I'm sorry, I read that again. If you're getting 0 signal on every other transponder that is a separate catsatrophy entirely. That is a voltage drop and is definitely a cable issue.

To switch between transponders the receiver sends alternatively 13 and 18 volt / 22khz pulses ('tone') to signal the LNB to tune alternate transponders. However the receiver has no way of knowing if all went well and simply sends the signal and waits to be sung its lullaby. If it sends the tone and doesn't get the approriate signal back, the signal just reads 0.

Zeros are not normal. Ever. There are maybe three transponders that read zero when the receiver isn't downloading any new software. But this bull about 'local' channels is a line you were fed unless your local television stations happen to periodically black out and go completely off-air during normal waking hours. If you're getting poor signal from every other transponder much less a sequence of zeros, the cable has become worn or damaged and isn't passing voltage.

The bum didn't want to run new cable- the most time consuming part of a satellite service install.

-VK

MMO-traffic jam sim...

Imagine a World of Warcraft game in which every single person has a mount, and that mount is the only reasonable means of getting from point A to point B. Sound exciting right?

Who is up for some random free-for-all Mad Max action? Anyone? Anyone?

Hello? ... Hello~ ?

Enough with the damn MMO's already.

Omega has been my boy for just that reason, too much flash in the frying pan just to make a few changes to the registry.

Still wish I could get my RADEON working in Linux though...

I'm sorry to see her go, really. I could've empathized with a 'normal'-shaped* heroine character. It could've been fun. She'd be that reserved-tough-guy kinda girl who got where she was 'by working twice as hard as the men' but wasn't a jaded Ms. Magazine cover girl feminazi because of it; or maybe just that savage shock-value-brutal MAX-Marvel-comic Jessica-Jones-as-the-Punisher type?

Is there not room in the minds of gutless-weasel-EIDOS's (oh Lord don't get me started on EIDOS, give me strength) marketing team for a tough female character? Don't marketing teams usually comprise almost soley of middle-aged women?

<RANT>

People, stop selling me boobs ... I don't care anymore. I've seen them all. Or at least plenty. That Double-E-cup freak CIA operative chick from Shadow Ops: Red Mercury? Yeah, she'd *never* have passed the CIA field-operative physical standards; you don't even have to know what they are exactly, but ... 'no'. Don't believe it. Not impressed. She's not running a track or obstacle course in any reasonable amount of time with those things gradually knocking her teeth out with every lap.

We're not all fourteen, and if the jackass powers-that-be believe their target audience is always a fourteen year old boy who's mama buys any games he wants, they should at least consider the very idea that we/they/he/whatever won't be fourteen forever.

Preaching to the choir. Badly, I know. Sorry. I'll shut up now.
</RANT>

Hengh-hengh-heh, he said 'intelligent design'.

===
That, and the video doesn't seem to be working.

I know this is the wrong crowd, as Counter Strike these days is about as childish as made-for-television 'professional' wrestling, but may I just say h3llz y3a, we be gettin' all d'boys back.

A little bit of childishness every once in a while never hurt anybody, and Steam is on my harddrive one way or another, so good call, churn the butter ... 'bout frikkin time.

Locke, according to The Amarillo Globe News, wants "to do away with property taxes statewide" while taxing "violent games" and a myriad of other things (i.e. abortions and soft drinks) a whopping 50%. He sees these taxes as "the power to destroy. So our concept is that we need to tax things we don't want and you want to not tax things you want to encourage.

Update: Actually, it seems the article quoted in the story is incorrect; Locke calls for a 100% tax. As stated on his website:

"[a] This COMMISSION shall levy a 100% of price sales cost tax for the sale on all item listed below: 1 . any video game containing any form of human violence."

I didn't see the part where the property taxes would actually be traded for the BS taxes; I guess it helps to read the article. That, and have a shot, then try to write Hemmingway.

The problem is that they say taxes have the power to destroy, which is ultimately the effect of taxes, regardless of intent. People such as this exist, and I haven't the power outside a one-way-trip assassination attempt to stop it. They clearly do not have the 'consent of the governed' in this, but I doubt should such a bill come to duck, they wouldn't bother giving the people a chance to vote on it. We the Sheeple, would rather watch CSI and think we're becoming amateur forensics by it, as if we learned somehow to watch all the little details.

