I suspect it has less to do with fear of rogue generals illegally declaring war against other countries as it does with generals illegally declaring war against their own commander in chief.
Surely no one understands better than Pervez Musharfaf that generals don't always voluntarily obey their President.
Am I alone here? I honestly have never clicked a Google ad, and I've used Google exclusively for searches since it first grew in popularity. I also use GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and occasionally use my iGoogle homepage and the Google Reader. I've downloaded Google Pack (to get StarOffice 8 for free), but I've never actually clicked one of those fancy targeted ads.
I don't avoid the ads on purpose, and I'm not one of those people who routinely argues "ads don't work on me!". I'm fully aware of the power of advertising, and my own susceptibility to a very convincing advertisement - I've clicked plenty on nytimes.com.
Honestly, the GMail ads are never relevant. Perhaps it's because I'm in academia and not the business world, but they just seem like desperate attempts to find something in my life that Google can market to.
Given this, I find it hard to believe that a small thing like 1% of users using "I feel lucky" occasionally actually has much of an opportunity cost for Google. Instead, I suspect it's one of those cute Google-y things that make so many of us web users so loyal to Google.
One of the things I've always admired about his writing is his willingness to talk about his kids. On the internet. With... people. Despite the obvious problems that could cause,... Am I missing something? What's so problematic about discussing your children on the internet? Everyone with kids does it.
It's a compelling idea, but what metric would be used to determine if a form of life arose independently? Wouldn't this suffer from the same problem as proving "Intelligent Design" - there is no metric for determining whether something is too complex to have arisen naturally, or too different to by related to known lifeforms. From TFA itself, life as we know it has been found everywhere on the globe, in radically different conditions than ours, which to me suggests that the related lifeforms on earth not only come in a huge variety of forms, but also will probably dominate any system they are in, including the hardest-to-reach ones that we can think of.
It raises an interesting question, however: if life can start, then it can have started more than once. In terms of probability, does this also mean that is has probably started more than once? And if life can start and stop, then does this also mean that life has probably started and stopped?
The one feature that really floored me is that you can browse ZIP files ONLINE! That's just novel! It's hidden though (most users would rather a ZIP file download than a directory listing pop up when they click it) and you access it by prepending "jar:" to the url and appending "!/" to the end. Try it! You're still downloading the.zip before you view its contents, aren't you? Actually browsing the contents of a.zip on-line would require server-side decompression; instead I'm guessing that Firefox is downloading the.zip into memory, uncompressing it (internally, or does it launch an external app?) and displaying the file names of the uncompressed files in your browser window (hyperlinked to "download" their contents to your default download directory).
It sounds like it could be convenient in the right context.
Can someone explain how this compares to the original recording?
It compares to the individual recording in the same way that the compressed contents of a.zip compare to the uncompressed contents.
Like a.zip, it takes more processing power to access its contents in real time - it must be decoded into PCM data in order to be played - but all the information is there. Of course, the compression ratio pales to that of lossy codecs (like MP3), but with good equipment and the right song you can notice a difference - I didn't believe it until I listened to some jazz Vorbis files over an M-Audio 5.1 Revolution card with Sennheiser HD 540 Open-Aire headphones (neither of which are expensive enough to be truly "audiophile"), and I noticed some distortion in the high frequency sounds. Playing the same song from the original CD was significantly better, and I assume that playing a FLAC (or Apple or MS equivalent) would sound near identical.
Content providers need to be responsible for the content of the ads posted on their sites - that's a given. TFA indicates that these content providers (the people behind NHL.com, for example) simply received payment for these ads via credit card or wire transfer and then posted the content.
If these sites used a network television model, they would have intimate relationships with the advertisers and would work together to provide less offensive and more effective ads. I don't think they need to go that far (network television ads are far from perfect, although they are quite effective), but clearly MLB.com and NHL.com need to be held responsible for the content on their sites, and hopefully this will encourage better cooperation between site hosts and advertisers.
the companies who would like to see their ad in myspace would pale in comparison to the ones that would put their ads on wsj. if they had done it long ago, they would have dwarfed that $50 mil buck a month for long now.
