They were uncontrolled, but not OUT of control. They continued on fairly stable paths diverging slightly outward from the shuttle's path. Even considering that they'd had a massive tank of liquid rocket fuel explode right next to them, they not only survived, but didn't even lose stability from what damage they took.
The escape mechanism mentioned in the article is worth remembering too. Remember, when Challenger blew up, three objects survived - both SRBs and the forward section of the shuttle itself, which is believed to have had at least part of the crew alive inside. Had the shuttle been equipped with an escape rocket (Which the Gemini, Appollo, and Soyuz capsules all were/are, and like the system shown in the article will), at least part of the Challenger crew may have survived.
But, the fundamental "airplane" design made that impossible or extremely expensive, and it was never done, even after Challenger.
I have a relative who practices family law here in Michigan. He tells me all sorts of stories, "To keep you from becomming a lawyer and hating your life."
My favorite one is of a lawyer in his firm who ran afoul of the Bar on a minor charge that, at worst, would have meant a fine or possible suspension. He wrote a letter infinitely more professional than JT here has, but in it, he made a comment that a memer of the Bar construed to be a threat of action against the Bar, and he was permanantly disbarred as a result.
There's no secret, though. By putting them in stores, the secret is out already. Stealing a display model a few weeks before release isn't like stealing a test rig months before release.
Certainly, one will get stolen. Probably more than one. Probably by enterprising Wal-Mart employees before by hooligan kids. But they aren't really gaining anything by getting ahold of a finalized system with launch looming. They'll sell it on eBay for an ungodly sum, and then in a while when everybody else gets the same thing at $400, that person who just spent $1000 on one is going to look very silly.
Take it like Halo 2. The launch date was broken, and a few copies were sold several days early. People were paying $120 for them on eBay, and guess what? Three days later it was out and absolutely anybody who wanted it had it for $50. Sure, it pissed off Microsoft, but in the end, it's not going to show us anything we didn't already know.
They're refuting him, but where? Who's hearing it? It isn't on CNN. Jack sure was, just days ago. No instigation of argument that CNN does with every religious or political opinion they invite to speak by bringing in their most dire opponents or even anchors playing devil's advocate. Nothing. Unfettered slander by Jack Thompson, presented as fact and Jack himself being called an insider and expert in the industry.
Where is the industry's rebuttal? Where? Not on CNN. Not on Fox. Not on CBS or ABC or NBC. It's on gaming websites, certainly. The video game industry is getting their rebuttal out there TO GAMERS. They're litterally preaching to the choir. We don't need convincing, and they aren't reaching those that do need it.
What kind of "rightist" are you, though? Jack Thompson's the new breed of rightist, just like Bush (But thankfully, still unlike a good chunk of the Republican party). Twenty years ago, extremist evangelical Christians who said the way to "conquer" America was to get a stranglehold on the Republican party. God-invoking figures like Jack Thompson, George W. Bush, and for that matter even Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Leiberman are the result of their attempts to do so.
Face it: This is the new face of the right wing. Cheny, Barcia, Powel, McCain, those people are becoming relics rapidly. Barcia's already gone from Congress, replaced by the Christian Right, McCain has probably given up hope for being president, Powel became fed up with what the right has become and left the cabinet, and it looks like Cheny's going to take the fall hard for the spy scandal.
It's all well and good to say what conservatives are SUPPOSED to be, but there are scant few of them left anymore. It's all well and good to say what Christians are SUPPOSED to be, but many of them have stopped reading the New Testament because Leviticus lets them increase their standing in God's eyes by persecuting others. It's great to say what Liberals SHOULD be and pull up great names like Kennedy and Roosevelt, but we've got to face it too: Liberals aren't what they're "supposed" to be anymore either.
I've played RO. WoW, though, is a bit more active. The gameplay is just too varied. Every class functions quite differently, and most of them have a number of variations in their talent builds that also effect their play a lot.
Just for an example: My main is a rogue. He's assassination/subtlty, and uses daggers. With this, winning a fight is all about getting the jump, building a combo quickly, and getting a big finishing move. I do 80% of the damage in the first and last hits of a fight. However, my friend is a rogue with combat talents instead, and he uses swords. He does much more sustained damage. Like me, 40% of his damage is in the last hit, but the rest is spread out evenly rather than focused in one big hit like mine. Another guildmate of mine is the (very rare) mace-wielding combat rogue, and his strategy is all about stunning. He does lower damage than both of the other versions, but his target spends half the fight unconscious.
Blizzard used Diablo 2 as a dress-rehearsal for an MMORPG. They learned how to prevent bots from working, and at the same time make an infinitely less boring MMORPG than most of the rest. Granted, they only have ten classes, but each one has three quite different playstyles. Sometimes diametrically opposed: Holy priests are all about protection and healing, Shadow priests are all about weakening and damage. There's just a lot more variation to deal with in making a bot.
