You can sell the game, but if you do, you also transfer all rights under the EULA. This means you have to close your account, because you've given away the rights to own any account along with the game disc. The original user didn't do that (and possibly could still be playing with a burned disc, cracked client, or whatnot), so he's in violation of the EULA.
Rather than trying to get your money back, the first course of action would be to go to Blizzard with proof of the purchase and make the EULA work for you.
If you can remove or tamper with files like that, then there is some SERIOUS bad development in the game. EVERY MMO I've played checks the integrity of every data file before starting, and compared them against server-stored values. Any file that failed or was missing is redownloaded before you can log into the game. Try to hack a data file? It redownloads. Delete it? Redownloads. Random corruption? Redownloads.
Taking steps to prevent abuse in some, a few, or even most cases isn't enough. Especially not when they leave the best and most sought after in the abusable category. The game I mentioned, Ashen Empires, had, when I stopped playing, only one remaining static spawned boss - Mekklor the Balron, and there were all sorts of problems with people camping him. He drops the Symboled Blade of Destruction, which technically isn't an extremely rare item. On average, assumign Mekklor dies shortly after he spawns every time, around five of these swords will enter the game per day. Not really common, but exceeds a few lower rares that are worth a fraction as much. However, when all of those five end up in the hands of a single guild every time, a moderately rare sword becomes nonexistently rare. All it ended up taking was an elegantly simple fix and a change to his behavior, and suddenly camping him is almost a nonissue.
Actually, based on the posts I read above from FFXI players, they're more like that guy last baseball season who dove accross five rows of seats and kicked a five year old while grabing a foul ball from him.
It's the "It's just a game" mentality. When something is just a game, there are no consequences. Your actiond don't hurt anybody, and there are no hard feelings, nothing to be guilty about. It's pretty easy to be exceedingly cruel to a few pixels on the screen, even if you have a hard time bringing yourself to ask for an exchange when your new shirt ends up being the wrong size. The issues arise when those pixels on the screen are connected to a real person at the other end, some people treat them no differently than they would an NPC.
I'd made a bigger post just below about this, but there are also easy fixes for the other problems you've mentioned here that I hadn't known about making that post.
I covered in my other post that all static spawns invite abuse, and there are easy fixes for it, the simplest one being just using an area spawn instead of a static spawn.
As for monster dropping, there's a good counter that I don't why more games don't use: Simply limit the distance a mob will pursue a target. Every mob just stores the coordinates it spawned at, and will mill around when idle in that area. When engaged with a player, it will pursue them a longer distance, but will stop and turn back. It doesn't take all that much no-man's-land between spawns for this system to stop people from dragging mobs into a lower level area. Perhaps an even easier one would be "barrier" points that mobs won't cross that denote area spawn borders, but I can think of some possible (but moch more minor) exploits of that system as well.
The grandparent's point is that punishments are all well and good, but they can only be enacted after damage has been done. You can't ban an abuser who hasn't abused yet, and odds are an abuser can get away with considerable annoyance before he's caught. The system should be changed to prevent the grief tactics from working. Sure, the changes might introduce new problems, but it's a step in the right direction. Once the developers are willing to change the system instead of just changing the rules, they'll be more likely to change it in the future to prevent new abuses. Not only would player not have these problems anymore, but the GMs won't have to waste their time dealing with them constantly.
I've played a lot of MMOs (eight if memory serves, although I only play one of them regularly anymore), and I've found no reason to change my opinion regarding gameplay flaws: If the system is designed in such a way as to invite abuse, if it has a flaw that can be exploited, whatever, it has to be fixed.
Banning people isn't a solution. You can't ban an abuser until after he's abused. At that point, damage has been done to the game, in a sense. You can ban him as punishment for that damage, but the flaw is still there.
Somebody else will come along and do more damage. People will be inconvenienced by abusers, there will be misunderstandings and confusions, newbies will accidentally do something they didn't know they weren't supposed to, and abusers will fall through the cracks. No matter how many GMs you have, you can't get perfect coverage. GMs are human, and they make mistakes. And through all this, the system is still abusable, and there's a path for damage to be done to the game.
You have to change the system so that the abusable flaw, oversight, or just plain bad design is removed, and abusers can no longer cause damage.
