The assumption you are making is that they need sperm to get your DNA.
Is it hot in the interrogation room? That glass you drank from has your spit on it.
Need to take a piss? Better clean up after yourself.
Had a smoke? Spit on the smoke.
Getting your DNA is easy, and they don't have to take your pants off. They can easily get hair when they search you, all clothes are bound to have a few.
Now if someone is going to the trouble of faking or planting your DNA, you're fucked. End of story. Who cares how it's going down?
Unless your name is Jason Bourne I don't think you have to worry about this anytime soon however. I don't see the boys in blue pulling this off, nor wanting to.
Children's secretary Ed Balls sure does have some.
That they are even talking about this is nefarious indeed. What we the people should be doing is insisting on our legislators and lawmakers being CCTV'd 24/7 along with phones. (With exceptions for national security.)
Imagine how much corruption would be uncovered this way. If the representatives choose to conduct business elsewhere it can be assumed they are guilty of something or at least worthy of voting out.
I think you need to distinguish between quality and gameplay. If a game has a finite budget (as they all do) you spend money where marketing believes it will make the most money. Lately that seems to be graphics. (And I do hope we focus more on gameplay moving forward and less on graphics as Nintendo has.) But as a 3D artist myself I can assure you that making all these 3d objects with textures is a time consuming process, now throw in normal maps, spec maps, bumps on top of that, and some paralax mapping and what you have is a very expensive process. This money has to come from somewhere, and generally the programmers need just as much budget to get these complex things working.
So naturally the money has to come from testing or distribution/packaging. Valve is discovering they can save it in distribution and packaging by offering things online for $30 as it eliminates the previous costs. Notice Valve doesn't make bad games, pretty much ever. They aren't sublime, they're smart. They save the money for testing by removing those other 2 costs. Most companies go the other way around. Nintendo cut costs on all the graphics (and accompanied programming) and knocked it out of the park. All the marketing droids and tv dunderheads were so convinced Nintendo was crazy, yet they completely dominated the lastest gen of console sales. This is a step in the right direction. If I wanted real life, I'd go outside... I can live without realistic graphics. Valve also clearly understands this concept.
The quality of games in general is vastly improved. To discount the improvement in graphics and AI over the past 10 years is quite an oversight. The problem is to keep games affordable with these demands and increase in complexity without tripling the budget (and sale cost) of your game. 15 years ago there were no 'open betas' in the amounts we see them today. Open beta is code for "we don't have a testing budget" with most game companies.
Marketing however doesn't generally understand this, and games go out buggy as hell. For an MMO, this is the end. For games like Bioshock, heck it didn't even work out of the box for the xbox 360. You had to patch it to play it. But it's a decent game, though imho not as great as everyone says.
The quality of the game is good, but it's buggy and as such the gameplay suffers. Poor gameplay means poor perception of the product, and in your case, products in general.
Addressing your "Quantity goes up, quality goes down" comment, I'm not sure what you mean. In a digital world, copies are infinite if you mean the number of games sold. If you mean the games sold per year per company (like fast food), I would advise you to note the company making them and not buy from them anymore. I've got 2K games and EA on my list of crappy game companies.
If people didn't buy the games from these fast food game companies then they'd stop making them. But you keep buying the crap, so it's more crap you'll get.
This keeps happening to me too. I work in 3D for tv and my boss likes to come around and cut my estimates in half on a regular basis. Then when I call him on it, he does himself it in such a way that it takes days to make changes instead of hours. We save money on setup, and lose out on weekends and nights on maintenence. (By we I mean everyone but him.)
He also likes to come into the end of a 6month project and make sweeping changes so he feels he saved the project. To make this more understandable to the/. crowd, it's like spending 6 months developing a back end in CSharp and 3 days before delivery your boss says, hey we could just do it in visual basic.
I'm looking for a new job.
I think in minds of many, reliable newpaper reporting is already dead. Bush and co. should have been absolutely battered bloody over the torture scandals, but largely they escaped it unscathed. Once the news is no longer a tool of the people, and instead a tool of the government, it loses its broad appeal to the masses. They will never get it back. It's over.
