I expect life (well, at least online gaming) to become very interesting for the Hamachi users once 5.0.0.0/8 is given to a registry. Well, until 2025 when the first ISPs will start assigning people IPv6 adresses and Hamachi can just take over 0005::/32.
I'm not sure about the rest of Europe but in Germany VAT is usually already contained in the price. That's how brick-and-mortar stores do it and that's what people expect.
If the bag of chips says it's 99 cents then it really means it's about 83 cents with 19% VAT factored in. Still, I need to pay 99 cents so that's what the sign says.
If you sell something on eBay (commercially) I expect VAT to be your problem. If your item sells for 10 EUR then I give you 10 EUR + s/h. It's your business to make sure the state gets its money, not mine.
As for VAT on bank transfers, that's something I've never heard of. The VAT on bank transfers may as well be 1900000% as bank transfers within Germany (at least those that I know of) are free. I'm not sure about the rest of the Eurozone but the few international transfers I've made have not resulted in additional cost to me at least.
Very true. What are the games I have played the most? The lead easily goes to UFO: Enemy Unknown. I don't even want to count. Final Fantasy Tactics has also sucked up a prodigious amount of time, as has Escape Velocity Nova, which I'm currently playing again. Every blue moon I play through Diablo II with a friend, which also adds up to a lot of time. Neverwinter Nights also took a lot of my time. And even though I don't play them much anymore, Unreal and Unreal Tournament had me quite hooked for a while through UnrealEd.
The only reason System shock 2 doesn't really qualify is because every time I try to play it on a modern system it breaks at some point and I drop it again.
In general, it's not about graphics or fancy effects. At all. A game's only pretty for a few months and only if you have the right hardware. What makes a game compelling is usually something else, whether it's customizability (EVN, NWN, Unreal, UT, SS2), a captivating storyline (FFT, EVN, NWN, SS2) or simply gameplay that just works extremely well (FFT, EVN, NWN, SS2). And usually it's a combination of them.
Unfortunately, it's not really profitable to make a game people will want to play again and again and again. Making a game that people want to play once and then releasing another game for them to buy makes more economical sense, which may be one reason why even most blockbuster titles are barely looked at after two or three years.
I think the Coward's point is that people will opt for convenience whenever possible. If they decide it's more convenient to shoot up a truck and loot it for food than to wait in line then some will screw ethic and do it. In short: Humans are capable of evil everywhere and a catastrophe will bring it out.
However, the "paws" button horribly failed at conveying what it does in every non-English locale. There is no applicable metaphor anymore; you have to memorize that "footprints" mean "pause the game". It's the kind of thing that, in a modern game, would be called a "Guide, Dang It" by TV Tropes - the only reason they got away with it was that back in the day it was consideres worthwhile to read the manual (granted, back in the day manuals actually provided value to the game).
(I know that the association isn't obvious in English either but there is at least a slight chance that someone gets it.)
Well, consider this: TFA is fairly wordy and some people don't have the patience to read unneccessarily wordy articles like TFA, which is quite wordy. At a certain point you start intruducing redundancy due to repeating what you said earlier, which is a sign of your article being unneccessarily words, just like TFA, which is wordy to the point of being redundancy, which makes it longer than it needs to be due to being wordy and redundant because it keeps repeating itself.
By repeating yourself, which introduces redundancy, you run a risk of being seen as unneccessarily and perhaps even excessively wordy, which might strain the patience of the reader who, had your article been less words and redundant, might have felt more positive about your article than he did now because it is quite wordy and redundant and thus longer than he preferred as he has a limited patience for articles which waste his time by repeating themselves until they are much longer then neccessary due to redundancy. Which is bad.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many sites will force you to use fairly short passwords. Yes, !qAyXsW2 is immune to a naive dictionary attack but so is please turn on your magic beam*. The latter has the advantage of being easy to remember but won't work on many sites with policies that restrict passwords to eight to eleven characters because apparently they don't want to pay for the extra storage space they'll need to store the hash of a longer password.
