You know, my wife will be eternally grateful for Rock Band, et al.

I led a very, er ... musically sheltered life prior to Rockband and Guitar Hero. Wasn't a fan of most forms of rock, couldn't stand metal or punk. Like, at all.

The Rockbank type games taught me a LOT about the melody, structure, and musicality of them; sort of acted as a crash course in understanding why they didn't suck.

Since then I've bought well over a hundred punk albums (literally) and other stuff I previously didn't like since playing the game.

Say what you will about these games ... but in my direct experience, nothing teaches the structure and musicality of a broad range of music as well as these things.

For me and my wife? We'd buy this again in a heartbeat ... because it's a fun game to play in parties, and a friend's wife makes drumming on expert look easy.

So when I'm rocking out to Rise Against in the car, my wife is laughing and saying "Thank god for Rockband". Because without those games, I most certainly wouldn't have been.

If you have a large enough market, the simplicity and repeatability of dedicated controllers with buttons chosen precisely for your game's design and so on is attractive.

If you don't, you run into the problem that low volume production of such gear isn't going to make the price point any more attractive, and it's fairly bulky and expensive for something you can only play a few games with.

Anyone know what the feasibility might be of, instead, of taking advantage of what is already available? For mics, the attempt to make voice control a fad left a fair number of consoles already equipped with one, cellphones and tablets all have them and support wired or wireless headsets, and USB mics of unexceptional quality cover everyone else for not much money. On the guitar side, probably-awful 'beginner' units are $60-80(probably less if you get one used after buyer's remorse claims the original victim), and essentially any electric guitar will support putting out a low-level signal into a 1/4inch jack. If a device already has a line in, a simple mechanical adapter will do, if not, cables that are a USB audio-in on one end, 1/4inch jack on the other are quite cheap. Once you had that, your game could presumably crunch the guitar's output and (depending on how much 'game' and how much 'learning tool' you want) do anything from treating a few large contact areas as 'buttons' to actually grading you on the degree to which your results match the correct output.

I doubt that, if the user needs to purchase everything, particularly new, you could beat the package cost of a mass-produced controller pack; but if you don't think that you have the volume for a suitable production run of instrument-controllers, it seems like an approach that has very low marginal cost and can work with more or less any instrument floating around in the wild, might be less risky and more approachable.

Last Halloween I got suckered into running a 13k in costume; since the only costume I own is a TNG uniform and one of my friends wore a TOS redshirt it wasn't much of a leap to get smashed afterwards on Romulan Ale. Alas, I found out the hard way that my Playmates Type II Phaser doesn't work on the bouncer at our local pub. He's a big guy, so maybe I just needed to bump it up to maximum stun....

It kind of tastes like gasoline but that's part of the appeal, along with pretending it was smuggled across the neutral zone after you've consumed too much of it.... ;)

LOL ... is this a thing? Like, an actual thing people do?

Because I was in the middle class doing manual unskilled work (soldering electronics) 26 years ago. Because that is what I saw predominantly everywhere I went. Yeah, you had a factory that manufactured and repaired electric motors. For each one of "you" there were a dozen of "others" truly doing unskilled jobs.

Jesus, look at all those people that used to work in the auto industry. Sure, there were truly skilled laborers, but the lot was just put thing A in mold B, yell "clear" and pull the lever. The garment industry? Unskilled by modern standards. Assembly of electronics? The bulk of it is unskilled by modern standards.

Look at the work done by FoxConn workers in China. Yeah, they are assembling your fucking awesome, newest iButtPlug electro-trinket, but those workers are unskilled. They simply pick part A and B from conveyor belt and put them together in a bucket in another conveyor belt.

Those are the type of manufacturing jobs that were predominant here, that were uber-sophisticated by the standards of the 50's and 60's when Europe and Japan were recovering from the ashes, China and India were completed fucked, Latin America was fucked and incompetent (hasn't changed much) and 2/3 of the planet was living in some weird state mixing stages from the Neolithic, Iron Age and Feudalism with a bit here and there from the Industrial Age circa 1800's.

