I'm not sure why you think those countries take care of people. Better examples would be Finland, or Norway, or to a lesser extent the UK. FWIW, I am looking to move to one of those places as soon as it becomes financially feasible for me to do so. It sounds like your knowledge of living standards worldwide is either 60 years out of date, or willfully ignorant.
Lol, spoilers... we all knew Aeris Dies WAY before we knew that Dumbledore Dies. Although I guess there are some players young enough not to know either.
I'm actually alt-tabbed out of the new AA as I type this. I assume you've played it so I won't go into details of how it sucks. What I will say is that it seems like the old AA players have left for games like Arma... I've not played it personally, and it's not free, but could be worth checking out.
Did they ever bring out more guns or maps in AA3? I played around 2012 and remember it being a decent game, but getting so bored of playing on the same three maps with the same three guns over and over. Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on with the franchise... they keep putting out beta games that are stuck in development hell then just giving up on those and starting on a newer, crappier version from scratch.
Shenmue was pretty big around 2000, or whatever year it came out. It was hyped as being one of the reasons to get a Dreamcast. IIRC, it was eventually ported to Xbox a few years later, but games were advancing quickly in those days and it no longer held as much weight by that time.
There's this insinuation in your post that casual games don't exist anymore. Really, in recent years, games have moved in a decidedly casual direction. Even developers and series that were reliably "hardcore" - BioWare, Elder Scrolls - are watering things down so that the games can be played in smaller chunks. Those games are still probably outside of your parameters, but ever hear of say Angry Birds? I realize that one's a few years old already, but I don't have a smartphone or a Facebook account, so I'm not up to date on the latest. But that certainly seems to be where a lot of today's hyper-casual games are. There's also the Wii (or "Wii U", I think that's their new console). Nintendo probably can't compete with the phone/web games on cost, but they do seem to be gunning successfully for the "aging cost-conscious casual gamer" market.
Honestly, it seems like the whole industry is bending over backwards to serve gamers that want the hit-it-and-quit-it experience. If you're not finding it, it's because you're not looking. "Looking" might even be too much for the Wii or phone platforms, pick a game at random there and it's likely to be casual.
Re:Say Good By to the Rainforests ....
on
FDA Bans Trans Fat
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· Score: 1
Seems pretty religious to me. The ethical arguments all boil down to the axiomatic belief that human and animal consciousness should be valued equally, which might not seem as ludicrous as it is at first glance. But that assumption raises questions like: What makes it OK to keep pets in any kind of confinement? Why shouldn't animals have the same legal rights (and obligations) as people? These questions should get you to see how ridiculous it, is depending on how for gone you are... There was actually an animal rights group, I believe in Europe, trying to get a chimpanzee declared a legal person... If you're on that level you're beyond hope. But to me it seems like most vegans just heard some famous guy talking about it, or read a hipstery blog - and the emotional ploy worked, and the future vegan thought, "Hey that sounds like a good idea..." Then you have the various spotty economic and nutritional justifications for veganism, hastily cobbled together to support the emotional conviction. It's 4:30 am so I won't go through all those, but they're mountains made from molehills, and they've got all the holes and tensile strength of a block of Swiss cheese.
Now the part that tends to draw drive-by vegan bashing like in the GP's post is the smugness that lots of vegans have. That's a characteristic they share with other fad dieters. These days your diet is like some kind of fashion statement. "Is veganism too hippie and effeminite for your no-nonsene Libertarian lifestyle? The Paleo diet is for you!" "Like exercising but need more variety than a caveman? Try our low-carb gluten-free menu"... The field of nutritional science, at least as it gets reported on/discussed by the general public, has become so filled with this garbage that I've been led to mostly just tune it out. When the discourse becomes this overgrown with emotional appeals and politicking, the truth gets stifled.
Apparently they don't have DSL either, since the article is about "broadband's arrival." TV is definitely something they can cut out though. There's more than enough video entertainment/edutainment on YouTube et al. to completely replace, even exceed, what's available on TV.
At the last call center I worked at, that would get you directed to the byzantine cancellation form on the web site. If you complained hard enough, it would maybe get you transferred to someone in the billing or "retention" department where you'd get to start a whole new runaround (notice how it's the "retention" department, not the "cancellation" department). What it would not do is get you to any kind of higher level tech support or get your issue resolved more quickly.
