What other addictions should be in the DSM-IV, if the requirement for inclusion is "financial or social harm"? Book reading addiction (I would be reading books if the Internet didnt exist)? Bad joke addiction? Bad hygiene addiction? Extreme sport addiction? Marriage addiction (which harms you financially AND socially)? Public service addiction? Scientific research addiction? Religious teaching addiction (though some financial profit)? Geek hobbies addiction? Military enlistment addiction?
The standard for something being called an addiction should not be "causes financial or social harm". It should be "causes physical withdrawal symptoms because the addicts body adapts to requiring the activity to function at a normal level". I have taken (legal) drugs that cause withdrawal symptoms, yet aren't medically classed as addictive because your body doesn't adapt to needing them.
Twinks are only really effective up to the 20-29 BG's. After that the benefit of twinking is so minor that you still need to be a good player. And if what you say is true, that most twinks lack skill, then twinking would not be a problem. I certainly think it is a much less serious problem then organized vs PUG BG's, or blue and green 60's vs Epiced 60's (which is a major reason why many people twink, you could twink one of every class to 29 before you get a 60 even average gear). Oh and the even more major problem is the fact that their are still plenty of hacks that work in WoW (what kind of moron MMO developer trusts the client enough to allow speed hacking?).
Personally I don't twink, I don't need to. I am skilled enough to beat 90% of BGers (dominating 40-49 BG's for a weeked with a 44 mage). Twinks have never been a problem to kill.
You can argue all you want about which model is better but that doesn't change the fact that if you copy something created by people expecting to get paid for it, you are stealing.
Lets check dictionary.com for "steal".
steal/stil/, verb, stole, stolen, stealing, noun -verb (used with object) 1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch. 2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment. 3. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance: He stole my girlfriend. 4. to move, bring, convey, or put secretly or quietly; smuggle (usually fol. by away, from, in, into, etc.): They stole the bicycle into the bedroom to surprise the child.
Hmmm 1) doesn't fit as infringing copyright is not taking property (what kind of insane world would we live in if property "expired"). You may infringe the copyright holders rights, but they still have their copyright. 2) Fits much more closely, but if it where legally enforced then MS would have gone out of business long ago. Oh and the United States of America would be sued out of existence by the United Kingdom (who would then be sued out of existence by Native Americans).
And recording artists would owe most of their money to the people who originally invented the instruments they play and the musical styles they use. Oh and the people who invented their native language would need to be compensated. Just because these people have been dead for thousands of years doesn't mean it is okay to steal from them.
Do you really want to live in a world where people use the retarded legal definition of steal that you use? Most "original" creative works are far from it.
P.S. I paid for most of the movies/music I own. But I actually understand that the natural system is for copyrights not to exist, and they are a benefit granted by the people, not an inherant right. And that corporations so grossly exploit and "steal" from people that they are the last entities that should be talking about morality. If you do not want other people using your ideas then don't communicate them.
The secret of EvE is money. He who was the most Isk wins. That is why it is a game of haves and have nots. Hell I spent the later part of my EvE career training newbies (only a few months of skill training) how to reap havoc against much older characters. But in the end the rich older characters can out last a group of newbs through a war of attrition. If they are really rich they can just hire some mercenaries to camp you into a station until your newbie corp falls apart (destroying morale is the only way to actually break an enemy in EvE).
And sure the last 5% of a skill takes ages to get compared to the first 20%, but when characters have three plus years of skill training then they have a lot of those extra 5% bonuses, and they do add up. One skilled player in a tech 2 ship will be able to take on a whole squadron of newbies (even ones lead by an old player), simply by picking them off one by one outside warp scrambler range (warp scramblers stop you from just warping off when in trouble).
Oh and with Interdictors (AoE warp scramblers) your squadron of newbies don't get to pick their battles anymore.
Newbies with proper training and leadership can cause havoc amongst high character/low player skill people, but that is it. Against high character/high player skill people they are free poddings.
By doing that all you would achieve would be to justify the extremists claims that the west is persecueting Islam, thus gaining them even more support. Where do you go from there? About the only place to go is to take Muslims out behind the chemical sheds and shoot them, because you will have guaranteed even more terrorist attacks by a persecuted population. This is because security will never be good enough to stop a determined attacker, as that would cost so much money that air travel would cease to be economically viable.
