My first thought, which others have echoed, is that if your software appears on the market as v6.3, a sensible person might wonder why they'd never heard of versions 1.0 - 6.2? Was it that niche, that sucky, or an in-house-only product before? Is it a name change from some other product? If so, why--to escape a bad reputation, perhaps?
These are probably not the kind of questions and hypotheses your marketers really want customers to entertain.
Funny, much of that same crap was going on back in the 18th century, when we Yanks decided to rebel for some mysterious reason...
Every protection against the government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and the original Bill of Rights was a reaction to abuses by the British Crown and Crown corporations. (Whereas the structure of the government as laid out in the body of the Constitution was both a reaction to the weaknesses of the Confederation that preceded it, and a deliberate effort to avoid the weaknesses of the Roman Republic, which the Founding Fathers were quite familiar with. Roman history and literature was a standard part of a good education in those days).
It's going to happen every few generations until you clean house and put a stiff leash on your government. Frankly, I think we need to do the same over here, too.
...or you could be being investigated for a Secret or Top Secret clearance, in which case you're actually considered more reliable than usual. (Assuming you get the clearance)
No personal belongings?? What alternate universe did these guys crash in from? Or do they not have an Equal Opportunity requirement over there? (I guarantee you will get NO professional employees who are female if they can't have a purse at their desk--and it looks really bad in the EEOC's eyes to have no female employees.)
Setting up impossible security regulations is as bad as setting up none, since they will be ignored/circumvented.
As someone who buys used cars because new cars are too damn expensive, the idea that a really reliable car devalues very quickly rather excites me. Means I can pick up a good car at a good price only a few years old...
I keep hearing 'EU servers' here, and to me that says GOA, who were pretty notorious among DAOC EU-players for bad customer service and *patches that lagged behind the U.S. version for months*.
*speculation* You may well be not seeing the same interface as the U.S. players.
Myself, I have no idea. I'm still playing DAOC, and am *definitely*, definitely doing a 'wait-and-see' before investing in another Mythic game.
But Blizzard are either too stupid to do this, or have deliberately made the PvP servers as "tard self-segregation servers" to keep the real idiots away from the grown ups so that the latter don't cancel.
Funny, that's what Mythic apparently did with Mordred, the DAOC PvP server. Unfortunately, with the collapsing game population, Mordred became unviable, and the Mordred griefers rejoined the general population--until they flocked off to AOC. 12-year-old gankers can't resist full-color gore plus T&A...
Well, Sheboygan could act like the city of New Orleans, which ignores lawsuit settlements against it by never budgeting the money, and claiming it can't afford to when sued again to actually pay up. Never mind that N'Awlins can somehow find the money for multi-million dollar contracts for the mayor's brother-in-law to do nothing...
Of course, as a citizen of the Third Imperium (and Emperor Strephon was not assassinated, that was an alternate timeline generated by time-travel experiments at Research Station Gamma), I am aware that (a) the Vilani Imperium was a hopelessly hidebound, bureaucratic mess that was falling over of it's own weight, and that (b) the Solomani were a bunch of racist nutjobs with an undeserved superiority complex who ran roughshod over their neighbors. History vindicates the balanced and rational government of the Third Imperium.
I'm afraid I'll have to thwart your attempts to alter our excellent future. We learned a lot about time travel from the Research Station Gamma debacle, you see...
I'm curious as to which country you call "your own country", as this is the Internet and you have never mentioned it.
If you are an American, you've already lost *your* cause, and if you haven't noticed that, it's because you live in one of the corners of the country that's still white majority. The most populous parts of the country... California, Texas, urban areas--you're already a minority. Get used to it, and try to remember we're all human beings here, or you will find yourself getting more isolated and bitter in your little dream-world of white supremacy as time goes on.
It's always a choice: rail at the world because it's not the way you want it, or learn to live with the world that *is*. Learn to appreciate people who sun-tan differently than you, or hate everyone who isn't just like you. Your choice.
I'm not surprised. GOA's handling of Mythic's previous MMORPG, "Dark Age of Camelot" was usually handled horribly, according to most European players I heard from.
