You're missing the third factor. The consumer will now have a predictor of which conditions they are likely to develop, and can adjust their purchasing based on this.
If the only people buying health insurance are those genetically prediposed towards problems, the insurance companies may be in trouble.
Of course, so are those poor sods who DON'T buy insurance, then develop something due to environmental conditions, or just plain dumb luck...
Quit being an old man and address the point rather than attacking the perceived person. LOTR, IMO is dull, both in book and film form. Crap all happens very slowly, the storyline is contrived and very simple, and the vast majority of characters are simplistic in the extreme. If you like it, so be it. Don't start hurling insults when someone criticizes it, especially not ones that have nothing to do with the criticism. This is coming from someone who has read probably a couple of thousand books, and no I don't want your pacifying drugs.
Well, let's just say that you opinion of both the book and the movie differs from most of the rest of humanity, and as such isn't really relevant to the rest of us. So why the heck would we be interested in it?
A couple thousand books?!? Assuming a book every two weeks, thats 80 YEARS of reading! And you're telling the other guy to quit being an old man?!?!
There is still room for God in Science. If Science is about trying to understand and describe Nature and God created Nature, then Science is about understanding God. There need not be a contradiction.
No. This is the most dangerous assertion I see put forward (by either side of the evolution debate).
There is no room for God in science for the same reason there is no room for Accounting in science, for Literature in Science, or for Hockey in Science. The two are unrelated and should not be taught in the same classroom.
Science is not about "trying to understand and describe nature". That's philosophy.
Science is about using a very specific toolset to try and understand and describe nature. The toolset is the scientific method. This toolset is incompatible with any discussion involving God simply because claims involving God are typically unfalsifiable. Falsifiability is a requirement for any claim made using the scientific method.
It is of course perfectly acceptable for a scientist to be religious in his personal life, but when heading to work, questions of religion should be left at the door.
As an analogy (apparently those are mandatory on Slashdot now), it's perfectly acceptable for an accountant to be a hunter in his spare time, but he really shouldn't show up at the office with a gun...
If you think that there are ANY sources without an agenda then I pity you
I hate to dispel your "glass half-empty, and the full part laced with poison" world-view, but there are a few researchers out there whose agenda is to produce accurate and unbiased results.
I pity anyone whose faith in mankind is so bleak that they believe otherwise.
Why all the interest in the second-place winner...especially given it can't possibly do what the designer claims without something like a 1 tonne weight...
The first prize winner seems MUCH more interesting: An open-source design for an energy meter.
Would the world be a better place if we had multiple competing HTML formats, and you had to pay $300 for a browser that supported both?
What a stupid strawman argument...but it's slashdot, what do you expect?
The proper analogy would be...would the world be a better place if we had multiple web presentation formats? Like say, maybe...Flash, HTML, DHTML, Ajax, Silverlight, etc?
Also, HTML is "controlled" by an open NON-profit organization. For some reason, I trust the W3C far more than I do the BluRay consortium.
With more format options, different features would be available on each format, which would drive innovation. As it is, the Blu-Ray consortium will have NO reason to ever improve the format....
I suppose we should get rid of streaming HD over the internet too. Or storing it on your hard drive. All HD content should be forced to be stored on BluRay exclusively...after all, competing formats is a bad thing, isn't it?
Having both formats available would be a GOOD thing...if the movie studio exec's weren't so blinded by short-term profit as to accept bribes from various manufacturers to go exclusive.
No...the word for what they did is "duplication". Teleportation means the actual transport of item A to position B.
The original proton was not moved. It is irrelevant that an idential proton was created...that is NOT what teleportation means. Teleportation refers to a change in position.
From Dictionary.com: Teleportation: hypothetical method of transportation in which matter or information is dematerialized, usually instantaneously, at one point and recreated at another.
IIRC, the chess tournament in question did not "ban players with hearing aids", it merely required them to take out their hearing aids during the match.
There was a quite reasonable fear that players could be using a receiver & obtaining outside help during the match.
never underestimate the number of parents buying Ratatouille for their kids.
As a parent, that's one of the least convincing reasons to go with HD discs.
The minute I start buying kids movies on HD, I lose the ability to play those movies: - on my laptop when on holiday - in the car - ripped onto my media centre - on the upstairs SD TV
My kids don't watch a lot of TV...but the places they do watch tend to be non-standard. They don't go down to the theatre room & plan to spend a couple of hours watching a movie. That's a mom & dad thing.
