Star Trek was about addressing and commenting on the norms and issues of current society. You go back and watch the original series and it is very obvious--and that's what was so endearing about he series. It wasn't about phasers, proton torpedoes, and teleporters. Those were just a veneer or a vehicle for people to think.
So unless there's a heavy handed allegory for some modern day social issue, its not really Star Trek? How do you explain episodes like "Operation: Annihiliate!" or "Mirror, Mirror"? Parables about the moral dangers of flying fake vomit and use of transporters in ion storms, respectively? Sure, Star Trek was famous for pushing the barrier and for talking about otherwise uncomfortable subjects through the guise of aliens, but there were plenty of episodes that were basically just like this movie, action pieces. If you want to pick a recurring theme from TOS and say that's what its about, then pretend its defining characteristic is Kirk overcoming evil computers, and then you've got your solution in the Kobiashi Maru scene in the new movie. If you don't want to like the new movie, don't like it, but don't pretend it makes you anything other than a crotchety old star trek fan.
For the idiomatically challeneged, GP post is vernacular for 'stop obsessing over fictional minutiae and participate in normal social structures, thus putting said minutiae in perspective'. He didn't actually mean for you to simply stand on a lawn.
The fact that Starfleet knew that Romulans were related to Vulcans before Stardate 1709.2 The Kelvin crew should have reported an attack by a strange ship populated by Vulcans with tattoos and emotions.
Or you could just accept the fact that the idea that Starfleet and Vulcan didn't know what the origin or Romulus was is stupid on its face and ignore the cannon established there as being as stupid as any part of 'Spock's Brain'
* The Temporal Prime Directive
* In the Future, there is a division of Starfleet that watches the timeline for massive changes
The idea that every new instance of Trek has to be faithful to every previous concept ever introduced is precisely why a lot of recent trek sucks. No matter what happened in the movie, I'm sure SOME previous episode or movie would contradict it. And if you don't like that idea, then MAKE UP A REASON why the temporal prime directive doesn't apply (like neither craft intended to travel through time) or the starfleet temporal agency didn't intervene (some bullshit technobabble related to the rate of propogation of changes in the timeline due to 'red matter'). If ypu need the explanation, then make it up, but don't put the burden on the filmmakers to add some dialogue to the movie which is only going to confuse 99% of the target audience who have never heard of either of these concepts.
* The fact that reversing the damage caused by Neo would require a simple bit of time travel (jump to the past to reverse the damage caused, then jump to the future to prevent Neo from ever going back)
Don't insist that among all the different star trek time travel plots that this movie should follow one particular formula just because you want the result it would provide (leaving the timeline largely unchanged at the end).
* Neo's ship conforms to NONE of the established Romulan shiip design
You've got the official starfleet ship identification flashcards for romulan MINING ships then have you? That's like complaining that a oil derrick doesn't look like an aircraft carrier.
* Voyager's Chakotay-style Face Tattoos on romulans?
The idea that every stellar culture is monolithic and all follow the same mode of dress and have the same philosophy is one of the major failings and conceit of Star Trek. I suppose you think there's some sort of central 'distinguishing characteristic registry' that means that a romulan mining crew can't wear tattoos because 'Chakotay' got there first.
* An Enterprise bridge designed by Apple
Every star trek bridge has been designed in the style of whatever filmmaker or tv maker was creating the show / movie at the time. In fact the ONLY time the bridge looks consistent from one incarnation to the other is because someone is saving money on production design and sets, NOT because they're trying to preserve continuity.
if you don't like the movie, just say you don't like the movie. Don't make up bullshit reasons to justify how its somehow objectively sub-par.
Yeah, it might be a good action movie or whatever, but is hardly consistent with the philosophical underpinnings of the original work.
Did you ever actually watch the original show? Star Trek had gotten more thinky and philisophical with every incarnation since then until it was suffocating under the weight of its own continuity and the expectation of the fans. This movie's lack of fealty to the fans is exactly what will refresh Star Trek to something that isn't dead.
That so few Star Trek fans "get" this is a bit unnerving.
What's unnerving is fans who think they have some right to dictate the direction of Star Trek.
So now when firefox wigs out and starts chewing up all available CPU cycles, it will take up 100% of my cycles instead of the 50% available to one CPU.
No you don't. Unless you're attaching huge files to the emails or transferring huge files over AIM, you would wear your fingers to bloody stumps before you could approach generating 1GB of data over a text channel carrying natural language.
