Until a proposed system to make automated vehicles feasible on public roads in mass is proposed, developed, protocols and legal procedures released related to this come about, this is nothing but a scare topic making vague assumptions about things that aren't even a topic for development yet.

I'd say the last "build" I did was in 2012, where I added a Radeon HD 7870, an extra 8GB of RAM and a SSD to my main PC. That PC has been incrementally built upon for years. It started as an office PC with an AMD Athlon T-bird CPU (impossible to keep cool), Radeon 7000 graphics (not HD of course), a 4gb IBM fireball hard drive and 256MB of RAM. I can't really think of any instance apart from my main PC where I've started from basically nothing since starting a career in IT (its amazing how easy corporations will just let their old servers and desktops go after an upgrade).

Nowadays most of the hardware available is more or less the same between vendors that the fun of sourcing the hardware is pretty much moot.

Not sure. It was up earlier but rather slow.

...and I'm not voting on any level this year. There is not a single candidate on the state or federal level that I believe will make any discernible difference over the other. I'd at least pitch in for local elections, but having just moved to a new area of my state I haven't had time to form any educated opinion of the local candidates.

I am strongly against throwing in a vote just in spite of a candidate I dislike more, since the fact I dislike any of them means they aren't worth my vote. Maybe they are to someone else, but not to me. So fuck it this year. The lesser of two evils is still evil. I'll vote when I feel there is someone worth voting for.

While its just a YouTube comment, it seems a Pixar representative made some comments of his own. Amongst them was one which explicitly stated that Blender can implement OpenSubdiv if they wanted to.

Of course the comment holds no legal weight whatsoever, but its an encouraging sign.

A snip from that comment (emphasis mine):

OpenSubdiv is a free open-source API : any software vendor can implement our code in their application, including Maya, 3DS Max, Mudbox, Mari or Blender. The implementation is based on a joint research effort between Pixar and Microsoft Research.

Indeed. Why just the other day I was able to successfully listen to Holy Diver while downloading Firefox. Then when I double clicked the Firefox installer, ReactOS went straight to a BSOD.

Honestly, it does Windows better than Windows.

Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.

It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.

Actually, its built atop what once was the quake 2 engine, but has since been modified to extremes to support all these cool new things.

Can't really complain when the price tag for your average end user is "free."

I agree entirely. I'm not sure about Alien Arena, but I have noticed with a few of these open source FPS games, particularly AssaultCube (I used to love playing AssaultCube), a certain social phenomena will occur where only a handful of the "elite" developers, contributors, and players will be recognized and their ideas accepted as okay to be part of the game. Anything which conflicts with their interests is deemed bad for the game, even if the larger portion of their user base prefers these "bad" ideas.

So, slowly but surely, the large, interested communities who enjoyed what the elites did not will fade away and find other games. The end result being something like a few weeks ago when I tried to get on one of these games again just to see if things calmed down, and all I saw was a bunch of empty servers.

I understand that people would be protective of their work and after a while, sensitive to ideas of change. I also understand OSS permits people the option of splitting from a community and making modifications to a game they feel make it better. But when it comes down to banning players and servers alike from a master server for playing certain maps and modes too much, then you have a problem.

Trolling aside, I'm just glad those who did buy one are doing cool things with them.

I had put myself on the waiting list a month or so ago and just today I got invited to purchase one. But they claimed delivery would take 12 weeks at least. Since I am likely moving downstate, and since I've already waited this long for one, I figure I can hold off at this point.

Besides, for what I want to use it for I need to pick up some more hardware and finish my software for the cause. I intend to set up an amateur radio repeater using the Pi as the controller.

If I had to take a guess, he probably used a plugin that supports straight up OpenGL, an audio backend with support for OpenAL, and for input used XInput2.

Congratulations, Pirate Pay. You repurposed the same technology Low Orbit Ion Cannon offers so that it could target BitTorrent clients. Its a bit early to assume anyone will jump on this software, though. Fighting fire with fire and then complaining when down the road your network hosting this software is inevitably being DDoS'd by the clients it aggravated would come off as a bit hypocritical.

Although, I wonder if this targets specific torrents, or just any torrent downloading it detects on a network. I'd be rather ticked if I was in the middle of downloading a Debian DVD ISO and my download speeds dropped substantially because my system was being DDoS'd for using my download protocol of choice.