Diablo 2 had full hostility. You could go hostile with someone but you had to be in town. When you did so, they were notified and all of their open portals were closed (so they couldnt TP, hostile, TP, kill right before killing a boss or something and screw you out of the drop). Here you could kill anyone else (at the risk of making yourself attackable) though there was an easy solution: leave the game and join a new one since they were 8 person servers.
sure, on a pvp, sometimes you have to deal with people way higher level than you who decide to gank you but if they stick around too long, its not too hard for you to tell the general or local defence channel what happened and there will almost always be people ready to kick their asses. In the lowbie zones, you have to flag yourself for PvP if it is your factions zone so this eliminates people ganking the people just starting the game while still letting everyone else have their fun. PvE is unreal...I shouldnt be able to walk up to someone who could obviously kill me in a handful of seconds and start taunting them without fear of reprecussion...
The HSBC account can have an ATM card (I have one myself) but the other online savings cant (ING, emigrant, etc). I'm not sure how you go about adding it but I know that I am currently pulling in 5.6% AND have an ATM card (just signed up 2 months ago so maybe its a new thing)
There are certian account types out there with high minimum balances but most CDs have no minimum and the minimum on money markets is usually pretty low (2000 or so).
Or you can just get a high-rate savings account. My HSBC account gets 5.6% right now (ING always trails behind) which is slightly more than my girlfriend's 12-month CD gets. Only difference is that my assets are completely liquid without losing interest and I have an ATM card to boot. (note, I am a college student and this is where my extra money lies)
well, those two examples are rather different...the root canal simply wouldnt work since you would have to be preforming an operation on yourself...
The transmission however, anyone could eventually learn how to replace/repair their transmission and gather all of the tools necessary to do the job. It's just at some point, their time becomes more valuable than the money it would take to have someone who knows right away how to do the job fix it (or even more valuable than the time used up by simply not having a working car). The law is like a very intricate transmission, you could learn everything that applies and how to defend yuorself but the courtroom is more like (lets stretch this even more here)...a race. You could fix the car and the mechanic could fix the car but when you've got a judge bearing down on you, the trained professional is going to be quick and accurate and move ahead at leaps and bounds over the person who is learning as they go and constantly pulling out a manual.
Pretty much every VW at the dealership I worked at has one of those stickers asking for premium fuel (even the piddly 2.0s).
Guess what, that tank out back had straight 87 octane gas and never anything different. It wasnt a problem for the mechanics because they knew that even the high compression 1.8 turbos didnt need more than the 87. At the worst you would lose some power if the anti-knock had to kick in and retard the timing. There was never a need for higher grade fuel unless someone had aftermarket parts (anything from a chip, to a bigger turbo to new cams). Of course there can be an advantage to the increased octane rating because you can run the smaller engines at higher compression for better efficiency but the manufacturers cant take that risk because they know people will just pump it full of regular.
also because our gas is so low octane we cant up the engine compression which would allow us to get more power out of our engines (and thus the same power out of smaller and more efficient engines).
And its just not as high quality as many european gasolines...which translates to worse efficiency. My VW gets 10-15 less mpg than the UK version of the same car...
"Because of the 4-sided structures, synthetic diamonds are UV reactive under "very intense short-wave ultraviolet" and will phosphoresce for a bit in the dark."
That makes synthetic diamonds sound cooler than natural diamonds...I'd love to avoid the dirty cartels AND have a stone that phosphoresces (granted only with specific light that is probobly dangerous to skin).
They were having a discussion on synthetic diamonds on npr today somewhere around early afternoon and it reminded me of the fantastic wired article on the topic. It's a little dated in terms of the newest cutting edge techniques (both for creation and analysis) but it is very very good.
It's not that people are buying WoW instead of his game (most long term wow players have written off that monthly cost and it no longer fits into their available spending money...just goes in witht he other bills) its that wow is so involving that it takes an amazing game to so much as pull someone away from it.
I took off from wow during my first year of college but now during the summer I picked it back up. During school though I didnt have enough time to devote to WoW, there were tiems I still wanted gaming so I played a fair amount of other games (and had times for things like multiplayer CS:s). Now that I have picked wow back up, the only time I have touched other games is to briefly try the prey demo and to play at a lan party I went to. There is simply too much to do in WoW to play other games and have time for work/life (I could cut out work and still not do everything I want in WoW). It would take something enthralling to pull me away...I was still in school (finals week actually...) when HL2 Episode 1 came out and while I hadnt picked up WoW again yet, it probobly would have pulled me away from wow long enough to beat it but, it cost less than $20 and was a short game, I would'nt pull myself away from my wow subscription to pay $60 and play a longer game when I could have just as much fun in WoW.
