This was mandatory in my first year of high school(8-12). It only took a few weeks and was rolled into either the fine arts elective or the everything else course(sex ed, woodwork, cooking, sewing, etc).

Touch Typing could be taught in Elementary School but when I was there the computers were older than the students. The school could have taught touch typing on apple 2s but it did not.

Of course, maybe children are just learning this on their own or from family members now. I was managing to type a few "papers" before being taught touch typing and I do not recall hunting and pecking at the keys to do it.

The Airbus example is an interesting one in the "two wrongs make a right" field.

"Industry espionage"
It is not Microsoft or Coca Cola who have access to the information right now.

If the EU is trying to track something down that goes through US accounts they should not be at a dead end either.

If the EU wants to keep the US out of their bank accounts that is fair, but someone should be watching, acting, and sharing if it is a useful tool for monitoring and prevention of terrorist actions.

From the picture it looks like it is going to wake his head up into a dresser.

Upon watching the video I was half right.

On the PS3 a certain amount of ram is reserved for the OS and it's features, the amount has been lowered at times but no game can turn off features to use that memory. At one time it was around 90 megabytes.

Looking past the very basic needs of searching and typing addresses I find that most web use today involves typing something

DOOM fans may have not been big on Doom 3 but it sold very well.

"Since 1996, id powered games have generated worldwide revenues in excess of $2 Billion. id's most recent internally developed title, DOOM 3ï½, extends a proven track record with over 3.5 million units sold and is id's most successful game to date." http://www.shacknews.com/docs/press/010710_id_carmack_emmys.x

They also did focus on one thing at a time until more recently. Raven made Quake 4, Splash Damage made ET:QW, then id fixed Quake 4 before starting on Rage.

You could also look at Warsow built on a dervivative of the Quake 2 engine. I think the pro mode portion of the Q3 CPMA mod may eventually be a stand alone product as well. Both are still deathmatch games(cpm is pretty much THE dm game), unlike urban terror.

None of the new games with "innovative" gameplay have been as good as the early offerings of id.

I think I remember hearing about that now. I also don't remember seeing anyone talk about it on VN since, so either the playerbase moved away from the boards or FF doesn't use it much.

Well I had stopped playing a year or more before that but I recall reading that it added a new tier of loot and level 8 spells, any other additions of that type broke pvp moreso.

Either way, that is the once in awhile thing i was talking about. There were probably only about 10 patches that were intended to be for pks(hollows, phantoms, weepings, aegis shield, balance changes, etc) whereas the other 90ish did not have pvp content.

PKlite slowly killed off any PVP outside of darktide, I doubt that game has any pvp bias today.

Hardly PVP biased. AC has been more and more anti pvp biased it's whole existence. One monthly patch every couple years was for PVP. The developers of the game were almost completely PVE focused.

There are always ways to deal with that. You could force players to be stuck as non player killers for a few minutes(this also gives them half a chance to run away if they are camped). It could be costly in time or resources to go cesspool fight. If the game is full loot or partial loot they eventually have to slow down or stop if they keep dieing.

Here is what AC did for PK deaths
-stuck white for 5 minutes, can't attack other players
-5% stat loss(temporary took a little bit of xp to get rid of) per death up to 40%
-lost 15 or so items, you were able to rig the odds so what you wanted to drop dropped but you would only have so much storage space before you would drop your real gear.
-it would take some time to rebuff your character(probably 5 mins in the old days)

The regular servers did get screwed up by what you talk about when they added an optional penalty free pvp though.

I assume that other games like UO also had enough cost of reequiping that people could not just zerg back immediately or indefinitely.

The article writer should try or have tried Asheron's Call. The game had a gigantic world to explore with little details everywhere. It would probably take days to run end to end. The game did have ways to travel fast though.

Like other games players needed somewhere to reappaer when they die, AC had lifestones, AC had HUNDREDS of lifestones. Towns had them but some wilderness areas had them as well, there were even a few rare ones inside dungeon areas. Early on in the game players had to die to get back there but that was eventually fixed, much later players got the ability store a second one accessible with spells.

Traversal of the great seemless world could be accomplished the same way as going inside/outside of dungeons - portals. In some areas there would be loops of quickly accessible portals to use like a transit system through the towns. Others would send the player to far off areas without a return. Players could save two of these with magic and summon them for themselves and others so that players could get back to that very far away place instantly, and bring friends. More and more special portal spells were added to the game over time giving the player instant access to special areas, usually islands added onto the game in patches.

The addition of landscape housing made traveling anywhere in this gigantic game easy. Near towns there would be portals to a dozen settlements of housing, Now 90% of the mainland in the game was accessible in less than 5 minutes.

AC had a large unique sandbox world to explore and did not force the player to spend hours running if they did not want to. It was the todays "next generation mmo" in many ways but released in 1999. Oh and players ran really fast!