And the monster closets. They've GOT to be able to come up with a better way to introduce new enemies into a room than that bullshit. Maybe, *maybe* it'll startle me when it opens, but then when I've blown away whatever was inside, I'm left standing there like, "WTF is *that* room for?"
As you know, Serious Sam: TFE and Serious Sam: TSE is known to to this sort of stuff - monsters that spawn from "closets" or on item pickups. In some cases, it's obvious that it's going to be a trap. However, you need to spring some of them to obtain all of the secrets.
But that's half the fun. Another thing special with Serious Sam is that you cannot predict when other players are going to spring these traps, especially ones that are experimenting by firing a rocket down a mouse hole. (All other players on the server typed in "WTF" in the chat bar from the resulting suprise.)
You'll have to blame Slashdot's developers for making that joke.
For some reason, if you try to read a story that just recently appeared on the front page, Slashdot simply gives an error message similar to "Nothing to see here. Move along." I suspect that is a syncronization issue, where the story is only half-posted.
Anybody who goes on and on about how a mouse is the optimal controller for first-person shooters and real-time war sims is also a PC fan if not a fanboy.
Actually, they're incorrect. The optimal controller is a Light gun as it allows for more accurrate snap-shots on targets. Light guns are available for PCs (but haven't been in common circulation, especially for IBM PCs.)
Of course, the best lightgun is the Nintendo Zapper. Unless there's targets on the screen that you must not shoot, you've got an instant superweapon by aiming at a lightbulb.
Game reviews do matter - its called word of mouth. Terms such as "clickfest", "pushover" and "tedious" are negative aspects of a game that you should avoid.
If you want a list of things that a good review should look for, all you have to do is find lists of Cliches and reviews that make note of them. There are similar lists for strategy and action games - but common components among all such lists involve being railroaded through events outside of the players control (e.g. is captured by 3 units after taking out 2000 soldiers), or events that are obvious enough to be traps but the player is forced to go through them to advance the plot.
I recently pulled out my Windows 98 Celeron 300A with 128MB PC100 RAM, and 5400rpm 6GB drive, booted it up, and cracked open Netscape 4. You know what I found? Not much.
Later in your posting, you mentioned "simple" web browsing. One thing that qualifies as "simple" is opening up a Slashdot page or some other generic site, and clicking on one of the story links - in some cases, you may naturally open multiple windows to queue up discussions in the background.
There are two potential problems with the configuration: - Windows 98 has a system-wide limit of 65535 window handles. If you don't notice having Slashdot moderation access, your system will encounter problems. AFAIK, no Windows-based browser is immune unless you crossgrade to Windows NT. - Netscape 4 has a rendering bug that appears to be related to tables - some cascaded table patterns can freeze the browser for ~20 seconds. There's no consistant duration for the delay, it is determined by page complexity and size.
This wasn't a problem years ago, but as systems, bandwidth, and pages get bigger...
A simple reinstall of the OS -- as long as the disk is still healthy -- can stretch out the lifespan of any old machine, as long as you stick with the software of time, which isn't that much different than what Aunt June uses today.
IIRC, MS-DOS doesn't require reinstalls to stretch out lifespans, since changes to the OS are manually performed by the user in two easily-found files. Viruses can still enter, by modifing EXE files and boot sectors.
The only issues with more-advanced operating systems is that there is more startup points and config files. Windows spreads startup files in several places: The startup folder, the registry, the service listing, and device drivers. MacOS 9 uses a Control Panel that contains extensions run on startup, while Unicies use various config files in/etc/rc.d/
However, an operating system can last forever when you keep all startup-files clean alongside any related DLL files.
If your client does not accept incoming external connections and share torrents (if your client is not on an externally accessible device and you don't have port forwarding configured), all other peers will assign you a priority lower than every other peer that is sharing.
Any client that relies on the fact that other peers cannot accept inbound connections is broken. A better design is based on the upload/download ratio. As long as the peer is capable of uploading (even if it is a seeder that makes outbound connections to peers), then it is still a good peer.
The only reason firewalled peers are slower is because they are incapable of connecting to other firewalled peers. This cuts down on the potential bandwidth available and therefore cuts down on download speed.
