Compare with WoW, where you might have a 100% chance of getting something if you complete some difficult task. There are plenty of instances in WoW where you'll have to use a large set of abilities to manage to succeed. Fail, and you can try again very quickly instead of packing up and waiting until tomorrow. That's hard, but not due to a time requirement, due to a skill requirement.
The time requirement comes into effect, too. There are several more instances (Five currently, one more comming out next month) where you have even more things to manage, and if you fail, you can't try again for three days or a week, depending ont he reset times.
Anybody who calls WoW dumbed down needs to sit through the Razorgore fight, and keep in mind that there are three (soon to be four) dungeons worth of bosses that put Razorgore's twelve minutes of pure chaos to shame.
For reference: Razorgore is the first boss (For that matter, the first hostile NPC you encounter in BWL, no "trash" pulls leading in) in Black Wing Lair. He comes complete with roughly 80 assorted mobs by the end of the first half of the fight, many of which can oneshot anything that isn't in plate armor. You need to manage all of this crap at the same time, while keeping Razorgore alive so you can battle several orcs for control of him. You use him to destroy the dragon eggs and stop more crap from spawning all around you, clean out the immense hordes of orcs and dragonkin, and THEN you get into the actual two-phase fight against Razorgore himself, which would be nontrivial going in at 100%, let alone how much the first half of the battle takes out of a raid. One person fucks up, does something stupid, screws up kiting or even walks in the wrong place? You all die, incur a repair bill tha can top 5 gold for warriors. You can't run away, the gates close behind you and the door in front of you leads to an even harder fight.
This fight is not a matter of having good gear - drops from much, much harder fights do not trivialize Razorgore yet, and it's doable with less gear than is needed in the lower level raid Molten Core - it's not a matter of grinding or farming. It's a matter of reflexes, practice, and just pure dumb luck most of the time.
I've heard a lot of people suggest WoW is "dumbed down." I've yet to meet somebody who will say that after they've done a Tribute run in Dire Maul North, done the Warlords Command quest, or even attempted (Much less succeeded) in the Baron's Ultimatum. Reducing the player cap in endgame dungeons from 10 to 5 has already made the end game impressively difficult. The final bosses in most endgame dungeons are now a challenge that's hardly reflected in the loot they give.
The travel time becomes minor when you're in a raiding guild. I'm usually present at our guild's "early arrival/bonus DKP" time. I then sit on my ass for an hour watching mages conjure water while everybody else gets their ass in gear and the warlocks burn half their shards summoning lazy people. My warlock just hit 60, too. I'm the only lock in the guild with a Core Felcloth Soulbag and a bottomless bag, and I come with both of those filled with shards. So I get put on summoning duty. The only fun thing in this time is positioning myself so somebody who annoyed me in guildchat comes out of the portal hanging in mid-air over the lava.
Charge me per minute for that? No thanks. Even if I'm saving money over my monthly payment, just the knowledge that I could save money by logging off and looking at porn until first pull will detract from the neccessary tedium before the fun starts.
The Hot Coffee content was included in the game. The textures, animations - the whole bit. The hack to unlock it was, in fact, almost trivial, and could be done without downloading the 6 kilobyte crack to unlock it.
The Oblivion nude mod is completely third party. It requires the use of a dowloaded addon and the addition of new texture and model files to the data folder. The simmilar mod for Morrowind weighed in at about 12 megabytes, and if the same people are behind this one, they would have cranked the detail up even more - their major justification for the mod had always been the less insectile look of the characters.
The difference is pretty clear: The ESRB rates games based on all content included on the disk. It's hidden, but it's still there. They can't rate games based on things users make and add to the game themselves, like they are with Oblivion.
The tax code has special rules for all sorts of illegal income. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch12.html Any income from illegal sales is self employment activity and must be declared as such. Bribes (Interestingly, bribes are explained right next to political campaign domations) are part of your income. Stolen property must be declared at it's fair market value unless it's returned to it's rightful owner in the same calendar year. Gambling winnings are taxable, even if it's illegal to gamble in your area.
