Giving these idiots the benefit of the doubt, how the Hell does something like this get past the planning stage, let alone into the release client, before someone realizes 'Hey! This could cause drama'? Fuck, Uber Entertainment apparently did the same thing with Super Monday Night Combat, but at least they had the guts to announce it, and offer company scrip in return for putting extra wear on your hardware and power bill.
"Those bastards at the military, they took it and... and they twisted it! My invention was intended only for peaceful purposes, and they turned it into a weapon!"
For those that aren't aware, the original Deus Ex was released when pirated games were heavily distributed via sneakernet and usenet in the form of spanned 2 MB (or 2.88-- it's been a while) RAR images. Needless to say, this was a lot of diskettes for the games that were coming out on CD at the time, so the cracking teams would cut out every ounce of fat that they possibly could: cutscenes, non-vital sound effects, you name it. The games ran, but you were likely to miss a lot of story and fluff.
An early Deus Ex rip went through the same process, but for some reason would just stop at an early point in the game-- specifically, when you hopped on a police boat and sailed off to the next level. It turned out that the scripts used to drive the in-game cutscenes weren't designed to fail cleanly, and one of the missing sound effects caused this one to hang partway through.
People with pirated copies started complaining and looking for tech help with this baffling bug. It didn't take the devs long to figure out what was going on, and only took slightly longer for people who'd paid for it to start leaping down the throats of anyone asking for help getting past the 'buggy' cutscene.
The problem with your suggestion is twofold, simply stated:
A) People are easily convinced of falsehoods, and nowhere near so easily convinced otherwise when the truth comes to light.
B) Companies that can afford to throw tens of thousands of dollars/sterling/euros at someone for complaining about less than two hundred can just as easily afford public relations efforts to concoct and reinforce damaging lies about people they feel are a threat, feeding back into A.
I really wish I had mod points, because White Flame hits the nail right on the head. Small local businesses need the Internet like a fish needs a bicycle. A blogspot page for events, maybe a simple '90s style page to show off bits of inventory and provide contact information, and that's really all they need at most.
Shit, I'm a gamer and I've spent on average a hundred bucks on upgrades a year for probably the last decade. With the exception of the occasional Cryengine game, there's been very little released in the last several years that demands (or even just begs) for regular, massive upgrades.
That was my reaction. I suspect they're going to wildly misread the 'subversive Star Trek' theme and make it so Roj Blake has more space-sex than James Kirk.
I hate to break it to you, but under that kind of model you'd probably be watching four channels worth of serene blue nothing. Cable packages subsidize less-popular channels, which includes... Syfy, TLC, the History channel, not that they're huge losses at this point, and basically anything else that isn't driven by one of the major basic networks or popular premium channels like HBO. Even they'd be impacted, because while advertising is a huge source of income, contracts with cable providers provide steady baseline funding as well.
In a nutshell: A lot of the crap you don't watch is ultimately funding the stuff that you do.
Whitelists are a fair idea in principle, but in practice malware-laden ads distributed by promiscuous ad networks are a problem. While reputable networks allow sites to tailor ad campaigns and block specific ads or types, they often trade spots among themselves which can result in bad ads slipping into rotation despite the safeguards. And 'bad' can range from 'loud, expanding Flash' to 'welcome to the botnet, comrade'.
Sites that are particularly large, or under a big umbrella, Slashdot for example, can avoid this kind of thing by running their own in-house network... but smaller sites don't have that kind of luxury. There still needs to be an interest in vetting submitted ads by those internal networks as well-- curse.com is basically an ad network with forums and MMO add-ons floating on top, and they have a bad history of serving malware and spear-phishing attacks to their users.
Mmmno. If you really think that there's one single reason why Linux has never swept the non-nerd world by storm, then I have an open-sourced bridge to sell you.
The formulation might be different. American soft drinks tend to use high-fructose corn syrup, which lends a different flavour than the glucose/fructose mix that's typical in Canada, and worlds away from stuff made with cane sugar.
Oh, that's easy. Take it down for 'improvements', set up a Kickstarter, and promise an assortment of Tux-themed gewgaws bought through Dealextreme in exchange for pledging at a variety of levels.
Someone's already done a short Portal movie (search Youtube for 'Portal: No Escape'; I don't want to accidentally give hits where they aren't due), but you're right. It's really difficult to pull off a film where there is only one visible, active actor. It's possible, but while I enjoy Abrams' oeuvre for its flashes of cleverness and all of its ridiculous spectacle, I don't think he could pull off a straight-up Chell vs. GlaDOS.
Of course, this is assuming that everything is based on the games and not the broader continuity they're built from. A movie about Gordon Freeman squeezing antlion bits, or Chell discovering that the cake is (twist ending!) moist, delicious, and real? No. God, no.
A movie based around the events of the Seven Hour War, or the events leading up to GlaDOS going on-line, on the other hands? Those, or something strongly resembling those, I could see.
What's worse is that ad networks will trade space between themselves. Even if a site is conscientious about the ads they show and the networks they're affiliated with, malware-laden ads can still filter through because of that promiscuity.
The fact that neither the pitchman nor the hands on the monitor were actually demonstrating the keyboard in a meaningful capacity...
Or the suggestion that installing the thing on a steering wheel could improve driving safety. Seriously, what? A distraction is a distraction, and if you're texting away in traffic, you're fucking distracted.
Do you have trouble fitting such a wide brush through doorways?
Re:3d printing ubiquitous? Even color printing ain
on
The 3D Un-Printer
·
· Score: 1
Of course it's ubiquitous! That's why you need, why everyone needs this doohickey that the anonymous submitter certainly isn't involved with developing or selling!
