The physical disks and documentation are owned by the person that bought it, and can be transferred. It's interesting that Blizzard agreed and put this in the actual EULA. It's forward-thinking, imho.
But the inability to transfer the account is conflicting.
The best thing to do is to get the original account information, and an agreement (contract) with the original seller that he won't try to commandeer the account or release the information about it, and that such an action would harm you.
Most people would have no problem with giving you the information and agreeing to do that, although they probably won't go through the trouble of sending you a notarized document after the fact. Just get it in an email with the agreement that they won't try to retract the account or give out info, and you won't run into any issues.
The sole purpose of managers is to provide the resources and motivation for the people you manage. The only reason you are there is to make it easier for them to get their jobs done. If problems come up, you're a dumping ground.
One more word of advice: treat your secretary very well. S/he will run interference for you and make your job that much easier.
Now, go sign the purchase order some more pens. You're running low.
Within days of the stresstest back in october, people were making up their own game servers.
Considering MMORPGs are based primarily on monthly fees (with very few exceptions), illicit server software is a direct threat. This is especially significant when you consider that the bulk of those that would play on a private server also do not need to buy the game in the first place since it's distributed over torrent, so they wouldn't even get the $50 for the initial purchase.
In addition, analysis (or allowing analysis) of the network protocol violates the TOS directly. But the law places the burden of prosecution on Blizzard.
Just like RIAA going after music pirates, I have little complaint of their methods. I have no sympathy for RIAA because they pretty much screw the artists and are a bunch of leeching thugs, but there was no other way to stop p2p sharing (other than *gasp* embrace it).
Anyone that played from the beginning knows damn well there aren't that many concurrent players, unless you count those: Waiting in the queue to login Disconnected and unable to logout Stuck doing a search in the auction house Stuck waiting the insane time to extract an item from your mail Running around a continent with no mobs or gryphons etc.
Yes, I'm being overly-sarcastic, but there is a real hint of truth. In all fairness, Blizzard has solved the bulk of the problems they had at launch... and they even extended subscriptions three days and a fourth later for the downtime. I just happen to be on a "lemon" server that was undergoing horrid lag and restarts for weeks. I would've changed servers if I didn't run a guild with nearly 200 unique accounts in it!
WoW doesn't do a whole lot new for MMORPGs, but it has taken many elements from different games and done them right. Huge number of quests that have lots of fun NPC interaction, mobs to grind if you like, cool items (almost as good as AC), immersive graphics with an attention to detail, great sound, a great intro movie, large world, seamless movement between most zones, nice crafting system comparable to horizons, decent pvp (can't block other players, though -- you walk right through), etc.
A couple of new things are the fog of war, gryphons (kind of new, as they show the "real" server as you fly -- you can see fights and monsters, and not just a picture of you moving), and an extensible user interface (missing a desired function? you can program it yourself in a "real" language).
In conclusion, WoW had a rocky start. It wasn't as bad as some games (AO and SWG were pretty horrid) and it wasn't as good as some (AC and CoH were great). It was kind of crappy, in fact. But they quickly announced that billing wouldn't even start because of the downtime, and they kicked ass on fixing the biggest issues on a live system with 200,000 whiny folks complaining about it. And then there was me, not whining of course.:-)
Do you likewise lament the loss of the 78? Vinyl has great frequency response, yet it has been replaced. The advantage of digital outweighs tons of the disadvantages, and most of those disadvantages can be overcome by throwing more bits at it.
This does sadden me, but I won't miss things like tape bleed-through and analog hums at every connection.
Also from the FAQs: Will LightScribe work in both Windows and Mac environments? At this time, LightScribe is available on Windows 2000 and XP. Look for additional software and operating system support in the months ahead.
And at slashdot, we like both kinds of music: country AND western.
I was referring to the 2000 elections and the difficulties Nader caused the democrats, when I segued into the fact Republicans defended the green party in the state I'm living (which happens to be a swing state). I meant to say it "keeps the green party" on the ticket, not Nader.
