There was this guy wanting to do a presentation in front of around 50 people on a ubuntu laptop and he typed his password in the "User" textedit of login window. Everyone erupted with laughter because his password was "jebenica_l01" (something like fuckery lol in english). I don't blame him too much, that login window has serious flaw with showing only one textedit at the time and both of them in the same place which can lead to situation like this when people are under pressure. Needless to say, the guy was red in the face and stuttering horribly the whole time.
True enough, but they ask only $30 for upgrade, on a system you already paid and bought. So there is no subsidizing when we are talking about upgrades. And in that light windows 7 upgrade prices are very high.
You actually didn't show that their strategy wasn't bad at all. On the contrary, prima facie their argument can seem reasonable because the germany had limited number of material, pilots, engineers and workers in general, so it is natural to expect to go high tech to combat the mass numbers of allies.
Moreover, they didn't have much problem with the technology by the end of the war, they had extremely large problem of material and fuel supplies. This is one of the reasons the horten (which was build at the end of the war) from the article had wooden wings. That problem would be even more pronounced if they went with large numbers. So they weren't "wrong" as you excitedly exclaim in that sense. They did lost the war and air superiority, but not because of going with the high-tech route.
The authors of the story were very lucky because the "find my iphone" feature is easily disabled. All it takes is to flip a clearly labeled switch in mail settings to OFF. Or disable location services (easily done too), or just format the iphone as a new one.
For this feature to truly work it would be great if they put a password on it and to be restore/format/network settings proof. That would be completely another story.
You are preaching to the choir here. I was just laughing at the fact that they even give you 30 days to reconsider.
Here in Croatia, if you want to cancel your plan you have to pay the full price for remaining months. For example you have 2 year plan for 70$/month and you want to cancel it after the first year. You would have to pay 12(remaining months)*$70 = $840 which is a downright robbery unfortunately.
Thanks for the info, I didn't check there in advance, as I completely forgot that software does like to update itself. And things like this always happen when most undesired. But I know for the next time now of course;)
Good thing only in theory. But I always remember the example I can see from my windows. There is a big bridge connecting the shore and an island which was of build with public funds 30 years ago. They of course charge (and quite much) the crossing the bridge but they did promise that will go away as soon as the credit for the bridge is repaid (to banks I suppose). But you can almost guess what happened. People repaid for the bridge in just a couple of years but that charging didn't go away. They did buckle just a little 10 years ago so those who live on the island don't have to pay for crossing. But since then it is just "normal" to pay for crossing that bridge.
Moreover, patches for OS, programs and games are now hundreds of megabytes big. For example, just new firmware for iphone is around 250MB.
Funny thing happened when I was away for two weeks depending only on a laptop with usb stick for mobile wireless. I have 500MB/month subscription and just after 5 days of my light surfing and mailing I was disconnected for doing more than 500MB. What happened? When I was away from the computer there was some OSX update and it eat all my monthly allowance. Btw, there should be an option to disable background/invisible download of patches when on this kind of connections.
I'm guessing that the GP is on a 2 year contract. A lot can happen in two years. What if you change your job, house, city or whatever? You can't know that in the first month. Not even 6 months. I'm not even certain what will happen in the next 7 days.
There is competition amongst the operators to develop the best handsets.. Without the iphone, would we have seen the Storm, Omnia or others?
If I'm not very much mistaken, Apple developed the iphone. There isn't a competition between at&t and samsung. It is a competition between phone manufacturers. And even that is not very a good competition actually because nokia has continued to produce 50 versions of the 2 crappy phones a year, SE is nowhere, samsung is trying something as is LG (both have shitty mobile OS).
At&T readily admits their network wasn't optimal for the number of users with the Iphone and they are now trying to remedy that so each user has a better experience.
If iphone were available to all cellphone users, then probably all cell providers would improve their networks.
