Except thier is no way that the information on even 8 people(9 including your self) is worth that $200. Heck you can get as much info they are asking by setting up people in a mall and offering people a can of soda and a candy bar if they fill in the info.
So here is the way they actually work.
They require that you sign up your for all thoses services(AOL for a year, a credit card, a CD club puchase X cds, a DVD club purchase X dvds, and others). They get a kick back each from thoses companies with each sign up. The problem is getting 5 other people to do all that, which is why they hardly have to send out ipods.
Someone did an interview with the company were they said they actually loose money each time they have to ship device, but they have very few that can get enough people to sign up to all of the services, so it is a rather profitable company. Also it sounded like a bunch of people will sign up for a few of the services, then start to recognize what they have gotten themselves into and stop at that point never completing all of it.
If you read the original stuff that Turbine wrote when AC2 was in development it is a totally different creature then what was released.
Also during the time before original comments and release Microsoft became more interested in making comments and changes. Unfortunatly it looks like microsoft decided to make a clone of daoc/eq and then forced it out before even that was done.
Since Turbine has purchased the franchise from microsoft, AC2 has turned into a rather nice game. The problem is the bad word when it came out and unless you are on during prime time the game is empty of other players.
The latest talk is that they are planning to do an expansion pack and do some advertisement at that time in hopes that it will draw more players, but I doubt that will do much to help it out.
I was in Berlin when the torch came through, and was in the area when it was coming through so I decided to watch.
First came 2 vehicles, one blaring music the other filled with people. At a big crowd the people got out and started to pass around signs and other swag loaded with the sponser names. Also the vehicles were covered with the name of the sponsers.
A few mins later came another vehicle load with cameras which the torch carrier ran behind, cameras focused on the running and the crowd. Vehicle covered with ads.
A little distance behind that came the bus which carried the family members. They got out when they switched carriers and would be in the pictures. No ads besides the company that owned the bus.
Following that was a bus with the new runners and to pick up the retired runner. This had its fill of olympic and sponser ads.
Then behind that came the trash vehicles, to collect all the swag and sign no ditched. Standard city of Berlin marking.
Following that was a black hearse. Just black no ads. Kind of sure it was not with the torch carriers but worth a good laugh.
Our old trick if you wanted to take extended time off during the middle of the day is the get an extra set of keys, then when you want to out just put the keys near your keyboard in plain view. People that look in on you figure you must be somewhere around since your keys are there.
work better if you carry a briefcase or hat in and out ever so often. Then put the hat of briefcase on your chair.
However franchises can bring a huge amount of people to the game. Look at SWG if it did not have the Star wars name would anyone have even looked at?
However they do need to just ignore the big name, famouse people from the franchise and focus on presenting a game based around the world, aka knight of the old reblic.
If will be interesting if middle earth online does any better. They have decided that they will have the various game area set after the ring bearer and after major events have already happened. THen I guess they are going to go off thier own direction as need be.
Grinding is totally in the mind of the player.
It only comes about when thier is something that you the player wants to do or see which you cannot do at your current level. Then you start grinding so that you can advance high enough to do that different stuff.
If the game is design good enough so that you as the player have plenty to do at your current capabilities thier is no grinding.
Since this is a geek site....
Thier is a old short story called "The Iron Standard" IIRC by Lewis Padgett who is psedoname for Henry Kuttner and CL Moore.
The basic story is that a group of astronauts land on mars or venus(written in the 40) and while waiting for the earth to get the correct location for a trip back they have to find a way to get food etc. But between having brougth worthless trade items and the locals have very stick laws which prevents them from trading other items, they are in trouble. Iron being scare but they had brough stuff rare on earth. So they come up a pill that allows the caste workers to work extra long, they proceed to give it away and go about ruining the economy until the local give in and provide them the provisions needed.
They come up ever so often under the term of tort reform and "looser pays". The biggest problem is that most of this comes down to a state decision, however it is something that we in the USA will have to solve because of the problems it is leading to in the area of medical and social affairs.
As an example of how bad it is, the Las Vegas casinos were offered information on terrorist activities around various casinos, they declinded because once they know about the threats they will have more problems with the lawyers if anything happens then then whatever possible damage the terrorist could do.
Here is one article on 2004 US election.
The American tort reform association has article detailing the various changes that various stats are doing.
Here a similar program is considered something that would never work.
