The thing is, we're not at war. Unless the Chinese sub took some seriously hostile action (launching a torpedo/missiles), chances are pretty low that they'll be fired on. Even if it's international waters it's not like you can just shoot anybody you want out there without repercussion.
Two button presses have a very good reason for existing. A single button is not sufficient when you're trying to protect against accidental presses. Even if you don't have a problem with it personally it is a problem. Making the buttons difficult to press is a terrible solution too, since it means wearing your fingers out to solve the accidental press problem.
Personally, I find the two button press option to be a pretty good solution in the case where your only controls are buttons. The op mentions how Apple came up with a new method to solve it, but apparently fails to realize that Apple was forced to come up with something like that on account of having only a single button on the phone. Frankly, the button press and finger motion on the iPhone seems like more effort than the two button press the op is complaining about. The article's author is dead wrong about two button presses being too many however, but I agree with him on pretty much all of his other points.
Gasoline tanks are actually pretty safe. Gas won't explode if you rupture the tank (it has to leak out, vaporize, and then catch fire, and even that is not an explosion, just a big fireball). A pressure vessel however will explode if ruptured. Even if the tank itself isn't ripped to shreds and turned into shrapnel, the mounting brackets, body, or even other car can be turned into shrapnel by the high pressure air escaping all at once. If you've ever seen what a comparatively low pressure SCUBA tank will do when ruptured it should give you an idea of what would happen to this car.
Luckily, my local Gamestop seems to have backed off of the whole strategy guide pushing. It was real bad there for awhile, you couldn't walk in the store without them trying to pawn off some completely worthless Prima guide on you.
For that matter, for a company that supposedly gets inside info on a game before it is released, Prima continually puts out some really poor quality material. Frequently they're little more than a slightly expanded version of what came in the manual and a bunch of screenshots that don't tell you anything. You'd thing they'd be great for giving you actual hitpoints or types of attacks or something, but they're usually far more interested in holding your hand through some already ridiculously easy tutorial puzzle or something. "Jump on the button to open the door!".
The final nail in the coffin of the whole Strategy Guide business is that you can almost invariably find far better guides online, usually much more complete and completely free. Gamefaqs alone renders Prima's whole business model obsolete, and it's far from the only gameplay resource online.
One thing the PC architecture is seriously lacking on is hardware diagnostics. If you have a machine that's crashing with when booted off of CD in your known-stable OS, it's a pain in the rear to track down what piece of hardware is causing the crashes. The almost complete lack of hardware diagnostics (work on a big iron machine once to see how good life can be with real diagnostic tools) means you're almost always reduced to just pulling out/swapping random bits of hardware until it stops crashing. This is slow and error prone, and doesn't work very well if you have say a faulty power supply that burnt up a cap on the motherboard, giving you two points of failure.
If something could monitor the voltage on every piece of hardware and tell me when something is out of spec, or when you start getting lots of parity errors on a bus, or when your ECC memory detects too many errors (as if you can get ECC memory for PCs anymore). If you spend a lot of time on it, you can get some of that functionality today with tons of proprietary pieces that don't integrate with each other. We have been long overdue for some standardization. I would have even been happy with standardizing SMBus stuff, but a completely new bus works too. I hope enthusiast boards get into races to see who can instrument the most parts of their board, since that's the sort of thing that would let manufacturers discover what is useful and what isn't in the long run and let it trickle down into the regular boards.
The market for those Air Cars is India, where you can use the expanded air to cool the cabin after you move. There was a Slashdot article on it awhile back. There are some practicality problems with it: the air tank is pretty dangerous in an accident, but luckily safety is not as paramount over there; and the range is a bit short, but for a little cab that scoots people around the city it's not a bad solution and certainly better than adding to the smog problem with combustion engines.
If all you care about is dialing numbers and talking to people, then stick with a cheap phone, the iPhone is not for you. If you think you might like to look up something in Google while you're on the go, then you need to consider the iPhone. If you want to bring up a map of the area and find stuff you could dial 411, but chances are you'll get better results out of the internet (and 411 fees add up quick). If you also carry around an iPod in addition to your phone, then the iPhone starts to make a lot more sense as you will be combining two devices into one to save not only on pocket space, but on recharging peripherals and other assorted sundries.
The complaints about EDGE being slower than EVDO are accurate, but not as critical as some people like to think. The phone can only render a webpage so fast, and EDGE isn't that bad (it's twice as fast as a POTS modem most of the time, which is fine for light browsing, it's not like you're going to be running bittorrent on your phone). The on-screen keyboard may sound like a bad idea, but once you use it for a bit it's almost impossible to go back to old cell phone pads. My wife only started using SMS when she got the iPhone. All of her old phones supported it, but she couldn't stand typing anything on the pad. With the iPhone she uses it all of the time.
