*mulph*

So that's how you spell that. I will use that from now on, well done.

...you've been able to trade real life money for ships, items, ...

But you've been able to trade it for things other players made. Other players made those ships and items (or ran the missions or complexes to get the items). In effect, you were buying game time for someone else in exchange for their in-game efforts.

Even when you did buy these things from other players, they didn't make it an "I win by credit card" situation. I say this as someone who has bought Plex and sold them for ISK.

So... babyzoink recommended the names Leofila, Diamorgan... and Ass.

I might as well just use George Carlin's "words". On second thought, I'll keep it clean and name my servers after Mitch Hedberg jokes. My servers shall now be called "fishclump", "goaround", and "smaquisthefrog".

My guess would be that the classes Kagetsuki took at Stanford were Computer Science classes, not programming classes. Those classes, I'd venture, were intended to teach you what computers can do. Computer Science and Programming are not the same thing.

By the same token, I suspect the classes in Japan that Kagetsuki mentions were classes on the craft of programming, and not computer science. They would teach how to tell a computer what to do, as opposed to teaching the range of opportunities. So vocational training rather than science.

You mean you dislike being able to lose? You dislike having human opponents? Or you dislike minimum competency requirements?

You actually have to try reasonably hard to lose everything, but if, for example, you buy a character with three years worth of skills, it's possible if you don't bother to learn the game basics.

You have to purposely ignore warnings. You have to put your character in situations where your ship will be destroyed. You then have to hang around while they take the time to target your pod and kill you. Assuming the character was sold to you with a proper clone, you then have to go do it all over again to lose your skills. You've not lost any assets beyond the two ships (one of which was likely free) and any implants in your character's head at the time of the initial pod-kill. You would then have to give away all your money, or continue to lose ships and buy new ones to lose all your assets. Finally, you'd have to do all of this in low or null security space instead of "hi-sec". Then you'd have to purposely avoid activities like missions, mining, killing NPC pirates in asteroid belts, trading, manufacturing, salvaging, and exploration to ensure you had no income.

All of this is possible, but if you manage to pull this off, you kind of deserve it. In fact a better way to put it would be to say "you have earned your losses."

Why shouldn't players be able to make a significant impact on the game world? If you can't really make an impact, then you're merely an incidental game mechanic instead of a driving force.

Now I'm not going to say that if you love WoW you'll love EVE. The two are very different games.

But there's not much else like heading into a fight with other players where you're risking your hard-earned (or bought with real money :p ) ISK. The risk makes the victory all the sweeter, or the loss all the more educational.

...they don't lose the skills they have already learned.

Of course, it is possible to lose skills. In Eve, loss of ship is fairly common. It is also possible to die if you have lost your ship and then also get your pod blown up, in which case your consciousness is restored into a clone (naturally). The trick of it is, you must purchase a clone of sufficient quality to hold all of the skill points you've accumulated. If you don't you will lose some of your skills. With Tech 3 ships, losing the ship causes "neural trauma" and you may lose some of your Strategic Cruiser skills.

If you fail hard enough, you can lose everything you've accumulated, usually at the hands of other players. This is where the meat of the game is. The striving for sovereignty, the warfare between large player factions, each one attempting to protect their own supply lines while damaging their opponents. The "play" extends right down to spies infiltrating rival player corporations and playing trust games to gain access to assets and liquidate them. More than most MMOs, this is a true sandbox game.

WoW funnels its players into "content" using "instancing" to fragment the gameplay player-by-player. EVE puts everyone in the same world, at the same time.

EVE is terrible, CCP is terrible.

Obligatory: Before you emo-rage-quit, can I have your stuff?

Wait, wait, wait... We're for the new Net Neutrality now?

A little history, the original Net Neutrality was essentially an anti-"toll road" proposal. It then morphed into a pro-"toll road" proposal at the hands of the telecoms. Then it became something completely different once Google did their deal. The version the FCC has decided to impose includes the ability to regulate speech. Say something or post something the FCC doesn't like and they take your blog down. You have to file an after-the-fact grievance, DMCA-style. Toll-roads are still there, they just follow the Google deal.