Sure for people who enjoy WoW, he is right...it stops them from buying his game. But the same could have been said about everquest (hence "evercrack"). Back when I played Starsiege in an active clan (and later in some other games like tribes/diablo2/planetarion) we lost many a player to the evercrack but there were still plenty of us who werent into the MMORPG thing (or couldnt pay for it like me) who played plenty of normal games. I know WoW is immensely popular but all they have to do is make sure their game targets more than just the exact group of people who play WoW. You can even advertise with snide remarks about wow to attract other gamers ("tired of not having anything to do because all of your friends are playingWoW?")
Exactly, this was a kid applying for a job, not a suspected terrorist. Why shoudl the patriot act be used at all?
Suddenly, when they call my former employer all they can do is confirm employment but when they call up facebook (or well, when they call someone who calls facebook) they can invoke the patriot act to get things I intentionally mark as private (as opposed to say, my personal habits or how I treat my coworkers which are plainly visible to former employers and I dont ask them to keep it a secret or anything yet they are still not allowed to say anything more than the fact that I worked at said business)
The real method you should be using to make your money accessable in an emergency is a system of rolling CD's
The idea behind it is that you will earn a lot better interest on say...a 5year cd than you would on a 12 month one but your money wouldnt only be accessable once every 5 years without dropping all earned interest. With rolling CD's for a 5 year CD you would split your money into 5 parts right when you invest it, the first part goes into a 5 year, the next into a 4 year, then a 3 year, 2 year, and finally 1 year. after that one year is up, you roll that money into a 5 year (you can have this done automatically). After the second year you roll the next one into a 5 year. Pretty soon you have all your money in 5 year CDs (still not the best investments but they get pretty good interest) but you can access a good portion of it at any time without forgoing more than a years worth of interest.
and hsbc's direct online savings accounts (as opposed to emigrants or ING) offer you an ATM card so not only are you earning a high rate (currently 5%) on the money, it is completely liquid and accessable from any ATM machine (unlike say...CDs or money market accounts)
That's the debit column so everything in it represents an ammount removed from the account. The other column represents a credit to the account so gaining cash would be in the left and spending cash would be in the right.
Accounting tends to not use the negative sign (when totals come up negative they are usually enclosed in parantheses)
Then what exactly do you plan to do (homeschoolers come out pretentious and wierd and often have their own religious agendas)? My public school really wasnt that bad and there are certainly private schools that are not only worse in terms of educational opportunities but much worse in terms of being a ruthless dictatorship.
I fully agree though...the bill of rights doesnt have an age limit (and yes, that includes the second ammendment and no I dont believe that that means everyone can go wacko with guns, it means they can do so in the interest of "a well regulated militia"...) so I am assuming that eventually they will just declare all school disctrict property to belong to the soverign nation of "Edumacationland" and therefor the bill of rights would not apply (and I'm not sure anything in the constitution prevents the law from requiring you to go to edumacationalnd until you graduate).
There, I told you so I'm assuming that you wont consider it an invasion of privacy after I read it? You put it on the internet and you know that email isnt all that secure so why should you ahve an expectation of privacy?
its not that you cant simply not deal with the monopoly, its that if you want to make those kinds of deals, the monopoly is becomming closer and closer to being your only choice.
A large amount of online transactions are processed through paypal and most of those are ebay (and most of ebay is paypal...etc). In terms of seperate companies, paypal and googlecheckout are both competing online payment vendors who use a third party to actually generate use of their service (in this case, ebay). In the 3 company world, ebay could only stand to benefit from another good payment service showing up, they wouldnt lose any transactions and they might gain a few from anti-paypal people. The problem lies in the fact that there are really only 2 companies here, ebay controls paypal and then stands to lose revenue if paypal loses transactions. If google enters the market, they will take more and more transactions away from paypal. They may also generate new transactions for ebay but not enough to eclipse the loss felt by paypal. What is the obvious self-interest first choice? Dont let people use things you dont own. Of course this ends up being bad for the consumer and potentially bad for ebay (things will stagnate or there will end up being a competitor who goes to court and wins) but at this point they arent thinking about that, they are just trying to keep their revenue stream (maybe they will switch to ebay-fee discounts or something to encourage paypal use which is probobly legal as long as its not huge).