Oddly, I heard of vote trading where people promise they will vote for your 3rd-party candidate of choice in their state if you promise to vote for Foo (usually Kerry) in a swing state. This might be a real solution to supporting 3rd parties, although only at the national level.
The development of a MMORPG client/server takes about as much work as a single-player game. Plus the packaging and distribution are about the same. But the MMORPG developer's duties are not done with just the sale of the game. Unlike the single-player game dev, the MMORPG game dev must supply
Servers
Sysadmins for the servers
Bandwidth (lots!)
and content updates to keep your playerbase playing.
An interesting data point I read in an interview is that Cryptic (makers of COH) will not be in the black until next year sometime even with 180k people giving them $15/mo.
If a large state, such as California, gave one electoral vote to each congressional district (And then say 2 for the overall popular vote winner), then 3rd party candidates could rack up some electoral votes.
Possibly. The 3rd party candidate would have to throw EVERYTHING at the single most-likely district because those districts are "winner take all", too. I believe the two states that split votes, Maine and Nebraska, haven't actually split their votes, and it's unlikely to happen this year, either. (Not to mention, it's suceptible to gerrymandering if the districts can get redrawn.)
Your last paragraph is correct... I realize I'm kind of blaming the messenger, but when I say it's the fault of the Electoral College, I'm really complaining about the way the Electoral College is implemented in most states. Even splitting by congressional district would not fix things very well, if it were still winner-take-all in each district. Only if percentages were assigned by popular vote (almost making it a popular vote in itself), and adopted by ALL STATES AT THE SAME TIME, would it work.
Because all the states would have to do it at once, it'll never change. If California split their electoral votes and wasn't winner-take-all, the republicans would win every single election because the smaller, rural states (usually republican) would not split theirs, giving a huge advantage to one side.
Jack, I played COH for a while, and am still very impressed by it. You should be proud of your remarkable achievement of finding the right niche. But after playing a couple months and doing several story arcs, I fell into the level-grind abyss. Things stopped being fun. The distance to my next power was seen in terms of xp, not in terms of heroic adventure.
So, what is going to happen to get me back? How can you significantly reduce the "level grind" (even if it's just the feeling of grinding levels) to get casual players like myself back?
The problem is, the Electoral College does not work with more than two parties.
All third parties are completely eliminated by the electoral college unless they have a huge following. I don't know of any electoral votes going to a 3rd party, although I suspect that it could've happened in the past.
Voting third party does not literally throw away your vote, but it does literally have no effect on the POTUS election.
What it does do is help your 3rd party for the next election. If your party gets a certain percentage of the votes, your party gets on the ballot and even qualifies for federal funds.
But let's take, for instance, Nader and the Green party. The republicans fought tooth and nail to get the Greens on every ballot they could, simply because it tends to split the Democratic vote. And the electoral college virtually eliminates the green votes, so it's like getting democrats to throw their votes away. This is american politics. The other side effect, though, is it helps republicans in the long run because it helps keep Nader on the ticket for next election, continuing the cycle of splitting the votes.
Bottom line: If you can't vote for Bush in good conscience, you should not vote for Nader.
I would love nothing better than if the electoral college and the method of voting could handle three parties. But the way it works, it simply does not. The electoral college system stops working as intended when three parties are in the running.
A nation where you can vote for the best man for the job, and expect the best man will get the job, would be wonderful. But that nation is not the USA.
To participate in American politics, you must play American politics. If you can't vote for Bush because of your conscience, you should certainly not vote for Nader. A vote for Nader does two things: 1) it literally has no effect on the outcome of this election. The electoral college will completely and utterly eliminate him from competition. It literally is "throwing away your vote" in terms of deciding the president. 2) keeps Nader on the ticket for the next election. This ultimately is a vote for republicans, no matter how you look at it. Nader was the "spoiler" for the last election, and keeping him on the ballot helps the republicans. The republicans fought tooth and nail, and donated tons of money to get Nader on the ballots.
