It makes sense. Bill Gates and the president are two of the most hated men among people who know how to use email.
But cussing out or threatening the life of Bill Gates, though, is wiser than cussing out/threatening the life of a guy who endorsed the Patriot Act and doesn't believe in privacy or that POWs have a right to an attorney, instead inventing some made-up term "enemy combatant" to get around the Geneva Convention.
FPS games aren't related to the workplace any more than Tetris, hockey, tiddlywinks, or llamas are.
This just in! Llamas are creating an exciting new generation of business-saavy workers and executives. We at Llama International have opened a synergic opportunity for the turnkey business of the future! You too can buy a llama and improve your social status more than camping mobs on Counterstrike! And have an 18-inch penis at the same time! Which you can use on the lla...er...on your girlfriend (orllamapricesandparticipationmayvaryseestoreforde tailsalllamassubjectto stateandlocaltax2.9%financingavailableonsomellamas notresponsibleforcrossspeciesstds)
You're living in a fucking Horatio Algers dream world.
I suppose you're the same person who thinks the estate tax (now so eagerly termed the death tax by Bush and his corporate hacks) should be removed? The estate tax basically taxes rich people when they die, thus not allowing all the riches from one generation to flow to another. You think that kid who just inherited daddy's fortune deserved it? You think he worked hard for it? Not likely. And now all that inherited income comes to him tax-free. Imagine if you just inherited 10 million dollars. If you had won a lottery, you'd get maybe 6 million after taxes. If your dad had 10 million, now you'd keep the whole lot, tax free.
This 'work hard' crap is a bunch of drivel. It in fact reminds me of the rich Lebowski. It's easy to get up on a high horse when you probably grew up in an upper middle class environment. Yes, there are plenty of slackers out there. But it goes both ways. I'd say probably about 90%-95% of the country fits into a slacker attitude. Not that they don't work, but that they don't work hard regularly. They don't plan in advance, they don't spend 60 hrs at the office every week for that next promotion, they fit into the attitude of regular joe. There are rich slackers and poor slackers. My guess is the rich slackers still make more than the poor slackers. But you give the poor slackers grief for living off the fruits of other peoples' labors. They probably lived in much worse living conditions. They probably never had someone to mentor them, they probably had a single parent who was never around. They grew up in bad schools and had bad teachers and bad influences on all ends. Environment has a lot to do with how one turns out.
I'm also going to guess you're a guy, who probably has no clue what it would be like to be a woman and try to raise a baby kid and go to school at the same time. Hard work? Try nigh impossible. The women who manage to do this, on their own, probably still won't manage to get a great job out of college because they have no connections, and even if they do, their child would suffer.
So don't give me any of this black and white bullshit. It's a grey world.
I figure in three to four years Global Warming will be so bad under Bush's environmental policy (is that an oxymoron or what?) that Canada will be about as warm as here in North Carolina. So it might not be so cold, eh hoser?
Yes, I believe it's important to stop these so-called "Superbaby" terrorists before they do something terrible, like convince Jon Voight to act in really really REALLY really REALLY HORRIBLE movie, even by John Voight standards.
There is a significant population mass on the east and west coast, which, when connected via a major trunk, say through Chicago or KC, would allow for much higher speed access in those areas.
There are several other problems. One is the current government deregulation, which has pretty much forced out all local competition except for cable providers and telcos. While deregulation is good in some respects, it's awful in others, because there weren't enough competitors to begin with, they've consolidated what is left, and there is currently a monopoly between a few major providers, with cable beginning to win out due to their generally better speeds. With no providers offering faster speeds at lower prices, the cable companies can sit on their 3Mb/s speeds while telcos try to keep up with their lame DSL speeds. In my area, the ONLY high speed internet provider offering higher than 1Mb speeds at relatively low prices is Time Warner. They are thus a monopoly, and there is no need for them to improve their service because there isn't anyone else.
If the telcos caught up, or other providers, this might change. But as there are no other providers due to consolidation, there is only the telcos. And thus far they aren't proving very competitive.
