Until you reinstall/upgrade your OS! Then you need to contact them to get a reactivation code. Better pray they haven't gone under.

Got a laptop, and want to play on it as well? See above.

Surprise special prices on newegg are neither imaginary nor magical.

But I assure you GTX460's won't show up in the surprise specials for quite a while. They seem to use it to flog off old stock.

Which is exactly my point. Steam has huge sales, often with 75-90% discounts. A lot of these games show up for $2 to $10 on Steam. Mass Effect has been $5 no less than a couple times.

For games with online communities, as soon as they hit rock-bottom prices, hundreds of thousands of people buy them. That leads to quite a lot of active players.

In the past year I've spent perhaps $400 on games, and amassed over a hundred of them. Far more than I'll be able to play over the next couple years.

With a console, you spend half as much as you would on a computer, but you're constantly spending $25 here or $60 there to keep entertained. At the end of a 3 year run, you've probably spent 3x as much, even if you factor in computer upgrades to keep current.

The unique and differing bacteria inside every person?

If you can't fix the environment for everyone, you can't fix every fetus's genes either.

What are you going to do if someone finds out later that they have serial killer genes? Kill them? Put them on watch lists and discriminate?

Just work on fixing the environment. It's safer and easier than altering our own blueprints.

Would this work for exhibits? (often protected behind glass?)

Touchscreens are expensive, and open up the annoying possibility of something getting damaged. A $20 smart camera system detecting motion on the glass would probably be safer and cheaper.

This project doesn't interest me because I'm a gamer. I suspect this lacks the DPI necessary for precise movements. Also, I Claw.

I always jump generations late, when you can get the best deals on new cards. My card choice is primarily based on what I can get for the money I have available.

I got an eVGA 7900GS when they came out at about $150. I lucked out - mine overclocked 70%, making it quite a bit faster than 7900GTX's - roughly the same speed as an 8800GS. (minus some shader power)

But, when I had a chance to get an 8800GS for $35, I jumped on that too. Turned out the memory wasn't stable at stock speeds, so I had to underclock it, making it slightly slower than my old card. Bummer. But at least it solved the crash issues L4D/L4D2 have with GeForce 7's.

When I finally got a chance to flip to a GTS 250 for $99, and sell my old card, I did that. It too was unstable at stock speeds, but some copper RAM sinks fixed that, and it now runs happily with a 20% memory overclock. It currently plays everything I throw at it at 2048x1152 - but newer games do require AA to be turned off.

My next GPU upgrade won't be for a while. I already have too many games to find time to finish. But I'll probably pick up a new CPU to speed up video encoding, shortly.

Are you kidding me? I got a brand new GTS 250 512MB for $99 CAD six months ago. (worked out to about $85 USD shipped)

A friend of mine picked up a brand new Radeon 4870 1GB (slightly faster than a 5770 in DX10) for $104 USD shipped in late June.

These cards are approximately 3-6x as fast as the ones you listed, for the same price. More importantly, GTX 460 is only ~25% faster for +100% price. If DX11 matters that much to you, go ahead. To me it's hardly a bargain.

P.S. 4870 1GB's score closer to 10k in 3Dmark Vantage, so for benchmarking the performance difference may be 50%

Later drivers will probably correct the Metro 2033 anomaly.

It took a year, but nVidia delivered drivers for L4D that provided ~50% FPS gains.

I suspect we'll see the same thing here, in a couple months to a half-year.

What manufacturer? After the last DFI piece of crap I bought, I've sworn off other manufacturers, and am sticking with Asus.

Plus eVGA for my videocards.

But you lose out on game prices if you do that. ;)

For some people they are hard, and actually have to be taught.

I've met people that figured out double-digit multiplication and division when they were 5 - and yet had to be taught that when going to a job interview, it's polite to shake hands, you look in the direction of the person's face, and you comb your hair. :P

Society and education is heavily centred around socializing. If you don't pick it up naturally, you're going to struggle a lot more than you would if Algebra didn't just come to you in a spark of genius when you were 7.

To conceptualize the struggle for an average socially-well-adjusted person, think back to how hard it was for you to pick up some of that highschool math, and then imagine trying to understand it years earlier. For whatever reason, some minds are wired differently; those mountains in math are merely hills or slight inclines to some other people; likewise, what's obvious to you socially, which you've known since you were 5, may take someone else an extra decade to figure out naturally unless they're taught it when they need it

There are very few courses that teach social skills at all age ranges. We generally rely on friends and family to do this. If your parents are social dunces, then currently you need to luck out and end up with a friend that can point out all the nuances of social interaction. It doesn't happen for everyone, so there's a large percentage of people out there struggling with it.

I agree with your point of view. I never go to a movie - unless someone else is paying - because it takes away money that could be spent on computer upgrades or games. I have an entertainment budget that I apply to all entertainment.

$150 for a meal?... if that's what floats your boat, I'm glad you enjoy it. I'm one of the $10 spenders. :P

Not all of us have money to blow. Some people are college students, or *gasp* teenagers, scraping together money for their own computer.

Blowing $600 on a videocard when all you've got is $1000 is a bad idea. It'd be much more prudent spending $600 on a computer. If you maintain the rest as a buffer, then you can pick up whatever games come on sale, and you aren't totally screwed if a part fails.

Since you've clearly got money, go ahead and spend it. You pay the R&D so other people can get things cheaper, later. :P

Modern games lack a way to limit the framerate.

I'd be quite happy at a stable 30fps, but 30fps, 45fps, 60fps, 45fps, 30fps makes aiming more difficult. Especially if it starts fluctuating as soon as the action starts.