He filed the patent for his idea, and all of the automakers failed to pay him for it, then started to install it on their cars. He won against Ford and Chrysler, then strangely had the case dismissed against GM, and all the foreign auto-makers, with none of them being forced to stop using his IP.
Re:Proof of inflated reviews
on
Review: Dragonshard
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You are correct. Most games are overrated. If you release a CD in a box, it earns a minimum score of 6 for most sites, regardless of the quality.
82 is an insane score for this game. I was in the beta, and I hated it. I wouldn't have done any further than I went, but I wanted to see the process through. Warcraft 3 is still better, even though it is somewhat dated, now.
Look at some of the real stinker games that came out, and what their metas are.
Then look at who pays most of those websites/magazines whose scores go into the metas, and you have your answer. Most of those websites/magazines are so far in bed with the game developers that they don't give you a reliable review on anything. And the previews are even worse. Every game is a blockbuster "best ever" game until it is released and everyone thinks it sucks. Then it gets shifted to a score of the mid 70s.
Lastly, those metas do not reflect user votes. That is purely magazine reviews. And with only 19 user votes when I checked, most of them didn't have much to say other than "I liked it" and a 10. Typical of most voting areas, it is either all or nothing, with little thought put into a score.
Yeah, I am sure they will target the BDSM crowd. And not have a clue as to what the mantra of said crowd usually is. (There are extremists, as with anything.)
Safe. Sane. Consentual.
Most BDSM relationships are more honest than regular ones, especialy for D/s. Almost everyone has a kink they would like to explore. BDSM folks usually explore it with their partner(s), or at least their partner(s) permission. Most regular folk hide it, agonize over it, and then pay for it to happen. And that payment is often a broken marriage, lost of children, or loss of life to AIDS and the like.
The level of honesty necessary in a D/s relationship is very deep. Knowledge of yourself and your partner is paramount to either of your safety. If a sub isn't truthful with themselves or their Dom, someone will end up getting hurt. So, they talk about things, plan, and work together.
Pardon the pun, but honestly, if most relationships had the level of communication that a D/s relationship did, there'd be a lot less breakups/divorces.
If you just read the meaning of many of the words, it can sound horrible. Bondage. Domination. Sadism. Masochism. And yet, if two (or more) consenting adults do it carefully, it can be one of the most powerfully positive encounters they may all have.
I don't mind the stamping out of child pornography, but if it is consenting adults, well... Live and let live.
In some ways, Blizzard is smart to give as little technical information it can, and in others, it is dumb.
Let's face it, the average bnet kid is a complete jerk. If you give them even the smallest tidbit of information, they go crazy because you didn't release the source code, let them attend development meeting, and be in charge of product design. And this makes up a large portion of their player base. I mean, have you *read* their forums???? A more idiotic group of complainers hasn't been found.
Having said that, many of their best spoken critics could be silenced with a few, well spoken responses. Blizzard won't give them, though, because of the flames they take from the masses.
Blizzard's forums are a wreck, because they refuse to clean them up. If they deleted off-topic posts, flames, and the like from their General forum ad naseum, maybe things would get better. Because they don't, their forum mods end up playing tag with a ton of nutcase windbags. Posts blow off the front page of their General forum in less than 5 minutes in many cases, and then you get no response, unless you/bump yourself, which is a punishable offense. They still haven't learned how to run a forum for an MMO.
In a nutshell, the response that Blizzard gave here was a very watered down version of things they have let their forum mods share with the public.
Why harder hitting questions, like why does it take months between patches, and the like, were left off, and these questions were included, is curious. Heck, EQ2 is patched almost daily, yet Blizzard still leaves bugs in place for as long as it can get away with. The amount of bugs in each release clearly indicate that their Q/A process is a joke. And many problems found on the Test Server are left in the release, because they don't want to go back and fix them. Important things like this were ignored for the questions that got asked?
The questions that *were* posed to Blizzard have all been answered in their forums, for the most part. We weren't going to learn anything new, especially when 2 of the questions (1 and 8) were essentially the same. Hello, economy and farming questions go hand in hand!
The fact that the results of this were lame is partly related to the poor choices of questions asked. The rest of it is that Blizzard is a bunch of weenies.
Me, I've gone back to playing CoH, and having fun again. That, and monkeying around in the CoV beta.
I know quite a few folks that still use WinMX, mostly because it seemed to fly under the RIAA's radar. Less publicity, to them, meant more safety from possible lawyers.
