What are the odds that CBS was the one to break this???
It's their time to shine, and they've spent so long looking for the right time to capitAlize on their name! See, BS!
The phone has *the same* specs as the OnePlus One, minus the head tracking camera. The OnePlus One costs $299 *off contract* while the Fire Phone costs $649 off contract. Are the head tracking cameras on the front are worth $350 extra versus an otherwise identically specced phone from a company that is actually turning a profit? The "value add apps" on the Fire Phone would seem more like an avenue for trimming margin rather than adding it, since they exist solely to sell you more things through Amazon.
Maybe I missed the memo... Have we figured out how to rapidly mobilize a coal mine to wherever we want to make a statement?
Yes, conventional weapons can cause serious deaths too, there is no debating that, and we as a species are getting ever more effective at making even more ingenious ways of killing each other.
Let's say that a bomb goes off in downtown Tokyo killing everyone. No potential for "long term injuries or complications from flying debris", everyone. If that explosion was a conventional chemical explosion, someone could walk into downtown Tokyo tomorrow and be safe from the explosive itself, and any danger would come solely from the rubble. If that bomb were biological or nuclear, entering downtown Tokyo would be extremely dangerous for months, years, decades, or longer depending on just what kind we are talking about.
And please don't be so obtuse that you can't realize that there is a wild difference between a nuclear weapon and a nuclear power source. One is designed to render an area uninhabitable *after* causing massive devastation. The other is designed to provide large amounts of energy in a controlled fashion that barring a major outside influence is safe.
The difference between a conventional explosive and a nuclear one is that in one case, when the damage is done and minutes later the region is inhabitable again... in the other, add a dozen orders of magnitude and it *may* be safe to return.
Your average smart phone knows where it is, the exact position in 3D space, what devices are nearby, whether it is being held versus on a table or in a pocket, whether you are laying down, sitting, walking, jogging, running, biking or driving, whether you are indoors or outdoors, what the temperature is, what the atmospheric pressure is, what the relative humidity is, UV levels, air quality levels, the tone of your voice to determine whether you are happy, sad, angry,..., and in many cases what your heart rate is when using it by looking at your face.
And more sensors are being added with each revision to make them better able to be everything for you.
There are even sensors out now that will build live 3D models of whatever the phone sees, letting it know what is in it's surroundings.
Your phone already knows the things that your thermostat *can* know, except it does a better job because in our hyper-connected, instant gratification culture it has become the 8th deadly sin to be anywhere without your cell phone for 5 minutes.
While it is good to be considerate about what could happen should all of these existing systems that we already have in our homes and are adding daily get linked together into one gigantic monitoring system, it is an exercise in futility considering that we knowingly don't care because next year we can play Kinectimals on our phone and have our ePet interact with the world by jumping up on the couch or hiding behind the counter.
WebGL is becoming a nice technology, and systems like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 are supporting web deployments (not download via the web, but render in a full on HTML5 compliant browser) so at a certain point it makes sense for someone to be the first mover for implementing gamepad support.
Um... a good PCI-E drive, such as a Fusion-IO board will certainly handle that write rate. That *he* is generating enough content to fill that pipe for a week strait is unlikely though as it would require multiple 10Gbase connections to do so. Since he is talking about video editing, let's say this is a surveillance system taking uncompressed HD streams that are being written natively to disk without transcoding prior to editing; we are still talking about 188 cameras coming to this one server.
That the likes of Facebook would be generating sufficient content to saturate these cards, again possible in terms of server to server replication to keep their cluster in sync and maintain live backups and hot standbys, however unlikely that they would want to fully saturate their bandwidth to single nodes as opposed to just adding some more servers to ensure that capacity exists so their users can connect.
They want to have the authority to regulate apps that after release have been linked to "safety related issues" that have an intended purpose of being used primarily while driving on a road. They're not asking to regulate all cell phones, or twitter, or Facebook use while in a car (yet), what they are asking for is the ability to bitch-slap developers after the fact who create apps that are designed for use while driving yet lead to distractions, ergo creating safety issues for those likely using said app while driving, presumably on a highway. To that end, is someone more likely to be using Navigon, Garmin, TomTom, or the multitude of other apps while going for a walk, or when driving somewhere?
And if they incorporated a "Thank you for using MotionX GPS Lite, before giving your your directions, please watch this YouTube video and answer this quick survey!", should NHTSB or anyone else for that matter have the authority to tell them that that is morally wrong, and potentially unsafe behavior, let alone compel them to take corrective action?
