Not likely, unless you short the guy in the back, or put a few extra rounds in him while he was down, I don't think any DA is going to touch it. It will, and should be investigated by the police, just to insure that there was no foul play involved (e.g. you pulled someone into your home and murdered them, to try and hide behind self-defense) But, between bad publicity, and the likelyhood of a jury siding with the dead criminal, I don't see a DA bothering.
A few friends and I picked up DS1 specifically to play in a LAN. We actually spent the whole weekend playing it, but really wish we had something else.
First off, the game didn't scale well to 6 players. It seems that the only thing which changes is the Hit Points of the enemies. e.g. Every enemy had a zillion HP. This was fine for the fighter types, as they could just put their character in attack mode and wait while they chopped down the enemy. For those of us who went the magic user route, it was an utter pain. We would blast off high level spell after high level spell, and not even dent an enemy. As one of the magic users, I tended to leave a town with my inventory full of mana potions, and I would burn through them like a fire in a straw field.
Second problem, for the fighter types, they game got boring fast. In the middle of battles, we'd usually have one or two players just set their characters in a follow mode, and go get sodas or food, or just relax for a while. If someone was going to be out of the room for a while, they had the person next to them hit the health potion key if needed.
From the sound of it DS2 is about the same. In other words, not worth buying.
YMMV, in California we have what is called the "Castle Doctrine" basically, if someone breaks into your home, and you have a reasonable belief that they are going to attack you or your family, they are fair game.
So, the obvious thing here is if someone breaks into your home, you identify your target, put a few rounds into them, and when the police show up say, "I thought he was going to kill me!"
I don't think I like the alternative either. Personally, I would hate to have union membership be a requirement for a job. I would certainly like to see it be an option, but forceing it is just as bad as not allowing it.
Really, what we need is to start passing some laws at the state level to disallow these shenanigans by comapnies who think they can control you outside the office. I know that in California we can, and have, put propositions on the ballot by the petition process. Perhaps this would be a good thing to try to get going. The problem is going to be getting people to understand why they are good for them. Not to mention finacing, etc. Also, you'd need a pretty good warchest after this type of thing passes, as you know businesses will be challenging it in court.
Sadly, this is probably all rather true. The only bright spot I can see in it is the tendancy for the displaced middle-class to start killing their leaders when it gets too far out of hand.
A quick look at history shows that people will let this type of thing get pretty far along before being desparate enough to do something about it; but, in the end, governments which destroyed thier middle-class and tried to make serfs of everyone tend to meet violent ends. Most of us probably won't live to see it, and it will probably get far worse before it gets better, but I'd lay money on it now, eventually it will go far enough that people start shooting their leaders.
And no, I don't think anyone should consider doing this just yet, we've still got a lot of better options on the table before that, but we should never forget that it is an option.
I'm slowly accepting the fact that I'm a freak of nature on this one. I used to sit down and waste an afternoon beating ET on the 2600 for fun. Sure the controls sucked, but it was still beatable.
All the certifications are going to do is get you and interview, and that is what they are there for. Once you get in front of someone who knows what the hell they are talking about, your pieces of paper are as good as toliet paper. If you are interviewing with someone who knows what they are doing, and you can't display the knowledge those certs say you have, you're not getting hired.
The other side of this is that certifications will get you a job at the higher levels where you will only be interviewed by upper management types and HR. None of them are going to know a thing about what you do, they just want the computer-thingies to run. So, the more letters the better, and it also helps to be a good salesman at that point.
Really, it comes down to the job you are after. If you are going to be part of an IT staff, a few certs might get you in the door, but it's your knowledge which will get you the job. If you are going for a high level job where you aren't going to face a knowledgable interviewer, go for the alphabet soup.
I do the same type of thing by having my own mail server. While it's not a solution for everyone (e.g. the parent poster on a 56k connection), it does control spam quite well.
Whenever I give out my email address to a new company, I just create an allias of company_name@my_domain.net If one of those addresses become a source of spam, I simply remove the alias. All of the aliases point to the same inbox, so there is no mess of checking different boxes, and having a client side rule which filters email based on where it came from is easy.