Oh and flashback to last century anyone?
"Guarantee? No, but prohibiting Irish Catholics from going into pubs (or at least giving them an extra-thorough level of scrutiny) will make a huge improvement. Religion is the single defining characteristic of modern terrorists who seek to destroy pubs full of patrons. And it's not Scientologists or Mormans we're talking about here, it's Irish Catholics.
Not all Irish Catholics are terrorists, but nearly all terrorists are Irish Catholic. And quite a large percentage are sympathizers as demonstrated by recent polls in America showing support for the recently foiled plot to kill a few thousand British in pubs. Call it flamebait if you want, but it is true. Nearly all pub bombings and intentional attacks on civilians have been done in the name of Irish Republicanism (which is nearly exclusively Irish Catholic). The world can go on pretending that's not the case, but until we are willing to at least identify the well-defined group of people responsible for most of this mayhem, increased security will be a pipe dream."
Seriously where do you think water comes from? Magic sky fairies? If we can develop a system that recycles water even close to what the natural rain cycle does, then it would be a hell of a lot better quality then most current dams (which get polluted by all sorts of things). You do realise that fish and birds quite happily crap in the dams don't you?
Actually buddy I was an anti-pirate for most of my EVE career. The "every second PVPer being rigged to run away rather then fight" was referring to "pierats" (aka gate campers). It got old pretty fast when the people who bragged about how uber they where at PVP, always sat greater then 100km off a gate with friends, or flew interceptors with warp core stabs (for non-eve players: You can stop a ship warping with a warp scrambler/disruptor, but warp stabilisers reduce scrambler/disrupter strength). I spent most of my eve time in the Jericho Fraction (who used to abhor gate camping of any kind) or the Aegis Militia (who used to try and keep their local systems clear of pirates). The only time I killed randoms was the month I spent in Band of Brothers (and I joined because I wanted massive fleet fights, not random ganking).
The fact is that if you actually want to find war targets (as in killing a specific enemy, not just randoms in low sec) you will need to gate and station camp. The local channel listing (which shows everyone in the local system) and buddy flagging (local channel will show a marker over the avatar of people in your buddy list, so of cause everyone has their enemies in their "buddy list") mean that anyone out doing missions or mining who has half a brain can get to safety before you can start to warp to them. The best way to do it is to patrol a series of systems so that the enemy can't setup to break your camp, but it is still camping.
Seriously? I played for a year and a half and I never saw anyone seriously disrupt the farmers for more then a few hours. EVE may allow you to shoot anyone you want in low security space, but the majority of farmers exist in high security. And they are nearly always in an NPC corp (which can't have war declared against them by player corps), which means you have to lose a ship to take one out (not losing your ship to the NPC police upon attacking another player in high security space is considered an exploit). The best you can do is to sit around in a combat ship and take the ore before they have a chance to move it to their hauler (this flags you so the person you stole from can kill you without NPC intervention, but farmers are never in combat ships).
When you consider that a lot of these operations go 24/7 (my alliance monitored the ones in our area of operations) there is very little you can do to seriously impact them. I spent a week harrasing my local farmers and all I would ever achieve is to shut them down for a few hours. While I was playing I never saw the developers do anything serious against blatant farmers (up to twenty ships mining, all named xyzzy1, xyzzy2, xyzzy3 etc). This is because all the farmer has to do is keep watch on his twenty bots and talk to the investigating GM and they can't touch him (the ultimate test by EVE GM's is to start a conversation with a suspected bot, which doesn't work against these professional operations).
And just suiciding ships to take them out will hurt them more then you, as once the farmers get to large mining barges and battleships, you will need to lose either a much more expensive ship or several (in the case of the BS) to kill it before the NPC's kill you.
I think CCP believed that making the China cluster (they even spouted some rubbish about real money trading and in game item purchase being more acceptable in "asian culture" and so would be allowed there) would get rid of a lot of farmers, but they are going to stay right where there customers are.
Currently, there is no need for Shards. Server does fine most of the time. Recently, there was even a battle with over 600 involved in one system at the same time.
