Well, you'd have to have a revolution in MRI technology in order to use it on any sort of mass scale. You'd have to lower the costs (current MRI machines of that caliber cost upwards of $1M) and make it much faster (older ones could take as long as 40 minutes, newer ones are still far too slow to compare in speed to metal detectors or backscatter machines).
I'd think it would be a polygraph replacement before it becomes a crime scanner. If someone asks you "where are the bodies buried", the first thing you're going to think of is... where the bodies are buried. The only problem might be that strapping someone down and shoving them into a dark, noisy, claustrophobic tube might count as torture under more strict interpretations of the law, but if waterboarding is OK, I don't see how MRIs will be banned.
"Existing but not able to do anything practical" is still a pretty big difference from "Could exist but nobody's built one yet". It's like the early airplanes - they existed, but they weren't exactly useful for anything besides proving that heavier-than-air aircraft could work.
Am I the only one who has difficulty thinking of quantum computers as things that actually exist and do calculations? It's like my brain has placed "quantum computer" firmly into the category "things that are theoretically possible but unable to be built with current technology", and refuses to change it, even to "things that exist in the lab but won't be commercially viable for decades outside classified government work".
Although they aren't 100% standardized, ASUS seems to be doing pretty well. They've got three chargers for their entire lineup - a 50W for netbooks, a 90W for most laptops, and a 150W for their high-power laptops. Which is a lot better than some laptop companies do (although I believe Apple manages one connector for all three of their laptop
I wonder if the Macbook Pro 17" compares. It won't on graphics (MBP has a 5750 or something), but the MBP has a nicer 1920x1200 screen... and quad core too, i think?
Current 17" Macbook Pros start with a quad-core, 2.2gHz processor. It's the same subfamily (Sandy Bridge i7) as the Blade's, so the numbers are comparable. So, with the exception of the few games that are singlethreaded, it will perform better. Graphically, the Macbook uses a Radeon 6750, which is about on par with the GeForce 555M based on the benchmarks I saw. It's weaker, but not by much.
The Macbook also has less RAM (4gb instead of 8), but at the same speed. Storage is weird - the default hard drive is bigger but slower, but they also have options for a faster AND bigger hard drive, or even a bigger SSD. It even has a bigger batter - 95 Wh instead of 60.
Wow, I never expected I would be recommending a Mac over a gaming PC for gaming purposes.
Getting it to work as just a mouse should be simple - doing drivers like that is easy.
The problem is taking advantage of the display portion. The default drivers will probably offer something similar to what my dumb trackpad does - tapping one corner will turn on a simple menu, letting you do common things like change the volume, pause/play a media player, or change the screen brightness. Maybe they'll have little applets, that do stuff like display CPU usage and temps, or maybe a music visualizer.
But as far as gaming, this will not take off naturally. You won't see many games doing anything with it, and most of those that do will just be duplicating HUD stuff. Just simple stuff like HP/MP displays, or a minimap, or something one guy can whip up in an afternoon. You'll probably see a lot of shared code with games that support the G15/G19 display, which ISN'T a touchscreen, so actual input is going to be rare.
