I've had that happen TO me before, and had the situation where someone was trying to make a group for guild run and I'm 5 minutes away from queue popping so I just don't say anything.
This is another part of the reason super-massive guilds are becoming the norm. There are 850 toons in my guild, most people have 2-3 alts yes, but thats at minimum 250+ players. We often have over 80 people online, and there are 20+ 24/7. These super massive guilds are the only way to go now because in a guild that huge there are probably a few people finishing dailies etc that will do your run with you in a few minutes, so you actually do have a chance of getting a guild run together.
I've attempted to put in feedback on the WoW forums but there aren't enough of us speaking up about the bane to the community that is the RDF.
I however am probably going to make a journal entry about it soon as many slashdotters that play WoW at least seem to be in agreement with me. They don't need to eliminate the RDF, just re-restrict it to realm-only. Bare minimum of Battlegroup-only.
There will be flames, there will be people that love the instant q's on their tanks, and love the anonymity, however hopefully blizzard will listen to the people that are trying to save their community rather than sacrifice it at the altar of convenience.
Besides which, the folks that love the amount of anonymity are often part of the problem within the community. They're part of a vocal maybe 5% that are trashing the community.
So anyone that's reading this that might be interested in helping: Watch my profile this weekend. I'll be adding a one time only Journal to it and posting it on the World of Warcraft forums as well as linking to the post in the forums with the hope of garnering support.
Blizzard have proven that they will listen to the community if the voice is loud enough. I don't know if I'll have any impact at all, but it can't hurt to try.
There have never been so many DPS race mechanics in normal dungeons before.
As it is, me and a friend of mine can't queue for randoms as tank + heals like we always used to without at least one DPS coming with us that we know is reliable and good. However I can queue as dps + tank or dps + heals with him because as a good player playing DPS I can carry some pretty fail people.
Right now the only role that can carry fail players is DPS, which is leading to a queue increase for that class, as bad players are getting carried easily as DPS, and good players can carry more easily as DPS.
Like, for example, the second boss in ZG randomly kills someone every 30-45 seconds. With the other mechanic of ohgan getting rid of ghosts etc if your group doesn't have enough DPS that fight is completely impossible. No tank or healer combo, no matter how good, is going to be able to get you through it.
On the other hand I've been on my Frost DK dpsing and him as a Resto Druid healing several times with DPS that otherwise would in no way make it and a tank thats taking a load of damage, but the healer can carry that, and pulling enough DPS for 2 people that would ordinarily be able to make it through there, thus carrying half the weight of the other 2 dps in the group, if I'd been in there as a tank, the tanks dps would have gone from 4-5k (bad tank) to 11-12k(me in tank gear). Instead it went from possibly ~6k dps to over-20k dps. Which leaves me with an extra 8k of DPS that the other DPS can fail at doing.
Its too much right now, too much DPS race. Used to be that a well prepared tank and healer could just last through it until the DPS eventually got around to killing things. Now in a lot of cases it doesn't matter how good the heals and tank are, you just can't do it.
But your love of the Random Dungeon Finder is loving it in the original form I mentioned.
Its not entirely feasible for them to combine all realms, there needs to remain a separation of players to some extent. When the random dungeon finder was restricted to realm-only you COULD friend people. You could get into guilds based on skill displayed in a random dungeon. You could do all sorts of things.
Best of all, there were consequences for acting like a complete douchebag. You'd develop a reputation on your server rather quickly and the douche would either be forced to act reasonably or find another server, then act reasonably there.
There are no more consequences. Thats one of the problems RDF is causing. There is no server community anymore. You at best have a guild community.
As a result super-massive guilds are becoming the norm, because people are inevitably playing a SOCIAL game and being in a guild is now the only real way to connect with other players, other than raid pugs.
Another problem is what they've done with PVE Raiding. Lack of content and attempting to make up for it with new abilities? Shit no. Spending months wiping on the same boss was one thing, spending months wiping on a slightly more powerful version of a boss you already killed is something else altogether.
