They're desperate to keep the customers they already have.
Procedure for lowering ISP bill:
- Research introductory price from local competing ISPs with same speed (cable vs. DSL, etc...) - Call current ISP, select billing from the phone menu. - Tell Person1 you want them to match the other ISP's introductory price. - Person1's job is to make you go away so they will put you on hold for 5 minutes. Don't go away. - Person1 will return and tell you they can't match the price. - Tell Person1 you'd like to cancel. - Person1 will transfer you to Person2 in the billing department. - Tell Person2 you've found a cheaper rate and would like to cancel. - Person2 will keep you on hold for 10 minutes to see if you'll go away, occasionally returning with progressively lower rates but still above the competing rate. Don't go away. Don't accept anything above than the competing rate. - Person2 will "find" a lower rate equal to the competing ISP's introductory rate for 1 year - Wait 1 year, repeat.
I have done this 3 times with a success rate of 100% on RoadRunner. Average annual savings = $180.
The most recent time I was already on an introductory rate ($45/mo for 30 megabit) but found an even lower intro ($34/mo for same) rate at the competing ISP. Person1 had the audacity to say "I think you're already getting a pretty good rate". I was tempted to not even give them the opportunity to keep my subscription at that point.
I disagree. Amazon's stock price is much too high right now, being driven so by extreme speculation. It's current selling for more than 21 times book value. It's a very poor investment over the long term - the next time the market goes bear the price will drop like a brick unless by some miracle they have increased their assets by about 20 times and profitability by about 1000 times (read: Good Luck With That). Investing in it in the short term is a game of musical chairs - somebody is going to be stuck owning it when the price tanks. Cashing out right before that point requires recognizing that the price is about to tank (before everyone else, who are all trying to do the same thing). Even if you trade as fast as a computer you're faced with a chicken-and-egg problem.
Compare that to oil companies which can be bought at bargain prices right now - if you can pick which ones are financially strong enough to ride out the current drop in oil prices (which will go away when ISIS does). For example with this one you're buying nearly $3 worth of assets and $0.30 in annual earnings for every $1 in stock price. (Before anyone interprets that as investment advice, I'm not convinced this example is strong enough to ride out the price drop.)
rent in the bay are is high, but 2500 get's you a 3-4 bed house in the east bay
You're missing the big picture of real estate: Equity.
When you pay into a mortgage you can sell the house or borrow against the equity. When you pay rent, you build someone else's equity for them. This person already has enough wealth to buy to pay the insane prices of houses in Silicon Valley. So the rich person is getting richer, and the poor person is going nowhere.
but you don't have many other expenses, silicon valley companies feed you, offer transportation, etc etc.
That was tried before in the coal mining towns of West Virginia. It doesn't turn out so well for the workers. Seethese. You're just skipping the pointless pieces of paper and instead presenting a company ID.
I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. Try this on for size:
The comparison with bees stings is misleading a BS statistic because they're comparing deaths per entire population rather than deaths per vulnerable population. A farmer in the middle of Oklahoma has a pretty low chance of being eaten by a shark but he has a shot at being a bee fatality. Therefore he's skewing that stat in the shark's favor for someone who is considering whether a beach is more risky than staying home with the bees.
Vulnerable-to-bee means anyone who is outside anywhere in any of the US's 3.8 million square miles. On a daily basis, this is pretty close to the entire population.
Vulnerable-to-shark means anyone who is in the water at or near an ocean, which translates to an area of about 88,633 square miles (source). Practically speaking, this is orders of magnitude less than the entire population otherwise the entire interior of the US would be abandoned.
Irrelevant. 'Voting against' is a consequence of a of a two-party system which is a consequence of a simple-majority, winner-take-all system. A system like run-off voting would fix this problem
I do agree the electoral college has far outlived its usefulness and is contrary to how a democracy should work, with its failure rate of 5%.
For all the hero worship the Founding Fathers get they made tremendous blunders when it came to the voting system.
Here in the USA we do not have the luxury of voting for the person we want for president. We have to vote against the person that we don't want to be president.
