We should remember the so-called "anonymized" search data Yahoo! released some months ago where two New York Times reporters tracked down someone based on the anonymized data in her searches.
That was AOL, not Yahoo!-- the released search results were from subscribers using the AOL browser.
There are solutions that smart people have come up with to improve on e-mail, searching, and remote hosting... but they cost either cost money or are not reliable. The primary issue is users regularly expecting to get more than what they have paid for.
In any serious FPS, the +150ms actual live on-location Korean kids would have playing on a server in North America would come close to evening out the 'ub4rl33t' no-sleep-just-games advantage.
Pre-teen Korean-American kids, that's where your real threat is. Of course, I've come to think that the 'net neutrality' debate will end up boiling down to "Gen-X gamers with enough money to buy low pings vs Gen-Y gamers with faster reflexes but no money = fair."
Makes a lot more sense that way, until you start considering spoiled Gen-Y gamers who have rich parents that buy them fast connections. D'oh.
Aggregation may be a handy way of profiting, but so are obfuscated pricing structures and excessive fees. Someone with $200 in their account who gets laid off and bounces a check when one of their other checks is late coming in, then bounces ten more within a week because the bank happens to be a little slow notifying them that the first bounced check's overdraft fees wiped out their balance is going to net the bank a lot more than someone with $2,000 in their account.
Happened to my roommate last year. He doesn't use Wells Fargo anymore, but they made more money off the chained fees from that train-wreck than they would have off his balance in a decade.
The only thing worse than banks is those paycheck loan outfits... clear proof that God and most states in the US want the poor to stay that way.
Short-term changes in sea level like waves, tides, and storm surge mask the effects of rising sea levels. When the signal-to-noise ratio is that low, you end up with news articles stating that the island in question became uninhabitable 22 years ago.
Unfortunately, the peak sustained energy generation of an average human is in the neighborhood of 100 watts, up to 300W or so for the Lance Armstrongs out there. Take the energy budget of a computer out, and the operation turns into a big loser really fast.
Machines do it better. Odds are good the car you drive has an engine producing >100KW.
The way that Iraq has been handled has turned it into a disastrous failure, with no apparent path out. Two years into the occupation of Germany, German police had taken over general policing and border control duties. The occupying force in Germany was under 20,000 men within two years of V-E, while three and a half years into Iraq the 140,000+ American troops in Iraq continue to be pulled back into fortified megabases as the rest of the country slips toward anarchy.
On the domestic side, I continue to be shocked by the inaction of our elected officials as major elements of the Federal Government continue to do everything they can to remove transparency and accountability from the political process. I was brought up to believe that Republicans supported limited government, but I haven't seen much evidence of that since before 1996. Secret laws, intimidation of critics, ballooning federal deficits, blinding and willful incompetence at all levels of the governent... it's like a nightmare. All of the people who stand to benefit from a corrupt government are silent-- media, government contractors, officials, large corporations. The people who are afraid to lose their reputation and livelihood are silent. The media are fractured, manipulated, and have their own concepts of fairness and balance used against them to weaken their message....and the people who refuse to see what is being done in their names continue to raise a hue and cry about issues that don't matter while corrupt men continue to pervert the ideals that America stands for.
The Bush Administration has been a disastrous failure for America, and for the world we should be an example to. I wish I could trust that the Democratic victories in this election will produce a change, but I don't have a lot of hope for improvement in the near future unless we all work together to demand it.
That is possibly the most brilliant suggestion I've ever heard regarding identity-theft mitigation in the US. Releasing all of the SSNs is excellent, and we need to do it. Right now.
Currently, the weakness in the system is that a SSN and publicly-available information is still being treated as secure enough to be useful for identification, despite being demonstrably insecure for nearly all individuals (I'm sure there are a few people out there who have never had a job, but they probably don't need to worry about identity theft) and completely compromised for a few.
A complete disclosure would kick the legs out from the whole ridiculous system, forcing all stakeholders currently using it to stop, because the entire system would be demonstrably compromised. Right now, the burden of proof is on the victims of identity theft, but after a leak of this magnitude any entity who used the SSN for authentication would be facing the legal equivalent of Armageddon.
Someone needs to acquire the complete SSN database, then publish the names followed by a new digit every week until complete disclosure is attained two months later. That'd give time and publicity for bureaucratic inertia to get a sound kick in the ass, and spark a dialogue about a robust, secure, and real system of identifiability to replace the worse-than-useless consensus kludge we have now.