This ment that I got 80% on my assignments and pnly 40% on my exams.
According to your logic, It would be obivous that I was a cheater, instead of someone that thinks before they act.
That's not obvious enough, and also doesn't give enough information to determine whether cheating is applicable. Since the teacher would be correcting the test anyway, he can see that you have properly made an attempt to write the essay but couldn't complete the task within the time limit.
Just because something raises flags does not mean that something is true. For my logic to reach that conclusio, I would have to say that a test/assignment mark disparity is guarenteed to detect cheaters.
BTW, the college courses that I attended require at least 50% on both tests and assignments. This means you need to perform well both with and without pressure.
No, it proves that you haven't been convicted. When a criminal record check brings up a positive, there is that rare case where it is a wrongful conviction
While most wrongful convictions pertain to murders, there are ones that apply to tresspass, theft and other "minor" crimes. Likewise, wrongful convictions can arise from the refusal to acknowledge self-defence (i.e. what occurrs under most American High School's "Zero-Tolerance" policy.)
2) If they tell you to do something illigal they don't want it comming back to them in the terms of "You hired a known felon..."
If they tell you to do something illegal, it will come back to them as "You told him to do something illegal." (And no, the illegal act was not performed.)
The government has security screening which permits criminals to obtain jobs that require security clearances. In this page, Section 204.3.B.k, you see instructions for criminal convictions that state that the application will be delayed if incorrectly filled (and potentially denied.)
The Student of Fortune website you linked to is the exact reason why colleges and universities also pair tests alongside assignments. While you can cheat on assignments, it requires different cheating skills to skip through tests. It will raise some flags if you pass assignments with flying colours but consistantly fail tests.
Even so, you cannot cheat on an actual work placement (or if you do, it probably doesn't count as cheating.) Sooner or later, cheaters that are incapable of performing in their field of expertise will be filtered out.
The good teachers are already capable of detecting cheaters, through various tell-tale signs. I'm not familiar with them offhand, but it involves checking writing patterns made by the student.
If she can't tell the difference between bankofamerica.com and bank0famerica.com
I might be able to tell the difference right away. However, a ransom user might not notice a problem between BankOfAmerica.com and Bank0fAmerica.com, or bankof11ama.com and bankofllama.com - especially with certain default fonts that don't give much of a distinction between the characters in question.
While the fixed-pitch font in Slashdot's textbox works fine, as does the address bar, it's easily trivial to display the URL in a smaller-than-normal font that is difficult to distinguish.
It's not just a question of making the text bigger, you then have to check that it all fits on screen through the entire game.
That's generally why you have multi-page notes. If the Final Fantasy series can handle it, why can't Dead Rising?
In the rare event that multi-pages would break something, it's trivial to create a magnifying glass - even Microsoft made one with the stock install of WXP. You just need an easy-to-remember command for the users (e.g. holding down L+Z and playing with the analogue stick). Unless the actual pixels themselves are incapable of producing readable text regardless of position, you don't even have to do double rendering (and can stick with Blitting instead.)
You kind of defeated your own argument there- PC games go the extra mile to make sure that more PCs can run the game by reducing quality, but on a console 100% of the machines run the game at maximum quality at all times.
And this is exactly what can cause problems with Consoles. When too many objects appear on the screen at once, the game slows down and has to process one frame-worth of gameplay over two display frames.
Games are affected by this effect to varying degrees - Mega Man for the NES is one of them, as the developerd decided to just grit their teeth with the lag. Other games can avoid the lag by reducing the number of objects that can appear at once on the screen, but it is still a side effect of that lag.
Yes, PC games are affected by this as well. Quake was one of them, where if you had a mod that took too many assembler instructions to complete a task, the game ends and kicks you to the console (along with a stack trace.)
I know the next page, new ad, is annoying, but to be fair there were only 4 pages.
3 and a half-pages actually. It's almost like the writer of that article can't get enough filler for the final page.
If there isn't enough text per page or if it looks obvious that there's no effort in putting in reasonable page breaks, then the page seperation is an annoyance rather than a boon. At the very least, the author could have covered it up by splitting the 10 reasons across the final two pages.