The other problem, which no one has pointed out, is the media consolidation and piracy issue. Time Warner not only provides broadband access, but produces content which would much more easily be pirated if they jacked their speeds up to 100Mb/s. Face it, they are the RIAA and the MPAA combined. Why would they want to allow a pipe where people could quickly download music and movies?
Not to mention, streaming TV or radio stations could broadcast which could challenge the production capabilities of the media giants. Get a domain like therealnews.tv and start streaming your own broadcast news show, or stream movies, who knows, it might start to impinge on their TV ratings. And as their business model is in the dark ages, they have to keep broadband in the dark ages. It's more political than you think.
The pipe could become available. There's all this dark fibre apparently all over the place which sits unused.
Break up the vertical integration, and I bet you'd see a real shift.
young-man$ rm trash rm: Aww, Mom! I'll do it later. young-man$ set TABLE "now" set: But I did it last week! Ask the Sparc5, I'm busy playing Counterstrike. young-man$ exec homework exec: Command failed. young-man$ write paper write: paper is not logged on. young-man$ kill -9 1 NOOOOooooooooooo...
The vulcan chick's breasts start expanding for no apparent reason, and the Enterprise is helpless to stop them!
Watch as Gene Roddenbury spins over and over in his grave and is then resurrected like in Star Trek IV!
Watch as Berman tries to save a hopelessly bad space opera which has lost all continuity and has turned into an ugly parody of science fiction!
Personally, I'd rather watch Star Trek: Borg, where you watch as the Borg take over the rest of the planets. I can see it now. "These are the voyages of Borg Cube #200345. It's mission: To explore strange new worlds...to seek out new life, and new civilizations...to annihilate them and steal their technology...to boldly destroy what no man has destroyed before. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." *Cue music*
What Mythic has done here is to reduce the pain the 30-hour people have to endure when they inevitably encounter the 50-hour people. And that's absolutely huge.
I agree, but I still think their solution does nothing to reduce the problems inherent with MMOs, nor does it really solve the problem that existed on DaOC.
Basically they turned what was originally supposed to be a PvP concept into a nightmare. From what I understand, the first expansion went fairly well (I played DaoC for a while before the expansions, then quit, came back, then quit again). The second one, however, Trials of Atlantis, introduced hugely powerful 'artifacts' into the hands of powergamers who spent that 50+ hrs playing. From what I also understand, they were huge several hour-long PvE grinds which involved large groups of people grinding for hours on end to get the item. I think some people reported that one of the missions took like 7 hrs to accomplish or something ridiculous.
Also, the artifacts the players received allowed them to form groups of 8-10 level 60 players who could kill maybe 50-70 other level 60 players. In other words, they overpowered the game with artifacts.
This seems like a week addition to a game which I think had a good concept but failed to appeal to the Player vs Player concept and finally died by making PvE the most important factor in the game. Too bad, I liked it for a while.
It gave his computers instant respectability with those who remembered the old Packard Bell and it didn't hurt that the name also sounded like a cross between Hewlett Packard and Bell Telephone.
Yes, and if I recall, Packard Bell then proceeded to make some of the worst, crappiest computers known to man.
There won't be anything left of SCO in the end. In fact, are they even in the software business anymore? Do they even sell software? Do they innovate? Do they have people on their payroll who don't file lawsuits? One might question whether or not some other law firm named SCO could sue for trademark violation as SCO doesn't seem to do anything but litigate nowadays.
I don't know, back when this was coming out I was young enough that one of my favorite pasttimes was hooking up Barbies to jumpercables and watching them turn black and melt while my sisters recoiled in horror. I was the proud owner of the only Barbie Suntan Station. Ahh, the memories...
Anyway, not to start a flame war, but I'd take Mia Sara aka Sloane Peterson over Kelly LeBrock any day.
Actually, that'd be a great name to use when replying to 419 spams.
Peter Vas Deferens, German Chancellor to the Office of External Organs.
"Dear Mr. Ngubu,
I can easily provide a massive tool to assist you in the process of removing your fourthy million dollars. As I have said previously, if you show me yours, I'll show you mine."
