That is also provided that additional storage actually provides a noticeable advantage over previous technologies.
If we're still watching traditional movies, the difference between 55GB and 550GB will probably be smaller than the difference between Blu-Ray and traditional DVD's. Heck, blu-ray is still struggling for wide adoption outside of the PS3 and technophile crowd.
Just because a standard is competitive in cost and bigger doesn't mean that a sufficient number of people will make the investment in new hardware and technology standards. Beta was better than VHS, and it still lost.
SD actually has optional built-in DRM. That's the "Secure" part of SD, which makes it distinct from the MMC standard it superceeded. As far as I know, only Disney has attempted to release music on SD cards using a variant of Windows Media.
Considering SD seems to be winning over CF, and SD doesn't support the higher file sizes that one would need for this sort of thing, you're probably looking at a whole new format. You can be sure that format will use some Windows Media and card-linked encryption to protect the data. The analog hole is still there, but the data is in a more secure format.
Re:BloatWare Continues....
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
To be fair, from a UI perspective Chrome is most visually streamlined browser I've seen in years. It lacks mail, RSS feeds, those annoying widgets, 30 types of help pages, the ability to edit a site's CSS on the fly, and a lot of the other bloat that has krufted around modern browsers.
I can't speak to the RAM footprint, since with all the memory management in modern browsers that number is fake anyway. But anything learned on this highly simplified interface should translate well to other devices.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a more demanding browser if you need the increased requirements to add functionality... that's the point of advancing our hardware capabilities!
In this case the increased requirements aren't going to added functionality that the user sees, but to limit the damage from browsers crashing. The knee-jerk reaction in me says that maybe the browser components shouldn't crash at all, but that's not realistic.
Increased requirements however do reduce the feeling of responsiveness of the browser, and price a lot of people out of it. In this case the tradeoff seems worth it, as the browser does seem to remain responsive and usable on this two-year-old machine. However, I'd hesitate to make blanket statements that all software slowdowns can be absorbed by faster hardware.
If Chrome requires more system than most people currently have, than advancing hardware be damned it won't get the necessary market penetration to stay around.
The interesting point isn't that there are autonomous helicopters out there (there have been a few spectacular ones in the past) but the use of learning via apprenticeship. Purely self-taught algorithms have been used in the past to good effect, but apprenticeship has many practical applications. A genetic helicopter may not "discover" all of the known maneuvers out there. If you make minor updates to hardware, it might be possible for the older copters to apprentice the younger ones. At a higher level, it would be much easier to show an AI how to use a television remote control, than to hope it can deduce from the infra-red broadcast patterns and television chip design the function of the thing.
This doesn't seem like ultimately an either-or situation. There are advantages to each kind of learning, and I'm sure that whatever AI eventually takes over the world will use multiple kinds of learning.
Additionally, there are many real-world disadvantages to teaching flight through constant crashing.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to be addicted to traditional single-player games. The number and potency of techniques to support that, however, are lower.
Single player games tend to have explicit end points, which help prevent addiction. Plus, the most eggregiously long single-player games generally are slated to last for 160 hours with massive grinding. I've seen Everquest players pull that in two weeks.
Non-massively multiplayer games can be additive, but usually focus more on "sport" aspects. As such any sort of character development mechanics are explicitly removed to create level playing fields. Playing for another hour is its own reward, rather than the tempting "I need just one more level." This also self-limits in that due to the competitive nature the barrier for entry is high: Counter Strike has become notoriously impossible for new players to enter.
MMORPG's really hit a sweet spot with RPG character development (I invested so much time in this character! I'll just play tonight until I get that piece of armor.) and human aspect which keeps gameplay fresh. Also, MMORPG's are the only game structure where the planned primary gameplay curve stretches out for thousands of hours. Oblivion and Nethack are probably the only major single-player game that comes close to this time scale, and both have similar levels of addition for many players.
