I have often wondered about it, but never paid much attention to it. One time I read about it, from a rather dubious source (hence I just sent it to the 'conspiracy theory' pile) was regarding heavy handed wikipedia editing of the Lockerbie Plane Crash article. The allegations were that one particular editor was either a spy, government agent or even more than one person due to the incessant editing. The stated aim of the editing was to completely sanitise the wiki article and only allow the official line surrounding the events in the article. I remember reading these accusations well before anything around the arab spring and ultimate demise of Gaddafi happened. Make of that what you will.

I guess since the spy agencies ultimately do the bidding of governments, this may be a newer method of 'crowd control'; dictating the consumption of the masses. It makes sense as one always wonders why certain topics are far more popular than they should be. The media with the internet has much better ability in tracking the consumption of certain topics in the media. As a result, these sorts of things are easy to game, especially with the resources available, so maybe the espionage agencies are trying to steer people away from touchy issues by stimulating activity in certain inane topics.

It's good that they're working on this, getting better pixel densities will no doubt have applications somewhere (such as VR, google glass type hardware), but really, I don't want to start seeing 4k phone displays.

As a mechanical engineer, I've used it. Great cure for insomnia if you need one.

Yea the uselessness of the DoF was quickly obvious when some gameplay footage was put up. Looks awesome for screenshots and 'on rails' trailers, but awful to play the game with.

It isn't like circlejerk, it is a circlejerk. My point about them being kids is that there's a lot of new gamers who have jumped into PC gaming. Good for them, but they seem oblivious to what it once was, many years ago, before steam. As a result, they treat valve as if it can do no wrong, while I'm somewhat more sentimental, and have a feeling that valve has done damage to PC gaming in many different ways.

For one, it is DRM, and one with rather strict buyer lock in. Now that's understandable for digital distribution, but rather unfair that they package the DRM in such a way to ensure that even other online distributors end up selling games which have to run through steam. This is a valve tax, it's absolutely no different to PC manufacturers selling computers without windows, yet still paying MS a fee. I also think that it's awful that they're now opening the flood gates and allowing a lot of really misleading games on steam. There's broken, buggy and incomplete games which have been abandoned, being sold on steam, and they're not necessarily "early access".

Now relating this to PCMR, it's hard to relay this to people who jump in and think 'well this is the way it is, it's how it has always been', but they don't understand, it hasn't always been like this. I think we've seen a race to the bottom with steam, but it's impossible to make that point when you have a massive circlejerk supporting valve and steam; all because they can buy cheap games they never play.

I can't wait for GoG Galaxy! Hopefully it will give me some choice.

But not just early access games, there's stuff like air control, bad rats, there's even a game whose name eludes me at the moment, where in order to get sound or music, you have to burn a CD... For a digitally distributed game... Early access is criticised, and rightfully so because there have been some games that sold and continue selling games but have decided to give up on development.

Well, if you're trying to compare value for money you can... Once you factor in cost of games, it starts to become a different story.

Although with steam, we're starting to see a class of game which is significantly worse than ever before. Broken, buggy and incomplete games which are PC exclusive...

I seriously doubt a greater conspiracy. I think it's a matter of releasing the game at the same time on all platforms, so first, they don't bother optimising the code for PC, second they don't want any striking differences between the platforms, because it will upset one group of fanboys who have invested their egos into that system.

Point being, it's better to just aim for the lowest common denominator. This was visible last generation, where at first there was some variation between X360 and PS4, until eventually the multiport games looked the same on both. There's no doubt that this is just an extension of that to now. They don't want their poster game for the new consoles to look unimportant, so they didn't go to any great lengths to make the PC version stand out.

Especially childish when you go to the PC Master Race subreddit, and find out that most of them are actually kids in school who continually whinge that their friends won't join them.

Where I'm from, people join motorcycle clubs to deal drugs, run protection rackets and applying discipline to people, mostly those who have debts. So your analogy doesn't work for me.

In essence the more specific CO2 output (that is per unit of air/fuel) is better, because it means that the engine is achieving a more complete combustion. That basically means you can extract more energy out of combustion. The reality is, while specific outputs may look bad in some cases, the real world application is an engine with improved efficiency, using less fuel, meaning overall, less CO2.

There are always going to be by-products, such as NOx and some CO emissions, as unavoidable things happen in the combustion chamber, the gap between the piston and cylinder wall is one where you get incomplete combustion, and black carbon build up.

• To summarise what happens to improve efficiency, there are a few things that get looked at;
• - Reduce friction, which is obviously losing energy just rotating the engine. This is beneficial in smaller engines, as they have fewer cam lobes, fewer bearings, less pistons to move, but getting tolerances, better lubrication and better materials also helps a lot.
• - Improve combustion, this directly improves efficiency, obviously you don't want to be pushing unburnt fuel into the exhaust, so making sure you get complete combustion, or generate as much heat as possible from a unit of fuel, is very useful.
• - Improve the speed of combustion. This might be difficult to understand, but combustion takes time, and during that time the motor is always moving. The spark gets initiated about 15-40 before the piston reaches its top of travel, that also means that pressure builds up while the combustion chamber is reducing in size, making it work against it, obviously a loss of power. The quicker controlled combustion can be, the less pressure you get acting against the upwards stroke. The timing also is advantageous if maximum pressure is around the point where the connecting rod is at a right angle to the crank journal.

Now a lot can be done with these things, but, factors also at play are, statutory emissions requirements, reliability of an engine, and longevity. These all can potentially prohibit certain things from happening to improve engine efficiency further.

I get the feeling that aggressive drivers who frequently change lanes with little room, do a lot to slow traffic down.

One of the things that should be possible now is to network traffic lights and make their timing dynamic to cope with flow and the movement of traffic. Too often I find my self stopping at every set of lights along the way, and it's a massive waste, all the energy to move from a stop, just to lose it all in braking to a stop.

I understand it won't be perfect, and maybe it might be better with the theoretical capabilities of a quantum computer, but my experience is that the quickest way to get places where I live is to avoid traffic lights as much as possible.

It's still not allowed here (IANAL, but this is my vague understanding), publishers are meant to check facts, the onus is put on them not to defame, it even makes broadcasters responsible for remarks made by guests or people not on the payroll of the station. Since defamation is a civil matter, there are going to be two ways to defend it; one prove that it's true (in which case it's no longer defamatory, case closed) or fight the damages claim (which is basically admitting that defamatory remarks were published/broadcast). I'm sure if there is a plethora of publishers who have published it, then it would be easy to prove that the one in court can't be held responsible for the whole damages claim. With that said, the loser in any court case in Australia is liable for the other parties court costs, so while the damages award may be low, the legal costs probably won't be.