I always thought that deja vu was an experience, comprised of things our senses tell us. most of my deja vus are triggered not by what I see but rather a combination of senses that makes up the familiar experience of deja vu.
there are certain popular names in China. Just as an example, many people with the family name "Lu" like to give their son the name of "Shuan". If I were still living in China, I probably wouldn't want to share the same name as another person who is posting things in blogs that would be offending to the Chinese government...
The article stated that they arn't including pistols in their market...
TFA said the pistol will be in a different pool as the other weapons.
There are two pools, pistols and everything else. the prices of items is determined by the number of times that item is bought compared to the number of times other items are bought in that particular pool. So as a result, prices of assesories like HE grenades, Flashbangs, Smoke Grenades are going down because they are in the same pool as frequently bought items such as the M4.
With this system, if every item were in the same pool, will result in a large decrease in most of the items while a HUGE increase in price on items like the M4, and AK. For example, items like pistols will not be bought by most players in the later rounds of the game, is put into the same pool as the M4 will cause a huge deflation of pistol prices while boosting the M4, AK prices even higher.
Steam has already started gathering data and showing the price changes on this page. As expected prices of the most popular gears (M4, AK, Armour, and Night Hawk) has gone up.
What I wonder how is if Valve will categorize assesories like grenades in one pool because they will usualy be bought less than items like the M4.
"The recipients appeared immune to the HIV-1 virus 15 days after the injection, indicating the vaccine worked well in stimulating the body's immunity," he told the press conference.
...
"The HIV-1 specific cells injected into the recipients were the DNA fragments of the virus which don't cause infection," [Sang Guowei] told Xinhua.
Biology is not my forte, but since the HIV-1 virus was made to NOT cause an infection, how would they know if the vaccine actually worked?
One of the reasons Will Wright released the first gameplay video of Spore at the Game Developer Conference 2006, instead of E3, was because he felt E3 was more like a commercial used by game producers to hype the games before it comes out, not a place for developers to exchange ideas and make better games.
are we seeing the forming of an equivilant of the Military-Industrial_Complex in the field of Space Exloration? Will the government contracts to private companies lead to massive spending in the field of space exloration like it did for the Millitary starting after WWII?
well, the page DOES say (as of this writing) almost 60 million downloads so far.
This was actualy one of the reasons why I wrote about how unreliable "14 percent of Chinese websurfers have used it" is at determining the popularity of the web browser.
The population of China, according to google, is 1,306,313,812.
14 percent of that would be 182,883,934. Compare that to the 60 million downloads and what do you get? So basicly the article indicated that 14 percent of the Chinese population have tried the web browser, but only one third of them actualy downloaded it? Does this really indicate the browser's popularity?
And that is assuming all the 60 million downloads are from the Chinese, the article also said "it is catching on in Europe" meaning a portion of the 60 million downloads are probably not from China...
Statistics like the one from the article are misleading and dont really paint the whole picture for you.
have used it? I've used countless softwares in the past, but the ones that I continue to use is only a fraction of that. Just because a Chinese websurfer have used it once does not mean they thought it was a good software and continued to use it. IMO some more evidence should be provided before saying this internet browser it is "gaining wide popularity in China"
What are you talking about? Google.cn censors without notifying users that content is being removed. For example...
. . .
Here's a Google.cn search for "tiananmen"
http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
Google does tell the users that the results are cencored. They even got blasted by the state ran media in China for doing so. (it was by XingHua I think...
Right at the bottom of the page is this
""
a rough translation is "according to local law and policies, some parts of the search results will not be shown".
regarding the video you posted, yes, ofcourse not a lot of students in China can be exactly sure what that picture is about, since they probably never seen it before. But that does not prevent them from knowing about the '89 masacare that took place. Some bad translation was in the video, somewhere after 1 min, the narrator says "the boy said 89","but the girl made no connection". However when the boy said 89 in Chinese, the girl actually answered "probably" in chinese. A few words makes a huge difference. It shows how students in China does know about this issue, even thou it never comes up in Chinese media.