Yet the messages on this topic consider it system for accuratly predicting how things will go.
Microsoft's alternative to xforms is infopath. A form of it, or something like it, will be included in Longhorn as microsoft's new web/intnet based API.
Other other major alternatives are:
Flash/Flex from macromedia.
Java applets.
While they are not all the same in the way they work or what they do they all marketed as improvements to the current web forms and a way to bring back alot of the user interface capabilities that were lost with the move to web based applications.
From what I can understand, from other sources, thier will be will central city. This central city is where everyone will start and will be the main meeting point. The city will have some adventure points, like sewers, dark alleys, etc but most of the adventuring will be outside of the city.
With thier just being one central meeting place it will make for easier in the locating of team members. Once you have your team formed you move on out and the all dungeons and location outside of the city are instanced to your own team.
You have star wars battlefront aka lucas arts answer to battlefield 1942, coming out in september. It is suppose to have x-wings and other space craft; in addition to ground.
Actually it is more of an american problem.
Gophers are members of the Geomyidae and native to the Americas.
The creature from this study is a Spermophilus richardsonii, family Sciuridae, commonly known as the Richardson's Ground Squirrel.
However it is very common in the US to call any larger ground based burrowing rodents a gopher.
They don't do the price, they do a product code. The product code is read in at the checkout counter and compared to the database to get the price. same with barcodes currently being used.
In addition each rfid has a unique number, which cannot be changed. If the store wanted to they could record thoses individual numbers instead of the product code and that would solve the problem. However that would be a major problem, since instead of having a single product code for 1000 items you now have to store thoses 1000 item in the database.
The biggest problem with pen ballots is that it takes a long time to count. You could go with something like having a machine read the results but then you are running into the same problems they had with the chad based ballots.
And you would actually believe thoses piece of paper(provided that you could find them) that have no form of accountability.
Also they would be worthless for validating what was actually entered in the database, since if you are worried about people modifing what the people actually voted they would just print out what the person entered while enter into the database the modified results.
If you want to use it for validation, the last time I used electronic systems it had a validation screen for my votes. That worked just as well for validation purposes.
Had that problem with firefox then got user agent switcher and use that when I need to lie about my brower type.
You can mess around with the message that is send, so for instance you can report that you are internet explorer running on a commodore-64.
So you are upset that they used the provision of this law so that a local agent could decided to investigate a crime instead of waiting for approval from headquarters and the weeks that use to take before the passing of this law?
It also removed alot of stupid laws such as thoses that prevented an agent from using google to look information about a possible crime.
While thier are a bunch of problems with this law, at least educate yourselves on what parts are being used and what they changed.
If you want to read something really scary go read Executive Order 12949.
The problem is not the cost of the box it is the cost of the subscription.
So while you are given an $80 box for free you now need to pay $250 to get your life-term subscription.
Also alot of people have upgraded thier boxes with more hard drive space which would have to be replaced.
Not sure why someone would put that they had anything to do with that movie on thier resume.
As for the book, I have always wondered why he put the sex scene in thier, it did not add anything to the story and broke up the rhythm of that portion of the story.
The expansion is not an FPS game. What was said is that it will be more FPS like.
The way it works is similar to the current combat system, however instead of turning and firing at something behind you, you can only fire when the target is in front of you. This does force a more FPS type system since you need to continually manuver, skills of your character determine hit/miss.
The total FPS stuff was just a rumor started in 2001 that started to build up alot of power.
If you read the current stuff, unless they did a massive turn around since April/May 2004, they say things like "Twitch reflexes will play a part in combat" "uses the same 'Point and Click interface' that the rest of SWG uses", input commands into the attack queue, it is a role-playing game not a fps, etc.
If you want FPS star wars game, join thoses who are waiting for star wars battlefront. It is an FPS designed as a competitor to the battlefield 1942 series and will include ships such as x-wings.
For 2004 about 96% of Google's revenue has come from ads.
Here is some more detailed info.
Because of thier desire for the IPO alot of financial info is now available.
With this new version has google removed the adware and spyware that Picasa use to be known for?
They also use to be a big spammer mainly doing it on usenet, go ridance to that part of them.
That was a different bet, the one you mentioned was for Cygnus X-1 and was back in the early 1990s. When Hawking lost he gave a year subscrition to penthouse if he had won he would of received a subscription to the magazine private eye.
