I have not played "BFG Edition," so perhaps this is the version where they entirely remade it into something actually scary by dumping everything from the original and remaking it from the ground up. Otherwise, the only "terrifying" it was was terrifyingly bad.
I mean by this point "space marines go to hell" isn't exactly surprising or a spoiler like it was with the original, so most of the game comes down to flashing lights and generic monsters predictably jumping out of things. This isn't scary. This doesn't even make you jump in your seat, unless maybe it's your first game of this variety.
(Even the original wasn't really scary per se, but it did build the "wtf" factor and provided a lot more interesting levels and atmosphere IMO.. but they weren't constrained nearly as much by "realism".)
But if you think this game is scary, you should play more actually scary games. Silent Hill 2, Fatal Frame, Lone Survivor, or plenty of others. Games that actually have you worried when you get up to open a door. Games that don't "scare" you by having things jump out of the closet, but scare you when something isn't there, that have you questioning what actually just happened.
I can understand not liking it, but there are a lot worse games out there.
This may be technically true, but Doom 3 isn't even good enough to waste your time playing it when there are far better games out there. A waste of a waste of time!
And, failing that, if they just got some reasonable and non-discriminatory patent licensing terms, there's a few million dollars lying about that they could have a chunk of just by NOT suing.
A few million dollars is nothing.. a fraction, even less. I'm guessing these guys would be happy to spend a few million dollars stifling any competition and clutching on to their dying monopoly for just a bit longer.
Agreed.. the Vita has breathed new life into a number of games that were painful to play at best... and they have just about all the useful second-stick mappings now. There are still a few odd/impossible things (button+stick) that won't be possible to fix, but hey, 3rd Birthday is a real shooter now, and Monster Hunter no longer requires The Claw to play!
I know this is a poor analogy because of all the variables, but to emulate PS2 you need a very hefty PC with a real GPU. Something far beyond the power of a PS3.
Utterly irrelevant. A PS2 uses an unusual proprietary architecture and games tend to take advantage of very low-level architecture-specific tweaks. A PSP is a pretty standard MIPS R4000 and a fairly crappy but fairly standard GPU. With high-level emulation, dyamic recompilation, etc, it shouldn't be hard to emulate even on modest hardware. With today's GHz+ CPUs in phones, brute forcing may even be a reasonable option.
[...] lets you play PSP Games with a touchscreen which was something PSP owners had wanted for years.
I've never heard anyone want this. Is this anything like all the people who wanted a non-UMD version of the PSP, and eventually got it in the PSPgo, which promptly fell flat on its face due to lack of actual interest?
Of course, I can always imagine an emulator being popular, if it plays copies of games (regardless of whether you consider this OK or not).
Same thing. The point is that they'd colonized the galaxy (one of the faulty assumptions), and we'd see them, or evidence thereof, and we don't, for any of the given reasons.
Otherwise you'll have to come up with a really good reason why we wouldn't be asking or questioning their clear existence despite a lack of any observation or evidence.
The Fermi Paradox assumes quite a few things which may not be true, such as interstellar travel being practical or desirable, life and intelligence being similar to our own, the fact we could actually spot it with our current techology (or that it would desire to be seen), and that artifacts of past civilizations would actually last for the millions of years between said civilization and our own.
We are barely able to start seeing extrasolar planets. The idea that "if it's out there, we would have seen it" seems a bit silly for any number of reasons. For instance, noticing, here on earth, the tiny blip in time a civilization that might use radio waves seems unlikely. People who subscribe to the technological singularity might assume that any civilization with high enough technology would be incomprehensible to us; think of us trying to tune into a radio show (or look for smoke signals) when they're using the internet. I think the article above lists a few more.
Star Trek may well not be possible as you say; that doesn't mean something better isn't.
Apple chose to use the "nuclear option," and have no-one to blame but themselves. These things are typically settled reasonably... compare patent stacks, few pennies go to the one with the taller stack. But no, Apple has shown they don't play nice. Everyone with any sense will be hostile toward Apple. Prisoner's Dilemma, basically, except everyone knows ahead of time that Apple defects.
Apple can't win this way in the long run. They may have a big pile of cash, but if everything they want to do suddenly gets nickel-and-dimed, they'll find that only goes so far.