Their request for oversight over this area doesn't seem like a "major" stretch at this point, but it does set a quite unusual precedent that can be used to expand their powers in the future. And as we all have seen in the past, if Government has the potential to grow, it will do so.
You mean like paying an undercover cop $80,000 equivalency from the same Bitcoin wallet that was seized to arrange to kill someone?
I completely agree with you that it is improper to conduct the auction before the trial because it sets a dangerous precedent that all it takes is a cop to lie for prosecutors to liquidate the assets of anyone they don't like.
The question is whether someone who claims to be innocent should have access to someone else's assets to mount their defense.
Should Ulbricht maintain that he is not DPR, his 5th Amendment rights are not being violated because he asserts that the property "wasn't his". Regardless, his 6th Amendment rights are not being violated because he has not been denied the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
The only noteworthy thing here is that should he admit perjury that he is in fact DPR, or another party come forward and either party later be found innocent of any wrongdoing, the government would be required to provide whatever funds they generate through the auction back to the innocent party; something that incentivizes them to sell at below market value.
Except, the distinction here is that Ulbricht is claiming that he is completely innocent, and has no part in the situation.
As such, the seized assets in this case are 'believed to be associated to Ulbricht, however are at present only known to belong to the previous "DPR", the former operator of Silk Road'. And no one else has stepped up to claim them, so the government is putting them up for auction, because why not.
Really, it is an interesting case... 100M equivalency of a cryptocurrency that the claim of ownership comes along with it the implication that you are ran an international drug ring and attempted to orchestrated the murders of several parties.
Acknowledge the property as yours, it remains seized and is instead held in your name until after trial for those acts, or walk away from it and claim that it is all someone else.
Devils Advocate to your argument, let's assume that Ulbricht is telling the truth and that he truly is not DPR; should he be entitled to use the seized SR assets that the government is asserting are his to mount his defense?
Really, most of our broadcasts are now directed back towards earth via satellites, and any signals sent to space are of such a low intensity and so absurdly directional that the odds of it being detected are minuscule at best even with extremely sophisticated equipment sitting on the moon.
That isn't to say that we can't *also* talk into space, but we have gone to highly directional, low powered communications systems as our primary means of communications as a species. Even AM, FM, VHF, UHF, and various Cellular transmissions are now directional and positioned in a longitudinal configuration to reduce power waste by broadcasting where people won't be (strait up).
During the 50's and 60's, sure... we were broadcasting some very powerful signals into space simply because we as a civilization were trying to be as loud as possible to hit every inch of our planet. During that point in time, there is a chance that another culture, if they were of sufficient technological advancement (about where we are today or ahead of it) that they *could* have seen us if they were specifically surveying our star and it's planets.
The bottom line is that like everything, intensity of any signal falls off at the square of the distance, and we are taking some major distances here. While those signals would be severely disrupted by the Oort Cloud, one would still see a deviation from the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation as well as that of our star.
And we didn't give a species like us much time to find us.
And as long as we are talking like that, is it reasonable to also make a logical jump that a species that would have developed technologies necessary to detect us would have also implemented similar efficient means of communications for their species, as a result making them "less detectable" in a similarly short window?
Do you realize that Valve does do two factor auth, and all it takes is a checkbox to turn on?
Afterwards, attempts to even log in from a new location will require that you be texted or emailed a code which you type in, and can then revoke access at any time.
Sounds like maybe you should make use of some of their security mechanisms, the least of which being simply changing your password.
This chair is Windows 7. It's comfortable. It's familiar. You've been sitting in it for years.
Now we'll install Windows 8 on the chair. We can still tell it's a chair. It's not the chair we know but it's still a chair.
It just --- unghh... takes some getting-- *WHIMPER* used to. You just need to-- huh... break it in a little bit, ungh. Eventually it will become comfortable and familiar--- gah!
Ahhh. The blood is body temperature, so it's almost like a heated seat. Mmmm... comfy.
It doesn't matter the amount of evidence available, there will always be deniers. Hell, there is photographic and some video evidence of the holocaust and yet there are still swarms of people saying that it never happened. 9/11, swarms of people saying 'the jets weren't even commercial airliners but were military cargo planes' and yet hundreds of millions of people if not billions watched it live with plenty of recordings available today. Some people just like to take confrontational standpoints because they find them fun.