Oh so the China shard doesn't exist? Oh wait the whole reason that it does exist is because they projected that China alone would generate more players then the rest of the world. Now imagine if EvE had WoW level numbers of players, the "single game universe" would go out the window quicker then it already has in China. EvE couldn't handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players, let alone several million. And one of the best points of EVE is the single game universe (and the player politics that involves), without that it would quickly become generic PVP with vastly sub-par PVE.
Oh and the alliances will quickly surpass 300 people in fleets, when I was in BoB we could easily muster those numbers. The problem was never been that those scale battles aren't possible, it is that they are randomly possible. I have had 100 v 100, and two hours later had a node freeze because of 20 v 20. You could never be sure of having no lag or crashes once you got beyond about ten people in a fleet. The hardware upgrades will just push those ceilings up, but more players will lower them.
My computer allows me to do work, surf the Internet and play music and video. Games are a side benefit, figure out how much money I have saved by not having a TV, DVD and stereo system. Buying all of those separately and having a console and an ultra-budget "web only" computer would work out to be much more then the cost of my computer.
And what do you mean by "remain at a decent level"? New games generally look better then older games even when you set them to run at levels your system can handle. In comparison to new systems yours wont look as good, but it doesn't *degrade*. And all the latest fancy graphic tricks add nothing to gameplay, most of the time you don't even notice them if they game is any good (as you are to busy playing to admire the HDR lighting).
I have never paid more then $250USD for a video card, so I don't know what your problem is. Like all other hardware the prices continue to go down, and I would say now days you have far more competition in the low to mid-range price bracket. I am using a card that was midrange at the end of 2004 (vanilla geforce 6800) and I can still run new games on medium to high graphics settings (though not at mind blowing res as I don't have a monitor that good). I generally upgrade my CPU or GPU once a year (so that is two years between upgrades for an individual component). Sure I can't run the latest FPS at highest detail but I don't buy games purely for the graphics (as most FPS producers some how expect you to).
Oh and my entire computer (with CPU and mobo upgrade late last year) cost me less then $1000AUD.
You really believe EVE could be as popular as WoW and have no shards? I played EVE for over a year and a half (I was in the Jericho Fraction and Aegis Militia for most of it) and for most of that time it was unplayable at peak hours or in hub systems. Even CCP were smart enough to create a separate shard for the Chinese market, and that will probably be broken into more shards if it gets really popular over there. EVE has around a hundred thousand active players, WoW has millions, you couldn't buy a pipe fat enough to allow hundreds of thousands of people to play on the same shard (and even if you could the game wouldn't work with thousands of people at the same system let alone the same planet).
And the main difference between EVE and WoW is that WoW is casual. I was a high end player in EVE and there was far to much work involved in keeping an effective PVP corporation going (logistics is what wins wars in real life and EVE). It was a second job to the people that did it. People whine about having to put in eight hours a week to do end game in WoW, the logistics people I knew put in eight hours a day, and high end PVP corps expected you to be on call whenever you where online (Band of Brothers). I got sick of a game being like a job (it took me three days to move my gear from one base to another) and now I play WoW. And the PVP is just as good, with none of the problems of having to go to extremes to find targets, or a 5:1 ratio of grinding to PVP, or every second PVPer being rigged to run away rather then fight.
The thing that everyone seems to miss in any discussion about child porn/pedophilia, is that pedophiles and especially ones who aren't parents, are not the ones doing the majority of abusing. Stranger danger is complete paranoia. Children are kidnapped and sexually abused by strangers, but the overwhelming majority of physical and sexual abuse is done by the childrens own family (who rarely self-identify as a pedophile).
If the worlds Governments actually wanted to stop child abuse they would put more money into child protection agenices rather then trying to stop people looking at kiddie porn. My mother works for an Australian child protection agency and her work conditions are fairly horrendous. Reports of abuse are regularly not investigated (and many more are investigated poorly) because they only have the manpower to investigate the worst examples.
The people you should worry about are the parents and extended family of the child, not some guy parked in front of a school.
