Its a silly (but very impressive) hack, but its a lot of fun. It strikes me that Apple ought to consider building a tiny screen into the logo themselves in the next generation.
It catches the attention of anyone looking at the laptop, its a way to show off or distinguish your laptop from any others nearby, and the entire time you are looking at whats happening *you are looking at an Apple logo*, surely thats got to be a marketing dweeb's wetdream. All they need to do is include it in the system without it using up the 2nd monitor slot.:P
I have always gotten the impression that the nukes were going to be used in Japan no matter what. I am sure they contributed to breaking the Japanese will and hastening a surrender, I am sure they saved both American and Japanese lives by abrogating the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which would likely have resulted in far more casualties than came from dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have no doubt those things are true.
However I think the main reason they were dropped is so that the US could get some hard data on their affects on a civilian population. By the reports I read, the whole area was intensively analyzed by the US, and surviving Japanese citizens were studied for years. There seems to have been an intensive and highly organized team of individuals on standby (or very quickly created) to hit the area of Hiroshima as soon as the Japanese had surrendered. I think the US Government had a new powerful weapon, and there was likely a lot of pressure to go use it so that the US could see what sort of a deterrent it was, and determine what preparations were needed in case anyone else ever figured it out (ie Russia). I think those people would have been very disappointed if Japan was able to surrender before they got a chance to use it. Its an impression admittedly, I have no proof to point to.
When someone logs into my website, I don't hear the modem fire off, with the distinctive sound of a successful handshake, hear my wife groan as I get out of bed to go see who was logging in. Nor can I interrupt their browsing to chat with them directly.
Yes, I can make a website that lets me know when someone has loaded a page, and I can even venture to say I could make a chat box that appears and lets me chat with them given some time playing with AJAX and php, but its not the same thing, nor does it have the same atmosphere.
As well the other guy who was saying I knew the people in real life was partially true as well. Also the internet wasn't generally available, and BBSes provided a means of communicating world wide on a relatively massive basis with things like Fidonet etc. It was a kind of a special community in that regard, whereas everyone and their dog uses the web these days.
To get the best all round reliable system that is also affordable and accountable. Surely some company or organization out there can be encouraged to put up a prize as a reward for development.
Getting commercial access to space is important for sure, glad that that is underway, but for any country calling itself a democracy, surely nothing is more important to its citizens than the assurance that all elections are being conducted fairly using a reliable system.
Up here in Canada, we still use paper ballots and that has worked well for us, but of course the US is 10x the size of Canada in terms of population, I can see the desirability of electronic accounting for managing elections, but not if its not reliable.
In all honesty, I think there is still considerable doubt that Bush & Co won the first election fairly, and look at the impact that has had on the world: massive economic meltdown, a war thats taken thousand of lives on both sides for debatable benefits, and 8 years of badly mismanaged US Foreign Policy (at least IMHO). There's no assurance that if the election had gone the other way it would have been any better, but if Bush didn't legally win the election what a testament to the necessity of reliable election hardware and software.
Oh, and if any design is submitted using an Access database - the submitters should be taken out back and shot:P
Yes, I ran a Roboterm BBS for a few years, it was miles ahead of regular text/ANSI graphics based BBS software, although it did require a proprietary client (that you could download for free of course) and that turned some people off.
Its funny that I hadn't ever thought of Roboterm as a precursor to HTML in any way. It was a very clever system and really easily configured etc.
Sadly, when the WWW emerged, the BBS died a slow death, but something was lost then as well. BBSes created a sense of community that is missing in a web environment.
To counter your argument: I bought a PS3 and got Rockband with it. As someone who very seldom listens to radio and who has (and I counted) 13 mp3 files on my system which I seldom play (I had to do a search to find out where I put them), I was only familiar with around 20% of the songs in the game. This didn't prevent me from enjoying playing it, and in fact I even enjoyed playing some of the songs I did recognize and recall thinking were absolute shit when I first heard them but are now at least "meh" for me.
Its all moot now as I sold the PS3 and Rockband because I still end up playing computer games over console games.
Yes, I realize they are making it for the XBox as well as for the PC, but the combat animations make me think of fighting games on the PS2 more than say the combat in City of Heroes/Villains. The later has a fantastic combat system that requires you to think tactically when in combat, this just looks like rushed flailing with lots of flashy blur and it suggests it will a much more simplistic combat system.
