Don't pay for the shit DLC, and Supply and Demand economics will take care of the problem.

Good arguments, but there's a chicken/egg phenomenon here. People may not bother continuing to later levels of a game because the developers didn't invest time in holding the interest of the players or providing content worth exploring. Then developers conclude that it's not worth investing money in a longer game. Then the game gets shorter and the new end of the game begins to get short-changed for similar reasons...

And pretty soon all anyone can buy is a God Damn 1 level game demo, that never materializes into anything substantial because the developers are already on to the next purchase enticing demo.

If you follow this shit out, then what you end up building is the shortest possible piece of shit that you can sucker people into shelling out the most money for. And that's what's wrong with letting economics be the primary driver of creation. The great games are ones that are built on a vision of something amazing and the follow through is driven by that personal desire for greatness by the developers rather than what the ROI will be.

It is, of course, true that you need good management of a project to keep the costs sane, but I would say that the games that are driven more by projected ROI end up as shit, and the games that are well-managed but allowed the time necessary to reach an artistic level of completeness are far superior. I don't like Blizzard very much, but if you look at their games, they don't design the first half of a campaign to be great and then just trail off. They build them great from beginning to end because they believe in their vision and they believe the ROI will follow suit.

No offense, but I'm sick of whiny bitches complaining about 14 year olds with more time than them. If you're an adult with a job--here's a news flash--use your adult social skills to find a couple friends and log on together and wipe the floor with the 14 year old jackass.

Or just grow some tougher skin and use those kids to get better. I'm almost 40 and I still kick most peoples' ass in multiplayer FPS, but sometimes I get my ass handed to me by some kid--so what? I've called up a friend before for the express reason of giving a beat down to some pimple-faced twit and that was good fun.

Have to disagree not with your math, which is correct, but with the fact that the base of the x^n is insignificant. I chose 10^n over other variants specifically because order of magnitude is very useful for many quantitative studies, but also because it is the most comfortable variant for the lay-person where our number system is tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.

The supremacy of random really reaffirms my faith in the Slashdot community, though.

"First we'll introduce these annoying eye-catching interruptions that generate a profit from the Sheep-90% of the population that buys stuff because we tell them to buy. Then we'll charge the remaining Smart-10% money to take that annoying shit back out."

What to do? When you're crushed in with 90% sheep, you go where they go, and aren't distinguishable in any meaningful way. Unless you get out of the herd. Then a wolf eats you.

*bleat* *munch* *poop* *dinner*

HTML5 is still under initial development. Flash has been around for years. Of course, Flash is the more mature technology. The point of HTML5 is to develop an open standard alternative with comparable functionality (including security). That isn't going to happen over night, and, as with any product, it will take some time to stabilize, mature, and become secure.

The reason HTML5 is important is the open standard aspect of it. Flash is ubiquitous on the web, but we are all at the mercy of a company and their proprietary technology. Believe me when I say that this is a huge risk, because I work full-time on a product that uses Flash as its core technology (www.smilebox.com). When the Flash 10.1 minor revision came out, it broke out product--HARD. And we had no choice but to deal with it and quickly because Adobe pushes hard on the update path in browsers. What resulted was a costly scramble to identify bugs, many of them in the 10.1 player, and adjust our product for the new API.

Mind you, this was in a minor revision, but I can tell you the changes and impact were huge and sudden. That. Really. Sucks. So an open-standard with more transparency is a valuable alternative. And that's where the real face-off is between the two alternatives.

Nature has had millions of years to come up with a 3D storage solution and it came up with neurons. Neurons have variable activation thresholds; the dendrites can adjust to require a variable amount of chemical stimulation from axons before they fire. Our memory system is based on resistance based circuits.

Nature tries to find the most efficient path. That means achieving the most storage/computation in the least space/energy. I think memristors are big, because we're following in the path of Nature.

Only if we also require operating systems to show a splash screen with a person as correspondingly fat as the operating system itself. Welcome to FattyOS!

We've just entered the Neoneolithic Age.

'Now imagine Shattrath City with ads you just saw on television or read in a newspaper—the latest movie release or television show or a new car model,' he said. 'Imagine further that it is up-to-the-minute, whether you played your game today or six months from now. That is much more realistic.'

Appropriately modified, Marketing Fuckwit #2's statement is entirely realistic.