Guiding Hand Social Club are great roleplayers (particularly Istvaan Shogaatsu), but the story is always blown out of all proportion. Ubiqua Seraph (UQS) was not a particularly rich corp before the robbery, in fact it was quite poor compared to my former corp (Jericho Fraction, one of the most famous corps in EVE) who were well of by EVE standards but not rich. And the robbery only got corporate assets, the wealth of the players in most corps far out strips that of the corp itself. The worst thing was the loss of limited edition items (such as Mirials battleship) and some Tech 2 blue prints originals (Which are generally lots free money through building T2 ships).
And in reality it only set the corp back a few months. We are happily functioning now just as well as before the robbery. And as Guiding Hand's original statements indicated that they believed it would be a mortal blow (they specialise in griefing corps out of existence), we are quite happy to flaunt our recovery to them. I would also note that the amount lost was high for a theft, but was about average for the amount of ISK damage a good merc corp can cause through combat.
Guiding Hand are great roleplayers, and good at what they do. But they are terrible braggarts.
Games by gamers for gamers is not the way the industry works currently. It is already too mainstream with very dry ideas.
Somewhere in the 90s the industry grew in capital and decided to sell the same shit sequel every year.
Yeah but I mostly don't play those games;)
I tend to play the one or two inovative games that new companies produce before going out of business because they planned on being a massive success.:(
Seriously what is so terrible about games by gamers for gamers? Most mainstream games, like mainstream movies and books are either rubbish or forgettable. So they make less money? So freaking what! Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is any good. Normally it is just marketed to suck in lots of consumers before they realize how crap it is, or is a fad that everyone is embrassed about a few years later.
I want to play games by people that know games and know what hardcore gamers want. You don't have to market to the widest possible audience, in fact doing so generally results in shit that doesn't sell without millions in marketing. Game companies need to only make enough money to release another game or two. I couldn't care less if companies who are only in it for the money, died off.
Why does everyone feel the need to justify their hobbies by trying to make them mainstream? You don't see crochet magazines bitching that their hobby hasn't broken into the mainstream. But of course being different is scary and horrifying.
No. Consumer gear almost by definition is never "state of the art". It takes years for "state of the art" gear to get cheap enough to be put in consumer electronics. 32 and 64 way multi-processor systems aren't even state of the art anymore, so a measly 3 cores is quite tame. And the graphics power of the new consoles is unlikely to match a single 7800Ultra or X18000 card, let alone a SLI/Crossfire rig, mainly because one of those cards costs more then an entire console.
Both Sony and Microsoft are buying their chips of IBM, and they are not even close to state of the art (except probably power consumption). This is just the first time such large multi-core chips have been put in a consumer device, and because of their unique design they will be significantly harder to program for, so don't expect many cutting edge games in the first year.
Halo really did suck the first time I played it through. It was a technically good shooter but didn't feel like anything special. And then you played it the second time through and noticed that in large battles the enemy didn't do the exact same thing. And the third time through they did something else entirely. The great thing about Halo was you could replay it and knowing were the enemies where didn't give you much of an advantage. Add in the fact that trying to beat it on legendary requires a ton of finesse and skill with the melee weapon, and it becomes an awesome game.
It is a poor first person shooter compared to PC ones. But it is a brilliant arcade shooter, and that is what you want in a console. You want to be able to just start up a game and go to a good level and spend an hour blasting away.
"I've now pattern-recognized you as someone who deems it more important to advertise what you regard as your highly-evolved sense of morality than to address actually address an argument. Apparently I've now seen enough of that on/. that it's deeply coded.:)"
No if I wanted to show of my "highly-evolved sense of morality" and not refute the agument I would have claimed not to have problems with sterotyping people, and then probably claimed you were just a rationalist bigot:P
I don't have a highly-evolved moral sense. I just know most of the flaws that it has.
As to your argument, I just don't see how a backlash based on lack of understanding and sterotypes should be coming from intelligent and rational people. Yes you may not have much to do with the various shades of Christianity in your day to day life, but if you want to stop ID you will need to figure out the differences. From what I have read the ID people know exactly who they are fighting and the weak points to attack (they have been doing this for a while now). If sensible secular and religous people don't pull together to fight them, then I am really ID people will win.
That is a silly argument. The problem is sterotyping people by the worst examples of a group they belong to. Now that racism and sexism aren't acceptable we find other ways to apply our natural gift of sterotype. If you so love rational thought then you should be striving (like me) to over ride your instinct to sterotype.