Despite all of the wishful thinking of game developers I reallly don't think that console gameplay (which is necessarily light on control options and precision) mixes well with MMOs which thrive on variety of options and of course communication with other players via chat (and which have the advantage of control via mouse and keyboard). I will make the assumption that a keyboard exists for an XBox so you can play it like a PC game, but since its unlikely to be a requirement for play, its going to make the game inherently much less social for most people. At that point you might as well stop calling it an MMO.
City of Heroes was brilliant in many regards, this looks flashier but otherwise kinda "meh". Thats too bad, I had high hopes. I look forward to seeing more gameplay footage to see if they have created a game I would want to play, or just more console-related crap (yes, I have a bias against consoles, I freely admit it. I have bought a PS2, XBox, and PS3 in the past in attempts to get into console gaming, I sold all 3 in turn because in the end the gameplay and the controllers were just not doing it for me).
What we need is a utility that detects these scripts, uploads them to a common website and generates a new host file that is downloadable by users to block all those sites. The website can make a running list of all the websites so blocked and the number of times users have NOT seen their content due to the advertising methods they have chosen. That way users get a regularly updated hosts file that prevents them from seeing the annoying ads and the website owners have a place they can go to that lets them see the thousands of users who are no longer visiting their website.
The only way to make technology like this impractical is to let those who use it see that they are losing revenue as well. Its easy to identify when you made a new sale, and match that to a new ad campaign, its harder to tell when people are turning away in droves and not buying something.
Of course the average user is probably a sheep and just endures the ads without realizing their are any options at all.
COH just added a Mac client, and is fairly playable if you meet the requirements. I am certainly having only minor problems which I expect will be cleaned up down the road.
The game is still quite playable, there are people playing at all levels so its not difficult to get a group, and its the sort of game that you can log into, do a mission or two in half an hour to an hour and feel like you accomplished something.
It also has the best combat system mechanics and character creation system of any MMO I have played. Sure you need to like comic book superheroes or villains to have a feel for the niche the game occupies but when I first tried it I hadn't read a comic in over 30 years and I enjoyed the game immensely from day one.
Once you have experienced the Flight travel power in this game, every other MMO travel power will seem quite lame:P
We, the secret cabal of/. users with IDs under 100k, will take your opinion into consideration when reviewing our attitudes. Of course given your higher value ID, your opinion will be weighted accordingly:P
He also quoted the "Hear O Israel" section from the bible, which is of course very important to Jews as its the first line of an important Jewish Prayer "Shma O Israel". It was a very ecumenical prayer and I was happy to hear it.
No mention of Odin, Freja or any other Pagan Gods and Goddesses though, so much of Neopaganism's adherents were left out in the cold, but you can't have everything:P
Perhaps even add +x seconds after every attempt, so your first attempt goes through and fails the next one has a delay of 5s and thereafter its incremented. Most users will get their password correct on the second try or perhaps the third, the script will die a slow death.
I admit I enjoyed Rome:TW and Shogun:TW, but I have had my doubts about the historical accuracy of the TW titles. Of course they should first and foremost be fun games, so I can understand that if something needs to suffer to preserve the enjoyment of playing, historical accuracy might go by the boards. My problem is that I think a lot of people learn their "historical" facts from sources such as TV, Movies and Games - and none of those media have the slightest interest in presenting objective facts.
I expect this game will be easier to win as the Americans and harder (or possibly impossible) to win as the British, will badly mangle even US history, and will only help firmly cement mythological knowledge of the American Revolutionary war, rather than anything historically accurate. Thats unfortunate.
Its the time the players have to spend playing that you want to get the market share for. The money follows since they will have to pay to play, but if they want to play they will pay because its usually only $15 a month.
I play MMOs about 1-2 hrs a night most nights, maybe 2-4 hrs on the weekend occasionally. I am probably a typical player in that regard. Some will play only occasionally, some will play very hardcore and be on it for 4-6 hrs a night. I am in the middle.