I object to any SINGLE-PLAYER game that refuses to play without an internet connection. If I want to be dependent on an internet connection, I'll play online games or fire up one of the MMORPGs I play on.
However, if (non-hypothetical example), hurricane Gustav knocks out my cable and DSL for over a week, but NOT the electricity, and the parish is shut down with harsh curfew/"no leaving or you're locked out of the county" conditions, it's nice to be able to play some entertaining time-waster. I finished mulitple Cleopatra scenarios and got most of the way through a game of Civ IV as it was.:-)
Or, if I'm up at a relative's house in the country where they only have 28.8 dial-up and said relative's computer is the only box hooked to the modem (and being used by the relative), it's nice to be able to play my SINGLE-PLAYER games on the laptop now and then.
"Must phone-home" games are totally unacceptable to me. I take my laptop some funny places without internet at times.
Side-note: Pharoah/Cleopatra and the Civilization series are still my favorite games of all time. Cleo has a "must have CD in drive" check, but the CD is easy to copy, so I just keep an ISO image on my server and burn a new one when I misplace the old CD. (The original, PAID-FOR CD set is still in a box filed carefully away). I haven't bothered with a NO-Cd patch since it's so easy to burn a CD. It's a game that has aged well and given me *years* of entertainment--and it works on my laptop when I'm stuck in the boonies.
Agreed. When I'm debating whether to buy a technical book or just curious about a game or novel, I check the Amazon reviews--and read carefully the best-rated good and bad reviews. Why? Because the reasons someone dislikes something are often more useful than the reason someone likes something.
e.g. "I didn't like 'Furbish Grommets for Dummies' because it spent 3/4 of the book talking about furbishing and only squeezed in grommets in the last few chapters as a sketchy afterward'..." is a lot more informative than "SQUEEE! Wonderful book! It's the greatest thing on Grommets evar!!!11!!"
Sometimes the reasons someone dislikes a tech book are the very reasons I want to buy it: "Python in a Nutshell assumes you already know Python programming and is mostly a reference; I found it very hard to learn from this book" was useful, because I wanted a Python book that was a reference and didn't waste pages try to teach me Programming 101 all over again.
Most of the Amazon negative reviews of Spore are of the nature of "The DRM is a deal-killer; it only allows you 3 installs and here's some of the everyday things that used up my 3 installs in no time:...." which is VERY informative. Convinced me not to touch the game with a 10-ft pole. Also there were a few gameplay comments that convinced me the game had nothing to offer me that I wasn't already getting from my collection of Civilization I-IV. (I love that game! Bought every copy I own, and it has eaten serious lifespan over the years).
So Co$ is a modern mystery/gnostic cult. A big one.
Historically, mystery cults either become non-mysterious (Christianity) or die out (Isis-Osiris mystery cult, Dionysus mystery cult, Eleutherans, Mithrans, etc, etc.)
Oh, and charging big chunks of change and time to be indoctrinated into the mysteries and even find out what they are? Dates back to at least the ancient Greek philosophers-for-hire that Lucian of Samosata satirized.
I can't handle the sheer levels of stupid here. Depleted uranium is used in penetrators because it's the densest and heaviest metal around save for iridiuim, which is far too expensive.
It's not any more radioactive than a block of granite. Look up what "depleted" means--it's the NON-radioactive isotope of uranium that can't be used for fission, leftover after the useful U-235 has been extracted. The radioactive isotope U-235 is much too valuable as a fissionable to be throwing away as tank ammo.
Whining about DU penetrators is a perfect earmark that the whiner is utterly ignorant of physics and biology and believes any and all anti-American propaganda to come down the pipe.
Remember what happened the last time the botnets went on a recruiting spree? (Hint: Georgia).
I wonder who they are prepping to DDOS this time? Georgia again? U.S. infrastructure? Which country is Russian invading next--or are they just going to finish the job they started in Georgia?
You actually do this?? I'm sorry, complying with an unconstitutional interstate tax imposed by one state to out-of-state purchases should never be convenient.
I prefer it the way it is, so I can point & laugh at that part of my tax return form and ignore it.
Cars & Boats, you generally have to pay for because they have to be registered, and "coincidentally" the initial title tax is the same as the sales tax, if you don't have a record of paying it...
