That's more because of the state of the software industry, as well as nVidia's failing to move the market forward through rebrands. My 8800GTS has the same longevity, but if you look one generation back you'll see that the 7900s didn't fare so well, even if people went even higher and put 7950s in SLI and such. At 1920x1080 you're going to spend maybe $200-$250 of course, but for somebody that was on a 1440x900 or 1680x1050 monitor? Nothing high end would end up lasting any longer than a 4850 right now.

No, you could upgrade every year to the highest price/performance card in the lineup and not bank on your expensive card lasting a long time. Because it won't. More expensive hardware doesn't "futureproof". It's just obsolete AND expensive.

That makes no sense because the publisher pays to make the game too, there is a tradition behind stand-alone patches, and the amount of work that goes into a patch is substantially less than an entire game. That also has nothing to do with parent's post which emphasizes that pirates are users, and further emphasizes it as failing to provide patches to pirates ultimately results in more calls to your support team.

seeing how Stardock puts patches behind Impulse "DRM" they do that worse, not better, than most major publishers

suppose someone was at a bar and they drove drunk but then their car turned into a robot and the robot saved 22 babies from the wreck but those babies would have died later from preventable diseases anyway and the act of saving those babies killed two adults who were tied to a train in a thought experiment saving fifty others because the guy that was at the controls was crushed.

you are comparing downloading [FLAC RIPPED HQ LIMITED BROUGHT TO YOU BY SCENEXX NONUKE] BRITNEY SPEARS DISCOGRAPHY [SEED] [UPPED BY NARUTOFAN69] to being killed by a drunk driver, how stupid do you have to be to think that's even a remotely useful analogy

Um, no they're not. The tracker is an index of seeds/peers, and DHT means that tracker-less sharing is also possible (and isn't walled off on TPB like it on Demonoid/other "private" trackers). If you're making the argument indexing something is suddenly illegal when the index is a "file" and not a remotely hosted...uh..file somewhere else that is downloaded exactly the same way but shown differently, I'm not sure what to tell you other than that's bizarre.

Oh, and the second forum link's second page makes a good point as well:

Pavlo claims that he wasn't aware of eventual ethical implications of his doing. He was. This quotation was present yesterday as footer in the FAQs, now deleted.
Quote:
"I found this paper completely outrageous." -- IPTPS'09 Reviewer.
Yesterday the original project aim was "A Subversive, Internet-Scale File Sharing Model". Today is to exploit wiki weaknesses.

It's pretty clear if you're gloating about the reactions to how unethical your "project" is you're fully aware of the fact it is unethical in the first place. Pavlo, Internet trolling isn't for the university setting.

Pretty easy to see through the whole "durr we are helping site owners secure their wikis" crap considering the original page said nothing about security, only a possible way of distributing files. The garbage about "abandoned" wikis is also transparently false, as the site makes no reference to even checking when the last edit(s) were made to the wiki through Recent Changes, as well as my own personal experience and several others. It's also a hilarious rationale considering wikis have pages-by-views counters built into them and any site owner would easily notice hundreds of peers downloading plaintext off a wiki regularly faster than they would the results of some graduate student's pet CS project.

It's a shocker, but some wiki owners like to allow anonymous edits, and they have the right to do so. It's equivalent to abusing other site resources like public uploads in everything but style. This "project" is not only unethical but now they're blatantly lying about (or at best misrepresenting) its purpose.

No, they weren't using "abandoned resources", they were using wikis with anonymous editing enabled so that they could experiment with what amounts to decentralized bandwidth leeching.

Floating cannon battles with the Ron Paul blimp.

The engineers don't have to seem as silly now that they get to put the purestrain gold shells to good use. Hard to starboard!

Um, no it's not. Sorry you suck at reading.

"We need more sensationalist bullshit that doesn't actually reflect the event PRONTO!"

>What's so great about nuclear fusion? If this works does that mean we'll have clean energy without radioactive byproducts?

Yes. Some reactions produce neutrons, but that's more of a 'how do we shield the reactors properly' issue.

>Why is this better than nuclear power plants today?

Because it's several (well, that's an understatement) orders of magnitude more efficient (in theory) and does not require uranium mining. Startup requires an initial energy investment but after this it is self-sustaining.

>Next, assuming we get this working, what material does it require to make it work successfully? And really, what then becomes the bottle neck to producing infinite cheap energy?

Mostly hydrogen and helium isotopes. Since fusion is not a particular, there are several different combinations that can result in exothermic reactions. Helium-3, for example, is known to be present in abundance on the moon. Unfortunately, the kind of reactions that it's involved in kind of suck for various reasons (energy density and production of neutrons) and helium in general is rather difficult to produce anyway.

They testfired the lasers they're going to be using for fusion later. Those beams (attempt to) put out a fixed amount of energy. They reported the total energy. No fusion happened, no energy was net produced, the only thing that happened was the lasers fired at 420J each.

This is pretty clear from the article, but not like anyone would RTFA anyway.

It's pretty easy to claim your own arguments are honest and insightful. Perhaps There Is No Cabal.

As ironic as that would be, if you want to be semantic it's only true if "illegal activities" is solely equal to "hacking". Otherwise it's purely inductive. Otherwise, anyone could get out of the same predicament on paper quite easily. 0. Create a site where users clearly are encouraged to blow up flags and statues of Lincoln or the moon or something suitably illegal and unpopular 1. Claim you're not responsible for the illegal activities of others 2. Ask people to stop turning left on red lights on your blog or something 3. People obviously don't listen and continue turning on red lights 4. You have supposedly proven you have no influence on the illegal activities of others and as such cannot be held responsible