funny, my opinion is that wow is in the best state it has ever been in. granted, with a game as old as wow, it is hard to recapture that shiny newness that a fresh mmo has. but wows endgame has never been better. now 10man raids are on equal footing with 25 mans since the loot is identical. this means players no longer feel forced to run both 10 and 25 mans to advance. this gives smaller guilds a huge advantage, making wows endgame more accessable than it has ever been. at the same time, the game is far from dumbed down - the heroic 5 mans are quite challenging (at least for pugs) and the raids have a mix of easy, somewhat hard, and crazy insane bosses. there is literally something for everyone now. anyway, if any slashdotters read this, i play as raymer on whisperwind alliance and will gladly help run you through some quests or dungeons and whatnot.

Gaming on the PC is not dead, even though some have been claiming the end is near for at least ten years now. But, gaming on the PC has changed quite a bit in the last decade. If you look at the gaming environment on the PC a decade ago, a bit longer even, in the late 90s with the launch of the first GeForce... gaming on the PC was a much larger affair - big budget games that took a big budget PC to play. Developers expected PC gamers to be on the bleeding edge, and for the most part they were. Sure, some developers tried to market to the low-end niche. But the general sense seemed to be, if you were gaming on the PC you had a beast of a rig for it, and all the big budget developers tailored their games with that in mind.

Now things have really changed. There a lot more PCs out there, but the high-end gaming enthusiast is a very small portion of computer users. So developers, with a few exceptions, tend to target those low to mid range systems out there, since that's where the market is... it's no longer reasonable for developers to expect a gamer to have a state of the art system. As a good example to this, I can't help but mention the elephant in the room when it comes to PC gaming: World of Warcraft. Easily one of the most popular PC games in the world. While WoW obviously requires more hardware than your average Facebook game, it's really not by much. They've made sure to design the game so it will run on a very low end machine, like the kind you can pick up at Walmart for under $500. Now, a game like WoW does have advanced shader features and DX11 stuff that can be toggled on for those with higher end systems, but none of it is required. Sure, the higher end machines make it look better and run faster, but it's a huge shift from the late 90s where developers just expected gamers to have high end machines to play their games at all.

Now, before someone points out that my example, WoW, is already several years old, I would point that Blizzard just released an expansion at the end of 2010, and if they wanted they could have totally reworked the game engine for high end systems (while that would be an expensive endeavour, if anyone could afford to it's Blizzard). They did not though, because Blizzard knows that having more systems able to run the game increases the potential market.

That's not to say games for high end systems don't exist on the PC anymore, since they obviously do, but they seem to be the exception instead of the norm these days. And a lot of those high end games are cross-platform, so they only require high end systems because they're competing with the current generation of consoles (which, I admit, isn't hard given this generation of consoles seems to have outlived all previous generations). I guess my long-winded point here is that the landscape of the PC gaming world has changed. High end systems are no longer the default assumption like they were a decade ago. I think overall this is good for gamers, since instead of being an expensive niche hobby, PC gaming is within the reach of anyone who can own a very modest PC.

My only complaint was the movie took a bit too long to get started. A lot of the intro scenes seemed kind of redundant. I felt like the audience didn't really need a background on the original Tron. Even people that haven't seen the first movie are going to know the basics because it's a movie that's sort of embedded into the culture somewhat. Sure, not to the extent of films like Star Wars, but if you haven't seen the first movie the time they wasted recapping it at the start isn't going to help you much anyway. And it's just a bit boring for everyone else. I did like that young Flynn felt ENCOM's new OS should be free, while the corporate drones wanted to charge for it. Seemed like a subtle nod to Windows and its free rivals. And I get that they want to establish him as kind of a rebel without a cause, so he can find himself a cause in the grid world. But it just dragged on a bit too long for me. Once he gets in though, wow. The visuals are stunning, and not just in the Avatar sense that it's really photo realistic (in some cases it's not, but that make sense). But it's visually creative. Watching them activate the bikes or planes, it's just amazing. The light-plane that they're flying too, it's a bit surreal. One very smart thing they did with this movie is after he gets out it's basically over. There's very few scenes in the real world afterward, because the filmmakers were smart enough to know it couldn't compare to what you've just seen on The Grid. Is the plot far fetched? Sure, but it for the most part is internally consistent and there weren't any issues with the plot that I found too distracting. If you want creative visuals with a surreal quality, this is the movie. As a piece of story-telling, there are better films, but it's not terrible in that regard, or at least not so bad that it distracts from the visuals.

