So am I the ONLY one that sees this and thinks "Wow, if they can run an emulator in nothing but HTML V5 and JS what kind of malware will they be cooking up with this tech?". Excuse me for being a bit of a party pooper but I fix infected machines all day and nearly all new infections I see are JavaScript based either by using browser trickery (you should really see the Windows Update site they have cooked up for Firefox, it is REALLY good) or some sort of drive by download.
So maybe its me, maybe I'm wrong, but I've been thinking for years instead of bolting ever more onto JavaScript maybe, just maybe, we should be looking at a new language for the web? Maybe something that automatically starts in a "penalty box" until it passes inspection, and doesn't allow a single page to be made up of sometimes dozens of scripts from all over the place?
Because frankly all these tricks like sandboxing and low rights mode just seem to me to be band aids on bullet wounds. JavaScript has been around since 1995 and the web is a vastly different (and nastier) place now than it was then. There has to be some way to let sites have their bling bling bullshit without making the user run untrusted code on their machine.
I think the better question would be "How long has it been since the courts ruled FOR a citizen AGAINST the corps?" my guess is it has been a pretty damned long time, probably Betamax. I mean when you have a SCOTUS judge's wife taking checks and nobody does shit? Yeah I don't think the odds are good on this one my friend. As much as I'd love to think that We, The People have a say and the courts don't favor the multinationals by a huge amount sadly Citizens United broke me of that particular fantasy.
The problem is it really depends on how bad the government wants to get you thanks to PATRIOT and "enemy combatant". You see miller was sitting in a nice cell with access to her lawyer, everybody knew where she was, etc. But since you can be labeled an enemy combatant by "giving material aid to the enemy" frankly the government can drop a reporter in a hole and promptly forget where the hole is. How many Americans are labeled enemy combatants? Does anyone even know?
Frankly if you are betting on a reporter to save your ass when the current administration says they have the right to assassinate Americans on American soil under irrevocable "war powers" I'd say you better be damned sure that reporter is willing to go all the way friend. Frankly even Nixon didn't have the balls to go as far as the last two administrations,and it ain't getting any better folks. I'm sure the next big leaker WILL be made an example of, mark my words. The Wikileaks leak stirred up too much shit for them to allow anybody to pull that shit again without paying horribly.
Re:am i the only one who misread it as al-Pacman?
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AI Takes On Pac-Man
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Hell I'd just be happy for game AI that doesn't blow rancid chunks before falling over and dying. Any game designers here? For the love of kittens and everything decent in the world STOP WITH THE BAD AI as it just ruins a game, it really really does.
There was a time, a short time mind you, but still a time, along about Far Cry I and Fear I where I was thinking "hey, finally! Thank fricking God! These guys are trying to flank me! They aren't lining up to be shot! Woo hoo, I'm having fun!" but then developers went back to caring only about bling and burst my little happiness bubble. Play RF:Guerrilla? You will spend most of your time shooting the good guys as they all can't wait to run right out in front of you while you are trying to fire. For the hell of it I put in the explosive pistol mod so I can just stand there and watch them ragdoll each other since none of them have the sense not to fire if their friends step in front of them.
So maybe stuff like TFA will help them learn how not to design dumb as stumps AI, hell if I know. Everyone talks about "realism" but nothing completely blows realism right out the airlock like watching a bad guy bang himself against a wall over and over again, or having them take "cover" behind the EXACT SAME CHEST HIGH WALL where I've piled three dozen of the friends in a kill box because their fricking heads stick out, or the worst having AI "help" that don't know which end of the gun to point at the enemy and who promptly run out into the open with such inane stupidity it seems like a race to see whether you or the bad guy will cap them first.
So please game devs, for the love of titties and beer and all that is good and right in this world, just stop okay? Nobody is asking for Einstein here, just not so damned retarded that they make Forest Gump look like Carl Sagan.
Sorry MR AC but if someone was to want free porn the best place is myfreepaysite.com (purposely not linking as it is the site I hand out to those that have gotten a porn bug and would rather it not get/.ed). Just make up a single throwaway email (so they have a place to send a password to, you DO have a throwaway address, yes?) and they have over 10,000 DVDs worth all nicely sorted by category. My customers are happy, I'M happy I'm not having to clean nasty porn bugs, its a win/win.
As for TFA, military guys like to look at titties, they also like to drink beer. This description also works for roughly 90% of the males on the planet with a pulse. News at 11.
Sure you do! You see the cover story fulfills two purposes, one it keeps the government from looking bad on the world stage, as you can't just say "cracking down on dissidents" without everyone thinking Tienanmen Square, and two it makes them easier to prosecute!
You see most folks look at a PC as a magic black box, it lets them chat to their friends, post pictures, but it is a strange thing and a little scary, especially with all that talk of ID theft and cyberterrorists. By sticking everyone with the Anon label, complete with that picture of the empty suit that Anon uses and the Guy Fawkes masks, it makes it even more scary to the average public so nobody will say squat when they drop them down a dark hole and forget where the hole is!
So you see friend Anon will be used the same way "suspected pedo" and "suspected terrorist" is used here in the USA. It is a one stop shop to do whatever you want to an individual as long as you are sure to stick that label on first. Frankly we shouldn't be surprised as governments can always use another bogeyman and Anon walked right into it with all the headlines they've been grabbing lately.
Notice I got modded down for daring to say we're broke? I love how the MSM has put its fingers in its ears and goes "la la la everything is fine" instead of admitting we are in the start of a depression which anyone in the flyover states can plainly see.
Years of outsourcing and declining wages has left this country a third world nation, with a few at the top rolling in cash and the rest not able to keep their homes. if we looked at the ACTUAL numbers and not the BS the feds spread you are looking at 30% unemployment and probably close to that underemployment, the business districts of most of mid America looks like Escape From New York with all the abandoned buildings, this place has had it. Yet NASA and the rest of the feds STILL spend like it is 1956!
Maybe it is time to default, maybe it is time for our own Arab Spring, because frankly it is pretty obvious the fed has gotten so corrupt there is simply no fixing it by legal channels. the money has gotten too concentrated, too much power in the hands of too few, the media to bought off, it is just over folks. Mod down all you want but it won't make 2+2=5 which is the kind of math we are looking at in Washington while they build the latest superweapons like the Cold War is still going.
