Oh I wish we could do that. We'd be able to solve many problems at once.

I'm curious how and if this applies to that patent fron earlier this year or last year about location-based advertising. Its bulk grabbing of cell phone data to feed you a coupon for something on or near the shelf you're standing by. True, the underlying motivation is different, but the mechanism is largely the same. I happen to be looking at power tools, look at my phone and am fed Sears adds. I'm sure with the appropriate warrant some agencies could listen in, if they arent already.

Where exactly does that text say anything about overthrowing the government?

Lets break this down: "Well regulated militia" because there was no standing military. Also, who do you think is actually doing the regulating? Why?"Necessary to the security of a free state" the 'militia' or 'military surrogate' defending its borders/people. "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" you can own a gun if you so choose, and no one can take it from you.

Looking at the time it was written, it was up to the people to defend themselves. There was no military, it wasn't organized yet... our country was a bunch of immigrants looking to start anew. Today the right has been (in my opinion) perverted to the point its about dick waving instead of self defense. Sure, get that hunting rifle and kill a few elk. Have a handgun in case of an intruder. Just don't bitch and moan that you need that semi-automatic rifle for "self defense, just in case Obama comes to your house to take your 9mm". The amendment is not saying the people need to mount a violent uprising because they don't like what the president is doing. It only says you can own a gun, not what you need to do with it.

My right to free speech ends where your rights begin. True, the government shall make no law abridging the right to freedom of speech (e.g. GOV restriction of speech), but in practice that right has been upheld to private sector too. That is exactly why customer clauses prohibiting negative reviews have been found illegal and unenforceable.

Penn and Teller put it pretty well in their first episode of Bullshit. To call someone a moron or an idiot is slander and you're open to lawsuits. To call someone an asshole or a motherf***er is expressing an opinion, and you're pretty much in the clear.

Take it a step further and you're getting into the slander/libel territory. A 14yo brat calling someone a "faggot" I would argue could get into lawsuit territory. If the target was in a position that, should the accusation be true or generally perceived as true, could cause irrepairable harm to that persons livelihood. Teachers, for example, may have a cause to start a lawsuit since along with the label "faggot" (homosexual) is an implied "pedophile".

With regard to this whole "movement", I liken it to Westboro Baptist. They are an incredibly vocal minority looking to stir up crap. They are within their rights to speak their opinion wherever and however they wish, so long as it is not destructive to others. They can picket all they want, but as soon as a rock is thrown through a windshield, they are in the wrong.

It goes far beyond peer pressure. Look around you next time you're in any store and look at how things are marketed toward men and women, girls and boys. For the strongest example, look no further than the toy section. Boys toys are all about building, destroying, superheroes, sports, and other stereotypical toys. Girls toys are more about Barbie, princesses, cooking, cleaning, etc...

I say this as a father of a young daughter. I want her to explore her interests without pressuring her in any particular direction. I also would rather her have toys that encourage her to learn and explore. By and large, that means going to specialty toy shops to find gender neutral toys. Things like K-nex, assorted Legos (that aren't focused on kitchens, princesses and horses), or more science-oriented toys.

To let your kid go to their toy isle and pick out their own is likely to just reinforce the stereotype of women being "princesses", waiting for their prince to come pay for their pampering.

This reminds me of the Prisoner's Dilemma. There's a few different variations of the reward, but the dilemma goes as follows:

You have two prisoners that are each offered a chance at freedom. They are given the choice to either rat out the other or remain silent. If both rat out the other, they both get a longer sentence. If only one rats out the other, they get a much reduced sentence. If they both remain silent, then they get something in between.

Obviously a "psychopathic attitude" would be to consistently rat out the other, despite it also being the only option that has a 50% chance of an increased penalty/sentence. It's not as simple as me-first, there is also logic and planning involved in how to get the greatest gain. This is why you get some players that will help others out, become part of the group, then take the group to the cleaners (e.g. steal all the stuff in the guild bank or whatever).

What nobody seems to be bringing up here is the concept of disassociation that all people have. One reason that some people road rage and scream at other cars is that they do not see that there are other people in the cars, they only see the vehicle. Likewise with some in-game avatar, there is no personal accountability for actions, no concept of personal punishment or social rejection. People behave much differently when they aren't being judged by others in person. There may be some lack of apathy in some players, in others maybe they just genuinely enjoy being a jerk when they won't get their face punched in.I believe that this is a big reason why we get griefers and in-game chat e-peen measuring contests, it's all a sort of virual posturing because there are no repurcussions. You take the same folks and put them in a room and I can all but guarantee the 70-lb 12 year old won't be mouthing off to the 300lb biker.

