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Comment Yet another suggestion.... (Score 1) 1007

Just throwing my suggestion on the heap of hundreds: Take the first letter of the chorus of a song you like, and make that the password. If you forget it, you can just think of the song and punch out the password. For example, Iron Maiden's "Run To The Hills", you have "Run to the hills, run for your lives", which comes out as rtthfryl, which is not likely to come up in any brute force dictionary based attack, and it has a built in method for you to remember it. Feel free to add characters or numbers if necessary, I really like the !1, or *8.

Comment Re:You're geniouses among men Sony, MS (Score 2, Insightful) 223

This is pretty much the exact reason why I traded my Wii to some dude on craigslist for a 360. It's been over a year now, I have had no issues whatsoever with the 360, and within the first month of owning it, I put in more quality gaming time on it than I did in over a year of owning a Wii. The Wii is an underpowered, shit system with annoying mini games that mostly just focus on how "nifty" the Wii-mote is. I'm looking forward to the idea of add on motion control mostly because I like to believe that they'll use it to make RTS games way more fun to me than they ever have been. I imagine that gesturing at masses of troops and such that I want to control will be far more rewarding than using a cursor or what have you. Or it will just be a positive way to browse through my streaming netflix queue. I play games because I want to relax and have fun and flailing around wildly in my living room is pretty much the opposite of fun or relaxing to me.

Comment Re:Other nuggets (Score 1) 402

Silly Europeans always have such a skewed sense of geography. Newark to Tampa is 1,000 miles, exactly. It's a two and a half hour flight and a 20 hour train ride.

Not sure how this was modded insightful. I mean, yeah, that's a long train ride, but the poster who was describing trains in an overly elaborate manner was making a quite accurate reference to the "missing" distance between London and Paris on the travel itinerary (a distance equating to roughly 212 miles - or 342 km since they use the painfully logical metric system across the pond). The "Silly European" was clearly not suggesting that the traveler took a train from Newark to Tampa.

Comment Re:Console Modding, the DMCA and You (Score 1) 1016

As someone who despises things that can be considered 'defective by design', I'd just like to point out that you don't actually need a chip or TSOP flash to swap hard drives in the original xbox - one can format and lock a replacement drive using the original drive's key rather easily. I put a 120 gig hard drive in my old xbox years ago to use it as a media center with XBMC, and I'd only soft-modded the thing using the MechAssault exploit.

Comment Re:You air and food addicts, get off your high hor (Score 1) 647

I've previously commented to the commenting regarding buying weed leading to buying hard drugs by pointing out that there have never been any times when I've got to buy weed and come home with a big fat bag of coke. You make it seem like the only source for weed is gangsters and thugs. Sure the people who sell it are technically criminals, but I've had plenty of friends who needed to make money and just decided that they were going to start selling weed to do so. Sure they're technically criminals, but these people are still my friends. And even that is beside the point, I've bought plenty of weed from people who aren't my friends, and none of them have ever tried to sell me on buying some heroin or meth instead. I'm not saying that I disagree that it should be legalized, or that I wouldn't prefer to hit up a pharmacy or coffee shop where I could purchase affordably priced, high quality marijuana. I'm just saying that I don't know where you get your weed, but all of the places I've ever got mine, hard drugs have never once been part of that equation.

Comment Re:Star Wars tech? (Score 1) 146

So sci-fi has to have crappy pseudo-science explanations for all of the vaporware contained therein? I guess that also disqualifies a book like Neuromancer from being sci-fi, since Gibson pretty much gives the explanation of "at some point in the future people figure out how to [implant cybernetics/write Turing Test passing AI/perfect human cloning/build sustainable space colonies/develop a full-immersion global VR network/defy the normal laws of electro-magnetic physics/create devices which allow the creation of full audio-visual illusions through the use of high powered and mind controlled lasers/work around human physiological operation to devise new forms of drug use/dozens of other non-trivial technological challenges] in some way... now quit asking useless questions and read the $%#@ing book!". So much for there being anything worth reading in THAT genre.

Seriously, have you never just taken it for granted that certain technology "just works"? the car flies because that's something cars can do... the characters don't care how, in fact they barely care that it does at all; it's just a car, and their main concern is using it to get from point A to point B. I for one have absolutely no interest in sitting through a BS explanation every time something not currently possible happens on screen, but I would LOVE to just get on with the fucking movie.

I could not agree more. What points you've made illustrate exactly why I love reading William Gibson's books, and why I've always liked Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and the like better than Star Trek. I don't care about why their technology does what it does. I'll accept that it works and get on with it. It's why the whole demystifying The Force with the bullshit about midichlorians was one of the things that really fucked with Star Wars - The Force especially is something we don't need an explanation for - at least, enough has already been given in A New Hope, shortly after the introduction of Kenobi.

ie:"Well, the Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together."

That's enough for me. I don't care how it works, it does, clearly, as the power to destroy a planet is insignificant to its power, and to me, that is plenty of qualification to be "working". And really, I cannot agree more with the Gibson argument. One of the things that I liked most about reading his books was that he'd introduce a technology without giving any real explanation of its function or how or why it worked, and once you saw it working, he'd consider it explained. Hell yes.

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