Agreed. What they really need is the ability to pause a scene for a short period of time - or advance when you're ready - and allow the viewer to travel around the room, look at the details, choose different vantage points as the story progresses. Add details, like articles in newspapers on tables and stuff in drawers. That's what makes all the best RPGs what they are. Tell a story by adding immersion. I'd pay good money for that.

...or something like that. Even if VR isn't quite up to spec yet, this would be a great way to get people in front of the Oculus &c. that aren't willing to shell out cash on pre-release hardware and software. That's how a lot of my friends and I got into games when we were kids - we'd go try them out at LAN cafes in town. With an investment into all of the stuff the article mentions - the omni-directional treadmill, the advanced sound system, and the headset of course - you could probably set up an hourly rate that makes the investment back pretty quickly just out of curious people.

Then when it gets really good - higher resolution, or maybe even Caprica level - upgrade to that and you'll be busy forever.

Making tech accessible to people in isolated parts of the world that need it more than I do is what excites me about tech. I used to live and work in the Alaskan bush, and dust threatened to kill just about everything with an on switch during the summer, and extreme cold during the winter. Now if only we had more people focusing on making reliable, effective, and modern tools like this, and fewer working on free-to-play games designed to suck out your money/identifying information/dignity/life force.

Overworking is the reason why we had all those 40-hour-workweek iniatives in the late 1800s. It applies to all industries. I happen to be a teacher, and you can expect 60-80 hour weeks as a matter of course (no pun intended). I fully agree that organizational failures show up as overwork in this fashion, and have to look no further than schools.

Now imagine how many people get to enjoy this sort of thing on a daily basis, and either don't want to go through the trouble of challenging it or can't afford to.

The only argument that I can remotely see being made for this sort of legislation is 'protecting jobs in X industry.' Manufacturer distribution and sales have got to be more efficient, and probably [relatively] more honest since the manufacturer suffers directly if someone's missold or if the product is misrepresented.

Frankly, the car dealer industry is one that could disappear without many complaints from the public, but there will still be plenty of used cars.

This is interesting, but expect a C&D any time now for using the trademark. Why not something entirely new? Or pick two other punctuation marks?

Agreed. Everyone needs to get a grip.

So I get that the beta sucks, but aren't we going to discuss these stories a bit too? If Dice gets the idea in their heads that we're all unappeasable *and* that /. is unprofitable, they'll give up on the paint job and just sink the whole ship.

I have to agree with the people saying that /. is about the comments. I've read through literally hundreds of comments by my peers and by wiser folk than I because I wanted to learn something and to get new perspectives. But on the beta, roughly every other article, I get this bloody error:

Shazbot! We ran into some trouble getting the comments. Try again... na-nu, na-nu!

That gets old. Neither reloading nor clicking on the try again button works. It's pretty much inevitable that they're going to 'update the look' to make it look like one of those awful clickfarm sites. That's 'in' right now. But they don't have to break the core of it.

What I'm about to say is probably going to tick off a lot of people, so start sharpening your blades now. But quite frankly, you can get over it. Gnome 3 is not an 'unholy mess' by any means, and having an attractive, functional (yes, it's functional - I get my work done and can access everything without a problem) DE is not a crime. Hardcore linux types seem to think that you can only get work done with boring, gray, win95 style environments. Gnome 3 makes me more efficient - hitting the meta and then typing out the first four letters of the program to call it up, then hitting enter is significantly faster than typing out a whole command or digging my way through gnome 2.x/winxp style menus. It seems like a lot of people are just afraid of change because it's change. Some people are ticked about the launching programs vs. window switching thing, but I really think this is a non-issue. If you don't like it that way, use the alt+tab to switch programs, don't use the bar. The hilarious thing here is that many of us want other people to use linux and show an interest in linux because open source is the best way to go for a lot of approaches. Open source allows for customization. If you don't like your DE, just download another one. If you really want a command line system only, you can do that. If you don't like Gnome 3 or any of the OS X inspired systems (which themselves are significantly more railroaded into the designer-inspired changes than the DEs we use on linux systems), just don't use them. Or write your own if it's that terrible. In short. Looking good isn't a sin, and some smooth animations are hardly the end of work on linux desktops. Now, feel free to leave your hate mail after the beep.