* Causing the financial crisis (he wasn't in the senate when most of the deregulation occurred that caused the problems)
Also, I love it when he gets blamed for the bank bailout. That happened a month or two before the election and was, for the most part, the final straw for McCain and many other Republican candidates.
* Taking away your guns (actually, the only gun-related legislation he passed made it legal to carry guns in national parks)
This was a bigger worry when the Democrats controlled the House and Senate. Pelosi is a left-wing nutcase who would've done it if given the chance but they targetted healthcare instead. Also, there are major import regulations that have caused spikes in prices due to decreased supply, this is due to the Feds.
You missed one though. He gets blamed for not getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan 'like he said he would'. Iraq, yes, he said he was going to get us out as quickly as possible but never promised a timeline (Hillary Clinton was promising 6-12 months) . However, Afghanistan was a target of his to ramp up, commonly saying in debates that Iraq was a distraction and not the real threat of terrorism (at the time of invasion).
... Doc Brown fills with household garbage, including a banana peel and some beer, to power the iconic time-traveling DeLorean. While we're still some way from such direct means of running our cars on table scraps...
The Mr. Fusion only powered the Flux Capacitor not the DeLorean. The DeLorean still ran on gasoline and is why Marty gets stuck back in 1885 when the arrow pierces the gas tank.
I think my order of operations would've been more like this:
1) google "Game coding tutorial HTML5" or similar,
2) Find the code listings, run them, modify them a little to see what happens but eventually be annoyed that I don't really know what the magic incantations in javascript etc mean
My wife is a Type I and constantly gets annoyed when the two are used interchangeably. When some stupid TV personality talks about how you can control 'diabeetus' with diet and exercise it takes away from the other spectrum of individuals who can't control it that way. It reduces the visibility of the disease of Type I, making it look like a lifestyle disease, like alcoholism or an STD, instead of a chronic but manageable illness, like arthritis, Lyme disease, or MS.
You are insane. That gets modded as informative? More like revisionist bull shit is more like it.
The only thing the U.S. saved Europe from in World War II was being completely overrun by our ally at the time, the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942-1943 when the U.S. was barely even engaged in Europe. Germany's defeat was a foregone conclusion by the time the U.S. landed at Normandy in 1944.
England was done, they weren't pushing the front from the West. There may have been pressure from Russia to the East but without the invasion of Normandy and the threat from the West, Germany could have easily sustained it's control over the entirety Europe. Without the pressure from the South in Italy, Mussolini could've held his ground as well. Is Russia going to be able to free even Poland? Not a chance without an invasion from the West.
Meanwhile, the US was fighting tooth and nail against Japan, preventing them from taking over the entire Western Pacific Rim, from New Zealand to China. You're welcome.
The U.S. helped win the war certainly but it simply wasn't the decisive force the Soviet Union was or that you are claiming.
Its true the U.S. helped turn the tide against Germany in World War I, but that was simply due to a huge infusion of fresh troops and supplies in to a war where all the incumbent armies and nations were spent. There wasn't anything exceptional about the U.S. troops, any infusion of a million fresh troops from anywhere would have had the same effect.
Fresh troops? You are making it seem like the US hadn't been fighting for 3+ years already, like we were just sitting on our hands with infinite resources ready to go, just coming in for garbage time. We were the only country who fought in every front of WW2 - Europe, Africa, the Pacific. Russia defended one front. It might've been 2 at one point but, oh yeah, the US took care of Japan for them.
All things considered, you proved the grandparents point by flaunting how self infatuated and self inflating American's can be. The grandparent is correct, the Vietnamese were probably the most succesful military in the 20th century, and I would add the Afghans as a close second, because they have defeated every vastly superior force they've faced including the Soviet Union and the U.S.
It really depends how you define success. If you want to call losing multiple generations of a population to an infinitely superior opponent, sure. To be fair, the Afghans were getting their ass kicked by the Soviets until the US started supplying them with arms. Obviously Vietnam would have to turned out differently without Soviet and Chinese supplying the Vietcong.
Take your blatant anti-Americanism out of it and look at history. Without American intervention does France get freed from Germany? (No.) Does Italy get freed from fascism? (No.) Does Russia have the ability to defeat a single-fronted German army? (No.) Does almost the entirety of SE Asia get freed from the control of Japan? (No.)
