Speaking of which, I wish they would stop lumping some guy at home who burns a game from his buddy to play on his machine in with some guy in china who produces and sells tens of thousands of copies of a game.
Anyway, I can't remember the last time I played a truly great id game, so I would say the real reason they had to start developing for consoles was to pick from a larger and less discerning player base.
Exactly. Only the total opposite of what you just said.
Seriously, building your own system to your precise spec and under your complete control with OEM parts will get you a far superior system to anything you can waste your money on from some douchebag pre-built company. I keep checking them out in case things change, but in almost twenty years, I have still never found any cause to buy a pre-built system unless it was a laptop.
The point is that you can't say PC gaming is dead or dying when there are countless people for whom a PC experience trumps that of a console experience, even with all the trimmings. And how is stating what you're playing your games on "bragging"?! My system is a mid-range system. Hardly something to "brag" about. But be a whiny pussy if it suits you.
Frankly, there are a couple things that are three major hindrances for me on the console.
The first hindrance is that a lot of console games are nothing more than ports of PC games. I'm seeing commercials for FEAR on the XBOX 360 as if it's a new game. It was out for the PC a year and a half ago!
The second hindrance is that the online multiplayer experience always sucks. Ridiculous limitations on the number of people that can play in any one game. Little or no persistence in any game beyond that one session. Terrible FPS games. Honestly, how is Halo the greatest FPS of all time? Average graphics and less than average gameplay?! Other than vehicles, what did Halo ever offer that Quake didn't offer years ahead of time? Just because it's new to the console world doesn't make it a revolution.
The third hindrance - and the most significant - is that console controllers are complete crap. Terribly inaccurate analog sticks and a bunch of clumsy buttons on a batwing? It's going to be hard to ever top a keyboard and mouse. I'm sure as hell not going to play RTS, strategy, or serious RPG and MMORPG games with a console controller. And even if they simply stuck a mouse and keyboard into the box with your console (a good idea, if you can use ANY USB mouse/keyboard you want and not just some klunky poorly made expensive one made by the console manufacturer), the screen resolution is still too poor for enough depth and detail for a highly text-oriented game.
The benefit of the console is that it's a good time when you want to just plop on the couch and brain-drain for a couple hours instead of sitting at your desk. I'd be more inclined to spend time with my consoles if at least the controller was improved. That is my single greatest gripe.
Why is it so damn hard to just make a simple universal lobby/game-connectivity center within a console? I don't have to join some idiotic twelve-year-old-girl's fantasy three-dimensional The Sims world to jump into a game of CounterStrike or Civilization IV on my PC. Why do I have to do that on my consoles? This is seriously one of the most retarded ideas ever and it would cause me to lean toward turning on my 360 instead of my PS3 when I sit down on the sofa for a bit of gaming, just because I don't want to play "Second Life" just to get to my damned Company of Heroes.
And forgive me if I don't take the skepticism over global warming seriously from the same crowd that believes people can rise from the dead and that while the massive scientific proof behind global warming is ludicrous and unreasonable, they're pretty sure that lesbians cause natural disasters.
First of all, you're not going to play a good RTS, RPG, MMORPG, FPS or strategy game on a console. How are you going to play Civilization IV on a console? Who wants to play an FPS with a crappy controller and "auto-aiming"? PC is the only game in town for a massive swath of genres. Not to mention, better graphics, performance and a more intimate connection to your peripherals. Sitting with my very agile mouse and keyboard in front of my 30" LCD is far more enjoyable than sitting on the couch with a poorly designed controller in front of my 65" Sony SXRD.
I have a PS2, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360 and a Wii sitting in the other room as part of my home entertainment center. And they're connected to my 65" widescreen with an $18,000 audio system (B&W 8xx series)... but I can't remember the last time I played any of them. I think I played the Wii the first week I got it a few months ago. Same with the PS3. I haven't played the 360 since September. I haven't even sat in front of the television itself since the beginning of December.
However, I've bought about $600 worth of games for my PC during that time and played many hours on it. I'm sure I'll get around to playing the consoles some more, but for the most part . . . they aren't as convenient or fun. Not to mention, multiplayer is ridiculously cumbersome to setup. For one thing, you usually can't join online games unless you have voice capabilities. People will just kick you out of the room/game. But to get voice capabilities (as far as I have found so far) on the 360, you need a headset. Now, why would I want to go stick a crappy $100 headset on my skull just so I can talk to a bunch of twelve year olds and not get kicked out of an online game, when I have almost $20k worth of home audio jacked out of my 360?!
