Beta testers are given early access to the QUAKE LIVE website and game, and will help us test all of the game's features and functionality while offering feedback and suggestions.

Quake Live Beta Signups [Id Via Videogaming24/7]

Would this be the last GTA, I wondered. The insider was quick to say no, even after I pointed out that I had watched a chunk of the single-player campaign, which impressed me, but didn't seem to include any giant leaps forward for the franchise.

"Did you see multiplayer?"

"No."

"Just wait."

After spending a morning at Rockstar late last month, playing around with Grand Theft Auto IV's single player campaign, the guys walked me to the room next door to check out Grand Theft Auto's first real take on multiplayer.

Over the course of several hours I had a chance to check out five multiplayer modes, including a short co-op campaign, out of what is rumored to be the game's more than dozen multiplayer modes.

I was happy to find that Grand Theft Auto has most definitely not jumped the shark.

I was initially disappointed when I discovered that my expectations, no matter how unreasonable, that GTA4 would let you play through the entire campaign with a friend weren't to be met. But that was short lived.

The sheer level of customization in the game, the wild variety of play, and the unsurpassed size of the maps made the lack of a full co-op campaign seem like an afterthought.

To start playing a multiplayer game you bring up Nikko's cell phone in the single player campaign and, using the in-phone menu, select multiplayer. So you can drop into one of these sessions whenever you want.

While you can't play as Nikko, the campaign's main character, you can customize your own character, creating someone by choosing male or female and then selecting among four different heads, four torsos, four legs and several types of glasses and hats.

All but one of the multiplayer modes supports up to 16 players. (The co-op missions only support up to four.) The host has an amazing array of options that they can control. While setting up a game, the host can choose to modify the routine, like respawn times, weapon selections and friendly fire, or the unusual, like the time of day, the weather, how heavy the traffic is or how many people are on the street. You can even control police presence in your matches.

While the game allows you to select parts of the map to play in, choosing specific boroughs, smaller neighborhoods, or areas like the airport, it doesn't prevent players from roaming the entire city during any given match. Instead the respawns and weapon drops only occur in those areas.

While the high level of customization adds a lot to the experience, I was just as wowed by some of the little things built into multiplayer, like the ability for players waiting in a lobby to turn on their radio and listen to GTA's soundtrack.

Deathmatch
My first experience with GTA 4 multiplayer was deathmatch and team deathmatch.

Instead of winning with kill counts, both of these modes look at your cash total to see who won the match. Cash is earned by killing members of the other team and you can get extra cash by darting out to collect the money they drop when they die.

The controls were solid, as I've mentioned before, but what made this deathmatch feel so different was that it felt like it was taking place in a living, breathing world. People were walking around, there were cars to be stolen. You can actually load up a car with your entire team and try to drive-by the other team mates. You could even, if you felt like it, take off to parts unknown, areas on the map nowhere near where the action was taking place.

Deathmatch was fun, and the added twist of an open world and a huge map, definitely upped the value, but it was still deathmatch.

Cops N Crooks
The next mode we played was Cops N Crooks, a variation on your typical deathmatch mode where you have to find and take out the bad guys.

The team playing as cops can see the crooks on their radar, but the the crooks can only see the escape point on the map and don't know where the cops are until it's almost too late. The mode has two derivations: In All for One you need to kill the boss, played by one of the crooks. In One for All everyone has just one life and once the crooks are dead the cops win.

There were some really nice touches to the game that made this stand out from some of the other modes I've played in shooters. For instance as the bad guys, you can give each other waypoints on the live map, allowing one player to drive and another to navigate.

We also played matches were the bad guys split up into two groups, doubling the chance for the boss to get away because we weren't sure which group he was with.

Lots of fun, plenty of potential, especially when you factor in that this all still takes place in GTA's open world.

GTA Race
This was the mode I least wanted to play, but came in as one of my favorites to mess around with. Imagine Mario Kart in a real world, with real cars. Now add machine guns, pistols, rocket launchers, molotov cocktails, in fact every weapons in GTA. Now, let people get out of their cars and do whatever they want to win, or prevent other people from winning. Wow, just wow.

This mode lets the host choose vehicle types before a race, the race course, time limit and number of laps. Sure the game has checkpoints, and you need to hit them, or most of them, to complete a lap, but being the fastest doesn't get close to guaranteeing a win.

In our introduction to the mode, myself and Newsweek's N'gail Croal were burning around the course, which I believe took place near GTA's Central Park, when we came to a stone archway we absolutely had to go through to complete the lap. Problem was, there were cars, lots of cars blocking our way. By the time I had assessed the situation, one of the other players ran up to me and killed me at the wheel.

The race quickly devolved into a deathmatch until we realized that Croal had nosed his car through the wreckage and was burning through the laps. In another race, this one taking place at an airport complete with moving planes, I didn't bother trying to speed through the course and instead clamored on top of an airport gangway with a rocket launcher and just waited. When people came by I blew up their cars. Meanwhile Rockstar's Jeronimo Barrera was taking great pleasure trying to mow down Croal in what looked like a golf cart.

From what I played of it, GTA Race could easily be a standalone game, something that would occupy a gamer's attention for months.

