Speaking as an iPod-with-a-dock owner, I can assure you that it was the most useless device accessory ever.
It takes the custom firewire jack on the iPod (which requires a special cable), and outputs the exact same custome firewire jack, requiring that you use the same special cable.
The only function it offers is that it splits out the line-level audio output to a headphone jack... just like the headphone jack on the top of the iPod (which can be adjusted to match line level using the volume.)
In other words, it's just a piece of plastic which does almost nothing and costs $40 retail. It does look a little more neat if you use your iPod with your stereo, I guess... but between the Airport Express and the Mac mini, this feature has been made redundant for most of us anyway. Now that my Mac mini is my media-center computer, I don't plug the iPod into the living room stereo at all anymore.
Didn't they just run a crapload of ads during the last superbowl for a camera which plays lame techno music while taking photos of people acting like jackasses?
Am I the only one who thinks those "Asterisk-Wing" fighters in the space battle shots look kind of lame?
Otherwise, yes. It looks spiffy. Too bad the script will probably be awful. "Attack of the Clones" is still the worst movie I've seen in the theaters in the last ten years, and I've seen some really bad ones.
I'm speakinf of technologies which may emerge a few years down the road. Most of these government-provided "broadband" conenctions are probably the same 256K deals which private companies currently provide for about $20/month (line included.) Like you, I pay closer to $50 right now for a 1M connection, but if that's still only the best I can get in 2015, I'll be rather ticked off. I'm saying if you remove market forces, we could have years or even decades of stagnation at a level of service only slightly better than what we have now.
In this case, I think its because they wouldn't get enough customers to justify digging up the streets and installing their own water pipes. Also, if people pay sewer fees based on H2O usage, then the new service would have to make arrangements to share their customer usage data with the muni water and sewer division. There are just too many cost headaches to make distributing water to homes via pipes a competetive industry.
That's what people said about coaxial cable, too... but when government regulations restricted the ability to compete directly between cable companies for individual consumers, a few media companies went to the trouble and expense of launching satelites into geo-stationary orbit for a work-around.
We have no way of knowing how much better (or worse) our water service would be if it were open to the free market. I'm making an educated guess that it would be quite a bit better.
Hey, if you are a good enough programmer to get a job at EA, and don't like the treatment, go work for a bank or an insurance company or a med-tech company or something. They will pay you more and work you less. You lose the "sexy" ability to say you make computer games for a living, but that's the trade off.
Seriously. I work for a medical software company in the midwest, and we get phat recruiting bonuses for finding reliable new hires. If you are an EA programmer who thinks he's getting the shaft, let me know. You can probably do very well with us. Otherwise, quitcherbitchin!
If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. There are a lot of fresh-faced college kids who would kill for the chance to be exploited the way you are right now.
But when a new verson of Madden Football comes out, most gamers with jobs end up going more than 24 hours without sleep, too. Seems to me that all QA should be done by sleep-depraved zombies, to simulate real-world conditions.
The simple reason is, the telecom companies are not doing a good job of providing a service; otherwise there would be no need for a governmental agency to step in.
Really? You mean if they offered 100% coverage of reliable service at a reasonable price, nobody would be interested in "free" broadband provided by their local city hall?
You clearly have more faith in people's ability to see through government scams than I do.
The sad thing is, the moment broadband becomes a government utility, competition ends, and with it any reason for anybody to push the technology farther. Why pay $30/month for 4-Mbit broadband when your taxes are already paying for a 1-Mbit connection which is "good enough" for current use? Why develop new uses for higher speeds when every city in America only connects at the old speed?
Notice how your water service has not changed much in the last 50 years? Bottled water and tap filters are big business to overcome the chlorine-heavy (and in some cases awful-tasting) local utility water, but nobody is lining up to offer to pipe better water to your house, because they would be competing with a baseline service run by the local governments.
So... the crime SBC was guilty of was... offering a "basic service" which had more extra services than you and some other people wanted to buy?
How is that any different than a car company making cruise control a "standard" feature?
Sounds like another frivolous lawsuit to me. I mean, obviously you were not damaged by them. You willingly paid them that money for that fully loaded service, at the price they asked, even though you wanted to pay less for a more stripped-down service. Then you turned around and demanded money back for the service you say you didn't want (but bought anyway) and got it in a settlement.
I have not used one myself, but as I understand it, head mouse selections are made by hovering on the spot you want to select for a second. You configure it to read a pause of a certain length over an active spot to be a "click."
