You make some good points about martial arts training. I'm not sure they are a good place to start though. Systems like BJJ are very technical systems, and they are focused on training for competition. While that is good, it does not provide the fundamental body strengthening and training that develops physical fitness. The real problem with trying to use martial arts to get in shape is that by far, the majority of martial arts places are of very low quality. Most of the people I know who train BJJ are already in shape. They spend time at the gym. They go running. The time that they spend at the school learning their BJJ is just a small component of their overall routine. The other downside to training BJJ or any other MMA is that it is really easy to get hurt. Joint locks and manipulations are a good way to tweak tendons and pull muscles. Those injuries take a while to heal, and will definitely discourage training.
The niche for MS SQL comes from all of the developers who have developed apps built on top of it. Most of those apps have been around for longer than a few years. From the point of view of a developer coding a new application from the ground up, it might not make much sense to saddle customers with the cost of MS SQL licenses when something like Postgres could get the job done.
Another issue might come from scalability. MS SQL scales pretty well. Postgres is still waiting into introduce it. Once they introduce it, how long until it is stable?
30-45 minutes three to four times a week is hardly a significant amount of time. Now if he said that he wants to work crazy hours AND train for a marathon, you'd be onto something.
You seem to have missed the point, while at the same time making a good one on your own. The good point that you made is that STAYING in shape is easy. GETTING in shape in the first place takes some work. The person who asked the question mentioned that he has gotten out of shape and is concerned about it. There will be some pain associated with getting back in shape. There will be muscle groups that he hasn't worked on in a long time that are going to feel sore when he first starts to strengthen them. That is just a simple, undeniable, physiological fact.
Like you mentioned, there are different degrees of being in shape. The person who is training to defend themselves is going to have a different routine than the house wife who wants to look good for her husband, or the IT guy who enjoys riding bicycles on the weekend.
Ditto what the OP said. Either you are serious about wanting to work out for a little bit becauase it will improve your life, or you aren't. If you are serious about it, you will find time to do it. If you aren't, you will come up with excuses not to.
As a completely antecdotal experience, I've been training martial arts for seven years. At this point I train five to six days a week for an hour or two each day. I'm in pretty good shape, but could still make a lot of improvements. I don't do any weight training, and I work out at a moderate intensity.
If all you want to do is "get in shape" you can do it in 30-45 minutes a day. The most important thing is to start out with stretching, and once you're stretched out, do some cardio (jogging, jumping rope, etc) for AT LEAST 20 minutes. If you can't jog, walk. Work up to walking with short periods of running. Then run more and walk less. You really don't need to get up to any more than two or three miles a couple of times a week to see some real results after a six to eight months.
The hardest part about working out is getting started. It feels counter-intuitive. It hurts. There is pain associated with it. Your body will tell you to stop doing it. The lazy voice in the back of your head will talk you out of it. The first couple of months are the most difficult part. Developing a schedule AND STICKING TO IT, is the most difficult part.
Be realistic with yourself. Realize that being healthy is a lifestyle choice. It isn't something that you do for a few months and then quit. It takes a while to see results. I'm not going to lie and tell you that it doesn't suck in the beginning because it does. It is much easier to sit in front of the computer and sleep than it is to set aside an hour a day to exercise.
The only other advice I have is to cut out drinking anything besides water. Soda is especially bad for you. Anything with high fructose corn syrup in it (most anything you'd get at 7-11 or the like) is tough for your body to digest. If you are out of shape, working out is going to burn a lot of fat. That fat is stored garbage. Your body is going to be working hard to get rid of that garbage. Water will help that process.
Fear is one of the biggest motivators. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. As Americans, we are unfortunately conditioned by fear based language. Unless something is presented to us as scary and threatening, we tend to ignore it. In order to get funding for projects, politicans and the like have to play the fear card. They will present doomsday what-if scenarios, and threaten to put responsibility for failure on anyone who gets in the way of getting things done.
Although I agree that "cyber security" should be a priority, it would be nice if there were a way to talk about things without having to wrap them in fear and threats.
