"Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which serve to mask the source and destination of data by routing it through a third-party server"

This is a false and very dangerous line of thinking. A VPN and a proxy are two different things. And they don't necessarily do what you're saying they do.

As a data point of one, I'm still running with the 4GB of OCZ ram I bought from newegg (I think) in 2009 and have had no problems. The reviews on that product were also decent.

After reading reviews of their SSD drives, though, I'd avoid those.

I guess the message here (if any) is, pay attention to the reviews on the product. If people say it's crap, it probably is.

Pinnacle of PVP shooters was and still is BF2 Karkand Infantry only. They want the perfect game just fix:

- Squad bug
- C4 jumping
- Team switching and balance
- Tone down nade spamming a little, not a lot
- Botting, glitching and assorted other hacks
⦠ship

Overdone graphics add nothing to game play, they just increase game expense and hardware requirements. They are marketing, they don't make games fun.

Endless fur balls shooting at each other like COD are just boring. Strategy and tactics is what makes PVP interesting, and being a better team than your opponents.

Air and armor just aren't that much fun. Its really hard to maintain balance between players with that wide a gamut of capabilites. Infantry only is a blast because everyone is relatively equal and its ability that makes the difference.

Karkand is a great map because it compels confrontation, has some room to manuever but not too much. Big maps like in PS3 result in endless running around trying to find a battle and when you find one the team are almost NEVER balanced so the play just sucks.

Balanced team of evenly matched players in a properly sized map for the number of players is the secret to PVP success. Don't know why gaming companies have so much troublt figuring this out. The excitement and challenge is playing against other players not against gimmicky vehicls or weapons and not gawking at overdone graphics.

Oh, and MY GOD DON'T PUT HEAD BOB IN YOUR GAME. IT IS JUST NAUSEA INDUCING INNER EAR TORTURE AND ADDS NOTHING TO YOUR GAME.

"We don't know why Facebook would be against a browser extension that improves their users' site experience."

Easy. You seem to be operating under the very common -- but clearly mistaken -- belief that Facebook users are Facebook's customers. In fact, Facebook's advertisers are their customers, and Facebook users are the product. Once you look at it from this perspective, everything Facebook does makes sense.

Agree about the difficulty with Swing. Swing permits different look and feels to differ too much in essentials like ordering of operations, focus, and etc. It makes it very hard to adjust the styling of individual components and expect it to do anything reasonable in different look and feels.

JavaFX sounds really good, but I've not yet developed against it. Thanks for the link to SceneBuilder, I look forward to playing with it.

"The automobile saved people time, which is why it replaced the horse."

It also saved Manhattan from being -- quite literally -- buried in horse shit.

"Most people don't think too highly of the folks behind Standard Oil, but an honest assessment would suggest that they did more to save whales than anyone at Greenpeace -- by making whale oil a less cost effective heating mechanism."

Strangers with this kind of intellectual honesty make me go a big rubbery one, if you know what I mean.

Didn't RTFA but there is nothing stopping them from building a massively parallel, electronic, analog machine composed of a large number of heavily interconnected pattern recognizers with the ability to self modify.

Then the only challenge is for it to learn how to learn and then to actually learn.

Some of the mechanisms evolution developed to create the human brain may well not be optimal so humans probably can do better once they understand how the basic mechanisms works which they increasingly do.

Yes, you could do that, but then you'd have to distribute the updated cacerts to all desktops that need to run your app, and keep it updated whenever a new JVM comes out.

Oracle did implement a runtime configuration file that could be used to whitelist certain hosts, but the distribution problem remains.

This would not affect Eclipse, no, but it does affect locally produced applications that are distributed from an intranet web server with Java Web Start / Java Network Launch Protocol.

Previously, we could just self-sign our app and users could choose to accept the app once and for all and not be bothered so long as the signing cert didn't change. Now, all of our users running Java 1.7.0_40 are given the threatening dialog each and every time they run our internal app, and they can't get rid of it.

We're going to pony up for a code signing cert from a (Java-recognized) certificate authority to make the dialog go away. It's a hassle, but probably still the right thing for Oracle to do at this point.

AAPL was elevated to stratospheric heights because of a bubble in their stock. Every hedge fund on the planet was buying it because the price was going up and the price was going up because every hedge fund on the planet was buying it. Its not really useful to compare to a time its stock was at stratospheric heights due to speculators.

On the other hand since Jobs died they do seem to be completely sucking. Hiring Kevin Lynch from Adobe was the most vivid illustration of that I can think of. I wager Jobs would have instantly fired anyone dumb enough to hire that guy.

Its probably an interesting question if those same hedge funds are pushing GOOG to heights greater than it deserves. Android is doing well but its a has a weird business model.

Japan has been using unmanned helicopters to spray crops for decades. Yamaha makes them, though they are a little expensive. They are extremely good at it, the down wash from the rotor helps spread the spray all through the plants.

UC Davis, if memory serves, has started trials on them in the U.S. recently but the restrictive drone regulatory climate needs to relax a little