I don't know about that. They just got almost a trillion of our dollars, with no oversight and no promise to pay it back. They spent billions on bonuses for the same assholes that caused this, AND Congress isn't doing a damn thing about it.
Sure, the classes in DaoC weren't balanced... ever. But should perfect balance be the point in any RPG? I've been playing them since Pool of Radiance (the first one) and I've always had a terrible time keeping my mages and healers alive. I'd have to arrange formations to keep bugbears from hitting my mage, but oh man when it was his turn there was fireworks and blood for the poor bugbears. It was fun to have heavy hitters in the back and have to protect them. These days everyone wants to be the hero in the front, and that is why PVP sucks in WoW. I never thought I'd see the day that a healer runs around killing people in plate armor with ease. I hope I never see that day again. (Actually I did in Age of Conan *shudders*)
Balance is boring. MMO PVP should have nothing to do with single class vs. class balance, it should have to do with teamwork and utilizing the strengths of each class. If you play something like Team Fortress 2, a medic vs. a soldier or demoman has 0% chance of survival, but man that game is fun and as a team, well balanced. One on one, not so much but it doesn't matter because the teamwork is there. I see no reason why an MMO shouldn't do the same. In Final Fantasy 11 you had to buddy up or you just couldnt level. They really exploited needing others to progress. It wasnt possible solo after 30. It made for a good dynamic, but a boring game because they made it take TOO long. PVE was all there was, and gear made all the difference in that game.
One thing to mention in Mythics favor though is that while the classes were imbalanced Mythic absolutely nailed the faction vs. faction vs. faction dynamic of the game. THere was nothing more fun than raiding for another factions relics and getting a racewide bonus for having them. THAT is pvp, and it benefits the pvers as well. No matter which way you slice it, it was awesome.
I've played just about every MMO out there. Wow is really good until the mid to end game. Then it is nothing but a chore with very little rewards. One on one PVP is either a complete blowout or takes 10 minutes to fight and then some 2nd person runs by, hurls a fireball and ends it in 3 seconds. Age of Conan has this same problem, and about 1000 others. Group PVP is decent, but there are a lot of problems with the team dynamics. EQs endgame is the best currently in my opinion.
If warhammer is making PVP factions like DaoC, but with seige weapons and cities, sign me up. Balance be damned I want to stalwartly protect my mage or hide behind my tank in fear and anticipation.
As far as Wow being the "best" EQ-like game, I disagree. It's damn good but you even used another game to describe it. Wow is a great game, I'm not putting it down as far as fun. However it seems to cater to the lowest common denominator, and that likely explains its success. I made it to the endgame and quit without looking back. I don't care if the peon is crying.
Wow makes it easy for gamers with little people skills to level all the way to endgame by themselves. Then all of a sudden there is nothing to do but raid with others and frankly they don't know how. Raid chats are filled with comments and nonsense that no sane intelligent rational person would type. Political discussions occur over world chat. It's like the myspace of the MMO world, and I for one am glad that is where they will stay. There is no immersion in that sense of the word. I'll grant that some of the jokes and easter eggs are hilarious, and Blizzard deserves a nod for them, but Wow lacks the feeling of adventure for adventures sake.
We've almost hit rock bottom.
It feels like the last 8 years were just a litmus test to see how much corruption we as a nation would turn our heads to. The answer appears to be all of it.
There is no way to know if Hillary would choose Barak as VP. She played the scorched earth campaign against her own party, few would nominate her as VP after something like that. After the things she said about him, I doubt either considered it an option.
Indeed, it looks like it's going to come back to haunt the Dems. Here's a gem of an ad running at 3AM. Whoops. The Dems don't want to lose (naturally), and having a well known Dem personality such as Hillary saying these things FOR the Republicans is downright shameful.
After this, you really think he should nominate this woman? This is exactly why you don't go full throttle in the primaries. She doesn't even know which party she is supposed to support, it's like watching Lieberman talk out of both sides of his face.
If a company you are interviewing at or contracting for asks you for login names to random web sites, I'd say you have bigger problems and might as well just break loose now. Unless you're working in a classified area, there is no excuse in this world to justify demanding those logins.
