That's funny because I actually enjoyed the leveling experience in WoW. The top level raiding was also fun but because of it's nature it wasn't as entertaining over all. At any time I could pickup and play one of my alts and go do questing and progress the character. At max level, once you finished the quests all that was left was waiting for the weekly raids or grinding out rep with whatever faction. The leveling experience was by far more versatile and fun for me. I had five max level characters of different classes when I quit during TBC and numerous lower level alts.
I know people are different but I've seen a good amount of feedback on blogs and whatnot that seemed to indicate the wholesale slaughter of the leveling game as a factor in WoW's decline. In large part because it kills replayability. For me hitting max level was often a bit of a let down because it meant I'd hit the point where progressing the character turned into a chore of a grind.
The Red all directions for a second or two is not uniformly implemented in all states. In fact what finally made them do that in my home town was when an inattentive driver ran over an elementary schooler that hadn't quite cleared the intersection on foot.
It in theory shouldn't matter because drivers should not be anticipating the behaviour of lights in that respect. In other words a driver shouldn't fail to slow down for a red light because s/he thinks it'll be green by the time they get to it. And a driver should never enter an intersection when there is still cross traffic present in the way. A green light is not an excuse to accelerate into another vehicle or pedestrian.
Generaly speaking nobody gets retirement pay immediately when they retire unless they are past a certain age. That's because regardless of the size of your retirement payments don't start until you hit a certain age, for me it's 62 I think. You can qualify for retirement pay prior to that but it often means reduced payments and such. If not mistaken all new military members are getting the same deal, whereas they used to be able to retire as early as 38 and start collecting retirement pay.
Based on some probably out of date numbers, in order to own a 1/300,000,000 stake in the market capitalization of the publicly traded stock in the US you'd need to invest $50,000. Now that's entirely possible for one person to do and have obviously. I know people who probably have 20 times that in the market right now. I'm somewhere around half myself. But I wouldn't say that it's easy for the most of the population to achieve that in the short term. And this isn't even counting market cap that isn't publicly traded, but is instead held privately.
Someone else pointed out already that the encryption for the military signal is so low bitrate that it's not likely to be very strong encryption.
And they didn't necessarily need to spoof the military signal. The drone might have the capability to use the unencrypted signal if it can't read the military one. In that case they could just jam the military signal and override the civilian one.
The damage could just be from them not landing it in a large and open enough area. It probably just ran into a rock or telephone pole while landing.
How much does an inertial guidance system weigh? I know they try to make these things as light weight as possible, could it have been left out deliberately?
In all likelyhood, unless you are very close to a hospital and know the way there, calling 911 and getting an ambulance on the way is going to be safer, faster and more effective than trying to play ambulance driver yourself.
Heart attacks probably are less likely to happen in a car simply because the people are sitting and hopefully at rest. But that isn't the only eventuality that could lead to someone's need to use a cell phone. I've used a cell phone a number of times over the years to report accidents and road hazards that I observed.
How about this as a possible example? You are running a cell signal jammer when the vehicle in front of you is t-boned at high speed right in front of you at a rural intersection. Being a good samaritan you immediately put on your hazard lights and park so as to protect the crashed vehicles from further accident. You get out and attempt to render assistance or see if it's even possible. How long might it be before you realize that you are blocking everyone from calling 911 while you are caught up in the situation? Even if there are homes nearby they might not have landlines as many people these days just use their cell phones. I'm not 100% on how On-Star type systems work, but it's possible that your jammer could be blocking these reporting mechanisms as well. Even if you have the forethought and situational awareness to turn off your jammer, someone else at the scene might not and leave theirs running. Every second wasted trying to get around a jammer to call 911 increases the risk to someone else's life.
Or how about the simple infringement on your rights if you as a pedestrian can't complete a conversation on your cell phone because cars driving by have jammers?
"Driving below minimum legal speed (usually 10mph below speed limit)"
I think the only places I've ever seen a minimum speed posted it's been at least 20mph under the posted maximum and sometimes 30. That said traveling only 5 or 10 over the maximum can result in clogging up the flow of traffic in some places.
Is there evidence that talking to a passenger is as distracting as talking on a cell phone? Everything I've heard so far has indicated that while passengers can be distracting they are less so than Cell Phones.