But this is attacking the article because of its medium - I'd rather attack it on content (which is done several times over by now.)
Right now, I'm looking for something that has: dial-up support, no update/anti-virus/etc pop-ups, and no software 'update' downloads, support for PDFs, Flash, Javascript, and other features necessary to accommodate more modern websites.
What you want to get is a minimal PC and install either Firefox, Opera or early versions of Netscape. Then, you configure the browsers to load minimal information (i.e. text only) and retrieves the extras only when required (i.e. clicking on an "Images" button.)
The greatest reason why modern sites load slowly on Dial-up is because of the large quantity of images - cutting them out (especially the advertisements) significantly speeds up loading time.
Any updates (other than the initial download of Flash and Java) that are available for your system are not needed to be installed as long as you keep a firewall enabled, and don't blindingly auto-execute any files from the web.
If your vendor is reputable, your data will be destroyed from the disks you send back...
Quick question - how does the vendor reliably receive the hard drives? Here's a list of possibilities (which may or may not be implemented):
- UPS, Fedex, DHL or other freight companies - Postal mail (regular service) - Postal mail, registered. - Hand delivery by customer or personal pickup by vendor.
In the first two options, there are chances of freight issues where the packages get lost or stolen. In the third option, the package is tagged as requiring special attention, and thus may convince some people that there may be valuable data on the drives heading to Maxtor or the likes. This is an issue common to all companies, no matter how much of a good reputation they may have.
The fourth option is generally a bit expensive, and usually defeats the purpose of returning the product for warrenty.
Seriously, if you are worried about the vendor not erasing data for you, you're better off just slagging the drive and forgetting about the warrenty. It's much easier than trying to find a similar circuit board and swapping it with the dead board (which still isn't guarenteed to work).
Somehow, I find it really hard to believe that Command & Conquer: Renegade (#79) outsold Command & Conquer: Generals (not on their list at all)...
It may be suprising at first, but when you do research between those two games, it makes sense.
For reference: - C&C, C&C:RA were initially released, considered popular (there was almost nothing else.) - C&C:TS gets released. It was behind the times, but is good enough. - C&C:RA2 gets released. It is suprisingly popular, and surpasses TS. It fixes some mistakes - however, some players like myself notice that the AI is extremely weak. - C&C:Renegade gets released. (I think this is the correct order, but it's close enough.) Whee, online first person shooter, with teamplay support (although the defences are a bit overpowered in my opinion, and the other buildings are a bit too easily destroyed by a single person - and perhaps too quickly repairable.) - By now, you've probably heard of Starcraft, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III, Warzone 2100, Age of Empires II, Earth 2150, and/or plenty of other games that have their own advantages and flaws. - C&C:Generals gets released. Some players notice that flaws that were originally fixed in RA2 resurfaced in Generals. (e.g. If you order your troops to attack an enemy outpost and it gets destroyed, they stop dead in their tracks in a manner that would cause real-life solders to be court-martialled - it is expected that solders keep walking from the doorstep of the barracks to a "reasonable" location near the field-of-battle, as what happens in RA2.) - As a side note, C&C:Generals got banned in China. The result was that some users agree that the voice acting seems a little "racist", even if it is not the case. Regardless of which, the plot was a bit more flat thatn RA2.
After the performance of RA2/YR, I felt that I shouldn't go for Generals because of it's weak implementation - and comments posted after the release of Generals confirmed my decision. While it does have good potential, it couldn't possibly be reached without a broadband connection (which I only recently obtained.)
What, have they forgotten how to create a DIN-5 to Sub-D9 cable? I'm sure google has several websites with the schematic of the machine (also available in the original user's manual), it shouldn't be THAT hard to construct an asynchronous serial cable.
I'm not sure that's the issue. While it may be a problem in the short term because of the unuaual computer type, this is because of procurement of the materials required to transfer the data. You have to buy the cable, review the specs, and test the cable to make sure that it is working - and you'll need a spare 5 1/4" to make sure that it works without risking the chance of accidently writing to the evidence.