Parental responsibility starts long before figuring out what games are appropriate for your children. First off, you shouldn't be having kids unless you are finanacially capable of taking care of them. Yes, accidents happen, however it was a risk you willing took upon yourself. No one gets pregnant by accident, they get pregnant because they decided to fuck. Even with pills and condoms, when you decide to have sex, you are accepting a risk, however miniscle, that the result will be a child. And, if you happen to be the lucky 1 in 1000, you are still responsible for your actions, and need to deal with the consequences.
Yup, having a kid is tough, and takes a lot of work. You decided to have it, you had better deal with it. This isn't scapegoating the parents, it's insisting that they take resposibility for their actions.
Now, I will agree that there is a societal problem, in that people have decided to buy too much stuff, get themselves in debt, and then both parents end up working just to pay for the junk they have bought. Again, too bad, you made the decision, you get to deal with it. If you want more time with your kids, and you should, buy less stuff. No, TV isn't necessary. Living in an apartment is an option. There are lots of areas where one can cut corners and lower their cost of living.
And what, exactly, are we doing now which is much different? It's nice to see thing like the Solar Array mentioned in the FA going up, but that is really only feasible in places like the Western Mojave, where we get 300-odd days of sun a year. It just wouldn't fly in, say, Seattle. Yes, the amount of time to get a reactor designed and built is long, but this is true of any large scale project. The previously mentioned solar array won't have any opertational capacity until at least 2007 (And I wouldn't expect them to actually be on time) And they don't mention how much longer until the full 500MW capacity will be online, with build out to start in 2008 it will be a while.
We do need to get something building now, and this array is a nice start, but it's not the silver bullet we need. Fission won't be it either I expect, but it would be a good delaying tactic until we do find one, or at least the next delaying tactic. If we can get something like an IFR reactor going, we may be able to buy ourselves a lot of time to figure out Fusion.
I wouldn't worry too much about the cloudy days. they are putting this thing by Victorville, CA; which, just happens to be right next door to where I live. We don't get much in the way of cloudy days, this year being a really anomolous exception. About the only time there will be a problem will be around January, when we get our yearly dose of rain (we get 2 to 3 weeks of rain a year, usually all at once). In summer, when we need the extra electricity for A/C, this thing will probably be getting enough sun to bleach the mirroring right off the mirrors.
Just what we need a game where most of your time is spent sitting in the field hoping the ball comes your way so that you can catch it. Of course, every time it does the glory hog from center field comes over and knocks you down. And then we have the guy in right field who connected, got bored and left his keyboard to get a snack, now the other team is hitting in-field home-runs over there. And the short stop won't stop making bad ball jokes, and is ignoring the actual ball when it comes his way.
Do people really think that this is going to be a good idea? Have those same people ever played an MMOG? Between the kids who get a kick out of typing "fuck" over and over again, and the guys who like ruining everyone else's experience, the game is going to suck.
you won't play the same Madden commentary sound files on every fifth play. "Whoa, he looked like he was hit by a truck! A five-ton truck hauling a trailer!" Yes, you'll hear that one six motherslapping times in one game of Madden '05. YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again until we're pointing at our television with a shaking finger and screaming "EAT ME, JOHN! JUST EAT MEEEEEEE!" as most of us do now.
Obviously this guy has never watched a football game where Madden was doing the commentary. Madden moves between a few mindless quips and stating the obvious. Why people are so impressed with Madden, I will never know. Yes, the guy really knows football, but listening to him makes me want to shoot myself.
The war on terrorism isn't about catching terrorists, or preventing attacks. The war on terrorism is simply about stripping people of their rights, and keeping them from noticing how corrupt their government gotten.
That would probably help, also, if they were to hold auctions for the occasional, really damn rare, or even unique item they could probably suck a ton of money out of the economy in one blow. Granted the price of said item could grow beyond belief, but that is really a non-issue. Better yet, if said item had a limited number of uses, but created a really spectacular effect when it was used, then it would not only pull the money out of the economy, but also eventually pull the whole value paid for that item out of the economy.
I would think that it's fairly obvious that inflation will always happen in MMORPG's.
