Sounds a little excessive for "fraud by another Newegg customer." Another customer would at least have had real stickers (from the original box).
In fact it reminds me of a childhood experience. Back when Final Fantasy "II" came out for the SNES, I bought it at Toys R Us. It was shrink-wrapped and everything. When I opened it, instead of a cartridge it had a bolt with a couple nuts screwed on so it would weigh the same as a cartridge. Fortunately, the manager was willing to swap it out for me--but from then on, I always opened my cartridges at the register after paying. Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?
Hopefully Newegg follows through, I'd be interested to know what happened here. At the very least I imagine they will be inspecting their shipments a little more closely for a while. I buy from them all the time, they have a great reputation, and I doubt they are doing to ignore these claims (whether we hear about it or not).
That's freaking uncanny. When I bought A Link to the Past at Toys R Us, I opened the box in the parking lot and found two bolts instead of a cartridge.
Come to think of it, years later I crunched down onto a much smaller bolt in a soft taco at Taco Bell. Is bolt-related crime this common in everyone else's life?
Somewhat true, but I find firefoxe's memory usage and startup time to be really irritating. That and it's gotten cluttered. Chrome's sleekness was the first big reason I switched over. Only the URL bar and bookmark bar take up screen space. The rest of it is dynamially hidden (status bar) or compartimentalized (the settings and configure menus) into smaller areas so as to not take up as much space.
Page loading is well and good, but when it comes down to it, browser's physical size, resource footprint and startup time are more noticible to me.
Firefox won the memory usage title in TFA, too. Also, I find that a properly customized Firefox has one of the smallest browser UIs. There's a title bar, then a single bar that includes all menus, shortcut icons, bookmarks, URL, and a search bar (and it's not cluttered if you've got at least 1280 pixels of width), and then either a list of tabs or a web page.
What I'd really like to see is a scrolling benchmark. If I have a page with a bunch of Slashdot comments and I want to scroll through it at a given rate, which browser shows me the smoothest motion? It's not just aesthetic. Smooth motion means you're missing less as you move and it allows more precise stopping. In my experience Safari and early Chrome versions were very bad at scrolling, but more recent Chrome is about as fast as Firefox. Opera won my personal comparison, but it was only a subjective test.
Earth radiates at around 10 micrometers wavelength. As far as I can tell, methane has no absorption bands near there. So, why is it reckoned that methane is a potent greenhouse gas? Curious minds want to know.
Three responses come to mind:
1) Earth radiates across a range of wavelengths, not at a sharp 10 micron peak.
2) Methane is supposed to have 25x the radiative forcing of CO2 per unit mass. A methane molecule has a mass 16/44 that of carbon dioxide, so a kg of methane produces almost 3x the molecules produced by a kg of carbon dioxide.
3) A particular absorption peak or the peak emission wavelength doesn't matter. The important thing is the power change caused by the integral over all wavelengths of absorption multiplied by emission energy at each wavelength. Here that is for methane.
I guess it's not legal, but if you're willing to go the emulator route you pay only $2 for thousands of NES games instead of the $9 I just spent on Final Fantasy on the iPhone.
Color theory says that orange and purple need green to make a balanced set (equidistant angular jumps between each component on the color wheel). I don't see any green in the screenshot and it grates on me.
Basically when Microsoft entered the operating system market, they borrowed a lot of ideas and they innovated some as well. Then they patented as much software "methods" as they could. Now you see them demanding everyone to pay protection money who is using Linux.
In the submission you compared Microsoft patents to Apple lawsuits. It seems that the difference there is the actual step of litigation. Has Microsoft done this? Wikipedia's article on Microsoft Litigation only shows suits against MS and countersuits where someone accuses MS of patent infringement and MS responding with, "no, you did it!"
I'd be interested in a list of patent infringement lawsuits filed by MS. A friend of mine has argued that MS generally patents software for defensive purposes because they get sued over software patents so much, but that sounds naive. Show me some facts.
