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Comment Consent to search (Score 4, Insightful) 462

And for heaven’s sake, don’t consent to a search if you are carrying a big roll of legitimate cash.

I have been pulled over twice for minor offenses such as a burned out taillight bulb and then had my vehicle searched for no cause. The police said they smelled marijuana and didn't need my consent. Basically, all they have to do is lie and the Bill of Rights is just a piece of paper as far as they are concerned. They found nothing either time.

Comment Typical day of usage for me (Score 1) 355

Download 4.69
Upload 0.40
Total 5.09
This is what a typical day looks like when I check my online usage with AT&T DSL. Those totals are in GB, so they are saying that I am uploading 400 MB, which is BS. Other than the occasional picture attached to an email, I upload nothing, no torrents, no facetime/skype, nada, yet they say I do nearly 1/2 a GB a day. That's about 10% of my download ratio, so they have to be measuring network overhead. That ovehead adds up to about 12 GB a month, so my 150 GB cap is really in the 130+ range.

Comment Chattanooga (Score 1) 338

I don't understand why the Republican would be against municipal broadband. Aren't they always talking about job creation? Chattanooga has added hundreds of jobs, had a huge increase in start-up companies, and attracted a lot of industry to the area since they deployed a municipal gigabit broadband network, so why oppose it? The only explanation I can possibly think of is that they are too cozy with the cable and telecomm monopolies.

Comment Dark Souls (Score 1) 669

Trying to finish it and any other games I have in my backlog that use Games For Windows Live before Microsoft pulls the plug on it this summer. Some have had it patched out, such as Bioshock and Batman, but others have not like Dark Souls.

Comment Streaming and Accounts (Score 1, Interesting) 252

Valve is pushing Linux for gaming, and I assume that the Steambox will be a Linux OS. There is only a very small subset of the Steam catalog that has native Linux games, so I am wondering if they are planning on supporting streaming from a PC running Steam to the TV via Steambox? There might still be some latency, but on a local network it is not going to be nearly what it would be streaming over the Internet, such as On Live or Sony's Gaikai.

My biggest question would be how are they going to handle the shared Steam account? What if the wife or kids wants to play a game on the Steambox and I want to play on my PC at the same time? The only way you can do that with the current system on multiple devices is to have one of them in offline mode, which means only one can play an online game at once. What about multiple profiles so that that each user can have their own friends lists and own achievements such as the PS3/360 do on their consoles? Currently there are not any separate profiles on a single account, you need separate Steam accounts, and separate game purchases on each account to do so.

Comment Home or work (Score 1) 410

We still use modems to connect Out of Band to routers for troubleshooting when the main WAN T1/DS3/MetroE connection is down.

I haven't used one at home since the 90s. Back then, the first broadband connection I had was downstream only, you still had to use a modem for upstream.

Comment Re:Not just recording gameplay (Score 1) 203

But they would not have their own achievements or own list of friends - doesn't matter so much to me, but it does to the kids. To do that, you need separate xblg accounts else the one account would be all you could play with online. Microsoft used to have a family plan for $100 for 4 members, but they discontinued that last spring.

Comment Not just recording gameplay (Score 4, Informative) 203

They are also putting OneGuide and Skype behind the Xbox Live Gold paywall. It looks like most of the new features they have added to Xbox One will require XBL Gold.The PS4 will let you record gameplay without a PS+ account.

The main difference I see in PS+ and Xbox Live Gold is that PS+ is per PS3/PS4 where Xbox Live Gold is per account. For those of us with families, that is a substantial difference. Both of my kids and myself would be able to play under the single PS+ account for $50, where for XBL Gold each of us would require our own account, bringing the total to $180.

Comment Depends on the definition of "always online" (Score 1) 435

I am just wondering if the Internet echo chamber has blew this way out of proportion. What if they are referring to always online in another sense?

Downloading updates, games, or movies when the console is in standby mode

The ability to use it as a Media Center when it is in standby

That's just a couple examples, but I am sure there could be many other benefits of having a console that is always online that has nothing to do with DRM. After the highly visible fiascoes such as the Sim City launch and the lack of Internet availability or stability in many parts of the country, much less the world, I can't see them writing off a large percentage of potential buyers by requiring to be online to play every game, even in single player. I still have a few friends in rural areas that are on dialup that do not have access to broadband, or one on satellite with it's 500 ms ping times on a good day.

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