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User: somersault

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  1. Re:It all comes down to one question. on Is Net Neutrality Really Needed? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When was the last time that voting in one of two directions actually had much correlation with what any single voter wanted?

    It seems to me more like the two main parties in the US are shaping the people, not the other way round. You can see it whenever someone goes on a long rant demonising "republicans" or "democrats", acting like their "side" is 100% right and everything the opposite side believes is wrong. It's absurd.

    Of course, most humans love to have their thinking done for them, so they just jump on one of the bandwagons and start taking potshots at the other one.

  2. Re:Answers. on Is Net Neutrality Really Needed? · · Score: 1

    (will that get me a +1 Funny?)

    Probably not, but your epic username fail is worth a chuckle :p

  3. Re:The sound I want on Electric Cars May Be Made Noisier By Law · · Score: 1

    How about a Tron lightcycle? :)

  4. Re:The sound I want on Electric Cars May Be Made Noisier By Law · · Score: 1

    Mount it backwards, outside, with a funnel on the mouthpiece. Problem solved.

    Though hopefully you were just trolling rather than being dumb enough to think he was going to blow it himself.

  5. Re:Forget that on Electric Cars May Be Made Noisier By Law · · Score: 1

    The engine in my car is in the middle. At low speeds (and therefore revs), people often don't hear me coming. I had to use my horn briefly the other day to tell a guy to get off the middle of the road (especially dumb of him because the roads are all snowy/slushy right now, so if someone wasn't paying attenion and didn't see him at first, they wouldn't be able to stop in time).

  6. Re:So buy a PS3 on DC Universe Online To Launch January 11th · · Score: 1

    I suppose some people might want to do that, but the point is that with the PC you should be able to use any input system you can buy or even create yourself.

    It's really dumb to say it's better playing on PS3 just because of the controls.

  7. Re:So buy a PS3 on DC Universe Online To Launch January 11th · · Score: 1

    Or, you could just buy a joypad for your PC? I have one somewhere that is very similar to a PS controller.

    Of course I now have a PS3 and no Windows machines, so I know what I'll be doing.

  8. Re:mobile platform on Why Android Is the New Windows · · Score: 1

    A lot of people prefer to have a device that is tailored to their needs than going with a one-size-fits-all solution. Things like having different sized screens, or physical keypads, are important to some people.

  9. Re:Expectation of Privacy on Woman Sues Google Over Street View Shots of Her Underwear · · Score: 1

    Ah, TFA confirms she is mentally ill:

    The suit claims her existing obsessive-compulsive disorder was worsened by the anxiety brought on by the photo, as she feared that everything she was doing throughout the day was being secretly recorded.

    It's a real shame as OCD can be crippling, but I don't think she has any actual grounds to sue Google here.

  10. Re:Expectation of Privacy on Woman Sues Google Over Street View Shots of Her Underwear · · Score: 1

    If she hangs her washing outside, people will see it. The people who live near her have probably seen her laundry already, and nobody is going to go out of their way to visit her just because they saw some underwear on a washing line. It isn't even sexy underwear. Why should a rapist choose her over any of the other millions of women in Japan? It makes no sense.

    It makes me think she must be mentally ill, though it could just be a cultural thing. If she's been a victim of sex crimes in the past, however, her fear is understandable.

    I'm interested now, I'm actually going to RTFA. Though I expect it to be a facepalm moment.

  11. Re:Since its a redirect... on D0z.me — the Evil URL Shortener · · Score: 1

    So spoof it?

  12. Re:Other possibility on PS3 Jailbreak Now Legal In Spain · · Score: 1

    It's as cheap as a netbook, has a blu-ray drive and many media center capabilities, with full HD output, as well as having plenty of graphics capability. You can even get a TV tuner to turn it into a PVR. So yes, I think plenty of people would buy one and be happy with indie and freeware games, or no games at all. I know a couple of people that basically just use theirs for media playback/recording.

    If they also had an open games platform, they'd lose even more games sales and it would make even less sense to sell the console so cheaply (it's not at a loss any more, but there can't be that much profit to justify losing games sales). People are happy with shitty games. Look at the mobile games market. Look at Farmville. Many people who play these things also have a console sitting there that they could be playing instead. My flatmate has spent many hours choosing "O game" (web based) and other crappy games on his iPad rather than play games on his PC, PS3 or Xbox.

    On top of that I got years of use out of games like Quake and Half-Life by modding the hell out of them. I occasionally bought other games, but really I was happy playing Counter-Strike and sampling all the other mods out there. If something like that happened on a console, it would be a disaster for the maker if they're relying on games sales to make a decent profit.