The kind of people who whine about PC gaming being near-death are the people who think that you should be able to buy a PC and still play the top of the line games on it five years down the line. They get frustrated that it can't be done and then start running around saying the sky is falling.
This is excellent news, because we're running out of people to kill on our own planet. I can't wait to see who our next enemy is. Maybe we can even enslave the ones we don't nuke the shit out of!
More important, Google already has the facilities to zoom in on the housing units and monitor everything their employees are doing! They could call it "GoogleEarth-Employee Monitoring Edition"!
I'm jealous of Google bastards. Son of a bitches. *pout*
I would live in a commune. Or rather, some sort of "corporate park". I have long wished that my employer owned and offered residential services on campus or at least near the campus with direct shuttles. In fact, I would rather have that than a raise at this point. And our company is not small. It has about 45,000 employees.
Phew. I was worried for a moment. It has been almost ten minutes since Digg or Slashdot posted another list of "must-have firefox extensions". Don't scare me like that, again. I need a new list of such items at least every other minute!
Also, more interesting would be a top list of GREASEMONKEY PLATYPUS scripts.
Well, I guess it's better than having her waste her time trying to force lessons on "Pluto is really a giant mythological space-god that created us all" into science class to appease some contingent ignorant of the scientific process.
Thank god we don't have any wars or homeless or anything to be concerned about these days, so we can afford such silliness!
Um, isn't that what Britain did? I'm not much of a history buff, but I'm pretty sure members of British government were actually very friendly with Hitler for a long time, believing that they could make certain concessions to him which would keep him from steamrolling their country. Eventually, they realized that he would only continue to want more each time, but their initial reaction was apparently to cave in a great deal so as to avoid trouble.
Frankly, I think they're all fucking crazy. I would say that free software, if anything, is the realm of the more libertarian among us. Arguing left versus right is like a normal person listening to an anal retentive obsessive compulsive and a total slob arguing over housecleaning. I'm for free software, because I like not having to pay money for things if I can get them for free. I also like being able to modify them without restriction and I like the community. Frankly, the idea that we have to be subjected by the philosophy of one side or another (who both want to control our lives and restrict our behaviors, but regarding different aspects) is fucking horrifying.
I have to disagree with your statement that people in the United States value their privacy and expect more of it than in Europe. It is possible that may have been true in the past. Perhaps in decades prior to my own existence. It's largely untrue today. The standard definition of "liberty" and "freedom" and "privacy" in this country tends to be a very selfish one in which everything I like should be acceptable and everything I don't like should be regulated, restricted and legislated out of existence whether it be your religion, lack of religion, sexuality or taste in literature.
A nation that sticks video cameras on every intersection stoplight, prevents people of a certain sexual orientation from entering the military, willingly submit their toddlers to having their biometric data archived in some sort of misguided attempt to save them from a potential kidnapping or rape, willingly submit their adolescents to drug and mental appraisals by public institutions of education and regularly utter the sickening phrase "we're in a war and we have to give up some of our freedom if we want to be safe" does everything except value its privacy.
But raise the price of gas a nickel or cancel American Idol or take the words "under god" out of the pledge of allegiance (which were not originally part of the allegiance to begin with!) and you'll have a majority of the population ready to slit your throat.
Well, I would presume his company has a method of backing up their mailstore, right? So they can just restore the individual mailbox from a snapshot and he can log back in? That's pretty much the standard method. If they didn't have some sort of archival and backup system, then the guy probably should have just been fired in the first place.
As for Windows Live OneCare that this article talks about. This is the first I've ever even heard of it. It sounds like some sort of tech support phone service thing. *shrug*
It doesn't matter. You either have freedom and civil liberties or you do not. You don't sacrifice your liberties and way of life because you're frightened. Especially when the sacrifices are entirely unnecessary. How about instead of spending a couple trillion dollars fighting in a military conflict that we initiated in a country that did not attack us and simultaneously turning ourselves into a police state, we spend HALF the amount and invest it in actual protection of the country through various technologies? You don't need to have my fingerprints, know what I'm thinking, see what books I'm reading and know my driving habits to prevent terrorism. It makes a convenient excuse to convince the ignorant population, but that's about it.
