Pretty sure you need a massive lobbying brigade in order to qualify for Safe Harbor protections. :P

Do you want pretty graphics or an excuse to keep griping about?

Actually - not so much "modders" as "tweakers". Back in the day, it was editing an .ini file, and what they do is nothing else. They don't add external shaders, they don't add or replace any content, they just enable content that is there, in game, disabled by settings. The only reason this is done through mods and not plain config file edit is that the config file is buried within proprietary archive of the game, and can be modified only through a mod.

"Get" stuttering? The mod actually managed to REMOVE stuttering from the original game.

I might not be able to build a skyscraper but I can nail some boards together, plunge a toilet, wire a room, or lay some tile.

Basic home maintenance is something that everyone needs to understand regardless of whether they own their place or not. People need to know enough to be able to delegate to experts and not get robbed in the process. People need to understand what they are buying.

People need to be able to fend for themselves on a very basic level.

This American love of stupidity only serves to make for easier victims.

"Complex" is not for laymen. There is only so much that you can do with any "appliance". Beyond that, you actually have to know what you are doing. This "problem" has nothing to do with programming.

Once you get into "complex", you really do want something along the lines of a profession were people have to be licensed and they can be held accountable for their failures. For the "complex" stuff, we should be striving MORE for something comparable to real engineering or medicine rather than pushing for trained monkeys and amateurs.

Right tool for the job and all that...

I already use 60+ ports for my camera rigs on my musical instruments, why not for controllers? Let's see, I've got NES to USB, Genesis to USB, PSX to USB, a few regular thrustmater and firestorm joysticks, couple flight sticks, wheel/pedals, and a lot more.

I could easily knock 127 devices out with just my every day stuff.

"but lets be frank - all AAA games shipping to date don't have the quality of textures required to saturate even PCI Express 1,"

Let alone AGP. I think we're just now saturating that bus entirely.

" a pc couldnt make halo look as delicious"

What? The XBox used a modified GeForce 3.

Just after Halo was released in November 2001, the GeForce 4 came out.

The GeForce 4Ti series ran rings around the Xbox's modified GeForce 3.

Yeah! I remember the first time I tunneled into a cave system, not realizing that some forgotten beasts can fly. Well naturally one flies up after a couple of years and starts breathing poison clouds everywhere. All my dwarves are running around and completely freaking out and I just can't stop laughing hysterically watching the devastation. I've never experienced that in a game before...

In most of my jobs, HR hires normal humans. The vast majority of them don't particularly enjoy programming. Most of them got into it because they heard it was a good salary. Some of them are pretty good at it, some of them aren't. Maybe 5% of the programmers I've met will go home and write more code because they enjoy it and have their own projects they want to do. Seems to me that with a small bit of training, a normal human CAN do programming and do it reasonably well if they put their mind to it.

They also seem to have an above-average chance to push management to jump on some new framework bandwagon because they think that will solve all their problems. To be a really good programmer, you have to know how to program, understand the processes that you're automating with your code and realize that no silver bullet will allow you to NOT understand the processes that you're automating. If you don't understand what you're trying to do, you're not going to do it very well.

"There's no practical limit on the number of USB controllers you can attach to one PC"

Yes, there is. 127 per USB controller.

Though in fairness, it should be mentioned that, as with other aspects of the language, Perl also assumes that you are using the right operator, and that you actually mean what you wrote:

perl -e 'print "x" + 1;'
1

Or, even better:

perl -e 'print "x" x 22;'
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Meanhile, the end result doesn't look THAT much better than the PS3, with its measly GeForce 7900 series.

Just had boy #2 a month ago. Life is good.