Would people please stop blaming Christians for this ID nonsense. I am a Christian, and I support the teaching of evolution and think ID has worse science behind it then the electric universe "theory".
Please stop blaming all of us for the work of a few fundie fruitcakes. A fight between scientist and normal Christians is exactly what they want.
Here down under, region free DVD players are quite legal AFAIK. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has stated previously that region codings are anti-competitive and should be banned.
In countries which stick to the Berne conventions 50 year copyrights, Lovercraft is in the public domain no matter what. Of course the US is now trying to get its trade partners to go to 70-90 year copyrights that retrospectively affects works that have fallen into the public domain.
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What other addictions should be in the DSM-IV, if the requirement for inclusion is "financial or social harm"? Book reading addiction (I would be reading books if the Internet didnt exist)? Bad joke addiction? Bad hygiene addiction? Extreme sport addiction? Marriage addiction (which harms you financially AND socially)? Public service addiction? Scientific research addiction? Religious teaching addiction (though some financial profit)? Geek hobbies addiction? Military enlistment addiction? The standard for something being called an addiction should not be "causes financial or social harm". It should be "causes physical withdrawal symptoms because the addicts body adapts to requiring the activity to function at a normal level". I have taken (legal) drugs that cause withdrawal symptoms, yet aren't medically classed as addictive because your body doesn't adapt to needing them.
Twinks are only really effective up to the 20-29 BG's. After that the benefit of twinking is so minor that you still need to be a good player. And if what you say is true, that most twinks lack skill, then twinking would not be a problem. I certainly think it is a much less serious problem then organized vs PUG BG's, or blue and green 60's vs Epiced 60's (which is a major reason why many people twink, you could twink one of every class to 29 before you get a 60 even average gear). Oh and the even more major problem is the fact that their are still plenty of hacks that work in WoW (what kind of moron MMO developer trusts the client enough to allow speed hacking?). Personally I don't twink, I don't need to. I am skilled enough to beat 90% of BGers (dominating 40-49 BG's for a weeked with a 44 mage). Twinks have never been a problem to kill.
Lets check dictionary.com for "steal".
steal
-verb (used with object)
1. to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right, esp. secretly or by force: A pickpocket stole his watch.
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
3. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance: He stole my girlfriend.
4. to move, bring, convey, or put secretly or quietly; smuggle (usually fol. by away, from, in, into, etc.): They stole the bicycle into the bedroom to surprise the child.
Hmmm 1) doesn't fit as infringing copyright is not taking property (what kind of insane world would we live in if property "expired"). You may infringe the copyright holders rights, but they still have their copyright. 2) Fits much more closely, but if it where legally enforced then MS would have gone out of business long ago. Oh and the United States of America would be sued out of existence by the United Kingdom (who would then be sued out of existence by Native Americans).
And recording artists would owe most of their money to the people who originally invented the instruments they play and the musical styles they use. Oh and the people who invented their native language would need to be compensated. Just because these people have been dead for thousands of years doesn't mean it is okay to steal from them.
Do you really want to live in a world where people use the retarded legal definition of steal that you use? Most "original" creative works are far from it.
P.S. I paid for most of the movies/music I own. But I actually understand that the natural system is for copyrights not to exist, and they are a benefit granted by the people, not an inherant right. And that corporations so grossly exploit and "steal" from people that they are the last entities that should be talking about morality. If you do not want other people using your ideas then don't communicate them.
The secret of EvE is money. He who was the most Isk wins. That is why it is a game of haves and have nots. Hell I spent the later part of my EvE career training newbies (only a few months of skill training) how to reap havoc against much older characters. But in the end the rich older characters can out last a group of newbs through a war of attrition. If they are really rich they can just hire some mercenaries to camp you into a station until your newbie corp falls apart (destroying morale is the only way to actually break an enemy in EvE).
And sure the last 5% of a skill takes ages to get compared to the first 20%, but when characters have three plus years of skill training then they have a lot of those extra 5% bonuses, and they do add up. One skilled player in a tech 2 ship will be able to take on a whole squadron of newbies (even ones lead by an old player), simply by picking them off one by one outside warp scrambler range (warp scramblers stop you from just warping off when in trouble).
