It may be, but playing an action oriented game is likely to cause your body to release adrenaline, and that will cause you to be more aggressive. It may also relieve stress and burn calories.
The problem I have with these studies is they are pretty much saying "all video games with violence" and they mean "action video games with violence." Have them play Civilization IV and conduct the same study. Is Civ IV violent? You can certainly play it that way (heck, nuke some cities - you probably kill more "people" than you did in any shooter). Note that my point here was made in the article without specific examples.
I do agree violent material desensitizes the audience. One of the first 'R' rated movies I saw in theaters was Robocop, and the shooting and surgery scene made me so sick I had to turn my head away. 5 years later I saw it again and was like "What? This made me sick?" I'd seen a ton of slasher and zombie movies in the interim. Does observing violence make you more violent? It could - abusive behavior is learned - but I would think it depended on the objectives of the game, as also pointed out by one point of view in the article (which was a tiny counterpoint). I don't associate much with movies or TV, but my wife will sob away when a character is sick or dies, so every person is different (real stories do affect me, so I'm definitely able to disassociate real and made up).
I haven't gotten to play much with Fallout 3 yet because my desktop machine can barely run it and my gaming laptop is in the shop.
My main complaint about Oblivion was quests were generic and there really was nothing that changed depending on choices made. For instance, there was one quest where there was an all female bandit group. If you were male, they would pretty much just attack you. If you were female, they would offer to let you join them, but even if you wanted to, you would still end up attacking and killing them. Quests like this are LAME - they always have the same ending no matter what - it would be much more interesting and rewarding to the player if there was an entirely different plot thread if you did join them. I've seen a bit of this forced direction so far with Fallout 3, as well, but mostly with the main plot.
Another problem that I've seen with Fallout 3 so far is strange dialog on the female character (I've only run her up to Moriarity's, so not far). I hope there's less of that as the game goes on - the dialog just felt unnatural. There are other weird things, like why a girl character would want a BB gun (remember to put on your pseudo-1950s hat)... I was just hoping there would be some variance there or that they would flesh it out more (everyone here needs to know how to help defend the vault), but they didn't.
My biggest disappointment so far was the bandits in the school - even if you're dressed like one, they immediately recognize you as an enemy and attack (my 'evil' character hasn't gone in yet, so I can't say they do the same yet, but I believe they will). There isn't even any real dialog when you first enter the school - just another dungeon of hostiles that felt just like every cave or tower in oblivion. I HATE it when RPGs like this do that - how the hell do groups like this recruit?
The buff was because of criticism of the early games that Radscorpions were too badass to be such easy monsters and that they should be more like Deathclaws. Sometimes developers agree with the advice, other times not. Personally, Radscorpions and Killer Cockroaches are too Damnation Alley for me (see here for a shot of the giant scorpions).
I'm with you on the 1980s, but the Bell breakup didn't happen until 1984 and BBSes first became popular in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The switch to not use tones for identification happened in 1983 (and before that Joybubbles, Captain Crunch and the colorful boxes - aka Phone Phreaking). Hackers were War Dialing before the term existed (1983, WarGames, though you could say 1982 because the movie was shot in 1982) and before the IBM PC existed (Apple CAT II scripting was very popular with my group from the early-to-mid 1980s).
Ah yes, and I remember people stealing CCs for the sole purpose of making long distance calls, but since you first refer to to post 1984 toll fraud era, where you'd have to call a long distance carrier on a local number, enter an access key and then the number you wanted to call, there wasn't a CC involved that I remember - I believe it went straight to billing by the key. I was straying from hacking/piracy around this time (by 1985 girls and music were much more interesting).
If you count editors, yes, I created a Wizardry character and (partial) scenario editor back in 1981-1982 (but it was pretty primitive and hard to use - I got a better and more complete one through pirate channels) and a friend of mine made an Ultima editor. I've used level editors for Lode Runner and Balderdash, as well (both came with the game, I think).