I guess it would have been after 1972, because I'd like to think that NASA would have sent some Apollo astronauts to collect some ice samples while they still had the chance. Or was it always known, theoretically, and for whatever reason they decided it could wait, as everyone assumed that if Apollo 21 didn't get around to it, Apollo 86 would.
Sigh. I really miss those days.
At least RTFS!
"After analyzing data from a radar device aboard last year's Indian Chandrayaan-1"
Chandrayaan-1 only went up a year and a half ago, so yes, this was figured out after 1972.
It (TFA is actually a link to the school that did the study) doesn't take into account that many if not most of the studies he was studying were horribly flawed and designed to give the answer the researcher wanted (in short, not real science).
This is the real kicker. Metanalysis doesn't work by magic. All it does it attempt to lump together different studies to see if a statistically valid correlation can be found in the data. One hopes that by having larger numbers, you get better statistical power than was available from smaller studies.
The validity of these studies is critically intwined with quality of the individual research. If all they did was lump everything together, you're going to get a lump of garbage. Interestingly, TFA doesn't mention any statisticians as authors. I would have serious doubts that psychiatrists or psychologists would have enough of a background in statistics to create a quality analysis.
And the fact that he is enough of an egotistical jerk to suggest that he has "definitively" proven anything in psychiatry leads me to believe that this is just part of the 94.277% (P less than 0.001) of all research that is crap.
A distressingly large number of psychological/sociological studies (I agree with your 94.277%) have deeply flawed statistics and/or experimental design. This meta-analytical study starts by assuming the validity of the conclusions from these broken studies and then adds another layer of potential statistical and design mistakes on top of that.
In such a fuzzy field, it would be much more useful to move in the other direction: rather than looking at tons of other studies from high overhead, very carefully examine one at a time to determine how valid it is.
And the best bit? If this code is really as complicated as they claim, it probably contains a few bugs. The pirated version, which bypasses all of this code and just dumps the data on disk, will be much simpler and so probably more reliable.
It doesn't need bugs to be unreliable. There's a guaranteed cap on reliability - it can't be better than your net connection. I think most people will see a couple losses of connectivity during a playthrough, making this one of the least stable games released in recent years. I also think that you're right - it will be quickly cracked and the pirates will be the only ones playing on truly stable code.
I really don't see the philosophical or policy basis for seeing this as something which privacy laws should prohibit. What is visible in public should be photographable to the public. If I can see it with my eyes without violating a law, why shouldn't I be able to photograph it? And if I can do it for individual photos why shouldn't Google be able to do it systematically?
Just for the sake of argument...
You drop skin cells in public all the time. Would you object to me collecting them, analyzing your DNA, and then sharing with the world a list of your genetic limitations?
Or...
Women wear skirts in public. In various circumstances, for instance on glass walkways, this creates "visibility issues." That's not a big problem. Would it be acceptable for the owner of such a walkway to stick a camera underneath, photograph each person, then put the photos on a website that connects them with identifying information?
Cue a bunch of silly/. responses about hypothetical situation #2...
Mass Effect 1 came out on XBox360 first and the PC port wasn't even done by Bioware, Mass Effect 2 came out on both systems at the same time.
That aside Bioware so far has been doing great on porting consoles to PC or visa versa, as they actually redesign the user interface for each system, instead of just mapping mouse moving to an analog stick, which never really works.
ME2 wasn't redesigned quite enough. Much of the menu interface isn't simply clickable. Instead you have to simulate moving the cursor by clicking once on the option you want and then simulate hitting X by clicking once on "choose this selection" or some equivalent. Also, scrolling text blocks really need to respond to the scroll wheel. And why didn't they had hotkeys to go to anything but the main menu? That said, it still doesn't get in the way of the gameplay very much. I'd a solid B level port.
Borderlands takes the same problems and amplifies them immensely.
Dragon Age, which was actually one of those rare ports from the PC to the console, had a fantastic PC interface and a console interface so much worse that console players think it's a vastly harder game than those on the PC. Micromanaging four characters is so easy with quick zooming in and out of the action and quickly clicking your way through the things you want them to do. Micromanaging on the PC isn't much of a slowdown over real time play, while on the 360 complete micromanagement is very clumsy and very sluggish.