I recently had to open up my washing machine to fix a clogged pressure switch tube. Inside the control panel I found a wiring and timer diagram. I am mostly finished with writing some Raspberry Pi code to replace the timer with a Pi and a relay board. I installed a web server onto the Pi and put it on my Wifi network also. The ultimate goal is to allow Wifi control of my washing machine, as well as have it send notifications when it finishes, be able to check status, etc. I foresee those notifications popping up in the corner of my desktop in the immediate future, and maybe on a media center in the future (if I ever bother to make one an attach it to the TV)
Another interesting tidbit - a new washing machine timer costs more than the Pi+parts that I will replace it with. (Might Ebay it when I'm done)
Your story and mine are similar, and I suspect Zuckerberg's is also close. I suspect Zuckerberg said was true - for the people now in their early to mid 30s but I think circumstances have changed in the last 20 years. All the digging through manuals and "ATDT" tweaks we had to make back then are all, standardized, GUI driven and automatic these days. Save for DayZ, it'd been years and years since I downloaded and installed a mod on a game. It isn't even possible to mod most games out there these days.
Younger than that and video games are a more widely accepted past time, and require almost nothing in the way of technical expertise to make work. There are programmers in this demographic but you won't be able to say with 90% accuracy someone has a future in IT because the group of people playing video games is not limited to the people willing to spend hours hand tweaking system files to get it to run well (or at all).
Older than that and (I suspect) there wasn't much gaming to do.
Instead, the entire industry would rather piss around with games and "loyalty" programs and such.
For those that might not be aware, the purpose of those loyalty programs is so that business travelers have their corporate travel agency to get them flights on particular airlines every time they fly. The points belong to the individual, not the company. The employee collects the points which can be turned into free vacations and the airline charges the corporate account the difference.
Ironically though when you travel frequently for work the last thing you want to do is spend more time away from home.
1. A competing trash service sent me a flier offering the same service at about 60% of the price I was paying. The current service matched the price for 1 year. Even if they're not making a dime on me they're dividing their fuel cost one more way.
2. Last month I called Time Warner and told them I wanted them to match the introductory price of competing internet service (~75% of regular price for 1 year). They did. This is the second time I've had my price lowered to an introductory rate without being a new customer.
When these prices run out I'll call again and get the rate lowered again. Or I'll cancel and go to the competitor. Either way, these add up to about $360 saved this year for two 15-minute phone calls. Pretty good $/hr.
Re:He's not "conceited". He's absolutely correct!
on
Is Ruby Dying?
·
· Score: 1
Its development tools are a decade or more behind those of Java and C++.
It's worse than just being behind. Behind is a solvable problem. Basic IDE features like auto-completion/typo checking are impossible for the IDE when the content of an object can't be known until run-time. Consider a simple example that uses a random number to either define a given property on an object or not - the IDE fundamentally cannot know whether than property should show up in its autocomplete list. So I think the poor quality of the tools can also be blamed on poor JS design. JSDoc provides reasonable solution to this problem at the cost of writing a bunch of documentation that would be pedantic in other languages and negates weak types (not enforced unfortunately). I compare this to documenting every "int foo = 0;" in C++ with a comment saying "//this is an integer".
Ultimately, I feel the lesson comes down to this: Weakly-typed languages are for smaller projects than strongly-typed languages.
Unfortunately, if you need to do something in a browser you don't really have a strongly typed option right now. That is also a solvable problem, and as the browser becomes more and more important as a platform someone will solve it. Though, if you'd have asked me 10 years ago I'd have at least expected to be able to see the solution on the horizon by this point.:-(
"All of this is done wirelessly and doesn't require the use of any exploit or security vulnerability"
"...detects the wireless signal sent out by a target drone, injects WiFi packets into the target’s connection, de-authenticates it from its real controller and then authenticates it to the Skyjack drone"
Uhh... for what definition of "security vulnerability" is this not a "security vulnerability"?
but there's SOO much downtime in between PVP fights
I reopened my account a little under a month ago (originally quit when Diablo 3 came out, THAT game was a waste of time and money.). After two weeks back with my old alliance, spinning ships, AFKing in station, I joined a new one. Night and day. I have seen more action every day in the new alliance than all 2 weeks with the old one. The problem for me was that the old alliance had largely faded from glory and the remaining members are 80% people in a 12 hour different time zone, and located way out in the middle of where there was nothing for a lone player to shoot at. The remaining 20% were insulated in their own system 15 jumps away and own teamspeak server. They invited no one else to come with them. The new one is right in the sweet spot for my time zone, and in a much better location for PVP and quite active. There is so much PVP going on I haven't had as much time to try out the new exploration mechanics as I would like, and best of all I don't feel like I need to be on all the time so that I don't miss what little action there is.
Ultimate lesson: A new corp solved your situation in my case.