Pilots and ATC do the same thing. Its because the guarantee of pilots being able to communicate with each other and with ground control is much more important than the alternative, for obvious reasons. Whether this argument applies to all coders might be subject to some debate, but I imagine for mission critical software like for medical devices or say, ATC, its a no brainer.
Its a stupid thing to nit pick I know, but 'dune coons' != 'indian'. I find it amusing that people with such blatantly racists attitudes apparently can't wrap their heads around the concept that 'brown' is not an ethnic group.
Agreed; which is why this statement from TFS: "... could churn out code that saved the company millions" - is nonsense. It may look that way on the surface, but when accounting for all the code maintenance pains that inevitably follow, I've yet to see a single such "genius" that wasn't a net loss
First off, sometimes there is a time basis that cannot be avoided and a solution, however dirty, is required right away in order to complete a contract or open a web storefront or the like. In these cases the original statement is literally true, millions could be made or lost depending on whether you can flip the on switch tommorow or next week. At that point, you're making money in the long term, regardless of whether you have to reimplement.
Of course companies are usually, imo, too focused on the here and now results anyway and this is a double edged sword. It can get you to market quicker, but I have time and again seen companies shopping for development libraries or other similar tools go against the selection of one vendor by EVERYONE who was going to use the product and go for another cheaper vendor that no one liked because it saves the company 100k right now, even though the cost of developing locally all the missing functionality from the cheaper solution will easily end up costing more that the saved amount in the long run.
Any particular reason why you have such complete trust for an underground illegal corporation that habitually constructs and deconstructs people's minds for money? They'll keep your dirty little secrets... they promised.
There's a very good reason. They've built their entire business model around it. Its not like they can advertise on fliers, they rely on good word of mouth, which you don't get from screwing over your customers. So Dollhouse has a strong financial incentive to be straight with their clients and protect their confidentiality. Unlike an individual professional of any sort, the Dollhouse's continued existence rests on their not screwing over the people that hire them. A lawyer might blackmail you. A law firm never will and will do its best to make sure its employees won't either.
As a client I would also think the fact that Dollhouse is an illegal organization works partly in my favor. In order to expose anything about my they'd have to risk exposing themselves.
That's not to say that they aren't saving up juicy tidbits for a rainy day.
The whole thing reminds me of all the arguments people had about Firefly back in the day about how in the future they wouldn't be riding around horses and shooting projectile weapons. These statements were patently absurd. Colonies at the frontier are always going to use easy to maintain and repair low tech over high tech for which they have no replacements or capacity to fix.
That applies to most of the episodes. I mean, the whole fantasy-date thing; sure I can see the rich-and-stupid shelling out for that, and a fantasy-date/human-hunt again, again sure; but a made-to-order negotiator? Why wouldn't you just hire the best real one instead of effectively trusting 'some programmer' with your daughter's life? and what about the scene at the beginning? a made-to-order mid-wife? That one doesn't even begin to make sense. I can't even theorize why I wouldn't just hire the best real one's.
The clients aren't just purchasing a skillset, they're buying complete privacy. You can pay as much as you want to a professional whatever, but that's no guarantee that someone with deeper pockets won't pay them to betray you or divulge information you'd rather were kept private. The most expensive call girl on the planet can later blackmail you, as could a skilled negotiator that you are forced to give access to your life in order to do their job. The most expensive midwife might end up selling cell phone shots of your wife's vag to the tabloids. The only way to ensure complete silence is to kill the hired hand. Or you can hire from the Dollhouse and rest assured that the person you hire won't even exist after the engagement.
Or you could just suspend some disbelief. I mean virtually every crime drama show on television uses completely implausible technology to zoom into reflections of reflections on photos.
So next time a cop pulls me over because I'm driving 5mph over the speed limit, the cop asks me if I know why he pulled me over, and I answer "why, no sir, I don't,", I should be arrested for lying to the officer?
The difference being that the officer in question has no evidence that you are lying. He can establish your speed but not your awareness of the speed. That wasn't the case in this instance. The officer had multiple accounts that conflicted with what the student was saying.
FYI, the appropriate response to 'do you know how fast you were going?' is 'how can I help you officer?'. A polite non-response to the question which neither lies nor gives up your 5th amendment rights.