Awesome Spume - Don't wrinkle my sheets Son, I was in combat before your brainpan held a litre. Southern California, Uncle Sam's Arena. Little Red shirts, going to war over little bags of White, with the little Blue shirts, while St. Kalashnikov kept score. The ball brought to us by Contra Force - a little snow to fund the War on Winter.

Conspiracy Theory isn't about taxes on tin foil hats, just the Loose Change that slips through tiny holes in tiny pockets, before the State rockets come screaming in to blast your trousers to ashes. What crime?

It's just a goddamned piece of paper.

It's not so much that a man should rape a little girl, then get sentenced 60 days in jail for it, it's the idea that anyone would rape a little girl in the first place that bothers me. Who cares the likelyhood of the taxes passing? If not merely on the march for a little time on a little chair - 'a sad little King on a sad little hill' - the man obviously wants to punish those who don't eat their porridge with their left hand while on their right hand standing.

Soda? You think a can of fizz, sugar and phosphoric acid pays for your national healthcare? No my Son, you don't pay the equivalent of $3.00_USD for a two-litre bottle. You pay the equivalent of £1.29_GBP for a two-litre bottle. It’s simple economic equivalency. I make $6.00_USD an hour at my job, and on your side of the pond, for the same job, you make £6.00_GBP an hour. True as it ever was that the sun never sets on the British Empire. Don’t get me wrong, you’re not to be blame for anything, certainly not consenting to a state-owned monopoly on health care supply. By the way, just between old rivals – how’s your teeth?

It comes again to the Frank Zappa argument, as it always has – I don’t want the State telling me how smart my child is or what magnitude of maturity per age group will be recognized by the People at large. I’ll trade No Child Left Behind for no child held back in this case.

Well the ricer punks deserve what they get for one, and the State of Texas is apparently neglecting the fact that the foundation for many of these 'evil' violent games comes from id Software, whom is based where? The popularity of Quake-engine technology may be fading, but the point made should not.

A %50 tax means a $54.99 game, plus (State only, not including city) sales tax, plus bullshit tax comes to a conservative estimate of $87.64**. Out-fucking-rageous.

Never mind! This is a fantasti-fuck idea! Let's just put a hellacious tax on every goddamn thing we choose not to understand!!

• Don't eat with chopsticks? Don't know how? Don't care to learn? Hey, let's just put a 200% tariff on the import and a 50% tax on the sale of disposable bamboo chopsticks!
• How about skateboards?
• Those cotton tee-shirts with the cynical for-shock-value messages? There’s a youth corruptor right there!
• The occasional ricer/tuner bolt-on engine part that actually improves fuel economy and/or combustion thoroughness (emissions)!
• The sale of a cell phone?
• Gaming peripherals specific to the FPS-genre! Plenty of room for typically dangerous vaguery with that one!

Don't mistake this for 'stupid' folks, see this for what it is: some New-World-Order-level bullshit. Yeah, I said it. Damage done. Credibility lost. But the idea for this latest outrage against Generation-Atari has to be coming from higher up than the State, and it can only be but a precedent to more bullshit taxes to come, further punishing all but the most prudish of simpleton sheep.

It just seems against-the-grain to used to come from Texas, the use of Capital Punishment for one. What happened to Texas' great pride in maintaining cultural independence from the rest of the country? What happened to that pride in having entered the Union as a sovereign nation? What about liberal gun-ownership? Fireworks handling and pit fires? Where did Texas’ balls go? Is it really all steers (bad pun) and political queers now?

This is my native-goddamn-state! What has happened in the past ten years? Illegal immigration, unchecked, has made native-Texan-born Americans an overall minority. Income taxes? Why weren’t you born upper-middle class into a six-figure income household? Property taxes? ‘What’s wrong with renting for thirty years?’ How fucking dare you own a few acres! The cost of malpractice insurance? The march against ‘overtly sexual’ cheerleading routines? The ouright infestation of petty trial lawyers in all levels of politics?

Am I on the wrong side of all this? Am I really so evil and so unhinged by it that I need to be repeatedly spanked (taxed) and punished (hen-pecking 3-mph-over speeding infractions, death sentence for violation of burn bans … etc.) for setting foot outside my door and critically analyzing the method-less madness of general authority? Should I not just lie down and accept total goddamn thought control?

A 50% tax on violent video games!?