I haven't played FFXI, but from the article and a couple posts I've read here, I can think of two ways this can be countered:
A. Get rid of the static spawn for unique mobs and shift to area spawns. One of my more recent MMOs was Ashen Empires, and it did this in most situations. The boss has an extended area that it could spawn in, so parties and soloers tend to spread out in that area and move around rather than camp (they still have a couple static spawns, and there are issues with people camping them. Things have been done to remedy that, as well, though, and other changes are probably on the way).
B. Dungeon instancing. Anarchy Online has a dynamic dungeon system that will basically allow a player to get a randomized dungeon whenever they want just by accepting a mission. The dungeon is tied to an item in the player's inventory instead of a door (so several dungeons can be extended off of a single entrance). Parties also have the added bonus of getting a "free" boss at the end of the dungeon. No camping, no loot or kill stealing (unless somebody in the party is an asswipe), no timing respawns.
AO's system also has an added bonus that after you kill the boss, you can't sit around and wait for it to respawn. You have to leave and start a new mission, and then you have to get to, and then fight through a new dungeon (Complete with a different layout, locked doors, mines, traps, and mobs) to get another boss fight.
The two aren't mutually exclusive either. General area spawns would make camping harder, and dynamic dungeons would draw people out of the currently overcrowded spawns.
You're not going to fix what does cause hunger without:
A. killing a LOT of people and causing a LOT of disruption in hunger-stricken areas. Even if those governments aren't distributing food properly, they are doing things like trying to keep people from running down the street shooting everybody.
B. Fundamentally changing human nature. Sorry, if threat of hell and promise of heaven by a thousand different prophets didn't do it, you're not going to.
Now, however, the idea of GM food for these areas is something that grows fast, requires minimal care, and can grow very densely and in poor soil. The vast majority of starving people in third world countries don't have enough space to grow enough food, and what they do have is not good quality. GM food would allow them to grow food for themselves in the conditions they have, breaking their governments' controll over the food supply, which is how a lot of two-bit regimes stay in power.
It also raises a risk. Like somebody said, the 419ers could easily redirect their domains onto whoever. Like the virus that DDOSed SCO. Somebody had suggested that SCO could simply redirect their domain to nothing to protect themselves, or even 127.0.0.1 so people with the virus end up flooding themselves, or worst of all, being truely evil and redirecting their domain onto Linux websites and DDOSing them.
Say I'm intentionally and knowingly running this program, and the 419ers redirect their domain to, say, whitehouse.gov. How strong do you think my defense is when I tell the judge, "I THOUGHT I was hacking idiots, not the president."
Ok, few things: First of all, ever notice how IE and Windows Explorer (the shell for the Windows operating system since win95) are functionally interchangeable? If an exploit gives you significant control over IE, it gives you that level of control over Windows as a whole. Firefox is separate from the operating system and doesn't have this level of integration. If you control Firefox, you control Firefox, not Windows. This doesn't mean its invincible, it just means less options for an attacker to use to wreck your system.
Next off, Firefox doesn't support AciveX (without plugins, which you shouldn't have anyway), which is the way just about all the worst malware gets itself into your system. There's an option to disable AciveX in IE, but it seems to do anything, since I've done it on computers and they still end up with shit like ISTBar, which is ActiveX.
Firefox doesn't let everything do whatever it wants. It could go farther in some places, but it does a good job of not letting websites screw with your computer. IE will let just about anything install just about anything if it asks permission, and 90% of users click Yes because if they click No, the box pops up two seconds later and won't let them do anything until they click Yes. Maybe they just installed Japanese Text support, maybe they just installed a dialer that sends their internet connection through a $55/minute line to Mongolia. Firefox just doesn't let programs do that.
Next, the open source advantage comes: Because lots of people have the source code, it is true that a hacker can use that code to find an exploit. However, a hacker can do the same thing without the source code. Look at Windows: Lack of source code hasn't slowed them down one bit hacking it, whereas with Linux, they have the source code and very rarely does a Linux system get hacked. When they do, it's almost always something that could have been easily prevented. On the other hand, there are far more developers than hackers looking at the code (and even many of the "hackers" are not the usual malicious type and are actually out to find holes that they might be patched), and they're also looking for holes. They find them, they fix them. Microsoft has a time delay. An exploit is reported, but then it has to be found by inside programmers. This means waiting until the next business day at least, and then limited man-hours to fix the problem.
