You may already know that China's government is still an overbearing dictatorship and has taken it upon itself to block all manner of websites that may speak ill of the Chinese government (the most positive thing we can say is with the whole world looking, they can't execute people for "crimes against the state" as much as they'd like to). What you may not know is what sites are blocked and what sites are allowed.
Our's is blocked. My guess is China bans entire IP ranges, OR they don't so much blacklist sites as whitelist ones they approve personally, blocking everything else.
This here thread should involve boring minutia that only like one person thinks would be cool. Post away, maybe.
Anyway, my main thought is this. I've been watching technology for some time now and if there's one thing I've realized, the end product of a "line" of products tends to keep the name it started with, but barely maintains the same function. We are surrounded by things with inaccurate names or names that only highlight ONE feature of a vastly more capable device.
They need to start doing that in sci-fi, that's what I'm saying. For example, we still call our phones "phones" even though that's only one thing it does. 100 years from now, they should have some vastly comlicated thing that also can be used for communication just called a "phone" and most people really don't even know why, until they watch something on the history channel about when they were primarily just used to talk to people, and phone came from "phono" or sound.
Gametap used to suck as far as I was concerned. Basically, the main issue is I will NEVER pay a monthly fee to access a single player game (and as for multiplayer, I have limits as to how much I'll spend but basically I'll only pay for online components, and then not that much, for example Xbox Live). I'd much rather own.
So basically, these Gametap guys with their annoying commercials and sickly green art style finally just copied steam and now I can just buy games outright from their little library. Now I'm interested.
Fun, but really hard. I got to floor 2 (late last week after getting it) then went and played Children of Mana for three hours, because I wanted to play something where I'd actually make progress... sure, Children of Mana is a far worse game and gets boring quickly, but 'easy' is fun sometimes. :D
... erm, right, Etrian Odyssey is cool... the mapping thing is the best feature of course. It's like Wizardry 6 without the graph paper... :)
This is an interesting story and everyone's quick to call the guy a hero for trying to save the day and catching a bullet, but in all likelyhood if the guy had called the cops instead, no one would have been hurt. I mean the muggers still got away so he really didn't accomplish anything. Generally speaking police frown on this sort of behavior unless there is a clear and present danger to someone else at the time. Money's not worth getting shot over.
The final episode of a piraty epic, this movie is kick-awesome. I won't say much except for those that worry it focused too much on "wacky Jack" as in Dead Man's Chest, that's not the case. It is about 3 hours long though so go to the bathroom before you watch it. Or don't, but don't expect any mercy from an angry sea that gave ya fair warning.
Also pirates aren't big on accurate descriptions. Apparently ANYONE can become the king of the pirates, not just 50% of the population.
So I was looking at slashdot, and they had the top 25 censored news stories of the year. A guy had a really good point: Lindsay Lohan has alot bigger tits than global warming.
