Books are marketed? I have never seen any of the books i buy in an advert or promotion. Usually word of mouth or i pick up each book and read the summary.
If i like an author, i buy all their books until they die. You hear that Jack McDevitt and Alastair Reynolds? Keep writing and i'll keep buying.
You really shouldn't leave out PC MMO games. An MMO with a mere 100k subscribers is around $15mil a year. And if the game continously expands, you can keep that user base for years and years. EVE-Online has been around for over six years?
There are probably a lot of accountability problems too. It might be difficult to tally all the console sales but pc sales are impossible. What about flash games that rely on ad revenue? (AHHH!) What about game developers that don't go through publishers.. you can buy straight from their site like World of Goo? Open Source games like freeciv? game mods?
I think PC games are just as popular as they ever were and the games are far far better than Doom/Quake/Duke/C&C. The best part about PC gaming is anyone can make and sell a game! I feel bad for console gamers.. they get the same crap over and over. I atleast get RTSs like TA, SC2, Majesty 2, DOW2, CoH. Hack n slash games like Dungeon Seige, Hinterland, Spell Force 2, Alien Swarm. City builders like Dawn of Discovery, Settlers 7 (haven't played it yet though). MMOs like WoW, Warhammer, EVE-Online, Gekkeiju. Oddballs like Spore and M&B: Warband.
The state of PC gaming right now is fantastic.
Don't be too alarmed that Doom is way up on that list.. because you can STILL buy it today and play it today. It's at the steam store for only a few bucks. Also, not sure if it's for a similar reason.. but the books with the most copies in circulation are some of the oldest, like the Bible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
I have heard about this sort of thing enough to believe it. But i think the GSM cracking thing is important because it means foreign government agents or other powerful organizations could listen to GSM calls without anyone knowing.. not even the phone companies.
If a foreign embassy had this capability and was safe within its doors, wouldn't that be a scary thing?
I would love to see a scan of your letter. Even if your Senator didn't do what you wanted him/her to do, the letter would explain why.
From where i'm sitting, your senator doesn't even know what you want. How can he do the best thing for his state if you don't talk to him/her? I'll bet companies in your state are talking to him/her though.
Come on man, just call the number on that page. Will only take you 2 minutes, i promise.
They are TRYING to show that the ability to crack GSM must already exist because it has been so easy for them to do. If a Government or powerful organization wanted to listen to a GSM call, they could be doing it today.
Called my Senator's office and gave my opinion. I keep their numbers in my phone so this kind of thing is easy to do.
Everybody (US Citizens) should call theirs to shoot this bill down. The FCC has been doing a good job so far to protect consumers. There's no need to limit them like this. You can find your senator's contact information here: http://senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
When you call the number, just tell the person who answers that you'd like to give your opinion. They will ask for your name and address and what message you wish to pass along to the senator. You might get a letter back in the mail concerning your opinions and what actually happened with the bill. You can hang these letters on your fridge and any ladies passing by will be impressed with your official correspondence with the government.
I qualify expert on the M249 SAW and the only way to fire the weapon is fully auto. There is no single shot, just safe and full auto.
During qualification you have 12 engagements at different ranges up to 400 meters. You can expend an average of 6 rounds per target but should do 3 round short bursts to conserve ammo for the longer shots. All the engagements are done in the prone position.
I have practiced shooting in the standing position as well and though it is more difficult, it is doable. You have to lean into it like you would a stiff wind.
Everyone i know hates it.. but not me.
--- some last minute additions On fully auto weapons i have noticed the first round or two go where you want and then you get some scatter.. but soon after you tighten it up again. I think that is normal.. M2.50 cal and M240B seem the same way.
I think he's saying that there is no way to use a GPS service without being tracked by apple. You can't opt out of being tracked if you want to use your GPS feature.
low-level threats are dealt with by low-level cops. There's no need to make it easy for a terrorist cell. Make them try harder, spend more time, and use more resources. Even better if you can push them into something they don't understand very well.. so they make a mistake or use it wrong.
Maybe we can help you, what game is it? What are you computer specs? What about the game doesn't run? Some things aren't obvious, like the game needs SSE2 and your proc only has SSE.