Oh really? Then why did the Prime Minister of Newfoundland come to the US for heart treatment? Because the wait in Canada would have caused his death, that's why. He's 59 fer chrissake, why save him? And, skip the argument that he's got millions. He's doing what the Democrap morons in the USA want to end for all of us - free choice.
The disingenuous Canadians know that rationing exists in the Canadian health system. A 20-something or 30-something gets fairly quick care mostly because it's routine stuff. Go try for for something more serious, and be over 40 and you wait - wait until you die or leave for the US to seek treatment. Heaven help you if you're over 50.
Cut the bullshit and tell the truth Canucks. Your system only treats the healthy. It's like banks who only lend money to people that don't need it.
I worked with a number of middle aged MDs in the United States who always took their families to India or France for treatment because the wait in America was too long and the cost was an order of magnitude higher.
By my count (of Wikipedia), there are 2 Enterprises from the Continental Navy, 6 from the US Navy, 1 balloon, 1 space shuttle, 1 training ship, and 8 starships that are worth counting, for a total of 19 Enterprises. If 75% have suffered major cyber attacks and we round down, we have 14 cyber-victims.
Here's where it gets weird. Clearly the 8 starships are attackable in the computerized sense. That leaves us with 6 other hackable Enterprises. Most likely 1 is the space shuttle, 1 is the training vessel, and 1 is the contemporary air craft carrier. But that means 3 more Enterprises were cyber-violated out of a pool containing a balloon used during the Civil War and 5 US Navy ships decommissioned between 1823 and 1947.
This seems to be proof of a pre-modern technological underground. Or time travel.
What all these anti-cheating efforts fail to realize is that cheating is an integral part of the game, especially in computer gaming. Given that such a cheat can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider cheating, they are removing key gameplay elements and ultimately changing the face of the game.
Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a rootkit just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior technology or extra knowledge. If these games are so unplayable with cheating enabled, perhaps the designers shouldn't have put those features in.
Crippling superior players is Communism.
What all these anti-murder efforts fail to realize is that murder is an integral part of life, especially in America. Given that such a murder can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider murder, they are removing key life goals and ultimately changing the face of humanity.
Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a police force just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior ability to murder or extra knowledge of how to carry it out. If life is so difficult with frequent random murdering allowed, perhaps we shouldn't have been made mortal
Crippling superior murderers is Communism.
The problem with Ayn Rand is that her hysterics appeal to a lot of high school students who forget to think about them in more detail when they grow up.
The terms green and CO2 are being tossed around as blatant lies to convince people to spend more to get the the same, or in cases like this, to get nothing at all.
It's really a shame that people believe politics over science. It makes me a cynic. Someone obviously decided to buy these "green" ice resurfacing machines because it made them feel like they were doing "their part" to help the environment. The problem is they were sold a lie. Not only were they sold a lie, but a non-functioning lie as well.
Seriously people, CO2 emissions are nothing to be afraid of. CO2 emissions are nothing you should be paying extra to decrease. The fact is that the CO2 that humans put into the atmosphere is infinitesimal compared to volcanoes and the oceans.
The people who bought the electric zams, which are actually pretty common, probably made the decision to reduce the carbon monoxide and particulate emissions that are not so great for the health of spectators in enclosed ice arenas.
Also, you made a blunder in your CO2 rant. The argument that CO2 emissions aren't bad is supposed to be, "increased CO2 doesn't lead to significantly more global warming," not "humans don't significantly affect CO2 levels." The reason for this is that contention 1 may be true, while contention 2 (yours) is demonstrably false. Note the ~25% increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the last 50 years shown here.
What the fuck? There are Americans out there who are willing to pay $40,000 a semester just to watch some goddamn "educational" videos? Is this for real?
Back when I was in college, I wasn't paying anywhere near that much, but you'd better fucking imagine that I got my money's worth by dealing with the professors and making sure they were teaching me directly, and not just telling me to watch some cockbiting "supplementary videos" or any fancy shit-in-my-pants like that. Fuck.