It's been proposed that passengers are by virtue of being in the vehicle more aware of the situation and will react appropriately. They can also point out things that the driver may not have noticed yet or missed completely.
While I agree that this could become a slippery slope I think it's a slope worth attempting to traverse. 15 years ago this would have been a complete non-issue, and for me it practically is. I don't own a cell phone and get grumpy when the wife insists I carry hers. People by and large do not need to be using a cell phone while driving, except maybe as a navigation aid. Just because we have the power to do it doesn't mean we should.
I think the best solution to the problem though wouldn't be to make it illegal. Just hold people strictly responsible for their actions. Start using cell phone use in the course of an accident as evidence of gross negligence, and then fine and imprison as necessary. The only problem with that would be that people are still bad at assessing the risks and we'll just end up with more people incarcerated or under heavy fines with the same number of innocent people killed.
The government only brought us alcohol prohibition in the sense that they did enact the laws for it. But they did so at the bidding of the people who demanded it.
And like the other guy said most of those other activities are momentary distractions, not minutes long or perpetual distractions. And talking to a passenger is balanced out and more by the fact that they are there to point out things the driver might have missed and can shut up on their own when condition demand the drivers attention.
The only reason I would advocate making it law that drivers not engage in cell phone use at all is because it's a prolonged activity. If it is happening it will go on for awhile at least. It's not like changing the radio or picking something up off the floor, because those things take a could seconds at the longest. And most people will realize if it's taking them more than a few seconds to do one of these things they need to stop the car and deal with it or let it go. People don't seem to make that distinction with phone calls in most cases.
While I agree with you in principle I think that your numbers have got to be way off base for the real population on the costs of owning and operating a car.
Personally the most expensive vehicle I have owned to date so far as maintainance and such is concerned was a mid 80's Porsche. I owned it from 2002 to 2008 I believe. No mechanic I could find would touch it for under $65 an hour. And even then including the upfront cost of buying the car and such I don't think it cost me more than $1500 a year in upkeep. Gas might have been up to $1500 on it's own but I doubt it as I was driving under 10K miles a year.
I think part of your error though is in the idea that a car is only used for ten years. The car I drive now is a 04 but I expect to be driving it for a decade or more. I owned an older model of the same car, a 1990, and it had no problems. I sold it to a friend because it ended up as the third car in a two driver house.
There is no reason for Public Transit to be the only option. Have you ever heard of ZipCar? My Sister lived in Boston for years and never had a car of her own. She used Public Transit for her day to day needs and a Zip car when she needed to do grocery shopping or carry a large load. Granted it's not as conveinent but it did save her loads of money on car payments and insurance.
WTF, how is this a sign of impaired driving? And even if someone is driving impaired I don't see how them maintaining a very large gap between them and the car ahead of them is dangerous in any way. I'll admit it's annoying as hell sometimes but it's hardly dangerous.
Actually in most places that I'm aware of there are no laws on the books specifically protecting many of those actions. For instance it is still a violation of the traffic laws for police officers to speed, cross intersections against a signal, make illegal turns and enter a private residence when they believe a crime is in progress.
What happens is that the DA and the police exercise discretion in these cases and simply don't press charges or even stop the event when they see it happening. A police officer is usually not required by law to give you a citation for speeding, it is almost always at his discretion. And this is a good thing for society like you pointed out. But codefiying these things into law can often lead to abuses and so it's best to avoid that.
Except that in our country it is up to the accuser to prove the truth of their allegations. From what I've read it sounds like she was making accusations and claims about this company and did not show any evidence to back it up in court. The journalism issue only comes up here because her evidence is hearsay supposedly coming through a third party whom she refused to disclose.
This is libel through and through, even if the company she was going after deserved it in some way or other.
I could be confused but I think I currently have a setup similiar to this.
My main OS is windows with a number of hard drives. On one of those drives I have a large file mixed with other large files, that is mislabeled to match the other files. This file is actually a True Crypt container, which has a Virtualbox unix OS installed on it.
Hopefully because the virtual machine is entirely encapsulated within the TC container nothing would leak out into the top level windows environment. The only obvious flaw that I can see is that the virtual machine talks to the network through the hosts connection. Although I suppose you don't absolutely have to have a net connection for some uses. And I'm not using a hidden partition, I've just camo'd the container.