To be 100% honest it probably has to do with them focusing too much on PVP and PVP players.
The unfortunate thing is these kids that PVP all the time have a lot more time on their hands to whine and bitch on the forums. Unfortunately for blizzard they're also the worst people to listen to if you want to keep your core fan base.
I don't know about anyone else... but WoW has completely lost its feel of epicness. Northrend still had it, even with nerfed to hell easy heroics etc. Cataclysm just doesn't.
Another problem for me is how much they changed things with the breaking.... I mean, I'd have much rathered they just added random holes etc and left things as it was. Destroying the quest progression system that was in place in the lowbie areas has killed a lot of the immersion for me.
I used to like leveling an alt. It took a lot longer but now.... I've got to learn how to level all over again, except I don't really need to because I can dungeon crawl my way up the levels with people I will never see or hear from again.
Which brings me to the point that most people don't bring up. Its something that was created and geared towards those idiot PVPers that love Arenas so much. The Random Dungeon Finder.
It has single handedly destroyed the communities on almost all of the servers. It was a good idea when it was realm restricted back in the burning crusade. Its a game-killing mechanic now.
My sensors have indicated that you are new to reality.
Allow me to assist you in getting up to speed.
People are people. People do stupid things for stupid reasons.
Some of the largest companies in history have been bankrupted due to corrupt and/or self-centered and/or moronic CEO's/Managers/Boards.
In any other industry or with any other company Ballmer would have bankrupted it a long, long time ago. Microsoft simply have too much inertia and market share behind them. Which is entirely a function of people not wanting to learn new things if they can avoid it.
See: Windows XP continued market dominance, even while declining.
However you are forcing the thorium into decay and using the excess energy. You're basically burning the thorium.
The thorium, like most radioactive materials just helps itself along once it gets to a certain temperature through other means.
I would figure that efficiency margins are simply wildly over estimated. There may be 250kw of energy in that thorium, but you're going to lose a fair bit of it to the simple fact of keeping the reaction going.
However, reading the article more thoroughly, I notice that they simply state that there is 250kw of potential energy in 1g of thorium. Not that the process is expected to extract that much.
150 billion cars with a 10 year life span accounting for nearly 300,000 km driven per car.
Given that population estimates put us at 12-13 billion 100 years from now.... actually, screw the growth curve. Lets just use 13 billion.
That gives us at least 115 years to figure out a more permanent solution, that is also figuring one car per person for the population of the entire god damn planet just based on US reserves.
That is also based on known deposits of a mineral that, up until now, no one was really bothering to look for. Canada has estimated reserves of thorium that dwarf the US known reserves by a couple of orders of magnitude, if even half of it turns out to be accurate we end up with 5000 years of fuel, not 100, and again, for the entire planet. Not to mention that the thorium would buy us more than enough time to figure out how to safely use uranium, of which Canada has yet another metric shit-ton.
I think we'd be ok with a full out switch to thorium. By that time I imagine tech will have advanced plenty far enough that we won't be worrying about resource consumption anymore.
If it confuses your green little head too much, look at it this way: Its like having a miniature under-powered sun under the hood. Perfectly natural and effectively infinite.
You don't recall correctly. You were right about the first bit, he was right about the second.
MS did not use the BSD stack, however their new TCP stack was invented for Vista.
Its got a long ass way to go to mature. Its sad that they didn't revert that one change for Windows 7.
From what I understand its supposed to allow more functionality eventually. I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.
He believed there were cells. That means there were people he was communicating with who, in this context, can be referred to as members of the cells.
Whether or not they actually are cells in the popularized terrorist sense or whether or not they would actually DO anything he told them to is another story entirely, and I did not make the assumption that they would.
Given that the possibility exists that they would do something on his behest however, it would be irresponsible to ignore that possibility.
I'll reply to this, and the other commentors "this is bullshit" comment in one swoop.
Brevik himself speaks briefly of cells of other operatives for which he is to be the firing pin in his own manifesto. He's possibly insane, however he's doesn't appear to have hallucinations, which would mean that there is at least SOME truth to what he's saying, and means its plausible that he was in contact with others.
