> Wouldn't the first sentence imply that nothing can be > determined? I mean, it sounds like they weren't beating the > shit out of robosparrow because of his wing movements but > more so because he was going around looking for Sparrow > Connor.
That was my first thought too.
Going out on a limb here but... this is the article not the paper. My assumption would be, before going to check the paper out, that the reporter who wrote the article either misunderstood the test or possibly, his editor did, and either worded it badly, or an important statement or two got cut.....now lets do a quick check,....and the abstract says.... the reporter/editor left shit out:
As predicted, subjects responded more aggressively to the mount during wing waving trials than during stationary trials. A second experiment demonstrated that this effect cannot be attributed simply to increased attention to movement. Less expectedly, subjects did not alter their own display behavior in response to wing waving as compared to a static mount. We conclude that the wing wave display in the context of singing is a signal that functions in maleâ"male aggressive communication. Questions remain, including whether wing waving functions as a signal in the absence of singing and whether wing waving and song are redundant signals or communicate different information.
Most everyone is saying similar things, one thing I missed if anyone said it.... put a fraud alert on your credit. Lifelock does this, in fact, its really their main product. Basically, if you write a letter to the credit reporting agencies to tell them that you have reason to believe that someone is trying to steal your identity, they will post an alert on your records, which makes them actually do things like ask for ID when someone claiming to be you asks for a credit report.
The main nice thing about lifelock is/was (its been a while) that this only lasts a few months, they automatically renew it for you. The credit reporting agencies were pretty pissed about this claiming that the fraud alert system is....well.... for people like you who actually have reason to think someone is trying.... not just those of us who know how common and easy it is and know that we are all targets. (or as I liked to paraphrase it "waaaaah we have to do our jobs now....waaaah we can't just be irresponsible with our humoungous database of other people's information....waaaaah")
SImple.... all we need is to get some congressional aid to slip language into a bill (since they don't read them anyway) requiring congressmen to do a walking tour of each nuclear site at least every 5 years. Garaunteed everything is squeeqy clean and no longer hot in 4 years.
That or there would be an emergency session of congress to remove the requirement for national security reasons.
Hes not the right guy until after his fair trial. If he dies being apprehended, then so be it, but, to just kill out of hand? Thats punative.
War should be a last resort against powers that are an existgential threat. Civil due process is a restriction on government to ensure that their power is not abused. Otherwise they may start getting the right guy for the wrong reasons.
Not to mention...so what, you got the right guy. Whats to say killing him was even helpful? Is it useful to kill the right guy, if his death recruits a replacement, what if it brings two new men to its cause? Civil process is designed to de-escalate situations. A lot less people are ready to destroy the government when daddy spends his life in jail than when he gets blown up from the sky.
Not to mention the evidence for the psychological terror effect that these killings have on people throughout the region. Talk about recruiting for your enemy.
Honestly, if we look only at the outcomes, we should be rounding up drone pilots and charging them with aiding the enemy through recruitment.
Not really, because nobody is talking about the use of drones in an honest-to-goodness battlefield scenario. Where is the declared war in Yemen? Pakistan?
Quite simply the answer is you abandon "wartime troaditions" for the travestesty of civil justice that they are and prosecute these criminals as the criminals they are.
And you have to, otherwise you just let the government pick where and when there is a battlefield. If they get to choose when the restrictions on them (which is what civil rights and due process are) apply and when they don't, then they may as well not exist.
How do you differenciate between someone who is giving material support to the enemy, and somebody who your informant has a grudge against? How do you gaurd against people being killed with no oversite? Due process thats how. And I don't even care about citizenship....if its not engaged in defensive war (we have a defense department) then civil process should be the rule....always....citizen or not. Because its the restriction on government to make sure they are not abusing their power....which is a bigger threat than any terrorist could dream of ever being.
As for ignore it.... all terrorism is is an extreme form of PR stunt. Ignore it is the only reasonable reaction, because they are not an existential threat in any way shape or form.