My concert was Accept/Dio, probably in the late 80's. My ears rang for 3 days afterwards, and it was horrible. People 5 miles away, and across a major highway, complained about the volume. From that point onwards, I took earplugs with me, in case it was too loud.
In the late 90's, as a EMT/Paramedic, I would often work concerts. (The medical staff at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD, is all volunteer EMTs/Paramedics from the Howard County's Volunteer Association, unpaid workers.) I think I worked almost every show from 97-99. For most of them, we stayed in the outdoors portion, but we all brought earplugs just in case we had to go down front. Or backstage. Backstage at a Phish concert has to be seen to be believed.
From 16-32, I had one tremendous stereo system in my car, and played heavy metal music at full volume most of the time in it.
For all of that, I can still tell you if a TV/Monitor that uses high voltage is on in a house, if it is quiet. I can hear the high pitch hum, even at nearly 39yrs of age.
I think it is more what your ability to tolerate high volumes is, than constant exposure. My brother is much like me in his music listening habits, and he is currently starting to do some live shows with his band, in support of his instrumental heavy metal guitar album. (I'd link it, but his megalomania is bad enough already!) Neither of us has any noticable hearing problem, but my sister does.
Well, I do have trouble picking out an individual voice from a group of them, but I've had that problem since I was 12. lol
This isn't exactly rocket science, but maybe companies like Dell and other PC sellers should include a free disk scrubbing utility when they send out a replacement HD.
Lord knows, Dell didn't even bother sending out an extra ATA cable. When my wife's new PC had it's 250GB HD die, I had to buy another cable to copy the resurrected data to the new HD. Then, I had to find a decent HD scrubber to clean the old one, since it had our info from Quicken and probably cache related stuff to online banking, etc.
Hmmm, maybe I should do a recovery on that new HD they sent us... Nah, not worth the effort.
The bottom line is, most coding isn't very pretty, nor is it designed for speed, unless it is specifically done for high end graphics/gaming.
I think that beauty of Assembly has been essentially lost for most development shops.
Lord knows, programming in Assembly/machine language is brutally hard on a developer. It must have been the hardest class I ever took, outside of some of the higher maths.
Flamewar? That wasn't a flamewar, but a little spat! At least, from the crappy details we got from the news article.
Let these folks learn about Usenet, and them drop them off in one of the more entertaining newsgroups, sans Nomex undies. Maybe then they will experience a flame war.
The numbers playing WoW are impressive, but the game has not even been out a year. When it has been out for 6 or so years, like EQ was before EQ2 and WoW sucked a ton of players away, then we can talk about it being a gorilla. Right now, it's just a noisy chimp.
As many people as join the game each month (and those numbers don't seem to be that high here in the U.S.), there are probably just as many that are leaving for greener pastures.
I suspect that City of Villians will make a dent in the WoW playerbase, as PvP is added to the game. City of Heroes made gameplay more fun for a lot of people. No loot hassles (you don't know when someone else gets an enhancement) and very little game economy. Take those two elements out of a game, and a lot of the complaints you had in WoW (loot arguements, "Chinese" farmers, gold selling, etc) go away.
DS1 had one simple strategy to follow to win the whole deal, and it didn't involve skill in the slightest. It was purely a matter of carrying enough healing potions with you. That's it. Not a lot of imagination went into it. Just some pretty graphics for it's time.
A monkey can beat it. All it have to do is hit the H key whenever a character's portrait flashes yellow. If they can learn sign language, beating DS1 is a piece of cake.
DS1 was interesting for a few hours, and everyone was stoked at first. Then, it went from Dungeon Seige to Potion Mule, and the game got boring fast. I'm sure half the reviews came in from players before they got half through the game, and started to claw their eyes out.
I've talked to a friend that actually bought it, and he said DS2 is the same. I wouldn't spend the $$$ on it, but it was good to know it was just as lame.
If they start suing churches I'd get upset (1st amendment and all that)
No disrespect intended, but folks sue churches. I do believe there are several people that have brought claims against the Catholic church for priests that molested them while they were children.
I just wish that when they had written that there would be a seperation of church and state, they wrote specifically that the church couldn't get involved in the state.
The government here in the U.S. doesn't mandate religion, but religion sure tries to dictate U.S. policy.
Which is why I am fond of saying "I have no religion, but I have Faith."
Some prescription facts that make it easier to get around.