You could try getting onto the steam support forums and asking your question there. I have never tried to contact valve, so i cannot help you there. You could try visiting the game creators site and looking for contact info. For example.. if you bought Spore, that is an EA game and you could visit ea.com.
When it comes to non-valve games, i think you can consider them just a distributor. You CAN copy the game from one computer to the next and it will run perfectly fine. There isn't an authentication mechanism other than what the 3rd party game company uses. Usually in the form of a CD-key.
Valve games are different and require authentication to launch.
I think re-selling games is mostly a console thing, not pc. I have expected cd-keys with my games for a long long time and any previously used copy with suspect. The first time you go to play online and you get a message saying "your cd-key is in use, try again later", you will understand what i'm trying to say.
I would like to have a "loan game" option though. But it would probably only work with valve games. I could lend the game to a friend for 2-3 hours, get them hooked, make them buy their own copy... then we can pub smash online together.
I would go for a "Download a copy, seed 1 copy" thing. As long as i could throttle it, that wouldn't be bad at all. My house already does this, one person downloads the game and the rest copy it from his steamapps folder. I don't need any more apps competing for bandwidth though.
I like that interpretation. I can see the higher biological and technological beings desiring traits in each other.. but with no way to obtain them while staying purely what they are. Your hybrids would be feared by both sides.
I wouldn't want my jeep to have temper tantrums but having tires that grew like fingernails would be wicked. Get into a fender bender and just feed it some aluminum cans for a few days. Of course i think at that point i wouldn't be telling the jeep what to do, it would probably be commanding me around to feed it more aluminum cans.
I like your interpretation though. Looks like i was modded troll for some reason.. possibly for mentioning an AI god?
haha, how ridiculous would that be. Every inch of wall and ceiling covered with a non-repeating wallpaper.
I think our plotter does color at 600x600dpi but the result would still be an impossibly big print at full res. Not to mention the insane cost of HP ink required for something like that. 4 catridges are 1000$ easy.. did some napkin math and got ~153k$. A really nice printer would be worlds better.. but i guess some things just can't exist in hardcopy form. I'm sure the trees are happy about that.
I thought 2 was ok.. but that part when they escape the trashed ship and he can somehow still "feel" the machines and somehow disables them. I was thinking.. WTF? how can he do that unless he is A) Still in the matrix. B) Wifi type deal in his head. I thought 3 would go into that but no.. pretty sure that was never addressed. Reminds me of Lost.
The part with the Architect reminds me of the Hyperion book series.. where the TechnoCore AIs were trying to build an Ultimate Intelligence that had every variable accounted for and could literally see the future through the sum of current events. An AI God. How could you fight something that knows every thought you are capable of making.. could predict outcomes based upon synapse firing in your brain. Could touch your life in extremely subtle ways to create outcomes decades down the road. Of course in the books, the AIs were parasites of Humanity.. this DARPA project is a crude step in that direction, hah.
yeah, it's certainly not for use in science / research / serious stuff. It's possible that's the thing is so stupid big that there isn't a good way to view the data. But without access to the actual images, it's an "ooo neato" click-through type deal.
Would be neat to map the image onto a room floorplan and print the image out on a plotter as wallpaper. Or somehow import the image into kstars?
You shouldn't harp on Android or iPhone when silverlight cannot be run on any existing Windows Mobile phones. As far as i can tell, only one phone (S60) can run silverlight and it's made by Nokia.
Most applications cannot run cross-OS, but the web is supposed to be os neutral. In many cases a program can be made to work with multiple OSs but there's no way a program can run on everything. The web isn't supposed to be that way. Each browser is supposed to use the same standards so that everyone sees the same stuff reguardless of OS/browser used. I guess i'm trying to say that android apps aren't listed on the iphone store.. because that would be stupid. But websites can be accessed by all browsers.. there isn't a windows-only internet that runs parallel to the other-OSs internet.
I can understand the bread thing but not carbs. There are more carbs in an Apple than several slices of Bread, right? There are lots of high carb fruits and stuff, those can't be causing "diseases of civilization".
The bread thing i've heard about several times being linked to auto-immune diseases. Usually from people on caveman diets (which is cool, imo).