Now, through an emulator, it is true that you get an "image". However, the standard d64 image doesn't contain anything fancy - for example, it does not contain copy-protection information found in some games. While such advanced information is unlikely to be found in the disks for evidence, investigators still need to be prepared for anything non-standard. (The most common trick would be Track-36ing semi-sensitive data - investigators aren't fooled if they know what to look for. Anything else is probably difficult to reproduce on home systems.) Because of this, they need to pour over technical manuals for the C64, find ways of hiding important data, and get equipment designed to read 5 1/4" floppies (other than the 1541 disk drive.)
Plus, images don't store erased data - computer forensics sometimes needs to "unerase" information on the disk. At least they are good enough for consumer-grade data transfers where you only need to retrieve files rather than do forensic work.
It's not that I'm so weak I can't pick up 44 pounds, or so clumsy I can't walk with a very wide awkward box in my arms. It's that I shouldn't have to! Besides the huge liability risk, it's just plain rude.
If you feel offended by the lack of customer service in pre-sales, you can most easily make your point known by backing off the sale at the last moment (if you have not developed that pattern already). It has the same effect as creating a written complaint, since a large box left sitting on the checkout counter is conspicuous that would have to be moved - back to the origin or stowed behind a desk.
And don't try to lay the blame on me!
Saying that companies prefer to have a paper trail does not lay the blame on the customer. It means that companies want to have a paper trail in the rare event that things get as ugly as the example that I provided.
The women in the story is presented as savvy, experienced etc. yet she receives horrible service, and she doesn't know what to do other than complain to the media?
Of course not, she wouldn't waste another second in that store full of idiots, she would find another ISP pronto.
Yes, finding another ISP is something that should be done right away.
However, there's always the case where there is a limited selection, where you have to pay a higher price to avoid a specific company - perhaps tolerate a bit more downtime or have a smaller inbox...
I dont' want to fill out a freaking form! I want to TELL you about the bad service. Because I thought you might care about it.
As an example, let's say that the guy at the computer section called you a slut/stud. You want something like that in writing - otherwise, there will be no paper trail describing his behaviour. Without a paper trail, it will still cost you indirectly through Employment Insurance - money that is diverted from other workers that have been layed off through no fault of their own.
Naturally, this is on the extreme side as most employees using that language would most likely be terminated instantly. However, there are cases where things slip through and go undisciplined.
And if you got to pick your partner, that would make the game prone to trolling.
Only if the game was rated. Most game matching systems for Real-Time strategy games do not rank players if they do a custom match, and only apply rating if they choose "Quick match".
Since choosing your own partner means there's a significant chance of having external communication lines, you can be certain that such games shouldn't be marked as "official". As a result, they get treated as practice sessions.
Yea, I would have to go with Rainbow Six WAY over SWAT 3.
I might agree, but the Rainbow Six (for at least a few games) series has a major problem - AI players have a level of accurracy that would cause multiplayers to be kicked from servers. Your AI teammates aren't able to compensate - and thus four guys can get wiped out all at once.
As an example, try one of the two "lone-wolf" maps in Eagle Watch -- you have to take out 20-30 enemies singlehandedly to complete the map. (As a side note, a graphics accellerator is required - if you don't have one, you can't see through windows.) I found this task to be extremely difficult as any minor mistake that results in eye-contact would result in death.
The issue was fixed in Ghost Recon as enemies don't make insanely accurrate snap-shots, however, the issue resurfaced in Raven Shield.
Slashdot Mirror
As you know, Serious Sam: TFE and Serious Sam: TSE is known to to this sort of stuff - monsters that spawn from "closets" or on item pickups. In some cases, it's obvious that it's going to be a trap. However, you need to spring some of them to obtain all of the secrets.
But that's half the fun. Another thing special with Serious Sam is that you cannot predict when other players are going to spring these traps, especially ones that are experimenting by firing a rocket down a mouse hole. (All other players on the server typed in "WTF" in the chat bar from the resulting suprise.)
You'll have to blame Slashdot's developers for making that joke.
For some reason, if you try to read a story that just recently appeared on the front page, Slashdot simply gives an error message similar to "Nothing to see here. Move along." I suspect that is a syncronization issue, where the story is only half-posted.