Can we do away with the "XP still alive" stories? At this point "everyone" knows that people are going to continue using XP for as long as possible. The other people with Software Assurance or other Microsoft volume licensing programs are going to stay on XP just until they can plan a migration to Windows 7. A small minority will finally make the shift to Linux, and a couple people will slurp up the Jobs flavored Kool-Aid and justify spending significant amounts of money to be locked into a completely proprietary hardware/software "solution".
I imagine that if this happens, it will be just like CRV tax on bottles here in California. Every beverage bottle we buy here has a CRV cost attached to it. That cost can be recouped by recycling the bottle. Very few people end up recycling the bottles so they eat the CRV (usually about five cents a container). I can see the same thing happening with "eWaste". There will be a $10 or $20 fee tacked onto the price of everything. The manufacturers will say that they have done their part to offset the cost of recycling their products. Most consumers won't bother recycling the hardware any more than they do today. A few people will fill up pickup trucks with old computers and take them to the recycling center a few times a week.
To Blizzard's credit, they have taken a couple of steps to address the situation that I spent real money on. I wanted an epic mount, but I didn't want to spend the time it took to gather up the gold required to buy it. They've since adjusted the quest reward structure to make it much easier for new players to earn enough gold to purchase an epic mount in a reasonable period of time.
The technology industry has moved beyond its infancy and become a fundamental part of most businesses. I'm a systems administrator and I started working in IT (MIS at the time) when I graduated from high school in 1996. In my childhood, I spent a lot of time hacking phone systems, hanging out at 2600 meetings, and doing all sorts of other not so legit activities with computers. I was interested in whatever systems I could get my hands on, whether it was a System 75 running Audix, a 5ESS/SS7 switch, Linux, Cisco routers, whatever. I read Internetworking with TCP/IP by Comer not because I was in college and had to, but because I wanted to understand what those around me were talking about. All of that development left me with a broad skillset that lacked focus. I developed a very high level understanding of how systems interconnect, and by working for some very good bosses, I developed an understanding of how the systems support the business processes of the organizations I worked for. I'm very much a stereotypical "Jack of all trades, master of none." sort of administrator.
When there weren't many people out there with an interest in or hands on aptitude with computer systems, people with my skillsets were in high demand. In the small business sector, where companies can't afford separate DBAs, system admins, network engineers and so on, I fit in quite well. In the corporate world, I can't even get a job interview because they are looking for individuals who are highly focused on a single aspect of the overall network. The same thing holds true for developers.
"Back in the day", being able to write code to get the job done was a mystical science for management types. Skilled coders were in short supply, so people who could hack programs together were employable. In this day and age, anybody can go to any number of colleges or trade schools and learn how to write decent code. Anybody can go to college or trade school and get an MCSE, or a CCIE, or any number of system/network specific certifications. Managers and employers want known quantities. They want developers who are going to deliver predictable code. They want system admins who are going to follow industry best practices.
The technology industry has grown up. We aren't in the days of "Just make it work" anymore. We're in the days of refining how things work. Best practices have been established. Frameworks for doing things have been established. Companies are just looking for people who can "Make application X do A and B." reliably.
It makes sense. Anyone who has been sick or undergone serious stress knows that weight loss often comes along with that. If you have "a few extra pounds" hanging around, then your body has some reserves to use when you get sick. On the other hand, if you're already rail thin, your body is going to start digesting muscles and organs when it needs nutrients. Doing that will just lead to further problems.
We pay the Chinese to do the grunt work so that we can focus on having fun. I bought gold once from a WoW gold farmer. I figured that the real life time I would have to spend to get an item in the game was worth more to me than the $50 it would cost me to pay a Chinese guy for the gold to buy the item. It was $50 well spent and it greatly increased the pleasure I got from playing the game.
Re:China seems to want to enhance its image...
on
China Bans Gold Farming
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Your average MMO player has a choice of activities. To use WoW as an example, you can do quests, you can run instances, you can do battle grounds, do some world PVP, level an alt, do silly seasonal quests, etc. As a gold farmer, you do one and only one thing... farm the most valuable items out there. You don't have the opportunity to do anything else, because doing anything else is a waste of time and isn't what you are getting paid for.