I worded some things a bit poorly, because theres no hard proof of these cells other than Breviks own writings. However there IS evidence for it.
While I agree with much of your sentiment you must understand why you got modded down.
That said, I agree to the extent that Christians are no different from most other religions. Most religions are bad, and I'm actually 100% on board with one particular infringement of what many consider a human right that China has attempted to instigate, which is a banning of most forms of religion.
In reality I consider it another form of human right. The right not to be brainwashed in the name of "god" or "allah" or whoever else.
Its universal too. I've met some of the nicest christian people that were trying to start up a church and were actually doing some good for their community. However even they are so brainwashed into believing the rhetoric that while most of their moral code is fairly admirable, and they are admirable people in their own right.... they also say things like "We have to teach the children, we have to get to them while they're young." with a sort of complacency and sometimes even fervor that to be perfectly honest, frightens me.
If, in reality, any of these theories or systems of belief were any better than any other, there would be no need for all of the ceremony and pomp that goes around indoctrinating the children into the same system. Most of the children would eventually come to realize that it was just the right thing to do and end up believing the same.
Some of these Bible Camps in the southern and western US frighten the shit out of me. I saw a video documentary of one that was supposed to be promotional and except for a lack of AK-47s and better looking clothes it looked like one of those Islam child training camps that they put videos of on the news to frighten people with.
Most likely its being made public just in case this is some sort of instruction system for various cells.
I imagine the reasoning behind it is to let anyone who might be thinking of following the instructions know that they're onto the fact that there is something here.
There is also benefit to crowd sourcing it this way in that someone may have been involved and may be able to use "figuring out the code" as an excuse without incriminating themselves to come forward and help prevent whatever these codes may set into motion.
Keeping it secret and trying to solve it with limited resources isn't going to do much good. So, rather than being idiots, they've taken the logical route.
The goal here is to prevent any further atrocities. They may not catch the cells this way, but they may dissuade them from acting at all, or they may catch a guilty conscience that helps solve the whole thing for them rapidly.
If the whole point is saving lives, then I feel, as they obviously do, that this is the best way to go about it.
It doesn't really matter whose fault it is. The end result is the same.
I should point out however that I'm not in america and AT&T's shitty service has little bearing on why the iPhone is a piece of shit. Its bad on every network its connected to. In Canada its the rogers network, which works just fine with other phones.
I'll be honest, a lot of it boils down to manufacturer. Motorola and lately Samsung have provided the best reception, bar none, of any of the cell phones I've used.
RIM had a few hits, but its the exception not the rule for them.
However when it comes to finally deciding I tend to look to friends and family members. Most all of them have phones. Almost none of them have two of the same phone. A lot of them end up traveling to touchy locations from time to time in which I'll need reception. Then some basic research into models etc. Then I'll compare against a conglomerate of web sites that rate reception. A lot of them are inadvertently, or sometimes intentionally biased by carrier and some of them by manufacturer but generally if you look at 10 and can find 3 phones that are pretty consistently inside the top 10 or top 5, whatever the reviews list, then those are your go to models. After that, find people that have those phones inside your extended social group. Ask them where they get trouble, and what happens when they do get trouble. If calls are dropping in a certain area of town but the phone is showing 5 bars of signal, then the phone can't compensate for the noise its picking up. Bam, garbage. If the phone gets down to 2 bars and starts dropping calls constantly, its antenna is either balls or too well shielded, and the primary user group that voted it up is living in the middle of a large city and never leaves. Phone otherwise is probably great but doesn't do well in edge of range conditions.
Those are the main factors I look at. It can take a few days work to pick out a phone, but if I'm going to be stuck with something for 2-3 years then I want the damn thing to work.
Comparing all recently sold android devices to all recently sold IOS devices the android devices come out on top by a wide margin. IOS isn't even dominating severely on a phone by phone basis and there is only one single source of it.