This means a slower response time, which makes "twitch-based" shooters a bit of a challenge, but then again, for somebody who has as many challenges to overcome as the author of this question, it might not be beyond the bounds of reason.
Personally, I'm rooting for big advancements in non-invasive brain interaction systems. Many of us are living longer, so the chances of all of us spending part of our lives partially or completely disabled continues to climb. Computer games might offer a great way to push the envelope in this field. Were I a gaming programmer or a biofeedback specialist, I would be awfully tempted to write a grant proposal for a project along these lines, and see if some University wanted to fund it.
This is one of many reasons why the first Matrix was really only a corny (yet well-made) kung-fu superhero flick, and not the great science fiction that many drooling fanboys insisted it was. None of it made a damn bit of sense. The sun was blotted out because it was the power source for the machines!? Who's that stupid? Machines can be powered by pretty much any energy source, we are the ones who need the sun!
Fortunately, the following two movies were bad enough that few people still claim to be hardcore fans of the original anymore. Wow, were those movies bad. Almost even "Attack of the Clones" bad.
In spite of all of this being true, I still say that (IMHO) the rescue of Morpheus, beginning with "I'll need guns" and ending with the helecopter crash, is the best action sequence in motion picture history, and one of the best reasons for owning a DVD player and a wide-screen HDTV. Too bad it eventually resolves with all that "you can't die because the prophet told me I would fall in love with The One" schmaltz.
Correct. This feature should work like this:/pizza medium thick sausage extra-cheese/pizza 2-liter diet coke
Otherwise... why not just pick up the phone while you play and save the trouble of switching window focus? Odds are, you're a broadband user if you're playing EQ2 and live in a town which Pizza Hut serves.
The big problem with this is, MMORPG's are a group activity for a small number of families, but that's not the case for most players.
Most of the time when I play World of Warcraft, it's when I'm home by myself. I should not eat a whole pizza by myself, but if I wanted to, I damn well couldn't afford to be too lazy to step away from the game for ten minutes and buy a frozen pizza from the local store! A whole pizza is hell of a lot of food, especially for somebody living a lazy indoor lifestyle of computer games and TV.
I think what we are seeing is a function of two trends in modern American economics regarding the tech sector:
1. Electronic components, especially those which are transistor-based, often cost less than the skilled labor costs of repairing them.
2. It's often cheaper to offer the latest tech as replacement parts than it is to keep an inventory of older components around in a warehouse.
As happy I am with Apple for handling things this way, I gotta give credit where credit is due: The many companies over the years who pushed transistor technologies to the point that people not only started talking about "Moore's Law", but actually took it for granted for a while.
My cheap living-room amp sounds better than my father's outrageously expensive "hi-fi" amp from the early 70s. My iBook probably has more computing power than was used for the entire moon shot (not counting the awesome analog power of geeks with slide rules.) When I was a kid, digital watches were status symbols for the idle rich; now they are two-for-a-dollar at the local drug store, and we are back to thinking of the spring-operated watches as the "expensive" ones. Every once in a while, it's nice to step back and marvel at how far things have come.
Not bad for a little gadget which was once invented to do little more than replace human phone operators.
A fedora is traditionally a men's hat, but like all staples of menswear, it has been adopted by women's fashion from time to time.
Blue jeans, windsor knot ties, penny loafers, sport jackets, baseball caps, white tube socks, wingtips, boxer shorts, the list goes on.
Go to the Victoria Sercret online catalog, and you will even see "boyfriend" tailored sweaters... tops which were specifically designed to look as if she might have borrowed them from your closet (even though the colors are ones you would probably not wear.)
That's the problem with any attepts at "tort reform": it is simply impossible to block frivilous lawsuits, which are usually a red herring in the first place, without also blocking legitimate ones as well.
I've been invited into many completely frivolous lawsuits over the years (including this one, which I could sign up for, if I was interested in helping lawyers get rich at the expense of a company I buy stuff from.)
When I am invited into, or even hear about, a legitimate class-action, I'll let you know.
There's a very simple way to block these without stifling legitimate complaints. It's called "loser pays." Companies tend to settle "nuisance" class actions because it makes shareholders happy to have the matter behind them and it saves money in the long run. If it cost nothing for a company to fend off a frivolous lawsuit (and far more to lose a legit one) then the settlements wouldn't happen nearly as often, and the crooked lawyers would lose their stream of guaranteed free money.
5. The product or service the company who was sued now offers costs more without any improvement in quality or service, because they need to recoup their legal costs.