Also, most Chinese does not want to do anything that will provoke the government. I don't know much about the backgrounds of the interview, but if a foriegn interviewer came to me to conduct an interview, asking me things that is very much sensitive to the government, I would just pretend to know nothing, since the governement could easily come the next day and expell me from the university without giving a valid reason. So in this interview, it is distinct possibility that the students might have guessed it was the 89 masacare, but pretended to not know about the issue, just so that they wont have to deal with the government.
what do you think of the concept of multiculturalism, which is very popular in Canada?
I think it is a step towards the right direction. It is great to see different people with different culture living in the same society. I love how many people who were born in Canada, despite their racial backgrounds, can come out and say "I am proud that we have people all around the world living here". From the racial aspect, Canada most definitly ahead of the world.
Despite the sucess, I dont think we as Canadians should elude ourselves the problems that are present in a multicultural society. There are often clashes between groups of people (Natives, people of Quebec, etc), but with time and good policies, Canada will be a great example to the world about how different people can live together.
People like Einstein would have slipped through the Chinese system of education completely. Einstein had a pretty lacklustre academic record at school, from what you've said, that would've been it for him in China.
Einstein failed his non-math subjects in school, the German education system was to blame for that because it placed such a importance on math, and nothing else. He was learning calculus at 12, which is amazing. In the 1890s, the system of grading was reversed so Einstein's 1, which ment for perfect, became a "fail". thats how the rumour started.
When was the last time you heard of a Chinese genius and when was the last time you heard of an American genius? I'm not intending to put the Chinese system down or anything, maybe the reason I've never heard of a Chinese genius is due to the language or the government not releasing research or something along those lines.
China was always had top technology (at least in the field of warfare;) ) before the industrial revolution. Since the Chinese only faced threats from the Mongolians in the north, they never bothered to improved their technology, as oppose to European countries who HAD to embrace the new technology or be wiped off the map. Starting then, China declined. To the point where it had to give Taiwan away to Japan in the first Sino-Japanses war, and then almost loose itself completely during the second Sino-Japanese war. Then the communist came into power, the cultural revolution and the Great Leap Forward plunged the nation backwards. It was only until recently did the education system in China became good. My dad's generation was not even allowed to go to university because the communist government considered it to be "useless". So the real reason you dont see a lot of famous Chinese scientists, is because only my generation of Chinese were educated properly. Those before us had to suffer through war or be forced to NOT learn.
The American system of picking "gifted" students out based on IQ does have it's problems but on the other hand it will rarely let a gifted student slip (if the system is working).
See, thats the problem, what defines a "gifted student"? The American system rely on the IQ, but a survey done on the richest 200 Americans showed that the IQ affects little of what people can achieve in life. There are various studdies (just search in google) that shows how IQ will not be as big a factor as dedication when achieving things in life. Americans, especialy the youth are very caught up in this IQ hype, thinking that high IQ = smart regardless of anything else. This also have social impacts as well because now the students realize if they have a lower IQ, they are counted as stupid, despite what they do in their life. This is the wrong approach to take if you want your students to do well.
The Chinese, on the other hand, picks their "gifted" students based on what the student had achieved. So when I saw people going into the Fast track class, I said to myself "I will be in it next year because I will work harder this year", as oppose to the IQ system where the students can't do anything to improve their self-esteem about their intelligence.
PS: sorry for the grammar/spelling mistakes, typing this in a hurry.
I am a Canadian citizen, immigrated to Canada when I was 10.
Now, even thou the article is focusing on American education, I just thought I bring Canadian and Chinese education into the mix.
First 10 years of my life, I went to school in China. In kindergarden, addition and subtraction were briefly introduced to us. We were easily able to do one digit addition/subtraction, however some parents like mine pushed us to do more, so as a result, on the first day of school in grade 1, I was able to do two digit addition and subtraction already.
School in China was hard, since the starting of grade one I had to do homework constantly from after school (around 5pm) to 8, or 9 PM. On the weekends most kids were sent to private lessons for various kinds of things like piano, English (you dont start learning English in school until grade 5, but parents send grade 1 kids to English lessons so that they can have a head start), or just for core classes like Math or Chinese.
