Your premises are flawed, but I'll answer anyway. Solitary confinement cannot be societal revenge because it's not publicized at all. What society sees is an arrest, a public trial, and a prison sentence. Extra disciplinary punishments inflicted by prison guards are not public and do not involve due process of law. If solitary confinement is overused (as the article says), then it stops being discipline and starts being extrajudicial torture. That's obviously bad.

(If you don't see how extrajudicial torture is obviously bad, then let me tell you about this great deal you can get on 8x10 ft apartments...)

Oh look, a bank-like entity failed and people lost money. Good thing the FDIC is there to--

Oops.

If cryptocurrencies are going to repeat the last 100+ years of economic history, can they hurry up and rediscover monetary policy too?

You have your credibility backwards. Blue's News predates Wikipedia by five years. It's not as big a deal as it used to be, but it's still a good news aggregator for video games. It's got useful information in a lightweight, text-focused design that doesn't arbitrarily change every 18 months.

Oops, I was looking at the first link and didn't even notice the video embedded in the Slashdot article. My comment is about the video in the Orlando Sentinel article.

The video is almost five minutes long and mostly computer animations. Actual footage of the moon can be found in three segments:

2:13 - 2:23 Examples of previous impact flashes
3:00 - 3:08 Full-speed MIDAS video of the big flash
3:20 - 3:30 Slow motion MIDAS video of the big flash

I interpreted the completed and polished parts of DNF as a brilliant satire on modern FPS games, with tongue-in-cheek "explanations" for things like regenerating health and bad vehicle controls. The commentary on the role of NPCs was particularly excellent. I think I'm the only one who interpreted it that way, though.

They were both excellent and revolutionary, but also very different games. Deus Ex was more dialog based, while HL2 focused more on visual storytelling. Deus Ex had a series of self-contained locations, while HL2 gave the illusion of a continuous journey. Deus Ex let you influence the story, while HL2 plunged you into a flow of events beyond your control. I love both of them, but one is not a substitute for the other.

Oops, forgot about Trespasser. Not a great example, but a legitimate one. Thank you for the correction.

I'm talking about the game, not the engine. But in terms of graphics, HL2 does have a distinctive and well-executed visual style that still stands up today.

I did. That's why I started the sentence with "personally". I'm glad we can both find games that we like.

Not to that extent. The skyhook tracks in Bioshock Infinite at least had different shapes. I'm glad you enjoyed Doom 3 more than I did, though.

Even in 2004, there was more to it than that. Wikipedia has a list of shooters that you can sort by release date. Looking at 2003-2004, I see:

* Unreal 2, which had a hub-based mission structure with consistent secondary characters. (I liked it, but nobody else did.)
* Vietcong, which tried to capture the feel of the Vietnam War (and did okay, IMHO). It was also one of the first games to allow iron sight aiming instead of crosshairs.
* Nosferatu: Wrath of Malachi, which I didn't play but I know had randomly-generated environments.
* Far Cry, which had semi-open world gameplay with stealth mechanics, plus a cool setting and okay story.

Going farther back, we have games like NOLF2 (comedy), Battlefield 1942 (vehicles galore), the first Aliens vs. Predator (play as an alien), System Shock 2 and Deus Ex (action RPGs), etc. So there was quite a lot of precedent for shooters being more than running and shooting around the time Doom 3 came out.

Thank you for providing a counterpoint. My memory of the first Serious Sam mostly involves running backwards in circles, but I know a lot of people enjoyed it.

There are still interesting ideas -- the Mass Effect and Witcher series, for instance. I do wish developers would stop looking to MMOs for inspiration for single-player RPGs. It's just insulting when a $60 SP-only RPG hits me with a "kill 10 of monster X" quest. But I also hate crafting, so maybe there's just something wrong with me.

1. It was way too dark. They designed it to show off John Carmack's fancy new real-time lighting engine, but went too far. You couldn't use a flashlight and a weapon at the same time, which was ridiculous and broke suspension of disbelief. (One of the first mods was called "Duct Tape", and did exactly what you'd expect.)

2. The gameplay was repetitive. Every time you found a lit hallway with an item at the end, you knew that taking the item would cause the lights to go out and monsters to appear from behind hidden doors. This happened way too often, further breaking suspension of disbelief.

3. The story wasn't very exciting. It's Doom. You already knew what was going on before you even started the game.

4. Half-Life 2 came out three months later and revolutionized first-person shooters, particularly in the area of in-game storytelling. It was also the first (?) FPS to have a real physics engine with interactive environments. It still compares favorably with AAA shooters released in the last year. Doom 3 seemed mediocre by itself, but in comparison it looked even worse.

That's the history. Personally, I think the Doom concept translates poorly to modern gaming. It is to first-person shooters what Tolkien-esque fantasy is to RPGs -- revolutionary in its time, but bland and generic today. Modern games need distinctive characters, settings, stories, and gameplay to succeed (artistically, anyway). All Doom's got are space marines and monsters, which is the same recipe that ruins most of the Aliens games. But that's another rant...

That's how the internet works to begin with, and it used to be the norm for IPv4 networks. A lot of large networks still do it that way -- the computer I'm on at work has a globally unique IP address. You can still get a block of static IPs if you buy a business-class connection. That used to be almost the definition of a business connection, back when more people ran their own servers instead of using hosting services. IP addresses cost money, so ISPs try to have as few as possible. NAT came about when people started getting multiple computers per household but didn't want to pay for a business connection. It was never meant to prop up the internet as a whole.

Unsurprisingly, address exhaustion still going on. APNIC and RIPE are down to their last /8 and are now handing out addresses as slowly as they can. ARIN and LACNIC will reach their last /8 this year. AFRINIC won't run out for years, so I suspect their new infrastructure will be built on IPv6. Here's the relevant data.

There's a finite number of addresses, guys. They're not going to magically stop running out.

The most complex circuits (in ICs) are synthesized from text-based HDLs or automatically generated by software tools. Schematics are common at the board level, but that's nowhere near the complexity of even a medium-sized software program. And of course all functionality is explained through text-based documentation.

Text is better for expressing abstract concepts. Graphics are better for expressing concrete concepts. If you try to use graphics for abstract concepts, you end up adding a lot of text anyway -- flowcharts, for example.

I wonder how much it would cost to buy Slashdot from DICE? Maybe we could have a Kickstarter.