I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.
But competent nonetheless... Mastering a game ultimately makes it boring. Four months would be quite a short time scale to master any decent MMO. The deeper the game, the longer it takes.
The curve is just too high for people looking to have fun and not turn the game into a way of life
I assume you have seen this, but I will post it for the amusement of others: EVE Learning Curve
Unrelated comment: I have only recently come to realize that EVE is only cosmetically a game about space ships. Its true nature is more a game of risk versus reward. You can mine in 0.5 space and make money faster... but those suicide gankers are 2 jumps away, or you can mine in 0.9 space and make less. Make your choice and live with the consequences. Trust no one, and never undock anything you cannot afford to lose.
Gamers and engineers and other hardcore users comprised a larger % of the PC market. These users tend to upgrade often to run the latest Doom at max 640x480 resolution with all options on.
Speaking as a gamer who was on the 1-2 year upgrade cycle 10+ years ago, even my PCs last a lot longer now too. My last 2 PCs have been play able to play the latest games at good settings for upwards of 4 years. This longer lifetime change coincided with my budget for building PCs increasing significantly (thank you, computer science degree). I'm unsure how much of an effect that has had, so take this with a grain of salt.
Bulk mail does not get returned to the sender. The post office will just throw it away.
I would argue this is helpful nonetheless as it increases the post office's costs related to bulk mail. I may adopt this practice myself. Here's an amusing thought: I pay for my trash service, a government agency is delivering some trash - can I write some portion of my trash service off my taxes? I understand typically you need to determine what proportion of the service is used for the purpose being written off. In the case of trash would that per unit of mass, per unit of volume, per discarded article?
Slight related, if only we had a similar solution to all the "free newspapers", advertisement fliers and other litter that gets tossed onto my driveway or hung on my mailbox once a week. I fail to see why *I* should be forced to deliver *their* garbage to my trashcan every week. After several attempts I was finally able to get one local free newspaper to stop delivering... mostly. No such luck with the advertisements.
Slashdot allows you to choose to turn off ads by paying.
There is (was?) also an option to turn off ads for 'positive contributors' whatever that means. I'm having trouble finding it in the UI right now, maybe pissing off the Blizzard fanbois a couple weeks ago cost me that option.:)
Anyway, this positive contribution concept could certainly be extended to almost any bulletin board like system and perhaps generalized into something like the captchas that are used as a way to digitize books. Find some minuscule task that somebody is willing to pay for being done on a large scale and you've got a business model. Imagine a future where Amazon's cloud service becomes a P2P network made up of the computers of people offering up their electricity and idle cycles as a ticket to free internet content for example.
You're fooling yourself. Blizzard is a publicly traded company. It is under no obligation to provide you with any more of a game experience beyond what is necessary to increase its share holders bottom line.
Until you can tie an item back to a players name (not character name - Blizzard holds the keys to that too) there is zero accountability. Bits in a database are cheap for Blizzard to flip.
Same situation here. I'm a hardcore gamer, she is not. In PC terms I have had success with Orcs Must Die 2 and Portal 2. I also tried Magicka but that didn't seem to be her to tastes. All are available on Steam. Portal 2's level editor provides a lot of replayability and we're currently working our way through Nightmare difficulty on Orcs Must Die 2. I got her to try these when we started doing "His/Hers nights" where each of us has 1 weeknight to totally dictate what activities we do that night (with the intent that whatever we do will be together). OMD2 has been so successful we've played it on a few of her nights or nights that or not either of ours.
On the Wii the Lego series of games has been a huge hit, especially since she's a Harry Potter fan. Replayability is limited after you 100% each of them (number of hours varies, typically 20-40).
All of these games are specifically 2 player coop.
In past Diablo games is that that choice was not left up to you, it was left up to the other players in the same game as you. I once heard someone lament there should be a force PvE option similar to the force PvP button because "if the griefers can force me to play their game I should be able to force them to play mine."
Slashdot Mirror
They're desperate to keep the customers they already have.
Procedure for lowering ISP bill:
- Research introductory price from local competing ISPs with same speed (cable vs. DSL, etc...)
- Call current ISP, select billing from the phone menu.
- Tell Person1 you want them to match the other ISP's introductory price.
- Person1's job is to make you go away so they will put you on hold for 5 minutes. Don't go away.
- Person1 will return and tell you they can't match the price.
- Tell Person1 you'd like to cancel.
