Lots of games already have special extra tasks you can accomplish to show off how "hard core" you are.
The 'Ratchet & Clank' games for the PS2, for instance, had the Skill Point system. A skill point would be some extra challenging task you could complete, such as winning the a minigame race in under a certain time limit, or acquiring all the weapons, or defeat a certain level/boss with just your wrench, etc. You even got a skill point if you managed to get all the other skill points! Skill Points could then be used to unlock additional things in the games, such as different skins for your character, or silly features like making everyone's head extra-large.
The only new thing here is that now your accomplishments are stored online and are visible even if you aren't currentally playing the game.
What exactly are achievement points used for? It's not like you can turn them into cash or whatever online currency used to "buy" other Live stuff.
Several places I've worked at use F-secure, and I used to use F-prot back when it was free.
Let's put it this way.
F-secure works.
Norton does not.
Which would you rather use?
Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. Let me put it this way: F-Secure's AV products have consistantly worked with no noticable performance impact regardless of the platform you're using. It scans, it updates, it doesn't screw up your other applications on the machine - and all without causing otherwise beefy computer to grind to a halt.
I don't know what the folks at Norton are doing, but making a quality, robust product doesn't seem to be very high on their to-do list. If you think the Norton experience is horrible with WinXP, just wait until you try their newer products under an older OS - like Win98 or Win2k. At least you XP folks can get the thing to run - which is more than I can say when I tried putting Norton2003 on a Win2000 box. Also, god forbid you actually try to use their emergency restore disc feature. I tried doing that on a XP laptop, and wasn't able to get it to work because of all the bugs I found - and this was a core feature in their earlier products!
Except that, it's not a few million consoles, and it's not just a few people.
Online polls have indicated that it could be as high as 1 in 6 consoles having problems. Granted, most people will only answer a poll if they have something negative to say, and it very well could be that 90% of the consoles on the market don't have any problems. Even then, I'd consider a 10% defect rate way too high. That would mean that some 32,000 consoles in the US alone are defective.
Considering that Microsoft cut their initial shipments by so much, I suspect that they're aware there's a problem, and are holding the additional stock to act as replacements for units that will fail in the field.
That passage only allows consumers to USE equipment and media to make digital or analog recordings. It says nothing about HOW you use them.
If your comment was true, then Napster would never have been shut down since it would be legal to copy music so long as you did so from someone who owns the CD.
IANAL, but the way I understand the copyright laws, while you are allowed to make copies of a music CD, the original must remain in possession of the owner (ie. YOUR house - not at a friend's house.)
So if you and a friend went 50/50 on a CD, you could still make a copy of it - but both the copy and original would have to remain "together." In other words, you couldn't hold onto the copy while the original was at your friend's house. Otherwise you'd get into problems with unauthorized copying and distribution. You would also have problems because you only bought >11 copy can be in use at any time. This technically would mean if you copied a CD and had one copy playing in your car while the original was playing in your house, you would technically be violating the copyright.
I believe that some software allows you to install on two computers nowadays (Windows XP?) so I guess if you and a friend split a copy of XP, you both could legally install the same copy on both of your computers? I haven't read the license, so I don't know the details.
When I used to use Stardock's desktop software, their license explicitly said you could install their software on your desktop and laptop - since you're only going to be using (ie. looking at) one or the other at one time. Very progressive of them.
Sounds like nothing has changed with regards to Microsoft's interviewing techniques in the ~10 years since I've left college...
When I interviewed with Microsoft, it was for an intern position. Imagine 8 hours of nothing but MENSA questions and simple coding tricks. And yes, I got that same question about variable swapping without a temp variable.
You know, I didn't notice it at the time, but until I read the article, but never once did anyone ever say why I should work at Microsoft, or how great it was working there...
In the end, I wasn't extended an intern position, but was told by the HR person that they would like me to come out next year to interview for a permanent position. I have no idea what I could have done to have failed the intern interview, but convinced them that I'd be a good permanent employee... I told her if I had to go through another 8 hours of grilling, I'd look elsewhere for employment.
With all the companies that *ARE* at E3, CNN chooses to talk about a company that was nothing but a shill to separate stupid investors from their millions?
