Religion has always been the solution to questions science couldn't answer (see Greek mythology). Such as it is today, the problem is we have the answers, but a large number of people choose to remain ignorant because to them, what they think they known and what they believe is far more important than the truth.
No way!! I myself witnessed Apollo driving his great Sun-Chariot across the sky. Well, it was really far away, and too bright to see him.... or his horses.. but I saw the Sun, so it MUST have been him!
The best way to get a child to do something is to tell them they're not allowed to do whatever it is. (Especially if you don't give them a good (or any) reason.)
I'm not talking about using Reverse Psychology on them either. I prefer to educate them and let them decide for themselves what is best. If they're old enough to use a computer and Google/iPods, they are probably old enough to decide for themselves what they feel is a better product/service. Good 'ole Dad is just ushering in another reason for rebellion. Sometimes children need to be treated like children (because they act like children, of course). If you want them to act like they're older, you have to treat them like they're older, which means respecting them. Outlawing a competitor's website is ridiculous. If anything it should inspire him to want to create a better website so his children will WANT to use Microsoft's search instead of Google. I just think he's going about it in the wrong way.
Civillians in the United States may--and do--lawfully possess all of the above. No "collectors/dealers license" required, though you may have to have a tax stamp, and automatic weapons manufactured after May 1986 are generally not allowed.
A friend of my dad's was looking to buy a Sherman tank a while back. I don't know if it ever happened, but I do know he purchased an M60 a while back. He had to have something like a class 4 collectors license or something like that (I forget the name, but it was basically the most difficult collectors license to get, and took him several years to get it) and had to go through tons of procedures, checks, and forms. On a side note, he ended up losing it during a Normandy re-enactment by dropping it into the water where it was too heavy to retrieve.
Anyway, my point is, not everything that the military has can be owned by a private citizen, at least an average citizen. This has been the case for a long time, and will probably continue long after I'm gone.
...who fears government having sole access to technology that its own citizens would be jailed for?
You mean like tanks? Fully-automatic weapons? Explosive devices? Artillery? Jets? Bombers? I don't think any of those can be legally possessed by any normal private citizen (with the possible exception of a collectors/dealers license, which are apparently not so easy to get)
The government owning/using technology that the average person cannot use (re: wiretaps) is commonplace. The only problem is to get through the secrecy/red tape to make sure they are not abusing it. (which also is very subjective, I understand that.)
In the interactions I've had with some gold farmers (note the lack of the word 'Chinese' there) they have all basically been rude. As a mage, I've had several approach me and demand 20 stacks of water and food. Something like 'food20 water20 NOW!!!' When that happens I usually sit and watch for a while, just to see if they're a farmer, and they're usually pretty easy to spot. Some randomly invite me into a group and in the couple times I accepted (due to expecting a group invite from a guildmate around the same time) they spout some all caps dialog in party chat then disband. Always something I cannot understand. Probably 95% of these types of people I have encountered have Eastern-style names. I understand that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but there does seem to be a pattern. I just think that if they modified their social interactions just a bit, they'd not get as much flak from the rest of the WoW community.
Firefox itself doesn't mean anything to someone who's never heard of it. Now obviously calling it TheBetterWebBrowserThanIE v1.5 is stupid, but the word FireFox says nothing about web browsing. Its just commonplace now because its very well-known. Who's to say this new application won't have the same amount of name-fame? Its new, give it a chance.
Or, people can just look it up and research for themselves instead of sitting there trying to think what Ekiga is. O'Reilly did this with the pictures of animals on their covers, and (usually) managed to tie them somehow into the theme of the book. (Armadillo for security or firewalls or something like that, I can't remember exactly.) But at least they did explain it right in the book cover.
When was the last time you saw a commercial for Planetside on television?
About as often as I've seen commercials for World of Warcraft on television. Zero. Yet WoW has reached the 6 million subscriber mark. Word of mouth has to count for something, and apparently people just aren't telling their friends about Planetside.
