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Comment Time is money - your evaluation is incorrect. (Score 1) 272

I judge my Steam purchases by hours of gameplay per pound (about $1.50). Anything over 10 hours per pound is usually pretty good. Some games are in the hundreds of hours per pound. Most half-decent games manage at least 1 hour per pound. Anything below that I consider a loss. So the game has to be either amazing and long (rare - HL2 managed it), or it has to be cheap, or it has to be very replayable.

I strongly disagree. Your argument assumes infinite time. Games are cheap, time is limited.

As time available for games approach zero, price can be ignored. The only metric that matters is "amusement per hour".

I would pay a lot more for a 5-hour great game that I would for a 20-hour decent game.

Submission + - Terror attack on Norwegian government (bbc.co.uk)

techtech writes: "A large explosion has hit near government headquarters in the Norwegian capital Oslo.

The blast is thought to have caused damage to the offices of Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg and a number of other official buildings.

Initial reports suggested Mr Stoltenberg was unharmed."

Comment They steal the difference between buyer and seller (Score 2) 448

There is really no benefit to society from picosecond trading. All it produces is more fancy excuses the intelligent sociopaths can use to take money from us.

This.

"provide liquidity" is pretty words. They are inserting a middle man in every single trade to leech the difference between buyer and seller.

They are removing huge values from the system without providing any benefit. It should definitely be illegal.

Comment Re:Thanks for the redesign! (Score 3, Informative) 2254

I usually start my day browsing the front page and opening interesting stories into tabs. Those I read one by one during the day.

This is no longer possible. After opening 5-10 stories, Firefox is consuming 100% of one core. This makes the browser extremely unresponsive and not possible to browse anything else.

Comment Matrices all the way down (Score 1) 640

His powers just branched out into the "real world" layer of the Matrix, where all who thought they were free were still enslaved. He has to re-learn his skills in this second layer (...)

Second layer? Ha!

Zero. One. Infinity. It's Matrices all the way down.

- Cheering for the Matrix since movie #1!

Comment Why is it at all possible? (Score 2) 113

Identity theft and "unauthorized access" and taking the money from an account holder is as absurd as a bank getting robbed and taking it from the last deposits made to the bank and not from their general coffers. It was never done that way before, so why is it done that way now?

Why does mere credentials allow large money transfers?

I thought everyone was using hardware ID by now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_token

I know such tokens can still be improved, and it will improve. And sure is a lot more secure than just a password.

Comment Salary details publibly availaible. (Score 2) 785

The company knows what each and everyone makes, you do not. More bargaining power for the company, less bargaining power to you, little bee.

In some socialist countries, net taxes are public information. From this it is trivial to estimate the base salary of anyone. Neighbor, co-worker, boss, prime minister.

Makes it harder to have huge salary gaps in a company as people will check the salary of the boss.

Comment You need to focus on the correct problem. (Score 2, Insightful) 724

Rather than hurting "anyone" is actually hurts "everyone". This is just another case of what's called the "tragedy of the commons". Each person who pirates a game benefits himself or herself, but if enough people do this it's no longer tenable to make games and no one has a game to play, for free or otherwise.

Be extremely cautious when comparing information to physical property. James Boyle have written a nice book about the trap you are falling into:
http://www.thepublicdomain.org/

Instead of thinking in terms of black and white, we really need to focus on the real issue: How much legal protection is needed?

I think we can all agree that "life + 75 years" (depending on country) is vastly more protection that a computer game needs. In my opinion, this excessive protection can only lead to stagnation.

We need to create a sensible copyright law first, then people will respect it. And only then can it be successfully enforced.

Comment 5 years - zero progress. (Score 1) 1140

I agree wholeheartedly with your "WTF". My 5 year old laptop (luggable) has 1920x1200 resolution. I though 5 years and going from a laptop to a desktop screen should give me a serious boot in resolution. Nope, nothing (unless I go all the way to 30").

The only comfort I have is that maybe the iPhone "retina" hype can switch the focus back to higher resolutions.

I too find it disturbing that displays have gone to 2MP and stopped. We were this close to being able to actually read a PDF on 100% zoom without squinting. WTF is going on?

- Full HD
- "Good enough"
- 3D graphics
- Fonts not scaling to higher resolution

Instead of pixels, most consumers just relate to the words "Full HD". For a lot of people "better than Full HD" makes no more sense than "it goes to 11". And sadly, it's good enough for most (even if it is not enough for you and me).

3D graphics performance is also increasingly critical. Increasing the number of pixels eats a LOT of 3D performance, but makes little difference unless your eyes can clearly see each pixel.

Not all fonts scale properly. On a lot of systems / programs, using higher than FullHD resolution on the average 20-some monitor will make it really hard to read the text in a lot of programs. A lot of people are unable to adjust/fix this.

Comment Re:The true believer (Score 1) 1328

But since it's written down in a special black book, that makes it totally sane and mainstream.

No. It's sane and mainstream because it is a part of the culture.

It is a part of the culture because it made the culture "fitter".

Not evolution per say, but culture changes slowly and a powerful religion certainly gave advantages (in warfare and others) mere centuries ago.

Of course religion still is a part of culture.

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