Firefox, however, when the problem is found, there's a good chance the finder will have a fix. If not, no matter what time or day, there are lots of people who will take a look. The best analogy might be with a distributed computing network. Microsoft is like a supercomputer - lots of potential power, but there's only one of it, and it's not always running, since the programmers all live in the same place and sleep at the same times. Open source is like a distributed network. Not as much potential in any single location (Lots of single developers, instead of large-scale, well-funded firms like Microsoft), but there are a LOT of them. When half of them are asleep, the other half are up and about, so there's always somebody available to look at a problem.
Then there are intangible advantages: The developers of Firefox are strongly driven to make a browser that is so superior to Microsoft's in every aspect, many of them just for the sake of making Microsoft look bad. Microsoft hasn't had that kind of drive with IE in years, and it shows. Heck, I remember getting three or four major upgrades to IE in under a year and a half, but then for almost five years accross three computers, it's been just small patches here and there and the same otherwise.
Lastly, and probably least important: Firefox was made with good old 20/20 hindsight. They saw what was wrong with IE and how it was exploited and abused, and they rebuilt Mozilla from the ground up to counter those shortcommings.
None of this makes Firefox invincible, but it does make it much harder to break into than IE. Any way that is found to break Firefox will be something new, and probably something that hasn't been seen before anywhere.
Full rights for $15? On a show that costs millions? Sure, fine, give the fans rights. You'll still only have 0.005% ownership, since a couple million other people are paying for it too. That's like buying a share of Microsoft stock - ONE SHARE - and then claiming you own the company.
Not just "can't hit what you can't reach," but if we can jump around the solar system in reasonable amounts of time largely under our own power (rather than our current slingshot methods for reaching the outer planets), imagine the sort of mobility that could create closer to home if the technology and techniques were adapted.
Fourteen years? Nothing. Before my family, this house was owned by a man who died in 1956 (he'd only lived here for about three years after the house was built, and spent a good chunk of that in the hospital). To this day, despite the fact that the house has been owned by my grandparents and now my parents, we still get mail for that guy, mostly from his bank. We keep sending it back now. My parents spent a good eight years trying to track down his family to send the mail to, but didn't find anything. The house number is even different now, due to a lot just a few down the street being split by eminent domain to put in a cross street about thirty years ago (shifted all the numbers on our side of the street by one for some reason).
It's also not a big invasion of privacy in any attempt to stop this (M-rated games, porn, or alcohol and tobacco sales to minors for that matter). I guess slashdotters don't drink, smoke, or buy porn, because you just flash your driver's license. It takes a quarter of a second if the clerk is slow, and all they care about is the picture and the birth date. Michigan makes it a step easier. If you're under 21, you're issued a different driver's license that has the dates you turn 18 and 21 on it, with the picture and numbers turned 90 degrees on it. If you produce a standard license, few places care and they don't usually check. If you have the "sideways" minor's license, they check the dates printed in bold red type down at the bottom.
Well, if it were finished it would have biolabs and engineering labs and nanotech labs and a bigass scaffolding thing outside where we can practice orbital assembly techniques and oh, Jesus, I forget all the cool stuff they were going to put up on the ISS that I was so excited to see.
But, yeah, the way they've left it now it pretty much just breaks all the time.
Not like the do-not-call list is worth shit anyway. It hasn't even slowed down the calls we get, and so far, no amount of complaining and filling out those stupid forms has gotten anything done about it. It's mostly comming from Georgia and Florida area codes, with a few comming from southern Michigan. I don't think we've gotten any international phonespam yet, but I guess it's just a matter of time.
If I remember correctly, the crew compartment is supposed to be able to survive and land independent of the shuttle itself. The only thing is, it can't handle reentry.
As for sticking an escape pod: A Soyuz capsule carries three people, correct? A bit over half of it is dumped just before reentry, so let's say for the sake of argument you can put the six-man crew into something the size of a Soyuz capsule. That's still a remarkable chunk of the cargo bay, meaning that things as large as the Hubble, or most of the planned ISS modules won't fit.
All this really adds up to yet another reason that they should really be scrapping the shuttle and making something new. They'd probably end up with a much more reliable system than just strapping yet another set of new parts to the old one.