Re:Only real answer is free character transfer
on
World of Queuecraft
·
· Score: 1
There's a simple way to fix any economic problems. Transferred characters can bring only soulbound items, crafting tools, and 1g per level. (ie, at level 60, you can bring 60 gold and all your soulbound stuff.) That's enough to get them a start, withoutsupporting farmers.
Most people would switch early in their careers, maybe shopping around, looking for a good server. Net economic effect: nearly zero. High-level characters wouldn't switch much, because they would lose a lot, but they probably wouldn't _anyway_.
Perhaps crafting supplies could be brought too, but it'd take only a few people transferring in, each with a bankful of dark iron bars, to knock the economy off kilter for awhile.
There's absolutely no reason why players should have to sacrifice anything to move to another server. I do not think, however, that they should be able to move multiple times, to any server, over and over. That's just as chaotic, if not moreso. As new servers come up, players on server x should have the option of moving to new server Y. Just as I have seen with Icecrown, sometimes whole guilds will move just so they can reign as the largest guild on the server (if only for a while). Guildless players with no strong social ties might move just to improve their lag problems.
Forcing higher level players to stay due to sacrificing gold and items is a pretty crappy thing. You say 'New players will shop around', but what I see is a bunch of pissed-off level 60s that are basically stuck on a lag-ridden server. Baaaaad idea. This is Blizzard's problem, and they need to fix it, and not "charge" the players in the process.
Now please keep in mind I'm not bitching out the lag/queue situation. As fast as WoW is growing, this is to be expected (at least by me), but now its Blizzard's turn to step up and do something about it. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, I don't really know. I hear that they are working on it, but we won't really know until something happens. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the execs at Blizzard were absolutely shocked at how fast the playerbase is growing. They should learn from their underestimation and grow their server base accordingly.
As far as the game economy, one has to realize that there is not a finite amount of money on a WoW realm. Killable beings have money (or trash loot that can be sold for money), and they spawn constantly. This correlates to inflation, but not at any set rate. The rate basically depends on how fast and how often these things spawn and how fast they are killed and looted. Allowing players to transfer their current monetary holdings will not disrupt the economy that much, as long as everyone is allowed to do it. The only possible exception is to pull the DeBeers tactic, where one rich person/group buys up EVERYTHING and then puts it for sale at a higher price. This only works when they control the whole or the majority of the market. In WoW, new items and treasure will continue to be found by others.
Just FYI, 6 million subscribers * $15/mo = $90 Million dollars a month. I understand not everyone is paying the full $15 due to bulk discounts and such, but thats also not taking into account the cost of the game itself. For $90M a month, there should be dozens of servers opening up each month. This cash cow needs to be milked.;-)
Hmmm... what degree of difference must exist between two works to render the second of them "not a copy in violation of copyright"? Can I publish a book that is one word different from Da Vinci code? What if I rename the characters?
I think you might be interested in my upcoming book, 'The De Vinci Code'. Its about this... uh... woman, who is called to a muse...err art gallery, where she finds an old man... err woman dead with stuff written on the floor in bloo... err saliva...
I can download the latest release of Slackware from Slackware.org for absolutely no cost (beyond normal ISP costs, etc) yet I can stroll into Microcenter and find a CD set of Slackware, (usually 1-2 versions behind) for anywhere from $10 to $20. This is the same principle. I'd be paying Microcenter (who in turn would pay Walnut Creek CDRom, the publisher) for the actual media, the label, the packaging (CD Case) and the nice little paper insert. It is a convienence charge, as well as an option for people who don't have the ability to burn their own CDs. Granted burning a CD isn't required for Firefox, but in general it's the same principle.
You could do the same with RedHat a while back. You purchase their 'box' for $80 or so, and you get the media, manuals, a subscription to the RedHat Network update site (think Windows Update) and most importantly to my manager at the time, customer support. I could personally get on their site and download the ISOs for free, and download all the RPM updates for free, yet I just had to download and install them manually. Its a convienence charge.