Phantom failed to show up at *last* year's E3, and when people called them on it, Inifium Labs tried to sue them.
The fact they didn't show up at this year's E3 isn't news.
The Phantom was never news. It was a disaster waiting to happen. A joke that required no punchline.
I can only assume the VP fired the marketoid on the spot?
No?
Idiot.
While I'm not in sales or marketting, the people I have worked with who are in those areas all say the same thing - it costs 5 to 10 "new customers" what it costs to get an existing customer back. In otherwords, it's cheaper to keep customers happy. They understood that, their boss (the CEO) understood that, and engineering was made to understand that.
If you think about it too, if a customer gets annoyed and leaves, how much collateral damage are they going to do by badmouthing your company to their peers - who are potential customers of yours? Wasn't there a study that showed that people are 10x as likely to badmouth a company about bad service/products as they are to praise one? Sad statement about human nature, but I know I'm much more likely to tell someone to avoid a product vs. praising one.
The degradable DVDs you speak of are still in the market. I saw some at an airport bookstore while waiting for a connecting flight.
The way they work is that the package is completely sealed and filled with nitrogen (I think.) The disc will degrade when exposed to air, so once you open the package, the clock starts ticking. Eventually the ink on the disc will degrade, leaving you with a useless plastic coaster.
Could have been a neat idea except:
* You're still stuck with a non-degradable plastic coaster. Might have been nice if there was a reason to keep said coaster, or make the entire disc out of bio-degradable material - like those garbage bags that degrade in sunlight.
* They were charging $12+tax for these! Anything above $3-5 is asking too much for something you're going to watch once, maybe twice, in the next 48 hours.
* They only had 'The Notebook' - and they had many many many many many copies. I get the feeling that many of these discs are going to end up going to the trash heap with their packaging still sealed.
My local Costco was selling 'The Notebook' for $10 And they still had many many many many many copies left unsold. Now you can get it in a bundled package with a "good" movie for $14. Basically, you're buying the "good" movie, and they're throwing in 'The Notebook' for free.
I had high hopes for Moo3. I lost track of the hundreds(!) of hours I put in on Moo and Moo2. However, Moo3 broke my heart.
My biggest complaint is that the game is unfinished. There are pieces of greater things in the game that really don't do anything. The AI for handling your colonies is severely brain damaged, requiring you to hand-manage each and every colony on every planet and moon you settle. Even a small empire might have 30 such colonies - all without MOO's "next colony" button, or MOO2's spreadsheet which let you see at a glance what planet was producing what, and let you shuffle things fairly easily.
Ship technology is missing several features, like, oh, HULL HIT POINTS. Yay! I discovered a technology giving me laser cannons that do 20 points of damage. Uh...is that good? Dunno. You're never given an idea of how tough your ships are - EVER. Ship combat was even worse. Missiles required manual intervention, but combat is real-time. Not that half the weapons actually work or anything... Oh sure, the enemy's tech works, BUT NOT YOURS! Made battles an increasingly aggravating exercise in futility.
The armada restriction you mention is a minor quibble, though it brings up a point about needless complexity, and the poor UI which made it neigh-impossible to figure out how to do anything. The manual was next to useless - it was more concerned with telling you about this grand, complicated and boring backstory. Bleh! Moo isn't about backstory! Even the "story" of Moo2 was rather annoying simply because it made no sense - I was able to outstrip the Antareans in terms of tech and strength so their random little attacks were little more than being attacked by a horsefly. Pitiful!
Geeze, all they had to do was take Moo1, increase the map/planet number (which is about the only thing Moo3 did well), maybe add some new races (which Moo3 did), ease the limitations on fleet and ship numbers (if I want a fleet of 1000 ships!) and fix the bugs from Moo2's combat system so that things like initiative worked properly.
But instead, you ended up with a colony management system that makes YOU build more things than Moo2, with no way to automate things (left to its own devices, the AI would do horrible things to your colonies - I can only imagine what the other empires' colonies looked like...) and a ship combat system that doesn't work. Period. Face it, playing Moo without ship combat is like trying to date an ex-girlfriend who's now a zombie. It may LOOK good, but nothing good will come of it...
The fact that you actually read the labels before giving things to your kid(s), and are educated about video games means you're clearly not part of the demographic whose collect butt Hillary is trying to kiss.