There is definitely discussion within the industry itself as to when compelling is too compelling. There are a lot of techniques utilized in game development to keep people interested, just like there are in movie and television show development. Soap Operas have their toolbox to keep people coming back day after day, but they can only consume one hour per day. MMORPG's have their suite of techniques to keep players interested and playing, but can absorb much more of a person's life.
Of course, we saw similar additions in the early days of television and radio. This may just be growing pains as society evolves to absorb new technologies.
Selling support for an in-progress operating system seems like a diminishing business. If the operating system is being developed correctly, then the further along you get the less support you need. My recent ubuntu install was buttery smooth, without even the usual hassles experimenting with wireless chip drivers.
The ultimate goal should be an operating system that needs no support at all. But then how would Red Hat et al survive as a business?
You see this elsewhere in the gaming world. In europe, there is a huge market for historical simulations for obsessed history buffs. They could tell you how heavy a particular shell fired in WW1 was, how long it took to forge an average pike, death rates in small vs large villages in the renissance, etc. And of course there are a lot of different names to these things (historical simulations, etc) to try to differentiate these from the more casual "games" people play.
In America, we have groups of people obsessed with flight simulators. These are both the people who take 8-hours on a saturday to fly from Boston Logan to SFO in their kitchen, and the more esoteric people who take 3 months to fly a moon mission. Sure, you could call Microsoft Flight Simulator a game, but it is more accurately described as either a Simulator, or a Borderline Creepy Obsession.
Calling a game which requires that kind of creepy dedication a "sport" doesn't seem all that far off from a categorization standpoint, and it helps them to connect their game with people looking for that kind of thing. I can't comment on the game itself, but this positioning seems understandable.
Find a really attractive box that matches your decor. Drill or cut a hole in one side, and feed a power strip into it. Plug in all of your electronics. Drill bunches of other holes. Pull just as much of the power cables as you need out the holes. If desired, cover the box in something pretty, like a doily or red napkin. Pray it doesn't overheat.
The iPhone comes with a dock connector which plugs into a USB port. This in turn plugs into a 5v USB wall wart, if you don't have a computer's USB port handy. And this cable can be had on amazon.com for 4 dollars. In other words, you're missing out on a phone that a lot of people like because of the hassle of carrying around a cable that is USB at one end rather than both ends.
I'd also point out that in this case USB does not do "everything these idiotic proprietary connectors will do AND MORE." Here's the pinout. The iPod / iPhone doc connector standard has dedicated lines for stereo audio both in and out, composite and S-video out, 3.3/5v, 5v, and 12v power, device type, and Firewire, USB, and serial connector data. Basically, the dock allows for both Firewire and USB operation, and direct a/v in (and out!) without additional expensive encoders and decoders. It's a perfectly reasoned engineering response to being in a mixed computing environment with an audio and video entertainment product.
I too am sick of devices which don't charge over USB. But decrying the iPhone over a 4 dollar USB adaptor cable seems like you're howling at the moon for being so close. There are a million reasons to decry the iPhone over anticompetitive practices... the cable seems like the least objectionable.
25 years is not all that long. My relatives still have 25 year old computers, and I've seen much older still in production use at companies. The main difference is the lack of power and regular use. Could a battery or a process be used to intermittently power a device every 6 months for 25 years? The traditional solution to bit rot (either flash or otherwise) is to refresh with new energy and new copying.
I assume that archival quality photo prints are too large for what you're attempting to store. What about writing each picture to a frame of a projection tape? Archival movie stock is pretty well understood at this point, and the size shouldn't be prohibitive.
For that matter, pay IBM to host an encrypted file of the pictures for 25 years. On a large slab of granite chisel the URL, searchable file name, and decryption code.
Ugly divorces are because breakups are ugly: If things hadn't gone to hell, you wouldn't be breaking up. And if they don't go to hell, you can never form a real emotional separation.
Human nature. By the time anything gets to a legal proceeding, it has gotten ugly. Otherwise, you wouldn't need a legal proceeding.
Would you hire a person found not guilty of child molestation to work in your daycare center? After all, he or she has been found legally innocent of the crime.
