Moridineas: "I'm a big support of Snowden. Much less so of Manning. This guy deserves whatever he gets."
I think this is the big telling point. Snowden is very controversial. Manning, the controversy is mostly about the magnitude of the punishment. But no one is seriously in favor of people just handing out secrets to foreign governments. Wherever you stand on the Snowdometer, this is just not that.
I've used gmail since it was a baby, but at least I always used redirected emails that point there. So I can, in theory, switch out. I wonder if they'll drop POP support before lowering the boom? I have so very much data in there.
I know they hinted at it being some far future change, but just being willing to say it at all is nuts. Gmail is a smashing success, that they would want to redefine email based on some user interface study is scary as shit.
If the encryption is real (aka, a third party isn't holding the key,or a copy of YOUR key), then they may as well deliver the order to a donkey.
So there's no threat about Apple and Google "deliberately creating encryption that they themselves cannot break", because that just means they can't help the government when they ask, much as, for instance, my dog could not help them out.
But there's a lot wrong with that sentence. They aren't creating encryption, they are writing crypto code using existing crypto algos- arguably the same thing, but still. Also, YOU, the user, will be the one encrypting it, much like you can't sue a knife manufacturer for making a sharp knife. And encryption that is "breakable" isn't really encryption by any decent standard.
The real concern isn't some ancient law trying to force the hand of companies- this will only force them further along the path of making sure that it's not THEIR data, because they lack keys, it's the USER data, go bug him. That's the logical place for them to be anyway- no one spends hundreds of dollars for a phone and then encrypts it without expecting that the encryption is actually a thing- while it's wise to supposed that government level attackers have ways to get keys, it is obviously NOT WHAT YOU WANT WHEN YOU BOUGHT IT. I mean, so there's that.
Anyway, the real concern will be NEW laws that force the companies to do this. And they wouldn't have to be federal laws- if California made some law about how you can't blah blah offer real encryption unless X, and Washington was like no real encryption unless Y, and New York was like no real encryption unless Z, then you would be pushing the companies out of too many markets, and then all the federal courts have to do is drag their feet and the feds get another full decade of Total Access To Your Own Papers And Possessions.
1)- Would it make slashdot? 2)- Would there be some social reason given?
So seriously, why? Choosing 12 years old for the study- instead of 9, say, when boys and girls are basically the same thing- is a very odd choice, given the later development of boys. Choosing 15 would also give very different results. Generalizing the one point of human development when girls are ahead of boys is very odd, but why doesn't the article spend a million words saying that we need to help the boys get on the same level as the girls?
Almost every sex article- and CERTAINLY every gender one- is so political it's fucking insane.
There was an anecdote in a recentish book (sorry, blanking on the book) where a teacher noticed that the girls were doing better in language, and the boys in math. This bothered her- after all, boys shouldn't do better in math. Bothered her a lot, because, after all, she "knew" that boys and girls have similar math skills. Her solution was to segregate the boys and the girls math studies, based on the assumption that the girls were being intimidated by the boys, who held up their hands faster, etc. Eventually after doing this, the scores evened out or something, and she was happy that the world was exactly as she thought it was (after a lot of manipulation on her part). But, of course... 1)- Were the classes taught the same? If you care enough to teach math twice because the girls being behind enrages you, you are unlikely to be the most impartial teacher, right? 2)- If the girls being ahead in language and the boys being ahead in math enrages you because the boys are ahead, what happened when they split the language classes? They didn't do this part, of course- it was fine that the boys were behind in language. Not even the author relaying the ancedote seemed to consider this point. 3)- If there really is a better way to teach girls, then it stands to reason that there's a better way to teach boys. There's some gender zealots searching for the first, but shouldn't we be all about the second?
Anyway, back on topic, the program in question has nothing to do with anything, or real games. This study was likely designed from the start to show this, or spun that way for attention, and the metric for what "better" is seems entirely related to the "types of triggers" used. But I'm sure the rest of slashdot will poke holes in that obvious attention grab metric, and likely point out some more details with the NWN engine.
What would be interesting would be to take the scripted things and have them rated blindly by another group of 12-13 year olds.
Anyway, gender politics are so fucking all over the internet, and every side so zealous, that it's ludicrous to see slashdot dip their toe in it. I come here to read about tech, not read about some loopy gender warrior finding a way to spin their point of view (which is one of: sex A is worse at X, and that's society's fault, OR, sex A is worse at X, and that's because gender B is shining and perfect and obviously superior at X).