You have a point. We should definitely use drones against anyone convicted in a court of law by a jury of his peers of such actions. Or do you mean we should continue to accept accusation as proof of guilt and reason enough to ignore due process before denying a person their life?
You installed Wheezy for a school, and sound didn't work?
First, Wheezy is a testing distro, I wouldn't install it unless I really needed something in it. In this case, I did install it (and like it) but, I did it because I couldn't get sound to work under the stable distro, not the other way around.
So you are willing to run a testing distro, and take the time to badmouth what doesn't work in testing, but also wont take the time to report bugs to the devs. Nice work there. Yah its a little rough around the edges sometimes, thats why its called testing.
FWIW, I was looking at the bugs list just before I upgraded. By my estimates, which comes from looking at the graph of release critical bugs vs previous releases, and I was (in December I think) predicting the next Debian release sometime in 3rd Q of 2013. I know thats not what they are saying, but, thats the way it appeared to be trending.
ROTFL police? When do police get fired? Not since their union became powerful and they figured out how to bankroll departments with asset forfeitures (thank you war on personal habbits)
Every time I look at the number of police anywhere in the past decade or so, its more and more, at the expense of everything else. Violent crime has been on the downswing for a generation, if we just stopped harassing people for more and more minor violations (I have NEVER in my life seen so many cars pulled over every week as I have since started in 2007 or so) and personal choices, we would empty half the prisons, decrease the numbers of people on parole by god knows how much....
Not legally no, but who cares? At this point their "claim" would easily be enforced by the same gravity well that has stopped everyone else from doing it yet. While its true, if someone else jumped their claim, nobody would likely care to enforce it and step in.... but.... as of right now.... making a symbolic claim is easily every bit as good, if not better, than having it enforced, simply because its harder to actually jump the claim than it is to ignore terrestrial powers..... so legal enforcibility is an entirely moot point.
Sigh, no. Actually, this is a mis-statement of Kevin Bacon theory, first proposed when Stanley Milgrim devised an experiment where he wrote fan mail to Kevin Bacon and distributed it through a random process to several people throughout the country, asking them to attempt to deliver it by handing it to a personal friend and asking them to do the same. On average, Kevin recieved them all within 6 transfers.
> 2. I'm not *for* guns, or else I'd be *for* guns for everyone, > especially those that cannot afford them. I don't see anyone > argue *for* subsidised guns for everyone.
I wouldn't have an issue with such a program. I mean, I tend to prefer not having centralized programs at all, but if you were going to have one, I would rather that than a program of exporting people with guns to other people's lands.
Your zero is a very strange zero.... because its a zero that contains the infrastructure to capture asteroids being built, meaning the next one should be quite a bit of profit. Its only a big fat zero if the whole purpose was short term profit.
No, then you get a list of completed tasks, each at or moving towards 100%.
It also means that if it stops for 15 hours, and you are crafting your specially worded bitch to the developers, that you can more specifically report your problem than "the install is stuck at 20%".
Maybe 20% has some definition in the code that the developers can easily index and find (lol, as if) but you can send them something that shows.... downloading is complete, stages Xand Y completed, and its stick somewhere in Z. That may have just saved a few hours of troubleshooting...which may be the difference between getting the problem fixed and that and any other people with that issue using the program or not.
Or if you are selling proprietary software, maybe it means your support staff spend a few more hours playing WoW and a few less asking your customers repetitve questions.
A number of things already do this, including text based linux installers, since at least the mid 90s. I have spent many hours babysitting kickstarting linux boxes, with the two progress indicators...one for the overall process, one for the current package being installed. Wildly inaccurate of course, but, it never mattered, because you could see what it was doing, and what it was blocking on, and it changed frequently enough to let you know it was succeeding at individual tasks and not just failing and spinning.
And how quickly would they decide to unratify that treaty, or just plain ignore it, if there was any reason to whatsoever? When has having signed a treaty or other niggling bs like that stopped them before?
