of course, we do things upside down here in Australia, where it is the big tobacco companies that are pushing the government to legalize e-cigarettes in order to protect their business... from the governments anti smoking laws (plain packaging, ever increasing taxes, limits on where people can smoke...).
P.S. the vaping units themselves are legal, but it is illegal to sell the nicotine juice.
Seriously, I can't figure out why they are not already doing this, unless it really is that they are short sighted idiots who still haven't realised that the world changed for them about a decade ago and they'd better get with the times. Can someone fill me in, please?
as mentioned in the article, and has been mentioned elsewhere, the money HBO gets from the cable companies for GoT is significantly more than they'd get from selling globally to individuals.
it is the cable companies that have dictated the limited availability of GoT, not HBO.
Other VR systems have come and gone, most without even registering on the radar. For the more recent ones, its not because the systems themselves have been lacking. Rather it is the lack of software that utilizes the systems. Developers want people to buy their creations, so they work with what people already have in the way of hardware.
This latest attempt is focusing on getting game developers on board first, and seems to be pulling in some pretty big guns in the industry. If the plan works out, we'll see big name games that players want to play supporting this VR system. If that happens, many gamers will buy the headset.
My only critisism is that for it to be a trully gaming focused system, it needs headphones and microphone too.
... I do not want to go back to Wow at all and think SWTOR has great potential...
SW:ToR had great potential during the betas. what it has now is lost subscriptions. Bioware did not understand MMOs when it made this game. It was made like a single player RPG. Once you reached the level cap, there is nothing to keep the player interested. Even the recent legacy system showed this by encouraging players to level new characters, giving rewards for leveling every class of every race of both factions.
When i canceled my sub, there was the ussual questionaire asking for feedback. After this is done, it suggests leveling alts as the solution to whatever the players problems are. I didnt unsub alone, those who unsubbed with me all recieved the same suggestion, regardless of feedback provided.
After playing a few MMOs and watching all of them slowly die, i would offer this advice to any future MMO developers: Have as much endgame content as possible BEFORE launching. Dont wait for 3/6/9 months down the track to add the endgame content as "expansions". Also, dont ignore PvP. MMOs are about PLAYERS interacting with OTHER PLAYERS. The content is the means of that interaction. One of the most popular ways players like to interact with eachother is by attacking and killing eachother. If your PvP is poor, your game is doomed.
GW2 is kinda appealing, as filler until something else comes along. But i'm more looking forward to the Neverwinter MMO later this year that features a toolset for players to create their own content.
Exploding termites have been known about for quite a while. Check out wikipedia's page on the subject: the oldest reference cited is from 1974.
what hasnt been seen until now is that these termites are using a toxic bomb that mixes two seperate ingredients. while the wiki link you provided does cite older references, they are only for the single ingredient toxic bombs. the most recent references it contains are dated today, and show the dual ingredient bomb carrying termites.
the other interesting thing about these termites is that the secondary ingredient is a crystiline copper chemical that is accumulated over the workers life, resulting in older workers becoming the more deadly defenders
i've played since beta and continue to play to this day. hacks were never as prevelant as people thought. not saying there wasnt some, but much of what was called hacks was players not understanding other classes.
example - speed hack: i often run my blackguard with the shielding anger + endless pursuit tactic. in larger fights this combination of tactics means i move 35% faster and never run out of action points until the last enemy has fallen or i am myself killed. shaman players in particular are often accused of speed hacking, while 99% of the time its due to the run away tactic the class gets. GCD exploiting is more a matter of bad system + lag.
having said that, hacking is simply not an issue in the current game, it just doesnt happen often enough. all the hackers have long since been banned
Moreover, Dr Gehling said better, older fossils had been found three years ago by University of Melbourne geologist Malcolm Wallace and his team. Dr Gehling suggested that competitive pressure might have been the reason Dr Wallace's group has been unable to publish their results.
The Australian understands that one of the co-authors of the contentious paper is a reviewer for the journal Science, to which Dr Wallace's group has submitted a paper. It is not clear whether the reviewer has read the paper but Dr Wallace acknowledged that "we've had difficulties getting our results published". He preferred not to discuss Dr Gehling's suspicions. He did affirm that his group's finds were roughly 20 million years older than those reported by the Princeton team, headed by paleontologist Adam Maloof.
A few of the Aussies here have mentioned their disappointment with Rudd and greater dislike of the opposition, and have expressed their intention to vote dreen or independant.