Now, I'm actually in their target market - I generally game on a laptop, and I'm actually looking for a replacement (current one is ~3 years old, starting to run current games badly). But this one isn't good. Why? 1. Heat. There's barely any vents on this, and a LOT of hot gear on the inside. I wouldn't be surprised if this has actual problems functioning like it is. 2. Battery life. 60Wh sounds like a lot, but there's a TON of stuff trying to eat that battery. The CPU draws 25 watts, the GPU 35, 7200RPM hard drives tend to eat battery quickly, and I don't even want to think about how much power that big backlit screen draws. My laptop lasted about 2 hours with 40Wh, and it drew about half that much power. I'd put money on this thing lasting under an hour under a heavy gaming load. 3. Specs too low. The GPU is good, and the amount and speed of RAM is good, but the CPU is really lacking. Dual-core? Not good - for $3K, I'd expect quad- or even hexa-core. Sure, it's clocked well, but remember, half the time a laptop CPU is running at a reduced clock to save power. 4. Hard drive space. 320GB? My laptop from 3 years ago had that much, for half the price! There's no excuse not to have at least 500GB. Hell, put a Momentus XT in there - 500GB of hard drive, and a 4GB SSD in the same package. Or do it yourself - there's laptop-sized terabyte hard drives out there now, put one of those in beside a 16GB SSD and you'll still both impressive performance and capacity. And trust me - gamers need a lot of hard drive space. Some games I've played will suck up 20-40GB, and I haven't seen a non-indie release in years that was under 10GB. So that's AT MOST 30 games, possibly as low as 10. Not going to happen. 5. Gimmicky. The touchscreen/buttons that replaced the number pad are honestly just tacky. You'd need to get game devs to specifically support it in their games. If you had made it compatible with the G19 or G15 keyboard, you might have gotten somewhere, but at this point, it's a gimmick that won't get much dev support unless it sells REALLY well. It's not even positioned well - most games use the left half of the keyboard, where the WSAD is. Reaching over to the touchscreen would be like putting key macros on the number pad - slow, hard to hit accurately, and difficult to use. It should have been on the left of the keyboard, or maybe in that big empty space below it. On my current laptop (and most others), the trackpad is below the spacebar; I often use it with my thumb when gaming, mainly to turn faster in the tanks in BC2. You could move it to the bottom, and then have room for a proper number pad as well.
Well, when you need to update your charts every time a new airport opens, or closes, or adds a runway, I imagine it's a lot more cost-effective to make a software patch than it is to print out new chart pages.
Exactly. Besides, commercial shipping's quite likely to be via container ship, which is a much more efficient way than flying it.
And when you factor in the environmental cost of the paper (which needs replacement every so often for updates or repair), it start to look like a relatively decent idea, ecologically.
(Mostly commenting to undo a misclicked moderation, but there's my $0.02)
Exactly. If we want some armchair general's view on the battle, or a politicians view, we check CNN or BBC or even Wikinews. If we want a comedian's view, we watch Colbert. If we want a moron's view, there's Fox. If we want the tech angle, we've got/. They all start from the same core story, but each specializes in a particular set of details.
Seriously, though, Inception's probably the best movie I've seen in years. I would probably call it a masterpiece of cinema, if I was an elitist asshole who used such phrases.
*Another* award for Girl Genius?
on
The 2011 Hugo Awards
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Seriously, as much as I like that comic, it does not deserve to get it for the third year in a row. Especially since the award's only been around for three years.
To be honest, even the nominations are kind of repetitive. Every year, the latest Schlock Mercenary, Fable, and Girl Genius volume gets nominated (plus a few "mainstream" comics), and GG wins. For three years in a row. And, personally, the 2010 Schlock ("The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse") was way better than the 2010 Girl Genius ("Heirs of the Storm"), especially as science fiction.
I think the judges need to realize that a) they have some fanboy bias, and b) they need to correct for it.
If I had to pinpoint one comic as the point "everybody" started reading it, I'd point to 214 - The Problem with Wikipedia. Somewhere in that general vicinity is when xkcd really hit its stride, and popularity followed shortly after.
Sure. I mainly listen to video game soundtracks, so it may not be your thing, but I really enjoyed "Terra in Black" and "The Might of Baron", both remixes of Final Fantasy songs (VI and IV, respectively). That whole site's pretty good, actually - they got contracted to do the soundtrack for Super Street Fighter II: Turbo HD Remix, which was cool.
Although, I just checked, and it's not actually Creative Commons. The license is basically CC-BY-NC-ND, though, so it's still completely free to download and redistribute. Just some crossed neurons in my memory, I guess.
Let's do some math, based on my personal collection. I have 7,677 songs, only a small minority of which (~400) are Creative Commons or public domain. If I were to rent those from RIM, that would be... $770 per month. Even by RIAA standards, that's extortionate. But, you say, I don't actually listen to all those songs. You're probably right. Let's trim out the ones I gave 1 or 2 star ratings (my entire collection is methodically tagged), the ones I only have because they came on an album with other songs, or even just to complete an artist's collection. That cuts things down to 6254 songs, or $630. Still way too high. Again, you repeat, I probably don't listen to all of those in one month. In fact, so far this month I have listened to a mere 727 songs. Adjust for the length of the month, and that comes out to 1090 songs/month, or $110. Which is still too much for me to pay, but maybe someone will. Sucker born every minute and all that. So let's say I only rent my very favorite songs, the one's I've given the full five-star rating. That's 70 songs (I'm very conservative with that rating), two of which are CC-licensed, and one more that is copyrighted but not available for sale. Still, that would be $10 a month, for my favorite songs and a few variations each month. Which isn't competitive with other streaming services, and isn't even really competitive with buying permanently from any popular store - those 70 songs would cost ~$70-100 to own forever, or a few month's worth of streaming.
