Eerongal

I personally have used these before, and they're relatively good wireless headphones. I prefer the H800 though (more comfortable and better sound quality), but they're significantly more expensive. These are also about double the price you wanted, it looks like, but they work either over bluetooth or USB (the USB part is like the USB piece for a wireless mouse, just a little USB chip you stick in that it connects to). I've used these for gaming and such, and they work great. You can get a cheaper version of these without the USB chip for much cheaper as well (a little above your price). If you plan on using bluetooth, or will spring for a bluetooth dongle as well, then you should be good. I obviously can't vouch for the quality of these, since i've never used them directly. I also have these to use with my tablet, but they require your device to have bluetooth. They aren't over the ear headphones like you wanted, but for the price, these are actually really good wireless earbuds.

Yeah, a bad narrator can kill any audio book, the same way that a bad actor can kill a good script. A good narrator is essential to the enjoyment of audio books.

Yeah. They've been married a while now. 2010, 2011? something like that. In the ballpark of 3-4 years now.

That has all the trimmings of a javascript injection attack. Since javascript is client-side, injection attacks of this nature happen through some malware/worm/virus/trojan/etc on the client system. Sounds like you could potentially be infected. I'd run a virus scan and a malware scan.

If you were JUST looking to player older/simpler games, 300-400 is a reasonable price. If you want to play newer games, you'd probably be looking more around 600-700 to get decent performance out of "medium" settings. A 300-400 laptop could probably get away pretty admirably at "low" settings for a while, but it wouldn't be terribly future-proof.

I've been learning guitar over the past year. I like to think i'm getting pretty good. I've been using a site called "guitar bots" that's really neat for learning how to play, and pretty good at keeping you motivated (since it's a video game)

With no firewall, in theory,its significantly easier someone to gain illegitimate access to the server and do pretty much whatever they want. If you've factory reset its most likely the servers issue. What's the website in question? I can check it on my end.

A firewall blocks access on ports to a PC. A port is basically just a number (like 8080) that a service runs on, and uses to communicate. So take HTTP for example. The HTTP protocol runs over port 80. That means that anytime you try to browse to a website, you computer needs to make a call out on port 80 to the website, also on port 8080, to talk to each other. A firewall "closes" ports unless you explicitly open them. Most firewalls by default leave things open on common ports (again, like 80), but closes everything else. So, say, for example, a video game you play runs on port 1234. In order to play the game, you might have to "open" this port, in order for the game to talk to the internet (there's reasons why this isnt always a problem, and most games work, but i digress). Since this is a non-standard service, you would have tell your firewall to specifically allow port 1234 for your PC, because you need to talk over that port in order to play. The problem with open ports (i.e. no firewall) is that it makes it a LOT easier for malicious people/software to work their way in. Lack of firewall in and of itself isn't inherently a problem, and their site lacking a firewall shouldn't particularly affect if that's the only issue.

Yep, he did. As such, i will go ahead and close this topic.

@All: We actually have our own writing group here on the site anyone is welcome to join. It's in the reading excuses subforum based upon Brandon's writing excuses podcast. There's people who fade in and out from it, and activity is sometimes irregular, but for the most part there's usually submissions every week or two, and there's usually always feedback to go around. @Jeff: I'm sure Silk (the person who runs it) would love to have your group merge here into our writing group, if you would so desire. That said, everyone is certainly free to pursue other writing groups if you so wish.

Makes me think of like a Stockholm syndrome dating site or something.....Which is a highly amusing idea.

If you're worried about your machine being compromised, I would try running HijackThis, and Spybot: Search and destroy, as well as performing a full scan with whatever virus scanner you use. These are generally also just good maintenance tips in the first place. I would also check any extensions for whatever browser you use, to make sure there's nothing you don't recognize, or anything that looks suspicious.

Well, I haven't even started up my 360 in months, so I don't really play it THAT much. That said, my xbox live handle is the same as on here (Eerongal). I do play the occasional windows live game, though, but games for windows live is being discontinued soon anyways.

Yeah, it doesn't really mean much in the scheme of things right now. It's not like they actually created a thinking, living hard AI. Just means that they've gotten it to some particular level of confidence in responding to human conversations.

Right, but it's still a pretty significant accomplishment. It's worth noting that there's several different "versions" of a turing test as well.

So apparently a chatbot has now passed a turing test. Granted, they said it was imitating a 13 year old boy, and if my experience with xbox live is typical, all they needed to do for THAT is to teach it to call me a noob and to yell colorful things about my mother. For those who don't know, a turing test is a test they put AI constructs against to determine if it is able to carry on a conversation (generally text conversations) in which it is difficult for a human to tell the difference between the AI or a fellow human.

Well, the current day design team includes pretty much no one who was on the 3E design team anymore. The lead designer STARTED at WoTC right up near the end of 3rd edition, and mostly wrote adventures at that time. Also, i don't think there's any actual collusion here, but it would be awesome if there were. I would definitely love for brandon to write up a Tome of Magic style book full of alternate magic/power systems for everyone to use.

Ok, maybe not, but still. Ran across these tweets from the other day. I seriously think it would be awesome if they could wrangle Brandon into working on some D&D supplements! For those who don't know, Mike Mearls is the lead designer of the 5th edition of D&D

Plot twist: Why do you think the parshendi grow such magnificent beards?

This is a pretty neat idea! It's cool to see a visualization of where everyone is. I'm assuming you did the same with the states in the US? Without specific information they go smack dab in the middle? Mostly asking because my pin is in the middle of the state I live in, yet, funny enough, it's MAYBE 20 miles east from where i ACTUALLY live (probably less)

We actually have a general mod (like myself, can take care of spam) in the UK. Joe ST is a brit to my understanding. So the sensible thing here is to lay all the failings of spam bot destruction at his feet, obviously! We are aware of the situation, though, and Chaos is currently working on giving all normal mods the ability to squash spambots as well.

You don't need an account. You just type in whatever you want and it posts it on it.

Heh, yeah, a good portion of the TWG crew is here on staff. Makes sense, though, since it was set up by TWG folks. Also: Welcome back, monsta! Good to see a familiar face after all this time!

He knows a thing or two about waffles.