And not to be condescending, but some 2,800 killed by terrorist acts in the WTC is really no comparison to 300,000,000 current citizens and billions upon billions of citizens over the next centuries who will be subjected to a country in which their liberties and society are pressured out of them for supposed protection.
As far as the original poster's comment - it is dead on. As I have said repeatedly, Americans do not care. Plenty of Americans will actually say "we have to give up some freedom for security"! Hell, we have a significant percentage of high school students who think we have "too much free speech"! As long as they can still play their Nintendo Wii, get their five dollar coffee, drive their SUV, praise their baby jebus and set their Tivo to record Next Top Model, Americans don't give a fuck. God damn, look at how irate the population gets when gas prices increase by twenty cents versus the absolute silence and lack of interest when we lose our rights to due process and not be subjected to unlawful search and seizure. We hand up our liberties daily and those of our children (who we willingly have registered with the police with their photographs, DNA and fingerprints when they're still toddlers) under the premise that having their DNA stuck on a swab in a box somewhere is going to prevent some freak from raping them!
You can't even motivate people to pursue an education and it's essentially given to them for free from childhood. It's a beast to motivate them to read or truly follow current events beyond whatever the latest USA Today "news-for-the-illiterate" copy brings them. Most couldn't recite the first ten Constitutional amendments (the Bill of Rights) and couldn't even tell you what habeas corpus is. The average American believes we must sacrifice our liberties for security and probably couldn't name the last six or seven presidents.
The only thing people in this country are motivated to do is buy big cars, fuck and spawn, watch American Idol and complain about gas prices while sipping their five dollar coffees. People are simply not motivated, because life is short and they're fine as long as they can be content and enjoy a few little trinkets of "the good life". Grief and depression makes great artists. If the greatest impact you suffer is paying the mortgage and getting the kids off to school in the morning, you're not going to have the drive or motivation to push for any change. You're happy to throw your fists in the air as long as other people are dying, but as soon as a little pressure is exerted, they'll crack like a lobster shell. And, I suppose, who can blame them? If you take 400,000 angry people marching in the streets with the intention of storming a state house and toss a thousand armed national guard in front of them and see how quickly they shrivel back and change their tunes.
I'm not suggesting that people need to "rise up and become violent and overthrow the government". What I am suggesting is that, unless people are ultimately willing to, then they're just a bunch of mushy rabbits that are convinced that everyone is acting only in the ultimate benefit of the individual's own good and that simply isn't so. How else do we explain people who are imprisoned for years without due process or subjected to illegal search and seizure with absolutely no acknowledgment or outcry from the society that is supposed to support and maintain these laws to protect their fellow citizens to begin with?
I know the other 299,999,999 Americans aren't willing to stand up if it ever becomes necessary. So why put myself out there by stepping in front of all of them? There have been about fifteen people to do that in the Soviet Union recently and you see what has happened to them!
When I hear most people, including here at slashdot, talk about fighting for change and freedom and civil liberties and all of this... I know full well that in another ten minutes, they will have forgotten all about it and will be wrapped up in some epic debate over Star Wars. We aren't the revolutionaries that founded the country and other great civilizations. We're just a bunch of weak, pudgy, soft consumers and if we woke up to find the Bill of Rights no longer applied tomorrow, we'd bitch about it on Talk Radio and blogs and by late afternoon, we'd be back to setting our Tivos to record Next Top Model.
I suppose the idea is that verification will be "simple" because every adult can just verify using a credit card. Oh, wait -- you don't have a credit card or you don't like to use your credit card or give out the details to every website you come across? Well, too bad for you. This should be a boon to Visa and MasterCard! Well, alternately, you may also send us a photocopy of your birth certificate, driver's license, state identification card, social security card and a paystub.
Of course, the preferred method will still be a credit card. After all, ONLY ADULTS CAN HAVE CREDIT CARDS. Well, and children. And people's dogs... and... whoever else they randomly send them to these days.
Remember, the burden should not be on the parent to guide and monitor their children! The burden should be on the rest of society to nerf everything for the precious flesh they squirted out in the backseat of the car after the prom!
Slashdot Mirror
Thank god nobody pirates console games! . . . oh, wait . . .
Speaking of which, I wish they would stop lumping some guy at home who burns a game from his buddy to play on his machine in with some guy in china who produces and sells tens of thousands of copies of a game.
Anyway, I can't remember the last time I played a truly great id game, so I would say the real reason they had to start developing for consoles was to pick from a larger and less discerning player base.
