Spray-and-pray is a gangster or rebel tactic. Actual soldiers use actual tactics.

Most infantry don't use automatic fire except as suppressing fire - making the enemy keep their heads down while your guys move in close enough for a kill-shot. For a while our main rifle didn't even have full-auto - late-era M16s were single or three-round-burst only. There's some exceptions for urban combat, but for the most part, if they're shooting full-auto, they don't expect to hit you, they're just making it unsafe for you to pop out of cover.

I work with several IT guys that are former military. I DM a D&D game including two of them, and one is also a massive Warhammer geek. They also had basically zero formal IT training (we all went to the same shitty night school, and taught ourselves the actual skills on our own) and yet are fully capable, so they're also big enough computer nerds to teach themselves programming at a professional level.

The PS3 was (and sometimes still is) widely ridiculed in gaming circles for having "no games", despite a launch lineup of 6-23 games (6JP/14US/23EU) and a current library of 796 retail games.

As no similar critiques were lobbed against the Xb360 (1,125) or Wii (1,222), we can conclude that the number of games necessary is somewhere in the range of 800-1100, most likely 1000.

However, your link only shows 702 games for me. Also, the above counts are of retail releases, which excludes a lot of the small indie stuff that makes up most of that list. And so we can conclude that Linux has "no games", and will continue to have "no games" for quite some time.

Look, if it's not running straight LISP at the hardware level, it's not a real computer. Who needs firmware when you have CONS?

Others have tried arguing with you, but I'll make this very plain and answer your questions bluntly, since you seem to lack some of the knowledge they assume you have.

It's not a ripoff - they are selling consumers exactly the performance they are promising.

Manufacturing isn't perfect. They test at the factory to see if each chip can run at the promised core count and clockspeeds. Fairly often, particularly with top-of-the-line chips, a few cores will be broken, or unstable at the specified clock speeds. They are unfit for sale as the originally-designed product. Rather than throw it away, they disable whatever is broken (either in firmware, or by blowing fuses built for this purpose on the processor) and sell it as a lower-cost, lower-capability product. This is standard procedure for everyone. Just off currently-sold chips:

For Nvidia:
The 970 is a 980 with 3 SMMs disabled (out of 16)
The Titan is a Titan Black/780 Ti with one SMX disabled (out of 15).
The 780 is a Titan Black/780 Ti with 3 SMX disabled (out of 15)
The 760 Ti is a 770 with one SMX disabled (out of 8)
The 760 is a 770 with two SMX disabled (out of 8)
The 745 and 750 are 750 Tis with one SMM disabled (out of 5)

For AMD (GPUs):
The 290 is a 290X with four CUs disabled (out of 44)
The 280 is a 280X with four CUs disabled (out of 32)
The 265 is a 270/270X with four CUs disabled (out of 20)
The 260 is a 260X with two CUs disabled (out of 14)
The 240 is a 250 with one CU disabled (out of 6)

Note: I wanted to include AMD CPUs as well, but I can't find perfect info on their CPUs. They are clearly using binning like everyone else (probably more, if their Phenom II days are anything to go by), but I can't tell you exactly which ones are stripped-down versions of which.

For Intel (CPUs):
The 5920K is a 5830K with 12 PCIe lanes disabled (out of 40). Both of those *might* be 5960Xs with two cores (of eight) disabled.
Every current desktop i5 is an i7 with hyper-threading disabled. Likewise, any current desktop Celeron or Pentium is an i3 with hyper-threading disabled. For the most part though, Intel only bins based on clock, not cores - if it's a low-clock version of a given chip, it likely tested unable to run at higher speeds with stock voltages and cooling.

Oh, and every single PS3 processor had one SPU disabled out of 8. Processors with all 8 functional were used in certain IBM servers, amongst other things.

If you want a car analogy, imagine you were sold a car with a 4-cylinder engine. You check later, and find a 6-cylinder engine block, but two don't have piston heads in them and don't run. When you get some spares and try to run them, you find the two cylinders have completely busted sealing, and they contribute no power, only noise and pollution and a nasty rumble.

When run exactly as you were promised it would run, it works perfectly. The extra cylinders affect nothing, because this is a metaphor and the actual physics of a car don't apply. They used a part to a higher-end car that would not work in said higher-end car, but they neither told you that it would, nor charged you as if it did. They actually probably charged you slightly less than if they had built it as a four-cylinder engine to begin with.

For this story, imagine some unscrupulous car dealer (also known as just "a car dealer") took that car, put the pistons back in, and sold it to you as the higher-end car without letting you test-drive it to find out that it doesn't actually work, only letting you pop the hood to see that it has all six cylinders. The car manufacturer then changes their procedures so that instead of simply removing the pistons, they actually fill the broken cylinders with steel to prevent it from even pretending to work.

Oh, exactly. I used SQLite for a game database - RPGs have a lot of stats and such, and SQLite was a million times faster than the hand-rolled CSV parser I was using. And I love how focused it is on reliability and correctness and standards compliance. It's just not built for certain things - it will work as a web database, and one of the frameworks I use even ships with it as a testing option, but it's not a good pick for production use.

The performance degrades (or at least, doesn't scale well) once you have multiple processes accessing the same database, as you would be on a web server. It's a great tool, don't get me wrong, and I can definitely see the use case for a test environment. But even on a single-server system, you're better off with an actual database process.