Watching TV for them is more typically on the way to grandma's house, or for 20 minutes in the family room so mom can get dinner ready. Unless I invest in a whole pile of new technology, blu-ray reduces the options for my kids. Do portable Blu-Ray players even exist yet?
And to make matters worse...my kids won't even care. Oh sure, if I sit them down and force them to compare they might notice a difference, but they won't whine about having to watch the DVD version over the HD version.
For that matter, neither will I. I'm gonna pass on this format war until I have no choice whatsoever (i.e. blockbuster doesn't carry standard DVD's).
It's still possible that BOTH formats will go the way of the laser disc.
£40 a year?!?! Wow, you Brit's are getting shafted!
Ebay commonly has 1 year XBOX Live membership cards (North American) on for ~$40USD + shipping.
I bought one recently...total came to $47 USD. Or approx £24.
I was hesitant about Xbox Live at first having been an avid PC gamer, but now having tried it, I find it a reasonable value at $4/month
The matchmaking, integrated voice chat, achievements & friends management all work very very well.
Even this past week where there were apparently "issues", the worst problem I had was finding people playing specific maps in Orange Box. Oh, and a couple of my achievements weren't recorded.
It wasn't anything like when "issues" have occurred on PC MMORPG's though (Yes, EQ2, WoW, I'm looking at you).
No surprise here in the Slashdot reaction. Rather than looking at this review objectively, and asking whether there are some issues with the gOS PC and whether improvements could be made to make Linux more palatable to grandma and Joe six-pack, the Slashdot group mostly jumps all over the article with stupid comments about how the reviewer is being paid off my Microsoft, and how "the gOS sold out, so it MUST be good!"
There seems to be this weird attitude in some of the pro-Linux crowd that everyone who isn't using Linux must be either stupid or incompetent, and that people should line up to buy any Linux product that is offered, regardless of how good.
The review did make some reasonable points that indicate why this is not a reasonable PC for grandma. And why just using an old PC with Ubuntu is a better option.
A google search that doesn't use the default browser? No indication when programs are launching? No flash install, and no obvious way of doing so? Difficulty changing the montior resolution? These and other issues make this a very questionable PC to be offered at Wal-Mart. It isn't like this PC is being offered by some store catering to geeks...this is freakin' WAL-MART! They must expect that a large portion of their market is going to be non-technical and the issues listed are fairly serious to a non-technical user.
Rather than taking criticism as an opportunity to evaluate why Linux hasn't penetrated the market to any great extent, the typical reaction seems to criticism seems to be "I don't believe it".
But in the words of a famous Jedi Master: "That is why you fail."
So, in your opinion they should have released a browser that ONLY (or by default) worked in "standards mode", and in the process broken thousands of websites written to work properly for IE7.
Only a FireFox/Opera shill could possibly think that breaking existing websites would be a good thing.
If you want to play, could you at least RTFA? The server is slow due to slashdotting, but not unreachable...
From the article:
Another moderator suggested creating a hidden forum and moving all of the incriminating content there, and Parker gave her the go-ahead.
Yep, that sounds like normal moderation.
Admins also replaced the names of copyrighted works posted in the forums with references like "[some movie 1]"; some of those edits were made months after the original post.
More typical forum moderation.
TorrentSpy also failed to provide the MPAA with full IP addresses of its users, testifying under oath that they were not available. Conversations on the forums between the moderators paint a different picture, however. A March 2006 conversation between a couple of moderators showed that users could be banned by IP address, and moderators testified that full IP addresses were logged until April 2007.
Nope, no IP logs here.
I agree that the court order to start logging IP's was inappropriate, but in this case TorrentSpy was actively hiding logs that already existed. They screwed up, big time...
But then again, what do you expect of a site that promotes breaking the law?
Accurate? How can you describe the posting as accurate? He doesn't describe one concrete bit of HID that OS-X does better than Ubuntu...he just claims it's better & more consistent. It's an opinion post, not a fact post. Accuracy has no meaning (unless you are commenting that he is accurately giving his opinion...)
Logical? Again, it's an opinion post. He doesn't make an argument. There is no logic here. The post just baldly states that OS-X is better & more consistent than Ubuntu. No reasoning, no examples, no deduction.
I have no idea how the post got modded so high...oh wait, apple apologists jumped on the first reasonably well-written post they encountered & bumped it up the chain.
Then wouldn't the sensible solution be for someone to offer a simple online data backup facility, rather than moving the whole friggin' app online?
