1 - If the car hits someone. Who is responsible
2 - If the car hits another autonomous car who is at fault.
3 - Imagine the much more complex and costly process to sort out damage claims.
I've seen this brought up on/. before, but it's largely not a concern because there will no longer be "fault" as we think of it today. e.g. if two autonomous cars hit each other then your insurance company will just pay you and theirs' them. The exception will probably be if the crash occurred because you ignored the need to replace a faulty GPS, or similar, in which case your insurance pays the other party. The point is that things will likely become a fight between you and your insurer rather than between your insurer and the other party. Thus, claims may well be more simple. The complexity may occur, admittedly, if the fault is traced to something the manufacturer was responsible for, but that's true now as well.
If the autonomous car hits a non-autonomous then we'll probably see some hybrid of what happens today. Hitting a pedestrian or cyclist may be more complicated. Autonomous cars will almost certainly have to adopt the Russian model: having at least one camera on board to record potential accidents (again, making claims easier to deal with). If a cyclist breaks the highway rules and gets hit, then the accident is probably their fault. If an old lady who can't hear properly walks into the path of an autonomous car and gets hit (despite the car attempting to avoid a collision) then nobody is to blame and the costs might be split between your insurer and her health insurance or perhaps it's all down to her insurance. Again, however, incidents such as this happen today as well.
I've used a technique much the same as yours but I leave out the tapping and just open slowly. Seems to work for me. I never understood why tapping should help.
PLoS has had comments for a long time, and the result is - mostly no comments at all. I suspect the problem is that you're posting in your professional capacity, under your real name. That means you can really hurt your reputation with an off-hand comment; on the other hand, they count for nothing as far as your CV and employment prospects are concerned.
Posting a comment is really a losing proposition, with no upside (you can always contact the first author directly with questions) and potential downsides. So people, rationally, don't comment. Unless PubMed has figured out a way around it, I suspect this will be the end result this time around as well.
Quite. When you look at the way scientists behave in public you see that they're usually very cautious about criticising another's work. For example, questions following a talk at a meeting are usually very tame, even if the talk has glaring holes in it. It's karma in action: it's in everyone's interest to be nice in public because everyone gets up on the podium eventually and they want an easy ride when they're there. Also, the purpose of a talk at a meeting isn't to get grilled but to share data. Talks within an institute can get more rough if there's an ass in the audience whose feathers get ruffled. Similarly, people might be more forthright at a poster at a conference, where the interaction is more direct and fewer ears are listening in. Interactions by e-mail have, in my experience, been very diplomatic indeed.
There are plenty of shitty papers in my field that end up in the very top journals because the lead author won a Nobel and knows the editors, etc. Whilst it would feel great to see the opinions of the rest of the field nailed to the wall, nobody will benefit and it will only hurt the PhD student or postdoc who's first author.
In your first scenario, I am not even sure we would benefit in the driverspace. Good drivers in the tree would be wonderful, but in that case why not simply work on their client, why do they need a branded 'OS?'
Because they need to package it in order to market it to the masses. It's got to look slick, integrated, and cool. Sure, under the hood it's basically just going to be a specialised Linux distro with everything set up for gaming, but what's the other option? Give their users Ubuntu with Steam pre-installed? That sounds rather half-baked. Regardless of the packaging, if it's Linux under the hood and then it'll be needing Linux drivers. Hasn't NVIDIA already responded positively?
Changing language in Windows is not perfectly straightforward either. There are a lot of fiddly things that need changing after the fact.
I know what you mean--not everyone needs it--but honestly, switching keyboard input (not OS language) shouldn't be considered a corner case. Tens of millions of people need to do it. It's piss-easy in OS X and it's piss-easy in Windows (at least for pinyin, which is all I've seen). In fact, I too sometimes need it to switch between Greek and English. A while ago I wasted hours and hours trying to get this to work in XFCE (turned out it wasn't even supported on the older version I had). I know Linux is *way* better than it used to be in terms of usability for beginners, but there are still issues that need solving. Perhaps some of these are merely in the presentation, such as naming software in a sane way or better laying out the desktop config settings.
