I completely agree!
I love Grizzly Hills and Howling Fjord.
Seriously, this is as polished as you can get in an MMO. Perfect? No, it's too complex and has far too many people (aka, queue lines) but it's really an excellent experiance when compared to other past (and current) MMO games.
My favorite thing? THE ARMOUR ACTUALLY MATCHES! (and looks cool to boot!). This is dramatically prevalent as a Death Knight, who's first big shoulder quest reward from Outlands is a bright green thing. Entering Northrend, you look like a clown. By the time you finish one of the starting zones, you'll actually look something tough again.
Is there a free version of NOD32? Antivir is still free (albeit with occasional ad pop-ups) for the home version. It also have a very small footprint. How's NOD32's footprint?
If they knew it was fake, why publish it? Did they not go back to the DoD and say "Hey, was this photoshopped/altered?" "Yeah?", "We can't publish this, we have a strict policy, 'blah','blah','blah', can we get the unaltered original?"
I just wonder if their idea to not publish their photos will be a benefit for them, if not hurt them. Or will they be willing to publish a DoD picture if they're actually taking it from a different source that the DoD gave it too first? Like, "this DoD picture is from Fox news, which the DoD gave and they published, so we're not at fault if the image was altered."
Or more, did the DoD actually GIVE them the image or did the DoD publish the image, like on their press release, and the AP just picked it up and ran with it, and got pissed later?
Well, there you have it. Dell's gaming machines, either their high-end XPS systems or Alienware, do not qualify for their "cheap" parts. They actually use high quality parts for these machines and make you pay for it.
I speak as a Dell XPS owner who bought there lower-end of their high-end XPS system just before they acquired Alienware and compared prices between the two. Alienware was fairly more expensive for just about the same specs at that time. Though, now that they own Alienware, they're trying not to cannibalize their own sales so they likely set their prices comparable. (The XPS brand use to be a direct competitor to Alienware) So, you should be able to cheaper "gaming" PC's. Regular PC's? Dell does offer great price points in comparison.
I still love my XPS system. It's been running like a champ and only had one problem when we experienced flooding. Though, that was 100% covered by Dell since I dropped a couple hundred more for the accidental damage service, given I tend to move around a lot. Best service I ever had, though, you definitely have to pay for it to get it from Dell. My Inspiron 8100's service was another story that could rank up their will "Dell Hell".
Also although I agree that Obama's message did strike a chord and McCain's messages were largely negative, in all fairness McCain had lots of positive messages but they were flatly refused to be reported.
If we're doing things in all fairness, then I should also point out that there's a difference between "McCain/Obama" ads and ads run by "McCain/Obama" supporters.
A lot of negative ads run against McCain/Obama were not directly from McCain/Obama but supporters of McCain/Obama.
Then, of course, we need to talk about money. When one side spends 3/4 to 1 on ads (Obama to McCain), it gives them a lot better ability to change their ratio of positive/negative advertising.
If, for example, McCain ran 10 negative ads and 10 positive ads and Obama runs 15 negative ads but 40 positive ads, Obama has actually run more negative ads but at a smaller ratio.
Hehe, maybe that's why the major media outlets loved him? He gave them a ton of money in advertisement.
Obama has already added a stipulation that you cannot simply get a rebate if you do not have a paycheck. This will be for payroll taxes only.
First, do I still have to tell people not to trust any promises a politician makes? Saying and doing are two entirely different things. Not because Obama, McCain, or whoever want to be dishonest, but because things are never what they seem once you get behind the wheel. The politician who promises less is likely a much better candidate because someone who stumps around making a new promise every day is never going to fulfill them.
Thankfully, I see more policy than promises from both candidates but I still see some.
Second, the Wall Street Journal has covered Obama's tax rebate. They explained it like this... People pay income taxes and social security taxes. Right? You with me so far?
Those who make too little, lets call them the "poor", don't have to pay income taxes. However, most still pay some small amount of social security taxes. You have to be "very poor" to not pay social security taxes.
Obama's plan is to give a tax rebate for payroll taxes, ie. those who pay taxes such as social security. Yet... what do we know about social security?
THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY!
That shouldn't be news to people. SS is fubar. Every tax collected coming in, goes right back out to people collecting SS. There isn't some big bank account in the government that's keeping your money you paid in taxes.