The net effect of these ludic-buggy games is that the actual game disk itself is entirely worthless for playing the game. Pretend that while browsing for 8 bit NES games, you finally found a game you wanted- say The Guardian Legend, a truly top-tier title. You grab it for cheap, walk it home... and instead of instantly booting into Miria racing towards Naju, it instead needs an overnight update from a service that hasn't existed in a decade to work properly, or at all.
These bugs are a feature to companies like Ubisoft and EA. The apology is only issued because the launch was truly and shockingly ludicrous- enough to get mocked world wide, in articles such as Cracked's:
If they had an offline mode, then the whole game would be in the hands of those to whom it is delivered- they would have a good (not just a service). If you want to say "We have X players, 40% of whom play in a persistent world and we profit from steadily, the others of whom might at some point in the future, but do not now" that is one thing, but if you can say "We have X players, 100% of whom depend on our servers to run", in the SECOND case, you are offering more stuff than can be monetized when EA buys you out- you represent more value to EA because you are holding your whole playerbase hostage to your servers.
When I play MMOs, I generally gank and will absolutely grief when the mood strikes- but I play factional MMOs, not all-for-themselves types. I definitely respect the griefer playstyle in general though, I just dislike when it essentially becomes real world trickery and betrayal (as seen in Eve, with the most notable heists being social exploits).
So I definitely get how you would want to avoid ALL of this. I'm actually pretty surprised that they coded it like this- it appears that they must have known for MONTHS, if not a year or more, that they had no intention of supporting offline play.
I say this as someone with three active MMO subscriptions that I play in widely varying amounts over time: games that rely on a company running a server are services, and everyone who backed this backed a good. Without a concrete binary you can run locally to full effect, they haven't delivered anything at all, they haven't made a product. It's a service contingent on their continued profitability. And I haven't given them anything yet, but I was (and still am) planning on buying this at launch. How much I play or avoid this entirely is based entirely on how the multiplayer looks and what the rest of my gaming crew drifts to. My X-55 is ready if it rocks hard, and the last thing I wanted was a single player experience out of this.
Which changes nothing- this is very much a bait and switch. So goddamned much.
Could we mod up parent, or similar posts at least? I came in here with righteous anger at Apple and find it's just a simple procedure to reenable this thing if you have one of those. This is Apple actually being more security conscious. My fucking iPhone has a goddamned gray bar overlay because my background is too pretty so it nerfs it, and I have to use buggy Fleksy for Dvorak (which works as of this week), so could we save shitting on Apple for the things it actually does wrong, and not for legit security boosts that are user bypassable without hackery?
The shenanigans that are possible to put in a driver, or in firmware, are hard to over emphasize. Any step towards being able to prevent a cleverly written hardware attack or up the cost of devel have merit, and while that's not worth losing user power over, this certainly isn't that.
By putting the caps like that, you make it look like they thought each of those was a sentence.
Here's direct from the binary (c_5k_b.bin). It uses byte aligned 8 bit ASCII, which is not super common back then, but it was the actual standard. (and still is!) This is UNIQUE, however- the REST of the file uses binary 0x00 (null) to map to numeral zero, up to 0x09 for numeral 9, then 0x0A for A, 0x10 for G, etc. That means that unlike all the other text in the game, this was rendered in ASCII, in another language, and burned to the ROM just so that maybe some hacker, somewhere, would answer their call- or at least feel cool.
It is most properly rendered:
CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.
The string begins with a null character. It has two spaces after "ANALYSE" and "THIS", and four spaces after the telephone 2141, and three spaces after the 304 and the "SYSTEM DESIGN". The entirety of it is exactly 160 bytes. There are no line feeds or other characters.
So, no, they did NOT type:
"If you analyse Difficult this program,"
This represents around 1% of their total space on their final shipped product. 1% of their product to put this call in a foreign language to hackers across the world. Granted, Donkey Kong has a bit of spare space in the ROM, but... still.
The Pauline scream is great, and the lost melodies are amazing. A lost section of Nintendo history? What a prize. A view into the hearts of those inspired to make an amazing game, a secret buried all these years. Impressive.
Though much older (and not part of this story), the long lost line hidden from Ikegami:
"CONGRATULATION ! IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU."
Made chills go through my spine. Hacker ethos full charge, mothafuggas!
I had never seen it before, in any event.
