Being the kind of gamer that enjoys a good challenge I am pretty disappointed with ME2

The story is great! The game is a cake walk even on insanity difficulty. I think they made combat way too simplified and the AI is simply annoying. There could be a few simple changes to make combat a lot more enjoyable.

There could be "behavior" buttons to toggle for your AI partners. Defensive, somewhere inbetween, and full out attack.

Yeah I am playing on Insanity but it is annoying when my AI partner decides to not take cover when he/she has just been hit by 2 rockets in rapid succession and thinks its a good idea to keep firing his/her heavy pistol at 5 synthetics. I just end up killing all the enemies and then waiting for them to get back up, not worth the medi gels lol.

To counter this I pause the game and make an effort to set up my AI partners behind cover that is wide enough to support 2 people. This way you can alternate cover positions to keep the AI moving which keeps them from getting hit. It works well but a simple button to tell them to take some damn cover is not asking for too much.

However after getting to around level 14-15, after the collector ship, its a non issue since any enemies encountered are dead within seconds. (tip: cloak + incisor rifle = win)

BioWare get it together please. Dragon Age on insanity was not easy on my first play through, but it was not hard either. DA was much harder than ME2 though.

I wouldn't even dare put Baldur's Gate 2 on the highest difficulty. That game scares me with how hard it can be. I want to have some respect for the hardest difficulty level in a game on the first play through at the very least. It could just be that I was about 12 when I played BG2 for the first time though =)

Get a satellite phone.

This is stupid idea, sorry.

People should be able to determine whether or not they are endangering their lives by talking on the phone. Not some test that will undoubtedly be flawed and manipulated.

I consider my self excellent at doing several things at once. There are times where I will not carry on a cell phone conversation and it is a judgment call on my part every time. It usually comes down to whether or not I am driving in a familiar area where I know my way around in my sleep. Another factor is the type of conversation and who it is with. If I am trying to have a focused and or emotional conversation I will save it for when I reach my destination.

If people can't do this then maybe they deserve to crash. As for the people they crash into? Well bad things happen all the time, not like we can pass a law that will magically stop all of that from happening. We can focus our efforts wherever we want as a society, we just need to pick the right battles. Something so fundamental as paying attention while driving seems like a losing one.

Wait a second, just realized that if we could somehow mind control people into paying attention there would be fewer accidents....

I read about events that happen on the internet in short headlines to get an idea of what is happening.

When my Economist comes to my door on Monday I read the articles for the commentary which is usually quite good compared to the drivel I find on the internet.

If I cant wait I can also log into their pay website and read things on my computer screen.

The problem is newspapers don't offer insightful analysis.

The Economist actually offered a very good piece on network effects and how newspapers have been shaped by them.

http://www.economist.com/businessfinance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=15108618

If you study the history of the newspaper you will see that the propagation of news was slow in the 1800s. To make up for this, newspapers were heavily based on analysis, prediction, and opinion to pull in readers. Of course, over time this process has been reversed slightly but the trend has left its mark.

The internet is simply sorting through the newspapers that offer quality analysis and chucking the rest.

I no longer need someone to find out facts that the internet finds for me! It is simply a machine doing the job that a person used to do.

When you improve efficiency in production you often cut jobs. (think robots doing human work)

When you improve efficiency in news reporting you often cut news sources!

It is a very simple parallel and I cannot stand the constant claims of entitlement by the industry.

You are not special, adapt or be destroyed.

So please, improve the content of your paper or go off into a corner and die quietly. I am certain that the newspapers that deserve to survive this transformation will!

My personal prediction is that the weekly newspaper will maintain its position while daily newspapers will be all but forgotten in the future. Probably a biased view since I get most of my news from a weekly source but I do believe that it is the perfect balance.

Instant simple facts from the internet with insightful commentary that I pay for on a weekly basis. Throw in a weekly/monthly science magazine and you are set!

I think no matter what we can all agree that OnLive is not for your serious - regular gamers because they already have the hardware, even if it is outdated, and are used to playing on their local system.

Since the system has flaws it will likely not persuade them to try the service.

However, those who do not game due to the entry cost of a console or PC might find the idea neat and it could catch on.

Turn some casual/non gamers into regular gamers only knowing what the gaming experience is like through OnLive.

The important question to me is whether or not that specific market share is enough to make the company profitable. I have a feeling that the business model includes the large market of current gamers running on sub-par hardware as potential clients. Sorry, but I don't think you will be getting their business!

Who really knows? Everything is about marketing these days anyways, with the majority of America just repeating whatever was on American Idol last night.

Electromagnetic fields do couple with human bodies. You do pick up EM radiation.

http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/Radio/table-power-field.gif

Note in the chart that the power densities are lowest among 10^2 - 5*10^2 MHz. There are several reasons for this. One is that when the chart was created a large number of devices used this frequency range.