One thing that wasn't mentioned yet is the fact that travel doesn't start out being easy in WoW. The only flight point you know by default is the one of the city you start out in. The rest have to be found before you can use them. Meaning you have to hoof it, or know a warlock with a couple of friends. In my guild of over 300 characters, that almost never happens, people usually just make the trek themselves while others are busy raiding MC or UBRS or whatever. Certain flight-point journeys are awful. (I managed to make it all the way through Felwood with a level 36 hunter without dying, but just barely) but others aren't so bad. Then once you get there, its not exactly a free lunch. Players with 5000 gold aren't affected by it, but last night I also had to sell some bandages to make up enough gold to fly somewhere. It *does* cost money, and if you use it a lot, those 7 silver fees add up. Also, there is a time factor involved. Granted its not as bad as walking, but it is real world time that you spend in the air, and time means a lot to the casual gamer. Its just not an instant teleportation.
In my opinion, this can be summed up by the common school lesson, where you learn how to do it the hard way first, then you can do it the easy way. Walk there, click the NPC with the green !, then fly back to wherever you came from knowing that you made an important journey (except to Stonetalon Mountains, whoever goes there!);-)
But I'm sure all of us who played it remember being fuzzed and letting your computer run for hours on end, hoping you would hop a train for somewhere you left crystals growing...just waiting to hear that ZAPPO sound...
Yup... I'd do this over dinner, homework, all the usual things. I'd sometimes turn my sound way up so I could hear it in the other room when someone got un-fuzzed. I'd run in there, usually only to see the last black hat turn into a fuzzie, then go back to my homework.
I think that was my first instance of stress in any video game. Seeing the train that I'm on pull into the city, only to hear that blip blip sound, and see fuzzies come out of the bottom part of the screen. Of course I had no ticket and couldn't get back on the train, so I had to try to dodge them, and we both know how well that worked. Bastids take half your crystals per hit.
Before seeking out the fuzzbomb I would always find some little 1-room city, push everyone in it on a train, then use the city as a crystal farming city and let it grow uncontrollably. I'd keep others out as best I could, and once I got my 100 crystals I'd leave more there to grow so I could come back if I was "on the run" with fuzzies behind me. What a great game.
Click on the link I posted before the quote... Lots more of interesting tidbits about why this movie would never happen in real life.
Man you guys get a 'Poor' in the Recognizing [Bad] humor arena.. Must people at least attempting to be funny insert the [Attempt at humor] tag in their posts? Damn.
It's pretty damn cold where I am right now, I can't say I'm too concerned about global warming at the moment. More like not getting frostbite for my 12-minute walk from my car to work.
I for one welcome our new global-warming overlords!
Out of interest - and waaaay offtopic now - is there a relationship between St John (or the Hospitaliers) and Denmark, whose national flag is also a white cross (albiet offset) on red background?
I know all about St. John. My mom has purchased his 'Worts' for years.
I don't know how many times I've seen players sitting in the empty (ie no trainers/vendors, etc) rooms/houses in major cities just chatting about whatever. For all I know, one of them could have been an interview (if it was, it would have been streaking time!) for a job, guild, whatever.
I can see this happening, but I doubt it will ever really take off. I mean how serious could a job interview be when you have a naked female night elf run in and start dancing seductively? 'Whaaa.... err.... oooh... yer hired, now leave me.'
There's an officer's barracks for the BG folks, how long until there is a skyscraper-equivalent building where you can rent out conference rooms with speakerphones (trying to get those Southshore folks to cut a deal on some wool and turtle meat) for their big board meetings.
I guess I won't be playing Halo 2. I have absolutely no other reason to upgrade from XP Pro. If they really want people who want to play Halo 2 to upgrade, they should give Vista purchasers a free copy of Halo 2. That'd probably stoke the Vista fire for them, sales-wise.