I'm pretty confident that eating grass fed beef would expose you to less bacteria than corn fed. I agree that the types may be the same and possibly even with the same distributions. But the overall amount could be significantly less, depending on how the bacteria is winding up on the meat.
One of the more interesting and scientific bits in Food Inc was a discussion about the levels of bacteria in the stomachs of cattle raised on grass vs corn. They had steers with permanent openings through their sides into the gut. The scientists could actually dip out a sample from the gut and measure what was in it. They had found that corn fed cattle had many times the amount of bacteria than grass fed. Which makes sense when you consider that grass has considerably less sugars by mass than corn and that cattle evolved to eat grass primarily with grains as an occasional treat. They found that switching cattle to a grass diet for just two weeks made a huge difference, and so proposed the idea of finishing cattle on grass in the last two weeks before slaughter.
Cheaper isn't exactly true, or rather I think people are likely to understand it incorrectly.
Corn fed beef is cheaper for a variety of reasons, and cheap corn prices enable the feedlot style of beef ranching. Feedlots require a lot less land per animal and so are less expensive to start up and maintain. You don't have to worry about cattle getting lost or eaten by predators. Since corn has a much higher caloric value than grass the steers grow larger more quickly and have a higher % of body fat, which is actually desireable to an extent for flavor. Because you are feeding from a trough it is easier to regulate just how much feed is being consumed and less is lost or wasted. All of this is made possible because corn is cheap enough for the market to bear the price of beef raised exlusively on it. But if we eliminated subsidies for corn it is likely that feed lots would just switch to using another cheap grain instead.
The danger of monocultures doen't have much of anything to do with switching between crop types. Monoculture problems are in everyone only raising a few breeds of each crop type. The patents on GM and other commercially hybridized crop seeds is what has created this problem in recent history. For instance Monsanto produces the weed killer Roundup, which is very effective but kills crops also. So Monsanto develops hybridized seed that is immune or resistant to their Roundup product. Monsanto then leverages the legal system to prevent farmers from using part of their previous crop as seed, forcing them to buy seed every year from Monsanto. Even if a farmer were to use some older non-patented seed within a couple of years their crop would likely contain a large percentage of plants that contained the patented genes from the Monsanto seed due to cross pollination from nearby fields. At which point the farmer gets sued into oblivion. The larger danger to us as a society from the monocultures though is that a single disease could wipe out an entire years crop, if not more depending on how long it took to develop new resistant seed.
Actually I think that SOPA would make it so that a judge wouldn't even have to weigh in on it at all. It basically allows corporations to vanish sites and media that they don't like without any kind of legal due process.
I agree it's the most lax, but it's also silly to think that it matters. The term ChairForce wasn't just made up on a lark.
Some details. I was on an exercise regimine for six months. I worked out for at least 1 hour five days a week with practically all of it being aerobic activity. I kept an honest food journal the entire time showing that I was at or below my 2200 calorie limit. I drank copious amounts of water and shunned juices and soft drinks. I lost maybe ten pounds and did increse my physical ability a good deal. But my waist measurement went from 42" to 40.5" which wasn't enough to pass muster.
I ran the mile and a half in 12:07, maxed pushups and situps, on my first attempt. I failed spectaularly because of the waist measurement. The next week I wrapped my waist with a neoprene weight belt and a broad leather weight belt for the 14 hours leading up to my retest, progressively tightening the belt. I removed the belts in the parking lot before going in for measurement and had a 39.5" waist, maxed out pushups and situps again. I then did my run in 12:00 with a friend helping to pace me.
The slightly faster run gained me a couple points because it got me to the next bracket, but dropping below 40" gained me a ton of points. I passed with an 80 something score. Then in six months when my enlistment was up I got out. I didn't enlist to look pretty in a uniform, I signed up to serve my country. Now I just do it without all the hoopla and macho crap.
I gotta agree. Whenever I went TDY and was driving I'd always opt for the rental car rather than drive my own. It was almost always cheaper for my employer than reimbursing me for the mileage. And the rentals really weren't all that pricey, maybe a couple hundred bucks for a week at the most. You could easily save that much money in gas on an EV.
One of the things I'd really like to see is for the auto companies to produce miniature generator trailers for their electric cars. All it would need is a small efficient generator and a couple gallon gas tank encased in an aerodynamic shell that you tow or suspend from a trailer hitch with a power jack. Sell them as an option on every EV car and rent them out from the dealership for those that don't want to buy it as an option. Such a device would be cheap enough to make, it could probably be sold as a $600 option at a nice profit, hell people pay more for 'sports' packages that add pinstripes and shiny wheels.