Exactly. Only the total opposite of what you just said.
Seriously, building your own system to your precise spec and under your complete control with OEM parts will get you a far superior system to anything you can waste your money on from some douchebag pre-built company. I keep checking them out in case things change, but in almost twenty years, I have still never found any cause to buy a pre-built system unless it was a laptop.
You're an idiot.
The point is that you can't say PC gaming is dead or dying when there are countless people for whom a PC experience trumps that of a console experience, even with all the trimmings. And how is stating what you're playing your games on "bragging"?! My system is a mid-range system. Hardly something to "brag" about. But be a whiny pussy if it suits you.
Frankly, there are a couple things that are three major hindrances for me on the console.
The first hindrance is that a lot of console games are nothing more than ports of PC games. I'm seeing commercials for FEAR on the XBOX 360 as if it's a new game. It was out for the PC a year and a half ago!
The second hindrance is that the online multiplayer experience always sucks. Ridiculous limitations on the number of people that can play in any one game. Little or no persistence in any game beyond that one session. Terrible FPS games. Honestly, how is Halo the greatest FPS of all time? Average graphics and less than average gameplay?! Other than vehicles, what did Halo ever offer that Quake didn't offer years ahead of time? Just because it's new to the console world doesn't make it a revolution.
The third hindrance - and the most significant - is that console controllers are complete crap. Terribly inaccurate analog sticks and a bunch of clumsy buttons on a batwing? It's going to be hard to ever top a keyboard and mouse. I'm sure as hell not going to play RTS, strategy, or serious RPG and MMORPG games with a console controller. And even if they simply stuck a mouse and keyboard into the box with your console (a good idea, if you can use ANY USB mouse/keyboard you want and not just some klunky poorly made expensive one made by the console manufacturer), the screen resolution is still too poor for enough depth and detail for a highly text-oriented game.
The benefit of the console is that it's a good time when you want to just plop on the couch and brain-drain for a couple hours instead of sitting at your desk. I'd be more inclined to spend time with my consoles if at least the controller was improved. That is my single greatest gripe.
Troll?
. . . Or insightful !
Why is it so damn hard to just make a simple universal lobby/game-connectivity center within a console? I don't have to join some idiotic twelve-year-old-girl's fantasy three-dimensional The Sims world to jump into a game of CounterStrike or Civilization IV on my PC. Why do I have to do that on my consoles? This is seriously one of the most retarded ideas ever and it would cause me to lean toward turning on my 360 instead of my PS3 when I sit down on the sofa for a bit of gaming, just because I don't want to play "Second Life" just to get to my damned Company of Heroes.
Science should be up for debate; not for sale.
And forgive me if I don't take the skepticism over global warming seriously from the same crowd that believes people can rise from the dead and that while the massive scientific proof behind global warming is ludicrous and unreasonable, they're pretty sure that lesbians cause natural disasters.
First of all, you're not going to play a good RTS, RPG, MMORPG, FPS or strategy game on a console. How are you going to play Civilization IV on a console? Who wants to play an FPS with a crappy controller and "auto-aiming"? PC is the only game in town for a massive swath of genres. Not to mention, better graphics, performance and a more intimate connection to your peripherals. Sitting with my very agile mouse and keyboard in front of my 30" LCD is far more enjoyable than sitting on the couch with a poorly designed controller in front of my 65" Sony SXRD.
I have a PS2, PS3, XBOX, XBOX 360 and a Wii sitting in the other room as part of my home entertainment center. And they're connected to my 65" widescreen with an $18,000 audio system (B&W 8xx series)... but I can't remember the last time I played any of them. I think I played the Wii the first week I got it a few months ago. Same with the PS3. I haven't played the 360 since September. I haven't even sat in front of the television itself since the beginning of December.
However, I've bought about $600 worth of games for my PC during that time and played many hours on it. I'm sure I'll get around to playing the consoles some more, but for the most part . . . they aren't as convenient or fun. Not to mention, multiplayer is ridiculously cumbersome to setup. For one thing, you usually can't join online games unless you have voice capabilities. People will just kick you out of the room/game. But to get voice capabilities (as far as I have found so far) on the 360, you need a headset. Now, why would I want to go stick a crappy $100 headset on my skull just so I can talk to a bunch of twelve year olds and not get kicked out of an online game, when I have almost $20k worth of home audio jacked out of my 360?!