Oh and with Interdictors (AoE warp scramblers) your squadron of newbies don't get to pick their battles anymore.
Newbies with proper training and leadership can cause havoc amongst high character/low player skill people, but that is it. Against high character/high player skill people they are free poddings.
Oh and flashback to last century anyone?
Seriously where do you think water comes from? Magic sky fairies? If we can develop a system that recycles water even close to what the natural rain cycle does, then it would be a hell of a lot better quality then most current dams (which get polluted by all sorts of things). You do realise that fish and birds quite happily crap in the dams don't you?
Actually buddy I was an anti-pirate for most of my EVE career. The "every second PVPer being rigged to run away rather then fight" was referring to "pierats" (aka gate campers). It got old pretty fast when the people who bragged about how uber they where at PVP, always sat greater then 100km off a gate with friends, or flew interceptors with warp core stabs (for non-eve players: You can stop a ship warping with a warp scrambler/disruptor, but warp stabilisers reduce scrambler/disrupter strength). I spent most of my eve time in the Jericho Fraction (who used to abhor gate camping of any kind) or the Aegis Militia (who used to try and keep their local systems clear of pirates). The only time I killed randoms was the month I spent in Band of Brothers (and I joined because I wanted massive fleet fights, not random ganking).
The fact is that if you actually want to find war targets (as in killing a specific enemy, not just randoms in low sec) you will need to gate and station camp. The local channel listing (which shows everyone in the local system) and buddy flagging (local channel will show a marker over the avatar of people in your buddy list, so of cause everyone has their enemies in their "buddy list") mean that anyone out doing missions or mining who has half a brain can get to safety before you can start to warp to them. The best way to do it is to patrol a series of systems so that the enemy can't setup to break your camp, but it is still camping.
Seriously? I played for a year and a half and I never saw anyone seriously disrupt the farmers for more then a few hours. EVE may allow you to shoot anyone you want in low security space, but the majority of farmers exist in high security. And they are nearly always in an NPC corp (which can't have war declared against them by player corps), which means you have to lose a ship to take one out (not losing your ship to the NPC police upon attacking another player in high security space is considered an exploit). The best you can do is to sit around in a combat ship and take the ore before they have a chance to move it to their hauler (this flags you so the person you stole from can kill you without NPC intervention, but farmers are never in combat ships).
When you consider that a lot of these operations go 24/7 (my alliance monitored the ones in our area of operations) there is very little you can do to seriously impact them. I spent a week harrasing my local farmers and all I would ever achieve is to shut them down for a few hours. While I was playing I never saw the developers do anything serious against blatant farmers (up to twenty ships mining, all named xyzzy1, xyzzy2, xyzzy3 etc). This is because all the farmer has to do is keep watch on his twenty bots and talk to the investigating GM and they can't touch him (the ultimate test by EVE GM's is to start a conversation with a suspected bot, which doesn't work against these professional operations).
And just suiciding ships to take them out will hurt them more then you, as once the farmers get to large mining barges and battleships, you will need to lose either a much more expensive ship or several (in the case of the BS) to kill it before the NPC's kill you.
I think CCP believed that making the China cluster (they even spouted some rubbish about real money trading and in game item purchase being more acceptable in "asian culture" and so would be allowed there) would get rid of a lot of farmers, but they are going to stay right where there customers are.
Oh so the China shard doesn't exist? Oh wait the whole reason that it does exist is because they projected that China alone would generate more players then the rest of the world. Now imagine if EvE had WoW level numbers of players, the "single game universe" would go out the window quicker then it already has in China. EvE couldn't handle hundreds of thousands of simultaneous players, let alone several million. And one of the best points of EVE is the single game universe (and the player politics that involves), without that it would quickly become generic PVP with vastly sub-par PVE.
Oh and the alliances will quickly surpass 300 people in fleets, when I was in BoB we could easily muster those numbers. The problem was never been that those scale battles aren't possible, it is that they are randomly possible. I have had 100 v 100, and two hours later had a node freeze because of 20 v 20. You could never be sure of having no lag or crashes once you got beyond about ten people in a fleet. The hardware upgrades will just push those ceilings up, but more players will lower them.
