There is an idiot at Betsheda and he is the designer. Oh and the person who includes a nipple in artwork in todays america.
Who on earth could have thought that including friendly fire was a smart move? Especially in a hack and slash. In a ranged combat game where you aim your weapon it is possible if you make sure no friendlies are about to make a headlong rush into your line of fire. But how do you stop yourselve from hitting a friendly in a melee when you can't control your swing and everyone dances about?
Please do note that this was a very real problem as well and massed melee combat was like walking into a grinder. The best armies were those who could control the amount of friendly stab. There is a reason all soldiers who fought side by side in thight formation did NOT wield large two handed swords desinged to be swung around.
No, this is very bad design. It is an attempt to introduce realism that is to real for the limited enviroment. If they wanted friendly fire they should have made sure you had far better control over who you hit. Yes those games where you can lob a firenuke at an enemy to fry him yet your mates inches away are unscathed are unrealistic. But they work and don't have endless rants on the net about how stupid it is when the guard that comes to your aid either buys the farm OR ends up attacking you because of an uncontrollable swing.
First off, something very very simple. An AI that doesn't cheat in obvious ways. The recent most blatant example of AI cheating I saw was in Advance Wars : Dual Strike (DS game). It is a turnbased strategy game and you earn cash to spend on units based on the number of bases you control. 1000 per base. In one game the AI owned 8 bases and indeed the money counter for him showed an income of 8000. Nonetheless for several rounds he bought a tank + artillery + recon. A bill off about 15.000
A very obvious cheat. Even worse then those other strategy games that simply gave the AI an undisclosed amount or infinite money. (Command & Conquer?). In AW:DS I can see a bit of intel, adopt a strategy based on it (starve the enemy of the means to fight a war) and then get it ruined by a cheating AI. (Or maybe he was sponsored by axis of evil nations?)
The sad thing is that the AI is resoanably capable in the game without cheating. It usually buys the right units for the moment even the right counter units. In a map with a sea between my bases and it it will buy air transport and when you put up fighters it will increase its own defences. Better then most AI I seen.
What I would however like to see in all games is AI that stops doing the same thing over and over. Again AW:DS is a bit guilty here. It send 4 loaded airtransports to their death against the exact same air defences over several turns. In another game it keps producing lander crafts and putting units on them. It didn't move them into the killing field of my artillery but instead blocked up its own space with a dozen units. It should have bought battleships and pounded my artillery to scrap and open the beaches.
The same thing is true in FPS. Even in the best you can still shoot a guard and the guy next to him will eventually go back to business as usual usually standing guards in his mates exploded brains.
I don't want the AI so much to learn as to not forget. Splinter Cell does attempt this but the alert stages decrease again in a few minutes. Yeah right because a mysterious assasin is going to sneak all the way in, kill a guard and then just disappear?
We keep reading about FPS designers and telling us how they got some really cool AI that did things they didn't expect and then in the game itself we see the same old bullshit again and again.
Oh well, if I can't have learning remembring AI can I have one thing? Friendly AI that keeps the fuck out of my line of fire. Sure sure having the look before you shoot it one thing but if I am emptying a machine gun into an enemy I can sorta expect my mates not to fling themselves into the stream of bullets right?
Oblivion is a very bad example of this. It ain't AI. It is game design. Wich fucker at Oblivion decided to include friendly fire in a hack and slash? 99% of the time in a struggle you end up hitting your ally. WHY?
Forget artificial intelligence in game. How about some intelligence in game designers or is that like asking for journalistic ethics in slashdot editors?
The one thing that intrests me is that the PS3 is supposed to be able to run linux officially with the addon of an HD. In theory that should give you a memory limited super computer. Yet I don't see any mention of it. Ofcourse the average gaming journalist would know about OS'es as much as eh, what is more ignorant then a gaming journalist, a politician.
It comes from unix. On unix systems all devices from the vidcard to the mouse are mounted on the filesystem. By standard under/dev/ (devices). There are in many ways files, some readable, some writable and some both.
/dev/null is a special device and it is nothing. If you write to it it goes nowhere just disappears.
Common joke is that you backedup to/dev/null because it had plenty of space.
I don't think windows has a similar function readily available.
So what do you use it for? Well when you have something that needs to output to something and you don't want it. Commonly used in scripts that run automatically to throw away unneeded messages.
As for how and why routers should have this. No idea. Sounds odd that you could get a router to discard its data.
They are based in Israel so this spammer doesn't need to worry about the might of the FBI. Lets see, what do I know of Israel, its security agencies and their methods. MMm, some group called "mosad" lets see, oh yeah. The kind of people who don't give a fuck when it comes to getting their man because when you are a country surrounded by enemies one more or less don't matter.
Not that I think that they would bother with a spammer but a guy can dream can't he?
They exist but are hard to get as they are not commenly stocked. WoW cards are available but blizzard is evil. Europe was not allowed in the beta, was not given the option of a free trial, and you can't play on american servers meaning I can't play with people I know (from the web, irc and other MMO's).
You also mention 2 companies of well over a dozen MMO companies out there.
