Wow, talk about a gross oversimplification. The Israel that was 'formed' by the UN partition agreement in 1947 was much smaller than what exists today. What happened in 1947/1948 was a civil war between the Israeli and Arab populations in Palestine followed by a full on war between Israel and Egypt/Jordan/Syria/Iraq/Saudi after the British mandate in Palestine ended. The current borders of Israel are the result of a war that Israels neighbors started and lost in 1948.

Calling the 1967 war a "land grab" is a bit of a joke too. Do you seriously think there was not provocation for that invasion? What's your excuse for 1973?

Finally I'll note that White Phosphorous is not "illegal".

You do realize that WoW has put in city portals, a 30-min CD on hearthstones, summoning stones at instances and given Warlocks what effectively amount to portable summoning stones. Right? Or is this a rant about WoW from 3 years ago?

I played the single player RPGs of yesteryear in to the ground and I loved many of them. Besides your extended travel time canard do you have anything else to add besides insulting the game taste of 11 million people with one broad stroke?

You're overhyping. I don't really care to dig up all the links to prove that you're exaggerating everything, but let's just try one...

"Yes its a huge forklift upgrade from CDMA to GSM/LTE for Verizon - but it is already well under way."

Just wrong. VzW is going to continue to run EV-DO and will run an overlay LTE network for data. Voice will stay on CDMA for the forseeable future. VzW is not upgrading anything to GSM.

You've overhyping big time.

LTE dongles will not be commercially available in volume until 2010. Chipsets for LTE phones won't be available in volume until 2011 at best. Verizon will also be late, so the net of it is you won't see widespread coverage and widespread device availability until the 2011-2012 timeframe anyway. Verizon will be selling EV-DO phones, dongles and netbooks for several years to come, there is no "changeover from CDMA to GSM in 2010" in any way and their CDMA network is not going anywhere any time soon.

Furthermore, Verizon isn't "skipping" HSPA since there isn't an upgrade path for them unless they wanted to forklift upgrade their 1x/DO network to HSPA which is never going to happen. AT&T on the other hand has an easier upgrade path from HSPA to LTE since the HSPA packet core can be upgraded to support LTE so they are really just looking at a RAN upgrade.

The net of it is that you won't be doing much with LTE for 2-3 years, and while Verizon will undoubtedly be first to market with LTE in the US AT&T won't be terribly far behind.

I still play BF2 a couple of times a week and enjoy it, but the number of players is still way down from a couple of years ago. At some point EA will pull the plug on the servers, which will be a shame. I still miss Desert Combat :(

I never said it was bad. The OPs point is that Blizzard only cares about and only releases "free" content for raiders, which is demonstrably not true.

Is gathering 5 other people of specific classes for a contiguous timespan casual? You do realize we're discussing a multiplayer game, right?

ZA was getting cleared by trade-channel PuGs before too long. The instance was designed for casual players - the timed run for the warbear mount was thrown in as a bone for raiding guilds.

In the TBC cycle, off the top of my head, the following was added for "casuals":
- Netherwing quest hub
- Shatari Skyguard quest hub
- Ogri'la quest hub
- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests
- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance
- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters

They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.

On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.

If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.