Oh dear, what a sad, misguided man you are...
on
Windows 95 Turns 10
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· Score: 1
Some people let their genitalia control them, and some people use their brains..
God, you are so funny. Did you know that Chris Martin and the rest of Coldplay all met at university, at University College London, one of the best universities in Britain, on par with Ivy League institutions? They're all very smart with good degrees to their names.
So, to recap, they're all intelligent as well as rich and popular. That kind of destroys your pathetic "some people use their brains" argument, doesn't it? Now how are you going to run them down?
What, any more than any of the gazillions of cross-related Pokemon games, etc? Or the Mortal Kombat 3 circus?
Man, if a collectable card game has you worried then go check out the plethora of products that those two franchises I mentioned had surrounding them. And, if you could, get a friend to video you doing it: I'm sure that there are plenty of Slashdotters who want to see what someone's head spontaneously exploding in amazement looks like.
No, you said "And as far as I know, Alan Moore didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with the movie", to which I said "Well, apart from writing the original story..."
Don't try to backtrack what you said. It might not have been what you meant, but it is what you said.
Go watch the movie then. Stay until the credits have run completely. See if "Alan Moore didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with the movie", according to those credits.
So you'd rather learn about the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci by first viewing sketchings of them made by an art student and then using your appreciation of that student's efforts, no matter how good or bad, to decide whether or not da Vinci's works are actually worth seeing? Gotcha.
Sorry, but that really is ridiculous. However good or bad this movie turns out to be, the original comic book will always be a masterpiece. Appreciating the original artist's vision and then judging the interpretations of others is the logical way of doing things.
There's a distinction between writing a film and adapting a screenplay. Hollywood recognises the difference, even at Oscar time if I remember correctly, as does the grandparent poster.
"Alan Moore didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with the movie."? Well, apart from writing the original story...
By that rationale Leonardo da Vinci "didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with" postcards of the Mona Lisa because, after all, he didn't take the photograph or print them, he was just the original artist...
In the words of Andy Dufresne, how can you be so obtuse?
You misunderstand the point that I was trying to make, and deliberately so, it seems.
Of all the entertainment media commonly associated with storytelling, film is probably the most superficial, with the possible exception of pop music (if you want to classify that as a storytelling medium too).
A picture might tell a thousand words, but a film director only has so many such pictures that he can put in the can during a typical film. 24 pictures a second, for two hours or so (two hours being a rough approximation of the length of a typical film nowadays) still leaves a director playing catch up to the novelist who is as free as he likes to be as verbose as he likes about every detail in every scene.
A character might pause for a second or two on screen before committing an act yet that pause can easily be strung out for pages and pages by even a half-decent author who can use it to describe everything from the character's immediate state of body and mind to his motivations, hopes, dreams and aspirations. An author has every luxury to wax lyrical, a director typically does not, hence my comment about superficiality.
Take a complex scene from any movie and try to express it in words. Now add ton and expand on that written description. With the written word, that's easily done, right? Now take a complex scene from any book and try to cram everything that a writer's telling you onto the screen. Sure, you might be able to express what a character's thoughts and actions whilst keeping the action on screen at a reasonable pace but could you do that for, say, four characters without losing anything and without being reduced to a crawl? Or would you have to leave some things to the viewers' imaginations?
And, of course, you can flip back a page or two in a book and re-read it, but you can't do that with a movie being played to a packed theatre. Whereas an author can be excused losing his readers from time to time (because they can go back a few lines and find their way again) a movie director cannot (whatever message needs to be conveyed has to be conveyed in a clear, unambiguous fashion). That's not to say that a book can freely wander meaninglessly about it's subject matter without causing concern or that a film has no room for subtlety, because that's not true in either case, only that time and the opportunity for retrospection are usually on an author's side but rarely on a director's one.
Of course, having said all that (and, believe me, it's far more than I wanted to say), there are some films with more depth to them than some books. My point was a generalisation of the media, not a specific critique comparing novel x to movie y and then a wild extrapolation from that to suit my own conclusions.
Coming back to some of your other points, I'm sorry, but I don't consider billboards and pamphlets to be entertainment media capable of story telling, so what relevance do they have in this discussion, even in its broadest sense?