Even then, the monsters are more varied than I ever saw in Everquest. Even as a rogue, which is one of the more straightforward and simplistic classes to play, I have four different ways to go through combat, depending on what I'm fighting. Low armor stuff, Ambush, sinister strike up a combo, finish with eviscerate. Low hp stuff, ambush, SS, and Slice and Dice for the speed buff to start out my next fight. High armor stuff, cheapshot, SS for the combo, kidney punch, loop around behind, double backstab, finish the combo with gouge and backstab again, then eviscerate for the (probable) kill.
Sure, you probably can make a bot for WoW, but with so many different combinations to deal with, it can get mind boggling. I've got decent experience with four classes, and if I didn't decide to stop typing after this paragraph, I could easily give you over 100 different combat strategies just from those, not counting the fact that many dungeon bosses require specially tailored strategies to fight - if you go into a fight with Onyxia the way you would with Random World Spawn Mob #26, you could end up getting your entire party killed in the first 5 minutes, even if they know what they're doing.
I suspect it came after their initial problems with the book publisher. They brought a businessman onboard to keep things straight. I'd bet he incorporated the whole place a while ago. At the very latest, it would have been a couple years ago when they took down the donation box.
None at all is the last kind of attention we should give him. Why? Becuase he's getting a LOT of sympathetic attention, and has for nigh on twenty years now. And because of that, he's managed to hurt the entertainment industry. Not much, but he has won victories. That's called precedent, and it means he will tend to win MORE victories.
He's already in the public eye, but currently, the public eye is not seeing how bad this man is. They haven't seen his nebulous threats of legal action against just about everybody in sight. They haven't seen him resort to childish namecalling in a discussion with a 14 year old child. They haven't seen the fact that the organization he's been invoking as supporters for years want nothing to do with him, or the fact that he's been throwing nebulous threats of legal action at them as a result. Outside of the gaming community, not many people know that he challenged the video game industry to rise to even more grotesque levels of debauchery than they ever have, and even moreso to direct that violent imagery against depictions of themselves. They didn't see him promise $10,000 to charity if they did. They didn't see him bragging of the check filled in and resorting to more childish namecalling.
Most importantly, they didn't see him then renig on his promise. They didn't see him refuse to give money he'd promised to charity. They haven't seen two gamers step up and have the balls to do what he promised to do, at their own expense. Much less, they have not seen that these two gamers have raised fifty times this much for charity over the last to years. And most importantly, they haven't seen him go into a rage, intimidate police, slander those two gamers, threaten more vague legal action and even send them letters to them which could be construed quite understandably as threats of physical harm.
Remember, this is a person the public has seen on TV. The person who's lie that Doom caused the Colombine massacre was so widely spread and believed that it's hard to tell that it was even a lie to begin with anymore. This is a person who has been lying to the public more than any US president, ever.
I have the same problem, and I have a solution that's actually quite productive. Take the hit and sell green drops on the cheap.
The place to make your money is on consumable items. Cloth is the easiest one, because every profession uses it, plus the reputation turnins. It's easy to get 100 runecloth in a day or two and throw it up at 4g a stack depending on time of day and server. Mithril is another easy one that can pull 5g for a stack of 20 bars. Leather is decent, too, since most professions use at least a little bit of it.
When you get those green drops, they tend to be harder to sell. I usually cut my price low, especially with off-class stuff (cloth with strength and agility, for example), so even if you can't get it sold for equipment, enchanters will snatch it up for reagents. You can even take up enchanting yourself and burn all those drops and sell reagents or enchants yourself.
The farmers do this too, granted, but there's a catch: Equipment, you can't sell over and over to the same people. If you have 10 level 30 swords, you'll need 10 level 30 sword users to buy them all up. If you have 10 stacks of cloth, it's a good chance you'll sell them all at once to the same person buying it in bulk.
They're doing quite well. it's been intermittently down for a while, but I was able to bring it up with a couple refreshes. They get 2 million plus hits a day, from what I've read, and this shit really hit the fan on a Tuesday, which helps. No new comic today, so more room for extra hits.
This is the same thing I discovered a few years ago. I went to Washington DC with a group of seven or eight other students at my school. We just had to visit the ESPN zone's immense basement arcade. They sell you a card rather than just putting money into the machines. It's great until your card comes up "Insufficient credit" and you realize you just blew $25 on 15 minutes of fun.
I'd love it if a snack company would sponsor my D&D or LAN parties. When you have a group of people who will live on one meal a day for three days when they know somebody else is paying for the potato chips on Friday, it gets rediculous. We used to draw straws to see who had to be stuck as the cleric, now we have two short straws. One is the cleric, one has to drive to the party store every thirty goddamn minutes.