Slashdot Mirror
It also has been reviewed at slashdot.
Except thier is no way that the information on even 8 people(9 including your self) is worth that $200. Heck you can get as much info they are asking by setting up people in a mall and offering people a can of soda and a candy bar if they fill in the info.
So here is the way they actually work.
They require that you sign up your for all thoses services(AOL for a year, a credit card, a CD club puchase X cds, a DVD club purchase X dvds, and others). They get a kick back each from thoses companies with each sign up. The problem is getting 5 other people to do all that, which is why they hardly have to send out ipods.
Someone did an interview with the company were they said they actually loose money each time they have to ship device, but they have very few that can get enough people to sign up to all of the services, so it is a rather profitable company. Also it sounded like a bunch of people will sign up for a few of the services, then start to recognize what they have gotten themselves into and stop at that point never completing all of it.
If you read the original stuff that Turbine wrote when AC2 was in development it is a totally different creature then what was released.
Also during the time before original comments and release Microsoft became more interested in making comments and changes. Unfortunatly it looks like microsoft decided to make a clone of daoc/eq and then forced it out before even that was done.
Since Turbine has purchased the franchise from microsoft, AC2 has turned into a rather nice game. The problem is the bad word when it came out and unless you are on during prime time the game is empty of other players.
The latest talk is that they are planning to do an expansion pack and do some advertisement at that time in hopes that it will draw more players, but I doubt that will do much to help it out.
I was in Berlin when the torch came through, and was in the area when it was coming through so I decided to watch.
First came 2 vehicles, one blaring music the other filled with people. At a big crowd the people got out and started to pass around signs and other swag loaded with the sponser names. Also the vehicles were covered with the name of the sponsers.
A few mins later came another vehicle load with cameras which the torch carrier ran behind, cameras focused on the running and the crowd. Vehicle covered with ads.
A little distance behind that came the bus which carried the family members. They got out when they switched carriers and would be in the pictures. No ads besides the company that owned the bus.
Following that was a bus with the new runners and to pick up the retired runner. This had its fill of olympic and sponser ads.
Then behind that came the trash vehicles, to collect all the swag and sign no ditched. Standard city of Berlin marking.
Following that was a black hearse. Just black no ads. Kind of sure it was not with the torch carriers but worth a good laugh.
Our old trick if you wanted to take extended time off during the middle of the day is the get an extra set of keys, then when you want to out just put the keys near your keyboard in plain view. People that look in on you figure you must be somewhere around since your keys are there.
work better if you carry a briefcase or hat in and out ever so often. Then put the hat of briefcase on your chair.
However franchises can bring a huge amount of people to the game. Look at SWG if it did not have the Star wars name would anyone have even looked at?
However they do need to just ignore the big name, famouse people from the franchise and focus on presenting a game based around the world, aka knight of the old reblic.
If will be interesting if middle earth online does any better. They have decided that they will have the various game area set after the ring bearer and after major events have already happened. THen I guess they are going to go off thier own direction as need be.
Grinding is totally in the mind of the player.
It only comes about when thier is something that you the player wants to do or see which you cannot do at your current level. Then you start grinding so that you can advance high enough to do that different stuff.
If the game is design good enough so that you as the player have plenty to do at your current capabilities thier is no grinding.
Since this is a geek site....
Thier is a old short story called "The Iron Standard" IIRC by Lewis Padgett who is psedoname for Henry Kuttner and CL Moore.
The basic story is that a group of astronauts land on mars or venus(written in the 40) and while waiting for the earth to get the correct location for a trip back they have to find a way to get food etc. But between having brougth worthless trade items and the locals have very stick laws which prevents them from trading other items, they are in trouble. Iron being scare but they had brough stuff rare on earth. So they come up a pill that allows the caste workers to work extra long, they proceed to give it away and go about ruining the economy until the local give in and provide them the provisions needed.
They come up ever so often under the term of tort reform and "looser pays". The biggest problem is that most of this comes down to a state decision, however it is something that we in the USA will have to solve because of the problems it is leading to in the area of medical and social affairs.
As an example of how bad it is, the Las Vegas casinos were offered information on terrorist activities around various casinos, they declinded because once they know about the threats they will have more problems with the lawyers if anything happens then then whatever possible damage the terrorist could do.
Here is one article on 2004 US election. The American tort reform association has article detailing the various changes that various stats are doing.
Here a similar program is considered something that would never work.