Uhhh...isn't this the bunch that acts like a bank yet doesn't have to follow the regulations of a bank and can, and often has, taken people's accounts (and the money therein) and just held it hostage, sometimes for months at a time? Uh no thanks, I much prefer my little home town bank which doesn't screw me over and actually has really nice folks that go out of their way to HELP me, not to just see how much profit they can wring from me.
I trust Paypal even less than the scammers on ebay, that is not at all. I've known too many folks burnt by Paypal to ever trust them with anything I considered important which is why when eBay basically switched to Paypal only I walked away and haven't been back. There are just too many horror stories from that bunch to ever trust them with anything worth having.
I wonder if this is the result of some "usability study" or some such? Sorry I can't find the link ATM but I remember reading an article a few years back on how Walmart shifts things around in its Supercenters to force the customer to wander looking for what they came for as it exposes them to more product and thus increases the chances they'll buy more stuff. Sadly at least in my case it works as I've noticed I've bought more when I couldn't easily find what I came in for as I'd have to wander down more aisles and see more products.
So I wonder if something similar isn't at work here? maybe cutting down on viewings of things most don't really care about cuts down on their bandwidth, as IIRC the CDNs Netflix uses only hosts the popular stuff while the more offbeat stuff is still hosted by Netflix itself. I hate to think crass commercialism when it could just be bad taste but after reading the Walmart article I always have to wonder about things that at first light seem obviously stupid. After all you'd think irritating customers by making things harder to find would be a bad idea, yet according to that article I read it actually improved sales, so I wouldn't be surprised if this obviously stupid design decision didn't have some ulterior purpose that ultimately saves the company money.
Or use a satellite launched while we are bankrupt that can measure an entire ocean all at once via spectroscopy and map it in real time with computers. FTFY.
This would be all well and good if it was 1955, or if it was launched by the Chinese, but the simple fact is we're broke and the right would rather risk us defaulting than raise taxes to even 1990 levels. So spending on this kind of shit really needs to stop, at least until we can quit blowing cash like shit through a goose on three wars, new aircraft carriers and superplanes, and at least get taxes on the 1%ers up to 1990s level, although I'd say 1950s levels would be better, after all isn't that the time the right wishes we'd go back to?
But we just don't have the money to afford this shit right now, hell we can't even afford a replacement for the shuttle.
See? That kind of behavior is simply inexcusable. BTW have you had a "phantom video" yet? that is where you close a video playing in a tab other than the one you are in and the video keeps playing which you can tell because of the audio still going and the ONLY way to stop it is a full killing and restart of the browser. Also if you go to any pron or driver downloads sites you might want to set a master security password to protect your passwords to keep from being hit by the XSS bug that will spam everyone in your address book if you use Yahoo Mail. That one only seems to affect FF BTW, doesn't work on webkit.
As much as I hate to say this, as someone who has used FF since it was named Phoenix and the suite before that, if you haven't tried Comodo Dragon you really should. It is really head and shoulders above FF ATM, and many of the extensions you are used to in FF like ABP now are there for Dragon (simply use Chrome extensions). It doesn't hang, or suck memory, or fall for XSS attacks like the one above, can run for days without going "runaway RAM" like FF seems to do, it is just really better built all around.
Personally I think it is Gecko. I think Gecko just wasn't ever designed for sandboxing and multithreading and instead of doing a rewrite they are trying to bolt on functionality that just isn't gonna work. It is like bolting a blower to a Pinto. Sure it might work for a little while, but it will eventually tear itself apart.
Realism is fine in small doses but If you want crazy fun you need to try Just Cause II and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Nothing more satisfying than being chased by a bunch of federales and using the grappling hook in JCII to shoot a line into their hood and the ground to do a nice, complete with massive explosions!, re-enactment of Terminator III. And being to drive through buildings in a semi in RF:Guerrilla just gives a nice warm fuzzy feeling deep in your heart. BTW if you do get RF you should immediately get the "explosive pistol" mod, as frankly the weapon design stinks and the mod makes all the difference with that game. Of course it seriously amps up the crazy if you run into a battle with the RF and drones both carrying pistols, it makes a rocket hoedown on QIII look like a Sunday picnic! We are talking dozens of bodies on both sides ragdolling everywhere while cars and trucks go sailing over the carnage like flaming balloons o' love.
Sure both games are about as realistic as growing wings out your ass and flying south for the winter but its a game and games are supposed to be fun dammit and those two sure as hell are!
For those that would like to see the actual hardware here is the PS2 and here is the X360. I hope he has released the plans so that when he does pass on someone can pick up the torch without having to reinvent the wheel, as these things do look to be seriously complex.
BTW if you are gonna be a dipshit and post old troll crap? Why not do it on one of the articles where there is plenty of fanboy bullshit and nerd rage and NOT on an article where poor cripples are afraid they are gonna lose the only way they have to interact with their friends and kids like normal folks.
It is called having class and style man, you should try it sometime.
I don't know about that, can you imagine if they went in and reset everyone's credit score to be "over 9000!" LOL? Even if they managed to set it back the next day just the sheer amount of chaos they could cause, especially if the group broadcast it all over the net right after (Hey got bad credit? Have fun LOL!) the amount of total pandemonium caused by everyone having wonderful credit might actually make those in power question letting everything be tied into an imaginary number held by three self appointed companies.
What failure? Private prisons funnel tons of dollars straight from the tax payers to the multinational cartels, a single drug bust can ensure you have a large underclass ready for exploitation for everything from booze and smokes to lotto tickets and check cashing places, it helps to keep the population under control while giving a nice excuse to make the police more and more like a military operating on home soil, while also helping to get rid of those pesky little things like the fourth amendment...oh...were you actually thinking it was about stopping drugs? Silly peasant it is about profits for the megacorps, just like everything else.
After all if it was about "The People" then pot would be legal, we wouldn't be fighting three wars while funneling ever more money to Wall Street and the MIC, nobody would touch Medicaid and Medicare, the military would be less than half the size and not building new aircraft carriers and superweapons like we had a war planned with the Ruskies for next Tuesday, but where is the room for massive profits and corruption in that? That is why your "vote" is a choice between "Rich corporate ass kisser in a blue suit" or "Rich corporate ass kisser in a slightly darker blue suit". Any choice that might actually listen to the people would cut into profits! Mustn't have that now, can we?
