I loved I, IV, VI, VII, IX, and X. I'm still working on XIII, and haven't bothered with the MMO ones -- I have no interest in MMOs.
I've been saying for years: if someone came out with a game with a story as engaging as say, FF VI or FF VII or Earthbound, I wouldn't care if it were still in 16 bit graphics. I still break out the Earthbound and FF VI occasionally to re-play because they were great games with great story lines.
Graphics are nice and all, but I'll take gameplay and story line any day of the week over them.
I have high hopes for FF XIII-2, if only because they publicly labeled it as wanting to "fix" FFXIII's mistakes. They even named some of the worst offenders with the game: railroad plot, and too much focus on the story rather than the characters (they also talked about governance issues, but I can't speak to that). I just hope they also work on dialogue, too; I don't know if all that sounded better in Japanese, but the English translation was some of the corniest, cheesiest drivel I've ever heard. The characters were engaging and complex people... right up until they opened their mouths, and they all became annoying mental patients. Ugh.
Actually this isn't true either. Studies show that the rich don't move to avoid taxes, any more than the middle class or poor do. Maybe you find it surprising, but rich people tend to like a lot of the things middle class people do: clean streets, low crime, working gas/water/electricity, decent weather, a stable government that doesn't erupt in bloody revolt every few years, etc. These things don't exist in ultra-low tax countries.
Would be hard to pay more or get less than we currently do.
Hard, yes, but the free market will find a way.
That's one of the fundamental misconceptions many free market fundamentalists make: they assume a market always works for the public. It doesn't; it's not even supposed to. What it does is create the most efficient conversion of assets to product through competition. In the case of airport security, actual, real security is not the product. it is in fact an expenditure, one that will be minimized by competitors. What will be maximized is security theater, that is, the presence of visible "security elements" which make the public believe that real security is being delivered, while what is in reality happening is that the company is maximizing its profits.
Look at privatized prisons to see how this "market" works: more arrests, more convictions, more corruption and collusion between judges and private prison companies. Less real public safety.
Actually, the people most at risk are those who cannot be vaccinated: the very young, and those with weak immune systems. If not for them, I wouldn't care about this sort of thing; for those who choose to ignore science and lose their children to easily preventable disease it's nothing more than Darwinism at work, but it's a tragedy when people die because their neighbors are fools.
They released version 3.4.2 three days ago. As I understand it they're mostly working on bug fixes for now--lord knows they need it--and removing as much Java dependence as possible.
No, I don't think encryption should be the only measure of whether or not a communication should be considered "private" for the purposes of wiretapping/privacy laws; I also think that both intent and the nature of the technology should play a role. For example, a quiet whisper into someone else's ear can be private, but now a shout, because one is obviously meant to be private and the other is obviously meant to be a "broadcast". Similarly, a cell phone should be private, while unencrypted wifi networking is not, because one is a point-to-point sharing technology, while the other is about broadly sharing information.
In other words, Google shouldn't be charged with wiretapping for sniffing open wifi packets, but my ISP should be when it uses deep packet inspection to throttle down my bittorrents and Netflix streams in favor of its own on-demand video service.
Not really. Catastrophic is actually looked down upon in the scientific community.
Excellent. Then there's no need to alter our way of life to the tune of trillions more dollars that we don't have.
Exactly. The majority of the economic pressure is always going to be on the side of doing nothing; after all, for most large corporations/governments money would much rather be using their money to line their own pockets, not spend it on green tech and protecting the human habitability of the planet. Nobody wants to find out that trillions need to be spent over the next several decades to prevent a geopolitical and economic disaster; the first person who finds definitive proof that global climate change is wrong will be showered in money.
The fact that hasn't happened yet, despite denialists looking for that elusive bit of proof for decades, while every year more and more factual evidence piles up on the side of the scientists, makes it more and more certain that there isn't any such missing, magic "fact" which will disprove GCC and save the oil companies' massive profits.
Er, wasn't it the other way around? The big story a few months back was how Facebook had hired a company to run an astroturfing smear campaign against Google, accusing them of antitrust and privacy violations (and then, "coincidentally" enough, the FTC opens an investigation a few months later).
I don't own any modern Apple products, and it's pretty unlikely I'll be buying any in the future, but this really would be the smart move for Apple. I mean, the only real reason they still have desktops is because they always have, but it's not like that's what's making the business money. If you have two product lines, both requiring extensive R&D, and one of them makes you heaping endless piles of money while the other just kind of muddles along, it doesn't take a business genius to know what the smart move is.
