Exactly.
Which is why all contracts have a severability clause in it so if any portion of the contract is legally null and void the rest of the contract isn't.
A EULA isn't even a contract. If you'd print it it might serve a purpose as toilet paper. But there are better ways to wipe your arse.
EU legislators take a very dim view on companies that take try to circumvent standing laws.
But bear in mind that class action suits are not common in the EU. You may appear as co-plaintiff and that's it. If a company royally screws up then it will be dealt with by state watchdogs of which there are a couple of kennels kept around.
I'm not even sure this is really legal. What happened to "unalienable"? I don't give this BS the chance of a snowball in hell to stand ind court.
And yes, a EULA can't be a contract.
Allowing? ALLOWING?
Valve is not in the position to allow or deny anything. State and federal law may allow small claims. State and federal law allow and deny stuff. Valve "licenses" stuff under state and federal law. They have some wiggle room within their contracts(which a EULA is not) and that's about it.
Even if you signed that EULA with your own blood it wouldn't be binding. Who makes you think that? Valve can't change the laws of this country and a contract(even if a EULA were one) can't be illegal.
Unalienable means you can't sell, be stripped, mugged, robbed, forbidden or sign over your rights as a citizen or a human being.
Unless you are a convicted felon, not quite the right type or not rich enough, that is.
Daltrey, Entwistle and Townshend could nip off to the pub leaving only Moon and his goldfish on the stage. Bonzo of Led Zep was something of the same caliber.
You can't replace people like this with a machine and they are not robots. Being able to vary is what sets artists apart from pastic stuff with midi ports.
I'd take a Buddy Rich over any sort of synthesized BS. It's the rough edges that keep stuff interesting.
I blame techno and the 90ies. They replaced real drum work with a tortoise in a trashcan that got kicked down a flight of stairs.
And in the 80ies we got the unholy trinity of Stock/Aitcken/Waterman who really figured out how to mass produce 'hits'. As long as people listen to codpiece Cowell we'd better not turn on the radio or TV because BS seems to sell.
Popular music has got no soul left. Crap in the 50ies, 60ies and 70ies had to be played mostly by real musicians.
I beg to differ. Whenever I go on a longish trip I will take my trusty old Dual Shock with me. Also a big portion of those mobile devices are tablets. And a lot of gmaes already do support controllers. Shadowgun and Riptide spring to mind.
A tablet CAN replace a console. It can fully replace a console if it is sufficiently beefy and has an HDMI port.
...or keep track of companies you don't want to do business with.
For instance Gameloft, which is reputedly nothing but a sweatshop. Go to their web page(which I conveniently didn't link) and take a look at the number of games they have. They crank out stuff like crazy. Crunch time follows crunch time. And I haven't yet met any of their devs in the underground billionaires club. They also very much don't show up at Ascot or adorn their arms with a Paris Hilton on both sides.
Isn't Dead Trigger "pay to win"? In-app purchases for anything but vanity items is something I don't find very attractive. But at 1$ I'd guess that that is their main revenue stream. So going free(as in no initial cost) was propably a smart move anyway.
I bought Shadowgun and one of their Samurai games which have not yet steered me to in-app purchases so it could be thei are trying a new way to generate revenue. Also f2p + in-app purchases is at the moment en-vogue. Isn't Valve in the hat-making business and quite successful with it? The era of the 60$ game may very well be over.
You are developing for Android which has quite a bit of a user base.
All you need to do is submit your thing to Google Play and be done with it.
It also forces people to support game controllers for their Android games. Simulating twin sticks with a touch screen is pathetic when the system supports any USB game controller that would also work on a PC. Well, at least it does support it on ICS. Not sure about Honeycomb. It's not even going the extra mile but the extra inch.
Riptide GP THD does also support 3D monitors with this nVision thing from nvidia. Works great, too.
Now imagine what basically is an Android tablet without a touch screen, the need to be as slim as possible, quite a lot of manufacturers where to buy parts(chpsets, connectors and so on) and you will find that the Ouya is not only viable but also a neat idea.