In elementary school, there are two exams, one is midterm and the other is final. These were basicly your report cards, everything you do in the year basicly prepares you for these tests. Much is dependant on the result of your final exam each grade. I remember my teacher saying "if you got below a 90 on the final exam, it would be the equivilant of failing." She wasn't exatrating either, middle school in China accepts students based on their final exam mark in grade 6. If you did not get a good mark on that exam, too bad, you will have to go to a crappy middle school. To people living in Canada or the US, they would probably say "so what, it's just middle school." It's much more than that, if you were in a bad middle school, high school wont even take a look at your application despite your mark. Universities will do the same to bad high schools. So it was made very clear to us when we were in grade 1, that if you were to do bad on the final exam in grade 6, your whole life is ruined.
Then I moved to Canada.
Everything changed. I was living in Vancouver at the time. (I had to take a 45 min bus to my school, because all the schools near my house were "over populated", but thats another issue)I walked in a Canadian classroom for the first time and found out these kids were doing two digit addition and subtraction, the same ones I knew how to do when I started elementary school in China. All of the sudden, I became a "genius". But soon I discovered that being a genius in a Canadian school isn't all that great. you see, in China your popularity depends a lot on your marks, just like in Canada and the US, but in an opposite way. If you had the best marks in the class, everyone will want to be your friend. If you were failing, you would be that "failure", or loner that everybody stays away from. In Canada however, I found out the hard way that if you were getting good marks for classes like Math, the chances are you will be pretty unpopular.
I had another thing to discover in Canada, when I went into high school I found myself hang around people who are "gifted". I found out that kids in Canada take a test in grade 3 and 6 to see if they have a high than averge IQ. They are put into the same class and were taught harder things than the normal kids.
Now, why did I write all that? It is to give you a bit of info before I present my opinion about why the quality of education here is not as good as it could be.
First, a lot of kids in Canada and the US have this weird ideology that if they arn't born smart, there is no way in the world for them to become smarter. I was considered a genius by kids in my class when I came to Canada, but they didn't say that because they knew about all the homework I did in grade 1 in China, they said it because they thought I was born smart since I was Asian or something. They refuse to work harder to achieve things because they believe that there is no point because they are not smart to start with.
Im not familiar with how source codes work... maybe someone could explain to me?
if I download this 1 gig file, what will it contain? Does it contain the game, or the engine that the game used?
you dont need to crack the game to pirate and play it. nor do you need to disconnect anything, if you use certain softwares specificly made to hid DT from SF, there is usualy a guide provided by the release group in the nfo file telling the pirates what programme to use to play it.
thats why even thou King Kong had not been cracked yet, there are still people pirating it and playing it with just a clone of the game.
"The WSJ notes an irony: Google is fighting for 'Internet freedom' in the U.S., by resisting the Justice Department's request for information on user searches."
This is not the same as cencoring google.cn.
not a lot of people use google in China, it seems that not a lot of people know this. Google never gained a lot of market shares in China through their own search engine because it didn't show up most of the time due to cencorship, as appose to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China. Baidu is obviously, being a chinese based search engine, cencored.
After obeying the laws of China, google can finally provide their service to the Chinese as a reliable search engine. It is the chinese users that google is benifiting as well as themselves.
However, providing the private information of search terms to the US goverment provids no benefit for google nor the users using the search engine.
So in a way, google is fighting for the best interest of the users, instead of freedom. (Im sure people in China rather have a working, cencored google than one that never works.)
If the game portrays it in a historically correct fashion...
The thing is, people from different ethnic backgrounds see historical events in different point of views. WWII in the views of Jews would be very different than the views of some Germans, so it's very hard to be "historically correct" since everyone view history from a different aspect.
This isn't as serious as most people think.
Companies such as these are keen on making a profit, when they see any problem that might prevent them from doing that they have to make a backup plan.
They might have goten only a few discs back that are scratched, but no matter how small of an amount that is they would still impliment this policy because they dont want to loose any money.
This is like the EULA in MMORPGS where it stats "we are allowed to ban you account for no reason" (something like that. They put a policy in place to avoice furthur inconveinence in the future.
