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I never understood what motivates pedants to waste everyone's time when nobody else cares.

Sexual perversion. Scroll down to number 1.

most netflix customers use it as a secondary service. it's the tiny percentage of cord cutters

Among some members of my family, I've detected a Grover Norquist mentality against any increase in entertainment spending. To afford another $120 per year recurring fee, they'd have to cut out something else. Cord cutters in countries where over-the-top video on demand (OTT VOD) services such as Hulu and Netflix are available recognize that everything but the "festering pile of social ills" that is televised sports is available on OTT VOD.

Jokes aside, it's kind of interesting to see how much our views of Radiation have changed.

1985? no, but 1965? The first thing that popped to mind were old Uranium toy kits.

I remember a podcast where they used to use a fluoroscope (live X-Ray basically) to size your shoes - see bone structure in real time. A family friend has bad feet because they used a huge dose of radiation to kill his athlete's foot.

See also the first entry in this list.

The Flintones happen in the future.
http://www.cracked.com/quick-f... ;)

Next you'll be telling me fighter pilots will be cutting off their legs to pull more G's without the blood flowing out. See also Douglas Bader,, SNES-era Star Fox...

Next you'll be telling me fighter pilots will be cutting off their legs to pull more G's without the blood flowing out. See also Douglas Bader,, SNES-era Star Fox...

In case anybody reading this is five:

Eee PC is a brand of low-end compact laptop computer formerly manufactured by ASUS.

USB (Universal Serial Bus) is the little rectangular port in the side of your laptop, marked with a drawing of a stick figure carrying a bowling ball. (See #36 in this Photoplasty.) It's where you plug in a mouse, a phone, a memory card, or an adapter the size of a memory card that connects your computer to the cellular network.

UMTS is the language that 3G (third-generation) cellular devices, such as phones and tablets, speak to connect to the Internet, except on Verizon or Sprint.

A CPU (central processing unit) is the part of a computer that processes. Processing means doing the math and making choices, such as laying out where the words and pictures go on a web page. A task is CPU-bound if the CPU can't process it fast enough to keep up with all the information coming in.

GL DSS, defined in the summary, lets 3G and 4G (fourth-generation) cellular devices share one frequency. I'm not sure how this works, but it may be done using TDMA, a fancy term for "taking turns".

A zombie apocalypse would end as quickly as it starts.

http://www.cracked.com/video_1...

http://www.cracked.com/article...

Exactly. Game glitches invented all sorts of new things ...

http://www.cracked.com/article...

#6. A Bad Mouse Click Leads to Lara Croft's Rack
#5. A Racing Game Glitch Gives Birth to Grand Theft Auto
#4. Space Invaders Accidentally Invents Difficulty Curves
#3. A Disgruntled Employee Invents the Easter Egg
#2. Street Fighter Accidentally Invents Combos
#1. A Programmer Sucking at Games Gave Us the Konami Code

Somehow, getting into a tank with a dangerous animal crosses over into the realm of "unreasonable risk"? Give me a break.

I did not say that. I pointed out your repeated appeals to worse problems. You claim that hazards faced in one job are false because other jobs are hazardous.

You should note that the job of killer whale trainer is sold as "family friendly fun". Few people are mislead into thinking that for example, coal mining is not dangerous and unpleasant.

Although this is an article on cracked, it seems pretty convincing and claims to be written by an insider. Feel free to criticise the source, of course.

You mention the trading of safety for cost reduction in towers, interesting. Please explain how this justifies performing animals.

Let's make it a hospital triage situation: One patient comes in complaining of a headache, the other has a bloody stump where their hand used to be, wrapped in a towel. Which patient do you see first?

You probably see the one that is your own country first. By discouraging the whale and dolphin equivalent of the dancing bear that happens in your own backyard. Appeals to the existence of worse problems elsewhere do not change the existence of problem. You don't even dispute the failings of Seaworld and the like, you want us to ignore them.

Say it with me: "One of these things is not like the other, one of these things is worse."

