It's yet another artificial means of extending the gameplay of a game. Kind of like the "find this stuff" types of missions in a lot of modern games. Sure, I'd like to get 100% on a game, but am I going to bore myself to tears to do it? No.

But, that's modern multi-player FPS games for you...

And don't forget, packing them all into one car like it's some kind of clown car. The mob approach was really one of my favorite ways to complete a mission. I can remember being extremely anal retentive on a couple of missions and persuading the entire town since you got money for each citizen you persuaded.

But you're definitely right. The game did provide numerous ways to complete a mission, and on more than one occasion I would split my team up to accomplish multiple objectives at once.

Ah, but you are assuming that, just because you live in a community of that size, you naturally have good public transit. in my experience, that's not necessarily the case.

To give but one anecdotal example, I'll point out the transportation problem I experienced when I lived in Atlanta area. I lived and worked in the north suburbs of Atlanta and would have loved to be able to take public transportation to and from work, but it simply wasn't viable. I would have had to drive to the train station in my own suburb. We'll call that about five minute. Then I would have to take a train south into the center of the city. I would guess that to be a 30 - 45 minute ride. I'd then have to change trains and take a new train back north into the suburb I worked in. We'll call that another 30 - 45 minutes. I'd then be at a train station a good 3 or 4 miles from the office complex where I worked. With the closest bus stop being 1.5 - 2 miles away from the office. In an area where most of the roads don't even have sidewalks and so aren't pedestrian friendly. All of this to cover a distance that's only 18 miles when I drive it direct.

Public transportation from home to work in New Orleans was just as inconvenient. Not to mention, I wasn't really comfortable with riding the buses in New Orleans.

This is the point that I'm trying to make: just because you live in a population center of 200,000 or more, that doesn't mean that public transportation is available or viable. America has grown up as a car culture, and as such the majority of population centers are very car centric where transportation is concerned.

The less dense the development, the worse the problem seems to be in my experience. Not everybody lives and works in the dense urban developments that public transportation seems to be mostly designed around.

All I'm saying is: if you want Americans to drive less and take public transportation more, give us the egg before you take away the chicken.

While I voted Rootkit, I do feel the need to comment on the backwards compatibility argument.

What annoyed the heck out of me was the lack of any advertisement about the removal of that feature or any way to visually identify the backwards compatible versions from the versions with the compatibility removed. Unless you were paying attention to the industry when the feature was removed, you had no idea that it was removed.

When I bought my 40 GB PS3 a few years ago, I had no idea that it didn't include this feature anymore. The compatibility feature was one of the features I was most excited about when I purchased my PS3 as I was still playing several PS2 games at the time and liked the idea of only having one system to play them all on. I went out the following day to purchase a reader for my old memory cards and was told by the uber geek at Gamestop that the 40GB systemss were not backwards compatible. For the casual video game consumer such as I was back then, this was quite a disappointment.

I already moderated, but screw that. I feel the need to point out that this bill doesn't take into account that the US on the whole lacks viable public transportation systems in all but the largest and densest metropolitan areas.

For that majority of Americans who don't live in New York, Chicago, DC, etc., public transportation is simply not an option. Taking into account that most of us are probably living at our means or just below it, any sort of significant increase in our transportation costs would most likely have a dire impact on the economy on the whole as people begin to reach the point that they can no longer afford to drive our cars. We're already seeing some of that now with the price of gas as high as it is.

Lastly, this is America dammit. The roadtrip is practically as American as Baseball and Apple Pie. We've grown up with a culture that glorifies the cross country road trip. I for one don't want to give that up. :-P

I'm actually curious as to where said cameras are placed. I only make it down to New Orleans once or twice a year now, but would like to make sure that I'm not fined for speeding when I am down there.

On a side note, you just reminded me of the time that I got photographed blowing through a toll booth while getting on to the Crescent City Connection on the west bank side. I had a toll tag, but as I was blowing through the booth, I noticed that the green light never came on. Maybe I was going too fast? Either way, I never got that ticket in the mail. Maybe because I still had the temp tags on my car. LOL.