Class action suits hurt consumers as well as companies, and line the pockets of asshole lawyers. When you get a class action invitation letter, please, for all of our sakes, throw it in the trash.
If you really were harmed by the company in any way that really matters, sue them yourself as an individual.
If somebody is "guilty" of something which demands punishment, then it should be done throught he criminal justice system, where their debt to society can be paid to society.
Everything you said about civil suits is bullshit. I've been sent letters inviting me into dozens of them, and while I have not signed on, I have watched what happened. In every single case, ALL OF THEM, the following was true:
1. The case was frivolous. The company in question had crappy service, but didn't do anything that was actually illegal. In many cases (such as my problem with Qwest), they had already offered partial refunds and discounts to partially make up for said screw-over.
2. The case was resolved with a settlement without going to trial.
3. Each person who signed on for the suit got some pittance (free rentals from Blockbuster, two free months of phone service from Qwest, a $50 gift certificate, etc.)
4. The lawyers pressing the case got enormous piles of money.
I'm one of the people who had one of those bad iBooks.
Not only did they repair it for me, but when there were problems with the repair which caused the iBook to go back and forth between here and Cupertino one time too many, they decided (without me even asking) that enough was enough, and simply exchanged it for the G4 iBook which I'm typing this on right now.
The patent on Coke's recipe is long gone, and anybody can easily reverse-engineer (for lack of a better term) the formula.
The main difference between Coke and Pepsi is the source of citrus (which you might not have realized is an important ingredient in cola.)
Coke uses mainly lemon for citrus flavor, Pepsi uses mainly lime. That's why Coke is a little tangier, and Pepsi is a little sweeter.
Otherwise they are both mostly mixtures of carbonated water, sugar, caffine, caramel color, and tiny amounts of a few other ingredients.
Anybody could make an identical copy of Coke... but how would you ever bring it to market? People have learned not to trust generic or off-brand "Cola", because they've experienced so many really horrible alternatives over the decades.
Interesting, you say that you got rid of your one and only Windows PC, but play games mainly on your XBox. Which is it?
Both are true. The X-Box is manufactured by Microsoft, but does not run Windows (although it can be modded to run Linux.)
I didn't get rid of my Windows PC out of anti-MS bigotry.
Nor do I own an X-Box simply because I'm some kind of MCSE-toting, Balmer-worshipping,.NET programming drinker of Microsoft Flavorade. I got rid of it because it became redundant to keep around.
I'm one of those rare people who likes to use the right tool for the job, regardless of where it came from. 90% of my computing tasks are done best via Mac OS X, and the X-Box allows me to play the games that matter to me: DOA3, DOAX, HALO, NBA Street, Madden Football, and two of the three recent GTA titles (so far... I'm sure SA will get a port from the PS2 in a few more months.)
Therefore I now do most stuff on a Mac, except most of my gaming, which is done on an X-Box. Windows is currently nowhere to be found, although I don't have a problem with adding it back into the mix someday in the future, if I ever need to.
If you followed the link, you would have seen that cops can be played... although from the promo shot it looks like they are supposed to look like the cop from the Villiage People.
I've found that I've been able to "create and define missions" for lowbies in just about any MMOG. It started in Everquest, when my barbarian shaman needed snake skins and bat wings for spell components. Instead of running around hunting level 2 monsters (or looking for somebody who already gathered some for sale), I would invite some 1-5 level characters to take up a "quest" for me, rewarding them with a platinum coin for each stack of 20 they gathered.
Since then, I've found that it's kind of fun to send players on errands. You would be surprised the lengths some people will go to for a "free" Sword-of-killing-pretty-touch-monsters, as long as you roleplay it out to make it seem like a "mission" to them.
Actually, the crowd of superheroes in CoH was not a problem for me. It was a fun sort of "The TICK" vibe.
What bugged me was that the game's rewards system encouraged you to behave exactly as you would in any other out-for-yourself RPG.
There's something wrong (within the context of Silver-age comics) with seeing an NPC old lady being mugged and crying out for help, as dozens of high-level "superheroes" simply dash right by her and the attackers, ignoring the situation completely, on their way back from their last "door mission" to level up and/or shop for enhancements.
Slashdot Mirror
Speaking as an iPod-with-a-dock owner, I can assure you that it was the most useless device accessory ever.
It takes the custom firewire jack on the iPod (which requires a special cable), and outputs the exact same custome firewire jack, requiring that you use the same special cable.
The only function it offers is that it splits out the line-level audio output to a headphone jack... just like the headphone jack on the top of the iPod (which can be adjusted to match line level using the volume.)
