Was salivated over for its eye candy, not necessarily for its gameplay. It's a benchmarking tool. Then again, people who downloaded it for benchmarking certainly had no qualms over blowing thousands for a top of the line gaming rig....

A mod thing is in the works, and has been given to several community mod makers to work over to make sure it functions properly.

As someone who classifies himself as a "geek", albeit one terribly bad at math and logic, I thought it was a pretty good read. I do wish I had some more "hello, this is information theory presented in an engaging manner" books, though.

...perhaps I'm getting to the point in my life where I don't want to fight with hundreds of abstract, obscure symbols in order to enjoy a game.

Oh, a question mark is an eye? That's funny, I thought it was a question mark.

I've tried Dwarf Fortress probably half a dozen times, and got insanely frustrated with the interface before deleting the directory in a rage. A shame, too, because I'm a sucker for open-ended sandboxes. i'm willing to put up with batshit-insane interfaces (See: Jeskola Buzz, Second Life, QuakeBSP), but if what I'm staring at, for entertainment, looks like a dot matrix printer exploded, im' outta here.

>>Whatever happened to providing a useful service and having your clients pay you for it?

As a Twitpic user, you are not a client, you are the sellable resource. Most companies we use online do not think of you as a client in their business plan; you are the valuable resource they sell to their actual clients, advertisers and data miners.

Well, that's stupid. Now, when the cops ask people for help, they won't get any. GG cops.

...protests about Facebook on Facebook tend to work out very well. It's just like those "don't buy gas on day X" chain letters that get bounced around whenever gas prices take a hike upwards.

I think the problem with ATITD is that there isn't any real competition. The only economy is based on helping "everyone else" achieve "some far-off goal", which, to the average player, is a crock of shit.

There's no incentive to profit from the inequal distribution of resources on the map; it's all very hold hands and love everyone. Which is great, but there isn't any room for conflict there.

Source is nearly 5 years old at this point, without any "major" updates. There have been a few upgrades with L4D and TF2, but nothing apocalyptic.

I agree, it's a wonderful engine, but IGN obviously wanted engines that were eye candy, physics, and eye candy, roughly in that order.

Steam only works on PC games. If you notice, a Gamestop stocks only the top... 10 or so PC games (in a tiny shelf hidden from everything else). That's because they can't resell them. They have more PS2 games than they do PC.

Seriously, about 60% of the store is resold merchandise. They stopped being a games retailer and became a pawn shop years ago. When will they buy my gold watch?

Anecdotally, my best friend from high school pulls down six figures at an international oil firm. He's an engineer, finds natural gas all day. He's one of the smartest guys I know. He pulls down 24 hour shift routinely.

What does he do in his very limited spare time? Runs raids in WoW with all of his fellow engineers. He has multiple accounts, each with multiple Level 80s on them.

Somehow I think your stereotype of "FATBALL LIVES AT HOME WITH MOMMY LOL" falls flat.

What does that have to do with anything? The summary is stupid; the lawsuit is over a product that enhances cybersex, not the cybersex itself.

In short, virtual dildos. Yes, it's big money. Well, it was. Now the poor guy is fighting a ton of copyright infringement lawsuits as well.

If you signed your name on an actual contract, you're liable for the contract. If, on the other hand, you're an idiot and sign it with your Second Life avatar (or Slashdot ID for that matter), I would imagine the contract is at least called into heavy question.

I did contract work in SL for 3 years. I always signed my name on real, mailed-over contracts. I had to do work with other contractors, though, who in a fit of privacy histrionics, refused to divulge any part of their private life to these real-world companies they were working for, and thus "signed" a "contract" inside the virtual world.

Not surprisingly, they either didn't last long doing contract work or got so heavily ostracized for their insanity they never got another call again.

In short, don't be a moron. Get a real contract, in real paper, and sign it with your real name (and make sure they do too!)

Anything else is just roleplay.

I recently purchased an Nvidia 9800 for around 129 bucks. It came with two Call of Duty games, so I imagine the card is significantly cheaper than that.

It runs everything without so much as a single complaint, on max details.

And is it just me, or does FSAA have little real effect on visual quality? I never have it on, and even with it on (such as in WoW), I can't notice a bit of difference on a 19" LCD monitor. Turning FSAA can save you tons of money (and framerates!)