Check out I've been dealing for way longer in Alaska: http://www.gci.com/forhome/promos/xtreme/ultimate_xtreme_tier_2.htm
And at its cheapest: http://www.gci.com/forhome/promos/xtreme/xtreme_asd7.htm
Those are the Anchorage rates.

Now for where I live in Southeast Alaska, and this service just got launched in December. We were formerly paying roughly the same rates for stupidly slow DSL. A 1mb line was about 125 bucks. Can we poor ole Alaskans have some nationwide nerd outrage too please? Alaska has been needing to import an angry torch and pitchforks mob for a while.

The basic mechanics of gaming are incredibly hard to change and the core archtypes of "the tank," "the healer," and so forth can never really be gotten rid of no matter the mechanics or settings. Even if you created an amazingly innovative game with groundbreaking freeform class mechanics, chances are the characters created will still end up being easily pegged as one of the basic archtypes.

That's just the way of things and has absolutely nothing to do with it being a 'fantasy setting'. It's completely genre independent. Even outside of RPGs people's natural play styles can easily be set into one of the basic archtypes. You've got the Tony Montana style of players who run out there with a machine gun and just hope for the best (tank). The long range sniper (ranged DPS). The in your face shotgun fanatics/melee guys (melee DPS). The sneaky explosives guys (nuke), and in the games that allow for them, the guys who run around throwing medkits at everyone like some hyperactive pez dispenser (healer).

As far as the basic concept of player/guild/alliance, come on now seriously? That's just basic clan e-peening. That's been around since mankind first assembled into tribes and started throwing rocks at each other in order to establish dominance in an area. Even without an actual guild system, people in a game will end up forming their little cliques so they can run around as a group and go beat on the other cliques so that they can claim nerd supremecy (and have something to do on Friday night).

The choice of setting still matters though. Swinging swords at goblins gets old fast. We've been doing it for ages, and sci-fi or any other non-fantasy setting can present a great change of pace. City of Heroes anyone?

The only difference in characters as they get older is not that they can do things better, but that they can do other things well too. Take for instance a one year old character and a 4 year old character. The one year old has spent their time tricking out their interceptor, the 4 year old has that already wrapped up. The big difference is that the four year old toon can also maybe fly HACs, HICs, and a few other toys, or maybe not. Who knows maybe they can fly a really tricked out inty and then went and trained for industrial skills? Anyway, both toons can fly an interceptor equally well skill wise. Technically the 1 year old has "caught up" in his chosen profession.
Case in point: My alt trained exclusively for mining as soon as I got her learning skills done. She's about a year and a half old, and I can't squeeze anything else out of her Hulk. However, besides that and indy piloting those are the only things she can do ridiculously well. She has however caught up to older industrial toons in her chosen profession.

People unfortunately have the classic leveling system burned into their skulls, so often they'll look at Eve as if it was WoW with infinite levels.
About freighters: Don't bother unless you're in a corp that needs the massive hauling space. Spend your time training for T2 indies instead. Blockade Runners are sexy, sexy boats.

I hate to come in sounding like an Eve Online fanboy, but your post does sound a lot like someone who got the trial, went 'meh' and thinks they've seen all there is to see. Feel free to TL;DR to the end of this to check out some game recommendations instead.

You are absolutely wrong about 0.0 first off. First off, there is no "endgame" in Eve. This isn't WoW or WAR. Secondly 0.0 is open to new pilots even with low skills. A newbie in a properly fitted (and by that I mean the right setup not necessarily T2 gear) frigate can work as a low cost interceptor quite easily, for example. That barely takes any time at all to train for. Believe it or not, creative T1 fits can be quite effective and not break the bank.
Combat is far from that simplistic, with some ship builds requiring a good deal of hands on management in order to keep yourself from capping out and proper module activation timing. On the broader spectrum, fleet commanding is pretty intense stuff and great fun to learn to do.
Go get into an interceptor duel with someone who knows what they're doing and try saying combat is boring again. :D

Getting podkilled is a bitch, true, but jump clones exist for a reason. Clone insurance is also very cheap so really if you get popped without it that's your own damn fault.

NPC Missions are kinda wank depth wise, but CCP is constantly adding new ones with better laid out mission briefings and do eventually plan on actually adding NPC AI beyond just the recently added sleepers (which for anyone who's been out there knows that they're no slouches and will rape the first logistics ship to show up and say hi).