Sonic got ported to Android, there are Amiga emulators that work great with a controller, there is MAME and DosBOX. I bought Master of Magic from GOG(I still have the floppies but no drive anymore) and play it on my Transformer Prime.
I think I recall distinctly that Apple doesn't want emulation in the AppStore.
Userbase: [x]
Parts manufacturers: [x]
Already available popular games: [x]
???
Profit.
I propably won't buy one for myself because I already got a similar system. But it did cost substantially more than the Ouya. IMHO they should reconsider Google Play. Sooner or later somebody will hack it into the system.
This is Romero, not Carmack.
Romero is not the king of PC gaming. He isn't even the queen of PC gaming. I always wondered why he is known at all since everybody else did the really heavy lifting and smart-making.
While I believe that this "make you his bitch" stunt wasn't his idea or authorized by him I didn't even understand why his name carried any weight 15 years ago.
You are spot on the convenience thing for using the PlayStore. I get at least 10 updates per week.for my apps. And I bought(sorry "licensed") quite a few games. Those cost about as much as a packet of cigarettes in my neck of the woods.
Why should I:
-search for the right version of the APK
-install it
-keep an eye open for updates
When I simply can kick back, look for interesting stuff I heard about, press download, say yes once or twice and play the thing a couple of minutes later and up to date ever after?
The only scenario I can think of where somebody pirates a game at this price is
-so poor that 5$ means eating this week or not
-has not got a credit card or other electronic payment system(possibly a kid; find another way to pay like for instance bill per telephone bill => a service problem)
-is unsure if it runs on his system(woefully problematic depending on the device)
-somebody who pirates out of principle
Those are platform or service issues that cost you customers. And the rest have not been and never will be your customer anyway. Why worry about them?
To somebody with a steady income the thought of jumping through flaming hoops to pirate a 5$ game should be ludicrous.
...and you don't get automatic updates. I don't know how cheap a pirates time is but mine isn't.
Chances are a person who pirates a 5$ game isn't going to be a customer anyway.
Instead of calling PIRATE and cowering in the corner I would rather expect from a respectable and sage person of John Romero's repute to take a look why anybody would pirate a 5$ game.
Is it because it's a kid with no bank account/credit card? As a kid I more than once skipped lunch and bought comic books with the money. Because I had the cash. If I could only buy the comic books with a credit card I would propably had eaten instead.
In this case I'd rather go with Newell who says that piracy is a service problem. Newell makes a killing selling games at 10$ or less. Could be he is on to something.
Posting this I've already put more thought into this issue than Romero has. Could it be that he is living up to his reputation? Just a wild stab in the dark. Banish the thought.
Ummm, John Romero lost all credibility AGES ago.
The first person who said it was a piracy platform was a guy who sold his free to play game for 1$. It still got pirated because it was a pay-to-win game that honestly wasn't worth the admission fee. Romero is again making you his bitch. And Slashdot too as it would seem.
The Ouya is a valid platform. I have hooked up my tablet to my monitor/a friends TV a couple of times and played quite a few very good games on it. At the price point those games usually sell piracy is indeed a service problem.
I just wondered about this one myself.
I've got a PS2 Twin Shock paired with my Transformer Prime and it works like a charm as long as it is supported by the game. It is even supported by the Amiga emulator I got on it.
The Ouya IMHO is quite possible at the 100$ price point. They can be very cheap. Think Android tablet without the touch screen and the battery and the need to be as thin as an IPad. All stock components. Why reinvent the wheel with the controller? Unless they got a sweet deal with Logitech I wouldn't have bothered. If they had PlayStore on it they'd have an established market... ...unless their business plan is a store and taking less than Google and having an already established platform. In which case the might possibly make a killing...