What standard would you propose? What standard could cover a CPU that you find in everything from routers to car dashboards? ARM is meant to be adaptable to corner cases. How would you fence that without hindering development?
Once again, you misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting we make a standard for any possible ARM device. I'm suggesting we make a set of standards for PC-like ARM computers - tablets, smartphones, netbooks, maybe even desktops and servers. That much is possible - x86 is able to work passably well in each, and it has a rather outdated standard not designed for those things. If you designed the standard to fit ARM's strengths (low power consumption, low cost), you could come up with something that works just as well as existing (mutually incompatible) standards, but which vastly speeds the process of designing and porting code.
The process is broken because the two organizations are working at opposing ends. The USPTO is trying to clear out a (significant) backlog by approving pretty much everything, rationalizing that "the courts will clear out any bad patents". Meanwhile, the courts are thinking "you know, we really don't know much about science, we should probably step back and let the experts at the USPTO make the calls".
Naturally, that lead to a metric shitload of bad patents being granted and enforced. Which triggered far more patents to be filed for, making the whole thing pretty much pointless.
If the courts do start throwing out bad patents, though, the system starts working better. If it's a particularly moronic patent, it might even get thrown out during discovery, keeping court fees in the four or even three digit range. It won't make the system perfect, but it will make it less bad, which is a good thing.
Uh, x86 is everywhere. PCs. Supercomputers. Microcontrollers. Embedded systems (you can still buy i386 chips because a lot of embedded systems like traffic light controllers use them). There's even been a few game consoles using it (original XBox and the Wonderswan series). Quite a few of them don't follow the PC standard, and that's fine. But there should still be a standard for common uses - even just covering smartphones, tablets and netbooks would be a major improvement over the current chaos.
This. Precisely this. I have plenty of time to play long games, it's just that I have literally dozens of games I own but haven't played yet, and I have no problem with quitting a game because it isn't fun. Often, I don't even "decide" to stop playing, I just never get back to it and eventually delete it to make room for more games. I open up Steam, look at what I have to play, and decide I'll get more fun out of playing yet another hour of Battlefield 2 than I will playing a game I haven't finished.
Even "good" games have problems. I stopped playing Dragon Age because 1) I was on a quest with no idea where to go next, and 2) it kept locking me out of the DLC I payed for. I quit Crysis because of the long, boring alien levels. I got bored with Minecraft because I'd built pretty much everything worth building. The Last Remnant - the story was going nowhere, and (since it's unplayable with mouse/keyboard) digging out the controller every time I wanted to play was a chore.
Older games (that I haven't played before) are just as bad, so it's not at all a "modern games suck" scenario. I've pretty much quit the lauded Deus Ex on the first mission because the stealth isn't fun. Morrowind - movement is slow, combat might as well be turn-based for how boring it is. Thief - too much punishment for any mistake, which means the only way to play is EXTREMELY cautiously and slowly.
The point of this article is that 5 hours of high-quality game is far better than 50 hours of boredom. That means, fundamentally, that you have to put just as much effort into the game, and spend just as much money on making it. Maybe even more - getting a game from "good enough" to "good" takes a lot of manpower.
I recall hearing of one election where the winner recieved over 1000% of the vote (his competition also got an impossible amount). Don't remember which country, though. Think it was a South American "democracy" in the 70s, but I'm probably wrong.
"Willing to settle it via arbitration" is different than "willing to give it up", because there's about even odds that Mojang would end up with the trademark, not Bethesda. It's not Notch saying "we have no claim to it", it's saying "we both have equal claim to it".