Generally they will have someone there with the skills to resolve your issue. They may or may not be available on the phone when you call (or available on the phone at all). You have to navigate the service providers' bureaucracy in order to get to them. There is no shortcut, there is no magic word - at least none that will work consistently across different providers. The system is designed for them to feed you BS. Trying to reverse that will be futile at best, and might just convolute the process further.
Maybe they were doing it to earn brownie points with other US gov parties - military guys, other intel agencies, politicians. I can think of reasons they would all want to get to Kaspersky, so the only reason the NSA needs is that they want to stay on all those parties' good side. Internal cooperation is needed to keep the whole US gov system working. The NSA can't put troops on the ground and the Army doesn't have some of the NSA's spying capabilities - they need eachother to keep the whole thing afloat. (How's that for "checks and balances"?)
"There’s a lot of projects, a lot of needs in the district, so there’s other priorities we have to put in place ahead of this,” Hopkins said. “This system is still running."
TFA doesn't give any particular timeline, but it sounds like they are betting on it running for a few more years.
As for the need to overhaul the system eventually, reasons might be something like: Scarcity of parts increasing, parts and labor for working on this crufty system being outside of their established maintenance and IT contracts (meaning extra delays and extra cost when something finally does break.) Going without heat for weeks while they find+hire someone who can debug assembly on an Amiga might not be acceptable. The computer system communicates with the hardware by RF - probably without any kind of encryption. The same frequency bands are used by maintenance walkie-talkies, and TFA mentions the maintenance guys having to work around that by "OK, Nobody use the radios for the next 15 minutes so that we don't interfere with the HVAC system." All this sounds pretty compelling to me. My guess is that the $1.5m - $2m cost cited is for a complete overhaul of the district's climate systems, not just to replace the Amigas. If the rest of the system is as old as the computers, there's probably a lot that needs replacing. At that point, building a cathedral of cruft around an Amiga on life support will be the thing they have no compelling reason to do.
"Working together" implies some kind of active collaboration between the two. Holding stock, however, does not always imply that sort of collaboration. Perhaps the reason you're not sure what they've collaborated on is because they haven't collaborated on anything? You seem very eager to make a connection between MS and FB. If you can actually come up with even a couple of examples from this "long history", everyone will come out of this discussion better-educated.
Morrowind was the last game Bethesda made with a non-crappy leveling system. It's an awesome game too, certainly within the top 5 RPGs of all time. It's definitely worth checking out if you like the Bethesda-style open world but don't like how dumbed down the leveling system of their newer games is. All the hand-holding BS from the newer games is absent. Morrowind is pretty much the full realization of the type of game they're going for - the other games are watered down versions of it. There seem to only be 2 complaints people have with it, which is the graphics look like they're from 1998 and the combat system isn't actiony enough for them - like the game considers hits or misses based on your character's skill levels, not whether the polygons of your sword and the enemy visually collide. People who are used to Skyrim will be like "This game sucks it's not registering any of my hits!" No, your character sucks, you have no points in the Long Blade skill.
I'll double up the recommendation of NoScript. In addition to what it actually does, it gives you quite a bit of information that's really an eye opener. There's hardly a web site out there these days that doesn't run scripts from at least a half-dozen domains. Some of them are up to 20. It's almost never more than 1 or 2 of the domains which actually belong to the owners of the site, the rest are third parties. Your data is getting spread far and wide each pageload.
Initially I thought it'd be too much of a hassle to use, but it really isn't. The majority of time I spend on the internet is visiting a dozen or so sites, I had all the necessary domains whitelisted for those on the first day. As for random sites, a lot of them don't need scripts to run for your average visit - most news sites, for example, will load the article text without any scripts running on the page. Occasionally they will have a "picture gallery"-type section that you'll want to look at where scripts are needed to scroll through the pictures, but it never takes more than a minute to determine which domain needs to be whitelisted for that. If you're feeling lazy you can "Temporarily allow all" scripts on the page which never fails. Sometimes I do that, remembering to clear the temporary permissions every couple days.
