I was really hoping that he would call himself Pope Awesome. A little marketing never hurt. If I were Pope, I'd have to go with either taking the name Mobile, or possibly Oree.

Funny, but it does make me wonder. While I'm not gay, I do tend to like statuses and pages that have to do with gay rights, and several of my friends on Facebook are gay, yet I still see ads all the time for single ladies in my area. It makes me wonder: 1) Has Facebook accurately pegged me as straight (or bisexual) even though I haven't given it any direct indication of what I am, 2) has Facebook not made the connection and/or advertisers don't care, just spamming their ads to all males, or 3) is Facebook using some other algorithm that happens to be accurate for me, but generally less accurate for the population as a whole? Personally, I think #2 is correct.

I'd like to see a page about me that says, "Here's the information you've provided, and here's the information we're inferring from what we know about you." I suppose they'd never do that because it might very well creep people out too much, but then, it might get people whose inferences are wrong to directly supply the information to them.

Maybe, but if you're a nude man and see someone attractive, it could be a bit embarrassing. You just can't hide that. And if you spend much time in an airport, you'll know that there are some VERY attractive people who go through there. While I'm not so low on self-control that I'd rape someone, sometimes just thinking about that girl I saw in the theater last night is enough that I'm glad I wear pants everywhere I go about my daily business.

True story: A few years ago I got sick as a dog, running fever, having chills, and relevantly to this story, I had a nasty case of laryngitis. I wasn't just hoarse, I just plain couldn't talk. I called my insurance company to get some information I needed to go to the doctor, and I had one of those damn voice menus. "Please say your social security number!"...

I tried entering it in using touch tones, but it wouldn't work. The damn thing insisted that I say my social security number, and it wouldn't let me talk to anyone until I did. And I tried, too. Oh lord, I did try. I could get enough weird sounds out that a human could probably understand what I was saying, but my voice was breaking up so badly that the IVR couldn't decipher it.

I ended up going to the doctor anyway, and they had someone from the receptionist desk help me out with the insurance stuff because according to that insurance company, if you can't talk, you don't get help.

To this day, I think that any company worth its salt should give you the option of dropping to a human operator to help you. There are just too many things that can go wrong with an IVR, and too many problems that are simply unsolvable via automated response systems.

I'd go even further, and say that most of even the best documentation doesn't provide use cases and best practices. Picking on MSDN as an example, there are some really good articles out there about various topics, but there aren't a lot of articles on addressing a specific question or need. If you need to know how to use, for example, a treeview control, MSDN is probably the best place to go. But it doesn't answer the question, should I be using a treeview control to begin with, or are there other solutions that might be better? Or, I'm having a specific problem with a treeview control, such as getting it to work right in a multithreaded application. How do I fix this? For those kinds of issues, you don't particularly need documentation, you need a community that is ready and willing to help you.

Having said that, one problem with StackOverflow is that it's not maintained that well. I've frequently found answers there that were just plain wrong, and answers that might have been applicable in 2005 when the software I'm working with was six versions behind what I'm using now. It would be nice if they had some sort of cleanup mechanism to maintain a bit of freshness to the answers and encourage people to re-answer questions when underlying technologies or software changes.

I didn't say that scientific discoveries can't be serendipitous. I said that counting on serendipity instead of active research for discoveries is foolish. One needs only look at how many discoveries were sought versus simply found for proof.

Gee, if only there were some way to convert one to the other, maybe even have a fuel source as a byproduct, wouldn't that be a wonderful dream?

Seriously? "Stumble upon" science? Man, I'm glad you had no authority in the Apollo program.

The idea is that you don't wait for these technologies to serendipitously come along, you go research and find them. Maybe your success will be limited, but in the process, you will probably stumble upon things that will be useful in other fields. In this day and age when we're approaching ecological disasters and energy crises, I think that a lot of the technology researched in working on a manned mission to Mars would be very useful in other fields.