That's obviously not what I meant. A lot of games are going to be keyboard and mouse and a lot of people will be running it on a monitor, since screen resolution on "HD" TVs isn't as HD as a monitor. For those people, dropping back into a regular OS and typing away will be a very viable option. It's even an option on a TV for some tasks. e.g. Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, etc, bittorrent, whatever you want, without worrying about whether there's an app for it and if it'll be any good.
I'm guessing you haven't tried a Fresh install of any version of Linux lately.
Its no harder than windows. There is actually less tinkering required than with windows.
Especially for those distributions that have aimed their packaging at the new users.
Yes, the install is easy in most cases but what about the post-install experience? I like Linux and just got my SO back onto it following a Win7 fuck-up, but if I wasn't around she likely wouldn't have a system that functions as she needs it to. She's Chinese and wants Chinese input in Kubuntu. There is no obvious setting that adds pinyin as there is in, say, OS X. I had to install the ibus stuff then figure out by trial and error what the config was called as it's not part of the KDE settings (as far as I could see, but then again the KDE settings are an untuitive cluster fuck so perhaps it's there somewhere). All seemed good and I was happy to give her working pinyin after only 5 minutes of tinkering. It could well have taken her half a day to get where I did on her own. A little while later she logs out and logs back in to KDE: no Chinese input. Ah, the ibus stuff needs to be told to start on login. So I stick a one-line script in.kde/Autostart and that fixes that problem. Again, would she have figured that out quickly on her own? I really doubt it. A little while later a new problem: no Chinese input in Firefox. Huh? Oh, I see: must install ibus-gtk. No way she'd have figured that out. The next day she asked me what this "dolphin thing" is and why it keeps crashing. I don't know why it keeps crashing but I'm placed in the position of explaining why the "file manager" is called "dolphin." So it's awesome that Linux is easy to install but a new user either needs to be motivated by geekery or they need a support person for certain basic tasks.
The game industry has always been a chicken-or-the-egg problem with Linux: Games spur adoption, but adoption is abysmal without the games. I'm not quite sure how Steam figures they will work around this inherent problem.
By making a console, of course. They're not pitching this to developers as "let's bring AAA games to Linux". They're pitching it as "we're bringing our viable and proven content delivery system to the living room and lowering the cost of entry by ditching Windows. Oh, and we're minimising the financial risk by spreading it out: giving away the open-source OS to hardware manufacturers and letting them take care of the dirty details." Sounds more tempting that way, doesn't it?
I reckon the degree to which SteamOS "converts" Windows people to Linux will depend on whether SteamOS allows for general-purpose computing. Take the scenario that boxes running SteamOS are just games consoles. People will be able to use them for games but not much else, in which case they'll still keep their Windows PC or partition for writing letters to the bank, or what have you. In this scenario, Linux would benefit from driver improvements but won't see much increase in user base. On the other hand, if SteamOS allows you quit Big Picture and enter a fully functional and feature-complete desktop then people may start to switch from Windows. Why boot into Windows if you can write your bank letter on Steam OS whilst taking a break from HL3? With an increased user base and a ready to go "app store" in the form of Steam, we might see more productivity software (e.g. Photoshop) appear for Linux. If Steam allows people to make money writing Linux software then that's got to be a positive thing. I know the die-hard free software guys shudder at the thought, but let's face it: the reason Linux is struggling on the desktop is because few developers think they can make money on the platform.
. There has to be a verifiable source (as in, a random group of editors consider it 3rd party and verifiable and a reasonable source).
