You should talk to the Secretary of the Air Force. They're saying otherwise.

http://thehill.com/policy/defense/213844-ayotte-rips-air-force-for-defending-a-10-retirement

Keeping the 300 A-10s operational costs over $800M per year. That's a lot of money for a plane that can only do one thing under specific circumstances. Newer, more flexible systems can take over those missions at little additional cost. The Air Force has been trying to get rid of the A-10 for years, but Congress won't let them.

Yes, the A-10 appeals to the inner 12 year old in all of us. But the days of a pilot flying slowly in a straight line directly towards its target are behind us.

I calculated this at 8 MH/s out of my memory and missed a comma but if it's 14MH/s that's only $3,534.62 per day. It's something like a 100:1 loss on electricity at $0.11/KWH by the way. Hurray for efficiency.

Of course, when it's your vict^H^H^H^Husers paying for the electricity and not you, you really don't need to care what it costs.

It's already being studied. Asbestos is dangerous because it creates naturally occurring nanoparticles. It's not chemically toxic.

These types of manufactured nanoparticles, including carbon nanotubes, won't see widespread use until they're shown to be safe.

You must have lost your mind. I used Windows Mobile for years. I had to install task managers to kill apps before they killed my battery. I had to install a registry editor and fiddle with settings to get even basic functionality working. IE on WM was a sick joke. I rebooted the phones every other day just to keep working.

  iOS was better in every way. It had a real grown up browser. Shit just worked. The fluid animations were just icing on the cake.

Powerful but flaky is useless.

A friend of mine recently got a job at Oculus. I asked her, if she ever meets John Carmack, to start the conversation with "Hey, aren't you the guy who wrote Commander Keen?". I thought it would be a refreshing change of pace for him. We'll see if she comes through.

As others said, there's not necessarily a guarantee Russia wouldn't decide to use Snowden as a bargaining chip or sorts, turning him over to the U.S. govt. at a very inopportune time for him to get any hope of justice. Surely, that's in the back of his head as at least a lingering possibility?

Also, he has quite a bit of support in the U.S. from people who think he's a hero, not a criminal. (Not everyone makes the front cover of Wired magazine, covered in a positive way.) Our current folks in political office may not care for him -- but *if* he could negotiate a high profile trial here, at least there would be a LOT of eyeballs watching, concerned that he received a fair outcome.

I'm positive he'd instantly find work in the private sector too, doing infosec of some sort.

I just attended a seminar today where a couple of Microsoft people gave presentations. One thing that they made pretty clear is that Microsoft's Azure "cloud" is a HUGE part of their future business model.

Right now, when you ask the typical MS user if they can name 3 things Azure does, they usually get stuck naming even one item. But one of these days, Microsoft hopes to embrace the software as subscription model to the point where practically everyone will just pay for Azure to spin up and host whatever servers they wish, vs. trying to run their own on their own hardware, in-house.

They've also made a big deal in their recent marketing about the Titanfall game running on Azure -- and I'm sure there will be more of this to come. If they do a Minecraft sequel, I'd suspect it will be designed so people can easily host Minecraft servers on Azure (probably with a friendly web front-end to create and configure them?). Maybe that will be the ONLY authorized way to do it?

I interpreted the question as independent of the article.

Because Republicans snuck a ban into a completely unrelated port security bill that they knew nobody could vote against right before an election.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unlawful_Internet_Gambling_Enforcement_Act_of_2006#Legislative_history

I think this is a great strategy, but how would Epic Games know what a developer's gross income was, year after year, on a particular game title?
Is this a matter of Epic trusting them to report it honestly, or is it part of contractual terms where you're required to supply them with your tax records each year, or what?

I'm thinking this might be similar to what some of the video card manufacturers have done (such as with the R9280X cards), where a physical DIP switch on the card selects between firmware flash A or B. If you suspected corruption, you could flip the switch to use the alternate, which presumably would be loaded from the factory with good, working firmware of whatever version was most recent at the time the product was manufactured.

I suppose this would technically only give you "one shot" at recovering from a firmware hack ... but better than nothing, right? And in the meantime, it would give protection to people from such things as a corrupt flash update or a way to do an easy A/B comparison between 2 firmware revisions.

I know that sounds a little snarky .... but that's been one of my issues with the Civ games for quite some time. It seems like as you get into the "thick" of the game, with a lot of units occupying more and more space -- the system resources taken get pretty large. It often leads to slowdowns and a freeze-up or crash before the game can be completed.

The difference, IMO, is that obtaining a real guitar to play with one of these games is really not much more "out of reach" than getting the plastic toy version.

If you want to play a sport like football, you have to gather together a willing team of players. If you want to drive a real car on a racetrack, that involves some expense and a suitable car. Chuck rocks at pigs? Umm.... sure, if you have a handy pig pen to go visit at whatever hour of day or night you're ready to play that game, and you have an ample supply of rocks to throw, plus nobody who'll call the cops on you.

I never had much interest in the Guitar Hero franchise, because meh.... playing a fake plastic guitar with buttons similar to the old "Simon" game I had as a pre-teen seems rather pointless. People put all that effort into mastering it and it's a useless skill for anything else. Why bother?

Rocksmith did interest me, because it was all about actually learning songs using your favorite electric guitar. But only a few minutes into that one, I realized I wasn't getting into it either. I like what they tried to do with it, but like others here said -- why no standard guitar tablature? The whole scrolling neck thing works for Guitar Hero, but I found it pretty disorienting and non-intuitive for learning music on a real guitar. Maybe offer a toggle between views/modes at least?

Also, maybe it's just me ... but I feel like the era of the "guitar god" and stadium rock is pretty much behind us. These games still cling to that theme, that you're trying to play bigger and bigger live shows, seeking the applause of the fans, etc. etc. But do people even really relate to that anymore? I guess it's one mechanism to try to make the game rewarding -- but part of me feels too old for that nonsense. I want a game that makes practicing songs and new guitar techniques fun, but without making me pretend I'm 25 years younger and striving to make it big in the era of 80's hair metal.