Anyway pre-paid cards are very expensive for what they offer. Why is it so hard to simply follow Sony's lead and get a third party to handle all non-cc banking? That is what they are therefore.
I recently noticed that Lik-sang (hong-kong internet store) had opened a german "division" just so it could do better business in europe. It ain't that hard, if SOE can do it, anyone can. Just as soon as people stop thinking, everyone got a credit card.
As one of the last adults on this planet not to have a credit card I welcome this. SOE seems to be one of the few companies in the world that realises NOT everyone in the world has a credit cards. In fact in some remote backwards part of the world not having a credit card is the norm.
Yes I have heard that SOE keeps billing CC accounts after you stopped your account but I never had problems with them. Finally a MMO I can pay for with my bank account.
I just hope they keep smedley far removed. Let him handle the billing. That he does well.
They killed EQ2, I liked it but a patch that increased running speed also increased the running animation. It looked like a Charlie Chaplin movie. I can live with bugs, unbalacing and whatever but I got to look at that running animation every second of gameplay. Get it right.
After all the deal goes both ways. Would you be happy if you find out that your manager behind you back has been advertising your job on monsterboard?
No? Then why should your employer be pleased that you are looking to replace him?
Do onto other as you wish to be done onto yourselve. Or something like that.
For whatever this may mean you and your employer have a relationship. You both expect certain things of each other. The employer expects you to turn up each day and that he can plan his business counting on the fact that you are there. You on the other hand count on the fact that your employer will keep paying you the agreed salary so you can plan your live around a steady income.
If you don't think you own your employer some loyalty then you shouldn't expect any back and ofcourse vice versa.
Now either of you may decice that it is time to end it. That is fine. The decent thing is to make it clear. Again, do to others as you want to be done onto. If you don't want to find your desk packed up when you arrive for work in the morning then you can't say "Oh I quit with the months notice and I got a month worth of vacation time that I am going to use now and today is a half day."
First you should decide if it is over or if with some adjustments you are willing to continue (again this goes for both parties). If not then you should be clear and open about it. Let the amount of time of notice that you give reflect how badly it has gone wrong. If you feel totally screwed over then by all means, 1 month notice. But if it just a feeling of wanting something else give the other sometime. You don't want to be fired on the spot and your employer don't want to loose you on the spot.
But IF you decide to leave do it. Then you shouldn't be afraid they find out because you already made up your mind.
But if your just testing the water with your resume on monsterboard then that offcourse gets a negative reaction. Again how would you react if you find that your employer has your job listed there just to test the waters?
What is good for the gander is good for the goose.
Can we once and for all get it clear that the nudity IS in the game of oblivion from the start. The NUDE SKIN comes ON the DVD.
Geez, the john remero link gets it wrong as well.
Oblivion characters wear clothing. Far more so then in other games. The mesh of your character has other meshes on top wich form the clothing. Remove those meshes and voila, you got a naked character. Betsheda even included a skin for it.
The mesh is deformed (the tits look weird) because they are meant to be under clothes BUT it is there, naked titties. In the game as you buy it in the store.
He says he is goverment. That means that you can't efficient IT projects developed in house by a skilled programmer. It is a law.
Any IT project got to run at least a year (planned) go overtime by at least a year. Go at least 2 million over budget. Not deliver what is required. Require that whatever the software does it cannot do it well or at all for at least half a year after it has been rolled out.
What the above ain't law? Then why do the same IT companies that screw up time and time again get the contract time and time again? Surely people ain't that stupid?
I did do a bit of work for goverment (non-it) and did some tools for them (for free I hate doing warehousing with paper). Two web apps for inventory tracking. Nothing important, just a timesaver. Ran fine until some manager came by and decided that all IT had to come from the IT supplier (Roccade, the dutch supplier of over-budget over-time bugware). It never emerged and we dealt with it by moving the PC's to a location were they were less noticable.
What is more common, rape by a stranger (even one from the net) or rape by a trusted relation (incest, date rape).
Thank you for playing. You guessed right. Most rapes are by people put in a position of trust. Teach about date rape before you start worrying about internet predators.
The current attitude is to warn kids about the dangers of undercooling in the artic while not telling them to watch the traffic while crossing the street.
You claim to be male. You also claim that 17yr olds are not just after on things when it comes to girls.
Must have been a nasty accident. First loosing all memory and then finding out your balls been ripped off and you are now a woman in all but name.
Cause if you were still a man or had memory of when you were a teenager you would know that "wanting to get to know her as a person" is a pickup line. It is what you tell them to get them drop their pants.
Age makes no difference.
Yet you conclude that the 50yr old is more dangerous then the 17yr old. What is even more shocking is that you seem to say that a 50yr old seducing your daughter is worse then the 17yr old who raped her.
Granted I am aware that there are some people who think that rape is normal even some who suggest that it is good for a woman but I thought we had those people safely put away as elected politicians and judges.
I really don't know what to think of your post. Rape is bad regardless of age and love is good regardless of age.
If you daughter found true love with an older man you would oppose it? Suggest she makes up with her rapist instead because he is closer to her age?
