I have gambled many times many ways and it is nowhere near as addictive as gaming is. i have played video games since i was 5 i think, i am currently 36. in my 31 years as a gaming addict there never was enough time to game... oh i learned a few other hobbies but gaming was always the excuse for someone to get me to read or do other acts besides the gaming. portable gaming just made the problem worse, and i started to have money -- to rent games. so i rented. my grades in school suffered because i always had to have that gaming fix. when i skimmed through school and finally got a job, i used that income to you guessed it game. i had 14 credit cards and an inability to hold down a job -- because it interfered with my gaming. had i hit rock bottom? nope i got a bankruptcy and eliminated all my debt all $35,000 of it and with nothing to show for it, because i lived off cash advances when i couldn't hold down jobs just to keep all the bills paid. and that wasn't rock bottom not yet. i had had problem in years past with starcraft, and broke, living with my parents i found the sequel to a game i had played years ago, the old game being warcraft II. warcraft III was way more addictive and when it's expansion came out i played it for a long time warcraft III The frozen throne is a game i literally played 8,000 ladder matched games plus countless thousands of non ladder games such as DOTA. this was rock bottom for me. i would play a good 14-16 hours a day into just one game i read this website and other while waiting for matches or when i felt the game was lost and stopped trying. i was having issues sleeping at night and i wasn't on any drugs not even caffeine since i had no funding to pay for it. i basically cracked and developed PTSD but it went unnoticed and i finally got help i needed, for other issues that were not related to the gaming but perhaps were increased by it. i had to quit games cold turkey as in hospitals it is very hard to game seriously because everything with a cord is prohibited and i only saw people using handheld games, like a hand held poker game, for example. nothing even as close to as addictive as the warcraft 3 game. tbh i even occasionally play games but i set pretty strict rules about when and how much i can game. fortunately i like to read and watch movies, and it no longer is 'instead of gaming' but rather because i don't dare game more than a few times a day (currently playing League of Legends a dota clone, which was spawned from warcraft to keep up micro skills of ladder players.) it is a free to play game, and is slightly easier to play than regular warcraft 3 tft. but even with all this addiction i never bought in game items (and there are plenty of them to buy) though i can see how people can be addicted to that like gambling. the adrenaline rush of playing a game is way more addictive than drugs or money, because there are ways to find cheaper fixes that are just as addictive. money is nice don't get me wrong, and yes chemicals can make you feel good but, dude an AAA video game is $60 a computer to play it starts around $400, for decent parts, my personal rig cost me $1100 in parts, including os cost, and it plays everything out there. how much heroin can $1,200 buy you? whereas between renting and internet research finding the game that addicts you most can take you down a long and windy road that only requires a little bit of electricity compared to drug costs to get the same effect.

"The car's systems are advanced enough to force a controlled deceleration while maninting everything else"

until that Blue screen of death comes up, doh!

kosher roughly means blessed.
that is why there is a 'kosher' hot dog and 'kosher' pickles they are blessed by rabbi under judaic law. however jesus preached a few things about people who said they had to teach the laws to children when those laws were not written by god. at least thats my take on these matters...

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/solar-roadways https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlTA3rnpgzU&feature=kp
where we're going we need roadways! solar freakin roadways! and before you say 'can't be done' the people doing it are doing it in the snowbelt. if you haven't seen the video watch it! i know they funded already but i was skeptical until they said they had used it in the snowbelt.

"More to the point, now that Occulus is highly capitalized via its facebook deal, its quite capable of ramping up production to meet demand at its price, BUT, it seems to me occulus dont seem to want its products in wide use yet , probably to protect their reputation whilst its still in development. If they just wanted cash, they could simply produce more."

this is exactly my point. if they wanted to they would take a page from sony http://store.sony.com/wearable-hdtv-2d-3d-virtual-7.1-surround-sound-zid27-HMZT3W/cat-27-catid-3D-Personal-Viewer and sell a vitual 750" screen as seen at 65' away. but they want real games that look nice and are meant for gaming. and sony is going to release a version that can be motion compensated for, as it's tv model is designed to be sit down and do your best to not move, because if you move the image doesn't change and sensitive folks get vertigo. whereas the gaming model is to track and move the image as smoothly as possible with as few vertigo as possible.

the occulus rift is a devkit, people have been asking for 3-d headset displays since digital tech made it possible. those people are not ready to own a rift yet, because it has one major game engine, and decent games take time to mature. i bought planetary annihilation when it was early in development and it was awesome but it is so much harder than a normal rts and the interface is so different that i stopped playing it, i might have enjoyed it better had they had weaker ais or no nukes allowed modes, which maybe it has by now, but playing it from beta was not a plesant experience. saying that the occulus rift should 'let the market decide the price' when games are all crappy and in early alpha development would be almost suicide. i bought the original playstation 1 just for final fantasy and the few rpgs they had all got me mad at buying a ps, cause i had no games i liked. sony almost died to me, but eventually good games came along and made it worth the money. so there is a litlle chicken and egg dillema because in order for people to 'eat the chicken' at a bbq no one can eat the mutant egg of the chicken for breakfast. if you do what philips did with the CDI (computer disc interactive) and release the system to everyone without securing launch titles it will fail. if you launch a system like sony, but promise on paper lots of games, maybe it will work for some, but others will be pissed at the lack of quality of the games that were rushed to fill the void. however what the rift is trying to do is they somehow knew the first chicken would come from that egg, and decided to hatch feed and grow it until it could lay eggs for chickens and once that was successful then they had bbq, and some people could still eat the eggs, of the other chickens.