Buying the game was super easy as those servers were all up and working. The game auth servers were not though, so once it was downloaded, it could not be activated to be played "offline". So Ubisoft has no problems taking your money, just with letting you use your purchase. Then on the other side, those who pirate it get to play immediately without all of these problems, but apparently some releases include a bitcoin miner. In thinking about it, amazed that game developers wouldn't incorporate that model into games themselves where "download for free, and we lower the quality of your experience by siphoning of compute cycles to earn us money, or pay to download and not have your computer mine for bitcoin while trying to enjoy our title!"
Well, there are those who have written Android App Compatibility layers for Tizen that would allow one to run all their existing apps. Not that different from how you can now run Android apps on a Blackberry. Since one can imagine that most have purchased from Play instead of Amazon, they would be highly unlikely to do so without a repurchase though. I still think of it as a solution in search of a problem, but should a major vendor (like Samsung) put all of their backing behind it, maybe it beats Windows Phone, maybe it doesn't. All comes down to whether the general purchasing public notices or cares about the change versus thinking that it is just them rebranding Android for differentiation from their competitors. Android already looks wildly different from HTC to LG to Samsung to Oppo to...
Definitely no midnight lines on either Surface or Windows Phone either just that people are taking a risk on them. Windows Phone is beating Blackberry at this point. Although in thinking about it, before long you may start counting Blackberries sold on one hand.
It would be very interesting to see if Microsoft can hold the #3 spot should Tizen ever ship on something, let alone a Samsung flagship.
Except, Microsoft is no longer making that much money from Windows. Their bread and butter is Office followed by their various server and software development products. Office gives them 16.2 billion in profit, Windows gives them 9 billion. So, office is *close* to double Windows in terms of supporting Microsoft's vision well into the future.
Windows ubiquity is great for Microsoft as it makes things far easier for them, hence why Windows is now free for 8" and less devices as a way of trying to grab a portion of the Android marketshare.
Xbox is cool, but then it only provides them with 800M. It does however create truckloads of good will towards them as it is a product that people really *WANT* to own. Try as they might, I doubt that they will ever get anyone lining up at their local BestBuy for a midnight Office 2015 launch. That want creates a halo for them where people are more willing to take a risk on one of Microsoft's other emerging offerings like Windows Phone or Surface.
Not that it really matters, but the majority of the deal is in stock...
Also known as "we now own you, and in exchange your stockholders now hold a smaller portion of our stock instead!
Only 30% of the deal is in cash, making it 14.5 Billion changing hands. Still a big number, but not as bad as it sounds.
As such, it actually comes out a touch cheaper than the cost that DirecTV spent on their satellites in the first place, and AT&T gets to exploit the 16% profit margin on DirecTV's lines of service.
Last I checked, when we as a civilization are launching satellites into orbit some costing in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, the payouts to a family for "my Timmy died in a fiery explosion" would probably be one of those "phew! Thank god it wasn't last weeks rocket that blew up!" moments for their insurance company. The cost of human life just isn't that high to a typical actuary.
You mean, they provided distributed, off-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service to other vendors in exchange for money so that said vendors wouldn't need to do handle multiplayer gaming server infrastructure themselves?
Yeah... totally different from "the cloud". What was the OP thinking?
Tell little boys that they're pretty, and that they are a perfect little prince...
Hold boys beauty pageants and have them televised on the local PBS affiliates.
Ostracize them for wanting to play outside or participate in sports.
Tell them that one day if they try hard enough they too can marry someone rich and live happily ever after.
While we are at it, we need to get Disney to have a movie with a "prince" as the main character... They've already shown that they care about maintaining appropriate diversity with their last few films focusing on a black princess, and a ginger princess, and a chinese princess, and a native american princess, and an arab princess... Where is the boy who gets his own "don't talk to strangers, unless they are hot!" storybook ending?
CounterStrike started it's life as a Half-Life Mod that reached popularity and then it's developers were hired by Valve to make it an official title.
Tools like Portal 2 Workshop has provided us with amazing mods like "Thinking With Time Machine".
Red Orchestra was an Unreal Mod that finally reached enough popularity to become a stand-alone title.
Battlefield 2 was made by the same people who made "Desert Combat", a Battlefield 1942 mod.
Seems like the only companies that still embrace modding are Valve and Blizzard, with everyone else treating it as either a necessary evil or a truly horrific thing to be avoided at all cost as to maintain the integrity of their work of art.
The good news is that now most studios use the same engines anyways, and those engines now cost less than your typical Adobe app.
Slashdot Mirror
What are the odds that CBS was the one to break this??? It's their time to shine, and they've spent so long looking for the right time to capitAlize on their name! See, BS!
