I think it may be a method to generate more profit.

What happens when two companies start working together, exchanging goods for services, etc? Their overhead goes up because now they are dealing with two different cost/profit models that are pulling from different budgets. Typically the primary reason for companies to merge is to reduce those costs and bring a service "inside."

The drilling companies will see a rise in costs because they won't have a parent company to absorb overages or internal costs. The refiner will see a rise in processing and administration fees having to deal with an "external" company. Add to both of these all the standards requirements, federal regulations, etc.

Bottom line is these costs will be passed on to the consumers so that BOTH companies can continue to make ungodly profits.

Watched Captain America and was impressed with the genuine characters, story and unobtrusive special effects - they added without overpowering the scenes. The only issue I had was right at the beginning - Chris Evans' voice not matching the body; I became accustomed to it after a few minutes. Chris made Steve's character completely believable that he was pure, honorable and just wanted to do the right thing. Those are qualities lost today even in our fantasy heroes.

I made the mistake of trying to continue my movie high by going to see Transformers 3. Ugh! I dozed off several times, but didn't feel like I really missed anything. Besides the eye candy of Carly, the voice acting of Nimoy was the only decent part of the movie. Buzz Aldrin himself was just freaking cool, but not nearly enough to save this film. Such a shame for the franchise.

Having worked at an IT company that supported the U.S. government, I saw first hand how a load of bureaucratic hogwash can bring an operation to a halt. I fully understand the "skill" needed to navigate government procurement, approval, change, spending, etc. It's the biggest time and money wasting factor in any operation. Because the department heads feel everything needs to be checked, double-checked, triple-checked, signed off, filed in 12 different ways, audited twice and then run through oversight, by the time the work gets done (if it does) it is either no longer needed or outdated. Past actions of unscrupulous politicians, administrative staff and government employees have led to this necessity.

Add to this the people problem. Everyone I ever dealt with in the department I supported was extremely unskilled and ignorant of the knowledge they needed to know to do their job. I know for a fact that work days are short, especially Fridays and thanks to web monitoring software, I know most of the employees only spend about an hour a day of actual work. Now put this sluggish, ignorant person in charge of making a technical change to an application, a server or god forbid, a whole data center. Top it off with the IT barrage of regulations and procedures (SOX, ITIL, ISO, etc.) and you have the epitome of steering a huge ship with a small wooden paddle.

In the three years I supported them, I only ever saw one major implementation of new equipment, one successful disaster recovery exercise and multiple misses of the DNS SEC implementation.

With my inside knowledge I have no faith in our government in any department. I'm surprised ANYTHING gets done ever. Except, of course, pay raises. Those happen immediately, without fail and completely without merit.

I am seriously looking for this content you speak of. I spent about an hour last night looking through Starz page by page. Mostly crap.

In the Browse DVDs, yes, there are a few thousand. I look through the genres, searches or the recommended based upon my past ratings.

In the Starz Play, Netflix even posts a bullet of "Approximately 1,000 titles available from Starz Play" at the top.

I can only guess your tastes in movies are much, much broader than mine. We've been watching DVDs from Netflix the last 3 years. We basically caught up with all the movies we might have missed in the past few years, so now I watch for new releases, search for classics in the genres we like and catch up on TV series. I have about 75 in my DVD queue, but only 25 in the instant play.

While I was not including the Starz play in my original post, I checked into it last night. I was hoping to justify staying with Netflix for the streaming side. The DVD side is already not worth it as more and more DVDs arrive heavily scratched. Despite cleaning them using the techniques on the sleeve, a portion of the movie will still skip.

Starz play is 38 pages of 31 titles (1178) plus another page of 18 for a total of 1196 titles. The *AGE* of most of those titles immediately decreases the value for a viewer wanting recent (last 20 years) movies. The number of series of old television shows (Gene Autrey, Perry Mason) further decreased the value.

With both the Netflix DVD on demand library and the Starz play, yes, there are several thousand titles. Unless you greatly enjoy old, low-rated or low-budget movies and shows, though, the selection is significantly smaller. For my tastes a few hundred, half of which I've watched over the last three years of my subscription.

I'm already checking into Amazon Prime and Blockbuster for my movie fix when I cancel Netflix.

1. I have a box full of 3-8 year old PC components... just in case.

2. My original TI 99-4/A, monitor, tape drive and cartridges are in the attic and make an appearance every 3 years or so.

3. DOSBox on my MacbookPro allows me to play any public domain PC games. Currently about to finish Ultima IV for the 30th time.

