It's so bad that "Reshippers" are increadibly popular here (in Australia). They have a US address so you can ship Amazon stuff there, and then either do a bulk shipment of multiple orders to Australia, or else just accept their shipping charges (which are usually 50% of what Amazon charges).
Those type of courier services are very popular throughout Latin America. I always assumed that developed countries like Australia had their own local suppliers and didn't need to buy from US-specific sites. Not enough to justify the existence of such courier services, anyways.
This also recently started happening in Australia, I got a text message 3 weeks ago saying my blood was used in Liverpool hospital. It was pretty fun knowing where it helped someone.
I will never, ever, ever get sick of watching that video.
I played EVE for a fair while, CEO'd a decent sized corp in a major alliance and took part in some of the biggest battles, and had to stop (aka: winning EVE) because "Life™".. but that video makes me want to get back into it SO badly. It's the most insane, addictive, complex, fun, rage-inducing, adrenaline-charging game I've ever played, but it will CONSUME you.
EVE looks like how I imagine TradeWars 2002, and considering the countless hours I've sunk into that game, I'm going to stay _VERY_ far away from EVE. (So shiny!)
Join a PvP corp, fly cheap ships, do just enough missions/exploration/pirating/trading/mining/whatever to keep yourself in ammo, and have a blast shooting people. EVE only turns into Spreadsheets in Space if you make it that way.
As a follow up, this "documentary" of sorts of the Rooks and Kings "pipe-bombing" campaigns is enthralling. I've never played the game, but watching this documentary made me feel like I've played months of it.
"Rooks and Kings: Clarion Call 4" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNUu75fH8Uc
With AWS and shell shock, it's an interesting time to have just started working for a managed hosting company, nothing like being thrown straight into the deep end of being on call!
I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.
A lot of the decline was due to people being driven away, directly or indirectly, by tyrannical ops.
A given channel, or even entire networks, would often start out pretty free. Dissenting discussion and arguments were allowed, if not encouraged. Users could hold and share their own beliefs without fear of repercussion. It was generally a fun experience. The channel or network would see growth.
But as the community became larger and more established, certain users would often end up becoming ops, and they'd start to enforce their own beliefs upon the entire community. People would start getting kicked or banned unnecessarily for very minor "violations", which most often involved just holding a different opinion than an op.
These kicked or banned users wouldn't come back, those users who liked them would have less incentive to return, and eventually there'd be more people getting booted or leaving than there would be new people coming and returning. The channel withers. If this happens with enough channels, the network withers. As networks wither, IRC itself withers.
I always thought major reason for the decline was all the other alternatives coming up back then (msn messenger and the likes) and more recently things that aren't really an alternative but steal time anyway (facebook and the likes) ?
I agree here, my friends weren't affected by ops (we were all ops in our own channels) - they moved to MSN and gave up on IRC. Then MSN was dropped and they moved to facebook/google chat, and now it's almost like IRC was by using group chats in whatsapp, but without meeting any new people.
I've been on Freenode for almost 10 years now (9 years, 48 weeks, 4 days, 18:19:12 ago), it's the only network which doesn't seem to be shrinking, though most of my old friends are gone now.
Garmin connect can do this, as can runkeeper: http://runkeeper.com/search/routes. I'm sure mapmyrun and others allow it as well? you point and click along the route and it calculates the distance for you, garmin even tells you expected time to complete.