There are a lot of amazing games on PlayStore at a price point that makes me wonder how they are making any money. Also there is quite a bit of crap. But Sonic works super smooth, Riptide is super polished, ShadowGun is a nice stock-of-the-mill 3D shooter. And they look either reasonably well or amazing on a monitor at 720p.
Wow, thank you. I didn't know this one.
It's a really humbling day when somebody from the fashion industry has to explain the tech and media world why copyright doesn't actually achieve what it was supposed to achieve.
Patents at least don't last forever. But they are very very silly at the moment as evidenced by the stupid little rent seeking lawsuits by Apple.
Because in many European countries EULAs hold little value. Also if by law a contract clause is illegal most contracts still are valid minus that clause.
For example, EA got into real hot water in Germany due to forcing Origin on Battlfield buyers. It wasn't advertised on the box and simply insisting on it during installation and by EULA wasn't considered fair on the user. The handy, neat and easy to memorize word for what EA had to agree to is Unterlassungserklärung.
Just because something is written in legalese doesn't make it legal. Law still trumps contracts in any civilized country. You could sign off your soul to the devil and still reclaim it in court.
On a sidenote: God and Satan fear lawyers. They find no place with either of them in the afterlife. Therefore the existance of lawyers disprove heaven and hell as the only alternatives you get when you snuff it. Which kinda makes a lot of religions more complicated when you bother to think about it.
I very well remember the single-player come online thing that was open battlenet in D2. It was infested with blatant cheats. Not the relatively uncommon dupes of D3 closed battlenet but really blatant edited items. Like the ever popular giant charm +7 skill to everything. Your D3 singleplayer games are closed bnet games with only you in it. As such, D3 doesn't really have a proper singleplayer mode. All games are hosted. Single or not. A singleplayer mode would have been nice, just don't let them take their characters online. Open bnet was ugly.
What really disturbs me is how shallow the skill system is in D3. While in D2 only cookie cutter builds were really viable it also allowed for really quirky and extreme and very gear dependent insane builds that were nearly competetive.
I'll play D3 until the cows(there are no cows) come home hoping that some of the depth will be there. Also what made D2 really interesting in a pathetic OCD kind of way was you couldn't respec. I used to plan for days how to spec and stat my new twinks assuming the availability of semi-affordable stuff and trading my things in trading forums so I could get what I needed. Interestingly I still think the best runeword was HelLumFal.
Yes, I'm a D2 nerd.
Dihydrogenmonoxide is not only dangerous when inhaled, ingested in quantities, it causes CATASTROPHIC events killing THOUSANDS each year! It's never ben publicized but it caused major damage in New Orleans after Katrina. Even months AFTER the storm was gone! Why does the government hush it up?
Do not mock this tragedy! Not only for our children, for our children's children!
The FDP is not even halfway liberal. They briefly were in the '70ies. Their earlier history is rather nationalistic. Brown-speckled yellow. Even the Greens are much more liberal.
They are liberal when it comes to markets. But as personal liberties go liberty is given when one person faces the same pressures as the next person. Read that last sentence very, very carefully. I'm too lazy to look up the actual quote but it is scary as hell. The fucking Wiesbadener Grundsätze read like like the crap Fukuyama wrote and later retracted. It is pure and utter crap. Westerwelle spearheaded the Rising Of The Decent(Austand der Anständigen) against the very, very tame unions who had previously even supported Schröders painful course. Westerwelle's assaults were so bad even the conservatives didn't want to follow his lead. And when Möllemann spewed his antisemitic populist crap, Westerwelle followed suit in a safe distance. That moron is OUR foreign secretary. I'd say lets send him as ambassador to Israel. They could use a laugh.
I don't know that much about the other parties. I know the FDP that well because THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE MY PARTY! They were supposed to be a liberal party with liberal ideas and highly interested in equality. Not cheaper VAT for hotels. Even when their chief came out of the closet(after I might add the head of the northern conservatives and of course Wowereit...none of which had any serious trouble afterwards) he didn't fight tooth and nail for gay marriage. He's not even got that much backbone.
