It's actually not so much about YouTube not taking them down as it is that Fox and CBS aren't requesting Obama's videos be taken down.
And that's what is beautiful about the takedown requests. Fox and CBS don't have to request Obama's videos come down if they don't want them to. They can, however, use it to selectively silence the ads of those they do not support.
Mind telling me where in the United States you can get health care without waiting in line? In my town a 10am appointment means sitting in the waiting room until at least 11am.
For me, it was simply a matter of calling several doctors until I found one that had some free time to perform a minor surgery in his office. Granted, I'm sure you can do that in Canada, Great Britain, or any other 'socialized medicine' country. (You can, right?)
However, back on topic, the issue with government paid medicine, is that technically you have already paid for it, but now you have to get approval to have it done with the money you have already paid. If you walked out of the Emergency Room in the US, you wouldn't be out of pocket any money.
So the real difference between US healthcare and socialized healthcare, is that while you may wait in the US, you are waiting because of the Triage. In the socialized healthcare world, the waiting you refer to is waiting for the approval to have the procedure performed.
(That is just intended as a very basic clarification of the 'waiting for a procedure' arguement. Every country is different in its implementation) It is not expressing any particular view for, or against socialized medicine.)
Barack Obama supports Linux. I did some freelance work for his North Carolina campaign headquarters, settting up a gentoo box for use as their intranet server. I met BO and talked about linux and modernizing the Federal Government, access to information, etc. He'll probably be a very linux-friendly administration. It may not be year of the linux desktop yet, but it will be year of the linux whitehouse.
It would just be silly for the President to get involved beyond the selection of someone who isn't beholden to a particular company to handle the IT affairs of the White House. Could you imagine what kind of fuss the President would kick up if he demanded that the FBI use a particular brand of calculator?
Anyway, WHCA already knows what OSes it is going to use years in advance.
My friends, I've always been a maverick and an outsider. So when I voted for the DMCA, I knew that I was sticking it to the man. Because, as a Senator, I am 'The Man'. It was the most logical way for me to stick it to myself.
I would love to have this question asked at tonight's debate.
"Senator McCain, your campaign is complaining that it is being unfairly censored by the DMCA. How do you reconcile your complaint when you yourself voted for this exact measure?
I'm no Obama supporter, but I'd love to watch him answer that question.
here's the actual vote: SENATE: 100% Democrats; 100% Republicans (unaminous) HOUSE: 90% Democrats; 85% Republicans (veto-proof) PRESIDENT: Signed by *democrat* William J. Clinton in 1998.
What was that about being a "republican" bill? It looks like a typical Duopoly bill to me, supported by BOTH sides, since they both pretty much act alike.
People like the person you were addressing are a serious impediment to rational discourse on the internet. They are insulated by the web, and have created some sort of cognitive dissonance that hides the real world situation from themselves.
Typical fanboy behavior. Unfortunately, it applies to all aspects of society; Sports teams, cities, nations, ethnicities, OS, and obviously politicians all have their fanboys. What really bugs me is when people like him get so wound up in their own fanaticism that they begin to engage in the old practice of 'If I can't have it, then no one can.'
But thanks for looking up the vote totals. I like to see that sort of information tossed back at these fanatics at every opportunity regardless of claims to any political ideology.
If anything happens, they'll just see to it that the DMCA doesn't apply to political ads.
That would be perfect.
Since there does exist an actual http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party Pirate Party. Now put a political message in the metadata of your files, and claim your exemption.
I'm certain that The Pirate Party would have no issue endorsing files so that they received DCMA exemptions.
(The Pirate Party of Podunk County has approved this message)
*I say they, I'll pretty much bet the Obama camp takes a similar stance to the McCain camp, I guess we'll see.
Well, one way to hold Obama's feet to the fire is to say that you will vote for McCain if Obama doesn't say that he will reform the DCMA.
Here is the thing, if this issue really is that important to you, then you must be willing to make sacrifices (Voting for McCain if you were planning to vote Obama, or the reverse). They need to know that their position, or lack thereof is worse than people not voting for them, they are actively voting against them. It is a bitter pill to swallow, for them and us. Who will blink first?
This holds true for whatever candidate you support. Threaten to withdraw that support, and mean it, if there are issues you need addressed. The other candidate may not be what you prefer, but you can be damned sure that all promises made to special interests will be forgotten if keeping them means costing them the actual election. If there is one thing that politicians like more than lobbyist money, it is winning the election in the first place.