There were some numbers, I think posted here on Slasdhot, regarding the trend in crime rates. Some coincidences in there that really look good for the video game industry.
For starters, in the late 80's and early 90's, crime among minors was in decline, but was increasing in people over 18. There was a big drop that seemed to coincide uncannily with the release of the Playstation that affected both minors and the 18-35 age group, which was the start of the decline in crime that's still continuing today. The Playstation was also a big boon for the industry - it got a lot of young people who had missed out on Nintendo and Super Nintendo into games, and did a lot to bring adults (mainly people like me who felt they'd had grown out of their Nintendos) into gaming as well. So around the time that young adults got into video games in earnest, crime rate in young adults was on the decline.
The only age group that had actually shown an increase in crime was over 50. 35-50 showed little change, but 50+ had increased quite a bit from 1995 to 2005. This also happens to be the age group that plays the least amount of video games, watches less TV, watches less movies, and listens to the least modern music.
Faster CPUs matter too. As bandwidth increases (say, gigabit speeds), it reaches a point at which the computers become the limiting factor in network throughput, not the pipe. What good is having a 5 gpbs line to your house when your computer chokes on 500 mbps or so? That's a lot of wasted boobage.
I have heard this many times before, but have yet to see references from which these facts are gleaned. Simply put, could they leave? Did they have freedom to do or go as they pleased?
Not as they pleased so much. "Slaves" of the time were usually either too poor to support themselves, and instead worked for food and shelter, or debtors to rich landowners unable to pay back their debts, who instead work for the landowner.
However, the bible does make mention of slaves being dismissed from service, and makes clear that this was a bad thing for the slave. They'd be left without money, food, or shelter and likely still owing their former slaver money.
Biblical-era slaves could own property, as well. Jesus used this example in a number of his stories - a slaver forgiving the debt of a debted slave and relieving him from service, while the slave himself refuses to forgive the debt of a subordinate slave (Also raises the interesting point that slaves could have slaves). When it comes down to it, Biblical slaves were more like early-American indentured servants. They were effectively slaves, but were not owned, but worked without pay to clear a debt.
One could just as easily argue that american slaves were paid in food and shelter, that wouldn't make it any less repugnant.
However, as covered, a Biblical-era slave owned himself. All other things equal, they still had a good deal of their dignity.
In fact, if it was so desireable of a lifestyle, why were the jews so up and ready to get out of egypt (which I seriously doubt was ever the case anyway)?
Different situation. The Jews were prisoners taken by conquest and used as slave labor, and were probably treated as poorly as American slaves. The rules they imposed regarding the condition of their own slaves was partly a result of their ordeal in slavery.
At best, your argument illustrates more that we should be taking a serious look at how to make "border hoppers" less like slaves, than throwing up our hands and saying, "Sometimes, slavery just ain't that bad."
Well, that's an oversimplification. The word "slavery" just isn't always used in the same context. The first slaves used in North America were natives. They were litterally "harvested" in raids on villages and usually worked to death, either by exaustion, malnutrition, or disease. Black slaves were a big step up, and were kept healthy and alive. They were about equal to livestock - if you kept them healthy, you wouldn't have to buy more, you could make your own. Very different situations, but both still called slavery.
The slavery in the biblical era was another different thing. The Egyptians kept Jewish slaves in conditions comparable with black slaves, but they were taken more akin to the Indian slaves - captured as prisoners of war. The Jews had constraints on who and how you could take somebody as a slave. Some of them were probably comparable to black American slaves, but many of them (The ones the bible and other historical writings mention the most) were really only slaves by modern translation. The term doesn't apply in it's normal context.
Another type of slavery happened in Greece. In Sparta, slaves formed a part of the army, like disposable shock troops. In other Greek cities, the city would have a slave labor pool of sorts, and citizens could lease them for household work, and slaves were usually eligible for freedom and eventually citizenship, after a certain age or time in service.
In Rome, most Gladiators were slaves by name, but they were the biggest celebrities of the age. The most popular gladiators set the standards of sexiness and lived the fast life of wine and women you'd expect of a modern day rockstar.
Well, those 12-man teams almost certainly are from long-time MC guilds, decked out in MC if not BWL-level epic gear. The difference between a self-equipped level 60, or even a level 60 equipped from the endgame 5 and 10 man instances, and a level 60 in raid gear is immense. The stories you read about 15 and 20 man raids taking down onyxia are the same thing - hardcore pros in the best gear there is.
This mess hit Orgrimar AND undercity (thanks to somebody getting infected while they were waiting for a mage to open a portal for them) on my server. While it was particularly bad, and a lot of people were just chatting idly in general chat while waiting for it to die down before they rezed, somebody had an idea of getting a big mass of people and trying to keep the plague active through them all the way to Ironforge or Stormwind and spreading the plague there.