Probably. But Apple has a remarkable way of taking a product that everybody has made before and giving it a makeover into something everybody wants. The underlying technology is the same, or even worse, but the interface finds the sweet spot of giving a lot of people exactly what they want.
They really haven't ever done this. They follow the standard business model of looking at a market and seeing what isn't out there and then knocking it out of the park.
Sure they killed it with portable music and tablets but no one was delivering anything even mediocre there when they came in. Their computers aren't that great and their market penetration is still not what PCs are. Their content for TV (Apple TV) hasn't been a failure but hasn't made much of a spash.
Forget about trying to get into TVs unless they can get the cable providers (all of them) to directly work with the TVs so I don't need a cable box/DVR. I want to plug in my coax and go. A separate BluRay player and sound is fine although those should be as close to one-cable setup too. I'd pay for that.
Agreed. If it were a running soundtrack you'd just end up shutting it off after a while. I did this in WoW since the music can get repetitive and annoying, especially when you are in a zone for an extended period of time.
That said, I wish Notch would incorporate more of C418's music into the game via records. Right now there are two (gold and green) records you can get through a difficult process (kill a creeper with a zombie-shot arrow) but it would be great to have more.
They would be unable to systematically cripple selected command and control, air defense and intelligence networks and databases of advanced adversaries, or to conduct deception operations by secretly manipulating the data in these networks.
But, could we (as in the US) do those things? Because that would be super.
I absolutely love Minecraft. It's one of those games that is thoroughly entertaining to my play style and also thoroughly entertaining to everyone else's pay style at the same time. Like to explore? Do it. Like to build? Do it. Like to craft? Do it. Like to kill stuff? Do it.
I will say that the direction of the last few patches has been a little weird. The addition of all the RPG elements that Notch has slowly integrated into the game really skew the focus. The achievement system is a weird addition also. There will also be a boss you can fight in a later patch. Odd.
Funny but when I clicked on your link only 1 of the manhole frames/covers on that page were rectangular. And while it's quite anecdotal, I can surely say that I have never seen a rectangular manhole cover. I live in a very large city as well so it's not like I have a sample bias against me.
What's worse, and what everyone seems to overlook, is that Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi aren't his movies at all. He wrote the story (not the screenplay) and is an executive producer for Empire, but at least has a screenplay credit for Return. He didn't direct either, so it's really not his vision to alter.
I'm fine with director's cut of a movie, since it's their movie. But let's ask Richard Marquand and Lawrence Kasdan if they felt that Empire or Return needs to be tweaked in the present. If they say no then why should Lucas get to change their vision? There isn't going to be a J.K. Rowling cut of the Harry Potter movies is there?
Some average WoW players have played the game for more than 365 *days*.
That's still saying a lot now, 6+ years into the game. I knew somebody at year 3 who was at 365 days/played. At the time they were logged into the game for 1/3 of the entire time the servers were running. And they weren't a bot.
"Waa Waa Waa give me free stuff just for playing, I'm entitled to it, I'm a paying customer!"
I forgot that faction in my previous comment.
That's the generic bullshit comment you see all the time when it comes to WoW - the myth of people 'crying' for free stuff. However, it's the little things that keep people around and Blizzard knows that, or at least knew that.
Case in point, their 5th anniversary they gave everyone who logged in a non-combat pet (polar bear cub). Nothing for the 6th anniversary but with the excuse that those were saved for 'special milestones'. Isn't every year an MMO is around a milestone? It's not like games like this live forever. The Summer Olympics in China had a 'Spirit of Competition' pet you could get by doing a little PvP. Nothing for the more recent Winter Games. Maybe the Olympics in London will yield something? Unlikely. It doesn't have to be an epic sword in the mail, non-combat fun stuff if just as interesting to a lot of the population. Blizzard has unfortunately put all that stuff into the card game bonus cards or their micro-transaction store.
Little things make people want to log in every once in a while and chase the carrot. A multi-week unlocking of a zone, Firelands, which is just a rehash of the Crusader's Pinnacle line, is not the way to do it. It's boring doing the same dailies over and over again for multiple weeks. That's why I haven't done any of them - I unsubscribed when I read all the grind stuff about the new zone.
We saw this in the last Olympics with swimmers. Everyone was wearing those shark-skin body suits allowing them to shatter world records. Didn't have a body suit? You were going to be about 3% slower than the guy who does not because he's better, because he's sponsored by a company that built something to give you an unfair advantage. 3% is 1.5 seconds in a 50 second race, in a sport where tenths of a second decide gold/silver/bronze.
