I like them a lot. I think I have 2 or 3 left counting the last one. This has been a slow and rewarding series for me. I find some frustration with the scope, you become invested in characters and events, only to start the next book in a completely different location with new characters. When they did the swap in I think book 5, I put it down for a year before I picked it up, and got invested in those new characters.

Honestly the thing is a love/hate for me. I hate them the first 100 pages, then am flipping the pages like a madman at the end. It is a deep investment for these books, but really, really worth it. The greatest part is that the entire book cycle was plotted out from the start, so it is written from day 1 with a plan. I guess I need to pick up those last few books and find out what that plan was now.

Also as a general feel for what the books are, I believe they are originating in stories and characters created from the author's long standing grups campaign, and some of the character names reflect that ;)

I know some people are capable of driving smartly at those speeds, but I've felt that the danger is what they leave in their wake. A lot of bad drivers freak out when a car rips past them at even 20mph + faster than what they are doing. I've seen some pretty crazy random moves from other people in reaction to someone weaving lanes or blowing by, and all those abrupt lane shifts and startled people are ripe opportunities for accidents.

Automated vehicles would get rid of this as was mentioned above. With computers at the helm and most likely differently designed cars, we could get everyone safely moving at 160mph I bet.

My greatest fear with them though is the 'hacker'. I'm not quite sure what keeps them on the road, but I imagine when you fully automate, road crews and such will need to communicate with the cars to tell them to fall into new patterns around construction. That, and an understanding of the sensors on the car will give people plenty of ways to communicate with the car or trick its sensors. What happens when that joker decides to divert cars to 'go left!' as they climb a scenic mountain top and are going around a hair pin. Or as a joke at prime time rush hour get several cars abreast to come to an abrupt halt? They will probably have a manual override, but people will most likely be sleeping or distracted in a fully auto set up.

I know that statistically the chances of that happening are probably much less than the types of stupid accidents that happen now, but it'll make it a hard PR sale until those kinds of situations are resolved.

When I swapped out from auto to manual a few years ago, I noticed I immediately started paying attention to more things, esp starting and stopping and light timings. I just go into neutral at lights, but want to make sure I have the clutch in and I'm in 1st before it changes. By now its second nature for me to be more aware of light timings and just in general what is going on around me at intersections, much more so than I was previously.

I think you can gift games to one another, so when the time comes you can probably set him or yourself up with a new account, then divvy up the games as needed, and probably trade back and forth if one or the other gets sick of it. Come to think of it, my dad still buys a lot of steam games and I think he gets sick of them almost as fast as I do, so maybe we could both save each other a little cash in that department.

I actually really wonder what to do with steam now when my sons get older (oldest is only 2) and want to start using games I have on steam. Granted I don't use a lot of the social features on steam, but if my son gets more into it and starts collecting buddies via steam, I don't want there to be a confusion over who is who.

Do they have steam shared accounts? It would be pretty useful if I could create some additional logins over steam that still have access to the same library but tracks friends and achievements separately.

Man, my dad had it easier 25 years ago, no such thing as all these social media drm login blah blah blah features to sort amongst your family. Once you got over the hurdle of installing the game, just play!

I recall reading/watching something saying that organic farming still used pesticides, but none of the new, probably better, synthetic ones. I guess they were 'natural source' pesticides. I guess wikipedia has a list of some.

Eh anyway, also in the same study I remember that on average it said most organic fruits did have much less pesticides on them when they hit the store, but all things end up equal after you rinse it off under water.

Microsoft did this during the xbox breaking fiasco phase. I sent mine back that I had kept in good shape after a read ring o death. I got back a 'refurbished' one that looked like it had been pretty beat up. It worked well for a few months then i started getting random crashes. After a bit it turns out the cd player was fubar in it, wobbling the cd ,and scratching all my disks.

I tried to tell tech support this, + they had sent me a shitty one, and they said for 90 they would let me ship it back since it was now out of warranty. I had some gift cards and figured a new one would be better anyway so just went to the store and got a new one for cheaper (ultimately NOT cheaper, but i had the gift cards).