If you were in court, would you admit that you cheated on your wife a few times, knowing that everyone who considers dating you will google your name? What if admitting the nature of your transgressions found you innocent of a different crime?
What would you do if you found arrest photographs of your child's teacher for being rip-roaringly drunk in college and peeing on a beach? What do you think the rest of the parents in your district would do to that teacher?
Credibility? They were bribery scandals in 2002 and 2006, caught giving steroids in 2004, etc. Even the concept of "protest pens" was an IOC suggestion to China. Who here doesn't think that China paid for the olympics in hookers?
While I dislike public money going to a bloated legal system, it's about time we lost the shield of protectionism around companies selling broken products to the government under false promises. A 1 billion dollar project should remain a 1 billion dollar project, not bloat out to 10 billion. A secure card system with fundamental known security flaws should not fall to the public to pay for.
We get milked out of countless dollars due to contractors making unrealistically lowball price quotes, then passing on high profit margins at a much higher price once locked in. Or implementing projects and products they know are flawed without disclosing or fixing them. If you look at the presentation, the paper ticket passes aren't even encrypted, and store value locally!
the interface is great. It handles voicemail, Internet surfing, mapping, and many other functions far more smoothly and easily than any other phone out there. For gods sake when the iPhone was introduced the razor represented the best of American phone options. It is definitely possible to love a phone with reception problems, just as easily as it is to hate 100 regular phones that had great reception and an interface designed by ADHD teenagers in desperate need of a bugzilla account.
There is a fine line between voluntarily entering into a contract with a 3rd party on equal negotiation footing and agreeing to ridiculous contractual options because everyone who offers this service requires it. For example, air travel is theoretically optional, but a basic necessity of modern living. You can then either opt out of modern living, or you can wear the contractually-obliged shock collar in order to fly.
Certain bits of modern contracts are quite frankly immortal, and should not be enforced by the government. As a further example, non-competes can be a way of ensuring that your employees don't simply run to another company with your hard-earned knowledge. But they're also a way of ensuring that certain employees can never work in their field again, and cannot realistically get another job afterwards. This can be held over the employee to prevent them from leaving due to underpay, abuse, or failure to live up to bonus or other compensatory promises. And they're always entered into while the employee is hungry.
Playing the devil's advocate, what if you could filter out all of the illegal traffic from a particular network? Assuming that the 70% P2P traffic is accurate, and assume that a perfect illegal material filter existed... how many people would pay 20 dollars for 10mbps FiOS, but without the illegal traffic? If you don't fileshare, would you rather be on a network that was twice as fast?
There are certainly enough legal uses for bittorrent to warrant usage (basically all broadcast file transfers should use the protocol). However, being a file transfer protocol, bittorrent (and FTP) perhaps should have a lower traffic priority than realtime applications like network gaming, movie streaming, hypertext, IM, and the like. If an ubuntu transfer takes 1:35 instead of 1:25, it will hardly be noticed compared to if every 5th packet of Team Fortress 2 hits a 400 ms ping.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the correct view. I'm just saying it is a defensible one.
P.S. "Slippery Slope" arguments are themselves a slippery slope. We should simply ban all discussions, lest an ungood idea take hold.
Puzzle Quest Puzzle Pirates 90% of iPhone games Portal Viva Pinata Penny Arcade N+
It seems to me like the person is complaining not that puzzles have gone away, but that Adventure game-style puzzles have gone away. Honestly, adventure game style puzzles ususally consisted of closing a door to get a set of keys to give to a criminal to get a crowbar to smash into a vending machine to get quarters to do your fricking laundry. And... time travel was involved. These puzzles weren't "difficult" in the traditional sense, so much as "the designer's barely coherent chains of logic" is difficult. You had to get a moldy cheese sandwich from a bartender to feed to a dog to avoid being eaten 4 hours later into the game. And the game doesn't tell you the bartender serves cheese sandwiches.