**$54.99_USD + 6.25% + 50%
This comment was edited on Jan 25, 23:35.

a game called someting like Lost in time

You're referring to the Journeyman Project series, specifically the second game Buried in Time where you do, as a matter of fact, explore Da Vinci's lab for objectives I don't specifically remember.

To confirm, the games were Myst-like in nature and the theme of time travel was used to justify the many exotic settings you would find yourself in.

The games were developed under the Presto Studios label and the first two were published by Sanctuary Woods, while the third was published by Red Orb Entertainment, of Take No Prisoners fame.

A fourth game was in the works, but was halted, and Presto Studios has developed the third Myst game in the mean time.
This comment was edited on Jan 19, 22:29.

Wow, Obsidian working on next gen Kotr 3, great detective work, the fact the working title is Kotr 3 or the fact they licesensed Unreal 3 engine?

I happen to know (vaguely) an independantly contracted graphics designer who's been working on the KOTOR 3 cutscenes. From what he tells me (mind you, this is one of those guy who knows a guy who knows a guy references) A Wookie will be among eleven selectable jobs spread among several races (rather than all job-classes being human) and exploration of the galaxy will be on a Morrowind scale while movement between planets will occur more freely as opposed to choosing a planet and then getting stuck there for several hours due to plot-point variations on having the Ebon Hawk locked down or stolen or somesuch.

From what he tells me the cutscenes are done, and the core Obsidian team is coding, target platforms are X360 and PC.

I couldn't get to Grokster from the provided link, I kept getting a 'Page Cannot Be Displayed' error. I immediately thought the internet community had unhinged some sweet vigilante justice - and it turned out my PeerGuardian icon was flashing in the system tray. W00t.

Here's where the bill becomes something special - it places legal value on the ESRB ratings rather than simply stating that violent video games depicting harm to sentient beings in whatever context shall not be sold to minors.

Bad Thing #1
This however, makes the judgment of what is essentially a guild - the ESRB - State enforceable, which is a problem because the judgments are legalized without State oversight into the ratings themselves or otherwise forces the ESRB to allow an oversight committee to pass legally-binding judgment on their actions.

Bad Thing #2
The Frank Zappa argument: I don't want someone else, especially a government body, telling me how smart my child is or what threshold of maturity will be acknowledged by the People at large.


===============================================
<RANT>

I would let an eight-year-old play Tribes: Vengeance or UT-2004 (mind the language though... wouldn't want them calling anyone at a soccer tournament 'You Whore!'), a ten-year-old play Quake, a 14-year-old play Doom 3, I'd let a 15-year-old have an occasional drink, and I'd trust an exceptionally well-disciplined 17-year-old to the 'pull out' method of conception-prevention during unprotected sex.
Video games have so little to do with the accelerating decline in maturity in growing children. Children, boys and girls, East and West - whatever - were bringing knives, brass knuckles, handguns, and short miniskirts to school and resorting to violence to solve their problems long before portable cassette decks were blasting their devil-rock-music 'poison' and long before Jack Thompson was urinating in our faces with his witless and psychotic hyperbole.

So what happened in the past 50 years? I'll offer yet another hyperbolic theory: America (and this violent-video-game-related whining I find to be largely an American event) has never existed in some blissful state of harmony when everything was relatively fine. There has always been a few elephants-in-the-room that kept the country worrying about one goddamn thing or another. Some would argue in favor of the post-war years of the 1950's, but it was barely a moment for the country to catch it's breath in preparation for the Civil Rights Movement. America has been a country desperate to recover any sort of unique identity since the fading of the frontier days. So what happened? Baby Boomers. One day the domesticated children of the domesticated working class went outside for a walk and saw that America was almost entirely explored, settled, and claimed, that with their knowledge of geography, if they had any, saw that the entire planet was pretty much the same way. All the great wars had been fought, all the monsters in the closet were gone, and there was nothing really to struggle for. There was even a cure for polio.