Site need cache? Here is cacheir check for $4500. Secretary make mistake and wrote for $500 to much so please to be sending remainder $500 cache. I trust you to send. With in 45 minutes. Please to send cache now please.
And why shouldn't [insurance companies factor in on-road alertness]?
Insurance companies don't work that way. They set their rates and are profitable only because of statistics. Believing the rates are fair for everyone is like believing 2.37 kids is the appropriate number of children to have for your income bracket, race, and location.
Insurance companies probably would have a field day with me, for one reason or another, and raise my rates through the roof if they had access to records of my driving style versus statistically safe driving styles. Yet I haven't had an accident for 20 years (only when I was a stupid teen in bad weather). In fact, I've avoided multiple serious collisions, including two potential head-on high speed collisions with oncoming drunks driving in my lane, many, many fenderbenders with potential injuries (30+ mph), and even thrice when pedestrians were sleepwalking in the street. They would've died (or some other accident occurred) had it been 50%+ of the other drivers out there, and my driving skills saved lives multiple times when someone else was being incredibly stupid. I'll note that none of these instances involved me doing anything unusually unsafe at the time.
Yet insurance companies would undoubtedly want to charge me more, because I drive faster than the average road speed. This, despite the fact that I've saved them money and have the maximum discount for accident-free.
Similarly, there are people that exhibit all sorts of safe driving tendencies which are dangerous as hell.
Kind of hard to pirate software that requires an ongoing billing contract and CC#. You pay before you can play.
Basically the only ways around this are to use someone else's CC (in which case you've just graduated from piracy to fraud), or set up your own server (and risk a roomful of lawyers showing up, or stay underground but lose the appeal of MMORPGs -- might as well play NWN instead.).
Nay. No MMORPG sends images to the clients. It is all stored locally, and the server sends which texture to use. You can see these with winmpq for all Blizzard games, portal opus for Turbine's Asheron's Call, and I know of many other viewers for Sony games.
If a company puts an ad in their game, it'll have to be a texture stored locally. And you can bet there will be software to overwrite those textures within a day of any patch.
If it is not stored locally, which is extremely unlikely, there will be proxies to block it. And if it comes from the game servers themselves to prevent proxies, that'll degrade service noticably.... plus proxies even exist within games (such as Decal for Asheron's Call).
That french farmer actually stole Roundup Ready corn seed and fabricated the whole "contamination from a GMO field" bit. The farmer's field was way out of propagating range for corn pollen. Actually, I was referring to soybeans where there was a debatable contamination case, and another where someone purchased soybeans from someone else for seed, and ended up bound to unknown contracts.
Corn, however, is wind-pollenated and can travel VERY far, and the cleanup is very difficult. Recent tests on roundup-ready grasses have shown it can contaminate grasses 16 mi away. I think there was a slashdot article about this earlier. Ah, found it.
You can bet your eye-teeth that if one golfcourse installs this GM grass and contaminates another course downwind, Monsanto will sue the one downwind for patent infringement. This is a no-brainer.
Nobody really cares (or should) about GM products unless any of the following happens, at which point they become everyone's problem:
They have no choice of non-GM products They have no marking of products due to legislation They have no choice due to environmental pollution such as GM pollen contaminating corn or grass or whatever They have to pay for the cleanup of the pollution, or cleanup is not impossible They become dependent on any product, merely to combat the intrusion of GM products The GM products harm any ecological or environmental system They have to pay a company (name rhymes with "Nonsanto") when someone contaminates their own non-GM crops for infringing on a patent
Slashdot Mirror
The physical disks and documentation are owned by the person that bought it, and can be transferred. It's interesting that Blizzard agreed and put this in the actual EULA. It's forward-thinking, imho.
But the inability to transfer the account is conflicting.
The best thing to do is to get the original account information, and an agreement (contract) with the original seller that he won't try to commandeer the account or release the information about it, and that such an action would harm you.
Most people would have no problem with giving you the information and agreeing to do that, although they probably won't go through the trouble of sending you a notarized document after the fact. Just get it in an email with the agreement that they won't try to retract the account or give out info, and you won't run into any issues.