My computer allows me to do work, surf the Internet and play music and video. Games are a side benefit, figure out how much money I have saved by not having a TV, DVD and stereo system. Buying all of those separately and having a console and an ultra-budget "web only" computer would work out to be much more then the cost of my computer.
And what do you mean by "remain at a decent level"? New games generally look better then older games even when you set them to run at levels your system can handle. In comparison to new systems yours wont look as good, but it doesn't *degrade*. And all the latest fancy graphic tricks add nothing to gameplay, most of the time you don't even notice them if they game is any good (as you are to busy playing to admire the HDR lighting).
I have never paid more then $250USD for a video card, so I don't know what your problem is. Like all other hardware the prices continue to go down, and I would say now days you have far more competition in the low to mid-range price bracket. I am using a card that was midrange at the end of 2004 (vanilla geforce 6800) and I can still run new games on medium to high graphics settings (though not at mind blowing res as I don't have a monitor that good). I generally upgrade my CPU or GPU once a year (so that is two years between upgrades for an individual component). Sure I can't run the latest FPS at highest detail but I don't buy games purely for the graphics (as most FPS producers some how expect you to).
Oh and my entire computer (with CPU and mobo upgrade late last year) cost me less then $1000AUD.
You really believe EVE could be as popular as WoW and have no shards? I played EVE for over a year and a half (I was in the Jericho Fraction and Aegis Militia for most of it) and for most of that time it was unplayable at peak hours or in hub systems. Even CCP were smart enough to create a separate shard for the Chinese market, and that will probably be broken into more shards if it gets really popular over there. EVE has around a hundred thousand active players, WoW has millions, you couldn't buy a pipe fat enough to allow hundreds of thousands of people to play on the same shard (and even if you could the game wouldn't work with thousands of people at the same system let alone the same planet).
And the main difference between EVE and WoW is that WoW is casual. I was a high end player in EVE and there was far to much work involved in keeping an effective PVP corporation going (logistics is what wins wars in real life and EVE). It was a second job to the people that did it. People whine about having to put in eight hours a week to do end game in WoW, the logistics people I knew put in eight hours a day, and high end PVP corps expected you to be on call whenever you where online (Band of Brothers). I got sick of a game being like a job (it took me three days to move my gear from one base to another) and now I play WoW. And the PVP is just as good, with none of the problems of having to go to extremes to find targets, or a 5:1 ratio of grinding to PVP, or every second PVPer being rigged to run away rather then fight.
The thing that everyone seems to miss in any discussion about child porn/pedophilia, is that pedophiles and especially ones who aren't parents, are not the ones doing the majority of abusing. Stranger danger is complete paranoia. Children are kidnapped and sexually abused by strangers, but the overwhelming majority of physical and sexual abuse is done by the childrens own family (who rarely self-identify as a pedophile). If the worlds Governments actually wanted to stop child abuse they would put more money into child protection agenices rather then trying to stop people looking at kiddie porn. My mother works for an Australian child protection agency and her work conditions are fairly horrendous. Reports of abuse are regularly not investigated (and many more are investigated poorly) because they only have the manpower to investigate the worst examples. The people you should worry about are the parents and extended family of the child, not some guy parked in front of a school.
Guiding Hand Social Club are great roleplayers (particularly Istvaan Shogaatsu), but the story is always blown out of all proportion. Ubiqua Seraph (UQS) was not a particularly rich corp before the robbery, in fact it was quite poor compared to my former corp (Jericho Fraction, one of the most famous corps in EVE) who were well of by EVE standards but not rich. And the robbery only got corporate assets, the wealth of the players in most corps far out strips that of the corp itself. The worst thing was the loss of limited edition items (such as Mirials battleship) and some Tech 2 blue prints originals (Which are generally lots free money through building T2 ships).
And in reality it only set the corp back a few months. We are happily functioning now just as well as before the robbery. And as Guiding Hand's original statements indicated that they believed it would be a mortal blow (they specialise in griefing corps out of existence), we are quite happy to flaunt our recovery to them. I would also note that the amount lost was high for a theft, but was about average for the amount of ISK damage a good merc corp can cause through combat.
