I typed up a description of what happened in the video for the benefit of visually impaired slashdotters. Here it goes:
For the first seventeen seconds, the disembodied head of Richard Ankrom floats mysteriously in front of his road sign as it talks about his project in a spooky, ominous voice.
In the next scene (you can hear the music change), you see him carefully examining a post with the INTERSTATE 5 symbol. The camera changes to a close up so you can see him comparing the blue of the shield a a color wheel he holds againts the sign.
Another scene change. Now Rick is on a bridge, looking down along the road sign attached to its side. He takes out his ruler... suddenly a big ruler fades, phantom-like, into the middle of the screen! The background fades into Rick's pepective, looking down at the road below as the cars drive underneath him--yet the ruler... remains! It moves further away, then closer, and starts to slide to the right as the background switches to the original view of the scene. Rick disappears as he bends behind the sign...
...and now a white-gloved hand rubbing a cloth over the pencil-outlined letters "RS"... the camera zooms out... "ERS"... "TERST"... now the camera is so far away that you can no longer recognize the letters. All you see in that same mysterious hand--now attached to an arm--rubbing what looks like dirt on a white surface. Wait... now you can see an outline! Its an interstate shield!
As the significance of this realization grips us, the rubbing hand fades away to a shadow... and then two shadows... and then none.
The camera has now pulled back to the point where we can catch a glimmer of Rick's chest--apparantly he is standing by his drawing. He walks to the side, and starts to roll it up--revealing a white shield lying underneath it!
The camera zooms... we are just able to make out the word "interstate" as the image changes.
We can now see the letters "ERST", only now in thicker pencil. Some sort of pale coloring lies ever the E... wait! That coloring is actually a sheet, which Rick is now using to cover "RST". You can only see his hand as it sets it down. His thumb rubs the top of the sheet, and then his fingers do the rest. The world becomes fuzzy...
We see the letters "RST"--the "E" presumably being covered by his hand. A ruler lies underneath the letters, oriented such that the numbers read upside-down to us. He traces along the ruler with a sharp object as hand and ruler and object all fade into oblivion, leaving only the letters. His hand mysteriously fades in and out at different positions and angles, cutting away at the outlines of different letters. A piece of his forehead pops into the scene, and then...
We see him peeling off the pale covering--yet pieces of it now remain where the letter outlines had been traced.
Now the angle shifts. We are now looking down at the word "INTERSTATE" from the right. He is applying some sort of pale tan tape to the top of the words. These hands start to fade away as another pair of hands fades in, applying tape to the left side. (The arms remain hidden.)
The image now dissolves into a completely new scene. We look down at both of his arms and hands donned in white gloves as one hang scoups green paint out of a can being held by the second. A color table lies sprawling open on the wooden table beneath.
The camera zooms out a little as his right hand stirrs the paint.
The hands fade away... now we see him (even a portion oh his head!) carefully comparing a rectangle he his holding in his hand to the aforemetioned color table.
Dissolution steals this image and replaces it with another. We are now outdoors. We can see Rick frow the abdomin up, facing us, and spraying red paint over our eyes. As the image is covered with this foggy red, the image transitions to a more solid red, with the clear white words "Pantone Color 199-200" at the bottom.
The red disappears as quickly (yet as gradually) as it appeared. We now see Rick spraying red the top of the interstate shield as it lies up-side down against some sort of rectangular prop covered in cloth.
The spray-paint disappears and the red paint on the sign becomes... green? Ah, no, it is now being covered with a green sheet as Rick sprays the top of the sign blue.
The red words "Pantone Color 293" fade onto the bottom, ominously, and then vanish as mysteriously as they had appeared.
A fast fade... now we see him spraying green onto some sort of table lying not far off the tiled ground... and green slowly blends into the scene along with the white words "Pantone Color 340-341" until both dominate... but once they do, the letters fade and a hand moves into our vision.
The hand peels away... an R! Realization dawns upon us as the angle changes to show him peeling off the letter to its right.
The scene changes again. Now we shee the shield standing upright, in its glorious red, white, and blue, as his hands, reaching from the top of our vision, cut away an "E" and completing the white word "INTERSTATE" at the top of the sign. He then peels off the last of the border lying at the top on the sign.
His body now fades into the right of the screen, starting to peel... something from the middle of the sign. The camera zooms into his hands... both hands are now peeling away at...