Yes: the smart move it to keep both of them, especially if they serve entirely different market segments.
What I'm expecting is for Jobs to convert the non-Pro Macbook line to iOS (and ARM) within one or two generations; eventually the line will simply merge with the iPad to become a tablet with a more robust docking station, much like the Eee Transformer. The Pro line will remain wedded to x86, at least in the near term (2-4 years).
As much as I hate to say it, physical media is largely dead. Digital only, with all titles being tied to your personal information, thus letting corporations tailor advertisements to you, is going to be standard very shortly.
I think the next gen will still be physical, but after that it is very unlikely.
Maybe in Japan, South Korea and Lithuania where you can get a decent internet connection for a reasonable price. Here in America, with ever-increasing last-mile prices and ever-tightening bandwidth caps (despite backhaul becoming exponentially cheaper year-over-year), in two console generations most people won't even be able to afford to play a game online, let alone download one.
Heh, I guess I got kind of lucky. I actually didn't even play the game until my dad got stuck near the end of chapter 9. Apparently I got the good part of the game.:)
Another reason to love capitalism; you think of gravity, the universe is your's!
Patents aren't capitalism. In fact they're almost the exact opposite of capitalism: they are government-granted monopolies on production. They were originally granted to protect individual innovators from exploitation by wealthy corporations, but almost since the laws were first passed they were used for the exact opposite purpose. They need to die, or at least be seriously reformed, but in the current pro-corporate, anti-consumer climate of, well both parties but I'm thinking of one in particular we'll never see real patent reform, just like how real health care reform and real banking reform were "compromised" to death, and even their hollowed-out husks are drawing fire from the radical right.
It's really that simple, squeenix has lost all manner of quality. They just make ugly designs, annoying musc, 100% grindy gameplay and stories which grow less and less cool.
The main problem is that japans gaming culture and western gaming culture has grown more and more widely apart.
This really hurts their market.
There's a lot to like about FF XIII. The Active Time Battle system is actually pretty cool when you really start delving into it (though the limitation of only six Paradigms is super-limiting in the late/post-game when you have a total of 216 possible combinations) The music and backgrounds were extremely well done; whoever was in charge of character art and scenery did a great job.
Unfortunately the game ended up failing because of the rather boring and horribly linear plot, which to my knowledge didn't have any of the humor of the previous FF greats (III, VI, VII), and the awful, awful, awful dialogue (at least in the English version, though I can't imagine how it could have been better in Japanese, given the plot).
Sigh... There are to many statements in this that are way to true. I miss the day when the US was a production powerhouse. If you wanted something then you got it at your local store and it was stamped Made in America. Of all the times to not have any mod points....
America still produces more, both in raw materials and finished goods, than China (though this will likely be reversed in the next two years or so). What we don't produce here are the cheap consumer-level goods that places like China and Vietnam are currently specializing in, because we don't pay our workers $5 a day here.
As China continues to modernize and the US continues to decline this dynamic will shift; their one-child policy will greatly increase labor costs in the coming decades, and the US's focus on tax breaks for the rich as economic stimulus will continue to cause median wages to decrease, as they have over the past decade, until Chinese workers and American workers are making comparable amounts of money. Times are changing, but for now it's still mostly true that if it has to work you build it in the US; if it has to be cheap you build it in China.
But in order to actually use encrypted data, it has to be decrypted at some point, so the rootkit just needs to wait for you to decrypt it. In the case of say, full disk encryption, this is rather easy.
The idea is that you encrypt the file you send to the filesharing site, that way when the filesharing site is hacked all the attackers get is an encrypted file. In fact this is a "perfect" use for data encryption: the file is never decrypted on the remote machine, only on your local one, so stealing the data off the remote site can never give an attacker access to anything but cyphertext.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/ (Taken from first link at the second link of the summary.)
Yes, I found it eventually myself. My point was that the search function on Mozilla's own site couldn't find it, nor was it listed in any of the category browsing options. Are they trying to black-hole the add-on by making it hard to find, or does it take that long to update their database?
this is one of the many reasons why you should use Mozilla's Firefox than Google's Chrome
There's a Chrome plugin too; maybe the lesson is to not use IE or Safari.
The point of his comparison has nothing to do with the plugin or its availability.
Well, until Google removes its own version of the plugin without telling anyone, it kind of is. We've already seen Google stand up to censorship before, and in fact stands to lose hundreds of millions, even billions, in doing so, so while I'll admit they're not as pure as I'd like them to be, they still are a sight better than some other companies I can name.
