If I could, I would try to convince the Romans of the past to stop building roads. The reason for this is that I've discovered that since the advent of roads, there has been such a phenomenon as road-side bandits, highway robberies, and even standing armies using this newly found infrastructure to lay siege to our vast empire.

Ever since the Romans came along and deprecated our glorious and superior dirt infrastructure, we've been carelessly hooking up critical systems to this "road"-system: tax-collection, food transportation, even up to the point where we are now moving cattle over these infernal cobblestones instead of using the much safer glorious dirt infrastructure. We've hooked up entire towns, cities, even castles and palaces to this infrastructure we can barely contain and are surprised when those of malicious intent use it to our disadvantage.

Back in the good old days of our vastly superiour dirt infrastructure we had no such troubles with malcontents, criminals and foreign armies. It was a pleasant land of peasants toiling about in our magnificent dirt.

In conclusion, the Roman empire was a detriment to all of society. While seemingly introducing a convenient mode of transportation, and making all of our society dependant on our infrastucture, they clearly have introduced this concept with the intent of ending civilization as we know it. I therefor call out to you, citizens, fellow countrymen: Tear down these "roads" that threaten us all! Go back to rolling around in our glorious dirt, and burn down anything even remotely Roman (even if it contains water, such as aquaducts, don't even get me started on those).

I don't have much faith in solutions like this because it's one of those problems which are social problems, not technological ones. If we disregard the technological feasibility of this, for the sake of argument, we're going to have people who are going to look for ways to circumvent this measure (and they will find it, have no worries about that). On top of that, any car and phone which isn't equipped with such a system still allows for people to call/text while driving.

A much better solution to this type of problem in my opinion is to raise awareness, make the whole thing punishable with a fine and for repeat offenders include a revocation of the drivers license, and actively enforce it. In the beginning you'll have people who will blatantly ignore these measures, but once they start getting hit with fines most of them will stop. And just like with parking fines, you'll have people who blatantly ignore the law, as with any other kind of restriction they feel that doesn't apply to them, which is where the revocation of the license comes into place.

On my morning commute which often involves 20km/h freeway "happiness", I've seen plenty of people use non-technological means to distract them from the task at hand. People reading the newspaper while driving, doing crossword puzzles, having breakfast, doing their make-up, etc etc etc. Hell, I've even seen someone miss a green light because they were too busy playing with their kids (an admirable feat, just not in traffic). You don't solve those kinds of things with a bit of electronics in the dashboard.

It's not the calling and texting that is the problem, that's just a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem is that people aren't paying attention as they're hurtling down the road at breakneck speeds. There's no chip you can place in the dashboard that makes people pay attention to what they're doing.

Meanwhile in Redmond on the end of an infinitely superior phone: "Oh hey there Steve, how's that windows phone thing working out for you? Got any market chairs to throw around latelty? Man, I'd love to chat on the phone all night but I've got this successful mobile OS to play with."

I hope there's no Ikea shop nearby.

The problem is that releasing new hardware isn't going to change anything. Sure, the first few months the consoles will have that edge over the PC in the price point, but as new CPUs and GPUs are released the point for a PC to be competitive in price quickly arrives. Look at the XBox One specs: 8 cores and 8GB of RAM with 500G of HDD. I can get an 8-core Bulldozer for a decent price. Finding 8GB of RAM is not all that uncommon with the average PC gamer. What's left is the resolution (4K) and 7.1 surround, which all in all is not that impressive since most people sit on 1080i TVs and 5.1 or better sound systems are a bit of a rarity for TVs (at least here, unless you're one of those home entertainment system guys/girls). The focus on the whole reveal seemed to be on the services: integrating it with cable, kinect and voice control, DVR features (to be discussed with the networks). All things considering that's a bit disappointing, because most people interested in such features have a DVR solution already, and the whole kinect/voice thing seems so pointless... Top it off with the heavy focus on DRM (required internet, the whole used games thing) and the console caters more to publishers than its owners. The same applies to what's know about the PS4: it has similar hardware to what's found on the market today in PC-land.

The mobile market does what Nintendo did with the Wii and the DS. Games don't need to have that much hardware available as long as they're well presented and have average to decent gameplay they'll sell. A lot of people are just interested in a quick casual diversion, and mobile taps that market pretty well, and it becomes more of a pricepoint issue where people decide on buying a game. Few people flinch at dumping $2.99 into some casual puzzle game. While the mobile gaming and the AAA title demographics overlap a little bit, I doubt that it will affect the bottom line much. Mass Effect and Angry Birds are two different beasts with two different types of consumers, and while some will play both, they serve a different "function". Angry Birds is what you play in 10 minutes of idle time (waiting for a appointment, sitting on the train, etc) while Mass Effect is something you play at home. Mobile is more likely to eat away at Nintendo with its relatively large casual games compared to MS and Sony.

