I betcha they paid for this with the change from those $ 500.00 toilet seats and $ 200.00 hammers. Oh, and maybe they siphoned some money from those $100 Million dollar F-35's. No wonder the government is always close to broke.

agreed... +1 to tripleevenfall

It'd cost you much less than $100.00 to get the game and all of it's expansions now. About half that, actually.

With the newest patch, [ 4.2.0 ] - anyone who has a retail version of vanilla WOW ( The first CD ) is automatically upgraded to The Burning Crusade expansion now. see http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2993743#technical ( last item under general patch notes ). And that first version of WoW is on sale often for about $ 10.00 these days.
So for $10 bucks if you catch it on sale, you get World of Warcraft and the first expansion ( The Burning Crusade ), which is now included. ( It downloads for you automatically when you begin playing ).

I found the Cataclysm expansion on sale at Buy.com during the month of May for $18.00 shipped.
So I'm up to $28.00, and just waiting for the WoLK expansion to go on sale somewhere. I figure I should be able to snag it for $20.00 or less. Making WoW - with all the expansions - cost about $48.00 for the software this year, or about the price of most other games on CD / DVD lately. Whether they be for PC, Mac, XBox, etc.

Just FYI :)

Thank You for reminding everyone. I was gonna do that till I saw your post.

Great to see your post, BigSes ! I couldn't believe it myself when I searched these posts and saw no mention of the grand-daddy of MMORPG's ! I had to chirp up.
Glad to meet you, if/when you log in to The Realm, look for WebWarrior ( 400 Warrior ), Wryen ( 400 Wizzie ), Kalann ( 520 Adventurer, or MorningGlory. ( Yeah, I prefer watching the female form on my screen all day :) A male Warriors arse is just too 'butt' ugly to be having to look at on my monitor for hours at a time, even if we are just talking about pixels !
Thanks for the Cheers, brother. Made my day meeting a fellow Realmer.
Seeya in the game :)

And, yeah, the sig, ain't it the truth though ? :)

Ok, moving away from the PvP conversation and more towards the OP's queries about the old games with housing, house thieves, pick pocketing, and whatnot, brought to mind a game I'd played for years, in a galaxy far, far away.... :)
No, nothing to do with Star Wars, but it is in it's own little world.
It's one of the oldest MMORPG games is still going. ( It claims to be THE Oldest still going ).

The Realm Online http://www.realmserver.com/ , though not as popular as EQ or WoW, still has it's cartoonish charm, PvE or PvP, ( You can switch your own PvP on or off, or just attack another PvP flagged player to turn it on ).
And last I knew, each player still had their own password protected house, with lock chests in the bedrooms, but you needed to get into the habit of typing /evict and using your see invisibility spell to make sure you weren't going to get robbed.

I return to The Realm every few years or so, it's such a neat trip down memory lane.. and I'm glad it's still there. And, every time I return, my trusty old characters are right there waiting for me.
Last time I'd played the max level was 1000. And it didn't come easy.

Gee.. Thanks guys... now I'm thinking it's time to renew my subscription.

Well, I guess it won't hurt to help keep a piece of history going !

Way to Create New Jobs ! Instead of hiring the many unemployed in the country to watch these cameras at, say, $15.00 an hour, our Gov't decides to ask for 300,000 volunteers to do the job for them for free ! Good thinking, that. Does this mean that these volunteers are considered part and parcel of Homeland Security ?

Actually, in Windows 7, WoW installs itself all over ones hard drive. In Win7, WoW primarily installs into the Users-Public folders by default, apparently to avoid UAC issues, especially while updating. ( Users-Public-Games-World of WarCraft ). But it now also installs files into several other folders throughout the hierarchy. Like the update and cache info in the Users-[your user name ]- AppData-Local-Blizzard Entertainment folder. And a log file in ProgramData-Blizzard, as well as dll files and Uninstall info in Program Files-Common Files- Blizzard Entertainment-World of Warcraft. There may be other locations now as well, but the point is Blizzard must have heard your wish, because now WoW is 'installed' into so many different places in my hard drive that I'd have trouble backing this one particular application up easily on a regular basis. I don't like the way it installs now in Windows 7. I'd rather it all be in one place, so I don't have to hunt all over my hard drive in order to back this program up. Or to remove it.

Dude, do you know how long a cow would last in the Serengeti ? Or even in the woods in upstate NY ?
As soon as the lions and tigers and bears caught a sniff of that cow, said cow would be chased down until it either fell from exhaustion or was tackled by fangs and claws in it's neck. Then it would be mercilessly ripped apart while alive, to feed the animals above it in natures food chain.
Said cow might last 2 days in the wild. 2 days of nervous 'freedom' while it looked for food whilst trying to not become food.
So, you're right. A cow in a field full of food and virtually no predators would stay put, happily.
Hell, we humans pretty much do the same.
Even though this cow still ends up being food someday, it has a better life. ( I'm talkin' field raised cattle here, obviously. The pen operations suck. )
With humans, I would venture to say that the cow's death is less dramatic, and probably less painful.