Some clarification-- as one of the peon-level network types at the University of Utah where the parent poster teaches, the network administration paradigm is based entirely around encouraging as much freedom as is feasible and assuming that users will not abuse that privelige until proven wrong. To the best of my knowledge, the following are effectively the only restrictions placed on users who haven't already been very very naughty:
The only campus-wide blocking is a limited number of addresses and protocols blackholed at the campus gateway for being clear and present risks to network security. (known botnet controllers, outbound SMTP, inbound remote access except to legitimate access points, etc) Other than that, no filtering at the top level. More importantly, workarounds or exceptions are available for anyone who can demonstrate a legitimate reason they need to use something that is security-blocked.
The only bandwidth limitation currently in place is 2GB per day of outbound traffic through the gateway for residents in campus housing, (yes, 2GB per *day*) with no restrictions on inbound traffic. This policy is currently being re-evaluated due to the trend of *legitimate* non-infringing uses occasionally reaching the limit, and will likely be raised or removed entirely in the future to avoid restricting legitimate use. As far as I know there are no hard bandwidth limits whatsoever on staff.
The only monitoring in place is automated stuff for bandwidth and for promiscuously-infectious malware trying to spread itself, and no individual traffic is checked on without a viable complaint against the user.
The TOS can be summed up as: 'No illegal use. No commercial use. Don't try to break things. Have fun and learn stuff!'
Overall, it works quite well, especially considering that it's being applied to a large public university with something in the neighborhood of 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. I can't recall ever hearing any complaints lack of access to anything that was being intentionally kept blocked.
Its more the latter (M.A.D.). See the SCO v IBM case for an example. SCO sued IBM for, among other things, violating some patents they may-or-may-not hold (as a result of the "asset transfer"). IBM then countersued SCO for, among other things, violating their patents on stuff.
Companies with huge patent portfolios (IBM, Microsoft, Intel, etc) will usually set up cross licensing deals in the settlement process from an infringement lawsuit that will allow them to use patents without fear of suit.
I'd say it's closer to Mutually Assured Noncompetion. The biggest shared interest that major patent holding groups have is keeping other entities out of the club, and massive cross-licensing of patents is a very effective way to prop up the status quo. Just one more reason why the current patent system is hopelessly broken from a benefit-to-society perspective...
The practicality of things is that most copy protection schemes inconvenience legitimate users.
I hate having to find/switch CDs. I really hate programs which prevent me from even running off of virtual drives so I can image the CDs rather than having to listen to my buzzing CD drive all the time, and I can't stand programs that will not let me legitimately run the game with a legitimate CD in the drive if I have virtual drive software installed on my machine.
And when I find a form of copy-protection annoying enough, I no longer purchase games which use that method, because it's less effort to warez it than it is to fiddle around with my system to get the copy-protection working.
So, game publishers: Get with the program. If you release good games which don't inconvenience the user, I'm a potential buyer. Otherwise, the best you can hope for is that I'll check it out with warez and buy the sequel if you've learned your lesson.
Today's object example: Battlefield 2: Copy-protected to some degree, but mainly relying on individual CDkeys to encourage players to purchase for online play, doesn't hassle me about running it off an image, and since I've got my CD key stored securely and everyone I know has the game, I don't have to worry about losing my disks. Excellent game. Total sales to me: $50 + $30 expansion pack.
Silent Hunter III: Copy-protected with StarForce, known for being nasty and occasionally *damaging DVD drives*. Since they still haven't released an official no-starforce patch for SH3, the only way of getting rid of the Starforce crap is warezing it, so total sales to me = $0. Great game though,and SH4 won't be using StarForce so I'll definitely pick that up when it comes out.
Galactic Civilizations II: No copy-protection, legitimate purchase provides the option of free access through an online account for new patches/content, no hassle, ongoing support. Total sales to me = $50.
Seriously this is developers thinking too highly of themselves again and Crysis is even going to carry a Recommend spec computer of "Dual Core" which is absurd. If UT2007 can run on Xbox 360/PS3, and Crysis can't, they must really suck at coding. -VoG-
Yes, it's completely absurd to recommend that users have a dual-core processor for best performance! It's only six months till the game comes out, and right now purchasing a dual-core processor is hideously expensive! There's no way any user will shell out $152 for a CPU with the economy as sluggish as it is right now. Why, at release time, the recommended spec processor probably won't be available for less than $120! This is ridiculous! If I didn't already have two dual-core machines in my household, I'd say it was impossible.