Actually, they could get that sort of realism from metal plates. They were used for burning images into wood quite commonly, and with beautiful results. Cloth is a bit trickier, since it'll burn faster than solid wood and you have to be careful not to actually light it on fire, but it should work if you have plenty of water on hand. You can do the same thing with a cheese sandwitch if you're up for a fun challenge (I have a nice little piece I made in high school shop class that you can put in a frying pan and get a pretty cool Decepticon logo on one. Not entirely safe to eat, since it's cut from cheap black iron, but I imagine steel or titanium can give the same result without the metal poisoning. I'm not saying anybody would sell something like this on ebay, but you never know)
The fact that it was discovered in Central Europe by a noble family and then sold - at great profit - to a monastary casts great doubt on it, in my opinion. All the relics associted with the death of Jesus, including the rags that were used to wipe his wounds, his cross and those of the people crucified with him, the robe taken from him were all destroyed in an invasion by an Arab king (Pre-Islamic, howver, aroudn 150 AD, if I remember history class right), except a piece of the cross, which was held for ransom and later burned whent he ransom was not forthcomming. If his burian shroud was kept, it was most likely among the relics destroyed then.
Anyway, the image is burned into the cloth (the two burn marks on it are separate, it was partially destroyed in a fire not long after its discovery). The leading belief among the clergy of the time it was discovered was that it was created by placing hot metal plates onto the cloth.
Even if microsoft were losing money on that sale, they're still benefiting. More sales means much more reason to say that the system is appraoching profitability, meaning more string to draw in investors.
People would stop hording them, but they'd still have value. When you re-issue currency (or a video game, car model, or whatever), you create an "original issue" and a "remake/imitation/etc" second issue. A 1933 Buick isn't as valuable as you'd think, because while they only made around a half dozen of them originally (most of GM's production was being used to produce military vehicles, only a few shops were building cars on special order), they reissued the model later and made a number of them after the war. The originals are some of the most expensive classic cars you can find, but the reissue is worth a fraction as much.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux developers strive to make Microsoft look bad, not to make Linux a better system.
[Every damn business in world history] is only trying to make profit, because that's what businesses do, not make/sell/provide a product/service.
Hospitals save lives because health care services bring massive profit margins, not because it saves lives.
People donate to charity so they can feel/act/look like better people and/or pay less on their taxes, not to help the disadvantaged.
I just swatted that fly because it was pissing me off, not to stop it from pissing somebody else off or spreading some kind of disease or something.
The argument doesn't work. Not getting sued and not burning down houses is the same thing by any measurable purpose, regardless of who's doing it.
You can sell the game, but if you do, you also transfer all rights under the EULA. This means you have to close your account, because you've given away the rights to own any account along with the game disc. The original user didn't do that (and possibly could still be playing with a burned disc, cracked client, or whatnot), so he's in violation of the EULA.
Rather than trying to get your money back, the first course of action would be to go to Blizzard with proof of the purchase and make the EULA work for you.
If you can remove or tamper with files like that, then there is some SERIOUS bad development in the game. EVERY MMO I've played checks the integrity of every data file before starting, and compared them against server-stored values. Any file that failed or was missing is redownloaded before you can log into the game. Try to hack a data file? It redownloads. Delete it? Redownloads. Random corruption? Redownloads.
Taking steps to prevent abuse in some, a few, or even most cases isn't enough. Especially not when they leave the best and most sought after in the abusable category. The game I mentioned, Ashen Empires, had, when I stopped playing, only one remaining static spawned boss - Mekklor the Balron, and there were all sorts of problems with people camping him. He drops the Symboled Blade of Destruction, which technically isn't an extremely rare item. On average, assumign Mekklor dies shortly after he spawns every time, around five of these swords will enter the game per day. Not really common, but exceeds a few lower rares that are worth a fraction as much. However, when all of those five end up in the hands of a single guild every time, a moderately rare sword becomes nonexistently rare. All it ended up taking was an elegantly simple fix and a change to his behavior, and suddenly camping him is almost a nonissue.
Actually, based on the posts I read above from FFXI players, they're more like that guy last baseball season who dove accross five rows of seats and kicked a five year old while grabing a foul ball from him.
It's the "It's just a game" mentality. When something is just a game, there are no consequences. Your actiond don't hurt anybody, and there are no hard feelings, nothing to be guilty about. It's pretty easy to be exceedingly cruel to a few pixels on the screen, even if you have a hard time bringing yourself to ask for an exchange when your new shirt ends up being the wrong size. The issues arise when those pixels on the screen are connected to a real person at the other end, some people treat them no differently than they would an NPC.