Any company coming out with a new MMORPG is competing for my attention span. Do I want to play their game enough to buy a subscription and do I want to play it enough that I will renew that subscription? I am likely subscribed to more than one game at a time (I often am), so which one has my attention sufficiently for me to keep paying for it, rather than becoming another "churn" statistic? Currently I am playing City of Heroes/Villains (the best designed MMO out there IMHO), but was playing WAR as well until recently, and dabbling in SWG because they gave us a free month and I used to be quite addicted to SWG in its early years. My WAR subscription just ran out, but playing it has made me nostalgic for the good old days in DAOC and I may renew that to play it for a month in January or February. Currently NCSoft is winning the war for my attention span with City of Heroes, and has continued to do so for the most part when compared to Warcraft (hated it), Pirates of the Burning Sea (great promise but frustrating leveling and too much PvP when I wanted to solo etc), Warhammer Online (nice idea but the RvR is borked and the zones are poorly designed), LOTRO (gorgeous game but unsatisfying for some reason), AOC (didn't get past the tutorial), and Tabula Rasa (which I tried against my better judgement and was soundly disappointed in).
The finite element here is how much time I want to spend playing and therefore which game I deem worthy of spending the money on to engage in playing. City of Heroes, while quite niche in nature (You have to like the world of Superheroes and Villains), is an all-round extremely well designed game and offers a lot of casual entertainment for me, my wife and my friends - therefore they continue to get our bucks as a result.
Since the vast majority will be dead or dying, the national infrastructure will be destroyed and quite likely beyond repair and there will be NO economy to speak of, I think applying for unemployment insurance will be moot. Finding food and shelter might be applicable but by and large the largest activity the majority of the population will be engaged in is dying from radiation exposure or starvation. Don't forget something like 90% of our population in Canada lives within 200 miles of the US-Canadian border. The typical NA city has no more than 3 days worth of food inside city limits most of the time. When the US gets nuked back to the Stone Age, most of us go with them, even if we weren't directly targeted. Whats left won't be in any position to argue they deserve UI benefits:P
when I was in the Reserves (Communications) I worked down in one of these facilities in Penhold Alberta. Bank vault style doors, a complete hospital, TV studio, a massive number of Government offices etc (If there is a nuclear war going on, why exactly do we need offices for the Unemployment Department?), all built under many feet of steel and concrete buried 30 ft underground and standing on massive springs to reduce shock. They were pretty impressive. They are several stories tall inside and no doubt about as secure a facility as you could ever want to store your servers in:)
Ah, if Runescape ever manages to have up to 320,000 players online at once, then that would most likely make it at least the 2nd largest MMO in the world, far exceeding the other games that were listed in the article.
This article had a massive NA-centric bias and excluded games which have massive populations far in excess of the majority of MMOs, presumably because they get played by players primarily located outside of North America.
I seriously can't wait until WOW dies off, not because I don't like it (I don't in fact like it at all), but because I hate seeing the responses from rabid fanboi types who leap to its defense if anything suggests that it might have its preeminence threatened in any way. To be honest I would feel the same way about a game I enjoyed playing. Its *JUST A GAME*:P
When I was in the Canadian Military we had a sat dish we could hook up to our PABX in the field, and it stated in the manual that you should not stand in front of the thing when it was operational or the transmitted signal from it "might cause sterility" or something to that effect. It had a hazard sticker on it that should have warned people to stay clear. Try as we might we couldn't get people to stop walking in front of it (even if we put up a tape barrier, people would just step over it rather than walking the 8 feet or so required to go around it).
In the end I had to sketch up a sign of someone with their balls being blown off their body and large letters warning "RADIATION HAZARD - SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR CHANCE TO EVER HAVE KIDS" and post it over top of the dish where it was clearly visible. That and the tape finally got people to stay out of the hazardous area.
SMS is hardly encouraging spelling the way things are said, its encouraging a shorthand form of speech with its own conventions and fashions that will differ from area to area, if not person to person. Its encouraging people to create their own spellings in a sea of pure anarchy.
English spelling may be completely inconsistent, and I am sure its really a bitch to learn English as a second language in the written form (although I bet spoken English isn't as bad overall as some languages with much more rigid rules on declensions etc), but the SMS users who are creating their own spellings are more properly playing with spellings. Its really more akin to the spelling of English prior to the first dictionaries when a writer might spell the same word several different ways inside of the same document and there were *no* official correct spellings.
The problem with non-standardized spellings based on an individual's pronunciation of an English word is the wide variety of English dialects spoken all over the world, and for that matter the large number of speakers who have it as a second language, and whose pronunciation is of course coloured by their native language and subsequent accent when speaking English. What you decide to use as an SMS abbreviation of a word when you come from Manchester England for instance, might make zero sense to me when I am from Western Canada, or to a third person living in Mumbai.