The appalling dearth of PvE and story-driven content in EVE bores me. Plus it seems that "you learned your lesson, don't be so stupid in the future" is kind of a worthless thing to say to someone when you can potentially be busted down to next-to-nothing for making one little mistake, making it next to impossible to get back to where you used to be in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time.
It's an MMO game. The point is that taking a 'reasonable amount of time' is contrary to the design philosophy, because then people would stop p[l]aying, and the content-to-profit ratio would require serious adjustment. Back in the beta, I was hoping they'd break through the MMO singularity and create a viable system for runaway player content creation, but it's still not even close, despite fun little emergent artifacts like viable pyramid schemes.
Actually, Calories/calories is an artifact of the system, which actually is case sensitive. For food labeling purposes in America: 1 Calorie (Cal) = 1000 calories (cal)= 1 kilocalorie = 4.184kJ
US-label food statistics are in Calories, with a capital C. One gram of protein = 4 Calories = 4000 calories = 16.7 kJ metric.
Not all that much weirder than the kilobyte = 1024 bytes, I suppose.
Ebay = accelerated accounts. It's already happened, but the MMO game makers are either a little slow to get on the bandwagon or terrified of the PR nightmare of market forces kicking the crap out of gameplay.
Personally, I think any game where players want to skip ahead that badly has serious design issues to begin with. I can't believe that anyone plays the current generation of MMO games, because they are all straight-up retarded.
If P.T. Barnum had lived long enough to see the internet, he'd have had to change 'There's a sucker born every minute' to 'There's a retard born every minute'. Then he'd have married Lowtax and proceeded to make WoW, but with lots of circus animals instead of orcs.
When it comes to player vs. player in EVE, EVE has so much more tactics and strategy than most other MMOs. The simple reason behind this is the massive variety of ships, loadouts, skillsets. Whereas WOW has certain classes that specialize in killing other classes, and strictly defined skilltrees, EVE has far more variety.
Unfortunately, citing any of the current crop of MMO games as an example of 'tactics and strategy' is about as useful as stating that your buddy is a better programmer than Paris Hilton.
High-level combat in EVE (or most of the alternatives, but ESPECIALLY in EVE) has at best a passing relation to tactics and strategy, it's an exercise in brute-force solutions to logistical problems, with the results being determined by which group has spent the most time preparing for the conflict. "My corp has spent more time buying tricked-out ships and finding rare parts for them, playing with spreadsheets to find the optimal damage loadout, and planning to gank you when you're not expecting it, so we crush your souls. PWNED!"
Ironically, this mirrors the fixation that professional soldiers have with logistics, but it's an uphill battle to make it 'fun' when the benefits of innovation and thinking are so massively outweighed by sheer teenager-grind-hours. Sure, CCP said all through the alphas and betas that EVE would be different, and it was different... but nowhere near different enough to change that balance, especially with the horrendous timesink UI/design they ended up with. That's why I stopped playing EVE shortly after it went into release, and hate current MMO games with a passion.
I will admit that EVE has more promise than the other MMOs I've seen, but I don't want to play any of them until things have changed more than any of the current generation of MMOs can imagine. Bring on the MMO singularity!
Another consideration is that reparing downed lines doesn't take all that long or even cost all that much. The real costs from storm damage, with regard to power, is replacing blown transformers and juctions. These things would still be above ground, and still be blown regardless if the lines were above or below ground.
The primary cause for blown transformers and junctions is abnormal load conditions on the power grid, and the primary cause for abnormal loads would be the problems created when exposed overhead wiring is grounded or shorted unexpectedly due to contact with foreign objects. Like blowing trees, falling branches, and similar problems which are much less likely to affect buried lines. The transformers may still be above ground level, but when properly installed, they should not be as vulnerable as exposed power lines.
When combined, problems can propagate outward as local load conditions cause failure on the local circuits, in turn causing abnormal load on nearby circuits and leading to a cascade effect from a large number of otherwise-local problems with last-mile lines.
The bottom line is that buried power lines are massively less susceptible to storm damage, despite the inherent difficulties of underground installation. It's not even close to being comparable.