Every time a new monster spawns with treasure, there is that much more money in the economy. While there will be some downward pressure from new people joining the world, the number of people joining will always be less than the number of spawned, treasure bearing creatures. If this wasn't so you would have a very dull game. Add to this the ability of characters to sell crafted items to NPC's, which effectivly adds more money to the economy, as the NPC's purses magically refill.
The only real downward preassure you have on the currency is the need to buy stuff from the NPC's. And again, since we are making a game where people want to progress, they will necessarily be able to generate more money doing stuff than the cost in materials from the NPC's.
All in all, MMORPG economies can do nothing but inflate, without intervention. There is just too much money being added to the economy, and nothing to pull it back out.
If you're buying an inkjet and plan to use it regularly, you can afford a laserjet. I picked up an HP2550L for US$450 (now has an MSRP of US$400) to do the printing for my wedding. We've printed "save the date" cards, engagement announcements, wedding invitations, thank you cards (for the bridal shower), and a whole bunch of other stuff. We're still on the toner cartridges which came with the printer. If we had tried that with the Lexmark inkjet my fiance has, we'd have spent way more on ink than we did for the printer, And the print quality is great. In fact, we had the local Office Depot do some test prints for us on the engagement announcement, and they were crap compared to what we are printing ourselves.
So far, the only downside was that the printer comes with 64MB of memory, on board. And, with all of the graphics we are using we kept getting "out of memory" errors. So, quick trip to kingston.com, find the 128MB SODIMM, $50 later we have 192MB, and no more "out of memory" errors.
I will admit, I haven't printed photos on it yet, but with the quality of the images we have printed, I'm expecting it to be as good, or better, than most inkjets.
The point is, while the up-front costs of a laser are higher, it's worth it in the long run if you plan to print more than a few pages. Even if that is all you print, with the ink drying up in an inkjet cartridge, you may still spend more money.
Directly, no, but the spin-off technologies may end up doing it. Consider the Manhattan project for a moment, the whole point of that project was to create an atomic weapon. Now, much of the work which went into that has been used to create fission reactors, which provide civilian electricity. After that the military started looking into fusion weapons, that research has now trickled down to the civilian sector, and, with any luck, will give us fusion reactors before too long. Jet engines were developed by the Nazi military to create long range bombers, they are now used for everyday travel.
Yes, putting wepons in space may not, directly help put people in space for the long term; but, there may be spin-off technologies which will open space up to regular travel. Just to throw out a possibility, if the military decides it needs a fighter/bomber which can go into space, eventually, that technology will be used to put civilian ships into space.
First off, please turn in your/. username, as this is far too rational of a post for this place.
Seriously though, you're correct, the problem which will be created by this is that the telcos who own the lines will be able to destroy all competition and then pillage their customers. If people think that Verizon DSL is bad now, wait until they don't have to compete at all.
While I don't think it will ever happen, what I would like to see is for the control of the lines and providing a service on them to be declared an anti-trust violation. As such, you would have one company which owns the lines and leases them out to companies to put services on, and everyone else would just be in the business of selling services. Unfortunatly, there is just too much inertia behind the current state of affairs for this to happen. Not to mention, technically, the telcos are responsible for the building of the network, though with some government help, and therfore do have some property claim to the lines.
That said, we're fucked, the FCC is about to hand the large telcos the collective heads of thier competition, in the DSL market, on a silver platter. And, at the same time, bend all of the US citizens over for an ass raping by the large telcos.
Yay for the FCC! Showing that they truly are the Fuck the Citizens Commision.
There really is a good "in the middle" solution for STMP traffic, but almost no ISP seems to get it. Block port 25, outbound, by default. But, if a customer asks for it, open port 25 for them and just monitor traffic volume. If they are pushing a large amount of data through port 25, cut it off and contact them and ask them to explain, otherwise, just stay out of their way.
This is what worries me about this decision, I currently have a great ISP (DSL Extreme), they let me have a server, and a static IP address. I would be on a 6Mbps/308Kbps line, if the lines to my home weren't crap, stuck at 768Kbps/128Kbps. And at around US$50 a month, the price is just fine with me. When this goes though, and I've no doubt it will, the FCC is bad that way, I expect to see my ISP go under and I'll be forced to choose between Verizon, blech!!, or go over to cable and give up my satellite TV. Either way, I won't be able to run my own server, as I do now. Someone remind me why we have the FCC again?
