No I don't. I don't have to prove anything in this discussion, because I'm posting on an Internet message board and voicing my opinion. When I'm trying to get published in scientific journals, or if I'm on trial for something, those are the times I need to prove something.

And in this case, I'm not even arguing that nobody should buy an XBox. I don't care what people do, and if the XBox is, for whatever reason, more convenient, by all means go buy one. I don't care very much what some random asshole on the Internet buys. You could go buy yourself an XBox for every room of the house, and hey, it's your money, you can do that. I'm still aloud to post on the Internet that it seems excessive and stupid.

As far as whether streaming PC games to your XBox is a good idea, my guess is that the experience won't be great for twitch games, but if it's a good enough experience for you, then again, by all means, have at it. I'm not going to be an asshole and claim that you have to prove that's the best choice for everybody.

At the same time, if what you really want is a method to stream your Steam games to your TV over your home network through a set-top box, I would guess that there are cheaper solutions than the XBox. You don't even need something with much 3D rendering performance to stream video.

Yes, it would. Gee, this is fun. Now your turn.

And there are plenty that are. And there are plenty of people who don't hook it up to the TV because they don't want to. And there are plenty of people who buy more than one computer, understanding that it's "redundant hardware", because that's what they want to do. In fact, that's what you're doing if you buy an XBox when you already have a good gaming PC anyway.

And why are you getting butthurt because I don't want to buy an XBox?

Well the easiest and cheapest option is to quit being such a particular whiny bitch, and either play games in the game room or move your gaming rig to the living room. That's easy and cheap. It doesn't give you every little thing your heart desires, but it sure keeps things simple. All of the other solutions are going to have some trade-off between "cheap and easy" and "works well".

Hi have no real opinions for or against KD -- I can see both sides of the argument.

However, there is one area where he is absolutely right -- and that's the issue of corruption running rife within the US and NZ governments. In fact, the list of "unlawful" actions that the NZ government or its agencies have been found to conduct is growing almost on a daily basis. I often wondered what the difference was between "unlawful" and "illegal" - and have since worked it out.

Illegal is when a mere citizen breaks the law. Illegal activities are punished by fines or incarceration.

Unlawful is when the government or one of its agencies breaks the law. Unlawful activities carry no censure or punishment. The government automatically excuses itself from the provisions of the laws which "mere citizens" must obey without question. Does this really seem fair -- to have those who make and enforce the laws effectively placed "beyond the law"? Surely they should actually be held to a higher standard of accountability -- not effectively given the right to dictate that "mere citizens" must "do as we say, not as we do".

The irrefutable evidence of corruption and blatant self-interest within government is clear to see for anyone who takes an interest. The sad thing is that the majority of the population has been "dumbed down" to the point where they either can't see or don't care about what's being done to them.

This is a "frog in a pan" scenario. Over successive generations, many western governments have slowly eroded the rights of their populations and reconfigured the economy and laws in a way that benefits the rich at the cost of the poor. While things may not seem too different to the way they were 10 years ago, I bet that if you took someone from the mid 1940s (who'd risked their life to protect the rights and freedoms of the Western World), they would be outraged that so much of what *they* fought for has been surrendered so readily by people.

When billions of dollars were effectively stolen by bankers -- who paid the price and who was punished?

Innocent depositors and the "poor" paid the price but virtually none of those who committed the crimes were held to account.

Socialize debt, privatize profit -- that's the mantra of today's world and it's something which is a clear indicator that governments are no longer serving to represent citizens. Governments now represent only those who can afford to lobby them and bribe them.

In the 1950s it was "reds under the bed" -- today it's corporate USA who are the unseen but very real enemy of the people (of all countries).

I suggest that *everyone* watches a documentary called "SuperPower". It has some *very* interesting facts that deliver irrefutable proof of exactly how the democratic process is just a farce.

Thanks.

I'd be curious about the distribution of the lights. Turning off lights in cities isn't going to help astronomers much. And if they're turning them off in places where there are few people walking, such as rural lanes, it might help astronomers without hurting pedestrians. (Criminals would be less likely to gather there, though those pedestrians had better be really aware of cars.)

I could see it working if there were more streetlights than we really needed. If that were the case, it could yield positive results. But it would also be invalid to extrapolate from those to the majority of lights in more densely populated places.

Indeed. There was an article floating around a few months ago with a hypothetical review of a gasoline-powered car if electric cars dominated. A lot of the downsides of ICEs that we take for granted would be really aggravating if we hadn't grown up with them.

Gasoline Car Test Drive: Noisy, Wasteful, Polluting, Fast But Pricey Refueling

Even for you, there could be considerable advantages to hiring an automatic car rather than owning one. You offload the maintenance overhead (though that's smaller for an electric car than an internal-combustion engine); that doesn't save money but it does save time. What would save you money is if your car were off servicing four or five other families during the times you didn't need it. Cutting a $30,000 expense by a factor of 4 or 5 would be a huge cost saving to you. Even if the service imposed an overhead of a factor of 2, it's still not an amount of money you'd give up on lightly.