If you recall, the fraction of a sentence that you decided to pick up on and pick apart was concerned with the translation of the story from comic book to film: trying to pull advertising hoardings into the debate is tangential at best.
Clearly you took umbrage at my use of the word superficial. Well, by superficial I didn't mean trivial or insignificant, I meant, more often than not, barely touching the surface. I think I've illustrated how films often barely touch the surface in comparison to books, haven't I?
I stand by what I wrote but I'll expand on it to eliminate some of the pedentry. Film isperhaps our most superficial entertainment medium for storytelling.
Now, of course, this is where the people who ignored my recognition that this was a generalisation will choose to step in to point out the error of my ways. And that, my friends, is your cue...
Look at how V for Vendetta is set out. Look at the chapter styling, the poetry, etc. How do you translate those elements to film without losing 90 percent of your audience?
The answer is you can't do it, so you don't even try to do it, and, consequently, much of the depth of the story is lost. V for Vendetta is perhaps the least superficial comic that you could ever hope to come across, yet film is perhaps our most superficial medium. It is inevitable that much of what makes V for Vendetta such an outstanding piece of work will be lost in translation.
I'd even go as far as to suggest that certain parts of the story that involve action rather than worlds will be diluted to suit modern sensibilities. Hollywood's primary audience is and always will be US filmgoers, and it's hard to imagine that some aspects of the story (I won't elaborate further, as I wouldn't want to spoil anything for someone who hasn't read it yet) wouldn't be watered down or eliminated totally to fall more in-line with what is and isn't taboo in a society that still hasn't gotten over a 1 second flash of one of Janet Jackson's nipples more than 18 months ago.
Suffice to say that, somewhere along the line, Alan Moore's beautiful nightmare will be so heavily diluted and edited that it will lose much of its raw power.
Where you see a potential Sin City, I see a potential (and probable) Judge Dredd: ie, a Hollywood mockery of the original source material.
The lead character in V for Vendetta, V, is basically Guy Fawkes, albeit in a contemporary dystopian setting. Now, you may not know it, but Guy Fawkes was one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament, on November 5th, 1605.
So, a November 5th release is very appropriate for V for Vendetta, especially as this year is the 400th anniversary of the plot. Releasing the film in March 2006 doesn't have quite the same marketing effect or poignancy.
I've commented on V for Vendetta in its original comic book form on Slashdot many times. I won't bother to drudge up what I've written elsewhere but I will summarise it all here: V for Vendetta is one of if not the greatest comic ever written, and there is no way that any film adaptation will ever do it justice.
My advice to anyone who will go to watch the film is read the original first and let that blow you away before you watch whatever butchery the story has to undergo to suit the media of film and the tastes of Hollywood execs.
The fourth word of the story submission is a rather obvious typo. Would it kill the editors to actually edit the submissions to correct errors like this one?
I mean, they wouldn't even had to RTFA to spot this particular typo: just glancing at the story's title would have been enough to spot do that.
Seriously, when is Slashdot going to pull its editorial socks up and start doing the basic stuff that even amateur teenage bloggers can manage to get right?
Slight difference? Between the US Govt and the US Army? Yeah, if you're a pedant. Let's see, just who does the US Army work for again? Who's the Commander-in-Chief of the US military forces?
Stop nitpicking and realise the truth: it's a joke to claim that you're fighting an enemy that hates the US because of the freedoms its people enjoy when the US government itself is actively denying its citizens freedoms simply because they say they are gay.
And, in this sham "war on terror", it's absurd to discard talented individuals whose skills you so desperately need just because of what they're legally allowed to do in their bedrooms. Perversely, US serviceman jumping into bed with another man is totally unacceptable but the US government jumping into bed with a dictatorship (Pakistan) that has actively exported WMD technology to "rogue states" (North Korea), which is still a hotbed of Al Qaeda-related activity and has a poor human rights record is just fine and dandy.
On a closing note, it's ironic that persecuting people on the basis of their sexual orientation seems to be just one of the many things that Osama bin Laden and George W Bush agree on.
Exactly. Some of the Diablo character classes might not be there in WOW but most are. Sorceress is now Mage, Assassin is now Rogue, Amazon is now Hunter, Barbarian is Warrior, etc.