I don't hope so. Oh and as far as the fact that she underage. Well if it is true love they can wait. It is how you tell the pedos from the people who just fall in love across the age gap. The lovers can wait. The pedos would lose the love as the younger partner gets older.
Tell me something. The party she went to where she was raped. Did you think it was okay because there weren't any old men there? Let me tell you one tiny thing then. Old men would have beaten the crap out of any 17yr old boy trying something like that.
Trusting a bunch of 17yr old boys without supervision with your daugher. Smart move.
The answer why you can't just check the logs is obvious IF you have a browser that somehow can tell you what it is getting from who as it loads the page.
Thats right. The ads are served from a different server.
What is therefore missing is the link between requests.
IF you served your own ads you could indeed build in some system that checks wether the ad you inserted into the page is being downloaded. You would have to start a session for each user, you would have to write a script around your image server that notes in the session wether the image was retrieved but it is doable.
But how do you do this with ads from a third party?
I serve a page to you with a link to get an image from another server. UNLESS I can communicate with that server I have no way of telling wether you did that.
How it could work.
Client sends request for page.
Server starts a session and generates the page includings ads.
Server sends the page to the client with the ad link (including sessionid).
Client loads page following the link to the adserver (sending the sessionid with the request for the ads).
Adserver sends a message to the server that an ad has been downloaded for this sessionid.
Server checks if all the ads it included got a response from the adserver and if all are loaded the user is allowed to ask pages again (with this sessionid) or told to fuck off.
There are other ways as well, the server could send a list of ads included to the adserver and get a single message back if they all been requested or not. But the idea remains the same, you need communication between the adserver and the page server.
That, to my knowledge isn't in use yet.
Oh and the above "solution" ain't perfect either. Ad blockers that retrieve the ad but don't show it would be unaffected. How do you deal with a slow client who browses to fast for the ads to download? You also end up sending your content and are only able to block the user from getting stuff again within the same session.
More problems then, for now, it seems worth to taggle.
There is one form of ad that bypasses all this. The blocking flash ad. You know those screens you get before you go to the content page with a huge flash ad? Some require you to wait some time but what if the content link is only IN the flash ad.
Just make the link to the content only display after the ad has played. Forced ads. Lovely eh?
I have had to think about this problem before. The writeup above is very simple because I can't be arsed to write it all down again because at the time I came to the realisation that it is hard to sell anti-ad-blocker solutions to people who use IE and don't even know how to block virusses.
I get the idea from his description of some game mechanics that this was NOT just a mud with cybersex. Rather that the sex was a game mechanic. He does after all talk about how he adopted the combat system.
So it would be far more then just chatting "wanna fuck". You would actuallly have to worry about stats. Probably for the male of making sure you stimulate her enough that you don't come to fast. Wonder if male players are disconnected within a few minutes of climax?
It sounds like he was trying for way more then just another adult chatroom. Could have been intresting BUT hard to sell indeed.
Companies got very weird attitudes to sex. Just check phone companies and how they handle porn. THey are happy to rake in the cash from phonesex lines and mobile porn sites but nobody wants to be the assigned to handle them.
But all is not lost. Read the recent article of upcoming MMO's. Naughty America is sex based and I remember another story about an MMO set in London that has sex as well.
I just hope that they indeed have the whole sex/relationship put in as game mechanics. If it is just freeform sex I am gonna suck at it as bad is in real life. Now anyone know how to grind a really big dick?
Just typical, you yanks always think your the best well NOT this time buddy. We can be just as bad in the rest of the world and don't you forget it.
Just google for movies like E.T. that were banned in various parts of the world. Germany is a nutcase for it but most countries got some silly stuff going on.
As for the whole crusade agaist porn thing or rating systems gone mad.
Pegi is the european version and it is just as bad.
It is just that it is european and therefore restricted by fact that we don't have war any more in the EU so we need some place to vent our hatred of each other and doing it by not accepting the proposal from our fellow enemies, eh members is one way.
Yet the "war on porn" is being attempted here as well. Even with the same "think of the childeren" crap.
The days of the first Elder Scrolls games with plenty of pixel nudity. Nude harpies, nude paperdolls, topless harlotts, the works. They were everywhere. Well okay I went everywere in the game to find them but nobody really gave a fuck.
We have had the sexual revolution, then the do as you please eighties and now we are turning back into the dark ages.
This is about a nude body. You murder and pick the clothes of their still twitchng corpse and the bad thing is that you can see a nippel?
This world is fucked up.
Yes the past wasn't always perfect either but I long back to the days when a bit of nudity wasn't considered the end and people could rate their own games.
But seeing as I am well over 18 now I suggest a compremise to all those people who want to keep their kids safe from titties.
All games are from now on 18+ only. So are all movies, books, radio programs, plays, music. EVERYTHING. Kids who even put their hands on one are flogged and their parents go through forced parenting classes.
It is a simple class. A cattle prod and a question. "Who is responsible for your kids". BZZZZZZ wrong answer.