I'm not sure about this.
AFAIK, everyone with money who reads newspapers for business news already has a WSJ subscription, and the majority of these readers probably prefer to read the print copy. Those who are interested in business news, but who don't have a subscription or are put off by the yearly access fee to on-line content probably aren't the target consumer for the ads that will appear.
I don't know the numbers, it's just a hunch. I think the penetration of WSJ in the households of the wealthy is much greater than the NYT, which therefore benefits from facilitating access to its content.
Tossing away the subscription model at a time when there is a rise in adblocking software doesn't necessarily seem like a smart move to me, but perhaps WSJ revenue isn't the primary motivation in this move, which will undoubtedly grow WSJ's readership.
I didn't RTFA, but I'd wager that the main reason this is marketed to the "adult" class of consumers and not "parents" (I realize the latter is usually a subclass of the former) is because a parent looking for an educational DVD will be disappointed in early seasons of Sesame Street. Young children, accustomed to the superior production values of the current PBS Kids shows (some are quite good - Curious George, for example) might find the badly aging episodes dull, and parents might find the content infantile.
This is a way for public television to make money from the School House Rock set, not the young families graduating from Baby Einstein.
This method does seem much more practical for human communication through such a device.
I don't think communication through this device would be very successful for a few reasons:
If you don't have a nerve or muscle disorder affecting articulation, this will require you to speak out loud, unless you can be trained to accurately pre-plan motor movements using covert speech.
If you are speaking out loud, why not use a mic? It will pick up a much higher percentage of speech sounds than this device.
This doesn't get around the problem of machine translation of speech - in fact, it would be much harder to accurately recognize speech if you could only process 80% of the acoustic signal (depending on how this value was obtained).
This seems like a promising way to improve articulation for individuals with certain muscle or nerve disorders - which is fantastic - but for the rest of us it's not directly applicable.
Thanks, that's quite helpful. I could find no details about this on my own, lacking a New Scientist subscription.
He isn't "imagining" these sounds - he's trying to produce them. I suspect they've tapped into the motor cortex, where one of the last stages of motor processing. They're not tapping into "speech" centers - it's simply a motor area associated with articulatory muscles.
Not that it isn't impressive, but it's not a step towards mind-reading or better computer-human interfaces unless you suffer from a muscle- or nerve-based speech disorder. We've understood to specific relationships between regions of the motor cortex and muscles in the body for quite some time. Actual language centers are far more mysterious.
I think rumors of its DRMed death are grossly exaggerated. From the review, it looks like it will not only play DRM-free files, but you can also purchase a slew of DRM-free songs at whatever on-line service it (strongly) encourages you to use. There appear to be annoyances (you can't store DRMed video on it? that makes no sense - I'm assuming that's the reviewer's mistake. Likely you can't store DRMed video that the Zune application can't find a license for), but none of them are a deal breaker for someone who just wants to rip CDs or buy songs/videos on a website and play them on their portable player, which I'm assuming is the majority of the portable music/video player market. I also suspect you can easily put copyrighted, DRM-free video and music files downloaded via BitTorrent on it with ease - at least the same amount of ease as you have with the iPod.
Leave you car at home, ride a bike to go to work, visit your friends
And if I work, like most people, more than a 15 minute drive from my house, I should bike for an hour each way? In the heat of Arizona or Southern California, so I can arrive at work dripping sweat and smelling terrible? Or in the freezing cold of most Midwest or Northeastern seasons?
Dont use escalators or elevators
So I should run up 4 or 5 flights of stairs a few times a day? And when my co-workers or boss - usually I only go up or down stairs to go talk to someone - stare at me funnily while I'm wheezing and coughing at them, what then? I realize this is minor, and I do take the stairs - four flights at my old job - but I didn't lose any weight, and, while I'm in fairly good shape, I was doing a lot of heavy breathing which was slightly embarrassing.