The bottom of a 5 appears in our vision, filled with several strange circles. His hand reaches from the bottom of our vision, grabs, and removes one of the circles.
Our vision grows blurry... now we see the bottom of a drill, as the hand repeatedly squezes the handle.
Quick fade.. we see some sort of nozzle being pressed against a small disc held by three of his fingers. We zoom in and watch as the nozzle squirts glue which Rick traces into a circle. This being done, the nozzle is pulled away...the scene changes...
...and we watch as the same hand now PUTS BACK the circle it had earlier removed from the 5!
Dramatic music and scene change. We now see Rick from a birds-eye view as he walks along a sidewalk next to a highway... he gets smaller as the camara soars higher. He approaches a hanging overhead road sign.
Our vision quickly flicks to a new scene, where we now see him much closer, almost completely obscured by greenery as he lays a ladder againts a large, metal pole.
The scene again changes abruptly, now showing us pole and ladder from a side view. We zoom into the ladder...
And switch back whence we came. Now Rick is climbing up his ladder....
Ane now we are like an eyeball floating in space, peering at Rick from a moderate distance as he makes it to the top of the ladder. We see him toss some white object (his towel?) onto a porch under the sign.
For a single instant, our vision changos, showing him leaning down and doing something next to the left side of the sign. Less than a second later we now see him climbing a stepladdep as he carries the word "NORTH" in white on a green background. It looks as if a piece of the sign was missing (or is it just a board lying against the sign?)...
...before we can ponder this thought for too long, the angle switches again. Now we see him from above and to the side as he mounts the right side of "NORTH" to the road sign. (It was a board, by-the-way.)
The scene has changed again. Now we see him kneeling on the "porch" under the sign on the right side... it looks as if he is prying or pulling a blue shield with a 5 on it out of a black bag.
The camera again flicks back, now showing Rick as he carries his shield over to the left side. We hear voices.
Now we are closer to him and see him lifting the shield against the sign... now we are above him and watch as he uses his electric screwdriver to mount it into place.
We watch from behind as he now removes the wooden board, first on the ladder, then on the porch (a tricky task, seeing as NORTH and 5 were both mounted over it for some reason). The 5 droops to the side... the scene changes and now we watch him fixing it.
The image becomes blurry and turbulent. Red words appear in two lines along the bottom of the screen: "Camera 3: Mark Concha" and "Driver/Grip: Markus Hays"
We see, vaguely (since our vision is shaking around) a man on a platform on a metal pole... another man breifly enters our vision.
Our vision stops jolting as terribly, but is now a touch unfocused. It is now directed directly at the road sign, and zooms in to the man as he walks across the porch.
Everything becomes much clearer and the words at the bottom disappear. We watch a little above and from a moderate distance (just far enough away to see the entire hanging road sign) as Rick takes down his ladder and carries it back to the right side of the sign. As he is about 1/2 of the way across the scene changes to show him climbing back down the ladder and to the ground.
Okay, so we can now fix our retinas' ability to receive light. That's all fine and dandy, but what I want to know is: How long until we have the technology to send light back out?
I want implants in my eyes that let me shoot laser beams at people!
Is having my own little Stare o' Death too much to ask for?
130TW in perspective...
on
Lunar Power
·
· Score: 1
Just to put things in perspective:
Man consumes about 15TW per year.
If we could get the moon (or whatever else we might employ) to generate 130TW, we would have at least 6.5 tiwes the current energy consumption of the entire world available to us.
If you assume that man's energy use continues to double every 20 years, then we'd have enough energy to meet all our needs for fifty years. And if its all solar energy, than this energy is all FREE after the system is built (assuming, of couse, that nothing ever breaks;-) )
That is a LOT of power--well worth a hefty price tag.
---
Feel free to correct me, flame me, and/or mod me into oblivion if any of my estimates are slightly off.
Does this mean that only Microsoft products will be used at the University of Maryland, College Park?
No, the agreement is not exclusive. Participation for faculty and staff is voluntary. Faculty and staff members have the freedom to use whatever software they personally choose; however, for the next three years they also have the option of participating in the MSEA.
You could play on one of three sides: Evil government operatives trying to end video gaming as we know it, valiant heroes defending our right to slaughter each other in cyberspace, and the poor video-game-addicted sops who are in the middle of it all.
The key to making this game succeed would be to include lawyers walking around as ambient creatures like the sheep in Warcraft II. If you click on them enough times, they explode.
