I was surfing through Amazon to confirm the story, and sure enough, all the copies of Brokeback Mountain and Lady Chatterley's lover I pulled up had no sales rank figures.

So I called my girlfriend over to see, and when I searched up the same items, I now saw sales ranks on all of them. In fact, digging through now I can't find any items of this sort without sales rank. Including Probst's The Filly, the very item cited in TFA.

Did Amazon reverse this policy in just the last ten minutes?

The problem is that the newest ideas put into games are ... or blatantly ripping off another title.

Newest ideas. Blatantly ripping off another title.

One of these things is not like the other.

... why was this story even run?

An article about a feature that a 14-year-old operating system didn't have?

Slow news day much, Slashdot?

1) Despite the cost, people pay it.
2) Thereby making the networks craploads of money.

Incentive to change it? Nil.

Count me in. I'm a Java developer and a Rails/PHP web developer, and I keep both a G4 PowerBook and an old Dell Pentium 3 around for exactly this reason. If any of my shit doesn't run well on them, I go back and fix it.

Which can be hard, given the crappiness of Apple's Java implementation, but there you have it...

But yeah, I code on top of the line machines, because some of my projects have test suites with 1000+ tests in them, running continuously in the background. (ZenTest/autotest for Ruby is so wonderful). And waiting three minutes for a test suite to complete is not fun.

... but most phones can be considered "net devices" these days, certainly an increasing number have browsers of some sort. And nearly none of those have flash.

(Frankly, I'm kind of glad. I don't really want to think what flash-animated websites would do to my phone's battery life...)

But then consider the budget that goes into making the massive 3D graphics, including modern rendering and lighting techniques, R+D, possible budget for voice actors

Objection, your honor, irrelevance.

Hollywood movies cost a hell of a lot more to make than games on average, and a hell of a lot more to distribute (building theaters & running projectors costs more than distributing DVD boxes), and yet they sell tickets for $10. Or you can buy the thing and watch it all you want for $20-$25.

Price is determined by what the market will bear, not by what it costs to make things. The game companies have been guessing too high for a while.

There have been several recent games I've wanted to grab, but at $60 a pop I haven't done it. But I've impule-bought several older ones (stronghold 2, battle for middle earth) out of the bargain bin for $15 a pop. If they dropped the price on new games down a bit, I'd end up spending more.

Based on that quote, they recognize that its not viable in the current market, and that average energy costs would have to increase by a factor of 15 to 20 times in order to make it viable. They think that the trends in energy cost are going to go that way.

No matter what happens to energy costs, space based solar cannot outcompete ground based solar. Space based solar can collect roughly twice as much power as ground based. (It's lit twice as long because there's no night, gains a bit from not having atmospheric reflection, but loses a bit in transmission.). So, ~2x power from the same array.

But what's the additional cost to put it up? The optimists think we might get the shipment costs of launch down to $100 per pound. Right now it's more like $10,000.

It is much, MUCH cheaper just to build twice as many solar arrays on the ground. Even if you have to build 5 times as many to have them close to where you need them, it is still dramatically cheaper than putting the damn things in orbit.

Prices CANNOT go high enough to make orbital solar competitive, because they would make ground-based solar competitive long before we got there.

I'm going to remain skeptical.

Net apps are great, but their performance in many areas is unavoidably way below that of native apps. When you can do everything with JS, you can be reasonably speedy if the processing requirements aren't huge and your browser doesn't leak memory too badly. (Dammit, Firefox!)

But when you need to persist data, you have to spawn an ajax query and that 1/10 to 1/4 second (even over a fast network connection) just isn't comparable from the user perspective to hitting a local HD. As local mass storage switches from HD to solid-state over the next couple of years, the difference between native and web apps is going to increase, not decrease.

Besides, half of these things are going to be ad-supported, right? At least in my experience, the performance of most websites has decreased the last 3 years or so as they hit and increasing number of different servers. It's typical for a single page to load content, ads, local javascript, stylesheets, and analytics from 10 or more pages. Each of these connections triggers its own DNS query. Every connection and every DNS lookup has a %age chance of hanging for a few seconds due to network traffic, server load, or what have you - as a result almost 10% of web pages I try to load these days stall for a few seconds. Do you really want that kind of crap going on in the background while you're developing? I don't.