The kind of people who whine about PC gaming being near-death are the people who think that you should be able to buy a PC and still play the top of the line games on it five years down the line. They get frustrated that it can't be done and then start running around saying the sky is falling.
As long as there are PCs, PC gaming will be HUGE.
This is excellent news, because we're running out of people to kill on our own planet. I can't wait to see who our next enemy is. Maybe we can even enslave the ones we don't nuke the shit out of!
Screw you, I have PLENTY of intimate interactions with members of the opposite sex! Sure, they usually aren't aware of it, but still . . . :P
More important, Google already has the facilities to zoom in on the housing units and monitor everything their employees are doing! They could call it "GoogleEarth-Employee Monitoring Edition"!
I'm jealous of Google bastards. Son of a bitches. *pout*
I would live in a commune. Or rather, some sort of "corporate park". I have long wished that my employer owned and offered residential services on campus or at least near the campus with direct shuttles. In fact, I would rather have that than a raise at this point. And our company is not small. It has about 45,000 employees.
Thanks for not sharing it, you insensitive dick! What, you think we all RTFAs? Hell no!
Phew. I was worried for a moment. It has been almost ten minutes since Digg or Slashdot posted another list of "must-have firefox extensions". Don't scare me like that, again. I need a new list of such items at least every other minute!
Also, more interesting would be a top list of GREASEMONKEY PLATYPUS scripts.
I will someday have children and their children's children will still be reading about what is going on with the SCO debacle. Good grief.
Well, I guess it's better than having her waste her time trying to force lessons on "Pluto is really a giant mythological space-god that created us all" into science class to appease some contingent ignorant of the scientific process.
Thank god we don't have any wars or homeless or anything to be concerned about these days, so we can afford such silliness!
Um, isn't that what Britain did? I'm not much of a history buff, but I'm pretty sure members of British government were actually very friendly with Hitler for a long time, believing that they could make certain concessions to him which would keep him from steamrolling their country. Eventually, they realized that he would only continue to want more each time, but their initial reaction was apparently to cave in a great deal so as to avoid trouble.
I'll throw them a few ideas if they plan on paying me for them. If not, then fuck them.
Frankly, I think they're all fucking crazy. I would say that free software, if anything, is the realm of the more libertarian among us. Arguing left versus right is like a normal person listening to an anal retentive obsessive compulsive and a total slob arguing over housecleaning. I'm for free software, because I like not having to pay money for things if I can get them for free. I also like being able to modify them without restriction and I like the community. Frankly, the idea that we have to be subjected by the philosophy of one side or another (who both want to control our lives and restrict our behaviors, but regarding different aspects) is fucking horrifying.
I have to disagree with your statement that people in the United States value their privacy and expect more of it than in Europe. It is possible that may have been true in the past. Perhaps in decades prior to my own existence. It's largely untrue today. The standard definition of "liberty" and "freedom" and "privacy" in this country tends to be a very selfish one in which everything I like should be acceptable and everything I don't like should be regulated, restricted and legislated out of existence whether it be your religion, lack of religion, sexuality or taste in literature.
A nation that sticks video cameras on every intersection stoplight, prevents people of a certain sexual orientation from entering the military, willingly submit their toddlers to having their biometric data archived in some sort of misguided attempt to save them from a potential kidnapping or rape, willingly submit their adolescents to drug and mental appraisals by public institutions of education and regularly utter the sickening phrase "we're in a war and we have to give up some of our freedom if we want to be safe" does everything except value its privacy.
But raise the price of gas a nickel or cancel American Idol or take the words "under god" out of the pledge of allegiance (which were not originally part of the allegiance to begin with!) and you'll have a majority of the population ready to slit your throat.
Well, I would presume his company has a method of backing up their mailstore, right? So they can just restore the individual mailbox from a snapshot and he can log back in? That's pretty much the standard method. If they didn't have some sort of archival and backup system, then the guy probably should have just been fired in the first place.
As for Windows Live OneCare that this article talks about. This is the first I've ever even heard of it. It sounds like some sort of tech support phone service thing. *shrug*
We don't care about civil liberties and freedom for our own society, why would we care about it in Islamic nations?
It doesn't matter. You either have freedom and civil liberties or you do not. You don't sacrifice your liberties and way of life because you're frightened. Especially when the sacrifices are entirely unnecessary. How about instead of spending a couple trillion dollars fighting in a military conflict that we initiated in a country that did not attack us and simultaneously turning ourselves into a police state, we spend HALF the amount and invest it in actual protection of the country through various technologies? You don't need to have my fingerprints, know what I'm thinking, see what books I'm reading and know my driving habits to prevent terrorism. It makes a convenient excuse to convince the ignorant population, but that's about it.