The worst part is that 5 or 6 of my games got scratched pretty badly in places and from that point on would crash or hang at parts of the game. Most of them crap out if I try to install them to the hard drive when they hit the scratched portion of it.

All in all it was a pretty shitty experience. I was planning on seeing about moding the xbox with the broken cd drive with a replacement, but just lost interest in even bothering with it.

My father mentioned once how as a structural engineer, he used to hate autocad back in the 80s, it just wasnt made to work yhe way they are trained. There were many other products out there that were much better but came with dongles and other crazy activation schemes.

Well as time passes, many of their customers have pirated autocad, and start requesting work in that format, or they have done things in that format, can you take a look please. Pretty soon autocad is just what is used, popularity from ease of piracy makes it the dominate program.

For other bad things of the same type see qwerty keyboards, or any closed ms office format

Really enjoyed demoted souls myself, great game...though I think the game beeping p2p broke the unique mp a bit. The only time I raged was Capra demon, but that was because many deaths were due too bad camera (big boss, small room) and sloppy targeting controls (2 small hit stun dogs with boss), which makes you mad. The rest though we're oops, my fault moments, so you don't feel bad.

The skills you learn in the game are great, a mix of knowledge of where things are in the world, memory of enemy attack patterns, stat building and gear optimization, yet still requiring some degree of reflexes and execution to make it all come together. That is something I really enjoy learning and playing.

Though I did t like the multiplayer, was hard to find people to coop with, even at the right level at the right spots. Pvp, I just didn't like how you have to play to win , not to mention if you want frequent fights I would invade, often feeling like a huge jerk since I knew that guy I just great combusted was gearing up to take down a hard boss and make progress, and I just wrecked it for him.

Overall a very cool seirs of games, well executed on many fronts, not to be missed by anybody if you can help it.

I've been plowing through emulator games recently, and to some extent the go is right, I play what I know longest, and the only ones that get more time are the rare gems that I missed out on like secret of mana or some such.

Anyway my point here is that games don't sit in consoles for weeks because we aren't 12 years old anymore. Back then you have time and no cash, so you just play what is available.

Often the skill needed to win the game was rote memorization or extreme repetition. Where is that next guy? Let me throw an endless supply of guys at you, or if you didn't run fast through this spot or kill that guy fast enough you are now in a auto die situation.

I don't know about you but I don't have the will to honestly waste time getting better at nes style games. Now, I used to be a person who locked myself in a small too. With 4 cyber demons in Doom2 and try to get through with no health pickups...but again that was a product of boredom.

Now if I am going to get good at a game it's because its most likely multiplayer and has fun mechanics. Once you peak out in a multiplayer game, no way you'll ever find a ai as unique as your opponents online, further, the skills and mechanics you need to know to beat someone are just more interesting than remembering that a random bullet will hit you once you land on platform x across the insta die pit, so you have to jump again when you get there, book.

Anyway, don't really miss the old designs, but like to visit them from time to time to remember. However I still don't like the corridor spoon feed we get now, and generally want interesting mechanics, not insta death and platforming.

I recently received and IPAD 2 for XMAS. It was my first time with any kind of mac/apple device short of a gen1 ipod. I got excited about the possibilities of stuff I could do on it and how portable it was. I liked the swipe interface for some stuff, hated it for others (kid reaching over and touching it makes it zoom instead of scroll etc).

I started thinking about writing an app for it for some random stuff. I also wanted to drop random files on it, and view images and movies over a samba share on my windows machines.

I guess I got spoiled browsing the web with adblock plus for the past few years. I forgot how ugly it was without it. I also hadn't been harassed for $$$$$$$ to do ANYTHING more so than when investigating anything related to the ipad. Free apps all have annoying add bars. Apps that do things the ipad should be able to do cost $. The spirit of open source and giving away of small apps seems to be quite dead in the i- whatever community.

To develop, I need a mac and 100 dollars. Yes, there are alternatives, but all of them seem ugly and honestly just not worth the time if you want to do some quick 'home use' programs.

All in all, the ipad has ended up being a great bathroom reader, so I guess it is good for something. I was just sad to see a bunch of potential great uses for it walled off with money.