***Remember, as an MMORPG consumer it is your job to always be upset and post everywhere how much your MMORPG sucks, it helps drive innovation! ****
I would have agreed with you... until I played WoW. I have VERY few complaints about this game, and the ones I do are all perihperal and aesthetic in nature.
SWG on the other hand, was just about the most borked game I have ever played. 12 months into it and you still couldnt sit on the floor without sliding across the room ala some bad Poltergeist re-enactment. The looting (lack of), the soloing everything in the game, the holo grind.... everything about that game - EVERYTHING - save the fact that it took place in a Galaxy far far away was just horribly designed.
Eveybody has key childhood moments and memories. Why is it so shocking or offense to you that for a lot of people, those memories and moments happen to be tied to the original Star Wars?
It is not just about those 3 movies. It has to do with the totality of the memories from a childhood spent playing with action figures, acting out scenes with friends, pretending to be Han, pretending your dog was Chewy, dreaming about Princess Leia (wait did I just say that?)....
Along with family, friends, little league, and a host of other fond and great memories.... Star Wars was and is a part of a lot of childhoods. So yeah, people are gonna react and be pissed off when it is tarnished or ruined in some way. I think this is perfectly natural. It is as natural as being upset about having any other fond and important childhood moment or memory ruined.
For years I have been playing MMORPGs.... and I come away from every single one of them (Ultima Online, EQ, and SWG were the ones I played) saying to myself, "jeez, ya know this game would be sooo much better if they just did X, Y, Z."
Well, Blizzard actually DID the X, Y, and Z. It is almost like they were eaves dropping on the conversations of all of us gamers over the past 5 years. Everything we have been saying about these massive online games over the years they have addressed in one way or another. They took the bad parts and either dropped them, or made them good. They then went ahead and added all of the obvious features we have all been asking for and wondering why they havent been around.
Its a gamers game. One that if I had the ability to make my perfect game... it would have been this.
It really is fantastic. Blizzard might not have put out a groundbreaking new genre game here... but they did somethng even better. They took an already existing genre and finally did it right.
That's some twisted logic there.
Just because you are writting software for a computer does not in anyway mean you are a capabale or trustable administrator of that computer.
Link not included: Metropolitan Areas with the Highest Violent Crime Rates in the United States
Umm, does 8% - even of these crime ridden cities - REALLY seem realistic to you? Think man. In order for 8% of the population of these areas to defend themselves against crime with a gun, that would necessitate that 8% of the population of these cities were victimized by crime in the first place. Right?
Lets take LA alone... The city of LA has a population of 3,763,486. 8% of that is what? By my calculations that is 300,000. According to the Department of Justice stats just released, and prominantly featured on Drudge today, LA experienced 137,000 property crimes and 57,000 violent crimes.
So in order for your 8% stat to be legit that would mean that not only did EVERY single victim of a crime have to defend himself with a gun, but 100,000 people who were not even victims of crime in the first place had somehow defended themselves with a gun.
Thank you.
I now live in a city with a million people (but thankfully one that is not on that list) - I may not be wordly, but I've tasted your battle fields and you dont need to live there to call BS on this lie.
I'm not damning people for their fantasies of crime, I know it is very real as I have been a victim of it. What I am damning is you and the others who actually believe in this silly notion that 2.5 million Americans are somehow making banditos tap dance out of their houses by waving guns at them every year.
just because southern california had X number of rapes and murders last year doesn't mean that in my sleepy little town (in socal) there were any.......
I doubt the amish had their fair share of the number of people chasing away intruders with guns too.
There are on average 816 tornado deaths per year in the US. As there are 290,809,777 people in the US, and 35,484,453 of them live in California, we have 12.2% of the national population so clearly we should have had about 100 of those tornado deaths here. The fact that we clearly haven't had that many of those deaths clearly shows that the tornado death number is just silly to the point of absurdity.
The funny thing is that you have unwittingly stumbled upon my very point. It may take you a few days to get it, but at least your in the right direction.
The 2.5 Million is a static number that produces.82 incidents per 100 people PER YEAR. (the emphasis on this being per year is mine to show you exactly how silly this is) That doesnt change across the population. So if some areas are drastically less than.82 per 100 people PER YEAR, that means some areas have to be drastically more than.85 to make up for it. And since there are thousands of small communities like mine all over the place (you were kind enough to point out the Amish as an example) who see absolutely nowhere near the.85 per 100 people PER YEAR - that means there would have to be thousands of communities each year who see much much much more than.85 per 100 people PER YEAR to make up for it and to keep the national average at that.85
In your tornado example, the reason the national average remains high, yet applies to so few communities, is that there is one or two places (tornado alley) who are subjected to a large amount of the incidents.