This is akin to visa saying they will only let you pay down your credit card bill with a personal check, cashiers check/money order, or another visa card. No mastercard, no discover, and definately no american express. People are still going to have to pay that bill, so its not like people will dissapear but it will direct additional revenue into the pockets of visa while blocking out competitors. (ok so the example isnt perfect since most people dont pay with another credit card, the credit card industry is an oligopoly not a monopoly and people are a lot more comfortable paying with checks but...you get the point.
However, in the corporation, they could probobly offer up the salaries provided to the 2 former workers and grab a few new hires to take over the position. They would most likey have the skillset but not the familiarity with the software so there would be some training time before they could begin to implement new functions. In the mean time, the project would continue to run as it is (though, freedb is still there...the front page has a link to take you to the site...its just that it might go away any time now).
You would almost think that they could find a few new people to take the place and instead of a salary they offer the prestige of working on the project managment (it is fairly well known...). The problem with that though is it seems that the guy with the control is the bad one here, not the people leaving so...maybe he doesnt care enough to do this. They probobly should have "incorporated" or left their assets to a foundation to prevent a hostile takeover. FSF or Mozilla would probobly have been willing to take on freedb if only in a top-level organizational role while leaving the project to its own ends (like a bank controlling a trust fund)
Well, I like to buy my whole package with liner notes and all (note: this only applies to good music...garbage is still garbage and if I jsut one one song, I'm not buying the album) and this would encourage me not to buy CDs.
If I cant have the physical media, I'm not going to be as willing to pay for it (sorry itunes, I really like having a real CD even though I listen to everything in well-tagged mp3 files). If the pirated album is already tagged, it is just another incentive for me to save my money and time.
I actually have the Kings of Convenience album and its quite good (though the only place I have heard it played here other than the friend who introduced me to it is on the current)
I really would love to go to norway sometime...I spent some time in denmark a few years ago (I'm half danish so there are lots of relatives and the such) and had a great time.
Well, thats because Norway gets things unlike the US.
The public broadcasting here is actually pretty damn good (to to mpr.org and find the streaming version of 89.3 The Current) but outside of exceptions like the aforementioned station, nobody listens to it compared to commercial radio or commercial broadcast/cable TV. For education...there are a ton of state owned schools and community colleges...most of them suck. The good ones are actually quite good (a lot of the flagship state universities in the midwest and on the coasts are very highly regarded) but they arent free and often arent even that cheap. They are cheap compared to the top private institutions but they also cant give you the same thing as 40+ thousand dollars a year can do. There are a lot of cheaper private colleges that are worse than the state schools though...just like there are a lot of terribe terrible radio stations that people insist on listening to.
While I am at it, let me just give you a link to The Current because it is simply amazing. The content varies by DJ (they pick what they play unlike the corporates) but it is usually quite good. They also have a large archive on their site of great in-studio preformances. All of it freely available without advertising to people like me and you.
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Diablo 2 had full hostility. You could go hostile with someone but you had to be in town. When you did so, they were notified and all of their open portals were closed (so they couldnt TP, hostile, TP, kill right before killing a boss or something and screw you out of the drop). Here you could kill anyone else (at the risk of making yourself attackable) though there was an easy solution: leave the game and join a new one since they were 8 person servers.
sure, on a pvp, sometimes you have to deal with people way higher level than you who decide to gank you but if they stick around too long, its not too hard for you to tell the general or local defence channel what happened and there will almost always be people ready to kick their asses. In the lowbie zones, you have to flag yourself for PvP if it is your factions zone so this eliminates people ganking the people just starting the game while still letting everyone else have their fun. PvE is unreal...I shouldnt be able to walk up to someone who could obviously kill me in a handful of seconds and start taunting them without fear of reprecussion...
The HSBC account can have an ATM card (I have one myself) but the other online savings cant (ING, emigrant, etc). I'm not sure how you go about adding it but I know that I am currently pulling in 5.6% AND have an ATM card (just signed up 2 months ago so maybe its a new thing)
Or you can just get a high-rate savings account. My HSBC account gets 5.6% right now (ING always trails behind) which is slightly more than my girlfriend's 12-month CD gets. Only difference is that my assets are completely liquid without losing interest and I have an ATM card to boot. (note, I am a college student and this is where my extra money lies)
The transmission however, anyone could eventually learn how to replace/repair their transmission and gather all of the tools necessary to do the job. It's just at some point, their time becomes more valuable than the money it would take to have someone who knows right away how to do the job fix it (or even more valuable than the time used up by simply not having a working car). The law is like a very intricate transmission, you could learn everything that applies and how to defend yuorself but the courtroom is more like (lets stretch this even more here)...a race. You could fix the car and the mechanic could fix the car but when you've got a judge bearing down on you, the trained professional is going to be quick and accurate and move ahead at leaps and bounds over the person who is learning as they go and constantly pulling out a manual.