Why would you be asking me what the new area looks like when there are trailers availiable on games sites like gamespots?
for example, in gamespot's trailer 1, at 2:43, you see these purle rays and trees on the ground, that is one of the places I remember because there was a huge sand timer in the middle with alot of sand trickling down, and the place was exactly like how it was shown in the trailer 1.
there were many more areas I visited that weren't availiable to the public, since that was almost a year ago, I dont remeber most of them, but when I saw the gamespot trailer I knew I've been to that place and many other places shown in the trailers.
despite the content of the expansion, there is still no reason to make the users pay for it again since they have so many suscribers. the reason tehy are doing this is because they want more money and because they know people will buy it because they love this great game, and the expansions for p2p always existed even before WoW and people are used to the idea, but it still doesn't make it right.
it makes no difference wether the expansion is released or not, because I saw the trailer for the new contents, I've already been to the areas shown when I was GM for a WoW server back at release. Much like what they did with Starcraft, the Dark Templars were shown in the beta version (made with WC engine) screenshots meaning they were originaly planed for the first release, but they decide to save it for the expansion to make more money.
the new contents in the WoW expansion shown in the trailers and screenshots were already there at release, ofcourse they are going to add a bit more things like items and monsters for the expansion, but thats hardly worth making people pay another 30 bucks for considering they are already paying 12-15 dollars a month.
dont even get me started on the amount of free content, many of those things they added were promised back in beta, most of the contents that came after release were suppose to be part of it.
Did I say that expansions did not exist?
I am one of those people that doesn't support expansion with p2p games. Look at WoW right now, they are making so much more money than they need for server maint and salaries and they still want people to pay for expansion for content that was already part of the game at release.
then look at Guild Wars, the Christmas and Halloween events were better than most p2p games out there, they even have a new PVP arena just for Christmas, an arena where you use skills such as throw snow ball, yellow snow (poison), ice castle (take no dmg from projections if you dont move for x seconds), snow cones (heal) and others, and Guild Wars doesn't even have a monthly fee!
the whole point of a P2P MMORPG is to have free content, why people are sooo thankful for Devs from a P2P game for releasing free content. They should be expected to do that!
btw I tried the snowball launcher already, IMHO it's nothing compared to what some other games are offering, but I dont blame them, it's hard to create a Christmas spirit in a MMORPG that takes place in Space.
Yeah, a whopping 0.8% of the population of the United States.
that would be 2.3 million people, and would be 7 percent of all immigrants that are in America right now. and in canada, 20 % of people whos mother tonge is either english or french, are chinese.
To live here permanently or to work here for a period to earn some money before going home?
normaly someone who immigranted to american legaly in the first place, already have a decent and stable job in China. why would they want to immigrant then? because there is this general ideology in China that in the western countries, especialy Canada and the US, it is easier to make money due to economic freedom and life is better there. However, many chinese immigrants realize, after immigrating, that the life isn't even as good as they thought it would be. the language barrier limits their job opertunities, and many resemes with a Chinese name (such as chang) would sometimes not even be read.
So the result of this is a lot of Chinese going back to China in hope to get their old job back. pick a few Chinese immigrants in your community and ask them to compare their job in China and their job now, you will see a huge differece in terms of earnings and stability of the two jobs.
Will being able to speak a Chinese dialect really be worthwhile to the general population in 2025
why 2025? why not now? maybe a new language would be the best to learn in the year 2025 for business, but as of now Chinese is the best choice for business. and im pretty sure it doesn't take you 20 years to learn chinese.. just because you consider Chinese as a "fad" doesn't automaticly make it useless, it is still a great asset to have. it's like a stock, if someone told you the stock of one company is going to soar for 20 years but will drop after that, you will still invest in it.
Slashdot Mirror
I always thought that deja vu was an experience, comprised of things our senses tell us. most of my deja vus are triggered not by what I see but rather a combination of senses that makes up the familiar experience of deja vu.
there are certain popular names in China. Just as an example, many people with the family name "Lu" like to give their son the name of "Shuan". If I were still living in China, I probably wouldn't want to share the same name as another person who is posting things in blogs that would be offending to the Chinese government...
TFA said the pistol will be in a different pool as the other weapons.
There are two pools, pistols and everything else. the prices of items is determined by the number of times that item is bought compared to the number of times other items are bought in that particular pool. So as a result, prices of assesories like HE grenades, Flashbangs, Smoke Grenades are going down because they are in the same pool as frequently bought items such as the M4.
