You can gleam a lot more about a product by looking at it in person than by looking at it on your typical online shop (which, if you're lucky, has a picture and the blurb that came from the company.)
And... there are actual people there that you can talk to about all this geeky stuff.
Over the years (as they've closed, unfortunately) I've bounced from game store to game store. The ones that are friendly and don't do anything noticeably dastardly tend to get my repeat business. Since the only place to get many tabletop games off-line is usually a small local store (as opposed to the giant chains where you'd often buy music or video games) it tends to come with more customer loyalty.
If I buy a video game from Best Buy, I don't see the owner of the store there in person, I don't generally talk to any employees or other customers about gaming. That's not the case with most gaming stores.
"Mother Teresa liked feeling important and only helped people because it made herself feel good and needed"
Most of the time when people believe such things, it is because they themselves are unable to feel charitable to anyone or anything. So they cannot understand when others do something charitable. All they do is throw stones rather than replicate or surpass the charity they criticize.
Ok, so I'm going to get modded into oblivion for this one. (And, FYI, I do give money to charity.)
Mother Teresa prayed for dying people. She didn't try to heal people. She was a symbol. She raised a lot of money. She could have used that money to get people real medical care. Instead, she watched them die and tried to "help them spiritually" I guess you'd say.
Being an atheist, I think it's great if she helped comfort the dying. But I think it's despicable that it appears that she took in millions in donations and did little to nothing to try to bring better medical care to the people she was caring for.
In other words, Mother Teresa did some good, but she was no Bill Gates.
I played WoW for half a year or so. In that time I heard of lots and lots of people complaining about having their names changed. There were regular flamewars on their forums about this.
Some folks complaining had names that were clearly over-the-top. E.g., offensive and not kid-friendly.
Some of the cases seemed particularly uncalled for. I recall someone had a gnome with a name that a GM thought was too "cute" that seemed perfectly fine to me. Or some folks would have fantasy-type names that an unimaginative GM would think were un-pronouncable, and therefore "gibberish" and against the naming policy. Some of these issues were highly ambiguous and seemed like idiot GMs run amok.
CmdrTaco's case is neither of these. It's not blatantly offensive, no. But there's a written policy on what you can name your character, and "CmdrTaco" clearly violates that policy. "Cmdr" is clearly a title. Yep. Whether you think it's right or wrong, it does obviously violate the written rules. There are other much more bothersome cases of name-changes, but they didn't happen to a/. mod, so we get a story about CmdrTaco instead.
Clearly, the name you chose is not confusing, nor does it in any way supplant any of the promotions that the game hands out. In any sane customer relations system, you would be granted an exception to the rule.
Most of their naming rules are about trying to keep the game's fantasy feel. You may disagree with them, but I see no reason why "CmdrTaco" should be an exception. They don't want people to have ranks or titles they didn't earn. "CmdrTaco" has a title. There isn't really any mitigating factor here.
I quit WoW a few months back. I've heard lots of stories like this one from people on the WoW forums or elsewhere. A few of them really seemed unfair. This is not one of those. The name CmdrTaco does clearly violate their rules. Some of the more disturbing stories I heard were, for example, where some idiot GM would decide that someone's name was "unpronouncable" or that a certain gnome's name was just a little too cute. Those are really subjective. The fact that "Cmdr" is supposed to be a title is obvious, though.
The second Batman movie -- Batman Returns -- had Danny De Vito as Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, and it wasn't too bad, in my opinion. (Even if you didn't like it, you'll have to admit it was much, much better than Batman and Robin.)
First off, for those of you who have no idea, or only a vague memory; "Chumbawamba are a band from the UK who use their music to promote anarchist ideas."
And, for those of you who are interested in why Chumbawamba might actually be mentioned when it comes to P2P music downloading: Chumbawamba were a one hit wonder. Their one song came out, people ran out and bought the album, and then got pissed off that they spent so much money on one song they liked and a bunch of crap they didn't. When people have the choice to buy/download just the songs they like, they'll do so. They won't get 15 Chumbawamba songs if all but one of them are crap.
Until we see what sort of 3rd party support is forthcoming, and until we see how well the new controller design works on some actual games, it's just too early to tell.