BTW how's that "Hope and Change" thing working out? Turned out to be nothing but Dubya dipped in chocolate huh? I'm afraid the late Bill Hicks nailed it more than 20 years ago. How sad is it the man has been gone for two decades and if anything his words are even more true now?
You argument would hold water if all the other browsers did that but they don't. Hell even shitastic IE don't bitchslap the living shit out of resources like FF 4. And like I said Chromium based have more things to deal with, like low rights mode, yet they use less resources and NEVER, I repeat NEVER lose responsiveness.
And are you saying FF should have a warning label that says "if you are on a mobile device like netbook/laptop, or on a low resource device like nettop or office machine, please don't use this product as it is unsuitable for purpose"? The VAST MAJORITY of laptops and thin and lights sold today are the sub $500 models, these come with 1-2Gb on average, most single cores or low end duals like Intel Atom and Celeron and AMD Sempron and Neo. You telling me ALL those people should avoid FF like the clap? When they have competition in the form of Chrome and its kin climbing the charts? Sounds like a good way to ensure they don't exist in 3 years my friend.
Like it or not rising prices have made the low end both from a power usage as well as price perspective THE growth market, and I can tell you from experience on the latest Atom and Neo netbooks, which frankly run both Win 7 HP and Dragon just find and are nice and peppy, that FF in its current incarnation is simply unsuitable for purpose. As I said you better make a sandwich if you are launching on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM, which is about double what you are getting out of your average netbook.
But what EXACTLY will that do to us and/or the environment? I really REALLY don't like how this push for everything to be on the cell doesn't seem to have any real long term damage considerations being looked at, it is strictly "LOL need more GHZ for FB LOL!".
It is already beginning to look like colony collapse disorder, which is wiping out beehives all over the place (you know, those things that without crops don't get pollinated and we all starve? yeah those things) are being affected by cells, which may even be the root cause of the collapse (place a cell near the hive, the hive wanders off and doesn't come back. We still don't know for sure why, may have something to do with their internal ability to tell ranges) and here you are talking about 1THz ranges? Maybe, God forbid, people actually wait until they get fucking home to watch YouTube?
See here's the thing: last I heard this was SUPPOSED to be America, a land where unlike the socialist and communist states one was SUPPOSED to have a lovely combination of FREE CHOICE along with PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY...remember that? Tell you what sparky, as a smoker I will be HAPPY to sign an iron clad contract that says that if I get cancer the ONLY thing I will be given is quite cheap morphine so I don't suffer, in return you remove ANY AND ALL TAXES from the product I CHOOSE to use, okay?
But that will NEVER EVER happen, why? Because it wouldn't let state and federal politicians spend like drunken sailors while at the same time telling what you can and can't do. Nanny state types just LOVE that shit. Did you know they are talking now about a sugar and a fat tax? Yep can't let that peasant decide whether or not he wants a coke or a burger now can we? Meanwhile the things they like, like say the imported vodka for their martini, is taxed much lower than cigarettes, huh isn't that funny. You'd almost think alcohol doesn't splatter hundreds of thousands of innocents all over our roads or something.
Take a look sometime at what the tobacco settlement was supposed to be used for and what it actually was sometime, it'll open your eyes. In my state they got pissed that the state next to us was bragging about how nice their trauma center was so we had to top them in a "our trauma is bigger than yours" penis waving. Didn't matter that the trauma center we had worked just fine for our smaller state, it wasn't like it was their money, right? WAKE UP! The smokers are the canaries in the coal mines. The nany staters don't want you to have ANY control of your life! They will add fat, sugar, hell I wouldn't be surprised if they end up taxing the hell out of white bread so you can only have wheat on your sandwich. Nothing gives those in control a bigger stiffie than controlling the lives of the peasants while having more money to blow on bridges to nowhere and payout to their owners...err...I mean "campaign donors".
Yeah that is the other thing that gets to me, what EXACTLY is FF doing that the memory keeps going up even when I'm not touching the thing? What finally got me to switch to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based) over FF 4 was I had just opened my usual tabs on the little nettop I use as a low heat/low power browser at the shop (a little Athlon XP with 2Gb I got off a customer) when I got called away to the phone. One thing led to another and I ended up busy for the better part of the day, and when I finally get back to the machine about 5 hours later FF is slamming the swap so hard I ended up having to do a hard shutdown and the thing is I had JUST opened it when I walked away, and it was only like 5 tabs! WTF?
I really hope they fix this thing, but after so many times being told "FF doesn't have a problem its just you" I'm not holding my breath. I've done the same thing with Dragon and when I've come back the machine has been how I left it, no real memory changes. WTF is FF doing that the memory climbs when you aren't even touching it?
Uhhh...noooo...if you are using a percentage of unused RAM that is ONE thing, having your program suck up RAM like a Bangkok whore and then mercilessly beat the page file like a pimp that hasn't gotten his money is quite another, thanks ever so.
I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM that I use as a nettop. This is roughly equal to what the average netbook is, actually it has 500Mb more RAM that most current netbooks, and what I have found is that while Chromium based like Comodo Dragon make this machine a nice pleasant way to do basic web surfing, YouTube, checking email, etc FF 4 is completely fucking unusable because of the way it bitchslaps the CPU and pounds the living shit out of the RAM.
Let me give an example: If say I am checking my email and a friend sends me a link to a Youtube video in Dragon I can click on that link and while the CPU will spike to say 80% for a few seconds in dragon it quickly drops down to a more reasonable level and most importantly never loses responsiveness so if I decide I don't want to watch said video or want to launch another tab? No problemo says Dragon. Now with FF4, which frankly FF 3 up to the 3.5 branch didn't have any problem with either, just launching a video tab can spike the CPU for up to two minutes where the machine isn't responding to shit. Also when I close a tab in Dragon I can actually look at Anvir task manager running in the taskbar and watch memory usage go down. FF 4? nope you better close that browser if you want any of the gobs of memory we are sucking up buddy! Also I've noticed while Dragon takes up around 150-200Mb on initialization after that it is pretty conservative which each page taking between 50-80Mb whereas FF 4 can quickly suck up over 1Gb of RAM and that bitch ain't giving it back, no sir no how! And it isn't the extensions since I use the exact same two in both, Adblock Plus and ForecastFox and that's it.