Does anyone know if there is an equivalently functional NoScript plugin for Chrome? Emphasis on equivalent - I don't want it to be like Adblock where it's a lesser version of the FF plugin. There's been a few plugins that keep me on Firefox, and NoScript is one of the big ones, but I'm really getting tired of the memory leaks, among other things...
70s? Shit... I grew up in the late 90s, and everyone played Pac-Man. My parents, who grew up in the 50s, also played Pac-Man at some point... I mean, I didn't ever see them, but they mentioned it and certainly knew what it was.
Really I think that part of the issue is they have no guidelines or limitations on the nominations. With the Rock & Roll hall of fame, there is a rule that a band or performer has to have released its first music at least 25 years ago to be nominated. The time aspect is important, it helps you recognize which releases are truly important and influential, and which ones are catchy but short-lived. The reason this game inductees list looks weird is that it's got WoW listed next to Pong and Tetris. Give it another decade, and it won't be so weird to see WoW in there. IMO they shouldn't be considering anything newer than the 90s for a few years.
That didn't stop them from nominating Kraftwerk. (Or for that matter, N.W.A., the Beastie Boys, and a bunch of other nominees and indeed inductees that are not rock.)
Have you tried downloading any music recently? The average music torrent out there is *way* better than it was 10 years ago in terms of encode quality and the tags being correct. There's still some messed up torrents out there, but not many. It's about on par with CDDB which you'd use when ripping a CD yourself - either that or tag everything manually. That goes for random music torrents on the Pirate Bay. There are several other large music-oriented trackers that actually require correct tags, and enforce the rule. I think I've found maybe one or two torrents there out of 970 downloaded (just checked) that weren't properly tagged. You can also usually get FLACs which actually makes it preferable to Amazon to me. There's also some rarities that aren't available online in any format, legally.
I recently had someone explain it to me as "Well, when I was growing up I'd watch my friend play video games but I didn't really like playing them so much myself"... I still don't get it.
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I'm not sure why you think those countries take care of people. Better examples would be Finland, or Norway, or to a lesser extent the UK. FWIW, I am looking to move to one of those places as soon as it becomes financially feasible for me to do so. It sounds like your knowledge of living standards worldwide is either 60 years out of date, or willfully ignorant.
Lol, spoilers... we all knew Aeris Dies WAY before we knew that Dumbledore Dies. Although I guess there are some players young enough not to know either.
I'm actually alt-tabbed out of the new AA as I type this. I assume you've played it so I won't go into details of how it sucks. What I will say is that it seems like the old AA players have left for games like Arma... I've not played it personally, and it's not free, but could be worth checking out.
Did they ever bring out more guns or maps in AA3? I played around 2012 and remember it being a decent game, but getting so bored of playing on the same three maps with the same three guns over and over. Sometimes I wonder what the hell is going on with the franchise... they keep putting out beta games that are stuck in development hell then just giving up on those and starting on a newer, crappier version from scratch.
Shenmue was pretty big around 2000, or whatever year it came out. It was hyped as being one of the reasons to get a Dreamcast. IIRC, it was eventually ported to Xbox a few years later, but games were advancing quickly in those days and it no longer held as much weight by that time.
If Peter robbed Paul first, it seems fine by me.
There's this insinuation in your post that casual games don't exist anymore. Really, in recent years, games have moved in a decidedly casual direction. Even developers and series that were reliably "hardcore" - BioWare, Elder Scrolls - are watering things down so that the games can be played in smaller chunks.
Those games are still probably outside of your parameters, but ever hear of say Angry Birds? I realize that one's a few years old already, but I don't have a smartphone or a Facebook account, so I'm not up to date on the latest. But that certainly seems to be where a lot of today's hyper-casual games are. There's also the Wii (or "Wii U", I think that's their new console). Nintendo probably can't compete with the phone/web games on cost, but they do seem to be gunning successfully for the "aging cost-conscious casual gamer" market.
Honestly, it seems like the whole industry is bending over backwards to serve gamers that want the hit-it-and-quit-it experience. If you're not finding it, it's because you're not looking. "Looking" might even be too much for the Wii or phone platforms, pick a game at random there and it's likely to be casual.