In other words, it's just a piece of plastic which does almost nothing and costs $40 retail. It does look a little more neat if you use your iPod with your stereo, I guess... but between the Airport Express and the Mac mini, this feature has been made redundant for most of us anyway. Now that my Mac mini is my media-center computer, I don't plug the iPod into the living room stereo at all anymore.
Does a digital camera play music?
Didn't they just run a crapload of ads during the last superbowl for a camera which plays lame techno music while taking photos of people acting like jackasses?
Am I the only one who thinks those "Asterisk-Wing" fighters in the space battle shots look kind of lame?
Otherwise, yes. It looks spiffy. Too bad the script will probably be awful. "Attack of the Clones" is still the worst movie I've seen in the theaters in the last ten years, and I've seen some really bad ones.
I'm speakinf of technologies which may emerge a few years down the road. Most of these government-provided "broadband" conenctions are probably the same 256K deals which private companies currently provide for about $20/month (line included.) Like you, I pay closer to $50 right now for a 1M connection, but if that's still only the best I can get in 2015, I'll be rather ticked off. I'm saying if you remove market forces, we could have years or even decades of stagnation at a level of service only slightly better than what we have now.
In this case, I think its because they wouldn't get enough customers to justify digging up the streets and installing their own water pipes. Also, if people pay sewer fees based on H2O usage, then the new service would have to make arrangements to share their customer usage data with the muni water and sewer division. There are just too many cost headaches to make distributing water to homes via pipes a competetive industry.
That's what people said about coaxial cable, too... but when government regulations restricted the ability to compete directly between cable companies for individual consumers, a few media companies went to the trouble and expense of launching satelites into geo-stationary orbit for a work-around.
We have no way of knowing how much better (or worse) our water service would be if it were open to the free market. I'm making an educated guess that it would be quite a bit better.
er...
g/depraved/s//deprived/
Then again, I guess it's sort of funny both ways.
Hey, if you are a good enough programmer to get a job at EA, and don't like the treatment, go work for a bank or an insurance company or a med-tech company or something. They will pay you more and work you less. You lose the "sexy" ability to say you make computer games for a living, but that's the trade off.
Seriously. I work for a medical software company in the midwest, and we get phat recruiting bonuses for finding reliable new hires. If you are an EA programmer who thinks he's getting the shaft, let me know. You can probably do very well with us. Otherwise, quitcherbitchin!
If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen. There are a lot of fresh-faced college kids who would kill for the chance to be exploited the way you are right now.
But when a new verson of Madden Football comes out, most gamers with jobs end up going more than 24 hours without sleep, too. Seems to me that all QA should be done by sleep-depraved zombies, to simulate real-world conditions.
Yippie-ki-yay, motherfucker.
No, that was not sarcasm. Europe is nice in a lot of ways, but I choose to live in America for a reason.
The simple reason is, the telecom companies are not doing a good job of providing a service; otherwise there would be no need for a governmental agency to step in.
Really? You mean if they offered 100% coverage of reliable service at a reasonable price, nobody would be interested in "free" broadband provided by their local city hall?
You clearly have more faith in people's ability to see through government scams than I do.
The sad thing is, the moment broadband becomes a government utility, competition ends, and with it any reason for anybody to push the technology farther. Why pay $30/month for 4-Mbit broadband when your taxes are already paying for a 1-Mbit connection which is "good enough" for current use? Why develop new uses for higher speeds when every city in America only connects at the old speed?
Notice how your water service has not changed much in the last 50 years? Bottled water and tap filters are big business to overcome the chlorine-heavy (and in some cases awful-tasting) local utility water, but nobody is lining up to offer to pipe better water to your house, because they would be competing with a baseline service run by the local governments.
I don't mean to upset those queued up in the "can I please blow you mr jobs" line but you'd have a point if MS charged for SP2 - it didnt.
If Apple charged for the 10.3.7 to 10.3.8 upgrade you would have a point - they didn't.
how on earth is charging for what are really nothing more than service packs a good thing?
10.4 is a new OS version. It's like going from Windows XP to Longhorn. The only difference is Apple is actually more or less on schedule.
So... the crime SBC was guilty of was... offering a "basic service" which had more extra services than you and some other people wanted to buy?
How is that any different than a car company making cruise control a "standard" feature?
Sounds like another frivolous lawsuit to me. I mean, obviously you were not damaged by them. You willingly paid them that money for that fully loaded service, at the price they asked, even though you wanted to pay less for a more stripped-down service. Then you turned around and demanded money back for the service you say you didn't want (but bought anyway) and got it in a settlement.