So in conclusion while FF 2 had some severe memory leaks there for awhile in FF 3 things seemed to be getting better. The pre 3.5 branch actually didn't constantly slam the CPU and memory, was generally responsive, and one could use it most of the day without watching the page file get an ass kicking. Since the switch to FF 4, now with extra bling, the thing is frankly unusable on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with a couple Gb of RAM and frankly that is inexcusable. This is a fricking browser we are talking about here, not the latest PhotoShop. Considering not only that there is something like 400 MILLION XP machines out there with specs similar to what I've described or even less, but also netbooks and nettops currently being sold with similar or less, having a browser that sucks resources like a fat guy at the all you can eat buffet just isn't acceptable.
I've have always used FF since the old days but now for me and my customers I'm handing out Comodo Dragon. I have to support everything from P4s and Netbook/tops to the latest and greatest and having whole classes of machines that can't do anything but stutter thanks to FF 4 makes it simply unusable for purpose. Personally I hope they fix this, along with supporting low rights mode for modern OSes (really FF devs the feature has only been out now for 5 years and now 2 versions of the OS, time to get on the ball) because I did like the extension framework and some of the GUI elements on FF better than I do the Chromium based. But having a better framework and GUI really doesn't help if you need to go make a sandwich while a page loads thanks to the CPU and RAM beatdown the machines gets.
Actually from the interpretative readings I've read Babylon in this case is referring to a 'great city" of a future kingdom like Babylon was a great city at the time it was written. If you haven't read it recently here is the text, take note of 4-6 and 12-18 and you'll see why my old preacher friend makes the connection.
Especially note the lines "And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication" and what has the US been doing, but flaunting our wealth while doing seriously evil shit all over the world and obviously selling out to the corps, and "And the ten horns which thou saw are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast." And what are these ubercorps that rule us like Goldman Sachs, but those with the power of kings yet no kingdom?
The problem with whether you should know what your teacher believes in is many are whacko so yeah, please keep religion out of schools. I know because we pulled my two boys out of public school in the 5th grade because a teacher actually brought her bible into class and gave a 45 minute lecture on "Godless heathens and sodomites" when my two boys where in class. FYI one is Catholic, the other is gay. Yes we could have sued and owned the fucking school (which is what I wanted to do) but at the time my sister was in the last stage of a terminal illness and frankly the rest of the family had too much stress already to deal with that on top.
But in the case of being gay, we aren't talking about "advocating" one way or another, we are talking about teachers actively supporting bashing either by inaction or basically taking the attitude "God hates fags so they get what they deserve". Replace the word gay with black or Jew and see how long this shit would be allowed. Religious bigotry is one of the few openly bigoted stances this country allows anymore, and frankly it really needs to end.
As someone who has a scar on the back of his head and a shoulder that hurts when it rains because of a cop that started with, and I quote "God damned niggers and fucking hippies, I don't know which I hate more" (BTW said "nigger" was a baptist minister I was taking to a revival to raise money for the homeless) I can say the reason why cops want to be able to throw your ass in jail if you dare to take their picture is a hell of a lot of them are roid raged "bullies with badges" that frankly took the job to get off on being absolute fucking pricks.
For a good example of why they want the cameras stopped I'd suggest you watch the largest gang in America and then you tell me what makes the actions in the video ANY different from the large scale intimidation tactics done by the brown shirts and the black shirts in times past? And before anyone says Godwin you watch the video and tell me that isn't large scale intimidation designed to suppress those that the blue shirts consider "undesirable". As I said I still have a scar from being a white person with hair the wrong length associating with a race the blue shirt considered undesirable.
Hey old CPU dude! I used to have one of those in my first "PC" a VIC20. Actually I'd say of the two MSFT is actually like a big old sweaty care bear compared to Apple right now. At least you don't need anybody to approve your app on Windows or WinPhone as far as i know. Meanwhile i'm betting in three years or less you'll see OSX phased out for iOS in laptop form factor, then if you want to use any Apple device it'll be Steve's way or jailbreak and void your warranty. Oh and after the shitpile that was Vista they actually got one right with 7, shocking I know.
But to me this is a perfect example of the difference between the two companies. Even if, lets say for the sake of argument, that Apple already had a similar idea a brewing, if this would have been MSFT they would have simply bought the guy out as the bad publicity isn't worth the hassle not when the guy could have been bought off for less than the interest these guys make in a weekend. Hell MSFT would have thrown him a few bucks, offered him a nice little job, maybe made him an MVP or something, basically they'd have come out looking like nice guys.
Sadly as you have pointed out since Steve got sick the first time Apple has been copying old Bill and his "kill crush destroy!" bad attitude that made MSFT so hated in the 90s. Nobody minds if you end up #1 as long as it doesn't look like you are getting there by stomping on the little guy. MSFT caught hell for this very same shit over Stacker/Doublespace, but notice how many iFanboys come out to apologize for Apple? I guess that thing about Apple users brains and the brains of religious zealots being the same must have some merit, huh? Because be honest, if you replaced the name Apple with MSFT and left every other word the same the hate would be ass deep in here!
The problem is it is too damned predictable and I'll give you some examples: if the game is set in modern times, you will get the MP5, the M16, The AK47, and for a sniper either the 50 or the Draganov. If it is WWII you will get the Garand, the MP40, the 1911, the Tommy gun, the k98. Yawn. All while the entire battlefield just so happens to have chest high walls, you know just for decor. Yawn.
Meanwhile they talk about "realism" yet I can be standing there with a fucking bazooka and I STILL CAN'T BLOW A FUCKING WOODEN DOOR DOWN! WTF? It is the stupid ass "game logic' bullshit that drives me up a damned wall! And surely to god those aren't the only weapons in the history of war, yes? Surely there are other weapons besides the same damned 8 or 9 guns every damned game has, yes?
Frankly I'm just sick of Chestie mcWallhigh and his friends shitty game logic and same weapon loadout. Variety is the spice of fricking life, so model some other damned guns and something besides chest high fricking walls!