Couldn't get enough people organized to maintain it, we didn't even manage to get it accross ont he zeplins. Wouldn't have mattered, with a 5:1 Alliance:Horde ratio on our server, Ironforge was getting it FAR worse already.
Mine wiped on the first encounter. Never saw a boss. Reminded me of our first MC runs. Wiped on the first pull four or five times a night for about two weeks before we got past it.
I wouldn't say you suck, ZG is a really hard instance. It's easily equal to Molten Core, if you account for the smaller group size. It'll be a few months before people have it down to a science. Heck, look at Blackwing Lair, nobody's beat Nefarion yet (If I remember right, nobody's even seen him yet. The boss before him has proven nigh unbeatable as yet).
I tried that, and it didn't work. Also, if you're under level 20, this curse is almost instant death anyway, and that's one of the biggest worries.
They'll figure out a fix. This is really no different than the hunter/warlock Living Bomb exploit - Get Baron Geddon to cast Living Bomb on your pet, dismiss it, and then recall it again when you get to a populated area and wait a few seconds. Pet goes boom, and nearly everybody in the area of effect dies. In that case, they just made pets immune to Living Bomb. It proved impossible to get a player back to Orgrimar while under the effect, and it's really not worth a guild's time to raid half of Molten Core just to be cockmongers in Orgrimar for ten seconds.
I think they're going to end up making the solution more complex than it has to be. Not the first time Blizzard's done that. A really simple one I see is having town-teleport spells like mage portals and hearthstones clear DoTs. I assume they're using a mage portal to get the plague to Orgrimar, anyway. The duration is too short for a hearthstone. It wouldn't be abusable really, since regardless of what's going on where you teleport from, you're teleporting into a noncombat area.
Not only Doom3. World of Warcraft had the collectors edition in a tin box at launch. Both Lunar games had special editions on the Sega CD and Playstation that came in tins with some extra junk. I could keep going, too. A lot of big-name games have special editions packed in tin boxes. Heck, I have a stack of those tins that AOL used to put their CDs in that I use as coasters and objects of wrath (They make a very satisfying noise if you throw them against a brick wall hard enough, without the potential mess and shrapnel you get doing the same thing with the CD itself).
I could see if they said Microsfot had stolen their box art, but this article sounds more to me like they're saying the box itself looks the same, not the art on it. How many ways can you seriously make a tin box? If you scrape the artwork off the World of Warcraft Collector's Edition tin, the Doom 3 tin, and the Halo 2 tin, how different would they look?
Planetside has a lot of issues. It's only about 50% that people won't pay the monthly fee for it. The other 50% is are those issues. I'm not going to rehash it yet again, but there have been outright bugs in the game for its entire run which the developers have passed off as intentional and inflexible design, or even as trivial and not worth fixing, and in one case very bad and difficult to fix, so they'd fix minor things first. Which they often said weren't worth fixing.
Honestly, Planetside's an excellent concept, but it's also a prime example of how NOT to run an MMOG, comparable with the abysmal job Nexon has been doing with Shattered Galaxy (which is an MMORTS).
As long as you don't need three arms to use it... Seriously, the N64 controller annoyed me to no end. Not so much the controller itself, but the poor use of it by some games that forced me to constantly take a hand off the controller and move it to a different position, or to hold just hold the damn thing in an awkward manner (Using that middle grip, especially with my right hand, would give me stabbing pains in my wrist after a while).
Like somebody said above, the PS1's Dual Shock wrote the book on controller layout. It has everything that the N64 controller had, but it actually put it in positions where it was actually useful. I do prefer the Xbox's triggers to the Playstation's shoulder buttons, though. Never had a finger slide off a trigger in a tight spot.
My guild hit that point pretty hard recently. We've got around 25 active members, so when we hit level 60, we were very lucky to be able to scrape up enough people for high level instances.
There is a solution, though, and it actually works quite well: Build a network of guilds and set up a shared LFG channel for you. We've hooked up with five other small guilds on our server which area also starting to get level 60 members, and now we can almost always get a 10-man raid set up on short notice, and we're to the point that we can usually scrape together a functional Onyxia raid with about two or three hours of preparation. Our MC attempts have been dysmal so far, but we're pretty confidant about the new 20-man raid.
And by "questionable", I mean supposedly/allegedly containing video of a topless 17-year-old girl who had signed release papers allowing the video to be shot but who later came forward and sued Sony/MSFT/Guy Game for including the underage video [gamespot.com] in the game.
Well, pretty stupid for a company to enter into a contract like that.
First off, it doesn't matter if it's consentual. In the US, under-18 porn is illegal no matter what.
Secondly, she was 17, and therefore couldn't enter into a binding contract anyway, so even if the contract itself were legal and valid, it wasn't binding and could be broken by either side for any/no reason.