And the game world - with regards to monsters, NPCs, quests, quest rewards, partying, etc - is clearly built on Diablo II. Heck, there are even items in WOW that are clear references to Diablo II, such as the Staff of Jordan, or the Cow King's Hide.
1. Bandwidth, large real-time databases with multiple levels of redundancy, GM and billing support, ongoing content development, etc, all cost money too. What Blizzard gets from you and what Blizzard clears in profit are two different things. Oh, and they had some up front costs too, you know: building a MMORPG isn't cheap and it isn't easy.
2. I don't have any data to back this up, but I'd be very surprised if WOW China charges the same monthly fee as WOW US or WOW EU, so your figures are way off. Also, most players I know don't pay for their subscription on a monthly basis, most pay for a few months at a time which is cheaper, and your figures don't take that into account either.
3. Game performance isn't just down to Blizzard. I can run around Ironforge between the bank and the auction house (arguably the busiest area of the game) with no lag but friends I have who play on their laptops but similar speed connections find it very laggy. It's a common misconception that all lag is down to the poor performance of Blizzard's servers: the servers aren't always the weakest link in the chain, far from it.
"Stuffing their pockets"? Hardly. If one company can claim to treat gamers right then it's Blizzard. If they were just concerned about money then there wouldn't have been free servers for Blizzard's previous games, would there? Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II BNE and Warcraft III are all free to play online via Battle.net, using servers that Blizzard still provides for free, years after the games were launched. Hardly sounds like the actions of a company that's made up of people only interested in "stuffing their pockets".
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
Yes, we do. Plenty of people like me are quite happy using Windows 2000 Professional, which is without a doubt the finest workstation (and by that I mean non-server) OS that Microsoft has ever produced.
But do they really think that one city will change anything? I think this is a step in the right direction if everybody starts using more efficient/ less waste cars, but why make such a big deal over the first step?
Because it's a bit hard to take a second step before you've taken your first one?
Besides, this isn't the first such programme. Even in India, buses, taxis and rickshaws are required to use CNG, compressed natural gas, which is less poluting than traditional vehicle fuels.
Uh, IRA weapons are being decommissioned ("put beyond use" is their preferred parlance), albeit not as publicly as most would like. It's certainly not the case that weapons used by Northern Irish paramilitary groups are ending up on the streets being used in ordinary crime by ordinary criminals, although it is true that the IRA has recently been involved in some large, well-organised and well-coordinated heists, but even those involved no shots being fired, if I remember correctly.
Don't try to educate me about the IRA and other Irish paramilitaries. I've walked past an IRA bomb, minutes before the police cordoned off the area and safely detonated it. I've educated myself on the subject and it's one that I know I know more about than few other people who aren't directly involved in it.
As for your other point, the incident that you cite could easily have happened anywhere. It's not like teenagers in Britain have a monopoly on illegal behaviour and I fail to see how crimes against the person are unique to Britain.
My attitude is a simple one: I call a spade a spade. If someone is ignorant of the facts but is talking as if they know what they're talking about then I'm not going to shy away from telling them how wrong they are and illuminating them with the evidence. In this case, the person to whom I was replying pretty much stated that getting hold of a machine gun in Britain wasn't too difficult, if not easy. I illustrated that that's so far from the truth that it's not even funny.
If you want to examine attitudes and how they project internationally may I suggest that you start with the President of the United States. I can't think of a man who's managed to turn more friends into enemies in such a short time: it takes a spectacular talent to piss away all the goodwill and support that almost every nation on this planet showed towards the US in the aftermath of September 11th but he's managed it. I think that you'll find that it's not British attitudes that has the world concerned right now, but American ones. From New World to Brave New World. Bravo.
To look at how "dissident vs tanks" works look no further than Tiananmen Square.
Once a population reaches a large enough size taking action against a marginal minority group becomes a lot easier, especially if the majority are constantly told that it's being done for their safety.
Look at the FBI vs David Koresh, or, more recently, look at the treatment of many innocent Muslims in the US in the aftermath of September 11th. Immediately after the attacks, hundreds of Muslims living and working in the US were incarcerated without trial, access to lawyers or anyone else, and their families didn't even know where they were being held: how much protest was there of those flagrant violations of civil rights?
Heck, most Americans aren't even aware that such round-ups and arrests without charges even happened. And if it could happen once without most people noticing it certainly could happen again.