Following your logic above, how is what Google does any different than what Microsoft is accused of doing? It seems to me like Google (and Microsoft) are "leveraging their monopoly in one market to influence other markets." Is the difference that Microsoft made the mistake of waiting for Netscape to get big before they crushed them, where as Google simply buys up the companies before they even really get off the ground? If Microsoft had just bought Netscape instead of developing IE, would it have been such a big deal? Seems like it sucks being a successful company. If you buy out your competition, you're in trouble. If you come up with a competing product and then leverage your competitive advantage, you're in trouble. No wonder there are so many lawyers in America. Natural human instinct is pretty much illegal at this point.
If Microsoft tries to buy out another software company, people are up in arms. But it's okay for Google? It's okay for Apple? Completely off topic here, but one of the things I really liked about the Apple laptop I bought for my girlfriend is that I could put a DVD in the drive and the OS started the movie. On my Windows box, I have to BUY a third party DVD player to get the same functionality. It would be great if Microsoft included native support for DVD movies in Media Player. They probably don't because they can't, lest they be accused of crushing another segment of the software market. Yet Apple can include native DVD playing functionality because they only account for a small percentage of the market?
The tech world is pretty schitzophrenic. On one hand, techies champion standards and interoperability. On the other, as soon as a company gets large enough to set a standard, people go into a frenzy and start crying about monopolies. It seems like we either have two choices. One, we allow companies to get big enough that they can influence the entire market, and with that influence bring about standards. Or two, we completely Balkanize the industry and give up on the desire to have standardized ways of doing things. Or maybe here in Amerika we come up with a third option? As soon as a company gets big enough, the government buys it out and open sources the technology??
With a million and a half registered UIDs and mod points being awarded on a semi-random basis, you are going to be searching far and wide to find any sort of consistency in moderation.
If my memory serves correctly, Windows Defender is based around IE and protecting the computer from exploits that come in through the browser. Anti-virus software on the other hand scans the rest of the system. To come up with a theoretical example, if you are running Windows Defender and AV software, when you visit a website with malicious code on it, Windows Defender will recognize the code attempting to execute in the browser and block it. On the other hand, if you are only running AV by itself, the malicious code will execute in the browser, and MAYBE your anti-virus software will catch whatever trojans and other executables the website copies onto the local system (if you're lucky and have up to date definitions that can detect whatever they are trying to drop on the system).
The sad reality of the fact seems to be that in order to secure a typical Windows network in this day and age requires a multi-tiered approach. You need some sort of proxy/web filter software to block known malicious sites outright, and also to do some sort of packet inspection/exploit detection on the open connections. You then need some sort of software to protect the browser itself, like Windows Defender (if you are running IE). As a last line of defense, you need anti-virus software running on the local workstation. Also worth noting if you're hosting email in house and forwarding that email to Windows clients, you need AV on the email server, and some sort of anti-spam box in front of the email server.
Agreed. Like the OP, I'm a long time AA player (since 2003). I remember the original versions of the game, and they had auth problems with the training content. In other words, you'd go through the training and when it came time to upload the results, they wouldn't upload. That was six years ago, and the same thing happened in this iteration. I think what really happened is the dev team knew there would be problems, but they under-estimated the impact of them. They probably figured a small percentage of auth connections would fail. This is the Army. They are working with tax dollars. The game is FREE. I doubt that they have the budget to roll out a serious number of servers to handle the load. They figure that people will look at the game, realize it is free, and deal with the issues... or just not play, and then the issues go away. I pre-downloaded the game on Steam and tried to play after it was done installing. After doing training three times and realizing that my results weren't getting uploaded, I checked the forums and saw a sticky post about auth problems. I turned the game off at that point. I will probably try it again in a couple of weeks and see if it is any better. Like I said in a previous post, the previous version of the game was a good FPS for what it costs (nothing).
As far as FPS games go, AA.2 is good for being a free download. As far a recruitment tool goes, I agree with you that it sucks, but for opposite reasons. When I first started playing it (and keep in mind I have been playing FPS games online since Quake), I was surprised by how quickly I died, especially on new maps. In the earlier iterations of the game before they introduced the mini-map and tagging enemy locations, it took a couple of rounds to even figure out where the bad guys were. It is a common occurance to be running toward a building, then all of a sudden a machine gun open up on you and you're dead. Or you're just jogging along with the rest of the team, and a 203 round comes out of no where and you're dead. I may be more analytical than most, but given how easy it was to die in that game, I thought to myself, "I wonder if kids are realizing that you don't respawn at the end of the round in real life?".