Treaties are for countries that have to worry about sanctions or invasion.
Guess I just never got used to it. It felt really klunky for me, but I am directly contrasting playing AC Revelations on the PC vs Brotherhood on the xbox...after nearly 6 or 7 years of almost exclusively console gaming...and having never done TPS on a PC
On the other hand, my experience with FPS is the opposite. I started with Wolf3d (keyboard only because the mouse control was terrible or nonexistent as I recall).... then Doom, where keyboard and mouse came together, and then Quake, where I found the holy WASD
So I always avoided FPS console games...because they always felt like I was playing in mud. But in that time, I came to enjoy TPS games and...maybe I just need to give it another try....
I am strangely comfortable with this.... though, I would apply the same to Romney voters, for all the same reasons. Though I am more surrounded by the people who think they made a difference by voting Obummer....so putting some control on their population would directly benefit me more.
> I guess there is some underlying truth to the fact that no-one wants too much questionning of the > usage of mouse models. The alternatives are much farther away from humans, or emotionally > difficult to work with (cat models are great I hear, but unsurprisingly no one wants to do to cats what > is commonly done to mice...)
I personally know people who have done this sort of work with dogs. I have also worked in (not as a lab tech or scientist, but in the lab and around the people who were) labs doing mouse experiments. There are a few considerations:
1. It may be people being squeamish. The people who did doc necropsies displayed a decidedly twisted sense of humor, far beyond anything the people who worked on mice did (using old facial skin as a hand puppet was one I particularly remember hearing about; or sending the groomer in to a dog that was just euthenized... which went a bit too far, i hear she broke down crying). Perhaps this was one of those cultural things between a local private lab (the dogs) and a large non-profit lab that employed researchers from all over the world? I don't know.
2. A cat eats about 2-3 mice worth of food a day. Not mouse food, adult mice. An average cat can weigh upwards of 15 lbs, compared to a few oz for a mouse. This means, larger facility, more food, and more work. You can put 20 mice in individual carriers on a small cart and cart them around easily.
3. Sticking with size, everything is larger. Procedures often involve surgery. A bigger animal means bigger incisions, more work....more space required. I have seen researchers doing surgical procedures on mice, right on the same lab bench that they work at. A cat would require a larger prep area. In fact... I have seen 4 researchers with binocular microscopes, each processing mice, all standing around a lab bench no bigger than a mid sized kitchen island.
None of this, of course, has any bearing on animal models or any of that, its almost 100% logistics. I wouldn't be shocked if running tests in cats rather than mice would, at base, cost a lot more than mice, before you even factor in that facilities are mostly already setup for mice... so adding cats means changing facilities, new protocols, and possibly a new variable too all studies.... now we have to see if mice or cats react differently when they can smell eachother in the lab. (I imagine the mice would find that stressful)
Not sure why I missed this comment before now. I agree with your assessment so far as the characterization is accurate. I have run into a few different discussions of this, and I think its skewed partially by the number of issuse.
I understand the last part, but I have issues with it. It kind of.... assumes a buit much. Since when does something have to make sense or be significant for politcians to care? If anything, they care more, the less it matters.
Seriously...every time budgets come up its nothing but fighting over issues that are too small to matter to the budget...so this one being special and being part of some concerted effort to do something specific.... seems like a lot to assume.
As far as I can tell, being too small and devicive is exactly what makes politicians take notice, because they run screaming from anything approaching a real issue.
I mean, maybe thats YOUR takeaway. You say it like its such a bad thing...when the program was a resounding success.
The positive takeaway is this.... if you are governor, you can make gobs of money by funneling state contracts to your own company? Why even bother looking at outcomes when they are clearly not the major decision indfluencer.
As long as his pockets got lined....and they did.... why does something as niggling as cost effectiveness matter? It wasn't a money saving measure, that would have defeated the purpose.
I have heard/read about this a bit....I just haven't cared enough to try. I do want to, and get back to Assasins Creed and GTA series, but.... there are enough other games that I have yet to get a strong enough itch.