* Why yes, I do have Mr. Sandman stuck in my head right now.
I thought Google's core offerings were search and ads. The smartphone platform that is seen as the biggest threat to the iPhone is still a bit too recent for me to consider it a core offering. And it also nicely illustrates how Google is moving in on Apple's territory. And Google's Something One smartphone is a very direct attack on one of Apple's most profitable markets.
You are aware that "Shock 2" has referred to System Shock 2 since the beginning of the SS2 intro?
Besides, they're makiung a followup to BioShock 2? I wonder what they will remove next. Probably turning and strafing; three dimensions are far too complex for the Halo generation.
The first, simply put, is a "hot coffee" reaction. As certain countries (eg. Germany and Australia) adopt wildly restrictive attitudes towards video game content, developers are naturally more paranoid about being criticised (or sued) for game content that was actually added or unlocked by a third party mod.
Note that neither Germany nor Australia are at fault here. it's the United States.
Germany doesn't care about modding. Color all the blood green and remove and swastikas your game might contain and maybe tone down the gibbing a bit. Done*. We don't care if your game has tits or whether people can mod them in. We don't care whether people can use a game company-provided editor to make people bleed gallons of blood in swastika patterns. That's user-generated content and we pass our age restrictions based on what's in the package. I mean, we don't even care if there's a cheat code you can enter to turn blood back on (in fact, for a while "blood cheat" wa a staple of a German gamer's vocabulary). If the game as delivered doesn't have red blood and gibbing it's not that violent period.
In the USA, however, your game can end up getting torn to pieces because you have a modding tool that theoretically allows people to add nude textures to ingame characters. Somehow that affects people's opinions on the game. And suddenly the publisher has a case against releasing the dev tools.
* Granted, depictions of excessive violence dont need blood to net the game a restriction over here. But as long as you don't make a Manhunt clone you should be fairly safe.
System Shock 2 (not sure about 1) is a good example - it has an editor and a once-thriving modding scene. In fact, it would probably still thrive if the game wasn't completely unstable on any operating system after Windows 98.
The end-to-end monitoring can be reduced by setting up your system to never talk to Google Analytics (whether through entries in/etc/hosts or through Firefox extensions like Ghostery) and Google's JavaScript hosting service.
Nah. With a YouTube rehaul being around the corner I can deal with Flash for a little bit longer. Besides, I have an extension that lets me download the videos already so I can always just watch them with VLC.
In fact, in Germany the liberal FDP is usually seen as close to the conservative CDU/CSU. The opposite are the pseudo-left SPD (initially a worker's party, nowadays just as populist as the CDU/CSU) and Die Linke (literally "the left one") with the Greens being closer to the SPD than the CDU/CSU.
"Liberal" and "leftist" are fairly orthogonal in Germany, with the (pseudo-)leftist parties wanting to add laws that protect the workers, the conservatives wanting laws that allow them to hunt terrorists in our bedrooms and the liberals wanting laws that give big tax breaks to corporations.
"Big government" is something all the big parties like as they traditionally divide themselves over "on the employees' side" and "on the employers' side" - even though they've since both changed to "on the side where we make lots of money" (as evidenced when the SPD's left wing left the party and joined forces with the successor of the GDR's Socialist Union Party to form Die Linke).
And did I mention their build system sucks? Sure, autotools is a bitch for a dev to set up, but at least it's never given me weird, inexplicable failures like jam and especially scons. (Damn you to hell, scons! I want those two afternoons back!)
Until you run into a program the developer of which didn't manage to properly set up the autotools, leading to, yes, inexplicable failures and having to rewrite files written in an antique macro language. Attempting to build SDL_sound and its weird dependency SMPEG by hand is one of the more grueling experiences I've had with *nix.
Using autotools only protects the user from a quirky and nerve-grating build process if the developer has an understanding of the autotools package, its associated programs and files and the M4 macro language. Otherwise you just usually end up lucky that the copypasted code happens to work as expected.