Still, nothing we created in the 1980s was nearly as popular as the total conversions Dino Smurfs or Castle Smurfenstein (1990s was a different story, mainly due to one guy's shareware).
The flavor scale bottom is something like this:... Storm sewer water Michelob Ultra Sewer Water... Ludafisk juice Concentrated beer pee Budweiser Liquid Vomit...
Um, if you have a sip of Budweiser, it's the same nasty half-rice, half-wheat beer-like substance that it was in 1978. The majority of Americans still drink that swill and like it.
On the other hand, there's decent US brewers like Fat Tire, Rogue and Goose Island, and great brews from other brewers like Surly Darkness (I'm not a big bitter fan, so I'll pass on most of their other beers, but that one is good - and VERY expensive - cost me $20 to buy one off a friend, and I think they sold for something like 6/$100), and Stone (Imperial Russian Stout is yummy - got that one at a beer festival and never saw it again).
I still have yet to find a decent 'black' from the US. Some like Sprecher are ok, but don't come close to a German black (e.g. Kostritzer). I also haven't found a decent US 'sweet' wheat (hard to describe - sorta like drinking King's Hawaiian Bread, but lighter and less heavy than you would think) like some German and Belgian brews - the US tends to make wheat beers as bitter as possible. I'm not a fan of Pils or IPA, mainly because I'm highly sensitive to bitter, so I can't comment on those.
Then you obviously missed the hints from 12+ months ago that rumored that Lucas Arts and Bioware were working together on a MMORPG and how nearly everyone that heard that knew immediately that it either meant Star Wars or Indiana Jones were involved (then immediately guessed a KOTOR MMORPG).
This news is about as surprising as me finding milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl.
I'd be reiterating if I went over the fairly minor issues with mercurial vs git (and to a lesser extent Bazaar). I think rockstarprogrammer says it fairly nicely.
My project uses mercurial, mostly because when we switched, git was difficult to use. I don't regret the choice, either - I struggled with git for about a week-and-a-half when we were testing repository tools and was not in favor of it. I can't say I'm a fan of TortiseHg on Windows, however, as it always seemed to cause more problems than it solved (we got some weird errors when it was involved and it had version compatibility issues with Hg for a while), but Hg itself has worked well for us.
Well, you could also spin this a different way - Apple fixes a huge security hole - but that may not be enough (depends on if a shift-command-option-delete drive enabling still exists).
I assume boot to CD/DVD is still unaffected, as well (hold c on boot). I spent many a day hacking macs to work around annoyances like Foolproof and Silverlining (pre-OSX security software). Early OSX was just about as trivial. X.0 had a few exploits, some of which affected X.1, but only if the user upgraded from X.0 to X.1. All of the ones I knew about were fixed by X.2, and I really haven't done any hacking since then except remotely trying to exploit my own box (one way to make sure your scripts are secure is to beat on them a bit).
I feel your pain - Vista update failed to install on my gaming laptop (it is better than my desktop until I can replace that next year) and I was forced to blow away the C drive and restore to image (losing registry settings required by many of these games). I then reinstalled games, and went on my merry way until... My GeForce 8600M melted two weeks later. I returned laptop to manufacturer, they wiped and reinstalled the OS and two weeks later SP1 is released. I try to install it and... it fails to validate. After 3 hours with MS tech support, they tell me I need to restore again. Back to image, update, and reinstall of games.
Guess what? Attempting to reinstall a couple of the games and I was accused of pirating them (ok, I'll be specific - Mass Effect and Bioshock). Fortunately, DRM restrictions were eased shortly after this incident (in fact, the restrictions were eased before I even had a chance to call 2k games support).
True - and when that person goes bankrupt, they write off the expense, wait 7 years, and send them credit card applications again renewing the cycle.
I happen to know at least one person declaring personal bankruptcy for the third time due to credit card debt, but this time will hurt a lot more (due to bankruptcy law reform). Why some people buy a big screen TV when they can't pay their mortgage is beyond me.