So, lets go back. Obama wants to give a tax break on payroll tax... except he can't. To give a tax break means to cut off SS funding and that's not going to happen because SS is falling apart due to a lack of funding. So, what is he to do? He wants to give anyone paying taxes on social security / payroll (because there's a lot of "poor" people who still pay these, even though they don't pay income tax) a rebate but he can't take money out of said taxes without under funding social security.
So, what he's going to do is use the numbers of one tax but take it out of another. He's going to give anyone paying payroll tax a rebate but only make people paying income tax the bill. But how could he do that? Then he's going to underfund whatever programs are funded by income tax?
Well, there's 2 options. Either he has to cut federal spending on programs or raise taxes. Obama's plan is to raise taxes on companies and people who make over $250,000 to pay for these.
The CC didn't swallow, they spit the cost out to their other customers so they would have to cover the load.
Hench, why I said "basically swallowed the cost". Basically meaning that most people understand customers pay for everything and that there's no such thing as a "free lunch", etc.
But nice pun on swallow/spit. I've got bad mental images now. =P
For some reason game developers of the more sleazy variety (Bill Roper, I'm looking at you) look at the success of World of Warcraft and think "cha-ching": MMO = Easy money.
Oh please. Stop the bitter divorce bull crap.
Bill Roper has gone on record stating the reason for the collapse of Hellgate. It had little if anything to do with this aforementioned idea of "greed" and everything to do with very poor business decisions by a guy who shouldn't have been making them to begin with. It's a very telling interview and worth a read. Speaking as a person who bought Hellgate:London but never purchased a subscription plan.
With regards to the lifetime subscription, you did the right thing by contacting your credit card company. It's pretty much the only course of action you had because Flagship didn't have any money to refund. Your CC company basically swallowed the cost for your bad investment.
I really don't understand why they can't ramp up production even more.
Well, this is the problem then, isn't it? What you need is to be educated in the manufacturing process which will also bring you down a few roads about business finances.
Both of these are very complex topics, but suffice it to say... no company can just "ramp up production" at will. There's a lot more too it than that.
But let me try to give you a few really high level thinking points to help you out. First, to produce something you need all the parts. To make a Wii, you need "x" number of Wii cases, motherboards, processors, sensor bars, etc. To get these, you have to ask the people that makes these. Those people have to find the raw materials to make those. If there isn't enough, lets say, metal, to make something then they can't produce enough of the part and the bottle neck isn't Nintendo's fault, it's their suppliers.
Ok, so I just pointed out Nintendo has suppliers and each supplier has to give "x" number of parts to produce a Wii. One supplier falling short means Nintendo, as a whole, cannot produce more units. Lets look at another factor...
Cost. Nintendo has choose to sell each Nintendo at $250 (YMMV depending on region). If Nintendo wants to ramp up production "instantly", there not going to meet that price point, not profitably anyways. Nintendo has supplies who are more than likely willing to give them more supply quickly, but it'll cost a lot more. Those costs become prohibitive for the company to make the planned profit they're shooting for. Nintendo won't make many fans if they decided to raise the price of the Wii to $350 for a couple months, just to pay for the massive production increase. Then drop it back down to $250. That will piss off all the $350 buyers... kind of like when people bought the first iPhone and 2 months later it dropped by $200 in price!
Ok, so now we talked, in vastly general terms, supplier vs speed vs cost vs profit ratios. Next, lets talk about manufacturing costs.
To manufacture a Wii, Nintendo needs a Wii producing Factory. They might own one or two of their own, but more often than note, they contract this work out to professional manufacturers. These manufacturers have been heavily inspected and approved by Nintendo and have singed pages of legal documents that are probably 1000's of pages thick, stating they have the right to produce the Wii but they're not allowed to do "x", "y", or "z" to give away their processes to others, or whatever Nintendo might want to stipulate.
To ramp up production, Nintendo either has to increase the capacity of each approved factory or it has to find more factories. Given that there's a very long red-tape processes of approving factory, then you have to go back to the supply side of things and outfit said factory with the proper tooling and machinery to produce Wii's, do some test runs to make sure the produce coming out of the new factory meets the standards of the other factories, takes a very long time.
Again, Nintendo *could* just start tossing more factories consignments to produce Wii's but it's going to cost them a lot of money if they want it done *fast*. It'll cost them even more if they want to protect their brand and image/quality. You wanton add new factories without proper vetting, you'll end up with your company secrets being sold to someone else who'll make knock offs. You're also signing a contract with a company saying "We'll let you make Wii's for 1 year and we'll pay you a boat load of money to do it!".