Only about 20% of the states in the U.S. actually require reporting based on the narcotics a doctor writes. The rest will blindly allow whatever happens to happen.
Add to that fact that this guy was unlikely to be running an actually pharmacy, and it makes it a little easier.
Most drugs with Hydrocodone in them are C-III, or schedule 3 drugs, and are not under super-tight restrictions for dispensing. Up to 5 refills allowed in a 6 month period kind of thing. Also, a written prescription isn't required in most states. (NY being the exception I am familiar with, but there may be others.) A doctor can phone one in.
The harder narcotics are C-II, or scheule 2. Those are only fillable once, no refills allowed, a written prescription is required all the time.
Since a doctor's DEA # is set by an invidivual state, you can change it up for different states, and make it look like a different doctor, if you wanted to. A doctor actually is supposed to have one DEA # for each office location, though most don't.
Besides, anyone that has worked in a pharmacy probably knows how to create a working DEA #. The formula isn't very hard to get through.
Lastly. Depending on what the doctor's specialty is, writing narcotics in large quantities may not throw up a red flag. Doctors that specialize in headache, orthopedics, any surgical discipline, and dentists, write a large number of narcotic prescriptions each year. Spread that number out over most of the 50 U.S. states, and the tracking is harder to do.
Between my 11+ years of working in a pharmacy, to my current job working for a pharmacy software company, if I really wanted to, I could pull this off, once I got a supplier to buy into me as legit. And all that takes is getting a pharmacist to play along. Show them enough $$$ (even though they make more than $70K starting, nowadays, I believe) and someone will play along.
Look at the last 5+ years of TV programming, and you can really see that Hollywood doesn't have any clue as to what may be popular. The whole "reality TV" craze happened because there is so little interesting on TV nowadays, that they were bound to draw attention.
Hollywood has been too busy trying to push actors and actresses with no major appeal onto us as consumers, and thinking we will buy them. cast members that should never be more than supporting actors/actresses, some pissant director/casting director will decide should be a star, and the movies are flops because of it. I mean, Brittany Murphy as a headliner in a half dozen movies? Please! She's not even that good looking, and all of her characters come across the same!
It's fairly simple. Better plots. Better stories. Better chemistry between the cast. Better casting.
Look at the last 5 years of comedies that have come out, and how many of them really do have that "rewatchability" factor? That if you were surfing through HBO, and saw it on, you would watch it again, even if you had seen it 4 times already? There aren't many, in my book. And the funny part is, most of them weren't huge box office successes. They did ok, but weren't blockbusters.
Maybe that is what Hollywood should start looking at. Would that movie generate repeat interest? If you don't think it will, don't make it.
Basically the same story. I originally signed up for AOL when it was a MAC only platform. Once they started taking on PC customers, the thing when to , and I cancelled my account. I was billed for over a year after, despite repeated phone calls asking for them to stop. They even caused a check to bounce, as I was in my poor mode at the time.
Suddenly, my father started getting on my case to cancel the service, and I showed him the names and times I had called. (Always document that kind of stuff was something I had already learned!) So, my father called up and said he was my lawyer, and started asking about letting them doing it until the value got over $550, so I could take them to something besides small claims court, then suing them for a few million, for mental anguish, economic stress, etc.
Got my money back, plus all bounced check fees I could document, and a little something extra for my "lawyer" fees.
It was too bad I owed my old man some cash for my car insurance at the time...
From it's late beta stages (from when I first got involved) through today, the economy has been hijaked by bot-farmers. Or, as most close minded people call them, Asian/Chinese farmers.
This is the major problem with in game economies. Players want them, because they can feel like they are getting something out of items they don't want. However, all they do is create a "business" opportunity for companies that will allow virtual items to be sold for cash. Players don't really benefit, especially new players, that don't hone their ability to play the game, but rely entirely on cool gear. You can spot an Ebayer from miles away.
This is one of the reasons Lineage II was not a big success in the U.S. The gameplay was only ok, the UI was poor (point and click for MMOs was a mistake, and everyone in beta told them that) and they made no real effort to clean out botters. It's only mildly redeaming quality was the Dark/Night Elf chicks in their leather thongage, making every 10-85yr old male want to play one for a little bit. And once you put a piece of armor on, away went said thongage.