I have a t-shirt that reads 'Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.' I thought of that shirt while reading this article. When the whole user-controlled wikipedia thing first came out, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Then I hear stories about the whole politicians thing, and I remember the shirt again.
Unfortunately what will happen is that people will keep altering information (and probably not just political info) until the information that is available for any interesting topic will be worthless. Someone who has a bad experience with product X just might go to that site and change everything to tell about how much it sucks, or whatever.
I really like the idea of user-controlled information, especially when the 'users' are pretty much everyone. There are just too many stupid and/or immature people in this world to make it stick. IMO this is a sad day for the internet.
While I don't have a problem with adult content in games, I think they should (in general) be honest about the content of their games. I won't get into whether or not Rockstar should have reported the code (playable or not, blah blah) but if the game companies are honest and forthcoming about the content of their games, then the current ESRB ratings system should work just fine.
People are blowing the whole thing out proportion by questioning the system based on one event of one company. Give it a chance to work for a couple years (or 5, or 10) and see how it goes after that. This is the whole FCC/Janet Jackson overreaction all over again. Guess what folks, women have breasts, its called anatomy. Educate the children instead of sheltering them from nudity, so they're not fanatics and obsessing about breasts when they're adolescents. Damn.
Slashdot Mirror
Religion has always been the solution to questions science couldn't answer (see Greek mythology). Such as it is today, the problem is we have the answers, but a large number of people choose to remain ignorant because to them, what they think they known and what they believe is far more important than the truth.
No way!! I myself witnessed Apollo driving his great Sun-Chariot across the sky. Well, it was really far away, and too bright to see him.... or his horses.. but I saw the Sun, so it MUST have been him!
The best way to get a child to do something is to tell them they're not allowed to do whatever it is. (Especially if you don't give them a good (or any) reason.)
I'm not talking about using Reverse Psychology on them either. I prefer to educate them and let them decide for themselves what is best. If they're old enough to use a computer and Google/iPods, they are probably old enough to decide for themselves what they feel is a better product/service. Good 'ole Dad is just ushering in another reason for rebellion. Sometimes children need to be treated like children (because they act like children, of course). If you want them to act like they're older, you have to treat them like they're older, which means respecting them. Outlawing a competitor's website is ridiculous. If anything it should inspire him to want to create a better website so his children will WANT to use Microsoft's search instead of Google. I just think he's going about it in the wrong way.
Civillians in the United States may--and do--lawfully possess all of the above. No "collectors/dealers license" required, though you may have to have a tax stamp, and automatic weapons manufactured after May 1986 are generally not allowed.
A friend of my dad's was looking to buy a Sherman tank a while back. I don't know if it ever happened, but I do know he purchased an M60 a while back. He had to have something like a class 4 collectors license or something like that (I forget the name, but it was basically the most difficult collectors license to get, and took him several years to get it) and had to go through tons of procedures, checks, and forms. On a side note, he ended up losing it during a Normandy re-enactment by dropping it into the water where it was too heavy to retrieve.
Anyway, my point is, not everything that the military has can be owned by a private citizen, at least an average citizen. This has been the case for a long time, and will probably continue long after I'm gone.
By the way, love your sig, I have to agree.
...who fears government having sole access to technology that its own citizens would be jailed for?
You mean like tanks? Fully-automatic weapons? Explosive devices? Artillery? Jets? Bombers? I don't think any of those can be legally possessed by any normal private citizen (with the possible exception of a collectors/dealers license, which are apparently not so easy to get)
The government owning/using technology that the average person cannot use (re: wiretaps) is commonplace. The only problem is to get through the secrecy/red tape to make sure they are not abusing it. (which also is very subjective, I understand that.)