Well, what happens when the market saturates and these less demand for the Wii than supply? Well, Nintendo cannot just stop production at all these new factories it just consigned with. They have a contract with them to produce Wii's for a certain amount of time. Breaking out of the contract would cost them the same amount as letting the contract run through, but without all the extra supply that it would have produced.
If they did find some way to commercialise them, McDonalds' lawyers simply sue them for trademark violation and the domain is handed over.
To which you clearly missed my other point... McDonalds having to sue every Tom, Dick and Harry website that uses their name will cost McDonalds millions or billions in extra legal fees. And good luck with that, when they're in some obscure country that the US doesn't have jurisdiction over... unless the rules in Tennessee set a new precedence.
And why would someone? Phishing, as you stated, for starters. It now makes phishing very easy to do because you have many more avenues to pursue for misspellings, etc. All of which will increase the difficulty of finding and blocking such sites.
Though, that might be over stated because the barrier to entry is also much higher for these TLDs... unless someone starts selling off the subdomains for real cheap.
a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]"
I suspect this will actually force them to register "*.mcdonalds" as a TLD. And likewise with other big companies.
Actually, the parent poster had a better point. What's to stop someone from registering "McDonalds.Hamburger", "McDonalds.Fries", or "McDonalds.restaurant", other than the cost.
A lot of generic domain keywords are often used to usurp specific names. It should would be confusing if you Googled "McDonalds" and you got the above domains along with "[whatever].McDonalds". Likely having to lead to major companies having to drop a lot on custom TLDs or fighting people infringing their trademark and diluting their brand.
As cool as the idea is, being a web dev. myself, I just see this becoming an even more chaotic mess than before. How much will the ".sex" TLD go for? What's a person going to do with a ".restaurant" or ".france" domain?
One thing is for certain... Google and all other search engines will have a heck of a time trying to devise new algorithms to return relevancy, especially if someone registered a ".restaurant" TLD and then uses it as a "restaurant networking site" (like a social networking site) and charges memberships to create "McDonalds.restaurant" or whatever?
Uph! Lots of work for the Search Engine folks, let alone new ways for SEO wizards to try and abuse and game the competition. And in the end, the internet "surfers" will be worse off unless some sort of standard comes about to keep it organized. But, perhaps not. It certainly doesn't look good on paper, to me.
I think Warcraft III was the only game that I played where I never actually played the normal game. I always had some kind of mod like Tower D, or DoTa.
Same here. I played many endless hours of (free) online gaming doing Tower Defense, Tug of Wars, or (my fav.) Enfo's Team Survival.
I've seen the lawyers say outrageous things, because there's NO CONSEQUENCES for doing so.
Except Jack Thompson, of course. Which maybe a equally good point in that, it surely took a lot of outrage to finally get some consequences for his actions.
My first thought was "greed" as well. But I'll hold final judgment until I see what the MSRP is on each box. It sounds like they've created the entire game/balance/races already, but they're just doing 3 separate story lines. So, the only difference between the games will be maps and story, not game mechanics, units, etc.
If it's $50-60 a game, I'll be pretty unhappy with that price. $30-40, I'd be ok with, assuming their typical Blizzard Quality(tm).
Otherwise, I'd just shovel this into the Episodic Gaming genre that other games (Half-Life 2) have tried.
Indeed. However those are a representation of assets, not your actual assets.Granted the "score keeping" is done digitally, but it is directly related to your estate.The goods are not data.
While pretty much true, it's not exactly how it works. Banking has, and likely always will be, an investment in itself. Much like the stock market.
When banking, you agree to give the bank your money for a big 'ol IOU sticker (these days a digital one). The bank takes your money and invests it. They don't just keep it in their vault until you want it back while it magically grows more money (interest rates).
Surprisingly, this should be well enough known today, what with all the banking crisis talks and all. The fact that there's banks collapsing today with people loosing the money they had in said bank (unless the Government steps up to insure it). I think this might have happened in the saving-in-loan crises but I'm not particularly familiar with it.
Though, A scene I remember that might also help others is the film "A Wonderful Life". There, George Bailey's S&L bank has a money rush where, in a panic, all the clients of the bank come storming in, demanding their money back, while the S&L doesn't keep enough cash on hand. This is where Bailey explains to his clients how a S&L works, by reinvesting.
