Honestly, nothing at all.

I found AC repetitive as hell and I don't see the gimmick of flying or dual hidden blades being of any real significance to the gameplay.

Don't own a console so I can't really be excited about God of War, Galaxy 2, or Final Fantasy 'whatever number they're up to now'.

Modern Warfare 2 is intriguing and will no doubt have a compelling but all too predictably short single player but I'm kind of pissed off from initial reports that they won't really be changing much in the way of multiplayer besides changing some guns. Perks will remain the same except for eavesdrop as far as I've heard and that's just really a silly move when some of them are either just badly conceived ideas, or are plain out useless.

Can't really get excited about motion control technology until I see it implemented into an actual triple-A title in a workable way. The tech demos, especially Sony's, which actually showed off a live demonstration rather than showing off 'hard to believe this would actually work in real life' video footage a la Microsoft, was pretty interesting.

Monkey Island SE looks like something to put on the to play list, although I don't know what to think about the episodic sequel yet.

Also, Deus Ex 3 didn't make a showing which probably says it'll be ages before its release sadly.

Very true! It's a great resource. And thanks, lol. Boy with the pearl earring

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Honestly I didn't know Pinkerton's involvement in presidential security when I started the "Pinkerton" themed queue. That's the fun thing about Sifting I guess. The stuff you learn. You look lovely in Vermeer, by the way.

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
Haha, if only! But that sounds pretty likely, yeah.. it was already such an intriguing, cool photograph - and then seeing that led me to wonder even more about the whole scene there. Neat little glimpse into a moment from the past.. wild indeed. Glad I stumbled across it. :}

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Wouldn't it be wonderful to know? Presumably some bedraggled union soldier quietly eavesdropping on those who will determine his fate. I didn't really notice him. That's pretty wild.

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
I saw this image you posted on Edeot's profile. Do you know who the man in the bottom left corner is? Had you noticed him yourself? He seems to be either laying in the grass or popping up right out of it.

Honestly I didn't know Pinkerton's involvement in presidential security when I started the "Pinkerton" themed queue. That's the fun thing about Sifting I guess. The stuff you learn. You look lovely in Vermeer, by the way.

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
Haha, if only! But that sounds pretty likely, yeah.. it was already such an intriguing, cool photograph - and then seeing that led me to wonder even more about the whole scene there. Neat little glimpse into a moment from the past.. wild indeed. Glad I stumbled across it. :}

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Wouldn't it be wonderful to know? Presumably some bedraggled union soldier quietly eavesdropping on those who will determine his fate. I didn't really notice him. That's pretty wild.

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
I saw this image you posted on Edeot's profile. Do you know who the man in the bottom left corner is? Had you noticed him yourself? He seems to be either laying in the grass or popping up right out of it.

Haha, if only! But that sounds pretty likely, yeah.. it was already such an intriguing, cool photograph - and then seeing that led me to wonder even more about the whole scene there. Neat little glimpse into a moment from the past.. wild indeed. Glad I stumbled across it. :}

In reply to this comment by schmawy:
Wouldn't it be wonderful to know? Presumably some bedraggled union soldier quietly eavesdropping on those who will determine his fate. I didn't really notice him. That's pretty wild.

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
I saw this image you posted on Edeot's profile. Do you know who the man in the bottom left corner is? Had you noticed him yourself? He seems to be either laying in the grass or popping up right out of it.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to know? Presumably some bedraggled union soldier quietly eavesdropping on those who will determine his fate. I didn't really notice him. That's pretty wild.

In reply to this comment by EndAll:
I saw this image you posted on Edeot's profile. Do you know who the man in the bottom left corner is? Had you noticed him yourself? He seems to be either laying in the grass or popping up right out of it.

>> ^burdturgler:
And because Obama hasn't immediately legalized pot, of course he can't be trusted. Ergo, everything he says is now a lie. I mean, so far he has done exactly what he promised, which was to end the Federal raids on medical marijuana clinics, but that huge step in this short amount of time just isn't enough.


It's hardly a huge step, and they've already busted one clinic in S.F. that we know of.

