Battlefield 3 - Sergeant major

https://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/soldier/Renegade%20Viking/stats/175726393/xbox360/

 

Cable TV screws us gamers

That evil cable TV is even more evil now. The ISPs see cable TV as a total disaster so they need bandwidth caps on the Internet so you cannot view a lot of streaming video. That means I am stuck with buying $20-$40 Blurays and DVDs that I only watch twice and glorious DirecTV.


^ The only way to get whats on cable 24/7/365 at low price anymore

If you're a gamer, internet service provider data caps are an important topic of conversation. Actually, if you're a fan of broadband-reliant entertainment at all, you need to think about limits on bandwidth. But as the games industry marches forward into digital distribution with no sign of stopping, heightened regulations on internet usage are an increasing problem. The providers have long-stated data caps are a plan to make internet access fair for everyone, but the limits are in direct opposition to the interests of gamers.
Who is Capping and Why?


Unfortunately, ISPs are actually doing very little to distribute those costs fairly. While it's completely reasonable to charge more to users with higher bandwidth usage, such “tiered” plans rarely offer lower-cost plans for those using less data. Instead, ISPs yank up the baseline price for heavier users, increasing their total revenue. And little of the money brought in by ISPs is reinvested into infrastructure to curb bandwidth problems. According to Wired, Time Warner Cable made $1.13 billion in revenue from broadband in the first quarter of 2011, but only reinvested 3-percent on improving its networks.
Gaming Data on the Rise

Downloadable game distribution is more prevalent year-over-year, driving down sales at traditional brick-and-mortar retailers. While bigger triple-A titles still make a significant dent on the market in the form of physical copies, we're also on the cusp of the next generation of home consoles. Will Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo continue to push for digital via their own marketplaces? Absolutely.



Take a look at this chart, showing my own recent internet usage from Time Warner Cable. You've probably noticed a steady increase from October through January, and there's a very simple explanation: I downloaded a bunch of games and watched a lot of streaming movies in those months. The holidays are a time of increased media releases, and so my bandwidth increased. Now imagine how that same chart will look, year-over-year, as videogame downloads bulge. Games, for the most part, are not getting any smaller.

The Call of Duty series is undoubtedly one of the most popular game franchises in the world, and we can learn a lot by looking at the history of each iteration's size. On Xbox Live, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a 6.5GB download. Modern Warfare 2 is an almost 7GB download. Modern Warfare 3 is a 7.5GB download. Are you sensing a pattern? Half-a-gigabyte may not seem like a huge step, but a 15-percent increase in size is substantial when you're facing big charges from your ISP.

The issue is even greater on the PC side of the games market, where file sizes tend to be larger and physical distribution is already all but dead, thanks to Steam. In short, most gamers will see an increased need for bandwidth as we download more – and larger – titles. And that's not even mentioning the bandwidth required from playing online games.

The games industry, for its part, has taken some contention with data caps, but the message has primarily focused on cable companies prohibitively limiting data to compete with console-based streaming video services. While those arguments are important, developers and publishers also need to recognize the very real consequences of a digital-only future for games. After all, if we can't afford those giant downloads, the industry hurts, as well.

Unless we see more internet service providers separated from the television-side of the business, or the government taking a harder stance on data caps, or the games industry acting more vocally, the problem will persist. But as gamers and consumers, you can also make your voices heard. Late last year, U.S. Senator from Oregon Ron Wyden introduced the Data Cap Integrity Act, largely aimed at keeping the FCC focused on monitoring how caps are being applied. You can write or call your Senator to show support for the bill (it currently has zero cosponsors), and get involved in groups like Video Game Voters Network, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Entertainment Consumers Association.

How we use the internet to access our games, and if we can actually continue to afford it, is sure to remain a hot point of contention. Don't get stuck in the middle.

Linux Mint 16 review

I uploaded Scientific Linux 6.5 on Youtube. There is absolutely nothing that SL 6.5 can do that SL 6.4 cannot. I just had the opportunity and took it. I downloaded Linux Mint 16 and nothing changed. Mint 16 upgraded MATE 1.6.0 to MATE 1.6.2. Linux Mint 16 is less stable then Linux Mint 15 for the shutdown sequence. The log says that INIT completes all but turning it off.