I have not used one myself, but as I understand it, head mouse selections are made by hovering on the spot you want to select for a second. You configure it to read a pause of a certain length over an active spot to be a "click."
This means a slower response time, which makes "twitch-based" shooters a bit of a challenge, but then again, for somebody who has as many challenges to overcome as the author of this question, it might not be beyond the bounds of reason.
Personally, I'm rooting for big advancements in non-invasive brain interaction systems. Many of us are living longer, so the chances of all of us spending part of our lives partially or completely disabled continues to climb. Computer games might offer a great way to push the envelope in this field. Were I a gaming programmer or a biofeedback specialist, I would be awfully tempted to write a grant proposal for a project along these lines, and see if some University wanted to fund it.
You are correct.
This is one of many reasons why the first Matrix was really only a corny (yet well-made) kung-fu superhero flick, and not the great science fiction that many drooling fanboys insisted it was. None of it made a damn bit of sense. The sun was blotted out because it was the power source for the machines!? Who's that stupid? Machines can be powered by pretty much any energy source, we are the ones who need the sun!
Fortunately, the following two movies were bad enough that few people still claim to be hardcore fans of the original anymore. Wow, were those movies bad. Almost even "Attack of the Clones" bad.
In spite of all of this being true, I still say that (IMHO) the rescue of Morpheus, beginning with "I'll need guns" and ending with the helecopter crash, is the best action sequence in motion picture history, and one of the best reasons for owning a DVD player and a wide-screen HDTV. Too bad it eventually resolves with all that "you can't die because the prophet told me I would fall in love with The One" schmaltz.
Correct. This feature should work like this: /pizza medium thick sausage extra-cheese /pizza 2-liter diet coke
Otherwise... why not just pick up the phone while you play and save the trouble of switching window focus? Odds are, you're a broadband user if you're playing EQ2 and live in a town which Pizza Hut serves.
The big problem with this is, MMORPG's are a group activity for a small number of families, but that's not the case for most players.
Most of the time when I play World of Warcraft, it's when I'm home by myself. I should not eat a whole pizza by myself, but if I wanted to, I damn well couldn't afford to be too lazy to step away from the game for ten minutes and buy a frozen pizza from the local store! A whole pizza is hell of a lot of food, especially for somebody living a lazy indoor lifestyle of computer games and TV.
I think what we are seeing is a function of two trends in modern American economics regarding the tech sector:
1. Electronic components, especially those which are transistor-based, often cost less than the skilled labor costs of repairing them.
2. It's often cheaper to offer the latest tech as replacement parts than it is to keep an inventory of older components around in a warehouse.
As happy I am with Apple for handling things this way, I gotta give credit where credit is due: The many companies over the years who pushed transistor technologies to the point that people not only started talking about "Moore's Law", but actually took it for granted for a while.
My cheap living-room amp sounds better than my father's outrageously expensive "hi-fi" amp from the early 70s. My iBook probably has more computing power than was used for the entire moon shot (not counting the awesome analog power of geeks with slide rules.) When I was a kid, digital watches were status symbols for the idle rich; now they are two-for-a-dollar at the local drug store, and we are back to thinking of the spring-operated watches as the "expensive" ones. Every once in a while, it's nice to step back and marvel at how far things have come.
Not bad for a little gadget which was once invented to do little more than replace human phone operators.
A fedora is traditionally a men's hat, but like all staples of menswear, it has been adopted by women's fashion from time to time.
Blue jeans, windsor knot ties, penny loafers, sport jackets, baseball caps, white tube socks, wingtips, boxer shorts, the list goes on.
Go to the Victoria Sercret online catalog, and you will even see "boyfriend" tailored sweaters... tops which were specifically designed to look as if she might have borrowed them from your closet (even though the colors are ones you would probably not wear.)
That's the problem with any attepts at "tort reform": it is simply impossible to block frivilous lawsuits, which are usually a red herring in the first place, without also blocking legitimate ones as well.
I've been invited into many completely frivolous lawsuits over the years (including this one, which I could sign up for, if I was interested in helping lawyers get rich at the expense of a company I buy stuff from.)
When I am invited into, or even hear about, a legitimate class-action, I'll let you know.
There's a very simple way to block these without stifling legitimate complaints. It's called "loser pays." Companies tend to settle "nuisance" class actions because it makes shareholders happy to have the matter behind them and it saves money in the long run. If it cost nothing for a company to fend off a frivolous lawsuit (and far more to lose a legit one) then the settlements wouldn't happen nearly as often, and the crooked lawyers would lose their stream of guaranteed free money.
