Way back in the day, when Steam used that ugly vaguely-military olive drab color, any free apps just showed up in everyone's accounts. There weren't that many - a few demos, all for Valve games. The entire Steam library was only like thirty or forty games at this point.

And then PopCap joined. They basically doubled the list of paid games, but also added demos for at least two dozen games (I recall the list was so long I actually had to scroll). People were understandably furious, because that made it a lot harder to pick out the games you had actually bought from the demos that just popped into everyone's accounts. I think this was before there was an option to show only installed games, which would have made things much worse.

Valve fixed that pretty damn quickly. And I thought everyone would have seen and learned from that. Sadly Apple refuses to learn from their own mistakes, let alone the mistakes of others.

You're making the assumption that any situation the car cannot handle is both an immediate danger, and a situation that can be handled perfectly by a human.

When I try to think of situations where an automated car would fail, most tend to be ones where a response of "come to a full stop, don't do anything until the human orients himself and takes charge" is a perfectly valid one. Traffic lights not working? Let the human figure it out. Bridge out ahead? Let the human figure it out. Conditions so bad you can't see the road markings? Let the human try to do better, and if he wants to sit on his ass until it clears, that's probably a good idea anyways.

Sure, there are situations where an AI might not be able to avoid an accident an alert human would. Let's say a trailer detaches from a truck in front of you, but not in your lane. As it skids, it suddenly tumbles into your lane. An automated car might have ignored it until it was too late, while an alert human would have slammed on the brakes as soon as they saw it.

But how many humans would have been that alert? Even if they weren't on a phone, or sipping their coffee, or fiddling with the radio, most drivers end up in a sort of trance, doing things automatically. I've seen people crash just because they weren't paying attention - not distracted by anything, just driving without conscious thought. Automated cars won't have that problem - they don't *get* bored. Even if they can't dodge a freak accident, they'll be avoiding plenty of routine accidents. Net gain for people who don't like car wrecks.

Or let's see if it could handle the commute I had this morning: There was a power outage. Seems to have affected at least two blocks, including the traffic lights. I was trying to make a left turn, onto Main Street. For those whose traffic laws may be different, in this jurisdiction, a downed traffic signal is treated as an all-way stop sign. Or at least, it's supposed to be. Traffic coming from the left refused to stop. They just blew right through it, most didn't even slow down. Traffic from the right stopped occasionally (they had passed through other downed lights to get there, so I guess they had a few seconds to think), but that didn't help me. I eventually had to turn around and find a different route, specifically one that would not hit any traffic lights. I wonder if automated cars would have done better. Would they have stopped, as they were supposed to? Would they recognize it as a dangerous situation, stop and hand control back to the driver? Would they just plow right through it like all the dumb humans? The first is obviously correct behavior, the second would be tolerable, and the third would be merely no better than humans were doing. What if my car was automated? Would it have stopped? I sure hope so. Would it have realized that humans are morons and that it would never be able to make that turn? Would it plan a backup route that avoided all traffic lights, or would it continue to be surprised every time humans failed to remember an obscure driving law? What if a policeman had been directing traffic? Do Google's cars know how to obey hand signals? People can usually figure them out even if they don't remember them, since they're fairly intuitive to us, but that has no bearing on whether it makes sense to a machine.

Few?

We need more penalties just for trying to include illegal terms in a non-negotiable contract. It's not enough to simply say "well, the courts will toss it out if they try to enforce it" - because that relies on people being able to fight a legal battle that they shouldn't have needed to fight to begin with.

I've got ideas for plenty of shooters that do things differently. Two have actually made it to playable prototypes, and confirmed that yes, the ideas are fun. I'd describe them, but I'm in talks to produce them so I'll keep my mouth shut for now. All the marketers think we want are "realistic" modern arena shooters, "realistic" modern open-map shooters, "old-school" twitch shooters, or maybe an occasional squad-level tactical shooter. In other words, a CoD clone, a Battefield clone, a Q3/UT clone, or a R6 clone. That's it. That's 90% of the industry, just remaking the same three games over and over with different settings or skins or variations on the same fucking theme. It's really quite infuriating, since half of them aren't even *good* clones.

It's a weird die layout. They have four "columns" of cores - three columns of 4 cores, and one of 6. The memory interface and some other stuff takes up the room that would have been used for the other two cores on the first three columns. I guess they didn't need to be longer, so they used the extra room for two more cores.

Good news! Slashdot Beta now live for all users!

Since nobody reads TFA, Phoronix killed an MSI X99S, and LR lost an Asus X99 Deluxe. It was also different RAM (Corsair vs G.Skill). However, both reported the burn was near the VRMs (Phoronix also reported a second event near the northbridge). The two mobos might be using identical parts for that, but I was unable to find out for sure.

So corporations can rip people off all they want, as long as those people suck? Man, no wonder there's no good music these days.

You can get 2560x1440 for about $500 +/-200 now - cheap imports are $350 on eBay, top-of-the-line ones are $700+ but you only need that if you do pro graphics stuff. For regular use, there's 27" 1440p monitors all over the place now.

You want to disable a division of tanks? I think the technical measure you're looking for is the CBU-100 cluster bomb. As long as you strike while they're still grouped together, you should be able to render them nonfunctional pretty effectively.

Software solutions to this sort of problem do not work. We've seen this a million times - if you have hardware access, getting software access is just a matter of time and effort. So you need to disable the hardware - and conveniently, we already have an entire category of "anti-tank weapons". So why not use them?

AnandTech is pretty much the only tech site I trust implicitly anymore. They don't do bullshit stories, they don't rush things out just because everyone else is, and they aren't afraid to criticize their own sponsor's products. More to the point, they know their stuff, and they have brought a lot more science to testing. They don't even test cases with actual computers in them anymore, they use strictly-controlled thermal loads and lab-grade probes because it wasn't repeatable enough. Hopefully Anand's spirit of accurate, thorough reporting will live on at Anandtech for years to come, because if they fail I don't know of anyone that could replace them.

Ah, but did they remember to reverse the polarity on the power couplings? It doesn't do anything unless you reverse the polarity.

Okay, but what are the odds of randomly drilling and finding water? Or consulting a geologist instead of a wizard? As others have noted, Ireland isn't exactly the Sahara, it wouldn't be too unusual to find water.