Google won me with speed, but, as usual with everything except search and GMail, they are losing me with bugs and a lack of features (Print Preview, the ability to remove typos from my search history
I agree with you. I switched to Chrome as my main browser for similar reasons. I used to use Firefox, but I became weary of how slow Firefox is relative to Chrome, even without extension. With extensions it's a joke. (Side note: I like the userscript extension method in the Chrome Beta - which is very stable for a Beta).
But why, as you say, can't they have a half intelligent search history, like Firefox? Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server? Why doesn't a Google search for "Chrome plugins" have as a result the proper Extensions page? https://chrome.google.com/extensions. In fact, why is that page the SECOND result for "Chrome extensions"?
Mystifying.
I tried to switch to Chrome version 3 for the javascript speed but I couldn't handle the slow html rendering of that version of Webkit. One of my peeves is grabbing the scroll bar on the right side of my browser and sliding it rapidly through a long page with lots of images and text and having the refresh framerate drop to jerky levels. Webkit did that for me (I tried Safari, too). IE was actually faster at html rendering than either of the Webkit browsers, but still a bit slow. Firefox is my standard, and even though it beat IE, Chrome, and Safari, the reason I was shopping for a new browser in the first place was to fix what I had seen as Firefox's slow html rendering. As a major surprise for me, Opera was noticeably faster than Firefox and easily the overall champion.
I switched to Opera for a couple days then missed the quality of FF's adblock and noscript and went back.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
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· Score: 1
The simplification in the combat is quite annoying, I especially missed more direct control of the teammates. In ME1 you could tell them to seek a defensive position or attack a specific enemy giving it a tactic shooter feel, in ME2 that is no longer the case. You are limited to telling them what power to use. You can also tell them where to go, but that never worked for me in ME2 as they always ended up running all over the place.
You can still tell each party member to target a specific opponent. Movement control seems more effective in ME2 as well, since they do a better just of finding the cover you intend for them to use when you tell them to go stand near a wall or crate or something. Overall I think ME2 offers the same level of party control as the PC version of ME1, and thus much more than the console ME1.
Also, grenades were replaced by the much more varied, useful, and interesting heavy weapons. Health packs still work, but you need to research them (+health during unity, and +shields during unity as a separate upgrade).
I, too miss parts of ME1's system. I miss the incredible crowd control abilities of a biotic character. Now that sort of ability only works when it no longer matters (once shields and armor are down, at which point the target is already a couple seconds from the end). Additionally, sharing a cooldown between every ability eliminates the lift/singularity/push combos that allowed a single character to completely direct an encounter without firing a shot.
I would like to remind you that the Kindle has a e-ink screen is much easier on the eyes than an LCD is.
Saying it doesn't make it true, but thank you for "reminding" me of the points I already specifically addressed. Have you actually used a Kindle in typical indoor lighting conditions for any length of time?
I'm an amusingly good test subject for this. For the last few weeks I've been reading off my Kindle almost every night by the light of a single Candle two feet behind my shoulder. I've had no eyestrain problems at all. If I did I'd light more candles, or maybe use a book light. This let's me read in a relatively dim room without bothering my sleeping wife. It's a lot more pleasant than the hours of reading I do on an LCD every day.
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Sounds a little excessive for "fraud by another Newegg customer." Another customer would at least have had real stickers (from the original box).
In fact it reminds me of a childhood experience. Back when Final Fantasy "II" came out for the SNES, I bought it at Toys R Us. It was shrink-wrapped and everything. When I opened it, instead of a cartridge it had a bolt with a couple nuts screwed on so it would weigh the same as a cartridge. Fortunately, the manager was willing to swap it out for me--but from then on, I always opened my cartridges at the register after paying. Considering the shrinkwrap and the contents of the box, to this day I suspect a factory worker took home a little souveneir... but who knows?
Hopefully Newegg follows through, I'd be interested to know what happened here. At the very least I imagine they will be inspecting their shipments a little more closely for a while. I buy from them all the time, they have a great reputation, and I doubt they are doing to ignore these claims (whether we hear about it or not).