In the interactions I've had with some gold farmers (note the lack of the word 'Chinese' there) they have all basically been rude. As a mage, I've had several approach me and demand 20 stacks of water and food. Something like 'food20 water20 NOW!!!' When that happens I usually sit and watch for a while, just to see if they're a farmer, and they're usually pretty easy to spot. Some randomly invite me into a group and in the couple times I accepted (due to expecting a group invite from a guildmate around the same time) they spout some all caps dialog in party chat then disband. Always something I cannot understand. Probably 95% of these types of people I have encountered have Eastern-style names. I understand that doesn't necessarily mean anything, but there does seem to be a pattern. I just think that if they modified their social interactions just a bit, they'd not get as much flak from the rest of the WoW community.
e.g. firefox is shown as webbrowser etc.
Firefox itself doesn't mean anything to someone who's never heard of it. Now obviously calling it TheBetterWebBrowserThanIE v1.5 is stupid, but the word FireFox says nothing about web browsing. Its just commonplace now because its very well-known. Who's to say this new application won't have the same amount of name-fame? Its new, give it a chance.
Or, people can just look it up and research for themselves instead of sitting there trying to think what Ekiga is. O'Reilly did this with the pictures of animals on their covers, and (usually) managed to tie them somehow into the theme of the book. (Armadillo for security or firewalls or something like that, I can't remember exactly.) But at least they did explain it right in the book cover.
When was the last time you saw a commercial for Planetside on television?
About as often as I've seen commercials for World of Warcraft on television. Zero. Yet WoW has reached the 6 million subscriber mark.
Word of mouth has to count for something, and apparently people just aren't telling their friends about Planetside.
There's a simple way to fix any economic problems. Transferred characters can bring only soulbound items, crafting tools, and 1g per level. (ie, at level 60, you can bring 60 gold and all your soulbound stuff.) That's enough to get them a start, withoutsupporting farmers.
;-)
Most people would switch early in their careers, maybe shopping around, looking for a good server. Net economic effect: nearly zero. High-level characters wouldn't switch much, because they would lose a lot, but they probably wouldn't _anyway_.
Perhaps crafting supplies could be brought too, but it'd take only a few people transferring in, each with a bankful of dark iron bars, to knock the economy off kilter for awhile.
There's absolutely no reason why players should have to sacrifice anything to move to another server. I do not think, however, that they should be able to move multiple times, to any server, over and over. That's just as chaotic, if not moreso. As new servers come up, players on server x should have the option of moving to new server Y. Just as I have seen with Icecrown, sometimes whole guilds will move just so they can reign as the largest guild on the server (if only for a while). Guildless players with no strong social ties might move just to improve their lag problems.
Forcing higher level players to stay due to sacrificing gold and items is a pretty crappy thing. You say 'New players will shop around', but what I see is a bunch of pissed-off level 60s that are basically stuck on a lag-ridden server. Baaaaad idea. This is Blizzard's problem, and they need to fix it, and not "charge" the players in the process.
Now please keep in mind I'm not bitching out the lag/queue situation. As fast as WoW is growing, this is to be expected (at least by me), but now its Blizzard's turn to step up and do something about it. Maybe they are, maybe they aren't, I don't really know. I hear that they are working on it, but we won't really know until something happens. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the execs at Blizzard were absolutely shocked at how fast the playerbase is growing. They should learn from their underestimation and grow their server base accordingly.
As far as the game economy, one has to realize that there is not a finite amount of money on a WoW realm. Killable beings have money (or trash loot that can be sold for money), and they spawn constantly. This correlates to inflation, but not at any set rate. The rate basically depends on how fast and how often these things spawn and how fast they are killed and looted. Allowing players to transfer their current monetary holdings will not disrupt the economy that much, as long as everyone is allowed to do it. The only possible exception is to pull the DeBeers tactic, where one rich person/group buys up EVERYTHING and then puts it for sale at a higher price. This only works when they control the whole or the majority of the market. In WoW, new items and treasure will continue to be found by others.
Just FYI, 6 million subscribers * $15/mo = $90 Million dollars a month. I understand not everyone is paying the full $15 due to bulk discounts and such, but thats also not taking into account the cost of the game itself. For $90M a month, there should be dozens of servers opening up each month. This cash cow needs to be milked.