Some folks are already bemoaning or praising the new controllers. As for me, I will say this new announcement is the first thing to make me really take any interest in the next generation of consoles. It does look like Nintendo could be on to something innovative here, but until I've at least heard some first hand accounts of how the system looks at launch, further speculation is... well, just further speculation.
The fact that the doctor sued under libel indicates that the claims were false or misrepresented. If the were in fact true, the doctor would gain nothing by bringing the case other than proving the claims were indeed true.
Oh, I dunno. Or the doctor might be gambling that even if the claims were true, the guy he's suing isn't a wealthy doctor who can easily afford a lawyer and that he can be intimidated into taking the site down.
What the hell? There are people struggling to survive, who have lost almost everything in their lives, and somehow we're supposed to be up in arms over the fact that you have to use Internet Explorer to access the FEMA site.
There's a lot of news, horrific and otherwise, coming out of the Katrina disaster. I read about it on a number of websites. I do not expect to see most of that news here on Slashdot. Government agencies designing websites to only work with one browser, however, is the sort of thing I expect to read about here.
...call me cynical but wasn't the gas we're putting in our cars today bought, paid for and process a long time ago? Why aren't we paying those prices instead of prices today?
Because the gas stations are going to use the money they make selling gas today to buy the gas they'll sell tomorrow? And the gas they buy tomorrow may cost a lot more than what they paid for their last batch?
...couldn't they just come out and say "we're going to do our part and drop the price of gas a whole dollar until this crisis is over". Right? Couldn't that help a hell of a lot of people?
It's called supply and demand. Demand is really high, so the price follows. One thing that really bugs me is that I hear a lot of people blaming the gas stations or the gas companies for high prices, and they don't focus enough on the fact that we have such a huge demand for oil. If there weren't so many vehicles on the road that get 12 mpg, I'm guessing our gas prices would be a lot better. For that matter, if oil companies somehow gave us a big temporary price drop, I think you'd be well on your way to more gas shortages as people stock up on it while it's cheap.
On a side note, I bought a Scion xB recently, and I very nearly walked out of my dealer like you did. Toyota makes claims about buying a Scion being easy, and about how there's no haggling and it's user-friendly. In my experience, those claims just don't seem to be true. A car dealer is a car dealer is a car dealer, I guess.
Many years ago when I was in school I knew a guy that purchased a portable video game system before he went on vacation with his family (a Lynx, I believe,) and then took it back to the store for a refund when he got back.
It shouldn't be that surprising that today he's got the biggest stack of pirated video games of anyone I know.
He's the sort of guy that cares deeply about the video game industry, just not enough to give them his money.
I agree. People should be able to have equal time for their Intelligent Design mumbo-jumbo. One of my co-workers gets up early and takes his kids to some sort of religious activity before their school starts each day. And, hey, spend all the time you want to talking about it on the weekend in the church of your choice. No reason to pull it into science class, though.
That Bible has this line from Jesus in it about those that feel the need to loudly proclaim their religiosity in public. And it wasn't positive.
I'd say lack of spending on primary education is an even bigger crime. Also, the shortfall the VA has had is something that borders on the criminal. But, of course, more spending in those areas wouldn't benefit Microsoft...
"A world where people had to, gasp!, go out and talk to other people face-to-face to buy product..."
It was called mail order back then. You would either phone or mail in an order instead of placing your order on the internet, but otherwise the idea was much the same.
Some of us have been avoiding people for a lot longer than 10 years.
I love the fact that this was posted by White Wolf's Director of Marketing. I'm sure he was trying to figure out how to get more people to sign up for fan club membership, and, oh hey, there you go -- tell people that they have to. That will work great.
It's also great that they try to tell you that they're doing this in order to "maintain" a "consistent quality of product." Oh right. And yet, "Camarilla membership does not mean Camarilla oversight or management." But, you know, as long as White Wolf has more of your money, I'm sure your gaming experience will be better.
I really don't think this is enforceable. White Wolf is requesting that you follow their policy. They have a right to request that you follow their policy. As near as I can tell, though, you aren't breaking any laws if you just decide to ignore them.
Slashdot Mirror
You can gleam a lot more about a product by looking at it in person than by looking at it on your typical online shop (which, if you're lucky, has a picture and the blurb that came from the company.)
And... there are actual people there that you can talk to about all this geeky stuff.
