One pack of cards. That's the minimum that every single single serious WoW player will buy. Others will buy several, maybe ten or twenty, and build decks and play with their RL friends who also play WoW. There's enough people out there that the fact is it'll turn a profit. Blizzard seems to be all about profit, and occasionally making good games.
I would dare to make a forecast by saying that this CCG, if anything like the MMO, will have absolutely no replay value. I admit, I pick up my Magic: The Gathering cards every now and then and play a game with my friends, but this game... expect to get a box full of them for $5 at a garage sale in about seven years.
If you mean download songs I already purchased from the record companies in casette format...
Downloading isn't what's illegal or against fair use or whatnot. It's the sharing that is. I think there's substantial legel precedent to be set by the person that actually has enough money to fight and the logs to prove that though he shared files, he never actually inadvertantly uploaded them to anyone other than the copyright holder who's trying to file a lawsuit against him.
OT: I'm a little extra adamant about this particular subject because I managed to get sued by the RIAA (yeah, I'm a sucker) and I remember when it happened too. I used to snag stuff on filesharing networks (mostly porn:P) and I kept all my media in the same folder. I would cancel the uploads a lot when they rolled around which wasn't often because I was usually the only source for most of the files I possessed. I leave the client open for the whole night one evening, and the next morning, I see something like 15 pages of uploads (small pages, but pages). I was astonished, but thought nothing of it. A few months later a letter came in the mail...
The lawsuit here (though I didn't RTFA) seems to state that, because file sharing networks are stereotypically outlets for piracy, Limewire's authors are somehow responsible for not protecting against a probable activity on their network.
It's amazing to me that the RIAA hasn't figured out that they really need to sue those bastards that wrote TCP/IP and didn't think for a minute to include DRM in the original description... They've made so much money since all the networks that operate on the protocol so viciously promote piracy of copyrighted material. They should pay for their lack of foresight.
Largest Object in the Universe discovered... 200 light years in diameter.
On first glace, I read about an object that was "200 light years wide," and was actually thoroughly impressed. I suppose (at least I think this way) that when you've got an astronomical mindset, you would tend to think of an "object" to be something that is held together gravitationally (such as stars, planets, and black holes), but something that isn't merely just a collection of smaller gravitationally bound objects (such as binary star systems, galaxies, and superclusters).
By this reasoning, I was hoping for something, anything, a black hole even, that was 200 light years in diameter. That would be extremely impressive, and of course, large.
Aside from that, I personally believe that anything that can give us more insight into how exactly galaxies and clusters form from their primordial constituents is good news enough. It's a shame but also a fact that we can only divine this information through mathematics and not observation. And seriously, with that in mind, who cares what the object's size is? As the OP says:
...what's a few orders of magnitude among friends?
The fundamental question is when does life begin. That's a question that every society must answer
IMHO, humans managed to answer that question a long time ago. Life began millenia ago, and, assuming that you believe Darwin knew what he was talking about, it is our obligation as a species to continue the propogation of life. When you take this kind of view, you arrive at the conclusion that not only is abortion "killing babies," but so is everything from effective use of condoms, birth control, and yes, even celibacy. Everyone in this damned country, on both sides of the fence, is so hung up on the matter of timing that they fail to realize that in the end, everyone is a hypocrite. Living in this society, personally, I've come to terms with that, and I rightfully enjoy my hypocrisy.
Sure, you're going to have people always shouting the completely fallacious argument, "What if your parents had decided to abort you?" I like to follow with, "Then we wouldn't be having this discussion."
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One pack of cards. That's the minimum that every single single serious WoW player will buy. Others will buy several, maybe ten or twenty, and build decks and play with their RL friends who also play WoW. There's enough people out there that the fact is it'll turn a profit. Blizzard seems to be all about profit, and occasionally making good games.
I would dare to make a forecast by saying that this CCG, if anything like the MMO, will have absolutely no replay value. I admit, I pick up my Magic: The Gathering cards every now and then and play a game with my friends, but this game... expect to get a box full of them for $5 at a garage sale in about seven years.
Downloading isn't what's illegal or against fair use or whatnot. It's the sharing that is. I think there's substantial legel precedent to be set by the person that actually has enough money to fight and the logs to prove that though he shared files, he never actually inadvertantly uploaded them to anyone other than the copyright holder who's trying to file a lawsuit against him.
OT: I'm a little extra adamant about this particular subject because I managed to get sued by the RIAA (yeah, I'm a sucker) and I remember when it happened too. I used to snag stuff on filesharing networks (mostly porn
The lawsuit here (though I didn't RTFA) seems to state that, because file sharing networks are stereotypically outlets for piracy, Limewire's authors are somehow responsible for not protecting against a probable activity on their network.
It's amazing to me that the RIAA hasn't figured out that they really need to sue those bastards that wrote TCP/IP and didn't think for a minute to include DRM in the original description... They've made so much money since all the networks that operate on the protocol so viciously promote piracy of copyrighted material. They should pay for their lack of foresight.
... What seems to be the problem?
"Uh, well, I was drunk and I, uh... My screen is cracked."
Largest Object in the Universe discovered... 200 light years in diameter.
...what's a few orders of magnitude among friends?
On first glace, I read about an object that was "200 light years wide," and was actually thoroughly impressed. I suppose (at least I think this way) that when you've got an astronomical mindset, you would tend to think of an "object" to be something that is held together gravitationally (such as stars, planets, and black holes), but something that isn't merely just a collection of smaller gravitationally bound objects (such as binary star systems, galaxies, and superclusters).
By this reasoning, I was hoping for something, anything, a black hole even, that was 200 light years in diameter. That would be extremely impressive, and of course, large.
Aside from that, I personally believe that anything that can give us more insight into how exactly galaxies and clusters form from their primordial constituents is good news enough. It's a shame but also a fact that we can only divine this information through mathematics and not observation. And seriously, with that in mind, who cares what the object's size is? As the OP says:
The fundamental question is when does life begin. That's a question that every society must answer
IMHO, humans managed to answer that question a long time ago. Life began millenia ago, and, assuming that you believe Darwin knew what he was talking about, it is our obligation as a species to continue the propogation of life. When you take this kind of view, you arrive at the conclusion that not only is abortion "killing babies," but so is everything from effective use of condoms, birth control, and yes, even celibacy. Everyone in this damned country, on both sides of the fence, is so hung up on the matter of timing that they fail to realize that in the end, everyone is a hypocrite. Living in this society, personally, I've come to terms with that, and I rightfully enjoy my hypocrisy.
Sure, you're going to have people always shouting the completely fallacious argument, "What if your parents had decided to abort you?" I like to follow with, "Then we wouldn't be having this discussion."