It need not even reduce your flexibility, if you could summon anybody's car on five minutes' notice. It's easy to see how that could happen, if large fleets were deployed strategically, even in the suburbs. (It would work less well as the density dropped, but even in a residential neighborhood, a car can move a fair distance in five minutes. Your house, your work site, your grocery store, etc. are all likely to be five minutes from a lot.)

There are still advantages to just having your own car. Mine is full of my crap, for example. I haven't taken my toolbox out in a while, but I will, and I don't know when. If I were calling for a car every day I wouldn't lug my toolbox around, and thus wouldn't have it. Customization is nice. Not having to worry about peak usage times would be nice (though peak usage will also coincide with peak traffic, which I try to avoid anyway).

Still... I'd consider ditching a car entirely if it saved me that much money. My car hit 200k miles, and while it's a Honda, I'm still gonna need to fork out $20k within the next few years. (I'm cheap, and don't want a luxurious car. I just want it to get me places.) A two-car household would likely make it very compelling to at least split the difference.

Hands are just incredibly complicated. There are a lot of tendons and ligaments in there, and I imagine that fine motor control comes from a lot of different nerves. How much dexterity can he be expected to get out of this?

I imagine that getting it done young means that he's got years to re-establish connections and train pathways for it. Still... anybody know how good it might get? Will he be able to play the violin?

Buying an XBox would still be redundant hardware, for the most part (excluding exclusive games). Also, at least for me, my office computer and my gaming PC aren't really redundant. For my office/productivity use, I'm content with an older computer with an integrated graphics chipset. It's not a gaming PC, but it's fast enough to open web pages.

I'm not sure I understand why this would make steam machines useless. The main value of a steam machine, as I see it, is that it allows you to have the convenience of a console in what is essentially a generic gaming PC. That is, it has a controller and a GUI aimed at connecting it to a TV and not using a keyboard or mouse, but it's not a locked-down console. It's just generic hardware that will play all of your PC games, and those games don't become obsolete and unplayable when you upgrade to the next generation.

The article says:

So what they're saying is, if you have a PC running Steam (which is really all a "Steam Machine" is) and an XBox One, then it's kind of the same as having a Steam Machine. Yes, it is... because you're starting with the scenario where you have a Steam machine. It's like saying, "There's no reason to buy a car, since if I already own a car and I buy a bicycle, it's like owning a car!"

Look, you shouldn't assume that I want an XBox. I can get a PC with better graphics and avoid being locked into Microsoft's ecosystem. I can install game mods, my games don't all go unnecessarily obsolete with every new generation of PC, Steam often has very good sales, Steam doesn't make me pay a monthly subscription for online services, and I can use that PC for other things if I like. To me, the only thing that would want me to buy a console at this point is if there were an exclusive game that I really wanted to play, and I've found that I can live without it. I don't want an XBox, so it doesn't make sense to me to say, "If you buy a Steam machine and an XBox, then it's like having a Steam machine!" I'll just buy a Steam machine, thank you, even if it's not a branded "Steam Machine".

My Osborne 1 split the capslock key into two regular-sized keys, one for CTRL and the other for capslock. That worked well. (And I really miss Wordstar. Amazing what they could cram into 64k. They had to play silly games, loading and unloading parts of the software from the floppy disk, a really primitive kind of virtual memory.)

From what I read back when the last time this was a story, a few people were saying, "It seems to be generating thrust, but on the other hand, the amount of thrust we're measuring is basically within the margin of error, so... we need to keep testing this."

It has the advantage of once having been worth something. People have a fondness for it. It might tempt back some of the old users. Social networks have an advantage in that they're worth more when more people are there, and that history might just barely let them leverage that.

The main value of the site, at least to me, was always its user base. I didn't RTFA because the commenters would often be able to give me a better summary of what was really going on. Especially when TFA was clickbait; I could see why it was clickbait without having to read it myself. Or for sciencey stuff that's out of my domain, Slashdot often had people who could explain it at my level. (That is, more than the average layman, but less than a grad student in that field.)

I'm not gonna get my hopes up, but I'll note that I'm still here, though mostly lurking. There may be others waiting for an improvement to the site's management to contribute more.

So in your head, some people who got vaccinated should be included in the classification "those who cannot get vaccinated. Well that says a lot about the strength of your argument.

I didn't claim that measles would kill 3 million people. I was using simple math to point out that "a small percentage of the population" might still include a whole lot of people.

Yes, but it's distinguished from the steam engine, from what I understand, in that the power output is comparable enough to the margin of error that they're still in the process of verifying that it's actually doing something.