4. Go to work. I'm amazed anything can run on this 10 year old crap, but hey, I remember how to support it.

Are you using the same Netflix I am? "...watch thousands of titles..." I see a few hundred, and most of those are older, lower budget or low rated movies.
I was looking at getting a wifi enabled player just for streaming Netflix, but after a few months of seeing the streaming selection is utter crap, it's not happening. I think I've watched all 10 of the streaming movies that were worth something.

http://www.freearcade.com/Zplet.jav/Scottadams.html

http://www.ultimaforever.com/

Is this really from CmdrTaco or is he posting it for a less than 20 year old? By the grammar and spelling mistakes, the general shallowness of the review and the lack of the real elements of the movie, I'm guessing the latter.

I saw this movie Friday, and while I didn't love it, I thought it was extremely enjoyable and a good fit with the rest of the Marvel stable of movies. Yes, it's a prequel and you know how it's going to end. Even so I thought the key story, the relationship between Charles and Eric and their back stories, was done very well. X-men has always been a gray area of debate, no clear good/bad side - Xavier's point of living peacefully with humans and Magneto's point of mutants dominating - are arguable from both points of view. This story set the baseline of that debate.

I thought it interesting that most of the cast was comprised of mostly unknown (to me) actors. Not being steeped in comic lore, I knew who a few characters were, but not all. The writers seem to expect viewers to know characters very well as they never once (that I caught) mentioned Riptide and only said Azazel a few times. i.e. for non-comic book mavens, a little more introduction would help.

I thought the main item lacking was the amount of action and especially working as a team. It's as if their powers were for display only. The montage of training and finding mutants was my favorite part of the entire movie. One point of annoyance was Banshee's mumble, but again, maybe that's part of his character and I just didn't know it.

If you try and lookup a few Marvel characters, you'll quickly realize that the movies can pick and choose any timeline or group they wish. Marvel has had so many reboots, re-writes and re-groupings it takes a real comic geek/genius to keep up with it all. I thought Havok was Cyclops' father by the movie timeline only to find out later he's his brother according to the comic history. I guess we're lucky to have anything resembling a thorough story for the movies.

1. Serve in government position, pushing BS about technology your legal career cannot comprehend.
2. Create a mega network for the worst managed sinkhole of ancient technology in history.
3. Profit$$$$$$$$

I think she is brilliant on a business level. She's already screwed over the customers of Comcast and NBCU. Now she's going to screw over the tax payers by soliciting for funds to patch the sinking ship. Meanwhile she rakes in dumpster loads of cash while she shovels what remains of her morales out the door.

So if my character name, "Phaltran Pogammon," is on a gravestone in Skara Brae in Ultima VII, does that mean EA now owns my character name and I no longer have the right to use it?

Guess I'll get the GMs in WoW to change it to "Phuquea" (phuq you EA)

Hahaha! I knew of the parser limitation, but I never considered you could enter other words.

Of course, the purist that I am, I cursed my friend for using my U7 save game and killing Lord British with the Blacksword. :-)

I'm sure someone with more time to research than I will come up with this answer, but what is the limitation of IP? When does software become "abandonware" as so many products out there are? An Ultima 4 port to Windows was given away with a magazine in the mid- late 90s.

Just because EA plans to re-release (and likely ruin) a title, does that mean they have the right to stop all the independent, original and to the best of my knowledge *non-profit" work? If people were making money off of it, I could understand, but how does freeware harm EA? Oh, yeah, because a handful of independents will do much better work than EA and their legion of slave coders.

EA will never get another dollar of mine. They've ruined enough games and there are plenty of other developers taking the time to deliver quality.

Lose an eighth? I don't think EA as an entity would ever get past "Name? Job? Join?"

I'll expound Tigger's Pet's excellent explanation.

In U4 you gained "skill" in each of the eight virtues. Once you "ascended" in each virtue you gained an eighth of an ankh. If you took any action counter to that ascended virtue, you lost it and had to again work through regaining it. Even if you were fully ascended (all eight pieces of the ankh) and did something that went against honesty and the other three virtues based upon the axiom of Truth, you might see...

"Thou hast lost an eighth!!!"
"Thou hast lost an eighth!!!"
"Thou hast lost an eighth!!!"
"Thou hast lost an eighth!!!"

...and half of your ankh just disappeared.

Not to mention Honesty, Justice, Sacrifice, Sprituality...

I guess they have Valor because they never seem to stop or back down from anything especially where money is involved.

Aw hell, I'm quite certain EA as a whole *is* The Guardian, Mr. Muppet himself.