Please move on from appeals to worse problems. No one is convinced.

education about what needs to be done to help animals in the wild.

Children and families are quite likely to get similar bees in their bonnet if they see documentaries about animals in captivity. .

How can you convince boaters to stop running over manatees?

One way is to de-normalise performing animals, so that children might stop seeing large sea animals as our playthings.

I put it to you that Seaworld's mentioning of conservation is greenwash. Nothing else.

Well, I have a horse in this race and it's already won [...] It's called a PC

On an Internet-connected PC, you have to worry about antivirus and other security issues. Or on an Internet-disconnected PC, you have to worry about reconnecting it to the Internet every few weeks so that Steam can renew its receipts. That and the PC doesn't have quite as many games designed to be played with multiple controllers. Sure, you can use an Xbox 360 Controller and use a TV as a monitor, but publishers aren't necessarily willing to accommodate this setup. On the whole, PC multiplayer games tend to be designed around the assumption of one player per machine so that the publisher can sell multiple licenses to a single household.

Multiple controllers on the same TV?? Sure, it looks like a lot of fun in the movies but whenever I've sat down with more than one person on a console the lack of screen real estate due to split screen kills it for me. You really need an 80" TV to do it right.

If you were right that the console makers actually cared about local multi-player, wouldn't you think that they would have built-in multiple TV support by now? Instead, the Xbox has multilink, which requires a separate console per player.

I do think that Dual Play for 3D TVs will improve two player games. I also think that there will be much more refined support for multi-player and controller on the PC as the Xbox and PS4 are basically PCs. This makes ports much easier to do while retaining full gamepad support. I can't remember a recent game that didn't have it....

Well, I have a horse in this race and it's already won [...] It's called a PC

On an Internet-connected PC, you have to worry about antivirus and other security issues. Or on an Internet-disconnected PC, you have to worry about reconnecting it to the Internet every few weeks so that Steam can renew its receipts. That and the PC doesn't have quite as many games designed to be played with multiple controllers. Sure, you can use an Xbox 360 Controller and use a TV as a monitor, but publishers aren't necessarily willing to accommodate this setup. On the whole, PC multiplayer games tend to be designed around the assumption of one player per machine so that the publisher can sell multiple licenses to a single household.

mindless outsourcers, contract buyers, and CIO magazine readers

In other words jobs and people you know nothing about, sort of like how executives know nothing about network infrastructure, right?

Disclaimer: I'm not "picking on you", I'm acknowledging you are human.

Not difficult? You, sir, have a great deal to learn about animal breeding. I'd suggest Cracked's recent article.

But how many retinas can it occupy at once? A phone is big enough for one person. A living room TV is big enough for a family of five and should cost five times as much, or perhaps less for a family pack discount. This is the same reason why a lot of video game developers have stopped making split-screen multiplayer modes: to make a household pay for more than one copy of a game. Besides, focusing on a target 30 cm away from the eye for the running time of a feature film causes eyestrain; viewers would pay more to avoid eyestrain.

Moses even had tablets, but they were pretty slow I'm told.

http://www.cracked.com/photoplasty_839_29-iconic-images-from-history-shamelessly-turned-into-ads_p29/#27

Look at #27.

You can plug PS3, PS4 and wired 360 controllers without any hardware adaptors and most modern games work just fine with them.

Gamepads on PC have at least four problems I can think of:

• Do the Dual Shock 3 and 4 work with the gamepad drivers included with Windows, or do they require a third-party driver? At least under Android, this third-party driver for the Dual Shock 3 is a paid app that doesn't even work with all Android devices, so the developer had to release a second app just for testing compatibility. And because Windows requires all input device drivers to be kernel mode, and 64-bit Windows requires all kernel-mode code to be digitally signed with a commercial kernel-mode code signing certificate from a certificate authority approved by Microsoft, how is this third-party driver signed?
• DirectInput and other APIs for reading HID joysticks return the button states as a numbered list. The game can't tell in what order the buttons are listed unless it looks up the gamepad's name or VID/PID in a massive database. And this is why...
• A lot of modern games work only with Xbox 360 controllers because they use the XInput API, which works only with controllers licensed by Microsoft. In fact, games sold as Windows Store apps aren't even allowed to use the DirectInput API that every non-Xbox 360 USB gamepad uses.
• A lot of modern games don't work with gamepads at all because the publisher wants to sell three copies to a household with three desktop PCs instead of one copy to a household with one home theater PC and three gamepads.

