It seems to me that your first point is moot. Personally, I use the AdBlock extension for Firefox (and I'm sure many others do) to block any ads I don't wish to see. Tired of seeing the same old ad? Nope, I'll never see them at all.
The other two points also seem invalid. Maybe if someone completely disabled their cookies they would be true. However, a much smarter approach is to simply set your web browser to delete cookies after a set period of time (every 30 days, for instance), or to delete them upon closing the web browser. This way tracking via cookies only lasts for a set period of time, but most other cookie functions would continue working.
I suppose that people using IE may not have these options available, so for them enabling cookies might be a better idea. Then again, who uses IE anymore? =P
As a member of one of the betas (though, I will give it that it was a moderately early beta), I can say that there really wasn't much in the game at all. The skill system worked as WoW's, with skills going up as you used them, but it worked differently in that you had to constantly use the skills or they'd start going down. Character movement was all point-and-click using pathing to determine how to get where you were going. Bad pathing too, as it would get stuck constantly if there was anything to get stuck on (again, this *was* an early beta). The graphics were alright if you zoomed in really close, but usually you were looking at the world from far out, with everything looking very small and bland. Worse, the camera was difficult to manipulate, and near-impossible when inside buildings. Character design was lackluster, and classes fairly nonexistant. Really, absolutely nothing in the game was very good. Personally, I'm surprised they didn't cancel it long ago.
Easy, start kids at the beginning. Hand 'em an old C64 or Amiga system and let them learn how to use it. It might give them an appreciation for functionality in software, as opposed to flashy graphics and glamor, as well as avoiding getting them locked into a DOS standpoint of CLI commands. At the very least, start a kid on a non-graphical interface, so they learn to actually use the system. How to set up the startup scripts, manage memory, maybe even some programming skills. Once they're ready, bump them up to a Linux system and let them go. Graphical systems are fine, but they teach very little in the way of actually using and running a computer system.
If you run a search for 'search engine' on other sites (I tried altavista, webcrawler, go.com and search.com myself), MSN does not come up either. I doubt this is so much something specific to Google as simply a result of the way MSN Search's site is set up. Search for 'web search', for instance, and MSN is the fourth result on Google. My guess would be that 'engine' doesn't feature very prominently on MSN's search, so it doesn't come up in results until much further down than other engines. Simply the fact that MSN Search comes up first on MSN Search shows that their engine is highly biased (as if that needs to be said).
I haven't seen it mentioned yet... Silhouette Mirage is a great and very unique game made by Treasure. Not from this year, but it's the best I've played this year. Skygunner is another great game I've had the pleasure of playing. Either game is well worth playing through several times.
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It seems to me that your first point is moot. Personally, I use the AdBlock extension for Firefox (and I'm sure many others do) to block any ads I don't wish to see. Tired of seeing the same old ad? Nope, I'll never see them at all.
The other two points also seem invalid. Maybe if someone completely disabled their cookies they would be true. However, a much smarter approach is to simply set your web browser to delete cookies after a set period of time (every 30 days, for instance), or to delete them upon closing the web browser. This way tracking via cookies only lasts for a set period of time, but most other cookie functions would continue working.
I suppose that people using IE may not have these options available, so for them enabling cookies might be a better idea. Then again, who uses IE anymore? =P
As a member of one of the betas (though, I will give it that it was a moderately early beta), I can say that there really wasn't much in the game at all. The skill system worked as WoW's, with skills going up as you used them, but it worked differently in that you had to constantly use the skills or they'd start going down. Character movement was all point-and-click using pathing to determine how to get where you were going. Bad pathing too, as it would get stuck constantly if there was anything to get stuck on (again, this *was* an early beta). The graphics were alright if you zoomed in really close, but usually you were looking at the world from far out, with everything looking very small and bland. Worse, the camera was difficult to manipulate, and near-impossible when inside buildings. Character design was lackluster, and classes fairly nonexistant. Really, absolutely nothing in the game was very good. Personally, I'm surprised they didn't cancel it long ago.
Easy, start kids at the beginning. Hand 'em an old C64 or Amiga system and let them learn how to use it. It might give them an appreciation for functionality in software, as opposed to flashy graphics and glamor, as well as avoiding getting them locked into a DOS standpoint of CLI commands. At the very least, start a kid on a non-graphical interface, so they learn to actually use the system. How to set up the startup scripts, manage memory, maybe even some programming skills. Once they're ready, bump them up to a Linux system and let them go. Graphical systems are fine, but they teach very little in the way of actually using and running a computer system.
If you run a search for 'search engine' on other sites (I tried altavista, webcrawler, go.com and search.com myself), MSN does not come up either. I doubt this is so much something specific to Google as simply a result of the way MSN Search's site is set up. Search for 'web search', for instance, and MSN is the fourth result on Google. My guess would be that 'engine' doesn't feature very prominently on MSN's search, so it doesn't come up in results until much further down than other engines. Simply the fact that MSN Search comes up first on MSN Search shows that their engine is highly biased (as if that needs to be said).
I haven't seen it mentioned yet... Silhouette Mirage is a great and very unique game made by Treasure. Not from this year, but it's the best I've played this year. Skygunner is another great game I've had the pleasure of playing. Either game is well worth playing through several times.