There's also the problem that Bethesda's entire suit is based on "customers could be confused into thinking Scrolls is a Bethesda game". Which is untrue for a reason that hasn't been brought up here: most gamers don't think of Bethesda's games as "the Elder Scrolls games", they think of them as "Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and those other two". I've spoken to people who were honestly surprised when I told them Oblivion was the fourth game in the series. There's relatively low odds that anyone will mistake one game series for the other, since one series doesn't really use the trademark it's under (the titular "Elder Scrolls", to my memory, only appears in one quest in one game).
No. You are completely wrong on that - the law does not say anything about *needing* a trademark. In fact, the courts will probably look favorably on this attempt to settle out of court - showing a willingness to compromise is actually a bonus, not a strike against you.
There's only a few outcomes left, now, which will show who's in the right: 1) If Bethesda agrees, and both parties abide by the results, everyone saying this is a case of the legal department not being in touch with the rest of the company gets vindicated. Both companies end up looking like good guys, and everyone wins. 2) If Bethesda agrees, but the loser backs out of the deal, we know which one is the real scumbag. Bethesda might lose and press on the suit anyways (even though they just shot themselves in the foot by doing so - going back on arbitration is a big no-no), or Notch could lose and decide to keep the name. Either way, it ends up in court, and one side ends up looking like a five-star douchebag. 3) Bethesda refuses the challenge, but decides to give up on the suit "in the spirit of generosity". They end up looking very good, but also sort of schizo. 4) Bethesda refuses the challenge, but aim for an out-of-court settlement. This might even be just buying Mojang - I wouldn't be surprised if they secretly want to do this. Depending on the terms, which may be secret, they look either like thugs, slime, or genuinely nice guys who hired bad lawyers. 5) Bethesda refuses, and goes all the way to court. They end up looking sort of like dicks, especially if they then lose. I won't bet either way as to who would win - "Scrolls" is arguably too short to trademark, making both sides' claims invalid. Bethesda has more money, but Mojang is fighting under Swedish law, not American, giving them some advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you'd have to have a revolution in MRI technology in order to use it on any sort of mass scale. You'd have to lower the costs (current MRI machines of that caliber cost upwards of $1M) and make it much faster (older ones could take as long as 40 minutes, newer ones are still far too slow to compare in speed to metal detectors or backscatter machines).
I'd think it would be a polygraph replacement before it becomes a crime scanner. If someone asks you "where are the bodies buried", the first thing you're going to think of is... where the bodies are buried. The only problem might be that strapping someone down and shoving them into a dark, noisy, claustrophobic tube might count as torture under more strict interpretations of the law, but if waterboarding is OK, I don't see how MRIs will be banned.
"Existing but not able to do anything practical" is still a pretty big difference from "Could exist but nobody's built one yet". It's like the early airplanes - they existed, but they weren't exactly useful for anything besides proving that heavier-than-air aircraft could work.
Am I the only one who has difficulty thinking of quantum computers as things that actually exist and do calculations? It's like my brain has placed "quantum computer" firmly into the category "things that are theoretically possible but unable to be built with current technology", and refuses to change it, even to "things that exist in the lab but won't be commercially viable for decades outside classified government work".
Although they aren't 100% standardized, ASUS seems to be doing pretty well. They've got three chargers for their entire lineup - a 50W for netbooks, a 90W for most laptops, and a 150W for their high-power laptops. Which is a lot better than some laptop companies do (although I believe Apple manages one connector for all three of their laptop
I wonder if the Macbook Pro 17" compares. It won't on graphics (MBP has a 5750 or something), but the MBP has a nicer 1920x1200 screen... and quad core too, i think?
Current 17" Macbook Pros start with a quad-core, 2.2gHz processor. It's the same subfamily (Sandy Bridge i7) as the Blade's, so the numbers are comparable. So, with the exception of the few games that are singlethreaded, it will perform better. Graphically, the Macbook uses a Radeon 6750, which is about on par with the GeForce 555M based on the benchmarks I saw. It's weaker, but not by much.
The Macbook also has less RAM (4gb instead of 8), but at the same speed. Storage is weird - the default hard drive is bigger but slower, but they also have options for a faster AND bigger hard drive, or even a bigger SSD. It even has a bigger batter - 95 Wh instead of 60.