Actually, they're incorrect. The optimal controller is a Light gun as it allows for more accurrate snap-shots on targets. Light guns are available for PCs (but haven't been in common circulation, especially for IBM PCs.)
Of course, the best lightgun is the Nintendo Zapper. Unless there's targets on the screen that you must not shoot, you've got an instant superweapon by aiming at a lightbulb.
Game reviews do matter - its called word of mouth. Terms such as "clickfest", "pushover" and "tedious" are negative aspects of a game that you should avoid.
If you want a list of things that a good review should look for, all you have to do is find lists of Cliches and reviews that make note of them. There are similar lists for strategy and action games - but common components among all such lists involve being railroaded through events outside of the players control (e.g. is captured by 3 units after taking out 2000 soldiers), or events that are obvious enough to be traps but the player is forced to go through them to advance the plot.
Later in your posting, you mentioned "simple" web browsing. One thing that qualifies as "simple" is opening up a Slashdot page or some other generic site, and clicking on one of the story links - in some cases, you may naturally open multiple windows to queue up discussions in the background.
There are two potential problems with the configuration:
- Windows 98 has a system-wide limit of 65535 window handles. If you don't notice having Slashdot moderation access, your system will encounter problems. AFAIK, no Windows-based browser is immune unless you crossgrade to Windows NT.
- Netscape 4 has a rendering bug that appears to be related to tables - some cascaded table patterns can freeze the browser for ~20 seconds. There's no consistant duration for the delay, it is determined by page complexity and size.
This wasn't a problem years ago, but as systems, bandwidth, and pages get bigger...
IIRC, MS-DOS doesn't require reinstalls to stretch out lifespans, since changes to the OS are manually performed by the user in two easily-found files. Viruses can still enter, by modifing EXE files and boot sectors.
The only issues with more-advanced operating systems is that there is more startup points and config files. Windows spreads startup files in several places: The startup folder, the registry, the service listing, and device drivers. MacOS 9 uses a Control Panel that contains extensions run on startup, while Unicies use various config files in
However, an operating system can last forever when you keep all startup-files clean alongside any related DLL files.
Any client that relies on the fact that other peers cannot accept inbound connections is broken. A better design is based on the upload/download ratio. As long as the peer is capable of uploading (even if it is a seeder that makes outbound connections to peers), then it is still a good peer.
The only reason firewalled peers are slower is because they are incapable of connecting to other firewalled peers. This cuts down on the potential bandwidth available and therefore cuts down on download speed.
That's not obvious enough, and also doesn't give enough information to determine whether cheating is applicable. Since the teacher would be correcting the test anyway, he can see that you have properly made an attempt to write the essay but couldn't complete the task within the time limit.
Just because something raises flags does not mean that something is true. For my logic to reach that conclusio, I would have to say that a test/assignment mark disparity is guarenteed to detect cheaters.
BTW, the college courses that I attended require at least 50% on both tests and assignments. This means you need to perform well both with and without pressure.
No, it proves that you haven't been convicted. When a criminal record check brings up a positive, there is that rare case where it is a wrongful conviction
While most wrongful convictions pertain to murders, there are ones that apply to tresspass, theft and other "minor" crimes. Likewise, wrongful convictions can arise from the refusal to acknowledge self-defence (i.e. what occurrs under most American High School's "Zero-Tolerance" policy.)
If they tell you to do something illegal, it will come back to them as "You told him to do something illegal." (And no, the illegal act was not performed.)
The government has security screening which permits criminals to obtain jobs that require security clearances. In this page, Section 204.3.B.k, you see instructions for criminal convictions that state that the application will be delayed if incorrectly filled (and potentially denied.)
The Student of Fortune website you linked to is the exact reason why colleges and universities also pair tests alongside assignments. While you can cheat on assignments, it requires different cheating skills to skip through tests. It will raise some flags if you pass assignments with flying colours but consistantly fail tests.
Even so, you cannot cheat on an actual work placement (or if you do, it probably doesn't count as cheating.) Sooner or later, cheaters that are incapable of performing in their field of expertise will be filtered out.
The good teachers are already capable of detecting cheaters, through various tell-tale signs. I'm not familiar with them offhand, but it involves checking writing patterns made by the student.