And yes, you are right. You're compelled to file your income tax, so anything you reveal on it can't be used against you in court. But if you report $75,000 that you stole from a bank and the fair market value of the car you jacked to get away, you can be sure the police will be very interested in you nonetheless.
The problem with an affiliate program for WoW right now is that, despite the ungodly immense revinue it's generating, the profits are a bit weak. Remember this article from a while back? This was before the Chinese release and the announcement of Burning Crusade, but also before their last round of network and server upgrades. Blizzard lost $37 million in 2004, and in 2005 had an $8 million profit, out of $460 million in sales and subscriptions to WoW - Also note, this is proof of why the old "n million people*($50 for the game+$15 a month*12 months)" figure is dubious - it yeilds a significantly higher number than Blizzard's total anual revinue. $460 million calculated for 2005 comapred to $189 million in actual revinue. If you've ever talked to an MMO developer, you'd be suprized how little of the $15 a month they actually see. The $50 in raw sales is almost all eaten by the publisher, who figured out back in the UO days that they could squeeze a lot more out of an MMO sale than they could out of a single-sale game, and nearly half of what eventually gets to Blizzard vanishes into taxes - more than that, when you consider that a lot of their business comes from countries outside the US with higher tax rates.
A $1 billion industry doesn't mean anybody's making $1 billion from it. Blizzard is still pretty deep in the hole after years of posting losses. WoW as a whole hasn't even paid for itself yet, let alone allowing 20,000 people to live comfortably. By your numbers, only 140 people lived comfortably on it last year, and probably 300 or 400 this year, since the number of players has nearly trippled.
Yeah, that worked really well averting WWII and the oil crisis in the 1970's. Ignore them and they'll stop bothering us. It's a historically common way of dealing with everything from dissidents to economics, and it almost universally bites you in the ass in the end.
So, ignore him. He's still on CNN, Fox news, whoever will listen to him on a weekly basis. The family protection groups are still throwing his name and words around - even the ones that publically renounced him a while back have made friendly again. What you have now is the same guy running unchallenged. This is the situation he had when he ruined many businesses in the porn industry. Nobody stood up to him, and the industry itself just ignored him and hoped their studio wasn't next. So a lot of people lost their businesses - some of whom hadn't actually been making pornography, but he figured it was close enough.
Then he went after music. Ruined a few artists, got a few CD's taken off the market - to this day he loves to tell anybody who'll listen that he's the reason Ice-T's career ended so suddenly. By and large, no opposition. The artists ignored him, the labels didn't really care, and the listeners didn't even know what was going on in most cases.
A decade running unchecked. He finally picked on an industry with a lot of fans who spend more time on their computers than anywhere else, and fighting back is easy online, so a lot of people are fighting back now.
And what happened? He's lost cases, he's been thrown out of court, he's been made a monkey of repeatedly, and right now he's in danger of losing his ability to make legal war on the media for good.
You've got it backwards. Patents are about exclusive control, not forced sharing. Once you have the patent, you have it for twenty years. Had Edison decided to be a total ass and refuse to let anybody else have light bulbs, it would have been his right as a patent holder. He could have strung his house up with lights until it shined like a tiny sun, and all you and I could do is sit and be jealous until the patent expired and anybody could sell light bulbs all they wanted. Yeah, he's a jerk. A jerk with electric lights. And you're a chump with a candle.
Eastern RPGs - and for that matter, a good chunk of western ones, too - give you a role to play. At best (i.e. the western RPGs like KOTOR and Jade Empire that are much closer to the console RPG style), you get to decide wether to be a nice guy or a jerk along the way.