Things changed, and those uber-sophisticated jobs no longer count as skilled. The rest of the planet did some catching up, and what counted as skilled now counts as menial.

Time to deal with it.

I've seen a lot of recipes over the years; the one that comes the closest to the effects of the "real" thing is equal parts Everclear, Bacardi 151, and Blue Curacao. It kind of tastes like gasoline but that's part of the appeal, along with pretending it was smuggled across the neutral zone after you've consumed too much of it.... ;)

Human beings are one of the few (the only?) species on this blue marble that can override their baser instincts in favor of reason. I personally know several people who quit smoking cold turkey after many years. It's simply a matter of will power. Don't whine about the "tobacco" companies if you can't summon it even when you know the consequences.

Honestly, yes, he died of smoking.

But he was 83. What is the median age of death?

It's like the great lines from George Burns:

"Is it true that you smoke eight to ten cigars a day?"
"That's true."
"Is it true that you drink five martinis a day?"
"That's true."
"Is it true that you still surround yourself with beautiful young women?"
"That's true."
"What does your doctor say about all of this?"
"My doctor is dead."

I come to Slashdot for interesting news, not sad news

"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters".

The passing of Leonard Nimoy matters to most of us.

Nobody promised you happy news. Not now, not ever.

There were actually two.

The second sequel pretended the stupid, implausible script from the first sequel had never happened. And then it produced it's own stupid implausible script.

For all purposes of discussion, anything which claims to be a sequel to Highlander doesn't exist to anybody except the people who wrote them.

Highlander was a story which really couldn't have a sequel, nor should it have. It was beautifully complete on its own, and should have stayed that way.

Even the TV series technically couldn't have existed without pretending the movie didn't happen, but then they still brought in the original guy eventually and did some strange stuff.

There can be only one.

If you set up a straw man, then it's very easy to kill it. The issue is not an OS providing something, it's that Microsoft, which had a near-monopoly in the desktop space, used the money from selling the OS to fund development in another market (browsers) and then bundled their version, undercutting the competition with cross subsidies. There was a thriving browser market before IE was introduced, but it's hard to compete when most of your customers are forced to pay to fund the development of your competitor.

The precision is actually pretty impressive, I've had a model I designed printed out in brass before, and some of the detail, I can't imagine milling achieving it. But yeah, no question that milling or sintering will get your stronger parts.

Microturbines are one of those few things where 3d printing might actually prove an economical means of production - the keys being small, intricate, and very expensive.

I wonder how effective it'd be to print out one of these, minus the windings. They've got crazy power output (up to 100kW sustained / 200kW peak) and efficiency (up to 98%) in a motor small enough (20kg; significantly less without the windings) to make a 3d printing service (or more realistically in this case, a custom CNC milling service) cost effective. Buying them commercially, they're something like $4k USD each. But there's a 3d model available, so....

All I can say is, I'd love an electric car with one of those driving each wheel....

Laser sintering of titanium is a well established process and should produce excellent turbine blades. 3d printing plus thermal spraying (a new one I've seen uses a form of laser spraying) might actually be able to produce parts better than would be possibly by any other means (such as machining cast metal) because you're not only heating the grains to join them together, but compacting them at high velocity.

Even for the more "primitive" 3d printing metal techs, they're just lost wax casting where the original mold is 3d printed. So the results are no worse than any other lost wax cast metal.

And yes, I was hopeful that this was a fully finished, working product. And that I'd be able to download the model. There's little that I'd be willing to pay the premium of laser titanium sintering for, but a micro jet turbine is one of those things. ;)

But those are not human hands.

Well, they are and they aren't.

The GP has a point, they are biological in nature, not mechanical.

Sebastian was a bio-engineer, and said he suffered the same problem as the replicants, premature aging.

So, they're not robots. But "more human than human", which means some of our limitations have been removed, but still built out of the same stuff.

It was never clear in the movie if the replicants ever started out as "babies", or sort of started out fully formed ... so to answer the GPs question about how we know they don't age ... I guess we don't, because we don't know much about their lifecycle, other than they don't live very long.

It could be an interesting movie. Cynically, I fear it is just there to make more money and not tell a good story.