  13. Re:Other possibility on PS3 Jailbreak Now Legal In Spain · · Score: 1

    Gaming skills are the skills you use to do stuff like get trophies without cheating by using someone else's save. I can understand wanting to avoid the grinding in a few games, like GT5 Prologue which had only a couple of tracks I think. With the actual GT5 it would be pretty sad for people to not just enjoy the game and work their way up. If they can't win races with the slower cars, there's no way they will be able to control the more powerful ones properly.

    I love that setup - combined with the ability to upgrade your car, it's what makes Gran Turismo so fun and rewarding. In games where everything is unlocked from the beginning, you get a choice overload and end up not really appreciating any one car because you are so busy trying them all out kind of thing.

    I like that I get rewarded with awesome cars for completing the license tests with all golds etc. For someone who hasn't put the time and effort in to learning how to race, to be driving around in the "GT Academy" version of the GTR V Spec would be pretty sad. There are plenty of cheap and fast cars to be found in the game if you actually know anything about cars, and it's easy to kick ass just by buying better tyres than the opposition, if that's your thing.

  14. Re:DURRRRR on 'Reading Level' Filter Added To Google Search · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hahaha. Soon "Advanced" will be renamed to "Faggy and retarded" to aid comprehension.

  15. Re:Other possibility on PS3 Jailbreak Now Legal In Spain · · Score: 1

    Yeah. After the original guy who designed the PS3 was kicked out, things got ugly. I'm sure that guy who was working on Other OS is just as pissed as the rest of us, if not more..

  16. Re:Other possibility on PS3 Jailbreak Now Legal In Spain · · Score: 1

    The PS3's music interface is very weak I'll give you that. The crippleware on the Linux port was annoying, but understandable. I though it was pretty admirable that it was in there in the first place, it let people tinker with the Cell without voiding their warranty. Worked fine for scientific apps, just not games.

    Freeware/homebrew games? Sure, Sony could do that, but then the actual console would cost up to twice what it does now to be able to make a profit. Then nobody would buy it, and it would flop badly. They were selling the consoles at a loss because they knew they could make money on the games. Sure you'd probably buy some full priced games too, but I think what they've been doing on PSN is pretty decent. There are plenty of good little games up there pretty cheaply, and original PS1 games very cheaply too (so cheap that I bought them again just so that I don't have to use the disc as you say).

    Wear and tear on discs.. not really an issue if you look after them properly. I'd be more worried about the actual drive. My flatmate already had his fail, and I've had issues with drives on PS1 and PS2 as well. Of course any optical drive screws up after a while, but the Sony ones seem particularly bad.

    You can buy some games direct on PSN too so you won't need the discs for that. But while there are some users that don't have an internet connection in the world, I don't see them letting people play games without the discs. Otherwise anyone who never plays online could just copy the game to their machine and then give the game to their friend who does the same thing, rinse and repeat.

    Now, maybe you don't agree with copyright in general, but it's a separate issue. I don't agree with DRM where it's so restrictive that it stops you from enjoying your own games in valid use, but I find the idea that people pay for their own copies of a game to be perfectly acceptable, and putting in the disc is the only way that doesn't get too much in the way. Otherwise everyone would have to authorise each game online when they buy it, and type in a validation code. People hate that. I hate that. I don't like putting in discs either (I used to just NoCD crack my games on PC), but it's better than that.

    Completely agree about the copy protected saves, it's moronic. GT5 corrupted my save game recently after I put a lot of work into golding something like 54/60 of the license tests. I now have to back up the whole system regularly because it won't let me just copy the save game itself (I suppose probably because so many people distributed a fully unlocked save of GT5 Prologue). I'm not even sure it'll restore that save game to a different PS3 if the whole console got fried (which my last one did a couple of months ago). There's no reason to copy protect saves. If some people want to skip 95% of a game's content, let them. It's their own money they're wasting, and their gaming skills will stay poor forever.

  17. Re:It's not about "convergence". The cloud is dyin on Gmail Creator Says Chrome OS Is As Good As Dead · · Score: 1

    Definitely Perl is more flexible, but I remember writing a script to do something before, then discovering I could have done the same thing with a couple of standard utilities. Though I found using xargs to try to do some batch processing really awkward before. I think I ended up just finding an app that had some better options for batch processing of images rather than trying to use a script that piped a whole set of results into an image processing app one at a time..

  18. Re:Other possibility on PS3 Jailbreak Now Legal In Spain · · Score: 4, Informative

    GeoHot. And then he gave up with actually enabling it again, with a total net result of.. losing Other OS. What a douche.

  19. Re:Pressing Questions on PS3 Jailbreak Now Legal In Spain · · Score: 1

    Nintendo also try to stop hackers getting into Wiis by issuing regular updates. Admittedly they didn't have a Linux feature which they later removed though.