Modern puzzles are all based around explicit known uses. If you fire a blue portal in Portal, you know that it will open a connection from the red portal. If you move a puzzle piece in Tomb Raider, you will know it will move a platform in an expected way. If, on the other hand, you attempt to use the crow on something in The Longest Journey, there is a 90% chance that you will have no idea what it does, and the attempted action will have no consequences.
* The "guess your monthly usage" shell game. Guess high, and you're paying for services you don't use. Guess low, and you will be hit with a 100 dollar bill for overusage * Grossly overcharging for text / multimedia messages * Grossly overcharging for data on non-unlimited plans. I remember downloading a game once on an AT&T network... the game cost 5 dollars, and the data charge to transfer the game was 10. * Locked into contracts / locked phones * Disabling features of phones they don't like * Compared to worldwide rates, overcharging for basic minutes too.
BTW, avoid that $5 insurance fee like the plague. My ex was paying $5 insurance per month on a late-90's pre-Ericssen Sony phone. When it finally broke, the insurance said that they didn't cover phones that old. Of course, she had been paying them the entire time to cover the phone that old, but they re-assured us that such a thing was not possible. They then asked if she would like to cancel her coverage.
See also this class action suit. These frequently come with a 100 dollar deductible and send back a refurb phone that is less expensive than that deductible. Similarly, they insure the current value of the phone, not the purchase value. As the value of the phone drops, your premium does not, and the likelyhood of a functional replacement drops to zero.
This makes no sense. A properly secure network should be in complete control of those creating it, simply through password and other authentication. Sure, good documentation is helpful in a worst case scenario, but you really need a hit-by-a-bus contingency team.
Hellboy is fantasy escapism. Pan's Labyrinth is about using fantasy escapism to deal with the horrors of growing up in the middle of a war. It was a very different movie than I was expecting, but it was also far better. It isn't fantasy so much as a historical war drama with occasional fantasy elements. Highly recommended.
Slashdot Mirror
That is also provided that additional storage actually provides a noticeable advantage over previous technologies.
If we're still watching traditional movies, the difference between 55GB and 550GB will probably be smaller than the difference between Blu-Ray and traditional DVD's. Heck, blu-ray is still struggling for wide adoption outside of the PS3 and technophile crowd.
Just because a standard is competitive in cost and bigger doesn't mean that a sufficient number of people will make the investment in new hardware and technology standards. Beta was better than VHS, and it still lost.
SD actually has optional built-in DRM. That's the "Secure" part of SD, which makes it distinct from the MMC standard it superceeded. As far as I know, only Disney has attempted to release music on SD cards using a variant of Windows Media.
Considering SD seems to be winning over CF, and SD doesn't support the higher file sizes that one would need for this sort of thing, you're probably looking at a whole new format. You can be sure that format will use some Windows Media and card-linked encryption to protect the data. The analog hole is still there, but the data is in a more secure format.
To be fair, from a UI perspective Chrome is most visually streamlined browser I've seen in years. It lacks mail, RSS feeds, those annoying widgets, 30 types of help pages, the ability to edit a site's CSS on the fly, and a lot of the other bloat that has krufted around modern browsers.
I can't speak to the RAM footprint, since with all the memory management in modern browsers that number is fake anyway. But anything learned on this highly simplified interface should translate well to other devices.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with having a more demanding browser if you need the increased requirements to add functionality... that's the point of advancing our hardware capabilities!
In this case the increased requirements aren't going to added functionality that the user sees, but to limit the damage from browsers crashing. The knee-jerk reaction in me says that maybe the browser components shouldn't crash at all, but that's not realistic.
Increased requirements however do reduce the feeling of responsiveness of the browser, and price a lot of people out of it. In this case the tradeoff seems worth it, as the browser does seem to remain responsive and usable on this two-year-old machine. However, I'd hesitate to make blanket statements that all software slowdowns can be absorbed by faster hardware.
If Chrome requires more system than most people currently have, than advancing hardware be damned it won't get the necessary market penetration to stay around.