One of the major reasons City of Heroes was a decent success was that there was no real economy. Sure, you could sell stuff, but you couldn't use Enhancements until you were +/- 2 levels of it's rating, so it cut the economy to almost nothing. Plus, other players had NO idea what Enhancements you received. No loot hassles, no worries. Sure, PlayNC started going nuts with balancing issues, and then World of Warcraft came out and made a huge dent in their playerbase, but it's the first MMO I have played in a long time that had no real economy, and now that WoW has bored me, I started back up, to be ready for City of Villians.
Don't think CoV won't suck some players that have gotten bored in WoW. Half my guild is waiting on beta invites.
Since release, there has often been issues cropping up with loot/AH/mailbox lag. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that since there is essentially one server for each continent, and then you have your instance servers, that the system bogs down. We've had numerous patches since release that have re-introduced this problem, and require subsequent patches to fix them.
Why hasn't blizzard gone to an AH zone, or a mail zone. A simple "zone into this spot in an inn for the mail" would hopefully allow the database servers to keep up with the rest of the world. The same would be true for the AH.
To me, the game got really boring when I hit 60. After 5+ years of EQ's grind it out for gear/levels, I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to 60, taking my time about it. Then, I hit 60, and it's nothing but grind for gear, or PvP. What else does Blizzard have planned for the lvl 60 crowd that may not be such a grind?
Too many parents today want an easy out. They don't want to have to monitor their kids. They want someone else to tell them what is appropriate or not.
I think some parents are more interested in the possibility of being able to file a class action suit against someone after the fact, than thinking for themselves before the fact.
It's pretty simple, really. If I can't beta a game (for MMOs especially) then I don't really want to shell out $50 to find out it sucks.
For non-online games, it still hold's true. I have more games that turned out to be complete stinkers on my bookshelf than I care to admit.
Most gamers don't just look at the company and say "Oh, EA made X, so Y should be great!". They look at X, and believe X2 should be at least as good, or at least offer a reasonable hope of fun.
If you played and loved Fallout and Fallout 2, and Interplay releases Fallout 3, aren't you going to buy it? Heck, even if the game engine doesn't get a radical overhaul, I'd still want to try it when it hits the bargain bin.
New games often require new engines, and a ton of creative juice. A sequel to a very successful game requires a new plot, maybe some engine tweaks, some graphic tweaks, and you are done.
And even if they do update the engine, etc... If they had released Doom 3 with just "Resurrection of Evil" as it's title, with no reference whatsoever to it's Doom legacy, what do you think it's sales would have been?
Age is just a number. Heck, I'm 38, almost 39, and I still am an MMO junkie. If it's a PC RPG, I've probably played it, and most of the FPS, as well.
I know a few folks in their 60's that play MMOs.
My father is over 75. He helped design the original hardware and software for the AWACS aircraft. He played a major role in the setting up and turning on of the first dedicated network on the Eastern side of the US. He's seriously old-school computers, the kind of guy that had a subscription to IEEE and actually read the damned thing.
Now, he plays computer games. Not the first person shooters, or other games that take more reflex speed than he can muster up, but the simplier games, like cards, Myst, and the like.
And, since he hasn't had to really do jack didly squat in the last 6 years, technically, he now calls me and asks his only kid without a college degree, what the best firewall is, etc.
He's comfortable with computers, so computer games don't intimidate him.
Now if I could just teach my mother that not everything her retirement buddies think is a funny joke needs to be forwarded on to me...
My company still uses Lotus Notes for email in it's Canadian office, and by extension, I use it, since I am the only U.S. based employee under that Canadian umbrella. All of the rest of the offices use Outlook.
I have never thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But, when the "I love you" virus came out, not a single computer in our old US office that used Notes, nor the Canadian office, was affected. Over 50 at the coporate HQ that used Outlook got hit.
Diamler-Chrysler uses Lotus Notes at many of it's facilities, as my wife works for them. They rarely get hit with a virus, as well.
So, while it's GUI may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, some of that may be a good thing. At least Notes doesn't open attachments automatically in the preview pane view.
Slashdot Mirror
A better example is a factual one. The case of Robert Kearns, and the intermittent windshield wiper. They give some details here, in his death notification: http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNew s/1109378985145_41?hub=SciTech
He filed the patent for his idea, and all of the automakers failed to pay him for it, then started to install it on their cars. He won against Ford and Chrysler, then strangely had the case dismissed against GM, and all the foreign auto-makers, with none of them being forced to stop using his IP.
You are correct. Most games are overrated. If you release a CD in a box, it earns a minimum score of 6 for most sites, regardless of the quality.