Now, the current standardized spellings for English (which can be divided into 1)the US spelling, and 2) the rest of the world's spelling), are really horrid and I am sure they are a major barrier to learning English for million of people in the rest of the world, but at least they are more or less conventions which are consistent. Any spelling reform almost has to come as an initiative based on the universal adoption of a particular dialect of English.
Although I live in Canada, speak and write the Queen's English (and thus spell the US word "color" as "colour" etc), my candidate for the eventually dominant form of English is the English language as defined by the speakers of Seattle - why? Because Microsoft Word's spell checker is using US English and I expect that to dominate eventually (yes, you can switch to other versions of English which presumably switches the spell checker as well, but the default is US English). Plus of course, US Culture is currently bombarding the rest of the world like it or not.
If the US decided to radically reform the official spelling of English and taught the new spelling in schools, its possible the rest of the world would eventually adopt it. The problem is course that all old documents would then be rendered unreadable by the next generation. I doubt that is likely to happen, so I think we are stuck with the current horrid orthography for the foreseeable future:P
The answer of course is that medieval Celtic monks were paid by the letter when illuminating manuscripts, so "bhfaighfear" was worth a lot more to them that simply writing "weehur":P
As a one time student of Scots Gaelic I have always been stunned at just how confusing the orthography for both Gaelic and Irish is. The above word is an excellent example. Both languages have undergone massive changes in pronunciation over time and the results are the incredibly odd spellings.
In the long term the goal is to produce a weapon capable of intercepting an ICBM threat to the USA.
In the short term, the goal is to produce sufficient success to allow the contractor to apply for more funds to continue research and pad the companies profit margin. Sadly, I would guess that goal #2 is more important than goal #1 to the contractors.
Slashdot Mirror
Its a silly (but very impressive) hack, but its a lot of fun. It strikes me that Apple ought to consider building a tiny screen into the logo themselves in the next generation.
It catches the attention of anyone looking at the laptop, its a way to show off or distinguish your laptop from any others nearby, and the entire time you are looking at whats happening *you are looking at an Apple logo*, surely thats got to be a marketing dweeb's wetdream. All they need to do is include it in the system without it using up the 2nd monitor slot. :P
I have always gotten the impression that the nukes were going to be used in Japan no matter what. I am sure they contributed to breaking the Japanese will and hastening a surrender, I am sure they saved both American and Japanese lives by abrogating the need for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, which would likely have resulted in far more casualties than came from dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I have no doubt those things are true.
However I think the main reason they were dropped is so that the US could get some hard data on their affects on a civilian population. By the reports I read, the whole area was intensively analyzed by the US, and surviving Japanese citizens were studied for years. There seems to have been an intensive and highly organized team of individuals on standby (or very quickly created) to hit the area of Hiroshima as soon as the Japanese had surrendered. I think the US Government had a new powerful weapon, and there was likely a lot of pressure to go use it so that the US could see what sort of a deterrent it was, and determine what preparations were needed in case anyone else ever figured it out (ie Russia). I think those people would have been very disappointed if Japan was able to surrender before they got a chance to use it. Its an impression admittedly, I have no proof to point to.
When someone logs into my website, I don't hear the modem fire off, with the distinctive sound of a successful handshake, hear my wife groan as I get out of bed to go see who was logging in. Nor can I interrupt their browsing to chat with them directly.
Yes, I can make a website that lets me know when someone has loaded a page, and I can even venture to say I could make a chat box that appears and lets me chat with them given some time playing with AJAX and php, but its not the same thing, nor does it have the same atmosphere.
As well the other guy who was saying I knew the people in real life was partially true as well. Also the internet wasn't generally available, and BBSes provided a means of communicating world wide on a relatively massive basis with things like Fidonet etc. It was a kind of a special community in that regard, whereas everyone and their dog uses the web these days.
To get the best all round reliable system that is also affordable and accountable. Surely some company or organization out there can be encouraged to put up a prize as a reward for development.
Getting commercial access to space is important for sure, glad that that is underway, but for any country calling itself a democracy, surely nothing is more important to its citizens than the assurance that all elections are being conducted fairly using a reliable system.
Up here in Canada, we still use paper ballots and that has worked well for us, but of course the US is 10x the size of Canada in terms of population, I can see the desirability of electronic accounting for managing elections, but not if its not reliable.