Over the years (as they've closed, unfortunately) I've bounced from game store to game store. The ones that are friendly and don't do anything noticeably dastardly tend to get my repeat business. Since the only place to get many tabletop games off-line is usually a small local store (as opposed to the giant chains where you'd often buy music or video games) it tends to come with more customer loyalty.
If I buy a video game from Best Buy, I don't see the owner of the store there in person, I don't generally talk to any employees or other customers about gaming. That's not the case with most gaming stores.
Isn't this a contradiction in terms? Like military intelligence or Microsoft Works?
"Mother Teresa liked feeling important and only helped people because it made herself feel good and needed"
Most of the time when people believe such things, it is because they themselves are unable to feel charitable to anyone or anything. So they cannot understand when others do something charitable. All they do is throw stones rather than replicate or surpass the charity they criticize.
Ok, so I'm going to get modded into oblivion for this one. (And, FYI, I do give money to charity.)
Mother Teresa prayed for dying people. She didn't try to heal people. She was a symbol. She raised a lot of money. She could have used that money to get people real medical care. Instead, she watched them die and tried to "help them spiritually" I guess you'd say.
Being an atheist, I think it's great if she helped comfort the dying. But I think it's despicable that it appears that she took in millions in donations and did little to nothing to try to bring better medical care to the people she was caring for.
In other words, Mother Teresa did some good, but she was no Bill Gates.
I played WoW for half a year or so. In that time I heard of lots and lots of people complaining about having their names changed. There were regular flamewars on their forums about this.
/. mod, so we get a story about CmdrTaco instead.
Some folks complaining had names that were clearly over-the-top. E.g., offensive and not kid-friendly.
Some of the cases seemed particularly uncalled for. I recall someone had a gnome with a name that a GM thought was too "cute" that seemed perfectly fine to me. Or some folks would have fantasy-type names that an unimaginative GM would think were un-pronouncable, and therefore "gibberish" and against the naming policy. Some of these issues were highly ambiguous and seemed like idiot GMs run amok.
CmdrTaco's case is neither of these. It's not blatantly offensive, no. But there's a written policy on what you can name your character, and "CmdrTaco" clearly violates that policy. "Cmdr" is clearly a title. Yep. Whether you think it's right or wrong, it does obviously violate the written rules. There are other much more bothersome cases of name-changes, but they didn't happen to a
Clearly, the name you chose is not confusing, nor does it in any way supplant any of the promotions that the game hands out. In any sane customer relations system, you would be granted an exception to the rule.
Most of their naming rules are about trying to keep the game's fantasy feel. You may disagree with them, but I see no reason why "CmdrTaco" should be an exception. They don't want people to have ranks or titles they didn't earn. "CmdrTaco" has a title. There isn't really any mitigating factor here.
I quit WoW a few months back. I've heard lots of stories like this one from people on the WoW forums or elsewhere. A few of them really seemed unfair. This is not one of those. The name CmdrTaco does clearly violate their rules. Some of the more disturbing stories I heard were, for example, where some idiot GM would decide that someone's name was "unpronouncable" or that a certain gnome's name was just a little too cute. Those are really subjective. The fact that "Cmdr" is supposed to be a title is obvious, though.
Whatever happened to CmdrTaco?
He met a troll with a really good THAC0.
The second Batman movie -- Batman Returns -- had Danny De Vito as Penguin and Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman, and it wasn't too bad, in my opinion. (Even if you didn't like it, you'll have to admit it was much, much better than Batman and Robin.)
Of course, this would mean all the posts between the respective dupes would slam together into a single entity of posts...
'Cause, boy oh boy, we sure need to make sure we keep all these insightful posts everyone made under this version of the story...
First off, for those of you who have no idea, or only a vague memory; "Chumbawamba are a band from the UK who use their music to promote anarchist ideas."
And, for those of you who are interested in why Chumbawamba might actually be mentioned when it comes to P2P music downloading: Chumbawamba were a one hit wonder. Their one song came out, people ran out and bought the album, and then got pissed off that they spent so much money on one song they liked and a bunch of crap they didn't. When people have the choice to buy/download just the songs they like, they'll do so. They won't get 15 Chumbawamba songs if all but one of them are crap.
Until we see what sort of 3rd party support is forthcoming, and until we see how well the new controller design works on some actual games, it's just too early to tell.