No, you don't have the dagger this time. As I recall the prince gives it to the princess at the end of Sands of Time. Though, I had forgotten about that particular attack in PoP:SoT. However, that attack, and a similar one in PoP:WW are not what I was referring to. In WW, they like to show the more grusome finishing moves you can do on enemies. For example, if you only have one weapon, use the secondary attack button, then use the primary attack button as you are flipping over the enemy, you will decapitate the enemy (assuming it is low enough on health, otherwise it just hurts the enemy). About half the time, the game will switch camera angles and do a slow motion effect, so you can see the head come flying towards the camera.
I thought that at first too, but I think what they were refering to was the bullet time effect when you killed an enemy with a combo of some sort. It'll slow down and switch camera angles so you can watch an enemies head go flying off or some such. It was cool the first few times, but it got annoying fast, you'd be fighting several enemies, kill one and it would go into bullet time, which would throw your rythm off for dealing with the next one.
I didn't look too hard for one, but I didn't see a way to turn that off. After having seen all the slow-mo deaths, I would have preferred to just be able to keep moving along killing one enemy after another, with no slow downs.
I can guarantee she had no idea what the game was like, and probably just wrote down what her Grandson told her. Then, she probably walked into the store and showed them the name of what she wanted.
This still requires a bit of a failure to pay attention. As grandma was writing down the name of the game, she has to ignore the fact that it's name is still the same as a major felony. And, she would have seen the box when she bought it. Maybe I'm expecting a little too much for her to pay attention to what she is buying, but for her to turn around and be involved in a lawsuit after missing some rather clear warning signs, just strikes me as shirking all responsibility as an adult.
I bet she's not the one who started the lawsuit. She's a front, but there is a larger force behind it
I will concede that this is a possibility, in which case I would feel a little more forgiving for her role in it; but again, I just don't see how the responsibility for the 14 year old getting a hold of this game belongs anywhere but with the person who purchased it and gave it to the kid. The parents are probably also partly responsible for not noticing what he was playing and questioning it. Even if the kid got the game as a gift, if the parents feel it is inappropriate, they should take it away.
All that said, I would also be curious as to how he was possibly harmed by this? First off, did he actually install the mod? If not, then there was no way for him to access the content. If he did, how did he get a hold of it? Assumably, he has internet access, and do you really want to compare the Hot Coffee mod to what you can get on the interent? He's 14, I'm willing to bet that, by now, he has figured out how to type 'sex' into google. I know that when I was 14, I was fairly good at finding porn to masturbate to on BBS's, with the internet, I have even less trouble now.
This thing strikes me as yet another parent trying to cash in on their children. It used to be that you had kids and put them to work on the farm. Now, you have kids and let them run around in the world unsupervised, and wait for them to do something which you can sue over.
Actually, I do agree with you that there are many 14 year olds who could play this game, Hot Coffee mod and all, and not be adversly affected by it. And if the parents believe that their child is one of those, then they should be free to buy it for them. However, it would seem that this is not the belief of the parents and/or grandparent, so they should have done a better job of checking into what this kid was getting and playing.
Either way, it's the fault of the grandparent, in this case, and not the game manufacturer. There were enough things there to warn her off of buying it, if she thought that it might be inappropriate, and she still bought it.
So, Granny fails to notice the M(17+) rating. Ok, it's not very prominent or well know. Then she completly ignores the box art, which I guess she could have overlooked on account of the way a lot of art is done these days. Finally, she didn't pick up on the fact that the game is named after a rather major felony. How oblivious do you have to be to buy this game for a 14 year old kid? Not to mention that she has managed to completly miss all of the noise made about the last installment. I'm sorry but she, and all of her offspring need to be scraped out of the gene pool as too stupid to breed.
Yes, she's an old granny, and may not get out much, but she has the ability to get a lawyer and sue, so please don't give me the "she's an old confused lady" bit. If she is able to track down a lawyer and start a lawsuit over this, she should have been capable of figuring out that this game may not have been appropriate for her grandson.