Rumor has it that the design doc for MPBT:3025 called for increasing the possible players in a battle to 16v16, as well as fun stuff like a much larger galaxy (kind of a duh, once it's out of beta) and missions more complicated than "wipe out the other 'mechs" as well as more advanced chain-of-command and supply line stuff.
To be honest, for a minute I was in favor of EA acquiring and killing lots of MMOs, simply because I can't stand the current paradigms that most of the MMORPG genre are based on, like level treadmills and timesinks.
Then I remembered that just five short years ago, EA killed my MMO dreams when they shut down Multiplayer Battletech: 3025. I place much of the blame for the tepid and weak pool of current MMO offerings on the axing of MPBT:3025, which was bar none the finest multiplayer 'mech experience I've seen.
Damn you, EA. Damn you to hell for continually working to make MMO games suck forever.
It's not two 7900GTXs, it's a pair of 7900GTs with extra memory, coming out of the same quality of chip yield, not the one-in-however-many GPUs that can be stably clocked up to GTX levels.
Plus, the lower clock means much lower cooling requirements and power consumption, with corresponding cost reduction.
Speaking of EVE Online, I think that qualifies as a legitimate first example of virtual taxation, entirely within the game universe. Player-run corporations which are de-facto nation-states are equipped with some options for directly taxing the income and transactions of their members, although back when I actually was playing, the tools were ridiculously clunky and effectively useless for real revenue-generation.
It's remotely possible that they fixed it since I dropped EVE like a hot rock a few months after release, so people may very well being taxed on virtual goods *right now*... just not by real-world governments.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going that route, the easiest solution is to shoot them... but where do you draw the line?
The 'easiest' solution usually has other problems.
If the system is combined with an (optional) automated car wash, they could make even more money! :D Park your car, and it's CLEAN when you get back!
We should remember the so-called "anonymized" search data Yahoo! released some months ago where two New York Times reporters tracked down someone based on the anonymized data in her searches.
That was AOL, not Yahoo!-- the released search results were from subscribers using the AOL browser.
There are solutions that smart people have come up with to improve on e-mail, searching, and remote hosting... but they cost either cost money or are not reliable. The primary issue is users regularly expecting to get more than what they have paid for.
In any serious FPS, the +150ms actual live on-location Korean kids would have playing on a server in North America would come close to evening out the 'ub4rl33t' no-sleep-just-games advantage.
Pre-teen Korean-American kids, that's where your real threat is. Of course, I've come to think that the 'net neutrality' debate will end up boiling down to "Gen-X gamers with enough money to buy low pings vs Gen-Y gamers with faster reflexes but no money = fair."
Makes a lot more sense that way, until you start considering spoiled Gen-Y gamers who have rich parents that buy them fast connections. D'oh.
No. Banks are about PROFIT, not aggregation.
Aggregation may be a handy way of profiting, but so are obfuscated pricing structures and excessive fees. Someone with $200 in their account who gets laid off and bounces a check when one of their other checks is late coming in, then bounces ten more within a week because the bank happens to be a little slow notifying them that the first bounced check's overdraft fees wiped out their balance is going to net the bank a lot more than someone with $2,000 in their account.
Happened to my roommate last year. He doesn't use Wells Fargo anymore, but they made more money off the chained fees from that train-wreck than they would have off his balance in a decade.
The only thing worse than banks is those paycheck loan outfits... clear proof that God and most states in the US want the poor to stay that way.
Short-term changes in sea level like waves, tides, and storm surge mask the effects of rising sea levels. When the signal-to-noise ratio is that low, you end up with news articles stating that the island in question became uninhabitable 22 years ago.
Not to rain on anyone's parade, but compared to serious examination of long-term sea level trends, one island isn't a very useful measuring stick.
Shouldn't that be:
"Any movie in which Tom Cruise survives filming is a bad movie."
My roommate works at best buy. He went in at 3AM this morning, and came home at 9PM tonight.
18 hours. Not bad for non-government work...
Unfortunately, the peak sustained energy generation of an average human is in the neighborhood of 100 watts, up to 300W or so for the Lance Armstrongs out there. Take the energy budget of a computer out, and the operation turns into a big loser really fast.
Machines do it better. Odds are good the car you drive has an engine producing >100KW.
Did you salt the earth so nothing would grow there again?
We found that sowing AOL CDs instead of salt was the most cost-effective solution.
