No, you fucking moron, he's not saying TROLL at the end. He's giving people like you an insight into how business is done in the real world. Just like companies MUST defend trademarks, even when the infringement is completely innocent, baseless and irrelevant because of how trademark laws work; maybe this company HAD to sue Nintendo in order to prevent other companies from willfully infringing on the patent. They can prove there is no prior art while Nintendo gets an exception to the patent. It's a win-win for the two companies involved.

I'm not saying that is what is actually happening. I'm just saying that baseless accusations like yours are ignorant and counterproductive.

This just in: some companies have large capital reserves and would rather duel lawyer v lawyer in court than cede negotiations to a much smaller company.

You have no idea what went on during those 5 years. Maybe they had been doing everything they possibly could to get Nintendo to license the patents. Maybe they were trying to get Nintendo to contract them to develop new hardware and technologies for the next gen system in exchange for free licensing of the patents.

You have absolutely zero knowledge, yet you completely dismiss and insult them based on your prejudices. Congrats on being what's wrong with the world today.

Dear Queen Caerdwyn:

Today I learned that people would rather breathe toxic fumes from coal fired power plants than spend $3 extra per year to have clean air. I also learned that some people would rather see a well-meaning company fail and have 1100 people out of work than see their political opponent succeed.

Your faithful screw-the-rest-of-the-world-as-long-as-I-get-mine crotchety-conservative Billybob,

Chevron Texaco

I feel the same way about the lockout system. It basically killed the game for me. I had been in progression guilds in the past, doing the hardest content with the highest skilled players (a lot of whom were elitist pricks), and would take 6 month to year long breaks once I got burned out. In Wrath I started a top-end raiding guild with 7 of my in-game friends I liked playing with and who were skilled as well. We used our core 10 man to progress and would PUG a 25 man to recruit. Once we got a good 25 man going then we used our 10 man to learn hard mode encounters and to just have fun with our friends and alts. Maybe doing 3 raids of the same place every week (2 on the main, 1 on the alt) is what burned me out. Regardless, when I came back to play casually and not be a core raider, the shared lockout meant I could never really raid with my friends. They had to keep their mains saved for the 25 man and their alts saved to a set group.

It also killed a lot of PUG raids that people did with their mains, since they didn't have to save themselves to just one lockout. So now I am basically forced to choose between joining a guild with people I don't know or like just to raid, or sit around for hours on end hoping a PUG starts up.

I read all the links on this story post, as well as a bunch of other outside sources and can't find a single mention of a death by bombing a week ago. Would one of the Slashdot editors care to back up their assertion with at least one linked source?

For years we've been trying really hard to get everyone to close down their open WiFi spots to prevent hacking/leeching/malicious activity/etc. Now they want us to do the opposite? I'm sorry, while I don't think a person should be held liable for the child porn their neighbor downloaded using their open WiFi, I also don't think we should be telling them to just ignore security. We have botnets precisely because people ignore security.

They are paying for a service and shouldn't be told to let others use it for free. Why wouldn't they then just cancel their service and use someone else's for free? They shouldn't have to open their computer up to being hacked (or do you want to explain to them how to beef up their security after telling them to lower their security?) just so someone can get free service. They shouldn't have to worry about bandwidth caps just so their neighbor can stream netflix for free.

They SHOULD be hassled if something goes wrong on their open network as a lesson to secure their system.

Hell, I turn off both my router and my cable "modem" when I'm not using them.

I played a crapload of GH2/GH3/RB/RB2/RB:Beatles before deciding I wanted to learn how to play a real guitar. It's been over a year since I made that decision and I haven't played the game once.

With projects like this, though, I'd love to pick up the games again and start learning those real songs on my guitar.

I don't know if I ever would have started playing real guitar without those games, and now that I play guitar I don't look down on those games or insult the people who play them. Not only are they just games (and games that I find fun), but they can be a gateway into real music and creativity.

Want to know how I know you didn't read the article?

Your username is entirely appropriate to the ignorance of your post.

Dammit, I was going to post that it's easy to get a normal username if you sign up early enough, but your UID is twice as low as mine.

This is one of the dumbest posts on /. today.

Congrats.

By your rationale, all states should be completely self-contained. I don't know where you live, but I hope you can survive losing all of the tax money California gives to almost every other state. I hope you can drill your own oil, create your own green electricity (oh, you aren't a windy/sunny/rivery state? too bad), mine your own ore, etc.

