Slashdot Mirror

during the dot.com boom, so the heavy lifting of connecting our far-flung nation is already done. And much of it is still dark, waiting to be used.

The coke part is certainly true, and most amusingly obvious in her glassy-eyed stare in the Star Wars Holiday Special. But the gang bang thing sounds like a Chinese whisper rumour based on the fact she did technically "feature" in a porn film, but just talks in it and doesn't get naked or anything.

http://www.cracked.com/article_15658_the-ten-minute-suicide-guide.html

People should read that article.

You are likely correct. People i know of that has actually commited suicide hid their plans until they did it. I don't know a bunch of people who did it, but of the 4 or 5 over the last 45 years who have, we never really saw it comming. The one suicide that the person constantly claimed they would, was actually shot and killed buy a cop who responded to her threat of suicide. Of course no one thought she was serious about killing herself but the cop that saw the knife she was threatening to slit her wrists with.

Not all of us do!

Forget the science. Forget the magic. How about this? (from that link)

The Hobbits both 1) refuse to wear shoes and 2) run a livestock-based farming economy. Wouldn't they constantly be stepping in feces? Why doesn't the movie address this issue?

Fantastic!

What makes the same people eat up LOTR or the Hobbit with total suspension of disbelief...

Not all of us do!

The is the RTS game i want to play! Ok not really, but its funny and in fact quite old.

If you want really twisted. How about that sea creature (Cymothoa Exigua) who starts by eating the tongue of a fish, then actually BECOMES the tongue for the rest of the fish's life.

See number 6:
http://www.cracked.com/article_17199_the-7-most-horrifying-parasites-planet.html

Someone (like a prospective employer) searching your name on Google will not know if a mugshot photo is you or just someone with the same common name.

On the other hand, having the same as a criminal can still confuse human resources departments who assume that the person whose name is on the application is the same person whose mugshot is on the site, provided the skin color matches. It's happened with the no-fly list, and it's happened with a 4-year-old rapist.

I expect most larger game publishing firms demand that you do not build in features to the game that allow you to buy less copies per person.

David Wong of Cracked would agree with you. But are there documented cases of couch multiplayer being cut from a PC or console game so that the publisher can sell multiple copies to one household?

Oh and this http://www.cracked.com/quick-fixes/4-u.s.-cities-that-are-sadistically-screwing-with-residents/

fictional zombie problem

Well of course. I'm sorry, movies and games having people shooting and using a crowbar on threatening live people just wouldn't go over. That'd be like "anarchy of the strongest" or something.

It's not a person you're shooting, just a zombie who happens to just _LOOK_ like a person. And besides, he's the one attacking me, I'm just an innocent bystander who would just happily just ignore them -- they're the ones that started it.

And besides, zombies with all of their bleeding and moaning and shuffling and all look Nothing Like Us, forget about skin color or religion or anything else. They're dumb, offensive, illogical, not human, and they deserve to die. Again if necessary.


Gee, if you have severely limited food stocks with some controlled depot concentrations, you can replace "zombie infection" with "hunger" (you can be infected if you share too much food), the "survivors" with the "ones in control of the local food depots" (?the rich?), and the panic, fear, angst and suffering that the infected deal with along with the power, control, and angst feelings that the survivors deal with, and you've got a uncivilized, more violent Soylent Green

Oh, look: it's the news:
Zero
One
Two
Three

Don't worry though -- remember, the ones in control over government are here to help YOU -- once they finish helping themselves.

And that's just human nature, that's pretty much what you can expect from everyone -- they take care of themselves and their friends, because -- they're friends. And the sad part is, I'm NOT against government at all -- especially ours -- I'm just again people in government with unlimited power and zero responsibility.

"A government big enough to give you everything you want, is a government big enough to take away everything that you have." ...and I'm only anonymous here because I'm too lazy to figure out my password -- I'll claim this accidental article shortly.

it turns out you make the most money following the lowest common denominator.

The lowest common denominator is one PC in a house, and not all gamers live alone.

There is no real set standard on how to support additional players.

One standard has existed since 1998 when Windows 98 added USB gamepad drivers: DirectInput. Another has existed since 2005 when the Xbox 360 came out: XInput.

From a game design perspective, the LCD is the game designer has no restrictions beyond the hardware. But if you tell a game designer to design a game with local multiplayer, that is a restrict beyond the hardware, which wouldn't need to be addressed if you just let them turn it to online multiplayer.