The phone has *the same* specs as the OnePlus One, minus the head tracking camera. The OnePlus One costs $299 *off contract* while the Fire Phone costs $649 off contract. Are the head tracking cameras on the front are worth $350 extra versus an otherwise identically specced phone from a company that is actually turning a profit? The "value add apps" on the Fire Phone would seem more like an avenue for trimming margin rather than adding it, since they exist solely to sell you more things through Amazon.
Maybe I missed the memo... Have we figured out how to rapidly mobilize a coal mine to wherever we want to make a statement?
Yes, conventional weapons can cause serious deaths too, there is no debating that, and we as a species are getting ever more effective at making even more ingenious ways of killing each other.
Let's say that a bomb goes off in downtown Tokyo killing everyone. No potential for "long term injuries or complications from flying debris", everyone. If that explosion was a conventional chemical explosion, someone could walk into downtown Tokyo tomorrow and be safe from the explosive itself, and any danger would come solely from the rubble. If that bomb were biological or nuclear, entering downtown Tokyo would be extremely dangerous for months, years, decades, or longer depending on just what kind we are talking about.
And please don't be so obtuse that you can't realize that there is a wild difference between a nuclear weapon and a nuclear power source. One is designed to render an area uninhabitable *after* causing massive devastation. The other is designed to provide large amounts of energy in a controlled fashion that barring a major outside influence is safe.
The difference between a conventional explosive and a nuclear one is that in one case, when the damage is done and minutes later the region is inhabitable again... in the other, add a dozen orders of magnitude and it *may* be safe to return.
Your average smart phone knows where it is, the exact position in 3D space, what devices are nearby, whether it is being held versus on a table or in a pocket, whether you are laying down, sitting, walking, jogging, running, biking or driving, whether you are indoors or outdoors, what the temperature is, what the atmospheric pressure is, what the relative humidity is, UV levels, air quality levels, the tone of your voice to determine whether you are happy, sad, angry, ..., and in many cases what your heart rate is when using it by looking at your face.
And more sensors are being added with each revision to make them better able to be everything for you.
There are even sensors out now that will build live 3D models of whatever the phone sees, letting it know what is in it's surroundings.
Your phone already knows the things that your thermostat *can* know, except it does a better job because in our hyper-connected, instant gratification culture it has become the 8th deadly sin to be anywhere without your cell phone for 5 minutes.
While it is good to be considerate about what could happen should all of these existing systems that we already have in our homes and are adding daily get linked together into one gigantic monitoring system, it is an exercise in futility considering that we knowingly don't care because next year we can play Kinectimals on our phone and have our ePet interact with the world by jumping up on the couch or hiding behind the counter.
WebGL is becoming a nice technology, and systems like Unity and Unreal Engine 4 are supporting web deployments (not download via the web, but render in a full on HTML5 compliant browser) so at a certain point it makes sense for someone to be the first mover for implementing gamepad support.
Um... a good PCI-E drive, such as a Fusion-IO board will certainly handle that write rate. That *he* is generating enough content to fill that pipe for a week strait is unlikely though as it would require multiple 10Gbase connections to do so. Since he is talking about video editing, let's say this is a surveillance system taking uncompressed HD streams that are being written natively to disk without transcoding prior to editing; we are still talking about 188 cameras coming to this one server.
That the likes of Facebook would be generating sufficient content to saturate these cards, again possible in terms of server to server replication to keep their cluster in sync and maintain live backups and hot standbys, however unlikely that they would want to fully saturate their bandwidth to single nodes as opposed to just adding some more servers to ensure that capacity exists so their users can connect.
They want to have the authority to regulate apps that after release have been linked to "safety related issues" that have an intended purpose of being used primarily while driving on a road. They're not asking to regulate all cell phones, or twitter, or Facebook use while in a car (yet), what they are asking for is the ability to bitch-slap developers after the fact who create apps that are designed for use while driving yet lead to distractions, ergo creating safety issues for those likely using said app while driving, presumably on a highway. To that end, is someone more likely to be using Navigon, Garmin, TomTom, or the multitude of other apps while going for a walk, or when driving somewhere?
And if they incorporated a "Thank you for using MotionX GPS Lite, before giving your your directions, please watch this YouTube video and answer this quick survey!", should NHTSB or anyone else for that matter have the authority to tell them that that is morally wrong, and potentially unsafe behavior, let alone compel them to take corrective action?