Take me for example, I've had a LOT of phones in the past and by far my #1 requirement is reception. Not how shiny it is. As such I tend to prefer motorola, samsung, or blackberries. HTC has mediocre reception, on par with what I've seen from the iphone, which won't work at all in a lot of places that I get perfectly clear phone calls on my Droid.
However, Motorola doesn't always have the phone with the best reception. They have great antennas but I guess sometimes the rest of the phone guts messes with it. Generally if they aren't on top then samsung is, and RIM have had a couple of real winners up their sleeves.
Now, due to the feature set and what I can do with it, I'm definitely buying a phone with Android on it in the future (sorry RIM, but your OS sucks balls even for the enterprise uses it used to be great for) but I'm not necessarily going to buy it from Motorola next time around.
Thus you end up with the only real way to compare is as an OS vs OS, not on a manufacturer scale.
The iphone is a shiny piece of shit. Works great in cities but thats about it. It really does spark some kind of religious zealotry in its owner for some strange reason though. Even while I'm lending my droid to a friend of mine I travel with because his iphone won't work he can't stop spouting excuses on behalf of apple.
Now if iOS was licensed to a competent manufacturer and would start getting good reception then I might consider switching. This is a big might however as I like the way my Android device integrates with most of the Google products I am already using.
The problem is that Google wants to fight most of these.
There are a large number of patents that need to be invalidated and you'll notice that no one is going after good directly, even though they manufactured their own phone.
Thats because Google as a company wants patent reform. It wants these things to be brought into a court of law where they can bring lawyers to bear and actually do some good.
Now, its not all altruistic on Googles part obviously. They have a massive amount of software developers etc employed and invalidating a bunch of software patents can only help their cause in being able to invent and innovate and do it better than the other guy. Most of the markets they want to get into are kludged to hell with software patents that are going to cost them a fortune to license and effectively act as a barrier to entry.
Ex: Oracle. They probably could have paid them off relatively cheaply at the beginning of their spat. Instead Google took them to court and is attempting to educate the judge enough to get a lot of the patents reviewed and nullified. So far with mixed results but they are having some success on that front. They probably knew going in that they would lose the battle, but invalidating a bunch of software patents from one of the biggest software companies out there is a good blow struck in the war.
Its good to know that its the same back in the UK as it is in other parts of the Empire.
I know a bunch of people in Canada who have made a living buying computers from retail stores and reselling them to government.
In one case I know they were buying corporate cast-offs and refurbishing them and then selling them to government. Computer cost $100, Upgrades to meet government specs: $90. Chargeout price: $1800.
I say this with incredulity because the Liberals did exactly that.
The only real difference is that the liberals shut down local fisheries and then sold the quotas equal to the fisheries they had just shut down to foreign nationals. So we still have over fishing going on, its just not helping canadians at all. All of it was very hush hush and no one knew about any of the fishing quotas that had been sold until Portuguese boats started getting spotted in Newfoundland waters.
I have this funny feeling like some of the prominent MAFIAA members are going to have to start leaving places in body bags before they actually give in.
Yes, the media server is a definite huge advantage. Thats how I view most things. Storage was starting to become and issue but with the huge availability of 2tb+ drives for under $100 its no longer a problem.
If the media companies would put a cap on movies of $15 and put everything up DRM free for sale somewhere I'd probably never pirate anything ever again.
As it is, they can't expect me to dish out the cash for everything I consume. I have over $30,000 worth of movies by current pricing standards, and have spent well over $15,000 anyways. That's a lot of freaking money. It gets to a point where people would probably like to pay for it, but just can't because the RIAA/MPAA are too damned greedy.
Slashdot Mirror
You'd be right about the Guild community thing.
I've had that happen TO me before, and had the situation where someone was trying to make a group for guild run and I'm 5 minutes away from queue popping so I just don't say anything.
This is another part of the reason super-massive guilds are becoming the norm. There are 850 toons in my guild, most people have 2-3 alts yes, but thats at minimum 250+ players. We often have over 80 people online, and there are 20+ 24/7. These super massive guilds are the only way to go now because in a guild that huge there are probably a few people finishing dailies etc that will do your run with you in a few minutes, so you actually do have a chance of getting a guild run together.