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So am I the ONLY one that sees this and thinks "Wow, if they can run an emulator in nothing but HTML V5 and JS what kind of malware will they be cooking up with this tech?". Excuse me for being a bit of a party pooper but I fix infected machines all day and nearly all new infections I see are JavaScript based either by using browser trickery (you should really see the Windows Update site they have cooked up for Firefox, it is REALLY good) or some sort of drive by download.
So maybe its me, maybe I'm wrong, but I've been thinking for years instead of bolting ever more onto JavaScript maybe, just maybe, we should be looking at a new language for the web? Maybe something that automatically starts in a "penalty box" until it passes inspection, and doesn't allow a single page to be made up of sometimes dozens of scripts from all over the place?
Because frankly all these tricks like sandboxing and low rights mode just seem to me to be band aids on bullet wounds. JavaScript has been around since 1995 and the web is a vastly different (and nastier) place now than it was then. There has to be some way to let sites have their bling bling bullshit without making the user run untrusted code on their machine.
I think the better question would be "How long has it been since the courts ruled FOR a citizen AGAINST the corps?" my guess is it has been a pretty damned long time, probably Betamax. I mean when you have a SCOTUS judge's wife taking checks and nobody does shit? Yeah I don't think the odds are good on this one my friend. As much as I'd love to think that We, The People have a say and the courts don't favor the multinationals by a huge amount sadly Citizens United broke me of that particular fantasy.
The problem is it really depends on how bad the government wants to get you thanks to PATRIOT and "enemy combatant". You see miller was sitting in a nice cell with access to her lawyer, everybody knew where she was, etc. But since you can be labeled an enemy combatant by "giving material aid to the enemy" frankly the government can drop a reporter in a hole and promptly forget where the hole is. How many Americans are labeled enemy combatants? Does anyone even know?
Frankly if you are betting on a reporter to save your ass when the current administration says they have the right to assassinate Americans on American soil under irrevocable "war powers" I'd say you better be damned sure that reporter is willing to go all the way friend. Frankly even Nixon didn't have the balls to go as far as the last two administrations,and it ain't getting any better folks. I'm sure the next big leaker WILL be made an example of, mark my words. The Wikileaks leak stirred up too much shit for them to allow anybody to pull that shit again without paying horribly.
Hell I'd just be happy for game AI that doesn't blow rancid chunks before falling over and dying. Any game designers here? For the love of kittens and everything decent in the world STOP WITH THE BAD AI as it just ruins a game, it really really does.
There was a time, a short time mind you, but still a time, along about Far Cry I and Fear I where I was thinking "hey, finally! Thank fricking God! These guys are trying to flank me! They aren't lining up to be shot! Woo hoo, I'm having fun!" but then developers went back to caring only about bling and burst my little happiness bubble. Play RF:Guerrilla? You will spend most of your time shooting the good guys as they all can't wait to run right out in front of you while you are trying to fire. For the hell of it I put in the explosive pistol mod so I can just stand there and watch them ragdoll each other since none of them have the sense not to fire if their friends step in front of them.
So maybe stuff like TFA will help them learn how not to design dumb as stumps AI, hell if I know. Everyone talks about "realism" but nothing completely blows realism right out the airlock like watching a bad guy bang himself against a wall over and over again, or having them take "cover" behind the EXACT SAME CHEST HIGH WALL where I've piled three dozen of the friends in a kill box because their fricking heads stick out, or the worst having AI "help" that don't know which end of the gun to point at the enemy and who promptly run out into the open with such inane stupidity it seems like a race to see whether you or the bad guy will cap them first.
So please game devs, for the love of titties and beer and all that is good and right in this world, just stop okay? Nobody is asking for Einstein here, just not so damned retarded that they make Forest Gump look like Carl Sagan.
Sorry MR AC but if someone was to want free porn the best place is myfreepaysite.com (purposely not linking as it is the site I hand out to those that have gotten a porn bug and would rather it not get /.ed). Just make up a single throwaway email (so they have a place to send a password to, you DO have a throwaway address, yes?) and they have over 10,000 DVDs worth all nicely sorted by category. My customers are happy, I'M happy I'm not having to clean nasty porn bugs, its a win/win.
As for TFA, military guys like to look at titties, they also like to drink beer. This description also works for roughly 90% of the males on the planet with a pulse. News at 11.
Sure you do! You see the cover story fulfills two purposes, one it keeps the government from looking bad on the world stage, as you can't just say "cracking down on dissidents" without everyone thinking Tienanmen Square, and two it makes them easier to prosecute!
You see most folks look at a PC as a magic black box, it lets them chat to their friends, post pictures, but it is a strange thing and a little scary, especially with all that talk of ID theft and cyberterrorists. By sticking everyone with the Anon label, complete with that picture of the empty suit that Anon uses and the Guy Fawkes masks, it makes it even more scary to the average public so nobody will say squat when they drop them down a dark hole and forget where the hole is!
So you see friend Anon will be used the same way "suspected pedo" and "suspected terrorist" is used here in the USA. It is a one stop shop to do whatever you want to an individual as long as you are sure to stick that label on first. Frankly we shouldn't be surprised as governments can always use another bogeyman and Anon walked right into it with all the headlines they've been grabbing lately.
Notice I got modded down for daring to say we're broke? I love how the MSM has put its fingers in its ears and goes "la la la everything is fine" instead of admitting we are in the start of a depression which anyone in the flyover states can plainly see.
Years of outsourcing and declining wages has left this country a third world nation, with a few at the top rolling in cash and the rest not able to keep their homes. if we looked at the ACTUAL numbers and not the BS the feds spread you are looking at 30% unemployment and probably close to that underemployment, the business districts of most of mid America looks like Escape From New York with all the abandoned buildings, this place has had it. Yet NASA and the rest of the feds STILL spend like it is 1956!
Maybe it is time to default, maybe it is time for our own Arab Spring, because frankly it is pretty obvious the fed has gotten so corrupt there is simply no fixing it by legal channels. the money has gotten too concentrated, too much power in the hands of too few, the media to bought off, it is just over folks. Mod down all you want but it won't make 2+2=5 which is the kind of math we are looking at in Washington while they build the latest superweapons like the Cold War is still going.