But why the hell would you comply with use taxes if you could evade them? They're Constitutionally-iffy and unenforceable and IMHO, immoral.
Actually, the high taxes on cigarettes in NY means that the NYC Mafia's biggest source of income is smuggling in and selling cigarettes without paying the taxes on them.
Yep, that's right: cigarette-smuggling is bigger business for organized crime than illegal drugs!
EQ is still out there. I play it again--oh, and they offer the 20 expansions for free download these days. That's how I got back into EQ (original, not II): SOE was running a "Welcome Back Legacy Players" special over the summer and let old players with lapsed accounts download everything and play free for a month. $0 up front, no giving a credit card, no need to buy the game... just a month to get hooked before you had to start paying.
They've improved the graphics a lot since I last played 3-4 years ago, and made quite a few little changes that make the game less painful at low levels. (Serpent's Spine == SOE's gift to newbies)
And after all these years, for all that it has shrunk from what it once was, EQ's population is still higher than DAOC's and they are running more servers. Still. (No, I and my 5-year-old characters in DAOC aren't bitter about that at all...)
Ladies & Gentlemen, we have a Net.Kook. Please step away from the kook and put those arguments down before someone gets hurt.
Dude, I hope you get out of your basement and learn that human beings are social animals that have to work together and compromise to survive. Because you sound about 2 hairs shy of going after the local building inspector with a sniper rifle just because you're told you have to have a building permit. Seriously. Your grossly insulting generalizations about the police told me that.
(Where the hell do they actually pay cops $50,000/year? No place I've lived, that's for sure. Also, those Crown Victorias that are the ubiquitous police cruiser aren't $50,000 luxury cars. Really.)
Slashdot Mirror
My first thought, which others have echoed, is that if your software appears on the market as v6.3, a sensible person might wonder why they'd never heard of versions 1.0 - 6.2? Was it that niche, that sucky, or an in-house-only product before? Is it a name change from some other product? If so, why--to escape a bad reputation, perhaps?
These are probably not the kind of questions and hypotheses your marketers really want customers to entertain.
Oh, hardly. They're just catching up with what the Soviets and the East Germans did to their citizens and visitors for DECADES.
Funny, much of that same crap was going on back in the 18th century, when we Yanks decided to rebel for some mysterious reason...
Every protection against the government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and the original Bill of Rights was a reaction to abuses by the British Crown and Crown corporations. (Whereas the structure of the government as laid out in the body of the Constitution was both a reaction to the weaknesses of the Confederation that preceded it, and a deliberate effort to avoid the weaknesses of the Roman Republic, which the Founding Fathers were quite familiar with. Roman history and literature was a standard part of a good education in those days).
It's going to happen every few generations until you clean house and put a stiff leash on your government. Frankly, I think we need to do the same over here, too.
...or you could be being investigated for a Secret or Top Secret clearance, in which case you're actually considered more reliable than usual. (Assuming you get the clearance)
No personal belongings?? What alternate universe did these guys crash in from? Or do they not have an Equal Opportunity requirement over there? (I guarantee you will get NO professional employees who are female if they can't have a purse at their desk--and it looks really bad in the EEOC's eyes to have no female employees.)
Setting up impossible security regulations is as bad as setting up none, since they will be ignored/circumvented.
As someone who buys used cars because new cars are too damn expensive, the idea that a really reliable car devalues very quickly rather excites me. Means I can pick up a good car at a good price only a few years old...
I keep hearing 'EU servers' here, and to me that says GOA, who were pretty notorious among DAOC EU-players for bad customer service and *patches that lagged behind the U.S. version for months*.
*speculation* You may well be not seeing the same interface as the U.S. players.
Myself, I have no idea. I'm still playing DAOC, and am *definitely*, definitely doing a 'wait-and-see' before investing in another Mythic game.
But Blizzard are either too stupid to do this, or have deliberately made the PvP servers as "tard self-segregation servers" to keep the real idiots away from the grown ups so that the latter don't cancel.
Funny, that's what Mythic apparently did with Mordred, the DAOC PvP server. Unfortunately, with the collapsing game population, Mordred became unviable, and the Mordred griefers rejoined the general population--until they flocked off to AOC. 12-year-old gankers can't resist full-color gore plus T&A...
