Oh no, the problem is much worse than you think. All Xbox consoles have USB; you only need an adaptor cable for the original Xbox, and both successors have USB ports — hell, the xbone has USB3. The Wii and its successor both have USB. And yet none of these consoles let you use non-proprietary USB input devices, at least not without substantial trickery. Keyboards are the exception, of course, but you can't play most games with them.

You dismiss several other problems with console gaming as being a problem with specific companies, but it does not matter whose fault it is. The issues are real issues either way.

That is not a feature. Also, some console games can be modded, but it's a massive pain in the ass. People still do it. Because it's a massive PITA it's not really a valid platform feature, but because people still do it it's clearly a desired one.

So far, you are batting zero.

Compared to PCs, it is very poor. This makes a massive difference for some types of game.

Here's your valid point. This is the only benefit to console gaming. But may I remind you of the RROD, and other massive console failures?

Game consoles not made by Nintendo are now noisy as fuck and easily cook themselves.

Because you don't use it, it's not a feature. You are self-centered. Try thinking about other people for more than two seconds and you can leave an insightful comment, too.

Exclusives are commonly used as a reason why consoles are good. But there are more of them on the PC; indeed, there are more PC games that won't run on consoles than there are games for any games console.

Logical fallacy, moving the goalposts. It's which is superior, not whether you have to eschew all other gaming.

Console gaming is typically superior for just sitting down and playing. PC Gaming is superior in literally every other way. You have only one valid argument, and tried to somehow transform it into an entire debate with logical fallacies and self-centered thinking. Consoles used to have simplicity and reliability but now games get massive updates and games choke, crash and hang all the goddamned time, because consoles are just PCs with fancy memory architectures with all of the complexity that entails.

That is a typically ignorant thing to say. I wrote "incredibly" but I must be new here if I think that. It's fucking trivial, and it hasn't happened, which is how we know no one is trying.

So let me be clear on this, it's illegal for you to clog the passing lane, but it's also illegal for another driver to tell you that you're breaking the law, and they would like to move through? Is anything legal in Germany? Besides, I suppose, boot licking.

I am not aware of a time when vmware player didn't have full screen support. I have been using it for years. Virtualbox, on the other hand, is an unremitting piece of shit. It also has full screen mode, but the d3d passthrough never works. It always crashes something, usually the VM.

I finally got ahold of another Win7 license (lost the code I got from IEEE PC club some time ago, sadly) so now I am dual-booting again, so that I can play some windows games. Even ones that I did have working under wine or vmware work better on the real machine, faster and less crashy. But I'm still running Linux some of the time, and ATI still fucking sucks. I have a Windows-only machine with integrated ATI graphics to my left. If I try to use them, the system always bluescreens. Had to install an nVidia card.

Extremely mixed bag. But most of the ones that won't run in WINE will run in a windows virtual machine in VMware Player. You do have a VLK XP ISO, don't you? Even most of the D3D games will work using that combination. Indeed, games that won't work in XP Mode on Windows 7.

They have a console-friendly Civ already though, it's called Civ Revolutions. I actually think it's quite good for a quick game, though it lacks any kind of depth at all. But who wants to play a complex simulator with a gamepad? Hopefully the plan is to develop both lines further. It would be cool if Civ Rev Sequel would have more complexity under the hood, but I'd never want to actually be exposed to it. That's what a PC is for. On the other hand, Microsoft wants the Xbox One to be more PC-like, so perhaps it would make sense to have a bi-modal game (ala moo2, see sibling, I guess. Never was a moo fan.)

Arguably, there oughta be a consumer protection law stating that any and all tested security patches delivered to any customer are freely redistributable. Not requiring their distribution, nor their support, nor a source release. Simply that if a patch has been packaged, those who paid for the OS may redistribute them. This would fix this whole nasty problem with Oracle and Sun, for example, and save many machines from landfills.

My Ubuntu box has 100% reliable resume, but it only goes to sleep once or twice and then it refuses to go to sleep again. But I suspect that's just an Ubuntu problem :)

This is a UI issue. Mobile devices can simply turn off the display before they've actually entered sleep mode. How would you know? Your PC could do the same thing, but there would be fans running and lights flashing, so you'd be aware that it was trying to trick you.

All the gasoline will be shitty within a year and worthless within three.

The diesel will be shitty in about three years and worthless within, say, ten.

How long do you think it will take after a major upset to get refineries going again?

The ammo will keep a hell of a lot better than the fuel.

You know, once a car battery has been run down, it is permanently damaged... Which usually only takes a few months. Sometimes you get lucky and a car starts after years, but rarely any of these fancy new computerized whatchamajiggers.

The people who are going to do the best are those who figure out how to mob up without falling apart due to internal power struggles. Ironically, your first point is probably the most incorrect. People will recentralize.

If you can find a local geologist who didn't die, they can probably tell you where to get the goods. Or just someone with a wikireader. I could tell you where to get sulfur coming right out of the ground in Lake County, CA. I haven't been to sulfur springs yet, but I know of some in the hills to the north.

Niter is harder. But again, ask a geologist.

It takes a lot of people to build a society.

On the other hand, lots of Americans are stockpiling ammo. A simple house-to-house search, even if only say 5% of homes remain, is likely to turn up ammunition. So the big question is, what kind of apocalypse are we talking about? Firestorm, or a sudden outbreak of virulent disease?

Where do I go to get a list with nVidia graphics cards? Because ATI drivers fail. I'm completely fucking done with ATI graphics. I've said it before, but now I mean it.

Isn't flash-to-pass what they do in every civilized nation? If you're flashing someone in the passing lane in Germany, aren't they the ones at risk of the ton of bricks approach? Unlike the USA, where the cops will pull up behind someone in the fast lane, sit behind them for ages, then go ahead and pass them on the right and just drive on without ticketing the fucks?

Thanks for making help slashdot grate.

Bullshit. They usually do distract the driver, because they're not in tune with driving. When you stop talking to concentrate on driving for a couple of seconds, your passenger is highly likely to say something else to see if you heard them, because people are self-important.

Also bullshit. They tend to distract the driver with bullshit concerns about drifting into the car in the next lane while the driver is moving over next to the line to avoid some jackass who's drifting over the line on the other side. The passenger doesn't have to be in tune with what the cars around them are doing, so they almost never are. The driver does have to. I know what some of the drivers around me are thinking about doing because I'm concentrating so hard on what is happening around me, and have a massive corpus of information on what cars will do next based on what they're doing now stored in my head — and I'm not focused on anything else. Because that car drifted a little left while the driver looked that way, I know they're thinking about merging, and I'm already plotting out an alternate route around them (because as usual, I am passing) before my passenger even knows that there's a potential issue.

You could, if you were concentrating as hard on driving as the driver is. But you aren't.