That's freaking uncanny. When I bought A Link to the Past at Toys R Us, I opened the box in the parking lot and found two bolts instead of a cartridge.
Come to think of it, years later I crunched down onto a much smaller bolt in a soft taco at Taco Bell. Is bolt-related crime this common in everyone else's life?
Somewhat true, but I find firefoxe's memory usage and startup time to be really irritating. That and it's gotten cluttered. Chrome's sleekness was the first big reason I switched over. Only the URL bar and bookmark bar take up screen space. The rest of it is dynamially hidden (status bar) or compartimentalized (the settings and configure menus) into smaller areas so as to not take up as much space.
Page loading is well and good, but when it comes down to it, browser's physical size, resource footprint and startup time are more noticible to me.
Firefox won the memory usage title in TFA, too. Also, I find that a properly customized Firefox has one of the smallest browser UIs. There's a title bar, then a single bar that includes all menus, shortcut icons, bookmarks, URL, and a search bar (and it's not cluttered if you've got at least 1280 pixels of width), and then either a list of tabs or a web page.
What I'd really like to see is a scrolling benchmark. If I have a page with a bunch of Slashdot comments and I want to scroll through it at a given rate, which browser shows me the smoothest motion? It's not just aesthetic. Smooth motion means you're missing less as you move and it allows more precise stopping. In my experience Safari and early Chrome versions were very bad at scrolling, but more recent Chrome is about as fast as Firefox. Opera won my personal comparison, but it was only a subjective test.
Earth radiates at around 10 micrometers wavelength. As far as I can tell, methane has no absorption bands near there. So, why is it reckoned that methane is a potent greenhouse gas? Curious minds want to know.
Three responses come to mind:
1) Earth radiates across a range of wavelengths, not at a sharp 10 micron peak.
2) Methane is supposed to have 25x the radiative forcing of CO2 per unit mass. A methane molecule has a mass 16/44 that of carbon dioxide, so a kg of methane produces almost 3x the molecules produced by a kg of carbon dioxide.
3) A particular absorption peak or the peak emission wavelength doesn't matter. The important thing is the power change caused by the integral over all wavelengths of absorption multiplied by emission energy at each wavelength. Here that is for methane.
Ah yes, greater variety in fart generator applications is really high on my list of features I want from a phone.
Out of curiosity, did Final Fantasy make it to Android?
Yes. Every NES, SNES (I think), and Genesis game is on Android via emulators. Here's a review of a NES emulator: http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/05/26/quick-review-nesoid-nes-emulator-for-android/
I guess it's not legal, but if you're willing to go the emulator route you pay only $2 for thousands of NES games instead of the $9 I just spent on Final Fantasy on the iPhone.
Color theory says that orange and purple need green to make a balanced set (equidistant angular jumps between each component on the color wheel). I don't see any green in the screenshot and it grates on me.
Basically when Microsoft entered the operating system market, they borrowed a lot of ideas and they innovated some as well. Then they patented as much software "methods" as they could. Now you see them demanding everyone to pay protection money who is using Linux.
In the submission you compared Microsoft patents to Apple lawsuits. It seems that the difference there is the actual step of litigation. Has Microsoft done this? Wikipedia's article on Microsoft Litigation only shows suits against MS and countersuits where someone accuses MS of patent infringement and MS responding with, "no, you did it!"
I'd be interested in a list of patent infringement lawsuits filed by MS. A friend of mine has argued that MS generally patents software for defensive purposes because they get sued over software patents so much, but that sounds naive. Show me some facts.
I guess it would have been after 1972, because I'd like to think that NASA would have sent some Apollo astronauts to collect some ice samples while they still had the chance. Or was it always known, theoretically, and for whatever reason they decided it could wait, as everyone assumed that if Apollo 21 didn't get around to it, Apollo 86 would.
Sigh. I really miss those days.
At least RTFS!