Michael Phelps was sponsored by Nike but didn't even wear their body suit because by the time the Olympics rolled around Speedo (IIRC, might have been TYR) had a suit that was insanely faster.
Whether or not this ruling was fair isn't the point, they can't keep up with the business anyways and would have to make a deal at some point with the distributors.
It's the standard Redbox problem. Redbox was sending their workers out on the day that a new DVD came out and then buying up all they could. They would then label them (barcode and case) and then put them into their machines. Then they can rent them legally as they see fit. However, once the distributors realized what was happening, they made it so big retailers (Walmart, Target, etc.) had a limit of 5 per customer. It doesn't affect you and me but it prevents Redbox from getting a large stock of movies. Then Redbox had to make nice with the distributors to get the movies and one of the concessions was to wait 28 days before putting some movies in their machines. This is the same story with Blockbuster, Netflix, and any other (legitimate) company.
And it would be the same for Zediva too. Unless they only wanted a few customers, the scaling up of their business was going to have a few problems. And once that happens they are no better than Netflix or Redbox.
Maybe I missed something about the difference between CD-R data and audio discs, bu I'm pretty sure there is only a miniscule difference between the two and that difference isn't quality.
First, the audio discs have a special bit that is readable by audio recorders (standalone units, not computers) that makes it so that the recorder will not use data discs. Second, for every audio disc sold you are paying a royalty to the RIAA.
The data discs have no restrictions and will record and play as audio just as good as the audio discs without the bullshit of having to pay extortion money to the RIAA.
All that gold isn't going to do him much good when the creepers, skeletons and zombies come around. If he can't find some wood, coal, and cobblestone, he's in for a long, dark night hiding in some dirt hole in Central Park.
In the end though, it just wasn't enough, but he would have done even worse if he's chosen a 'safe' VP.
Worse? He lost by a significant amount once everyone found out exactly who the hell she was, even the so-called 'excited base'.
McCain's big failure was that he was Republican at a time when the party has no idea or interest in courting the undecided independents, which are the people you actually need if you are going to win a national election. No, the Republicans are more interested in labeling fellow party members RINOs and helping the Democrats take Senate and House seats that they had no chance of winning.
Don't get me wrong, Day of the Tentacle is a great game but I think it might be a little too hard for a 10 year old. It's been decades since I last played it but as I remember some of the interactions of the different items in the game are abstract as hell. Not the same as The Dig or Full Throttle where things made contextual sense.
SMALL SPOILER: In The Dig you might get a tool and that will be used at some point as the tool. Same with Full Throttle, a motorcycle part is just that, used in a motorcycle. However, in Day of the Tentacle, you got some coins which were actually used as coins but were used to pay for a dryer that was used dry a wet sweater which would shrink it (sometime in the far future, didn't I mention 3 different time lines?) so that a wet hamster that you defrosted in the microwave because he was encased in a block of ice from the ice machine can be warmed up. Make sense? And that's not even one of the more abstract puzzles.
I was surprised because I had the impression Cata sold quite well. I did a bit of googling and found this:
The new expansion sold more than 3.3 million copies worldwide as of its first 24 hours of release, including digital pre-sales, eclipsing the previous first day record of 2.8 million sold for Wrath of the Lich King, released in 2008.
It may be that Cata sales haven't continued as well as WotLK, but I suspect Cata outsold most of the new free MMO's put together.
A lot of players are going to pick up the expansion no matter what. What has happened is, much like he is saying about the launch of Rift, after a short amount of time the subscriptions are stopping and people are leaving the game. The subscriptions are where the money is made since just purchasing the expansion typically covers the cost of creating the content.
As someone who has played WoW off and on for a very long time, I have seen things in the last few months that are specifically tailored to fix some of the major issues that plagued the expansion. There is a sense that Blizzard is attempting to placate their North American and European fans to prevent attrition (China hasn't gotten the expansion yet). The loss of 600k subscriptions is quite significant to any game, even to one that has (er, had) 12 million subscribers. It's a bad sign and definitely points to something being wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Or what could go right?
If we end up with the (New) New York City from Futurama with transport tubes, I for one will welcome our new Omicron Persei overlords.
Don't forget the Norwegian mass-murderer played World of Warcraft obsessively, so everyone who does this as well should be suspect.
This guy is 800X a man than any of you ever will be simply because he is actually doing something other than being a tool like the rest of you.