New Patent Application - A physical device that we will call a 'vehicle' used for the transport of people and goods at speeds exceeding that of a sea slug. The vehicle will use between 0 and 50 wheels, 1 engine or motor in conjunction with a fixed or variable ratio transmission. It will have at least 1 door for entrance and exit and a system of windows and mirrors for visibility.
As you can see it's just a bunch of ideas with no clear indication of precisely how the generalized parts interact to accomplish anything. It isn't necessarily a new idea, and isn't non-obvious.
I seriously wouldn't be suprised if there is an approved software patent out there for 'Hello World!'
Not having tried it for myself, I imagine you could disconnect from the LAN when starting the game, and then once steam has started in offline mode, reconnect to the LAN.
With a wireless LAN that might be as simple as a few mouse clicks. But it's still ludicrous that we'd have to do that to play a game that has already been authenticated and is resident on the system.
You could look at the diablo replayability thing being more varied forms of different difficulty levels. The different classes played differently and so fit different play styles. Playing a class that doesn't fit your play style can easily make the game more challenging and that's not even touching the skill choices within each class.
From my understanding Skyrim does have branching quest lines that alter either the end outcome or open/close availability of other quests and other gameplay avenues. The simplest example that comes to mind is in the first town you will likely encounter, where you meet two men who will give you conflicting quests. Whichever npc you finish the quest for will offer to be your follower, while the other will give you the cold shoulder, dialog options are different and whenever you come near him he'll have something unpleasant to say to you.
I don't know how deeply implemented that kind of thing is in the game over all but it's fun never the less. I've barely done any of the main quest line and I probably already have 30 hours spent in the game. I didn't play the other Elder Scrolls games but Skyrim seems like it's Fallout 3 in a fantasy setting with much improved graphics. I've actually kind of wished for a system like VATS since my computer can barely handle Skyrim on lowest settings, even with some ini tweaks.
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That's funny because I actually enjoyed the leveling experience in WoW. The top level raiding was also fun but because of it's nature it wasn't as entertaining over all. At any time I could pickup and play one of my alts and go do questing and progress the character. At max level, once you finished the quests all that was left was waiting for the weekly raids or grinding out rep with whatever faction. The leveling experience was by far more versatile and fun for me. I had five max level characters of different classes when I quit during TBC and numerous lower level alts.
I know people are different but I've seen a good amount of feedback on blogs and whatnot that seemed to indicate the wholesale slaughter of the leveling game as a factor in WoW's decline. In large part because it kills replayability. For me hitting max level was often a bit of a let down because it meant I'd hit the point where progressing the character turned into a chore of a grind.
The Red all directions for a second or two is not uniformly implemented in all states. In fact what finally made them do that in my home town was when an inattentive driver ran over an elementary schooler that hadn't quite cleared the intersection on foot.
It in theory shouldn't matter because drivers should not be anticipating the behaviour of lights in that respect. In other words a driver shouldn't fail to slow down for a red light because s/he thinks it'll be green by the time they get to it. And a driver should never enter an intersection when there is still cross traffic present in the way. A green light is not an excuse to accelerate into another vehicle or pedestrian.
It's not an entirely true statement.
Generaly speaking nobody gets retirement pay immediately when they retire unless they are past a certain age. That's because regardless of the size of your retirement payments don't start until you hit a certain age, for me it's 62 I think. You can qualify for retirement pay prior to that but it often means reduced payments and such. If not mistaken all new military members are getting the same deal, whereas they used to be able to retire as early as 38 and start collecting retirement pay.
Based on some probably out of date numbers, in order to own a 1/300,000,000 stake in the market capitalization of the publicly traded stock in the US you'd need to invest $50,000. Now that's entirely possible for one person to do and have obviously. I know people who probably have 20 times that in the market right now. I'm somewhere around half myself. But I wouldn't say that it's easy for the most of the population to achieve that in the short term. And this isn't even counting market cap that isn't publicly traded, but is instead held privately.
Someone else pointed out already that the encryption for the military signal is so low bitrate that it's not likely to be very strong encryption.
