The addresses are frequently wrong too. Sometimes it's only off by one building. Sometimes it's off by miles. I usually give people coordinates to the entrance.

Of course, Google had to redo maps, removing features I used all the time, like "Drop Coordinates", which would display the coordinates at the point you selected. The distance ruler is gone too. They were beta features, but I used them all the time.

You can still pull the coordinates sometimes. Not always though. Sometimes it'll show in the tag of the location. Otherwise, it's up in the URL, but you have to guess which one it is.

The agency abbreviation is USSS. It doesn't help that everyone knows them as "Secret Service", which is intuitively abbreviated to SS.

Strange, why would they think the suspect would leave, and then come back for the photos? Most people who would do that know they have very little time to work. Once the car is noticed missing or found, they're done. Sure, they like their trophies, but going back the next day is a huge risk they usually aren't willing to do. It's safer to steal another car for anything they may have forgotten.

Why not? That is *precisely* what wolfram did here. He designed the 'language' and decided 'gee it would be nice to have a first class function for travelling salesman', and then when he goes to demo, he whips that out to say 'look at this obscure capability omitted from most languages'. This may be useful, but being excited around the linecount is not something compelling in this case, as it shows no particularly exciting grammer/syntax stuff, just that Wolfram deemed 'travelling salesman' a problem worthy of being a first class function in the namespace.

Well, it's been nice knowing you. Agents will be at your house shortly.

    No, it's ... Oh, ok, it is. The only difference between this and a Death Star is the crunchy center, and a lack of soldiers in white uniforms that can't shoot straight.

I don't think it would ever be built, simply because it's exactly a space based weapon. Aim the beam at a receiving station, and everything is fine. Aim it at a major city, and ... well, it won't go very well for anyone there. They say 2 technologies, laser and microwave. We know what happens to things in a residential microwave at just 1,000 watts. Imagine how fast you could make an egg explode under 17,000 terawatts (roughly Earth's energy consumption).

I was going to say there's no laser capable of that kind of energy, but it seems NIF at LLNL did make a 500 terawatt laser, but it only runs for a very small fraction of a second. It would be more accurate to say no laser has been made for continuous use. But that would be one hell of a cutting laser.

I'm sure the SyFy channel will be making a direct-to-cable movie about it soon. :) Maybe they can get the Sharktopus mixed into the script somehow.

Miles, kilometers, what's it matter. It's not rocket science... ... oh ...

Pretty much anyone can submit an IETF RFC if they really want. The existence of a draft does not guarantee a ratified version will exist someday.

For another, it could be much worse. There is explicit wording at least here about seeking consent from the user and allowing opt-out even in the 'captive' case, as well as notifying the actual webserver of this intermediary, and that the intermediary must use a particular keyusage field meaning that some trusted CA has explicitly approved it (of course, the CA model is pretty horribly ill-suited for internet scale security, but better than nothing). Remember how Nokia confessed they silently and without consent had their mobile browser hijack and proxy https traffic without explicitly telling the user or server? While something like this being formalized wouldn't prevent such a trick, it would be very hard to defend a secretive approach in the face of this sort of standard being in the wild.

Keep in mind that in a large number of cases in mobile, the carriers are handing people the device including the browser they'll be using. A carrier could do what Nokia admits to in many cases without the user being the wiser and claim the secretive aspect is just a side effect today. If there was a standard clearly laying out that a carrier or mobile manufacturer should behave a certain way, that defense would go away.

I would always elect the 'opt out' myself, but I'd prefer anything seeking to proxy secure traffic be steered toward doing things on the up and up rather than pretending no one will do it and leaving the door open for ambiguous intentions.

    That's a pretty good deal. Cause a huge explosion, (probably) kill someone, and blow up a truck, and pay the town off with a pizza and 2 liter.

    If *I* caused a huge explosion.. no, lets just say a small explosion, like just the propane truck. Say one person caught a tiny piece of shrapnel that was picked out with tweezers and fixed with a band-aid, I'd be in jail for an awful long time.