They should google your name spelled normally and with abbreviations. If that doesn't turn up much it should be assumed you are discreet. Besides, answering the question with 'no' doesn't seem unreasonable, and I think most people would lie about it. I certainly would, so perhaps I'm biased.
I'm a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus. When I was a kid I thought that was so cool... today it's something I typically keep to myself. The early years of the colonization of this continent are a travesty that people still bitch about today, and rightly so.
I guess you could say my family is directly responsible for slavery in the US and the genocide of the native American people. He died in a jail cell from what I understand.
My father used to tell me not to feel bad about it because my family didn't actually move here until 1930 but as I got older I realize he just did that to make me feel better.
Permanent lack of contact wouldn't equal immunity? I'm intrigued... what could happen? Short of email becoming a standard feature on day to day appliances, I guess my imagination isn't good enough to think up how it could affect them.
There surely was a lot of yapping. I know it's petty but two things also bothered me quite a bit. 1) The highway scene the robots run/skate with grace and precision, yet they can't walk around a flowerpot. I know it's comedic relief but c'mon. 2) Energon? Hello? Ya know, the whole point if it all? Can't imagine why this wasn't important. Imagine how cool to watch the deceptacons raiding power plants and cities going dark. So many possibilities but no, we get the mega cube.
I know, I'm petty.
It really does seem to be both parties working together.
In the past for social change to become in the public awareness it has taken a bad economy or an intolerable immediate social situation. Given the track record of the Republicans over the past 30 years the best path to force social change would be to keep electing them so that they destroy the economy and the standing of the US in the rest of the world to such a level that only public outcry and massive social change can bring us back. Naturally, no one wants this so we are stuck between a rock (iraq) and a hard place.
/sarcasm on
So do us all a favor and vote for the worst candidate from here on out. It's the only way. It will bring out social change faster than the small bandaid method we are currently employing. This is the best way to 'burn out'.
/sarcasm off
Note: this message has been edited for the sarcasm impaired.
Or... as another idea, why not keep the sensitive data on the HD of your iPod. No one checks those... and if you don't also have a laptop it's not even easy for them to look on it. I'd bet 93% of TSA people don't even know you can put data on them as well as music. Even better if you hide the files with all the encrypted ones in the music directory, then it's going to be a real pain in the ass to find them.
Seems like putting it on your laptop is begging for trouble, encryption or not. If you have something you want to keep hidden (and by this I mean trade secrets and nothing else) why put it where you KNOW they will look? Makes no sense...
Hell, I have a pen that has a 2GB drive in it. No ones ever looked at it twice, I just put it in the basket and if anyone notices the wiring it has a flashlight on the end of it that I demostrate. You know what I keep on it? Save games. "Here you go officer, and if you get a chance check out what I did to everyone in Oblivion. I killed the entire world but quest npcs, isn't that rad? Hey look at my armor! I deflect 99% of damage back at my enemies! Watch me poke this dragon...".
I could follow it up with "Check my Fall from Heaven 2 save games for Civ4! I built the tower of complacency in my main town then switched to hyborem and now i have a population of 250 and I can build Genesis in 3 turns!" Yet all the while the files are on my iPod, which is in my front pocket.
I think some people need to watch more Bond flicks. Rather than worry what happens if your laptop is encrypted, be more sneaky. Hide it in plain sight, like an iPod or keychain. Keeping the files on the actual computer is just eating where you shit.
Maybe complex organic molecules form into self-organising self replicating structures BECAUSE they were delivered from elsewhere. The two need not be mutually exclusive.
What if the "seeds" of life require foreign interference to mutate into life. I don't understand how we can evaluate a missing link if we don't know where all the components came from. The Earth could have been an unfertilized egg waiting to be inseminated. For that reason how they came to be is just as interesting as where they came from especially if they are intertwined.
Imagine the odds that would have to be overcome if it takes a specific type of meteor to react with a specific type of dead planet to make life. If that is true the odds of the right elements being present in both cases could be so high that they could be conceivably called divine. It would be pretty funny as well if the chain reaction took 7 days.
It must be costing them a fortune for it to be going this far. And they can't really sue the end users because then they cut off the revenue stream. No other real options for them, but I can assure you they don't give a damn about cheating. Never have never will. It has to affect the bottom line for it to be on the radar.
Cheating was completely out of control when I was playing WoW, and I quit years ago. I can't imagine anything has changed. I put "server hacks" as my reason for leaving then, so it at least cost them 24 months (that it's been for me) x $15 = $360. If it's 10000 people we're talking about real money here. And thus, the action by Blizzard.
They also couldn't care less what attack vector they use, as long as the problem goes away. They probably chose the one that they felt was going to do the most damage so they can nuke the problem out of orbit. Naturally it won't work and another will spring up and the pattern will continue. God I hate cheaters.
IANAL, however I believe you are wrong about this. The ex post facto condition is making something ILLEGAL and then prosecuting people for violation from before when the law was passed. For example if we outlawed beer today and I came to arrest you for the beer you drank yesterday.
This is entirely different, this is giving a pardon basically to an entire industry today for breaking a law already in place yesterday. There is a subtle yet important difference. I sincerely hope that the board of directors for these telco companies are shitting their pants at the moment, because there has never been a 300 million person class action lawsuit, and it would absolutely destroy them. Just as a private citizen doing this sort of thing would absolutely destroy you or I.
It's still a crock of shit, but it isn't illegal. Unethical? You betcha but this is government we are talking about here. The same people who claim god talks to them and then starts killing innocents.
I'd like to see how likely developing cancer from a cell phone is compared to say... second hand smoke. Maybe we need to ban cell phones in bars and public places, like smoking.
I use my iPod as a hard drive. 80GB and fits in my pocket. On top of that it has me 3D reel on it so whenever a potential client asks, I have it on me and they can see it right then. It makes me look pretty spiffy.
Yeah I listen to music on it, but it's music I've had for 10 years. I really don't care all that much about music anymore. Sure I'll iTunes out a single once and a while, but only because I need it for a project or because I can't get the tune out of my head.
Slashdot Mirror
The assumption you are making is that they need sperm to get your DNA.
Is it hot in the interrogation room? That glass you drank from has your spit on it.
Need to take a piss? Better clean up after yourself.
Had a smoke? Spit on the smoke.
Getting your DNA is easy, and they don't have to take your pants off. They can easily get hair when they search you, all clothes are bound to have a few.
Now if someone is going to the trouble of faking or planting your DNA, you're fucked. End of story. Who cares how it's going down?
Unless your name is Jason Bourne I don't think you have to worry about this anytime soon however. I don't see the boys in blue pulling this off, nor wanting to.
That they are even talking about this is nefarious indeed. What we the people should be doing is insisting on our legislators and lawmakers being CCTV'd 24/7 along with phones. (With exceptions for national security.)
Imagine how much corruption would be uncovered this way. If the representatives choose to conduct business elsewhere it can be assumed they are guilty of something or at least worthy of voting out.
Yes, that sounds much better.
I think you need to distinguish between quality and gameplay. If a game has a finite budget (as they all do) you spend money where marketing believes it will make the most money. Lately that seems to be graphics. (And I do hope we focus more on gameplay moving forward and less on graphics as Nintendo has.) But as a 3D artist myself I can assure you that making all these 3d objects with textures is a time consuming process, now throw in normal maps, spec maps, bumps on top of that, and some paralax mapping and what you have is a very expensive process. This money has to come from somewhere, and generally the programmers need just as much budget to get these complex things working.
So naturally the money has to come from testing or distribution/packaging. Valve is discovering they can save it in distribution and packaging by offering things online for $30 as it eliminates the previous costs. Notice Valve doesn't make bad games, pretty much ever. They aren't sublime, they're smart. They save the money for testing by removing those other 2 costs. Most companies go the other way around. Nintendo cut costs on all the graphics (and accompanied programming) and knocked it out of the park. All the marketing droids and tv dunderheads were so convinced Nintendo was crazy, yet they completely dominated the lastest gen of console sales. This is a step in the right direction. If I wanted real life, I'd go outside... I can live without realistic graphics. Valve also clearly understands this concept.
The quality of games in general is vastly improved. To discount the improvement in graphics and AI over the past 10 years is quite an oversight. The problem is to keep games affordable with these demands and increase in complexity without tripling the budget (and sale cost) of your game. 15 years ago there were no 'open betas' in the amounts we see them today. Open beta is code for "we don't have a testing budget" with most game companies.
Marketing however doesn't generally understand this, and games go out buggy as hell. For an MMO, this is the end. For games like Bioshock, heck it didn't even work out of the box for the xbox 360. You had to patch it to play it. But it's a decent game, though imho not as great as everyone says.
The quality of the game is good, but it's buggy and as such the gameplay suffers. Poor gameplay means poor perception of the product, and in your case, products in general.
Addressing your "Quantity goes up, quality goes down" comment, I'm not sure what you mean. In a digital world, copies are infinite if you mean the number of games sold. If you mean the games sold per year per company (like fast food), I would advise you to note the company making them and not buy from them anymore. I've got 2K games and EA on my list of crappy game companies.
If people didn't buy the games from these fast food game companies then they'd stop making them. But you keep buying the crap, so it's more crap you'll get.
Yes, but do they do it ... in REAL TIME?!?
To do this in windows xp I'm prety sure all you have to do is hold down shift and right click an icon and use the "Run As" command.
This keeps happening to me too. I work in 3D for tv and my boss likes to come around and cut my estimates in half on a regular basis. Then when I call him on it, he does himself it in such a way that it takes days to make changes instead of hours. We save money on setup, and lose out on weekends and nights on maintenence. (By we I mean everyone but him.) He also likes to come into the end of a 6month project and make sweeping changes so he feels he saved the project. To make this more understandable to the /. crowd, it's like spending 6 months developing a back end in CSharp and 3 days before delivery your boss says, hey we could just do it in visual basic.
I'm looking for a new job.
I think in minds of many, reliable newpaper reporting is already dead. Bush and co. should have been absolutely battered bloody over the torture scandals, but largely they escaped it unscathed. Once the news is no longer a tool of the people, and instead a tool of the government, it loses its broad appeal to the masses. They will never get it back. It's over.
I don't know about that. They just got almost a trillion of our dollars, with no oversight and no promise to pay it back. They spent billions on bonuses for the same assholes that caused this, AND Congress isn't doing a damn thing about it.
I'd say they understand it pretty well.
Sure, the classes in DaoC weren't balanced... ever. But should perfect balance be the point in any RPG? I've been playing them since Pool of Radiance (the first one) and I've always had a terrible time keeping my mages and healers alive. I'd have to arrange formations to keep bugbears from hitting my mage, but oh man when it was his turn there was fireworks and blood for the poor bugbears. It was fun to have heavy hitters in the back and have to protect them. These days everyone wants to be the hero in the front, and that is why PVP sucks in WoW. I never thought I'd see the day that a healer runs around killing people in plate armor with ease. I hope I never see that day again. (Actually I did in Age of Conan *shudders*)
Balance is boring. MMO PVP should have nothing to do with single class vs. class balance, it should have to do with teamwork and utilizing the strengths of each class. If you play something like Team Fortress 2, a medic vs. a soldier or demoman has 0% chance of survival, but man that game is fun and as a team, well balanced. One on one, not so much but it doesn't matter because the teamwork is there. I see no reason why an MMO shouldn't do the same. In Final Fantasy 11 you had to buddy up or you just couldnt level. They really exploited needing others to progress. It wasnt possible solo after 30. It made for a good dynamic, but a boring game because they made it take TOO long. PVE was all there was, and gear made all the difference in that game.
One thing to mention in Mythics favor though is that while the classes were imbalanced Mythic absolutely nailed the faction vs. faction vs. faction dynamic of the game. THere was nothing more fun than raiding for another factions relics and getting a racewide bonus for having them. THAT is pvp, and it benefits the pvers as well. No matter which way you slice it, it was awesome.
I've played just about every MMO out there. Wow is really good until the mid to end game. Then it is nothing but a chore with very little rewards. One on one PVP is either a complete blowout or takes 10 minutes to fight and then some 2nd person runs by, hurls a fireball and ends it in 3 seconds. Age of Conan has this same problem, and about 1000 others. Group PVP is decent, but there are a lot of problems with the team dynamics. EQs endgame is the best currently in my opinion.
If warhammer is making PVP factions like DaoC, but with seige weapons and cities, sign me up. Balance be damned I want to stalwartly protect my mage or hide behind my tank in fear and anticipation.
As far as Wow being the "best" EQ-like game, I disagree. It's damn good but you even used another game to describe it. Wow is a great game, I'm not putting it down as far as fun. However it seems to cater to the lowest common denominator, and that likely explains its success. I made it to the endgame and quit without looking back. I don't care if the peon is crying.
Wow makes it easy for gamers with little people skills to level all the way to endgame by themselves. Then all of a sudden there is nothing to do but raid with others and frankly they don't know how. Raid chats are filled with comments and nonsense that no sane intelligent rational person would type. Political discussions occur over world chat. It's like the myspace of the MMO world, and I for one am glad that is where they will stay. There is no immersion in that sense of the word. I'll grant that some of the jokes and easter eggs are hilarious, and Blizzard deserves a nod for them, but Wow lacks the feeling of adventure for adventures sake.
Why don't I believe you?
We've almost hit rock bottom. It feels like the last 8 years were just a litmus test to see how much corruption we as a nation would turn our heads to. The answer appears to be all of it.
There is no way to know if Hillary would choose Barak as VP. She played the scorched earth campaign against her own party, few would nominate her as VP after something like that. After the things she said about him, I doubt either considered it an option.
Indeed, it looks like it's going to come back to haunt the Dems. Here's a gem of an ad running at 3AM. Whoops. The Dems don't want to lose (naturally), and having a well known Dem personality such as Hillary saying these things FOR the Republicans is downright shameful.
After this, you really think he should nominate this woman? This is exactly why you don't go full throttle in the primaries. She doesn't even know which party she is supposed to support, it's like watching Lieberman talk out of both sides of his face.
If a company you are interviewing at or contracting for asks you for login names to random web sites, I'd say you have bigger problems and might as well just break loose now. Unless you're working in a classified area, there is no excuse in this world to justify demanding those logins. They should google your name spelled normally and with abbreviations. If that doesn't turn up much it should be assumed you are discreet. Besides, answering the question with 'no' doesn't seem unreasonable, and I think most people would lie about it. I certainly would, so perhaps I'm biased.
Her prison sentence should be to answer the suicide hotline phones, and her sentence based directly on how many lives she fails to save.
I'm a direct descendant of Christopher Columbus. When I was a kid I thought that was so cool... today it's something I typically keep to myself. The early years of the colonization of this continent are a travesty that people still bitch about today, and rightly so.
I guess you could say my family is directly responsible for slavery in the US and the genocide of the native American people. He died in a jail cell from what I understand.
My father used to tell me not to feel bad about it because my family didn't actually move here until 1930 but as I got older I realize he just did that to make me feel better.
Ah well, time to play some quake.
Permanent lack of contact wouldn't equal immunity? I'm intrigued... what could happen? Short of email becoming a standard feature on day to day appliances, I guess my imagination isn't good enough to think up how it could affect them.
There surely was a lot of yapping. I know it's petty but two things also bothered me quite a bit. 1) The highway scene the robots run/skate with grace and precision, yet they can't walk around a flowerpot. I know it's comedic relief but c'mon. 2) Energon? Hello? Ya know, the whole point if it all? Can't imagine why this wasn't important. Imagine how cool to watch the deceptacons raiding power plants and cities going dark. So many possibilities but no, we get the mega cube. I know, I'm petty.
What about the chance of them meeting us?
In the past for social change to become in the public awareness it has taken a bad economy or an intolerable immediate social situation. Given the track record of the Republicans over the past 30 years the best path to force social change would be to keep electing them so that they destroy the economy and the standing of the US in the rest of the world to such a level that only public outcry and massive social change can bring us back. Naturally, no one wants this so we are stuck between a rock (iraq) and a hard place.