The controller raises a lot of interesting possibilities
Just like the Wii! And the GameCube! And the N64! Yet, somehow, none of these "interesting possbilities" ever seem to pan out into a large library of games.
But I haven't been hearing a lot of buzz about it, considering it's supposed to be launching next month. I know it's supposed to be as powerful as the PS3/360.
Wow, it's just as powerful as the consoles I've had for the last 5 years. And it's going to cost more than they have in a long time. And guess what! Instead of one of those puny 500GB PS3-with-a-game bundles, we're going to get a whole 32GB flash, and a piece of crap. Yawn. They could try a lot harder.
But I haven't heard much about the debut game lineup.
Then you haven't been paying attention. It's going to have some games at launch: a lot of non-exclusives with a few bizarre exclusives (Bayonetta 2?) and yet more rehashing of old Nintendo franchises.
Frankly I think Nintendo, for all their faults (most notably, their admittedly piss-poor online support), kind of gets the short-shrift in the gaming community. Their systems may not have the cutting edge CPU's and GPU's, but they do what they do pretty well.
This is utter BS and I'll tell you why Nintendo is getting well-deserved apathy: games. The NES and SNES had amazing lineups of games that are still playable today. The N64 started a long line of bad decisions for Nintendo: tiny cartridges; it had Mario64 and Zelda64 that were genre-defining games, but little else that stands up. The GameCube had slightly more, but due to tiny disc size and bizarrely-different controller, the lineup wasn't huge. Still, I'd take it over the Wii, which has nothing defining, lots of rehashing (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, few of them any good), and the occasionally good third-party title Nintendo refuses to import (Xenoblade).
It's not (just) because Nintendo panned the community by repeatedly insulting the "hard-core" constituents, it's a continuing downward spiral of crap gaming library. Granted, this hasn't been the last-last generation where I packed six shelves with just the good PS2 games, but the PS3 has a solid three shelves, and the 360 has a good two shelves, and I don't give a crap where any of the Wii games are.
Now I should be excited about the Wii U, which is just now playing catchup with last gen and getting lots of ports? Sony is already pushing to have the Vita and PS3 interact to kill whatever "interesting possbilities" the WiiU wants to hold exclusive. Love or hate Sony, they can build a platform that has a game library worth playing. If Microsoft does something similar with smartphones or the Surface, say bye to any interest in the Wii U from anyone.
The problem, obviously, is that they need extra capacity for peak hours, plus bandwidth costs, plus tons of data centers to minimize latency, all of which results in massive overhead.
That's the point. You can't get away with paying for minimum capacity, so you have to always pay for maximum capacity. I've heard they cut corners and not all games got premium hardware, but that just brings down the average price. What happens when the majority of your player base wants to play the latest new thing?
Someone with existing cloud services might be able to pull this off, as well, if they charged hourly for usage and bandwidth. At least then they could repurpose the capacity when it's not in use. That said the pricing might not be so attractive, and without lots of specialized hardware it's probably not possible to achieve sufficiently-low latency.
They may have even discovered that gamers don't tolerate an internet connection level of input delay in their games!
Eh. I tried OnLive to see how well they accomplished what they did. Latency wasn't the main concern, but then I have a reasonable connection (~25Mbps) and may be geographically near one of their data centers. The main problems are more the following:
The rendering quality was often crap; this may be a function of the encoding, but it doesn't matter. Washed-out colors, blurry video, and heavy artifacting don't make a great experience.
Price model. This was too good to be true. Pay for the game or like $10/mo for their PlayPack stuff. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that they can provide sufficient rendering at $700 a box on average for any given game. They need one rendering unit for every player. They need to pay for bandwidth and energy to run all these units, plus people to maintain them. They need to stay upgraded, generously, every year or two, to play the latest stuff. That's quite a bit of money to support a single user paying $120/year.
Casual/hardcore disconnect. Is this for casual gamers who don't want to pay for a gaming PC? Or hardcore gamers who want to play all the latest stuff? A casual gamer can likely find plenty to play on their phone or the web; a hardcore gamer isn't going to be satisfied with the limitations. There may be a niche, but it doesn't seem big enough to support the model.