But if you tell a game designer to design a game with online multiplayer, that is a restrict beyond the hardware, which wouldn't need to be addressed if you just let them turn it to local multiplayer. It is a restrict because it requires the user to move to an area where wired broadband Internet access is affordable and/or buy an additional PC and an additional copy of the game for each additional player.

Simple example: poker. How can you ensure each player can only see his own hand, and nobody else's?

I see your point about games with intentionally limited information. But there also exist games with intentionally unlimited information that must propagate instantly. Simple example: karate. How can you ensure each player sees each punch and kick as it is thrown, and not 200 ms later? How can you ensure each player owns a gaming PC, as opposed to a PC with integrated graphics more suited for word processing and Facebook, and a wired broadband connection, as opposed to satellite or cellular broadband or dial-up because the user lives in an area without cable or DSL or fiber?

Board games are relatively cheap to make, so you can still money making and selling them (and thanks to wear and tear, there's a market to sell the same old game over and over). Video games do not share that luxury.

By "video games" do you mean AAA games or indie games? I was under the impression that an indie game could be developed and brought to market on not much more than a board game budget.

I realize you're probably trolling, but on the off chance you're simply ignorant, here are some articles that you might find interesting/informative.

This article shows the point of view of a westerner living in Japan and debunks some of the most common misconceptions people have.

This article details some of the cultural issues that continue to hinder their society.

These are some examples of the 'civilized' behaviours they've demonstrated in the past, and this is the attitude that they have towards said behaviours and those who committed them.

If you're going to idolize a country, at least do some research. It's like someone praising Josef Mengele for advancing medical science without looking at the bigger picture. Oh well, at least the Japanese weren't Mengele-level bad, right? Oh wait.

For games, I'd just have a multiplayer mode

I don't see how that'd help. People would just plug two to four USB gamepads into an Internet-disconnected PC and play on one screen, like in puzzle games, fighting games, and puzzle fighting games. Windows has supported USB HID gamepads since Windows 98 and Xbox 360 controllers since a Windows XP service pack.

To access it, a valid key is needed and if two keys (assuming each key is one license) are used, the newer one will not be allowed on.

Which breaks with multiple gamers in one household.

The fact is, for the western world, risk is largely eliminated. Plague, famine, pestilence, and war - all are pretty nonexistent in the civilized world.

We evolved to deal with immediate, natural risk.

I'd suspect that the human brain is rather good at this in the aggregate - witness, for example, the breadth of 'home remedies' or natural herbs etc that have been determined to actually have some sort of core chemical that (surprising to scientists) actually DOES have a beneficial effect.

So now we're reduced to worry, more than risk-management.
Rather than facing starvation, we worry that we're eating too much.
Rather than facing working day and night to barely survive, we worry that we're too sedentary.
Rather than face the constant risk of agonizing death from the billions of germs trying to kill us like Typhus and Diptheria, we worry that there *might* be a vanishingly small cumulative risk of cancer from the additives that make our food safe from spoilage, mold, etc.
Rather than facing the imminent pillage, rape, or murder by a neighbor village that's decided we have something they want, we worry that there might be some crazy zealot somewhere who might harbor some resentment vaguely against our society.

Seriously, I suspect that worry is endemic to the human creature. If we don't have actual things to be concerned about, we invent / inflate them to fill that psychological space.

Oh, and Cracked has a wonderful article on this: http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-reasons-news-looks-worse-than-it-really-is/

The way capitalism works is demand first, then supply shows up. It can't even be done the other way around.

Sure it can. Inventing demand for a waste product is a great way to create new markets. Examples include whey protein as a byproduct of cheese production, biodiesel from waste fryer oil, the huge demand for a process to turn cellulose into ethanol, the invention of silage for animal feed in the 19th century, scrap metal reselling, gasoline and petroleum jelly as byproducts of refining oil into kerosene, etc. These are all examples where supply came first and demand came later.

Also, marketing can be a huge creator of demand for products people didn't even know they wanted. For a humorous, non-scholarly article on that, check out 5 Basic Facts of Life (Were Made Up By Marketing Campaigns). While it doesn't focus on the creation of markets as much as their radical expansion, The 7 Sneakiest Ways Corporations Manipulated Human Behavior is also good for a read on the subject. (Take with a grain of salt; both articles are from a comedy site that doesn't exactly cite its references.)

The way capitalism works is demand first, then supply shows up. It can't even be done the other way around.

