We haven't seen Version 6 yet, though after 22 years you'd think they'd come out with another entry in the series...

and when little kids walk up, I'll leap out in my Conan the Mathematician costume and roar out the skull-splitting multiplication rules for Quaternions.

On the bright side, at least one of your statements is true!

Contrary to popular belief, the North East is not the safest, most prosperous, and most enlightened region of the United States. I'm not saying the rest of it is better than your own country, just that your sample was less-than-ideal :-/

Reports indicate the Asian Giant Hornet was briefly spotted in Australia. Upon arriving the colony looked around, said "Fuck me...", and promptly returned to Asia.

Where's a "-1 Depressing" moderation when you need one? Or maybe it should be a +1...

Whatever, who cares :/

http://twinbeard.com/frog-fractions

Frog Fractions taught me enough fractions to pass my GED!

Thanks, Frog Fractions :-D

Only 628,977 left to go!

One of the benefits of traditional consoles is the (relative) lack of the kind of hardware fragmentation that can cause errors, glitches, and performance drops. Case in point, my copy of No More Heroes just works when I pop it into my Wii. Of course when you do have an issue (due to aged hardware or what have you), there's not much you can do about it.

One of the benefits of PC's is that when something DOES go wrong, you can usually figure out what's wrong and fix it. For example, when XCOM: Enemy Unknown came out, I was experiencing unplayable slowdown (not a low framerate, more like slow motion). After an hour of digging around and trying a few things, I figured out that I needed to update my BIOS. Unfortunately, the BIOS updater refused to recognize the thumb drive carrying the update file, and it took a little more searching to find out that BIOS's sometimes have trouble recognizing thumb drives that are larger than 512 mb. Most stores no longer carry drives that small, but fortunately I was able to find someone at work with an old, tiny thumb drive lying around, and used it to update my BIOS at home. Voila, all the issues disappeared, and the game ran great! The whole experience was annoying and frustrating, but I was ultimately able to fix the issue.

So... if SteamBox or whatever they call it has all the hardware fragmentation of PC's, with the streamlined interface of traditional consoles, what's my recourse for when the game has obscure compatibility issues with the hardware? Will you be able to back out into a Linux shell and fix the issue yourself? Will it be up to standards adherence and vigilant devs to make sure hardware fragmentation doesn't get out of hand? Or is there some magic bullet that Valve has discovered?

Or are we looking at the worst of both worlds, with broken games that you can't fix?

You are aware that Sony is one of the biggest members of both the MPAA and the RIAA, right? Two of the most decidedly anti-consumer organizations out there?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPAA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA

My understanding is that the PS4 uses HDCP encryption for everything, whereas the XB1 only uses it for playing movies. This means existing recording solutions should work fine for the XB1 (i.e. you don't need to pay Microsoft), whereas for recording PS4 footage requires the use of the PS4's own recording tools (along with any baked in limitations, like a 15 minute limit I've read about).

Not really sure of the practical implications of any of that, seeing as I don't myself record footage of games, but whatever :P

"The National Rifle Association has launched a website defending the use of lead ammunition against scientists and environmental organizations" was what I read at first glance.

Obligatory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_law_of_headlines

I heard the NSA has had trouble complying with a recent FOIA request, something about not being able to read their own emails. Someone should tell them about this "XKeyScore" thingamajig!

Can you explain that again, but with more car analogies?