Online sucks balls for any serious work. Right now internet is just not ubiquitous enough or reliable enough to guarantee a connection wherever I want to do work. Once internet is as available and reliable as electricity, and once online apps are a simple and intuitive to use as desktop apps, and once internet speeds are similar to desktop speeds, then maybe I'd consider using an online office alternative.
But the obvious solution in this case (that I'm certain has been pointed out in other posts that I'm too lazy to read) is as follows:
Require a minimum number of points to be purchased in any one transaction. I think this would make consumers more happy & actually INCREASE the amount of money Microsoft makes
Suppose the minimum purchase is 1000 points and that most stuff costs around 800 points.
Then if I have 100 points in my account, I can buy 1500 points and get TWO games, rather than just spend 1000 and let the other 300 rot.
It's not like the actual content is costing them anything. It's just a dumb system.
Well too bad for you, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray are all compressed LOSSY. It's just a small enough loss that you don't really notice.
Lossless transfer would require insanely large disks...likely in the Terrabyte range.
I've seen HD and DVD on an HD television. I certainly wouldn't call it "night and day". It noticible, sure, but IMHO only if I'm watching a movie specifically for the effects. Problem is, if I'm watching a movie specifically for effects, it probably sucks as a movie.
I think the big problem is that (a) crappy movies are still crappy, regardless of how good they look. (b) good movies don't gain much from HD.
Well, to start with, they are my spare CPU cycles. I'll spend them (or not) however I see fit, thank you very much.
Otherwise, why not same the same about spare anything? Why don't we SELL our PC's and dedicate that cash & electricity saved to: .
Second, this isn't an either-or question. Some of us can spend CPU's on cancer research, others on SETI, others can just turn their damn CPU's off to save electricity.
And why the fixation on AIDS & cancer? I think this planet has a heck of a lot worse problems than either AIDS or cancer to worry about. Neither of those are going to wipe out our species.
Global warming, lack of renewable energy, an insane foreign policy, or a major pandemic all have a much larger chance of wiping us out
So, are you actually a parent? From your post it looks like you don't actually have children. And you seem to be having a bad logic day.
First off, you take someones post on Slashdot, and conclude "You ain't got a clue how to parent". Wow. You must know this person intimately, cause otherwise making that kind of offensive statement based on a Slashdot post just makes you an asshole.
Next, you claim: "It is a give and take and the secret is that there are no books you can follow for this. No simple one liners.". But apparently your diatribe is going to give us the secret.
Believe it or not, many of those books give some of the same advice: It's give and take. Be a parent, not a friend. There are no simple solutions. You may want to try reading one of them someday. Most parenting books are actually pretty good, with lot's of helpful advice.
Next up: "if you need the help of a machine to deal with a child, you are a miserable failure". Yet you never address the points brought up in the GP post. So I assume you would not have a locked gun cabinet in a house with guns? After all, that's using a machine to deal with a child.
Better not use the clock to check if you child is past curfew. Don't lock up weapons in a gun cabinet. Leave your PC unlocked with no password. Give them your credit card, bank PIN and a set of your car keys. Otherwise apparently you are a miserable failure as a parent.
Obviously some of these are extreme examples, but what exactly do you suggest a parent do after they have trusted a child to limit their gaming time appropriately, and they continue to violate that trust? Believe it or not, some children will do so regardless of how well they were brought up.
I agree that children have to be given the opportunity to make mistakes. They also have to understand that their are consequences to mistakes, and to learn to live with those consequences. But children don't have to be trusted with everything in order to make that point. You can trust them with curfew, but automatically limit their gaming time and still get the same point across.
Finally, not everything has to be about "being the perfect parent", and it's utterly ridiculous and offensive to make ANY comment about someone's ability as a parent based on whether they want to use this feature.
The point that should be taken home is that if you put your brain to work, you can build a system that's cheaper, more powerful, and plays better games than the consoles out there right now. This is the first time this has really happened: consoles from a generation or two ago were always rather cheap.
This is true, but the isssue I have (and the reason I've finally jumped to consoles for my primary game system), is that the PC is constantly a moving target.
A year from now, this $500 "upgrade" will likely be obsolete. And an the upgrade at that point will quite possible cost more than $500 due to the inability to reuse IDE drives, power supply, DVD drive, etc...
But my Xbox 360 from a 18 months ago (no RROD for me...yet), still plays all the latest 360 games just fine. And it will for the lifetime of the console...cause that's the target that developers will develop to.