With this system, if every item were in the same pool, will result in a large decrease in most of the items while a HUGE increase in price on items like the M4, and AK. For example, items like pistols will not be bought by most players in the later rounds of the game, is put into the same pool as the M4 will cause a huge deflation of pistol prices while boosting the M4, AK prices even higher.
Steam has already started gathering data and showing the price changes on this page. As expected prices of the most popular gears (M4, AK, Armour, and Night Hawk) has gone up.
What I wonder how is if Valve will categorize assesories like grenades in one pool because they will usualy be bought less than items like the M4.
Biology is not my forte, but since the HIV-1 virus was made to NOT cause an infection, how would they know if the vaccine actually worked?
One of the reasons Will Wright released the first gameplay video of Spore at the Game Developer Conference 2006, instead of E3, was because he felt E3 was more like a commercial used by game producers to hype the games before it comes out, not a place for developers to exchange ideas and make better games.
Don't astronauts use centrifuges to train?
are we seeing the forming of an equivilant of the Military-Industrial_Complex in the field of Space Exloration? Will the government contracts to private companies lead to massive spending in the field of space exloration like it did for the Millitary starting after WWII?
The population of China, according to google, is 1,306,313,812.
14 percent of that would be 182,883,934. Compare that to the 60 million downloads and what do you get? So basicly the article indicated that 14 percent of the Chinese population have tried the web browser, but only one third of them actualy downloaded it? Does this really indicate the browser's popularity?
And that is assuming all the 60 million downloads are from the Chinese, the article also said "it is catching on in Europe" meaning a portion of the 60 million downloads are probably not from China...
Statistics like the one from the article are misleading and dont really paint the whole picture for you.
Google does tell the users that the results are cencored. They even got blasted by the state ran media in China for doing so. (it was by XingHua I think...
Right at the bottom of the page is this a rough translation is "according to local law and policies, some parts of the search results will not be shown".
regarding the video you posted, yes, ofcourse not a lot of students in China can be exactly sure what that picture is about, since they probably never seen it before. But that does not prevent them from knowing about the '89 masacare that took place. Some bad translation was in the video, somewhere after 1 min, the narrator says "the boy said 89","but the girl made no connection". However when the boy said 89 in Chinese, the girl actually answered "probably" in chinese. A few words makes a huge difference. It shows how students in China does know about this issue, even thou it never comes up in Chinese media.
Also, most Chinese does not want to do anything that will provoke the government. I don't know much about the backgrounds of the interview, but if a foriegn interviewer came to me to conduct an interview, asking me things that is very much sensitive to the government, I would just pretend to know nothing, since the governement could easily come the next day and expell me from the university without giving a valid reason. So in this interview, it is distinct possibility that the students might have guessed it was the 89 masacare, but pretended to not know about the issue, just so that they wont have to deal with the government.
I think it is a step towards the right direction. It is great to see different people with different culture living in the same society. I love how many people who were born in Canada, despite their racial backgrounds, can come out and say "I am proud that we have people all around the world living here". From the racial aspect, Canada most definitly ahead of the world.
Despite the sucess, I dont think we as Canadians should elude ourselves the problems that are present in a multicultural society. There are often clashes between groups of people (Natives, people of Quebec, etc), but with time and good policies, Canada will be a great example to the world about how different people can live together.
Einstein failed his non-math subjects in school, the German education system was to blame for that because it placed such a importance on math, and nothing else. He was learning calculus at 12, which is amazing. In the 1890s, the system of grading was reversed so Einstein's 1, which ment for perfect, became a "fail". thats how the rumour started.
China was always had top technology (at least in the field of warfare
See, thats the problem, what defines a "gifted student"? The American system rely on the IQ, but a survey done on the richest 200 Americans showed that the IQ affects little of what people can achieve in life. There are various studdies (just search in google) that shows how IQ will not be as big a factor as dedication when achieving things in life. Americans, especialy the youth are very caught up in this IQ hype, thinking that high IQ = smart regardless of anything else. This also have social impacts as well because now the students realize if they have a lower IQ, they are counted as stupid, despite what they do in their life. This is the wrong approach to take if you want your students to do well.