You can get just about any talk plan you want with the iPhone, but it's the data plan that gets you. AT&T has always had overpriced data plans, and the iPhone plan is no exception ($20/month for unlimited). I pay the bill because it's a nice feature, but I much prefer my T-Mobile plan that only runs me $10/month for the same unlimited data. I have to laugh at the people who say "I won't use it until it does EVDO!", having apparently never looked at the price of data plans on EVDO networks. I hope you like paying $60/month for your data.
Once I had the natural stealth plasmid I always routed the flow to alarm tiles when I realized I'd messed up the hack. That way the bots would just buzz around you without causing any real problem while you went back and hacked again.
There were a lot of unsolvable puzzles from about midways on if you didn't have the right plasmids installed. Several others where you had get every single piece exactly right in order to win (which mostly meant getting lucky and getting the first piece you needed on an early click so you can place it and give yourself enough time to finish the rest of the puzzle). Once you had a couple of the hacking plasmids installed however you would almost never run into an impossible puzzle. Plus by the end you can craft more autohacks than you can actually use (and have maxed out cash, and max ammo, etc...).
Are you still living in 1997? Clearly you don't own anything anymore, you merely have some permission to use the publisher's sacred content in the one way they deem fit. Your concept of owning stuff you paid for is laughable.
I've sometimes wondered if the macros weren't left enabled on purpose to let players MST3K the cutscenes if they wanted to. The fact that they are unskippable is bad, but being an MMO the only way to skip a cutscene is to have everybody vote and agree to skip the cutscene, which is more work and probably something the devs have well down on the priority queue. Fortunately cutscenes are pretty rare in the game so it's not a huge problem (it's a bigger problem in Villains than Heroes).
The worst part about those hardware firewalls is that they're buggy. People think that because they're in hardware they're bug free, but frankly I've discovered way more bugs in those cheap commercial "internet routers" that I've ever seen in iptables, ipfw, and pf combined. VxWorks is not easy to debug and most vendors seem to do as little work in it as possible. I actually had one on my home network that got replaced by a FreeBSD box when I discovered a firmware bug that DOSed my local network and the remote network with malformed packets about once a day, requiring me to reboot the router.
I wonder if the players have the same design that Microsoft is using where each new release of the blacklist has a serial number on it and the player will only update the blacklist if the serial number is larger than the one it has internally. Thus to defeat it all you need is a disc with a MAXVAL serial number and an empty blacklist (or a minimal valid blacklist, maybe copied from an older disc with the serial number bumped).
I wonder if it matters that the people I work with often have to go into areas where they are not allowed to bring a cellphone? When someone is setting up a secure computing space the very first thing they do is ban cellphones from the room.
Are watches out of style? I have been wearing a watch since I was a kid, and in fact the one I'm wearing now dates back to 1993 and has only occasionally left my wrist during the day. Most of my co-workers wear watches, but I'm not exactly in the fashion industry here and we could all easily be out of touch. I know some of them have dumped their watches and just use their cellphone for time (sort of the pocketwatch for the new millennium), but that trend is hardly universal.
Actually, running a portscan of my own machine I discovered a few more blocked ports:
Hole found from 80 to 80
Hole found from 135 to 139
Hole found from 445 to 445
Looks like they also block MS filesharing, which I think is a good idea.
A lot of companies don't block any ports, but if you read the ToS you'll find that servers of any kind are generally prohibited. Frequently it is worded to include even port (not passive) FTP, bittorrent, and almost always VPN like connections. The typical industry boilerplate TOS basically says that you are allowed to surf the web and read email (preferably webmail), anything more is grounds for termination without warning or reimbursement. Luckly ISPs don't actually enforce their TOS unless they need an excuse to kick someone off of their system.
I'm pretty sure the parent has a "business class" connection (the only way to get a 5/5 with Fios AFAIK, why they rip businesses off on the downlink is still a mystery to me), business users always have to pay a lot more because the phone company figures they can afford it. At least he probably don't have inbound port 80 blocked.
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The thing is, we're not at war. Unless the Chinese sub took some seriously hostile action (launching a torpedo/missiles), chances are pretty low that they'll be fired on. Even if it's international waters it's not like you can just shoot anybody you want out there without repercussion.