Oh please, he's AT MOST only 750X the man I am.
* Causing the financial crisis (he wasn't in the senate when most of the deregulation occurred that caused the problems)
Also, I love it when he gets blamed for the bank bailout. That happened a month or two before the election and was, for the most part, the final straw for McCain and many other Republican candidates.
* Taking away your guns (actually, the only gun-related legislation he passed made it legal to carry guns in national parks)
This was a bigger worry when the Democrats controlled the House and Senate. Pelosi is a left-wing nutcase who would've done it if given the chance but they targetted healthcare instead. Also, there are major import regulations that have caused spikes in prices due to decreased supply, this is due to the Feds.
You missed one though. He gets blamed for not getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan 'like he said he would'. Iraq, yes, he said he was going to get us out as quickly as possible but never promised a timeline (Hillary Clinton was promising 6-12 months) . However, Afghanistan was a target of his to ramp up, commonly saying in debates that Iraq was a distraction and not the real threat of terrorism (at the time of invasion).
... Doc Brown fills with household garbage, including a banana peel and some beer, to power the iconic time-traveling DeLorean. While we're still some way from such direct means of running our cars on table scraps...
The Mr. Fusion only powered the Flux Capacitor not the DeLorean. The DeLorean still ran on gasoline and is why Marty gets stuck back in 1885 when the arrow pierces the gas tank.
1) google "Game coding tutorial HTML5" or similar,
2) Find the code listings, run them, modify them a little to see what happens but eventually be annoyed that I don't really know what the magic incantations in javascript etc mean
3) Go play Skyrim
My wife is a Type I and constantly gets annoyed when the two are used interchangeably. When some stupid TV personality talks about how you can control 'diabeetus' with diet and exercise it takes away from the other spectrum of individuals who can't control it that way. It reduces the visibility of the disease of Type I, making it look like a lifestyle disease, like alcoholism or an STD, instead of a chronic but manageable illness, like arthritis, Lyme disease, or MS.
The only thing the U.S. saved Europe from in World War II was being completely overrun by our ally at the time, the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union defeated Nazi Germany at Stalingrad and Kursk in 1942-1943 when the U.S. was barely even engaged in Europe. Germany's defeat was a foregone conclusion by the time the U.S. landed at Normandy in 1944.
England was done, they weren't pushing the front from the West. There may have been pressure from Russia to the East but without the invasion of Normandy and the threat from the West, Germany could have easily sustained it's control over the entirety Europe. Without the pressure from the South in Italy, Mussolini could've held his ground as well. Is Russia going to be able to free even Poland? Not a chance without an invasion from the West.
Meanwhile, the US was fighting tooth and nail against Japan, preventing them from taking over the entire Western Pacific Rim, from New Zealand to China. You're welcome.
The U.S. helped win the war certainly but it simply wasn't the decisive force the Soviet Union was or that you are claiming.
Its true the U.S. helped turn the tide against Germany in World War I, but that was simply due to a huge infusion of fresh troops and supplies in to a war where all the incumbent armies and nations were spent. There wasn't anything exceptional about the U.S. troops, any infusion of a million fresh troops from anywhere would have had the same effect.
Fresh troops? You are making it seem like the US hadn't been fighting for 3+ years already, like we were just sitting on our hands with infinite resources ready to go, just coming in for garbage time. We were the only country who fought in every front of WW2 - Europe, Africa, the Pacific. Russia defended one front. It might've been 2 at one point but, oh yeah, the US took care of Japan for them.
All things considered, you proved the grandparents point by flaunting how self infatuated and self inflating American's can be. The grandparent is correct, the Vietnamese were probably the most succesful military in the 20th century, and I would add the Afghans as a close second, because they have defeated every vastly superior force they've faced including the Soviet Union and the U.S.
It really depends how you define success. If you want to call losing multiple generations of a population to an infinitely superior opponent, sure. To be fair, the Afghans were getting their ass kicked by the Soviets until the US started supplying them with arms. Obviously Vietnam would have to turned out differently without Soviet and Chinese supplying the Vietcong.
Take your blatant anti-Americanism out of it and look at history. Without American intervention does France get freed from Germany? (No.) Does Italy get freed from fascism? (No.) Does Russia have the ability to defeat a single-fronted German army? (No.) Does almost the entirety of SE Asia get freed from the control of Japan? (No.)