Western RPGs - the breed of them that's truely dying, even in a world where KOTOR got game of the year - you're given a stage to play on. Everything else is up to you. I'm several hours into Oblivion right now. I'm not even sure if I'm on the main quest or not, but I love it anyway. The Ultima series are the only games I played much of that I can really compare to Elderscrolls in terms of sheer freedom.
I love that I can just blow off the main quest givers and go do whatever. Become an assassin, a thug, a knight in obligatory shining armor, (Or if I invest enough time raising my skills, all of the above), or just blow that stuff off and spend an hour picking flowers in a field.
Or even doing something completely pointlss and weird. In Morrowind once, I had a weekend off and nothing else to do, so I set about stealing every last spoon in the game (I think - I may have missed a few, but I had a good couple hundred of them), and then writing "I AM THE KING OF SPOONS" with them on the roof of the Underskar... Just because I could.
I was bored one time, made a spell that was stacked something like this:
100 Fire Damage On Target, Radius: 100 100 Frost Damage on Targe, Radius: 100 100 Thunder Damage on Target, Radius: 100 100 Poison Damage on Target, Radius: 100
Doubled over (You're allowed eight effects per spell). I should have called it "Oops" because the only time I cast it (and it took a good few Fortify Magicka potions just to get the mana pool to manage it), I broke the main quest and several faction chains in one blast.
Man, the tonka truck bit sorta sealed it. Anybody who couldn't figure out he was joking from that isn't smart enough to have bothered reading the comments after the big words in the article summary scared them off.
They should just drop the "online" part to stop people from asking that question. "Your Rights."
Then, people will be asking, "Is this really MY rights? It sounds more like the guy in the article's rights."
Yes, it is. He went AFK. He wasn't there to respond to the GM whisper they do when they think you're botting. You want to split hairs, but both halves are bannable. Blizzard doesn't divide the specification between a bot, a script, a macro, or whatever, they ban all automation.
This is why the Decursive mod isn't fully automated anymore, and why the macro-delay function was made inaccessible by the UI. Anything that will allow you to perform N functions in less than N keystrokes/clicks hits Blizzard's definition of automation. Entire raids got banned for the use of the old Decursive, and that's even less automation than this guy had set up - all Decursive did was cast one debuff-removal spell over and over until deactivated. His setup could change his weapons, heal, buff, debuff, and initiate autoattack while he watched TV.
Exactly. After reading it, there's really no other possible explanation. I've used the same keyboard for WoW for months, and I've run it under WINE numerous times with no problem. Hell, Blizzard GAVE AWAY a logitech gaming keyboard a while back - they know what it is, it's not something new to them.
Also, for unattended actions, they don't determine it by using WoW's ability to detect outside programs. Having once or twice triggered their bot detection myself, the first thing that happens is you get a little/w from a GM. If you respond in a timely manner, answer a couple questions, and speak English, no problem, they go away and apologize for inturrupting you. If he got banned, then he wasn't there to respond to the GM and he got banned.
Not just too late, but probably counterproductive. With the level of DRM Sony has hinted at in the past for the PS3, I think a lot of Slashdotters will consider the fact that Linux is facilitating it to be more of an insult than anything.
The collonial period is why the West has advanced so much faster than any civilization before it. The Chinese didn't expand, and eventually stagnated in their own beauracracy at home. The Arabs expanded slowly, and didn't progress that far - they moved into India and North Africa, but that was about it.
Europe, however, expanded with astonishing speed. From their emergence onto the world stage, it was less than two hundred years before they'd colonized the Americas. By the end of the 1800's, nearly the entire world was under some degree of control of European states. Even standing governments, like China, were being trivialized by European authority in their own lands. They had an immense amount of space to fill up, so their population exploded like nothing the world's seen in recorded history. Add in the American and French revolutions and the Napoleanic Wars, which between them sealed the fate of the old forms of government that had held civilizations back for thousands of years, upending the social order and replacing them with new and highly progress-driven governments.