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Not likely, unless you short the guy in the back, or put a few extra rounds in him while he was down, I don't think any DA is going to touch it. It will, and should be investigated by the police, just to insure that there was no foul play involved (e.g. you pulled someone into your home and murdered them, to try and hide behind self-defense) But, between bad publicity, and the likelyhood of a jury siding with the dead criminal, I don't see a DA bothering.
A few friends and I picked up DS1 specifically to play in a LAN. We actually spent the whole weekend playing it, but really wish we had something else.
First off, the game didn't scale well to 6 players. It seems that the only thing which changes is the Hit Points of the enemies. e.g. Every enemy had a zillion HP. This was fine for the fighter types, as they could just put their character in attack mode and wait while they chopped down the enemy. For those of us who went the magic user route, it was an utter pain. We would blast off high level spell after high level spell, and not even dent an enemy. As one of the magic users, I tended to leave a town with my inventory full of mana potions, and I would burn through them like a fire in a straw field.
Second problem, for the fighter types, they game got boring fast. In the middle of battles, we'd usually have one or two players just set their characters in a follow mode, and go get sodas or food, or just relax for a while. If someone was going to be out of the room for a while, they had the person next to them hit the health potion key if needed.
From the sound of it DS2 is about the same. In other words, not worth buying.
YMMV, in California we have what is called the "Castle Doctrine" basically, if someone breaks into your home, and you have a reasonable belief that they are going to attack you or your family, they are fair game.
So, the obvious thing here is if someone breaks into your home, you identify your target, put a few rounds into them, and when the police show up say, "I thought he was going to kill me!"
I don't think I like the alternative either. Personally, I would hate to have union membership be a requirement for a job. I would certainly like to see it be an option, but forceing it is just as bad as not allowing it.
Really, what we need is to start passing some laws at the state level to disallow these shenanigans by comapnies who think they can control you outside the office. I know that in California we can, and have, put propositions on the ballot by the petition process. Perhaps this would be a good thing to try to get going. The problem is going to be getting people to understand why they are good for them. Not to mention finacing, etc. Also, you'd need a pretty good warchest after this type of thing passes, as you know businesses will be challenging it in court.
Sadly, this is probably all rather true. The only bright spot I can see in it is the tendancy for the displaced middle-class to start killing their leaders when it gets too far out of hand.
A quick look at history shows that people will let this type of thing get pretty far along before being desparate enough to do something about it; but, in the end, governments which destroyed thier middle-class and tried to make serfs of everyone tend to meet violent ends. Most of us probably won't live to see it, and it will probably get far worse before it gets better, but I'd lay money on it now, eventually it will go far enough that people start shooting their leaders.
And no, I don't think anyone should consider doing this just yet, we've still got a lot of better options on the table before that, but we should never forget that it is an option.
I'm slowly accepting the fact that I'm a freak of nature on this one. I used to sit down and waste an afternoon beating ET on the 2600 for fun. Sure the controls sucked, but it was still beatable.
All the certifications are going to do is get you and interview, and that is what they are there for. Once you get in front of someone who knows what the hell they are talking about, your pieces of paper are as good as toliet paper. If you are interviewing with someone who knows what they are doing, and you can't display the knowledge those certs say you have, you're not getting hired.
The other side of this is that certifications will get you a job at the higher levels where you will only be interviewed by upper management types and HR. None of them are going to know a thing about what you do, they just want the computer-thingies to run. So, the more letters the better, and it also helps to be a good salesman at that point.
Really, it comes down to the job you are after. If you are going to be part of an IT staff, a few certs might get you in the door, but it's your knowledge which will get you the job. If you are going for a high level job where you aren't going to face a knowledgable interviewer, go for the alphabet soup.
I do the same type of thing by having my own mail server. While it's not a solution for everyone (e.g. the parent poster on a 56k connection), it does control spam quite well.
Whenever I give out my email address to a new company, I just create an allias of company_name@my_domain.net If one of those addresses become a source of spam, I simply remove the alias. All of the aliases point to the same inbox, so there is no mess of checking different boxes, and having a client side rule which filters email based on where it came from is easy.