82 is an insane score for this game. I was in the beta, and I hated it. I wouldn't have done any further than I went, but I wanted to see the process through. Warcraft 3 is still better, even though it is somewhat dated, now.
Look at some of the real stinker games that came out, and what their metas are.
Then look at who pays most of those websites/magazines whose scores go into the metas, and you have your answer. Most of those websites/magazines are so far in bed with the game developers that they don't give you a reliable review on anything. And the previews are even worse. Every game is a blockbuster "best ever" game until it is released and everyone thinks it sucks. Then it gets shifted to a score of the mid 70s.
Lastly, those metas do not reflect user votes. That is purely magazine reviews. And with only 19 user votes when I checked, most of them didn't have much to say other than "I liked it" and a 10. Typical of most voting areas, it is either all or nothing, with little thought put into a score.
Something like daemontools, or another virtual CD/DVD drive, so you wouldn't have to eat the extra cost of a CD-ROM...
Really, this has to be one of the dumbest things any record label has pulled.
Yeah, I am sure they will target the BDSM crowd. And not have a clue as to what the mantra of said crowd usually is. (There are extremists, as with anything.)
Safe. Sane. Consentual.
Most BDSM relationships are more honest than regular ones, especialy for D/s. Almost everyone has a kink they would like to explore. BDSM folks usually explore it with their partner(s), or at least their partner(s) permission. Most regular folk hide it, agonize over it, and then pay for it to happen. And that payment is often a broken marriage, lost of children, or loss of life to AIDS and the like.
The level of honesty necessary in a D/s relationship is very deep. Knowledge of yourself and your partner is paramount to either of your safety. If a sub isn't truthful with themselves or their Dom, someone will end up getting hurt. So, they talk about things, plan, and work together.
Pardon the pun, but honestly, if most relationships had the level of communication that a D/s relationship did, there'd be a lot less breakups/divorces.
If you just read the meaning of many of the words, it can sound horrible. Bondage. Domination. Sadism. Masochism. And yet, if two (or more) consenting adults do it carefully, it can be one of the most powerfully positive encounters they may all have.
I don't mind the stamping out of child pornography, but if it is consenting adults, well... Live and let live.
Nope, not new here.
But if you go to the WoW forums, in General... They practice the art of dupes the way politicians practice lies. It's a never ending thing.
Truly, they make most slashdotters look like MIT's Magna Cum Laudes.
In some ways, Blizzard is smart to give as little technical information it can, and in others, it is dumb.
/bump yourself, which is a punishable offense. They still haven't learned how to run a forum for an MMO.
Let's face it, the average bnet kid is a complete jerk. If you give them even the smallest tidbit of information, they go crazy because you didn't release the source code, let them attend development meeting, and be in charge of product design. And this makes up a large portion of their player base. I mean, have you *read* their forums???? A more idiotic group of complainers hasn't been found.
Having said that, many of their best spoken critics could be silenced with a few, well spoken responses. Blizzard won't give them, though, because of the flames they take from the masses.
Blizzard's forums are a wreck, because they refuse to clean them up. If they deleted off-topic posts, flames, and the like from their General forum ad naseum, maybe things would get better. Because they don't, their forum mods end up playing tag with a ton of nutcase windbags. Posts blow off the front page of their General forum in less than 5 minutes in many cases, and then you get no response, unless you
In a nutshell, the response that Blizzard gave here was a very watered down version of things they have let their forum mods share with the public.
Why harder hitting questions, like why does it take months between patches, and the like, were left off, and these questions were included, is curious. Heck, EQ2 is patched almost daily, yet Blizzard still leaves bugs in place for as long as it can get away with. The amount of bugs in each release clearly indicate that their Q/A process is a joke. And many problems found on the Test Server are left in the release, because they don't want to go back and fix them. Important things like this were ignored for the questions that got asked?
The questions that *were* posed to Blizzard have all been answered in their forums, for the most part. We weren't going to learn anything new, especially when 2 of the questions (1 and 8) were essentially the same. Hello, economy and farming questions go hand in hand!
The fact that the results of this were lame is partly related to the poor choices of questions asked. The rest of it is that Blizzard is a bunch of weenies.
Me, I've gone back to playing CoH, and having fun again. That, and monkeying around in the CoV beta.
I know quite a few folks that still use WinMX, mostly because it seemed to fly under the RIAA's radar. Less publicity, to them, meant more safety from possible lawyers.