The Chinese, on the other hand, picks their "gifted" students based on what the student had achieved. So when I saw people going into the Fast track class, I said to myself "I will be in it next year because I will work harder this year", as oppose to the IQ system where the students can't do anything to improve their self-esteem about their intelligence. PS: sorry for the grammar/spelling mistakes, typing this in a hurry.
I am a Canadian citizen, immigrated to Canada when I was 10.
Now, even thou the article is focusing on American education, I just thought I bring Canadian and Chinese education into the mix.
First 10 years of my life, I went to school in China. In kindergarden, addition and subtraction were briefly introduced to us. We were easily able to do one digit addition/subtraction, however some parents like mine pushed us to do more, so as a result, on the first day of school in grade 1, I was able to do two digit addition and subtraction already.
School in China was hard, since the starting of grade one I had to do homework constantly from after school (around 5pm) to 8, or 9 PM. On the weekends most kids were sent to private lessons for various kinds of things like piano, English (you dont start learning English in school until grade 5, but parents send grade 1 kids to English lessons so that they can have a head start), or just for core classes like Math or Chinese.
In elementary school, there are two exams, one is midterm and the other is final. These were basicly your report cards, everything you do in the year basicly prepares you for these tests. Much is dependant on the result of your final exam each grade. I remember my teacher saying "if you got below a 90 on the final exam, it would be the equivilant of failing." She wasn't exatrating either, middle school in China accepts students based on their final exam mark in grade 6. If you did not get a good mark on that exam, too bad, you will have to go to a crappy middle school. To people living in Canada or the US, they would probably say "so what, it's just middle school." It's much more than that, if you were in a bad middle school, high school wont even take a look at your application despite your mark. Universities will do the same to bad high schools. So it was made very clear to us when we were in grade 1, that if you were to do bad on the final exam in grade 6, your whole life is ruined.
Then I moved to Canada.
Everything changed. I was living in Vancouver at the time. (I had to take a 45 min bus to my school, because all the schools near my house were "over populated", but thats another issue)I walked in a Canadian classroom for the first time and found out these kids were doing two digit addition and subtraction, the same ones I knew how to do when I started elementary school in China. All of the sudden, I became a "genius". But soon I discovered that being a genius in a Canadian school isn't all that great. you see, in China your popularity depends a lot on your marks, just like in Canada and the US, but in an opposite way. If you had the best marks in the class, everyone will want to be your friend. If you were failing, you would be that "failure", or loner that everybody stays away from. In Canada however, I found out the hard way that if you were getting good marks for classes like Math, the chances are you will be pretty unpopular.
I had another thing to discover in Canada, when I went into high school I found myself hang around people who are "gifted". I found out that kids in Canada take a test in grade 3 and 6 to see if they have a high than averge IQ. They are put into the same class and were taught harder things than the normal kids.
Now, why did I write all that? It is to give you a bit of info before I present my opinion about why the quality of education here is not as good as it could be.
First, a lot of kids in Canada and the US have this weird ideology that if they arn't born smart, there is no way in the world for them to become smarter. I was considered a genius by kids in my class when I came to Canada, but they didn't say that because they knew about all the homework I did in grade 1 in China, they said it because they thought I was born smart since I was Asian or something. They refuse to work harder to achieve things because they believe that there is no point because they are not smart to start with.
On the other side, you had many of these gif
Im not familiar with how source codes work... maybe someone could explain to me?
if I download this 1 gig file, what will it contain? Does it contain the game, or the engine that the game used?
This is not the same as cencoring google.cn.
not a lot of people use google in China, it seems that not a lot of people know this. Google never gained a lot of market shares in China through their own search engine because it didn't show up most of the time due to cencorship, as appose to Baidu, the most popular search engine in China. Baidu is obviously, being a chinese based search engine, cencored.
After obeying the laws of China, google can finally provide their service to the Chinese as a reliable search engine. It is the chinese users that google is benifiting as well as themselves.
However, providing the private information of search terms to the US goverment provids no benefit for google nor the users using the search engine.
So in a way, google is fighting for the best interest of the users, instead of freedom. (Im sure people in China rather have a working, cencored google than one that never works.)
The thing is, people from different ethnic backgrounds see historical events in different point of views. WWII in the views of Jews would be very different than the views of some Germans, so it's very hard to be "historically correct" since everyone view history from a different aspect.