It saddens me how many parents are seemingly ignorant of the video game rating system - despite all the video game ads saying what rating the game has, not to mention putting the rating on the box along with a description of why that rating was given. What's even more aggravating is that in California, stores are required BY LAW to prominentaly display signs that describe the video game rating system whereever video games are sold. And I still see parents buying GTA3. The latest example I saw was where a kid no more than 8 asked if his mom would buy it for him, and she put the game into her basket without even glancing at the package.
It wasn't just tabloids... I remember one of the 24 hour news networks in the US doing a whole feature on MS Flight Simulator, which they claimed was "programmed to kill." Fortunatly, all of the pilots they interviewed for the segment scoffed at the idea that a few hours on a simple PC simulator would give you the skills to pilot a real-life jumbo jet.
But as everyone here already knows, this whole hubbub about video game violence is just to appeal to a certain demographic of voters. It doesn't even matter if you explained to Hillary (or the others) that TV-style rating system, and that the parents should *KNOW* better than to let their child buy (much less play) a violent video game if they're already concerned about violence.
Uh...Tivo's been putting ads on "your" hardware for years now.
The ad stuff from the main menu? The TV spotlights? All advertising paid to Tivo by the corresponding companies. Even the pop-up thing was pioneered by the "thumbs up" graphic that would show up during specific commercials. Hitting the thumbs-up would either allow you to view an additional commercial about the product (eg. that 4x4 truck) or record the program being advertised (eg. Friends.)
Tivo has made no secrets about their activities. They collect aggregated data from your box (unless you opt-out) and this data is then used to help sell ad space/time on the Tivo to interested companies.
As for the new pop-up ads, I'm going to have to wait and see them in action. Right now, reports are too confused to really know what exactly is going on. I'd be interested to know how they'll work with the 30sec. skip backdoor. Will they remove this completely, or will it just not work at all, or will the ads show up during my shows? Obviously, that last one would be the worst case scenario...
There's more than enough ancedotal evidence that shows that trying those 'unsubscribe' links results in the address getting MORE spam - assuming the link/account/etc. is valid, works, and is actually processed...
If you think about it for a second, the vast majority of spam already violates the CAN-SPAM law in the US, and makes outrageous claims for products/services that are most likely not legit or even partially truthful. So given the fact that most spammers are criminal liars, would you really trust them to *NOT* spam your address if you asked them? Remember - even if you DO end up dealing with an "honest" spammer, submitting your address to his remove-mechanism is a confirmation that not only is that address valid, but that the address isn't being spam filtered, and is being read by a human who will open spam messages!
Would you STILL trust a spammer to actually remove you from his list, and NOT sell your address to his spamming buddies?
No one's asked the obvious question here: *WHY* do you want to go back to school, and *WHAT* do you want to do with your education?
If all you want to do is further your education for its own personal sake, then take something like history, or philosophy, or something that interests you personally. If nothing else, you'll gain a certain balance that most tech-degrees utterly lack.
If you want to move up in the business world - say, into management or even starting your own company - then an MBA is an obvious choice.
That said, you cannot ever go wrong studying a 2nd language. You don't need to get a degree in it (though, I did) but demonstratable proficency in another language will immediatly put you in a different category than "just another BS-CS coder..."
Yes, that was the intent, but for crying out loud, could they have been a bit more clever about it? When the whole Xindi thing was first introduced when their weapon zapped the Earth, the paralells were painfully obvious. Even the whole story was painfully obivous.
So you attack the Earth because you're told they'll annihilate you for attacking them. Um... here's an idea - why don't you NOT attack the Earth, and therefore they'll NOT annihiliate you for NOT attacking!? Geeze. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. And this is supposed to be an intelligent space-faring race?
The other thing that annoyed me about the Xindi was that apparentally the writers have played 'Masters Of Orion 3' a bit too much and thought it would be "neat" to rip their story off...
The whole Xindi thing was the major reason I stopped watching Enterprise. If I wanted to watch the good guys hunt down terrorists, only to be foiled again and again, I can watch CNN.
