Might want to fix that image... before anyone realizes you use IE instead of.... anything else.

I'm a game collector myself, I've bought 3 Xbox 360 consoles and over 150 games on that platform this generation. I will also buy exactly ZERO if the always on DRM is implemented.

For me the biggest problem is the the fact that the games have a finite time after which they will not work. The servers will not be available forever and if I'm spending money on game I want to know that I'll still be able to play them 10 years, 20 years or even further in the future. I have games that I bought in the late 80s and early 90s that I still play, it stands to reason that if I buy games next generation I will want to play them again in the distant future, but that's not going to happen if "Always on" becomes a reality. Given a long enough time frame my having an internet connection is more guaranteed than MS supporting their server for the remainder of my lifespan.

This doesn't even take into consideration people like my friends who serve in the military, and play games in their down time despite not having access to broadband while deployed, or those friends who lost their jobs due to the economy and had to cancel their internet and TV service but kept their gaming consoles as a meager source of entertainment in an otherwise shitty period in their life.

Microsoft earned the lions share of my gaming budget the last two generations and if I were to receive similar gaming experiences in the next generation I have no problem continuing to spend money that way, but if they required an internet connection I will not be giving them any money what-so-ever. I have no interest in purchasing games with an expiration date.

Since your goal is 3D printing or CNC machinging I would say you definitly want a "Solid Modeler" type package. I prefer SolidWorks personally, In my experience it's the defacto among small to medium sized manufacturing shops that keep up with the times, Pro-Engineer is popular too. AutoCAD seems pretty popular among shops that are a little behind the times.

Larger companies (Auto and Aerospace manufacturers) tend to use packages such as Catia, but that's way overkill (and way out of budget) for 3D printing and the like, it's more suited to massive assemblies with thousands or millions of components. Solidworks isn't without it's faults but I find the interface fairly intuitive once you learn the basics and it's perfect for small-scale stuff. I've used it many times to design small components and assemblies for car and computer projects among other things. Most professional software solid-modeling packages can export to whatever format you'll need for your 3D printer, CNC software, or whatever it is that your manufacturer requires.

You want a solid-modeler like Solidworks/Pro-E/Catia/etc because they're all designed with dimensional accuracy in mind. Surface modelers are generally used for 3D graphics production and have a higher concentration on making things look good than being dimensionally accurate. It's like the difference between MS Word and Adobe Photoshop... if you want to write a book, Word is probably the better software, but if you're designing a poster, Photoshop is probably the better choice... both create "documents" but they have very different uses... similarly if you need a 3D design software for manufacturing or real world production you want Solidworks, but if you wanted to make a 3D move or game Maya would be a better choice.

A Perfect Example of that is the game buying/download service available right now on the Xbox Live Marketplace and Playstation Store.... That new $60 game at GameStop can be downloaded to your console for... $60, you know because they didn't have to press the physical media, manufacture the case and print the manual, or ship that to a store and sell it at wholesale price, that savings was passed onto you... no wait, it went right into the pockets of the game makers... and that's a game that you bought that you can't resell so the fact that you've guaranteed there will be no re-sale on the used market means they reduced the cost right? nope... again they still charge full price.

But what about 3 months later when you can buy the game in the store for $25 instead of $60? ... oh well that game is still $60 if you want to download it. You know it's more expensive because of the convenience right.

Let me tell you a little story... I was a PC gamer for years... I eventually got tired of dropping over a grand ever other year to keep my PC up to date, then the headaches with the game I just bought not being compatible with my hardware, wasting sometimes hours getting things installed and setup well enough to make them playable... I loved fighting games and racing games and those were two areas where consoles really out-shined the PC market so I made the switch and I was happy. Graphics weren't as good but I loved the fact that I could just sit down on my couch after a long day at work and enjoy the games without any roadblocks... no installation, no configuration, no worries about compatibility, no worries about lack of hardware power.. just pure gaming without any noise.