Probably. But Apple has a remarkable way of taking a product that everybody has made before and giving it a makeover into something everybody wants. The underlying technology is the same, or even worse, but the interface finds the sweet spot of giving a lot of people exactly what they want.
They really haven't ever done this. They follow the standard business model of looking at a market and seeing what isn't out there and then knocking it out of the park.
Sure they killed it with portable music and tablets but no one was delivering anything even mediocre there when they came in. Their computers aren't that great and their market penetration is still not what PCs are. Their content for TV (Apple TV) hasn't been a failure but hasn't made much of a spash.
Forget about trying to get into TVs unless they can get the cable providers (all of them) to directly work with the TVs so I don't need a cable box/DVR. I want to plug in my coax and go. A separate BluRay player and sound is fine although those should be as close to one-cable setup too. I'd pay for that.
Agreed. If it were a running soundtrack you'd just end up shutting it off after a while. I did this in WoW since the music can get repetitive and annoying, especially when you are in a zone for an extended period of time.
That said, I wish Notch would incorporate more of C418's music into the game via records. Right now there are two (gold and green) records you can get through a difficult process (kill a creeper with a zombie-shot arrow) but it would be great to have more.
They would be unable to systematically cripple selected command and control, air defense and intelligence networks and databases of advanced adversaries, or to conduct deception operations by secretly manipulating the data in these networks.
But, could we (as in the US) do those things? Because that would be super.
I absolutely love Minecraft. It's one of those games that is thoroughly entertaining to my play style and also thoroughly entertaining to everyone else's pay style at the same time. Like to explore? Do it. Like to build? Do it. Like to craft? Do it. Like to kill stuff? Do it.
I will say that the direction of the last few patches has been a little weird. The addition of all the RPG elements that Notch has slowly integrated into the game really skew the focus. The achievement system is a weird addition also. There will also be a boss you can fight in a later patch. Odd.
Many modern covers are rectangular.
Funny but when I clicked on your link only 1 of the manhole frames/covers on that page were rectangular. And while it's quite anecdotal, I can surely say that I have never seen a rectangular manhole cover. I live in a very large city as well so it's not like I have a sample bias against me.
Wah wah wah wah, wah wah wah. Wah wah wah wah wah.
What's worse, and what everyone seems to overlook, is that Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi aren't his movies at all. He wrote the story (not the screenplay) and is an executive producer for Empire, but at least has a screenplay credit for Return. He didn't direct either, so it's really not his vision to alter.
I'm fine with director's cut of a movie, since it's their movie. But let's ask Richard Marquand and Lawrence Kasdan if they felt that Empire or Return needs to be tweaked in the present. If they say no then why should Lucas get to change their vision? There isn't going to be a J.K. Rowling cut of the Harry Potter movies is there?
This was in a public school in Georgia, mind you.
You could've saved yourself 4 paragraphs and just left it to that.
Some average WoW players have played the game for more than 365 *days*.
That's still saying a lot now, 6+ years into the game. I knew somebody at year 3 who was at 365 days /played. At the time they were logged into the game for 1/3 of the entire time the servers were running. And they weren't a bot.
"Waa Waa Waa give me free stuff just for playing, I'm entitled to it, I'm a paying customer!"
I forgot that faction in my previous comment.
That's the generic bullshit comment you see all the time when it comes to WoW - the myth of people 'crying' for free stuff. However, it's the little things that keep people around and Blizzard knows that, or at least knew that.
Case in point, their 5th anniversary they gave everyone who logged in a non-combat pet (polar bear cub). Nothing for the 6th anniversary but with the excuse that those were saved for 'special milestones'. Isn't every year an MMO is around a milestone? It's not like games like this live forever. The Summer Olympics in China had a 'Spirit of Competition' pet you could get by doing a little PvP. Nothing for the more recent Winter Games. Maybe the Olympics in London will yield something? Unlikely. It doesn't have to be an epic sword in the mail, non-combat fun stuff if just as interesting to a lot of the population. Blizzard has unfortunately put all that stuff into the card game bonus cards or their micro-transaction store.
Little things make people want to log in every once in a while and chase the carrot. A multi-week unlocking of a zone, Firelands, which is just a rehash of the Crusader's Pinnacle line, is not the way to do it. It's boring doing the same dailies over and over again for multiple weeks. That's why I haven't done any of them - I unsubscribed when I read all the grind stuff about the new zone.