Run a few blocks in the morning or evening
It's dark before I go to work, and it's dark after I go to work. Is it really more healthy to go around running outside in the dark than it is to stay inside? Are there any statistics showing that the marginal health benefits I get from dropping 10 pounds - which is about all you can expect from exercise unless you are quite obese - outweigh the increased risk I will face every day of getting hit by a car or mugged?
Get a hobby that does not involve sitting in front of a tv or monitor
I don't really get much exercise reading or listening to LPs or even playing my guitar. What hobby should I take up -
wakeboarding? hunting?
Sorry, it's just not that easy.
Call me a romantic, but if the sight of an emotionally distant, overweight gamer bouncing his legs up and down under his desk isn't enough to get the old flame rekindled, what is?
... many (I won't say most) gamers that I know or talk to agree that these are just rehashes of more of the same, and the quality invariably declines with each iteration.
Yet, for similarly braindead reasons, developers of these amazing, cult-following sorts of titles steadfastly refuse to make sequels to their games even when millions of people all over the globe are clamoring for them. I think you've answered your own question. If quality predictably declines, then the cult status of these games will predictably decline. In order to maintain quality and excitement, you have to be innovative. Silent Hill, for example, was a cult hit; it was followed by Silent Hill 2, which likewise succeeded as a cult hit because it reinvented itself as a psychological thriller in what can be described as a new setting. However, Silent Hill 3 was far from innovative (it is a direct sequel to SH1) - at some point it becomes extremely difficult to be both creative and work within the framework of an extant franchise. SH4, IMHO, was a very innovative game, but was not originally designed as a SH game, and ultimately fails to fit well within the Silent Hill framework, leading to disappointed fans. Overall, I'd say that the cult status of the Silent Hill series has taken a hit from the 2 most recent disappointing titles (not to mention the terrible film). It's also important to note that aside from Akira Yamoaka, none of the original Silent Hill developers worked on the later sequels.
The developers of original games like doing original things. While there is nothing wrong with sequels, they do present some creative restrictions that some developers eschew.
I think what makes this marginally newsworthy is the price tag. Until I recently upgraded my 3-year-old box with a $42 Radeon 9600 and more RAM (upgraded to 1 gig for $50), I would have thought that most modern games were hopelessly out of my PC's league. However, I recently purchased the Orange Box, and I've been enjoying Portal, HF2, and TF2 with more than acceptable video quality. I had a decent rig to start with (P4 3.0Ghz), and my current set-up is far inferior to the one described. It's nice to be reminded that for what could be construed as a reasonable amount of money you can enjoy modern PC games with better-than-console graphics.
There's a huge difference between $500 and $3,000. I would have put the "budget box" tag closer to $1000. $500, within console range, is friendlier.
Of course, decent power supplies, cases, and HDs can nickel and dime you to death, and one of the reasons I didn't go with a more powerful GPU was my relatively low-power PSU, so YMMV when it comes to the economics of this upgrade.
The game recognizes that it is bad, and your mission is to rescue him from this unhappy state. Who would be offended? Similarly, why not allow your young child to watch The Hills Have Eyes re-make? Sure, women are raped, men are burned alive, and babies are held at gun-point, but the movie recognizes that these things are bad, and it is the mission of the hero to rescue the family from this unhappy state.
The Nintendo was for children, and, AFAIK, Maniac Mansion was marketed to children. A scene where a young boy discusses his father's potential cannibalism (which is how I first read the scene in the summary) is disturbing, much in the way that an electric shock is disturbing.
On some unconscious level, that isn't considered as bad.
Look at the Texas woman who drowned her 5 children. A jury let her off easy - innocent by reason of insanity.
Do you think that Florida guy who killed a single child will get off like that? Even after the police totally screwed up the case? Of course not, he'll die.
The key is: touch someone else's children, you fry. Kill several of your own children, you need help.
We're a society that is terrified of other people and extremely protective of our own. We really don't care about all the kids who are killed by their parents, or the black kids getting murdered every day in inner cities. As long as our white suburban kids could be touched by some stranger, that's the real crisis, and all our attention will go to it.