I mean, who really takes the idea seriously that just because
*) ALL DOGS ARE MAMMALS *) FLUFFY IS A DOG
that it MUST follow that Fluffy is a mammal? After all, there is absolutely NO WAY that we can know this for sure. For all we know, Fluffy could really be a bird, or even a space alien trying to take over the world. In fact, we don't even know that Fluffy is a dog. After all, the person asserting that he was COULD have been wrong, couldn't he have? Despite those arrogent logicians and their assertion of provable certainty, we still know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about Fluffy, nor will we ever.
All of these years, I had believed that, if nothing else, 1+1 must equal 2... but recently I have started to doubt this. Big Brother's assertion that 2+2 actually equals 5 just makes more and more sense every day that I think about it... perhaps more of the things he says are really true.
Nothing... NOTHING, can ever be known with 100% uncertainty--and since that includes this sentence, we don't even know for a fact that nothing can truly be known! Feeling depressed at this? Hopeless? Well, look at the bright side: you might not be feeling anything at all, since there exists the very distinct possibility that you don't actually exist. After all, nothing can be known for certain, so your own belief that you exist may turn out to be fundamentally flawed.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to go back to throwing myself at the ground in the hope that I'll miss it and be able to fly... people keep telling me that this is impossible, but when I succeed, ho ho!, then all of you scientists, mathemeticians, and logicians will be revealed for the flawed fools you really are...
*climbs up steps* *jumps off building* "I'm flying!!! I'm..." *THUD* "Dammit... well, as they always say, 3,333,333rd time's a charm!" *climbs up steps...*
I think that everyone is missing the point here. It's not that the U.S. is the only country in the world which has plans for when to use its nuclear weapons, it's that the U.S. is one of the few countries whose policies are open and transparant enough for us to know about them.
Do you really believe that China, Russsia, etc. don't have similar plans? Just because we don't hear about them doesn't mean that they don't exist--just that they are held more closely secret.
I do not play computer games that often because I generally have more interesting ways to pass the time.
When I get a copy of a game from my friends, it's because, quite frankly, I'm not impressed enough with it to buy it on my own. In fact, more often then not I'm just installing it so we can all play it at a LAN Party. When the party is over, I never touch it again.
The companies have lost NO money from me. If my friends hadn't had the game, I just wouldn't have played the game. I DEFINATELY wouldn't have spent any money on it. This "$1 billion" or whatever they're claiming to be their lost sales may be greatly inflated for the simple reason that many (maybe even most) of the people who copied these games wouldn't have spent money on them anyways. (Or at least, they wouldn't have paid the shelf price for it--maybe they would have bought them if they cost less.)
Now, don't get me wrong: I DO spend money on computer games, and I've bought about 90% of the games that I've actually played for more than just a couple hours of "dabbling" (for the last 10% I had physically borrowed the CDs). My tastes generally go towards games with novel ideas such as Afterlife and Strife, which are usually conveniently lying in the $15 bin since nobody else likes them.:-) I get MUCH more satisfaction from these games then I do from Quake 3 at $30-40 or so.
Copying a game, to me, is akin to "borrowing" a book from a friend, minus the physical inconvenience of having to physically give it back to him. He tells me its interesting, so I try it out for a bit. If I really like it enough, I might even spend some money on it. (Like I have on many books that I own.)
In fact, "borrowing" this game while allowing my friend to keep the original (i.e. copying it) should even theoretically be legal in this scenerio: Assume for a moment that only one of us is actually playing it at a given time. What's the difference between us swapping it back and forth and us maintaining two copies of it then? None--if you believe that people have a right to transfer their license to play the software to others. It's just that the transfer of the license in this case does not require an actual "physical" transfer of the software.
Yeah, yeah, I know you're all going to reply and tell me that some programmer out there is starving because I didn't give him any money for his game. That's just not true. If he's starving, it's because his game simply wasn't worth spending any money on--at least, to me.
Oh, and if he were to stop making games because he couldn't make a living off of them, I wouldn't feel agony over it. I'd just shrug my shoulders and find something better to do. Again, it's not as if I spend that much of my life playing games anyways.
Now, having said that...
Puts on flame gear and runs away from angry horde of starving programmers.
the sensation of reading a/. comment you have read before...