Exclusive handsets aren't necessarily a bad thing
Of course it is. Exclusive (in this sense) is just another word for lock-in and lock-in is bad by definition. Can you imagine how would it be if all had to buy computers from internet providers? You would be paying 10 times more for 10 times lesser hardware, and I hope you would like your monthly payments, and probably you won't even own the computer.
There really isn't enough spectrum to have true competition.
Since when? Even if there isn't enough of spectrum (which isn't true) some regulation would help to break down those lock-ins and other anti-consumer policies which would help with at least some competition. The problem we have now that there isn't a competition at all.
Bill Gates needing a Size 10 shoe instead of a size 9 = Vista needing a high end PC instead of a stripped down one.
I have a feeling you're reading too much into it. Moreover, even if that was their message the analogy is completely wrong. People for the better part of their life use the same number of shoes. It would make just a little bit of sense if they were showing some boy/girl (which have different shoe number every year).
But in any case you may have extremely subtle messages in a pile of junk but only 0,01% of the target population will understand it. But do you really want that? Why not send a hand signed mail to those 10 people instead of wasting millions on a production of one of the worst commercials I have ever seen?
Apple's commercials may be arrogant* or whatever, but people understand them and get their point completely. And that is the point of a commercial. If you don't want for your stuff to be understood, to be always confused, well one should stop doing commercials and write post modernism drivel.
First of all, people were talking about them.
I'm guessing that you are referring to the saying that there is no such thing as a bad publicity? The saying is generally true, but when one is producing material of questionable coherence against itself, people will say that the author is crazy. And that was precisely the point which was raised against those commercials. Nobody understood them, and that was probably because there was nothing to understand, and they were a complete failure. If they didn't spend millions on those commercials everyone would forget those the very next day. The problem was that they did spend a fortune on those commercials and people, completely predictable, talked about them. Not much about the message (as I said, there was none for the general population), but they talked about the waste of money and just reinforcing the image of completely clueless microsoft and his ex ceo. And that kind of publicity they certainly don't want.
* and that can generally be a good thing for a consumer because a lot of consumers was to buy "exclusive" products so they can feel special.
We all can always imagine some small atomic or whatever battery to solve all our mobile problems, and nobody disagrees with that, nor will I. But we already have solar energy.
Some watches are already powered by it. Some of those are somewhat advanced (citizen eco-drive diver's, casio g-shock with automatic time adjustment etc) so I don't think that atomic battery is really needed.
Moreover, I do find putting solar cells on mobile phones a good thing, because in reality people usually have the mobile phones not in pockets (which are difficult to get out when sitting, and people sit on their workplaces most of the time) but somewhere around them (desk usually) and there it gets plenty of normal light which can fill the battery of the phone. I'm quite aware that many mobile phones need a lot of power, and a solar cell wouldn't be enough, but even in that case it can help. So instead of your batter lasting 2 days, it can last 3 or 4. And/or you can have 1 hour more of talk time so you don't have to charge the mobile phone at the workplace. In any case I do think that for simpler mobile phones some solar cells would be quite enough in a near future.
a) The levelling game is dead. D-E-A-D. Blizzard reduced the xp requirement between 20-60 by 20%. Then you've got Recruit-A-Friend, and the +10% xp heirloom bonus on top of that. They're killing the ability of new users to really acclimatise, learn the game, or experience what was genuinely good content, all for the sake of letting the established crowd race to the cap.
I agree with all your other points but I don't really agree with this.
There is still *a lot* of leveling to do. Not everyone has a recruit-a-friend ability, and even if you level your alt there is some serious leveling from 1-60-70-80. Even from 60-80 there is tons of leveling to do actually. And I'm not so sure about that "learning the game and experiencing genuinely good content". Many people, including me, didn't learn much from 1-60. All you learn is something like 1-2222-3-222-f key combos to kill a mob and move on. Only on end level you can actually learn how to deal with multiple mobs, other players, guilds, pvp, raids etc. Leveling is pretty much completely devoid of any content. It is just run to x, kill y, loot, move on. And that is extremely, extremely boring.
