...did not have a reasonable likelihood of succeeding, the court may award the recovery of full costs to the prevailing party, including reasonable attorney’s fees, other than the United States...

All this bill does is give judges the ability to required the loser to pay up. The legal definition and use of the word MAY is very important. MAY gives the judge discretion, SHALL does not. IANALBMWIAPL and she says this effectively does nothing other then give a judge the same ability to require one side to pay up without having to dismiss the case with prejudice. Nothing more then giving the judge more tools to punish trolls.

(Shameless plug of sorts, apologies)

I DM'ed (Dungeon Mastered) RPGs for many (like 20) years and I learned a very important lesson I mention in some youtube vids I am throwing out there (not a full timer, I'm just documenting some stuff for posterity so-to-speak http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL42823901F978F00D&feature=mh_lolz) but I'll give you a specific relevant quote:

"Every detail you give a player, is one less detail they can imagine for themselves." Part of limiting graphics is, it allows a viewer or player's imagination more flexability. This is why I preferred Batman TAS' art direction more then say Fist of the North Star or Robot in the Shell anime (not that I disliked either of those). The more minimal art allowed me, mentally, to focus more on the movement, the framing, the scene as a whole, and gave me enough flexibility to flesh out the world without having every rat and piece of eye candy thrown at me.

It was an embarrassment to EA to say the least. They lost over 50% of their subscription base within 90 days actually surpassing the industry's worst launch\retention Warhammer. It was a single player game with an MMO bolted on and after everyone beat it in 30 days. less then 1/2 people bothered to subscribe.

Think of this as a resturant: 50% of the customers didn't like the food enough to come back. Doesn't sound good. Prior to Warhammer, retention at 90 days was about 80% by estimate with players usually averaging 6 months before attrition. The problem is with the market saturation the demographic changed when WoW came into the picture. The Old School MMO players (pre-WoW players) had a much longer attention span in regards to rewards. The pacing, the very core was a longer experience. A novel. WoW came along and transformed that experience into a Short Story. Both enjoyable in their own right, but with the advent of the Theme Park and Sandbox styles (rather then the Virtual World model of Everquest in contrast to say WoW or Eve respectively) and the addition of a structured tread mill. The demands to engage this new demographic are not, IMHO, sustainable via a subscription model.

The problem with F2P is without safeguards, every troll douche and his inbred cousin can just script up and troll, ban, repeat. F2P is a recovery and long tail approach to MMOs and I see the industry needs to change.

MMOs should be more like muds and Counter Strike servers. More intimate, targeting 200-300 people a shard and allowing people to "roll-their-own" shards much like a counter strike server. Transform the MMO industry into a hosting industry where a few of you "Roll-Your-Own" and throw in what mods you want then invite people. Open it public, set a level cap, or an age limit, customize some rules, or make it invite only. Oddly I am seeing an uptick in Muds once again courtesy of CoffeeMud and newer Diku\Merc\Rom derivatives. Maybe a second golden age of MMOs is coming, perhaps the MMO will die and the GMUD will be revived. Who knows.

What I can say is that the original demographic of EQ players are as a majority, parents (statistically, they should all now mostly be about 35 years old) and the time commitment for old school MMOs (you know Virtual Worlds rather then Theme Park\Sandbox MMOs) means devs are left with the ADHD FPS converts that can't stand waiting more then 4 seconds before something spawns.

We call it statistical 'profiling' and it happens to be illegal apparently.

Zip guns like that are movie fiction short of using a .22 LR round !!for now!!. The walls of the barrel would based on the material need to be about 4 inches thick, minimum. That would make his zip gun roughly the size of a bowling ball if he was using a 9mm round. Otherwise it would just explode in his hand since the pressure from the cartridge wouldn't be contained in the polymer barrel. Toyota is working on high-heat\high-pressure ceramics for engines and I tell you this: weapon manufacturers are looking at those materials for military equipment.

That skinny teen? Have you seen a recent picture of Trevon?

You realize editors with integrity and a brain was dropped long ago when we got kdawson right?

I offer this: British accents (accounting Welsh, English, Scottish, and Irish variations for discussion sake) are varied enough but understandable to be "exotic" against one another while still being familiar.

Crowdsourcing accelerates evolution of 3D printable objects by leveraging the synergy of cloud computing resulting in a substantial paradigm shift in cost effective design.

I haven't bought an EA product since they dissolved Origin. FU EA.

--I'm an old fart, and I "can't see past the fact that there isn't a world inside the computer" either---

Haven't played many MMOs have you? I won't run up a deep philosophical debate but in the context of defining a reality (deep stuff there) there can exist "worlds" inside of data such that World of Warcraft is a light-weight world (but tightly rule bound). You have to put 1 foot in the deep end and start thinking Turing complete universe context.

If anyone wonders why there are no aliens around I offer this: "Perhaps someone made Flynn's grid a reality and people decided to explore a virtual frontier."

If human existence can be distilled to pure information then you could spend a near eternity exploring a virtual universe. That is a topic touched on in the film.

The system Flynn was in (The Grid) was by design. The environment he was in, in the first film, was perhaps his mind attempting to rationalize his existence in some fashion he could understand. The two are not the same so the new film doesn't in fact imply that anything in the grid is a reflection of the computer's inner workings. Flynn just made a really neat MMO environment to build a system "Where programs can be free." (e.g. AI programs can function in a sandbox environment without fear of the MCP).

So the assumption, as I read it, is the environment in which the bacteria is deployed is assumed to have a consistent pH level to help it identify that it is in fact, concrete. However anything that also has that pH could potentially be a hospitiable environment.

Question: How are they planning on accounting for a non-lab environment where everything from moisture, temperature, hell even lighting apparently, can influence the pH of the target location? Based on respitory infection the pH in a lung is hardly consistent in that scenario and as many have jested, the side walk could have a cold. The point is if they are pinning the identification based on the pH I fail to see this as viable in uses outside of a controlled lab. Bridge work going on in Nov with snow and sleet I fail to see a consistent pH for this to work on any credible level. Just more theortical lab work that will get a bit of grant money and that is about it. With construction workers dealing with a lot of concrete dust during repairs the pH is one hurdle for the bacteria. As for phsyical contaminates, respitory contaminates could be lunch for this stuff. I doubt there is a lethal risk, but having to throw someone on sick leave because they have a mild infection of this stuff is more economic risk then anything. pH to me seems a tad bit flaky as a marker for concrete. Even from what the article mentions, it requires too much of a controleld environment to be usseful. The number of things that could have similar pH seems rather high, the non-concrete contaminates... potential predators\competitors... It might work great in a lab... but in the real world? I'm doubtful.

And the bacteria knows the difference between concrete and lung tissue how?