Seems pretty religious to me. The ethical arguments all boil down to the axiomatic belief that human and animal consciousness should be valued equally, which might not seem as ludicrous as it is at first glance. But that assumption raises questions like: What makes it OK to keep pets in any kind of confinement? Why shouldn't animals have the same legal rights (and obligations) as people? These questions should get you to see how ridiculous it, is depending on how for gone you are... There was actually an animal rights group, I believe in Europe, trying to get a chimpanzee declared a legal person... If you're on that level you're beyond hope. But to me it seems like most vegans just heard some famous guy talking about it, or read a hipstery blog - and the emotional ploy worked, and the future vegan thought, "Hey that sounds like a good idea..." Then you have the various spotty economic and nutritional justifications for veganism, hastily cobbled together to support the emotional conviction. It's 4:30 am so I won't go through all those, but they're mountains made from molehills, and they've got all the holes and tensile strength of a block of Swiss cheese.
Now the part that tends to draw drive-by vegan bashing like in the GP's post is the smugness that lots of vegans have. That's a characteristic they share with other fad dieters. These days your diet is like some kind of fashion statement. "Is veganism too hippie and effeminite for your no-nonsene Libertarian lifestyle? The Paleo diet is for you!" "Like exercising but need more variety than a caveman? Try our low-carb gluten-free menu"... The field of nutritional science, at least as it gets reported on/discussed by the general public, has become so filled with this garbage that I've been led to mostly just tune it out. When the discourse becomes this overgrown with emotional appeals and politicking, the truth gets stifled.
Apparently they don't have DSL either, since the article is about "broadband's arrival." TV is definitely something they can cut out though. There's more than enough video entertainment/edutainment on YouTube et al. to completely replace, even exceed, what's available on TV.
At the last call center I worked at, that would get you directed to the byzantine cancellation form on the web site. If you complained hard enough, it would maybe get you transferred to someone in the billing or "retention" department where you'd get to start a whole new runaround (notice how it's the "retention" department, not the "cancellation" department). What it would not do is get you to any kind of higher level tech support or get your issue resolved more quickly.
Generally they will have someone there with the skills to resolve your issue. They may or may not be available on the phone when you call (or available on the phone at all). You have to navigate the service providers' bureaucracy in order to get to them. There is no shortcut, there is no magic word - at least none that will work consistently across different providers. The system is designed for them to feed you BS. Trying to reverse that will be futile at best, and might just convolute the process further.
Maybe they were doing it to earn brownie points with other US gov parties - military guys, other intel agencies, politicians. I can think of reasons they would all want to get to Kaspersky, so the only reason the NSA needs is that they want to stay on all those parties' good side. Internal cooperation is needed to keep the whole US gov system working. The NSA can't put troops on the ground and the Army doesn't have some of the NSA's spying capabilities - they need eachother to keep the whole thing afloat. (How's that for "checks and balances"?)
"There’s a lot of projects, a lot of needs in the district, so there’s other priorities we have to put in place ahead of this,” Hopkins said. “This system is still running."
TFA doesn't give any particular timeline, but it sounds like they are betting on it running for a few more years.
As for the need to overhaul the system eventually, reasons might be something like: Scarcity of parts increasing, parts and labor for working on this crufty system being outside of their established maintenance and IT contracts (meaning extra delays and extra cost when something finally does break.) Going without heat for weeks while they find+hire someone who can debug assembly on an Amiga might not be acceptable. The computer system communicates with the hardware by RF - probably without any kind of encryption. The same frequency bands are used by maintenance walkie-talkies, and TFA mentions the maintenance guys having to work around that by "OK, Nobody use the radios for the next 15 minutes so that we don't interfere with the HVAC system." All this sounds pretty compelling to me.
My guess is that the $1.5m - $2m cost cited is for a complete overhaul of the district's climate systems, not just to replace the Amigas. If the rest of the system is as old as the computers, there's probably a lot that needs replacing. At that point, building a cathedral of cruft around an Amiga on life support will be the thing they have no compelling reason to do.
"Working together" implies some kind of active collaboration between the two. Holding stock, however, does not always imply that sort of collaboration. Perhaps the reason you're not sure what they've collaborated on is because they haven't collaborated on anything? You seem very eager to make a connection between MS and FB. If you can actually come up with even a couple of examples from this "long history", everyone will come out of this discussion better-educated.