Their request for oversight over this area doesn't seem like a "major" stretch at this point, but it does set a quite unusual precedent that can be used to expand their powers in the future. And as we all have seen in the past, if Government has the potential to grow, it will do so.
You mean like paying an undercover cop $80,000 equivalency from the same Bitcoin wallet that was seized to arrange to kill someone?
I completely agree with you that it is improper to conduct the auction before the trial because it sets a dangerous precedent that all it takes is a cop to lie for prosecutors to liquidate the assets of anyone they don't like.
The question is whether someone who claims to be innocent should have access to someone else's assets to mount their defense.
Should Ulbricht maintain that he is not DPR, his 5th Amendment rights are not being violated because he asserts that the property "wasn't his". Regardless, his 6th Amendment rights are not being violated because he has not been denied the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.
The only noteworthy thing here is that should he admit perjury that he is in fact DPR, or another party come forward and either party later be found innocent of any wrongdoing, the government would be required to provide whatever funds they generate through the auction back to the innocent party; something that incentivizes them to sell at below market value.
Except, the distinction here is that Ulbricht is claiming that he is completely innocent, and has no part in the situation.
As such, the seized assets in this case are 'believed to be associated to Ulbricht, however are at present only known to belong to the previous "DPR", the former operator of Silk Road'. And no one else has stepped up to claim them, so the government is putting them up for auction, because why not.
Really, it is an interesting case... 100M equivalency of a cryptocurrency that the claim of ownership comes along with it the implication that you are ran an international drug ring and attempted to orchestrated the murders of several parties.
Acknowledge the property as yours, it remains seized and is instead held in your name until after trial for those acts, or walk away from it and claim that it is all someone else.
Devils Advocate to your argument, let's assume that Ulbricht is telling the truth and that he truly is not DPR; should he be entitled to use the seized SR assets that the government is asserting are his to mount his defense?
When there is money to be made in perpetuating the problem?
Really, most of our broadcasts are now directed back towards earth via satellites, and any signals sent to space are of such a low intensity and so absurdly directional that the odds of it being detected are minuscule at best even with extremely sophisticated equipment sitting on the moon.
That isn't to say that we can't *also* talk into space, but we have gone to highly directional, low powered communications systems as our primary means of communications as a species. Even AM, FM, VHF, UHF, and various Cellular transmissions are now directional and positioned in a longitudinal configuration to reduce power waste by broadcasting where people won't be (strait up).
During the 50's and 60's, sure... we were broadcasting some very powerful signals into space simply because we as a civilization were trying to be as loud as possible to hit every inch of our planet. During that point in time, there is a chance that another culture, if they were of sufficient technological advancement (about where we are today or ahead of it) that they *could* have seen us if they were specifically surveying our star and it's planets.
The bottom line is that like everything, intensity of any signal falls off at the square of the distance, and we are taking some major distances here. While those signals would be severely disrupted by the Oort Cloud, one would still see a deviation from the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation as well as that of our star.
And we didn't give a species like us much time to find us.
And as long as we are talking like that, is it reasonable to also make a logical jump that a species that would have developed technologies necessary to detect us would have also implemented similar efficient means of communications for their species, as a result making them "less detectable" in a similarly short window?
Do you realize that Valve does do two factor auth, and all it takes is a checkbox to turn on?
Afterwards, attempts to even log in from a new location will require that you be texted or emailed a code which you type in, and can then revoke access at any time.
Sounds like maybe you should make use of some of their security mechanisms, the least of which being simply changing your password.
People willingly use $200 computers that only browse the Internet when all they want from a computer is to browse the internet.
This chair is Windows 7. It's comfortable. It's familiar. You've been sitting in it for years.
Now we'll install Windows 8 on the chair. We can still tell it's a chair. It's not the chair we know but it's still a chair.
It just --- unghh... takes some getting-- *WHIMPER* used to. You just need to-- huh... break it in a little bit, ungh. Eventually it will become comfortable and familiar--- gah!
Ahhh. The blood is body temperature, so it's almost like a heated seat. Mmmm... comfy.
CAD - The Upgrade
It doesn't matter the amount of evidence available, there will always be deniers. Hell, there is photographic and some video evidence of the holocaust and yet there are still swarms of people saying that it never happened. 9/11, swarms of people saying 'the jets weren't even commercial airliners but were military cargo planes' and yet hundreds of millions of people if not billions watched it live with plenty of recordings available today. Some people just like to take confrontational standpoints because they find them fun.
