Actually, I ordered a very nice vostro from dell with a spiffy webcam. And windows XP.

The best part of the laptop? It had a very fancy phased array microphone setup. Even better, the line from it went too close to the CPU and was unshielded, so it rendered it useless as it would provide more static and line noise than anyone could hear from my actual voice on the other end.

I mean seriously, if they can't even figure out a MAJOR hardware defect, how the hell do you expect them to even start getting their drivers right on linux?

Actually the best part is they usually give you a few "waves" down the major cross town streets, like fulton + geary. Just floor it a lil bit over the speed limit and you can ride the lights for a while... provided there's no traffic!

SF is definitely a pedestrian city however. And they tend to want to slow down the motorists more than anything else.

And competing with bicycle space has become some what of an issue.

Which is definitely not a "no problem" kind of situation. Look at the list of canceled PS3 games, heck, even EA had issues getting red alert 3 onto it! It is not a simple nor easy setup. Anyone that has any experience threading systems could tell you that, especially across asymmetric cores!

Yes, but there is nothing stopping them from swiping the plans for the rocket boosters and developing a few payload systems that could easily hit US shores with a dirty/chemical warhead.

Technically, this would not result in massive retaliation. Technically, as we weren't nuked, but I have no idea how governments would react to this kind of attack. And frankly, if it was a terrorist/extremist group it would be just as bad I guess.

Either way, I'd really prefer it if our rocketry sciences weren't put into public domain. (Although, yes, the ingredients are one of the hardest parts... as I believe the rocket fuel for NASA was published at some point and people COULD make it if they improvised on some of the ingredients and it would do some pretty awesome stuff).

You are completely and utterly out of your mind if you think we should be letting out all of our rocket technology to the public.

Absolutely insane.

The only thing keeping us from getting "missiled" at this point is that few countries have the ICBM technology to hit us. Which is why we're developing these "missile shields" (which sometimes work... the patriot missle defence is more or less useless at this point against modern missiles).

Giving other countries access to our space shuttle tech (aside from the iron state memory and whatever else is inside the shuttle is pretty much useless), I'm sure they could use at least the engine to design a better missile.

Some of this stuff needs to be kept safeish right now.

On a side note, lots of companies make a lot of money and jobs by being given these contracts and they usually do it more efficiently than the government can so I'm all in favor of it (I'm not saying they're perfect, I've heard enough stories of the government contract jobs that it really pisses me off when I pay taxes...)

If you keep all of your data sets as vector3 floats you'll be fine...

hah.

Actually, if I remember this story correctly, they actually tried to REPEATEDLY warn the MBTA about this. They even offered a comprehensive list of suggestions to fix it.

They were repeatedly denied.

It wasn't until they were going to present the hack at a conference that the gag order was brought up and issued.

Either way, the MBTA basically told them to get lost on their suggestions and then threatened them to hell and back when they were going to go public with the knowledge.

I read the paper, whoever designed that system should be ashamed.

Uh... guys, it's called UDP, which has pretty much entirely replaced IPX. Mostly because it's the same protocol more or less running through IP. It saves you from having to install multiple network interfaces on your system. And it's all going through the same layers. That and UDP can work through NATS/Firewalls, which I'm not totally sure IPX did successfully (at least back in teh day when I was still learning how to use port forwarding when I was playing star craft games over a LAN).

Amen. Although I'm only a student/intern in game development, the sincere joy of using C#/XML has far outpaced ever going back to a text file and created "Yet Another Scripting Language". Never having to write my own parser that may be buggy and ridiculously out of scope? No problem, C# has them built in, even with low weight forward only readers! C++? No problem, TinyXML (or whatever other parser you want to use). Saving myself from writing a text parser? PRICELESS. XML Serialization is entirely and completely useful instead of having to change data inside my code, which is a ridiculous practice. I'd rather just change an xml file instead of having to recompile. I use XML for most of my projects, and my artists on my team have thanked me for not using some assinine formate for getting data into the game. If they want to change ANYTHING, they just start plugging in new values in the XML docs. Simple. Easy. And requires 0 input/effort on my end. Never having to worry about EOF? Thank you!