I have a home theater setup now with a nice big 109 in screen, and my PC is a laptop which is quite convenient, it's also 3 years old and I only paid about $600 for it then and it's not even close to being obsolete for my needs. With Steam launching big picture mode there there having been a few PC only games I wanted to play in the last few years I decided... maybe the Home Theater Gaming PC is a reality now? I dropped the cash and built a machine the last few parts came in last week... I had the box in my office hooked up to a spare monitor, keyboard, and mouse that I had... I spent a few hours installing windows, running windows update, installing and signing up for steam among other things.... I was ready to use it so a hauled the machine down into my home theater room, removed some old equipment to make room and hooked up my sleek new Home Theater Gaming PC.

It booted up and everything seemed to be going well but once I was in windows the wireless keyboard and mouse wasn't being recognized... ok I unplugged and plugged back in the dongle, no use, I checked the batteries, they were good, checked the documentation, there's no special instructions other than to plug it in. So I ran and got my wired keyboard and mouse and had to sit 2ft from my giant projection screen on the floor trying to figure out why the wireless devices weren't working... For some reason windows was recognizing the wireless dongle as a mass storage device that had 0 space. I plugged the dongle into my laptop and it worked fine without any problems... so I know the device is fine, the problem is with the windows install/drivers on the new machine. after banging my head against this issue for about an hour not finding anyone with similar problems online and not being able to futz with the drivers to get the machine to recognize it properly I gave up on that... I had a wireless adapter to use an Xbox 360 controller on the machine so for the time being I would just use the wired keyboard and mouse to navigate windows and play with the controller once I was in the games.

Throughout dealing with the keyboard and mouse problems I realized that I wasn't getting any sound, I didn't have speakers hooked up when it was in my office so I hadn't thought about it. I needed HDMI sound output for my home theater setup and pouring through all the sound options I couldn't find anything to enable sound out via HDMI. I went to look at the graphics driver options when I realized that I had never installed the nVidia graphics driver and it was still using the generic windows video driver. I went to nVidia's website, downloaded the latest driver and installed. It wanted to reboot so I obliged. I see the bios screen, the then some info on the raid array, then the windows loading screen then my projector looses the video signal, then it finds the video signal but the screen is black... for about 5 seconds then it loses the signal again, and repeats this loop endlessly. I force shutdown by holding the power button wait a few seconds and reboot...same problem.... I force shut down again and reboot into safe mode... same problem

So after spending nearly a grand, spending a day building the thing and half a day banging my head against driver issues I've at the moment bought myself a really expensive brick. I shut it off again and turned on my console and was already playing a game in less time than it takes the new machine to boot up. When I have some more free time I'll unplug everything from the home theater setup and haul it back up to my office to troubleshoot it with a normal monitor and a less annoying seating position, and I'll probably have to spend even more money to buy another keyboard and mouse setup that might actually work... In the end though it reminded me why I stopped playing PC games in the first place.

I benefit from console gaming because I use gaming as a way to sit down, relax and unwind, and that's something that using a mobile device or a PC just doesn't do for me.

" it's a hell of a lot easier to kill 26 people in a short period of time with a gun than with a knife"

Knives don't seem to slow down the school stabbings in china the number of victims in most of those incidents is similar if not more than the gun attacks here.

Agreed... it's just too bad that most newer cars have forgotten about that. For a while the aftermarket has been pretty good about designing adapter mounts, conversion face-plates and modules to undo all of the integration and serial data garbage that passes through your stereo from the factory these days, but the OEMs are making it harder and harder with each new model.

The "DIN" standard needs to be freshened up (maybe call it DIN2) along with a standard electronic interface to help curb this trend.

this is the geekiest way to cook a turkey

There are also geeky ways to prepare the whole thanksgiving dinner

• Mathed Potatos
• Green Bean Matherole
• Borromean Onion Rings

They do exist in the US, most US manufacturing is done by robots. The only reason we have things made in China is because Chinese labor is still cheaper than US robots. 10,000 laborers being replaced by one Chinese manufacturer is hardly enough to dramatically shift costs, but it is a sign of things to come. If the trend continues we could see thing shifting back within 5-10 years.