- Person1 will transfer you to Person2 in the billing department.
- Tell Person2 you've found a cheaper rate and would like to cancel.
- Person2 will keep you on hold for 10 minutes to see if you'll go away, occasionally returning with progressively lower rates but still above the competing rate. Don't go away. Don't accept anything above than the competing rate.
- Person2 will "find" a lower rate equal to the competing ISP's introductory rate for 1 year
- Wait 1 year, repeat.
I have done this 3 times with a success rate of 100% on RoadRunner. Average annual savings = $180.
The most recent time I was already on an introductory rate ($45/mo for 30 megabit) but found an even lower intro ($34/mo for same) rate at the competing ISP. Person1 had the audacity to say "I think you're already getting a pretty good rate". I was tempted to not even give them the opportunity to keep my subscription at that point.
I disagree. Amazon's stock price is much too high right now, being driven so by extreme speculation. It's current selling for more than 21 times book value. It's a very poor investment over the long term - the next time the market goes bear the price will drop like a brick unless by some miracle they have increased their assets by about 20 times and profitability by about 1000 times (read: Good Luck With That). Investing in it in the short term is a game of musical chairs - somebody is going to be stuck owning it when the price tanks. Cashing out right before that point requires recognizing that the price is about to tank (before everyone else, who are all trying to do the same thing). Even if you trade as fast as a computer you're faced with a chicken-and-egg problem.
Compare that to oil companies which can be bought at bargain prices right now - if you can pick which ones are financially strong enough to ride out the current drop in oil prices (which will go away when ISIS does). For example with this one you're buying nearly $3 worth of assets and $0.30 in annual earnings for every $1 in stock price. (Before anyone interprets that as investment advice, I'm not convinced this example is strong enough to ride out the price drop.)
Recommended reading (ironically an Amazon link)
rent in the bay are is high, but 2500 get's you a 3-4 bed house in the east bay
You're missing the big picture of real estate: Equity.
When you pay into a mortgage you can sell the house or borrow against the equity. When you pay rent, you build someone else's equity for them. This person already has enough wealth to buy to pay the insane prices of houses in Silicon Valley. So the rich person is getting richer, and the poor person is going nowhere.
but you don't have many other expenses, silicon valley companies feed you, offer transportation, etc etc.
That was tried before in the coal mining towns of West Virginia. It doesn't turn out so well for the workers. See these. You're just skipping the pointless pieces of paper and instead presenting a company ID.
I agree with your conclusion but not your reasoning. Try this on for size:
The comparison with bees stings is misleading a BS statistic because they're comparing deaths per entire population rather than deaths per vulnerable population. A farmer in the middle of Oklahoma has a pretty low chance of being eaten by a shark but he has a shot at being a bee fatality. Therefore he's skewing that stat in the shark's favor for someone who is considering whether a beach is more risky than staying home with the bees.
Vulnerable-to-bee means anyone who is outside anywhere in any of the US's 3.8 million square miles. On a daily basis, this is pretty close to the entire population.
Vulnerable-to-shark means anyone who is in the water at or near an ocean, which translates to an area of about 88,633 square miles (source). Practically speaking, this is orders of magnitude less than the entire population otherwise the entire interior of the US would be abandoned.
Irrelevant. 'Voting against' is a consequence of a of a two-party system which is a consequence of a simple-majority, winner-take-all system. A system like run-off voting would fix this problem
I do agree the electoral college has far outlived its usefulness and is contrary to how a democracy should work, with its failure rate of 5%.
For all the hero worship the Founding Fathers get they made tremendous blunders when it came to the voting system.
This is the woman people want for president
Here in the USA we do not have the luxury of voting for the person we want for president. We have to vote against the person that we don't want to be president.
See also
I recently had to open up my washing machine to fix a clogged pressure switch tube. Inside the control panel I found a wiring and timer diagram. I am mostly finished with writing some Raspberry Pi code to replace the timer with a Pi and a relay board. I installed a web server onto the Pi and put it on my Wifi network also. The ultimate goal is to allow Wifi control of my washing machine, as well as have it send notifications when it finishes, be able to check status, etc. I foresee those notifications popping up in the corner of my desktop in the immediate future, and maybe on a media center in the future (if I ever bother to make one an attach it to the TV)
Another interesting tidbit - a new washing machine timer costs more than the Pi+parts that I will replace it with. (Might Ebay it when I'm done)
I understand that TestTrack TCM has been integrated with JIRA at some shops.