For this to translate over to the gun numbers, we would need a few battle fields right in the middle of America.
Since I've lived in 5 different communities, have gone to a college with 8,000 people, and now live in a major city..... and still have never seen, heard of, or known anyone that has chased an intruder away with a gun....
I will again ask. Where the hell do you people live? Were is this battle field?? What areas are raising our national average so that it does not realistically apply to anywhere else?.82 people per 100 nationally PER YEAR
Just stop and think about that for 5 minutes - it doesnt make any sense at all.
---- Based on his extensive independent survey research, Kleck estimates that each year Americans use guns for protection from criminals more than 2.5 million times annually ----
I mean, ugh. Stop and think about that. That is roughly one person per 100 (.82 per 100 according to last census - 2.5 million out of 290 million).
The town I grew up in has about 20,000 people in it. That means statistically there should have been about 164 cases of defensive uses of a gun last year.
It's a small town, and I can guarantee you that if there was a single instance of someone chasing away an intruder with a gun, I would have heard about it. Let alone almost 200.
So where are all of these gun defense scenarios taking place? Why do I not know any of the people involved in them... I mean statistically, over the course of my 30 years, it would almost seem a certainty that I would know someone closely who shot away an intruder.
Again... where the hell do you people live?
That number is just silly to point of absurdity. Do the math for where you live now and see if it makes sense to you.
And besides all of that, what is very important to remember about a number like that, as ridiculous a number as it is anyway, is that it doesn't include whether or not the gun was "necessary" for the defense. That is a key point of any argument and an essential point if you are to convince me that you "need" your gun to protect yourself. I wonder how many times some scared strung out kid slipped a window looking for a VCR, and upon any movement or sound in the house he bolted.... and oh the owner happened to have a gun.
, but how come no one ever asks "how much" when Democrats proposed essentually the same thing?
Well, people DO ask that "how much" when Democrats propose things like this. They are called Republicans. You just don't notice it as much because Dems generally don't propose ridiculous things like this as often. Going to Mars? Heck both Bushies did that. Plus Dems have become the party of Balanced Budgets of late... not sure when that switch happened, but anyway.
- Wait for the material to pass into public domain, the way all material is eventually supposed to....
- or ignore the copyright and buy an original DVD set on EBay.
Seeing as how laws have a funny way of changing everytime some important cash cow piece of art is due to enter public domain (ie: Mickey Mouse) I think we may be waiting a long, LONG time for that. (bad pun)
But in either case, this arrogant jerk will not be getting my money.
"You try explaining why an urgent email the Managing Director sent from his home PC didn't reach an important client and didn't send back an error message. It might not be your fault he got a virus, but it's sure as hell not his fault the company didn't get that billion-dollar contract."
You could start by explaining to your boss that in some situations email is not THAT reliable. And if a billion follar contract rests on the successful delivery of an email, he'd better pick up the phone and call someone to make sure it was recieved.
" I've never heard of an exploit of Winzip before "
Hate to say it.... but like my users, you are not getting the point.
Who cares if it looked legitamate, if you were curious, or if you have ever heard of a Zip exploit before.
Stop opening up random email attachments that come in on messages you werent expecting and we wont have these problems.
This things just SCREAMED virus. It was so damn obvious what it was.
"i've never heard of an exploit of winzip before"
Besides the fact that this was NOT an exploit of winzip, who is say there isnt one out there you havent heard of? Or that one wont be developed in the future?
I cant even believe I am writting this..... but Star Wars to me is now like Metallica.
I was so diehard for both of them 10-15 years ago, and well, something has changed that. You could say they both got old and sold out, you could say I grew out of them, you could even say they were just trumped by better things. I dont quite know.
What I DO know is that my feelings for both are all but gone now. I have since completely given up on Metallica and I hate to say it, but those fond memories of concerts and thrashing around to 'Ride the Lightning' are a bit tainted because of the crapola they have put out in the past 10 years and the pompous school yard bully act they pulled with napster.
I think back to how hardcore I was with Metallica and I shake my head and get a bit embarrased.
Well, thats happening with Star Wars. I cant help but think that one more horrible film will effectivly put a nail in the coffin of my Star Wars memories.