I can see why this is needed but sometimes the policy feels a little short-sighted. For starters, who said the BBS article (or any "from memory" article) is a "personal account". It could well be written in a scholarly, dispassionate, and informative way. If this is the case, surely it makes more sense to slap a "citation needed" notice on it rather than to flag it for removal. It's precisely this over-zealousness that turns people off. Ultimately, if someone wants their $foobar new article to appear then all they need to do is produce a convincing website then cite that in the article. What the WP really needs is a system by which a real expert is able to write original content without being hassled. So if I'm Herr Prof. Dr. BBS Door Games, then my qualifications should count for something. Right now, as far as I can tell, they don't.
I too have experienced assholery on the Wikipedia, but there are articles out there which need help and are unlikely to be controversial and so have a "guardian" associated with them. For example, 2-photon imaging is an important new(ish) biological technique, yet its article on the Wikipedia is rather short and doesn't reflect the importance of the technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_excitation_microscopy
So, it pays Apple to get people onto the same version of OS X, just so they can push store changes out and entice more developers to the platform.
Yes, that certainly makes sense. After all, it's been the successful working model on the iPhone and iPad.
I think I'll whack Mavericks onto my media centre Mini and see how it goes. Getting onto my laptop will cost me $20 because I'll have to upgrade TotalSpaces (unless there's a free version or Apple have produce a non-fucked version of multiple desktops).
Yeah, I get that, but the earlier upgrades were pretty cheap so it didn't feel like money was an object when it came to upgrading your OS. I could see they were doing what you say: provide a cheap, possibly loss-making, OS upgrade in order to boost the ecosystem as a whole. It's the fact that this one actually is free that made me pause.
I recall paying for my upgrades to Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, so if Mavericks is free then what's Apple getting out of this? Are they slipping in some iOSification of the desktop, or other bullshit like that? I've looked at Apple's pages on Mavericks and I can't see anything overtly dodgy, but also I don't believe there's such a thing as a free lunch...
Nintendo's products are not a good example of technically inferior stuff doing better in the market place. They're games consoles and what Nintendo does is produce games that play well and that people love. Technical whizz-bang only gets you so far; if the games suck the sales will be slower.
Price and outcomes are not always related. For example, a hospital that does many heart surgeries could be very good at them, and also very efficient, so they can do them more cheaply. Whereas another hospital that doesn't do many heart surgeries will need to charge more as a result, and also will have worse outcomes.
I wonder if that's true. Why will a hospital doing fewer heart surgeries have to charge more? Do you have a citation for that? If a place is doing heart surgeries then they're tooled up for it and ready to go. The difference is if they're doing a given procedure 50 times a year or 500 times a year. The more practice they have the better they are, but I don't see why doing it only 50 times a year would make them more expensive.
Hopefully Balmer's replacement will either backtrack on this and remove the Metro UI from the desktop or they'll just run Microsoft into the ground of irrelevancy. Either way works for me.
Hopefully, yes. For sure Metro has backfired, but their reasons for going that route are: 1) Be seen as innovators again. 2) Stem the (potential) flow of web/e-mail/cat-video users from Windows to tablets. Obviously (1) was a total miss-fire but Metro could have worked for (2). The problem, of course, is that they are perceived to have converted Windows to a cat-video OS without the option of leaving things as they were for more advanced users.
The other reason for Metro is integrate the "App" experience with the new Windows App Store. The App Store is potentially a good thing: one thing that Windows definitely can do with is a properly curated software centre. It could take away some of locating clean utilities, etc. Example: I recently had to re-install Win 7 on my other half's laptop following a slow-down and apparent dll corruption. I also installed a Linux partition and set it up then told her to deal with Windows herself and that everything (including MS security essentials) needed to be installed. I should have done it myself... The first thing she did was search for and install Dropbox. Problem is that it was a malicious copy (somehow Google placed the site high on search results) which not only installed a load of toolbars everywhere, but apparently also a password-harvesting trojan that masquerades as the lock-screen. Windows update failed and the system no longer boots. She's using Linux now because the Win partition is in need of another re-install.
No, we don't have to ask that question. We already have the answer. GTA V sold over eleven million copies in the first day of sales. It's grossed over a billion dollars. Only a complete fucking idiot would doubt that there's a market for good, high-quality AAA games.