The West managed to create a civilization that had a rapidly growing population, access to every resource they could ever want, plenty of space to grow, and a lot of available money (since most of the wealth was no longer going to the glorification of kings). Advancement was no longer something that just "happened" like it had in Arabia and China, it was an end unto itself that people spent their whole lives chasing.
This is pretty much spot on... but Homeland Security? It is standard practice for unusually large payments like this to be reported to the IRS, who will usually snif around and ask where the money came from. They don't care if you stole it, just that you paid taxes on it - illegal income - including theft, drug sales, and bribes - must be declared as "self-employment" on your taxes.
If you make a large deposit into the bank, a large purchase in cash, or whatever, the IRS will likely come knocking - this happened to me after running almost $1500 in change through a coin counting machine at my bank.
The fact that Homeland Security is starting to get involved in this now could mean that DHS is trying to watch everybody as much as possible no matter who or what they are, or it could mean that DHS's powers are soo poorly and broadly defined that it's now become the default point of contact for the government "just in case."
Not only free, but usually better. I have a Starcraft strategy guide. Not sure WHY I bought it, but I did. It's got a run of errors in it that are almost entertaining. It's fairly clear that the guide was made using a beta copy, since it mentions Queens and Science Vessels having non-energy-based attacks, Firebats attacking air units, and the guide for one Terran mission guide even helpfully suggests lifting off your Refinery and moving it to a new base.
The guides on GameFAQs, when they fall THIS far out of date, either get updated, or replaced with newer and more accurate guides. You can always publish a new edition of a strategy guide, but that leaves the people who already bought one with a piece of garbage. GameFAQs, it's just a matter of going back and trying a different one.
A couple of times, a few local news outlets here (Usually WNEM CBS 5 and either the Saginaw News or WSMH Fox 66) will get into something like this. It gets rediculous quickly. 5 and 66 have been going back and forth on the Cheny shooting. 5 had hunters on explaining what safety rules Cheney was breaking, 66 had the local NRA president on explaining that Cheney did nothing wrong and it was his partner who was being unsafe. Then 5 has a gunshop owner on saying how he'd never sell Cheney a gun, and 66 has anotehr gunshop owner on who talked about how he shook hands with Cheney once and it was the greatest moment of his life. 5 has a bit on how gun safety regulations would have prevented the accident, and 66 has a bit on how 5 wants to take away our butter knives. At the last point I heard, 66 said there could have been a second gunman, possibly a liberal apologist who was trying to shoot the vice president.
Pretty good journalism if you compare it to what passes often. Here's a few recent stories from my local news channels:
WNEM 5: What they reported: "Detroit Police are detaining and arresting Christians for praying in the privacy of their own homes." What happened: Two people, who were never specified to be Christian, "prayed" by laying down in crosswalks, accross doors - even in court while the judge was talking to them, and were arrested for disturbing the police and obstructing traffic.
WSMH 66: What they reported: "Deomcrats are contracting the terrorist defense of hour great country to Al Qaida!" (66 makes the national Fox News look liberal). What happened: The President contracted several ports to a company from the middle east.
Saginaw News: What they reported: "Governor Granholm is having unshielded nuclear waste transported in open-air freight cars through the heart of Saginaw County!" What actaully happened: Some steel was being shipped from Sault St. Marie to be used to make components for a nuclear reactor in Oregon. News also misreported the route, so about 50 people had to be restrained when they tried to picket a train full of corn.
By comparison, the DS article was relatively accurate. Their only mistake was that the predator has to be in the same room as your poor innocent vulnerable daughter, not accross the country in some seedy bar with wireless access.
Slashdot Mirror
Compare with WoW, where you might have a 100% chance of getting something if you complete some difficult task. There are plenty of instances in WoW where you'll have to use a large set of abilities to manage to succeed. Fail, and you can try again very quickly instead of packing up and waiting until tomorrow. That's hard, but not due to a time requirement, due to a skill requirement.