My point is this: if the Government comes knocking on your door then there's not a damn thing that your machine gun is going to do to help you remain at liberty/avoid the law. If it ever comes to that you will have lost before it's started. It's far more likely that that machine gun is going to play a tragic role in killing or maiming a family member in an accident, etc than it is ever going to be used to help you defend you, your family, your property or your liberty.
If that day ever comes then I don't think that your machine gun or whatever small legal arsenal that you have is going to help you defeat what's the most well-equipped army in the world. Try taking out an Abrams MBT with whatever you've got stashed away: there's going to one definite winner and it's not going to be you.
Anyone who's living in the real world realises that in the scenario that you're talking about it's going to be Government 1, Militia 0, every single time, so the argument that someone needs a machine gun to defend himself against his own Government is just desperate clutching at straws.
By the way, wasn't Timothy McVeigh "defending himself" from his own Government too? I guess the people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, including the infants in the building's creche, were an imminent threat to his personal rights.
I know that you're German, I found that out from reading one of the comments in your comments history, which is why I didn't accuse you of being biased because of your nationality...
Really, are you suggesting that British beers are, in general, inferior to their American counterparts? That American beer is good and British beer is bad?
God, you're an idiot. You really think that the finding an illegal machine gun in Britain is easier than filling in some paperwork in Texas? Really? In that case, where do all these illegal machine guns go and what are they used for? From the evidence, it's certainly not gun crime.
We have about as many gun deaths in Britain every year than you have in the US every day*. Read that last sentence again, because I'm sure it's news to you. The US, which has roughly five times Britain's population, has roughly 365 times as many gun deaths per year. And the number of non-fatal incidents is similarly disproportionate.
Of the UK fatalities, almost all involved handguns and shotguns (most of them illegally owned; there are a few, heavily-regulated, legitimate reasons, such as farming use, why someone might be permitted to a gun licence and gun ownership in the UK). Gun incidents in the UK involving machine guns are all but unheard of: on the rare occasions that they do occur, the tabloid press isn't slow to sensationalise that element of the crime, so when it does happen we do hear about it. The lack of machine gun usage in the few gun crimes that do occur is a good indicator that the country isn't awash with them and that they aren't as easy to come by as you think.
You paint this picture that getting an AK-47 in Britain isn't much more difficult than buying a beer. Your picture couldn't be further from the reality. I suggest you check the facts first before making such pithy throw-away comments about something as serious as guns and gun crime.
(*US gun deaths for 2001, the latest year for which I could find statistics: 29,573, or an average of 567 a week, or 81 a day. UK gun deaths for July 2003 to June 2004, the latest records available: 81.)
Uh, I believe India's last President was from the "untouchable" class that's at the very bottom of that caste system. It's hardly as if caste is a barrier to success: it can be, but clearly it doesn't have to be.
Contrast that with the US, where every President has been a very rich, white, anglo-saxon Christian male, and all but a very few of them were married and/or not Protestant. It's hardly as if that's a poster for the racial and social diversity, is it?
It's not as customisable via extensions but then it has a default set of features that includes virtually every feature that the majority of Firefox users crave, plus many, many more. Whether these features work far better in Opera than in Firefox is something for debate - I would argue that they do; no doubt someone else out there would disagree with me - but what's not up for debate is that in Opera they interoperate perfectly with one another, whereas many Firefox extensions struggle to work with others ones.
Added to this Opera has a far smaller footprint than Firefox (the installer is smaller, despite containing a more feature-rich product, and so is the application when it's running). While this may not matter to most of us, I'm sure it does to some. And, I've no doubt that if the situation was reversed - if Opera was far bigger than Firefox then people would be accusing it of being bloated or heaping further praise on Firefox for being so small and effective.
The truth is, in this debate, the only thing that Firefox has in its favour are extensions (which are sometimes handy but sometimes more pain than they're worth) and its free (as in beer)/free (as in speech) status. When you consider that you can use Opera for free (as in beer) then it's clear that most people's reasons for favouring Firefox over Opera have more to do with ideology than logic.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people let their genitalia control them, and some people use their brains..