IMHO, a "bleeding edge minus one" PC is the most economical you can buy, but it still needs to be upgraded every 2-3 years in order to play the latest games at a reasonable setting.
I'd put the total cost of owning/upgrading a gaming PC at around $300/year, whereas the TCO of a console at somewhere around $150/year.
Slashdot Mirror
You're missing the third factor. The consumer will now have a predictor of which conditions they are likely to develop, and can adjust their purchasing based on this.
If the only people buying health insurance are those genetically prediposed towards problems, the insurance companies may be in trouble.
Of course, so are those poor sods who DON'T buy insurance, then develop something due to environmental conditions, or just plain dumb luck...
Well, let's just say that you opinion of both the book and the movie differs from most of the rest of humanity, and as such isn't really relevant to the rest of us. So why the heck would we be interested in it?
A couple thousand books?!? Assuming a book every two weeks, thats 80 YEARS of reading! And you're telling the other guy to quit being an old man?!?!
No. This is the most dangerous assertion I see put forward (by either side of the evolution debate).
There is no room for God in science for the same reason there is no room for Accounting in science, for Literature in Science, or for Hockey in Science. The two are unrelated and should not be taught in the same classroom.
Science is not about "trying to understand and describe nature". That's philosophy.
Science is about using a very specific toolset to try and understand and describe nature. The toolset is the scientific method. This toolset is incompatible with any discussion involving God simply because claims involving God are typically unfalsifiable. Falsifiability is a requirement for any claim made using the scientific method.
It is of course perfectly acceptable for a scientist to be religious in his personal life, but when heading to work, questions of religion should be left at the door.
As an analogy (apparently those are mandatory on Slashdot now), it's perfectly acceptable for an accountant to be a hunter in his spare time, but he really shouldn't show up at the office with a gun...
Yes, the sunlight thing is an issue, but I think the following is a bit of a bigger challenge:
During the lunar day, the surface temperature averages 107C, and during the lunar night, it averages -153C. (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon#Surface_Temperature)
I hate to dispel your "glass half-empty, and the full part laced with poison" world-view, but there are a few researchers out there whose agenda is to produce accurate and unbiased results.
I pity anyone whose faith in mankind is so bleak that they believe otherwise.
The first prize winner seems MUCH more interesting: An open-source design for an energy meter.
See here
Basically, he's gonna provide the design specs to build your own kill-a-watt
So, it's:
And no interest whatsoever on Slashdot? WTF?
And exactly how does having a screw generate more energy?
The path the weight takes to the ground is irrelevant.
An object weighing X lifted to a height of Y meters generates has a certain amount of potential energy, regardless of the path taken to the ground.
What a stupid strawman argument...but it's slashdot, what do you expect?
The proper analogy would be...would the world be a better place if we had multiple web presentation formats? Like say, maybe...Flash, HTML, DHTML, Ajax, Silverlight, etc?
Also, HTML is "controlled" by an open NON-profit organization. For some reason, I trust the W3C far more than I do the BluRay consortium.
With more format options, different features would be available on each format, which would drive innovation. As it is, the Blu-Ray consortium will have NO reason to ever improve the format....
I suppose we should get rid of streaming HD over the internet too. Or storing it on your hard drive. All HD content should be forced to be stored on BluRay exclusively...after all, competing formats is a bad thing, isn't it?
Having both formats available would be a GOOD thing...if the movie studio exec's weren't so blinded by short-term profit as to accept bribes from various manufacturers to go exclusive.
No...the word for what they did is "duplication". Teleportation means the actual transport of item A to position B.
The original proton was not moved. It is irrelevant that an idential proton was created...that is NOT what teleportation means. Teleportation refers to a change in position.
From Dictionary.com:
Teleportation: hypothetical method of transportation in which matter or information is dematerialized, usually instantaneously, at one point and recreated at another.
IIRC, the chess tournament in question did not "ban players with hearing aids", it merely required them to take out their hearing aids during the match.
There was a quite reasonable fear that players could be using a receiver & obtaining outside help during the match.
Simple....anyone who runs a server...
As a parent, that's one of the least convincing reasons to go with HD discs.
The minute I start buying kids movies on HD, I lose the ability to play those movies:
- on my laptop when on holiday
- in the car
- ripped onto my media centre
- on the upstairs SD TV
My kids don't watch a lot of TV...but the places they do watch tend to be non-standard. They don't go down to the theatre room & plan to spend a couple of hours watching a movie. That's a mom & dad thing.