Hangman's NOOSE
The final mode we played was probably the most impressive. Hangman's NOOSE is Rockstar's answer to a story-driven campaign mode. Instead of allowing players to complete chunks of the single player campaign with a friend, the developers decided to create side missions, featuring ancillary characters, that can be played as a group with a total of four people.

Rockstar declined to say how many of these co-op missions the game will ship with, but I'd think it would come with more than the one and I'd bet that the 360 DLC will be all about this mode.

The mission we played was Hangman's NOOSE. In it you're asked to rescue a crime boss from an army of police who are picking him up on the runway of the airport. The missions started out on the runway and as we shot it out with cops, two more armored SWAT trucks drove up, unloading more and more cops.

The first play through was pretty succinct, we grabbed the armored truck, got the boss in it and tore across the city to our extraction point while the city's entire police force mobilized to stop us.

The second play through didn't go nearly as well.

A Rockstar developer took the wheel of the armored car again, and another rode shotgun. Croal hopped into the back to shoot at pursuing cops. I opted to swipe a helicopter that was on the runway and followed the wagon as it entered the interstate, trying to gun down the stream of cop cars in pursuit.

Then it happened: Croal was shot. The hit didn't kill him, but it did knock him from the truck which continued to speed toward the drop off point. Soon Croal was surrounded by cops on the middle of an interstate. I turned my chopper around and told Croal I was coming for him. Landing the copter in a nearby clearing, I got out to try and find Croal, but he had snatched a car and was already out of the police infested area.

I ran back to my copter only to find its rotors had been snapped off during my crap landing next to a copse of trees. The whole thing ended with me being gunned down by a phalanx of cops as I ran down the interstate toward the distant extraction point, and the whole team losing.

The missions was actually very straight forward, lacking almost completely in narrative and pretty short, but that works in GTA IV. It works because the game, especially in the multiplayer modes, seems to be providing you a way to create your own experiences.

I could replay Hangman's NOOSE a dozen times and not get tired of it, mostly because each time through created a different experience. It's so open ended that they story you play, as with single player, often seems like your own.

I've certainly not played enough of Grand Theft Auto IV to being able to say whether the game will live up to mounting expectations, but I can certainly say that Rockstar hasn't been caught resting. This game, and it's unusual and varied take on multiplayer gaming isn't packed with obvious innovations, but it still manages to innovate where it counts most: In storytelling.

Uploaded Today

81 likes

Uploaded Today

3 likes

You're still proud of yourself for figuring it out.

Someone stick a walkthrough on Gamefaqs, please. I'm busy posting.

You Have to Burn the Rope

Found at Wooster Collective: this creative (and non-destructive) street art by a mysterious artist who makes animals out of discarded plastic bags and ties them to subway grates. When the train rushes below, the puff of air makes the animal jump to life!

Link - via Today and Tomorrow - Thanks Lee!

Looks familiar? Maybe it’s because you’ve seen this post before on Neatorama: Shopping Bag + Subway Grate = Art?

RyAnne Fultz, a 33-year-old woman who suffers from pattern-sensitive epilepsy, says she clicked on a forum post with a legitimate-sounding title on Sunday. Her browser window resized to fill her screen, which was then taken over by a pattern of squares rapidly flashing in different colors.

Fultz says she "locked up."

"I don’t fall over and convulse, but it hurts," says Fultz, an IT worker in Coeur d’Alene, Ohio. "I was on the phone when it happened, and I couldn’t move and couldn’t speak."

After about 10 seconds, Fultz’s 11-year-old son came over and drew her gaze away from the computer, then killed the browser process, she says.

Link (Photo: RyAnne Fultz) - Thanks AnotherJake!

Nina Matsumoto of Space Coyote (of the Simpsonzu fame, blogged on Neatorama here), made another fan art. This time, it’s her take of Bill Watterson’s classic comic Calvin and Hobbes:

Few historians know of the heartwarming friendship between French Reformation theologian John Calvin and English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the latter of whom may or may not have been real, considering he was not even born yet.

Print (and larger pic) available at deviantART: Link - via Locust & Honey

Now, a team of scientists at UC Santa Barbara discovered the answer:

To solve the mystery, the research team painstaking studied the chemical composition of the sharp beak of the Humboldt squid. They found that the components in the beak — polysaccaride chitin, water and protein enriched in the compound Dopa and amino acid histidine — slightly change in quantities between the tip and the base. Dopa is concentrated at the tip, and gradually decreases as it moves toward the beak, the researchers found.

When mixed with water, the beak becomes increasingly soft and bendable as it moves toward the mouth. However, when the base dries out, it becomes as stiff as the tip.

"Nature takes care of the problem by changing the beak composition progressively, rather than abruptly, so that its tip can pierce prey without harming the squid in the process," Zok said. "It’s a truly fascinating design!"

Link - via Scribal Terror

NOTE: It would be irresponsible to assure you that all of the methods highlighted below are foolproof. However, each method can do a lot to increase your privacy and security when you're downloading.

