SteamOS has a unique problem that no other ecosystem has to deal with: In order to leverage steam's strength, the size of the community, they had to do two things. First, ensure that the catalog of games is playable on the TV, and second, that this userbase can interact with the steam community on PCs. If the system can't do this, it requires a huuuge shift of users in order to make it successful, which requires the kind of investment microsoft did with the XBox.

The second bullet point above leads to an interesting problem if they go down the path of interoperability with PC clients: controllers and mice. PCs have several genres that are unplayable with a controller, and the mouse and keyboard combo offers a significant advantage in almost every kind of competitive gaming and multiplayer. I hope that their controller bridges the gap, and chances are it might.

The touchpad-based movement is a huge change from a joystick. Precision movement on a touch-style pad like that is the only way a controller could handle snap turns and accuracy that muscle movement on a mouse pad offers. The way its set up, I'd expect it to work sort of like the Thinkpad nib. If it works and people adopt it, it will allow people to play things like RTSes, turn-based games like Civ, and a host of other options. Yeah, hotkeys are another important point, but one more easily overcome than the massive gulf that currently exists between the mouse and the analog joystick.

There are other factors that will tie to its success, but I think the future of the system ties to its interoperability with the PC gamers. If it doesn't, its just going to be an also-ran.

Just some info, early adopters of blu-ray who went with Samsung got screwed. They pulled a Sony and the software updates required to play newer BD-movies removed the functionality to play DVDs. Why? I think because they skimped on the memory.

Of course they didnt' compensate or replace all 3 I bought (Mom, Brother, Me). I was rightly pissed off and haven't bought a Samsung product since.

This has nothing to do with labor costs, and everything to do with idle costs. In the port industry, berth productivity is king. If we can reduce the idle time of a ship by 6 hours, it can save the carrier millions on that trade route through route optimization taking a ship out of the loop or via fuel efficiency on slower speeds.

I think we don't see how much damage these things can do to society in a long-term look at things. I think the best case study to look at would be China in the late 19th century, where the opioids grown in India were cheap and accessible in the country spurring a 10% addiction rate in the population. It caused very serious societal problems which eventually lead to a major clean-up phase involving the ban and blocking of imports.

People arguing cheap and available are superimposing their rationality on addicts. Addicts, regardless of cost, will destroy every aspect of their life for more. This can be seen with fairly cheap alcohol, fathers spending their kids college savings and opening joint credit accounts with their family to steal their credit and burden them for life with their parent's debt, running up payday loans and not paying the mortgage, and so on. I've seen this first hand.

I agree certain drugs shouldn't be treated this way like pot, but opioids are not one of them.

A lot of left turns in my town use sensors on the ground with a lower limit of 5 seconds. The sensors will turn the light yellow if it doesn't detect a car in 3 seconds. There is one big left turn near my house that I use to go to the grocery store that always has around 10-20 cars in it at any time before 8 PM, and its a 30 second left turn light that will only last 5 seconds with one car. The full cycle for the intersection is about 3 minutes. One person not accelerating and turning causes cars to back up onto the main road until the next transition. It is a common problem with lackidaiscal god-window-sticker soccer mom drivers not hitting the damn gas pedal, and the more recently added majority infringers, dipshits looking at their phones.

Causing traffic congestion because you can't wait 10 minutes to read and type out a text is unnaceptable.

I can confirm this happens even on dual-monitor setups with the default driver. It is extremely common when playing a full screen game on one monitor and leaving the other up for your background stuff, even with the cursor stuck to the gaming monitor. This happens to me when playing Dota 2.

It is common to the point where there's threads about it spattered around the internet.

Even if what you said was true, you assume that the reward outweighs the risk. You are flat out wrong. Intent matters. In our industry, we get a serious investigation from OSHA even if a union worker dies of a heart attack, or if someone ran a stop sign and caused an accident at the facility. We do everything we can to make it safe, even as far as changing traffic patterns, and it is the number one commitment in my company. See, the fines START at the massive numbers and are reduced if you can prove that it was not willful negligence. Basically, you ahve to have policies in place that control against bad behavior in a reasonable manner or you have no oomph to your requests to reduce fines when accidents occur. It is more expensive to hide than it is to implement properly, and even if you are focusing solely on the money, it is more expensive to anyone worth their salt who can map out all the real costs associated with bad behavior.

The companies that can't look beyond step 2 are the ones that fail. Safety pays, as does reducing emissions and power consumption.

For a minute, I was thinking that I was the only one who had seen this movie. Bravo for sharing it.

Sometimes I wonder if John Stewart got his formula from Eddie Murphy's comedies.

As an extension of this, see if there's correlation between this entitlement and the increased ubiquity of pre-purchase offers in the industry. I can understand the demands given you paid $60 for the game 3 months ago.

As an additonal note, freight trains between SF and LA shouldn' be a point of discussion. Both locations have large deepwater ports and are served as transport hubs for inland cargo. The amount of freight that moves between the two cities is miniscule because a large percentage of the ships that dock in LA also dock at Oakland. Both ports have nearby or on dock rail depots. A rail connection for freight connecting west coast cities offers very little value.

While I think there's likely some truth in the studies' conclusion, I don't think it controls for the environmental changes and attributes it all to avoiding unnatural light, and I don't think this is necessarily an accurate assessment.

One of the things that happens when you camp and hike is that you eat less and burn more calories. One of the things that keeps us up is our high calorie diets coupled with our sedentary lifestyles, causing our bodies to burn off excess calories through stupid things like nervous twitches. You can see the same circadian fix as the one the study proposes by working out for an hour and a half a day or doing heavy physical labor.

Couple that with how much easier it is to sleep when you're bored, and the fact that there's not much you can do in the woods at night compared to day, and you get a natural gravitation towards sleeping during the dark hours of the day. Hiking may regulate our sleep, but I think there's more factors here at play.

A scientist or engineer that can't handle common unit conversions is an unemployed scientist or engineer.

The article is from a US website intended for a US audience, and uses US measurements. I don't expect a news aggregator to do extra work because you're lazy.

I'm sorry, but you are wrong. I used to think the same way, then I managed to pry some stories out of my calculus teacher during a key club convention, who was a former USAF pilot. One of my friends was looking to follow that path so he discussed the dark side of being a pilot. I was always wondering why the guy looked so beat up given that he was only 60, and its because of the intense strain on your body by the profession. He was telling us about how when you're taking sharp turns, you basically have to flex your entire body and breathe in tiny spurts. It can stress every blood vessel in your body so badly that a single flight can force you into days of physical pain.

I suggest you go to youtube and look up airforce centrifuge training, click on one of the longer videos, showing you the strain level of different prolonged G-forces and what they have to do to stay consious. It gave me a new respect for how difficult it can be.