I'd upvote the wiki and the story, but thankfully this website has none of that drek. In fact, I'm sure if this was a website with upvotes it would just be people saying the same thing over and over again and maybe occasionally linking a cat pick.
One of the big problems DC comics has had since they no longer were, you know, about detectives, is that they generally tell the large stories like Marvel, but in a similar universe with fewer characters and often crazier origin stories and power sources.
I would argue that this difference has been a key to their success, but also has hurt them badly. Superman's origin story- the lone orphan survivor of an amazing race- resonates pretty ludicrously well, but the frequently paired Amazonian warrior or Galactic Cop both presuppose the existence of an entire universe of other stuff. Suddenly you need to have Amazonians in the modern era, and suddenly you need a galactic everything in place, and etc.
The Marvelverse, meanwhile, just takes random events and decides that they just happened to make a super hero now. Gamma radiation, radioactive spider bite, radiation in the upper atmosphere, random genetic powers- these are all "more realistic", but importantly, they don't drag a bunch of bullshit into the story from the sidelines. While Krypton conveniently self destructed, meaning that you can have as much or as little Krypton in your superman story as you need, most of the DC guys bring with them a whole wide world of junk you need to wade through and consider.
Even the divine characters are much more tied to reality for Marvel, with the Norse Gods being a fine set of guys to throw on screen any old time. Meanwhile, the "new gods" of DC are alien, bizarre, and require much devotion to understand what the heck is going on.
The Marvel universe has given us a ton of X-Men, Spiderman, the Hulk, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, Captain America, and they are all very well loved. Soon we'll see Dr. Strange as well. To explain these we have: "Some people are mutants", "Radiation can give you powers", "there's some magic", "super serum, one time only offer".
Meanwhile, just to get us to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman, a reasonable superfriends crew, you end up needing Themyscira, a modern Amazon place, a whole race of Amazons to go with it, Atlantis as a living and actual kingdom under the sea, a whole race of martian (or alternately, several of them left with a destroyed race and a host of badguys that killed them), a whole lot of crazy stuff in Gotham, a bunch of alien superpower guys doling out willpower rings, meaning, oh yea, a galaxy spanning set of everything imaginable.
The other thing hurting them in a movie format is that they have a relatively light tone in many of the comics, and when they do not, they don't try to avoid whatever they are talking about. The race of goofy green aliens with the dumb rings are meaningful if they are being exterminated, and you feel bad for them, etc. Is a movie going to make you feel bad for these CGI freaks you learned about 15 minutes prior, in the space of two hours? Unlikely.
Instead, they will often darken everything, and just leave out most of the lore, trying to make them more marvel-like. Wonder woman is going to look like she's dressed as a robot, superman couldn't even keep his actual outfit and had to straight up murder some dude, etc.
This got modded troll? It's a perfectly valid comparison! He's saying that putting e- in front of something to denote that it's electronic means you aren't even claiming its the same thing. Would the post office come around in 19XX and be all "You can't call it email, it's just a bunch of beared unix guys transmitting a few bits. There's not even any trucks!"
Playing real sports with friends can harm you for life as well, so be sure to put that into your equation. After all, presumably the casual football players are fucking unhealthy idiots in your world too, as after all, the casual videogamers are "swilling red buff, munching on funyuns".
The "youtube herp derp" chrome addon (a joke addon that literally replaces all the youtube comments with a stream of "herp" and "derp", allowing you to right click the comment to revert to normal) has...
Really improved the youtube experience. I often would catch a glimpse of comments, and they were normally awful. Conspiratorial, racist, ludicrously political, wildly insulting, whatever. TERRIBLE.
There are a couple videos with acceptable comments, but you mostly know those going in, and unherping them is trivial.
Anyway, google+ doesn't stop that, and you've always been able to youtube account comment, and whatever. This is actually nice because I've never understood why google felt the need to copy suckerberg and his fucking palace of shit. Now I can actually use Google+- I'd never tolerate my real name returning everything I ever write about anything and to anyone to an employer. The idea that this is ok or reasonable is a laughable mid-2000s idea. We knew it sucked in the 80s, the 90s, and now. Good riddance to bad fucking rubbish.
Others have said it too, but this guy isn't "bald", he has an autoimmune system that attacks his hair follicles.
Definition of "bald": "having a scalp wholly or partly lacking hair."
This guy lacked: eyebrows, eyelashes, facial hair, body hair, pubic hair, and all head hair.
The treatment fixed it all, because it was autoimmune in nature.