Parental responsibility starts long before figuring out what games are appropriate for your children. First off, you shouldn't be having kids unless you are finanacially capable of taking care of them. Yes, accidents happen, however it was a risk you willing took upon yourself. No one gets pregnant by accident, they get pregnant because they decided to fuck. Even with pills and condoms, when you decide to have sex, you are accepting a risk, however miniscle, that the result will be a child. And, if you happen to be the lucky 1 in 1000, you are still responsible for your actions, and need to deal with the consequences.
Yup, having a kid is tough, and takes a lot of work. You decided to have it, you had better deal with it. This isn't scapegoating the parents, it's insisting that they take resposibility for their actions.
Now, I will agree that there is a societal problem, in that people have decided to buy too much stuff, get themselves in debt, and then both parents end up working just to pay for the junk they have bought. Again, too bad, you made the decision, you get to deal with it. If you want more time with your kids, and you should, buy less stuff. No, TV isn't necessary. Living in an apartment is an option. There are lots of areas where one can cut corners and lower their cost of living.
In other words, wait for a silver bullet?
And what, exactly, are we doing now which is much different? It's nice to see thing like the Solar Array mentioned in the FA going up, but that is really only feasible in places like the Western Mojave, where we get 300-odd days of sun a year. It just wouldn't fly in, say, Seattle. Yes, the amount of time to get a reactor designed and built is long, but this is true of any large scale project. The previously mentioned solar array won't have any opertational capacity until at least 2007 (And I wouldn't expect them to actually be on time) And they don't mention how much longer until the full 500MW capacity will be online, with build out to start in 2008 it will be a while.
We do need to get something building now, and this array is a nice start, but it's not the silver bullet we need. Fission won't be it either I expect, but it would be a good delaying tactic until we do find one, or at least the next delaying tactic. If we can get something like an IFR reactor going, we may be able to buy ourselves a lot of time to figure out Fusion.
I wouldn't worry too much about the cloudy days. they are putting this thing by Victorville, CA; which, just happens to be right next door to where I live. We don't get much in the way of cloudy days, this year being a really anomolous exception. About the only time there will be a problem will be around January, when we get our yearly dose of rain (we get 2 to 3 weeks of rain a year, usually all at once). In summer, when we need the extra electricity for A/C, this thing will probably be getting enough sun to bleach the mirroring right off the mirrors.
Just what we need a game where most of your time is spent sitting in the field hoping the ball comes your way so that you can catch it. Of course, every time it does the glory hog from center field comes over and knocks you down. And then we have the guy in right field who connected, got bored and left his keyboard to get a snack, now the other team is hitting in-field home-runs over there. And the short stop won't stop making bad ball jokes, and is ignoring the actual ball when it comes his way.
Do people really think that this is going to be a good idea? Have those same people ever played an MMOG? Between the kids who get a kick out of typing "fuck" over and over again, and the guys who like ruining everyone else's experience, the game is going to suck.
you won't play the same Madden commentary sound files on every fifth play. "Whoa, he looked like he was hit by a truck! A five-ton truck hauling a trailer!" Yes, you'll hear that one six motherslapping times in one game of Madden '05. YOU HAVE A HARD DRIVE NOW, taking data from a 9 GB DVD. You have NO excuse to keep recycling the same mindless observations over and over and over again until we're pointing at our television with a shaking finger and screaming "EAT ME, JOHN! JUST EAT MEEEEEEE!" as most of us do now.
Obviously this guy has never watched a football game where Madden was doing the commentary. Madden moves between a few mindless quips and stating the obvious. Why people are so impressed with Madden, I will never know. Yes, the guy really knows football, but listening to him makes me want to shoot myself.
The war on terrorism isn't about catching terrorists, or preventing attacks. The war on terrorism is simply about stripping people of their rights, and keeping them from noticing how corrupt their government gotten.
That would probably help, also, if they were to hold auctions for the occasional, really damn rare, or even unique item they could probably suck a ton of money out of the economy in one blow. Granted the price of said item could grow beyond belief, but that is really a non-issue. Better yet, if said item had a limited number of uses, but created a really spectacular effect when it was used, then it would not only pull the money out of the economy, but also eventually pull the whole value paid for that item out of the economy.
I would think that it's fairly obvious that inflation will always happen in MMORPG's.