This will drive a record number of people to install the plug in...
Thanks DHS, we appreciate the endorsement and confirmation of its efficacy!!!
Wish I could; where the heck is it? I don't see it on the Mozilla website. I could certainly just download it from MAFIAAFire.com or whatever, but shouldn't it be there too?
Please elaborate. So far I can't see anything that could possibly change.
About five stories back was the real news: the US got ahold of bin Laden's computer. Regardless of the symbolism of killing the man himself, the seizure of his files may turn out to be the beginning of the end of at least the Pakistan/Afghanistan chapter of Al Queda.
Both parties are similarly corrupt, and that's a fact. Saying that one party is less evil than the other one is pretty much stupid on your part. It is really easy to point out crazy things that politicians from each party does. Very easy.
Instances are not trends. Yes, it's true that the Democrats share a few of the Republicans' failings:, in particular an over-willingness to kowtow to the whims of the media/telcomm lobby (an unfortunate necessity in today's world, where so few media companies control so much of public opinion), which leads to their unfortunate shared support for strengthening imaginary property laws. They also have the unique failing of being especially enamored of the trial lawyer lobby, and thus aren't really looking that hard at frivolous lawsuits and litigation trolls. On the other hand, the Republican Party is at this point completely taken over by megacorporate interests, to the point that they no longer even consider the impact of their policies on any other group.
You don't have to look back any further than last December to see that the only Republican principle that they really care about is to give away money to wealthy campaign donors, and to take money away from any program that is not a giveaway to those donors. These Tea Party activists may have genuinely bought into the media campaign that Republicans have used for decades to get elected, but that's almost more frightening; the only thing more destructive to the country than what the Republicans are actually doing are the things that they *say* they're going to do, backed by the fanaticism of true believers.
Slashdot Mirror
For really large alt-tab lists, it's better to (hold)ALT-tab, then while holding ALT you click on the desired window.
I loved I, IV, VI, VII, IX, and X. I'm still working on XIII, and haven't bothered with the MMO ones -- I have no interest in MMOs.
I've been saying for years: if someone came out with a game with a story as engaging as say, FF VI or FF VII or Earthbound, I wouldn't care if it were still in 16 bit graphics. I still break out the Earthbound and FF VI occasionally to re-play because they were great games with great story lines.
Graphics are nice and all, but I'll take gameplay and story line any day of the week over them.
I have high hopes for FF XIII-2, if only because they publicly labeled it as wanting to "fix" FFXIII's mistakes. They even named some of the worst offenders with the game: railroad plot, and too much focus on the story rather than the characters (they also talked about governance issues, but I can't speak to that). I just hope they also work on dialogue, too; I don't know if all that sounded better in Japanese, but the English translation was some of the corniest, cheesiest drivel I've ever heard. The characters were engaging and complex people... right up until they opened their mouths, and they all became annoying mental patients. Ugh.
Invest in your damn network infrastructure, you big goddamn babies. Your shareholders can go without their precious dividends for a while.
Sprint hasn't turned a profit in four years. I'm pretty sure they're not paying dividends.
Actually this isn't true either. Studies show that the rich don't move to avoid taxes, any more than the middle class or poor do. Maybe you find it surprising, but rich people tend to like a lot of the things middle class people do: clean streets, low crime, working gas/water/electricity, decent weather, a stable government that doesn't erupt in bloody revolt every few years, etc. These things don't exist in ultra-low tax countries.
Just what we want, to pay more for less security.
Would be hard to pay more or get less than we currently do.
Hard, yes, but the free market will find a way.
That's one of the fundamental misconceptions many free market fundamentalists make: they assume a market always works for the public. It doesn't; it's not even supposed to. What it does is create the most efficient conversion of assets to product through competition. In the case of airport security, actual, real security is not the product. it is in fact an expenditure, one that will be minimized by competitors. What will be maximized is security theater, that is, the presence of visible "security elements" which make the public believe that real security is being delivered, while what is in reality happening is that the company is maximizing its profits.
Look at privatized prisons to see how this "market" works: more arrests, more convictions, more corruption and collusion between judges and private prison companies. Less real public safety.
Actually, the people most at risk are those who cannot be vaccinated: the very young, and those with weak immune systems. If not for them, I wouldn't care about this sort of thing; for those who choose to ignore science and lose their children to easily preventable disease it's nothing more than Darwinism at work, but it's a tragedy when people die because their neighbors are fools.
They released version 3.4.2 three days ago. As I understand it they're mostly working on bug fixes for now--lord knows they need it--and removing as much Java dependence as possible.