I'm sure these problems have solutions, and I'd appreciate help figuring it out other than "just buy a console; the games are better because developer approval keeps out the riff-raff".

Aside from the number of people being smaller, this does't seem that different from a tour of duty on a nuclear submarine. Three months is normal for that. Having little time to shower is a minor stress which could easily apply to almost any military duty, and submarines are again in that category. Moreover, submarine showers are disgusting. At least with a Mars mission you won't have the constant movement and shaking. And they don't get the regular email contact because they are underwater. http://www.cracked.com/article_20871_6-things-movies-dont-show-you-about-life-submarine.html discusses some of the many unpleasant things about subs. It seems like the people who are worried about the "human factors" are massively overestimating what conditions human minds can actually cope with, and it seems they also aren't doing a good job looking at counterexamples to their worries. This shouldn't be that surprising though: Robert Zubrin in his excellent book "Case for Mars" argued that a large part of the medical and psychological research to see if humans could handle a trip to Mars was more excuses for grant funding than serious concerns.

More depressing clips: A guy called ClimateBrad has a large collection of clips from US politicians doing their very best to make up their own facts and rules of logic.

Up until I reached my 40's I thought people like Senator Inhofe in the US and Tony Abbot here in Oz were uneducated, stupid, or more likely both. They are none of those things, they're just plain immoral by normal western standards when it comes to honesty (even the good ones). To paraphrase Shaun Micallef - "The media is called the fourth estate but behaves like a fifth wheel", like the political system it revels in conflict and is trained in the (in)humanities. If it can't find controversy in a story then it invents some (say) by equating a "one jump away" lobbyist's press release from one of their major sponsors to a meticulous scientific report. The Iraq war and "Climategate" are both prime examples of commercial media being worse than useless in clarifying a complex issue, particularly in the US.

The honest self-skepticisim required to be successful in the scientific and engineering world is a career killer in the political world. They have a different worldview that says everything boils down to an opinion, and all opinions are equal. Therefore social skills are more important than evidence and manipulation is more useful than reason. OTOH we have way too many Phd's in the hard sciences who have never stepped foot in a "Ph" class in their life and would not know Popper from Popoff.

Thing is, the political worldview is our natural behaviour, it's instinctual and we all do it to some degree because...well..it almost works. Critical thinking is a learned behaviour that basically refines "common-sense" using agreed rules of evidence and logic, it is the foundation of The Enlightenment, a radical shift in human behaviour barely 500yrs old. It's unsurprising that it hasn't permeated to everyone in the modern world that the "age of reason" created with extraordinary speed over the last 50-100yrs.

"I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness..." - Sagan, Demon Haunted World (Science as a candle in the dark)

To see what sort of advantages autism could give, please see #5 in "5 Horrible Diseases That Changed The World (For the Better)" by Robert Evans and Philip Moon and #1 in "5 Brain Disorders That Started as Evolutionary Advantages" by Matthew Moffitt and Himanshu Sharma.

To see what sort of advantages autism could give, please see #5 in "5 Horrible Diseases That Changed The World (For the Better)" by Robert Evans and Philip Moon and #1 in "5 Brain Disorders That Started as Evolutionary Advantages" by Matthew Moffitt and Himanshu Sharma.

You will not develop the capacity to police yourselves. That is for the state.