Sure it can. Inventing demand for a waste product is a great way to create new markets. Examples include whey protein as a byproduct of cheese production, biodiesel from waste fryer oil, the huge demand for a process to turn cellulose into ethanol, the invention of silage for animal feed in the 19th century, scrap metal reselling, gasoline and petroleum jelly as byproducts of refining oil into kerosene, etc. These are all examples where supply came first and demand came later.

Also, marketing can be a huge creator of demand for products people didn't even know they wanted. For a humorous, non-scholarly article on that, check out 5 Basic Facts of Life (Were Made Up By Marketing Campaigns). While it doesn't focus on the creation of markets as much as their radical expansion, The 7 Sneakiest Ways Corporations Manipulated Human Behavior is also good for a read on the subject. (Take with a grain of salt; both articles are from a comedy site that doesn't exactly cite its references.)

http://www.cracked.com/article_20055_6-unassuming-animals-that-are-secretly-immortal.html

Since there are no animals that live forever, you have to assume that extending life is a totally new feature... not a bugfix.

Really? http://www.cracked.com/article_20055_6-unassuming-animals-that-are-secretly-immortal.html

Hey! Cracked is at least as reliable as CNN, fox, or MSNBC, and lately it is more unbiased.

Everybody knows that the value of a life depends on your monkeysphere: http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_what-monkeysphere.html

Cave Johnson was a parody, and any parody has to have a basis in the thing it's making fun of. The Cold War was filled with junk science and grandiose, delusional "engineering" projects to try to one up stuff that we imagined the commies were up to (and vice versa). Cold War threat assessment by both sides essentially ran on games of telephone and urban legends, and by god we would not have a mine shaft gap!

Try these links on for size, this article surprised you:
Nuke the Moon: 5 Certifiably Insane Cold War Projects
10 Ridiculous Cold War Government Projects
10 Creative Military Plans to Use Animals as Weapons (half of which are Cold War era).

Me? There's almost nothing you could say that the US or the Soviets experimented with during the Cold War or thought about doing that I would immediately disbelieve.

because lying is not itself illegal.

only certain kinds of lies are, and there's damned few of those.

this is a small article from just yesterday: http://www.cracked.com/article_19485_5-outrageous-lies-companies-are-legally-allowed-to-tell-you.html

People who want a box whose industrial design doesn't stick out like a sore thumb next to a television.

So like I said, niche. You actually believe that Sony and Microsoft are the only ones capable of an aesthetically pleasing industrial design? Please.

People who play games other than FPS and RTS, games whose multiplayer mode uses one screen and up to four gamepads, such as platformers, fighting games, and rhythm games. Multiplayer PC games, on the other hand, have tended to require a separate computer, monitor, OS license, and game license per player.

You've missed the point, if you want open hardware then - even if they were open - why would you choose the Playstation or XBox? For innovation that requires open hardware you can already do everything on the PC (or perhaps the Ouya). All the things you listed aren't console-exclusive, you can easily do that on the PC.

Because there weren't credible Linux tablets between the release of the original iPad and the release of the Xoom

Read the question you responded to, what you wrote is not an answer to that question.

Besides, it appears you would prefer having to buy three tablets and carry all three everywhere you go: an iPad for running iOS-exclusive applications, a Surface RT for running Windows Store-exclusive applications, and something else for running Linux-exclusive applications.

How is that apparent to you? I don't, and certainly have no reason to do that.

So what are the open alternatives to AAA games?

I'm talking hardware, not games, no reason games have to be open.

If the XBox or Playstation were open they would just be pretty average, overpriced PCs. But we already have PCs so why would we want that?

People who want a box whose industrial design doesn't stick out like a sore thumb next to a television. People who play games other than FPS and RTS, games whose multiplayer mode uses one screen and up to four gamepads, such as platformers, fighting games, and rhythm games. Multiplayer PC games, on the other hand, have tended to require a separate computer, monitor, OS license, and game license per player.

Why not get an already available Linux tablet?

Because there weren't credible Linux tablets between the release of the original iPad and the release of the Xoom, just as there weren't any credible Linux smartphones between the release of the original iPhone and the release of the HTC Dream. This, combined with delayed availability of Google Checkout (now Google Wallet) in some countries, caused people to end up with a collection of purchased applications and movies that don't transfer to anything but an iPad. Besides, it appears you would prefer having to buy three tablets and carry all three everywhere you go: an iPad for running iOS-exclusive applications, a Surface RT for running Windows Store-exclusive applications, and something else for running Linux-exclusive applications.

realistically we have open alternatives to pretty much everything already.