God, you are so funny. Did you know that Chris Martin and the rest of Coldplay all met at university, at University College London, one of the best universities in Britain, on par with Ivy League institutions? They're all very smart with good degrees to their names.
So, to recap, they're all intelligent as well as rich and popular. That kind of destroys your pathetic "some people use their brains" argument, doesn't it? Now how are you going to run them down?
What, any more than any of the gazillions of cross-related Pokemon games, etc? Or the Mortal Kombat 3 circus?
Man, if a collectable card game has you worried then go check out the plethora of products that those two franchises I mentioned had surrounding them. And, if you could, get a friend to video you doing it: I'm sure that there are plenty of Slashdotters who want to see what someone's head spontaneously exploding in amazement looks like.
No, you said "And as far as I know, Alan Moore didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with the movie", to which I said "Well, apart from writing the original story..."
Don't try to backtrack what you said. It might not have been what you meant, but it is what you said.
Go watch the movie then. Stay until the credits have run completely. See if "Alan Moore didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with the movie", according to those credits.
QED.
So you'd rather learn about the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci by first viewing sketchings of them made by an art student and then using your appreciation of that student's efforts, no matter how good or bad, to decide whether or not da Vinci's works are actually worth seeing? Gotcha.
Sorry, but that really is ridiculous. However good or bad this movie turns out to be, the original comic book will always be a masterpiece. Appreciating the original artist's vision and then judging the interpretations of others is the logical way of doing things.
There's a distinction between writing a film and adapting a screenplay. Hollywood recognises the difference, even at Oscar time if I remember correctly, as does the grandparent poster.
"Alan Moore didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with the movie."? Well, apart from writing the original story...
By that rationale Leonardo da Vinci "didn't/doesn't have sh*t to do with" postcards of the Mona Lisa because, after all, he didn't take the photograph or print them, he was just the original artist...
In the words of Andy Dufresne, how can you be so obtuse?
You misunderstand the point that I was trying to make, and deliberately so, it seems.
Of all the entertainment media commonly associated with storytelling, film is probably the most superficial, with the possible exception of pop music (if you want to classify that as a storytelling medium too).
A picture might tell a thousand words, but a film director only has so many such pictures that he can put in the can during a typical film. 24 pictures a second, for two hours or so (two hours being a rough approximation of the length of a typical film nowadays) still leaves a director playing catch up to the novelist who is as free as he likes to be as verbose as he likes about every detail in every scene.
A character might pause for a second or two on screen before committing an act yet that pause can easily be strung out for pages and pages by even a half-decent author who can use it to describe everything from the character's immediate state of body and mind to his motivations, hopes, dreams and aspirations. An author has every luxury to wax lyrical, a director typically does not, hence my comment about superficiality.
Take a complex scene from any movie and try to express it in words. Now add ton and expand on that written description. With the written word, that's easily done, right? Now take a complex scene from any book and try to cram everything that a writer's telling you onto the screen. Sure, you might be able to express what a character's thoughts and actions whilst keeping the action on screen at a reasonable pace but could you do that for, say, four characters without losing anything and without being reduced to a crawl? Or would you have to leave some things to the viewers' imaginations?
And, of course, you can flip back a page or two in a book and re-read it, but you can't do that with a movie being played to a packed theatre. Whereas an author can be excused losing his readers from time to time (because they can go back a few lines and find their way again) a movie director cannot (whatever message needs to be conveyed has to be conveyed in a clear, unambiguous fashion). That's not to say that a book can freely wander meaninglessly about it's subject matter without causing concern or that a film has no room for subtlety, because that's not true in either case, only that time and the opportunity for retrospection are usually on an author's side but rarely on a director's one.
Of course, having said all that (and, believe me, it's far more than I wanted to say), there are some films with more depth to them than some books. My point was a generalisation of the media, not a specific critique comparing novel x to movie y and then a wild extrapolation from that to suit my own conclusions.
Coming back to some of your other points, I'm sorry, but I don't consider billboards and pamphlets to be entertainment media capable of story telling, so what relevance do they have in this discussion, even in its broadest sense?
If you recall, the fraction of a sentence that you decided to pick up on and pick apart was concerned with the translation of the story from comic book to film: trying to pull advertising hoardings into the debate is tangential at best.