We developed the capacity to police ourselves a long time ago, the tool we use for that is called the rule of law, it's enforced by courts and (wait for it...) the police. If you have a better idea I assure you I and many others are all ears, but the naïve notion that people will nice to each other if "government just gets out of the way" was disproven with every one of the thousands of hippie communes that started and failed in my youth during the late 60's early seventies. It was said to be the largest US internal migration since the civil war, most communes lasted less than two years the main problem being that since politics was taboo, verbal and physical bullying won the day and the group disintegrated, often leaving the bully with a nice piece of real estate and the "quitters" with nothing.

I find it ironic (and endlessly amusing) that the flower power people and the hard core libertarians suffer from the same naïve delusion that people will nice to each other if "government just gets out of the way". Anthropology and even the most tenuous grasp of history says that given the opportunity we won't "just all get along". Without enforceable laws (democratic or otherwise) society would simply not exist beyond the basic extended family tribe, almost by definition "civilization" would be impossible.

Throwing out "the state" is the easy bit, the real problem has always been and will always be - then what, Napoleon, Mugabe? - We already know anarchy does not work, if it did we wouldn't be "trapped" within our respective democratic nation sates at this point in our evolution, right?

That's what I've been saying for years. Webs within a single city can become very thick, but extending that thickness outside a city can become difficult especially as the TSA puts more people on no-fly lists for piddly little things.

I'd still have bought one but it doesn't support 4 controllers with displays. That was a massive failure.

How many controllers does a typical PC game support, with or without displays? It's been claimed that PC game developers leave out support for split-screen play and spawn installation on purpose, in order to sell multiple copies of a game to one household.

They bring their laptops.

That has drawbacks: everyone having to drive back home to get the laptops (or, alternatively, having to preplan the LAN party which destroys spontaneity), having to buy multiple copies of a game, and the possibility of not everyone already owning a gaming laptop as opposed to one with a pre-Ivy Bridge Intel CPU used as a secondary Office-and-Facebook computer alongside a desktop PC. I explain further here.

Or I use a cheap wireless HDMI streamer.

How does that work? Can it combine multiple PCs' displays into one stream that gets sent to the television? I'd appreciate an explanation.

I would say the all around most interesting weird thing that occasionally shows up would be exotic pets. People trying to bring exotic baby snakes from the U.S. to Britain, for example. There were cases of that happening at O'Hare, I was on the checkpoint for a snake smuggling situation, someone had a bag of baby snakes taped to his leg, I believe it turned out to be. This happens at airports around the world fairly frequently. I sometimes write for Cracked.com, and in googling this, I wasn't surprised to find a Cracked article on it: http://www.cracked.com/article... Off the top of my head, and I should really think about this more thoroughly and more often before I forget, I would say that another of the funniest things that turned up sometimes were people wrapping their bottles of alcohol in tinfoil, thinking that would prevent the x-ray operator from being able to tell that it was a large bottle of liquids. One Russian lady did that at least twice that I knew of, on separate occasions. An old lady who, each time, acted as though she had no idea why her vodka was wrapped in tinfoil, or how it got there, claiming to speak no English. She was hilarious. We could just see that she was completely lying, and it pretty much felt as though she knew that we knew, and it was all just completely ridiculous.

No.
No.
No.

It is imposible to overexagerate the animals of australia. In australia, NEARLY EVERYTHING is poisoinous. Poisoinous fish, poisoinous spiders, poisoinous insects/bugs, poisoinous snails, poisoinous jellyfish. I'm surprised the birds and mammals arent poisons to.

and then there's the snakes. OH THE SNAKES! (why'd it have to be snakes??) over 40 different varieties just of poisonous snakes, and 21 of the 25 most venomous snakes in the world live there.