This isn't as serious as most people think.
Companies such as these are keen on making a profit, when they see any problem that might prevent them from doing that they have to make a backup plan.
They might have goten only a few discs back that are scratched, but no matter how small of an amount that is they would still impliment this policy because they dont want to loose any money.
This is like the EULA in MMORPGS where it stats "we are allowed to ban you account for no reason" (something like that. They put a policy in place to avoice furthur inconveinence in the future.
Why would you be asking me what the new area looks like when there are trailers availiable on games sites like gamespots? for example, in gamespot's trailer 1, at 2:43, you see these purle rays and trees on the ground, that is one of the places I remember because there was a huge sand timer in the middle with alot of sand trickling down, and the place was exactly like how it was shown in the trailer 1. there were many more areas I visited that weren't availiable to the public, since that was almost a year ago, I dont remeber most of them, but when I saw the gamespot trailer I knew I've been to that place and many other places shown in the trailers. despite the content of the expansion, there is still no reason to make the users pay for it again since they have so many suscribers. the reason tehy are doing this is because they want more money and because they know people will buy it because they love this great game, and the expansions for p2p always existed even before WoW and people are used to the idea, but it still doesn't make it right.
it makes no difference wether the expansion is released or not, because I saw the trailer for the new contents, I've already been to the areas shown when I was GM for a WoW server back at release. Much like what they did with Starcraft, the Dark Templars were shown in the beta version (made with WC engine) screenshots meaning they were originaly planed for the first release, but they decide to save it for the expansion to make more money. the new contents in the WoW expansion shown in the trailers and screenshots were already there at release, ofcourse they are going to add a bit more things like items and monsters for the expansion, but thats hardly worth making people pay another 30 bucks for considering they are already paying 12-15 dollars a month. dont even get me started on the amount of free content, many of those things they added were promised back in beta, most of the contents that came after release were suppose to be part of it.
Did I say that expansions did not exist? I am one of those people that doesn't support expansion with p2p games. Look at WoW right now, they are making so much more money than they need for server maint and salaries and they still want people to pay for expansion for content that was already part of the game at release. then look at Guild Wars, the Christmas and Halloween events were better than most p2p games out there, they even have a new PVP arena just for Christmas, an arena where you use skills such as throw snow ball, yellow snow (poison), ice castle (take no dmg from projections if you dont move for x seconds), snow cones (heal) and others, and Guild Wars doesn't even have a monthly fee!
the whole point of a P2P MMORPG is to have free content, why people are sooo thankful for Devs from a P2P game for releasing free content. They should be expected to do that!
btw I tried the snowball launcher already, IMHO it's nothing compared to what some other games are offering, but I dont blame them, it's hard to create a Christmas spirit in a MMORPG that takes place in Space.
Yeah, a whopping 0.8% of the population of the United States. that would be 2.3 million people, and would be 7 percent of all immigrants that are in America right now. and in canada, 20 % of people whos mother tonge is either english or french, are chinese. To live here permanently or to work here for a period to earn some money before going home? normaly someone who immigranted to american legaly in the first place, already have a decent and stable job in China. why would they want to immigrant then? because there is this general ideology in China that in the western countries, especialy Canada and the US, it is easier to make money due to economic freedom and life is better there. However, many chinese immigrants realize, after immigrating, that the life isn't even as good as they thought it would be. the language barrier limits their job opertunities, and many resemes with a Chinese name (such as chang) would sometimes not even be read. So the result of this is a lot of Chinese going back to China in hope to get their old job back. pick a few Chinese immigrants in your community and ask them to compare their job in China and their job now, you will see a huge differece in terms of earnings and stability of the two jobs. Will being able to speak a Chinese dialect really be worthwhile to the general population in 2025 why 2025? why not now? maybe a new language would be the best to learn in the year 2025 for business, but as of now Chinese is the best choice for business. and im pretty sure it doesn't take you 20 years to learn chinese.. just because you consider Chinese as a "fad" doesn't automaticly make it useless, it is still a great asset to have. it's like a stock, if someone told you the stock of one company is going to soar for 20 years but will drop after that, you will still invest in it.