And I don't see how North Korea or Iran are a threat to anybody if we would just leave them the fuck alone and, yes, start working with them instead of antagonizing them at every turn.

Are they angels? No. Are our current policies making them weaker or stronger? Stronger, obviously.

The only reason America keeps fucking with them is because they refuse to roll over on their backs and play dead, because we have to maintain corporate control over every square inch of the world, apparently.

Guantanamo is still open, isn't it?

Most of Bush's signing statements regarding eavesdropping are still in place, aren't they?

As a candidate and a senator, Mr. Obama was a strong backer of whistleblower protections. But as president, he issued a signing statement reserving the right to keep whistleblowers from talking to Congress in cases where their communications would be unlawful or “otherwise confidential.” The White House says previous presidents have used similar language, but critics say Mr. Obama’s phrase — “otherwise confidential” — gives him broad authority.
(New York Times)

Yeah, that's sure good for the country: muzzle the whisleblowers some more.

Azureus is a torrenting app that has a plugin called SafePeer that hides traffic from IP addresses that have been detected by their network to be eavesdropping.

If you're interested in Azureus, you'll find the Advanced tab on the far right to be the most helpful view. Safepeer can be installed via Tools>Plugins>Installation Wizard.

For my torrenting needs, I find www.piratebay.com is hard to beat, and the comments often indicate any problems with torrents. www.mininova.com is also good, and also has comments. www.torrentz.com is a metasearch site that can be useful, and searches both of the above sites, though it seems to take some time to update if you're looking for something recently released.

If your video is a .flv file, you'll need to download FLV player. Otherwise, you can always try another video player like realplayer.

It's all complicated, isn't it?

Here's a very informative article on invasive ISP surveillance by Paul Ohm:

Nothing in society poses as grave a threat to privacy as the Internet Service Provider (ISP). ISPs carry their users' conversations, secrets, relationships, acts, and omissions. Until the very recent past, they had left most of these alone because they had lacked the tools to spy invasively, but with recent advances in eavesdropping technology, they can now spy on people in unprecedented ways. Meanwhile, advertisers and copyright owners have been tempting them to put their users' secrets up for sale, and judging from a recent flurry of reports, ISPs are giving in to the temptation and experimenting with new forms of spying. This is only the leading edge of a coming storm of unprecedented and invasive ISP surveillance.

Republicans do get research, they believe that the private sector can handle research tasks for society, which is not really true since Pfizer and other biomedical firms would not go undertaking research or publish their work if there is no monetary pay off at the end, especially given that almost 80% of research ends with no pay off.

These firms are corporations seeking a profit, not a social good. Viagra was a shot in the dark, they were trying to make something for the heart when they noticed that alot of the testers mentioned getting boners.

Furthermore I think the investment priorities have been heavily skewed in the favor of defense and security industries, along with the usual military research (flavor of the month? Network centric warfare). Even then alot of these projects are being funded by the government, alot of them as well end up having no viable real world application, if you really think everything researched or built has an application we must live on different planets.

I believe in government funded research but I also think that for the last 8 years there has been alot of wasteful spending on high tech military and security projects, panic has lead to a shotgun like application of funding resulting in a massive growth in the security industry and creating its own lobby component in Washington - look for them to push forward various threats to guarantee continued growth/existence, not an announcement that America remains safe.

This kind of approach has meant that the US has overlooked other threats such as biochemical and cyber attacks. There isn't a cohesive plan, only more investment into network centric warfare, which as a doctrine of war has been marvelous in conquering uniformed armies but is unable to bring victory in Iraq and Afghanistan because the doctrine was not written to fight a asymmetrical war with combatants being part of the civilian population, so you have very few soldiers trying to pacify very large populations.

Okay I didn't mean this to turn into an essay.

I doubt either candidate will reign in government expenses. The whole "pre and post 9/11 world" thing is highly political and would mean a continued military and security industrial complex for the foreseeable future. Alot of it will consist of eavesdropping on Americans themselves.

This thread made me laugh.

I'm sure Choggie's floating around out there, kind of like a ghost eavesdropping on the conversations at his own funereal.