When has that never been the case? The only exception to that rule are the fighting games and most of the Square Enix titles. For the most part Japanese publishers have always catered to Japan first, and the western market has for the most part been second. This is not exactly a new trend.

That's kind of the problem with AAA titles, isn't it? If you want the damn thing to shine like nothing else available today you're throwing in a lot of skilled labor: programmers, artists, (voice) acting, and the list goes on and on... Yet over the years I've found AAA games to be providing less and less content or depth and more superficial shine, and to me this shows especially in RPGs because that is a genre where content really is king in my opinion. In MMOs the lack of content is made up for by delaying the player with grind and copy-paste quests ("Fetch me 300 moose heads" -> "Fetch me 300 deer heads") in order to buy the dev team time to create new content and keep the player paying for another month, but this pattern has been adopted in so many single player RPGs as side-quest filler content that I in general am very disappointed with the genre as of late. The thing is, I remember RPG games having interesting side-quests (with an actual plot), exploration that went beyond copy-paste dungeon #23, and I don't find that in todays RPGs, which probably has to do with the costs associated with the development and the heavy emphasis on impressing people with graphics and engine features.

That's strange, I remember picking up games in the early to mid 90s for as little as 2.5 euro (converted from my own currency). I think the most I ever paid for a game at the time was 12 euro. Inflation has been pretty bad, so I'm sure that with enough math and argumentation you can make it look like today that would 30 euro, but today AAA titles go for 50 to 60 euro, not including the day 1 DLC or some sort of pass, not to mention subscription fees in the case of most MMOs. I have more disposable income these days than I used to have as a kid, and I find the current pricepoint for new games to be at a point where I hesitate and wait for a bargain, whereas when I was younger it was less of an issue despite having less disposable income and more interests to spend that income on. Then again, this is my own experience, and I guess it depends on country to country, and from person to person, and in no doubt nostalgia-goggles play a big part in my opinions.

I think there are many reasons for this, and not just the exhaustion of the 1st world market:

• Some people grow up and have less time for games, instead there's work, family, other hobbies, ... That doesn't mean they stop gaming, just that their time allotted to games is smaller. So they'll buy one game over the same period of time instead of 3. You don't have an ever fast-growing audience, rather it stagnates and depending on how kids spend their disposable income can even shrink.
• Some people (like me) don't feel like paying 60 euro for a game with 12 hours of gameplay at most, when I can pay 15 euro for an indie game which offers more gametime. Doesn't mean I'm not interested in that game, but I'll just wait until it's cheaper in a bargain. The title has to be really really good to warrant my 60 euro. For me games are often an impulse purchase ("I'm bored... Oh hey, [Game X] is only Y euro" -> click click -> bought & installing"). At 60 euro that impulse is gone. A game which is 60 euro, for it to be a day 1 buy it's usually something I've been looking forward to for years, and I still tend to wait for the first decent reviews on metacritic.
• Which brings me to the next point: metacritic, user submitted reviews, youtube and word of mouth. If you're going to release a bad game, your target audience is far more likely to find it out. There's so many places for people to get information from that nobody bothers with the major review sites like IGN etc anymore, because they'll hardly ever give a honest review anyway. Youtube will have tons of gameplay videos, often from "Let's Play" type of videos, metacritic has a user review system where people submit their own experiences, and internet fora the specialize on gaming are VERY honest about games. It's much harder to sell a terrible game compared to that past.

Which has a very adversive effect on people like me by the way, especially day 1 DLC and season passes. I know, nobody is forcing me to pay for these, but it feels like content is being left out on purpose at times, especially when there's an NPC in the game telling me to buy the DLC on the day of release to do quest X, or something like that. Not only that, but the whole price-point difference between "regular version", "deluxe version" and "super-dooper deluxe version" is sure to make me wait until the GOTY edition or whatever name pasted on top of it comes out with all of that included at half the price of the regular version. Mind you, it's not the fact that DLC exists that bothers me, but it's the non-cosmetic day 1 DLC, and intentionally leaving out content. If the deluxe version includes a soundtrack, a making of movie, or some sort of PDF file containing bullshit on how great the dev team is, I don't really mind, since I'm not interested in anything beyond the game.