The way that Iraq has been handled has turned it into a disastrous failure, with no apparent path out. Two years into the occupation of Germany, German police had taken over general policing and border control duties. The occupying force in Germany was under 20,000 men within two years of V-E, while three and a half years into Iraq the 140,000+ American troops in Iraq continue to be pulled back into fortified megabases as the rest of the country slips toward anarchy.
...and the people who refuse to see what is being done in their names continue to raise a hue and cry about issues that don't matter while corrupt men continue to pervert the ideals that America stands for.
Total postwar combat casualties in the American occupations of Germany, Japan, Haiti, former Yugoslavia: Zero
On the domestic side, I continue to be shocked by the inaction of our elected officials as major elements of the Federal Government continue to do everything they can to remove transparency and accountability from the political process. I was brought up to believe that Republicans supported limited government, but I haven't seen much evidence of that since before 1996. Secret laws, intimidation of critics, ballooning federal deficits, blinding and willful incompetence at all levels of the governent... it's like a nightmare. All of the people who stand to benefit from a corrupt government are silent-- media, government contractors, officials, large corporations. The people who are afraid to lose their reputation and livelihood are silent. The media are fractured, manipulated, and have their own concepts of fairness and balance used against them to weaken their message.
The Bush Administration has been a disastrous failure for America, and for the world we should be an example to. I wish I could trust that the Democratic victories in this election will produce a change, but I don't have a lot of hope for improvement in the near future unless we all work together to demand it.
That is possibly the most brilliant suggestion I've ever heard regarding identity-theft mitigation in the US. Releasing all of the SSNs is excellent, and we need to do it. Right now.
Currently, the weakness in the system is that a SSN and publicly-available information is still being treated as secure enough to be useful for identification, despite being demonstrably insecure for nearly all individuals (I'm sure there are a few people out there who have never had a job, but they probably don't need to worry about identity theft) and completely compromised for a few.
A complete disclosure would kick the legs out from the whole ridiculous system, forcing all stakeholders currently using it to stop, because the entire system would be demonstrably compromised. Right now, the burden of proof is on the victims of identity theft, but after a leak of this magnitude any entity who used the SSN for authentication would be facing the legal equivalent of Armageddon.
Someone needs to acquire the complete SSN database, then publish the names followed by a new digit every week until complete disclosure is attained two months later. That'd give time and publicity for bureaucratic inertia to get a sound kick in the ass, and spark a dialogue about a robust, secure, and real system of identifiability to replace the worse-than-useless consensus kludge we have now.
Some clarification-- as one of the peon-level network types at the University of Utah where the parent poster teaches, the network administration paradigm is based entirely around encouraging as much freedom as is feasible and assuming that users will not abuse that privelige until proven wrong. To the best of my knowledge, the following are effectively the only restrictions placed on users who haven't already been very very naughty:
The only campus-wide blocking is a limited number of addresses and protocols blackholed at the campus gateway for being clear and present risks to network security. (known botnet controllers, outbound SMTP, inbound remote access except to legitimate access points, etc) Other than that, no filtering at the top level. More importantly, workarounds or exceptions are available for anyone who can demonstrate a legitimate reason they need to use something that is security-blocked.
The only bandwidth limitation currently in place is 2GB per day of outbound traffic through the gateway for residents in campus housing, (yes, 2GB per *day*) with no restrictions on inbound traffic. This policy is currently being re-evaluated due to the trend of *legitimate* non-infringing uses occasionally reaching the limit, and will likely be raised or removed entirely in the future to avoid restricting legitimate use. As far as I know there are no hard bandwidth limits whatsoever on staff.
The only monitoring in place is automated stuff for bandwidth and for promiscuously-infectious malware trying to spread itself, and no individual traffic is checked on without a viable complaint against the user.
The TOS can be summed up as: 'No illegal use. No commercial use. Don't try to break things. Have fun and learn stuff!'
Overall, it works quite well, especially considering that it's being applied to a large public university with something in the neighborhood of 45,000 students, faculty, and staff. I can't recall ever hearing any complaints lack of access to anything that was being intentionally kept blocked.
Its more the latter (M.A.D.). See the SCO v IBM case for an example. SCO sued IBM for, among other things, violating some patents they may-or-may-not hold (as a result of the "asset transfer"). IBM then countersued SCO for, among other things, violating their patents on stuff.