So, yes and no. The account isn't just a score-card that represents actual assets. It is, in many ways, a fictional representation of assets that are only worth what the bank you use is worth. Should said bank go under, you could very well loose everything (like some people who invested in Iceland banks are experiencing). This is why the government banks savings accounts up to $100,000 (in the US). To insure people that banking is safe and get people to continue to invest in banks, who turn it around and give loans to businesses and for mortgages (at a higher interest rate).
Though, I'm no expert, so everything I say is only based on my general understanding of the system and should be taken with a grain of salt. No doubt I don't have a complete or accurate understanding of something as complex as the financial markets.
*yawn* I know there's not much point to replying to an AC, but oh well.
Crazy positional attacks?
Yup. And do you know whyI thought it was "crazy"? No, because the rest of your comment was pure n00bness.
Hard to control pet?
Really? Where did I say it was hard to control the pet? Reading comprehension FTW!
Go back to WoW please and spam anytime style more noob.
Says the n00b. Pot, kettle, black.
How hard is to click attack on the pet window and attack something from behind or on the side?
Again, Reading Comprehension FTW! I never said that's what I found hard to play about WAR. It was actually the crazy insane positional attacks that were bugged as hell. You know, like being able to "back" and "side" positional attacks from the front. Yup, I found that bug. But getting an error when trying to do them from their respected "back" and "side" positions, saying I couldn't do it. It's crazy to release a game with a positional mechanic but have it massively bugged.
Learn how to circle strafe maybe?
Again, learn to comprehend, maybe? Learn to n00b and troll better.
Thanks. That's basically how I understand it as well.
As for WAR, I played it on release as a White Lion. I found it too hard to play. To many bugs and user feedback issues. However, I played it again last weekend, this time rolling a Witch Hunter. I found the experiance much, much better. A lot of the bugs I had weren't an issue because I no longer had a pet and I didn't have to try all kind of crazy positional attacks. I think they patched a good amount as well.
I still enjoy WoW and plan on continuing it (I'm excited about 3.0 changes and the xpac) but having tried a different (non pet and positional) class, I've also found more enjoyment in WAR. Though, I'm probably not going to keep that subscription. I'm only willing to pay 1 subscription at a time.
I'm looking for the MMO company to create a graduated membership rate based on how much you actually play. If you haven't logged in for 1 month, you pay nothing. If you only logged in a few hours, you pay X rate, if you logged in an decent amount of time you pay Y, if you played heavily, you pay the maximum amount of $15.
That would be nice and it'd allow me to freely play the games I feel like playing. As long as the rates and values are reasonable. Something like $0/0 hours, $5/30 hours, $10/60 hours, $15/unlimited would be cool. I would definitely have 3 subscriptions going. Sure, Bliz. wouldn't benefit, but I could see competitors trying to draw subscribers away from Bliz. doing it. I'd have another account for $5/month and once I got hooked on the game, I wouldn't care much to cancel my WoW account and up my subscription to the $15 unlimited. I'd be a nice way to get players to invest in your game, and less likely to give it up. Though, that's just a consumer pipe-dream.
They are not setting you to zero anymore. However I imagine the new items meant for lvl 80 with be a order of magnitude more costly. I also imagine lvl 80 arena will give a lot more points. It will almost be like setting you to zero in regards to getting the new lvl 80 gear.
Hmmm... I'm still a bit confused about this. Last update I heard is that they're not wiping honor, but they are going to reset Arena points at the launch of WotLK. Here they state honor will not be reset and here they state arena points will not be reset until the release of the xpac. I read somewere else (wowhead?) that stated arena points will be wiped, but not honor points. Though, I don't really know if that's normal for arena points because I've yet to do the arena, but will probably try it out at level 80 (since doing it now is kind of pointless)
That had more to do with arenas no longer having any reward for lower ranked players then it did Warhammer. There was simply no point in playing anymore, so they stopped.
That and they're resetting Arena points for everyone to 0 before the expansion and I think right before patch 3.0.x This makes Arena completely pointless until after the xpac, which will be arriving in about 1-month.
Once that's released, a wave of players will return to WoW and they'll get back into doing the Arena. Bliz. will put a lot of candy out there to attract them. It's only Honor Points that Bliz. is massively increasing for *new* rewards, because they're not wiping Honor Points (and people are stock piling them for the Xpac).
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree! I love Grizzly Hills and Howling Fjord. Seriously, this is as polished as you can get in an MMO. Perfect? No, it's too complex and has far too many people (aka, queue lines) but it's really an excellent experiance when compared to other past (and current) MMO games.
