I was skeptical and was thinking the same thing earlier on, but portals are public and typically some kind of civil works building. Parks, firehouses, statues, museums, that sort of thing. I haven't seen a portal pop up on a Starbucks or McDonalds, yet.

The points where the hackable nodes are located (at least in my area) are very close to a variety of businesses but I don't think any money is being exchanged just yet.

On a total side note, I turned the app on this afternoon while running errands and suddenly my day took on a new little twist playing and doing what I set out to do.  As a total surprise, I found a few new things/places to eat/bars/post office branch playing the game and managed to walk a surprising distance while doing it all.

Tricksie Gooogle bastards made my afternoon of getting errands done fun AND helped me to discover new stuff.

Thread necro FTW!

So during my annual cleaning of my email boxes I found my invite to the beta for this game and after a little Googling, I picked it up and ran with it a little.

Its billed as an ARG with lots of secrets and little side stories but really I think it's something much more sinister.  *cue up x-files theme*  So there's this game, that tracks where you go and gives you points for performing certain actions at those points.  What determines where these points are?  What if a point was influenced by a company that is located nearby?  What if this company paid into the game to get a point near their shop when they had a great sale?

I'm looking for the words but it's nearly the human analog to SEO.  Except you're not pushing internet users towards a website, you're pushing humans towards a real world destination.  And oh by the way if there's a coffee shop there or a restaurant or a store that has something you might like... well you get the idea.

All that said, I'm playing and I sorta dig it.

For the RESISTANCE!!

I hope you're right but...

When you put the Rift on do you perceive the game in 2D or 3D?

Is a 3D (stereoscopic) display an important part of a virtual reality experience?

What important elements would you consider exist in a "VR display?"

I think the technologies are VERY similar and there could be a case to be made.  If Apple even files so much as an injunction it's going to be "GAME ON" in a legal sense and the corporate lawyers from Apple (the whole army of them) will no doubt zerg the Rift team.

I hope I'm wrong here but I've seen it too often.

Cases in point .. Apple and Samsung.

I guess the rift guys are basically done until they licence.

Sucks to be them.

Sared.. They beat me to the punch, sorta.

For the rest of you very clever people I offer to you the following unique "gaming" experience...

http://www.fastcompany.com/3022299/why-this-company-is-crowdsourcing-gamifying-the-worlds-most-difficult-problems#!

http://www.wikistrat.com/

Much like a fisherman, I'm waiting with baited fucking breath to hear Mharz weigh in on some of this.

And since I hate to disappoint I'll paste a portion of a conversation I'm involved in for professional reasons on the topic. 

"While I'm excited that one of the world's largest retailers is coming into our space to help advance domestic operations we have to consider a couple of practical things.

1. Drone delivery security. I hack the drone or otherwise bring it down prior to delivery destination and steal the cargo. After losing a couple of pieces of cargo with high price tags this suddenly becomes a lot less attractive of a delivery solution.

2. Flight times. Currently flight times are limited by battery capacity. Nominal times for exceptional systems are 30 minutes but most are less. This would allow a 10 minute flight out, a 10 minute flight back, and some reserve for emergency. Is this useful?

3. Cargo capacity. Current lifting weights are modest making this method only suitable for the lighter loads. This limitation restricts the usefulness of the device to a small subset of potential deliveries.

4. Operational costs. Assuming some clever folks could automate the process as Jeff is famous for doing, what metrics could be used to justify the operational costs of a UAS compared to a delivery truck? If you use cost/pound of package delivered I'm not sure the UAS will hold up well.

Please don't take these comments as rain on the Amazon parade but more as constructive questions that need to be answered before we move forward."

In short, we're a number of major technology hurdles away from Jeff's ideal delivery solution, or anyone else's to be very frank.  On the surface it looks great but if you look a little deeper the idea totally falls flat until some challenges are met.

Beyond what I mentioned there are a number of regulatory issues that are currently in place thanks to the FAA (perhaps the most worthless branch of the government in existence) that prevent this or any other domestic UAV operations.  The industry is estimated to be a multi-billion dollar high tech field (estimates are nearly 100 billion in the first 5 years) that will bring thousands of high skill, good paying jobs to Americans during one of our country's worst economic periods.

Thank goodness we have Washington protecting us from innovation, doing business, and being successful.

Everything that has a beginning, has an end.

MxO had both. 

Do not try to reinvent MxO.  That would be impossible.  Instead only try to realize the truth. 

There is no MxO market.

Quote from: Da6onet on September 12, 2013, 01:01:00 pm

So every time I shop at this latino super market near my house I always treat myself to a coke or pepsi in a glass bottle hecho en mexico. I told my wife how much better it tastes than normal and I assumed it was due to being in a glass bottle as opposed to a metal can or plastic bottle.

She then informed me it tastes different because the stuff in the glass bottle is made with cane sugar instead of HFCS. I've never been anti HFCS like some people, but goddamn if cane sugar soda doesn't taste ten times better. I've now discovered costco sells the cane sugar stuff and I now refuse to ever buy syrupy soda ever again.

It's also the water.

Don't drink the water man..