My peeve with ATI is lack of OpenGL Windows extensions (which extends to Linux). ATI tends not to add EXTs even when the card supports the hardware (for instance, geometry shaders, which are supported in DirectX but not in OpenGL, and likely won't be supported in OpenGL until they become ARB, knowing ATI, so maybe OGL3.1).
I think ATI has a better scalable design and better heat properties (in SLI they rule the roost in power consumption, heat dissipation and throughput). Shader performance is still fairly poor on ATI cards, but they make up for it by massive amounts of shaders. ATI has had memory bandwidth issues in the past, but I haven't checked lately.
So basically, from a DirectX Windows only perspective, ATI is one of the best routes to go. From an OpenGL Linux, Windows, or MacOS X perspective, I prefer nVidia because they tend to support the latest public extensions (EXT is the agreed upon name and likely ARB - vendor only extensions have a vendor code like _ATI or _NV).
only for basic math - try asking it harder math questions. A good AI that doesn't know the answer should say "Sorry, I have no idea how to do that" or something like that (for instance, ask it stuff like "Do you remember the quadratic equation?" "Can you tell me the derivative of 3x + 2?" or even give it broken math like "what does b equal to in the equation 4a + 2b = 2b [b can be anything]). The bots always return an answer and shouldn't if they don't know.
You don't even need to get that absurd. Elbot's response was funny, which gives it a bit of credence, but asking them childish questions like:
Me: Have you ever colored a wall with a crayon? Elbot: I think I'd like to take lessons first. Jabberwocky: I am the great lord of the dark. Cleverbot: Oh, did you have fun.
Also try calculation questions: Do you know what the square root of 2 is? In every case it gave me a wrong answer. I was expecting a why? Or no, or what am I, a calculator? or some other humor.
And to Cleverbot: Hey - have you ever played frisbee? > I have played it always. Even as a baby? > No, not even a tattoo.
Breathed did retire the characters with the comic and did not intend to return, citing that he was burned out from publishing a daily (and was a trend setter - his vacation breaks and early retirement were followed by other comic page artists like Gary Larson, Bill Watterson and Aaron McGruder). When Outland was announced as a Sunday only strip shortly after Bloom County's end, many people speculated that he'd bring back Bloom County characters, but he said initially it would be an entirely new comic with new characters but may feature a Bloom County character from time to time. It was supposed to be focused around Ronald-Ann Smith and Mortimer Mouse, but gradually grew to be generally focused around Opus, as had been Bloom County.
Watterson retired mainly because of the grind of a daily and having other less constrained interests he wanted to pursue (painting, as I recall).
I'd say far too many of the orchestral scores in games are just downright boring. I'm not saying everything Jeremy Soule (to name names) writes is utter crap, but more that it isn't written to stand out and doesn't. Can you hum a Soule song? I can't even remember one and I'm sure I've heard several hundreds of times.
Compare that to Diablo, which I think had very distinctive and interesting music and I can instantly pop the theme into my head. The intro to Max Payne 2 has a very Faure "The Sicilian" feel, and is also memorable to me (though the rest of the game music is not - if it had any I don't remember it). I'm sure I could give other examples if I thought about it. I can't remember a lick of music in NWN, Dungeon Siege, Morrowind or Oblivion, barely remember the opening theme to Guild Wars which I've heard hundreds of times including yesterday, and nothing of KoTOR (all Soule). The irony is Jeremy got in the business because games "lacked drama and intensity" and I find his music is exactly that - lacking in both those areas, as well as musical tension (something I think Matt Uelmen [Diablo, WoW] does MUCH better).
Orchestral scores can be distinctive and powerful, like the Star Wars theme or Also sprach Zarathustra (the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey), or unobtrusive and beautiful like "The Aquarium" from Carnival of the Animals - it is not impossible to create distinctive yet beautiful pieces.
true - I should also point out the scamware Windows Antivirus XP 2008 (and 2009 now) is actually a software company run by a Florida guy who is getting sued - the trojan that delivered it as a payload, however is Russian in origin, as were all of the spambots and password and outlook email address cullers that came with it (a check of the dynamic libs the viruses use is an easy way to identify purpose). My bet is the guy hired Russian virus writers (as I implied above), but I just wanted to clarify that this program is NOT Russian - it is an American scammer.
