I'm thinking this might be similar to what some of the video card manufacturers have done (such as with the R9280X cards), where a physical DIP switch on the card selects between firmware flash A or B. If you suspected corruption, you could flip the switch to use the alternate, which presumably would be loaded from the factory with good, working firmware of whatever version was most recent at the time the product was manufactured.

I suppose this would technically only give you "one shot" at recovering from a firmware hack ... but better than nothing, right? And in the meantime, it would give protection to people from such things as a corrupt flash update or a way to do an easy A/B comparison between 2 firmware revisions.

I know that sounds a little snarky .... but that's been one of my issues with the Civ games for quite some time. It seems like as you get into the "thick" of the game, with a lot of units occupying more and more space -- the system resources taken get pretty large. It often leads to slowdowns and a freeze-up or crash before the game can be completed.

The difference, IMO, is that obtaining a real guitar to play with one of these games is really not much more "out of reach" than getting the plastic toy version.

If you want to play a sport like football, you have to gather together a willing team of players. If you want to drive a real car on a racetrack, that involves some expense and a suitable car. Chuck rocks at pigs? Umm.... sure, if you have a handy pig pen to go visit at whatever hour of day or night you're ready to play that game, and you have an ample supply of rocks to throw, plus nobody who'll call the cops on you.

I never had much interest in the Guitar Hero franchise, because meh.... playing a fake plastic guitar with buttons similar to the old "Simon" game I had as a pre-teen seems rather pointless. People put all that effort into mastering it and it's a useless skill for anything else. Why bother?

Rocksmith did interest me, because it was all about actually learning songs using your favorite electric guitar. But only a few minutes into that one, I realized I wasn't getting into it either. I like what they tried to do with it, but like others here said -- why no standard guitar tablature? The whole scrolling neck thing works for Guitar Hero, but I found it pretty disorienting and non-intuitive for learning music on a real guitar. Maybe offer a toggle between views/modes at least?

Also, maybe it's just me ... but I feel like the era of the "guitar god" and stadium rock is pretty much behind us. These games still cling to that theme, that you're trying to play bigger and bigger live shows, seeking the applause of the fans, etc. etc. But do people even really relate to that anymore? I guess it's one mechanism to try to make the game rewarding -- but part of me feels too old for that nonsense. I want a game that makes practicing songs and new guitar techniques fun, but without making me pretend I'm 25 years younger and striving to make it big in the era of 80's hair metal.

The new machines lack LPT ports? WTF kind of machine did you buy without an LPT port? A laptop, sure, a desktop? You have to look hard, even today to find a machine that doesn't have a printer port.

Pretty much anything built in the last five or so years won't have serial or parallel ports. If you're lucky, you might have some headers on the motherboard that can be brought to the slot cage with connectors in brackets like what were common before ATX, but I've run across plenty of motherboards that don't even have those. Notebooks are even less likely to have them. This Dell Inspiron E1505 I'm typing on is a bit long in the tooth...main reason I'm keeping it going is its 15" 1680x1050 screen. No serial or parallel ports on it.

When I saw a sufficiently-old notebook come through my office a while back that had a serial port on it, I hung onto it for talking to our switches and routers. I forget what model of HP it is, but it's old enough that it runs on an Athlon XP. It's probably the better part of 10 years old at this point. The last emerge -uND world took a couple of days to run, but it's fast enough to run Minicom and Firefox, and to do traffic captures from the switch: serial connection to the management port to enable SPAN, Ethernet to the SPAN port for capture, and WiFi to talk to the whole thing from my office instead of the server room.

Receiving large amounts of money is actually fine. Receiving large amounts of money and not disclosing it is a problem.

Comcast is fighting against this tooth and nail and has promised to file lawsuits to stop it.

But don't let facts get in the way of your political bullshit.

At high levels, Jeopardy is all about who presses the button first. Watch a Tournament of Champions. All 3 people buzz in for pretty much every question.

The trick is who can parse what the "answer" is really asking, recall the fact required, and then buzz in before the other players can do all 3 things. If Watson can do those things faster than a person, it won fair and square. Just being able to parse the "answer" was an incredibly impressive achievement.

Net metering doesn't force the utility to provide a service without getting compensated for it. Here in Maryland, I'm billed for the transport costs to move the power BOTH to or FROM my residence. So I have to cover a cost of my generated solar power getting pushed back out over their lines.

As I also pointed out, if the utilities were more forward-thinking and less resistant to change, they'd embrace PV solar as a useful addition to their overall system. There are pretty large losses involved in transporting power long distances to customers from the central power generation plant. That's why you see those big structures surrounded by chain link fence. They contain transformers needed to step up the voltage to compensate for resistive losses going over miles of copper wire on the poles.

If they've got people scattered about with small solar power generation capabilities on their roofs, they can purchase and immediately resell excess power generated there and avoid the big transmission losses.

I completely agree that this stuff requires some coordination with the utility company, for best results. As it is, you can't even get a solar system up and running without filling out a lot of paperwork, undergoing an inspection, and waiting for an approval from the utility though. So the ball is in their court in this respect. (They DO have first-hand knowledge of exactly where the solar systems will go online and how much power they're capable of generating.)

Most likely, what will happen is when particular neighborhoods reach a certain saturation level of solar installation, the power company will have to say - "Sorry... We won't approve any more new systems here with more than X amount of generation capacity because we've got all we need for this geographic area."

You're correct, except in reality, those of us adopting PV solar right now aren't really so much expecting the utility company to act as a battery as we expect that they'll be able to immediately redirect/resell the excess electricity we generate to another customer nearby.

I believe a recent statistic said solar adoption would, in fact, work nicely this way in any given neighborhood until it exceeds at least a threshold of around 8%?

In my own town, for example ... we have a population of roughly 6,000. As far as I'm aware, there are only approximately 5 residences using PV solar. (I think the city makes some use of solar as well for the water treatment plant, but that's probably NOT a situation where they're generating more than they're using and expecting repayment for excess generation!) Even if you assume you've got 3 or 4 (or more) people living in one residence in some cases, and a number of people in apartment complexes? It's clear we haven't hit the saturation point yet where more people are making power than want to use it at that same time.

If the utility company can resell the power I generate and push back out over the wires connected to my house, that's power they don't have to generate themselves AND transmit a relatively long distance, running it through "step up" transformers and so on to offset losses from the electrical resistance of the long run of wire. In that sense, it should be valuable to them -- not something inherently "bad" or "problematic".

if you've done nothing wrong you've got nothing to fear
if you've something to hide, you shouldn't even be here

(techo beat)

=)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Ten years ago

When we inevitable lose the battle (the government does have a tendency to get their way in these things), do we get to reap the benefits of a total information society? I mean, will there be a searchable database where I can find out where I left my keys? That link to that awesome video i saw on sometube.com that i can't remember? If i remembered to feed the cat?

Yeah, like GTA. GTA V spent $150M on development and $150M on advertising. There's no way they could put out a high quality game every year.

Most games don't require $150M development budgets.