The interesting point isn't that there are autonomous helicopters out there (there have been a few spectacular ones in the past) but the use of learning via apprenticeship. Purely self-taught algorithms have been used in the past to good effect, but apprenticeship has many practical applications. A genetic helicopter may not "discover" all of the known maneuvers out there. If you make minor updates to hardware, it might be possible for the older copters to apprentice the younger ones. At a higher level, it would be much easier to show an AI how to use a television remote control, than to hope it can deduce from the infra-red broadcast patterns and television chip design the function of the thing.
This doesn't seem like ultimately an either-or situation. There are advantages to each kind of learning, and I'm sure that whatever AI eventually takes over the world will use multiple kinds of learning.
Additionally, there are many real-world disadvantages to teaching flight through constant crashing.
I'm not saying it isn't possible to be addicted to traditional single-player games. The number and potency of techniques to support that, however, are lower.
Single player games tend to have explicit end points, which help prevent addiction. Plus, the most eggregiously long single-player games generally are slated to last for 160 hours with massive grinding. I've seen Everquest players pull that in two weeks.
Non-massively multiplayer games can be additive, but usually focus more on "sport" aspects. As such any sort of character development mechanics are explicitly removed to create level playing fields. Playing for another hour is its own reward, rather than the tempting "I need just one more level." This also self-limits in that due to the competitive nature the barrier for entry is high: Counter Strike has become notoriously impossible for new players to enter.
MMORPG's really hit a sweet spot with RPG character development (I invested so much time in this character! I'll just play tonight until I get that piece of armor.) and human aspect which keeps gameplay fresh. Also, MMORPG's are the only game structure where the planned primary gameplay curve stretches out for thousands of hours. Oblivion and Nethack are probably the only major single-player game that comes close to this time scale, and both have similar levels of addition for many players.
There is definitely discussion within the industry itself as to when compelling is too compelling. There are a lot of techniques utilized in game development to keep people interested, just like there are in movie and television show development. Soap Operas have their toolbox to keep people coming back day after day, but they can only consume one hour per day. MMORPG's have their suite of techniques to keep players interested and playing, but can absorb much more of a person's life.
Of course, we saw similar additions in the early days of television and radio. This may just be growing pains as society evolves to absorb new technologies.
Selling support for an in-progress operating system seems like a diminishing business. If the operating system is being developed correctly, then the further along you get the less support you need. My recent ubuntu install was buttery smooth, without even the usual hassles experimenting with wireless chip drivers.
The ultimate goal should be an operating system that needs no support at all. But then how would Red Hat et al survive as a business?
You see this elsewhere in the gaming world. In europe, there is a huge market for historical simulations for obsessed history buffs. They could tell you how heavy a particular shell fired in WW1 was, how long it took to forge an average pike, death rates in small vs large villages in the renissance, etc. And of course there are a lot of different names to these things (historical simulations, etc) to try to differentiate these from the more casual "games" people play.
In America, we have groups of people obsessed with flight simulators. These are both the people who take 8-hours on a saturday to fly from Boston Logan to SFO in their kitchen, and the more esoteric people who take 3 months to fly a moon mission. Sure, you could call Microsoft Flight Simulator a game, but it is more accurately described as either a Simulator, or a Borderline Creepy Obsession.
Calling a game which requires that kind of creepy dedication a "sport" doesn't seem all that far off from a categorization standpoint, and it helps them to connect their game with people looking for that kind of thing. I can't comment on the game itself, but this positioning seems understandable.
My girlfriend made something like this from better homes and gardens.
Find a really attractive box that matches your decor. Drill or cut a hole in one side, and feed a power strip into it. Plug in all of your electronics. Drill bunches of other holes. Pull just as much of the power cables as you need out the holes. If desired, cover the box in something pretty, like a doily or red napkin. Pray it doesn't overheat.