Slashdot Mirror
They were uncontrolled, but not OUT of control. They continued on fairly stable paths diverging slightly outward from the shuttle's path. Even considering that they'd had a massive tank of liquid rocket fuel explode right next to them, they not only survived, but didn't even lose stability from what damage they took.
The escape mechanism mentioned in the article is worth remembering too. Remember, when Challenger blew up, three objects survived - both SRBs and the forward section of the shuttle itself, which is believed to have had at least part of the crew alive inside. Had the shuttle been equipped with an escape rocket (Which the Gemini, Appollo, and Soyuz capsules all were/are, and like the system shown in the article will), at least part of the Challenger crew may have survived.
But, the fundamental "airplane" design made that impossible or extremely expensive, and it was never done, even after Challenger.
I have a relative who practices family law here in Michigan. He tells me all sorts of stories, "To keep you from becomming a lawyer and hating your life."
My favorite one is of a lawyer in his firm who ran afoul of the Bar on a minor charge that, at worst, would have meant a fine or possible suspension. He wrote a letter infinitely more professional than JT here has, but in it, he made a comment that a memer of the Bar construed to be a threat of action against the Bar, and he was permanantly disbarred as a result.
There's no secret, though. By putting them in stores, the secret is out already. Stealing a display model a few weeks before release isn't like stealing a test rig months before release. Certainly, one will get stolen. Probably more than one. Probably by enterprising Wal-Mart employees before by hooligan kids. But they aren't really gaining anything by getting ahold of a finalized system with launch looming. They'll sell it on eBay for an ungodly sum, and then in a while when everybody else gets the same thing at $400, that person who just spent $1000 on one is going to look very silly. Take it like Halo 2. The launch date was broken, and a few copies were sold several days early. People were paying $120 for them on eBay, and guess what? Three days later it was out and absolutely anybody who wanted it had it for $50. Sure, it pissed off Microsoft, but in the end, it's not going to show us anything we didn't already know.
They're refuting him, but where? Who's hearing it? It isn't on CNN. Jack sure was, just days ago. No instigation of argument that CNN does with every religious or political opinion they invite to speak by bringing in their most dire opponents or even anchors playing devil's advocate. Nothing. Unfettered slander by Jack Thompson, presented as fact and Jack himself being called an insider and expert in the industry.
Where is the industry's rebuttal? Where? Not on CNN. Not on Fox. Not on CBS or ABC or NBC. It's on gaming websites, certainly. The video game industry is getting their rebuttal out there TO GAMERS. They're litterally preaching to the choir. We don't need convincing, and they aren't reaching those that do need it.
What kind of "rightist" are you, though? Jack Thompson's the new breed of rightist, just like Bush (But thankfully, still unlike a good chunk of the Republican party). Twenty years ago, extremist evangelical Christians who said the way to "conquer" America was to get a stranglehold on the Republican party. God-invoking figures like Jack Thompson, George W. Bush, and for that matter even Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Leiberman are the result of their attempts to do so.
Face it: This is the new face of the right wing. Cheny, Barcia, Powel, McCain, those people are becoming relics rapidly. Barcia's already gone from Congress, replaced by the Christian Right, McCain has probably given up hope for being president, Powel became fed up with what the right has become and left the cabinet, and it looks like Cheny's going to take the fall hard for the spy scandal.
It's all well and good to say what conservatives are SUPPOSED to be, but there are scant few of them left anymore. It's all well and good to say what Christians are SUPPOSED to be, but many of them have stopped reading the New Testament because Leviticus lets them increase their standing in God's eyes by persecuting others. It's great to say what Liberals SHOULD be and pull up great names like Kennedy and Roosevelt, but we've got to face it too: Liberals aren't what they're "supposed" to be anymore either.
I've played RO. WoW, though, is a bit more active. The gameplay is just too varied. Every class functions quite differently, and most of them have a number of variations in their talent builds that also effect their play a lot.
Just for an example: My main is a rogue. He's assassination/subtlty, and uses daggers. With this, winning a fight is all about getting the jump, building a combo quickly, and getting a big finishing move. I do 80% of the damage in the first and last hits of a fight. However, my friend is a rogue with combat talents instead, and he uses swords. He does much more sustained damage. Like me, 40% of his damage is in the last hit, but the rest is spread out evenly rather than focused in one big hit like mine. Another guildmate of mine is the (very rare) mace-wielding combat rogue, and his strategy is all about stunning. He does lower damage than both of the other versions, but his target spends half the fight unconscious.
Blizzard used Diablo 2 as a dress-rehearsal for an MMORPG. They learned how to prevent bots from working, and at the same time make an infinitely less boring MMORPG than most of the rest. Granted, they only have ten classes, but each one has three quite different playstyles. Sometimes diametrically opposed: Holy priests are all about protection and healing, Shadow priests are all about weakening and damage. There's just a lot more variation to deal with in making a bot.