I had heard if you pay for this scamware it downloads more crapware, but I don't know if it is virus infected crapware like the payload of the trojan.
I was tired that day - National Security Directives (not edicts)...
FEMA can create a police state in any undefined emergency, and yes FEMA did come out of EOs. I don't expect them to do this, but they could create a '1984' given their power.
AFAIK, the only agency/people that gets to see a national security directive without a court order is the agency/people it is directed to. They do need to go on the federal register so we can get the idea of what they are about, but the details are hidden.
Most of the malware is set up to trick the user, such as fake e-cards sent on her birthday (which is how my wife got infected with a virus/spambot pack that included the Windows AV 2008 trojan + ransomware - I wonder if the date was harvested from somewhere...). It also doesn't benefit ransomware providers to ever remove the virus, so they charge money to a bank account in the Caymans or a fly-by-night business front in Russia, cash it in before authorities close in and disappear.
Some ransomware like Windows AV 2008 actually installs MORE malware if you pay the ransom. Fortunately, that one didn't encrypt the drive or she would have lost hundreds of photos as well as work stuff and I was able to rip it out in safe mode using a date search for the infection date (and identified several new virus variants in the process). Almost all ransomware (including the above) originates in Russia or former Russian republics (as do many spambots since spammers are paying Russian virus writers to include them as payload - hey, it's work...).
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It may be, but playing an action oriented game is likely to cause your body to release adrenaline, and that will cause you to be more aggressive. It may also relieve stress and burn calories.
The problem I have with these studies is they are pretty much saying "all video games with violence" and they mean "action video games with violence." Have them play Civilization IV and conduct the same study. Is Civ IV violent? You can certainly play it that way (heck, nuke some cities - you probably kill more "people" than you did in any shooter). Note that my point here was made in the article without specific examples.
I do agree violent material desensitizes the audience. One of the first 'R' rated movies I saw in theaters was Robocop, and the shooting and surgery scene made me so sick I had to turn my head away. 5 years later I saw it again and was like "What? This made me sick?" I'd seen a ton of slasher and zombie movies in the interim. Does observing violence make you more violent? It could - abusive behavior is learned - but I would think it depended on the objectives of the game, as also pointed out by one point of view in the article (which was a tiny counterpoint). I don't associate much with movies or TV, but my wife will sob away when a character is sick or dies, so every person is different (real stories do affect me, so I'm definitely able to disassociate real and made up).
I haven't gotten to play much with Fallout 3 yet because my desktop machine can barely run it and my gaming laptop is in the shop.
My main complaint about Oblivion was quests were generic and there really was nothing that changed depending on choices made. For instance, there was one quest where there was an all female bandit group. If you were male, they would pretty much just attack you. If you were female, they would offer to let you join them, but even if you wanted to, you would still end up attacking and killing them. Quests like this are LAME - they always have the same ending no matter what - it would be much more interesting and rewarding to the player if there was an entirely different plot thread if you did join them. I've seen a bit of this forced direction so far with Fallout 3, as well, but mostly with the main plot.
Another problem that I've seen with Fallout 3 so far is strange dialog on the female character (I've only run her up to Moriarity's, so not far). I hope there's less of that as the game goes on - the dialog just felt unnatural. There are other weird things, like why a girl character would want a BB gun (remember to put on your pseudo-1950s hat)... I was just hoping there would be some variance there or that they would flesh it out more (everyone here needs to know how to help defend the vault), but they didn't.
My biggest disappointment so far was the bandits in the school - even if you're dressed like one, they immediately recognize you as an enemy and attack (my 'evil' character hasn't gone in yet, so I can't say they do the same yet, but I believe they will). There isn't even any real dialog when you first enter the school - just another dungeon of hostiles that felt just like every cave or tower in oblivion. I HATE it when RPGs like this do that - how the hell do groups like this recruit?
