• Apparently, not only has Google figured out how to bypass security settings in Safari, they've been able to do it in IE as well. Micro$oft has countered by publishing a "Tracking Protection List" that blocks all Google embeds. At least, in Internet Asploder. I'm inclined to respond by saying that anyone who's still using Internet Asploder deserves what they get...and, as a Chrome user, I'm not particularly worried.


• Interesting factoid from ZeroHedge: by being perceived as hostile towards gun owners, President Obama has helped the firearms industry tremendously by driving record sales of guns and ammo. I'd almost be inclined to think Obama was pulling a Xanatos Gambit and is ready to claim credit for the "stimulus" to the gun industry...but he's probably not that smart.


• A lengthy but informative piece here on the art of salary negotiation. Via Chris Byrne, who offers some pointers of his own to supplement that article. Sad but true fact: "We [engineers] overwhelmingly suck at it. We have turned sucking at it into a perverse badge of virtue." Sigh...he's right, especially since my own philosophy is closer to "Be thankful you have a job, shut up and do as you're told."


• Valorna Edgeworth from Second Life and EVE pointed me to the things MakerBot Industries is doing. I'd read about some of their stuff on TechCrunch, this, for instance. This sort of technology will just become more pervasive; what happens, for instance, when it becomes affordable to have your own CNC milling machine in your garage? It almost is, now, if you buy a used one you can adapt to control via a standard PC...


• And speaking of disruptive technologies, how about a DNA sequencer the size of a USB key? Expensive now, but just wait. The future is now, folks.


• This Android tablet is available for $139 for a 7-inch model or $250 for a 10-inch model, runs ICS, does not have any bootloader locks or other obstructions, and comes with optional source code disk. Might be worth getting to hack around with. (Via TC)


• If you haven't followed Ken White's "Anatomy of A Scam" at Popehat, it's worth a read. It's almost a HOWTO for investigating and reporting scammers, using Google, PACER, and court records searches. Suffice to say, the principal scammers in this tale look like they're in a world of hurt...


• PandoDaily: Stop Trying to Make F-Commerce Happen. Seriously? "F-commerce" meaning "commerce via Facebook"? That's as bad as "m-commerce" meaning "commerce via mobile," maybe more so. Whoever thought to call it "F-commerce" should be F-slapped around. (FuckedCompany.com: Never forget!)


• CBS, which now owns Paramount, is putting Star Trek: The Next Generation out on Blu-ray starting this year with Season 1. I just got the "teaser" disc with three restored episodes, and boy, do they look beautiful. Any TNG fan should have it, particularly as one of the remastered episodes is "The Inner Light" from Season 5, universally acknowledged as being one of the best TNG episodes ever, and one of four Star Trek episodes to win a Hugo. The only drawback is, the episodes were all filmed in 4:3 for the TV sets of the day, and so appear pillarboxed on a modern HD set. (JMS was thinking ahead when he filmed Babylon 5 in widescreen...)

Sometimes I think that the greatest enemy of "free time" is gaming.

Recently, here at Erbosoft Galactic HQ, we've been exploring a game that's been out for awhile: Fable III.  Originally, I had bought a used copy at GameStop, intending to check it out myself, but Sabrina found out I had it, and commandeered it for her own Xbox.  I wound up having to buy another one.  (And then, since it was a bit uncomfortable to play games while lying on the bed, I moved my Xbox from there to the computer room...and bought a cheap 19" TV to act as a HD display for it.  Now my desk feels like the bridge of the Enterprise.  Oh well, the TV does have a VGA input, so I can use it as a backup monitor if need be, too...)

Fable III, as with the earlier games in its series, is noted for having a "moral choice" system, where you can make choices between "good" and "evil" options (such as, at one point, to either protect a beautiful lake, or drain it to create a mine for needed resources).  Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, purveyor of the fabulous Zero Punctuation game reviews you can find on The Escapist Web site, tends to criticize "morality choices" in gaming, because, in order to get the "best" endings to the game, you generally are forced to choose all one or the other (i.e., either be Mother Teresa or Bill the Slasher, to borrow terminology from an old 2600 article), but his review of Fable III, rather than rehashing that stance, goes into more detail about the difference in this game.

The storyline of the game puts the player as the younger sibling (pick "brother" or "sister," it's all the same) of King Logan of Albion, a tyrannical monarch by anyone's stretch of the imagination.  The player is called upon to assume the Heroic mantle of his father (her mother) and lead a revolution against Logan.  However, it turns out that Logan knows of the impending invasion of an eldritch horror called "The Darkness," and his harsh rule has been the result of focusing single-mindedly on building an army to repel the Darkness.  He's more than happy to hand off the burden to you, with a year to go until the invasion, and from then on you're trying to both make sure your treasury has enough money to pay an army to put down the Darkness and to make the population happy by reversing all the bad decisions your brother made (which acts as a further drain on the aforementioned treasury).

Most of the "moral decisions" as this point seem to equate "good" with "liberal" and "evil" with "conservative" (gee, I wonder what game designer Peter Molyneux's personal political beliefs are?), but, as Yahtzee points out, "conservative" decisions aren't necessarily "evil" if they make the difference between a year of misery followed by survival, or a year of happy times followed by Armageddon.  And the threat here isn't some nebulous "terrorism" threat, either; each of the loading screens at this point is telling you, "X Days Until Attack; Treasury Balance Y; Estimated Casualties max(6,500,000 - max(Y,0), 0)." And, post-victory, the NPCs you didn't manage to save appear as dead bodies on the ground all over the kingdom.  When you look at it that way, it's easy to start thinking that perhaps Logan was right.

Still, this association left a bad taste in my mouth on occasion.  For instance, one of the "good" choices you're faced with is to--wait for it--bail out Albion's banks.  Now, I didn't like the fact that the Federal Government bailed out U.S. banks, but, in order to stick on the "good" path, I had to bite the bullet and drop the 500,000 gold. (Fortunately, my treasury, unlike the United States one, could afford it. How? Two words: Real estate.) And Yahtzee's criticism that the ending kind of "sneaks up" on you, jumping from "121 Days Until Attack" right to "1 Day Until Attack," is well-founded; in Sabrina's first game, she hadn't realized the issue and had been deficit-financing all the social reforms, which led to a "good but everybody dead" ending.  I avoided her mistake by starting early and aggressively on developing a personal income (again, real estate) sufficient to bolster the treasury to the extent that I could spend freely and still have enough margin to save everyone with room to spare.  (Another two words: Strategy guide.)

As flawed and simplified as it is for the purpose of gameplay, though, the storyline system of Fable III is light-years beyond, say, the DOOM series of games, which basically boil down to "If it moves, shoot it; if it doesn't move, shoot it anyway." Or, say, the Modern Warfare games Sabrina likes so much, which are pretty much "We're the good guys; here are some bad guys; go shoot 'em." It's not quite as open-ended as the so-called "4-X" games or "God Games," of which the Civilization series is one of the trope codifiers (and which are so compelling to me that I often actively avoid them to avoid the syndrome where I start playing one at 8 PM and next thing I know, "Hey, is that the sun rising?" ), but it's in-between enough that it can suck you in.  Hence my not having posted anything since I planned to several days ago.

Some days I think I oughta just stick to solitaire on the iPhone.