You are right on one thing though, Eve is not a tourist's game. It takes a fair amount of time at the beginning to get through the initial learning curve and general entry barrier, and this puts off a lot of people who don't have friends in game to help them out. It's entirely up to the player motivating him or herself to get out there and make something of the game. It doesn't hold your hand and gently point you at a few wolf cubs to go kill for cheap xp, which really, is what most gamers want in a game. It instead says "here's your rookie ship, have fun!" and leaves it up to you. Definitely a niche game, but a successful one.

You may want to check out Jumpgate: Evolution which features hands on ship control with classic space sim combat.
http://www.jumpgateevolution.com
On a non-mmo but still space shooty shooty level there's also Naumachia which is shaping up to be all sorts of awesome.
http://naumachia.aureasection.com/

Anyway, sorry for the fanboy rant, but posts such as yours drag that out of me. I don't like seeing people drag Eve through the mud and potentially put off people who may actually enjoy the game by posting pretty innacurate statements.

I've always felt that the pro gaming crowd has really done nothing but to spawn a really crappy attitude problem in games that tend to show up in players. Aka "Hur Hur I play in the CPL" syndrome.
I honestly would not shed a tear if the entire pro gaming circuit dried up and died. Maybe then playing online can get back to being about having fun rather than waving your e-dick around.

The sad part is is that if you actually track their knife attack statistics, you'll find they go directly hand in hand with the one thing none of the chavs that make up the UK's parliament will ever admit, and it's their ban on firearms.
Mr. Taylor is just a prick trying to steal more money from its populace.
You gents and ladies over in the UK really need to start putting pressure on your government and get them to clean up their act. It seems like every other day I'm reading about a new big brother style law or badly argued tax that your government is implementing on you. Everyone else in the world should be hearing about daily protests from your country instead of how you guys just roll over and let them keep ratcheting up the bullshit laws on you guys.

I never understood the mentality between trying to create a 'WOW killer.'
There's really nothing that can topple it so long as Blizzard doesn't suddenly go squirrely and pull a Star Wars Galaxies on itself. The MMO market is still quite open, unfortunately most devs don't look beyond the same tired fantasy RPG formula. Some like City of Heroes offer up something different enough in setting to keep an active user base. Others like Eve Online have done something so drastically different that there really is no competition, not even from WOW. The industry just needs to accept that it needs to innovate rather than clone, and WOW will suddenly become a non-issue. I know I'd be all for a Warhammer 40k MMO with Planetside style gameplay.

No, but he's kinda got a point as far as the story being iffy. You'd think that considering how the average xbox live pubber is a sexually deprived, drools at anything with tits, caveman that the initial response would be more along the lines of "damn that's hot, pics plz?" rather than "OMG A LESBIAN GET HER!"
There's some details missing from this story.

I wasn't targeting Wow specifically, however my statement about the retard filter is quite true though and I think you're just taking it the wrong way. The average Eve player is in their 20s and 30s and younger players shy away from the game. I'm not slamming other MMOs, I'm just stating a cold hard fact. This does alter the personality of the community though. Rather than the usual online fare that everyone is used to, Eve does unfortunately tend to attract people who take the game just a weeeeeeeeeeee bit too seriously and really need to chill the fuck out. I got the hell out of one of the biggest alliances in the game because of people with terrible attitudes just making things not fun (Band of Brothers in case anyone asks). The leadership consisted mostly of just a bunch of blowhards who would literally swear and insult people over voice chat when doing PVP operations, and I just got tired of their crap. So when you see these sort of people come on here and insult and flame other people for playing WoW, just ignore them, much like we ignore the consoletard kids who go on about Halo being the best game ever. These people aren't the majority, they're unfortunately just some of the most vocal.

The only reason I tend to be vocal about Eve is that because people will make blanket statements like "there's nothing there for people who like PVE," which is just not true. It'd be like if someone was just making blanket statements about WoW like "there's no in game economy at all" or that "the devs don't make any attempts to balance the game whatsoever." Both of which are things that could be said by a disgruntled WoW players, everyone knows is bullshit and would hopefully be corrected by players who've actually played for a while.
I have nothing against WoW, I played it for a while, and probably would still be playing it to a degree if it wasn't for the fact that the guild I was in collapsed and the fun factor of the game dropped off a lot. My time on Dark Iron during the webcomic wars was easily one of my favorite moments in gaming.