Finally, truth be told, there isn't much of genuinely good content when you level too. Sure, you have 3 million mobs standing in your way but they all react in the completely same way and there are not many models of them anyway. They just rehash them all the time. At least to 60 and dare I say 70, there is no coherent story anyway (alliance's the missing diplomat and onyxia chain were a notable exception), you are just sent around to kill, kill and kill some more. But if you think about the design of zones, yes, some of them are nice, but you won't miss anything if you magically skip them all and then return to explore them when you are much higher level. The only thing you'll lose is the problem of the whole zone aggroing on you, which isn't such a bad thing to miss. Instances at 60 were generally weak and even if you level properly you won't find a group to do them anyway. I can understand that people might miss "good old days" when to get to 60 you had to level for like couple of hours a day for a month, but it is my belief that large majority of people just don't like it. So I can understand that blizzard want to address the problem (even though their solutions are usually more worse than the problems).
2G cost $599 at launch because it did not require a contract.
You are wrong here.
The original iphone did require a contract because the device was carrier locked and you had to activate (and get a plan) in store or at home. Some managed to get prepaid plans, but great majority went with 2year contracts.
I have that inverted y-z keyboard and it seems to me that it is easier to press y (z on US keyboard) with my left pinky than z (y on US) with my right index.
At $199/$299 the iphone is the same price as other cell phones with similar features. cheaper than a few and a bit more expensive than others.
Can you show me where can I buy those for that price, I would buy 5 of them.
How does the subscription plan count in?
Yeah, thought so.
It is fucking pathetic how people can say with a straight face that the $phone costs $199/$299 and at the same time *completely* disregarding the fact about huge monthly payment which binds you for two fucking years.
It is almost a common practice between mobile operators here in croatia. Every couple of months or less they introduce "new" services, which are nothing but reshuffled old ones. They will introduce "more flexible" pricing when in fact that is just another word for raising the current ones. And every month or so you will get some "special offers" which expire in a month leaving you with old pricing.
Similar to this, but more infuriating for business users was constant rebranding of our national mobile and land operator after the acquisition by t-com. iirc it went from HT, to T-HT to T-Com, (cronet->t-mobile etc) but worst of all, e-mail addresses went from @xx.tel.hr to @xx.hinet.hr to @xx.t-com.hr. That was great news for business users who had to change business cards every year or less. I'm even sure I missed a change or two in the mail addresses, and that easily explains why many people went with web based mail.
So this was not really a case of bad service (live.com comes to mind) but just changing name for the sake of looking fresh even though fundamentally nothing changes.
Our diving center wanted to sink a 70m long, 40+y old trading ship. The reason was that with it we could have more tourism in the town, more sea life, and the shipyard (which was the owner of the ship, located only 300m from the purposed sinking location) didn't have to pay for towing and scrapping the ship (net loss). But we soon come to an impassable obstacle in the form of a treaty which my country (Croatia) signed barring intentional sinking of any ship (for whatever purpose).
This is what you get when you have boneheads in the government signing everything they got on the table.
I'm ashamed to a admit: 180+ days/played. How about you then?
Play every few days and Bang, you get double XP while you play.
Sure, and you'll level your char in like 5 months. And maybe you have forgotten that most of the time spent in pre-lvl60 zones is just for running around wasting time on nothing? Quest item drop rates are still a laugh, the quest zones still have too large level differences (ie 3 lvl 30 quests, 3 lvl 35 and 3 lvl40). And there is still a lot of tedious and boring leveling from 60-70-80.
My point is that there is *alot* of leveling from 1-80 which is boring to any kind of player frankly. Especially if you are leveling your n-th alt.
Playing ~2hrs a week it would not take you too long to get to 80 and have everything you'd want.
But what can you get with playing wow for lets say an hour? Some flights still take 20minutes! For fuck sake, everything greater than the loading time is unacceptable. Period.
