Yes, if there's a reactor meltdown in your neighborhood you should stay put and ignore the panic mongers. A little radiation never did anything.

No, my life would have been changed (i.e., ended in the cosmic collapse) if I *had* hit him.

That's what happens when you kick a game out into the open long before it's done and ready for prime time. And while it's become the norm for the industry to release MMOs that are barely finished and still quite buggy, that one was decidedly NOT finished. Easy to be seen by looking at how they retained the WHOLE coder staff into release (instead of the usual way of putting most people to new projects while letting a core team iron out the kinks). The game was a mess. Shot balance (to the point where a few classes could not even afford the ammo they needed with slowly killing guns while others turned into veritable cash machines that instakilled nearly everything on dirt cheap ammunition/no ammunition), buggy quests and zero endgame content. And when I say zero I mean zero. Not "just one dungeon" or "just a few things you could do". There was literally NOTHING to do when you hit 50, which happened VERY quickly.

That improved over time and by the time it was about to be shut down, i.e. a year after launch, it was ready. TR was a really great game right at the moment they wanted to pull the plug on it, that's pretty much when it began to be awesome. The classes were balanced and there were synergies between them, everything worked really well and with the reclaiming of Earth, Endgame began to work out.

It was released a year prematurely. I can understand that after IIRC 5 years of development NC got a bit queasy, but waiting another year would have given them a gem that could still shine today. It was finally something other than the n-th WoW clone. Many people I know who played it were fed up with WoW and were happy that there was finally something different. Yeah, even though it was a drag during most of its run, but it least it was NOT WoW!

And as "compensation" for shutting it down on us, they wanted to hand us a free copy of their WoW clone Aion. Talk about NOT understanding your player base at all...

Yep. No sane kid would think that it's a great idea to have a vacation in a warzone.

Seems that kids have more common sense than some parents...

The speed of light is a limit on how fast you can accelerate something *in* space, but it's not a limit on how fast space can expand.

In fact you can't even state the rate of expansion of space as a velocity, because the velocity apparent as the speed of recession depends on how far away you're looking.

That's not rigorous enough for physics, but I do believe it meets the standards for good economics.

At least that much of your theory is correct.

[clears throat] "the stray cat I almost ran over yesterday is the fundamental reason for why the universe didn't become a black hole in the early stages after the Big Bang."

There's a difference between 'a vacuum' and 'nothing'.

One of my back-burner ideas is speeding up email forwarding. Most email forwarders (sendmail, etc.) accept emails, put them in a queue, and then later spool them out to the destination. This adds a minute or so of latency. It's done this way for historical reasons. In the early days, the destination mail agent might be down, or the mail transfer might be over some polled protocol like UUCP.

That's dead. Today, if the destination mail agent exists, it's probably up and immediately reachable via a fast connection. So a modern mail fowarder should accept the incoming email via SMTP, and then, while holding the incoming connection open, send the email on to the destination mail agent. Any problems are immediately reported to the sender via SMTP status code.

This not only speeds things up a bit, it eliminates "bounce messages" generated between mail agents. Problem reports come back immediately, as SMTP errors. There's a series of open TCP connections from sender to the receiver's IMAP server. From the IMAP server to the final destination, today you usually have some kind of push notification. So you get the effect of instant messaging, using existing email protocols.

This also eliminates "joe jobs", where impersonation generates vast numbers of bounce messages. The spammer just gets lots of SMTP errors, which never bother anybody else.

Godzilla is now based on science!

I can stated with equal evidence and authority that the stray cat I almost ran over yesterday is the fundamental reason for why the universe didn't become a black hole in the early stages after the Big Bang.

Be glad I missed him.

No, you're thinking about the Divine Monkeyspank hypothesis, which is indeed religion, but not disguised as science.

p.s. - Your troll score is: 0

Which he stated, but did not attempt to explain.

I always wondered why collapsing matter would drag space with it. After reading the link, I still do.

It DOESN'T MAKE ANY DIFFERENCE where Apple stores credit card / serial number / address info. Look folks, it's pretty obvious. Any government larger than, say, North Korea, has the contacts, money and power to get any consumer or personal information running across their territory. Britain, France, Germany, hell even Portugal or Texas (well maybe not Texas).

So, all you can hope for, be you Chinese or American, Swiss or Tongan, is that your friggen Credit Card stays away from some clown in Eastern Europe who wants to make a quick buck. That's ALL you can hope to do.

You put something on a computer hooked to the Internet - it's not private anymore. End of story.