What your argument basically boils down to is that games are too expensive to make and that consumers aren't willing to pay 70 euro (or arbitrarily higher number) on release date. The argument that it's not about maximizing profits doesn't fly with me since a lot of game companies are doing well enough to make a tidy profit in general. I won't deny the huge cost of making games, but in the end you need to do the math as a business before you start. If your costs are too high compared to your expected sales it should be an indicator that you need to scale down the costs required for making the game itself.

Instead of a sensible approach many large game companies seem to prefer the route where they start with a well-thought out concept, then crack the whip to the dev team, release a half finished game preferably with some of the content put in day 1 DLC. Instead of developing a proper expansion for a reasonable price, the aim seems to be to nickle and dime people to death with tiny updates which barely add any content. "Oh boy, a new area with 2 hours of gameplay and a fetch-sidequest." Big whoop.

Go to an average gaming forum, ignore the rabid fanboys and the obvious flamebait and hate and you'll discover that a lot of people feel that the current gaming industry, while releasing quite a few good games, is getting a terrible reputation for many of the tactics they're using to maximize revenue. The words "rushed", "buggy" and "short" come too mind all too often.

Nah, it's called getting a set of basic user requirements and then looking through a set of products to see which match the list. This just reeks of laziness and namedropping on slashdot so someone will post the solution for you.

By the way, I'm looking for a toaster on linux, it needs to be able to have 6 settings, usuable by many people (including students). I need to be able to develop toast on it, but it also needs to run an operational toasting environment, preferably on the same hardware. I would like it to be fully scriptable, and I need to be able to hook it up to an LDAP. It would be nice if it came included with a coffeemachine, which should also be fully scriptable. I've found the Coffee HOWTO, but haven't bothered reading it. Could you guys give me an opinion on how to adapt this to my toaster project? I've looked at relays, resistors and capacitors... They all seem very nice.

Please spend a little more time reading the manuals and typing in a few requests in Google before posting this to Ask Slashdot: be a bit more professional.

Fuck it, karma to burn anyway.

If people I knew started e-mailing me pictures of their cats I'd be most obliged to redirect their mail to /dev/null. However, if people ran their own website or blog or whatever I would happily subscribe to their RSS feed and ignore the junk I didn't care about. And the best part of it is that there's no middle man, making money from it, datamining it, or whatever.

None of the features facebook/Google+/whatever offers wasn't available before all of this "social networking" craze took hold. Somehow I was able to attend BBQs, see pictures from people's holidays (and cats), discuss stuff that mattered to groups of people (and with less inane bullshit in between on how the kids just puked on the carpet, including a video on youtube). Somehow people seemed to be more aware of the fact that when they put things on a website it's there for the world at large to see, but instead now we get people complaining "My privacy options".

I get the feeling eternal september got upped to a whole new level, where "Me too" has been replaced with +1 or "Like".

Perhaps it's all a big cock-up?

I remember it well, and it was the first steps for me into the dark art of understanding how computers work. I can only thank videogames of that era for making me start a voyage into a new realm. Understanding memory, learning about DMA and IRQs, getting a modem to work, setting up a LAN, trying my hand at programming, ... I learned a great deal from all that and it got me interested in a subject I had little interest in before.

Thanks DOS games! You've set me onto a career which I enjoy tremendously (despite becoming such a cynic).

She did it twice? She must've been very thorough.

The launch aside, it's yet another terrible incarnation of a great series. I've been peeking at a few videos on youtube because I was hoping for something with a little depth to it, but it's even below my worst expectations (and given Simcity Societies, the expectations were already pretty low).

Simcity 4 with NAM installed still beats this game gameplay-wise hands down from what I can see. It's one of the few games that get reinstalled every X years on my computer. It's ridiculously in-depth if you want it to be, and you can add plenty of mods to make your roads curvy/circular with overpasses and underpasses and however the hell you please.

This has nothing to do with "bill of rights", it's just a bad game with stupid DRM. No need to write a longwinded document nobody's going to read, which will immediately get dismissed with the word "entitled". Just don't buy it.

In fact, don't buy games that use a mechanism you don't agree with, if that be day 1 DLC, the form of DRM they're using, or if you expect them of eating babies. Play another game and have fun. Take those 60 bucks and buy something else.

Oh great, we've just taken the first step into creating Cranium Rats. Bring enough of those together and there'll be talk about overthrowing the bonds human opression.

Yes, a splendid trackrecord to boot as well...

It's the rolling naked in hundred dollar bills that has them scared really. The papercuts would be horrifying.