Guiding Hand are great roleplayers, and good at what they do. But they are terrible braggarts.
Yeah but I mostly don't play those games
I tend to play the one or two inovative games that new companies produce before going out of business because they planned on being a massive success.
Seriously what is so terrible about games by gamers for gamers? Most mainstream games, like mainstream movies and books are either rubbish or forgettable. So they make less money? So freaking what! Just because something is popular doesn't mean it is any good. Normally it is just marketed to suck in lots of consumers before they realize how crap it is, or is a fad that everyone is embrassed about a few years later.
I want to play games by people that know games and know what hardcore gamers want. You don't have to market to the widest possible audience, in fact doing so generally results in shit that doesn't sell without millions in marketing. Game companies need to only make enough money to release another game or two. I couldn't care less if companies who are only in it for the money, died off.
Why does everyone feel the need to justify their hobbies by trying to make them mainstream? You don't see crochet magazines bitching that their hobby hasn't broken into the mainstream. But of course being different is scary and horrifying.
No. Consumer gear almost by definition is never "state of the art". It takes years for "state of the art" gear to get cheap enough to be put in consumer electronics. 32 and 64 way multi-processor systems aren't even state of the art anymore, so a measly 3 cores is quite tame. And the graphics power of the new consoles is unlikely to match a single 7800Ultra or X18000 card, let alone a SLI/Crossfire rig, mainly because one of those cards costs more then an entire console.
Both Sony and Microsoft are buying their chips of IBM, and they are not even close to state of the art (except probably power consumption). This is just the first time such large multi-core chips have been put in a consumer device, and because of their unique design they will be significantly harder to program for, so don't expect many cutting edge games in the first year.
Halo really did suck the first time I played it through. It was a technically good shooter but didn't feel like anything special. And then you played it the second time through and noticed that in large battles the enemy didn't do the exact same thing. And the third time through they did something else entirely. The great thing about Halo was you could replay it and knowing were the enemies where didn't give you much of an advantage. Add in the fact that trying to beat it on legendary requires a ton of finesse and skill with the melee weapon, and it becomes an awesome game.
It is a poor first person shooter compared to PC ones. But it is a brilliant arcade shooter, and that is what you want in a console. You want to be able to just start up a game and go to a good level and spend an hour blasting away.
"I've now pattern-recognized you as someone who deems it more important to advertise what you regard as your highly-evolved sense of morality than to address actually address an argument. Apparently I've now seen enough of that on /. that it's deeply coded. :)"
:P
No if I wanted to show of my "highly-evolved sense of morality" and not refute the agument I would have claimed not to have problems with sterotyping people, and then probably claimed you were just a rationalist bigot
I don't have a highly-evolved moral sense. I just know most of the flaws that it has.
As to your argument, I just don't see how a backlash based on lack of understanding and sterotypes should be coming from intelligent and rational people. Yes you may not have much to do with the various shades of Christianity in your day to day life, but if you want to stop ID you will need to figure out the differences. From what I have read the ID people know exactly who they are fighting and the weak points to attack (they have been doing this for a while now). If sensible secular and religous people don't pull together to fight them, then I am really ID people will win.
And I don't want to live in a theocracy.
That is a silly argument. The problem is sterotyping people by the worst examples of a group they belong to. Now that racism and sexism aren't acceptable we find other ways to apply our natural gift of sterotype. If you so love rational thought then you should be striving (like me) to over ride your instinct to sterotype.
Would people please stop blaming Christians for this ID nonsense. I am a Christian, and I support the teaching of evolution and think ID has worse science behind it then the electric universe "theory".
Please stop blaming all of us for the work of a few fundie fruitcakes. A fight between scientist and normal Christians is exactly what they want.
The problem with cell phones is that people expect you to be reachable all the time. So they get annoyed when you deliberately turn it off.
Here down under, region free DVD players are quite legal AFAIK. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has stated previously that region codings are anti-competitive and should be banned.
In countries which stick to the Berne conventions 50 year copyrights, Lovercraft is in the public domain no matter what. Of course the US is now trying to get its trade partners to go to 70-90 year copyrights that retrospectively affects works that have fallen into the public domain.