Two button presses have a very good reason for existing. A single button is not sufficient when you're trying to protect against accidental presses. Even if you don't have a problem with it personally it is a problem. Making the buttons difficult to press is a terrible solution too, since it means wearing your fingers out to solve the accidental press problem.
Personally, I find the two button press option to be a pretty good solution in the case where your only controls are buttons. The op mentions how Apple came up with a new method to solve it, but apparently fails to realize that Apple was forced to come up with something like that on account of having only a single button on the phone. Frankly, the button press and finger motion on the iPhone seems like more effort than the two button press the op is complaining about. The article's author is dead wrong about two button presses being too many however, but I agree with him on pretty much all of his other points.
Maybe Google saw the name and thought it had to be a prank.
It seems to work just about as well as anything else they've tried.
Gasoline tanks are actually pretty safe. Gas won't explode if you rupture the tank (it has to leak out, vaporize, and then catch fire, and even that is not an explosion, just a big fireball). A pressure vessel however will explode if ruptured. Even if the tank itself isn't ripped to shreds and turned into shrapnel, the mounting brackets, body, or even other car can be turned into shrapnel by the high pressure air escaping all at once. If you've ever seen what a comparatively low pressure SCUBA tank will do when ruptured it should give you an idea of what would happen to this car.
Luckily, my local Gamestop seems to have backed off of the whole strategy guide pushing. It was real bad there for awhile, you couldn't walk in the store without them trying to pawn off some completely worthless Prima guide on you.
For that matter, for a company that supposedly gets inside info on a game before it is released, Prima continually puts out some really poor quality material. Frequently they're little more than a slightly expanded version of what came in the manual and a bunch of screenshots that don't tell you anything. You'd thing they'd be great for giving you actual hitpoints or types of attacks or something, but they're usually far more interested in holding your hand through some already ridiculously easy tutorial puzzle or something. "Jump on the button to open the door!".
The final nail in the coffin of the whole Strategy Guide business is that you can almost invariably find far better guides online, usually much more complete and completely free. Gamefaqs alone renders Prima's whole business model obsolete, and it's far from the only gameplay resource online.
One thing the PC architecture is seriously lacking on is hardware diagnostics. If you have a machine that's crashing with when booted off of CD in your known-stable OS, it's a pain in the rear to track down what piece of hardware is causing the crashes. The almost complete lack of hardware diagnostics (work on a big iron machine once to see how good life can be with real diagnostic tools) means you're almost always reduced to just pulling out/swapping random bits of hardware until it stops crashing. This is slow and error prone, and doesn't work very well if you have say a faulty power supply that burnt up a cap on the motherboard, giving you two points of failure.
If something could monitor the voltage on every piece of hardware and tell me when something is out of spec, or when you start getting lots of parity errors on a bus, or when your ECC memory detects too many errors (as if you can get ECC memory for PCs anymore). If you spend a lot of time on it, you can get some of that functionality today with tons of proprietary pieces that don't integrate with each other. We have been long overdue for some standardization. I would have even been happy with standardizing SMBus stuff, but a completely new bus works too. I hope enthusiast boards get into races to see who can instrument the most parts of their board, since that's the sort of thing that would let manufacturers discover what is useful and what isn't in the long run and let it trickle down into the regular boards.
The market for those Air Cars is India, where you can use the expanded air to cool the cabin after you move. There was a Slashdot article on it awhile back. There are some practicality problems with it: the air tank is pretty dangerous in an accident, but luckily safety is not as paramount over there; and the range is a bit short, but for a little cab that scoots people around the city it's not a bad solution and certainly better than adding to the smog problem with combustion engines.
If all you care about is dialing numbers and talking to people, then stick with a cheap phone, the iPhone is not for you. If you think you might like to look up something in Google while you're on the go, then you need to consider the iPhone. If you want to bring up a map of the area and find stuff you could dial 411, but chances are you'll get better results out of the internet (and 411 fees add up quick). If you also carry around an iPod in addition to your phone, then the iPhone starts to make a lot more sense as you will be combining two devices into one to save not only on pocket space, but on recharging peripherals and other assorted sundries.
The complaints about EDGE being slower than EVDO are accurate, but not as critical as some people like to think. The phone can only render a webpage so fast, and EDGE isn't that bad (it's twice as fast as a POTS modem most of the time, which is fine for light browsing, it's not like you're going to be running bittorrent on your phone). The on-screen keyboard may sound like a bad idea, but once you use it for a bit it's almost impossible to go back to old cell phone pads. My wife only started using SMS when she got the iPhone. All of her old phones supported it, but she couldn't stand typing anything on the pad. With the iPhone she uses it all of the time.