Hmmm... what degree of difference must exist between two works to render the second of them "not a copy in violation of copyright"? Can I publish a book that is one word different from Da Vinci code? What if I rename the characters?
I think you might be interested in my upcoming book, 'The De Vinci Code'.
Its about this... uh... woman, who is called to a muse...err art gallery, where she finds an old man... err woman dead with stuff written on the floor in bloo... err saliva...
It's an original work!
I can download the latest release of Slackware from Slackware.org for absolutely no cost (beyond normal ISP costs, etc) yet I can stroll into Microcenter and find a CD set of Slackware, (usually 1-2 versions behind) for anywhere from $10 to $20. This is the same principle. I'd be paying Microcenter (who in turn would pay Walnut Creek CDRom, the publisher) for the actual media, the label, the packaging (CD Case) and the nice little paper insert. It is a convienence charge, as well as an option for people who don't have the ability to burn their own CDs. Granted burning a CD isn't required for Firefox, but in general it's the same principle.
You could do the same with RedHat a while back. You purchase their 'box' for $80 or so, and you get the media, manuals, a subscription to the RedHat Network update site (think Windows Update) and most importantly to my manager at the time, customer support. I could personally get on their site and download the ISOs for free, and download all the RPM updates for free, yet I just had to download and install them manually. Its a convienence charge.
One thing that wasn't mentioned yet is the fact that travel doesn't start out being easy in WoW. The only flight point you know by default is the one of the city you start out in. The rest have to be found before you can use them. Meaning you have to hoof it, or know a warlock with a couple of friends. In my guild of over 300 characters, that almost never happens, people usually just make the trek themselves while others are busy raiding MC or UBRS or whatever. Certain flight-point journeys are awful. (I managed to make it all the way through Felwood with a level 36 hunter without dying, but just barely) but others aren't so bad. Then once you get there, its not exactly a free lunch. Players with 5000 gold aren't affected by it, but last night I also had to sell some bandages to make up enough gold to fly somewhere. It *does* cost money, and if you use it a lot, those 7 silver fees add up. Also, there is a time factor involved. Granted its not as bad as walking, but it is real world time that you spend in the air, and time means a lot to the casual gamer. Its just not an instant teleportation.
;-)
In my opinion, this can be summed up by the common school lesson, where you learn how to do it the hard way first, then you can do it the easy way. Walk there, click the NPC with the green !, then fly back to wherever you came from knowing that you made an important journey (except to Stonetalon Mountains, whoever goes there!)
But I'm sure all of us who played it remember being fuzzed and letting your computer run for hours on end, hoping you would hop a train for somewhere you left crystals growing...just waiting to hear that ZAPPO sound...
Yup... I'd do this over dinner, homework, all the usual things. I'd sometimes turn my sound way up so I could hear it in the other room when someone got un-fuzzed. I'd run in there, usually only to see the last black hat turn into a fuzzie, then go back to my homework.
OMFG I can't believe someone else in the entire world actually remembers Agent USA too...
I can still hear the music in my head on that wonderful bloop sound system:
Doo doo doodoodoodoo doodoodoo doodoodoo, doo doo doodoodooDOO...doo doodoo
blipblipblipblip blip blip blipblipblipblip!
I think that was my first instance of stress in any video game. Seeing the train that I'm on pull into the city, only to hear that blip blip sound, and see fuzzies come out of the bottom part of the screen. Of course I had no ticket and couldn't get back on the train, so I had to try to dodge them, and we both know how well that worked. Bastids take half your crystals per hit.
Before seeking out the fuzzbomb I would always find some little 1-room city, push everyone in it on a train, then use the city as a crystal farming city and let it grow uncontrollably. I'd keep others out as best I could, and once I got my 100 crystals I'd leave more there to grow so I could come back if I was "on the run" with fuzzies behind me. What a great game.
