an iLoafer ?

Quake 2 was a pretty dull single player game IMO, and the only thing it brought to multiplayer (IMO) was the railgun. I really wanted to like it, but like you said, it just felt hollow. And starting off with nothing more than that lame laser pistol, that thing just sucked all kinds of hairy balls.
More than anything else, Q2 was a demonstration platform for, "Look- color lighting!". Too much of it, in a way. Much like Doom3 was, "Look, shadow volumes!"

As dated as it is, I'll second this.
For whatever reason, I found it, despite it's lack of thematic consistency, the most fun FPS by far.. or maybe I'm just waxing nostalgic.

Carmack's contribution however is to the game engine alone, not gameplay itself (though gameplay will be dependent on the engine's abilities). id's games got very stagnant in terms of of gameplay innovation, just the same thing over and over: shoot enemies, find key, unlock new area, shoot enemies, rinse, lather, repeat. The only things that really changed were the ability to move in true 3D, use colored lighting, more polys, better graphics, etc.. every recent id game has been more or less a demonstration platform for a new or improved engine, but not much else. Valve ushered in a whole new era with it's imaginative and immersive Half Life, and it's scripting sequences.

Depends what you use it for. For ordinary web browsing, asymetrical connections are fine, but if you're gaming, then yeah, the upload is just as important as the download. I did a packet capture once while playing Quake2 (obviously a long time ago) and was quite surprised by the almost equal up/down ratio.

Well, now you know one more. :) I've tried Chrome a couple of times, both at home and at work, and it got on my nerves. I kept going back to Firefox because it behaves better and seems more compatible across the board. I only use Chrome on my Nexus 7.

It sounds nothing like he's from the US. Most of us (especially the older generations) know basic European history better than you might think; however, we're also taught our own history in depth (The original colonies, revolutionary war, civil war, industrial revolution, etc..), something Europeans are not, so naturally we are not quite as versed in your history. But I think most americans at this time would not be defending Russia or Putin over Finland, in any case. Remember, the USSR was the big bad wolf to us for over 25 years.

Perhaps you are not from the US, but here, people can be legally fired for a belief or statement that is currently politically incorrect. Religious symbols get taken down (by law) because a group of atheists are offended and can't stand to see such a thing (I'm not religious, and I don't care either way), a football team must legally change their name, etc...
It may not affect laws directly so much, but it definitely affects and controls people's lives.

No, that's NOT what I was saying. Did you even read what I wrote? In fact, I pointed out that freedom of speech has limits where things like defamation are concerned, as one example. What, did you need me to bullet list every single example of such limits imaginable to get the point across more clearly?

My gripe is with all the "offense" everyone takes at every little thing these days, but especially when that leads to people being essentially harassed by others' ideologies. But I also believe people have the right to be offended if they want, by trivial things, like for example, a football team being called the Redskins, or a restaurant chain being called "Hooters" with skimpily clad women as waitresses, but it just doesn't give them the right to dictate how everyone else thinks, or in most cases, act.
And what I was talking about was in a much broader context than this case; in case you hadn't noticed, the discussion had evolved into something more generalized.

The way I look at it, (whatever the topic) they have a "right" to be offended all they want (it's their opinion), but they don't have the further right to act on that and shut anyone up/down, unless it's serious defamation or the like.
When people can shut others down simply because they become drama queens over something they find disagreeable, that's when the real problem happens. It shouldn't, but thanks to political correctness, that's how things have been rolling the past 20 years or so, and it keeps getting worse.

OTOH, videos like this one make it look safe. What with the rash of idiots doing the cinnamon challenge, the fire challenge, etc, you KNOW a bunch of people are going to try this, and get seriously hurt, but probably not killed. Then the lawyers get involved and everyone loses. The only good thing is, LN isn't as easy to get a hold off.

Oh man, I remember those days. I was in a couple of clans. I remember the first time I fired up Quake in GL mode with my new 3DFX card, I almost spooged;, it's amazing how good even just 640x480 looked back then, when the default was what- 320-x200 I think? It was fun picking people in or out of the water and seeing their bewilderment.. for a while. But overall, good times., good times. I've never found anything else as fun as the original Quake, despite it's lack of a railgun.

He might not jump to nukes so quickly, but I think he feels confident - with good reason- that he can annex the Ukraine without any serious reprisal; not from Obama or Congress, so not any other country then. Worst case, Ukraine might be the Sudetenlan of the 21st century. Hopefully not.
I still think the middle east is the catalyst for the next major war though.

What irked me is the totally useless video. Instead of exhibiting the case, using the benefit of multiple angles provided by a video cam, etc.. we just get a bunch of bullshit seizure inducing game screens and other pointless alien metaphor type stuff. The video could have been used to give us a much better grasp of the design than the picture or two on the webpage. They have definitely chosen flashy sensationalism over substance, and for that I cannot trust anything they claim.

This is a whoosh, but even more of a whoosh to whomever modded it informative.