I really, really hope nobody is using SQLite for a production web database, but sadly I know somebody probably is.

1) They still haven't explained how they solved the memory-bandwidth issues inherent to point-cloud rendering. As far as I'm concerned, they're probably a scam just because of this. I can't say with 100% certainty, but their refusal to demonstrate it actually running in real-time is extremely suspicious.

2) How do they plan to work with dynamic content? Animations? Dynamic lights/shadows? So far I've only seen static scenes - unless they just want to make a new Myst, this is basically useless for games.

3) How exactly is this "cheaper"? Instead of making a scene in Maya or whatever, you now have to physically fabricate your set, then scan it, and then probably do some edits on the computer anyways. Even if they really can do everything they say they can, they're just going to make game development orders of magnitude more expensive, which is directly against one of their main advertising pillars.

I'd ban the last book for being a crap ending to an otherwise-good trilogy. Golden Compass was great, Subtle Knife was pretty good, but Amber Spyglass got bogged down in muddled philosophy before it got annoyingly preachy. Even now that I'm actually an atheist I find parts of it unbearable.

While I suppose it's not impossible that there's a second group that uses that disguise, uses those methods and hates anyone who isn't a white protestant, Occam's Razor suggests that those five were most likely the KKK. While we would of course want to identify those five specifically when pursuing legal action, "5 as-yet-unidentified klansmen" would suffice for my criteria of a plausible conspiracy. Remember, *you're* the one who said that wouldn't be good enough, not I.

As an aside, you really need to work on your debate skills. A word of advice, if I may?

If you're going to fight by using reductio ad absurdum, you might as well go all the way. How can I prove that there were only five of them? How can I prove that five is a number? How can I prove that they were people? How can I prove that *I* am a person?

If you want to ignore every precept of reality, go all the way! Argue that reality doesn't exist! Question whether or not truth is true! Prove basic logic fundamentally inconsistent! Everything else you believe is completely detached from reality anyways - arguing that the moon landings could not have happened because we're all just minds with unprovable senses that may or may not be lying to us, is just as plausible as arguing that they could not have happened because the lighting is wrong.

Those were the PAL codes, basically a safety. On top of that, you've got the two-man rule and the authorization codes (the ones the President carries), plus dozens of safeties against accidents. The PALs were really there to secure it when on loan to other countries - like the nukes positioned in Europe.

Yes, it was dumb. They've remedied that now. However, the British didn't even have that, and to this day there is no similar safety on British nuclear weapons.

Perhaps, but unless they were faking some of their achievements as well, they would still have nothing to lose by revealing the American landings as a hoax. Coupled with a rational explanation of "it's not possible with current technology", that would suffice to let them bow out gracefully while still humiliating their enemies. They might not even need to explain why they hadn't succeeded - they could still say they were working on it, and just keep running the probe series and space stations they were working on.

And if the Soviets *were* faking some of their missions, that again raises the question of why the Americans didn't call them out on it, with all the same reasons I listed above, just swap "Soviets" for "Americans".

Dodging the question, I see. List your "obvious flaws", or I will be forced to conclude you were making them up.

Go ahead. List them. I guarantee you there is an answer to every single one of them that doesn't involve a worldwide conspiracy.

Conspiracies do happen. But if you want to prove one happened, you need to a) identify all the conspirators, and b) identify their goal. If you just handwave the former as "oh, it was the government" or invent or co-opt some secret society that ran it, you're not doing an investigation, you're creating a cult. If you just handwave the latter as "oh, it was to prove that they had control of the planet" or some other vague goal, your rantings have no more weight than the average paranoid schizophrenics. Specific members. Specific goals. Can you do that?

Conspiracies that actually happened can easily meet those. The Gunpowder Plot? We know every member of the conspiracy, and their goals, while unlikely to be achieved, were realistic and real. Same for dozens, even hundreds of other actual conspiracies, from the Reichstag Burning to everyday criminal plots.

If you agree that those two conditions must be met to even consider a conspiracy theory plausible, I can disprove the Moon Hoax Theories right here, right now. Two words: Soviet Union.

They had the tech to put stuff into space (we're still using it). They launched probe after probe to the Moon. They had the means to monitor our launches and our communications (during Apollo 13, they made a gesture of ordering their people off any frequencies near the NASA ones, to prevent any interference). In short, if it were faked, the Soviets would have known. Why, then, would they have remained silent? Unless they were "in" on the conspiracy, they would not have.

What possible conspiracy could have counted both sides of the Cold War among their conspirators? What possible goal could they have had that would have justified it not just to the Americans, but to their mortal enemies? The purpose of the conspiracy, as most tell it, was to cheat at the space race and win it for America. Why would the USSR go along with it? What did they gain from it that was worth so much of a loss?

I can come up with nothing that can explain Soviet participation in this conspiracy. And so I am forced to conclude that the initial premise was wrong - the moon landings happened, as supported by literal tons of evidence.

Interestingly, if you theorize that Soviets started to spread lies and misinformation that the Apollo landings were faked, to reduce American prestige and regain their own, you can easily meet both the two conditions I had for a plausible conspiracy theory. They had the means - it's simple propaganda, through word-of-mouth. Get it started and the paranoid will parrot it for you. They had the motivation, obviously enough. This isn't proof that it did happen that way, of course, but it's a much more plausible theory than the one you subscribe to.