It puts you on the front line of seeing what decisions people are making and why. It's actually a very important perspective.

I am a developer for a company that sells products and provides in-house phone support. If you asked someone about my product and they piped up and then said at the end "I support this product", you might be tempted to say "Oh, you aren't a developer so you don't know what you're talking about." But the support dude has a better picture of some things than I do, because he's actually there, talking to customers directly, and part of my job is making sure I get that information from him. Because there's just no replacement for that sort of thing; the CEO is even further from customers than I am, my manager tries to keep on top of such things but still doesn't talk directly to customers as much as our support crew.

Of course, I have a better picture than the support dude does of some other things, too, but I'd be a moron if I discounted the support perspective because they're "below" me, or for some other dumb reason.

Running a game store may not qualify you to discuss video game company strategy, and actually Gord tries to sometimes IIRC and at that point I believe he oversteps a bit. But it's the best qualification there is for having a firm grasp on what people are looking for and how people buy, and you ignore that at your own peril... well, "your own peril" if you're a video game company, anyhow, you're probably not in any peril.

You can get this by being an employee too, but A: he did it for a very long time and B: being the business owner and being very, very directly affected by the issues will have a stronger focus on the issues than "somebody who works at Gamestop over Christmas" would.

You're assuming that nanotech and interstellar drives + enough fuel to power said interstellar drive are readily-available and cheap enough in this hypothetical civilization to make it feasible for Joe "Sixpack" E.T. to go out and buy himself a self-replicating computer-building solar-system consuming interstellar probe.

No, I'm not. I said "entity". This may be one individual, a company, a collective which we have no name for, a government, whatever.

The alternative that all the resources are so evenly spread out and no collective of any kind of sufficient size to fund this project exists (because, what, they fight too much all the time?) is the stretch.

Also, keep in mind that the emerging scientific consensus is that tool-using intelligent life is probably extremely rare in the Universe (on the order of a few such independent instances in every galaxy or so).

I said: "Is life or intelligent life or evolution profoundly less likely than we think it is?"

I recently complained that I mostly left Slashdot when people no longer even bothered actually reading the comment, in their zeal to post some zinger. I think this comment of mine rather proves the point, what with two people jumping up with objections that I had already explicitly mentioned... :-/ Guess I'll upgrade that "mostly".

"Maybe something did colonize our solar system that way, and for ethical reasons chose to simulate all future life on Earth while they tore our solar system apart for their own needs. This could even have happened a bare few years ago in real time, even as the simulation crossover point could well have been millions of years ago subjective."

One thing I forgot: Why would a civilization choose to send out such colonies? The civilization may not care, but it only takes one entity in that civilization who gets fed up with the neighbors, the restrictions, or for any other reason wants to own their own world to send out such a probe. This entity gets loaded onto the probe, goes to sleep, and wakes up in their own solar system. No issues with delay, massive economic payback for the entity that did this (energy to send probe pays off with an entire star, that's a lot of payback). In order for our galaxy not to be full of this sort of colony, it has to be the case that this is absolutely, positively never desirable. Even to an otherwise irrational entity who has the power to make this happen. Never, ever, ever.

Assuming you can't skirt around the light barrier then that basically means sending small groups of people (or aliens or whatever) across trillions of miles, probably in some kind of hibernated state, in the hope that they'll bump into a habitable somewhere, set up shop, and begin to populate.

That is a grotesquely 20th century view of interstellar colonization. It may or may not be on the edge of feasibility with fusion-based propulsion, it probably is with implausible anti-matter propulsion, but it's quite questionable whether it works physically, let alone economically.

What is way more plausible is something involving a nanotech-based seed that can start up a virtual society that fits easily within a few kilograms of payload. That seems feasible today. That doesn't seem like something we could build today, but it involves no fundamental breakthroughs in physics. This would tear apart the entire target solar system and turn it into computronium.

Two things come out of that: First, this should have happened before there was any interesting life on Earth to be ethically worried about, assuming such beings would even care. Second, we should be able to see the outcome of such radical changes as the entire solar output of stars would be used. But we don't. We just see stars.