This is even less likely since the recent news about the Battle of Asakai got me enthralled with Eve online, enough to break my long standing rule of "I don't play MMORPGS". (and so far, I really like it)
Some day though, I will want to get back to some of those games, and I WILL try to get a controller going. In my prioritiy list though, that is somewhere below getting Eve working under Wine so I don't have to reboot so much,
My wife was hounding me for a while because before we had gotten married I borrowed some money from her that she was planning to buy a PC with for Diablo 3 when it came out, so... I got us both gaming PCs..... my first in years
The consoles have all been collecting dust ever since. It killed a few game series, just because buying a controller isn't that high on my list and third person running around games suck on kb and mouse... but the experience is better too.
Its not so much about graphics, my PC blows them away, but its also a lot newer, so thats understandable.... and thats kind of my thing... I can upgrade it.
The tradeoffs are simple. Consoles are consistent. Games are written to their specs for years. If a game says "Xbox360" there is no question, it will work on my Xbox360.
The downside, no upgrades untill the next version comes out. Performance has always been far behind PCs (a friend was over and saw my wife playing skyrim and he was shocked at how short the loading screens were compared to his console).. and as great as controllers are for some games (3rd person and games with simple rough mechanics) they are decidedly inferior to keyboard and mouse for anything remotely FPS, and when you look at the recent FPS RPGS like skyrim and Fallout....one word.... autorun.
Of course when I put a PC together, I can't seem to do it for less than 3x the cost of a console, but, I know the lower end of the market is perfectly fine at this point and, based on the last gen of consoles, at about the same price.
Thats the real kicker. When a console is $100-200... thats one thing... when it converges on the price of a low end gaming PC.... which can be used to do so much more, its hard for me to justify the console.
For me the balance is just so far tipped towards PC; I just can't justify another console.
Slashdot Mirror
> Wouldn't the first sentence imply that nothing can be
> determined? I mean, it sounds like they weren't beating the
> shit out of robosparrow because of his wing movements but
> more so because he was going around looking for Sparrow
> Connor.
That was my first thought too.
Going out on a limb here but... this is the article not the paper. My assumption would be, before going to check the paper out, that the reporter who wrote the article either misunderstood the test or possibly, his editor did, and either worded it badly, or an important statement or two got cut. ....now lets do a quick check,....and the abstract says.... the reporter/editor left shit out:
Ok.... apparently what I said was correct...all except for the lifelock part. They WERE doing this until they got sued, they apparently don't do that anymore: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LifeLock#Service_controversies
Not sure what they are doing now, but I haven't kept up in years (obviously)
Most everyone is saying similar things, one thing I missed if anyone said it.... put a fraud alert on your credit. Lifelock does this, in fact, its really their main product. Basically, if you write a letter to the credit reporting agencies to tell them that you have reason to believe that someone is trying to steal your identity, they will post an alert on your records, which makes them actually do things like ask for ID when someone claiming to be you asks for a credit report.
The main nice thing about lifelock is/was (its been a while) that this only lasts a few months, they automatically renew it for you. The credit reporting agencies were pretty pissed about this claiming that the fraud alert system is....well.... for people like you who actually have reason to think someone is trying.... not just those of us who know how common and easy it is and know that we are all targets. (or as I liked to paraphrase it "waaaaah we have to do our jobs now....waaaah we can't just be irresponsible with our humoungous database of other people's information....waaaaah")
SImple.... all we need is to get some congressional aid to slip language into a bill (since they don't read them anyway) requiring congressmen to do a walking tour of each nuclear site at least every 5 years. Garaunteed everything is squeeqy clean and no longer hot in 4 years.
That or there would be an emergency session of congress to remove the requirement for national security reasons.
Honestly, thats not even good enough for me.
Hes not the right guy until after his fair trial. If he dies being apprehended, then so be it, but, to just kill out of hand? Thats punative.
