You might, but then again you might on consoles too. Games cost full retail on Steam. Assassin's Creed 4 is $60, same as for the PS4 and the Xboner. It is, in fact cheaper for the PS3 and 360, only $50. Now, it was on sale for a day on Steam's winter sale for $45 (still more expensive than the Wii U version now) but only for that short sale. If you want it now, $60 it is.

What about older titles? Say, Crysis 2. Only $30 in the Steam Store now. From Amazon? $20 for the PS3/360.

Yes Steam has sales, but they are limited time only sales. Guess what? Amazon, Gamestop, etc all do that too. If you shop sales, and if you buy older titles, you can have games cheaper. You want the newest titles around release? You are paying $50-60, regardless of platform.

Don't get me wrong, I love Steam, I'm a PC-only gamer, I have 200 games in my Steam library. However don't kid yourself in to thinking you spend more getting a Steam machine and the save money on all games. No such luck.

In fact, I'd hazard a guess that on the old generation consoles, you could spend even less if you stuck strictly to older games, because used is an option. Like again take Crysis 2. If you buy on Steam, you pay Steam's price, period. $30 right now, and even assuming a big 75% sale $7.50. Right now Amazon has used copies for sale for $5 for the 360. There are never any used Steam games, since you cannot resell them.

So sorry, but for most consumers it isn't going to equal some amazing cost savings, unless Valve drops their prices a lot. They can't do that though, because they let publishers set the prices and the big publishers require agency pricing anyhow.

Yes, MS may eventually go out of business, or discontinue Windows. They also might eventually change the way it works so substantially as to break things. However, it is a pretty unlikely scenario, they have pretty good history and a good definition of their support lifecycle.

Nothing in the universe is certain, of course, but neither would be something like Steam Box. Being Linux based doesn't mean anything. I mean, suppose all of a sudden Intel, AMD, and nVidia got together and decided to totally change everything. New ISA, no more DirectX or OpenGL, etc, etc. Everything would need to be reported, redeveloped, and it would be a massive problem.

Now that is exceedingly unlikely to happen, but just another example that you can't have some solution that is perfect, forever, and will never go away no matter what.

Hell look at the console market. You can't rely on shit there, yet it still seems to do well. You don't know if a new console will come out, if it does when, when it does if it'll be backwards compatible, etc, etc.

This idea that a Steam Box is needed for some kind of stability is silly. The parent has it right: It is an ego thing, and a thing to try and protect Steam. Valve loves Steam because it means they can fuck around and do as they please, no worries about money because it rolls in for very little effort. However if people started using the Windows Store to get their software instead (not likely, Microsoft is making a big hash of it) then Steam's market could dry up and that would suck for Valve.

The hardware makers have to make money on it.

Traditional game consoles are subsidized. When they launch they are sold for a very thin profit at most, and generally are sold for a loss (sometimes a fair sized one). The money is then made up on games (each game sold pays a license fee to the console maker).

That's not the case with Steam boxes. Valve isn't subsidizing it, they aren't even participating the the building. They are having others do it. Well Dell doesn't mind, they are open to sell PC hardware anywhere they can. But they require a profit on it. They aren't going to take a loss, because the only money they'll see from it is the up front sale.

Also, something that does help the consoles price wise this generation is the AMD chip. Their GPU and CPU is one unit. That costs less than two separate units. Also AMD is giving the makers a very deep discount to win the contract.

Hence, it is gonna be more expensive. That is one of the major problems a Steam box will have: It'll cost more than a console of roughly equal performance.

Realistically, if these guys ide of the relative complexity of logic makes them think that Add is 3 gates (per bit), but divide is 6, then they should not even be designing softwatre.

Hint: divide can be implemented in a wide variety of gates, but for words longer than abuot 2 bits, there is likely to be an enormous difference in speed (like 10^6) between implementations using 6 gates and ones using 10B^2 gates (where B is width of operands in bits).

(A real expert will havev a more accurate figure).

I once implemented a divide in hardware (FPGA) by using look up tables to find the logs of the numbers, subtracting them, and looking up the antilog (it had to be fast),

If you read posts from many Bitcoin supporters, you will discover that they actually believe that deflation is a good thing. They think that deflation will make the money in their piggy bank worth more, and thus they like it. They have a poor understanding of the overall economic impact so they believe it would be positive. They also tend to conflate the ideas of saving and hoarding so while Bitcoin encourages the latter, they believe that's the same thing as the former.

What's even funnier to me, is that these are often the same people that get mad about "the 1%". What they fail to realize is that deflation is something that would benefit the rich and the very most and harm the poor the very most. The more money you have, and the less debt you have, the better deflation would be for you. If you've got a massive bank account, more than you need for the rest of your life, deflation is great. You keep all your money in cash, spend it only as you need, and the remaining money gets worth more. You don't need to invest it or take any risk, just keeping cash increases your value.

On the other side, if you owe money, deflation is a big problem. A loan becomes increasingly difficult to pay back as your nominal payment stays the same, but the real value that you are having to pay out increases. It works to keep you poor and to make it more difficult for you to ever become financially self-sufficient.

Really what it comes down to is many Bitcoin supporters just have a very poor understanding of economics. They don't understand the downsides of Bitcoin, because they actually believe many of them to the upsides. Really, Bitcoin is a dream for the rich robber barons. They would love something outside of any government regulation, something that works to make the rich richer, something where there's no recourse if they take money from you, no chargeback that kind of thing. It really isn't something that the rest of us should be that interested in seeing.