I am currently playing Animal Crossing Wild World on my shiny DS Light and it is fun. It is also a grind.
If you ever played Everquest 2 you might feel a bit of similarity between EQ2 collections and AC:WW museum.
Hell, last time I went fishing was in Star Wars Galaxies.
Considering how popular AC:WW is and how it was welcomed as a breath of fresh air I think there sure enough is a market for mindless grinds.
Hell at least in MMO grinds you are only dependend on time. AC:WW simply tells me that I am not going to catch all the fish/bugs until winter.
Maybe I am just weird but I sorta like it. The problem I got with MMO's is that people are so fucking serious about it. Who cares if mob x has more xp per second. I play for fun. Yeah I know I am not keeping up with the guild in level. Is there a timelimit or something? What is the rush to level up?
You claim there are no story lines in MMO's well I claim that there are but most people are to busy power grinding to read.
MMO's can be fun but you need to find a group of people who are willing to take their time. Not roleplayers perse but people who just want to do the quests as the writer wrote them down and enjoy the game.
If you can play games like AC:WW without feeling pressure to get all the items then you can enjoy some of the MMO's. Even PvP games like Guild Wars still got a lot of story. Just that most people are to much in a rush to enjoy it. Kind of like life in general.
I give you two "classic" scenes from two different movies. One a sword and sorcerer, the other a "sci-fi" movie.
First, The Princess Bride, the battle ontop the cliffs of insanity. Ten minutes of "believable" action. Attack, defend, counter attack. It works.
Next, Star Wars A New Hope, the "battle" in the Mos Eisley cantina. Either one will do. Notice something? Yup that is right, over in a flash.
So now we take say a fantasy MMO like ooh say Everquest and the endless fights make sorta sense. You can deflect a sword blow or catch it on your armor so you can indeed hack away at each other.
Now take EQ, put it in a Star Wars jacket and all of sudden it don't make sense anymore. You can shoot somebody in the face with a rocket launcher and they will remain standing!
The problem with "modern" settings is that the weapons are to lethal. Current game design has few enemies requiring that each one takes a bit of time to go down. So we got FPS shooters where baddies need 2-3 rocket up the nose before they collapse.
It was one of the things people complained about when Star Wars Galaxies first launched. That Storm Troopers did not go down with 1 hit. You did but not the troopers.
Magic "works" because it is magic and doesn't have to obey the rules of the real world. You can do an awfull lot of stuff if you just say it is magic.
Amazon sorta makes sense. Normal book stores are limited. They are either in a good location OR they got space for lots and lots of books. Rarely both.
Amazon has a lousy location (try stopping by to just have a browse and see the book and scim through it) BUT has infinite space. Well almost.
If you got even a small chain of stores you need to stock a copy of a book in everyone of them if you want to sell it.
Amazon can stock 1 copy and sell it across a continent.
Internet stores make sense for goods where there is an awfull lot of choice but little specific demand and enough profit/costs to keep shipping costs down.
Yet I don't see bookstores closing down. Yes they are having a hardtime but the older people can tell you that bookstores have always had a hard time.
But for lots of other things online doesn't make as much sense. Computer hardware has the same wide choice but I prefer talking to a person to make sure I get advice. Granted I shop at a small store where they know you and have in the past been warned that a new vid card would overload my PSU.
Maybe the US is different but in europe the small savings don't make up for the lack of customer service and delays especially if something goes wrong.
Offcourse there are people like you but might I suggest something? Are you perhaps just a modern version of the catalog shopper?
Holland has two catalog companies that send a thick book with products from wich people order.
The net in paper if you like.
They been around for ages and were never a threath to real shops.
Yes there are exceptions but just go down to the highstreet on a saturday. Hope you can stand crowds.
I remember it from before the net when it was supposed to attach to your tv. No doubt in the days of radio they had similar ideas and I am pretty sure I remember it being discussed as an option for film theathers.
Basically the ideas of adding smells to other media is eternal. I even had some scratch and sniff books at a time.
The logic is simple. Smells are important, the smell of fresh coffee or baking bread really wakes me up and tells me it is morning. The smell of wet grass after a thunderstorm would really make a picture of such a scene come to life.
The problem? Well it just don't work. Smells linger. So long after the movie has passed on to another scene the smell would still be there. Anyway do you really want to smell the rotting corpses? I cleaned up after the bodies have been removed and it ain't a pleasant experience.
Frankly I see this device as a game. See how many time it passes by in your lifetime.
Worse when you are talking about non-whites in the UK you must immidialty also talk about social status and conclude that it is usually not very good.
The fast majority of citizens of the UK are white and if you want to sample "normal" group where social/economic factors aren't going to be a major influence then you are stuck with them.
Would a study between say muslims or blacks be intresting? No. Background is too different.
A large portion of blacks in americas were former slaves. Britain was a slave nation BUT did not import them in any numbers. The majority of blacks in britain today are the descendants of immigrants.
As far as muslims are concerned. Well at least in europe there are huge differences per country as to where the muslims come from. Germany has a lot of turks, Holland morrocans and england has a lot of people from pakistan. So you can't compare them because their ethnic background would interfere. Hell, you are talking three different races if your strict.