War should be a last resort against powers that are an existgential threat. Civil due process is a restriction on government to ensure that their power is not abused. Otherwise they may start getting the right guy for the wrong reasons.
Not to mention...so what, you got the right guy. Whats to say killing him was even helpful? Is it useful to kill the right guy, if his death recruits a replacement, what if it brings two new men to its cause? Civil process is designed to de-escalate situations. A lot less people are ready to destroy the government when daddy spends his life in jail than when he gets blown up from the sky.
Not to mention the evidence for the psychological terror effect that these killings have on people throughout the region. Talk about recruiting for your enemy.
Honestly, if we look only at the outcomes, we should be rounding up drone pilots and charging them with aiding the enemy through recruitment.
Not really, because nobody is talking about the use of drones in an honest-to-goodness battlefield scenario. Where is the declared war in Yemen? Pakistan?
Quite simply the answer is you abandon "wartime troaditions" for the travestesty of civil justice that they are and prosecute these criminals as the criminals they are.
And you have to, otherwise you just let the government pick where and when there is a battlefield. If they get to choose when the restrictions on them (which is what civil rights and due process are) apply and when they don't, then they may as well not exist.
How do you differenciate between someone who is giving material support to the enemy, and somebody who your informant has a grudge against? How do you gaurd against people being killed with no oversite? Due process thats how. And I don't even care about citizenship....if its not engaged in defensive war (we have a defense department) then civil process should be the rule....always....citizen or not. Because its the restriction on government to make sure they are not abusing their power....which is a bigger threat than any terrorist could dream of ever being.
As for ignore it.... all terrorism is is an extreme form of PR stunt. Ignore it is the only reasonable reaction, because they are not an existential threat in any way shape or form.
You have a point. We should definitely use drones against anyone convicted in a court of law by a jury of his peers of such actions. Or do you mean we should continue to accept accusation as proof of guilt and reason enough to ignore due process before denying a person their life?
You installed Wheezy for a school, and sound didn't work?
First, Wheezy is a testing distro, I wouldn't install it unless I really needed something in it. In this case, I did install it (and like it) but, I did it because I couldn't get sound to work under the stable distro, not the other way around.
So you are willing to run a testing distro, and take the time to badmouth what doesn't work in testing, but also wont take the time to report bugs to the devs. Nice work there. Yah its a little rough around the edges sometimes, thats why its called testing.
FWIW, I was looking at the bugs list just before I upgraded. By my estimates, which comes from looking at the graph of release critical bugs vs previous releases, and I was (in December I think) predicting the next Debian release sometime in 3rd Q of 2013. I know thats not what they are saying, but, thats the way it appeared to be trending.
ROTFL police? When do police get fired? Not since their union became powerful and they figured out how to bankroll departments with asset forfeitures (thank you war on personal habbits)
Every time I look at the number of police anywhere in the past decade or so, its more and more, at the expense of everything else. Violent crime has been on the downswing for a generation, if we just stopped harassing people for more and more minor violations (I have NEVER in my life seen so many cars pulled over every week as I have since started in 2007 or so) and personal choices, we would empty half the prisons, decrease the numbers of people on parole by god knows how much....
and be able to afford more fucking teachers!
Not legally no, but who cares? At this point their "claim" would easily be enforced by the same gravity well that has stopped everyone else from doing it yet. While its true, if someone else jumped their claim, nobody would likely care to enforce it and step in.... but.... as of right now.... making a symbolic claim is easily every bit as good, if not better, than having it enforced, simply because its harder to actually jump the claim than it is to ignore terrestrial powers..... so legal enforcibility is an entirely moot point.
Sigh, no. Actually, this is a mis-statement of Kevin Bacon theory, first proposed when Stanley Milgrim devised an experiment where he wrote fan mail to Kevin Bacon and distributed it through a random process to several people throughout the country, asking them to attempt to deliver it by handing it to a personal friend and asking them to do the same. On average, Kevin recieved them all within 6 transfers.