Playing 2 hours a week will get you *nothing* in wow. It is similar to being a retard and always staying in the last year of kindergarten and watching people leaving for schools every year.
But if you mean that 2hrs/week on lvl80 will get you anything, I'm afraid I have to repeat myself, it will get you nothing. It won't get you any pvp/pve gear or anything else in the same year. Even if you play 2h/*day* you wont' get much because every raid takes longer (no guild breaks apart raiding) and getting some pvp gear through battlegrounds (casual doesn't have a chance in arenas without alot of gear first) is a sick joke now as I heard (don't play anymore), and getting that gear took a long time before anyway. Every piece of gear has a pretty much fixed price to pay in your time to get and can be easily calculated. And all this takes weeks not hours.
And then we come at your last sentence.
Wow is an Easy game.
Nobody argued that WoW is hard. It is very easy in almost all respects. Except in pvp which I always preferred. But this has nothing to do with casuals. Team fortess 2 is a hard game but it is still very casual friendly. WoW is easy but that doesn't mean it is casual friendly. Well, it is friendly, but WoW is actually having a very passionate love life with hardcore and semi-hardcore (often called casuals in wow) gamers.
There are 11 types of player in WoW. Hardcore (play every free moment), hardcore-light (called casuals in wow, play good part of the day, several hours at least), and true casuals (probably quitting soon).
And you are also wrong on the percent count, not only because of the famous (meta) statistics sentence, but also because end-game dungeon!=heroic level dungeon and my observation that very great majority of playing people actually end up in end-game dungeons or PvP.
Slashdot Mirror
And if you call in the next 20 minutes (because we can't do this the whole day), well give you MS Works ABSOLUTELY FREE!!!
I've seen it.
There was this guy wanting to do a presentation in front of around 50 people on a ubuntu laptop and he typed his password in the "User" textedit of login window. Everyone erupted with laughter because his password was "jebenica_l01" (something like fuckery lol in english). I don't blame him too much, that login window has serious flaw with showing only one textedit at the time and both of them in the same place which can lead to situation like this when people are under pressure. Needless to say, the guy was red in the face and stuttering horribly the whole time.
True enough, but they ask only $30 for upgrade, on a system you already paid and bought. So there is no subsidizing when we are talking about upgrades. And in that light windows 7 upgrade prices are very high.
You actually didn't show that their strategy wasn't bad at all. On the contrary, prima facie their argument can seem reasonable because the germany had limited number of material, pilots, engineers and workers in general, so it is natural to expect to go high tech to combat the mass numbers of allies.
Moreover, they didn't have much problem with the technology by the end of the war, they had extremely large problem of material and fuel supplies. This is one of the reasons the horten (which was build at the end of the war) from the article had wooden wings. That problem would be even more pronounced if they went with large numbers. So they weren't "wrong" as you excitedly exclaim in that sense. They did lost the war and air superiority, but not because of going with the high-tech route.
The authors of the story were very lucky because the "find my iphone" feature is easily disabled. All it takes is to flip a clearly labeled switch in mail settings to OFF. Or disable location services (easily done too), or just format the iphone as a new one.
For this feature to truly work it would be great if they put a password on it and to be restore/format/network settings proof. That would be completely another story.
You are preaching to the choir here. I was just laughing at the fact that they even give you 30 days to reconsider.
Here in Croatia, if you want to cancel your plan you have to pay the full price for remaining months. For example you have 2 year plan for 70$/month and you want to cancel it after the first year. You would have to pay 12(remaining months)*$70 = $840 which is a downright robbery unfortunately.