"After analyzing data from a radar device aboard last year's Indian Chandrayaan-1"
Chandrayaan-1 only went up a year and a half ago, so yes, this was figured out after 1972.
This is the real kicker. Metanalysis doesn't work by magic. All it does it attempt to lump together different studies to see if a statistically valid correlation can be found in the data. One hopes that by having larger numbers, you get better statistical power than was available from smaller studies.
The validity of these studies is critically intwined with quality of the individual research. If all they did was lump everything together, you're going to get a lump of garbage. Interestingly, TFA doesn't mention any statisticians as authors. I would have serious doubts that psychiatrists or psychologists would have enough of a background in statistics to create a quality analysis.
And the fact that he is enough of an egotistical jerk to suggest that he has "definitively" proven anything in psychiatry leads me to believe that this is just part of the 94.277% (P less than 0.001) of all research that is crap.
A distressingly large number of psychological/sociological studies (I agree with your 94.277%) have deeply flawed statistics and/or experimental design. This meta-analytical study starts by assuming the validity of the conclusions from these broken studies and then adds another layer of potential statistical and design mistakes on top of that.
In such a fuzzy field, it would be much more useful to move in the other direction: rather than looking at tons of other studies from high overhead, very carefully examine one at a time to determine how valid it is.
And the best bit? If this code is really as complicated as they claim, it probably contains a few bugs. The pirated version, which bypasses all of this code and just dumps the data on disk, will be much simpler and so probably more reliable.
It doesn't need bugs to be unreliable. There's a guaranteed cap on reliability - it can't be better than your net connection. I think most people will see a couple losses of connectivity during a playthrough, making this one of the least stable games released in recent years. I also think that you're right - it will be quickly cracked and the pirates will be the only ones playing on truly stable code.
I really don't see the philosophical or policy basis for seeing this as something which privacy laws should prohibit. What is visible in public should be photographable to the public. If I can see it with my eyes without violating a law, why shouldn't I be able to photograph it? And if I can do it for individual photos why shouldn't Google be able to do it systematically?
Just for the sake of argument...
You drop skin cells in public all the time. Would you object to me collecting them, analyzing your DNA, and then sharing with the world a list of your genetic limitations?
Or...
Women wear skirts in public. In various circumstances, for instance on glass walkways, this creates "visibility issues." That's not a big problem. Would it be acceptable for the owner of such a walkway to stick a camera underneath, photograph each person, then put the photos on a website that connects them with identifying information?
Cue a bunch of silly /. responses about hypothetical situation #2...
Mass Effect 1 came out on XBox360 first and the PC port wasn't even done by Bioware, Mass Effect 2 came out on both systems at the same time.
That aside Bioware so far has been doing great on porting consoles to PC or visa versa, as they actually redesign the user interface for each system, instead of just mapping mouse moving to an analog stick, which never really works.
ME2 wasn't redesigned quite enough. Much of the menu interface isn't simply clickable. Instead you have to simulate moving the cursor by clicking once on the option you want and then simulate hitting X by clicking once on "choose this selection" or some equivalent. Also, scrolling text blocks really need to respond to the scroll wheel. And why didn't they had hotkeys to go to anything but the main menu? That said, it still doesn't get in the way of the gameplay very much. I'd a solid B level port.
Borderlands takes the same problems and amplifies them immensely.
Dragon Age, which was actually one of those rare ports from the PC to the console, had a fantastic PC interface and a console interface so much worse that console players think it's a vastly harder game than those on the PC. Micromanaging four characters is so easy with quick zooming in and out of the action and quickly clicking your way through the things you want them to do. Micromanaging on the PC isn't much of a slowdown over real time play, while on the 360 complete micromanagement is very clumsy and very sluggish.
Oh really? Then why did the Prime Minister of Newfoundland come to the US for heart treatment? Because the wait in Canada would have caused his death, that's why. He's 59 fer chrissake, why save him? And, skip the argument that he's got millions. He's doing what the Democrap morons in the USA want to end for all of us - free choice.