And not to be condescending, but some 2,800 killed by terrorist acts in the WTC is really no comparison to 300,000,000 current citizens and billions upon billions of citizens over the next centuries who will be subjected to a country in which their liberties and society are pressured out of them for supposed protection.
As far as the original poster's comment - it is dead on. As I have said repeatedly, Americans do not care. Plenty of Americans will actually say "we have to give up some freedom for security"! Hell, we have a significant percentage of high school students who think we have "too much free speech"! As long as they can still play their Nintendo Wii, get their five dollar coffee, drive their SUV, praise their baby jebus and set their Tivo to record Next Top Model, Americans don't give a fuck. God damn, look at how irate the population gets when gas prices increase by twenty cents versus the absolute silence and lack of interest when we lose our rights to due process and not be subjected to unlawful search and seizure. We hand up our liberties daily and those of our children (who we willingly have registered with the police with their photographs, DNA and fingerprints when they're still toddlers) under the premise that having their DNA stuck on a swab in a box somewhere is going to prevent some freak from raping them!
I have some friends who are married and from what I have observed, this whole "nerves / sound" thing is dead on.
You can't even motivate people to pursue an education and it's essentially given to them for free from childhood. It's a beast to motivate them to read or truly follow current events beyond whatever the latest USA Today "news-for-the-illiterate" copy brings them. Most couldn't recite the first ten Constitutional amendments (the Bill of Rights) and couldn't even tell you what habeas corpus is. The average American believes we must sacrifice our liberties for security and probably couldn't name the last six or seven presidents.
The only thing people in this country are motivated to do is buy big cars, fuck and spawn, watch American Idol and complain about gas prices while sipping their five dollar coffees. People are simply not motivated, because life is short and they're fine as long as they can be content and enjoy a few little trinkets of "the good life". Grief and depression makes great artists. If the greatest impact you suffer is paying the mortgage and getting the kids off to school in the morning, you're not going to have the drive or motivation to push for any change. You're happy to throw your fists in the air as long as other people are dying, but as soon as a little pressure is exerted, they'll crack like a lobster shell. And, I suppose, who can blame them? If you take 400,000 angry people marching in the streets with the intention of storming a state house and toss a thousand armed national guard in front of them and see how quickly they shrivel back and change their tunes.
I'm not suggesting that people need to "rise up and become violent and overthrow the government". What I am suggesting is that, unless people are ultimately willing to, then they're just a bunch of mushy rabbits that are convinced that everyone is acting only in the ultimate benefit of the individual's own good and that simply isn't so. How else do we explain people who are imprisoned for years without due process or subjected to illegal search and seizure with absolutely no acknowledgment or outcry from the society that is supposed to support and maintain these laws to protect their fellow citizens to begin with?
I know the other 299,999,999 Americans aren't willing to stand up if it ever becomes necessary. So why put myself out there by stepping in front of all of them? There have been about fifteen people to do that in the Soviet Union recently and you see what has happened to them!
When I hear most people, including here at slashdot, talk about fighting for change and freedom and civil liberties and all of this... I know full well that in another ten minutes, they will have forgotten all about it and will be wrapped up in some epic debate over Star Wars. We aren't the revolutionaries that founded the country and other great civilizations. We're just a bunch of weak, pudgy, soft consumers and if we woke up to find the Bill of Rights no longer applied tomorrow, we'd bitch about it on Talk Radio and blogs and by late afternoon, we'd be back to setting our Tivos to record Next Top Model.
I suppose the idea is that verification will be "simple" because every adult can just verify using a credit card. Oh, wait -- you don't have a credit card or you don't like to use your credit card or give out the details to every website you come across? Well, too bad for you. This should be a boon to Visa and MasterCard! Well, alternately, you may also send us a photocopy of your birth certificate, driver's license, state identification card, social security card and a paystub.
Of course, the preferred method will still be a credit card. After all, ONLY ADULTS CAN HAVE CREDIT CARDS. Well, and children. And people's dogs... and... whoever else they randomly send them to these days.
Remember, the burden should not be on the parent to guide and monitor their children! The burden should be on the rest of society to nerf everything for the precious flesh they squirted out in the backseat of the car after the prom!