Firefall for the Sci-fi/Borderlands fans. Free 2 play, no pay to win. FPS style with dynamic(tornados) and static(player activated) world events. Only been out a couple weeks but looks pretty nice so far. It does need a bit more content in the midrange levels and there are still the occasional bugs but all in all one of the better MMOs I have seen recently. I am not bored yet even having done some missions upwards of a dozen times. In any case if you like FPS (you can even set it 3d person if you like), Sci-Fi and Borderlands (It has that feel not sure how else to explain it) then you should at least try it out. It is free after all.

Here is an article that explains this better than I did, written by an attorney that specializes in computer security, electronic privacy etc.

http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/09/the-unexpected-result-of-fingerprint-authentication-that-you-cant-take-the-fifth/

While I understand some users concerns about theft of the print/data/etc my concern is more to do with legal issues that have been brought up about this. The fingerprint could be considered a key and used to circumvent 5th Amendment issues. Currently the government (US at least) cannot compel you to give them a password or combination to unlock something but they can compel you to give them blood/urine or any other forensic item. They can already fingerprint you at arrest so it is not a far leap to envision the courts deciding that compelling you to unlock your phone by fingerprint is permissible.

Example: They cannot compel you to revel the combination of a safe because that requires you to give them knowledge that only you know that could incriminate yourself. However, they *can* compel you to hand over the key to a lock as that is evidence and is not considered knowledge covered by the 5th. This technology removes the lock code which would be considered 5th Amendment territory and places the fingerprint into evidentiary collection. They could compel you to place your finger on the phone for the purpose of unlocking it same as they could compel you to provide the key to unlock a door/safe/etc. Now the 2 day PIN code would help, but seriously who has not unlocked their phone in 2 days?

Yes, I know they can currently confiscate your phone and break into it same as they could any other obstruction, but that is not the point. As phones get ever more sophisticated encryption this is opening a very large door for the government to walk through.

Um, not necessarily. It doesn't need to load the entire 5Gb of the game in order to provide good caching response. If you played the entire game, then exited, played the entirety of another game and *then* came back to the first then, yes, it *might* load slowly again.

However, if you load a game, play a level (or even a few), exit play another game for a level and went back to the first it is highly probable that your previous session will still be cached, but loading the next level *might* be slow (depending on what textures and other data are needed to load). 8Gb is actually quite a lot of data as far as individual programs/games go, so 8 or even 16gb of cache goes a long way towards speeding load times as well as accessing textures on the fly.

That said, there are many games and applications that just routinely hammer the drive. Which is why on my system I have a SSD for certain games and a caching HDD for others. There is practically no noticeable difference playing games from different drives as long as you understand what each program/games needs are and store it appropriately. How do you determine this prior to installing? Good luck with that. I haven't been able to determine beforehand where to install so I move things around as needed when I notice too much latency. Personally, anything that is twitchy I put on the SSD just, well just because. :P

I went back 30 years prior to the ban (when the Home Office still had those records). The only drastic increase both prior and since was in 1997-2002. Their violent crime literally doubled in 5 years. Prior to '97 their crime increase was marginal to nonexistent, pretty much in line with population increase. There was no reason for the explosion of crime in that period. It was pretty much unprecedented.

They have since brought their crime back down to at or below 1997 levels (as a percentage of pop), but the gun ban did not work as intended. There were numerous MPs that were absolutely livid about the statistical numbers when they came out in 2002, but nothing ever came of it and any attempts to reverse the ban were defeated.

Yes, UK gun ownership was always low and gun murder (actually murder in general) low as well. The fact that it doubled immediately after the ban, while I cannot claim causation, cannot be dismissed lightly and putting the UK as a good example of gun control at work is disingenuous at best. To this day they are still dealing with massive numbers of illegal guns in the hands of criminals.

The Supreme Court rules what the Constitution means not you. A well-regulated militia has no bearing whatsoever on the right to keep and bear arms and that is exactly what they said In Heller. If that isn't disagreeing with you then I do not know what is. Your statement is not factual unless you are playing word games with the 2dA. The Constitution does not grant rights, period. It enumerates what rights the Government may not infringe upon. The Supreme Court stated that no militia membership is required to satisfy the right to keep and bear arms. Therefore, your statement that the Constitution grants this right to militias is in direct opposition to what the Court ruled. Also, the definition of "well-regulated" circa 1800 meant to be in working order or effective. Nowhere in the 2dA does it ever state that membership in such a body was required, only that in order to have such a body the people need arms and as such the government may never infringe upon this right.