But he isn't really dead! It was all just a dream! Just a crazy little dream! And Kommie was there, and Jonny, and Blankfist....

Judging from his reaction I'd say this is a real gaffe...

Ashcroft did one honorable thing, and that was to very dramatically let the domestic eavesdropping expire in 2004, a move that almost brought down the house of cards when the rest of the story began to come out. http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/07/24/gonzales.hearing.ap/index.html

Are they seriously taking sides with Miers and Bolten, because those two are very clearly in the wrong here.

*WTF is this Boehner even talking about? Oh thats right, domestic eavesdropping expires today. Hah, eat it, Boehn!

(related article)
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iBnUf1TO7w4L8FKPASjWkHX8tZBwD8UQ9DAG1

That video shows a clear individual who we can judge..it's good TV, not abstract. Katrina is visual and visceral..global warming and civil liberties are not: http://www.videosift.com/video/Frogs-in-Boiling-Water-the-Psychology-of-Global-Warming

In reply to this comment by Farhad2000:
People seemingly get more railed up about police abuses captured on video then the continuing judicial abuses committed by the Whitehouse. One affects a minority the other affects the majority. Kind of like whats going on right now in the Senate:

Senate Yesterday

After more than a year of wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory on Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers and to give legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s program of eavesdropping without warrants.

One by one, the Senate rejected amendments that would have imposed greater civil liberties checks on the government’s surveillance powers. Finally, the Senate voted 68 to 29 to approve legislation that the White House had been pushing for months. Mr. Bush hailed the vote and urged the House to move quickly in following the Senate’s lead.

People seemingly get more railed up about police abuses captured on video then the continuing judicial abuses committed by the Whitehouse. One affects a minority the other affects the majority. Kind of like whats going on right now in the Senate:

Senate Yesterday

After more than a year of wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory on Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers and to give legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s program of eavesdropping without warrants.

One by one, the Senate rejected amendments that would have imposed greater civil liberties checks on the government’s surveillance powers. Finally, the Senate voted 68 to 29 to approve legislation that the White House had been pushing for months. Mr. Bush hailed the vote and urged the House to move quickly in following the Senate’s lead.

N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell will travel to Washington on Wednesday to meet with Senator Arlen Specter for a discussion about the league’s investigation into the Patriots’ spying on other teams.

“I have a lot of questions,” Specter said. “I’m hoping to get some answers.”

Specter, of Pennsylvania, is the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. He first requested a meeting with Goodell in a letter in November. Specter wanted to know why the league had destroyed all evidence in the spying case and whether there was any indication that the Patriots had cheated when they played the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX."

I admit it - I downvoted.

You pasted the wrong description.

Instead of pasting the description for "#7. - Listen Up" you pasted the description for "#9. My Lil' Reminder".

Here it is:

Listen Up, a hearing aid for people who can't admit they need a hearing aid, has the added bonus of endowing users with super-hearing so that they can eavesdrop and generally hear things they aren't supposed to.

Hey, that's the My Lil' Reminder chick. The poor dear must have tried playing back her audio recordings only to discover that she was going deaf, too.

The hyperbole:
It starts with the old guy listening to the TV and then his radio too loud, then getting totally owned by his harpy of a wife. He takes it surprisingly well (his grin is slightly maniacal), perhaps because he couldn't hear what she was saying.

Then the whole thing strays into the reprehensible, when it boasts that you can eavesdrop on people's private conversations from "Up to 100 feet away."

Then there's a shot of an elderly couple using it in church. We found it weird that they would market their product to both eavesdroppers and church-goers in the same ad. But then isn't God the biggest spy there is?

The reality:
The false advertising is blatant. For example, the guy at the football game can apparently hear the quarterback call plays in the huddle from the stands. Unless the Listen Up is capable of some fancy Fourier analysis for isolating specific sounds, and you can be sure that it is not, then he would bleed from the ears due to amplified crowd noise before ever hearing a single call. The only reason his ears aren't bleeding is because, as the customer reviews can tell you, the piece of crap doesn't work: