Anyway, there's probably studies and stuff that trumps my anecdotal evidence for crashes in a 70s car. I'm not trying to say they're wrong. :P I'm sure cars today are much safer. It's just the low-medium crashes with a 70s car might not require much body work to keep driving, where a new crumple friendly car might have serious work to do. Kinda like how they used to make helmets to be reused, but then they did disposable helmets designed to break when you wreck. The newer helmets are better, no need to risk your brain on a wreck, but the older ones might not be bad if they're all you can afford.

I always wonder why a motorcyclist can get away with passing safety regulations, when cars are so heavily regulated with safety. My theory is that the big auto manufactures just don't want little auto manufactures competing in the US market. If a motorcyclist will get hurt 29x more likely than a car driver, you'd think they'd be more generous on what passes safety in a car.

I'm all for safety, we should all drive safe, but people should have the right to buy super cheap foreign cars with less safety regulations. Even if you're twice as likely to get hurt in a car, you're still 15x better than driving a motorcycle.

I owned a 74 chevy nova as my first car. I was racing with my friends. I wrecked my car into a guard rail, and jammed it back a bunch of feet. My car's damage? It had about a 1/2 inch dent which wasn't noticeable since I had so many other dents :) Big ol steel bodied cars are okay for people in them, but not so much the things you hit... kinda like how trucks operate...

I live in a family of people who can do pretty well under the hood for repairs. They've said they think it'd be great if auto manufacturers would go the reverse direction and make vehicles designed to be worked on. I'm not surprised car manufacturers are admitting they've been designing vehicles harder and harder to work on.

I don't know how many of you watch the auto auction sites on television, but those old 60s/70s vehicles seem to only go for a couple grand. If you're in the market for a car and you're low on cash, a nice shiny chunk of steel could be superior to whatever you might get used locally. Used cars always a risk because the people selling them might be doing it just because the car has hidden problems.

Hey, I've used micro transactions in games I wrote in the past to be honest! I just personally avoid games I pay for that also have micro transactions. I have enough games in my library that I don't have to lower myself to that level. Also I am not a fan of EA ever since they've been shutting down so many company's offices to slow competition. That is toxic for the game player who wants quality games being released.

The exception was the late 80s. Better graphics = better production budget = more likely to be quality. Judging a game by its graphics ended somewhere around the time 3d was being experimented with, then everything was hit or miss. Even a lot of big budget companies had no idea how to make a 3d game early on...

Followed by: I should have never bought that blaster battery from EA. I switched over to force sensitive for 100$. They didn't tell me advancing to deeper levels costs incrementally more money. But I get powers other players don't get, soooo worth it. The downside is that there is now permadeath for force sensitive characters, but I can revive myself at any time for 1$ with no loss of experience!

I don't have a data plan so I can't stream. And the 20$ portable radios you buy from Target break after a few months. I'm not sure I foresaw the smart phone revolution, but I did think they'd try and jam as many features into them as they could. Sad they have the FM feature disabled. I listen to www.KLOVE.com radio all day long. It isn't as great rhythmically as old 60s-70s classic rock and 90s alternative, but the lyrics are enriching.

Positive:

You don't keep running back to town for a ton of arrows and selling stuff. That's just boring. If you're really trying, you might have even tried to check every time the elite object guy was selling. This was boring.

No hovering next to stairs for easy escape which feels like cheating

Identifying potions, equipment and mushrooms becomes a lot more fun. Um, I have no food left! I guess its time to id the mushrooms and scrolls

Rules: Never take up stairs or recall. If you accidentally recall from id by reading, don't use the store or stairs, just recall back to where you were by buying a scroll( you should have enough gold). If you find down stairs, you don't need to take them until you're ready.

Spoiler strategy:

The only sane approach is Half Troll warrior. It sounds far fetched since they need to eat twice as mutch, but you need the brute strength for extra attacks to fight orcs and trolls before you have: Phial and enough food.



Sell everything you have to buy food/light. You may want to keep your weapon. You may want to add to the challenge by saying no town even to start.

You will want to clear the first 5-10 levels and just go down stairs without resting for wandering monsters.
Once you're about 10-20, you need to figure out if you want to rest or go down in stairs.

I go down in stairs if:
I'm getting low on food, fresh levels are more likely to have food.
There's a boss critter I can't handle. But going down in stairs makes it more challenging, so you might end up spiraling downstairs to a death condition because monsters are too tough.
When light is low, I dive for more light. Remember to make your rest macro remove your light before you rest. If you're really detail oriented, have a light removal macro when you enter rooms with light, but I find you don't need this. Light isn't as big as a problem as food(but is a possible loss condition)
The results is sometimes you dive further than you want to just to get food/light or avoid a boss or situation. Then you need to be aware of monsters that paralyze or breath you can't resist. It feels great when you get a Phial, or pile up satisfy hunger scrolls.