This is huge for the sufferers of this disease- who are very rare, and not linked to sex.
It's worthless to the many bald men who find sometime after puberty that their head hair just retracts. Those men are actually bald. This guy was something else entirely.
For the Windows gaming PC, I went with the 250 for an operating system. Mostly because at least it's an operating system, not some crazy mock up like Windows 8. Windows 8 just made me think that Microsoft is fucking insane- the few things written by the GUI designers about how it's for these users and not for these users and they have this model of user types and they want to get their casuals off the desktop or whatfuckingever- just go to hell, guys. Everyone who wants to innovate can be divided cleanly into two camps: people who jump through legal and technical hoops to prevent you from opting out of their bullshit, and those that don't. The folks in the second group normally have something to sell you. The folks in the first group- and that includes Microsoft on all counts and fucking GNOME on some- are arrogant pricks not worth the time of day.
Quite honestly, the moment I can play games natively under Linux, I'll be full Linux again. And no, WINE and derivatives are not adequate for all of gaming, and very much not the section I use.
Probably haven't killed any heroic raid bosses eh? The grouping part is still there, but it's not as present at the lower levels, or for the simpler things. But if you want to group, there's three tiers that make that mandatory and reward accordingly.
Currently the pve game is: Levelling and dungeons -> dungeons, scenarios at 90 -> LFR -> Flex -> Normal -> Heroic.
Everything from Flex up takes a premade group to succeed with. Heroics take a lot more effort and dedication, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Moridineas: "I'm a big support of Snowden. Much less so of Manning. This guy deserves whatever he gets."
I think this is the big telling point. Snowden is very controversial. Manning, the controversy is mostly about the magnitude of the punishment. But no one is seriously in favor of people just handing out secrets to foreign governments. Wherever you stand on the Snowdometer, this is just not that.
Most people with a clearance do NOT have a "number they would sell out for". That's the whole fucking point of that thing.
If you don't have a clearance, you can't be "entrapped" by this, so worry not your pretty little head.
This is a bad seed getting weeded, nothing more.
I've used gmail since it was a baby, but at least I always used redirected emails that point there. So I can, in theory, switch out. I wonder if they'll drop POP support before lowering the boom? I have so very much data in there.
I know they hinted at it being some far future change, but just being willing to say it at all is nuts. Gmail is a smashing success, that they would want to redefine email based on some user interface study is scary as shit.
25% of people having an irrational belief is absolutely fine. That's far away from a plurality or majority.
77% of Americans believe there's evidence for aliens, and while that's a sketchy study, it's a huge number.
If the encryption is real (aka, a third party isn't holding the key,or a copy of YOUR key), then they may as well deliver the order to a donkey.
So there's no threat about Apple and Google "deliberately creating encryption that they themselves cannot break", because that just means they can't help the government when they ask, much as, for instance, my dog could not help them out.
But there's a lot wrong with that sentence. They aren't creating encryption, they are writing crypto code using existing crypto algos- arguably the same thing, but still. Also, YOU, the user, will be the one encrypting it, much like you can't sue a knife manufacturer for making a sharp knife. And encryption that is "breakable" isn't really encryption by any decent standard.
The real concern isn't some ancient law trying to force the hand of companies- this will only force them further along the path of making sure that it's not THEIR data, because they lack keys, it's the USER data, go bug him. That's the logical place for them to be anyway- no one spends hundreds of dollars for a phone and then encrypts it without expecting that the encryption is actually a thing- while it's wise to supposed that government level attackers have ways to get keys, it is obviously NOT WHAT YOU WANT WHEN YOU BOUGHT IT. I mean, so there's that.
Anyway, the real concern will be NEW laws that force the companies to do this. And they wouldn't have to be federal laws- if California made some law about how you can't blah blah offer real encryption unless X, and Washington was like no real encryption unless Y, and New York was like no real encryption unless Z, then you would be pushing the companies out of too many markets, and then all the federal courts have to do is drag their feet and the feds get another full decade of Total Access To Your Own Papers And Possessions.
If the study found the opposite:
1)- Would it make slashdot?
2)- Would there be some social reason given?
So seriously, why? Choosing 12 years old for the study- instead of 9, say, when boys and girls are basically the same thing- is a very odd choice, given the later development of boys. Choosing 15 would also give very different results. Generalizing the one point of human development when girls are ahead of boys is very odd, but why doesn't the article spend a million words saying that we need to help the boys get on the same level as the girls?