What are you talking about? What do you mean when you say the system "rewards just about everything bad and wrong"? I've been playing AA since 2003. The only way to get Honor points is by doing what you're supposed to be doing during the matches. You're penalized for doing things that mess up the mission (shooting your team mates and shooting civilians).
The Group Policy Objects do more than just update the browser itself. They update the settings within the browser. For example if you need to add a new site to the Trusted Sites zone, on 100,000 PCs, you can do that pretty simply with a Group Policy. Another policy mentioned updating prefs.js, and perhaps that would be the equivalent for Firefox. Group Policies can be further targetted to specific Organizational Units (LDAP containers). So in the above example of updating Trusted Sites, there might be a site that developers need access to, but you don't wnat the rest of the organization going to. With GP, you can apply the policy to the subset of computers that you want to roll it out to.
Someone else pointed out that it might be possible to write Group Policy specific plugins for Firefox. It very well might be. Maybe the Mozilla Foundation can get right on that?
Why should he have to pay a fee to transmute the money from one form to another? He was as a fund raising event where he was making a lot of small, cash transactions (selling t-shirts, etc.) He wasn't doing anything illegal and the money was obtained via lawful activities. This whole, "Assumed guilty until you pay a lawyer to prove otherwise" way of doing business in this country is a complete load of shit. I'm glad that the Ron Paul staffer stood up for his rights and I'm glad that the ACLU is championing his cause. The TSA is there to make sure that the planes are safe, and that the people boarding the planes aren't going to try to bring them down. Other than that, they need to GTFO with their wanna be law enforcement procedures.
To my knowledge, the only time you have to declare currency is on international flights and on amounts over $10,000.
The same thread ties the two ends of the spectrum together... lack of personal responsibility. Both ends feed on the center, the productive portion of the population. The government tells the teen mother, "Don't worry, we will take care of you and your baby." The government tells the banks, "Don't worry, the people will cover your losses."
The OP suggested that the immigrants receive welfare until they can get on their feet. My question is, how are immigrants going to find jobs and get on their feet in an economic like Flint Michigan? If there was a viable economy there in the first place, they wouldn't be bulldozing neighborhoods and we wouldn't be having this discussion. The solution to bring in some "hard working immigrants" isn't going to solve jack if there isn't anything for them to work hard at.
Slashdot Mirror
You make some good points about martial arts training. I'm not sure they are a good place to start though. Systems like BJJ are very technical systems, and they are focused on training for competition. While that is good, it does not provide the fundamental body strengthening and training that develops physical fitness. The real problem with trying to use martial arts to get in shape is that by far, the majority of martial arts places are of very low quality. Most of the people I know who train BJJ are already in shape. They spend time at the gym. They go running. The time that they spend at the school learning their BJJ is just a small component of their overall routine. The other downside to training BJJ or any other MMA is that it is really easy to get hurt. Joint locks and manipulations are a good way to tweak tendons and pull muscles. Those injuries take a while to heal, and will definitely discourage training.
The niche for MS SQL comes from all of the developers who have developed apps built on top of it. Most of those apps have been around for longer than a few years. From the point of view of a developer coding a new application from the ground up, it might not make much sense to saddle customers with the cost of MS SQL licenses when something like Postgres could get the job done.
Another issue might come from scalability. MS SQL scales pretty well. Postgres is still waiting into introduce it. Once they introduce it, how long until it is stable?
30-45 minutes three to four times a week is hardly a significant amount of time. Now if he said that he wants to work crazy hours AND train for a marathon, you'd be onto something.
You seem to have missed the point, while at the same time making a good one on your own. The good point that you made is that STAYING in shape is easy. GETTING in shape in the first place takes some work. The person who asked the question mentioned that he has gotten out of shape and is concerned about it. There will be some pain associated with getting back in shape. There will be muscle groups that he hasn't worked on in a long time that are going to feel sore when he first starts to strengthen them. That is just a simple, undeniable, physiological fact.
Like you mentioned, there are different degrees of being in shape. The person who is training to defend themselves is going to have a different routine than the house wife who wants to look good for her husband, or the IT guy who enjoys riding bicycles on the weekend.
Gentle stretching after exercise IS good.