In all honesty, I think there is still considerable doubt that Bush & Co won the first election fairly, and look at the impact that has had on the world: massive economic meltdown, a war thats taken thousand of lives on both sides for debatable benefits, and 8 years of badly mismanaged US Foreign Policy (at least IMHO). There's no assurance that if the election had gone the other way it would have been any better, but if Bush didn't legally win the election what a testament to the necessity of reliable election hardware and software.
Oh, and if any design is submitted using an Access database - the submitters should be taken out back and shot :P
Yes, I ran a Roboterm BBS for a few years, it was miles ahead of regular text/ANSI graphics based BBS software, although it did require a proprietary client (that you could download for free of course) and that turned some people off.
Its funny that I hadn't ever thought of Roboterm as a precursor to HTML in any way. It was a very clever system and really easily configured etc.
Sadly, when the WWW emerged, the BBS died a slow death, but something was lost then as well. BBSes created a sense of community that is missing in a web environment.
To counter your argument: I bought a PS3 and got Rockband with it. As someone who very seldom listens to radio and who has (and I counted) 13 mp3 files on my system which I seldom play (I had to do a search to find out where I put them), I was only familiar with around 20% of the songs in the game. This didn't prevent me from enjoying playing it, and in fact I even enjoyed playing some of the songs I did recognize and recall thinking were absolute shit when I first heard them but are now at least "meh" for me.
Its all moot now as I sold the PS3 and Rockband because I still end up playing computer games over console games.
Yes, I realize they are making it for the XBox as well as for the PC, but the combat animations make me think of fighting games on the PS2 more than say the combat in City of Heroes/Villains. The later has a fantastic combat system that requires you to think tactically when in combat, this just looks like rushed flailing with lots of flashy blur and it suggests it will a much more simplistic combat system.
Despite all of the wishful thinking of game developers I reallly don't think that console gameplay (which is necessarily light on control options and precision) mixes well with MMOs which thrive on variety of options and of course communication with other players via chat (and which have the advantage of control via mouse and keyboard). I will make the assumption that a keyboard exists for an XBox so you can play it like a PC game, but since its unlikely to be a requirement for play, its going to make the game inherently much less social for most people. At that point you might as well stop calling it an MMO.
City of Heroes was brilliant in many regards, this looks flashier but otherwise kinda "meh". Thats too bad, I had high hopes. I look forward to seeing more gameplay footage to see if they have created a game I would want to play, or just more console-related crap (yes, I have a bias against consoles, I freely admit it. I have bought a PS2, XBox, and PS3 in the past in attempts to get into console gaming, I sold all 3 in turn because in the end the gameplay and the controllers were just not doing it for me).
What we need is a utility that detects these scripts, uploads them to a common website and generates a new host file that is downloadable by users to block all those sites. The website can make a running list of all the websites so blocked and the number of times users have NOT seen their content due to the advertising methods they have chosen. That way users get a regularly updated hosts file that prevents them from seeing the annoying ads and the website owners have a place they can go to that lets them see the thousands of users who are no longer visiting their website.
The only way to make technology like this impractical is to let those who use it see that they are losing revenue as well. Its easy to identify when you made a new sale, and match that to a new ad campaign, its harder to tell when people are turning away in droves and not buying something.
Of course the average user is probably a sheep and just endures the ads without realizing their are any options at all.
COH just added a Mac client, and is fairly playable if you meet the requirements. I am certainly having only minor problems which I expect will be cleaned up down the road.
http://www.cityofheroes.com/
The game is still quite playable, there are people playing at all levels so its not difficult to get a group, and its the sort of game that you can log into, do a mission or two in half an hour to an hour and feel like you accomplished something.
It also has the best combat system mechanics and character creation system of any MMO I have played. Sure you need to like comic book superheroes or villains to have a feel for the niche the game occupies but when I first tried it I hadn't read a comic in over 30 years and I enjoyed the game immensely from day one.
Once you have experienced the Flight travel power in this game, every other MMO travel power will seem quite lame :P
We, the secret cabal of /. users with IDs under 100k, will take your opinion into consideration when reviewing our attitudes. Of course given your higher value ID, your opinion will be weighted accordingly :P
He also quoted the "Hear O Israel" section from the bible, which is of course very important to Jews as its the first line of an important Jewish Prayer "Shma O Israel". It was a very ecumenical prayer and I was happy to hear it.