At least not at the level they have. Usually customer service is responsible for things like billing issues, anyway, so if you didn't make the users pay the 15 bucks a month to play the game you wouldn't need to pay the customer service people. In-game GMs would handle all game-related problems, and the cust could return/trade in the game they bought ONCE.
naturally, being a commie Pac Man game, you would team up with your commie buddies as comrades (ghosts) fighting against the capitalist pig (ie. Pac-Man).
Makes you wonder if that was subconsciously the point of the original Pac-man, in reverse.
The reply gently and wisely pointed out that "politics" is what makes things happens.... That letter writer was George W Bush.
Ahh yes, King Bush the Wise. Please, God, somebody mod this guy up as funny.
Seriously though, how or better yet why, would you undermine data on subatomic particle interaction?
Now I'm inherently politically biased, but I voted for Bush once - which I won't do again - and let's face it, when I think of this administration, the term 'junk science' comes to mind. I was having a discussion with a colleague of mine, a Republican I should add, who told me that there's no proof that we're destroying the environment. He said for every study I had that proved one thing, he could find another study that proved me wrong. Let's see, right off the top of my head, there's deforestation, global warming, a limited oil supply, the ozone layer. And I'm absolutely sure he's right, he could find someone to refute it. So here I am, ready to point at any number of studies done on the environmental impact of the world, and I can't even convince the guy because some idiot somewhere posted his bunko, supposedly scientific refutation which would obviously back up this guy's point. It really makes me sad, too. It's obvious that oil, for instance, is a limited resource. And deforestation is occurring, whether or not you want to hear about it. It's obvious that we're affecting the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
That was Dr. Evil's lair. You know, with the big 'laser'? Just because they own Starbucks doesn't mean they serve coffee on it. Although they should.
Throw me a frickin bone here, people.
It makes sense. Bill Gates and the president are two of the most hated men among people who know how to use email.
But cussing out or threatening the life of Bill Gates, though, is wiser than cussing out/threatening the life of a guy who endorsed the Patriot Act and doesn't believe in privacy or that POWs have a right to an attorney, instead inventing some made-up term "enemy combatant" to get around the Geneva Convention.
Well, keep in mind this is from ONE SLIDE that THE ENQUIRER found.
I wouldn't exactly report this as news, it didn't come out of the mouth of God or anything.
FPS games aren't related to the workplace any more than Tetris, hockey, tiddlywinks, or llamas are.
e tailsalllamassubjectto stateandlocaltax2.9%financingavailableonsomellamas notresponsibleforcrossspeciesstds)
This just in! Llamas are creating an exciting new generation of business-saavy workers and executives. We at Llama International have opened a synergic opportunity for the turnkey business of the future! You too can buy a llama and improve your social status more than camping mobs on Counterstrike! And have an 18-inch penis at the same time! Which you can use on the lla...er...on your girlfriend (orllamapricesandparticipationmayvaryseestoreford
- Bob Rucker
Llama International, LLP
You're living in a fucking Horatio Algers dream world.
I suppose you're the same person who thinks the estate tax (now so eagerly termed the death tax by Bush and his corporate hacks) should be removed? The estate tax basically taxes rich people when they die, thus not allowing all the riches from one generation to flow to another. You think that kid who just inherited daddy's fortune deserved it? You think he worked hard for it? Not likely. And now all that inherited income comes to him tax-free. Imagine if you just inherited 10 million dollars. If you had won a lottery, you'd get maybe 6 million after taxes. If your dad had 10 million, now you'd keep the whole lot, tax free.
This 'work hard' crap is a bunch of drivel. It in fact reminds me of the rich Lebowski. It's easy to get up on a high horse when you probably grew up in an upper middle class environment. Yes, there are plenty of slackers out there. But it goes both ways. I'd say probably about 90%-95% of the country fits into a slacker attitude. Not that they don't work, but that they don't work hard regularly. They don't plan in advance, they don't spend 60 hrs at the office every week for that next promotion, they fit into the attitude of regular joe. There are rich slackers and poor slackers. My guess is the rich slackers still make more than the poor slackers. But you give the poor slackers grief for living off the fruits of other peoples' labors. They probably lived in much worse living conditions. They probably never had someone to mentor them, they probably had a single parent who was never around. They grew up in bad schools and had bad teachers and bad influences on all ends. Environment has a lot to do with how one turns out.