My biggest problem with Trek and time travel is that they can't seem to keep things straight. When you start mucking around in time, you suddenly add a whole lot more background stuff to your stories. This isn't neccessarily a problem if you don't care about story continuity, but in the case of Voyager and Enterprise, it just made things...messy. In fact, Enterprise contradicted itself and previously established Trek history so much, I just gave up. It wasn't the only reason, but it was pretty strong one...
I have a book that attempts to compile the entire Dr. Who TV series into a single timeline - which the writers openly admit they weren't trying to do. Oddly, with only a handful of contradictions, the authors managed to hammer out a rather coherent timeline of events that occur in Dr. Who episodes, or are mentioned peripherally (such as a war or other event.)
I suspect if you tried to do the same thing with the entire Trek franchise, you wouldn't get a "timeline" - you'd get a "timeknot" or maybe even the dreaded "timebush".
As for all good time travel stories being short stories, I have to disagree. B5 had some major threads that ended/started with time travel. I will say that time travel is a difficult tool to use in stories - and can easily be abused, as we've seen with Star Trek. But used properly...ah...that's another story altogether.
I fail to see how default blocking outbound port 25 traffic is "mean, nasty, evil and a bad idea" when it's a safe bet that over 99% of the users of the internet don't know about, don't care about, and just don't need such a feature.
No, such a thing isn't going to be a cure-all for the spam/virus problem, but it's a simple thing that all ISPs should be doing and will have a positive affect on the internet as a whole.
But we've still got major providers who are complaining that such a move would cost them too much in support calls, and so their network remains an veritable overflowing sewer of garbage.
That's the majority of the spam problem right there.
So long as people can make money from it, they'll keep doing it.
Many large ISPs *knowingly* have contracts with some of the largest, criminal spammers on the planet. Why? Because money talks. It's a miracle that SPEWS hasn't pitched an entire backbone provider into its list by now.
Granted, even if the US companies, by some miracle, decided to "do the right thing" instead of just looking out for their own bottom line, you'd still have the cesspool that is China, Korea, Brazil, Russia, and other places where "right" and "wrong" have no meaning, and the only laws that apply are the ones made by those holding money and/or the guns.
But as folks already know, it's a lot easier to just wholesale blackhole an entire country, than to try to pick through a stream of garbage for the few legitimate messages that may exist in it.
Why was this guy bothering with bittorrent, when he could have easily bought these movies for HK$10 (~US$1.50) or less a piece?
And since when do the HK police actually *arrest* you for dealing with pirated goods? Even avoiding the known areas that deal exclusively with pirated stuff, I was still seeing CDRs for sale in stores along side otherwise legitimate merchandise. About the worst I'd hear about would be they'd announce when they were going to sweep for pirated goods, and all the stores would mysteriously be closed that day. A week later, it was business as usual.
The impression I got from folks there is that the pirate industry is so large, ubiquitous and well organized that many legitimate companies don't even bother trying to import their goods anymore. The pirates are too fast and too cheap to compete against. As a result, just about *everyone* buys pirated goods and doesn't give it a second thought.
Re:Anti-Spam Legislation Is Only Effective Solutio
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Spammers' Upend DNS
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When you've got companies spending millions of dollars a year on extra equipment to deal with the spam problem, you've gone beyond being a "large nuisance."
And this is WITH the horribly lenient joke law that is "CAN-SPAM".
The last time I tried watching TechTV/G4 was at my brother's over Christmas vacation. While I do have Comcast, I refuse to pay the extra $50/mo to get all the upgrades to get the channel.
It's pretty clear to me that Comcast's aim isn't "hardcore gamers". They get far more accurate information long before G4 gets a chance to dumb it down for their audience. At least, I know that's the case for me, and I don't even consider myself a hardcore gamer anymore (not enough time;)
Instead, G4 is going for the same audience that Spike TV was aimming for with their travesty of an award show for video games that aired earlier this month.
Yes, apparentally all these years, gamer that I am, I'm supposed to be more interested in rap and rock artists, while ogling the ocassional football video game for the graphics.
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Lots of games already have special extra tasks you can accomplish to show off how "hard core" you are.