I've attempted to put in feedback on the WoW forums but there aren't enough of us speaking up about the bane to the community that is the RDF.
I however am probably going to make a journal entry about it soon as many slashdotters that play WoW at least seem to be in agreement with me. They don't need to eliminate the RDF, just re-restrict it to realm-only. Bare minimum of Battlegroup-only.
There will be flames, there will be people that love the instant q's on their tanks, and love the anonymity, however hopefully blizzard will listen to the people that are trying to save their community rather than sacrifice it at the altar of convenience.
Besides which, the folks that love the amount of anonymity are often part of the problem within the community. They're part of a vocal maybe 5% that are trashing the community.
So anyone that's reading this that might be interested in helping: Watch my profile this weekend. I'll be adding a one time only Journal to it and posting it on the World of Warcraft forums as well as linking to the post in the forums with the hope of garnering support.
Blizzard have proven that they will listen to the community if the voice is loud enough. I don't know if I'll have any impact at all, but it can't hurt to try.
The focus on not enough DPS is terrible as well.
There have never been so many DPS race mechanics in normal dungeons before.
As it is, me and a friend of mine can't queue for randoms as tank + heals like we always used to without at least one DPS coming with us that we know is reliable and good. However I can queue as dps + tank or dps + heals with him because as a good player playing DPS I can carry some pretty fail people.
Right now the only role that can carry fail players is DPS, which is leading to a queue increase for that class, as bad players are getting carried easily as DPS, and good players can carry more easily as DPS.
Like, for example, the second boss in ZG randomly kills someone every 30-45 seconds. With the other mechanic of ohgan getting rid of ghosts etc if your group doesn't have enough DPS that fight is completely impossible. No tank or healer combo, no matter how good, is going to be able to get you through it.
On the other hand I've been on my Frost DK dpsing and him as a Resto Druid healing several times with DPS that otherwise would in no way make it and a tank thats taking a load of damage, but the healer can carry that, and pulling enough DPS for 2 people that would ordinarily be able to make it through there, thus carrying half the weight of the other 2 dps in the group, if I'd been in there as a tank, the tanks dps would have gone from 4-5k (bad tank) to 11-12k(me in tank gear). Instead it went from possibly ~6k dps to over-20k dps. Which leaves me with an extra 8k of DPS that the other DPS can fail at doing.
Its too much right now, too much DPS race. Used to be that a well prepared tank and healer could just last through it until the DPS eventually got around to killing things. Now in a lot of cases it doesn't matter how good the heals and tank are, you just can't do it.
The quest progression etc is fine.
But your love of the Random Dungeon Finder is loving it in the original form I mentioned.
Its not entirely feasible for them to combine all realms, there needs to remain a separation of players to some extent. When the random dungeon finder was restricted to realm-only you COULD friend people. You could get into guilds based on skill displayed in a random dungeon. You could do all sorts of things.
Best of all, there were consequences for acting like a complete douchebag. You'd develop a reputation on your server rather quickly and the douche would either be forced to act reasonably or find another server, then act reasonably there.
There are no more consequences. Thats one of the problems RDF is causing. There is no server community anymore. You at best have a guild community.
As a result super-massive guilds are becoming the norm, because people are inevitably playing a SOCIAL game and being in a guild is now the only real way to connect with other players, other than raid pugs.
I'd say you're right these days, back when they hit 2 million players in vanilla however it was more like 1 in 10 at best.
Spot on m8.
You've hit the nail on the head with that.
Another problem is what they've done with PVE Raiding. Lack of content and attempting to make up for it with new abilities? Shit no. Spending months wiping on the same boss was one thing, spending months wiping on a slightly more powerful version of a boss you already killed is something else altogether.
To be 100% honest it probably has to do with them focusing too much on PVP and PVP players.
The unfortunate thing is these kids that PVP all the time have a lot more time on their hands to whine and bitch on the forums. Unfortunately for blizzard they're also the worst people to listen to if you want to keep your core fan base.