The meme that the FDP is a liberal party has got to die.
Remember when a LOT of students tried to hijack the Berlin FDP back in 1998? They suddenly had 2800 membership applications. It was beautiful. The party went into full shitstorm mode because it was rather unlikely those students would have followed the neoliberal lead of the Limping Devil.
The FDP is a prime candidate for hot-air rhetoric. Even Schröder was relatively frank about what he wanted to do.
The Greens used to be like the PP is now. They lost quite a lot of their culture when they were in government. Which is a pity.
This might even be a typically German thing. If you gather 3 of us in one room you will have 4 separate parties and 6 different coalitions within minutes.
All joking aside, the Occupy movement wasn't very strong in Germany when compared to for instance the UK and the US. Which is a bit astonishing considering we take to the streets. A lot.
What happened was that people flocked to the Pirate Party. And it was mostly the non-voters, the disenfranchized and astonishingly mostly the clever types who did so. To me this is a sign that our parliamentary democracy actually works and is in fact very healthy. Whereas I previously thought it was nearly dead. And the PP and their rather complete manifesto is actually the first party that ticks off at least 75% of my check boxes. The next biggest match is actually Die PARTEI, although I don't agree with their reasoning, being a satircal joke, actually. Martin Sonneborn is a farking satirical genius.
The FDP is NOT a liberal party. It is neoliberal. If they had their way they'd be neoconservative. "The End of History and The Last Man" neoconservative.
The FDP(or should I say F.D.P.) took up the moniker "Die Liberalen"(Teh Liberallz - lulz! We R librl and gots us dots in our name cuz we R hep!) in 1976. They did so when they found out they weren't percieved as such before and that it was en-vogue at the moment. You could call them LINO(Liberal In Name Only). I can't recall when they truly and decisively pushed a liberal agenda throughout the federation. There was this one time when piglet-faced Roland Koch wanted to use DNA profiling to catch fare dodgers(no kidding - he took his lawn-and-order persona that far) and they called foul. But that may have been common sense(which in the first part of the 2000s had become uncommon sense) rather than liberal roots. Which they didn't have. Just read what they have in their Wiesbadener Grundsätze. Which they got in 1997 because their last manifest was from the time when they needed to explain why they broke the social-liberal coalition. When they broke off the social-liberal coalition they also lost all of their intellectuals. They tried to give Lord Dahrendorf a post as head of the Naumann Stiftung because he was a smart one but later they rather tried their luck with the already thrice disgraced Möllemann and his populistic schenanigans.
They do not have an agenda beyond less taxes(if they can't get this for everybody then at least for their voters), privatization of nearly everything(utilities, public services, police...) and not a cent for those who are in need. Tax excemption for those who earn less than 13k Euros a year? That's gotta be a joke. Meanwhile they joyfully will vote for every snooping on their own citizens, black covert ops within and without, snooping in the internet(as long as they can forsee that it will stick, if it's going to fail anyway then they wil loudly vote against it citing "privacy concerns").
There are a very few true liberals in that party. One now prominently is fending off a snooping directive pushed by the EU even under the threat of having to pay fines and is a constant thorn in the side of her party and of Angela Merkel. I wish her best of luck. The dagger that pierces her heart will come from her own party rather than the conservatives. And it will hurt again as it did before.
The FDP does NOT have a liberal bone in it. It has a couple of liberal fig-leaves and a hand on the ventilator to blow even those away. Again.
The FDP has so few actual members that late in the 90ies people figured out that the students crowded together in the auditoriums in the Berlin universities would be enough to take over the local branch of the party and gain a lot of influence in the federal branch. They barely staved it off. The students had only to muster 3000 people to potentially take over the branch of the FDP in the nations Capital. That's practically non-existent.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly.
Which is why all contracts have a severability clause in it so if any portion of the contract is legally null and void the rest of the contract isn't.
