I'm playing mostly RPGs so I won't comment on the other genres. There are plenty of great games that came out in the last few years: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Bioshock, etc. I also enjoyed Drakensang personally. Only some of them are reusing the existing worlds or gaming systems, but even then they bring a lot in comparison to the previous version. (Fallout 2 being isometric with turn based combat it's hard to compare it with Fallout 3 - plus the story, NPC, some weapons and almost everything else are new. It certainly beats playing Fallout 1 or 2 a 10th time.)

Fallout New Vegas should be about $60 in US, perhaps even more for the collector's edition.

Besides that there's a different point of view we should consider:

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-- John Dalberg-Acton

Some jobs are dangerous. We have specific safety rules and mechanisms in place in factories, for example, because even the most diligent and disciplined people are still people and will inevitably do mistakes. We do this to protect their health.

The same applies to police: they are still just people and even the most diligent and disciplined people will inevitably be corrupted by power. It's only a question of time. They are doing this job for us and that's why we owe them a working system of checks and balances that will protect their moral health when their human nature eventually, but inevitably takes over and tries to lead them away from the right path.

We should consider moral health as important as bodily health and prevent work environment from deteriorating it even if these safety rules tend to somewhat get in the way of the work.

Yesterday we were assigning IP addresses to PCs. Today we're giving IP addresses to mobile phones too.

But in the future we'll be giving them to each and every device out there: PC, mobile phone, car, all the home appliances (refrigerator, microwave, oven, TV, DVD, Hi-Fi, every speaker, AC, garage doors, multiple smart remote controls in homes controlling everything mentioned), key chains, wireless hard drives, wireless mice/keyboards/other controllers, printers, scanners, cameras, iPads and Kindles, advertisement screens on the streets, bus stops, individual gas station fuel injectors, all the CCTV cameras (multiple per every gas station, shop, on streets, etc.), all the vehicle sensors for collecting tolls, etc.

Not only is this list not extensive, it's going to keep increasing both in device types and devices per person. Everything is going to be connected and have a unique IP address. So how long before we need a new system?

Indeed, it is without doubt that 50-50 chance is quite probable, although ultimately not very likely, to be exact representation of the empirical distribution that is based on completely artificial data we draw a large part (but not all) of the important conclusions from — not ignoring the fact, that the resulting quality of education can be viewed from both subjective and objective point of view, or mixture of thereof, treating both as equals or using a customized scale model, adjusting for personal background, field, individual personality or even requirements set by third parties — which certainly is not based solely on personal income within a specific month or year a certain period of time after finishing the college, university or other educational entity providing comparable education at the comparable education level, not excluding educational entities that provide low level of quality of the education, but otherwise provide the comparable level of education.

Which is not to say that I personally disagree with your professional or personal opinion that you have come to, even though I cannot agree with it in its entirety, since it doesn't fully represent the true specifics of the topic at hand, that requires much greater attention that the like of which it's clearly receiving, much like other topics discussed in similar fashion on this web site, which I have been a member of for quite some time, which, although irrelevant, does prove completely nothing, which is to say exactly the kind of analogy I would present to most of the posts here included (even if one would not count future useless posts or useless posts with score below average threshold set up by an average user).

In conclusion one can't help but wonder why this topic is considered News instead of Ask Slashdot.

None of those arguments are available to GM pissing away tax dollars subsidizing yuppies who want bragging rights for being greener than thou.

Perhaps they are preparing the market. First of all, selling more Volts now will put pressure on the development of infrastructure to accommodate this type of car, which in turn will result in more people willing to buy it later, when the car is profitable. Second, being the market leader means the infrastructure will be accommodated primarily to your car, not a competitor's. People will be more likely to choose your car because of this and the competitors will have to adapt to your car, making it more expensive for them to produce their cars. There are many other smaller benefits to being the first one to fill the market with a new type of product.

Everything we mortals do is done in a hurry. We want to quickly earn a lot of money while we're young, because we feel the pressure of time. Later we won't be as bright and we'll have to rely on the earned experience, instead of the ability to learn and adapt fast. We also need to earn extra for the time when we're too old to work.

