I find it hard to imagine that they're now suffering anything close to the way in which being locked in a 3*3*2 meter cage for half the day is suffering.

The fact that one of the two parties, y'know, did something to earn their suffering might factor into things a bit here.

Which one is it (or is it both somehow)?

If news coverage of it's saying one thing - that the player's gunning down civilians - and the company producing the game is saying another - that it's effectively an interactive cutscene whose point is to say that These Guys Are Bad - I'm inclined to give Activision the benefit of the doubt, even if they're still deep in the failure mines with other aspects of the game.

While the idea of those Windows-induced problems traveling back through time to, say, influence King Leopold II's management style or spawn any of the other eleven gazillion and three problems that Africa has had over the twentieth century is, honestly, kind of awesome in a horrible way, I'm skeptical that that's how it actually happened.

Without Bill Gates keeping science and engineering from developing, those people wouldn't be poor in the first place.

You heard it here, ladies and gentlemen: Bill Gates' marketing tactics in the eighties and nineties are the cause of catastrophically-botched decolonization in the sixties and seventies.

All they have to do is to hit the cockpit with the cannon (as to prevent further manoeuvres by the terrorists) and then the engines/wings until enough propulsion/flight surfaces are destroyed.

Wow.

You're one of those people who think that all police officers need to do is shoot the gun/knife/whatever out of the criminal's hand, aren't you?

(ObDisclaimer: agnostic speaking here.)

Purgatory and Limbo are two different creatures. The former's Heaven's waiting room with a maximally irritating selection of magazines and radio stations, and the latter's an area of neither-punishment-nor-reward for those who hadn't earned a ride on either elevator just yet.

You probably wouldn't mind hanging out on Limbo with nothing better to do, since it's supposed to be maximally benign without actually being heaven itself. Purgatory sucks by design, though.

I've always loved the look of Tibetan myself; it looks like writing you'd find in a moderately-epic fantasy or science fiction setting, to say nothing of simply looking neat for its own sake.

As to the original topic of the thread, I've also recently come to the horrible realization that my Greek handwriting is clearer than my English. When folks look at my writing it's all Greek to them regardless of whether it actually is or not. :P

The euthenasia of this massive organization will breathe new life into the game, but it may also drive a large number of these people who were screwed out of the game, making a huge dent in the userbase.

I got the impression that quite a few people were either signing up or returning because, well, the euthanasia of that massive organization breathed new life into the game.

It's like an in-character collapse of Rome in space or something. The sheer amount of disorder and fluidity that this set off provides all sorts of opportunity for players to do a variety of interesting things before the dust settles. I don't play Eve myself - MMOs give me soul cancer - but I tend to look over friends' shoulders a lot who do play this particular game, and the stuff going on in the last few days has gotten me closer to considering signing up than, well, pretty much anything else.

(Also, "Alliance" does not map to "Guild" in the WoW sense at all. You're underestimating the scope of the organization that got taken down, I think.)

So's one hydrogen atom these days.

It's too late. We're everywhere.

The times I've had to get that crap off a system I felt I needed a priest rather than a technician. Ugh.

(For discussion's sake I'm assuming against all hope and reason that it wouldn't be ultra-aggressive, malign Futurespam(tm) which constantly fills your browser and email and HUD with exquisitely personalized 3D video, surround audio and complimentary pheromones.)

At that point I'd be annoyed at the tunnel vision it involves - you'd see a bunch of stuff you're demonstrably interested in, but what about the things out of left field you wouldn't have acquired an interest in until you went "hey, what the.."?

Might be useful for some people, but for those of us with a lot of interests and every desire to acquire more, it'd fall short. You can't personalize advertising for things which haven't wound up as part of someone's personality, after all.

This is likely to be an extremely unpopular view but there are very legitimate reasons for a state to seek limits in the distribution of news, and limits to what its citizens communicate to outsiders. Most of these actions truly do have the welfare of the citizens and their crucial security in mind. These things are done to preserve their life most of the time.

No there aren't, no they don't, and no they aren't.

The one where her character was talking about Turhan? Yeah.

Having (briefly) met her once, I think she'd appreciate the cascade of awful, awful Trek jokes that would spring up at the news of something like this.

Or the Scotty route, which ideally done results in a thundering hangover and the inability to find at least half your clothes.