i think that for as long as i have waited for VR in the home that the occulus and the ps4 both getting head tracking VR is very cool, and i will use whichever one works better. so if occulus or sony delays their head tracking vr units i might even get impatient and get the one that is released, rather than wait on reviews. but only if that model can do 3-d bluray movies (i have 3 3d bluray capable computers if you count my ps3) either with a standard pc or with a ps4. if it doesn't do movies it is dead to me, and games are less important. support for google earth streetview would be very, very interesting.

correction dk1 units sel for $470 dk2 are not even on ebay yet. and dk1 weren't hd capable... they were more to just test game engines.

i guess if dogs can smell memory sneakernets into dictatorships to provide outside information is doomed. i wonder can they smell a blu-ray too? cause 25 GB is a lot of storage...

mark, the oculus rift2 devkit can play a few game engines, but it is not released to the public yet! it's not about shipping a full retail model in china, it is that chinese companies are requiring their employees to buy (at $350) the one per custom limit then selling them on ebay or like sites for $470 http://www.ebay.com/itm/BRAND-NEW-Oculus-Rift-DK1-Virtual-Reality-Headset-NEVER-USED-/151342637965?pt=US_Video_Glasses&hash=item233cb9638d

$120 profit at posting time. to compound the issue the devkit includes chips that have been discontinued, and are no longer available unlike a 'retail' model which will use custom chips, from a vendor like intel or amd or someone else.

no landfills are very dry. to avoid contaminating local water they tend to have a 500 year plastic liner, and what little moisture is there from the garbage itself. i know they put off methane but that is largely from organics not plastics.
sorry i was lazy that day here is a link http://environment.about.com/od/recycling/a/biodegradable.htm

plastic can be made of corn and sugar. that does not make 'plastic' a viable food. however we have been requiring biodegradable plastics for decades now, they don't degrade in landfills but they do in the wild. also recycling has been vastly improved and that means less plastic in landfills and in the wild. scientists thought they'd see more plastic but people have suggested this is based on the amount of plastic produced, without even considering possible reasons like more recycling. also some pretty bright people have figured out where in the ocean to place nets that capture all the floating garbage, without having to use ships to 'drag' all across the ocean. perhaps that information is old, perhaps someone has been harvesting ocean plastic to recycle it.

"The difficulty with anonymous cowards is knowing when one is the same person. The coward to which Chrisq was responding was appeal to Descartes. The problem with Descartes is that you can only prove your own existence to yourself. In the event of some higher power deceiving you, the only proof you have is of your own existence. So even though you and others say that there's no evidence that I'm existing in a dream or simulation there's no way for me to verify their existence."

while i can't prove that i exist to you, surely i can reference data that suggests that corporations will do almost anything to raise the bottom line, and that includes lying, cheating, and stealing.

red dwarf mocked virtual reality in it's 5th season(1993), yet it took the japanese 2 years later to build a mono-chromatic(red lcd) despite red dwarf mocking full immersion which i think there are finally ps4 vr headsets as well as the oculus rift.

technically flat screens are old tech was it in 1989 was my first handheld with a lcd was a gameboy, and my first laptop in 1997 came with a color lcd screen and technically there was no barrier to an oculus rift after lcds became reliable. other than bandwidth related to high definition signaling.

now we 'see' these bluetooth smart watches when people said we'd never have a radio watch that could be used to call people even if it's radio range is literally measured in feet.

what does all this prove? it proves that companies are greedy and have screwed people over time and time again with garbage tech designed to last fewer years.

i can also prove that laserprinters are still using 1994 processors to handle the buffers of the print queue. when a watch has a chip that can drive a low def screen and digital radio transmission 'proven' 1994 tech is still preferred over energy saving modern chips.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3
486 computers had 'mp3' codecs and they were around in 1991 and was standardized in 1994. standardized means many people had access to working code by then.