Almost every sex article- and CERTAINLY every gender one- is so political it's fucking insane.
There was an anecdote in a recentish book (sorry, blanking on the book) where a teacher noticed that the girls were doing better in language, and the boys in math. This bothered her- after all, boys shouldn't do better in math. Bothered her a lot, because, after all, she "knew" that boys and girls have similar math skills. Her solution was to segregate the boys and the girls math studies, based on the assumption that the girls were being intimidated by the boys, who held up their hands faster, etc. Eventually after doing this, the scores evened out or something, and she was happy that the world was exactly as she thought it was (after a lot of manipulation on her part). But, of course...
1)- Were the classes taught the same? If you care enough to teach math twice because the girls being behind enrages you, you are unlikely to be the most impartial teacher, right?
2)- If the girls being ahead in language and the boys being ahead in math enrages you because the boys are ahead, what happened when they split the language classes? They didn't do this part, of course- it was fine that the boys were behind in language. Not even the author relaying the ancedote seemed to consider this point.
3)- If there really is a better way to teach girls, then it stands to reason that there's a better way to teach boys. There's some gender zealots searching for the first, but shouldn't we be all about the second?
Anyway, back on topic, the program in question has nothing to do with anything, or real games. This study was likely designed from the start to show this, or spun that way for attention, and the metric for what "better" is seems entirely related to the "types of triggers" used. But I'm sure the rest of slashdot will poke holes in that obvious attention grab metric, and likely point out some more details with the NWN engine.
What would be interesting would be to take the scripted things and have them rated blindly by another group of 12-13 year olds.
Anyway, gender politics are so fucking all over the internet, and every side so zealous, that it's ludicrous to see slashdot dip their toe in it. I come here to read about tech, not read about some loopy gender warrior finding a way to spin their point of view (which is one of: sex A is worse at X, and that's society's fault, OR, sex A is worse at X, and that's because gender B is shining and perfect and obviously superior at X).
The net effect of these ludic-buggy games is that the actual game disk itself is entirely worthless for playing the game. Pretend that while browsing for 8 bit NES games, you finally found a game you wanted- say The Guardian Legend, a truly top-tier title. You grab it for cheap, walk it home... and instead of instantly booting into Miria racing towards Naju, it instead needs an overnight update from a service that hasn't existed in a decade to work properly, or at all.
These bugs are a feature to companies like Ubisoft and EA. The apology is only issued because the launch was truly and shockingly ludicrous- enough to get mocked world wide, in articles such as Cracked's:
http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-...
That are well outside of the normal area of video game journalism / forums / reviews.
http://www.theonion.com/articl...
If they had an offline mode, then the whole game would be in the hands of those to whom it is delivered- they would have a good (not just a service). If you want to say "We have X players, 40% of whom play in a persistent world and we profit from steadily, the others of whom might at some point in the future, but do not now" that is one thing, but if you can say "We have X players, 100% of whom depend on our servers to run", in the SECOND case, you are offering more stuff than can be monetized when EA buys you out- you represent more value to EA because you are holding your whole playerbase hostage to your servers.
When I play MMOs, I generally gank and will absolutely grief when the mood strikes- but I play factional MMOs, not all-for-themselves types. I definitely respect the griefer playstyle in general though, I just dislike when it essentially becomes real world trickery and betrayal (as seen in Eve, with the most notable heists being social exploits).
So I definitely get how you would want to avoid ALL of this. I'm actually pretty surprised that they coded it like this- it appears that they must have known for MONTHS, if not a year or more, that they had no intention of supporting offline play.
I say this as someone with three active MMO subscriptions that I play in widely varying amounts over time: games that rely on a company running a server are services, and everyone who backed this backed a good. Without a concrete binary you can run locally to full effect, they haven't delivered anything at all, they haven't made a product. It's a service contingent on their continued profitability.
And I haven't given them anything yet, but I was (and still am) planning on buying this at launch. How much I play or avoid this entirely is based entirely on how the multiplayer looks and what the rest of my gaming crew drifts to. My X-55 is ready if it rocks hard, and the last thing I wanted was a single player experience out of this.
Which changes nothing- this is very much a bait and switch. So goddamned much.
Could we mod up parent, or similar posts at least? I came in here with righteous anger at Apple and find it's just a simple procedure to reenable this thing if you have one of those. This is Apple actually being more security conscious. My fucking iPhone has a goddamned gray bar overlay because my background is too pretty so it nerfs it, and I have to use buggy Fleksy for Dvorak (which works as of this week), so could we save shitting on Apple for the things it actually does wrong, and not for legit security boosts that are user bypassable without hackery?