You know, whenever I see someone quip how corrupt the US government is, I secretly wish that they could live for a year or two in a place where the government really is corrupt. Methinks they'd come back and never flippantly make such a comment again.

To be fair, no on is smarter than Isaac Newton, with the possible exception of Archimedes. Both of those dudes were off the charts. Any idiot can figure out a computer. Most people even after years of study could never come close to figuring out from scratch the stuff that Isaac Newton and Archimedes did. I'm convinced that if we could go back in time right before each's death, bring them to today, and give them a few extra years, either one could probably cure cancer or solve some of the weirdest questions we have in physics today. (After they got over the whole "Rela-- what? And what's so quantum about mechanics again?" thing.)

To me, intelligence isn't what you know, but your practical capacity and willingness to learn and discover new things.

Exactly. I run several hobbyist sites for gaming and such. I don't run ads, I don't charge for it, it's just for fun for games I play. The free version of Google Apps was absolutely perfect for us as a free alternative to paying for hosting our own e-mail services. Plus, everyone was pretty much familiar with the Gmail interface. I've set up several gaming "guilds" with basic sites and e-mail addresses.

Back when you could have up to 50 or so accounts, this was absolutely perfect. When they reduced it to 10, that put a serious dent in our ability to host all but the smallest of our guilds. Now that it's zero, well, I suppose I'll be finding and alternate solution because I simply cannot afford $50 per user per year for something that's just a hobby.

I don't understand why Google doesn't come up with some happy medium. For example, have a more limited free tier, something that allows you to manage 50 or 100 free e-mail accounts and calendars (with Google ads on them) with access to Gtalk, a total of 100 Google Docs (or 10 MB or some other limitation), and a few pages. If you want all of the full suite of hosting services, access to discussion groups, metrics, advertising, a larger site layout, etc. then you charge the $50 per user per year.

As it is, might get Google a few more paying customers, but more likely than not, it will just drive a lot of people away from Google and to another service. That's too bad, because I'd really like to continue using Google for these groups I set up.

I don't have time to respond to trolls, but I'll just point this out. From my OP above:

The average City of Heroes launch day veteran has probably spend between $1,500 and $2,000 on this game, many much more.

And then from your post:

The average launch day veteran actually probably spent a lot more than that.

That's the average launch day veteran, not the average player veteran - now you're starting to move the goal posts away from your original statement.

Yeah. Moving those goalposts... I'll read the rest of your post some other time, but if this is how it starts, I'm not feeling very encouraged that it will provide much insight.

- $15 per month for 8 years, 2 months = $1,470. Plus around $120 to $150 for the initial purchase and major expansions, and that puts you around $1,590 to $1,620 just for owning the game with one account. The average launch day veteran actually probably spent a lot more than that. Count in around an additional $40 or so for collector's editions, $100 for various add-on packs, $100 to $200 for microtransactions, and it's easily upwards of $2,000. If someone has two accounts, double all of that. If someone paid airfare and hotel costs to attend a convention or Player Summit, that could easily add between $500 and $1,000 almost at a minimum. Multiple trips, multiple outlays of cash. Run a fan site? Hosting costs, domain name registration, etc. could easily run up a few hundred bucks more. The average launch day veteran spent $1,500 to $2,000 on the game. A few might have spent less if they paid by the year and didn't buy any expansions or add-on packs. A few might be in the neighborhood of $10,000. So whatever math you're using, you're way off.

- First of all, you'd have to be pretty dense to have so many people claiming first-hand and second-hand knowledge of these negotiations and yet still believe that they didn't happen. You sound like the idiotic birthers who still don't believe that Obama was born in Hawaii in that there is no standard of "proof" that you will accept as real. Second of all, I defy you to explain why millions are required to be ponied up to acquire the game. Frankly, you sound like an NCsoft shill, given that they put out a statement halfway through October saying that they had "exhausted all options" in selling the game. Um... Really? I have a 5-year-old Honda Accord that I'll sell you for $100,000. It's even in pretty good shape. What? You don't want to buy it? Well, I guess I've exhausted all options in trying to sell my car then, and it's really your fault for not ponying up the arbitrarily hugely inflated price I pulled out of my ass. No, actually I call it being damned greedy and disingenuous, and completely disrespectful of people making good faith offers and screwing over your customers.