Oh yeah, and usually:
5. The product or service the company who was sued now offers costs more without any improvement in quality or service, because they need to recoup their legal costs.
Class action suits hurt consumers as well as companies, and line the pockets of asshole lawyers. When you get a class action invitation letter, please, for all of our sakes, throw it in the trash.
If you really were harmed by the company in any way that really matters, sue them yourself as an individual.
If somebody is "guilty" of something which demands punishment, then it should be done throught he criminal justice system, where their debt to society can be paid to society.
Everything you said about civil suits is bullshit. I've been sent letters inviting me into dozens of them, and while I have not signed on, I have watched what happened. In every single case, ALL OF THEM, the following was true:
1. The case was frivolous. The company in question had crappy service, but didn't do anything that was actually illegal. In many cases (such as my problem with Qwest), they had already offered partial refunds and discounts to partially make up for said screw-over.
2. The case was resolved with a settlement without going to trial.
3. Each person who signed on for the suit got some pittance (free rentals from Blockbuster, two free months of phone service from Qwest, a $50 gift certificate, etc.)
4. The lawyers pressing the case got enormous piles of money.
I'm one of the people who had one of those bad iBooks.
Not only did they repair it for me, but when there were problems with the repair which caused the iBook to go back and forth between here and Cupertino one time too many, they decided (without me even asking) that enough was enough, and simply exchanged it for the G4 iBook which I'm typing this on right now.
Best. Warranty. Service. Ever.
The patent on Coke's recipe is long gone, and anybody can easily reverse-engineer (for lack of a better term) the formula.
The main difference between Coke and Pepsi is the source of citrus (which you might not have realized is an important ingredient in cola.)
Coke uses mainly lemon for citrus flavor, Pepsi uses mainly lime. That's why Coke is a little tangier, and Pepsi is a little sweeter.
Otherwise they are both mostly mixtures of carbonated water, sugar, caffine, caramel color, and tiny amounts of a few other ingredients.
Anybody could make an identical copy of Coke... but how would you ever bring it to market? People have learned not to trust generic or off-brand "Cola", because they've experienced so many really horrible alternatives over the decades.
Interesting, you say that you got rid of your one and only Windows PC, but play games mainly on your XBox. Which is it?
.NET programming drinker of Microsoft Flavorade. I got rid of it because it became redundant to keep around.
Both are true. The X-Box is manufactured by Microsoft, but does not run Windows (although it can be modded to run Linux.)
I didn't get rid of my Windows PC out of anti-MS bigotry.
Nor do I own an X-Box simply because I'm some kind of MCSE-toting, Balmer-worshipping,
I'm one of those rare people who likes to use the right tool for the job, regardless of where it came from. 90% of my computing tasks are done best via Mac OS X, and the X-Box allows me to play the games that matter to me: DOA3, DOAX, HALO, NBA Street, Madden Football, and two of the three recent GTA titles (so far... I'm sure SA will get a port from the PS2 in a few more months.)
Therefore I now do most stuff on a Mac, except most of my gaming, which is done on an X-Box. Windows is currently nowhere to be found, although I don't have a problem with adding it back into the mix someday in the future, if I ever need to.
If you followed the link, you would have seen that cops can be played... although from the promo shot it looks like they are supposed to look like the cop from the Villiage People.
I've found that I've been able to "create and define missions" for lowbies in just about any MMOG. It started in Everquest, when my barbarian shaman needed snake skins and bat wings for spell components. Instead of running around hunting level 2 monsters (or looking for somebody who already gathered some for sale), I would invite some 1-5 level characters to take up a "quest" for me, rewarding them with a platinum coin for each stack of 20 they gathered.
Since then, I've found that it's kind of fun to send players on errands. You would be surprised the lengths some people will go to for a "free" Sword-of-killing-pretty-touch-monsters, as long as you roleplay it out to make it seem like a "mission" to them.
Actually, the crowd of superheroes in CoH was not a problem for me. It was a fun sort of "The TICK" vibe.
What bugged me was that the game's rewards system encouraged you to behave exactly as you would in any other out-for-yourself RPG.
There's something wrong (within the context of Silver-age comics) with seeing an NPC old lady being mugged and crying out for help, as dozens of high-level "superheroes" simply dash right by her and the attackers, ignoring the situation completely, on their way back from their last "door mission" to level up and/or shop for enhancements.