I'll straighten out the details on this clickbait.

First, while uPlay is indeed a complete flaming piece of shit, it doesn't prevent you from playing the game once installed. When you launch it and press 'play', even if it wont sync with ubisoft's servers, it will still launch. It takes a good while (couple of minutes) for uplay and the sync to time out, but it works.

An actual gripe on uplay: what kind of game publisher doesn't institute predownloads for people who've already bought the game? It didn't show up in my games list until today so I couldn't even get the DL started. Their servers being crippled is partly due to not distributing downloads for pre-purchasers properly, forgivable 5 years ago but not in today's distribution systems.

Console port gripe: mouse acceleration is on by default and you must turn it off by actually going in and editing the xml settings file. If that doesn't scream lazy, I don't know what does. The menus and mouse control aren't bad overall, but that mouse acceleration makes the gameplay infuriating, felt like I had a joystick deadzone on my mouse. After googling and changing this setting, the game felt much better.

Overall though, I'm happy with the game, though I've not gotten far into it. I wouldn't have bought it straight up, partly due to bitterness about destroying the Thief franchise and partly due to their shitty company policies, but I've enjoyed it as a bundle purchase. Ubisoft is a frustrating company. Their policies and DRM money-grubbing aspects make them almost as unlikeable as EA, but they make the type of games I tend to enjoy. I prefer to stay away on principle but its hard.

I had this problem growing up, it destroyed my interest in school and motivation to learn. In 5th, 6th, and 7th grade I learned algebra 3 years in a row. I even remember getting ahead of my class in elementary school in math, then having my progress 'reset' by the teachers every year as I advanced a grade.

A lack of individualized learning plans and forcing everyone into the same progress speed, caused by the grade-age system and lack of resources, destroys the enjoyment of school for the gifted. The ironic thing about this teacher's union gripe is that tech appears to be the best way to implement individualized learning. Hopefully someone figures out a good method to do so soon.

If you spent HALF that on your network you'd crush your competition! What a crock of shit.

I'd like to add that the GP's thought process is typical with alpha and beta males. The thought that since guns are unicorns in his country, he could fight off an assailant or get help within a reasonable time frame given a hostile situation without a gun. Maybe its the police presence that brought his thought process, but I find more than likely its the one I mentioned.

As a confident male myself, I have issue with that line of thought. Its not about me, its about my family or people who can't so readily defend themselves. In a case of home invasion, rape, and kidnapping, I find resorting to physical strength and skill to be more barbaric than the barbarism some people like to call the right to bear arms. Guns are a great equalizer, allowing a 125lb mom of three to stand equal to a 250 pound rapist or pedo who feels entitled to take what he wants.

That chart is incredibly wrong. The physics behind it all will always make waterborne shipping more energy efficient. Cost per mile is a poor metric because it can be easily manipulated by choosing basis areas with saturated/barren markets. In this case, the computations are done by the DoT and wouldn't include international shipping numbers, by far the most efficient, but would only include barge cargo which is the only way to ship domestically. To frame the comparison, that blog link compares domestic transport links like Chicago to New Orleans via barge, or NJ to Chicago via rail. In practice this is less than 10% of the transit, 90% is shipping it overseas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

It is important to note that while the ships listed are more energy efficient than rails, they are also the least efficient of all cargo transport ships. Barges are tiny and barely move anything in proportion to their dead weight. There are ships over 100 times the size with economies of scale to match.

This is technically incorrect. Put aside that its a bad investment for a minute and think about this: While I'm not a car person and couldnt give two shits about what I drive, to some its an amenity they enjoy, like a big screen TV or a computer. To use an analogy people here would understand, these people are the kind of people that get a new computer every 2 years because they have to have the latest and greatest, and to them, those of us in old clunkers are like the geezers who have a 10 year old comp that's 'good enough.'

The cost of ownership between lease and own for someone who gets a new car every 3 years is relatively break-even assuming reasonable mileage, mainly due to rapid depreciation and the interest cost associated with the car loan. The big difference is that the owning cycle has more upfront costs to get ahead of the equity chase. That seems counterintuitive, but let me explain. Say you purchase a $30,000 car and put the same down as you would have on the lease, lets say $4,000. In 3 years that car is worth around $18,000, so you have to pay at least $8,000 in 3 years just to break even to buy a new car at full price, which comes out to $230/mo with interest included. Everything over that payment is technically a down payment on a new car in 3 years. On a 5 year loan, the monthly payment would be between $500-$600/mo. The lease for the same car is going to be around $300/mo. Technically you pay a little more for the lease, ~$50-$70/mo, but as you can see the upfront cost is lower. This means you can predictably drive a nicer car continuously for less money on your monthly budget at the cost of spending a little more on the tail end of the 10 year average.

In short, yes a lease is a little more costly but the difference is much smaller than 'far more' and is useful for someone who treats a car experience as an enjoyment and not a mode of transportation/investment. Car dealerships make relatively little on leases and mainly use them to secure a used car base, they make more in financing interest on new cars and sales of used cars. The salesmen are typically reluctant to focus on offering leases for this reason.