The 'Ratchet & Clank' games for the PS2, for instance, had the Skill Point system. A skill point would be some extra challenging task you could complete, such as winning the a minigame race in under a certain time limit, or acquiring all the weapons, or defeat a certain level/boss with just your wrench, etc. You even got a skill point if you managed to get all the other skill points! Skill Points could then be used to unlock additional things in the games, such as different skins for your character, or silly features like making everyone's head extra-large.
The only new thing here is that now your accomplishments are stored online and are visible even if you aren't currentally playing the game.
What exactly are achievement points used for? It's not like you can turn them into cash or whatever online currency used to "buy" other Live stuff.
Several places I've worked at use F-secure, and I used to use F-prot back when it was free.
Let's put it this way.
F-secure works.
Norton does not.
Which would you rather use?
Ok, that's a slight exaggeration. Let me put it this way: F-Secure's AV products have consistantly worked with no noticable performance impact regardless of the platform you're using. It scans, it updates, it doesn't screw up your other applications on the machine - and all without causing otherwise beefy computer to grind to a halt.
I don't know what the folks at Norton are doing, but making a quality, robust product doesn't seem to be very high on their to-do list. If you think the Norton experience is horrible with WinXP, just wait until you try their newer products under an older OS - like Win98 or Win2k. At least you XP folks can get the thing to run - which is more than I can say when I tried putting Norton2003 on a Win2000 box. Also, god forbid you actually try to use their emergency restore disc feature. I tried doing that on a XP laptop, and wasn't able to get it to work because of all the bugs I found - and this was a core feature in their earlier products!
Except that, it's not a few million consoles, and it's not just a few people.
Online polls have indicated that it could be as high as 1 in 6 consoles having problems. Granted, most people will only answer a poll if they have something negative to say, and it very well could be that 90% of the consoles on the market don't have any problems. Even then, I'd consider a 10% defect rate way too high. That would mean that some 32,000 consoles in the US alone are defective.
Considering that Microsoft cut their initial shipments by so much, I suspect that they're aware there's a problem, and are holding the additional stock to act as replacements for units that will fail in the field.
That passage only allows consumers to USE equipment and media to make digital or analog recordings. It says nothing about HOW you use them.
If your comment was true, then Napster would never have been shut down since it would be legal to copy music so long as you did so from someone who owns the CD.
IANAL, but the way I understand the copyright laws, while you are allowed to make copies of a music CD, the original must remain in possession of the owner (ie. YOUR house - not at a friend's house.)
So if you and a friend went 50/50 on a CD, you could still make a copy of it - but both the copy and original would have to remain "together." In other words, you couldn't hold onto the copy while the original was at your friend's house. Otherwise you'd get into problems with unauthorized copying and distribution. You would also have problems because you only bought >11 copy can be in use at any time. This technically would mean if you copied a CD and had one copy playing in your car while the original was playing in your house, you would technically be violating the copyright.
I believe that some software allows you to install on two computers nowadays (Windows XP?) so I guess if you and a friend split a copy of XP, you both could legally install the same copy on both of your computers? I haven't read the license, so I don't know the details.
When I used to use Stardock's desktop software, their license explicitly said you could install their software on your desktop and laptop - since you're only going to be using (ie. looking at) one or the other at one time. Very progressive of them.
Sounds like nothing has changed with regards to Microsoft's interviewing techniques in the ~10 years since I've left college...
When I interviewed with Microsoft, it was for an intern position. Imagine 8 hours of nothing but MENSA questions and simple coding tricks. And yes, I got that same question about variable swapping without a temp variable.
You know, I didn't notice it at the time, but until I read the article, but never once did anyone ever say why I should work at Microsoft, or how great it was working there...
In the end, I wasn't extended an intern position, but was told by the HR person that they would like me to come out next year to interview for a permanent position. I have no idea what I could have done to have failed the intern interview, but convinced them that I'd be a good permanent employee... I told her if I had to go through another 8 hours of grilling, I'd look elsewhere for employment.
With all the companies that *ARE* at E3, CNN chooses to talk about a company that was nothing but a shill to separate stupid investors from their millions?
Phantom failed to show up at *last* year's E3, and when people called them on it, Inifium Labs tried to sue them.
The fact they didn't show up at this year's E3 isn't news.
The Phantom was never news. It was a disaster waiting to happen. A joke that required no punchline.
I can only assume the VP fired the marketoid on the spot?