I'm also going to guess you're a guy, who probably has no clue what it would be like to be a woman and try to raise a baby kid and go to school at the same time. Hard work? Try nigh impossible. The women who manage to do this, on their own, probably still won't manage to get a great job out of college because they have no connections, and even if they do, their child would suffer.
So don't give me any of this black and white bullshit. It's a grey world.
And if not, how do you establish what sort of cultural phenomena you want to document? What made you decide to make Trekkies, for instance?
I'm with you, man.
I figure in three to four years Global Warming will be so bad under Bush's environmental policy (is that an oxymoron or what?) that Canada will be about as warm as here in North Carolina. So it might not be so cold, eh hoser?
Yes, I believe it's important to stop these so-called "Superbaby" terrorists before they do something terrible, like convince Jon Voight to act in really really REALLY really REALLY HORRIBLE movie, even by John Voight standards.
There's only one law of robotics...
Kill John Conner.
ok, and maybe afterwards do some vacuuming and make some chai green tea.
There is a significant population mass on the east and west coast, which, when connected via a major trunk, say through Chicago or KC, would allow for much higher speed access in those areas.
There are several other problems. One is the current government deregulation, which has pretty much forced out all local competition except for cable providers and telcos. While deregulation is good in some respects, it's awful in others, because there weren't enough competitors to begin with, they've consolidated what is left, and there is currently a monopoly between a few major providers, with cable beginning to win out due to their generally better speeds. With no providers offering faster speeds at lower prices, the cable companies can sit on their 3Mb/s speeds while telcos try to keep up with their lame DSL speeds. In my area, the ONLY high speed internet provider offering higher than 1Mb speeds at relatively low prices is Time Warner. They are thus a monopoly, and there is no need for them to improve their service because there isn't anyone else.
If the telcos caught up, or other providers, this might change. But as there are no other providers due to consolidation, there is only the telcos. And thus far they aren't proving very competitive.
The other problem, which no one has pointed out, is the media consolidation and piracy issue. Time Warner not only provides broadband access, but produces content which would much more easily be pirated if they jacked their speeds up to 100Mb/s. Face it, they are the RIAA and the MPAA combined. Why would they want to allow a pipe where people could quickly download music and movies?
Not to mention, streaming TV or radio stations could broadcast which could challenge the production capabilities of the media giants. Get a domain like therealnews.tv and start streaming your own broadcast news show, or stream movies, who knows, it might start to impinge on their TV ratings. And as their business model is in the dark ages, they have to keep broadband in the dark ages. It's more political than you think.
The pipe could become available. There's all this dark fibre apparently all over the place which sits unused.
Break up the vertical integration, and I bet you'd see a real shift.
Just my two cents.
young-man$ rm trash
rm: Aww, Mom! I'll do it later.
young-man$ set TABLE "now"
set: But I did it last week! Ask the Sparc5, I'm busy playing Counterstrike.
young-man$ exec homework
exec: Command failed.
young-man$ write paper
write: paper is not logged on.
young-man$ kill -9 1
NOOOOooooooooooo...
Tribbles take over the Enterprise! Again!
The vulcan chick's breasts start expanding for no apparent reason, and the Enterprise is helpless to stop them!
Watch as Gene Roddenbury spins over and over in his grave and is then resurrected like in Star Trek IV!
Watch as Berman tries to save a hopelessly bad space opera which has lost all continuity and has turned into an ugly parody of science fiction!
Personally, I'd rather watch Star Trek: Borg, where you watch as the Borg take over the rest of the planets. I can see it now. "These are the voyages of Borg Cube #200345. It's mission: To explore strange new worlds...to seek out new life, and new civilizations...to annihilate them and steal their technology...to boldly destroy what no man has destroyed before. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated." *Cue music*
I always thought it was "All You Can!" like 'be all you can be.' :)
What Mythic has done here is to reduce the pain the 30-hour people have to endure when they inevitably encounter the 50-hour people. And that's absolutely huge.