In the end this always seems to fail at a financial level: if it's cheap enough per-player that a $10/mo fee can cover licensing, hardware, and utility, then it's probably cheap enough the user is going to have his or her own device (e.g., a smartphone). If not, then it's not going to work anyway.
And it's not a matter of volume. Nintendo, Sony, and MS have volume on their consoles, and they still sell for $200+, often at a loss, and the only maintenance cost is warranty support. Making up for this on licensing isn't an option for OnLive, since they don't make any games. There are no exclusives.
The only way this might work (financially, at least) is a subsidized hardware console with a reasonable contracted subscription fee, and first-party game support as well as third-party exclusives. Gamestop might be trying this, but it's unclear if they're actually funding games or just providing a similar service.
McAfee says that the malware family makes up more than 60 percent of Android samples the company processes.
End of article:
If you want to significantly reduce your chance of getting malware such as this one, only install apps from the official Google Play store. That being said, malware has snuck into the store before, so it can happen again.
So in essence this article is a nearly-worthless scare piece. Unless you're downloading "pirated" versions of (presumably) commercial apps from a shady source, this article isn't relevant. But then, it's a McAfee article, so surprise.
I think my biggest complaint is the same as Borderlands 2.. no crafting to break up the slay-collect-sell rinse-repeat. I guess if you like slay-collect-sell that much, this game is perfect for you. If you want to set your own goals for finding rare components and crafting powerful gear, you're SOL, but that's not everyone's cup of tea.
On the other hand, TorchED is promised, and moddable games are good, which is what sold me. Hopefully someone can add to the gameplay!
Yeah it's almost like someone decided to put a funny pattern on some paper, cut it up into small rectangles, and declare it worth something. Can you imagine people accepting something like that?! A completely artificially-restricted supply of controlled by one organization! What next, they arrest people who try and print their own!?
In seriousness, there is no value beyond consensus. Gold is not any more intrinsically valuable than diamonds (or fiat currency!); people simply agree to trade a certain amount of one thing (paper, bank balance, etc) for it. This is why people pay for BitCoins (and other virtual goods), why currency fluctuates, and in essence, how the economy works.
(The malleability of gold and other arguments of function are entirely irrelevant; people always agree on value for some reason, from "I have too much money and I felt like it," to "I need it for my research." Reason is a constant, and one reason is not inherently better or more valid than another.)
Well, he could act. And then make the press release. To me, that's the better course of action. It would prove he means business.
You're missing the point. Action is undesirable. Threat of action means that people scratch their heads and wonder what it means, what the fallout could be, if their political careers might be impacted. Possibly unrealistic worst cases are made. If not, an ultimatum ("next friday") is delivered. Stirs things up, gets people wondering and talking (like this!).
Action, on the other hand, leads only to the question "is there a major outcry, and how long will it last?" Most people don't notice unless they can't access the site. Doesn't actually accomplish much, unless outcry can be sustained for a considerable period of time, which would require a lot more than "we're going SSL-only"... like UK-wide wikipedia blackout. And that hurts more than it helps.
That's because it's wrong. This statement is not valid. It may be true or false.
From the GP:
Now consider there are tens of millions of people who haven't even had an introduction to Critical Thinking and they are influenced by advertising, politcal speeches,much of the garbage on talk radio and those evil stinkers who talk young men and women into committing atrocities.
"Critical Thinking" is the security theater equivalent of thinking. Call it "Thinking Theater" if you will: it makes a show of thought while being utterly uninformed and mindless. The grandparent is a perfect example. I suggest a rigorous study of logic (both formal and informal) so you can actually analyze statements, and rhetoric, so you can be aware of the communication techniques you will encounter.
now this guy could have constructed the bottom part without a 3d printer too.
While as you said copyrights will cause things to heat up, I think the real issue will be when 3D printers progress to the point they can do relatively cheap "mass" production. Not sure how long it takes to print one of these now, but imagine being able to hit "print" and make 1000 copies overnight. You could build this by hand now, but you couldn't easily build thousands with next to no effort.
Will they do what they do with currency and block printing certain shapes? Introduce errors? Seems a lot harder since you can already build your own 3D printer, and homebrew printers will only get better.