I wish it wasnt that way, I wish the present didnt affect my feelings about the past, but it does.
Of course the problem here is that you are judging the differences and qualities of another species based on your human experience. And from the sounds of it, you are specifically referring to intelligence.
Yes, you, the previous poster, and all posters in between are 'ridiculously' and 'obviously' more intelligent than 'just another monkey' *sic*
But there are many hundreds of qualities possesed by Chimps and other species on this planet that we drastically lack.
Don't you find it a bit peculiar that the qualities that you judge to be obviously more important than all others just happen to be the ones you posses?
the commentary on this scientific study is missing the point, as usual.
--in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.--
Global warming is not about plotting the temperature of the earth from some point in the past till today. If there are some environmentalists out there who claim that it is, then they are missing the point as much as the commentator of this article is.
Global warming is a concern NOT because of how cold or hot we think it once was on earth, it is a concern because we know that we are adversely affecting our climate with certain actions. The greenhouse affect and the heat retention properties of certain elements and substances in our atmosphere are without question - these are scientific facts beyond doubt - and THESE are the concerns of environmentalists. They realise that global warming is propably not in our best interest, and if it were to occur (or if it is occuring) because of something we are doing, and we have the ability to prevent it - shoudlnt we?
It has absolutely ZERO - ZILCH - NOTHING to do with what the weather was like for the Knights in Shining Armour
If the enjoyed 90 degree days year round that doesnt change the fact that certain subsatnces when poured into our atmosphere will affect our atmosphere - in a way that we will most likely regret.
Keep the ignorant and lazy out of the electoral process, I say.
Sounds a bit like an oligarchy, no?
The problem with this thought is that we would no longer be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. We become a government of the educated and ambitious - the elite if you will. History is full of governments like this, rarely with good results.
Democracy, by its very definition, must involve the participation of the people. Even the ignorant and lazy ones.
again - I wish there was a bit of elaboration on this. I'd love to hear exactly what it was they cut out of Ultima 8 - because, like you, I rather enjoyed the game.
after all of these years, he stil never mentions them.... I mean am I the only one who really enjoyed that stepchild Ultima - Martian Dreams ???
It's entirely possible that I am being nostalgic here, but where else could you play a killer game and in some small way enlighten your knowledge of classics, and science and politics? The NPC's were outstanding! I remember Freud, Tesla, Twain, Lenin, Roosevelt - heck I even recall reading parts of their intellectual works within the game!!
I enjoy a good scifi/fanatsy trip as much as the next guy, but in my book, on content alone, Martian Dreams was the standout of Garriots crop. Ambitious and smart.
But then again, I really enjoyed Savage Empire too.
In the Garriot interview, he mentioned a riff between EA and himself about the future and direction of online games. And he hinted that his ideas led to UO being rather successful while EA's ideas led to the other online games that EA released being rather unsuccessful.
I'd love to get the deets on this one.
Anyone khave insight into exactly what EA's philosophy on online games was? And why it didnt gel with Garriots or translate into success? he didnt go into detail, but im interested
Slashdot Mirror
I would have agreed with you... until I played WoW. I have VERY few complaints about this game, and the ones I do are all perihperal and aesthetic in nature.
SWG on the other hand, was just about the most borked game I have ever played. 12 months into it and you still couldnt sit on the floor without sliding across the room ala some bad Poltergeist re-enactment. The looting (lack of), the soloing everything in the game, the holo grind.... everything about that game - EVERYTHING - save the fact that it took place in a Galaxy far far away was just horribly designed.
Eveybody has key childhood moments and memories. Why is it so shocking or offense to you that for a lot of people, those memories and moments happen to be tied to the original Star Wars?
It is not just about those 3 movies. It has to do with the totality of the memories from a childhood spent playing with action figures, acting out scenes with friends, pretending to be Han, pretending your dog was Chewy, dreaming about Princess Leia (wait did I just say that?)....
Along with family, friends, little league, and a host of other fond and great memories.... Star Wars was and is a part of a lot of childhoods. So yeah, people are gonna react and be pissed off when it is tarnished or ruined in some way. I think this is perfectly natural. It is as natural as being upset about having any other fond and important childhood moment or memory ruined.