Uhhh...isn't this the bunch that acts like a bank yet doesn't have to follow the regulations of a bank and can, and often has, taken people's accounts (and the money therein) and just held it hostage, sometimes for months at a time? Uh no thanks, I much prefer my little home town bank which doesn't screw me over and actually has really nice folks that go out of their way to HELP me, not to just see how much profit they can wring from me.
I trust Paypal even less than the scammers on ebay, that is not at all. I've known too many folks burnt by Paypal to ever trust them with anything I considered important which is why when eBay basically switched to Paypal only I walked away and haven't been back. There are just too many horror stories from that bunch to ever trust them with anything worth having.
I wonder if this is the result of some "usability study" or some such? Sorry I can't find the link ATM but I remember reading an article a few years back on how Walmart shifts things around in its Supercenters to force the customer to wander looking for what they came for as it exposes them to more product and thus increases the chances they'll buy more stuff. Sadly at least in my case it works as I've noticed I've bought more when I couldn't easily find what I came in for as I'd have to wander down more aisles and see more products.
So I wonder if something similar isn't at work here? maybe cutting down on viewings of things most don't really care about cuts down on their bandwidth, as IIRC the CDNs Netflix uses only hosts the popular stuff while the more offbeat stuff is still hosted by Netflix itself. I hate to think crass commercialism when it could just be bad taste but after reading the Walmart article I always have to wonder about things that at first light seem obviously stupid. After all you'd think irritating customers by making things harder to find would be a bad idea, yet according to that article I read it actually improved sales, so I wouldn't be surprised if this obviously stupid design decision didn't have some ulterior purpose that ultimately saves the company money.
Or use a satellite launched while we are bankrupt that can measure an entire ocean all at once via spectroscopy and map it in real time with computers. FTFY.
This would be all well and good if it was 1955, or if it was launched by the Chinese, but the simple fact is we're broke and the right would rather risk us defaulting than raise taxes to even 1990 levels. So spending on this kind of shit really needs to stop, at least until we can quit blowing cash like shit through a goose on three wars, new aircraft carriers and superplanes, and at least get taxes on the 1%ers up to 1990s level, although I'd say 1950s levels would be better, after all isn't that the time the right wishes we'd go back to?
But we just don't have the money to afford this shit right now, hell we can't even afford a replacement for the shuttle.
See? That kind of behavior is simply inexcusable. BTW have you had a "phantom video" yet? that is where you close a video playing in a tab other than the one you are in and the video keeps playing which you can tell because of the audio still going and the ONLY way to stop it is a full killing and restart of the browser. Also if you go to any pron or driver downloads sites you might want to set a master security password to protect your passwords to keep from being hit by the XSS bug that will spam everyone in your address book if you use Yahoo Mail. That one only seems to affect FF BTW, doesn't work on webkit.
As much as I hate to say this, as someone who has used FF since it was named Phoenix and the suite before that, if you haven't tried Comodo Dragon you really should. It is really head and shoulders above FF ATM, and many of the extensions you are used to in FF like ABP now are there for Dragon (simply use Chrome extensions). It doesn't hang, or suck memory, or fall for XSS attacks like the one above, can run for days without going "runaway RAM" like FF seems to do, it is just really better built all around.
Personally I think it is Gecko. I think Gecko just wasn't ever designed for sandboxing and multithreading and instead of doing a rewrite they are trying to bolt on functionality that just isn't gonna work. It is like bolting a blower to a Pinto. Sure it might work for a little while, but it will eventually tear itself apart.
Realism is fine in small doses but If you want crazy fun you need to try Just Cause II and Red Faction: Guerrilla. Nothing more satisfying than being chased by a bunch of federales and using the grappling hook in JCII to shoot a line into their hood and the ground to do a nice, complete with massive explosions!, re-enactment of Terminator III. And being to drive through buildings in a semi in RF:Guerrilla just gives a nice warm fuzzy feeling deep in your heart. BTW if you do get RF you should immediately get the "explosive pistol" mod, as frankly the weapon design stinks and the mod makes all the difference with that game. Of course it seriously amps up the crazy if you run into a battle with the RF and drones both carrying pistols, it makes a rocket hoedown on QIII look like a Sunday picnic! We are talking dozens of bodies on both sides ragdolling everywhere while cars and trucks go sailing over the carnage like flaming balloons o' love.
Sure both games are about as realistic as growing wings out your ass and flying south for the winter but its a game and games are supposed to be fun dammit and those two sure as hell are!
For those that would like to see the actual hardware here is the PS2 and here is the X360. I hope he has released the plans so that when he does pass on someone can pick up the torch without having to reinvent the wheel, as these things do look to be seriously complex.
BTW if you are gonna be a dipshit and post old troll crap? Why not do it on one of the articles where there is plenty of fanboy bullshit and nerd rage and NOT on an article where poor cripples are afraid they are gonna lose the only way they have to interact with their friends and kids like normal folks.
It is called having class and style man, you should try it sometime.
I don't know about that, can you imagine if they went in and reset everyone's credit score to be "over 9000!" LOL? Even if they managed to set it back the next day just the sheer amount of chaos they could cause, especially if the group broadcast it all over the net right after (Hey got bad credit? Have fun LOL!) the amount of total pandemonium caused by everyone having wonderful credit might actually make those in power question letting everything be tied into an imaginary number held by three self appointed companies.
What failure? Private prisons funnel tons of dollars straight from the tax payers to the multinational cartels, a single drug bust can ensure you have a large underclass ready for exploitation for everything from booze and smokes to lotto tickets and check cashing places, it helps to keep the population under control while giving a nice excuse to make the police more and more like a military operating on home soil, while also helping to get rid of those pesky little things like the fourth amendment...oh...were you actually thinking it was about stopping drugs? Silly peasant it is about profits for the megacorps, just like everything else.
After all if it was about "The People" then pot would be legal, we wouldn't be fighting three wars while funneling ever more money to Wall Street and the MIC, nobody would touch Medicaid and Medicare, the military would be less than half the size and not building new aircraft carriers and superweapons like we had a war planned with the Ruskies for next Tuesday, but where is the room for massive profits and corruption in that? That is why your "vote" is a choice between "Rich corporate ass kisser in a blue suit" or "Rich corporate ass kisser in a slightly darker blue suit". Any choice that might actually listen to the people would cut into profits! Mustn't have that now, can we?
