested that things needed to be balanced with regard to how much could be spent in a RL auction (which assumes that the auction is held on the game producer's servers). A hard limit of currency, or perhaps decreasing how much you can spend based on how many hours you logged last month would go a long way towards coming to the balance I proposed was needed--that is, time vs. money. The company can take a cut to line their pockets/help pay for updates, the seller gets a little help paying for their account, and the buyer gets an item they would otherwise have had to spent days looking for.
Oh, and as for training, WoW solved that, too. The game just has to be designed so that the idiots don't ruin the fun for everyone else, then who cares if they buy their way up to the max level?
I agree.
/time/. If you have 16 hours a day to grind in a MMORPG, you are going to advance faster than someone who can play for 4 hours. In a world where time is money, I think it's only reasonable to allow the equalizer of paying a bit more for a benefit. Let's face it, if you're playing 16 hours per day, you're probably not going to be able to pay real money for in-game items. Conversely, if you've got a real job that takes up most of your day, you likely have enough disposable income to pay a little extra.
There have been two reasons I've read about for companies banning the sale of in-game items. The first is that it promotes farming/camping which is detrimental to the game because it prevents players who aren't trying to make a buck from getting the items. This inherently implies that making a buck is a bad thing (it's not). Also, with the farming that still goes on in WoW, it's pretty clear that banning auctions isn't a total solution to this problem (although I see that WoW auctions still pop up on Ebay pretty regularly--hadn't they quashed that?)
The second reason for preventing sales of in-game items has been the claim that it makes people with lots of money advance more easily than people without much money. I've always taken offense to this argument, largely because these games are already biased towards people who have a lot of
The only thing I can blame SoE for is not thinking of this sooner. EQ2 probably wasn't designed with this sort of thing in mind, and that means things could break. If a game was designed from scratch to allow auctioning (with appropriate restrictions kept in mind), it could truly be a fair system to those with either more time or more money.
The GC controller /has/ two analog sticks. The yellow thingy under your right thumb. It's analog. It's a stick.
As for the triggers, I think they work ok. I played Crazy Taxi, which uses the analog form of the triggers for accelerate/brake, and it worked fairly well. It's not Nintendo's fault that the game designers (overall) don't make full use of this feature.
Which Atari are you talking about? Atari is the company, not the system. The Atari 2600, for example, distinctly had /one/ button and was definitely a digital joystick.
I'm unsure about the Colecovision. I don't remember it being analog or analog-like (multiple direction "settings" rather than using a potentiometer. I never had an Intellivision, so I can't say for that.
I happen to love analog sticks, except for their durability. I'll wear out a controller within a few months of hard-use, whereas I've still got my original NES controllers, and they still work.
I think Mages are just about the most balanced class for PvE. The talent trees are amazing, they've got multiple forms of creature control, and specializing in any of the three trees will yield someone with about equal levelling power. Frost may damage more slowly, but you can line your enemies up and go from one to the next with no downtime. Fire has a little more downtime for regen and has to be more careful with multiple enemies. Arcane is just absurd damage and reduced threat, meaning grouping becomes easier.
In a sense, mages are overpowered in that they are so very versatile. It's hard to fuck up a talent tree with your mage, and there is no class I can think of that is simply superior to the mage.
Actually, many NPCs will tell you that the Horde and Alliance have an "uneasy peace". Officially, there is no war.
You may have missed the fact that he is using a 64 bit machine.
Interesting that this was modded as flamebait. Even as an American, this is pretty much how I see things.
Sci-fi doesn't succeed in the States for some reason. I really think it probably does have something to do with the culture. Work yourself to death, come home and turn your brain off. Wash, rinse, repeat. Honestly, how else can you explain some of the tripe that makes millions at the box office?
My favorite portable audio player doesn't play mp3s by default. You have to pay. It plays oggs by default. For free.
Also, some people want to use other formats for the same reason some people want to use Linux--to get away from proprietary/patent-encumbered software.