If IP/copyright reform is as important to Slashdotters as we claim, then you HAVE to take positions like this to force it to be a real issue. Again, a bitter pill, and not for everyone, but you have to ask yourself, how important is copyright reform to me?
Not necessarily a good thing. A foreign-owned company operating a manufacturing plant with a skeleton crew means a lot of the money is leaving the country, and isn't even partially slowed down by the wages paid to a full workforce.
So you keep a close watch on those manufacturing plants, and make sure that the heart of the manufacturing is never removed or sold off. In the end, if a foreign government tried to screw with the US by 'closing' factories, they would be left with a lot of worthless dollars, and the US would be left with the factory.
On any bill, I count the lack of a vote as a vote on the side I disagree with the most. It shows a decision to allow a 'pass' on a controversial bill with the resulting effect of allowing them to be on both sides at once. I don't like it, so I count their abstaining vote as the worst case vote unless they have a very good excuse.
Honestly, road noise is probably the last thing I'd rank as a safety feature. I'm sure there is some situation where it would be helpful, but I haven't yet experienced it. I used to drive approximately 1000 miles per week, for several years, and never once found a noise that helped me drive. In my opinion, here are things you can do that will provide several times more benefit.
1. Leave early, and don't be in a rush. 2. Don't drive while tired. 3. Take breaks, and stretch your legs for 10 minutes to refresh your body and mind.
4. Adopt a policy that 'dangerous driving, not speed, kills' and enforce it as such. I've seen more highway accidents that were caused by police than I thought was possible.
Why? In the US, it is not a fun thing to see a cop car pretty much ever. You could be doing 50 in a 55 mph zone and you would instinctively want to press on your brakes when you see a cop on the side of the road, then for a few seconds, you will look at your speedometer, check your mirrors, and generally be on edge.
What weren't you doing for those few seconds? Paying attention to the road and other cars.
When people become more worried about if there is a police car behind the next bend, and not a deer, that causes significant risk in driving.
AoC felt empty. I wasn't able to interact with players much at all during the early levels, and that resulted in the feeling that this was effectively Oblivion Online, the online being that there was some chat room element included. The game just felt cold. I enjoyed it, and likely would have continued to enjoy it, if it didn't feel like a 1 player mmorpg.
WoW: I still play this, and I'm loading a copy on this laptop as I type. It's a good game, but it needs a kick in the pants to keep its innovation going, and to end the feeling of treading water that it has had since BC.
War: I like it. I would like to continue to play it, and it may be the PvP half that may force WoW to refocus on PvE. I'd have no problem playing a PvP and a PvE game. WoW seems to have focused too much on Arenas and PvP as a method to showcase your gear.
I like a lot of what goes into Warhammer, and I'm willing to overlook its faults for now.
Perhaps the best praise I can give it is this:
I'm considering not purchasing WoTLK for several days so I can see the reaction from the WoW players and decide if I want to continue on with Warhammer. So far, at best (for WoW), I plan to play both.
I recently read that the average age of a gamer is 35 years old. You've got a ways to go yet!
Since video games have only recently entered the mainstream, I would estimate that number will stabilize somewhere near the average age of the general populace as time goes by. It will be skewed slightly below the median due to the number of 'indoctrinated' gamers that simply play less or quit playing due to their need to work for a living as they get older. (Or will we see it balanced out by retiree age gamers who pick up playing again?)
And while we may think games have been around for our entire lives, video games haven't had a timeline that is greater than the total lifespan of a human yet. IE: lets say the first mainstream start of video games was in 1970-1980, we won't see the gamer population reach its equilibrium until at least 2090. In 2100 is when I would expect the median age of gamers to be just slightly lower than the median age of the population.
It's 8:00 on a Thursday, and I'm not done drinking my tea....You get the idea.:-P
So gamers need caffeine in order to function properly. In that case, I think I'll need to raise the rates on all gamers that live more than 2 miles from a Starbucks.
Perhaps it is what is beyond the bubble that is attracting the matter within the bubble. If the rest of the universe, ie. beyond what is visible to us, is dense in matter, perhaps it is attracting the sparse matter within our visible universe. Seems a lot more plausible than non detectable dark matter.
If you can see something being affected by gravity, and gravity's effects are bound by the speed of light, then you should be able to see the object which is the source of that gravitational force.