    That doesn't quite seem fair.

hahahah.. and eewww..

Oh, I know the type. Actually, I've seen pretty much all the types.

I've been pretty lucky with the angry drunks. Usually I can talk them down, dodge their punches, or block. In the event I'm hit ... well ... hopefully I have enough drinks in me to not care. I can take a hit sober or drunk. I just get upset about it if I'm sober.

At one bar, I worked for the owner in another business, and I worked with the bartender at the other business, so all my drinks were free (per the owner). That night I was order a shot of rum, and a double rum and coke chaser. The bartender was amazed. I just kept drinking and talking to people all night. The next day she told me, the rum and coke was eventually just rum with a splash of coke for coloring. She wanted to see how much it would take to get me drunk, but I appeared perfectly sober the whole night. The only difference is that I flirted with her more after quite a few drinks. I told her it was about 4 rounds in I felt it.

But no, I wasn't good to drive. I have the same human metabolism everyone else has. If I had to do a breathalyzer, it would have probably caught on fire. Even though I can look perfectly sober, and act perfectly sober, and my coordination doesn't suffer, that doesn't mean I should drive.

It's a lot cheaper for me to be the designated driver. :) I don't even drink very often any more. It just costs too much. I can find more interesting things to spend money on.

    I don't know what fine drinking establishments you've been to. The ones I've been to only cut you off when you can't pay, puke on the floor, or start a fight.

    For some of us, there are few visible signs of our intoxication. I'd probably love that real-fake pub. "Nope, not drunk yet, keep trying."

Even if it did need to have something like IR cameras to observe IR leds in the headset (or vice-versa, as the Wii did), I don't think it would be too bad.

They have gyroscopic in there already. That's how they can do yaw and such. Still does nothing to help you with linear movement.

Granted, but then again, a lot of particular prominent, even more special purpose successes require a pretty big commitment. Rock band did well and no one is going to claim it's trivial to whip out the guitars and drumset. Granted their success did not endure, but primarily because the experience lacked sufficient variety, it did show people were committed to go through some hoops. Similarly, *really* sitting down to enjoy a feature length movie requires some commitment (doing so without commitment is possible, but much less enjoyable.

And there weren't many games that supported accelerated 3D graphics when 3dfx voodoo came out. Being too discouraged by that leads to a chicken and egg situation. It's probably also off putting that the set of available titles are at best adaptations of existing games or very basic things. The reason being that the quality games take longer and as such are still in progress (Star Citizen is one I'm really looking forward to). Crystal Cove demonstrates they will have capabilities the dev kits aren't even equipped to help publishers prepare for yet. Oculus is doing the only thing that might have a chance, building up a lot of excitement and coming in at an approachable price point to try to break the chicken and egg situation.

This is one area that has me pretty worried and waiting (that and the availability of good positional sensing). I'm really hoping they will be able to use at least a 2560x1440 OLED display (thanks to the mobile resolution pissing contest, Samsung looks ready to announce a shipping product with 2560x1440 at 5.2", 560 ppi seems very promising to construct a display out of, even if magnified).

Very, very rarely is gaming remotely entertaining to mere observers. A lot of very popular things are *always* equally anti-social (texting, reading books, listening to music on headphones, pretty much doing *anything* on a smartphone or even tablet, laptop, or computer).

The same can be true of racing or flying games, but that doesn't stop the vast majority of people making do with simpler controls. Just because you *can* take things very far at a very high price, doesn't mean you have to. The external tracking of the head is going to be baked into the headset cost (and not that expensive, as Kinect has shown) Headphones are straightforward as is positional audio in the headphone situation. Beyond eyewear and headphones, things get optional pretty fast. Wiimote-grade tracking for hands I certainly see as a big value add, but things start falling off real fast beyond that (the treadmill I'm skeptical would do anything to pull me that much more in as I think it would still feel very very off, but would wear me out greatly).