Guess what, that tank out back had straight 87 octane gas and never anything different. It wasnt a problem for the mechanics because they knew that even the high compression 1.8 turbos didnt need more than the 87. At the worst you would lose some power if the anti-knock had to kick in and retard the timing. There was never a need for higher grade fuel unless someone had aftermarket parts (anything from a chip, to a bigger turbo to new cams). Of course there can be an advantage to the increased octane rating because you can run the smaller engines at higher compression for better efficiency but the manufacturers cant take that risk because they know people will just pump it full of regular.
And its just not as high quality as many european gasolines...which translates to worse efficiency. My VW gets 10-15 less mpg than the UK version of the same car...
That makes synthetic diamonds sound cooler than natural diamonds...I'd love to avoid the dirty cartels AND have a stone that phosphoresces (granted only with specific light that is probobly dangerous to skin).
They were having a discussion on synthetic diamonds on npr today somewhere around early afternoon and it reminded me of the fantastic wired article on the topic. It's a little dated in terms of the newest cutting edge techniques (both for creation and analysis) but it is very very good.
It's not that people are buying WoW instead of his game (most long term wow players have written off that monthly cost and it no longer fits into their available spending money...just goes in witht he other bills) its that wow is so involving that it takes an amazing game to so much as pull someone away from it.
I took off from wow during my first year of college but now during the summer I picked it back up. During school though I didnt have enough time to devote to WoW, there were tiems I still wanted gaming so I played a fair amount of other games (and had times for things like multiplayer CS:s). Now that I have picked wow back up, the only time I have touched other games is to briefly try the prey demo and to play at a lan party I went to. There is simply too much to do in WoW to play other games and have time for work/life (I could cut out work and still not do everything I want in WoW). It would take something enthralling to pull me away...I was still in school (finals week actually...) when HL2 Episode 1 came out and while I hadnt picked up WoW again yet, it probobly would have pulled me away from wow long enough to beat it but, it cost less than $20 and was a short game, I would'nt pull myself away from my wow subscription to pay $60 and play a longer game when I could have just as much fun in WoW.
Sure for people who enjoy WoW, he is right...it stops them from buying his game. But the same could have been said about everquest (hence "evercrack"). Back when I played Starsiege in an active clan (and later in some other games like tribes/diablo2/planetarion) we lost many a player to the evercrack but there were still plenty of us who werent into the MMORPG thing (or couldnt pay for it like me) who played plenty of normal games. I know WoW is immensely popular but all they have to do is make sure their game targets more than just the exact group of people who play WoW. You can even advertise with snide remarks about wow to attract other gamers ("tired of not having anything to do because all of your friends are playingWoW?")
If you can do all of that, why cant you install firefox?
Suddenly, when they call my former employer all they can do is confirm employment but when they call up facebook (or well, when they call someone who calls facebook) they can invoke the patriot act to get things I intentionally mark as private (as opposed to say, my personal habits or how I treat my coworkers which are plainly visible to former employers and I dont ask them to keep it a secret or anything yet they are still not allowed to say anything more than the fact that I worked at said business)
The idea behind it is that you will earn a lot better interest on say...a 5year cd than you would on a 12 month one but your money wouldnt only be accessable once every 5 years without dropping all earned interest. With rolling CD's for a 5 year CD you would split your money into 5 parts right when you invest it, the first part goes into a 5 year, the next into a 4 year, then a 3 year, 2 year, and finally 1 year. after that one year is up, you roll that money into a 5 year (you can have this done automatically). After the second year you roll the next one into a 5 year. Pretty soon you have all your money in 5 year CDs (still not the best investments but they get pretty good interest) but you can access a good portion of it at any time without forgoing more than a years worth of interest.
and hsbc's direct online savings accounts (as opposed to emigrants or ING) offer you an ATM card so not only are you earning a high rate (currently 5%) on the money, it is completely liquid and accessable from any ATM machine (unlike say...CDs or money market accounts)
Accounting tends to not use the negative sign (when totals come up negative they are usually enclosed in parantheses)
They are probobly the type of people they want anyways considering what they intend to do with unregistered domains.