Every nuclear accident has its own beauty. The next will be as unexpected as the tsunami.
As opposed to deaths related to coal power, which are ugly, expensive, frequent, and utterly predictable.
How do you encrypt your voice? Your handwriting?
No, I don't think encryption should be the only measure of whether or not a communication should be considered "private" for the purposes of wiretapping/privacy laws; I also think that both intent and the nature of the technology should play a role. For example, a quiet whisper into someone else's ear can be private, but now a shout, because one is obviously meant to be private and the other is obviously meant to be a "broadcast". Similarly, a cell phone should be private, while unencrypted wifi networking is not, because one is a point-to-point sharing technology, while the other is about broadly sharing information.
In other words, Google shouldn't be charged with wiretapping for sniffing open wifi packets, but my ISP should be when it uses deep packet inspection to throttle down my bittorrents and Netflix streams in favor of its own on-demand video service.
Not really. Catastrophic is actually looked down upon in the scientific community.
Excellent. Then there's no need to alter our way of life to the tune of trillions more dollars that we don't have.
Exactly. The majority of the economic pressure is always going to be on the side of doing nothing; after all, for most large corporations/governments money would much rather be using their money to line their own pockets, not spend it on green tech and protecting the human habitability of the planet. Nobody wants to find out that trillions need to be spent over the next several decades to prevent a geopolitical and economic disaster; the first person who finds definitive proof that global climate change is wrong will be showered in money.
The fact that hasn't happened yet, despite denialists looking for that elusive bit of proof for decades, while every year more and more factual evidence piles up on the side of the scientists, makes it more and more certain that there isn't any such missing, magic "fact" which will disprove GCC and save the oil companies' massive profits.
Er, wasn't it the other way around? The big story a few months back was how Facebook had hired a company to run an astroturfing smear campaign against Google, accusing them of antitrust and privacy violations (and then, "coincidentally" enough, the FTC opens an investigation a few months later).
I don't own any modern Apple products, and it's pretty unlikely I'll be buying any in the future, but this really would be the smart move for Apple. I mean, the only real reason they still have desktops is because they always have, but it's not like that's what's making the business money. If you have two product lines, both requiring extensive R&D, and one of them makes you heaping endless piles of money while the other just kind of muddles along, it doesn't take a business genius to know what the smart move is.
Yes: the smart move it to keep both of them, especially if they serve entirely different market segments.
What I'm expecting is for Jobs to convert the non-Pro Macbook line to iOS (and ARM) within one or two generations; eventually the line will simply merge with the iPad to become a tablet with a more robust docking station, much like the Eee Transformer. The Pro line will remain wedded to x86, at least in the near term (2-4 years).
I'm guessing you're a fan...In fact, you may actually be her, judging by your meticulous grammar and extraordinary vocabulary.
At least he used "could have been" rather than "could of been"; I'm not much of a grammer nazi, but that is one of my biggest linguistic pet peeves.
As much as I hate to say it, physical media is largely dead. Digital only, with all titles being tied to your personal information, thus letting corporations tailor advertisements to you, is going to be standard very shortly.
I think the next gen will still be physical, but after that it is very unlikely.
Maybe in Japan, South Korea and Lithuania where you can get a decent internet connection for a reasonable price. Here in America, with ever-increasing last-mile prices and ever-tightening bandwidth caps (despite backhaul becoming exponentially cheaper year-over-year), in two console generations most people won't even be able to afford to play a game online, let alone download one.
Heh, I guess I got kind of lucky. I actually didn't even play the game until my dad got stuck near the end of chapter 9. Apparently I got the good part of the game. :)
Honestly?
Another reason to love capitalism; you think of gravity, the universe is your's!
Patents aren't capitalism. In fact they're almost the exact opposite of capitalism: they are government-granted monopolies on production. They were originally granted to protect individual innovators from exploitation by wealthy corporations, but almost since the laws were first passed they were used for the exact opposite purpose. They need to die, or at least be seriously reformed, but in the current pro-corporate, anti-consumer climate of, well both parties but I'm thinking of one in particular we'll never see real patent reform, just like how real health care reform and real banking reform were "compromised" to death, and even their hollowed-out husks are drawing fire from the radical right.
It's really that simple, squeenix has lost all manner of quality.
They just make ugly designs, annoying musc, 100% grindy gameplay and stories which grow less and less cool.
The main problem is that japans gaming culture and western gaming culture has grown more and more widely apart.
This really hurts their market.