Full disclosure: I work on this product.
Your story and mine are similar, and I suspect Zuckerberg's is also close. I suspect Zuckerberg said was true - for the people now in their early to mid 30s but I think circumstances have changed in the last 20 years. All the digging through manuals and "ATDT" tweaks we had to make back then are all, standardized, GUI driven and automatic these days. Save for DayZ, it'd been years and years since I downloaded and installed a mod on a game. It isn't even possible to mod most games out there these days.
Younger than that and video games are a more widely accepted past time, and require almost nothing in the way of technical expertise to make work. There are programmers in this demographic but you won't be able to say with 90% accuracy someone has a future in IT because the group of people playing video games is not limited to the people willing to spend hours hand tweaking system files to get it to run well (or at all).
Older than that and (I suspect) there wasn't much gaming to do.
The protection of dealerships was originally created for good reasons.
Don't see many supporters of this perspective on /. I am ignorant of the reasons you speak of. Can you go into more detail on them or provide a link?
Instead, the entire industry would rather piss around with games and "loyalty" programs and such.
For those that might not be aware, the purpose of those loyalty programs is so that business travelers have their corporate travel agency to get them flights on particular airlines every time they fly. The points belong to the individual, not the company. The employee collects the points which can be turned into free vacations and the airline charges the corporate account the difference.
Ironically though when you travel frequently for work the last thing you want to do is spend more time away from home.
-A former business traveller
The government is working at this from the other angle. More the rights they eliminate the closer we come to having them 100% protected!
"...attempts to retain customers at any cost."
I use this to my advantage.
1. A competing trash service sent me a flier offering the same service at about 60% of the price I was paying. The current service matched the price for 1 year. Even if they're not making a dime on me they're dividing their fuel cost one more way.
2. Last month I called Time Warner and told them I wanted them to match the introductory price of competing internet service (~75% of regular price for 1 year). They did. This is the second time I've had my price lowered to an introductory rate without being a new customer.
When these prices run out I'll call again and get the rate lowered again. Or I'll cancel and go to the competitor. Either way, these add up to about $360 saved this year for two 15-minute phone calls. Pretty good $/hr.
Its development tools are a decade or more behind those of Java and C++.
It's worse than just being behind. Behind is a solvable problem. Basic IDE features like auto-completion/typo checking are impossible for the IDE when the content of an object can't be known until run-time. Consider a simple example that uses a random number to either define a given property on an object or not - the IDE fundamentally cannot know whether than property should show up in its autocomplete list. So I think the poor quality of the tools can also be blamed on poor JS design. JSDoc provides reasonable solution to this problem at the cost of writing a bunch of documentation that would be pedantic in other languages and negates weak types (not enforced unfortunately). I compare this to documenting every "int foo = 0;" in C++ with a comment saying "//this is an integer".
Ultimately, I feel the lesson comes down to this: Weakly-typed languages are for smaller projects than strongly-typed languages.
Unfortunately, if you need to do something in a browser you don't really have a strongly typed option right now. That is also a solvable problem, and as the browser becomes more and more important as a platform someone will solve it. Though, if you'd have asked me 10 years ago I'd have at least expected to be able to see the solution on the horizon by this point. :-(
"All of this is done wirelessly and doesn't require the use of any exploit or security vulnerability"
"...detects the wireless signal sent out by a target drone, injects WiFi packets into the target’s connection, de-authenticates it from its real controller and then authenticates it to the Skyjack drone"
Uhh... for what definition of "security vulnerability" is this not a "security vulnerability"?
but there's SOO much downtime in between PVP fights
I reopened my account a little under a month ago (originally quit when Diablo 3 came out, THAT game was a waste of time and money.). After two weeks back with my old alliance, spinning ships, AFKing in station, I joined a new one. Night and day. I have seen more action every day in the new alliance than all 2 weeks with the old one. The problem for me was that the old alliance had largely faded from glory and the remaining members are 80% people in a 12 hour different time zone, and located way out in the middle of where there was nothing for a lone player to shoot at. The remaining 20% were insulated in their own system 15 jumps away and own teamspeak server. They invited no one else to come with them. The new one is right in the sweet spot for my time zone, and in a much better location for PVP and quite active. There is so much PVP going on I haven't had as much time to try out the new exploration mechanics as I would like, and best of all I don't feel like I need to be on all the time so that I don't miss what little action there is.
Ultimate lesson: A new corp solved your situation in my case.