Thanks for the info, I didn't check there in advance, as I completely forgot that software does like to update itself. And things like this always happen when most undesired. But I know for the next time now of course;)
Good thing only in theory. But I always remember the example I can see from my windows. There is a big bridge connecting the shore and an island which was of build with public funds 30 years ago. They of course charge (and quite much) the crossing the bridge but they did promise that will go away as soon as the credit for the bridge is repaid (to banks I suppose). But you can almost guess what happened. People repaid for the bridge in just a couple of years but that charging didn't go away. They did buckle just a little 10 years ago so those who live on the island don't have to pay for crossing. But since then it is just "normal" to pay for crossing that bridge.
So much about promises and "temporary" things.
Moreover, patches for OS, programs and games are now hundreds of megabytes big. For example, just new firmware for iphone is around 250MB.
Funny thing happened when I was away for two weeks depending only on a laptop with usb stick for mobile wireless. I have 500MB/month subscription and just after 5 days of my light surfing and mailing I was disconnected for doing more than 500MB. What happened? When I was away from the computer there was some OSX update and it eat all my monthly allowance. Btw, there should be an option to disable background/invisible download of patches when on this kind of connections.
I'm guessing that the GP is on a 2 year contract. A lot can happen in two years. What if you change your job, house, city or whatever? You can't know that in the first month. Not even 6 months. I'm not even certain what will happen in the next 7 days.
There is competition amongst the operators to develop the best handsets.. Without the iphone, would we have seen the Storm, Omnia or others?
If I'm not very much mistaken, Apple developed the iphone. There isn't a competition between at&t and samsung. It is a competition between phone manufacturers. And even that is not very a good competition actually because nokia has continued to produce 50 versions of the 2 crappy phones a year, SE is nowhere, samsung is trying something as is LG (both have shitty mobile OS).
At&T readily admits their network wasn't optimal for the number of users with the Iphone and they are now trying to remedy that so each user has a better experience.
If iphone were available to all cellphone users, then probably all cell providers would improve their networks.
Exclusive handsets aren't necessarily a bad thing
Of course it is. Exclusive (in this sense) is just another word for lock-in and lock-in is bad by definition. Can you imagine how would it be if all had to buy computers from internet providers? You would be paying 10 times more for 10 times lesser hardware, and I hope you would like your monthly payments, and probably you won't even own the computer.
There really isn't enough spectrum to have true competition.
Since when? Even if there isn't enough of spectrum (which isn't true) some regulation would help to break down those lock-ins and other anti-consumer policies which would help with at least some competition. The problem we have now that there isn't a competition at all.
Bill Gates needing a Size 10 shoe instead of a size 9 = Vista needing a high end PC instead of a stripped down one.
I have a feeling you're reading too much into it. Moreover, even if that was their message the analogy is completely wrong. People for the better part of their life use the same number of shoes. It would make just a little bit of sense if they were showing some boy/girl (which have different shoe number every year).
But in any case you may have extremely subtle messages in a pile of junk but only 0,01% of the target population will understand it. But do you really want that? Why not send a hand signed mail to those 10 people instead of wasting millions on a production of one of the worst commercials I have ever seen?
Apple's commercials may be arrogant* or whatever, but people understand them and get their point completely. And that is the point of a commercial. If you don't want for your stuff to be understood, to be always confused, well one should stop doing commercials and write post modernism drivel.
First of all, people were talking about them.
I'm guessing that you are referring to the saying that there is no such thing as a bad publicity? The saying is generally true, but when one is producing material of questionable coherence against itself, people will say that the author is crazy. And that was precisely the point which was raised against those commercials. Nobody understood them, and that was probably because there was nothing to understand, and they were a complete failure. If they didn't spend millions on those commercials everyone would forget those the very next day. The problem was that they did spend a fortune on those commercials and people, completely predictable, talked about them. Not much about the message (as I said, there was none for the general population), but they talked about the waste of money and just reinforcing the image of completely clueless microsoft and his ex ceo. And that kind of publicity they certainly don't want.
* and that can generally be a good thing for a consumer because a lot of consumers was to buy "exclusive" products so they can feel special.
We all can always imagine some small atomic or whatever battery to solve all our mobile problems, and nobody disagrees with that, nor will I. But we already have solar energy.
