I'd be fairly thrilled if I could get my aircraft carrier spayed for $0.01, too.

Because hosting your own instance of the old pirate bay (sort of) sounds more impressive and rebellious and has a better chance of getting mass adaptation in the moment than Tribler.

This still needs to pass the senate, and if enough commotion can be stewed up among the masses it'll make that whole process a bigger pain in the ass for them. And it should, because this is blatantly unconstitutional and they know it. Now would be the time to make it a point to your representatives that this is not what you want, and certainly doesn't represent the intents and demands of their constituents.

Just like the LimeWire lawsuit ended music piracy, right? Its so much easier to cling to a bad marketing model for dear life and sue anyone who gets in your way. Of course, contrary to their beliefs most of my own clients didn't even know what adblock was until I recommended it. I suppose while they're at it they should sue Microsoft, too, for introducing their own content blocker and opt-out do-not-track requests which uses the same lists as adblock.

IMO, win or lose they won't survive any longer for it.

The only board this kind of thing could really matter on is /b/. Any of the others slow enough to persist threads for days (3DCG, oh no someone might post a 3D model of a cone) are benign and thus this policy amendment won't accomplish anything.

Until a proposed system to make automated vehicles feasible on public roads in mass is proposed, developed, protocols and legal procedures released related to this come about, this is nothing but a scare topic making vague assumptions about things that aren't even a topic for development yet.

I'd say the last "build" I did was in 2012, where I added a Radeon HD 7870, an extra 8GB of RAM and a SSD to my main PC. That PC has been incrementally built upon for years. It started as an office PC with an AMD Athlon T-bird CPU (impossible to keep cool), Radeon 7000 graphics (not HD of course), a 4gb IBM fireball hard drive and 256MB of RAM. I can't really think of any instance apart from my main PC where I've started from basically nothing since starting a career in IT (its amazing how easy corporations will just let their old servers and desktops go after an upgrade).

Nowadays most of the hardware available is more or less the same between vendors that the fun of sourcing the hardware is pretty much moot.

Not sure. It was up earlier but rather slow.

...and I'm not voting on any level this year. There is not a single candidate on the state or federal level that I believe will make any discernible difference over the other. I'd at least pitch in for local elections, but having just moved to a new area of my state I haven't had time to form any educated opinion of the local candidates.

I am strongly against throwing in a vote just in spite of a candidate I dislike more, since the fact I dislike any of them means they aren't worth my vote. Maybe they are to someone else, but not to me. So fuck it this year. The lesser of two evils is still evil. I'll vote when I feel there is someone worth voting for.

While its just a YouTube comment, it seems a Pixar representative made some comments of his own. Amongst them was one which explicitly stated that Blender can implement OpenSubdiv if they wanted to.

Of course the comment holds no legal weight whatsoever, but its an encouraging sign.

A snip from that comment (emphasis mine):

OpenSubdiv is a free open-source API : any software vendor can implement our code in their application, including Maya, 3DS Max, Mudbox, Mari or Blender. The implementation is based on a joint research effort between Pixar and Microsoft Research.

Indeed. Why just the other day I was able to successfully listen to Holy Diver while downloading Firefox. Then when I double clicked the Firefox installer, ReactOS went straight to a BSOD.

Honestly, it does Windows better than Windows.

Of course I'm not ready for "next gen" prices. I'm not even willing to pay the current gen prices. If I can't wait it out for the price to come down by at least 50%, I won't buy it.

It doesn't help that almost all commercial PC games come in the form of sloppy console ports these days. I wouldn't even consider pirating them. If there wasn't such a strong indie game market I probably wouldn't buy any new games at all.

Actually, its built atop what once was the quake 2 engine, but has since been modified to extremes to support all these cool new things.

Can't really complain when the price tag for your average end user is "free."

I agree entirely. I'm not sure about Alien Arena, but I have noticed with a few of these open source FPS games, particularly AssaultCube (I used to love playing AssaultCube), a certain social phenomena will occur where only a handful of the "elite" developers, contributors, and players will be recognized and their ideas accepted as okay to be part of the game. Anything which conflicts with their interests is deemed bad for the game, even if the larger portion of their user base prefers these "bad" ideas.

So, slowly but surely, the large, interested communities who enjoyed what the elites did not will fade away and find other games. The end result being something like a few weeks ago when I tried to get on one of these games again just to see if things calmed down, and all I saw was a bunch of empty servers.

I understand that people would be protective of their work and after a while, sensitive to ideas of change. I also understand OSS permits people the option of splitting from a community and making modifications to a game they feel make it better. But when it comes down to banning players and servers alike from a master server for playing certain maps and modes too much, then you have a problem.