If you wish to keep legislation such as this from passing its important to understand how the Australian government works. firstly there is the Upper House: parliament. Here you find the Prime minister, Ministers and back benchers. Voting for anyone other than either of the two major parties here is basicly a wasted vote. In most cases the winning party will always have enough seats here to propose anything they like and see it pass. I suggest voting for the major party you find least objectionable.
The Lower House: The Senate, is where the postions of minor parties/independents are most powerfull. It is here that legislation such as the internet filter stand the best chance of being stopped. Many years ago the Australian Democrats held a significant proportion of seats here. Never aiming for the upper house, they focused on the senate with the tag line of 'keeping the bastards honest'. Today that power is held by the Greens and the Family First party, each equaly scary depending upon your own personal views (damn hippies vs Christian nutjobs). If you are disillusioned with Labor, and intend to vote Green, doing so in the senate will have the greatest impact.
i've been in battles in the tier 3 map RvR with 50+ per side that lasted for hours, seen others with 100+ of one side or the other come rampaging through a fortress, and otherwise had some great fun doing nothing but RvR scenarios for 5 levels (though tor anroc does get a tad repetative after the millionth time). i'm about to head into tier 4 and am looking forward to invading a capitol city.
if 5 vs 5 is the best your server can come up with, i suggest you take the free server transfer when its offered.
i converted from playing Eldar and Dark Eldar in WH40k to playing Khador in WARMACHINE a few years ago and havent looked back since.
for anyone interested in miniature gaming or currently dissatisfied with games workshop, i strongly encourage you to seek out the WARMACHINE website - privateerpress.com - or something like that.
many of the privateer press staff are former GW employees (including miniature designers) who saw the direction that GW was heading and set off for a brighter future
Recent comments from the Vatican shows that the Chatholics are finaly getting a clue.
many of the more reasonable christians thoughout the world seem more concerned with the ethical implications of the emerging biotechnology and genetics fields that with bible bashing creationism.
I ussualy try to avoid disparaging Americans, but they do seem to hold most of the copyrights for the whackier side of theology at the moment
"If Putin pulled the plug on an anti-Putin web site inside Russia, the anti-Putin web site could simply be migrated offshore to a server in, say, the United States."
Fair trade. the US gets the anti-Putin sites, and Russia gets the Torrent servers after the RIAA pulls the plug in the US.
Meanwhile, Canada gets the former US internet radio streams.
'The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers'
imo the best bit is actually split into two places in the letter. first theres this part:
'Mr. Merchant has and had no more duty to respond to attempts to "sell" him one of your clients' boilerplate, non-negotiable $3750 settlements than he has to return cold calls from pushy life insurance salespeople.'
this is followed later by:
'My clients are willing to accept dismissal of the litigation in exchange for
1. Payment of Mr. Merchant's reasonable fees and costs including retainer of $6,880.25. The payment represents good value considering what your own firm's billings will have been to date and use of those billing records as the loadstar rate for Mr. Merchant's award. See Capitol Record v. Foster, Western Dist. Okla No. 5:04-cv-1569-W, Docment 182 filed 3-15-07).'
you gotta love how it says they wont pay the riaa's protection money..., and then asks the riaa to pay them twice as much.
Your posting to slashdot, and u have a 4 digit uid. You will never have children, as that requires interaction on an intimate level with a member of the opposite sex.
More likely your home made robotic shark with freakin lasers will read about the SCO debacle in soviet russia as they welcome their new beowulf cluster overlords running linux.
my friends family operates a large number of holiday units. i recall that once thay had an american tourist staying there who was determined to shout all his aussie mates a bottle of fosters.
it took three days for local bottleshop to order it in for him.
Slashdot Mirror
of course, we do things upside down here in Australia, where it is the big tobacco companies that are pushing the government to legalize e-cigarettes in order to protect their business... from the governments anti smoking laws (plain packaging, ever increasing taxes, limits on where people can smoke...).
P.S. the vaping units themselves are legal, but it is illegal to sell the nicotine juice.
Some of you might remember previous slashdot articles featuring the CSIRO sueing tech companies over patents. :)
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/09/04/22/1545238/csiro-settles-with-tech-giants-over-wifi-patent-spat
http://slashdot.org/story/12/04/05/2131233/the-story-behind-australias-csiro-wi-fi-claims
Well...this is the kind of thing the cash from those patents is paying for
I, for one, welcome our new CSIRO nerd overlords.