Ditto what the OP said. Either you are serious about wanting to work out for a little bit becauase it will improve your life, or you aren't. If you are serious about it, you will find time to do it. If you aren't, you will come up with excuses not to.
As a completely antecdotal experience, I've been training martial arts for seven years. At this point I train five to six days a week for an hour or two each day. I'm in pretty good shape, but could still make a lot of improvements. I don't do any weight training, and I work out at a moderate intensity.
If all you want to do is "get in shape" you can do it in 30-45 minutes a day. The most important thing is to start out with stretching, and once you're stretched out, do some cardio (jogging, jumping rope, etc) for AT LEAST 20 minutes. If you can't jog, walk. Work up to walking with short periods of running. Then run more and walk less. You really don't need to get up to any more than two or three miles a couple of times a week to see some real results after a six to eight months.
The hardest part about working out is getting started. It feels counter-intuitive. It hurts. There is pain associated with it. Your body will tell you to stop doing it. The lazy voice in the back of your head will talk you out of it. The first couple of months are the most difficult part. Developing a schedule AND STICKING TO IT, is the most difficult part.
Be realistic with yourself. Realize that being healthy is a lifestyle choice. It isn't something that you do for a few months and then quit. It takes a while to see results. I'm not going to lie and tell you that it doesn't suck in the beginning because it does. It is much easier to sit in front of the computer and sleep than it is to set aside an hour a day to exercise.
The only other advice I have is to cut out drinking anything besides water. Soda is especially bad for you. Anything with high fructose corn syrup in it (most anything you'd get at 7-11 or the like) is tough for your body to digest. If you are out of shape, working out is going to burn a lot of fat. That fat is stored garbage. Your body is going to be working hard to get rid of that garbage. Water will help that process.
Fear is one of the biggest motivators. The squeaky wheel gets the grease. As Americans, we are unfortunately conditioned by fear based language. Unless something is presented to us as scary and threatening, we tend to ignore it. In order to get funding for projects, politicans and the like have to play the fear card. They will present doomsday what-if scenarios, and threaten to put responsibility for failure on anyone who gets in the way of getting things done.
Although I agree that "cyber security" should be a priority, it would be nice if there were a way to talk about things without having to wrap them in fear and threats.
Can we do away with the "XP still alive" stories? At this point "everyone" knows that people are going to continue using XP for as long as possible. The other people with Software Assurance or other Microsoft volume licensing programs are going to stay on XP just until they can plan a migration to Windows 7. A small minority will finally make the shift to Linux, and a couple people will slurp up the Jobs flavored Kool-Aid and justify spending significant amounts of money to be locked into a completely proprietary hardware/software "solution".
I imagine that if this happens, it will be just like CRV tax on bottles here in California. Every beverage bottle we buy here has a CRV cost attached to it. That cost can be recouped by recycling the bottle. Very few people end up recycling the bottles so they eat the CRV (usually about five cents a container). I can see the same thing happening with "eWaste". There will be a $10 or $20 fee tacked onto the price of everything. The manufacturers will say that they have done their part to offset the cost of recycling their products. Most consumers won't bother recycling the hardware any more than they do today. A few people will fill up pickup trucks with old computers and take them to the recycling center a few times a week.
To Blizzard's credit, they have taken a couple of steps to address the situation that I spent real money on. I wanted an epic mount, but I didn't want to spend the time it took to gather up the gold required to buy it. They've since adjusted the quest reward structure to make it much easier for new players to earn enough gold to purchase an epic mount in a reasonable period of time.
The technology industry has moved beyond its infancy and become a fundamental part of most businesses. I'm a systems administrator and I started working in IT (MIS at the time) when I graduated from high school in 1996. In my childhood, I spent a lot of time hacking phone systems, hanging out at 2600 meetings, and doing all sorts of other not so legit activities with computers. I was interested in whatever systems I could get my hands on, whether it was a System 75 running Audix, a 5ESS/SS7 switch, Linux, Cisco routers, whatever. I read Internetworking with TCP/IP by Comer not because I was in college and had to, but because I wanted to understand what those around me were talking about. All of that development left me with a broad skillset that lacked focus. I developed a very high level understanding of how systems interconnect, and by working for some very good bosses, I developed an understanding of how the systems support the business processes of the organizations I worked for. I'm very much a stereotypical "Jack of all trades, master of none." sort of administrator.