Think of it like a relay race in which the original runner doesn't stop, and doesn't slow down. When runner A meets runner B, and runner A continues to run at the same pace as Runner B then Runner A and Runner B will arrive at the finish line at the same time.
So why is it hard to believe that our planet exists in conditions that have incredibly low odds? The universe is not only more vast than anyone can imagine, it's also been around for over 13 billion years! For all you know, these "special conditions" you complain about could have happened a million times by now.
It isn't hard to imagine that at all. Since we don't have a good set of data to determine the probability of sentient life, we can't really come up with much justification on its probability. What if the likelyhood of a form of sentient lifeform developing in the universe is only 1 every billion years? It could be 1 billion every 1 billion years, or 1 trillion every billion years. We simply don't know that yet. It is quite possible that Earth is the only planet in the entire universe that has developed sentient life. It is also possible, that every third planet in the universe has developed sentient life (And we just can't tell).
It all depends on how 'special' those special conditions are. Other than our own innate dislike for probabilities that aren't measured in integers on 'x in a million chance' scale, there is no reason to assume that the probability is anything other that somewhere between 1:1 or 1:infinity. (I probably rambled on there for a bit). It is my personal opinion, that life is exceptionally rare, even at an intergallactic scale. I base that opinion on the very unlikely circumstances that must occur without interference in order for sentient life (as we know/define it) to develop.
It doesn't imply that we are special. The only thing we can know for certain is that we are.
In an infinite number of trials, and an infinite number of universes, there would exist a universe where the braziilion to one odds that only one form of sentient life would develop, would exist.
I noticed that when I was grinding my second lvl 70; it was about a zillion times harder to get a group for a group quest than it had been for the first character...We're talking the 60->70 grind here, not the 1->70. I can't frankly imagine what it must be like in the 1-60 right now, even with the massive boost to gained XP. Just skip the instances and the group quests, because there is just no point.
Level to 15, do the deadmines. (chances are, someone will be running through it with a 70 friend) Level to 30-35, do the scarlet monestary. That place is always busy. Level 40-45, Zul Farrak Level 50-52, BRD, Sunken temple.
Then grind to 58, go to outlands and experience real XP.
Thankfully outlands has enough group quests to push you to 70, because there are very few people that even bother with the level 60-65 instances anymore.
As I said in my previous post, I'm loving Warhammer Online right now because the PvP gives you XP.
That is exactly what I did. I've moved my character to 70, bought him his mount, and shelved him. 3 days into the expansion he will end up with better gear than I could earn him doing any of the content that exists right now.
Maybe. I am enjoying Warhammer Online quite a bit.
Why are players bothering with online games that can be manipulated by manipulating the local client's RAM? Isn't the whole point of "Online" supposed to make client side vulnerabilities moot?
That would work for most online games where the character interaction is limited to 10-30 people at once. However with a MMORPG like WoW that, while partially instanced, definately places the emphasis on 'massive-multiplayer'. The computing power required to perform all of the positioning, calculation, and then the bandwidth to report that information to several thousand clients at once would be astronomical.
In the end, especially with PC and not console based gaming, there will always be a security gap that can be exploited. If you are giving a person the information necessary to draw their enemies position, their own position, there will always be some amount of that which can be exploited. Especially when the exploitation is something as simple as 'bot software'. Given Point A, Point B and a method to input ways to interact or travel between those two points, you will never be able to lock it down without completely locking down the client computer.
It isn't so much desperation, but rather the annoyance that the longer this game goes on, the more you are pigeon-holed into your first character choice.
Lets say you want to try a new character now, you better hope that you have the support of your guildmates/friends because it will take a good player 5-6 days to level that character to 70. And that is if you do nothing but grind the character up. So you don't build any of the relationships that you normally would when leveling a character normally and at a reasonable pace. You are banking on using that character with your already established guild relations.
I can't imagine what it will be like when the level cap is raised to 80. The old content is barren enough as it is, now we will have a fairly empty outlands as well. That is unfortunate because a good many of the later quests are group quests which even now are hard as hell to gather a group for. So the game will soon be a 70 level pure grindfest for anyone interested in trying something new or joining the game. Then, add on the rep/gear grinds once you catch up to your friends again.
To paraphrase Chris Rock, I'm not saying I agree with people who use MMOGlider, but I understand.