2 of 36 is much better.
The sole purpose of managers is to provide the resources and motivation for the people you manage. The only reason you are there is to make it easier for them to get their jobs done. If problems come up, you're a dumping ground.
One more word of advice: treat your secretary very well. S/he will run interference for you and make your job that much easier.
Now, go sign the purchase order some more pens. You're running low.
I always thought his best quote was (paraphrased), "640k ought to be enough for anyone."
*blasts a 2600 hz tone into the keyboard*
watch it, or I'll send you a +++ATH0 {~{~{~{~{~{{{{{{DxDxDxDx
CARRIER LOST
Within days of the stresstest back in october, people were making up their own game servers.
Considering MMORPGs are based primarily on monthly fees (with very few exceptions), illicit server software is a direct threat. This is especially significant when you consider that the bulk of those that would play on a private server also do not need to buy the game in the first place since it's distributed over torrent, so they wouldn't even get the $50 for the initial purchase.
In addition, analysis (or allowing analysis) of the network protocol violates the TOS directly. But the law places the burden of prosecution on Blizzard.
Just like RIAA going after music pirates, I have little complaint of their methods. I have no sympathy for RIAA because they pretty much screw the artists and are a bunch of leeching thugs, but there was no other way to stop p2p sharing (other than *gasp* embrace it).
But the methods are sound, if distasteful.
Anyone that played from the beginning knows damn well there aren't that many concurrent players, unless you count those:
:-)
Waiting in the queue to login
Disconnected and unable to logout
Stuck doing a search in the auction house
Stuck waiting the insane time to extract an item from your mail
Running around a continent with no mobs or gryphons
etc.
Yes, I'm being overly-sarcastic, but there is a real hint of truth. In all fairness, Blizzard has solved the bulk of the problems they had at launch... and they even extended subscriptions three days and a fourth later for the downtime. I just happen to be on a "lemon" server that was undergoing horrid lag and restarts for weeks. I would've changed servers if I didn't run a guild with nearly 200 unique accounts in it!
WoW doesn't do a whole lot new for MMORPGs, but it has taken many elements from different games and done them right. Huge number of quests that have lots of fun NPC interaction, mobs to grind if you like, cool items (almost as good as AC), immersive graphics with an attention to detail, great sound, a great intro movie, large world, seamless movement between most zones, nice crafting system comparable to horizons, decent pvp (can't block other players, though -- you walk right through), etc.
A couple of new things are the fog of war, gryphons (kind of new, as they show the "real" server as you fly -- you can see fights and monsters, and not just a picture of you moving), and an extensible user interface (missing a desired function? you can program it yourself in a "real" language).
In conclusion, WoW had a rocky start. It wasn't as bad as some games (AO and SWG were pretty horrid) and it wasn't as good as some (AC and CoH were great). It was kind of crappy, in fact. But they quickly announced that billing wouldn't even start because of the downtime, and they kicked ass on fixing the biggest issues on a live system with 200,000 whiny folks complaining about it. And then there was me, not whining of course.
According to my computer, I get
bash: 600,000*: command not found
So, I'm going with the no units.
Likewise,
$ units 600,000
reveals "no table". Of course there's no table in a MMORPG... there's no pen or paper either!
Do you likewise lament the loss of the 78? Vinyl has great frequency response, yet it has been replaced. The advantage of digital outweighs tons of the disadvantages, and most of those disadvantages can be overcome by throwing more bits at it.
This does sadden me, but I won't miss things like tape bleed-through and analog hums at every connection.
Also from the FAQs:
Will LightScribe work in both Windows and Mac environments?
At this time, LightScribe is available on Windows 2000 and XP. Look for additional software and operating system support in the months ahead.
And at slashdot, we like both kinds of music: country AND western.
I just buy inkjet coated CDR/DVDRs now.
Isn't it difficult to feed the CDRs through the printer?
(Reminds me of the old joke about the pharmacy assistant that was fired because he kept breaking the pill jars when putting them into the typewriter.)
