The lack of editing really makes it look like Taco and CO. have really given up on the site, as long as it's still making their bank accounts larger.

Well that, and the fact that the title is completely stupid.

Funny value of "can't", for two things that are the same order of magnitude in price as a car. I could buy the speakers or the camera. I wouldn't, but to say I CAN'T is stupid.

That sort of list will get you arrested if anyone finds out...

If you've got seawater on your flight deck, there's a pretty good chance you're not launching airplanes off it...

It's not necessarily a bad argument. I've seen plenty of college clubs/programs that would happily apply their chosen talent/focus to a problem. They would even budget/fund-raise to make sure they could successfully pull it off. Why? Personal pride, sense of purpose, but often, if there is a cash prize, there's a round of photographs, news articles, and coverage in magazines and other media forms dedicated to their personal niche.

The money may not be the motivation, but if there's an oversized check for $50,000, you can bet that someone's going to take a picture or two and write about it somewhere. For a lot of groups, that exposure is worth far more than the cash. Although the cash might be seed money for the next venture they jump into.

It doesn't even take a high IQ for this to be a problem - all it takes are some parents willing to teach their kid things outside of school. Unfortunately, school has now taken the place of parents teaching their kids stuff. Teach him to play the school game, or find him better placement. As a former teacher, I don't know that I'll be able to send my kids to public school. It's clear that I could teach them everything they'll learn in school (including social interaction) by the time they're 15, at the worst. The awesome part will be when you kid gets into 8th, 9th grade and finds that he's in classes with kids who still haven't mastered subtraction or multiplication.

That only helps if you're religious about changing it back and removing all traces each time you connect for a brief bit of time. Stay connected for a few months doing something that will get you a visit by police/fbi/cia, etc, and you're no better off if they visit while you're still connected, still using the "spoofed" IP address. If you've got a "spoofed MAC address" file on your desktop and they come looking, I'm pretty sure that if that MAC address matches the ones they have logs of, you're still toast, no matter what it is currently.

Sure, I can see how spoofing your MAC address once in awhile to do something on another connection could be useful. But if you leave any trace of it and your machine is picked up and inspected, it doesn't help you any more than if you didn't spoof it in the first place.

The main issue is that she might live on a quiet street, with a dozen people passing by each day. Sure, her neighbors, whom she's friendly with or related to may see her underwear. She probably sees theirs too.

Now her underwear are on the internet. They're searchable, bookmarkable, they can be put into lists for underwear fetish websites, and theoretically a billion people now can check them out. That's different. Very different.

Sure, for us, it's not a big deal. We understand that any such thing is a drop in the ocean, and unless you call attention to it by suing or something.... nobody is probably every going to notice. In other cultures, lacking a real technical grasp of the internet, I believe the above situation seems more realistic. I would call it possible, but very, very unlikely. She apparently feels that it's much more likely. I can't totally blame her, since Japan has a crazy pantie fetish, and sells chilled panties among other pantie fetish stuff. It's not like the western world, for sure...

I'll bet some serious money that it was just your school, and only because you had an awesome instructor. If you want to be sure, look at your state standards for education - I'd seriously doubt that under "Computer Literacy" there's "7a) Students can demonstrate the ability to assemble a computer from component parts."

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that your school let a teacher like that get away with teaching what he did. The emphasis has so shifted to adhering to state standards that most truly awesome teachers like that get forced into teaching to the state exam. When you hit 21, find the guy and buy him a beer. That's awesome stuff.

In part, but I saw another side to this where I grew up. In rural areas, most mom & pop stores have pretty thin margins. They can't see a loss of 10% of their revenue. Walmart shows up, and is reviled by 90% of the population. Still, even a 90% loyalty rate isn't enough to keep those small stores in business. Once they are gone, it's another part of the company Walmartized.

The port is largely done. Ryan Gordon historically did many/all the ports for the UT franchise. (Among many other games - he's the god of porting games to linux.) In late 2009 or so he had screenshots of UT3 working, and said it was largely done.

If there's no port for UT3 to linux by now, you can be guaranteed that it was a decision by Epic not to release it. Either due to some DRM/proprietary code they wedged in there, (There was a lot of talk about PhysX being an issue, if I recall.) or because they just don't care to release it.

There are thousands of 2k4 players on every day right now to a couple hundred UT3 players.

It bombed on launch day because they didn't have the linux server port ready. That's a good indication of how serious they took linux. It bombed in general because they never got a community of players. If a large percentage of your players can't play on launch day, and you overhaul your editor to the point that it can't be casually used, you kill a large percentage of your community. Forcing everyone to use a GameSpy ID to log in doesn't help.

The comment above by citizenr is spot on - UT is now a console engine. The unpatched version of the game shows it clearly in the menus. No PC game has ever had menus that terrible before, I don't think. It took me a bit before I realized that with an arrow pad and a 'X' and 'O' that the menus made total sense. No ability to put multiple menus on screen at the same time, no "hit a letter and jump to that menu item", lack of back button in many menus, forcing you to escape back to the main menu and work your way through the tree again...

I agree with the previous two posters. Been playing UT for more than a decade now. UT3 sucks. It's pretty, but not a fun game. The linux port was confirmed early on, and there was talk of even supporting UnrealED under linux too. When release-day came, they didn't even have a linux SERVER ready, which meant that the 80% or so of the servers normally used for UT games couldn't even host the new version.

That right there was pretty much the stamp of authority that there would be no UT3 client linux port. When you don't think the most popular server architecture is worth porting UT3 to for release day, there's no way a client is going to follow. So the end result was that they completely shot themselves in the foot. Not enough servers on release day meant a lot of pissed off gamers. The game wasn't great, and tons of functionality had been removed from previous versions. (Hell, the menus were optimized for a console, with no back button because they figured you'd have a red "X" to hit.) You need a GameSpy ID to log in, and at first, the only way to ban people was by GameSpy ID, which you could generate in-game. So essentially there was no banning function until the first patch.

If you're a long-time fan of the UT franchise, be glad you skipped this one. It took everything good about the game, and trashed it. (Hell, I tried to pick up my mapping, which was passable under UT2k4. I had to read a huge web page, and spend an hour tinkering about to make fog in a test level. UT2k4 had a fog volume. You made a volume, and checked off "fog". UT3 has dynamically scripted effects. Like fog. They even took the editor and made it so that it was so ridiculously complicated that nobody could casually make maps. Either you need to spend a few months learning it, or you can't do much of anything with it. Sure, it's more powerful than all the previous versions. But it's another barrier for the community. Because of this, there are orders of magnitude less maps for UT3 than there were this far into the life of any of the other versions.)

I have an index card on my desk with things like 'I_k1ck_@ss St.' written on them. Those are my stock answers for those stupid security questions. Sure, if someone savvy with computers breaks into my house, they might notice that, and take it with them when they steal the computer. Then, with some detective work, they could possibly reset my passwords.

But more realistically, someone doing some identity theft isn't in my house, so they won't be able to crack that, since it's not based on anything they can dig up online about me. (Or even from my garbage can.) And someone stealing my computer is likely doing a smash and grab, to sell for drug money. They're not going to bother with an index card on my desk.

I've been predicting a boom in mining landfills for several years now. As we strip the surface mines bare, the relative concentration of minerals in landfills will start to exceed the concentration in non-war-torn areas that we can mine. Plus, as environmental law gets more strict, it gets less cost effective to mine. Focus instead on landfills, get some subsidies from the govt or owner of the landfill, and you might turn a decent profit. Methane, heavy metals, lead, steel, aluminum, plastics, oil.... there's a lot to be found in high concentrations in a landfill.