I remebering hearing about this idea on NPR a while back, but making it political: Red-State Edition DVD commentaries. Here's a transcript of one for Aliens.
Here's a great section:
COULTER: Again, here: Burke in a very natty red tie. And he really fills out a pair of chinos.
D'SOUZA: We're watching how he tries to help Ripley help herself, by convincing her to get back on the bike and revisit an alien-infested planet. Just in case anybody thought that conservatism and compassion couldn't go hand in hand...
COULTER: Burke?
D'SOUZA: Yeah, look at him. He's clearly got Ripley's best interest in mind.
COULTER: I think so.
While I realise Tekken has a "training mode", where you're supposed to look at some tiny Help window and somehow associate strange phrases with what (at first) appear to be arbitrary button combinations, that gets pretty old fast.
It would be a lot better with a coach telling you when to use each move, since they all seem equally wicked and the more complicated moves don't seem particularly useful at first.
Similarly, I'd love a coach for a tennis game. While the controls for a tennis game are much easier to master than for a combat game, I'd rather build up my tennis character stats by training on the court than by playing silly mini-games.
With any of these ideas, the player could simultaneously learn the controls of the game and some techniques in the actual sport.
Their encryption scheme is even more complex. Hundreds of acoustic patterns are variably and arbitrarily mapped onto a small set of visual patterns, which are then combined using complex rules to represent geographical locations.
And if your visual system goes down, forget about it.
What kind of idiots do they have working for them that would compromise future intelligence gathering by revealing their sources and methods.
Easy: to show both Americans and internationals that they are being watched. You don't need to watch everyone to keep people in line - you just need to convince everyone that they could be watched at anytime.
It's like when all those accounts of torture at Abu Ghraib came out. They know torture doesn't produce actionable intelligence. But they know that when these reports get leaked, people get nervous.
The message is: they're watching you, and they're prepared to torture you. Pretty chilling, isn't it?
You've got to be kidding me. Timothy McVeigh used enough explosive to destroy a SOLID building in Kansas City. How much wout it take to destroy a tunnel? Remember folks, Gravity would work on the side of the explosives.
Was McVeigh trying to blast the building into outer space? If not, I'm pretty sure gravity was on his side as well. I also don't recall that the "SOLID" building he attacked was actually detroyed, but instead was just damaged.
The Holland Tunnel isn't a cave. If this amateur in Lebanon wanted to take it down, he'd have to rip thick steel apart.
Mod parent up. That is obviously not a troll response.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the statements expressed, but we have every right to be genuinely skeptical of vague media reports on counter-terrorism activity.
There are likely thousands of individuals in Lebanon who routinely talk about what we would call "terrorist" activities, primarily against Israel. To find one that has no connections to an actual terrorist network (he's not even in Hezbollah, which pretty much runs the market in Lebanon) means that he's just a poser with no capabilities of carrying out a military strike within the borders of a superpower. The idea that tax payer dollars were spent to monitor this guy for a YEAR is an embarrassment.
The point of this media report? To tell us that the FBI is good and keeping us safe? Kinda. To tell us that there are important threats out there? Kinda. To chill anyone from even THINKING of talking about terrorism on the internet? Definitely.
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I suspect it has less to do with fear of rogue generals illegally declaring war against other countries as it does with generals illegally declaring war against their own commander in chief. Surely no one understands better than Pervez Musharfaf that generals don't always voluntarily obey their President.
Am I alone here? I honestly have never clicked a Google ad, and I've used Google exclusively for searches since it first grew in popularity. I also use GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, and occasionally use my iGoogle homepage and the Google Reader. I've downloaded Google Pack (to get StarOffice 8 for free), but I've never actually clicked one of those fancy targeted ads.
I don't avoid the ads on purpose, and I'm not one of those people who routinely argues "ads don't work on me!". I'm fully aware of the power of advertising, and my own susceptibility to a very convincing advertisement - I've clicked plenty on nytimes.com.
Honestly, the GMail ads are never relevant. Perhaps it's because I'm in academia and not the business world, but they just seem like desperate attempts to find something in my life that Google can market to.