So what are the open alternatives to AAA games? U.S. copyright law hasn't been as kind to cloners of games (Tetris v. Xio) as it has been to cloners of libraries (Oracle v. Google) and cloners of business applications (Lotus v. Borland).

The major cause of war between humans is that they're human.

Don't assume we have a feeling to take care of all humans. Don't assume we even can conceptualize all humans as humans. Assume that we're somewhat aware of humans as numbers, but really we have a small clique of people we can think of as humans, and we take care of those. That means it's very easy for us to abstract out anyone else, and yes, kill them. One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.

So, we find semi-random excuses to kill people. Religion. My flag has stripes and stars, but yours has a single star; you must therefore die. I'm on this side of this line of some demarcation. You're on this other side; you must therefore die.

Need more proof? Don't even think of war only. How many times has a NGE (non government entity) decided that it's OK for you to die. Bhopal India was a corporate disaster, where a corporation thought it was easier to risk you dying rather than fix some valves. A web search for "death by corporate negligence" will pick up one or two other cases I'm sure.

So blame the human brain, that allows us to abstract out the life of other people and eliminate them for various reasons. Don't act as if Religion is the actual cause, nor Video games, nor Patriotism. They're really more tools than causes.

David Wong called this effort shock. Basically, most (U.S.) kids today vastly underestimate how much effort it takes to accomplish anything worthwhile.

In fact, quite a few of them exist:

http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-6-stupidest-video-game-school-commercials/

Quite a few of the linked videos are gone, but you get the idea.

The group of people known as the government are however capable of having friends and enemies. You stated that government can't have friends which is nonsense.

Most of the EU nations are classed as friends by the United States government. Not only in policy but in the manner in which the US government treats them.

As to you never saying the government is not made up of people, you did try to abstract them to being non-human which would include not being made up of people.

As to diplomatic immunity... its been abused many times in the past:

http://www.cracked.com/article_19591_6-most-ridiculous-abuses-diplomatic-immunity.html

Funny list of some extreme examples. The point of it is not to let you f' over other countries. The point is to smooth over little issues and facilitate cooperation.

Smuggling people out of a country is not a little issue. Use it to avoid parking tickets or minor fines. But if you're playing a bigger game no one is going to blink at going right through it.

Now did the Bolivian president smuggle Snowden out by plane? No he didn't. The whole thing was clearly pretty embarrassing for everyone. But do you think a US diplomatic plane could leave Bolivia with a wanted criminal? Unlikely.

Again... regrettable. However, the overblown offense of the Bolivians is frankly as tiresome as it is sad.

The United States is subjected to worse offenses against our national dignity then that on a daily basis. Chavez for example called Bush the devil and suggested the place he stood not long ago still smelled of sulfur. To which American comedians suggested that Bush might have had an Egg Salad sandwich for lunch.

But that sort of thing is frankly ongoing. To say nothing of the mindless anti americanism we're treated to throughout the world.

Look at the Egyptian protesters. Both sides blame America somehow. The Muslim Brotherhood which Obama helped get into power by respecting the democratic process by which they obtained power blame Obama/The United States for losing power to a military coup. At the same time, the military faction blames the US for helping the Muslim brotherhood and otherwise opposing their coup which they see as righteous for various reasons.

THAT is what most opposition to the US looks like throughout the world. Both sides blaming the US without any real evidence of it. We're the international scapegoat of the incompetent. If your government is badly run or you're otherwise in danger of losing power due to incompetence... Blame the US. Its our fault they're stupid. We apparently picked them out of their mother's arms when they were babies and promptly dropped them on their heads.

And despite the ongoing mindless stupidity and unjustifiable hostility... We continue to work peacefully and constructively with powers that frankly don't deserve that much respect. Why? We have no choice. We can't choose the planet we live on and we unfortunately live on planet Earth which appears to be populated by morons.

Is the US perfect? Hardly. But we're not a banana republic yet. We are not strategically beholden to anyone. We are one of the few independent nations left on this planet. Secure in our own power and truly sovereign in our own territory. That is an accomplishment few other nations can claim. We have also maintained the same government since the 18th century. Through invasion, war, civil war, world war, world war again, the cold war, and now whatever you want to call these terrorist attacks. We have prevailed through it all. We have survived problems political, economic, social, and religious that have laid low lesser nations. And we have done it all without devolving into a police state or a dictatorship.