My favorite thing? THE ARMOUR ACTUALLY MATCHES! (and looks cool to boot!). This is dramatically prevalent as a Death Knight, who's first big shoulder quest reward from Outlands is a bright green thing. Entering Northrend, you look like a clown. By the time you finish one of the starting zones, you'll actually look something tough again.
I like it.
Is there a free version of NOD32? Antivir is still free (albeit with occasional ad pop-ups) for the home version. It also have a very small footprint. How's NOD32's footprint?
If they knew it was fake, why publish it? Did they not go back to the DoD and say "Hey, was this photoshopped/altered?" "Yeah?", "We can't publish this, we have a strict policy, 'blah','blah','blah', can we get the unaltered original?"
I just wonder if their idea to not publish their photos will be a benefit for them, if not hurt them. Or will they be willing to publish a DoD picture if they're actually taking it from a different source that the DoD gave it too first? Like, "this DoD picture is from Fox news, which the DoD gave and they published, so we're not at fault if the image was altered."
Or more, did the DoD actually GIVE them the image or did the DoD publish the image, like on their press release, and the AP just picked it up and ran with it, and got pissed later?
I priced out some gaming machines [...]
Well, there you have it. Dell's gaming machines, either their high-end XPS systems or Alienware, do not qualify for their "cheap" parts. They actually use high quality parts for these machines and make you pay for it.
I speak as a Dell XPS owner who bought there lower-end of their high-end XPS system just before they acquired Alienware and compared prices between the two. Alienware was fairly more expensive for just about the same specs at that time. Though, now that they own Alienware, they're trying not to cannibalize their own sales so they likely set their prices comparable. (The XPS brand use to be a direct competitor to Alienware) So, you should be able to cheaper "gaming" PC's. Regular PC's? Dell does offer great price points in comparison.
I still love my XPS system. It's been running like a champ and only had one problem when we experienced flooding. Though, that was 100% covered by Dell since I dropped a couple hundred more for the accidental damage service, given I tend to move around a lot. Best service I ever had, though, you definitely have to pay for it to get it from Dell. My Inspiron 8100's service was another story that could rank up their will "Dell Hell".
Also although I agree that Obama's message did strike a chord and McCain's messages were largely negative, in all fairness McCain had lots of positive messages but they were flatly refused to be reported.
If we're doing things in all fairness, then I should also point out that there's a difference between "McCain/Obama" ads and ads run by "McCain/Obama" supporters.
A lot of negative ads run against McCain/Obama were not directly from McCain/Obama but supporters of McCain/Obama.
Then, of course, we need to talk about money. When one side spends 3/4 to 1 on ads (Obama to McCain), it gives them a lot better ability to change their ratio of positive/negative advertising.
If, for example, McCain ran 10 negative ads and 10 positive ads and Obama runs 15 negative ads but 40 positive ads, Obama has actually run more negative ads but at a smaller ratio.
Hehe, maybe that's why the major media outlets loved him? He gave them a ton of money in advertisement.
Obama has already added a stipulation that you cannot simply get a rebate if you do not have a paycheck. This will be for payroll taxes only.
First, do I still have to tell people not to trust any promises a politician makes? Saying and doing are two entirely different things. Not because Obama, McCain, or whoever want to be dishonest, but because things are never what they seem once you get behind the wheel. The politician who promises less is likely a much better candidate because someone who stumps around making a new promise every day is never going to fulfill them.
Thankfully, I see more policy than promises from both candidates but I still see some.
Second, the Wall Street Journal has covered Obama's tax rebate. They explained it like this... People pay income taxes and social security taxes. Right? You with me so far?
Those who make too little, lets call them the "poor", don't have to pay income taxes. However, most still pay some small amount of social security taxes. You have to be "very poor" to not pay social security taxes.
Obama's plan is to give a tax rebate for payroll taxes, ie. those who pay taxes such as social security. Yet... what do we know about social security?
THERE IS NO SOCIAL SECURITY MONEY!
That shouldn't be news to people. SS is fubar. Every tax collected coming in, goes right back out to people collecting SS. There isn't some big bank account in the government that's keeping your money you paid in taxes.
So, lets go back. Obama wants to give a tax break on payroll tax... except he can't. To give a tax break means to cut off SS funding and that's not going to happen because SS is falling apart due to a lack of funding. So, what is he to do? He wants to give anyone paying taxes on social security / payroll (because there's a lot of "poor" people who still pay these, even though they don't pay income tax) a rebate but he can't take money out of said taxes without under funding social security.