No?
Idiot.
While I'm not in sales or marketting, the people I have worked with who are in those areas all say the same thing - it costs 5 to 10 "new customers" what it costs to get an existing customer back. In otherwords, it's cheaper to keep customers happy. They understood that, their boss (the CEO) understood that, and engineering was made to understand that.
If you think about it too, if a customer gets annoyed and leaves, how much collateral damage are they going to do by badmouthing your company to their peers - who are potential customers of yours? Wasn't there a study that showed that people are 10x as likely to badmouth a company about bad service/products as they are to praise one? Sad statement about human nature, but I know I'm much more likely to tell someone to avoid a product vs. praising one.
The degradable DVDs you speak of are still in the market. I saw some at an airport bookstore while waiting for a connecting flight.
The way they work is that the package is completely sealed and filled with nitrogen (I think.) The disc will degrade when exposed to air, so once you open the package, the clock starts ticking. Eventually the ink on the disc will degrade, leaving you with a useless plastic coaster.
Could have been a neat idea except:
* You're still stuck with a non-degradable plastic coaster. Might have been nice if there was a reason to keep said coaster, or make the entire disc out of bio-degradable material - like those garbage bags that degrade in sunlight.
* They were charging $12+tax for these! Anything above $3-5 is asking too much for something you're going to watch once, maybe twice, in the next 48 hours.
* They only had 'The Notebook' - and they had many many many many many copies. I get the feeling that many of these discs are going to end up going to the trash heap with their packaging still sealed.
My local Costco was selling 'The Notebook' for $10 And they still had many many many many many copies left unsold. Now you can get it in a bundled package with a "good" movie for $14. Basically, you're buying the "good" movie, and they're throwing in 'The Notebook' for free.
I had high hopes for Moo3. I lost track of the hundreds(!) of hours I put in on Moo and Moo2. However, Moo3 broke my heart.
My biggest complaint is that the game is unfinished. There are pieces of greater things in the game that really don't do anything. The AI for handling your colonies is severely brain damaged, requiring you to hand-manage each and every colony on every planet and moon you settle. Even a small empire might have 30 such colonies - all without MOO's "next colony" button, or MOO2's spreadsheet which let you see at a glance what planet was producing what, and let you shuffle things fairly easily.
Ship technology is missing several features, like, oh, HULL HIT POINTS. Yay! I discovered a technology giving me laser cannons that do 20 points of damage. Uh...is that good? Dunno. You're never given an idea of how tough your ships are - EVER. Ship combat was even worse. Missiles required manual intervention, but combat is real-time. Not that half the weapons actually work or anything... Oh sure, the enemy's tech works, BUT NOT YOURS! Made battles an increasingly aggravating exercise in futility.
The armada restriction you mention is a minor quibble, though it brings up a point about needless complexity, and the poor UI which made it neigh-impossible to figure out how to do anything. The manual was next to useless - it was more concerned with telling you about this grand, complicated and boring backstory. Bleh! Moo isn't about backstory! Even the "story" of Moo2 was rather annoying simply because it made no sense - I was able to outstrip the Antareans in terms of tech and strength so their random little attacks were little more than being attacked by a horsefly. Pitiful!
Geeze, all they had to do was take Moo1, increase the map/planet number (which is about the only thing Moo3 did well), maybe add some new races (which Moo3 did), ease the limitations on fleet and ship numbers (if I want a fleet of 1000 ships!) and fix the bugs from Moo2's combat system so that things like initiative worked properly.
But instead, you ended up with a colony management system that makes YOU build more things than Moo2, with no way to automate things (left to its own devices, the AI would do horrible things to your colonies - I can only imagine what the other empires' colonies looked like...) and a ship combat system that doesn't work. Period. Face it, playing Moo without ship combat is like trying to date an ex-girlfriend who's now a zombie. It may LOOK good, but nothing good will come of it...
The fact that you actually read the labels before giving things to your kid(s), and are educated about video games means you're clearly not part of the demographic whose collect butt Hillary is trying to kiss.