But what would happen if there was no pressure of time? Would we still try to have children earlier, because later we might not be able to? Would we still prioritize early earned money, because we have a limited productive age? Or would we simply start enjoying every moment of life?

You try to imaging how would it be like to live a life of an immortal, but you don't realize that the world would change fundamentally. Yes, you will be stuck with "them", but "they" will change too.

We can't tell if membership of these groups results in the behavior or if the behavior results in people becoming members of these groups.

Or if people behave differently online... or when playing games. One might even think that people actually play games to relax and get away from the usual problems they are facing, and therefore try to avoid stressful situations when gaming. Hard to believe, I know.

In the case of concert tickets, there is no value to geographic translocation (the concert is in a fixed venue), or early acquisition (the concert is at a fixed time). The value the scalper is providing is that you don't have to queue to get your ticket, and you have a higher probability of getting a ticket because fewer people want to pay their higher price.

When you set the ticket price high enough, not all seats might sell. Higher price is therefore a risk. Scalper that buys tickets takes this risk upon himself: he might get stuck with the extra tickets that he paid for. Taking the risk in this way is the classical example of being a businessman. If the scalper is better at estimating demand than the concert organizer, then the scalper will get extra value from it. The fact that scalpers buy tickets, therefore, means that (they think) they can predict demand better than concert organizers. If organizers would be able to predict demand perfectly, then scalpers buying tickets will benefit organizers at the cost of the scalper investment. Scalpers are just filling in the void. This is, however, assuming the tickets can't be returned. A ticket should be either returnable for full cost OR transferable, not both. (But also not neither.)

The problem being that the scalper is part of the reason they provide value ; they quickly buy up large quantities of tickets from the vendor, which artificially increases the scarcity of the goods. That isn't free-market capitalism, because they are distorting their market. If the organizer did their sums right, they should have enough seats for everyone willing to pay their stated ticket price. I'm not saying they do ... but in this case, the scalper is the reason for their own existence - the reason you're willing to pay the scalpers prices for a ticket is because the scalpers have bought them instead of you. They're not adding value and making a fat buck doing it and that annoys people. It's rent-seeking behaviour - they are profiting from the mere ownership of those tickets for a while

The fact that it annoys people is irrelevant from the economical standpoint - of course everyone would love to have goods cheaper or even free. The scalpers are simply filling the void. Yes, they are buying tickets in bulk. But that's because they believe the tickets are under-priced. If they didn't believe so, they would not take the risk. In this case it's not about adding the value, it's about the transfer of the risk. Risk is always part of the equation. Still the same assumption applies: the ticket must not be returnable for full price.

If concert goers didn't have to pay their inflated prices, they'd have more disposable income remaining and organizers might put on more dates in bigger venues to capture that, resulting in money going toward what people actually want, which is live music performances.

Scalpers don't inflate price, they bring it on par with demand. The original price was simply too low. Yes, if organizers were better at estimating demand, they would put the price higher. But that means they have to put extra effort (money) into market research and take the risk upon themselves. If they don't want to do that, the scalpers will do it for them. Once again, the risk is always part of the equation.

I'm not sure what is this "skill" you're talking about is. MMORPGs aren't FPS where you have to move your cursor to the target's head fast enough to be called skillful. Skill in RPGs involves assessing situation and making the best choice of action. If you've got a guide, good for you. Make sure you read it thoroughly while enemies are beating on you.

If you want a game with less grind and more fun quests, I can recommend Dungeons and Dragons Online. There are no "kill 10, bring 20, wait for 30 respawns, travel for 15 minutes" quests. All the quests are hand-crafted adventures in their own hand-crafted areas. DDO also has much more interesting character building - not many other MMOs have multiclassing, for example. Also you can now try it for free for unlimited time (but not all content) and see if you like it.

But less social also means it's harder to find friends in the new area, making moving much harder.

Evolution got us this far and is certainly a powerful tool, but it's *slow*. It's finally time humans took their future into their own hands.

No, he's not. He was asked to work on a problem and he delivered what he was asked for. He got paid for it too, whether it was money, social respect or anything of the sort. That's just normal honest business. The fault is with people who fraudulently submitted his work as their own.