Another important reason is the wavelength of such EM radiation.

For a human body to actually act as a receiver and extract power from an EM wave then the wavelength of that radiation must be on the order of the length of your body in a given orientation.

It just so happens that the most heavily regulated part of the frequency spectrum corresponds to the height of your average human.

It is also of interest as to why E fields are assigned lower values than H fields. This has to do with the relative permittivity being higher than the permeability of the human body which in turn affects the power extracted from a given EM wave.

EM radiation is not safe. The uninformed should not handle it. With a little bit of knowledge it is not all that bad. People with these Wi-Fi allergies should take a little bit of solace in the fact that people work to protect them from these harmful effects.

There is an incredible amount of people who think they know what EM radiation is but they do not. Do not spread your misinformation so freely :)

You see a wide spread in the quality of endings from games put out by EA because they are simply the publisher and not the developer in many cases.

While EA has a say in matters that determine its profits for the most part the creative integrity of the project is up to the publisher...

X-rays are most certainly detectable by humans.

The energy they contain is orders of magnitude higher than what a wireless router would emit.

Depending on the length of exposure you could determine whether or not you are being exposed to x-rays

Wi Fi is on the order of a GHz which is 10^9 Hz.

An X-ray is defined as a pretty large range but it starts at about 10^18 Hz.

Being that EM radiation energy is directly proportional to frequency you can see that the chances of experiencing thermal heating due to x-rays is not entirely unlikely. Not to mention you did not specify the intensity of the x-ray source.

My buddy in the Navy said he and a couple of crew members were accidently caught infront of one of the large radars on the ship.

They began to vomit immediately after exposure and felt terrible for hours.

Thats the power of EM radiation at high intensities...

You can also view the IEEE standards for allowable transmittable power densities at given frequency ranges. You think they would regulate this stuff if there was no danger?

http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/Radio/table-power-field.gif

I mean yeah what the guy is claiming is bogus but do not go so far as to claim x-rays are harmless. X-rays account for many times the mSv incurred on a given human body than any nuclear explosion or accident at a power plant has ever caused.

Holy shit. Said it way better than I ever could. Nail =>> head

"Valid" laws must have faith put into them by the scientists of their day if they ever hope to build upon these laws and continue to improve technology and science.

I would say it was less of a questioning of the laws and more of a realization that experimental evidence is not explained by current theory.

Experiment proceeds theory. This is science working at its best. Yes it sometimes works the other way around but it is more often than not a dead end. We just happen to hear about the cases where someone predicted an event and it was performed by experiment.

  When we no longer have experiment leading theory development, look at what a mess everything becomes ;)

*cough* string theory and its derivatives.

To touch on the original topic, I would say its pretty damn hard to run an experiment simulating global warming. Hence global warming is pretty controversial and there is no real solid evidence that can shut the door on the skeptics. There are plenty of theories but where is the experimental evidence that definitively matches them.

  Maybe we should run a huge experiment on Mars...

It seems to me as if everyone is missing the point here.

Yes MS can do whatever they want with their network.

The problem is that they have no burden of proof to do whatever they want.

When you start affecting peoples lives with no due process it starts to become an issue.

XBox live is not a good example but I am sure there are services out there that people rely on for their lively hood and if someone were to commit an act on this network that the operator did not like they could be terminated.

What if this action was not so black and white? What if the banning from the network was unjust? Tough luck because the TOS basically screws you out of any recourse.

The user has to have some rights to protect their investment into the network from unreasonable operators.

Example, using a service within the guidelines of the TOS but cutting into the operators profit margins.

You can be damn sure that the TOS will change the next day and you will be promptly banned because there is a clause in the TOS that they may change at any moment with no warning.

But hey , I for one welcomed our corporate overlords along time ago.

First of all let me say that the market for used xbox consoles just got extremely dangerous!

Microsoft needs to set up a system where you can check the status of an xbox console remotely so people can still sell consoles with confidence... 600K Xboxes are about to go up on ebay for a deal that is just too good to pass up.

Secondly if you assume that you do not mind playing games offline that you have pirated, you can still beat the system. Is that not what this is all about?

Step 1: Buy an xbox that has been live banned for very cheap off ebay. It has already been modded, so you dont have to pay for that.

Step 2: Download 50-60 dollar games for free and play them to your hearts content, offline.

After a few games you have already made your money back from the initial purchase of the console.

What if you want to play on xbox live? You have a live console that you do not hack and just enjoy online games there.

You still have to buy games that you want to play online, but there are a lot fewer online games that are worth playing than there are short and sweet single player games that you can just download for free.

I laughed pretty hard when I was going through the dialog for the DLC. I thought the guy was trying to pull a nigerian inheritance scam on me, talking about family debts and assisting him to unlock untold fortunes!