Yeah, but the Space Shuttles had some flawed designs resulting in a few orbiter losses. Completing 11/11 launches isn't a good enough record, they should shoot for 12/11 or 13/11.

No, a lot of people on Slashdot don't use IP in that sense, but at the content creation companies (game/movie/whatever), that phrase gets tossed around pretty often.

Well, to be fair WoW is much much older and was releasing its 3rd expansion when Starcraft 2 came out. Starcraft 2 expansions have come out at roughly the same rate that that WoW expansions have.
WoW: every two years, pretty much like clockwork.
Starcraft 2: July 2010
Heart of the Swarm: March 2013
Legacy of the Void: In progress, art and voice assets finished. Game content currently being tuned. Sometime in 2015?

So Starcraft may be every 2 - 2.5 years. I'm not sure where the "each installment was supposed to be available a year afterward" came from, I heard early on that each installment was supposed to be the content size of the initial game, so it's more like buying a full game than an "expansion set."

I like referring to it's in-game name, "the Molten Corgi." I am ashamed that in 10 years of WoW I never thought of that myself, nor did the punster in my guild.

The valor upgrades were just there at the end of the expansion so that players would have something to do with all the valor they no longer had a use for, and the feature was removed for Pandaria, readded in a patch between raid dungeons to give a bit of an upgrade before the new raid came out, removed again when that raid was released, and readded (and later extended) at the end of Pandaria. Basically, it's something that was added for a limited time to give you a way to get a minor upgrade between raid cycles -- after an old raid had been out for awhile but before the new one was in. An item wasn't "not raid ready" if it didn't have a valor upgrade, and a raid who enforced that would have been very misguided. It did have the unintended consequence of inflating the item levels since newer raids had to come out with items better than the upgraded items from the old raid, and with how damage/healing/etc scaled with item levels... well, raiding at the end of Mists feels quite different than at the start.

Which is pretty much why for Warlords, stats like hit chance and expertise are being dropped, and the reforging system is being removed. No more having to regem and reforge every item to get that perfect 17% hit (or whatever). The developers said that when you need to get an external website like askmrrobot (which they called out by name at Blizzcon) to make all your reforging decisions for you, the system has gotten out of hand. I'm looking forward to its demise.

Cataclysm was next, and it actually started out as an improvement, introducing interesting stat combinations (I miss armor pen) and much, much harder starting dungeons. But by the end of the expansion Blizzard had entirely reversed course with the pronouncement that 5-mans should be extremely easy (and therefore disposable).

Pandaria has been a mixed bag.

Warlords might be interesting with the introduction of new secondary stats multistrike and versatility, and tertiary stats which don't count towards the item budgets, like chances of extra item levels or gem slots. The tertiary stats are intended to break the "item X is the best in slot I should always use" practice that has been prevalent in the last several years.

A lot of these things DID sound really cool, but playtesting with millions of players over several revealed that hey... being 1-2 shot just isn't very fun. It's not a fun playstyle for either side, whether it's the super-squishy mage himself, or the victim of the "3-minute-mage." For hunters are well, the inventory thing was ridiculous from the start -- the drawback is they have to fill their bags with arrows? Is this supposed to be World of Inventorycraft? Turns out that inventory hassles didn't actually ADD anything to the game. I was glad to see the addition of Void Storage, turning mounts into spells instead of physical objects you carry around, and the upcoming Toy Box, where unequipable toys and doodads go. That sort of inventory management never added to the game, didn't make it any more fun or interesting; it was only an annoyance.

I will say I looked forward to the PvP system promised with Diablo 2 -- that PvE and PvP balancing would be entirely separate, that spells would be balanced completely differently and have different effects in PvP, avoiding WoW's "they nerfed me in PvE because of PvP" problem (which is admittedly, still a really big problem for WoW, and it's only getting worse in the new expansion). But then real PvP for Diablo 2 was scrapped completely. Too bad.

Because "Game" and "IP" mean different things? They can have a new game, but it could be part of the Starcraft universe, as Starcraft 2 and Heart of the Swarm were.

"New IP" is a phrase that has meaning: "containing a new story, characters, and environment not featured in the company's other products."
"New game" and "new product" were too vague and generic to get the point across.

Phrases sometimes have multiple meanings, and IP is one of those. Sure, it's an umbrella term for copyright, trademark, patents, and trade secrets. But it's also an industry term for product lines.

In general, the "correct" way is to allow things to be done in the client, check them, and then deny access if what the client did was impossible or illegal given server constraints. That how you get responsiveness. If you require the server to send approval of every action, then things will indeed seem "sluggish." That's in a number of online games (like wow and FF) you can move freely, but you might "snap back" if a little lag strikes. Or why you can move instantly, but things like spellcasts might be delayed for server verification.

It's not easy to tell where the line should be for what you allow right now, and what you allow only after an ok from the server.

Hey, color (and honor, etc) is the original spelling. If the Normans hadn't conquered England and introduced those frenchified variations, we wouldn't be having this argument.

And no, England and English having the same root word in no way makes England the ultimate arbiter in how language spellings go.

Resting in an amphora.
One of appropriate size.

Sure, but the government has to be a broker, since the power companies need to work on property that isn't theirs. We can't have any company tearing up the streets at their leisure. Or any company laying lines underground under a private residence. It requires a government to be a coordinator and arbiter.

Ahhh, I was always happy to hear that when I had Pacbell Internet, as it meant I'd gotten past the clueless front-line and had gotten in touch with a back-end engineer who knew what I was talking about. Those guys always helped me out.

Now that's just cruel.

Yes it is, and the reporter is complaining about: "Wales insisted, apparently without irony, that requests for Google to remove links – not actual web pages, not actual source material, just links – to pages covered by the ruling (which includes libellous attack pages, revenge porn, and old police blotters) should, at minimum, be adjudicated by a court of law. In other words, European taxpayers should pay, without limitation, for their already-overburdened court systems to deal with every single revenge-porn complaint Google receives under the ruling, at a time when the economies of half the EU’s member-states are already close to the brink, and with energy prices set to rise precipitously during the coming winter."

In other words, the EU passes provisions sharply curtailing free speech, and they expect the companies to pay out of their own pocket for such ridiculous provisions. The idea that the EU member states should actually have to pay for their nonsense is reprehensible to this reporter.