I should probably add that I have had a power-supply fail in the past. It wasn't a computer I built myself but rather a cheapo HP Pavilion. You're right, it didn't explode or fry any of my components, but the experience left me with one distinct impression: As a hobbyist without access to testing equipment, intermittent PSU failures can be a very frustrating diagnosis of exclusion.

So, yeah, the chances of a catastrophic failure may be remote. And sure, maybe I do end up paying more for that one component, but overall, I'm paying at lot less than I would for a similar computer in a store, no?

-Grym

I've only built a few computers, so I may not be as experienced as you, but here's how I approached the quality issue on a parts by part basis:
"What is the worst that can happen?"

• With cheap RAM, I get less performance, maybe a bad stick or two which I can weed out during stress testing.
• With a cheap GPU, I get less performance, the thing craps out in a year--no problem it was going to get replaced in two to three years anyway.
• With a cheap PSU, on the other hand, a catastrophic failure could literally have me buying all new parts and starting from scratch.

The computers I've built have been for myself and family and I personally found that risk unacceptable. As an aside, for the past couple of computers I've built, I've used PC Power and Cooling PSUs and have never had a problem with it. As always, YMMV.

-Grym

My point was not that the climate should or will stay the same. I'm refuting his claim that we have no control or influence whatsoever over the climate at all.

Humanity has the ability to affect the global climate. It's a very basic point that everyone needs to agree upon in order for any sort of discussion on environmental policy or analysis of anthropogenic climate change can begin.

-Grym

Trying to terraform the Earth to keep the climate the same way it was before is a pointless and futile exercise. Beliving that humans can control the climate is an arrogant statement that is provably false.

Is it? Do you think if we exploded every nuclear weapon in the world all at once that such a human action would not have any effect upon the global climate?

Assumptions such as yours are antiquated and, quite frankly, foolhardy. Human technology and industry has progressed to the point where our activities can affect the world as a whole--including the atmosphere.

-Grym

My question for those who advocate gun control is this:

Do you not see the futility of measures such as Alcohol Prohibition or the War on Drugs? And, if you do, why do you think prohibitions against guns will be different and more successful?

-Grym

In video game development, I see latent racism. In many games all of the central characters are white. The game developers probably never even though about racial issues. They just made a game. Being rendered invisible is almost as hurtful as being actively discriminated against.

Videogames are made by companies which are acutely aware of how sensitive some people are to issues related to race. So they take the simple solution and attempt to avoid it altogether by making most--if not all--of the characters white. Take, for example, Farcry 2, a game which takes place in Africa and thematically similar to the movie Blood Diamond. The game hardly has any Africans in it! Do you think this is a coincidence or a shrewd business decision to avoid the controversy and maximize sales?

Finding all the various ways to be offended is practically a cottage industry. People who sit around thinking about all the various types and sub-types of conscious and unconscious racism can (and will) find it anywhere. The best a company can hope for in these situations is being branded a "latent racist," so that's what they do.

In the first several GTA games the central character is white. In San Andreas, the central characters are almost all black and THAT'S when people notice. I salute Rockstar for making an effort.

San Andreas may have been the first GTA game with a black central character, and it will probably also be the last. At the time, Rockstar took a lot of flak for San Andreas because of it's "racism". People said it was a stereotypical depiction of "black youths reveling in street crime" with storylines which advocated a subtle, insidious brand of racism. I'm unsure if that would be classified as active or passive racism, but I do know that most companies would rather not try and walk that impossible tightrope. I don't blame them.

-Grym

Of course the best way to tackle the 'issue' of 2nd hand gaming is to bring the price down of new games. If there are more customers (there are), then there is more room to bring the price down. I'm not holding my breath.

Exactly. The gaming industry's greed created this monster. By insisting on agranular pricing, so that nearly all games are MSRP priced at $50-60, regardless of production costs and actual value, they virtually ensured the gamestop niche. As a consumer, if you only had $30 to spend and wanted a new game, until very recently (via XBLA and steam), you were basically out of luck.

The secondhand market filled that gap. Plus, it also allowed a way for consumers to recoup some of the cost of bad games which publishers insist on pricing the same as triple-A titles.

-Grym

The largest banks that failed (Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae) were almost arms of the government, they were tied so tightly in. And to call the financial industry of the U.S. "unregulated" is, frankly, breathtakingly idiotic or at the very least utterly ignorant of the market and the regulations imposed thereon. The WHOLE PROBLEM was that the government was TOO involved with the financial industry, not that they were too hands off. You don't get quite they level of giant sums of money and poor decisions without the government involved somehow.

There's a lot of disinformation out there regarding the nature of the financial crisis, and I can see how one might have such an opinion. However, I have made a genuine effort to research this issue and I can assure you that, as difficult as it may be to believe, our government did allow a 60 trillion dollar market, in the form of, modern OTC derivatives to exist completely and utterly unregulated.

In fact, this market was so "free" that that figure--60 trillion--is actually just an estimate (some go as high as 600 trillion). Nobody knows just how much money has been tied up in what was essentially bets between the mega-rich about the rise and fall of company values. Even crazier, not even the companies themselves know the others' positions because the information is secret. As a result, they've stopped lending to each other, the so-called "credit freeze" or more pleasant euphemism "lack of confidence."

Before you label others ignorant or a revisionist, please educate yourself on this issue. If you think Fannie Mae (an institution which has been around since the Great Depression) was the cause of all this, you have been misled. You need to ask yourself why you have been deceived and whose purpose does this lie serve.

-Grym

Trust me. You wouldn't be terribly comfortable if AIG imploded. No one would be.

And that is the essence of the problem, is it not? How can a a political establishment so obsessed with "national security" let a market of an estimated $60 trillion dollars (almost 5 times our national GDP) go completely unregulated? It's absurd...

No terrorist in Guantanamo (or Afghanistan, for that matter) could ever do this much damage to the country, and yet none of those responsible will ever be executed, waterboarded, or undergo "extraordinary rendition." Funny how that works, huh? While we were all arguing over Dick Cheney's ticking time bomb hypothetical scenarios, the nation's economy was being set up for the largest act of sabotage and fraud in human history, and not a single person has yet to be arrested for it.

I'd be surprised if even a single CEO or government official ever gets convicted over this. And even if they do, we won't see a cent of their ill-gotten gains. Take a look at Kenneth Lay, mastermind of the Enron fraud. The man just so happened to conveniently die after his conviction but before his sentencing. The result? His conviction was wiped from the records and none of his or his wife's assets were seized.

Justice. Does the word even have a place in our society any more?

-Grym