Well, Sheboygan could act like the city of New Orleans, which ignores lawsuit settlements against it by never budgeting the money, and claiming it can't afford to when sued again to actually pay up. Never mind that N'Awlins can somehow find the money for multi-million dollar contracts for the mayor's brother-in-law to do nothing...
Very large animals reproduce more slowly and they are huge walking targets for hungry, intelligent pack hunters (aka humans).
Another Traveller player! Woot!
Of course, as a citizen of the Third Imperium (and Emperor Strephon was not assassinated, that was an alternate timeline generated by time-travel experiments at Research Station Gamma), I am aware that (a) the Vilani Imperium was a hopelessly hidebound, bureaucratic mess that was falling over of it's own weight, and that (b) the Solomani were a bunch of racist nutjobs with an undeserved superiority complex who ran roughshod over their neighbors. History vindicates the balanced and rational government of the Third Imperium.
I'm afraid I'll have to thwart your attempts to alter our excellent future. We learned a lot about time travel from the Research Station Gamma debacle, you see...
Oh look, a white supremacist! How cute.
I'm curious as to which country you call "your own country", as this is the Internet and you have never mentioned it.
If you are an American, you've already lost *your* cause, and if you haven't noticed that, it's because you live in one of the corners of the country that's still white majority. The most populous parts of the country... California, Texas, urban areas--you're already a minority. Get used to it, and try to remember we're all human beings here, or you will find yourself getting more isolated and bitter in your little dream-world of white supremacy as time goes on.
It's always a choice: rail at the world because it's not the way you want it, or learn to live with the world that *is*. Learn to appreciate people who sun-tan differently than you, or hate everyone who isn't just like you. Your choice.
I'm not surprised. GOA's handling of Mythic's previous MMORPG, "Dark Age of Camelot" was usually handled horribly, according to most European players I heard from.
I object to any SINGLE-PLAYER game that refuses to play without an internet connection. If I want to be dependent on an internet connection, I'll play online games or fire up one of the MMORPGs I play on.
However, if (non-hypothetical example), hurricane Gustav knocks out my cable and DSL for over a week, but NOT the electricity, and the parish is shut down with harsh curfew/"no leaving or you're locked out of the county" conditions, it's nice to be able to play some entertaining time-waster. I finished mulitple Cleopatra scenarios and got most of the way through a game of Civ IV as it was. :-)
Or, if I'm up at a relative's house in the country where they only have 28.8 dial-up and said relative's computer is the only box hooked to the modem (and being used by the relative), it's nice to be able to play my SINGLE-PLAYER games on the laptop now and then.
"Must phone-home" games are totally unacceptable to me. I take my laptop some funny places without internet at times.
Side-note: Pharoah/Cleopatra and the Civilization series are still my favorite games of all time. Cleo has a "must have CD in drive" check, but the CD is easy to copy, so I just keep an ISO image on my server and burn a new one when I misplace the old CD. (The original, PAID-FOR CD set is still in a box filed carefully away). I haven't bothered with a NO-Cd patch since it's so easy to burn a CD. It's a game that has aged well and given me *years* of entertainment--and it works on my laptop when I'm stuck in the boonies.
Why can't more games be like that?
Agreed. When I'm debating whether to buy a technical book or just curious about a game or novel, I check the Amazon reviews--and read carefully the best-rated good and bad reviews. Why? Because the reasons someone dislikes something are often more useful than the reason someone likes something.
e.g. "I didn't like 'Furbish Grommets for Dummies' because it spent 3/4 of the book talking about furbishing and only squeezed in grommets in the last few chapters as a sketchy afterward'..." is a lot more informative than "SQUEEE! Wonderful book! It's the greatest thing on Grommets evar!!!11!!"
Sometimes the reasons someone dislikes a tech book are the very reasons I want to buy it: "Python in a Nutshell assumes you already know Python programming and is mostly a reference; I found it very hard to learn from this book" was useful, because I wanted a Python book that was a reference and didn't waste pages try to teach me Programming 101 all over again.