I don't know about anyone else... but WoW has completely lost its feel of epicness. Northrend still had it, even with nerfed to hell easy heroics etc. Cataclysm just doesn't.
Another problem for me is how much they changed things with the breaking.... I mean, I'd have much rathered they just added random holes etc and left things as it was. Destroying the quest progression system that was in place in the lowbie areas has killed a lot of the immersion for me.
I used to like leveling an alt. It took a lot longer but now.... I've got to learn how to level all over again, except I don't really need to because I can dungeon crawl my way up the levels with people I will never see or hear from again.
Which brings me to the point that most people don't bring up. Its something that was created and geared towards those idiot PVPers that love Arenas so much. The Random Dungeon Finder.
It has single handedly destroyed the communities on almost all of the servers. It was a good idea when it was realm restricted back in the burning crusade. Its a game-killing mechanic now.
Hello there.
My sensors have indicated that you are new to reality.
Allow me to assist you in getting up to speed.
People are people. People do stupid things for stupid reasons.
Some of the largest companies in history have been bankrupted due to corrupt and/or self-centered and/or moronic CEO's/Managers/Boards.
In any other industry or with any other company Ballmer would have bankrupted it a long, long time ago. Microsoft simply have too much inertia and market share behind them. Which is entirely a function of people not wanting to learn new things if they can avoid it.
See: Windows XP continued market dominance, even while declining.
Agreed 100% actually.
We should be getting these installed into transfer stations etc.
There is more than enough fuel there to do it.
I thought that too.
However you are forcing the thorium into decay and using the excess energy. You're basically burning the thorium.
The thorium, like most radioactive materials just helps itself along once it gets to a certain temperature through other means.
I would figure that efficiency margins are simply wildly over estimated. There may be 250kw of energy in that thorium, but you're going to lose a fair bit of it to the simple fact of keeping the reaction going.
However, reading the article more thoroughly, I notice that they simply state that there is 250kw of potential energy in 1g of thorium. Not that the process is expected to extract that much.
Correcting myself:
Canadian thorium reserves are *theorized* at those levels.
Estimates based on actual mineral tests are much closer to what is listed in the article.
150 billion cars with a 10 year life span accounting for nearly 300,000 km driven per car.
Given that population estimates put us at 12-13 billion 100 years from now.... actually, screw the growth curve. Lets just use 13 billion.
That gives us at least 115 years to figure out a more permanent solution, that is also figuring one car per person for the population of the entire god damn planet just based on US reserves.
That is also based on known deposits of a mineral that, up until now, no one was really bothering to look for. Canada has estimated reserves of thorium that dwarf the US known reserves by a couple of orders of magnitude, if even half of it turns out to be accurate we end up with 5000 years of fuel, not 100, and again, for the entire planet. Not to mention that the thorium would buy us more than enough time to figure out how to safely use uranium, of which Canada has yet another metric shit-ton.
I think we'd be ok with a full out switch to thorium. By that time I imagine tech will have advanced plenty far enough that we won't be worrying about resource consumption anymore.
If it confuses your green little head too much, look at it this way: Its like having a miniature under-powered sun under the hood. Perfectly natural and effectively infinite.
You don't recall correctly. You were right about the first bit, he was right about the second.
MS did not use the BSD stack, however their new TCP stack was invented for Vista.
Its got a long ass way to go to mature. Its sad that they didn't revert that one change for Windows 7.
From what I understand its supposed to allow more functionality eventually. I can't really see what sort of functionality you need out of a tcp stack that wasn't already there. Anything else can be bolted on top.
He believed there were cells. That means there were people he was communicating with who, in this context, can be referred to as members of the cells.
Whether or not they actually are cells in the popularized terrorist sense or whether or not they would actually DO anything he told them to is another story entirely, and I did not make the assumption that they would.
Given that the possibility exists that they would do something on his behest however, it would be irresponsible to ignore that possibility.
I'll reply to this, and the other commentors "this is bullshit" comment in one swoop.