Even still there are lots of other costs involved that still benefit China:

• - Less strict environmental laws meaning they can save by polluting
• - Most of the component parts that make up a widget are also made in china so they can save by using "Just In Time" manufacturing.
• - A lot of the raw materials used are also mined in China, or at least have the distribution infrastructure to support Chinese manufacturing.
• - Even with robots you still need human workers to monitor and maintain the robots, and that labor is still cheaper in China.

I have no doubt that if this trend continues we'll see things start to shift back, but it's not going to happen overnight.

"robots" aren't smart, by definition they simply perform per-programmed repetitive tasks; they're just a piece of hardware following some software instructions. You're thinking of an "automaton" which is a self-operating machine. When most people think "robot" they're actually thinking of the stereotypical sci-fi Android, which is an automaton with human characteristics. When manufacturers say robot they mean... robot, not android, not automaton... robot

Robots have been used in manufacturing for years, both in the US and abroad. In general though manufacturing moved off-shore because the human labor was so cheap it was even more cost effective than buying and maintaining robots domestically. If China is moving towards robots it only means that their human labor force is no longer cost effective, and will likely mean that a lot more manufacturing will move back to being domestic (the cost of running a robot locally is hardly different than the cost of running a robot off-shore). About the only reason to continue manufacturing in China at that point would be the proximity to the production of other components (which will likely become less of an issue over time) and availability of raw materials (which varies from industry to industry, country to country).

I love it when someone asks me if their computer is fast enough for "X" and I ask "well, what are your computer specs?" only to get "Oh, i have the Inspertron 5001".... that is completely useless information to me.

Marketing terms that have real world meaning in lieu of a threshold number that it represents might be handy; but not when it's a trademarked term only used by one company. eg: if "retina display" could be used to mean any display over 300ppi then it might be useful, but being an Apple trademark makes it ultimately useless.

Not much for internals but if you're interested in the I/O ports (Controller, AV, Cart Port, etc) and protocols GameSX is a great site.

This might make a good addition to whatever you can glean from an emulation discussion since emulators don't typically deal with the external connections.

Most speed limits in non-highway areas aren't due to lack of skill but rather the required reaction time to events outside the control of the driver, eg: a light turning red, another car pulling out, a pedestrian crossing the road. Even the the car is self driving and can react instantly it can still take a substantial amount of time to stop the vehicle, and I doubt we'd want to program them to slam on the brakes at the last minute all the time just to help maintain a higher average speed. I can't imagine non-highway roads seeing a speed increase of more than 5 or 10 mph, and really that just puts the speed in line with how most people are driving on those roads now anyway.

I would suspect that we'll see special highway lanes for high speed autonomous traffic similar to how we have car-pool lanes... and as autonomous cars gain popularity those lanes will simply occupy more of the highway traffic.

This was similar to a question I had about the Higgs field. Maybe my understanding of physics is lacking in this area but since higgs gives things mass and gravitational forces are based on mass I'm curious if this discovery could potentially lead to a greater understanding of how gravity works. I also wonder if this discovery gives us any insight as to how we might be able to manipulate the higgs field to say alter the mass of objects leading to perhaps new forms of propulsion.

^this is the best post in the discussion so far... however I think the upgraded Alternator can't be overstated enough. An alt from '77 will likely have fairly poor output, partly because of the older design, partly because of the age, and mostly because the regulator circuit will be fairly poor by today's standards. Also consider that the regulator will likely not produce the kind of clean output that modern electronics would prefer.

IMO no matter what kind of electronics you plan on running, job 1 should be to retrofit a modern alternator onto the engine.

I should also mention that http://the12volt.com/ and http://mp3car.com/ are both phenomenal resources on this subject.