I have observed the price per bit of broadband dropping recently. My comcast service has gone from 1mbit to 3mbit to 6mbit over the last 5 years with no change in price.
The introduction of the cap, of course, significantly complicates that computation.
Your service has gone from a 1mbit to 3mbit to 6mbit service. But what does that really mean? Quite likely, there is the qualifier 'Up to..' right before that mBit number. What that means, is that number means nothing.
They could offer up to 100mbits of service and it wouldn't mean a thing since there is nothing in their contract that states any QoS on it. In fact, they could very well claim (and they have) that limiting you to below those published values is necessary to preserve the network for everyone else. It is pure marketing hogwash.
Amusingly, these caps are the only guarantee of service from these companies that I would bet any real money on.
It is a bit like politics. I know all the politicians have alterior motives. I know that they are just doing this because the publicity will help them. But, I would be foolish not to support them when the outcome of their publicity stunt would be in my favor.
Or this scenario:
Victim: *getting punched in the face by hoodlum A* Hoodlum B: It is wrong to punch him in the face, I'm calling the cops. Hoodlum A: You punched him last week and I didn't call the cops. Victim: Yes, I agree, that would be hypocritical, therefore I would not want you to call the police.
I may not like someone, and I may not like their past actions, and their present actions may be hypocritical based on their past actions, but if what they are doing now is what is right, then it is really foolish to reject the message because you don't like the messenger.
That's a nice theory, but unless you work in fast food high turnover is not a good thing. It's very expensive to find and train qualified people, so dumping them for minor things like this is unwise.
Pretty much.
It is much easier (and cheaper) to restrict things, but give employees the ability to request certain features, programs, or support for gadgets. It does take time to evaluate those requests, but it is certainly cheaper than replacing an unhappy employee or one that needs to get around the blocks because there is no method to request acess. When you make the decision, it is also helpful to explain in a dept or company wide letter why the program or gadget is blocked. Do not install "XYZ" will only get you so far. Do not install "XYZ" because it has a known security flaw that we cannot allow on our system, will give you a much better response.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually not so much about YouTube not taking them down as it is that Fox and CBS aren't requesting Obama's videos be taken down.
And that's what is beautiful about the takedown requests. Fox and CBS don't have to request Obama's videos come down if they don't want them to. They can, however, use it to selectively silence the ads of those they do not support.
Mind telling me where in the United States you can get health care without waiting in line? In my town a 10am appointment means sitting in the waiting room until at least 11am.
For me, it was simply a matter of calling several doctors until I found one that had some free time to perform a minor surgery in his office. Granted, I'm sure you can do that in Canada, Great Britain, or any other 'socialized medicine' country. (You can, right?)
However, back on topic, the issue with government paid medicine, is that technically you have already paid for it, but now you have to get approval to have it done with the money you have already paid. If you walked out of the Emergency Room in the US, you wouldn't be out of pocket any money.
So the real difference between US healthcare and socialized healthcare, is that while you may wait in the US, you are waiting because of the Triage. In the socialized healthcare world, the waiting you refer to is waiting for the approval to have the procedure performed.
(That is just intended as a very basic clarification of the 'waiting for a procedure' arguement. Every country is different in its implementation) It is not expressing any particular view for, or against socialized medicine.)
Barack Obama supports Linux. I did some freelance work for his North Carolina campaign headquarters, settting up a gentoo box for use as their intranet server. I met BO and talked about linux and modernizing the Federal Government, access to information, etc. He'll probably be a very linux-friendly administration. It may not be year of the linux desktop yet, but it will be year of the linux whitehouse.
It would just be silly for the President to get involved beyond the selection of someone who isn't beholden to a particular company to handle the IT affairs of the White House. Could you imagine what kind of fuss the President would kick up if he demanded that the FBI use a particular brand of calculator?
Anyway, WHCA already knows what OSes it is going to use years in advance.
My friends, I've always been a maverick and an outsider. So when I voted for the DMCA, I knew that I was sticking it to the man. Because, as a Senator, I am 'The Man'. It was the most logical way for me to stick it to myself.
I would love to have this question asked at tonight's debate.
"Senator McCain, your campaign is complaining that it is being unfairly censored by the DMCA. How do you reconcile your complaint when you yourself voted for this exact measure?
