Retail the books at whatever price the publisher wants, but then arrange with publishers to do amazing sales. If they manage to advertise the sales to likely consumers based on product purchasing history (Nico buys fantasy novels at a disproportionate rate to others, advertise this fantasy novel to him) they stand to make a lot of money. For instance yesterday I had been watching some comic con panels that featured some of my favorite authors. One of the other authors (Patrick Rothfuss) on the panel was an author I had been interested in and meaning to read for some time. Yesterday I went to buy the book and to my pleasant surprise it was marked down to only four bucks. I bought it instantly. However if that had happened and it had been advertised to me at any point in the last six months, I would have bought the book on the spot at that point. If they can find a way to make such happy accidents happen regularly, everybody wins.

He was with Epic when it was making isometric shareware games. He was a big part of the reason Epic became one of the most influential AAA development houses on the planet, and that grew out of a startup. So he has already been there, he knows the path, and he has helped create some of the best and most influential games in the history of gaming. I'd say he has a damned good chance at making it again considering his premier game with the startup is a multi-player shooter. UT 2004 is still a hell of a lot more fun than most of the multiplayer shooters out there these days. The reason UT III failed miserably is because the company released it broken, didn't patch it up to snuff quickly, and generally failed to support the game because they believed the PC was a much worse market than console. Cliff is coming back to the PC, with a free-to-play shooter, which if he does right, will be a massive success on the scale of games like League of Legends. The reason PC was believed to be inferior by lots of developers was that people pirate games. But they can't pirate your game if it's free right? The game will be supported, and likely regularly release new content because he's not dumb enough to let it die. This might be the shooter people have been waiting for for 10 years. Not some shitty Console port, but an honest to god PC monster. I can't wait.

It's the thing that makes the magic box go!

Politicians saying one thing and doing another? I am totally surprised about this!

Hackers gonna hack right? This guy obviously had the necessary skillset to hack "critical infrastructure" before the game released. I mean unless they want us to believe that anybody inspired by a video game can learn how to hack such things in the span of a little over a month, this guy already had the skillset. So are they implying that the game provided the motivation? Last time I checked, hackers didn't need video games to provide them with motivation. Likely the guy is a fan of Watchdogs both because it is a fun game, and because he is intelligent enough to tie his activities to a popular video game in order to boost his notoriety. Of course a small percentage of fans of the game will experiment with such things. But chances are, these were already people that were likely to do such things. What we can look forward to now is the media going on and on about every single hack like this and trying to tie it to the game. Just waiting for one of these media dinosaurs to come along and talk about how the game is basically hacking practice.

It's a boarding school yeah? So my statement doesn't imply that the search for porn need to take place within actual school hours.

Never underestimate the determination of an adolescent boy in search of porn.

Just one more thing internet trolls and politicians have in common.

All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

All of the examples they gave in the article break one of the fundamental rules in that XKCD strip. The words shouldn't be words that are easily associated with each other. Of course picking a quote straight out of fiction is stupid. Four random 4-6 letter words that don't appear together in common language usage would be harder to crack for people using the strategy in the article http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/10/how-the-bible-and-youtube-are-fueling-the-next-frontier-of-password-cracking/

Push this "controversy" as far as they can without actually getting themselves kicked out of the program because they only come off looking really good and cool and the government agency looks like its splitting hairs and being a baby. Of course Tesla is proud of how safe they've made their cars, and they want people to know how safe their cars are, and now people will know that they scored so high they got in trouble for saying how high they scored.

This didn't result in the loss of human life. Who knows what might have happened? The plug could have come undone. My father manages the (clean) water for a property and even a small plug left unfastened can leak insane amounts of water in a short period of time.

Guess I should have read the article more closely. Originally, the phrasing and headline (sigh, sensationalization anybody?) made it seem like it was intentional. Seems like it wasn't which means my previous comment was made out of ignorance. Sorry, I will try to be better at this.

The problem is the goddamn double standard. Spray a few ounces of spray paint on a wall, and you get criminal charges pressed against you. Hell there was a guy arrested for writing in chalk outside Bank of America, on the sidewalks... wash away chalk. But dump 50k gallons of polluted water into the wild and it's all NBD.

That poor woman. I hope she doesn't blame herself. These people are snakes.