That depends on how desperately you want to restart Firefox. Seeing that the script managed to crash mine (3.5.7 on Snow Leopard) twice within two minutes (introducing fun effects like "the video is overlaid every single tab" along the way), I'd recommend it only if you really want to see crash recovery in action.
Note that for a while you could get the 1110i for 10 EUR in Germany. Contract-free. Nokia is very effectively covering the budget sector while at the same time offering high-end devices people in the market describe as tasty. But for me the important part is that I can get a decent phone that does everything I want for the price of a moderate-to-large USB stick.
They themselves probably have a contract that stipulates they need proper paid-for licenses to all components they use, therefore they ask for a commercial license. The OP can really just slap "4. And pay me $1000." at the end of the license and everyone is happy.
You realize that Apple's UI would come with Apple's OS and Apple's lockdown policy? It's unlikely that they'd port Cocoa touch to Linux even though they already have a smartphone OS that does everything they want. Likewise, I don't see much of a business case for allowing the user to customize his phone. If anything, you'd see both lines continued in parallel.
Also, neither company has any reason to merge. Both of their smartphone businesses are going well; Nokia can most likely just dodge Apple's patents if things go wrong and Apple doesn't have the money to strongarm Nokia into anything. Plus, every time Apple tries to mix their brand with someone else's it desn't go very well (eg. the HP iPod, the Motorola ROKR...).
This will end with both companies agreeing on licensing terms and those terms will be closer to what Nokia wants than to what Apple wants. Apple has a few cool UI things; Nokia has patents neccessary to make any kind of phone at all. Most of Apple's patents just aren't quite worth (to Nokia) as much as those they license off Ericcson etc.
They can be combined and are used in that manner, which is enough to make the statement "Claymore mines contain motion sensors" responsible journalism as per modern standards.
Converting to metric wrks vers well in that regard; room temperature is 18-22 degrees Celsius. Yes, in Europe "room temperature IQ" is a tina bit harsher than in the States.
Slashdot Mirror
John 15:14 would work rather well, though.
Commercial Space Initiative abbreviates to CSI. Must... resist... urge to... make... a one-liner...
Okay. Urge suppressed. Well, back to topic. I think that when NASA goes commercial, average people will finally have enough... space.
Yeeeeeeeeeah!
Damn!
I expect life (well, at least online gaming) to become very interesting for the Hamachi users once 5.0.0.0/8 is given to a registry. Well, until 2025 when the first ISPs will start assigning people IPv6 adresses and Hamachi can just take over 0005::/32.
I'm not sure about the rest of Europe but in Germany VAT is usually already contained in the price. That's how brick-and-mortar stores do it and that's what people expect.
If the bag of chips says it's 99 cents then it really means it's about 83 cents with 19% VAT factored in. Still, I need to pay 99 cents so that's what the sign says.
If you sell something on eBay (commercially) I expect VAT to be your problem. If your item sells for 10 EUR then I give you 10 EUR + s/h. It's your business to make sure the state gets its money, not mine.
As for VAT on bank transfers, that's something I've never heard of. The VAT on bank transfers may as well be 1900000% as bank transfers within Germany (at least those that I know of) are free. I'm not sure about the rest of the Eurozone but the few international transfers I've made have not resulted in additional cost to me at least.
Very true. What are the games I have played the most? The lead easily goes to UFO: Enemy Unknown. I don't even want to count. Final Fantasy Tactics has also sucked up a prodigious amount of time, as has Escape Velocity Nova, which I'm currently playing again. Every blue moon I play through Diablo II with a friend, which also adds up to a lot of time. Neverwinter Nights also took a lot of my time. And even though I don't play them much anymore, Unreal and Unreal Tournament had me quite hooked for a while through UnrealEd.
The only reason System shock 2 doesn't really qualify is because every time I try to play it on a modern system it breaks at some point and I drop it again.