So this study focusing on whites is not racism. It is just trying to exclude other factors from influencing the results.
If you did a study into the health of pets in various countries would it really be fare to compare the german shepperd with the british bulldog to determine wich country takes better care of its pets? No you would have to pick a generic breed to elimenate inbred diseases from skewing the results.
Nurses pay. Anyone other BBC watcher remember all those stories about UK nurses leaving for the US because, although there is the language barrier, the pay is better in the US of A?
It is easy got spend less IF you force the medical staff to starve.
Considering other alarm stories about the NHS I would hardly claim the medical care is the cause of brits being healthier.
But from the study I think there is one shocking possibilty.
What if the UK health care is so bad that only the strongest survive. If in the UK you die while in the US you can live on unhealtily then yes UK citizens are more healthy.
It makes as much sense as claiming the NHS is somekind of miracle institution. Most likely it is down to differences in live styles.
Families around the world with their weeks worth of shopping. Not exactly scientific (only one family per country) but I was a bit suprised by the "healthiness" of the american family. Yes they were all overweight BUT strangely enough the food looked a lot more healthy then their european counterparts (the rest of the world ofcourse easily won, hard to get fat when your pork has four legs and knows what a chopper is for)
So if the euro families ate just as much junkfood how can they possibly be thinner?
I don't know what the fuck causes the effect these scientists have discovered. Are americans really that fat and overworked that even though they got more money they are less healthy?
Cause any claims that european healthcare (for the welloff) is better is idiotic. Especially british healthcare wich seems to specialize nowadays in shipping patients abroad to get decent care.
Then again wasn't there the little fact that people in Cuba (poor) had better medical care then americans? That infant death rate was significantly higher in the wealthy US then in the poor Cuba?
Perhaps money doesn't mean shit when it comes to being healthy.
Slashdot Mirror
Who on earth could have thought that including friendly fire was a smart move? Especially in a hack and slash. In a ranged combat game where you aim your weapon it is possible if you make sure no friendlies are about to make a headlong rush into your line of fire. But how do you stop yourselve from hitting a friendly in a melee when you can't control your swing and everyone dances about?
Please do note that this was a very real problem as well and massed melee combat was like walking into a grinder. The best armies were those who could control the amount of friendly stab. There is a reason all soldiers who fought side by side in thight formation did NOT wield large two handed swords desinged to be swung around.
No, this is very bad design. It is an attempt to introduce realism that is to real for the limited enviroment. If they wanted friendly fire they should have made sure you had far better control over who you hit. Yes those games where you can lob a firenuke at an enemy to fry him yet your mates inches away are unscathed are unrealistic. But they work and don't have endless rants on the net about how stupid it is when the guard that comes to your aid either buys the farm OR ends up attacking you because of an uncontrollable swing.
Bad Bethseda.
A very obvious cheat. Even worse then those other strategy games that simply gave the AI an undisclosed amount or infinite money. (Command & Conquer?). In AW:DS I can see a bit of intel, adopt a strategy based on it (starve the enemy of the means to fight a war) and then get it ruined by a cheating AI. (Or maybe he was sponsored by axis of evil nations?)
The sad thing is that the AI is resoanably capable in the game without cheating. It usually buys the right units for the moment even the right counter units. In a map with a sea between my bases and it it will buy air transport and when you put up fighters it will increase its own defences. Better then most AI I seen.
What I would however like to see in all games is AI that stops doing the same thing over and over. Again AW:DS is a bit guilty here. It send 4 loaded airtransports to their death against the exact same air defences over several turns. In another game it keps producing lander crafts and putting units on them. It didn't move them into the killing field of my artillery but instead blocked up its own space with a dozen units. It should have bought battleships and pounded my artillery to scrap and open the beaches.
The same thing is true in FPS. Even in the best you can still shoot a guard and the guy next to him will eventually go back to business as usual usually standing guards in his mates exploded brains.
I don't want the AI so much to learn as to not forget. Splinter Cell does attempt this but the alert stages decrease again in a few minutes. Yeah right because a mysterious assasin is going to sneak all the way in, kill a guard and then just disappear?
We keep reading about FPS designers and telling us how they got some really cool AI that did things they didn't expect and then in the game itself we see the same old bullshit again and again.
Oh well, if I can't have learning remembring AI can I have one thing? Friendly AI that keeps the fuck out of my line of fire. Sure sure having the look before you shoot it one thing but if I am emptying a machine gun into an enemy I can sorta expect my mates not to fling themselves into the stream of bullets right?
Oblivion is a very bad example of this. It ain't AI. It is game design. Wich fucker at Oblivion decided to include friendly fire in a hack and slash? 99% of the time in a struggle you end up hitting your ally. WHY?
Forget artificial intelligence in game. How about some intelligence in game designers or is that like asking for journalistic ethics in slashdot editors?