Clearly you took umbrage at my use of the word superficial. Well, by superficial I didn't mean trivial or insignificant, I meant, more often than not, barely touching the surface. I think I've illustrated how films often barely touch the surface in comparison to books, haven't I?
I stand by what I wrote but I'll expand on it to eliminate some of the pedentry. Film isperhaps our most superficial entertainment medium for storytelling.
Now, of course, this is where the people who ignored my recognition that this was a generalisation will choose to step in to point out the error of my ways. And that, my friends, is your cue...
Look at how V for Vendetta is set out. Look at the chapter styling, the poetry, etc. How do you translate those elements to film without losing 90 percent of your audience?
The answer is you can't do it, so you don't even try to do it, and, consequently, much of the depth of the story is lost. V for Vendetta is perhaps the least superficial comic that you could ever hope to come across, yet film is perhaps our most superficial medium. It is inevitable that much of what makes V for Vendetta such an outstanding piece of work will be lost in translation.
I'd even go as far as to suggest that certain parts of the story that involve action rather than worlds will be diluted to suit modern sensibilities. Hollywood's primary audience is and always will be US filmgoers, and it's hard to imagine that some aspects of the story (I won't elaborate further, as I wouldn't want to spoil anything for someone who hasn't read it yet) wouldn't be watered down or eliminated totally to fall more in-line with what is and isn't taboo in a society that still hasn't gotten over a 1 second flash of one of Janet Jackson's nipples more than 18 months ago.
Suffice to say that, somewhere along the line, Alan Moore's beautiful nightmare will be so heavily diluted and edited that it will lose much of its raw power.
Where you see a potential Sin City, I see a potential (and probable) Judge Dredd: ie, a Hollywood mockery of the original source material.
The lead character in V for Vendetta, V, is basically Guy Fawkes, albeit in a contemporary dystopian setting. Now, you may not know it, but Guy Fawkes was one of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament, on November 5th, 1605.
So, a November 5th release is very appropriate for V for Vendetta, especially as this year is the 400th anniversary of the plot. Releasing the film in March 2006 doesn't have quite the same marketing effect or poignancy.
I've commented on V for Vendetta in its original comic book form on Slashdot many times. I won't bother to drudge up what I've written elsewhere but I will summarise it all here: V for Vendetta is one of if not the greatest comic ever written, and there is no way that any film adaptation will ever do it justice.
My advice to anyone who will go to watch the film is read the original first and let that blow you away before you watch whatever butchery the story has to undergo to suit the media of film and the tastes of Hollywood execs.
The fourth word of the story submission is a rather obvious typo. Would it kill the editors to actually edit the submissions to correct errors like this one?
I mean, they wouldn't even had to RTFA to spot this particular typo: just glancing at the story's title would have been enough to spot do that.
Seriously, when is Slashdot going to pull its editorial socks up and start doing the basic stuff that even amateur teenage bloggers can manage to get right?
Slight difference? Between the US Govt and the US Army? Yeah, if you're a pedant. Let's see, just who does the US Army work for again? Who's the Commander-in-Chief of the US military forces?
Stop nitpicking and realise the truth: it's a joke to claim that you're fighting an enemy that hates the US because of the freedoms its people enjoy when the US government itself is actively denying its citizens freedoms simply because they say they are gay.
And, in this sham "war on terror", it's absurd to discard talented individuals whose skills you so desperately need just because of what they're legally allowed to do in their bedrooms. Perversely, US serviceman jumping into bed with another man is totally unacceptable but the US government jumping into bed with a dictatorship (Pakistan) that has actively exported WMD technology to "rogue states" (North Korea), which is still a hotbed of Al Qaeda-related activity and has a poor human rights record is just fine and dandy.
On a closing note, it's ironic that persecuting people on the basis of their sexual orientation seems to be just one of the many things that Osama bin Laden and George W Bush agree on.
Exactly. Some of the Diablo character classes might not be there in WOW but most are. Sorceress is now Mage, Assassin is now Rogue, Amazon is now Hunter, Barbarian is Warrior, etc.
And the game world - with regards to monsters, NPCs, quests, quest rewards, partying, etc - is clearly built on Diablo II. Heck, there are even items in WOW that are clear references to Diablo II, such as the Staff of Jordan, or the Cow King's Hide.