So, what he's going to do is use the numbers of one tax but take it out of another. He's going to give anyone paying payroll tax a rebate but only make people paying income tax the bill. But how could he do that? Then he's going to underfund whatever programs are funded by income tax?
Well, there's 2 options. Either he has to cut federal spending on programs or raise taxes. Obama's plan is to raise taxes on companies and people who make over $250,000 to pay for these.
The CC didn't swallow, they spit the cost out to their other customers so they would have to cover the load.
Hench, why I said "basically swallowed the cost". Basically meaning that most people understand customers pay for everything and that there's no such thing as a "free lunch", etc.
But nice pun on swallow/spit. I've got bad mental images now. =P
For some reason game developers of the more sleazy variety (Bill Roper, I'm looking at you) look at the success of World of Warcraft and think "cha-ching": MMO = Easy money.
Oh please. Stop the bitter divorce bull crap.
Bill Roper has gone on record stating the reason for the collapse of Hellgate. It had little if anything to do with this aforementioned idea of "greed" and everything to do with very poor business decisions by a guy who shouldn't have been making them to begin with. It's a very telling interview and worth a read. Speaking as a person who bought Hellgate:London but never purchased a subscription plan.
With regards to the lifetime subscription, you did the right thing by contacting your credit card company. It's pretty much the only course of action you had because Flagship didn't have any money to refund. Your CC company basically swallowed the cost for your bad investment.
I really don't understand why they can't ramp up production even more.
Well, this is the problem then, isn't it? What you need is to be educated in the manufacturing process which will also bring you down a few roads about business finances.
Both of these are very complex topics, but suffice it to say... no company can just "ramp up production" at will. There's a lot more too it than that.
But let me try to give you a few really high level thinking points to help you out. First, to produce something you need all the parts. To make a Wii, you need "x" number of Wii cases, motherboards, processors, sensor bars, etc. To get these, you have to ask the people that makes these. Those people have to find the raw materials to make those. If there isn't enough, lets say, metal, to make something then they can't produce enough of the part and the bottle neck isn't Nintendo's fault, it's their suppliers.
Ok, so I just pointed out Nintendo has suppliers and each supplier has to give "x" number of parts to produce a Wii. One supplier falling short means Nintendo, as a whole, cannot produce more units. Lets look at another factor...
Cost. Nintendo has choose to sell each Nintendo at $250 (YMMV depending on region). If Nintendo wants to ramp up production "instantly", there not going to meet that price point, not profitably anyways. Nintendo has supplies who are more than likely willing to give them more supply quickly, but it'll cost a lot more. Those costs become prohibitive for the company to make the planned profit they're shooting for. Nintendo won't make many fans if they decided to raise the price of the Wii to $350 for a couple months, just to pay for the massive production increase. Then drop it back down to $250. That will piss off all the $350 buyers... kind of like when people bought the first iPhone and 2 months later it dropped by $200 in price!
Ok, so now we talked, in vastly general terms, supplier vs speed vs cost vs profit ratios. Next, lets talk about manufacturing costs.
To manufacture a Wii, Nintendo needs a Wii producing Factory. They might own one or two of their own, but more often than note, they contract this work out to professional manufacturers. These manufacturers have been heavily inspected and approved by Nintendo and have singed pages of legal documents that are probably 1000's of pages thick, stating they have the right to produce the Wii but they're not allowed to do "x", "y", or "z" to give away their processes to others, or whatever Nintendo might want to stipulate.
To ramp up production, Nintendo either has to increase the capacity of each approved factory or it has to find more factories. Given that there's a very long red-tape processes of approving factory, then you have to go back to the supply side of things and outfit said factory with the proper tooling and machinery to produce Wii's, do some test runs to make sure the produce coming out of the new factory meets the standards of the other factories, takes a very long time.
Again, Nintendo *could* just start tossing more factories consignments to produce Wii's but it's going to cost them a lot of money if they want it done *fast*. It'll cost them even more if they want to protect their brand and image/quality. You wanton add new factories without proper vetting, you'll end up with your company secrets being sold to someone else who'll make knock offs. You're also signing a contract with a company saying "We'll let you make Wii's for 1 year and we'll pay you a boat load of money to do it!".
Well, what happens when the market saturates and these less demand for the Wii than supply? Well, Nintendo cannot just stop production at all these new factories it just consigned with. They have a contract with them to produce Wii's for a certain amount of time. Breaking out of the contract would cost them the same amount as letting the contract run through, but without all the extra supply that it would have produced.