The time requirement comes into effect, too. There are several more instances (Five currently, one more comming out next month) where you have even more things to manage, and if you fail, you can't try again for three days or a week, depending ont he reset times.
Anybody who calls WoW dumbed down needs to sit through the Razorgore fight, and keep in mind that there are three (soon to be four) dungeons worth of bosses that put Razorgore's twelve minutes of pure chaos to shame.
For reference: Razorgore is the first boss (For that matter, the first hostile NPC you encounter in BWL, no "trash" pulls leading in) in Black Wing Lair. He comes complete with roughly 80 assorted mobs by the end of the first half of the fight, many of which can oneshot anything that isn't in plate armor. You need to manage all of this crap at the same time, while keeping Razorgore alive so you can battle several orcs for control of him. You use him to destroy the dragon eggs and stop more crap from spawning all around you, clean out the immense hordes of orcs and dragonkin, and THEN you get into the actual two-phase fight against Razorgore himself, which would be nontrivial going in at 100%, let alone how much the first half of the battle takes out of a raid. One person fucks up, does something stupid, screws up kiting or even walks in the wrong place? You all die, incur a repair bill tha can top 5 gold for warriors. You can't run away, the gates close behind you and the door in front of you leads to an even harder fight.
This fight is not a matter of having good gear - drops from much, much harder fights do not trivialize Razorgore yet, and it's doable with less gear than is needed in the lower level raid Molten Core - it's not a matter of grinding or farming. It's a matter of reflexes, practice, and just pure dumb luck most of the time.
I've heard a lot of people suggest WoW is "dumbed down." I've yet to meet somebody who will say that after they've done a Tribute run in Dire Maul North, done the Warlords Command quest, or even attempted (Much less succeeded) in the Baron's Ultimatum. Reducing the player cap in endgame dungeons from 10 to 5 has already made the end game impressively difficult. The final bosses in most endgame dungeons are now a challenge that's hardly reflected in the loot they give.
The travel time becomes minor when you're in a raiding guild. I'm usually present at our guild's "early arrival/bonus DKP" time. I then sit on my ass for an hour watching mages conjure water while everybody else gets their ass in gear and the warlocks burn half their shards summoning lazy people. My warlock just hit 60, too. I'm the only lock in the guild with a Core Felcloth Soulbag and a bottomless bag, and I come with both of those filled with shards. So I get put on summoning duty. The only fun thing in this time is positioning myself so somebody who annoyed me in guildchat comes out of the portal hanging in mid-air over the lava.
Charge me per minute for that? No thanks. Even if I'm saving money over my monthly payment, just the knowledge that I could save money by logging off and looking at porn until first pull will detract from the neccessary tedium before the fun starts.
The Hot Coffee content was included in the game. The textures, animations - the whole bit. The hack to unlock it was, in fact, almost trivial, and could be done without downloading the 6 kilobyte crack to unlock it.
The Oblivion nude mod is completely third party. It requires the use of a dowloaded addon and the addition of new texture and model files to the data folder. The simmilar mod for Morrowind weighed in at about 12 megabytes, and if the same people are behind this one, they would have cranked the detail up even more - their major justification for the mod had always been the less insectile look of the characters.
The difference is pretty clear: The ESRB rates games based on all content included on the disk. It's hidden, but it's still there. They can't rate games based on things users make and add to the game themselves, like they are with Oblivion.
The tax code has special rules for all sorts of illegal income. http://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch12.html Any income from illegal sales is self employment activity and must be declared as such. Bribes (Interestingly, bribes are explained right next to political campaign domations) are part of your income. Stolen property must be declared at it's fair market value unless it's returned to it's rightful owner in the same calendar year. Gambling winnings are taxable, even if it's illegal to gamble in your area. And yes, you are right. You're compelled to file your income tax, so anything you reveal on it can't be used against you in court. But if you report $75,000 that you stole from a bank and the fair market value of the car you jacked to get away, you can be sure the police will be very interested in you nonetheless.