Oh, and I know it's popular to bash 3D on Slashdot, but I saw it in 3D and I feel like it added something to it. One thing though, there's a bit of a disclaimer at the start saying some scenes were filmed in 2D (like the intro scenes) but to leave your 3D glasses on the whole time. Whatever - take them off for the intro scenes, you don't need them and it makes the film look a bit brighter anyway. But once he gets inside, definitely put them on and keep them on. It's worth it.

But, BeOS does live on in Haiku.

I really loved BeOS back in the 90s. It was a solid, stable and insanely fast OS. Sadly I guess those things don't matter much when you've got nothing to run on it.

Can't say I have. So is your point that WoW has more potential for addiction than TV, and that's why it's less socially acceptable? I cited an extreme case in an effort to demonstrate that I don't feel like I'm an extreme case. With TV, there's examples of children re-enacting scenes from Beavis and Butt-head and setting the house on fire, etc. Does that mean that every child that watches it will do so? No. Likewise I think only a small percentage of people that play WoW will ever become addicted to it.

But lets take your point and move it to something else that's socially acceptable: alcohol. Now, I certainly have heard of people living in cars (or homeless) because of alcohol. Yet it seems to me that not drinking alcohol turns more heads than drinking it, even with its potential for serious addiction. Why's that? Just wondering...

I play WoW, but the amount of time per week fluctuates. Recently I went almost a month without logging in since I'm all prepped for the expansion and there isn't much else to do until then. When the expansion hits my hours played per week will spike up for the first couple weeks as I rush to 85, but then it will level off at probably around 10 hours a week at most. Now on to the topic of TV. I get really confused by the strange dichotomy between watching several hours of TV a week vs playing a video game for that same amount of time instead. I guess TV is more socially acceptable for some reason, but both are essentially mindless entertainment, I don't think one is really superior to the other. WoW offers a bit of a social outlet due to its MMO nature, but then I suppose some (sadly rare) TV programming offers educational shows. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but in the end, both are entertainment. Yet when I tell people I play WoW, and how often I play (again, usually no more than 10 hours a week, sometimes it spikes up a bit, sometimes it's much lower, but that's the average) I get labled a nerd or an addict. It bothers me, because I have run into real addicts playing WoW and I feel like I'm not anything like that. I've run into a kid just out of high school that got kicked out of his parents house for doing nothing but WoW all day, and lived in a car while playing on a laptop with WiFi spots in public places. That's addiction. Playing WoW 10 hours a week is not, and I wish people wouldn't be so quick to toss out the A-word. No one would ever be called a "TV addict" for watching 10 hours a week. Why is there a different standard? Why does society view one form of entertainment as more valid, and less damaging than another? Is it simply because people fear what they don't understand? I don't know, but it irks me.

I essentially agree with the content of your post, but this comment makes me want to post some off-topic and pedantic remarks:

That might not help a whole lot. IQ doesn't really measure intelligence, but rather the capacity for it. A person can have an extremely high IQ but know next to nothing about certain topics, or be just plain wrong about a lot of them. A good example of that is Bobby Fischer, a chess genius with an IQ of 180, but he wasn't immune to xenophobic paranoia. Personally, I've taken two IQ tests and was in the 130 range both times, well above average, but there are a lot of things I know next to nothing about. For example, even though I have the capacity to understand it, I never learned much advanced mathematics because I simply lacked the motivation. An above average IQ doesn't make a person immune to other mental pitfalls. IQ also does not measure experience. I wouldn't tell a plumber or electrician how to do their job, since I lack the expertise they possess. Something that makes Slashdot discussions interesting is the fact that people have a variety of expertise here, and it's not uncommon to find people employed in whatever topic the article is discussing. It would be a mistake to discount the insight of those people if they failed to meet some arbitrary cutoff.