2.2 Trillion to repair US Intrastructure

ou can tell a lot about a nation by the condition of the infrastructure.  So what does our infrastructure say about us?  It says that we are in a very advanced state of decay.  At this point, much of America is being held together with spit, duct tape and prayers.  Our roads are crumbling and thousands of our bridges look like they could collapse at any moment.  Our power grid is ancient and over a trillion gallons of untreated sewage is leaking from our aging sewer systems each year.  Our airports and our seaports are clogged with far more traffic than they were ever designed to carry.  Approximately a third of all of the dam failures that have taken place in the United States since 1874 have happened during the past decade.  Our national parks and recreation areas have been terribly neglected and our railroads are a bad joke.  Hurricane Katrina showed how vulnerable our levees are, and drinking water systems all over the country are badly outdated.  Sadly, at a time when we could use significant new investment in infrastructure, our spending on infrastructure is actually way down.  Back during the 50s and the 60s, the U.S. was spending between 3 and 4 percent of GDP on infrastructure.  Today, that figure is down to about 2.4 percent.  But of course we don't have any extra money to spend on infrastructure because of our reckless spending and because of the massive amount of debt that we have accumulated.  While the Obama administration is spending more than half a million dollars to figure out why chimpanzees throw poop, our national infrastructure is literally falling apart all around us.  Once upon a time nobody else on the planet could match our infrastructure, and now we are in the process of becoming a joke to the rest of the world.

The following are 21 facts about America's failing infrastructure that will blow your mind....

#1 The American Society of Civil Engineers has given America's crumbling infrastructure an overall grade of D.

#2 There are simply not enough roads in the United States today.  Each year, traffic jams cost the commuters of America 4.2 billion hours and about 2.8 million gallons of gasoline.

#3 It is being projected that Americans will spend an average of 160 hours stuck in traffic annually by the year 2035.

#4 Approximately one-third of all roads in the United States are in substandard condition.

#5 Close to a third of all highway fatalities are due "to substandard road conditions, obsolete road designs, or roadside hazards."

#6 One out of every four bridges in America either carries more traffic than originally intended or is in need of repair.

#7 Repairing all of the bridges in the United States that need repair would take approximately 140 billion dollars.

#8 According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, our decaying transportation system costs the U.S. economy about 78 billion dollars annually in lost time and fuel.

#9 All over America, asphalt roads are being ground up and are being replaced with gravel roads because they are cheaper to maintain.  The state of South Dakota has transformed over 100 miles of asphalt roads into gravel roads, and 38 out of the 83 counties in the state of Michigan have transformed at least some of their asphalt roads into gravel roads.

#10 There are 4,095 dams in the United States that are at risk of failure.  That number has risen by more than 100 percent since 1999.

#11 Of all the dam failures that have happened in the United States since 1874, a third of them have happened during the past decade.

#12 Close to half of all U.S. households do not have access to bus or rail transit.

#13 Our aging sewer systems spill more than a trillion gallons of untreated sewage every single year.  The cost of cleaning up that sewage each year is estimated to be greater than 50 billion dollars.

#14 It is estimated that rolling blackouts and inefficiencies in the U.S. electrical grid cost the U.S. economy approximately 80 billion dollars a year.

#15 It is being projected that by the year 2020 every single major container port in the United States will be handling at least double the volume that it was originally designed to handle.

#16 All across the United States, conditions at many of our state parks, recreation areas and historic sites are deplorable at best.  Some states have backlogs of repair projects that are now over a billion dollars long....

    More than a dozen states estimate that their backlogs are at least $100 million. Massachusetts and New York's are at least $1 billion. Hawaii officials called park conditions "deplorable" in a December report asking for $50 million per year for five years to tackle a $240 million backlog that covers parks, trails and harbors.

#17 Today, the U.S. spends about 2.4 percent of GDP on infrastructure.  Meanwhile, China spends about 9 percent of GDP on infrastructure.

#18 In the United States today, approximately 16 percent of our construction workers are unemployed.

#19 China has plans to build 55,000 miles of highways by the year 2020.  If all of those roads were put end to end, it would be longer than the total length of the entire U.S. interstate system.

#20 The World Economic Forum ranks U.S. infrastructure 23rd in the world, and we fall a little bit farther behind the rest of the developed world every single day.

#21 It has been projected that it would take 2.2 trillion dollars over the next 5 years just to repair our existing infrastructure.  That does not even include a single penny for badly needed new infrastructure.

So where did we go wrong?

Well, one of the big problems is that we have become a very materialistic society that is obsessed with short-term thinking.  Investing in infrastructure is something that has long-term benefits, but these days Americans tend to only be focused on what is happening right now and most politicians are only focused on the next election cycle.

Start Menu for Windows 8 / Windows 8.1

I read the new Windows 8.1 reviews as well as the old Windows 8 reviews, and download Classic Shell (5.4 Megabytes).  

 There are morons who downgrade to Windows 7 service pack 1. This isn't safe.  Windows 7 has kernel 6.1 while Windows 8.1 has kernel 6.3.  Classic shell fixes the problem.


The Windows 8 & 8.1 reviews are all stupid on this subject matter.