Spiders with 1 inch fangs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Worlds largest and most vicious crocs, commonly ranging over 22ft long, AND known for jumping almost an entire body length out of the water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Red back spiders (basically, black widow's australian cousin): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Dugite snakes (cobra family), one of the most potent toxins in an animal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Blue Ringed Octopus, the most toxic animal in the world, and a nearly painless sting (oh fun): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Australian Box Jellyfish...giant, dangerous jellyfish that swarms every year...causes painful scars for life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Irukandji jellyfish...tiny jellyfish (1inch bell) with really long tentacles (3+ feet), and nearly painless sting...that causes Irukandji syndrome, a rarely fatal condition that usually resolves after several hours, but before it does is essentially the most torturous experience a person can have: severe headache, backache, muscle pains, chest and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, sweating, anxiety, hypertension, tachycardia and pulmonary edema, and a "sense of impending doom so strong, that patients lose the will to live, and even beg their doctors to just kill them and get it over with): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Inlaand Taipan, another cobra relative, again highly toxic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Australian paralysis tick...yes EVEN THE TICKS ARE POISONOUS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

--
Letterman: "Can you just go out and play?
I mean it's dangerous in Australia."
Worthington: "You're aware of the dangerous animals. We have dugites...which is like one of the most poisonous snakes in the world...and if it bites you, you have 10 seconds...You have redback spiders; same thing, if it bites you, you have 10 seconds."
Letterman: "So what's a person to do?"
Worthington: "Pray."
--
Australia: Where everything wants us dead, and everything has the capability to make that a reality.
--
http://www.cracked.com/funny-2...
http://www.cracked.com/funny-5...

No.
No.
No.

It is imposible to overexagerate the animals of australia. In australia, NEARLY EVERYTHING is poisoinous. Poisoinous fish, poisoinous spiders, poisoinous insects/bugs, poisoinous snails, poisoinous jellyfish. I'm surprised the birds and mammals arent poisons to.

and then there's the snakes. OH THE SNAKES! (why'd it have to be snakes??) over 40 different varieties just of poisonous snakes, and 21 of the 25 most venomous snakes in the world live there.

Spiders with 1 inch fangs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...

Worlds largest and most vicious crocs, commonly ranging over 22ft long, AND known for jumping almost an entire body length out of the water: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Red back spiders (basically, black widow's australian cousin): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Dugite snakes (cobra family), one of the most potent toxins in an animal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Blue Ringed Octopus, the most toxic animal in the world, and a nearly painless sting (oh fun): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Australian Box Jellyfish...giant, dangerous jellyfish that swarms every year...causes painful scars for life: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

Irukandji jellyfish...tiny jellyfish (1inch bell) with really long tentacles (3+ feet), and nearly painless sting...that causes Irukandji syndrome, a rarely fatal condition that usually resolves after several hours, but before it does is essentially the most torturous experience a person can have: severe headache, backache, muscle pains, chest and abdominal pain, nausea and vomiting, sweating, anxiety, hypertension, tachycardia and pulmonary edema, and a "sense of impending doom so strong, that patients lose the will to live, and even beg their doctors to just kill them and get it over with): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Inlaand Taipan, another cobra relative, again highly toxic: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

Australian paralysis tick...yes EVEN THE TICKS ARE POISONOUS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

--
Letterman: "Can you just go out and play?
I mean it's dangerous in Australia."
Worthington: "You're aware of the dangerous animals. We have dugites...which is like one of the most poisonous snakes in the world...and if it bites you, you have 10 seconds...You have redback spiders; same thing, if it bites you, you have 10 seconds."
Letterman: "So what's a person to do?"
Worthington: "Pray."
--
Australia: Where everything wants us dead, and everything has the capability to make that a reality.
--
http://www.cracked.com/funny-2...
http://www.cracked.com/funny-5...

Occam's Razor says very strongly that we already have a far more likely answer.

Why is there a foreign language requirement anyway?

For many years, I had this same damn question unanswered. If I were to ever live in a foreign country, I knew that I'd learn that language and move on with my life. Well... I'm now living in a foreign country and I'm learning that language.

School never answered it for me, but Cracked did. How sad.

Other answers from my own personal experience? From a world-business perspective, you are more valuable if you know a foreign language. Unfortunately, you really have to live abroad to learn it or live in an area that naturally multilingual.