No mention of Odin, Freja or any other Pagan Gods and Goddesses though, so much of Neopaganism's adherents were left out in the cold, but you can't have everything :P
Except that to right-click on OS X, you need ctrl+mousebutton, which means you need two hands instead of one.
or I can just, you know, right click as with any mouse and lo and behold! it right clicks :P
It might *look* like there is only one button, but it actually does register right and left clicks, just like it does when I boot into XP.
I get sick of Mac stereotypes perpetuated by people who really ought to know better.
Oh I use my mac because its a superior environment to work and play in, not because I am some kind of OS/Hardware snob (stereotype #2) :P
I go to the article with zero comments posted and the server is already unavailable. Talk about preparation in advance...
Perhaps even add +x seconds after every attempt, so your first attempt goes through and fails the next one has a delay of 5s and thereafter its incremented. Most users will get their password correct on the second try or perhaps the third, the script will die a slow death.
I admit I enjoyed Rome:TW and Shogun:TW, but I have had my doubts about the historical accuracy of the TW titles. Of course they should first and foremost be fun games, so I can understand that if something needs to suffer to preserve the enjoyment of playing, historical accuracy might go by the boards. My problem is that I think a lot of people learn their "historical" facts from sources such as TV, Movies and Games - and none of those media have the slightest interest in presenting objective facts.
I expect this game will be easier to win as the Americans and harder (or possibly impossible) to win as the British, will badly mangle even US history, and will only help firmly cement mythological knowledge of the American Revolutionary war, rather than anything historically accurate. Thats unfortunate.
Its the time the players have to spend playing that you want to get the market share for. The money follows since they will have to pay to play, but if they want to play they will pay because its usually only $15 a month.
I play MMOs about 1-2 hrs a night most nights, maybe 2-4 hrs on the weekend occasionally. I am probably a typical player in that regard. Some will play only occasionally, some will play very hardcore and be on it for 4-6 hrs a night. I am in the middle.
Any company coming out with a new MMORPG is competing for my attention span. Do I want to play their game enough to buy a subscription and do I want to play it enough that I will renew that subscription? I am likely subscribed to more than one game at a time (I often am), so which one has my attention sufficiently for me to keep paying for it, rather than becoming another "churn" statistic? Currently I am playing City of Heroes/Villains (the best designed MMO out there IMHO), but was playing WAR as well until recently, and dabbling in SWG because they gave us a free month and I used to be quite addicted to SWG in its early years. My WAR subscription just ran out, but playing it has made me nostalgic for the good old days in DAOC and I may renew that to play it for a month in January or February. Currently NCSoft is winning the war for my attention span with City of Heroes, and has continued to do so for the most part when compared to Warcraft (hated it), Pirates of the Burning Sea (great promise but frustrating leveling and too much PvP when I wanted to solo etc), Warhammer Online (nice idea but the RvR is borked and the zones are poorly designed), LOTRO (gorgeous game but unsatisfying for some reason), AOC (didn't get past the tutorial), and Tabula Rasa (which I tried against my better judgement and was soundly disappointed in).
The finite element here is how much time I want to spend playing and therefore which game I deem worthy of spending the money on to engage in playing. City of Heroes, while quite niche in nature (You have to like the world of Superheroes and Villains), is an all-round extremely well designed game and offers a lot of casual entertainment for me, my wife and my friends - therefore they continue to get our bucks as a result.
Since the vast majority will be dead or dying, the national infrastructure will be destroyed and quite likely beyond repair and there will be NO economy to speak of, I think applying for unemployment insurance will be moot. Finding food and shelter might be applicable but by and large the largest activity the majority of the population will be engaged in is dying from radiation exposure or starvation. Don't forget something like 90% of our population in Canada lives within 200 miles of the US-Canadian border. The typical NA city has no more than 3 days worth of food inside city limits most of the time. When the US gets nuked back to the Stone Age, most of us go with them, even if we weren't directly targeted. Whats left won't be in any position to argue they deserve UI benefits :P
Whoosh. That was rather my point. I noticed the Unemployment office had its own rooms in the bunker and wondered why they bothered :P
when I was in the Reserves (Communications) I worked down in one of these facilities in Penhold Alberta. Bank vault style doors, a complete hospital, TV studio, a massive number of Government offices etc (If there is a nuclear war going on, why exactly do we need offices for the Unemployment Department?), all built under many feet of steel and concrete buried 30 ft underground and standing on massive springs to reduce shock. They were pretty impressive. They are several stories tall inside and no doubt about as secure a facility as you could ever want to store your servers in :)
Ah, if Runescape ever manages to have up to 320,000 players online at once, then that would most likely make it at least the 2nd largest MMO in the world, far exceeding the other games that were listed in the article.