(i.e. "Free speech? There's a difference." by at-b)
Not only has this comment been copied ad verbatim, but apparantly two moderators found it "original" enough to give it a +2 bonus. Hrm...
Slashdot Mirror
I typed up a description of what happened in the video for the benefit of visually impaired slashdotters. Here it goes:
For the first seventeen seconds, the disembodied head of Richard Ankrom floats mysteriously in front of his road sign as it talks about his project in a spooky, ominous voice.
In the next scene (you can hear the music change), you see him carefully examining a post with the INTERSTATE 5 symbol. The camera changes to a close up so you can see him comparing the blue of the shield a a color wheel he holds againts the sign.
Another scene change. Now Rick is on a bridge, looking down along the road sign attached to its side. He takes out his ruler... suddenly a big ruler fades, phantom-like, into the middle of the screen! The background fades into Rick's pepective, looking down at the road below as the cars drive underneath him--yet the ruler... remains! It moves further away, then closer, and starts to slide to the right as the background switches to the original view of the scene. Rick disappears as he bends behind the sign...
...and now a white-gloved hand rubbing a cloth over the pencil-outlined letters "RS"... the camera zooms out... "ERS"... "TERST"... now the camera is so far away that you can no longer recognize the letters. All you see in that same mysterious hand--now attached to an arm--rubbing what looks like dirt on a white surface. Wait... now you can see an outline! Its an interstate shield!
As the significance of this realization grips us, the rubbing hand fades away to a shadow... and then two shadows... and then none.
The camera has now pulled back to the point where we can catch a glimmer of Rick's chest--apparantly he is standing by his drawing. He walks to the side, and starts to roll it up--revealing a white shield lying underneath it!
The camera zooms... we are just able to make out the word "interstate" as the image changes.
We can now see the letters "ERST", only now in thicker pencil. Some sort of pale coloring lies ever the E... wait! That coloring is actually a sheet, which Rick is now using to cover "RST". You can only see his hand as it sets it down. His thumb rubs the top of the sheet, and then his fingers do the rest. The world becomes fuzzy...
We see the letters "RST"--the "E" presumably being covered by his hand. A ruler lies underneath the letters, oriented such that the numbers read upside-down to us. He traces along the ruler with a sharp object as hand and ruler and object all fade into oblivion, leaving only the letters. His hand mysteriously fades in and out at different positions and angles, cutting away at the outlines of different letters. A piece of his forehead pops into the scene, and then...
We see him peeling off the pale covering--yet pieces of it now remain where the letter outlines had been traced.
Now the angle shifts. We are now looking down at the word "INTERSTATE" from the right. He is applying some sort of pale tan tape to the top of the words. These hands start to fade away as another pair of hands fades in, applying tape to the left side. (The arms remain hidden.)
The image now dissolves into a completely new scene. We look down at both of his arms and hands donned in white gloves as one hang scoups green paint out of a can being held by the second. A color table lies sprawling open on the wooden table beneath.
The camera zooms out a little as his right hand stirrs the paint.
The hands fade away... now we see him (even a portion oh his head!) carefully comparing a rectangle he his holding in his hand to the aforemetioned color table.
Dissolution steals this image and replaces it with another. We are now outdoors. We can see Rick frow the abdomin up, facing us, and spraying red paint over our eyes. As the image is covered with this foggy red, the image transitions to a more solid red, with the clear white words "Pantone Color 199-200" at the bottom.
The red disappears as quickly (yet as gradually) as it appeared. We now see Rick spraying red the top of the interstate shield as it lies up-side down against some sort of rectangular prop covered in cloth.
The spray-paint disappears and the red paint on the sign becomes... green? Ah, no, it is now being covered with a green sheet as Rick sprays the top of the sign blue.
The red words "Pantone Color 293" fade onto the bottom, ominously, and then vanish as mysteriously as they had appeared.
A fast fade... now we see him spraying green onto some sort of table lying not far off the tiled ground... and green slowly blends into the scene along with the white words "Pantone Color 340-341" until both dominate... but once they do, the letters fade and a hand moves into our vision.
The hand peels away... an R! Realization dawns upon us as the angle changes to show him peeling off the letter to its right.
The scene changes again. Now we shee the shield standing upright, in its glorious red, white, and blue, as his hands, reaching from the top of our vision, cut away an "E" and completing the white word "INTERSTATE" at the top of the sign. He then peels off the last of the border lying at the top on the sign.