You can get just about any talk plan you want with the iPhone, but it's the data plan that gets you. AT&T has always had overpriced data plans, and the iPhone plan is no exception ($20/month for unlimited). I pay the bill because it's a nice feature, but I much prefer my T-Mobile plan that only runs me $10/month for the same unlimited data. I have to laugh at the people who say "I won't use it until it does EVDO!", having apparently never looked at the price of data plans on EVDO networks. I hope you like paying $60/month for your data.
I don't know about you, but I was seriously glad to finally get the bots researched up high enough to auto-hack them.
Once I had the natural stealth plasmid I always routed the flow to alarm tiles when I realized I'd messed up the hack. That way the bots would just buzz around you without causing any real problem while you went back and hacked again. There were a lot of unsolvable puzzles from about midways on if you didn't have the right plasmids installed. Several others where you had get every single piece exactly right in order to win (which mostly meant getting lucky and getting the first piece you needed on an early click so you can place it and give yourself enough time to finish the rest of the puzzle). Once you had a couple of the hacking plasmids installed however you would almost never run into an impossible puzzle. Plus by the end you can craft more autohacks than you can actually use (and have maxed out cash, and max ammo, etc...).
Are you still living in 1997? Clearly you don't own anything anymore, you merely have some permission to use the publisher's sacred content in the one way they deem fit. Your concept of owning stuff you paid for is laughable.
I've sometimes wondered if the macros weren't left enabled on purpose to let players MST3K the cutscenes if they wanted to. The fact that they are unskippable is bad, but being an MMO the only way to skip a cutscene is to have everybody vote and agree to skip the cutscene, which is more work and probably something the devs have well down on the priority queue. Fortunately cutscenes are pretty rare in the game so it's not a huge problem (it's a bigger problem in Villains than Heroes).
The worst part about those hardware firewalls is that they're buggy. People think that because they're in hardware they're bug free, but frankly I've discovered way more bugs in those cheap commercial "internet routers" that I've ever seen in iptables, ipfw, and pf combined. VxWorks is not easy to debug and most vendors seem to do as little work in it as possible. I actually had one on my home network that got replaced by a FreeBSD box when I discovered a firmware bug that DOSed my local network and the remote network with malformed packets about once a day, requiring me to reboot the router.
I wonder if the players have the same design that Microsoft is using where each new release of the blacklist has a serial number on it and the player will only update the blacklist if the serial number is larger than the one it has internally. Thus to defeat it all you need is a disc with a MAXVAL serial number and an empty blacklist (or a minimal valid blacklist, maybe copied from an older disc with the serial number bumped).
It's one thing to make unbreakable encryption (DRM), it's quite another to make a DRM that nobody can be bothered to break.
Has anybody ever seen both of them in a room at the same time?
At least the kid has taste. He could have been buying Deer Hunter XXV or something.
I wonder if it matters that the people I work with often have to go into areas where they are not allowed to bring a cellphone? When someone is setting up a secure computing space the very first thing they do is ban cellphones from the room.
Are watches out of style? I have been wearing a watch since I was a kid, and in fact the one I'm wearing now dates back to 1993 and has only occasionally left my wrist during the day. Most of my co-workers wear watches, but I'm not exactly in the fashion industry here and we could all easily be out of touch. I know some of them have dumped their watches and just use their cellphone for time (sort of the pocketwatch for the new millennium), but that trend is hardly universal.
Starcraft: Ghost was at least properly shitcanned.
Actually, running a portscan of my own machine I discovered a few more blocked ports:
Hole found from 80 to 80
Hole found from 135 to 139
Hole found from 445 to 445
Looks like they also block MS filesharing, which I think is a good idea.
Aren't those kind of like DataPilot? It's not like the feature is exclusive to Excel.
A lot of companies don't block any ports, but if you read the ToS you'll find that servers of any kind are generally prohibited. Frequently it is worded to include even port (not passive) FTP, bittorrent, and almost always VPN like connections. The typical industry boilerplate TOS basically says that you are allowed to surf the web and read email (preferably webmail), anything more is grounds for termination without warning or reimbursement. Luckly ISPs don't actually enforce their TOS unless they need an excuse to kick someone off of their system.
I'm pretty sure the parent has a "business class" connection (the only way to get a 5/5 with Fios AFAIK, why they rip businesses off on the downlink is still a mystery to me), business users always have to pay a lot more because the phone company figures they can afford it. At least he probably don't have inbound port 80 blocked.