As a note, I absolutely abhor wasting money on cars and will prob drive my paid off car until it falls apart. Just playing the devil's advocate. I have worked with what I like to term 'car people' and they have a completely different mindset when it comes to cars than I do. I think its a giant waste of money, but they think the same way of all my tech stuff. To each their own.

I just set up two laptops for family, both shipped with the original Windows 8 RTM. Fortunately this was my third go-around so I was prepared and knew what to expect.

Windows 8, when originally shipped, had a bug in the windows updater. It would not display the status of your update downloads or update installs. They also designed the updater to be a background task and not something the user actively does anymore, with the stupid design decision to artificially limit bandwith for updates to a trickle regardless of internet connection or network activity.

The result of this failure is that it takes around two hours to just download the updates for a fresh install, all without any visible indicator that the updates are going. The updater isn't frozen, its just the progress indicator is ass. It takes about ~3 hours to get a fresh machine updated and ready for windows 8.1, which takes another hour or two. I suggest using the desktop control panel (type 'contr' on the start screen to get to it) and disabling any kind of auto hibernate for this period.

To get you to sign up for it, they're kind of deceptive. You can press 'skip' or 'no thanks' to verified by visa signup. Of course now that you're signed up your boned, and its probably a good idea to do it, but not having it isn't going to remove the ability for you to report and void fraudulent charges.

While it can be frustrating that people can't take 1+1 and get 2, the psychology of it is that people are generally irrational. The wierdest thing is that when you get into an adversarial argument with people, they are more likely to reinforce their original belief than to ponder on new evidence. There are better ways to present information to people than the way you described. All that happens when you do that is they think you're a dick and ignore anything you present in the future unless they see you as an authority figure.

Aim to describe, educate, and communicate. Talk about the idea rather than focusing on the correction and you'll reach more people than if you take the current approach. Maybe you don't want to reach more people, but think about why you don't want to reach more people. Isn't that just a rationalization, justifying your way of thinking and way of life without wanting to learn the circumstances or mental capacity of those around you, limiting their ability to understand as easily as you? Its rationalizing the irrational negative feelings for others, the same exact behavior you despise of others.

I think a lot of it comes from the motivation for communicating. I approached it how you did when I was younger, but fortunately landed with a good company that taught me a lot about myself and let my strengths as well as limitations show through so I could see where to improve (communication). When I was younger, I communicated to find like minded individuals and to reaffirm my way of thinking and beleifs. Now, I communicate to share, learn, and educate.

If you live in the southern US states, you don't have to deal with snow and ice often, and as a result also don't have to deal with brine and de-icing agents on road as much. Those things will cause good damage to cars when the cars are exposed to them on a regular basis, and in southern states its good to wash your car after a period of having them on the roads.

There's a reason when you go to Philly or Detroit that most the cars look asstastic, and its not because of standard of living or income. Classic car enthusiasts look to buy from the southern states for the same reason.

150k wouldn't surprise me at all, especially with construction and UAW union workers. Some manual laborers in this country make much more than that.

I recall one of the new trucks being built on an aluminum frame? I think that requires tig welding which is extremely difficult and very few have mastered the skill. Very precise welding is also extremely important in large steel works projects like bridges and condo/office towers.

This wouldn't have been possible 200 years ago. We didn't have the kind of metals that would stand up to the long term punishment with that kind of constant torque long term.

Are you sure you're making a profit? Leaving your comp on all the time to accrue playtime hours costs power, though I'm not sure how much it would be costing you. When looking at dollars and cents balancing though, I think it should factor in.

This reminds me of another, somewhat offtopic issue that bothered me in Europe.

I found European stores very unwelcoming in Finland in part because of the lack of public restrooms. In downtown Helsinki, pretty much only Stockman's had a public restroom on ONE floor and it was a 15 minute wait if you wanted to use it. My girlfriend says this is fairly common around Europe. I found that during a day of travelling, I had to plan my day around my urge to pee, which was very annoying. In the US, you can go into pretty much any store and ask to use the restroom. Twice, something has caught my eye and landed a purchase, simply because I came in the store to use the restroom.

I'd think this would be a pretty straightforward thing for stores to adopt to increase impulse customers. Is there a specific reason for Europe's aversion to this? Is it because the staff is unwilling to take on that responsibility, culture, etc?

The consequences of their actions aren't there in these games. Free-to-play and reroll as many times as you like and a massive playerbase with only pros reaching the 'top floor.' The top floor of these games is like the Poker guys on ESPN, some do tournaments for a living and make significant amounts of money, so the guy playing 2-3 hours a day rarely has a shot (watch the Free-to-play documentary on Steam).

HoN at its inception had a lot less trolling due to tracking, kickability, and the $20 accounts, but the sheer nature of the game bred a ton of animosity. Imagine a game of football where one teammate constantly let you down, but without the physical activity to burn out that frustration and that you couldn't ever bench that player for the match. That's what these games are.

The solution is literally a million dollar question. So many have tried and failed. If someone figures it out, people will flock to it within the genre because new player attrition is awful in DotA 2, HoN, and LoL.