Almost a decade ago, I had the pleasure of playing Quake (II or III, don't recall) on a "real" VR setup produced as a one-off toy by the IBM R&D boys... And while I won't claim it had a "full" field of view, it had a wide enough field that I stopped noticing the shortcoming within about 30 seconds.

Given the advances in display tech in the ensuing 10 years, yes, we damned well could have fully immersive VR goggles, with a resolution high enough to make them close enough to "native" not to matter. As for game-specific support, unnecessary, for the most part - We've had games that support real 3d hardware since before the first Doom (any OpenGL or Direct3d game requires nothing more than rendering to two "cameras" approximately eye-width apart).

The real limitation for 3d games comes partly from the inputs (most games don't support 3d gyroscopic data as an "input" device), and the physical environment for the player. Go ahead and try playing your favorite 3d FPS with a VR headset in an uncontrolled environment without injuring yourself. I can tell you from my experience a decade ago that I bounced off the great big Nerf rails of the VR "tank" over and over and over and over...

You should read economic theories that compare metallism vs. chartalism.

I have some familiarity with Knapp's work. He conveniently glosses over what happens when a government's spending grows at a higher rate than inflation of its issued currency, however. Fortunately, we have several modern examples of that... Greece, Cyprus, Ireland... Great clubs to join - They all have awesome beaches, right?

Chartalism "guarantees" the USD only while we keep our spending and foreign debt within certain bounds. Beyond that, we may as well use oak leaves as money for all the value the USD will have.

2: They have a very well made system for hunting down people who are actual people versus dummy/sock puppet accounts that get squashed.

And yet, my chinchilla still has an account. Which has never (age adjusted into human years) lied about its chinchilla-ness. Mighty fine police work there, Zuck!

4: They created the "commodity hardware, have the backend application do all the redundancy" where the fault tolerance is in the top of the stack

Yeah, Google wants a word with you...

5: They have the best behavioral reporting and profiling tech out there. Want to check if people 18-25 are interested in your new widget? Easily done by a FB trial balloon.

Except for 18-25 year old chinchillas, of course? Pssst - Mr. Spikey doesn't want your damned mortgage. He owns his own 24x36 Habitrail module, free and clear..

6: FB advertising is one of the few channels that work. People turn off their TV, but the FB ads will still come to them no matter what.

Seriously? Sad. Adblock and Ghostery, and Mr. Spikey hasn't seen a FB ad in years


Beside which, Mr. Spikey really doesn't count as old enough for Facebook. Only middle-aged soccer-moms still use it (and force their kids to do the same just to respond once in a while to keep up appearences). Facebook jumped the shark half a decade ago. That said, soccer moms have money, while their kids do not, so +1 to Zuck on that count. Still... A dying medium. With the failure of King, shorting Facebook seems like a no brainer at this point.

So the photos of him in an SS helmet are also not true, the proof being that the pictures were in the New Zealand media proves it never happened?

So all those all those old guys dressed in confederate regimental attire every July 3rd on a nearby hill (deeeeply North of the Mason/Dixon line)... I should suspect them as secessionist scum, rather than just the original LARP'ers?

For some reason, people really get into military history. And like it or not, Uncle Adolf ran the biggest game ever.

He published the email addresses of 114,000 people who just bought an iPad

So? Every company you do business with does the same. So moving on to the "real" crime...

by hacking into AT&T's computers

Changing a URL to point to a different ICC does not even remotely count as "hacking". It amounts to the same level of security as if GMail let you see another user's email simply by changing "&username=myname" to "&username=yourname" on the address bar.

So yeah, stupid law is stupid.

All to easy to hit the "report" button in frustration after the same guy headshoots you for the 6th time in a round.

Clearly you missed the intent of this, then.

Shooting people, even in-game, naturally counts as antisocial behavior. In order to keep a positive rating, you need to all sit around the battlefield and sing Kumba-Ya. You can expect a Mario-clone as MS's next big hit.

Of course, I think Microsoft underestimates their user base - As the real outcome of this rating system, people will compete for the worst ratings possible. Go ahead and refuse to play with 95% of the userbase - Which rating will end up with reduced matchmaking possibilities?