"What he means, I think, is that most computer companies make "consumer grade" machines and "commercial grade" machines. I've not has an Asus or Lenovo, but I've had Toshiba, HP, and Dell. With respect to Dell, I've had both consumer and commercial grade machines, built to higher specifications."

i have owned and used packard bell, HP, dell, compaq(before hp bought em), and a lenovo. the first computer i bought with my own income was a packardbell 80486 dx2 75mhz. that was built like a tank, and was about as useful as a paperweight. it took the thing about 40 minutes to encode a 4 minute song to mp3. and yes i did that on that machine. anyways that was the most reliable piece of hardware i ever owned. it spent 4 years as a desktop and about 11 years as a server, though the hdds failed on it 3 times in the same timeframe. my laptop a compaq pentium 120, ran for 13 years until i hid it in a dumpster, but it had the F00F bug so was never reliable. from there on all my parts lasted less long, the quality went down. my first dell laptop lasted about 5 years less than the pentium120 and my recent alienware rig had a motherboard failure in 3 weeks and a psu issue another month later. that makes it qualify as my least reliable pc ever. alienware laptops aren't even designed by the main fab producers for dell, and still a bad MB. anyways consumer and commercial grade isn't real at dell, and i doubt it is real elsewhere. if you research parts you can build a desktop that is fast and will last a decade, and for only a little more than the 'fast enough for windows8/debianwheezy' laptop. seriously the default WM for debian wheezy is slower than windows 8 i timed them. on the same computer.

" Most recently I purchased a Dell Latitude 5000 series laptop--in Dell's explanation of this computer in comparison to the 7000 series, it gave the 5000 series a build quality of 3 out of 4 stars, it gave the 3000 series 2 out of 4 stars (still Latitude--which implies the consumer grade stuff is 1 out of 4 stars for build quality). The consumer grade machines seem to be designed to last about 2 years or less. The commercial grade machines are designed to last more like 4 years."

i have a laptop that was built like trash grade and it has been more reliable than alienware. of course its running linux with a lighter wm than the default one in wheezy... but it is going to last me another 6 years, as all it does is internet when main rig is in install/update/backup discs mode, and is used as a second layer of virus detection and removal for windows machines not all of which belong to me, and i have no say as to the os on those windows machines.

"The problem is, you have to pay a premium for the commercial grade machines."

there was a day when a computer was $5,000 and was a calculator at massive size. remember the dx2 75mhz? it was about 100 times faster than the $5000 machine i am thinking of and can't recall the specs or useful links right now.

"With Apple, there is no "consumer grade" and "commercial grade"--they're all made to high specifications."

apple products are all one grade of materials. however, they are not any more immune to faulty boards caps etc. their parts are notorious for being high profit, http://appleinsider.com/articles/13/09/24/iphone-5s-5c-teardowns-suggest-199-183-build-costs-for-apple they buy $183 worth of parts sell it for $1,000 $600 of which the cell phone has you pay over 12 months roughly. the mac lineup is in a similar situation and really if apple gets the chips for that price i doubt samsung pays higher ditto with dell. apple gets by on reputation. they wouldn't have that reputation if they hadn't been in schools or have numerous graphics stuff like photoshop, and the new ipad commercial where they make a whole symphony from one ipad. windows can't buy that reputation. they are the 'buggy, but just works and can game too even if the people you game with are hacking you' reputation that windows has earned, as well as 'benivolent dictator' cause there can be only one survivor of the os wars according to gates philosophy. glad he is gone maybe their recent attempts to be 'apple did it so we can too, almost but without the same apps, so no really its not the same we just had to follow marekting which said copy apple' kind of aura.

then there is gnu. smart people know that free software (though not necisarily $0 'free') is the only way to avoid vendor lockin, and a slew of other problems that closed source software can't address. there is a lot of interesting things going on with open hardware and open source software and custom fabs and xray verification of chips adhering to doing what they were built to look like etc. really knowing what the compiler is doing is as important as using free open knowledge to make the world a better more secure and fun place. someday soon they are going to announce the first 3d printed microchip, and from there hobbiests can build a 3d printer from the 3d printer that is capable of printing itself and all the hardware for an advanced computer, and hobby x-ray gear and a nice hardcopy of the specs for the processor and you can then in theory have a 3d printer where one person knows all the code and can audit it for making a chip in their basement or garage. all the open hardware and open software and new 3d printers make it all possible. to geniunely know that there are 0 backdoors in both the hardware and the software you are using. and still be fast enough to protect the 'rest' of your less secure equipment.

tar sands produce a vile sludge that can literally be used like agent orange.

methanol and ethanol production from municipal waste is taking trash out of the 'too dry to rot too much gas to oxidize' landfill and instead produce useful chemical some of which can be safely used to operate machinery like cars, and produce fewer noxious fumes.

if the world was run by clones in thought of you, there wouldnt be a living being on this planet for at least half a million years -- assuming that the colapse of organic life including human life by using pestacides that kill bees (after which humans would live another 4 years) and all the carbon heating the planet from all the pricks driving cars using up the worlds 200 year supply of fossile fuels at the consumption and production levels predicted for humans, based on your view that making a city 0 impact on the environment is some how wrong, and that consuming every molecule of carbon in fire until the skys rain acid like they do on venus, is the 'right thing to do' well we would never survive the consumption of all the fossil fuels, as bees would die first.

yes hydrothermal life can resist an autoclave but... "However, Strain 121 is non-infectious because it cannot grow at temperatures near 37 ÂC.[citation needed]"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strain_121
also flame throwers are considerably hotter than an autoclave, but they might be able to grow again after being flame thrown we won't know til someone tests it out.