I'd made a bigger post just below about this, but there are also easy fixes for the other problems you've mentioned here that I hadn't known about making that post.
I covered in my other post that all static spawns invite abuse, and there are easy fixes for it, the simplest one being just using an area spawn instead of a static spawn.
As for monster dropping, there's a good counter that I don't why more games don't use: Simply limit the distance a mob will pursue a target. Every mob just stores the coordinates it spawned at, and will mill around when idle in that area. When engaged with a player, it will pursue them a longer distance, but will stop and turn back. It doesn't take all that much no-man's-land between spawns for this system to stop people from dragging mobs into a lower level area. Perhaps an even easier one would be "barrier" points that mobs won't cross that denote area spawn borders, but I can think of some possible (but moch more minor) exploits of that system as well.
The grandparent's point is that punishments are all well and good, but they can only be enacted after damage has been done. You can't ban an abuser who hasn't abused yet, and odds are an abuser can get away with considerable annoyance before he's caught. The system should be changed to prevent the grief tactics from working. Sure, the changes might introduce new problems, but it's a step in the right direction. Once the developers are willing to change the system instead of just changing the rules, they'll be more likely to change it in the future to prevent new abuses. Not only would player not have these problems anymore, but the GMs won't have to waste their time dealing with them constantly.
I've played a lot of MMOs (eight if memory serves, although I only play one of them regularly anymore), and I've found no reason to change my opinion regarding gameplay flaws: If the system is designed in such a way as to invite abuse, if it has a flaw that can be exploited, whatever, it has to be fixed.
Banning people isn't a solution. You can't ban an abuser until after he's abused. At that point, damage has been done to the game, in a sense. You can ban him as punishment for that damage, but the flaw is still there.
Somebody else will come along and do more damage. People will be inconvenienced by abusers, there will be misunderstandings and confusions, newbies will accidentally do something they didn't know they weren't supposed to, and abusers will fall through the cracks. No matter how many GMs you have, you can't get perfect coverage. GMs are human, and they make mistakes. And through all this, the system is still abusable, and there's a path for damage to be done to the game.
You have to change the system so that the abusable flaw, oversight, or just plain bad design is removed, and abusers can no longer cause damage.
I haven't played FFXI, but from the article and a couple posts I've read here, I can think of two ways this can be countered:
A. Get rid of the static spawn for unique mobs and shift to area spawns. One of my more recent MMOs was Ashen Empires, and it did this in most situations. The boss has an extended area that it could spawn in, so parties and soloers tend to spread out in that area and move around rather than camp (they still have a couple static spawns, and there are issues with people camping them. Things have been done to remedy that, as well, though, and other changes are probably on the way).
B. Dungeon instancing. Anarchy Online has a dynamic dungeon system that will basically allow a player to get a randomized dungeon whenever they want just by accepting a mission. The dungeon is tied to an item in the player's inventory instead of a door (so several dungeons can be extended off of a single entrance). Parties also have the added bonus of getting a "free" boss at the end of the dungeon. No camping, no loot or kill stealing (unless somebody in the party is an asswipe), no timing respawns.
AO's system also has an added bonus that after you kill the boss, you can't sit around and wait for it to respawn. You have to leave and start a new mission, and then you have to get to, and then fight through a new dungeon (Complete with a different layout, locked doors, mines, traps, and mobs) to get another boss fight.
The two aren't mutually exclusive either. General area spawns would make camping harder, and dynamic dungeons would draw people out of the currently overcrowded spawns.
Not just the US. In a couple European companies, chainsaws have to bear a notice to "Keep hair and genitals away from blade while in use"
You're not going to fix what does cause hunger without:
A. killing a LOT of people and causing a LOT of disruption in hunger-stricken areas. Even if those governments aren't distributing food properly, they are doing things like trying to keep people from running down the street shooting everybody.
B. Fundamentally changing human nature. Sorry, if threat of hell and promise of heaven by a thousand different prophets didn't do it, you're not going to.
Now, however, the idea of GM food for these areas is something that grows fast, requires minimal care, and can grow very densely and in poor soil. The vast majority of starving people in third world countries don't have enough space to grow enough food, and what they do have is not good quality. GM food would allow them to grow food for themselves in the conditions they have, breaking their governments' controll over the food supply, which is how a lot of two-bit regimes stay in power.