The problem with an affiliate program for WoW right now is that, despite the ungodly immense revinue it's generating, the profits are a bit weak. Remember this article from a while back? This was before the Chinese release and the announcement of Burning Crusade, but also before their last round of network and server upgrades. Blizzard lost $37 million in 2004, and in 2005 had an $8 million profit, out of $460 million in sales and subscriptions to WoW - Also note, this is proof of why the old "n million people*($50 for the game+$15 a month*12 months)" figure is dubious - it yeilds a significantly higher number than Blizzard's total anual revinue. $460 million calculated for 2005 comapred to $189 million in actual revinue. If you've ever talked to an MMO developer, you'd be suprized how little of the $15 a month they actually see. The $50 in raw sales is almost all eaten by the publisher, who figured out back in the UO days that they could squeeze a lot more out of an MMO sale than they could out of a single-sale game, and nearly half of what eventually gets to Blizzard vanishes into taxes - more than that, when you consider that a lot of their business comes from countries outside the US with higher tax rates.
A $1 billion industry doesn't mean anybody's making $1 billion from it. Blizzard is still pretty deep in the hole after years of posting losses. WoW as a whole hasn't even paid for itself yet, let alone allowing 20,000 people to live comfortably. By your numbers, only 140 people lived comfortably on it last year, and probably 300 or 400 this year, since the number of players has nearly trippled.
Not so much a speed run - try the low level challenge. At an average character level of 8, Kefka is one hell of a hard fight.
Yeah, that worked really well averting WWII and the oil crisis in the 1970's. Ignore them and they'll stop bothering us. It's a historically common way of dealing with everything from dissidents to economics, and it almost universally bites you in the ass in the end.
So, ignore him. He's still on CNN, Fox news, whoever will listen to him on a weekly basis. The family protection groups are still throwing his name and words around - even the ones that publically renounced him a while back have made friendly again. What you have now is the same guy running unchallenged. This is the situation he had when he ruined many businesses in the porn industry. Nobody stood up to him, and the industry itself just ignored him and hoped their studio wasn't next. So a lot of people lost their businesses - some of whom hadn't actually been making pornography, but he figured it was close enough.
Then he went after music. Ruined a few artists, got a few CD's taken off the market - to this day he loves to tell anybody who'll listen that he's the reason Ice-T's career ended so suddenly. By and large, no opposition. The artists ignored him, the labels didn't really care, and the listeners didn't even know what was going on in most cases.
A decade running unchecked. He finally picked on an industry with a lot of fans who spend more time on their computers than anywhere else, and fighting back is easy online, so a lot of people are fighting back now.
And what happened? He's lost cases, he's been thrown out of court, he's been made a monkey of repeatedly, and right now he's in danger of losing his ability to make legal war on the media for good.
Just ignore him. He'll be back.
You've got it backwards. Patents are about exclusive control, not forced sharing. Once you have the patent, you have it for twenty years. Had Edison decided to be a total ass and refuse to let anybody else have light bulbs, it would have been his right as a patent holder. He could have strung his house up with lights until it shined like a tiny sun, and all you and I could do is sit and be jealous until the patent expired and anybody could sell light bulbs all they wanted. Yeah, he's a jerk. A jerk with electric lights. And you're a chump with a candle.
I particularly liked the part about new grass areas being added to the opposing faction lands. "This grass is exceptionally green."
This is how I've always made the distinction:
Eastern RPGs - and for that matter, a good chunk of western ones, too - give you a role to play. At best (i.e. the western RPGs like KOTOR and Jade Empire that are much closer to the console RPG style), you get to decide wether to be a nice guy or a jerk along the way.
Western RPGs - the breed of them that's truely dying, even in a world where KOTOR got game of the year - you're given a stage to play on. Everything else is up to you. I'm several hours into Oblivion right now. I'm not even sure if I'm on the main quest or not, but I love it anyway. The Ultima series are the only games I played much of that I can really compare to Elderscrolls in terms of sheer freedom.