The idea of a crypto currency is an interesting one, but Bitcoin is very poorly implemented from an economic standpoint, if nothing else.

Also there's a difference between saving and hoarding. What happens during deflation, in particular severe deflation is hoarding more than saving. Saving is setting aside some percent of your income for rainy day, and for later in life when you won't work. It's a negative feedback mechanism to put it in electrical engineering terms and, as with electrical circuits, it add stability to a system. With deflation what goes on is hoarding. People hold on to as much money as possible, spend as little as possible, because the money will be worth more in the future. That's very different than saving. While fundamentally yes, we're talking about spending less than you make it's a difference in attitude.

Money is only useful if it is spent, if it circulates. Money is not a magical force, it's not an end of itself, it's a theoretical construct to facilitate trade. So it only does it job if it is facilitating trade, and for that to happen it has to flow it has to be spent. Deflation runs directly counter to that since it encourages people, particularly those with more monies that are rich, to hoard as much as possible. Spend only what you need right now, because it'll all be worth more later.

Personally, I can't wait for a musical version of the Lady Chatterly's Lover trial - perhaps featuring the cast of Mama MIa? (Cast of Umoja might be more fun!)

Then I have two questions for you:

1) Why the heck are you still here? If you truly believe that the US is an oppressive police state, yet they are still clearly letting people freely travel across their borders (I just got back from Canada a couple weeks ago) then why are you not getting out now? If you really believe that the US has fallen in the police state, but it hasn't figured this out in isn't restricting the populace from leaving, then the logical thing to do is get the hell out before they do. That you would stay yet believe this is rather odd.

2) Why are you posting things against the government online? Again, if you believe that this is a police state and that the government goes after those that speak against it, why would you tempted by speaking against it online? It's not like a post like this on Slashdot is going to do any good, it won't start a revolution, or even change anybody's mind for that matter, so the only possible result would be the you would get in trouble. As such it makes no sense that you would call attention to yourself, with no gain it all.

Or, maybe, like so many people online you just like to whine and bitch, and you lack any real worldwide or historical perspective. If that's the case, please do us all a favor and quit it. It gets rather old hearing people cry that the US is evil, a police state, fascist, a dictatorship, whatever, and yet do nothing about it.

If you truly believe that this is the case, then you need to do something. If you want to stay, then you either need to keep your head down, your nose clean, and try to make yourself as invisible to the state as possible so you don't get in trouble. Or, you need to rebel you need to fight against the power, you need to try to make things better. If neither of those appeal to you, then leaving is the logical conclusion, since they aren't stopping you.

If I believe that the US was as bad as many of the whiners online do, I would leave. I wouldn't want to live in continual fear, I wouldn't want to live in a society where I couldn't speak freely, so I get out. I don't believe that's the case, as is evidenced by the fact that I speak freely online, so I'm happy to stay.

So please clarify what you believe, and don't just whine online.

That makes it harder to deal with.

What some people seem to forget is that we dealt with the easy stuff in medicine already. We are getting to tougher and tougher problems to tackle, hence why it takes longer and more research to deal with.

Cancer is very tricky. As you note it is a type of issue, not a single disease (much like the flu is a type of viral infection, not a single virus) and it really is the body turning against itself, it isn't an outside pathogen that can be dealt with.

Not in the Star Chamber into which he would be thrust. You assume that the people on the other side of the "debate" are honorable. That's an assumption that is, on its surface, laughable. I don't believe that lying to Congress is honorable. I don't believe that lying to the American people is honorable. I don't believe that unequal application of the law is honorable. Show me where the majority of the Executive Branch of the US Government has demonstrated honor, and I'll agree with you. From where I sit as a citizen, though, "honor" is conspicious by its absence.

And who guarantees he will get a fair trial, with a jury of his peers, before he returns? Who can give assurance that Snowden's attorneys can discover and submit all the evidence? If The System wants to be "fair" about this, then let them demonstrate their fairness by having a trial of those who violated the Constitution as exposed by the revelations to date. Will that happen?

Why hasn't US Attorney General Holder done anything yet about the violations? Because he's part of the problem, perhaps? (I'm a citizen, who thinks that with the current Administration there are legal "haves" and "have nots" in the USA today. Witness Fast and Furious as an example of the uneven application of justice.)

Problems with using social media aside, headhunters are fucking lazy morons. I've never personally had to deal with them, thankfully, but one of my friends, being a consultant, does often and they are universally wastes of flesh. They are not concerned with trying to find the best candidate for the job, carefully vetting resumes and checking experience. Rather they are interested in finding someone as fast as possible and mating them with a job so they can get their fee. They rarely have the faintest idea of what they are talking about in terms of technical requirements and so on.

So ya, I'm sure this doesn't help. Particularly since what people put on their social networking sites varies a ton. Some people have lots of work related things, some have none. Doesn't really translate to job performance, just to what they like to share or not share.

Sounds like more what they are doing, particularly based on the discrimination report, is finding people they think "look good" meaning largely white and particularly good looking female, and sending them on.

The "S" in SEC stands for Securities. It is their job to regulate that kind of thing.

As you say, Kickstarter is different. Not only are you not getting any equity in the company, you aren't getting any financial stake in the project or anything. It is an investment for creative return, not financial, and thus not something that would be covered.

You need to pay income tax on Kickstarter funds, of course, but that's all. They aren't an investment as far as the SEC is concerned.