Wow, I never expected I would be recommending a Mac over a gaming PC for gaming purposes.
Getting it to work as just a mouse should be simple - doing drivers like that is easy.
The problem is taking advantage of the display portion. The default drivers will probably offer something similar to what my dumb trackpad does - tapping one corner will turn on a simple menu, letting you do common things like change the volume, pause/play a media player, or change the screen brightness. Maybe they'll have little applets, that do stuff like display CPU usage and temps, or maybe a music visualizer.
But as far as gaming, this will not take off naturally. You won't see many games doing anything with it, and most of those that do will just be duplicating HUD stuff. Just simple stuff like HP/MP displays, or a minimap, or something one guy can whip up in an afternoon. You'll probably see a lot of shared code with games that support the G15/G19 display, which ISN'T a touchscreen, so actual input is going to be rare.
Now, I'm actually in their target market - I generally game on a laptop, and I'm actually looking for a replacement (current one is ~3 years old, starting to run current games badly). But this one isn't good. Why?
1. Heat. There's barely any vents on this, and a LOT of hot gear on the inside. I wouldn't be surprised if this has actual problems functioning like it is.
2. Battery life. 60Wh sounds like a lot, but there's a TON of stuff trying to eat that battery. The CPU draws 25 watts, the GPU 35, 7200RPM hard drives tend to eat battery quickly, and I don't even want to think about how much power that big backlit screen draws. My laptop lasted about 2 hours with 40Wh, and it drew about half that much power. I'd put money on this thing lasting under an hour under a heavy gaming load.
3. Specs too low. The GPU is good, and the amount and speed of RAM is good, but the CPU is really lacking. Dual-core? Not good - for $3K, I'd expect quad- or even hexa-core. Sure, it's clocked well, but remember, half the time a laptop CPU is running at a reduced clock to save power.
4. Hard drive space. 320GB? My laptop from 3 years ago had that much, for half the price! There's no excuse not to have at least 500GB. Hell, put a Momentus XT in there - 500GB of hard drive, and a 4GB SSD in the same package. Or do it yourself - there's laptop-sized terabyte hard drives out there now, put one of those in beside a 16GB SSD and you'll still both impressive performance and capacity. And trust me - gamers need a lot of hard drive space. Some games I've played will suck up 20-40GB, and I haven't seen a non-indie release in years that was under 10GB. So that's AT MOST 30 games, possibly as low as 10. Not going to happen.
5. Gimmicky. The touchscreen/buttons that replaced the number pad are honestly just tacky. You'd need to get game devs to specifically support it in their games. If you had made it compatible with the G19 or G15 keyboard, you might have gotten somewhere, but at this point, it's a gimmick that won't get much dev support unless it sells REALLY well. It's not even positioned well - most games use the left half of the keyboard, where the WSAD is. Reaching over to the touchscreen would be like putting key macros on the number pad - slow, hard to hit accurately, and difficult to use. It should have been on the left of the keyboard, or maybe in that big empty space below it. On my current laptop (and most others), the trackpad is below the spacebar; I often use it with my thumb when gaming, mainly to turn faster in the tanks in BC2. You could move it to the bottom, and then have room for a proper number pad as well.
Well, when you need to update your charts every time a new airport opens, or closes, or adds a runway, I imagine it's a lot more cost-effective to make a software patch than it is to print out new chart pages.
Exactly. Besides, commercial shipping's quite likely to be via container ship, which is a much more efficient way than flying it.
And when you factor in the environmental cost of the paper (which needs replacement every so often for updates or repair), it start to look like a relatively decent idea, ecologically.
(Mostly commenting to undo a misclicked moderation, but there's my $0.02)
Exactly. If we want some armchair general's view on the battle, or a politicians view, we check CNN or BBC or even Wikinews. If we want a comedian's view, we watch Colbert. If we want a moron's view, there's Fox. If we want the tech angle, we've got /. They all start from the same core story, but each specializes in a particular set of details.
My bad - I was not aware of that. Normally public-judged awards aren't nearly as prestigious as the Hugo.
What? Outfits?