I might be able to tell the difference right away. However, a ransom user might not notice a problem between BankOfAmerica.com and Bank0fAmerica.com, or bankof11ama.com and bankofllama.com - especially with certain default fonts that don't give much of a distinction between the characters in question.
While the fixed-pitch font in Slashdot's textbox works fine, as does the address bar, it's easily trivial to display the URL in a smaller-than-normal font that is difficult to distinguish.
FYI, if you've managed to place the order, you can probably verify the 1-800 number on the company website.
That's generally why you have multi-page notes. If the Final Fantasy series can handle it, why can't Dead Rising?
In the rare event that multi-pages would break something, it's trivial to create a magnifying glass - even Microsoft made one with the stock install of WXP. You just need an easy-to-remember command for the users (e.g. holding down L+Z and playing with the analogue stick). Unless the actual pixels themselves are incapable of producing readable text regardless of position, you don't even have to do double rendering (and can stick with Blitting instead.)
And this is exactly what can cause problems with Consoles. When too many objects appear on the screen at once, the game slows down and has to process one frame-worth of gameplay over two display frames.
Games are affected by this effect to varying degrees - Mega Man for the NES is one of them, as the developerd decided to just grit their teeth with the lag. Other games can avoid the lag by reducing the number of objects that can appear at once on the screen, but it is still a side effect of that lag.
Yes, PC games are affected by this as well. Quake was one of them, where if you had a mod that took too many assembler instructions to complete a task, the game ends and kicks you to the console (along with a stack trace.)
3 and a half-pages actually. It's almost like the writer of that article can't get enough filler for the final page.
If there isn't enough text per page or if it looks obvious that there's no effort in putting in reasonable page breaks, then the page seperation is an annoyance rather than a boon. At the very least, the author could have covered it up by splitting the 10 reasons across the final two pages.
But this is attacking the article because of its medium - I'd rather attack it on content (which is done several times over by now.)
What you want to get is a minimal PC and install either Firefox, Opera or early versions of Netscape. Then, you configure the browsers to load minimal information (i.e. text only) and retrieves the extras only when required (i.e. clicking on an "Images" button.)
The greatest reason why modern sites load slowly on Dial-up is because of the large quantity of images - cutting them out (especially the advertisements) significantly speeds up loading time.
Any updates (other than the initial download of Flash and Java) that are available for your system are not needed to be installed as long as you keep a firewall enabled, and don't blindingly auto-execute any files from the web.
Text-to-speech generally causes the ATM to announce that you are attempting to withdrawl $500.
A better text-to-speech interface would be the tellers. While they aren't 24/7 in most places...
Quick question - how does the vendor reliably receive the hard drives? Here's a list of possibilities (which may or may not be implemented):
- UPS, Fedex, DHL or other freight companies
- Postal mail (regular service)
- Postal mail, registered.
- Hand delivery by customer or personal pickup by vendor.
In the first two options, there are chances of freight issues where the packages get lost or stolen. In the third option, the package is tagged as requiring special attention, and thus may convince some people that there may be valuable data on the drives heading to Maxtor or the likes. This is an issue common to all companies, no matter how much of a good reputation they may have.
The fourth option is generally a bit expensive, and usually defeats the purpose of returning the product for warrenty.
Seriously, if you are worried about the vendor not erasing data for you, you're better off just slagging the drive and forgetting about the warrenty. It's much easier than trying to find a similar circuit board and swapping it with the dead board (which still isn't guarenteed to work).
It may be suprising at first, but when you do research between those two games, it makes sense.
For reference:
- C&C, C&C:RA were initially released, considered popular (there was almost nothing else.)
- C&C:TS gets released. It was behind the times, but is good enough.
- C&C:RA2 gets released. It is suprisingly popular, and surpasses TS. It fixes some mistakes - however, some players like myself notice that the AI is extremely weak.
- C&C:Renegade gets released. (I think this is the correct order, but it's close enough.) Whee, online first person shooter, with teamplay support (although the defences are a bit overpowered in my opinion, and the other buildings are a bit too easily destroyed by a single person - and perhaps too quickly repairable.)