Saying Californians need to produce more locally or use less is moronic at best. Californians COULD just fire up a bunch of coal plants if they wanted, but they are trying to be intelligent and use cleaner sources of energy. Some of those sources are better found in other states. But your addled brain seems to think an imaginary line means all that wonderful energy must be completely kept within its cage and never let out.

Haha, it's funny to say California is stupid and wasteful and has economic problems (which it does), but we give more money to all those "better" states in taxes than we receive. Also, isn't it better to have Arizona and Nevada making craploads of solar power and distributing it out than trying to capture any solar in Seattle? What about having Kansas try to harness wave power from all their oceans?

Your ideas and goals and numbers are all well and good, but you don't ever look at the actual design of the vehicle you propose.

I worked on Ares and know what the design is. That thing was a gigantic piece of crap just waiting to fail. Badly. From the barely stable structural dynamics of a 400ft long pencil flying at mach 6, to the ugliest, most disaster prone separation sequence; that design was doomed to fail.

Look, I like the idea of saving money by using off the shelf parts and getting something flying fast, but you end up making too many sacrifices to the overall design to accommodate the limitations of the pre-built parts. Think of it like trying to build a city bus out of parts you scrounged from a Ferrari warehouse.

Also, the very first class you take in Aerospace Engineering teaches you exactly why SSTO (single stage to orbit) is not as cost-effective as multiple stages. So your argument that this design is better because it doesn't need a second stage is not a good one. The design might be simpler and easier to build, but it requires so much more fuel per launch that it isn't worth it.

I can see why people wouldn't want the background image, and I remember being annoyed that I couldn't easily find a way to change or turn off the image.

But I actually liked the splash of color the images brought to the screen. The only thing I wanted from Google was for them to give details
on the images themselves... i.e. who took the shots, what were the shots of/where were they taken, etc.

Come on, this isn't as bad as the massacres in the Ukraine and other Soviet nations. This game is over 6 years old and played on a console that hasn't been sold in 4 years... at best this is as bad as disappearances and political oppression.

Also: Halo sucks.

"I know some pretty dedicated people. But I can't think of anyone in a right frame of mind that would actually welcome the experience after a week. Its going to be really tough to find someone willing to do this."

Really? Really?

You obviously don't know any dedicated people, or many people at all. I could walk around my office (I work in the aerospace industry) and find easily 12 people willing to do this. I would be one of those 12. If I went over to Johnson Space Center to ask, I would have people beating down my door to go.

Here's what you don't get: some people do things for the sheer thrill of exploration. No other reason. Some people realize that the earth is 6 billion years old and they are going to die in 50. Whether they die now or then isn't that big of a difference, really; but if they can do something dramatic in that time versus "just getting by" then their time on Earth actually meant something.

Also, it isn't like we'd be sending them in a sensory deprivation chamber for 6 months. People already spend 6 months up in space stations, and the vehicle we send to mars will probably be built up over time in orbit so it can be much larger and better equipped. They'll have computers for movies, email, internet (the lag will suck), and games. They'll have mandatory exercise periods, scientific research to be done, food cultivation work to be done, etc. They will also go as a team of 6-12 people, so your notion of them having "no one to interact with" is moronic. Even when they are all the way out at mars, the lag is only 28 minutes so emailing isn't that bad at all.

You seem to completely forget that just 100 years ago people wrote letters back and forth that took weeks (not minutes) to be returned. You seem to completely forget that just 100 years ago it took people weeks to get from Europe to America. Even today people will sail SOLO from Los Angeles to Hawaii, which takes around a month. Every year people solo sail around the earth for 120 days nonstop in the Vendee Challenge, which is 4 months completely alone where people die on a regular basis.

Hell, people climb and die on Everest every year and that's already been done.

This is exactly how I feel about the situation. I'm not happy about all the new systems companies force us to use to play their games, but I'm not going to go out of my way to circumvent them.... I'll just not buy their product.

I wasn't happy with the Steam idea when HL2 came out, so I didn't buy anything from Steam until I read enough reviews saying it was OK and had friends tell me it was fine. I'm not happy with Blizzard forcing everyone to use battle.net accounts for WoW, so once they start enforcing that I'll just quit playing the game. There are plenty of other diversions out there that I don't need to create ANOTHER login account when I have one that works fine already... especially since all I ever here about battle.net is people getting their accounts hacked all the time and that it doesn't connect well with Comcast cable internet.