I agree, but I still think their solution does nothing to reduce the problems inherent with MMOs, nor does it really solve the problem that existed on DaOC.
Basically they turned what was originally supposed to be a PvP concept into a nightmare. From what I understand, the first expansion went fairly well (I played DaoC for a while before the expansions, then quit, came back, then quit again). The second one, however, Trials of Atlantis, introduced hugely powerful 'artifacts' into the hands of powergamers who spent that 50+ hrs playing. From what I also understand, they were huge several hour-long PvE grinds which involved large groups of people grinding for hours on end to get the item. I think some people reported that one of the missions took like 7 hrs to accomplish or something ridiculous.
Also, the artifacts the players received allowed them to form groups of 8-10 level 60 players who could kill maybe 50-70 other level 60 players. In other words, they overpowered the game with artifacts.
This seems like a week addition to a game which I think had a good concept but failed to appeal to the Player vs Player concept and finally died by making PvE the most important factor in the game. Too bad, I liked it for a while.
It gave his computers instant respectability with those who remembered the old Packard Bell and it didn't hurt that the name also sounded like a cross between Hewlett Packard and Bell Telephone.
Yes, and if I recall, Packard Bell then proceeded to make some of the worst, crappiest computers known to man.
There won't be anything left of SCO in the end. In fact, are they even in the software business anymore? Do they even sell software? Do they innovate? Do they have people on their payroll who don't file lawsuits? One might question whether or not some other law firm named SCO could sue for trademark violation as SCO doesn't seem to do anything but litigate nowadays.
The fourth bit is reserved for the cow's mouth.
Running a MOO will never be the same.
I don't know, back when this was coming out I was young enough that one of my favorite pasttimes was hooking up Barbies to jumpercables and watching them turn black and melt while my sisters recoiled in horror. I was the proud owner of the only Barbie Suntan Station. Ahh, the memories...
Anyway, not to start a flame war, but I'd take Mia Sara aka Sloane Peterson over Kelly LeBrock any day.
Actually, that'd be a great name to use when replying to 419 spams.
Peter Vas Deferens, German Chancellor to the Office of External Organs.
"Dear Mr. Ngubu,
I can easily provide a massive tool to assist you in the process of removing your fourthy million dollars. As I have said previously, if you show me yours, I'll show you mine."
Apparently while trying to access the article on Kirsten Dunst's boobies, I got this error, caused by a slashdot effect on slashdot...
Please, no articles on Natalie Portman. I can't deal with the downtime.
At least not at the level they have. Usually customer service is responsible for things like billing issues, anyway, so if you didn't make the users pay the 15 bucks a month to play the game you wouldn't need to pay the customer service people. In-game GMs would handle all game-related problems, and the cust could return/trade in the game they bought ONCE.
Ahem...second person... ;)
naturally, being a commie Pac Man game, you would team up with your commie buddies as comrades (ghosts) fighting against the capitalist pig (ie. Pac-Man).
Makes you wonder if that was subconsciously the point of the original Pac-man, in reverse.
The reply gently and wisely pointed out that "politics" is what makes things happens. ...
That letter writer was George W Bush.
Ahh yes, King Bush the Wise. Please, God, somebody mod this guy up as funny.
Seriously though, how or better yet why, would you undermine data on subatomic particle interaction?
Now I'm inherently politically biased, but I voted for Bush once - which I won't do again - and let's face it, when I think of this administration, the term 'junk science' comes to mind. I was having a discussion with a colleague of mine, a Republican I should add, who told me that there's no proof that we're destroying the environment. He said for every study I had that proved one thing, he could find another study that proved me wrong. Let's see, right off the top of my head, there's deforestation, global warming, a limited oil supply, the ozone layer. And I'm absolutely sure he's right, he could find someone to refute it. So here I am, ready to point at any number of studies done on the environmental impact of the world, and I can't even convince the guy because some idiot somewhere posted his bunko, supposedly scientific refutation which would obviously back up this guy's point. It really makes me sad, too. It's obvious that oil, for instance, is a limited resource. And deforestation is occurring, whether or not you want to hear about it. It's obvious that we're affecting the earth.
I got a whole bag of shhh...with your name on it. ;)