Yes, the article is badly thought-through. It's also silly to flag the dropping sales of current gen consoles as a concern, given that they're nearing the end of their life cycle and most people who want one have bought one. However, it is fair to ask which way the industry is going to go next given that phones and tablets are sucking up a lot of game time. e.g. will smaller indie games on consoles and PCs take a hit? So we'll be left with only the AAA. That would be a pity.
... is sucking because the industry is obsessed with creating movies, not games.
This is a real issue, for sure (at least on Playstation and XBox). The Uncharted games, which are often hailed as being amongst the better titles for the PS3, only really work because the story is somewhat interesting and and they have a charm about them. The actual gameplay is nothing special and isn't challenging: in the third game it regularly tells you what buttons to press; the puzzles are painfully obvious even before the NPCs drop hints as to what to do (you can't turn off the hints and they're dropped almost immediately). Even more extreme is Beyond Two Souls (I played the demo) which really is like a movie where you have to press buttons at the right times in order find out what happens next. In the demo there seemed to be no real game play to speak of, which is a pity considering how good the graphics are for a PS3 title.
Bitching aside, there are good titles even on consoles. The indie studios are churning them out and there are creative platformers. It's just that a lot of the big-name titles on consoles are over-rated. Of course the situation is better on PC, where there are more strategy games and some quality FPS titles (which work better on a PC anyway).
Boggs is an artist who makes accurate, but one-sided, copies of banknotes and then uses them to purchase things on the grounds that what he's actually doing is trading art for a service or product. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs Rather similar to making a perfect clone of a copyrighted game.
Slashdot Mirror
1 - If the car hits someone. Who is responsible 2 - If the car hits another autonomous car who is at fault. 3 - Imagine the much more complex and costly process to sort out damage claims.
I've seen this brought up on /. before, but it's largely not a concern because there will no longer be "fault" as we think of it today. e.g. if two autonomous cars hit each other then your insurance company will just pay you and theirs' them. The exception will probably be if the crash occurred because you ignored the need to replace a faulty GPS, or similar, in which case your insurance pays the other party. The point is that things will likely become a fight between you and your insurer rather than between your insurer and the other party. Thus, claims may well be more simple. The complexity may occur, admittedly, if the fault is traced to something the manufacturer was responsible for, but that's true now as well.
If the autonomous car hits a non-autonomous then we'll probably see some hybrid of what happens today. Hitting a pedestrian or cyclist may be more complicated. Autonomous cars will almost certainly have to adopt the Russian model: having at least one camera on board to record potential accidents (again, making claims easier to deal with). If a cyclist breaks the highway rules and gets hit, then the accident is probably their fault. If an old lady who can't hear properly walks into the path of an autonomous car and gets hit (despite the car attempting to avoid a collision) then nobody is to blame and the costs might be split between your insurer and her health insurance or perhaps it's all down to her insurance. Again, however, incidents such as this happen today as well.
I've used a technique much the same as yours but I leave out the tapping and just open slowly. Seems to work for me. I never understood why tapping should help.
Why not just release the app so that people that want it can install it on the system they are already using?
You mean like this? https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_under_Linux#Native_Steam_on_Linux If they're doing that, then it seems unlikely that they're planning to implement some unspecified "lock-in." Why would they? The software is already protected via Steam, and that's what matters to publishers.
PLoS has had comments for a long time, and the result is - mostly no comments at all. I suspect the problem is that you're posting in your professional capacity, under your real name. That means you can really hurt your reputation with an off-hand comment; on the other hand, they count for nothing as far as your CV and employment prospects are concerned.
Posting a comment is really a losing proposition, with no upside (you can always contact the first author directly with questions) and potential downsides. So people, rationally, don't comment. Unless PubMed has figured out a way around it, I suspect this will be the end result this time around as well.