Without even reading the article (GASP!) I can tell this isn't GPS, and it isn't a (pure) INS. What they are talking about is a more accurate magnetometer that have been used in stabilizing pure inertial nav systems for years. The idea being that if they cool it down and isolate it (e.g. negate many of the problems a compass has, such as changing direction when near a large ferrous object), that they could pinpoint location based on the Earths magnetic field. There has been some experimentation with this in the civilian space with smart phones using built-in magnetometers to help aide in GPS-limited environments, such as around large buildings or within shopping malls, instead of the built in inertial sensors. I wouldn't call it GPS, though I would call it some "new" form of navigation.

A lot of what you say already exists and is somewhat transparent. Here are some examples:

For years they said that cross-realm mail was impossible, that the physical segregation of hardware (despite them all being on the same network) made it impossible. Now we have cross-server group finding in the random queues. We have account-wide mail of account-bound items that are not tied to servers or factions.

The cross-realm character transfer (and faction transfer) are advertised as though they they take at most 24 hours, and some forum posts by Blizzard employees have hinted that it isn't just a switch in a database, that it was closer to taking a USB stick and physically moving character data. If you've ever paid for any of those services, you'll notice that it is typically done in minutes, as though it was done in a lower-priority task as soon as the servers in question had a few free cycles. Or maybe just a simple transact-SQL script.

Hell, they even said for years that there was no way to automatically level a character, that the process was too complex and computationally expensive. Now you have "boosted" 90's running around all over the place. They've also implemented a server-side update stream for pre-patching installations, as well as server-based changes in environments (see phasing).

Of course, this is all just speculation. They could very well still have all the separate servers, complete with little printed labels slapped onto the front of the machines separating Drak'Thul from Doomhammer. 9 years is a lot of time for software development, they might have refined their network code to make all the above that much easier. They might have also upgraded from copper to fiber. They aren't public with their server setups, so who knows what they've got going on.

We already see this at gas stations, though I wonder where the advertisement offset truly goes. You start pumping gas then all of a sudden this speaker starts in on the wonderful gas station hot dogs and how they're one step shy of caviar served off a french stripper. I'm already paying for the fuel, and paying as much or more then other gas stations within eye-shot, am I really that starved for amusement that the gas pump has to start talking to me for the few minutes I'll be there?

What, you're too good to program it with punch cards? and you can't tell what "Beep Beep Boop Wrrrr" means?

Yes, but where is that money going?

Winston Brooks, superintendent for Albuquerque Public Schools, makes $250k a year as of 2013. APS teachers averaged closer to $43k last year. According to CNN Money the poverty rate (lowest 15% of income) in 2013 was on the order of $51k nationwide. Granted there are some areas that bring up that average, such as Washington DC, New York and California. You can look into the salaries for teachers and assorted staff, but it still doesn't seem to add up to the overall funding line. Money gets tied up into standardized tests and the bureaucracy in managing them. Similarly to large corporations, education systems can (and sometimes do) get top-heavy with assorted C-level personnel that demand an unexplainably high salary for being little more than stamp jockeys.

This is what they mean when they say they can't be common carriers, it will cut their ability to "upgrade infrastructure". I'm not following how Merger-fest 2014 is somehow giving consumers more choice, however.

I'd attribute the popularity of the SNES in part to the resurgance of classic titles being released in ways like Nintendo's Virtual Console. In addition, those folks that grew up with the NES/SNES would be hitting their 30's now and may already have that good job and are able to go back and buy some of their childhood from their local used game store. I know I've been doing just that this year.

To give some numbers to CronoCloud:
SNES had 784 games.
Playstation 1 had 2,418 games.
Playstation 2 had 3,870 games.
(Side note, N64 had 387 games.)

Touche'. Gears of War apparently had 20 people actively working on it at any given time... but that does not include the number of developers working on the Unreal Engine, nor any of the publishing company, marketing, etc... 100 seems small when you start talking about every single person that ever had the title cross their desk, including middle and upper management whose only role was endorsing the project. The Wikipedia page for EWJ (the only thing I can access from work) shows 2 designers, 2 composers and 4 artists. Not sure how many programmers, but I do know it was heavily marketed and I'm sure some of the stamp-jockeys in big offices wanted their name on it too. Dammit.. now you're making me want to do some "empirical research" and go beat some of these games...

There is a reason that Austin has topped Forbes list of Biggest Boom Towns, and Top Tech Town. The ratio of income to cost of living, it even made it on Slashdot. A lot of big names have offices there too, such as Dell, HP, Cisco, Apple, etc...