I felt barely competent after 4 months of play.
But competent nonetheless... Mastering a game ultimately makes it boring. Four months would be quite a short time scale to master any decent MMO. The deeper the game, the longer it takes.
The curve is just too high for people looking to have fun and not turn the game into a way of life
I assume you have seen this, but I will post it for the amusement of others: EVE Learning Curve
Unrelated comment: I have only recently come to realize that EVE is only cosmetically a game about space ships. Its true nature is more a game of risk versus reward. You can mine in 0.5 space and make money faster... but those suicide gankers are 2 jumps away, or you can mine in 0.9 space and make less. Make your choice and live with the consequences. Trust no one, and never undock anything you cannot afford to lose.
Gamers and engineers and other hardcore users comprised a larger % of the PC market. These users tend to upgrade often to run the latest Doom at max 640x480 resolution with all options on.
Speaking as a gamer who was on the 1-2 year upgrade cycle 10+ years ago, even my PCs last a lot longer now too. My last 2 PCs have been play able to play the latest games at good settings for upwards of 4 years. This longer lifetime change coincided with my budget for building PCs increasing significantly (thank you, computer science degree). I'm unsure how much of an effect that has had, so take this with a grain of salt.
Granted, you maybe shit canned over it
You're looking at it all wrong. This is a weapon to get your least favorite office mate shit canned over it.
Bulk mail does not get returned to the sender. The post office will just throw it away.
I would argue this is helpful nonetheless as it increases the post office's costs related to bulk mail. I may adopt this practice myself. Here's an amusing thought: I pay for my trash service, a government agency is delivering some trash - can I write some portion of my trash service off my taxes? I understand typically you need to determine what proportion of the service is used for the purpose being written off. In the case of trash would that per unit of mass, per unit of volume, per discarded article?
Slight related, if only we had a similar solution to all the "free newspapers", advertisement fliers and other litter that gets tossed onto my driveway or hung on my mailbox once a week. I fail to see why *I* should be forced to deliver *their* garbage to my trashcan every week. After several attempts I was finally able to get one local free newspaper to stop delivering... mostly. No such luck with the advertisements.
Slashdot allows you to choose to turn off ads by paying.
There is (was?) also an option to turn off ads for 'positive contributors' whatever that means. I'm having trouble finding it in the UI right now, maybe pissing off the Blizzard fanbois a couple weeks ago cost me that option. :)
Anyway, this positive contribution concept could certainly be extended to almost any bulletin board like system and perhaps generalized into something like the captchas that are used as a way to digitize books. Find some minuscule task that somebody is willing to pay for being done on a large scale and you've got a business model. Imagine a future where Amazon's cloud service becomes a P2P network made up of the computers of people offering up their electricity and idle cycles as a ticket to free internet content for example.
You are not buying things from Blizzard
You're fooling yourself. Blizzard is a publicly traded company. It is under no obligation to provide you with any more of a game experience beyond what is necessary to increase its share holders bottom line.
Until you can tie an item back to a players name (not character name - Blizzard holds the keys to that too) there is zero accountability. Bits in a database are cheap for Blizzard to flip.
Low risk, high reward, and really simple math.
1. Abraham lincoln, neither vampire hunter nor martial arts expert
[citation needed]
Same situation here. I'm a hardcore gamer, she is not. In PC terms I have had success with Orcs Must Die 2 and Portal 2. I also tried Magicka but that didn't seem to be her to tastes. All are available on Steam. Portal 2's level editor provides a lot of replayability and we're currently working our way through Nightmare difficulty on Orcs Must Die 2. I got her to try these when we started doing "His/Hers nights" where each of us has 1 weeknight to totally dictate what activities we do that night (with the intent that whatever we do will be together). OMD2 has been so successful we've played it on a few of her nights or nights that or not either of ours.
On the Wii the Lego series of games has been a huge hit, especially since she's a Harry Potter fan. Replayability is limited after you 100% each of them (number of hours varies, typically 20-40).
All of these games are specifically 2 player coop.
You don't like PvP? Don't participate.
In past Diablo games is that that choice was not left up to you, it was left up to the other players in the same game as you. I once heard someone lament there should be a force PvE option similar to the force PvP button because "if the griefers can force me to play their game I should be able to force them to play mine."
No company pays a penny of their own in taxes, they just collect it from customers and pass it on.
Not true. My company pays all of my taxes because I pass on the expense in the form of my salary.