Even then, the monsters are more varied than I ever saw in Everquest. Even as a rogue, which is one of the more straightforward and simplistic classes to play, I have four different ways to go through combat, depending on what I'm fighting. Low armor stuff, Ambush, sinister strike up a combo, finish with eviscerate. Low hp stuff, ambush, SS, and Slice and Dice for the speed buff to start out my next fight. High armor stuff, cheapshot, SS for the combo, kidney punch, loop around behind, double backstab, finish the combo with gouge and backstab again, then eviscerate for the (probable) kill.
Sure, you probably can make a bot for WoW, but with so many different combinations to deal with, it can get mind boggling. I've got decent experience with four classes, and if I didn't decide to stop typing after this paragraph, I could easily give you over 100 different combat strategies just from those, not counting the fact that many dungeon bosses require specially tailored strategies to fight - if you go into a fight with Onyxia the way you would with Random World Spawn Mob #26, you could end up getting your entire party killed in the first 5 minutes, even if they know what they're doing.
I suspect it came after their initial problems with the book publisher. They brought a businessman onboard to keep things straight. I'd bet he incorporated the whole place a while ago. At the very latest, it would have been a couple years ago when they took down the donation box.
None at all is the last kind of attention we should give him. Why? Becuase he's getting a LOT of sympathetic attention, and has for nigh on twenty years now. And because of that, he's managed to hurt the entertainment industry. Not much, but he has won victories. That's called precedent, and it means he will tend to win MORE victories.
He's already in the public eye, but currently, the public eye is not seeing how bad this man is. They haven't seen his nebulous threats of legal action against just about everybody in sight. They haven't seen him resort to childish namecalling in a discussion with a 14 year old child. They haven't seen the fact that the organization he's been invoking as supporters for years want nothing to do with him, or the fact that he's been throwing nebulous threats of legal action at them as a result. Outside of the gaming community, not many people know that he challenged the video game industry to rise to even more grotesque levels of debauchery than they ever have, and even moreso to direct that violent imagery against depictions of themselves. They didn't see him promise $10,000 to charity if they did. They didn't see him bragging of the check filled in and resorting to more childish namecalling.
Most importantly, they didn't see him then renig on his promise. They didn't see him refuse to give money he'd promised to charity. They haven't seen two gamers step up and have the balls to do what he promised to do, at their own expense. Much less, they have not seen that these two gamers have raised fifty times this much for charity over the last to years. And most importantly, they haven't seen him go into a rage, intimidate police, slander those two gamers, threaten more vague legal action and even send them letters to them which could be construed quite understandably as threats of physical harm.
Remember, this is a person the public has seen on TV. The person who's lie that Doom caused the Colombine massacre was so widely spread and believed that it's hard to tell that it was even a lie to begin with anymore. This is a person who has been lying to the public more than any US president, ever.
This is a person who the public has believed.
And it's time for that to stop.
I have the same problem, and I have a solution that's actually quite productive. Take the hit and sell green drops on the cheap.
The place to make your money is on consumable items. Cloth is the easiest one, because every profession uses it, plus the reputation turnins. It's easy to get 100 runecloth in a day or two and throw it up at 4g a stack depending on time of day and server. Mithril is another easy one that can pull 5g for a stack of 20 bars. Leather is decent, too, since most professions use at least a little bit of it.
When you get those green drops, they tend to be harder to sell. I usually cut my price low, especially with off-class stuff (cloth with strength and agility, for example), so even if you can't get it sold for equipment, enchanters will snatch it up for reagents. You can even take up enchanting yourself and burn all those drops and sell reagents or enchants yourself.
The farmers do this too, granted, but there's a catch: Equipment, you can't sell over and over to the same people. If you have 10 level 30 swords, you'll need 10 level 30 sword users to buy them all up. If you have 10 stacks of cloth, it's a good chance you'll sell them all at once to the same person buying it in bulk.
They're doing quite well. it's been intermittently down for a while, but I was able to bring it up with a couple refreshes. They get 2 million plus hits a day, from what I've read, and this shit really hit the fan on a Tuesday, which helps. No new comic today, so more room for extra hits.
This is the same thing I discovered a few years ago. I went to Washington DC with a group of seven or eight other students at my school. We just had to visit the ESPN zone's immense basement arcade. They sell you a card rather than just putting money into the machines. It's great until your card comes up "Insufficient credit" and you realize you just blew $25 on 15 minutes of fun.
I'd love it if a snack company would sponsor my D&D or LAN parties. When you have a group of people who will live on one meal a day for three days when they know somebody else is paying for the potato chips on Friday, it gets rediculous. We used to draw straws to see who had to be stuck as the cleric, now we have two short straws. One is the cleric, one has to drive to the party store every thirty goddamn minutes.
It's not a matter of release dates. I think it's a matter of taking preorders on a game that very well may STILL be years away or not come out at all.