BTW how's that "Hope and Change" thing working out? Turned out to be nothing but Dubya dipped in chocolate huh? I'm afraid the late Bill Hicks nailed it more than 20 years ago. How sad is it the man has been gone for two decades and if anything his words are even more true now?
You argument would hold water if all the other browsers did that but they don't. Hell even shitastic IE don't bitchslap the living shit out of resources like FF 4. And like I said Chromium based have more things to deal with, like low rights mode, yet they use less resources and NEVER, I repeat NEVER lose responsiveness.
And are you saying FF should have a warning label that says "if you are on a mobile device like netbook/laptop, or on a low resource device like nettop or office machine, please don't use this product as it is unsuitable for purpose"? The VAST MAJORITY of laptops and thin and lights sold today are the sub $500 models, these come with 1-2Gb on average, most single cores or low end duals like Intel Atom and Celeron and AMD Sempron and Neo. You telling me ALL those people should avoid FF like the clap? When they have competition in the form of Chrome and its kin climbing the charts? Sounds like a good way to ensure they don't exist in 3 years my friend.
Like it or not rising prices have made the low end both from a power usage as well as price perspective THE growth market, and I can tell you from experience on the latest Atom and Neo netbooks, which frankly run both Win 7 HP and Dragon just find and are nice and peppy, that FF in its current incarnation is simply unsuitable for purpose. As I said you better make a sandwich if you are launching on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with 2Gb of RAM, which is about double what you are getting out of your average netbook.
But what EXACTLY will that do to us and/or the environment? I really REALLY don't like how this push for everything to be on the cell doesn't seem to have any real long term damage considerations being looked at, it is strictly "LOL need more GHZ for FB LOL!".
It is already beginning to look like colony collapse disorder, which is wiping out beehives all over the place (you know, those things that without crops don't get pollinated and we all starve? yeah those things) are being affected by cells, which may even be the root cause of the collapse (place a cell near the hive, the hive wanders off and doesn't come back. We still don't know for sure why, may have something to do with their internal ability to tell ranges) and here you are talking about 1THz ranges? Maybe, God forbid, people actually wait until they get fucking home to watch YouTube?
See here's the thing: last I heard this was SUPPOSED to be America, a land where unlike the socialist and communist states one was SUPPOSED to have a lovely combination of FREE CHOICE along with PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY...remember that? Tell you what sparky, as a smoker I will be HAPPY to sign an iron clad contract that says that if I get cancer the ONLY thing I will be given is quite cheap morphine so I don't suffer, in return you remove ANY AND ALL TAXES from the product I CHOOSE to use, okay?
But that will NEVER EVER happen, why? Because it wouldn't let state and federal politicians spend like drunken sailors while at the same time telling what you can and can't do. Nanny state types just LOVE that shit. Did you know they are talking now about a sugar and a fat tax? Yep can't let that peasant decide whether or not he wants a coke or a burger now can we? Meanwhile the things they like, like say the imported vodka for their martini, is taxed much lower than cigarettes, huh isn't that funny. You'd almost think alcohol doesn't splatter hundreds of thousands of innocents all over our roads or something.
Take a look sometime at what the tobacco settlement was supposed to be used for and what it actually was sometime, it'll open your eyes. In my state they got pissed that the state next to us was bragging about how nice their trauma center was so we had to top them in a "our trauma is bigger than yours" penis waving. Didn't matter that the trauma center we had worked just fine for our smaller state, it wasn't like it was their money, right? WAKE UP! The smokers are the canaries in the coal mines. The nany staters don't want you to have ANY control of your life! They will add fat, sugar, hell I wouldn't be surprised if they end up taxing the hell out of white bread so you can only have wheat on your sandwich. Nothing gives those in control a bigger stiffie than controlling the lives of the peasants while having more money to blow on bridges to nowhere and payout to their owners...err...I mean "campaign donors".
Yeah that is the other thing that gets to me, what EXACTLY is FF doing that the memory keeps going up even when I'm not touching the thing? What finally got me to switch to Comodo Dragon (Chromium based) over FF 4 was I had just opened my usual tabs on the little nettop I use as a low heat/low power browser at the shop (a little Athlon XP with 2Gb I got off a customer) when I got called away to the phone. One thing led to another and I ended up busy for the better part of the day, and when I finally get back to the machine about 5 hours later FF is slamming the swap so hard I ended up having to do a hard shutdown and the thing is I had JUST opened it when I walked away, and it was only like 5 tabs! WTF?
I really hope they fix this thing, but after so many times being told "FF doesn't have a problem its just you" I'm not holding my breath. I've done the same thing with Dragon and when I've come back the machine has been how I left it, no real memory changes. WTF is FF doing that the memory climbs when you aren't even touching it?
Uhhh...noooo...if you are using a percentage of unused RAM that is ONE thing, having your program suck up RAM like a Bangkok whore and then mercilessly beat the page file like a pimp that hasn't gotten his money is quite another, thanks ever so.
I'm typing this on a 1.8GHz Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM that I use as a nettop. This is roughly equal to what the average netbook is, actually it has 500Mb more RAM that most current netbooks, and what I have found is that while Chromium based like Comodo Dragon make this machine a nice pleasant way to do basic web surfing, YouTube, checking email, etc FF 4 is completely fucking unusable because of the way it bitchslaps the CPU and pounds the living shit out of the RAM.
Let me give an example: If say I am checking my email and a friend sends me a link to a Youtube video in Dragon I can click on that link and while the CPU will spike to say 80% for a few seconds in dragon it quickly drops down to a more reasonable level and most importantly never loses responsiveness so if I decide I don't want to watch said video or want to launch another tab? No problemo says Dragon. Now with FF4, which frankly FF 3 up to the 3.5 branch didn't have any problem with either, just launching a video tab can spike the CPU for up to two minutes where the machine isn't responding to shit. Also when I close a tab in Dragon I can actually look at Anvir task manager running in the taskbar and watch memory usage go down. FF 4? nope you better close that browser if you want any of the gobs of memory we are sucking up buddy! Also I've noticed while Dragon takes up around 150-200Mb on initialization after that it is pretty conservative which each page taking between 50-80Mb whereas FF 4 can quickly suck up over 1Gb of RAM and that bitch ain't giving it back, no sir no how! And it isn't the extensions since I use the exact same two in both, Adblock Plus and ForecastFox and that's it.