Brevik himself speaks briefly of cells of other operatives for which he is to be the firing pin in his own manifesto. He's possibly insane, however he's doesn't appear to have hallucinations, which would mean that there is at least SOME truth to what he's saying, and means its plausible that he was in contact with others.
I worded some things a bit poorly, because theres no hard proof of these cells other than Breviks own writings. However there IS evidence for it.
While I agree with much of your sentiment you must understand why you got modded down.
That said, I agree to the extent that Christians are no different from most other religions. Most religions are bad, and I'm actually 100% on board with one particular infringement of what many consider a human right that China has attempted to instigate, which is a banning of most forms of religion.
In reality I consider it another form of human right. The right not to be brainwashed in the name of "god" or "allah" or whoever else.
Its universal too. I've met some of the nicest christian people that were trying to start up a church and were actually doing some good for their community. However even they are so brainwashed into believing the rhetoric that while most of their moral code is fairly admirable, and they are admirable people in their own right.... they also say things like "We have to teach the children, we have to get to them while they're young." with a sort of complacency and sometimes even fervor that to be perfectly honest, frightens me.
If, in reality, any of these theories or systems of belief were any better than any other, there would be no need for all of the ceremony and pomp that goes around indoctrinating the children into the same system. Most of the children would eventually come to realize that it was just the right thing to do and end up believing the same.
Some of these Bible Camps in the southern and western US frighten the shit out of me. I saw a video documentary of one that was supposed to be promotional and except for a lack of AK-47s and better looking clothes it looked like one of those Islam child training camps that they put videos of on the news to frighten people with.
Most likely its being made public just in case this is some sort of instruction system for various cells.
I imagine the reasoning behind it is to let anyone who might be thinking of following the instructions know that they're onto the fact that there is something here.
There is also benefit to crowd sourcing it this way in that someone may have been involved and may be able to use "figuring out the code" as an excuse without incriminating themselves to come forward and help prevent whatever these codes may set into motion.
Keeping it secret and trying to solve it with limited resources isn't going to do much good. So, rather than being idiots, they've taken the logical route.
The goal here is to prevent any further atrocities. They may not catch the cells this way, but they may dissuade them from acting at all, or they may catch a guilty conscience that helps solve the whole thing for them rapidly.
If the whole point is saving lives, then I feel, as they obviously do, that this is the best way to go about it.
It doesn't really matter whose fault it is. The end result is the same.
I should point out however that I'm not in america and AT&T's shitty service has little bearing on why the iPhone is a piece of shit. Its bad on every network its connected to. In Canada its the rogers network, which works just fine with other phones.
I'll be honest, a lot of it boils down to manufacturer. Motorola and lately Samsung have provided the best reception, bar none, of any of the cell phones I've used.
RIM had a few hits, but its the exception not the rule for them.
However when it comes to finally deciding I tend to look to friends and family members. Most all of them have phones. Almost none of them have two of the same phone. A lot of them end up traveling to touchy locations from time to time in which I'll need reception. Then some basic research into models etc. Then I'll compare against a conglomerate of web sites that rate reception. A lot of them are inadvertently, or sometimes intentionally biased by carrier and some of them by manufacturer but generally if you look at 10 and can find 3 phones that are pretty consistently inside the top 10 or top 5, whatever the reviews list, then those are your go to models. After that, find people that have those phones inside your extended social group. Ask them where they get trouble, and what happens when they do get trouble. If calls are dropping in a certain area of town but the phone is showing 5 bars of signal, then the phone can't compensate for the noise its picking up. Bam, garbage. If the phone gets down to 2 bars and starts dropping calls constantly, its antenna is either balls or too well shielded, and the primary user group that voted it up is living in the middle of a large city and never leaves. Phone otherwise is probably great but doesn't do well in edge of range conditions.
Those are the main factors I look at. It can take a few days work to pick out a phone, but if I'm going to be stuck with something for 2-3 years then I want the damn thing to work.