Seriously, though, Inception's probably the best movie I've seen in years. I would probably call it a masterpiece of cinema, if I was an elitist asshole who used such phrases.
Seriously, as much as I like that comic, it does not deserve to get it for the third year in a row. Especially since the award's only been around for three years.
To be honest, even the nominations are kind of repetitive. Every year, the latest Schlock Mercenary, Fable, and Girl Genius volume gets nominated (plus a few "mainstream" comics), and GG wins. For three years in a row. And, personally, the 2010 Schlock ("The Longshoreman of the Apocalypse") was way better than the 2010 Girl Genius ("Heirs of the Storm"), especially as science fiction.
I think the judges need to realize that a) they have some fanboy bias, and b) they need to correct for it.
If I had to pinpoint one comic as the point "everybody" started reading it, I'd point to 214 - The Problem with Wikipedia. Somewhere in that general vicinity is when xkcd really hit its stride, and popularity followed shortly after.
Sure. I mainly listen to video game soundtracks, so it may not be your thing, but I really enjoyed "Terra in Black" and "The Might of Baron", both remixes of Final Fantasy songs (VI and IV, respectively). That whole site's pretty good, actually - they got contracted to do the soundtrack for Super Street Fighter II: Turbo HD Remix, which was cool.
Although, I just checked, and it's not actually Creative Commons. The license is basically CC-BY-NC-ND, though, so it's still completely free to download and redistribute. Just some crossed neurons in my memory, I guess.
Uh, RTFC, dude. I covered that already.
And, as usual, everyone on this entire site is aware of that.
Let's do some math, based on my personal collection. I have 7,677 songs, only a small minority of which (~400) are Creative Commons or public domain. If I were to rent those from RIM, that would be... $770 per month. Even by RIAA standards, that's extortionate.
But, you say, I don't actually listen to all those songs. You're probably right. Let's trim out the ones I gave 1 or 2 star ratings (my entire collection is methodically tagged), the ones I only have because they came on an album with other songs, or even just to complete an artist's collection. That cuts things down to 6254 songs, or $630. Still way too high.
Again, you repeat, I probably don't listen to all of those in one month. In fact, so far this month I have listened to a mere 727 songs. Adjust for the length of the month, and that comes out to 1090 songs/month, or $110. Which is still too much for me to pay, but maybe someone will. Sucker born every minute and all that.
So let's say I only rent my very favorite songs, the one's I've given the full five-star rating. That's 70 songs (I'm very conservative with that rating), two of which are CC-licensed, and one more that is copyrighted but not available for sale. Still, that would be $10 a month, for my favorite songs and a few variations each month. Which isn't competitive with other streaming services, and isn't even really competitive with buying permanently from any popular store - those 70 songs would cost ~$70-100 to own forever, or a few month's worth of streaming.
What standard would you propose? What standard could cover a CPU that you find in everything from routers to car dashboards? ARM is meant to be adaptable to corner cases. How would you fence that without hindering development?
Once again, you misunderstand me. I'm not suggesting we make a standard for any possible ARM device. I'm suggesting we make a set of standards for PC-like ARM computers - tablets, smartphones, netbooks, maybe even desktops and servers. That much is possible - x86 is able to work passably well in each, and it has a rather outdated standard not designed for those things. If you designed the standard to fit ARM's strengths (low power consumption, low cost), you could come up with something that works just as well as existing (mutually incompatible) standards, but which vastly speeds the process of designing and porting code.
The process is broken because the two organizations are working at opposing ends. The USPTO is trying to clear out a (significant) backlog by approving pretty much everything, rationalizing that "the courts will clear out any bad patents". Meanwhile, the courts are thinking "you know, we really don't know much about science, we should probably step back and let the experts at the USPTO make the calls".
Naturally, that lead to a metric shitload of bad patents being granted and enforced. Which triggered far more patents to be filed for, making the whole thing pretty much pointless.
If the courts do start throwing out bad patents, though, the system starts working better. If it's a particularly moronic patent, it might even get thrown out during discovery, keeping court fees in the four or even three digit range. It won't make the system perfect, but it will make it less bad, which is a good thing.