Given this, I find it hard to believe that a small thing like 1% of users using "I feel lucky" occasionally actually has much of an opportunity cost for Google. Instead, I suspect it's one of those cute Google-y things that make so many of us web users so loyal to Google.
It's a compelling idea, but what metric would be used to determine if a form of life arose independently? Wouldn't this suffer from the same problem as proving "Intelligent Design" - there is no metric for determining whether something is too complex to have arisen naturally, or too different to by related to known lifeforms. From TFA itself, life as we know it has been found everywhere on the globe, in radically different conditions than ours, which to me suggests that the related lifeforms on earth not only come in a huge variety of forms, but also will probably dominate any system they are in, including the hardest-to-reach ones that we can think of.
It raises an interesting question, however: if life can start, then it can have started more than once. In terms of probability, does this also mean that is has probably started more than once? And if life can start and stop, then does this also mean that life has probably started and stopped?
It sounds like it could be convenient in the right context.
It compares to the individual recording in the same way that the compressed contents of a .zip compare to the uncompressed contents.
Like a .zip, it takes more processing power to access its contents in real time - it must be decoded into PCM data in order to be played - but all the information is there. Of course, the compression ratio pales to that of lossy codecs (like MP3), but with good equipment and the right song you can notice a difference - I didn't believe it until I listened to some jazz Vorbis files over an M-Audio 5.1 Revolution card with Sennheiser HD 540 Open-Aire headphones (neither of which are expensive enough to be truly "audiophile"), and I noticed some distortion in the high frequency sounds. Playing the same song from the original CD was significantly better, and I assume that playing a FLAC (or Apple or MS equivalent) would sound near identical.
Content providers need to be responsible for the content of the ads posted on their sites - that's a given. TFA indicates that these content providers (the people behind NHL.com, for example) simply received payment for these ads via credit card or wire transfer and then posted the content. If these sites used a network television model, they would have intimate relationships with the advertisers and would work together to provide less offensive and more effective ads. I don't think they need to go that far (network television ads are far from perfect, although they are quite effective), but clearly MLB.com and NHL.com need to be held responsible for the content on their sites, and hopefully this will encourage better cooperation between site hosts and advertisers.
I'm not sure about this.
AFAIK, everyone with money who reads newspapers for business news already has a WSJ subscription, and the majority of these readers probably prefer to read the print copy. Those who are interested in business news, but who don't have a subscription or are put off by the yearly access fee to on-line content probably aren't the target consumer for the ads that will appear.
I don't know the numbers, it's just a hunch. I think the penetration of WSJ in the households of the wealthy is much greater than the NYT, which therefore benefits from facilitating access to its content.
Tossing away the subscription model at a time when there is a rise in adblocking software doesn't necessarily seem like a smart move to me, but perhaps WSJ revenue isn't the primary motivation in this move, which will undoubtedly grow WSJ's readership.
I didn't RTFA, but I'd wager that the main reason this is marketed to the "adult" class of consumers and not "parents" (I realize the latter is usually a subclass of the former) is because a parent looking for an educational DVD will be disappointed in early seasons of Sesame Street. Young children, accustomed to the superior production values of the current PBS Kids shows (some are quite good - Curious George, for example) might find the badly aging episodes dull, and parents might find the content infantile.
This is a way for public television to make money from the School House Rock set, not the young families graduating from Baby Einstein.
I don't think communication through this device would be very successful for a few reasons:
This seems like a promising way to improve articulation for individuals with certain muscle or nerve disorders - which is fantastic - but for the rest of us it's not directly applicable.
Thanks, that's quite helpful. I could find no details about this on my own, lacking a New Scientist subscription. He isn't "imagining" these sounds - he's trying to produce them. I suspect they've tapped into the motor cortex, where one of the last stages of motor processing. They're not tapping into "speech" centers - it's simply a motor area associated with articulatory muscles. Not that it isn't impressive, but it's not a step towards mind-reading or better computer-human interfaces unless you suffer from a muscle- or nerve-based speech disorder. We've understood to specific relationships between regions of the motor cortex and muscles in the body for quite some time. Actual language centers are far more mysterious.