Buying the game was super easy as those servers were all up and working. The game auth servers were not though, so once it was downloaded, it could not be activated to be played "offline". So Ubisoft has no problems taking your money, just with letting you use your purchase. Then on the other side, those who pirate it get to play immediately without all of these problems, but apparently some releases include a bitcoin miner. In thinking about it, amazed that game developers wouldn't incorporate that model into games themselves where "download for free, and we lower the quality of your experience by siphoning of compute cycles to earn us money, or pay to download and not have your computer mine for bitcoin while trying to enjoy our title!"
Well, there are those who have written Android App Compatibility layers for Tizen that would allow one to run all their existing apps. Not that different from how you can now run Android apps on a Blackberry. Since one can imagine that most have purchased from Play instead of Amazon, they would be highly unlikely to do so without a repurchase though. I still think of it as a solution in search of a problem, but should a major vendor (like Samsung) put all of their backing behind it, maybe it beats Windows Phone, maybe it doesn't. All comes down to whether the general purchasing public notices or cares about the change versus thinking that it is just them rebranding Android for differentiation from their competitors. Android already looks wildly different from HTC to LG to Samsung to Oppo to ...
Definitely no midnight lines on either Surface or Windows Phone either just that people are taking a risk on them. Windows Phone is beating Blackberry at this point. Although in thinking about it, before long you may start counting Blackberries sold on one hand. It would be very interesting to see if Microsoft can hold the #3 spot should Tizen ever ship on something, let alone a Samsung flagship.
Except, Microsoft is no longer making that much money from Windows. Their bread and butter is Office followed by their various server and software development products. Office gives them 16.2 billion in profit, Windows gives them 9 billion. So, office is *close* to double Windows in terms of supporting Microsoft's vision well into the future. Windows ubiquity is great for Microsoft as it makes things far easier for them, hence why Windows is now free for 8" and less devices as a way of trying to grab a portion of the Android marketshare. Xbox is cool, but then it only provides them with 800M. It does however create truckloads of good will towards them as it is a product that people really *WANT* to own. Try as they might, I doubt that they will ever get anyone lining up at their local BestBuy for a midnight Office 2015 launch. That want creates a halo for them where people are more willing to take a risk on one of Microsoft's other emerging offerings like Windows Phone or Surface.
Not that it really matters, but the majority of the deal is in stock...
Also known as "we now own you, and in exchange your stockholders now hold a smaller portion of our stock instead!
Only 30% of the deal is in cash, making it 14.5 Billion changing hands. Still a big number, but not as bad as it sounds.
As such, it actually comes out a touch cheaper than the cost that DirecTV spent on their satellites in the first place, and AT&T gets to exploit the 16% profit margin on DirecTV's lines of service.
Last I checked, when we as a civilization are launching satellites into orbit some costing in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, the payouts to a family for "my Timmy died in a fiery explosion" would probably be one of those "phew! Thank god it wasn't last weeks rocket that blew up!" moments for their insurance company. The cost of human life just isn't that high to a typical actuary.
You mean, they provided distributed, off-premise Infrastructure-as-a-Service to other vendors in exchange for money so that said vendors wouldn't need to do handle multiplayer gaming server infrastructure themselves?
Yeah... totally different from "the cloud". What was the OP thinking?
Perfect solution...
... Where is the boy who gets his own "don't talk to strangers, unless they are hot!" storybook ending?
Tell little boys that they're pretty, and that they are a perfect little prince...
Hold boys beauty pageants and have them televised on the local PBS affiliates.
Ostracize them for wanting to play outside or participate in sports.
Tell them that one day if they try hard enough they too can marry someone rich and live happily ever after.
While we are at it, we need to get Disney to have a movie with a "prince" as the main character... They've already shown that they care about maintaining appropriate diversity with their last few films focusing on a black princess, and a ginger princess, and a chinese princess, and a native american princess, and an arab princess
Agreed.
CounterStrike started it's life as a Half-Life Mod that reached popularity and then it's developers were hired by Valve to make it an official title.
Tools like Portal 2 Workshop has provided us with amazing mods like "Thinking With Time Machine".
Red Orchestra was an Unreal Mod that finally reached enough popularity to become a stand-alone title.
Battlefield 2 was made by the same people who made "Desert Combat", a Battlefield 1942 mod.
Seems like the only companies that still embrace modding are Valve and Blizzard, with everyone else treating it as either a necessary evil or a truly horrific thing to be avoided at all cost as to maintain the integrity of their work of art.
The good news is that now most studios use the same engines anyways, and those engines now cost less than your typical Adobe app.