Anyhoo, rambling aside, I'm sorry if some of the more vocal douchebags out of the community got to you, just don't judge the rest of us based on their foul attitudes.

Eve survives and continues to grow because of exactly what it is. It's big, it's complex, and there's an insane amount of depth to it. Not everyone is put off by a huge learning curve, and those that stick with Eve and get really involved are rewarded with a game where they can actually feel like they're making contributions that actually alter the course of the game environment and are constantly learning something.

Name another MMO where that holds true.

If anything, I'd say that Eve's biggest turn off to most people is that the game absolutely does not cater towards instant gratification. Every aspect of the game requires a level of patience and you always have to be looking forwards towards the bigger picture. The common complaint I hear is that people try the game and quit after a few hours because there is no "push the lever, get your reward" gameplay like other MMOs thrive on.

The positive upside to this, is that Eve has a built in retard filter. We don't have the issues with whiny-assed 14 year olds and other similiar pea-brains that MMO's like WoW have.

Eve is not for everyone and any Eve player will admit that. We'll do our best to help anyone looking to get into the game, but we know that most of the people we invite in won't stick with it, and we're fine with that. We do wish however that rather than go out and badmouth Eve, people would instead just say "yanno, this game wasn't for me," and leave it at that.

I work in the maritime industry and I've seen more than a few really crappy workers get shitcanned (yay!). Are there some sort of provisions in other unions that prevent people from getting fired for being retards?

[rant]This is probably one of the more fundamental things wrong with society at the moment. People are being conditioned to be victims rather than to stand up for themselves and get shit done. This holds especially true in school where you have bullies messing with other kids in plain sight of adults and having no reprocussions, but the minute the victim decides to just beat the crap out of the bully, all of a sudden he/she is the one in trouble. And so kids get taught to just be victims from an early age, to whine and cry, feel sorry for themselves, and even just go tattle to anyone about everything.
It's the Barney generation mentality where everyone is supposed to be all soft and squishy. Parents aren't using a stern hand with their kids anymore and often are absent in their child's lives. What else is the child to do without someone to teach them that it is ok to put the bully in their place? Even then, these days I'm pretty sure that if a parent taught a child that and the kid did knock a bully out, the teachers would jump the parent's shit and maybe even call child services on them even though it's quite clearly the fault of the teacher for not paying attention.[/rant]

Anyhoo, with this case, is what Lori did wrong? Yep, but was it illegal? Nope.
Megan's parents were clearly at fault for every aspect of this. They failed at the very basics of parenting. They weren't involved with their daughter's life, they didn't keep an eye on her behavior, they didn't monitor what she was doing on the internet, etc. etc. They're just playing victim, blaming their own inadequacies as parents on someone else. Yes Lori is an evil bitch, but if the parents had just paid attention they would have noticed what was going on and caught it. It's not like it's hard to tell when someone you know is going through a depressive swing. Especially when it's your own damn daughter. It could have then been resolved on a personal level (i.e. knocking Lori out), and that would have been that.
But no, Megan was clearly a sad little victim, her parents are just so downtrodden by their loss, and Lori is an evil tyrant laying down fire and brimstone who needs to be caged away. Never mind the fact that if it wasn't for this happening, Megan's parents probably barely even knew she existed. They should be the ones in jail.

The only real advantage older players have is that they can do more. When you start playing Eve, if you choose something to specialize in and just go for that, then you'll be just as effective as the older players in doing that in a short while. Then from there you can start branching out.
For instance if you decide you want to be an interceptor pilot, then it really won't take a long time at all to get the skills you need to be a good interceptor pilot. From there you can branch upwards and learn to pilot a cruiser of some sort, or maybe learn to fly one of the electronic attack frigates, etc. etc.

I have a three year old toon and a toon around one year old, and my one year old toon, just through careful skill selection, is getting to be just as good of an equivalent battleship pilot (note: It doesn't take a year to do it, I took an early detour and got her into a fully tricked out Hulk exhumer first). Meanwhile my older toon isn't getting any better at battleship piloting because there's no more room for him to grow in that field. So essentially she has caught up to the older player and will be performing just as well. The difference between him and her isn't that he's better, just that he has access to more options than her.

Younger players can very easily compete with the older players just so long as they play (and train skills) smartly.