His body now fades into the right of the screen, starting to peel... something from the middle of the sign. The camera zooms into his hands... both hands are now peeling away at...
The bottom of a 5 appears in our vision, filled with several strange circles. His hand reaches from the bottom of our vision, grabs, and removes one of the circles.
Our vision grows blurry... now we see the bottom of a drill, as the hand repeatedly squezes the handle.
Quick fade.. we see some sort of nozzle being pressed against a small disc held by three of his fingers. We zoom in and watch as the nozzle squirts glue which Rick traces into a circle. This being done, the nozzle is pulled away...the scene changes...
...and we watch as the same hand now PUTS BACK the circle it had earlier removed from the 5!
Dramatic music and scene change. We now see Rick from a birds-eye view as he walks along a sidewalk next to a highway... he gets smaller as the camara soars higher. He approaches a hanging overhead road sign.
Our vision quickly flicks to a new scene, where we now see him much closer, almost completely obscured by greenery as he lays a ladder againts a large, metal pole.
The scene again changes abruptly, now showing us pole and ladder from a side view. We zoom into the ladder...
And switch back whence we came. Now Rick is climbing up his ladder....
Ane now we are like an eyeball floating in space, peering at Rick from a moderate distance as he makes it to the top of the ladder. We see him toss some white object (his towel?) onto a porch under the sign.
For a single instant, our vision changos, showing him leaning down and doing something next to the left side of the sign. Less than a second later we now see him climbing a stepladdep as he carries the word "NORTH" in white on a green background. It looks as if a piece of the sign was missing (or is it just a board lying against the sign?)...
...before we can ponder this thought for too long, the angle switches again. Now we see him from above and to the side as he mounts the right side of "NORTH" to the road sign. (It was a board, by-the-way.)
The scene has changed again. Now we see him kneeling on the "porch" under the sign on the right side... it looks as if he is prying or pulling a blue shield with a 5 on it out of a black bag.
The camera again flicks back, now showing Rick as he carries his shield over to the left side. We hear voices.
Now we are closer to him and see him lifting the shield against the sign... now we are above him and watch as he uses his electric screwdriver to mount it into place.
We watch from behind as he now removes the wooden board, first on the ladder, then on the porch (a tricky task, seeing as NORTH and 5 were both mounted over it for some reason). The 5 droops to the side... the scene changes and now we watch him fixing it.
The image becomes blurry and turbulent. Red words appear in two lines along the bottom of the screen: "Camera 3: Mark Concha" and "Driver/Grip: Markus Hays"
We see, vaguely (since our vision is shaking around) a man on a platform on a metal pole... another man breifly enters our vision.
Our vision stops jolting as terribly, but is now a touch unfocused. It is now directed directly at the road sign, and zooms in to the man as he walks across the porch.
Everything becomes much clearer and the words at the bottom disappear. We watch a little above and from a moderate distance (just far enough away to see the entire hanging road sign) as Rick takes down his ladder and carries it back to the right side of the sign. As he is about 1/2 of the way across the scene changes to show him climbing back down the ladder and to the ground.
Fade to black.
Okay, so we can now fix our retinas' ability to receive light. That's all fine and dandy, but what I want to know is: How long until we have the technology to send light back out?
I want implants in my eyes that let me shoot laser beams at people!
Is having my own little Stare o' Death too much to ask for?
"...and by 'country' we mean Antarctica."
Just to put things in perspective:
;-) )
Man consumes about 15TW per year.
If we could get the moon (or whatever else we might employ) to generate 130TW, we would have at least 6.5 tiwes the current energy consumption of the entire world available to us.
If you assume that man's energy use continues to double every 20 years, then we'd have enough energy to meet all our needs for fifty years. And if its all solar energy, than this energy is all FREE after the system is built (assuming, of couse, that nothing ever breaks
That is a LOT of power--well worth a hefty price tag.
---
Feel free to correct me, flame me, and/or mod me into oblivion if any of my estimates are slightly off.
Wow, that would make such a great RTS...
You could play on one of three sides: Evil government operatives trying to end video gaming as we know it, valiant heroes defending our right to slaughter each other in cyberspace, and the poor video-game-addicted sops who are in the middle of it all.
The key to making this game succeed would be to include lawyers walking around as ambient creatures like the sheep in Warcraft II. If you click on them enough times, they explode.
Wow... so much for my blind faith in logic...