You left out the fact that after 1997, when the UK implemented its handgun ban, murders with handguns doubled over the next 5 years (not that they were all that high to begin with). Violent crime doubled and violent crime with firearms (not including air-weapons) quadrupled. (Home Office Statistical Bulletin Jan 2002). The UK has *always* had low murder rates both prior to and after your ban, but it took close to 12 years after your ban was put in place to get your murder rates back down to where they started prior to 1997. That is not exactly a shining example of gun control done right. That is also not mentioning the fact that the UK press estimates 4-5 million illegal guns on the streets in the UK as well as the fact that they did a survey and 1 in 5 Brits know where to get a gun if they need one. Again, not the shining example of working gun control.

I hate getting into a gun control debate on this thread and replying to an AC to boot but.... what massive killings? Out of a nation of 300 million we have approx ~15k gun deaths annually. Granted, any death is tragic but I would hardly call it massive compared to other causes of death. The majority of these are criminal with accidental and suicides thrown in. Even if you make the case that all of the suicides would have been saved (good luck making that case), criminals will still be able to get weapons since they are...(wait for it) criminals.

The UK tried this in 97. In the 5 years after their gun ban violent crime doubled, violent crime with handguns (not including air weapons) quadrupled and handgun murders doubled (Home Office Statistical Bulletin Jan 2003). It took them another 7 years to get their crime back down to where it started in the first place. All this for a nation that had an annual gun homicide rate of 50 in 1997. As it is, today they estimate there are in excess of 5 million illegal guns on the streets of the UK (as reported by the UK press) and that 1 in 5 Brits know how to get a gun if they need one. This is gun control working? Also keep in mind the UK is an island, has 1/10 the population of the US and even they cannot control guns effectively. Exactly how are we to do it when we can't even keep illegal drugs out (and that is a whole different can of worms).

Guns are not the problem. We have a violent society and we are no longer properly identifying and caring for our mentally ill citizens. We need to fix the cause not the result.

My High School was lucky enough to have one gifted to it. Apparently, Hugh Hefner (Yes, *that* Hugh Hefner) was an alumnus of my High School and had his daughter come to the school to present the check. I remember learning Assembly, Fortran, Watfiv, PL\1 and I think Cobol as well as rudimentary LED and circuit logic either on it or the IBM 360 downtown. Yes, once upon a time the Chicago public school system had a very good education system. I even remember breaking into the 360 and messing with other school's (and students) teachers assignments (teacher's password: pencil....really?! and taped to the desk next to their terminal. /facepalm).

Because it just sits there all day, doing nothing and is of no real use....errr hmmm, you may have a point there.

Saw this little idea on another site (wish I could take credit for it, but meh). Sony creates new ad campaign. Ad starts out with "XBox, Off!"

Troll level - Over 9000!!


hehehe

Hey, you leave my wif...err sister out of this. ;)

Hey, I have relatives in West Virginia you insensitive clod!

.....and a couple ex-girlfriends

....don't ask.

That is called deduplication and most modern SAN systems have this feature. You can have both thin-provisioning and deduplication for increased savings. In Mr. Dotcoms business model I doubt he will get many exact duplicate files, but that really doesn't matter because you can still deduplicate similar binary strings within differing binary files or as you said duplicate blocks. In any case dedupe and thin-prov are not mutually exclusive, you can do both.

Normally dedupe is more efficient for backups or when used on the disk target for a virtual environment since you only need one copy of notepad.exe if you are hosting 200+ windows servers. The same applies to unchanging files in *nix systems. The thing is you *have* to have some way to "present" the 50GB of promised space. While you may use dedupe or any other method to reduce your storage footprint the end user wants to see that storage. You either have to present that space raw, which comitts it from the SAN or as a thin-provisioned LUN with only the bare minimum of space actually reserved. How you store those files after the fact is up to you as the hosting company, but if you promise 50GB of space the user will want to see that space available.

Depending on the backend SAN he has, you can use thin-provisioning since there will not be a demand from all users for the entirety of their storage immediately. He can install 50 or so TB, provision that out then add the rest as needed, when needed. The user will see 50gb available but until they actually upload a certain percentage of that they don't actually have that amount of storage. Since the vast majority won't be uploading that in the near term he can do this until there is a demand for it.

Even adding in duplication for backups that only means 100TB. 100TB SAN is not that expensive actually. Since this is storage and not active access you can load it up with inexpensive 1TB SATA disks vs FC.