Although I've got to say that I find her more attractive these days on The Cape than I ever did on Firefly. Maybe she's like a fine wine and gets better with age?

Funny story. At a previous employer, one of the UPS nodes (I can't seem to recall the technical term here) was so close to capacity that if you attempted to bring up all devices on that node, you'd end up popping the breaker on that node, and would have to reset the breaker in the UPS. Long story short, because of that we couldn't rely on all services to return after an outage, so somebody would have to stick around to bring up all devices in the proper order, lest we lose 1/3 of our servers due to a popped breaker.

He can't drive 55!

After Hurricane Katrina, I along with several other co-workers from New Orleans had been moved out to our Atlanta office. One day, one of my fellow transfers (I always hated being called a victim) called me up all flustered. She had just gotten internet installed at her place, but her computer hadn't survived the move and they really needed it so that her husband could try to find a new job. I tell her to bring it by my apartment, and I'll take a look at it.

As soon as I open it up, I can see that the plastic retaining clip for the heat sink had broken off and the heat sink was rolling around in the bottom of the case. A quick call to Dell and I was told (surprise, surprise), that they didn't sell the retaining clip and the only fix was to purchase a new motherboard from them. Knowing that, like me, her financial situation had taken a hit due to the hurricane, I said "no thanks, hung up the phone, looked at the motherboard, and noticed that the heat sink was significantly larger than the processor and overlapped onto a plastic base on all 4 sides of the processor. It looked like I could "glue" the processor down, but I wasn't sure what kind of glue would withstand the temperatures required.

Then I remembered that I still had a tube of RTV sealant in my trunk from a water pump job we'd done on one of my friend's cars a month or so before. So, I carefully applied the sealant to the edges of the heat sink, seated it in place, and stuck a heavy weight on top and left it over night. The next morning, I powered up the computer and ran it through some operations meant to stress the processor to make sure that once it got hot, it wouldn't overheat. Everything worked like a charm and a year later when I left that job, she was still using the computer with the RTV'd heat sink.

I once had a similar problem, but in the reverse. One of our local area hospitals has lost all of their technical staff, so the IT department was reduced to one AS/400 operator who we gave access to the ticketing system and AD privileges to reset passwords. Then I would come in after lunch and work on as many tickets as possible.

I got a page while at lunch one day that they had an emergency -- the entire radiology department had no network access. So I come on in and proceed right to the networking closet, finding the radiology department head and some GE technician standing there looking at "my" equipment. They had apparently gotten building services to let them into the closet instead of putting in a ticket with IT. Apparently the GE guy was there to install the hospitals new digital imaging system, but had no network access, so he took it upon himself to get into the closet and "make it work". In the process he'd somehow decided to plug a patch cable in to two different ports on the same switch, causing a loopback situation on the switch and downing the entire department. I took one look at the rack, saw the problem immediately and had service restored in 5 seconds. I then spent 5 minutes scolding the department head in the privacy of his own office.

I actually once "bump started" a computer whose hard drive was on the verge of dying. I just smacked it really hard on the side of the case right after applying power and heard the hard drive spin right up.

It was the only case in my career where percussive maintenance actually worked. The machine was non-critical and I was surprised that it actually worked. I just told the user not to shut it down again, and we'd replace it sooner or later.

Hey, just think. It could be worse: you could be an IT manager for an ad agency. Try blocking ads at one of [i]those[/i] places!

I suspect that the iPad was named after the iPod to achieve some sort of marketing synnergy. Not the NewsPad.

It's interesting that you mention that. I have a Dell machine here that I purchased in 2003, and when the PSU died in 2006 I was pleasantly surprised to find out that Dell now used standard plug wiring on their PSUs and motherboards. However, it wasn't just a drop and replace deal. The PSU came with an on/off switch on the back, and the Dell case was constructed with a solid back except for the vent and the cut-out for the plug. I had to perform a bit of surgery on my case and cut away some sheet metal in order to get the PSU to fit. I'd call their machines "mostly" standards compliant.