<quote><p>>I miss that realistic twist from the old rules, without "feats" or "powers" or other abstract concepts that are more just bootstraps to their specific world.</p></quote>

Then USE the old rules. There are plenty of people that still do. Or better yet, write your own.. I don't think I've ever played with a group of people that used any set of book rules in its entirety.

And if you're not imaginative enough to write your modules, it's incredibly easy to buy a modern module and convert it to any rule set you'd like.

You're entirely wrong. What you're talking about is class warfare. It's the same red hearing that totalitarian governments always throw up. "It's the rich! It's the Jews! It's the capitalists!" How many times have we heard this in history? How many times did we fall for it? Are you going to fall for it again?

The game was headed by former SOE staff... the very people that worked on EQ2 disaster. There was only 1 way this was going to end.

They take the rights of the unscrupulous first. Then they change their definition of unscrupulous slightly to include more of the population. Once rights only belong to a limited set of people, that limited set tends to shrink until those rights apply to no one but the ruling class. The beginning of this century is being marked by the same gradual slide into totalitarianism that the last century was. Do you really think the federal government cares about pirated movies? This is about power, and control.

Rarely, if ever, is anyones goal a transparent amplifier. Especially when it comes to actual instrument amplification. Tube amps produce superior sound in almost all situations. A transistor, when clipping, literally squares off the top of the wave. A Tube will still clip but does so gradually, producing a more rounded wave form. Basically when clipping a transistor sounds horrendous... you must always operate a transistor well bellow its clipping threshold (hard to do with analog instruments) where as the tube amp can actually make the tone sound better than it originally was (again, especially in instrument amplification where dynamic range is extremely large and clipping is almost a constant issue)

Their drawbacks are pretty strait forward. They require large voltages for the plate current, and therefor require large transformers... making them heavy and impracticable for small devices like portable radios. They are also a lot more efficient than transistor amps. Compare a 10watt tube amp to a 10watt transistor amp sometime. The tube amp will rattle your windows while the transistor amp will be hard to hear from across the room. This is actually a negative in my opinion. Consumers like to compare numbers so amplifier manufacturers rarely produce anything bellow 10-20 watts, and tube amps sound their best when they are hot (turned all the way up) the result is that it's rare to find a tube amp you can use at full volume. I have a 600watt MesaBoogie guitar amp that literally has shattered windows in my house. It's more appropriate for playing stadiums than bars. It's a great amp but I definitely wish I purchased the lowest wattage model they were selling at the time. Lastly Tubes are expensive, and ware out. Not a problem with transistors.

Because the environment "feels" real. You can run around and see the circuit pathways and actually visually understand how the processor works... as apposed to having some abstract flowchart or diagram.

So wait... the PC is dead and we'll all be browsing the internet on our 4" smartphone screens? That'll make reading anything longer than a sentence rather difficult... and wikipedia... wait, they're full of shit aren't they?

IBM invents new things, clearly something Apples never been interested in. Good call.

Apple is using that same control to prevent you from scanning for viruses...

http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/05/22/apple-wont-let-kaspersky-develop-tools-for-ios/

As usual when someone with an agenda throws statistics at you, you can rest assured that they've manipulated them in such a way to achieve their own goals. In this case, it's rather easy to see what they are doing. Worldwide? When I was in Africa 2 years ago, the hotel I stayed in had a computer in the community room. Windows Genuine Advantage warnings kept popping up. I fixed that for them... much to the bemusement of the Microsoft employee that was staying their with us. After traveling to several other locations we found that, at least to our limited exposure, ALL the software on EVERY computer was pirated. The Microsoft guy was appalled. I asked him where he expected these people to buy his software? Shipping to that part of africa was somewhere in the neighborhood of $500... There were no walmarts, or any sort of software vendors. The fastest data connection I came across was at a coffee shop at it was 56k. So you can be fairly certain that the entire continent of Africa's piracy rate is well above 99% Take the population of Africa... oh and China... and India... are you starting to get the picture? Did their poll ask people if it were possible for them to buy the software they needed in the first place? I doubt it.