But there definitely seems to be too many artificial foods/flavors/colors/preservatives/thickeners/whatever in our foods. Several months ago i tried the paleo thing but went back on bread. I still mostly drink water, eat fish/steak, veggies, fruit, and of course.. nuts & berries. Anything that needs to be sweetened gets local honey instead of sugar. The downside is gatorade tastes like shit now.. same for foods/drinks i use to enjoy. Tastes like i'm drinking an industrial by-product that was leaking from some machine in the basement.
The appliances bit is where i get nervous. There are so many cool things we can do with sensors, monitoring, and automation in our homes.. but almost all of them are double edged swords.
I don't want to step on your rant, but most US Gov websites i've seen.. are on linux. I would guess much of the infrastructure is the same. End-user computers are mostly windows boxes though. With those come exchange and sharepoint and blah blah. But the critical stuff appears to be linux/bsd. You can check here: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=whitehouse.gov
Also, the last time i saw a Certificate of Networthiness list.. there was plenty of OSS approved: apache, php, python, putty, RHEL, firefox blah blah.
As far as the rest of your post is concerned.. i have no facts one way or the other.
My guess is intel agencies already have access to power consumption numbers.. though not live data, like a smart meter provides. I really don't think it's that useful though.. does a plug-in hybrid look like a rack of grow lights? Or a rendering cluster? Or a water-splitting setup? But i do think it would be bad for them to have access to. If i had that data, i could plan my raids around the times of least usage.. under the assumption that everyone is asleep or out of the house. It could be useful in a very short list of situations though.
I'm with you on the security clearance stuff. I'm pretty sure there are sub-groups that cannot have blogs and social-site profiles. But i don't think it's a problem for Big Army, it's more of a problem for Special Forces and similar groups. Rangers are.. well, i won't assign them to either group because someone would be unhappy either way.
I should also say that all military personnel are trained to identify these types of things: http://iase.disa.mil/eta/ Though nothing is specific to social networks, much of the training is similar (like phishing awareness).
Books are marketed? I have never seen any of the books i buy in an advert or promotion. Usually word of mouth or i pick up each book and read the summary.
If i like an author, i buy all their books until they die. You hear that Jack McDevitt and Alastair Reynolds? Keep writing and i'll keep buying.
You really shouldn't leave out PC MMO games. An MMO with a mere 100k subscribers is around $15mil a year. And if the game continously expands, you can keep that user base for years and years. EVE-Online has been around for over six years?
There are probably a lot of accountability problems too. It might be difficult to tally all the console sales but pc sales are impossible. What about flash games that rely on ad revenue? (AHHH!) What about game developers that don't go through publishers.. you can buy straight from their site like World of Goo? Open Source games like freeciv? game mods?
I think PC games are just as popular as they ever were and the games are far far better than Doom/Quake/Duke/C&C. The best part about PC gaming is anyone can make and sell a game! I feel bad for console gamers.. they get the same crap over and over. I atleast get RTSs like TA, SC2, Majesty 2, DOW2, CoH. Hack n slash games like Dungeon Seige, Hinterland, Spell Force 2, Alien Swarm. City builders like Dawn of Discovery, Settlers 7 (haven't played it yet though). MMOs like WoW, Warhammer, EVE-Online, Gekkeiju. Oddballs like Spore and M&B: Warband.
The state of PC gaming right now is fantastic.
Don't be too alarmed that Doom is way up on that list.. because you can STILL buy it today and play it today. It's at the steam store for only a few bucks. Also, not sure if it's for a similar reason.. but the books with the most copies in circulation are some of the oldest, like the Bible: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_books
I have heard about this sort of thing enough to believe it. But i think the GSM cracking thing is important because it means foreign government agents or other powerful organizations could listen to GSM calls without anyone knowing.. not even the phone companies.
If a foreign embassy had this capability and was safe within its doors, wouldn't that be a scary thing?
I would love to see a scan of your letter. Even if your Senator didn't do what you wanted him/her to do, the letter would explain why.
From where i'm sitting, your senator doesn't even know what you want. How can he do the best thing for his state if you don't talk to him/her? I'll bet companies in your state are talking to him/her though.
Come on man, just call the number on that page. Will only take you 2 minutes, i promise.
