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Comment Re:Secret World (Score 1) 197

Furthermore, the game is aimed at adults with the purchasing power to subscribe to games. ... which is why it's rated M. They simply don't give a crap about the teenage demographic that most other MMOs target.

In that sense it's a niche title, but on the other hand the market they're targeting isn't very saturated so they have plenty of opportunity to gain a strong and loyal following.

Comment Screw ships, go RKVs (Score 4, Interesting) 892

Remove ships out of the equation entirely. I don't quite see what they could contribute. They're slow and inefficient, and impossible to give orders in time over large distances.

Relativistic kill vehicles are far more menacing weapons than any ship. It's a reinvention of one of mankind's earliest weapons: The humble rock, thrown at the enemy. But this rock is accelerated very near the speed of light, making it nearly impossible to detect, and completely impossible to stop (if you blow one up, it just increases the destruction). Even a fairly modest RKV can carry the destructive force of a hundreds of atomic bombs and absolutely obliterate it's target.

Comment Re:No win, really (Score 4, Insightful) 213

If you censor criticism, you're not merely losing the moral high ground, you're also validating the criticism (after all, why would you censor something if it wasn't true?) as well as giving it publicity (see the Streisand effect.)

The correct thing to do is to face the criticism. If they are wrong, then you prove it (tour of the facilities maybe?). If they've unearthed something wrong, then you publicly apologize and fix that. Under no circumstances try to weasel out through semantic loopholes or by putting down straw men.

Comment Re:I've been using FF for exclusively for years (Score 1) 683

Shit started with the "smart" URL bar in Firefox 3. It behaved completely differently to the Firefox 2 URL bar, and there was no getting back to the original behavior. Which wouldn't be bad, except the new URL bar was became incredibly slow on certain slow software configurations (largely dependent on what file system was used) after a couple of months of use.

There has been many more changes like this through the years. The official mozilla policy seems to be to never offer ways of fixing a slow or frustrating user experience ("switch to tab" in newer firefox, how I despise you), and hand all that to extension developers. Except, they're rarely able to actually fix the problem.

Comment Re:Less Duplication? (Score 1) 306

Experiments need to be repeated because they're fairly often wrong. If we remove verification from science, while we will produce more results initially, a large portion of that will be wrong, and so will any future science based on those results, and in the end, so much of science will be incorrect that it's completely useless.

Comment Re:Multiplayer games that are actually social (Score 1) 111

Back in the day (est. 2000), there was not very subtle Zelda: A Link to the Past clone called "Graal Online" that was multiplayer. The gameplay mechanics and graphics were very similar to the SNES title, except there were hundreds of people running around doing random quests (and the lore was different).

It was a lot of fun in the day, but it sort of went down hill and slipped into obscurity (even if a cursory googling sugests it's still around). Partly from competition from emerging MMORPGs like WoW, but also due to questionable business decisions (it went from free to play to credit card only; brilliant move when a bunch of kids without credit cards constitute a significant chunk of the player base).

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