You guys are all leaving out statloss if you died as a red. That was a serious deterrant. It wasn't easy to get back the skill points you lost, especially if you were 5 or 6X GM. You'd lose days of grind time if you were red status and got killed......it really did suck. This is one reason all the reds always ran together in huge gangs. Also the bounty system, I remember there were some guys on my server ( Alice Cooper ), if you could get his head to turn in for the bounty you would be a VERY rich man for doing so. UO was the grief fest everyone made it out to be, I found it to be rather balanced and will always miss it.

I didn't realize Mastodon was on Warner. I played guitar for a long time(10 years)....then my band needed a bass player so I picked up the bass and left the guitar behind. Been playing bass probably 5 or 6 years now. I sing to.

Hardly, The 'Hippies' were a small subculture. There were plenty of red-blooded conservative Americans during the 60's that went to vietnam and such....those are the ones in charge.

From what I've seen it's all mainstream crap that I would rather than hear it either turn it off, if that is not an option....I get up and leave the room. Although, I am quite an asshole when it comes to music.....being a musician and all.

At my University, one of the last classes we take before graduation is a Senior Seminar class, at the time the class was about ethics. Well, the class was assigned a paper to write about ethics. The professor actually read the papers, upon reading one girls paper he said.....'Hey, this girls English isn't this good. There is no way she wrote this. He googles the first time of the paper, bam, this 25 page paper pops up. Turns out she had copied and pasted 14 pages of the 25 page paper and turned it in. Well, she was kicked out of University one class from graduation. I thought it was rather funny. She ended up moving back to India, who knows what happened after that.

It amazes me how some of you can rationalize pirating. Just because they have some shitty DRM system that is a reason to pirate......no.....it is a reason to avoid the game all together. Piracy = theft. Someone had to write the code for these games and that takes time and we all know, Time = Money. I often get disgusted with the slashdot community when it comes to issues like this. Piracy is wrong, it is that simple. If you can not afford a car, you do not go and steal one, you just do not have a car. If you cannot afford a game title you should not go steal the game. It is pretty much the same thing, theft is theft.

I just graduated a little over 9 months ago, and I to can attest to the fact that the CS program felt watered down. However, they did not lighten up on the Math, at my school the Computer Science department was actually the Math/Computer Science department. We had to take a lot of Math classes ( upper level courses ). Three more math courses and I'd have a BS in Mathematics along with my BS in Computer Science, however, I don't want to butcher my GPA since I have to study very hard to get good grades in Math, where, even with the more conceptual theoretical parts of Computer Science it is easy for me. I feel like the Universities are producing poor quality graduates from Computer Science. I was top of my class when I graduated, my co-worker was top of the class the year before I graduated......there were very few students who were even close to our skill levels and I'm not saying I'm the greatest coder. However, I am good at Computer Science ( which really has very little to do with coding ). Universities are not preparing students for jobs writing software, that is something you have to do on your own time outside of class. My university taught the Science of Computing, not 'How to write Software for *insert industry here*.

I did the same thing. My senior year in college I got a co-op position with a manufacturing plant writing software. It was an hour long commute to the job (which really sucked) but hey, you have to get that experience somewhere. There were SO many students in my graduating class and the class below me that flat out refused to look for internships or co-op positions. They were just completely uninterested. They would say, 'Oh I'm still in school I will worry about that when I graduate'. Well when graduation came, I got a contract position with the company ( due to a hiring freeze ) which turned into a full time position 6 months later when my contract was up. Pretty good salary for entry level in South Georgia.....and those guys who wouldn't look for an internship or a co-op position, well, most of them are still looking for a job in the industry and quite honestly I would only hire a hand full of them as most of them were useless for writing code in school, and I assume are still useless to this day. You gotta get out there, the money may not be what is use to be, but there seems to be an overall decline in wages in many fields that use to pay good. I blame it on the government and outsourcing. You can't outsource everything, when you do, the only jobs left will be service industry and who can afford to be a consumer on those salaries. Just doesn't make sense.

In Japan in Older Generations when an Old Person would 'Go to the mountain' it was kind of like, they were going there to die and be with the spirits. My fiance told me something like that (she's Japanese). I thought it was kind of strange sending old people to the mountain to die. Maybe someone should do that with Pat Robertson!

I remember when I was growing up if you found a Sega Game with a Yellow Tab on the side (indicating it was an EA Game), you could almsot bet it was going to be a badass game. I guess some of you never experienced the glories of the yellow tab Genesis games. I've had several friends agree with me. Although recently EA just seems to buy up companies and bastardize the games. I'll never forgive them for what they did to Origins with Ultima Online. After EA bought Origins the game went to complete shite.

I was 2 when I got mine, many years were spent yelling "The game is cheating!"