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They have done worse than that. They poison the search with useless results. Starting with their ongoing campaign to pare down and "simplify" the search interface by removing "advanced" search terms and changing the way strings and keywords are handled. (e.g enclosing in quotes no longer results in an exact string search...)
Ironically, resistor thermal noise is probably a better source of entropy than the gyro would have been. Why does the boot process require random numbers, anyway?
Rankings don't tell anything about proficiency. If the other 29 ahead are pretty functional, then #30 is probably also pretty functional.
The ringing phones thing doesn't make sense. If the phones really are connected to a cell phone network, then the search area is really small - a few square miles surrounding the cell tower that they're connected to.
The straighter the line the bigger the circle....
The obvious implication is they were hijacked. The not so obvious explanation is hypoxia-induced dementia in the pilots.
I've yet to see anything that eliminates either possibility.
Do RT users really matter?
I'm sure both of them would say, "Yes!"
..well, so pretty much have all the FUD-spreaders in the CDC, government, and NGOs who've been all telling us that "any moment" we could get a "deadly flu" since the (ha ha ha) Sars "epidemic".
All I've ever gotten is the "Cry Wolf" heebie jeebies.
If I have a $7.6 billion cushion, I frankly don't care if you knock me from my perch.
Granted this was beta, but here's what I found:
- a slavish determination to mimic World of Warcraft's aesthetic. Unsurprising, since the dev team AFAIK largely came from Blizzard. IMO this is a little too slavish, coming off like "WoW sci fi with guns". To me it's jarring that you have nicely-detailed characters with hi-rez textures, but you're running around a world with a klunky geometry that screams "this is all computers can handle in 2004". TF2 showed that you could adhere to a non-representational, 'cartoony' theme without necessarily deliberately going so far as to mimic the design compromises of a decade ago.
- Obviously this is entirely subjective, but there's a very fine line between quirky/kitschy and cheesy. The "bad guys" n00b island story line in Wildstar is cheesy; the good guys story is cheesy AND sappy. WoW had a certain sort of self-referential humor to a lot of what it did (at its best), and that has seemed to dominate latter releases *cough* *cough* Pandas *cough*. Wildstar continues this unfortunate narrative/editorial choice, with everything from animations to storyline being so "over the top" that it has to be self-mocking (with the 'good guy' side adding a further drippy saccharine layer of narrative - the tutorial quest has you saving a guy's pregnant wife...)
- They've already very much adopted the modern-mmo paradigm of "go to quest hub, get a bunch of quests, complete those quests, move to next hub". There's almost never (at least in the first 12-15 levels) a point where you go backward, for any reason. Everything is very conveniently placed; when you hit a place where you level up, there's a new-skill trainer already waiting for you.
- Some clever design ideas in UI, communicating what enemies are doing and what you're doing (and the area effects) clearly and intuitively.
It's WoW40k, nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I don't find the modern design choices in MMOs for 'everything to be easy' to be interesting or engaging, but that's not Wildstar's fault at all. They're very solidly in the current mainstream.
IF the system asked "do you want us to save your cc# for later purchases?" and they affirmed, it's the parents' problem.
If, OTOH the cc# was saved without advising the user that it WOULD be saved, that's just economic opportunism, and SHOULD be illegal - saving cc# data in a format that it can be executed for a transaction without affirmative confirmation by the sole cardholder is pretty much the same as making a copy of their cc, no?
The moon may be smaller than Earth, but it's further away.