Sometimes, crappy has it's benefits.
There's a handbook?
Damn, why didn't I get a copy!?!?
Oh, you mean that common sense thing? Sheesh! You expect me to use THAT?
My concert was Accept/Dio, probably in the late 80's. My ears rang for 3 days afterwards, and it was horrible. People 5 miles away, and across a major highway, complained about the volume. From that point onwards, I took earplugs with me, in case it was too loud.
In the late 90's, as a EMT/Paramedic, I would often work concerts. (The medical staff at Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, MD, is all volunteer EMTs/Paramedics from the Howard County's Volunteer Association, unpaid workers.) I think I worked almost every show from 97-99. For most of them, we stayed in the outdoors portion, but we all brought earplugs just in case we had to go down front. Or backstage. Backstage at a Phish concert has to be seen to be believed.
From 16-32, I had one tremendous stereo system in my car, and played heavy metal music at full volume most of the time in it.
For all of that, I can still tell you if a TV/Monitor that uses high voltage is on in a house, if it is quiet. I can hear the high pitch hum, even at nearly 39yrs of age.
I think it is more what your ability to tolerate high volumes is, than constant exposure. My brother is much like me in his music listening habits, and he is currently starting to do some live shows with his band, in support of his instrumental heavy metal guitar album. (I'd link it, but his megalomania is bad enough already!) Neither of us has any noticable hearing problem, but my sister does.
Well, I do have trouble picking out an individual voice from a group of them, but I've had that problem since I was 12. lol
Hasn't this story been run a few dozen times before? http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/31/06 18205&tid=158&tid=198&tid=172&tid=218
This isn't exactly rocket science, but maybe companies like Dell and other PC sellers should include a free disk scrubbing utility when they send out a replacement HD.
Lord knows, Dell didn't even bother sending out an extra ATA cable. When my wife's new PC had it's 250GB HD die, I had to buy another cable to copy the resurrected data to the new HD. Then, I had to find a decent HD scrubber to clean the old one, since it had our info from Quicken and probably cache related stuff to online banking, etc.
Hmmm, maybe I should do a recovery on that new HD they sent us... Nah, not worth the effort.
The bottom line is, most coding isn't very pretty, nor is it designed for speed, unless it is specifically done for high end graphics/gaming.
I think that beauty of Assembly has been essentially lost for most development shops.
Lord knows, programming in Assembly/machine language is brutally hard on a developer. It must have been the hardest class I ever took, outside of some of the higher maths.
Flamewar? That wasn't a flamewar, but a little spat! At least, from the crappy details we got from the news article.
Let these folks learn about Usenet, and them drop them off in one of the more entertaining newsgroups, sans Nomex undies. Maybe then they will experience a flame war.
The numbers playing WoW are impressive, but the game has not even been out a year. When it has been out for 6 or so years, like EQ was before EQ2 and WoW sucked a ton of players away, then we can talk about it being a gorilla. Right now, it's just a noisy chimp.
As many people as join the game each month (and those numbers don't seem to be that high here in the U.S.), there are probably just as many that are leaving for greener pastures.
I suspect that City of Villians will make a dent in the WoW playerbase, as PvP is added to the game. City of Heroes made gameplay more fun for a lot of people. No loot hassles (you don't know when someone else gets an enhancement) and very little game economy. Take those two elements out of a game, and a lot of the complaints you had in WoW (loot arguements, "Chinese" farmers, gold selling, etc) go away.
DS1 had one simple strategy to follow to win the whole deal, and it didn't involve skill in the slightest. It was purely a matter of carrying enough healing potions with you. That's it. Not a lot of imagination went into it. Just some pretty graphics for it's time.
A monkey can beat it. All it have to do is hit the H key whenever a character's portrait flashes yellow. If they can learn sign language, beating DS1 is a piece of cake.
DS1 was interesting for a few hours, and everyone was stoked at first. Then, it went from Dungeon Seige to Potion Mule, and the game got boring fast. I'm sure half the reviews came in from players before they got half through the game, and started to claw their eyes out.
I've talked to a friend that actually bought it, and he said DS2 is the same. I wouldn't spend the $$$ on it, but it was good to know it was just as lame.
If they start suing churches I'd get upset (1st amendment and all that)
No disrespect intended, but folks sue churches. I do believe there are several people that have brought claims against the Catholic church for priests that molested them while they were children.