For years I have been playing MMORPGs.... and I come away from every single one of them (Ultima Online, EQ, and SWG were the ones I played) saying to myself, "jeez, ya know this game would be sooo much better if they just did X, Y, Z." Well, Blizzard actually DID the X, Y, and Z. It is almost like they were eaves dropping on the conversations of all of us gamers over the past 5 years. Everything we have been saying about these massive online games over the years they have addressed in one way or another. They took the bad parts and either dropped them, or made them good. They then went ahead and added all of the obvious features we have all been asking for and wondering why they havent been around. Its a gamers game. One that if I had the ability to make my perfect game... it would have been this. It really is fantastic. Blizzard might not have put out a groundbreaking new genre game here... but they did somethng even better. They took an already existing genre and finally did it right.
That's some twisted logic there. Just because you are writting software for a computer does not in anyway mean you are a capabale or trustable administrator of that computer.
Lets take LA alone... The city of LA has a population of 3,763,486. 8% of that is what? By my calculations that is 300,000. According to the Department of Justice stats just released, and prominantly featured on Drudge today, LA experienced 137,000 property crimes and 57,000 violent crimes.
So in order for your 8% stat to be legit that would mean that not only did EVERY single victim of a crime have to defend himself with a gun, but 100,000 people who were not even victims of crime in the first place had somehow defended themselves with a gun.
Thank you.
I now live in a city with a million people (but thankfully one that is not on that list) - I may not be wordly, but I've tasted your battle fields and you dont need to live there to call BS on this lie.
I'm not damning people for their fantasies of crime, I know it is very real as I have been a victim of it. What I am damning is you and the others who actually believe in this silly notion that 2.5 million Americans are somehow making banditos tap dance out of their houses by waving guns at them every year.
The 2.5 Million is a static number that produces .82 incidents per 100 people PER YEAR. (the emphasis on this being per year is mine to show you exactly how silly this is) That doesnt change across the population. So if some areas are drastically less than .82 per 100 people PER YEAR, that means some areas have to be drastically more than .85 to make up for it. And since there are thousands of small communities like mine all over the place (you were kind enough to point out the Amish as an example) who see absolutely nowhere near the .85 per 100 people PER YEAR - that means there would have to be thousands of communities each year who see much much much more than .85 per 100 people PER YEAR to make up for it and to keep the national average at that .85
In your tornado example, the reason the national average remains high, yet applies to so few communities, is that there is one or two places (tornado alley) who are subjected to a large amount of the incidents.
For this to translate over to the gun numbers, we would need a few battle fields right in the middle of America. Since I've lived in 5 different communities, have gone to a college with 8,000 people, and now live in a major city..... and still have never seen, heard of, or known anyone that has chased an intruder away with a gun.... I will again ask. Where the hell do you people live? Were is this battle field?? What areas are raising our national average so that it does not realistically apply to anywhere else? .82 people per 100 nationally PER YEAR
Just stop and think about that for 5 minutes - it doesnt make any sense at all.
I mean, ugh. Stop and think about that. That is roughly one person per 100 (.82 per 100 according to last census - 2.5 million out of 290 million).
The town I grew up in has about 20,000 people in it. That means statistically there should have been about 164 cases of defensive uses of a gun last year.
It's a small town, and I can guarantee you that if there was a single instance of someone chasing away an intruder with a gun, I would have heard about it. Let alone almost 200.
So where are all of these gun defense scenarios taking place? Why do I not know any of the people involved in them
Again... where the hell do you people live?
That number is just silly to point of absurdity. Do the math for where you live now and see if it makes sense to you.
And besides all of that, what is very important to remember about a number like that, as ridiculous a number as it is anyway, is that it doesn't include whether or not the gun was "necessary" for the defense. That is a key point of any argument and an essential point if you are to convince me that you "need" your gun to protect yourself. I wonder how many times some scared strung out kid slipped a window looking for a VCR, and upon any movement or sound in the house he bolted.... and oh the owner happened to have a gun.
what that have to do with being a liberal?
Y'ouch
Sounds like someone needs to re-read that book, carefully this time.
- or ignore the copyright and buy an original DVD set on EBay.
Seeing as how laws have a funny way of changing everytime some important cash cow piece of art is due to enter public domain (ie: Mickey Mouse) I think we may be waiting a long, LONG time for that. (bad pun)
But in either case, this arrogant jerk will not be getting my money.
You could start by explaining to your boss that in some situations email is not THAT reliable. And if a billion follar contract rests on the successful delivery of an email, he'd better pick up the phone and call someone to make sure it was recieved.