Don't know what you are talking about, Rome fell when the republic died, and kings took power again.
thats funny, because I usually think Utica, rather than that blighted pimple of new jersy shore busting its puss into such a nice state.
> 2. I'm not *for* guns, or else I'd be *for* guns for everyone,
> especially those that cannot afford them. I don't see anyone
> argue *for* subsidised guns for everyone.
I wouldn't have an issue with such a program. I mean, I tend to prefer not having centralized programs at all, but if you were going to have one, I would rather that than a program of exporting people with guns to other people's lands.
Your zero is a very strange zero.... because its a zero that contains the infrastructure to capture asteroids being built, meaning the next one should be quite a bit of profit. Its only a big fat zero if the whole purpose was short term profit.
No they havn't, they have armed thugs stopping random people in the street and frisking them.
Seriously, read up.
No, then you get a list of completed tasks, each at or moving towards 100%.
It also means that if it stops for 15 hours, and you are crafting your specially worded bitch to the developers,
that you can more specifically report your problem than "the install is stuck at 20%".
Maybe 20% has some definition in the code that the developers can easily index and find (lol, as if)
but you can send them something that shows.... downloading is complete, stages Xand Y completed, and its
stick somewhere in Z. That may have just saved a few hours of troubleshooting...which may be the difference between getting the problem fixed and that and any other people with that issue using the program or not.
Or if you are selling proprietary software, maybe it means your support staff spend a few more hours playing WoW and a few less asking your customers repetitve questions.
A number of things already do this, including text based linux installers, since at least the mid 90s. I have spent
many hours babysitting kickstarting linux boxes, with the two progress indicators...one for the overall process, one for the current package being installed. Wildly inaccurate of course, but, it never mattered, because you could see what it was doing, and what it was blocking on, and it changed frequently enough to let you know it was succeeding at individual tasks and not just failing and spinning.
And how quickly would they decide to unratify that treaty, or just plain ignore it, if there was any reason to whatsoever? When has having signed a treaty or other niggling bs like that stopped them before?
Treaties are for countries that have to worry about sanctions or invasion.
Guess I just never got used to it. It felt really klunky for me, but I am directly contrasting playing AC Revelations on the PC vs Brotherhood on the xbox...after nearly 6 or 7 years of almost exclusively console gaming...and having never done TPS on a PC
On the other hand, my experience with FPS is the opposite. I started with Wolf3d (keyboard only because the mouse control was terrible or nonexistent as I recall).... then Doom, where keyboard and mouse came together, and then Quake, where I found the holy WASD
So I always avoided FPS console games...because they always felt like I was playing in mud. But in that time, I came to enjoy TPS games and...maybe I just need to give it another try....
I am strangely comfortable with this.... though, I would apply the same to Romney voters, for all the same reasons. Though I am more surrounded by the people who think they made a difference by voting Obummer....so putting some control on their population would directly benefit me more.
> I guess there is some underlying truth to the fact that no-one wants too much questionning of the
> usage of mouse models. The alternatives are much farther away from humans, or emotionally
> difficult to work with (cat models are great I hear, but unsurprisingly no one wants to do to cats what
> is commonly done to mice...)
I personally know people who have done this sort of work with dogs. I have also worked in (not as a lab tech or scientist, but in the lab and around the people who were) labs doing mouse experiments. There are a few considerations:
1. It may be people being squeamish. The people who did doc necropsies displayed a decidedly twisted sense of humor, far beyond anything the people who worked on mice did (using old facial skin as a hand puppet was one I particularly remember hearing about; or sending the groomer in to a dog that was just euthenized... which went a bit too far, i hear she broke down crying). Perhaps this was one of those cultural things between a local private lab (the dogs) and a large non-profit lab that employed researchers from all over the world? I don't know.