Yet the messages on this topic consider it system for accuratly predicting how things will go.
Microsoft's alternative to xforms is infopath. A form of it, or something like it, will be included in Longhorn as microsoft's new web/intnet based API.
Other other major alternatives are:
Flash/Flex from macromedia.
Java applets.
While they are not all the same in the way they work or what they do they all marketed as improvements to the current web forms and a way to bring back alot of the user interface capabilities that were lost with the move to web based applications.
From what I can understand, from other sources, thier will be will central city. This central city is where everyone will start and will be the main meeting point. The city will have some adventure points, like sewers, dark alleys, etc but most of the adventuring will be outside of the city.
With thier just being one central meeting place it will make for easier in the locating of team members. Once you have your team formed you move on out and the all dungeons and location outside of the city are instanced to your own team.
You have star wars battlefront aka lucas arts answer to battlefield 1942, coming out in september. It is suppose to have x-wings and other space craft; in addition to ground.
Actually it is more of an american problem.
Gophers are members of the Geomyidae and native to the Americas.
The creature from this study is a Spermophilus richardsonii, family Sciuridae, commonly known as the Richardson's Ground Squirrel.
However it is very common in the US to call any larger ground based burrowing rodents a gopher.
They don't do the price, they do a product code. The product code is read in at the checkout counter and compared to the database to get the price. same with barcodes currently being used.
In addition each rfid has a unique number, which cannot be changed. If the store wanted to they could record thoses individual numbers instead of the product code and that would solve the problem. However that would be a major problem, since instead of having a single product code for 1000 items you now have to store thoses 1000 item in the database.
The biggest problem with pen ballots is that it takes a long time to count. You could go with something like having a machine read the results but then you are running into the same problems they had with the chad based ballots.
And you would actually believe thoses piece of paper(provided that you could find them) that have no form of accountability.
Also they would be worthless for validating what was actually entered in the database, since if you are worried about people modifing what the people actually voted they would just print out what the person entered while enter into the database the modified results.
If you want to use it for validation, the last time I used electronic systems it had a validation screen for my votes. That worked just as well for validation purposes.
Had that problem with firefox then got user agent switcher and use that when I need to lie about my brower type.
You can mess around with the message that is send, so for instance you can report that you are internet explorer running on a commodore-64.
So you are upset that they used the provision of this law so that a local agent could decided to investigate a crime instead of waiting for approval from headquarters and the weeks that use to take before the passing of this law?
It also removed alot of stupid laws such as thoses that prevented an agent from using google to look information about a possible crime.
While thier are a bunch of problems with this law, at least educate yourselves on what parts are being used and what they changed.
If you want to read something really scary go read Executive Order 12949.
The problem is not the cost of the box it is the cost of the subscription.
So while you are given an $80 box for free you now need to pay $250 to get your life-term subscription.
Also alot of people have upgraded thier boxes with more hard drive space which would have to be replaced.
Not sure why someone would put that they had anything to do with that movie on thier resume.
As for the book, I have always wondered why he put the sex scene in thier, it did not add anything to the story and broke up the rhythm of that portion of the story.
The expansion is not an FPS game. What was said is that it will be more FPS like.
The way it works is similar to the current combat system, however instead of turning and firing at something behind you, you can only fire when the target is in front of you. This does force a more FPS type system since you need to continually manuver, skills of your character determine hit/miss.
The total FPS stuff was just a rumor started in 2001 that started to build up alot of power.
If you read the current stuff, unless they did a massive turn around since April/May 2004, they say things like "Twitch reflexes will play a part in combat" "uses the same 'Point and Click interface' that the rest of SWG uses", input commands into the attack queue, it is a role-playing game not a fps, etc.
If you want FPS star wars game, join thoses who are waiting for star wars battlefront. It is an FPS designed as a competitor to the battlefield 1942 series and will include ships such as x-wings.
For 2004 about 96% of Google's revenue has come from ads.
Here is some more detailed info.
Because of thier desire for the IPO alot of financial info is now available.
With this new version has google removed the adware and spyware that Picasa use to be known for?
They also use to be a big spammer mainly doing it on usenet, go ridance to that part of them.
That was a different bet, the one you mentioned was for Cygnus X-1 and was back in the early 1990s. When Hawking lost he gave a year subscrition to penthouse if he had won he would of received a subscription to the magazine private eye.