Also, I have found that it is the learning of a culture that has been the most important for me. Learning that other culture after you have formed a lot of your own opinions helps you understand that you've made mistakes along the way and that you have come to a lot of wrong conclusions. Just because someone has a different opinion than you [pick a hot topic and it doesn't matter the side: abortion, guns, social welfare, religion] doesn't necessarily mean that they are wrong or that you are right.

I must admit that the multi-lingual Europe is not immune from American-like stupidity. A lot of Europeans also have the same stuck-up, pig headed, I'm-always-right opinion as their American counterparts. Like I said, it's the cultural learning that is important and foreign language merely opens that door. I also believe learning it later in life rather than as a child can also make a difference. Being dependent on the grace of others while living in a foreign land (until I can speak their language) has most definitely given me a different opinions about certain aspects of the whole Mexicans-in-America thing. And before you think I was for or against Mexicans-in-America, keep in mind that I did and continue to disagree with both sides of the main arguments. I'm also married to a non-Mexican, non-American who lived with me in the U.S.

Being married to a foreigner has given me the best education of all. Interestingly enough, it was her foreign language skills and her cultural involvement that helped me to truly begin learning. I wish my fellow Americans were more open to hearing the answers that I have to the question you posed. (I just scratched the surface.) I wish neither of us had to ask that question and have it linger for so long without an answer.

Hope what I said helped to begin to answer that question for you.

Really, don't be that guy.

But this is an online dating site. The alternative is to be one of these guys.

One thing that consoles get right is cost per player. A family can buy three gaming PCs and three accounts for each game. Or a family can buy one or more low- to mid-grade laptops with integrated graphics, one console, a couple extra controllers, and games that support split-screen multiplayer (such as Mario Kart) or non-split shared-screen multiplayer (such as Smash Bros.). Which costs less?

Which is precisely why the "cash=terrorism" scare campaigns have already started.

I dunno if I should be terrified that fascism is once again rising from its grave, or laugh at the sheer comical ineptness of the whole affair. It's like a zombie clown trying to get out of a clown car to eat your brains. Scary, yes, but also damn hilarious.

Oh well, enjoy peace while it lasts and buckle up for World War Three: Here We Go Again...

games that are substantially more expensive

In my experience, one copy of a console game that allows up to four players in one household is cheaper than two to four copies of a PC game that requires a separate PC per player.

artificial roadblocks to indie developers

The roadblocks were put in place because in 1983, a flood of me-too titles from startup developers was causing the median quality of Atari 2600 games to become unacceptable. Retailers were discontinuing video games in their stores citing end user dissatisfaction. Nintendo couldn't even get its console into stores in 1985 without finding some cryptographic way to assure retailers that their valuable shelf space wouldn't be filled with crap. How would you propose to improve median game quality while still allowing indie developers?

7) demanding I have the disc in the drive, despite installing it to the hard drive
8) locking my online purchases to single physical console

Other than by using the disc or the console as the root of trust, how would you propose instead to verify that a single purchased copy of a computer program isn't being used on more offline machines than for which it is licensed? Armed service members who are deployed often don't have Internet access to phone home daily (as in the original Xbox One plan) or even monthly (as in Steam).

9) arbitrary limitations on what controllers are available

As opposed to PC games, many of which impose arbitrary limitations on how many controllers a game recognizes at once as a way to sell more copies. Few PC games allow split screen. I've also noticed a disturbing trend of games using only XInput and ignoring DirectInput, which ends up allowing only Xbox 360 controllers, not USB HID joysticks. Microsoft in fact requires games to be XInput-only if they're made for Windows RT or otherwise sold through Windows Store because the Windows Runtime does not support DirectInput.

10) 5 years out of date hardware on launch day

The hardware in the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS was 10 years out of date, being roughly equivalent to a Super NES or Nintendo 64 respectively. They won on battery life.