There are a gazillion "Android" phones out there... how do I know if I want 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 3.0?, what do the different processor names mean?, can I actually compare "GHz" to get a reasonable idea of what is best (no)?, what apps will or won't run on this?
Clearly a troll, but common FUD nonetheless---and, as per the parent, Apple turning a weakness into a (perceived) strength). However, either:
You know enough to care, in which case you want the latest. You read a few reviews (there really aren't that many top phones every year) or ask someone you know, and find the clear winner. You know enough to compare simple numbers, such as versions.
You don't care, you just want one of these shiny smart android things you saw in a commercial. You ask the person at the store. He or she recommends one, you buy it. You're happy.
Despite "choice is bad" propaganda, which is surprisingly successful, especially among those who should know better, actually making a good choice is not difficult for anyone.
I mean think about it -- the Wii shipped for $200ish in Japan and had far more custom hardware than this will have. That was 6 years ago.
The Wii shipped with essentially souped-up 5-year-old hardware and still cost $212 (JP) to $249 (US). The custom stuff should have been taken out of the equation by manufacturing volume. Just because the hardware exists doesn't obviate development and testing time. And they still have custom cases, controllers, etc. Nintendo shipped millions at launch. They have tens of thousands. Low volume is going to raise the cost, too.
Right, this is one of the things I mean by "tempered". "Free-to-play" and "microtransactions" are buzzwords; they've proven to be successful business models in some cases, so this seems reasonable. The question is, do they already have titles lined up for launch? Contracts for their f2p store? With a 10-month launch window, they should have devkits out now. Most existing android games assume a touchscreen. You can't just drop those on a device with controller and screen.
At a glance it seems legit, but on rereading, I had to wonder this myself:
Promise of "killer" opening price-point of $99.
Promise of "every game free-to-play".
Use of Android and other buzzwords.
Multitude of unrelated screenshots of unrelated, unsupported, non-Android games.
Promise of "easy rooting" (why would you need to root something if root was manufacturer-supported?)
Lots of pseudo-appeal to the "non-mainstream".
Release in 10 months with <$1mil budget.
>10,000+ consoles already promised at or below price-point.
This has a lot of "too-good-to-be-true" tempered by some things to make it seem reasonable. But with the promises made, I'm not sure. "Estimated Delivery: March 2013" is awfully soon to manufacture a console with presumably no prior hardware development experience. Do they have all their contracts already lined up? Is their software already developed? Just look how long it took to get the OpenPandora out.
All of this starts making you wonder "wait, is this really legit?" I certainly can't say it's not, but it seems either naive or too good to be true.
Just ignore any number your phone doesn't recognize. Better, have software ignore it for you. If it's important, they can leave a message (and potentially be whitelisted).
If your complaint is "but I have a landline," the solution is even simpler: disconnect it from a phone.:-P
Because I've been using RiscOS on X for awhile and see no reason to change. It's not "gnome" (though it uses gtk). It's interactively very fast even on slow hardware. It's functionally very fast; apply all sorts of filters, selections, and commands to the current window, or bring up a shell in the window's cwd by typing "x". It's an augmentation of the terminal, not a UI for casual users. It's extremely screen-space efficient, since I can do everything and keep all the menubars and toolbars off, and the icons small. It offers a nice direct-manipulation-oriented interface (i.e., comprehensive DND).
Even if KDE offers all of this, it would have to offer quite a bit more in addition to make it worth switching.
Suppression of free political speech and intimidation by an elected official is a "minor case"? If so, it shouldn't be.
That said, I have to wonder if this wasn't a corruption investigation by the FBI in the first place, though you'd think if it was, they'd jump at the opportunity to "meet".
Slashdot Mirror
I have not played "BFG Edition," so perhaps this is the version where they entirely remade it into something actually scary by dumping everything from the original and remaking it from the ground up. Otherwise, the only "terrifying" it was was terrifyingly bad.
I mean by this point "space marines go to hell" isn't exactly surprising or a spoiler like it was with the original, so most of the game comes down to flashing lights and generic monsters predictably jumping out of things. This isn't scary. This doesn't even make you jump in your seat, unless maybe it's your first game of this variety.