And they didn't necessarily need to spoof the military signal. The drone might have the capability to use the unencrypted signal if it can't read the military one. In that case they could just jam the military signal and override the civilian one.
The damage could just be from them not landing it in a large and open enough area. It probably just ran into a rock or telephone pole while landing.
How much does an inertial guidance system weigh? I know they try to make these things as light weight as possible, could it have been left out deliberately?
In all likelyhood, unless you are very close to a hospital and know the way there, calling 911 and getting an ambulance on the way is going to be safer, faster and more effective than trying to play ambulance driver yourself.
Heart attacks probably are less likely to happen in a car simply because the people are sitting and hopefully at rest. But that isn't the only eventuality that could lead to someone's need to use a cell phone. I've used a cell phone a number of times over the years to report accidents and road hazards that I observed.
How about this as a possible example? You are running a cell signal jammer when the vehicle in front of you is t-boned at high speed right in front of you at a rural intersection. Being a good samaritan you immediately put on your hazard lights and park so as to protect the crashed vehicles from further accident. You get out and attempt to render assistance or see if it's even possible. How long might it be before you realize that you are blocking everyone from calling 911 while you are caught up in the situation? Even if there are homes nearby they might not have landlines as many people these days just use their cell phones. I'm not 100% on how On-Star type systems work, but it's possible that your jammer could be blocking these reporting mechanisms as well. Even if you have the forethought and situational awareness to turn off your jammer, someone else at the scene might not and leave theirs running. Every second wasted trying to get around a jammer to call 911 increases the risk to someone else's life.
Or how about the simple infringement on your rights if you as a pedestrian can't complete a conversation on your cell phone because cars driving by have jammers?
"Driving below minimum legal speed (usually 10mph below speed limit)" I think the only places I've ever seen a minimum speed posted it's been at least 20mph under the posted maximum and sometimes 30. That said traveling only 5 or 10 over the maximum can result in clogging up the flow of traffic in some places.
Is there evidence that talking to a passenger is as distracting as talking on a cell phone? Everything I've heard so far has indicated that while passengers can be distracting they are less so than Cell Phones.
It's been proposed that passengers are by virtue of being in the vehicle more aware of the situation and will react appropriately. They can also point out things that the driver may not have noticed yet or missed completely.
While I agree that this could become a slippery slope I think it's a slope worth attempting to traverse. 15 years ago this would have been a complete non-issue, and for me it practically is. I don't own a cell phone and get grumpy when the wife insists I carry hers. People by and large do not need to be using a cell phone while driving, except maybe as a navigation aid. Just because we have the power to do it doesn't mean we should.
I think the best solution to the problem though wouldn't be to make it illegal. Just hold people strictly responsible for their actions. Start using cell phone use in the course of an accident as evidence of gross negligence, and then fine and imprison as necessary. The only problem with that would be that people are still bad at assessing the risks and we'll just end up with more people incarcerated or under heavy fines with the same number of innocent people killed.
The government only brought us alcohol prohibition in the sense that they did enact the laws for it. But they did so at the bidding of the people who demanded it.
And like the other guy said most of those other activities are momentary distractions, not minutes long or perpetual distractions. And talking to a passenger is balanced out and more by the fact that they are there to point out things the driver might have missed and can shut up on their own when condition demand the drivers attention.
The only reason I would advocate making it law that drivers not engage in cell phone use at all is because it's a prolonged activity. If it is happening it will go on for awhile at least. It's not like changing the radio or picking something up off the floor, because those things take a could seconds at the longest. And most people will realize if it's taking them more than a few seconds to do one of these things they need to stop the car and deal with it or let it go. People don't seem to make that distinction with phone calls in most cases.
While I agree with you in principle I think that your numbers have got to be way off base for the real population on the costs of owning and operating a car.
Personally the most expensive vehicle I have owned to date so far as maintainance and such is concerned was a mid 80's Porsche. I owned it from 2002 to 2008 I believe. No mechanic I could find would touch it for under $65 an hour. And even then including the upfront cost of buying the car and such I don't think it cost me more than $1500 a year in upkeep. Gas might have been up to $1500 on it's own but I doubt it as I was driving under 10K miles a year.
I think part of your error though is in the idea that a car is only used for ten years. The car I drive now is a 04 but I expect to be driving it for a decade or more. I owned an older model of the same car, a 1990, and it had no problems. I sold it to a friend because it ended up as the third car in a two driver house.