A EULA isn't even a contract. If you'd print it it might serve a purpose as toilet paper. But there are better ways to wipe your arse.
EU legislators take a very dim view on companies that take try to circumvent standing laws.
But bear in mind that class action suits are not common in the EU. You may appear as co-plaintiff and that's it. If a company royally screws up then it will be dealt with by state watchdogs of which there are a couple of kennels kept around.
I'm not even sure this is really legal. What happened to "unalienable"? I don't give this BS the chance of a snowball in hell to stand ind court.
And yes, a EULA can't be a contract.
Allowing? ALLOWING?
Valve is not in the position to allow or deny anything. State and federal law may allow small claims. State and federal law allow and deny stuff. Valve "licenses" stuff under state and federal law. They have some wiggle room within their contracts(which a EULA is not) and that's about it.
Even if you signed that EULA with your own blood it wouldn't be binding. Who makes you think that? Valve can't change the laws of this country and a contract(even if a EULA were one) can't be illegal.
Unalienable means you can't sell, be stripped, mugged, robbed, forbidden or sign over your rights as a citizen or a human being.
Unless you are a convicted felon, not quite the right type or not rich enough, that is.
....or comparing Die Große Fuge to anything ever created by man.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s0Mp7LFI-k
Daltrey, Entwistle and Townshend could nip off to the pub leaving only Moon and his goldfish on the stage. Bonzo of Led Zep was something of the same caliber.
You can't replace people like this with a machine and they are not robots. Being able to vary is what sets artists apart from pastic stuff with midi ports.
I'd take a Buddy Rich over any sort of synthesized BS. It's the rough edges that keep stuff interesting.
I blame techno and the 90ies. They replaced real drum work with a tortoise in a trashcan that got kicked down a flight of stairs.
And in the 80ies we got the unholy trinity of Stock/Aitcken/Waterman who really figured out how to mass produce 'hits'. As long as people listen to codpiece Cowell we'd better not turn on the radio or TV because BS seems to sell.
Popular music has got no soul left. Crap in the 50ies, 60ies and 70ies had to be played mostly by real musicians.
I beg to differ. Whenever I go on a longish trip I will take my trusty old Dual Shock with me. Also a big portion of those mobile devices are tablets. And a lot of gmaes already do support controllers. Shadowgun and Riptide spring to mind.
A tablet CAN replace a console. It can fully replace a console if it is sufficiently beefy and has an HDMI port.
For serious gaming you still will need a PC.
...or keep track of companies you don't want to do business with.
For instance Gameloft, which is reputedly nothing but a sweatshop. Go to their web page(which I conveniently didn't link) and take a look at the number of games they have. They crank out stuff like crazy. Crunch time follows crunch time. And I haven't yet met any of their devs in the underground billionaires club. They also very much don't show up at Ascot or adorn their arms with a Paris Hilton on both sides.
Isn't Dead Trigger "pay to win"? In-app purchases for anything but vanity items is something I don't find very attractive. But at 1$ I'd guess that that is their main revenue stream. So going free(as in no initial cost) was propably a smart move anyway.
I bought Shadowgun and one of their Samurai games which have not yet steered me to in-app purchases so it could be thei are trying a new way to generate revenue. Also f2p + in-app purchases is at the moment en-vogue. Isn't Valve in the hat-making business and quite successful with it? The era of the 60$ game may very well be over.
The ??? could possibly be :
Get Supergiant to port Bastion to Android. Or Legend of Grimrock. Hell, that thing should be able to handle Orcs must Die!
You are developing for Android which has quite a bit of a user base.
All you need to do is submit your thing to Google Play and be done with it.
It also forces people to support game controllers for their Android games. Simulating twin sticks with a touch screen is pathetic when the system supports any USB game controller that would also work on a PC. Well, at least it does support it on ICS. Not sure about Honeycomb. It's not even going the extra mile but the extra inch.
Riptide GP THD does also support 3D monitors with this nVision thing from nvidia. Works great, too.