The iPhone comes with a dock connector which plugs into a USB port. This in turn plugs into a 5v USB wall wart, if you don't have a computer's USB port handy. And this cable can be had on amazon.com for 4 dollars. In other words, you're missing out on a phone that a lot of people like because of the hassle of carrying around a cable that is USB at one end rather than both ends.
I'd also point out that in this case USB does not do "everything these idiotic proprietary connectors will do AND MORE." Here's the pinout. The iPod / iPhone doc connector standard has dedicated lines for stereo audio both in and out, composite and S-video out, 3.3/5v, 5v, and 12v power, device type, and Firewire, USB, and serial connector data. Basically, the dock allows for both Firewire and USB operation, and direct a/v in (and out!) without additional expensive encoders and decoders. It's a perfectly reasoned engineering response to being in a mixed computing environment with an audio and video entertainment product.
I too am sick of devices which don't charge over USB. But decrying the iPhone over a 4 dollar USB adaptor cable seems like you're howling at the moon for being so close. There are a million reasons to decry the iPhone over anticompetitive practices... the cable seems like the least objectionable.
25 years is not all that long. My relatives still have 25 year old computers, and I've seen much older still in production use at companies. The main difference is the lack of power and regular use. Could a battery or a process be used to intermittently power a device every 6 months for 25 years? The traditional solution to bit rot (either flash or otherwise) is to refresh with new energy and new copying.
I assume that archival quality photo prints are too large for what you're attempting to store. What about writing each picture to a frame of a projection tape? Archival movie stock is pretty well understood at this point, and the size shouldn't be prohibitive.
For that matter, pay IBM to host an encrypted file of the pictures for 25 years. On a large slab of granite chisel the URL, searchable file name, and decryption code.
Ugly divorces are because breakups are ugly: If things hadn't gone to hell, you wouldn't be breaking up. And if they don't go to hell, you can never form a real emotional separation.
Human nature. By the time anything gets to a legal proceeding, it has gotten ugly. Otherwise, you wouldn't need a legal proceeding.
Would you hire a person found not guilty of child molestation to work in your daycare center? After all, he or she has been found legally innocent of the crime.
If you were in court, would you admit that you cheated on your wife a few times, knowing that everyone who considers dating you will google your name? What if admitting the nature of your transgressions found you innocent of a different crime?
What would you do if you found arrest photographs of your child's teacher for being rip-roaringly drunk in college and peeing on a beach? What do you think the rest of the parents in your district would do to that teacher?
Credibility? They were bribery scandals in 2002 and 2006, caught giving steroids in 2004, etc. Even the concept of "protest pens" was an IOC suggestion to China. Who here doesn't think that China paid for the olympics in hookers?
Mod parent up.
While I dislike public money going to a bloated legal system, it's about time we lost the shield of protectionism around companies selling broken products to the government under false promises. A 1 billion dollar project should remain a 1 billion dollar project, not bloat out to 10 billion. A secure card system with fundamental known security flaws should not fall to the public to pay for.
We get milked out of countless dollars due to contractors making unrealistically lowball price quotes, then passing on high profit margins at a much higher price once locked in. Or implementing projects and products they know are flawed without disclosing or fixing them. If you look at the presentation, the paper ticket passes aren't even encrypted, and store value locally!
the interface is great. It handles voicemail, Internet surfing, mapping, and many other functions far more smoothly and easily than any other phone out there. For gods sake when the iPhone was introduced the razor represented the best of American phone options. It is definitely possible to love a phone with reception problems, just as easily as it is to hate 100 regular phones that had great reception and an interface designed by ADHD teenagers in desperate need of a bugzilla account.
There is a fine line between voluntarily entering into a contract with a 3rd party on equal negotiation footing and agreeing to ridiculous contractual options because everyone who offers this service requires it. For example, air travel is theoretically optional, but a basic necessity of modern living. You can then either opt out of modern living, or you can wear the contractually-obliged shock collar in order to fly.