I admire your no-console policy because consoles haven't traditionally been platforms for end user experimentation. For example, console games rarely have legitimate user-created mods. But with a no-console policy and more than one gamer in the house, you have to either take turns on the PC, connect multiple gamepads and a large monitor to the PC, or buy multiple gaming PCs and multiple copies of each game. Which option did your household choose?

Hm. Daughter used to have DDR parties. The dance pads are USB and you can plug two into a PC at a time. Lessee... We have multiple PCs, of course. I'm a computer geek. I have five spun up right now, and two servers in the garage. We used to play Diablo against each other, and for that you really do need two copies of the game, unfortunately. Other than that, not really. We played a lot of board games, though. When she was really little I started her on chess. Yes, I did. We each played with half the pieces. It was easier for her to keep track. We really weren't oriented towards computer games. I read to her a lot. All of the Heinlein juveniles, all ten Amber novels, much of Lord of the Rings (prep for the movies), something like 30 of Terry Pratchett's novels.

I'm grappling with the question a little because our family just isn't like that. I guess she had a terrible childhood, never having played cooperative Halo. Or, wait, she did, at a friend's house. Bad example.

I admire your no-console policy because consoles haven't traditionally been platforms for end user experimentation. For example, console games rarely have legitimate user-created mods. But with a no-console policy and more than one gamer in the house, you have to either take turns on the PC, connect multiple gamepads and a large monitor to the PC, or buy multiple gaming PCs and multiple copies of each game. Which option did your household choose?

In August 2001, a FEMA training session discussed the three most likely major natural disasters they would have to deal with in the next decade. They were a terrorist attack in New York, a hurricane hitting New Orleans, and an earthquake on the San Andreas line.

Two of those happened. But nobody is really surprised they were 66% accurate, because with timespans like this, 66% accuracy is trivial. A damn comedy website managed to predict Fukushima to within 200km (they predicted a TEPCO-run reactor on the opposite side of Japan would be struck by an earthquake and tsunami).

Why? Because it turns out that when you look at the situation, the history and the statistics, it's pretty easy to predict the future as long as you don't give a strict time. Just look at science fiction, or even general fiction, to see how people who did their research were able to come up with scenarios plausible enough to actually happen.

Now, the difference here is supposedly that instead of looking at the history and statistics, they were looking at geological data. If they can improve on this technique to get even just a one-year timespan for an earthquake, that would be groundbreaking (pun totally intended). Or if they can use it to predict an earthquake where there isn't a history of earthquakes. As it is, it's useless, but hopefully they can improve it.

I think Science Fiction does occasionally let us all indulge our inner nihilist, with a sort of dystopian future-template somehow graven in our minds by modern culture.

As a counterpoint, though, I'd like to offer http://www.cracked.com/article_20731_5-amazing-pieces-good-news-nobody-reporting.html which sums neatly the fact that we (as humanity generally) are far more likely on the track of a UFP than a Dark Stellar Empire.

I believe it was in that sense that Iain Banks connected a relatively "hard"-ish science fiction (depending on which of the umpteen definitions you prefer) with a rock-solid core of optimism. His stories could be absolutely bleak on a personal level, with an overlay of brutal, naked realpolitik on a political level, yet he somehow managed to convey that ultimately we - as humanists, as small-l liberal enlightened thinkers, "won" as a species.

We will dearly miss you, Mr Banks.

Have you seen this?

http://online.sfsu.edu/rone/GEessays/Ingham.htm

http://www.cracked.com/article_18503_how-biotech-company-almost-killed-world-with-booze.html

http://online.sfsu.edu/rone/GEessays/Ingham.htm

http://www.cracked.com/article_18503_how-biotech-company-almost-killed-world-with-booze.html

Check out what's going on with the SteamBox.

But where was this for the past seven years? Virtually every TV produced since the fourth quarter of 2006 has had a PC input, be it a VGA input or an HDMI input for a DVI-to-HDMI cable, yet major PC makers hadn't done much with it.

Besides, it's not exactly rocket science to set up a game to accept commands from both controllers and keyboards.