Now imagine what basically is an Android tablet without a touch screen, the need to be as slim as possible, quite a lot of manufacturers where to buy parts(chpsets, connectors and so on) and you will find that the Ouya is not only viable but also a neat idea.
Sonic got ported to Android, there are Amiga emulators that work great with a controller, there is MAME and DosBOX. I bought Master of Magic from GOG(I still have the floppies but no drive anymore) and play it on my Transformer Prime.
I think I recall distinctly that Apple doesn't want emulation in the AppStore.
Userbase: [x]
Parts manufacturers: [x]
Already available popular games: [x]
???
Profit.
I propably won't buy one for myself because I already got a similar system. But it did cost substantially more than the Ouya. IMHO they should reconsider Google Play. Sooner or later somebody will hack it into the system.
This is Romero, not Carmack.
Romero is not the king of PC gaming. He isn't even the queen of PC gaming. I always wondered why he is known at all since everybody else did the really heavy lifting and smart-making.
While I believe that this "make you his bitch" stunt wasn't his idea or authorized by him I didn't even understand why his name carried any weight 15 years ago.
You are spot on the convenience thing for using the PlayStore. I get at least 10 updates per week.for my apps. And I bought(sorry "licensed") quite a few games. Those cost about as much as a packet of cigarettes in my neck of the woods. Why should I:
-search for the right version of the APK
-install it
-keep an eye open for updates
When I simply can kick back, look for interesting stuff I heard about, press download, say yes once or twice and play the thing a couple of minutes later and up to date ever after?
The only scenario I can think of where somebody pirates a game at this price is
-so poor that 5$ means eating this week or not
-has not got a credit card or other electronic payment system(possibly a kid; find another way to pay like for instance bill per telephone bill => a service problem)
-is unsure if it runs on his system(woefully problematic depending on the device)
-somebody who pirates out of principle
Those are platform or service issues that cost you customers. And the rest have not been and never will be your customer anyway. Why worry about them?
To somebody with a steady income the thought of jumping through flaming hoops to pirate a 5$ game should be ludicrous.
...and you don't get automatic updates. I don't know how cheap a pirates time is but mine isn't.
Chances are a person who pirates a 5$ game isn't going to be a customer anyway.
Instead of calling PIRATE and cowering in the corner I would rather expect from a respectable and sage person of John Romero's repute to take a look why anybody would pirate a 5$ game.
Is it because it's a kid with no bank account/credit card? As a kid I more than once skipped lunch and bought comic books with the money. Because I had the cash. If I could only buy the comic books with a credit card I would propably had eaten instead.
In this case I'd rather go with Newell who says that piracy is a service problem. Newell makes a killing selling games at 10$ or less. Could be he is on to something.
Posting this I've already put more thought into this issue than Romero has. Could it be that he is living up to his reputation? Just a wild stab in the dark. Banish the thought.
Well I only have one view but I object to be called a monolith.
Ummm, John Romero lost all credibility AGES ago.
The first person who said it was a piracy platform was a guy who sold his free to play game for 1$. It still got pirated because it was a pay-to-win game that honestly wasn't worth the admission fee. Romero is again making you his bitch. And Slashdot too as it would seem.
The Ouya is a valid platform. I have hooked up my tablet to my monitor/a friends TV a couple of times and played quite a few very good games on it. At the price point those games usually sell piracy is indeed a service problem.
Not sure if troll or stupid.
I just wondered about this one myself.
...unless their business plan is a store and taking less than Google and having an already established platform. In which case the might possibly make a killing...
I've got a PS2 Twin Shock paired with my Transformer Prime and it works like a charm as long as it is supported by the game. It is even supported by the Amiga emulator I got on it.
The Ouya IMHO is quite possible at the 100$ price point. They can be very cheap. Think Android tablet without the touch screen and the battery and the need to be as thin as an IPad. All stock components. Why reinvent the wheel with the controller? Unless they got a sweet deal with Logitech I wouldn't have bothered. If they had PlayStore on it they'd have an established market...