Comparing all recently sold android devices to all recently sold IOS devices the android devices come out on top by a wide margin. IOS isn't even dominating severely on a phone by phone basis and there is only one single source of it.
Take me for example, I've had a LOT of phones in the past and by far my #1 requirement is reception. Not how shiny it is. As such I tend to prefer motorola, samsung, or blackberries. HTC has mediocre reception, on par with what I've seen from the iphone, which won't work at all in a lot of places that I get perfectly clear phone calls on my Droid.
However, Motorola doesn't always have the phone with the best reception. They have great antennas but I guess sometimes the rest of the phone guts messes with it. Generally if they aren't on top then samsung is, and RIM have had a couple of real winners up their sleeves.
Now, due to the feature set and what I can do with it, I'm definitely buying a phone with Android on it in the future (sorry RIM, but your OS sucks balls even for the enterprise uses it used to be great for) but I'm not necessarily going to buy it from Motorola next time around.
Thus you end up with the only real way to compare is as an OS vs OS, not on a manufacturer scale.
The iphone is a shiny piece of shit. Works great in cities but thats about it. It really does spark some kind of religious zealotry in its owner for some strange reason though. Even while I'm lending my droid to a friend of mine I travel with because his iphone won't work he can't stop spouting excuses on behalf of apple.
Now if iOS was licensed to a competent manufacturer and would start getting good reception then I might consider switching. This is a big might however as I like the way my Android device integrates with most of the Google products I am already using.
The problem is that Google wants to fight most of these.
There are a large number of patents that need to be invalidated and you'll notice that no one is going after good directly, even though they manufactured their own phone.
Thats because Google as a company wants patent reform. It wants these things to be brought into a court of law where they can bring lawyers to bear and actually do some good.
Now, its not all altruistic on Googles part obviously. They have a massive amount of software developers etc employed and invalidating a bunch of software patents can only help their cause in being able to invent and innovate and do it better than the other guy. Most of the markets they want to get into are kludged to hell with software patents that are going to cost them a fortune to license and effectively act as a barrier to entry.
Ex: Oracle. They probably could have paid them off relatively cheaply at the beginning of their spat. Instead Google took them to court and is attempting to educate the judge enough to get a lot of the patents reviewed and nullified. So far with mixed results but they are having some success on that front. They probably knew going in that they would lose the battle, but invalidating a bunch of software patents from one of the biggest software companies out there is a good blow struck in the war.
Hey!
Its good to know that its the same back in the UK as it is in other parts of the Empire.
I know a bunch of people in Canada who have made a living buying computers from retail stores and reselling them to government.
In one case I know they were buying corporate cast-offs and refurbishing them and then selling them to government. Computer cost $100, Upgrades to meet government specs: $90. Chargeout price: $1800.
Realy?
I say this with incredulity because the Liberals did exactly that.
The only real difference is that the liberals shut down local fisheries and then sold the quotas equal to the fisheries they had just shut down to foreign nationals. So we still have over fishing going on, its just not helping canadians at all. All of it was very hush hush and no one knew about any of the fishing quotas that had been sold until Portuguese boats started getting spotted in Newfoundland waters.
Sources such as Internal memos from CEO's of some of the aforementioned companies to their largest shareholders?
Its not physically consuming anything no.
What it is doing is consuming the experience of watching it.
I can never have the exact same experience watching a TV show after I have seen it the first time.
I have this funny feeling like some of the prominent MAFIAA members are going to have to start leaving places in body bags before they actually give in.
Yes, the media server is a definite huge advantage. Thats how I view most things. Storage was starting to become and issue but with the huge availability of 2tb+ drives for under $100 its no longer a problem.
If the media companies would put a cap on movies of $15 and put everything up DRM free for sale somewhere I'd probably never pirate anything ever again.
As it is, they can't expect me to dish out the cash for everything I consume. I have over $30,000 worth of movies by current pricing standards, and have spent well over $15,000 anyways. That's a lot of freaking money. It gets to a point where people would probably like to pay for it, but just can't because the RIAA/MPAA are too damned greedy.