- By now, you've probably heard of Starcraft, Total Annihilation, Warcraft III, Warzone 2100, Age of Empires II, Earth 2150, and/or plenty of other games that have their own advantages and flaws.
- C&C:Generals gets released. Some players notice that flaws that were originally fixed in RA2 resurfaced in Generals. (e.g. If you order your troops to attack an enemy outpost and it gets destroyed, they stop dead in their tracks in a manner that would cause real-life solders to be court-martialled - it is expected that solders keep walking from the doorstep of the barracks to a "reasonable" location near the field-of-battle, as what happens in RA2.)
- As a side note, C&C:Generals got banned in China. The result was that some users agree that the voice acting seems a little "racist", even if it is not the case. Regardless of which, the plot was a bit more flat thatn RA2.
After the performance of RA2/YR, I felt that I shouldn't go for Generals because of it's weak implementation - and comments posted after the release of Generals confirmed my decision. While it does have good potential, it couldn't possibly be reached without a broadband connection (which I only recently obtained.)
I'm not sure that's the issue. While it may be a problem in the short term because of the unuaual computer type, this is because of procurement of the materials required to transfer the data. You have to buy the cable, review the specs, and test the cable to make sure that it is working - and you'll need a spare 5 1/4" to make sure that it works without risking the chance of accidently writing to the evidence.
Now, through an emulator, it is true that you get an "image". However, the standard d64 image doesn't contain anything fancy - for example, it does not contain copy-protection information found in some games. While such advanced information is unlikely to be found in the disks for evidence, investigators still need to be prepared for anything non-standard. (The most common trick would be Track-36ing semi-sensitive data - investigators aren't fooled if they know what to look for. Anything else is probably difficult to reproduce on home systems.) Because of this, they need to pour over technical manuals for the C64, find ways of hiding important data, and get equipment designed to read 5 1/4" floppies (other than the 1541 disk drive.)
Plus, images don't store erased data - computer forensics sometimes needs to "unerase" information on the disk. At least they are good enough for consumer-grade data transfers where you only need to retrieve files rather than do forensic work.
If you feel offended by the lack of customer service in pre-sales, you can most easily make your point known by backing off the sale at the last moment (if you have not developed that pattern already). It has the same effect as creating a written complaint, since a large box left sitting on the checkout counter is conspicuous that would have to be moved - back to the origin or stowed behind a desk.
Saying that companies prefer to have a paper trail does not lay the blame on the customer. It means that companies want to have a paper trail in the rare event that things get as ugly as the example that I provided.
Yes, finding another ISP is something that should be done right away.
However, there's always the case where there is a limited selection, where you have to pay a higher price to avoid a specific company - perhaps tolerate a bit more downtime or have a smaller inbox...
As an example, let's say that the guy at the computer section called you a slut/stud. You want something like that in writing - otherwise, there will be no paper trail describing his behaviour. Without a paper trail, it will still cost you indirectly through Employment Insurance - money that is diverted from other workers that have been layed off through no fault of their own.
Naturally, this is on the extreme side as most employees using that language would most likely be terminated instantly. However, there are cases where things slip through and go undisciplined.
Only if the game was rated. Most game matching systems for Real-Time strategy games do not rank players if they do a custom match, and only apply rating if they choose "Quick match".
Since choosing your own partner means there's a significant chance of having external communication lines, you can be certain that such games shouldn't be marked as "official". As a result, they get treated as practice sessions.
I might agree, but the Rainbow Six (for at least a few games) series has a major problem - AI players have a level of accurracy that would cause multiplayers to be kicked from servers. Your AI teammates aren't able to compensate - and thus four guys can get wiped out all at once.
As an example, try one of the two "lone-wolf" maps in Eagle Watch -- you have to take out 20-30 enemies singlehandedly to complete the map. (As a side note, a graphics accellerator is required - if you don't have one, you can't see through windows.) I found this task to be extremely difficult as any minor mistake that results in eye-contact would result in death.
The issue was fixed in Ghost Recon as enemies don't make insanely accurrate snap-shots, however, the issue resurfaced in Raven Shield.
Soldier of Fortune 2 has a random level generator. For multiplayer, it creates a large outdoor scene with buildings.