There were some numbers, I think posted here on Slasdhot, regarding the trend in crime rates. Some coincidences in there that really look good for the video game industry.
For starters, in the late 80's and early 90's, crime among minors was in decline, but was increasing in people over 18. There was a big drop that seemed to coincide uncannily with the release of the Playstation that affected both minors and the 18-35 age group, which was the start of the decline in crime that's still continuing today. The Playstation was also a big boon for the industry - it got a lot of young people who had missed out on Nintendo and Super Nintendo into games, and did a lot to bring adults (mainly people like me who felt they'd had grown out of their Nintendos) into gaming as well. So around the time that young adults got into video games in earnest, crime rate in young adults was on the decline.
The only age group that had actually shown an increase in crime was over 50. 35-50 showed little change, but 50+ had increased quite a bit from 1995 to 2005. This also happens to be the age group that plays the least amount of video games, watches less TV, watches less movies, and listens to the least modern music.
Faster CPUs matter too. As bandwidth increases (say, gigabit speeds), it reaches a point at which the computers become the limiting factor in network throughput, not the pipe. What good is having a 5 gpbs line to your house when your computer chokes on 500 mbps or so? That's a lot of wasted boobage.
I have heard this many times before, but have yet to see references from which these facts are gleaned. Simply put, could they leave? Did they have freedom to do or go as they pleased?
Not as they pleased so much. "Slaves" of the time were usually either too poor to support themselves, and instead worked for food and shelter, or debtors to rich landowners unable to pay back their debts, who instead work for the landowner.
However, the bible does make mention of slaves being dismissed from service, and makes clear that this was a bad thing for the slave. They'd be left without money, food, or shelter and likely still owing their former slaver money.
Biblical-era slaves could own property, as well. Jesus used this example in a number of his stories - a slaver forgiving the debt of a debted slave and relieving him from service, while the slave himself refuses to forgive the debt of a subordinate slave (Also raises the interesting point that slaves could have slaves). When it comes down to it, Biblical slaves were more like early-American indentured servants. They were effectively slaves, but were not owned, but worked without pay to clear a debt.
One could just as easily argue that american slaves were paid in food and shelter, that wouldn't make it any less repugnant.
However, as covered, a Biblical-era slave owned himself. All other things equal, they still had a good deal of their dignity.
In fact, if it was so desireable of a lifestyle, why were the jews so up and ready to get out of egypt (which I seriously doubt was ever the case anyway)?
Different situation. The Jews were prisoners taken by conquest and used as slave labor, and were probably treated as poorly as American slaves. The rules they imposed regarding the condition of their own slaves was partly a result of their ordeal in slavery.
At best, your argument illustrates more that we should be taking a serious look at how to make "border hoppers" less like slaves, than throwing up our hands and saying, "Sometimes, slavery just ain't that bad."
Well, that's an oversimplification. The word "slavery" just isn't always used in the same context. The first slaves used in North America were natives. They were litterally "harvested" in raids on villages and usually worked to death, either by exaustion, malnutrition, or disease. Black slaves were a big step up, and were kept healthy and alive. They were about equal to livestock - if you kept them healthy, you wouldn't have to buy more, you could make your own. Very different situations, but both still called slavery.
The slavery in the biblical era was another different thing. The Egyptians kept Jewish slaves in conditions comparable with black slaves, but they were taken more akin to the Indian slaves - captured as prisoners of war. The Jews had constraints on who and how you could take somebody as a slave. Some of them were probably comparable to black American slaves, but many of them (The ones the bible and other historical writings mention the most) were really only slaves by modern translation. The term doesn't apply in it's normal context.
Another type of slavery happened in Greece. In Sparta, slaves formed a part of the army, like disposable shock troops. In other Greek cities, the city would have a slave labor pool of sorts, and citizens could lease them for household work, and slaves were usually eligible for freedom and eventually citizenship, after a certain age or time in service.
In Rome, most Gladiators were slaves by name, but they were the biggest celebrities of the age. The most popular gladiators set the standards of sexiness and lived the fast life of wine and women you'd expect of a modern day rockstar.
Well, those 12-man teams almost certainly are from long-time MC guilds, decked out in MC if not BWL-level epic gear. The difference between a self-equipped level 60, or even a level 60 equipped from the endgame 5 and 10 man instances, and a level 60 in raid gear is immense. The stories you read about 15 and 20 man raids taking down onyxia are the same thing - hardcore pros in the best gear there is.
This mess hit Orgrimar AND undercity (thanks to somebody getting infected while they were waiting for a mage to open a portal for them) on my server. While it was particularly bad, and a lot of people were just chatting idly in general chat while waiting for it to die down before they rezed, somebody had an idea of getting a big mass of people and trying to keep the plague active through them all the way to Ironforge or Stormwind and spreading the plague there. Couldn't get enough people organized to maintain it, we didn't even manage to get it accross ont he zeplins. Wouldn't have mattered, with a 5:1 Alliance:Horde ratio on our server, Ironforge was getting it FAR worse already.