When there weren't many people out there with an interest in or hands on aptitude with computer systems, people with my skillsets were in high demand. In the small business sector, where companies can't afford separate DBAs, system admins, network engineers and so on, I fit in quite well. In the corporate world, I can't even get a job interview because they are looking for individuals who are highly focused on a single aspect of the overall network. The same thing holds true for developers.
"Back in the day", being able to write code to get the job done was a mystical science for management types. Skilled coders were in short supply, so people who could hack programs together were employable. In this day and age, anybody can go to any number of colleges or trade schools and learn how to write decent code. Anybody can go to college or trade school and get an MCSE, or a CCIE, or any number of system/network specific certifications. Managers and employers want known quantities. They want developers who are going to deliver predictable code. They want system admins who are going to follow industry best practices.
The technology industry has grown up. We aren't in the days of "Just make it work" anymore. We're in the days of refining how things work. Best practices have been established. Frameworks for doing things have been established. Companies are just looking for people who can "Make application X do A and B." reliably.
It makes sense. Anyone who has been sick or undergone serious stress knows that weight loss often comes along with that. If you have "a few extra pounds" hanging around, then your body has some reserves to use when you get sick. On the other hand, if you're already rail thin, your body is going to start digesting muscles and organs when it needs nutrients. Doing that will just lead to further problems.
We pay the Chinese to do the grunt work so that we can focus on having fun. I bought gold once from a WoW gold farmer. I figured that the real life time I would have to spend to get an item in the game was worth more to me than the $50 it would cost me to pay a Chinese guy for the gold to buy the item. It was $50 well spent and it greatly increased the pleasure I got from playing the game.
Your average MMO player has a choice of activities. To use WoW as an example, you can do quests, you can run instances, you can do battle grounds, do some world PVP, level an alt, do silly seasonal quests, etc. As a gold farmer, you do one and only one thing... farm the most valuable items out there. You don't have the opportunity to do anything else, because doing anything else is a waste of time and isn't what you are getting paid for.
Following your logic above, how is what Google does any different than what Microsoft is accused of doing? It seems to me like Google (and Microsoft) are "leveraging their monopoly in one market to influence other markets." Is the difference that Microsoft made the mistake of waiting for Netscape to get big before they crushed them, where as Google simply buys up the companies before they even really get off the ground? If Microsoft had just bought Netscape instead of developing IE, would it have been such a big deal? Seems like it sucks being a successful company. If you buy out your competition, you're in trouble. If you come up with a competing product and then leverage your competitive advantage, you're in trouble. No wonder there are so many lawyers in America. Natural human instinct is pretty much illegal at this point.
If Microsoft tries to buy out another software company, people are up in arms. But it's okay for Google? It's okay for Apple? Completely off topic here, but one of the things I really liked about the Apple laptop I bought for my girlfriend is that I could put a DVD in the drive and the OS started the movie. On my Windows box, I have to BUY a third party DVD player to get the same functionality. It would be great if Microsoft included native support for DVD movies in Media Player. They probably don't because they can't, lest they be accused of crushing another segment of the software market. Yet Apple can include native DVD playing functionality because they only account for a small percentage of the market?
The tech world is pretty schitzophrenic. On one hand, techies champion standards and interoperability. On the other, as soon as a company gets large enough to set a standard, people go into a frenzy and start crying about monopolies. It seems like we either have two choices. One, we allow companies to get big enough that they can influence the entire market, and with that influence bring about standards. Or two, we completely Balkanize the industry and give up on the desire to have standardized ways of doing things. Or maybe here in Amerika we come up with a third option? As soon as a company gets big enough, the government buys it out and open sources the technology??
What do you mean by dissection? You can click on any post header and get a break down of the moderation.
With a million and a half registered UIDs and mod points being awarded on a semi-random basis, you are going to be searching far and wide to find any sort of consistency in moderation.