(Even the original wasn't really scary per se, but it did build the "wtf" factor and provided a lot more interesting levels and atmosphere IMO .. but they weren't constrained nearly as much by "realism".)
But if you think this game is scary, you should play more actually scary games. Silent Hill 2, Fatal Frame, Lone Survivor, or plenty of others. Games that actually have you worried when you get up to open a door. Games that don't "scare" you by having things jump out of the closet, but scare you when something isn't there, that have you questioning what actually just happened.
This may be technically true, but Doom 3 isn't even good enough to waste your time playing it when there are far better games out there. A waste of a waste of time!
A few million dollars is nothing .. a fraction, even less. I'm guessing these guys would be happy to spend a few million dollars stifling any competition and clutching on to their dying monopoly for just a bit longer.
Agreed.. the Vita has breathed new life into a number of games that were painful to play at best... and they have just about all the useful second-stick mappings now. There are still a few odd/impossible things (button+stick) that won't be possible to fix, but hey, 3rd Birthday is a real shooter now, and Monster Hunter no longer requires The Claw to play!
Utterly irrelevant. A PS2 uses an unusual proprietary architecture and games tend to take advantage of very low-level architecture-specific tweaks. A PSP is a pretty standard MIPS R4000 and a fairly crappy but fairly standard GPU. With high-level emulation, dyamic recompilation, etc, it shouldn't be hard to emulate even on modest hardware. With today's GHz+ CPUs in phones, brute forcing may even be a reasonable option.
I've never heard anyone want this. Is this anything like all the people who wanted a non-UMD version of the PSP, and eventually got it in the PSPgo, which promptly fell flat on its face due to lack of actual interest?
Of course, I can always imagine an emulator being popular, if it plays copies of games (regardless of whether you consider this OK or not).
Same thing. The point is that they'd colonized the galaxy (one of the faulty assumptions), and we'd see them, or evidence thereof, and we don't, for any of the given reasons.
Otherwise you'll have to come up with a really good reason why we wouldn't be asking or questioning their clear existence despite a lack of any observation or evidence.
The Fermi Paradox assumes quite a few things which may not be true, such as interstellar travel being practical or desirable, life and intelligence being similar to our own, the fact we could actually spot it with our current techology (or that it would desire to be seen), and that artifacts of past civilizations would actually last for the millions of years between said civilization and our own.
We are barely able to start seeing extrasolar planets. The idea that "if it's out there, we would have seen it" seems a bit silly for any number of reasons. For instance, noticing, here on earth, the tiny blip in time a civilization that might use radio waves seems unlikely. People who subscribe to the technological singularity might assume that any civilization with high enough technology would be incomprehensible to us; think of us trying to tune into a radio show (or look for smoke signals) when they're using the internet. I think the article above lists a few more.
Star Trek may well not be possible as you say; that doesn't mean something better isn't.
Apple chose to use the "nuclear option," and have no-one to blame but themselves. These things are typically settled reasonably ... compare patent stacks, few pennies go to the one with the taller stack. But no, Apple has shown they don't play nice. Everyone with any sense will be hostile toward Apple. Prisoner's Dilemma, basically, except everyone knows ahead of time that Apple defects.
Apple can't win this way in the long run. They may have a big pile of cash, but if everything they want to do suddenly gets nickel-and-dimed, they'll find that only goes so far.
Just like the Wii! And the GameCube! And the N64! Yet, somehow, none of these "interesting possbilities" ever seem to pan out into a large library of games.
Wow, it's just as powerful as the consoles I've had for the last 5 years. And it's going to cost more than they have in a long time. And guess what! Instead of one of those puny 500GB PS3-with-a-game bundles, we're going to get a whole 32GB flash, and a piece of crap. Yawn. They could try a lot harder.
Then you haven't been paying attention. It's going to have some games at launch: a lot of non-exclusives with a few bizarre exclusives (Bayonetta 2?) and yet more rehashing of old Nintendo franchises.