Some watches are already powered by it. Some of those are somewhat advanced (citizen eco-drive diver's, casio g-shock with automatic time adjustment etc) so I don't think that atomic battery is really needed.
Moreover, I do find putting solar cells on mobile phones a good thing, because in reality people usually have the mobile phones not in pockets (which are difficult to get out when sitting, and people sit on their workplaces most of the time) but somewhere around them (desk usually) and there it gets plenty of normal light which can fill the battery of the phone. I'm quite aware that many mobile phones need a lot of power, and a solar cell wouldn't be enough, but even in that case it can help. So instead of your batter lasting 2 days, it can last 3 or 4. And/or you can have 1 hour more of talk time so you don't have to charge the mobile phone at the workplace. In any case I do think that for simpler mobile phones some solar cells would be quite enough in a near future.
a) The levelling game is dead. D-E-A-D. Blizzard reduced the xp requirement between 20-60 by 20%. Then you've got Recruit-A-Friend, and the +10% xp heirloom bonus on top of that. They're killing the ability of new users to really acclimatise, learn the game, or experience what was genuinely good content, all for the sake of letting the established crowd race to the cap.
I agree with all your other points but I don't really agree with this.
There is still *a lot* of leveling to do. Not everyone has a recruit-a-friend ability, and even if you level your alt there is some serious leveling from 1-60-70-80. Even from 60-80 there is tons of leveling to do actually. And I'm not so sure about that "learning the game and experiencing genuinely good content". Many people, including me, didn't learn much from 1-60. All you learn is something like 1-2222-3-222-f key combos to kill a mob and move on. Only on end level you can actually learn how to deal with multiple mobs, other players, guilds, pvp, raids etc. Leveling is pretty much completely devoid of any content. It is just run to x, kill y, loot, move on. And that is extremely, extremely boring.
Finally, truth be told, there isn't much of genuinely good content when you level too. Sure, you have 3 million mobs standing in your way but they all react in the completely same way and there are not many models of them anyway. They just rehash them all the time. At least to 60 and dare I say 70, there is no coherent story anyway (alliance's the missing diplomat and onyxia chain were a notable exception), you are just sent around to kill, kill and kill some more. But if you think about the design of zones, yes, some of them are nice, but you won't miss anything if you magically skip them all and then return to explore them when you are much higher level. The only thing you'll lose is the problem of the whole zone aggroing on you, which isn't such a bad thing to miss. Instances at 60 were generally weak and even if you level properly you won't find a group to do them anyway. I can understand that people might miss "good old days" when to get to 60 you had to level for like couple of hours a day for a month, but it is my belief that large majority of people just don't like it. So I can understand that blizzard want to address the problem (even though their solutions are usually more worse than the problems).
2G cost $599 at launch because it did not require a contract.
You are wrong here.
The original iphone did require a contract because the device was carrier locked and you had to activate (and get a plan) in store or at home. Some managed to get prepaid plans, but great majority went with 2year contracts.
I have that inverted y-z keyboard and it seems to me that it is easier to press y (z on US keyboard) with my left pinky than z (y on US) with my right index.
At $199/$299 the iphone is the same price as other cell phones with similar features. cheaper than a few and a bit more expensive than others.
Can you show me where can I buy those for that price, I would buy 5 of them.
How does the subscription plan count in?
Yeah, thought so.
It is fucking pathetic how people can say with a straight face that the $phone costs $199/$299 and at the same time *completely* disregarding the fact about huge monthly payment which binds you for two fucking years.
It is almost a common practice between mobile operators here in croatia. Every couple of months or less they introduce "new" services, which are nothing but reshuffled old ones. They will introduce "more flexible" pricing when in fact that is just another word for raising the current ones. And every month or so you will get some "special offers" which expire in a month leaving you with old pricing.