Every time a new monster spawns with treasure, there is that much more money in the economy. While there will be some downward pressure from new people joining the world, the number of people joining will always be less than the number of spawned, treasure bearing creatures. If this wasn't so you would have a very dull game. Add to this the ability of characters to sell crafted items to NPC's, which effectivly adds more money to the economy, as the NPC's purses magically refill.
The only real downward preassure you have on the currency is the need to buy stuff from the NPC's. And again, since we are making a game where people want to progress, they will necessarily be able to generate more money doing stuff than the cost in materials from the NPC's.
All in all, MMORPG economies can do nothing but inflate, without intervention. There is just too much money being added to the economy, and nothing to pull it back out.
If you're buying an inkjet and plan to use it regularly, you can afford a laserjet. I picked up an HP2550L for US$450 (now has an MSRP of US$400) to do the printing for my wedding. We've printed "save the date" cards, engagement announcements, wedding invitations, thank you cards (for the bridal shower), and a whole bunch of other stuff. We're still on the toner cartridges which came with the printer. If we had tried that with the Lexmark inkjet my fiance has, we'd have spent way more on ink than we did for the printer, And the print quality is great. In fact, we had the local Office Depot do some test prints for us on the engagement announcement, and they were crap compared to what we are printing ourselves.
So far, the only downside was that the printer comes with 64MB of memory, on board. And, with all of the graphics we are using we kept getting "out of memory" errors. So, quick trip to kingston.com, find the 128MB SODIMM, $50 later we have 192MB, and no more "out of memory" errors.
I will admit, I haven't printed photos on it yet, but with the quality of the images we have printed, I'm expecting it to be as good, or better, than most inkjets.
The point is, while the up-front costs of a laser are higher, it's worth it in the long run if you plan to print more than a few pages. Even if that is all you print, with the ink drying up in an inkjet cartridge, you may still spend more money.
Directly, no, but the spin-off technologies may end up doing it. Consider the Manhattan project for a moment, the whole point of that project was to create an atomic weapon. Now, much of the work which went into that has been used to create fission reactors, which provide civilian electricity. After that the military started looking into fusion weapons, that research has now trickled down to the civilian sector, and, with any luck, will give us fusion reactors before too long. Jet engines were developed by the Nazi military to create long range bombers, they are now used for everyday travel.
Yes, putting wepons in space may not, directly help put people in space for the long term; but, there may be spin-off technologies which will open space up to regular travel. Just to throw out a possibility, if the military decides it needs a fighter/bomber which can go into space, eventually, that technology will be used to put civilian ships into space.
First off, please turn in your /. username, as this is far too rational of a post for this place.
Seriously though, you're correct, the problem which will be created by this is that the telcos who own the lines will be able to destroy all competition and then pillage their customers. If people think that Verizon DSL is bad now, wait until they don't have to compete at all.
While I don't think it will ever happen, what I would like to see is for the control of the lines and providing a service on them to be declared an anti-trust violation. As such, you would have one company which owns the lines and leases them out to companies to put services on, and everyone else would just be in the business of selling services. Unfortunatly, there is just too much inertia behind the current state of affairs for this to happen. Not to mention, technically, the telcos are responsible for the building of the network, though with some government help, and therfore do have some property claim to the lines.
That said, we're fucked, the FCC is about to hand the large telcos the collective heads of thier competition, in the DSL market, on a silver platter. And, at the same time, bend all of the US citizens over for an ass raping by the large telcos.
Yay for the FCC! Showing that they truly are the Fuck the Citizens Commision.
There really is a good "in the middle" solution for STMP traffic, but almost no ISP seems to get it. Block port 25, outbound, by default. But, if a customer asks for it, open port 25 for them and just monitor traffic volume. If they are pushing a large amount of data through port 25, cut it off and contact them and ask them to explain, otherwise, just stay out of their way.
This is what worries me about this decision, I currently have a great ISP (DSL Extreme), they let me have a server, and a static IP address. I would be on a 6Mbps/308Kbps line, if the lines to my home weren't crap, stuck at 768Kbps/128Kbps. And at around US$50 a month, the price is just fine with me. When this goes though, and I've no doubt it will, the FCC is bad that way, I expect to see my ISP go under and I'll be forced to choose between Verizon, blech!!, or go over to cable and give up my satellite TV. Either way, I won't be able to run my own server, as I do now. Someone remind me why we have the FCC again?