Seriously, I can't figure out why they are not already doing this, unless it really is that they are short sighted idiots who still haven't realised that the world changed for them about a decade ago and they'd better get with the times. Can someone fill me in, please?
as mentioned in the article, and has been mentioned elsewhere, the money HBO gets from the cable companies for GoT is significantly more than they'd get from selling globally to individuals.
it is the cable companies that have dictated the limited availability of GoT, not HBO.
Other VR systems have come and gone, most without even registering on the radar.
For the more recent ones, its not because the systems themselves have been lacking. Rather it is the lack of software that utilizes the systems. Developers want people to buy their creations, so they work with what people already have in the way of hardware.
This latest attempt is focusing on getting game developers on board first, and seems to be pulling in some pretty big guns in the industry. If the plan works out, we'll see big name games that players want to play supporting this VR system. If that happens, many gamers will buy the headset.
My only critisism is that for it to be a trully gaming focused system, it needs headphones and microphone too.
I am.
... I do not want to go back to Wow at all and think SWTOR has great potential...
SW:ToR had great potential during the betas. what it has now is lost subscriptions.
Bioware did not understand MMOs when it made this game. It was made like a single player RPG. Once you reached the level cap, there is nothing to keep the player interested. Even the recent legacy system showed this by encouraging players to level new characters, giving rewards for leveling every class of every race of both factions.
When i canceled my sub, there was the ussual questionaire asking for feedback. After this is done, it suggests leveling alts as the solution to whatever the players problems are. I didnt unsub alone, those who unsubbed with me all recieved the same suggestion, regardless of feedback provided.
After playing a few MMOs and watching all of them slowly die, i would offer this advice to any future MMO developers: Have as much endgame content as possible BEFORE launching. Dont wait for 3/6/9 months down the track to add the endgame content as "expansions". Also, dont ignore PvP. MMOs are about PLAYERS interacting with OTHER PLAYERS. The content is the means of that interaction. One of the most popular ways players like to interact with eachother is by attacking and killing eachother. If your PvP is poor, your game is doomed.
GW2 is kinda appealing, as filler until something else comes along.
But i'm more looking forward to the Neverwinter MMO later this year that features a toolset for players to create their own content.
Exploding termites have been known about for quite a while. Check out wikipedia's page on the subject: the oldest reference cited is from 1974.
what hasnt been seen until now is that these termites are using a toxic bomb that mixes two seperate ingredients.
while the wiki link you provided does cite older references, they are only for the single ingredient toxic bombs.
the most recent references it contains are dated today, and show the dual ingredient bomb carrying termites.
the other interesting thing about these termites is that the secondary ingredient is a crystiline copper chemical that is accumulated over the workers life, resulting in older workers becoming the more deadly defenders
i've played since beta and continue to play to this day. hacks were never as prevelant as people thought. not saying there wasnt some, but much of what was called hacks was players not understanding other classes. example - speed hack: i often run my blackguard with the shielding anger + endless pursuit tactic. in larger fights this combination of tactics means i move 35% faster and never run out of action points until the last enemy has fallen or i am myself killed. shaman players in particular are often accused of speed hacking, while 99% of the time its due to the run away tactic the class gets. GCD exploiting is more a matter of bad system + lag. having said that, hacking is simply not an issue in the current game, it just doesnt happen often enough. all the hackers have long since been banned
the author of the paper and his conclusions have already been called into question
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/australians-say-uss-oldest-fossil-claims-dont-hold-water/story-e6frg6nf-1225907040826
from TFA
Moreover, Dr Gehling said better, older fossils had been found three years ago by University of Melbourne geologist Malcolm Wallace and his team. Dr Gehling suggested that competitive pressure might have been the reason Dr Wallace's group has been unable to publish their results.
The Australian understands that one of the co-authors of the contentious paper is a reviewer for the journal Science, to which Dr Wallace's group has submitted a paper. It is not clear whether the reviewer has read the paper but Dr Wallace acknowledged that "we've had difficulties getting our results published". He preferred not to discuss Dr Gehling's suspicions. He did affirm that his group's finds were roughly 20 million years older than those reported by the Princeton team, headed by paleontologist Adam Maloof.
A few of the Aussies here have mentioned their disappointment with Rudd and greater dislike of the opposition, and have expressed their intention to vote dreen or independant.
If you wish to keep legislation such as this from passing its important to understand how the Australian government works.
firstly there is the Upper House: parliament. Here you find the Prime minister, Ministers and back benchers. Voting for anyone other than either of the two major parties here is basicly a wasted vote. In most cases the winning party will always have enough seats here to propose anything they like and see it pass. I suggest voting for the major party you find least objectionable.
