This. If it's a Black Box, sealed, and I can't get into it at all to do anything? It's a liability. I've spent literally my entire life repairing things I own, especially vehicles, and if you're going to somehow lock me out of it? I'll end up stranded somewhere because it broke down, and I'm screwed. If the world goes that way then I guess I'm going to start buying and fixing up antique vehicles to drive, or just go back to my 20's and own only a motorcycle.

'Cost effective' is one thing, and don't get me wrong, a good thing. As sad as it makes me to have to say it, we need to get away from internal-combustion engines. However, for my own purposes, it won't be 'life effective' unless I can get a small pickup truck that is 100% electric, and a highway-legal motorcycle that is 100% electric, too. Otherwise I'm on gasoline engines for the duration.

Did they, really? You have shit like Xbox 360, which you are FORCED to pay a perpetual subscription fee in order to use at all, and isn't the PS4 just as bad? Now, tell me again how you're saving money? Computer gaming has got just as bad, too, you either pay a premium for game software, which no longer has any substantial single-player mode (if any at all), and you have to PAY to play multi-player online. Smartphone games are monitized to within an inch of their lives. Games like WoW require subscription to play. Again: How are you saving money?

Has it occurred to you, that this 'outdated business model' of which you speak, may have been CAUSED by Nintendo and their contemporaries, driving independent operators and arcades out of business by abandoning them, leaving them with games nobody wanted to play anymore and no new ones in sight? Conversion kits are what kept things going, but those have always been expensive compared to VS System games, which were a few 2764 EPROMs and a co-processor, a new marquee and side decals for the cabinet.

The design on the VS system motherboard never changed throughout it's entire lifespan. Nintendo are bastards because the evidence on the schematic of the PCB clearly shows that they intended to develop a home system all along, and once that was launched and well-established, they abandoned the coin-op industry entirely, leaving everyone with aging games and no new ones being developed. Back in the day it caused quite a bit of controversy. Some operators had hundreds of Nintendo VS System games, which no one wanted to play when they could play the SAME games at home for FREE. Nintendo fucked everyone.

You misunderstand my post; everything I'm talking about is on the PCB in the coin-operated game. Literally two shift registers with copper traces connecting them. If you are sufficiently enabled electronically-speaking, then google 'nintendo vs system schematic, find the VS system operator's manual, which contains the PCB schematic; look for the player inputs, they go to 74LS165's, which are shift registers, which then lead to other shift registers converting the serial data back to parallel, which is then gated onto the data bus. Literally no reason to design it this way. Coin switch inputs (that detect a coin inserted) and DIP-switch inputs aren't gated onto the bus this way, only player inputs.

Firefighters and military need to be at their peak levels of physical fitness, not allow their ankles to get weak because they're using a form of crutch. Devices like this should be limited in use to people who are injured or disabled in some way, not healthy people who can and should regularly exercise in order to maintain (or improve) their overall health.

In a previous lifetime I repaired coin-op arcade games, and the Nintendo VS system was certainly one of them. At some point after Nintendo utterly abandoned the coin-op industry (leaving countless operators flapping in the wind with no new games for their VS system cabinets) I discovered, in the schematics of the VS system motherboard, proof that Nintendo was using the coin-op industry as a test-bed for a home system: the control panel inputs, which in an arcade game are all discrete inputs per switch (4 for a joystick, for instance) didn't go to a parallel buffer or parallel-input register IC, they went to a parallel-input shift register, the serial output of which was routed to a serial-to-parallel shift register, which was then connected to the data bus! If you have or can get a schematic for this PCB, look for it for all the player inputs. There is no reason to have this over-complicated arrangement in an arcade game -- but it just so happens that this is the exact arrangement that the NES used to connect player controls, via a skinny cable with as few connections as possible. So don't go getting so misty-eyed about Nintendo, they're utter bastards who care only about profits, and not who they screw over in the process.

You, sir, I think I like. Do you happen to live in Northern California? You sound like someone I'd like to have as an in-real-life friend, someone perhaps worth knowing.

Fuck so-called 'social media'. For something that claims to 'connect people', I have never seen anything so effective at giving people an excuse to not connect, never see each other in person, and otherwise just stare at a screen. Don't get me wrong -- I have always lived a technological lifestyle, I've been building my own computers since before the IBM model 5150 (The PC) was even dreamt of (soldered together circuit boards with wirewrap wire for my very first computer), and have worked in IT and hard electronics my entire life, and currently work for 'a major microprocessor manufacturer', so you can't call me a Luddite by any stretch of the imagination -- but shit like Failbook is just plain insulting, intrusive, false, misleading, and sometimes downright illegal. Who the fuck needs 10000 'friends' (with an lower-case 'F', mind you) who you have NEVER met, NEVER will meet, and NEVER want to meet? What the actual fuck is that shit anyway? In this life, if you have half a dozen decent, in-real-life, see-them-in-person Friends (with an upper-case 'F') that you can actually trust, have common interests in, and hang out with on a regular basis? Then you're doing pretty damned good. You don't NEED 'social media'; it's just yet another way for corporations, governments, and nosy people who have no business being in your business, to mine data about you, make (usually comically incorrect) assumptions and draw (almost always tragically wrong) conclusions about who you are and what you're about, and otherwise turn you into a product, like you may as well have a gods-be-damed UPC barcode tattooed on the back of your necK. Me? The day that I decided that posts on Failbook of mine past a certain age needed to go away for good, and I discovered much to my horror that it would not allow me to delete anything permanently, and would put them all back the next day? That's when I concluded that It Was Up To No Good, deleted my account, and vowed to never go back to it or anything like it ever again. I recommend you all do the same and start actually connecting with people in real life, work on those social interaction skills, and stop giving away all the details of your lives to these asshole corporations and nosy ne'er-do-well 'friends' who don't give a rat's ass about your well being, only what they can SELL you to someone else for.

Please, bring the hateful comments, now; every one of you who posts your insults, bald-faced hate, and other negative, spiteful, derisive shit, just convinces me more and more that I'm right an you're just either the Sheep or the Wolves (not sure which is worse).

If the subject line of this posting appears blank to you, don't worry, it wasn't intended for you anyway.

..also, The Game.

That is all.

More likely it's an excuse to have an orbital weapons platform or massive surveillance platform.

The 'Notel Motel' franchise values secrecy -- so much so, that even publicly using the name is strictly forbidden in the charter. Typically the way you can identify an establishment as a member of the Notel network, is by their rate structure: If they can charge by the half-hour, then it's almost certainly a Notel Motel.

..meanwhile, back in North Korea: You can't stop the signal, now can you? I bet that despite his outward appearance of being virulently xenophobic and rabidly against all things Western, Kim Jong-un likely has an Xbox 360 and/or PS4, likes his Levis, Hershey bars, and Coca-Cola, and most of all his free Internet porn. Probably has seen all of MTV's Jackass, including the movies, and thinks Johnny Knoxville is a fucking genius. Nope, I think the North Korean tree is rotting from within -- or in this case, starting to grow from within, finally. I think the day will come when North and South are indeed reconciled and reunited -- and it'll all happen without a single shot being fired, and the whole thing will be shared with the world via YouTube.

More like 'Enjoy high speed Internet access for free! Just sign in using your Facebook account!'.

That's what they should change their company name to, to be more in line with reality.