I love that I can just blow off the main quest givers and go do whatever. Become an assassin, a thug, a knight in obligatory shining armor, (Or if I invest enough time raising my skills, all of the above), or just blow that stuff off and spend an hour picking flowers in a field.
Or even doing something completely pointlss and weird. In Morrowind once, I had a weekend off and nothing else to do, so I set about stealing every last spoon in the game (I think - I may have missed a few, but I had a good couple hundred of them), and then writing "I AM THE KING OF SPOONS" with them on the roof of the Underskar... Just because I could.
I was bored one time, made a spell that was stacked something like this:
100 Fire Damage On Target, Radius: 100
100 Frost Damage on Targe, Radius: 100
100 Thunder Damage on Target, Radius: 100
100 Poison Damage on Target, Radius: 100
Doubled over (You're allowed eight effects per spell). I should have called it "Oops" because the only time I cast it (and it took a good few Fortify Magicka potions just to get the mana pool to manage it), I broke the main quest and several faction chains in one blast.
Man, the tonka truck bit sorta sealed it. Anybody who couldn't figure out he was joking from that isn't smart enough to have bothered reading the comments after the big words in the article summary scared them off.
Slightly different idiom, I think it captures your point a bit better: Mind the wolf in the pasture. The packs roving beyond may never get in.
They should just drop the "online" part to stop people from asking that question. "Your Rights." Then, people will be asking, "Is this really MY rights? It sounds more like the guy in the article's rights."
Yes, it is. He went AFK. He wasn't there to respond to the GM whisper they do when they think you're botting. You want to split hairs, but both halves are bannable. Blizzard doesn't divide the specification between a bot, a script, a macro, or whatever, they ban all automation.
This is why the Decursive mod isn't fully automated anymore, and why the macro-delay function was made inaccessible by the UI. Anything that will allow you to perform N functions in less than N keystrokes/clicks hits Blizzard's definition of automation. Entire raids got banned for the use of the old Decursive, and that's even less automation than this guy had set up - all Decursive did was cast one debuff-removal spell over and over until deactivated. His setup could change his weapons, heal, buff, debuff, and initiate autoattack while he watched TV.
His reasonable explanation is an effective admission of guilt and a lot of dodging and clouding of the issue. He got what he asked for.
Exactly. After reading it, there's really no other possible explanation. I've used the same keyboard for WoW for months, and I've run it under WINE numerous times with no problem. Hell, Blizzard GAVE AWAY a logitech gaming keyboard a while back - they know what it is, it's not something new to them.
/w from a GM. If you respond in a timely manner, answer a couple questions, and speak English, no problem, they go away and apologize for inturrupting you. If he got banned, then he wasn't there to respond to the GM and he got banned.
Also, for unattended actions, they don't determine it by using WoW's ability to detect outside programs. Having once or twice triggered their bot detection myself, the first thing that happens is you get a little
Not just too late, but probably counterproductive. With the level of DRM Sony has hinted at in the past for the PS3, I think a lot of Slashdotters will consider the fact that Linux is facilitating it to be more of an insult than anything.
The collonial period is why the West has advanced so much faster than any civilization before it. The Chinese didn't expand, and eventually stagnated in their own beauracracy at home. The Arabs expanded slowly, and didn't progress that far - they moved into India and North Africa, but that was about it.
Europe, however, expanded with astonishing speed. From their emergence onto the world stage, it was less than two hundred years before they'd colonized the Americas. By the end of the 1800's, nearly the entire world was under some degree of control of European states. Even standing governments, like China, were being trivialized by European authority in their own lands. They had an immense amount of space to fill up, so their population exploded like nothing the world's seen in recorded history. Add in the American and French revolutions and the Napoleanic Wars, which between them sealed the fate of the old forms of government that had held civilizations back for thousands of years, upending the social order and replacing them with new and highly progress-driven governments.