We have also stood by our allies. There are few powers on earth that are worth having as friends. And despite all of that... you want to spit on our faces because we conduct a global intelligence network that lik

For one thing, a PC doesn't ship with a gamepad, and a mouse isn't ideal for every game genre. For another, PCs tend to be connected to far smaller monitors than consoles. Though you've been able to plug in four gamepads since 1999 when USB became popular, it's hard to fit four players' bodies around the 17" monitor in a typical laptop, and most gamers who own a PC don't think to run VGA, DVI, or HDMI out to the big HDTV in the living room. This encourages developers to design games under the assumption that four players means four gaming PCs and four copies of the game. Not all households with more than one gamer can afford this.

In case you haven't noticed, not every terrorist and terrorist-wannabe is a genius.

Five cases in point.

Those were soldiers run amok over a short period of time. A number of them went to jail. They were criminals, and were treated as such.

Agree "following orders" is not a valid excuse for war crimes. However that's only half the story, it has been common knowledge since the 70's that normal humans will behave like a death camp guard/inmate if they find themselves in the right environment, there was even a movie about it. The catch 22 from those famous experiments? - Turns out the more you believe that you are incapable of acting like a dungeon master/slave the more likely you will do so if you find yourself in the right social environment for what is essentially (but uncomfortably) "normal human behavior" to emerge.

While the army were busy identifying scapegoats for prosecution did any of them stop to wonder why all the "bad apples" were found in the same small barrel, a remarkable "coincidence", no? The Iraq prison system of which we speak could not have created a real life "stanford prison" environment any better if they had done so on purpose. So the (multi-part) question was (and still is): Who set up the system that created this environment? Why did they not know the first thing about the psychology of imprisonment? Or if they did, why aren't they in jail?

Having said that, any army would instantly be mowed down on the battle field if it did not take full advantage of it's soldiers natural ability to dehumanize the enemy.

No, that's not the problem. As another follow-up rightly pointed out, broadband is a prerequisite for most online gaming.

The problem is that those friends in rural are locked out from console gaming at all. Well, that's one of the problems, anyway.

Which $400 gaming PC

I'd recommend google.

I thought the Chromebook could only run simple little web games, not AAA first-person shooters. Or are major video game developers taking Native Client + WebGL seriously? Perhaps you meant Google Search, but in my experience, I haven't been able to get Google Search to assess the reliability of a particular source.

[with PC] you save a lot in the long run on game prices

Not necessarily. PC versions of a game tend to support fewer players per copy of the game than console versions, which becomes important when this cousin has classmates over to visit. True, some products have abandoned split-screen, but recent Call of Duty games for Xbox 360 still support two players.

not to mention the ability to upgrade and get better stuff when you want

Except by the time it's time to replace a CPU, there's usually a new socket, which means a new motherboard and probably new RAM.

The PC has free online multiplayer which neither the XBone or PS4 are offering. How does that factor into your cost assessment?

As far as I can tell, even if Xbox One and PlayStation 4 follow the Xbox 360 model of charging $360 over the six-year expected life of a console for online multiplayer, consoles are still far more likely to provide free offline multiplayer. PC game developers have tended to refuse to implement that, instead expecting a household with four PCs to buy four copies.

That isn't to say WoW is no fun at all. I expect like most MMOs it's a lot of fun at the beginning but that slowly gives way to repetition and grind and the process is so gradual that players don't necessarily see it happening.

If you launch an app then hit the home button, that app stays running in the background.

If a task involves two applications, each with its own user interface, it's still more jarring for the user to have to switch back and forth between two maximized windows than to split it down the middle. It gives the user doorway amnesia.

Also the latest firmware update [for the Samsung Galaxy S3] gives you a split screen option to run 2 apps on the same screen at the same time.

I'm told very few applications support this, other than those few applications supplied by Samsung, because variable window size is not a standard feature of Android. See my reply to Cenan.

Eventually, your kind will attempt to invade with real-world laws

It's much more likely to be a coup from within, reason being "your kind" are also humans. The bit that "your kind" haven't worked out yet is that the ability to discern the folly of humans in large groups does not imply the ability to avoid it.

We understand this. You don't.

"My kind" get the hyper-organism thing, it's not created by "my kind", it spontaneously forms whenever a human society grows past a handful of related individuals. It's only when "your kind" fully realize "your kind" are not immune that "your kind" will start to understand why society 'doesn't work'.

I felt this cracked.com article was pertinent here. When dealing with your own/loved one's impending/recent death, usually moping about thinking about it is not very helpful.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-things-no-one-tells-you-about-dealing-with-death/
Also, read the top comments. It was quite a good one.

If I have a keyboard, I want a shortcut that allows me to write the command I want to start.