Contrxllers, plural? A lot of major-label multi-platform games are set up to allow two to four players on the console but only single player and online multiplayer on a PC, with no non-networked multiplayer because publishers want to sell more than one copy of a game to a household. This means there aren't a lot of well-known PC games that really take advantage of the unique selling points of Xbox 360 contrxllers and HID joysticks. If this comment is any indication, people aren't going to buy a second PC for the living room just for one game.

Some people are using GestureWorks GamePlay for their Windows tablets.

It's an on-screen gamepad that overlays the action. I don't see how it's any different from the on-screen gamepad in games that I've played on my Nexus 7 tablet, such as NES games in Nesoid and the demo of Pixeline and the Jungle Treasure. I found those incredibly unsatisfying, as a flat sheet of glass gives my thumbs no feedback as to where they are relative to the center or sides of the active control areas. I kept pressing the wrong button or "whiffing" (pressing the inactive area between buttons). Even the critically panned Turbo Touch 360 gamepad by Triax is better than a common touch screen because a Turbo Touch at least has a raised border and textured areas inside the directional control area.

You can also use a DualShock 3 on android.

I'm told not all Android devices work with the DualShock 3 driver whose title is "Sixaxis Controller". How easy will it be to return a contrxller should your phone or tablet happen not to work with it? And how many people are willing to carry around such a contrxller along with a phone?

Now, you just need to get enough people interested in what it is you're creating. That's not easy

Especially if people will have to buy a contrxller before becoming competent at contrxlling what you're creating.

[Censored to work around Slashdot's lameness filter's dislike for the word "troll".]

More fascinating than watching a monkey shit a grandfather clock

People have been gathering the sexual habits of people that they may need to discredit for thousands of years. In the Roman times the Christians accused the Pagan Roman's in charge of having orgy's and myth sticks around to this day. Mind you having relations with slaves that were children was considered perfectly acceptable by that society so nobody bothered to use it to slander anyone and the result was that people talked freely about it. What they didn't talk freely about was having orgies as they were simply a myth. In other words this story is as old as prostitutes, politicians and spies, only the names have changed.

the cross platform titles (Assassin's Creed, COD, Battlefield) are no better than the same games running on a quite modest gaming PC.

A lot of games, such as every Call of Duty game for Xbox 360 that I've seen, let up to two players use one console by splitting the screen or by putting both players in one semi-fixed camera view. If you happen to have friends or relatives who game with you, this means you don't need to dismantle your PC and take it with you in order to game together in a room. Furthermore, being able to see where your teammate is builds team cohesion. Ideally, more PC games would support split-screen mode when connected to an HDTV, but publishers want to sell multiple copies to a household.

For the first time, the BEST games on the new consoles are also on the PC

That'll be true up until the moment Nintendo releases Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.

But it seems likely that the best games will continue to be published on the PC as well

Will these games include games that are best played with two to four gamepads? For example, will the next Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat come to PC in month 1, or will there be a 2-year delay as there was with Mortal Kombat 2011?

If you want local multiplayer, get a Wii.

And get limited by what Nintendo allows onto its platform.

As for tying up the PC, who doesn't have their own PC these days?

A lot of times, mom, dad, and two kids will have fewer than four computers. Besides, one needs not only his own PC but also a gaming video card (or Flare/OnLive and a really fast Internet connection) and a separate license for the software per player.

http://www.cracked.com/article_20725_6-myths-about-drone-warfare-you-probably-believe.html has an interesting take on why unmanned drones aren't the panacea some people (higher ups in the military) believe them to be.

For some of us, video games are played alone/with friends in our basement or living room

And others can't coordinate their schedules to play with friends, so they prefer pickup games with strangers.

with no networking involved

Fewer and fewer games for Microsoft and Sony consoles support split screen multiplayer for two reasons. First, time is money, and supporting both split screen and online splits the effort between optimizing for split screen and optimizing for online. Second, publishers want to sell multiple copies to a household.