Borders is *not* part of Barnes and Noble. Why would you say that?

He's misguided in what he means by it but it is true that B&N bought the Borders brand name and customer list after Borders shut down. borders.com now goes to the B&N website.

There is such a thing as Fire Fighting simulators. It's like a networked LAN game. The game is perfectly safe and can simulate situations that you can't get easily in live exercises. Due to its nature and limited market they're expensive (like $10K a license or seat) but they exist. They are no substitute for real on the job training and controlled exercises and no one's arguing anything to the contrary, but they do exist.

Yeah... you have no idea what you're talking about.

Listen to Act Two of this episode of This American Life. The example they hunt down to its conclusion has one guy, Chris Crawford, selling his patent to IV and in turn he gets 10% of whatever they get on it (which considering IV was settling with dozens of firms for fucktons of dollars in perpetuity, is not too shabby).

Once IV does your dirty work for you, you'll never need to make widget bolts again.

In theory what a NPE does is actually quite admirable. You're an inventor and you invented something and you have a patent and big companies rip you off. They know you can't afford to fight them so they just do what they want. So you sell your patent to someone like Intellectual Ventures who goes after the big companies for you. Now no one can make your widget bolt without paying you, as it should be.

And look what's happened - even giant companies are scared shitless to defend against patent lawsuits. In that respect, the idea worked.

In practice though what happens is minute, even trivial things get patented and NPE's go looking for people to sue, using a byzantine series of shell companies and borderline gaming of the legal system. Whereas the inventor of the widget bolt has to make the exact specifications of how his bolt works open to the public (who could also just figure it out by looking at it) software companies don't have to make the source code of their patented inventions available to anyone.

NPE's to me are like the NRA or PETA - organizations/concepts which started out with noble intentions (responsible gun ownership, don't torture animals) and just strayed way off the mark.

Obama, software glitches, and smoking.

It's like the holy trilogy of contentious Slashdot topics.

All we need now is to tie this into movie or music piracy somehow, and maybe sprinkle in some Scientology for good measure.

BRB, making popcorn.

I've tried about a dozen keyboards on mine, most didn't work, the others randomly repeated keystrokes. This was from $5 nonames to Logitech and Microsoft high end keyboards.

Your problem is your power supply. It's pretty much the culprit of just about any RPi issues. Get the right power supply and just about anything you plug in works.

The way to be sure is to plug the RPi in for power to one of the USB ports on your main PC. Yes that's counter-intuitive and not the long term goal but once you get the right power supply then everything should work. Speaking from experience here.

The emulation runs at a speed around that of a 20MHz 80486 [...] Perfect for playing old classics such as Doom

With all due respect, back in high school I owned a Packard Bell 486SX 20MHz. Every time I have ever told anyone that, even as a historical curiosity, I have had to follow it with "yes, they did make them that slow".

Did you know that DOOM had a "low detail" mode? I did, because that was the only way I was going to get the 486SX 20MHz to run it (after I upgraded the RAM to a whopping 6MB of course). It was unusuably slow otherwise. And when games like ROTT came out? They wouldn't even run unless they were in low detail mode. And lord help you if you accidentally hit the Turbo button, setting you back down to 8MHz.

So I hope for this thing's sake that it runs a bit faster than that otherwise DOOM is going to just flat out not work worth a damn.

Also, his "it's been done before" example is an Android stick - so, basically, a cut down Linux aimed at cell phones and sealed in a box, with no GIPO pins. Maybe there's more to it and you can load up your own Linux distros on it but the Pi is closer to a "real computer" than this thing is. In fact, the original goal of the Pi was to be small and stick-based like this but it made accessing the pins impossible.

Remember when those same publishers got rid of big boxes, printed manuals and goodies that used to come in normal pc game editions -- with the excuse of going green and lesser price ? Yeah, what happened to those prices ? They went up, up and up.

Citation needed.

Seriously, I think this is something people have made up retroactively. Publishers have never said "oh we want to reduce the amount of packaging to pass that savings on to the consumer". They may have used the "green" excuse but really they're just trying to increase their profit margins.

Another thing I see is: Aren't we supposed to be getting savings passed onto us for the digital distribution?

No. I don't know where you got that idea or why so many people have misconceptions about this but no, the point of digital distribution is not to pass the savings on to the consumer and it never has been.

Cutting out all the middle men means that the publisher and developer make more money. This is a good thing, especially in the PC space. Games are already more expensive to make and the maximum price has been set at $50-$60 for some time now. The recent upping of COD6 on the PC to $60 incurred quite a wrath.

Publishers and developers making more money on the sale of a game because they cut out the middle men means that developers might make a decent living wage. It means there will be less layoffs. It means that the advance money is made back quicker so the developer might see a profit from a game.

If you think that Steam savings from the lack of physical materials should be passed on to you then you don't get to bitch when a developer closes or has a layoff. If you want to wait for a Steam sale that's fine, if you prefer having a physical game from a store, that's fine, too. But don't think that you should pay less because there's not a disc involved. You're wrong.

You play the game by holding the 3DS upright, rather than sideways like a book, and it works so well I wonder why previous Brain Age games used the wacky book-like layout at all.

They did this with the original games because they were wacky (a polygonal head of a Japanese man in glasses laughs at you) and also because "smart" people read books so it makes sense that a "smart" game would also be used like a book. It was also conducive to the Sudoku puzzles.

My guess would be they abandoned it in the 3DS version because it wouldn't work with the 3D screen, which relies on you holding the screen at the right angle to get the effect.

Majority of gamers still choose consoles in spite of your claim that laptop gaming is the way to go.

Well then they're in for a big surprise since OnLive only plays PC games.

To me this is like the worst case scenario. Bad enough that OnLive might make an otherwise good looking game look and play like shit, but now they're going the rest of the mile and saying that games should be changed and designed for the service.

No, OnLive, go fuck yourself. Your idea will never work technically or logistically and you need to hurry up and die.

All I am saying is that the current schemes to stop illegal redistribution suck for me, a legitimate customer. That means I am no longer a customer. There are plenty of people who are willing to pay for their own abuse. As long as they are around, I guess you will be able to make some money. I really do not care.

I'm with you on the fact that Steam by itself is unobtrusive DRM which is acceptable and that more restrictive things like activation schemes are unacceptable. But I had lumped you in with all the people who basically think that a lack of DRM is completely fine and people will by and large behave and not pirate the software if you don't have any. Nothing could be further from the truth. Games like World of Goo have a 90% piracy rate. Look at what happened with Adobe put up CS2 with serials but "only download these if you already own it" yeah right, the Internet downloaded it millions of times for free. Gizmodo basically said they're giving it away for free. People think if something doesn't have DRM then it's OK to pirate it.

And the number of people like you who just won't buy something if it has any DRM is small enough to ignore.

If this is true, where is the patch to remove the obnoxious DRM after 6 weeks?

The developer for The Witcher 2 removed it a week after release. A couple of months in, 2K removed the activation limits for BioShocks 1 and 2 (which isn't the same as removing the DRM but it makes it less obnoxious). And BioShock 1 was unpirated for close to twelve days after relase.

Look, I know you want to live in some little world where there's no DRM and everything is the same but it's just not. DRM is required and the people who make decisions on this are not idiots, no matter how smug you are about it.