The one thing that intrests me is that the PS3 is supposed to be able to run linux officially with the addon of an HD. In theory that should give you a memory limited super computer. Yet I don't see any mention of it. Ofcourse the average gaming journalist would know about OS'es as much as eh, what is more ignorant then a gaming journalist, a politician.
Enjoy your promotion.
/dev/null is a special device and it is nothing. If you write to it it goes nowhere just disappears.
Common joke is that you backedup to /dev/null because it had plenty of space.
I don't think windows has a similar function readily available.
So what do you use it for? Well when you have something that needs to output to something and you don't want it. Commonly used in scripts that run automatically to throw away unneeded messages.
As for how and why routers should have this. No idea. Sounds odd that you could get a router to discard its data.
Not that I think that they would bother with a spammer but a guy can dream can't he?
You also mention 2 companies of well over a dozen MMO companies out there.
Anyway pre-paid cards are very expensive for what they offer. Why is it so hard to simply follow Sony's lead and get a third party to handle all non-cc banking? That is what they are therefore.
I recently noticed that Lik-sang (hong-kong internet store) had opened a german "division" just so it could do better business in europe. It ain't that hard, if SOE can do it, anyone can. Just as soon as people stop thinking, everyone got a credit card.
Yes I have heard that SOE keeps billing CC accounts after you stopped your account but I never had problems with them. Finally a MMO I can pay for with my bank account.
I just hope they keep smedley far removed. Let him handle the billing. That he does well.
They killed EQ2, I liked it but a patch that increased running speed also increased the running animation. It looked like a Charlie Chaplin movie. I can live with bugs, unbalacing and whatever but I got to look at that running animation every second of gameplay. Get it right.
No? Then why should your employer be pleased that you are looking to replace him?
Do onto other as you wish to be done onto yourselve. Or something like that.
For whatever this may mean you and your employer have a relationship. You both expect certain things of each other. The employer expects you to turn up each day and that he can plan his business counting on the fact that you are there. You on the other hand count on the fact that your employer will keep paying you the agreed salary so you can plan your live around a steady income.
If you don't think you own your employer some loyalty then you shouldn't expect any back and ofcourse vice versa.
Now either of you may decice that it is time to end it. That is fine. The decent thing is to make it clear. Again, do to others as you want to be done onto. If you don't want to find your desk packed up when you arrive for work in the morning then you can't say "Oh I quit with the months notice and I got a month worth of vacation time that I am going to use now and today is a half day."
First you should decide if it is over or if with some adjustments you are willing to continue (again this goes for both parties). If not then you should be clear and open about it. Let the amount of time of notice that you give reflect how badly it has gone wrong. If you feel totally screwed over then by all means, 1 month notice. But if it just a feeling of wanting something else give the other sometime. You don't want to be fired on the spot and your employer don't want to loose you on the spot.
But IF you decide to leave do it. Then you shouldn't be afraid they find out because you already made up your mind.
But if your just testing the water with your resume on monsterboard then that offcourse gets a negative reaction. Again how would you react if you find that your employer has your job listed there just to test the waters?
What is good for the gander is good for the goose.
Geez, the john remero link gets it wrong as well.
Oblivion characters wear clothing. Far more so then in other games. The mesh of your character has other meshes on top wich form the clothing. Remove those meshes and voila, you got a naked character. Betsheda even included a skin for it.
The mesh is deformed (the tits look weird) because they are meant to be under clothes BUT it is there, naked titties. In the game as you buy it in the store.
It was NOT introduced.
When will people learn to read.
Any IT project got to run at least a year (planned) go overtime by at least a year. Go at least 2 million over budget. Not deliver what is required. Require that whatever the software does it cannot do it well or at all for at least half a year after it has been rolled out.
What the above ain't law? Then why do the same IT companies that screw up time and time again get the contract time and time again? Surely people ain't that stupid?
I did do a bit of work for goverment (non-it) and did some tools for them (for free I hate doing warehousing with paper). Two web apps for inventory tracking. Nothing important, just a timesaver. Ran fine until some manager came by and decided that all IT had to come from the IT supplier (Roccade, the dutch supplier of over-budget over-time bugware). It never emerged and we dealt with it by moving the PC's to a location were they were less noticable.
Don't know if it is still there.
This is a 18+ site and kids like you without a credit card aren't supposed to be here. Geez, you would think the admins would take better care.
Thank you for playing. You guessed right. Most rapes are by people put in a position of trust. Teach about date rape before you start worrying about internet predators.
The current attitude is to warn kids about the dangers of undercooling in the artic while not telling them to watch the traffic while crossing the street.
Must have been a nasty accident. First loosing all memory and then finding out your balls been ripped off and you are now a woman in all but name.
Cause if you were still a man or had memory of when you were a teenager you would know that "wanting to get to know her as a person" is a pickup line. It is what you tell them to get them drop their pants.
Age makes no difference.
Yet you conclude that the 50yr old is more dangerous then the 17yr old. What is even more shocking is that you seem to say that a 50yr old seducing your daughter is worse then the 17yr old who raped her.
Granted I am aware that there are some people who think that rape is normal even some who suggest that it is good for a woman but I thought we had those people safely put away as elected politicians and judges.