The West managed to create a civilization that had a rapidly growing population, access to every resource they could ever want, plenty of space to grow, and a lot of available money (since most of the wealth was no longer going to the glorification of kings). Advancement was no longer something that just "happened" like it had in Arabia and China, it was an end unto itself that people spent their whole lives chasing.
Tell your buddy to pick a developer. Any developer. Do bad a bad preview on their next game, and see how many more you get to preview.
This is pretty much spot on... but Homeland Security? It is standard practice for unusually large payments like this to be reported to the IRS, who will usually snif around and ask where the money came from. They don't care if you stole it, just that you paid taxes on it - illegal income - including theft, drug sales, and bribes - must be declared as "self-employment" on your taxes.
If you make a large deposit into the bank, a large purchase in cash, or whatever, the IRS will likely come knocking - this happened to me after running almost $1500 in change through a coin counting machine at my bank.
The fact that Homeland Security is starting to get involved in this now could mean that DHS is trying to watch everybody as much as possible no matter who or what they are, or it could mean that DHS's powers are soo poorly and broadly defined that it's now become the default point of contact for the government "just in case."
Not only free, but usually better. I have a Starcraft strategy guide. Not sure WHY I bought it, but I did. It's got a run of errors in it that are almost entertaining. It's fairly clear that the guide was made using a beta copy, since it mentions Queens and Science Vessels having non-energy-based attacks, Firebats attacking air units, and the guide for one Terran mission guide even helpfully suggests lifting off your Refinery and moving it to a new base.
The guides on GameFAQs, when they fall THIS far out of date, either get updated, or replaced with newer and more accurate guides. You can always publish a new edition of a strategy guide, but that leaves the people who already bought one with a piece of garbage. GameFAQs, it's just a matter of going back and trying a different one.
A couple of times, a few local news outlets here (Usually WNEM CBS 5 and either the Saginaw News or WSMH Fox 66) will get into something like this. It gets rediculous quickly. 5 and 66 have been going back and forth on the Cheny shooting. 5 had hunters on explaining what safety rules Cheney was breaking, 66 had the local NRA president on explaining that Cheney did nothing wrong and it was his partner who was being unsafe. Then 5 has a gunshop owner on saying how he'd never sell Cheney a gun, and 66 has anotehr gunshop owner on who talked about how he shook hands with Cheney once and it was the greatest moment of his life. 5 has a bit on how gun safety regulations would have prevented the accident, and 66 has a bit on how 5 wants to take away our butter knives. At the last point I heard, 66 said there could have been a second gunman, possibly a liberal apologist who was trying to shoot the vice president.
No, it didn't say Denmark - it did say that the person could be in a coffee shop anywhere in the country, however.
Pretty good journalism if you compare it to what passes often. Here's a few recent stories from my local news channels:
WNEM 5: What they reported: "Detroit Police are detaining and arresting Christians for praying in the privacy of their own homes."
What happened: Two people, who were never specified to be Christian, "prayed" by laying down in crosswalks, accross doors - even in court while the judge was talking to them, and were arrested for disturbing the police and obstructing traffic.
WSMH 66: What they reported: "Deomcrats are contracting the terrorist defense of hour great country to Al Qaida!" (66 makes the national Fox News look liberal).
What happened: The President contracted several ports to a company from the middle east.
Saginaw News: What they reported: "Governor Granholm is having unshielded nuclear waste transported in open-air freight cars through the heart of Saginaw County!"
What actaully happened: Some steel was being shipped from Sault St. Marie to be used to make components for a nuclear reactor in Oregon. News also misreported the route, so about 50 people had to be restrained when they tried to picket a train full of corn.
By comparison, the DS article was relatively accurate. Their only mistake was that the predator has to be in the same room as your poor innocent vulnerable daughter, not accross the country in some seedy bar with wireless access.