This is utter BS and I'll tell you why Nintendo is getting well-deserved apathy: games. The NES and SNES had amazing lineups of games that are still playable today. The N64 started a long line of bad decisions for Nintendo: tiny cartridges; it had Mario64 and Zelda64 that were genre-defining games, but little else that stands up. The GameCube had slightly more, but due to tiny disc size and bizarrely-different controller, the lineup wasn't huge. Still, I'd take it over the Wii, which has nothing defining, lots of rehashing (Mario, Zelda, Metroid, few of them any good), and the occasionally good third-party title Nintendo refuses to import (Xenoblade).
It's not (just) because Nintendo panned the community by repeatedly insulting the "hard-core" constituents, it's a continuing downward spiral of crap gaming library. Granted, this hasn't been the last-last generation where I packed six shelves with just the good PS2 games, but the PS3 has a solid three shelves, and the 360 has a good two shelves, and I don't give a crap where any of the Wii games are.
Now I should be excited about the Wii U, which is just now playing catchup with last gen and getting lots of ports? Sony is already pushing to have the Vita and PS3 interact to kill whatever "interesting possbilities" the WiiU wants to hold exclusive. Love or hate Sony, they can build a platform that has a game library worth playing. If Microsoft does something similar with smartphones or the Surface, say bye to any interest in the Wii U from anyone.
"Possessive," but then, Muphry's Law.
That's the point. You can't get away with paying for minimum capacity, so you have to always pay for maximum capacity. I've heard they cut corners and not all games got premium hardware, but that just brings down the average price. What happens when the majority of your player base wants to play the latest new thing?
Someone with existing cloud services might be able to pull this off, as well, if they charged hourly for usage and bandwidth. At least then they could repurpose the capacity when it's not in use. That said the pricing might not be so attractive, and without lots of specialized hardware it's probably not possible to achieve sufficiently-low latency.
Eh. I tried OnLive to see how well they accomplished what they did. Latency wasn't the main concern, but then I have a reasonable connection (~25Mbps) and may be geographically near one of their data centers. The main problems are more the following:
In the end this always seems to fail at a financial level: if it's cheap enough per-player that a $10/mo fee can cover licensing, hardware, and utility, then it's probably cheap enough the user is going to have his or her own device (e.g., a smartphone). If not, then it's not going to work anyway.
And it's not a matter of volume. Nintendo, Sony, and MS have volume on their consoles, and they still sell for $200+, often at a loss, and the only maintenance cost is warranty support. Making up for this on licensing isn't an option for OnLive, since they don't make any games. There are no exclusives.
The only way this might work (financially, at least) is a subsidized hardware console with a reasonable contracted subscription fee, and first-party game support as well as third-party exclusives. Gamestop might be trying this, but it's unclear if they're actually funding games or just providing a similar service.
Top of article:
End of article:
So in essence this article is a nearly-worthless scare piece. Unless you're downloading "pirated" versions of (presumably) commercial apps from a shady source, this article isn't relevant. But then, it's a McAfee article, so surprise.
I think my biggest complaint is the same as Borderlands 2 .. no crafting to break up the slay-collect-sell rinse-repeat. I guess if you like slay-collect-sell that much, this game is perfect for you. If you want to set your own goals for finding rare components and crafting powerful gear, you're SOL, but that's not everyone's cup of tea.
On the other hand, TorchED is promised, and moddable games are good, which is what sold me. Hopefully someone can add to the gameplay!
Yeah it's almost like someone decided to put a funny pattern on some paper, cut it up into small rectangles, and declare it worth something. Can you imagine people accepting something like that?! A completely artificially-restricted supply of controlled by one organization! What next, they arrest people who try and print their own!?
In seriousness, there is no value beyond consensus. Gold is not any more intrinsically valuable than diamonds (or fiat currency!); people simply agree to trade a certain amount of one thing (paper, bank balance, etc) for it. This is why people pay for BitCoins (and other virtual goods), why currency fluctuates, and in essence, how the economy works.
(The malleability of gold and other arguments of function are entirely irrelevant; people always agree on value for some reason, from "I have too much money and I felt like it," to "I need it for my research." Reason is a constant, and one reason is not inherently better or more valid than another.)
You're missing the point. Action is undesirable. Threat of action means that people scratch their heads and wonder what it means, what the fallout could be, if their political careers might be impacted. Possibly unrealistic worst cases are made. If not, an ultimatum ("next friday") is delivered. Stirs things up, gets people wondering and talking (like this!).