They are TRYING to show that the ability to crack GSM must already exist because it has been so easy for them to do. If a Government or powerful organization wanted to listen to a GSM call, they could be doing it today.
Called my Senator's office and gave my opinion. I keep their numbers in my phone so this kind of thing is easy to do.
Everybody (US Citizens) should call theirs to shoot this bill down. The FCC has been doing a good job so far to protect consumers. There's no need to limit them like this. You can find your senator's contact information here: http://senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
When you call the number, just tell the person who answers that you'd like to give your opinion. They will ask for your name and address and what message you wish to pass along to the senator. You might get a letter back in the mail concerning your opinions and what actually happened with the bill. You can hang these letters on your fridge and any ladies passing by will be impressed with your official correspondence with the government.
I qualify expert on the M249 SAW and the only way to fire the weapon is fully auto. There is no single shot, just safe and full auto.
During qualification you have 12 engagements at different ranges up to 400 meters. You can expend an average of 6 rounds per target but should do 3 round short bursts to conserve ammo for the longer shots. All the engagements are done in the prone position.
I have practiced shooting in the standing position as well and though it is more difficult, it is doable. You have to lean into it like you would a stiff wind.
Everyone i know hates it.. but not me.
--- some last minute additions .50 cal and M240B seem the same way.
On fully auto weapons i have noticed the first round or two go where you want and then you get some scatter.. but soon after you tighten it up again. I think that is normal.. M2
I think he's saying that there is no way to use a GPS service without being tracked by apple. You can't opt out of being tracked if you want to use your GPS feature.
You might like the achievements in l4d / l4d2 / tf2
low-level threats are dealt with by low-level cops. There's no need to make it easy for a terrorist cell. Make them try harder, spend more time, and use more resources. Even better if you can push them into something they don't understand very well.. so they make a mistake or use it wrong.
Maybe we can help you, what game is it? What are you computer specs? What about the game doesn't run? Some things aren't obvious, like the game needs SSE2 and your proc only has SSE.
You could try getting onto the steam support forums and asking your question there. I have never tried to contact valve, so i cannot help you there. You could try visiting the game creators site and looking for contact info. For example.. if you bought Spore, that is an EA game and you could visit ea.com.
When it comes to non-valve games, i think you can consider them just a distributor. You CAN copy the game from one computer to the next and it will run perfectly fine. There isn't an authentication mechanism other than what the 3rd party game company uses. Usually in the form of a CD-key.
Valve games are different and require authentication to launch.
I think re-selling games is mostly a console thing, not pc. I have expected cd-keys with my games for a long long time and any previously used copy with suspect. The first time you go to play online and you get a message saying "your cd-key is in use, try again later", you will understand what i'm trying to say.
I would like to have a "loan game" option though. But it would probably only work with valve games. I could lend the game to a friend for 2-3 hours, get them hooked, make them buy their own copy... then we can pub smash online together.
I would go for a "Download a copy, seed 1 copy" thing. As long as i could throttle it, that wouldn't be bad at all. My house already does this, one person downloads the game and the rest copy it from his steamapps folder. I don't need any more apps competing for bandwidth though.
I like that interpretation. I can see the higher biological and technological beings desiring traits in each other.. but with no way to obtain them while staying purely what they are. Your hybrids would be feared by both sides.
I wouldn't want my jeep to have temper tantrums but having tires that grew like fingernails would be wicked. Get into a fender bender and just feed it some aluminum cans for a few days. Of course i think at that point i wouldn't be telling the jeep what to do, it would probably be commanding me around to feed it more aluminum cans.
I like your interpretation though. Looks like i was modded troll for some reason.. possibly for mentioning an AI god?
haha, how ridiculous would that be. Every inch of wall and ceiling covered with a non-repeating wallpaper.
I think our plotter does color at 600x600dpi but the result would still be an impossibly big print at full res. Not to mention the insane cost of HP ink required for something like that. 4 catridges are 1000$ easy.. did some napkin math and got ~153k$. A really nice printer would be worlds better.. but i guess some things just can't exist in hardcopy form. I'm sure the trees are happy about that.