I'm no Obama supporter, but I'd love to watch him answer that question.
here's the actual vote:
SENATE: 100% Democrats; 100% Republicans (unaminous)
HOUSE: 90% Democrats; 85% Republicans (veto-proof)
PRESIDENT:
Signed by *democrat* William J. Clinton in 1998.
What was that about being a "republican" bill? It looks like a typical Duopoly bill to me, supported by BOTH sides, since they both pretty much act alike.
People like the person you were addressing are a serious impediment to rational discourse on the internet. They are insulated by the web, and have created some sort of cognitive dissonance that hides the real world situation from themselves.
Typical fanboy behavior. Unfortunately, it applies to all aspects of society; Sports teams, cities, nations, ethnicities, OS, and obviously politicians all have their fanboys. What really bugs me is when people like him get so wound up in their own fanaticism that they begin to engage in the old practice of 'If I can't have it, then no one can.'
But thanks for looking up the vote totals. I like to see that sort of information tossed back at these fanatics at every opportunity regardless of claims to any political ideology.
DCMA exemptions.
Err... DMCA exemptions.
(I suppose my username + mixing up DMCA/DCMA exemptions indicates one hell of a Freudian Slip.)
If anything happens, they'll just see to it that the DMCA doesn't apply to political ads.
That would be perfect.
Since there does exist an actual http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party Pirate Party. Now put a political message in the metadata of your files, and claim your exemption.
I'm certain that The Pirate Party would have no issue endorsing files so that they received DCMA exemptions.
(The Pirate Party of Podunk County has approved this message)
*I say they, I'll pretty much bet the Obama camp takes a similar stance to the McCain camp, I guess we'll see.
Well, one way to hold Obama's feet to the fire is to say that you will vote for McCain if Obama doesn't say that he will reform the DCMA.
Here is the thing, if this issue really is that important to you, then you must be willing to make sacrifices (Voting for McCain if you were planning to vote Obama, or the reverse). They need to know that their position, or lack thereof is worse than people not voting for them, they are actively voting against them. It is a bitter pill to swallow, for them and us. Who will blink first?
This holds true for whatever candidate you support. Threaten to withdraw that support, and mean it, if there are issues you need addressed. The other candidate may not be what you prefer, but you can be damned sure that all promises made to special interests will be forgotten if keeping them means costing them the actual election. If there is one thing that politicians like more than lobbyist money, it is winning the election in the first place.
If IP/copyright reform is as important to Slashdotters as we claim, then you HAVE to take positions like this to force it to be a real issue. Again, a bitter pill, and not for everyone, but you have to ask yourself, how important is copyright reform to me?
Not necessarily a good thing. A foreign-owned company operating a manufacturing plant with a skeleton crew means a lot of the money is leaving the country, and isn't even partially slowed down by the wages paid to a full workforce.
So you keep a close watch on those manufacturing plants, and make sure that the heart of the manufacturing is never removed or sold off. In the end, if a foreign government tried to screw with the US by 'closing' factories, they would be left with a lot of worthless dollars, and the US would be left with the factory.
On any bill, I count the lack of a vote as a vote on the side I disagree with the most. It shows a decision to allow a 'pass' on a controversial bill with the resulting effect of allowing them to be on both sides at once. I don't like it, so I count their abstaining vote as the worst case vote unless they have a very good excuse.
Honestly, road noise is probably the last thing I'd rank as a safety feature. I'm sure there is some situation where it would be helpful, but I haven't yet experienced it. I used to drive approximately 1000 miles per week, for several years, and never once found a noise that helped me drive. In my opinion, here are things you can do that will provide several times more benefit.
1. Leave early, and don't be in a rush.
2. Don't drive while tired.
3. Take breaks, and stretch your legs for 10 minutes to refresh your body and mind.
4. Adopt a policy that 'dangerous driving, not speed, kills' and enforce it as such. I've seen more highway accidents that were caused by police than I thought was possible.
Why? In the US, it is not a fun thing to see a cop car pretty much ever. You could be doing 50 in a 55 mph zone and you would instinctively want to press on your brakes when you see a cop on the side of the road, then for a few seconds, you will look at your speedometer, check your mirrors, and generally be on edge.
What weren't you doing for those few seconds?
Paying attention to the road and other cars.
When people become more worried about if there is a police car behind the next bend, and not a deer, that causes significant risk in driving.
I've played all three.
AoC felt empty. I wasn't able to interact with players much at all during the early levels, and that resulted in the feeling that this was effectively Oblivion Online, the online being that there was some chat room element included. The game just felt cold. I enjoyed it, and likely would have continued to enjoy it, if it didn't feel like a 1 player mmorpg.