Funny thing is, up here in Canada a lot of us pick up a smattering of Imperial measurement-- inches, feet, pounds, cups, and so on, but rarely measurements that are larger. When I took a woodworking course in high school, one of the first things the teacher told us was that while we're officially Metric, just about everything related to construction is still measured in Imperial. Measuring tapes and yardsticks tend to be bilingual though, for those times that you really need to know how many millimeters 1/8" is.
Slashdot Mirror
Giving these idiots the benefit of the doubt, how the Hell does something like this get past the planning stage, let alone into the release client, before someone realizes 'Hey! This could cause drama'? Fuck, Uber Entertainment apparently did the same thing with Super Monday Night Combat, but at least they had the guts to announce it, and offer company scrip in return for putting extra wear on your hardware and power bill.
"Those bastards at the military, they took it and... and they twisted it! My invention was intended only for peaceful purposes, and they turned it into a weapon!"
For those that aren't aware, the original Deus Ex was released when pirated games were heavily distributed via sneakernet and usenet in the form of spanned 2 MB (or 2.88-- it's been a while) RAR images. Needless to say, this was a lot of diskettes for the games that were coming out on CD at the time, so the cracking teams would cut out every ounce of fat that they possibly could: cutscenes, non-vital sound effects, you name it. The games ran, but you were likely to miss a lot of story and fluff.
An early Deus Ex rip went through the same process, but for some reason would just stop at an early point in the game-- specifically, when you hopped on a police boat and sailed off to the next level. It turned out that the scripts used to drive the in-game cutscenes weren't designed to fail cleanly, and one of the missing sound effects caused this one to hang partway through.
People with pirated copies started complaining and looking for tech help with this baffling bug. It didn't take the devs long to figure out what was going on, and only took slightly longer for people who'd paid for it to start leaping down the throats of anyone asking for help getting past the 'buggy' cutscene.
...for this to go down in history with the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.
A) People are easily convinced of falsehoods, and nowhere near so easily convinced otherwise when the truth comes to light.
B) Companies that can afford to throw tens of thousands of dollars/sterling/euros at someone for complaining about less than two hundred can just as easily afford public relations efforts to concoct and reinforce damaging lies about people they feel are a threat, feeding back into A.
Later, Kerrigan discovers that she's the only entity in the Swarm that can handle a bra clasp.
I really wish I had mod points, because White Flame hits the nail right on the head. Small local businesses need the Internet like a fish needs a bicycle. A blogspot page for events, maybe a simple '90s style page to show off bits of inventory and provide contact information, and that's really all they need at most.
Shit, I'm a gamer and I've spent on average a hundred bucks on upgrades a year for probably the last decade. With the exception of the occasional Cryengine game, there's been very little released in the last several years that demands (or even just begs) for regular, massive upgrades.
That was my reaction. I suspect they're going to wildly misread the 'subversive Star Trek' theme and make it so Roj Blake has more space-sex than James Kirk.
In a nutshell: A lot of the crap you don't watch is ultimately funding the stuff that you do.
Anyone with the gumption to claw their way out of an unmarked grave deserves an interview at the very least.
Ask a Zentraedi.
Sites that are particularly large, or under a big umbrella, Slashdot for example, can avoid this kind of thing by running their own in-house network... but smaller sites don't have that kind of luxury. There still needs to be an interest in vetting submitted ads by those internal networks as well-- curse.com is basically an ad network with forums and MMO add-ons floating on top, and they have a bad history of serving malware and spear-phishing attacks to their users.
Mmmno. If you really think that there's one single reason why Linux has never swept the non-nerd world by storm, then I have an open-sourced bridge to sell you.
The formulation might be different. American soft drinks tend to use high-fructose corn syrup, which lends a different flavour than the glucose/fructose mix that's typical in Canada, and worlds away from stuff made with cane sugar.
Oh, that's easy. Take it down for 'improvements', set up a Kickstarter, and promise an assortment of Tux-themed gewgaws bought through Dealextreme in exchange for pledging at a variety of levels.
Of course, this is assuming that everything is based on the games and not the broader continuity they're built from. A movie about Gordon Freeman squeezing antlion bits, or Chell discovering that the cake is (twist ending!) moist, delicious, and real? No. God, no.
A movie based around the events of the Seven Hour War, or the events leading up to GlaDOS going on-line, on the other hands? Those, or something strongly resembling those, I could see.
Preferably one from a regime that doesn't have a history of embarrassingly faked propaganda shots.
What's worse is that ad networks will trade space between themselves. Even if a site is conscientious about the ads they show and the networks they're affiliated with, malware-laden ads can still filter through because of that promiscuity.
Or the suggestion that installing the thing on a steering wheel could improve driving safety. Seriously, what? A distraction is a distraction, and if you're texting away in traffic, you're fucking distracted.
Do you have trouble fitting such a wide brush through doorways?
Of course it's ubiquitous! That's why you need, why everyone needs this doohickey that the anonymous submitter certainly isn't involved with developing or selling!
Jedi classes only comprise about a third of possible class options; lots of people would rather pretend to be a Han Solo or Boba Fett.
It's 'free' for people with currently active subscriptions to the product, not every Tom, Dale, and Hates the Gimp, alas.
Funny thing is, up here in Canada a lot of us pick up a smattering of Imperial measurement-- inches, feet, pounds, cups, and so on, but rarely measurements that are larger. When I took a woodworking course in high school, one of the first things the teacher told us was that while we're officially Metric, just about everything related to construction is still measured in Imperial. Measuring tapes and yardsticks tend to be bilingual though, for those times that you really need to know how many millimeters 1/8" is.