There is no reason for Public Transit to be the only option. Have you ever heard of ZipCar? My Sister lived in Boston for years and never had a car of her own. She used Public Transit for her day to day needs and a Zip car when she needed to do grocery shopping or carry a large load. Granted it's not as conveinent but it did save her loads of money on car payments and insurance.
"excessively long cushions to the next car"
WTF, how is this a sign of impaired driving? And even if someone is driving impaired I don't see how them maintaining a very large gap between them and the car ahead of them is dangerous in any way. I'll admit it's annoying as hell sometimes but it's hardly dangerous.
Actually in most places that I'm aware of there are no laws on the books specifically protecting many of those actions. For instance it is still a violation of the traffic laws for police officers to speed, cross intersections against a signal, make illegal turns and enter a private residence when they believe a crime is in progress.
What happens is that the DA and the police exercise discretion in these cases and simply don't press charges or even stop the event when they see it happening. A police officer is usually not required by law to give you a citation for speeding, it is almost always at his discretion. And this is a good thing for society like you pointed out. But codefiying these things into law can often lead to abuses and so it's best to avoid that.
Except that in our country it is up to the accuser to prove the truth of their allegations. From what I've read it sounds like she was making accusations and claims about this company and did not show any evidence to back it up in court. The journalism issue only comes up here because her evidence is hearsay supposedly coming through a third party whom she refused to disclose.
This is libel through and through, even if the company she was going after deserved it in some way or other.
My wife would disagree, a two day trip might even require multiple trunks.
I could be confused but I think I currently have a setup similiar to this.
My main OS is windows with a number of hard drives. On one of those drives I have a large file mixed with other large files, that is mislabeled to match the other files. This file is actually a True Crypt container, which has a Virtualbox unix OS installed on it.
Hopefully because the virtual machine is entirely encapsulated within the TC container nothing would leak out into the top level windows environment. The only obvious flaw that I can see is that the virtual machine talks to the network through the hosts connection. Although I suppose you don't absolutely have to have a net connection for some uses. And I'm not using a hidden partition, I've just camo'd the container.
I'm pretty confident that eating grass fed beef would expose you to less bacteria than corn fed. I agree that the types may be the same and possibly even with the same distributions. But the overall amount could be significantly less, depending on how the bacteria is winding up on the meat.
One of the more interesting and scientific bits in Food Inc was a discussion about the levels of bacteria in the stomachs of cattle raised on grass vs corn. They had steers with permanent openings through their sides into the gut. The scientists could actually dip out a sample from the gut and measure what was in it. They had found that corn fed cattle had many times the amount of bacteria than grass fed. Which makes sense when you consider that grass has considerably less sugars by mass than corn and that cattle evolved to eat grass primarily with grains as an occasional treat. They found that switching cattle to a grass diet for just two weeks made a huge difference, and so proposed the idea of finishing cattle on grass in the last two weeks before slaughter.
Cheaper isn't exactly true, or rather I think people are likely to understand it incorrectly.
Corn fed beef is cheaper for a variety of reasons, and cheap corn prices enable the feedlot style of beef ranching. Feedlots require a lot less land per animal and so are less expensive to start up and maintain. You don't have to worry about cattle getting lost or eaten by predators. Since corn has a much higher caloric value than grass the steers grow larger more quickly and have a higher % of body fat, which is actually desireable to an extent for flavor. Because you are feeding from a trough it is easier to regulate just how much feed is being consumed and less is lost or wasted. All of this is made possible because corn is cheap enough for the market to bear the price of beef raised exlusively on it. But if we eliminated subsidies for corn it is likely that feed lots would just switch to using another cheap grain instead.
The danger of monocultures doen't have much of anything to do with switching between crop types. Monoculture problems are in everyone only raising a few breeds of each crop type. The patents on GM and other commercially hybridized crop seeds is what has created this problem in recent history. For instance Monsanto produces the weed killer Roundup, which is very effective but kills crops also. So Monsanto develops hybridized seed that is immune or resistant to their Roundup product. Monsanto then leverages the legal system to prevent farmers from using part of their previous crop as seed, forcing them to buy seed every year from Monsanto. Even if a farmer were to use some older non-patented seed within a couple of years their crop would likely contain a large percentage of plants that contained the patented genes from the Monsanto seed due to cross pollination from nearby fields. At which point the farmer gets sued into oblivion. The larger danger to us as a society from the monocultures though is that a single disease could wipe out an entire years crop, if not more depending on how long it took to develop new resistant seed.