I really don't know what to think of your post. Rape is bad regardless of age and love is good regardless of age.
If you daughter found true love with an older man you would oppose it? Suggest she makes up with her rapist instead because he is closer to her age?
I don't hope so. Oh and as far as the fact that she underage. Well if it is true love they can wait. It is how you tell the pedos from the people who just fall in love across the age gap. The lovers can wait. The pedos would lose the love as the younger partner gets older.
Tell me something. The party she went to where she was raped. Did you think it was okay because there weren't any old men there? Let me tell you one tiny thing then. Old men would have beaten the crap out of any 17yr old boy trying something like that.
Trusting a bunch of 17yr old boys without supervision with your daugher. Smart move.
Thats right. The ads are served from a different server.
What is therefore missing is the link between requests.
IF you served your own ads you could indeed build in some system that checks wether the ad you inserted into the page is being downloaded. You would have to start a session for each user, you would have to write a script around your image server that notes in the session wether the image was retrieved but it is doable.
But how do you do this with ads from a third party?
I serve a page to you with a link to get an image from another server. UNLESS I can communicate with that server I have no way of telling wether you did that.
How it could work.
There are other ways as well, the server could send a list of ads included to the adserver and get a single message back if they all been requested or not. But the idea remains the same, you need communication between the adserver and the page server.
That, to my knowledge isn't in use yet.
Oh and the above "solution" ain't perfect either. Ad blockers that retrieve the ad but don't show it would be unaffected. How do you deal with a slow client who browses to fast for the ads to download? You also end up sending your content and are only able to block the user from getting stuff again within the same session.
More problems then, for now, it seems worth to taggle.
There is one form of ad that bypasses all this. The blocking flash ad. You know those screens you get before you go to the content page with a huge flash ad? Some require you to wait some time but what if the content link is only IN the flash ad.
Just make the link to the content only display after the ad has played. Forced ads. Lovely eh?
I have had to think about this problem before. The writeup above is very simple because I can't be arsed to write it all down again because at the time I came to the realisation that it is hard to sell anti-ad-blocker solutions to people who use IE and don't even know how to block virusses.
So it would be far more then just chatting "wanna fuck". You would actuallly have to worry about stats. Probably for the male of making sure you stimulate her enough that you don't come to fast. Wonder if male players are disconnected within a few minutes of climax?
It sounds like he was trying for way more then just another adult chatroom. Could have been intresting BUT hard to sell indeed.
Companies got very weird attitudes to sex. Just check phone companies and how they handle porn. THey are happy to rake in the cash from phonesex lines and mobile porn sites but nobody wants to be the assigned to handle them.
But all is not lost. Read the recent article of upcoming MMO's. Naughty America is sex based and I remember another story about an MMO set in London that has sex as well.
I just hope that they indeed have the whole sex/relationship put in as game mechanics. If it is just freeform sex I am gonna suck at it as bad is in real life. Now anyone know how to grind a really big dick?
Just google for movies like E.T. that were banned in various parts of the world. Germany is a nutcase for it but most countries got some silly stuff going on.
As for the whole crusade agaist porn thing or rating systems gone mad.
Pegi is the european version and it is just as bad.
It is just that it is european and therefore restricted by fact that we don't have war any more in the EU so we need some place to vent our hatred of each other and doing it by not accepting the proposal from our fellow enemies, eh members is one way.
Yet the "war on porn" is being attempted here as well. Even with the same "think of the childeren" crap.
This turn back to puritan times is global.
We have had the sexual revolution, then the do as you please eighties and now we are turning back into the dark ages.
This is about a nude body. You murder and pick the clothes of their still twitchng corpse and the bad thing is that you can see a nippel?
This world is fucked up.
Yes the past wasn't always perfect either but I long back to the days when a bit of nudity wasn't considered the end and people could rate their own games.
But seeing as I am well over 18 now I suggest a compremise to all those people who want to keep their kids safe from titties.
All games are from now on 18+ only. So are all movies, books, radio programs, plays, music. EVERYTHING. Kids who even put their hands on one are flogged and their parents go through forced parenting classes.
It is a simple class. A cattle prod and a question. "Who is responsible for your kids". BZZZZZZ wrong answer.
If you ever played Everquest 2 you might feel a bit of similarity between EQ2 collections and AC:WW museum.
Hell, last time I went fishing was in Star Wars Galaxies.
Considering how popular AC:WW is and how it was welcomed as a breath of fresh air I think there sure enough is a market for mindless grinds.
Hell at least in MMO grinds you are only dependend on time. AC:WW simply tells me that I am not going to catch all the fish/bugs until winter.
Maybe I am just weird but I sorta like it. The problem I got with MMO's is that people are so fucking serious about it. Who cares if mob x has more xp per second. I play for fun. Yeah I know I am not keeping up with the guild in level. Is there a timelimit or something? What is the rush to level up?
You claim there are no story lines in MMO's well I claim that there are but most people are to busy power grinding to read.
MMO's can be fun but you need to find a group of people who are willing to take their time. Not roleplayers perse but people who just want to do the quests as the writer wrote them down and enjoy the game.