Certain bits of modern contracts are quite frankly immortal, and should not be enforced by the government. As a further example, non-competes can be a way of ensuring that your employees don't simply run to another company with your hard-earned knowledge. But they're also a way of ensuring that certain employees can never work in their field again, and cannot realistically get another job afterwards. This can be held over the employee to prevent them from leaving due to underpay, abuse, or failure to live up to bonus or other compensatory promises. And they're always entered into while the employee is hungry.
The devil you know?
Playing the devil's advocate, what if you could filter out all of the illegal traffic from a particular network? Assuming that the 70% P2P traffic is accurate, and assume that a perfect illegal material filter existed... how many people would pay 20 dollars for 10mbps FiOS, but without the illegal traffic? If you don't fileshare, would you rather be on a network that was twice as fast?
There are certainly enough legal uses for bittorrent to warrant usage (basically all broadcast file transfers should use the protocol). However, being a file transfer protocol, bittorrent (and FTP) perhaps should have a lower traffic priority than realtime applications like network gaming, movie streaming, hypertext, IM, and the like. If an ubuntu transfer takes 1:35 instead of 1:25, it will hardly be noticed compared to if every 5th packet of Team Fortress 2 hits a 400 ms ping.
I'm not saying this is necessarily the correct view. I'm just saying it is a defensible one.
P.S. "Slippery Slope" arguments are themselves a slippery slope. We should simply ban all discussions, lest an ungood idea take hold.
Puzzle Quest
Puzzle Pirates
90% of iPhone games
Portal
Viva Pinata
Penny Arcade
N+
It seems to me like the person is complaining not that puzzles have gone away, but that Adventure game-style puzzles have gone away. Honestly, adventure game style puzzles ususally consisted of closing a door to get a set of keys to give to a criminal to get a crowbar to smash into a vending machine to get quarters to do your fricking laundry. And... time travel was involved. These puzzles weren't "difficult" in the traditional sense, so much as "the designer's barely coherent chains of logic" is difficult. You had to get a moldy cheese sandwich from a bartender to feed to a dog to avoid being eaten 4 hours later into the game. And the game doesn't tell you the bartender serves cheese sandwiches.
Modern puzzles are all based around explicit known uses. If you fire a blue portal in Portal, you know that it will open a connection from the red portal. If you move a puzzle piece in Tomb Raider, you will know it will move a platform in an expected way. If, on the other hand, you attempt to use the crow on something in The Longest Journey, there is a 90% chance that you will have no idea what it does, and the attempted action will have no consequences.
Ways phone companies rip you off in the US:
* The "guess your monthly usage" shell game. Guess high, and you're paying for services you don't use. Guess low, and you will be hit with a 100 dollar bill for overusage
* Grossly overcharging for text / multimedia messages
* Grossly overcharging for data on non-unlimited plans. I remember downloading a game once on an AT&T network... the game cost 5 dollars, and the data charge to transfer the game was 10.
* Locked into contracts / locked phones
* Disabling features of phones they don't like
* Compared to worldwide rates, overcharging for basic minutes too.
BTW, avoid that $5 insurance fee like the plague. My ex was paying $5 insurance per month on a late-90's pre-Ericssen Sony phone. When it finally broke, the insurance said that they didn't cover phones that old. Of course, she had been paying them the entire time to cover the phone that old, but they re-assured us that such a thing was not possible. They then asked if she would like to cancel her coverage.
See also this class action suit. These frequently come with a 100 dollar deductible and send back a refurb phone that is less expensive than that deductible. Similarly, they insure the current value of the phone, not the purchase value. As the value of the phone drops, your premium does not, and the likelyhood of a functional replacement drops to zero.
This makes no sense. A properly secure network should be in complete control of those creating it, simply through password and other authentication. Sure, good documentation is helpful in a worst case scenario, but you really need a hit-by-a-bus contingency team.
Hellboy is fantasy escapism. Pan's Labyrinth is about using fantasy escapism to deal with the horrors of growing up in the middle of a war. It was a very different movie than I was expecting, but it was also far better. It isn't fantasy so much as a historical war drama with occasional fantasy elements. Highly recommended.