I think rumors of its DRMed death are grossly exaggerated. From the review, it looks like it will not only play DRM-free files, but you can also purchase a slew of DRM-free songs at whatever on-line service it (strongly) encourages you to use. There appear to be annoyances (you can't store DRMed video on it? that makes no sense - I'm assuming that's the reviewer's mistake. Likely you can't store DRMed video that the Zune application can't find a license for), but none of them are a deal breaker for someone who just wants to rip CDs or buy songs/videos on a website and play them on their portable player, which I'm assuming is the majority of the portable music/video player market. I also suspect you can easily put copyrighted, DRM-free video and music files downloaded via BitTorrent on it with ease - at least the same amount of ease as you have with the iPod.
1) Support for Ogg Vorbis or FLAC?
2) How is the sound quality overall?
3) How are the headphones?
I suspect I can guess the answers to these:
1) No
2) Like the iPod.
3) Ditto.
Leave you car at home, ride a bike to go to work, visit your friends
And if I work, like most people, more than a 15 minute drive from my house, I should bike for an hour each way? In the heat of Arizona or Southern California, so I can arrive at work dripping sweat and smelling terrible? Or in the freezing cold of most Midwest or Northeastern seasons?
Dont use escalators or elevators
So I should run up 4 or 5 flights of stairs a few times a day? And when my co-workers or boss - usually I only go up or down stairs to go talk to someone - stare at me funnily while I'm wheezing and coughing at them, what then? I realize this is minor, and I do take the stairs - four flights at my old job - but I didn't lose any weight, and, while I'm in fairly good shape, I was doing a lot of heavy breathing which was slightly embarrassing.
Run a few blocks in the morning or evening
It's dark before I go to work, and it's dark after I go to work. Is it really more healthy to go around running outside in the dark than it is to stay inside? Are there any statistics showing that the marginal health benefits I get from dropping 10 pounds - which is about all you can expect from exercise unless you are quite obese - outweigh the increased risk I will face every day of getting hit by a car or mugged?
Get a hobby that does not involve sitting in front of a tv or monitor
I don't really get much exercise reading or listening to LPs or even playing my guitar. What hobby should I take up - wakeboarding? hunting? Sorry, it's just not that easy.
Call me a romantic, but if the sight of an emotionally distant, overweight gamer bouncing his legs up and down under his desk isn't enough to get the old flame rekindled, what is?
... many (I won't say most) gamers that I know or talk to agree that these are just rehashes of more of the same, and the quality invariably declines with each iteration. Yet, for similarly braindead reasons, developers of these amazing, cult-following sorts of titles steadfastly refuse to make sequels to their games even when millions of people all over the globe are clamoring for them. I think you've answered your own question. If quality predictably declines, then the cult status of these games will predictably decline. In order to maintain quality and excitement, you have to be innovative. Silent Hill, for example, was a cult hit; it was followed by Silent Hill 2, which likewise succeeded as a cult hit because it reinvented itself as a psychological thriller in what can be described as a new setting. However, Silent Hill 3 was far from innovative (it is a direct sequel to SH1) - at some point it becomes extremely difficult to be both creative and work within the framework of an extant franchise. SH4, IMHO, was a very innovative game, but was not originally designed as a SH game, and ultimately fails to fit well within the Silent Hill framework, leading to disappointed fans. Overall, I'd say that the cult status of the Silent Hill series has taken a hit from the 2 most recent disappointing titles (not to mention the terrible film). It's also important to note that aside from Akira Yamoaka, none of the original Silent Hill developers worked on the later sequels.The developers of original games like doing original things. While there is nothing wrong with sequels, they do present some creative restrictions that some developers eschew.
I think what makes this marginally newsworthy is the price tag. Until I recently upgraded my 3-year-old box with a $42 Radeon 9600 and more RAM (upgraded to 1 gig for $50), I would have thought that most modern games were hopelessly out of my PC's league. However, I recently purchased the Orange Box, and I've been enjoying Portal, HF2, and TF2 with more than acceptable video quality. I had a decent rig to start with (P4 3.0Ghz), and my current set-up is far inferior to the one described. It's nice to be reminded that for what could be construed as a reasonable amount of money you can enjoy modern PC games with better-than-console graphics.
There's a huge difference between $500 and $3,000. I would have put the "budget box" tag closer to $1000. $500, within console range, is friendlier.
Of course, decent power supplies, cases, and HDs can nickel and dime you to death, and one of the reasons I didn't go with a more powerful GPU was my relatively low-power PSU, so YMMV when it comes to the economics of this upgrade.
On some unconscious level, that isn't considered as bad. Look at the Texas woman who drowned her 5 children. A jury let her off easy - innocent by reason of insanity. Do you think that Florida guy who killed a single child will get off like that? Even after the police totally screwed up the case? Of course not, he'll die. The key is: touch someone else's children, you fry. Kill several of your own children, you need help. We're a society that is terrified of other people and extremely protective of our own. We really don't care about all the kids who are killed by their parents, or the black kids getting murdered every day in inner cities. As long as our white suburban kids could be touched by some stranger, that's the real crisis, and all our attention will go to it.
I remebering hearing about this idea on NPR a while back, but making it political: Red-State Edition DVD commentaries. Here's a transcript of one for Aliens.
Here's a great section:
COULTER: Again, here: Burke in a very natty red tie. And he really fills out a pair of chinos. ...
D'SOUZA: We're watching how he tries to help Ripley help herself, by convincing her to get back on the bike and revisit an alien-infested planet. Just in case anybody thought that conservatism and compassion couldn't go hand in hand
COULTER: Burke?
D'SOUZA: Yeah, look at him. He's clearly got Ripley's best interest in mind.
COULTER: I think so.
While I realise Tekken has a "training mode", where you're supposed to look at some tiny Help window and somehow associate strange phrases with what (at first) appear to be arbitrary button combinations, that gets pretty old fast.
It would be a lot better with a coach telling you when to use each move, since they all seem equally wicked and the more complicated moves don't seem particularly useful at first.
Similarly, I'd love a coach for a tennis game. While the controls for a tennis game are much easier to master than for a combat game, I'd rather build up my tennis character stats by training on the court than by playing silly mini-games.
With any of these ideas, the player could simultaneously learn the controls of the game and some techniques in the actual sport.
And if your visual system goes down, forget about it.
Easy: to show both Americans and internationals that they are being watched. You don't need to watch everyone to keep people in line - you just need to convince everyone that they could be watched at anytime.
It's like when all those accounts of torture at Abu Ghraib came out. They know torture doesn't produce actionable intelligence. But they know that when these reports get leaked, people get nervous.
The message is: they're watching you, and they're prepared to torture you. Pretty chilling, isn't it?
Was McVeigh trying to blast the building into outer space? If not, I'm pretty sure gravity was on his side as well. I also don't recall that the "SOLID" building he attacked was actually detroyed, but instead was just damaged.
The Holland Tunnel isn't a cave. If this amateur in Lebanon wanted to take it down, he'd have to rip thick steel apart.
Mod parent up. That is obviously not a troll response.
I don't necessarily agree with all of the statements expressed, but we have every right to be genuinely skeptical of vague media reports on counter-terrorism activity.
There are likely thousands of individuals in Lebanon who routinely talk about what we would call "terrorist" activities, primarily against Israel. To find one that has no connections to an actual terrorist network (he's not even in Hezbollah, which pretty much runs the market in Lebanon) means that he's just a poser with no capabilities of carrying out a military strike within the borders of a superpower. The idea that tax payer dollars were spent to monitor this guy for a YEAR is an embarrassment.
The point of this media report? To tell us that the FBI is good and keeping us safe? Kinda. To tell us that there are important threats out there? Kinda. To chill anyone from even THINKING of talking about terrorism on the internet? Definitely.