Hah! Just reminded of a most annoying example! Slashdot, for me, loads pretty much instantly. But every time I post and click that "preview" button, there's a five-second wait before the preview actually shows up. That'll be fun, and additional five seconds for every classfile save in my IDE...

While I love those games as much as the next guy (I am particularly enjoying Fallout 3 at the moment), I've found that similar experiences without the blood are just as much fun.

Oni was a fighting/shooting game in a future, grim, urban environment. Later stages of the game were just about post-apocalyptic. And yet, it didn't have blood, and it was an remains one of my favorite game experiences.

I certainly get a rise out of the bloody gib-explosions in Fallout 3, but I'm not as convinced as you that I wouldn't enjoy the game if they were absent. I think there's an initial shock value to the gore that's fun, but beyond that I'm more interested in playing the game. And the gore isn't necessary to it.

(On the other hand, I don't think the gore is harmful, either.)

...Feinstein does not have my support. She barely supports democratic issues, and is of extremely authoritarian mindset. Verging on fascist in some cases. And I'm a libertarian-leaning democrat, so this pretty much pisses me off.

Aside from being beholden to the media industry (which most California democrats are, sadly), she also:

• 
     
• Supports a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning (so much for free speech)
     
• Has blocked domestic partnership rights for same-sex couples (so much for equal rights)
     
• Works to ban gun ownership, but has her own concealed carry permit and uses it (so much for equal protection of the laws)
     
• Supported GWB far too often
     
• Frequently votes against liberal causes I care about

She's the worst kind of supporter of excessive government control over our lives that you'll find outside of the Republican party. There are plenty of Republicans I like better than Dianne Feinstein.

I detest her. Fortunately, I like Barbara Boxer pretty well.

(Note - can't figure out how to eliminate the blank first bullet. There's no LI tag there, /. is adding it somehow.)

... No, really. The change in technology from broadcast to cable and and the internets solves the paradox.

Omnidirectional high-energy broadcast is a profligate waste of energy. We are increasingly switching to cable, fiber optic, directional transmission, and low-power networks of short-range transmitters like Wi-Fi and cell networks. As a result, within 100 years, you won't be able to detect earth's radio signature from more than a couple light years out for this reason. The same will be true of other advanced civilizations.

In the 1950s when the "Fermi Paradox" was coined, broadcasting was still growing, and extrapolations of that growth led to the belief that "advanced civilizations" would be spewing out significant fractions of a star's output as radio waves. Those extrapolations were simply wrong - technology took a sharp left.

Advanced civilizations will likely be maximally efficient with their energy, and thus silent from a passive-detection point of view.

This is exactly what I will do when my puppy passes on - he is getting pretty old. He was a street rescue, and my next dog will also be a rescue (though more likely from a shelter).

However, I can certainly understand the temptation. I've had a lot of dogs, but none ever with such an ideal temperament as my current loyal companion:
    * Energetic enough to run and hike
    * Totally mellow the rest of the time
    * Never destructive / chewing of anything other than plush toys
    * Never slobbery
    * Doesn't lick
    * Very independent - with food and water I can leave him alone for even 2-3 days, much like a cat.
    * Very gentle. Extremely good even with children who pull his fur.
    * Not a barker at all.
    * Implicitly trusting of humans, never aggressive or fearful of guests.
    * Very polite - no begging for food (ever!)
    * He ask for attention/petting but give up quickly and lie by your feet if you're busy. (which is good, since I work at home).

This combination of traits I've never seen in any other dog or breed ... not even close ... and I've known dozens of dogs. He's a mix, and we're not sure of what - my best guess is 50/50 Malamute/Border Collie, but with none of the collie hyperactivity or neuroticism, and all of the malamute sociability.

This dog I would be seriously tempted to clone, if it were possible, or even establish a new breed. His temperament makes him a perfect pet for many kinds of people.

Screw Crysis! I'm still waiting on the processor that can play the ascii-based Dwarf Fortress at a decent framerate.

Maybe all I needed is a little liquid helium...

Package up the old computer with archival media and instructions to open it again in 10 years.

Instruct the folks in 2019 to replace the batteries and re-burn copies of all the discs to fresh archival media. Then have them add their own computer to the capsule, re-seal, and store it until 2029. Repeat every 10 years.

In 50 years you have not one old broken computer that won't work, but a series of old computers, one for each decade, each of which has been refreshed and refurbished every decade so that they all work. Much more likely to succeed, and much more interesting to boot.