WoW: I still play this, and I'm loading a copy on this laptop as I type. It's a good game, but it needs a kick in the pants to keep its innovation going, and to end the feeling of treading water that it has had since BC.
War: I like it. I would like to continue to play it, and it may be the PvP half that may force WoW to refocus on PvE. I'd have no problem playing a PvP and a PvE game. WoW seems to have focused too much on Arenas and PvP as a method to showcase your gear.
I like a lot of what goes into Warhammer, and I'm willing to overlook its faults for now.
Perhaps the best praise I can give it is this:
I'm considering not purchasing WoTLK for several days so I can see the reaction from the WoW players and decide if I want to continue on with Warhammer. So far, at best (for WoW), I plan to play both.
I recently read that the average age of a gamer is 35 years old. You've got a ways to go yet!
Since video games have only recently entered the mainstream, I would estimate that number will stabilize somewhere near the average age of the general populace as time goes by. It will be skewed slightly below the median due to the number of 'indoctrinated' gamers that simply play less or quit playing due to their need to work for a living as they get older. (Or will we see it balanced out by retiree age gamers who pick up playing again?)
And while we may think games have been around for our entire lives, video games haven't had a timeline that is greater than the total lifespan of a human yet. IE: lets say the first mainstream start of video games was in 1970-1980, we won't see the gamer population reach its equilibrium until at least 2090. In 2100 is when I would expect the median age of gamers to be just slightly lower than the median age of the population.
It's 8:00 on a Thursday, and I'm not done drinking my tea....You get the idea. :-P
So gamers need caffeine in order to function properly. In that case, I think I'll need to raise the rates on all gamers that live more than 2 miles from a Starbucks.
Perhaps it is what is beyond the bubble that is attracting the matter within the bubble.
If the rest of the universe, ie. beyond what is visible to us, is dense in matter, perhaps it is attracting the sparse matter within our visible universe. Seems a lot more plausible than non detectable dark matter.
If you can see something being affected by gravity, and gravity's effects are bound by the speed of light, then you should be able to see the object which is the source of that gravitational force.
Think of it like a relay race in which the original runner doesn't stop, and doesn't slow down. When runner A meets runner B, and runner A continues to run at the same pace as Runner B then Runner A and Runner B will arrive at the finish line at the same time.
So why is it hard to believe that our planet exists in conditions that have incredibly low odds? The universe is not only more vast than anyone can imagine, it's also been around for over 13 billion years! For all you know, these "special conditions" you complain about could have happened a million times by now.
It isn't hard to imagine that at all. Since we don't have a good set of data to determine the probability of sentient life, we can't really come up with much justification on its probability. What if the likelyhood of a form of sentient lifeform developing in the universe is only 1 every billion years? It could be 1 billion every 1 billion years, or 1 trillion every billion years. We simply don't know that yet. It is quite possible that Earth is the only planet in the entire universe that has developed sentient life. It is also possible, that every third planet in the universe has developed sentient life (And we just can't tell).
It all depends on how 'special' those special conditions are. Other than our own innate dislike for probabilities that aren't measured in integers on 'x in a million chance' scale, there is no reason to assume that the probability is anything other that somewhere between 1:1 or 1:infinity. (I probably rambled on there for a bit). It is my personal opinion, that life is exceptionally rare, even at an intergallactic scale. I base that opinion on the very unlikely circumstances that must occur without interference in order for sentient life (as we know/define it) to develop.
It doesn't imply that we are special. The only thing we can know for certain is that we are.
In an infinite number of trials, and an infinite number of universes, there would exist a universe where the braziilion to one odds that only one form of sentient life would develop, would exist.
I noticed that when I was grinding my second lvl 70; it was about a zillion times harder to get a group for a group quest than it had been for the first character...We're talking the 60->70 grind here, not the 1->70. I can't frankly imagine what it must be like in the 1-60 right now, even with the massive boost to gained XP. Just skip the instances and the group quests, because there is just no point.
Level to 15, do the deadmines. (chances are, someone will be running through it with a 70 friend)
Level to 30-35, do the scarlet monestary. That place is always busy.
Level 40-45, Zul Farrak
Level 50-52, BRD, Sunken temple.
Then grind to 58, go to outlands and experience real XP.