Not a smart bus
If they did find some way to commercialise them, McDonalds' lawyers simply sue them for trademark violation and the domain is handed over.
To which you clearly missed my other point... McDonalds having to sue every Tom, Dick and Harry website that uses their name will cost McDonalds millions or billions in extra legal fees. And good luck with that, when they're in some obscure country that the US doesn't have jurisdiction over... unless the rules in Tennessee set a new precedence.
And why would someone? Phishing, as you stated, for starters. It now makes phishing very easy to do because you have many more avenues to pursue for misspellings, etc. All of which will increase the difficulty of finding and blocking such sites.
Though, that might be over stated because the barrier to entry is also much higher for these TLDs... unless someone starts selling off the subdomains for real cheap.
a company like McDonalds will now be forced to register "mcdonalds.[every possible alphanumeric string]"
I suspect this will actually force them to register "*.mcdonalds" as a TLD. And likewise with other big companies.
Actually, the parent poster had a better point. What's to stop someone from registering "McDonalds.Hamburger", "McDonalds.Fries", or "McDonalds.restaurant", other than the cost.
A lot of generic domain keywords are often used to usurp specific names. It should would be confusing if you Googled "McDonalds" and you got the above domains along with "[whatever].McDonalds". Likely having to lead to major companies having to drop a lot on custom TLDs or fighting people infringing their trademark and diluting their brand.
As cool as the idea is, being a web dev. myself, I just see this becoming an even more chaotic mess than before. How much will the ".sex" TLD go for? What's a person going to do with a ".restaurant" or ".france" domain?
One thing is for certain... Google and all other search engines will have a heck of a time trying to devise new algorithms to return relevancy, especially if someone registered a ".restaurant" TLD and then uses it as a "restaurant networking site" (like a social networking site) and charges memberships to create "McDonalds.restaurant" or whatever?
Uph! Lots of work for the Search Engine folks, let alone new ways for SEO wizards to try and abuse and game the competition. And in the end, the internet "surfers" will be worse off unless some sort of standard comes about to keep it organized. But, perhaps not. It certainly doesn't look good on paper, to me.
I think Warcraft III was the only game that I played where I never actually played the normal game. I always had some kind of mod like Tower D, or DoTa.
Same here. I played many endless hours of (free) online gaming doing Tower Defense, Tug of Wars, or (my fav.) Enfo's Team Survival.
In that case, are we going to be hearing about lawsuits and domain confiscations against places like the Pirate Bay?
I've seen the lawyers say outrageous things, because there's NO CONSEQUENCES for doing so.
Except Jack Thompson, of course. Which maybe a equally good point in that, it surely took a lot of outrage to finally get some consequences for his actions.
As I and my college roommates have always said, "I'm a geek. It's like a nerd but with a social life."
Starcraft 2- 3 Separate boxes to buy
My first thought was "greed" as well. But I'll hold final judgment until I see what the MSRP is on each box. It sounds like they've created the entire game/balance/races already, but they're just doing 3 separate story lines. So, the only difference between the games will be maps and story, not game mechanics, units, etc.
If it's $50-60 a game, I'll be pretty unhappy with that price. $30-40, I'd be ok with, assuming their typical Blizzard Quality(tm).
Otherwise, I'd just shovel this into the Episodic Gaming genre that other games (Half-Life 2) have tried.
Indeed. However those are a representation of assets, not your actual assets.Granted the "score keeping" is done digitally, but it is directly related to your estate.The goods are not data.
While pretty much true, it's not exactly how it works. Banking has, and likely always will be, an investment in itself. Much like the stock market.
When banking, you agree to give the bank your money for a big 'ol IOU sticker (these days a digital one). The bank takes your money and invests it. They don't just keep it in their vault until you want it back while it magically grows more money (interest rates).
Surprisingly, this should be well enough known today, what with all the banking crisis talks and all. The fact that there's banks collapsing today with people loosing the money they had in said bank (unless the Government steps up to insure it). I think this might have happened in the saving-in-loan crises but I'm not particularly familiar with it.
Though, A scene I remember that might also help others is the film "A Wonderful Life". There, George Bailey's S&L bank has a money rush where, in a panic, all the clients of the bank come storming in, demanding their money back, while the S&L doesn't keep enough cash on hand. This is where Bailey explains to his clients how a S&L works, by reinvesting.