Action, on the other hand, leads only to the question "is there a major outcry, and how long will it last?" Most people don't notice unless they can't access the site. Doesn't actually accomplish much, unless outcry can be sustained for a considerable period of time, which would require a lot more than "we're going SSL-only" ... like UK-wide wikipedia blackout. And that hurts more than it helps.
not necessarily true (therefore false)
I'm not clear on this bit...
That's because it's wrong. This statement is not valid. It may be true or false.
From the GP:
Now consider there are tens of millions of people who haven't even had an introduction to Critical Thinking and they are influenced by advertising, politcal speeches,much of the garbage on talk radio and those evil stinkers who talk young men and women into committing atrocities.
"Critical Thinking" is the security theater equivalent of thinking. Call it "Thinking Theater" if you will: it makes a show of thought while being utterly uninformed and mindless. The grandparent is a perfect example. I suggest a rigorous study of logic (both formal and informal) so you can actually analyze statements, and rhetoric, so you can be aware of the communication techniques you will encounter.
While as you said copyrights will cause things to heat up, I think the real issue will be when 3D printers progress to the point they can do relatively cheap "mass" production. Not sure how long it takes to print one of these now, but imagine being able to hit "print" and make 1000 copies overnight. You could build this by hand now, but you couldn't easily build thousands with next to no effort.
Will they do what they do with currency and block printing certain shapes? Introduce errors? Seems a lot harder since you can already build your own 3D printer, and homebrew printers will only get better.
Clearly a troll, but common FUD nonetheless---and, as per the parent, Apple turning a weakness into a (perceived) strength). However, either:
Despite "choice is bad" propaganda, which is surprisingly successful, especially among those who should know better, actually making a good choice is not difficult for anyone.
The Wii shipped with essentially souped-up 5-year-old hardware and still cost $212 (JP) to $249 (US). The custom stuff should have been taken out of the equation by manufacturing volume. Just because the hardware exists doesn't obviate development and testing time. And they still have custom cases, controllers, etc. Nintendo shipped millions at launch. They have tens of thousands. Low volume is going to raise the cost, too.
Right, this is one of the things I mean by "tempered". "Free-to-play" and "microtransactions" are buzzwords; they've proven to be successful business models in some cases, so this seems reasonable. The question is, do they already have titles lined up for launch? Contracts for their f2p store? With a 10-month launch window, they should have devkits out now. Most existing android games assume a touchscreen. You can't just drop those on a device with controller and screen.
At a glance it seems legit, but on rereading, I had to wonder this myself:
This has a lot of "too-good-to-be-true" tempered by some things to make it seem reasonable. But with the promises made, I'm not sure. "Estimated Delivery: March 2013" is awfully soon to manufacture a console with presumably no prior hardware development experience. Do they have all their contracts already lined up? Is their software already developed? Just look how long it took to get the OpenPandora out.
All of this starts making you wonder "wait, is this really legit?" I certainly can't say it's not, but it seems either naive or too good to be true.
Just ignore any number your phone doesn't recognize. Better, have software ignore it for you. If it's important, they can leave a message (and potentially be whitelisted).
If your complaint is "but I have a landline," the solution is even simpler: disconnect it from a phone. :-P
Because I've been using RiscOS on X for awhile and see no reason to change. It's not "gnome" (though it uses gtk). It's interactively very fast even on slow hardware. It's functionally very fast; apply all sorts of filters, selections, and commands to the current window, or bring up a shell in the window's cwd by typing "x". It's an augmentation of the terminal, not a UI for casual users. It's extremely screen-space efficient, since I can do everything and keep all the menubars and toolbars off, and the icons small. It offers a nice direct-manipulation-oriented interface (i.e., comprehensive DND).
Even if KDE offers all of this, it would have to offer quite a bit more in addition to make it worth switching.
Suppression of free political speech and intimidation by an elected official is a "minor case"? If so, it shouldn't be.
That said, I have to wonder if this wasn't a corruption investigation by the FBI in the first place, though you'd think if it was, they'd jump at the opportunity to "meet".