Actually I think that SOPA would make it so that a judge wouldn't even have to weigh in on it at all. It basically allows corporations to vanish sites and media that they don't like without any kind of legal due process.
I agree it's the most lax, but it's also silly to think that it matters. The term ChairForce wasn't just made up on a lark.
Some details. I was on an exercise regimine for six months. I worked out for at least 1 hour five days a week with practically all of it being aerobic activity. I kept an honest food journal the entire time showing that I was at or below my 2200 calorie limit. I drank copious amounts of water and shunned juices and soft drinks. I lost maybe ten pounds and did increse my physical ability a good deal. But my waist measurement went from 42" to 40.5" which wasn't enough to pass muster.
I ran the mile and a half in 12:07, maxed pushups and situps, on my first attempt. I failed spectaularly because of the waist measurement. The next week I wrapped my waist with a neoprene weight belt and a broad leather weight belt for the 14 hours leading up to my retest, progressively tightening the belt. I removed the belts in the parking lot before going in for measurement and had a 39.5" waist, maxed out pushups and situps again. I then did my run in 12:00 with a friend helping to pace me.
The slightly faster run gained me a couple points because it got me to the next bracket, but dropping below 40" gained me a ton of points. I passed with an 80 something score. Then in six months when my enlistment was up I got out. I didn't enlist to look pretty in a uniform, I signed up to serve my country. Now I just do it without all the hoopla and macho crap.
I gotta agree. Whenever I went TDY and was driving I'd always opt for the rental car rather than drive my own. It was almost always cheaper for my employer than reimbursing me for the mileage. And the rentals really weren't all that pricey, maybe a couple hundred bucks for a week at the most. You could easily save that much money in gas on an EV.
One of the things I'd really like to see is for the auto companies to produce miniature generator trailers for their electric cars. All it would need is a small efficient generator and a couple gallon gas tank encased in an aerodynamic shell that you tow or suspend from a trailer hitch with a power jack. Sell them as an option on every EV car and rent them out from the dealership for those that don't want to buy it as an option. Such a device would be cheap enough to make, it could probably be sold as a $600 option at a nice profit, hell people pay more for 'sports' packages that add pinstripes and shiny wheels.
The automotive equivilant could go like this:
New Patent Application - A physical device that we will call a 'vehicle' used for the transport of people and goods at speeds exceeding that of a sea slug. The vehicle will use between 0 and 50 wheels, 1 engine or motor in conjunction with a fixed or variable ratio transmission. It will have at least 1 door for entrance and exit and a system of windows and mirrors for visibility.
As you can see it's just a bunch of ideas with no clear indication of precisely how the generalized parts interact to accomplish anything. It isn't necessarily a new idea, and isn't non-obvious.
I seriously wouldn't be suprised if there is an approved software patent out there for 'Hello World!'
Not having tried it for myself, I imagine you could disconnect from the LAN when starting the game, and then once steam has started in offline mode, reconnect to the LAN.
With a wireless LAN that might be as simple as a few mouse clicks. But it's still ludicrous that we'd have to do that to play a game that has already been authenticated and is resident on the system.
You could look at the diablo replayability thing being more varied forms of different difficulty levels. The different classes played differently and so fit different play styles. Playing a class that doesn't fit your play style can easily make the game more challenging and that's not even touching the skill choices within each class.
From my understanding Skyrim does have branching quest lines that alter either the end outcome or open/close availability of other quests and other gameplay avenues. The simplest example that comes to mind is in the first town you will likely encounter, where you meet two men who will give you conflicting quests. Whichever npc you finish the quest for will offer to be your follower, while the other will give you the cold shoulder, dialog options are different and whenever you come near him he'll have something unpleasant to say to you.
I don't know how deeply implemented that kind of thing is in the game over all but it's fun never the less. I've barely done any of the main quest line and I probably already have 30 hours spent in the game. I didn't play the other Elder Scrolls games but Skyrim seems like it's Fallout 3 in a fantasy setting with much improved graphics. I've actually kind of wished for a system like VATS since my computer can barely handle Skyrim on lowest settings, even with some ini tweaks.