There are a lot of amazing games on PlayStore at a price point that makes me wonder how they are making any money. Also there is quite a bit of crap. But Sonic works super smooth, Riptide is super polished, ShadowGun is a nice stock-of-the-mill 3D shooter. And they look either reasonably well or amazing on a monitor at 720p.
Wow, thank you. I didn't know this one.
It's a really humbling day when somebody from the fashion industry has to explain the tech and media world why copyright doesn't actually achieve what it was supposed to achieve.
Patents at least don't last forever. But they are very very silly at the moment as evidenced by the stupid little rent seeking lawsuits by Apple.
Because in many European countries EULAs hold little value. Also if by law a contract clause is illegal most contracts still are valid minus that clause.
For example, EA got into real hot water in Germany due to forcing Origin on Battlfield buyers. It wasn't advertised on the box and simply insisting on it during installation and by EULA wasn't considered fair on the user. The handy, neat and easy to memorize word for what EA had to agree to is Unterlassungserklärung.
Just because something is written in legalese doesn't make it legal. Law still trumps contracts in any civilized country. You could sign off your soul to the devil and still reclaim it in court.
On a sidenote: God and Satan fear lawyers. They find no place with either of them in the afterlife. Therefore the existance of lawyers disprove heaven and hell as the only alternatives you get when you snuff it. Which kinda makes a lot of religions more complicated when you bother to think about it.
I very well remember the single-player come online thing that was open battlenet in D2. It was infested with blatant cheats. Not the relatively uncommon dupes of D3 closed battlenet but really blatant edited items. Like the ever popular giant charm +7 skill to everything. Your D3 singleplayer games are closed bnet games with only you in it. As such, D3 doesn't really have a proper singleplayer mode. All games are hosted. Single or not. A singleplayer mode would have been nice, just don't let them take their characters online. Open bnet was ugly.
What really disturbs me is how shallow the skill system is in D3. While in D2 only cookie cutter builds were really viable it also allowed for really quirky and extreme and very gear dependent insane builds that were nearly competetive.
I'll play D3 until the cows(there are no cows) come home hoping that some of the depth will be there. Also what made D2 really interesting in a pathetic OCD kind of way was you couldn't respec. I used to plan for days how to spec and stat my new twinks assuming the availability of semi-affordable stuff and trading my things in trading forums so I could get what I needed. Interestingly I still think the best runeword was HelLumFal.
Yes, I'm a D2 nerd.
Dihydrogenmonoxide is not only dangerous when inhaled, ingested in quantities, it causes CATASTROPHIC events killing THOUSANDS each year! It's never ben publicized but it caused major damage in New Orleans after Katrina. Even months AFTER the storm was gone! Why does the government hush it up?
Do not mock this tragedy! Not only for our children, for our children's children!
The FDP is not even halfway liberal. They briefly were in the '70ies. Their earlier history is rather nationalistic. Brown-speckled yellow. Even the Greens are much more liberal.
They are liberal when it comes to markets. But as personal liberties go liberty is given when one person faces the same pressures as the next person. Read that last sentence very, very carefully. I'm too lazy to look up the actual quote but it is scary as hell. The fucking Wiesbadener Grundsätze read like like the crap Fukuyama wrote and later retracted. It is pure and utter crap. Westerwelle spearheaded the Rising Of The Decent(Austand der Anständigen) against the very, very tame unions who had previously even supported Schröders painful course. Westerwelle's assaults were so bad even the conservatives didn't want to follow his lead. And when Möllemann spewed his antisemitic populist crap, Westerwelle followed suit in a safe distance. That moron is OUR foreign secretary. I'd say lets send him as ambassador to Israel. They could use a laugh.