In general, it's not about graphics or fancy effects. At all. A game's only pretty for a few months and only if you have the right hardware. What makes a game compelling is usually something else, whether it's customizability (EVN, NWN, Unreal, UT, SS2), a captivating storyline (FFT, EVN, NWN, SS2) or simply gameplay that just works extremely well (FFT, EVN, NWN, SS2). And usually it's a combination of them.
Unfortunately, it's not really profitable to make a game people will want to play again and again and again. Making a game that people want to play once and then releasing another game for them to buy makes more economical sense, which may be one reason why even most blockbuster titles are barely looked at after two or three years.
I think the Coward's point is that people will opt for convenience whenever possible. If they decide it's more convenient to shoot up a truck and loot it for food than to wait in line then some will screw ethic and do it. In short: Humans are capable of evil everywhere and a catastrophe will bring it out.
However, the "paws" button horribly failed at conveying what it does in every non-English locale. There is no applicable metaphor anymore; you have to memorize that "footprints" mean "pause the game". It's the kind of thing that, in a modern game, would be called a "Guide, Dang It" by TV Tropes - the only reason they got away with it was that back in the day it was consideres worthwhile to read the manual (granted, back in the day manuals actually provided value to the game).
(I know that the association isn't obvious in English either but there is at least a slight chance that someone gets it.)
Well, consider this: TFA is fairly wordy and some people don't have the patience to read unneccessarily wordy articles like TFA, which is quite wordy. At a certain point you start intruducing redundancy due to repeating what you said earlier, which is a sign of your article being unneccessarily words, just like TFA, which is wordy to the point of being redundancy, which makes it longer than it needs to be due to being wordy and redundant because it keeps repeating itself.
By repeating yourself, which introduces redundancy, you run a risk of being seen as unneccessarily and perhaps even excessively wordy, which might strain the patience of the reader who, had your article been less words and redundant, might have felt more positive about your article than he did now because it is quite wordy and redundant and thus longer than he preferred as he has a limited patience for articles which waste his time by repeating themselves until they are much longer then neccessary due to redundancy. Which is bad.
The problem is compounded by the fact that many sites will force you to use fairly short passwords. Yes, !qAyXsW2 is immune to a naive dictionary attack but so is please turn on your magic beam*. The latter has the advantage of being easy to remember but won't work on many sites with policies that restrict passwords to eight to eleven characters because apparently they don't want to pay for the extra storage space they'll need to store the hash of a longer password.
* Why yes, I do have Mr. Sandman stuck in my head right now.
I thought Google's core offerings were search and ads. The smartphone platform that is seen as the biggest threat to the iPhone is still a bit too recent for me to consider it a core offering. And it also nicely illustrates how Google is moving in on Apple's territory. And Google's Something One smartphone is a very direct attack on one of Apple's most profitable markets.
For me, the first hit is the Google Trends page for the specific search string. Yup, we have just slashdotted a search term.
You are aware that "Shock 2" has referred to System Shock 2 since the beginning of the SS2 intro?
Besides, they're makiung a followup to BioShock 2? I wonder what they will remove next. Probably turning and strafing; three dimensions are far too complex for the Halo generation.
Note that neither Germany nor Australia are at fault here. it's the United States.
Germany doesn't care about modding. Color all the blood green and remove and swastikas your game might contain and maybe tone down the gibbing a bit. Done*. We don't care if your game has tits or whether people can mod them in. We don't care whether people can use a game company-provided editor to make people bleed gallons of blood in swastika patterns. That's user-generated content and we pass our age restrictions based on what's in the package. I mean, we don't even care if there's a cheat code you can enter to turn blood back on (in fact, for a while "blood cheat" wa a staple of a German gamer's vocabulary). If the game as delivered doesn't have red blood and gibbing it's not that violent period.
In the USA, however, your game can end up getting torn to pieces because you have a modding tool that theoretically allows people to add nude textures to ingame characters. Somehow that affects people's opinions on the game. And suddenly the publisher has a case against releasing the dev tools.
* Granted, depictions of excessive violence dont need blood to net the game a restriction over here. But as long as you don't make a Manhunt clone you should be fairly safe.