The Lower House: The Senate, is where the postions of minor parties/independents are most powerfull. It is here that legislation such as the internet filter stand the best chance of being stopped. Many years ago the Australian Democrats held a significant proportion of seats here. Never aiming for the upper house, they focused on the senate with the tag line of 'keeping the bastards honest'. Today that power is held by the Greens and the Family First party, each equaly scary depending upon your own personal views (damn hippies vs Christian nutjobs). If you are disillusioned with Labor, and intend to vote Green, doing so in the senate will have the greatest impact.
i've been in battles in the tier 3 map RvR with 50+ per side that lasted for hours, seen others with 100+ of one side or the other come rampaging through a fortress, and otherwise had some great fun doing nothing but RvR scenarios for 5 levels (though tor anroc does get a tad repetative after the millionth time). i'm about to head into tier 4 and am looking forward to invading a capitol city.
if 5 vs 5 is the best your server can come up with, i suggest you take the free server transfer when its offered.
load the band up onto the back of a flatbed truck, then hoon around while pretending to perform.
request the resulting footage under the freedom of information laws, then release as the video to your latest single.
yes its illegal to not vote if your enrolled.
many simply dont enrole to vote in the first place.
Libraries in parallel universe....librarians that are monkeys (sorry, Apes),
its starting to sound like the RIAA are alumni of Unseen University.
I wonder if they have been helping themselves to the Bursars pills?
Australia doesnt have a walmart store anywhere either
have a look for the battle of brisbane on wikipedia (i'm to lazy to grab the link right now.
aussie and american service personnel have confronted eachother before
A lot of Heinleins stories feature a fair amount of porn too
i converted from playing Eldar and Dark Eldar in WH40k to playing Khador in WARMACHINE a few years ago and havent looked back since.
for anyone interested in miniature gaming or currently dissatisfied with games workshop, i strongly encourage you to seek out the WARMACHINE website - privateerpress.com - or something like that.
many of the privateer press staff are former GW employees (including miniature designers) who saw the direction that GW was heading and set off for a brighter future
friend of mine had a tyranid army made entirely out of cheap plastic frogs
Which Church?
Recent comments from the Vatican shows that the Chatholics are finaly getting a clue.
many of the more reasonable christians thoughout the world seem more concerned with the ethical implications of the emerging biotechnology and genetics fields that with bible bashing creationism.
I ussualy try to avoid disparaging Americans, but they do seem to hold most of the copyrights for the whackier side of theology at the moment
The adoption of broadband internet in The Rest of The World (tm) continues to out pace the USA as websites formaly hosted in the US move offshore.
The average Australias understanding of baseball is at about the same level as the average Americans understanding of cricket
"If Putin pulled the plug on an anti-Putin web site inside Russia, the anti-Putin web site could simply be migrated offshore to a server in, say, the United States."
Fair trade. the US gets the anti-Putin sites, and Russia gets the Torrent servers after the RIAA pulls the plug in the US.
Meanwhile, Canada gets the former US internet radio streams.
'The more you tighten your grip, the more systems will slip through your fingers'
imo the best bit is actually split into two places in the letter. first theres this part:
'Mr. Merchant has and had no more duty to respond to attempts to "sell" him one of your clients' boilerplate, non-negotiable $3750 settlements than he has to return cold calls from pushy life insurance salespeople.'
this is followed later by:
'My clients are willing to accept dismissal of the litigation in exchange for
1. Payment of Mr. Merchant's reasonable fees and costs including retainer of $6,880.25. The payment represents good value considering what your own firm's billings will have been to date and use of those billing records as the loadstar rate for Mr. Merchant's award. See Capitol Record v. Foster, Western Dist. Okla No. 5:04-cv-1569-W, Docment 182 filed 3-15-07).'
you gotta love how it says they wont pay the riaa's protection money..., and then asks the riaa to pay them twice as much.
Your posting to slashdot, and u have a 4 digit uid. You will never have children, as that requires interaction on an intimate level with a member of the opposite sex.
More likely your home made robotic shark with freakin lasers will read about the SCO debacle in soviet russia as they welcome their new beowulf cluster overlords running linux.
my friends family operates a large number of holiday units.
i recall that once thay had an american tourist staying there who was determined to shout all his aussie mates a bottle of fosters.
it took three days for local bottleshop to order it in for him.
and then no one would drink it with him.