But adding more people and more money does let them churn out sequels like kleenex. All they had to do was get the bare essentials down to hook the newly opened "Bro" market and they can sell yearly rehashes with record profits.

EA is the mcdonalds of the gaming industry. Poor quality and no one with any self respect would admit to liking them. But every once in awhile you end up going there to satisfy a craving.

So yeah, not really a Dark age but more of a Fast Food age.

Ms. Manners Guide to Civilized Computing?

"One should always keep a clean and tidy desktop so as not to offend the sensibilities of one's guests. Remember Sir Cupertino's rules for icon placement: editors on the left, utilities on the right, and games tucked away in a neat folder to the right of the desktop center to provide easy access without drawing too much attention. Unless, of course, LAN Party rules have been invoked. At which point the editors must be placed out of view and the games spread out in colorful yet tasteful folders sorted by genre.

If one finds one's self visiting another's desktop then one should to bring a gift for one's host. A vintage RTS of a good year is thrifty but always welcome.
Endeavor to avoid cookies or reading materials of the fanfictional variety."

Probably more like 7% reduction in people who pirate. And most of those would be kids who lost their in room PCs when mommy and daddy got the notice.

People don't all pirate the same amount, so changes in infringer numbers don't equate to an identical change in traffic amounts. The industry knows this and uses both interchangeably depending on whichever supports their case the best.
Here, as always, there is little to no context so we don't know the actual effect of the notices. We just have to take them on their word.

Yup. A bunch of cheap single boards with ethernet would work. Like raspberry pi.
Strip down the OS and script it to push the update from a given directory on boot up. Then you can just clone the SD card for 4/8/16 devices and update them with the new firmware as needed.

Pi, case, battery with power switch, small SD card. $50-$75 a piece depending on how fancy your want to get with the case and battery.

Basic math.
Top of the line AMD FX-9590 processor, $260. Top of the line Intel i7-5960X processor, $1050. (blatantly lazy, I just sorted newegg's processor list by price)
Intel's performance lead over AMD, nowhere near 4x.
I can't think of a normal situation that justifies that big of a price difference for the performance. I can build a whole second AMD computer for the price difference.

Intel spent billions over the last 15 years kneecapping the competition. Any advancements they have right now is less than what we could be using today if the fight had been fair. Intel could very easily have been the top dog in a fair market, but we will never know.
So you know what, go ahead. Call me a zealot all you want. I'll just stay happy over here knowing I don't supporting a company that is actively hampering progress.

Neither amd nor nvidia makes the actual card, just the chips and design spec. Busted fans would be the fault of the card manufacture. And it's a good bet the same manufacture makes crappy nvidia cards too.

Drivers are a valid point. Though not one I've experienced myself.
Worst i can say about drivers is nvidia won't let you easily uninstall the support software if you replace a burnt out card with an amd. The uninstaller wouldn't run without a valid nvidia card installed.

I'm not exactly a routine patron of review sites, but from my last bit of research the top sites all dock points because amd made the cards.
Same with cpus. The first site google returned claimed no performance difference between my 6 year old 4 core 2.3ghz amd, my new 8 core 4.2ghz amd, and the single core intel my father's 8 year old netbook runs.

There is a lot of blatant intel/nvidia bias out there and it's really annoying to wade through to get an idea of real performance.

I buy AMD because it's cheaper. I have yet to notice a real performance difference.
The fact my money doesn't go towards bribing benchmark/review sites and prebuilt manufactures to lock competition out of the market is just a bonus.

640k res. That should be enough for anyone.

"The great white devils executed him out of fear. Even with him helpless they feared him so much they killed him in his sleep."

VS

"They feared him so much they, uhm, tossed him in basement and forgot about him... like, uhm, birthday socks from your aunt..."

The latter has less of a holy war recruitment kick to it.

Slapping him in maximum security prison for life with no chance of parole might as well be death, but is something like 1/10th as expensive as execution.

Plus, in death he gets to be a martyr and his story paraded around on recruitment drives. But in life he can be forgotten and quietly keel over (after a couple years of a porkrind and bacon diet).

Unfortunately their luggage was placed on air freight and half of it is currently believed to be somewhere in Seattle. The other half was recently spotted in a TSA frequented pawnshop in Miami.

As I recall, the original iteration of subway cars were windowless.
It didn't end well...

Even if there is nothing to see outside, people still need that visual connection to the outside world.

Cryofreeze everyone in the world for the duration of a trip. Then all transportation will be instantaneous for all.

AC is just using his default rage scapegoat.
If this were fox news the post would be "Thanks Obama!"
NBC: "Bush era leftover for us to deal with."
Country music station: "Muslim terrorists!"
3am radio talk show: "Alien Illuminati plot to steal our toe nails!"