The disingenuous Canadians know that rationing exists in the Canadian health system. A 20-something or 30-something gets fairly quick care mostly because it's routine stuff. Go try for for something more serious, and be over 40 and you wait - wait until you die or leave for the US to seek treatment. Heaven help you if you're over 50.
Cut the bullshit and tell the truth Canucks. Your system only treats the healthy. It's like banks who only lend money to people that don't need it.
I worked with a number of middle aged MDs in the United States who always took their families to India or France for treatment because the wait in America was too long and the cost was an order of magnitude higher.
By my count (of Wikipedia), there are 2 Enterprises from the Continental Navy, 6 from the US Navy, 1 balloon, 1 space shuttle, 1 training ship, and 8 starships that are worth counting, for a total of 19 Enterprises. If 75% have suffered major cyber attacks and we round down, we have 14 cyber-victims.
Here's where it gets weird. Clearly the 8 starships are attackable in the computerized sense. That leaves us with 6 other hackable Enterprises. Most likely 1 is the space shuttle, 1 is the training vessel, and 1 is the contemporary air craft carrier. But that means 3 more Enterprises were cyber-violated out of a pool containing a balloon used during the Civil War and 5 US Navy ships decommissioned between 1823 and 1947.
This seems to be proof of a pre-modern technological underground. Or time travel.
The EU fines Firebug 3.5 billion euro and demands a web development tool ballot screen in 3...2...1...
What all these anti-cheating efforts fail to realize is that cheating is an integral part of the game, especially in computer gaming. Given that such a cheat can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider cheating, they are removing key gameplay elements and ultimately changing the face of the game.
Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a rootkit just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior technology or extra knowledge. If these games are so unplayable with cheating enabled, perhaps the designers shouldn't have put those features in.
Crippling superior players is Communism.
What all these anti-murder efforts fail to realize is that murder is an integral part of life, especially in America. Given that such a murder can be performed by anyone, the playing field is *always* level in the aggregate. By removing actions that they consider murder, they are removing key life goals and ultimately changing the face of humanity.
Additionally, it says a lot that they must resort to installing what is essentially a police force just to make sure someone isn't taking advantage of superior ability to murder or extra knowledge of how to carry it out. If life is so difficult with frequent random murdering allowed, perhaps we shouldn't have been made mortal
Crippling superior murderers is Communism.
The problem with Ayn Rand is that her hysterics appeal to a lot of high school students who forget to think about them in more detail when they grow up.
Ok i'd buy the game... but not if a subscription fee is required. one of the many reasons i got a PS3.
Ars (I think it was Ars, at least) recently reported that PS3's online features are soon going to require a subscription.
...or one could slow down at 0.999 c and the trip is going to be two minutes longer.
Except from the perspective of the people on the ship, thanks to the Lorentz factor having the form 1/(1-(v^2)/(c^2))^0.5.
If you die the Octomom will have another baby and replace you.
Your fantastic rant was beautifully capped with the Octomom Prophecy. I think I've found a new sig.
The terms green and CO2 are being tossed around as blatant lies to convince people to spend more to get the the same, or in cases like this, to get nothing at all.
It's really a shame that people believe politics over science. It makes me a cynic. Someone obviously decided to buy these "green" ice resurfacing machines because it made them feel like they were doing "their part" to help the environment. The problem is they were sold a lie. Not only were they sold a lie, but a non-functioning lie as well.
Seriously people, CO2 emissions are nothing to be afraid of. CO2 emissions are nothing you should be paying extra to decrease. The fact is that the CO2 that humans put into the atmosphere is infinitesimal compared to volcanoes and the oceans.
The people who bought the electric zams, which are actually pretty common, probably made the decision to reduce the carbon monoxide and particulate emissions that are not so great for the health of spectators in enclosed ice arenas.
Also, you made a blunder in your CO2 rant. The argument that CO2 emissions aren't bad is supposed to be, "increased CO2 doesn't lead to significantly more global warming," not "humans don't significantly affect CO2 levels." The reason for this is that contention 1 may be true, while contention 2 (yours) is demonstrably false. Note the ~25% increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the last 50 years shown here.