It saddens me how many parents are seemingly ignorant of the video game rating system - despite all the video game ads saying what rating the game has, not to mention putting the rating on the box along with a description of why that rating was given. What's even more aggravating is that in California, stores are required BY LAW to prominentaly display signs that describe the video game rating system whereever video games are sold. And I still see parents buying GTA3. The latest example I saw was where a kid no more than 8 asked if his mom would buy it for him, and she put the game into her basket without even glancing at the package.
It wasn't just tabloids... I remember one of the 24 hour news networks in the US doing a whole feature on MS Flight Simulator, which they claimed was "programmed to kill." Fortunatly, all of the pilots they interviewed for the segment scoffed at the idea that a few hours on a simple PC simulator would give you the skills to pilot a real-life jumbo jet.
But as everyone here already knows, this whole hubbub about video game violence is just to appeal to a certain demographic of voters. It doesn't even matter if you explained to Hillary (or the others) that TV-style rating system, and that the parents should *KNOW* better than to let their child buy (much less play) a violent video game if they're already concerned about violence.
Uh...Tivo's been putting ads on "your" hardware for years now.
The ad stuff from the main menu? The TV spotlights? All advertising paid to Tivo by the corresponding companies. Even the pop-up thing was pioneered by the "thumbs up" graphic that would show up during specific commercials. Hitting the thumbs-up would either allow you to view an additional commercial about the product (eg. that 4x4 truck) or record the program being advertised (eg. Friends.)
Tivo has made no secrets about their activities. They collect aggregated data from your box (unless you opt-out) and this data is then used to help sell ad space/time on the Tivo to interested companies.
As for the new pop-up ads, I'm going to have to wait and see them in action. Right now, reports are too confused to really know what exactly is going on. I'd be interested to know how they'll work with the 30sec. skip backdoor. Will they remove this completely, or will it just not work at all, or will the ads show up during my shows? Obviously, that last one would be the worst case scenario...
There's more than enough ancedotal evidence that shows that trying those 'unsubscribe' links results in the address getting MORE spam - assuming the link/account/etc. is valid, works, and is actually processed...
If you think about it for a second, the vast majority of spam already violates the CAN-SPAM law in the US, and makes outrageous claims for products/services that are most likely not legit or even partially truthful. So given the fact that most spammers are criminal liars, would you really trust them to *NOT* spam your address if you asked them? Remember - even if you DO end up dealing with an "honest" spammer, submitting your address to his remove-mechanism is a confirmation that not only is that address valid, but that the address isn't being spam filtered, and is being read by a human who will open spam messages!
Would you STILL trust a spammer to actually remove you from his list, and NOT sell your address to his spamming buddies?
No one's asked the obvious question here: *WHY* do you want to go back to school, and *WHAT* do you want to do with your education?
If all you want to do is further your education for its own personal sake, then take something like history, or philosophy, or something that interests you personally. If nothing else, you'll gain a certain balance that most tech-degrees utterly lack.
If you want to move up in the business world - say, into management or even starting your own company - then an MBA is an obvious choice.
That said, you cannot ever go wrong studying a 2nd language. You don't need to get a degree in it (though, I did) but demonstratable proficency in another language will immediatly put you in a different category than "just another BS-CS coder..."
Yes, that was the intent, but for crying out loud, could they have been a bit more clever about it? When the whole Xindi thing was first introduced when their weapon zapped the Earth, the paralells were painfully obvious. Even the whole story was painfully obivous.
So you attack the Earth because you're told they'll annihilate you for attacking them. Um... here's an idea - why don't you NOT attack the Earth, and therefore they'll NOT annihiliate you for NOT attacking!? Geeze. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies. And this is supposed to be an intelligent space-faring race?
The other thing that annoyed me about the Xindi was that apparentally the writers have played 'Masters Of Orion 3' a bit too much and thought it would be "neat" to rip their story off...
The whole Xindi thing was the major reason I stopped watching Enterprise. If I wanted to watch the good guys hunt down terrorists, only to be foiled again and again, I can watch CNN.
My biggest problem with Trek and time travel is that they can't seem to keep things straight. When you start mucking around in time, you suddenly add a whole lot more background stuff to your stories. This isn't neccessarily a problem if you don't care about story continuity, but in the case of Voyager and Enterprise, it just made things...messy. In fact, Enterprise contradicted itself and previously established Trek history so much, I just gave up. It wasn't the only reason, but it was pretty strong one...