No, you don't have the dagger this time. As I recall the prince gives it to the princess at the end of Sands of Time. Though, I had forgotten about that particular attack in PoP:SoT. However, that attack, and a similar one in PoP:WW are not what I was referring to. In WW, they like to show the more grusome finishing moves you can do on enemies. For example, if you only have one weapon, use the secondary attack button, then use the primary attack button as you are flipping over the enemy, you will decapitate the enemy (assuming it is low enough on health, otherwise it just hurts the enemy). About half the time, the game will switch camera angles and do a slow motion effect, so you can see the head come flying towards the camera.
I thought that at first too, but I think what they were refering to was the bullet time effect when you killed an enemy with a combo of some sort. It'll slow down and switch camera angles so you can watch an enemies head go flying off or some such. It was cool the first few times, but it got annoying fast, you'd be fighting several enemies, kill one and it would go into bullet time, which would throw your rythm off for dealing with the next one.
I didn't look too hard for one, but I didn't see a way to turn that off. After having seen all the slow-mo deaths, I would have preferred to just be able to keep moving along killing one enemy after another, with no slow downs.
I can guarantee she had no idea what the game was like, and probably just wrote down what her Grandson told her. Then, she probably walked into the store and showed them the name of what she wanted.
This still requires a bit of a failure to pay attention. As grandma was writing down the name of the game, she has to ignore the fact that it's name is still the same as a major felony. And, she would have seen the box when she bought it. Maybe I'm expecting a little too much for her to pay attention to what she is buying, but for her to turn around and be involved in a lawsuit after missing some rather clear warning signs, just strikes me as shirking all responsibility as an adult.
I bet she's not the one who started the lawsuit. She's a front, but there is a larger force behind it
I will concede that this is a possibility, in which case I would feel a little more forgiving for her role in it; but again, I just don't see how the responsibility for the 14 year old getting a hold of this game belongs anywhere but with the person who purchased it and gave it to the kid. The parents are probably also partly responsible for not noticing what he was playing and questioning it. Even if the kid got the game as a gift, if the parents feel it is inappropriate, they should take it away.
All that said, I would also be curious as to how he was possibly harmed by this? First off, did he actually install the mod? If not, then there was no way for him to access the content. If he did, how did he get a hold of it? Assumably, he has internet access, and do you really want to compare the Hot Coffee mod to what you can get on the interent? He's 14, I'm willing to bet that, by now, he has figured out how to type 'sex' into google. I know that when I was 14, I was fairly good at finding porn to masturbate to on BBS's, with the internet, I have even less trouble now.
This thing strikes me as yet another parent trying to cash in on their children. It used to be that you had kids and put them to work on the farm. Now, you have kids and let them run around in the world unsupervised, and wait for them to do something which you can sue over.
Actually, I do agree with you that there are many 14 year olds who could play this game, Hot Coffee mod and all, and not be adversly affected by it. And if the parents believe that their child is one of those, then they should be free to buy it for them.
However, it would seem that this is not the belief of the parents and/or grandparent, so they should have done a better job of checking into what this kid was getting and playing.
Either way, it's the fault of the grandparent, in this case, and not the game manufacturer. There were enough things there to warn her off of buying it, if she thought that it might be inappropriate, and she still bought it.
So, Granny fails to notice the M(17+) rating. Ok, it's not very prominent or well know. Then she completly ignores the box art, which I guess she could have overlooked on account of the way a lot of art is done these days. Finally, she didn't pick up on the fact that the game is named after a rather major felony. How oblivious do you have to be to buy this game for a 14 year old kid? Not to mention that she has managed to completly miss all of the noise made about the last installment. I'm sorry but she, and all of her offspring need to be scraped out of the gene pool as too stupid to breed.
Yes, she's an old granny, and may not get out much, but she has the ability to get a lawyer and sue, so please don't give me the "she's an old confused lady" bit. If she is able to track down a lawyer and start a lawsuit over this, she should have been capable of figuring out that this game may not have been appropriate for her grandson.