Quite. When you look at the way scientists behave in public you see that they're usually very cautious about criticising another's work. For example, questions following a talk at a meeting are usually very tame, even if the talk has glaring holes in it. It's karma in action: it's in everyone's interest to be nice in public because everyone gets up on the podium eventually and they want an easy ride when they're there. Also, the purpose of a talk at a meeting isn't to get grilled but to share data. Talks within an institute can get more rough if there's an ass in the audience whose feathers get ruffled. Similarly, people might be more forthright at a poster at a conference, where the interaction is more direct and fewer ears are listening in. Interactions by e-mail have, in my experience, been very diplomatic indeed.
There are plenty of shitty papers in my field that end up in the very top journals because the lead author won a Nobel and knows the editors, etc. Whilst it would feel great to see the opinions of the rest of the field nailed to the wall, nobody will benefit and it will only hurt the PhD student or postdoc who's first author.
In your first scenario, I am not even sure we would benefit in the driverspace. Good drivers in the tree would be wonderful, but in that case why not simply work on their client, why do they need a branded 'OS?'
Because they need to package it in order to market it to the masses. It's got to look slick, integrated, and cool. Sure, under the hood it's basically just going to be a specialised Linux distro with everything set up for gaming, but what's the other option? Give their users Ubuntu with Steam pre-installed? That sounds rather half-baked. Regardless of the packaging, if it's Linux under the hood and then it'll be needing Linux drivers. Hasn't NVIDIA already responded positively?
Its far from normal. Its a corner case.
Changing language in Windows is not perfectly straightforward either. There are a lot of fiddly things that need changing after the fact.
I know what you mean--not everyone needs it--but honestly, switching keyboard input (not OS language) shouldn't be considered a corner case. Tens of millions of people need to do it. It's piss-easy in OS X and it's piss-easy in Windows (at least for pinyin, which is all I've seen). In fact, I too sometimes need it to switch between Greek and English. A while ago I wasted hours and hours trying to get this to work in XFCE (turned out it wasn't even supported on the older version I had). I know Linux is *way* better than it used to be in terms of usability for beginners, but there are still issues that need solving. Perhaps some of these are merely in the presentation, such as naming software in a sane way or better laying out the desktop config settings.
Had you let her do the original install in Chinese, you would not be in this mess. Seems YOU are the problem here.
She wants to switch input languages on the fly not have a Chinese OS.
That's obviously not what I meant. A lot of games are going to be keyboard and mouse and a lot of people will be running it on a monitor, since screen resolution on "HD" TVs isn't as HD as a monitor. For those people, dropping back into a regular OS and typing away will be a very viable option. It's even an option on a TV for some tasks. e.g. Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, etc, bittorrent, whatever you want, without worrying about whether there's an app for it and if it'll be any good.
I'm guessing you haven't tried a Fresh install of any version of Linux lately. Its no harder than windows. There is actually less tinkering required than with windows. Especially for those distributions that have aimed their packaging at the new users.
Yes, the install is easy in most cases but what about the post-install experience? I like Linux and just got my SO back onto it following a Win7 fuck-up, but if I wasn't around she likely wouldn't have a system that functions as she needs it to. She's Chinese and wants Chinese input in Kubuntu. There is no obvious setting that adds pinyin as there is in, say, OS X. I had to install the ibus stuff then figure out by trial and error what the config was called as it's not part of the KDE settings (as far as I could see, but then again the KDE settings are an untuitive cluster fuck so perhaps it's there somewhere). All seemed good and I was happy to give her working pinyin after only 5 minutes of tinkering. It could well have taken her half a day to get where I did on her own. A little while later she logs out and logs back in to KDE: no Chinese input. Ah, the ibus stuff needs to be told to start on login. So I stick a one-line script in .kde/Autostart and that fixes that problem. Again, would she have figured that out quickly on her own? I really doubt it. A little while later a new problem: no Chinese input in Firefox. Huh? Oh, I see: must install ibus-gtk. No way she'd have figured that out. The next day she asked me what this "dolphin thing" is and why it keeps crashing. I don't know why it keeps crashing but I'm placed in the position of explaining why the "file manager" is called "dolphin." So it's awesome that Linux is easy to install but a new user either needs to be motivated by geekery or they need a support person for certain basic tasks.