Thankfully outlands has enough group quests to push you to 70, because there are very few people that even bother with the level 60-65 instances anymore.
As I said in my previous post, I'm loving Warhammer Online right now because the PvP gives you XP.
That is exactly what I did. I've moved my character to 70, bought him his mount, and shelved him. 3 days into the expansion he will end up with better gear than I could earn him doing any of the content that exists right now.
Maybe. I am enjoying Warhammer Online quite a bit.
Why are players bothering with online games that can be manipulated by manipulating the local client's RAM? Isn't the whole point of "Online" supposed to make client side vulnerabilities moot?
That would work for most online games where the character interaction is limited to 10-30 people at once. However with a MMORPG like WoW that, while partially instanced, definately places the emphasis on 'massive-multiplayer'. The computing power required to perform all of the positioning, calculation, and then the bandwidth to report that information to several thousand clients at once would be astronomical.
In the end, especially with PC and not console based gaming, there will always be a security gap that can be exploited. If you are giving a person the information necessary to draw their enemies position, their own position, there will always be some amount of that which can be exploited. Especially when the exploitation is something as simple as 'bot software'. Given Point A, Point B and a method to input ways to interact or travel between those two points, you will never be able to lock it down without completely locking down the client computer.
It isn't so much desperation, but rather the annoyance that the longer this game goes on, the more you are pigeon-holed into your first character choice.
Lets say you want to try a new character now, you better hope that you have the support of your guildmates/friends because it will take a good player 5-6 days to level that character to 70. And that is if you do nothing but grind the character up. So you don't build any of the relationships that you normally would when leveling a character normally and at a reasonable pace. You are banking on using that character with your already established guild relations.
I can't imagine what it will be like when the level cap is raised to 80. The old content is barren enough as it is, now we will have a fairly empty outlands as well. That is unfortunate because a good many of the later quests are group quests which even now are hard as hell to gather a group for. So the game will soon be a 70 level pure grindfest for anyone interested in trying something new or joining the game. Then, add on the rep/gear grinds once you catch up to your friends again.
To paraphrase Chris Rock, I'm not saying I agree with people who use MMOGlider, but I understand.
10,000,000/40,000 = $250
I was wondering what the market value of an innocent soul was these days.
Remember, this is dealing with intentional infringement of copyright, so those damages are likely treble.
I have observed the price per bit of broadband dropping recently. My comcast service has gone from 1mbit to 3mbit to 6mbit over the last 5 years with no change in price.
The introduction of the cap, of course, significantly complicates that computation.
Your service has gone from a 1mbit to 3mbit to 6mbit service. But what does that really mean? Quite likely, there is the qualifier 'Up to..' right before that mBit number. What that means, is that number means nothing.
They could offer up to 100mbits of service and it wouldn't mean a thing since there is nothing in their contract that states any QoS on it. In fact, they could very well claim (and they have) that limiting you to below those published values is necessary to preserve the network for everyone else. It is pure marketing hogwash.
Amusingly, these caps are the only guarantee of service from these companies that I would bet any real money on.
It is a bit like politics. I know all the politicians have alterior motives. I know that they are just doing this because the publicity will help them. But, I would be foolish not to support them when the outcome of their publicity stunt would be in my favor.
Or this scenario:
Victim: *getting punched in the face by hoodlum A*
Hoodlum B: It is wrong to punch him in the face, I'm calling the cops.
Hoodlum A: You punched him last week and I didn't call the cops.
Victim: Yes, I agree, that would be hypocritical, therefore I would not want you to call the police.
I may not like someone, and I may not like their past actions, and their present actions may be hypocritical based on their past actions, but if what they are doing now is what is right, then it is really foolish to reject the message because you don't like the messenger.
That's a nice theory, but unless you work in fast food high turnover is not a good thing. It's very expensive to find and train qualified people, so dumping them for minor things like this is unwise.
Pretty much.
It is much easier (and cheaper) to restrict things, but give employees the ability to request certain features, programs, or support for gadgets. It does take time to evaluate those requests, but it is certainly cheaper than replacing an unhappy employee or one that needs to get around the blocks because there is no method to request acess. When you make the decision, it is also helpful to explain in a dept or company wide letter why the program or gadget is blocked. Do not install "XYZ" will only get you so far. Do not install "XYZ" because it has a known security flaw that we cannot allow on our system, will give you a much better response.