I mean, who really takes the idea seriously that just because
*) ALL DOGS ARE MAMMALS
*) FLUFFY IS A DOG
that it MUST follow that Fluffy is a mammal? After all, there is absolutely NO WAY that we can know this for sure. For all we know, Fluffy could really be a bird, or even a space alien trying to take over the world. In fact, we don't even know that Fluffy is a dog. After all, the person asserting that he was COULD have been wrong, couldn't he have? Despite those arrogent logicians and their assertion of provable certainty, we still know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about Fluffy, nor will we ever.
All of these years, I had believed that, if nothing else, 1+1 must equal 2... but recently I have started to doubt this. Big Brother's assertion that 2+2 actually equals 5 just makes more and more sense every day that I think about it... perhaps more of the things he says are really true.
Nothing... NOTHING, can ever be known with 100% uncertainty--and since that includes this sentence, we don't even know for a fact that nothing can truly be known! Feeling depressed at this? Hopeless? Well, look at the bright side: you might not be feeling anything at all, since there exists the very distinct possibility that you don't actually exist. After all, nothing can be known for certain, so your own belief that you exist may turn out to be fundamentally flawed.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I am going to go back to throwing myself at the ground in the hope that I'll miss it and be able to fly... people keep telling me that this is impossible, but when I succeed, ho ho!, then all of you scientists, mathemeticians, and logicians will be revealed for the flawed fools you really are...
*climbs up steps*
*jumps off building*
"I'm flying!!! I'm..."
*THUD*
"Dammit... well, as they always say, 3,333,333rd time's a charm!"
*climbs up steps...*
I think that everyone is missing the point here. It's not that the U.S. is the only country in the world which has plans for when to use its nuclear weapons, it's that the U.S. is one of the few countries whose policies are open and transparant enough for us to know about them.
Do you really believe that China, Russsia, etc. don't have similar plans? Just because we don't hear about them doesn't mean that they don't exist--just that they are held more closely secret.
When I get a copy of a game from my friends, it's because, quite frankly, I'm not impressed enough with it to buy it on my own. In fact, more often then not I'm just installing it so we can all play it at a LAN Party. When the party is over, I never touch it again.
The companies have lost NO money from me. If my friends hadn't had the game, I just wouldn't have played the game. I DEFINATELY wouldn't have spent any money on it. This "$1 billion" or whatever they're claiming to be their lost sales may be greatly inflated for the simple reason that many (maybe even most) of the people who copied these games wouldn't have spent money on them anyways. (Or at least, they wouldn't have paid the shelf price for it--maybe they would have bought them if they cost less.)
Now, don't get me wrong: I DO spend money on computer games, and I've bought about 90% of the games that I've actually played for more than just a couple hours of "dabbling" (for the last 10% I had physically borrowed the CDs). My tastes generally go towards games with novel ideas such as Afterlife and Strife, which are usually conveniently lying in the $15 bin since nobody else likes them. :-) I get MUCH more satisfaction from these games then I do from Quake 3 at $30-40 or so.
Copying a game, to me, is akin to "borrowing" a book from a friend, minus the physical inconvenience of having to physically give it back to him. He tells me its interesting, so I try it out for a bit. If I really like it enough, I might even spend some money on it. (Like I have on many books that I own.)
In fact, "borrowing" this game while allowing my friend to keep the original (i.e. copying it) should even theoretically be legal in this scenerio: Assume for a moment that only one of us is actually playing it at a given time. What's the difference between us swapping it back and forth and us maintaining two copies of it then? None--if you believe that people have a right to transfer their license to play the software to others. It's just that the transfer of the license in this case does not require an actual "physical" transfer of the software.
Yeah, yeah, I know you're all going to reply and tell me that some programmer out there is starving because I didn't give him any money for his game. That's just not true. If he's starving, it's because his game simply wasn't worth spending any money on--at least, to me.
Oh, and if he were to stop making games because he couldn't make a living off of them, I wouldn't feel agony over it. I'd just shrug my shoulders and find something better to do. Again, it's not as if I spend that much of my life playing games anyways.
Now, having said that...
Puts on flame gear and runs away from angry horde of starving programmers.
the sensation of reading a /. comment you have read before...
(i.e. "Free speech? There's a difference." by at-b)
Not only has this comment been copied ad verbatim, but apparantly two moderators found it "original" enough to give it a +2 bonus. Hrm...