It also raises a risk. Like somebody said, the 419ers could easily redirect their domains onto whoever. Like the virus that DDOSed SCO. Somebody had suggested that SCO could simply redirect their domain to nothing to protect themselves, or even 127.0.0.1 so people with the virus end up flooding themselves, or worst of all, being truely evil and redirecting their domain onto Linux websites and DDOSing them.
Say I'm intentionally and knowingly running this program, and the 419ers redirect their domain to, say, whitehouse.gov. How strong do you think my defense is when I tell the judge, "I THOUGHT I was hacking idiots, not the president."
Grand Theft Auto
Ok, few things: First of all, ever notice how IE and Windows Explorer (the shell for the Windows operating system since win95) are functionally interchangeable? If an exploit gives you significant control over IE, it gives you that level of control over Windows as a whole. Firefox is separate from the operating system and doesn't have this level of integration. If you control Firefox, you control Firefox, not Windows. This doesn't mean its invincible, it just means less options for an attacker to use to wreck your system.
Next off, Firefox doesn't support AciveX (without plugins, which you shouldn't have anyway), which is the way just about all the worst malware gets itself into your system. There's an option to disable AciveX in IE, but it seems to do anything, since I've done it on computers and they still end up with shit like ISTBar, which is ActiveX.
Firefox doesn't let everything do whatever it wants. It could go farther in some places, but it does a good job of not letting websites screw with your computer. IE will let just about anything install just about anything if it asks permission, and 90% of users click Yes because if they click No, the box pops up two seconds later and won't let them do anything until they click Yes. Maybe they just installed Japanese Text support, maybe they just installed a dialer that sends their internet connection through a $55/minute line to Mongolia. Firefox just doesn't let programs do that.
Next, the open source advantage comes: Because lots of people have the source code, it is true that a hacker can use that code to find an exploit. However, a hacker can do the same thing without the source code. Look at Windows: Lack of source code hasn't slowed them down one bit hacking it, whereas with Linux, they have the source code and very rarely does a Linux system get hacked. When they do, it's almost always something that could have been easily prevented. On the other hand, there are far more developers than hackers looking at the code (and even many of the "hackers" are not the usual malicious type and are actually out to find holes that they might be patched), and they're also looking for holes. They find them, they fix them. Microsoft has a time delay. An exploit is reported, but then it has to be found by inside programmers. This means waiting until the next business day at least, and then limited man-hours to fix the problem.
Firefox, however, when the problem is found, there's a good chance the finder will have a fix. If not, no matter what time or day, there are lots of people who will take a look. The best analogy might be with a distributed computing network. Microsoft is like a supercomputer - lots of potential power, but there's only one of it, and it's not always running, since the programmers all live in the same place and sleep at the same times. Open source is like a distributed network. Not as much potential in any single location (Lots of single developers, instead of large-scale, well-funded firms like Microsoft), but there are a LOT of them. When half of them are asleep, the other half are up and about, so there's always somebody available to look at a problem.
Then there are intangible advantages: The developers of Firefox are strongly driven to make a browser that is so superior to Microsoft's in every aspect, many of them just for the sake of making Microsoft look bad. Microsoft hasn't had that kind of drive with IE in years, and it shows. Heck, I remember getting three or four major upgrades to IE in under a year and a half, but then for almost five years accross three computers, it's been just small patches here and there and the same otherwise.
Lastly, and probably least important: Firefox was made with good old 20/20 hindsight. They saw what was wrong with IE and how it was exploited and abused, and they rebuilt Mozilla from the ground up to counter those shortcommings.
None of this makes Firefox invincible, but it does make it much harder to break into than IE. Any way that is found to break Firefox will be something new, and probably something that hasn't been seen before anywhere.
Full rights for $15? On a show that costs millions? Sure, fine, give the fans rights. You'll still only have 0.005% ownership, since a couple million other people are paying for it too. That's like buying a share of Microsoft stock - ONE SHARE - and then claiming you own the company.
Not just "can't hit what you can't reach," but if we can jump around the solar system in reasonable amounts of time largely under our own power (rather than our current slingshot methods for reaching the outer planets), imagine the sort of mobility that could create closer to home if the technology and techniques were adapted.