The game industry has always been a chicken-or-the-egg problem with Linux: Games spur adoption, but adoption is abysmal without the games. I'm not quite sure how Steam figures they will work around this inherent problem.
By making a console, of course. They're not pitching this to developers as "let's bring AAA games to Linux". They're pitching it as "we're bringing our viable and proven content delivery system to the living room and lowering the cost of entry by ditching Windows. Oh, and we're minimising the financial risk by spreading it out: giving away the open-source OS to hardware manufacturers and letting them take care of the dirty details." Sounds more tempting that way, doesn't it?
I reckon the degree to which SteamOS "converts" Windows people to Linux will depend on whether SteamOS allows for general-purpose computing. Take the scenario that boxes running SteamOS are just games consoles. People will be able to use them for games but not much else, in which case they'll still keep their Windows PC or partition for writing letters to the bank, or what have you. In this scenario, Linux would benefit from driver improvements but won't see much increase in user base. On the other hand, if SteamOS allows you quit Big Picture and enter a fully functional and feature-complete desktop then people may start to switch from Windows. Why boot into Windows if you can write your bank letter on Steam OS whilst taking a break from HL3? With an increased user base and a ready to go "app store" in the form of Steam, we might see more productivity software (e.g. Photoshop) appear for Linux. If Steam allows people to make money writing Linux software then that's got to be a positive thing. I know the die-hard free software guys shudder at the thought, but let's face it: the reason Linux is struggling on the desktop is because few developers think they can make money on the platform.
. There has to be a verifiable source (as in, a random group of editors consider it 3rd party and verifiable and a reasonable source).
I can see why this is needed but sometimes the policy feels a little short-sighted. For starters, who said the BBS article (or any "from memory" article) is a "personal account". It could well be written in a scholarly, dispassionate, and informative way. If this is the case, surely it makes more sense to slap a "citation needed" notice on it rather than to flag it for removal. It's precisely this over-zealousness that turns people off. Ultimately, if someone wants their $foobar new article to appear then all they need to do is produce a convincing website then cite that in the article. What the WP really needs is a system by which a real expert is able to write original content without being hassled. So if I'm Herr Prof. Dr. BBS Door Games, then my qualifications should count for something. Right now, as far as I can tell, they don't.
I too have experienced assholery on the Wikipedia, but there are articles out there which need help and are unlikely to be controversial and so have a "guardian" associated with them. For example, 2-photon imaging is an important new(ish) biological technique, yet its article on the Wikipedia is rather short and doesn't reflect the importance of the technique: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_excitation_microscopy
So, it pays Apple to get people onto the same version of OS X, just so they can push store changes out and entice more developers to the platform.
Yes, that certainly makes sense. After all, it's been the successful working model on the iPhone and iPad. I think I'll whack Mavericks onto my media centre Mini and see how it goes. Getting onto my laptop will cost me $20 because I'll have to upgrade TotalSpaces (unless there's a free version or Apple have produce a non-fucked version of multiple desktops).
Yeah, I get that, but the earlier upgrades were pretty cheap so it didn't feel like money was an object when it came to upgrading your OS. I could see they were doing what you say: provide a cheap, possibly loss-making, OS upgrade in order to boost the ecosystem as a whole. It's the fact that this one actually is free that made me pause.
I recall paying for my upgrades to Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion, so if Mavericks is free then what's Apple getting out of this? Are they slipping in some iOSification of the desktop, or other bullshit like that? I've looked at Apple's pages on Mavericks and I can't see anything overtly dodgy, but also I don't believe there's such a thing as a free lunch...
Turdy Tablet
Nintendo's products are not a good example of technically inferior stuff doing better in the market place. They're games consoles and what Nintendo does is produce games that play well and that people love. Technical whizz-bang only gets you so far; if the games suck the sales will be slower.
