They haven't announced an Assassin's Creed game for next year, yet. Hopefully they'll learn from their mistake, and delay it until fall 2016. That'd give them time to fix up the performance issues and myriad glitches with the updated engine. Maybe at the same time they'll rethink the idea of the microtransaction-unlocked chests.

I, for one, am certain that the only thing standing between Africa and prosperity is 4k cat videos. And/or pornography. Support the diaspora of your neocolonialist hegemony today!

The summary implies (by omission) that congestion for Comcast customers hasn't improved since Netflix paid off Comcast. What're they getting for their money?

Sure, I'll cancel my broadband subscription with the local monopoly and go back to dialup. But who do they get their upstream bandwidth from? At&t, Verizon, Time Warner or Comcast. Doh!

I agree, I should've made an addendum that politicians may make laws that are primarily intended to increase the security or safety of a privileged few.

Jefferson said lots of great things about freedom, too, but quickly became corrupt once he became president. It's easy to be an idealist when you don't have power.

All laws involve giving up freedom to do a certain thing, usually in exchange for security or safety for the society. Other laws, particularly regulations, ensure justice via making society more fair; for example the USA's Civil Rights Act prohibits a variety of forms of discrimination. The problem is that our overlords use propaganda to convince the plebes that a broad selectively-enforced law is necessary when a narrow strictly-enforced law would lead to more security for the society. Being secure in your belief that you won't be imprisoned falsely, or under a law that wasn't intended or reasonable to apply to your situation, is also an important aspect of society's security.

Now all they need are robotic gazelles. Its silent electric motor lets it sneak up on its prey on the robo-savannah, consuming its delicious battery juices so it can live another day.

Nintendo took the legally safe option by recommending children under 7 not use the 3DS' 3d mode, although research wasn't conclusive that it could cause Lazy Eye. Palmer Luckey (CEO of Oculus) actually directly responded to a query about this. I seem to recall him saying that it could eventually be made safe for children. The 3DS uses an adjustable virtual inter-pupillary distance (IPD) which is most likely set different from your real IPD. In contrast, the Oculus Rift is calibrated to use your real IPD, and your eyes focus at infinity while using it. Given that, the Rift should be far less likely to cause Strabismus.

There's been little point in developing those technologies thus far, though. Until VR software exists where the programmers intend to adopt technologies which maximize the immersion of the player, and players are in a mindset where they want their immersion to be maximized, it won't happen. Haptics and motion tech are reasonably far along, sound is nearly there, taste is pretty much there, but smell is going to be trouble with current tech though. According to many people who have used the Rift, it subjectively 'feels' like you're in there, even if some senses contradict the world presented.

If they decided to eat the fine and get sucked dry, they could spend every last dying breath telling everyone on the internet how injust this was. It would've gone on long enough for something to happen.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

It was recently found that when the FCC (or some other US federal govt. agency) has a request for comments, they're only compelled to seriously consider the in-depth, intelligent comments. In practice, this means that form-letters done via the EFF website etc. are tossed out, while lawyer-produced walls of text that read like Congressional legal pronouncements get serious consideration. Almost always, the latter are produced by big businesses with lots of money to spend on lawyers to ensure the decision goes in the direction of greater profits for themselves.

The only way to undermine this is for organizations like the EFF, and individuals, to gather and present as much easily-digestible data as possible and edit and refine their message until it's intelligible and palatable to a politician. Mindless ranting is immediately dismissed as uninformed. Probably only a dozen or so of these 1.7 million messages will actually be read by a decision-maker.

Fax is the best medium to contact your agencies with, as it tends to be printed and read by a human, rather than a keyword-search-delete-all like can be done for email ("delete all emails containing superlatives"). Also, 1.7 million sounds alot bigger when pushcarts full of paper can be wheeled into their office, rather than the messages easily fitting on a disc or flash drive. I presume they don't tend to auto-OCR faxes.

One side-effect of this is that people who eat this fish will consume more mercury, PCBs and other harmful substances compared to if they ate the native (potentially restricted-catch) fish. This is due to the northern snakehead consuming poisons in the water plus toxins accumulated in the flesh of their prey. Humans who eat this fish (or any predatory fish) would thus consume more toxins than if they ate a fish (like much of its prey likely is) that only eats primary producers.

The obvious solution involves Needle Snakes.
Seriously though, how much can we interfere with nature to ensure some animals' survival, and continue to call it 'nature' with a straight face? Eventually, the figurative and literal cage bars make it indistinguishable from captivity. Isn't there a point where we should let evolution do its thing? I know that often leads to extinction, but if we're only keeping wild animals alive so we can eat their tasty flesh, then we may as well keep enough to eat captive.

This will create a Sharknado, won't it?