Sucks doesn't it? They target the impulsive younger audience that is more willing to pay for a shitty game so they can increase profit margins, rather than target those of us (older usually) gamers with the disposable income to blow on any and every game we want.

Think about it though. The more free time you have, the less picky you are about the games you play. So those of us that have little free time now have to decide carefully what to spend our precious little free time playing. It's all about the value you're getting out of the game, where value = enjoyment/time. But as time progresses aren't games supposed to be getting better and better? If games really were better than they were back in the days of our youth, then our perceived value from those games would have stayed the same. But it hasn't. With value = enjoyment/time, if time goes down, enjoyment must go up in order to maintain equilibrium. At the very least our drop in free time has outpaced the increased enjoyment from games, lowering perceived value below an acceptable threshold.

I still play games in my free time, but I'm damn sure pickier than I used to be back in middle/high-school. Hell back in high-school I would buy a new game almost every week, I was beating them so fast. I wasn't picky about quality or even enjoyment as I had free time to burn and games were how I chose to spend that time. Once college rolled around, and then a career, I started playing only the most enjoyable of games; which is the expected response. However a funny thing has occured as I have gotten older. When I was younger it seemed that a large majority of the games out there were 'above par'. Even if I decided not to play them, I didn't expect that actually playing it would make me want to shoot myself. However these days it seems that there are far fewer diamonds amongst a much larger rough. Games have always fallen into three groups for me: Must Play, Good if I Find Time, and Holy Shit Keep it Away From Me. Back when, it seemed like most games fell into the first two groups with a spattering in the third, probably close to a 20/70/10 split. These days it seems more like 10/10/80. This shift seems to be much larger in magnitude than one would expect from an aging gamer; you would expect a person's standards to rise over time, but the shift appears disproportionate. So while I agree that there are 'winner' games out there that are very popular and heavily played, the industry as a whole has taken a huge nose-dive. Which is probably why people complain so much and pine for the 'Good Ol' Days'.

I hope you guys are able to follow through with that. I'm really looking forward to Super Clog Dancer 3 Turbo.

By definition what you have in this moment is simultaneously the best and worst you can have at that moment because you have no frame of reference. The frame of reference is only that moment, thus what you have has no comparison. Get it? Calling it 'the best' for that moment is simply looking for the silver lining. Since you can't change the past, you always have the best that you can have, but not necessarily the best you could have had, or that you could have in the future. Treating what you have now as the best you can have is simple optimism, while treating it as the best you could ever have is what breeds complacency. Complacency is not without virtue however, as there is certainly a point where the ROI you get from your time spent improving things just isn't worth the improvement itself. At that point it's acceptable to become complacent. There is definitely a point where 'good enough' truly is good enough.

This is slashdot, no-one reads the summary or the article anymore, so no-one will get it. Ten years ago they would have gotten the joke though.

You must be female then. Now zip your pants back up and get back on topic.

That doesn't mean shit. You have to infringe on all of them. Look at number three:

triggering action taken by said electronic equipment in response to said handheld device's sending of a signal to indicate said action is desired

Sounds a hell of a lot like something a TV remote has been doing for decades. If you only had to infringe on one claim to be infringing on the entire patent then Thinktopic would have never been granted their patent in the first place.

Oh the delicious irony of destroying art in order to create it. I commend you good Tigger, mad though you may be.

And to think that people called me uncivilized when I laughed at that monkey in a cowboy outfit riding a dog around like a horse.

Ah, Art.

Thank you for giving us rule 34 of the internet long before the internet was even conceived.

Don't be silly. Anyone wearing a beret obviously lacks the upper body strength to lift an iPad. They'd stick to their iPhone.

There's a bit of logical fallacy in your claim here, but I'll concede that it may just be due to simple ignorance. BT clients can be set to only download and never upload by either setting the outbound bandwidth usage cap to zero or setting the outgoing connection pool to zero. So, even though the artist used bittorrent it is not necessarily true that he can be sued. Well, I guess technically they could be sued no matter how they downloaded the files (anyone can sue for any reason) however the case would have no merit if the artist asserts they took care not to upload any of what they downloaded. Burden of proof to the contrary would be on the 'prosecution' side, and if the arist is telling the truth there would be no evidence.

Because then the camera would be about as large as the SX-70 was(is). And the market seems to demand that cameras now be these tiny little pieces of shit that break the second you fart on them. At least with consumer level point-and-shoot cameras, not so much with expensive professional cameras. But then again professional cameras are expected to be a bit bigger and bulkier to begin with, and if you're using one chances are you don't give a toss about the instant feature. The people that want the instant photos are the ones that also want the little breakable you can slip in your back pocket. A neat little idea you have, but it wouldn't sell very well.

You're correct. Combatting Cyber-Crime could create thousands of new jobs.

Terrorism? I dunno, unless you're worried about hipsters pissing themselves because they can't reach the new york times website because that's the only website they go to for news, then sure, maybe. But I hardly see how Cyber-Crime is affecting terrorism. Terrorist groups seem to prefer funding themselves off of drug, weapon, and human trafficking. That's not to say that some of the money stolen through Cyber-Crime doesn't make its way into terrorist hands, but I don't see it as a primary or even significant funding source.

As for it impacting "immanent threats to America" I'm going to have to ask for an example, because I have no clue what the hell you're trying to convey there.

I have to disagree about it being a 'good thing'. As others have mentioned, there is no reason the RICO act couldn't already be applied to perpetrators of cyber-crime. Having additional language added to the act is unnecessary, wasting both time and valuable tax dollars. I would prefer if the government would spend their time and my money on shit that actually fucking matters, like the recession and alternative fuels.

I'd mod you up if I had points. I'd be torn between funny and insightful however.