IANAPP, but 8-bit color sounds PRETTY FRIKKIN LOW. Is this a term professionals use to mean 24-bit split on 3 channels?
*confused*
Aye, that was sloppy of me.
I was referring to the 2000 elections and the difficulties Nader caused the democrats, when I segued into the fact Republicans defended the green party in the state I'm living (which happens to be a swing state). I meant to say it "keeps the green party" on the ticket, not Nader.
Oddly, I heard of vote trading where people promise they will vote for your 3rd-party candidate of choice in their state if you promise to vote for Foo (usually Kerry) in a swing state. This might be a real solution to supporting 3rd parties, although only at the national level.
The development of a MMORPG client/server takes about as much work as a single-player game. Plus the packaging and distribution are about the same. But the MMORPG developer's duties are not done with just the sale of the game. Unlike the single-player game dev, the MMORPG game dev must supply
- Servers
- Sysadmins for the servers
- Bandwidth (lots!)
- and content updates to keep your playerbase playing.
An interesting data point I read in an interview is that Cryptic (makers of COH) will not be in the black until next year sometime even with 180k people giving them $15/mo.If a large state, such as California, gave one electoral vote to each congressional district (And then say 2 for the overall popular vote winner), then 3rd party candidates could rack up some electoral votes.
Possibly. The 3rd party candidate would have to throw EVERYTHING at the single most-likely district because those districts are "winner take all", too. I believe the two states that split votes, Maine and Nebraska, haven't actually split their votes, and it's unlikely to happen this year, either. (Not to mention, it's suceptible to gerrymandering if the districts can get redrawn.)
Your last paragraph is correct... I realize I'm kind of blaming the messenger, but when I say it's the fault of the Electoral College, I'm really complaining about the way the Electoral College is implemented in most states. Even splitting by congressional district would not fix things very well, if it were still winner-take-all in each district. Only if percentages were assigned by popular vote (almost making it a popular vote in itself), and adopted by ALL STATES AT THE SAME TIME, would it work.
Because all the states would have to do it at once, it'll never change. If California split their electoral votes and wasn't winner-take-all, the republicans would win every single election because the smaller, rural states (usually republican) would not split theirs, giving a huge advantage to one side.
Jack, I played COH for a while, and am still very impressed by it. You should be proud of your remarkable achievement of finding the right niche. But after playing a couple months and doing several story arcs, I fell into the level-grind abyss. Things stopped being fun. The distance to my next power was seen in terms of xp, not in terms of heroic adventure.
So, what is going to happen to get me back? How can you significantly reduce the "level grind" (even if it's just the feeling of grinding levels) to get casual players like myself back?
The problem is, the Electoral College does not work with more than two parties.
All third parties are completely eliminated by the electoral college unless they have a huge following. I don't know of any electoral votes going to a 3rd party, although I suspect that it could've happened in the past.
Voting third party does not literally throw away your vote, but it does literally have no effect on the POTUS election.
What it does do is help your 3rd party for the next election. If your party gets a certain percentage of the votes, your party gets on the ballot and even qualifies for federal funds.
But let's take, for instance, Nader and the Green party. The republicans fought tooth and nail to get the Greens on every ballot they could, simply because it tends to split the Democratic vote. And the electoral college virtually eliminates the green votes, so it's like getting democrats to throw their votes away. This is american politics. The other side effect, though, is it helps republicans in the long run because it helps keep Nader on the ticket for next election, continuing the cycle of splitting the votes.
Bottom line: If you can't vote for Bush in good conscience, you should not vote for Nader.
I would love nothing better than if the electoral college and the method of voting could handle three parties. But the way it works, it simply does not. The electoral college system stops working as intended when three parties are in the running.
A nation where you can vote for the best man for the job, and expect the best man will get the job, would be wonderful. But that nation is not the USA.
To participate in American politics, you must play American politics. If you can't vote for Bush because of your conscience, you should certainly not vote for Nader. A vote for Nader does two things:
1) it literally has no effect on the outcome of this election. The electoral college will completely and utterly eliminate him from competition. It literally is "throwing away your vote" in terms of deciding the president.