Price and outcomes are not always related. For example, a hospital that does many heart surgeries could be very good at them, and also very efficient, so they can do them more cheaply. Whereas another hospital that doesn't do many heart surgeries will need to charge more as a result, and also will have worse outcomes.
I wonder if that's true. Why will a hospital doing fewer heart surgeries have to charge more? Do you have a citation for that? If a place is doing heart surgeries then they're tooled up for it and ready to go. The difference is if they're doing a given procedure 50 times a year or 500 times a year. The more practice they have the better they are, but I don't see why doing it only 50 times a year would make them more expensive.
Hopefully Balmer's replacement will either backtrack on this and remove the Metro UI from the desktop or they'll just run Microsoft into the ground of irrelevancy. Either way works for me.
Hopefully, yes. For sure Metro has backfired, but their reasons for going that route are: 1) Be seen as innovators again. 2) Stem the (potential) flow of web/e-mail/cat-video users from Windows to tablets. Obviously (1) was a total miss-fire but Metro could have worked for (2). The problem, of course, is that they are perceived to have converted Windows to a cat-video OS without the option of leaving things as they were for more advanced users.
The other reason for Metro is integrate the "App" experience with the new Windows App Store. The App Store is potentially a good thing: one thing that Windows definitely can do with is a properly curated software centre. It could take away some of locating clean utilities, etc. Example: I recently had to re-install Win 7 on my other half's laptop following a slow-down and apparent dll corruption. I also installed a Linux partition and set it up then told her to deal with Windows herself and that everything (including MS security essentials) needed to be installed. I should have done it myself... The first thing she did was search for and install Dropbox. Problem is that it was a malicious copy (somehow Google placed the site high on search results) which not only installed a load of toolbars everywhere, but apparently also a password-harvesting trojan that masquerades as the lock-screen. Windows update failed and the system no longer boots. She's using Linux now because the Win partition is in need of another re-install.
No, we don't have to ask that question. We already have the answer. GTA V sold over eleven million copies in the first day of sales. It's grossed over a billion dollars. Only a complete fucking idiot would doubt that there's a market for good, high-quality AAA games.
Yes, the article is badly thought-through. It's also silly to flag the dropping sales of current gen consoles as a concern, given that they're nearing the end of their life cycle and most people who want one have bought one. However, it is fair to ask which way the industry is going to go next given that phones and tablets are sucking up a lot of game time. e.g. will smaller indie games on consoles and PCs take a hit? So we'll be left with only the AAA. That would be a pity.
... is sucking because the industry is obsessed with creating movies, not games.
This is a real issue, for sure (at least on Playstation and XBox). The Uncharted games, which are often hailed as being amongst the better titles for the PS3, only really work because the story is somewhat interesting and and they have a charm about them. The actual gameplay is nothing special and isn't challenging: in the third game it regularly tells you what buttons to press; the puzzles are painfully obvious even before the NPCs drop hints as to what to do (you can't turn off the hints and they're dropped almost immediately). Even more extreme is Beyond Two Souls (I played the demo) which really is like a movie where you have to press buttons at the right times in order find out what happens next. In the demo there seemed to be no real game play to speak of, which is a pity considering how good the graphics are for a PS3 title.
Bitching aside, there are good titles even on consoles. The indie studios are churning them out and there are creative platformers. It's just that a lot of the big-name titles on consoles are over-rated. Of course the situation is better on PC, where there are more strategy games and some quality FPS titles (which work better on a PC anyway).
However, I don't think I was the first to think this all up. In any case, Science didn't accept my letter proposing it.
That's probably because these things are much easier to think up than to do.
Boggs is an artist who makes accurate, but one-sided, copies of banknotes and then uses them to purchase things on the grounds that what he's actually doing is trading art for a service or product. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._S._G._Boggs Rather similar to making a perfect clone of a copyrighted game.
It's Samuel Barber: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KylMqxLzNGo