System Shock 2 (not sure about 1) is a good example - it has an editor and a once-thriving modding scene. In fact, it would probably still thrive if the game wasn't completely unstable on any operating system after Windows 98.
The end-to-end monitoring can be reduced by setting up your system to never talk to Google Analytics (whether through entries in /etc/hosts or through Firefox extensions like Ghostery) and Google's JavaScript hosting service.
Nah. With a YouTube rehaul being around the corner I can deal with Flash for a little bit longer. Besides, I have an extension that lets me download the videos already so I can always just watch them with VLC.
In fact, in Germany the liberal FDP is usually seen as close to the conservative CDU/CSU. The opposite are the pseudo-left SPD (initially a worker's party, nowadays just as populist as the CDU/CSU) and Die Linke (literally "the left one") with the Greens being closer to the SPD than the CDU/CSU.
"Liberal" and "leftist" are fairly orthogonal in Germany, with the (pseudo-)leftist parties wanting to add laws that protect the workers, the conservatives wanting laws that allow them to hunt terrorists in our bedrooms and the liberals wanting laws that give big tax breaks to corporations.
"Big government" is something all the big parties like as they traditionally divide themselves over "on the employees' side" and "on the employers' side" - even though they've since both changed to "on the side where we make lots of money" (as evidenced when the SPD's left wing left the party and joined forces with the successor of the GDR's Socialist Union Party to form Die Linke).
Until you run into a program the developer of which didn't manage to properly set up the autotools, leading to, yes, inexplicable failures and having to rewrite files written in an antique macro language. Attempting to build SDL_sound and its weird dependency SMPEG by hand is one of the more grueling experiences I've had with *nix.
Using autotools only protects the user from a quirky and nerve-grating build process if the developer has an understanding of the autotools package, its associated programs and files and the M4 macro language. Otherwise you just usually end up lucky that the copypasted code happens to work as expected.
That depends on how desperately you want to restart Firefox. Seeing that the script managed to crash mine (3.5.7 on Snow Leopard) twice within two minutes (introducing fun effects like "the video is overlaid every single tab" along the way), I'd recommend it only if you really want to see crash recovery in action.
Note that for a while you could get the 1110i for 10 EUR in Germany. Contract-free. Nokia is very effectively covering the budget sector while at the same time offering high-end devices people in the market describe as tasty. But for me the important part is that I can get a decent phone that does everything I want for the price of a moderate-to-large USB stick.
They themselves probably have a contract that stipulates they need proper paid-for licenses to all components they use, therefore they ask for a commercial license. The OP can really just slap "4. And pay me $1000." at the end of the license and everyone is happy.
You realize that Apple's UI would come with Apple's OS and Apple's lockdown policy? It's unlikely that they'd port Cocoa touch to Linux even though they already have a smartphone OS that does everything they want. Likewise, I don't see much of a business case for allowing the user to customize his phone. If anything, you'd see both lines continued in parallel.
Also, neither company has any reason to merge. Both of their smartphone businesses are going well; Nokia can most likely just dodge Apple's patents if things go wrong and Apple doesn't have the money to strongarm Nokia into anything. Plus, every time Apple tries to mix their brand with someone else's it desn't go very well (eg. the HP iPod, the Motorola ROKR...).
This will end with both companies agreeing on licensing terms and those terms will be closer to what Nokia wants than to what Apple wants. Apple has a few cool UI things; Nokia has patents neccessary to make any kind of phone at all. Most of Apple's patents just aren't quite worth (to Nokia) as much as those they license off Ericcson etc.
They can be combined and are used in that manner, which is enough to make the statement "Claymore mines contain motion sensors" responsible journalism as per modern standards.
Converting to metric wrks vers well in that regard; room temperature is 18-22 degrees Celsius. Yes, in Europe "room temperature IQ" is a tina bit harsher than in the States.
Remember that motion detectors are an important part of Claymore mines and sentry guns. It's a wonder nobody was killed or worse.