Once you use the shortcut, a list of completions of the command that you are typing should appear. The problem with the Windows 8 Start screen is that a full-screen list of completions completely obscures what you're working on. This change in visual context leads to a memory loss analogous to doorway amnesia, as another Slashdot user pointed out.

Did you seriously just suggest that we should look at a comic book for a likely model of how we'll run our society in the future?

Science fiction has been wrong in the past, but it has also been right in the past. Read the article "5 Important Things You Won't Believe Comic Books Invented" by Diana McCallum, and once you finish that, there are more. If an idea appears plausible, and the implementation described in a work of fiction appears plausible, why not? Jonathan Swift described the welfare state of Lilliput in Travels into Several Remote Nations long before "welfare state" was a household name. And now you even.

Welcome to post-modern slavery: where a small "aristocracy" composed of slaves is forced to labor to provide for the needs of a massive herd of uneducated livestock who contribute nothing to society

"Livestock"? Really? Next thing you'll tell me is that 800 millennia from now, humankind's descendants will have speciated into above-ground fatted cattle and the below-ground cave dwellers who tend them. The subterraneans provide the necessities of life for the upworlders, who turn a garden full of food that food eats into flesh that the subterraneans' carnivorous digestive systems can handle. Oh wait, that's an H. G. Wells novel.

"Charity begins at home"

One of the most misused proverb.

http://www.cracked.com/article_20251_the-5-most-frequently-misused-proverbs_p2.html

Let me know when PCs have a rich selection of PC games that allow multiplayer with two to four gamepads and one PC. Developers appear stuck in the desktop, one-machine-per-player mentality because selling two to four copies to a household is more lucrative than selling one.

Okay, right now. I'm assuming you mean 'new games', because any emulator will give you a 4+ player split screen option. oh and no one likes playing on a split screen, unless its a fighting game, where all the action takes place in view of a single camera (SSBM, Mortal Kombat, etc)

Yes you can hook it to your TV and use a controller, if that is what you desire.

The question then becomes whether enough PC games will support multiple controllers connected through USB, or whether they're hardwired to read only one controller and require separate copies of the game for more than one player. I imagine that major developers of PC games don't consider the PC-and-TV use case because not enough other people already do it.

Nope, instead I have to create an in-app-purchase and lock away features calling the locked neutered game a "demo"

Doom by Id Software split the game into three episodes and made the entire first episode a demo. Buying the game bought you two additional episodes (at first) or three (once The Ultimate Doom was out).

and then I have to check with the Ouya DRM servers before you start playing the full version of the game (better be connected to the Internet, always)

Or the game can cache the receipt locally for a month like Steam does.

Game on your damn PCs.

Let me know when PCs have a rich selection of PC games that allow multiplayer with two to four gamepads and one PC. Developers appear stuck in the desktop, one-machine-per-player mentality because selling two to four copies to a household is more lucrative than selling one.

Nothing remotely unethical was caught in the video. The segments that apparently show the responses to the questions O'Keefe and the woman with him posed while dressed as a pimp & ho, were actually a mix of responses they received in formal wear and joking responses they received from an employee who called the police for them immediately after they left.

I know it's a comedy site but here's an overview of the hoax with good citations at #4:

http://www.cracked.com/article_20369_5-major-news-stories-that-forgot-to-tell-you-best-part.html

Cracked.com is a perfect example of how to move from a print publication to an online model.

Actually, Cracked was a meh, me-too imitation of MAD as a print publication. They got MUCH better in their online incarnation.

Cracked.com is a perfect example of how to move from a print publication to an online model.

Here you go: http://www.cracked.com/article_19402_6-mind-blowing-ways-zombies-vampires-explain-america.html

If you want near absolute control buy a PC.

What should someone do who wants both absolute control and the ability to play a game without buying a separate copy of each game each member of the household? What should someone do who wants both absolute control and the assurance that the game one bought will just work?

That being said, I'm ready for the PS4. The small screen in the controllers should be interesting and just about big enough to use for menu and item swapping.

That's what they said about the screen in the Dreamcast VMU, but that feature by itself wasn't enough to save the Dreamcast.

Here ya go..

http://dx.com/p/27-neocube-buckyballs-magnet-balls-36-magnets-stripes-set-golden-180954

But I do agree.. I mean toys back then were awesome! Lawn darts, _real_ chemistry sets with radium and such..

Have a look at http://www.cracked.com/article_19481_the-8-most-wildly-irresponsible-vintage-toys.html

I'm still in favor of Darwinism, even with children's toys.