The shenanigans that are possible to put in a driver, or in firmware, are hard to over emphasize. Any step towards being able to prevent a cleverly written hardware attack or up the cost of devel have merit, and while that's not worth losing user power over, this certainly isn't that.
I'm actually shocked that any other opinion than yours has any traction at all.
By putting the caps like that, you make it look like they thought each of those was a sentence.
Here's direct from the binary (c_5k_b.bin). It uses byte aligned 8 bit ASCII, which is not super common back then, but it was the actual standard. (and still is!)
This is UNIQUE, however- the REST of the file uses binary 0x00 (null) to map to numeral zero, up to 0x09 for numeral 9, then 0x0A for A, 0x10 for G, etc. That means that unlike all the other text in the game, this was rendered in ASCII, in another language, and burned to the ROM just so that maybe some hacker, somewhere, would answer their call- or at least feel cool.
It is most properly rendered:
CONGRATULATION !IF YOU ANALYSE DIFFICULT THIS PROGRAM,WE WOULD TEACH YOU.*****TEL.TOKYO-JAPAN 044(244)2151 EXTENTION 304 SYSTEM DESIGN IKEGAMI CO. LIM.
The string begins with a null character. It has two spaces after "ANALYSE" and "THIS", and four spaces after the telephone 2141, and three spaces after the 304 and the "SYSTEM DESIGN". The entirety of it is exactly 160 bytes. There are no line feeds or other characters.
So, no, they did NOT type:
"If you analyse
Difficult this program,"
This represents around 1% of their total space on their final shipped product. 1% of their product to put this call in a foreign language to hackers across the world. Granted, Donkey Kong has a bit of spare space in the ROM, but... still.
Seriously, this is fucking metal. Aces link.
The Pauline scream is great, and the lost melodies are amazing. A lost section of Nintendo history? What a prize. A view into the hearts of those inspired to make an amazing game, a secret buried all these years. Impressive.
Though much older (and not part of this story), the long lost line hidden from Ikegami:
"CONGRATULATION !
IF YOU ANALYSE
DIFFICULT THIS
PROGRAM,WE WOULD
TEACH YOU."
Made chills go through my spine. Hacker ethos full charge, mothafuggas!
I had never seen it before, in any event.
I'd upvote the wiki and the story, but thankfully this website has none of that drek. In fact, I'm sure if this was a website with upvotes it would just be people saying the same thing over and over again and maybe occasionally linking a cat pick.
One of the big problems DC comics has had since they no longer were, you know, about detectives, is that they generally tell the large stories like Marvel, but in a similar universe with fewer characters and often crazier origin stories and power sources.
I would argue that this difference has been a key to their success, but also has hurt them badly. Superman's origin story- the lone orphan survivor of an amazing race- resonates pretty ludicrously well, but the frequently paired Amazonian warrior or Galactic Cop both presuppose the existence of an entire universe of other stuff. Suddenly you need to have Amazonians in the modern era, and suddenly you need a galactic everything in place, and etc.
The Marvelverse, meanwhile, just takes random events and decides that they just happened to make a super hero now. Gamma radiation, radioactive spider bite, radiation in the upper atmosphere, random genetic powers- these are all "more realistic", but importantly, they don't drag a bunch of bullshit into the story from the sidelines. While Krypton conveniently self destructed, meaning that you can have as much or as little Krypton in your superman story as you need, most of the DC guys bring with them a whole wide world of junk you need to wade through and consider.
Even the divine characters are much more tied to reality for Marvel, with the Norse Gods being a fine set of guys to throw on screen any old time. Meanwhile, the "new gods" of DC are alien, bizarre, and require much devotion to understand what the heck is going on.
The Marvel universe has given us a ton of X-Men, Spiderman, the Hulk, Iron Man, Fantastic Four, Thor, Captain America, and they are all very well loved. Soon we'll see Dr. Strange as well. To explain these we have:
"Some people are mutants", "Radiation can give you powers", "there's some magic", "super serum, one time only offer".