I just wish that when they had written that there would be a seperation of church and state, they wrote specifically that the church couldn't get involved in the state.
The government here in the U.S. doesn't mandate religion, but religion sure tries to dictate U.S. policy.
Which is why I am fond of saying "I have no religion, but I have Faith."
Starbucks, Taster's Choice, and Juan Valdez.
Some prescription facts that make it easier to get around.
Only about 20% of the states in the U.S. actually require reporting based on the narcotics a doctor writes. The rest will blindly allow whatever happens to happen.
Add to that fact that this guy was unlikely to be running an actually pharmacy, and it makes it a little easier.
Most drugs with Hydrocodone in them are C-III, or schedule 3 drugs, and are not under super-tight restrictions for dispensing. Up to 5 refills allowed in a 6 month period kind of thing. Also, a written prescription isn't required in most states. (NY being the exception I am familiar with, but there may be others.) A doctor can phone one in.
The harder narcotics are C-II, or scheule 2. Those are only fillable once, no refills allowed, a written prescription is required all the time.
Since a doctor's DEA # is set by an invidivual state, you can change it up for different states, and make it look like a different doctor, if you wanted to. A doctor actually is supposed to have one DEA # for each office location, though most don't.
Besides, anyone that has worked in a pharmacy probably knows how to create a working DEA #. The formula isn't very hard to get through.
Lastly. Depending on what the doctor's specialty is, writing narcotics in large quantities may not throw up a red flag. Doctors that specialize in headache, orthopedics, any surgical discipline, and dentists, write a large number of narcotic prescriptions each year. Spread that number out over most of the 50 U.S. states, and the tracking is harder to do.
Between my 11+ years of working in a pharmacy, to my current job working for a pharmacy software company, if I really wanted to, I could pull this off, once I got a supplier to buy into me as legit. And all that takes is getting a pharmacist to play along. Show them enough $$$ (even though they make more than $70K starting, nowadays, I believe) and someone will play along.
Look at the last 5+ years of TV programming, and you can really see that Hollywood doesn't have any clue as to what may be popular. The whole "reality TV" craze happened because there is so little interesting on TV nowadays, that they were bound to draw attention.
Hollywood has been too busy trying to push actors and actresses with no major appeal onto us as consumers, and thinking we will buy them. cast members that should never be more than supporting actors/actresses, some pissant director/casting director will decide should be a star, and the movies are flops because of it. I mean, Brittany Murphy as a headliner in a half dozen movies? Please! She's not even that good looking, and all of her characters come across the same!
It's fairly simple. Better plots. Better stories. Better chemistry between the cast. Better casting.
Look at the last 5 years of comedies that have come out, and how many of them really do have that "rewatchability" factor? That if you were surfing through HBO, and saw it on, you would watch it again, even if you had seen it 4 times already? There aren't many, in my book. And the funny part is, most of them weren't huge box office successes. They did ok, but weren't blockbusters.
Maybe that is what Hollywood should start looking at. Would that movie generate repeat interest? If you don't think it will, don't make it.
Basically the same story. I originally signed up for AOL when it was a MAC only platform. Once they started taking on PC customers, the thing when to , and I cancelled my account. I was billed for over a year after, despite repeated phone calls asking for them to stop. They even caused a check to bounce, as I was in my poor mode at the time.
Suddenly, my father started getting on my case to cancel the service, and I showed him the names and times I had called. (Always document that kind of stuff was something I had already learned!) So, my father called up and said he was my lawyer, and started asking about letting them doing it until the value got over $550, so I could take them to something besides small claims court, then suing them for a few million, for mental anguish, economic stress, etc.
Got my money back, plus all bounced check fees I could document, and a little something extra for my "lawyer" fees.
It was too bad I owed my old man some cash for my car insurance at the time...
PlayNC really messed up with Lineage II.
From it's late beta stages (from when I first got involved) through today, the economy has been hijaked by bot-farmers. Or, as most close minded people call them, Asian/Chinese farmers.
This is the major problem with in game economies. Players want them, because they can feel like they are getting something out of items they don't want. However, all they do is create a "business" opportunity for companies that will allow virtual items to be sold for cash. Players don't really benefit, especially new players, that don't hone their ability to play the game, but rely entirely on cool gear. You can spot an Ebayer from miles away.