I don't know that much about the other parties. I know the FDP that well because THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE MY PARTY! They were supposed to be a liberal party with liberal ideas and highly interested in equality. Not cheaper VAT for hotels. Even when their chief came out of the closet(after I might add the head of the northern conservatives and of course Wowereit...none of which had any serious trouble afterwards) he didn't fight tooth and nail for gay marriage. He's not even got that much backbone.
The meme that the FDP is a liberal party has got to die.
Remember when a LOT of students tried to hijack the Berlin FDP back in 1998? They suddenly had 2800 membership applications. It was beautiful. The party went into full shitstorm mode because it was rather unlikely those students would have followed the neoliberal lead of the Limping Devil.
The FDP is a prime candidate for hot-air rhetoric. Even Schröder was relatively frank about what he wanted to do.
The Greens used to be like the PP is now. They lost quite a lot of their culture when they were in government. Which is a pity.
This might even be a typically German thing. If you gather 3 of us in one room you will have 4 separate parties and 6 different coalitions within minutes.
All joking aside, the Occupy movement wasn't very strong in Germany when compared to for instance the UK and the US. Which is a bit astonishing considering we take to the streets. A lot.
What happened was that people flocked to the Pirate Party. And it was mostly the non-voters, the disenfranchized and astonishingly mostly the clever types who did so. To me this is a sign that our parliamentary democracy actually works and is in fact very healthy. Whereas I previously thought it was nearly dead. And the PP and their rather complete manifesto is actually the first party that ticks off at least 75% of my check boxes. The next biggest match is actually Die PARTEI, although I don't agree with their reasoning, being a satircal joke, actually. Martin Sonneborn is a farking satirical genius.
The FDP is NOT a liberal party. It is neoliberal. If they had their way they'd be neoconservative. "The End of History and The Last Man" neoconservative. The FDP(or should I say F.D.P.) took up the moniker "Die Liberalen"(Teh Liberallz - lulz! We R librl and gots us dots in our name cuz we R hep!) in 1976. They did so when they found out they weren't percieved as such before and that it was en-vogue at the moment. You could call them LINO(Liberal In Name Only). I can't recall when they truly and decisively pushed a liberal agenda throughout the federation. There was this one time when piglet-faced Roland Koch wanted to use DNA profiling to catch fare dodgers(no kidding - he took his lawn-and-order persona that far) and they called foul. But that may have been common sense(which in the first part of the 2000s had become uncommon sense) rather than liberal roots. Which they didn't have. Just read what they have in their Wiesbadener Grundsätze. Which they got in 1997 because their last manifest was from the time when they needed to explain why they broke the social-liberal coalition. When they broke off the social-liberal coalition they also lost all of their intellectuals. They tried to give Lord Dahrendorf a post as head of the Naumann Stiftung because he was a smart one but later they rather tried their luck with the already thrice disgraced Möllemann and his populistic schenanigans.
They do not have an agenda beyond less taxes(if they can't get this for everybody then at least for their voters), privatization of nearly everything(utilities, public services, police...) and not a cent for those who are in need. Tax excemption for those who earn less than 13k Euros a year? That's gotta be a joke. Meanwhile they joyfully will vote for every snooping on their own citizens, black covert ops within and without, snooping in the internet(as long as they can forsee that it will stick, if it's going to fail anyway then they wil loudly vote against it citing "privacy concerns").
There are a very few true liberals in that party. One now prominently is fending off a snooping directive pushed by the EU even under the threat of having to pay fines and is a constant thorn in the side of her party and of Angela Merkel. I wish her best of luck. The dagger that pierces her heart will come from her own party rather than the conservatives. And it will hurt again as it did before.
The FDP does NOT have a liberal bone in it. It has a couple of liberal fig-leaves and a hand on the ventilator to blow even those away. Again.
The FDP has so few actual members that late in the 90ies people figured out that the students crowded together in the auditoriums in the Berlin universities would be enough to take over the local branch of the party and gain a lot of influence in the federal branch. They barely staved it off. The students had only to muster 3000 people to potentially take over the branch of the FDP in the nations Capital. That's practically non-existent.