" I've never heard of an exploit of Winzip before " Hate to say it.... but like my users, you are not getting the point. Who cares if it looked legitamate, if you were curious, or if you have ever heard of a Zip exploit before. Stop opening up random email attachments that come in on messages you werent expecting and we wont have these problems. This things just SCREAMED virus. It was so damn obvious what it was. "i've never heard of an exploit of winzip before" Besides the fact that this was NOT an exploit of winzip, who is say there isnt one out there you havent heard of? Or that one wont be developed in the future?
You are my hero! Thank you so much.
Is there a way to filter out the "Funny" posts that get mod'ed up?
/.
They seem to overwhelm the posts that have actual content in them... oh and I've got news for ya. They are rarely funny.
Just like I dont want to read the joke emails that get forwarded to me, I dont want to read 500 little clever comments about every subject on
Please tell me there is a way to filter out the comedy hour so I can get to the substance of the discussion.
I cant even believe I am writting this..... but Star Wars to me is now like Metallica.
I was so diehard for both of them 10-15 years ago, and well, something has changed that. You could say they both got old and sold out, you could say I grew out of them, you could even say they were just trumped by better things. I dont quite know.
What I DO know is that my feelings for both are all but gone now. I have since completely given up on Metallica and I hate to say it, but those fond memories of concerts and thrashing around to 'Ride the Lightning' are a bit tainted because of the crapola they have put out in the past 10 years and the pompous school yard bully act they pulled with napster.
I think back to how hardcore I was with Metallica and I shake my head and get a bit embarrased.
Well, thats happening with Star Wars. I cant help but think that one more horrible film will effectivly put a nail in the coffin of my Star Wars memories.
I wish it wasnt that way, I wish the present didnt affect my feelings about the past, but it does.
Yes, you, the previous poster, and all posters in between are 'ridiculously' and 'obviously' more intelligent than 'just another monkey' *sic*
But there are many hundreds of qualities possesed by Chimps and other species on this planet that we drastically lack.
Don't you find it a bit peculiar that the qualities that you judge to be obviously more important than all others just happen to be the ones you posses?
the commentary on this scientific study is missing the point, as usual.
--in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.--
Global warming is not about plotting the temperature of the earth from some point in the past till today. If there are some environmentalists out there who claim that it is, then they are missing the point as much as the commentator of this article is.
Global warming is a concern NOT because of how cold or hot we think it once was on earth, it is a concern because we know that we are adversely affecting our climate with certain actions. The greenhouse affect and the heat retention properties of certain elements and substances in our atmosphere are without question - these are scientific facts beyond doubt - and THESE are the concerns of environmentalists. They realise that global warming is propably not in our best interest, and if it were to occur (or if it is occuring) because of something we are doing, and we have the ability to prevent it - shoudlnt we?
It has absolutely ZERO - ZILCH - NOTHING to do with what the weather was like for the Knights in Shining Armour
If the enjoyed 90 degree days year round that doesnt change the fact that certain subsatnces when poured into our atmosphere will affect our atmosphere - in a way that we will most likely regret.
Keep the ignorant and lazy out of the electoral process, I say.
Sounds a bit like an oligarchy, no?
The problem with this thought is that we would no longer be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people. We become a government of the educated and ambitious - the elite if you will. History is full of governments like this, rarely with good results.
Democracy, by its very definition, must involve the participation of the people. Even the ignorant and lazy ones.
again - I wish there was a bit of elaboration on this. I'd love to hear exactly what it was they cut out of Ultima 8 - because, like you, I rather enjoyed the game.
after all of these years, he stil never mentions them.... I mean am I the only one who really enjoyed that stepchild Ultima - Martian Dreams ???
It's entirely possible that I am being nostalgic here, but where else could you play a killer game and in some small way enlighten your knowledge of classics, and science and politics? The NPC's were outstanding! I remember Freud, Tesla, Twain, Lenin, Roosevelt - heck I even recall reading parts of their intellectual works within the game!!
I enjoy a good scifi/fanatsy trip as much as the next guy, but in my book, on content alone, Martian Dreams was the standout of Garriots crop. Ambitious and smart.
But then again, I really enjoyed Savage Empire too.
In the Garriot interview, he mentioned a riff between EA and himself about the future and direction of online games. And he hinted that his ideas led to UO being rather successful while EA's ideas led to the other online games that EA released being rather unsuccessful. I'd love to get the deets on this one. Anyone khave insight into exactly what EA's philosophy on online games was? And why it didnt gel with Garriots or translate into success? he didnt go into detail, but im interested