You misunderstand what a naked short is. You're describing a normal short. In a naked short, no borrowing of shares occurs. What you're selling is a virtual share. You have an obligation to either replace this share with a real share or to buy it back when sold.

My apologies, I guess I didn't really explain my point well.

Yes, naked shorts do technically exist - In the same sense that people technically "get out of" paying their taxes by declaring themselves a sovereign nation. Namely, the system has built in protections against doing it, which people need to deliberately circumvent, and doing so (in virtually all cases) commits a crime.

The average Joe simply doesn't have the option of selling a naked short. When you hear about, for example, the two Florida professors recently busted for it, it took two people with multiple trading accounts each, to deliberately confuse the system enough to allow them to keep it floating for a while. For the most part, only actual brokerages have the ability to even try to pull off a naked short, much less do so without getting caught.

Perhaps I owe the GP an apology as well, but I took his putting it in the same context as HFT as intending to refer to it as another form of kosher-but-abusive trading technique, rather than an outright crime.

there is no free lunch, and there’s also no cost-free delivery of streaming movies. Someone has to pay that cost.

So the $80 a month I pay my ISP goes to what exactly? Oh, riiight... All those rural infrastructure improvements you've fought tooth and nail against. Got it.

Guess what, Jimmy? Without the likes of Netflix, we have no use for your "internet" that goes nowhere. Perhaps you could go read up on this idea on your Compuserve account.

There are two inherent problems with a purely gold standard that at least some of the mineral backers would agree with.

I agree with much of what you said, though I don't understand why you said it - BitCoin is not a commodity currency.

For all the hypocrites who modded the parent a troll...

How's your USENet feed working these days?

Short selling.. it is a scam especially 'naked' shots - where you bet on the price before you have the contracts in place.

The idea of a "naked" short doesn't really exist. You have a standing contract with your broker. You don't "create" shares when you sell short, you borrow them from your broker on margin. And, if your broker doesn't consider your position solid enough, they can demand you cover the short at any time.

Short selling has a stigma of negativity around it, but keep in mind that once a company issues stock, it makes little difference what actually happens to that stock on the short term (beyond those few investors who own enough of it to actually have a real voice in shareholder voting). Yes, a short position bets against a company - But that company doesn't win or lose either way. Neither does the lender of the stock you short. Short selling merely serves to increase liquidity of a security that would otherwise have remained uselessly tied up in someone else's portfolio.


Oh, and they still skim 10% off, and they're still old white guys in charge of the exchanges.

Do you have any idea what you talk about here? Who skims 10% off, and how? To give you an idea of the reality of the situation, I reallocated a sizeable chunk of my IRA two weeks ago. "They", including all aggregate parties who could possibly count as "them", skimmed a total of 0.0391% ($7 trade and $0.04 bid/ask spread) from the transaction. Wow, those evil old white bastards! It'll take me at least two hours of my average expected return to cover that!

The strength and credibility of the dollar is unquestioned

Funny how this comment comes up (not by you personally) in every thread about either BTC or the Fed or the economy in general.

You realize, of course, that the very fact that you (and those holding a similar position) even need to make that argument in the first place, means that quite a few people very much do question the strength and credibility of the dollar.

That said, I don't think any of us expect it to vanish overnight in a Zimbabwe-esque hyperinflationary spiral. Instead, it will just continue its slow decline, year after year, decade after decade, as deliberately inflationary monetary policies make up for the inability of the asshats in DC to "keep it in their pants" (by which I mean the federal wallet).

The sad part of that? A slow, predictable decline does count as the best game in town. And you seriously have to wonder why some of us want to see a non-fiat currency succeed?

Well now! That should buy them a whole five minutes of government-mandated third-worlditude. Good job, boys!

Remember, if they outlaw Twitter, only outlaws (and the Turkish President... And... Okay, just about everyone) will have Tweets!

Let me 'splain it to you, Looshy - He meant that as a joke about how, with all the mind-opening intoxicants available on our planet, we almost exclusively stick with one that does nothing but make us slower and dumber. We choose the blue pill over the red pill.

Alternately, he may simply have meant that the very fact that we enjoy intoxicants in the first place suggests we want to dumb ourselves down. Again, same outcome.

And again, whoosh!

Whoosh!