Companies with huge patent portfolios (IBM, Microsoft, Intel, etc) will usually set up cross licensing deals in the settlement process from an infringement lawsuit that will allow them to use patents without fear of suit.
I'd say it's closer to Mutually Assured Noncompetion. The biggest shared interest that major patent holding groups have is keeping other entities out of the club, and massive cross-licensing of patents is a very effective way to prop up the status quo. Just one more reason why the current patent system is hopelessly broken from a benefit-to-society perspective...
See: Oligarchy, Barriers to Entry
The practicality of things is that most copy protection schemes inconvenience legitimate users.
I hate having to find/switch CDs. I really hate programs which prevent me from even running off of virtual drives so I can image the CDs rather than having to listen to my buzzing CD drive all the time, and I can't stand programs that will not let me legitimately run the game with a legitimate CD in the drive if I have virtual drive software installed on my machine.
And when I find a form of copy-protection annoying enough, I no longer purchase games which use that method, because it's less effort to warez it than it is to fiddle around with my system to get the copy-protection working.
So, game publishers: Get with the program. If you release good games which don't inconvenience the user, I'm a potential buyer. Otherwise, the best you can hope for is that I'll check it out with warez and buy the sequel if you've learned your lesson.
Today's object example:
Battlefield 2: Copy-protected to some degree, but mainly relying on individual CDkeys to encourage players to purchase for online play, doesn't hassle me about running it off an image, and since I've got my CD key stored securely and everyone I know has the game, I don't have to worry about losing my disks. Excellent game. Total sales to me: $50 + $30 expansion pack.
Silent Hunter III: Copy-protected with StarForce, known for being nasty and occasionally *damaging DVD drives*. Since they still haven't released an official no-starforce patch for SH3, the only way of getting rid of the Starforce crap is warezing it, so total sales to me = $0. Great game though,and SH4 won't be using StarForce so I'll definitely pick that up when it comes out.
Galactic Civilizations II: No copy-protection, legitimate purchase provides the option of free access through an online account for new patches/content, no hassle, ongoing support. Total sales to me = $50.
Seriously this is developers thinking too highly of themselves again and Crysis is even going to carry a Recommend spec computer of "Dual Core" which is absurd. If UT2007 can run on Xbox 360/PS3, and Crysis can't, they must really suck at coding. -VoG-
Yes, it's completely absurd to recommend that users have a dual-core processor for best performance! It's only six months till the game comes out, and right now purchasing a dual-core processor is hideously expensive! There's no way any user will shell out $152 for a CPU with the economy as sluggish as it is right now. Why, at release time, the recommended spec processor probably won't be available for less than $120! This is ridiculous! If I didn't already have two dual-core machines in my household, I'd say it was impossible.
The appalling dearth of PvE and story-driven content in EVE bores me. Plus it seems that "you learned your lesson, don't be so stupid in the future" is kind of a worthless thing to say to someone when you can potentially be busted down to next-to-nothing for making one little mistake, making it next to impossible to get back to where you used to be in anything resembling a reasonable amount of time.
It's an MMO game. The point is that taking a 'reasonable amount of time' is contrary to the design philosophy, because then people would stop p[l]aying, and the content-to-profit ratio would require serious adjustment. Back in the beta, I was hoping they'd break through the MMO singularity and create a viable system for runaway player content creation, but it's still not even close, despite fun little emergent artifacts like viable pyramid schemes.
Actually, Calories/calories is an artifact of the system, which actually is case sensitive. For food labeling purposes in America:
1 Calorie (Cal) = 1000 calories (cal)= 1 kilocalorie = 4.184kJ
US-label food statistics are in Calories, with a capital C. One gram of protein = 4 Calories = 4000 calories = 16.7 kJ metric.
Not all that much weirder than the kilobyte = 1024 bytes, I suppose.
Ebay = accelerated accounts. It's already happened, but the MMO game makers are either a little slow to get on the bandwagon or terrified of the PR nightmare of market forces kicking the crap out of gameplay.
Personally, I think any game where players want to skip ahead that badly has serious design issues to begin with. I can't believe that anyone plays the current generation of MMO games, because they are all straight-up retarded.
If P.T. Barnum had lived long enough to see the internet, he'd have had to change 'There's a sucker born every minute' to 'There's a retard born every minute'. Then he'd have married Lowtax and proceeded to make WoW, but with lots of circus animals instead of orcs.