Some folks are already bemoaning or praising the new controllers. As for me, I will say this new announcement is the first thing to make me really take any interest in the next generation of consoles. It does look like Nintendo could be on to something innovative here, but until I've at least heard some first hand accounts of how the system looks at launch, further speculation is... well, just further speculation.
The fact that the doctor sued under libel indicates that the claims were false or misrepresented. If the were in fact true, the doctor would gain nothing by bringing the case other than proving the claims were indeed true.
Oh, I dunno. Or the doctor might be gambling that even if the claims were true, the guy he's suing isn't a wealthy doctor who can easily afford a lawyer and that he can be intimidated into taking the site down.
What the hell? There are people struggling to survive, who have lost almost everything in their lives, and somehow we're supposed to be up in arms over the fact that you have to use Internet Explorer to access the FEMA site.
There's a lot of news, horrific and otherwise, coming out of the Katrina disaster. I read about it on a number of websites. I do not expect to see most of that news here on Slashdot. Government agencies designing websites to only work with one browser, however, is the sort of thing I expect to read about here.
Because the gas stations are going to use the money they make selling gas today to buy the gas they'll sell tomorrow? And the gas they buy tomorrow may cost a lot more than what they paid for their last batch?
It's called supply and demand. Demand is really high, so the price follows. One thing that really bugs me is that I hear a lot of people blaming the gas stations or the gas companies for high prices, and they don't focus enough on the fact that we have such a huge demand for oil. If there weren't so many vehicles on the road that get 12 mpg, I'm guessing our gas prices would be a lot better. For that matter, if oil companies somehow gave us a big temporary price drop, I think you'd be well on your way to more gas shortages as people stock up on it while it's cheap.
On a side note, I bought a Scion xB recently, and I very nearly walked out of my dealer like you did. Toyota makes claims about buying a Scion being easy, and about how there's no haggling and it's user-friendly. In my experience, those claims just don't seem to be true. A car dealer is a car dealer is a car dealer, I guess.
Oh so the airport screening machines are on the internet, are they? I feel safer in the hands of people as competent as the DHS already...
Or more likely, this is just another piece of DHS propaganda designed to enphasize how dangerous those virus writers are.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Many years ago when I was in school I knew a guy that purchased a portable video game system before he went on vacation with his family (a Lynx, I believe,) and then took it back to the store for a refund when he got back.
It shouldn't be that surprising that today he's got the biggest stack of pirated video games of anyone I know.
He's the sort of guy that cares deeply about the video game industry, just not enough to give them his money.
I agree. People should be able to have equal time for their Intelligent Design mumbo-jumbo. One of my co-workers gets up early and takes his kids to some sort of religious activity before their school starts each day. And, hey, spend all the time you want to talking about it on the weekend in the church of your choice. No reason to pull it into science class, though.
That Bible has this line from Jesus in it about those that feel the need to loudly proclaim their religiosity in public. And it wasn't positive.
That's "yin," not "ying." It seems kinda bad when you don't even run the title of your article through the spellchecker.
I have to moficate hardware to get this to work? Yowza.
I'd say lack of spending on primary education is an even bigger crime. Also, the shortfall the VA has had is something that borders on the criminal. But, of course, more spending in those areas wouldn't benefit Microsoft...
If you roll 20's, you're playing with the wrong dice.
Maybe that's meant like a taunt. "Ha-ha, White Wolf, I just play d20, anyway."
Does he talk much about the music?
"A world where people had to, gasp!, go out and talk to other people face-to-face to buy product..."
It was called mail order back then. You would either phone or mail in an order instead of placing your order on the internet, but otherwise the idea was much the same.
Some of us have been avoiding people for a lot longer than 10 years.
I love the fact that this was posted by White Wolf's Director of Marketing. I'm sure he was trying to figure out how to get more people to sign up for fan club membership, and, oh hey, there you go -- tell people that they have to. That will work great.
It's also great that they try to tell you that they're doing this in order to "maintain" a "consistent quality of product." Oh right. And yet, "Camarilla membership does not mean Camarilla oversight or management." But, you know, as long as White Wolf has more of your money, I'm sure your gaming experience will be better.
I really don't think this is enforceable. White Wolf is requesting that you follow their policy. They have a right to request that you follow their policy. As near as I can tell, though, you aren't breaking any laws if you just decide to ignore them.