The buff was because of criticism of the early games that Radscorpions were too badass to be such easy monsters and that they should be more like Deathclaws. Sometimes developers agree with the advice, other times not. Personally, Radscorpions and Killer Cockroaches are too Damnation Alley for me (see here for a shot of the giant scorpions).
I'm with you on the 1980s, but the Bell breakup didn't happen until 1984 and BBSes first became popular in the late 1970s-early 1980s. The switch to not use tones for identification happened in 1983 (and before that Joybubbles, Captain Crunch and the colorful boxes - aka Phone Phreaking). Hackers were War Dialing before the term existed (1983, WarGames, though you could say 1982 because the movie was shot in 1982) and before the IBM PC existed (Apple CAT II scripting was very popular with my group from the early-to-mid 1980s).
Ah yes, and I remember people stealing CCs for the sole purpose of making long distance calls, but since you first refer to to post 1984 toll fraud era, where you'd have to call a long distance carrier on a local number, enter an access key and then the number you wanted to call, there wasn't a CC involved that I remember - I believe it went straight to billing by the key. I was straying from hacking/piracy around this time (by 1985 girls and music were much more interesting).
There are wars that are not profit driven - Ireland and Iran-Iraq for two - they just f*cking hate each other.
If you count editors, yes, I created a Wizardry character and (partial) scenario editor back in 1981-1982 (but it was pretty primitive and hard to use - I got a better and more complete one through pirate channels) and a friend of mine made an Ultima editor. I've used level editors for Lode Runner and Balderdash, as well (both came with the game, I think).
Still, nothing we created in the 1980s was nearly as popular as the total conversions Dino Smurfs or Castle Smurfenstein (1990s was a different story, mainly due to one guy's shareware).
Do both and we can all be happy!
Yes, in fact
The flavor scale bottom is something like this: ... ... ...
Storm sewer water
Michelob Ultra
Sewer Water
Ludafisk juice
Concentrated beer pee
Budweiser
Liquid Vomit
Um, if you have a sip of Budweiser, it's the same nasty half-rice, half-wheat beer-like substance that it was in 1978. The majority of Americans still drink that swill and like it.
On the other hand, there's decent US brewers like Fat Tire, Rogue and Goose Island, and great brews from other brewers like Surly Darkness (I'm not a big bitter fan, so I'll pass on most of their other beers, but that one is good - and VERY expensive - cost me $20 to buy one off a friend, and I think they sold for something like 6/$100), and Stone (Imperial Russian Stout is yummy - got that one at a beer festival and never saw it again).
I still have yet to find a decent 'black' from the US. Some like Sprecher are ok, but don't come close to a German black (e.g. Kostritzer). I also haven't found a decent US 'sweet' wheat (hard to describe - sorta like drinking King's Hawaiian Bread, but lighter and less heavy than you would think) like some German and Belgian brews - the US tends to make wheat beers as bitter as possible. I'm not a fan of Pils or IPA, mainly because I'm highly sensitive to bitter, so I can't comment on those.
No smurfs?
and I mean, really - mods from the early 1990s? That's a decade late ;)
Then you obviously missed the hints from 12+ months ago that rumored that Lucas Arts and Bioware were working together on a MMORPG and how nearly everyone that heard that knew immediately that it either meant Star Wars or Indiana Jones were involved (then immediately guessed a KOTOR MMORPG).
This news is about as surprising as me finding milk at the bottom of my cereal bowl.
I'd be reiterating if I went over the fairly minor issues with mercurial vs git (and to a lesser extent Bazaar). I think rockstarprogrammer says it fairly nicely.