M.U.L.E. was one of my favorite C64 games. I used to play that for hours and hours. Other favorites of mine:
Impossible Mission
Who Dares Win 2
Raid over Moscow
Raid on Bungeling Bay
Countdown to Shutdown
Armor Alley (for PC)
Pirates! (original C64 version)
Airborne Ranger
Montezum'a Revenge
Pharoh's Curse
Sword of Fargoal
Ghostbusters
Agent USA
Jumpman
Realm of Impossibility
Echelon
Oh now I want to dig the old C64 out and play!
Only 45 more stacks of Runecloth and the Net will then be of 'Friendly' faction to me!!
Click on the link I posted before the quote... Lots more of interesting tidbits about why this movie would never happen in real life.
Man you guys get a 'Poor' in the Recognizing [Bad] humor arena..
Must people at least attempting to be funny insert the [Attempt at humor] tag in their posts? Damn.
...from weather 'proxies' such as tree rings, ice cores, and seashells...
I'm no ice core expert, but I always figured ice cores came in 3 different varieties... Cold, Damn cold, and F'in cold.
Maybe I need to watch The Day After Tomorrow again.
It's pretty damn cold where I am right now, I can't say I'm too concerned about global warming at the moment. More like not getting frostbite for my 12-minute walk from my car to work.
I for one welcome our new global-warming overlords!
Never said it wasn't... it was the quote from the movie. But thanks for the info.
Ah! Now it makes sense - thanks for that.
Out of interest - and waaaay offtopic now - is there a relationship between St John (or the Hospitaliers) and Denmark, whose national flag is also a white cross (albiet offset) on red background?
I know all about St. John. My mom has purchased his 'Worts' for years.
I don't know how many times I've seen players sitting in the empty (ie no trainers/vendors, etc) rooms/houses in major cities just chatting about whatever. For all I know, one of them could have been an interview (if it was, it would have been streaking time!) for a job, guild, whatever.
I can see this happening, but I doubt it will ever really take off. I mean how serious could a job interview be when you have a naked female night elf run in and start dancing seductively? 'Whaaa.... err.... oooh... yer hired, now leave me.'
There's an officer's barracks for the BG folks, how long until there is a skyscraper-equivalent building where you can rent out conference rooms with speakerphones (trying to get those Southshore folks to cut a deal on some wool and turtle meat) for their big board meetings.
I guess I won't be playing Halo 2. I have absolutely no other reason to upgrade from XP Pro. If they really want people who want to play Halo 2 to upgrade, they should give Vista purchasers a free copy of Halo 2. That'd probably stoke the Vista fire for them, sales-wise.
I have a t-shirt that reads 'Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.' I thought of that shirt while reading this article. When the whole user-controlled wikipedia thing first came out, I thought it was a fantastic idea. Then I hear stories about the whole politicians thing, and I remember the shirt again.
Unfortunately what will happen is that people will keep altering information (and probably not just political info) until the information that is available for any interesting topic will be worthless. Someone who has a bad experience with product X just might go to that site and change everything to tell about how much it sucks, or whatever.
I really like the idea of user-controlled information, especially when the 'users' are pretty much everyone. There are just too many stupid and/or immature people in this world to make it stick. IMO this is a sad day for the internet.
Part of the breakthrough is a way for humans to view data as 3D holographic images
Did any of you see the original Jurassic Park?
"It's a Unix system!"
The ratings system isn't broken.
While I don't have a problem with adult content in games, I think they should (in general) be honest about the content of their games. I won't get into whether or not Rockstar should have reported the code (playable or not, blah blah) but if the game companies are honest and forthcoming about the content of their games, then the current ESRB ratings system should work just fine.
People are blowing the whole thing out proportion by questioning the system based on one event of one company. Give it a chance to work for a couple years (or 5, or 10) and see how it goes after that. This is the whole FCC/Janet Jackson overreaction all over again. Guess what folks, women have breasts, its called anatomy. Educate the children instead of sheltering them from nudity, so they're not fanatics and obsessing about breasts when they're adolescents. Damn.