If you can play games like AC:WW without feeling pressure to get all the items then you can enjoy some of the MMO's. Even PvP games like Guild Wars still got a lot of story. Just that most people are to much in a rush to enjoy it. Kind of like life in general.
First, The Princess Bride, the battle ontop the cliffs of insanity. Ten minutes of "believable" action. Attack, defend, counter attack. It works.
Next, Star Wars A New Hope, the "battle" in the Mos Eisley cantina. Either one will do. Notice something? Yup that is right, over in a flash.
So now we take say a fantasy MMO like ooh say Everquest and the endless fights make sorta sense. You can deflect a sword blow or catch it on your armor so you can indeed hack away at each other.
Now take EQ, put it in a Star Wars jacket and all of sudden it don't make sense anymore. You can shoot somebody in the face with a rocket launcher and they will remain standing!
The problem with "modern" settings is that the weapons are to lethal. Current game design has few enemies requiring that each one takes a bit of time to go down. So we got FPS shooters where baddies need 2-3 rocket up the nose before they collapse.
It was one of the things people complained about when Star Wars Galaxies first launched. That Storm Troopers did not go down with 1 hit. You did but not the troopers.
Magic "works" because it is magic and doesn't have to obey the rules of the real world. You can do an awfull lot of stuff if you just say it is magic.
Amazon has a lousy location (try stopping by to just have a browse and see the book and scim through it) BUT has infinite space. Well almost.
If you got even a small chain of stores you need to stock a copy of a book in everyone of them if you want to sell it.
Amazon can stock 1 copy and sell it across a continent.
Internet stores make sense for goods where there is an awfull lot of choice but little specific demand and enough profit/costs to keep shipping costs down.
Yet I don't see bookstores closing down. Yes they are having a hardtime but the older people can tell you that bookstores have always had a hard time.
But for lots of other things online doesn't make as much sense. Computer hardware has the same wide choice but I prefer talking to a person to make sure I get advice. Granted I shop at a small store where they know you and have in the past been warned that a new vid card would overload my PSU.
Maybe the US is different but in europe the small savings don't make up for the lack of customer service and delays especially if something goes wrong.
Offcourse there are people like you but might I suggest something? Are you perhaps just a modern version of the catalog shopper?
Holland has two catalog companies that send a thick book with products from wich people order.
The net in paper if you like.
They been around for ages and were never a threath to real shops.
Yes there are exceptions but just go down to the highstreet on a saturday. Hope you can stand crowds.
Basically the ideas of adding smells to other media is eternal. I even had some scratch and sniff books at a time.
The logic is simple. Smells are important, the smell of fresh coffee or baking bread really wakes me up and tells me it is morning. The smell of wet grass after a thunderstorm would really make a picture of such a scene come to life.
The problem? Well it just don't work. Smells linger. So long after the movie has passed on to another scene the smell would still be there. Anyway do you really want to smell the rotting corpses? I cleaned up after the bodies have been removed and it ain't a pleasant experience.
Frankly I see this device as a game. See how many time it passes by in your lifetime.
The fast majority of citizens of the UK are white and if you want to sample "normal" group where social/economic factors aren't going to be a major influence then you are stuck with them.
Would a study between say muslims or blacks be intresting? No. Background is too different.
A large portion of blacks in americas were former slaves. Britain was a slave nation BUT did not import them in any numbers. The majority of blacks in britain today are the descendants of immigrants.
As far as muslims are concerned. Well at least in europe there are huge differences per country as to where the muslims come from. Germany has a lot of turks, Holland morrocans and england has a lot of people from pakistan. So you can't compare them because their ethnic background would interfere. Hell, you are talking three different races if your strict.
So this study focusing on whites is not racism. It is just trying to exclude other factors from influencing the results.
If you did a study into the health of pets in various countries would it really be fare to compare the german shepperd with the british bulldog to determine wich country takes better care of its pets? No you would have to pick a generic breed to elimenate inbred diseases from skewing the results.
It is easy got spend less IF you force the medical staff to starve.
Considering other alarm stories about the NHS I would hardly claim the medical care is the cause of brits being healthier.
But from the study I think there is one shocking possibilty.
What if the UK health care is so bad that only the strongest survive. If in the UK you die while in the US you can live on unhealtily then yes UK citizens are more healthy.
It makes as much sense as claiming the NHS is somekind of miracle institution. Most likely it is down to differences in live styles.
So if the euro families ate just as much junkfood how can they possibly be thinner?
I don't know what the fuck causes the effect these scientists have discovered. Are americans really that fat and overworked that even though they got more money they are less healthy?
Cause any claims that european healthcare (for the welloff) is better is idiotic. Especially british healthcare wich seems to specialize nowadays in shipping patients abroad to get decent care.
Then again wasn't there the little fact that people in Cuba (poor) had better medical care then americans? That infant death rate was significantly higher in the wealthy US then in the poor Cuba?
Perhaps money doesn't mean shit when it comes to being healthy.
Oh well. Go europe eh?