This doesn't resolve the paradox, because our understanding of physics still says at least one civilization should have gotten to this point, and once they do, a wave of near-lightspeed colonization should still occur. (Where "near-lightspeed" may still be 10% of lightspeed or something; on this scale, it doesn't matter.) It turns out "colonization" looks nothing like it does on Star Trek, but it still is colonization and we'd still see it, if not in actual "communication". But we don't.

The Fermi paradox remains. These sorts of explanations show it to be a deeper problem than they understood in Fermi's time, but it remains. Is there something wrong with our understanding of physics? (Is the max computational limit far lower than it seems, by many orders of magnitude? Is there some easy way to build a pocket universe such that all civilizations, with 100% totality, choose to escape into a pocket universe rather than colonize this one? If so, we have no hint of that in our most sophisticated theories.) Is there something wrong with our understanding of the universe? (Are we simulated? Maybe something did colonize our solar system that way, and for ethical reasons chose to simulate all future life on Earth while they tore our solar system apart for their own needs. This could even have happened a bare few years ago in real time, even as the simulation crossover point could well have been millions of years ago subjective. Is there actually some sort of superior being preventing this from happening, a god, a God, or some sort of Saberhagen-style Berserkers? Is life or intelligent life or evolution profoundly less likely than we think it is?) As my parentheticals indicate, there are still many possibilities, but in my opinion, the Fermi paradox remains a profound challenge for the conventional, secular humanist/athiest, WYSIWYG-view of the universe. (And I do mean "challenge", not "disproof".)

I can only think of one title in Video Game History that had both dynamic maps and interactive elements that were different every time: Larn. It's a 20 year old DOS title that used nothing but ASCII characters. But hey, it rocked since it was new every time.

I almost hate to do this to you, but... are you aware that that's actually just one member of the genre called "roguelikes"? My preference is for Angband, but you should also try Nethack. There are tens of other good ones. (IIRC, Angband is closer to Larn writ large, but Nethack has its own charms.)

I'm sorry for the hundreds of hours I just sucked out of your life. Perhaps you should just ignore this message and forget about it.

And all of this manifests... how? My Roku only plays Netflix. (Or rather, only played now that I've sent it back.) How do I get it to play anything else?

Right now, it's all 100% talk, and has been for a while. GPL'ed code doesn't mean crap if I can't change the box at all.

There is unlikely to be any student assignment that can't be completed with Open Office. In my experience, there's a lot of people that still simply don't know about the alternatives, so they buy Office up-front, only to find out about Open Office later. Paying a subscription radically increases the chance that one of their friends will pass them a copy of Open Office, so Microsoft gets $15 instead of $200.

So, do some math here. $1.25 an hour is $20 for sixteen hours. For $20, you can currently buy a number of greatest hits games, which for the sake of argument certainly have more than sixteen hours of gameplay in them. 40 hours is a good rule of thumb, more in some cases. I'm an extreme bargain shopper but I've been known to pour 100+ hours into a $17 game (I'm thinking FFX-2 100%-completion here), which is 17 cents an hour.

This, in addition to the documented preference humans have to pay one up front fee if it means avoiding the cognitive cost of having to think about hourly fees. For how many people is this a radical price increase over the current system? It'll never fly for those people, because there's no chance in hell the games will be any appreciably better than today.

Again, I'm an extreme bargain shopper so maybe the average gamer is already in the $1.25-hour range... but I doubt it's all that many.

What "openness" would that be? Link?

I'd call you a shill as a couple of AC's have done, but if you are a shill, you're an incompetent one making completely baseless claims. At the moment there is no evidence of openness that I can find.

A bad statistical model for predicting cable outages?

Not that conspiracy theories aren't a whole lot of fun and all, but as I'm yet to see a terribly credible motive*, "people are too optimistic about how good their tech works" is a pretty reasonable explanation.

(*: Remember, for a motive to be credible, it has to not merely "explain" the actions, but explain why the perpetrator thinks this is the best thing they could do with their time, or at least credibly close to the "best thing". Nothing I've seen even comes close to that standard.)