There's something to be said about attitude. Don't act like prey, don't be treated as prey.

Also, all the cameras and people lead me to believe this is a for-profit area. The wolves are probably well fed.

@newtboy -- I used a credit card (Discover) almost exactly as you described while I was going to college. Get a balance to pay for normal stuff, but pay it ALL off at the end of every month.

But I don't think the credit card companies hate people like us for 2 reasons:

1) For every one of us, there's a buttload who pay the minimum rather than the entire balance.

2) In my case, I think that in 4 years of college I forgot to pay off my balance (simply forgot to send in the check) once or possibly twice. I remembered a bit late and called Discover to see what to do, and they would tell me to pay the balance (or the minimum payment, not that I actually did that) plus a late fee.

I can't remember how much the late fee was. Maybe about $20? Anyway, at the kind of monthly balance I was running (not high), I'd wager that $20 was equivalent to maintaining an actual balance and paying the interest for a month or two or three. Which makes Maher's argument that they are "profiting from people's mistakes" reasonably accurate.


...On the other hand, Discover had "cashback bonus" awards of .5 to 1% or so, from which I stocked up and claimed somewhere in the $50-100 range over the 4 years, definitely enough to keep me in the net positive range in spite of a $20 late fee or two. That tells me that the magnitude of my "mistakes" must have been tiny in comparison to average credit card users.

I don't think Discover is an evil company per se for "preying" on people that don't use the card in the same way that you or I would. Paying a $20 late fee was a fully reasonable thing to charge me with. On the other hand, there's many many examples of predatory type fees that really do take advantage of people for "offenses" that are way less egregious, even things that have previously been considered standard use of the product / service in the past (paying WAY more for an extra inch of legroom, checked bags, food, etc. on airplanes comes to mind). Many of those arguably do cross the line into "evil" territory, I think.

I liked the 2006 Prey, but it wasn't the best game ever (I actually have a boxed copy--remember those? ). Prey 2017 is said to be System Shock 3, I'm sure you know. It's not really in the Prey universe, but I guess they couldn't acquire the System Shock IP.

I only played the original Prey demo which was decent. System Shock 2 scared me.

Yeah. More than once I think. It was a long ass time ago, but I remember the end involves you leaving the mansion, amid happy-ish music and a bright sunny day, and being picked up by your driver who ends up being this undead skeleton dude or something.

The game I'm really enjoying right now is Prey (2017). OMG so good. I saw some let's plays of it and initially it felt underwhelming, but the game is so immersive and non-linear, with a great story and evolving game world... It's not so much a horror game, but it has tension and some jump-scares here and there. I feel like it's got some gameplay similarities to Alone in the Dark 1, oddly enough, despite being completely and entirely different.

You know, I went on a roller coaster of emotions watching this.

First, I felt mildly amused by the lady who claims to be able to see angels.

Then I felt pity for everyone up there that seems to believe her.

After that I felt a bit of anger, because I remembered that this guy Bakker is an ex-con who swindled his congregation and possibly raped one of his secretaries and yet somehow here he is on TV again preying on people desperate to find meaning and hope in their lives.

Then I felt disgust as I remembered the news from the other day about the teen denied birth control from her Walgreens pharmacist because he claimed a religious objection to filling the prescription and that in many places in the U.S. it is perfectly legal for pharmacists to do so.

The only thing that eased my mind after this is that young people in the U.S. are non-religious in record numbers and that these numbers have steadily increased and will likely continue to increase going into the future. The quicker organized religion dies out, the better off we'll all be.

So they didnt get any "inspiration" from Prey?
I doubt that very much.

thanks...Michaela was our first child, born 2004, with HLHS (basically, no left ventricle and closed aorta, and a number of holes in the heart), and we quite literally lived in Hospital for close to half the year for the whole time. We are incredibly lucky to still be together through "all this", and this is coming from 6 years after her death...and the effects/affects keep a'coming. But through it all, if we didn't experience it directly, we knew someone who did. [personal micro-example: nurse preyed, hospital lock-down/police protection, then suicide...uh...]

doubt that clarified anything...sorry.

Pfft. Bird of prey might be sexier, but I reckon real props for speed should go to ducks or pigeons. You ever see a duck gliding? No, nor me.

Let's be extremely optimistic and figure that these things work in a 25 meter radius, with 100% kill rate to any mosquito inside that zone for 30 seconds+. That's plenty to put in or near a house and drastically reduce the mosquito population in (and a little bit around) that area. But just a short distance away, the mosquito population will be completely unaffected.

Animals that prey on mosquitoes will find a small dead zone and move on.

Lets say they worked extremely well, and we decided to cover an entire city with a grid of these things. Maybe New York (800 km^2). Would the local ecosystem be affected? Sure. Some species of birds, bats, etc. would move upstate -- but overall there would probably be way less impact on the ecosystem than simply having a gigantic city there in general.

It would probably be better to set them up covering small villages in area with high risk of malaria, in which case any affects on ecosystems would be very small and contained. But on the other hand, first world people like New Yorkers with high population density and more $$$ to burn might be plenty happy to chip in (tax dollars?) for these things if they never got any mosquito bites again. And that would probably help the economy of scale kick in and make it much cheaper to set them up in places that would really benefit...

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Dutch-Police-use-birds-of-prey-to-take-down-drones

Dutch Police use birds of prey to take down drones has been added as a related post - related requested by kulpims.

"Cage goes in the water, you go in the cage. Shark's in the water, shark goes into the cage. Now everybody is in the cage."

So to be clear, this shark enters the cage from the side, right. So this shark just wrestles itself through the bars towards its prey in the cage. Back to bungee jumping for me....

I agree. Genius may be overstating things. That said, knowing that you have to drop in on the prey in their blind spot is something I'd think wolves or cats would do, but wee little spiders? That's adorable and scary!