Meanwhile, just to get us to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash, Martian Manhunter, and Aquaman, a reasonable superfriends crew, you end up needing Themyscira, a modern Amazon place, a whole race of Amazons to go with it, Atlantis as a living and actual kingdom under the sea, a whole race of martian (or alternately, several of them left with a destroyed race and a host of badguys that killed them), a whole lot of crazy stuff in Gotham, a bunch of alien superpower guys doling out willpower rings, meaning, oh yea, a galaxy spanning set of everything imaginable.
The other thing hurting them in a movie format is that they have a relatively light tone in many of the comics, and when they do not, they don't try to avoid whatever they are talking about. The race of goofy green aliens with the dumb rings are meaningful if they are being exterminated, and you feel bad for them, etc. Is a movie going to make you feel bad for these CGI freaks you learned about 15 minutes prior, in the space of two hours? Unlikely.
Instead, they will often darken everything, and just leave out most of the lore, trying to make them more marvel-like. Wonder woman is going to look like she's dressed as a robot, superman couldn't even keep his actual outfit and had to straight up murder some dude, etc.
and email isn't mail. what's your point?
This got modded troll? It's a perfectly valid comparison! He's saying that putting e- in front of something to denote that it's electronic means you aren't even claiming its the same thing. Would the post office come around in 19XX and be all "You can't call it email, it's just a bunch of beared unix guys transmitting a few bits. There's not even any trucks!"
Playing real sports with friends can harm you for life as well, so be sure to put that into your equation. After all, presumably the casual football players are fucking unhealthy idiots in your world too, as after all, the casual videogamers are "swilling red buff, munching on funyuns".
The "youtube herp derp" chrome addon (a joke addon that literally replaces all the youtube comments with a stream of "herp" and "derp", allowing you to right click the comment to revert to normal) has...
Really improved the youtube experience. I often would catch a glimpse of comments, and they were normally awful. Conspiratorial, racist, ludicrously political, wildly insulting, whatever. TERRIBLE.
There are a couple videos with acceptable comments, but you mostly know those going in, and unherping them is trivial.
Anyway, google+ doesn't stop that, and you've always been able to youtube account comment, and whatever. This is actually nice because I've never understood why google felt the need to copy suckerberg and his fucking palace of shit. Now I can actually use Google+- I'd never tolerate my real name returning everything I ever write about anything and to anyone to an employer. The idea that this is ok or reasonable is a laughable mid-2000s idea. We knew it sucked in the 80s, the 90s, and now. Good riddance to bad fucking rubbish.
If a brain scan is "reliable", rest assured it will be mandatory, and amendments will be ignored to make this happen.
Others have said it too, but this guy isn't "bald", he has an autoimmune system that attacks his hair follicles.
Definition of "bald": "having a scalp wholly or partly lacking hair."
This guy lacked: eyebrows, eyelashes, facial hair, body hair, pubic hair, and all head hair.
The treatment fixed it all, because it was autoimmune in nature.
This is huge for the sufferers of this disease- who are very rare, and not linked to sex.
It's worthless to the many bald men who find sometime after puberty that their head hair just retracts. Those men are actually bald. This guy was something else entirely.
Mod this up. While this is a great discovery, the autoimmune form of this is super rare compared to any of the male pattern baldness things.
It won't help most men at all. But, still, good news.
For the Windows gaming PC, I went with the 250 for an operating system. Mostly because at least it's an operating system, not some crazy mock up like Windows 8. Windows 8 just made me think that Microsoft is fucking insane- the few things written by the GUI designers about how it's for these users and not for these users and they have this model of user types and they want to get their casuals off the desktop or whatfuckingever- just go to hell, guys. Everyone who wants to innovate can be divided cleanly into two camps: people who jump through legal and technical hoops to prevent you from opting out of their bullshit, and those that don't. The folks in the second group normally have something to sell you. The folks in the first group- and that includes Microsoft on all counts and fucking GNOME on some- are arrogant pricks not worth the time of day.
Quite honestly, the moment I can play games natively under Linux, I'll be full Linux again. And no, WINE and derivatives are not adequate for all of gaming, and very much not the section I use.
Agh, my kingdom for a mod point. This is a very very good point that gets almost no play.
Probably haven't killed any heroic raid bosses eh? The grouping part is still there, but it's not as present at the lower levels, or for the simpler things. But if you want to group, there's three tiers that make that mandatory and reward accordingly.
Currently the pve game is: Levelling and dungeons -> dungeons, scenarios at 90 -> LFR -> Flex -> Normal -> Heroic.
Everything from Flex up takes a premade group to succeed with. Heroics take a lot more effort and dedication, etc.