So, yes and no. The account isn't just a score-card that represents actual assets. It is, in many ways, a fictional representation of assets that are only worth what the bank you use is worth. Should said bank go under, you could very well loose everything (like some people who invested in Iceland banks are experiencing). This is why the government banks savings accounts up to $100,000 (in the US). To insure people that banking is safe and get people to continue to invest in banks, who turn it around and give loans to businesses and for mortgages (at a higher interest rate).
Though, I'm no expert, so everything I say is only based on my general understanding of the system and should be taken with a grain of salt. No doubt I don't have a complete or accurate understanding of something as complex as the financial markets.
Speaking of which... it's all , including game trailors.
*yawn* I know there's not much point to replying to an AC, but oh well.
Crazy positional attacks?
Yup. And do you know whyI thought it was "crazy"? No, because the rest of your comment was pure n00bness.
Hard to control pet?
Really? Where did I say it was hard to control the pet? Reading comprehension FTW!
Go back to WoW please and spam anytime style more noob.
Says the n00b. Pot, kettle, black.
How hard is to click attack on the pet window and attack something from behind or on the side?
Again, Reading Comprehension FTW! I never said that's what I found hard to play about WAR. It was actually the crazy insane positional attacks that were bugged as hell. You know, like being able to "back" and "side" positional attacks from the front. Yup, I found that bug. But getting an error when trying to do them from their respected "back" and "side" positions, saying I couldn't do it. It's crazy to release a game with a positional mechanic but have it massively bugged.
Learn how to circle strafe maybe?
Again, learn to comprehend, maybe? Learn to n00b and troll better.
FYI, I have a level 25 White Lion.
FYI, I don't care.
Thanks. That's basically how I understand it as well.
As for WAR, I played it on release as a White Lion. I found it too hard to play. To many bugs and user feedback issues. However, I played it again last weekend, this time rolling a Witch Hunter. I found the experiance much, much better. A lot of the bugs I had weren't an issue because I no longer had a pet and I didn't have to try all kind of crazy positional attacks. I think they patched a good amount as well.
I still enjoy WoW and plan on continuing it (I'm excited about 3.0 changes and the xpac) but having tried a different (non pet and positional) class, I've also found more enjoyment in WAR. Though, I'm probably not going to keep that subscription. I'm only willing to pay 1 subscription at a time.
I'm looking for the MMO company to create a graduated membership rate based on how much you actually play. If you haven't logged in for 1 month, you pay nothing. If you only logged in a few hours, you pay X rate, if you logged in an decent amount of time you pay Y, if you played heavily, you pay the maximum amount of $15.
That would be nice and it'd allow me to freely play the games I feel like playing. As long as the rates and values are reasonable. Something like $0/0 hours, $5/30 hours, $10/60 hours, $15/unlimited would be cool. I would definitely have 3 subscriptions going. Sure, Bliz. wouldn't benefit, but I could see competitors trying to draw subscribers away from Bliz. doing it. I'd have another account for $5/month and once I got hooked on the game, I wouldn't care much to cancel my WoW account and up my subscription to the $15 unlimited. I'd be a nice way to get players to invest in your game, and less likely to give it up. Though, that's just a consumer pipe-dream.
They are not setting you to zero anymore. However I imagine the new items meant for lvl 80 with be a order of magnitude more costly. I also imagine lvl 80 arena will give a lot more points. It will almost be like setting you to zero in regards to getting the new lvl 80 gear.
Hmmm... I'm still a bit confused about this. Last update I heard is that they're not wiping honor, but they are going to reset Arena points at the launch of WotLK. Here they state honor will not be reset and here they state arena points will not be reset until the release of the xpac. I read somewere else (wowhead?) that stated arena points will be wiped, but not honor points. Though, I don't really know if that's normal for arena points because I've yet to do the arena, but will probably try it out at level 80 (since doing it now is kind of pointless)
Mr Fusion for the Win!
That had more to do with arenas no longer having any reward for lower ranked players then it did Warhammer. There was simply no point in playing anymore, so they stopped.
That and they're resetting Arena points for everyone to 0 before the expansion and I think right before patch 3.0.x This makes Arena completely pointless until after the xpac, which will be arriving in about 1-month.
Once that's released, a wave of players will return to WoW and they'll get back into doing the Arena. Bliz. will put a lot of candy out there to attract them. It's only Honor Points that Bliz. is massively increasing for *new* rewards, because they're not wiping Honor Points (and people are stock piling them for the Xpac).
Do you believe PC gaming is dead?