So in conclusion while FF 2 had some severe memory leaks there for awhile in FF 3 things seemed to be getting better. The pre 3.5 branch actually didn't constantly slam the CPU and memory, was generally responsive, and one could use it most of the day without watching the page file get an ass kicking. Since the switch to FF 4, now with extra bling, the thing is frankly unusable on anything less than a 3GHz P4 with a couple Gb of RAM and frankly that is inexcusable. This is a fricking browser we are talking about here, not the latest PhotoShop. Considering not only that there is something like 400 MILLION XP machines out there with specs similar to what I've described or even less, but also netbooks and nettops currently being sold with similar or less, having a browser that sucks resources like a fat guy at the all you can eat buffet just isn't acceptable.
I've have always used FF since the old days but now for me and my customers I'm handing out Comodo Dragon. I have to support everything from P4s and Netbook/tops to the latest and greatest and having whole classes of machines that can't do anything but stutter thanks to FF 4 makes it simply unusable for purpose. Personally I hope they fix this, along with supporting low rights mode for modern OSes (really FF devs the feature has only been out now for 5 years and now 2 versions of the OS, time to get on the ball) because I did like the extension framework and some of the GUI elements on FF better than I do the Chromium based. But having a better framework and GUI really doesn't help if you need to go make a sandwich while a page loads thanks to the CPU and RAM beatdown the machines gets.
Actually from the interpretative readings I've read Babylon in this case is referring to a 'great city" of a future kingdom like Babylon was a great city at the time it was written. If you haven't read it recently here is the text, take note of 4-6 and 12-18 and you'll see why my old preacher friend makes the connection.
Especially note the lines "And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication" and what has the US been doing, but flaunting our wealth while doing seriously evil shit all over the world and obviously selling out to the corps, and "And the ten horns which thou saw are ten kings, which have received no kingdom as yet; but receive power as kings one hour with the beast." And what are these ubercorps that rule us like Goldman Sachs, but those with the power of kings yet no kingdom?
The problem with whether you should know what your teacher believes in is many are whacko so yeah, please keep religion out of schools. I know because we pulled my two boys out of public school in the 5th grade because a teacher actually brought her bible into class and gave a 45 minute lecture on "Godless heathens and sodomites" when my two boys where in class. FYI one is Catholic, the other is gay. Yes we could have sued and owned the fucking school (which is what I wanted to do) but at the time my sister was in the last stage of a terminal illness and frankly the rest of the family had too much stress already to deal with that on top.
But in the case of being gay, we aren't talking about "advocating" one way or another, we are talking about teachers actively supporting bashing either by inaction or basically taking the attitude "God hates fags so they get what they deserve". Replace the word gay with black or Jew and see how long this shit would be allowed. Religious bigotry is one of the few openly bigoted stances this country allows anymore, and frankly it really needs to end.
As someone who has a scar on the back of his head and a shoulder that hurts when it rains because of a cop that started with, and I quote "God damned niggers and fucking hippies, I don't know which I hate more" (BTW said "nigger" was a baptist minister I was taking to a revival to raise money for the homeless) I can say the reason why cops want to be able to throw your ass in jail if you dare to take their picture is a hell of a lot of them are roid raged "bullies with badges" that frankly took the job to get off on being absolute fucking pricks.
For a good example of why they want the cameras stopped I'd suggest you watch the largest gang in America and then you tell me what makes the actions in the video ANY different from the large scale intimidation tactics done by the brown shirts and the black shirts in times past? And before anyone says Godwin you watch the video and tell me that isn't large scale intimidation designed to suppress those that the blue shirts consider "undesirable". As I said I still have a scar from being a white person with hair the wrong length associating with a race the blue shirt considered undesirable.
Hey old CPU dude! I used to have one of those in my first "PC" a VIC20. Actually I'd say of the two MSFT is actually like a big old sweaty care bear compared to Apple right now. At least you don't need anybody to approve your app on Windows or WinPhone as far as i know. Meanwhile i'm betting in three years or less you'll see OSX phased out for iOS in laptop form factor, then if you want to use any Apple device it'll be Steve's way or jailbreak and void your warranty. Oh and after the shitpile that was Vista they actually got one right with 7, shocking I know.
But to me this is a perfect example of the difference between the two companies. Even if, lets say for the sake of argument, that Apple already had a similar idea a brewing, if this would have been MSFT they would have simply bought the guy out as the bad publicity isn't worth the hassle not when the guy could have been bought off for less than the interest these guys make in a weekend. Hell MSFT would have thrown him a few bucks, offered him a nice little job, maybe made him an MVP or something, basically they'd have come out looking like nice guys.
Sadly as you have pointed out since Steve got sick the first time Apple has been copying old Bill and his "kill crush destroy!" bad attitude that made MSFT so hated in the 90s. Nobody minds if you end up #1 as long as it doesn't look like you are getting there by stomping on the little guy. MSFT caught hell for this very same shit over Stacker/Doublespace, but notice how many iFanboys come out to apologize for Apple? I guess that thing about Apple users brains and the brains of religious zealots being the same must have some merit, huh? Because be honest, if you replaced the name Apple with MSFT and left every other word the same the hate would be ass deep in here!
The problem is it is too damned predictable and I'll give you some examples: if the game is set in modern times, you will get the MP5, the M16, The AK47, and for a sniper either the 50 or the Draganov. If it is WWII you will get the Garand, the MP40, the 1911, the Tommy gun, the k98. Yawn. All while the entire battlefield just so happens to have chest high walls, you know just for decor. Yawn.
Meanwhile they talk about "realism" yet I can be standing there with a fucking bazooka and I STILL CAN'T BLOW A FUCKING WOODEN DOOR DOWN! WTF? It is the stupid ass "game logic' bullshit that drives me up a damned wall! And surely to god those aren't the only weapons in the history of war, yes? Surely there are other weapons besides the same damned 8 or 9 guns every damned game has, yes?
Frankly I'm just sick of Chestie mcWallhigh and his friends shitty game logic and same weapon loadout. Variety is the spice of fricking life, so model some other damned guns and something besides chest high fricking walls!