Despite how you feel about racial integration, it's illegal. It doesn't matter one iota your feelings, there's no "freedom to sit wherever you want on the bus". Especially since the law states otherwise.
Oh wait..... its not integration, its segregation that's illegal and that's largely due to people who willfully refused to obey the laws of the time, which they saw as unjust.
If one disagrees with the dogma of the day, that makes one a "denier"?
No. If one denies global warming is happening (independent of whether global warming is actually happening) then one is a global warming denier. Trying to frame the argument in such a way to promote the idea that people who deny global warming exists are somehow rebellious free thinkers (as opposed to short-sighted morons motivated by profit or politics) doesn't make use of the term 'global warming denier' somehow evidence of political correctness run amok.
Just ask the Vietnamese. They succeeded in stymieing one of the largest and well-equipped military forces on the planet.
What stymied U.S. forces was in large part the jungle. Being an invading force in difficult and unfamiliar terrain against people who know the terrain and are defending their homes counts for a lot.
They rarely used suicide bombers because the tactic was counter-productive.
And before you speak out of your ass again, try googling 'viet kong suicide bombers'.
No, that just means the bomber has lost the conflict but is to stupid to admit the fact.
Asymmetric warfare isn't designed to 'win' in the conventional sense. Its designed to wear down the will of an invading force.
It doesn't weaken the stronger military by any meaningful amount, it just pisses them off.
Not in terms of absolute numbers or weapons, but certainly in morale. And again, the point of such an attack is not the effect it will have on the military (which is already admitted to be superior by the very term 'asymmetric warfare') but the effect it will have on the morale of the invaders and their homeland as a whole.
The Japanese started using kamikaze tactics in WWII when the leadership already knew or should have known that the war was a lost cause.
The allies never invaded the Japanese islands, did they? Instead they chose to use the Atomic bomb. Its conceivable that the demonstrated willingness of the Japanese to die in defense of their country discouraged the use of a full scale invasion, such as the one in Europe.
Maybe you're right, and the only people who might question whether suicide attacks are genuinely ineffective are the people like myself who are already questioning the point of being an invading force in the first place. But then again, maybe even the most pro-war mother and father might stop for a second and wonder if their child really had to die, and whether he really had to be an occupying force in the first place.
You can argue the effectiveness of suicide bombing all you want, and you can tell a conquered people that it will do no good till you're blue in the face, but even if you're right, that's not going to stop them. People who are cornered or conquered have two choices: assimilate or fight. Some will choose to fight and of those some will believe that the only effective way to fight a vastly superior force is to resort to suicide tactics. The only way to prevent this is to go all the way back and do your best to prevent the need for an invasion in the first place. Say for instance, by not lying about the presence of WMD's in a country that doesn't have them, and not conflating the government of that country with a completely unrelated (ethnically, politically, and geographically) group that is responsible for an actual attack on your country.
My objective is not to die for my country/planet but to make the other bastard die for his.
Sure, if you're a soldier fighting in a standard 'symmetric' war. On the other hand, the kill ratio in Iraq for coalition forces is 100:1 (1 coalition soldier dead for every 100 enemy combatants). Numbers like that make suicide bombing start to look pretty appealing.
A game should not involve 'effort'. It's a game, not a job.
That's retarded. Any sport (which are all games) requires effort to excel. What the original poster is doing is tantamount to saying he wants to play baseball and get the rewards of being a big league star player without doing any of the corresponding work.
Your response to not having access to Dalaran was "know a mage."
No. As others have pointed out there are numerous ways to get to Dalaran. I got in very quickly because of a large social network, but that doesn't mean you can't get in if you don't have a large social network. It just means you have to utilize one of the other ways to get to Dalaran, one of which of course is to level to 74.
What about normal people?
Normal people make friends.
As for leveling to 80 netting me 3,000 gold, I play a resto shaman.
You could complain about anything. No one is forcing you to play a resto shaman. In fact, Blizzard has explicitly stated that you should only NEED to play a specced tank or healing class in endgame heroics and raids. Otherwise, you're perfectly fine healing as Elemental, or tanking as Arms, which means you can also quest very easily. The cost to respec once at 70 and again back to resto at 80 is insignificant compared to the gold you could make if you wanted to quest. Even if you did decide to level to 80 purely by dungeon healing, you're still going to earn a lot of money from greens and blues that you don't use, the value of which either in enchanting mats or at vendors would far exceed any repair bill you should have as a healer.