Watching TV for them is more typically on the way to grandma's house, or for 20 minutes in the family room so mom can get dinner ready. Unless I invest in a whole pile of new technology, blu-ray reduces the options for my kids. Do portable Blu-Ray players even exist yet?
And to make matters worse...my kids won't even care. Oh sure, if I sit them down and force them to compare they might notice a difference, but they won't whine about having to watch the DVD version over the HD version.
For that matter, neither will I. I'm gonna pass on this format war until I have no choice whatsoever (i.e. blockbuster doesn't carry standard DVD's).
It's still possible that BOTH formats will go the way of the laser disc.
So this judge is to be disbarred based on the fact that they didn't correct ONE statement made by a lawyer.
Have YOU ever made a mistake in your job? Ever?
If so, then based on your logic, you should not only be fired, but prevented from ever working in your profession again.
£40 a year?!?! Wow, you Brit's are getting shafted!
Ebay commonly has 1 year XBOX Live membership cards (North American) on for ~$40USD + shipping.
I bought one recently...total came to $47 USD. Or approx £24.
I was hesitant about Xbox Live at first having been an avid PC gamer, but now having tried it, I find it a reasonable value at $4/month
The matchmaking, integrated voice chat, achievements & friends management all work very very well.
Even this past week where there were apparently "issues", the worst problem I had was finding people playing specific maps in Orange Box. Oh, and a couple of my achievements weren't recorded.
It wasn't anything like when "issues" have occurred on PC MMORPG's though (Yes, EQ2, WoW, I'm looking at you).
No surprise here in the Slashdot reaction. Rather than looking at this review objectively, and asking whether there are some issues with the gOS PC and whether improvements could be made to make Linux more palatable to grandma and Joe six-pack, the Slashdot group mostly jumps all over the article with stupid comments about how the reviewer is being paid off my Microsoft, and how "the gOS sold out, so it MUST be good!"
There seems to be this weird attitude in some of the pro-Linux crowd that everyone who isn't using Linux must be either stupid or incompetent, and that people should line up to buy any Linux product that is offered, regardless of how good.
The review did make some reasonable points that indicate why this is not a reasonable PC for grandma. And why just using an old PC with Ubuntu is a better option.
A google search that doesn't use the default browser? No indication when programs are launching? No flash install, and no obvious way of doing so? Difficulty changing the montior resolution? These and other issues make this a very questionable PC to be offered at Wal-Mart. It isn't like this PC is being offered by some store catering to geeks...this is freakin' WAL-MART! They must expect that a large portion of their market is going to be non-technical and the issues listed are fairly serious to a non-technical user.
Rather than taking criticism as an opportunity to evaluate why Linux hasn't penetrated the market to any great extent, the typical reaction seems to criticism seems to be "I don't believe it".
But in the words of a famous Jedi Master: "That is why you fail."
So, in your opinion they should have released a browser that ONLY (or by default) worked in "standards mode", and in the process broken thousands of websites written to work properly for IE7.
Only a FireFox/Opera shill could possibly think that breaking existing websites would be a good thing.
From the article:Yep, that sounds like normal moderation.More typical forum moderation.Nope, no IP logs here.
I agree that the court order to start logging IP's was inappropriate, but in this case TorrentSpy was actively hiding logs that already existed. They screwed up, big time...
But then again, what do you expect of a site that promotes breaking the law?
Full reverse! Chewie, lock in the auxiliary power.
Lucid. Yep, I'll give you that one.
Accurate? How can you describe the posting as accurate? He doesn't describe one concrete bit of HID that OS-X does better than Ubuntu...he just claims it's better & more consistent. It's an opinion post, not a fact post. Accuracy has no meaning (unless you are commenting that he is accurately giving his opinion...)
Logical? Again, it's an opinion post. He doesn't make an argument. There is no logic here. The post just baldly states that OS-X is better & more consistent than Ubuntu. No reasoning, no examples, no deduction.
I have no idea how the post got modded so high...oh wait, apple apologists jumped on the first reasonably well-written post they encountered & bumped it up the chain.
So that's the big advantage? Backups?
Then wouldn't the sensible solution be for someone to offer a simple online data backup facility, rather than moving the whole friggin' app online?