Anyway, I'm sure you weren't really serious and it was just a flippant remark, but I thought I'd comment anyway.

For a dystopian look at the inevitable progression of endless consumerism, read Brave New World. It's a good book on multiple levels, but when I first read it 10 years ago, I thought the satire of consumerism was a bit extreme, bordering even on the absurd. Sadly, I don't think so anymore.

Ah, but is winter in the midwest better or worse than summer in the middle east? I mean, solely from a weather perspective, heh.

From TFA:

And his evidence for any of this is...? Maybe the voters rejected this because, after 60 or so years of the modern UFO "movement" we are no closer to any hard evidence than when it started. In that time real science has landed men on the Moon, conquered the atom and used computers to connect the world. I think the lesson here is that science works: it produces real, tangible results. Pseudoscience produces nothing, save the false sense of superiority in those that practice it. People that believe UFOs are alien spacecraft, and that the government covers it up, aren't interested in facts. They believe it in the same mode of thought people use for religion. And that's not to disparage religious folk; while I am not religious myself, I understand the desire to believe and the strength people can draw from that belief. But some modes of thought, such as accepting things on faith, are not useful for real science.

Here's a major mistake UFO proponents make. They tend to believe, if science can't explain away every single detail about a UFO sighting, then it "must" be an alien spacecraft. It doesn't work that way though, because alien spacecraft are not known to exist. So, jumping to that conclusion is as absurd as saying it was elves or unicorns that caused the lights in the sky. And yet UFO proponents think explanations like "marsh gas" are absurd. But guess what: marsh gas is known to exist. So what's really more absurd? From the vantage point of science, we have to presume something does not exist until we have evidence it does. So until we have an alien spacecraft to examine up close, the default assumption will always be that they do not exist, and that will continue to be sound scientific reasoning until we have more than lights in the sky to support the alien spacecraft hypothesis.

And to think Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk that read "The buck stops here" referring to the fact that he was ultimately responsible for the decisions he makes. Did both parties have failures in preventing terrorism? Sure. But I think ignoring a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack inside the US" is one of our woes that we can safely rest squarely on the shoulders of George W. Bush. Now, I can admit that had he given that memo more attention, the attacks may still have happened anyway, or some other attack instead. It's as impossible to predict future events in an alternate timeline as it is in this one. But the point, and the reason even some rational people who don't believe Bush was Hitler are still upset with him, is that by ignoring that memo he failed in one of his most basic duties as President, to protect the country from attack by foreign agents.

Before anyone brings up the economic situation, sure. We can blame both parties and a parade of Presidents going back decades for that. Though, Bush's refusal to veto a single spending bill until it conflicted with his party's morality didn't help matters. I find it a bit ironic and hypocritical that all the Republicans shouting to reign in spending now didn't give two shits about it when it was their guy doing the spending. Really, that's what the two party system has evolved into now. Essentially both "choices" are the same with different branding. And the mass of voters who refuse to embrace third-party candidates are just as guilty as Clinton, Bush, and Obama in everything that we want to blame on each of them.

War is a great motivator for invention, sure. But I would be willing to live as we did prior to the 1940s if it meant the Holocaust didn't have to happen. The accounts I've read and the images I've seen reveal one of the darker chapters of human history. Also, without the second world war, we likely would not have invented (and used) nuclear weapons. And personally I would give up a lot to live in a world without those, too. Sure, today it's not the constant threat of nuclear war that people lived under during the cold war, but there are still a lot of stockpiles out there, and if the shit really hits the fan someday and there's another global or semi-global conflict, are all the nuclear powers just going to sit on those warheads? I hope so, but I tend to doubt it. So overall I could live without the advancements of WW2 if it meant the horrors of it would not have occurred.