This article had a massive NA-centric bias and excluded games which have massive populations far in excess of the majority of MMOs, presumably because they get played by players primarily located outside of North America.
I seriously can't wait until WOW dies off, not because I don't like it (I don't in fact like it at all), but because I hate seeing the responses from rabid fanboi types who leap to its defense if anything suggests that it might have its preeminence threatened in any way. To be honest I would feel the same way about a game I enjoyed playing. Its *JUST A GAME* :P
When I was in the Canadian Military we had a sat dish we could hook up to our PABX in the field, and it stated in the manual that you should not stand in front of the thing when it was operational or the transmitted signal from it "might cause sterility" or something to that effect. It had a hazard sticker on it that should have warned people to stay clear. Try as we might we couldn't get people to stop walking in front of it (even if we put up a tape barrier, people would just step over it rather than walking the 8 feet or so required to go around it).
In the end I had to sketch up a sign of someone with their balls being blown off their body and large letters warning "RADIATION HAZARD - SAY GOODBYE TO YOUR CHANCE TO EVER HAVE KIDS" and post it over top of the dish where it was clearly visible. That and the tape finally got people to stay out of the hazardous area.
SMS is hardly encouraging spelling the way things are said, its encouraging a shorthand form of speech with its own conventions and fashions that will differ from area to area, if not person to person. Its encouraging people to create their own spellings in a sea of pure anarchy.
English spelling may be completely inconsistent, and I am sure its really a bitch to learn English as a second language in the written form (although I bet spoken English isn't as bad overall as some languages with much more rigid rules on declensions etc), but the SMS users who are creating their own spellings are more properly playing with spellings. Its really more akin to the spelling of English prior to the first dictionaries when a writer might spell the same word several different ways inside of the same document and there were *no* official correct spellings.
The problem with non-standardized spellings based on an individual's pronunciation of an English word is the wide variety of English dialects spoken all over the world, and for that matter the large number of speakers who have it as a second language, and whose pronunciation is of course coloured by their native language and subsequent accent when speaking English. What you decide to use as an SMS abbreviation of a word when you come from Manchester England for instance, might make zero sense to me when I am from Western Canada, or to a third person living in Mumbai.
Now, the current standardized spellings for English (which can be divided into 1)the US spelling, and 2) the rest of the world's spelling), are really horrid and I am sure they are a major barrier to learning English for million of people in the rest of the world, but at least they are more or less conventions which are consistent. Any spelling reform almost has to come as an initiative based on the universal adoption of a particular dialect of English.
Although I live in Canada, speak and write the Queen's English (and thus spell the US word "color" as "colour" etc), my candidate for the eventually dominant form of English is the English language as defined by the speakers of Seattle - why? Because Microsoft Word's spell checker is using US English and I expect that to dominate eventually (yes, you can switch to other versions of English which presumably switches the spell checker as well, but the default is US English). Plus of course, US Culture is currently bombarding the rest of the world like it or not.
If the US decided to radically reform the official spelling of English and taught the new spelling in schools, its possible the rest of the world would eventually adopt it. The problem is course that all old documents would then be rendered unreadable by the next generation. I doubt that is likely to happen, so I think we are stuck with the current horrid orthography for the foreseeable future :P
Yes it is from Irish Gaelic and Scot's Gaelic. It is pronounced "sow-in" in Scots, and I believe "sav-een" in Irish.
The answer of course is that medieval Celtic monks were paid by the letter when illuminating manuscripts, so "bhfaighfear" was worth a lot more to them that simply writing "weehur" :P
As a one time student of Scots Gaelic I have always been stunned at just how confusing the orthography for both Gaelic and Irish is. The above word is an excellent example. Both languages have undergone massive changes in pronunciation over time and the results are the incredibly odd spellings.
In the long term the goal is to produce a weapon capable of intercepting an ICBM threat to the USA. In the short term, the goal is to produce sufficient success to allow the contractor to apply for more funds to continue research and pad the companies profit margin. Sadly, I would guess that goal #2 is more important than goal #1 to the contractors.