Online sucks balls for any serious work. Right now internet is just not ubiquitous enough or reliable enough to guarantee a connection wherever I want to do work. Once internet is as available and reliable as electricity, and once online apps are a simple and intuitive to use as desktop apps, and once internet speeds are similar to desktop speeds, then maybe I'd consider using an online office alternative.
But the obvious solution in this case (that I'm certain has been pointed out in other posts that I'm too lazy to read) is as follows:
Require a minimum number of points to be purchased in any one transaction. I think this would make consumers more happy & actually INCREASE the amount of money Microsoft makes
Suppose the minimum purchase is 1000 points and that most stuff costs around 800 points.
Then if I have 100 points in my account, I can buy 1500 points and get TWO games, rather than just spend 1000 and let the other 300 rot.
It's not like the actual content is costing them anything. It's just a dumb system.
Well too bad for you, DVD, HD-DVD, and Blu-Ray are all compressed LOSSY. It's just a small enough loss that you don't really notice.
Lossless transfer would require insanely large disks...likely in the Terrabyte range.
I've seen HD and DVD on an HD television. I certainly wouldn't call it "night and day". It noticible, sure, but IMHO only if I'm watching a movie specifically for the effects. Problem is, if I'm watching a movie specifically for effects, it probably sucks as a movie.
I think the big problem is that (a) crappy movies are still crappy, regardless of how good they look. (b) good movies don't gain much from HD.
Well, to start with, they are my spare CPU cycles. I'll spend them (or not) however I see fit, thank you very much.
Otherwise, why not same the same about spare anything? Why don't we SELL our PC's and dedicate that cash & electricity saved to: .
Second, this isn't an either-or question. Some of us can spend CPU's on cancer research, others on SETI, others can just turn their damn CPU's off to save electricity.
And why the fixation on AIDS & cancer? I think this planet has a heck of a lot worse problems than either AIDS or cancer to worry about. Neither of those are going to wipe out our species.
Global warming, lack of renewable energy, an insane foreign policy, or a major pandemic all have a much larger chance of wiping us out
So, are you actually a parent? From your post it looks like you don't actually have children. And you seem to be having a bad logic day.
First off, you take someones post on Slashdot, and conclude "You ain't got a clue how to parent". Wow. You must know this person intimately, cause otherwise making that kind of offensive statement based on a Slashdot post just makes you an asshole.
Next, you claim: "It is a give and take and the secret is that there are no books you can follow for this. No simple one liners.".
But apparently your diatribe is going to give us the secret.
Believe it or not, many of those books give some of the same advice: It's give and take. Be a parent, not a friend. There are no simple solutions. You may want to try reading one of them someday. Most parenting books are actually pretty good, with lot's of helpful advice.
Next up: "if you need the help of a machine to deal with a child, you are a miserable failure". Yet you never address the points brought up in the GP post. So I assume you would not have a locked gun cabinet in a house with guns? After all, that's using a machine to deal with a child.
Better not use the clock to check if you child is past curfew. Don't lock up weapons in a gun cabinet. Leave your PC unlocked with no password. Give them your credit card, bank PIN and a set of your car keys. Otherwise apparently you are a miserable failure as a parent.
Obviously some of these are extreme examples, but what exactly do you suggest a parent do after they have trusted a child to limit their gaming time appropriately, and they continue to violate that trust? Believe it or not, some children will do so regardless of how well they were brought up.
I agree that children have to be given the opportunity to make mistakes. They also have to understand that their are consequences to mistakes, and to learn to live with those consequences. But children don't have to be trusted with everything in order to make that point. You can trust them with curfew, but automatically limit their gaming time and still get the same point across.
Finally, not everything has to be about "being the perfect parent", and it's utterly ridiculous and offensive to make ANY comment about someone's ability as a parent based on whether they want to use this feature.
This is true, but the isssue I have (and the reason I've finally jumped to consoles for my primary game system), is that the PC is constantly a moving target.
A year from now, this $500 "upgrade" will likely be obsolete. And an the upgrade at that point will quite possible cost more than $500 due to the inability to reuse IDE drives, power supply, DVD drive, etc...
But my Xbox 360 from a 18 months ago (no RROD for me...yet), still plays all the latest 360 games just fine. And it will for the lifetime of the console...cause that's the target that developers will develop to.
IMHO, a "bleeding edge minus one" PC is the most economical you can buy, but it still needs to be upgraded every 2-3 years in order to play the latest games at a reasonable setting.
I'd put the total cost of owning/upgrading a gaming PC at around $300/year, whereas the TCO of a console at somewhere around $150/year.