Here is physicist Richard Feynman's take on the meaning of life. For more insights, check out his page on wikiquote here.

I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and in many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about a little, but if I can't figure it out, then I go to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.

I get that we want to think that military officers are supposed to be more reliable than your average Joe Schmuckatellii, but come on.

Everyone thinks that because it sounds like a "common sense" notion, right? But guess what actual, scientific studies on the subject of eyewitness testimony has shown? The answer: It does not matter who you are or what you do for a living, your brain is subject to the same logical fallacies as anyone else, and eyewitness testimony from air force pilots is statistically on equal footing as the testimony from cab drivers.

Here's a big problem that comes from interviewing eyewitnesses. If you interview them more than once, you get more data. However that data is almost always unintentionally fabricated. The human mind likes to subconsciously add details that fit a particular cognitive narrative. For example, say you witness a flock of geese but are convinced they are alien spacecraft. Your mind will then add subtle details to your recollections in an effort to more closely fit that narrative.

And herein lies the problem with most UFO "researchers" when it comes to eyewitness testimony. They do not attempt to filter out the cognitive bias at all. The typical "research" consists of 1) listen to fantastic story of UFO sighting and 2) believe story. That's not research.

UFO proponents always gripe that science doesn't take UFOs seriously, but that's exactly what the scientific community does when it applies harsh critiques to eyewitness testimony. Should we not apply the same techniques to filter out unreliable eyewitness accounts that we apply to aircraft accidents or murder trials? So really, when the UFO crowd says science isn't taking it seriously, what they mean is, we're applying too harsh a standard - a scientific standard - to their fantasies. They would rather we lower the bar so that speculation, supposition and circular reasoning all substitute for real science.

In the 50 odd years since modern UFO proponents have been trying to prove their case they have come no closer to proving anything. In that same time human beings have landed men on the Moon, remotely explored the outer solar system, and unraveled the history of the universe to its infant stages. And it didn't require a lower standard of proof to do any of those things. So why apply it to UFOs?

Kids swearing reminds me of a great scene in Misery. If you haven't seen the film it's worth watching, it's both intringuing horror and somewhat comical (both intentionally and unintentioally). Anyway, romance novel writer Paul Sheldon is being held captive by his insane fan Annie Wilks. She reads a manuscript for his as yet unpublished novel with a more serious tone, and this is her reaction:

Annie Wilkes: It's the swearing, Paul. It has no nobility.
Paul Sheldon: These are slum kids, I was a slum kid. Everybody talks like that.
Annie Wilkes: THEY DO NOT! At the feedstore do I say, "Oh, now Wally, give me a bag of that F-in' pig feed, and a pound of that bitchly cow corn"? At the bank do I say, "Oh, Mrs. Malenger, here is one big bastard of a check, now give me some of your Christ-ing money!" THERE, LOOK THERE, NOW SEE WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!

It's a great scene, mainly because Kathy Bates is so convincing as the mentally deranged Annie. But it does bring up the sort of cognitive dissonance about swearing. What does it really damage? From a philosophical standpoint, it's kind of odd that we humans make words that are considered taboo in the first place. Words have only the power that people give them. For example, others have already mentioned how what's acceptable has changed, and on that subject, I recall talking to my grandmother once about movies she saw when she was a kid. One of them was Gone with the Wind, and when Clark Cable uttered his famous "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" line, she said there was audible gasp in the theater. I can't even imagine the string of profanities needed to make a modern movie-going audience gasp. Actually, I think a string of profanities would have the opposite impact today, people would likely find it absurd at start laughing. So yes, language evolves, but so does society. Perhaps we've moved beyond assigning such power to words. The only exception I can think of is racial slurs, those are more offensive today to many people than they ever were in the past. It's not uncommon to find elderly folks that drop the N-word, not out of hatred or malice, but because that was just what "everyone" called black people when they were growing up. Granted, some elderly folks that use racial slurs are also racists, but it's not necessarily the case either. Things change, and not everyone can or will adapt.