When it comes to player vs. player in EVE, EVE has so much more tactics and strategy than most other MMOs. The simple reason behind this is the massive variety of ships, loadouts, skillsets. Whereas WOW has certain classes that specialize in killing other classes, and strictly defined skilltrees, EVE has far more variety.
Unfortunately, citing any of the current crop of MMO games as an example of 'tactics and strategy' is about as useful as stating that your buddy is a better programmer than Paris Hilton.
High-level combat in EVE (or most of the alternatives, but ESPECIALLY in EVE) has at best a passing relation to tactics and strategy, it's an exercise in brute-force solutions to logistical problems, with the results being determined by which group has spent the most time preparing for the conflict. "My corp has spent more time buying tricked-out ships and finding rare parts for them, playing with spreadsheets to find the optimal damage loadout, and planning to gank you when you're not expecting it, so we crush your souls. PWNED!"
Ironically, this mirrors the fixation that professional soldiers have with logistics, but it's an uphill battle to make it 'fun' when the benefits of innovation and thinking are so massively outweighed by sheer teenager-grind-hours. Sure, CCP said all through the alphas and betas that EVE would be different, and it was different... but nowhere near different enough to change that balance, especially with the horrendous timesink UI/design they ended up with. That's why I stopped playing EVE shortly after it went into release, and hate current MMO games with a passion.
I will admit that EVE has more promise than the other MMOs I've seen, but I don't want to play any of them until things have changed more than any of the current generation of MMOs can imagine. Bring on the MMO singularity!
Another consideration is that reparing downed lines doesn't take all that long or even cost all that much. The real costs from storm damage, with regard to power, is replacing blown transformers and juctions. These things would still be above ground, and still be blown regardless if the lines were above or below ground.
The primary cause for blown transformers and junctions is abnormal load conditions on the power grid, and the primary cause for abnormal loads would be the problems created when exposed overhead wiring is grounded or shorted unexpectedly due to contact with foreign objects. Like blowing trees, falling branches, and similar problems which are much less likely to affect buried lines. The transformers may still be above ground level, but when properly installed, they should not be as vulnerable as exposed power lines.
When combined, problems can propagate outward as local load conditions cause failure on the local circuits, in turn causing abnormal load on nearby circuits and leading to a cascade effect from a large number of otherwise-local problems with last-mile lines.
The bottom line is that buried power lines are massively less susceptible to storm damage, despite the inherent difficulties of underground installation. It's not even close to being comparable.
Rumor has it that the design doc for MPBT:3025 called for increasing the possible players in a battle to 16v16, as well as fun stuff like a much larger galaxy (kind of a duh, once it's out of beta) and missions more complicated than "wipe out the other 'mechs" as well as more advanced chain-of-command and supply line stuff.
Would have been so sweet... I miss MPBT forever.
To be honest, for a minute I was in favor of EA acquiring and killing lots of MMOs, simply because I can't stand the current paradigms that most of the MMORPG genre are based on, like level treadmills and timesinks.
Then I remembered that just five short years ago, EA killed my MMO dreams when they shut down Multiplayer Battletech: 3025. I place much of the blame for the tepid and weak pool of current MMO offerings on the axing of MPBT:3025, which was bar none the finest multiplayer 'mech experience I've seen.
Damn you, EA. Damn you to hell for continually working to make MMO games suck forever.
7900GT: 500MHz core, 256MB @ ~600MHz memory. $280
7950GX2: 500MHz core, 1024MB @ 600MHz memory $600
7900GTX: 650MHz core, 512MB @ 800MHz memory $500
It's not two 7900GTXs, it's a pair of 7900GTs with extra memory, coming out of the same quality of chip yield, not the one-in-however-many GPUs that can be stably clocked up to GTX levels.
Plus, the lower clock means much lower cooling requirements and power consumption, with corresponding cost reduction.
Not a bad idea, really.
Speaking of EVE Online, I think that qualifies as a legitimate first example of virtual taxation, entirely within the game universe. Player-run corporations which are de-facto nation-states are equipped with some options for directly taxing the income and transactions of their members, although back when I actually was playing, the tools were ridiculously clunky and effectively useless for real revenue-generation.
It's remotely possible that they fixed it since I dropped EVE like a hot rock a few months after release, so people may very well being taxed on virtual goods *right now*... just not by real-world governments.