The only people who think that BF3 doesn't suck never played BF2 and thought BC2 was the most epic of Battlefield games. They took everything that was shitty in BC2 and made it shittier in BF3, then added jets. It is hollow in terms of tactics compared to BF2 and even BF2142. They were trying to appease the COD crowd and try to get some of that money (even though they said the PC was the target, it is obvious that the PC is suffering from their focus on the consoles).

I canceled my preorder because to me it felt the complete opposite. Auto regenerating health (vehicles and people), unlimited ammo in the vehicles, spawning on any member of the squad, shitty flight dynamics, etc. It is like they took the worst of Bad Company 2 and noobed it up even more, then added jets.

That question doesn't mean you are pedantic, it means you are incapable of using common sense.

Isn't comparing a gaming laptop to a desktop kinda completely useless? Of course the laptop is going to cost more than the desktop, it always has and always will.

ASL was one of the most amazing simulations of all time. The improvements it made over the Squad Leader system were incredible. I'm pretty sure I can still find my maps and counters in my garage of one of the closets if I looked hard enough. That might be a project for the upcoming weekend.

I tried using my hard drive as an soundcard once while encoding MP3s. That was a pain in the ass to recover. It did teach me to check the device in a commandline a couple times before hitting enter though.

We tested a system like this about 10 years ago or so for helicopter pilots to better alert them from which direction they were being shot at. It never made it past the 'test in our sim' stage.

One of the best uses aside from utter destruction (ever seen what a November does to anybody unlucky enough to be in the house it hits?) is deterrent. Bad guys don't want to go out when Apaches are in the air. There is a reason that Apaches have been in the air around Baghdad 24/7 for several years.

Blu-Ray drive from Lite-On for $69.99 at Newegg. Blu-Ray got really cheap, even burners are only $150-$200.

I'd be way more leery of them selling three separate single player campaigns instead of one like SC was. That right there made me lose any interest I had in SC2 at all.

And the company doing the switching as they experience a period of lower productivity as they have to retrain the employees on using the new software.

Installing Win7 is fast. Upgrading, specifically transferring the migration files, takes forever, even HDD -> SSD. It took over an hour to transfer about 80G or so stuff from a 10k RPM drive to a SSD on my machine. The article is about the time it takes to upgrade, not a clean install.

There is a difference between 'possible' and 'stupidly easy'.

The developers went to the PS2 and XBox because the Dreamcast was stupidly easy to pirate games for. If the developers weren't making money, why support the system?

And miss most things of any tactical value in that time. There is a place for fast places, in strategic recon, which happens to be a lot harder to hide from satellites. We are going toward slower (I prefer the term lumbering) platforms with awesome endurance for tactical recon, staring is better than glimpsing in that case.