Getting back on the subject,
The point is,
If you aren't living in the wild yourself, then somebody, somewhere, has your history. Your credit history, your employment history, you health history, your shopping history, your web page history, and on and on...
If you use a shopping card, Like Krogers, Marsh, IGA, etc, then you probably get coupons in the mail for just the exact foods that you like to eat and that you normally buy. Your coupon is a thank you for having allowed your grocer to sell your purchasing and eating habits to other firms. Your bank regularly sells your information to brokers, insurance companies, mortgage lenders, and anyone else with some cash to pony up for the information. In fact, almost ALL of the companies you've Ever done business with, sells your information in some form or another. This gives them even more income to further enhance their bottom line.
So why are you so paranoid about this company verses all the others ?

btw, this is all Just in case you were unaware of, but might become interested in, this view.

As mentioned in several posts before this one, I prefer to be redirected to PayPal's own website, and being asked to confirm my UID and password there. The whole idea behind PayPal was always anonymity when making payments online. The website you were purchasing from never had a chance to get your payment information. Being redirected to PayPal to make such an 'anonymous' payment to any website, made transactions safe and secure ( with any legitimate website, anyway ), and it also let me double check that I was indeed being redirected to PayPal, and not to some web page in Nigeria. . With this API, I don't think that I can never be sure of that. Too much is happening behind the scene. I would be entering my payment info into the web server of company xyz. In fact, alot of different company xyz's, throughout the year. Are each of these companies promising me that they aren't keeping my payment info ? Is my payment info being automatically and silently backed up into a dozen places on the operating system ? Histories ? Web Logs ? Is company xyz promising me that their system is well maintained, locked down, and they can safeguard the information that I have entered into their web page ? Will there never be any scripts on their web server that can capture my information and send it to Nigeria ? I don't think so. I don't see why PayPal is moving away from the security model that sold so many of us into using their service to begin with. And, just for PayPal's information, I don't like the new idea. I guess that all I can hope for is that PayPal insists that all of their clients include a link for me to go to the PayPal webpage to complete a transaction, just the way it has been for years now. And put that link somewhere close by this new API gizmo of theirs..

It's not just one CEO.
That "RIAA Organization" is owned, or paid for, and representing, and suing people, at the behest of the record labels you buy your CD"s from.
These include;

Big Machine Records
BMG Entertainment
Disney
EMI ( Capitol, Capitol Nashville, Virgin Records, and others )
Flicker
HBO
MGM
MTV ( including Nick at Nite, Nickelodeon, VH-1 and others )
Paradigm
Sony BMG ( Columbia, Epic, RCA, Arista, and others )[ all part of the same family ]
Universal Music Group ( Universal Records )
Warner Music Group
etc.
There are hundreds of them.
If you haven't seen it before, here's a good list http://www.riaaradar.com/tree.asp
That is your RIAA. It isn't just one CEO. It's the group of companies in that list on that website.
Want to hurt them ? Stop buying their stuff and feeding their lawyers, till they fly right.
I haven't purchased a CD from any of these 'companies', or any Sony product in almost 4 years. And Counting. And I hear plenty of music all day long on the radio. It ain't killing me.
I don't want my money going to their lawyers to twist the laws the way they do. It's a matter of principle. And now, maybe even pride.
I'm not out to sink the RIAA. The record labels need that group to protect their interests. It's the way they are Going About protecting that interest that I am opposed to. And I don't want the record labels to disappear either. I like music.
But I won't give my money to any group that abuses peoples rights and the laws as they were Intended.
I'm not hurting them much, they seem to have made it through this last recession without having to ask for a handout from the feds.
Even if they do claim they are in such poor financial condition from the abundant volumes of piracy they say is going on, they seem to be in good financial shape. So Somebody is still buying their products and supporting their RIAA "lawyers".
Which leads me to a parting question. Don't lawyers have to take some kind of oath to uphold the spirit of our Constitution and obey the laws that protect the people ?

Wikipedia keeps its past articles. In any case, that can be said of anything on the internet, as it can all be changed. Books can go out of print. Short of keeping a copy yourself and emailing them to others as needed, there is no form of citations that will get around the problem.

eink doesn't have less eyestrain or whatever, its still dark gray on light gray, just like the LCD, but it does use less power. They claim one year battery life for the LCD reader... with eink they could probably go a couple years... why bother.

At the time, people never seemed to get that the Rendition Verite, while not getting the best benchmarks, looked amazing compared to the crappy Riva. But of course because of that high number nVidia is the one that is still around today.