Uh, x86 is everywhere. PCs. Supercomputers. Microcontrollers. Embedded systems (you can still buy i386 chips because a lot of embedded systems like traffic light controllers use them). There's even been a few game consoles using it (original XBox and the Wonderswan series). Quite a few of them don't follow the PC standard, and that's fine. But there should still be a standard for common uses - even just covering smartphones, tablets and netbooks would be a major improvement over the current chaos.
This. Precisely this. I have plenty of time to play long games, it's just that I have literally dozens of games I own but haven't played yet, and I have no problem with quitting a game because it isn't fun. Often, I don't even "decide" to stop playing, I just never get back to it and eventually delete it to make room for more games. I open up Steam, look at what I have to play, and decide I'll get more fun out of playing yet another hour of Battlefield 2 than I will playing a game I haven't finished.
Even "good" games have problems. I stopped playing Dragon Age because 1) I was on a quest with no idea where to go next, and 2) it kept locking me out of the DLC I payed for. I quit Crysis because of the long, boring alien levels. I got bored with Minecraft because I'd built pretty much everything worth building. The Last Remnant - the story was going nowhere, and (since it's unplayable with mouse/keyboard) digging out the controller every time I wanted to play was a chore.
Older games (that I haven't played before) are just as bad, so it's not at all a "modern games suck" scenario. I've pretty much quit the lauded Deus Ex on the first mission because the stealth isn't fun. Morrowind - movement is slow, combat might as well be turn-based for how boring it is. Thief - too much punishment for any mistake, which means the only way to play is EXTREMELY cautiously and slowly.
The point of this article is that 5 hours of high-quality game is far better than 50 hours of boredom. That means, fundamentally, that you have to put just as much effort into the game, and spend just as much money on making it. Maybe even more - getting a game from "good enough" to "good" takes a lot of manpower.
I recall hearing of one election where the winner recieved over 1000% of the vote (his competition also got an impossible amount). Don't remember which country, though. Think it was a South American "democracy" in the 70s, but I'm probably wrong.
"Willing to settle it via arbitration" is different than "willing to give it up", because there's about even odds that Mojang would end up with the trademark, not Bethesda. It's not Notch saying "we have no claim to it", it's saying "we both have equal claim to it".
There's also the problem that Bethesda's entire suit is based on "customers could be confused into thinking Scrolls is a Bethesda game". Which is untrue for a reason that hasn't been brought up here: most gamers don't think of Bethesda's games as "the Elder Scrolls games", they think of them as "Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim and those other two". I've spoken to people who were honestly surprised when I told them Oblivion was the fourth game in the series. There's relatively low odds that anyone will mistake one game series for the other, since one series doesn't really use the trademark it's under (the titular "Elder Scrolls", to my memory, only appears in one quest in one game).
No. You are completely wrong on that - the law does not say anything about *needing* a trademark. In fact, the courts will probably look favorably on this attempt to settle out of court - showing a willingness to compromise is actually a bonus, not a strike against you.
There's only a few outcomes left, now, which will show who's in the right:
1) If Bethesda agrees, and both parties abide by the results, everyone saying this is a case of the legal department not being in touch with the rest of the company gets vindicated. Both companies end up looking like good guys, and everyone wins.
2) If Bethesda agrees, but the loser backs out of the deal, we know which one is the real scumbag. Bethesda might lose and press on the suit anyways (even though they just shot themselves in the foot by doing so - going back on arbitration is a big no-no), or Notch could lose and decide to keep the name. Either way, it ends up in court, and one side ends up looking like a five-star douchebag.
3) Bethesda refuses the challenge, but decides to give up on the suit "in the spirit of generosity". They end up looking very good, but also sort of schizo.
4) Bethesda refuses the challenge, but aim for an out-of-court settlement. This might even be just buying Mojang - I wouldn't be surprised if they secretly want to do this. Depending on the terms, which may be secret, they look either like thugs, slime, or genuinely nice guys who hired bad lawyers.
5) Bethesda refuses, and goes all the way to court. They end up looking sort of like dicks, especially if they then lose. I won't bet either way as to who would win - "Scrolls" is arguably too short to trademark, making both sides' claims invalid. Bethesda has more money, but Mojang is fighting under Swedish law, not American, giving them some advantages.