1. Bandwidth, large real-time databases with multiple levels of redundancy, GM and billing support, ongoing content development, etc, all cost money too. What Blizzard gets from you and what Blizzard clears in profit are two different things. Oh, and they had some up front costs too, you know: building a MMORPG isn't cheap and it isn't easy.
2. I don't have any data to back this up, but I'd be very surprised if WOW China charges the same monthly fee as WOW US or WOW EU, so your figures are way off. Also, most players I know don't pay for their subscription on a monthly basis, most pay for a few months at a time which is cheaper, and your figures don't take that into account either.
3. Game performance isn't just down to Blizzard. I can run around Ironforge between the bank and the auction house (arguably the busiest area of the game) with no lag but friends I have who play on their laptops but similar speed connections find it very laggy. It's a common misconception that all lag is down to the poor performance of Blizzard's servers: the servers aren't always the weakest link in the chain, far from it.
"Stuffing their pockets"? Hardly. If one company can claim to treat gamers right then it's Blizzard. If they were just concerned about money then there wouldn't have been free servers for Blizzard's previous games, would there? Diablo, Diablo II, Starcraft, Warcraft II BNE and Warcraft III are all free to play online via Battle.net, using servers that Blizzard still provides for free, years after the games were launched. Hardly sounds like the actions of a company that's made up of people only interested in "stuffing their pockets".
And don't try to counter with the BnetD stuff: it's called protecting your investment. Blizzard has every right to do that, just like you or anyone else.
Yes, we do. Plenty of people like me are quite happy using Windows 2000 Professional, which is without a doubt the finest workstation (and by that I mean non-server) OS that Microsoft has ever produced.
*<---------------Ability to distinguish the meaning of "Parent" from that of "Grandparent"
*<---------------Your head
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
But do they really think that one city will change anything? I think this is a step in the right direction if everybody starts using more efficient/ less waste cars, but why make such a big deal over the first step?
Because it's a bit hard to take a second step before you've taken your first one?
Besides, this isn't the first such programme. Even in India, buses, taxis and rickshaws are required to use CNG, compressed natural gas, which is less poluting than traditional vehicle fuels.
Uh, IRA weapons are being decommissioned ("put beyond use" is their preferred parlance), albeit not as publicly as most would like. It's certainly not the case that weapons used by Northern Irish paramilitary groups are ending up on the streets being used in ordinary crime by ordinary criminals, although it is true that the IRA has recently been involved in some large, well-organised and well-coordinated heists, but even those involved no shots being fired, if I remember correctly.
Don't try to educate me about the IRA and other Irish paramilitaries. I've walked past an IRA bomb, minutes before the police cordoned off the area and safely detonated it. I've educated myself on the subject and it's one that I know I know more about than few other people who aren't directly involved in it.
As for your other point, the incident that you cite could easily have happened anywhere. It's not
like teenagers in Britain have a monopoly on illegal behaviour and I fail to see how crimes against the person are unique to Britain.
My attitude is a simple one: I call a spade a spade. If someone is ignorant of the facts but is talking as if they know what they're talking about then I'm not going to shy away from telling them how wrong they are and illuminating them with the evidence. In this case, the person to whom I was replying pretty much stated that getting hold of a machine gun in Britain wasn't too difficult, if not easy. I illustrated that that's so far from the truth that it's not even funny.
If you want to examine attitudes and how they project internationally may I suggest that you start with the President of the United States. I can't think of a man who's managed to turn more friends into enemies in such a short time: it takes a spectacular talent to piss away all the goodwill and support that almost every nation on this planet showed towards the US in the aftermath of September 11th but he's managed it. I think that you'll find that it's not British attitudes that has the world concerned right now, but American ones. From New World to Brave New World. Bravo.
To look at how "dissident vs tanks" works look no further than Tiananmen Square.
Once a population reaches a large enough size taking action against a marginal minority group becomes a lot easier, especially if the majority are constantly told that it's being done for their safety.
Look at the FBI vs David Koresh, or, more recently, look at the treatment of many innocent Muslims in the US in the aftermath of September 11th. Immediately after the attacks, hundreds of Muslims living and working in the US were incarcerated without trial, access to lawyers or anyone else, and their families didn't even know where they were being held: how much protest was there of those flagrant violations of civil rights?
