You mean like the one I use on my PC? I call it a controller, but that's because I perceive a gamepad to have no analog thumbsticks.

It's the joy of a PC. I can use keyboard and mouse for strategy, FPS and RPG games (online / MMO / offline or otherwise), use HOTAS for flight/space sims, use a wheel or a controller for driving games and just use the mouse for Hexcells.

Or combine options. For Saints Row III the keyboard and mouse gives me the control and precision I want for moving around on foot, then switch to the controller when I'm in a car or aircraft.

But then, I've been using peripheral controllers of various forms for gaming with keyboard based programmable computers since before they came with a mouse...

I practically begged a friend to get a 970 on the PC he bought a week ago. Their pricing was so aggressive that as soon as you went within £40 of it the performance uplift was just too appealing to turn down. You get a PC that'll play new release games beautifully at 1920x1080 for another 4-5 years instead of just 2-3.

I gave up and went 16:9. I cheated though; I didn't drop to 1080 height, I switched to 2560x1440.

The aspect ratio is less important to me than having good vertical resolution. This way I get more vertical than 1920x1200 and the bonus of a few extra pixels on the sides too.

That's the bit that confuses and disappoints me. The consoles seem to be expecting 3GB of graphics RAM so it feels pretty asinine to release a PC card with only 2GB. Surely matching console performance in a midrange PC is a fairly basic expectation?

Nah, it means that Nvidia offer a range of graphics cards for gaming, and this one is not "cheap and nasty" and it's not "top end". It's sort of near the middle of the range.

Yeah, any card released in the last five years should be awesome for games released before 2005, so if those are the games you want to play then save your money and see how the onboard graphics cope with them before even buying a dedicated graphics card.

My year old graphics card is still coping fine with games released in the past few months at full detail and 2560x1440, so that gives you an idea of how far ahead of the current game demands the graphics cards are. 1920x1080 gaming is comparatively extremely cheap these days.

You forgot to mention: They spend a higher percentage of their time on the road in urban areas, where the pedestrians and cyclists are.

When crossing the road, can you hear the fake engine noise being played to the driver of a Mustang?

No.

Now fuck off and stop mandating that we all have to put up with unnecessary noise because you don't know how to fucking cross a road safely.

Then there's the software engineer, who is lazy at heart. This means that if there's a working implementation that does what's needed, they'd like to re-use it.

They can then spend their time building new and interesting capabilities to supplement the already working code. The world advances.

Seems better than reinventing the wheel each project.

Yeah, I'm still distraught that Project Gotham Racing II never reached the PC. I'd still play it now. In fact, I need to play it now - I need to learn the Nurburgring before I take a V8 Jaguar around there later this year.

I think it's good that multiple gaming styles are accommodated in the market place, I just get frustrated when people that only play games on consoles claim that it's all you could ever need.

Anybody discounting PHP based solutions based on them being based on PHP doesn't have an opinion I want to base my decisions on.

Hopefully tried to understand why.

I was a bully at school. Nearly as much as I was bullied. I could blame Aspergers but there were a number of other factors.

Could those have been addressed? No idea. It was great when I reached university though and all that shit went away.

Only the good ones.

There's a reason there's a two-tier university system in the UK. I suspect the US is pretty similar.

I do online multiplayer. I don't pay a subscription.

I play Guild Wars 2, can I get that on xbox? I play World of Tanks, can I get that on Xbox? I play Euro Truck Simulator 2, can I get that on Xbox? I play Hexcells Infinite, can I get that on Xbox? I play Dwarf Fortress, can I get that on Xbox?

Doesn't seem to me like the Xbox is any fucking use at all for games.

Thing is, it's pretty easy to think of, and viable with current technology.

Designing, procuring, building and deploying without detection is about the only real barrier between major metropolitan areas and a serious terrorist incident.

Planning how to detect and thwart such an attack is pretty sensible if your job is national defense. That's not fear, that's risk recognition and mitigation.