2. A cat eats about 2-3 mice worth of food a day. Not mouse food, adult mice. An average cat can weigh upwards of 15 lbs, compared to a few oz for a mouse. This means, larger facility, more food, and more work. You can put 20 mice in individual carriers on a small cart and cart them around easily.
3. Sticking with size, everything is larger. Procedures often involve surgery. A bigger animal means bigger incisions, more work....more space required. I have seen researchers doing surgical procedures on mice, right on the same lab bench that they work at. A cat would require a larger prep area. In fact... I have seen 4 researchers with binocular microscopes, each processing mice, all standing around a lab bench no bigger than a mid sized kitchen island.
None of this, of course, has any bearing on animal models or any of that, its almost 100% logistics. I wouldn't be shocked if running tests in cats rather than mice would, at base, cost a lot more than mice, before you even factor in that facilities are mostly already setup for mice... so adding cats means changing facilities, new protocols, and possibly a new variable too all studies.... now we have to see if mice or cats react differently when they can smell eachother in the lab.
(I imagine the mice would find that stressful)
Not sure why I missed this comment before now. I agree with your assessment so far as the characterization is accurate. I have run into a few different discussions of this, and I think its skewed partially by the number of issuse.
I understand the last part, but I have issues with it. It kind of.... assumes a buit much. Since when does something have to make sense or be significant for politcians to care? If anything, they care more, the less it matters.
Seriously...every time budgets come up its nothing but fighting over issues that are too small to matter to the budget...so this one being special and being part of some concerted effort to do something specific.... seems like a lot to assume.
As far as I can tell, being too small and devicive is exactly what makes politicians take notice, because they run screaming from anything approaching a real issue.
I mean, maybe thats YOUR takeaway. You say it like its such a bad thing...when the program was a resounding success.
The positive takeaway is this.... if you are governor, you can make gobs of money by funneling state contracts to your own company? Why even bother looking at outcomes when they are clearly not the major decision indfluencer.
As long as his pockets got lined....and they did.... why does something as niggling as cost effectiveness matter? It wasn't a money saving measure, that would have defeated the purpose.
I have heard/read about this a bit....I just haven't cared enough to try. I do want to, and get back to Assasins Creed and GTA series, but.... there are enough other games that I have yet to get a strong enough itch.
This is even less likely since the recent news about the Battle of Asakai got me enthralled with Eve online, enough to break my long standing rule of "I don't play MMORPGS". (and so far, I really like it)
Some day though, I will want to get back to some of those games, and I WILL try to get a controller going. In my prioritiy list though, that is somewhere below getting Eve working under Wine so I don't have to reboot so much,
My wife was hounding me for a while because before we had gotten married I borrowed some money from her that she was planning to buy a PC with for Diablo 3 when it came out, so... I got us both gaming PCs..... my first in years
The consoles have all been collecting dust ever since. It killed a few game series, just because buying a controller isn't that high on my list and third person running around games suck on kb and mouse... but the experience is better too.
Its not so much about graphics, my PC blows them away, but its also a lot newer, so thats understandable.... and thats kind of my thing... I can upgrade it.
The tradeoffs are simple. Consoles are consistent. Games are written to their specs for years. If a game says "Xbox360" there is no question, it will work on my Xbox360.
The downside, no upgrades untill the next version comes out. Performance has always been far behind PCs (a friend was over and saw my wife playing skyrim and he was shocked at how short the loading screens were compared to his console).. and as great as controllers are for some games (3rd person and games with simple rough mechanics) they are decidedly inferior to keyboard and mouse for anything remotely FPS, and when you look at the recent FPS RPGS like skyrim and Fallout....one word.... autorun.
Of course when I put a PC together, I can't seem to do it for less than 3x the cost of a console, but, I know the lower end of the market is perfectly fine at this point and, based on the last gen of consoles, at about the same price.
Thats the real kicker. When a console is $100-200... thats one thing... when it converges on the price of a low end gaming PC.... which can be used to do so much more, its hard for me to justify the console.
For me the balance is just so far tipped towards PC; I just can't justify another console.