    You forgot Intel btw. I'm against buying from them where possible at the moment.

    I eventually gave in and bought an Xbox 360 recently though. The hardware is getting pretty reliable, and Xbox Live is generally better than PSN (plus a lot of my friends can't afford PS3s, and I want to play online with them).

  20. Re:Other possibility on PS3 Jailbreak Now Legal In Spain · · Score: 3, Informative

    Re-enabling the "other os" feature should be low on this list.

    Personally I think it's the only thing that should be on the list, otherwise it just legitimises Sony's claims that they did it to stop piracy. I don't want people pirating games, and I really don't want to be playing against cheaters. I did however like that I could run Linux on my PS3 if I wanted. I tried it when it first came out and it sucked, and when I started hearing that it was much improved in the latest versions, that's around the time they removed the feature. I wasn't impressed. I already have Linux on my netbook though, so overall it doesn't matter to me too much.

  21. Re:I beg to differ on Gmail Creator Says Chrome OS Is As Good As Dead · · Score: 1

    Yeah it doesn't sound like you have much experience with this kind of thing.

    What do you mean by "crashes"? Blue screen? The whole system freezes? Certain apps popping up error reports?

    It may very well be a hardware error, or driver issue since I think Safe Mode just uses generic drivers where possible. Also if you've been plugging in any new devices recently that could obviously cause issues. One employee here had issues just from using a USB mouse.

    I agree that web apps have many benefits, and it's much easier to only have to bugfix your app in one location rather than push fixes out to all clients.

  22. Re:It's not about "convergence". The cloud is dyin on Gmail Creator Says Chrome OS Is As Good As Dead · · Score: 1

    Seems it isn't so bad that I didn't bother with RoR and all that other new stuff when I started writing web apps 4-5 years ago. I decided to use Perl. It's fine for web apps, and also handy when you need to do local scripts too. It's also standard on most Linux installs which is nice. Though probably if I learned a bit of bash scripting I could do the same batch processing stuff with even less effort using standard UNIXy utilities.

    Sounds like I should have a look at Lisp sometime :) though really the days when I coded just for fun in my spare time are gone now, and there's no point rewriting the code base I've built up in some other language (yet).

  23. Re:What is the point on Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Need New Respect · · Score: 1

    Yeah I've seen a video of it before, looked a lot of fun. I've yet to try it with the guys I do Parkour with :)

    Well, I maybe am not remembering it all but I think Wii Sports is:

    Tennis: Your character moves around automatically, but the timing and power of your shots is pretty important. If you get two good players against each other it is pretty competitive.

    Baseball: seems this is a little flawed as when I was playing it, if I do a certain throw each time I can pretty much make it impossible for the other person to hit the ball. There's a lot of variation you can do in the pitches and swing angles/speed etc tho.

    Golf: I just found this bloody difficult to judge the swings, maybe it's better with MotionPlus

    Bowling: Again there's a lot you can do with spin etc, it's pretty similar to real bowling, but without the weight obviously.

    Boxing: Again it's a relatively simple game, but you can do hooks, jabs, dodge sideways/back etc.. another one that I felt was let down by the controls, again might be better with MotionPlus. I can imagine could be pretty tactical if you get good at it.

    Sorry, just when people make broad sweeping statements I like to try to point out the exceptions. There's some stuff in Wii Sports and Wii Fit that is enjoyable even for hardcore gamers, I got pretty serious about the bubble racing and kept going til I 5 starred the courses :p

    I've now got all gold in the GT5 license tests, and actually acing some of the Wii Fit stuff was more frustrating than half of the license tests!

  24. Re:What is the point on Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Need New Respect · · Score: 1

    Hardcore tag? Do you mean like Parkour tag or something?

    I don't think you've played much Wii sports if you can't imagine it being hardcore - in single player it's maybe pretty easy, but in multiplayer the level of gaming depends on the attitude and skill of the players. The gameplay is pretty simple in a lot of the games, but so is something like Tetris. The challenge where you have to get as many bounces off the wall as you can in Tennis takes a lot of skill, and my sisters got pretty competitive with it. I found it difficult to get anywhere near their scores.

  25. Re:What is the point on Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Need New Respect · · Score: 1

    Yeah I haven't watched any of the Mortal Kombat or Streetfighter movies yet, they did look a little awful. I saw Dead or Alive cheap and got it.. decent action I suppose, though obviously nothing amazing on the plot front.

    I forgot to mention the Resident Evil movies above, I think they're very good.

    The Pokemon series was pretty decent I suppose, it did get me to try the game on a GB emulator and I spent over 100 hours playing it :P (I did buy an actual Pokemon GBA cartridge later on for my DS, for those who are annoyed at the blatant piracy)