Mine wiped on the first encounter. Never saw a boss. Reminded me of our first MC runs. Wiped on the first pull four or five times a night for about two weeks before we got past it.
I wouldn't say you suck, ZG is a really hard instance. It's easily equal to Molten Core, if you account for the smaller group size. It'll be a few months before people have it down to a science. Heck, look at Blackwing Lair, nobody's beat Nefarion yet (If I remember right, nobody's even seen him yet. The boss before him has proven nigh unbeatable as yet).
I tried that, and it didn't work. Also, if you're under level 20, this curse is almost instant death anyway, and that's one of the biggest worries. They'll figure out a fix. This is really no different than the hunter/warlock Living Bomb exploit - Get Baron Geddon to cast Living Bomb on your pet, dismiss it, and then recall it again when you get to a populated area and wait a few seconds. Pet goes boom, and nearly everybody in the area of effect dies. In that case, they just made pets immune to Living Bomb. It proved impossible to get a player back to Orgrimar while under the effect, and it's really not worth a guild's time to raid half of Molten Core just to be cockmongers in Orgrimar for ten seconds. I think they're going to end up making the solution more complex than it has to be. Not the first time Blizzard's done that. A really simple one I see is having town-teleport spells like mage portals and hearthstones clear DoTs. I assume they're using a mage portal to get the plague to Orgrimar, anyway. The duration is too short for a hearthstone. It wouldn't be abusable really, since regardless of what's going on where you teleport from, you're teleporting into a noncombat area.
Not only Doom3. World of Warcraft had the collectors edition in a tin box at launch. Both Lunar games had special editions on the Sega CD and Playstation that came in tins with some extra junk. I could keep going, too. A lot of big-name games have special editions packed in tin boxes. Heck, I have a stack of those tins that AOL used to put their CDs in that I use as coasters and objects of wrath (They make a very satisfying noise if you throw them against a brick wall hard enough, without the potential mess and shrapnel you get doing the same thing with the CD itself).
I could see if they said Microsfot had stolen their box art, but this article sounds more to me like they're saying the box itself looks the same, not the art on it. How many ways can you seriously make a tin box? If you scrape the artwork off the World of Warcraft Collector's Edition tin, the Doom 3 tin, and the Halo 2 tin, how different would they look?
Planetside has a lot of issues. It's only about 50% that people won't pay the monthly fee for it. The other 50% is are those issues. I'm not going to rehash it yet again, but there have been outright bugs in the game for its entire run which the developers have passed off as intentional and inflexible design, or even as trivial and not worth fixing, and in one case very bad and difficult to fix, so they'd fix minor things first. Which they often said weren't worth fixing.
Honestly, Planetside's an excellent concept, but it's also a prime example of how NOT to run an MMOG, comparable with the abysmal job Nexon has been doing with Shattered Galaxy (which is an MMORTS).
As long as you don't need three arms to use it... Seriously, the N64 controller annoyed me to no end. Not so much the controller itself, but the poor use of it by some games that forced me to constantly take a hand off the controller and move it to a different position, or to hold just hold the damn thing in an awkward manner (Using that middle grip, especially with my right hand, would give me stabbing pains in my wrist after a while).
Like somebody said above, the PS1's Dual Shock wrote the book on controller layout. It has everything that the N64 controller had, but it actually put it in positions where it was actually useful. I do prefer the Xbox's triggers to the Playstation's shoulder buttons, though. Never had a finger slide off a trigger in a tight spot.
My guild hit that point pretty hard recently. We've got around 25 active members, so when we hit level 60, we were very lucky to be able to scrape up enough people for high level instances.
There is a solution, though, and it actually works quite well: Build a network of guilds and set up a shared LFG channel for you. We've hooked up with five other small guilds on our server which area also starting to get level 60 members, and now we can almost always get a 10-man raid set up on short notice, and we're to the point that we can usually scrape together a functional Onyxia raid with about two or three hours of preparation. Our MC attempts have been dysmal so far, but we're pretty confidant about the new 20-man raid.
And by "questionable", I mean supposedly/allegedly containing video of a topless 17-year-old girl who had signed release papers allowing the video to be shot but who later came forward and sued Sony/MSFT/Guy Game for including the underage video [gamespot.com] in the game.
Well, pretty stupid for a company to enter into a contract like that.
First off, it doesn't matter if it's consentual. In the US, under-18 porn is illegal no matter what.
Secondly, she was 17, and therefore couldn't enter into a binding contract anyway, so even if the contract itself were legal and valid, it wasn't binding and could be broken by either side for any/no reason.