I also find it amusing that you defend the mindless grinds of WoW
Nowhere did I do any such thing. In fact what I've said at every turn is that there are alternatives to virtually every path of advancement in the game. Your problem is that you don't want alternatives. You want free lootz without the effort, hence 'Progress Quest'. Actually I don't think you even want that. You just want to complain. Every suggestion or alternative that's been pointed out to you by myself or anyone else is be met by a new complaint to the extent that the very letters of your posts begin to take on an almost supernatural whine, like as a mosquito trapped in my monitor. If you hate the game so much, please by all means take your ball and go home. Stop standing around and threatening to do it, just go.
Ignoring the fact, of course, that mages have been charging 20-50 gold per port.
A lot of your complaints boil down to 'I have no friends in the game to work with or help me out'. I got into Dalaran about an hour into playing LK, completely for free, mostly because I'm part of a very large Guild that is in turn part of a larger alliance of about a half dozen other guilds all of whom have membership numbers in the hundreds. By and large we all help each other out and even if I don't know someone personally, if I see that they're a member of one of the allied guilds I can typically rely on being able to group with them and having them be able to play adequately and not be an asshole. That's because we all help each other learn to play adequately and if you're an asshole you either stop being one or you get kicked out (its pretty much the ONLY way to get kicked out).
You'll be broke and will have to mindlessly grind dungeons for rep instead.
Leveling to 80 will easily gain you over 3k gold even if you never do a daily, so you won't be broke. As for rep, seriously, what the hell? You complain about dailies and you complain about dungeons. Apparently you want to hit exalted with factions without doing anything at all. I take it back. You don't need to play Oblivion. You need to play Progress Quest or find a pretty screensaver.
That flying mount you saved up for (worse, if you bought an epic) - can't use it until 77 or so. Bad call.
I think this decision is used to good effect to keep people from skipping large sections of the content.
Not a mage? Can't get to Dalaran until 74 (or so, I haven't done it yet).
You can easily get to Dalaran by knowing a mage or knowing someone who knows a mage and so on. Anyone in Dalaran can easily bring anyone else in the same level range to Dalaran by queuing them for a battleground, which the other person then goes into and when they exit, poof they're in Dalaran. Regardless, the design intent is to make sure people don't simply skip all the content and go straight to the fabulous magical city. On the other hand its not that hard for people who are determined.
More dailies...ugh
You can level to 80 and also hit exalted with every reputation in the game without ever doing a daily quest.
At least as far as tailoring is concerned, in TBC I could at least earn decent epic items without having to set foot in a raid
Every profession / armor type has a corresponding level 80 blue bind on equip set of items which are suitable both for doing endgame dungeons (including heroics if you've got enough skill) and starting PVP. The tailoring version is called frostsavage.
Nothing in WoTLK addresses the elitist mentality the game has been designed for.
You've gone completely off the rails here. EVERYTHING in WotLK is desgined to serve the needs of the many, not the needs of the few. The elite hardcore players are already complaining that compared with BC this game is far too easy. Most hardcore players I know skipped normal 80 dungeons and went straight to heroics. On the other hand my parents in law are quite happily two thirds of their way to 80.
What you need, sir, is to go buy a copy of 'Elder Scrolls: Oblivion' and leave the rest of us to play in peace.
If uninstalling the free trial would leave your computer in exactly the same state as before, then nothing could stop you from free trying again.
You could also accomplish the same effect by making an image of your drive before you installed the app and restoring to it. But practically speaking people aren't going to do that. By the same token, given ubiquitous internet access and identifiable characteristics of a given machine, it would be fairly easy for EA to keep a server side record of where its been installed and where it hasn't.
Placing the DRM intrusion level so high isn't just an annoyance. Its pointless. All you do is punish people who are using the game legitimately and have basically no impact on those who pirate the game and use a crack anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
So unless there's a heavy handed allegory for some modern day social issue, its not really Star Trek? How do you explain episodes like "Operation: Annihiliate!" or "Mirror, Mirror"? Parables about the moral dangers of flying fake vomit and use of transporters in ion storms, respectively? Sure, Star Trek was famous for pushing the barrier and for talking about otherwise uncomfortable subjects through the guise of aliens, but there were plenty of episodes that were basically just like this movie, action pieces. If you want to pick a recurring theme from TOS and say that's what its about, then pretend its defining characteristic is Kirk overcoming evil computers, and then you've got your solution in the Kobiashi Maru scene in the new movie. If you don't want to like the new movie, don't like it, but don't pretend it makes you anything other than a crotchety old star trek fan.