Fourteen years? Nothing. Before my family, this house was owned by a man who died in 1956 (he'd only lived here for about three years after the house was built, and spent a good chunk of that in the hospital). To this day, despite the fact that the house has been owned by my grandparents and now my parents, we still get mail for that guy, mostly from his bank. We keep sending it back now. My parents spent a good eight years trying to track down his family to send the mail to, but didn't find anything. The house number is even different now, due to a lot just a few down the street being split by eminent domain to put in a cross street about thirty years ago (shifted all the numbers on our side of the street by one for some reason).
It's also not a big invasion of privacy in any attempt to stop this (M-rated games, porn, or alcohol and tobacco sales to minors for that matter). I guess slashdotters don't drink, smoke, or buy porn, because you just flash your driver's license. It takes a quarter of a second if the clerk is slow, and all they care about is the picture and the birth date. Michigan makes it a step easier. If you're under 21, you're issued a different driver's license that has the dates you turn 18 and 21 on it, with the picture and numbers turned 90 degrees on it. If you produce a standard license, few places care and they don't usually check. If you have the "sideways" minor's license, they check the dates printed in bold red type down at the bottom.
Well, if it were finished it would have biolabs and engineering labs and nanotech labs and a bigass scaffolding thing outside where we can practice orbital assembly techniques and oh, Jesus, I forget all the cool stuff they were going to put up on the ISS that I was so excited to see.
But, yeah, the way they've left it now it pretty much just breaks all the time.
Not like the do-not-call list is worth shit anyway. It hasn't even slowed down the calls we get, and so far, no amount of complaining and filling out those stupid forms has gotten anything done about it. It's mostly comming from Georgia and Florida area codes, with a few comming from southern Michigan. I don't think we've gotten any international phonespam yet, but I guess it's just a matter of time.
If I remember correctly, the crew compartment is supposed to be able to survive and land independent of the shuttle itself. The only thing is, it can't handle reentry. As for sticking an escape pod: A Soyuz capsule carries three people, correct? A bit over half of it is dumped just before reentry, so let's say for the sake of argument you can put the six-man crew into something the size of a Soyuz capsule. That's still a remarkable chunk of the cargo bay, meaning that things as large as the Hubble, or most of the planned ISS modules won't fit. All this really adds up to yet another reason that they should really be scrapping the shuttle and making something new. They'd probably end up with a much more reliable system than just strapping yet another set of new parts to the old one.
Actually, they could get that sort of realism from metal plates. They were used for burning images into wood quite commonly, and with beautiful results. Cloth is a bit trickier, since it'll burn faster than solid wood and you have to be careful not to actually light it on fire, but it should work if you have plenty of water on hand. You can do the same thing with a cheese sandwitch if you're up for a fun challenge (I have a nice little piece I made in high school shop class that you can put in a frying pan and get a pretty cool Decepticon logo on one. Not entirely safe to eat, since it's cut from cheap black iron, but I imagine steel or titanium can give the same result without the metal poisoning. I'm not saying anybody would sell something like this on ebay, but you never know)
The fact that it was discovered in Central Europe by a noble family and then sold - at great profit - to a monastary casts great doubt on it, in my opinion. All the relics associted with the death of Jesus, including the rags that were used to wipe his wounds, his cross and those of the people crucified with him, the robe taken from him were all destroyed in an invasion by an Arab king (Pre-Islamic, howver, aroudn 150 AD, if I remember history class right), except a piece of the cross, which was held for ransom and later burned whent he ransom was not forthcomming. If his burian shroud was kept, it was most likely among the relics destroyed then. Anyway, the image is burned into the cloth (the two burn marks on it are separate, it was partially destroyed in a fire not long after its discovery). The leading belief among the clergy of the time it was discovered was that it was created by placing hot metal plates onto the cloth.
Even if microsoft were losing money on that sale, they're still benefiting. More sales means much more reason to say that the system is appraoching profitability, meaning more string to draw in investors.
People would stop hording them, but they'd still have value. When you re-issue currency (or a video game, car model, or whatever), you create an "original issue" and a "remake/imitation/etc" second issue. A 1933 Buick isn't as valuable as you'd think, because while they only made around a half dozen of them originally (most of GM's production was being used to produce military vehicles, only a few shops were building cars on special order), they reissued the model later and made a number of them after the war. The originals are some of the most expensive classic cars you can find, but the reissue is worth a fraction as much.
Good point.