This is one of the reasons Lineage II was not a big success in the U.S. The gameplay was only ok, the UI was poor (point and click for MMOs was a mistake, and everyone in beta told them that) and they made no real effort to clean out botters. It's only mildly redeaming quality was the Dark/Night Elf chicks in their leather thongage, making every 10-85yr old male want to play one for a little bit. And once you put a piece of armor on, away went said thongage.
One of the major reasons City of Heroes was a decent success was that there was no real economy. Sure, you could sell stuff, but you couldn't use Enhancements until you were +/- 2 levels of it's rating, so it cut the economy to almost nothing. Plus, other players had NO idea what Enhancements you received. No loot hassles, no worries. Sure, PlayNC started going nuts with balancing issues, and then World of Warcraft came out and made a huge dent in their playerbase, but it's the first MMO I have played in a long time that had no real economy, and now that WoW has bored me, I started back up, to be ready for City of Villians.
Don't think CoV won't suck some players that have gotten bored in WoW. Half my guild is waiting on beta invites.
Since release, there has often been issues cropping up with loot/AH/mailbox lag. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that since there is essentially one server for each continent, and then you have your instance servers, that the system bogs down. We've had numerous patches since release that have re-introduced this problem, and require subsequent patches to fix them.
Why hasn't blizzard gone to an AH zone, or a mail zone. A simple "zone into this spot in an inn for the mail" would hopefully allow the database servers to keep up with the rest of the world. The same would be true for the AH.
To me, the game got really boring when I hit 60. After 5+ years of EQ's grind it out for gear/levels, I thoroughly enjoyed my trip to 60, taking my time about it. Then, I hit 60, and it's nothing but grind for gear, or PvP. What else does Blizzard have planned for the lvl 60 crowd that may not be such a grind?
Boxr, lvl 60 rogue, Uther
Too many parents today want an easy out. They don't want to have to monitor their kids. They want someone else to tell them what is appropriate or not.
I think some parents are more interested in the possibility of being able to file a class action suit against someone after the fact, than thinking for themselves before the fact.
It's pretty simple, really. If I can't beta a game (for MMOs especially) then I don't really want to shell out $50 to find out it sucks.
For non-online games, it still hold's true. I have more games that turned out to be complete stinkers on my bookshelf than I care to admit.
Most gamers don't just look at the company and say "Oh, EA made X, so Y should be great!". They look at X, and believe X2 should be at least as good, or at least offer a reasonable hope of fun.
If you played and loved Fallout and Fallout 2, and Interplay releases Fallout 3, aren't you going to buy it? Heck, even if the game engine doesn't get a radical overhaul, I'd still want to try it when it hits the bargain bin.
New games often require new engines, and a ton of creative juice. A sequel to a very successful game requires a new plot, maybe some engine tweaks, some graphic tweaks, and you are done.
And even if they do update the engine, etc... If they had released Doom 3 with just "Resurrection of Evil" as it's title, with no reference whatsoever to it's Doom legacy, what do you think it's sales would have been?
Age is just a number. Heck, I'm 38, almost 39, and I still am an MMO junkie. If it's a PC RPG, I've probably played it, and most of the FPS, as well.
I know a few folks in their 60's that play MMOs.
My father is over 75. He helped design the original hardware and software for the AWACS aircraft. He played a major role in the setting up and turning on of the first dedicated network on the Eastern side of the US. He's seriously old-school computers, the kind of guy that had a subscription to IEEE and actually read the damned thing.
Now, he plays computer games. Not the first person shooters, or other games that take more reflex speed than he can muster up, but the simplier games, like cards, Myst, and the like.
And, since he hasn't had to really do jack didly squat in the last 6 years, technically, he now calls me and asks his only kid without a college degree, what the best firewall is, etc.
He's comfortable with computers, so computer games don't intimidate him.
Now if I could just teach my mother that not everything her retirement buddies think is a funny joke needs to be forwarded on to me...
My company still uses Lotus Notes for email in it's Canadian office, and by extension, I use it, since I am the only U.S. based employee under that Canadian umbrella. All of the rest of the offices use Outlook. I have never thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. But, when the "I love you" virus came out, not a single computer in our old US office that used Notes, nor the Canadian office, was affected. Over 50 at the coporate HQ that used Outlook got hit. Diamler-Chrysler uses Lotus Notes at many of it's facilities, as my wife works for them. They rarely get hit with a virus, as well. So, while it's GUI may not be the greatest thing since sliced bread, some of that may be a good thing. At least Notes doesn't open attachments automatically in the preview pane view.