Shit, they'll give you more than the Ask toolbar...
The McAffee thing is still in Flash as of yesterday (I installed it accidentally.) Not sure if it is or was ever in Java.
Is the US gov. still a thing?
And the business, in turn, isn't legally required to serve you, as far as I know.
Morrowind was the last game Bethesda made with a non-crappy leveling system. It's an awesome game too, certainly within the top 5 RPGs of all time. It's definitely worth checking out if you like the Bethesda-style open world but don't like how dumbed down the leveling system of their newer games is. All the hand-holding BS from the newer games is absent. Morrowind is pretty much the full realization of the type of game they're going for - the other games are watered down versions of it. There seem to only be 2 complaints people have with it, which is the graphics look like they're from 1998 and the combat system isn't actiony enough for them - like the game considers hits or misses based on your character's skill levels, not whether the polygons of your sword and the enemy visually collide. People who are used to Skyrim will be like "This game sucks it's not registering any of my hits!" No, your character sucks, you have no points in the Long Blade skill.
I'll double up the recommendation of NoScript. In addition to what it actually does, it gives you quite a bit of information that's really an eye opener. There's hardly a web site out there these days that doesn't run scripts from at least a half-dozen domains. Some of them are up to 20. It's almost never more than 1 or 2 of the domains which actually belong to the owners of the site, the rest are third parties. Your data is getting spread far and wide each pageload.
Initially I thought it'd be too much of a hassle to use, but it really isn't. The majority of time I spend on the internet is visiting a dozen or so sites, I had all the necessary domains whitelisted for those on the first day. As for random sites, a lot of them don't need scripts to run for your average visit - most news sites, for example, will load the article text without any scripts running on the page. Occasionally they will have a "picture gallery"-type section that you'll want to look at where scripts are needed to scroll through the pictures, but it never takes more than a minute to determine which domain needs to be whitelisted for that. If you're feeling lazy you can "Temporarily allow all" scripts on the page which never fails. Sometimes I do that, remembering to clear the temporary permissions every couple days.
Does anyone know if there is an equivalently functional NoScript plugin for Chrome? Emphasis on equivalent - I don't want it to be like Adblock where it's a lesser version of the FF plugin. There's been a few plugins that keep me on Firefox, and NoScript is one of the big ones, but I'm really getting tired of the memory leaks, among other things...
70s? Shit... I grew up in the late 90s, and everyone played Pac-Man. My parents, who grew up in the 50s, also played Pac-Man at some point... I mean, I didn't ever see them, but they mentioned it and certainly knew what it was.
Really I think that part of the issue is they have no guidelines or limitations on the nominations. With the Rock & Roll hall of fame, there is a rule that a band or performer has to have released its first music at least 25 years ago to be nominated. The time aspect is important, it helps you recognize which releases are truly important and influential, and which ones are catchy but short-lived. The reason this game inductees list looks weird is that it's got WoW listed next to Pong and Tetris. Give it another decade, and it won't be so weird to see WoW in there. IMO they shouldn't be considering anything newer than the 90s for a few years.
That didn't stop them from nominating Kraftwerk. (Or for that matter, N.W.A., the Beastie Boys, and a bunch of other nominees and indeed inductees that are not rock.)
They're just following in the footsteps of the Rock and Roll hall of fame... this year, Green Day was picked over Kraftwerk to be inducted. Nuff said
Have you tried downloading any music recently? The average music torrent out there is *way* better than it was 10 years ago in terms of encode quality and the tags being correct. There's still some messed up torrents out there, but not many. It's about on par with CDDB which you'd use when ripping a CD yourself - either that or tag everything manually. That goes for random music torrents on the Pirate Bay. There are several other large music-oriented trackers that actually require correct tags, and enforce the rule. I think I've found maybe one or two torrents there out of 970 downloaded (just checked) that weren't properly tagged. You can also usually get FLACs which actually makes it preferable to Amazon to me. There's also some rarities that aren't available online in any format, legally.
I recently had someone explain it to me as "Well, when I was growing up I'd watch my friend play video games but I didn't really like playing them so much myself"... I still don't get it.
Is this what space exploration has been reduced to?