Now other classes can win! I especially started with the cleric/priest/druid or whatever gets a book of satisfy hunger, but I find that Morgoth needs to be whacked in melee, and the best melee is a fighter to do damage quickest. Also there's nothing more annoying than getting belted with a bunch of flames and your spell books all disappear and can't easily be restored. Play around, see what you can do.

No up stairs Angband is a whole new game, one which actually has challenges you can't exploit your way around. I'd say its one of the best games of all time, but few people even know about it. Make sure you get a version with autosquelch so the end levels don't slow you down sorting through trash on the floor.

Nethack? Angband is the superior choice for digging. If you think its too easy, don't ever take upstairs again, the game is beatable(and adds a whole new couple levels of fun and strategies).

Boulderdash wasn't bad either for an early C64 game when I experienced it. There was something about the rising sun coming over the horizon in more complicated games than atari2600 could provide that just opened a young kid's mind.

I've found that the more you tout that you have good security, the more recreational hackers come out of the wood work who would otherwise have no interest in your product other than you make it sound like a challenge. If you want good security, do your encryption, do your trip wires, keep important stuff server side, etc etc, but don't brag about it. Bragging about security on the Internet is like putting on a white karate outfit with a black belt and strutting all around the low income parts of town. Maybe you are secure in your components or your not, but don't go looking for people to try and break you.

To be honest, you're right, I really don't expect the telephone company to compete. For the longest time(2 decades), all they could offer is ASDL if you lived within a block of them. But what I don't like is when a state municipality rolls out their own solution, and then gets sued out of oblivion. If UPS could get away with what the telecoms have gotten away with, the Post Office would get sued out of existence for competing with private entities.

Turbine did pretty well with Microsoft too. They ran one of the biggest MMORPGS in the world(made tens of millions) before they released one of the worst MMOs the world had ever seen calling it the sequel to their well performing one.(Asheron's Call 1/2). What happened is "everyone" quit Asheron's Call 1 which they were enjoying, played Asheron's Call 2, hated it and quit without returning to Asheron's Call 1. Lesson here? Maybe never make a sequel to a MMORPG that is thriving because it makes the earlier version sound inferior.

Now good old Turbine is still around, but for some strange reason, they quit trying to make original MMORPGs. Personally, I think the next big MMORPG might be an action oriented game where you need to think when you fight instead of faceroll. Will one of these new space combat and economy games be good?

There are many different places much more sparse than USA, but with faster broadband and lower prices. The reason we have it so bad in the USA is because ISPs lobby the government against competition, and ISPs avoid overlapping with competitors. In the olden days of Ma Bell, at least the government stepped in to stop monopolistic abuse. Today with legalized bribery, USA officials don't necessarily regulate the corporations anymore. In fact the corporations are influencing the government more and more. Unchecked, the buying of the government officials could do more than just let monopolies gouge us and hold back innovation.

My broadband speed is only like 25mb/s which is way faster than 56k modem, but I tried downloading a 35gB file the other day and it took me about 2 days. South Korea has been rolling out 8000mb/s (1GB/s) internet lately and they don't pay nearly as much as we do in the states. ISPs in the states are dragging their feet to gouge the consumers, paying off senators to fight Net Neutrality. My Internet speed hasn't increased in about 5-10 years. If ISPs weren't so greedy and just invested some of their profits into better infrastructure, we should be able to compete with South Korea. Faster Internet helps society in all facets like education and culture.

Then at the end of the match, he accuses you of bringing a phone in to cheat. After all, it has half the match in its cache memory.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure my friend played this guy a few years ago, and he's been toileting every turn from years ago. My friend had great satisfaction this guy got busted because my friend accused him of cheating back in the day, but the officials did nothing.

I started using a Commodore 64 when I was 7. All of our family was amazed when we realized how to do 'Load"*",8,1' and Load"*",8,1
So many good times were had with the C64 simply because the jump in technology from what we had before it was so huge. We got our C64 a little over half a year before the NES. Its hard to imagine so much technology jump in one year. If you look at video games today, not much changes(more polys) each console generation anymore since we already had enough computing power to do what we wanted last generation. But going from Atari2600 games to C64/NES games was such a jump that it is hard to put into words, and maybe no one will understand it unless they lived through it. It inspired some sort of awe that I couldn't put into words.