How You Get Caught Sharing Files with BitTorrent

There are a few methods you can employ to protect yourself from this sort of tracking when you're sharing files with BitTorrent, thus setting up a layer of protection between you and those who might track you and report you. Below I'll cover a couple: PeerGuardian2 and proxies—particularly a new proxy service called BTGuard.

Keep Anti-P2P Trackers Away from Your BitTorrent Downloads with PeerGuardian2

The first time you run PeerGuardian2 after you install it, you'll have to go through a setup wizard to tell PeerGuardian what kind of blacklists to download and block. By default, PG2 already has Anti-P2P organizations checked. For our purposes, that's really all you need, but PG2 is capable of blocking more IPs if you have other privacy concerns beyond P2P that you want to address.

On the next window of the PG2 setup wizard, you need to set your automatic update preferences. Since your privacy is only as good as your blacklists, you want to ensure that you've always got the latest and greatest lists available, so I'd recommend choosing to check automatic updates every day.

Now you're done setting up PG2. On the last window of the setup wizard, you'll notice a disclaimer similar to the disclaimer I made above. Remember, PG2 is not and cannot be 100% effective, but it will provide a good deal more protection than downloading without.

When you click finish on the wizard, PG2 will run its first check for updates, downloading the blacklist for Anti-P2P organizations. With PG2 running, you'll never connect to the IP addresses on the Anti-P2P blacklist, meaning that those organization can't log your IP and your participation in a copyrighted download.

Obscure Yourself from Anti-P2P Trackers with a Proxy

If we're talking about file sharing, a proxy protects you by routing all of your traffic through another server when it leaves your computer and before it comes back to you. That means that when you're downloading data using a peer-to-peer protocol like BitTorrent, your peers can only see the proxy IP address, not your home IP address—so even if they are tracking your activity, they're not actually tracking your address at all.

There are a number of proxy servers out there, including the well known The Onion Router network (Tor). The catch is, Tor is a proxy project that's already choked for servers and speed, and using Tor to download via BitTorrent is considered poor form. However, there are other proxy servers out there, including one made specifically for BitTorrent routing called BTGuard.

Located in Canada, BTGuard is a subscription service (about $7/month) that promises anonymous BitTorrent connections, unlimited speeds, and that it can bypass your ISP's bandwidth throttling (if your ISP throttles BitTorrent).

The main catch when sending your BitTorrent traffic through proxies is that you'll most likely see a speed drop, and sometimes it's a very significant drop. According to the TorrentFreak weblog, though, BitTorrent transfers with BTGuard are almost equal to a direct connection—meaning you get all the protection of a proxy without any of the nasty slowdown.

To set up a proxy in the popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent, just go to the uTorrent preferences, click on Connection in the sidebar, and then find the Proxy Server section. From there, choose your proxy server type (Socks4/5, HTTP or HTTPS), enter in the address and port of your proxy server, and include any login information if your proxy uses it. (If you're using BTGuard, for example, you'll be given a username and password when you sign up.) Finally, be sure to tick the checkbox labeled "Use proxy server for peer-to-peer connections", which is the whole reason you're setting it up to begin with.

Anecdotes of folks who've been caught downloading copyrighted material are always a little scary. Despite the legal issues involved, don't forget that BitTorrent is only a protocol, and you choose how to use it. BitTorrent isn't synonymous with copyright infringement—there are plenty of legal uses and legal downloads going on with BitTorrent applications every day.

Whether or not you're using your BitTorrent client to download copyrighted materials, no one likes being spied on. If you're really serious about protecting your privacy, a proxy solution is probably the best. There are several drawbacks to proxies, most notably speed issues, but also difficulty in finding reliable free proxies or the cost of a service like BTGuard.

PeerGuardian2 is freeware, easy to use, and will never slow down your downloads. However, it's much more susceptible to holes than proxies, since an IP-blocker is only as good as its blacklist, and those lists have to change and update regularly to keep up with the Anti-P2P addresses.

If you practice safe(r) BitTorrenting using one of these methods or an entirely different approach, share your experience in the comments. Alternately, if you throw caution to the wind, downloading copyrighted material with impunity, we'd love to hear your thoughts as well.

For those of you who are still new to BitTorrent, check out our beginner and intermediate guides.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who encourages safe downloading. His special feature Hack Attack appears regularly on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

How can one find the most beautiful woman in Italy? A Japanese expert determined the following 4 steps:

1) Find a random woman on the street.
2) Ask that woman to introduce the film crew to a more beautiful friend.
3) Have that more beautiful friend introduce the film crew to an even more beautiful friend.
4) Repeat until one meets the 12th woman - she will be the most beautiful woman in Italy.

A Japanese TV show traveled to Italy and attempted this method, and the results are in the video. As seen on Japan Probe.

Click play or go to Link.

The organisers assumed he was female - but he had only had the first phase of surgery to turn him into a woman.

Mr Xie says the Fashion Beauty Plastic Surgery Hospital in Fuzhou city had offered him a full sex change in exchange for him advertising its services.

"After the first phase of surgery, I stopped for a while to deal with some personal issues, and when I came back last autumn they’d gone bankrupt," he said.

Mr Xie says he isn’t sure now whether he’s a man or a woman and can’t even get a job because he can’t confirm his gender.

Link