I thought 2 was ok.. but that part when they escape the trashed ship and he can somehow still "feel" the machines and somehow disables them. I was thinking.. WTF? how can he do that unless he is A) Still in the matrix. B) Wifi type deal in his head. I thought 3 would go into that but no.. pretty sure that was never addressed. Reminds me of Lost.
The part with the Architect reminds me of the Hyperion book series.. where the TechnoCore AIs were trying to build an Ultimate Intelligence that had every variable accounted for and could literally see the future through the sum of current events. An AI God. How could you fight something that knows every thought you are capable of making.. could predict outcomes based upon synapse firing in your brain. Could touch your life in extremely subtle ways to create outcomes decades down the road. Of course in the books, the AIs were parasites of Humanity.. this DARPA project is a crude step in that direction, hah.
yeah, it's certainly not for use in science / research / serious stuff. It's possible that's the thing is so stupid big that there isn't a good way to view the data. But without access to the actual images, it's an "ooo neato" click-through type deal.
Would be neat to map the image onto a room floorplan and print the image out on a plotter as wallpaper. Or somehow import the image into kstars?
You shouldn't harp on Android or iPhone when silverlight cannot be run on any existing Windows Mobile phones. As far as i can tell, only one phone (S60) can run silverlight and it's made by Nokia.
List of phones/browsers/os support: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverlight#Operating_systems_and_web_browsers
Most applications cannot run cross-OS, but the web is supposed to be os neutral. In many cases a program can be made to work with multiple OSs but there's no way a program can run on everything. The web isn't supposed to be that way. Each browser is supposed to use the same standards so that everyone sees the same stuff reguardless of OS/browser used. I guess i'm trying to say that android apps aren't listed on the iphone store.. because that would be stupid. But websites can be accessed by all browsers.. there isn't a windows-only internet that runs parallel to the other-OSs internet.
the users will change the search engine to their fav again? That's not so different than IE 7.
I can understand the bread thing but not carbs. There are more carbs in an Apple than several slices of Bread, right? There are lots of high carb fruits and stuff, those can't be causing "diseases of civilization".
The bread thing i've heard about several times being linked to auto-immune diseases. Usually from people on caveman diets (which is cool, imo).
But there definitely seems to be too many artificial foods/flavors/colors/preservatives/thickeners/whatever in our foods. Several months ago i tried the paleo thing but went back on bread. I still mostly drink water, eat fish/steak, veggies, fruit, and of course.. nuts & berries. Anything that needs to be sweetened gets local honey instead of sugar. The downside is gatorade tastes like shit now.. same for foods/drinks i use to enjoy. Tastes like i'm drinking an industrial by-product that was leaking from some machine in the basement.
How can the russians trust the source code to a binary if they can't compile and compare the binaries?
The appliances bit is where i get nervous. There are so many cool things we can do with sensors, monitoring, and automation in our homes.. but almost all of them are double edged swords.
I don't want to step on your rant, but most US Gov websites i've seen.. are on linux. I would guess much of the infrastructure is the same. End-user computers are mostly windows boxes though. With those come exchange and sharepoint and blah blah. But the critical stuff appears to be linux/bsd. You can check here: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/site_report?url=whitehouse.gov
Also, the last time i saw a Certificate of Networthiness list.. there was plenty of OSS approved: apache, php, python, putty, RHEL, firefox blah blah.
As far as the rest of your post is concerned.. i have no facts one way or the other.
My guess is intel agencies already have access to power consumption numbers.. though not live data, like a smart meter provides. I really don't think it's that useful though.. does a plug-in hybrid look like a rack of grow lights? Or a rendering cluster? Or a water-splitting setup? But i do think it would be bad for them to have access to. If i had that data, i could plan my raids around the times of least usage.. under the assumption that everyone is asleep or out of the house. It could be useful in a very short list of situations though.
I'm with you on the security clearance stuff. I'm pretty sure there are sub-groups that cannot have blogs and social-site profiles. But i don't think it's a problem for Big Army, it's more of a problem for Special Forces and similar groups. Rangers are.. well, i won't assign them to either group because someone would be unhappy either way.
I should also say that all military personnel are trained to identify these types of things: http://iase.disa.mil/eta/ Though nothing is specific to social networks, much of the training is similar (like phishing awareness).