- I'm not even going to dignify the claim that the game wasn't making money or stable with a response. It's already been addressed by the Korea Times article and thoroughly debunked in other venues. Again, you either don't know what you're talking about or you're deliberately misrepresenting facts to troll.

I take it you're one of the forum trolls that was naysaying the crap every step of the way? Because you're spouting their party/propaganda line almost word-for-word, and you clearly either have no clue what you're talking about, or worse, you do and you're deliberately misrepresenting the truth to troll people.

Etc... etc... indeed.

As for the "tempest in a teapot," it's gotten national attention from several high-profile names, made virtually all gaming journalism sites of note, even hit the radar of mainstream news organizations like CNN and CNBC, and now there's a blisteringly negative article about them plastered on the front page of the Money section of one of the largest Korean news sites right in their own back yard. I'm not sure how much publicity you consider something to have needed getting before you consider it more than a "tempest in a teapot," but to most people, that's a pretty damn significant uproar, especially given the topic at hand.

This is true, we always knew that the game would shut down at some point. However...

The MMO genre of game is especially conducive to getting people to invest enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into the product. The average City of Heroes launch day veteran has probably spend between $1,500 and $2,000 on this game, many much more. And many have spent thousands of hours playing--not just mashing buttons, but coming up with creative stories, even contributing to user-generated content areas such as the Mission Architect system that allowed players to create their own custom enemies, contacts, mission objectives, dialog, etc. In other words, what NCsoft doesn't realize is that at this point, we have just as much stake in the game as they do (some would argue more), yet they hold the ultimate authority to unilaterally declare, "Okay, game over, we're going to destroy years of your effort and a large monetary investment." Not because the game wasn't making money--it was--but because they're undergoing a corporate "realignment".

Not only that, but in the process, they laid off over 80 employees at Paragon Studios, the Mountain View, California development studio that built and maintained City of Heroes. Before the shutdown announcement, a group of employees and investors tried to acquire the IP from NCsoft to keep the game running, but NCsoft wouldn't sell it. After the shutdown announcement, thanks to the SaveCoH movement, another attempt was made, but again, NCsoft wouldn't play ball, even releasing a statement that they had "exhausted all options" in trying to sell the game. Excuse me? Exhausted all options? They hold the IP. Now that the shutdown has come and gone and the community has largely dispersed, practically speaking, it's worth zero. It's impossible for them to have "exausted all options" unless and until the ink is dried on the page transferring the game and its IP to another company or organization that can run it.

Not only that, but this isn't the first time that NCsoft has done this. This is the fifth game in as many years. Auto Assault. Exteel. Dungeon Runners. Tabula Rasa. Now City of Heroes. Clearly to me, the company is an MMO killer. The players of City of Heroes aren't the first group of people to have their hard work and investment destroyed, and apparently, NCsoft doesn't really care very much that it's systematically destroying communities and the output of people's creative expression. As a gamer, why the hell would I ever want to buy a game like Guild Wars 2 or any of NCsoft's other games? Answer: I wouldn't, and they won't be seeing any money from me again.

So does NCsoft have the legal right to shut down City of Heroes, lay off everyone at Paragon Studios, and carry on as if nothing happened even though the company's own investor relations statements indicate that the game was steadily profitable and it had the overwhelming support of its development staff and management? Sure, no one is disputing that. However, I do firmly believe that NCsoft, and MMO game companies in particular, have an ethical obligation to do everything they can to plan for a game's sunset ahead of time and be willing to release the game property to another company or third-party organization willing to take over running it if one is willing to (which, in this case, there were multiple parties interested in doing so). To not do so shows an immense amount of disrespect for your customers, and you run the risk of generating the negative publicity and outcry such as the one NCsoft is facing right now.