So do us all a favor and vote for the worst candidate from here on out. It's the only way. It will bring out social change faster than the small bandaid method we are currently employing. This is the best way to 'burn out'.
Note: this message has been edited for the sarcasm impaired.
Or... as another idea, why not keep the sensitive data on the HD of your iPod. No one checks those... and if you don't also have a laptop it's not even easy for them to look on it. I'd bet 93% of TSA people don't even know you can put data on them as well as music. Even better if you hide the files with all the encrypted ones in the music directory, then it's going to be a real pain in the ass to find them.
Seems like putting it on your laptop is begging for trouble, encryption or not. If you have something you want to keep hidden (and by this I mean trade secrets and nothing else) why put it where you KNOW they will look? Makes no sense...
Hell, I have a pen that has a 2GB drive in it. No ones ever looked at it twice, I just put it in the basket and if anyone notices the wiring it has a flashlight on the end of it that I demostrate. You know what I keep on it? Save games. "Here you go officer, and if you get a chance check out what I did to everyone in Oblivion. I killed the entire world but quest npcs, isn't that rad? Hey look at my armor! I deflect 99% of damage back at my enemies! Watch me poke this dragon...".
I could follow it up with "Check my Fall from Heaven 2 save games for Civ4! I built the tower of complacency in my main town then switched to hyborem and now i have a population of 250 and I can build Genesis in 3 turns!" Yet all the while the files are on my iPod, which is in my front pocket.
I think some people need to watch more Bond flicks. Rather than worry what happens if your laptop is encrypted, be more sneaky. Hide it in plain sight, like an iPod or keychain. Keeping the files on the actual computer is just eating where you shit.
Maybe complex organic molecules form into self-organising self replicating structures BECAUSE they were delivered from elsewhere. The two need not be mutually exclusive.
What if the "seeds" of life require foreign interference to mutate into life. I don't understand how we can evaluate a missing link if we don't know where all the components came from. The Earth could have been an unfertilized egg waiting to be inseminated. For that reason how they came to be is just as interesting as where they came from especially if they are intertwined.
Imagine the odds that would have to be overcome if it takes a specific type of meteor to react with a specific type of dead planet to make life. If that is true the odds of the right elements being present in both cases could be so high that they could be conceivably called divine. It would be pretty funny as well if the chain reaction took 7 days.
It must be costing them a fortune for it to be going this far. And they can't really sue the end users because then they cut off the revenue stream. No other real options for them, but I can assure you they don't give a damn about cheating. Never have never will. It has to affect the bottom line for it to be on the radar.
Cheating was completely out of control when I was playing WoW, and I quit years ago. I can't imagine anything has changed. I put "server hacks" as my reason for leaving then, so it at least cost them 24 months (that it's been for me) x $15 = $360. If it's 10000 people we're talking about real money here. And thus, the action by Blizzard.
They also couldn't care less what attack vector they use, as long as the problem goes away. They probably chose the one that they felt was going to do the most damage so they can nuke the problem out of orbit. Naturally it won't work and another will spring up and the pattern will continue. God I hate cheaters.
This is entirely different, this is giving a pardon basically to an entire industry today for breaking a law already in place yesterday. There is a subtle yet important difference. I sincerely hope that the board of directors for these telco companies are shitting their pants at the moment, because there has never been a 300 million person class action lawsuit, and it would absolutely destroy them. Just as a private citizen doing this sort of thing would absolutely destroy you or I.
It's still a crock of shit, but it isn't illegal. Unethical? You betcha but this is government we are talking about here. The same people who claim god talks to them and then starts killing innocents.
I'd like to see how likely developing cancer from a cell phone is compared to say... second hand smoke. Maybe we need to ban cell phones in bars and public places, like smoking.
Yeah I listen to music on it, but it's music I've had for 10 years. I really don't care all that much about music anymore. Sure I'll iTunes out a single once and a while, but only because I need it for a project or because I can't get the tune out of my head.