Most of the Amazon negative reviews of Spore are of the nature of "The DRM is a deal-killer; it only allows you 3 installs and here's some of the everyday things that used up my 3 installs in no time:...." which is VERY informative. Convinced me not to touch the game with a 10-ft pole. Also there were a few gameplay comments that convinced me the game had nothing to offer me that I wasn't already getting from my collection of Civilization I-IV. (I love that game! Bought every copy I own, and it has eaten serious lifespan over the years).
So Co$ is a modern mystery/gnostic cult. A big one.
Historically, mystery cults either become non-mysterious (Christianity) or die out (Isis-Osiris mystery cult, Dionysus mystery cult, Eleutherans, Mithrans, etc, etc.)
Oh, and charging big chunks of change and time to be indoctrinated into the mysteries and even find out what they are? Dates back to at least the ancient Greek philosophers-for-hire that Lucian of Samosata satirized.
Scientology will not survive the long run.
I can't handle the sheer levels of stupid here. Depleted uranium is used in penetrators because it's the densest and heaviest metal around save for iridiuim, which is far too expensive.
It's not any more radioactive than a block of granite. Look up what "depleted" means--it's the NON-radioactive isotope of uranium that can't be used for fission, leftover after the useful U-235 has been extracted. The radioactive isotope U-235 is much too valuable as a fissionable to be throwing away as tank ammo.
Whining about DU penetrators is a perfect earmark that the whiner is utterly ignorant of physics and biology and believes any and all anti-American propaganda to come down the pipe.
On a side note I'm going to guess that you have recently read or are a huge fan of Ayn Rand, not that there is anything wrong with that
Nah, he's just repeating Scrooge's reply to a request for charity for the poor, from "A Christmas Carol".
Remember what happened the last time the botnets went on a recruiting spree? (Hint: Georgia).
I wonder who they are prepping to DDOS this time? Georgia again? U.S. infrastructure? Which country is Russian invading next--or are they just going to finish the job they started in Georgia?
You actually do this?? I'm sorry, complying with an unconstitutional interstate tax imposed by one state to out-of-state purchases should never be convenient.
I prefer it the way it is, so I can point & laugh at that part of my tax return form and ignore it.
Cars & Boats, you generally have to pay for because they have to be registered, and "coincidentally" the initial title tax is the same as the sales tax, if you don't have a record of paying it...
But why the hell would you comply with use taxes if you could evade them? They're Constitutionally-iffy and unenforceable and IMHO, immoral.
Actually, the high taxes on cigarettes in NY means that the NYC Mafia's biggest source of income is smuggling in and selling cigarettes without paying the taxes on them.
Yep, that's right: cigarette-smuggling is bigger business for organized crime than illegal drugs!
Louisiana has an option like that, too. It's amazing how many people never shop out-of-state, according to their tax returns.
EQ is still out there. I play it again--oh, and they offer the 20 expansions for free download these days. That's how I got back into EQ (original, not II): SOE was running a "Welcome Back Legacy Players" special over the summer and let old players with lapsed accounts download everything and play free for a month. $0 up front, no giving a credit card, no need to buy the game... just a month to get hooked before you had to start paying.
They've improved the graphics a lot since I last played 3-4 years ago, and made quite a few little changes that make the game less painful at low levels. (Serpent's Spine == SOE's gift to newbies)
And after all these years, for all that it has shrunk from what it once was, EQ's population is still higher than DAOC's and they are running more servers. Still. (No, I and my 5-year-old characters in DAOC aren't bitter about that at all...)
Ladies & Gentlemen, we have a Net.Kook. Please step away from the kook and put those arguments down before someone gets hurt.
Dude, I hope you get out of your basement and learn that human beings are social animals that have to work together and compromise to survive. Because you sound about 2 hairs shy of going after the local building inspector with a sniper rifle just because you're told you have to have a building permit. Seriously. Your grossly insulting generalizations about the police told me that.
(Where the hell do they actually pay cops $50,000/year? No place I've lived, that's for sure. Also, those Crown Victorias that are the ubiquitous police cruiser aren't $50,000 luxury cars. Really.)
My dear innocent:
WHO do you think owns & has owned the music industry for years? Where do you think the RIAA gets its thuggish tactics from?