I have a book that attempts to compile the entire Dr. Who TV series into a single timeline - which the writers openly admit they weren't trying to do. Oddly, with only a handful of contradictions, the authors managed to hammer out a rather coherent timeline of events that occur in Dr. Who episodes, or are mentioned peripherally (such as a war or other event.)
I suspect if you tried to do the same thing with the entire Trek franchise, you wouldn't get a "timeline" - you'd get a "timeknot" or maybe even the dreaded "timebush".
As for all good time travel stories being short stories, I have to disagree. B5 had some major threads that ended/started with time travel. I will say that time travel is a difficult tool to use in stories - and can easily be abused, as we've seen with Star Trek. But used properly...ah...that's another story altogether.
I don't think SPEWS lists all of any backbone network - yet. Large chunks maybe, but not the whole thing. Not like listing 4.0.0.0/8.
I fail to see how default blocking outbound port 25 traffic is "mean, nasty, evil and a bad idea" when it's a safe bet that over 99% of the users of the internet don't know about, don't care about, and just don't need such a feature.
No, such a thing isn't going to be a cure-all for the spam/virus problem, but it's a simple thing that all ISPs should be doing and will have a positive affect on the internet as a whole.
But we've still got major providers who are complaining that such a move would cost them too much in support calls, and so their network remains an veritable overflowing sewer of garbage.
That's the majority of the spam problem right there.
So long as people can make money from it, they'll keep doing it.
Many large ISPs *knowingly* have contracts with some of the largest, criminal spammers on the planet. Why? Because money talks. It's a miracle that SPEWS hasn't pitched an entire backbone provider into its list by now.
Granted, even if the US companies, by some miracle, decided to "do the right thing" instead of just looking out for their own bottom line, you'd still have the cesspool that is China, Korea, Brazil, Russia, and other places where "right" and "wrong" have no meaning, and the only laws that apply are the ones made by those holding money and/or the guns.
But as folks already know, it's a lot easier to just wholesale blackhole an entire country, than to try to pick through a stream of garbage for the few legitimate messages that may exist in it.
Moo3 is like having a relationship with someone you know is totally wrong for you, yet you keep coming back for the abuse.
Each time you think "it'll be better this time...I'll make it work!" only to meet with the same pain, dissapointment, and anger.
And like that person, you can't change Moo3 no matter how hard you try...
Why was this guy bothering with bittorrent, when he could have easily bought these movies for HK$10 (~US$1.50) or less a piece?
And since when do the HK police actually *arrest* you for dealing with pirated goods? Even avoiding the known areas that deal exclusively with pirated stuff, I was still seeing CDRs for sale in stores along side otherwise legitimate merchandise. About the worst I'd hear about would be they'd announce when they were going to sweep for pirated goods, and all the stores would mysteriously be closed that day. A week later, it was business as usual.
The impression I got from folks there is that the pirate industry is so large, ubiquitous and well organized that many legitimate companies don't even bother trying to import their goods anymore. The pirates are too fast and too cheap to compete against. As a result, just about *everyone* buys pirated goods and doesn't give it a second thought.
When you've got companies spending millions of dollars a year on extra equipment to deal with the spam problem, you've gone beyond being a "large nuisance."
And this is WITH the horribly lenient joke law that is "CAN-SPAM".
How am I a troll?
And why should an AC giving "moderation lessons" be taken seriously?
If I wanted to troll, I would have rambled on about a beowulf cluster of video game boobies spelling out "Frist Post - linux suxor!"
The last time I tried watching TechTV/G4 was at my brother's over Christmas vacation. While I do have Comcast, I refuse to pay the extra $50/mo to get all the upgrades to get the channel.
;)
It's pretty clear to me that Comcast's aim isn't "hardcore gamers". They get far more accurate information long before G4 gets a chance to dumb it down for their audience. At least, I know that's the case for me, and I don't even consider myself a hardcore gamer anymore (not enough time
Instead, G4 is going for the same audience that Spike TV was aimming for with their travesty of an award show for video games that aired earlier this month.
Yes, apparentally all these years, gamer that I am, I'm supposed to be more interested in rap and rock artists, while ogling the ocassional football video game for the graphics.