We saw this in the last Olympics with swimmers. Everyone was wearing those shark-skin body suits allowing them to shatter world records. Didn't have a body suit? You were going to be about 3% slower than the guy who does not because he's better, because he's sponsored by a company that built something to give you an unfair advantage. 3% is 1.5 seconds in a 50 second race, in a sport where tenths of a second decide gold/silver/bronze.
Michael Phelps was sponsored by Nike but didn't even wear their body suit because by the time the Olympics rolled around Speedo (IIRC, might have been TYR) had a suit that was insanely faster.
Whether or not this ruling was fair isn't the point, they can't keep up with the business anyways and would have to make a deal at some point with the distributors.
It's the standard Redbox problem. Redbox was sending their workers out on the day that a new DVD came out and then buying up all they could. They would then label them (barcode and case) and then put them into their machines. Then they can rent them legally as they see fit. However, once the distributors realized what was happening, they made it so big retailers (Walmart, Target, etc.) had a limit of 5 per customer. It doesn't affect you and me but it prevents Redbox from getting a large stock of movies. Then Redbox had to make nice with the distributors to get the movies and one of the concessions was to wait 28 days before putting some movies in their machines. This is the same story with Blockbuster, Netflix, and any other (legitimate) company.
And it would be the same for Zediva too. Unless they only wanted a few customers, the scaling up of their business was going to have a few problems. And once that happens they are no better than Netflix or Redbox.
Maybe I missed something about the difference between CD-R data and audio discs, bu I'm pretty sure there is only a miniscule difference between the two and that difference isn't quality.
First, the audio discs have a special bit that is readable by audio recorders (standalone units, not computers) that makes it so that the recorder will not use data discs. Second, for every audio disc sold you are paying a royalty to the RIAA.
The data discs have no restrictions and will record and play as audio just as good as the audio discs without the bullshit of having to pay extortion money to the RIAA.
All that gold isn't going to do him much good when the creepers, skeletons and zombies come around. If he can't find some wood, coal, and cobblestone, he's in for a long, dark night hiding in some dirt hole in Central Park.
In the end though, it just wasn't enough, but he would have done even worse if he's chosen a 'safe' VP.
Worse? He lost by a significant amount once everyone found out exactly who the hell she was, even the so-called 'excited base'.
McCain's big failure was that he was Republican at a time when the party has no idea or interest in courting the undecided independents, which are the people you actually need if you are going to win a national election. No, the Republicans are more interested in labeling fellow party members RINOs and helping the Democrats take Senate and House seats that they had no chance of winning.
Don't get me wrong, Day of the Tentacle is a great game but I think it might be a little too hard for a 10 year old. It's been decades since I last played it but as I remember some of the interactions of the different items in the game are abstract as hell. Not the same as The Dig or Full Throttle where things made contextual sense.
SMALL SPOILER: In The Dig you might get a tool and that will be used at some point as the tool. Same with Full Throttle, a motorcycle part is just that, used in a motorcycle. However, in Day of the Tentacle, you got some coins which were actually used as coins but were used to pay for a dryer that was used dry a wet sweater which would shrink it (sometime in the far future, didn't I mention 3 different time lines?) so that a wet hamster that you defrosted in the microwave because he was encased in a block of ice from the ice machine can be warmed up. Make sense? And that's not even one of the more abstract puzzles.
I was surprised because I had the impression Cata sold quite well. I did a bit of googling and found this:
The new expansion sold more than 3.3 million copies worldwide as of its first 24 hours of release, including digital pre-sales, eclipsing the previous first day record of 2.8 million sold for Wrath of the Lich King, released in 2008.
It may be that Cata sales haven't continued as well as WotLK, but I suspect Cata outsold most of the new free MMO's put together.
A lot of players are going to pick up the expansion no matter what. What has happened is, much like he is saying about the launch of Rift, after a short amount of time the subscriptions are stopping and people are leaving the game. The subscriptions are where the money is made since just purchasing the expansion typically covers the cost of creating the content.
As someone who has played WoW off and on for a very long time, I have seen things in the last few months that are specifically tailored to fix some of the major issues that plagued the expansion. There is a sense that Blizzard is attempting to placate their North American and European fans to prevent attrition (China hasn't gotten the expansion yet). The loss of 600k subscriptions is quite significant to any game, even to one that has (er, had) 12 million subscribers. It's a bad sign and definitely points to something being wrong.