What the fuck? There are Americans out there who are willing to pay $40,000 a semester just to watch some goddamn "educational" videos? Is this for real?
Back when I was in college, I wasn't paying anywhere near that much, but you'd better fucking imagine that I got my money's worth by dealing with the professors and making sure they were teaching me directly, and not just telling me to watch some cockbiting "supplementary videos" or any fancy shit-in-my-pants like that. Fuck.
UCLA tuition is more like $5000/semester.
Some people can't be bought, bargained or reasoned with.
Yes, and they absolutely will not stop.
If you beat up the kids who bully you, they often will stop. There are downsides, as well (see Ender's Game).
Um, you don't suppose that might have something to do with the vastly improved security measures do you? Backward logic is fun.
I've got a rock that repels tigers, too.
Google won me with speed, but, as usual with everything except search and GMail, they are losing me with bugs and a lack of features (Print Preview, the ability to remove typos from my search history
I agree with you. I switched to Chrome as my main browser for similar reasons. I used to use Firefox, but I became weary of how slow Firefox is relative to Chrome, even without extension. With extensions it's a joke. (Side note: I like the userscript extension method in the Chrome Beta - which is very stable for a Beta). But why, as you say, can't they have a half intelligent search history, like Firefox? Why does the browser constantly chatter to 1e100.net? image If this is a Google server, why doesn't it LOOK like a Google server? Why doesn't a Google search for "Chrome plugins" have as a result the proper Extensions page? https://chrome.google.com/extensions. In fact, why is that page the SECOND result for "Chrome extensions"? Mystifying.
I tried to switch to Chrome version 3 for the javascript speed but I couldn't handle the slow html rendering of that version of Webkit. One of my peeves is grabbing the scroll bar on the right side of my browser and sliding it rapidly through a long page with lots of images and text and having the refresh framerate drop to jerky levels. Webkit did that for me (I tried Safari, too). IE was actually faster at html rendering than either of the Webkit browsers, but still a bit slow. Firefox is my standard, and even though it beat IE, Chrome, and Safari, the reason I was shopping for a new browser in the first place was to fix what I had seen as Firefox's slow html rendering. As a major surprise for me, Opera was noticeably faster than Firefox and easily the overall champion. I switched to Opera for a couple days then missed the quality of FF's adblock and noscript and went back.
The simplification in the combat is quite annoying, I especially missed more direct control of the teammates. In ME1 you could tell them to seek a defensive position or attack a specific enemy giving it a tactic shooter feel, in ME2 that is no longer the case. You are limited to telling them what power to use. You can also tell them where to go, but that never worked for me in ME2 as they always ended up running all over the place.
You can still tell each party member to target a specific opponent. Movement control seems more effective in ME2 as well, since they do a better just of finding the cover you intend for them to use when you tell them to go stand near a wall or crate or something. Overall I think ME2 offers the same level of party control as the PC version of ME1, and thus much more than the console ME1. Also, grenades were replaced by the much more varied, useful, and interesting heavy weapons. Health packs still work, but you need to research them (+health during unity, and +shields during unity as a separate upgrade). I, too miss parts of ME1's system. I miss the incredible crowd control abilities of a biotic character. Now that sort of ability only works when it no longer matters (once shields and armor are down, at which point the target is already a couple seconds from the end). Additionally, sharing a cooldown between every ability eliminates the lift/singularity/push combos that allowed a single character to completely direct an encounter without firing a shot.
I would like to remind you that the Kindle has a e-ink screen is much easier on the eyes than an LCD is.
Saying it doesn't make it true, but thank you for "reminding" me of the points I already specifically addressed. Have you actually used a Kindle in typical indoor lighting conditions for any length of time?
I'm an amusingly good test subject for this. For the last few weeks I've been reading off my Kindle almost every night by the light of a single Candle two feet behind my shoulder. I've had no eyestrain problems at all. If I did I'd light more candles, or maybe use a book light. This let's me read in a relatively dim room without bothering my sleeping wife. It's a lot more pleasant than the hours of reading I do on an LCD every day.