Heck, most Americans aren't even aware that such round-ups and arrests without charges even happened. And if it could happen once without most people noticing it certainly could happen again.
My point is this: if the Government comes knocking on your door then there's not a damn thing that your machine gun is going to do to help you remain at liberty/avoid the law. If it ever comes to that you will have lost before it's started. It's far more likely that that machine gun is going to play a tragic role in killing or maiming a family member in an accident, etc than it is ever going to be used to help you defend you, your family, your property or your liberty.
If that day ever comes then I don't think that your machine gun or whatever small legal arsenal that you have is going to help you defeat what's the most well-equipped army in the world. Try taking out an Abrams MBT with whatever you've got stashed away: there's going to one definite winner and it's not going to be you.
Anyone who's living in the real world realises that in the scenario that you're talking about it's going to be Government 1, Militia 0, every single time, so the argument that someone needs a machine gun to defend himself against his own Government is just desperate clutching at straws.
By the way, wasn't Timothy McVeigh "defending himself" from his own Government too? I guess the people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, including the infants in the building's creche, were an imminent threat to his personal rights.
I know that you're German, I found that out from reading one of the comments in your comments history, which is why I didn't accuse you of being biased because of your nationality...
Really, are you suggesting that British beers are, in general, inferior to their American counterparts? That American beer is good and British beer is bad?
God, you're an idiot. You really think that the finding an illegal machine gun in Britain is easier than filling in some paperwork in Texas? Really? In that case, where do all these illegal machine guns go and what are they used for? From the evidence, it's certainly not gun crime.
We have about as many gun deaths in Britain every year than you have in the US every day*. Read that last sentence again, because I'm sure it's news to you. The US, which has roughly five times Britain's population, has roughly 365 times as many gun deaths per year. And the number of non-fatal incidents is similarly disproportionate.
Of the UK fatalities, almost all involved handguns and shotguns (most of them illegally owned; there are a few, heavily-regulated, legitimate reasons, such as farming use, why someone might be permitted to a gun licence and gun ownership in the UK). Gun incidents in the UK involving machine guns are all but unheard of: on the rare occasions that they do occur, the tabloid press isn't slow to sensationalise that element of the crime, so when it does happen we do hear about it. The lack of machine gun usage in the few gun crimes that do occur is a good indicator that the country isn't awash with them and that they aren't as easy to come by as you think.
You paint this picture that getting an AK-47 in Britain isn't much more difficult than buying a beer. Your picture couldn't be further from the reality. I suggest you check the facts first before making such pithy throw-away comments about something as serious as guns and gun crime.
(*US gun deaths for 2001, the latest year for which I could find statistics: 29,573, or an average of 567 a week, or 81 a day. UK gun deaths for July 2003 to June 2004, the latest records available: 81.)
Uh, I believe India's last President was from the "untouchable" class that's at the very bottom of that caste system. It's hardly as if caste is a barrier to success: it can be, but clearly it doesn't have to be.
Contrast that with the US, where every President has been a very rich, white, anglo-saxon Christian male, and all but a very few of them were married and/or not Protestant. It's hardly as if that's a poster for the racial and social diversity, is it?
It's not as customisable via extensions but then it has a default set of features that includes virtually every feature that the majority of Firefox users crave, plus many, many more. Whether these features work far better in Opera than in Firefox is something for debate - I would argue that they do; no doubt someone else out there would disagree with me - but what's not up for debate is that in Opera they interoperate perfectly with one another, whereas many Firefox extensions struggle to work with others ones.
Added to this Opera has a far smaller footprint than Firefox (the installer is smaller, despite containing a more feature-rich product, and so is the application when it's running). While this may not matter to most of us, I'm sure it does to some. And, I've no doubt that if the situation was reversed - if Opera was far bigger than Firefox then people would be accusing it of being bloated or heaping further praise on Firefox for being so small and effective.
The truth is, in this debate, the only thing that Firefox has in its favour are extensions (which are sometimes handy but sometimes more pain than they're worth) and its free (as in beer)/free (as in speech) status. When you consider that you can use Opera for free (as in beer) then it's clear that most people's reasons for favouring Firefox over Opera have more to do with ideology than logic.
Sorry, I haven't a clue what you're talking about...