They have half of the nodes, but 1-2% of the traffic. They set up a bunch of new nodes, not took over existing nodes. As a result, they have a bunch of nodes that not many people are using. As the issue gets more attention, more of their new nodes are cut out of the loop.

I'm pretty sure it is Stephen Fry, and since I recognize it I'm guessing it's from an episode of QI. I've seen him in plenty of things, but that seems like something that would come up there.

I don't think flying ~500 miles away equates to a deer running scared from a sound in the woods. If this is the same story I saw yesterday, the birds in question had just settled in after a migration flight of 3000 miles or so total. After one or two days back they up and flew ~500 miles away, then came right back to the same spot. This is way more specific than most tales you hear of animals getting away from natural disasters. It's worth looking into for exactly the reason you said, "if someone actually predicted a natural disaster by using animal behaviour, that might be interesting." Thus why it's a news story at all.

When you're talking about a projected image, those things are not automatically linked. If you have an image up on your computer screen you can touch the screen, but you can't feel anything to let you know one image from another. You feel the screen, not the image. With 3d projections you can have the same problem, and that's where this comes in.

So the super rich are cemented as untouchables in law by the simple fact that any government short of federal isn't going near charges against them with a ten foot pole. And even federal would be up in the air depending on charges. I agree, for nearly all cases the above would be an improvement...but at the same time it would permanently close other doors when it comes to leveling the playing field of the legal system.

Every blanket solution has problems like this, which makes me lean towards case by case solutions. That leads to a "who watches the watchers" kind of argument. I don't think that there can be a real solution without trust, and that trust has been beaten and abused so much that nothing is left. At this point everyone is kind of looking around and thinking, "Yeah, this is screwed up" but has no one to put faith in to fix it. It's a broken system behind a broken system. You have to start at the root of the problem; the people's relation to their government. People need to become more involved and government needs reform. It's a huge system designed specifically to keep sudden change from sweeping through it, which becomes a double edged blade in this case. It's also hard for most people to even grasp the scope of our current government and all of the tangled webs between local, state, and federal.

If you back up even further the problem expands to encompass our entire society. People don't trust people. People fear people. People blame people. People hate people. You have negative reinforcement from all sides. You have cities divided into something akin to war zones. Police are seen as the bad guys more often than not when they step in. Ditto for government. A lot of people just don't care, or pretend not to. Of those that do care, very few make it to a place suitable to making change and of those even less make the trip unscathed.

I've lost my point in the downward spiral, so I'll just end it there.

How are there no references to the Jackie Chan cartoon show here? C'mon people...

Car hit stopped car due to winter conditions.
Airbag hit me with enough force to cause me to black out for a split second. It felt longer but had to be nearly instant.
Gathered my wits. Noticed pool of blood forming in my lap. Felt blood on neck. Moment of panic thinking my neck was cut.
Got out of car, found my glasses, noticed bent earpiece.
Several people come over to help and tell me about my ear. I didn't even know where I was injured.
Put two and two together in time to stave off the paramedics worries that my head slammed the side window hard enough to do that.

It was a fairly surreal experience. Afterwards I was simply glad the earpiece had gotten my ear instead of say, my eye socket.

I had a subscription to PC Gaming Magazine in the late 90s. Even then the reviews were more like advertisements. I've not trusted them since. These days I just look for gameplay footage on YouTube if I'm iffy about a game. No amount of news articles or fancy CG trailers will convince me a game is worth buying. I rely on direct, face-to-face word of mouth and gameplay videos.

When Planetside 1 came out it was a utopia for the FPS fan + MMO fan crowd for the first month. Then the first subscription time hit and the population dropped like a rock. That first month was a wonderful thing though... Giant battles with firm lines (there might as well have been trenches) and the hotshots darting between the two. There was so much that was new to FPS games at the time. The array of vehicles, choosing your skills to spec in vehicles or weapons or body armor suits. Hacking to take over bases. So much to encourage team play among your faction.

I feel that if the free to play movement had been stronger back then and Planetside had gone with that it would have done so much better. No one wanted to pay a subscription for a shooter though. Planetside 2 can be fun, but it doesn't come close to the first game due to the sheer scale of battles during that release month.

On topic, I'm considering getting an XBox One just for Destiny. I'd probably get D3 on it as well just for convenience.

And your proposed solution is....?

As a gamer that's played PC games long enough to remember when everything used the arrow keys...WASD was a considerable improvement over the horror that was using the arrow keys for games. If you're using a standard keyboard for input then WASD is about as good as it gets. If you aren't using a standard keyboard / mouse then the entire argument is invalid as you have more options available.

I've sprained my wrist using my hand to vault over the hood of a car that decided it didn't have to check for pedestrians before making a turn...or look up during the turn itself I guess. I was crossing on the same intersection side, from the far side of the road. In a crosswalk. With the go ahead. I have zero faith in anyone else's ability to not be a complete and total retard at any given time.

That said, there's not any way to get people to follow the no-texting-while-driving laws without invading privacy on a whole new level. I know people that will text while changing lanes. I know other people that will let the phone make all the noise it wants and ignore it till a red light. I don't agree with halting voice communications while driving either. With hands free setups it's no different than chatting with a passenger in the car. Yes, it statistically raises your chances of having a crash, but I'll be damned if you're going to get my approval to make it completely illegal.

If you made a Venn diagram of people willing to pay for this service and people so braindead that they need it, how much overlap are you really going to have? How did this fact not come to their attention while making this?

Have you been in a car crash where the airbag deployed? Your seatbelt is the most important thing, yes, but god damn that airbag is powerful. I can still taste the blood 8 years later. I can honestly say I've never been hit by anything as hard as that airbag, and that was a low speed crash. I almost lost half of an ear to it as well, since I wear glasses. My glasses flew forwards from the initial impact, then the airbag hit with enough force to push the earpiece through my ear and rip the top half nearly all the way off. A tiny piece of skin was the only thing holding it on. To this day I can't wear in-the-ear earbuds because the one on that side works itself out.

So yeah, as the poster above you said... Airbags are good in life or death situations. For any other crash, they're easily as much of a danger as the crash itself.

Decentralization. It's not like the people supplying the data get to directly see how it's used. I'm sure plenty of them aren't even aware of just who they're supplying data to. And the people compiling the data don't necessarily know where it comes from or what the output will be used for.

You can guess an awful lot, but hindsight is 20/20 and all that.

I play RPGs for the RP. I grew up freeform RPing on IRC. I'm one of the small margin of RPGers that actually loves rolling stats one at a time with do-overs only for min values. Nowadays everyone has to be equal, even in a fantasy world. That's boring to me.

When I read books I don't expect every character to be an in-your-face war hero, and I certainly don't look down on the characters that support them in things outside of combat. Remember the days when a rogue loaded with social skills and charisma could be just as pivotal to the adventure as some ninja assassin rogue? You can't even make that character under the newest editions; most of the skills were cut out to give more room for combat/trap skills so you didn't end up with "useless" rogues.

I've played in several systems with perks/flaws and they're normally fun. It encourages people to take personality traits that they otherwise wouldn't bother with, and also gives it a solid spot on their sheet to remind them.

That said, I stopped buying D&D stuff after 3.5 was announced and I realized WotC was going to just keep changing the game every few years. 3.5 was still mostly compatible, but I saw the writing on the wall. Nowadays I just make my own systems for fun, keeping die rolls to a minimum and trying to avoid encouraging min/maxing.