I dont even know why, you arent saying anything new and you arent even saying it in a special fancy way. It just works. Thank you
I fully agree though...the bill of rights doesnt have an age limit (and yes, that includes the second ammendment and no I dont believe that that means everyone can go wacko with guns, it means they can do so in the interest of "a well regulated militia"...) so I am assuming that eventually they will just declare all school disctrict property to belong to the soverign nation of "Edumacationland" and therefor the bill of rights would not apply (and I'm not sure anything in the constitution prevents the law from requiring you to go to edumacationalnd until you graduate).
Or really on any land as long as one of your parents us a US citizen (which is usually the case of US citizens).
There, I told you so I'm assuming that you wont consider it an invasion of privacy after I read it? You put it on the internet and you know that email isnt all that secure so why should you ahve an expectation of privacy?
Oh, so you wouldnt be alright with that?
because of those two things, it violates primarily google's right to free and open market competition which is required for capitalism to function.
its not that you cant simply not deal with the monopoly, its that if you want to make those kinds of deals, the monopoly is becomming closer and closer to being your only choice.
A large amount of online transactions are processed through paypal and most of those are ebay (and most of ebay is paypal...etc). In terms of seperate companies, paypal and googlecheckout are both competing online payment vendors who use a third party to actually generate use of their service (in this case, ebay). In the 3 company world, ebay could only stand to benefit from another good payment service showing up, they wouldnt lose any transactions and they might gain a few from anti-paypal people. The problem lies in the fact that there are really only 2 companies here, ebay controls paypal and then stands to lose revenue if paypal loses transactions. If google enters the market, they will take more and more transactions away from paypal. They may also generate new transactions for ebay but not enough to eclipse the loss felt by paypal. What is the obvious self-interest first choice? Dont let people use things you dont own. Of course this ends up being bad for the consumer and potentially bad for ebay (things will stagnate or there will end up being a competitor who goes to court and wins) but at this point they arent thinking about that, they are just trying to keep their revenue stream (maybe they will switch to ebay-fee discounts or something to encourage paypal use which is probobly legal as long as its not huge).
This is akin to visa saying they will only let you pay down your credit card bill with a personal check, cashiers check/money order, or another visa card. No mastercard, no discover, and definately no american express. People are still going to have to pay that bill, so its not like people will dissapear but it will direct additional revenue into the pockets of visa while blocking out competitors. (ok so the example isnt perfect since most people dont pay with another credit card, the credit card industry is an oligopoly not a monopoly and people are a lot more comfortable paying with checks but. ..you get the point.
You would almost think that they could find a few new people to take the place and instead of a salary they offer the prestige of working on the project managment (it is fairly well known...). The problem with that though is it seems that the guy with the control is the bad one here, not the people leaving so...maybe he doesnt care enough to do this. They probobly should have "incorporated" or left their assets to a foundation to prevent a hostile takeover. FSF or Mozilla would probobly have been willing to take on freedb if only in a top-level organizational role while leaving the project to its own ends (like a bank controlling a trust fund)
If I cant have the physical media, I'm not going to be as willing to pay for it (sorry itunes, I really like having a real CD even though I listen to everything in well-tagged mp3 files). If the pirated album is already tagged, it is just another incentive for me to save my money and time.
I really would love to go to norway sometime...I spent some time in denmark a few years ago (I'm half danish so there are lots of relatives and the such) and had a great time.
The public broadcasting here is actually pretty damn good (to to mpr.org and find the streaming version of 89.3 The Current) but outside of exceptions like the aforementioned station, nobody listens to it compared to commercial radio or commercial broadcast/cable TV. For education...there are a ton of state owned schools and community colleges...most of them suck. The good ones are actually quite good (a lot of the flagship state universities in the midwest and on the coasts are very highly regarded) but they arent free and often arent even that cheap. They are cheap compared to the top private institutions but they also cant give you the same thing as 40+ thousand dollars a year can do. There are a lot of cheaper private colleges that are worse than the state schools though...just like there are a lot of terribe terrible radio stations that people insist on listening to.
While I am at it, let me just give you a link to The Current because it is simply amazing. The content varies by DJ (they pick what they play unlike the corporates) but it is usually quite good. They also have a large archive on their site of great in-studio preformances. All of it freely available without advertising to people like me and you.