I thought that was a bad thing.

It's worse than that because it is being put in place as a power grab by the FCC, not as a power granted by new law. The House resolution was mainly to swat down the power grab... You know, balance of powers...

I thought that was a good thing.

If I understand your intent, I believe you've mixed up the use of the word "public" in your rewrite. My use of the word "public" meant "governmental". A taxpayer enterprise, would still mean the government, and yes, quasi-corporations run by the government are also bogus; see Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which were originally created as way to get government-held (public) debt off the budget reports.

One of your other possible meanings was simply to say publicly traded corporations are bad. That's both silly and a non-sequitur. Alternatively, you meant to say that governments paying private corporations for goods and services is bad. Again, that's fairly difficult to support.

If on the other hand, you were attempting to make some comment on the power of for-profit corporations when they lobby government officials, I'd probably agree that it can be bad thing. Unfortunately, your rewrite didn't clearly convey any of these messages, and again, had it done so, it would have been unrelated.

As you point out, this was a much simpler story: a whitelist issue on a guest network.

...that's obviously a free speech issue.

No it is obviously not a free speech issue. The civil right to say what you want does not include the right to use an employer's equipment to read or view whatever you want.

If the State Capitol wanted to increase worker productivity, they would block ESPN, not a pro-labor site.

It is not a pro-labor site as in "we favor doing your job well". It is a pro-labor-movement site and as such, contributes zero to getting work done. As to blocking ESPN, my guess is that the network admin would do so if the traffic grew to be a problem.

It's perfectly acceptable to surf the web during one's OSHA mandated break. The only reason to block the site...

Agreed. But if you use someone else's equipment, they get to decide what you look at. There's nothing to stop them from using their own smart phones to read the site. As for reasons why, I've given you at least one other reason; network traffic.

As far as the pro-labor movement goes, I tend to think unions are fine for workers in the private sector that need them. But unions for workers that get paid by taxpayers? That makes no sense at all. The people they "bargain" with have no incentive for efficiency, so very little pressure to negotiate vigorously for the side they represent (the taxpayers). The public unions are often "bargaining" with people whose campaigns they funnel money into, so there's also a conflict of interest. This inevitably leads to public unions becoming a faction organized against the public good, the very thing James Madison warned against. So government workers can't view a website aimed against the public interest using government PCs: boo hoo.

No, the phrase isn't cool (sadly). He ran as "One tough nerd." Therefore, he's keeping in character by making a software reference.

Might I recommend to you Eve On-line. It allows other players to punish the dumb. That's essentially what keeps the Eve economy running.

Even in PvE, the game finds ways to punish the loserly: get your tech-level 3 ship blown up and you lose some of the skills (trained in real time) used to run it. Also makes for some nice holy-crap moments in PvP.

I could be wrong, but I suspect you missed the point. The more debt China buys, the larger the chunk of U.S. citizen's lives China owns.

Our children will be the slaves when the bill comes due.

...Witness the Republican outrage over TSA's antics now that a Democrat is calling the shots and contrast it against the silence when GWB was calling the shots....

I don't think it's just Republican outrage... The TSA weren't running nudie scanners with the alternative being a junk-touching session when GWB was calling the shots. That's a brand new wrinkle that brings the privacy outrage up close and personal. I've always assumed that the government could listen into phone calls anyway (not legally, they just didn't blab about doing it), and that actual private conversations could only occur face-to-face. I'd also argue that these two kinds of privacy are of a very different quality. Privacy of one's communications is not the same as privacy of one's body.

You're making the false assumption that regulation will fix the problem. There's little guarantee or recourse for the viewer if the volume is too loud in spite of the law.

Granted, you can pay people in every TV market across the U.S. to sit and watch TV with tax-payer money to make sure of compliance. Or better, let's have the government commission the creation of software that monitors these levels for every broadcast and cable transmission everywhere, again with tax-payer dollars. We know how efficient the government is at software projects, for example that 18 million dollar web site... All of this seems drastically more wasteful than relying on the viewer to USE THE FREAKING MUTE BUTTON.

It is ridiculous that congress wasted time on this.