The sad reality of the fact seems to be that in order to secure a typical Windows network in this day and age requires a multi-tiered approach. You need some sort of proxy/web filter software to block known malicious sites outright, and also to do some sort of packet inspection/exploit detection on the open connections. You then need some sort of software to protect the browser itself, like Windows Defender (if you are running IE). As a last line of defense, you need anti-virus software running on the local workstation. Also worth noting if you're hosting email in house and forwarding that email to Windows clients, you need AV on the email server, and some sort of anti-spam box in front of the email server.
Agreed. Like the OP, I'm a long time AA player (since 2003). I remember the original versions of the game, and they had auth problems with the training content. In other words, you'd go through the training and when it came time to upload the results, they wouldn't upload. That was six years ago, and the same thing happened in this iteration. I think what really happened is the dev team knew there would be problems, but they under-estimated the impact of them. They probably figured a small percentage of auth connections would fail. This is the Army. They are working with tax dollars. The game is FREE. I doubt that they have the budget to roll out a serious number of servers to handle the load. They figure that people will look at the game, realize it is free, and deal with the issues... or just not play, and then the issues go away. I pre-downloaded the game on Steam and tried to play after it was done installing. After doing training three times and realizing that my results weren't getting uploaded, I checked the forums and saw a sticky post about auth problems. I turned the game off at that point. I will probably try it again in a couple of weeks and see if it is any better. Like I said in a previous post, the previous version of the game was a good FPS for what it costs (nothing).
As far as FPS games go, AA.2 is good for being a free download. As far a recruitment tool goes, I agree with you that it sucks, but for opposite reasons. When I first started playing it (and keep in mind I have been playing FPS games online since Quake), I was surprised by how quickly I died, especially on new maps. In the earlier iterations of the game before they introduced the mini-map and tagging enemy locations, it took a couple of rounds to even figure out where the bad guys were. It is a common occurance to be running toward a building, then all of a sudden a machine gun open up on you and you're dead. Or you're just jogging along with the rest of the team, and a 203 round comes out of no where and you're dead. I may be more analytical than most, but given how easy it was to die in that game, I thought to myself, "I wonder if kids are realizing that you don't respawn at the end of the round in real life?".
What are you talking about? What do you mean when you say the system "rewards just about everything bad and wrong"? I've been playing AA since 2003. The only way to get Honor points is by doing what you're supposed to be doing during the matches. You're penalized for doing things that mess up the mission (shooting your team mates and shooting civilians).
The Group Policy Objects do more than just update the browser itself. They update the settings within the browser. For example if you need to add a new site to the Trusted Sites zone, on 100,000 PCs, you can do that pretty simply with a Group Policy. Another policy mentioned updating prefs.js, and perhaps that would be the equivalent for Firefox. Group Policies can be further targetted to specific Organizational Units (LDAP containers). So in the above example of updating Trusted Sites, there might be a site that developers need access to, but you don't wnat the rest of the organization going to. With GP, you can apply the policy to the subset of computers that you want to roll it out to.
Someone else pointed out that it might be possible to write Group Policy specific plugins for Firefox. It very well might be. Maybe the Mozilla Foundation can get right on that?
Why should he have to pay a fee to transmute the money from one form to another? He was as a fund raising event where he was making a lot of small, cash transactions (selling t-shirts, etc.) He wasn't doing anything illegal and the money was obtained via lawful activities. This whole, "Assumed guilty until you pay a lawyer to prove otherwise" way of doing business in this country is a complete load of shit. I'm glad that the Ron Paul staffer stood up for his rights and I'm glad that the ACLU is championing his cause. The TSA is there to make sure that the planes are safe, and that the people boarding the planes aren't going to try to bring them down. Other than that, they need to GTFO with their wanna be law enforcement procedures.
To my knowledge, the only time you have to declare currency is on international flights and on amounts over $10,000.
The same thread ties the two ends of the spectrum together... lack of personal responsibility. Both ends feed on the center, the productive portion of the population. The government tells the teen mother, "Don't worry, we will take care of you and your baby." The government tells the banks, "Don't worry, the people will cover your losses."
The OP suggested that the immigrants receive welfare until they can get on their feet. My question is, how are immigrants going to find jobs and get on their feet in an economic like Flint Michigan? If there was a viable economy there in the first place, they wouldn't be bulldozing neighborhoods and we wouldn't be having this discussion. The solution to bring in some "hard working immigrants" isn't going to solve jack if there isn't anything for them to work hard at.