There's a lot to like about FF XIII. The Active Time Battle system is actually pretty cool when you really start delving into it (though the limitation of only six Paradigms is super-limiting in the late/post-game when you have a total of 216 possible combinations) The music and backgrounds were extremely well done; whoever was in charge of character art and scenery did a great job.
Unfortunately the game ended up failing because of the rather boring and horribly linear plot, which to my knowledge didn't have any of the humor of the previous FF greats (III, VI, VII), and the awful, awful, awful dialogue (at least in the English version, though I can't imagine how it could have been better in Japanese, given the plot).
Sigh... There are to many statements in this that are way to true. I miss the day when the US was a production powerhouse. If you wanted something then you got it at your local store and it was stamped Made in America. Of all the times to not have any mod points....
America still produces more, both in raw materials and finished goods, than China (though this will likely be reversed in the next two years or so). What we don't produce here are the cheap consumer-level goods that places like China and Vietnam are currently specializing in, because we don't pay our workers $5 a day here.
As China continues to modernize and the US continues to decline this dynamic will shift; their one-child policy will greatly increase labor costs in the coming decades, and the US's focus on tax breaks for the rich as economic stimulus will continue to cause median wages to decrease, as they have over the past decade, until Chinese workers and American workers are making comparable amounts of money. Times are changing, but for now it's still mostly true that if it has to work you build it in the US; if it has to be cheap you build it in China.
But in order to actually use encrypted data, it has to be decrypted at some point, so the rootkit just needs to wait for you to decrypt it. In the case of say, full disk encryption, this is rather easy.
The idea is that you encrypt the file you send to the filesharing site, that way when the filesharing site is hacked all the attackers get is an encrypted file. In fact this is a "perfect" use for data encryption: the file is never decrypted on the remote machine, only on your local one, so stealing the data off the remote site can never give an attacker access to anything but cyphertext.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mafiaafire-redirector/ (Taken from first link at the second link of the summary.)
Yes, I found it eventually myself. My point was that the search function on Mozilla's own site couldn't find it, nor was it listed in any of the category browsing options. Are they trying to black-hole the add-on by making it hard to find, or does it take that long to update their database?
this is one of the many reasons why you should use Mozilla's Firefox than Google's Chrome
There's a Chrome plugin too; maybe the lesson is to not use IE or Safari.
The point of his comparison has nothing to do with the plugin or its availability.
Well, until Google removes its own version of the plugin without telling anyone, it kind of is. We've already seen Google stand up to censorship before, and in fact stands to lose hundreds of millions, even billions, in doing so, so while I'll admit they're not as pure as I'd like them to be, they still are a sight better than some other companies I can name.
This will drive a record number of people to install the plug in...
Thanks DHS, we appreciate the endorsement and confirmation of its efficacy!!!
Wish I could; where the heck is it? I don't see it on the Mozilla website. I could certainly just download it from MAFIAAFire.com or whatever, but shouldn't it be there too?
this is one of the many reasons why you should use Mozilla's Firefox than Google's Chrome
There's a Chrome plugin too; maybe the lesson is to not use IE or Safari.
Please elaborate. So far I can't see anything that could possibly change.
About five stories back was the real news: the US got ahold of bin Laden's computer. Regardless of the symbolism of killing the man himself, the seizure of his files may turn out to be the beginning of the end of at least the Pakistan/Afghanistan chapter of Al Queda.
Both parties are similarly corrupt, and that's a fact. Saying that one party is less evil than the other one is pretty much stupid on your part. It is really easy to point out crazy things that politicians from each party does. Very easy.
Instances are not trends. Yes, it's true that the Democrats share a few of the Republicans' failings:, in particular an over-willingness to kowtow to the whims of the media/telcomm lobby (an unfortunate necessity in today's world, where so few media companies control so much of public opinion), which leads to their unfortunate shared support for strengthening imaginary property laws. They also have the unique failing of being especially enamored of the trial lawyer lobby, and thus aren't really looking that hard at frivolous lawsuits and litigation trolls. On the other hand, the Republican Party is at this point completely taken over by megacorporate interests, to the point that they no longer even consider the impact of their policies on any other group.
You don't have to look back any further than last December to see that the only Republican principle that they really care about is to give away money to wealthy campaign donors, and to take money away from any program that is not a giveaway to those donors. These Tea Party activists may have genuinely bought into the media campaign that Republicans have used for decades to get elected, but that's almost more frightening; the only thing more destructive to the country than what the Republicans are actually doing are the things that they *say* they're going to do, backed by the fanaticism of true believers.