2) keeps Nader on the ticket for the next election. This ultimately is a vote for republicans, no matter how you look at it. Nader was the "spoiler" for the last election, and keeping him on the ballot helps the republicans. The republicans fought tooth and nail, and donated tons of money to get Nader on the ballots.
for instance, Nov01.png
So, can anyone find the link to Nov02_final.png? I'm curious....
this site need cache
Site need cache? Here is cacheir check for $4500. Secretary make mistake and wrote for $500 to much so please to be sending remainder $500 cache. I trust you to send. With in 45 minutes. Please to send cache now please.
And why shouldn't [insurance companies factor in on-road alertness]?
Insurance companies don't work that way. They set their rates and are profitable only because of statistics. Believing the rates are fair for everyone is like believing 2.37 kids is the appropriate number of children to have for your income bracket, race, and location.
Insurance companies probably would have a field day with me, for one reason or another, and raise my rates through the roof if they had access to records of my driving style versus statistically safe driving styles. Yet I haven't had an accident for 20 years (only when I was a stupid teen in bad weather). In fact, I've avoided multiple serious collisions, including two potential head-on high speed collisions with oncoming drunks driving in my lane, many, many fenderbenders with potential injuries (30+ mph), and even thrice when pedestrians were sleepwalking in the street. They would've died (or some other accident occurred) had it been 50%+ of the other drivers out there, and my driving skills saved lives multiple times when someone else was being incredibly stupid. I'll note that none of these instances involved me doing anything unusually unsafe at the time.
Yet insurance companies would undoubtedly want to charge me more, because I drive faster than the average road speed. This, despite the fact that I've saved them money and have the maximum discount for accident-free.
Similarly, there are people that exhibit all sorts of safe driving tendencies which are dangerous as hell.
Kind of hard to pirate software that requires an ongoing billing contract and CC#. You pay before you can play.
Basically the only ways around this are to use someone else's CC (in which case you've just graduated from piracy to fraud), or set up your own server (and risk a roomful of lawyers showing up, or stay underground but lose the appeal of MMORPGs -- might as well play NWN instead.).
Nay. No MMORPG sends images to the clients. It is all stored locally, and the server sends which texture to use. You can see these with winmpq for all Blizzard games, portal opus for Turbine's Asheron's Call, and I know of many other viewers for Sony games.
If a company puts an ad in their game, it'll have to be a texture stored locally. And you can bet there will be software to overwrite those textures within a day of any patch.
If it is not stored locally, which is extremely unlikely, there will be proxies to block it. And if it comes from the game servers themselves to prevent proxies, that'll degrade service noticably.... plus proxies even exist within games (such as Decal for Asheron's Call).
That french farmer actually stole Roundup Ready corn seed and fabricated the whole "contamination from a GMO field" bit. The farmer's field was way out of propagating range for corn pollen.
Actually, I was referring to soybeans where there was a debatable contamination case, and another where someone purchased soybeans from someone else for seed, and ended up bound to unknown contracts.
Corn, however, is wind-pollenated and can travel VERY far, and the cleanup is very difficult. Recent tests on roundup-ready grasses have shown it can contaminate grasses 16 mi away. I think there was a slashdot article about this earlier. Ah, found it.
You can bet your eye-teeth that if one golfcourse installs this GM grass and contaminates another course downwind, Monsanto will sue the one downwind for patent infringement. This is a no-brainer.
Nobody really cares (or should) about GM products unless any of the following happens, at which point they become everyone's problem:
They have no choice of non-GM products
They have no marking of products due to legislation
They have no choice due to environmental pollution such as GM pollen contaminating corn or grass or whatever
They have to pay for the cleanup of the pollution, or cleanup is not impossible
They become dependent on any product, merely to combat the intrusion of GM products
The GM products harm any ecological or environmental system
They have to pay a company (name rhymes with "Nonsanto") when someone contaminates their own non-GM crops for infringing on a patent