My project uses mercurial, mostly because when we switched, git was difficult to use. I don't regret the choice, either - I struggled with git for about a week-and-a-half when we were testing repository tools and was not in favor of it. I can't say I'm a fan of TortiseHg on Windows, however, as it always seemed to cause more problems than it solved (we got some weird errors when it was involved and it had version compatibility issues with Hg for a while), but Hg itself has worked well for us.
Well, you could also spin this a different way - Apple fixes a huge security hole - but that may not be enough (depends on if a shift-command-option-delete drive enabling still exists).
I assume boot to CD/DVD is still unaffected, as well (hold c on boot). I spent many a day hacking macs to work around annoyances like Foolproof and Silverlining (pre-OSX security software). Early OSX was just about as trivial. X.0 had a few exploits, some of which affected X.1, but only if the user upgraded from X.0 to X.1. All of the ones I knew about were fixed by X.2, and I really haven't done any hacking since then except remotely trying to exploit my own box (one way to make sure your scripts are secure is to beat on them a bit).
I feel your pain - Vista update failed to install on my gaming laptop (it is better than my desktop until I can replace that next year) and I was forced to blow away the C drive and restore to image (losing registry settings required by many of these games). I then reinstalled games, and went on my merry way until... My GeForce 8600M melted two weeks later. I returned laptop to manufacturer, they wiped and reinstalled the OS and two weeks later SP1 is released. I try to install it and... it fails to validate. After 3 hours with MS tech support, they tell me I need to restore again. Back to image, update, and reinstall of games.
Guess what? Attempting to reinstall a couple of the games and I was accused of pirating them (ok, I'll be specific - Mass Effect and Bioshock). Fortunately, DRM restrictions were eased shortly after this incident (in fact, the restrictions were eased before I even had a chance to call 2k games support).
erm, Flight of Conchords seems minor next to Chronicles of Narnia, King Kong or Xena: Warrior Princess, but they are funny.
True - and when that person goes bankrupt, they write off the expense, wait 7 years, and send them credit card applications again renewing the cycle.
I happen to know at least one person declaring personal bankruptcy for the third time due to credit card debt, but this time will hurt a lot more (due to bankruptcy law reform). Why some people buy a big screen TV when they can't pay their mortgage is beyond me.
My peeve with ATI is lack of OpenGL Windows extensions (which extends to Linux). ATI tends not to add EXTs even when the card supports the hardware (for instance, geometry shaders, which are supported in DirectX but not in OpenGL, and likely won't be supported in OpenGL until they become ARB, knowing ATI, so maybe OGL3.1).
I think ATI has a better scalable design and better heat properties (in SLI they rule the roost in power consumption, heat dissipation and throughput). Shader performance is still fairly poor on ATI cards, but they make up for it by massive amounts of shaders. ATI has had memory bandwidth issues in the past, but I haven't checked lately.
So basically, from a DirectX Windows only perspective, ATI is one of the best routes to go. From an OpenGL Linux, Windows, or MacOS X perspective, I prefer nVidia because they tend to support the latest public extensions (EXT is the agreed upon name and likely ARB - vendor only extensions have a vendor code like _ATI or _NV).
only for basic math - try asking it harder math questions. A good AI that doesn't know the answer should say "Sorry, I have no idea how to do that" or something like that (for instance, ask it stuff like "Do you remember the quadratic equation?" "Can you tell me the derivative of 3x + 2?" or even give it broken math like "what does b equal to in the equation 4a + 2b = 2b [b can be anything]). The bots always return an answer and shouldn't if they don't know.
You don't even need to get that absurd. Elbot's response was funny, which gives it a bit of credence, but asking them childish questions like:
Me: Have you ever colored a wall with a crayon?
Elbot: I think I'd like to take lessons first.
Jabberwocky: I am the great lord of the dark.
Cleverbot: Oh, did you have fun.
Also try calculation questions:
Do you know what the square root of 2 is?
In every case it gave me a wrong answer. I was expecting a why? Or no, or what am I, a calculator? or some other humor.
And to Cleverbot:
Hey - have you ever played frisbee?
> I have played it always.
Even as a baby?