Similar to this, but more infuriating for business users was constant rebranding of our national mobile and land operator after the acquisition by t-com. iirc it went from HT, to T-HT to T-Com, (cronet->t-mobile etc) but worst of all, e-mail addresses went from @xx.tel.hr to @xx.hinet.hr to @xx.t-com.hr. That was great news for business users who had to change business cards every year or less. I'm even sure I missed a change or two in the mail addresses, and that easily explains why many people went with web based mail.
So this was not really a case of bad service (live.com comes to mind) but just changing name for the sake of looking fresh even though fundamentally nothing changes.
Artist can create art on almost any medium while my biggest achievement is a stick figure pictured below ;)-
Our diving center wanted to sink a 70m long, 40+y old trading ship. The reason was that with it we could have more tourism in the town, more sea life, and the shipyard (which was the owner of the ship, located only 300m from the purposed sinking location) didn't have to pay for towing and scrapping the ship (net loss). But we soon come to an impassable obstacle in the form of a treaty which my country (Croatia) signed barring intentional sinking of any ship (for whatever purpose).
This is what you get when you have boneheads in the government signing everything they got on the table.
There've been calls to open-source the game.
The problem is that there is no source whatsoever to release I'm afraid.
Have you played WoW?
I'm ashamed to a admit: 180+ days /played. How about you then?
Play every few days and Bang, you get double XP while you play.
Sure, and you'll level your char in like 5 months. And maybe you have forgotten that most of the time spent in pre-lvl60 zones is just for running around wasting time on nothing? Quest item drop rates are still a laugh, the quest zones still have too large level differences (ie 3 lvl 30 quests, 3 lvl 35 and 3 lvl40). And there is still a lot of tedious and boring leveling from 60-70-80.
My point is that there is *alot* of leveling from 1-80 which is boring to any kind of player frankly. Especially if you are leveling your n-th alt.
Playing ~2hrs a week it would not take you too long to get to 80 and have everything you'd want.
But what can you get with playing wow for lets say an hour? Some flights still take 20minutes! For fuck sake, everything greater than the loading time is unacceptable. Period.
Playing 2 hours a week will get you *nothing* in wow. It is similar to being a retard and always staying in the last year of kindergarten and watching people leaving for schools every year.
But if you mean that 2hrs/week on lvl80 will get you anything, I'm afraid I have to repeat myself, it will get you nothing. It won't get you any pvp/pve gear or anything else in the same year. Even if you play 2h/*day* you wont' get much because every raid takes longer (no guild breaks apart raiding) and getting some pvp gear through battlegrounds (casual doesn't have a chance in arenas without alot of gear first) is a sick joke now as I heard (don't play anymore), and getting that gear took a long time before anyway. Every piece of gear has a pretty much fixed price to pay in your time to get and can be easily calculated. And all this takes weeks not hours.
And then we come at your last sentence.
Wow is an Easy game.
Nobody argued that WoW is hard. It is very easy in almost all respects. Except in pvp which I always preferred. But this has nothing to do with casuals. Team fortess 2 is a hard game but it is still very casual friendly. WoW is easy but that doesn't mean it is casual friendly. Well, it is friendly, but WoW is actually having a very passionate love life with hardcore and semi-hardcore (often called casuals in wow) gamers.
Uh, how do you explain the hordes (pun intended) of us 30-40 year old working professionals who play WoW then?
Adults who don't wont to explore something wonderful called real world and learn your kids how to level in it?
Heh, you had me until you said:
You can level to 80 and get near everything a Hard Core Gamer gets in WoW with little effort and time.
Wrong.
There are 11 types of player in WoW. Hardcore (play every free moment), hardcore-light (called casuals in wow, play good part of the day, several hours at least), and true casuals (probably quitting soon).
And you are also wrong on the percent count, not only because of the famous (meta) statistics sentence, but also because end-game dungeon!=heroic level dungeon and my observation that very great majority of playing people actually end up in end-game dungeons or PvP.