Fuck me, those Baby Boomers got bored, and decided for the sake of causing a goddamn ruckus, they were going to rebel without a cause or a clue, in search of some unique identity for themselves. So two shitty Woodstocks and and a few gasoline shortages later, we have a generation of so-called baby-boomers raised on MTV, LSD, and some romanticized perception of 'urban/street' culture that without question they manufactured themselves and somehow stamped on the foreheads of their lionized dark-skinned brethren. Oh yes, the Baby-Boomer was an almost exclusive pale-face klan.
Determined not to discipline their children as their rotten, oppressive parents had treated them, the Baby-Boomer by definition gave rise to generation Y-the-Fuck-Care?, an L-7 Weenie 2.0 if you will who, by and large sees very little purpose to their existence beyond survival, consumption and street-cred. It's gotten to where you can't trust anyone under 30 to see more to youth than self-administered alcohol poisoning 'parties' and sexual decadence as Life's defining moments, and I'm tired of feeling sorry for these people getting hysterical over a bunch of overpriced electronic toys clearly intended for consumption by people born between 1975-1990.

Get out and ride a bike. Climb a fucking tree. Get out there and play some goddamn laser-tag for chrissake. Bring you iPod if you have to. Move the-fuck on.

</RANT>

This comment was edited on Jan 1, 04:40.

Ease up Cheesy; it was a question. If he looks stupid it's because you choose to brand him stupid. Objects in Space buddy. Unless the judgement is more or less unanimous as it has been in my case once or thrice.

To answer the question as Cheesy said, 'yes' the AI is aware of you, it has been since the European '06 Civic Si Demo. The AI fairs suprisingly well avoiding collision and giving right of way to the players' mad tarmac swishery. No bump-the-dope dronian Grand Turismo 4 here, these opponents are real enough.

I do believe this is one of the few times I'm grateful for Microsoft's intervention, aside from the whole DirectX revolutionizing PC Gaming thing...

This comment was edited on Nov 13, 20:36.

Agreed, the game was better off in hands of the Road and Track team. Need for Speed should by now be able to compete with the Grand Turismo franchise.

Let me say this more clearly: NFS should by now be Grand Turismo on the PC with full interiors and unchecked vehicle and engine damage. Every vehicle from every manufacturer should be represented in the last running year of every body style with only a few exceptions. EA has the funds, but they keep scrapping previous material with every generation or out-on-a-whim theme.

Instead we have a rotting franchise of shoe-horned-into-mainstream appeal ("Oh you're gonna like it God-damnit! 'Cause this is all you're getting! We own the fucking games now!"), where cars are present in one game and gone the next, and vehicle damage is a "Idun'nuhmaybe".

At least the vehicle selection this time is nothing to be ashamed of, though now we're just ricing up more expensive cars instead of tearing through the countryside with some dignity.

"Dignity". That's the word. The dignity is missing from the Need for Speed series. It used to convey an image of crisp suits, driving gloves, wood-highlight interior and tearing through a generic European countryside at 250kph in an F350 or the all-loved Diablo SV kicking up autumn leaves and twigs and staring into the distance at the winding road, the eternal evening sun (NFS used to be played in a day-time setting! Believe it kids!), and sunrays like machine-gun fire cutting through the trees as you passed through a tunnel of willow and oak.

Now the focus is on 'street-cred' and angry seventeen-year-olds doing donuts in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot in a Toyota AE86 with their faggoty aero kits, shower-door sized wings and square meters of the car's surface decorated in all-mighty unpainted carbon fiber- real fap-fap material there; plently of room for intellectual discussion and dignity there. Or perhaps the characters couldn't hear each other over their turd-pulse MTV muzak and fart-cannon exhaust systems. Wow! A turbo-charged D15B2! Someone give that man a blowjob!

The joy of driving is gone, the thrill of vehicle feedback is gone, and PC Gamer will probably be bought off with an exclusive first review and give the game a score in the mid-to-high 80%, if not a full-blown Editor's Choice award. But it's a turd game now. You guys know it's trash. But on the PC we are led by Wal*Mart to believe that it's our only worthy option. At least they brought the god-damned BMW's back...

-Z

This comment was edited on Nov 10, 23:53.

Poor Hubble, so they cut the system down to one gyro hoping power lasts until mid-2008.

Let's do the math: Basically Hubble has to outlast this Presidency while we sit and hope the next bloke will approve funding. That bastard.

This comment was edited on Jul 20, 00:40.

Okay, okay, I got this one:

"Is this the patch that makes the game fun?"

There, now where's my damn cookie? I was promised a rubber cookie.

Um, uh... which videos did I reference there? I wrote that last October.

For the love of God - why?

http://www.bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=51835
This comment was edited on Jul 8, 02:10.