> No, not even a tattoo.
Breathed did retire the characters with the comic and did not intend to return, citing that he was burned out from publishing a daily (and was a trend setter - his vacation breaks and early retirement were followed by other comic page artists like Gary Larson, Bill Watterson and Aaron McGruder). When Outland was announced as a Sunday only strip shortly after Bloom County's end, many people speculated that he'd bring back Bloom County characters, but he said initially it would be an entirely new comic with new characters but may feature a Bloom County character from time to time. It was supposed to be focused around Ronald-Ann Smith and Mortimer Mouse, but gradually grew to be generally focused around Opus, as had been Bloom County.
Watterson retired mainly because of the grind of a daily and having other less constrained interests he wanted to pursue (painting, as I recall).
I'd say far too many of the orchestral scores in games are just downright boring. I'm not saying everything Jeremy Soule (to name names) writes is utter crap, but more that it isn't written to stand out and doesn't. Can you hum a Soule song? I can't even remember one and I'm sure I've heard several hundreds of times.
Compare that to Diablo, which I think had very distinctive and interesting music and I can instantly pop the theme into my head. The intro to Max Payne 2 has a very Faure "The Sicilian" feel, and is also memorable to me (though the rest of the game music is not - if it had any I don't remember it). I'm sure I could give other examples if I thought about it. I can't remember a lick of music in NWN, Dungeon Siege, Morrowind or Oblivion, barely remember the opening theme to Guild Wars which I've heard hundreds of times including yesterday, and nothing of KoTOR (all Soule). The irony is Jeremy got in the business because games "lacked drama and intensity" and I find his music is exactly that - lacking in both those areas, as well as musical tension (something I think Matt Uelmen [Diablo, WoW] does MUCH better).
Orchestral scores can be distinctive and powerful, like the Star Wars theme or Also sprach Zarathustra (the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey), or unobtrusive and beautiful like "The Aquarium" from Carnival of the Animals - it is not impossible to create distinctive yet beautiful pieces.
in addition, more recent news confirms the aircraft wreckage found is probably his.
true - I should also point out the scamware Windows Antivirus XP 2008 (and 2009 now) is actually a software company run by a Florida guy who is getting sued - the trojan that delivered it as a payload, however is Russian in origin, as were all of the spambots and password and outlook email address cullers that came with it (a check of the dynamic libs the viruses use is an easy way to identify purpose). My bet is the guy hired Russian virus writers (as I implied above), but I just wanted to clarify that this program is NOT Russian - it is an American scammer.
I had heard if you pay for this scamware it downloads more crapware, but I don't know if it is virus infected crapware like the payload of the trojan.
I was tired that day - National Security Directives (not edicts)...
FEMA can create a police state in any undefined emergency, and yes FEMA did come out of EOs. I don't expect them to do this, but they could create a '1984' given their power.
Here's some links:
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/fema_executive_orders.htm
http://www.sweetliberty.org/issues/eo/femalist.htm
AFAIK, the only agency/people that gets to see a national security directive without a court order is the agency/people it is directed to. They do need to go on the federal register so we can get the idea of what they are about, but the details are hidden.
Most of the malware is set up to trick the user, such as fake e-cards sent on her birthday (which is how my wife got infected with a virus/spambot pack that included the Windows AV 2008 trojan + ransomware - I wonder if the date was harvested from somewhere...). It also doesn't benefit ransomware providers to ever remove the virus, so they charge money to a bank account in the Caymans or a fly-by-night business front in Russia, cash it in before authorities close in and disappear.
Some ransomware like Windows AV 2008 actually installs MORE malware if you pay the ransom. Fortunately, that one didn't encrypt the drive or she would have lost hundreds of photos as well as work stuff and I was able to rip it out in safe mode using a date search for the infection date (and identified several new virus variants in the process). Almost all ransomware (including the above) originates in Russia or former Russian republics (as do many spambots since spammers are paying Russian virus writers to include them as payload - hey, it's work...).