For the idiomatically challeneged, GP post is vernacular for 'stop obsessing over fictional minutiae and participate in normal social structures, thus putting said minutiae in perspective'. He didn't actually mean for you to simply stand on a lawn.
Or you could just accept the fact that the idea that Starfleet and Vulcan didn't know what the origin or Romulus was is stupid on its face and ignore the cannon established there as being as stupid as any part of 'Spock's Brain'
The idea that every new instance of Trek has to be faithful to every previous concept ever introduced is precisely why a lot of recent trek sucks. No matter what happened in the movie, I'm sure SOME previous episode or movie would contradict it. And if you don't like that idea, then MAKE UP A REASON why the temporal prime directive doesn't apply (like neither craft intended to travel through time) or the starfleet temporal agency didn't intervene (some bullshit technobabble related to the rate of propogation of changes in the timeline due to 'red matter'). If ypu need the explanation, then make it up, but don't put the burden on the filmmakers to add some dialogue to the movie which is only going to confuse 99% of the target audience who have never heard of either of these concepts.
Don't insist that among all the different star trek time travel plots that this movie should follow one particular formula just because you want the result it would provide (leaving the timeline largely unchanged at the end).
You've got the official starfleet ship identification flashcards for romulan MINING ships then have you? That's like complaining that a oil derrick doesn't look like an aircraft carrier.
The idea that every stellar culture is monolithic and all follow the same mode of dress and have the same philosophy is one of the major failings and conceit of Star Trek. I suppose you think there's some sort of central 'distinguishing characteristic registry' that means that a romulan mining crew can't wear tattoos because 'Chakotay' got there first.
Every star trek bridge has been designed in the style of whatever filmmaker or tv maker was creating the show / movie at the time. In fact the ONLY time the bridge looks consistent from one incarnation to the other is because someone is saving money on production design and sets, NOT because they're trying to preserve continuity.
if you don't like the movie, just say you don't like the movie. Don't make up bullshit reasons to justify how its somehow objectively sub-par.
Did you ever actually watch the original show? Star Trek had gotten more thinky and philisophical with every incarnation since then until it was suffocating under the weight of its own continuity and the expectation of the fans. This movie's lack of fealty to the fans is exactly what will refresh Star Trek to something that isn't dead.
What's unnerving is fans who think they have some right to dictate the direction of Star Trek.
So now when firefox wigs out and starts chewing up all available CPU cycles, it will take up 100% of my cycles instead of the 50% available to one CPU.
Except no one is going to confuse 'microsoftsucks.org' as being affiliated with Microsoft.
No you don't. Unless you're attaching huge files to the emails or transferring huge files over AIM, you would wear your fingers to bloody stumps before you could approach generating 1GB of data over a text channel carrying natural language.
Pilots and ATC do the same thing. Its because the guarantee of pilots being able to communicate with each other and with ground control is much more important than the alternative, for obvious reasons. Whether this argument applies to all coders might be subject to some debate, but I imagine for mission critical software like for medical devices or say, ATC, its a no brainer.
Its a stupid thing to nit pick I know, but 'dune coons' != 'indian'. I find it amusing that people with such blatantly racists attitudes apparently can't wrap their heads around the concept that 'brown' is not an ethnic group.
First off, sometimes there is a time basis that cannot be avoided and a solution, however dirty, is required right away in order to complete a contract or open a web storefront or the like. In these cases the original statement is literally true, millions could be made or lost depending on whether you can flip the on switch tommorow or next week. At that point, you're making money in the long term, regardless of whether you have to reimplement.
Of course companies are usually, imo, too focused on the here and now results anyway and this is a double edged sword. It can get you to market quicker, but I have time and again seen companies shopping for development libraries or other similar tools go against the selection of one vendor by EVERYONE who was going to use the product and go for another cheaper vendor that no one liked because it saves the company 100k right now, even though the cost of developing locally all the missing functionality from the cheaper solution will easily end up costing more that the saved amount in the long run.
There's a very good reason. They've built their entire business model around it. Its not like they can advertise on fliers, they rely on good word of mouth, which you don't get from screwing over your customers. So Dollhouse has a strong financial incentive to be straight with their clients and protect their confidentiality. Unlike an individual professional of any sort, the Dollhouse's continued existence rests on their not screwing over the people that hire them. A lawyer might blackmail you. A law firm never will and will do its best to make sure its employees won't either.
As a client I would also think the fact that Dollhouse is an illegal organization works partly in my favor. In order to expose anything about my they'd have to risk exposing themselves.
That's not to say that they aren't saving up juicy tidbits for a rainy day.
The whole thing reminds me of all the arguments people had about Firefly back in the day about how in the future they wouldn't be riding around horses and shooting projectile weapons. These statements were patently absurd. Colonies at the frontier are always going to use easy to maintain and repair low tech over high tech for which they have no replacements or capacity to fix.
The clients aren't just purchasing a skillset, they're buying complete privacy. You can pay as much as you want to a professional whatever, but that's no guarantee that someone with deeper pockets won't pay them to betray you or divulge information you'd rather were kept private. The most expensive call girl on the planet can later blackmail you, as could a skilled negotiator that you are forced to give access to your life in order to do their job. The most expensive midwife might end up selling cell phone shots of your wife's vag to the tabloids. The only way to ensure complete silence is to kill the hired hand. Or you can hire from the Dollhouse and rest assured that the person you hire won't even exist after the engagement.
Or you could just suspend some disbelief. I mean virtually every crime drama show on television uses completely implausible technology to zoom into reflections of reflections on photos.
The difference being that the officer in question has no evidence that you are lying. He can establish your speed but not your awareness of the speed. That wasn't the case in this instance. The officer had multiple accounts that conflicted with what the student was saying.
FYI, the appropriate response to 'do you know how fast you were going?' is 'how can I help you officer?'. A polite non-response to the question which neither lies nor gives up your 5th amendment rights.
Despite how you feel about racial integration, it's illegal. It doesn't matter one iota your feelings, there's no "freedom to sit wherever you want on the bus". Especially since the law states otherwise.
Oh wait..... its not integration, its segregation that's illegal and that's largely due to people who willfully refused to obey the laws of the time, which they saw as unjust.
No. If one denies global warming is happening (independent of whether global warming is actually happening) then one is a global warming denier. Trying to frame the argument in such a way to promote the idea that people who deny global warming exists are somehow rebellious free thinkers (as opposed to short-sighted morons motivated by profit or politics) doesn't make use of the term 'global warming denier' somehow evidence of political correctness run amok.
What stymied U.S. forces was in large part the jungle. Being an invading force in difficult and unfamiliar terrain against people who know the terrain and are defending their homes counts for a lot.
And before you speak out of your ass again, try googling 'viet kong suicide bombers'.
Asymmetric warfare isn't designed to 'win' in the conventional sense. Its designed to wear down the will of an invading force.
Not in terms of absolute numbers or weapons, but certainly in morale. And again, the point of such an attack is not the effect it will have on the military (which is already admitted to be superior by the very term 'asymmetric warfare') but the effect it will have on the morale of the invaders and their homeland as a whole.
The allies never invaded the Japanese islands, did they? Instead they chose to use the Atomic bomb. Its conceivable that the demonstrated willingness of the Japanese to die in defense of their country discouraged the use of a full scale invasion, such as the one in Europe.
Maybe you're right, and the only people who might question whether suicide attacks are genuinely ineffective are the people like myself who are already questioning the point of being an invading force in the first place. But then again, maybe even the most pro-war mother and father might stop for a second and wonder if their child really had to die, and whether he really had to be an occupying force in the first place.
You can argue the effectiveness of suicide bombing all you want, and you can tell a conquered people that it will do no good till you're blue in the face, but even if you're right, that's not going to stop them. People who are cornered or conquered have two choices: assimilate or fight. Some will choose to fight and of those some will believe that the only effective way to fight a vastly superior force is to resort to suicide tactics. The only way to prevent this is to go all the way back and do your best to prevent the need for an invasion in the first place. Say for instance, by not lying about the presence of WMD's in a country that doesn't have them, and not conflating the government of that country with a completely unrelated (ethnically, politically, and geographically) group that is responsible for an actual attack on your country.
Sure, if you're a soldier fighting in a standard 'symmetric' war. On the other hand, the kill ratio in Iraq for coalition forces is 100:1 (1 coalition soldier dead for every 100 enemy combatants). Numbers like that make suicide bombing start to look pretty appealing.
That's retarded. Any sport (which are all games) requires effort to excel. What the original poster is doing is tantamount to saying he wants to play baseball and get the rewards of being a big league star player without doing any of the corresponding work.
No. As others have pointed out there are numerous ways to get to Dalaran. I got in very quickly because of a large social network, but that doesn't mean you can't get in if you don't have a large social network. It just means you have to utilize one of the other ways to get to Dalaran, one of which of course is to level to 74.
Normal people make friends.
You could complain about anything. No one is forcing you to play a resto shaman. In fact, Blizzard has explicitly stated that you should only NEED to play a specced tank or healing class in endgame heroics and raids. Otherwise, you're perfectly fine healing as Elemental, or tanking as Arms, which means you can also quest very easily. The cost to respec once at 70 and again back to resto at 80 is insignificant compared to the gold you could make if you wanted to quest. Even if you did decide to level to 80 purely by dungeon healing, you're still going to earn a lot of money from greens and blues that you don't use, the value of which either in enchanting mats or at vendors would far exceed any repair bill you should have as a healer.
Nowhere did I do any such thing. In fact what I've said at every turn is that there are alternatives to virtually every path of advancement in the game. Your problem is that you don't want alternatives. You want free lootz without the effort, hence 'Progress Quest'. Actually I don't think you even want that. You just want to complain. Every suggestion or alternative that's been pointed out to you by myself or anyone else is be met by a new complaint to the extent that the very letters of your posts begin to take on an almost supernatural whine, like as a mosquito trapped in my monitor. If you hate the game so much, please by all means take your ball and go home. Stop standing around and threatening to do it, just go.
A lot of your complaints boil down to 'I have no friends in the game to work with or help me out'. I got into Dalaran about an hour into playing LK, completely for free, mostly because I'm part of a very large Guild that is in turn part of a larger alliance of about a half dozen other guilds all of whom have membership numbers in the hundreds. By and large we all help each other out and even if I don't know someone personally, if I see that they're a member of one of the allied guilds I can typically rely on being able to group with them and having them be able to play adequately and not be an asshole. That's because we all help each other learn to play adequately and if you're an asshole you either stop being one or you get kicked out (its pretty much the ONLY way to get kicked out).
Leveling to 80 will easily gain you over 3k gold even if you never do a daily, so you won't be broke. As for rep, seriously, what the hell? You complain about dailies and you complain about dungeons. Apparently you want to hit exalted with factions without doing anything at all. I take it back. You don't need to play Oblivion. You need to play Progress Quest or find a pretty screensaver.
I think this decision is used to good effect to keep people from skipping large sections of the content.
You can easily get to Dalaran by knowing a mage or knowing someone who knows a mage and so on. Anyone in Dalaran can easily bring anyone else in the same level range to Dalaran by queuing them for a battleground, which the other person then goes into and when they exit, poof they're in Dalaran. Regardless, the design intent is to make sure people don't simply skip all the content and go straight to the fabulous magical city. On the other hand its not that hard for people who are determined.
You can level to 80 and also hit exalted with every reputation in the game without ever doing a daily quest.
Every profession / armor type has a corresponding level 80 blue bind on equip set of items which are suitable both for doing endgame dungeons (including heroics if you've got enough skill) and starting PVP. The tailoring version is called frostsavage.
You've gone completely off the rails here. EVERYTHING in WotLK is desgined to serve the needs of the many, not the needs of the few. The elite hardcore players are already complaining that compared with BC this game is far too easy. Most hardcore players I know skipped normal 80 dungeons and went straight to heroics. On the other hand my parents in law are quite happily two thirds of their way to 80.
What you need, sir, is to go buy a copy of 'Elder Scrolls: Oblivion' and leave the rest of us to play in peace.
A copper 'fence' as it were? But that might not be an issue since most fences are made of iron or wood.
You could also accomplish the same effect by making an image of your drive before you installed the app and restoring to it. But practically speaking people aren't going to do that. By the same token, given ubiquitous internet access and identifiable characteristics of a given machine, it would be fairly easy for EA to keep a server side record of where its been installed and where it hasn't.
Placing the DRM intrusion level so high isn't just an annoyance. Its pointless. All you do is punish people who are using the game legitimately and have basically no impact on those who pirate the game and use a crack anyway.